Hong Kong: Shipping law change proposed

The Government proposes to amend the Merchant Shipping (Safety) (IMSBC Code) Regulation to incorporate the International Maritime Organization's (IMO) latest requirements in the International Maritime Solid Bulk Cargoes Code (IMSBC Code) into local legislation.

The IMSBC Code requires shippers to inform the ship master, prior to loading solid bulk cargoes onto a ship, whether the cargo being carried is harmful to the marine environment in accordance with the criteria set out at Annex V to the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, the Transport & Housing Bureau said.

Such information has been exempted in the existing regulation, so there is a need to amend the regulation to remove such exemption to implement the IMO's requirement, it added.

The Legislative Council Panel on Economic Development and the Hong Kong Fleet Operation Advisory Committee of the Marine Department have been consulted on the legislative proposal. Members supported the proposal.

The proposed legislative amendment was gazetted today and will be tabled at the Legislative Council on March 27 for negative vetting.

This story has been published on: 2019-03-22. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.RTHK: Pompeo compares Trump to Biblical saviour of Jews

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has told a Christian broadcast network that it's "possible" President Donald Trump is like Queen Esther, who saved Jews in the Old Testament.

Pompeo made the statement in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network on his trip to the Middle East.

The interviewer asked if Trump is "like Queen Esther", who interceded with her husband to save Jews in what was then Persia and is now Iran. Trump has backed new sanctions on Iran aimed at reducing its ability to threaten Israel.

Pompeo said in response that "As a Christian, I certainly believe that's possible."

The secretary of state recently drew criticism for holding a briefing exclusively for "faith-based" journalists.

Pompeo on Friday vowed new measures against what he said was the threat from Iran. (AP)

This story has been published on: 2019-03-22. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.Egyptian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Khaled Tharwat (Photo: VOV)

In an interview granted for the Voice of Vietnam (VOV), he said that the relationship between the two countries is developing well, with many agreements and minutes of cooperation having been signed.

According to the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, in the past, President Ho Chi Minh visited Egypt 3 times, which showed that Vietnam attached great importance to strengthening the relationship with Egypt.

Over the past 2 years, the two countries have exchanged high-ranking visits. Egyptian President Al Sisi visited Vietnam and late Vietnamese State President Tran Dai Quang also visited Egypt. Many agreements were signed and we are willing to work with Vietnam to realize the agreements, he said.

He added that both countries have great potential for development, and thus have great potential for cooperation.

We hope that Vietnam will win a seat as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, he added. As Egypt has experience at the United Nations, Vietnamese and Egyptian missions can coordinate in New York.

He went on to say that the two Ministries of Foreign Affairs had agreed to increase trade and culture cooperation. In terms of investment, Egyptian companies can come to invest in Vietnam and Vietnamese companies can come to Egypt, while the two sides have also agreed to lift bilateral trade to USD1 billion, from the current USD471 million, he said.

He also informed of the cooperation between the two countries diplomatic academies in exchanging students to benefit both sides./.404

This page could not be found .The release of a previously secret report exposes how the police collaborated with big companies to blacklist workers.

The report was marked on its front cover [Police] Commissioner only. While the released version is heavily redacted, it shows that police agencies including the Special Branch secret service and its infiltration unit, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), colluded with blacklisting agencies such as the Consulting Association (CA), a secretive body funded by employers, and its predecessor the Economic League (EL).

Blacklisting was only made illegal at the end of the Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009, and even then only as a civil offence, not a criminal offence.

Big businesses used the CA and the secret police to spy on workers and hired and fired them based on the information collectedoften lies and distortions. The blacklisted workers and their families were condemned to a life of poverty and hardship.

One worker was falsely described by the police as having a link to terrorism, ensuring he was refused employment. Showing how the EL worked in 1978, the case was uncovered as a result of a senior police officer who was related to the blacklisted worker and intervened on his behalf.

An active trade unionist, the worker had applied for a job making training videos for a company with links to the construction firms. The company asked the EL for information on him, causing the EL to go to the police due to the perceived risk of involvement in education.

The receiving officers initial inquiries revealed a potential link to [redacted] which in his opinion had not been resolved satisfactorily... he returned to EL asking for any further information, stressing the matters importance due to the possible link to terrorism. This was recorded as fact by the EL representative.

The EL reported back to the employer and the worker was turned down.

The Economic League was wound up in 1993, before blacklisting was made illegal. It had accumulated files on around 22,000 people. The CA was founded in the same year by Ian Kerr, described as a key figure in the EL by its director.

The CA was raided by the Office of the Information Commissioner in February 2009. Although only 15 percent of CAs material was confiscated by the IC, it was enough to prove that it was illegally keeping a blacklist on more than 3,000 workers based on their trade union membership, political views and any raising of health and safety concerns.

It got information from the police agencies, including the Special Branch and the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).

Building workers were the most frequently targeted, but the blacklist also included teachers, dockworkers, firefighters, students and many others.

The CA got its funding from companies, which paid fees of several thousand pounds per year, as well as paying for each file they accessed. The list of more than 40 companies includes all the major construction firms.

The report states, Police, including Special Branches and the Security Services supplied information to the blacklist funded by the countrys major construction firms...

The Metropolitan Police Special Branch Industrial Unit spied on trade unionists from teaching to the docks, attending conferences, and protests personally, and also developing well placed confidential contacts.

The report makes clear that police are still sharing information about workers with big businesses and other bodies by means of the Industrial Liaison Section of the National Domestic Extremism Unit.

Mark Jenner was an undercover police spy from 1995 to 2000, who entered a five-year relationship with an innocent, law-abiding woman as part of his cover story. He posed as a construction worker and joined UCATT. He also infiltrated the Colin Roach Centre, which was involved in numerous industrial and union disputes, particularly in the construction industry.

The centre was associated with the Building Workers Group (BWG) and hosted some of its meetings. Jenner was also a member of the BWG.

His activities in UCATT, the BWG and the Colin Roach Centre gave Jenner ample opportunity to spy on workers involved in disputes. He provided information on more than 300 people, at least 16 of whom appeared in the illegal blacklist.

On March 12, 2015, former SDS police spy-turned-whistleblower Peter Francis made a statement on his own and Jenners activities targeting trade unions, saying, [H]ere in this supposed home of UK democracy, please let me state very clearly that Mark Jenner was 100 percent one of my fellow undercover SDS Police Officers deployed alongside me in the 1990s.

Jenner, who has now been very publicly exposed, should be forced to appear in person at the public inquiry to account for his spying on, amongst numerous other political protesters, the totally law-abiding construction union UCATT members whose only crimes were being union members.

I would also like take this opportunity to unreservedly apologise to all the union members I personally spied upon and reported back on whilst deployed undercover in the SDS.

The targets of his spying included not only [those] engaged in working in the construction industry but also those in the National Union of Students (NUS), National Union of Teachers (NUT), Communication Workers Union (CWU), UNISON and the Fire Brigades Union (FBU).

After becoming a whistleblower, Francis was threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

The EL also worked with trade union officials to supply detailed files on workersan aspect of its blacklisting work studiously avoided by the capitalist media and the Stalinist Morning Star.

Trade unionist Michael Anderson discovered that on his file there was a note saying that the union Amicus had recommended he not be employed. Several of those who have received their files have raised concerns that information appears to have come from union officials. Anderson said: I have written and asked Unite the union to conduct an independent inquiry into who of Amicus was responsible for supplying information that I was not recommended by my own trade union. I have received no reply. I have also asked how other privileged detailed information about which members attended union branch meetings and discussions held at branch fell into the hands of The Consulting Association. I have received no plausible reply. [1]

The fact that the employers relied on the tip-offs given to them by trade union officials alongside the reports of police spies confirms the role of the union bureaucracy as an industrial police force on behalf of big business and the capitalist state.

The building industry has the worst record of all for fatalities at work, with 38 deaths in 2017-18. The report on blacklisting sheds some light on the methods by which such dangerous conditions were imposed, but a lot more is yet to come.

The official papers on the prosecution of the Shrewsbury building worker pickets in 1972 and how they were railroaded into prison have yet to be released. One of the pickets, Des Warren, who became a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party, then the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, was kept drugged while in prison and suffered permanent damage to his health and an early death.

His son Andy Warren has stated, My dad argued that he was not a criminal, he was a political prisoner. He spent eight and a half months in solitary confinement. Both him and Ricky Tomlinson went on hunger strikes in protest at the way that the prison authorities treated them. My dad endured three hunger strikes, the longest lasting 22 days

When my dad was finally released and came home he was never the same My dad never worked again. Every employer in the country blacklisted him. After a time his health began to fail due to the treatment that he had endured in prison, particularly the drugs. [2]

Des Warren died in 2004 aged just 66.

[1] The construction industry blacklist: how the Economic League lived on, Winter 2009/10, by Phil Chamberlain

[2] My Dad, Des Warren, by Andy WarrenThe European Unions (EU) 27 member states have agreed a plan allowing a delay of Brexit to May 22. But this is only on condition that UK MPs approve the deal the EU agreed with Prime Minister Theresa May by the previous official exit date of March 29.

May and the EU leaders hope that the threat of a hard-Brexit as the only alternative will swing enough MPs behind the proposed Strasbourg Agreement between May and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. If not, the UK will have only until April 12.

Any further extension would involve UK participation in elections to the European parliamenta further incentive to the Conservative Partys hard-Brexit faction and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to come on board.

This only gives two additional weeks towards a new cliff edge. After that the EU has made clear that essentially only an abandonment of Brexit will prevent the UK crashing out without a deal. There will be no further renegotiation.

May came to the two-day summit just eight days before Britain was due to exit the European trade block under the terms of Article 50following the June 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU. She arrived after making a televised statement to the nation the previous evening in which she posed as the peoples champion against a recalcitrant Parliament.

You want this stage of the Brexit process to be over and done with. I agree. I am on your side. It is now time for MPs to decide, May said.

Mays request was for an extension to June 30. The proposal agreed fixes May 22 as the new Brexit date because that is when EU elections begin. May has so far ruled out any scenario which would mean UK participation in the elections.

All reports and public statements portrayed French President Emmanuel Macron as taking the hardest linemost notably against Germany. But this was likely a prearranged case of good cop/bad cop. Macron in fact spoke for the entire EU when he warned, In the case of a negative vote [in the UK parliament], we will go towards no dealwe all know it.

He stressed that the stability and homogeneity of the EU was at stake. We must respect the will of the British people, but also the European project. European leaders understand and respect the will of the British people, but we defend the interests of our own people We are ready for Brexit. France didnt choose this, the British people did The European project must continue and must be stronger.

Europes ruling circles must do whatever they can to limit the massive social, political and economic damage threatened by Brexit. Francois Heisbourg, special adviser of the French Fondation de la Recherche Strategique think tank, said that in France and within the EU it was viewed that Britain, having dragged itself deep into the cesspool, will now drag us into the cesspool as well.

Tensions over Brexit in UK ruling circles have resulted in a full-blown constitutional crisis.

Last week, Parliaments Speaker, John Bercow, a supporter of remaining in the EU, dredged up an archaic clause dating back to 1604 to prevent May putting her deal to a third vote if it was substantially the same as those previously rejected.

It has been suggested that Mays deal will now be put to Parliament again on Tuesday, March 26, in a meaningful votewith the government arguing that Bercows ruling is invalidated by the change of date agreed. But given the continued difficulties May has in getting the DUP and her hard-Brexiteers on board, this is by no means certainespecially as there are reports of MPs wanting her to step down. May can now hold a vote in Parliament any time before April 12.

As the summit began, MPs on both sides of the house denounced Mays national address. In language evoking an impending civil war, Remain supporting Labour MP Wes Streeting described Mays Downing Street address as incendiary and irresponsible. If any harm comes to any of us [MPs], she will have to accept her share of responsibility.

Labourite Lisa Nandy stated, Pitting Parliament against the people in the current environment is dangerous and reckless. With MPs speaking of death threats being made against them, Bercow felt obliged to intervene again, saying to MPs, None of you is a traitor.

A pro-Remain online petition calling on the government to revoke Article 50 reached over two million signatures last night, at one point crashing the governments petition website. This is aimed at galvanising support for Saturdays People Vote march in London for a second EU referendum that is expected to be attended by hundreds of thousands of people. But in Parliament at this point there doesnt appear to be a possible majority for a second referendum.

With no solution to the deadlock over Brexit in place, the government announced that extraordinary powers are to be enacted next Monday through its Operation Yellowhammer command and control contingency plans for a no-deal outcome. The governments Cobra committee, which is only convened under conditions of national emergency, is now empowered to deal with all no-deal preparations, including having 3,500 troops on standby.

With dire implications for the working class and democratic rights, the operation allows sweeping powers embodied in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, introduced by the Labour government of Tony Blair, to be rolled out. In January, the Times revealed that scenarios for martial law were being considered and that curfews, bans on travel, confiscation of property [and] deployment of the armed forces to quell rioting are among the measures available to ministers.

On Thursday evening, Sky journalist Deborah Haynes, tweeted, UK military has activated team in a nuclear bunker under the @DefenceHQ [Ministry of Defence] main building to step up preparations for a no-deal Brexit The crisis management operationdubbed Operation #REDFOLD will direct 3,500 personnel who have been put on standby to help government if required if UK leaves EU next Friday without a withdrawal agreement. The REDFOLD mission is military dimension of cross-Whitehall no-deal contingency preparations, called Operation Yellowhammer.

Under conditions of the greatest crisis of rule in Britain in peacetime, the working class has been reduced to the role of spectator. That a hated government still remains in place despite being in political meltdown is entirely the responsibility of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Nothing he says or does is aimed at alerting workers to the gravity of the political threat they face, under conditions in which senior military figures have warned that central to the armed forces remit under Operation Yellowhammer is breaking strikes, particularly in the transport sector.

Corbyn has made no appeal to the working class to intervene independently in this mounting crisis. That would involve rejecting support for any faction of Britains ruling elite, whose conflict is over how best to pursue trade war policiesinside or out of the EUat the expense of the working class. It would mean making an appeal for a unified offensive of the European working class against all of Europes capitalist governments and for socialism.

Instead his sole aim is to convince the ruling class that he is a safe pair of hands in defending the national interest.

Corbyn walked out of cross-party talks with May on Wednesday eveningdue to the presence of Chuka Umunna, the leader of the Blairite breakaway Independent Group. But he then took a private phone call with the prime minister!

His next stop was Brussels, for what he described as very constructive discussions with EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and European Commission secretary general Martin Selmayr. These focussed on Our determination to prevent a no-deal exit from the European Union next Friday and looking for alternatives and building a majority in Parliament that can agree on a future constructive economic relationship with the European Union.Last Friday D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge Morin ordered all charges against the remaining defendants involved in the Disrupt J20 demonstration against the inauguration of President Donald Trump on January 20, 2017 to be dropped with prejudice. The decision ends the more than two-year attempt by the US government to set a legal precedent for the criminalization of constitutionally protected political speech and protest. The decision was the result of months of deliberation following federal prosecutors dismissal of charges last July.

The prosecutions decision to withdraw charges last summer stemmed from the weakness of its case. The prosecution team, which had the support of the Trump administration, would have been able to bring the remaining defendants back to trial on new charges if they were able to compile compelling evidence to do so. The courts ruling to dismiss all charges with prejudice is designed to rule out any possibility that federal prosecutors could introduce new charges in the future.

Of those charged, none who pleaded innocent were convicted in court. This occurred in the face of enormous odds: a virtual media blackout, government attempts at jury rigging, and even the presentation of tampered evidence in court meant to malign defendants. Throughout the course of the trials, not a single Democratic Party official spoke up in support of any of the accused.

As of today, not a single article has been published by any major media outlet on the judges decision.

Protesters initially faced a bogus charge of felony rioting, a sentence which carries decades in prison. The lives of the accused were heavily disrupted, incurring over a years worth of court dates, financial burdens and psychological stress. Though the government failed to secure convictions, its ability to tie up the lives of hundreds constitutes a form of repression on its own.

It was clear the prosecutions case was beginning to unravel last May when it announced its decision to dismiss felony charges for 10 defendants, followed by a dismissal of charges for 8 others the next month. In July the government dismissed charges for the remaining 39 defendants. This occurred after the Justice Departments failure to convict four of the accused. After the first six defendants on trial were acquitted at the end of 2017, prosecutors were forced to drop charges against more than 150 others, citing an inability to prove their guilt.

The acquittals stemmed from an argument by the defense that the prosecutions use of a selectively edited video as evidence constituted a violation of the Brady rule, a legal provision which outlines the states obligations regarding evidence potentially favorable to the defendants exoneration.

The 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland established the legal precedent that the suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused  violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution.

The J20 defendants attorneys argued that the withheld evidence in question was from an edited video created by Project Veritas, a far-right political formation. This organization has become known for sting operations utilizing selectively edited footage in targeted smear campaigns against its political opponents.

The organizations founder, James OKeefe, gained notoriety in 2009 for producing doctored video evidence that led to the collapse of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). In the current case, the prosecution presented a doctored video produced by Project Veritas-linked infiltrators of Disrupt J20 planning sessions to falsely suggest that the group intended to incite violence at the inauguration.

The continued attempts by the prosecution to smear protestors as violent conspirators also hinged on the concept of collective punishment. This stands in direct violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which prohibits abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In addition to US due process and First Amendment violations, the governments case violated international law. The practice of collective punishment is characterized as a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

The mainstream media responded to last years dropping of charges with disappointment. The Washington Post was quick to smear the demonstrations as destructive Inauguration Day protests in the nations capital, which stretched more than 16 blocks. The paper continued with further slander, claiming a large group of protesters set small fires and used bricks and crowbars to smash storefronts.

At the time, D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham made an extraordinary statement decrying the decision. In the American criminal justice system, he said, sometimes the bad guys win. Thats what happened in this case. He went on to say that the police plan to adjust our tactics accordingly to insure that anyone who comes to Washington D.C. with the intent of destroying property and/or injuring people is held accountable for their actions.

Newshams statement should serve as a warning to the working class that there are significant fascistic elements within the police and the state itself that would rather dispense with democratic rights, including the right to due process, in favor of open repression.

The police responded to the J20 demonstration with indiscriminate violence and the mass kettling of protesters, eventually arresting 230 people. Officers fired on the crowd with chemical agents, pepper spray, rubber bullets and crowd control grenades.

D.C. police have attempted to justify the crackdown by citing several windows that were broken at five different corporate storefronts, a relatively common occurrence during mass demonstrations. Hours after the arrests took place, a limousine was set on fire, an unrelated act which the prosecution had attempted to pin on defendants.

An American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, currently underway against the D.C. police, alleges that officers knocked a 10-year-old boy to the ground and pepper-sprayed his mother. Overall, police deployed weapons on at least 191 occasions in the course of the day. Police fired 74 sting ball grenades, a type of non-lethal explosive that ejects rubber balls in a radius surrounding the point of impact. Protesters also claim police sexually assaulted detainees.A week rarely passes without the publication of a major study documenting the misery unleashed on Americans by the US pharmaceutical industry and its rapacious drive for profits.

Earlier this month a study analyzing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data found that more than 150,000 Americans died from alcohol and drug-induced fatalities and suicide in 2017, the highest number ever recorded.

The biggest factor in this shocking number of deaths of despair were drug overdoses, in particular from synthetic opioids like fentanyl. While illicitly manufactured fentanyl and related drugs are now responsible for increasing numbers of deadly overdoses, blame for the rising rates of opioid addiction lies with Big Pharma, which has flooded neighborhoods across the country with prescription opioids, fully aware of their addictive and potentially deadly properties.

A Boston trial beginning in January heard testimony of how Insys Therapeutics executives pushed prescription narcotics through bribing doctors to prescribe an addictive fentanyl nasal spray.

Also in January, portions made public of a lawsuit filed by the state of Massachusetts allege that one of the founders of Purdue Pharma, who developed OxyContin, said in 1996 on the debut of the opioid painkiller that it would be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. Dr. Richard Sackler, whose family developed OxyContin, wrote at the time that they would push the drug by vilifying its addicted victims. They are the culprits and the problem, the email read. They are reckless criminals.

20112016: Fentanyl overdose deaths soar

A study released Thursday by the CDCs National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) provided more grim detail on overdose deaths from fentanyl. In 20112012, fentanyl was involved in roughly 1,600 overdose deaths in the US in both years. From 2012 through 2014, fentanyl-related deaths more than doubled each year. By 2016, deaths attributed to fentanyl had skyrocketed to more than 18,335, a tenfold increase over 20112012 .

While researchers found exponential increases in fatal fentanyl overdoses among all age groups, the largest average annual percent change occurred among young adults aged 2534 and 1524. Men are dying from opioid overdoses at nearly three times the rate of women. Overdose deaths are also increasing faster among blacks and Latinos.

Fentanyl can be 50 times more powerful than heroin. It can shut down breathing in less than a minute. It is more likely to cause an overdose than heroin due to its potency and also because the high fades more quickly than with heroin, which means drug users may inject it more frequently, increasing the risk of overdose.

The New England statesConnecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermontsaw the largest increase in fentanyl overdose deaths, with a 102.2 percent increase per year from 2011 to 2016. This compares to the region comprising Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada, which saw a very small annual increase. Although researchers had no firm explanation for these geographical disparities, one theory is that it is easier to mix a few white fentanyl crystals into the powdered form of heroin that is more popular in the eastern part of the country.

Newly prescribed ADHD medications may cause psychosis

Published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine was a study that found that certain medications used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in teens and young adults may be more likely to cause psychosis, including symptoms such as paranoia, hallucinations, delusions and hearing voices.

Researchers found that patients ages 13 to 25 who had been newly prescribed amphetamines, such as Adderall and Vyvanse were more likely to develop psychosis than those prescribed methylphenidates, such as Ritalin and Concerta.

The rate of psychosis with either class of medications is relatively rare, occurring in one in 660, according to researchers. However, the CDC estimates that 11 percent of US children ages 4 to 17 are diagnosed with ADHD, making the potential pool of patients very large. While the studys findings only showed the relationship between newly prescribed medications and psychosis, with over 3.5 million children currently taking an ADHD drug, this still amounts to tens of thousands of patients at risk each year.

According to data from IMS Health, US prescriptions to treat ADHD rose from 67.4 million in 2010 to 87.5 million in 2015. Sales of ADHD medications rose from $7.9 billion to $11.2 billion during this same period, a more than 40 percent increase.

Doctors are also prescribing these medications off-label for those who dont have an ADHD diagnosis. Nonmedical use of ADHD medications on college campuses is exploding, with students obtaining the drugs from friends or family with a prescription, by obtaining a prescription by claiming to have ADHD, or from classmates selling their own prescriptions.

In these cases, the companies selling the drugsincluding Shire and Tevaare profiting off of the use of study drugs on campuses across the country. Students dealing with the scramble for grades under the pressure of student debt, working in addition to studying, and competing for dwindling job opportunities upon graduation, are using the drugs to help them pull all-nighters to ace exams.

The drug companies are always striving to increase the appeal of their products, through consumer targeted advertising and other means. In 2016, the FDA approved Adzenys, a fruity-flavored film from Neos Therapeutics that dissolves in the mouth. The portability, convenience and tasty delivery increase the risk of abuse of the potentially addictive drug, not to mention the danger of psychosis documented in the study published in NEJM.

One-third of uninsured adults dont take drugs as prescribed due to cost

An NCHC Data Brief published in the centers March 2019 edition examined the strategies used by adults aged 18-64 to reduce the costs of prescription medications. In 2017, those who were uninsured were far more likely to take measures to cut costs than those with either private insurance or Medicaid.

To reduce the burden of skyrocketing drug prices, the uninsured asked their doctors to prescribe a cheaper medication, used alternative therapies to manage their conditions, or did not take their medication as prescribed. More than 33 percent of uninsured adults did not take their medications as prescribed by their doctor, by either leaving their prescription unfilled, dividing doses or spreading them out.

Those living under 400 percent of the poverty lineabout $65,000 for a two-person householdare much more likely to be uninsured. With 12 percent of adults aged 18-64 uninsured, millions of Americans are forgoing prescription drugs due to cost, endangering their health and, potentially, their lives. This is but another demonstration of the incompatibility of the for-profit health system in the US, which places the cash hoards of Big Pharma executives over the well-being of the population, particularly its most vulnerable.On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law two bills that dramatically escalate the governments censorship of the internet and crackdown on free speech. The first bill provides for the removal of and ban on sites and blogs that allegedly spread fake news, and the fining of their authors. The second outlaws the alleged disparaging of state symbols and the government, and the inciting of society to hooliganism.

Individuals accused of spreading unreliable information on socially significant issues that could cause harm to individuals or social disorder, can be fined 30,000-100,000 rubles (US$ 466-1,553) for their first violation of the law  an amount that surpasses what a sizable portion of the population make in a month  and up to 400,000 rubles (US$ 6,211) for repeated offenses. Legal entities can be charged up to 1,5 million rubles (US$ 23,292).

What constitutes unreliable information is nowhere defined and will be decided by the General Prosecutors office, which will be overseeing the implementation of the law, as well as the state agency Roskomnadzor (Russian Communication Oversight), the main agency responsible for the surveillance and censorship of the internet in Russia.

The two laws are part of an international campaign by the ruling class to crack down on the internet, which has become the main platform for the dissemination and discussion of news and opinions that run counter to the official bourgeois mainstream media, as well as for the organization of demonstrations and strikes.

The bill had been approved in a first and second reading by the Russian parliament earlier this year, amid a strike of some 12,000 truckers in southern Russia. The signing of the bills by Putin occurred on the same day as medical personnel at several hospitals in Novosibirsk launched a work-to-rule action to protest against their miserable salaries (about 20,000 rubles monthly or US$ 314 with overtime) and the ongoing cuts in the health care sector.

If the US political establishment and corporate media have based their campaign of internet censorship ideologically on the fight against alleged fake news with reference to the Russian meddling in the election, the Russian government and state media have justified Moscows own clamping down on free speech on the internet by citing the international campaign against fake news as well as the Ukraine conflict and the overt propaganda by the Western bourgeois media.

Amid escalating tensions with the US and European imperialist powers, and rising levels of social inequality, the Russian government in recent years has worked to set up what is now a comprehensive framework for the surveillance of the internet and individual users. It has banned the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that hide users actual internet IP, allowing them to surf on the internet without being automatically identifiable; public WiFis require personal identification for usage and the government has also obliged corporations running social media platforms to store their information about users on Russian servers and make them available upon request to the secret service. Meanwhile, a 2018 attempt to ban the popular messaging app Telegram, which enables encrypted communication, has largely failed.

In addition to these two new censorship laws, the Russian government is also actively preparing to create a Russian internet that would be separate from the World Wide Web. In February, the Russian parliament approved the first reading of a such a bill. The Kremlin has presented the law as a response to the US national cybersecurity strategy that was passed in 2018, and Putin has defended the law as necessary to guarantee the security of Russian citizens.

While there is no question that the open war preparations by the United States and NATO against Russia are a major motivation for the efforts to create a separate Russian internet, at least as important a factor is the fear of the Russian oligarchy that the internet can be used by Russian workers and youth to access information about and link up their struggles with the growing struggles of the working class all over the world. Russia is the most unequal large economy in the world, with the top 1 percent owning as much as one-third of the countrys net wealth and the bottom 50 percent of the population owning less than 5 percent.

The yellow vest protests in France, as well as the strikes by Iranian workers and, most recently, the mass protests and strikes in Algeria have been closely followed in Russia, where over 90 percent of the population has expressed opposition to the raising of the retirement age by five years, which was rammed through in the summer and fall of last year.

The US media coverage of the new censorship laws in Russia, feigning outrage over the Kremlins crackdown, has been entirely hypocritical. Thus, the editorial board of the Washington Post denounced as an authoritarian assault on the potential value of the Internet, and its very freedom.

The same Washington Post has been fully complicit in the internet censorship campaign in the US. It has been one of most vociferous proponents of a campaign against fake news, and, in November 2016, it published a black list of anti-war and left-wing web sites, many of which, including the World Socialist Web Site, were subsequently demoted by Google in search results, and purged by Facebook.On March 6, the application process for the so-called reddito di cittadinanza (citizen income) opened to Italian citizens. This scheme is a vanity project of the co-governing Five-Star Movement as they seek favour ahead of the European elections. It will not, however, change the stark social inequality in the country.

According to the statistical institute Istat, more than five million people are considered to be living in absolute poverty in Italy. This means they are unable to meet their basic daily needs for food, housing, clothing, medical care and social inclusion. The number has almost tripled from 1.8 million in 2007 to over five million today. The younger generations and southern Italians are worst affectedone in ten among them in absolute poverty.

This rampant impoverishment is the result of systematic wealth redistribution in recent decades. This fact is reflected in Italys changing tax rates. In 1974, there were 32 tax brackets in which inhabitants had to pay a rate, depending on their income, between 10 and 72 percent. Today there are only six brackets. The lowest income earners pay no less than 23 percent, while the highest tax rate does not exceed 43 percent. This tax rate also applies to billionaires like Berlusconi, Ferrero or Giorgio Armani.

Workers households are particularly affected by the economic decline. According to the Istat report, absolute poverty in households where the caregiver is a worker has risen to a dramatic 11.8 percent.

So it is not surprising that in the first week following March 6, more than 350,000 Italians sent in online or postal applications for the citizen income scheme. In theory, the scheme entitles citizens to 780 euros per month, with a 1,300 euro limit for families. In practice, however, the assistance is subject to numerous terms and conditions.

Originally, Beppe Grillo had promised every Italian an unconditional basic income as a fixed monthly sum. Yet now, the Italian government has reduced the reddito di cittadinanza to a weak imitation of Germanys Hartz IV labour reforms, with additional high hurdles.

In order to be eligible, citizens must prove that they have less than 9,360 euros available and no more than 6,000 euros in a savings account (the numbers are slightly higher for families). The number of recipients may be reduced after March 28, as only then will the final wording of the law be decided. By the end of March, Parliament has to pass the previous decree into law, and until then new restrictions are always possible.

It was recently revealed that recipients of the citizens money scheme must be prepared to commute up to 100 kilometers for the first available job. For the second, they have to travel up to 250 kilometers, and, if after two rejections, they get a third offer, they must accept it, no matter where in Italy it is.

The right to the citizen income scheme expires after 18 months. Recipients will be given a yellow plastic card, with which they can only buy from grocery stores, supermarkets or pharmacies. This is officially justified as an insurance measure to prevent gambling and squandering. There is a cap of 100 euros on every transaction.

Punishment for violations range to up to several years in prison. The new citizens income thus equals a hastily introduced state employment scheme. Lately, public debate has raged around how applications are scrutinized and the ways in which recipients are tightly controlled to prevent misuse.

To this end, the government wants to recruit 3,000 students and unemployed academics to become so-called navigators for the states employment offices. These navigators are themselves precarious auxiliaries. As one state secretary described the positions: You gain work experience and then you are available for the competition. This temporary workforce is supposed to check applications as quickly as possible so that the first payouts can be made by the end of April.

The Five-Star Movement is desperately hoping to counter its rapidly declining poll numbers with this citizen income scheme. Yet, as the realities of its implementation materialise, the artificial euphoria is turning into disappointment and anger. Workers voices against the project are becoming ever clearer.

The online journal francetvinfo quotes unemployed Marco (34) from Rome saying: The state gives us a bare minimum, but we had hoped to find work.

On the internet, one M5S member disappointedly wrote: The citizen income scheme is a flop (...) Thanks to the selection criteria, those in need of help will not only be humiliated by poverty, they will now be treated as potential fraudsters as well. You are told how, where and for what you can spend the money on (...) This income scheme treats you like a criminal.

Last year, I chose the five stars because I wanted something to change, said a disappointed worker from the former Sardinian mining area of Sulcis to the daily La Stampa .

On the issue of the citizen income scheme, all of the opposition parties are against the Five-Star Movement. Yet, all these parties are arguing from the right, from the point of view of the Italian economy. From the PD (Democratic Party) and the trade unions to Berlusconis Forza Italia, they criticize the reddito di cittadinanza because it is harmful and impossible given empty state coffers and high public debt.

An example of this is the trade union representative Alfred Ebner (CGIL South Tyrol), who sees a limit in the scheme, since only limited financial resources are available. When such resources have been exhausted, the scheme is either over or it will be scaled back.

Even the Lega, the Five-Star Movements coalition partner, refuses to back it on the citizen income scheme. A few days ago, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini (Lega) asserted that the richer regions in the northSouth Tyrol and the two Lega strongholds of Veneto and Lombardywould have a substantial say in the implementation of the scheme.

As the European elections near, the rifts in the coalition government widen. There are now new conflicts between the Lega and the M5S every other day. Yet this gives the Lega an advantage, as it continues to attract Berlusconi and neo-fascist voters with its right-wing and xenophobic program.

According to polls, the Lega may almost double its 2018 parliamentary election results, from 17.4 percent to 33.2 percent. The party is contemplating a swap of coalition partners after the European elections to bring an even more right-wing government into office.

The Five-Star Movement, which reached 32.7 percent in parliamentary elections a year ago, has now fallen to 22 percent in polls. Beppe Grillos party, with its shrill protest and promise of a citizen income scheme, was able to venture into the vacuum left by the Democrats and Rifondazione. They became the strongest single party by using anger and frustration against the existing political parties and the EU for their own purposes. But once in government, Five-Star turned out to be just a placeholder for the ultra-right Lega.On Wednesday, the U.S. Eastern District Court of Virginia unsealed several filings concerning Chelsea Mannings legal challenge to the subpoena attempting to force her to testify before a grand jury involved in fabricating charges against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

Among the unsealed documents is Mannings legal motion of March 1 to have the subpoena thrown out on the grounds that it violates her First and Fifth Amendment rights, that it is an abuse of the grand jury process and that it is the product of illegal electronic surveillance by the government.

The documents include the governments response to Mannings motion and other filings related to unsealing the documents as well as a transcript of a March 5 hearing before US District Judge Claude Hilton on these matters.

Chelsea Manning

Chelsea Manningwho has taken a brave and principled stand against the attempt to frame up Assangewas jailed on March 8 on civil contempt charges for refusing to testify before the secret grand jury. Judge Hilton cruelly sentenced her to jail indefinitely knowing full-well that she had already served seven years in prisonincluding long stretches in solitary confinementeven though she is recognized throughout the world as a courageous whistleblower and defender of the truth.

The unsealed documents shine a light on the desperate measures to which the US government has resorted in pursuing a legal pretext to prosecute Julian Assange. It also exposes the fact that Chelsea Manning has been the target of an endless campaign of intimidation and conspiracy in violation of her democratic rights.

In Mannings legal filing of March 1, Omnibus Motion to Quash Grand Jury Subpoena, it is explained, for example, that a primary objective of the grand jury questioning is to prove that she made false or mistaken statements during her 2013 court-martial trial.

The document states, Given the prosecutors unwillingness to disclose information to Ms. Manning that would help her evaluate the risks of testifying, she must assume that the grand jury is a perjury trap or even worse, a subterfuge for another military prosecution. Such an entrapment, the motion argues, would violate her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

The document also elaborates further on the First Amendment basis for Mannings refusal to answer questions before the grand jury. Mannings lawyers write, First, there is a likelihood that this grand jury to be used expressly to disrupt the integrity of the journalistic process by exposing journalists to a kind of accessorial liability for leaks attributable to independently-acting journalistic sources. This administration has been quite publicly hostile to the press, and there is reason to believe that this grand jury may function to interfere profoundly with the operation of a free press.

In other words, the Trump administration intends to make examples of both Manning and Assange and threaten any future journalists who report the truth about the crimes of American imperialism and its criminal military and intelligence operations around the world.

Mannings motion also exposes the fact that federal prosecutors are using the grand jury mechanism in a wholly unconstitutional manner. They write, Furthermore, it is possible that this subpoena represents an effort on the part of the FBI or another investigative agency in collaboration with government prosecutors to compel by grand jury process testimony that would otherwise be inaccessible.

In violation of her legal rights, the FBI attempted unsuccessfully to question Chelsea Manning in 2010 while she was at the Quantico military brig in Virginia. Federal authorities are now attempting to use their power to compel testimony that was otherwise off limits to them.

Finally, and most significantly, Mannings motion to quash the grand jury subpoena exposes the fact that she has been subjected to massive unlawful electronic surveillance in violation of her First Amendment rights.

The legal team writes, There can be little doubt that local police, federal agencies, and possibly the military have been involved in surveilling and communicating about Ms. Manning, people with whom she is lawfully associated, and the entirely lawful activities in which they engage. Likewise, there is reason to believe that non-state actors may have enabled the state to circumvent legal constraints on electronic surveillance, by surveilling Ms. Manning, and then conveying their intelligence to state actors.

Furthermore, the document explains,  Ms. Manning has encountered at least one individual who appeared to tape her while attempting to goad her into conversations about unlawful uses of technology, she reasonably fears that this or something similar is happening to her.

Considerable public criticism emerged after Manning was sent to jail, which no doubt contributed to the decision of the US government attorneys to also support Mannings motion to unseal the documents. The World Socialist Web Site and International Youth and Students for Social Equality have called a series of rallies and meetings to demand Mannings immediate release from jail.

Media reports on the unsealed documents have focused exclusively on the federal prosecutors assertion that Manning gave false or mistaken statements in her 2010 court martial trial. That this fact was exposed by Mannings legal team as the means through which the prosecutors wish to entrap her is buried in coverage.

Given the well-documented record of US government spying and surveillance of political opponents over many decades, combined with Mannings own declarations, the record of harassment and intimidation and attacks on her democratic rights must be understood as a threat to the entire working class.

The information contained in these unsealed documents confirms that the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning is part and parcel of a US government conspiracy to punish her, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for telling the world the truth about the crimes of US imperialism.Thousands of residents of two suburbs of Houston, Texas, were told to shelter-in-place Thursday morning after elevated levels of benzene, a colorless, cancer-causing, flammable liquid used in the manufacture of gasoline, were detected in the area. Air quality monitoring stations reported dangerous levels of the chemical in the atmosphere, prompting local officials to close schools as well.

According the statement, one-hour levels of benzene in Deer Park were measured at a maximum of 190.68 parts per billion at 4 a.m., dropping to 48.03 ppb at 5 a.m, and 8.12 ppb at 6 a.m. Any short-term exposure above 180 ppb is considered hazardous.

The regulatory agency also reported elevated levels of benzene, measuring 165.17 ppb, at the Lynchburg Ferry monitoring station on Wednesday at 9 p.m.

This is the third time residents of Deer Park have been ordered to stay inside due to dangerous air quality levels since the fire at the Intercontinental Terminals Company (ITC) chemical storage plant began early Sunday morning. As of this writing a shelter-in-place order remains in effect for Galena Park, which is located approximately 12 miles east of Houston. The shelter-in-place order was lifted for Deer Park Thursday afternoon after seven hours.

The massive chemical fire at the ITC plant in Deer Park was declared extinguished by firefighters Wednesday after it raged for over three days. However the danger isnt over for thousands of residents located near the sprawling 2,300-acre facility.

Of the 15 storage tanks located at the ITC facility, 11 have suffered severe fire damage. Firefighters have been dousing the smoldering petrochemical tanks with firefighting foam in an attempt to prevent dangerous chemical vapors from escaping or potential flare-ups from reemerging. Besides gasoline components, several storage tanks contained chemicals used in nail polish remover, glues and paint thinner.

It is still unknown at this time what was the catalyst for starting the inferno, however local officials promised a thorough investigation in an attempt to quell rising public anger.

A Texas National Guard Unit, the 6th Civil Support Team, has been activated in response to the chemical leaks detected at the facility. Civil Support Teams are typically made of Army and Air National Guard troops with civilian contractors as well. Each team is equipped with highly sensitive monitoring equipment used in the detection of nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological compounds. In many cases these teams are deployed undercover to monitor large sporting events or concerts that are considered soft-targets for a dirty bomb radiological attack.

The deployment of a Civil Support Team at the ITC facility could signal that local officials are unable to locate the precise location(s) of the chemical or vapor leaks. The CSTs equipment could also be used to test air quality and precisely assess what has leaked into the atmosphere over the past week. It is also a testament to the danger posed to local residents. Prolonged exposure to any of the various chemicals stored at ITC is comparable in severity to a chemical weapon attack.

People living near the facility have exhibited signs of severe chemical exposure. Serious symptoms reported by residents include headaches, nausea and nosebleeds. Long-term exposure to highly flammable chemicals can have an immediate and long-lasting effect on the human body, seeping into the bloodstream and deep into the bone marrow. Young children, the elderly and pregnant are especially susceptible to exposure.

A 2015 study conducted by the Department of State Health Services found that residents living in eastern Harris County and east Houston have higher than expected levels of certain cancers compared to the general population. In the entire study area, which includes towns such as Deer Park, more cases than expected of childhood lymphoma and melanoma, and an increase at all ages for brain and cervical cancer was established.

Local residents and environmental groups have been highly skeptical of the TCEQ, the states environmental regulatory agency that has been in charge of disseminating air quality information to residents. Local reporters questioned officials as to why an air quality monitoring site near the plant was down for seven hours Monday morning. TCEQ released a statement assuring residents this was a routine quality control check that is required following a repair.

The prevailing attitude of workers toward the TCEQ and the petrochemical companies is comprised of doubtful reservations and seething anger. Sentiments such as those expressed by Deer Park mother Kristin Crump in an interview with CBS News are common, I do not fully trust what they say, she said. I do believe what is in the air is very harmful and it can have long-term effects such as cancer and things like that later down the line. I dont think its worth risking that for me or my kids to stay there and breath in this stuff.

Besides unbreathable air, east Texas residents may have to contend with contaminated water. While conditions have remained dry, a thunderstorm could cause a runoff of chemicals into the Houston Ship Channel which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Even the firefighting foam used to contain the vapors contains hydrocarbons that are known to cause cancer.

The TCEQ has been slow to respond to air quality concerns in the past, notably during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The TCEQ was unable to keep track of millions of pounds of excess pollution released into the air by oil refineries and chemical plants that were experiencing failures and restarts during the powerful hurricane. The TCEQ hasnt taken any regulatory or enforcement action against any of the companies responsible for leaking chemicals, including benzene, into the air and waterways following the storm.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the agency has penalized the local petrochemical industry for less than 3 percent of rogue releases of harmful air pollutants since 2011.

These rogue releases are shockingly common in the greater Houston area. As the Chronicle reported in 2016, southeast Texas has a chemical fire or explosion every six weeks on average. The TCEQ and Environmental Protection Agency have acted as appendages of the petrochemical industry, conducting public relations on behalf of the economic interests that dominate political and social life in the region.

The agencies charged with protecting public health routinely turn a blind eye to safety violations while offering false assurances to workers and residents who have to live with the after effects of deadly fires and chemical leaks. Meanwhile the companies themselves do everything to extract profits out of the environment, regardless of sustainability or safety.In a March 19 announcement, Unifor President Jerry Dias stated that his union will suspend its Save Oshawa GM publicity campaign whilst Dias explores with General Motors avenues to slightly adjust the companys 2019 plant closing schedule.

General Motors has targeted the Oshawa assembly plant for closure in the latter half of 2019 as part of a re-structuring program that will see 2,600 union jobs lost in Oshawa and another 12,500 white collar and production jobs cut and four plants closed in the United States.

The discussions, however, will not alter GMs plan to shutter its Oshawa, Ontario, assembly plant. As Dias wrote, While it is clear to the union that GM has no intention of extending vehicle manufacturing beyond December of 2019, we are examining the potential to transform operations so as to maintain a base level of hourly employment. The parties have agreed to continue talks over the next few weeks and Unifors priority is to save as many jobs as possible in Oshawa.

On Thursday, GM Canadas vice president of corporate affairs, David Patterson, explained that the discussions with Unifor are largely related to adjustments recently announced in the closure schedule for Detroits Hamtramck assembly plant. Earlier this month, GM said it was balancing production timing on the Cadillac CT6 built at the Hamtramck facility and will also temporarily continue production of the Chevrolet Impala. This would keep the plant open until January 2020 instead of closing it this month as previously scheduled. Production of the Buick LaCrosse and Chevrolet Volt in Detroit has already ended while GMs Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant was closed March 8.

There will be some modest Oshawa job and work upside in the second half of this year because Oshawa does some stamping work for the Detroit Hamtramck plant, said Paterson. It is estimated that several hundred workers in Oshawa could be affected by this extension, leaving over 2,000 workers without a job at the assembly plant and thousands more permanently idled in the Ontario auto parts industry. Alongside, the temporary extension of stamping work, Dias hopes to arrange for agreements on a small skeleton crew for facility and truck bay maintenance and additional early retirement buyouts.

The extension of some assembly work in Hamtramck is entirely bound up with GMs preparations for this years contract negotiations with the UAW. Faced with growing rank-and-file opposition to the companys closure plans and a groundswell of worker demands for significant improvements in the miserable contracts they now toil under, GM and the UAW are recalibrating their actions. The slight extension of some production in Hamtramck now puts the closure date after what both parties hope will be the negotiation without a strike of a new deal to replace the four-year labor contracts, which expire on September 14. The possible continued retention of some work at Hamtramck or other vulnerable US based plants will be used as a carrot to demand yet another brutal round of contract concessions from workers.

US President Trump is pressing the UAW to immediately reopen the contract in order to impose drastic concessions on workers to reopen or find another buyer for the Lordstown plant. Trump coupled that with renewed calls for GM to close Mexican, Chinese and other plants outside the borders of the US. As for the UAW, it needs little encouragement to use the threat of plant closings to wrench concessions from its members.

Workers in Oshawa will be entirely familiar with this tactic. During the 2016 Canadian contract negotiations, Unifor picked GM to set the pattern, then accepted the institutionalization of the hated two-tier system, work-rule concessions and a miserable wage and benefits settlement in exchange for guarantees that the Oshawa plant would stay open for the life of the collective agreement. At the ratification meetings, Dias felt it circumspect to not mention clauses in the deal that gave the company the right to alter production plans based on changing market conditions.

The possibility of a slight extension of some Oshawa stamping work will remind veteran workers In Oshawa of a similar exercise by GM during the mothballing of its truck plant in 2009, which saw a delay in the original closure plan that kept some workers on the job for a few additional weeks. This allowed the leaders of the Canadian Auto Workers (the predecessor of Unifor) to claim, without a hint of shame, that they did all they could to push back against the companys initial plan.

Over the past several months autoworkers have witnessed the phony fire-and-brimstone pontification of Dias. Unifor, he would yell, will not accept the closure of the Oshawa plant. The union would launch a helluva fight that would force GM to back down from its plan. But what did this fight actually consist of?

Unifor steadfastly opposed any struggle by rank-and-file to strike or occupy the plant and fight for spreading the strike throughout Canada and the rests of North America. When workers spontaneously sat down in the plant after the initial closure announcement was made in November and then assembled at the union hall, Dias and Unifor Plant Chairman Greg Moffat made sure to instruct workers to show up for their next shift and continue production. Similarly, when workers spontaneously stopped production on January 8 and sat down in the plant after GM confirmed it would not alter its closure decision, Moffat rushed back from Detroit to ensure the action would not turn into an occupation and led the workers out of the plant after GM management, also fearing the possibility of an occupation, ordered the shift to end early.

Later in January a toothless demonstration at the gates of GM offices was quickly dismantled. Two production stoppages at nearby parts suppliers lasting a few hours were not meant to extend beyond the length of a shift. Instead, Unifor launched a media campaign, dripping with anti-Mexican nationalist poison, calling for a consumer boycott of all GM vehicles sold in Canada that were assembled in Mexico. For Unifor, it was the jobs of Mexican workers that had to be cut, continuing with the unions decades-old whip-saw tactics that has pit workers in one country against those in another and set the stage for a never-ending race to the bottom for ever diminishing jobs and wages.

The anti-Mexican campaign was launched as more than 70,000 maquiladora workers in Matamoros, Mexico, conducted a courageous strike against the foreign-owned auto parts companies and corrupt unions, leading to a shortage of steering wheels and other parts and a slowdown of production across North America and message of solidarity by Canadian and US GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers.

The spontaneous actions in Oshawa demonstrate the determination of autoworkers to fight. To be successful in their struggle, autoworkers must organize rank-and-file factory committees, independent of Unifor and the UAW, to take charge of their struggle. These committees should issue an urgent appeal for a joint fightback to GM workers and other autoworkers in Canada, the United States, Mexico and internationally as part of a united fight to defend the jobs and living standards of all workers.Country

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Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of ZimbabweDragon Ball FighterZ is Adding Super Baby 2 to the Roster in JanuaryHong Kong and Hungary wish to strengthen bilateral economic ties, Edward Yau Tang-wah, Hong Kongs secretary for commerce and economic development, told a press conference after meeting Hungarian officials of the foreign and finance ministries in Budapest.

Hungary is an important partner of Hong Kong in central Europe, Yau said. The aim is to further strengthen those ties, he added.

Bilateral trade between Hungary and Hong Kong jumped by 13.2% to 2.3 billion dollars in 2018. Yau is leading a delegation of Hong Kong Trade Development Council on a two-day official visit to Hungary.

The delegation will meet Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, and Gabor Gion, the state secretary of the financial ministry, and will visit the National Bank of Hungary as well as Hungarian companies to obtain information about investment and development opportunities.



MTI Photo: Bruzak NoemiAt stake in the upcoming European parliamentary elections is whether Prime Minister Viktor Orban succeeds in driving Hungary out of the European Union, the top candidate of the opposition Democratic Coalition has said, commenting on the European Peoples Partys decision to freeze the ruling Fidesz partys rights within the bloc.

Klara Dobrev (pictured on top) said that it had been the EPP that had voted to suspend Fideszs rights on Wednesday and not the other way round.

Under the Article 7 procedure Brussels launched against Hungary last year, the country could end up losing access to EU funds along with its voting rights, Dobrev noted.

Now the EPP has decided to examine the state of the rule of law in Hungary, she said, also referring to a vow by Manfred Weber, the EPPs group leader and spitzenkandidat, to ensure that member states observe basic European democratic norms after the May ballot.

Unless theres a change of course after the May ballot, Viktor Orban could end up freezing Hungary out of the EU just as he succeeded in doing with Fidesz from the EPP, she insisted.



MTI Photo: Monus MartonHungary is set to build a new 500km railway line over the next decade connecting major cities in Hungary, Serbia and Romania, Fidesz MP Janos Lazar told the local daily Delmagyarorszag.

The project is expected to cost 800 billion forints (EUR 2.6bn), he said.

The railway line will connect the cities of Pecs, Baja, Subotica (Szabadka), Szeged, Hodmezovasarhely, Bekescsaba, Salonta (Nagyszalonta), Oradea (Nagyvarad) and Debrecen.

The Hungarian and Serbian governments are expected to discuss the project at a joint cabinet session next month, he said, adding that the Serbian government was ready to help finance it.

Lazar said the project could also potentially receive European Union funding, noting that the plan was in line with the EUs transport development strategy.

Certain sections of the railway line will also function as suburban railway lines like the tram-train line being built to connect Szeged and Hodmezovasarhely, Lazar said.

He said certain sections like the Pecs-Baja and Szeged-Bekescsaba lines will be completed by 2022, with the total project likely taking 8-10 years to finish.



MTI Photo: Mathe ZoltanEverybody is over the moon about Jennifer Lopezs engagement to Alex Rodriguez  including former president Barack Obama.

On Friday morning, the retired New York Yankees player, 43, shared a photo of the thoughtful, handwritten note Obama, 57, sent the couple, congratulating them on their big news.

Jennifer and Alex, the note read. Michelle and I just wanted to congratulate you on your engagement.

The former commander in chief went on to share a piece of advice with the couple, writing, After 26 years together, we can say that whatever challenges life may bring, sharing them with someone you love makes it all better. All the best, Barack Obama.

Alongside the photo of the sweet gesture, Rodriguez wrote, This means the world to us.

RELATED: Jennifer Lopez Speaks Out for the First Time Since Her Engagement to Alex Rodriguez: Were Really Happy

Opening up about their news for the first time, Lopez recently told PEOPLE that she and Rodriguez couldnt be more excited.

Were really happy, the global superstar, 49, told PEOPLE in this weeks issue.

Rodriguez, who surprised Lopez with a 16-carat diamond ring on March 9 during a romantic Bahamas beach getaway, added, We have an appreciation for where we are in our lives today and thats what were enjoying the most.

They also find joy in strengthening the bonds of their blended family, which includes Rodriguezs daughters Natasha, 14, and Ella, 10 (with ex-wife Cynthia Scurtis) and Lopezs 11-year-old twins Max and Emme (with ex-husband Marc Anthony).

Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez | Arod Corp

Opening up about what makes their relationship so special, Lopez shared that she truly has found a partner in Rodriguez.

Everything that we do, we do together, Lopez said. Were constantly supporting each other in our individual endeavors and then were thinking about all the things that we can build together.

She added, He knows my dreams and I know his dreams, and together we feel like were stronger. He is my biggest collaborator, and my biggest supporter.

Story continues

RELATED VIDEO: Ellen DeGeneres Is Taking Complete Credit for Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguezs Engagement

A source close to Lopez recently told PEOPLE that the vacation proposal was the best surprise ever.

Jennifer cant stop looking at her ring, the source said. She is obsessed and loves it. She keeps saying that the proposal was the best surprise ever.

They were going for a beach walk when Alex asked her to marry him. Jennifer loves that the proposal was so romantic and low-key, the insider revealed. She loves that Alex knows her so well and felt comfortable keeping it real instead of going for a flashy proposal. It was a dream proposal for Jennifer. She wouldnt have wanted it any other way.Ohio police are investigating a fatal wrong-way crash that killed a couple and their 10-year-old daughter, PEOPLE confirms.

The fatal crash, which is being investigated as vehicular manslaughter, occurred just after 8 p.m. Sunday in the southbound lanes of I-75 near Dayton.

Police said 21-year-old Abby Michaels was driving northbound in the southbound lanes when her white Kia Forte crashed head-on into a black Toyota Camry occupied by 51-year-old Timmy Thompson, Karen Thompson, 50, and their 10-year-old daughter Tessa, according to the Dayton Daily News.

Father and daughter died at the scene. Karen Thompson was transported to Kettering Memorial Hospital where she also died.

Michaels was taken by medical helicopter to Miami Valley Hospital and is listed in critical but stable condition, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports.

At this time, we do believe alcohol was a factor, Sgt. Andrew Parish of the Moraine Police Department told WLWT. To what extent, were not sure yet, but we are investigating that.

According to a police report obtained by PEOPLE, Michaels was allegedly wearing a festive St. Patricks Day shirt, multiple green, plastic shamrock necklaces and she had a temporary tattoo on her right cheek of an apparent beer mug.

The report said Michaels allegedly had a frothy liquid coming from her mouth.

Using my flashlight, I could see the medics attempting to get an airway started, the report states. I noticed they were having difficulty due to a frothy liquid coming from her mouth. The medics identified the fluid/froth as beer.

The officer at the scene said he searched Michaels vehicle and in her purse found a large cup with a Fireball whiskey logo.

I noticed that the cup had a small amount of an unknown dark liquid in the bottom, according to the report.

 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.

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One witness told police he was driving northbound on 1-75 when a white sedan passed him in the left lane and then pulled into the U-turn area of the median.

[The witness] stated the car then pulled into the middle of oncoming traffic and within 10-15 seconds hit another car head on, the report states.

Another witness said she saw a white car cross the median and begin traveling northbound in the southbound. She said the car didnt appear to be slowing down.

Neighbor Terri Holt told WCPO that the couple and their daughter were a beautiful family.Spring is finally here, and it seems winter is determined to go with an ice-filled bang!

As Lake Michigan continues to thaw, water underneath the ice has pushed broken sheets up to the surface  making for a stunning sight along portions of the lake, including the South Haven Pier, according to Today.

Photos taken on Tuesday show the ice shards perched above the water in unique patterns and featuring a blue hue. Approximately 56 percent of Lake Michigan was covered in ice over the winter, according to Today  and experts say the lake is thawing at a rapid pace.

No ice is safe ice, especially this time of year, U.S. Coast Guard BMC Grant Heffner said, according to MLive. The ice is certainly deteriorating and breaking up.

Joel Bissell/Kalamazoo Gazette via AP

Meteorologist Jason Lindsey shared the photos in a Facebook post.

A spring thaw shatters Lake Michigan into pieces and its beautiful, he wrote. The water under the ice pushed giant shards of ice into mesmerizing patterns, creating the perfect setup for a breathtaking sight.

RELATED: Stunning Photos Show Rare Blue Ice as High as Three-Story Building Forming Along Michigan Bridge

Another Facebook user, Debbie Davis Hunt, took a jab at recent chilly weather as she highlighted the photos, writing, On a beautiful note. Other than our spring weather.

Joel Bissell/Kalamazoo Gazette - MLive.com via AP

Lake Michigan is well known for its beautiful sites both during winter and into spring.

Last year, photographers and nature lovers across Michigan flocked to the Mackinac Bridge to see the stunning blocks of blue ice that had formed around the structure.

The frozen blocks got their blue hue because the lake ice, where Lakes Michigan and Huron met, had no bubbles.

Joel Bissell/Kalamazoo Gazette via AP

This allowed for short wavelength light to penetrate and scatter in the water and reflect back through the ice, George Leshkevich, a field scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, told USA Today.

In deep, midlake water, where chlorophyll content is low, the reflection of the water can make the ice look even bluer, he said.

The phenomenon commonly appears in glaciers.Italian Court Ruling That a Woman Was 'Ugly' and 'Too Masculine' to be Raped Sparks Outrage

A massive crowd of protestors showed up to an Italian courthouse this week in response to a ruling that cleared two men of rape charges due to the alleged victims undesirable appearance.

Though the case occurred two years ago, the shocking ruling was brought to light on Monday after Italys highest appeal court ordered the decision be overturned and the case retried, The Guardian reports. Close to 200 people gathered in the town of Ancona to protest the original decision.

Its shameful, but to get almost 200 people at the protest was a miracle for Italy, Cinzia Molinaro, the womans lawyer, told the outlet. Fortunately, it shows that sensitivity towards such topics is becoming stronger.

In 2015, two men were accused of raping a 22-year-old Peruvian woman, whose name has not been publicly released, the outlet said. They appeared in court for the first time in 2016 until the decision to acquit them was made by a group of all-female judges in 2017.

The three Ancona court judges claimed that the alleged victims story was not credible enough since she looked too masculine to be raped, according to the Italian wire service Ansa General News.

Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome

Their arguments were reportedly based on a photograph on the woman, as well as the two men allegedly stating that they were not attracted to her. One of the defendants even allegedly had the womans name in his phone under Viking, The Guardian said.

RELATED: Alyssa Milano, Padma Lakshmi & Lili Reinhart Share Their Sexual Assault Stories to Protest Trump

Speaking to the outlet, Molinaro said she was sickened by their decision, which is why she referred it to the Supreme Court of Cassation.

It was disgusting to read; the judges expressed various reasons for deciding to acquit them, but one was because the [defendants] said they didnt even like her because she was ugly. They also wrote that a photograph [of the woman] reflected this, she told The Guardian.

According to Molinaro, her clients drink was spiked with drugs during a group encounter at a bar after an evening class. She also explained that doctors believed her injuries were consistent with rape and found a high level of benzodiazepines in her blood.

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RELATED VIDEO: Man Allegedly Raped Teen As She Died and Texted Co-Workers Photos: LOL I Think She ODd

Benzodiazepines are prescribed depressant medications, often used to treat anxiety and depression, the Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR) reports. Because of their sedative properties, they can be potentially abused, especially if combined with alcohol.

CESAR also reported that a particular benzodiazepine called flunitrazepam, which goes by the trade name Rohypnol, is often referred to as the date-rape drug because of its use in sexual assaults.

It is not clear, however, what specific benzodiazepine was found in her bloodstream.

RELATED: Everything You Need to Know About the Womens March 2019: Locations, Speakers and Recent Controversy

The woman eventually left Ancona and moved back to Peru because of how badly she was ostracized for reporting the men, Molinaro said.

Her case will be reheard by a court in Perugia, according to The Guardian. At this time, it is not clear whether the woman will be in attendance.

Molinaro did not immediately respond to PEOPLEs request for comment.White House rejects House Democrats' request for Trump-Putin communications originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

The White House rejected a request from Congressional Democrats for a slew of documents related to President Donald Trump's phone calls and meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, in a letter sent Thursday to the chairmen of the House Oversight, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence Committees, said that Congress has demonstrated no legal or constitutional authority to gain access to the president's diplomatic communications.

"The president must be free to engage in discussions with foreign leaders without fear that those communications will be disclosed and used as fodder for partisan political purpose," Cipollone wrote.

"This is why, from the Nation's beginning, Presidents from all political parties have determined that the law does not require the Executive Branch to provide Congress with documents related to confidential diplomatic communications between the president and foreign leaders," he said in the letter.

PHOTO: House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Elijah Cummings, D-Md., speaks during the House Oversight Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, March 14, 2019. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

Cipollone writes that there is an "unbroken recognition that the Constitution assigns the conduct of foreign affairs exclusively to the Executive Branch" and says that Democrats failed to cite any law or regulation that would justify their right to access the president's communications other than the Presidential Records Act, with which he insists the White House is in proper compliance.

Earlier this month, three House Democrats requested that the White House and State Department turn over detailed information about any communications between Trump and Putin. The letter, signed by Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Adam Schiff, Chairman of House Foreign Affairs Committee Rep. Eliot Engel, and Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Elijah Cummings, was sent to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

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(MORE: Jared Kushner used WhatsApp to message foreign contacts in White House: Cummings)

Democrats have sought to investigate whether or not Russia has influenced the president, and point to media reports that Trump has attempted to conceal the details of his communications with President Putin. Investigators argue that the presidents actions are a threat to national security and present concerns that the president may have been manipulated by Russia.

But White House counsel argues that Democrats are making an overly broad request for "detailed information related to the President's meetings and telephone calls with Russian president Vladimir Putin," in addition to "confidential communications" between the president and top advisers.

(MORE: As investigations swirl, Trump team ready to fight, distract)

Cummings has accused the White House of stonewalling.

The problem is that the White House is engaged in an unprecedented level of stonewalling, delay and obstruction, Rep. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, wrote in a scathing Washington Post editorial Tuesday.

Chairman Cummings, D-Md., noted, The White House has not turned over a single piece of paper to our committee or made a single official available for testimony during the 116th Congress.

The same goes for the House Judiciary Committee whose chairman, Jerrold Nadler of New York, launched a wide-ranging probe earlier this month into allegations of obstruction of justice and abuse of power by the president.

The president initially indicated that he would cooperate with the Judiciary Committee, but White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders just hours later called the probe a disgraceful and abusive investigation into tired, false allegations.

Despite that pointed criticism, ABC News has learned from sources familiar with the matter that the White House does plan to reply to some requests, though they only intend to respond to those they deem legitimate.

Its unclear what that would mean.

In Thursdays letter, White House counsel Cipollone said he is "unaware of any precedent supporting such sweeping requests."

House Democrats have compiled a list - obtained by ABC News  that indicates that the Trump Administration, writ large, has either refused to respond to or slow-walked, more than 30 inquiries for documents and interviews by 15 committees.

This week, Chairman Nadler also ratcheted up the pressure on the president to assert executive privilege. The panel is interested in conversations Trump may have had about his former attorney Michael Cohen with his then-acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker who left his post last month after the confirmation of William Barr.

According to Nadler - in a letter to the head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department - Whitaker, in a follow-up interview with the Judiciary Committee after a public hearing in February, refused to answer questions on the basis that the President may one day want to invoke executive privilege to prevent the content of these communications from becoming public.

The executive branch has an obligation to respond to congressional oversight, especially where a committee has articulated its particular need for access to the information, said John Bies who worked in the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel and is now chief counsel at American Oversight. Certainly this letter ratchets up the pressure on the White House either to permit Whitaker to answer the questions or to actually invoke executive privilege.

A "my way or the highway" approach to oversight is fundamentally inconsistent with the notion that ours is a government of checks and balances, and that each branch is obligated to try in good faith to accommodate the legitimate interests of the other, Bies added.

Both chairmen, Nadler and Cummings, made clear this week that they intend to issue subpoenas for the documents they are seeking. Last year Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee blocked a move by Democrats to subpoena the State Department translator in the room during Trump and Putins private meeting in Helsinki.

ABC News' Katherine Faulders contributed to this report.Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez are feeling the love. Two weeks after getting engaged, the couple has revealed that they received a handwritten congratulations note from none other than Barack and Michelle Obama, whose own affectionate marriage has long been a source of joy and inspiration to the American public and beyond.

Jennifer and Alex, Barack wrote in the note, which Rodriguez shared a photo of on Instagram. Michelle and I just wanted to congratulate you on your engagement. After 26 years together, we can say that whatever challenges life may bring, sharing them with someone you love makes it all better. All the best.

The former New York Yankee expressed his gratitude to the former president and first lady, writing This means the world to us as a caption on the snap.

A-Rod and J-Lo announced their engagement on Saturday, March 9. They each shared the same Instagram post of the former athlete holding Lopezs hand  which, naturally, showed off a massive diamond ring. The engagement happened during the couple vacation to the Bahamas.

The pair had dated for over two years prior to getting engaged, during which time fans as well as high-profile talk show hosts like Jimmy Fallon and Ellen DeGeneres frequently grilled the couple on their marriage plans. Most recently, in December 2018, DeGeneres told Lopez that A-Rod had spilled his proposal plans.

I dont know, Lopez would simply say when pressed on whether theyd tie the knot. I dont know. The couple were first linked back in 2017, and have since blended their families, which includes Lopezs two children with ex-husband Marc Anthony, and Rodriguezs two children with ex-wife Cynthia Rodriguez.

RELATED: The Biggest Celebrity Engagements of 2019 (So Far)

(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)BEVERLY HILLS, CA - FEBRUARY 24: Emilia Clarke attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 24, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

Life on the set of Game of Thrones wasn't always easy for Emilia Clarke. In a recent essay for The New Yorker, the actress opened up about her experience treating two life-threatening brain aneurysms during her first few years on the HBO show. In the essay, Clarke revealed that she experienced her first aneurysm in 2011 during a workout with her trainer, when she "felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain."

"I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn't. I told my trainer I had to take a break," the 32-year-old wrote. "Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain - shooting, stabbing, constricting pain - was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged."

Clarke was then rushed to a hospital in London where she was diagnosed with a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a type of stroke caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. Afterward, she was taken to another hospital where she underwent a "minimally invasive" brain surgery to seal off the aneurysm. She described the pain upon waking up as "unbearable," and recalled not being able to remember her name due to a condition known as aphasia.

"My full name is Emilia Isobel Euphemia Rose Clarke. But now I couldn't remember it," she said. "Instead, nonsense words tumbled out of my mouth and I went into a blind panic." Eventually the aphasia had passed, and Clarke began filming Season 2 of Game of Thrones within months of her recovery - but another, smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain left her with more to worry about.

I was often so woozy, so weak, that I thought I was going to die.

"Even before we began filming Season 2, I was deeply unsure of myself. I was often so woozy, so weak, that I thought I was going to die," she wrote. "Staying at a hotel in London during a publicity tour, I vividly remember thinking, I can't keep up or think or breathe, much less try to be charming. I sipped on morphine in between interviews. The pain was there, and the fatigue was like the worst exhaustion I'd ever experienced, multiplied by a million."

After wrapping Season 3 in 2013, the second aneurysm had doubled in size, and Clarke was urged to undergo another surgery to "take care of it." The recovery period after her second surgery, unfortunately, ended up being worse than that of the first. "I emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head. Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium," she said. "These days, you can't see the scar that curves from my scalp to my ear, but I didn't know at first that it wouldn't be visible. And there was, above all, the constant worry about cognitive or sensory losses."

Thankfully though, Clarke was able to push through after spending another month in the hospital. Now, as she announced near the essay's end, she's "at a hundred percent," and has founded a charity called SameYou which aims to help raise money for people recovering from brain injuries. Head over to The New Yorker to read Clarke's moving story in its entirety."It struck me at some point that if I were to look around and see no women coming up through mathematics behind me, how would I feel? I would feel terrible."

For the first time ever, the most prestigious mathematics prize in the world was awarded to a woman. Karen Uhlenbeck, Ph.D., 76, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin and current visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, was honored with the Abel Prize for mathematics. Known as the Nobel Prize for math, the Abel comes with a cash prize of about $700,000. (NBD: It's up to the king of Norway to give it.) The award was established in 2003, and all previous winners have been men.

Uhlenbeck was recognized for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry, and mathematical physics, according to The New York Times. Uhlenbeck found out she'd won as she was leaving her Unitarian Universalist church, when she received a text message from a colleague telling her to look out for a call from Norway. She checked her missed calls. "I pressed the button and called [the Abel committee] back, and they told me I'd wonand I had to sit down," she told Glamour.

When Uhlenbeck began teaching mathematics in the 1960s, she had to fight tooth and nail to even procure a professorship. "It was really only at the period of time that I got my degree, that the jobs in academiaand probably elsewherewere slowly being opened up to women," she says. "I was right on the edge of that. There were certainly universities that would not consider hiring me. There were universities that said, 'Oh well, why dont you go teach at a womens college?' I was told things like that, but I guess I have a rebellious streak, so I persevered."

Since there weren't a huge number of women who had come before her to look up to in STEM, Uhlenbeck paid attention to women who'd pioneered in other fields for inspiration. Famed chef Julia Child was a particular role model. "She was 6'2", a big woman with this immense presence," she says. Uhlenbeck recalls the story of Child dropping a turkey on her television show and carrying on nonetheless. "She had presence and wasn't perfect. The feeling was if Julia Child could do it, maybe you could too," she says.

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Uhlenbeck has emulated Child's style of being an approachable and human role model to the many women she's mentored over the yearsas well as those who have simply come in her wake. "Since winning the award, Ive gotten innumerable emails from women telling me how important my being there is, and its a great feeling," she says. But this isn't a coincidence. Uhlenbeck made it her mission to encourage more women to enter the field. "I have to say that it struck me at some point that if I were to look around and see no women coming up through mathematics behind me, how would I feel? I would feel terrible. Now I see these lively, enthusiastic, brilliant, wacky young women coming up and doing mathematics. When I was young, I couldnt afford to be wacky. I had to be careful. I couldnt dye my hair purple and get up and teach calculus class, but I love seeing it; its wonderful to see."

With new efforts to get girls into STEM from a young age, Uhlenbeck is hopeful that we'll see even more women work in mathematics. "Certainly the problem [of girls not pursuing STEM] starts very young," she says. "I dont know how many young girls are still being told that they dont have to bother taking advanced-placement math because theyre a girl and they dont need itbut I know it still happens. However, all I can say is that its getting better."

For Uhlenbeck, the Abel is not a lifetime achievement award; it's also a reminder that she still has new ideas for and contributions to make to her preferred field. While she hasn't decided what she'll do with her prize money, she has a few project ideasand a lot more women she intends to set an example for before she's done.

Samantha Leach is an assistant culture editor at Glamour. Follow her on Twitter @_sleach.A small gray seal appears to be on a tour of the Souths best beach towns.

Scientists have had their eyes on the wayward juvenile since it was found lethargic in Virginia Beach on February 28. After some observation, veterinarians at the Virginia Aquarium Marine Animal Conservation Center determined that the young male seal needed assistance. With some fluids for dehydration and antibiotics, it was released back into the wild a few days later.

But instead of heading north to his natural habitat filled with rocky outcroppings for him to rest, the seal continued his journey south, puzzling scientists.

It is not unprecedented, but it is not what we want to see, Susan Barco, research coordinator and senior scientist with the Virginia Aquarium Stranding Response Program, told The State.

Ten days after its release in Virginia, the same seal bearing an orange tag with the number 36 on its left rear flipper, took a break from swimming at Myrtle Beach State Park in South Carolina.

Ann Wilson, a ranger at Myrtle Beach State Park, told WMBF that this is only the second seal she has seen in the 25 years shes been at the park.

Then on Monday, researchers confirmed that same seal was found lounging on the beach on Hilton Head Island. The Hilton Head Sea Turtle Patrol reportedly cordoned off an area of the beach in the Palmetto Dunes Marriott area to prevent curious beachgoers from approaching the seal. Fortunately, Amber Kuehn, a marine biologist with the Hilton Head Sea Turtle Patrol, confirmed to The State that the seal went back into the ocean overnight as expected.

According to Wayne McFee, research wildlife biologist with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the last time a seal was seen on a Hilton Head beach was in 1997.

This is a yearling, so its not too surprising that its trying to poke its head into different places, McFee told The State. It might just be curious about other things and may end up going back north, which we hope it will at some point.

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He said as long as the seal continues to display normal seal behavior and remains healthy, scientists have no plans to intervene.

This one seems to be doing whatever he feels like, McFee said.

WATCH: Watch This Baby Sea Turtle Make Its Way To The Ocean

For now, the biggest risk to the young seal is humans. Hes very cute, which means people will likely want to touch him, and, as Kuehn explained, his previous interaction with people appears to have left him unafraid of human interaction.

It hardly reacted to the people being less than five feet away from it, Kuehn told The State.

But that doesnt mean he cantand wontbite. And as a federally protected marine mammal species, its illegal to touch, feed or harass seals.

If you spot this little guy or any other marine mammal on the beach, Kuehn recommends keeping your distance and calling the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources at 1 (800) 922-5431.If youre feeling low, it may be time to book a trip to Finland.

The results of the seventh annual World Happiness Report have revealed that residents of Finland are the happiest in the world  for the second year in a row. But its not something inherent in Finnish DNA, according to the researchers.

It's true that last year all Finns were happier than rest of the countries' residents, but their immigrants were also happiest immigrants in the world, John Helliwell, co-editor of the report and a professor of economics at the University of British Columbia, told CNN. It's not about Finnish DNA. It's the way life is lived in those countries.

And that same sentiment can be extended to countries geographically near Finland. Despite winters without much sunlight, Scandinavian residents are the happiest in the world, according to this report. The following most happy countries were Denmark, Norway, Iceland and The Netherlands.

The report, which is produced by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, ranks 156 countries around the globe based off of how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be. Categories considered include wealth, life expectancy, social support, freedom to make life decisions and levels of government corruption.

While Scandinavia may have reason to celebrate, the rest of the world is not so happy. According to the report, world happiness has fallen in recent years, largely driven by a significant decrease in India. Emotions like worry, sadness and anger have increased throughout Asia and Africa in that same time.

The U.S.s ranking in the survey slipped from 18 to 19, which researcher credit in large part to rampant compulsive pursuit of substance abuse and addictive behaviors, including consumption of digital media and gambling.

We are living a moment of transition to a new age and this generates a sense of uncertainty, Andrea Illy, Chairman of illycaffe and Member of the Board of Fondazione Ernesto Illy, which co-sponsored the study, said in a statement. Social happiness is therefore even more relevant, in order to give a positive perspective and outlook for the present and for the future.Algiers (AFP) - Hundreds of thousands of Algerians demonstrated Friday a month after ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's bid for a fifth term sparked a protest movement that shows little sign of abating.

Despite bad weather, people marched for several kilometres (miles) through one of the main streets of the capital Algiers for more than four hours to rally at the Grand Post Office in the city centre.

Like the past two Fridays, the Muslim day of prayer, when record numbers of protesters rallied in Algiers, drums and horns cheered the demonstrators as the crowds clogged other major roads.

Security forces said "hundreds of thousands" of protesters gathered in central Algiers and that demonstrations were also held in 42 out of the North African country's 48 provinces.

Demonstrators took to the streets of second city Oran and across the country of 40 million people, according to Algerian media and social networks.

Foreign diplomats say "millions" of Algerians have rallied against Bouteflika's plans to extend his two-decade rule since the protest movement began.

Now an indispensable accessory for protesters, the green and white Algerian flag with its red star and crescent moon could be seen everywhere draped around shoulders, flying from balconies or held aloft and waved.

"Stand down," read one banner.

- Marching for change -

Friday afternoon police used a water canon and tear gas to prevent a group of demonstrators from breaking through a security cordon to try to reach a road that leads to the presidential palace.

No one was hurt and by nightfall the protests in the capital -- largely held in a festive mood with music, dancing and free food offered to the marchers -- ended.

But retired civil servant Zineb, 59, said she would continue demonstrating "in rain or snow, until this rotten regime falls".

Bouteflika said on February 22 he would run for a fifth term in April 18 elections, despite concerns about his ability to rule.

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The 82-year-old uses a wheelchair and has rarely appeared in public since suffering a stroke in 2013.

Following early protests, he made the surprise announcement on March 11 that he was pulling out of the race -- and also postponed the polls.

Protesters initially greeted the move with elation, but staged further mass demonstrations once they realised he intended to remain in office.

On Friday, many had again travelled far to attend demonstrations in the capital.

"I will march every Friday, until there is a radical change" to the system, said Younes Laroussi, an unemployed 24-year-old from Tiaret, 270 kilometres (170 miles) from Algiers.

In the northeastern city of Annaba, local journalists said "many people" took to the streets despite heavy rains that flooded the town.

Demonstrators also braved "the cold weather and storms" to pack the streets of Tizi Ouzou east of Algiers, with one protester, Mokran Zarabi, saying it took three hours to cover just 600 metres (yards).

Organisers used social media this week to call for further protests against Bouteflika and his entourage in the former French colony.

"The Algerian people demand the immediate and unconditional departure of President Bouteflika," read one widely-shared post, which urged that "the leaders of countries that support Algeria's illegitimate power stop... their interference".

The demonstrations, unprecedented since Bouteflika won a first term in 1999, have remained largely peaceful.

The government has responded with promises of political and constitutional reform.

Authorities have pledged to hold a "national conference" to discuss reforms, followed by a referendum on a new constitution and eventually the election of a new president.

- 'A future state' -

Deputy prime minister Ramtane Lamamra on Tuesday promised "open and transparent" steps to resolve the political crisis, as Algeria's ally Russia backed his government's plans.

Lamamra said Algeria was developing a "concept of a future state" and that a new constitution would be written "on the basis of an open and transparent discussion".

The national conference would decide the date of future elections, he said, adding Bouteflika was "ready to fully transfer his powers" to a new president.

But students, professors, medics, lawyers and magistrates have continued to protest this week and cracks have emerged within Bouteflika's own regime.

His National Liberation Front party said Wednesday it supports protesters' calls for change, while the main trade union confederation and business organisation have been hit by dissent and resignations over their leadership's initial support of another term for Bouteflika.Staff at a Harare branch of Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe formed a human chain on March 20 to prepare supplies for distribution to those affected by Cyclone Idai, which hit parts of the country, as well as Malawi and Mozambique, on March 14 and 15.

The bank donated an array of goods worth RTGS$200,000 (approximately $53,000), including tents, blankets, bottled water, and reusable sanitary pads, according to a Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe spokesperson.

Footage shared to Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe social media accounts shows staff members transporting the supplies to a truck via a human chain.

Cyclone Idai pummeled southeastern Africa on the week of March 15, leaving an estimated 1,000 feared dead in Mozambique alone and over a hundred dead and hundreds missing in Zimbabwe, according to reports. Credit: Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe via StoryfulBy David Shepardson and Cindy Silviana WASHINGTON/JAKARTA (Reuters) - A U.S. lawmaker on Friday urged current or former Boeing Co and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees to come forward with any information about the certification program for the 737 MAX, which has suffered two fatal crashes in five months. Boeing and the FAA are under global regulatory scrutiny over software and training on the signature aircraft. Boeing risked losing a $6 billion order for the jet on Friday, its first since the world's entire fleet was grounded last week. Indonesian airline Garuda said it plans to scrap its order because some passengers are afraid to board the plane, although industry analysts said the deal was already in doubt. In the United States, the chairman of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Peter DeFazio urged people to use the committee's whistleblower web page. "It is imperative we continue to ensure we have the highest level of safety for the traveling public," DeFazio said. American Airlines pilots were preparing to test Boeing's planned software upgrade for an anti-stall system on MAX simulators this weekend, saying they want their own safety guarantees on the software fix. The 737 MAX was Boeing's fastest selling jet before an Ethiopian Airlines crash near Addis Ababa on March 10, which followed a Lion Air crash in Indonesia on Oct. 29. Ethiopian and French investigators have pointed to "clear similarities" between the two crashes, which killed 346 people, putting pressure on Boeing and U.S. regulators to come up with an adequate fix. No direct link has been proven between the crashes but attention has focused on whether pilots had the correct information about the "angle of attack" at which the wing slices through the air. Ethiopia has shared limited information with foreign investigators, Reuters reported on Thursday, and an industry source said Boeing had not yet received any black box and voice recorder data. Meanwhile, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, on Friday raised concerns in a letter to the FAA about regulations that allow aircraft manufacturers to effectively self-certify the safety of their planes and "left the fox guarding the henhouse." The FAA declined to comment. The U.S. Justice Department opened a separate investigation this week. The FBI has declined comment. Garuda CEO Ari Askhara told Reuters on Friday: "Many passengers told us they were afraid to get on a MAX 8." However, the airline had been reconsidering its order for 49 of the narrowbody jets before the Ethiopian crash, including potentially swapping some for widebody Boeing models. Southeast Asia faces a glut of narrowbody aircraft like the 737 MAX and rival Airbus A320neo at a time of slowing global economic growth and high fuel costs. "They have been re-looking at their fleet plan anyway so this is an opportunity to make some changes that otherwise may be difficult to do," CAPA Centre for Aviation Chief Analyst Brendan Sobie said. Indonesia's Lion Air has also said it might cancel 737 MAX aircraft, though industry sources say it is also struggling to absorb the number of planes on order. RETROFITS Boeing now plans to make compulsory a light to alert pilots when sensor readings of the angle of attack do not match - meaning at least one must be wrong -, according to two officials briefed on the matter. Investigators suspect a faulty angle-of-attack reading led the doomed Lion Air jet's computer to believe it had stalled, prompting its anti-stall system, called MCAS, repeatedly to push the plane's nose down. Norwegian Air played down the significance of the compulsory light, saying that, according to Boeing, it would not have been able to prevent erroneous signals that Lion Air pilots received before their new 737 MAX plane crashed in October. Boeing must be cautious with how it characterizes the safety alert, risking legal claims by saying it could have made a difference in the crash while not wanting to suggest that the retrofit is meaningless, legal experts said. The Lion Air plane did not have the warning light installed, and Ethiopian Airlines did not immediately comment on whether its crashed plane had the alert. But the Ethiopian carrier, whose reputation along with Boeing's is at stake, issued a statement on Friday emphasizing the modernity of its safety and training systems, with more than $500 million invested in infrastructure in the past five years. The Ethiopian crash has set off one of the widest inquiries in aviation history and cast a shadow over the Boeing 737 MAX model intended to be a standard for decades. Boeing did not comment on the plan to make the safety feature standard, but separately said it was moving quickly to make software changes and expected the upgrade to be approved by the FAA in coming weeks. Experts said the change needs regulatory approval and could take weeks or months. Regulators in Europe and Canada have said they will conduct their own reviews of any new systems. Boeing shares have fallen 14 percent since the Ethiopian crash. GRAPHIC: Boeing 737 MAX deliveries in question interactive - https://tmsnrt.rs/2Hv2btC GRAPHIC: Grounded 737 MAX fleet interactive - https://tmsnrt.rs/2O6jQbI GRAPHIC: Ethiopian Airlines crash and black boxes - https://tmsnrt.rs/2ChBW5M (Reporting by David Shepardson in WASHINGTON, Cindy Silviana in JAKARTA and Tracy Rucinski in CHICAGO; Additional reporting by Terje Solsvik in Oslo, Jamie Freed in Singapore, Bernadette Christina Munthe in Jakarta, Maggie Fick and Jason Neely in Addis Ababa, Tim Hepher in Paris, and Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Writing by Sayantani Ghosh, Georgina Prodhan and Tracy Rucinski; Editing by Mark Potter and Grant McCool)People look at tributes at the Botanic Gardens in Christchurch on March 21, 2019, six days after the twin mosque shooting massacre that claimed the lives of fifty people. - New Zealand is banning the sale of assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons with almost immediate effect, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on March 21, rapidly making good on a pledge to tighten the country's gun laws. (Photo credit: WILLIAM WEST/AFP/Getty Images)

Semi-automatic rifles will be included in an upcoming review of possible gun bans in Canada. The move by Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction Minister Bill Blair, comes as a direct result of last weeks attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, where a gunman used the firearm to kill 50 people. The government in that country was swift to ban the ownership of semi-automatic rifles in that country, coming to the agreement just three days after the tragic incident.

There is no option that we will not consider, Blair was quoted as saying on Tuesday, when asked about a review of military-style rifles following the attack. I am prepared to examine every measure and to discuss with my prime minister and the cabinet and our government on any measure that can be effective in keeping Canadians safe.

Here in Canada, members on both sides of the gun ownership debate feel the government is going about things in the wrong way when it comes to curbing gun violence.

Blair Hagen, executive vice-president of National Firearms Association, says the current laws target people who are law abiding, and do nothing to stop someone whos determined to get a firearm.

Theyll get them legally, theyll get them illegally, if theres no legal mean to it, he told Yahoo Canada. The demand is still going to be there, and thats still going to be fulfilled. Attacking the rights and property to law-abiding people is not the answer to this.

Hagen describes the system as arbitrary, focused largely on firearm licenses that have expired, which is considered a criminal offence and will result in an investigation and seizure of the license-carriers property.

The entire system is focused on that and its not focused on ways and means of preventing people who should not get firearms, from getting them, he says. Its entirely upfront on people who are law abiding and compliant.

In order to tackle the issue of gun violence, a firearms act has to be written, says Hagen. This will take the emphasis off people who are law abiding, and comply with a reasonable system.

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Those resources have to be used instead to target the criminal misuse of firearms, he says. A lot of those resources could be used for background checks, because as it stands now, the background checks are only directed towards people who are currently involved in that system. Theyre onerous and confiscatory towards people who are law-abiding to the system.

Canadians who legally own guns will be watching when Bill C 71, which intends to amend certain acts and regulations in relation to firearms, goes before the Senate this spring.

This will attack firearms owners and their property, says Hagen. And were going to remember that come election day.

Waiting for a consensus?

For Louis March, founder of Toronto-based Zero Gun Violence Movement, the gun laws in Canada are reactive, circumstantial and not ahead of the curve. Hes concerned that were reacting to whats going on in other countries, when we have our own problems in Canada that arent being addressed.

The access to guns, the brazen nature of the shootings, the total disregard for life has changed dramatically these days, he says. We have to review and assess whats really going on. When we see the shooting in the States or New Zealand, then we start running around to see what we can be doing or should be doing. Thats not going to help us.

March says Blairs review of the system has been slow-moving, and wonders if hes stalling to come up with a plan in order to appease all sides.

The pro-gun lobby people are already threatening them, saying anything to further regulate guns is going to be political suicide to them, he says. Theyve been stick-handling around trying to find some common ground while were seeing a record number of shootings in Toronto last year. Were not seeing that definitive action that were seeing in New Zealand. Thats concerning.

Without political leadership, will and hard decisions that will offend some people, nothing is going to happen, says March.

No one wants to take the lead in bringing the stakeholders to the table to get a clear picture of whats going on what and what can be done to prevent and avoid these types of situations, he says. Everyones working in their silos. Everyone has self-serving interests. We dont have that collective impact or strategy that speaks to a clear understanding of whats going on.

Making changes to the system, March says, should start by addressing the issue of straw purchases - where one person without a license pays someone else with a license to buy multiple guns on their behalf.

We need to do a better attempt at identifying whats going on here, he says. If someones buying five or 10 guns, there has to be a reassessment to insure that these are for legitimate purchases. You can do that without oversight.

The focus of Zero Gun Violence Movement is the banning of poverty, instead of the banning of guns. March explains that the socioeconomic positions in certain communities in Toronto, for example, bet on violence as a means of survival. And when violence becomes a means of survival, people will get guns.

Our intention is to close that gap so theres no need for people to use violence as a means of survival, he says. When people are saying its easier for them to get guns than it is to get jobs, we have a problem. Thats where all focus has been.By Tom Daly and David Stanway BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - A Chinese court on Friday fined the firm behind the now-defunct Fanya Nonferrous Metals Exchange 1 billion yuan ($149.04 million) for illegal fundraising and handed its founder a lengthy prison term, the official Xinhua news agency reported. The Kunming Intermediate People's Court sentenced Shan Jiuliang, who founded and ran the minor metals bourse, to 18 years in prison for crimes including embezzlement, according to a Xinhua report carried on the court's website. Shan, whose company was said to have caused investors "huge economic losses," was also fined 500,000 yuan and had 50 million yuan of his personal property confiscated, the report added. The Fanya exchange was launched in 2011 in Kunming, in southwest China's Yunnan province, with the aim of raising the prices of minor metals like bismuth by building up stockpiles using money borrowed from thousands of individual investors. But the exchange froze transactions and members' accounts in 2015 after experiencing "liquidity" problems and was later taken over by government investigators. The same Kunming court had in January attempted to raise funds to pay off investors owed nearly 40 billion yuan by auctioning off the bourse's inventories of indium, a silvery metal used in flat-panel screens and semi-conductors, on Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao. The sale ultimately attracted no bids. Asked on Friday if the court's decision was good news, one former Fanya investor said it had fallen short of the investors' expectations. "Where is the money? The key question is not addressed in the sentence," he said. Besides Shan, 20 other defendants are facing criminal charges for Fanya-related crimes, Xinhua said. These include Yang Guohong, the former vice president of the exchange, who is accused of illegally appropriating property by abusing his position. Reuters was not immediately able to reach Shan, Yang or their representatives for comment. (Reporting by Tom Daly in BEIJING and David Stanway in SHANGHAI; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier and Shreejay Sinha)Last May, Congress obtained a worrying internal memo written by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation. The IGs investigators had been probing the safety records of two airlines, but as the officials dug in, they found a broader issue that affected the manufacture and daily operations of most of Americas airplanes.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which since 1958 has ensured the safety of the U.S. aviation industry, had in recent years shifted its oversight strategy, the IG reported. Instead of emphasizing enforcement actions, the IG wrote, the FAA was taking an ever more hands-off approach, working with private industry to address the root causes for noncompliance of safety regulations.

In the wake of the two Boeing 737 Max 8 crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people in less than five months, last Mays IG memo reads like the latest in a series of missed red flags. Thanks to the FAAs oversight strategy, some industry players are doing virtually all of their own safety checks: one manufacturer approved about 90% of the design decisions for all of its own aircraft, according to a recent Department of Transportation audit. And in the fall of 2017as Boeing scrambled to catch up with its prime competitor, Airbus, which had just introduced a more efficient model for the short-haul market that the 737 servedthe aerospace giant reportedly took several liberties with its self-certification.

Those liberties, according to a Seattle Times investigation published March 17, included understating the extent to which a new software program could control flight, downplaying the danger that a failure of the program might pose and minimizing pilot training on the new software.

Now multiple law-enforcement and watchdog bodies are looking into whether the same software program may have contributed to the deadly 737 Max crashes. Theyre also looking at Boeings handling of the aircrafts production and the FAAs oversight. On March 11, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., issued a subpoena on behalf of a federal prosecutor from the Justice Departments criminal division relating to the development of the 737 Max, according to the Wall Street Journal. Representative Peter DeFazio, the top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has called for an investigation into the FAAs approach to certifying the 737 Max. There will be a great discovery effort to find out if the plane was rushed through to compete with Airbus, says attorney Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general who now represents the victims of airline accidents.

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The airline pilots control panel inside a Boeing 737 Max cockpit

The FAA grounded the 737 Max on March 13, and Boeing promised a software fix by April to address potential problems with its planes. Boeing has overcome tough challenges before, and theres little doubt among pilots, industry analysts and aviation insiders that the aerospace giant will fix the problem. Once Boeing carries out what needs to be done, says former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the American people should feel 100% sure that the planes are safe.

In some ways, the collaborative approach between FAA and the companies it regulates was to be expected. In the years following 9/11, the FAA was stretched thin by new responsibilities. At the same time, the complexity of computer and automated flight systems had made the job of oversight much harder. Unable to double-check engineering in every corner of the sprawling civil-aviation industry, the FAA had chosen to delegate some responsibility for certifying plane safety to makers and carriers. And Congress itself required the agency to cede safety certification to the industry.

Its also true that the U.S. commercial-aviation accident rate is the lowest its ever been. But the two crashes in rapid succession raise troubling questions about just how far the outsourcing of safety has gone in a time of rapid technological change.

Boeing had made its name on long-haul planes that could fly passengers across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But in the 60s, market demand for smaller, short-haul jets increased, and Boeing responded with the twin-engine 737, nicknamed the Baby Boeing. The jet, which now seats about 190, ultimately became the backbone of short-haul fleets worldwide. Boeing has delivered more than 10,000 of the planes, making it the worlds best-selling commercial jet-aircraft model.

Just like the smartphone in your pocket, the 737 has been continually updated. The company has long flirted with a new design to replace the 737. But those plans were shelved more than a decade ago when Airbus announced an upgraded version of its direct competitor to the 737, the A320neo. At the time, the market share of single-aisle planes like the 737 was nearly 70% of new aircraft deliveries. Boeing estimated that market would be worth some $2.5 trillion over the next 20 years, and was not going to cede it.

Enter the 737 Max. Featuring new engines and aerodynamic changes, the grownup Baby Boeing promised carriers up to 20% better fuel efficiency and lower operating costs. There were challenges in the new design. The models new LEAP-1B engines, for instance, are 20 in. larger than the original engines. So Boeing redesigned the 737s pylons, which hold the engines to the wing, and moved them farther forward. But the more powerful engines in a different location could pitch the jets nose upward, creating the conditions for a midair stall.

To prevent the stall, Boeing created an automated-flight-control feature called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). When MCAS sensors detected the nose of the plane pitching up, the software controlling the tails horizontal stabilizer would automatically push the nose back down. It was a novel fix to a nagging design problem.

But Boeing took a number of steps that blunted the scrutiny the feature could draw from safety regulators at the FAA. In an early report to the FAA that certified the plane as safe to fly, Boeing understated how much the system could move the horizontal tail, according to the Seattle Times. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document, the Times reported. Also, Boeing failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplanes nose downward. And Boeing said MCAS should not be activated if it received data gathered from just one of two sensorsand yet thats how it was designed, the Times reported.

Just as it understated the extent to which MCAS might take automated control of the plane, Boeing, with the support of regulators, decided against extensive training for pilots on the 737 Max, including in how to disable the software. Boeing said additional flight-simulator training for pilotswhich costs airlines time and money, and therefore could have dampened 737 Max saleswerent necessary. Boeing acknowledged that training guidelines for the 737 Max didnt mention MCAS. These moves got the 737 Max to market faster, allowing Boeing to offer it just nine months after Airbus introduced its single-aisle, fuel-efficient competitor, the A320neo. The Max was an immediate hit, garnering more than 5,000 orders from more than 100 customers worldwide. It received FAA certification in March 2017, and regulators around the world followed suit. Two months later, Boeing began deliveries.

Much of the certification of the aircraft took place under an FAA program known as Organization Designation Authorization (ODA). In-house inspectors directly managed by Boeing reviewed designs and oversaw testing to ensure industry standards and proper certification.

The ODA program was first introduced in 2005 as a way to streamline FAA procedures. FAA officials were struggling to enforce regulations across the sprawling industry, which encompasses more than 200,000 aircraft, 1,600 manufacturers and 5,400 airlines and operators. Backed by industry groups, the program provided a way to quickly resolve technical issues at different stages of the certification process.

The logic was simple: manufacturers have heavy incentives to build a safe airplane, not least because accidents can significantly harm their bottom line and perhaps even put them out of business. That argument, propounded by lobbyists, carried the day in D.C. The program was fully implemented in 2009, and by 2018 Congress had mandated the FAA to delegate fully safety functions to industry.

Federal watchdogs were critical of the FAAs oversight of the ODA program throughout its implementation. The Department of Transportations inspector general wrote a report in 2011 instructing the FAA to better assess the programs risks. In 2015, the inspector general again warned the FAA about insufficient oversight. Delegation is an essential part of meeting FAAs certification goals, the report said. However, robust FAA oversight that is systems-based and targeted to high-risk areas is necessary to ensure that ODA companies maintain high standards and comply with FAA safety regulations.

It is not an easy problem. Technology and automation are making oversight harder, and regulators have been spread thin since 9/11. Overseas competitors are pushing U.S. industry to move fast. European aviation authorities have also outsourced safety certification to private contractors. And decades of deregulatory zeal in both parties created a welcome environment for outsourcing safety. Jeff Guzzetti, recently retired director of the FAAs Accident Investigation Division, who audited the ODA program when he was with the Transportation Departments office of inspector general, says theres risk anytime the FAA moves further from direct oversight. But he also acknowledged that the delegation of responsibility is needed now that aircraft are increasingly technologically complex. No one knows the airplane better than the manufacturer, and the FAA just doesnt have the resources, or the speed or the expertise, to keep up with the modern airplane technologies, he says. Ultimately, he says, There has to be some trust in the manufacturer to ensure their product is safe.

Since the latest crash, Boeing has appointed a new vice president of engineering and dedicated a top executive to the companys aircraft investigations. The planemaker has said the FAA concluded that MCAS met all certification and regulatory requirements. According to the FAA, the 737 Maxs certification followed agency standards and took approximately five years. The FAA, for its part, said it received no whistle-blower complaints or any reports alleging pressure to speed up certification. The long-standing collaborative engagement between the FAA, Boeing, its customers and industry partners has created the safest transportation system in the world, says Boeing spokesman Paul Bergman.

It will take months for investigators to uncover the causes of the crashes, and months more for them to determine if the FAA or Boeing played a role in the disasters. Even if they conclude that one or both did, the battle to reimpose strict regulatory oversight on the aviation industry may be just beginning. After all, it was Congress itself, prodded by its big-spending friends in the aviation lobby, that mandated safety outsourcing at the FAA in the first place.

With reporting by ALANA ABRAMSON, HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS, ABBY VESOULIS and JOHN WALCOTT/WASHINGTONBy Gabriela Baczynska BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders meet in Brussels on Thursday to give Prime Minister Theresa May an offer to delay Brexit beyond March 29, on condition that she can finally win over her many opponents in parliament next week. Nearly three years after Britons narrowly voted in a referendum to leave the EU, May has been unable to unite her divided cabinet, parliament or nation behind her exit plan. Increasingly embattled, she asked the EU on Wednesday to postpone Brexit until June 30 to give her time to secure a deal in parliament and avoid an abrupt departure next week that could spell economic chaos. "We could consider a short extension conditional on a positive vote on the Withdrawal Agreement in the House of Commons," summit chairman Donald Tusk said in a letter inviting all 28 EU national leaders to Brussels talks. Any delay must be unanimously approved by all the other 27 national EU leaders, increasingly exasperated with Britain's inability to find a way of a domestic political deadlock that is weighing heavily on the whole bloc. Raising the stakes, France threatened to reject May's request and the EU's executive said Britain had to be out by May 23 to avoid having to take part in European Parliament elections. May said in London late on Wednesday that she opposed any further postponement, telling parliament to pick between her deal, a no-deal divorce, or no Brexit. "It is now time for MPs (lawmakers) to decide," May said in a televised statement. "You want us to get on with it. And that is what I am determined to do." All 28 leaders assemble in Brussels at 1400 GMT. May will address her peers before leaving the room while they discuss the issue. The 27 are then expected to agree what will amount to a technical extension, intended to give Britain time to pass the necessary exit legislation - if the House of Commons approves the divorce package before March 29. EXIT DATE APPROACHING FAST The chamber has already twice voted it down heavily, with some saying May's deal would leave Britain too closely aligned with the EU, others arguing that it would not be close enough. If Britain fails to ratify the deal in time, and with the legal exit date of March 29 approaching fast, Tusk could then call an emergency summit for late next week. At stake would then be a "no-deal" Brexit or a much longer extension to give the British parliament time to find a notional consensus approach. Brexit's backers fear that, with such a long delay, their project might never materialize. EU supporters hope a longer delay could pave the way for a new vote in Britain or a reversal of May's strategy to leave the EU's single market and customs union, a policy that has exposed intractable differences over how to handle the Irish border. But this would appear to require Britain to take part in European elections in late May that it had never expected to participate in - or present the EU with a painful constitutional conundrum. The EU wants to avoid repeated Brexit delays or more renegotiations of the legally binding Withdrawal Agreement, put together in months of painstaking talks with London. It is designed to settle Britain's bill with the EU, guarantee expatriates' rights and provide a status-quo transition period after Brexit. As Brexit is sapping EU resources, the leaders will also turn to other pressing issues on Thursday and Friday. These include the state of their economies, their ties with China, climate change and ringfencing the European elections from illegitimate interference. Eyes will also be on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who will be meeting his EU peers a day after his Fidesz party was suspended from Europe's main center-right alliance over a venomous campaign against EU institutions and migration policies. (Reporting by Brussels, London and Paris bureaux; Editing by Kevin Liffey)RIO DE JANEIRO (AP)  Former Brazilian President Michel Temer remained silent when questioned by investigators Friday, a day after he was arrested as part of the country's sprawling Car Wash corruption probe.

The probe has ensnared several top politicians and businessmen in the South American country, including former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is currently serving a 12-year sentence.

Temer, 78, was arrested on corruption charges Thursday, with prosecutors saying that construction company Engevix paid him bribes in exchange for a contract to build a nuclear power plant in the city of Angra dos Reis in the southern part of Rio de Janeiro state.

Federal prosecutor Fabiana Schneider told journalists that Temer's attorneys said he would not answer any questions. She said she is "absolutely convinced" the former president needs to be jailed so investigations can go forward.

"The Car Wash task force has been very restrained in its requests for arrest," Schneider said. "We are talking about a criminal organization that has robbed the taxpayer for 40 years."

Lawyers for the former president consider his jailing illegal and have filed two requests for his release. A federal court based in Rio de Janeiro postponed a ruling to next Wednesday.

Temer's former Cabinet minister, Wellington Moreira Franco, was also arrested and has denied any wrongdoing.

Both of their arrests come at a time of considerable tension between Car Wash prosecutors and Brazil's top court. A week ago, the nation's Supreme Federal Tribunal ruled that some graft investigations should be handled by electoral judges because they involve politicians who allegedly received kickbacks from companies to finance their campaigns.

In ruling, some justices acknowledged that Brazil's electoral court system lacks the infrastructure and expertise to handle such big corruption cases, but expressed confidence that the gap could be bridged.

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The country's top court also blocked a move that allowed the Car Wash task force to manage hundreds of millions of dollars recovered from corruption scandals at state-run oil giant Petrobras.

While prosecutors and judges involved in the investigation see the imprisonment of Temer as a major win after those setbacks, however, others in Brazil  including adversaries of the ex-president  were critical of the decision of federal Judge Marcelo Bretas to arrest him.

"Car Wash is trying to turn the focus away from the discredit it was falling into," said former President Lula da Silva on Twitter Thursday night. "The (Car Wash) task force does not need pyrotechnics to survive, it needs sobriety."

Luis Henrique Machado, a law professor at IDP university in Brasilia, said the arrest of deeply unpopular Temer on "absurd grounds" appeared to be a response to recent blows by courts.

"Prosecutors and magistrates have pressured and intimidated Brazil's Supreme Court recently. That game is being played," Machado said. "It is a judicial invention that could cost all sides dearly."

This is not the first time that Bretas, who is in charge of all Car Wash cases in the state of Rio de Janeiro, has come under fire. Bretas is also behind the arrests of ex-Rio de Janeiro Gov. Sergio Cabral and Brazilian businessman Eike Batista, once number eight on Forbes' World's Billionaires list. In 2016, he sentenced then president of state-run Eletronuclear, Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva, to 43 years in prison.

Supporters of Bretas see him as serious, firm and uncompromising, while adversaries consider him to be a zealot with political ambitions.

Temer governed between 2016 and 2018 after his predecessor Dilma Rousseff was impeached.

His administration was clouded by corruption allegations, with the former president himself surviving two votes in Congress that would have suspended him from office and put him on trial for graft charges.

There are now 10 investigations related to Temer, who was once a discreet backroom dealmaker in Congress before he was propelled into Brazil's presidency amid a huge political and economic crisis.

Temer left office with his job approval in single digits, and many of adversaries were sure that his imprisonment was imminent.

____

AP writer Savarese reported from Madrid.By Humeyra Pamuk

VALLEY, Neb. (Reuters) - A string of small Missouri towns on Wednesday prepared for the next deluge along the snow-melt-swollen Missouri River after flooding wreaked nearly $1.5 billion in damage in Nebraska, killing at least four people and leaving another man missing.

High water unleashed by last week's late-winter storm and swiftly melting snow this week has already inundated a large swath of Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa along the Missouri River, North America's longest river. States of emergency have been declared in all or parts of the three Midwestern farm states.

The Missouri River's next big flood crest was due to hit St. Joseph, Missouri, about 55 miles (89 km) north of Kansas City, Missouri, and Atchison, Kansas, a short distance downstream, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman James Lowe said on a briefing call.

Homeowners and businesses across Leavenworth County, Missouri, where 81,000 people were under a flood warning on Wednesday, were placing sandbags around property as they have watched the river rise over the last few days, Kim Buchanan, the countys deputy director of emergency management, told Reuters.

"We have moderate flooding at this time," she said, noting that the forecast shows the river cresting seven feet above flood stage on Thursday or Friday. "Anybody with river interest has already instigated their flood plans and have taken their defensive actions.

The floods have killed four people in Nebraska and Iowa since the weekend, and officials warned the toll of physical damage would rise as receding waters revealed more devastated roadways, bridges and homes.

A fifth man has been missing since the collapse of the Spencer Dam last week on the Niobrara River. He was identified by the Omaha World-Herald newspaper as Kenny Angel.

Authorities said they had rescued nearly 300 people in Nebraska alone.

A levee break prompted the evacuation of the small community of Craig, Missouri. Local real estate agent Jamie Barnes said everyone in Craig had time to get out before it was flooded, and water was now flowing south through farmland toward communities such as Forest City, Forbes and St Joseph.

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"There's just water as far as the eye can see, from bluff to bluff. In some places its five miles, in some 15," Barnes said by phone.

LEVEE SYSTEM COMPROMISED

Several other communities in that area of northwest Missouri have also been evacuated, the Army Corps of Engineers said at a briefing.

"Much of the levee system remains compromised, and as of noon Wednesday there are more than 30 total breaches across the system," in the three states experiencing flooding, Lieutenant Colonel James Startzell, deputy commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Omaha District told the briefing.

"I was driving out to get one more load of corn from the bins when the levee broke, and there was a wall of water coming at me," said Howard Geib, 54, whose farm is near Craig. "I was on the phone with my son-in-law, who was driving out to help, telling him, 'Stop! Stop! Turn around!'"

The flooding killed livestock, destroyed grains in storage and cut off access to farms because of road and rail damage.

Across the Missouri from the evacuated town of Craig, the village of Rulo, Nebraska, drew a small crowd of onlookers to see the deluge, said Kelly Klepper, owner of Wild Bills Bar & Grill.

"We're kind of a tourist attraction right now," Klepper said by phone. "People that don't normally come to Rulo have been coming to Rulo to check out the water."

FLOODED AIR BASE

More than 2,400 Nebraska homes and businesses were destroyed or damaged, with 200 miles (322 km) of roads unusable and 11 bridges wiped out, Governor Pete Ricketts said on Wednesday.

Ricketts estimated the floods caused at least $439 million in damage to public infrastructure and other assets, and $85 million to privately owned assets. He put flood damage for the state's agricultural sector at nearly $1 billion.

Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, which houses the U.S. Strategic Command, remained heavily flooded, though base officials said on Twitter the facility was still "mission-capable." The Strategic Command's mission includes defending against and responding to nuclear attacks.

In Valley, Nebraska, outside Omaha, Pete Smock, 42, worked to clear deep mud surrounding his home and construction business.

"Devastation is everywhere. I haven't seen anything like this in my lifetime," Smock said. He had rented heavy equipment to fill deep holes cut by the floods with gravel and repair driveways leading to his office and garage.

The flooding killed livestock, destroyed grains in storage and cut off access to farms because of road and rail damage.

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York, Rich McKay in Atlanta, Jarrett Renshaw in Philadelphia, P.J. Huffstutter and Mark Weinraub in Chicago, Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee, Andrew Hay in Taos, N.M. and Steve Gorman and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Editing by Leslie Adler and Alistair Bell)President Trump approved a Nebraska disaster declaration after flood waters continue to ravage the area, impacting over 7 million people across three states and killing four.

Now, neighboring states are worried that they too will be flooded as the Missouri River is expected to have several more crests over the next few weeks.

This a growing problem for farmers as crop fields are getting flooded and livestock are getting destroyed.

Blake Hurst, President of the Missouri Farm Bureau, said on Countdown to the Closing Bell Thursday that he believes the damage being done could take years to fix.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX BUSINESS APP

Hurst noted the flooding has caused severe damage to roadways, currently closing interstate highways and railroads.

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts called the flooding the most widespread disaster we have had in our state's history.

Related ArticlesIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump in the Oval Office on March 5, 2018. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

Stepping again into the fraught territory of Middle Eastern politics, President Trump on Thursday reversed a long-standing American policy that treated Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights as temporary.

Trump wrote on Twitter: After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

The precise legal significance of Trumps tweet was unclear, and its practical impact is limited. Israel has had military control of the territory for more than 50 years and extended its legal authority to it in 1981. But the tweets political meaning was clear to most observers, who saw it as a brazen effort on the part of the president to interfere in Israels election, to be held on April 9, putting his thumb on the scales in favor of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing a formidable challenge from his centrist political rivals.

The tweet followed growing speculation in both countries about such a move, even as presidential adviser Jared Kushner is still working on a comprehensive Mideast peace plan. On the American side, Sen. Lindsey Graham expressed his support for U.S. recognition of Israels annexation of the territory during a recent visit to Israel earlier this month, and Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton have both advocated for legislation to formally recognize the territory as part of Israel. Recently the State Department has begun referring to the territory as Israeli-controlled rather than Israeli-occupied, as it has done in the past.

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On the Israeli side, Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, heads of the centrist Blue and White party, Netanyahus chief rivals in the current election, have also recently expressed support of the United States recognizing Israeli control over the 500 square miles of the Golan Heights Israel conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. And so too, of course, has Netanyahu himself, who has advocated for U.S. recognition of Israels ownership of the Golan for years, including during a visit to the United States in 2015.

With Netanyahu facing multiple corruption investigations and at least one indictment, he faces in Lapid and Gantz the most serious threat to his reelection since he began his current decadelong tenure as prime minister. (He also served an earlier term from 1996 to 1999.) Netanyahu has run his reelection campaign largely on the message that he is indispensable to Israels security and to its position in the world, and he has made his close personal relationship with President Trump an integral part of his campaign  including in videos on social media and on prominent billboards showing the two leaders shaking hands. U.S. recognition of what has been called Israels virtual annexation of the Golan Heights would be more evidence of Netanyahus ability to leverage his relationship with Trump to deliver on long-sought Israeli goals  following Trumps recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and American withdrawal from the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, often referred to as the Iran deal.

Trump has made little secret of his preference for Netanyahu, who will meet with the president at the White House next week during a visit to the United States to speak to the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is currently in Israel, ostensibly to discuss U.S.-Israeli cooperation on Iran. After Trumps announcement today, Pompeo and Netanyahu held a joint press conference at the prime ministers residence in Jerusalem, where Netanyahu praised Trump for his announcement regarding the Golan: President Trump has just made history, I called him, I thanked him on behalf of the Israeli public. Hes done it again. In the press conference, Netanyahu called the announcement of recognition a Purim miracle, referring to the Jewish holiday that commemorates the foiling of a 5th century B.C. plot to murder the Jews in the Persian Empire.

Netanyahu, center, Sen. Lindsey Graham, left, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman visit the border between Israel and Syria at the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on March 11. (Photo: Ronen Zvulun/AP)

While U.S. recognition of the Golan Heights may raise concerns and objections from members of the international community in coming days, the territory also lacks the emotional significance that has made Israels occupation of Palestinian territories, such as the West Bank and Gaza, so explosive. Unlike those territories, which Israel also seized in the Six-Day War after an invasion by three Arab countries, the Golan is not central to the national identity of either Israelis or Palestinians, and so disputes over the territory lack the sharp ideological rifts that have defined disputes over the West Bank and Gaza. Israel prizes the region largely because its topography makes it important for national defense, and because of its fertile soil.

With no end to the Syrian Civil War in sight, and with Syria remaining territorially divided, few expected that Israel would return the Golan to Syria anytime soon: Israel sees the territory as an important buffer that enables it to prevent the civil war from spilling across its own borders. In the 1990s, Syria and Israel nearly reached a land for peace deal, in which Israel would have returned the land to Syria in exchange for a formal peace deal, but the agreement fell through at the last moment over a disagreement over minute adjustments to the border. In a move that was widely condemned by the international community  including both the United Nations and the United States  Israel extended Israeli law over the Golan Heights in 1981, marking the lowest point in the history of U.S.-Israeli relations. Now American recognition of Israeli control over the same territory has become a touchstone of the closest relationship ever between leaders of the two countries.

Ben Manson is an American journalist based in Israel and New York.

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Read more from Yahoo News:This photo of Renty, an enslaved African man, was taken in South Carolina in 1850 and is the subject of a lawsuit against Harvard University by Tamara Lanier, his direct descendant. Lanier is seeking possession of this photo and one other similar photo.

This photo of Renty, an enslaved African man, was taken in South Carolina in 1850 and is the subject of a lawsuit against Harvard University by Tamara Lanier, his direct descendant. Lanier is seeking possession of this photo and one other similar picture. Courtesy photo.



Two prominent attorneys from opposite ends of the East Coast have teamed to represent a descendant of a slave whose photos have become iconic at Harvard University.



Josh Koskoff of Bridgeport, Connecticut-based Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder and Florida-based civil rights attorney Ben Crump are among nine litigators representing Tamara Lanier, the great-great-great-granddaughter of an enslaved African man identified as Renty in photos taken in South Carolina in 1850.



The attorneys met through "Marshall," a movie about the life of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Koskoff's father, Michael, who also represents Lanier, wrote the screenplay. Crump had a small role in the movie, along with his clients, whose teenage son, Travyon Martin, was shot on his way from the store by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman.



While attending a civil rights conference featuring Crump, their future client, Lanier, approached the attorney about her conflict with Harvard. Crump agreed to take the case, and reached out to Michael Koskoff's firm to work on the case. That led to Crump and the younger Koskoff holding a press conference on the lawsuit in New York City Wednesday.



The attorneys filed suit Wednesday in Massachusetts Superior Court, accusing Harvard of wrongfully profiting from the photographs, which they say the university has refused to turn over to Lanier and her family.



Both men have litigated high-profile cases.



Koskoff has been in the news most recently for his representation of multiple families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. He had a victory in that case on March 14, when the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled the families' lawsuit against gun maker Remington could move forward. Koskoff also won a $25 million verdict from a Bridgeport jury for an 18-year-old woman whose lower leg was amputated due to poor medical care.



Crump is the lead attorney at Ben Crump Law, which has offices in California, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Washington, D.C. He is best known for representing the Martin family, but grabbed headlines this week for a case in South Florida involving alleged police brutality.





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In that case, Crump called on the Department of Justice to investigate the internal procedures of South Florida police departments following a number of incidents. He sent a letter to the DOJ in light of the March 12 death of Latasha Walton, who died after a Florida Highway Patrol trooper shot her during a traffic stop.



Now the attorneys are turning their attention to the Ivy League school.



According to Koskoff, Harvard's behavior toward the Lanier family had been "arrogant, dismissive and utterly shameful."



At the center of the controversy are nearly 170-year-old photos of Renty and his daughter, Delia, who were both slaves. Renowned Harvard professor Louis Agassiz had commissioned the photos, which, according to the lawsuit, were used to support polygenism, a theory that Africans and African-Americans are inferior to whites.



Agassiz worked for Harvard for 27 years, and the university still praises him to this date, the suit contends, adding that Harvard's website this week described Agassiz as "celebrated" and "charismatic."



Now, Renty's descendants want to end the university's use of their ancestors' images. They say Renty's daughter was told to strip to her waist for the photo shoot, and that the pictures, taken without the consent of the two slaves, belong to the family.



Harvard's "leading scientist commissioned this study by dragging this man and stripping him of his clothing to prove that blacks were inferior," Koskoff said.



Echoing the lawsuit, Koskoff said Harvard has profited handsomely from the images.



"They have licensed images of the photos for $600-$700," Koskoff said. "There is also merchandise in forms of alleged educational material for sale with Renty's image on the cover. Obviously, these images are extremely valuable and of historical importance."



Neither Harvard's media relations department or Robert Iuliano, its general counsel, responded to requests for comment. The university, as of Thursday, had not assigned attorneys to the case.



The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages, and the photos' return to the Lanier family.



Also representing Lanier in her lawsuit are: Sean McElligott and Katherine Mesner-Hage of the Koskoff law firm; Elizabeth Mulvey of Crowe & Mulvey; Scott Carruthers and Talley Kaleko of the Crump law firm; and Mark Marderosian of Cohen & Marderosian.Garuda Indonesia said Friday it may change its 737 Max order to another type of Boeing jet.

Boeing 737 Max planes have been grounded by authorities in multiple countries after two recent fatal crashes.

Airline Garuda Indonesia GIAA-ID said Friday that it is requesting a cancellation to its current order for 49 Boeing BA 737 Max jets valued at $6 billion.

Newswires Reuters and AFP both reported the company's plans.

Reuters, citing Garuda's CFO, said the company may change its 737 Max order to another type of Boeing jet. The national carrier of Indonesia did not explain why it no longer wanted the planes.

In response to CNBC's request for comment, Garuda spokesman Ikhsan Rosan said the airline sent a letter to Boeing on March 14 to cancel its order for the 737 Max jets. Garuda has not heard back from Boeing, but the aircraft manufacturer will visit Jakarta on March 28 for "further discussion," said Rosan.

Garuda currently only has one 737 Max 8 in its fleet, according to Reuters.

The Indonesian airline is the first to publicly confirm plans to cancel an order for the Boeing jets after two fatal crashes involving the 737 Max 8. The planes have been grounded by authorities in multiple countries  including in the United States , Europe , China and Indonesia .

A 737 Max 8 operated by Indonesia's Lion Air crashed into the Java Sea last October, killing all 189 people on board. Investigators suspect a malfunction in the flight control system is a contributing factor to both crashes.

Less than five months later, the same plane model operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed . None of the 157 on board the flight survived. Ethiopian Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges said that preliminary data retrieved from the plane's flight data recorder showed "a clear similarity" with the Indonesian crash.

The two incidents have also led the U.S. Department of Transportation to ask for an audit of the Federal Aviation Administration's approval of the 737 Max 8 planes, while the FBI has reportedly joined in a criminal investigation of the certification process for the jets.

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 Reuters contributed to this report.





More From CNBC

By Cindy Silviana

JAKARTA (Reuters) - National carrier Garuda Indonesia has sent a letter to Boeing Co asking to cancel an order for 49 737 MAX 8 narrowbody jets, Garuda Chief Financial Officer Fuad Rizal said on Friday.

The airline could switch the order, valued at $6 billion (4.57 billion) at list prices, to other Boeing models, Rizal told Reuters. He said negotiations with Boeing were ongoing and Airbus SE jets were not under consideration.

Garuda is the first airline to publicly confirm plans to cancel an order for the troubled jets after the second crash of a 737 MAX 8, which killed 157 people in Ethiopia last week.

Indonesian rival Lion Air has been reconsidering its orders since one of its 737 MAX jets crashed in October.

Garuda CEO Ari Askhara told Reuters on Friday that customers had lost trust in the 737 MAX 8.

The airline has only one in its fleet at present.

"They have been relooking at their fleet plan anyway so this is an opportunity to make some changes that otherwise may be difficult to do," CAPA Centre for Aviation Chief Analyst Brendan Sobie said.

Askhara said last week it was possible it would cancel the order for 20 of the jets, with a final decision depending on what the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration does after the Ethiopian crash.

He told Reuters before the crash that the airline had decided to reduce the Boeing 737 MAX order from 49 by swapping some to widebody Boeing models.

Boeing declined to comment on customer discussions.

(Reporting by Cindy Silviana; additional reporting and writing by Jamie Freed; editing by Darren Schuettler and Stephen Coates)By Stephen Farrell and Jeffrey Heller JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday he would sue two of his main political rivals for libel, claiming that they labeled him a traitor over a graft scandal involving a German submarine deal. In a video published on his Facebook page, Netanyahu said he instructed his attorneys to take legal action against former armed forces chief Benny Gantz and ex-defense minister Moshe "Bogie" Yaalon. Both are from the centrist Blue and White party which is seeking to unseat the veteran prime minister in an April 9 election. Opinion polls put Netanyahus right-wing Likud and Gantzs new party neck-and-neck. In the video, Netanyahu said that through their "labeling of me as a traitor" Gantz, Yaalon and their party colleague Yair Lapid - who cannot be sued because he is a legislator - had committed "a blood libel that must not be ignored". Netanyahu's lawyer and other suspects have been the focus of a long-running police investigation into the sale of German submarines to Israel, amid concerns about a conflict of interest. Netanyahu was questioned by police in the investigation but investigators said last year that the prime minister was not a suspect. He issued the video in apparent response to comments Yaalon made on Israel Radio about the submarines case two days ago. Gantz, who has promised to pursue clean government, has sought to undermine Netanyahu by focusing public attention on the state's decision not to deem the prime minister a suspect in the submarine case. In a video statement in response, Lapid said Netanyahu's video was full of lies and that neither he nor his colleagues had called the prime minister a traitor. He said he was willing to forgo his parliamentary immunity to prove it, adding: "Sue me." Officials in the Blue and White party said Gantz was unavailable for comment on Friday because he was on his way to the United States. Asked about Yaalon's response, the party referred to Lapid's video statement. IRAN HACKING ALLEGATION For his part, Netanyahu has put Iran's alleged hacking of Gantz's cellphone at the forefront of his election campaign, repeating in his video on Friday - without presenting any evidence - an allegation that it contained information Tehran could use to blackmail the former general. Iran has denied targeting Gantz. Gantz has said he had been informed by Israel's domestic security service of a breach but there was no sensitive information on the device. Last month Israeli Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit said he intends to indict Netanyahu in three cases on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, pending the outcome of a pre-trial hearing that will take place after the election. Netanyahu denies all wrongdoing, and has consistently accused his opponents of carrying out a politically motivated "witch-hunt". The prime minister's broadside against his strongest election opponents came a day after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his support for Israel's claim of sovereignty over the Golan Heights, in what was widely seen in Israel as a boost for Netanyahu. The prime minister will fly to Washington next week to meet Trump at the White House and address the pro-Israeli lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. Gantz is also due to address AIPAC. (Additional reporting by Rami Ayyub in Nazareth; Editing by Gareth Jones and Frances Kerry)By Brendan Pierson NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Lithuanian man on Wednesday pleaded guilty to U.S. charges that he helped orchestrate a scheme to defraud Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google out of more than $100 million, federal prosecutors announced. Evaldas Rimasauskas, 50, entered his plea to one count of wire fraud before U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan. He faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison at his sentencing, currently scheduled for July 24. Rimasauskas also agreed to forfeit about $49.7 million he personally obtained from the scheme, according to a court filing. Paul Petrus, a lawyer for Rimasauskas, said the plea spoke for itself and declined to comment further. Rimasauskas, originally from the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, was extradited to the United States from Lithuania in August 2017. U.S. prosecutors accused Rimasauskas and unnamed co-conspirators of bilking Google and Facebook out of more than $100 million by posing as an Asian hardware vendor and claiming that the companies owed the vendor money. The prosecutors did not name the companies, but Taiwan-based Quanta Computer Inc confirmed after Rimasauskas' arrest that it was the Asian vendor, and a Lithuanian court order in 2017 identified Google and Facebook as the victims. The scheme defrauded Google out of $23 million and Facebook out of $99 million, according to that order. Prosecutors said Rimasauskas contributed to the scheme by setting up a fake company and a bank account in Latvia. The scheme is an example of a growing type of fraud called "business email compromise," in which fraudsters ask for money using emails targeted at companies that work with foreign suppliers or regularly make wire transfers. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in February 2017 that losses from such scams since the agency began tracking them in 2013 totaled more than $3 billion. (Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)Jerusalem (AFP) - Top US diplomat Mike Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Wednesday to counter Iranian "aggression" as the two met in Jerusalem just weeks ahead of Israel's elections.

Netanyahu said US President Donald Trump's pressure on Iran was already having an effect, referring to his withdrawal from the landmark 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers and the reimposition of sanctions.

"We need to increase it, we need to expand it, and together the United States and Israel are working in close coordination to roll back Iranian aggression in the region and around the world," the premier told journalists after Pompeo arrived.

Pompeo spoke of a Middle East conference in Warsaw last month that included Arab nations as well as Israel, saying the discussions involved efforts "to stop Iran's regional rampage" among other issues.

The US secretary of state also noted Iranian calls for Israel's destruction.

"With such threats a daily reality of Israeli life, we maintain our unparallelled commitment to Israel's security and firmly support your right to defend yourself," he said.

Netanyahu reiterated his pledge to keep Iran from entrenching itself militarily in neighbouring Syria, where the Islamic republic backs President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes there against what it says are Iranian and Hezbollah targets.

"There is no limitation to our freedom of action, and we appreciate very much the fact that the United States backs up our actions as we do them," Netanyahu said.

The premier, facing a stiff challenge from a centrist alliance in April 9 polls, will also visit Washington next week and meet with Trump twice while there.By Joanna Plucinska

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland will fall behind the rest of Europe on 5G unless it makes regulatory changes, an Ericsson executive told Reuters, raising fresh concerns over the country's plans as it considers excluding China's Huawei from its 5G rollout.

Swedish telecoms equipment maker Ericsson is among the companies that could benefit should Poland bar Huawei from its 5G plans over concerns about cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the Chinese company's equipment.

A number of European governments, including the Czech Republic and Poland, have raised concerns about Huawei's role in the next generation of mobile connectivity, with the European Union is also considering proposals to exclude Chinese firms from 5G networks.

"Ericsson is ready. But there needs to be spectrum made available and this should be made available in 2020 by the latest, otherwise Poland can really fall behind Europe," said Martin Mellor, Ericsson's manager for Poland.

Finland's Nokia and Ericsson are the leading European contenders to provide 5G equipment for Poland, the largest economy in eastern Europe.

As well as freeing up spectrum frequencies for 5G, the Polish government needs to ease regulations for building new sites for the next-generation network, Mellor said.

"There may be the need to have a denser network, so you can see lamp posts, bus stations, street furniture becoming part of the 5G network," he said. "It would be beneficial if it was easier to build on these sites."

Poland also needs to recalibrate power density limits, which Mellor said are among the most limited in Europe, to allow base stations to transmit enough electricity to make the 5G network function.

The government has yet to announce a decision on Huawei and finding viable replacements for Chinese telecoms equipment will be challenging, Poland's deputy digital minister Wanda Buk told Reuters.

Telecoms industry and government officials told Reuters that Ericsson's equipment is considered significantly more expensive than Chinese alternatives, which is why most operators in Poland opted for Huawei-produced equipment.

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Ericsson's commercial offerings are priced at a competitive rate, Mellor said.

"Like all companies, Ericsson will always evaluate its commercial offerings," he added.

(This story has been refiled to correct spelling of Ericsson in lead).

(Additional reporting by Anna Koper; Editing by David Goodman)WASHINGTON (AP)  In a matter of months, Stacey Abrams has gone from losing the Georgia governor's race to being a heavily recruited Democratic star, urged to run for Senate and mentioned as a possible presidential contender.

It's a dramatic rise often fueled by the promotional spending of Fair Fight Action, a nonprofit she founded to advance voting rights. The organization has paid for advertisements featuring Abrams and some of her travel and organized national watch parties when she delivered the Democratic rebuttal to President Donald Trump's State of the Union.

But spending by Fair Fight Action, which is staffed by former Abrams campaign aides, could prompt questions about whether the nonprofit is inappropriately supporting her political ambitions. Although there is no proof of any illegal activity, some of the organization's expenditures could pose a problem if Abrams follows through with her pledge to run for office again.

"There is nothing wrong with a nonprofit promoting its charismatic founder," said Adav Noti, a former Federal Election Commission attorney who now works for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. But, he added, that "if we later learn that the spending was to lay the groundwork for a campaign, retrospectively that could be a violation."

Abrams has said that she will decide soon on her political future. Last week, she met with former Vice President Joe Biden, leading to speculation he might pick her as a running mate if he enters the 2020 White House race and wins the Democratic nomination. Her latest moves have also been closely watched by national Republicans, who think she would be a formidable challenger to Republican Sen. David Perdue of Georgia in 2020.

On Wednesday, a GOP-affiliated group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, or FACT, filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service. The group points to roughly $100,000 worth of Facebook ads featuring Abrams, an advertisement for a "Stacey Abrams Fundraiser" that featured Fair Fight Action's logo, travel for Abrams' post-election "thank you" tour of Georgia and a professionally produced "highlight reel" of Abrams footage on the group's website.

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The complaint argues Fair Fight Action is supporting Abrams' political ambitions, not advocating for voting rights. That's a violation of tax law that forbids political 501(c)(4) nonprofits from providing a "private benefit" to a particular person or group, according to a copy of the complaint provided to The Associated Press. The group typically files ethics complaints against Democrats but has also targeted some Republicans, including North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, a leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams' former campaign manager, disputed the details of FACT's complaint. She said that while Abrams is the figurehead of the organization, Fair Fight Action's promotional activities have always focused on voting rights issues.

"It's no surprise that right-wing hit groups allied with Donald Trump are launching bogus attacks against Fair Fight," she said in an emailed statement. "They're afraid of Stacey Abrams and even more afraid that all eligible Georgians will exercise their right to vote."

It's not unusual for politicians to have a nonprofit or be supported by one staffed by their associates. The group Our Revolution backs Bernie Sanders' White House bid, but the Vermont senator does not have a direct role in the group, according to its most recent tax filing. Trump has a nonprofit staffed by allies that is facing a complaint pending before the FEC.

Biden, too, has several 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which are largely barred from engaging in political activity. They have employed longtime aides and are mostly geared toward academia and medical research. Much of his spending on political advertising runs through his political action committee, which is subject to federal donation limits.

For nonprofits like Fair Fight Action, which can raise unlimited sums and engage in political activity, steps are often taken to at least give the appearance of being kept at arm's length from the politician they support. But Abrams serves as the chairwoman of Fair Fight Action's board, giving her a direct hand in the group's management.

If she runs for federal office and it is determined that the group laid the groundwork for her campaign, donation limitations could retroactively apply to Fair Fight Action, legal experts say.

"If she were to maintain the same relationship with this nonprofit and become a candidate, then legal risks do arise," said Paul S. Ryan, an attorney for the liberal-leaning government watchdog group Common Cause.

Caitlin Highland, an Abrams spokeswoman, said Abrams will step down from Fair Fight Action if she runs for office again.

The mission of Fair Fight Action, founded in 2014 as the Voter Access Institute, was to provide "education to voters on how and where to vote." It paid Abrams an annual salary of about $80,000 and was barred under its own corporate bylaws from promoting political candidates, records show.

The group, which does not disclose its donors, raised about $2.5 million from 2014 to 2016, records show. It has not yet filed tax paperwork showing what it raised in 2018, when she was running for governor.

After Abrams lost the governor's race, the nonprofit was overhauled. She became the chairwoman, stepping down as CEO. Groh-Wargo began running the operation. Language forbidding the group from promoting a political candidate was stripped out of its charter, records show. The group also took over the Twitter account used by Abrams' gubernatorial campaign and renamed it Fair Fight Action.

The group's leaders say all its activities focus on highlighting the need to protect voting rights in Georgia. Furthermore, they say, staff members carefully separate voting rights work from more overtly political activities done by newly formed Fair Fight PAC, which does not have to report its fundraising and spending to the FEC until April 15.

Ultimately, it may be tough to tell if any of the spending crosses the line. Only limited information is included in publicly available tax filings. The IRS has also been hesitant to enforce the law, particularly after facing intense blowback for investigating tea party nonprofit groups earlier in the decade.

"There have been a lot of former candidates and officeholders over the years that have been closely associated with (nonprofit) organizations," said former FEC chairman Michael Toner, a Republican. "The devil is in the details in terms of whether the legal line has been crossed."By Jeffrey Heller JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showcased his close relationship with the Trump administration on Wednesday, hosting U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo three weeks before an Israeli election. Washington's announcement that President Donald Trump, a popular figure among Israelis, had invited Netanyahu to the White House for talks and a dinner two weeks ahead of the April 9 vote was also widely seen in Israel as a boost for the right-wing Likud party chief. Following a visit to Kuwait, Pompeo met Netanyahu in Jerusalem, where both men hailed U.S.-Israeli ties under Trump, a leader whom the prime minister has featured on election billboards. "We also know that our alliance in recent years has never been stronger," Netanyahu said in comments to reporters, with Pompeo at his side. Netanyahu is battling for his political survival against both a strong challenger in centrist candidate Benny Gantz and against plans by Israel's attorney-general to indict the prime minister, now in his fourth term, in three corruption cases. Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing and portrayed himself in the election race as a leader with a wealth of international diplomatic experience that Gantz, a former armed forces chief and novice politician, cannot match. "I look forward to my visit next week to Washington, where I will meet with President Trump, and I believe we can carry this relationship even stronger," Netanyahu said. "It's getting stronger and stronger and stronger." Angering Palestinians and drawing international concern, Trump broke with decades of U.S. Middle East policy by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital in 2017 and moving the American Embassy, which Pompeo will visit on Thursday, to the city last May. Pompeo, in his remarks, said the Israeli people should have confidence that Trump - who is due to present a peace plan after the Israeli ballot - will maintain a "close bond" with Israel. "I know that you and the president have an outstanding working relationship," Pompeo said, addressing Netanyahu. "He sent me here to build upon that and to represent him here." Netanyahu said he and Pompeo, at the start of their discussions, examined how to "roll back Iranian aggression" in the region. Pressure on Iran, Netanyahu said, must be intensified now that the United States has reimposed sanctions on Tehran following Washington's withdrawal from a 2015 deal with world powers to limit the Iranian nuclear program. Pompeo and Netanyahu later attended a meeting in Jerusalem with leaders from Cyprus and Greece on the construction of a 2,000 km (1,243 mile) gas pipeline linking vast eastern Mediterranean gas resources to Europe through those countries and Italy at a cost of $7 billion. Lebanon - Pompeo's next stop - has warned its Mediterranean neighbors that the planned EastMed pipeline must not be allowed to violate its maritime borders. (This story has been refiled to remove inadvertently repeated clause in paragraph three.) (Reporting by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Hugh Lawson)Geneva (AFP) - A second round of talks on the disputed Western Sahara region ended Friday with the sides agreeing to meet again, but with the UN acknowledging many positions remained far apart.

Morocco and the Polisario Front liberation movement appeared to have come no closer on the thorny issue of an independence referendum to decide Western Sahara's fate.

The Polisario has demanded a vote -- a proposal categorically rejected by Rabat.

"This is not and will not be easy," United Nations envoy and former German president Horst Kohler told reporters in Geneva.

"There is still a lot of work ahead," he said.

"Nobody should expect a quick outcome, because many positions are still fundamentally diverging."

Foreign ministers from Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania along with the Polisario's chief negotiator spent the past two days meeting in a secret location "near Geneva".

Kohler read a joint communique hailing the delegations for engaging in "courteously and openly in an atmosphere of mutual respect."

The talks focused on finding "a mutually acceptable political solution ... that is realistic, practicable, enduring, based on compromise, just, lasting, (and) which will provide for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara," the communique said.

The parties had agreed to "continue the discussion in order to identify elements of convergence," it added.

Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita told journalists the sides agreed to meet before the summer.

The international community has long advocated that a referendum be held to decide the status of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony on the western edge of the vast eponymous desert, stretching around 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) along the Atlantic coastline, a prime fishing region.

- 'Free referendum' -

The Polisario fought a war with Morocco from 1975 to 1991, when a ceasefire deal was agreed and a UN peace mission was deployed to monitor the truce.

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Morocco, which annexed the territory after Spain withdrew in 1975, considers Western Sahara an integral part of the kingdom and has offered autonomy instead of an independence referendum.

This week's talks followed an unproductive round at the UN in Geneva last December after six years of stalemate.

The positions did not appear to have gotten much closer on Friday.

Bourita reiterated his country would discuss "autonomy", but that under no circumstances would it "accept a referendum where one of the options is independence."

Polisario delegation head Khatri Addouh meanwhile insisted the Sahrawi people should be allowed to freely express themselves on how the territory should be run.

"Besides a free referendum, organised by the UN and guaranteed by the UN, we do not see how such an expression can take place," he told reporters.

The new round of talks comes as the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission that has helped guarantee a ceasefire in Western Sahara since 1991 is about to end next month.

The United States has warned it may allow MINURSO's presence in Western Sahara to lapse, or it could agree to prolong its mandate by another six months.

Other Security Council members are pushing for a longer engagement, including France which wants the mandate extended for a year.Baghouz (Syria) (AFP) - Kurdish-led forces on Friday battled a small group of Islamic State jihadists refusing to surrender and still defending the last few acres of their moribund "caliphate" in eastern Syria.

In the afternoon mortar rounds hit a former IS encampment in the village of Baghouz on the banks of the Euphrates River, sending a column of dark smoke up into the sky, an AFP correspondent said.

The White House said the once-sprawling "caliphate" had been wiped out but the Syrian Democratic Forces it backs on the ground stressed that clashes were ongoing.

President Donald Trump's spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, said "the territorial caliphate has been eliminated in Syria."

"Clashes are ongoing in Baghouz. Small IS groups refusing to surrender are launching attacks and our forces are responding," SDF spokesman Adnan Afrin told an AFP reporter near Baghouz.

The White House has jumped the gun several times on announcing the demise of IS territorial control.

An SDF official who asked not to be named said warplanes of the US-led coalition resumed strikes on suspected jihadist positions before dawn on Friday.

Top SDF commander Jia Furat said his forces were engaging with the jihadists on several fronts.

The US-led coalition said the "operation to complete the liberation of Baghouz is ongoing".

"It remains a hard fight, and Daesh is showing that they intend to keep fighting for as long as possible," it said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

The SDF launched what it called its "final assault" against the jihadists' last redoubt in Baghouz on February 9.

Finally on Tuesday, they cornered diehard fighters into a few acres of farmland along the Euphrates River, after forcing them out of the encampment.

- Tunnels -

Inside Baghouz on Friday afternoon, SDF fighters languished idle on the roofs of abandoned buildings in the middle of a sea of ruins, an AFP reporter said.

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In the no-man's-land on the edge of what was once the jihadist encampment, a few US-backed fighters walked about unarmed.

The six-month-old operation to wipe out the last vestige of IS's once-sprawling proto-state is close to reaching its inevitable outcome, but the SDF has said a declaration of victory will be made only after they have completed flushing out the last tunnels and hideouts.

According to SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel, hundreds of IS fighters, including some women, still remain on the outskirts of the jihadist encampment.

They are hiding along the bank of the Euphrates River as well as at the base of a hill overlooking Baghouz, he told AFP.

"In around one or two days, we will conclude military operations if there are no surprise developments," he said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS holdouts were hiding in underground tunnels in Baghouz.

More than 66,000 people, mostly civilians, have quit the last IS redoubt since January 9, according to the SDF.

They include 5,000 jihadist fighters and 24,000 of their relatives as well as 37,000 other civilians.

- Calls for more attacks -

The thousands who have streamed out have been housed in cramped camps and prisons run by Kurdish forces further north.

On Wednesday night, around 2,000 women and children from Baghouz arrived at the largest camp, Al-Hol, which is struggling to cope with the influx of tens of thousands of people, many in poor health.

Since December, at least 138 people, mostly children, have died en route to Al-Hol or shortly after arrival, according to the International Rescue Committee.

IS declared a "caliphate" in June 2014 after seizing a vast swathe of territory larger than Britain straddling Iraq and Syria.

The loss of the Baghouz enclave would signal the demise of the "caliphate" in Syria, after its defeat in Iraq in 2017.

The jihadists still retain a presence in eastern Syria's vast Badia desert and have continued to claim deadly hit-and-run attacks in SDF-held territory.

In a video released on IS's social media channels on Thursday, jihadists vowed to continue to carry out attacks.

"To those who think our caliphate has ended, we say not only has it not ended, but it is here to stay," said one fighter.

He urged IS supporters to conduct attacks in the West against the enemies of the "caliphate".

The war in Syria has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions since it erupted following the repression of anti-government protests in 2011.As the romantics among us have long suspected, you really can metaphorically and literally die from a broken heart. Takotsubo syndrome (TTS) is a heart condition thats been nicknamed broken-heart syndrome because it is often triggered by a highly emotional event, whether happy or sad. There can also be a physical cause, including an asthma attack, surgery, or a car accident. The big question researchers are trying to solve is why some peoples hearts respond to stress this way  a question that a team at the University of Switzerland have moved closer to answering with a new study published in the European Heart Journal. Their research reminds us that your head really can affect your heart.

broken heart

What Is Takotsubo Syndrome?

Takotsubo syndrome is characterized by a weakened left ventricle as a result of changes in heart muscle cells and/or coronary blood vessels. The ventricle balloons, causing it to resemble the Japanese octopus pot the condition is named after. Typically heart disease is due to problems with the valves like calcification, or cholesterol plaque in the arteries, explains neurologist Nirav Shah, MD, CEO of Sentinel Healthcare in Seattle. Takotsubo syndrome is different because it is not primarily due to disease of the heart. It is thought to arise from people undergoing extreme stress and the response to the stress dilates the heart like a pot. TTS comes on suddenly and affects more women than men, and symptoms are similar to a heart attack caused by a blockage, including shortness of breath and chest pains. Most peoples heart muscles recover, but it can be fatal.

The Brain-Heart Connection

Instead of looking at the heart for answers, researchers at the University of Switzerland went to the source of the emotional stress itself: The brain. It turns out that the metaphorical connection between your emotions and your heart are not completely unscientific. Often neurologists will see a set of problems that are not clearly from brain damage, but are likely from the mind, Dr. Shah confirms. For example, some people come to the hospital seeming to have seizures due to stress or other trauma People who have panic attacks feel pressure in their chest and a pounding.

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There are certain parts of your brain that are responsible for processing emotions (as part of the limbic system) and for controlling unconscious physical processes like heartbeat (in the autonomic nervous system.) The researchers were particularly interested in the amygdala: Thats the part of your brain that responds to fear by activating your fight-or-flight system. They also looked at the hippocampus, which is responsible for memories. Dr. Shah explains that if something threatening is approaching, your brain processes the threat by drawing on your past experiences to determine if its actually dangerous (thats your hippocampus job), and then once its scared, your amygdala tells your autonomic nervous system to send out adrenaline that will make your heart pump blood to your muscles faster, so you can run away. In this way, these parts of the brain are important both because they help us process emotions and memories, and because they cause a physical response, notably in your heart.

What the Study Found

The researchers wanted to see if people with TTS showed any differences in these brain regions compared to a control group. They scanned the brains of 15 female patients with TTS and 39 without. They found that those with TTS showed weaker functional connectivity between separate parts of the brain involved in processing emotions and regulating heartbeat, compared to the control group. Basically, this means that in people with TTS, the parts of the brain that work together to regulate both emotions and heartbeat arent communicating with each other as effectively. In addition, the researchers found that TTS patients showed weaker connectivity between parts of the brain that form the default network mode: regions of the brain that are active when were at rest (e.g., daydreaming, planning what to have for dinner, or thinking over our day.) They suggested that lower performance from these parts of the brain might make TTS patients less able to regulate stress, which in turn puts pressure on the heart.

As with all studies, there are limitations. The authors note that since they didnt scan the TTS patients brains before they had their attack, they cant determine whether that lower connectivity leads people to get TTS, or whether getting TTS causes the decreased communication. However, it is a promising development in that it shows the brain likely plays a role in the condition. This study is interesting because it is the first to demonstrate what was suspected but never demonstrated, Dr. Shah says. The idea of functional connectivity is relatively new and provides a better understanding of how the brain can cause TTS. It could be the basis for future work to understand other diseases. So there is some hope for the brokenhearted.

RELATED: 10 Surprising Facts You Didnt Know About Your Heart

(Photo via Getty)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)CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP)  The family of a slain 3-year-old boy and a Jordanian prince are among those visiting a New Zealand mosque as it reopens for the first time since a terrorist killed 42 people there. Hundreds of people stopped at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch on Saturday to lay flowers or pray after police removed a cordon and those running the mosque decided to reopen even though they haven't yet had time to replace the carpet. Inside the mosque, there were few signs of the carnage from eight days earlier. Crews had replaced windows that worshippers smashed in a desperate attempt to escape when the attacker mowed them down during Friday prayers.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP)  As soon as vascular surgeon Adib Khanafer received the call March 15, he started running toward the operating theater at Christchurch Hospital. At that point, he had no idea a white supremacist had slaughtered 50 people. But he could hear an urgency in the request for help. "When I walked in, I found a young girl, a 4-year-old, on the table, with three pediatric consultants working on her trying to stop the bleeding," he says. "So this was a shock for me really. I just could not believe what I was seeing." Khanafer, who is Muslim and knew some of those killed in the attacks at two Christchurch mosques, says he typically fixes veins and arteries on adults in controlled environments.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP)  Their voices have thundered across this heartsick city, in parks and at flower memorials and schools. Day after day, the students of Christchurch have gathered, feet smashing the ground in unison as they chant the words of their nation's indigenous people in an outpouring of grief and love and support. In the aftermath of last week's deadly shooting spree on two mosques blamed on a white supremacist, the young people of Christchurch have found solace in an old tradition: a Maori ceremonial dance called the haka. To much of the world, the haka is largely associated with New Zealand's rugby team, the All Blacks, who perform it before games.

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President Donald Trump says he is reversing his administration's decision to slap new sanctions on North Korea, ordering them withdrawn. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders says Trump "likes Chairman Kim and he doesn't think these sanctions will be necessary." Trump says in a tweet that, "It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea." But he says, "I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!" The White House did not immediately respond to questions about which sanctions Trump was referring to. His administration on Thursday sanctioned two Chinese shipping companies suspected of helping North Korea evade sanctions  the first targeted actions taken against Pyongyang since Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (gihm jung oon) met in Hanoi last month.

BANGKOK (AP)  Thailand's election Sunday is likely to produce a weak unstable government whether it's a civilian or military-backed party that cobbles together a coalition, setting off a new phase of uncertainty in a country that's a U.S. ally in Southeast Asia and one of the world's top tourist destinations. The election is Thailand's first since its military seized power from an elected government in May 2014. It was the conservative establishment's third major attempt by either military or legal coup to eradicate the influence of Thaksin Shinawatra, a tycoon who made his fortune in telecommunication and upended Thailand's politics with a populist political revolution nearly two decades ago.

HONG KONG (AP)  Thailand's exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra won't know until Sunday whether people in his homeland are still fans of his politics, but he was happy as he hosted a wedding reception in Hong Kong for his youngest daughter. Though ostensibly a family affair with a raft of VIP guests, the timing of Friday ceremony two days ahead of Thailand's first general election since a 2014 military coup seemed to carry an implicit message to Thaksin's countrymen: Don't forget me and my political allies when you go out to vote. Thai Princess Ubolratana Mahidol, who made an abortive attempt last month to be a prime ministerial candidate for a political party allied to Thaksin, was a special guest.

BEIJING (AP)  A massive explosion at a chemical plant in eastern China with a long record of safety violations has killed at least 62 people and injured hundreds of others, 90 of them seriously. The death toll appeared likely to rise still further, with another 28 people still listed as missing, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Saturday. Just 26 of those confirmed dead in Thursday's explosion have been identified, it said. The blast in an industrial park in the city of Yancheng, north of Shanghai, was one of China's worst industrial accidents in recent years. State-run television showed crushed cars, blown-out windows and workers leaving the factory with bloodied heads.

BEIJING (AP)  A fire on a tour bus traveling along a highway in central China has left 26 people dead and as many as 30 injured, local authorities reported Saturday. Five of those injured remained in critical condition, according to the Hunan province's spokesman's office. The incident occurred at around 7:15 p.m. (1115 GMT) Friday along a stretch of Hanshou County in the city of Changde. Aboard were 56 people, including 53 passengers, a tour guide and two drivers, both of whom have been detained as authorities investigate the cause of the accident. Changde authorities put the number of injured at 30.

SYDNEY (AP)  A vast and powerful cyclone made landfall Saturday along a remote stretch of the northern Australian coast, bringing fierce winds and heavy rains amid safety fears for a small number of residents who've stayed in the area. A category 4 storm, with 5 being the strongest, Cyclone Trevor crossed the Gulf of Carpentaria coast at 9:50 a.m. local time (2250 GMT) in the far east of the Northern Territory, near its border with Queensland state. Most of the sparsely populated area has been evacuated, with more than 2,000 people put up in temporary accommodation in the Northern Territory capital Darwin, and the nearby town of Katherine.

HANOI, Vietnam (AP)  Vietnamese authorities have ordered monks at a popular Buddhist pagoda to stop "soul summoning" and "bad karma eviction" ceremonies after an investigation found the rituals were a scam. Tens of thousands of worshippers have been paying the 18th century Ba Vang pagoda in northern Quang Ninh province between 1 million and several hundred million dong ($45-$13,500) to have their bad karma vanquished, according to the state-run Lao Dong (Labor) newspaper. The Committee for Religious Affairs, a government body, issued a statement on its website on Friday saying "the ritual goes against Buddhist philosophy and violates Vietnam's law on religion and folk beliefs." "It has a negative impact on social order and security," it added.At a trade promotion meeting on March 21st, officials from the ministry exchanged ideas on speeding up efforts to forge free trade deals with Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, and seek to sign sideline deals to bolster economic cooperation, including in the energy segment.

RoK's Trade Minister Yoo Myung-hee ( Source: Yonhap)



Participants discussed expanding cooperation with Brunei and Cambodia as well, Yonhap news agency reported.

Moreover, the RoK and ASEAN can seek new opportunities together in third countries.

Earlier this month, RoK President Moon Jae-in paid a week-long trip to three Association of Southeast Asian (ASEAN) nations.

During his trip, President Moon had meetings with Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

At their talks, the two sides pledged to promote cooperation in various areas such as energy, infrastructure and technology.

The RoK side expressed hope for greater cooperation with ASEAN.

The RoK has been pushing its New Southern Policy designed to cement largely relations with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The grouping is among the RoKs important partners due to its growth potential, rich resources and growing diplomatic influence.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam./.WASHINGTON (AP)  President Donald Trump will host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (neh-ten-YAH'-hoo) at the White House next week.

The president will welcome Netanyahu for his third White House visit since Trump took office, the White house said Wednesday. They will discuss Middle East issues in a meeting March 25 and Trump will host Netanyahu for dinner March 26.

Trump and Netanyahu have enjoyed a close relationship and Trump has been applauded in Israel for recognizing Jerusalem as their capital and moving the U.S. Embassy there. His administration has been working on a Middle East peace plan, but has yet to release details.

The prime minister is visiting the United States weeks before elections in Israel. His poll numbers have sagged since the announcement of a pending indictment on corruption charges.Washington (AFP) - Who really gets under Donald Trump's skin? A man who has been dead since last year and another whom the president says he hardly knows.

At least that's the bizarre picture painted by Trump this week in angry rants at the late senator John McCain and a Washington lawyer called George Conway.

Trump lashed out yet again Wednesday at the broadly popular McCain, saying "I've never liked him much. I really probably never will."

This followed a series of tweets and other statements in the last few days raging at the former senator's politics, role in the Russia collusion probe, and personal intelligence.

As for Conway, "he's a whack job," Trump told journalists Wednesday. "A stone cold LOSER," he wrote on Twitter a few hours earlier.

The venom of the attacks was not unusual for a president who revels in put-downs. The targets of his ire, though, raised eyebrows.

McCain is widely remembered by Americans as a hero for his courage during six years of often brutal captivity in Hanoi during the Vietnam war.

More to the point, he died in August at 81. While he fell out over policy several times with his fellow Republican Trump, he's been buried for seven months.

No less curious is the Conway obsession.

A prominent lawyer in Washington circles but a nobody to ordinary Americans, Conway burst into the public eye because he is married to a senior White House aide and has begun loudly questioning Trump's mental stability on Twitter.

In both cases, Trump could have avoided controversy.

McCain, after all, can never clash with him again and Conway poses no real threat -- other than, perhaps, to the stability of his marriage to senior Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway.

Even Trump says, "I barely know him."

Backing off from a fight, however, wouldn't be Trump: his entire presidency is based on being combative. Or, as Kellyanne Conway, told Politico: "he's a counter-puncher."

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"His base sees this as classic Trump behavior," said Rich Hanley, who teaches on politics and the media at Quinnipiac University.

"They expect Trump to swing at everybody, even ghosts."

- Thriving on toxic Twitter -

Trump enjoys landing pithy, sometimes humorous, sometimes what many would call poor taste verbal blows. And Twitter, where he has more than 59 million followers, is his principal weapon.

The Twitter president has largely dispensed with formal news briefings, finding that a tweet alone can get everyone talking -- without giving them much chance for questioning.

Trump defended this method of communication on Wednesday as an antidote to what he calls the "corrupt" and "fake" media. By that, he means most standard news organizations.

"It's a way that I can get honesty out," he said.

It's a way where Trump typically gets to punch first and punch hard, thereby dominating the news agenda.

George Conway, however, has broken the mold.

Leveraging his position as husband to a Trump aide and posting outrage-seeking tweets that claim to diagnose personality disorders, he effectively out-trolled the troller in chief.

Trump's "not used to that. He's used to being the aggressor, the bully, the one who controls," Hanley said.

"Now he's finding that there are characters like Conway... who are more aggressive than he is and he doesn't know how to handle it."

In a different sense, the same applies to McCain.

He's gone, but memory of the maverick senator, who was not afraid to break with Republican ranks or to hide his dislike for a president who ridiculed his capture in Vietnam yet never served himself, remains fresh.

Clearly much too fresh for Trump, who has talked so much this week about his disagreements with McCain that it sounds as if they had been locking horns only hours ago.

Trump just can't let go.

"My dad... would think it was so hilarious that our president was so jealous of him that he was dominating the news cycle in death," McCain's daughter Meghan said on ABC television Wednesday, demonstrating some put-down skills of her own.

With Trump soon starting his 2020 reelection campaign and Democrats launching their own nomination battle, the ugly back and forth is set to intensify.

But Mark Rom, a politics professor at Georgetown University, predicted that Democratic candidates will get surrogates to do the dirty work while they try to keep above it all.

Their mantra, he said, will be modelled on the icily dismissive approach taken by the House of Representatives speaker, Nancy Pelosi: "I'll just ignore that little man."By Hyonhee Shin and David Brunnstrom SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea on Friday pulled out of a liaison office with the South, in a major setback for Seoul, just hours after the United States imposed the first new sanctions on the North since the second U.S.-North Korea summit broke down last month. North Korea said it was quitting the joint liaison office set up in September in the border city of Kaesong after a historic summit between leader Kim Jong Un and South Korea's President Moon Jae-in early last year. "The North's side pulled out after conveying to us that they are doing so on the instructions from a higher level, during a liaison officials' contact this morning," South Korea's Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung told a briefing. South Korea regrets the decision and urged a swift normalisation of the arrangement, Chun said, adding the South would continue to staff the office, set up as a regular channel of communication to ease hostility between the rivals, which technically remain at war. The move came after the United States on Thursday blacklisted two Chinese shipping companies it says helped North Korea evade sanctions over its nuclear program and cited 67 vessels it said engaged in illicit trade helping the North. It was the first such step since a second meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi broke down over conflicting demands by the North for relief from sanctions and from the United States for Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons. The North's withdrawal from the office was another blow to Moon, who has seen his standing as a mediator between Pyongyang and Washington deteriorate and divisions grow within his government over how to break the impasse. Moon's administration had touted the office as a major feat resulting from his own summit with Kim last year despite U.S. concerns about possible loosening of sanctions. The South's Chun said he would not directly link the North's move to the failed Hanoi summit. But experts saw a pattern in the North lashing out against the South when its crucial strategic position with Washington is in jeopardy. "The North sees its nuclear issue and ties with the United States as a matter of greater strategic importance, so when they try to assert its position, they sacrifice the ties with the South, which is considered inferior," said Shin Beom-chul of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. Moon's office reacted by holding an urgent meeting, headed by his national security adviser, to discuss the withdrawal. The won weakened about 0.4 percent against the dollar in non-deliverable forward (NDF) trade after the news. NEW SANCTIONS The U.S. Treasury Department identified two Chinese firms for new sanctions - Dalian Haibo International Freight Co Ltd and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co Ltd - which had helped the North evade U.S. and international sanctions, it said. It also cited 67 vessels for engaging in illicit transfers of refined petroleum with North Korean tankers or facilitating the export of the North's coal. Reuters was unable to locate contact details for either of the Chinese companies to seek comment. The U.S. sanctions prohibit U.S. dealings with the designated companies and freezes any assets they have in the United States. "The United States and our like-minded partners remain committed to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea and believe that the full implementation of North Korea-related U.N. Security Council resolutions is crucial to a successful outcome," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. The latest sanctions showed there was some "leakage" in North Korea sanctions enforcement by China, but it was mostly abiding by U.N. resolutions, a senior U.S. official told reporters on condition of anonymity. While declining to say whether Washington was trying to send a post-summit message to Pyongyang, the official said Trump "has made clear that the door is wide open to continuing the dialogue with North Korea." LIMBO U.S.-North Korean engagement has appeared to be in limbo since the Feb. 27-28 summit, despite U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying on March 4 he was hopeful he could send a team to North Korea "in the next couple of weeks." North Korea has warned it is considering suspending talks and may rethink a freeze on missile and nuclear tests, in place since 2017, unless Washington makes concessions. Activity was detected at the North's main rocket test facility around the time of the failed summit, fueling concern that Pyongyang may be about to resume weapons development to ratchet up pressure on Washington. On Monday, two senior U.S. senators called for the Trump administration to correct a slowing pace of American sanctions designations on North Korea, saying such actions had seen a marked decline in the past year of U.S. diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang. They pointed to a recent U.N. report that North Korea continued to defy U.N. sanctions with an increase in smuggling of petroleum products and coal and violation of bans on arms sales. A U.N. sanctions panel said in the report Liaoning Danxing was suspected of illicitly shipping Mercedes-Benz limousines to North Korea. Last July, the Netherlands seized a cargo of Belarusian vodka, also banned as luxury goods, en route to North Korea via the company, it said. (Reporting by David Brunnstrom, Matt Spetalnick and Doina Chiacu in Washington and Hyonhee Shin and Joyce Lee in Seoul; Additional reporting by Choonsik Yoo in Seoul and Gao Liangping and Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by Jack Kim and Clarence Fernandez)By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday condemned Israel's "apparent intentional use of unlawful lethal and other excessive force" against civilian protesters in Gaza, and called for perpetrators of violations in the enclave to face justice. Protests at the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip began in March last year, with Palestinians demanding Israel ease a blockade of Gaza and recognize their right to return to lands their families fled or were forced from when Israel was founded in 1948. On Friday, Israeli forces killed two people and wounded 55 others taking part in the weekly protests along the fortified border, the Palestinian health ministry said. On the final day of a four-week session, the Geneva forum adopted a resolution on accountability, brought by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The vote was 23 states in favor, eight against, with 15 abstentions and one delegation absent. It called for cooperating with a preliminary examination opened by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2015 into alleged Israeli human rights violations. The resolution was based on a report by a U.N. inquiry which said that Israeli security forces may have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in killing 189 Palestinians and wounding more than 6,100 at weekly protests last year. "The targeting of civilians is a serious matter that should not be condoned," Palestine's ambassador Ibrahim Khraisi said, citing the report's findings. The toll included 35 Palestinian children, two journalists, and medical workers, he noted. "There have not been any injuries inflicted on any Israelis, be they military or civilians," he said. Israeli ambassador Aviva Raz Shechter denounced what she called "clear evidence of political bias against Israel" in the report but said that authorities were "examining individual incidents". She accused the independent panel of ignoring "the very real threat" posed to 70,000 Israeli citizens living along the border by 1,300 rockets fired by Hamas militants during the period of inquiry, March 30-December 31. In Jerusalem, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement dismissing what it called an "absurd, hypocritical ritual" of singling out Israel for criticism in "predetermined" findings that ignored the reality on the ground. European countries were divided on the resolution, with Britain and Italy abstaining, while Spain voted in favor and Austria and Hungary against. The United States did not participate, having quit the body last year over perceived anti-Israel bias. "Hamas of course bear principle responsibility as their operatives have cynically exploited the protests and we are clear that Israel has the right to self-defense," Britain's ambassador Julian Braithwaite said. "But equally we have publicly and privately expressed our long-standing concerns about the use of live ammunition and excessive force by the IDF. Our decision to abstain reflects this balance." (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Additional reporting by Stephen Farrell in Jerusalem; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky and Hugh Lawson)Kinshasa (AFP) - The United States on Friday placed new sanctions on three Democratic Republic of Congo officials who monitored last year's poll, including electoral commission head Corneille Nangaa.

The US Treasury sanctions also target commission vice president Norbert Basengezi and Marcellin Mukolo Basengezi, a son of Basengezi who is an adviser to Nangaa.

Washington accuses the trio of corruption and of obstructing democracy in Decembers presidential election.

"Yesterday, the US government imposed further sanctions on #DRC officials responsible for undermining the countrys democratic process," tweeted US ambassador Mike Hammer.

"We remain committed to working with President Tshisekedi in an effort to create a more peaceful and prosperous future for the Congolese people," added Hammer.

On Thursday, the US had demanded that Kinshasa release "accurate" election results, or face sanctions for undermining democracy.

"This action follows persistent corruption by senior officials within the DRCs National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI) and the former Kabila government to obstruct and delay preparations for credible and inclusive elections," said Sigal Mandelker, Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

The Treasury found that "under Nangaa's leadership, CENI officials inflated by as much as $100 million the costs for the electronic voting machine contract with the intent to use surplus funds for personal enrichment, bribes, and campaign costs to fund the election campaign of Kabila's candidate."

The voting machines were bought from a South Korean company.

Mandelker said the Americans "remain concerned about a flawed electoral process in which, following the presidential election, CENI continued to obstruct the democratic process and failed to ensure the vote reflected the will of the Congolese people."

Basengezi is accused of delivering bribes to constitutional court judges "to uphold a decision by the CENI to delay DRC's 2016 elections."

Story continues

The poll saw Felix Tshisekedi controversially declared the winner, marking the country's first peaceful handover of power since independence from Belgium in 1960.

Fellow opposition leader Martin Fayalu insisted he had won the poll by a wide margin in a disputed contest mired by fraud allegations.

The poll commission found Tshisekedi the winner and the constitutional court ratified the result, allowing him to be invested on January 24 with Kabila present.

The election was delayed several times as outgoing President Joseph Kabila clung to power having been scheduled to step down at the end of 2016.

Fayalu accused the commission of "fabricating" results.

Kabila retains considerable influence as his Common Front for Congo (FCC) wields a huge majority in the National Assembly, which also held elections on December 30.

The US State Department last month announced a first raft of sanctions against Nangaa and the chairman of the constitutional court, including barring them from visiting the United States, citing "legitimate concerns" over the election.Beirut (AFP) - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday urged Lebanon to pick a side as he visited the country on a regional tour to build a united front against Iran.

He especially expressed concern over the role of Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shiite movement that is targeted by US sanctions but holds three cabinet posts in Lebanon.

Pompeo flew in from Israel a day after he became the first high-ranking American official to visit the Western Wall in annexed east Jerusalem with an Israeli prime minister.

His visit also came just hours after US President Donald Trump said Washington should recognise Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, breaking with the policy of successive administrations as well as UN Security Council resolutions.

"Lebanon and the Lebanese people face a choice: bravely move forward as an independent and proud nation or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future," he said during a joint news conference with his Lebanese counterpart.

"The US will continue to use all peaceful means, everything at our disposal to choke off the financing, the smuggling the criminal network and the misuse of government positions and influence," by Hezbollah, he said.

- 'Not terrorist' -

"We will not hesitate to call out those who actively and passively support those activities."

Pompeo and Lebanon's Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil stood side by side at the new conference but their statements were contradictory.

And a question and answer session with the media was cancelled "at the behest of the Americans", a Lebanese foreign ministry official said.

Bassil he held "constructive and positive talks" with Pompeo but stressed that their were differences of perspective with regards to Hezbollah.

"Hezbollah is a Lebanese party, not a terrorist group, and it enjoys a wide popular base," Bassil said.

"We don't want our ties with America to be affected and we want to work together to solve problems, including the issue with Hezbollah," he said, stressing that Lebanon's stability is of mutual interest to both states.

Story continues

In an earlier meeting with Lebanese President Michel Aoun, Pompeo conveyed his worry over Hezbollah.

He stressed "the US government's strong concerns over the role of Hezbollah and Iran in Lebanon and the region and the risks this poses to Lebanon's security, stability, and prosperity", US deputy spokesman Robert Palladino said.

Hezbollah fighters have backed government forces in neighbouring Syria in the civil war that broke out there in 2011.

Pompeo also met parliament speaker Nabih Berri, who is himself a Shiite, and warned of the group's "destabilising activities" in the region.

Pompeo and Berri also discussed "the need to maintain calm along the boundary between Lebanon and Israel", Palladino said.

Lebanon and its southern neighbour Israel are still technically at war, even after Israeli troops withdrew from the south of the country in 2000.

- Provocation? -

Israel and Hezbollah fought a devastating month-long war in 2006, and skirmishes still erupt along a UN-patrolled demarcation line.

Pompeo and Prime Minister Saad Hariri discussed "the importance of the US-Lebanese security partnership and the need for continued support for Lebanon's legitimate state security institutions, particularly the Lebanese Armed Forces," Palladino said.

Pompeo "commended the Lebanese people for hosting more than one million Syrian refugees".

In a meeting with Interior Minister Raya al-Hassan, Pompeo "discussed regional and internal security challenges facing Lebanon and how the United States can help support the interior ministry's efforts".

Hassan became the first woman interior minister in Lebanon and the Middle East in a cabinet line-up unveiled in late January following an eight-month delay.

The United States has branded Hezbollah, the only group in Lebanon that has not disarmed since its 1975-1990 civil war, a "terrorist" organisation and targeted it with tough sanctions.

Hezbollah's cleric Ali Damush questioned the timing and purpose of Pompeo's visit during his Friday sermon.

"What are the Lebanese expecting from America and its foreign minister after these two announcements that are totally biased in favour of Israel, except for inciting (Hezbollah) and turning Lebanese against each other?".WASHINGTON (AP) -- America is waiting for special counsel Robert Mueller's report. But anyone looking for a grand narrative on President Donald Trump, Russian election interference and all the juicy details uncovered over the past 22 months could end up disappointed.

The exact timing of Mueller's endgame is unclear. Attorney General William Barr, who oversees the investigation, has said he wants to release as much information as he can about the inquiry into possible coordination between Trump associates and Russia's efforts to sway the 2016 election. But during his confirmation hearing last month, Barr said he ultimately will decide what the public sees, and that any report will be in his words, not Mueller's.

Some key questions:

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE INVESTIGATION ENDS?

Mueller will have to turn in a report of some kind when he's done. It could be pretty bare-bones.

Justice Department regulations require only that Mueller give the attorney general a confidential report that explains the decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions. That could be as simple as a bullet point list or as fulsome as a report running hundreds of pages.

Mueller has given no guidance on what or when it will be, but signs a conclusion is coming soon have mounted in recent months.

Matthew Whitaker, who was acting attorney general before Barr was confirmed, said in January that the investigation is nearly done. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller, has been preparing to leave his post soon. The number of prosecutors working for Mueller has dwindled, and his team, which had sought an interview with the president, has not had meaningful dialogue with Trump's lawyers in months.

Mueller also hasn't filed any new cases in two months.

___

WHAT DOES BARR SAY HE'LL DO?

Barr said he envisions two reports, and only one for congressional and public consumption.

Barr has said he takes seriously the "shall be confidential" part of the regulations governing Mueller's report. He has noted that department protocol says internal memos explaining charging decisions should not be released.

Story continues

During his confirmation hearing, Barr said he will draft, after Mueller turns in his report, a second one for the chairman and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees. But here again, the regulations provide little guidance for what such a report would say.

The attorney general is required only to say the investigation has concluded and describe or explain any times when he or Rosenstein decided an action Mueller proposed "was so inappropriate or unwarranted" that it should not be pursued.

Barr indicated that he expects to use his report to share the results of Mueller's investigation with the public, which the regulations allow him to do. But he hedged on specifics and said his plans could change after speaking with Mueller and Rosenstein.

___

WHAT WILL TRUMP DO?

Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has said the president's legal team wants to review any report before it's released. Giuliani also raised the prospect that Trump lawyers could try to invoke executive privilege to prevent the disclosure of any confidential conversation the president has had with his aides.

It's not clear whether the president's lawyers will get an advance look at Mueller's conclusions. Mueller, after all, reports to the Justice Department, not the White House.

Barr himself seemed to dismiss that idea. When Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Barr whether Trump and his lawyers would be able to correct the report before its release and put their own spin on it, Barr replied: "That will not happen."

___

WILL THERE BE A FINAL NEWS CONFERENCE?

It seems unlikely, especially if prosecutors plan to discuss people they never charged.

Then-FBI Director James Comey broke from Justice Department protocol in extraordinary fashion with his July 2016 news conference announcing the FBI would not recommend criminal charges against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server. Barr has made clear his disapproval of Comey's public move.

"If you're not going to indict someone, you don't stand up there and unload negative information about the person," Barr said.

There have been times when the department has elaborated on decisions not to pursue criminal charges. Also, there is some precedent for special counsels appointed by the Justice Department to hold news conferences.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel who investigated the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame and who was granted even broader authority than Mueller, held a 2005 news conference when he charged I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. But even then, Fitzgerald drew a clear line.

"One of the obligations of the prosecutors and the grand juries is to keep the information obtained in the investigation secret, not to share it with the public," Fitzgerald said then. "And as frustrating as that may be for the public, that is important because, the way our system of justice works, if information is gathered about people and they're not charged with a crime, we don't hold up that information for the public to look at. We either charge them with a crime or we don't."

___

CAN CONGRESS SUBPOENA MUELLER AND HIS REPORT?

Sure. Powerful Democratic committee chairmen have said as much.

House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York has raised the prospect of subpoenaing the report and calling Mueller before Congress to ask him about his findings. So has Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Democrats also want all of Mueller's underlying evidence, including interview transcripts and documents.

Schiff says he's watching Barr's moves carefully to see if he were "to try to bury any part of this report." He says anything less than complete disclosure would leave Barr with "a tarnished legacy."

Many Republicans have also argued that the full report should be released. And the House voted 420-0 this month for a resolution calling for any final report to be made public. Still, many allies of the president have stopped short of saying it should be subpoenaed.

Trump, as the leader of the executive branch, could direct the Justice Department to defy the subpoena, setting the stage for a court fight that would almost certainly go to the Supreme Court.

___

WILL TRUMP BE ABLE TO SEE THE REPORT?

It is unclear whether Trump will ask to see the report and under what circumstances he or his attorneys might be able to view it, especially because the document is meant to be confidential for Justice Department leadership.

Barr said at his confirmation hearing that he would not permit White House interference in the investigation. But he also has voiced an expansive view of executive power in which the president functions as the country's chief law enforcement officer and has wide latitude in giving directives to the FBI and Justice Department.

Democrats could seize on any disclosure to the president to argue that the report really isn't confidential and should be immediately provided to them as well.

___

Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP)  Islamic State militants no longer control any territory in Syria, President Donald Trump proudly announced Friday, though the U.S. was still launching airstrikes and sporadic fighting continued on the ground against the group's holdouts.

"It's about time," Trump exclaimed on an airport tarmac in Florida. He held up maps indicating the territory once held by the IS group in Iraq and Syria had shrunk to nothing.

Elimination of the last IS stronghold in Baghouz in eastern Syria would mark the end of the militants' self-declared caliphate, which at its height blanketed large parts of Syria and Iraq. The campaign to take back the territory by the U.S. and its partners has spanned five years and two U.S. presidencies, unleashed more than 100,000 bombs and killed untold numbers of fighters and civilians.

Controlling territory and assets, such as oil facilities, has given the group a stream of revenue and a place from which to launch attacks around the world. However, if history is a guide, the reconquering of IS-held territory could prove a short-lived victory unless Iraq and Syria fix a problem that gave rise to the extremist movement in the first place: governments pitting one ethnic or sectarian group against another.

Trump has been teasing the victory for days, most recently Wednesday when he said the milestone would be achieved by that night.

On Friday, after a flight to Florida, Trump held up a map to supporters cheering him on the tarmac. Then he turned to reporters standing nearby.

"Here's ISIS on Election Day," he said, linking coalition gains since then to his presidency. He pointed to a swath of red signifying the group's previous territorial hold, and then to a version without any red, "Here's ISIS right now."

But Trump appeared to be overstating his administration's contribution to the anti-IS fight. A close-up of the map showed that he was displaying the group's footprint at a high-point in 2014, not Election Day 2016, by which point the U.S.-backed campaign was well underway.

Story continues

And American officials familiar with the situation in Syria said that the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces  who had not announced victory and weren't planning to on Friday  were still battling remaining IS fighters who were holed up in tunnels along river cliffs in Baghouz. Another official confirmed that the U.S. launched airstrikes there on Friday and that the fighting continued to clear out final pockets of IS members.

Associated Press journalists in Baghouz said coalition fighters were still conducting mop-up operations in the village after seizing an encampment Tuesday where the extremists had been for months. SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel told AP earlier Friday that there were still IS fighters and women and children hiding in caves near Baghouz. He said final operations were ongoing and there appeared to be several hundred people still inside. Other SDF officials said the camp was full of corpses, and some civilians and IS fighters were still handing themselves over.

As the militants have put up a desperate, last-ditch fight for weeks, they have kept up their recruiting efforts, as Trump noted.

"ISIS uses the internet better than almost anyone, but for all those susceptible to ISIS propaganda, they are now being beaten badly at every level," the president tweeted. "They will always try to show a glimmer of vicious hope, but they are losers and barely breathing."

He warned would-be recruits: "Think about that before you destroy your lives and the lives of your family!"

The coalition siege has been slowed by the unexpectedly large number of civilians in Baghouz, most of them families of IS members. In recent weeks, they have been flowing out, exhausted, hungry and often wounded. The sheer number who emerged  nearly 30,000 since early January, according to Kurdish officials  took the Syrian Democratic Forces by surprise.

According to the officials, the SDF is moving slowly and carefully, and is willing to wait out the IS fighters who are out of food and low on water. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss mission details.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump was briefed by acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan who was traveling with him to Florida where he was meeting Caribbean leaders at his Mar-a-Lago club. "We got the information from the DOD," she said.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking in Jerusalem, said Thursday the U.S.-led coalition had achieved "amazing" results in Syria.

But he said, "The threat from radical Islamic terrorism remains."

___

Baldor reported from Washington. AP writers Philip Issa in Baghouz, Syria, Robert Burns, Zeke Miller and Kevin Freking in Washington and Matthew Lee in Jerusalem contributed.Less than a week after a gunman attacked two mosques in New Zealand and killed 50 people, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has officially announced the ban of all assault rifles and military-style semi-automatic guns.

Ardern made the announcement on Thursday local time during a press conference at Parliament, just six days after New Zealands worst mass shooting in history.

I absolutely believe there will be a common view amongst New Zealanders, those who use guns for legitimate purposes, and those who have never touched one, that the time for the mass and easy availability of these weapons must end. And today they will, she began in her speech, according to The Guardian.

Today I am announcing that New Zealand will ban all military-style semi-automatic weapons. We will also ban all assault rifles. We will ban all high capacity magazines. We will ban all parts with the ability to convert semi-automatic or any other type of firearm into a military-style semi-automatic weapon. We will ban parts that cause a firearm to generate semi-automatic, automatic or close to automatic gunfire, she continued.

In short, every semi-automatic weapon used in the terrorist attack on Friday will be banned in this country, Ardern added.

The law is expected to go into full effect by April 11, she said.

In New Zealand, guns referred to as miltary-style semi-automatic weapons are almost all those known as assault weapons or semi-automatic weapons in America. The few semi-automatics that do not come under the term in New Zealand can be converted to military-style but require additional parts such as a larger magazine. These parts will now also be banned.

RELATED: What to Know About New Zealands Prime Minister

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern | Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

During the press conference, Ardern and Minister of Police Stuart Nash advised residents that buying a gun in the meantime would be a waste of time, and told stores to return their stock to suppliers now.

A buyback scheme will also be instituted in the country as a way to collect all current weapons from owners with fair and reasonable compensation, which Ardern estimated may cost between $100-200 million.

Story continues

That is the price that we must pay to ensure the safety of our communities, Ardern said, according to The Guardian.

Though the prime minister acknowledged that the law is a work in progress, she said she is confident that it will benefit the country and be widely supported by all.

It is about all of us. It is in the national interest and it is about safety, she said. I will work hard to retain that support as we work on the remaining tranches of reform that we must make to prevent an act of terror happening in our country ever again.

RELATED: What to Know About New Zealands Prime Minister, Hailed for Response to Mosque Mass Shooting

Last Friday, a gunman opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch and killed 50 people, while injuring dozens of others. A 28-year-old man has since been charged with murder.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on March 15 | Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

In the wake of the shootings, Ardern vowed to give not to give any recognition to the man who allegedly attacked the mosques.

You will never hear me mention his name, she told Parliament in her first address there since the mass shootings on Friday, the deadliest in the countrys modern history.

RELATED: New Zealand Mass Shooter Will Have Justice but Not Infamy: We Will Give Him Nothing. Not Even His Name.

Instead, Ardern called the alleged killer a terrorist, criminal and extremist.

But he will  when I speak  be nameless, she continued, and to others I implore you: Speak the names of those who were lost rather than the name of the man who took them.

He may have sought notoriety, Ardern said. But we in New Zealand will give him nothing. Not even his name.

Ardern also spoke out against Islamophobia and white nationalism  taking care to note that while the suspected mosque shooter was not from New Zealand, that did not mean those same ideas did not exist in New Zealand.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern | Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

We wish for every member of our communities to feel safe. Safety means being free from the fear of violence. But it also means being free from the fear of those sentiments of racism and hate that create a place where violence can flourish, Ardern said. And every single one of us has the power to change that.

RELATED: What to Know About New Zealands Prime Minister, Hailed for Response to Mosque Mass Shooting

Ardern, her countrys youngest leader in 150 years, has been lauded for her response since the attack, as the face of a grieving but resilient nation.

Her point about namelessness is a resonant one for anti-gun violence advocates and experts on violent threats: As mass shootings have become ever deadlier in America, they have pushed for media companies and other public groups to avoid focusing the discussion on the shooter or shooters  including naming them  so as to prevent the unattended spread of their ideas.

Now with this new law, many anti-gun violence advocates have called for similar action to occur in America.By Tom Westbrook CHRISTCHURCH (Reuters) - The Muslim call to prayer sounded out over Christchurch and around New Zealand on Friday, as thousands gathered to remember the 50 people killed by a lone gunman at two mosques a week ago. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern joined about 20,000 people standing quietly at Hagley Park, in front of the Al Noor mosque where most of the victims were killed during Friday prayers last week. "New Zealand mourns with you. We are one," she said in a short speech, followed by two minutes of silence. Ardern, who swiftly denounced the shooting as terrorism, has announced a ban on military-style semi-automatic and assault rifles. The country is under heightened security alert since the attack, and police said on Friday they were investigating a threat made against Ardern on Twitter. New Zealand Herald reported that a Twitter post containing a photo of a gun and captioned "You are next" was sent to the prime minister. Reuters could not verify this independently. The report said the account was suspended. Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected white supremacist, has been charged with one murder following the Christchurch attack and was remanded without a plea. He is due back in court on April 5, when police said he was likely to face more charges. Most victims of New Zealand's worst mass shooting were migrants or refugees from countries such as Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Somalia, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. "We are broken-hearted, but we are not broken. We are alive, we are together, we are determined to not let anyone divide us," Imam Gamal Fouda told the crowd at the Al Noor mosque, many wearing headscarves in support of the grieving Muslim community. "To the families of the victims, your loved ones did not die in vain. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope," he said in prayers broadcast nationally. Tens of thousands of people paid their respects around the country with some forming human chains in front of mosques. Others said silent prayers at schools, cafes and even offices. Relatives and other mourners thronged into a Christchurch cemetery where 26 victims of the attack, and one person who died in a car crash that was unrelated to the mosque shooting, were laid to rest in a mass burial. This is a special janazah. We dont do these every day," one mourner said over a microphone, referring to an Islamic funeral prayer. "We dont bury 27 of our brothers and sisters every day. The first to be laid to rest was Naeem Rashid, who was hailed as a hero, killed trying to tackle the gunman at the Al Noor mosque. ISLAMOPHOBIA Ardern, surrounded by ministers and security officials at Hagley Park, wore a black headscarf and a black suit. Female police at the park also wore headscarves, with a red rose on their uniforms. In a powerful speech that lasted about 20 minutes, the imam, Fouda, said through its love and compassion, New Zealand was unbreakable. "We are here in our hundreds and thousands unified for one purpose  that hate will be undone, and love will redeem us," he said. He thanked Ardern for her compassion, saying: "It has been a lesson for world leaders." Fouda also denounced Islamophobia, saying it had killed people. "Islamophobia is real. It is a targeted campaign to influence people to dehumanize and irrationally fear Muslims. To fear what we wear, to fear the choice of food we eat, to fear the way we pray and to fear the way we practice our faith," he said. Muslims account for just over 1 percent of New Zealand's population. Many women wore headscarves in New Zealand as a sign of support to the community, and a #headscarfforharmony movement was trending on Twitter. "We are wearing headscarves showing our support, love and solidarity, and hope that by everybody doing this it will demonstrate to Muslim women ... that they are one with us," said Robyn Molony, 65, with a group of friends wearing headscarves at Hagley Park. Residents of Christchurch are still recovering from a devastating earthquake that hit in 2011, killing 185 and injuring thousands. "Since the earthquakes, weve gone through a lot as a city and were a lot more caring and looking out for one another, said James Sheehan, 62. (Additional reporting by Charlotte Greenfield, Joseph Campbell; Writing by Praveen Menon; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Michael Perry)By Tom Westbrook CHRISTCHURCH (Reuters) - New Zealanders on Friday marked one week since a mass shooting killed 50 Muslim worshippers in the South Island city of Christchurch, holding nationwide prayers and wearing headscarves to show their support for the devastated community. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will lead thousands of mourners expected to gather at Hagley Park in front of the Al Noor mosque, where most of the victims died. The Muslim call to prayer at 1.30 p.m. (0030 GMT) will be broadcast nationally, followed by two minutes of silence. Ardern, who has labelled the attack as terrorism, announced a ban on military-style semi-automatic and assault rifles under tough new gun laws on Thursday. The prime minister is expected to be accompanied in the Christchurch prayers with community leaders and other foreign dignitaries. Most victims of New Zealand's worst mass shooting were migrants or refugees from countries such as Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Somalia, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Muslims account for just over 1 percent of New Zealand's population, most of whom were born overseas. The #headscarfforharmony movement, launched by an Auckland doctor, encouraged people to wear headscarves on Friday to show their support for the Muslim community. Robyn Molony, 65, was with a group of friend wearing headscarves at Hagley Park, where they walked daily. We are wearing headscarves showing our support, love and solidarity, and hope that by everybody doing this it will demonstrate to Muslim women ... that they are one with us," she said. Images of a grieving Ardern wearing a black headscarf as she visited families of the victims a day after the attacks were broadcast around the world. Some women in the capital Wellington were also seen wearing headscarves on their morning commute. SECURITY HIGH Armed police have been guarding mosques around New Zealand since the attacks and police said there would be a "heightened presence" on Friday to reassure those attending weekly prayers. Officers dotted around Christchurch wore green ribbons pinned to their chests as a sign of peace and solidarity. Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected white supremacist who was living in Dunedin, on New Zealand's South Island, has been charged with murder following the attack. He was remanded without a plea and is due back in court on April 5, when police said he was likely to face more charges. Newspapers across the country ran full-page memorials with the names of the victims, and a call for national mourning. "A call to prayer...in unity there is strength," New Zealand Herald said on its front page. Candlelight vigils continued until late on Thursday across the country, while volunteers prepared the bodies of the deceased for a mass burial that expected after the prayers. All the bodies are washed. We finished around 1.30 a.m. this morning. It was our duty. After we finished there was a lot of emotion, people were crying and hugging," said a body washer in Christchurch who gave his name as Mo. (Writing by Praveen Menon; Editing by Lincoln Feast)Last Friday, an avowed white supremacist wielding an assault rifle burst into two Christchurch mosques during afternoon prayers, murdering 50 people in what is far and away the worst terrorist attack in New Zealands history. On Thursdayso, less than a week laterPrime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a nationwide ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, which she expects to be fully implemented by mid-April. Our history changed forever, she said. Now, our laws will, too.

The changes take effect immediately, and will encompass more than just a prospective sales ban. Ardern revealed that the country will also implement a buyback program to take affected military-style semiautomatic weapons, or MSSAs, out of circulation for good. (Estimated cost: between $100 and $200 million.) As soon as this weekend, MSSA owners will be able to turn in their weapons at police stations for safe destruction, no questions asked. We just want the guns back, she pleaded. Its about all of us.

Once the amnesty period has ended, MSSA owners will face fines of about $2,700 or up to three years in prison. The Class E license that is required to buy and deal MSSAs will functionally cease to exist. I can assure people there is no point in applying for such a permit, she said. Ardern also made clear that the country isnt done, calling these merely the first tranche of firearms reforms; in the months to come, she expects the legislature to take a hard look at registration requirements, licensing, mandatory storage, and other forms of regulation.

Meanwhile, here in America, the murders of 20 first-graders and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 prompted Congressafter four months of debateto reject both a modest assault-weapons ban and a bipartisan proposal that would have mandated universal background checks. In 2017, the murders of 58 Las Vegas concertgoers elicited meek, fruitless legislative efforts to outlaw bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. (Relying on its executive authority, the Trump administration eventually banned bump stocks, but only after lawmakers failed to act.)

Story continues

At last, in 2018, the murders of 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the national outpourings of rage and fear and grief that ensued led the House to pass the STOP School Violence Act, which earmarks federal funds that schools can use to purchase metal detectors, door locks, and anonymous threat-reporting services. By providing critical resources to schools to strengthen their security infrastructure and train teachers, administrators, and law enforcement officers to intervene, we can save countless lives, said Utah senator Orrin Hatch. As to guns, the tools that make it possible to so easily take the lives of which he spoke, the bill is silent.

There are structural reasons New Zealand was able to mobilize in a way the United States has never been able to do; its unicameral legislative structure, for exampleone Parliament, not a separate House and Senatemakes it easier for consensus bills to sail through the process. But also, it happened because New Zealands government is composed of decent people who see it as their responsibility to respond to devastating tragedies by doing everything within their power to ensure that such devastating tragedies do not occur again. Gun violence is a moral issue, not a partisan one. (Ardern hails from the progressive Labour Party, but leaders of both the center-right National Party and far-right New Zealand First party have already pledged their support.)

It also happened because New Zealand has no equivalent to the Second Amendment, and thus no stubborn cadre of its citizenry who insist that some 250 years after its enactment, a constitutional provision that prohibits disarmament of colonial-era militias must operate as an inviolable, latent suicide pact. The calculus is simple in New Zealand, as it was in Australia and in other countries that respond to firearms-fueled massacres with tough, decisive action: People are dead because of assault rifles, and so for the common good, the assault rifles must go.

Most importantly, these reforms happened because politicians in New Zealand do not live in mortal fear of incurring the National Rifle Association's wrath, and feel empowered to do what they think is right, instead of what is least likely to elicit attack ads during their next re-election bid. The American gun lobbys power has so warped our conception of what is possible that to us, every instance of meaningful gun reform now seems astonishing. What New Zealand just did is not astonishing, though. It is the only safe, rational, and sane thing to do. We are the insane ones. We just don't realize it anymore.How to help

Donation accounts have been created at US Bank to help the families of Thompson and Chavez. People may make donations to US Bank to any of these three accounts:

 Thompson Memorial Fund.

 Thompson Family Fund.

 Chavez Family Fund.

Donations may be made in person or a check may be mailed to any US Bank branch. To ensure funds are deposited into the correct account, please provide the teller with the name of the fund or indicate it on the memo line of the mailed check.

Family funds are for family expenses while the memorial fund is for funeral expenses. Any excess funds after the funeral service will be released to Thompsons wife, the sheriff's office said.Thank you for reading!

Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue.April 10 will not only be the day following the Israeli elections, it is also the date when the last batch of Qatari money will enter Gaza. Israel will be occupied with the formation of a government coalition while in Gaza, the local mafia will be racking their brains trying to figure out how to continue milking more money from whomever possible.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter



And when the mafia is concerned, if they dont get their protection money  they will burn down the house. Therefore, the day after the elections kicks off the final moments before an inevitable round of fighting in Gaza.





Gaza border

Israel and Egypt are working to extend the deadline as long as possible. Talks are still underway with the Gaza mafia over toning down the intensity of the disturbances emanating from the Strip in return for cash. Prime Minister Netanyahu, in the midst of a close election campaign, wont admit to the cabinet or the public all that Hamas is really being offered.

Concessions to the Palestinians will harm the prime ministers image and he does not even intend to deliver on much of what is purportedly on the table. In addition, the Egyptian offer contains nothing new, much of it has been discussed already in recent years and have not been implemented  and that is not expected to change if the present government is reelected.

But the Palestinians, especially the leadership of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) taking part in the discussions alongside Hamas, are more than glad to publicize the negotiation particulars. Moreover, consultations with Israeli security officials confirm that Palestinian media reports do indeed match the list of issues that were discussed and not categorically rejected; which might explain why such an effort is being made to conceal the concessions being made to Hamas in contrast to the eager proclamations about the intelligence success in the North.

Confriontation on border

The document consists of 10 paragraphs and the first is about (what else?) money. Hamas is demanding at least another six months of revenue flow from Qatar. Israel and Egypt would prefer the money come from the Saudis, so as not to allow the Qataris to expand their influence in the region. But the Saudis are not interested and it seems that Qatar will indeed remain the primary sponsor.

Hamas wants $30 million: $10 million for UN infrastructure projects in Gaza, $10 million for poor families and $10 million for civil servant salaries. For this reason, the UN envoy Nickolay Mladenov is in Gaza working to advance the construction of diesel storage containers for Gazas power plant.

The section dealing with fishing demands of Israel to expand the fishing zone for Gazans to 15 miles out. But at the same time, Israel is concerned that Hamas may try to attack the gas rig off the coast of Gaza. Another section demands that Israel issue another 5,000 entry permits to Gaza merchants. In fact, most of those merchants are actually day laborers for the towns in the Gaza vicinity.

The document also seeks the creation of an industrial zone near the Karni and Erez crossings between Israel and Gaza that would employ some 15,000 Gazans. In the long term, Israel is also supposed to examine constructing a gas pipeline into Gaza and increasing the electricity quota.

The Egyptians are being asked to complete the Rafah Crossing for cargo by the end of the month in addition to funding the construction of a cancer hospital in Gaza. Israel is demanding a return to the time that there was a 300-meter security corridor along the border and the end to all hostile action along the border fence.

Both sides acknowledge that the document is only meant to buy time. The militants in Gaza refuse to make any concessions to Israel and the document lacks any mention of the Israelis missing in Gaza and believed to be held by Hamas. So even if concessions are made to Hamas, they would be marginal ones that would not meet the needs and wishes of either side. The only thing left for the incoming government to do is sharpen its swords.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hopes to use his first visit to Lebanon this week to step up pressure on Iran and its local ally, Hezbollah. But he could face resistance even from America's local allies, who fear that pushing too hard could spark a backlash and endanger the tiny country's fragile peace.

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Hezbollah wields more power than ever in parliament and the government. Pompeo will meet Friday with President Michel Aoun and will also hold talks with Lebanon's parliament speaker and foreign minister -- all three of whom are close Hezbollah allies. He will also meet with Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a close Western ally who has been reluctant to confront Hezbollah.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Reuven Rivlin during their meeting Thursday in Jerusalem (Photo: Mark Neiman (GPO))

"We'll spend a lot of time talking with the Lebanese government about how we can help them disconnect from the threat that Iran and Hezbollah present to them," Pompeo told reporters earlier this week.

But isolating Hezbollah, whose military power dwarfs that of the Lebanese armed forces, could prove impossible.

The Iran-backed group has an arsenal of tens of thousands of rockets and missiles. Its battle-hardened cadres fought Israel to a stalemate in 2006, and have fought alongside President Bashar Assad's army since the early days of the Syrian civil war, securing a string of hard-won victories. Over the past year, the group has translated this power into major political gains unseen in the past.

Hezbollah and its allies today control a majority of seats in parliament and the Cabinet, after it managed in 2016 to help Aoun, an allied Christian leader, be elected president. The group has three Cabinet seats, the largest number it has ever taken, including the Health Ministry, which has one of the largest budgets.

That has angered Washington, where US officials have called on Hariri's national unity government to ensure Hezbollah does not tap into public resources. Last month, U.S. Ambassador Elizabeth Richard expressed concerns over Hezbollah's growing role in the new Cabinet, saying it does not contribute to stability.

Lebanon has long been a political battleground in the region-wide struggle between Washington and Tehran. But tensions have risen since President Donald Trump withdrew from Iran's nuclear deal with world powers and re-imposed sanctions on Tehran.

Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, during a speech on Al-Manar satellite television station affiliated with his movement

The United States backs a coalition of groups opposed to Hezbollah led by Hariri's Sunni-led Future Movement and the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces, but Washington's local allies are proceeding with caution. Memories are fresh of the clashes that erupted in May 2008, when the Shiite Hezbollah rapidly defeated a group of Sunni opponents on the streets of Beirut.

"Washington should be careful not to push Lebanon to the brink, as Hezbollah would retaliate if its survival is at stake," said Joe Macaron, a resident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington. "In the current status quo, the most effective way to restrain Hezbollah remains within the intricate parameters of the Lebanese political system," he said.

The Trump administration appears to be aware of the difficulties it faces, and while it has talked tough about Hezbollah, it has done little beyond strengthening already tough sanctions on the group, which has long been blacklisted as a terrorist organization by Western countries.

The United States is a strong supporter of Lebanon's national army, supplying it with arms and more than $1.5 billion in aid over the past decade. But Hezbollah, the only group that did not disarm after the 1975-1990 civil war, takes credit for ending the 18-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000 and says it is the only force capable of repelling another Israeli invasion.

Lebanese PM Said Hariri (Photo: AP)

During his visit to Lebanon, Pompeo is expected to reiterate Washington's support to the Lebanese army. In return, he is expected to demand that Lebanon's Central Bank act to prevent Iran from using the country's banking sector to evade sanctions.

Asked by journalists on his way to the Middle East about his meetings with Aoun, who helped facilitate Hezbollah's rise to power, Pompeo responded: "In my business we talk to a lot of people that we're hoping to change their way."

Aoun is scheduled to visit Russia later this month for talks with President Vladimir Putin. The two are expected to discuss a number of topics, including the return of Syrian refugees and oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean, which has been a source of tension between Lebanon and Israel.

Pompeo will likely offer continued U.S. mediation to try and resolve the maritime border dispute between Lebanon and Israel. Lebanon plans to begin offshore oil and gas exploration later this year."This is where Bedouin and Jewish values meet," said Ismail Khalidi, an Israeli Bedouin diplomat now serving in the Foreign Ministry as he sat with Chabad emissary to Nepal Rabbi Hezki Lifshitz, a year and a half after Vered Aviyashar (26) of Kibbutz Ein Hanatziv, was killed when her Jeep overturned on the Annapurna ridge of the Himalayas. After the accident, a medical project was launched in her memory.

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"The project  owing to my personal commitment to the Chabad center in Katmandu, administered by Rabbi Hezki Lifshitz and his wife Chani, who are dedicated to their work all year round," Khalidi said. The diplomat also donated three months salaries for the medical project which includes the distribution of small oxygen tanks to help Israeli backpackers trekking in the Himalayas suffering from altitude sickness.

Lifshitz and Khalidi

Khalidi immediately committed himself to the project and began raising funds. "Now, that the climbing and trekking season is beginning and Israelis are setting out in groups, only when they are at high altitudes do they discover that they have an oxygen problem and are in need of urgent rescue," he explains. "Until the helicopter arrives, they will be able to make use of the small oxygen tanks available for rent that will carry Vered's name and her heart-breaking life-story."

Demonstrating oxygen mask placement

Khalidi is the first Bedouin diplomat in the Foreign Ministry. He arrived in Nepal a year and a half ago to temporarily reinforce the Israeli Embassy in the country where he served as the acting ambassador. The day after his arrival in Nepal he received the harsh news of the jeep that overturned on the Annapurna ridge, critically wounding and eventually killing Vered Aviyashar and injuring eight of her friends.

In the week following the accident, Khalidi was in contact with the Aviyashar family and put all of his efforts in to ensuring that her body would be flown to Israel as soon as possible for burial. He also extended aid to her wounded friends in the hospital.

The day after Vered was laid to rest in Israel, Khalidi decided to go to the scene of the accident, along the 41 miles-long route that Vered traveled with her friends. He walked twelve and a half kilometers on dangerous hilly terrain, to the scene of the accident near the Nepali village of Tal.

Rabbi Hezki and Chani Lifshitz run the Chabad House in Kathmandu and take care of the needs of Jewish backpackers all year round. They took it upon themselves to lead the project in Vered's memory. "The project is an additional step in making the trip for trekkers in Nepal safe," concluded the rabbi.

Presently, Chabad of Kathmandu is running a campaign to raise funds for its activities. For donations and details click here.BEIRUT -- U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has arrived in Lebanon, the last leg of a Mideast tour that took him to Kuwait and Israel.

Pompeo is scheduled to meet with a host of Lebanese officials, including allies of the Iran-backed Hezbollah during the two-day visit, his first as secretary of state.

Pompeo hopes to step up pressure on the Shiite militant group, but could face resistance even from America's local allies, who fear that pushing too hard could spark a backlash and endanger the tiny country's fragile peace.

Pompeo's plane arrived on Friday travelling through the Cypriot airspace, as Lebanon, which is technically in a state of war with Israel, bans direct flights from Israel.ATHENS - Attackers on a motorcycle threw a hand grenade at the Russian consulate in Athens early on Friday, causing no injuries and slight damage, police said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the early morning attack on the consulate in the Athens suburb of Chalandri. Police had cordoned off the area.

The device exploded beneath a guard booth in the compound of the consulate but was thought to be low-density explosive.

"The material damage was small and there were no injuries," a police spokesman told Reuters.Chairman of the Blue and White Party Benny Gantz is heading to the US to attend the AIPAC Conference where he is expected to speak.Stock Market Russell 2000 Leads The Way For Technical Analysts

The Russell 2000 ETF continues to deliver critical technical and longer-term price patterns for skilled technicians. Combining the IWM chart with the Transportation Index, Oil, Gold, and others provide a very clear picture of what to expect in the immediate future.

Recently, we posted a research article about the Head-n-Shoulders pattern setting up in the $INDU. Again, the IWM chart is also showing a very clear Head-n-Shoulders pattern with critical resistance near $159.50 and support near $144.25. Our researchers, at Technical Traders Ltd., believe this right Shoulder will prompt a downside market move towards support near $144.25 before a downward sloping wedge pattern sets up. This first downward price leg will setup and congesting wedge formation that will, eventually, break to the upside and drive market prices higher.

We authored a research article about this pattern setup on February 17, 2019. You can read it here.

Skilled traders watch all the charts to assist them in identifying characteristics that can assist them in understanding price moves, key support/resistance levels, and price patterns. This IWM chart should be on everyones radar at the moment. Where the IWM finds support, so will the other US stock market indexes.

WEEKLY IWM RUSSELL 2000 INDEX PATTERN

The IWM setup indicates we may only see a 5~7% downside price swing before support is found. Well have to watch how this plays out over the next few weeks/months to determine if the $144.25 level is true support or if the lower $137.00 level will become support. Either way, the downside price swing appears poised to unfold over the next few days/weeks  so be prepared.

Please take a minute to visit www.TheTechnicalTraders.com to learn how we can help you find and execute better trades in 2019. We have already positioned our clients for this move and we believe we can help you stay ahead of these markets. Visit www.TheTechnicalTraders.com/FreeResearch/ to read all of our most recent research.

Chris Vermeulen

www.TheTechnicalTraders.com

Chris Vermeulen has been involved in the markets since 1997 and is the founder of Technical Traders Ltd. He is an internationally recognized technical analyst, trader, and is the author of the book: 7 Steps to Win With Logic



Through years of research, trading and helping individual traders around the world. He learned that many traders have great trading ideas, but they lack one thing, they struggle to execute trades in a systematic way for consistent results. Chris helps educate traders with a three-hour video course that can change your trading results for the better.



His mission is to help his clients boost their trading performance while reducing market exposure and portfolio volatility.



He is a regular speaker on HoweStreet.com, and the FinancialSurvivorNetwork radio shows. Chris was also featured on the cover of AmalgaTrader Magazine, and contributes articles to several leading financial hubs like MarketOracle.co.uk

Disclaimer: Nothing in this report should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell any securities mentioned. Technical Traders Ltd., its owners and the author of this report are not registered broker-dealers or financial advisors. Before investing in any securities, you should consult with your financial advisor and a registered broker-dealer. Never make an investment based solely on what you read in an online or printed report, including this report, especially if the investment involves a small, thinly-traded company that isnt well known. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report has been paid by Cardiff Energy Corp. In addition, the author owns shares of Cardiff Energy Corp. and would also benefit from volume and price appreciation of its stock. The information provided here within should not be construed as a financial analysis but rather as an advertisement. The authors views and opinions regarding the companies featured in reports are his own views and are based on information that he has researched independently and has received, which the author assumes to be reliable. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any content of this report, nor its fitness for any particular purpose. Lastly, the author does not guarantee that any of the companies mentioned in the reports will perform as expected, and any comparisons made to other companies may not be valid or come into effect.

Chris Vermeulen Archive

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.



The State Prosecution submitted an indictment against Mahmud Jabarin, 36, of the northern city of Um el Fahm for offering to provide support to Hezbollah in a psychological war with Israel.BEIRUT -- U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held talks with Lebanese leaders on Friday amid strong regional condemnation of President Donald Trump's declaration that it's time the U.S. recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

The abrupt pronouncement was likely to cloud Pompeo's two-day visit during which he is to meet with top officials, including some who are aligned with the Iran- and Syria-allied militant Hezbollah group.

The visit is the last leg of a Mideast tour that took Pompeo to Kuwait and Israel, where he lauded warm ties with Israel, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on at least three separate occasions and promised to step up pressure on Iran.BEIRUT - The long-serving speaker of Lebanon's parliament told visiting U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday that U.S. sanctions on the Hezbollah group were having a "negative impact on Lebanon and the Lebanese".

Nabih Berri told Pompeo that Hezbollah is a Lebanese party in the government and parliament, and that its armed "resistance" against Israel was a result of continuing Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory, Berri's office said in a statement.CAIRO - Egypt said on Friday it considers the Golan Heights as occupied Syrian land, rejecting a call by U.S. President Donald Trump to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

In a statement carried by state news agency MENA, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry cited U.N. Security Council resolution 497 of 1981 which rejected Israel's annexation of the territory.

The ministry "stressed the importance that everybody should respect the resolutions of international legitimacy and the United Nations Charter in respect of the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force," the statement said.WASHINGTON - The United States reserves the right to take action against any person helping Iran evade U.S. sanctions on energy shipments, a State Department official said on Friday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was responding to a request for comment on a Reuters report this week that at least two tankers have sent Iranian fuel oil to Asia in recent months despite U.S. sanctions against such shipments.

"The United States, in cooperation with our allies and partners, is closely monitoring efforts by the Iranian regime to evade U.S. sanctions," said the official. Washington "reserves the right to designate any person engaging in or facilitating these activities in accordance with our laws."By P.J. GLISSON

[email protected]

MARENISCO  Marenisco Township voters may decide the fate of potential enterprises relating to recreational marijuana.

Thats what Marenisco supervisor Richard Bouvette said in a Thursday phone call with the Globe.

Once we get the ordinance together, all we have to do is put it on the ballot, said Bouvette. The people will decide whether we have marijuana.

If the issue is determined via an election, Marenisco will be unique in being the only city or township in Gogebic County, so far, to take that route.

Except for a few pending decis...In Defence of Marxism is committed to safeguarding your privacy. At all times we aim to respect any personal data you share with us, or that we receive from other organisations, and keep it safe. This Privacy Policy (Policy) sets out our data collection and processing practices and your options regarding the ways in which your personal information is used.

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Please let us know if you have any queries or concerns whatsoever about the way in which your data is being processed by emailing the Data Protection Manager at webmaster@marxist.comWILDLIFE BIOLOGIST Brian Bogaczyk talks to a crowd Thursday at Cold Iron Brewing about recreational opportunities on the Ottawa National Forest during this month's Tech and Science on Tap event.

By RICHARD JENKINS

[email protected]

IRONWOOD - This month's Tech and Science on Tap program Thursday at Cold Iron Brewing featured some of the best the Ottawa National Forest has to offer as wildlife biologist Brian Bogaczyk talked about some of the many recreational opportunities available in the forest.

At roughly 1 million acres, the national forest covers parts of Gogebic, Ontonagon Iron, Houghton, Baraga and Marquette counties.

After briefly talking about the popular scenic area around Black River Harbor and waterfalls upstream, Bogaczyk moved onto some of the other areas of...Investors might be attracted to buying brand-new properties because of government-initiated incentives, but its a decision that can have consequences, said a buyer's agent in Brisbane.

"There are benefits for government to incentivise brand-new properties because, of course, the building and construction industry is very important to our economy and various levels of government make money through new development through costs such as local infrastructure charges, stamp duties and GST, for example," Melinda Jennison, Brisbane buyers agent at Streamline Property, told Your Investment Property.

Brand-new homes are commonly situated in new land estates, which are most often located on the fringes of capital cities. In these areas, numerous lands are available. It follows that an ongoing supply of new dwellings is assured for many years.

The setup also often means that capital growth is stagnant, and investors find that they see very little growth in the value of their property for several years, according to Jennison.

Investors who are looking for a capital-growth strategy, then, may be disappointed.

Investors who are looking for a cash-flow strategy, though, may take advantage of the situation. Because the property is brand-new, there are huge depreciation benefits.

Jennison said that the yield on brand-new properties is often higher than on established ones. This is because people will pay slightly higher rent for a new property when all else is equal.

In the end, keeping a strategy in place would help investors.

"If an investor is looking to create long-term wealth through compounding capital growth, then I could recommend steering away from brand-new properties. But for an investor looking to make short-term income from their investment property, then this may be a good investment strategy," Jennison said.News

Washington, DC - When it comes to the foods we eat, we live in an unprecedented time of technological change. Thanks to innovations in technology and the new requirements of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), we now have more opportunities to strengthen public health and bring innovative food products to consumers than perhaps at any other time in our history. But our ability to fulfill these responsibilities becomes more challenging every year with increased globalization, advances in science and technology, and shifts in consumer expectations that drive change throughout the food system.

We must continue to embrace innovation across the food safety system to make sure we secure our public health mission.

Thats why as part of the Presidents 2020 Budget, weve proposed new funding across multiple aspects of our food safety system. We must invest to prevent problems from happening by solidifying the agencys tools under FSMA. We must also embrace new innovations to improve our ability to secure the food supply chain and engage in more effective tracking and tracing of food from farm to fork. This includes continuing to improve our capabilities for both detecting and responding to food contamination when preventive measures alone are insufficient. The funds were requesting for food safety represent the FDAs commitment to the promises weve made to help keep people and animals safe from contaminated food, and our vision of a future in which both human and animal health is protected and strengthened by new and emerging technologies that will create a more digital, traceable, diverse, and safer food system.

A smarter, more technologically advanced food safety system will always stand on the shoulders of the preventive framework of FSMA. This landmark piece of legislation represented a sea change in food safety. It moved the FDA from a posture of response to one that prevents problems from occurring in the first place. States are critical partners in creating a prevention-based food safety system as part of our integrated national food safety system. To advance these goals, were proposing new resources to fund human and animal preventive controls and produce safety inspections through the State Cooperative Agreement Program. The FDAs funding supports the states in conducting more than half of the domestic food and more than 80 percent of animal feed facility inspections required by FSMA.

We also recognize that our most effective toolkit for domestic food safety is not identical to the optimal toolkit for imported food safety. Our budget request reflects those differing needs. Our proposed budget makes other critical investments to help the FDA ensure a more secure and modern food safety framework.

Investing in Modern Food Safety

The work under FSMA is just one part of our food safety net. We also need to invest in and further modernize our ability to detect and respond to problems in the food supply. For Fiscal Year 2017, our Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition responded to 794 recall events due to issues such as microbial contamination and undeclared allergens and oversaw the recall of 3,609 products, more than any other FDA Center.

We know that additional resources are required to ensure that contaminated food is detected and removed from the marketplace as quickly as possible, using the most modern technologies. For example, Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) has been a game changer for the way we find and address microbial contamination in foods. This technology has made it easier determine the source of contaminated food associated with human illness, and to better identify foodborne outbreaks that previously would have gone undetected. WGS continues to be put into widespread use as the technology itself becomes more accessible, affordable, and much less bulky. We need to expand our use of these modern tools.

At the same time, the more widespread use of WGS has also increased the number of detected outbreaks and subsequent investigations. This is good news. We are identifying more sources of potential food contamination and taking steps to reduce risks to consumers. But at the same time, the success of WGS in identifying sources of food contamination and outbreaks has also greatly increased the FDAs workload to identify and mitigate potential food safety concerns. In Fiscal Years 2017 and 2018, the FDAs Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation Network evaluated nearly 120 potential human food safety outbreak incidents per year. This is nearly double what was reviewed in Fiscal Years 2015 and 2016. The increase requested in the 2020 Budget will allow the agency to add new staff and resources to enhance signal detection, response to outbreaks and post-response evaluations.

As part of the Presidents 2020 Budget, were also requesting additional resources to support the use of WGS and expand our ability to respond when we identify food contamination.

These additional resources also will increase the FDAs ability to leverage other new technologies that make it easier to track and trace products throughout the product lifecycle, from the time that theyre grown or manufactured, until a consumer uses them. Efficiently tracking and tracing regulated products will enable the FDA to work with stakeholders, including industry producers, to more quickly remove harmful products or ingredients from the supply chain. Over the last year alone, we faced challenges dealing with the complexities of supply chain tracking and management related to two outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 in romaine lettuce where records were being kept mostly on paper. In the wake of these two incidents, we worked with industry on common sense changes, like providing greater clarity on package labeling by including harvest date and location, and calling for industry to better improve traceability.

In recent years, weve seen emerging track and trace technologies that can assist response efforts to allow the FDA to intervene in time to alert consumers, implement recalls, and avoid human illnesses. This includes blockchain technology. This technology uses a decentralized, secure, ledger thats shared by all parties in the supply chain to provide transparency on a products origins. It can greatly assist in warning consumers about risks with specific foods and in implementing more targeted and efficient recalls.

Such technologies can reduce the time it takes to find a food source from days or weeks, to minutes or even seconds, in certain cases. While our primary goal in enhancing track and trace is protecting public health, this new technology will also assist industry by minimizing the number of products implicated in outbreaks of foodborne illness and other product problems that could result in the loss of millions of dollars in profits.

When the lack of transparency in supply chains delays the identification of contamination sources and the root causes of product problems, the economic and public health costs can be considerable. An enhanced ability to trace foods to source during an outbreak will also allow us to conduct better and more real-time root cause analysis to prevent similar reoccurrences.

Finally, our enhanced use of state food safety resources can also help our work securing the safety of imported foods, allowing the FDA to focus more resources on import oversight. Planned resources in the 2020 Budget request will also advance our import program goal of ensuring that domestic and imported foods receive parity of oversight by investing in additional resources to increase compliance with Foreign Supplier Verification Programs (FSVP) as well as assessing the agencys Import Alert program.

Advancing Food Innovation

Just as consumer demands have changed how we respond to problems with food, the FDA supports industry as it develops and implements new technologies in food and veterinary products. This includes biotechnology products. Although neither traditional human nor animal food products require pre-market approval, new foods and new ingredients such as food and color additives must be reviewed to determine that they will be safe for the ways in which theyll be used. We want to improve the timeliness of these reviews and eliminate unnecessary burdens to industry related to the premarket safety reviews of these food ingredients. Weve requested additional resources to help us meet these important objectives.

Biotechnologies are enabling the development of many promising, innovative food products, such as genome-edited animals and plants. At the same time, we are seeing increased interest in the development of new protein sources, such as cell-culture technology. Part of our public health mission is to advance these promising innovations and to ensure theyre safe, and that they dont have any unintended consequences.

Last fall, the FDA announced a new Plant and Animal Biotechnology Innovation Action Plan. Our plan is focused on advancing policy priorities the FDA will pursue to clarify our science-and-risk-based approach for product developers; avoiding unnecessary barriers to future innovation in plant and animal biotechnology; and securing their safety and our public health mission. In the 2020 Budget, weve requested additional resources to ensure that the FDA continues to keep pace with the increasing requests for review of new products.

Were dedicated to making sure the FDA continues building a modern, prevention-based food safety system. We believe that the additional resources requested from Congress will help our program better protect our nations food supply and lay the foundation for efforts to create a new era of smarter food safety in which new technologies can provide innovative products, help us better detect outbreaks, and better track and trace foods in the supply chain to prevent contaminated foods from reaching consumers.Latest News

Yuma, Arizona - On Friday, March 15, 2019 the Yuma Police Department responded to two separate calls, in reference to an overdose. One call was for a 16 year old male and the second call was for a 17 year old female. Both reportedly overdosed and were transported to Yuma Regional Medical Center. In both of these cases, Narcan was administered. On Sunday, March 17, 2019 a 27 year old male reportedly overdosed and Narcan was administered.

The subject was transported to Yuma Regional Medical Center, but was pronounced deceased upon arrival.

Fentanyl is a dangerous and often lethal opioid medication, or narcotic, when not administered professionally. Fentanyl is often used by illegal drug users in place of, or along with, heroin. The pill the student ingested is the same type found in the recent overdose incidents in San Luis, Arizona.

The Yuma Police Department is partnering with the Yuma Fire Department and the Yuma Union High School district to get information out to the students and parents regarding the hazards of ingesting any illegal narcotics but specifically Fentanyl. The Police Department is concerned people do not know they are taking Fentanyl and mistakenly believe they are taking OxyContin/oxycodone. Very small doses of Fentanyl can be lethal.

The participating agencies encourage parents to talk to their children about the hazards of ingesting Fentanyl in any form. For additional information and facts on Fentanyl, go to the following website: https://www.dea.gov/factsheets/fentanyl.

The Yuma Police Department strongly encourages parents and community members who discover any medications matching the above description, to refrain from handling the pills (Fentanyl is known to be absorbed through the skin) and to contact their local law enforcement agency.

Due to the potential for causing respiratory arrest, the Yuma Fire Department urges anyone suspected of ingesting one of these pills, or even a portion of it, to seek emergency medical attention.

The above picture is one example what the tablet may look like. Other tablets may have M-30 on the same side or an M without the square as in the picture above.

The Yuma Police Department encourages anyone with any information about these incidents to please call the Yuma Police Department at (928) 373-4700 or 78-Crime at (928) 782-7463 to remain anonymous.Our directory features more than 18 million business listings from across the entire US. However, if we're missing your business, add your business by clicking on Add Your Business.We are back with industry trends and this time we are looking at India. With data collated from multiple sources as our guide, we try to provide partners with context and inspire action.

India and the world

The World Bank, as it usually does, released a report which acts as an overarching study of world economies. Globally, it presents a pretty dismal picture and raises concerns about trade wars between the United States and China. In a connected world, the slow growth in developed nations also affects the developing nations. Fittingly the report was called Darkening Skies.

The only silver lining in a cloudy sky was India, which bucked global trends and continues to remain the worlds fastest growing economy. To give a perspective, the global GDP growth is estimated to be around 2.9% while India will grow at 7.5%. A statistic is just a number, but with context it becomes an opportunity. Understanding industry trends would provide consulting partners with focus areas, make better use of their resources and generate new business.

Industry Trends

That travel and tourism is one of the key drivers of the economy, is not a surprising insight. Considering the diverse number of tourist spots in India ranging from wildlife sanctuaries to ancient sites. These places of interest drive both domestic and international tourists . A recent report from the World Travel and Tourism Council reported that the sector contributed to 9.2% of the economy and is a major employer. Government initiatives like the e-tourist visa scheme (which is now extended to 166 countries) have made this a spotlight sector.

Opportunities: India aims to double the number of foreign tourists by 2020 taking the tally to 20 million!

India is counting on its demographic dividend for future growth. As the country with the most number of youngsters, there is a need for education in all forms ranging from primary education like schools to specialized research academies.Two statistics take the center stage in the discourse about education and illustrate the potential of the sector. The first is the number of students which is close to 500 million. The second is Gross Enrollment Ratio(GER) which tells on how many Indian students go on to pursue higher education . The GER now stands at an abysmal 25.3. Only 25 out of 100 students make it past secondary education.

Opportunities: Mission 2020 to increase GER ratio to 30%

Manufacturing is one of the primary drivers of the Indian economy, and it currently provides employment to 30 million people and makes up 17% of Indias GDP. An economy that delivers sustained growth needs to have manufacturing as its backbone.The fact of the matter is that this percentage contribution has not gone up since the opening up of markets in 1991. But recent efforts such as Make in India and the jump in the Ease of Doing Business rankings have helped. Testimony to these efforts, India quietly became the 4th largest auto industry in the world.

Opportunities: A government mission to increase GDP contribution of manufacturing to 25% by 2025.

After undergoing some stress over the years, the real estate sector has bounced back. This u-turn attributed to structural reforms like the RERA act which aim to bring in transparency for both buyers and sellers.

Opportunities: Various initiatives under Housing for all scheme including Pradan Mantri Awas Yojana aim to make housing affordable for all Indians by 2022

India has a long history in retail, most of which is in the unorganized sector, which competes for the same customer as big retail chains. Retail is also interesting because of the emergent and disruptive e-commerce channel which is not just for organized players but opens up a new avenue for unorganized retail as well.

Opportunities: In 2018, the retail industry attracted 1.42 billion USD as foreign direct investment which is a good indicator for a growth industry.

With an expanding middle class, rising incomes and lifestyle diseases, there has been an increase in demand for quality and specialized healthcare in India. In the public health space, there have been some initiatives that tried to increase the awareness of modern and traditional healthcare (Ayurveda & Unani) to all sections of the society. The low cost of surgery compared to the rest of the world has made India a major destination for medical tourism which is growing 25% year-on-year.

Opportunities: The governments flagship health insurance scheme which has a defined cover of 5,00,000 lakh INR per family for secondary and tertiary care.

Afterword

While there is no doubt in Indias growth, realizing this potential is dependent on the smart use of emerging technology and cloud solutions. For partners, each of these 6 industries have limitless opportunities for tech integration. We hope that this information will provide you with the macro economic context and inspire you to dive deep into the workings of these industries, understand them from the inside and with the arsenal of Zohos cloud products- formulate winning solutions.

You can read our trends report covering Latin America here

For more information write to us at partner-team@zohocorp.com

Find Zoho Partners in your region here

Sources

World Bank Annual Economic Report

IMF Reports

Central Statistical Office, Government of IndiaGhana and Guinea are set to begin discussions for bilateral cooperation in the bauxite industry development, similar to the trade cooperation between Ghana and Ivory Coast in the Cocoa sector.

The nation intended to add value to bauxite by setting up refineries, therefore, the cooperation would enable Guinea and countries patronise the refinery.

This was made known by Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia after a bilateral meeting between him and the Prime Minister of Guinea, Ibrahima Kassory Fofana, on the sidelines of the 14th CII-Exim Bank Conclave on India-Africa Partnership Project in New Delhi, India.

Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia Source: DepositPhotos

Source: UGC

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Bawumia said the cooperation would enable the two countries share knowledge, draw synergies and enhance mutual benefits.

That, he said, would boost the Ghanaian economy and earn additional foreign exchange.

Guinea has the largest bauxite deposits in the world and Ghana has close to a billion metric tonnes of bauxite, therefore the two countries would control between 70-80 percent of the worlds bauxite resources.

READ ALSO: We are ready to support you - Akufo-Addo

Therefore, the two nations working together would help strengthen their position and voice in the global market on bauxite, which would be beneficial for the two countries.

It is estimated that Ghanas bauxite deposits in refined form could earn the country an export value of over US$350 billion.

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Source: YenIslamabad: Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said he discussed the issue of Masood Azhar with close ally China, which blocked for the fourth time a proposal at the UN to designate the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief as a 'global terrorist'.

Qureshi who returned from Beijing on Thursday after attending the first strategic bilateral dialogue between the two all-weather allies, heaped praise on China.

"We take each other into confidence on all issues. Sometime they guide us and sometimes they change their policy after listening to us," he said after talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Qureshi said he discussed the issue of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Azhar with China, which used its right of technical hold to stop a proposal by France, the US and the UK against him at the UN Security Council.

China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, for the fourth time blocked a bid in the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council to designate Azhar as a "global terrorist", saying it wanted "more time to examine" the proposal.

The technical hold is valid for up to six months and it can be again extended by up to three months.

India has described the outcome as "disappointing".

The JeM claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama suicide attack that left 40 CRPF personnel dead and raised tensions between India and Pakistan.

"As you know, China despite a lot of pressure used the right of technical hold in order to collect more information on the issue.... We talked what US, China and UK were thinking about it," Qureshi said.

He said the two sides held a discussion on the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanction Committee but refused to share details. He said Pakistan was aware what the world wanted on the issue of Azhar.

"We are aware. We know what the world wants, what we should do, what are our interests, and what should be our policy. It (issue of Azhar) should be seen in larger context...It should be seen in the context of money laundering and what FATF is saying because it is all linked,? he said.

Qureshi further said that discussion with China on the issue of Azhar will continue.

He also said that Pakistan was analysing the contents of the dossier given by India on Pulwama. "We are serious about it and are analysing the dossier and (will) present our findings to you (media) and to the world," the foreign minister said.

Amidst the Indo-Pak tensions following the Pulwama terror attack by a JeM suicide bomber, Qureshi confirmed that Azhar was present in Pakistan but said he was "very ill."

He said Pakistan was committed to address militancy and eliminate it completely from the country.New Delhi: Electric scooter maker Avan Motors India Friday launched its new model Trend E priced at Rs 56,900 and Rs 81,269 (ex-showroom).

The Trend E with single-battery is tagged at Rs 56,900 while the double-battery version is priced at Rs 81,269, the company said in a statement.

Bookings have been opened from Friday at a fee of Rs 1,100, it added.

The new model is powered by a lithium-ion battery with a top speed of 45 kmph and has a range of 60 km with single battery and 110 km with double battery, it said, adding the battery can be fully charged in 2 to 4 hours.

Avan Motors Business Development Head Pankaj Tiwari said the company has worked extensively to create the Trend E scooter as a vehicle that is suitable for Indian roads.

"We are delighted with the response the scooter has received in its pre-launch phase and are confident that customers too will appreciate the Trend E and all its features," he added.New Delhi: The sizzling diva of the Bhojpuri industry Monalisa celebrated Holi with zeal in Mumbai with her friends and colleagues. Mona, who has a huge fan following took to Instagram to share her post-Holi pics.

Dressed in a white top and denim hot pants, Monalisa had the perfect look for her Holi party. Check out her pic:

On her work front, Mona has starred in more than 125 Bhojpuri films and featured in several language movies such as Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Oriya and Bengali as well. She became a household name after participating in popular reality show 'Bigg Boss 10'.

Mona 's personal life became the talk of the town when she got married to her then-boyfriend Vikrant Singh Rajpoot on the reality show. The couple is now happily married and Mona never fails to share lovey-dovey pictures every now and then on her social handles.New Delhi: Fugitive Proceedings were listed before the Special PMLA Court in Mumbai against absconding jeweller Mehul Choksi, co-accused in the Rs 13,5000 crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam.

Choksi, the maternal uncle of prime accused Nirav Modi, through his Advocates Vijay Aggarwal and Ashul Agarwal filed additional submissions stating that the entire proceedings against him are bad in law.

Choksi's advocates also gave a detailed medical history of his ailments stating that these have put restrictions on his travel following which his return to India doesn't seem possible. His advocates have also put forward 38 documents including latest prescriptions and certificates. A medical certificate dated February 27, 2019 by Dr. HA Morcos, Antigua has also been submitted.

The court was further apprised that travelling may be detrimental to Choksi's health since he needs to be under continuous medical supervision in Antigua. Choksi, after fleeing from India last year as soon as the PNB scam surfaced, took the citizenship of Antigua, by surrendering his Indian passport

Court has now adjourned the matter for next hearing on April 9.

Meanwhile, Nirav Modi, who was arrested in London by Scotland Yard on Tuesday, was denied bail by the Westminster Magistrates' Court. Remanding him to police custody, the court has scheduled the next hearing on the case to March 29. It is believed that Modi has sought time before the court to present his version in the case.

Modi along with Choksi allegedly cheated Punjab National Bank through fraudulent issuance of Letters of Undertakings (LoUs) and Foreign Letters of Credit (FLCs), thus siphoning off funds worth Rs 6,498.20 from PNB's Brady House branch in Mumbai while Choksi has been accused of swindling Rs 7080.86 crore.New Delhi: Hitesh Patel, a co-accused in the Rs 5,000 crore Sterling Biotech case, was detained by the National Crime Bureau -Tirana in Albania on March 20.

Patel was detained following Interpol notice that was issued on March 11 on the request of ED and is expected to be extradited to India soon.

Earlier ED had moved the special PMLA court in Delhi and filed complaint under Fugitive Economic Offenders act against four persons namely Nitin Sandesara, Chetan Sandesara, Dipti Sandesara and Hitesh Patel. All the four accused are promoters of Sterling Group and has fled country to avoid criminal investigation.

Patel, is the brother in law of the Nitin Sandesara and Chetan Sandesara, the main accused behind Sterling Biotech case.

The ED has accused Sandesara brothers and others of hatching a criminal conspiracy and dishonestly cheating banks to obtaining higher loans. Following this, they diverted the loans funds to non-mandated purposes through a web of shell companies. The loan fraud pertains to domestic as well as offshore branches of Indian Banks.

The probe agency has so far arrested four persons in this case including a Delhi based business man Gagan Dhawan and his front man Ranjeet Malik, former director of Andhra Bank Anup Garg and director of Sterling Biotech Limited R B Dixit

ED has also attached assets to the tune of Rs 4,710 Crores involved in money laundering.Delhi: A massive blaze erupted after a cylinder explosion in New Delhi's Moonga Nagar on Friday night. Thirteen fire tenders rushed to the spot.

The fire, caused by the cylinder blast, spread in a building at gali number 9 on Karawal road in Moonga Nagar area. There are no reports of any injuries or casualties so far.

Delhi: Fire breaks out after a cylinder blast in a building on Karawal road in Monga Nagar. 8 fire tenders have rushed to the spot. More details awaited. pic.twitter.com/gjO030zq2G  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

The fire department received a call at around 8.00 pm. The reason of the fire is yet to be ascertained.

Earlier on Friday, a fire broke out at a factory in national capital's Bawana area.

A call about the fire was received at 9 AM after which four fire tenders were rushed to the spot, a senior official of the Delhi Fire Service said.New Delhi: A report by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds has said that 80 percent of engineers are not employable for any job in the knowledge economy.

As per its National Employability Report for Engineers, Aspiring Minds found that only 2.5 percent of Indian engineers possess the skills in artificial intelligence that includes machine learning and data science.

Only 1.5 percent - 4.5 percent of engineers possess the necessary skills in data engineering, while only 2.8 percent - 5.3 percent are qualified in wireless technologies.

This report is based on a sample of more than 170,000 engineering students from 750+ engineering colleges across multiple Indian states, Aspiring minds noted.

The report found host of reasons behind low employability of engineering students. It said that since engineering is an applied discipline, only 40 percent of engineering students in India perform internships and only 36 percent undertake projects outside their assigned coursework.

60 percent of faculty do not discuss how engineering concepts apply to industry. Only 47 percent of students report the opportunity to attend a talk by industry personnel during their college career, it said.

The report found that the percentage of Indian engineers who code well is greater than the number of Chinese engineers. A much higher proportion of Indian engineers (37.7%) cannot write a compilable code compared to Chinese engineers (10.35%).

By comparison, the US engineers perform four times better than Indian engineers in coding. Only 4 percent of the US candidates cannot write compilable code despite the fact that the base of the engineering population in the US is approximately four times smaller than in India, it added.Les membres du Cabinet ont pris note que le gouvernement va presenter le Mental Health Care (Amendment) Bill au parlement, quune campagne de vaccination contre linfuenza va commencer dans une futur proche entre autres.

1. Cabinet has agreed to the introduction of the Mental Health Care (Amendment) Bill into the National Assembly. The object of the Bill is to amend the Mental Health Care Act to enhance the legal framework for the proper functioning of mental health care.

2. Cabinet has taken note that the Minister of Financial Services and Good Governance would promulgate the Ombudsperson for Financial Services (sworn statement) Regulations. The Ombudsperson for Financial Services Act provides that the Ombudsperson shall not hear and determine a complaint under the Act unless the complainant has voluntarily made a sworn statement that he has waived his right to initiate civil proceedings before any Court in Mauritius in respect of the facts that form the subject matter of the complaint.

3. Cabinet has taken note that the anti-influenza vaccination exercise for 2019 would start shortly. Vaccines would be provided to elderly persons aged 60 and above, children with disabilities attending specialised schools and inmates of charitable institutions and private licensed homes. The vaccination exercise would also be carried out in Rodrigues and Agalega.

4. Cabinet has agreed to Mauritius hosting, as Chair of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS), the Second South-West Indian Ocean Ministerial Conference on Maritime Security on 18 and 19 June 2019 and the 22nd Plenary Session of the CGPCS on 20 June 2019. The Second Ministerial Conference on Maritime Security would be a major event to follow up and discuss the progress and implementation of the Roadmap on Maritime Security in the South-Western part of the Indian Ocean. Various dignitaries, including Ministers, high officials of continental and international organisations are expected to attend the Conference.

5. Cabinet has taken note that the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Regional Integration and International Trade and the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Consumer Protection, would organise a capacity building workshop on Transforming Mauritius: Policies to Foster Industrialisation and Development in Mauritius, on 11 and 12 April 2019. The Workshop would cover topics such as Structural Transformation and Industrial Policy, Industrial Policy in a Digital World, Industrial Policy in Open Economies and Regional Value Chains in SADC. Participants would have an opportunity to acquire knowledge about new challenges in industrial policy formulation. Some 70 participants from both the public and private sectors are expected to attend the Workshop.

6. Cabinet has taken note that Mauritius would host the Second Working Meeting of National Research Coordinators and Research Committee Members of the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SEACMEQ) from 08 to 12 April 2019. The Meeting which would be attended by some 42 delegates would:

(a) review the data collection instruments for SEACMEQ V Project; and

(b) build capacity of the national research teams in the development of data collection instruments for the Project.

7. Cabinet has taken note that the 3rd Meeting of the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement (SIOFA) Compliance Committee and the 6th Meeting of Parties would be held in Mauritius from 27 to 29 June 2019 and from 1 to 5 July 2019, respectively. The SIOFA is a multilateral agreement adopted in July 2006 at the Food and Agriculture Organisation for the conservation and sustainable use of fishery resources in the waters beyond national jurisdiction in the Southern Indian Ocean region. Some 35 participants from the Member States would attend the 3rd SIOFA Compliance Committee, while 50 participants would attend the 6th Meeting of Parties.

8. Cabinet has taken note of the outcome of the recent mission of the Minister of Tourism to Germany and France. In Germany, the Minister attended the Internationale Tourismus-Borse (ITB) 2019 which is a leading travel trade show. The Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority (MTPA) participated in the ITB with more than 100 representatives from hoteliers, Destination Management Companies, and other key stakeholders of the tourism industry. The Minister of Tourism was also invited to attend the Berlin Economic Forum to deliver a keynote speech on Sustainable Tourism Investment in the Tourism Industry, the Euro news roundtable to debate about the expansion of infrastructure and the influence it has on promoting leisure and business tourism, and the award ceremony organised by the Pacific Area Travel Writers Association.

In France, a meeting was organised with the Interface Tourism, the MTPA Public Relations Office in France and all major tourism and travel stakeholders serving the Mauritian destination, to discuss strategic actions for the French market and how to address challenges for 2019.

9. Cabinet has taken note of the outcome of the recent mission of the Attorney General, Minister of Justice, Human Rights and Institutional Reforms to Geneva where he attended the 65thSession Committee on the Economic, Cultural and Social Rights where Mauritius was reviewed. Cabinet has also taken note of the Concluding Observations adopted by the Committee on the Economic, Cultural and Social Rights following the submission of the fifth periodic report of Mauritius under the International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights. The Attorney General gave an overview of the various developments that have occurred in Mauritius, namely:

(a) the introduction of the National Minimum Wage and the Negative Income Tax Scheme;

(b) the extension of maternity leave from 12 to 14 weeks;

(c) the provision of free tertiary education in public institutions; and

(d) the introduction of the Social Contract Scheme under the Marshall Plan against Poverty.

The Committee welcomed the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of 25 February 2019 concerning the right of return of the Chagos islands to Mauritius and also requested clarifications on various issues.

The Concluding Observations of the Committee would be disseminated to all stakeholders, the civil society, the NGOs and Ministries through the National Mechanisms for Reporting and Follow Up which would consider the ways and means to fulfill the recommendations made as far as possible.

10. Cabinet has taken note of the outcome of the recent mission of the Minister of Labour, Industrial Relations, Employment and Training to South Africa where he participated in the 45thAfrican Regional Labour Administration Centre (ARLAC) Governing Council Meeting for Ministers (GCMM) responsible for Labour/ Employment/Manpower issues in Anglophone Africa. The Programme consisted, among others, of a presentation on Violence and Harassment at Work by the Chief, Gender, Equality and Diversity Branch of the ILO and the launching of the Future of Work Global Commissions Report by the President of the Republic of South Africa. During panel discussions, Mauritius was cited as one of the few countries where a Protection from Domestic Violence Act was in force and the legislation was instrumental in the prevention of violence and harassment at work. Mauritius was also cited with regard to the implementation of the National Minimum Wage.

In the margins of the Meeting, the Minister had meetings with the Minister of Labour of South Africa and the ILO Regional Director for Africa and discussions focused on the future of work, the Decent Work Country Programme and emerging issues in the labour market.

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LinkedInWashington: India has been one of the fastest growing large economies in the world, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said, asserting that the country has carried out several key reforms in the last five years, but more needs to be done.

Responding to a question on India's economic development in the last five years at a fortnightly news conference here, IMF communications director Gerry Rice Thursday said, "India has of course been one of the world's fastest growing large economies of late, with growth averaging about seven per cent over the past five years."

"Important reforms have been implemented and we feel more reforms are needed to sustain this high growth, including to harness the demographic dividend opportunity, which India has," he said.

Details about the Indian economy would be revealed in the upcoming World Economic Outlook (WEO) survey report to be released by the IMF ahead of the annual spring meeting with the World Bank next month, he said.

This report would be the first under Indian American economist Gita Gopinath, who is now IMF's chief economist.

"The WEO will go into more details. But amongst the policy priorities, we would include accelerate the cleanup of banks and corporate balance sheets, continue fiscal consolidation, both at centre and state levels, and broadly maintain the reform momentum in terms of structural reforms in factor markets, labour, land reforms and further enhancing the business climate to achieve faster and more inclusive growth," Rice said.Two Light Combat Aircraft Tejas fighters of the Indian Air Force (IAF) departed from Air Force Station, Kalaikunda on Friday to take part in the Langkawi International Maritime Aero Expo (LIMA) 2019 in Malaysia from March 26, 2019, to March 30, 2019. The Indian Air Force is participating in the Maritime Aero Expo for the first time and the Tejas fighters will reach Langkawi via Myanmar.

The IAF said that participation of their fighter jets, pilots and other air warriors in LIMA 2019 will provide an opportunity to them to interact with their Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) counterparts and foster close relationship between the two services. "This will serve as a foundation for any future interaction with the Malaysian Air Force. It will also provide an opportunity to RMAF to assess the capabilities of LCA," said the IAF.

Apart from the two Tejas, the IAF contingent also consists of one C-130J Super Hercules military transport aircraft and one IL-76 plane along with 27 officers, 42 air warriors and 11 Hindustan Aeronautics Limited personnel. The IL-76 and C-130J will provide logistics support for induction of LCA Tejas aircraft to Langkawi.

Tejas is the world's lightest supersonic fighter. The fighter's empty weight is 6,560 kg while the loaded weight is 9,800 kg. The plane's maximum takeoff weight is 13,500 kg.

The fighter, inducted into IAF's Number 45 Squadron called Flying Daggers on July 1, 2016, was given the Final Operational Clearance on February 20, 2019, during Aero India 2019 at Bengaluru's Yelahanka Air Force Station.

IAF is inducting the Tejas to replace the MiG-21s in its arsenal. HAL is already working on a newer version of the aircraft called Tejas MK 2, which will be a Medium Weight Fighter (MWF).New Delhi: India will not send any representative at the Pakistan National Day reception that will take place on Friday at the Pakistani High Commission. The reason behind not sending its representative is that the High Commission has invited Hurriyat representatives to the reception, irking New Delhi. Pakistani national day is marked on March 23 every year.

The development comes in the backdrop of Pulwama terror attack on February 14 whose responsibility was claimed by Pakistan based United Nations listed Jaish-e-Mohammad. The attack, the worst on Indian security personnel in two decades, killed more than 40 Indian CRPF personnel.

Pakistan national day is the day when the Muslim League passed the Lahore resolution calling for the formation of Pakistan on March 23, 1940. Pakistan on March 23, 1956, also adopted its first constitution.

This year Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad will be the chief guest at the Pakistan Day Parade in Islamabad.

In the last few years, India has sent Minister of state in the ministry of external affairs Gen VK Singh, former minister of state in the ministry of external affairs MJ Akbar and minister of state in agriculture ministry Gajendra Singh Shekhawat as its representatives to the national day.

It is part of a diplomatic tradition that a host country is invited to importation national events by any embassy or high commission and the host country deputes a political representative according to the nature of relationship it has.

India has been taking a strong stance when it comes to Pakistan's outreach to Hurriyat. In January this year, India summoned the Pakistani high commissioner Sohail Mahmood after Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi spoke to Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq.The death toll in the under-construction building collapse in Karnataka's Dharwad district has further increased to 14 and 12 people are still missing.

The four-storey building collapsed on Tuesday and rescue operations have been going on since then. More than 400 staff comprising NDRF, SDRF, Police and Revenue Dept are involved in the rescue operation.

Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy visited the site on Thursday and said that over 10 people are suspected to be trapped under the debris. "It`s suspected that more than 10 workers are still trapped under the debris. The district administration has already announced magistrate inquiry, and the government is ready to appoint a retired high court judge if required," he added.

Dharwad sub-division Assistant Commissioner Pankaj Kumar said 13 people died as a result of the mishap, adding that rescue operation is still underway at the site.

"56 people have been rescued, 12 are missing and 13 dead. More than 400 staff comprising NDRF, SDRF, Police, and Revenue Department are involved in the rescue operation," he told news agency ANI.

The building, located in Kumareshwar Nagar, collapsed on Tuesday, following which the Indian Air Force (IAF) airlifted two teams of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel to Karnataka`s Hubli to assist in rescue operations.

The building belonged to one of the relatives of former Congress minister Vinay Kulkarni. Police are yet to arrest anyone in connection with this incident.

BJP MLA from Hubballi-Dharwad Central and former Karnataka chief minister Jagadish Shettar visited the spot on Thursday to take stock of relief and rescue operations.

On Wednesday, the police had said that 10 ambulances and five fire tenders were taking care of relief and rescue operations with three teams of the NDRF.

Police, fire and emergency personnel are also helping the NDRF teams in relief and rescue operations.

According to an eye-witness, the building did not have the capacity to bear four storeys and it collapsed when the owners decided to add an extra floor. "The builders had used substandard materials," he said. The majority of the victims were migrant labourers from north India, said news agency PTI.Two terrorists were killed in Hajin area of Bandipora district in Jammu and Kashmir after a gunfight took place in the area on Thursday. The terrorists have been identified. While one of them is a member of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) Ali Bhai, the other is a local terrorist Iskantru.

The security forces, with the help of locals, on Thursday had rescued one of the two civilians held "hostage" by terrorists after a search operation in the Mir Mohalla area, police had said. The encounter started around 10 am on Thursday and search operations are still going on.

Hajin area was once considered a zone "liberated" from the terrorist control in Bandipora.

Police had said that the security forces had started a cordon and search operation in the area following intelligence inputs about the presence of terrorists there. The terrorists who were in hiding opened fire at the security forces, sparking off the gunfight.

In another encounter in Baramulla district, one of the two terrorists killed in an encounter on Thursday was a Pakistani national, claimed the police. Both the terrorists were the member of the proscribed terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). The other terrorist has been identified as Aamir Rasool, a resident of Sopore. An encounter broke out on Thursday when a troop of 176 Battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) along with SOG and Rashtriya Rifles (RR) were carrying out a search operation in the vicinity.

"On the basis of incriminating material recovered at the site of the encounter, it is understood that one of the terrorists who was killed (yesterday) is a Pakistani national," said the police press release.

"They were wanted by law for their complicity in a series of terror crimes including an attack on security establishments and civilian atrocities. They were involved in conspiring and executing many terror attacks in the area. Several terror crime cases were registered against both the terrorists," it added.New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Friday came down heavily on Sam Pitroda for his remarks on Balakot airstrike and 2008 Mumbai terror attack and said that it is unfortunate that such people are an ideologue of a political party. "He believes what we did was wrong. No country in the world said this, not even the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation said this. Every country supported as in surgical strike and airstrike. Only Pakistan was reluctant to do so. Unfortunate such people are ideologues of a political party," Jaitley said at the BJP headquarters today.

Taking a jibe at Congress President Rahul Gandhi, Jaitley said further, "If the teacher is of such opinion then the disciple is bound to be inefficient and the entire country has to bear the result today."

"This is a condemnable statement. We have been fighting terrorism since a long time. We will destroy the terror bases wherever it will perpetrate. Both surgical strike and sir strike were meant to do that. We were supported by global leaders in our attempts," he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also slammed Pitroda for questioning the death toll in Balakote airstrike and said that "Pitroda has kickstarted the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning India's armed forces. Pakistan observes its National Day on March 23.

The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning Indias armed forces. Shame! https://t.co/puSjTK8Y4x  Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 22, 2019

Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest! https://t.co/Mul4LIbKb5  Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 22, 2019

Pitroda is a close aide of Rahul Gandhi and Overseas Congress chief and is a part of Congress' manifesto committee for the Lok Sabha elections. He is considered a senior ideologue of the party. On Friday, he questioned the death toll in Balakote airstrike carried out by Indian Air Force (IAF) in response to Pulwama terror attack by terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed and said, "it was wrong to attack Pakistan".

"If you say 300 people were killed, we all need to know that. All Indians need to know that. Then comes the global media which says nobody was killed. I look bad as an Indian citizen. I would like to know more as I have read in the New York Times and other newspapers. What did we really attack? we really killed 300 people?" Pitroda said. "Data has be neutral. So you come in today and say I killed 300 people and I say wait a minute, the World is saying we didn't kill anybody or kill less or kill more," he said.

When asked on his views on the airstrike in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, he added that "the international news outlets had an alternate view on the impact of the airstrike". He also pressed for dialogue with Pakistan and said that it would be naive to believe that every citizen of Pakistan is to be blamed behind the Pulwama attack."

Pressed further to clarify if dialogues with Pakistan was an option post-Pulwama attack while killed at least 40 CRPF personnel, Pitroda said that he didn't know much about the attack and said that it happens all the time. "Attack took place in Mumbai Taj Hotel and Oberoi Hotel. We could have reacted then and sent our planes but that is not the right approach according to me and that's not how you deal with the World."

Referring to the 2008 Mumbai attack, he said that eight people came and did something but we don't jump on the entire nation," he said.

He also said that he totally disagree with the way PM Modi acted post-Pulwama attack. "The formula is to create an environment of fear by saying that there is an enemy at the border. In India, it's Pakistan, in the US, its Mexican immigrants. They say everybody is bad because nobody is competent," he said.In the biggest seize ever in Uttar Pradesh's Ghaziabad district, more than hundred kilograms of gold was recovered from a vehicle.

The state police while conducting a checking in Modinagar in the district nabbed a vehicle carrying 120 kg of gold, the estimated cost of which is Rs 38 crore.

At least four people have been detained in connection with the matter.

The gold was being transported from Delhi to a factory in Uttar Pradesh's Haridwar where this gold was to be made in shapes of biscuit and sent ahead to other places.

The people who have been detained include a cashier, a driver and two security guards.New Delhi: President Ram Nath Kovind will next week visit Croatia, Bolivia and Chile and hold talks with the leadership of these countries to strengthen ties in keys sectors such as trade, investment and renewable energy.

Kovind will first visit Croatia from March 25-28 in what would be the first visit by an Indian president to the European country, Vijay Thakur Singh, Secretary East in the Ministry of External Affairs, said at a media briefing.

During the visit, Kovind will participate in the India-Croatia Business Forum. He will also deliver an address at the University of Zagreb.

He will hold talks with his Croatian counterpart Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, Singh said.

From Croatia, Kovind will head to Bolivia on March 28 for a three-day visit, the first high-level visit to the Latin American country since the establishment of diplomatic ties, the secretary east said.

Kovind will hold restricted and delegation-level talks with Bolivian President Evo Morales during the visit.

He will also participate in a India-Bolivia business meet, address university students, and interact with Indian community members during his stay in Bolivia.

On March 30, he will head to Chile where he will hold talks with the restricted and delegation-level format with Sebasti?n Pi?era.

During the visit, Kovind will participate in a business meet, address University of Chile and interact with members of the Indian community, Singh said.

Renewable energy and defence cooperation will be on the agenda during Kovind's talks in Chile, she said.

"The president's visit to the three countries will have a full agenda...We are hopeful that the president's visit will reinvigorate our bilateral ties and provide new direction to our relationship with these three countries," she said.

Kovind will head back on April 2 and will make a transit halt in Cape Town in South Africa during which he will pay tribute to the late former South African president Nelson Mandela and interact with the Indian community.New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday came down heavily on Congress president Rahul Gandhi's close aide Sam Pitroda and said that the latter has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress.

"The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning Indias armed forces. Shame!" he tweeted.

The Prime Minister slammed Pitroda for raising questions on the death toll in the Indian Air Force-conducted airstrike targetting Jaish-e-Mohammad terror camps inside Pakistan. He said, "Opposition insults our forces time and again. I appeal to my fellow Indians- question Opposition leaders on their statements. Tell them- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics. India stands firmly with our forces. #JantaMaafNahiKaregi"

In another tweet, PM Modi said, "Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!" PM Modi said in another tweet.

Pitroda, earlier in the day, stirred controversy by questioning the logic behind the IAF airstrikes following the February 14, 2019 suicide bombing of the Central Reserve Police Force convoy in which at least 40 paramilitary personnel were killed.

The Congressman had asked the Narendra Modi government to reveal if the aerial operations were a success and killed as many as 300 terrorists. Furthermore, he had refused to blame Pakistan for terror strikes in India and also brushed aside the Pulwama attack as something that happens all the time.New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi's close confidant and chief of Indian Overseas Congress Sam Pitroda on Friday questioned the logic behind the Indian Air Force (IAF) targeting Jaish-e-Mohammad terror camps inside Pakistan following the February 14, 2019 suicide bombing of the Central Reserve Police Force convoy in which at least 40 paramilitary personnel were martyred.

Raking up up the much-talked-about IAF airstrikes on Jaish-e-Mohammad terror camp in Balakot, Pitroda asked the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to reveal if the aerial operations were a success and killed as many as 300 terrorists.

The Congressman refused to blame Pakistan for terror strikes in India and also brushed aside the Pulwama attack as something that happens all the time. "Dont know much about attacks, it happens all the time. An attack happened in Mumbai also, we could have then reacted and just sent our planes but that is not the right approach. According to me, that's not how you deal with the world. Eight people(26/11 terrorists) come and do something, you dont jump on the entire nation (Pakistan). It is naive to assume that just because some people came here and attacked, every citizen of that nation is to be blamed. I dont believe in that way," he told news agency ANI.

#WATCH Sam Pitroda,Indian Overseas Congress Chief, says, "8 people(26/11 terrorists) come&do something, you dont jump on entire nation(Pakistan).Naive to assume that just because some people came &attacked,every citizen of that nation is to be blamed.I dont believe in that way" pic.twitter.com/K66Ds4p3ke  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

He cited instances of global media and added, "If you say 300 people were killed, we all need to know that, all Indians need to know that. Then comes the global media which says nobody was killed, I look bad as an Indian citizen.

Pitroda recalled the ghastly 26/11 Mumbai terror attack in 2008 and said, "Eight people (26/11 terrorists) came and do something, you don't jump on the entire nation (Pakistan). Naive to assume that just because some people came and attacked, every citizen of that nation is to be blamed. I dont believe in that way."

However, the number of Pakistani terrorists who attacked Mumbai was not eight as claimed by Pakistan but 10. While nine of them were killed by the security forces and National Security Guard commandos, one terrorist Ajmal Amir Kasab was arrested and hanged on November 21, 2012.

He claimed that the Modi regime was taking forward the work done by the previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government. "There are no red lines. During Manmohan Singh's time whatever the platform was built, built by us was taken over by Modi government which wisely did not scrap it. Modi government did not create jobs at the rate at which we created. In India lots of wrong information floats, you really need to go deep. Truth is mishandled, lies amplified on social media."

According to Pitroda the Lok Sabha election 2019 is not about Congress versus BJP, but it is a fight for the idea of India.

"The choice is not between BJP or Congress. The fight is between the idea of India, soul of India, the fight is about inclusion. The fight today is very different. I do not think today Indians are really focussed on this. You create fear. India will have to decide that the strong is not necessarily a good thing or democracy. (German dictator Adolf) Hitler was very strong, all dictators are very strong. Chinese leaders are very strong. But we are a democracy, we want discussion. A democratically elected leader is a totally different thing. Do not get confused between a democratically elected leader versus the quality of the leader."It is with great sadness that the Government of Mauritius has taken note of the situation prevailing in the Republic of Mozambique and Republic of Zimbabwe following the passage of cyclone Idai.

According to the authorities, the cyclone has affected more than 1.5 million people, with a death toll of more than 1,000.

Idai caused flooding over vast stretches of land and has also swept away houses, buildings and dams.

The Government of Mauritius expresses its solidarity with the people of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In line with our practice to provide financial support to countries affected by natural disasters, the Government of Mauritius will donate USD 200,000 and USD 100,000 to the Republic of Mozambique and the Republic of Zimbabwe respectively.

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LinkedInRajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Thursday called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) an extra-constitutional authority, accusing it of having a hold on the government.

The chief minister said that the organisation should convert itself into a political party and merge with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He alleged that the present situation is such that no one becomes a chief minister or a minister without the consent of the RSS.

Gehlot further added that the RSS is a cultural organisation and they have nothing to do with politics. He reiterated that when the organisation was banned, they had given in writing that they will not get involved in politics and would continue to be a cultural organisation. The chief minister said that the RSS should stick to their words.

"RSS has its hold on govt as an extra-constitutional authority. No one becomes a CM or a Minister without asking RSS, that's the present situation. It should convert into a political party & merge with the BJP. We don't have a problem with that. RSS is a cultural organisation, they have got nothing to do with politics. When it was banned, they had given in writing that they will not get involved in politics and would continue to be a cultural organisation. They should stick to their words," said CM Gehlot.

He further accused the BJP of politicising patriotism and patriots.Continuing its strong action against terrorism, the Centre on Friday banned the Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) for promoting secessionism and channelling illegal funds to instigate terrorism in the state.

The development comes exactly a month after the separatist leader's arrest on February 22. The decision to ban JKLF was taken in a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 22, which incidentally also happens to be the Pakistan Day or Pakistan Resolution Day.

Briefing the media, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba recalled how the JKLF was involved in the kidnapping of Mehbooba Mufti's sister Rubaiya Sayeed in December 1989 and the killing of four Indian Air Force personnel, besides several other acts of terror. Gauba also noted JKLF's role in the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley in 1990.

More than 37 FIRs have been registered by the Jammu and Kashmir Police against JKLF, two cases, including the case of the murder of IAF personnel, were registered by CBI. It is also being investigated in several cases by the National Investigation Agency.

Here's the complete statement of the Indian government, explaining in detail why the separatist organisation has been outlawed.

Strong Action against Terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir

1. Central Government in its pursuit of strong action against terrorism, has today declared JKLF (Yasin faction) as an unlawful association under the provisions of Section 3(1) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

2. Central Government has followed the policy of Zero Tolerance against terrorism and has acted strongly against terrorists. Securities Forces have been given free hand to deal with terrorism.

3. Government is committed to relentlessly pursuing the policy of curbing the activities of secessionist organizations which are threat to unity and integrity of the country. NIA and Enforcement Directorate are taking strong action against these organizations.

4. With above objective, Government on 28.02.2019 has declared Jamaat-e-Islami (J&K) as an unlawful association under the provisions of Section 3(1) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

5. It was made clear at that time that Jamaat-e-Islami (J&K) is separate from Jamaat-e-Islami Hind. In 1953, it made its own constitution. JeI (J&K) is responsible for formation of Hizbul Mujahidin (HM), the biggest terrorist organization active in Jammu & Kashmir. JeI (J&K) has been providing all kind of support to HM in terms of recruits, funding, shelter, logistics, etc

6. Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front led by Md. Yasin Malik has spearheaded the separatist ideology in the valley and has been at the forefront of separatist activities and violence since 1988. Murders of Kashmiri Pandits by JKLF in 1989 triggered their exodus from the valley. Md. Yasin Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley and is responsible for their genocide.

7. JKLF has many serious cases registered against it. This organisation is responsible for murder of 4 Indian Air Force personnel and kidnapping of Dr. Rubaiya Sayeed (daughter of the then Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in Shri V. P. Singhs Government). This organization, alongside, is also responsible for illegal funneling of funds for fomenting terrorism. JKLF is actively involved in raising of funds and its distribution to Hurriyat cadres and stone-pelters to fuel unrest in the Kashmir valley as well as for subversive activities.

8. Activities of JKLF (Y) pose a serious threat to the security of the country and are prejudicial to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of India. The organization has been actively and continuously encouraging, feelings of enmity and hatred against the lawfully established Government as well as armed rebellion.

9. 37 FIRs have been registered by J&K Police against JKLF. Two cases including the case of murder of IAF personnel were registered by CBI. NIA has also registered a case, which is under investigation. It is evident from these that JKLF continues to be actively engaged in supporting and inciting secessionism and terrorism including terror financing.

10. A large number of secessionist leaders were being provided security by the State. Government, after review, has withdrawn the security of many such persons. This process will continue further.

11. The Government has re-vitalized grass-root democracy in J&K by conducting elections peacefully for the first time in 2018 for Urban Local bodies after 2005 and for Panchayats after 2011. There was active participation of the people in these elections and overall polling percentage was 74%. More than 3,652 Sarpanches and 23,629 Panches were elected in these elections. Panchayats have been empowered and made more accountable towards public. Direct elections were held for Sarpanches. Financial powers of Panchayats have been increased 10 times. About 20 Departments have been brought under Panchayati Raj. Government is committed for integrated and coordinated development of all the three regions of the State, Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh.NEW DELHI: Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), one of the terrorist organisations active in the state advocating against India, has been banned by the Centre. The decision to ban JKLF under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was taken on March 22, Friday, which is also the Pakistan Day or Pakistan Resolution Day, in a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Announcing the decision to ban JKLF, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba said the terrorist group has been active in Jammu and Kashmir since 1988. It had taken part in several attacks on Kashmiri Pandits and government agencies including the security forces. The organisation has been named in 37 FIRs and it is being investigated in several cases by Jammu and Kashmir police and the National Investigation Agency.

Gauba pointed out that JKLF was responsible for the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1989 and in the later years. Yasin Malik was the mastermind behind the attacks and mass purge of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley, added Gauba.

Yasin Malik, a former terrorist, was arrested on February 22 in a late night raid, days after the Pulwama attack that claimed the lives of over 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) jawans. He was booked under the Public Safety Act and shifted to Jammu's Kot Balwal jail.

Yasin Malik is an accused in several heinous cases including the killing of four unarmed Indian Air Force officers in January 1990 in Srinagar. The IAF officers were shot dead in Srinagar's Sannat Nagar on January 25, 1990.

He was also involved in the kidnapping of Rubiya Saeed, daughter of the then Union home minister Mufti Mohammad Saeed in December 1989. The then Central government of prime minister VP Singh released five JKLF terrorists in lieu of Rubiya. The terrorists set free were Pakistani terrorist Sher Khan, Abdul Hamid Sheikh, Noor Mohammad Kalwal, Altaf Ahmed and Javed Ahmed Jargar.

JKLF was founded by Amanullah Khan and Maqbool Bhat in United Kingdom's Birmingham in June 1976 and advocated violent rebellion against India in Jammu and Kashmir. The organisation gave up armed rebellion in 1994 but continued to organise protests against India in the state.

In February 2019 the Centre had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir.New Delhi: A Delhi court on Friday sent alleged Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist Sajjad Khan to the custody of National Investigation Agency (NIA) till March 29. The NIA had sought his custody for 10 days from the additional session judge.

Sajjad, who is a resident of Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama, is believed to be a close aide of Pulwama attack mastermind Muddasir Ahmed Khan. He was arrested on Thursday night from Red Fort area in the national capital. He was roaming in Delhi as a trader of shawls.

He was tasked by the terror group of establishing a sleeper cell in the national capital, police told PTI.

It is to be noted that Muddasir was eliminated by the Indian Army earlier this month. He was neutralised during Tral encounter in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district. According to reports, Muddasir had provided the van used in the attack and explosives to Pulwama suicide bomber Adil Ahmed Dar. He was also involved in plotting multiple IED blasts in Kashmir valley.

At least 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14 after a JeM suicide bomber rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into their bus.New Delhi: In a brutal incident, two Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) terrorists, who took a local boy hostage to shield themselves from security forces, killed him by slitting his throat with a sharp weapon in Bandipora's Hajin area in Jammu and Kashmir on Friday. The 12-year-old boy Aatif Mir was captured by the terrorists along with another civilian Abdul Hameed (60) on Thursday evening.

And while the terrorists let go the elderly man Hameed yesterday evening, they kept the minor boy with them as a shield against the armed forces. The boy's family members and community members had repeatedly requested the terrorists to release the boy.

The incident took place 33 km north of Srinagar where the terrorists had taken shelter in the boy's house at gunpoint. Police officials told PTI that the terrorists wanted to sexually abuse minor's sister but the family helped her escape. This infuriated them and they started beating up the family members, including Atif and his old uncle Hameed Mir, they said.

Hearing loud screaming from the house, the neighbours alerted the police. After assessing the situation, the police started rescuing the family. They managed to secure the release of the parents and other family members until they were fired upon by the holed up terrorists. A senior official said that they asked the villagers and boy's family members to appeal to terrorist to secure the boy's release. However, as pressure started to mount on the terrorists, they killed Aatif Mir.

A fierce gunbattle then took place between the security forces and terrorists. In the ensuing encounter, both terrorists were killed and the bodies were retrieved from the site of encounter. From the incriminating material recovered at the site of the encounter, the slain terrorists were identified as Ali and Hubaib and of Pakistani national. As per the police records, both were affiliated with proscribed terror outfit Lashkar.

The police has cordoned off the entire area and issued an advisory asking people to refrain from venturing inside the encounter zone.New Delhi: The security forces on Friday killed one more militant in an encounter in Shopian district of Jammu and Kashmir.

Earlier, the security forces had killed another terrorist in Imam Sahib area of Shopian in south Kashmir following information about the presence of militants there. Army officials told PTI that the terrorists opened fire on the forces, who retaliated, triggering a gun battle.

The security forces had launched a search and cordon operation in Imam sahib area in Shopian. The official said that the identity and group affiliation of the slain ultra was being ascertained. He said no casualties have been reported so far in the operation.

In another incident, two Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists were killed in an encounter with security forces at Kalantara in Baramulla district on Thursday while three security force personnel including an officer suffered injuries during the operation. A police spokesperson said that one of the slain militants was Amir Rasool, a local from Sopore, while the other was a Pakistani national.

In addition, two militants of terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) were killed in an overnight gunbattle in Hajin area of Bandipora district on Friday, officials said. The operation against the militants was started on Thursday but the security forces had to proceed with caution as the ultras had taken two civilians hostage, the officials said.

While one civilian was rescued Thursday evening, the other hostage -- a 12-year-old boy -- was killed during the operation, the officials said.

"Two Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists were killed in the Hajin encounter. From incriminating material, both the terrorists were identified as Pakistani nationals, Ali and Hubaib," a police spokesman said.

He said while one hostage -- Abdul Hameed was rescued Thursday evening, the second hostage -- minor boy Aatif Ahmad -- "could not be saved and was brutally killed by terrorists.".New Delhi: A group of terrorists on Friday opened fire on Hilal Shah, the Chairman of Municipal Committee of Anantnag. One Personal Security Officer (PSO) of the chairman received bullet injuries in the firing.

The injured was immediately rushed to a hospital.

Meanwhile, the area has been cordoned off and a search operation was immediately launched by the security forces to track down the attackers.

More details awaited.Bengaluru: Death toll in the building collapse at Dharward in North Karnataka climbed to 15 on Friday. Meanwhile, authorities and emergency personnel continued with rescue operations 72 hours after the incident. More people are suspected to be trapped under the debris.

It has been more than 72 hours, the operation is still on. Till now the death toll is 15, Sunil Agarwal, Additional Director General of Police (Fire and Emergency Services), Karnataka told news agency ANI.

At least 72 people have been rescued from the site, police said.

#DharwadBuildingCollapse: Latest visuals from the spot as rescue operation is still underway. Sunil Agarwal, ADGP (Fire & Emergency Services), Karnataka says, "It has been more than 72 hours, the operation is still on. Till now the death toll is 15." pic.twitter.com/jmeYGQ8x1s  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

The four-storeyed under construction building collapsed Tuesday evening at Kumareshwaranagar in the heart of Dharwad, about 400 km from Bengaluru.

Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy, who visited the site on Thursday, ordered a magisterial inquiry into the incident.

Rescue team consists of over 400 personnel including members of NDRF, SDRF, Police, and Revenue Department.

Following the collapse, the Indian Air Force airlifted two teams of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel to Karnataka`s Hubli to assist in rescue operations.

An FIR was also registered against five people on Friday including owners of the building named Basavraj Nigadi, Ravi Sabrad, Mahabaleshwar Puradgudi and Gangappa Shintre, and an engineer Vivek Pawar.

Pawar was later arrested from Maharashtra`s Kolhapur while the four partners of Renuka Construction surrendered before the policePATNA: After days of hectic parleys, Bihar's mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) announced its seat-sharing formula for the upcoming Lok Sabha election 2019.

The Rashtriya Janta Dal will contest on 20 seats, Congress on nine seats, Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) on five seats, Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) and Vikasheel Insaan Party (VIP) on three seats each and Communist Party of India (MarxistLeninist) Liberation on one seat (from RJD quota).

Sharad Yadav will contest on RJD symbol and merge his political outfit Loktantrik Janata Dal with the party after the Lok Sabha polls, RJD national spokesman Manoj Jha said at a press conference on Friday.

HAM chief Jitan Ram Manjhi will contest from Gaya constituency, while his party colleague Upendra Prasad will fight from Aurangabad constituency.

RJD's Vibha Devi has been fielded from Nawada seat while RLSP's Bhudev Chaudhary from Jamui constituency.

RJD also announced the names of two candidates for Assembly by-election: Direndra Kumar Singh alias Munna will contest from Nawada while Mohammad Firoz Hussain from Dehri.

Denying any rift in the Grand Alliance, Jha said, "How can you say 'all is well' when your leader (Tejashwi Yadav) doesn't come. Am I nothing in my party? You are making me insignificant? If format changes at the last moment, it's a party's decision, do not question that."

Zee News had earlier reported that the deadlock over seat sharing in Bihar's Grand Alliance has been solved, with RJD contesting on 20 seats and Congress on nine seats.

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has already announced its seat-sharing pact -- the BJP and the JD(U) will contest on 17 seats each and six seats were allotted to the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP).New Delhi: The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) on Friday was dismissive about the papers which the Congress claimed to be parts of a diary, saying the loose sheets alleging payment of Rs 1,800 crore by former Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa to top BJP leaders prima-facie appear to be of a doubtful nature and were given by a Congress leader during a raid on him for tax violations.

"All efforts have been made by the Income Tax Office concerned to procure the originals of the disputed writings. However, the details about the place and custody of the original writings and, if the original writings exist, are not available," said Income Tax Commissioner Surabhi Ahluwalia in an official statement.

Earlier during the day, the Congress alleged that some top BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had received Rs 1,800 crore from Yeddyurappa, who rubbished the charges as "atrocious and malicious" and threatened to file a defamation case. He said that an inquiry had found the documents, cited by the Congress, as fake.

"Income Tax Department officials have already probed the issue and found that the documents and signature and handwritten notes are forged. The Congress leaders are apt in carrying out all these atrocious and malicious campaigns. They planted the story in the media to gain political mileage in the coming elections," the BJP leader said.

Ahluwalia said a search action under section 132 of the Income Tax Act 1961 was carried out on D K Shivakumar and group of cases on August 2, 2017 by the Income Tax Investigation Directorate of Karnataka and Goa. A large evidence of incriminating material against him and his company were found.

During the search, some loose papers were given to the raiding party. They were a xerox copy of Karnataka Legislative Assembly, Legislator`s Diary pages of 2009 with details of numerical entries against some individual names. The original of these documents was never given.

Shivakumar had said this was a copy of diary, written by Yeddyurappa and the payments paid on his behalf to legislators, and received from various leaders, MLAs and ministers when they were in power.

On being asked as to how he got possession of the said loose sheets, Shivakumar said that, being a politician, he procures information about other parties, leaders and members and as the said loose sheets contain political information, he cannot disclose the source of information.

On November 25, 2017, Yedyurappa said in a statement that he was not in the habit of writing a dairy and that the loose sheets in question were not in his handwriting.

He further said that contents of the loose sheets were false and fabricated and his name has been used to malign his political career. He also provided a sample of his handwriting in order to verify the genuineness of the said loose sheets.Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.Lucknow: Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav on Friday said the sacrifices of the armed forces should not be questioned, but asked the government to "stop pretending to be the Indian Army".

Hitting back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his attack on rival parties over the Pulwama attack and the subsequent IAF strike in Pakistan, Yadav also said that in a democracy it was a "fundamental right" to ask questions of politicians. "Politicians who say they cannot be questioned are dangerous," he said.

Yadav's remarks came after his party colleague Ram Gopal Yadav came in for heavy criticism from the PM for alleging that the Pulwama terror attack was a "conspiracy" to garner votes.

In a series of tweets, the PM also slammed Congress' Sam Pitroda for saying he wanted to "know more" about the Balakot strike and asking as to how many terrorists were killed in the operation.

In his attack, Modi termed the Opposition "the natural habitat of terror apologists" and accusing them of "insulting" armed forces.

Akhilesh Yadav's tweet came an hour after the Prime minister's. "The sacrifices of our Armed Forces should never be questioned. To ask questions of politicians in a democracy is our fundamental right. This government needs to stop pretending to be the Indian Army," the SP leader said.

On Thursday, referring to the Pulwama attack, SP general secretary Ram Gopal Yadav had said, "This was a conspiracy...But, when there will be a change of government, investigations will be done and prominent people will come under the scanner, who had pushed our youth to death to garner votes."

PM Modi termed the statement reprehensible.

"Opposition is the natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners of our armed forces. This reprehensible statement by a senior leader like Ram Gopal Ji insults all those who have given their lives in protecting Kashmir. It humiliates the families of our martyrs," he said.

Meanwhile, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said Ram Gopal Yadav's comments were "big example of dirty politics" and an "attempt to demoralise" security forces. He said the remarks can weaken the morale of jawans. "He has questioned the sacrifices made by CRPF jawans. He must apologise for this comments."

Such statements will lower the morale of soldiers and raise the morale of terrorist organisations, Adityanath claimed. On earlier occasion also, Akhilesh has accused the BJP of using the strike to "distract" people. "The soldiers were martyred and there was an intelligence failure (in the Pulwama attack). What have they (BJP) done for the Army men? People of the country want 'ann' (food) not gun," he had recently said.Salman Khan will not be contesting elections or campaigning for any political party, the actor clarified amid rumours of him joining the Congress.

"Contrary to the rumours I am not contesting elections nor campaigning for any political party," he tweeted.

The Congress which had been demanding that Salman campaign for the party in Madhya Pradesh has also said that the party is not in talks with the actor for election campaigning.

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath had also set the rumuor mills abuzz after he had spoken to Salman. After his conversation with the actor the CM had said that he will be promoting tourism and heritage in the state. The CM said that Salman will be in the state from April 1-18.

Madhya Pradesh Congress spokesperson Pankaj Chaturvedi had also said that the party is trying to bring the actor to campaign for it in Madhya Pradesh's commercial capital Indore.

"Our leaders have already talked to Salman Khan to campaign for us in Indore. We are almost certain the actor will campaign for us," Chaturvedi was quoted by news agency PTI.

The actor was born in Indore's Palasia area in 1965 and spent a substantial part of his childhood in that city before moving to Mumbai.

Earlier on Thursday, Salman had replied to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's tweet urging him to inspire the youth to vote in the upcoming election. "We are a democracy and it is every Indian's right to vote. I urge every eligible Indian to exercise your right and participate in making the Government," he tweeted.

Along with Salman, PM Modi had tagged Aamir Khan too in a tweet referring to their cult comedy movie Andaz Apna Apna. "Dear @BeingSalmanKhan and @aamir_khan, It is time to inspire and motivate youth in your own Andaz to vote so that we can strengthen Apna Democracy & Apna countrym" he had tweeted.NEW DELHI: As the worlds largest democracy goes into elections in less than a month, Twitter India launched a special Lok Sabha poll emoji aimed at encouraging healthy participation in election-related discussions and encouraging more people to go out and vote.

The emoji, featuring an image of the Parliament of India, will be available in 12 languages - Hindi, English, Bengali/Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odiya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. It will be accessible to Twitterati till May 31, 2019.

By introducing the emoji, Twitter India hopes to make it easier for Indians across the world to join the election conversation on its platform. Available now until 31st May 2019, the emoji features a panoramic colored illustration of the Parliament of India. People can Tweet in Hindi, English, Bengali/Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odiya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu, says Twitter.

To use the emoji, one needs to use the following hashtags: #LokSabhaElections2019, #IndiaDecides2019, #IndiaElections2019, #2019, #, #, #, #, #, #, #, #,#, and __#

Twitter also welcomed the debut of ECs Systematic Voters' Education and Electoral Participation Program's (SVEEP's) on its platform.

The Election Commission of Indias Systematic Voters' Education and Electoral Participation program (SVEEP) on Twitter (@ECISVEEP) is set up to raise more voter awareness through the platform. The handle was launched on Holi and one of their first campaigns on Twitter #DeshKaMahaTyohar is about ensuring no voter is left behind, said the microblogging site.

Thank you @TwitterIndia

Follow us at @ECISVEEP for all the updates and information on the upcoming #LokSabhaElections2019

Make your vote count in #DeshKaMahaTyohar https://t.co/3wxLLscWu4  ECI #DeshKaMahaTyohar (@ECISVEEP) March 22, 2019

The Election Commission of India has implemented stringent measures on social media platforms, asking them to deploy "appropriate fact checkers" to scan fake news, tackle the use of abusive language, issuing guidelines on political advertisements and many more.

As we move closer to the 17th Lok Sabha election in the country, we are committed to ensuring fair administration of the electoral process, by equipping Indias voters with accurate and adequate information to make their choice. We are proud to extend this commitment with the launch of our new handle on Twitter, said Umesh Kumar Sinha, Deputy Election Commissioner.

"@ECISVEEP would allow us to further the aim of building a stronger democracy, by encouraging all eligible citizens to be aware and active in the voting process, thereby maintaining and enhancing the sanctity of the electoral process. Its our wish and hope that all voters will participate in the coming national election 2019 in an informed and ethical way," he added.

The #LokSabhaElections2019 is just 20 days away! Join in the election conversation with a special emoji using the below hashtags, available in 12 different languages. #LokSabhaElections2019 #IndiaDecides2019#IndiaElections2019#2019 pic.twitter.com/TY49t0ETI1  Twitter India (@TwitterIndia) March 22, 2019

India is the worlds largest democracy, and the upcoming election is a key priority for us at Twitter. Over the past several months, weve taken significant steps to safeguard the integrity of conversations and enhance the health of our platform. Election-related conversations dominate the platform today, and we are honored to onboard the Election Commission handle @ECISVEEP to encourage voter awareness and education. Citizens will receive crucial information directly from the Election Commission on Twitter, in turn they can engage with and amplify accurate and positive information to their community, said Mahima Kaul (@misskaul), Director, Public Policy and Government at Twitter India

New Delhi: The Delhi Police on Thursday received more than 4,000 calls of quarrel-related cases on the occasion of Holi and issued over 13,000 challans for violation of traffic rules, including drunk driving.

Around 2,440 calls were made related to hooliganism in Holi (like the use of colour against his/ her will or quarrel incidents), police said.

As many as 13,219 challans were issued for traffic violations, including 431 for interception and 1591 for drunken driving, the Delhi Police said.

The police received around 4,026 calls related to quarrel-related incidents. The Delhi Police had said that special checking teams with alcometers were deployed at major intersections and vulnerable points to detect and prosecute traffic violations during Holi celebrations.

"Delhi Traffic Police appeal to all motorists to avoid traffic violations, especially drunken driving. Parents should not allow their minors to drive vehicles. All motorists are advised to obey traffic rules and regulations and follow the directions of the traffic policemen on duty for their safety as well as the safety of other road users," a statement had said.

Meanwhile, Mumbai Police said that 9,191 challans were issued on the occasion of Holi for violation of traffic rules. This includes 461 challans for drunken driving, 162 for rash driving, 345 for overspeeding, 680 for tripling, 4,595 for riding without a helmet, and 2,948 for other miscellaneous offences, the Mumbai Police said.Mumbai: Actress Alia Bhatt, who is playing one of the leading ladies in the upcoming film "Kalank", on Friday visited Mumbai's iconic Gaiety theatre for the first time in her life.

She was here to launch the film's song "First class".

The actress arrived alongside her co-star Varun Dhawan at the theatre, located in Bandra, one of the suburban areas of Mumbai city where thousands of her fans were waiting to catch a glimpse of their favourite star.

As the fans welcomed the duo with a loud cheer, Varun addressed them saying, "it is overwhelming to come and see the responses from all you guys."

He also shared that "Alia is visiting the theatre for the first time."

At the event, the fans demanded that Alia perform live on stage. So, Alia performed Kathak for her fans on the stage. Later, Varun also joined her and flaunted his dance moves.

After the event, they both entertained their fans outside the theatre. Varun and Alia stepped on the theatre's roof and wooed the crowd by grooving on their just launched song "First class".

The song also features Aditya Roy Kapur, Madhuri Dixit Nene and Kiara Advani. Composed by Pritam and written by Amitabh Bhattacharya, it is sung by Arijit Singh and Neeti Mohan.

"Kalank" is scheduled to release on April 17.New Delhi: Search engine giant Google has said that it is launching a beta program for a new Drive file feature. It will allows users to search for Google Drive files that they have access to when using the Chrome Omnibox (search/URL box).

Users in the beta can now search for files in Drive by owner or type, where previously they could only search for a title or URL of a webpage. This feature is similar to what users see when searching for files in Google Drive, Google wrote in its blog.

Google said that this feature will give users faster access to the files and data they need while searching in Google Chrome.

Users will now be able to see Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs, and other file type suggestions from both My Drive and Shared with Me when searching in Chrome browser. This will help people get work done faster, Google added.

This feature will be available to users who are signed into a Chrome profile on any operating system: Chromebook, Mac, Windows, etc. The feature will be available to G Suite Business, G Suite Enterprise, and G Suite Enterprise for Education but it will not available to G Suite Basic, G Suite for Education, and G Suite for Nonprofits.

This feature will be On by default for beta participants and can be controlled at the OU level, Google added.BEIJING: Chinese police shot dead a man on Friday after he ploughed his car into pedestrians, killing six people, state television reported.

The man had intentionally driven into the people but the report did not elaborate on the motive behind the early morning incident in Zaoyang city in the central province of Hubei.

Seven people were injured and were in the hospital, state television added. It gave no other details.

There have been several similar incidents in China in recent years.

In September 2018, at least 11 people were killed when a car drove onto a crowded square in southern China and the driver attacked people with a knife and spade seeking "revenge" on society for previous criminal convictions.ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Friday claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi greeting him on Pakistan National Day. In a tweet, Khan said that he received a message from PM Modi where he has focussed on the need for the people of the sub-continent to work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive and prosperous region.

"Received msg from PM Modi: "I extend my greetings & best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that ppl of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive & prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence," Khan tweeted.

The tweet comes on a day when India refused to send any representative to the National Day celebrations organised by the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi on Friday. "The decision was taken after Pakistan High Commission decided to call Hurriyat leader to the reception. In February we were very clear, any attempt by Pakistan High Commission or Pakistani leadership to engage with Hurriyat leaders will not be taken lightly," said Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar.

Islamabad celebrates its National Day on March 23 to mark the Lahore Resolution, also called Pakistan Resolution, which was passed on this day in 1940. It is considered to be a major milestone in the Muslim struggle for an independent Muslim state.Washington: The relationship between India and the US flourished under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an official in the Donald Trump administration has said, adding it expects the ties to improve after the Lok Sabha elections.

The senior official also said the first ever India-US two-plus-two dialogue, held in New Delhi last year, took the relationship forward.

Responding to a question on five years of the Modi government and the recent visit of India's Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale to the US, the official said, "US-India relationship has really flourished... Since Modi took power."

"The highlight, I would say, was Prime Minister Modi's visit to the White House in the June of 2017 where a lot of progress was made on the relationship. I would just say that the visit by Foreign Secretary Gokhale was just the latest illustration of the positive trajectory that the relationship is on," the official said requesting anonymity.

"We look forward to working with whoever is elected in this (general) election," the senior official said, adding there is "a lot of strategic logic" to the India-US relationship.

The official said the US expects the ties to continue to improve and the country is looking for ways of cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region in particular on Washington's converging strategic interest in that part of the world.

Describing the recent visit of Gokhale to the US a milestone, the official said the visit of the top Indian diplomat began with a meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and concluded with National Security Advisor John Bolton.

During his three-day to the US visit last week, Gokhale had important foreign office consultation and strategic security dialogue at the state department. A wide range of bilateral, regional and global issues was discussed.

"They were able to talk about our shared vision for the Indo-Pacific, ways to strengthen our defence and security cooperation. Of course, they discussed Indian Pakistan situation as well as Afghanistan," the senior official said.The US Defense Department on Friday stated that the Islamic State no longer holds any territory in Syria.

As per a report by news agency Reuters, US President Donald Trump was briefed abut the development while he was travelling to Florida on Air Force One. While addressing a press conference, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders showed maps of Islamic State territory in 2014 vis a vis the maps of the same place in Syria.

As per a report by news agency Reuters, US President Donald Trump was briefed abut the development while he was travelling to Florida on Air Force One. While addressing a press conference, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders showed maps of Islamic State territory in 2014 vis a vis the maps of the same place in Syria.

Trump on Friday tweeted about the terror group saying: "ISIS uses the internet better than almost anyone, but for all of those susceptible to ISIS propaganda, they are now being beaten badly at every level."

ISIS uses the internet better than almost anyone, but for all of those susceptible to ISIS propaganda, they are now being beaten badly at every level....  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2019

"There is nothing to admire about them, they will always try to show a glimmer of vicious hope, but they are losers and barely breathing. Think about that before you destroy your lives and the lives of your family!,"he added.BRUSSELS: British Prime Minister Theresa May returned on Friday to her mammoth struggle of persuading a deeply divided parliament to back her Brexit deal after an EU summit granted her more time but little to help change minds in London.

After a bruising day in Brussels, May secured a two-week reprieve to try to get the deal she negotiated in November through parliament at a third attempt or face a potentially chaotic departure from the European Union on April 12.

But while the Brexit deadline has moved - from an original March 29 deadline - parliament has not.

In fact, incensed by comments from May that pinned the blame for Britain`s Brexit chaos on them, many lawmakers have hardened their resistance to the deal she will bring back before them next week.

In an appeal to the very same lawmakers she criticised on Wednesday, May said in the early hours of Friday: "I know MPs (members of parliament) on all sides of the debate have passionate views, and I respect those different positions."

"Last night I expressed my frustration. I know that MPs are frustrated too. They have difficult jobs to do. I hope we can all agree, we are now at the moment of decision."

She needs to change the minds of 75 more lawmakers to get her deal through after it was overwhelmingly rejected twice before.

EU leaders were keen to increase the pressure on Britain`s parliament, which is also expected next week to try to wrest control of the Brexit process from May`s government.

DOUBTS

Arriving for a second day of the EU summit on Friday, Belgium`s prime minister said he hoped for a rational decision by British lawmakers, while warning that preparations for a no-deal, in which Britain would face sudden trade barriers and restrictions on business, were still underway.

"This is perhaps the last chance for Britain to say what it wants for the future," Charles Michel told reporters. "More than ever, this is in the hands of the British parliament."

Several leaders said they doubted whether May could get her deal through parliament, which like the country itself is deeply split over how, or even if, Britain should leave the EU after a 2016 referendum in which 52 percent backed Brexit and 48 percent voted to remain.

Parliament will start next week with another vote on Brexit, which may open the way for lawmakers to be able to vote on alternative options for Britain`s departure.

With parliament deadlocked, the lack of certainty is forcing some Britons to try to influence politicians from the streets or over the Internet.

Hundreds of thousands of Britons are expected to march through central London on Saturday calling for a second Brexit referendum, while an online petition demanding May revoke the so-called Article 50 negotiating period and stop Brexit altogether has received more than 3 million signatures.

Luxembourg`s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said he believed May had a 50:50 chance of getting the deal through the House of Commons. "Hope dies last with me," Bettel said.

But French President Emmanuel Macron told the summit that before coming to Brussels he had thought May had only a 10 percent chance of winning the vote. After listening to the prime minister, he said, he had cut his estimate -- to five percent.

Seven hours of summit brainstorming on Thursday kept a host of options open for the EU leaders, who say they regret Britain`s decision to leave but are eager to move on from what they increasingly see as a distraction.

A first-ever leaders` dinner debate over the EU`s China policy at the summit got delayed until Friday.

May, who addressed leaders on Thursday but missed out on the dinner because the 27 were forced to focus on Brexit rather than China, was kept in the loop by summit chair Donald Tusk, the European Council president, who shuttled back and forth.

Tusk explained the leaders` thinking to May and secured her acceptance for the plans, officials said.

LOOSE ENDS

May originally wanted to be able to delay Britain`s departure until June 30 to tie up legislative loose ends.

But now, a May 22 departure date will apply if parliament rallies behind the British prime minister next week. If it does not, Britain will have until April 12 to offer a new plan or decide to leave the European Union without a treaty.

"We wanted to support May and we showed that," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters. "It was an intensive, but successful evening."

A senior EU official said the key achievement was to shift the focus of responsibility to London from Brussels.

But the details of exactly how and when Britain would leave on or after April 12 are still somewhat vague.

It might leave abruptly at midnight (2200 GMT) on that Friday night. But EU officials said it could also agree a date with the EU to leave later, deal or no deal.

That could give some weeks to make a no-deal exit somewhat less chaotic, though the EU will refuse attempts to try and emulate the smoothness of the withdrawal treaty.

It would also try for Britain being out by May 22 to avoid problems over the EU election on May 23-26, but some leaders indicated they could cope with Britain leaving any time until June 30 - before the new European Parliament convenes on July 2.

In the case of a longer extension, the main idea is for one-year, EU officials said. That would give Britain time to hold an election, and possibly a second referendum if it chose to, and avoid a longer delay that would complicate negotiations for a new long-term EU budget.The crash of a Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that killed all 189 passengers and crew members on board drew medias great attention again after a second deadly accident in Ethiopia last week prompted regulators to ground the worldwide fleet of the aircraft.

A Lion Air plane (Source: Airline Ratings)



Pilots of both flights lost control over the aircraft only several minutes after taking off.

The Lion Airs jet, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, was en route from Jakarta to Pangkakpinang in Bangka Belitung province off Sumatra island when it crashed into the sea on October 29th, 2018. This was the worst aviation accident that Indonesia has met since 1997.

Meanwhile, flight ET 302 of Ethiopian Airlines crashed on March 10th near Bishoftu town, 62 km southeast of the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa, killing all 149 passengers and eight crew members aboard. The ill-fated plane was a Boeing 737-800 Max.

The plane left Bole airport in Addis Ababa at 8:38 am (local time) before losing contact with the control tower just six minutes later./.We attempted to send a notification to your email address but we were unable to verify that you provided a valid email address. Please click here to update your email address if you wish to receive notifications. Otherwise, you may click here to disable notifications and hide this message.The Kampong Speu provincial Trade Fair 2019, held 60 km south-west of Phnom Penh, features nearly 100 booths run by Cambodian, Vietnamese and Thai businesses.

Representing Vietnam to participate in the fair this year, roughly 10 enterprises from the Mekong Delta province of Vinh Long are introducing their high-quality products to local consumers, including textiles and garments, handicrafts, pharmaceuticals, construction materials, agricultural materials and plant varieties.

Speaking to Nhan Dan Newspapers correspondents in Cambodia, Deputy Head of Vinh Long provincial Industry and Trade Department, Nguyen Van Con, said that this is the fifth time Vinh Long enterprises has attended Kampong Speu province's annual trade fair, aiming to promote their goods and expand markets to facilitate business growth. The activity also aims to strengthen and develop the traditional solidarity relationship between the twinned localities, he added.

Governor of Kampong Speu province, Vy Som Nang, affirmed that the participation of enterprises from Vinh Long province is a specific expression of the traditional solidarity and friendship between the authorities and the people of both locales. He also hailed Vietnamese businesses for bringing a variety of goods to the fair, helping local consumers to access quality goods produced in Vietnam.

Held from March 21 to 25, the Kampong Speu annual trade fair offers a good opportunity for Cambodian businesses and their peers from neighbouring countries to strengthen cooperation and promote their products to consumers."We're happy to say that we've started construction, and we are just about near completion," said attorney Darwin Beauvais on behalf of Amazon. "In fact, we're scheduled to be completed on or about that first or second week in January."Pennsylvania Horticulture Societys Harvest program ends season with almost 19,000 pounds of produce donated and $30K raised to fight food insecurityThe event is being jointly held by the Vietnamese Embassy in Chile, the Chile-Vietnam Cultural Institute and the Chile-Vietnam Friendship Parliamentarian Group.

Speaking at the opening ceremony, Karol Cariola, president of the Chile-Vietnam Friendship Parliamentarian Group, stated that Vietnam is a shining example for nations worldwide of how to overcome difficult times in history to regain independence and freedom, as well as for its active development and extensive international integration today.

She expressed her wish to continue coordinating with the Vietnamese Embassy and the Chile-Vietnam Cultural Institute to organise activities to advertise and enhance Chile-Vietnam people-to-people exchanges, while sharing solidarity between the two countries, which was demonstrated with the march of Chilean students and workers in the 1970s to show support and call for peace for Vietnam.

Karol Cariola, president of the Chile-Vietnam Friendship Parliamentarian Group, speaks at the event. (Photo: VNA)



For his part, Vietnamese Ambassador to Chile Nguyen Ngoc Son voiced his gratitude for the close support and coordination of the National Congress of Chile, the Chile-Vietnam Cultural Institute and the Chile-Vietnam Friendship Parliamentarian Group in organising the photo exhibition week at the headquarters of the Chilean parliament, a well-known place in the country.

He emphasised the significance of the event, which is being held on the 48th anniversary of Vietnam-Chile diplomatic ties (March 25, 1971-2019) and the 50th anniversary of the historic meeting between late Chilean President Salvador Allende and President Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi in May 1969.

The ambassador affirmed that the photos on display demonstrate the profound, close and strongly growing relations between the two countries, which have become a comprehensive partnership, while showing that Vietnam today has become a peaceful and hospitable country on the momentum of rapid development and extensive international integration.

At the exhibition, guests had the chance to enjoy some typical Vietnamese dishes and listen to songs featuring Vietnam and President Ho Chi Minh, such as The right to live in peace composed by Victor Jara and Ho Chi Minh by musician Rolando Alarcon.

After the opening ceremony, Ambassador Nguyen Ngoc Son held a meeting with Senator Alfonso de Urresti, Vice President of the Senate of Chile, to discuss orientations for parliamentary cooperation between the two countries and measures to accelerate the Vietnam-Chile comprehensive partnership.Welcome to Morningstar.co.uk!

You have been redirected here from Hemscott.com as we are merging our websites to provide you with a one-stop shop for all your investment research needs.To search for a security, type the name or ticker in the search box at the top of the page and select from the dropdown results.Registered Hemscott users can log in to Morningstar using the same login details. Similarly, if you are a Hemscott Premium user, you now have a Morningstar Premium account which you can access using the same login details.Staff writer Jesse Buchanan joins the Morning Record to talk about possible recommendations from the office of the child advocate after a spike in death by suicide among teens and preteens.

Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or on Stitcher

Music: thegoodlawdz.bandcamp.com

msavino@record-journal.com

203-317-2266

Twitter: @reporter_savinoThe projects, worth more than US$483,270, will be launched in the provinces of Binh Phuoc, Kien Giang, Long An and Bac Lieu in the south and Dak Lak and Dak Nong provinces in the Central Highlands.

They are to build rehabilitation faculty and provide medical equipment, medical waste treatment system and laboratory equipment for the provinces, along with building schools and working facilities for the blind.

Projects to supply clean water and build five classrooms for elementary students are also included in the assistance.

According to the Japanese office, the projects will be promptly implemented to help local children and people access modern healthcare conditions, clean water, education and waste treatment towards environmentally protection, as well as support sight-impaired people.

General Consul of Japan in HCM City Junichi Kawaue said that the non-refundable aid aims to ensure basic demand of the beneficiaries, especially those residing in remote and mountainous areas.There seems an inevitability in the movement toward legalizing recreational marijuana, an attitude that recognizes that sooner or later its going to happen. Rhode Islands Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo expressed it in January when she announced plans to call for legalizing recreational weed in the Ocean State.

I will say, I do this with reluctance, Raimondo said. She had resisted, she told the Providence Journal, now, however, things have changed, mainly because all of our neighbors are moving forward.

Connecticut, of course, has not yet moved forward, though there are plenty of those who now expect it to.

Into this field of growing momentum appears Wallingford Mayor William W. Dickinson Jr., who just recently was at the helm of a rally on the steps of Town Hall, voicing opposition to legal pot. Fifty or so gathered in support of that point of view, overcrowding the small number who were there to support legalizing marijuana.

A skeptical approach is not new to Wallingford, which skirted the issue of opening medical marijuana outposts (medical marijuana is already legal in Connecticut) by reminding the world that at the federal level marijuana is not legal and any wise municipality would do well to stay out of it.

Another notable objection raised by Dickinson during the rally was the lack of a federally funded study about the potential harms of cannabis. This is science. Its not emotion, said the mayor. Emotions make a mess.

Dickinson also connected the marijuana issue with the opioid scourge. There was no testing done to determine if they were appropriate for long-term use, he said. Now we have an epidemic the likes of which the country has never seen. Here we are going to be headed down the same pathway again.

Whether or not you agree with such a warning, the points the mayor was making during the rally were not without merit. Nor were some of the others offered by other elected representatives. As the mayor noted, the question is a great debate.

With a great debate to be had, a rush to judgment or, in this case, a rush to approval would be ill considered. Wallingfords mayor is reminding us that even in the face of what seems inevitable some things are worth talking over.The event saw the presence of foreign ministers and senior officials from 10 ASEAN nations and its eight partner countries, namely Australia, China, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Russia and the US, along with representatives of some South Pacific countries.

Themed "Towards a Peaceful, Prosperous, and Inclusive Region," the dialogue offered an opportunity for the countries to exchange cooperation initiatives in the Indo-Pacific region and seek win-win partnerships.

At the discussion on March 20 morning, representatives of the 10 ASEAN countries and the eight partner countries presented their views on cooperation in the Indio-Pacific region, as well as suggested orientations and measures to boost collaboration.

Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs To Anh Dung called on the countries to join hands to realise the target of building a peaceful, stable, cooperative, developed, and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.

The diplomat recommended taking peace, stability and prosperity as the common goal while respecting independence, sovereignty, and self-determination right of the countries.

He described dialogue and cooperation as key tools in relations between the countries and suggested promoting comprehensive and effective multinational cooperation and increasing the role of ASEAN to orient cooperation based on the existing cooperation programmes and plans as well as the cooperation mechanisms and frameworks founded and led by the bloc.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.

Continue >By Express News Service

CHENNAI: A Chennai-based photojournalists presence of mind saved the life of a 13-year boy who collapsed in a pool when celebrating Holi here on Thursday morning.

According to eye-witnesses, the boy collapsed in the pool with two others during the indoor celebration organised by a private agency, in which around 500 people participated.

Three kids almost drowned in the water during holi celebrations organised at Vepery. (Photo| EPS)

While the other boys recovered soon after, one continued to remain unconscious before P Ravikumar, a photojournalist who was there to cover the event, performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on the boy. I was trained in first-aid skills including CPR a few years ago and so I performed CPR on him within a few minutes. When we saw that the boy was beginning to respond to the CPR and regain consciousness, we took him to a private hospital for treatment, Ravikumar said. The boy was discharged later in the day.

While eye witnesses suspect that the boys may have suffered from electric shock, police maintained that the boy suffered from seizures. However, going by the police version, it remains unclear how the other two boys collapsed in the pool at the same time.

The mother of boy, who did not want to be named, told Express, He is doing fine now. We want to give our son some time to recuperate before asking him questions about what had happened.Rajesh Kumar Thakur By

Express News Service

PATNA: A 35-year-old cultivator of cauliflower has won the prestigious National Grassroots Innovation Award. He is the first person from Bihar to win the award.

Sanjiv Kumar, who matriculated from a government school in Chakwara, has developed a special variety of high-yield cauliflower seed named as the Sanjiv-Selection (SS) after years of in-field experiments at his village.

The National Grassroots Innovation Award was conferred upon him by President of India, Ram Nath Kovind in Gujarat on March 15 for his extraordinary works in the fields of cultivating seeds for cauliflower, without any kind of formal education in the concerned field.

Kumar has been motivating the farmers of Chakwara village in Vaishali district since 2005. He set up the Andata Kissan Club in a room of his thatched house that year.

He took the villagers to fields and motivated them to start seed cultivations in order to improve their economic condition.

Initially, many of my villagers did not take me seriously, but when some them succeeded in cultivating cauliflower seed and got good prices from traders, all other villagers joined me in it, Kumar said.

Kumar added that between 2005 and 2018, around 100 farmers have produced cauliflower seed in bulk quantity and supplied to other states such as Punjab, Haryana, UP, Jharkhand, West Bengal and other states including the J&K.

Now, Chakwara with a population of 1,000 farmers has everything of comfort available in the houses of each farmers just because of earning made through seed cultivations, Kumar said.

Impressed by the success stories of Kumar and his villagers, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had made a visit to this village and met all farmers including Sanjiv Kumar in 2010. Kumar had served the CM a special dish made of cauliflower, called-Fulgobhi ka Halwa (porridge of Cauliflower) and he had tasted it with officials.China, U.S. to hold new rounds of trade talks in Beijing, Washington

BEIJING, March 21 (Xinhua) -- China and the United States will hold their eighth round of high-level economic and trade consultations in Beijing from March 28 to 29, the Ministry of Commerce (MOF) said Thursday.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were invited to visit China for the talks, MOF spokesperson Gao Feng told a news conference.

Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chief of the Chinese side of the China-U.S. comprehensive economic dialogue, was invited to visit Washington D.C. for the ninth round of talks in early April, Gao said.

Recently, both sides have held several rounds of talks by phone on economic and trade issues and agreed on holding the eighth and ninth rounds of high-level consultations, he said.By IANS

KOLKATA: Discontent is growing within the West Bengal BJP over its first list of candidates for the 2019 polls as a senior state leader on Friday resigned while a group of BJP activists protested against the nomination of former Trinamool Congress leader Nisith Pramanik, who joined the BJP, from the Coochbehar seat.

The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Bengal unit Vice-President RajKamal Pathak resigned from his post after not getting a ticket for the Lok Sabha polls. He will, however, continue to remain in the party.

"If I am not eligible to be a candidate, then there is no need for me to hold on to the post of the party. So I have resigned," he said.

Pathak said he wanted to contest from either Sreerampur or Hoogly or any other important seat and was assured that his name was on the top of the list of probable candidates.

"Those who have recently joined the party are more eligible and they are big leaders with a 'clean image'. They should also get a post within the party. That's why I have stepped down."

The saffron party on Thursday announced its candidates for 28 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal. The party's women wing president Locket Chatterjee has been fielded from Hoogly and state youth wing (Yuba Morcha) chief Debojit Sarkar from Sreerampur.

A group of angry activists in the district vandalised a party office in protest against the nomination of Nisith Pramanik, who recently switched to the BJP from the Trinamool Congress.

The activists also heckled District Chief Malati Rava on Thursday accusing her of taking a bribe from Pramanik. "We do not want any turncoat to be selected from Coochbehar. The party did not consider leaders who have been fighting against Trinamool for years. We are disappointed," a worker said.

Rava denied all allegations and said that the central leadership had nominated Pramanik and the districts leaders have "no say" in it.

State Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Dilip Ghosh said those not willing to accept the central leadership's decision may leave the party.

"We have gained in strength in West Bengal over the past two-three years... As a cadre-based and disciplined party, we have to accept the decision. Those who are opposing it can leave the party," he said.

Meanwhile, posters in protest against the candidature of state BJP general secretary Sayantan Basu could be seen in North 24 Parganas district's Basirhat.

A banner, which bore the names of the district BJP leadership, termed Basu as an 'outsider'. Basu called it a "dirty political game" by the rival Trinamool Congress.

"Trinamool is habituated in playing such dirty games in politics. Did Trinamool themselves not give any seat to the outsiders in a constituency? Basirhat falls under the North 24 Parganas district and I am also from the same district," Basu said.By PTI

NEW DELHI: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley Thursday said fake campaigns of 'compulsive contrarians' on three issues the Hindu terror theory, the Godhra incident and Nirav Modi case - were busted in a single day.

In the Samjhauta Express blast case, the trial court on Wednesday dismissed the UPA government's theory of Hindu terror; while in the Godhra case, the court convicted one more person.

Also, the fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi was arrested in the United Kingdom on the same day. A fundamental difference between truth and falsehood is that truth holds together and falsehood falls apart. To each fake campaign of the 'compulsive contrarians' over a period of time, ultimately the truth has prevailed.

Either it is the electoral mandate or the judicial process which gives the final verdict, Jaitley said in his blog titled Three Fake Campaigns Busted in a Single Day. 'Jaitley said Nirav Modi started cheating the public sector banks in 2011.

Nirav Modi's crime was detected in 2018 by the banks and investigating agencies under the present government, Jaitley said, adding that Modi's assets have been frozen, are being auctioned, a criminal prosecution against him has been filed, recovery action for the dues owed to the banks and creditors are being pursued.

"On our request, he has now been arrested and denied bail. There is a strong unanswerable case against him and hopefully, India will get him back. Whoever cheats India and its institutions cannot get away. He will be found out. This also busts the fake campaign that the present government had anything to do with him," Jaitley said.

The minister said there is an inherent danger in relying only on fake issues. I hope the manufacturers of fake campaign learn some lesson. They don't seem to be considering their brazen attitude," he added.By Bloomberg

Google has requested a meeting with a top US general as political tension rises over the internet giants artificial intelligence work in China.

General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that Google "indirectly benefits the Chinese military" and is planning to meet with the company over the matter. The Pentagon official cited a Google AI lab that opened in Beijing in 2017 as a cause of concern.

"In my judgment, us assisting the Chinese military in advancing technology is not in U.S. national interests," Dunford said on Thursday at an Atlantic Council event. "So its a debate we have to have."

READ HERE | US officials blast Google for 'helping' Chinese military, pulling out of state defence contracts

Dunford is "tentatively scheduled" to meet next week with a senior Google official in Washington, at Googles request, Colonel Patrick Ryder, a military spokesman, wrote in an email.

Googles relationship with the Pentagon has been strained since it retreated from an AI defence contract last year following employee protests. The tech giant has faced criticism in Washington for plans to launch a search engine in China, where Google pulled most of its commercial services in 2010. At a Senate hearing last week, Dunford said Google was indirectly helping Chinas military. Days later, U.S. President Donald Trump repeated the critique in a tweet.

In response, Google issued a statement on Sunday denying the claim. "We are not working with the Chinese military," the Alphabet Inc. unit said. "We are working with the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense, in many areas including cybersecurity, recruiting and healthcare.

ALSO READ | Clueless US lawmakers wipe smile off Google CEO Sundar Pichai's face - but not for long

On Thursday, a Google spokeswoman declined to comment on the tentative meeting with the general. The companys Beijing lab is focused on developing software including TensorFlow, one of the most popular AI tools, along with education initiatives, "research on natural language understanding and market algorithms," the spokeswoman wrote in an email.

TensorFlow is a critical part of Googles expansion strategy. TensorFlow has been downloaded 17 million times with more than 2 million of those coming from China-based users, Google engineering director Rajat Monga said at a September conference backed by the Chinese government. TensorFlow is free, open-source software, so Google doesnt control who uses it.Sana Shakil By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The Centre on Friday banned the Yasin Malik-led Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF-Y), alleging that the organisation was behind the murders of Kashmiri Pandits in 1989 (that) triggered their exodus from the (Kashmir) Valley.The decision to ban the JKLF-Y under provisions of Section 3(1) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, was taken at a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security chaired by PM Narendra Modi.

After the meeting, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba said the separatist outfit had been banned as the government had a policy of zero tolerance.The Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front led by Md. Yasin Malik has spearheaded the separatist ideology in the valley and has been at the forefront of separatist activities and violence since 1988. Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley and is responsible for their genocide, Gauba said.

The Centre's move comes after Islamabad invited separatist leaders to Pakistan's National Day event at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi on 23rd March, which India officially boycotted.

Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba: 37 FIRs have been registered by Jammu and Kashmir Police against JKLF. Two cases including the case of murder IAF personnel were registered by CBI. National Investigation Agency (NIA) has also registered a case which is under investigation. https://t.co/fHVpvQsN4F  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

Malik is currently in Jammus Kot Balwal jail and is facing trial in several cases. The ban, the first for the organization, comes just months before the tenure of the Modi government ends. Gauba said the activities of the JKLF (Y) posed a serious threat to the security of the country and the organization had been actively and continuously encouraging feelings of enmity and hatred against the lawfully-established government.

ALSO READ | PM Modi greets Imran Khan; MEA boycotts Pakistan National Day event in Delhi

Hurriyat Conference leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq decried the ban. Strongly denounce the ban on JKLF after Jamaat-e-Islami. Such anti-Kashmir tactics will not change the reality of the Kashmir issue nor the urgency to resolve it, the Mirwaiz tweeted.

The JKLF-Y is the second outfit from Kashmir to be banned in less than a month. On February 28, the government banned the separatist Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir saying the activities of the Jamaat had the potential of disrupting the unity and integrity of India. The Jamaat has been banned twice earlier.

(With online desk inputs)By PTI

MUMBAI: Days after a school teacher was killed by the Naxals in Maharashtra's Gadchiroli district, the rebels have issued a letter calling it a mistake, the police claimed Thursday.

Yogendra Meshram was killed because he was suspected to be a policeman but he was "innocent", the purported letter said. Meshram, teacher at a municipal school at Korchi, was shot dead by Naxals at Kombda Bajar on March 12.

Local people had protested the killing vehemently, said Shailesh Balkawade, District Superintendent of Police, `Pawan', who is a divisional commander of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), issued an apology letter which was circulated Wednesday, he said.

The letter, addressed to Meshram's family, said Maoists killed him as he was wrongly thought to be a policeman due to "intelligence failure", the SP said.

Maoists apologised to the family for the killing, the letter added.

Balkawade said the police were gaining the upper hand against the Maoists. The rebels were under pressure and therefore targeting innocent persons, he said. On March 8, over 12,000 women took part in an anti-Naxal rally in the district, he claimed.By PTI

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi Friday launched a fresh offensive on rival parties over the Pulwama terror attack and the subsequent IAF strike inside Pakistan, terming the Opposition "the natural habitat of terror apologists" and accusing them of "insulting" armed forces.

Using the hashtag 'Janta Maaf Nahi Karegi' (people will not forgive) in a tweet, Modi attacked Sam Pitroda, who looks after Congress' overseas affairs, for reportedly saying that post the Mumbai terror attacks, India could have responded with air strikes, but "according to me that's not how you deal with world."

ALSO READ: Rahul Gandhi confidant Sam Pitroda questions death toll in Balakot air strike, bats for dialogue with Pakistan

"Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!," Moid said.

"Opposition insults our forces time and again. I appeal to my fellow Indians- question Opposition leaders on their statements. Tell them- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics. India stands firmly with our forces," he added, using the hashtag.

Opposition insults our forces time and again.



I appeal to my fellow Indians- question Opposition leaders on their statements.



Tell them- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics.



India stands firmly with our forces. #JantaMaafNahiKaregi https://t.co/rwpFKMMeHY  Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) 22 March 2019

In another tweet, the Prime Minister slammed Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav, who alleged the Pulwama attack was a "conspiracy" to garner votes.

"This was a conspiracy. But, when there will be a change of government, investigations will be done and prominent people will come under the scanner, who had pushed our youth to death to garner votes," he alleged Thursday speaking at a programme at Saifai.

PM Modi termed the statement reprehensible.

"Opposition is the natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners of our armed forces. This reprehensible statement by a senior leader like Ram Gopal Ji insults all those who have given their lives in protecting Kashmir. It humiliates the families of our martyrs," he said.

The PM in his tweets tagged the reported statements of Yadav and Pitroda.By PTI

MUMBAI: In another setback to the NCP ahead of next month's polling, its state unit vice president Bharti Pawar Friday joined the BJP, while Congress leader Pravin Chheda also returned to the ruling party.

The two leaders joined the BJP in the presence of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and other senior functionaries of the party here.

Pawar had unsuccessfully contested the 2014 Lok Sabha polls from Dindori constituency against BJP's Harishchandra Chavan.

Chheda, a three-term corporator in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), had quit the BJP to join the Congress seven years ago reportedly due to his differences with the then local MLA Prakash Mehta, currently a minister in the Maharashtra government.

Speaking on the occasion, Fadnavis claimed that BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Kakade will continue to be in the party.

FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE

His remark comes in the wake of reports that Kakade was unhappy with the BJP and that he was likely to join the Congress.

Without naming the opposition parties, Fadnavis slammed those "who speak the language of Pakistan and questioned the surgical strike" post Pulwama terror attack.

Earlier this week, son of NCP MP Vijaysinh Mohite-Patil, Ranjitsinh, had joined the BJP.

Polling will be held in Maharashtra in four phases next month.

Pawar said she was impressed by the developmental works carried out across the country and in Maharashtra under the leaderships of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Fadnavis respectively.

"Their works over the past five years have inspired me to join the BJP. I will work for the uplift of the poor and tribals," she added.

Expressing satisfaction on his return to the BJP fold, Chheda said he was impressed by the development works being carried out by the BJP governments.

He claimed that the Congress had offered him candidature from the Mumbai North East seat, but he ignored the offer and came back to the BJP instead.

"I will play the role the party wants me to play now," Chheda added.

Fadnavis said that leaders and workers doing good job in other parties were joining the BJP trusting Modi's performance and schemes being carried out by the Centre for the poor and farmers.

"Kakade is in the BJP. He was unhappy for some reason of late. The Congress contacted him then and offered a poll ticket from Pune. But after my meeting with him, he decided to end the animosity," Fadnavis said.

The chief minister said that Kakade has been asked to focus on campaigning for the party in western Maharashtra.

Fadnavis said the pride of the nation has awakened under Modi's leadership that isolated Pakistan in the world following the Pulwama attack last month.

"Sometimes I feel bad that nationalism is politicised. Some people questioned the surgical strike, while some are of late speaking the language of Pakistan. So, I have to tell them questions will be raised on your patriotism if there is no difference between the language you and Pakistan speak," he said.By PTI

JAMMU: A photograph of a blank State Subject Certificate (SSC) signed by officials in Jammu and Kashmir's Ramban district has gone viral on social media, prompting authorities to order a probe into the matter, officials said on Thursday.

Every permanent resident of the state is entitled to Permanent Residence Certificate (PRC) or State Subject Certificate (SSC) under the Jammu and Kashmir Grant of Permanent Resident Certificate (Procedure) Rules, 1968.

The certificate is crucial to obtain admission to educational institutions, government scholarship, ration cards, purchasing property in the state and for voting.

According to officials, the picture of the blank state subject certificate signed by Assistant Commissioner Revenue (ACR), Ramban Vivek Puri is in violation of the rules.

Taking a serious view of the matter, Deputy Commissioner Ramban, Shoukat Ajaz Bhat ordered an inquiry and directed additional deputy commissioner, Ramban to submit the report within three days.

"An inquiry has been ordered in the matter by Deputy Commissioner Ramban, Shoukat Ajaz Bhat and ADC Ramban has been appointed as the inquiring officer," an officer said.

The photograph shows the blank SSC signed by Puri, Naib Tehsildar and Patwari concerned along with carrying an official number and date.

The incident comes amid reports that blank SSCs duly signed by officials were being sold at a cost.By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: In a surprise move, Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote to his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan conveying his greetings on the eve of its National Day. The news was broken by Imran, who tweeted Modis message, I extend my greetings & best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that ppl of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive & prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence.

This is a significant development as it comes at a time when relations between the two countries are at an all-time low, following the Pulwama terror attack.

Received msg from PM Modi: "I extend my greetings & best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that ppl of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive & prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence"  Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) March 22, 2019

Welcoming Modis gesture, Khan said, I believe it is time to begin a comprehensive dialogue with India to address & resolve all issues, esp the central issue of Kashmir.

Earlier, Pakistani envoy Sohail Mahmood, in an address at the reception here, said Pakistan and India need to consolidate the process of de-escalation and stabilise the ties against further shocks, hoping that the "long winter" in bilateral relations would come to an early end.

He said both the countries should act with "wisdom" to normalise ties, asserting that "coercive measures" have not worked in the past and will not work in the future.

ALSO READ | India won't send any representative to Pakistan National Day: MEA

The envoy said a key takeaway from recent developments was that a lack of engagement creates "dangerous vacuum and serious risks" for relations between the two neighbours, adding Pakistan has "turned a corner" in its fight against the scourge of terrorism.

However, the MEA sought to underplay it, saying, The PM sends a customary message on National Day to other Heads of State or Government. His message to Imran highlighted the importance of a terror-free South Asia.

With the MEA deciding to boycott the event at the Pakistan mission in Delhi on Friday, an unnamed official appealed to the conscience of the guests, reminding them about Indias official line.

Different strokes

While PM greeted Pakistan, the foreign office in India boycotted the National Day celebrations at the Pak High Commission in New Delhi to protest its invite to Hurriyat leaders.

Pakistan Day is celebrated to mark the Lahore Resolution on March 23 each year. The Lahore Resolution, which is also called Pakistan Resolution, passed on March 23, 1940, is considered a major milestone in the Muslim struggle for an independent Muslim state which was later called Pakistan.

ALSO READ | India bans Yasin Malik's JKLF as Pakistan invites separatists to National Day event

(With inputs from online desk)By Express News Service

KOLKATA: Two people were killed and several injured after the engine of the 15904 Chandigarh-Dibrugarh Express caught fire near Chathaat Station near Phansidewa, 18 km from major railhead New Jalpaiguri Junction (NJP) in West Bengal on Friday.

According to local sources, the victims died on the spot after jumping off the train during the melee after seeing smoke billowing from the engine rear and the adjoining first three compartments. The victims are yet to be identified.

The motorman saw the smoke and applied emergency brakes to halt the train, sources revealed. Oil leakage from the engine is stated to be the cause of the fire. Fire tenders from New Jalpaiguri Junction were rushed to the spot and brought the fire under control.

The location is remote and there is weak mobile connectivity. Aid has been dispatched, said NJP ADRM Partha Pratim Roy. Videos clicked by passengers showed the train halting in an empty field without

any habitations nearby.

Time maps: How our brain perceives time

What happens in our brain when we listen to the rhythmic pace of a song or when, at the traffic light, the light is red and we are trembling awaiting the green? How do we perceive such an abstract feature of the world? For the first time in humans, an imaging study shows that in a specific area of the brain, the so-called "supplementary motor area (SMA)", a time map exists. The study, conducted by the team led by SISSA Professor Domenica Bueti and published in PLOS Biology, shows that distinct portions of the SMA, a region of the cerebral cortex important for both motor preparation and time perception--respond preferentially to different durations. The portions of the SMA responding to similar durations are in close spatial proximity on the cortical surface according to an anterior-to-posterior spatial gradient. The most anterior portions of SMA are greatly active for the shortest duration (200 ms), while the most posterior bits are active for the longest duration (3 sec), the intermediate durations led to the activation of the cortex between those extremes. These novel findings, which are the result of a collaborative effort between SISSA and research institutions in Japan, Switzerland and the Netherlands, are important to gain insights on the computational architecture underlying time perception and they also open up new perspectives to the study of temporal cognition.

The representation of time

"Topography i.e., the fact that neurons processing similar stimulus properties occupy neighbouring positions on the nervous system, is an encoding mechanism widely used in the brain to represent sensory and motor information. For example, there is a body map in our primary somatosensory cortex. In this map, the portions of the cortex receiving tactile information from the hand and the wrist are neighbours compared to those receiving information from the toe" says Domenica Bueti, coordinator of the research whose leading author is the Greek researcher Foteini Protopapa: "our findings show that a topographic representation exists also for something immaterial like time". Previous studies conducted in humans and other animals have shown the involvement of SMA in time perception. However none of those previous works clarified how temporal information is represented in this area.

"With our work we show that in SMA time is represented via topography and duration tuning. The first, as we said earlier, refers to the fact that the portions of SMA responding to similar durations are in close spatial proximity on the cortical surface". The second is duration tuning: "our results show that different portions of SMA respond preferentially to certain durations in a way that the response is greater for the preferred duration and become progressively weaker for durations far from the preferred one. Moreover, we show that temporal maps are linked to perception: i.e., the better the map in SMA, the more accurate and precise is duration perception. This is how SMA represents time".

A cutting-edge study

The research was conducted with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at ultra-high field i.e., 7 Tesla, available at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale of Lausanne. During the study, two groups of healthy volunteers carried out a temporal discrimination task of visual stimuli i.e., two images displayed in sequence on a computer screen for durations ranging from 200 milliseconds up to 3 seconds. Each volunteer had to decide which of the two images was presented for longer time. While the volunteers carried out the task, their cerebral activity was recorded through fMRI.

"It was an extremely complex study, which took a long time to carry out and, besides SISSA, it involved researchers from Osaka University, Sussex University, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale of Lausanne, the Royal Academy for Arts and Sciences of Amsterdam, Lausanne University and Araya Inc. of Tokyo" explains Domenica Bueti.

Perceiving time: innate or acquired phenomenon?

Many interesting and fascinating questions arise from these original findings. Domenica Bueti explains: "We have now to understand what is the time that has been mapped in SMA: is it the physical or the perceived time? Does the map change as the perceived duration changes? Does the map change if an observer perceives a stimulus, which was physically displayed on the screen for one second, as either longer (for example a second and a half) or shorter (for example, 800 milliseconds)? And, are there maps at birth? Or are they the by-product of experience and education? These are important and fascinating questions we would like to investigate with our future research".

###

This story has been published on: 2019-03-22. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.Merkel reiterates will to fight for orderly Brexit "until the last hour"

BERLIN, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Ahead of the European summit starting on Thursday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated her will to fight for an orderly Brexit "until the last day, until the last hour".

"One can certainly talk positively about a short extension" for Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, said Merkel during a speech at the German parliament.

On Wednesday, British Prime Minister Theresa May had called upon the European Union to postpone the date of Britain's withdrawal until June 30.

According to Merkel, the governmental leaders of the European members would probably comply in principle with Britain's request for a postponement. However, Merkel stressed that "the legitimacy of the European elections in May" must be preserved.

Merkel also stated that a condition for a postponement was that there would be a positive vote on the withdrawal treaty in the British parliament as negotiated with the EU. If there would be no agreement in the parliament in London for the withdrawal treaty "then we will keep it open whether there should be another meeting before the resignation date", Merkel said.

A major issue would be the problems surrounding the so-called backstop. It is still unclear how the border regulations between Northern Ireland which belongs to Britain, and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member, are to be designed. Merkel stressed that the EU had made sufficient concessions on this controversial issue.

Meanwhile, she pointed out that Germany, as well as the other EU members, had been preparing for an unorderly Brexit with regards to issues like the rights of British citizens living in Germany.

Relations with Britain could not be as after Britain left the EU, Merkel said. However, "the door is wide open to cooperation in friendship and mutual benefit from our side," she said.Namita Bajpai By

Express News Service

LUCKNOW: BSP chief Mayawati launched a scathing attack at BJP leadership, especially, referring to 'Chowkidar' campaign accusing its leaders of failing to protect the important files and documents related to controversial Rafale fighter aircraft deal with France.

The BSP chief, on Friday, also charged the Modi government with hiding crucial data related to unemployment and farmers' distress as it may reflect their failure.

In a series of tweets, the BSP chief alleged they neither the PM Modi nor his colleagues were bothered about Rafale files allegedly "stolen", but were hiding data on "declining" employment rate, poverty and farmers' plight.

She tweeted: "BJP leaders are scrambling to declare themselves Chowkidar for appeasement." The BSP chief wondered if the country needed such a chowkidar.

"They (the data related to jobs and farmers' crisis) are to be hidden for vote/image. Does the country need such a chowkidar?" Mayawati wrote.

Mayawati's jibe has come in response to PM Modi's campaign "Main bhi chowkidar (I too am a watchman) launched to counter Opposition's, especially the Congress', 'chowkidar chor hai' (watchman is thief) slogan. The former Uttar Pradesh chief minister further said while several BJP leaders and ministers declared themselves 'chowkidars' following the PM, CM Yogi Adityanath was not sure whether to announce himself as one or remain a public servant or a yogi (sannyasi).-"BJP leaders may adopt whatever fashion they want-", but they should work as the 'watchman' of the law and Constitution, she said. -"People want just this much,-" she added.Kaleeswaram Raj By

In his recent book, historian Yuval Noah Harari remarked that in the present day world, peoples struggle is against irrelevance rather than exploitation. He said that revolts will be staged not against economic elite that exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any more. (21 Lessons for the 21st Century, 2018).

Hararis words indicate the reduced sphere of employment opportunities across the world in the public sector as well as in the private sector. This, however, does not reduce the significance of reservation in public employment. On the other hand, it does quite the opposite. When the avenues are reduced, the need for protective discrimination is only enhanced.

The 103rd amendment to the Constitution, which is inaccurately termed economic reservation, is now challenged before the apex court. The top court may also consider whether the matter should be referred to a Constitution Bench. The idea of 10 per cent quota for the economically backward among the general categories is a contentious issue warranting a national debate.

It is trite that the reservation is neither an employment generation scheme nor a poverty alleviation programme. Caste is a constant whereas income is not. While the former remains a clear basis for compensatory discrimination due to historical reasons, the latter could be uncertain and fluctuating.

Let it be however taken for the sake of argument, that the new system is capable of identifying and emancipating the poor. Let it also be assumed that economic disadvantage is a sound criteria for quota in the realm of public employment. In that scenario, the question is whether the country can exclude a poor Dalit or an equally poor Backward Class citizen from the ambit of the new reservation scheme, which is meant for the economically weaker sections. The newly inserted Article 15(6) of the Constitution does exactly this exclusion. The amended portion says that the state is not prevented from making any special provision for the advancement of any economically weaker section of citizens other than the classes mentioned in clauses (4) and (5) of Article 15. The excluded classes make up 70 per cent of the nations populationreferred to as Backward Classes or Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in clauses (4) and (5) of Article 15 of the Constitution.

The present reservation is exclusively meant for the forward communities. A new quota upto 10 per cent is offered by the newly inserted Article 16(6) of the Constitution. This would mean that when a Brahmin with a monthly income of `1,000 and a Dalit with a still lesser income compete for a post, the former would fall within the new 10 per cent zone whereas the latter will not, only for the reason that she is a Dalit.

Thus the exclusion is one solely based on a persons backwardness in terms of caste which cannot stand the constitutional test, despite the amendment. That there is already a communal reservation for the Dalits does not legally justify the exclusion, since a Dalit who is economically backward has only lesser avenues when compared with her companion in the same community who is richer and relatively better placed. Thus the exclusion really works against the poorest among the backward and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. This untouchability in public service emanating from the present amendment is deplorable.

The new quota rule is fundamentally flawed in yet another way. Every candidate who can claim communal reservation is essentially a general candidate. The general quota, in the legal sense includes the meritorious among the backward and the scheduled communities, who do not require or who abandoned the benefit of communal reservation. To deny this general status to them when it comes to the 10 per cent quota defies not only logic but also the equality clauses in the Constitution.

Gail Omvedt correctly said that the community-based reservation was meant to end the caste-monopoly of organised sector jobs, especially of the public sector. She explained that caste-based reservation, on its own, will not end casteism but it may be a necessary condition for doing so. It is this foundation of reservation which is now altered for the purpose of the new 10 per cent quota. This alters the ideological premise of the very concept of reservation.

Wealth, not the income, is a surer criteria for protective discrimination. As economists say, income is a flow, whereas wealth is a stock. The massive deprivation of resources, especially of land, necessitated an indemnification to the wealthless and the marginalised by way of better representation in public employment. Thus, the reservation, in the conventional sense, was not totally devoid of any economic criteria, as commonly perceived.

Poverty is however, a problem that should have economic solutions. The state can have varied policies for scholarships, concessions, loan waiver, subsidies, etc. in fields ranging from education to agriculture. But confusing poverty for historical discrimination and poverty alleviation for reservation in public employment is a grave mistake. And excluding the poor belonging to marginalised communities from the category of the economically weaker sections, solely based on their birth is a graver mistake.

Kaleeswaram Raj

Lawyer practising in the Supreme Court

Email: kaleeswaramraj@gmail.comAnusha Ravi By

Express News Service

BENGALURU: The BJP on Thursday evening released names of 21 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls in Karnataka but coalition partners  Congress and JD(S)  are still dilly-dallying. While the Congress  with 20 constituencies according to the seat-sharing formula  is awaiting high commands nod, the JD(S) with just 8 seats is still struggling to find candidates. The delay in announcing the names is now impacting aspirants who are running out of time to kickstart campaigns.

Congress chief Rahul Gandhi has addressed two rallies in Karnataka but not a single candidate has been named so far officially. JD(S) supremo H D Deve Gowda proudly announced the names of his grandsons Nikhil Kumar and Prajwal Revanna as candidates for Mandya and Hassan seats respectively but the party is yet to come out with an official list of candidates.

While Gowdas grandsons have started campaigns in their respective constituencies, Gowda himself hasnt been able to make up his mind over his choice of seat. Other aspirants of the JD(S) are awaiting announcement of the list restlessly. In seats like Udupi-Chikmagalur and Uttara Kannada, the party is scrambling to find candidates. Such is the desperation for the JD(S) that it is now willing to borrow candidates from the Congress.

It is too late now to reshuffle seats between the two parties but there are still possibilities of borrowing and lending candidates, said a senior Congress leader. JD(S) is looking to borrow Congress Pramod Madhwaraj in Udupi and a candidate suggested by Revenue Minister RV Deshpande in Uttara Kannada. But the borrowing business comes with a catch. JD(S) will be willing to borrow a Congress candidate if the Congress is also willing to field a JD(S) candidate on their ticket, said a JD(S) party worker indicating that Mysore-Kodagu could be one such seat.

The Congress was to release the list of its candidates on March 16. Rahul Gandhi was scheduled to visit Karnataka on March 18. There were aspersions that announcing list may lead to some disappointment that could hamper Rahuls visit. After the March 18 visit, Rahul was busy with campaigning in other states and hasnt had the time to approve the list, said a Congress minister in Karnataka.

The delay in announcing the list has cost the Congress. Finding candidates for seats like Bangalore South and Dakshina Kannada has now become difficult with eligible probables not having enough time to build favour among the electors.

In Bangalore South, the Congress was keen on fielding former MLA Priya Krishna. But the delay in announcing the candidate list has made its probable candidate unsure of contesting. AICC working committee member and Congress legislature party chief Siddaramaiah will be in New Delhi on Friday to take part in the screening committee meeting followed by the Central Election Committee meeting. A list is expected to be released post the meetings.By Express News Service

PALAKKAD: The CPM is again in the dock over allegations of sexual abuse of a girl in the party office at Cherpulassery in Palakkad district. The incident came to light when the girl abandoned the newborn after giving birth, and the police investigated as to who was behind the incident. The girl, who is living in a rented house in Mannur, told the Mankara police that she had been sexually abused at the area committee office of the CPM at Cherpulassery by a youth while they were in the process of preparing a college magazine. The girl was studying in a parallel college in Cherpulassery at that time.

The Mankara police said they had recorded the complaint of the girl who has been admitted to the district hospital in Palakkad and forwarded it to the Cherpulassery police station, under which the incident occurred, for further investigations. The police have also registered a case against the girl for abandoning the newborn.

It was on March 16 that a one-day-old infant was found abandoned at Nagaripuram near Mannur with ants all over her body. It was the locals who found the girl child whose cries attracted their attention and they informed the Mankara police. The infant was then transferred to a hospital in Pathripala and later to the district hospital by the locals with the help of the police.

Meanwhile, the police have provided high security at the district hospital where the girl has been admitted. The infant is recuperating at the intensive care unit at the hospital. None of the mediapersons or the public are being allowed to meet the girl at the hospital.However, the youth when questioned by the police said he had visited the house of the girl while she was living in Cherpulassery and had not gone to the party office. The police said the youth did not belong to either the CPM or any other political party. He was managing a two-wheeler automobile workshop in Cherpulassery. The youth is reportedly in the custody of the Cherpulassery police.

During the day, the activists of the Congress, Yuva Morcha and the Youth League marched to the Cherpulassery police station demanding that all those who have been associated with the incident be arrested. The police have since deployed additional forces in the area.

It was recently that Shoranur MLA P K Sasi of the CPM was charged by a DYFI woman activist of sexually harassing her at the party office in Mannarkad . And now comes a similar incident which has pushed the CPM to defend the charges, more so coming on the eve of the elections where the opponents are ready to pounce upon any issue which comes in handy to score brownie points over their political rival.

Police record victims complaint

The Mankara police said they had recorded the complaint of the girl who has been admitted to the district hospital in Palakkad.

CPM offices being used to abuse women

Kanhangad: The CPMs offices are being used to sexually abuse women, alleged opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala. Every time, a party worker abused a woman, it would try to cover up instead of filing a police complaint and ensuring she got justice, he said. A DYFI activist was sexually abused allegedly by her college mate in the CPMs area committee office in Cherpulassery. The accused is also a DYFI activist, he said.

The crime came to light when residents found an abandoned newborn in Mannur panchayat on March 16, he said. Probe revealed that the young mother was abused by a party worker, he said. Both the DYFI activists were in a relationship, and she said her partner promised to marry her but went back on his word, he said.

BJP refutes CPMs charge

Palakkad:The BJP on Thursday refuted CPM Cherpulassery area secretarys allegations that a member of the saffron party was responsible for sexually abusing the young woman who gave birth to a girl child. The sexual abuse took place at the CPM area committee office. How can people from other parties enter there? Is the CPM operating a party office, or a lodge which is accessible to strangers? asked BJP district secretary E Krishnadas.

He said CPM area secretary himself had admitted sexual abuse took place in the office. The CPM cannot term it election conspiracy, he told reporters here. The youth responsible for the sexual abuse is in illegal custody of the police. His arrest is yet to be recorded, Krishnadas alleged. He said BJP will use the issue in its Lok Sabha election campaign. He also asked M B Rajesh to respond to the repeated atrocities on women committed by his party men in his constituency.By Express News Service

TIRUVANNAMALAI: A 30-year-old woman, working as a government school teacher in Arni, has been arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a minor boy. The incident came to light after the womans husband allegedly found intimate pictures and videos of the student in her mobile phone.

Police say U Nitya, an English teacher, used to take tuition classes for the minor boy at his residence. During her visits, she allegedly assaulted him and recorded videos of her acts. Nityas husband, who is also a school teacher, happened to see these intimate pictures and videos on his wifes phone.

He confronted her and it led to a major fight between the couple, say police. Despite her husbands warnings, Nitya was stubborn and continued her physical relationship with the minor, following which he filed a petition with the District Collectors office. Based on instructions from the Collector, the Tiruvannamalai District Child Protection Unit conducted an inquiry. The suspect is said to have confessed to the crime. She was arrested by Arni all-women police station officials on Thursday.

Police suspect the woman could have assaulted four or five more minor boys. They are investigating for further information.

Complaint not taken?

Nityas husband says he tried to lodge a police complaint last year, but was turned down by cops saying only DCPO or victims parents could do so. However, POCSO Act allows anyone to file a complaint. He then petitioned the Collector who asked DCPU to investigate.By Express News Service

CHENNAI: The sudden demise of Sulur AIADMK MLA R Kanagaraj has further reduced the strength of the State Assembly to 212 and increased the number of vacant seats to 22. So, the strength of the ruling party has been reduced to 113, excluding the Speaker who is from the ruling party.

This unexpected development will mount pressure on the ruling party to win a handsome number of seats in the ensuing bypolls to the 18 Assembly constituencies.

After the by-elections are conducted, the strength of the House will go up to 230 and then, the ruling party will need the support of at least 116 MLAs to sustain its government. Though the party has 113 members at present, three of them are supporting the rebel leader TTV Dhinakaran and three more, who had contested on the AIADMKs symbol, have been frequently shifting their stance on the support to the ruling party. Hence, the AIADMK has to win at least eight to 10 seats in bypolls to ensure the stability of its government.

The opposition DMK has 88 MLAs and its allies  Congress and IUML  have eight and IUML one respectively. In total, the DMK-led alliance has 97 members. If the party wins all 18 seats in the bypolls, it may succeed in toppling the AIADMK government though it may not get the required numbers to form government on its own.By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: Making it clear that carbide should not be used for any other purpose except for industrial use, a division bench of the Telangana High Court has directed the State government to take action against any person found to be in possession of carbide other than those permitted by law.

Carbide seemed to be used excessively to ripen fruits and vegetables for human consumption. This is totally impermissible and it is forbidden by law. Use of carbide is confined to industrial purposes only. What now needs to be done is to ensure that carbide does not reach any hand, which is not duly authorised to possess it. Use of carbide is legally permissible as confined to the industrial sector, the bench observed while expressing concern at adulteration of food items.

The bench comprising Chief Justice TBN Radhakrishnan and Justice A Rajasheker Reddy was passing this order on Thursday in a suo moto taken up PIL case based on a news item published in a vernacular daily in 2015 on rampant use of calcium carbide for artificial ripening of fruits in both Telangana and AP states.

On Wednesday, the standing counsel for Telangana State Public Service Commission told the court that the TSPSC had received orders from the State government for initiating the selection process for recruitment of food safety officers. The bench directed the principal secretary to medical, health and family welfare to submit report regarding the steps taken for the purpose and posted the matter to April 23 for further hearing.By AFP

MOSUL: At least 77 people died as a ferry packed with families celebrating Kurdish New Year sank in a swollen river in the former jihadist stronghold of Mosul, in Iraq's worst accident in years.

There was an outpouring of grief among residents who only this year resumed the annual festivities on the banks of the Tigris after the northern city's recapture from the Islamic State group.

The vessel was crammed with men, women and children crossing the Tigris to go to a popular picnic area to celebrate Nowruz, the Kurdish New Year and a holiday across Iraq marking the start of spring.

While war and jihadist attacks have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Iraq in recent years, such accidents are relatively rare.

"It's a disaster, no one expected that," said a young man who had just managed to reach the shore. "There were a lot of people on the boat, especially women and children," he said.

A Mosul security source said the high water levels and overcrowding on the boat, with well over 100 people on board, had been to blame for the disaster.

The health ministry put the death toll at 77 after the interior ministry's spokesman Saad Maan said the victims included 19 children, with 55 people rescued.

"The boat sank because there were too many passengers on board," another security official based in Mosul said.

The health ministry said earlier that 33 women were among those who drowned. Iraq's justice ministry said it had ordered the arrest of nine ferry company officials and banned the owners of the vessel and the tourist site from leaving the country.

The authorities had warned people to be cautious after several days of heavy rains led to water being released through the Mosul dam, causing the river level to rise.

Videos shared on social media showed a fast-flowing, bloated river and dozens of people in the water floating in the water or trying to swim around the partly submerged boat.By PTI

TIJUANA: US Border Patrol agents on Thursday fired tear gas at Central American migrants attempting to cross the border from the Mexican city of Tijuana, AFP journalists saw.

A group of migrants, including children, used an improvised rope to try to scale fencing installed on the beach between Tijuana and San Diego, California -- but were forced back with tear gas, which agents had not deployed since January 1.

An AFP journalist witnessed only one migrant cross the border, where he was immediately detained.

It marked the third time in a week that a group of Central Americans had tried to cross the border to ask for asylum on the grounds their lives were threatened by violence at home.

On the first occasion, a week ago, around 50 people made it across, with about 10 more crossing on Tuesday.

All were detained by authorities.

"Someone brought them here, they train them because they know that upon crossing they must ask for asylum and that way they won't be deported and they have to be processed according to US laws," said one Tijuana policeman, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak.

Last November, hundreds of Central Americans that arrived from Honduras as part of a large caravan tried to cross en masse -- but only a few succeeded as the crowd was met with tear gas.

In recent months, thousands of Central Americans have arrived in Mexico in several caravans in the hope of finding a better life in the United States.

US President Donald Trump has branded such migrants a threat to national security, demanding billions of dollars from Congress to build a wall on the southern US border.By PTI

NEW DELHI: Pakistan on Friday said a key takeaway from recent developments was that a lack of engagement creates "dangerous vacuum and serious risks" for Indo-Pak ties, and hoped that the "long winter" in bilateral relations would come to an early end.

Pakistan High Commissioner to India Sohail Mahmood, in his remarks at a reception here on the eve of Pakistan's National Day, said the release of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, return of the two High Commissioners to their respective Missions, and bilateral meetings on Kartarpur Corridor "are steps in a positive direction".

Coercive measures have not worked in the past and will not work in the future, he said and added diplomacy and dialogue remain indispensable for enhancing mutual understanding, addressing mutual concerns, and resolving long-standing disputes including Jammu and Kashmir.

ALSO READ | India won't send any representative to Pakistan National Day: MEA

The Pakistani envoy also claimed that in the fight against the scourge of terrorism, his country has "turned a corner".

"There is a real transformation underway in Pakistan," he claimed. His remarks come amid Pakistan facing intense pressure from the global community to act against the terror sanctuaries operating from its soil.

A relationship based on sovereign equality, mutual respect and mutual interest is the best guarantee for a peaceful and prosperous future, the envoy said.

"We do hope the long winter in India-Pakistan relations would come to an early end. The founding fathers of Pakistan and India had envisaged amicable relations between the two countries. However, the relationship has remained challenged, for the most part of our history as free nations. In particular, the two countries passed through a very difficult time recently," he said.

"Prime Minister Imran Khan's decision to release Wing Commander Abhinandan, return of the two High Commissioners to their respective Missions, and bilateral meetings to develop modalities for operationalisation of the Kartarpur Corridor are steps in a positive direction," Mahmood said.

Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after Indian Air Force fighter jets bombed terror group JeM 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 Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama in which 40 soldiers were killed.WASHINGTON, March 20 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Department of Defense said Wednesday it had launched an internal probe to determine whether acting defense chief Patrick Shanahan is biased toward Boeing, where he had worked for over 30 years.

"The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General has decided to investigate complaints we recently received that Acting Secretary Patrick Shanahan allegedly took actions to promote his former employer, Boeing, and disparage its competitors, allegedly in violation of ethics rules," Pentagon Inspector General spokesperson Dwrena Allen said in a statement.

"In his recent Senate Armed Services Committee testimony, Acting Secretary Shanahan stated that he supported an investigation into these allegations. We have informed him that we have initiated this investigation," the statement said.

The probe came after activist group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics filed a complaint earlier this month alleging Shanahan is biased toward Boeing and against Lockheed Martin, both major defense manufacturers.

Shanahan spokesman Lt. Col. Joseph Buccino said Shanahan supports the investigations, saying that Shanahan's ethics agreement "ensures any matters pertaining to Boeing are handled by appropriate officials within the Pentagon to eliminate any perceived or actual conflict of interest issue with Boeing."

Shanahan, 56, became the Deputy Secretary of Defense on July 19, 2017, and was made acting defense chief in Jan.1, 2019 after former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis left.

Prior to his post in the Pentagon, Shanahan worked in Boeing from 1986 to 2017.Reporter

Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk).Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.One of Editor & Publishers 10 That Do It Right 2021Italian President Sergio Mattarella reacts during a joint interview with Xinhua and other Chinese media in Rome, capital of Italy, March 19, 2019. The partnership between Italy and China is built on solid foundations, Italian President Sergio Mattarella said in an interview. (Xinhua/Italian Presidential Press Office)

ROME, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The partnership between Italy and China is built on solid foundations, Italian President Sergio Mattarella told Xinhua in an interview ahead of a state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries, and this partnership is "built on solid foundations, inspired by natural convergences between two very ancient civilizations," said Mattarella, who paid a state visit to China two years ago.

Mattarella ascribed the positive achievements in bilateral relations to efficient intergovernmental dialogue and the "growing and fruitful interaction between our peoples, who are so similar in terms of industriousness and creativity."

Both China and Italy recognize that "uniting the efforts of the entire international community is needed to successfully face the main challenges of our time, from the safeguarding of peace and stability, fighting climate change, to enacting the agenda for inclusive and sustainable development," Mattarella noted.

Xi's visit, which starts Thursday, is an expression of the "solidity of the bond and the mutual respect" between Italy and China, he said.

"I believe there could be no better way to celebrate the eve of the important anniversary (our two countries) will share in 2020, which will mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations," Mattarella said.

The Italian president said that economic and trade relations "play a key role" in Italy-China ties, and that the consistently growing trade, business cooperation and mutual investments "confirm the trust on which our relations are based."

"Italy sees China not only as an economic partner of prime importance, but also as a driver of global trade," Mattarella said, adding that Italy has experience, advanced technology and solutions in various sectors, such as energy, environmental protection, sustainable urbanization, machinery manufacture, food security, health services and geriatric care.

To promote trade relations, the two sides should create "a context that is as open and transparent as possible," in which economic players from the two countries can act "on an equal basis" and "in a mutually free and balanced way," he said.

The two sides must "favor access to their respective markets while protecting investments and intellectual property, as well as the vital principles and standards of social, economic and environmental sustainability," Mattarella added.

On the cultural front, noted the president, the heritage of both Italy and China "arouses admiration everywhere in the world" and this heritage could be a great development driver.

Calling for the "promotion and valorization of each other's cultural and creative industries," Mattarella said "these dynamics must be facilitated, so they can realize their enormous potential."

He specifically referred to the mechanism of forging twinning relationships between the two countries' World Heritage Sites.

The two sides, he said, will soon announce the pairing up of Italy's Vineyard Landscape of Langhe-Roero and Monferrato and China's Honghe Hani Rice Terraces, as well as the establishment of sister-city relationship between Italy's Verona and China's Hangzhou.

As for people-to-people exchanges within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, the president said that Italy not only participates in building the new Silk Road, but hopes to turn it into a path for better mutual understanding.

More Chinese tourists are coming to visit Italy, the two countries are hosting more students from each other, and joint research programs are increasing between the two countries' universities, added Mattarella.

Speaking of how the Italy-China partnership contributes to a better and more stable world, the president said that Italy is committed to safeguarding peace and rules-based multilateralism, and is pleased to see the two sides have consensus on that.

He suggested that in order to better understand each other's positions and concerns, Italy and China carry out "continuous dialogue" within frameworks such as the Group of Twenty and the United Nations.

In addition, both countries "are committed ... to promoting the UN 2030 Agenda and fighting climate change, a challenge in which China has a growing decisive role, and in which Italy is ready to make its contribution," Mattarella said.

"There can be no peace without development, social justice, and protection of the environment," said the president.Chief Executive Carrie Lam today met visiting Kaohsiung City Mayor Han Kuo-yu and hosted a lunch for him at Government House.

Secretary for Constitutional & Mainland Affairs Patrick Nip and Acting Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Bernard Chan were also present.

Mrs Lam welcomed Mr Han's first trip to Hong Kong after his assumption of office to attend an agricultural product promotion event later today and conduct other visits.

She pointed out Hong Kong and Taiwan are major trading partners with frequent trade, economic and people-to-people exchanges.

Hong Kong is an international financial, trade, transportation and logistics centre, Mrs Lam said, adding many Taiwanese enterprises have established a presence here, covering financial services, innovation and technology, catering and consumer products, to leverage Hong Kong's advantages to open up the Mainland and overseas markets.

The Chief Executive said she welcomes more high-quality agricultural and fisheries products to be exported from Kaohsiung to Hong Kong, or re-exported via Hong Kong to other places in the future.

She hoped Mr Han's visit will boost exchanges between Hong Kong and Kaohsiung, presenting more room for co-operation.(Newser)  The Kansas ACLU wants to know why a black man was detained by police while he was moving into his new house late at night. Police stopped Karle Robinson, 61, as he was carrying a large-screen television into the house. He was handcuffed outside for 8 minutes last August, the Kansas City Star reports. Tonganoxie police have said they had reason to think a crime was taking place. After watching the video, the police chief said officers did nothing wrong. The ACLU said that it's a case of "moving while black" and that Robinson, a military veteran, tried to file a complaint in writing with police but was stopped by the chief. Robinson says officers have regularly followed him, parked in front of his house, and driven by since that night.

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"Each of these incidents would be concerning had they been alleged independently," the ACLU said in a statement. "Together, they suggest a pervasive culture of racial bias." The ACLU asked the state attorney general to investigate. Police Chief Greg Lawson told the AP that the ACLU's letter to the attorney general "contains multiple accusations that are inaccurate" but didn't elaborate. He did say that his department has cooperated with the ACLU and Robinson and would cooperate with a state investigation. Census figures show 97% of Tonganoxie residents are white. "I'd like to see those cops and that chief lose their jobs, because this was uncalled for," Robinson tells the AP. "This is strictly racial profiling." (Read more ACLU stories.)(Newser)  Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed about President Trump's trade policy that was routine in everything but the byline: Robert Porter. That would be the same Rob Porter who lost his job as a White House official last year when allegations of physical abuse surfaced from two ex-wives. In the Washington Post, one of those exes, Jennie Willoughby, has written an op-ed expressing her unhappiness with the development. It's not that she thinks Porter must be banished from public life forever, she writes. But Willoughby finds it disturbing that he has re-emerged so quickly without addressing how he behaved in his two marriages or expressing any public regret.

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"I don't claim to have all the answers for what happens now," writes Willoughby. "But the matter-of-fact way Rob has reappeared can't be right." She acknowledges that the idea of atonement in this kind of a situation is complicated. "Is there life after disgrace?" she wonders. The answer can be yes, but it takes work. We "feel the truth when someone openly walks a path toward healing," she writes, but Porter seems not to have taken even the first step. Everybody loves a "redemption story," Willoughby concludes, but "true redemption is not a given. It is earned." (Click to read her full column.)(Newser)  After a big Brexit development Thursday, only one thing is clear: Brexit will not happen on March 29, as has long been scheduled. Beyond that, things get a little confusing. The European Union agreed to postpone the UK's exit from the union next Friday because UK lawmakers have not been able to agree on an exit strategy, reports the BBC. The next steps:

March 29: This is now off the table as a date for Brexit to happen.

This is now off the table as a date for Brexit to happen. Vote next week: Parliament will vote on Theresa May's exit plan. (They've already rejected it twice.)

Parliament will vote on Theresa May's exit plan. (They've already rejected it twice.) If it's a yes: If lawmakers approve May's plan, Brexit would occur on May 22 .

If lawmakers approve May's plan, Brexit would occur on . If it's a no: If lawmakers reject May's plan a third time, the UK must present a new plan to the EU by April 12, per the AP. This scenario increases the chances that the UK would be forced to exit with no plan at all, a chaotic alternative that all sides are trying to avoid.

(Read more Brexit stories.)(Newser)  Medieval kings have sparked a legal battle between beer titans. MillerCoors is suing Anheuser-Busch over a "misleading," minute-long Super Bowl ad emphasizing the use of corn syrup in making both Coors Light and Miller Lite. The ad shows Bud Light's "king" visiting his fellow monarchs at Miller Lite and Coors Light castles, attempting to find the owner of corn syrup mistakenly delivered to him. Coors Light's king finally says, "Looks like the corn syrup has come home to be brewed. To be clear, we brew Coors Light with corn syrup." The ad is actually far from clear, suggesting corn syrup is a beer ingredient, and perhaps the only one, according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in a Wisconsin federal court, per the New York Times. MillerCoors says yeast breaks down corn syrup in the fermentation process so none remains in beer sold.

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Yet Anheuser-Busch hoped to deceive consumers because focus groups show they equate corn syrup with high-fructose corn syrup, which is linked to obesity, according to the suit, which also alleges misuse of trademarks, per CNBC. MillerCoors is seeking an injunction to stop the airing of the ad and a trial by jury. "Anheuser-Busch is fearmongering over a common beer ingredient that's used, by the way, in many of its own beers as a fermentation aid," says MillerCoors' VP of communications, per the Times. His counterpart at Anheuser-Busch, which reportedly uses corn syrup in Stella Artois Cidre and Busch Light, only stresses that Miller Lite and Coors Light are brewed with corn syrup, while Bud Light is brewed with rice. "We stand behind the Bud Light transparency campaign and have no plans to change the advertising," she says. (Read more beer stories.)(Newser)  The president's son-in-law is up to date with technology but possibly not with the Presidential Records Act. House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said Thursday that a lawyer for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner told him that Kushner, a White Houser adviser, used the encrypted messaging service WhatsApp for official business, the New York Times reports. That included contacts with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Cummings said lawyer Abbe Lowell also told him during a December meeting that Ivanka Trump was still receiving email relating to official White House business on a private email account and she wasn't consistently forwarding them to her White House account, reports the Washington Post.

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Cummings said in a letter to the White House that the conduct Lowell described raises serious "security and federal records concerns," reports the AP. The Oversight Committee is demanding documents relating to the communications of Kushner and other officials and Cummings, a Democrat, might issue subpoenas if they are not received by April 4, Politico reports. Lowell, however, disputed Cummings' account of the meeting. In a letter Thursday, Lowell said Ivanka Trump now "always forwards official business to her White House account" and Kushner preserves WhatsApp conversations by taking screenshots and sending them to his White House account. Lowell also said he never told lawmakers that Kushner had used WhatsApp to communicate with foreign leaders. (Read more Ivanka Trump stories.)Automation is turning Chinas Port of Qingdao, Shandong Province into an unmanned terminal, reducing the pressure on human labor and contributing to high-quality development of the country.

Photo taken on Mar.18, 2019 shows the Huangdao oil terminal and Qianwan ore terminal at the Port of Qingdao and the streets in Qingdao West Coast New Area beside the two terminals. (Photo/Peoples Daily Online)

A few years ago, when Wang Yang, a young bridge crane operator started his career in the Port of Qingdao, his daily routine was lifting cargos up and down in a bridge crane 40 meters above the ground. He had to lower his head for a dozen hours each day for operation.

What he endured back then was not only the sweats, but also the loneliness in the operation room that covered less than 3 square meters.

When can we work with our heads up? That has been a dream for generations of workers like Wang.

Finally, the dream came true for Wang and his colleagues today. Now the Port of Qingdao has established a fully automated container terminal, where the previous bridge crane operators have turned into remote monitoring personnel.

The fully automated Qingdao Qianwan Container Terminal is now a no mans zone. From a 60-meter-high crane, it can be seen that autopilot electric vehicles are transporting cargos in an orderly manner, and the hoisting equipment are operating rapidly at the stacking area automatically.

Wang now works at an office building far from the operating area, and he can finally keep his uniform clean in the new working environment. He has transformed from a manual laborer that had to endure harsh working conditions to an employee that works in front of a computer.

Now, the workload that used to need more than 60 people at a traditional port can be completed by only nine. Thanks to the great changes in the port, the blue-collar workers have become the commanders that control the brain of the terminal.

The change of the working content reflects the transformation of the production mode.

The development of ports indicates that in the old days, manpower always had to take the most strenuous part of the jobs, be it loaders or mechanical operators.

However, the situation is totally different today. All the procedures are automated at the unmanned port. An average of 33.1 units can be handled each hour, a performance way better than that of a traditional port.

Photo taken on Mar.8, 2019 shows cargo vessels work at the foreign trade container terminal of the Port of Qingdao, east Chinas Shandong province. (Photo/Peoples Daily Online)

At present, operation instructions are sent by computers, and tasks completed by robots. What the unmanned port relies on are the new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), intelligent control, information management, communications and navigation, big data, and cloud computing.

The practice of the Port of Qingdao has demonstrated that container terminals, though long been regarded as a typical traditional industry, can achieve deep integration with new impetus, new technologies, and new forms of business.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee stressed during his visit to the Tianjin port that the city should aim for the far-off future in its efforts to develop the port into a world-class smart and green port, noting that a country must enhance its transportation, especially sea transportation, before seeking economic development and improvement in national strength.

While liberating workers from intense physical work is the direct consequence of an unmanned port, the updates of technologies and the improvement in production mode mean more to the port itself.

From physical work to intelligence, and from manual skills to machinery operation, the ports path to automation driven by scientific and technological development has contributed solutions to the transition in which traditional drivers are replaced by new ones.

Only by fostering new driving forces and upgrading traditional engines to realize self-revolutionary development, can a world-class smart port be built and high-quality economic development realized.

Hard work is the foundation of development and innovation is crucial. More than 40 patents were applied during the construction of the fully automated container terminal. The engineering has proven that the courage and capability to innovate, and to throw off the shackles of traditional knowledge and position are necessities for seeking development, and its clear that in order to pursue development, enterprises need to make courageous breakthroughs so as to overtake their competitors.

In February, the Port of Qingdao was invited to attend the Press Conference for the Worlds First 5G Smart Harbour during the 2019 Mobile World Congress (MWC) held in Barcelona, Spain. By sharing and promoting its experiences in technology application and smart harbor development, the port won extensive recognition and praise.

During Peoples Dailys interview at the Port of Qingdao, the smart terminal was also visited by a group of artificial intelligence experts from Germany. It is learned that such foreign technological exchanges have already become a routine for the port.

A slogan in the office building of the port says that innovation defines the future, which makes the smart terminal more like a tech firm.

Indeed, the evolving technological advances and innovative ideas are what support the attempt of the port to transform labor-intensive production to one that is driven by science and technology. In addition, they are also the source of the ports tireless exploration of the future

Seeking new possibilities with innovation and intelligence, once will always find a road leading to a better future.(Newser)  Pennsylvania woman Sara Packer shared horrific details of the rape, murder, and dismemberment of her adopted daughter in a courtroom Wednesdayand the AP reports that she "appeared to smirk at times." Packer admitted that she hated 14-year-old Grace Packer and "wanted her to go away," reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. She said after "giving up" on the child, she drugged her and watched as boyfriend Jacob Sullivan punched her in the face and raped her. She said she told her daughter during the attack: "I can't help you anymore. This is now your life. The couple then bound her, put a ball gag in her mouth, and left her to die in a closet in the hot attic of a Quakertown home. Packer testified that when they returned the next day to discover Grace had broken free from the zip ties, Sullivan strangled her.

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"Grace had become, for lack of a better word, a non-entity," Packer said "She just didn't exist anymore." They stored the body in kitty litter for months after the July 2016 murder, then dismembered it with a bow saw and dumped the remains in woods 75 miles away. Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub told Packera former county adoptions supervisorthat she was an "utter and miserable failure" as a human being. Packer, who pleaded guilty to murder last month in exchange for a life sentence, was testifying at a sentencing hearing for Sullivan. A jury will decide whether he is sentenced to death or life without the possibility of parole. In a letter read at the hearing, Grace's brother Josh urged adults to do more to prevent child abuse. "Watch out for all the kids so that a loss like Grace's loss never happens again," he wrote. "Do your best to help kids who can't help themselves." (Read more child murder stories.)/

They Say Their Layover at the Beach Turned Into a Nightmare

Jane Does 1 and 2 are suing JetBlue, 2 pilots after allegedly being drugged, raped(Newser)  Two American service members were killed during an operation in Afghanistan on Friday, US and NATO forces said, providing no other details on the combat deaths. The fatalities, which bring to four the number of US soldiers killed so far this year in Afghanistan, underscore the difficulties in bringing peace to the war-wrecked country even as Washington has stepped up efforts to find a way to end the 17-year war, America's longest. The US and NATO Resolute Support mission said the names of the service members killed in action are being withheld until after notification of the next of kin, in accordance with US Department of Defense policy, the AP reports.

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The statement also did not specify the location of the combat or say who the soldiers were fighting. "The incident is under investigation and we have no additional information to provide," said Sgt. 1st Class Debra Richardson, a Resolute Support spokeswoman. There are about 14,000 US forces in Afghanistan, supporting embattled Afghan forces as they struggle on two frontsfacing a resurgent Taliban that now holds sway over almost half the country and also the ISIS affiliate, which has sought to expand its footprint in Afghanistan even as its self-proclaimed "caliphate" has crumbled in Syria and Iraq. (Last year, a Utah mayor was killed in a Kabul attack.)(Newser)  The reason, at least, is sound: Indonesia's national airline is seeking to cancel a $4.9 billion order of Boeing 737 Max 8 jets, citing a lack of passenger confidence in the model involved in two crashes in five months that killed everyone aboard both planes. "Continuing the Max order does not benefit Garuda [Indonesia]," says spokesman Ikhsan Rosan, per the New York Times. "Our passengers, psychologically, they don't trust flying with Max anymore." Whether the airline can in fact cancel the order of 49 jets is another matter. Ikhsan admits it's hard to get out of such an agreement, though there's the possibility that "we change to another model  still from Boeing." Alternatives are to be discussed with Boeing executives in Jakarta on Thursday. Boeing says it won't comment on "customer discussions," per CNN. (Read more Boeing stories.)(Newser)  The relationship between the Koreas has taken another step backward after the collapse of the President Trump-Kim Jong Un summit. South Korean officials say North Korea has pulled out of a joint liaison office set up months ago, reports Reuters. The office was set up after a summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in last year, and the North's withdrawal is a major setback for Moon, the AP reports. South Korea's Unification Ministry says it was told staff would be pulled from the office on the orders of "higher-level" authorities, who did not confirm whether the withdrawal would be temporary or permanent. The move follows Thursday's US blacklisting of two Chinese shipping firms for alleged sanctions-busting.

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The opening of the office in the North Korean border city of Kaesong in September was seen as a major step forward that would allow officials from the two countries to communicate regularly for the first time since the Korean War. Seoul has urged North Korea to return to the office as soon as possible, though analysts say the South Korean people are pessimistic about the outlook. "Many started to believe, that after 70 years of false hope, this time would be different," writes BBC correspondent Laura Bicker. "But North Korea is now walking away from the pledges it made and this latest development will be seen by many as a sign that peace is once again a distant prospect." (Read more North Korea stories.)(Newser)  A 24-year-old Australian woman's flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles earlier this year might end up wrecking her life. Adau Akui Atem Mornyang could get up to 21 years in prison after being convicted of assaulting a flight attendant on her United Airlines flight in January, reports the Australian. During the flight, an apparently intoxicated Mornyang began shouting racial slurs, flailing her arms, and generally disturbing other passengers, then slapped a male flight attendant across the face when he tried to intervene, says the US Justice Department in a news release.

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Air marshals aboard the flight restrained Mornyang in the rear of the plane until it landed. A jury in LA found her guilty of interference with a flight crew and misdemeanor assault. A court affidavit says she responded to being restrained by saying she was a "strong black woman" who was being singled out for abuse. Crew members had served her two glasses of wine and later found an empty wine bottle by her seat. Mornyang, a native of South Sudan who works as a model, made headlines two years ago when she spoke publicly about being raped, reports NBC News. She became known as an advocate for rape victims, particularly in her native country. (Read more air travel stories.)(Newser)  Charlottesville, Virginia, site of the 2017 white nationalist rally that left a counter-protester dead, is now dealing with another high-profile racial issue. The city school district closed all schools Thursday and Friday after an online threat emerged against black and Latino students, reports the Daily Progress. After a post on the 4chan forum Wednesday warned white students to stay home from Charlottesville High School to avoid a mass shooting, the district closed all schools as a cautionary move. On Friday, police arrested a 17-year-old male, and he now faces felony charges over the online threat, reports NBC News.

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He has not been identified, and police have not said whether he is a student at the high school. In a separate development, the Albermarle County Police Department also arrested a teen over online threats made to Albermarle High School. (Charlottesville is located within Albermarle County.) These threats emerged after the ones in Charlottesville, and police said they are exploring whether it was a copycat incident. Albermarle did not close its schools, but all had an increased police presence on Friday. (Read more Charlottesville, Va. stories.)(Newser)  Those watching the livestream of morning mass at Canada's largest church on Friday saw a jarring scene: Police say an assailant went to the altar of Saint Joseph's Oratory in Montreal and stabbed the 77-year-old Catholic priest, Father Claude Grou, reports NBC News. Churchgoers then interrupted the assault, reports the Montreal Gazette. The church says Grou suffered only superficial wounds to his upper body and will be OK. Meanwhile, a 26-year-old suspect is in custody, and police were questioning him. They have not speculated about a motive.

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A witness tells the Gazette that a man stood up during the service and went behind the altar to where Grou was standing. "No one was sure what exactly was happening and I saw the priest move a bit, farther away from this person, says Philip Barrett. The man struck the priest, causing him to fall. "Then, suddenly, people reacted and went toward the front of the church. The church is a major tourist attraction in Canada, drawing about 2 million visitors per year, per NBC. (Read more Catholic priest stories.)(Newser)  The Robert Mueller report is in. And while we won't know details for a while, one big one has leaked: The special counsel seeks no new indictments, reports the Washington Post and the New York Times. Mueller on Friday officially wrapped up his nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election by submitting his report to Attorney General William Barr. The attorney general will now review it and summarize the findings for Congress, reports Politico. How much, if any, is released to the public is up to Barr. Mueller has been investigating whether anyone in President Trump's orbit cooperated with Russians during the campaign and whether Trump obstructed justice. Earlier Friday, Trump again criticized the Mueller inquiry, declaring "there was no collusion, there was no obstructioneverybody knows it. It's all a big hoax."

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Barr told the leaders of the House and Senate judiciary panels in a letter that he was "reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend." Barr said he would consult with Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein and Mueller to determine how much of the report will be released to Congress and the public. "I remain committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review," Barr wrote. Mueller has secured numerous convictions during his inquiryincluding that of Trump's former campaign chief, Paul Manafortthough none was related to the election meddling, "leaving the question at the heart of the special counsels probe unanswered," per the Hill. (Read more Robert Mueller stories.)Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Intermittent snow showers, especially early. High near 0F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of snow 60%. Snow accumulations less than one inch..

Tonight

Scattered snow showers during the evening. Then partly to mostly cloudy overnight. Low -7F. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 30%.Chinese company COSCO SHIPPING Ports Limited is contributing efforts to the construction of an Italian port, lifting capacity for the terminal and creating win-win results, as Chinas Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) continues expanding its global influence.

The photo shows a bird's-eye view the container terminal of the Vado Ligure port. (Photo by Vado Holding B.V)

The Port of Vado Ligure, 140 kilometers away from Italys industrial powerhouse Turin and 190 kilometers away from Milan, enjoys ideal geographical location. It is of vital importance for the economic development of northern Italy.

In October, 2016, the COSCO SHIPPING Ports Limited officially joined the construction and operation of a new container terminal at the Port of Vado Ligure, after reaching an agreement with Vado Holding B.V.

The terminal, upon completion, will become Italys first automated container terminal, and also the first one built in the recent three decades in the country.

Currently, the construction of the container terminal is in full swing. Gantry cranes and quay cranes have been installed and started operation, and the bridge cranes are also ready for use.

Site manager of Vado Holding Bruno told Peoples Daily that nearly 80 percent of the project had been completed, and the first berth is expected to be put into use before the end of this year. The new terminal will have a quay that is 700 meters long, with an annual handling capacity of 860,000 TEUs, Bruno said, adding that it can berth the largest vessel in the world.

A constructor (left) receives an interview from Peoples Daily at the construction site of the container terminal. (Photo by Vado Holding B.V)

According to Wang Yuqiu, vice-general manager of Vado Holding, the maximum capacity of surrounding terminals was 8,800 TEUs due to the limited channel depth and headroom. He introduced that the new terminal would be able to berth 20,000-TEU vessels, expanding the original cargo structure of the port that used to center with fruits.

With the inflow of other commodities such as industrial products and daily necessities, the cargo supply structure of the port will be largely diversified, Wang added.

After inspecting at the construction site, Vado Holdings general manager Paolo Cornetto received an interview from Peoples Daily. He said that the advanced equipment and operation system brought by the Chinese enterprise offered powerful technical support for the Italian side to construct its first automated container terminal. The new terminal would create nearly 400 jobs for local community, he added.

Since the start of the China-Italy cooperation, the operation of the Vado Holding witnessed continuous improvement. Last year, the companys profit went up by 16 percent.

Cornetto was very pleased to see the new development of the company, saying the Chinese management team shared valuable experiences in construction and operation. We have the same goal, and the cooperation is energetic. Everyone is actively facing challenges and focusing on their jobs, he said.

In a sense, the cooperation between China and Italy on the construction of the Vado port is collaboration between the strong, and our clients are also expecting the cooperation to bring new changes to the port, Cornetto told Peoples Daily.

The BRI enhanced connectivity among countries along the route, and facilitated social and economic development, said Cornetto, believing that the Vado port would play a more important role in the initiative.

Paolo Emilio Signorini, president of the Port Authority of the Port of Genoa, noted that Chinese investment endowed the Vado Ligure port with a new look. Thanks to the COSCO fleet, more and more cargos were entering the port, which further facilitated the development of local logistics industry, created more jobs, and injected impetus to the economy of Genoa, he said.

The construction of the Vado Ligure port is an important part to improve the supply chain in northern Italy, Switzerland and southern Germany, and the port will possess a vital strategic position in the Liguria region, greatly improving the efficiency of the terminals. said Giovanni Toti, president of Liguria.

We hope to make more contributions to the construction of the Belt and Road, he told Peoples Daily.

The first batch of equipment purchased by the container terminal arrives at the port, December, 2018. (Photo by Vado Holding B.V)

In the future, most of the cargos imported via the Vado Ligure port will be transported by rail to northern Italy, Germany and Switzerland.

I hope that the port can be connected with the China-Europe freight trains so that the cargos imported via the port can be shipped to central and western Europe, central Asia and China by land. In addition, the cargos transported by the freight service can also be transferred to the port and be shipped to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, Wang told Peoples Daily.

If so, the Vado Ligure port will not only serve as a new gate for central and southern Europe, but also a channel to enhance the regions trade relations with Africa.

Apart from the Vado Ligure container terminal, other ports in Trieste on the Adriatic Sea, in Venice and Ravenna are also beefing up cooperation with Chinese enterprises.

Italy issued its fifth annual report on blue economy last June, pointing out that the transportation route of Asian trade was gradually becoming a leading force for global trade under the promotion of the Belt and Road construction.

The competitiveness of the Mediterranean ports was rising together with their elevating importance, the report said.Rarely a week passes without hearing about a new type of robot created in Japan. Every other country of the world is wondering how Japan has managed to become a leading technological power.

The answer is simple, yet extremely complex. All technological advancements that Japan has made among time were a solution to the problems that the country and its population were facing. Japan was one of the first countries to understand the true power of technology and has embraced its benefits. Therefore, the country has started to invest in technological innovation early in time. That is how nowadays Japan is qualified as one of the most powerful tech giants all over the world. High-tech Japan has brought the best technology to casinos too, as you can see on the BONS website by spending your free time there!

Fast infrastructure

Perhaps the most well-known aspect of the technological innovation which can be found in Japan is its fast infrastructure. The first high-speed train, or so-called bullet train, was built in Japan. The line was built between two massive hubs, Tokyo and Osaka, and was inaugurated in 1964. The high-speed train has carried around 10 billion riders since its inauguration and has an incontestable record of safety as there have not been any fatal derailments or collisions. Moreover, the average delay of the high-speed train is 36 seconds. The so-called Shinkansen is not only an outstanding symbol of Japan's technological innovation and efficiency, but it has also brought notable benefits to the economy of the country. As only 20 percent of the country's land is habitable, the high-speed train was an amazing solution for workers to live in distant areas and easily commute to the metropolis such as Tokyo in just a few hours. Also, another benefit which Japan has received is the booming tourism. Tourists who often come to large cities are more likely to visit also relatively underdeveloped areas increasing the local economy in those places.

Workforce automation

In the last several years, robots have become a must-have solution to the chronic labor shortage. Japan's overall population has started to decline rapidly which has created a problem in the labor market. Nowadays, robots which are able to perform jobs in almost every industry have become a must. Studies show that right now, 49 percent of the Japanese jobs are automatable. The job vacancies at its highest require Japan to either accept large numbers of immigrants or rely on automation. Therefore, Japan's combination of artificial intelligence and robots is the answer to the rapidly shrinking labor force. Workforce automation has completely redefined human labor and work style in some services and industries. While some countries are worrying that automation can negatively impact the need for the human workforce and have tremendous consequences on the population and overall economy, for Japan it was a necessity well embraced. Workforce automation did not only help the country to cover the human workforce that was needed. But it has also helped the employees to work more productively and efficiently. For example, repetitive manufacturing tasks, as well as lifting heavy materials in the construction industry do no longer affect the employees with the help of a robotic arm. Moreover, business automation with robots and artificial intelligence triggers improved product quality and productivity which allows companies to stay ahead of their competition. Therefore, the association of Japanas labor force with robotics has brought success and large gains in industrial productivity.

Automation boosts wages and economic growth

Although the process of Japanas workforce automation has started as a solution to a problem, evidence shows that it has brought the country unexpected economic growth. The continued advance of robotics and artificial intelligence boost the economy of Japan. Although the shrinking labor force would be expected to lead to a substantial decline in labor shares, rising inequality, and unemployment, automation could boost wages and economic growth. By filling the labor gap, robotics and AI brings higher outputs and greater income by eliminating the need for replacement of the human workforce and through increased productivity.

Environmental problems solved with technological advancements

There is no doubt that nowadays, every country is dealing with heavy environmental problems. From global warming to extreme heavy pollution and extreme weather changes are all affecting countries from all over the world. However, Japan struggled with two major environmental problems for a long time which has influenced them to seek solutions for them with technology innovations. Heavy air pollution and extreme meteorological phenomena such as earthquakes and tsunamis are the most common environmental issues that Japan is facing. However, once again, the country is relying on technology innovation to help its population deal easier with those conditions. Japan was one of the first countries to implement regulations and approaches for environmental concerns. In order to reduce air pollution and secure the health and safety of its citizens, diesel vehicles whose emission levels were not conforming to the standards were prohibited in traffic. Automation was heavy introduced in the production of electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles to meet the demand of the population for those low-emission cars.

Also, the country has frequently faced environmental phenomena which have caused various hazards. Numerous earthquakes and tsunamis have destroyed thousands of properties and buildings living the country and the population in despair. However, Japan has understood that as Mother Nature cannot be controlled, it needs to find a solution to reduce the consequences of these conditions that the country is exposed to often. Therefore, the construction industry has been significantly improved with automation and robotics to increase its productivity in case of the consequences of natural disasters will hit the country again. Automated building construction systems have been developed in many Japanese companies to increase the speed of the construction works and for improved productivity.

In the last several years, Japan has undoubtedly become a leader in innovation and technology. Japan's progress in automation, use of robots, and integration of artificial intelligence with daily living is likely to continue to thrive better than in many other advanced economies. It is a fascinating country which has become a technological superpower being focused on the scope for revolutionary development.The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has urged Nigerians to be cautious of information they divulged to people on the social me...

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has urged Nigerians to be cautious of information they divulged to people on the social media and other ICT platforms.









Mr Jide Azeez, of the Consumer Advocacy Group of the NCC, gave the advice during the agencys 104thconsumer outreach programme held in Ado-Ekiti on Thursday.









Azeez spoke on the topic-Mitigating Effects of Cyber-crime: Role of Telecom Users.









According to him, there is a need for consumers to avoid frivolous discussion with unknown individuals on social media platforms.









It is the best way not to fall into hands of fraudsters, he said.









The regulatory agency noted that the menace of cyber theft has wreaked havoc on many Nigerians, making them lose valuable property and money to fraudsters.









The fraudsters used information and communication telecommunication infrastructure to defraud innocent citizens.









They also attack consumers on social media, a website where consumers carry out financial transactions by using credit/debit cards. Our mobile devices and computers are the targets of yahoo boys.









Users must be aware that this fraud and attacks can emanate from any part of the world as long as the devices are connected to the global superhighway known as the internet.









We must always take precautions on our SIM cards, by not using preregistered cards. Follow guidelines on SIM replacement and where you lose your phone, or sim quickly contact your bank to stop transactions on the account, he said.









He said many Nigerians have lost their lives as a result of trauma caused by ICT fraudsters, saying consumers must protect their personal data from being stolen.









The Director, Consumer Affairs Bureau, Mrs Felicia Onwuegbuchulam, said the programme was packaged by NCC to inform and educate telecommunication users on how best to protect their lives.









Represented by the Deputy Director in the Department, Mr Ismail Adedigba, Onwuegbuchulam said the NCC would continue to take actions that would protect the rights and lives of consumers.









It is our belief that without consumers becoming aware of cyber-crime trends and making efforts to ensure the safe use of connected devices, cybercriminals will continue to make ICT space unsafe.









We are concerned about curtailing activities of dishonest people, who are bent on using ICT for illegal businesses and this awareness campaign is part of that strides to make consumers enjoy the fruits of their labour, she said.







BEIJING, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Italy, Monaco and France are the three legs of Chinese President Xi Jinping's first overseas trip this year.

Xi's state visits from March 21 to 26 are expected to boost the economic ties between China and the European countries.

Here are some facts and figures revealing the growing vitality of trade and investment between China and the countries as well as broader economic exchanges.

-- Bilateral trade between China and Italy hit a historical high of 54.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2018. China is Italy's largest trading partner in Asia, while Italy is China's fifth largest within the European Union.

-- Italy had invested 7.21 billion dollars in 5,937 projects in China by the end of last June.

-- Chinese investment in Italy has exceeded 11 billion dollars, mainly in the spheres of energy, high-end manufacturing, chemicals and sports.

-- Chinese tourists made a total of 1.8 million trips to Italy last year. Italy issued 15 percent more visas in China in 2018.

-- According to a recent report by the China Tourism Academy and the travel agency Ctrip, Italy was the second most popular European destination for Chinese tourists.

-- The volume of trade between China and Monaco surged 794.8 percent year-on-year to 127 million dollars between January and September 2018.

-- Monaco had invested 3.59 million dollars in 24 projects in China as of last August.

-- China has vowed to deepen cooperation with Monaco in environmental protection, climate change, clean energy, low carbon and wild animal protection, under the Belt and Road Initiative.

-- Bilateral trade between China and France exceeded 60 billion dollars in 2018, also a historical high.

-- China was the largest Asian trading partner of France as of last September, while France was China's fourth largest in the EU.

-- Two-way investment between China and France was also robust. French companies had invested 17.49 billion dollars in 5,647 projects in China as of November 2018, while China's investment in France reached 330 million dollars in the January-November period.

-- French investors in China prefer the energy, automobile, aviation, telecommunication and chemicals sectors.

-- China is one of the largest sources of tourists to France with a total of 2.3 million trips in 2018, an all-time high. French products, such as luxuries, cosmetics, food and liquor, have been popular among Chinese consumers.Breaking: Chief Raymond Dokpesi has been arrested at Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport on return from medical treatment /operation at the American Hospital Dubai. Reasons have not been given yet for the arrest. pic.twitter.com/I1QS2O06Wd

Dokpesi is standing trial for allegedly receiving N2.1 billion from the office of the national security adviser (NSA) for the media campaign of the PDP in the buildup to the 2015 elections.

Having said so, I must assure you that there is nothing like the much flaunted $2.1 billion dollars arms deal, it does not exist. Its a figment of the imagination of the current administration in an attempt to disseminate, misinform, destroy the very root of the PDP and you must stand, each and every one of you must stand for the Peoples Democratic Party, Dokpesi had said at a programme in Abuja.The Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai, has commended troops of Operation Lafiya Dole for displaying great valour in repelling ...

The Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai, has commended troops of Operation Lafiya Dole for displaying great valour in repelling Boko Haram insurgents attack in Michika, Adamawa State.









Buratai made the commendation during an operational visit to troops of 155 and 143 Task Force Battalion at Michika and Lassa.









Buratai, who was represented by Brig.-Gen. Bulama Biu, the Acting General Officer Commanding (GOC) 7 Division and Commander Sector I, Operation Lafiya Dole, said the troops successfully repelled an attempt by the insurgents to attack the community.









It was gathered that the insurgents, on March 18, attacked the only commercial bank building in the town and looted shops.









He said that the troops displayed a high sense of patriotism and gallantry in the defeat of the insurgents and prevented their robbery mission.









I am proud of you, the COAS is proud of you for your doggedness and commitment. We must also understand that this pure resilient, doggedness and focus must be up-scaled.









We must be prepared to always put up strong offensive so that they dont have any hiding place. The end of insurgents cannot come on its own, we must be all out and remain focused.









We have upscale our operations in all the Theatre and it is yielding many results. We have neutralised dozens of the terrorists and recovered many weapons in Northern Borno. There is no hiding place for the terrorist, he said.









The GOC, therefore, urged Commanders of the battalion to give purposeful leadership in order to achieve the desired goal of defeating Boko Haram.











The Coalition of United Political Parties has described the judgement delivered by the Osun State Election Petition Tribunal as a boost ...

The Coalition of United Political Parties has described the judgement delivered by the Osun State Election Petition Tribunal as a boost to the desire of the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, to reclaim his stolen mandate.









It described the judgement of the tribunal that declared Senator Ademola Adeleke of PDP as the winner of the governorship election in the state as a victory for democracy and an affirmation of the sanctity of the ballot.









The coalitions statement by its spokesperson, Imo Ugohinyere, was made available to journalists in Abuja on Friday.









Ugochinyere said, The tribunal has given hope to Nigerians with this courageous decision to sack the impostor governor who was foisted on the people of Osun State through the barrel of guns instead of the ballot.









The rampaging electoral robbery of the Muhammadu Buharis All Progressives Congress is beginning to crumble in their face with the determination of the judiciary to stand firm, despite monetary inducements and threats.







The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has announced decision to halt the rerun for the Niger state House Assembly electio...

The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has announced decision to halt the rerun for the Niger state House Assembly elections in Agaie constituency.





The Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) in the state, Prof. Sam Egwu, yesterday, issued a press statement declaring the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, candidate, Yahaya Abdullahi, as winner of the election.





INEC said its decision was sequel to the earlier declaration of the PDP candidate winner of the election by the returning officer, Prof. Musa Kolo.





The REC, in a statement he personally signed, said, the rerun in two units has been dropped after due consultations with stakeholders.





However, in a swift reaction, APC chairman, Eng. Mohammed Jibril Imam said the commissions decision declaring the PDP candidate winner was unacceptable.





He said INEC erred in declaring the PDP candidate winner of the election it earlier said was inconclusive.



The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has distributed sensitive materials across the 23 local government areas of Benue...

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has distributed sensitive materials across the 23 local government areas of Benue in readiness for Saturdays supplementary polls.









Mr Terkaa Andyarigeria, the INEC Public Relations Officer (PRO) in the state, disclosed this in a telephone interview in Makurdi.









It was gathered that the March 23 Governorship Supplementary Election will hold in 22 out of the 23 local government areas of the State.









The only local government area in the state where the governorship supplementary election will not be holding is Katsina-Ala.









However, the supplementary election for the state House of Assembly will hold in Katsina-Ala and nine other local government areas of the state.









Even where the supplementary elections will be taking place, not the entire local government areas will be participating, but only places where elections didnt take place at all or where elections were cancelled.















An aide of Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, Kenneth Opusingi, arrested by soldiers has been released. Opusingi is the Chairma...





An aide of Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, Kenneth Opusingi, arrested by soldiers has been released.





Opusingi is the Chairman, Rivers State Petroleum Taskforce whose wife, Mrs Opusingi, led other women on a peaceful protest to the headquarters of 6 Division of the Nigerian Army on Thursday, to demand for his freedom.





The freedom of Kenneth Opusingi from the barracks of the 6 Division of the Nigerian Army, was confirmed by his brother, HRH Hope Daminabo Dan Opusingi (JP), the Paramount ruler of the Opu-Kula in Kula of Akuku-Toru local government area in a press statement.





He, however, lamented that the joy of the family was short lived, as the governors aide has been transferred to the state Headquarters of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, SARS, in Port Harcourt.

He frowned at his detention at the SARS headquarters despite subsisting court orders granting him freedom. He has spent about a month in detention.





Kenneth Opusingi has just been released by the GOC 6 Division Nigeria Army and transferred to SARS after one month of his detention. This action of the GOC is in flagrant disobedience of the rule of law and court order on display, he stated.









He expressed appreciation to the National Youth Council of Nigeria, NYCN, Rivers state Chapter as a body, especially its women wing, the Chairman, Amb. Chijioke Ihunwo and the Hon. Akuro Tobins, Hon Commissioner for Youths for a successful protest.





Scores of women in solidarity with Mrs Kenneth Opusingi, and the Womens wing of hte National Youth Council of Nigeria, NYCN, Rivers state chapter, with its Chairman, Mr Chijioke Ihunwo, on Thursday staged a peaceful protest to the 6 Division of the Nigerian Army to demand for the unconditional release of Mr Kenneth Opusingi.





The women were received by top officers of the 6 Division and the detained Kenneth was brought out for them to see.





Our Correspondent learnt that he was released to SARS officers later in the night, according to the his brother.





The Army had declared Kenneth Opusingi and Rowland Sekibo, Chairman of Akuku-Toru local government wanted, accusing them of being behind the attack on a detachment of soldiers on the eve of the presidential election where a Lieutenant was killed in an ambush in Abonnema.



Osun State Governor, Adegboyega Oyetola says he is going to the Appeal Court to challenge the Osun State Governorship Election Petitio...





Osun State Governor, Adegboyega Oyetola says he is going to the Appeal Court to challenge the Osun State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal which nullified his election as governor.





The tribunal had upturned Oyetolas victory on Friday and declared Ademola Adeleke of the PDP winner of the governorship election held in Osun last year.





A statement issued by Wole Oyebamiji, Secretary to the State Government of Osun, said that the judgment of the election tribunal had been put on appeal.





The governor said justice would prevail at last, and that the law enforcement agencies had been instructed to maintain law and order across the State.





He appreciated the support of the majority of the people in all things essential for mutual progress, assuring that the residents of adequate security of lives and properties.



The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has hailed the verdict of the Osun State Governorship Election Tribunal, which on Friday declared t...





The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has hailed the verdict of the Osun State Governorship Election Tribunal, which on Friday declared the partys candidate, Sen. Ademola Adeleke as the winner of the Sept. 22, 2018 governorship election in Osun.





A statement issued by PDP National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan described the judgment as a victory for democracy and the will of the people.





Ologbondiyan said that the judgment was a clear indicator that no matter how evil and injustice appeared to thrive, the truth must always prevail at the end of the day.





Nigerians have accepted democracy as a way of life and a form of government that suits the multi-plurality of our nation.





The spontaneous jubilation that greeted this judgment is, therefore, a direct indication that it is in consonant with the wishes and aspiration of Nigerians across the board.





For those who have been desperate to destroy our democracy, this judgment has proven to them that their shenanigans will always come to no avail, Ologbondiyan said.





He commended the judiciary for standing upright in the defence of democracy.





This verdict, which reverberates across our nation, points to the fact that the truth will always prevail.





It is also an indication that our party, the PDP, will recover all our stolen mandates in the 2019 general elections, particularly, the Presidential mandate, which Nigerians freely gave to our candidate, Abubakar.





Furthermore, all our candidates who have already won their elections, but whose victories are being manipulated by anti-democratic forces, must take solace in the words of the Osun election petition panel.





The solace is that once valid votes have been declared and a winner emerges by a majority of votes, a rerun is illegal.





He congratulated Adeleke, the people of Osun as well as all lovers of democracy across the country for the triumph of justice.





The Osun State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal sitting in Abuja had on Friday declared Adeleke winner.





The three-member panel said during its ruling that the rerun election that held on Sept. 27, 2018, was illegal.





The tribunal, therefore, deducted the votes scored by the APC candidate, Gboyega Oyetola, in the rerun after declaring the rerun illegal.





The tribunal said Adeleke won the election at the first ballot on Sept. 22 and the rerun that INEC devised to reach a final conclusion a week later was illegal.



The Police in Bayelsa has launched a manhunt for the killers of two National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members in the state. Susp...

The Police in Bayelsa has launched a manhunt for the killers of two National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members in the state.









Suspected cultists on Wednesday night attacked the residence of corps members along School Road in Yenagoa, killing two and injuring another critically.









In a statement on Thursday the Commands Spokesman, DSP Asinim Butswat, reiterated the commitment of Police to fighting crime and all forms of criminality in the state.









He said on March 20, 2019, at about 2200hours, armed robbers numbering about seven, attacked the residence of one Jerry Yeseme Moses, Proprietor of a school at Swalli, Yenagoa.









The armed robbers instantly shot and killed one corps member, Oluwatobi Popoola, male, 30 years; they also shot one George Onokpoma, male and Anthony Dada.









The victims were rushed to the Federal Medical Center, Yenagoa, where George Onokpoma was confirmed dead, while Anthony Dada is responding to treatment.









The command has launched a manhunt for the unknown gunmen, and the investigation is ongoing.









Butswat also disclosed that two masked gunmen operating on a motorcycle, kidnapped an eight-year-old girl in their home in Yenagoa, at about 8.10 p.m. on Monday.









He, however, said that the girl, Dora, daughter of one 40-year-old Amara Diekedie, had been safely rescued.









He said that when the commands control room was alerted, it responded swiftly, pursuing the kidnappers and gunned down one of them.







The United States has expressed disappointment over the irregularities, including reports of military interference, in the 2019 genera...





The United States has expressed disappointment over the irregularities, including reports of military interference, in the 2019 general election.





In a statement on Thursday, the US embassy expressed sadness over the loss of lives during the elections and urged all stakeholders to work towards ensuring fair and credible supplementary elections.





The US congratulated Nigerians commitment to the electoral process, saying it would continue to follow the ongoing polls closely.





The embassy also reiterated its support for a democratic process where the will of the Nigerian people is reflected in the results.





The United States once again congratulates the Nigerian peoples commitment to the democratic process throughout the election season, the US said in a statement.





The United States supports a democratic process where the will of the Nigerian people is reflected in the results.





As long-time friends of Nigeria, we continue to follow closely the still ongoing elections. We do not have a preferred party or candidate.





As noted by many observer groups in their preliminary reports, we too were disappointed by the low voter turnout as well as credible reports of voter intimidation, vote buying, interference by security forces, and violence in some locations.





We are saddened by those acts of violence and extend our deepest sympathy to the families of those who lost their lives, including those who worked for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the security services.





As the 2019 electoral cycle comes to an end, we urge all stakeholders to work towards a free, fair, credible, transparent, and peaceful process, especially for the many Nigerians across the country who again will go to polls on Saturday.





We encourage all stakeholders, including INEC, political parties, and the security services, to continue to improve the electoral process for future elections.





We look to Nigeria as an important leader on the African continent. As a democratic partner of Nigeria, the United States remains committed to working together to achieve our mutual goals of peace and prosperity for the citizens of both our countries.



Paris has already felt the warmth of the spring wind in March. In this beautiful season of the revivification of nature, President Xi Jinping is about to pay his second state visit to France.

In March five years ago, President Xi visited France, and the leaders of the two countries reviewed the precious experience of the development of bilateral relations in half a century. Both countries have followed the spirit of independence, mutual understanding, strategic vision and win-win cooperation in developing bilateral ties, a principle providing important guidance to an even brighter future of China-France relations.

Today, five years later, our world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century. On one hand, the trend toward globalization and informatization is gaining momentum, and countries are increasingly interconnected and interdependent. The historical trend of peace, development, openness, and cooperation is irreversible. On the other hand, amid surging protectionism, unilateralism and populism, as well as growing uncertainty and instability in international situation, the global governance system based on multilateralism is faced with challenges unseen before.

There are certain historic occasions that empower us with the wisdom and strength to move forward. This year marks the 55th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France. President Xis visit this time is the first visit to France by a Chinese top leader after the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and President Emmanuel Macrons assumption of office. It is of great significance for promoting the development of China-France and China-Europe relations in the new era.

The two countries will take President Xis visit as an opportunity to revitalize the spirit of bilateral diplomatic relations, and plan the future of bilateral relations from a historical and strategic perspective to better benefit both countries and people of the world.

China and France should continue to respect each other, seek common ground while reserving differences, and set a model of relations between eastern and western major countries. 55 years ago, China and France independently made a great decision to establish ambassadorial diplomatic ties, transcending their huge differences in geography, national conditions, ideology, and political systems and focusing on the common and long-term interests of both sides.

Today, the desire for independence and the pursuit of multi-polarity are still the underlying features of China-France relations, and the inexhaustible energy for boosting closer and sincere bilateral cooperation.

China and France should continuously make new progress for mutual benefit and win-win results, and deepen pragmatic cooperation and integration of interests.

The two sides will make solid efforts to advance cooperation in traditional fields such as nuclear energy and aerospace, and maintain the prominent characteristics of pragmatic and strategic cooperation. Both sides will also strengthen cooperation in emerging fields such as agricultural integration, digitalization, artificial intelligence, medicine and health, and green development to promote deep integration of development strategies.

Meanwhile, the two countries will also actively facilitate cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative via cooperation platforms in third-party markets, in a bid to chart the course for the BRI cooperation between China and Europe.

China and France should uphold openness, inclusiveness, exchanges and mutual learning to further strengthen people-to-people and cultural exchanges and cooperation. Both countries should promote in-depth communication and cooperation in a wide range of areas including language, culture, science, education, health and sports, especially exchanges between young people, from a perspective of dialogue between the two civilizations.

By doing so, the two countries will bring closer the hearts of the two peoples, pass on bilateral friendship from generation to generation, and promote exchanges and mutual learning among different civilizations in the world for the prosperity of human civilization.

Still further, China and France should stand together with a global perspective to enhance strategic coordination and cooperation. As permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, China and France should take responsibility for speaking with one voice on safeguarding basic norms of international relations, promoting global peace and prosperity, and advancing international unity and justice in an unstable world troubled by mounting unilateralism.

The two sides should also intensify communication and coordination to tackle climate change, address the Iranian nuclear issue, promote the reform of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and build broader consensus to safeguard multilateralism and improve global governance.

These endeavors will provide solutions to challenges facing the international community and to the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.

Spring is meant to bring people confidence and strength. I look forward to President Xi Jinpings upcoming historic visit to France, which will bring new prospects for China-France relations and the world.

(The author is Chinese Ambassador to France.)The US, in the 2018 country reports on human rights practices released by its State Department on March 13, once again acted as a self-styled human rights defender.

It continued pointing fingers at over 190 countries and slandering their human rights situations groundlessly, as if the US had done a perfect job in this regard. However, facts and data are clear enough to reveal its own serious human rights problems.

The US claims that it values the right to life of every person, but statistics indicates that the safety of American citizens has been seriously threatened.

The US reported 57,103 incidents of gun violence in 2018, resulting in 14,717 deaths, 28,172 injuries, including casualties of 3,502 juveniles.

Chicago was named as one of the most dangerous metropolis in the US, as hundreds of people were murdered annually in recent years. On August 4 and 5 last year, 74 people in the city were shot, and 12 of them killed.

The Huffington Post reported on December 6 that gun violence has shortened the life expectancy of Americans by nearly 2.5 years, with shooting driving down the average lifespan of African-Americans by 4.14 years, based on official data on gun deaths between 2000 and 2016.

A 2018 report issued by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said drug overdose deaths among US residents exceeded 70,000 in 2017, or 200 per day. The rate had increased on average by 16 percent per year since 2014.

According to an article published on USA Today on December 18, 2018, the suicide rate of the US had climbed 33 percent since 1999. In 2017, more than 47,000 Americans committed suicide.

The US boasts its freedom of speech, but it is unprecedentedly controlling public opinions and pressuring news media.

A total of 89.7 percent of American colleges maintained policies that restricted student and faculty expression, said a report issued by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education(FIRE), a non-profit, non-partisan group founded in 1999 that focuses on civil liberties in academia in the United States, after analyzing written policies at 466 of America's top institutions of higher education for their protection of free speech. In 11 states, at least half of colleges received the worst rating for clearly and substantially restricting free speech rights.

The Columbia Journalism Review reported that the US arrested journalists 34 times in 2017, 29 of whom were arrested for protest, and nine were accused of felony. Forty-four journalists suffered from personal attacks.

A Pew Research Center survey on American democracy and the political system showed 53 percent said the US did not respect the rights and freedoms of all people.

The US labels itself as a role model regarding democratic politics, but what has been presented by statistics and facts is money politics.

The 2018 midterm elections were proved to be by far the most expensive midterm elections on record. The final cost of 2018 elections stood at $5.2 billion, a 35 percent increase over 2014 in nominal dollars, the Center for Responsive Politics said on November 8, 2018.

Records were also set by the more than $1.3 billion spent by outside groups  those other than the candidates campaign committees  and the $98 million in so-called dark money, said a USA Today report.

The Guardian reported on August 7, 2018 that US elections were widely seen to be corrupt by the public. Members of Congress were viewed to be captured by corporations, wealthy donors and special interests groups. The average cost of winning a Senate seat was $19.4 million while winning a House of Representatives seat would cost at least $1.5 million on average.

According to a report released by Philip G. Alston, special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights for the UN, the combined wealth of the US cabinet reached about $4.3 billion, turning the US government into the spokesperson of the rich people.

The US took a vow of equal protection of everyones dignity, but the dignity of American women and children have long been trampled on.

An online survey done by non-profit organization Stop Street Harassment found that 81 percent of women interviewed had experienced some form of sexual harassment during their lifetime. Another industry-wide survey by USA Today suggested that 94 percent of the surveyed women would have experienced some form of harassment or abuse during their career.

As reported by Gallup on November 12, the percentage of the US women who say they worry about being a victim of sexual assault has edged up to 36 percent, the highest figure bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbsince 2011.

More than 300 Catholic priests in Pennsylvania committed sexual abuse against a large number of children over the past 70 decades, with more than 1,000 victims, while senior church officials took steps to cover it up, said a CBS report.

According to a report by Star-Telegram on December 9, 2018, 168 clergies from fundamental Baptist churches spanning 40 US states were accused of committing sexual crimes against children, with as many as 45 of them continuing in ministry.

Nearly 40 percent of American middle-schoolers said theyd been bullied while 27 percent of high-schoolers said the same, said a report issued by nonprofit group YouthTruth.

The US poses as a country attaching high importance to racial equality, but recent data indicated increasingly serious racial discrimination and ethnic violence have been prevalent in every field of the social life.

A report released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said hate crimes rose by about 17 percent to 7,175 cases in the US in 2017. Offenses motivated by racial prejudice made up about 60 percent of hate crimes, with African-Americans being targeted in nearly half of them.

According to the analysis of homicide arrest data on Washington Post, in the past decade, 63 percent of suspects who killed white victims were arrested, while the percentage of suspects who killed black victims was only 47. A 2017 survey by Pew Research Center indicated that 81 percent of African-Americans believe racial discrimination to be a serious issue in todays world, up from 44 percent 8 years earlier.

The US promises to guarantee human rights protection for countries around the globe, but is indeed following unilateralism under the banner of America first.

It broke its faith by flagrantly withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, the UNESCO, the Paris Climate Agreement, and Iran nuclear deal. In addition, it rejected to ratify core UN human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Facts and statistics evidenced the hypocrisy and dual-standards of the US government on human right issues. The US takes human rights as a tool to slander and attack other countries, and protect the capital interests of the privileged class, which fully exposed the duplicity of its clarification on human rights practices.

(Chang Jian, director of the Center for Human Rights Studies, Nankai University)Chinese President Xi Jinping published a signed article titled East Meets West  A New Chapter of Sino-Italian Friendship on March 20 on the leading Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera ahead of his state visit to the European country.

In the article, the Belt and Road and Marco Polo who is closely related to the Silk Road, were frequently mentioned by the Chinese president.

China hopes to work with Italy to advance the Belt and Road cooperation, the article said. The two countries will harness their historical and cultural bonds forged through the ancient Silk Road as well as their geographical locations to align connectivity cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative with Italys plan to develop its northern ports and the InvestItalia program, and jointly build the Belt and Road of the new era on sea, on land, in the air, in space and in the cultural domain.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said at a recent foreign policy seminar that Italy is willing to join the co-construction of the Belt and Road, as it will bring new opportunities to the country.

In fact, the co-construction of the Belt and Road will create substantial opportunities, not only for Italy, but also for the whole Europe.

It will create opportunities for economic revival of Europe. Upon the proposal of the BRI, the European Commission (EC) expressed its willingness to align the Juncker Plan, a 315-billion-euro investment scheme to boost private investment in European infrastructure projects, with the BRI.

The EC reiterated its willingness in joining the BRI in a policy paper on connectivity of the Eurasian continent it released last year.

Valuing the opportunities to be provided by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and Switzerland have all joined the organization. It is an effective measure for these European countries to enhance the influence of the British pound, euro and Swiss franc.

In addition, the co-construction of the BRI will create opportunities for Europe to explore its unique advantages. Some European countries and cities have already become connectivity gateways or pivots under the BRI. Some of them from Eastern Europe are now the forerunners of Europe-Asia interconnectivity, gaining extra competitiveness than their European peers.

Cities such as Prague and Budapest have opened multiple air routes to China, becoming regional aviation hubs. The China-Europe freight trains are also energizing the logistics services and industries of countries and cities along the railways, making central and eastern European countries a stronger bond linking China and Europe.

The BRI turned Balkan countries from a powder keg into an important pivot of land-sea connectivity, and the Belgrade-Budapest railway is a great example. It also turned Azerbaijan, which was depicted as a geopolitical pivot in Zbigniew Brzezinskis book The Grand Chessboard, into a geo-economic pivot.

In the BRI network of connectivity, even small countries can become regional and global pivots, to promote connectivity in traditional aspects and soft connectivity of systems, policies, rules and standards, and to create connectivity in more new areas.

The joint construction of the Belt and Road will further facilitate the China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership. Based on the China-EU 2020 Strategic Agenda for Cooperation, China and the EU are negotiating on a bilateral investment pact, and going through feasibility research of an EU-China free trade agreement.

The BRI will provide greater energy for these efforts, and also promote the development of China-EU partnership of peace, growth, reform and civilization.

Currently, CHINA RAILWAY Express have made 14,000 trips between China and 49 cities in 15 European countries, linking countries together for shared development and building a new type of partnership featuring cooperation and win-win results.

The joint construction of the Belt and Road offers the EU an easier access to the participation of Asia-Pacific affairs.

The BRI brings Europe and Asia closer to each other through land- and sea-based transport links, allows Europe to take part in Asia-Pacific affairs more conveniently, increases the EUs capability to grasp the development opportunities of the Asia-Pacific region, and expands EUs influence in the region.

The BRI is valued by European countries. So far, 16 central and eastern European countries have signed intergovernmental memoranda of understanding on Belt and Road cooperation with China under the framework of China-central and eastern European countries cooperation. Greece, Portugal and Malta have also joined the BRI circle of friends.

The joining of these countries indicates the dividends generated by the BRI and the initiatives rising popularity in Europe.

It is believed that the BRI will become a buzzword during President Xi Jinpings upcoming state visits to Italy, Monaco and France.

(Wang Yiwei is a Jean Monnet Chair Professor of the European Union, and a senior researcher at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China)Xis upcoming visits to usher in new chapter of China-Europe ties

Chinese President Xi Jinping will pay state visits to Italy, Monaco and France from March 21 to 26.

Xi was invited by Italian President Sergio Mattarella, Head of State of the Principality of Monaco Albert II and French President Emmanuel Macron.

The Chinese Presidents first overseas trip this year, scheduled at the spring equinox, heralds hope and vitality, and bears the earnest anticipation from the heads of state and people of the three countries.

Planting a seed of friendly relationship between China and the three countries, the visits will definitely further boost China-Europe ties.

Both China and Italy are ancient civilizations closely bonded by the ancient Silk Road  a bridge for the exchanges of western and eastern cultures.

In recent years, the two countries maintained frequent high-level exchanges, as well as people-to-people exchanges at all levels. The Belt and Road construction also establishes a bridge for bilateral friendly cooperation in each field in the new era.

A recent special exchange of letters delivered a warm message to the public. Eight students from Italian boarding school Rome Convitto Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II and its president Paolo M. Reale wrote Xi a letter to express their eager expectations for his visit and their willingness to promote friendship between Italy and China.

In the response letter, Xi encouraged the students to be cultural ambassadors between the two countries, and become modern-day Marco Polo.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of comprehensive strategic partnership between China and Italy. Xis upcoming visit to the European country will take China-Italy ties in the new era to a new high.

Though China and Monaco are geographically far apart, the two countries maintained sound development of bilateral relationship based on mutual respect, equality, and win-win cooperation, setting an example for the friendly ties and common development between big and small countries.

In recent years, China-Monaco relations enjoyed stable and healthy development under the personal guidance from the heads of state of the two countries, with progress continuously being made in trade and economy, culture, and environmental protection.

The two countries held an economic and trade forum during Prince Albert IIs state visit to China last year.

They also held frequent cultural exchanges in recent years. Chinas Palace Museum displayed cultural relics at the Grimaldi Forum Monaco, and 271 collections from Monaco were also exhibited at the Palace Museum.

The increasingly frequent cultural exchanges have reinforced public support for further consolidation and development of bilateral friendly cooperation. It is believed that fruitful results will be achieved for China-Monaco friendship during Xis visit.

This year marks the 55th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and France.

Over the past 55 years, the two countries upgraded their comprehensive partnership to comprehensive strategic partnership, and then the close and enduring comprehensive strategic partnership.

China-France ties have always been at the forefront of Chinas relations with major countries in the west.

In Xis speech at the Meeting Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Establishment of China-France Diplomatic Relations held in 2014, the Chinese President described the spirit of the bilateral relationship with independence, mutual understanding, strategic vision and win-win cooperation.

In January, 2018, Macron became the first head of state visiting China in 2018, and also the first European state leader to visit China after the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The Chinese and French Presidents agreed to carry forward their traditional friendship, and ensure the long-term stability of the close and enduring comprehensive strategic partnership between China and France.

Today, Xi chose France as an important destination of his first overseas trip in 2019. His state visit to France will point clear direction and draw a blueprint for the future cooperation between the two countries in each field.

During Xis first visit to Europe as the Chinese President in March, 2014, he proposed to link the two strong forces, two big markets, and two major civilizations of China and the European Union (EU), and build China-EU partnership for peace, growth, reform and civilization, pointing out the strategic direction of the development of China-EU relationship.

During Xis following visits to European countries, he made great efforts to draw new blueprints for China-Europe relations and vitalize China-Europe cooperation.

At the end of last year, Chinese government issued its third policy paper on the EU, defining its EU policy objectives in the new era and its major measures to enhance China-EU dialogues and cooperation for a time to come. The policy paper endowed China-EU ties with new connotation.

Under the complicated international situation, the stable development of the relationship between China and Europe, two of the worlds major stabilizing factors and major economies, conforms to the common interests of both parties, and will also inject certainty to the world.

It is expected that Xis first overseas trip this year will deepen China-Europe cooperation and create more positive energy for global win-win cooperation.NoDerog/iStock(NEW YORK) -- If you've already filed your income taxes and weren't too excited about your refund, there is hope for next year.



The tax code changed during 2018, so a lot of people were surprised this year that they didn't receive the same amount back from the IRS that they had become accustomed to.



But don't fret, there are a slew of little things you can do in 2019 to ensure a larger return next year.



Let's take a deeper look:

Tax deductions that also invest in your future



Nobody wants to think about next year, but if you make a few, simple changes now, you will get a bigger return from the IRS in 2020. And if you had to pay taxes, maybe this will help you avoid that next year.



Let's start with the benefits of 401(k) plans. Some companies have a plan that you can contribute to and that isn't automatically set up for you.



These plans allow you to manipulate the amount of your income (pre-tax) that you contribute to your retirement plan.



If you want and can do so, up your contribution and lower your taxable income in the process. Also some companies will match up to a certain percent, so that's free money your company is offering for your future.



There are also investments called traditional IRAs, where the money you contribute, also for retirement, is tax deductible, as well.



You can't work (or play) if you don't have your health



Another option, depending on what type of health insurance you have, is a heath savings account.



In most cases, you can elect to deduct funds each paycheck, pre-tax, into your HSA and then use that account to pay for medical bills, prescriptions and more.



Since the money is pre-tax, it yet again lowers your taxable income and makes those doctor visits more affordable.



There is also a cap to how much you can contribute to your HSA each year, but the leftover funds at the end of the year rollover, which is really nice if you don't use them.



There are also options for other insurance plans called flexible spending accounts, but those do not rollover. They will also lower your taxable income.



Finally, you have dependent care flexible savings account, which is a great option for young parents out there.



When in doubt, talk to HR or your accountant



You may not have noticed this, but you probably got a little bump in your weekly or biweekly paycheck last year with the new tax code.



What you can do is talk to your company's HR department or your accountant and up your withholdings on your W-4 form.



Go ahead and take out maybe $25 to $50 a paycheck and that will result in upwards of $500 to $1,000 more in your refund at the beginning of next year.



You are still making the same amount of money, but if you rely on this big refund for a fun trip or a yearly gift to yourself, well go ahead and start saving this way.

Remember your side hustle



So many young professionals are working on something fun on the side. If this includes you, you may be eligible for several tax deductions.



If you have an LLC or work for an app-based job on the side like Uber or Wag, you probably don't have taxes taken out automatically, so that is something to consider and save for. Make sure to set aside some of your profits in case you have to pay taxes for what you earned.



But you can also expense a lot more items for this freelance work than you can at your full-time job. For example, driving your car, getting gas, or other equipment you've purchased is all deductible. The main catch is what you buy or use has to be in the effort to make a profit.



Also, there is a nice tax credit for freelancers and small businesses, where you can deduct up to 20 percent of qualified domestic business income.



So, if you forgot to include these items this year, you'll know next time.



Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.File photo of Romano Prodi, the former Italian Prime Minister. Photo via Global Times

Chinese President Xi Jinpings state visit to Italy is of great significance and will bring about a profound impact on bilateral relations, Romano Prodi, the former Italian Prime Minister and former chairman of the European Commission, said in an exclusive interview with Peoples Daily, adding that the nation is full of expectations for the Chinese presidents visit.

Prodi said Italy is an important member of the European Union (EU) and China is one of the EUs most important partners, and since the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) will help raise Italy-China and Europe-China relations to a higher level, Italy should actively participate in this project and develop its advantages.

He also said that there remains wide space for cooperation between Italy and China and both sides should fully explore ways to cooperate and strengthen mutually beneficial cooperation in various fields.

For Italy, the former Prime Minister said deepening cooperation with China is very important, and Italy has a long history of navigation and many decent ports, such as Venice, Trieste, Genoa, and Savona, which all possess advantages in maritime trade and land-sea transport.

Referring to the ancient Silk Road as a valuable historical memory of Italians, Prodi pointed out that Italy and China can therefore work together to expand cooperation under the framework of the BRI to complement mutual advantages and further achieve reciprocal benefit and win-win results.

During his tenure as chairman of the Istituto Per La Ricostruzione Industrial (IRI), Prodi visited Tianjin in the 1980s, establishing a foundation for China-Italy cooperation on a seamless steel pipe plant. He was awarded with a certificate issued in 1993 which recorded the Tianjin governments invitation to him as an economic consultant.

During the past 40 years of reform and opening-up, Chinas economic development and social progress have been witnessed all over the world, Prodi said. Meanwhile, the tremendous achievements of the Chinese people led by the Communist Party of China have not only changed their homeland, but has also brought great deals of opportunities to the world, he said.

The two countries have maintained a kind relationship for a long time and play a positive role in promoting the development of EU-China relations, Prodi added. He believes President Xis visit will bolster mutual trust, deepen friendship, and accomplish positive results between two nations, which may boost EU-China cooperation.Gif photos of a Fuxing bullet train under maintenance have gone viral on Chinese social media as the giant machine goes up and down in the photo as if doing push-ups.

Two Fuxing bullet trains on Monday arrived in an advanced maintenance workshop in Beijing for the first level-three maintenance in the high-speed rail section of the workshop. After running for 1.2 million kilometers, the bullet trains must undergo a level-three checkup and a level-four is required after running for 2.4 million kilometers.

A level-three check mainly inspects the bogie, the framework that carries wheelsets. The most important part of the inspection process is to separate the vehicle from the bogie with the trains lifting equipment.

The gross weight of a Fuxing set is about 450 tonnes, which is equivalent to more than 200 automobiles. Hence, to hoist this giant, a special lift-up apparatus is deployed, which is able to support over 1,088 tonnes.

The short-model Fuxing train (CR400AF) has a total length of 208.95 meters, with a closely compacted vehicle bottom and bogie. During the hoist process, it is necessary to ensure that the lifting height of each train is consistent. No lapses are allowed.

To guarantee travel safety, Chinas bullet trains undergo various checkups after entering service. Level-four, the highest level of maintenance, tests the performance of each component of the entire train.As the first stop of President Xi Jinpings first state visit in 2019, Xis visit to Italy, also the first one by a Chinese president in a decade, is of epoch-making for mutual relations and will open a new chapter in pragmatic cooperation, according to Chinas ambassador to Italy.

After the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Italy in 1970, especially since the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries, bilateral relations have entered a fast lane of development, which injected great vitality into comprehensive cooperation, said Li Ruiyu, the ambassador.

High-level exchanges between the countries have maintained a good momentum. Premier Li Keqiang and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte opened the regular meeting mechanism. The two sides have always supported each others core interests and major concerns, which continuously consolidated mutual trust, the ambassador added.

The ambassador also pointed out that high complementation lies in the economic structure of the two countries. The $542.3-billion trade volume of two countries hit a new historical record last year, and the scale of two-way investment reached over $20 billion.

Earlier this month, Italy also expressed its interest in joining the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which brings broader cooperative prospects, such as infrastructure construction and aerospace, for the two countries, Li noted.

Meanwhile, Li emphasized the long-lasting friendship of the two countries. After a massive earthquake in 2008 struck Wenchuan County, SW Chinas Sichuan province, the Italian government quickly donated relief supplies and dispatched an emergency team to carry out rescue work. Under the background of international financial crisis and the European debt crisis, China and Italy have also worked together to overcome difficulties.

Li also pointed out that the year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Italy. President Xi Jinpings visit will set a new direction and propose a new vision for bilateral ties. Standing on the new historical coordinates, the two sides raise China-Italy relations to higher level, Li said.Ancient Greece and Rome have provided fertile hunting grounds for animated subject matter since the very inception of the form.

So what if the results wind up doing little more than frolic in the pastoral setting? Witness 1930s Playful Pan, above, which can basically be summed up as Silly Symphony in a toga (with a cute bear cub who looks a lot like Mickey Mouse and some flame play that prefigures The Sorcerers Apprentice)

Others are packed with history, mythic narrative, and period details, though be forewarned that not all are as visually appealing as Steve Simons Hoplites! Greeks at War, part of the Panoply Vase Animation Project.









Some series, such as the Asterix movies and Aesop and Sona staple of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show from 1959 to 1962have been the gateways through which many history lovers curiosity was first roused.

(Russian animator Anatoly Petrovs erotic shorts for Soyuzmultfilm may rouse other, er, curiosities, and are definitely NSFW.)

And then there are instant classics like 2004s Its All Greek to Scooby in which Shaggys purchase of a mysterious amulet only serves to cause a pestering archaeologist and centaur to chase him. (Ye gods)

Senior Lecturer of Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt, Chiara Sulprizio, has collected all of these and more on her blog, Animated Antiquity.

Beginning with the 2-minute fragment thats all we have left of Winsor McCays 1921 The Centaurs, Sulprizio shares some of her favorite cartoon representations of ancient Greece, Rome, and beyond. Her areas of professional specializationgender and sexuality, Greek comedy, and Roman satireare well suited to her chosen hobby, and her commentary doubles down on historical context to include the history of animation.

The appearance of cartoon stars like Daffy Duck, Tom and Jerry, and Popeye further demonstrates this antique subject matters sturdiness. TED-Ed and the BBC may view the genre as an excellent teaching tool, but theres nothing stopping the animator from shoehorning some fabrications in amongst the buxom nymphs and buff gladiators.

(Raise your hand if your mother ever sacrificed you on the altar to Spinachia, goddess of spinach, in hopes that she might unleash a mushroom cloud of super-atomic power in your puny bicep.)

Youll find a number of entries featuring the work of Japanese and Russian animators, including Thermae Romae, part of the juggernaut thats sprung from Mari Yamazakis popular graphic novel series and Icarus and the Wise Men from the legendary Fyodor Khitruk, whose retelling of the myth sent a message about freedom from the Soviet Union, circa 1976.

Begin your decade-by-decade explorations of Chiara Sulprizios animated antiquities here or suggest that a missing favorite be added to the collection. (We vote for this one!)

Related Content:

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vases Come to Life with 21st Century Animation

18 Classic Myths Explained with Animation: Pandoras Box, Sisyphus & More

An Animated Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the Citys Virtually-Recreated Streets

25 Animations of Great Literary Works: From Plato, Dostoevsky & Dickinson, to Kafka, Hemingway & Bradbury

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in New York City for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain, this April. Follow her @AyunHalliday.Photo courtesy to Xinhua

Speaking in fluent Chinese, Xin Xiaomeng, the worlds first female AI news anchor, could pass as a real one in many ways. The lifelike anchor launched during the 2019 Two Sessions captured many eyes and again showed Chinas passion and ambition about AI technology.

In fact, the nations development in AI in recent years has caught wide attention and was given high credit by experts at the China AI Index 2018 conference held in Beijing on Wednesday, especially in regard to the flourishing applications of the advanced technology.

According to the Index issued at the conference, Chinese researchers started publishing more AI research papers than the US since 2016, and there has been skyrocketing growth in the number of Chinese participants at major conferences on AI globally.

Along with the emergence of 5G technology and the Internet of Things, AI, as the basic technical support, is being widely applied in Chinese peoples lives and kindling business enthusiasm across the nation.

At numerous railway stations in China, the speed of check-in has been greatly increased after the installation of facial recognition in 2017, which is 10 times faster than manual ticket checks.

Photo courtesy to CKGSB

Another prominent example of AI application is by G7 Networks, a Chinese AI technology provider in the logistic sector, which uses AI to fight the problem of drowsy truck drivers.

Through abnormal behavior detection of such things as fatigue or sudden braking, the AI technology safeguards the lives of more than 20,000 truck drivers across the nation. The trace-tracking service under its AI solutions also means the drivers can always find the fastest, cheapest, and safest routes, the companys CEO Zhai Xuehun introduced at the conference.

China is catching up with the US, but gaps still exist in China-US AI research, especially in the fields of basic science, Cui Xiaohui, professor of Wuhan Universitys big data and cloud computing laboratory told the conference.

Chinese talents will be easily replaced by AI technology if they are simply trained for technical skills. Even for AI talents, the nation needs more researchers on the technology, while many more should set their eyes on applications. Also, the Chinese academic paper evaluation system needs further reforms so Chinese voices in the AI field can be heard on the world stage, Xu Chenggang, a professor at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), Chinas only business school with faculty governance, told Peoples Daily Overseas Social Media.

At this stage, Xu noted, Chinas AI industry is much younger than the US.

The Index found that about 60% of AI talents in China working in the industry have been working for less than 10 years, while over 70% of Americans working in AI industry have been working for more than 10 years.

China released a new-generation AI development plan in 2017, which outlines Chinas strategy to build a domestic AI industry, which is estimated to be worth nearly $150 billion in the next few years. The nation aims to become the leading AI power by 2030.

Chinas ambition and curiosity toward AI technology is like a baby in its early days. We are looking forward to creating a promising future on the basis of the principle of objectivity and the spirit of science, said Liu Yadong, chief editor of Science and Technology Daily.DPRK withdraws from joint liaison office with S.Korea in Kaesong: Seoul unification ministry

SEOUL, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) withdrew from the joint liaison office with South Korea in the DPRK's border town of Kaesong, South Korean vice unification minister told an emergency press conference Friday.Tweet

WST - Tell us about yourself; who is Ashley Gateson-Amankwah?

Ashley G-A. - I am Ashley Gateson-Amankwah. I am the proud owner and musical director of a small but growing family-based steel band called PanUp.

I began this epic journey when I was eight years old during primary school.

I have had the opportunity to be involved in multiple steel band competitions, such as; Champions of Steel UK Panorama (2005 onwards), Junior UK Panorama and Pan Explosion.

I have had the privilege to travel to Trinidad and Tobago for an exceptional experience of being a part of Panorama 2010. The effect of steel pan music has resonated within me.

WST - How were you first introduced to the steel pan?

Ashley G-A. - During my younger years in Fairchildes Primary School, New Addington, Croydon, there was an impressive selection of steel pans. A known group by the name of Croydon Steel Orchestra (CSO) was where it all started for me.

Paul Dowie, the Musical Director of CSO was my Pan teacher throughout Primary and High School. My very first pan I started on, was a Double Guitar. Over the years I gained confidence through performing and competing as part of a group. I now play lead pan, Double Tenor for my own band.

WST - Being female, were you ever cautioned or perhaps dissuaded in any way, from becoming involved in the steelband art form?

Ashley G-A. - From the moment I started, there was never any discrimination towards female pan players. However, over the years, as Ive gotten older and more involved with different bands, Ive found that allowing my talent to speak for itself has given me the confidence to showcase my skills on a public scale.



Ashley Gateson-Amankwah - PanUp Ashley Gateson-Amankwah - PanUp

WST - Do any of your family members play pan?

Ashley G-A. - A big Yes to this question! My mother, father and husband are all involved in my own band. Im very lucky to share my passion with close family members.

WST - What keeps your passion for pan going?

Ashley G-A. - My passion for pan is ignited by the public satisfaction of the music we produce. On top of that, the pure excitement that children and adults demonstrate when being taught the art of pan is enthralling.

WST - What have you been most proud about as it relates to Pan?



Ashley Gateson-Amankwah with Pan Up Ashley Gateson-Amankwah with Pan Up

Ashley G-A. - In 2017 I was taken by surprise as I was nominated for the BAS (British Association of Steelbands) Crystal Holder Award. Its a treasured moment in my life to have obtained such an achievement. I now have a collection of medals and trophies I deeply cherish, and Im proud to be involved in such a great community.

WST - Can you share some of your more memorable moments regarding Pan?

Ashley G-A. - My proudest and memorable moments would have to be travelling to Trinidad and Tobago in 2010, where I was chosen to perform in the semi-finals of Panorama with Invaders.

It was an opportunity I couldnt pass as this experience was second to none. The atmosphere was contagious and very exhilarating. What also adds to this memorable moment was that we learned and performed with the junior band, which went on to winning their category.

After this experience, We also competed in Holland alongside CSI and another local band later.

WST - What about the Pan and/or the fraternity do you find most disappointing?

Ashley G-A. - I enjoy every aspect that comes with playing pan. Im struggling to find a reason to be disappointed but my only comment would be, that I wish steel pan would be more widely recognised and taught around the world.

WST - And what excites you the most, and/or makes you most proud about being affiliated with the art form?

Ashley G-A. - In East Sussex where PanUp Steel Band is based, we are classed as unique due to being so vastly different to what people of today are used to hearing and seeing.

We love to perform for every different event that is asked of us. Were proud to say we put our own unique touch on contemporary music.

WST - Do you think the steelband community and its musicians are well regarded/respected in the UK?

Ashley G-A. - In the UK the steelband community is now becoming more popular within schools and towns. I believe this will gain more respect for the sweet instrument itself in the near future. I think that every musician is respected for their art in what ever form that may be, which leads me to believe that I can achieve the same.

WST - Your band, PanUp SteelBand, is a family band; are there any plans to expand to perhaps include other members of the community? Do you get inquiries for membership?

Ashley G-A. - PanUp SteelBand has grown slowly over the years due to relocation. We are now happily situated by the sea in East Sussex. Our numbers have increased and we are continually getting inquiries about childrens and adult classes which are in progress for the near future. We are in contact with friends from other steel bands which come along to some of our performances. Joining in the madness of carnivals held by the coast. Schools and academies local to myself have gotten in contact with me to collaborate in upcoming events with their students.

WST - What is Panorama to you?

Ashley G-A. - Panorama is an event you cannot miss!

The process of getting everyone together and the pure intelligence of any arranger who signs up for the job, is outstanding.

I thoroughly enjoy Panorama. The intense atmosphere of rehearsals and the urge you get when you feel the rhythm, its an experience which is very hard to explain. The energy is palpable!



Ashley Gateson-Amankwah - BAS Awards

WST - Overall, is it (Panorama) a curse or blessing from your perspective?

Ashley G-A. - From my perspective I personally feel it is indeed a blessing. The people that I have met over the years, there is a likelihood I would never see again. Ive got the chance to perform in front of thousands of people and to travel to places I never thought Id visit. There is no better vibe or atmosphere in any other activity, like Panorama!

WST - Do you have a favourite Panorama arrangement - and if so - what is it about that piece that endeared itself to your soul?

Ashley G-A. - My favourite would have to be Tell Dem as one of my proudest and most memorable moments in my life was visiting Trinidad in 2010. I had come to the stage where I believed in myself, gained confidence as a musician and proved that I was good enough. So in my opinion I told them through my talents on pan.

WST - Who, and what are your musical influences?

Ashley G-A. - Honestly, I am more of a general listener to all genres of music. I am inspired mostly by a variety of styles. For example: Ska, TV/film, soul, funk, rock, etc. I cannot pinpoint a solo artist but I do generally focus on the What is popular today. This type of music we choose to perform is usually what everyone loves to sing along to. This also makes us unique in our own special way.

WST - Who is your favourite arranger and why?

Ashley G-A. - From this journey I have endeared, Annise Halfers Hadeed has to be top of the list of arrangers. My first reason for my choice has to be that he is a technical mastermind of a composer. His process to teach is unique but the pure skill he possesses is inspiring.

During Panorama, as the tune is coming together, to watch the connection from mind to pan is mind boggling.

WST - What is your vision for Pan in the UK a decade from now?

Ashley G-A. - Pan in the next decade will show more upcoming talent, both female and male musicians in the next generation. Pushing for steel pans to become a part of the wide variety of instruments readily accessible by anyone.

WST - If you could change one thing about pan what would that be?

Ashley G-A. - I am very passionate when I teach the art of pan. Children and adults who have disabilities, are unfortunately restricted as to what they can achieve. This is due to the limited stock or knowledge of stands, sticks and pan makers in the UK. So Id like to change how everyone interprets steel pans and imagine how it can be tweaked so every person can give it a try comfortably.

WST - What advice would you give to young and upcoming females who would like to follow in your footsteps as a female steel pan musician?

Ashley G-A. - Everyone can be inspired by an individual or even an event that they may encounter in their lives. Every experience is a unique one and one to cherish. If you ever get the chance to play or perform on a steel pan, be proud that youve been given the opportunity to learn a new skill.

As Ive been playing and performing for over 17 years now, I am amazed as to what can be achieved once you set your mind to it. The art of pan will never die, it will always be available to us for many, many years to come. Let your hands do the talking and show off your skills.

WST - Are there any other steelband-related matters you would like to bring forward?

Ashley G-A. - In my humble opinion, UK Panorama should be more publicized. Drawing from my vast experience within the steel pan community, the channels to promote such a big event is minimal.

Panorama is the very first event to start the spectacle that is Notting Hill Carnival. However, this has never been publicly promoted as well as it could be. Its a must-see event for all those who appreciate music and respect its art form.

WST - What is next for Ashley Gateson-Amankwah?

Ashley G-A. - My next step is to become a teacher within schools in East Sussex. To grow my band and to share my musical ethos. To feel the inspiration I felt at a young age to continue the legacy of these instruments.

photos provided by Ashley Gateson-Amankwah





Their Story, Their Voice, Their Life, Their Dreams - click for more stories

Leave a comment in the WST forumIndia is no stranger to the problem of sexual assault. The country has time and again confronted heightened incidents of rape with public outcries, rallies and protests, calling for an end to the rampant misogyny that makes men believe they are entitled to the bodies of women and girls.



But none of these rules apply on Holi, the Hindu festival that marks the onset of spring and the victory of good over evil. Celebrations for the multi-day event kick off with the lighting of a bonfire, followed by the colorful festivities its known around the world for. There's loud party music, bright colors, water balloons, alcohol, and it's often all playing out on the streets of major cities and town. Its jubilance is crystalized in the popular Hindi catchphrase: "Bura Na Mano, Holi Hai," which loosely translates to, "Don't feel bad, it's Holi."

Let's unpack what this means: in theory, non-stop party  a coming together of friends and foes, where all grievances are forgiven  marked by great food, music and flowing drinks.

In reality, though, that same anything-goes attitude makes room for a no holds barred rampage of sexual assault and harassment where inhibitions are down, spirits are high, and women are up for grabs. Women who brave to venture out to celebrate the day are cat-called, pelted with water balloons strategically aimed at their breasts and genitals, groped under the guise of a friendly hug, and finally, violently assaulted.

The celebration takes different forms from state to state, with some festivities more radical than others. In Barsana, a small town in the state of Uttar Pradesh, for instance, residents celebrate Lathmaar Holi, meaning "Holi with stick-beating." What's meant to be a playful reenactment of a legend often ends in women being accosted and harassed to such an extent that they're forced to take up sticks to defend themselves from boys and men.

In short, the familiar theme that outlines any form of Holi celebration is sexual violence. And the painful tradition is turning women and girls off of celebrating at all.



One young resident of Pune, who asked to remain anonymous, describes how one violent incident put her off the festival altogether: "Of course, harassment and assault is part of the festivities and it has happened to me and all my friends all too often. No one would call it 'assault' though, it's Holi," she told PAPER. "I think one of the most violent instances was when I went to this Holi party at an upscale hotel. Everyone was drunk or high, but my friend and I were having a good time. Suddenly, this man grabbed by hips from behind. When I turned around to push him away, he threw colored powder in my eyes temporarily blinding me. The next thing I know, I feel multiple hands grab me from everywhere. And this was in the middle of a party surrounded by people. No one cared. Once I could see more clearly, I pushed them off and basically ran away. I haven't celebrated Holi since."

"I pushed them off and basically ran away. I haven't celebrated Holi since."

In a particularly horrifying instance last year in the capital, New Delhi, a woman was pelted with semen filled balloons on her way home. Delhi University's Gender Study Group released a report in 1996 documenting how instances of sexual harassment and assault peaked during Holi, pointing out that 60.5% of the women staying on the campus that year reported aggravated harassment around the holiday.



A popular way of perpetuating assault is through drugging victims, often with bhang, a milky cannabis infused concoction that's widely circulated during the festival as a 'party drink.' The taste of the drink is so similar to other softer beverages  like thandai (a spicy milk-based cold drink)  that they're often interchangeable. Victims unaware of this are often offered bhang and told it's something else, or their drinks are laced with cannabis or other substances to make them more vulnerable to assault.

It's a well-known problem that's been discussed over the years, with local advertisements, publications and YouTube channels addressing its causes and effects with PSAs and think pieces. In many cases, stories of harassment have also sparked wide outrage on social media and led to protests. But who's listening? The outcries are hardly taken seriously because in the end, it'll ruin the 'spirit of the holiday.' The pain and violent assault of women is diminished and disguised in the spirit of the season and a range of bright colors.

"It's inappropriate, but you can't protest or say no. It's just rude to do that, and you'll be told you're ruining the festivities."

One 'solution' that's been offered? Ban women (not men) from the festivities altogether. Families will sometimes restrict women and girls to their homes, and hostels and hotels will enforce curfews solely for women, forcing them to stay indoors and restrict their mobility  "for their own good." In 2018, undergraduate women across the University of Delhi were put into a lockdown by their dormitories on the day of Holi. Naturally, there were protests, which were then met by ignorant statements by Indian politicians defending the decision.



"When you are 16 or 17, you are hormonally very challenged," Maneka Gandhi, the Indian Union Cabinet Minister for Women & Child Development said. "So to protect you against your own hormonal outbursts, perhaps a [boundary] is drawn."



It's an infuriatingly familiar discourse around sexual assault, where it's up to the victims to protect themselves, and not the perpetrators to stop. Still other women and girls are told to simply be polite and take the harassment. "My family never imposed restrictions on me on Holi," Vidhi Purohit, a fashion designer based in Mumbai who lives with her parents, said. "I was told to be careful, but that's it. Random men approaching you to put colors on your cheeks or simply give you a hug is considered normal." She added, "It's inappropriate, but you can't protest or say no. It's just rude to do that, and you'll be told you're ruining the festivities."

So what can you do if you are assaulted at Holi? Report it and expect justice? Fat chance. Unless you can prove you were raped, in most instances the police will blatantly refuse to take you seriously. In a 2018 Guardian report, a young woman who was attacked by group of men on the day of Holi describes how she was casually dismissed by the policeman."I was deeply agitated, but the police said they couldn't lodge a case. They said it was Holi  they couldn't do anything about it," she said. Despite the international #MeToo discourse and increased conversations around sexual assault, consent continues to be treated like an alien concept around the festival.

Meanwhile, women across the world often find themselves quite literally pushed out of public spaces through harassment, assault, and various other forms of violence. Holi, which is supposed to be a celebration, has just morphed into another excuse to reassert the belief that women belong indoors. The mindset behind normalizing such behavior or breaching consent in the name of celebration is that sexual assault, in the end, is not a big deal. Women's bodies are commodities made for men to exploit, and if it weren't for laws or "political correctness," it'd all be okay. This kind of violence thrives in the face of silence and denial.

Photo via Getty



Artists and enthusiasts gathered to celebrate Chinas intangible cultural heritage and the artists who continue to carry traditional crafts into the modern day at the first event in a series to be hosted by the Beijing Intangible Cultural Heritage Talents Innovation and Development Association, at the Beijing Intangible Cultural Heritage Parlor on March 20.

During the event, three well-established artists discussed their careers and displayed a number of works. Alex Lee, Wu Zhongfeng and Yao Xiaojing are all masters in their fields, each belonging to one of the Eight Unique Skills of Yanjing.

The traditional skills of Beijing represented by the "Eight Unique Skills of Yanjing", Yanjing being Beijings former title, have become a representation of traditional Chinese culture and have been protected as such. The eight skills include engraved lacquer, ivory carving, cloisonne, jade sculpture, inlaid filigree, inlaid gold lacquer, palace carpets and palace embroidery. In addition to these specific categories, craft skills in glass, clay and paper arts are also heavily steeped in Chinas history.

The event was a chance for enthusiasts to learn more about these ancient skills and meet some of the most influential modern day artists in Beijing. The next event in the series will take place at the same location next Wednesday, March 27.

Li Zhigang is a master of carved lacquer arts. Li has enjoyed carving since he was a child, and has made significant achievements in furniture, murals and decoration, winning many awards both at home and abroad.

He was recognized and awarded by the Beijing municipal government in 2015 and then went on to win the title of highly skilled talents with outstanding contributions in Beijing in 2016. (Picture provided by artist)

Li Zhigangs piece Lotus is more than enough (Picture provided by artist)

Wu Zhongfeng is a master in Mongolian marquetry. Her piece "Jiulongbi with gold inlaid treasure" was celebrated as a national treasure by more than a dozen researchers of the Palace Museum.

Wu is now the chairman of Beijing Wuzhongfeng Mengxiang Art Co., Ltd, and her work has won many domestic gold and silver awards.

Wi Zhongfengs Silver Pot with Gold Horse (picture provided by artist)

Yao Xiaojing is the artist behind the Clay Man Zhang Painted Sculptures, and is a representative successor of intangible cultural heritage projects as the fourth generation in her family to continue the craft.

The "Clay Man Zhang" sculptures originated in the Qing Dynasty and have a history of over 180 years.

Yao XiaoJing is a member of the China Folk Literature and Art Association, a member of the China People's Association Coloured Plastic Professional Committee, and a director of the Beijing Folk Literature and Art Association. (Photo credit Wang Xiaobing)When the iconic documentary Paris Is Burning debuted in 1990, for the first time, global audiences were exposed to New York's queer underground ballroom scene and its pioneering dance style: vogueing. Almost 30 years later, FX's new hit series Pose has glamorously recaptured this iconic time and introduced its beauty to younger audiences. This renewed interest in vogueing recently captured the attention of 26-year-old South African DJ and Performance Artist, Queezy, who together with his group of friends, assembled one of Cape Town, South Africa's first vogueing performances. Queezy captured this groundbreaking moment in the new short film Historical Glitch: Doing It for the Vogue, which also documented queer South African's mission to claim spaces they have notoriously been ostracized from.

Historical Glitch reads like a vintage home video put together by a group of friends, and in a way, that's what it is. The short nine-minimum film was a true labor of love that takes viewers behind the scenes of the group's first voguing performance commissioned by Cape Town's Norval Foundation and curated by local artist Khanyisile Mbongwa. Short clips captured intimate moments with Queezy and his fellow performers Daniel Walton, Mziyanda Malgas, and Chester Martinez, as they rehearsed in their apartment and discussed matters of love, creativity, and freedom. The final performance, held at Cape Town's prestigious Norval Foundation museum, was also featured at the end of the film, where performers can be seen serenading the camera and audiences with classic Voguing moves inspired by iconic Voguers like Willi Ninja and local South African music dance styles.

Although the performers in the short film enjoyed their experiences studying the art of Voguing, none of them, who are all artists in their own right, plan to pursue careers as Vogue performers. Queezy explained that the weeks of practicing and the final performance was just a way to channel their creativity through an art form created for and by queer people. "We're looking at Voguing as another way to express ourselves," said Queezy. "While we walk down the street we're feeling the same feeling as Vogue artists, that same feeling of liberation, that same feeling of self-expression. It's more like a state of mind that we're trying to relay."

Since being the first African nation to legalize same-sex marriage in 2006, South Africa's queer community has continued to carve out valuable spaces for themselves. Local Cape Town events like Miss Gay Western Cape and Death of Glitter have provided spaces for a community that still faces anti-queer hostility, particularly in rural areas. As more and more of these events continue to pop up in Cape Town and other metropolitan cities around South Africa, the desire for queer South Africans to freely express themselves has increased, and Voguing has becoming one of many creative mediums that could potentially take over the city.

Queezy spoke with PAPER about his short film Historical Glitch: Doing It for the Vogue and the importance of queer expression in Cape Town, South Africa.

Why the name Historical Glitch? Historical Glitch is sort of like looking at the timeline of history and looking at events that are recurring. Voguing, for example, is a dance form that was started in New York in the 80s, but we wanted to relay it in our present day, in our South African narrative. It's basically history repeating itself, but in different ways.

Is voguing popular in Cape Town? I've been speaking to a lot of people who want to start a ball scene. In New York for example, they have vogue balls almost every weekend, it's not like that here. It's definitely going to be happening this year that's for sure. I know people want to start getting out of their comfort zones and competing in this sort of format.

Can you explain the backstory behind the performance?

When we performed at Norval Foundation Museum, we first started off in their bathroom. We started putting on makeup, getting ready for our day. A lot of queer people do different routines, so we sort of wanted to bring the audience into that environment. We all wore stockings, no tops, wigs or sunglasses, and we were just modeling throughout. It's quite a big institution with a lot of money associated with it, so we also wanted to occupy that space because it's in a part of Cape Town that has a lot of rich white people.

Who are some of the people you idolize in the voguing scene?

I'd say Willi Ninja is my number one. Voguing sort of came from this idea that we're not going to fight each other, rather we're going to do it through dance. And then Willi Ninja took that idea and said, "Let me incorporate martial arts and these movements," and illustrated them through in their own way. I thought it was amazing. As an artist, I look up to people like that because they took one thing and they made it completely different.

What South African elements did you integrate into your voguing performance? We walked into this room where we had four huge bouquets of flowers to illustrate that this huge institution is our house, our living room. In there, we did different dance forms  stuff that we do in South Africa  which I would say is African to us. Angel-Ho, who produced one of the songs, is also a queer POC artist from Cape Town. It was sort of like our interpretation of what we are now today as African, which is a combination of different ideas from around the world. We're not a stereotype; we're definitely exploring our personal identities. I first started off walking around the room greeting everybody, which is something I love about South Africans  we are really welcoming. I wanted to welcome everybody to my house.

How did you come up with the choreography? The performers were me, Daniel Walton, Mziyanda Malgas, Chester Martinez. Chester is a choreographer, he's worked with FKA twigs and he knows voguing very well. In preparation for the performance, we met up at my apartment three times a week for a month. We were doing this choreography and mixing it in with our own dance moves and personal style as well, and Chester taught us about the basics of voguing. I asked, "How do I get into the rhythm of vogue," and Chester said to think of yourself as a cat when you flick your arms forward. That really helped me sort of getting into a voguing mindset.

What role do costumes play in the performance?

We had two sets of costumes. The first costumes were just stockings with thongs on and we were wearing high heels, no tops, and wigs or sunglasses. We wanted to illustrate this sex-positive body expression, which is not super accepted in society nowadays. We wanted to sort of liberate people in that way like it's fine you can love yourself, you can express yourself in whichever way with no stigma attached to it. For the second part, I made these costumes out of plastic materials and created volume to suggest this glamour. A lot of times, the only people that are occupying these institutions are super wealthy people that are wearing these super expensive garments. I wanted to show that glamour can come in any form  just like how the queer performers in the 80s in New York illustrated that. They were very thrifty in terms of how they dressed, but they were still glamorous and it was still amazing. They transcended class and I wanted to pay homage to that as well.

What did you want the film to capture?

I just wanted the film to capture for once a view of queer people, from queer people. Our voices, not caricatures of us. I think the main main point is that we are people as well, and we are part of society and we are fab and fierce and fun, and come join us!Muslims countries hold emergency meeting, urge fight on Islamophobia and slam West after carnage in New Zealand

03/22/19

Source: Press TV

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says certain countries in the West must be held accountable for an attack on two mosques in New Zealand, which left at least 50 worshipers dead. "The terrorist attack in New Zealand represents a very dangerous tide in the West that is Islamophobia," he said in Istanbul where the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held an emergency meeting Friday.

Final Communique of the Open Ended Emergency Meeting of the #OIC Executive Committee held at the level of Foreign Ministers in

Istanbul, Turkey, on the #Islamophobic #terrorist attacks on Muslim worshipers at two Mosques in #Christchurch, #NewZealand. #OICNewZealandTerrorism pic.twitter.com/81NRcoPpvd  OIC (@OIC_OCI) March 22, 2019

Certain Western officials and institutions, he said, are aiding and abetting crimes against Muslims with their silence.



Zarif criticized "those who prevent citizens of Muslim countries from entering their countries," referring to US President Donald Trump and "those who prevent the use of Islamic symbols in their countries," meaning Europeans.



"Unfortunately those who claim to be promoting freedom of speech are both suppressing the freedom of expression of Muslims and allowing all forms of insult against Muslims in the name of the freedom of expression," he said.



"And we are seeing the consequences of this in various parts of the West," Zarif added.



The minister said the OIC emergency meeting in Istanbul came on Iran's request during his phone conversation with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu last week after the New Zealand massacre.



"Our Turkish friends, given the sensitivity they have toward the issue, announced holding this ministerial meeting within a couple of hours after our conversation. This was a very good step taken by the Turkish government," Zarif said.



"At this meeting, we plan to try to establish a consensus not only to condemn this (terrorist attack in New Zealand), but also to take necessary measures for the Islamic countries to prevent the repetition of such events," he said.



"With OIC ministers in Turkey; all condemn barbaric Christchurch terror against Muslims & seek to unite against dangerous tide of racism & Islamophobia in the West," Zarif tweeted later.

With OIC ministers in Turkey; all condemn barbaric Christchurch terror against Muslims & seek to unite against dangerous tide of racism & Islamophobia in the West. All shocked by @realDonaldTrump continuing to try to give what is not his to racist Israel:first Al-Quds & now Golan  Javad Zarif (@JZarif) March 22, 2019

In his speech to the OIC meeting, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan called for a global fight against rising Islamophobia, saying Muslim nations cannot allow "this brutal terror attack to be forgotten."



"Just as humanity fought against anti-Semitism after the Holocaust disaster, it should fight against rising Islamophobia in the same determined fashion," Erdogan said.



"Right now we are facing Islamophobia and Muslim hatred," he said, adding far-right neo-Nazi groups should be treated as terrorists in the same way as Daesh extremists.



The Turkish president also said the reaction and empathy shown by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern following the attack should be an example to world leaders.



New Zealand's foreign minister arrived in Turkey early Friday for "substantial" talks after comments made by Erdogan over the killing sparked a diplomatic spat between the nations.



Representatives from the UN, the European Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) also participated in the event.



Among the victims of the terrorist attack were nationals from Syria, Jordan, India, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.Iran's Supreme Leader likens European financial mechanism to a 'bitter joke'

03/22/19

Source: Tehran Times

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Leader of the Islamic Revolution, on Thursday likened the European financial mechanism for trade with Iran to a "bitter joke". "Europe's financial channel introduced recently is more like a bitter joke," the Khamenei remarked.



Ayatollah Khamenei speaking at the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad

Thursday March 22nd, first day of Persian New Year Norooz

After months of delay on January 31, France, Germany and Britain finally announced the creation of INSTEX, a special purpose vehicle aimed at facilitating legitimate trade between European economic operators and Iran. However, experts and diplomats say the mechanism lack teeth.



The Leader said Europeans did not live up to their commitments under "different pretexts" since the Trump administration withdraw the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).



"They (Europeans) had to resist in regard to the JCPOA but they, under different pretexts, did not do their duties and repeatedly insisted that Iran should not pull out of the JCPOA, but the performance of themselves was in fact exit from the JCPOA," Ayatollah Khamenei told a large gathering of people and officials in the shrine of Imam Reza (AS) in Mashhad on the first day of the Persian New Year called Norooz.



Europeans' behavior was a 'knife in the back'



The Leader said there is a wide gap between what the Europeans had to do and what they actually did, adding their behavior toward Iran was in fact "a knife in the back".

The Leader said according to studies conducted and also based on the realities on the ground, politics and power in Europe and the U.S. are laced with cruelty, bullying and excessive demands and Western politicians, despite a modern appearance, are "wild".



Under the JCPOA, Iran is tasked to put limits on its nuclear activities in exchange for termination of economic and financial sanctions. The agreement was signed in July 2015 between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. The JCPOA was turned into international law as the UN Security Council adopted a resolution endorsing the deal.



Since the deal went into force in January 2016, the UN nuclear watchdog has issued numerous reports each time confirming that Iran is fully sticking to its commitments.



However, the Trump administration, quit the JCPOA in May 2018 and ordered sanctions against Iran. Officials close to President Trump have conceded that the toughest ever sanctions have been imposed against Iran. The Trump administration has even threatened to punish any company or country that does business with Iran.



"Today all (Iranian) officials have acknowledged that the enemy is in economic war with us," the Leader pointed out.



The Leader predicted that Iran will emerge victorious and will defeat the sanctions by tapping its potential. "We will defeat the enemy."



1398 will be the year of opportunities



The Leader went on to say that the new Iranian year will be the "year of opportunities".



The new calendar year 1398 began on March 21.



Ayatollah Khamenei said the country's chief problem is related to the economic situation of the poor classes that part of which is originated from European and American sanctions and part of it lies with mismanagement at home.



Saudi Arabia is corrupt, despotic and cruel



Elsewhere in his remarks, Leader of the Islamic Revolution said Saudi Arabia is the worst country that he has ever known.



"I do not know any country worse than the Saudi government," the Leader said. "The Saudi government is corrupt, despotic and also oppressive."



Saudi Arabia has been leading an atrocious war against Yemen since March 2015. The United Nations has announced that the war on Yemen has caused the greatest human disaster in the modern history.



The Leader also pointed to Congressional revelations that the administration of President Donald Trump is transferring nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, saying he is not personally worried about this issue because "in the not-too-distant future" Saudi Arabia will fall into the hands of Mujahideen.



Iran will continue to strengthen defense power



Leader of the Islamic Revolution also reiterated that Iran will continue to strengthen its defense power regardless of the pressure by the West.



"We will continue to strengthen defense infrastructure and will not give to pressure by others," the Leader asserted.International Norooz Day celebrated in Geneva

03/22/19

Source: Mehr News Agency

The International Norooz Day, marking the Persian New Year and arrival of spring, was celebrated in the Swiss city of Geneva on March 21, hosted by Iran and ten other countries. The ceremony was held at the World Intellectual Property Organization building in Geneva on March 21, marking the beginning of the Persian New Year and arrival of spring.

As the Permanent Mission of Turkey we co-hosted an event celebrating #Nowruz together with the friendly countries at WIPO. pic.twitter.com/fnh5ELQpkJ  TR Mission UN Geneva (@TurkeyUNGeneva) March 21, 2019

During the ceremony, Iranian ambassador to UN office at Geneva, Esmaeil Baghaei, delivered a speech on behalf of the 11 countries which celebrate Norooz, discussing the philosophy of Norooz and the importance of getting inspiration from this ancient rite to promote solidarity, friendship and mutual respect among nations.



Baghaei described Norooz as the bearer of this universal message of welcoming transformation and renewal, and perceiving the dependency of human beings on nature and the environment.

About Norooz:



artwork by Ardeshir Rostami

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.Prestigious Ecobank Academy will be training 150 senior leaders of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) from 45 African countries this week to strengthen their leadership skills with regard to helping the communities they serve.



The IFRC is leveraging its partnership with Ecobank to upscale its capabilities through training to enhance its work in local communities.



The three day IFRC Africa Region Leadership Forum training course is being provided by the Ecobank Academy. The Academy delivers world-class management development courses and is the first pan-African corporate university as well as being one of the largest capability development centers in Africa.



The aim of the course is Building African National Society leadership to be proud of and it will include training on leadership skills, leading National Societies effectively, partnership management, governance and responsibility, risk management and controls, sustainability, integrity and transparency, youth and gender engagement and the opportunities of digitization.



Simon Rey, Group Head, Ecobank Academy and Carl Manlan, COO of Ecobank Foundation, said: The Ecobank Academy and Ecobank Foundation have worked closely with the IFRC to devise training courses for their national leaders covering key leadership skills such as governance, accountability and sustainability. We have built a strong relationship with the IFRC and it is hugely gratifying that we can play a role in their impactful work supporting suffering communities.



Dr. Fatoumata Nafo-Traore, IFRCs Regional Director for Africa, commented that: at the IFRC we recognise that leadership is about solving problems. The training that our African leaders will receive from the Ecobank Academy will successfully position them to devise solutions to the challenges they face. Ecobanks support in this, and in many other ways, is proving to be an invaluable asset in our work to address health, disasters and crises affecting communities throughout the African continent.



Ecobank and the IFRC signed a partnership agreement in November 2018 to work closely together to empower local communities to cope with disasters more efficiently. In addition to providing training, Ecobank is leveraging its digital banking and QR code capabilities to boost IFRCs fundraising.



Initiatives on behalf of IFRC National Societies by Ecobanks affiliate companies have seen the setting up of digital membership records and enrolment processes, Ecobank staff volunteering to help in communities facing crisis, and the receipt of First Aid training from IFRC volunteers.

Source: Daniel Adu Darko/Peacefmonline.com/[email protected]









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Featured VideoThe President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has sent messages of condolence to the peoples of Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique following the devastation caused by the tropical cyclone, Idai.



The President made this known in three personalized letters, dated Wednesday, 20th March, 2019, to President Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique, President Emerson Mnangagwa, and President Peter Mutharika of Malawi.



On behalf of the Government and people of Ghana, I extend sincere, heartfelt condolences to you, Your Excellency, and to the brotherly people of Mozambique on this tragedy, President Akufo-Addo said.



He continued, You can be assured of the solidarity of the Ghanaian people and its Government in these difficult times. We stand ready to assist, within our modest means, in helping to restore a sense of normalcy to everyday life in the affected communities.



Effects of Cyclone Idai



In Zimbabwe, at least 98 people have died and 217 people are missing in the east and south, the government said.



In Malawi, the UN says more than 80,000 people have been displaced by the cyclone.



Large parts of Mozambique have been engulfed after the cyclone smashed into its low-lying coastal areas, while heavy rains caused landslides and floods in Malawi and Zimbabwe.



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Featured VideoTwo servicewomen of the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) who were dismissed in 2013 and 2014 for getting pregnant have been reinstated.



Fire Woman (FW) Thelma Hammond and FW Grace Fosu's reinstatement comes after a long legal battle with the state to have their dismissal reversed because it was against their human rights.



The final legal tussle came off on January 22, this year, when the High Court threw out an appeal by the Attorney-General (A-G) against the Gh50,000 costs awarded to either woman in April 2018 and a stay of execution.



Immediate reinstatement



A letter by the Chief Fire Officer, Mr Edwin Blackson, to the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) stated that the two firewomen have been reinstated into the service with immediate effect.





The letter, dated March 13, 2019, accordingly, directed the two women to report to the Greater Accra Regional Fire Officer for reassignment.



It further stated that the necessary arrangements are being made to effect the payment of their entitlements.



Discriminatory regulation



Ms Hammond and Ms Fosu, after their dismissal, petitioned CHRAJ and the commission took the matter to the Human Rights Division of the Accra High Court.



In April 2018, the court, presided over by Mr Justice Anthony Yeboah, ruled in favour of CHRAJ and the two fire service women that Regulation 33 (6) of the Conditions of Service of the GNFS which prohibited fire servicewomen from getting pregnant within the first three years of their employment was discriminatory and infringed on the rights of women.



It ordered the GNFS to pay Ms Hammond and Ms Fosu GH50,000 each as compensation and also ordered the service to reinstate them.





The second and third applicants (Ms Hammond and Ms Fosu) are women who are protected under Article 17 of the 1992 Constitution. The right to family includes their right to be pregnant and they are entitled to the right to choose when to become pregnant, Mr Justice Yeboah said.



The court was also of the view that unlike their male colleagues, Regulation 33 (6) negatively affected the marriage and sex life of the women during their first three years of employment.



The women employees are, therefore, subjected to adverse treatment. The GNFS discriminated against the second and the third applicants on the ground of gender, Mr Justice Yeboah added.



Appeal



The A-G, however, appealed against the quantum of costs awarded and applied for a stay of execution on the judgment.



The CHRAJ fought the challenge and the court, on January 22, 2019, ruled that the previous suit was so thoroughly covered that there was no basis for an appeal or a stay of execution to succeed.



With the victory, CHRAJ wrote to the GNFS on February 6, 2019, for the service to begin implementing the judgment of the court or face a contempt of court suit by the end of the month if it did not comply.



The GNFS, in a letter to the commission, said the two had been reinstated with immediate effect, with arrangements being made to effect payment of their awards.



Meanwhile, CHRAJ has urged all institutions to take notice of the judgment and revise all regulations and conditions that infringe on the rights of women to reproduction and marriage, particularly banks and financial institutions in the private sector.

Source: Graphic.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoThe growing size of Chinas middle class is generating an increasing demand for imported fruits such as cherries, avocados, and durian, bringing profit to foreign fruit farmers, WeChat account WednesdayNews reported on March 20.

Chinese tourists who go to Malaysia to eat the durians. (Photo/Chinanews.com)

The volume of avocados being imported has grown by nearly ten thousand times in just a few years in China, while pricey imported cherries are jokingly regarded as a new criterion for a persons financial status by Chinese netizens. Moreover, some Chinese people are even flying to Thailand or Malaysia to get a bite of the local durian.

Most of Chinas imported cherries are from Chile. In 2018, the volume of cherries imported from Chile accounted for 90 percent of the total imported to China, according to Chinas General Administration of Customs.

The popularity of Chilean cherries in China is attributed mainly to their ripening time, which is between November and January, right when China is celebrating its most important festival-the Spring Festival, in a season that lacks domestic fruits.

Bilateral trade relations between China and Chile have also contributed a lot to the rise of Chilean cherries in China, as in 2017, the two countries signed an upgraded version of the free trade agreement, realizing a zero-tariff policy on 97 percent of products traded between the two nations, cherries being one such product.

According to a report by The Economist, because of Chinas increasing demand for imported cherries, Chilean company San Francisco Lo Garces has become the worlds largest cherries producer, seeing its output grow by 25 times in 15 years.

As the profit of growing cherries is several times higher than that of other fruits, many Chilean fruit farmers who were previously planting other fruits have turned to cherries, as they believe that Chinas soaring demand will continue to expand Chilean cherry exports.

In the first week of the export season of 2018-2019, Chilean cherry exports to the Far East market (mainly China) rose 17 percent year-on-year, according to a report by the Chilean Cherries Committee of the Chilean Fruit Exporters Association.

Besides cherries, imported avocados have witnessed tremendous growth in the Chinese market over recent years.

In 2010, China imported 2 tonnes of avocados, while in 2017, the volume had risen to over 30,000 tonnes.

Such dramatic growth is driven by China's emerging middle class, who are keen on healthy food and have become enthusiastic consumers of avocados, according to foreign media.

Statistics from the Mexican Ministry of Economy showed that the country had exported about $25.55 million worth of avocados to China in 2017, making China its eighth largest export destination of avocados.

The demand in China has been growing at a remarkable speed, noted Ramon Paz, counselor of the Avocados Producer and Exporting Packers Association of Mexico (APEAM), disclosing that most of the demand comes from consumers in big cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou.

Chinese millennials who travel overseas are contributing to the increase too, said Ramon Paz.

Durian has also seen increasing popularity in China. On April 17, 2018, after the golden pillow durians of Thailand were released on Alibabas online grocery platform Tmall Supermarket, 80,000 durians were sold within one minute, weighing 200,000 kilograms in total.

In 2017, Nanning, capital of south Chinas Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, held a festival for Malaysian durian, which attracted about 165,000 people, who waited in long queues to taste the finest Malaysian durian.

Malaysian Minister of Agriculture and Agro-based Industry Ahmad Shabery Cheek said that in China, people would now wait in lines for two things: an iPhoneX mobile phone, and Malaysian durian.

Durian expert Lindsay Gasik told American Broadcasting Company (ABC) in an interview that she has witnessed the influence of Chinas demand for durian.

Several of the durian farms I used to buy from now supply only to China, said Gasik, disclosing that when she first got into durian in 2012, the durian bubble had just burst and people were telling her there was no money in durian. She added that at that time, many people replaced their durian trees with palms, while now people are cutting down palm trees and replanting durians.The Police Administration has requested Parliament to release Mr Kennedy Agyapong, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament for Assin Central, to assist the police with investigations into a case of assault lodged against him.



The March 19, 2019 request to the Speaker of Parliament said a police officer, Detective Sergeant George Ofori, had reported an alleged assault against Mr Agyapong.



The said incident is alleged to have occurred on 14th March, 2019, during a demonstration by students of University of Education at Winneba, the letter signed by the Director-General/Administration, Commissioner of Police (COP), Mr Ken Yeboah, said.



It explained that the Police Administration was mindful of the privileges and immunities of Members of Parliament under the 1992 Constitution as well as the Standing Orders of Parliament.



In the circumstances, we respectfully crave your indulgence to release Hon. Kennedy Agyapong to report to the Central Regional Police Commander to assist with investigations into the alleged assault, it stated.



Complaint



Briefing the Daily Graphic on the details of the complaint, the Director-General in charge of Police Public Affairs, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), Mr David Eklu said Detective Sergeant Ofori on March 17, 2019, reported to the Central Regional Police Command that he and other police personnel were performing their lawful duties of providing security at the forecourt of the Administration block of the University of Education, Winneba, to protect that facility against irate rampaging students.



According to the complainant, Mr Agyapong and the NPP MP for Effutu, Mr Afenyo Markins, accompanied by some irate youth numbering about 500, stormed the forecourt apparently to see the Regional Police Commander.



He said in an attempt to prevent the irate youth entry to the facility, Mr Agyapong obstructed him (complainant) by attacking and hitting his back three times.



Mr Eklu said Mr Agyapong was reported to have also threatened to dismiss him (complainant) from the Ghana Police Service.



He said the Regional Commander came to the aid of the Sergeant and told Mr Agyapong that he could not dismiss any police officer discharging his lawful duties.

Source: Daily graphic









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Featured VideoWorld Bank Africa Vice President, Hafez Ghanem will arrive in Ghana on Sunday, March 24, 2019, as part of a three-day mission to the country.



Vice President, Hafez Ghanem will pay a courtesy call on His Excellency President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to discuss macroeconomic, fiscal and monetary policies and highlight opportunities for investing in education and the booming digital economy.



Ghanem will also meet His Excellency Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, Senior Minister Yaw Osafo Marfo, the Minister of Finance, other Ministers of State and the Central Bank Governor, Dr. Ernest Addison for in-depth discussions on sector-specific issues. He will also interact with key private sector officials to discuss Ghanas business environment.



On March 25th, Ghanem will also participate in an African CSO and Parliamentary Dialogue Series connecting 15 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa and launch a World Banks report Profiting from Parity  Unlocking the Potential of Women Businesss in Africa. He will also visit World Bank Group-funded projects in and outside Accra, such as the Accra Digital Center, Women in Agriculture Green House Farming project, and VegPro Farms all at Akuse in the Eastern Region of Ghana.



This is Ghanems first visit to Ghana since becoming Vice President in 2018.



The active IDA portfolio in Ghana comprises 21 projects, cutting across all major sectors including energy, transport, education, water, and sanitation, among others. All World Bank commitments stand at $1,731 million with about 66% disbursed. Ghana also participates in one Regional project in Education.

Source: Daily Guide









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Featured VideoNestle is engaging with communities around its factory operations to help people lead healthier lives by providing free access to clean drinking water and better sanitation, as part of its commitment to raise awareness on water conservation and improve access to water and sanitation across its value chain.



The company believes access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) is a basic human right, which helps to reduce mortality and morbidity rates, strengthen community resilience and support personal dignity.



In Central and West Africa (CWA), Nestle is working with its partners to improve the lives of people across the region by building and repairing damaged water points, raising awareness of the importance of safe water to schoolchildren and teachers, and endorsing best water management practices, as part of its contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation.



Free access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene is a basic human right, said Remy Ejel, Market Head for Nestle CWA Ltd. Together with our partners, we aim to make a real contribution to society by helping more people gain access to them, he added.



The companys efforts aim to highlight the importance of World Water Day 2019, supporting this years theme of Leaving no one behind.



Partnering for safe water



Over 2,000 people in the Ayensunao district in the Eastern region of Ghana are now benefiting from safe drinking water after Nestle teamed up with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) to built three new boreholes.



Clean water is available to children in two local schools where two of the boreholes were constructed. Five water points have also been repaired in the community to reach more people in the nearby villages.



Water is scarce in this community, said mother-of-four Grace Owu. We have to walk miles to get access to water. Sometimes the children have to walk in the morning with their sponge and towel to wash, and fetch some water for household chores. Because of the distance to the riverside, they end up late for school and miss the early morning lessons.



Some of the children also swim in the ayesu, a river in the community that is infected with diseases, such as bilharzia. Thanks to Nestle and the IFRC, we now have boreholes in the community that make it easier for us and our children to get clean water on a daily basis, added the 48-year-old baker.



Nestle began working with the IFRC in 2002 to improve access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene in rural communities in Cote dIvoire. The partnership has helped to build thousands of community and school latrines, construct hydraulic pumps and educate thousands of children on good hygiene practices.



Since 2015, Nestle and the IFRC extended its partnership to Ghana. The project has helped to improve access to sustainable WASH services for over 76,300 people living in 50 communities in the rural Ashanti and Eastern regions by providing over 40 water points and 110 toilets.



We have been relying greatly on surface water which dries up during the Harmattan season, explained 34-year-old Ghanaian farmer Eric Awuku. This makes life difficult in this community for both young and old.



Thankfully, Nestle and the IFRC have come to our aid with clean water points. Children are now able to leave home early for school as they dont have to travel miles to fetch water for the house, the dad-of-four added.



Philomena Tan, Managing Director of Nestle Ghana commended the partnership with IFRC and called on other institutions to join forces to send WASH services to deprived communities. Water is life and collective effort is required to be able to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goal 6  Clean Water and Sanitation. We at Nestle Ghana will continue to help bridge the WASH gap in Ghana through partnerships such as this to complement efforts of the Government.



Reaching more communities worldwide by 2030



Nestle also supports the IFRC's Global Water and Sanitation Initiative, which aims to reach 30 million people across the globe by 2030.



The company looks to provide 600,000 local communities with free access to water, sanitation or hygiene projects around its production sites and main agricultural supply chains by 2020.



Providing free clean drinking water to communities



Neighbouring communities near Banendale, Bonaberi in Cameroon now have free access to safe water after a borehole was built at Nestles factory in 2012. Today, about 40 people a day visit the borehole to collect clean water  having had no access to safe drinking water previously.



Earlier this year, three new fountains were also built at the Abaji factory in Nigeria providing clean water to thousands of people in surrounding communities.



In addition, four fountains were built at the Flowergate factory; with four more just been inaugurated on the occasion of this international day.



In Senegal, about 2,000 local people also have access to clean drinking water from a water point at Nestles Dakar factory.



Raising awareness on the importance of water access



In Nigeria, Nestle looks to raise awareness on the importance of water access, support early water education and promote good hygiene by engaging with about 50 schoolchildren and their teachers at its Agbara factory during this years World Water Day.



Nestle Waters has also trained teachers and schoolchildren on water preservation and conservation through Project WET, benefiting over 8,000 students and 420 teachers in 140 schools across the country.



Alliance for Water Stewardship certification



Nestle Waters Nigeria is committed to achieve the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) certification by 2020 to benchmark its operations with global water stewardship best practices  five years ahead of the companys goal to have all of its sites AWS certified.



So far, it has engaged with the community through a number of programmes, raised awareness of local water use and helped to provide local residents with clean drinking water.



As part of the NW Nigerias water management strategy, groundwater assessments will take place every five years in its catchment areas to understand the impact of water abstraction and identify potential contaminants.





Source: Peacefmonline.com









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Featured VideoThe founder and leader of the Glorious Word Power Ministry, Reverend Isaac Owusu Bempah has revealed that some New Patriotic Party (NPP) executives, as well as ministers state in the current administration, are among some prominent figures seeking the downfall of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.



According to him, it is their wish that the president fails as the Commander-In-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces and are therefore scheming in various ways to ensure that their wishes become a reality.



The clergyman who claims he is the nations prophet failed to mention who these persons are but only served a warning to them to be mindful they will account for their actions one day if they fail to put a stop to these evil plots.



I am using this medium, I know the NPP leaders are listening they should change their conduct, most NPP leaders hate Akufo-Addo and sabotaging his administration in order for him to fail, it is their wish he fails.



Ministers should work and support the administration of Akufo-Addo and develop Ghana because they will account for whatever they have done on judgement day, he warned on NET 2 Television monitored by MyNewsGh.com.



Reverend Isaac Owusu Bempah observed that he has over time made enemies in the country because of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) with sections tagging him to the ruling government but is worried about the conduct of some leading members of the governing party.



The hatred I have in this country is because of the prophecies God has used me to do that favour the NPP, he lamented on NET 2 Television on Monday in an interview MyNewsGh.com monitored.



On the recent outburst of NPP firebrand, he said there are times certain things appear very depressing and hurting. They should bear in mind that Kennedy Agyapong has laid his life for the party is struggling for it. Because of the party he is doing a lot and spending so much on it.

Source: ghanaweb.com









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Featured VideoA bus driver of Senegalese descent hijacked his own vehicle and set it on fire in Italy while more than 50 children, whose hands he had bound, were on board.



The 47-year-old driver said he was acting in revenge for the thousands of migrants, many of them African, who have drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years while trying to reach Europe from Libya.



The man, named as Ousseynou Sy, was driving 51 children from their middle school near the city of Cremona to a sporting event when he started making threats, brandishing a knife. He had also bound the hands of the children so they could not leave the bus.



In an ordeal that lasted around 40 minutes, he started driving towards nearby Milan. He rammed the bus into cars on a busy highway before it came to a stop at a roadblock set up by police. He then doused the bus in petrol and set it on fire.



According to police, he said, "No one will survive," as he set the bus alight.



"He shouted 'Stop the deaths at sea, I'll carry out a massacre'," said Marco Palmieri, a police spokesman.



Police succeeded in smashing the windows of the vehicle to allow the children to escape.



Mobile phone footage taken by passing motorists showed children screaming in panic as they ran away from the vehicle. At least 12 children were taken to hospital for bruises, smoke inhalation or because they were suffering from shock.



Francesco Greco, a prosecutor from Milan, said: "It was a miracle, it could have been a massacre. The carabinieri (police) were exceptional in blocking the bus and getting all the children out. They broke the windows and managed to get all 51 kids out."



One of the children told reporters that the driver had threatened to pour petrol on them and set them alight.



"He handcuffed us and threatened us. He said that if we moved he would pour out the petrol and set fire to it.



"He kept saying that people in Africa are dying and the fault is Di Maio and Salvini's"  a reference to Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini, the leaders of the two parties that make up the populist coalition, Telegraph UK reports.



A 12-year-old boy who was interviewed by Italian television said the driver claimed that three of his children had drowned at sea while trying to reach Italy by boat from North Africa.



"He said he had lost three children, that many children die at sea, so we should die too, by being burned. I was afraid I would die," the boy said.



Police said the suspect, who obtained Italian citizenship in 2004, had a criminal record, with convictions for sexual molestation and driving while drunk.



The bus driver was arrested on Wednesday and is likely to face charges of kidnapping, attempted mass murder, causing a fire and resisting arrest. Prosecutors said he could also be charged with terrorism offences.

Source: telegraph.co.uk









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Featured VideoThe opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has replied the ruling New Patriotic Party's letter inviting them to dialogue on the issue of disbanding vigilante groups linked to them.



The General Secretary of the NPP, Mr John Boadu in an invitation letter said the NPP invites the NDC to "a meeting to discuss the menace of political vigilantism, which has gained notoriety in the country and explore ways of permanently disbanding the various vigilante groups associated with Ghanas two major political parties.



Youll recall that since the president made this call, our National Chairman, Freddie Blay, has been engaging your good self in telephone conversations on the subject. We think that time is now ripe for the parties to hold this crucial meeting, which the whole nation has been looking forward to. We have also taken notice of your request to expand the scope of the engagement to include multiple stakeholders and wish to assure you that the NPP avails itself of this consideration at the meeting, which will afford the two parties the opportunity to agree on the various stakeholders to be invited to the subsequent engagements.



The NPP proposes that this crucial meeting comes off during this week at a venue convenient to you and, so, we entreat you to, as soon as possible, get in touch with the party when you find a suitable venue for this meeting the letter stated.



A letter signed by the General Secretary of the Party, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah expressed gratitude for the invite and the content of the letter.



According to the statement, "we have taken the liberty to request the National Peace Council (NPC) to kindly exercise its statutory mandate and assume the role of Mediator in the deliberations on the above subject".



Even though the NDC was given the liberty to choose their own venue, they have handed over that responsibility to the NPC.



"We hold ourselves ready to meet your goodselves at any venue and date the National Peace Council may propose" the NDC added.





Background



President Nana Akufo-Addo first proposed the meeting between the two parties when he presented his state of the nation address in February following the gun violence that marred the Ayawaso West Wuogon by-election on Thursday, 31 January 2019.



The NDC, however, wrote to the president, through its National Chairman, Mr Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, suggesting that the National Peace Council be made to be part of such a meeting as a neutral interlocutor along with other stakeholders.



The president responded to that letter insisting the two parties were capable of meeting at the table to deal with the problem themselves without involving outsiders.



The NDC replied the president in a second letter in which the party insisted on having neutral third parties such as the UN, AU, and ECOWAS at such a meeting to mediate the talks.



In his second reply to the NDC, the president said he had ordered his Attorney General to start drafting legislation toward outlawing party militarism without prejudice to any meeting the two parties may subsequently have over the same matter.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoThe Deputy Minister for Health, Tina Naa Ayeley Mensah says unemployed private nurses must at least appreciate efforts by the Nana Addo-led government to get them working.



According to her, their actions in recent times to picket and demand employment is unfortunate - she however described them as ungrateful health workers.



From 2017 to this month, this government has employed a sizable number of nurses. No government has been able to do that so they should be grateful to us, she said in an interview with NEAT FMs morning show Ghana Montie.



The Coalition of Unemployed Private Nurses (COUPN) has given the government a 10-day ultimatum to find its members jobs or face a demonstration.



The group has accused the government of gross discrimination in securing its members jobs.



The aggrieved nurses, who said they have been home since 2012, explained that they have participated in several discussions with the ministries involved to get their grievances addressed but to no avail.



The irate nurses have subsequently given the government a 10-day ultimatum for appropriate responses to their situation or else they will embark on a series of demonstrations across the country.













Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/ Twitter: @Washman5/ Instagram: Washman007









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Deputy General Secretary of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Peter Boamah Otokunor has described Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumias upcoming Town Hall meeting to discuss Ghanas economy as useless.



He said his party has no interest in Bawumias discourse after ordering him to fix the economy than the plenty talks which will not benefit anyone.



Bawumia should know that he is no more a running mate, he is the Vice President of this country so he must work to fix the economy. What benefit will Ghanaian gain from his lecture? he questioned in an interview with NEAT FMs evening political program Torchlight with Mac Jerry Osei Agyeman.



Vice President Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia is expected to lead an economic management team town hall meeting with stakeholders on the economy on April 3 in Accra.



Minister for Information Kojo Oppong Nkrumah who disclosed this at a Press briefing in Accra said the Vice President who is also the head of the Economic Management Team will be speaking on the theme our progress, our status, our future.



He said the Town Hall Meetings are designed to bring government closer to the people and shall therefore see State actors give an account to the people who also have an opportunity to ask questions and make contributions to the local and national development process.

Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/ Twitter: @Washman5/ Instagram: Ambrose_wash









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoThe National Womens Organiser of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Madam Kate Abena Gyamfua has paid a day's visit to the Kotokuraba market in the Central Region to interact with market women and explain into detail the various policies of the Nana Addo government.



According to her, the NDC often use deliberate tactics to confuse people about the good policies of the government hence her decision to frequently visit various markets and speak to market women.



Fantastic policies like the Free Senior High School, One district One factory, NABCO amongst the rest were all well explained for better understanding.



She pleaded with the traders to continue with their unflinching support for the government, saying, the future is brighter under Nana Addo.



Madam, Gyamfua further described as a mere propaganda, the NDCs street talk that the ruling party is rather a violent party after the Ayawaso West Wuogon by-election.



She said, the Presidents swift intervention on political vigilantism affirms that the NPP is the most disciplined and well mannered party in Ghana.



Some of the traders expressed their appreciation to the President, Nana Akufo-Addo for the introduction of better policies especially the Free Senior High School which has given their wards the opportunity to attend first class schools which before could not have been possible.





Source: Josephine Acheampomaa/Peacefmonline/[email protected]









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoThe General Secretary of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketia has disclosed that his party is always not comfortable meeting NPP alone behind closed doors because of mistrust.



Speaking on Okay FMs 'Ade Akye Abia' programme, he revealed that NPP has always been deceptive whenever it comes to issues of the state.



According to him, the dialogue on disbandment of vigilantism is very important, but it will amount to nothing if the discussion is limited to only the NDC and NPP.



He reiterated that since 1992, the NDC, NPP and EC have been meeting on IPAC and after every meeting they (NPP) will ambiguously turn around and mislead many especially when the issues go against them.



Because of this (mistrust) we the two parties have even agreed to allow the EC to write its own minutes so that nobody will misinterpret anything to one another.



"Because of mistrust we cannot have a genuine and faithful dialogue, that is why we are calling for a mediator, third party to spearhead this meeting, he stressed.







Source: Josephine Acheampomaa/Peacefmonline/[email protected]









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Featured VideoVietnam and Laos would combine forces in cooperative economy, heard a meeting in Hanoi on March 21 between President of the Vietnam Cooperative Alliance (VCA) Nguyen Ngoc Bao and head of the National Economic Research Institute of Laos Bouasone Bouphavanh.

The Lao guest said that he was impressed by the rapid changes in Vietnam, particularly in cooperative economy development.

He expressed his hope that Laos will branch out its cooperative system based on Vietnams experience.

Meanwhile, Bao expected that bilateral collaboration in the cooperative economy will make significant contributions to bolstering the development of the sector in the future.

He said that in the past few years, the Vietnamese Party and Government have outlined various policies and programmes to facilitate the development of the cooperative system in the context of the socialist-oriented market economy.

According to VCA Vice President Nguyen Van Thinh, Vietnam is now home to more than 22,000 agricultural cooperatives, 3,500 higher than the amount recorded in 2013. Many establishments have enjoyed effective operations, and each earned an average 264 million VND (11,400 USD) per year with the income of workers estimated at 40 million VND (1,730 USD) per person per year.

Most of the cooperatives see joining a value chain as an important factor for their sustainable development, Thinh said, adding that they have applied advanced technologies into production, and enhanced trade promotion in both domestic and foreign markets.

The same day, Bouasone Bouphavanh and the Lao working delegation visited several new cooperative models in northern Vinh Phuc province. VNAThe General Secretary of the ruling New Patriotic Party(NPP), John Boadu has warned the leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to be mindful of their action in the process of the disbandment of the Vigilante Groups.



According to him, the President of the land (Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo-Addo) is not their co-equal for them to be writing to him all the time instead of them (NDC) addressing their concerns to the NPP Headquarters.



Speaking on Okay FMs 'Ade Akye Abia' programme, he emphatically stated that the opposition party is 'going overboard' with their numerous letters to the presidency as they have already written to the Peace Council, so wondering why they wrote to the President again.



He reiterated that if they are not interested in the dialogue they should let Ghanaians know and stop this back and forth tactics they are exhibiting.



Sometimes when someone doesnt want to do something they try everything possible to come out with so many excuses to create negative impressions . . . NDC as a party is coming from a revolutionary background, therefore unleashing violence has always been their hall mark, so we are not surprise about what they are doing, he said.



Mr. Boadu added that what he has noticed concerning the disbandment of the vigilante groups is that the NDC is trying to bring the name of the President into the discussion so that they will later turn around and accuse him of sidelining them in the process.



He asked the NDC to accept the verdict of the Peace Council after the dialogue.



John Boadu maintains that the NPP is always committed to the disbandment of vigilantism because it does not benefit them in any way.



Meanwhile, National Democratic Congress (NDC) has asked the National Peace Council to choose a date and venue for the proposed party militia disbandment talks between the main opposition party and the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) as proposed by President Nana Akufo-Addo during his third state of the nation address.



In a response to the NPPs official invitation to the talks, the NDC, in a letter signed by General Secretary Johnson Asiedu Nketia, said: We write to acknowledge receipt of your letter dated 15 March 2019 and wish to thank you for the contents therein.



We are gratified that you have, in agreement with our view, confirmed our position that this discussion has to be a multi-stakeholder engagement.



In furtherance of this, we have taken the liberty to request the National Peace Council to kindly exercise its statutory mandate and assume the role of mediator in the deliberations on the above subject (disbandment of party vigilante groups).



We hold ourselves ready to meet your good selves at any venue and date the National Peace Council may propose."



President Nana Akufo-Addo first proposed the meeting in February following the gun violence that marred the Ayawaso West Wuogon by-election on Thursday, 31st January, 2019.



The NDC, however, wrote to the President, through its National Chairman, Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, suggesting that the National Peace Council be made part of such a meeting as a neutral interlocutor along with other stakeholders.



The President responded to that letter insisting the two parties were capable of meeting at the table to deal with the problem themselves without involving outsiders.



The NDC replied the President in a second letter in which the party insisted on having neutral third parties such as the UN, AU, and ECOWAS at such a meeting to mediate the talks.



In his second reply to the NDC, the President said he had ordered the Attorney General to start drafting legislation toward outlawing party militarism without prejudice to any meeting the two parties may subsequently have over the same matter.



The NPPs invitation letter, written by its General Secretary, Mr John Boadu addressed to Mr Ofosu-Ampofo for the meeting on the subject matter, said he was pleased, on behalf of the party, to officially invite you [the NDC] to a meeting to discuss the menace of political vigilantism, which has gained notoriety in the country, and explore ways of permanently disbanding the various vigilante groups associated with Ghanas two major political parties.











Source: Josephine Acheampomaa/Peacefmonline/[email protected]









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoWe're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on!

Go to formHuawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, who is out on bail and remains under partial house arrest after she was detained Dec. 1 at the behest of American authorities, arrives back at her home after a court appearance in Vancouver, on Wednesday, March 6, 2019. judge has ordered the RCMP to provide copies of the content on seven electronic devices to an executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies after they were seized at Vancouver's airport during her arrest. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl DyckOpposition leader Juan Guaido, who has declared himself interim president of the country, embraces a child at the end of a press conference at a school where he delivered humanitarian aid, in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 21, 2019. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)In a few short years, the Presage collection has won over watch lovers throughout the world for its collection of watches that combine Seikos traditional watchmaking skills with dials that showcase different forms of Japanese craftsmanship, from enamel to Urushi lacquer. Today, Presage brings to life another expression of Japans rich cultural heritage in a series of two automatic watches with dials made of porcelain from Arita, a town which, for over 400 years, has been the home of porcelain in Japan.

Arita porcelain

Arita, a small town on Kyushu, the third largest island in the southwest of Japan, came to prominence in the early 17th century when clay suitable for porcelain manufacture was discovered there and its porcelain products soon became highly prized in Japan for the high quality of their artistry. Within a generation, Arita porcelain, also known as Imari ware after the port from which most was shipped, became known overseas and was exported, first to Europe and later across the world, when Japan opened its doors to international trade in the 19th century. Today, this porcelain is still highly prized worldwide and many porcelain makers still thrive in the town of just 20,000 people, thanks to its long tradition of craftsmanship, to the rich variety of its products and to the Japanese sensibility that they embody.

Arita porcelain was therefore a natural choice for the dials of a Presage collection but the Presage team needed to be 100% confident in its durability and strength. A new type of Arita porcelain material, created just three years ago, provided the solution. This new porcelain is more than four times harder than the usual material and has both the strength and flexibility required for a Presage watch dial.

Dial manufacturing

The new Presage porcelain dials are made by an experienced manufacturer in Arita that has been making porcelain since 1830. Hiroyuki Hashiguchi is the master craftsman and he and his colleagues have been developing the dials with the Presage team over the past few years.

Master craftsman Hiroyuki Hashiguchi  Seiko

To produce the dials involves a challenging combination of skill, patience and artistry. First, the base material is put into a special mold which gives dials depth, especially in the version where the power reserve indictor is recessed into the dial with a deep cut. The dials are dried and then fired for the first time at 1,300 degrees to harden and whiten the material. Hashiguchi and his craftsmen then apply the glaze by hand, after which the dials are fired again, this time cementing the glaze on to the dial, a process which gives the dials their deep, rich finish and the subtle blue tinge. Next, the holes for the date window and hands are cut by laser. Finally, the dials are then fired again to render smooth the surfaces that have been cut.

Dials in porcelain from Arita  Seiko

The heritage of Arita porcelain is respected in the color of the new Presage dials, white with a trace of blue, which was the color of the earliest Arita porcelain. Made in Arita itself, they have the rich texture and depth which is the signature of all the finest porcelain.

New Presage models

This new Presage series comprises two interpretations of the design, both of which are powered by Seikos high performance 6R series calibers. The first is powered by caliber 6R27, with a power reserve indicator at the nine oclock position and a date indicator at six oclock. The second offers a new caliber, 6R35, which delivers a power reserve of 70 hours.

Presage with dial in porcelain from Arita  Seiko

Every aspect of both watches reflects the care and craftsmanship for which Presage is renowned. The crystal glass is a dual-curved sapphire, the exhibition case back reveals the fine finishing of the 6R movements and both versions are 10 bar water resistant.

Presage with dial in porcelain from Arita  Seiko

This Presage Arita porcelain dial series will be available from September, 2019 at Seiko Boutiques and selected Seiko retail partners worldwide.An antibiotic is an agent that either kills or inhibits the growth of a microorganism. This useful infographic outlines some of the major c...Gavin Higgins: The Monstrous Child - the gods in Asgard - Royal Opera ( ROH | Stephen Cummiskey)

Perhaps it was John Adams and his opera Nixon in China (which premiered in 1987) who showed that story telling was still acceptable in contemporary opera; the idea of straightforward narrative with beginning, middle and end. But Adams based his opera on historical events, though the piece is very much about the creation of a modern myth. With the notable exception of Sir Harrison Birtwistle, the idea of using traditional myths, fairy-tales or folk tales as an operatic source was not something that featured that much late 20th century opera.





Noah Mosley: Aurora - Andrew Tipple

Bury Court Opera (Photo Robert Workman)

Yet last month, I attended three new operas by young composers, one based on myth, one on fairytale and one on folk tale, demonstrating that these rich sources of inspiration had returned to more regular use in the creation of new opera.

Dani Howard: Robin Hood - William Barter-Sheppard, Nicholas Merryweather

The Opera Story (Photo Robert Workman)

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In the 19th century, folk tale, fairy tale and myth were common currency of the opera libretto, Composers such as Weber and Marschner established the new German romantic opera based very much on German folk tales and fairy tales, and Wagner developed this, creating his own very personal mythology based on folk tale and myth.Wagner's success gave rise to generations of emulators, all by and large failed to achieve what he did. Few now remember Reyer'sthough Chausson'sgets an occasional outing, but Albeniz'sremained buried for decades. One composer stands out from this post-Wagner crowd, Engelbert Humperdinck whose fairy tale operamanages to be Wagnerian in construction, yet delightful and light in touch. Fairy-tale opera developed into quite a late 19th and early 20th century genre, Humperdinck would write a number and his pupil, Siegfried Wagner (Richard's son) did too.Over in England Rutland Boughton mined Celtic myth for popular hits like(which created something of a record by running for 216 consecutive performances at its London premiere in 1922) and Stanford's final operaused a Hans Christian Anderson tale [see my review of New Sussex Opera's recent revival].Yet changes were afoot. Wagner's sheer ubiquity prevented composers from successfully following him, and it is perhaps significant that the major German composer of the next generation, Richard Strausswrote opera in a very unWagnerian way. The giants of mid 20th century opera, Alban Berg, Benjamin Britten and Leos Janacek, all avoided fairy-tale and myth. Though folk-tales still creep in at one remove or two, whilst Schoenberg'sremains a fascinating re-working of the idea of didactic myth-based opera.You feel opera in the 20th century moving away from fairy-tale, myth and folk-tale, particularly in the post-War period when the avant garde set about deconstructing the idea of opera and story telling entirely.It seems that we can now return to these tales, whose apparently simple and striking nature reflects the complexities of the human psyche. Harrison Birtwistle's use of folk tale and myth in his operas demonstrates the way these stories can reflect the darker elements.What was notable about my trio of new operas was the willingness to engage in storytelling for its own sake. Noah Mosley's[see my review ] was based on an Italian folk tale, full of twists and turns, dark and light, with the leading character required to undergo travails before the happy resolution.Gavin Higgins[see my review ] was based on a children's book, Francesca Simon's re-telling of Norse myth, looking at the events through the yes of a teenage goddes. The effect was to feel that,- like, Wagner's Ring was happening in the next room.The Opera Story is a company whose commissions have alreaded raided Snow White, and a mash up of the three pigs and Goldilocks and the three bears. So this year they gave uswith music by Dani Howrd, a darking de-construction of the folk hero. [see my review Turning fairy tale, myth or folk tale into opera is quite a challenge, but rewarding when it succeeds, combining clarity and complexity with hints of the darker human psyche. I look forward to what further young composers will come up with.Hungary Richter to pay HUF 100 dividend per share

Gedeon Richter, Hungarys leading pharmaceutical producer, is to hold its annual general meeting on 24 April 2019 (at 2 P.M.), according to the invitation

Richter has notified its shareholders that is annual general meeting will be held on 24 April, 2019 at 2.00 p.m. at Matyas u. 8, H-1093 Budapest (Budapest Music Center). Lacking quorum, the reconvened AGM will be held at H-1103 Budapest, Gyomroi ut 19-21., on May 8, 2019 at 2.00 p.m.

Shareholders rights at the AGM may be exercised by the person who is the owner of the shares on the reference date for the identification of ownership and whose name is contained in the Share Register on the second business day before the first day of the AGM.

Richter also requested the shareholders to indicate to the respective investment service providers their intention to attend the AGM, and the investment service providers to provide the data of the shareholders within the deadline as set forth in the announcement of KELER Zrt. The shareholders shall also, in person, by telephone or by e-mail, confirm their intention to attend the AGM to the Company's Shareholders Relations Department on April 23, 2019, between 8.00 a.m. and 4.00 p.m. ("registration").

The agenda of the AGM include the discussion and approval of the companys report on its 2018 business activities, other reports by the auditor, the Supervisory Board and the Board of Directors, and the AGM is also to decide on the remuneration of the BoD and SB members, as well as on the dividend.

The BoD proposes the AGM for approval the payment of HUF 100 dividend per share, which corresponds to a 2% dividend yield at yesterdays closing price.

to the AGM published on Friday. The Board of Directors proposes the payment of HUF 100 dividend per share, which - calculating with the shares closing price on the Budapest Stock Exchange (BSE) on Thursday - corresponds to a 2% dividend yield.If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this





Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found hereEgypts interior ministry said on Thursday it would release more than 400 prisoners who received a presidential pardon earlier this year.

The ministry will release 134 prisoners after an assessment of their cases was made by a special committee, it said in a statement on its official Facebook page. It will grant conditional release to 274 others, it added.

Conditional release often includes requirements that prisoners report to a police station on a daily basis, or are subject to police supervision in other ways.

In January, President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi issued a decree pardoning a number of prisoners on the occasion of the eighth anniversary of the 2011 revolution and of Police Day.

The presidential decree instructed the interior ministry to examine the cases of the prisoners to determine those who deserve pardons.

President El-Sisi issues pardons several times a year, usually on major national holidays.

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ABC/Image Group LATwenty One Pilots have premiered the next episode on the duo's ongoing video series documenting their Bandito tour, which supports their new album Trench.

The latest segment, streaming now on YouTube, features footage from the end of TOP's recently wrapped European tour, and frontman Tyler Joseph and drummer Josh Dun reflecting on the trek.

"The shows have been the best that they have been in a long time," Joseph says. "It's really cool to come all the way over here and, in a weird way, feel at home with our fans."

"The rooms have just felt amazing," he continues. "Everyone sings really well, I can't believe [the fans] all learned the new songs. It's worth being exhausted all the time."

The Bandito tour heads to South America later this month, and will return to the U.S. in May.

Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.Egypt reaffirmed on Friday that it considers the Golan Heights to be occupied Syrian territory after US President Donald Trump announced that Washington would recognise Israeli sovereignty over the territory which Israel seized from Syria in 1967.

The Arab Republic of Egypt affirms its firm position that the Syrian Golan is occupied Arab land, in accordance with resolutions that have international legitimacy, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

It cited UN Security Council Resolution 497 of 1981, which declared an Israeli law of that year which formalised its annexation of the territory to be null and void.

The ministry called on the international community to respect the resolutions of international legitimacy and the United Nations charter in connection with the inadmissibility of acquiring lands by force, the statement said.

The Golan Heights was occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed in 1981 in a move not recognized internationally.

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Atlanta, GA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 03/22/2019 --First Choice Accident & Injury Care is quite a well known, trusted and respected organization that primarily operates in the state of Georgia. This organization is known to offer specialized and unique services relating to medical care and legal assistance to discerning individuals who have been in any major accident. First Choice Accident & Injury Care ideally employs board-certified physicians who have adequate training and experience that is required to deal with accident injuries. All of the medical practitioners belonging to this organization ideally focus on making sure all their patients well extremely welcomed, respected and valued, and thereby provide them with the most compassionate care possible. Apart from seeking out the services of medical care, accident victims quite often need solid legal representation as well. Therefore, First Choice Accident & Injury Care event offers the services of a truck accident attorney in Alpharetta and Atlanta Georgia to their clients who need such assistance. These trained and qualified legal professionals have the efficiency required to resolve various types of disputes that may arise in the scenario of an accident, such as issues relating to medical settlement claims.



Due to the nature of their make, two-seater vehicles are quite prone to getting into an accident. These accidents can cause severe harm to the motorcyclist, any co-riders, as well as passer-byes. In this scenario, it is imperative that people seek out the services of motorcycle accident doctor in Macon and Savannah Georgia in case they get injured in a collision as a motorcyclist. First Choice Accident & Injury Care is known to be staffed with professionals renowned for the most trusted and efficient practice for any motorcycle accident treatment. There are a plethora of diverse medical conditions that may arise due to any motorcycle accident. Some of these conditions can essentially be extremely severe, such as joint tissue damage, broken bones, neurological disorders, and so on. First Choice Accident & Injury Care is known to feature medical professionals who can quite efficiently diagnose the problems suffered by the accident victim, and subsequently, take measures to accelerate the healing process.



Give First Choice Accident & Injury Care a call at 404-455-2720.



About First Choice Accident & Injury Care

First Choice Accident & Injury Care provides its services to the people of Macon, Savannah , Atlanta, and its neighboring areas.Saint Louis, MO -- (ReleaseWire) -- 03/22/2019 --The American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) will celebrate, March 17- 23, 2019, the 58th National Poison Prevention Week (NPPW). The Missouri Poison Center will join this national campaign to highlight the dangers of poisonings, and how to prevent them. In 2018, the Missouri Poison Center received approximately 58,000 calls. The most common substances involved in all exposure calls to the Missouri Poison Center are for: pain relievers, household cleaning products, cosmetics/personal care items, mental health medications, and antihistamines.



"The poison center has worked locally and nationally to bring awareness to childhood poisonings, yet we need to remember poisons span all ages. We need to do more to help educate parent and prevent the latest trends in "Juuling" or the misuse of household products in our teens." said Julie Weber, Missouri Poison Center Director.



To prevent poisonings, The Missouri Poison Center recommends the following:

- Be prepared for an emergency. Program the national, free Poison Help hotline into your phone: 1-800-222-1222.

- Practice safe storage habits. Always store medicines and hazardous substances up, away, and out of sight. Keep these substances in their original, child resistant containers.

- Read and follow all labels and directions. Review medicine and product labels before you use them, especially before giving medicine to children.

- Detect invisible threats. Have a working carbon monoxide detector in your home.



All calls to the Missouri Poison Center are answered by specially trained nurses, pharmacists, and physicians. In addition to lifesaving services, poison centers also provide educational outreach to prevent poison emergencies and inform the public about the dangers of poisons



Follow National Poison Prevention Week on social media at #PoisonHelp, #PreventPoison, and #NPPW19 on Twitter, by liking our Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/MOPoisonCenter/ and by saving the Poison Help hotline (1-800-222-1222) in your phone. Or you can visit us on the web, https://missouripoisoncenter.org/Richmond, BC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 03/22/2019 --As an immigration consultant in Vancouver, the team at Racer Immigration believes it is important for families to stay together. For foreign Caregivers hoping to come to Canada, securing clearance for their families was a long and badly understood process. However, the Government of Canada has announced a limited-time pilot program that could open the pathway to family immigration to Canada. For more, go to: http://racerimmigration.com/preapproved-permanent-residency-for-caregivers-in-canada-%EF%BB%BF/



Previously, caregivers coming to Canada had to work for a period of time before they could even think about bringing their families over. This meant spouses and children were often separated for years, which placed considerable strain on families.



The new Caregiver Pilot Program, announced February 23rd, will allow overseas workers to bring family members with them to Canada with pre-approved Permanent Residency. Applications will be accepted between March 4, 2019, and June 4, 2019.



Eligibility for Permanent Residency will be determined before applicants arrive in Canada. They will be given a new, occupation-specific Work Permit that allows for changing employers without applying for a new Work Permit.



The pilot program will run for five years, and allow caregivers to bring their spouses, common-law partners, and dependent children. Spouses and partners will be issued Open Work Permits, allowing them to work for any Canadian employer. Children will be issued Study Permits, so they can register for school. Caregivers already living in Canada are also welcome to apply.



For those curious about Canada's new Caregiver pilot program, Racer Immigration's consultants in Vancouver are pleased to provide guidance and advice. To learn more, visit http://racerimmigration.com/ or contact (778) 688-4848.



About Racer Immigration

Racer Immigration Vancouver is a full-service immigration and business consulting firm that assesses the best possible way for clients to immigrate to Canada. They can assist and represent people in the event of serious immigration problems or work with employers who need support in the processing of LMIA or searching for foreign skilled workers. To learn more about working with Racer Immigration, call (778) 688-4848 or visit racerimmigration.com.



Mike

Racer Immigration

(778) 688-4848

Company Website: racerimmigration.comItalys interior ministry has said the country will grant citizenship to an Egyptian schoolboy who alerted authorities that his school bus had been hijacked by its driver on Wednesday.

The driver, an Italian of Senegalese descent, hijacked the vehicle, which had 51 children on board, near Milan and set it on fire, in an apparent protest at migrant drownings in the Mediterranean.

Thirteen-year-old Ramy Shehata hid his mobile phone when the bus driver confiscated phones from students and called the authorities. Police then rushed to the scene and broke the bus windows to get the passengers to safety.

The office of Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said it would grant citizenship to Shehata.

"The interior ministry is ready to take on the expenses and speed up the procedures to recognise citizenship for the little hero. The hope is to attribute ... citizenship to Ramy and remove it from the bus driver," the ministry said in a statement.

Shehata was born in Italy but was has never been granted official citizenship documents, his father told Italys Ansa news agency on Thursday.

"My son did his duty, it would be nice if he got Italian citizenship now," the father, Khaled Shehata, told the news agency. "We would love to stay in this country.

Police spokesman Marco Palmieri said that during the standoff the driver shouted: Stop the deaths at sea, Ill carry out a massacre. He was apparently referring to the deaths of African migrants at sea while trying to reach Europe.

According to the United Nations, some 2,297 migrants drowned or went missing in the Mediterranean in 2018.

Italy has taken a hard line on the matter, closing its ports to charity search and rescue ships, something that observers say drove up deaths.

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SACI Instagram: Statement from SACI Council on tertiary training in chemistry as a result of disruptions to the 2020 academic year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the professional body representing the interests of all chemists in South Africa, we recognise the challenges that the current COVID-19 crisis presents to all our members in academia, research and industry. We also acknowledge the challenges the current situation presents to our tertiary institutions and specifically the challenges presented by moving to online teaching. We applaud the efforts of all our members who work at tertiary institutions who have adapted and innovated to ensure that we can continue as far as possible with our teaching and learning of chemistry even when on campus face-to-face contact is not possible. Our tertiary institutions play a critical role in not only training the next generation of chemists, but they are also tasked with the important responsibility of ensuring that many people from other professions and disciplines are trained in the fundamental principles of chemistry. We reaffirm our belief that this training is essential, as chemistry is one of the central sciences. Key to this training is the practical component and laboratory based skills development. While we accept that this critical component of our training is not possible under the current situation, we strongly urge that plans be put in place to preserve this component of training as part of the curriculum as far as possible. In some cases, virtual laboratory tools can facilitate learning, but we believe that in laboratory practical training particularly for senior level courses should be preserved. SACI strongly recommends that at least a critical minimum practical experience should form part of the plans to complete the 2020 academic year at our tertiary institutions. We believe that this is essential to preserve the validity and integrity of the academic training programmes in chemistry. Statement issued on behalf of the SACI Council, Professor Peter Mallon

President of SA Latest Updates: Pay your SACI membership fees with SnapScan New Interactive Electronic Version of the IUPAC Periodic Table of the Elements & Isotopes How do we know what the temperature of our planet was a million years ago, to better understand climate change? Where did Otzi the Iceman live as a child and an adult? What evidence gives doping agencies the gold standard to determine whether testosterone in an athletes sample comes from doping? How do we obtain 3D images of tumors in soft tissues? The answers to all of these questions and many more can be revealed through a deeper understanding of isotopes of the elements. Isotopes matter! These new resources are created for educators and students at secondary and post-secondary levels, and to inform the public about the many uses of isotopes in our lives. They are based on educational practices that encourage engaged and active learning by students. The new IUPAC interactive electronic periodic table and accompanying educational materials were created by a partnership between an , and researchers at the , and build on the work of a previous IUPAC project team to create a print version of the Periodic Table of the Isotopes. This project responds to requests by educators and students for resources highlighting the importance of isotopes in our lives, and that give students help in using interval atomic weights for elements. brings free engaging and interactive learning resources to the fingertips of students and educators around the world, says Task Group Co-Chair Peter Mahaffy, Professor of Chemistry at the Kings University in Canada, and co-director of the Kings Centre for Visualization in Science. And Norman Holden, retired Research Coordinator of the High Flux Beam Reactor (HFBR) and the Brookhaven Medical Research Reactor (BMMR) and a Guest Scientist at the National Nuclear Data Center (NNDC) of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, adds: Its great when scientists and educators work together to create a vehicle to provide students with an understanding of fundamental scientific facts and accomplish this internationally. Following the global launch on August 17, 2016, the new IUPAC interactive electronic periodic table and accompanying resources can be accessed at . A print version of the periodic table of the isotopes and elements is available at . Further details will be published in the peer-reviewed IUPAC Journal, Pure and Applied Chemistry. Contact:

Dr. Peter Mahaffy, IUPAC Project Task Force Co-Chair

Co-Director, The Kings Centre for Visualization in Science

The Kings University, Canada

Dr. Norman Holden, IUPAC Project Task Force Co-Chair

Brookhaven National Laboratories, USA

Dr. Fabienne Meyers

Associate Director, IUPAC



SACI Ties, Scarfs and T-shirts Periodic table ties and ladies scarfs R130 each. Periodic table T Shirt Short sleeve R180, Long sleeve R200 Please contact head office to place orders. There is also a courier charge of R150 per order for delivery.

Q: I am a HOA board member, and our management company contract is coming up for renewal. We realized we have no formal way of evaluating how they are doing. I was wondering if in your dealings with homeowners associations you have come across a checklist or evaluation instrument.

B.T., Encinitas

A:I dont have a standard checklist, because each association has different priorities and needs, and evaluation of management should be customized to the uniqueness of each community. I relayed your question to a number of management company owners and officers, and I hope you find their responses helpful.

Brian Davidoff, CEO of Ross Morgan & Company, said it is all about responsiveness: Respond, respond, respond...service is all we offer!

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David Brock PCAM, co-owner of Beven and Brock, said evaluating a management company might involve three major questions: Are the managers credentialed, does the company provide transparency in financial reporting and potential conflicts, and is the company responsive and accessible?

Managers also evaluate prospective clients. If I ask the board members who their landscaper is and no one knows (when they see them at a minimum weekly and sign their checks monthly), that tells me they are not as involved in their communitys governance as they should be said Kelly Bunnell, PCAM, President of Bentley Community Management.

Last years Community Associations Institute President John Hammersmith PCAM, CEO of Hammersmith Management in Colorado, said I have always viewed the relationship between board and management as a partnership, and the evaluation process should be viewed the same way. It is important that both the Board and Management understand how each can work to improve the relationship and the ultimate outcome; a better community. To him, the most important items are how board and management treat each other, communicate, support each other, and allow each other to disagree. He said that both managers and board members come to meetings prepared, that managers should follow through, and directors should establish and communicate expectations.

We feel the three important items are financial accounting, board member training and technology, said Michelle Burge, CFO of Powerstone Property Management. She added, reviewing internal financial controls is an important factor and shows the companys dedication to risk management and detailed financial practices. A management company can also set itself apart by providing educational programs and innovative technology. High client and employee retention rates also demonstrate that the company excels in its management practices.

Regarding potential new management, Joe Winkler, Chief Marketing Officer of Keystone Pacific Property Management, suggests associations develop a specific scope of work and then see if a candidate company submits a boilerplate proposal or rather something specifically tailored to the association. Winkler suggests that boards discuss their challenges with management candidates, (thereby giving the management company the opportunity to demonstrate how closely they listen), and ask to interview the specific manager the company would assign to the HOA.

Thanks to the above management leaders for their advice. In my view, management is all about service, accuracy, competency, and integrity. Look for credentials, reputation, and indications of commitment to the HOA housing sector. Dont judge a management firms solely based on price. Look for quality and responsiveness, not bargains, and make sure that management meets the particular communitys needs.

Kelly G. Richardson CCAL is a Fellow of the College of Community Association Lawyers and Senior Partner of Richardson Ober PC, a California law firm known for community association advice. Send questions to Kelly@richardsonober.com. Past columns at www.HOAHomefront.com.The regions largest home builder has acquired a huge piece of land alongside Interstate 15 in Rancho Penasquitos and is preparing to build 324 single- and multi-family homes for middle-class families.

Lennar Homes of California bought the 29.93-acre parcel at 10955 Carmel Mountain Rd. from Atlantic Pacific Companies in early February for $52.14 million, according to information provided by the county assessors office. The transaction was disclosed by the buyers representative, Cushman & Wakefield, on Thursday.

After a four-year entitlement process, Lennar is looking forward to creating more homes in a central part of San Diego, said Kevin Nolen, a director with Cushman & Wakefield.

The new homes, some of which will be completed by the end of 2020, are said to be designed for entry-level buyers, although prices are not being disclosed. The for-sale residences will range in size from 1,324 square feet to 2,034 square feet, and will have two to four bedrooms. There will be 99 single-family homes, 105 triplex homes and 120 townhouses.

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This new community will allow residents to own homes in the community they serve, while also offering mortgage and lending options with a wide variety of programs for first-time homebuyers, Nolen said.

Lennars Penasquitos property accounts for around three-quarters of a bigger, 41.5-acre workforce housing development known as Pacific Village, which was approved by San Diegos City Council one year ago. Lennar and Atlantic Pacific were partners on the project, although the latter owned all of the land until last month.

In total, the Pacific Village development calls for 601 residences spread across the southern parcel now owned by Lennar, and the smaller, northern parcel still owned by Atlantic Pacific.

Lennar is handling all of Pacific Villages infrastructure needs, although Atlantic Pacific, which specializes in rentals, will build the 277 apartments on its 11-acre site.

Pacific Village replaces the now-demolished, 332-unit Penasquitos Village apartment complex at the northwest corner of the 56 Freeway and Interstate 15.

The previous complex was home to roughly 200 Section 8 recipients. The developers covenant with the city required that they provide relocation assistance to, and cover moving expenses for, the residents who were receiving federal rental assistance.

The real estate firms also committed to providing 115 subsidized, low-rent units. Sixty of the apartments at Pacific Village will be subsidized for low-income households. The other 55 subsidized apartments will be offsite at other projects owned by the developers.

The project did not originally include subsidized housing, but organized labor advocates successfully lobbied for several concessions that were only finalized in the days before Pacific Village went before the City Council in March of 2018.

In addition, Lennar and Atlantic Pacific will make $10 million worth of community and infrastructure improvements. The enhancements include updated sidewalks and landscaping, and a sound wall along Interstate 15. There will also be a new bike lane along Carmel Mountain Road and new traffic signals along Carmel Mountain Drive.

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jennifer.vangrove@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1840 Twitter: @jbruinFirst Congress threatened to cut off federal funds to universities using components made by telecom giant Huawei. Next came a classified FBI briefing last fall for University of California research chiefs about foreign espionage threats.

Then in January the U.S. government charged the Chinese firm with bank fraud, violation of U.S. sanctions against Iran and theft of trade secrets.

This was the point in which the line was crossed for me, said Randy Katz, UC Berkeleys vice chancellor for research.

He promptly announced an immediate ban on new research with Huawei, suspending a partnership with one of the schools largest corporate donors, one that had provided about $9 million over the last eight years.

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Berkeley is among a growing number of American universities, including research powerhouses such as Stanford, MIT and UC San Diego, that have begun to cut ties with Huawei. The moves come in response to warnings from U.S. law enforcement agencies that Huawei cant be trusted and could secretly do Beijings bidding, whether by spying or sabotage.

Moreover, the Trump administration wants to restrain Huawei  the worlds largest telecom equipment maker  from expanding its grip on development of critical 5G infrastructure, the next-generation wireless networking system that experts believe will transform connectivity for self-driving cars, factory automation and many other applications.

While Europe has generally been skeptical of White House calls to prevent Huawei from dominating new 5G networks, U.S. universities, many of which have long-standing relationships with Chinese entities, find themselves in a bind: China may be one of the largest outside sources of technology research funding, but it runs a distant second to Washington in underwriting such work.

UC San Diego, one of the nations largest research universities, counts on the federal government for most of its more than $1 billion in annual research and development spending. The school in August issued a six-month moratorium on new research involvement with Huawei, and last month extended that indefinitely.

Not only do universities fear jeopardizing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants, but they also dont want to find themselves in the position down the road of having contributed to national security problems, however inadvertently.

We are sensitive to the federal governments concerns about technologies being appropriated by other countries to the detriment of U.S. national security, Stanford said in December as it announced a moratorium on new engagements, gifts, affiliate membership fees and other support from Huawei.

As long ago as 2012, a House Intelligence Committee report warned that deploying Huawei gear could make U.S. infrastructure vulnerable to spying and cyberattacks.

More recently, Congress 2019 appropriations measure for the Defense Department, signed into law in August, prohibits funds from going to universities and other institutions that use substantial or essential components from Huawei and certain other Chinese firms for telecom and video surveillance systems.

Universities immediately began to scour their campuses for any Huawei gear. UC Berkeley ripped out Huawei-made video communications equipment at one of its off-campus sites, replacing it with an American brand.

The freeze by leading research universities should have little effect on Huaweis ability to roll out 5G gear, in which Huawei already is a leader and has no American rival. Still, cutting off Huaweis access to the resources of major U.S. research institutions could have ramifications for the companys long-term growth and technical development.

It is also a further blow to the companys reputation, at least in the West. Even as Huawei has become a formidable player in the global telecom industry, with competitive quality and pricing, it has become a virtual pariah in America.

Unlike in Europe and Africa, where Huaweis equipment is widely used, the companys products, which also include smartphones, have made little headway in the United States. And given the size of the American market and the reach of its technical and economic power, it may prove difficult in the years ahead to ignore the U.S. position.

Although U.S. officials have not offered any public proof of security problems with Huawei equipment, such as malicious code or back doors, they argue that Beijing could at any time order Chinese companies to hack into products they make for espionage or sabotage.

Huawei has insisted it would never accede to such requests.

The Shenzhen-based firm became a technological powerhouse in part by pouring billions of dollars into research and development, internally and with outside partners. The company could be at a disadvantage if it is slow to reap advances in, say, artificial intelligence and all of its potential applications.

Huaweis partnership in Berkeleys artificial intelligence research will continue for now because it was already funded. As part of a consortium of corporate donors that includes Intel and Google, Huawei does not have exclusive rights to any results.

Huawei, for its part, has made little public comment about the cutoff in research ties with universities in the United States and elsewhere, including Oxford. But a top company research executive, in a recent newspaper ad that sought to counter U.S. pressure on Europe to ban Huawei, claimed it had never appropriated anyone elses discoveries and thanked European universities for cooperating on mutually beneficial research.

All the papers and patents based on joint innovation belong to both sides or to scientists, said Zhou Hong, president of Huaweis European Research Institute.

For American universities, its not just about research funds. With more than 400,000 Chinese nationals studying and teaching at U.S. colleges, many schools are concerned that the attention on Huawei and broader U.S.-China tensions could hurt another crucial source of revenue: full-tuition-paying students.

The University of Illinois, which has also halted new Huawei-funded research projects, carries a $60-million insurance policy to protect against a sudden drop in students from China. Chinese enrollment was about 5,800 last year, down slightly from 2017 figures, according to the universitys newspaper.

Cornell University is among those that havent placed new restrictions on Huawei research. A university spokeswoman said that the school did a careful review to make sure there were safeguards and that they were in compliance with government laws. She declined to provide additional comment.

Government records show that in 2017, Cornell reported receiving a $3.9-million contract from Huaweis investment arm, the single largest award to the school from a foreign source that year.

Berkeleys ties with Huawei and its Silicon Valley research subsidiary, Futurewei Technologies, go back to 2011. Huaweis total gifts to Berkeley since then represent only a speck of the universitys overall research spending.

None of Huaweis existing grants to Berkeley involve sensitive technological secrets, said Katz, the vice chancellor. He described Huawei as having been a responsible research partner, and made a point of emphasizing that the university remains committed to upholding international scientific collaboration.

Berkeleys chancellor, Carol Christ, worries about the larger relationship with China. She said the university has had a long and deep research relationship with partners like Peking and Tsinghua universities. Many of its faculty were educated in China.

Obviously we have to be careful to protect our intellectual property, and I realize there are legitimate concerns about Chinas practices in regard to intellectual property, she said. But nonetheless, I think the world has so much more to profit by the sharing of research than putting up walls.

Times staff writer Teresa Watanabe in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

The latest from Washington 

More stories from Don Lee Boko Haram militants killed at least 23 Chadian soldiers overnight, Chadian security sources said on Friday, in what appeared to be the deadliest such attack inside Chad by the Islamist insurgents.

Boko Haram has been fighting for a decade to carve an Islamist caliphate out of northeast Nigeria, and has carried out regular raids over loosely guarded borders into neighbouring Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

Friday's attack occurred in the town of Dangdala, near the banks of Lake Chad, two security sources told Reuters.

One of them added that the assailants were believed to have crossed the frontier from Niger before attacking Chadian soldiers around 1:25 a.m. (0025 GMT).

An army spokesman declined to comment.

Chadian soldiers are part of a U.S.-trained West African task force deployed to counter Boko Haram. The violence over the past decade has killed more than 30,000 people and forced about 2 million to leave their homes.

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The Paradise Point Resort has agreed to pay the city of San Diego $34,500 to settle a legal claim that one of its restaurants had been misleading customers by not clearly disclosing a surcharge it was levying on diners bills to cover increased labor costs stemming from minimum wage hikes.

The settlement comes more than a year after San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott filed a civil enforcement action targeting the Mission Bay resorts Barefoot Bar & Grill, alleging that the waterfront eatery failed to conspicuously display the dining surcharge and then only added it to menus in extremely small print after Elliott sent a warning letter last August.

By not clearly alerting consumers to its 3 percent surcharge prior to ordering, the restaurant effectively advertised prices that didnt reflect the true cost of items to customers.

While the Barefoot Bar was one of 11 restaurants that previously received letters from the City Attorneys office alleging violations of Californias False Advertising and Unfair Competition Law, the other establishments either opted to stop using the surcharges or they began complying with the law by more clearly disclosing the levies. No legal action was taken against them.

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The Barefoot Bar, however, continued to mislead customers by disclosing the fee only in fine print on some of its menus, according to a news release from Elliotts office.

Paradise Point Area Managing Director Michael Stephens released a statement late Friday, saying, We were pleased to have settled this issue with the city last year, and while one of our many menus we offer our guests had a clerical error for a short period of time, we are also pleased to share that we have taken measures to ensure that this issue would not happen in the future.

Under the California Business and Professions Code, it is illegal to make false or misleading statements in advertising, Elliotts office pointed out.

When you order a meal, you trust the menu to clearly state the price, Elliott said in a statement. It is dishonest, unfair, and illegal to dupe customers into paying a hidden charge after they get the bill. Protecting consumers is one of my priorities, and our office will continue to prosecute businesses that think they are above the law.

Her office said that most of the $34,500 settlement will go toward a public restitution fund that will be used for consumer education and future minimum wage and surcharge investigations.

The use of surcharges has become increasingly common among San Diego restaurants following a succession of increases in the minimum wage over the last several years. The city of San Diegos minimum wage currently stands at $12 an hour.

While some restaurants have responded with menu price increases to help absorb rising labor costs, others have gone the route of adding a surcharge of anywhere from 2 percent to 4 percent to the final bill. The City Attorney has not challenged the legality of the surcharges but it has instead focused on making sure that diners are fully informed up front that a surcharge is coming before they receive their bill at the end of their meal.

Earlier this year, a Superior Court judge ruled that a number of San Diego restaurants were within their legal right to add the labor-related surcharges to customers bills. Multiple lawsuits targeting some of San Diegos highest-profile restaurant operators, including Georges at the Cove and the Cohn Restaurant Group, claimed they were defrauding their patrons by tacking on surcharges in violation of multiple statutes of the state business code, among them false advertising and unfair competition. The legal challenges also cited violations of the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act.

Until last week, Chula Vistas police drones could only fly within a roughly one-mile radius of the police station downtown.

Now, thanks to special authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration, the Chula Vista Police Department can expand its drone programs coverage area.

This month, the FAA granted Chula Vista a Certificate of Authorization, effective March 15, to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight. Before receiving this permission, a police officer had to maintain direct eye contact with the drones, which limited how far that drone could go.

This is a brand-new change to our operations and we are very, very happy with it, said police Capt. Phil Collum.

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The FAA granted the Palm Beach Police Department in Florida similar permission to fly beyond the visual line of sight about a year ago.

Since Chula Vista launched its drone program last year, drones have responded to 328 emergency calls and contributed to 45 arrests. Drone deployment has also negated the use of 38 officers, which leaves them available to respond to other emergencies, according to stats from the Chula Vista Police Department.

But so far, that success has been limited to a small area immediately around the police station, Collum said.

Now this gives us the potential of replicating that success in other parts of Chula Vista, Collum said. But exactly how we will go about doing that is still being determined.

The FAA has a partnership with Chula Vista to develop new drone regulations for law enforcement agencies. The regulations that come out of this partnership will set the guidelines for how police departments throughout the country can use drones for law enforcement purposes.

The FAAs permission to fly drones beyond the line of sight doesnt give the Chula Vista Police Department the ability to fly drones however they want.

Regulations still require the Police Department to have a spotter looking at the airspace the drones are flying in to protect them from any obstacles, such as incoming aircraft or light poles. But the officers do not have to maintain physical eye contact with the drone itself.

Moving forward, the Police Department will have an officer on the roof monitoring the sky to make sure nothing comes near the drone. The department can also position officers throughout Chula Vista to be observers if drones are flying nearby.

So while the new regulations allow Chula Vista to cover more ground with drones, exactly how much is yet to be determined, Collum said.

In Chula Vista, drones use a high-definition camera to send a live video feed to police headquarters, where a supervisor evaluates the situation and coordinates an appropriate response. Officers heading to the scene can use a mobile phone app to see what is happening before they arrive.

Police data show the drones respond to emergency calls in less than two minutes  faster than the departments current response time of more than six-and-a-half minutes.

Having a drone get to the scene first helps the police determine how to respond because a live video stream is more accurate than a dispatch call. For example, live footage can show the difference between a minor or a major car crash. Or, officers can see whether a suspect is carrying a weapon.

Cape, a Silicon Valley tech company, has helped Chula Vista develop its drone program. The companys software allows drones to fly on autopilot while officers view the live footage from miles away.

The company ran a similar program with the Ensenada Police Department in Mexico, where regulations dont require officers to physically monitor airspace. During a 10-month period last year, Ensenada police officers made more than 500 arrests with the help of drones, according to Cape.

Chula Vistas long-term goal for the drone program is to have similar results. Officers envision having a small fleet of drones that can be dispatched from various locations in Chula Vista and respond to emergencies faster than patrol vehicles.

However, the department is well aware that the technology is new and they plan to take their time with it, Collum said.

We are very aware that we are a test, Collum said. We are a potential model for law enforcement all over the country so, for that reason, we are going very, very slow.

Before launching the program, Chula Vista developed some privacy protection protocols. Drones do not conduct random surveillance or go out on general patrols. Also, the camera does not record until after the drone arrives to a crime scene.

Additionally, the Police Department plans to build a website that the public can use to review every flight path.

Contact Gustavo Solis via Email or TwitterChula Vista received more granny flat permit applications in 2018 than it did during a three-year span between 2014 and 2016.

Since the city streamlined the process, removing some parking requirements, and cutting the permitting fees by nearly $10,000 last year, residents are a lot more interested in building granny flats, also known as accessory dwelling units, on their property, said Kelly Broughton, the citys development services director.

They give our citizens more places and opportunities to live within our city, Broughton said. They accommodate a greater range of household incomes; thats the primary benefit I see.

Prompted by a state law that makes it easier to build granny flats as a way to deal with the states housing shortage, Chula Vista adopted a pair of pro-granny flat resolutions in April 2018.

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Those changes waive parking requirements  which were historically one of the biggest deal breakers  for properties that are within a half-mile of a bus or trolley stop. The citys rules also limit the size of an accessory dwelling unit to 1,200 square feet.

Between April and November 2018, which is the most recent data available, Chula Vista completed or reviewed 18 accessory dwelling unit applications. For comparison, the city completed or reviewed only 13 applications for all of 2017, data shows.

People can rent the accessory dwelling unit or move into the dwelling unit and rent their main property. Residents can also use the dwelling units for family, which is what Mayor Mary Casillas Salas did about 10 years ago.

Its really been a godsend for our family because we have our mother, who is 95 years old, live in the granny flat, Salas said. Her caretakers live with her so its a way for us to keep her close to us and assure she has good quality care.

The mayor sees granny flats as a way to encourage more housing in Chula Vista. She wants to make it even easier to build accessory dwelling units by further reducing fees.

Max Zaker, a member of the citys Planning Commission who owns a real estate company in Chula Vista, said more people are seriously thinking about building a granny flat on their property.

Zaker himself is thinking of doing it as a way to help his college-graduate daughter find an affordable place to live in San Diegos expensive rental market.

This could be part of the solution to a much, much bigger challenge that we are dealing with, not just in our city, but the entire state, Zaker said.

A bonus to building a granny flat is that because property values are calculated by square footage, building one on your property is a good way to increase a homes value, Zaker added.

Contact Gustavo Solis via Email or TwitterHouse Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said Thursday that an attorney for Jared Kushner told him in December that the presidents son-in-law uses the encrypted messaging application WhatsApp for official business, including with people overseas.

Cummings described the Dec. 19 discussion with Kushner lawyer Abbe Lowell in a letter to the White House counsel in which he requested information about the use of such messaging apps and other communications by White House personnel.

Lowell challenged aspects of Cummingss account, writing in his own letter that he did not say that Kushner used WhatsApp to communicate with foreign leaders. He also said he told Cummings and then-House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy, who was also in the December meeting, that he was not familiar with the details of Kushners use of the messaging application and referred them to the White House counsel.

A White House spokesperson acknowledge receiving Cummingss letter Thursday and said the chairmans requests would be reviewed.

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The use of messaging services such as WhatsApp could run afoul of White House policy and the Presidential Records Act, which prohibits White House officials from sending a record using a nonofficial electronic message account unless the messages are copied to an official account within 2o days.

According to a Feb. 22, 2017 directive from the White House Counsels Office, all White House personnel are required to conduct all work related communications on your official EOP email account except under emergency circumstances.

Early last year, White House lawyers warned West Wing staffers in mandatory ethics training sessions not to use encrypted messaging apps. Kushner attended one of the sessions, The Washington Post reported at the time.

According to Cummingss letter, Lowell said during their December meeting that Kushner was in compliance with records preservations rules because he took screen shots of his communications and forwarded them to his official email or to National Security Council officials.

Questions about Kushners use of WhatsApp comes in the wake of the revelation that Trump last year directed that his son-in-law receive a top-secret security clearance, despite objections by career intelligence officials.

In his letter Thursday, which was first reported by Politico, Cummings said Lowell also told him in their December meeting that Kushners wife, presidential adviser Ivanka Trump, was continuing to receive emails related to White House business on her private email account and did not always to forward them to her White House account.

The Post reported in November that Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails in 2017 to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules.

In his letter Thursday, Lowell said he was referring to Ivanka Trumps email practices before September 2017, when White House lawyers discovered the extent of her personal email use.

Cummings asked the White House on Thursday for information about any appointees who have used personal email accounts, text messages, phone-based message applications or encryption software to conduct official business.

The request is part of the Oversight Committees broader effort to get information about White House operations and Kushners security clearance process.

Cummings asked the White House to confirm by March 28 whether it plans to respond to its request. If the White House does not respond, he suggested that he would consider subpoenaing the records.It was kind of a big deal when Walter Gervers left Foals. The bassist departed the Oxford-based indie rockers on good terms in 2017, after the band had completed touring for their 2015 fourth album, What Went Down, and before work had begun on the bands just-released latest effort, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost  Part 1.

But as the de facto emotional leader of the until-then 5-piece, his exit was one that couldve been potentially disastrous for the two-time Mercury Prize nominees.

Walter had such an important role within the band, said founding drummer Jack Bevan from a recent promotional stop in Germany. He was the oldest member and the guy that everyone would lean on. It was like taking the foundation out of a building.

But we worked really hard to redefine the dynamic. And now it seems like were stronger than ever.

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That isnt just lip service, either. Instead of replacing Gervers, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Yannis Philippakis added some bass lines to his repertoire, and synth player Edwin Congreave contributed some on keys.

The new alchemy infused the reconfigured quartet with a fresh creative perspective and Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost  Part 1 reaped the benefits. Standout tracks like In Degrees and White Onions are among some of Foals best to date, and there is a newfound spirit of camaraderie within the band.

Just dont give Gervers all the credit. His decision to leave also happened to dovetail with the groups first legitimate stretch of time off in a decade.

Foals. (Alex Knowles)

We toured really, really hard on the last album, Bevan said. From the beginning of the band until now, wed pretty much just written, recorded, toured, written, recorded, toured. Wed really never taken a break. But taking some time off really got us feeling grateful for what it is that we do and enabled us to get excited again.

So much so that, as the title suggests, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost  Part 1 is only the start. Foals already has announced that Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost  Part 2 is currently being mixed and is set for release later this fall.

Philippakis and guitarist Jimmy Smith brought so many new ideas into the studio last year that when the band was done fleshing them out, they were staring at 20 finished songs.

But instead of cherry picking a lions share of them for a single album, the decision was made to divide them evenly into two  something Bevan acknowledges wasnt part of the original game plan.

We never thought we were making two albums, he said. We just tried to record everything and had 20 finished songs at the end. And there was no way that we were going to agree on cutting it down. The tracks that would have been cut out were just too good not to make it onto a record.

It also gave the band a chance to sequence each album in a way they havent been able to do before. Foals have always incorporated a multitude of styles into their music and previous albums have been forced to reconcile that or make cuts. This gave them the chance to do it without sacrifice.

It was really important to make the second record as strong as the first, said Bevan. We wanted to make sure that both records stood up by themselves. We didnt want the second one to be seen as the b-sides. This is something weve never done before and its incredibly exciting to us to know that theres this other record coming in six months.

Up until that point, as well as far beyond it, Foals are back to the unfathomably busy schedule that has (almost) always defined the band. And after successfully navigating the first real speed bump of their careers, Bevan knows they wouldnt want it any other way.

Were in a great place right now, he said. Knowing the rug could be pulled out from beneath us and it could come to an end, in a way, made us more determined than ever to do something really great. And getting back to being busy is a good thing. Wed be really worried if we werent busy at this point.

Foals

When: 8 p.m. March 23

Where: Observatory North Park, 2891 University Ave, North Park

Cost: Sold out

Online: observatorysd.comThe real desert sunset occurs in that unlikely direction, the east, Bruce Berger writes in one of his essays from A Desert Harvest. It is opposite the sun that the last rays, deflected through clear skies, fall on the long, minutely eroded mountain ranges and bathe our eyes with light of decreasing wavelengths.

In this latest collection, consisting of both new and previously published work, Berger makes a habit of these subversive observations. He looks where others may look  at the Phoenix canals, or a simple found photograph, for instance  and then turns away, examining the subject within another context, collapsing the space between history and present, between one place and the next: That is the revelation about desert sunsets: that the distance is so unmoored, so delicious, that you want to be there, to become that distance. The reader can almost taste it.

As landscape without our image recedes, the wilds only deepen in their strangeness. Bruce Berger

Bruce Berger waxes poetic about cactus, like these slow-growing saguaro at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. (Adam Rodriguez)

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Berger was raised in Chicago and educated on the East Coast, but now, at age 80, hes a bona-fide desert veteran. His style is more poetic and less raucous than contemporary Edward Abbey; his conservationism equally felt, if not as stridently expressed. Taken in its entirety, A Desert Harvest renders Bergers travels across the Southwest and down through Baja California Sur with plenty of charm and a comic sense for the surreal, but it also leaps beyond: into questions of water use or the substance of time (those foremost of arid subjects), grounding readers in the issues of the region.

In one exemplary essay, The Mysterious Brotherhood, Berger begins with the task of describing varieties of decayed cactus: the barrels great mashed thumb, the organ pipes burnt candelabra, the staghorn still more like antlers when stripped of its flesh. Death is a common preoccupation, the result of encroaching human activity in his treasured and adopted home, of his many years engaged with a land of extremes: vastness, temperature, extraordinary spines. Cactus tells us nothing of whats ahead, any more than the death of a close friend: all they reveal is process, but process which retains, even in human terms, immeasurable beauty.

The history of Phoenix, from outpost through oasis to elephantiasis, is written in channeled water... Bruce Berger

This emphasis on process, or linked events, is one of Bergers strengths, which appears in his style of storytelling as much as the stories themselves. The standout Cactus Pete takes place during multiple visits across three years to the namesakes remote Arizona outpost. Pete claims to map the mountains on Venus, cure cancer and discover rare minerals with his trusty doodlebug, a mysterious contraption that seems nothing more than a spring with a rubber handle and a plastic cone (apparently tipped with uranium). Bergers willingness to return and engage with Pete, embracing his antics, provides material for a wonderfully nutty portrait. But Berger has more in mind: He uses Petes mention of caliche to turn the essay inward, likening the hard mineral substance (the deserts false bottom) to Petes persistent solitude. This new angle is where real meaning develops, as Berger finds himself navigating between nostalgia and dementia, attempting to understand the mixed motives of desert settlers: escapism to some pristine, primeval world, paired with a desire to make that world ones own  to shape it.

In Phoenix, a Central Arizona Project canal, which brings water to the desert city. Many of the canals were built on the vestiges of waterways built by the Hohokam people centuries ago. (Matt York / Associated Press)

Phoenician Shipwrecks charts the fascinating history of the Phoenix canals, some of whose routes predate the city by nearly two millenniums. Berger begins the essay around 200 AD  when the Hohokam Indians used handheld digging tools to create more than 250 miles of irrigation lines  and then proceeds to the canals retrenching by settlers in the mid-1800s (for grain and alfalfa), to the citrus boom that soon followed, and into the recent past: when residential neighborhoods replaced the groves, children swam in the canals, families congregated on the banks and adventurous water skiers ploughed past at 50 miles per hour tethered to cars on adjacent streets.

The history of Phoenix, from outpost through oasis to elephantiasis, is written in channeled water, he writes. Now the neighborhoods are walled and the canals dredged each year to remove the tires, guns, refrigerators and dead fish that accumulate. Its an engrossing and illuminating look at the development of one of the Wests most populous places. Total control, once gained, was exercised, reducing the riverbed to a waste  Berger concludes, taking his elegiac stance against Western water hubris.

These longer works are composed with the structure and pacing of good fiction or music. Bergers background as a pianist is evident in this respect, and more explicitly in his story The Search for Mata Hari, in which he plays a benefit concert for the community of La Paz and searches for the lost melodies of a local maestro. Other essays riff on Willa Cather or quote Robinson Jeffers or, as when Berger returns to La Paz for the 1991 eclipse, attempt dialogue with Annie Dillard. In some of these riffs (Cather), the payoffs are great; others (as with Dillard, where its more mention than engagement) feel like reaches without rewards.

A Desert Harvest also includes a number of shorter pieces, two-page meditations on heat, sunsets, slick rock and side canyons, that verge on prose poetry:

The addict knows that to enter a side canyon is to spin the wheel of fortune. His career is a series of tangents, out and back, out and back; like the sidewinder he advances laterally. It does no good to tell him his behavior is about as reasonable as a frayed rope, that his days are a compendium of minutiae, that he cannot see the river for its tributaries.

Cactus against a dramatic sunset off Interstate 10 in Tonopah, Ariz. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

The books final essay, Arrows of Time, takes up the theme of time most explicitly, despite the abstract angle. Berger accompanies a friend to a physics conference in Spain on the Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry, and between meals with Stephen Hawking and chasing birds in the nearby preserve, distills the behavior of quantum-level particles. The essay meanders and feels somewhat out of place in the collection but manages to provide an interesting counterpart to Bergers reflections on geologic time in his pieces set in the Southwest. One such piece likens a wilderness trip to cycles of sleep: Hallucination, blackout; hallucination, blackout As if time, like a series of dreams, were measured by the vividness of unfamiliar scenery, punctuated by nights of sheer oblivion. Desert hikers know that time can easily collapse or elapse in foreign proportion when surrounded by layers of ancient sediment, far from civilization, with a limited supply of water.

A Desert Harvest has the feel of a tributary collection for Berger; the book places him among the best of past generations to write about the Southwest. For longtime readers, though, it fails to offer much in terms of new material. The finest essays  Cactus Pete and Curse of the Adorers and Mata Hari  are culled from prior works. This wide range presents new readers with an excellent survey of Bergers career, but it also leaves the collection, as a whole, spread somewhat thin; it lacks the cohesion and sustained devotion of his earlier investigations.

Nonetheless, Harvest is a welcome revival for an author for whom too many books have gone out of print. In Bergers words: The more our lands are surfeited by our presence, the more the forces that spawned us retreat from sight. As landscape without our image recedes, the wilds only deepen in their strangeness. Berger brings us closer to the strange and encourages us to preserve it: to bridge the distance with care, or else steer clear.

::

A Desert Harvest

Bruce Berger

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pp., $26

McCoy is a writer from Arizona and the editor of Contra Viento, a journal for art and literature from range lands. He lives in Los Angeles.Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. Its Friday, March 22, and heres whats happening across California:

TOP STORIES

Wealthy parents have been going to great lengths to help their kids get into elite universities for years. But the college admissions scandal, a well-documented  and viral  moment in the helicopter-parenting era, indicates a willingness to go to greater extremes. In an era of badly behaving bankers, entertainment and sports figures, and government officials who tweet first and think later, the cheating may seem like perversely logical behavior. Experts in parenting say the win-at-all-costs attitude can have a pernicious effect on a child. Los Angeles Times

Wiretaps, emails and checks: Parents face a tough legal fight. Los Angeles Times

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And if it doesnt work out: Parents are turning to this convicted felon for advice on life in prison. Washington Post

The kids: As colleges decide the fate of children in the scandal, theres a key question: What did they know? Los Angeles Times

New boss in town

As chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carol L. Folt removed the Confederate statue that had been at the heart of a brewing scandal. For some, it was a brave act. For others, like Jerry Wilson, a black graduate student at the university, it was the right move  but one Folt also made when it was politically safe: on her last day on the job. As Folt becomes USCs new president, it remains to be seen how bold a crusader for change the normally cautious leader will be at a university that desperately needs change. Los Angeles Times

Some pushback from the Marines

The commandant of the Marines has warned the Pentagon that deployments to the southwest border and funding transfers under the presidents emergency declaration, among other unexpected demands, have posed unacceptable risk to Marine Corps combat readiness and solvency. In two internal memos, Marine Corps Gen. Robert Neller said the unplanned/unbudgeted deployment along the border that President Trump ordered last fall, and shifts of other funds to support border security, had forced him to cancel or reduce planned military training in at least five countries and delay urgent repairs at bases. Los Angeles Times

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L.A. STORIES

Poppy boom: Overwhelmed by visitors because of this years epic super bloom of spring flowers, Lake Elsinore on Thursday announced new measures designed to control the crowds. Los Angeles Times

Plus: Where to go to see the flowers. Los Angeles Times

Thousands have visited Walker Canyon in Lake Elsinore to see the poppies in bloom. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Scary: For the second time this month, Los Angeles County public health officials are warning travelers that a person with measles flew into Los Angeles International Airport. Los Angeles Times

More fallout: UCLA mens soccer coach Jorge Salcedo resigned in the wake of his alleged involvement in accepting $200,000 in bribes to help enroll two players using fake athletic profiles. Los Angeles Times

It begins: Walt Disney Co. began laying off senior-level executives after acquiring 21st Century Fox this week. Los Angeles Times

IMMIGRATION AND THE BORDER

Illuminating: This photo shows why a border wall wont stop the immigration surge. Washington Post

These arrests are up: Federal immigration agents under President Donald Trump have set a new record for arrests of undocumented immigrants who dont have a criminal record, according to data released Thursday. USA Today

POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

Scoop: The Trump administration is quietly laying the groundwork to weaken a decades-old federal law that empowers California and other states to slow and even stop offshore oil and gas drilling in federal waters. Los Angeles Times

Who knew we needed a law? More California students may be banned from using cellphones at school under new bill. Los Angeles Times

No thanks: The Economic Roundtable, an L.A. nonprofit, says it can predict with high accuracy whether some adults and youths will become chronically homeless. But L.A. County officials dont want that research. Instead, they have accused the nonprofit of misusing data it received from government agencies. Los Angeles Times

New legislation alert: Female surfers push beyond equal pay  even if it means letting men into the water too. CALmatters

Heading to Texas: Sen. Kamala Harris puts Beto ORourke on notice. Politico

CRIME AND COURTS

Interesting battle: Gov. Gavin Newsom is considering prohibiting new death sentences in criminal cases, a position that is sure to be opposed by local district attorneys and possibly state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra. It comes after Newsom imposed a moratorium on actual executions while he is in office. Los Angeles Times

In court: Tesla Inc. sued Zoox Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up that is a rival in the race for fully autonomous cars, and four former employees, accusing them of stealing confidential information. Bloomberg

Under review: UC Berkeleys athletic department has referred an allegation of sexual harassment involving the football team to the campus Office for Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination. San Francisco Chronicle

THE ENVIRONMENT

Called out: The Trump administrations reliance on industry-funded environmental specialists is again coming under fire, this time by researchers who say that Anthony Tony Cox Jr., who leads a key EPA advisory board on air pollution, is a fringe scientist and ideologue pushing policies detrimental to public health. Los Angeles Times

Food safety: Farmers are supposed to consider safer alternatives to toxic pesticides. A UCLA report says thats not working out well. KQED

CALIFORNIA CULTURE

Cleaning up: WarnerMedia, roiled by a sex scandal that led to the departure of former studio chief Kevin Tsujihara, said it will create a new executive position that will focus on diversity and inclusion. Los Angeles Times

Spring arts preview: Recommendations from our critics and profiles of the emerging artists you should know now. Los Angeles Times

Opening day is soon: The clock is ticking on Justin Turners shot at a World Series title. Los Angeles Times

FBF: Historian Kevin Starrs years as a newspaper columnist. Boom California

Harrowing story: Emilia Clarke had just finished filming Season 1 of Game of Thrones. Then, she writes, I was struck with the first of two aneurysms. The New Yorker

Hes in charge: Lachlan Murdoch takes control of Fox Corp. But how will he deal with President Trump? Washington Post

Great story: In praise of Jason Clarke, Hollywoods go-to cuckold. New York Magazine

CALIFORNIA ALMANAC

Los Angeles area: partly cloudy, 66, Friday and Saturday. San Diego: partly cloudy, 64, Friday and Saturday. San Francisco area: showers, 57, Friday; sunny, 58, Saturday. San Jose: showers, 62, Friday; partly cloudy, 62, Saturday. Sacramento: rainy, 57, Friday; partly cloudy, 64, Saturday. More weather is here.

AND FINALLY

Todays California memory comes from Richard Durant:

We moved from New Hampshire to the South Bay area via Route 66 in 1956. My father was an oil worker at the Richfield refinery in Wilmington. The area had dairies and farms. I left in 1971 to serve in the Air Force, returning to attend college in 1975. I grew up watching the area develop and grow. The only thing better today is the air quality. I remember days as a kid when you could hardly breathe the air. I remember driving to Disneyland passing fields of oranges. The area, sadly, has no open space left. I currently live in Ventura, which still has agriculture.

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.Oliver Knight was thoroughly prepared to undergo a hysterectomy, having consulted with his surgeon before scheduling the surgery for late August 2017.

He completed pre-operative procedures and upon arrival at St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka was asked to put on a pink hospital gown and booties. Now, his doctor would remove his uterus and Knight would complete another step in his journey as a transgender man.

But after about an hour of Knight waiting while he was hooked up to an IV on a hospital bed, his doctor called the surgery off, according to a lawsuit Knight and the American Civil Liberties Union filed against St. Joseph Health Northern California. The suit was filed Thursday in Humboldt County Superior Court.

Knight, shocked and in tears, asked if the reason was because he was transgender. His doctor replied simply: Yes, according to the complaint.

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The ACLU alleges the hospital discriminated against Knight when they refused to perform the hysterectomy, because they routinely performed the procedure on other non-transgender patients. Their decision, according to the lawsuit, is a violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits businesses from discriminating against patrons, including on the basis of sex, gender identity and gender expression.

I didnt understand how this could be happening, Knight said in an ACLU blog post. The Catholic bishops didnt approve of my surgery. It seemed unreal.

Through an ACLU representative, Knight declined an interview with The Times.

Knight said in the suit that the experience caused severe emotional distress and anxiety and is suing for unspecified damages, including attorney fees.

Since childhood, Knight felt something was amiss with his body, he said in the blog post. Eventually, he was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is classified as a medical condition in which a persons gender identity and sex dont match, the suit states.

Knight worked for years to affirm his gender, including by taking testosterone and having a double mastectomy, Knight said in the blog post.

His next step was to have a hysterectomy, which is performed on transgender men looking to affirm their gender and women who are diagnosed with various health conditions, including endometriosis, chronic pelvic pain and gynecological cancer. Once the procedure is completed, patients can no longer become pregnant.

It was Knights surgeon, Dr. Deepak Stokes, who suggested a hysterectomy as treatment for Knights diagnosis, according to the lawsuit. He regularly performed the surgery at St. Joseph Hospital, the suit states.

After his doctor informed him he would not perform the surgery, Knight said he began having an anxiety attack. He was given the anti-anxiety medication Ativan while at the hospital, and then asked to leave, still wearing his hospital booties.

I felt humiliated and queasy as I sat on the curb waiting for my roommate to pick me up, he said in the blog post.

The hospital justified denying Knight the surgery by saying that it did not meet [its] parameters for a sterilization, the complaint said.

According to the lawsuit, all Catholic health care facilities, including St. Joseph Hospital, is required to follow policies created by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The policies state that direct sterilization is intrinsically evil and to be performed only when it alleviates a present and serious pathology.

The complaint quotes the Catholic organization saying: Claiming that this is a civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.

But one of Knights attorneys took issue with the hospitals position.

Gender affirming care is lifesaving and medically necessary, Elizabeth Gill, one of Knights attorneys said in a prepared statement. Transgender people are part of our community, our workplaces, and our neighborhoods and they, just like everyone else, deserve to get the health care they need.

A St. Joseph Health representative said the health care facility had not yet reviewed the suit.

At St. Joseph Health, we believe health care is a basic human right and that every individual seeking care should always be treated with compassion and respect, said spokeswoman Elizabeth Brophy in an emailed statement. We are committing our full attention to investigating this matter.

alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com

Twitter: @r_valejandraCustoms and Border Protection officers have not always followed policies intended to protect Central American asylum seekers who are likely to be harmed in Mexico from returning there under the Remain in Mexico program, according to documents obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The program, known officially as Migrant Protection Protocols, sends certain migrants who ask for asylum at the southern border back to Mexico while they wait for their immigration court cases to be called.

If migrants tell officials that they are afraid of going back to Mexico, the Border Patrol is supposed to send them for follow-up interviews with asylum officers who work under a separate agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to an agency memo. Those officials are specially trained to weigh a persons story about fear of returning against specific legal standards and definitions.

Customs and Border Patrol documents detailing questions asked of individual asylum seekers who were returned to Mexico as part of the migrant protection program show that some of those who expressed fear of being in Mexico were returned to Tijuana without talking to USCIS asylum officers.

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Others returned under the program said that they had not been able to express their fear to Border Patrol officials during processing because of the way officials conducted their intake interviews.

The majority of those who spoke with the Union-Tribune after they had been returned under the program said they were afraid to be in Mexico, but few had been referred for the additional screening to determine whether they should be part of the program.

Juan Carlos, a Salvadoran man who came to the port of entry with his wife and three children, the youngest of whom is 10 months old, said that when he told the Border Patrol official that he and his family were afraid to return to Mexico, the official asked how long theyd been there already. Juan Carlos responded three months.

He said, Well, they havent done anything to you yet, Juan Carlos recalled in Spanish.

He was not given the opportunity to talk to an asylum officer about his fears.

Were human beings, Juan Carlos said. No one wants to die, not an American, not a Salvadoran, not a Nicaraguan. Were looking for protection, for help.

Karen, a 28-year-old woman from Honduras who came with her three children, similarly told Border Patrol that she was afraid of being in Mexico. She had fled her country because of domestic violence and said she was afraid that the man who had abused her would find her in Mexico. Hed already been able to find her when she tried to change cities within her country, and shed heard that he again knew her whereabouts.

While there has been recent debate about whether claims of fear based on domestic violence should count for asylum, some survivors have been able to win their asylum cases and stay in the U.S.

As she told her story to the Border Patrol officer, documents show, Karen explained that she had been afraid to be in Mexico.

Instead of referring her for an interview with an asylum officer, the Border Patrol officer asked, Did anybody harm you or your children in Mexico?

Karen responded, No.

Did anybody threaten to harm you or your children in Mexico? the officer continued.

No, Karen said again.

Karen was returned to Mexico without being interviewed by an asylum officer. She said she cried when she found out she was going back to Tijuana.

Department of Homeland Security officials said that a question at the end of the Border Patrol interviews asking if the asylum seeker has anything else he or she would like to say should serve as an opportunity for people to discuss any safety concerns they might have.

Being interviewed by USCIS asylum officers is no guarantee that someone who expresses fear of being returned to Mexico will be kept out of the program. Under the Migrant Protection Protocols standard, the official has to determine that it is more likely than not that the migrant will be persecuted or tortured in Mexico in order to prevent his or her return.

Gelin, a 29-year-old woman from Honduras who came with her 13-year-old son, was evaluated by an asylum officer after explaining to border patrol that she had been robbed in Mexico two weeks before asking for asylum. She, too, was returned.

Asked about such cases, Border Patrol and Homeland Security officials maintained those migrants are referred to asylum officers for further evaluation.

Everyones trained to take very seriously our commitments under international treaties, said a senior DHS official speaking on background. We will never send someone back to a country where its more likely than not that they will be harmed or tortured.

Customs and Border Patrol said that it could not comment on specific cases but said that it processes each case individually and with integrity.

Last week, U.S. officials announced that the Migrant Protections Protocols program is also now operational at the port of entry between Calexico and Mexicali. According to the officials, 240 migrants had been returned through the program through March 12.

Court hearings also began last week for those enrolled in the Migrant Protection Protocols program. So far, eight returnees have told judges that they are afraid to go back to Mexico.

Those who said they were afraid to go back were held in custody at the port of entry overnight before their interviews were conducted, according to Ian Philabaum from Innovation Law Lab, an organization that has been working with several asylum seekers in a class-action lawsuit over the legality of the Remain in Mexico program. Philabaum had not yet heard whether any of them had received decisions about where they would be released.

Volunteer attorneys working with Al Otro Lado, a legal services organization in Tijuana, have stood in the El Chaparral plaza every morning for months trying to prepare asylum seekers before theyre taken in to the San Ysidro Port of Entry for processing.

The organization recently filed a complaint with Mexicos National Commission on Human Rights after Mexican immigration officials blocked access to asylum seekers preparing to enter the port. According to Al Otro Lado, officials threatened volunteers with deportation if they didnt comply.

The targeted harassment of volunteers providing humanitarian aid and legal orientation to migrants to asylum seekers trapped in Tijuana is a coordinated effort between the U.S. and Mexican governments to trample the human rights of refugees, said Nicole Ramos, an attorney with Al Otro Lado. Unfortunately most of the names of the migrants murdered in Mexico as a result of these policies and shameful practices will never be known.

Two attorneys with the group recently had their passports flagged and were blocked from entering Mexico, and Ramos appeared on a list of advocates, attorneys and journalists maintained by the U.S. to investigate people who had interacted with the migrant caravan that arrived in Tijuana in November.

A federal judge in Northern California will hear arguments on Friday on a motion for a preliminary block on the Remain in Mexico program brought by several returnees and advocacy groups.

Morrissey writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.comArguing that turning apartments into hotel guest rooms undermines Los Angeles efforts to improve access to housing, a Westside planning board this week ruled against a businessman who has been trying to legalize his conversion of a 32-unit apartment building on the Venice boardwalk.

This seems to be contrary to all the citys policies to preserve affordable housing, said West Los Angeles Area Planning Commissioner Esther Margulies during a hearing on Wednesday evening.

Venice businessman Carl Lambert later said he would appeal the planning commissions 3-0 ruling on his request to the Los Angeles City Council.

The ruling comes amid a wave of controversial hotel conversions as Venice, a once-funky beach town that is now home to offices of Google, Snap and other tech companies, transitions into a luxury residential community and tourist destination. Longtime residents argue they are being pushed out.

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Lambert, who operates as many as 90 hotel rooms in Venice, purchased and renovated the Ocean Front Walk building in 2005 and began advertising it as an extended stay hotel called Venice Suites. In the 1990s, long-term tenants had leased the rent-stabilized studios and one-bedroom apartments for rates as low as $500 a month, former renters said.

City Attorney Mike Feuer filed a lawsuit against Lambert two years ago, claiming the conversion was illegal. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge, in a partial decision last year, ruled in Lamberts favor, saying the city code did not prohibit renting apartments for short stays.

A trial on the city attorneys remaining claims of false advertising and unfair competition  for presenting the building as a hotel  is set to begin May 29, a spokesman said.

Meanwhile, the City Council has adopted new rules since the judges ruling last year, allowing Airbnb-style short-term rentals only in Angelenos primary residences  not at a second home or an investment property. A city zoning administrator also turned down a separate application that Lambert had filed for a zoning variance to operate the Ocean Front Walk building as a hotel, setting the stage for Wednesdays public hearing.

During the testimony, Lambert and his lawyers cited old building permits and city codes that they said permitted him to turn the building into an apartment-hotel.

I have vested rights, he told the planning commissioners.

Lamberts team and supporters also contended that Venice needs more hotel rooms. The beach towns zany street performers, skaters, muscle men and sidewalk vendors have turned the boardwalk into an international tourist destination.

Venice residents countered that the tourists come for the bohemian charms of artists and performers who increasingly cant afford to live there.

Were at risk of becoming a neighborhood without neighbors, said Judy Goldman, who also warned of a domino effect if the hotel conversion was approved. Another appeal is pending over the 52-unit Ellison building in Venice, which was cited by the city as an illegal hotel. The buildings owner, Lance Robbins, is vigorously contesting the complaint.

Zoning Administrator David Weintraub told the commission that he rejected Lamberts variance request because other city codes, planning designations and permits trumped the old documents the hoteliers team unearthed. If Lambert had vested rights for a hotel, he wouldnt need a variance, Weintraub said.

Commissioner Margulies acknowledged that the citys paper trail on rentals and hotels is troubling.

Im really in disbelief, Margulies said of the conflicting language. This is not the first time we have found some loopholes or vague policies that seem to be in contradiction to the citys policy to preserve housing.

But she and other commissioners said they were swayed by the citys affordable housing crisis.

After the hearing, Lambert said he had been unfairly caught up in the political furor over short-term rentals.

I feel the process was a stacked deck against me for political reasons, he said. I lovingly restored that building. Otherwise, it would have been razed and you would have two condos there.

gholland@latimes.com

Twitter: @gehollandHundreds of Algerians took to the streets of the capital on Friday to demand President Abdelaziz Bouteflika quit immediately, as mass protests against the veteran leader entered a fourth week.

Protesters gathered in the city centre defying rain, carrying Algerian flags and pamphlets. "Rain will not stop us from continuing our pressure," said 23-year old Ahmed Khoudja.

Bouteflika, who has ruled for 20 years, bowed to the protesters last week by reversing plans to stand for a fifth term. But he has stopped short of stepping down and said he would stay in office until a new constitution is adopted, effectively extending his present term.

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By February, the snow made many neighborhoods here feel subterranean.

Twenty-foot walls of white, corniced by the wind, leaned over the plowed roads. Residents worked feverishly to keep the snow from swallowing their homes. They dug tunnels and narrow passageways to the street, opened portals to get light through second-story windows, shoveled dangerous weight off their roofs.



For the record: An earlier version of this article misstated when Mammoth ski resort founder Dave McCoy retired. It was in 2005, 50 years after he built the resorts first chairlift, not 68 years after.

Unoccupied homes were so buried that a child might unknowingly sled down one. On still nights, when the wind stopped and the plows had passed, the silence was absolute. Only the streetlights and spirals of smoke from unseen chimneys suggested human life.

This years record-setting February and continued storms have reconnected residents to a historic rite of passage in Californias highest town, a place that largely came to be because of its monumental snowfall.

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(Lorena Elebee / Los Angeles Times)

Brenda McCann had gone through the many harsh Mammoth snowfalls since her first autumn here in 1998, when four feet fell in two days at Thanksgiving. The old-timers called her neighborhood of Old Mammoth Moleville because of its propensity to get buried, turning homes into burrows.

The long drought began to make those eerie winters feel distant, a fading quirk of a town just five hours from Los Angeles that regularly made winters in Buffalo look moderate.

But the heavy snows of 2017 brought back memories. Many homeowners were unprepared, and roofs collapsed.

This winter, the town was ready, as 17 feet of snow landed in February, with more storms following in March.

My whole house is encased in snow, said McCann, 54, last week. Im in an igloo.

Brenda McCann has had to deal with more snow this year than any other in recent memory since she moved to Old Mammoth more than 20 years ago. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

While her house sits a good four feet above her driveway, she had to climb five feet over a frozen berm to get out, until she had someone plow it away. In the backyard, the snow rises straight up over the two-story roof of her next-door neighbor.

Ive seen a lot of dogs on roofs this winter.

During and after white-out days, people spend so much time shoveling, blowing, shoveling, that their backs wince and their abs feel like theyd done a couple hundred sit-ups. Members come into the gym where McCann works, they say, I worked out all day, I just need the Jacuzzi.

One of her friends, who had moved back to Mammoth in summer after many years away, told her: Im outta here. Now I remember why I moved away in the first place.

The sheer volume of the snow creates a logistical puzzle. Where to put it?

The towns public works crews and the California Department of Transportation use large ribbon-bladed blowers to shoot it up on hills between homes, where it builds until it looms over the roads like a wave ready to take a ship down. Dump trucks haul the rest to a site down Highway 203, where its bulldozed off the side of the mesa.

From the huge ski operations on the mountain to town hall to condo complexes to small cabins and trailer homes, the urgent matter day and night has been snow management.

People cant understand this type of snow, said Grady Dutton, the towns public works director. Fifty-three feet fell at the top of the mountain.

During storms, his crews hack away at it 24 hours a day. County employees scrape 104 miles of street with seven plows and five massive Kodiak snowblowers, delivering the snow to scattered spots and the snow pit off the mesa. We have a good idea of every nook and cranny in town, Dutton said.

The machinery keeps the resort town functioning at the height of the ski season.

 Record snowfall in the Sierra has entire homes in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., encased in snow as residents look forward to a long ski season.

Mammoth gets its heavy snow due to its altitude and the topography surrounding it. Generally in the Sierra, Pacific storms hit the western slopes and rise into thinner atmosphere against the ridges. The clouds relative humidity climbs, ice particles congeal and snow falls  mostly in the highest, uninhabited interior  wrung dry by the 12,000- to 14,000-foot peaks.

But here, storms roll up the deep gorge of the middle fork of the San Joaquin River, rising quickly to a wide break between the high peaks  Mammoth Pass, just 9,300 feet.

Clouds funnel through the pass, and dump snow with a vengeance, particularly on the volcanic Mammoth Mountain, which rises to 11,059 feet.

Most of Californias big snow areas rely on this orographic effect of the storms rising and funneling up deep canyons  Squaw Valley, Bear Valley, Echo Summit and the home of Americas original snow nightmare, Donner Pass.

The community of Tamarack, three miles from Bear Valley, holds the record for the greatest snow depth ever measured in the U.S.  37 feet.

In Mammoth, the remoteness of the area combined with the harsh winters, keeping settlers at bay.

The first to try it were some 2,500 prospectors who built a boom town they called Mammoth City in 1879. That December, storms dumped snow for 18 days. By spring, 28 feet had engulfed the newcomers.

Residents were forced to cut a warren of snow tunnels to allow them to make their way through town, and businesses hacked long rows of snow steps down to their front doors, wrote Martin Forstenzer, in Mammoth: The Sierra Legend.

Miners strapped barrel staves to their boots to use as skis, taking their cues from a Norwegian man who delivered U.S. mail all over the Sierra no matter the weather.

Only a handful of residents stayed to endure the following winter.

The town of Mammoth Lakes has had to deal with more snow than almost anywhere in the country with 635 inches, or almost 53 feet, at the summit of Mammoth Mountain. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Modern Mammoth traces back to 1936, when a penniless 21-year-old from Independence took a job as a hydrographer for Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which had famously diverted the snowmelt of the Eastern Sierra into an aqueduct to the exploding city. Dave McCoys job was to ski throughout the Sierra measuring snowpack so the water managers in L.A. would know what to expect come summer. He came to realize with the bald lava dome of Mammoth Mountain that it had the deepest snow he had seen, and regularly trekked there with friends to ski. Where the miners had failed, McCoy struck what would become white gold.

But it was a place where skiers could race giddily down a wide bowl in brilliant sunshine, and an hour later, as a blizzard howls through, start envisioning a fate like the Donner Partys.

One day McCoy arrived at his friend Ted Cushions cabin, only to have it snow unrelentingly for 11 days, according to Forstenzer. When it stopped 20 feet later, McCoy and Cushion went to check on neighbors who ran a tavern. They climbed in a second-story window to find them alive and well. Cushion asked McCoy to check on a couple named Phillips who were winter caretakers of a summer camp.

He told me about how far it was and how to get to it, McCoy recalled to Forstenzer. But when I got there, I couldnt see a cabin or anything, anywhere.

Pretty soon I saw a little opening in the snow with a little bit of smoke coming out of it, and heard a strange noise.

Down below, the Phillips were trying to tunnel out by shoveling snow by the front door into the cabin. McCoy helped dig them out.

Such conditions never daunted him.

McCoy built the first chairlift on Mammoth Mountain in 1955, and retired 50 years later, selling his ski resort for $365 million.

Snow is piled nearly 20 feet high along Davison Street in the town of Mammoth Lakes, which has had to deal with more snow than almost anywhere in the country with 635 inches. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

The town contains many microclimates sloping down a thousand feet from the base of the mountain at 8,700 feet into the Long Valley caldera. Some areas might have 10 feet of snow, where others have two. Near the top, and just below the pass, Old Mammoth, gets heaps.

If you go down some of the smaller streets in town, it is literally tunnels, said Jo Louise, a hotel receptionist who moved here 22 years ago. You have to be careful. Its eerie.

She was taking a bus to work because her car was buried.

The clouds had vanished the night before  storms rarely linger  leaving the snow glistening and draping off roofs like a Bavarian fairy tale. The wind sculpted it into strange formations. People found faces and animals. One man found a mythical dwarf with a hat.

Gary and Cathy Wyatt took the crystalline day to cross-country ski across Snow Creek meadow and up to a knoll of the Sherwin Mountains to look over the vast caldera, with its volcano cones, and the White Mountains beyond. All of it covered in snow that will melt in spring and summer and flow out of taps in Los Angeles.

The beauty belied the harsh forces that delivered it.

Last time I was up here a couple weeks ago, it was blowing 85 miles per hour on the top of the mountain, he said. You could see about 10 feet in front of you.

Dave Harvey, 72, was once the president of the towns search and rescue team.

In February, he could hear his house in Old Mammoth groaning under the weight.

You got to respect the snow and wind, he said. Make no mistake, this is rugged country.

joe.mozingo@latimes.com

@joemozingoWhen Christine Kehoe won her first election in 1993, she won more than a seat on the San Diego City Council. She earned herself a place in local history.

That was the year Kehoe became San Diegos first openly gay elected official. That victory also marked the moment when Kehoe knew her political career would be about something bigger than politics.

I felt that it had become a community campaign, Kehoe remembered of those early grassroots days of phone banks and precinct walking. People poured their hearts and souls into it. Some people wrote the first checks (to a candidate) that they had ever written in their lives because they wanted to see me run.

On election night, I remember thinking that no matter what happened, it would be a turning point. I said to my partner (Julie Warren), now my wife, that we would never go back. We were holding each other and saying, Here we go.

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Once the groundbreaking started, it did not stop. And Kehoes journey as a high-profile member of San Diegos LGBTQ+ community quickly became more than a solo endeavor.

When Kehoe was elected to the state Assembly in 2000, her City Council seat went to her staff member Toni Atkins, who ran mostly because Kehoe insisted that she take the plunge.

Fourteen years later, Atkins became the first lesbian named speaker of the Assembly. Kehoe was elected to the California State Senate in 2004. Atkins was elected to the State Senate in 2016, and as Senate President pro Tempore, she became the first openly gay Senate leader in California history.

Now, Kehoe and Atkins have hit another milestone. And this time, they are doing it together.

On Saturday, the two pioneering politicians and longtime friends will be honored as the San Diego History Centers Makers of San Diego History for 2019. The award is given to the people, business and communities that have changed San Diego for the better, and nearly two decades after winning that City Council seat, Atkins is still shocked that she is one of those trailblazers.

I grew up thinking that government and mainstream society wasnt about me, that I didnt have a place there because I was working-poor, and LGBT and a woman, Atkins said. The fact that I have been able to do what Ive done is pretty incredible. I give a lot of the credit to Chris for giving me the opportunity.

When they accept their Makers honors, Kehoe and Atkins will be joining a lively and influential group that includes San Diegos Jewish community, Qualcomm, Price Club founder Sol Price, and our craft-brew industry. Like the movers and shakers before them, they are part of the rich fabric of San Diego life.

In many ways, San Diegans and people who call San Diego home are incredible innovators. And they do set the stage, said Bill Lawrence, president and CEO of the San Diego History Center. Toni and Christine really embody that San Diego spirit. I think the region is always looking to continually make itself better and to do big things.

As in previous years, the Makers awards are part of a bigger picture. The recognition of Atkins and Kehoe is part of the history centers larger tribute to San Diegos LGBTQ+ community and the part it has played in the San Diego story.

Last summer, the center  in partnership with the Lambda Archives  opened LGBTQ+ San Diego: Stories of Struggles and Triumphs, an exhibit devoted to the history of the local LGBT community. The exhibit, which runs through Jan. 20, looks at everything from the struggles for equal rights to LGBT trailblazers in the arts and the devastating impact of the AIDS crisis. Visitors can appreciate it both for what it says about about the LGBT community and what it says about all of San Diego.

This exhibit is a way of shining a light on not just the good history, but on the history that makes us a better community. The history that causes change that results in inclusion, Lawrence said.

When they accept their awards on Saturday, Christine Kehoe and Toni Atkins will be celebrating not just their boundary-busting political careers, but also the odds-defying relationships that blossomed there. There is the long friendship between two pioneers, and there is the shared love they have for the forward-thinking place that put them on the trail they continue to blaze today.

Im very proud to be thought of as a San Diego history maker, said Kehoe, who is now a member of the California Transportation Commission. I came here in 1978 from upstate New York, and from the moment I saw it, I loved it. My goal was always to make things better for the people of San Diego and the people of California. I wasnt successful every time, but Im proud of the work I did.

Twitter: @karla_peterson

karla.peterson@sduniontribune.comA San Diego judge on Friday delayed a decision on where to house a violent sexual predator after hearing emotional appeals to place the man somewhere other than East Countys Jacumba Hot Springs.

Alan Earl James, 56, convicted in the 1980s for sexual assaults on at least three children  including younger relatives has been found to meet criteria for release from a state psychiatric hospital to supervised housing in the community.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Albert Harutunian III last fall approved James conditional release to a home in Jacumba Hot Springs, on Old Highway 80 across from Jacumba Airport.

County Supervisor Dianne Jacob asked Harutunian to find another spot, saying the rural setting has an over-concentration of violent sexual offenders, with nine of them placed in Jacumba, Boulevard and Campo.

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She cited a news report that the ratio of sexually violent predators to the countys overall population is 1 in 961, while in sparsely populated Jacumba the ratio is 1 in 37.

I believe it is wrong and enough is enough, Jacob told the judge. The state believes these (sexually violent predators) should be integrated into the community. Whoever makes these decisions is living in a bubble. They are never going to be integrated into any community.

Three of James victims, crying openly or choking back tears, voiced fears that James will victimize other children if he is released from the state hospital.

I feel hes a danger, because of what happened to me, as well as my siblings, as well as others, one man said. My biggest fear is hes going to end up killing a kid.

His sister also spoke, saying their older cousin James assaulted her when she was 4 years old, her brother when he was 2, and their older brother when he was 10.

He was arrested, released and able to go out and rape and kidnap more children, the sister said. He is an evil monster.

Deputy District Attorney Judy Taschner read a statement from yet another victim, who was 5  when James tried to attack her. She said her family moved away from Imperial Beach to Campo  the very region where James might now be housed.

Please place him under the strictest supervision, the woman said in her statement.

James was convicted in 1981 of one count of lewd act on a child under age 14 and was given a six-month jail sentence and three years probation. In 1986, he was convicted of kidnapping, molesting and having unlawful sexual intercourse with the three children, and was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Before he was due to be released, county prosecutors petitioned for James to be committed to a state hospital as a sexually violent predator  one likely to re-offend, with multiple victims.

He was diagnosed with pedophilia disorder and in 2007 was committed to Coalinga State Hospital in Fresno County. James sought his conditional release several times and was denied until a final hearing in October, when medical experts deemed him fit for release with continued treatment.

Kym Caudle, regional coordinator for Liberty Healthcare Inc., which contracts with the state to supervise sexual predators on conditional release in the community, told the judge her company made inquiries with 219 property owners across the county about housing James. Of that number, 41 owners had land in Jacobs district, Caudle said.

Mary Taylor, who has publicly opposed a similar release for the man who raped her years ago, Alvin Quarles, asked the judge to reconsider his October decision to release James, given that his victims were not notified of that hearing.

Under Marsys Law, sex crime victims have a right to be notified when their attacker has a community placement hearing, which is what occurred on Friday. Taylor said victims should be notified of all hearings involving their attackers.

Harutunian said he would look into the law regarding victim notification as well as Jacobs staff report on the concentration of violent sexual predators in East County.

The judge also took note of another speakers contention that a previous sex offender placed in East County let his GPS monitoring ankle bracelet battery run down, giving him the potential to leave the home unsupervised.

Im not a believer in shooting from the hip, Harutunian said. I will take this under submission and render a written decision as soon as I can reasonably do that.

pauline.repard@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @pdrepardA former caregiver from City Heights  convicted last year of financial abuse of one elderly victim  mistreated two others in her care, causing the death of one of them, a prosecutor said Thursday.

A preliminary hearing got underway with witnesses in the case against Shirley Montano, 52, who is charged with murder, kidnapping, willful cruelty to an elder, theft from an elder and other charges.

The motive was financial gain, Deputy District Attorney Rebecca Zipp told a San Diego Superior Court judge.

She spent money on herself and spent as little as possible on her dependents, Zipp said.

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Montano faces life in prison if convicted of all charges.

Deputy district attorney Rebecca Zipp asked questions of Tamara Chagas, whose brother-in-law, Robert Chagas died whilein the care of Shirley Montano. (John Gibbins/San Diego Union-Tribune)

A felony complaint against Montano alleges that she caused the Oct. 7, 2016 death of Robert Chagas, 74.

Chagas sibling, Richard Chagas, testified that his older brother was developmentally slow from birth  when a doctor smashed his head with foreceps during his delivery.

Richard Chagas said his brother ran his life according to a rigid schedule. He was able to work  at a car wash for some time, then as a janitor at Sea World  but was easily taken in by various scam artists.

The Australian lottery scam depleted Robert Chagas bank account and at one point he was persuaded to strap cash all over his body and try to board a plane to Canada, the younger brother said. He said the FBI got involved in that case.

The picture drawn by the testimony of Richard Chagas, his wife and their daughter was one of a man who was too trusting with his money and too easily influenced by others.

Montano served as his live-in caregiver and, according to the complaint, from 2011 until 2016, stole his identity and his funds and neglected his care to the point his health was endangered.

Before 2011, Richard Chagas said, he often paid his brothers rent or other bills, but after that year, his brother stopped asking for any help.

Robert Chagas was admitted to a hospital emergency room with pneumonia and was put on life support, with Montano posing as a niece who directed that the life support be removed a few days later, a nurse testified.

Montanos attorney, Shannon Sebeckis of the Alternate Public Defenders Office, challenged some of the family testimony, getting them to acknowledge they didnt know much about Montanos role in Robert Chagas life.

Montano is also charged with kidnapping, kidnapping for ransom, reward or extortion, willful cruelty and theft involving a woman named in the complaint only as Josefina K.

Prosecutors allege Josefina was imprisoned in Montanos apartment for possibly as long as 23 years, starved, beaten and isolated until a neighbor viewed the abuse.

Josefina is expected to testify in the preliminary hearing, which is expected to continue for several days.

Also expected to testify as a witness against Montano is Lorraine Vega, 80, whose testimony was taken in a November hearing in case she didnt survive to take part in later court proceedings.

Montano pleaded guilty last year to one count of elder financial abuse involving the theft of funds from Vega, a neighbor in City Heights. Vega testified last fall that she was starved, kept largely in isolation and her funds diverted away from her care by Montano.

Zipp played recordings of telephone conversations between customer service representatives at Vegas bank and a woman who asked how to withdraw cash on the account. A San Diego police detective testified he believed the voice was that of Montano, not Vega.

Montanos lawyer objected to having Vega appear as a witness, but the judge said he will allow it. Sebeckis said the Vega case was not similar to the other two cases, where Robert Chagas and Josefina lived with Montano.

pauline.repard@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @pdrepardA lawsuit filed by an affordable housing advocacy group claims the San Diego Housing Commission is perpetuating racial segregation by setting its housing values below market rate.

In the suit filed March 7 by the San Diego Tenants Association, attorney Parisa Ijadi-Maghsoodi argues the Housing Commission should either follow a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program aimed at desegregating neighborhoods or adjust the value of housing vouchers in the program it has followed for the past year.

Housing Commission general counsel Charles Christensen issued a statement that the commission does not comment on pending litigation, but would respond in court when appropriate.

The suit concerns Section 8 housing vouchers, a HUD subsidy that aims to keep rent no more than 30 percent of the adjusted income of people in the program. Federal regulations allow the rent to be up to 40 percent of a voucher-holders income.

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The Tenants Association filed the lawsuit on behalf of Darlisa McDowell, identified in the suit as a voucher recipient who lives with and cares for her five children and elderly father.

Ijadi-Maghsoodi said the value of McDowells voucher has not been adjusted since 2017 and will not be reviewed until November 2020. She is paying almost 40 percent of her income on rent to live in the 92113 ZIP code, which includes Logan Heights and Southcrest, Ijadi-Maghsoodi said.

The area is described in the suit as a high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhood where only 9 percent of residents are white.

McDowell has tried to move to another neighborhood, but cant find an affordable place with her voucher, Ijadi-Maghsoodi said.

Her situation is not unique.

Nationwide, the level of subsidies had been been based on the average rent across a city, so vouchers would cover much of the housing cost in some neighborhoods, but not in more affluent ones.

The result left voucher-holders often clustered in low-rent, segregated neighborhoods with high crime-rates, few job opportunities and under-performing schools.

HUD attempted to address the issue with a new formula called the Small Area Fair Market Rent rule, which based voucher values on ZIP codes rather than a city-wide average rent.

The new rule went into effect early last year, but the San Diego Housing Commission declined to participate.

Instead, it created its own version called the Choice Communities Initiative. Rather than basing voucher values on more than 30 ZIP codes in the city, the initiative created just three funding tiers based on the rents in certain neighborhoods.

While the Choice Communities Initiative does increase the value of vouchers in more affluent neighborhoods, Ijadi-Maghsoodi argued that it is not enough.

Under HUDs Small Area Fair Market formula, rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Little Italy would be subsidized with a $2,880 voucher, according to the lawsuit. Under the Housing Commissions Choice Communities formula, the voucher would be $1,630.

This lawsuit is not to demonize the San Diego Housing Commission for not implementing a certain program, but the Housing Commission cannot be allowed to continue to administer the Section 8 program in a way that perpetuates racial segregation, Ijadi-Maghsoodi said.

Housing Commission president and CEO Rick Gentry last year criticized the HUD formula as overly complicated and an attempt at social engineering.

He also criticized the HUD formula because it might have resulted in vouchers in poor neighborhoods dipping in value to help pay for more-expensive vouchers in other neighborhoods.

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Twitter: @GaryWarthUT

760-529-4939Customs and Border Protection officers have not consistently followed policies intended to protect Central American asylum seekers who are likely to be harmed in Mexico from returning there under the Remain in Mexico program, according to documents obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The program, known officially as Migrant Protection Protocols, sends certain migrants who ask for asylum at the southern border back to Mexico while they wait for their immigration court cases.

If migrants tell CBP officials that they are also afraid of going back to Mexico, CBP is supposed to send them for interviews with asylum officers who work under a separate agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to an agency memo. Those officials are specially trained to weigh a persons story about fear of returning against specific legal standards and definitions.

CBP documents detailing questions asked of individual asylum seekers who were returned to Mexico as part of the MPP program show that some migrants who expressed fear of being in Mexico were returned to Tijuana without talking to USCIS asylum officers.

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Others returned under the program said that they had not been able to express their fear to CBP officials during processing because of the way CBP officials conducted their intake interviews.

The majority of those who spoke with the Union-Tribune after they had been returned under the program said they were afraid to be in Mexico, but few had been referred for the additional screening to determine whether they should be part of the program.

Juan Carlos, a Salvadoran man who came to the port of entry with his wife and three children, the youngest of whom is 10 months old, said that when he told the CBP official that he and his family were afraid to return to Mexico, the official asked how long theyd been there already. Juan Carlos responded three months.

He said, Well, they havent done anything to you yet, Juan Carlos recalled in Spanish.

While the document given to Juan Carlos is a summary of the questions and answers of their conversation rather than a full transcript, it does indicate that Juan Carlos said that he did not feel safe in Mexico and that he had a fear of being removed from the United States.

He was not given the opportunity to talk to an asylum officer about his fears.

Were human beings, Juan Carlos said. No one wants to die, not an American, not a Salvadoran, not a Nicaraguan. Were looking for protection, for help.

Karen, a 28-year-old woman from Honduras who came with her three children, similarly told CBP that she was afraid of being in Mexico. She had fled her country because of domestic violence and said she was afraid that the man who had abused her would find her in Mexico. Hed already been able to find her when she tried to change cities within her country, and shed heard that he again knew her whereabouts.

(While there has been recent debate about whether claims of fear based on domestic violence should count for asylum, some survivors have been able to win their asylum cases and stay in the U.S.)

As she told her story to the CBP officer, documents show, Karen explained that she had been afraid to be in Mexico.

Instead of referring her for an interview with an asylum officer, the CBP officer asked, Did anybody harm you or your children in Mexico?

Karen responded, No.

Did anybody threaten to harm you or your children in Mexico? the CBP officer continued.

No, Karen said again.

Karen was returned to Mexico without being interviewed by an asylum officer. She said she cried when she found out she was going back to Tijuana.

Two Salvadoran men who were returned under the program said they werent asked if they were afraid to go back to Mexico. They said they werent able to bring up the topic on their own.

They dont let you express yourself, the 18-year-old said. They only ask their questions and nothing more.

They dont let you talk, the 29-year-old agreed. We worried about them punishing us if we spoke out of turn.

DHS officials said that a question at the end of CBP interviews asking if the asylum seeker has anything else he or she would like to say should serve as an opportunity for people to discuss such concerns.

Being interviewed by USCIS asylum officers is no guarantee that someone who expresses fear of being in Mexico will be kept out of the program. The Department of Homeland Security opted to use a higher legal standard for a persons claim of fear in implementing MPP than the one used during credible fear interviews, the initial step in the asylum process if the person is not returned to Mexico.

Under the MPP standard, the official has to determine that it is more likely than not that the migrant will be persecuted or tortured in Mexico in order to prevent his or her return.

Gelin, a 29-year-old woman from Honduras who came with her 13-year-old son, was evaluated by an asylum officer after explaining to CBP that she had been robbed in Mexico two weeks before asking for asylum. She, too, was returned.

When asked about cases of those who had been sent back without referral to USCIS, officials with the CBP and DHS maintained that CBP officers refer migrants to asylum officers.

Everyones trained to take very seriously our commitments under international treaties, said a senior DHS official speaking on background. We will never send someone back to a country where its more likely than not that they will be harmed or tortured.

CBP said that it could not comment on specific cases but said that it processes each case individually and with integrity.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has begun ramping up the MPP program, which began as a pilot at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in late January and sent back single adults from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who had asked for asylum through the port. It later expanded to include families from those countries and then people from those countries who asked for asylum after crossing the border illegally.

Last week, U.S. officials announced that the program is also now operational at the port of entry between Calexico and Mexicali. According to the officials, 240 migrants had been returned through the program through March 12.

Court hearings also began last week for those enrolled in the program. So far, eight returnees have told judges that they are afraid to go back to Mexico.

A woman who had her first hearing on Thursday told Immigration Judge Scott Simpson that she wanted to come back as soon as possible because she was scared of spending more time in Mexico.

I have problems being in Mexico, she said. I was kidnapped, and I was going through a very difficult time.

You were kidnapped in Mexico? Simpson repeated.

Yes, the woman said, her voice full of emotion.

Simpson asked the government attorney what would happen to her, and the attorney assured him that the woman would be referred to an asylum officer for further questioning.

Those who said they were afraid to go back were held in custody at the port of entry overnight before their interviews were conducted, according to Ian Philabaum from Innovation Law Lab, an organization that has been working with several asylum seekers in a class-action lawsuit over the legality of the Remain in Mexico program. Philabaum had not yet heard whether any of them had received decisions about where they would be released.

Philabaum said that many of the asylum seekers told him that they felt intimidated during their initial conversations with CBP officers. Several who spoke to the Union-Tribune described the officers behavior as rude and said they felt nervous while they were questioned.

Carolina Martin Ramos, an immigration attorney and former asylum officer, said shed also observed issues with CBPs questioning when she recently worked in Guatemala supporting deported parents who were separated from their children at the border by the Trump administration. From her interviews, she said it seemed like CBP officers had started doing mini asylum interviews.

Sometimes the officer would tell the migrants that they didnt have valid claims, she said.

That wasnt for them to determine, Martin Ramos said.

Similar lines of questioning appear in many of the CBP documents obtained by the Union-Tribune.

Have you or your children ever been persecuted because of your political party, religion, race, nationality, or participation in a particular social group? an officer asked one of the MPP returnees, per CBP documents.

Many coming to ask for asylum may not understand what those terms mean, Martin Ramos said. The woman who was asked this particular question told the CBP officer that she had a sixth-grade education.

Other questions to returnees documented by CBP asked whether the person received any legal advice prior to asking for asylum.

Knowing about asylum shouldnt change the case, Martin Ramos said. It sounds like the government is trying to make a case against activists and attorneys who tried to help.

When asked about the lines of questioning by its officers, CBP said, Responses may open a line of questioning not readily apparent to a CBP officer and lead to additional questions clarifying the relevance of a prior response. Additionally, prior questions and answers to oral statements are often validated and documented in written format on sworn statements.

Volunteer attorneys working with Al Otro Lado, a legal services organization in Tijuana, have stood in the El Chaparral plaza every morning for months trying to prepare asylum seekers before theyre taken in to the San Ysidro Port of Entry for processing.

The organization recently filed a complaint with Mexicos National Commission on Human Rights after Mexican immigration officials blocked access to asylum seekers preparing to enter the port. According to Al Otro Lado, officials threatened volunteers with deportation if they didnt comply.

The targeted harassment of volunteers providing humanitarian aid and legal orientation to migrants to asylum seekers trapped in Tijuana is a coordinated effort between the U.S. and Mexican governments to trample the human rights of refugees, said Nicole Ramos, an attorney with Al Otro Lado. Unfortunately most of the names of the migrants murdered in Mexico as a result these policies and shameful practices will never be known.

Two attorneys with the group recently had their passports flagged and were blocked from entering Mexico, and Ramos appeared on a list of advocates, attorneys and journalists maintained by the U.S. to investigate people who had interacted with the migrant caravan that arrived in Tijuana in November.

A federal judge in Northern California will hear arguments on Friday on a motion for a preliminary block on the Remain in Mexico program brought by several returnees and advocacy groups.

In fiscal 2017, the most recent year with government data available, immigration judges granted asylum in 20 percent of the cases that came before them. They denied asylum in 34 percent of those cases, and the remaining 46 percent of cases were closed without a decision on the asylum merits, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

The agency changed the way that it calculates asylum grant rates in fiscal 2017. Under the previous method, which only looked at cases in which immigration judges made a decision on the asylum merits and is still used by organizations such as Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University, judges granted asylum in 38 percent of cases and denied asylum in 62 percent of cases in fiscal 2017. In fiscal 2018, TRACs calculated denial rate rose to 65 percent, meaning 35 percent were granted asylum.

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kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate on TwitterThe 3-year-old boy squirmed in his mothers arms, an IV drip unspooling from his wrist, his skin flush with a pale pink rash.

As a doctor struggled to put an inhaler between the boys blistered lips to calm his coughing, his mother, Norayah Cabugatan, explained how she had resisted vaccinating her son and his two siblings against measles.

The measles virus, with its rash and often high fever, may cause dangerous complications. But Cabugatan had been spooked by the idea of a vaccine, having heard it could have fatal side effects.

I was scared, Cabugatan, 32, said during a recent visit to a Manila hospital. What Ive heard on TV, it was really scary.

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The boy, Andrew, is among more than 20,000 people, mainly children, who have been infected during a measles outbreak in the Philippines. As of mid-March, about 315 people had died from measles since the start of the year, according to the Philippine Red Cross, compared with 202 people who died of the disease in the country last year.

A driving force behind the outbreak, according to some doctors, health workers and government officials in the Philippines, has been a 2-year-old, politically charged scandal involving a government-led dengue vaccination program that cratered an already wavering confidence in vaccines.

Although it remains unclear whether the program caused any deaths, many parents stopped showing up at medical centers for vaccinations and began turning away health workers offering at-home vaccines. The spread of misinformation and rumors about vaccines was aided by social media, according to some doctors.

Other countries have also seen increases in measles cases, officials said. In the United States, where there is a fervent movement against vaccines, there were 268 recorded cases of measles in the U.S. this year as of March 14, compared with 372 cases during all of 2018, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The number of cases of measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases has been going up while vaccination rates are going down. The reason that it is measles first is because measles is the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases, said Edsel Salvana, an infectious diseases physician at the University of the Philippines, Manila, who has written extensively about the recent outbreak.

With all the stuff that is going on with anti-vaxxers in the U.S., that kind of gets exported all over the place, he said in an interview.

The root of the anti-vaccine scare in the Philippines dates to April 2016, when the previous government launched a program to provide a mass vaccine for dengue, a tropical mosquito-borne disease. The government, just a month from a nationwide election, chose Dengvaxia, produced by the French drugmaker Sanofi, for the immunization drive.

The following year, in November, Sanofi announced that the vaccine could lead to severe cases of dengue for people who had not previously contracted the disease. The announcement alarmed parents whose children had been vaccinated, and some politicians and the media linked deaths to the vaccine with little or no evidence.

The vaccine program, under which about 830,000 schoolchildren had received at least one dose of the vaccine, was halted, and the vaccine was later banned.

People started to panic. There was hysteria andchaos, said Lulu C. Bravo, executive director of the Philippine Foundation for Vaccination.

At a health center in south Manila, a sprawling city with about 13 million people, vaccination researchers who were not part of the government investigations collected testimony from community health workers describing the hostility they faced when trying to discuss or administer vaccines in light of the Dengvaxia scandal.

ALSO: Manila tries to fix its notorious traffic  bad news for jeepneys and trolley boys 

In one video testimonial, a health worker nervously recounted being confronted by members of a neighborhood where she had worked for years. When she would show up, residents would shout warnings, telling one another other to run away. Some called health workers the murderers of children, she said.

The University of the Philippines and Philippine General Hospital investigated the deaths of 14 children linked to Dengvaxia. The formal investigation, which was not connected to the testimony collected by vaccination researchers, found no direct evidence that the vaccine caused any of the 14 deaths. Six cases require further review, investigators said.

Philippine Sen. Richard Gordon, who led an investigation into the dengue vaccine and serves as chairman of the Philippine Red Cross, said Sanofi didnt have a sterling record and accused the company of improper contacts with the past administration.

The Senate investigation last year found former President Benigno Aquino III and other officials from his government liable for violating numerous laws in connection with the procurement and distribution of the Dengvaxia vaccine. The previous government maintained the vaccine program was handled properly, and Sanofi denied any wrongdoing.

There has been no causal link between any deaths and the vaccine, Sanofi said in a statement. The company closely monitored the safety of the vaccine and followed all Philippine laws and regulations with regard to the registration, usage and promotion of the vaccine and we fully cooperated with all investigations into this matter.

The Philippines banned the vaccine on Feb. 19.

Karen M. Fresco-Tadina, a pediatrician at the Amang Rodriguez Memorial Medical Center, a government-run hospital on the east side of metropolitan Manila where Cabugatans son was being treated, said doctors there noticed a surge inmeasles patients beginning in late December and continuing into January.

Fresco-Tadina said the hospital struggled to find space to house patients. An isolation ward meant to house six patients was soon filled with 53 people.

By mid-February, the hospital appealed to the Philippine Red Cross to set up treatment facilities in tents outside, which they did. From the start of the year to March 14, the medical center treated 925 measles patients; 19 of them died. During a normal year, Fresco-Tadina said, doctors would see about 30 measles cases.

The herd immunity is gone, she said, using a medical term that refers to vaccination coverage that is extensive enough to prevent a virus from circulating in a community. There is a distrust of the whole system.

In a Red Cross tent, which is where Cabugatan obtained treatment for her son, children lay listlessly on cots; others wailed. Cabugatan had gotten her other two children, an 8-month-old daughter and 4-year-old son, vaccinated after Andrew fell ill on March 8. She pleaded with other parents to do the same.

My advice, she said, is, please, get them vaccinated.

McLaughlin is a special correspondent.One day after President Trump signaled a change in U.S. policy certain to alienate Arab allies, Americas top diplomat traveled to Beirut on Friday to denounce Iran and urge that its proxies be removed from the Lebanese government.

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo had a complex mission on his hands: condemning the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization that he blames for regional violence while refusing to acknowledge its deep involvement in Lebanese government and society.

The visit to Lebanon was part of a three-day tour through the Middle East to rally forces against Iran, viewed by the Trump administration as an aggressive threat to Israel and peace.

A day before Pompeos arrival here, he stood at the side of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem as Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy and announced his intention to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a verdant, disputed region Israel seized from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967.

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From the archives, 1993: COLUMN ONE: Feeling Unsettled in Golan 

Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. The U.N. Security Council, in a resolution supported by the United States, condemned the annexation as illegal.

The move to recognize Israeli dominion was seen as a major gift to Netanyahu, embroiled in a difficult campaign for reelection and facing possible indictment on corruption charges, and a step that will further isolate Washington in a world less avidly supportive of Israel.

It also gave opponents of the United States such as Iran and Syria added ammunition to mobilize their forces.

Even without Trumps comments, Pompeos trip to Lebanon was not likely to be a friendly one. In recent days, he had made clear his top priority would be helping the government there disconnect from the threat of Iran and Hezbollah.

Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shiite party, supported by Iran, that the United States designated a terrorist group in 1997. But the group also represents a wide swath of Lebanons population, and has entrenched itself in the countrys social fabric ever since its beginnings in the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s.

Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. You ask how tough I am going to be? It is a terrorist organization. Period. Full stop, Pompeo said in Jerusalem on Thursday.

Emboldened by Trump, Israels Netanyahu suggests a tough new approach to the Palestinian territories 

He refused to explain how he would navigate the complexity of Hezbollahs presence in Lebanon and those who facilitated it, some of whom he was scheduled to meet with in Beirut.

Pompeo met Friday with Lebanese President Michel Aoun and Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, both of whom have worked with Hezbollah politicians.

The U.S. envoy accused Hezbollah of using intimidation and election fraud to win the seats it has in parliament, and called on Lebanon to act against it.

I expressed hope that the new Lebanese government will be able to meet the need of the Lebanese people, he said. We will not hesitate to call out those who actively and passively support those activities.

Pompeo spoke as he met with Bassil, who is Aouns son-in-law and was instrumental in brokering a parliamentary alliance with Hezbollah.

In comments later, after Pompeo and his hosts declined to hold a news conference, Bassil said that Hezbollah was not a terrorist organization but a Lebanese party whose parliamentarians are elected by the Lebanese people. Any terrorist designation, he added, was the responsibility of the country that issued it, but the government would prioritize national unity.

The Lebanese government is concerned that any move to limit Hezbollahs influence could destabilize the countrys always delicate detente among its 18 fractious sects, of which Hezbollah is the strongest.

We do not want our relations with America to be affected, Bassil said, and we want to work together to solve these problems, including Hezbollah  because finally we consider Lebanons stability and the preservation of its national unity a Lebanese interest and a U.S. one.

Last years elections gave the group additional power in parliament, which it used to assume control of the Health Ministry along with two other Cabinet positions.

The dynamic illustrates the complexity of relations in the Middle East, and the need for experienced diplomats. The State Department under Trump has lost many such experts.

Hezbollahs armed wing is thought to be more powerful than the Lebanese army (which receives annual aid of $70 million from the U.S.), and is considered to be Irans most successful proxy. Along with Iran, its cadres have been instrumental in helping Syrian President Bashar Assad defeat his rebel adversaries, and Hezbollah operatives have appeared on battlefields in Yemen and Iraq.

Israel says Hezbollah is moving into a portion of the Golan Heights still controlled by Syria, potentially within striking distance of Israel.

The expansion has alarmed the Trump administration, and inspired a steady round of economic sanctions against Tehran, including another batch announced Friday that targeted 34 individuals and entities that the Treasury Department accused of supporting Irans now-dormant nuclear program.

Sanctions on Iran have already begun to bite into Hezbollahs funds. Earlier this month, the groups leader, Hassan Nasrallah, called for increased donations from Hezbollahs supporters in Lebanon so as to guarantee the groups victory in what he called a financial war.

Trumps Golan decision, following his recognition last year of Jerusalem as Israels capital, also contravening international norms, renewed hostility to the U.S. in the Arab world.

Al Akhbar, a pro-Hezbollah Lebanese daily newspaper, put Pompeo on its front page Friday with the headline The dirty Yankee  and his lackeys. It said Trumps words on the Golan Heights were proof to Lebanese politicians who wished to hide their head in the lap of the American whore that the U.S. cared about Israels interests more than those of its allies in the country.

Elsewhere, protests were held near the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy north of Beirut, while activists online urged people to fill the streets with demonstrators. No such crowds were visible from Pompeos motorcade.

Traffic on Beiruts perpetually congested streets choked to a standstill amid heavy security arrangements for Pompeos last stop on his regional tour, and his first trip to Lebanon since becoming secretary of State.

Trumps policies also complicate Pompeos mission by making it difficult for potential allies in the region reluctant to openly support U.S. plans, said Joe Macaron, a resident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, in a phone interview on Friday.

Theres a push to challenge the status quo in the administration here, but you have a political class that is not willing to clash with each other, said Macaron.

There is a focus on corruption. You have a severe economic crisis. All those factors are not conducive to this shift in U.S. policy.

The Golan issue would be used by Hezbollah in its favor, said Macaron.

This will add to the groups narrative to justify their presence in Syria and the Iranian role there, he said.

Bulos reported from Beirut and Wilkinson reported from Jerusalem.Syria and its Russian and Iranian allies on Friday slammed President Trumps call to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, inflaming regional tensions at a time when the Trump administration is seeking to curtail Irans expanding influence.

A statement by the Syrian Foreign Ministry said the move would increase the countrys determination to recover the territory occupied by Israel by all available means, and Russia and Iran said it violated international law.

Turkey, a U.S. ally, said it risked creating a new Middle East crisis.

Trumps push to assert Israels ownership of the strategic heights along the Syrian-Israeli border, conveyed in a tweet on Thursday, marked a major shift in U.S. policy and has been welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But it also raised concerns that confrontations along the cease-fire line could escalate.

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Israel seized two-thirds of the Golan during the 1967 war, and since 1973 Syria has made no military effort to regain it. Its army is no match for Israels superior military capabilities.

In the 1990s and later in the late 2000s, Damascus engaged in peace talks with Israel, backed by the United States, to secure the return of the territory.

The Syrian civil war, however, has brought Iranian military advisors and Iranian-backed militias such as Lebanons Hezbollah into the part of the Golan Heights that remains under Syrian control, and they have on a number of occasions fired rockets into Israel, triggering retaliatory strikes.

Syria called the assertion of Israeli sovereignty irresponsible, saying it revealed the U.S. mentality of hegemony and arrogance.

The statements of the American president and his administration  will never change the fact that the Golan was and will remain part of Arab Syria and that the Syrian people are more resolute and determined to liberate this precious patch of Syrian national territory by all available means, the Foreign Ministry statement said.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said Trumps assertion was illegal and unacceptable and does not change the fact that the Golan belongs to Syria. The Russian Foreign Ministry said it violated United Nations resolutions that call for the restoration of the territory to Syria.

The U.S. assertion of Israeli claims will give Iran a propaganda boost at a time when the Trump administration is pressing allies in the region to join efforts to roll back Iranian influence. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo arrived in Beirut on Friday on a visit aimed at urging Lebanese leaders to take action to limit Hezbollahs growing prominence in the Lebanese government.

His message may be blunted, however, by the fury over Trumps Golan tweet, which has also raised fears of a similar U.S. shift on the status of the Palestinian territories.

Announcing the U.S. policy shift on the eve of the Lebanon visit will backfire, according to Hilal Khashan, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut. Most ordinary Lebanese, including those who are opposed to Hezbollah, are outraged by the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over land they see as Arab, he said.

This measure will boost Hezbollah by justifying its military presence on the Golan and giving it an excuse for continued expansion, he said. Hezbollah will benefit by telling everyone: Our pledge to maintain our military arsenal is justified, the war is not over. And it will weaken those who would like to see Hezbollah eventually disarmed.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned in a speech in Istanbul that Trumps unfortunate remarks recognizing Israeli sovereignty risked pushing the region toward a new crisis.

We cannot allow the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights, he said.

Liz Sly is a reporter for the Washington PostOn one of the first foreign trips I took with John McCain, he handed me his comb and asked me to straighten out his hair. He could not raise his arms above his shoulders to comb his own hair, a lifelong consequence  and not the only one  of the abuse he suffered during his more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison.

Years later, I traveled to Hanoi with McCain and visited that prison, which is now a museum. A group of Vietnamese high school students came through, and when they recognized him, they began chanting his name, cheering, clapping and asking for pictures and autographs. McCain had become a hero to the Vietnamese people because he had sponsored the legislation that normalized U.S. relations with Vietnam, the country that had treated him so inhumanely.

Somehow, he had found it within his soul to put the past behind him and lead the way forward in U.S.-Vietnam relations because that was in the best interests of the United States. McCain was a passionate person, and he had a temper, but he rarely stayed angry at anyone. He liked people generally, but I also think he concluded that it wasnt worth staying angry, particularly at those you needed to work with to get things done. He was always looking forward, not backward.

That is a powerful example for all of us, including President Donald Trump, who has continued to attack McCain seven months after his death.

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McCains life on Earth has ended. His legacy as a great American patriot, hero and exemplary public servant is beyond revision. The person who suffers most from the strange, posthumous attacks by the president is the president himself. Respectfully, the president should let McCain rest in peace and give his family the peace they deserve during this difficult time after his death.

The two main grievances Trump seems to have against McCain are not well-founded. If he were alive now, he would probably not answer the president. But I feel a responsibility as his friend to do so.

First, when McCain turned a controversial dossier involving Trump over to the FBI in 2016, it was exactly what he should have done, what I would have done and what every senator I served with did in similar circumstances. Serious allegations were made in that file, so McCain turned it over to the FBI to investigate. Giving the file to anyone else or throwing it away would have been a dereliction of duty and improper in our rule-of-law country.

Second, I know the president and many other Republicans were angry that McCain came back to Washington in July 2017 after his first operation to remove cancer from his brain and surprised everyone by voting against the repeal of Obamacare. But I can tell you, because I talked to him about it, that he didnt vote that way to spite Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., or anyone else. People who heard his speech on the Senate floor that day or have read it since know that McCain cast that vote not against repeal of Obamacare but against the partisanship that had taken over the Senate and made it into a feckless, gridlocked, divided place.

After his brain cancer diagnosis, McCain understood he might not have long to live and that the vote might have been one of the last, best times he would have to make the points he needed to make. So he made them  and he did so brilliantly. As he said in his speech in the Senate: Our deliberations ... are more partisan, more tribal more of the time than any other time I remember. ... Weve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle.

He continued: The Obama administration and congressional Democrats shouldnt have forced through Congress without any opposition support a social and economic change as massive as Obamacare. And we shouldnt do the same with ours. ... What have we to lose by trying to work together to find those solutions? Were not getting much done apart. ... The times when I was involved even in a modest way with working out a bipartisan response to a national problem or threat are the proudest moments of my career, and by far the most satisfying.

That is the lesson Trump and every member of Congress should take away from McCains acts and words in the U.S. Senate on that long day in July 2017. Trump, because he is president, has the greatest capacity to move our government in the direction McCain appealed for that day and that most Americans clearly want.

I pray Trump will follow McCains advice and give Democrats in Congress an opportunity to work with him to solve some of our most pressing national problems and threats. And I also pray Democrats respond to Trump in good faith and with the national interest as their guiding light, which it consistently was for McCain.

Lieberman represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate from 1989 to 2013. This first appeared in The Washington Post.New Zealand's deputy prime minister said the gunman accused of killing 50 people in two mosques in the South Pacific nation would spend the rest of his life in isolation in prison and called for solidarity to eradicate "hate-filled ideologies.''

Winston Peters was speaking at an emergency session of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation's executive committee in Istanbul where he denounced last Friday's attacks as "an attack on all of us'' in his country of "religious tolerance.''

Australian Brenton Harrison Tarrant was arrested and charged with murder. Tarrant, 28, livestreamed the attack and released a manifesto describing his white supremacist views and how he planned the shootings.

Peters said "no punishment can match the depravity of his crime but the families of the fallen will have justice.'' He screened photographs of New Zealanders mourning the victims.

The comment appeared to be in response to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who during a speech earlier this week said: "If New Zealand fails to hold the attacker accountable, one way or another we will hold him to account.''

Addressing the OIC meeting Friday, Erdogan thanked New Zealand for its "sensitivity and determined stance.'' He praised New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, saying her "reaction, the empathy displayed and her solidarity with Muslims'' should serve as an example to all leaders.

Erdogan slammed populist politicians who he said encouraged attacks on Muslims and refugees.

"Politicians who pave themselves the road to power by alienating Muslims and creating enemies out of refugees, must pull themselves together.'' He argued Muslims weren't the only ones affected by "rising cultural racism.''

But Erdogan himself has sparked outrage abroad by screening excerpts of Tarrant's video at campaign rallies to denounce Islamophobia but also to shore up Islamic and nationalist sentiments before the March 31 local elections.

Despite widespread criticism, Erdogan has continued showing the blurred out video with clear audio of automatic gunfire to thousands of people at rallies and broadcast live on Turkish televisions.

New Zealand has been trying to prevent the use of the video and Peters is expected to take up the issue. Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos of the shootings during the first 24 hours after the massacre.

Thousands of people gathered in New Zealand for Friday prayers and to pay their respects during a mass funeral.

Peters said the government was working to ensure Muslims' safety with an increased police presence, measures on social media and new gun control laws that already went into effect.

Erdogan called for measures to combat and outlaw Islamophobia.

"We have to show our reaction in a strong way so that similar pains don't occur again and mosques are not turned into a bloodbath,'' he said.

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Descanso Republican Larry Wilske, a retired Navy SEAL, officially announced his candidacy in Californias 50th Congressional District, vying for a seat currently held by embattled Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, R-Alpine.

Wilske is the first Republican challenger to officially declare his candidacy for Hunters seat. Temecula Mayor Matt Rahn and El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells, who mounted a challenge for Hunters seat in 2018, have both filed paperwork to run for the seat.

Hunter, a six-term incumbent, is set to go on criminal trial in September on charges that he and his wife, Margaret, stole $250,000 in campaign funds. They have pleaded not guilty.

Wilske said in an interview Wednesday that he would try to win, whether its in a general or a special election. But Wilske did not criticize Hunter; he praised the voting records of Hunter and his father, former congressman Duncan Hunter Sr., who previously held the seat for 28 years.

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Wilske stressed the importance of ensuring San Diegos congressional delegation has at least one Republican, given the uncertainty of Hunters future.

Me running is just me running; it is not about beating up on a fellow combat vet, Wilske said. I hope Duncan comes out of this okay, but were gonna be realistic about it. Weve got to be prepared to not vacate that seat.

Wilske said his priorities include supporting the 2nd Amendment, immigration reform, border security, and continuing tax reform.

Democrat Ammar Campa-Najjar, who came up short in his challenge of Hunter last fall, is vying for the seat again in 2020.

Wilske, 58, is a San Diego native who served in the Navy for 30 years. He has operated a maritime charter business and worked as a consultant for military logistics since retiring from the Navy.

He also has run for elected office before.

In 2014, he unsuccessfully tried to unseat longtime Rep. Susan Davis, D-San Diego, in the 53rd District, which encompasses central and eastern San Diego. He lost by about 17 percentage points.

Then last year Wilske squared off against Assemblymember Randy Voepel in the 71st Assembly District, which covers much of East County from Borrego Springs to Spring Valley and pieces of the Inland Empire in Riverside County.

During the primary race, Wilske accused fellow Republican Voepel of stolen valor, alleging Voepel had wrongly claimed credit for a Combat Action Ribbon.

However, reporting by multiple news organizations including the Union-Tribune found that Voepel did receive a Combat Action Ribbon.

Wilske lost the primary, and Voepel won a second term in the general election in November.

Were coming to a crossroads as a country and were beating each other up we shouldnt be, Wilske said Wednesday, discussing this run for congress. We need to stop this nonsense of inviting socialism in  and we need to start getting our arms around what makes us great as Americans and start appreciating each other even when we disagree.Firefighters were able to revive one dog but a second died after a fire broke out inside a Carlsbad homes garage Thursday afternoon, officials said.

The fire was reported shortly before 12:20 p.m. at a home on James Drive near Jeanne Place. When crews arrived they found heavy fire showing from the garage of the single-story home, said Carlsbad Fire Division Chief Mike Lopez. Firefighters from Carlsbad, Vista and Oceanside departments responded.

A resident was home when firefighters arrived and was trying to get his dogs out of the home, but the intensity of the fire didnt allow him to get in, Lopez said.

After knocking down the flames, firefighters searched the home and found the dogs, unconscious and unresponsive, inside, Lopez said. The pets were carried across the street to a neighbors front lawn, where an Oceanside firefighter gave them oxygen, trying to revive them.

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The larger of the two dogs could be seen on OnScene TV video regaining consciousness and wagging its tail. It eventually got up and was shown walking around. The second dog didnt make it, Lopez said.

Pets are part of our families and any opportunity where we can  revive a pet, we are going to give it 100 percent, Lopez said. In this case, thats exactly what our firefighters did. Unfortunately one succumbed to his injuries but we were successful on the other.

The fire caused extensive damage to the garage and flames extended into the home. No damage estimate was immediately available. Fire investigators are trying to determine what sparked the blaze, Lopez said.

The Red Cross was contacted to assist with temporary lodging. Animal Control officials were called to help with the deceased dog, he said.

Lopez said a firefighter and the homes resident suffered minor injuries. He said they both transported themselves to the hospital for medical attention.

Twitter: @karenkucher

(619) 293-1350

karen.kucher@sduniontribune.comBarbara Beckers boys were just 7 and 9 years old on March 21, 1979, the day they returned from school, headed into the living room and found their mothers bloody body. She had been repeatedly stabbed in her neck and back.

Investigators found blood in several rooms of the La Jolla home. Police at the time said Becker, 37, had tried to escape her attacker. She had fought hard. Some of the blood was his.

It would take four decades to discover his name. The answer would come through genetic genealogy, a sleuthing method that combines DNA and family trees.

On Thursday, exactly 40 years to the day of Beckers death, San Diego police announced that they have solved her slaying, and identified the suspect as Paul Jean Chartrand.

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Chartrand died 25 years ago. Police did not say how old he was or how he died.

Thursdays announcement marked the first time that San Diego police have publicly named a suspected killer that they identified through genetic genealogy  a method that gained national attention last year after it was used to identify a suspect in the Golden State Killer case.

Its also the third time authorities in the region have closed a case by following leads generated through genetic genealogy.

With the method, expert genealogists try to match DNA from a crime scene to relatives  a third cousin will do  who have upload their DNA in publicly accessible databases. A hit helps genealogists generate family trees, in hopes of putting a name to the mystery DNA.

San Diego police homicide Lt. Matt Dobbs said in a written statement Thursday that the team is grateful the case has been solved however, it is tempered by the fact it took 40 years to give Barbara Beckers family the answers they deserved, and that Chartrand was able to avoid justice for 16 years after Barbara Beckers murder.

Dobbs said the Becker and Chartrand families asked for privacy, and that the Chartrand family also has expressed their condolences.

He and she were strangers. It seems it was a burglary gone bad.

Back in 1979, the San Diego Union, reported that the Beckers had lived in the La Jolla home off Torrey Pines Road not far from UC San Diego for seven years.

Barbara Becker was last seen at 8:30 a.m. on the day she died. She had failed to show up for a 10 a.m. salon appointment.

Her husband, a doctor at the Veterans Administration Hospital, had been at work that day.

Beckers young sons found her body about 1 p.m. Terrified, they ran to a neighbors home for help.

Based on the evidence at the scene, Becker put up a tremendous fight for her life, Dobbs said.

But the case went cold, and despite forensic advancements, it stayed that way. Chartrand died in 1995, before his DNA made it into the criminal databases.

Last October, San Diego police investigators and the District Attorneys Office turned to the FBIs Investigative Genealogy Team for help.

They found a distant relative through a public database and worked it backward to identify Chartraunds direct family members, who agreed to provide DNA.

Through that, Chartrand was identified as the source of the blood at the crime scene.

Genetic genealogy became crime-solvings newest tool nearly a year ago, with the announcement that it had been used to catch the suspected Golden State Killer  so named for a crime spree of at least 13 murders and more than 50 rapes in California from 1974 to 1986.

The method has increasingly become viable for investigators thanks to a sharp rise consumer DNA testing  such as provided by Ancestry or 23 and Me.

Police do not use and do not have access to databases of those and other companies. Instead, law enforcement-based searches are done in public databases  GEDmatch, with 1.2 million DNA profiles, is the biggest.

To be a part of the public database, consumers must intentionally upload their DNA data onto the site.

Since November, police in San Diego County employing the method have publicly identified suspected killers in two cold cases: the 2006 sword-stabbing death of Scott Martinez in La Mesa, and the 2007 beating death of Jodine Serrin in Carlsbad.

teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com

(760) 529-4945

Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUTA 49-year-old woman trying to cross a Spring Valley street was struck by an SUV and seriously injured Thursday night, a California Highway Patrol officer said.

It happened about 8:15 p.m. as the woman was trying to cross Jamacha Boulevard just west of Grand Avenue in the La Presa neighborhood, Officer Travis Garrow said.

The woman, a San Diego resident, crossed into the path of an 2008 Ford Escape driven by a 68-year-old Spring Valley man headed eastbound on Jamacha, the officer said.

The SUV struck the woman, and she was thrown to the pavement, he said.

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She was taken to a hospital with potentially major injuries, but is expected to survive, the office said.

The Ford driver remained at the crash scene and cooperated with authorities, Garrow said. Neither drugs nor alcohol are suspected to have been a factor, he said.

City News Service contributed to this report.

Twitter: @Alex_Riggins

(619) 293-1710

alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com

UPDATES:

3:05 p.m. March 22: This story was updated with more information from the California Highway Patrol. It was originally published at 10:10 p.m. March 21.President Donald Trump on Friday intensified his attacks on special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation in his latest effort to undermine the findings in Muellers highly anticipated report, saying people will not stand for it.

The probe is widely expected to end in the coming weeks, but Trump was focused on its beginnings rather than its conclusion, complaining about Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosensteins appointment of Mueller in May 2017. Rosenstein appointed the special counsel after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

I have a deputy, appoints a man to write a report on me, to make a determination on my presidency, Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network. People will not stand for it.

Trump bemoaned that the special counsel was best friend to Comey, who succeeded Mueller as FBI director. Theres no evidence the two are close friends.

Mueller was appointed following the recusal two months earlier of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. That action entangled Rosenstein, whose memo castigating Comey was cited by the White House as justification for his firing. In addition, Rosenstein didnt appoint Mueller to write a report  thats simply the ordinary course of action laid out in the special counsel regulations.

The president, speaking to reporters on the White House lawn before leaving for meetings at his Florida estate, again repeated his claim that There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. Everybody knows it. Its all a big hoax. Its all a witch hunt.

Guessing when Muellers report will be turned over to the Department of Justice has become a popular Washington parlor game, though the special counsel has not officially indicated that his probe is in its final stages. Justice Department regulations require only that Mueller give the attorney general a confidential report that explains the decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions. That could be as simple as a bullet point list or as fulsome as a report running hundreds of pages.

Attorney General William Barr is required only to say the investigation has concluded and describe or explain any times when he or Rosenstein decided an action Mueller proposed was so inappropriate or unwarranted that it should not be pursued. After Mueller turns in his report, Barr has said he will draft a second one for congressional and public consumption.

Trump and his allies have spent nearly two years trying to discredit Mueller. But the president has grown increasingly confident the report will produce what he has insisted all along: no clear evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and his 2016 campaign. And Trump and his advisers are considering how to weaponize those possible findings for the 2020 race, painting the probe as a failed coup while railing against investigations launched by House Democrats.

Even if Muellers final report does not implicate the president in criminal conduct, the investigation was far from fruitless. His team charged 34 people, including six Trump associates, and three companies. His prosecutors revealed a sweeping criminal effort by Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and showed that people connected to the Trump campaign were eager to exploit emails stolen from Democrats.Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III turned in his long-anticipated report on the Russia investigation on Friday, but did not recommend any more indictments in the political and legal saga that has threatened President Trumps tenure in the White House and is likely to cloud his legacy.

Mueller delivered a confidential report to Atty. Gen. William Barr, the Justice Department announced. A Barr spokeswoman described it as comprehensive but provided no other details.

The special counsels decision to wrap up the investigation without further criminal charges probably brings a measure of relief to the president and his inner circle after nearly two years under scrutiny by the former FBI director.

Mueller has charged 34 people, the most of any special prosecutor since Watergate. They include more than two dozen Russians and several of Trumps top former aides, including his national security advisor and his campaign chairman.

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No Americans were charged with conspiring with Moscow to influence the 2016 presidential campaign, the original focus of the criminal and counter-intelligence investigation.

However, Muellers work spawned a web of other inquiries, most notably from House Democrats and federal prosecutors in New York, that will continue to shadow Trump and may lead to additional charges.

In a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate judiciary committees, Barr wrote that Mueller has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters.

Barr said he may be able to advise the committees of Muellers principal conclusions as soon as this weekend. He also wrote that other information may be made available to Congress, and he remains committed to as much transparency as possible.

There were no instances in which Justice Department leaders overruled a decision by the special counsel, Barr wrote.

Trump flew to his resort compound in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, before Barr received the report and had no immediate comment.

The White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in a statement that the next steps are up to Barr and we look forward to the process taking its course. The White House has not received or been briefed on the special counsels report.

Although Muellers report ends his investigation, its filing marks the starting point for waves of legal battles, congressional wrangling and political recriminations in the months ahead and through the 2020 presidential campaign.

Democrats and some Republicans quickly demanded that the report be made public as soon as possible and that all of the material be sent to Congress without redactions. Many of the 2020 presidential contenders tweeted their demand for a full public review minutes after news broke of Barrs notification to Congress.

The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.

Democrats have expressed concern that the Justice Department would release only portions of the report that defend the president and his aides, or that the White House might try to bury damaging material.

Congress and the American people deserve to judge the facts for themselves, said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Any attempt by the Trump administration to cover up the results of this investigation into Russias attack on our democracy would be unacceptable.

House Democrats have vowed to issue subpoenas, if necessary, to obtain the complete report as they launch multiple investigations aimed at Trumps businesses, private finances and presidency.

Republican leaders said they were eager to see the report as well.

The attorney general has said he intends to provide as much information as possible, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in a statement. I sincerely hope he will do so as soon as he can, and with as much openness and transparency as possible.

I expect [the Justice Department] to release the special counsels report to this committee & public w/o delay & to maximum extent permitted by law, Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote on Twitter.

A security officer working for the special counsels office delivered Muellers report to the Justice Department early Friday afternoon.

Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, then went to Capitol Hill to deliver the letter notifying Congress that Muellers report had been received.

Barrs chief of staff, Brian Rabbitt, called Emmet Flood, a member of the White House counsels office, about 4:35 or 4:40 p.m. to alert him as well. Flood, who was hired to help the president handle the investigations, was traveling with Trump in Palm Beach, Fla.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein, who first appointed and supervised Mueller, telephoned him at 4:30 p.m. to thank him for his service and express his appreciation, according to a senior Justice Department official. Rosenstein has said he plans to leave the department shortly.

Mueller was later seen eating dinner at an American-style restaurant that he frequents in northwest Washington.

Many of Muellers prosecutors are returning to other positions at the Justice Department, while his top deputy is returning to academia. Mueller has not yet stepped down as special counsel. Hes expected to remain in place as the office wraps up its operations.

Even before he filed his report, the former FBI director had produced a vast public record of crimes, lies and misdeeds, one that is especially alarming because it involves a foreign adversary interfering in a U.S. election.

Mueller gave no interviews and issued no public statements apart from a one-sentence statement when he was appointed special counsel in May 2017. That added an unusual degree of mystery to his work and prompted endless speculation about the sprawling investigation.

The special counsels office investigated Moscows efforts to sway the 2016 presidential campaign, whether Trumps aides or allies conspired with the Kremlin-backed operation, and whether the president improperly interfered with the investigation.

Along the way, Muellers team uncovered and prosecuted numerous other crimes, including an epidemic of lying to lawmakers and federal agents, as well as financial crimes related to an illegal lobbying scheme on behalf of Ukraines pro-Russian government.

Other federal prosecutors already have used Muellers work to kick off their own investigations. The U.S. attorneys office in Manhattan has directly implicated Trump in an illegal hush-money scheme allegedly designed to silence his alleged mistresses in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.

Depending on what the report says, Trump is expected to claim full vindication or continue his tirades against a witch hunt that he says was conducted for partisan purposes.

He submitted written answers to questions from Muellers team, but despite months of negotiations did not submit to a formal interview.

On Wednesday, the president appeared to agree with polls showing widespread public support for releasing the entire report.

Let it come out. Let people see it, he told reporters at the White House. Lets see whether or not its legit.

Its unclear whether Muellers report includes any major revelations beyond the extensive indictments and court filings hes assembled in the last two years.

The special counsels office detailed how Vladimir Putins Russia attempted to influence the last presidential election with a vast disinformation campaign on social media as well as illegal hacks and leaks of Democratic Party emails.

Court filings showed that Trumps top lieutenants met or communicated dozens of times with Russian diplomats, suspected intelligence agents or officials during the campaign and the transition that followed  and then lied repeatedly about those contacts.

In addition, while Trump was running for president, his confidants secretly tried to assemble financial and political support in Moscow to build a luxury Trump Tower condominium and hotel complex potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars to his business.

Mueller and his team ultimately charged 34 individuals, including 25 Russians. Seven people pleaded guilty, including several in Trumps inner orbit.

They include Michael Flynn, his former national security advisor; Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman; Richard Gates, his deputy campaign chairman; and Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer and a senior executive in the Trump Organization.

No Americans were charged with conspiring with the Kremlin-backed operation, however, and Trump has consistently denied any collusion between his campaign and Moscow.

On Wednesday, Trump complained that Mueller, unlike him, had never won an election.

I got 63 million votes. And now somebody just writes a report? I think its ridiculous, the president said. The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, won more than 65 million votes but lost the electoral college.

Mueller was appointed special counsel by Rosenstein after Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director in May 2017.

Rosenstein was overseeing the Russia investigation because Jeff Sessions, then attorney general, had recused himself because of his role in the campaign. Sessions was forced out in November, and Barr was confirmed as his replacement in February.

Times staff writers Jennifer Haberkorn, Sarah D. Wire, Noah Bierman and David Willman contributed to this report.When President Trump proposed opening nearly the entire U.S. coastline to more offshore oil and gas drilling, the backlash from states seeking exemptions was swift.

Governors, Republican and Democratic, and state legislatures up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines protested so vigorously that the administration promised to consult with them before finalizing any plans.

Instead, Trump is quietly laying the groundwork to weaken a decades-old federal law that empowers California and other states to slow and even stop offshore development in federal waters.

Republicans are always supposed to be in favor of states rights, said Richard Charter, who has worked on oil issues for 40 years and is a senior fellow at the marine conservation nonprofit Ocean Foundation. But this is in fact an effort to take away states rights when it comes to offshore drilling.

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In a notice published earlier this month, the Commerce Departments National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asked the public to weigh in on ways to streamline a state review process granted under the Coastal Zone Management Act.

GRAPHIC: Here is where the Trump administration wants to expand offshore oil and gas drilling 

The 1972 law is widely considered one of the most powerful tools states have to regulate activity off their coasts. It applies to all of the coastal and Great Lakes states, with the exception of Alaska.

The act gives states a voice when federal projects or industry development affect their coast, even activities that occur outside a states jurisdiction, which extends three miles from the coast.

The scientific agency cant change the law, but through regulation and implementation, it can have a major impact on how it is enforced.

Among other things, the administration appears to be considering limits to the scope of states review powers and a shorter period of time to process an appeal. The full extent of its plans is unclear.

The goal, officials wrote, is to provide greater efficiency and predictability for oil and gas projects  language often used to justify deregulation.

The oil industry cheered the administrations move.

We appreciate and support efforts to modernize and improve the governance and efficiency of the permitting and approvals process so that unnecessary barriers to oil and natural gas development are minimized and eliminated, said Erik Milito, a vice president of the American Petroleum Institute.

Passed in the wake of the devastating 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, the act assures that drilling, shipping, commercial fishing, mineral extraction, wind power projects and other activities fit into states plans for protecting their coastal zones.

In practice, this means that activity in federal waters that would otherwise not be open to extensive public scrutiny can be subjected to hearings and local environmental impact assessments.

State leaders can insist on modifications. They can negotiate with industry representatives to reach a compromise. According to a 2016 NOAA report, states end up approving 93% to 95% of the federal projects they review. Supporters of this coordinated review process say it has resolved some of the nations most contentious cases without costly litigation that can drag on for years.

And though their word is not final, states have used the act as a weapon to defeat projects that threatened the environment and public health.

Citing the law in the early 2000s, California managed to halt 36 controversial oil leases between Monterey Bay and Channel Islands national marine sanctuaries.

In 2007, the state blocked a proposed liquefied natural gas port that would have floated 14 miles offshore from Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The project was ultimately abandoned after a state review found it posed significant risks to air quality and marine life.

These regulations provide an important public process, said Linda Krop, chief counsel at the Environmental Defense Center, a nonprofit environmental law firm based in Santa Barbara. Obtaining these rights has been a hard-fought battle by coastal states, with California leading the charge.

Its very meaningful, she said, and thats what the federal government is afraid of.

Mark Delaplaine, who manages the California Coastal Commissions Energy, Ocean Resources and Federal Consistency Division, said attempts to weaken the law were alarming.

It gets to the heart of arguably the most powerful tool, even with the checks and balances, that the state has. Period, Delaplaine said.

This is not the only states rights battle California is fighting with the Trump administration, which is also seeking to end Californias unique ability to set fuel-economy standards for cars higher than the federal level.

The Trump administrations draft offshore proposal would allow new oil and gas drilling in more than a billion acres off the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic coasts. It includes plans for 47 lease sales over a five-year period, more than half of which would take place in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska.

The plan would give the oil and gas industry the first new access to California waters in decades, with six proposed lease sales. Another lease sale would be held off Washington and Oregon. Governors of all three states have vowed to protect their coastlines from offshore drilling.

Some now fear the Interior Department is slow-walking the unpopular plan to avoid upsetting the nomination of David Bernhardt, the agencys acting chief, who faces a Senate confirmation hearing later this month. A revised draft of the offshore plan  which was expected earlier this year  has been delayed without explanation.

On Wednesday, 17 senators sent a letter to Bernhardt asking him to clarify how much of the countrys coast would be included in the plan. The American people deserve to know your plan for the Outer Continental Shelf before the Senate votes on your nomination, they wrote.

Florida politicians who secured the Interior Departments promise a year ago to exempt the state from new offshore drilling were scrambling to figure out whether the administration would honor it. Floridas entire congressional delegation signed a letter last month asking to be left out of Trumps offshore drilling plan.

New Jersey, Delaware, New Hampshire, California and other states passed laws prohibiting new oil and gas pipeline and other infrastructure from being built on state lands  an attempt to make transporting oil prohibitively expensive.

MORE: First came the proclamations against Trumps offshore drilling plan. Now comes the legislation 

Cindy Zipf, executive director of the New Jersey advocacy group Clean Ocean Action, said the states resistance likely prompted the administrations effort to reduce their power by revising the coastal law.

I do think this is blowback from President Trump in response to the states actions to block oil and gas drilling and infrastructure in state waters, Zipf wrote in an email.

Trump has also tried to weaken the law by gutting its funding.

In his recent budget proposal, the president sought to end the grants given to states to help implement their coastal management programs, which include reviewing federal offshore activities. The administration made a similar attempt last year, but Congress restored funding in the final budget.

Previous administrations have also tried to limit states role in overseeing what happens in federal waters  part of a decades-long tug of war.

In the 1980s, California sued the Reagan administration to protect its right to review activities occurring off its coast. Under former President George W. Bush, key parts of the review process were expedited to address concerns raised by the energy industry, according to a NOAA report.

Delaplaine, of the California Coastal Commission, said that when he started in 1976, California lacked any review authority in federal waters.

When Exxon asked that year to build an offshore storage and treatment facility in state waters less than a mile from shore, the commission denied the project. So Exxon moved the project 3.1 miles offshore, into federal waters, and built the same storage and treatment facility. The state couldnt do anything about it.

The risk of oil spills was enormous, Delaplaine said. So this tool is infinitely powerful  we dont have absolute authority ... but the state can be a lot more involved in the process to negotiate less environmentally damaging alternatives to a project.

The latest from Washington 

More stories from Anna M. Phillips 

Last weekend, a caseworker visited Brittany Hyc to make sure her two small boys were doing all right in a home where there had been repeated allegations of abuse and neglect.

The worker, on contract with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, reported back that 2-year-old Jahir Gibbons and his 5-year-old brother were both safe, according to the agency.

Two days later, Jahir was brutally beaten to death. The following day, the worker filed another report saying only the older brother was at the Chicago home at the time of the visit and that the worker never saw the 2-year-old at all, the agency disclosed late Thursday.

Jahir Gibbons (Family photo)

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The caseworker has been barred from having any contact with children or families the agency serves as the conflicting reports are investigated.

Falsifying records will not be tolerated, DCFS Interim Director Debra Dyer-Webster said in a statement. DCFS will pursue all available discipline, including termination, if records were falsified.

The incident raises more questions about how the agency dealt with allegations of abuse against the boys mother and her boyfriend and how it monitored the well-being of the children. Jahir was beaten so violently that his liver was lacerated, but he also showed signs of older injuries such as rib fractures. His older brother had bruises over his body, apparently from past beatings, according to police.

Its very disturbing, said Acting Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert, whose office represents abused and neglected children. By definition, there are allegations that children are abused in their home and that warrants the highest level of care.

He was particularly troubled by the apparent filing of conflicting reports. Its absolutely another huge red flag. This is beyond a red flag. ... I mean its about the quality of work that this agency is doing.

The mother and boyfriend are both facing felony charges. The boyfriend, Dejon Waters, 21, was charged with first-degree murder after he admitted getting angry at the boy and beating him with his hands and a rolled-up shirt until Jahir began foaming at the mouth, prosecutors said.

Hyc, 28, was charged with child endangerment because she left Jahir with Waters  even though she had noticed bruises and burns on Jahir for a week or two  because she had to go to work, prosecutors said.

There had been suspicions about the couples treatment of the children for more than a year, according to prosecutors.

A year ago, a neighbor saw Jahir limping after a loud fight in his home. Last August, a doctor reported a bite on his stomach and other bruising that the mother blamed on day care. In October a DCFS worker was assigned to the family after the agency got a hotline complaint about possible abuse in the home. Earlier this month, Jahirs grandparents visited the boys and noticed bruises on the boys face and arms, prosecutors said.

On Saturday the caseworker went to the familys home in the 6000 block of South Prairie Avenue. The next day, the worker submitted a report saying both children were at home and were doing fine. Following Jahirs death, a second report was submitted March 19 saying only the older child was home.

The agency did not say which report it believes to be true. But prosecutors made it clear that the abuse of Jahir had been going on for some time while DCFS was monitoring the family.

The medical examiner discovered fractures in various stages of healing to the ribs and a relatively new wrist fracture. There were numerous lacerations to the liver and a contusion to the lung. There were numerous bruises about the body in various stages of healing, prosecutors said in court. The ME noted that the injuries require significant blunt-force trauma.

When Hyc was arrested, police found an iPad showing recent searches for ways to hide bruises, authorities said.

Chanel Perkins said she sprang into action and performed chest compressions on a cold, pale boy after his frantic mom banged on doors seeking help. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)

On Thursday, prosecutors laid out Jahirs last moments in heart-wrenching detail. After picking up her 5-year-old son from school, she came home Monday evening to find Jahir on the floor, Assistant States Attorney James Murphy said in court.

Hyc asked Waters what happened to the boy but could not get an explanation, Murphy said. At first she thought Jahir was taking a nap, but then she realized something was wrong and tried reviving the boy. Panicking, she started banging on doors up and down the hall outside her apartment.

Chanel Perkins was visiting her twin sister down the hall when she heard the urgent pounding and a woman screaming, Call the police, my baby isnt breathing!

The sisters opened the door and saw Hyc holding a seemingly lifeless boy in her arms. They followed her into Hycs apartment, where the mother laid Jahir on the floor and grabbed a blanket for a pillow. The boy was pale and cold to the touch, Perkins said. His eyes were rolled back into his head. There were bruises on his face, on his chest, on his stomach, on his arms, on his legs. There were two cuts on his face.

Perkins sister called 911 and the dispatcher asked if anyone could perform CPR until help came. At first I didnt want to do anything. ... There were so many bruises, said Perkins, a nursing assistant. But then 911 told me to do the chest compressions.  I just wanted to help. I didnt want to see anybody lose a child. It was devastating.

Paramedics arrived and, picking up a pulse, took Jahir to Comer Childrens Hospital, where he was pronounced dead within the hour Monday evening.

DCFS said its contact with Hyc stretches back to 2010, when there were allegations of abuse and neglect involving her older children, a spokesman said. Last October, prosecutors said, a DCFS worker followed up at Hycs home and overheard what was believed to be Waters hitting Jahir.

Recent DCFS involvement included home visits and therapy for the mother, according to agency spokesman Jimmie Whitelow. Jahir also started participating in speech and developmental therapy, which he was continuing to receive, according to the agency.

Golbert, the public guardian, said the agency was providing intact family services and was supposed to keep a comprehensive set of eyes on the family. He said the agency should have brought the case to court to ensure that the children were protected.

He said the case illustrates the weakness of leadership in the department.

Theres been a string of 12 directors in 10 years, Golbert said. Thats on average a new director more often than every year. We really need to get a long-term leadership team with some vision and innovation.

Chicago Tribunes William Lee contributed.

rsobol@chicagotribune.com

mcrepeau@chicagotribune.comSan Diego is proof positive that migration doesnt bring mayhem in its wake. With Americas biggest and most active port of entry at San Ysidro, its vast pool of cross-border commuters, and the lowest murder rate among Americas biggest cities, San Diego is a national beacon for those seeking a prototype of successful U.S.-Mexican relations. Why arent more people watching?

With Washingtons exclusive focus on the wall, other approaches need to be highlighted. San Diego demonstrates secure borders work best when they are at the same time efficient crossroads for business and culture. San Diegans know border security is more than just fencing. Borders have to be secure enough to stop crime but porous enough not to hinder legitimate intersectionality between nations. This is the San Diego model.

No city in America has been a greater beneficiary of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) than San Diego. In the decades since NAFTA was signed San Diegos metropolitan region has exploded economically. NAFTA-driven growth in Mexico has spilled north across the border. Tijuana and Mexicali have grown from sleepy tourist towns to major commercial and industrial powerhouses. Our border cities have been growing in symbiosis, with benefits to our educational institutions, our cultural diversity and our economy.

San Diego-born ideas like Custom and Border Protections SENTRI system of pre-clearing trusted travelers have become national models for successful facilitation of busy border crossings. Cross border educational exchanges make both our nations smarter. The University of California at San Diego is a world leader among elite universities in part by taking advantage of geographical proximity to Mexico with innovative cross-border strategies.

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With Washingtons political bandwidth overwhelmed by often fearful debate about immigration across Americas southern border, San Diegos positive experience is of national importance.

San Diego has been blessed with more than its share of visionary civic leadership. Leaders on both sides of the border must continue to build on the positive while fighting the negative. New ideas must continue to be explored; new forms of cooperation tried. This is a model Americans can understand: private sector leadership bringing slow-moving governments along. San Diegos relationship with Tijuana is already a national role model for trans-border interaction; more Americans need to hear about this, particularly given Tijuanas long-running martyrdom to United States drug demand.

Politically, San Diegos Republican leaders, in particular, can also serve as national role models, exemplifying a GOP both true to its roots and capable of courting and building Latino constituencies. Kevin Falconer has provided an example worthy of note. Is the GOP in Washington listening and learning?

Institutionally, UC San Diegos Pradeep Khosla has the right instincts with regard to expanding the universitys cross-border ties. There is no elite university anywhere in the United States as close to a major border as UC San Diego; Dr. Khoslas strategic planning should keep this geographical reality foremost as he looks to the universitys future.

Ideas are important to policy-making. Two hemispherically relevant think tanks are based in La Jolla. UC San Diegos Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies under Rafael Fernandez de Castro is steadily enhancing its reputation as a critical element of the United States and Mexicos cross-border think tank infrastructure. The Institute of Americas (IOA) should be doing more as well. Ambassador Jamal Khokhars departure from IOA provides that institutions leaders with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape IOA into a think tank on par with Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution  albeit differently focused.

Americas essential international challenge in the twentieth century was the battle against communism  hence Hoovers seminal role. This centurys challenge for us as Californians and as Americans will be to better align neighboring economies, cultures, and migratory policies to ensure another century of American prosperity. Philanthropy will be required to strengthen IOA in this ambitious vision. San Diegans in the past have stepped up to the plate when a compelling case has been made. Its time to make that case.

No other city in America has the geographical location, the educational and cultural institutions, and the experience to take the lead in this challenge. Now is the time.

Erickson is a former United States consul general in Baja California.Californias death penalty is dead! Long live Californias death penalty!

That lede isnt a contradiction. In our state, the death penalty has long existed simultaneously as grave problem and necessary tool.

If Gov. Gavin Newsoms moratorium on the death penalty becomes permanent, we Californians should celebrate the end of a policy that magnified our worst disparities and created the risk of putting an innocent person to death.

But we also might pause to mourn the demise of this miserable practice. For the death penalty has provided an essential public service  shining light into the darkness of Californias prison system  that we may miss once its gone.

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Lets start by stipulating: Since its revival in 1978, the death penalty has never been about killing large numbers of people. Californians have executed 13 people in 40 years. More Californians than that die in traffic accidents over a holiday weekend.

Californias death penalty was a symbolic expression of frustration at violent crime and support crime victims. The death penalty also was an enormous headache for the criminal justice system, since capital cases consumed resources and slowed the courts with endless appeals. These costs are why so many wanted to do away with the death penalty.

But these same costs are also why the death penalty had real value.

Californias prison system, because it exists in the dark, is a scandal.

A powerful prison guards union effectively runs the show, soaking up billions in state dollars for their compensation that should go to higher education or infrastructure. For decades, the system was unconstitutionally overcrowded, with health care that failed to meet basic standards. The state refused to fix these problems until the federal courts intervened.

In this context, the death penalty was vital because it provided one of the few sources of accountability, and attention, for the prison system. Californians happily locked up people with life sentences and forgot about them, but death penalty cases couldnt be so easily ignored.

The media is more likely to cover death penalty cases, scrutinizing all aspects of the criminal justice process. Celebrities love opposing the death penalty; you could cast 10 Oscar-winning films with just the actors advocating for Kevin Cooper, the states most high-profile death-row inmate.

The death penalty also commands official attention. Governors cant avoid reckoning with death penalty cases. Some of the states best attorneys work on death penalty appeals, many pro bono. And the justices of the California Supreme Court must review all death sentences.

Forcing our states most powerful minds to examine the details of cases has brought to light any number of abuses of the system, and raised questions about the prisons themselves. And in the last few years, those questions have forced policymakers and voters to reconsider some criminal justice policies, particularly around sentencing. Would California now be reforming sentencing and other criminal justice procedures without the spotlight provided by the machinery of death?

There is another group of people who appreciate the death penaltys value: those 730-plus Californians who sit on death row at San Quentin. Twice in the past decade, ballot initiatives asked California voters to end the death penalty. In both campaigns, a significant number of death-row prisoners took an improbable stand against the initiatives that would end their own death sentences.

Why? Because their death sentences conferred special resources  including guaranteed attorneys for appeals and federal court reviews  that allowed them to fight their convictions. If the death penalty went away, death-row inmates could become just 737 more forgotten lifers.

California hasnt executed anyone since 2006, when the state Supreme Court questioned the constitutionality of lethal injections. This is not a popular opinion, but I would argue that for the last 13 years California has achieved the perfect death penalty equilibrium. Our state has capital punishment on the books, which provides the aforementioned accountability and represents the views of Californians who support the death penalty. But California no longer actually executes anyone, thus acknowledging the problems of state-sanctioned killing.

In other words, we have had it both ways.

Unfortunately, the governors moratorium disturbs that death penalty equilibrium. Newsoms effort could spark a backlash that forces the state to start executing people again. And even if the governor succeeds in creating a permanent ban, Californians will lose the scrutiny that the death penalty brings to criminal justice, and we seem unlikely to find some other mechanism to replace it.

RIP, California death penalty. And thank you for your service.

Mathews writes for Zocalo Public Square, www.zocalopublicsquare.orgArab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit criticized Trump's announcement the US would recognize Israel's 'sovereignty' over the occupied Syrian land, saying it 'comes outside the international legitimacy'

From Syria to the Arab League to Russia, Egypt to Turkey and beyond, President Donald Trump's abrupt declaration that Washington will recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights drew strong criticism and condemnation on Friday.

The Syrian government called it "irresponsible'' and a threat to international peace and stability, while Iran's foreign ministry said it plunges the region into a new crisis.

The Foreign Ministry in Damascus said Trump's statement confirms "the blind bias of the United States to the Zionist entity,'' referring to Israel, and added that it won't change "the fact that the Golan was and will remain Arab and Syrian.''

The ministry also said Damascus is now more intent on liberating the Golan, "using every possible means.''

Trump's announcement the day before was a major shift in American policy and gives Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a political boost a month before what is expected to be a close election.

The administration has been considering recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the strategic highlands, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967, for some time and Netanyahu had pressed the matter with visiting U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week.

Israel unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. The U.N. Security Council resolution 497, issued after the annexation, refers to Israel as "the occupying power'' and says Israel's attempt to "impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect.''

Damascus also said Trump's statement "clearly shows the U.S. disdain to the international legitimacy and violates its resolutions, especially Security Council resolution 497'' while also threatening "international peace and stability.''

The Egyptian foreign ministry issued a statement reaffirming its longstanding position that the Golan Heights are an occupied Arab land and rejecting any recognition of the legitimacy of the 1981 Israeli annexation decision.

"Egypt raeffirms its firm position that the Syrian Golan is an occupied Arab land in accordance with international legitimacy decisions," including UN Security Council resolution 497 of 1981 which rejected Israels decision to impose its sovereignty on the territory, the foreign ministry said.

The Israeli decision was "null and lacked international legitimacy," the statement added.

It called on the international community to "respect the resolutions of international legitimacy and the United Nations Charter in regard of the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force, it added.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said Trump's "personal and arbitrary decisions'' plunge the region into a new crisis, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.

Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit also criticized the American stance, saying it "comes outside the international legitimacy and no country, no matter how important it is, can make such a decision.''

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Trump's "unfortunate'' declaration has brought the region "to the brink of a new crisis and new tensions.''

"We will never allow the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights,'' Erdogan added. Egypt also issued a statement, saying the Golan is occupied Arab territory and calling for respect for international resolutions.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Trump's comments "can destabilize the already fragile situation in the Middle East.''

"The very idea is not helping the goals of the Middle East settlement, quite the other way round,'' he said. "Right now, it's merely a declaration. Let's hope it will stay this way.''

The U.S. will be the first country to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, which the rest of the international community regards as territory occupied by Israel whose status should be determined by negotiations between Israel and Syria. Attempts to bring Israel and Syria to the table have failed.

It was not immediately clear how a U.N. peacekeeping force that is in place in the Golan might be affected by the U.S. move. That force's mandate expires at the end of June.

There had been signals that a U.S. decision was coming. Last week, in its annual human rights report, the State Department dropped the phrase "Israeli-occupied'' from the Golan Heights section, instead calling it "Israeli-controlled.''

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Now that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has turned in his report on the 2016 Trump campaigns connections with the Russian government to Attorney General William Barr, the focus shifts to Barr and his decision on how much of the report should be made public and how long it takes him to decide. But this should not be a difficult choice.

Given that Muellers probe involves an attempt by a feared enemy of America to sway a presidential election, for the good of democracy, Barr should release as much of Muellers report as possible  and as quickly as possible.

Early indications are promising. In a letter to ranking members of the House and Senate judiciary committees, Barr wrote that he has already begun reviewing the report and may be in a position to advise you of the special counsels principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.

Its possible the report wont have any bombshells beyond those revealed by Mueller when he charged 34 people, including 25 Russians. Seven people pleaded guilty, including Michael Flynn, President Donald Trumps first national security adviser; Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer; and Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman. But given the traditional Justice Department view that a sitting president cannot be indicted, its plausible that Mueller will cite evidence of alleged criminal behavior by Trump. Americans need to know what he has found  and soon.

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Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & OpinionIn response to authoritarian remarks and actions over the past four years by Donald Trump, first as a candidate and now as president, The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has repeatedly expressed optimism that the strength of the U.S. democratic system will preserve democratic norms. In June 2017, we wrote that the checks and balances built into government by the Constitution have kept Trumps excesses in check, and will keep doing so.

Unfortunately, our optimism is being chipped away. Both parties, not just the president, now seem open to throwing away norms. Its troubling enough that 41 Republican senators believe Trump can bypass federal lawmakers in appropriating $6.6 billion for a border wall that even a GOP-controlled Congress refused to fund. But as detailed in a new analysis in The Washington Post, the Trump administration no longer believes it has to follow a 1946 federal law requiring that changes in basic federal policies need to be justified with legitimate explanations supported by facts. This is the primary reason that federal judges, including 15 GOP appointees, have rejected at least 63 policy changes promulgated by the White House. No administration in history has lost so often so quickly in court.

This record shows the judiciary remains a valuable check on executive overreach. But at least five Democratic presidential candidates  Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, former Texas congressman Beto ORourke, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg  have declined to rule out or suggested they may support an assault on the independence of the judiciary. They are receptive to expanding the U.S. Supreme Court with the express intent of adding liberal justices.

There is no constitutional requirement that the Supreme Court have nine justices. In the 1860s, there were briefly 10 members. But ever since, there have been nine. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to add six new justices in 1937, he got nowhere. There was a considered view that if Congress and the White House were controlled by the same party, and that if an explicitly partisan decision was made to add justices, that would destroy the judiciary as a credible check on the executive and legislative branches. The next time the other party took over Washington, it would be their turn to pack the court.

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But many Democrats have no patience for this long, measured view. Their anger over Trump and the Republican Senates refusal to even consider President Barack Obamas 2016 nomination of Judge Merrick Garland consumes them.

Will lingering Democratic anger and Republican indifference to democratic norms fade  or will they combine to yield a battered, dysfunctional America? It seems the nation will soon find out. Buckle up.

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & OpinionThe country deserves to see the full Mueller report

We, who love freedom of information in government, should not take any refusal to release the contents of the Mueller report without a huge fight.

If Attorney General William Barr keeps the good stuff regarding Russian interference from public view, or from Congress, I think the House of Representatives has a good remedy for him trying to hide the truth. Three House committees  Intelligence, Oversight and Judiciary  should subpoena Robert Mueller, Barr, Rod Rosenstein and as many of Muellers assistant investigators as they can.

With all these extraordinary minds at the committees disposal, Mueller, Barr, Rosenstein and the assistant investigators can surely testify from memory as to what the report concluded and the reasons for arriving at those conclusions.

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We should never accept a no regarding such a crucial issue as election interference and finding out who from the Trump group was trying to collude or conspire.

Gerald Lance Johannsen

Carlsbad

Democrats are only focused on attacking Trump

Some $25 million, no collusion or corruption and yet they wont stop and accept it. Do the Democrats have any plans of importance to the people other than their constant desire to ruin Donald Trump.

What policies are they planning on? I havent seen or heard of one thing. Their whole plan is simply get rid of Trump. I see their entire party crumbling because of the totally horrible plans pursued by the socialist side of the members.

Colleen Kline

Allied Gardens

Trump is the same man despite Mueller report

With the release of the Mueller report we can now expect Donald Trump and his sycophants to declare a total victory and become more emboldened. We can look forward to the Republican spin machine to be working on overdrive in an effort to denigrate the opposition. They will also make every effort to thwart any efforts to clarify the unclear issue of obstruction. Still all their concerted chest thumping and bravado will do nothing to diminish the fact that their leader is still the same narcistic, petty, nasty megalomaniac he has always been.

Regina Hanan

Scripps Ranch

Democrats must keep the pressure on to regain control

Lets see, what can the Democrats do now? They can continue to promote a reasonable health care system, something the Republicans have never touched. They can continue to protect the rights of all people in the United States by promoting harmony, non-violence, and trust among the people, Trump promotes and incites racial violence by his speech, actions, and decrees. They can can continue to protect the environment and believe in scientific progress discoveries that will move the country to clean energy, where Trump is in bed with fossil fuel industries. They can continue to foster a healthy relationship with our allies around the world, instead of cow-towing to dictators and killers around the world. Finally, they can continue to be the watch-dog to a president that has brought all of this clamor and attention to himself strictly due to his own actions and behaviors. He has no one to blame but himselfhe invites scrutiny.

Chet Chebegia

San Marcos

Mueller already has bagged some big swamp creatures

Congrats to Bob Mueller for partially fulfilling one of Trumps campaign promises, to drain the swamp.

Hopefully he can nail the big orange gator before hes done.

Steven Saint-Martin

San Diego

Lets not jump to conclusions about Trump

Re Trumps future may be in Congress hands  (March 9): The letter writer has, without a sniff of proof, already determined that not only is Trump going to be found guilty - but excused by new AG Bill Barr. If the crooked Mueller report finds nothing, is he going to go after the four dingbats who already have the result they want, now just want to find the proof to fit their result? Do you think it will stop the massive taxpayer funded circus?

Do you think Barr should go after those who really colluded: like Hillary, the DNC, The FBI and the Obama integrated Security Departments run by Clapper and Brennan? My guess is no.

Bob Spencer

San Diego

Mueller has already exposed a lot about Trump

So President Trumps base thinks he hung the moon. Contrary to the wave of subpoenas and convictions of his confidants and Cabinet members, supposedly he can do no wrong.

But the rest of us who dont watch his personal propaganda news program hes becoming increasingly unhinged (see Mr. Kellyanne Conways latest tweets).

Steve Blumenschein

Clairemont

Trump said hes be happy to share the report

On Wednesday, when asked whether the American public had the right to see the report, Trump said I dont mind. I mean, frankly, I told the House, If you want, let them see it,

Trumps statement conflicts with continuous attempts to obstruct or discredit Muellers investigation, which he has branded a witch hunt and something no President should suffer. Just last week he tweeted: there should be no Mueller report.

Trump claims innocence and argued that the entire investigation is illegal. Trump repeated the same argument Friday, tweeting that the investigation was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime.

In June 2018, Trump claimed the appointment of the Special Counsel is totally unconstituional!

Keep in mind that Mueller and the majority of his team are Republicans and that multiple court rulings have upheld Muellers appointment, his authority, and the decisions hes made.

Anthony Kopec

San Marcos

Democrats know the report will be a dud

Regarding article Democrats in Congress broadening Trump inquiries, (March 4), you would think that two years wasted on Muellers report would satisfy the Democrats. Even their own base dont believe that Putin won the election for Trump. They must already know that there is not enough meat in Muellers report to satisfy them. So they have decided to waste more time and energy tying up 6 high-level committees focused solely on destroying Trump. They are more interested in harassing anyone who has ever spoken to Trump then fulfilling the needs of the people. They will regret this when the ultra liberal socialist leftist tear their party apart while theyre not paying attention.

Carl Tovsrud

San Marcos

The nation made it clear it wants Trump to go

The American people voted decisively in November to give the Democrats a majority in the House of Representatives. The purpose of that vote was for one purpose and one purpose only. To impeach Donald Trump and remove him from office.

The evidence for impeachment is now abundantly clear, through the many indictments by Robert Mueller, the sworn testimony of credible witnesses and the constant lies that Trump tells the American people and his own staff everyday. It is now up to Congress to act courageously and boldly. To remove Trump from office is the right thing to do. Not to remove him would be a travesty for America.

Robert Hall

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.We saw a lot of thermostat-related gags this week, but we thought Alan Van Loys was the coolest. Congratulations, Alan! He 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

As long as Im CEO, the thermostat will stay at 30 degrees. Alan Van Loy, San Diego

Finalists

My time here is limited so let me get right to the point. Michael Ehrenfeld, San Diego

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If one more person asks if Im CEO of Jack in the Box, my head will explode. Susan Wiczynski, La Jolla

Congratulations on your promotion. Our last boss suffered a meltdown. Lou Franzini, Jacksonville Beach, Florida

I need you to pick up a bunch of fresh noses from the grocery. Davis Kahan, San Diego

The computer just froze on me again. Noah Mationg, Imperial Beach

Whaddaya mean the SEC is turning up the heat? Mike Goloskie, San Diego

Were looking for someone well-rounded who knows how to keep a cool head. Dennis Romero, Ramona

Sorry if I seem a bit frosty this morning. Dan Collins, San Diego

Get a mop ... Im feeling a climate change. Bob Essman, Oceanside

I didnt say my keyboard sticks, I said I cant keyboard with sticks. Bob Daily, Spring Valley

Can you please stop telling our clients they have a snowballs chance in hell of winning their case? Don Kakuda, La Jolla

No, I do not know Eugene ONeill. Ruben Escobosa, San Diego

I take the accusation of maintaining a slush fund seriously, for multiple reasons. Mechelle Perrott, La Mesa

Like it or not, I speak for the coal industry. Bruce Kliewe, Oceanside

I like your qualifications, but were in the middle of a hiring freeze. Brad Crawford, San Marcos

K-12

Not to be cold, but youre fired. Cougan Snodgrass, sixth grade, Muirlands Middle School

I heard that people here are chill, but this is ridiculous. Justin Tran, sixth grade, Waggenheim Middle School

Do you know how to get rid of a brain freeze? Jacob Beach, sixth, Dana Middle School

New recruits just warm my heart. Ronan McHenry, sixth grade, Dana Middle School

Do you want to build a snowman? Alfredo Jimenez, fifth grade, Baker Elementary 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.Northbrook, IL -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/21/2019 -- The report "Eco Fibers Market by Type (Organic Fibers, Recycled Fibers, Regenerated Fibers, and Others), by Application (Clothing/Textile, Household & Furnishings, Industrial, Medical, and Others), and by Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World) - Global Forecast to 2020",

This report defines and segments the eco fibers market with analysis and forecast of the market size.



Browse 88 market data tables with 52 figures across 157 pages and in-depth TOC on "Eco Fibers Market - Global Forecast to 2020"



Download PDF Brochure @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=152829511



The global eco fibers market size, in terms of value, is projected to reach USD 74.65 Billion by 2020, and is projected to record a CAGR of 11.46% between 2015 and 2020.



Clothing/Textile - major market for eco fibers

Clothing/textile is a major application for the eco fibers market. Eco fibers are becoming the most popular type of fibers used in the clothing and apparel industry for properties similar to non-organic fibers. The two main functions performed by eco fibers in clothing are strength and comfort. Major fibers used in the clothing/textile application are organic cotton fibers, recycled fibers such as polyester, and regenerated fiber such as lyocell, viscose. Among these, organic fibers are the most preferred fibers for clothing as they provide an optimum level of comfort and are best suited for maintaining a person's health and well-being. Variations of fibers are also implemented to provide strength and color consistency to the fabric manufactured such as recycled cotton fibers along with rPET, cotton fibers along with virgin acrylic fibers, and so on.



The U.S. and India cumulatively accounted for more than 40% of the global eco fiber market in terms of value in 2014

The U.S. is the biggest market in the North American region as well as in global scenario with around 53% regional share. India is the biggest end user and producer of eco fiber with about 35% share in the Asia-Pacific region and is the second largest globally. The U.S. and India together accounted for around 40.0% of the global eco fibers market size in terms of value in 2014. The U.S. and India are the largest markets in their respective regions, and are expected to compete with each other to dominate the global market by 2020, with advanced eco fiber materials for end users.



Speak with our Expert @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/speaktoanalystNew.asp?id=152829511



In 2014, Asia-Pacific was estimated to be largest market for eco fibers that accounted for around 37% of the overall eco fiber market in terms of value. North America and Europe, together accounted for more than 40% of the global eco fibers market in terms of value in 2014. The eco fibers market in these regions is expected to increase substantially between 2015 and 2020, as the acceptance for these fibers is increasing in these regions.



Lenzing AG (Austria), Grasim Industries Limited (India), Teijin Ltd. (Japan), and US Fibers (U.S.) are the dominant market players in the global eco fibers market.



This report covers the market by value and volume for eco fibers and forecasts the market size till 2020. It includes the market segmentation by type, application, and region. It also provides company profiles and competitive strategies adopted by the major market players in the global eco fibers market. Companies such as Lenzing AG (Austria), Grasim Industries Limited (India), Teijin Ltd. (Japan), and US Fibers (U.S.) are the dominant market players in the global eco fibers market.



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Email: sales@marketsandmarkets.comNew York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/21/2019 -- "Glass Tempering System Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) And Opportunity Assessment (2017-2027)" is a new report of Future Market Insights that tracks the performance of the market for the projected period of 10 years i.e. between 2017 and 2027. The global glass tempering system market is expected to witness significant growth during the forecast period, expanding at a CAGR of 3.7% during the projected period. Growth in the global glass tempering system market can be attributed to huge investments in R&D, increasing use of hybrid guide plates, solar control glazing for automotive and building glasses, growing use of lightweight glazing glass, and increasing usage of advanced nanotechnology in glass manufacturing. According to this report, North America and APEJ are the key regions for glass tempering system market participants. In North America, the United States is investing in tempering activities, which is creating immense opportunities for glass tempering system manufacturers. Product development and establishment of long-term relationships with tempered glass OEMs is also a key to success in this market. The global market for glass tempering system is expected to be valued at US$ 94.5 Mn by 2017 end and is estimated to reach US$ 135.6 Mn by 2027 end.



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Global Glass Tempering System Market: Drivers



Shift towards renewable solar energy will accelerate the growth of the market



Improving construction sector especially in Latin America is fuelling the growth of the global market



Construction of energy efficient buildings and renovation of existing infrastructure is another key market driver



Global Glass Tempering System Market: Forecast by Tempering Technology



On the basis of tempering technology, the global glass tempering system market is segmented into controlled heating and quenching equipment and chemical treatment. Controlled heating and quenching equipment is further segmented into standard configuration and advanced configuration. In terms of value, the controlled heating and quenching equipment segment is anticipated to be valued at US$ 89.0 Mn by 2017 end, which is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 3.7% and reach a value of US$ 127.8 Mn by the end of 2027.



Global Glass Tempering System Market: Forecast by Application



The application segment consists of flat, bent and combined flat and bent segments. Flat segment is further segmented into continuous and oscillating segments. Oscillating type segment is expected to emerge as the most attractive segment by application over the forecast period. Combined flat and bent segment is anticipated to create incremental $ opportunity worth US$ 4.2 Mn over the forecast period.



Global Glass Tempering System Market: Forecast by End Use



By end use the market is categorized into automotive windows, architectural, electronics, solar applications and others. Architectural segment is sub-segmented into windows and doors, mirror and partitions and furniture, while electronics segment is sub-segmented into smartphone and appliances. The solar applications segment is estimated to reach US$ 1.6 Mn in 2027 from US$ 1.3 Mn in 2017. The segment is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 2.4% during the forecast period.



Global Glass Tempering System Market: Forecast by Region



Seven regions have been covered in this report and they are North America, Latin America, APEJ, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Japan and MEA. China is expected to remain a strong market for glass tempering systems. Most of the APEJ, Eastern Europe, and Latin America buyers import glass tempering lines from China with standard configuration, due to investment constraints. North America is also projected to hold a significant share of the global glass tempering system market over the forecast period.



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Global Glass Tempering System Market: Key Vendors



Glaston OYJ Abp, Luoyang Landglass Technology Co. Ltd., LiSEC Austria GmbH, Luoyang North Glass Technology Co., Ltd., Glasstech Industries (India) Private Limited, Keraglass Industries Srl, CoolTemper Ltd., HHH Tempering Resources Inc., Ratnesh International, North East Machines, Meta Therm Furnace Pvt. Ltd., Mappi International, EFCO, Saint-Gobain S.A., IGE Glass Technologies, Inc., Lambert GT Services Ltd. are some of the glass tempering system market companies profiled in the report.New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/21/2019 -- The Top key vendors in Plantation Shutters Market include are Hunter Douglas, Griesser France, California Shutters, Royal Building Products, Lafayette Interior Fashions, Hillarys, Springs Window Fashions, Aspect Blinds, Liyang Xinyuan Curtain, ALL BLINDS CO., LTD, Nien Made, TOSO, Tachikawa Corporation, Ching Feng Home Fashions, Nichibei.



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Apart from this, the valuable document weighs upon the performance of the industry on the basis of a product service, end-use, geography and end customer.



The industry experts have left no stone unturned to identify the major factors influencing the development rate of the Plantation Shutters industry including various opportunities and gaps. A thorough analysis of the micro markets with regards to the growth trends in each category makes the overall study interesting. When studying the micro markets the researchers also dig deep into their future prospect and contribution to the Plantation Shutters industry.



A high focus is maintained on factors such as demand and supply, production capacity, supply chain management, distribution channel, product application and performance across different countries. The report not only offers hard to find facts about the trends and innovation driving the current and future of Plantation Shutters business, but also provides insights into competitive development such as acquisition and mergers, joint ventures, product launches and technology advancements.



A quick look at the industry trends and opportunities



The researchers find out why sales of Plantation Shutters are projected to surge in the coming years. The study covers the trends that will strongly favor the industry during the forecast period, 2019 to 2025. Besides this, the study uncovers important facts associated with lucrative growth and opportunities that lie ahead for the Plantation Shutters industry.



#This Reports Includes Segmental analysis, Regional analysis, Research Methodology, Competitive Landscape, Learn how to build the strategy and business case to implement Order Here@ https://www.marketgrowthinsight.com/checkout/19091



On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, and market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into

- Interior Shutters

- Outdoor Shutters



On the basis of the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, including

- Residential

- Commercial Building

- Others



Region wise performance of the Plantation Shutters industry



This report studies the global Plantation Shutters market status and forecast, categorizes the global Plantation Shutters market size (value & volume) by key players, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top players in North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia India and Other regions (Middle East & Africa, Central & South America).



Key points from TOC



7 Global Plantation Shutters Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis



7.1 Hunter Douglas

7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors

7.1.2 Plantation Shutters Product Category, Application and Specification

7.1.2.1 Product A

7.1.2.2 Product B

7.1.3 Hunter Douglas Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)

7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview



7.2 Griesser France

7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors

7.2.2 Plantation Shutters Product Category, Application and Specification

7.2.2.1 Product A

7.2.2.2 Product B

7.2.3 Griesser France Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross

argin (2013-2018)

7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview



7.3 California Shutters

7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors

7.3.2 Plantation Shutters Product Category, Application and Specification

7.3.2.1 Product A

7.3.2.2 Product B

7.3.3 California Shutters Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)

7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview



Continue..



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This Plantation Shutters market report holds answers to some important questions like:



- What is the size of occupied by the prominent leaders for the forecast period, 2019 to 2025? What will be the share and the growth rate of the Plantation Shutters market during the forecast period?



- What are the future prospects for the Plantation Shutters industry in the coming years?



- Which trends are likely to contribute to the development rate of the industry during the forecast period, 2019 to 2025?



- What are the future prospects of the Plantation Shutters industry for the forecast period, 2019 to 2025?



- Which countries are expected to grow at the fastest rate?



- Which factors have attributed to an increased sale worldwide?



- What is the present status of competitive development?



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Website- https://www.marketgrowthinsight.comU.S. officials are preparing an official document to codify recognition by the United States of Israeli sovereignty of the Golan Heights and President Donald Trump is likely to sign it next week, a senior administration official said on Friday.

Trump announced on Thursday that it was time for the United States to recognize Israeli sovereignty of the Golan Heights that Israel seized from Syria in 1967. Trump is likely to sign the presidential document when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington on Monday, the official said.

Trump's announcement marked a dramatic shift in U.S. policy and gave a boost to Netanyahu, who is in a closely contested race in the April 9 election while also fighting allegations of corruption, which he denies.

The Golan Heights was captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981 in a move not recognized internationally.

Netanyahu has pressed the United States to recognize its claim and raised that possibility in his first White House meeting with Trump in February 2017.

The decision to go ahead with the Golan announcement was spurred in part by an assessment by Trumps aides that his controversial moves on Jerusalem in 2017 and 2018.

Aides advice to Trump on recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan was that the U.S. administration could again weather any storm of international criticism, the source said.

The U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday criticized Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The council adopted an annual resolution on the Syrian Golan. European members including Britain voted against it. The United States, which quit the council last year accusing it of an anti-Israel bias, does not participate.

European Council President Donald Tusk said on Friday the EU was holding its line on the Golan Heights despite Trump's move.

The European Union does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the area.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online

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Rockville, MD -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/21/2019 -- Quarter Sawn Flooring Market: Insights



Quarter sawn flooring is preferred for its attractive straight grain pattern that enhances the aesthetics of the quarter sawn flooring as compared to other wooden floorings such as rift sawn or flat sawn. In addition, the wood used in the quarter sawn floorings is easy to work with as it presents higher dimensional stability and resistance to moisture penetration. Quarter sawn flooring wood surface is less prone to warping, cupping or twisting and prevents incidences of surface checking and raised grain. Further, the quarter sawn woods used in quarter sawn floorings have long lengths which allow easier flooring work in larger spaces.



Red and white oak quarter sawn floorings are highly sought after as these trees have characteristic medullary rays that give a distinct appearance to quarter sawn flooring. A novel trend of mixing the rift sawn and quarter sawn floorings to decrease the overall flooring costs is also propelling the growth of the quarter sawn flooring market. Although the quarter sawn flooring is preferred over its other wooden flooring counterparts, lower yield during the manufacturing process and higher labor costs increase the overall product cost. Further, there is less number of sawmills that manufacture quarter sawn flooring, leading to a limited supply of quarter sawn flooring.



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Fact.MR, after analyzing the global market for quarter sawn flooring, has come up with a new research publication on global quarter sawn flooring market which includes a multitude of angles that have an influence on the adoption and sales of quarter sawn flooring, the analysis of which is systematically drafted in this research report. This research gives a thorough understanding on various market participants, their recent developments and innovations. A complete understanding of the competiveness of the global quarter sawn flooring market has been portrayed in this research report. Key participants in the global quarter sawn flooring market include Quarter-Sawn Flooring Inc., Kustom Floors LLC, Midwest Hardwood Corporation, Taylor Lumber and Stonewood Products.



Wooden flooring has gained high traction since past several years owing to its aesthetic features along with versatility and durability of its engineered equivalents. Wooden flooring is easy to maintain, and can be restored and styled according to one's requirements  these factors continue to support the growing adoption of quarter sawn flooring.



Demand for Engineered Wood Flooring to Impact Sale of Quarter Sawn Flooring in the Coming Years



Engineered wood flooring is witnessing higher demand in the construction industry, owing to its various benefits. It offers high resistance against moisture owing to presence of additional layers wherein the grain is at 90 degree angle making it impossible for the wood to shrink or swell. In addition, on engineered flooring, different effects can be achieves via techniques such as sawing, planning, brushing and smoking.



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Engineered hardwood for quarter sawn flooring is expected to witness increased adoption as ideal flooring material. Regulatory bodies have recommended the use of engineered wood flooring over solid wood. For instance, the US Department of Energy has recommended the use of engineered wood with a view to reduce wood shrinking or cracking owing to drying effects of heat. Also, the National Wood Flooring Association has recommended engineered quarter sawn flooring for radiant heating owing to its dimensional stability. Also, it has suggested the use American Cherry, North American Oak, and American Walnut as ideal wood species for engineered quarter sawn flooring. This is expected to positively influence the sale of quarter sawn flooring in the years to follow.



Increasing Demand for Wood Flooring, Especially in Developed Economies, to Significantly Contribute to the Sale of Quarter Sawn Flooring



Use of high quality wood for residential flooring has been observed in the developed economies such as US and Europe. Majority of people are opting for wood flooring for their row houses and apartments owing to its aesthetic appeal. For example, in Europe, the wood flooring sales increased by 1% in 2017 according to European Federation of the Parquet Industry. Wood flooring industry in this region witnessed a 1.6% growth in 2016. The slight decrease in this percentage is mainly due to a decline in purchases of wood flooring in Germany and in Switzerland. According to European Federation of the Parquet Industry, albeit this small decline, the wood flooring industry is expected to witness bright future in the coming years. Moreover, all other European countries reflected a steady rise in this industry. Poland, Belgium, Sweden and Netherlands witnessed significant growth with respect to adoption of wood flooring. This steady growth in demand for wood flooring coupled with increasing awareness regarding benefits associated with quarter sawing of wood for flooring purposes is expected to significantly fuel the sale of quarter sawn flooring in the coming years.



Additionally, per capita GDP of developed countries is high as compared to emerging economies. In 2016, the GDP per capita of US was US$ 54,000 which increased to US$ 59,495 in 2017. Likewise, in European countries, the GDP per capita across countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France and Russia, to name a few, has been steadily rising. People are willing to spend more on high quality quarter sawn flooring, which is typically highly priced as compared to plain or flat sawn flooring. This aspect is also anticipated to drive the adoption of quarter sawn flooring during the forecast period.



With this research, the reader can gain incisive market acumen on quarter sawn flooring at a global level. The global quarter sawn flooring market research report covers past data, current market position and future trajectory of the quarter sawn flooring market. The forecast period of nine years, starting from 2018 till 2027 is presented in this research study. The reader can gain high level insights on the volume and value projections of quarter sawn flooring across regions in the globe.



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Read Industrial News : http://insiderstribune.com/Maharashtra, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/21/2019 -- Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge Market



Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge Market involves remedying defects such as potholes that occur in the carriageway from time to time (corrective maintenance) and providing treatments such as crack sealing which will slow the rate of deterioration (preventative maintenance). Typical maintenance activities include: Crack filling and sealing.



More Insightful Information | Request a Sample Copy @ https://www.reportsmonitor.com/request_sample/385964

Global Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge Market provides the latest information on the present and the future industry trends, allowing the readers to identify the products and services, hence driving the revenue growth and profitability. The research report provides an in-depth study of all the leading factors influencing the market on a global and regional level, including drivers, restraints, threats, challenges, opportunities, and industry-specific trends.



The given Top manufacturers are covered in this report: New York, Pennsylvania, California, Florida, Washington, North Carolina, New Jersey, Indiana, Illinois, Utah, Delaware & More...



Segmentation by product type:

Pavement Management, Maintenance to Road Fixtures, Litter Control, Others

Segmentation by application:

Highway, Road and Street



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Manufacturing cost structure:

The Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge Market report also studies the manufacturing cost structure and presents the various details such as raw material, overall production process, and the industry chain structure. Every region key factors are provided which is attracting this market towards growth. The report also elaborates on the opportunities the emerging markets of Asia Pacific and Latin America offer and Globally.



Important Facts About Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge Market Report:

-This research report reveals Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge business overview, product overview, market share, supply chain analysis, demand and supply ratio and import/export details.

-The Industry report features different approaches and procedures endorsed by the Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge market key players to make vital business decisions.

-Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge market depicts some parameters such as production value, Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge marketing strategy analysis, Distributors/Traders and effect factors is also mentioned in this Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge research report.



Key questions answered in the report include:

What will the market growth rate of Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge market in 2024?

What are the key factors driving the global Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge market?

Who are the key manufacturers in this market space?

What are the market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge market?

What are sales, revenue, and price analysis of top manufacturers of this market?

Who are the distributors, traders and dealers of this market?

What are the this market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the global Repairs and Maintenance Service for Road and Bridge market?



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2.Assess the production processes, major issues, and solutions.

3.Market strategies that are being adopted by leading respective organizations

4.The report gives specific analysis for rapidly changing dynamics of this Industry.

5.To understand the future outlook and prospects for the this market with Marketing & Price (Price and Margin, Factors of Price Change, Manufacturers Gross Margin Analysis)



About Reports Monitor

Reports Monitor is a market research and consulting company that provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries including Healthcare, Technology, Chemicals, Materials, and Energy. With an intrinsic understanding of many business environments, Reports Monitor provides strategic objective insights.Singapore -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/21/2019 -- Tn Online Payroll has since its establishment in 2004 been providing businesses with a fair ground for operations by offering them a team that will take the burden of caring for employees off their backs. The payroll outsourcing company has become synonymous with cutting-edge solutions in the niche segment which is of great importance to any business regardless of size. As a way of solidifying their relevance in the modern market environment, Tn Online Payroll has diversified their areas of expertise to include tax services and compliance administration.



Speaking about why businesses have to invest on their human resource systems, the Company Spokesperson said, "The most important asset that any business can have over their competitors is in a skilled workforce that has all it takes to deliver on set objectives. However, it is not enough to have stringent selection criteria if you will fail to keep your employees happy and motivated. The primary motivation is in their remunerations, and as a payroll company, we stand in the gap to ensure that all worries on employee benefits are catered for professionally."



Increasingly more businesses are discovering the value of outsourcing business functions that could be better completed by certified third-parties. The search for the best payroll service in Singapore has always led businesses to Tn Online Payroll as their reputation precedes them. A dedication to taking care of employees and the absolute confidence in the quality of their services further enhance the relevance of settling for the company. Tn Online Payroll has their doors open to all businesses including start-ups and small-sized organizations who will find their competitive pricing suitable for them.



Talking about why they are rated as the best payroll service company in Singapore, the Company Spokesperson said, "Right from the beginning our systems were centered on the local Singapore market which is crucial when it comes to payroll services. This is because there is the unavoidable necessity of ensuring payroll processing is done in accordance with the latest government regulations. In giving you a ready for use system which is flexible enough to take to account the latest changes by the government, we give you the assurance of zero mistakes and solutions approved by relevant authorities."



The time-consuming and demanding payroll functions are best left to a team of specialists who will not only save on the costs of hiring the right staff but equally deliver outstanding results. Tn Online Payroll stands tall as the home for payroll services in Singapore thanks to their comprehensive range of scalable solutions. The company has made this possible through the incorporation of the latest technologies and having in place a team that understands all aspects of payroll processing.



About Tn Online Payroll

Tn Online Payroll is leveraging on their expertise in payroll processing and management to give businesses in Singapore the desired partnership that will see them focus on their lines of specialization as the specialists care for their employees.



Contact Details

Company Name: Tn Online Payroll

Address: 531A, Upper Cross St, 03-108

Homg Lim Complex 051531 Singapore

Telephone Number: 6719 2295

Email: Contact@Tnpl.Com.Sg

Website: https://payrollservice.com.sg/European Council President Donald Tusk said on Friday the EU was holding its line on the Golan Heights despite U.S. President Donald Trump's move to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the territory seized in war.

"The EU's position is well know and has not changed," Tusk told a news conference when asked to comment on Trump's comments.

The European Union does not recognise Israeli sovereignty over the area.

The Golan Heights was occupied by Israel in the 1967 War and annexed by Tel Aviv in 1981, in a move not recognized internationally.

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The tender has been published in the Official Gazette and is due to be posted before month's end at www.panamacompra.gob.pa.

This facility is being built at Panama City's Amador Causeway, near the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal. Two large ships up to 380 meters/1,247 feet each will be able to berth at a finger pier.

First cruise calls by year's end

Jorge Barakat Pitty, minister of maritime affairs and administrator of the Panama Maritime Authority, hopes that an operator will be selected to begin work by October, with the first cruise ships expected on transit calls before year's end.

Earlier this year, Barakat told Seatrade Cruise News more than 50 berthing requests have been received, most by Caribbean operators in conjunction with Panama Canal transits. But the goal is for homeport operations by 2021, and a number of proposed itineraries have been developed to that end.

New South Pacific route

These include a new 14-day South Pacific route that springs from an agreement between Panama and Chileto work together to promote cruising.

While the Panama Cruise Terminal will be able to take ships starting this year, the $166m first phase of the facility is set for 2020 completion.

It will be up to Panama's next government to decide on the second phase. In future, a jetty can add room for two more ships of the same size, while a fifth (smaller) vessel could potentially berth alongside the breakwater.

MSC Cruises executive chairman Pierfrancesco Vago recently toured the construction site.Press Release

March 22, 2019 ANGARA: WATER SECTOR NEEDS SWEEPING REFORMS Reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara is seeking wide-ranging reforms in the water sector to ensure the availability of the precious resource across the country at all times in the wake of the water shortage in most parts of Metro Manila and Rizal province that has exposed the lack of a master plan to ensure proper water management and governance. "The problem brings to light the urgent need to put in place an integrated water resource master plan for water security," Angara said. "With the dry spell getting severe each year, climate change and increasing population, it is imperative that we secure all available and accessible water resources." Residents of Mega Manila and Rizal are still grappling with water shortages since the massive water interruption on March 6, with officials from government and private concessionaires unable to provide convincing explanations on the water interruption. They also failed to present a master plan to deal with water shortages. "Every year the country struggles with severe El Nino events. Every year our water dams drop to critical levels. Unless we address these and come up with long-term and integrated solutions, we are all in trouble," said the senator, who is running under the platform "Alagang Angara". Angara is proposing to amend the 43-year-old Water Code of the Philippines, or Presidential Decree No. 1067, to ensure that it is able to respond to the requirements of the country. "We have to make the law more responsive to the needs of the times." "Dati-rati wala namang climate change, noon wala namang El Nino. But this is the new normal now. Akma pa rin kaya ang batas para sa mga ganitong pagbabago?" Angara pointed out. Part of the reform should also include the audit of all government agencies and institutions dealing with water resource and its management whose functions seem to be teeming with duplication. Citing a 2018 study by Arangkada Philippines on water, Angara said there were over 30 agencies managing and overseeing the country's water resources. "This is a very complicated environment, and rather than come out with a timely response to water problems, it may be impeding our government agencies," Angara explained. Angara has earlier asked the government to enforce Republic Act 6716, also known as the Rainwater Collector and Springs Development Act of 1989, which requires the construction of rainwater collectors in every barangay to prevent flooding and ensure the continuous provision of clean water during dry seasons. The senator from Aurora has also put forward a proposal for an "El Nino action plan" to be rolled out in food-growing areas in the country before the drought caused by the weather phenomenon unleashes its full brunt on farmers who are also grappling with low prices of rice and coconut. This early, he added, the government should appoint an "anti-El Nino czar" who will orchestrate a multiagency response to the dry spell, which is already causing farm harvest to dip.Press Release

March 22, 2019 De Lima elated over US House resolution calling for her freedom Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has expressed elation over the filing of a resolution at the US House of Representatives calling for her immediate release from her more than two years of unjust detention over trumped-up illegal drug trade charges. De Lima, the first prominent political prisoner under the Duterte regime, said she is thankful to the six members of the US Congress for underscoring the importance of respecting her rights not only as a senator but also as a human rights defender. "I feel humbled and surprised to learn that despite being thousands of miles away from me, these honorable lawmakers did not fail to make me feel that they are fighting with me and for me," she said. "I am beyond thankful not only for their concerns about my personal and work conditions but also about the plight of human rights defenders who are persecuted for fighting human rights abuses in the government's war on drugs," she added. Last March 14, US California Rep. Jackie Speier introduced House Resolution 233 "[c]ondemning the Government of the Philippines for its continued detention of Senator Leila de Lima, calling for her immediate release, and for other purposes." It was co-sponsored by US Reps. James P. McGovern of Massachusetts, Henry C. Johnson of Georgia, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Brad Sherman of California, and Lloyd Doggett of Texas. It was referred to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee. In their five-page resolution, the US lawmakers urged "the Philippine government to immediately release De Lima and drop all charges against her, remove restrictions on her personal and work conditions, and allow her to fully discharge her legislative mandate." Calling De Lima as a "prisoner of conscience," the lawmakers affirmed their belief that the former justice secretary was detained solely for her political views and her legitimate exercise of her freedom of expression. De Lima said she hopes that the overwhelming outpouring of calls for her immediate release would send a strong message straight to Mr. Duterte and his minions that they should finally respect the rule of law and value human rights. "Duterte should think twice about abusing his power to silence dissents and persecute his political enemies because the day of reckoning will come soon. He surely cannot escape global condemnation and justice," she said. "The recent call of these honorable American lawmakers for my freedom from unjust and illegal detention should be enough to remind Mr. Duterte that the world is indeed watching, and he should start doing what is right," she added. Several international organizations and human rights leaders and advocates have repeatedly called for De Lima's freedom as they noted that no strong or credible evidence has been ever presented to pin her down from trumped-up charges of illegal drug trading. These groups include the European Parliament, Canadian Parliament, Australian Parliament, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Inter-Parliamentary Union, Amnesty International, Liberal International, Human Rights Watch, Parliamentarians for Global Action, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights.Press Release

March 22, 2019 HONTIVEROS TO DOH: STUDY INCENTIVIZING VACCINATION Amid reports that over 21,000 measles cases have been recorded across the country with 315 fatalities, Akbayan Senator Risa Hontiveros called on the Department of Health (DOH) to study the possibility of incentivizing its vaccination programs to motivate more Filipinos to get their recommended vaccines. Hontiveros, who is the Vice-chair of the Senate Committee on Health, said that on top of the government's information drive, incentive rewards may be given in exchange for receiving a vaccination and returning for subsequent vaccination shots. She said that this could be in the form of food vouchers, medicine discounts and even tax credits. Hontiveros cited Australia as an example. She explained that the Australian government provides financial incentives for parents to get kids vaccinated in the form of tax credits. Doctors, too, are incentivized when children get vaccinations on schedule. As a result, in January 2016, more than 210,000 families had taken action to ensure that they comply with Australia's immunization programs. "Libreng load para sa bakuna" Hontiveros said that telecommunication companies could also help in providing incentives as part of their corporate social responsibility. "Aside from text message reminders, maybe the telcos can provide incentives in the form of 'libreng load' for families whose children have completed their vaccinations. Libreng pasa load para sa bakuna," Hontiveros said. "While educating people about the benefits of vaccination is our top priority, these proposals are worth studying and exploring. As we double our efforts to increase our vaccination coverage, especially in urban poor localities and far-flung areas where children are prone to preventable diseases, we must also be creative in employing new strategies," Hontiveros said.Legarda Invites Everyone to Burdang Lumban, an Embroidery Workshop

Senator Loren Legarda invites everyone to join the Burdang Lumban: a two-day workshop featuring Lumban, Laguna's embroidery, to be held from March 22 to 23, 2019, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., at the Escuela Taller Compound in Intramuros, Manila. The workshop is part of the pilot exhibition of Likha-an.

Legarda envisioned the creation Likha-an, a resource center of Philippine living traditions, way back in 2015. She provided funding for its establishment in 2016 and in 2017, and will soon open this year in Intramuros.

"Likha-an is a venue where we can showcase the beauty of our intangible heritage, where our dances, chants, our weaving, our poetry can come alive," Legarda said.

Lorna Trillana, Lilia Jacobe, Lagrimas Aguino and Maria Victoria Gordovez are embroiderers from Lumban who will teach participants various motifs such as haspe (shadow stitch, usually applied on leaves and petals), aldaves (leaf with pointed tip), pelete (small protruding circles that form an image of a flower) and calado (pulling out of fibers to create openwork).

"I encourage everyone to attend the workshop and live the beauty of our woven and embroidered fabrics," said Legarda.

For interested participants, you may call Tin Orante at 09171331238 or send an email to [email protected].A leading Auckland based security provider has attracted investment from globally recognised SIS Group via its Australian subsidiary, which includes MSS Security (www.msssecurity.com.au).

Platform 4 Group (P4G) has been actively looking for a strategic partnering opportunity to support its growth strategy in New Zealand.

P4G is a leading provider of event services, patrols, monitoring and static guarding in the manufacturing, construction, hospitality, and commercial sectors throughout New Zealand.

P4G Managing Director Aaron Colthurst says the deal is exciting news for the companys 1,100 employees and over 500 customers.

This new strategic partnership gives us the resources we need to support our planned growth and provide international expertise from a partner who shares our values and our focus on doing an exceptional job for our customers, Mr Colthurst said.

Whilst SIS Group has acquired just over 50% shareholding in P4G, in a practical sense the existing operational structure will remain the same. I will continue in my role of Managing Director and it will be business as usual for our management team, with MSS and its parent SIS Group providing valuable financial and strategic support.

Alongside the financial support, there are many benefits of P4G being able to access MSSs business intellectual property which support a wide range of industry sectors across Australia.

We are now in the enviable position to seek out further bolt-on acquisition opportunities, as part of our overall growth strategy, in addition to our organic growth.

We are looking forward to a strong future in the New Zealand security industry with this global giant as our strategic partner, Mr Colthurst said.

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The fertile hillsides of the Israeli-occupied Golan are scattered with villages inhabited by 22,000 Druze, an Arab minority who practice an offshoot of Islam.

Many still have relatives on the Syrian side of the fortified boundary.

In Majdal Shams, older residents remember being part of Syria before Israel captured most of the heights in the 1967 Middle East war, occupying and later annexing it in 1981.

That annexation was not recognized internationally, and although they have lived under Israeli rule for more than half a century and shopfronts bear signs in both Arabic and Hebrew, many Druze still regard themselves as Syrian.

"Trump can make his statements and say he wants to make the Golan part of Israel. But we know this will stay Syrian land," said Sheikh Mahmoud Nazeeh, 70.

Amal Safadi, 54, a librarian, said: "Our blood is Syrian. If you take a blood test for a child, it will read Syrian."

Israel has given Druze residents the option of citizenship, but most rejected it.

In October last year hundreds demonstrated against the holding of Israeli municipal elections on the Golan, blockading the polling station in Majdal Shams and waving Syrian and Druze flags.

Madjal Shams overlooks the divide between Israeli-occupied Golan and that part of the plateau controlled by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The two armies are divided by an Area of Separation - often called a demilitarised zone - into which their military forces are not permitted under a 1974 ceasefire arrangement.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online

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The Syrian government vowed to take back the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as its allies and enemies alike condemned U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday for moving to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the territory seized in war.

Trump's statement on Thursday marked a dramatic shift in U.S. policy over the status of a disputed area that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East conflict and annexed in 1981 - a move not recognized internationally.

Against this backdrop of hostility towards the U.S. move, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Beirut where he took aim at Israel's main regional foes - Hezbollah and its backer Iran - and declared the success of U.S. sanctions against them.

Trump's declaration is the latest U.S. step to fuel anger in the region, both in states that are hostile to Israel and others that have relations with it and are allied to the United States.jer

It follows the U.S. recognition in December 2017 of Jerusalem as Israel's capital - a decision that also stirred international criticism as the occupied city's status remains at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Russia, an ally of President Bashar al-Assad with forces in Syria, said Trump's comments risked seriously destabilizing the region, and it voiced hope the statement was just declaratory.

Iran, Assad's main regional ally and which also has forces in Syria, condemned the statement as illegal and unacceptable.

"The personal decisions of Trump...will lead to crisis in the region," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said.

Turkey, a U.S. ally and an adversary of Damascus, also said the move had brought the Middle East to the edge of a new crisis and the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights could not be allowed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for his gesture "at a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel". It could help Netanyahu in the midst of a tough re-election battle, analysts said.

The Syrian government said the Golan was an "indivisible" part of Syrian territory and recovering it "via all means guaranteed by international law is still a priority".

It said United States with its "stupidity and arrogance" had no right to decide the fate of the area and any move to recognise Israeli sovereignty over it was "an illegal action with no impact".

After remaining calm for decades since a 1974 armistice monitored by U.N. peacekeepers, Golan re-emerged as a flashpoint for regional tensions during the Syrian civil war. Last May, Israel accused Iran's Revolutionary Guards of launching a rocket salvo into its territory from the Syrian side of the truce line.

Israel, which has mounted numerous air strikes against what it has called Iran-backed targets in Syria, has demanded Russia keep forces allied to Tehran away from the boundary.

The Syrian side was held by rebel forces for years until pro-government forces recovered it in July.

Jason Greenblatt, a senior White House adviser, said on Twitter that "under any conceivable circumstance, Israel could not give up the Golan ... To do so would endanger Israel's very existence".

But Fouad Mundhir, a Syrian whose home village is in Israeli-occupied Golan, said Trump was "cancelling the will of an entire nation.

"You say you are carrying the flag of democracy. Okay, Mr. Trump, have you taken into account the will of the people of the Golan?" he told Reuters in Jaramana, near Damascus.

In the Golan itself, Druze Arabs also rejected the move, while Israeli settlers welcomed it.

The European Union said its position on the status of the Golan Heights was unchanged and that it did not recognise Israeli sovereignty over the strategic plateau.

Germany said any change in borders should be "done through peaceful means between all those involved", while France said it did not recognise the Israeli annexation of the Golan and any recognition was contrary to international law.

The Arab League, which suspended Syria in 2011 after the start of its civil war, said Trump had paved "the way for official American recognition" of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan and called this "completely beyond international law".

Egypt said it still considers the Golan as occupied Syrian territory.

The Arab Republic of Egypt affirms its firm position that the Syrian Golan is occupied Arab land, in accordance with resolutions that have international legitimacy, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

It cited UN Security Council Resolution 497 of 1981, which declared an Israeli law of that year which formalised its annexation of the territory to be null and void.

The ministry called on the international community to respect the resolutions of international legitimacy and the United Nations charter in connection with the inadmissibility of acquiring lands by force, the statement said.

Israel says Syria's civil war has reaffirmed the need to keep the plateau - coveted for its water resources and fertile soil - as a buffer zone between Israeli towns and the instability of its neighbour.

In Lebanon, Pompeo said the United States would continue to use "all peaceful means" to choke off funding that "feeds Iran and Hezbollah terror operations".

"Lebanon faces a choice: bravely move forward as an independent and proud nation, or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future," he said.

Arab Druze in Golan condemn Trump move

The fertile hillsides of the Israeli-occupied Golan are scattered with villages inhabited by 22,000 Druze, an Arab minority who practice an offshoot of Islam.

Many still have relatives on the Syrian side of the fortified boundary.

In Majdal Shams, older residents remember being part of Syria before Israel captured most of the heights in the 1967 Middle East war, occupying and later annexing it in 1981.

That annexation was not recognized internationally, and although they have lived under Israeli rule for more than half a century and shopfronts bear signs in both Arabic and Hebrew, many Druze still regard themselves as Syrian.

"Trump can make his statements and say he wants to make the Golan part of Israel. But we know this will stay Syrian land," said Sheikh Mahmoud Nazeeh, 70.

Amal Safadi, 54, a librarian, said: "Our blood is Syrian. If you take a blood test for a child, it will read Syrian."

Israel has given Druze residents the option of citizenship, but most rejected it.

In October last year hundreds demonstrated against the holding of Israeli municipal elections on the Golan, blockading the polling station in Majdal Shams and waving Syrian and Druze flags.

Madjal Shams overlooks the divide between Israeli-occupied Golan and that part of the plateau controlled by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The two armies are divided by an Area of Separation - often called a demilitarised zone - into which their military forces are not permitted under a 1974 ceasefire arrangement.

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iStock/Graffizone(NEW YORK) -- A former New York City police officer was indicted for attempting to cover up a crime scene after shooting a man in the face, multiple sources confirmed to ABC News.



Ritchard Blake turned himself in to the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office on Friday and is expected to get arraigned on two counts of tampering with physical evidence charges, sources said.

Blake, 41, is alleged to have gotten into an altercation with Thavone Santana during the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 2, 2018 and fired one shot at the man, according to police officials. The bullet struck Santana in the mouth.

It lodged in his neck, where it remains, according to a civil lawsuit Santana filed in Brooklyn federal court in January.

After the shooting, Blake allegedly told 911 he opened fired in self-defense because he was being robbed. Blake was fired from the force in August, following an internal NYPD investigation.

Based on video surveillance, the grand jury determined that the shooting was justified because the victim had his hand in his pocket and had previously motioned as if he had a weapon, sources told ABC News.

Blake is not charged in the shooting itself but in the cover-up -- after police, citing the video surveillance, said he hovered over Santana and removed a knife from his own back pocket and dropped it on the ground next to Santana.

After noticed the security cameras on a lamppost, Blake "picked the knife back up and put it back into the same back...pocket," Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a press release.

According to the lawsuit, Blake has a history of violence.

"Sgt. Blake has a prominent and long history of violence, assaults and was the subject of Internal Affairs investigations of his actions in 2010, 2011 and 2016 and was disciplined for his violations of NYPD Policies."

Blake's attorney, Abe George, previously told ABC News that his client acted in self-defense and that Santana was the aggressor.

"Mr. Blake is relieved that the grand jury has finally exonerated him with any wrongdoing related to the shooting," said George, who said Blake did not testify in the grand jury. "We are confident when a trial jury hears Mr. Blake's version of what happened on that night, he will be cleared of any wrongdoing pertaining to the incident."

NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill said in a press release that the charges filed against Blake should be a warning to fellow officers.

By swiftly moving to terminate former Sergeant Ritchard Blake in August of 2018, the department sends a clear and unambiguous message that criminal conduct will not be tolerated within the ranks of the NYPD.



Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.The U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday criticised Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights a day after U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the disputed territory.

The U.N. rights forum adopted an annual resolution on the Syrian Golan, brought by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), with 26 states in favour, 16 against and 5 abstentions.

European members including Britain voted against it. The United States, which quit the Council last year accusing it of an anti-Israel bias, does not participate.

"Voting for such a resolution should send a clear message... to the occupying power and to all who support Israel inside this Council and outside," Syria's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Hussam Edin Aala, told the talks.

"The United States is justifying the practices by the Israeli occupation and ignoring Security Council resolutions," he said. "The occupied Syrian Golan was and shall remain Arab and Syrian."

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East conflict and annexed the area in 1981 - a move not recognized internationally.

The resolution called on Israel to stop building settlements, to stop imposing Israeli citizenship and Israeli identity cards on Syrian citizens in the Golan, and to cease repressive measures.

Israel's ambassador Aviva Raz Shechter rejected the resolution, among five condemning it on Friday, including one on its killing of Palestinian protesters in Gaza. It said the council was biased against Israel and needed reform.

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The Global Tamil Forum (GTF) acknowledges the passing of the resolution Promoting reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka (40/1) at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), and thank all those who worked towards it, particularly the thirty-two countries that co-sponsored, among those the core-group that led this initiative. While we welcome continuous monitoring of human rights and accountability in Sri Lanka by the UNHRC, we are disappointed that the new resolution failed to set clear pathway for accelerated progress towards implementation of the Resolution 30/1.









There is strong disappointment in the Tamil community that ten years after the end of the war, and three years after Sri Lanka co-sponsored Resolution 30/1, there is very little progress on accountability and transitional justice. High Commissioner Michelle Bachelets report to the Council accurately describes this unfortunate reality - the minimalist initiatives by Sri Lanka have yet to produce concrete benefits for individual right holders; such slow progress in establishing meaningful transitional justice measures has engendered mistrust among victims and other stakeholders; and that Sri Lanka has failed to seize the opportunity provided by the Human Rights Council to establish a trustworthy domestic mechanism to address impunity.





Therefore, the burning question among the victims and the Tamil community is  what difference is another resolution going to make, considering this is the seventh UNHRC resolution in the decade after the end of the war? It is this dismal performance by the Sri Lankan government and the increasing frustration among the victims that UNHRC will not be able to course-correct Sri Lanka towards an acceptable pace of progress that contribute to calls by many that UNHRC should refer Sri Lanka to the UN Security Council for further action.





Resolution 40/1 seriously falls short of required action  Sri Lanka's abject failure and delay in implementing its key commitments, the continuing sufferings of the victims and their families, and the need for accelerated progress on constitutional reform for devolution of power have not merited mention; and it does not set timelines and benchmarks to guide and monitor progress. Our minimum expectation for this resolution was to incorporate a time-bound action plan with the involvement of the OHCHR  very much in alignment with High Commissioners recommendation. While the need for a time-bound implementation strategy is acknowledged, it is disappointing that the resolution lacks specificities of how it will become operational. It is our earnest request that such an operational arrangement be worked out as an urgent priority with the full involvement of the OHCHR.





We call upon the international community and the key UNHRC member countries to ensure two unambiguous messages are conveyed to the people and the leaders of Sri Lanka:





Accountability for the atrocity crimes committed in Sri Lanka via faithful and timely implementation of Resolutions (30/1,34/1,40/1) is a must, and that the absence of which will have consequences  may that be diplomatic, judicial or economic as appropriate; and





Assurance to the community of victims of all different backgrounds that they will not be abandoned before achieving a sense of justice, closure and the reforms needed for non-recurrence.





Such strongly articulated positions are critical to emphasize urgency and commitment to the political leadership of the country and to prevent the victims further descent into despair.





We firmly believe that steady progress and eventual success of the current transitional justice initiatives in Sri Lanka is crucial  not only to maintain and enhance the reputation of the UNHRC as an effective UN organ capable of living up to its creation mandate, but also specifically for Sri Lanka to prevent any seeds of potential conflict germinating in the hopeless and desperate situation most victims find themselves in.





We urge member states to take note of the High Commissioners recommendation that they investigate and prosecute, wherever possible, in particular in accordance with universal jurisdiction principles, those allegedly responsible for such violations as torture, enforced disappearance, war crimes or crimes against humanity; and explore other options to advance accountability in the absence of credible domestic processes. We also urge member states to consider adopting parallel processes on accountability to supplement efforts by the UNHRC to deal with atrocity crimes in Sri Lanka during and after the war that ended ten years ago.A culture that promotes hatred will surely continue to foster violence. To stop these attacks, we must shift our cultural values to peace and tolerance.





by Arlene J. Schar and Dr. David Leffler





Three days after the terrorist attack in New Zealand, another shooting has taken place in Netherlands, leaving three dead. While both the Netherlands and New Zealand are considered safe and peaceful nations, violence has still managed to find its way to them. In today's world, apparently no place is safe anymore.





As a civilization, how have we come to this?









So far, our way of addressing violence has been to capture the perpetrators and administer justice, which unfortunately does nothing to bring back the victims whose lives have been taken. We have grown so accustomed to terrorist attacks that we have resigned ourselves to a feeling of inevitability that they will occur. Over time, we have created a culture which in many ways condones and promotes and glorifies violence; a culture that is xenophobic, and instills fear of those who are different from us.





A culture that promotes hatred will surely continue to foster violence. To stop these attacks, we must shift our cultural values to peace and tolerance. A proven way for us to accomplish this is by utilizing a little known means of ending all violence, war and terrorism once and for all: Invincible Defense Technology (IDT).





Invincible Defense Technology:





A Non-Religious, Humane and Beneficial Approach





The practical components of IDT are the non-religious Transcendental Meditation (TM) and the more advanced TM-Sidhi programs. When large groups of experts practice these programs together, a powerful field effect of coherence and peace is generated that spills over into the surrounding population. Extensive scientific research has repeatedly confirmed measurable decreases in war deaths, terrorism, and crime when IDT is utilized. Due to this research the non-profit organization Global Union of Scientists for Peace (GUSP) advocates this simple and cost-effective approach for reducing social stress (see: https://www.gusp.org/global-peace-summit).





Invincible Defense Technology is Cost-Effective





For about the cost of a few modern fighter jets, any military could establish a group of warriors trained in this advanced IDT approach. This Prevention Wing of the Military would practice IDT programs twice a day in large groups, defusing societal tensions not only in their country but also globally. The collective consciousness of all populations will rise through the influence of greater harmony and peace. Those who have engaged in violence will no longer do so. Studies have shown repeatedly that this method worksand will continue to work as long as the peace-creating group is maintained.





Implementation





IDT is not restricted to the military; any large groups of experts trained in the advanced IDT techniques can accomplish the same goals of alleviating terror and violence simply by practicing this approach in groups twice a day. These groups could be comprised of congregations at places of worship, prisoners, the elderly in nursing homes, even schoolchildren. The important factor is that the techniques be performed by trained experts consistently in groups twice a day. In this way the chains of violence will finally be broken.





Nothing Else has Worked





At this critical juncture of our history, it is not only enough for governments and militaries to take preventative action; it is up to each of us as individuals to examine our own values and honestly assess whether we are promoting peace and tolerance or fostering hatred in our everyday speech and actions. As individuals, we can each embrace the tenets of Transcendental Meditation and set aside twenty minutes twice a day to practice the techniques that will ultimately shift our culture from hate to love.





It is up to each one of us to now take responsibility for the world we have created by together consciously creating a world without violence, war and terrorism.





About the Authors:





Arlene J. Schar has served as Dr. Lefflers Executive Assistant at the Center for Advanced Military Science (CAMS) http://www.StrongMilitary.org since 2015. She has edited and co-authored many of Dr. Lefflers articles.





Dr. David Leffler served as an Associate of the Proteus Management Group at the Center for Strategic Leadership, US Army War College. Currently, he serves as the Executive Director at CAMS.None of the Sinhalese kings had visited Anuradhapura or Polonnaruwa at least on a pilgrimage for 500 years since the Raja Rata Kingdom had been abandoned by prince Vijayabahu, son of Parakramabahu 11, in 1262, and the kingdom was shifted to the wet zone.





by Victor Ivan





First of all, I was delighted to note a counter criticism A reply to Victor Ivans What went wrong with Sri Lanka? published in the Financial Times on 11 March in response to my article which appeared in the same newspaper on 22 February. I always welcome open debates and intellectual dialogues on academic issues.





However, I was rather disappointed, and my satisfaction soon disappeared when I noticed that it had been written under the pseudonym Avocado Collective, hiding the true identity of the author or the authors of the article. The articles published hiding the identity of the author/s are generally called vituperative literature. I am at a loss to understand why an important subject deserving academic dialogue has been turned into a guerrilla-type debate under a pseudonym.









It seems that the way I interpret the history of Sri Lanka is not to their liking. I am not surprised about that. There are many Sri Lankan scholars who hold the view that the golden era of the history of the country was destroyed first by the South Indian Tamil invaders and later by the European invaders. This must be the way the so-called Avocado Collective too perceives my interpretation of the history of Sri Lanka. But I have a different perspective and critical way of looking at many issues of importance.





Whenever a particular kingdom in the South India, the immediate neighbour of Sri Lanka, had become strong and powerful, it used to attack and overpower the neighbouring kingdoms, and in the process invade Sri Lanka as well. It had been a usual practice adopted at that time by the dominant South Indian kings. The conquest of neighbouring countries by a powerful monarch was considered not an offence but a sign of the power wielded by them.





There had been instances in which even Sri Lanka had invaded South Indian kingdoms with the intent of capturing them when it was powerful. But the invasions launched at that time cannot be considered to have been initiated with the malicious motive of destroying the Sinhalese civilisation. Even amidst those invasions, there existed a racial harmony between Sinhalese and Tamils and religious tolerance between the Buddhist and the Hindus.





The decline of Sinhalese civilisation





The period in which the Sinhalese kingdom thrived in the Raja Rata can be described as the phase of greatest success and prosperity of Sinhalese civilisation. According to B.H. Farmer, with the South Indian invasions, anarchic situations prevailed from time to time and the malaria epidemic caused their decline.





The analysis made by Professor Senarath Paranavithana, in the University of Ceylon  History of Ceylon Vol. 2 in this respect is very important and worth our attention. Paranavithana has alleged that king Parakramabahu the Great also was responsible for the collapse of the Raja Rata civilisation. His analysis is produced below.





The seeds of decay which became manifest in the Dambadeniya period had been sown in a century or two earlier. During the Cola conquest early in the eleventh century, and in the many unsuccessful revolts as well as in the campaigns which restored Sinhalese sovereignty, many thousands of lives must have been lost. The long and generally peaceful reign of Vijayabahu 1 gave an opportunity for the nation to recuperate, but the forty-two years of civil war which followed was a period of disintegration. The irrigation system was neglected, and in the wars of rival factions many thriving villages are said to have been destroyed without leaving a trace. An era of development was inaugurated by Parakramabahu, but his way to the throne was strewn with the dead bodies of thousands of his countrymen. The several revolts in Rohana and the campaigns necessary to put them down resulted in the death of thousands of able-bodied men. Parakramabahu, it is true developed the resources of the island to a higher pitch than it had ever been raised before, but his prolonged foreign wars must have caused a great drain of manpower, and the high tempo of his administration left the country in a state of exhaustion at the end of his rule. The megalomania of Nissankamalla did not improve matters, and by the beginning of the thirteenth century, the healthiest and the more physically fit section of the population must have been sacrificed to satisfy the ambitions of these two monarchs. Rohana did not suffer from foreign invasions, but wars had been equally disastrous; this principality too, must have contributed its levies to the armies sent abroad by Parakramabahu. Thus, the manhood left to propagate the race must have been not the fittest and the most vigorous, and their progeny in the subsequent generations did not possess the necessary stamina of mind and body to cope with the difficult situations that they were faced with, both in struggling against adverse natural forces and in resisting the onslaughts of enemies from abroad. (University of Ceylon  History of Ceylon Vol. 2 Pages 716-717)





According to B.H. Farmer, The Portuguese caught Sinhalese civilisation when it was already fast disintegrating. Gone were the glories of ancient days in Raja Rata, abandoned to the jungle were many of the great shrines of former times. The process of decay and of fragmentation had been in train long before Don Lorenzo de Almeidas accidental landing, and might well have gone much further had the Portuguese never come to Ceylon. (B.H Farmer  Ceylon  A Divided Nation, page17)





The British period





By the time the Kandyan kingdom was captured by the British, the society of its domain remained at a primitive level beset by extreme poverty and ignorance. Infanticide or intentional killing of a considerable number of infants for various reasons had become a common characteristic of the life of the people.





In my opinion, the book of Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, is the best historical source that can be cited to illustrate the pathetic condition that prevailed in the country at that time.





The critic or the team of critics while declining to accept my views had challenged the authenticity and the accuracy of Knoxs book as an important historical source and the numbers I had quoted about the infanticide practised, with the following sarcastic remark: We wonder if Ivan has the superhuman ability to conjure up statistics that were simply never recorded in the 18th century? Ivan invokes Robert Knox, who was a prisoner after all with limited knowledge of the entire country, to show how poor the peasantry were in the Kandyan kingdom. I hope to discuss this remark and point out the paucity of their knowledge on this subject elsewhere in this article.





The British ruled Sri Lanka for 133 years since the capture of the Kandyan kingdom until independence. The relative development of the country during this period can be considered poles apart when compared to the period of rule by the ancient kings. Obviously, a country falling into foreign domination cannot be considered a beneficial thing to happen. Yet, the decay which became manifest after the fall of the Raja Rata civilisation might have become worse and Sri Lanka might have lagged in an unfortunate and miserable condition if the rule of ancient kings had continued any longer.





If it happened that way, the people of Sri Lanka would not have been able to live as independent citizens as they are today. The majority of them would still be living as serfs performing feudal services determined by the caste system. This should not be misconstrued to mean that the British rule was perfect and did not have bad features and a darker side. But, compared to the darkness that prevailed prior to British rule, it can be said that the results generated by the British rule had more beneficial and positive aspects. However, there cant be an argument in regard to the object of the British that they captured Sri Lanka for their own advantage and not for our benefit.





It is a fact that they exploited and reaped benefits from Sri Lanka. The rebellions launched against their rule were suppressed ruthlessly. Especially the 1818 Uva Wellassa rebellion was suppressed brutally and pitilessly. Not only foreign rulers, even the local rulers would not allow rebellions to break out. Suppression of rebellions is a normal course of state rule whether the rulers were native or foreign. How did the native rulers suppress youth insurrections that broke out in the country after independence? Can one say the measures adopted by local rulers in combating them were not ruthless and cruel?





At certain stages of British rule, oppressive taxes such as body tax and grain tax were in operation. Oppressive taxes had been in operation during the Kandyan kingdom as well as the reign of ancient kings. During the reign of king Parakramabahu the Great, more than one-sixth of the paddy crop had to be paid to the treasury, and of which 50% was paid in paddy and balance in cash. The Pujavaliya has a poignant account of the difficult life, the peasants led during the 13th century and how they suffered due to oppressive taxes.





During the British period, by a Wastelands Ordinance, the forest lands were acquired by the government and were transferred at a very low price to European planters and to the indigenous capitalists who showed interest in plantation agriculture. Plantation agriculture, besides being a lucrative source of income for planters themselves, can be considered an avenue which had contributed to the overall development of the country.





During the British period there emerged a modern system of rule coupled with a system of local administration and a new economic system based on trade.





The ancient feudal system known as Rajakariya, the traditional system of land tenure based on caste system, was abolished by the British allowing the people to select a career of their choice. They abolished the trade monopoly of the government, creating a system of free trade. Legal privileges enjoyed by only a certain section of people were abolished and a system in which all were treated equal before the law was established.





Besides that, a common system of judiciary and law was established. They granted universal franchise to the people, removed dictatorial powers of the Governor and set up a democratic system of governance consisting of executive and legislative councils. They introduced a modern system of education together with a modern system of schools. Consequently, a literate society that reads books and capable of debating on matters of importance came into being.





Lessons of history





It was the British civil servants who worked in Sri Lanka who took the lead to motivate us to study our ancient history and the grandeur of the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa kingdoms by exploring the ancient arts and crafts, irrigation systems, religious and literary achievements of our forefathers.





Alexander Johnston, third Chief Justice of Ceylon, encouraged the translation of the Mahavamsa and Rajavaliya and published it in three volumes and also a book on indigenous laws and customs of Sri Lanka in two volumes. John DOyly collected the laws and traditions of Sinhalese regions and codified them into a book on Sinhalese administration. William Tolfrey, a British civil servant in Ceylon and translator of the Bible into Sinhalese, translated Balawatharaya, a grammar book on Pali language, into English. Samuel Tolfrey translated Sidathsangara, the Sinhalese grammar book into English. George Turnour published a book on the history of Ceylon based on the Mahavamsa commentary and also a critical analysis of the Mahavamsa. Sir Emerson Tenant wrote a book on the history of Ceylon in two volumes. H.W. Codrington wrote two books on the history of Ceylon and a book on land tenure in Sri Lanka. Wilhelm Geiger published an edition of the Mahavamsa and in addition a book on the historical development of the Deepavamsa and Mahavamsa. Besides that he wrote a book on Sinhalese grammar. Though Geiger was not a British civil servant, the British Government of Sri Lanka bore all expenses.





The British Government employed James de Alwis to compile a bibliography of Sanskrit, Pali and Sinhalese literature. The cost of English translation of the Sidathsangara made by James de Alwis in 1925 was also defrayed by the British Government. The Sinhalese translation of the Mahavamsa in 1877 by Ven. Hikkaduve Sri Sumangala Thero and scholar Batuvanthudave was initiated by the British Government. Sinhalese translation of the Chulavamsa undertaken by L.C. Wijesingha in 1879 was also sponsored by the British Government.





None of the Sinhalese kings had visited Anuradhapura or Polonnaruwa at least on a pilgrimage for 500 years since the Raja Rata Kingdom had been abandoned by prince Vijayabahu, son of Parakramabahu 11, in 1262, and the kingdom was shifted to the wet zone. The Raja Rata had remained an abandoned region covered with jungle and devoid of people.





The ruins of Polonnaruwa buried in the jungle were discovered by H.M. Fanon, a British Lieutenant Commander. The notes he had made on this discovery had been published in the Ceylon Gazette on 1 August 1860. The Sri Lanka branch of the Royal Asiatic Society founded in 1845 served as an organisation which encouraged the Government to explore into the ancient glamour of Sri Lanka. Sir William Jones, the founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, was a scholar of Oriental languages.





The major ruins of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa were photographed and published in 1871. It was in 1873 that the necessary guidance was given to initiate archaeological research in Sri Lanka, on a decision by Governor Gregory. The Colombo Museum was established in 1876 and the pictures and plans of main ruins of Sri Lanka were published in 1877.





P. Goldschmidt, a German Professor, was employed to compile a list of rock inscriptions of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Mihintale. He died, succumbing to a fever contracted while engaged in examining inscriptions at Tissamaharamaya and Kataragama. Thereafter, Dr. E. Muller was entrusted to pursue the task which he completed in 1877 and published a book titled Ancient Inscriptions of Sri Lanka in 1881.





H.C.P. Bell, British civil servant and the first Commissioner of Archaeology in Ceylon, should be credited for advancing the archaeological research into a formal level. The task he initiated in Thun Koralaya and Hathra Koralaya areas was later extended to other areas as well. It was he who persuaded the Government to establish a Department of Archaeology, which was set up in 1890. An Act to protect ruins of historical importance was passed in 1900.





Ignorance or impudence





The British helped us in the discovery of our hidden history. They did not distort it. They did not attempt to suppress the pride that we owe.





The condition of Sri Lanka when the British captured it and the condition that prevailed when they left us were poles apart. It may be that they had exploited us. But, Sri Lanka had achieved its highest development in terms of human freedom, independence of thinking and orientating the country into the modern world during the British rule and not during the rule of ancient kings. It is a historical fact. We must not be ashamed to admit it.





There are many things in the article of my counter critic or the critics that can be negated. But it is of no use in replying most of them. However, in view of the space limitation, I choose to respond specifically to the following remark and the two questions raised therein, which I consider the main argument they had put forward in an attempt to refute my proposition.





Life in the Kandyan kingdom must surely have been hard for the average peasant. But we wonder if Ivan has the superhuman ability to conjure up statistics that were simply never recorded in the 18th century? Ivan invokes Robert Knox, who was a prisoner after all, with limited knowledge of the entire country, to show how poor the peasantry were in the Kandyan kingdom.





First of all, I wish to quote from Ralph Pieris, the first Sri Lankan Professor of Sociology of University of Ceylon, to substantiate the historical importance of the book of Robert Knox.





An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681) written by Robert Knox is the first historical account written in English about Sri Lanka. His object of writing this book was to place before the English readers an account of diverse, strange and unique customs of the people of Sri Lanka. Whatever may be his intention, the author had been able to compile an anthropological research study





On account of the lengthy description he had made on this, I wish to produce here only the concluding remarks of his interpretation: Therefore, the book of Knox had been acclaimed for a period of over two centuries as a source of correct and reliable information on the medieval society of Sri Lanka. (A Note on Sources  Sinhalese Social Organisations by Ralph Pieris, page 267)





Now, I am coming to the subject of superhuman ability attributed to me by my critics. This remark tinged with a kind of sarcasm has been based on the observation I have made in my article that the rate of infant mortality at birth as well as the rate of infanticide remained high during the times of the Kandyan kingdom





I wish to draw your attention to the following observations made in the research publication of Ralph Pieris who had made an excellent research study on the social organisations in the Kandyan Kingdom. Please note that the instances quoted below constitute the footnotes (FNs) introduced by the author to prove the infanticide practised during that period.





Among the Sinhalese too, the persistence of (an uneven) sex ratio conducive to polyandry in certain areas, at any rate might be attributed to infanticide. Knox mentions that a child born under an inauspicious planet was killed either by starving it, letting it lye and die, or by drowning it putting it into a vessel of water or by burning alive. (Page 206 FN 54)





In 1812, Ahalapola Adhikarama published an order forbidding people to expose children, a very common practice after three or four children are born or in case of a child born under an unlucky nakatha or the parents are poor  and something that parents themselves put them to death by crushing them with a stone or drowning. (Page 206 FN 56)





The uneven sex ratio had been a matter of concern of the officers who compiled the census reports in 1820. Infanticide continued in early British times. They have described how a child is put to death in a manner it cannot be proved to be a culpable homicide. (Page 206 FN 56)





Doilys Diary 13.1 1812 Infanticide continued in early British times. It carries a note on an infanticide case: Oedogodegedara Kiri Etana Vs Mohotigedera Ran Hamy (BJC25.1.1821- CGA 23/32). A witness described how a mother had thrown a child into a hole from which yam had been dug saying she had no father for it.





The judicial commission sentenced a woman found guilty of burying alive her female child, to three years imprisonment at hard labour in the Gabadawa and to stand in the pillory three times in the public bazaar. (RCD27.11.27 Lawrie, MSS111) (Page 206 FN 56)





A nation which had achieved a great progress at one time may sometimes fail to maintain it at a different time of its history. It need not to be a matter for shame. It is through understanding the truth and not concealing it, that it can gain critical wisdom and determination required for inaugurating a new era of development.





To end this article, I wish to quote an assessment made by Rhys Davids, a scholar of Pali language and the founder of the Pali Text Society, about the value and the authenticity of Knoxs book as an important historical source document.





This most valuable work is thoroughly trustworthy. Knox and his companions were not confined in any prison, but in separate villages where they were allowed to go in and out among the people. Most of them acquired property and married Sinhalese women and became Sinhalese peasants. But Knox himself never gave up the hope of escape and ultimately effected his purpose. His mode of life in Kandy was the best possible for gaining sure knowledge of the habits of the people. The simple straightforward style of this book must convince every reader of his truthfulness and the more one knows of the state of society among the Sinhalese in the remote districts who are little acquainted with Europeans, the more one learns to value the accuracy of his intimate and careful observations. (A Note on Sources  Sinhalese Social Organisations by Ralph Pieris, page 267)Vietnam has lodged an official protest with China following the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat which was being chased by a Chinese maritime surveillance vessel in the disputed South China Sea, Vietnam said late on Thursday.

Vietnam and China have for years long been embroiled in a dispute over the potentially energy-rich stretch of waters, called the East Sea by Vietnam.

The fishing vessel was moored near Da Loi island in the Paracel archipelago on March 6 when a China Maritime Surveillance Vessel chased it and fired water cannon at it, Vietnam's foreign ministry said in a statement.

The boat sank after hitting rocks while it was being chased. All five fishermen on board were rescued by another Vietnamese fishing boat, the ministry said.

A Vietnamese rescue agency said earlier that the Chinese vessel rammed the fishing boat.

"The Chinese vessel committed an act that violated Vietnam's sovereignty over the Hoang Sa archipelago, threatened the lives and damaged the properties and the legitimate interests of Vietnamese fishermen," the ministry said in the statement, referring to the Paracel islands by their Vietnamese name.

Vietnam had lodged a protest with China's embassy in Hanoi and demanded that China deal strictly with its Maritime Surveillance agency to prevent similar incidents and to compensate fairly the fishermen for their losses.

In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the Paracel Islands were China's and Vietnam must immediately stop illegal fishing activities in the vicinity.

The fishing boat had already struck a reef and sunk before the Chinese vessel arrived, he added.

"We hope the Vietnamese side can stop making things up."

China claims 90 percent of the South China Sea, where it has steadily expanded military and other installations on artificial islands and reefs, unnerving the region and angering Washington.

In addition to Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have claims to parts of the sea.

Separately, the Vietnamese government on Friday denounced Taiwan's military drills on and around Itu Aba, an island in the South China Sea, that Vietnam calls Ba Binh.

Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said the drills were "a serious violation of Vietnam's sovereignty over the (Spratly) archipelago, threatening peace, stability, and maritime safety and security, stressing and complicating the situation in the East Sea."

"Vietnam resolutely opposes (the drills) and demands that Taiwan not repeat similar actions," Hang said in a statement on the government website.

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Self-service check-in machines are becoming a familiar scene in airports around the world and a sign of modernity. Passengers use the machines to pay for tickets, reserve seats and label luggage. However, what many of them may not realise is that these machines could also be destroying jobs.

Lant Pritchett, director of research on improving systems of education at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University in the UK, said that enormously scarce talent in the developed world has invested in creating technology to overcome the problems of costly labour, adding that policies that close off borders have limited the supply of labour and rendered it more expensive.

Technology does not have to happen; it is happening because of price distortions, he told participants at the 25th annual conference of the Economic Research Forum, a regional think tank, under the title Knowledge, Research Networks, and Development Policy. The conference was held at the Arab Fund in Kuwait, March 10-12.

There is no denying the difference technology has made to all aspects of life, often changing the way business is conducted.

Albert Zeufack, World Bank chief economist for Africa, spoke at the conference on how technology has become all-pervasive and showing that a typical day in the life of the Internet in 2015 included 803 million purchases on Amazon, 186 million Instagram messages, and 207 billion e-mails. He showed data from the 2019 World Banks World Development Report that showed that business nowadays is done differently.

Whereas it took Ikea, a Swedish furniture retailer, 40 years to open around 400 shops around the world, it took Taobao, a Chinese online-shopping platform, only 15 years to find nine million online merchants covering 220 countries, Zeufack showed. In 2018, people on Airbnb booked more than double the number of rooms booked through the Marriott and Hilton Hotel chains put together, he said.

Zeufack showed how knowledge is being leveraged to benefit people, adding that 11 million Rwandans now have access to healthcare in digital form through a mobile-based healthcare scheme that includes artificial intelligence symptom-checking and live telephone consultations with trained nurses and doctors. Prescriptions can also be sent to patients phones.

In Nigeria, farmers have better access to tractors thanks to an application similar to that used for ride-hailing apps, he said.

Global economic growth could accelerate by one to two percent per year as a result of the adaptation of new technologies, according to Shahrokh Fardoust, a research professor at the Global Research Institute at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. New technologies, such as cloud computing, automation, robotics, blockchain, and 3D printing are as game changing as the steam engine was back in the 18th century and the electricity in the latter half of the 19th century, he told the participants at the conference.

Despite the potential for economic gains over the longer-term, the implied major reallocation of economic activity between sectors and countries could be painful and costly during the transition period, he said. The labor-saving and skill bias aspects of the new technologies, Fardoust added, are bound to have a negative impact on the jobs and wages of the relatively less educated and unskilled workers in both developed and developing countries.

He argued that according to recent research, digitalization, robotics and automation are already altering the demand for skills as increasing number of tasks and jobs are automated and new jobs are created in new activities with low labor intensity and bias for high-end labor skills.

He added that these new technologies and their rapid advances increasingly require skills, such as abilities to interpret, analyze and communicate complex information and problem-solving. At the same, digitalization and automation are reducing demand for basic manual labor skills in manufacturing and some services. Recent estimates by McKinsey, a private consulting firm, and the World Bank indicate that the proportion of employment that is automatable in emerging economies is large and could range between 41 to 85 percent.

However, the new technologies coupled with a huge youth population could translate into a new growth model for the MENA region according to Hassan Ali, dean of the School of Business at Nile University in Cairo. The youth in the MENA region, deployed through proper public policies, could be the new oil of the region, he told the conference.

Around 30 per cent of the population of the Middle East is aged between 15 and 29, and they are ready for change, Ali said, pointing out that the MENA region is ranked second in the world by number of daily Youtube video views at more than 310 million.

By 2020, projections suggest that there will be around two zettabytes of data in the Middle East, greater than the estimated number of grains of sand covering the entire Arabian desert, he said.

Already, Ali told the Weekly, many young people are working in what he called the cloud labour market. They may be physically located in Egypt, but they may be producing software for companies anywhere around the globe, he explained. Technology has enabled young people to go beyond physical boundaries, he pointed out.

Just as exploration, extraction, and building refineries are essential primary costs to produce and sell oil, a holistic change in the education system is essential to use and improve human capital productivity, Ali said.

The new growth model, he said, should be one that turns the surplus of unemployed and misemployed people into productive human capital through innovation, technology and entrepreneurship. This could happen if there was proper planning and coordination between the government, the private sector and civil society, Ali added.

Other conference speakers highlighted the importance of training and innovation. RohintonMedhora, president of the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Canada, showed how countries in the MENA region perform poorly on the Global Innovation Index of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) that ranks 126 countries. Except for the United Arab Emirates, which ranks 38, most of the countries in the region are not doing well, he showed.

Innovation was important to compete in a world that is increasingly dominated by what Medhora called the intangible economy. These intangibles include software development, patents, copyrights and research and development and design.

Over the last two decades, tangibles and intangibles have traded places, he told the conference. The share of intangibles investment in GDP is larger than investment in tangibles in the developed countries, Medhora said. Meanwhile, poorer countries still invest in tangibles, he added.

The divide today is between the digitally rich and the digitally poor, not the developing and the developed countries, he argued. According to Medhora, that needs to change, and countries need to create, protect and valorise their intellectual property.

The big challenge facing public policy makers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is how to harness the technologies for the public benefit by accelerating growth and job creation, Fardoust said. First, he said, governments must invest in infrastructure making broadband accessible to all segments of the population. What is also important, according to Fardoust, is for governments to broaden the access and enable the usage of broadband by everyone regardless of their income level by providing them with some sort of subsidy, particularly for the poorest segment of the population, because broadband usage tends to be quite costly in most developing countries, including the MENA region.

Governments must reform and upgrade the current educational systems given the high skill needs of the new technologies, he told the Weekly. And they must also substantially strengthen the existing social safety nets so that those that fall behind can survive.

With technology changing by the minute, it is very difficult to predict what will happen in the next few years, Fardoust said. He added that even by the early 1990s no one knew that the Internet was coming, and when it came very few people knew how big the impact would be.

There is no going back, we cannot throw away what is liberating us; new technologies are part and parcel of our lives today, according to Fardoust. Governments in the MENA region, however, must be on top of these developments and design and implement appropriate policy responses, in order to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of the new technologies to society, he added.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 21 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Investing in knowledgeEnergy giants spent $1bn on climate lobbying, PR since Paris: watchdog



Paris, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2019



The five largest publicly listed oil and gas majors have spent $1 billion since the 2015 Paris climate deal on public relations or lobbying that is "overwhelmingly in conflict" with the landmark accord's goals, a watchdog said Friday.

Despite outwardly committing to support the Paris agreement and its aim to limit global temperature rises, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and Total spend a total of $200 million a year on efforts "to operate and expand fossil fuel operations," according to InfluenceMap, a pro-transparency monitor.

Two of the companies -- Shell and Chevron -- said they rejected the watchdog's findings.

"The fossil fuel sector has ramped up a quite strategic programme of influencing the climate agenda," InfluenceMap Executive Director Dylan Tanner told AFP.

"It's a continuum of activity from their lobby trade groups attacking the details of regulations, controlling them all the way up, to controlling the way the media thinks about the oil majors and climate."

The report comes as oil and gas giants are under increasing pressure from shareholders to come clean over how greener lawmaking will impact their business models.

As planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions hit their highest levels in human history in 2018, the five companies wracked up total profits of $55 billion.

At the same time, the International Panel on Climate Change -- composed of the world's leading climate scientists -- issued a call for a radical drawdown in fossil fuel use in order to hit the 1.5C (2.7 Fahrenheit) cap laid out in the Paris accord.

InfluenceMap looked at accounts, lobbying registers and communications releases since 2015, and alleged a large gap between the climate commitments companies make and the action they take.

It said all five engaged in lobbying and "narrative capture" through direct contact with lawmakers and officials, spending millions on climate branding, and by employing trade associations to represent the sector's interests in policy discussions.

"The research reveals a trend of carefully devised campaigns of positive messaging combined with negative policy lobbying on climate change," it said.

It added that of the more than $110 billion the five had earmarked for capital investment in 2019, just $3.6bn was given over to low-carbon schemes.

The report came one day after the European Parliament was urged to strip ExxonMobil lobbyists of their access, after the US giant failed to attend a hearing where expert witnesses said the oil giant has knowingly misled the public over climate change.

"How can we accept that companies spending hundreds of millions on lobbying against the EU's goal of reaching the Paris agreement are still granted privileged access to decision makers?" said Pascoe Sabido, Corporate Europe Observatory's climate policy researcher, who was not involved in the InfluenceMap report.

The report said Exxon alone spent $56 million a year on "climate branding" and $41 million annually on lobbying efforts.

In 2017 the company's shareholders voted to push it to disclose what tougher emissions policies in the wake of Paris would mean for its portfolio.



- US donations -



With the exception of France's Total, each oil major had largely focused climate lobbying expenditure in the US, the report said.

Chevron alone has spent more than $28 million in US political donations since 1990, according to the report.

AFP contacted all five oil and gas companies mentioned in the report for comment.

"We disagree with the assertion that Chevron has engaged in 'climate-related branding and lobbying' that is 'overwhelmingly in conflict' with the Paris Agreement," said a Chevron spokesman.

"We are taking action to address potential climate change risks to our business and investing in technology and low carbon business opportunities that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

A spokeswoman for Shell -- which the report said spends $49 million annually on climate lobbying -- said it "firmly rejected" the findings.

"We are very clear about our support for the Paris Agreement, and the steps that we are taking to help meet society's needs for more and cleaner energy," they told AFP.

BP, ExxonMobil and Total did not provide comment to AFP.

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ROYAL DUTCH SHELL PLCSerbian downed US stealth jet, then befriended pilot



Skorenovac, Serbia, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2019



Twenty years ago, Zoltan Dani achieved a miraculous military feat: wielding outdated missile equipment, his army unit shot down an American F117 "stealth fighter" flying over Serbia as part of NATO's 1999 air strike assault.

The David-vs-Goliath victory was one of the most surprising achievements of the Serbian side as it was battered by NATO bombs that began dropping 20 years ago on Sunday, in a bid to halt Belgrade's war with Kosovo.

But in perhaps an even more remarkable twist, the retired army officer is now close friends with the American pilot whose Nighthawk he brought down.

"Bingo," Dani, now 62, recalls saying when he first learned he had struck the American aircraft, which was touted as invisible to radar.

The downing of the F117 three days into the NATO assault earned Dani national hero status.

It was the first and only time a F117 has been shot down in combat, leading celebratory Serbs to print shirts and posters with the slogan: "We didn't know it was invisible!"

After three months of air strikes, Serbia was forced to withdraw its troops from Kosovo, where its forces had been battling ethnic Albanian separatists.

While the NATO intervention is celebrated as the basis of Kosovans' liberation today, traumatic memories of the bombs remain deeply etched in Serbia's public memory.

But Dani and his US counterpart, Air Force pilot Dale Zelko, managed to put their past behind them.

Around a decade ago, they started exchanging emails.

"It was important, among other things, to learn what kind of man he was," Dani, who is part of Serbia's Hungarian minority, told AFP from his home in eastern Skorenovac.

"After two to three years we decided together that it was time to meet."



- 'Message of peace' -



That 2012 encounter, filmed in a documentary called 'The Second Meeting', saw Zelko travel to Dani's home where he had opened a bakery after retiring from military service.

"When he arrived... I handed him an apron, he took it and we worked together," recalls Dani with a grin.

In the documentary, the two men are seen rolling out pastry dough together before visiting a Serbian museum where tattered pieces of the F117 are on display.

"Hey, that's my stuff," Zelko jokes, pointing at the display.

They also visit the field where the American pilot landed after he ejected from his aircraft in a parachute.

"As soon as I saw those missiles I thought, oh man, they got me," Zelko says standing in the field.

At a screening of the film in Belgrade in 2012, Zelko addressed the room.

"I am sorry for your suffering and sorrow, loss and anguish," he said, visibly shaken.

"War is not between normal, average people, it is between the governments," he added.

Dani says he was initially hesitant about making contact with his former war foe, but ultimately decided it would "be an opportunity to send a common message of peace and understanding".

The following year he visited Zelko and his family at their home in New Hampshire.

Now they still talk "once or twice a week by email", reports Dani.

Near his computer is a large chunk of dark metal -- another recovered piece of the F117 -- leaning against the wall.Renewed US-led air strikes pound IS holdouts



Sousa, Syria, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2019



US-led warplanes bombed the north bank of the Euphrates River in eastern Syria early Friday to flush out holdout jihadists from the last sliver of their crumbling "caliphate".

Friday's bombardment ended two days of relative calm on the front line in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had paused its advance while it combed a makeshift jihadist encampment it overran on Tuesday.

An SDF official who asked not to be named said that warplanes of the US-led coalition resumed airstrikes on suspected jihadist positions in the early hours of the morning.

Top SDF commander Jia Furat said his forces were engaging with the jihadists on several fronts while the coalition warplanes provided air support.

The US-led coalition said the "operation to complete the liberation of Baghouz is ongoing".

"It remains a hard fight, and Daesh is showing that they intend to keep fighting for as long as possible," it said using an Arabic acronym for IS.

The SDF launched an assault against the jihadists' last redoubt in the village of Baghouz on February 9.

On Tuesday, they cornered diehard fighters into a few acres of farmland by the Euphrates River, after forcing them out of the encampment where they had been hold up.

The six-month-old operation to wipe out the last vestige of IS's once-sprawling proto-state is close to reaching its inevitable outcome.

But the SDF said on Thursday that a declaration of victory would be made only after mopping up operations had been completed.

IS declared a "caliphate" in June 2014 after seizing a vast swathe of territory larger than Britain straddling Iraq and Syria.

The loss of the Baghouz enclave would signal the final demise of the "caliphate" in Syria, after its defeat in Iraq in 2017.

But IS has already begun its transformation into a guerilla organisation, and still carries out deadly hit-and-run attacks from desert or mountain hideouts.

The war in Syria has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions since it erupted following the repression of anti-government protests in 2011.China protests US sanctions on shipping firms



Beijing, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2019



China has lodged a diplomatic protest with the United States after Washington sanctioned two Chinese shipping companies for doing business with North Korea, the foreign ministry said Friday.

Beijing said it has consistently enforced all UN resolutions on North Korea after the US Treasury Department added two Chinese firms to a sanctions list on Thursday.

The US Treasury sanctioned Dalian Haibo International Freight Co. Ltd. for shipping cargo from the Chinese port of Dalian to North Korea on behalf of the Paeksol Trading Corporation, which in the past has sold metal and coal to earn money for Pyongyang.

It also blacklisted Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co., saying it had assisted North Korean officials based in Europe in procuring goods for the regime.

"We firmly oppose any country imposing unilateral sanctions and taking long-arm jurisdiction against any Chinese entity according to their own domestic laws," said foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang.

Any Chinese company or individual found to be violating sanctions will be "dealt with according to laws and regulations," Geng said.

"China has already made solemn representations to the US on this matter and urged the US to immediately stop its mistaken actions to prevent affecting bilateral cooperation on related issues," Geng told reporters.

Washington's move comes less than a month after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met in Hanoi with President Donald Trump for a second summit that broke down in part over Pyongyang's demands for immediate sanctions relief.

Trump, while walking away from the talks, has been eager to reach a potentially landmark agreement on North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.Egypt's Minister of Antiquities Khaled El-Enany is to officially inaugurate the Tutankhamun, the Treasures of the Pharaoh exhibition in Paris this evening

Tutankhamun fever hit the French capital this week as Paris is welcoming the Tutankhamun, the Treasures of the Pharaoh exhibition on its second leg after Los Angeles in the US as part of a worldwide tour.

The features of the golden boy-king can be seen everywhere in the city centre, including in metro stations, shops, restaurants and outside residential buildings.

Meanwhile, the golden sarcophagus of Tutankhamun has caught the front pages of many French newspapers and magazines, some of which have devoted issues to Tutankhamuns treasures, history, and the discovery of his tomb.

Statuette of god Horus

The collection of the young Pharaoh is back in Paris, 52 years after its last visit in 1967 when more than 1.2 million visitors gathered to admire 45 objects from the boy-kings collection exhibited in the Petit Palais.

Managing director for exhibitions at the IMG company that organised this years show, John Norman, said the exhibition was like none that had been seen before.

Millions of people around the world would get the opportunity to see these ancient objects in an immersive context, he said, adding that Tutankhamuns place in peoples imaginations will be secure for generations to come.

The mask

According to the organiser of the exhibition, some 130,000 tickets had been sold, and it is expected that this will reach 150,000 tickets before the public opening of the exhibition at the Grande Halle de la Villette on 23 March.

A VIP inauguration by Egypts Minister of Antiquities Khaled El-Enany is to be held on 21 March.

The immersive exhibition will unveil more than 150 artefacts from the tomb of Tutankhamun over the next six months. More than 50 pieces from this collection have travelled for the first time out of Egypt.

It is a unique opportunity for worldwide audiences to rediscover the history of one of the most perplexing kings in ancient Egyptian history who lived almost 3,300 years ago as well as many of the personal belongings of the young sovereign that accompanied him in the two worlds of life and death.

These will be exhibited within the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) that is currently under construction overlooking the Giza Plateau and is scheduled to open in 2020.

Ka

Visitors will be able to learn about how scientific analysis of the Pharaohs 3,000-year-old mummy has revealed new information about his health and lineage, as well as how cutting-edge archaeological tools have assisted in discovering tombs and analysing existing ones in ways never before imagined.

The discovery of the tomb and the history of Egyptian archaeology, along with new scientific analysis of the mummy, will be also shown through a video exhibition in the show presenting scan data of Tutankhamuns mummy.

The god Horus

New DNA testing shows that the young Pharaoh suffered from malaria and had a badly broken left leg above the knee that pierced his skin. This likely resulted in the infection that caused his death.

The exhibition also takes visitors into the afterlife, visualising it through objects from Tutankhamuns tomb. It combines technology, music and animation in novel ways.

We have used a lot of technology in the exhibition, Norman said, describing it as a very theatrical experience.

Tutankhamun

The most important artefacts on show include a 40cm gold coffin, the gold diadem from Tutankhamuns mummy, a gold fan featuring an ostrich hunt, a small gold canopic coffin ornamented with faience, a silver trumpet used for religious ceremonies, a gilded wooden statuette depicting the king riding a black varnished leopard, four marble canopic jars, and a gilded wooden jackal-headed figurine with the god Duamutef on the base.

There is a wooden travelling chest with gilded knobs inlaid with ebony and ivory, gold finger rings with images of the god Amun-Re on a cartouche-shaped bezel, a marble game board, and tapestry woven linen gloves.

One iconic item in the exhibition is a statue of Ka, a wooden guardian statue with gilded head-dress and skirt, and other items including ushabti figurines, head-rests, boxes and jewellery.

We had to change the 110 doors of the Grande Halle to hardened steel models to protect the works from the risk of fire and to ensure their safety. We also had to modernise the temperature conditions, since it was necessary to cool the room without air-conditioning,  Didier Fusillier, head of the Grande Halle de La Villette, told the French newspaper Les Echoes.

The works arrive from Los Angeles and only come out of their container inside La Villette. Cranes and trucks enter directly into the Grande Halle, which avoids the manipulation of objects.

Tutankhamun posters

We have equipped the crates with a SenseAware system, which provides information on geolocation and environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity, Mathilde Goffard, vice president of land operations at FedEx France, told the newspaper.

Elham Salah, head of the Museums Sectors at the ministry, said the collection had been insured for $800 million.

It would be accompanied by an officer from Egypts Tourist and Antiquities Police, a restorer and a curator, she said, adding that the revenue from the exhibition was estimated at $50 million for each country involved, and there would also be a percentage paid on the number of tickets and souvenirs sold.

The ministry would benefit from 10 per cent of the value of the items sold, as well as $1 for each visitor above 400,000, reaching $4 per visitor at 700,000 visitors.

The exhibition arrived in Los Angeles in March 2018, and it is now in Paris as a message of peace from the Egyptians to the whole world to show how the ancient Egyptians built their own great civilisation with passion, faith, love, knowledge and art, El-Enany said.

It will allow humanity to admire our treasures and encourage visitors to come to see the fascinating monuments in their original context in Egypt, he added.

Other legs of the exhibition include the Saatchi Museum in London, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, the Sydney Museum in Australia, the National Museum in South Korea, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Muri Art Centre in Tokyo and the Osaka Museum of Art.

The French TV channel France2 described the Tutankhamun exhibition as the most important cultural event in Paris for years, while the one held in 1967 was the most beautiful Christmas gift imaginable, it said.

Recalling the 1967 exhibition, Jean-Marc Gonion, the editor of Le Figaro magazine, told Tarek Al-Awadi, the curator of the exhibition, that although he was young at that time he remembered that his parents had left him at his grandmothers house so he would not stand queuing at the Petit Palais to explore the treasures of the Egyptian boy-king.

He was very happy to have a chance to see the exhibition on its return to Paris 50 years later, he said, adding that in the queues for the exhibition in 1967 some marital problems had been solved while other couples had been divorced. New friendships had been created, and some bachelors had found marriage, he said.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 21 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Tutankhamun comes to Paris

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Renewed US-led air strikes pound IS holdouts



Sousa, Syria, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2019



US-led warplanes bombed the north bank of the Euphrates River in eastern Syria on Friday to flush out holdout jihadists from the last sliver of their crumbling "caliphate".

Friday's bombardment ended two days of relative calm on the front line in the remote village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had paused its advance while it combed a makeshift jihadist encampment, which it overran on Tuesday.

An SDF official who asked not to be named said warplanes of the US-led coalition resumed strikes on suspected jihadist positions before dawn on Friday.

Top SDF commander Jia Furat said his forces were engaging with the jihadists on several fronts while the coalition warplanes provided air support.

The US-led coalition said the "operation to complete the liberation of Baghouz is ongoing".

"It remains a hard fight, and Daesh is showing that they intend to keep fighting for as long as possible," it said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

The SDF launched what it called its "final assault" against the jihadists' last redoubt in the village of Baghouz on February 9.

Finally on Tuesday, they cornered diehard fighters into a few acres of farmland along the Euphrates River, after forcing them out of their rag-tag encampment of tents and battered vehicles.



- Tunnels and caves -



The six-month-old operation to wipe out the last vestige of IS's once-sprawling proto-state is close to reaching its inevitable outcome, but the SDF has said a declaration of victory will be made only after they have completed flushing out the last tunnels and hideouts.

According to SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel, hundreds of IS fighters, including some women, still remain on the outskirts of the jihadist encampment.

They are hiding along the bank of the Euphrates River as well as at the base of a hill overlooking Baghouz, he told AFP.

"In around one or two days, we will conclude military operations if there are no surprise developments," he said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS holdouts were hiding in underground tunnels and caves in Baghouz.

SDF official Jiaker Amed said several jihadists want to surrender but are being prevented from doing so by other fighters.

"We are trying our best to wrap up the operation without fighting, but some of them are refusing to surrender," he said.

More than 66,000 people, mostly civilians, have quit the last IS redoubt since January 9, according to the SDF.

They compromise 5,000 jihadist fighters and 24,000 of their relatives as well as 37,000 other civilians.

The thousands who have streamed out have been housed in cramped camps and prisons run by Kurdish forces further north.

On Wednesday night, around 2,000 women and children from Baghouz arrived at the largest camp, Al-Hol, which is struggling to cope with the influx of tens of thousands of people, many in poor health.

Since December, at least 138 people, mostly children, have died en route to Al-Hol or shortly after arrival, according to the International Rescue Committee.



- Calls for more attacks -



IS declared a "caliphate" in June 2014 after seizing a vast swathe of territory larger than Britain straddling Iraq and Syria.

The loss of the Baghouz enclave would signal the demise of the "caliphate" in Syria, after its defeat in Iraq in 2017.

But IS has already begun its transformation into a guerilla organisation, and still carries out deadly hit-and-run attacks from desert or mountain hideouts.

In a video released on IS's social media channels on Thursday, jihadists vowed to continue to carry out attacks.

"To those who think our caliphate has ended, we say not only has it not ended, but it is here to stay," said one fighter.

He urged IS supporters to conduct attacks in the West against the enemies of the "caliphate".

The war in Syria has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions since it erupted following the repression of anti-government protests in 2011.Iran cleric accuses France of deceit, rejects rights warning



Tehran, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2019



A senior Iranian cleric on Friday accused French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian of "deceit" on the 2015 nuclear deal and rejected a warning over human rights, news agencies reported Friday.

"The French foreign minister lies that despite America's withdrawal from the JCPOA (nuclear deal) they have made considerable efforts to preserve the nuclear agreement," Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said at the main weekly Muslim prayers in Tehran.

"This financial channel you have made is completely deceitful," he said of the special payment system called INSTEX.

The mechanism was launched by Britain, France and Germany in late January after President Donald Trump in May 2018 abruptly quit the nuclear accord signed by Tehran and world powers.

The July 2015 accord signed in Vienna lifted sanctions in return for curbs on Iran's atomic programme.

London, Paris and Berlin said INSTEX was designed to save the deal by allowing Tehran to keep trading with European companies despite Washington reimposing sanctions.

Le Drian on Thursday called for Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh to be released and warned Tehran that its adherence to a nuclear accord does not give Iran a blank cheque on human rights.

"We have been making considerable efforts in recent months to preserve the (Iranian) nuclear accord, despite America's withdrawal," said Le Drian.

"Our wish to preserve the Vienna accord does not grant carte-blanche to Iran and certainly not in the matter of human rights," he added.

In response, Khatami accused France itself of violating human rights.

"Be ashamed, you beat up and kill your people and still speak of human rights? Do you understand human rights? You are at the forefront of violating human rights," he said, apparently referring to France's "yellow vest" protests.

Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei already on Thursday rejected INSTEX as nothing more than a "bitter joke" and said that European countries could not be trusted.Trump drops new N.Korea sanctions because he 'likes' Kim: W.House



Washington, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2019



President Donald Trump on Friday abruptly announced the cancellation of sanctions imposed by his own Treasury Department to tighten international pressure on North Korea.

"It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!" Trump said in a tweet.

He appeared to be referring to measures unveiled Thursday that targeted two Chinese companies accused of helping North Korea to evade tight international sanctions meant to pressure Pyongyang into ending its nuclear weapons program.

They were the first new sign of pressure since talks between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un broke down in Hanoi less than a month ago. However, Trump, who has previously spoken of "love" for the totalitarian leader, appears to retain hope that his strong personal relationship will bear fruit.

"President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesn't think these sanctions will be necessary," the president's spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, said.

Adam Schiff, a Democrat who heads the intelligence committee in the House of Representatives, blasted Trump for cancelling sanctions "imposed only yesterday and championed by his own national security advisor, because he 'loves' Kim."

"Foolish naivete is dangerous enough. Gross incompetence and disarray in the White House make it even worse," Schiff tweeted.

On Thursday, Trump national security advisor John Bolton had tweeted that the sanctions were meant to put an end to "illicit shipping practices" by North Korea.

"Everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Korea's sanctions evasion," he said.

China complained, saying that it did enforce all UN resolutions and opposed "any country imposing unilateral sanctions and taking long-arm jurisdiction against any Chinese entity according to their own domestic laws."

This was Trump's second major, unexpected foreign policy announcement by Twitter in two days. On Thursday, he sent a tweet reversing decades of US policy and pledged to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the hotly contested Golan Heights border area with Syria.The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2018 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement, agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy StatementDuring the 2019 New Year celebrations in Germany, far-right militias appeared patrolling the streets for the first time. The mayor of Amberg said to the AFP: Ive notified the police about the formation of vigilante groups in the town.

Then he clarified: I can understand the uncertainty that I see in the reactions of some local people, but this hatred and the threats of violence coming from all over the country are going too far.

The far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), close to the Nazi current, has published photos of a number of its members dressing in red vests on which the partys logo is printed. Newspapers described the red vests vigilantes as security patrols belonging to the far-right and outside state institutions.

In the first days of 2019, the German newspaper Die Welt mentioned that an explosion occurred in front of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) offices in Dobeln, Saxony State. Authorities believe that political motives are most likely behind the incident.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the official representative of the far-right current in the country. It has become the third biggest party in only four years, and the first far-right party to enter the German Bundestag since the end of World War II.

World War II was the war waged by the far-right against the right, the war of fascism and Nazism against the European and American right. The far-right ideology and the far-right countries were eliminated after fifty thousand hours of war and the death of seventy million people.

There wasnt a single far-right person in the whole of Europe who was able to raise his voice or to express what he believed in public. It seemed that Adolf Hitler was the last Nazi and there wont be any Nazi after him and it wasnt even conceivable that the ideas of the 1930s will once again return.

Seventy years have passed and it seemed that the consequences of World War II have concluded and that the intellectual structure that was founded following this war has cracked and collapsed.

World War II resulted in the international rise of Communism; the Soviet Unions power increased and it began to share global influence with the USA.

At that time the classical Imperialism represented by France and Britain for so long ended and a new image emerged, that of American Europe.

The defeat of Nazism, the rise of Sovietism and the decline of European imperialism was the intellectual triangle of post-World War II ideology.

Decades have passed under this new ideological stability; then came the Soviet Unions collapse like an empire made of clay, the emergence of neo-Nazis, and the cracking of the European-American alliance.

The waters of the Atlantic Ocean began to gradually widen, until the political distance became greater than ever. American Europe ended and European Europe returned. The East is East and the West is West once again.

During President Donald Trumps term, this geopolitical aloofness became public. The American president started to talk about the necessity of Europe paying for the continuance of American Europe.

After the American dissociation, Germany and France got to work. Discussions were made regarding a European military alliance that wouldnt wait for an American rescue that might not come.

The intellectual triangle which had ruled the world has now ended. Nazism has returned through several premises and decency required it be called far-right and the rise of populism.

Communism has gone, so capitalist Russia and capitalist China are confronting capitalist America. The West has been witnessing what can be called the autumn of NATO. Some countries are buying arms from Russia and others have become distrustful of this distant ally.

The worlds political thought is changing and the predominant visions of the world today are changing from what they were during the post- World War II era. The end of Communism, the rise of Nazism, the NATO autumn and the return of China constitute the intellectual end of World War II.

The expectation, which we dont want to think about, is that the world will collapse and we will see the return of blood-letting once again. The intellectual end of World War II could be the intellectual beginning of World War III.

World War III wont be like its predecessors. The military technology and the way wars are fought has changed completely.

Missiles used to be short-range, medium-range and long-range. Now some missiles have no range. Missiles used to be launched on a path, which can be traced and be dealt with. Now some missiles have no path.

The aircraft pilots, submarine and tank commanders were the stars of the battles and they were the ones who took decisions. Now there are the drones, self-driving submarines and driverless tanks.

The infantry were the war; they were the ones who liberated or occupied, who are trained in competence and bravery and in how to conquer geography and traverse wide swathes of land. Now the soldiers are robots that can fight, hordes of new humans, tin soldiers who dont feel or bleed.

The number of nuclear warheads used to be in the tens. Now the numbers of nuclear bombs in the world are more than 15,000.

The world has always been a dangerous place, but it has never been more dangerous than now. There were always probabilities of great wars, but they were never more likely than now. Many a time international politics has moved far from the green zone, but today it is standing on the brink of the abyss.

During the Korean crisis, Washington talked and also Pyongyang talked about using nuclear weapons, and during the American missile crisis in Europe Moscow talked and Washington also talked about reaching the end of the line after options narrowed.

Strategic studies are discussing missile experiments to blow up satellites, manoeuvres underneath the oceans to cut marine cables. There will be no media, no communication and no internet. The world will return to World War II technology.

Naturally, scientists, who have set up a symbolic Doomsday Clock, moved it forward. They estimate that when the clocks handles reach twelve oclock it will be the zero hour in the third and final World War. Those who set up the clock were in great anxiety when the hydrogen bomb was invented and when the Bay of Pigs crisis escalated. Today they are feeling more anxious than ever.

There is not too much time left for the world; is little bit before twelve. What a miserable world! Mankind is heading towards the best of periods in history; huge advances in medicine; distant existence on Mars surface and on the dark side of the moon; artificial intelligence and three dimensional printers; features of the Fourth Industrial Revolution; four-dimensional microscopy; efforts to communicate with extra-terrestrials.

Can folly end this fantastic planet?

If the Doomsday Clock reaches its ultimate end there wont be anyone to narrate what happened. There wont be history or historians. Our planet will be the new Mars: a planet of nothingness.

Seven billion human beings are crying out for reason. It is too frightening that this could be the last call.

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The Emergence of Homo Sapiens 'Those Who Obeyed the Rules Were Favored by Evolution'

British anthropologist Richard Wrangham believes our humanity began with the murder of a tyrant. In an interview with DER SPIEGEL, he explains why homo sapiens are so murderous, while also being among the most peaceful species.SPIEGEL+-Zugang wird gerade auf einem anderen Gerat genutzt

SPIEGEL+ kann nur auf einem Gerat zur selben Zeit genutzt werden.

Hier weiterlesen

Klicken Sie auf den Button, spielen wir den Hinweis auf dem anderen Gerat aus und Sie konnen SPIEGEL+ weiter nutzen.The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (CCC) was founded on 25 March 1893, for the purpose of best promoting the interests of commerce. This was among the very first group of chambers established in Asia.





The Chamber has grown from having 26 memberships at its initial stages, to just over 600 today  with an outreach of 8,500 institutions. Twenty nine (29) of the current members have been members of the Chamber for over 100 years.





Over the last 180 years, the CCC has diversified its services across the field. From taking a primary interest in the sale of tea, rubber and spices, and commencing auctions that have been held continuously to this day, the Chamber offers secretarial services to 21 affiliated associations, has a computerized business information portal, organizes conferences, seminars, and events on a regular basis, and issues certificates of origin and provides authentication of quality survey reports. The Chamber has established eight subject-specific Steering Committees and six National Agenda Committees to gather, assess and formulate recommendations for policy interventions. In addition to this, it provides business intelligence, while the Economic Intelligence Unit delivers timely and relevant economic updates to all its members.





Meanwhile, flagship events like the SL Economic Summit (held consecutively for 17 years), awards for the Best Corporate Citizen (held continuously over the last 15 years), and the Investment and Business Conclave over the last several years were conducted by the CCC.





Whenever the need arose, the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce has intervened in matters of national importance and provided leadership to gather a collective voice with other Chambers to engage with Government.





Over the past 180 years, the Ceylon Chamber has responded to the needs of the business community that has experienced an evolving landscape  from a focus on a few traditional commodities trade, to a widely diversified commercial business arena shaped by new consumer needs, export diversification, and deeper engagement with countries across the world, fueled by technology and the advent of the digital economy.





The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce looks to continue in its quest, carrying forward the wisdom of two centuries, while staying relevant to its fast evolving membership, remaining to be Sri Lankas most powerful voice in business.



On rituals and material offerings to the Buddha in the name of worship, Professor Rahulas ideas are exceptionally rational, if not revolutionary.





by Ameer Ali





Professor Ven. Walpola Rahula (1907-1997), a Buddhist rationalist and free-thinker of international repute, was a unique intellectual, teacher and writer who never minced his words when speaking truth to power, a rare quality fast disappearing in a world of comprador intellectualism. It would be a crucial weakness, he avers, if you do not express your honest and forthright views fearing public opposition. Persons seeking personal gain, glory, praise, and power are reluctant to go against public sentiment by expressing their honest opinions. These words of his must be engraved in gold on the doors of every educational institution in the country.









Ven. Rahulas Sathyodaya, translated into English as Truth Awakening, was published by one who is arguably Walpolas replica in thought and compassion  Ven. Galkande Dhammananda. He is the Chairman of Walpola Rahula Institute, a much-needed and timely contribution to the national salvation of Sri Lanka. Ven. Dhammananda captures this when he says in the introduction: Sri Lanka appears to have developed a psyche that continually seeks an external foe or enemy to lock horns with. There is a lack of will for inward appraisal of short-comings in society that can lead to positive internal reform.





This need for self-introspection is conspicuously absent in all three communities, which are ready to blame the other for their own short-comings. Rev. Walpola Rahulas address to the Buddhists is applicable to other communities as well. At a time when Buddhism and other religions of the country have become so politicised and used instrumentally to achieve power, prestige and opulence, the noble teachings of the masters are lost in the wilderness and ignored by both preachers and practitioners. It is in such gloomy environment that Sathyodaya radiates its light to drive away the spiritual and moral darkness that is fast besetting the nation.





Ven. Rahulas singularly forceful and impeccably erudite critique of the ruling Buddhist orthodoxy and its ritual-centric misrepresentation of the Buddhas teachings has relevance even to non-Buddhists. When he says that, After the founder of a spiritual teaching passes away, the priests associated with the teaching frequently alter the religion into a livelihood, he captures the mind of millions of young men and women who are fast losing faith in any religion. The gatekeepers of these faiths deliberately keep the masses ignorant of the true message of the masters and make a living out of that ignorance. Through a language not understood by the vast majority of followers, and through a priestly class distinctly separated from the masses by way of attire, appearance and artificial veneration, religion has become a source of livelihood, control and even oppression.





Dogma vs. the spiritual





With reference to Buddhism, Ven. Rahula is particularly harsh on the community of Bhikkhus. He points out that, People have moved away from the right teaching due to mistaken notions such as the Bhikkhus are the Sangha, the legacy of the Buddha cannot be maintained without the Bhikkhus and the legacy of the Buddha will end when there are no robe-wearers He questions the audacity of the Bhikkhus in claiming that, We are the Sangha. Without us how could the legacy of the Buddha survive? In his elaboration of the Disciple Sangha (Sravaka Sangha) and Eight noble persons Sangha (Ashta Ariya Pudgala Sangha) he defines a community that may even include the laity. This and his attack on caste-ridden monasteries will shatter the monopoly that orthodoxy has historically bestowed upon the Bhikkhu community.





On rituals and material offerings to the Buddha in the name of worship, Professor Rahulas ideas are exceptionally rational, if not revolutionary. He knew that he was stepping into a very sensitive territory of Buddhist practices. Before he spells out his views on this matter, he warns the reader, not to be upset or angry. When an unfamiliar opinion is being expressed on an issue, please listen with patience and compassion, a quality many of us lack. We always shoot the messenger before reading the message. His explanation is typical of his intellectual maturity and compassionate outlook. The Buddha, who was the epitome of ethical conduct (Seela), mental discipline (Samadhi), and wisdom (Pragna), departed over two thousand five hundred years ago. If we think that we can venerate him now by offering food items, it reflects our low moral maturity. We cannot pay our respects to him by offering material objects for consumption. The Buddha has stressed that he should be honoured through practice-based offerings (Prathipaththi Puja) rather than through flowers, food, money and other material things. This reminds me of a Sri Lankan Hindu scholar and savant Swami Vipulanandhar (1892-1947), who like Ven. Rahula, was also critical of ritualistic Hinduism and material offerings by its worshippers.





Prof. Rahulas thoughts on Buddha Sasana deserves serious attention today by those who claim to protect it with political power. The Sasana, according to Sathyodaya, signifies performing wholesome actions and refraining from unwholesome deeds, he says. It is about cleansing the mind. It is represented by ethical conduct mental discipline and wisdom Virtuous practice is Buddha Sasana. If this is what Sasana means, do we really need a minister and ministry to protect it?





A message relevant across communities





The esteemed professors broad survey of the status of Buddhist community in the land of Dharmadeepa is true of all other communities. Every week there are thousands of sermons delivered and numerous meritorious activities organised across the country. Almost every village has a temple. There are over thirty thousand ordained monks to provide counsel. Yet, there appears to be very little advancement in moral conduct. Have you wondered why? What he asked of Buddhists should equally be asked of other communities also.





Throughout Sathyodaya, its author relentlessly battles the mis-teaching and malpractices of Buddhist orthodoxy. The rigidity of religious orthodoxy with its arrogated power to impose sanctions upon dissenters or heretics has been the cause of many an unrest and rebellion in the history of all faiths. Ven. Rahula claims with justification that Buddhists may be regarded as the foremost among free-thinkers in this world and that, the Buddha was the first to emphasise the value of free thinking. His teaching was a bold and forthright act of assertion that underlined the capacity to realise the truth.





Buddhisms impact on Islamic free-thinking





From a historical perspective, the Buddhist concept of free-thinking was an important factor in the rise of a rationalist movement in Islam headed by a group of philosophers called Mutazilites in the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258). Thanks to Sathyodaya, let me illuminate this forgotten chapter of Buddhist-Islamic relations to help ease the prevailing disquiet between Buddhist and Islamic orthodoxies in Sri Lanka.





Ven. Walpola Rahula (1907-1997), author of Sathyodaya

Not many Buddhists and Muslims of this country would be aware of an ancient but famous Buddhist family called Barmakids from Balkh in todays Afghanistan. The members of this family were the custodians of the Nava Vihara (Nawbahar) monastery. Sometime during the Umayyad invasion of Afghanistan in the 7th century, its members converted to Islam. During the legendary rule of Harun al-Rashid, the Barmakids rose to great power and influence in the caliphs court before they fell out of his favour and were killed.





What is important for the present purpose is that it was the intellectual influence of this Buddhist family, who were patrons of literature, philosophy and science and tolerant towards other religions, that fed the philosophical and intellectual appetite of free-thinking Mutazilites, who revolted against the prevailing orthodoxy and searched for the ultimate truth outside the scriptures. Although the orthodoxy returned with a vengeance after the 12th century and lately has embraced the ultra-conservative, exclusionist and literalist Wahhabi-Salafist ideology, early Buddhist influence on Muslim philosophers free-thinking must be acknowledged. Sathyodayas condemnation of blind faith in rituals and traditions is equally applicable to Muslim orthodoxys taqlid or blind imitation.





Paths of truth and righteousness





Another novelty in Sathyodaya is the authors interpretation of the concept of Nirvana in Buddhism. Nirvana is the final-state for all beings, he says, not only for Buddhists. If a person follows the teaching without desiring Nirvana but with intention of doing good to the world, he will reach Nirvana at the end of his journey. Consider this with verse 62 in chapter 2 in the Holy Quran, Any who believe in Allah and the Last Day and work righteousness shall have their reward. Doing good is righteousness and it is open to anyone whether one is Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or Christian. The reward for righteousness is Nirvana or paradise. This is the essence of Sathyodaya. In Rahulas view therefore, Nirvana unites humanity.





Buddhism and Islam are not religions in the Western sense. Buddhism is dhamma, the path of truth and righteousness, and Islam is din, the righteous way of life. In their obligatory prayers Muslims ask Allah at least seventeen times a day to show them the straight path. To Buddhists, dhamman saranan gachchami is to surrender to the righteous path, which is the straight path the Muslims ask for. What a congruence? Why should Islam be in conflict and why should Buddhists quarrel with Muslims in Sri Lanka? Ignorance is the reason and Sathyodaya is their salvation.





When Professor Walpola Rahula critiqued Buddhist orthodoxy, his academic stature and intellectual depth was so unimpeachable no one dared to counter his arguments. His critique is highly relevant today, and unless Buddhists and others cultivate pure and wholesome intentions for the deeds  (they) perform and follow the true teachings of their masters, sages and scriptures, Sri Lankas pluralism will be thrown into jeopardy.





Finally, when reading the Truth Awakening one forgets that it is a translation and not the original. Niranjan Selvadurai deserves to be congratulated for a job well done.





(The writer is attached to the School of Business and Governance, Murdoch University, Western Australia.)English21/03/2019

PULJIC: 10,000 CATHOLICS LEFT BiH LAST YEAR

MOSTAR, March 21 /SRNA/ - Cardinal Vrhbosanski Vinko Puljic said on Thursday that according to data from Catholic parishes in BiH, around 10,000 Catholics left BiH last year, stressing that these messages must reach the authorities which must create conditions for the youth to remain in the country.



Conditions must be created for this population to become accomplished as human beings in their own country. Everyone must have equal employment opportunities, regular salaries, and all other rights. Unfortunately, we cannot have a decisive influence here, but we can and will work on encouragement and hope, Puljic said after a session of the Bishopric Conference in Mostar.



Puljic said that all Bishops are aware that there wont be mass return in the near future, but encourage all those who want to return to their fathers land to do so.



The BiH Bishopric Conference says that Croats in BiH were tricked in the last years general elections.



Puljic said that they accepted with regret the refusal of the Klagenfurt Bishopric's manager to give his consent pertaining to a gathering in Bleiburg.



Pujic says that Bishops cannot accept the fact that the process of denationalization of confiscated property is lacking, and that the Church is not enabled to dispose of its property as it wants.



Delegates from Italy and Croatia attended the Bishopric Conference in Mostar and Bishops thanked them for financial support and spiritual unity. /end/sgState power is a critical factor in international relations because it is a main determinant of the role a state can play in the international community and in its relationship with others.

However, it is not enough for a state to possess such power. It must also utilise it effectively. In developed capitalist societies, economic resources are major sources of power. But there are other sources too, such as organisational capacities, numerical strength, efficiency, advanced knowledge, control over the access to information or over certain types of jobs or instruments, and even the reputation for having power. The latter is unique in that it depends not on the actual possession of power but on the perception that it exists.

The forms of power are numerous, and they have varied over time. In general, however, they fall under the categories of military strength, economic might, political power, and technological prowess. Political scientists have recently also begun to speak of a new category of power, soft power, even though this has in fact existed since time immemorial. It is difficult to draw sharp lines between these forms of power, since they usually interact and are mutually contingent.

Broadly speaking, power makes it possible to make others do what they may not be otherwise inclined to do, making them align their priorities and preferences with yours and creating or shaping the perceptions and beliefs without their realising it.

When a government determines its foreign policy aims and objectives, it must carefully assess its sources of strength and how they can be deployed in order to realise its ends. In so doing, it will typically utilise a combination of hard and soft power.

Egypt possesses numerous types of soft power. Among the most important are its language, history, culture, and political geography. Its moderate religious establishments such as Al-Azhar and the Coptic Church, lend the country a major religious and spiritual status, religion being the cornerstone of forging a peoples collective consciousness and way of thinking. Egypts great historical and civilisational heritage is another form of cultural capital and has enabled it to remain one of the most important players in the international and regional orders up until the present day.

In modern times, Egypts pivotal role has been manifested in its support for Arab causes, especially the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian peoples struggle against the Israeli occupation. It has also supported African causes, from the continents anti-colonialist and national liberation struggles to its developmental causes of today.

Egypt is also one of the worlds most open countries to other cultures, especially Western cultures with which it has had a long history of interplay and mutual influence. Egypt is a pioneer in cinema, television, the theatre, the media, music and literature. Egyptian Arabic has been instrumental in bringing the peoples of the Arab world closer together, through Egyptian films, plays, songs, as well as newspapers, magazines and radio. The Cairo-based Sawt Al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs) radio station, for example, was a major vehicle in unifying the Arab peoples against colonialism.

The crucial role that Egypt has played in the preservation of international peace and security by its participation in UN-sponsored peace-keeping operations has augmented its soft power. This has been important across the region, where Egyptian culture, thought and foreign policy values are a source of inspiration, and innumerable Egyptian intellectuals, artists, writers and religious leaders have contributed to shaping the Arab collective consciousness.

The strength and influence of Egypts soft power in the region is integrally related to the strength of the state and its political leaderships awareness of the importance of culture as a mainstay of national strategy. The foundation and rapid development of the modern Egyptian state allowed it to become a pioneer in the regional and international environment in many fields. Starting with the reign of Mohamed Ali Pasha at the outset of the 19th century, for example, Egypt founded the first modern army in the region and established what might be regarded as the first modern universities, such as the Al-Mohandes Khana (1816), the regions first school of engineering, and the first school of medicine in the Abu Zaabel (1817), which was followed in the 1820s and 1830s by the schools for midwives and veterinarians and of music, agriculture, mineralogy, languages and so on.

Mohamed Ali also established the tradition of sending students on educational missions abroad. Governments under his successors followed his lead, adding other instruments of soft power, such as museums, libraries, a royal opera house, and scientific establishments such as the Astronomical Observatory, the Chemistry Authority, and the Khedival Geographical Society. In the 20th century, during the reign of king Fouad the government founded the Arab Music Academy, the Egyptian Academy in Rome, the School of Fine Arts, and the Egyptian Broadcasting Company, to name but a few.

Egypts sources of soft power continued to accumulate until the late 1970s, which brought a major shift in Egypts affiliations abroad combined with a shift in focus to the domestic front where the government utilised soft power in its drive to equip the public to adjust to new political developments, most notably the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty and its repercussions on Egyptian-Arab and Egyptian-African relations.

Egypts regional influence declined further as a result of changes in the international order following the end of the Cold War, the rise of the US as the worlds sole superpower, and the rise of regional powers that began to jockey for regional leadership.

DECLINING POWER

Among the causes of Egypts regional decline are the negative impacts of globalisation and information technology on Egyptian culture, which began to lose its unique character blending authenticity, contemporaneity and the preservation of cultural, religious and historical identity in a regionally and internationally important form.

At the same time, Egypt saw an exodus of brain power and creative talent due to the governments declining attention to the needs of these sections of the population combined with other countries, particularly in the Gulf region, having the capacity to attract them. Regional rivals also emerged that were bent on spreading their influence in the Arab region by using soft power. The prime example of this is Turkey, which has presented itself as a model to be emulated by others and utilises Turkish media, arts and literature to influence other cultures.

Because of its preoccupation with domestic issues at the expense of external causes, Egypt lost much of its regional and international influence and its social, political, economic and cultural persuasiveness abroad. Egyptian culture, such as the arts, literature, and music, has also tended to project a negative image in which marginal elements are made to represent Egyptian society as a whole, with the language used also being needlessly vulgar.

The spread of mahragan (festival) music in Egypt has caused the countrys cultural influence to recede. And many commentators today believe that the Arab world in general and Egypt in particular is structurally flawed in terms of its ability to exercise soft power because it is so heavily subordinated to the West, which uses its media and control of cyberspace to influence Arab minds.

According to the US commentator Joseph Nye, soft power is a way to influence others to get the outcomes that you want. Coercion, or the stick, can be used, as can the carrot of money, to influence the way others think and behave such that they can be induced to want what you want them to want. Carrots and sticks constitute hard power, whereas the ability to persuade others without employing these things is soft power.

Soft power persuades or lures others to serve the ends you desire without having to use force or money. The most important forms of soft power include a given societys culture, especially those aspects of it that most attract others, a countrys political values, especially those most accepted or admired at home and abroad, a governments foreign policy if it conforms with the criteria of legitimacy, and a countrys economic or military resources, if the latter are channelled into such activities as international cooperation, training, and humanitarian relief.

Soft power can be exercised directly through powers of persuasion such as diplomacy or charismatic leadership or indirectly by generating an environment that induces others to modify their behaviour. Its feasibility is contingent on its credibility, especially in this age of intense rivalry among news and information outlets which leads people to search for the most credible sources of information even if they are based outside of their home countries. The longer audiences remain loyal to a countrys news and information outlets, the more durable is its soft power.

It would be mistaken to regard soft power as just an alternative to hard power, however. Soft power is often exercised in conjunction with hard power, and it is also a reflection of a countrys hard power. The two are inseparable and reinforce each other. Ultimately, hard power has the final say in balances of power, which is why those with soft power still prefer to possess hard power as well even if they have no intention of using it as a threat or deterrent.

Soft power is frequently found among those connected to the worlds cultural elites. This has led some to believe that it is not effective because it cannot compel compliance. Others go further and say that it is ineffective when it comes to solving major international problems such as armed conflicts. Such objections have contributed to the rise of the concept of smart power, which is essentially the art of effectively blending soft and hard power.

It is possible to convert hard power into soft power, notably by the use of coercive or gunboat diplomacy which involves the threat of force, military operations if legitimate and intended to defend rights or to protect civilians, and the extending of protection and security to friends and allies. Other ways of converting hard into soft power include taking part in peacekeeping operations that aim to protect civilians, safeguarding the arrival of humanitarian aid, or checking cross-border flows of refugees. The provision of training and humanitarian aid and emergency relief is another such method.

CHANGING CONCEPTS

The concept of power has also changed considerably in modern times, with Nye speaking in terms of its distribution and conversion.

The former takes place at the military, economic and transnational levels. As the US is the only military power capable of reaching any point in the world today, it ranks as the worlds strongest military power. However, economically there are other poles of power as well as multi-power entities such as the EU. The transnational encompasses all transnational phenomena outside of the control of states such as climate change, international terrorism and organised crime.

The 20th-century Italian writer Antonio Gramsci emphasised the need to differentiate between state control and cultural hegemony. Culture is multi-centred and has various influences and roles, he said, from school and religious establishments to media and financial circles, and it can help to generate a positive image of a countrys elite and help to control the minds of the public and ensure that people do not stray too far from the ways of capitalist society.

Gramsci argues that such hegemony or control is the key to historical pre-eminence and that culture more than any other force both drives people and keeps them under control, thereby serving the purposes of hegemony. However, cultural and intellectual hegemony require support if they are to prevail, and that support must stem from a sense of conviction that requires an intellectual and cultural order that attracts adherence to a particular belief system. In other words, capitalism, for example, is not built purely on the power of money and might, but also on the power of conviction which is shaped and reinforced in society by the culture of the ruling class.

Frances political elites accord particular value to sustaining a strong international presence and influence for their country. France is a world leader in the use of the principles of soft power, according to a 2017 report by Portland Communications, a leading political consultancy. The UK, the US and Germany ranked second, third and fourth, respectively, out of a list of 30 countries in this report. Russia placed 26, despite its status as the second global and nuclear power after the US.

French culture is a central component of Frances soft power. The country possesses a vast international network of French language-teaching organisations, and it is constantly expanding and upgrading French schools and universities abroad, of which there are 459 which enjoy excellent reputations as bastions for the production of national elites. French perfume, fashion, beauty products and jewellery are also among the visible trademarks of Frances soft power, and France has long stood in the vanguard of the power of ideas.

The French government has been proactive in developing its instruments of soft power by adopting policies to promote the economy of the intangible or symbolic capital, with this being grounded in Frances rich artistic heritage as epitomised by the Louvre Museum in Paris and the countrys other famous museums and in its intellectual and educational heritage as epitomised by the Sorbonne and other universities.

One example of the success of such policies can be found in the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum that French President Emmanuel Macron inaugurated in 2017. In his speech on that occasion, Macron quoted from the Russian writer Dostoyevskys novel Crime and Punishment, in which the main character, Raskolnikov, says that beauty will save the world. The museum cost $525 million, footed by the UAE, in exchange for the Louvres name and 130 works of art on loan for 30 years. Art and creativity thus became a new avenue for the realisation of economic aims.

Turkey offers another example of the use of culture as soft power in order to attain economic ends. Turkish TV series are the second most-exported after American ones, and they are exported to 102 countries, with the Arab countries being the foremost consumers. Some see this export drive as being part of a systematic intellectual and cultural campaign designed to project and polish Turkeys image. The productions themselves, from the selection of their casts and the elaborate and tightly woven plots that respect the audiences intelligence to the wealth and diversity of the characters and the choice of alluring locations as settings, seem to support this contention. The Turkish dramas also address social and human relations in moving and memorable ways.

With regard to the Arab market, it was a clever move to choose the Syrian dialect for the dubbing of the series because of its acceptability to the Arab ear due to the success of Syrian shows. Arab tourism to Turkey has shot up at times when Turkish serials were aired in the Arab region.

As for the US, its real power may lie not so much in its Fifth or Sixth Naval Fleets or in its marines and other elite military forces. Rather, the country consists of a collection of soft power buttresses that include universities of the status of Harvard, the economic and innovation hub of Silicon Valley in California, the city of New York, the Hollywood film industry, strong political parties, a free press and a strong civil society.

The US attracts the largest numbers of immigrants and foreign students that will carry US values into the future: 750,000 foreign students per year come to study in the US and 46 current heads of state graduated from US universities. The US has the largest numbers of Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry and economics. It is the worlds largest exporter of films and TV programmes, and it boasts the largest number of original music sales.

Egypt

EGYPTS SOFT POWER

Egypt undoubtedly has the potential to recover its sources of soft power and to put them to use both regionally and internationally.

It has the wealth and allure of its cumulative history and civilisation, which attract the West with its passion for Pharaonic history, and it attracts other African countries because of long and deep historical ties. Verdis opera Aida inspired many other musicians and librettists to compose works inspired by ancient Egyptian history. Mozarts opera The Magic Flute was also performed in Paris in 1801 under the title The Secrets of Isis. Rossini wrote an opera called Moses in Egypt.

The ancient Egyptian musical instruments that appear in the reliefs in Pharaonic temples attract musicologists as well as laypeople throughout the world to learn more about these instruments and the types of music they produced. In addition, the love story that linked the Ethiopian Aida with the Egyptian army commander in Verdis opera could also inspire other dramatic or fictional works that could be used to dissolve the boundaries between Egypt and Ethiopia and Africa in general.

Think of how cleverly the 2008 Indian film Jodhaa Akbar drew on the love story between Jalaluddin Mohamed Akbar, the Mughal emperor, and the Rajput princess Jodhaa in an artistic attempt to end Hindu-Muslim hostilities, for example. Egypt should also promote the study of its history and encourage the selection of the most inspiring and edifying episodes as subject matter for the cinema and the other arts, just as it should stimulate the optimal use of all its resources.

However, in addition to identifying the sources of Egyptian soft power, it is important to know how to put them to work effectively. Some of the following points need to be borne in mind.

There needs to be a clarity of objectives and their consistency with the values and interests to be promoted, and Egyptian culture and history should be explored for their most attractive and edifying aspects, and work should be undertaken to present them as alluringly and persuasively as possible. Modern technologies, especially the Internet and social-networking sites, should be used as much as possible, as these are powerful, rapid and relatively inexpensive instruments for the exercise and dissemination of soft power. The value of available resources and how they might change in accordance with changes in the international environment should also be assessed.

Efforts should be made to identify and rank preferences in terms of their aims, legitimacy and feasibility, and soft power should be incorporated into the national strategy, precisely because of its value in attracting others. Translation should be encouraged both in order to promote familiarity at home with other cultures and to transmit our culture to others. Efforts should be made to learn from the experiences of others, notably by looking at how France, the UK, the US and Germany have managed to rank so high in the indexes in the Portland report and adapting such lessons to Egypts circumstances.

Particular attention should be paid to the French experience, as this is particularly applicable to Egypts historical and civilisational wealth. A multi-language international news channel should be established to help to unify the Arab region and defend Arab interests in credible and persuasive ways. Lessons should be drawn from the Turkish, Indian and Korean film and television industries by promoting quality productions that can be directed, for example, to African markets and that are dubbed in local languages using appealing voices. Joint productions should be encouraged, especially those inspired by shared histories and interactions between peoples of different cultures.

Ultimately, soft power can go where hard power cannot. The patriotic song is mightier than the sword and more persuasive than political rhetoric. Films treating tolerance and love can be highly effective ways to dispel ethnic and sectarian discord and promote assimilation and coexistence both within a society or between societies. Soft power in its diverse forms in cultural and creative products can drive home a countrys political messages more widely and deeply than conventional propaganda.

It also can have major economic and developmental paybacks as it can be used to promote the domestic economy and attract investment and stimulate tourism, especially by the production of popular films set in attractive locations. In short, soft power can effectively showcase a countrys historical, scientific, cultural, economic, and technological attractions and achievements.

*The writer is an expert on national security affairs

*A version of this article appears in print in the 21 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: The importance of soft power

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Jewish National Fund will host a community reception on Sunday, March 31 at the Hilton St. Louis Frontenac, 1335 South Lindbergh Blvd. This free event will feature guest speaker Lt. Col. (Res.) Tiran Attia, the director of Special in Uniform. The reception will be held from 3 to 4:30 p.m. and RSVP is available at jnf.org/stl.

Attia serves as the director of Special in Uniform, a program that aims to integrate young people with autism and other disabilities into the Israel Defense Forces and, in turn, into Israeli society. After their service, Special in Uniform helps usher its graduates toward a self-sufficient life, through employment or other meaningful societal involvement, once they are discharged from the army.

As the mother of a former IDF lone soldier, I know first-hand about the strength of community that is built through Israeli army service, says Jenny Wolkowitz, who is co-chairing the event with Traci Goldstein. For those young people who cant participate in army service, for health reasons, they are at a major disadvantage in Israeli society. To find meaningful participation for these soldiers, allowing them to integrate into Israeli society, is truly a mitzvah of the highest order.

Connect with your community every morning.

As part of its focus on improving the quality of life in Israel for all its citizens, JNF hopes to ensure that no member of Israeli society is left behind. Through a variety of initiatives and partnerships, JNF is providing state-of-the-art rehabilitative services, special education and medical care in areas where they were previously unavailable. Beyond the medical, JNF is also ensuring that recreational facilities, including forests, parks, picnic areas, playgrounds and nature trails, are inclusive for visitors of all ability levels.

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For more information on this event or ways to get involved with JNF in St. Louis, contact Kim Levy at [email protected] or 314-635-0400.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.

Since seemingly no one in the cigar industry can resist commemorating an anniversary, its no surprise that the La Galera 1936 Box Pressed was introduced in 2016 to celebrate 80 years since the Blanco family opened its factory in the Dominican Republic. With an Ecuadorian Habano wrapper, Dominican binder, and Dominican Piloto Cubano and Criollo 98 filler, I thought the Robusto (5 x 50, $7.50) offered promise. But it began with a bit of harshness and didnt begin to smooth out until roughly the midpoint, when I picked up light spice and earthiness. The harshness returned in the final third. Construction was fine, with a solid burn and good draw.

Verdict = Hold.

George E

photo credit: Stogie Guys

The two British men accused of the kidnapping of a Latvian woman in Marbella in 2014, told a Malaga court on Monday that they did not know where she was.

Westley Capper, the son of British multimillionaire John Capper, and Craig Porter, face prison sentences of 12 years and damages of more than 80,000 euros for the disappearance of Agnese Klavina. The trial began on Monday in Malaga's provincial court.

Experts say Agnese's gestures show "fear" in CCTV footage In court on Tuesday police specialists explained their conclusions after analysing the CCTV footage showing Agnese leaving the nightclub and getting in the car with Capper and Porter. They explained that the last images of the missing woman show that she was afraid. The experts is analysing body language said that Capper invades the young woman's intimate space which indicates a threat and she moves backwards "to recover her space". The images show a struggle in which the woman makes defensive gestures while the defendant "holds her tightly by the wrists" explained the officers who went on to describe how in the sequence of her getting into the car shows that her dominant emotion is "fear".

The young woman was last seen leaving the Aqwa Mist nightclub in Puerto Banus on 6 September 2014 and getting into a car with the defendants. The prosecution says that video footage shows that Agnese was forced into the car against her will. She has not been seen since.

In court on the first day of the trial, Capper, whose defence is calling for his acquittal, said that he met Agnese that night in the club and had a few drinks with her and her female friend. He then suggested, he said, that they went back to his house to continue partying and Agnese agreed.

The young woman had been drunk, he said, and stumbled on the way to the car, which is why he had to grab her arm to hold her up.

According to Capper's story, he asked the club's doorman to close the car door and, after taking some cocaine, they drove out of the car park heading for his house on the El Madronal estate.

Minutes later, he said, Agnese asked him to stop the car because she wanted to get out. He dropped her off at the Ronda road roundabout, he said, as she told him she lived nearby, even though her home was really two kilometres away.

Drugs and alcohol

He and Porter, he said, carried on to his home where they took more drugs and drank alcohol.

Craig Porter confirmed in court that he had gone back to Capper's home where they continued "the party" by themselves. He told the court, however, that he didn't remember anything about what happened on the journey there from the nightclub as he fell asleep in the car. In court on Monday the nightclub's doorman said that the woman got into the car of her own accord and he had to close the door twice because the first time it didn't close properly.

"Nothing unusual"

On Tuesday Agnese's sister, called as a witness, told the court that there was nothing unusual going on in her life and that she had never said she wanted to disappear.

The missing girl's mother and a male friend also stated that she lived a normal life. Everything in her apartment, they said, had been left in its place, just as it would be if someone goes out and expects to return home a few hours later. There was no indication that she might have planned to disappear of her own accord.Police have broken up a gang that pretended to be Guardia Civil officers to steal from drug traffickers and business people.

The seven members were surprised while holding a meeting to launder 480,000 euros on behalf of a drug gang at which they falsely claimed they were undercover police in order to make off with the cash.

The gang operated in Malaga, Seville and Madrid.The minister for the Interior has confirmed that a judge has now taken over the investigation into some members, past and present, of two local councils and the dumping of untreated sewage in nearby waterways or the sea.

Fernando Grande-Marlaska, on a visit to Malaga on Wednesday, commented on the investigation, codenamed Operation Vastum, (from the Latin for waste dump). He said, "It's early days and we'll see what the outcome is."

The Guardia Civil's environmental protection unit, Seprona, has been leading an inquiry since November 2017 into some public officials, initially at Coin and Nerja councils and more recently extending into Alhaurin el Grande.

Wipes clog up a sewage outlet on the seabed. / SUR

Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Minister of the Interior: "It's early days and we'll see what the outcome is" Jose A. Armijo, former mayor of Nerja: "Nerja town hall met its obligation in 2002 by handing over the land to the Junta and the Ministry for a treatment plant that isn't in service yet" Fernando Fernandez-Tapia, Former PP mayor of Coin: "In 2010 the Junta promised 47 sewage treatment plants paid for by the water-bill levy. All a town hall can do is wait" Rosa Arrabal, PSOE mayor of Nerja: "It's municipal responsibility once the infrastructure is in place, but not before"

However, those quizzed so far, including some current and former mayors, have hit back saying that it isn't their town halls' job to treat waste if the Junta de Andalucia regional government hasn't provided the treatment plants to do it.

Fines for polluting

For several years, Spain has been fined by the EU for continuing to allow some of its councils to dump untreated waste. The current investigation stems from a complaint by green action group, Ecologistas en Accion, claiming that councils were committing fraud by adding a sewage-treatment levy to people's water bills even though no treatment was going on. The levy is passed on by the town halls to the Junta de Andalucia, which, the council officials say, should be getting on with putting in the missing treatment works.

In total, 16 mayors, former mayors, councillors and public officials in Nerja and Coin have been questioned by police. The complaint was originally against five local urban areas where waste went untreated, including Estepona and San Pedro, but with a new treatment plant now open at Guadalmansa, near Estepona, only three town halls are apparently now flouting a 2001 law for municipalities with populations over 15,000 that says they should have treatment plants in place.

Coin waste

In inland Coin, police say waste is being dumped in protected tributaries of the Pereilas river, causing "a lifeless area". Most towns and villages in the Guadalhorce valley, except Alhaurin de la Torre, dump waste from homes and businesses.

Former mayor of Coin for the PP party, Fernando Fernandez-Tapia, who has now, ironically, taken on a role in the new Junta de Andalucia, said that in 2010 "the Junta promised 47 sewage treatment plants paid for by the water-bill levy. All town halls can do is wait".

The planned lower Guadalhorce treatment plant for Coin, which also would serve Pizarra and Alora, should go into test phase shortly, having been started in 2013.

Nerja's three outflow pipes

In Nerja, untreated sewage is still pumped into the sea at three points. Two pipes offshore opposite Burriana and Torrecilla beaches and one closer to shore near the Maro cliffs.

The current mayor of Nerja, Rosa Arrabal, of the PSOE said, "It's a municipal responsibility once the infrastructure is in place, but not before," saying she was surprised by the inquiry and that she would tell that to the judge if asked.

In Nerja, work on a treatment plant started in 2014 and it should have been up and running three years ago, however constructors' financial problems and differences within the council have stopped it coming into service, even through it is four-fifths finished.

The third phase of Operation Vastum, involving Alhaurin el Grande, is still in the early stages and has not yet been passed to a judge.Numerous Brits living in Malaga will be among at least 100 UK residents in Spain travelling to London for Saturday's Put it to the People march, to call on the government to give the UK population another chance to vote on Brexit.

Biggest march to date

It is expected to be the biggest anti-Brexit demonstration to date and hundreds of thousands of protesters will be calling for a people's vote. For many this is a "now or never" moment to get their voices heard, with less than a week before the date set by the British government for the UK to leave the EU, and with parliament voting against a second referendum but in favour of extending Article 50 last week.

Bremain in Spain chair, Sue Wilson said in a press release this week, "If Theresa May can keep asking parliament the same question, how can she deny the public a second chance?"

Theresa O'Shea, an English teacher who has lived in Malaga province for over 20 years, is travelling to London especially for the march. She told SUR in English, "I wasn't allowed to vote in the ballot box, so I'm voting with my feet." Theresa will be meeting up with the Bremain in Spain group who are gathering at Green Park tube station at 11:30 and will join the march from there.

Other groups that represent Britons abroad and Spanish residents living in the UK to be joining Bremain in Spain include In Limbo Project, Brexpats-Hear our voice and Espanoles en Reino Unido.

Tamara Essex, a British resident living in Malaga, will also be walking with the Bremain in Spain group, explained why she decided to fly to London for the march.

"We are at such a critical moment for the future of our country. The Prime Minister is determined to have two, three, four votes on her deal, trying to get people to change their minds, despite nothing having changed between votes. All we are asking is the chance to look at all the new information that has emerged in the last two years, and have a second referendum, because we know that many sensible people have changed their minds because of that new information."

She added, "I feel I have to march in London to play a tiny part in showing the government what we want."

Spaniards in London

Carmen Ortega and Jose Luis Millet, who are both from Velez-Malaga but have lived and worked as teachers in London for over five years, are also planning to go to the event.

Millet told SUR in English, "I am going to the march because the UK deserves another opportunity to vote, as politicians lied to the people and now everyone has seen the negative consequences of those lies."

Ortega said, "I have made London my home. I work and pay my taxes here and have a life here now. I have spent the last three years worrying about my future and I feel strongly that Brexit is having a huge, negative effect on my life."

Anyone travelling to London for the march on Saturday is invited to meet up with other Brits and Spaniards at Green Park underground station from 11.30am.Every rule is made to be broken. That was what red-faced national regulators discovered on Thursday morning in their ongoing attempts to get the Catalan regional government to take down its "political" yellow ribbon symbols. It needs to comply with a rule that guarantees the neutrality of public bodies ahead of forthcoming elections in Spain.

The Spanish electoral commission had said last week that the regional government, headed by Quim Torra, needed to remove them as the local authority has the role of overseeing fair play in upcoming municipal, Euro and national votes, and so cannot be seen to be taking sides. The yellow symbol is displayed by Catalan separatist supporters in protest over the detention and trial of some of its leaders and politicians.

After initial defiance, the regional president said he would only agree to an official Catalan body, not a national one, telling him to take them down. That job fell to the Catalan public ombudsman on Wednesday, who agreed with the electoral commission. Torra then said he would comply, although it was later claimed he had already known, before publicly asking the ombudsman last Friday, what the expert's decision was.

Spain waited on Thursday to see the removal of the yellow ribbon from the balcony of the seat of the regional government in Barcelona.

However, to people's surprise, Torra had found a way around his problem. The same banner with the yellow ribbon was swapped for an identical one but with the ribbon in white with a red brushstroke across it.

Opposition politicians accused the regional president of playing "cat and mouse" with the electoral commission and Spain waited to see if the new-look banner would be allowed to stay or not.The Bank of Spain has been trying to predict the effect that the UK's withdrawal from the EU will have on the Spanish economy. Such a task is far from straightforward, not least because it remains uncertain what kind of Brexit, if any, will occur (Theresa May has requested a three-month extension to get the job done). Nevertheless, the Bank has stated that the effect on Spain's GDP over the next five years will be "significant" but not "excessive". What do these rather vague terms actually mean, though?

In the case that the UK divorces the EU with a deal next Friday, Spain's GDP will contract by 0.02% over five years, the Bank predicts. In other words, in an increasingly-unlikely scenario that everything goes more or less as it should do, the Spanish economy will barely register Brexit over the course of the medium-term future.

This forecast depends either on May being able to secure approval in the UK parliament for her existing deal in the next seven days, or being granted a three-month extension by the EU. The latter is the more probable of the two but still far from certain, with France requesting that Britain offer "guarantees" that it will deliver a deal in order for the deadline to be delayed. Brussels has every reason to doubt the UK's ability to make such promises, though: if May is unable to pull off Brexit in two-and-a-half years, what difference will an extra three months make?

According to the Bank of Spain, the "default option" is now that Britain will stroll (or, more accurately, stumble backwards) into the unknown without a deal on March 29th. The effect on the Spanish economy over the next five years, in this case, will be around 0.82%, says the Bank. Again, in terms of concrete impact, such a contraction is almost negligible.

Without wanting to be unduly pessimistic, one wonders if both these figures (especially the second one) are too optimistic. British expatriates and holidaymakers are hugely important to the Spanish economy: last year a record 18.8 million Britons visited Spain - the largest group, by some way, of all foreign tourists holidaying here - and spent over 17 billion in doing so.

If it becomes more expensive or difficult to visit or continue living in this beautiful country, many Britons will start to seek the joys of Mediterranean culture elsewhere - an exodus that would likely have a substantial impact on Spain's GDP. This is precisely why the Spanish government has been working to secure the rights of Britons in Spain and Spaniards in the UK, and why a no-deal Brexit would be the worst outcome for both countries. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.Alex Wong/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- President Donald Trump made the surprise announcement Friday that he was cancelling a new round of sanctions intended to target North Korea announced only 24 hours earlier by his own administration.



"It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea," Trump tweeted after arriving at his Mar a Lago club in Florida. "I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!"

It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2019



White House press secretary Sarah Sanders confirmed the president's announcement in a statement, citing his personal friendship with the North Korean dictator.



"President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesnt think these sanctions will be necessary," Sanders said.



The Treasury Department just Thursday had announced the round of sanctions targeting two Chinese shipping companies that it said have helped North Korea evade sanctions.



The tweet marked a stunning and major policy reversal of the first round of sanctions targeting the regime since Trump's failed Hanoi summit with Kim last month.



In a tweet following the original sanctions announcement, President Trump's national security adviser John Bolton highlighted the move as an "important" step and warned other countries against similar actions to aid North Korea.

Important actions today from @USTreasury; the maritime industry must do more to stop North Koreas illicit shipping practices. Everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Koreas sanctions evasion. https://t.co/AVnOPrWbH6  John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) March 21, 2019



In a briefing on the sanctions with reporters Thursday, an administration official similarly touted the significance of the sanctions, characterizing the package as unprecedented and comprehensive.



Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.Genalguacil, a village in Malaga province's Genal valley with barely 400 inhabitants, has been included in a list of Spain's top 100 cultural hotspots. The Culture Observatory, carried out by Fundacion Contemporanea, is based on survey responses from 1,000 professionals in the cultural sector in Spain.

Genalguacil's cultural attraction is its Encuentro de Arte, held for two weeks in August every two years. Selected artists travel the winding mountain roads to create their artistic projects in the village, among the locals. They leave the results behind them as part of the village's artistic heritage.

Genalguacil was in 15th place on the Andalusian top 20 cultural projects list, which was headed by Seville's flamenco festival and Malaga's Picasso museum.

Malaga came fifth in the national list of cultural cities and the Picasso Museum was 16th in the overall top 60 cultural projects for Spain.Three startup teams from Swinburnes Innovation Precinct travelled to Indias top engineering institute to participate in an incubator program to take their ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Equipping entrepreneurs

I-NCUBATE is an intensive program at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

The program helps researchers and entrepreneurs validate whether their technological ideas could become scalable and sustainable businesses. In the program, participants interact with potential customers, produce a product that can be tested in the marketplace, and receive mentoring to formulate a business model.

Swinburne startups

The Swinburne startups that took part cover a diverse range of ideas and industries:

Cathease Catheter Forceps: Dr Andrew Dyall, an emergency medicine physician and Swinburne PhD student, has designed forceps to reduce infection caused when inserting urinary catheters.

Dr Andrew Dyall, an emergency medicine physician and Swinburne PhD student, has designed forceps to reduce infection caused when inserting urinary catheters. Low-cost, environmentally-friendly apartments: Swinburne graduate Andrew Steed wants to use prefabricated Hempcrete panels to build dwellings that can be constructed in a fraction of the time of typical buildings.

Swinburne graduate Andrew Steed wants to use prefabricated Hempcrete panels to build dwellings that can be constructed in a fraction of the time of typical buildings. Bond coating for turbine engines: Swinburne researcher Andrew Ang and PhD student Ashok Meghwal are developing a new thermal coating to improve turbine engine performance in jet engines.

Dr Andrew Dyall says the I-NCUBATE program helped him to understand the entrepreneurial spirit in India and make valuable connections.

I got a real feel for the kinds of products that are useful to the Indian market in a relatively low-resource environment, and I spoke with a number of doctors about setting up a trial. My key takeaways are to be open, curious and really listen to potential customers, he says.

Product Design Engineering graduate Andrew Steed, says the program equipped him with the skills to progress his idea and start conducting interviews with potential customers.

The biggest reason startups fail is because they dont listen to their customers and understand their needs, says Andrew.

The program gave me a better understanding of whats next. The program didnt give me the answers  it gave me the questions to ask.

For PhD student Ashok Meghwal, the project management and customer liaison skills he learnt will enable him to progress his teams idea into domestic and international markets.

Im from a technology background so Ive never learnt much about managing a project and interacting with customers  that was the most important thing for me. We need to learn what the customer wants and needs and model our product in that way, he says.

Research, innovation and commercialisation

Executive Director of Swinburne's Innovation Precinct Dr John Morrison travelled to India with the teams and believes the program fosters an entrepreneurial mind-set.

Its an essential pit-stop on the journey of transforming an idea into something bigger. India is a fascinating, highly-segmented market, and it has been a huge learning experience for the teams, says Dr Morrison.

Last year Swinburne and IIT Madras established a jointly funded research centre to explore and link the research, innovation and commercialisation capabilities of the two institutions.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Development) Professor Aleksandar Subic says the partnership with IIT Madras enlarges Swinburnes international research innovation and commercialisation ecosystem.

We want to produce research with impact and be an innovative enterprise. Joint research centres and global partnerships enable Swinburne to do that.

This partnership is helping us to transform industry and positively impact lives and communities across the world. IIT Madras brings a scale to projects that is impossible in Australia, says Professor Subic.ICS updates flag state performance table

The International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) has updated its Flag State Performance Table, which can be downloaded free of charge from the ICS website.

The annual update, which was also supported by the Asian Shipowners Association (ASA) and the European Community Shipowners Associations (ECSA), provides an indication of the performance of individual flag administrations, using information available in the public domain.



Since the Table was launched 15 years ago, ICS said it has been pleased by the ongoing improvement which the data has helped to demonstrate. Among the 12 largest flag states, responsible for 80% of world merchant tonnage, none had more than one potential negative indicator and nine had no negative indicators.



The purpose of the ICS Table is to encourage ship operators to examine whether a flag state has substance before using it and to put pressure on their current flag administrations if improvements might be needed, for example with regard to port state control records of ships under their flag, failure to ratify key IMO Conventions or regular attendance at IMO meetings, explained ICS secretary general, Guy Platten.



In a global industry such as shipping there is nothing unusual about an international ship registry system. But a balance has to be struck between the commercial advantages of selecting a particular flag and the need to discourage the use of flag states that may not fully adhere to their international obligations, especially with regard to safety and environmental performance Platten added.



Markets - Activity disappointing

With the March VLCC MEG programme behind us, the owning community was looking forward to a spurt in activity for early April hoping to push rates up to WS60 eastbound.

However, activity has thus far been disappointing, Fearnleys reported. Last done for a MEG/China run was WS59 by Wednesday, although this equates to about $30,000 per day in TCE returns on a non eco modern ship - well above the normal returns for this time of year. USG activity has also stopped. A handful of owners have ballasted ships from the east on spec and are nervously awaiting fresh export cargoes to return to the east. In the Suezmax segment, continued sparse activity in the West has allowed charterers to push rates even further down. The 1st decade in West Africa has been worked at a slow pace with ships being taken quietly and owners just content to cover cargoes closest to their dates. However, there has been a reversal of fortunes in MEG with a flurry of action for first decade April dates. Owners managed to wrestle back some control as the tonnage list tightened. The Turkish Straits delays have slowly decreased, and this has allowed more fluidity in the availability for the Black Sea, TD6 has come off to WS70 at the time of writing (Wednesday). The week ahead has a softer tone as too many ships are still available and cargoes not seemingly increasing in volume. Turning to Aframaxes, trading in the North Sea and Baltic came off significantly this week. Rates came under downward pressure, due to lack of activity and tonnage building up. The market is waiting to hear when ice restrictions in certain Baltic ports will be lifted. We expect this soft trend to continue, Fearnleys said. In the Mediterranean and Black Sea, TD19 (cross-Med) has fallen to WS85 levels at the time of writing. Over the past week, rate levels ex Black Sea have dropped from more than WS100 to sub-WS90 levels. On a lighter note, the current week started with a boost in activity, as a steady flow of cargoes came onto the market decreasing the tonnage build up in the area and creating an optimistic vibe among owners. They hope to see an upturn towards the end of this week, as there is currently no obvious alternative markets to turn to, the broker concluded. Meanwhile, Euronav has reportedly chartered a Scorpio tanker to ship a 30,000 tonne cargo of low sulphur fuel oil from northwest Europe to Malta. The vessel was believed bound for the anchored ULCC Oceania to transfer her cargo. Oil analytics firm Vortexa said the Handysize STI Brixton loaded an lsfo cargo at Antwerp on 9th March and was due to reach Malta this week. This is the first STS operation to be reported with the Oceania since she arrived offshore Malta in January, Vortexa said. Euronavs chartering and fuel oil purchasing activity signals an emerging trend of shipowners becoming more active in the trading arena, said senior Vortexa trading specialist, Cosmo Kedros. We expect to see more of this across Europe and Asia in the run-up to the IMO 2020 deadline. The 244 m LR2 berthed at Stolthavens bulk liquids terminal Mayfield 7, marking the culmination of a significant investment in the port. This milestone followed the arrival of the ports first LR1 in early January. Receiving vessels of this size was made possible following a four-year collaborative project between Stolthaven, Port of Newcastle, Port Authority of NSW and Svitzer to expand channel capacity and accommodate deep draft tankers of up to 245 m LOA. In the charter market, brokers reported that Koch had taken the 2019-buit VLCC New Melody for 12 months at $30,000 per day. There were several MRs reported fixed for 12 month periods at rates ranging from $13,000 to $14,200 per day, plus options, while the 2007-built Handysize San Carlos was thought taken by Repsol for 12 months at $13,500 per day. In the S&P sector, the 2001-built VLCC Sea Horizon was said to have been sold to Ocean Tankers for $22.5 mill, while the elderly 1998-built Suezmax La Mer was thought to have changed hands for $11.1 mill. A 2009-built Aframax Southern Spirit was believed committed to undisclosed interests for $22.5 mill, while the older 2005-built Agrios was believed sold to undisclosed interests for $16 mill. In the MR segment, German interests were said to have paid $14 mill for the 2007-built MR Sirius, while Wilmar was reported to have bought the 2004-built Stavanger Breeze for $8.5 mill and Waruna agreed $6 mill for the 2002-built Handysize Emmanuel Tomasos. As for newbuildings, reports were coming in suggesting that Nanjing Tankers had ordered up to four LR1s at domestic yards.



Replacing Iranian barrels

OPEC crude production fell by 240,000 barrels per day in February to 30.68 mill barrels, the lowest level in four years.

February numbers show a significant cut over compliance, with Saudi Arabia leading the way with a 153% compliance rate, already some 170,000 barrels per day below the overall target. Iraq and Saudi Arabia contributed 170,000 barrels in additional cuts between them in February alone, Gibson Shipbrokers said in a report. However, having already cut production close to their original 2019 target, they may now be missing the opportunity to capture market share in the face of rising demand. The impact of sanctions on crude supply may soon increase. Although Iran is exempt from OPECs cuts, in seven weeks waivers for Iranian crude are set to expire. Some of Irans biggest customers - China, India, Japan and South Korea - are all partially exempt from the current US oil sanctions on Iran, however this may soon change. Last week, IEA data showed Iranian crude production had fallen to 2.85 mill barrels per day in February, its lowest level since the first quarter of 2015, when Iran was under previous sanctions. In 2018, Iran exports averaged almost 2.5 mill barrels per day, with over 1 mill going to China and India. The US Administration has not yet revealed whether any of these waivers will be extended, leaving those countries potentially having to replace over 1 mill barrels per day from elsewhere. However, this may not be as easy as it sounds. Obvious sources, such as Venezuela and Iraq, are already under sanctions or participating in OPEC cuts. This may now leave OPEC wondering whether deeper cuts are appropriate considering many refineries in the region are optimised for heavier crudes. The tightness in the heavy crude market is also exacerbated by greater US appetite to replace Venezuelan barrels with heavy grades already in short supply. Incremental supplies from Canada are also limited, owing to government enforced production cuts. Recent reports from Reuters said that the US aims to cut Irans exports by a further 20% to below 1 mill barrels per day, saying that they were unwilling to cut anymore over price hike fears, backtracking on previous statements to cut their exports to as close to zero as possible. However, analysts have indicated that India could be willing to cut all Venezuelan crude imports to satisfy US sanctions in return for further waivers on importing Iranian crude. This would potentially starve Venezuela of its last majorcash buyer although simultaneously, it would cause a headache for some Indian refiners that prefer Venezuelan grades. However, the situation in Venezuela looks like it will get worse before it gets better. The heavy crude market is already incredibly tight and production cuts come at a time when demand for heavy grades is rising.This is significant, as greater demand for heavy grade crudes will have to be sourced from elsewhere, especially when we start to exit the Asia/Pacific maintenance season and new refineries come online. With production cuts coming from the main heavy grade producing regions, refiners may have to look West to replace their missing barrels thus supporting tonne/mile demand from West to the East. With US production posting strong growth this year, OPEC cuts are to be largely offset, perhaps justifying the organisations current stance even if theres a mismatch of grades. Meanwhile, Reuters has reported that the Maritime Authority of Panama (AMP) has removed 59 Iranian-linked ships from its registry, quoting ShareAmerica, the US State Department-run platform. The move came after Juan Carlos Varela, Panamanian President, issued a presidential decree last month, allowing the AMP to de-register the vessels. Out of these, at least 21 Iranian-owned tankers have had their registration revoked, Reuters reported. In 2016, Iran and Panama agreed to add Iranian tankers to the Panamanian flag, which has now been dissolved due to the sanctions.



MOSCOW, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Two Russian Su-27 fighters escorted a U.S. B-52H strategic bomber over neutral waters of the Baltic Sea until it left the Russian border, the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.

The appearance of U.S. bombers near Russian borders created additional tension, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a briefing on Thursday.

The Russian jets took off to identify and accompany the U.S. bomber after it was detected "at a considerable distance" from the Russian border, the defense ministry said in a statement on Facebook.

After the B-52H changed its route and flew away from the Russian border, the Su-27 aircraft returned to their home airfield.

The ministry did not disclose the date of the incident.

According to media reports, the U.S. Air Force recently deployed six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to Europe for "theater integration and flying training" drills with regional allies and North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners.By Yu Lin and Pang Qingjie

FRIGATE YUEYANG, March 22 (ChinaMil)  At about 10 a.m. on March 20, 2019, the Chinese guided-missile frigate Yueyang (Hull 575) set sail from a naval port in Sanya, a city in southern Chinas Hainan Province, for Malaysia, to participate in the 15th Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition (LIMA).

The 15th LIMA is set to open in Langkawi, Malaysia's largest island, on March 26, 2019. Totally 15 ships from thirteen countries, including China, the United States, Japan, Russia and Thailand will attend the exhibition. Chinas frigate Yueyang will participate in activities such as maritime display, warship inspection, maritime exercise and gourmet festival.

"Participating in this event will help strengthen exchanges with the navies of various countries, enhance friendship and mutual trust, and also display the good image of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) Navy as a peace-loving and civilized armed force," said Tang Yapeng, political commissar and commanding officer of the Chinese frigate Yueyang.

The biennial Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace (LIMA) Exhibition, dating back to 1991, is the largest comprehensive maritime and aerospace exhibition for defense in the Southeast Asia region.It is more likely that it is the former UN ambassador who does not like their answer. The reaction was immediate, with hundreds of people identifying themselves as Finns happy with their health care system offering statistics and anecdotes about how good it is.

Haley, who is touted as a rising star in the Republican Party and a potential presidential candidate in 2024, shot back that, "Health care costs are too high that is true but comparing us to Finland is ridiculous. Ask them how their health care is. You won't like their answer."

Sanders, who has made universal health care one of his signature platforms, said it costs an average of $12,000 for a woman to have a baby in the United States, while in Finland it costs only $60.

Haley, a savvy politician who as President Donald Trump's United Nations ambassador from 2017 until December 2018, regularly topped opinion polls as the most popular member of his administration, ignited the Finns when she tried to take a swipe at a tweet by Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders.

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley found herself in a Twitter feud with the people of Finland on Thursday, after she commented unfavorably on their health care system.

While personal income tax rates are very high -- 51.60 percent -- Finns get many services in return, not just health care. But for new mothers, the system offers comprehensive services.

While the charge to the patient who gives birth is only $60, the government picks up the rest of the cost. In addition, new mothers receive a generous care package with clothes and baby care products. Mothers and their babies also get free medical checkups. Day care is heavily subsidized and mothers get at least four months' paid maternity leave. And according to the World Health Organization, Finland has the lowest maternal mortality rate in the world.

South Carolina, which Haley governed from 2011-2017 when she left to join the Trump administration, has seen its maternal mortality rates drop slowly, but they still remain among the highest in the United States. There are also wide disparities in who is affected. Many more African-American mothers are likely to die from complications of childbirth than white mothers in the southern state.

Haley's former counterpart at the United Nations, Finnish Ambassador Kai Sauer, also sent out a string of tweets touting his nation's health care system. He noted in addition to its strong record on preventing maternal mortality, Finland has the world's third-lowest infant mortality rate and the second-lowest mortality rate for cancer in the European Union.

Sauer's tweets came several hours after Haley's original one and he apologized for that noting, "We were out celebrating our rank as the happiest country of the world."

Since leaving her UN post at the end of December, Haley has been spending much of her time on the social media platform tweeting about lighter fare, including learning how to use the taxi service app Uber, her new favorite lipstick and her beloved dog, Bentley.

She has also set up a new advocacy group, "Stand for America" that will focus on "promoting public policies that strengthen America's economy, culture, and national security."

Last month, U.S. aerospace manufacturer Boeing announced that it had nominated Haley to join its board of directors. Company shareholders will vote on whether to give her a seat at their annual shareholders meeting on April 29. Boeing has recently come under intense scrutiny after two of its 737 Max aircraft crashed in the space of five months, killing all aboard.

Haley, a strong advocate for Israel during her UN tenure, was recently honored by having a commemorative coin struck with her image on it by three Israeli religious organizations.

According to the Associated Press, the coin features Haley's face set with the UN building in the background and goes for $65 in silver and $90 in gold. While at the UN, Haley was a vocal supporter of Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; to slash funding to the UN agency that cares for Palestinian refugees; and to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council, which is seen by critics as overly focused on Israel.

Haley is also hitting the lucrative speakers' circuit. Last week, she became the first woman to give the keynote address at the Society of The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, and June 3, she is scheduled to be the main speaker in Washington at the Campaign for Life Gala, which advocates against abortion. Last year, Trump delivered the keynote address.

Haley's post at the United Nations remains unfilled nearly three months after her departure. Trump's first choice for the post, former State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, withdrew her name from the process. On Feb. 22, the president announced he would nominate Kelly Craft, a top Republican donor and U.S. ambassador to Canada, to the post, but her name has not yet been sent to the Senate for approval.

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

Queen Margrethe II and Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark embarked on an official visit to Argentina this week, and Margrethe brought along several signature pieces from her jewelry box.

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

On Monday, Margrethe arrived for a luncheon at the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires, where she was greeted by President Mauricio Macri and his wife, First Lady Juliana Awada.

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

Margrethe wore heart-shaped earrings with pearls for the luncheon.

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

Heres a closer look at the golden heart earrings, which also feature a dark cabochon gemstone (garnet, perhaps?) set in their center.

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

She wore a long strand of pearls in a vintage-inspired style reminiscent of sautoir necklaces worn by royal women in the past.

On Monday evening, Margrethe was joined by Frederik for a reception at the Yacht Club in Buenos Aires.

Margrethe wore summery jewels, including a golden brooch and festive earrings, for the reception.

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

On Tuesday, Margrethe visited the Remembrance Park in Buenos Aires, which includes a memorial paying tribute to lives lost during the nations former dictatorship.

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

She chose one of her signature pieces for the event: playful daisy earrings from Georg Jensen.

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

She also wore a golden brooch with a bright, abstract floral design.

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

Heres a closer look at the brooch, which features a small gemstone set at the center of the flower.

Margrethe and Frederik joined Vice President Gabriela Michetti on Tuesday evening for a gala reception at the Alvear Hotel in Buenos Aires.

Margrethe wore a gold necklace with four drops, as well as matching earrings. Im not sure whether these are rubies, spinels, or maybe even garnets. The suite bears some resemblance to the silver anniversary jewels given to Margrethe by the late Prince Henrik.

MARA SOSTI/AFP/Getty Images

On Wednesday, Margrethe traveled to Tandil to visit to the statue of Juan Fugl, one of the first Danish immigrants who settled in the area.

MARA SOSTI/AFP/Getty Images

Margrethe again looked to her collection of daisy-themed jewelry for accessories for Wednesdays outfit.

MARA SOSTI/AFP/Getty Images

Along with a bright daisy brooch, Margrethe wore large button-style earrings made of clusters of smaller daisies.March 15-20, 2019

Official visits brought us a bounty of royal jewels this week  dont forget to vote for your favorites in the poll below! (Also, please note that this post had to be prepared a day earlier than usual, so jewels worn late Wednesday and Thursday will be included in next weeks roundup!)

Ian Vogler -WPA Pool/Getty Images

15. On Tuesday, the Duchess of Sussex wore a pair of gold earrings given to her by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern during a visit to New Zealand House in the wake of the recent horrific shootings in Christchurch.





Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

14. The Duchess of Devonshire appropriately wore a pin with a canine design at Chatsworth on Wednesday to launch the homes latest exhibition, The Dog: A Celebration.

Pablo Cuadra/Getty Images

13. Shoulder-dusting statement earrings were Queen Letizia of Spains choice for the National Culture Awards in Madrid on Tuesday.

Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

12. For engagements in London on Tuesday, the Duchess of Cambridge chose morganite earrings from Kiki McDonough. ( Much more over here!

BENOIT DOPPAGNE/AFP/Getty Images

11. Queen Mathilde of the Belgians were pink earrings on Friday for a visit to an institution for people with intellectual disabilities in Deinze.

Chris Jackson/Getty Images

10. The Duchess of Cornwall has already made more than one appearance in her signature pearl drop earrings during this weeks Caribbean tour, including an outing at a Commonwealth Big Lunch in Barbados on Tuesday.

9. For a reception at the Yacht Club in Buenos Aires on Monday evening, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark chose summery jewels, including a golden brooch. ( More over here!

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

8. Margrethe chose daisy earrings and a golden floral brooch on Tuesday for a visit to Remembrance Park in Buenos Aires. ( See close-ups over here!

MARA SOSTI/AFP/Getty Images

7. Margrethe wore major daisy jewels on Wednesday for a visit to the statue of Juan Fugl in Tandil. ( More here!

JUAN MABROMATA/AFP/Getty Images

6. Pearls and heart-shaped earrings accompanied Margrethe to an official luncheon at Argentinas Presidential Palace on Monday. ( Much more here!

5. Margrethe wore a suite of jewels with red gemstone drops for a gala reception in Argentina on Tuesday evening. ( More here!

A royal christening today for Lena Elizabeth Tindall. The Queen arrived there for her great-granddaughters christening. Lovely lovely in white. pic.twitter.com/SH2H06J23e  RoyalistSupporter (@ProRoyalFamily) March 18, 2019

4. For the christening of Lena Tindall on Sunday, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom wore her Pearl Trefoil Brooch.

Chris Jackson/Getty Images

3. Camilla chose diamond earrings from the Magic Alhambra collection by Van Cleef and Arpels for a reception at the Governor Generals House in Bridgetown, Barbados on Tuesday evening.

GARETH FULLER/AFP/Getty Images

2. Kate paired Kiki McDonough earrings with the luminous Irish Guards Brooch as she handed out shamrocks on Sunday in London. ( Much more over here!

Paul Grover  WPA Pool/Getty Images

1. For a visit to Kings College London with the Duchess of Cambridge on Tuesday, Queen Elizabeth II wore pearls with her pink cluster brooch. ( More here!Venezuelan opposition leader and self-declared interim president Juan Guaido says intelligence agents have detained his chief of staff.

Guaido's aide, Roberto Marrero, reportedly was taken into custody in an overnight raid on his home. "We do not know his whereabouts," Guaido wrote of Marrero in an early morning Twitter post. "He must be released immediately."

Also, opposition lawmaker Sergio Vergara's home was searched but he was not detained. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Guaido both claim to be the legitimate president of the South American country.

The United States has frequently warned Maduro's socialist government from arresting Guaido or his aides. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo quickly denounced the actions and demanded that Marrero be released.

"We call for his immediate release," Pompeo said on Twitter. "We will hold accountable those involved."

U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton tweeted "Maduro has just made another big mistake" that "will not go unanswered." U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated Tuesday that "all options" are under consideration to oust Maduro from office, suggesting military action if necessary.

Released only a few weeks ago, Enchantee (Trelease's debut) follows Camille Durbonne, a girl in 1789 Paris who has the ability to do small magic as she attempts to infiltrate the Court of Versailles and win big so she and her sister can finally live in comfort, but the Court is more dangerous than it seems and danger lurks around every turn, plus Revolution is coming.If you're an Outlander fan and love 18th Century Paris, then Dragonfly in Amber would be perfect for you (after you've read the first book of course) as it follows Jamie and Claire in 1745 Paris as they attempt to thwart the forthcoming Jacobite Rising.If you're wanting a cute romance set in Pairs, then look no further than Anna and The French Kiss, which follows American teenager Anna as she navigates falling in love as she is sent off to boarding school in Paris for her senior year.If you're looking for something a little bit more heartbreaking, then this WWII story of two sisters in Nazi Occupied France as they make their seperate journies toward freedom during WWII.The setting of Code Name Verity switches between 1941 England and 1943 in Ormaie, France as an SOE agent is being questioned by the Gestapo. We follow Maddie and "Verity" and see how the two girls became friends and what led to "Verity" being in the situation she finds herself in at the beginning of the book. It's a heartbreaking story of friendship and the lengths two women will go to help their country in war.YA is delivering a lot of amazing Parisian set fantasies this year and this is just one of many. Set in 1889 Paris, it follows a group of friends as they attempt to pull of a daring heist to discover an important ancient artifact.Grim Lovelies is set in a fantastical Paris and follows heroine Anouk as she attempts to evade capture for the murder of her mistress.....a crime she did not commit.If short stories are more your thing, then this collection of romantic Parisian stories from Jojo Moyes might be just the helping of the City of Love that you're looking for.Hull University student Libby Squire may have been killed police have revealed in a statement released today.

Confirmation her death is being treated as a possible homicide came as part of an update into Humberside Police's investigation and follows the conclusion of a post-mortem examination.

Photo: Humberside Police Handout

Libbys body was found in the Humber Estuary on Wednesday (20 March) six weeks after she disappeared.

This afternoon Detective Superintendent Martin Smalley said: In regards to our investigation, while we have considered throughout the missing person inquiry that Libby may have come to some harm, Libbys death and the recovery of her body now leads us to solely investigate as a potential homicide.

The post-mortem examination concluded late last night and at this stage, we will not be releasing any results for investigative and operational reasons.

We have to protect the integrity of the investigation, which is live and very much active and ongoing, with one man who remains under investigation.

The University of Hull has created a space on their campus for people to leave flowers and messages in memory of Libby. Anyone who is struggling or wants to talk to someone is being encouraged to contact the universitys Student Support Centre.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by University of Hull (@universityofhull) on Mar 22, 2019 at 4:06am PDT

Professor Susan Lea, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Hull has paid tribute to Libby, saying: As a close-knit University community of staff and students, we are all absolutely devastated by the loss of our student, Libby Squire.

Our hearts go out to Libbys family and friends at this incredibly difficult time and we will continue to give them our full support.

We have been incredibly moved by the way staff, students, Humberside Police and the local community have all come together over the past few weeks.

The kindness and care everyone has shown towards each other has been overwhelming, as has everyones commitment to finding Libby since she went missing.

An inquest into Libbys death will be opened on Monday afternoon (25 March) at Hull Coroners Court at 1pm.Unfortunately, The Content Is Not Here

You have arrived at this page because the page or post you were looking for no longer exists. Please check our main navigation pages for other content: 

Home PageLim is set to meet U.S skater Mariah Bell as soon as the competition ends as Bell wants to apologize for a collision during a warm-up session prior to the short program competition on Wednesday. The collision caused Lim to sustain a cut to her calf from Bell's skate blades.

Figure skater Lim Eun-soo will be able to focus on her free program at ease in the ISU World Figure Skating Championships in Saitama, Japan on Friday.

The Korea Skating Union said Thursday, "Bell expressed her wish to apologize to Lim." Lim agreed to accept it.

After Lim's injury, her management agency complained that Bell did not apologize following the collision, adding that it seemed intentional, which prompted the ISU to call a meeting of Korean and U.S. officials on Thursday.

A representative from the U.S. said Bell was unable to apologize straight away because the music for the warm-up session had started.

Meanwhile, in the men's short program on Thursday, Cha Jun-hwan finished in 18th place with 79.17 points, well short of his personal best of 97.33.Theres no rush among Downriver communities to clear the way for commercial sales of recreational marijuana.

Since Michigan voters approved a ballot proposal in November to legalize recreational weed, nine Downriver communities have acted to reject or opt out of pot sales. Nine others are taking a wait-and-see position.

Among those opting to prohibit commercial sales of marijuana in their communities are Allen Park, Flat Rock, Gibraltar, Huron Township, Melvindale, Riverview, Trenton, Woodhaven and Wyandotte.

Still reviewing their options are Brownstown Township, Ecorse, Grosse Ile Township, Lincoln Park, River Rouge, Rockwood, Romulus, Southgate and Taylor.

Lincoln Park is the most recent community to address the matter, holding a public hearing on March 11. The vast number of people who spoke were in favor of allowing marijuana sales in the city, with many talking about the influx of tax money the city would receive by allowing the sales.

Some people gave emotional testimony detailing how marijuana allowed them to end their opioid addictions.

City Manager Matt Coppler said the matter would be decided over the next few months, but Assistant City Attorney Amy Higgins had a message for everyone.

Everything about this is going to end up in court, she said, talking about how the voter-initiated marijuana measure has a lot of unanswered questions that likely will be decided by a judge.

A number of officials said they are looking to Lansing, and to their lawyers, for additional information to clarify the impact and liability of issuing  or denying  business licenses for recreational pot shops.

Some communities are taking the issue to public hearings or meetings to gauge the sentiment of residents now, some three months after voters have spoken.

Recreational marijuana became legal in Michigan on Dec. 6. There have been no sales while state officials and regulators settle on the rules and regulations to manage the new market. Most observers expect that process to continue well into 2019, with sales likely to begin in 2020.

Voters in all but one Downriver community approved the November pot proposal. Only Grosse Ile Township  by a 51-49 percent result  rejected the measure. River Rouge had the highest percentage of voters in favor  73 percent  followed by Ecorse at 68 percent.

The Grosse Ile Township board is likely to honor the expressed will of our voters and pass a measure to prohibit recreational marijuana establishments, township Supervisor Brian Loftus said.

Loftus said the township likely will follow a model ordinance suggested by the Michigan Townships Association. That document proposes that violators be fined not less than $100 nor more than $500. Each day of a continuing violation would be considered a separate offense.

Loftus said the township board will consider the measure fairly soon.

River Rouge Mayor Michael Bowdler said his city allows medical marijuana facilities and currently has four of them. While those businesses have flourished, he said, hes hoping council members vote along with him not to allow recreational sales in the city.

Weve not had one police call to any of the dispensaries that have been open for two years, he said. I cant say that about my bars. Theyre called to those establishments once a month.

As far as expanding and allowing recreational pot businesses to locate in Rouge: I think weve got enough right now, Bowdler said. In fact, I know weve got enough. But Im only one vote out of seven.

Editor Jason Alley contributed to this report.

Editors note: This story was changed to reflect that Romulus officials have not yet decided on recreational marijuana. An earlier report saying the city had opted out referred to officials vote on medical marijuana, not recreational marijuana.

remaining of

Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading.The singer read out a letter of apology as he entered the courthouse. "I have committed an unforgivable crime," it said. "I will fully cooperate with the investigation and live the rest of my life repenting my offenses."

The Seoul Central District Court granted the arrest warrant due to concerns that he could try to destroy evidence.

Singer Jung Joon-young was arrested on Thursday on charges of secretly filming himself having sex and sharing the footage with his celebrity buddies on social media.

Police also arrested Jung's lawyer on charges of destroying evidence. The lawyer defended Jung when he was charged with a similar offense back in 2016 and falsely told police that a tech lab was unable to recover any data from Jung's phone.

Police also suspended an officer who handled the case at the time. The officer allegedly asked Jung's lawyer if he could obtain a letter from the lab confirming that the data was irrecoverable to allow him to close the case.

Meanwhile, Choi Jong-hoon of boy band FT Island, who was part of another group chat that also included Seung-ri of boy band Big Bang, was indicted on charges of attempted bribery.

A police officer testified that Choi tried to give him W2 million to look the other way in 2016, when he was caught drunk driving (US$1=W1,129).

Seung-ri is being investigated on a raft of charges, from pimping to aiding and abetting drug peddling and sexual abuse at his swanky Gangnam nightclub Burning Sun.

The National Tax Service has launched a special probe of the now-defunct club, which frequently entertained rich Chinese customers.The third entry in the Drake Wells 2019 Petroleum Series celebrated the 200th birthday of Colonel Edwin Drake, which will take place on March 29. The presentation featured actors performing as Drake and his wife, Laura Drake, as well as the reading of a proclamation from the colonels home town of Greenville, New York. From left, are Greenville Town Historian Don Teater; Drake Well Museum Volunteer Bob Archer, as Colonel Drake; Drake Well Museum Educator Sarah Goodman, as Laura Drake; and Drake Well Museum Curator Sue Beates.Order Book Innovation Delivers Midpoint & Block Trading Results

As the industry gathers for the 2019 EMEA Trading Conference in London, the largest single-day event focusing on electronic trading, it seems fitting to review what happened in the first full year of MiFID2 compared with expectations three years prior. When 900 electronic trading experts of FIX Trading Community gathered from 22 countries at the 2016 EMEA Trading Conference in London, they were asked their opinion about the European trading landscape in 2018 post MiFID2.

More than half the audience, 51%, said they expected in 2018 More electronic Block Trading. With the next question, it was our privilege to see distinguished practitioners clearly express their independent opinion that Turquoise was their preferred venue for order book innovation.

Independent Rosenblatt Securities 2018 Year-in-Review confirmed Turquoise as the largest European dark pool. Turquoise Plato ended the year as the fastest growing and biggest dark pool  achieving all-time record activity. Turquoise Plato is now #1 of 20 venues evaluated by Rosenblatt Securities, thank you to our customers.

Rosenblatt Securities observed during 2018 that MiFID2 eliminated broker crossing networks and, combined with the impact of MiFID2 double volume caps, contributed to a steep drop in the annual share of trading by dark pools. The changes favoured venues that focus on block trades which are exempt from the caps. The share of trading of European electronic block trading services evaluated by Rosenblatt Securities including Turquoise grew to

just under 30% of European dark pool value traded.

The following Turquoise chart shows that Turquoise Plato continues to set year on year records for value traded. All of these trades as matched at midpoint of the primary best bid and offer for potential price improvement. The interesting trend is the remarkable growth of Turquoise Plato Block Discovery from less than 5% to more than 45% of all the Turquoise Plato midpoint value traded by calendar 2018, reflecting the significant change in investor behaviour by sending much larger orders to the market.

Fast forward to February 2019, and customers using Turquoise Plato Block Discovery have traded more than 172 billion  more than any other provider as

a fully automated service without the fading associated with manual firm up models. The insight is that electronic block trading at midpoint works and Turquoise is fully adopted by the global investor community, ready to scale beyond UK and European markets.

Turquoise customers on 31 January 2019 set a new daily record of 653m value traded via Turquoise Plato Block Discovery, contributing to a new weekly record of 2,581m from 28 January to 1 February 2019.

The puzzle facing exchanges worldwide is that electronic order books shrink trade size. A large order matching against small orders leads to small trades 

and published data shows that European exchange order books have shrunk and converged to an average of around 10,000 per trade. Why does this matter? Because institutional investors, such as asset managers, pension funds and insurance companies, handling large trades  ultimately on behalf of end investors  will suffer stronger negative market impact and signalling risk in such an environment.

Working together for years with buy-side and sell-side, Turquoise designed and refined a multilateral model where the average trade size of electronic block trading on Turquoise midpoint order book has grown for blue chips with LIS above 500k to more than 1m per trade via Turquoise Plato Block Discovery. This is 100x larger than the average trade size of 0.01m per trade.

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For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:FLASHBACK FRIDAY GALLERY: California STA of Los Angeles 68th Annual Convention

The City of Angels is filled with traders.

The STA Los Angeles (STALA) STALA is a non-profit organization founded in 1936. Its current leadership team is composed of the following:

CHAIRMAN  Sahak Manuelian, Wedbush Securities

VICE CHAIRMAN  Greg Reposa, Empyrean Capital

SECRETARY  Kirk Howard, Alliance Global Partners

TREASURER  Brittany Letto

The chapters 84th Annual Conference will be held March 29-31.

Please enjoy the look back 16 years ago as West Coast traders and vendors got together at the Border Grill in Santa Monica over the course of two days.

Please click here for the gallery - California STA of Los Angeles 68th Annual Convention - March 21-23

For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:People of Turkmenistan celebrated the ancient festival of Novruz Bayramy. According to tradition, the Valley of Novruz near Ashgabat was the venue of festive evens. An impromptu ancient Turkmen village is erected there every year for the period of the festival. It is populated with yurts and an oriental bazaar, artisan workshops and grounds where folk groups present theatrical performances based on real and fictional historical events.

At the end of the tour of the ancient settlement, the guests of the festival come to the part of the village called Cuisine of Novruz. In this place, one can see 40 cauldrons with skilled chefs conjuring over them. They cook the most exquisite dishes of the Turkmen cuisine, as well as the cuisines of the peoples of the Central Asian region. The guests are treated to pilaf, shurpa, gutaby, somsa, dumplings with eggs, meat, greens, pumpkin, lamb and fish kebabs and much more. This is the part of the village where guests forget about all the recommendations of all nutritionists of the world.

Novruz Bayramy continues into the evening when people light the bonfires and those wishing to do so jump over them, as did Turkmen ancestors in the very distant past, believing that it would bring good luck and well-being.

Festive concerts and mass celebrations dedicated to Novruz Bayramy are taking place these days in all regions of Turkmenistan.

 TURKMENISTAN.RU, 2021ANNECORDON/iStock(WASHINGTON) -- With everyone still waiting on former Vice President Joe Biden to decide if hes running (and the added speculation that he might pick Stacey Abrams as his running mate), the field did see one more official entry this week.



New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand transitioned her exploratory committee to a full-fledged campaign on Sunday and officially joined the groundswell of candidates in the 2020 Democratic field. She also scored her first home state endorsement from New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney.



But Gillibrand is struggling to gain traction in a field that has already seen record fundraising hauls and a collection of bold policy proposals -- a reminder that its increasingly difficult for many of the candidates running to stand out.



Here's the weekly candidate roundup:

Mar. 15-21, 2019

Stacey Abrams (D)



After meeting privately with former Vice President Joe Biden last week, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate signaled that she is willing to meet with any of the Democratic hopefuls in the 2020 presidential contest, but she said she has a couple of ground rules.

"My two requirements," Abrams said Tuesday at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "One, you have to tell me what youre going to do about voter suppression. And two, you have to believe Georgia is a swing state."



Abrams, who is considering a presidential bid of her own, is -- for now -- returning to her roots as an organizer and promoting the nonprofit group she founded to advance voting rights, Fair Fight Action.



On Thursday, Abrams' spokesperson Lauren Groh-Wargo addressed rumors that close advisers to Biden are pitching a pre-packaged ticket with her as his vice president.

"Abrams continues to keep all options on the table for 2020 and beyond, Groh-Wargo said in a statement to ABC News. She has met with over half a dozen presidential contenders to discuss their commitment to voting rights and to investing in Georgia."



Michael Bennet (D)

Although several Democratic presidential candidates have expressed an openness to expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court, the Colorado senator literally slammed his head on a table when asked about it, according to The Washington Post.

"Having seen up close just how cynical and how vicious the tea party guys and the Freedom Caucus guys and Mitch McConnell have been, the last thing I want to do is be those guys, Bennet said, referring to some Republicans' efforts in recent years to alter Washington rules and traditions. What I want to do is beat these guys so that we can begin to govern again."



Bennet, who said hell decide whether to officially enter the race within weeks, told the Post: "I guess I'm starting to think strongly that we need a voice in this primary that's willing to make the kind of case that I think that I would make."



Joe Biden (D)



For a brief moment Saturday, it appeared as though the former vice president had inadvertently revealed that he had decided to run for president: At a Delaware Democratic Party fundraiser, he said that he had "the most progressive record of anybody running."



The audience launched into applause, but Biden quickly corrected himself, explaining that he meant "of anybody who would run." Even so, those close to Biden, including Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, continue to report that Biden is telling them he is all-but-certain to enter the race.



CNN reported on Monday that Biden discussed with advisers the possibility of choosing a running mate early in the primary to "keep the focus of the primary fight on the ultimate goal of unseating Trump." That running mate might be Stacey Abrams, according to Axios.

Cory Booker (D)



The New Jersey senator this week contended with a barrage of questions about his love life. After actress Rosario Dawson confirmed to TMZ that she and Booker are dating, the former Newark, New Jersey mayor told Ellen DeGeneres on her show on Wednesday that Dawson "is just a deeply soulful person and has taught me a lot of lessons about love already."



Despite the focus on his personal life, Booker managed to resurface an issue that had fallen out of the news a bit when he indicated he was willing to consider eliminating the filibuster.



"Im going to tell you that for me that door is not closed," he said on "Pod Save America" on Wednesday.



Booker will return to the trail this weekend, making his third campaign sweep through South Carolina since officially declaring his candidacy for president.

Steve Bullock (D)



The Montana governor, who is still deciding whether to enter the presidential race, traveled to Iowa to support state Senate candidate Eric Giddens, who won a special election on Tuesday.



Bullock sat with Giddens over beers last weekend, according to Politico.



Bullocks trip to Iowa will be followed by a visit to another early primary state, New Hampshire. Bullock is expected to celebrate New Hampshire Senate Majority Leader Dan Feltess birthday in Concord on Sunday, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Pete Buttigieg (D)



Over the weekend, Buttigieg, who is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, qualified for the first Democratic debate -- hitting the 65,000-donor threshold.



In an appearance on MSNBC, Buttigieg made his case for why a mayor of a city of 100,000 people should be president. Buttigieg said becoming president is "a tremendous leap for anybody," adding that he thinks "this is an executive position that requires executive experience."



He joins ABCs The View on Friday before heading to South Carolina for his first trip to the state since announcing his exploratory committee in January.

Julian Castro (D)

At a campaign stop in Las Vegas this week, following an article in which he was called "the other Texan" of the Democratic presidential field, Castro said, "Im the one from the other side of the tracks. Im the one that didnt grow up as a front-runner."

His comments appeared to be a jab at fellow Texan and Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke. But Castro pushed back against that interpretation during an interview with MSNBC, saying that he was just speaking for himself.



The former secretary of Housing and Urban Development said he is "confident" that he will qualify for the first primary debate in June and that he will be a front-runner "by the time the Iowa caucus comes around."

Bill de Blasio (D)



Potentially gearing up for a presidential bid, the New York City mayor toured New Hampshire over the weekend. His trip got off to a lackluster start, however. The New York Post reported that only 20 people showed up to his roundtable on mental health -- the 14 people who were on the panel and six audience members.



Asked by the Post when he will make a decision about a bid, de Blasio said, "Sooner rather than later."

John Delaney (D)

Asked in an interview with CNN about whether he is in favor of eliminating the Electoral College and electing a president via the popular vote, Delaney said: "If I were starting from scratch, I would do that. It requires a constitutional amendment.  I'd much rather focus on things that can get done and affect the American people. I'd much rather focus on lowering drug prices, building infrastructure, creating digital privacy legislation in this country, expanding pre-K, that every kid has that opportunity, making sure community college is free for every kid in this country.

Tulsi Gabbard (D)



Gabbard kicked off the week with visits to Fremont, California, and Las Vegas, where she delivered a message of peace.



In California, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Gabbard said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drained "trillions of dollars out of our pockets for health care, infrastructure, education, for clean energy." The U.S. House member from Hawaii was twice deployed to the Middle East as part of the Army National Guard.



Gabbard is ending the week in New Hampshire.



Kirsten Gillibrand (D)



After launching a presidential exploratory committee in January, the New York senator officially joined the race last weekend. In a video posted to her social media channels, Gillibrand also revealed that she will be holding an event outside of the Trump International Hotel in New York City on Sunday.



Gillibrand participated in an MSNBC town hall Monday that touched on immigration policy, her plans for a national paid leave program, her involvement in the resignation of Democratic Sen. Al Franken from his Senate seat in December and her belief that she "should have done more" on gun control earlier in her career.

Kamala Harris (D)



Harris edged up the candidate leaderboard this week: In a new CNN poll, she climbed into third place, with 12 percent support among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. This was a significant increase for the California senator, whose support was 4 percent in December. Biden and Bernie Sanders captured first and second place, respectively.



Harris also joined ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live this week and said she believes that voters want a nominee who holds the ability to "prosecute the case" against President Trump.



Harris visits Texas this weekend for a campaign rally in Houston and an event hosted by Tarrant County Democrats in Grapevine before heading to Atlanta.

John Hickenlooper (D)



Hickenlooper joined CNN for a town hall in Atlanta on Wednesday night, taking questions from Dana Bash and directly from voters on a range of issues, including marijuana and the death penalty. Bash also asked the former governor of Colorado if he would vow to put a woman on the ticket like some of the other male contenders in the race, and he answered, "Of course."



"Ill ask you another question," he said. "But how come were not asking, more often, the women, Would you be willing to put a man on the ticket?"



Hickenlooper plans to crisscross New Hampshire and Vermont this weekend, with stops in Manchester, Concord, Lebanon, Burlington, Littleton, Plymouth and Newmarket.

Jay Inslee (D)



In an an appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Inslee said: "I'm finding people who really want to see a president who believes in science, who believes the number one job of the Untied States is to defeat climate change. People are telling me that's the right message."



When asked why he would "risk it all" on this single issue as he competes for the nomination against a sprawling pool of candidates, Inslee responded that "you can't solve other problems unless you solve climate change."

John Kerry (D)



Kerry, who has left the door open for a presidential bid, received 4 percent of the support among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in the CNN poll this week.



In an appearance with Condoleezza Rice, another former secretary of state, at Notre Dame on Tuesday, Kerry criticized the Trump administration.

Trump "hasnt made anything better," Kerry said, according to the South Bend Tribune. "Not the Iran Deal, not the Paris Climate Accord, not TPP, not (the war in) Afghanistan and not Syria. He was teed up to prove to the world what a great negotiator he was."

Amy Klobuchar (D)



Klobuchar stopped in California this week, joining community leaders in San Francisco for a conversation about the effects of climate change.



In her first visit to the state since announcing her presidential candidacy in February, the Minnesota senator also hosted a "high-dollar fundraiser" in the San Franciscos Presidio Heights neighborhood, according to CNN.



The cost to attend the event was up to $5,600 a chair, CNN reported. Klobuchar joins the Rye Democrats for a town hall in New Hampshire on Saturday.

Terry McAuliffe (D)



During a visit to South Carolina Tuesday, the former Virginia governor fueled speculation that he might enter the field of Democratic hopefuls.



Seth Moulton (D)



Moulton kicked off his week in New Hampshire to meet with the tri-city New Hampshire Young Democrats. He told the audience that he expects to make a decision about a presidential run next month, according to The Salem News.



Ultimately the decision for me will come back to one simple question: How can I best serve the country," he said.



Moulton also stopped in another early voting state, South Carolina, and is set to visit Iowa next week for a roundtable with veterans.

Beto ORourke (D)



O'Rourke continued his campaign sprint across the country this week, traveling to Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire (where he hit all 10 counties in 48 hours).



At a stop in Pennsylvania, the former Texas congressman was asked about delivering more than "platitudes and nice stories" on the stump.



"Im going to try to be as specific as I can," he said. "In every single policy area, Im trying to describe not just the goal and the aspiration, but the path we will take to get there."



The breakout political star, who fell just short in his 2018 Senate bid against Ted Cruz, reported raising $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his presidential campaign, which surpassed Sen. Bernie Sanders' $5.9 million and the rest of the Democratic field.

His record haul came from 128,000 unique contributions for an average donation size of $47. None of the donations came from PACs, corporations or special interests, according to his campaign.



O'Rourke brings his off-the-cuff and frenetic campaign style through South Carolina this weekend with eight events in Rock Hill, Columbia, Orangeburg and Charleston.



Bernie Sanders (D)



Sanders committed this week to offsetting emissions from his travel and events by partnering with a carbon offsets provider that will support renewable energy and carbon reduction projects.



This effort follows the Vermont senator's announcement that his workers will be the first presidential campaign staff to unionize.



Sanders holds rallies in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco starting Friday as he makes his first visit to California since launching his second presidential campaign.

Howard Schultz (I)



As Schultz continues to test the waters of an independent bid for president, he holds a series of town halls in Denver where he will hold a roundtable discussion at a startup incubator called Techstars Boulder Accelerator, according to the Denver Post.



The Post also reports that Schultz's schedule includes a stop at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs for a town hall event with the athletes.

Elizabeth Warren (D)



Warren, known for her pace-setting policy proposals, started a swing through the South in Memphis, Tennessee, before heading to Jackson, Mississippi, for a CNN town hall on Monday and unveiled her support for a bold proposal.



"My view is that every vote matters, she said.

And that means getting rid of the Electoral College," she went on, to applause from the audience. "Presidential candidates dont come to places like Mississippi, they also dont come to places like California or Massachusetts, because were not the battleground states."



The Massachusetts senator then headed to Alabama for two stops in Selma and Birmingham this week. She returns to New Hampshire this weekend for a conversation on the opioid crisis in Littleton and a pair of meet-and-greets in Berlin and Conway.

Andrew Yang (D)



Yang said there were 3,000 people in attendance at his rally in San Francisco last Friday. In a blog post recounting the event, the entrepreneur said "huge rallies" would help him build name recognition and that he'd be launching a national tour to draw crowds.



"Think Bernie 2.0 but with better music," he wrote.



The New York Times reported on Yang's internet popularity Wednesday, noting that his supporters, who have been nicknamed the "Yang Gang," are harnessing memes and inside jokes to promote the candidate much in the way that Trump supporters did in 2016. On Monday, Yang holds an event in Chicago.



Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.North Korean state media on Thursday complained that it is suffering the "most severe hardship in its inglorious history" amid international sanctions over its nuclear and missile programs.

"We have gone through post-war ashes and the 'arduous march,' but the challenges that we have been facing in recent 10 years of the century are in effect the most severe hardship in our republic's history," the official Rodong Sinmun daily said.

It also called for "a strong spirit" as well as "courage and bold creativity of making something out of nothing" so that life can go on "as long as there is water and air."

The lachrymose call came after North Korean officials were reportedly taken aback when U.S. President Donald Trump walked out of a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi last month.

The regime has since been reviving references to the old "juche" or self-reliance doctrine of founder Kim Il-sung that has made North Korea one of the poorest countries in the world.

It is rare for the state media to admit how bad things are, which is perhaps a measure of how disgruntled even the elite and nascent mercantile class have become as sanctions continue.

Nam Sung-wook at Korea University said, "North Korea's leadership didn't bat an eyelid when millions starved to death during the 'arduous march'" of the 1990s. "But it seems to have realized that the latest crisis is make-or-break for the regime."

North Korea's economy began to deteriorate rapidly after tough sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council began to take effect in late 2017. That is when North Korea started a flurry of diplomatic activities, starting by joining the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang early last year.

Trade data alone demonstrate the severity of North Korea's foreign currency shortage. Its official exports to China last year plummeted 87 percent compared to a year earlier, and this January bilateral trade fell 8.4 percent compared to the previous month.

North Korea is struggling to bypass the sanctions with illegal transshipments of oil and attempts to steal money by hacking, but tougher monitoring by the U.S. has made even that more difficult to pull off. And countries in many parts of the world are refusing to issue visas to North Korean laborers and repatriating them.

The daily insisted on the need for the country's nuclear weapons. "We have achieved the biggest and most powerful feat even during such a difficult time," it said, claiming that the North "confidently holds a strong grip on the sword of self-sufficiency," which is common code for nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile Kim Jong-un's head of protocol, Kim Chang-son, is in Russia, apparently to arrange a trip for his leader to see if sanctions can be softened that way as support from China wanes.

Nam Joo-hong at Kyonggi University said, "China needs to be wary of Washington due to ongoing bilateral trade talks, while China's own economy is not in a good state and cannot aid North Korea."

As prepared for delivery.

Senor Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la Republica Argentina, Embajador Jorge Faurie (as President of the Conference)

H.E. President of the General Assembly, Maria Fernanda Espinosa

Excellencies,

Distinguished delegates,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Opening

It is a privilege for me to offer some closing remarks for this highly successful Second High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation.

Throughout the past three days, we welcomed over 3800 participants, at the highest levels with (160) member states including (6) Heads of State, (2) Vice Prime Ministers and (61) Ministers from around the world as well as (23) intergovernmental organizations, (13) specialized agencies, civil society, the private sector, and academic institutions.

This participation  plus the over 14 million people who followed the discussions virtually - is an indication of the interest and engagement in taking South-South Cooperation to the next chapter.

As a true commemoration of the historic Buenos Aires Plan of Action adopted here over 40 years ago, the BAPA+40 Outcome Document will serve as a reference for future initiatives of South-South and triangular collaboration.

The United Nations is deeply appreciative of the leadership and support of the Government of Argentina in hosting us.

The strong collaboration between the Government of Argentina, the United Nations Department for General Assembly and Conference Management (DGACM), the United Nations Office of South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC) and the UNDP Country Office in Argentina, helped us deliver a successful conference with concrete outcomes.

If we reflect on the changes that have taken place in the global economy, in development, in human wellbeing since the signing of first BAPA 40 years ago, its clear that there are no limits to what we can achieve when we combine forces.

We have forged new partnerships for current and future concerted efforts and seen the spectrum of opportunities available to us.

Let us use the understanding that we have gained here and the partnerships we have forged to double down on the achievements of the the last 40 years to solve some of the greatest challenges of our time.

The conference clearly demonstrated how countries can share experiences and adapt ideas to their own contexts. These range from:

- Kenyas mobile phone-based money transfer services being expanded to Afghanistan, South Africa and India;

- To Mexico's experience in diversifying corn products to improve health and nutrition in Kenya;

- To Cuba's support in the fight against Ebola in West Africa;

- To lessons from Chile to the Caribbean countries on product labeling as a measure to end obesity;

- To knowledge of strategies to reduce hunger shared by Colombia with Mesoamerican countries.

BAPA+40 Homework

Excellencies, Distinguished delegates,

We will all leave this conference with a lot of homework to do, but also many opportunities.

The responsibility is now on us to take what we have heard, the linkages that we have made and the connections to the next level.

This includes the need to tackle climate change, address inequalities, as well as improve institutional arrangements both within and between countries to improve cooperation and trade. South-South cooperation will be a vital tool in tackling these challenges.

The fact is that we simply cannot achieve all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) unless we leverage this cooperation, share practical solutions and give each other the support, inspiration and indeed push in the right direction.

Throughout our discussions we also saw a growing recognition of the importance and complementarity of South-South and triangular cooperation.

We have also keenly recognized that investment by multilateral, regional and bilateral financial and development institutions in South-South and triangular cooperation will be vital. The United Nations is actively pursuing innovative ways to expand the financing for SDG implementation, including South-South Cooperation.

In addition to all of you, many actors from the United Nations family have been involved in these efforts.

I would like to take this opportunity as the UNDP Administrator to state that UNDP welcomes and is proud to continue to be entrusted with hosting the United Nations Office on South-South Cooperation, since 1974.

We look forward to working closely with the UNOSSC to implement the decisions you have taken here this week and will forge a stronger collaborative partnership between the UN system-wide reach of the Office and the work of UNDP.

Closing

In closing, I would like to warmly thank the Government of Argentina for generously hosting us in Buenos Aires. The conference would not have been such a success without the leadership of President Macri and his government.

We will all leave BAPA+40 with increased vigor to build more prosperous, inclusive, resilient and secure societies.

Thank you also to all Member states present here for their determination to work in a cooperative spirit. I acknowledge and thank also the invaluable contributions from civil society, the private sector, and many other stakeholders participating in the conference.

The conference has brought the necessary momentum and provided us with a roadmap (i.e. Outcome Document) for South-South and triangular cooperation.

Here, I wish to join others in thanking the co-facilitators of the Outcome Document, Her Excellency Ambassador Audra Plepyte and His Excellency, Mr. Adonia Ayebare Permanent Representatives of the Republic of Lithuania and Uganda to the United Nations, respectively, for their outstanding leadership.

The reinvigorated UN System has listened keenly to the wishes of the delegates and it stands ready to strongly support this momentum of change behind South-South cooperation.

I thank all my colleagues in the UN family, particularly Catherine Pollard (Secretary of the Conference) and Jorge Chediek (UNOSSC). Thank you for the work of your dedicated staff that made this conference a success.

It is true that the multilateral development system comes away from BAPA+40 in a better position to support South-South cooperation and implement the 2030 Agenda.

I thank all of you for the passion, knowledge and appetite for sustainable development that you have shown and shared with each other this week.

Finalmente, agradezco a los mas de cien voluntarios de la Universidad de Buenos Aires que trabajaron largas horas para asegurarse de que nuestro trabajo fuera efectivo.

Thank you.Pride, Prejudice and Punditry, a book written by Dr Shashi Tharoor launched in Hyderabad 12 Dec 2021 | 12:05 AM Hyderabad, Dec 11 (UNI) A Kolkata based nonprofit trust, Prabha Khaitan Foundation (PKF) which is dedicated to socio-cultural welfare and humanitarian causes, launched the second in the series of Dr Shashi Tharoor's 23rd book "Pride, Prejudice and Punditry" here on Saturday. see more..

Telangana reports 188 new Covid-19 cases, one death 12 Dec 2021 | 12:04 AM Hyderabad, Dec 11 (UNI) Telangana reported 188 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24-hours, taking the states COVID tally to 6,78,142, while the active cases stood at 3,891. see more..

TTD decides to provide Vaikunta Dwara darshanam for SC, ST, Fishermen devotees 11 Dec 2021 | 11:26 PM Hyderabad, Dec 11 (UNI) The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) Trust Board, in its meeting on Saturday decided to provide Srivari Vaikunta Dwara darshanam to the devotees of SC, ST, BC and fishermen colonies on the lines of Srivari Brahmotsavam Darshanam. see more..

Kakinda City Mayor appreciate SP for launching 'women drop at home' service 11 Dec 2021 | 10:38 PM Kakinada, Dec 11 (UNI): Kakinada city Mayor Sunkara Siva Prasanna Sagar along with Chair person Kakinada urban development authority (KUDA) Ragireddy Chandra Kala Deepthi called on the Superintendent of police M.Ravindranath babu at his chambers here on Saturday and conveyed their appreciation for launching of ` women drop at home  service ensuring safe travel of womenfolk during odd hours.. see more..Dozens feared dead after tornados hit US, tens of thousands without power 11 Dec 2021 | 11:43 PM Washington, Dec 11 (UNI/Xinhua) Tornados rip through across the Midwest and southern United States including states of Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee, with dozens feared dead and tens of thousands of households running out of power. see more..

Blasts in S Lebanon caused by electrical fault: Hamas 11 Dec 2021 | 10:10 PM Beirut, Dec 11 (UNI/Xinhua) The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) announced on Saturday the explosions that shook a warehouse in southern Lebanon on Friday were caused by an electrical fault, the Lebanese National News Agency reported. see more..

190 Houthis killed in military operations by Saudi-led coalition 11 Dec 2021 | 9:36 PM Riyadh, Dec 11 (UNI/Xinhua) The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen said on Saturday that 190 Houthis had been killed in military operations in the last 24 hours. see more..

RAB did not violate human rights, but protected them: Legal Director, RAB 11 Dec 2021 | 9:07 PM Dhaka, Dec 11 (UNI) The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) has been performing its duties with humanity since its inception. The force has not looted human rights, but continues to protect them, said Khandaker Al Moin, Director of RAB's legal and media wing. see more..South Koreans overwhelmingly condemn the North Korean regime's human rights abuses but are not prepared to welcome refugees from the repressive state under all circumstances, a survey suggests.

The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights published the survey of 1,000 South Koreans on Thursday. Some 85.4 percent of the respondents said the human rights situation in North Korea is "serious," and only 10.9 percent that it is not.

But their willingness to help North Koreans only goes so far, with 49.8 percent saying the South should accept a limited number of North Korean refugees in the event of major unrest there, while only 35.6 percent said all North Korean refugees should be allowed to come here. That is a significant switch from the same survey a year ago, where 49.6 percent supported admitting all refugees versus 38.1 percent supporting a limited influx.

When asked what is the best way to persuade North Korea to improve its human rights record, 36.3 percent ticked "international pressure" and 33.8 percent "continued dialogue and support."The UTSA Main Campus in the 1980s.

Editors note: This article was originally published in UTSA newsletter The Discourse in Jan. 1974.

(March 22, 2019) -- Oneil Ford sat behind a table in the overfilled front room of the restored Victoria home on King William Street that is the office of Ford, Powell, and Carson. He spoke distinctlyand rapidlywith flamboyant gestures and a great deal of concentration. He paused occasionally to take a puff on his cigar.

He was a different sort of man. He worked strange hours. He wore offbeat clothes. He devoured books on architectural history. If one had not already guessed that he was an artist, his temperament provided the final clue. To Ford, architecture is an artthe art of building spaces which are to be usedand doing it tastefully, decently, and with a strong idea.

Ford talked enthusiastically with architect Milton Babbitt about the UTSA campushow its focus on a plaza is much like that of many old European cities, about the simple buildings made from native materials and about students studying under the oak trees.

>> Read the rest of this story and relive other memories from UTSAs history as we celebrate UTSAs 50th Anniversary.UW Phi Kappa Phi Chapter to Hold Initiation Ceremony April 7

The University of Wyomings Phi Kappa Phi chapter -- the nations oldest and most selective collegiate honor society for all academic disciplines -- will host its spring initiation ceremony Sunday, April 7, at 2 p.m. in the Wyoming Union Family Room.

Membership in Phi Kappa Phi is by invitation only. Invitations to qualifying UW students were sent in February. Only the top 10 percent of seniors and graduate students, and 7.5 percent of juniors are eligible for membership. Faculty, professional staff and alumni who have achieved scholarly distinction also qualify.

The UW Phi Kappa Phi chapter was installed March 21, 1922, making it the 28th institution to join the society at the time. Today, Phi Kappa Phi has chapters in more than 300 select college and university campuses in North America and the Philippines.

Since UWs chapter installation, several students and alumni have received competitive Phi Kappa Phi awards and grants, including fellowships for graduate study, post-baccalaureate awards for professional development and undergraduate study abroad grants.

Approximately 30,000 students, faculty, professional staff and alumni are initiated into the society each year at local chapter institutions. Phi Kappa Phis mission is to recognize and promote academic excellence in all fields of higher education and to engage the community of scholars in service to others.

To learn more about Phi Kappa Phi, visit www.PhiKappaPhi.org.

About Phi Kappa Phi

Since its founding in 1897 at the University of Maine, more than 1.5 million members have been initiated into Phi Kappa Phi and recognized for outstanding academic excellence.

The society has awarded more than $15 million since the inception of its awards program in 1932. Today, nearly $1 million is awarded each year to outstanding students and members through award programs that last year recognized more than 350 recipients.

Notable members include former President Jimmy Carter; NASA astronaut Wendy Lawrence; novelist John Grisham and YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley.Perhaps the 2015 acid attack on two teenage girls in Basantapur of Kathmandu was enough to make Jason Shah realise challenges that women would face in the Nepali society while travelling.

Therefore when he was invited to join a march against the incident, he decided that it would make little or no difference in the situation. Instead, he vowed to do something more.

The inception of a new campaign

When Shah started NepaliTravellers with a few friends in 2015, he wanted to create a platform for Nepali travellers who could share their stories and problems while travelling in Nepal. Three years on, NepaliTravellers has become a public institution where people from different backgrounds have come and run campaigns. One of such campaigns is the solo woman travel challenge (SWO-YATRA).

I wanted to do something different and creative. And as we were into tourism, we decided to send two women to travel to any destination of their choice on their own.

After sending the two women, NepaliTravellers started to get good feedback and it gave them the motivation to continue the project.

It was completely passion-driven, but soon we realised it could go a long way. We felt that, through this social initiative, we could talk about issues surrounding travelling in Nepal and the problems people, especially women travellers, face, adds Shah.

While SWO-YATRA did intend to promote women travellers in Nepal, Shah mentions that this is not a women empowerment project. We work with empowered women to promote travel in Nepal. We want to give out a message that people, mainly women, should travel. If the ladies did get empowered, I think it is purely coincidental.

His thoughts are echoed by this years participant in SWO-YATRA, Pooja Rijal.

Rijal walked all the way from her house in Pepsicola of Kathmandu to the Everest Base Camp because she thought it was cool. Rijal also adds that this journey in no way has changed her as a person.

I did it just because I wanted to travel and this was an amazing opportunity. This gave me a chance to get out of my comfort zone and experience something new. This trip offered me a new way to look at certain things, adds Rijal who in 2018 was one of the 400 women who applied for the challenge.

The safety concern

The application process to take part in the solo woman travel challenge is a rigorous one. We want to make it so because we want serious applicants. We do not want people to waste our time, Shah says.

The girls who are sent to the journey are given a five-day active boot camp which teaches them risk management, first aid techniques and visual storytelling. It gives them a general idea of what to expect during their solo journey.

Shah also adds that the girls are also given self-defence training and map reading session, which will help them beyond their solo trip.

We dont want anything to go wrong. People havent said anything because nothing bad has happened till date, but if god forbids anything bad does happen, people will want our heads. We take the risk of these girls very seriously and that is why there havent been any incidents yet, adds Shah.

Shah shares that one of the toughest moments is when parents come to talk to them and ask them if NepaliTravellers will take responsibilities. Its not easy convincing them. While most understand, there are a few who dont; which is why a few ladies pulled out of the trip, adds Shah.

He says that the safety of these girls are of prime importance, which is why we have asked them to call us every night to inform where they are staying and a provide a number of the place they are staying at.

Rijal adds she didnt face any trouble and shares she received a lot of support from her parents. Yes they were worried, but they knew the hard work I had put to be selected to go on this trip. But I know many who were unable to go on this trip because their families were scared.

But, the journey must go

Shah shares that his plan with SWO-YATRA is to solve issues like these. Boys can travel easily, but girls cant. They face so many restrictions which makes it quite tough for them. This is why from this year, we have come up with the title of Miss NepaliTraveller, who will be the face of this project.

We want one person to represent us. This year Pooja was selected as Miss NepaliTraveller and she will help us tell the stories of all these different women who have travelled to different parts of the country, Shah continues.

NepaliTravellers is also coming up with a video series which will show people how these brave women travelled alone around Nepal. Through this series, they want to inspire more people, both men and women, to travel. It doesnt have to be alone and doesnt have to be trekking. But Nepalis should travel so that people do not give us differential treatments, adds Shah.

Rijal shares that being part of this challenge she met a lot of people and has realised that it has had an impact on a lot of people. A 49-year-old woman solo-travelled as did an 18-year-old; and both of them have a different perspective. Some say they were empowered while some say that this was a life-changing experience, adds Rijal who shares as Miss Nepali Traveller, she wants to be the face of a common traveller and not a celebrity.

Photo courtesy: NepaliTravellersYou have permission to edit this article.

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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Mar. 21, 2019 | CLINTON

By West Kentucky Star Staff Mar. 21, 2019 | 03:27 PM | CLINTON

Former Hickman County Sheriff Mark Green will soon be the defendant in a trial.



According to the Hickman County Circuit Court Clerk, Green was indicted Thursday on a charge of abuse of public trust, which is a class D felony. An arraignment was scheduled for April 4.



Kentucky State Police presented testimony to the Grand Jury, saying they began investigation into possible missing funds from an account to which Green had access. Trooper Jay Thomas told West Kentucky Star the county attorney asked police to investigate after looking at accounts in January, after the new sheriff took office.



Green, who is 50, was elected to office in 2010 and served two terms as sheriff. He did not run for re-election last year.



In March of 2015, a report by then-Auditor Adam Edelen showed that Green had $2,882 of disallowed expenditures during the 2013 calendar year. Those expenditures were disallowed due to their personal nature or the lack of proper supporting documentation. The auditor recommended that Green repay the money from his personal funds to the Hickman County Fiscal Court.



Mayfield under dusk-to-dawn curfew; no volunteers requested at this timeEconomic growth impaired by poor ICT data

Academics and business must partner to help government understand what skills pupils and workers require for 4IR.

Data on information and communication technology (ICT) is sorely lacking in South Africa, even though it is generally recognised that the sector is instrumental in helping build a sustainable economy and social cohesion.

According to a report, this continues to result in fragmented policy because it is based on flimsy and obsolete information, and therefore, its effectiveness cannot be properly measured.

To exacerbate matters, the countrys schooling system continues to produce poor math and science results, and exposure to the ICT sector is minimal.

The report is compiled by the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE), which is a University of Witwatersrand partnership with government and industry, and the Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA).

The document, which is the JCSEs ninth edition of its survey of skills trends in the ICT sector, says the state of the South African economy continues to restrict growth in the demand for ICT skills as the sectors clients limit their budgets.

The sector contributes more than R250bn (approximately 6%) to the countrys GDP. Good growth in the agriculture sector in the second quarter of 2017 reversed the recession of the previous two quarters, but this was short lived as the country again retreated into recession in 2018.

John-David Lovelock, who is from international information technology research and advisory company, Gartner, forecasted that South Africas IT spend would reach R276bn in 2018, up 4,3% from 2017.

While the report acknowledges President Cyril Ramaphosas commitment to speed up processes to develop the sector, it says that until there are concrete developments, South Africa will continue to lag its peers in Africa  notably Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Egypt  who continue to derive the benefits that technology adoption adds to economic growth and social development.

Unacceptable delays in implementing policies, such as the migration from analogue television signals and the rollout of broadband networks, continue to frustrate the potential contribution of the ICT sector to the overall economy, the report reads.

We emphasise again our concern at the slow pace of improvement in South Africas basic education for the majority of pupils. Exposure to and familiarity with ICTs for all learners is essential, in order to equip them to adapt the modern tools to their daily lives.

It says that while there have been some laudable initiatives such as the use of tablets in Gauteng schools, they are yet to reach a sustained, critical mass for all grades of school-goers. Also, of over one million pupils entering the schooling system each year, only half will write matric and less than 20% will be able to enrol for tertiary studies.

The lack of overall market growth is also being aggravated by a continuing restriction of the skills pipeline due to pupils performing poorly in maths and science.

The JCSE says it is concerned that a prolonged failure to improve the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) output will have a dire impact on the countrys ability to counter the growing risk of cybercrime attacks, which is estimated as costing R1bn each year, as well as its capacity to maintain a competitive and innovative ICT industry.

The report says one of the chief concerns is that too many state entities have disparate views on their roles in regulating, acquiring, implementing, promoting and utilising the broad range of elements that come under the ICT umbrella. This has resulted in resources being wasted and no holistic view.

we continue to suffer from a lack of current, coordinated data about the so-called ICT sector in South Africa. So-called because it is almost impossible to define where the creation and implementation ends and the embedded use and further development of ICTs begins, the document reads.

It says there is a critical need for academia and business to partner in influencing the governments understanding of future skills, so that all three spheres can invest in the development of people, to prepare them for the changed roles that will come from the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Closing the skills gap

Despite the failure of the schooling system, the JCSE says it is pleased to observe many private sector initiatives to address the skills gap.

Although one could argue that this is self-interest, most of the programmes reach beyond the needs of a vendor to support its products and offer genuine skills upliftment and employment opportunities.

Also, the JCSE has continued its partnership with BankSETA, which has funded 50 students through the Digital Skills Pipeline Programme, a two-year initiative to improve employability of matriculants and graduates. They are being taught scarce IT skills and exposed to realistic project experience.

Three universities have partnered with Amazon Web Services to offer a specialised cloud-computing focused curriculum. Others may join the programme later.

The government has committed to train one million young people between 2019 and 2030 to become data scientists.

On the face of it, this is a very welcome initiative, but examination of the numbers causes some doubts about the feasibility of the programme. As Moira de Roche (a director of IITPSA) commented, One cant just churn out data scientists; instead they need some specialist skills which are only built by experience of about five to eight years.

Telkom-owned IT services company BCXs Explore Data Science Academy (EDSA) is teaching students how to solve real world problems during a one-year engagement, using the latest data science tools and methodologies. But the report says the initiative is nowhere near the scale the government envisages.

The JCSE says it agrees with the prevailing opinion that reaching even a tenth of this ambitious goal will be very tough. The EDSA is offering 300 or 400 internships over 2018/2019.

It says that hopefully there will be more realistic results from the launch of Microsoft Azure data centres, which intend to add 53,000 new jobs by 2022, with an additional 112,000 generated through other cloud services.

Practitioners to fill these jobs must be appropriately skilled. Microsoft claims its programmes can train school leavers to the level of software engineer or data scientist.

According to a master plan developed by the ICT sector, it wants to work with the government to introduce new legislation and policies for ICT to become a formal part of the school curriculum to support the digital economy.

Its measures for success in this regard are the inclusion of an ICT relevant curriculum by next year, STEM subjects digitised by 2020, and a common platform for learning by the same year.

This article was first published on https://4irsa.org/ - the official website of the 4IRSA alliance between the Universities of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Fort Hare, Telkom and the Department Of Telecommunications & Postal Services (DTPS) that aims to stimulate dialogue, understanding and action to shape a coherent 4IR plan for South Africa.A person I wish could be alive today

Letter to Wits Review

One person I wish could still be alive today would be turning seventy on May 5th 2019, yet she died at the age of thirty-five under unspeakably terrible circumstances. You can follow her path up to that moment on the internet: from Vice-President of NUSAS in 1972 to a moving force behind the Western Province Workers Advice Bureau, founder of the Industrial Aid Society and archivist at the Institute for Race Relations, from arrest in 1976 under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act to the inevitable flight out of South Africa to Botswana after marrying another banned person whom she had no legal right to even meet, ex-political prisoner Marius Schoon.

Not feeling safe there, they moved on to Lubango in northern Angola. That was where Jenny Curtis, as we knew her, was killed along with her six-year old daughter Katryn on 28th June 1984, when, in her own kitchen, she opened the parcel-bomb sent to her by Craig Williamson. Her then three-year old son Fritz, who was also in the kitchen, still lives with the traumatic shock of that moment.

Would anyone on the Wits campus in the repressed yet turbulent, wild-edged atmosphere of the late 1960s and early 1970s have been able to predict that Jenny might lead such a richly engaged life, with such a violently abrupt end? And though she was already an activist on campus, how many of us could have guessed at the political resolve and utter determination behind her shy smile and quiet words, always caring, rarely speaking of herself before inquiring about others?

I did not know Jenny well enough. But the Curtis home in Johannesburg, where she grew up alongside her brother Neville  a much appreciated NUSAS president who died at no more than 60 years old in 2007  was a place so many including myself enjoyed for its warm and easy hospitality and convivial parties. I will take a glass from a table there and raise it now to Jenny, making the sharply bitter-sweet wish that those who knew her then, and throughout her life, might celebrate the day she turns three score years and ten.

Denis Hirson, ParisCALS connects social justice and academia

CALS is not only a law clinic, but also a research centre at Wits University. We have a unique role to play in connecting social justice and academia

As both a social justice organisation and a university centre, CALS takes an approach which combines legal theory and practice  ensuring our work is informed by research and that our academic activity is supported by real world cases. CALS staff members are encouraged to pursue their own studies, research and teaching as part of their work here. 2019 has seen a strong show of academic activity already.

Teaching and Supervision

Being based at a centre of Wits University, staff members at CALS are well placed to provide training to students that integrates theory and practice. Teaching and supervising also gives them an opportunity to enhance their own academic careers. This year, three of our staff members are teaching essential undergraduate LLB courses at Wits University: Palesa Madi is teaching Introduction to Law, Stanley Malematja is lecturing Jurisprudence and Dr Esther Gumboh is taking on Criminal Procedure. Over at the University of Pretoria, Louis Snyman has given a series of guest lectures on Environmental Law. A number of us are also supervising Independent Research Essays.

Further Studies

CALS is proud to have a number of staff members who are continuing their studies in a variety of disciplines. This year, Louis Snyman has completed and submitted his PhD thesis at Wits University. Sheena Swemmer is studying towards her PhD at the University of Johannesburg and Phindile Khulu is completing an LLB degree through Unisa. At Wits University, we have Palesa Madi, Amelia Rawhani, Matimba Hlungwani and Lee-Anne Bruce studying towards an LLM, Postgraduate Diploma in Law, MA in Social Work and an Honours in Creative Writing respectively.

We are committed to assisting our staff to develop academically and provide support in any way we can  from offering study leave to providing financial assistance. Since we are a part of the University, we are also very fortunate to have all the degrees being completed at Wits fully covered by the Universitys staff bursary programme, and degrees at other universities partially covered for full time staff.Consumers ask about luxury goods at a duty-free shop in Haikou, Hainan province. [Photo by Yuan Chen/For China Daily]

Half of Chinese luxury spending will take place in China rather than traditional overseas locations by 2025, according to global consultancy Bain& Co.

Such purchase repatriation is thanks to a combination of factors like discretionary millennials, a crackdown on the domestic gray market and digital channel promotions in China, Bain said in its annual China Luxury Report released on Tuesday.

"Millennials will continue to be the main driver of the growth of this market in the future, as the average age of luxury consumers is much younger in China than anywhere else in the world  and they value newness more than discounts," said Bruno Lannes, a Shanghai-based partner and author of the report.

Consumers aged 23 to 38 have exhibited a higher willingness to spend on luxury brands. One case in point is that 70 percent of China's millennials own their own homes, Lannes said citing an HSBC survey, a rate twice that of their US counterparts, thus giving them enough financial leeway on discretionary spending.

"This demographic might not always buy the most expensive items, but they shop frequently. That's why it's important to have new collections and apply the fast-fashion playbook," he said.

Meanwhile, Chinese expenditure on luxury goods jumped 20 percent last year, accounting for one-third of the 260-billion-euro ($295 billion) global market, the report said. The rising share of domestic consumption will lead to import duty reductions, stricter control over gray markets and price harmonization in and outside China.

"Today you have enough legitimate platforms inside China to buy authentic products and that absolutely plays to the strategy of the government and the international brands who have made all the investment here," he said, projecting that growth will reach low-to-mid teens this year.

Meanwhile, digitalization, covering both digital engagements with consumers and sales online, continues to fuel luxury spending in China. Cosmetics led the pack as the top-performing category to achieve over 20 percent of online sales.

Luxury brands are also increasingly allocating a growing share, 60 to 70 percent, of their marketing budget to digital marketing platforms.

For example, e-commerce platform Tmall said it would focus on recruiting more top-notch brands this year, such as Tom Ford Beauty, which is set to launch an official flagship store on the site this year.

"Powered by Tmall's strength in big data, our new boutique gives us reach throughout China without compromising our commitment as a luxury brand," said Natsuko Watanabe, Asia-Pacific regional director at Tom Ford Beauty.

Tmall also created an invite-only option called Maison available to a select group of the world's most-prestigious luxury brands, offering their unique brand stories and innovations, said Lili Chen, general manager of Tmall Luxury Pavilion.

(Source: China Daily)Traditional dwellings dominate a village of the Miao ethnic group in Leishan county, Guizhou province. [Photo by Zhan Rencai/Provided to China Daily]

Photographer Zhan Rencai is preparing to take his 5-year-old daughter to visit the She ethnic group in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang in April.

He hopes she will eventually be able to see all the country's ethnic groups, matching his own achievement in the first decade of this century.

"With the rapid development of society, some formerly isolated ethnic group settlements have had opportunities to communicate with the outside world," the 57-year-old, from Mudanjiang, in northeastern China's Heilongjiang Province, said. "It is a good chance for them to learn more about modern civilization, but it can also be a challenge for them to preserve original ethnic characteristics.

"I want to understand their daily lives in various ethnic dwellings through my photographs."

From 2003 to 2009, Zhan traveled around the country, taking more than 40,000 photographs of ethnic groups' daily lives.

In April last year, he decided to donate all his precious negatives to the Museum of Ethnic Cultures at Minzu University of China, in Beijing.

After five years of service in the military, Zhan began working in the publicity department of the railway bureau in Mudanjiang in 1990, devoting himself to photography.

During the decade of rapid development in the 1990s, Zhan took a series of photographs recording the great changes in the railway system and outstanding railway staff.

To improve the quality of his photography, Zhan spent 120,000 yuan buying a camera set in 1998.

"That was almost all my savings, with which I had originally planned to buy a new apartment," he said. "At that time, the money could have bought a 200-square-meter apartment in Mudanjiang."

In 2003, he was tasked with taking a set of photographs featuring China's railways to welcome the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.

During that project, Zhan came up with the idea of simultaneously photographing ethnic groups.

With the privilege of free train travel as a railway employee, Zhan traveled more than 300,000 kilometers in a seven-year period for the project.

He recorded his entire journey in 1.2 million words in 22 photographic diaries.

"Before I started, I spent eight months looking up information, including the distribution, locations, cultural and local customs, and historical changes of ethnic groups," he said.

"Therefore, I focused my photography on ethnic dwellings that can represent their customs, migration and integration well.

"From the dwellings, we can find evidence of caves, tents, houses and other forms during the process of human development. They can even tell the historical changes of a nation, as well as the balance between man and nature."

During the project, he visited more than 500 ethnic villages in 50 regions.

"Even in the same ethnic group, residents in different regions have different characteristics in dwellings and lifestyles," he said.

"For example, in the pastures of the Tibet autonomous region, Tibetan residents usually choose to live in tents, while in the farming areas, residents choose dwellings made of earth, stones and wood."

The long journeys also brought him lots of unforgettable difficulties, such as the lack of food in the mountains, poor road conditions and walking dozens of kilometers on mountain roads to get to remote villages, especially when he had to carry 20 kilograms of photographic equipment.

"However, the hardest part for me was communicating well with local residents," he said. "I was often rejected by my interviewees for various reasons."

But he worked hard to win their trust.

"In 2005, for instance, I came across a funeral ceremony in a village of the ethnic Zhuang people in Napo county (in southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region)," Zhan said.

"Before that, I had shot several wedding ceremonies of different ethnic groups, but it was my first time experiencing a funeral ceremony. To grasp the unique opportunity, I tried my very best to ask for the family's permission."

He helped them with chores such as splitting firewood and carrying water, which made the family and the villagers treat him as a family member.

They allowed him to shoot the three-day funeral ceremony and the villagers introduced him to lots of Zhuang funerary customs.

To retain the most realistic images, Zhan insisted on recording them on film.

"Compared with digital photographs, negatives can't be modified at all," he said.

"Furthermore, the film can be kept for about 100 years with good preservation."

Buying film and printing photographs became his biggest expenses.

He sold his apartment in Mudanjiang in 2005 and spent 800,000 yuan during the seven-year project. "Almost all my friends couldn't understand why I decided to donate all the negatives," Zhan said.

"They advised me to leave them to my daughter, but I believed the films could be of huge value to the museum, which is a great platform to present China's ethnic groups.

"I hope we can finish the journey of visiting all the ethnic groups before my daughter goes to college, just like what I did before. It will be the most precious treasure for her growth."

Zhan with a couple from the Bai ethnic group in Dali, Yunnan province, in 2004. [Photo by Zhan Rencai/Provided to China Daily]

Zhan with a couple from the Tatar ethnic group and their grandchild in Qitai, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, in 2006. [Photo by Zhan Rencai/Provided to China Daily]

(Source: China Daily)Feng Yue (right) with a mother and her baby at a maternity and child care center in Beijing. [Photo/China Daily]

As one of China's first internationally certified lactation consultants, Feng Yue often comes across absurd infant care scenarios and the lack of awareness that new mothers have about breastfeeding.

"In particular, these absurd scenarios often happen to highly educated mothers," she said.

Feng, a co-founder of New Way Breastfeeding Care, has helped some 6,000 new mothers in China, including a number of Olympic gold medalists and film stars, with lactation in the last seven years.

"I, myself, was such a case," she said. "It was the enormous pain that I felt from a strong and hard hand massage by a nanny who had no professional training in massaging the breast for milk 10 years ago that made me determined to seek a career in this sector."

In the first few days after giving birth to her son in September 2008, Feng said her nanny massaged her incorrectly, leading to blocked lactiferous ducts.

She had to undergo breast surgery to completely unblock the ducts.

Those painful experiences prompted Feng to quit her job at a joint venture and start acquiring professional knowledge about breastfeeding. She has been a volunteer helping new mothers since 2009.

She said some mothers were cheated by masseuses who told them that they needed to be massaged more than 100 times to sustain their breast milk.

Not only did the new mothers spend a lot of money on such useless massages, but some of the massages also caused breast-related health complications.

Feng said increasing Chinese women's knowledge about breastfeeding and providing more psychological support to them are crucial.

Breastfeeding has been proved to help newborns develop intelligence and healthy bodies, and help reduce the mental stress of new mothers. However, Feng said Chinese mothers are more interested in buying imported milk powder.

Statistics from the National Health Commission indicate that only 29.2 percent of mothers in China provide pure breast milk to one-to six-month-old infants, while the figure overseas is 40 percent.

Statistics from a Sohu report last year show that China has fewer than 400 international board certified lactation consultants, or IBCLCs, indicating that many breast massage professionals and nannies have not been well trained.

Some may only have local training certificates, but many in suburban areas have no certification at all.

Currently, Chinese lactation professionals can only take the IBCLC examination in Taiwan or in the United States.

"To a certain extent, all these circumstances have led to false breastfeeding methods, and a low breast milk rate," Feng said.

To her delight, more Chinese celebrities have joined campaigns to raise awareness of breastfeeding in recent years.

Thanks to her professional techniques, Feng has helped some 20 Olympic medalists and world champions, including figure skater Shen Xue, synchronized swimmer Zhang Xiaohuan and gymnast Zhang Nan, and film stars such as Jiang Qinqin, to breastfeed their babies. These public figures have vowed to publicly support breastfeeding education for Chinese women.

Feng plans to offer more e-learning courses for new mothers and professionals in the sector, and also introduce the IBCLC examination to the Chinese mainland.

(Source: Xinhua)Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) and his wife Peng Liyuan disembark from the airplane upon their arrival in Rome, Italy, on March 21, 2019. Xi arrived in Rome Thursday for a state visit to Italy to map out the future of the bilateral relationship and move it into a new era. [Xinhua/Wang Ye]

Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Rome Thursday for a state visit to Italy to map out the future of the bilateral relationship and move it into a new era.

It is the first visit by a Chinese head of state to the European nation in 10 years.

Two Italian fighter jets escorted Xi's plane as it entered the country's airspace.

Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, were greeted by senior Italian government officials at the airport.

While delivering a written speech upon arrival, Xi said that the China-Italy relations have withstood the test of time and international vicissitudes since the two countries forged diplomatic ties 49 years ago.

Upholding the principle of mutual respect, trust and benefit, China and Italy have constantly promoted their friendship and cooperation, setting an example of developing bilateral ties between two countries of different social systems, cultural backgrounds and development stages, Xi said.

The practical cooperation between the two countries has yielded fruitful results, bringing tangible benefits to the two peoples, said Xi, adding that the bilateral cultural and people-to-people exchanges are rich and colorful, and have enhanced mutual understanding and friendship.

The Chinese president noted that he is looking forward to meeting the Italian leaders to jointly draw the blueprint for the future development of bilateral relations.

"I believe with the concerted efforts of both sides, the China-Italy comprehensive strategic partnership will enjoy a better tomorrow," Xi said.

Italy is the first stop of Xi's three-nation Europe tour, which will also take him to Monaco and France.

(Source: Xinhua)[Photo/China Daily]

President Xi Jinping left Beijing for Rome on Thursday, kicking off his first overseas trip of the year  one that is aimed at broadening areas of cooperation and injecting new impetus into Sino-European ties.

During his state visit to Italy, the first stop of a six-day tour that will take him to three nations, Xi and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte will jointly witness the signing of intergovernmental cooperation documents in fields of diplomacy, economy and trade, and culture, as well as commercial agreements in infrastructure, machinery and finance.

The two countries will also work to strengthen Belt and Road cooperation.

The ambassadors of the two countries said they also hope Xi's visit will send out a clear signal that China and Italy are joining hands in promoting open and fruitful cooperation, and will serve to uphold multilateralism and rules-based global trading.

"It is in the interest of the two peoples as well as the entire international community," said Italian Ambassador to China Ettore Sequi.

"We need to work together within a fair, rules-based international trade system on a level-playing field to pull the global economy back on a path of strong, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth," Sequi told China Daily in a written interview.

Further opening up of our economies, societies and cultures is also conducive to the development of the two countries, he added.

The Italian ambassador described the two countries as good trade partners whose bilateral trade has been growing steadily.

Last year, bilateral trade volume reached $54.23 billion amid a global economic downturn, and two-way investment between China and Italy exceeded $20 billion, according to sources at China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"We want to expand our exports to China, rebalance our trade deficit and bring more products and services from Italy to the Chinese market," Sequi said.

"Italy can offer the Chinese people quality, innovation, design, and customer care among other things," he added, noting that Italy has been closely watching the reforms and policies made by the Chinese government related to market access for foreign products and services.

Calling Italy "a trusted friend and good partner within the European Union," Chinese Ambassador to Italy Li Ruiyu said Xi's visit will open a new chapter in the bilateral relationship  one that has already been on a fast track for many years.

He described bilateral cooperation in various areas as being "full of vitality" and described high-level contacts between the two countries as "maintaining sound momentum."

The Italian government has responded positively to the Belt and Road Initiative, a move that Li said shows Italy believes there is much to explore in terms of win-win cooperation between the two countries.

Paolo Gentiloni, then prime minister of Italy, attended the first Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing in May 2017.

Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio signed a memorandum of understanding with China covering third-party market cooperation during his visit to China last year.

Li said many Italian port cities are increasingly interested in participating in the infrastructure and logistical cooperation associated with the BRI, and that they have noted the investments made by China COSCO Shipping Ports and Port of Qingdao in expanding and modernizing the port of Vado Ligure, near Genoa.

(Source: China Daily)Concerns for missing man who could be in Wrexham area

This article is old - Published: Thursday, Mar 21st, 2019

North Wales Police have issued an appeal this evening amid concerns for a missing man.

Andrew Steven Wylie was last seen at his home address on Tuesday 12th March 2019.

Police say he is likely to be in the Wrexham and Flintshire area.

Any sightings please call North Wales Police on 101 using iTrace reference 24914.



(Click for large)David Jones OBE steps down as CEO of Coleg Cambria after 20 years in North East Wales education

This article is old - Published: Friday, Mar 22nd, 2019

The chief executive of Coleg Cambria will step down from the role later this year.

David Jones OBE oversaw the merger of Deeside and Yale colleges in 2013 and has led the institution through an unprecedented period of success.

Cambrias board of governors thanked him for his efforts and achievements and said he will be sorely missed.

Coleg Cambria has grown year on year, breaking academic records, raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for charity, driving economic growth in north east Wales and forming partnerships with global giants of business and industry.

Mr Jones leadership was rewarded in 2017 at the annual TES (formerly Times Educational Supplement) Awards, when he was named UK FE leader of the Year.

In recent years Flintshire, Denbighshire and Wrexham have seen more than 60m of new buildings  pushing the envelope of design, innovation, conservation and creativity.

This will continue with the completion of the 22m Yale redevelopment in the town centre in September 2020, with David securing Welsh Government support for the project.

The 57-year-old is looking forward to a new start and bringing his wealth of skills and experience to future roles having made a huge impact on education, training and apprenticeships in Wales and beyond.

It is with a heavy heart that I announce I will be leaving Coleg Cambria, but Im looking forward to the adventures that lie ahead, he said.

It has been an absolute pleasure to lead Cambria having previously done the same at Deeside College, and we have achieved so much together.

The academic side of the college is crucial, as are the many links we have with industry, but whats most important for me is the care and support we give to students, staff and our local community.

Thats what Ive always been passionate about, and thats why I  and everyone at Cambria  strives for better every year.

I am so pleased that Estyn have recognised this through a series of sector-leading inspections. Weve achieved this through amazing students, staff and governors, and I thank them all for their work and support.

Mr Jones added: This Autumn we will begin to Re-Vision and start a comprehensive process to develop a new Strategic Plan which has to be delivered from 2020 to 2025.

Its the right time to hand over the baton to someone else who can shape and deliver the next steps for Cambria

There is still a lot of work to do, and I will be with the college until December, so theres no time to sit back and reflect.

All I know is I am incredibly proud to have presided over three mergers that brought together the four colleges in north east Wales, and of course being the first Principal and Chief Executive of Coleg Cambria.

Thats a massive honour I will take forward with me into the future.

Mr Jones has enjoyed a 20-year career at Deeside and now Cambria, leading the college to become one of the top FE, work-based learning and apprenticeship providers in the UK.

He is also the chair of both the North Wales CBI and Deeside Enterprise Zone.

Brought up in the village of Ciliau Aeron in Ceredigion, one of his personal highlights was receiving an OBE from the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace in 2015, for services to further education in north east Wales.

Mr Jones went on to gain a BSc in electronics engineering from the University of Glamorgan, a PGCE from the University of Wales, Cardiff, and an MBA from Warwick Business School before beginning his career in education in 1987.

In 2013 Mr Jones became Principal of Coleg Cambria, following the challenging merger of Deeside and Yale.

The merger has been seen as a success, with Cambria now pumping 400m a year into the local economy and employing over 1,000 people. The college is a major player at the annual WorldSkills competition and recently received the best work-based learning inspection in Wales to date from Estyn.

John Clutton, chair of Governors at Coleg Cambria, paid tribute to Mr Jones, stating that his influence and achievements are immeasurable.

The governing body would like to thank David for the leadership, friendship and vision he has shown as Principal and now Chief Executive of Cambria, said Mr Clutton.

His legacy will be the outstanding success that students of the college have achieved locally, nationally and internationally during his tenure.

In addition, the support and opportunities provided to local businesses and organisations have been equally impressive. He will be sorely missed by us all.

For more on Coleg Cambria, visit www.cambria.ac.uk



(Click for large)Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-20 12:30:14|Editor: Liangyu

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VIENTIANE, March 20 (Xinhua) -- An additional 4.5-million-U.S. dollar funding is needed this year to effectively carry out unexploded ordnance (UXO) operations in Laos.

The information came last Friday during the Lao National Unexploded Ordnance Programme (UXO Lao)'s annual meeting, local daily Vientiane Times reported on Wednesday

According to the meeting, which summarized work in the past year and planned for the year ahead, UXO operations in Laos included mine surveys and clearance, along with risk education and victim assistance.

The National Regulatory Authority for the UXO/Mine Action sector (NRA) this year expected its UXO surveys, clearance, risk education, administration, capacity building for humanitarian teams and victim assistance to cost 33.33 million U.S. dollars, the report said.

The meeting heard that UXO surveys have been conducted in nine provinces around the country. While UXO surveys covered 60,000 hectares, only 5,000 hectares have been cleared because of insufficient funding.

This year, a non-technical survey will be carried out in 1,106 villages with the technical survey to cover 22,750 hectares. UXO clearance work will be carried out on 3,211 hectares in rural development projects.

UXO community awareness and risk education campaigns will take place in 673 villages and 395 schools covering 54 districts of 12 provinces, aiming to reduce the number of UXO casualties to less than 40 a year.

Authorities will continue to provide vocational training courses to assist 612 UXO victims in their livelihoods.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-21 18:43:01|Editor: ZX

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ANKARA, March 21 (Xinhua) -- An emergency meeting of Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) will be held on Friday in Istanbul to discuss rising anti-Muslim violence following mosque terror attacks in New Zealand, Turkish Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

In a statement, the ministry said the upcoming meeting is upon the demands by Turkey, the current OIC Summit Chair, for discussing "the increasing violence based on Islamophobia, racism and xenophobia."

The emergency ministerial meeting will be chaired by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, it added.

Nearly 20 countries have already confirmed their participation in the event, which is also expected to be attended by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and delegation from New Zealand, according to Anadolu Agency.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-21 19:23:12|Editor: xuxin

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CAIRO, March 21 (Xinhua) -- A blast took place in a factory on Thursday in Ain Sokhna district of Suez province east of the Egyptian capital Cairo, official news agency MENA reported.

"While testing an operating tank inside a factory that manufactures phosphate fertilizers in Ain Sokhna, a fire erupted," MENA added.

The fire left 15 killed and wounded, according to MENA.

Meanwhile, an independent local newspaper said eight people were killed and other seven were wounded in the accident.

The wounded have been transferred to the Suez Public Hospital, MENA added.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 02:55:30|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NICOSIA, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Cyprus on Thursday welcomed an agreement between the foreign ministers of Turkey and Greece to start meetings to explore each other's positions on the security aspect of a settlement of the Cyprus problem.

Cyprus Foreign Minister Nicos Christodoulides said in a statement that the agreement was an important development in the context of efforts to end the division of the eastern Mediterranean island.

He said Greek Foreign Minister George Katrougalos briefed him on his talks with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu earlier on Thursday, at which they also agreed on confidence building measures by the two countries.

Christodoulides said he was informed by Katrougalos that the deputy foreign ministers of the two countries will meet on April 12 in Athens to explore each other's positions on how to replace the current system of guarantees for Cyprus with a new security system after a solution of the Cyprus problem.

Cyprus was partitioned when Turkey sent troops to intervene in the northern part of Cyprus in 1974, in response to a coup by the military rulers of Greece at the time.

More than 40 years of negotiations came to an end in July 2017, when participants at an international conference in Switzerland - Greek and Turkish Cypriots and guarantor powers Greece, Turkey and Britain - failed to agree on a blueprint submitted by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

A United Nations official has been tasked by the Secretary General to explore the positions of the parties involved on the prospects or restarting the Cyprus peace negotiations.

Christodoulides said that the UN official, Jane Holl Lute, is expected to be back in Cyprus in the first 10 days of April to further explore the prospects of continuing the negotiations.Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has asked the DOTs Inspector General to audit the FAAs approval of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. This closely follows a detailed investigative piece by the Seattle Times revealing mischaracterizations of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), preliminarily thought to be a component of the two fatal crashes of 737 MAX 8 aircraft. The Ethiopian transport minister, who had been presented with preliminary data from Ethiopian Flight 302, said there are clear similarities to data from the Lion Air crash last October.

Secretary Chao told IG Calvin Scovel, To help inform the Departments decision making and the publics understanding, and to assist the FAA in ensuring that its safety procedures are implemented effectively, this is to confirm my request that the Office of Inspector General proceed with an audit to compile an objective and detailed factual history of the activities that resulted in the certification of the Boeing 737-MAX 8 aircraft. Boeing requested an amended type certification for the MAX 8 and 9 aircraft in 2012, and received approval in March 2017.

Other countries are seeking their own answers. Reuters is reporting that Canadian and European Union aviation authorities have signaled they will not rubber stamp the FAAs conclusions or Boeings fixes. Transport Canada has indicated that it will conduct an exhaustive review of the 737s MCAS before clearing the airplane.

The Times report revealed that the MCAS had far more authority over stabilizer trim than was originally thought and could create yoke forces of more than 100 pounds for pilots trying to regain control of the aircraft. Boeing had previously stated that software fixes were in progress; reports are that the MCAS will be connected to both angle-of-attack sensors (not just one, as currently configured) and be limited to the number of times it can move the stabilizer should it sense an impending stall.

The Boeing 737 MAX series remains grounded worldwide.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 04:56:07|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIRUT, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Visiting president of Russia's International Association of Islamic Business (IAIB) Marat Kabayev said on Thursday that Russia wants to increase mutual investments with Lebanon.

"This is the right time to start mutual investments between the two countries. Russian businessmen have many innovative ideas that they want to be implemented in Lebanon," Kabayev was quoted as saying by the National News Agency.

The starting point could be Lebanon's northern city Tripoli, he added.

Kabayev's remarks came during a meeting between a Russian delegation and Toufic Dabbousi, head of Tripoli's Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture.

Kabayev also said he hopes the cooperation with Lebanon will focus on the economic and cultural fields.

Alexander Gogolev, chairman of the Lebanese-Russian Business Council, said Russia could partner with Lebanon in all fields especially in the banking sector.

For his part, Dabbousi called upon Russians to invest in big projects in Lebanon such as the creation of railways and the expansion of Tripoli's port.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 05:06:08|Editor: Li Xia

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Turkish designer Murat Aytulum receives an interview with Xinhua at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Istanbul, in Istanbul, Turkey, March 21, 2019. Murat Aytulum, a Turkish designer, on Thursday released his 30-piece Fall/Winter 2019-2020 collection at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Istanbul, the biggest fashion show in Turkey. (Xinhua/Xu Suhui)

ISTANBUL, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Models on the catwalk displayed a leather collection mostly in black, white, powder and rose pieces which bear some sparkling mathematical symbols.

Murat Aytulum, a Turkish designer, on Thursday released his 30-piece Fall/Winter 2019-2020 collection at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Istanbul, the biggest fashion show in Turkey.

The collection, dubbed as the "Memory," consists of pieces that Aytulum designed by sketching and installing mathematical symbols and formulas on soft leather outfits by using several techniques.

"The combination of mathematical signs with the designs indicates the perfection and toughness of mathematics," he told Xinhua before the runway show started.

"In my collection, I intend to reduce most of the prejudices against mathematics by acknowledging its existence in every aspect of life, including nature as well," he said.

The designer used several techniques, many of which were applied for the first time, in placing the symbols on the dress and accessories in the form of manuscript and graffiti.

Nilgun Korucu, a female spectator, said the designer somehow managed to create a chalkboard effect on the dress with all these symbols and formulas.

"Women will look stronger and wiser with his designs," she said.

For Caterina Demiroz, a Serbian model, the creation is "gorgeous" in various pastel and dark colors and very feminine at the same time with all the metal sparkles.

Demiroz has been living in Turkey for several years and has taken the podium for Aytulum's creations many times.

"His designs are all handmade while the leather is extremely comfortable and suitable for all kinds of personalities," she said.

"Whether you have a feminine style or you are manly, you can wear them at any time in the day," she added.

In her view, the mathematical signs on the dress are part of the fashion indicating strong women.

Aytulum, who established his brand a decade ago, has been working on leather designs for almost 20 years.

For him, the Far Eastern markets are critical in supplying materials for his designs.

He is currently working with several companies in Beijing, China's capital, in co-designing.

"In the coming years, I am planning to attend more international fairs and events to be more internationally recognized," he said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 05:11:11|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BELGRADE, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The 54th International Motor Show opened here on Thursday with new technologies in the automobile industry highlight of this year's show.

Under the slogan "In rear-view mirror", the fair brought some 400 exhibitors all over the world, with 48 premieres of models from premium brands expected.

The annual fair was opened by Serbia's famous veteran actor Vlasta Velisavljevic, a 92-year-old who still has a valid driving license.

According to Velisavljevic, the International Motor Show, which was first held 81 years ago, continues the tradition of presenting the latest from the automobile world to Serbia.

According to the organizers, the exhibit area is some 37,000 square meters. The International Motor Show this year brings 35 automobile brands and 36 motorcycle brands, of which some saw their world premieres at the just concluded Geneva Salon.

One of the most popular cars at the ceremony was Jaguar I-pace, awarded by the prestigious magazines with the "European car of the year" for 2019, while visitors were also attracted by the new Rolls Royce Cullinan, Ferrari Portofino, BMW X7, Range Rover Evoque, Audi A1 Sportback and many others.

Moreover, the visitors tested some of the latest motorcycles from BMW, Honda, Harley Davidson and many other brands.

The fair will gather car lovers from Serbia and the region until March 31, hosting numerous presentations, lectures and discussions on new technologies, traffic safety and other topics.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 05:26:12|Editor: Liangyu

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Models present jewellery during a fashion show at the 2019 edition of BaselWorld in Basel, Switzerland, March 21, 2019. The 2019 edition of BaselWorld, the world's biggest annual watch and jewelry fair, opened its doors to the public on Thursday, with exhibitors, show managers and industry experts looking forward to a future-oriented transformation of the show in the digital world. (Xinhua/Xu Jinquan)

BASEL, Switzerland, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The 2019 edition of BaselWorld, the world's biggest annual watch and jewelry fair, opened its doors to the public on Thursday, with exhibitors, show managers and industry experts looking forward to a future-oriented transformation of the show in the digital world.

"BaselWorld is currently undergoing a transformation," said Hans-Kristian Hoejsgaard, interim CEO of the MCH Group which hosts and organizes BaselWorld, at a press conference prior to the opening.

Since 1917, the show has showcased luxury watches, fine jewelry, loose diamonds and gems. But this year, it has begun a series of changes faced with challenges posed by digitalization to both the watchmaking industry and the exhibition sector.

"Our industry is undergoing a radical upheaval due to digitalisation. This is a fact that presents us with completely new challenges," said Michel Loris-Melikoff, managing director of Baselworld.

"Everybody uses their smartphone to make purchases, to book a taxi, to do their banking transactions and, in the end, smartphones also revolutionize fairs and the exhibitions' business," he said.

The initial changes have already been implemented at Baselworld 2019. These included modern communication strategies, strengthening the jewelry sector, and expanding the gastronomic offerings at the show.

Meanwhile, BaselWorld is coordinating its dates with the Geneva watch fair, the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH), starting from next year. It is only the beginning of the comprehensive transformation of BaselWorld that it will undergo from 2020 onwards, according to Melikoff.

Hoejsgaard also confirmed that the changes would combine digital communication with real experiences and encounters. He promised that BaselWorld would be transformed from a classic sales and distribution platform into a future-oriented experience event.

"We listened carefully to the exhibitors and worked with them to develop a vision and concept for BaselWorld 2020 and beyond," Hoejsgaard said.

Swiss Federal President Ueli Maurer, in his speech at the opening ceremony, said that every civilization had begun with trade fairs and markets where opinions and ideas were exchanged as well as knowledge and goods.

"Basel has been such a marketplace for centuries that it stands for growth and further development," because this exchange cannot be reduced to the screen of a smartphone, he said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 05:36:16|Editor: Xiaoxia

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Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic (R, front) and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (L, front) attend a welcoming ceremony in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, March 21, 2019. Croatia is the "bridge" between the European bloc and the Southeast European countries with which it joins the common past, said German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is on an official two-day visit to Croatia, here on Thursday. (Xinhua/Goran Stanzl)

ZAGREB, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Croatia is the "bridge" between the European bloc and the Southeast European countries with which it joins the common past, said German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is on an official two-day visit to Croatia, here on Thursday.

The German president was welcomed at the residence of Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic. After a joint conversation of the two leaders, they said that bilateral ties between the two countries will be even more successful after 2020 when both countries are presiding over the European Union.

Croatia assumes the EU presidency on Jan. 1 2020, and on July 1 it will be chaired by Germany.

Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic informed her guest that during the presidency Croatia would organize summits of South East Europe countries with the theme of further EU enlargement.

The presidents agreed that the European Union should not lose in bilateral disputes, and that the elections for the European Parliament should decide on the future of the EU.

"In Europe, there are many things to do today, and the European elections in May will decide on various drafts for the future of the European Union," Steinmeier said in a statement to reporters.

President Grabar-Kitarovic highlighted the important role of Germany in the international recognition of Croatia and emphasized the appreciation of Germany's strong support for Croatia's membership in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

"The EU will become stronger when Croatia enters the Schengen area and the Eurozone," the Croatian president said.

Steinmeier pointed out that the whole area of south-east Europe was faced with difficulties, but overwhelmingly open questions had to be overcome.

"In Europe, dealing with the difficulties of the past has wasted the road to the future," Steinmeier said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 05:51:20|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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AMMAN, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Although the border crossing between Jordan and Syria was officially reopened in mid October 2018, Jordan's agricultural sector does not benefit from the move, experts said.

Jordan has not exported a single kg of fruits or vegetables to neighboring Syria since the border crossing was repened, said Adnan Khaddam, president of Jordan Valley Farmers Union.

"We thought the reopening of the borders will be a win-win situation. But obviously it is not, as the Syrian farmers benefited more. The continuation of this situation means more losses to Jordanian farmers," Khaddam told Xinhua.

"We will lose more in the summer when their produce is exported to the Gulf states and this means they are competing with our farmers who lost millions of dinars over the past years," he added.

Before 2011, Jordan's agricultural exports to Syria exceeded 200,000 metric tonnes per year, according to Zuhair Jweihan, vice president of the Jordan Exporters and Producers Society for Fruits and Vegetables.

Jordan also exported more than 60,000 metric tonnes of produce to Russia, eastern European countries and Turkey via Syria before the border closure, Jweihan said.

In April 2015, Jordan closed the Jaber border crossing with Syria for security reasons. Passenger and cargo traffic was halted as a result of the escalating violence in the Syrian town of Nasib across the border, some 80 km north of Amman.

Hosam Ayesh, a Jordanian economist, said the reopening of the borders provided opportunities for hundreds of thousands of Jordanians to visit Syria for work or holiday, but the agricultural sector did not benefit.

"It seems that there are many obstacles in Syria and several measures that hamper the flow of Jordanian agricultural produce to Syria," Ayesh told Xinhua.

"The reopening of the crossing should bring benefits for the two sides as currently farmers in Jordan are losing and the Syrian agricultural produce swarmed the local market for a while after the border reopened," he said.

Jweihan told Xinhua that there is no demand for Syrian traders but "obstacles" for Jordanian produce exporters.

"Jordan allowed Syrian agricultural produce to enter the Jordanian market and since the border reopening, scores of Syrian trucks loaded with fruits and vegetables such as onions or apples have entered Jordan, which is unfair to us," he told Xinhua.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 06:06:25|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GENEVA, March 21 (Xinhua) -- A two-day roundtable on Western Sahara organized in accordance with United Nations Security Council resolution 2440 on Thursday officially kicked off in an undisclosed place near Geneva.

In a media statement issued Thursday, the UN office at Geneva (UNOG) said that the Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General for Western Sahara, Horst Kohler, is hosting delegations from Morocco, the Frente POLISARIO, Algeria and Mauritania.

"During the meeting, which will last until tomorrow, delegations are expected to discuss elements of a solution in accordance with Security Council resolution 2440, revisit regional issues and explore trust-building measures," UNOG said.

The Personal Envoy was cited by UNOG as saying that he hopes the meeting will also build on the positive dynamic achieved during the first roundtable, which was held last December in Geneva.

Western Sahara was partitioned between Morocco and Mauritania at the end of Spain's colonial rule in 1976. When Mauritania, under pressure from Polisario guerrillas, abandoned all claims to its portion in August 1979, Morocco moved to occupy that sector and asserted administrative control over the whole territory.

Fighting then broke out between Morocco and the Polisario Front, which is fighting for the independence of Western Sahara. A cease-fire was signed in 1991 and in that year, the UN mission, known by its French acronym as Minurso, was deployed to monitor the cease-fire.

On the issue of Western Sahara, Algiers supports self-determination for the Sahrawi people there, while Rabat insists that Western Sahara is part of Morocco territories.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 07:11:40|Editor: Yurou

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UNITED NATIONS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The number of confirmed deaths from Cyclone Idai in southern Africa has risen to at least 437 with officials expecting the death toll to rise further, a UN official said on Thursday.

In Mozambique, "the death toll has now risen to 242," said Gemma Connell, head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' (OCHA) Regional Office for Southern and Eastern Africa, in the Mozambican capital of Maputo.

More than 195 people died in neighboring Malawi (56) and Zimbabwe (139), according to the respective governments, she said in a telephone briefing for reporters.

"We do anticipate for that to rise in the days ahead as the full extent of the loss of life becomes known," she said. "It's critical for everyone to be aware that many areas remain inundated with water and therefore the counting of the dead will continue to take some time, so we expect the death toll to rise as that progresses.

Connell said that on Wednesday she was in Beira, a flooded port city of about 500,000, and toured some of the region by helicopter, where roads were mostly impassible.

Beira is a key gateway for neighboring and landlocked Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe where Idai made landfall on March 15.

"When I was over the area of Buzi (a nearby district), we were starting to see some of the flood waters beginning to go down," she said. "There is still the possibility of secondary floods."

"Therefore, we are on high alert for this situation to worsen," the aid worker said. "But, we are happy that we have the good news of the flood waters going down."

The OCHA official lauded two key non-governmental organizations (NGOs) providing air support for the relief operation, Mercy Air and Wings Like Eagles, calling helicopter crews "heroic," and saying it was "absolutely critical" to have the air support.

She said OCHA was not seeking supplies but needed more funds.

The head of OCHA, Undersecretary-General Mark Lowcock, announced earlier in the week 20 million U.S. dollars had been freed from the UN's Central Emergency Relief Fund. Connell said that was not near enough.

She said high energy biscuits and clean drinking water had initially been provided to flood victims, many of whom had gathered in houses of worship, stadiums and other large sites above the water.

Idai, as a tropical storm, flooded parts of central Mozambique and southern Malawi in early March, meteorological agencies said. It then went back out to sea, gathered strength and doubled back as a full-fledged cyclone to hit many already flooded areas.

The OCHA regional head said Cyclone Idai had created a "complex situation and an even more complex (humanitarian) response."Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 07:16:40|Editor: Yurou

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UNITED NATIONS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The members of the United Nations Security Council are leaving New York Thursday evening on a visiting mission to Mali and Burkina Faso.

The main objective of the visiting mission is to "assess progress and encourage further implementation of the 2015 Peace and Reconciliation Agreement in Mali," according to the Security Council Report (SCR), whose mission is to advance the transparency and effectiveness of the Security Council.

Other two main objectives of the visiting mission are assessing the status of the operationalization of the joint force of the G5 Sahel (FC-G5S) after a six-month hiatus following a terrorist attack against its headquarters in central Mali in June 2018 and seeking to focus on the degradation of the security situation in Burkina Faso.

This is the fourth council visiting mission to Mali since the establishment of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) in 2013. The council previously visited the country in February 2014, March 2016 and October 2017 (when it also went to Burkina Faso and Mauritania).

This visit takes place three months before the renewal of the mission's mandate in June. Upon returning to New York, the council is expected to hold a ministerial meeting on Mali, featuring a briefing by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the participation of Malian Prime Minister Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga.

After a long process of dialogue and negotiation, a peace accord had finally been concluded in May 2015 between the Malian Government and two coalitions of armed groups that were fighting the government and against each other, namely the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA) and the Platform of armed groups (the Platform).Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 07:21:41|Editor: Yurou

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People transfer the body of a victim to a military helicopter in Chimanimani, Manicaland Province, Zimbabwe, March 21, 2019. The death toll from Cyclone Idai in Zimbabwe has risen to 139 with 189 still missing, the government said Thursday. (Xinhua/Shaun Jusa)

HARARE, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa has declared two days of national mourning following the devastating Cyclone Idai which has killed 139 people and left a trail of destruction in the eastern and southern parts of the country.

In an address to the nation Thursday, the president declared the weekend of March 23-24 as national days of mourning.

"In these two days of national mourning, we must remember all our dear departed by way of prayer and other forms of practice," said Mnangagwa.

"Allow me to pay tribute to foreign governments, organizations and citizens whose deep sense of compassion has moved them to stand by us in this hour of great national grief and need," he added.

Cyclone Idai hit Zimbabwe from neighboring Mozambique between Friday and Sunday, unleashing strong winds and floods that displaced thousands of others and left many homeless after their homes collapsed due to the heavy rains.

The government also said more than 150 people were missing after the floods.

The floods destroyed property and caused widespread destruction to infrastructure such as roads and bridges, particularly in Chimanimani district that has been the most affected.

As rescue and search efforts continue, donations of relief supplies to the victims continue to pour in from local people, companies, regional governments and international aid agencies.

China, the United States, United Nations and the European Union have made donations to the affected communities.Ethiopian Airlines Thursday disputed a New York Times report that claimed the captain of the 737 MAX that crashed on March 10 with the loss of all aboard hadnt received simulator training on the aircraft. The airline said all of its pilots had completed differences training from the 737 NG to the newer MAX. However, although Ethiopian Airlines has one of the few MAX simulators, the airline didnt deny the Times report that the captain trained on another simulator.

The pilots had also been made aware of, and well briefed on the Emergency Airworthiness Directive issued by the FAA following the Lion Air accident, Ethiopian Airlines statement said. The content of the airworthiness directive has also been well incorporated in all pilot training manuals, operational procedures and working manuals, it added. A number of other airlines operating the MAX, including Southwest Airlines in the U.S., dont have dedicated MAX simulators. Pilots were given a tablet-based differences course that initially didnt include information on the MAXs MCAS stall protection subsystem. Pilot unions have criticized Boeing for the omission and following the Lion Air MAX crash on Oct. 29, it forwarded additional technical details on MCAS to operators.

Ethiopian Airlines statement said, The B-737 MAX full flight simulators are not designed to simulate the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) problems.File Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump (L) speaks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, on May 22, 2017. (Xinhua/Gil Cohen Magen)

WASHINGTON, March 21 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that was is time for the United States to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria in 1967.

Such a bold move marking a major shift in U.S. policy would further complicate the situation and escalate tensions in the region, U.S. experts said.

In a surprise tweet, Trump said that "after 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

In response, Israel's Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer tweeted "THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!"

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has always asserted that the Israeli presence in the Golan is "thwarting" Iran's ambitions of expansion and "is a guarantee for stability" in the region, also tweeted that "at a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump!"

Richard N. Haass, head of U.S. think tank Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted that he "strongly disagree(s) @realDonaldTrump; now NOT the time 4 US to recognize Israel sovereignty over Golan Hts."

"No Arab govt would make peace w Israel & would violate UNSCR 242 which rules out acquiring territory by war and serves Israel as it says all states have right 2 live in peace," he added, refering to United Nations Security Council Resolution 242.

Trump's statement came after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Wednesday, when Netanyahu said "I think it's time that the international community recognizes Israel's stay in the Golan, the fact that the Golan will always remain part of the state of Israel."

Pompeo said earlier on Wednesday at a joint press conference with Kuwait's Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah Al-Khalid Al-Sabah that "there's been no change in U.S. policy with respect to" the position on the Golan Heights.

But recent signs have shown otherwise, indicating that the Trump administration was moving in accordance with Israel's appeal.

A State Department human rights report unveiled earlier this month used the term "Israeli-controlled" instead of "Israeli-occupied" to describe the status of the Golan Heights, sparking wide speculation and worry among observers.

Pompeo told the press traveling with him in the Middle East on Thursday that "we used that language in the Human Rights Report with great intentionality."

"We didn't make a mistake. It's there for a reason. It's not a change in U.S. policy. It was our intent, as it is in every element of the Human Rights Report, to be as factually descriptive as we can, and that's what we did," he said, according to the transcript provided by the State Department.

Israel seized the land in a war in 1967 and annexed it in the 1980s, but the international community has never recognized the move.

The UN peacekeeping force tasked to patrol the buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights was deployed in 1974 to separate Syrian and Israeli forces. Since then, the buffer zone had remained quiet until the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

In July 2018, the Syrian state media outlets said the rebels in southern Syria near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights accepted plan to evacuate and surrender their heavy weapons to the Syrian army, which has restored control of large swathes of territories in the region, including the crossing with the Golan Heights.

Netanyahu called on the White House in January this year to recognize "Israeli sovereignty" over the Golan Heights in a joint statement with U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton in Jerusalem.

The White House said Wednesday Trump will host next week at the White House the Israeli prime minister, who is now seeking re-election for a fifth term in the April 9 elections.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 07:26:43|Editor: Lu Hui

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BRUSSELS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- European Union's (EU) 27 members unanimously agreed to Art. 50 extension until May 22 if Withdrawal Agreement is approved next week by Britain's House of Commons, President of the European Council Donald Tusk said Thursday.

If the Withdrawal Agreement is not approved next week, then extension will go to April 12, said Tusk after the end of the Brexit summit held here on Thursday.

The EU 27 also approved the Strasbourg Agreement on Thursday and will continue no-deal preparations, said Tusk.

The EU and Britain last week reached an agreement in Strasbourg on legal assurances about the functioning of the backstop.

"April 12 is the date for UK to decide to participate in the European election. If it hasn't done so by then, long extension will become impossible," said Tusk at a press conference following the EU's Brexit summit here.

Tusk said that the conditional extension could be approved by "written procedure" at the end of next week, so it would not require the reconvening of the summit.

Asked about "how long would the 'long extension' be", Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission who co-chaired the conference with Tusk, told reporters that "long extension would mean until the every end."Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 07:36:47|Editor: Yang Yi

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WASHINGTON, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese paleontologists have discovered a trove of well-preserved fossils in China 518 million years ago, representing more than 50 previously undescribed animal species, including jellyfish, arthropods and algae.

The study published on Thursday in the journal Science showed that this new fossil assemblage with a high abundance and diversity of species might rival previously described Cambrian sites like the Burgess Shale in Canada and Chengjiang localities in southwest China.

The newly-found fossils have the potential to greatly inform the understanding of early animal evolution, according to the study.

Researchers from China's Northwest University in Xi'an have collected 4,351 specimens at the site in central China's Hubei Province, representing 101 different taxa. The new fossil trove is called the Qingjiang biota.

About 542 million years ago, life on earth diversified at extremely rapid speed, which is known as the Cambrian explosion. Almost all present animal phyla appeared at that time.

Unlike other Cambrian fossil troves, the Qingjiang biota appears to contain a high proportion of jellyfish and comb jellies, which are are extremely rare at other sites, according to the study.

"Compared with Chengjiang biota living in the shallow water along the coast, Qingjiang biota lives in deep ocean, making the two biota complementary to each other in their scientific significance," the paper's co-author Zhang Xingliang, a paleontologist at Northwest University, told Xinhua.

Also, the marine fossils of Chengjiang biota experienced no strong weathering, making those life forms well-preserved so that they could become better material for scientific study than previously uncovered specimens.

"The treasure trove of the Qingjiang biota provides an exciting opportunity to explore how paleoenvironmental conditions influenced ecological structuring and evolutionary drivers during the Cambrian Explosion," said Allison Daley, a paleontologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who was not involved in the study.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 08:16:51|Editor: Xiaoxia

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ISLAMABAD, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad arrived in Pakistan Thursday evening on a three-day visit for talks on bilateral matters with focuses on economic cooperation, officials said.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan welcomed Mahathir on his arrival. Mahathir is accompanied by a delegation of senior officials and businessmen.

The two prime ministers will hold one-on-one meetings followed by delegation level talks.

During his stay in Islamabad, Mahathir would be the Guest of Honor at the Pakistan Republic Day Parade on March 23 in Islamabad.

Mahathir is expected to call on Pakistani President Arif Alvi, according to the Foreign Ministry here.

Khan and Mahathir will also speak at a round table business and industry meeting on possible investment from Malaysia to Pakistan's automobile and telecommunication sectors.

Khan visited Malaysia in November last year.

"Prime Minister Mahathir's visit would further cement the existing brotherly and friendly relations between the two countries. The focus of the interest is on enhancing economic, trade, investment, and defense ties, for the mutual benefit of the peoples of the two countries," a Pakistani Foreign Ministry statement said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 09:27:03|Editor: Liangyu

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BUENOS AIRES, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Colombia and River Plate midfielder Juan Fernando Quintero has undergone successful knee surgery as he begins a recovery process that will take at least six months, the 26-year-old's agent said on Thursday.

Quintero ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament of his left knee during River's 3-0 home victory over Independiente in the Superliga Argentina on Sunday.

"Everything went well. The operation lasted two years," Quintero's representative Rodrigo Riep told Radio Continental.

River Plate team doctor Pedro Hansing performed the surgery at a clinic in Buenos Aires, Riep said.

Quintero has been ruled out of the Copa America, to be played in Brazil from June 14 to July 7.

The injury came barely a month after the playmaker signed an improved contract that extends to 2022 and reportedly includes a 30 million-euro buyout clause.

Reigning Copa Libertadores champions River Plate have won their past four matches and are currently fourth in the Superliga Argentina standings with two rounds remaining.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 09:52:10|Editor: Yang Yi

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YAGNON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Eighteen Myanmar citizens, who were trafficked to Thailand, have been brought back homeland through Myanmar's border town of Myawaddy in southeastern Kayin state, according to the Myawaddy General Administration Department Friday.

The 18 Myanmar victims including six women and four children were handed over by the Thai authorities to Myanmar counterparts in the border town on Thursday under the arrangement of Myanmar Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement and Thai Ministry of Social Development and Human Security.

With compensation provided by the Thai side, the 18 victims are being kept at a temporary care center in Myawaddy awaiting for sending back to their homes on Saturday, according to the department.

Meanwhile, 15 illegal Myanmar migrant workers have also been repatriated to homeland from Thailand recently under the arrangement of authorities of the two sides, according to the Ministry of Labor, Immigration and Population.

With their border passes expired and holding no other official travel documents, the Myanmar migrant workers were sent back to Myanmar on March 11 via Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge-2.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 10:07:12|Editor: Xiaoxia

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WASHINGTON, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Foreign retaliatory tariffs in response to U.S. duties on steel and aluminum imports caused a decline in U.S. whiskey exports in the second half of 2018, said an industry report released Thursday.

The Washington-based Distilled Spirits Council said U.S. whiskey exports totaled 593 million U.S. dollars in the last six months of 2018, slumping by 11 percent year-over-year. That, according to the report, is the consequence of U.S. trading partners levying duties on U.S. liquors beginning in June.

Canada, China, Mexico and the European Union (EU) imposed tariffs ranging from 10 percent to 25 percent on U.S. whiskeys last year, resulting in less U.S. exports of distilled spirits in the second half of the year than in the first half, which, according to the report, was untypical.

"Globally, for the first six months of the year, American Whiskey exports grew 28 percent to a total of 595 million dollars," the report said, adding that the subsequent downward trend underscored "the harm the tariffs have caused."

For the full-year 2018, total U.S. whiskey exports reached a record 1.18 billion dollars, up 5.1 percent from the previous year. That gain, the report said, was "a significant deceleration from the annual growth rate of 16 percent recorded in 2017."

"With the full year data in hand, it is clear that the retaliatory tariffs are having a significant and growing impact on American whiskey exports," said Chris Swonger, president and CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council. "The damage to American whiskey exports is now accelerating, and this is collateral damage from ongoing global trade disputes."

Total U.S. spirits exports reached 1.8 billion dollars in 2018, a 9.5-percent increase from 2017, "but the rate of growth significantly slowed from the 14.9 percent growth recorded between 2016 to 2017," the report said.

The EU accounted for nearly 60 percent of total U.S. whiskey exports in 2018, the report said, adding that sales to the EU were "whiplashed into a 13.4 percent decline in the second half" after a 33-percent growth in the first half.

Small distillers have been particularly hit hard as local distributors were reluctant to commit to new orders given the uncertainty.

Small distillers, which made substantial investments in international marketing and distribution, are not alone in suffering the impact of the tariffs, the report said. "Large distillers have reported declining sales in some key export markets as a result of the tariffs."

"We urge policy makers and our trading partners to rapidly address these retaliatory tariffs before more damage is done" to the U.S. whiskey industry, Swonger said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 10:47:21|Editor: xuxin

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Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni (front R) and Zheng Zhuqiang (front L), the Chinese ambassador to Uganda, cut the ribbon during an inauguration ceremony in Kayunga, Uganda, March 21, 2019. Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni on Thursday inaugurated the Chinese-built Isimba Hydropower Plant on the Victoria Nile in the central part of the African country. The 183 MW power plant cost an estimated 568 million U.S. dollars, with 85 percent in a concessional loan from the Export-Import Bank of China. Uganda provides the rest of the funding. The power plant is intended to address a power shortage that experts say affects Uganda's economic development. Its construction started in 2015 and hired more than 3,000 workers, of whom 85 percent were Ugandans. China is also financing the building of the 600 MW Karuma Hydropower Plant, another power plant at the upper stretch of the river Nile, in northern Uganda. (Xinhua/Zhang Gaiping)

KAYUNGA, Uganda, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni on Thursday inaugurated the Chinese-built Isimba Hydropower Plant on the Victoria Nile in the central part of the African country.

Addressing the inauguration, Museveni thanked the Chinese government for financing his country's transport and energy infrastructure projects, which are expected to put the country onto a fast track of development.

Zheng Zhuqiang, the Chinese ambassador to Uganda, praised the Chinese contractor, China International Water & Electric Corp. and its local counterparts, for delivering a high-quality power station.

"This project is one of the remarkable achievements in China-Uganda and in China-Africa cooperation," Zheng said.

The 183 MW power plant cost an estimated 568 million U.S. dollars, with 85 percent in a concessional loan from the Export-Import Bank of China. Uganda provides the rest of the funding.

The power plant is intended to address a power shortage that experts say affects Uganda's economic development. Its construction started in 2015 and hired more than 3,000 workers, of whom 85 percent were Ugandans.

China is also financing the building of the 600 MW Karuma Hydropower Plant, another power plant at the upper stretch of the river Nile, in northern Uganda.Photo taken on March 21, 2019 shows the drilling-through ceremony of Boten Tunnel along the China-Laos railway in Boten of Laos. (Xinhua/Wang Jingqiang)

BOTEN, Laos, March 21 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese railway engineering company on Thursday drilled through Boten Tunnel, the first major tunnel over 5,000 meters along the China-Laos railway.

This marks an important milestone in the construction of the project. The Boten Tunnel, with a length of 6453.5 meters, is among the 10 major tunnels longer than five km along the China-Laos Railway.

Khamsouk Bounyavong, vice president of Lao People's Revolutionary Party Central Committee's Inspection Committee, and Ju Guojiang, chairman of the Laos-China Railway Co., Ltd, the joint venture in charge of the construction and the operation of the railway, attended the drilling-through ceremony in Boten on Thursday.

The tunnel has to pass through unfavorable geology such as karst, bedding rock, fault fracture zone, gypsum, carbon mudstone, and water inrush, and it varies, thus creating lots of difficulties to the Chinese engineering company, China Railway No. 5 Engineering Group (CREC-5).

The Boten Tunnel was selected to be built as a high-quality demonstration model for the railway project. Since March 2017 when the construction started, the Chinese engineers have strictly implemented the managing requirements of mechanization, industrialization, informatization and profession.

The CREC-5 strengthened the on-site safety and quality control and extensively applied tunnel construction kits, vigorously carried out scientific and technological research, actively promoted the application of new technologies, and paid close attention to process management so as to ensure the safe and orderly advancement of tunnel construction, and lay a solid foundation for the Thursday's victorious breakthrough.

The China-Laos Railway is a strategic docking project between the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative and Laos' strategy to convert from a landlocked country to a land-linked hub.

The 414.332-km railway runs from Mohan-Boten border gate in northern Laos to the capital of Vientiane within an operating speed of 160 km per hour.

The electrified passenger and cargo railway is built with the full application of Chinese management standards and technical standards

The project started in December 2016 and is scheduled to be completed and opened to traffic in December 2021.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 11:02:25|Editor: Xiaoxia

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SAN FRANCISCO, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The two air crashes involving the same Boeing 737 Max model in a span of five months revealed some problems with the industry regulation as well as pilot training, said an aviation expert Thursday.

"I believe this is the fundamental root cause of these accidents -- inadequate regulation and oversight to counter financial incentives (of the airline industry)," Douglas Moss, an aviation safety and security expert at University of South California, told Xinhua in an interview.

An Ethiopian Airlines Flight crashed on March 10, killing 189 people onboard. Last October, an Indonesian Lion Air Flight went down in Jakarta, killing 157 people.

Both crashes showed some similarities -- both ill-fated aircraft are Boeing 737 Max which crashed shortly after takeoff.

The Chicago, Illinois-headquartered Boeing Company, has since been put under spotlight and potential legal liability has been widely discussed, even though an investigation is still underway.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is mandated to guarantee airline safety via a certification process. But under its Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program, the FAA delegates to the manufacturer certain aspects of certifying the airplane -- making sure that the airplane design meets all the FAA requirements, according to Moss.

"There is evidence that Boeing failed to fulfill its duties under the ODA," said Moss, also a pilot and owner of AeroPacific Consulting, a Reno, Nevada-based firm providing aviation-related expert witness and accident investigation services.

"They (Boeing) take their responsibilities for safety seriously," said Moss, who worked with and for Boeing for many years.

But the financial risks and incentives for both manufacturers and operators are so large that they sometimes sway corporate judgement, he said.

"The company may make a corporate decision that undermines safety and there isn't enough governmental oversight or manpower to correct the issue," Moss explained.

He added the pilot training at airlines is "woefully inadequate."

"The 737 MAX pilots at American Airlines were given only a 56-minute iPad presentation to convey all the differences between the 737 MAX and its cousins," he said. "Certainly that is not enough to ensure that the pilots are now competent to fly this new plane with all the new changes incorporated into it."

"During the FAA-approved training I received at my airlines, we practiced only about 2 percent of the possible failures that one could experience when flying the plane," said Moss. "We only trained one failure at a time and were not exposed to multiple failures."

In fact, most of the simulator time was devoted to administrative or rudimentary procedures instead of practicing how to handle emergencies, said Moss.

"In my opinion, airline pilot training should be much more intensive and robust -- to ensure that pilots are ready to handle almost any emergency," he said.

Another example he gave is the "poor documentation" that airlines give their pilots.

In the Lion Air accident, the pilots reportedly spent several minutes trying to find the right procedure in their emergency handbook to address their flight control problem.

"In my experience, the document writers at airlines are not pilots or human factors experts, and they follow mostly only rigid rules of format, with no concept of how the procedure will be used in the cockpit," said Moss.

"Hopefully all these will change for the better after these accidents," he said.Image: Lion Air

New reports claim that conversations captured by the Lion Air Flight 610 cockpit voice recorder (CVR) confirm that the pilots were unable to diagnose the control issues encountered in the minutes before the accident that claimed the lives of all 189 people onboard on Oct. 29, 2018. Although a complete transcript of the CVR recording has not been released, Reuters reported that its staff had spoken with three peoplewhose identities were kept anonymousfamiliar with the CVRs contents.

The information shared implies that the pilots were focused on discrepancies between the captains and first officers displays along with the planes airspeed. They didnt seem to know the trim was moving down, one of the sources told Reuters. They thought only about airspeed and altitude. That was the only thing they talked about. They also said that the captain asked the first officer to check the quick reference handbook. The cockpit voice recorder was recovered in January, more than two months after the crash. The preliminary accident report was released before the CVR was recovered.

Pilots on the 737 MAXs previous flight experienced similar control issues. It was recently reported by Bloomberg that a pilot jump-seating on that flight diagnosed the problem and told the crew how to disable [the] malfunctioning flight-control system. That flight landed safely, which provides some anecdotal evidence for claims by U.S.-based airlines American and Southwest that even if similar problems did arise with their 737 MAXs, their pilots are trained to safely address such issues. Both airlines also told The Wall Street Journal that the data they had gathered from their fleets of 737 MAXs did not support immediately grounding their aircraft after the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.

As previously reported by AVweb, similarities between the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines accidents led to the grounding of all 737 MAXs in the U.S.and most of the rest of the worldlast week. Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has asked the DOTs Inspector General to audit the FAAs approval of the Boeing 737 MAX and it is now being reported that the FBI has joined the investigation. On Monday, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in a statement that the company will soon release a software update and related pilot training for the 737 MAX that will address concerns discovered in the aftermath of the Lion Air Flight 610 accident.New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern joined a national silence in mourning the Christchurch massacre victims in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 22, 2019. (Xinhua/Zhu Qiping)

Christchurch, New Zealand, March 22 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern joined a national silence in mourning the Christchurch massacre victims on Friday afternoon.

"New Zealand mourns with you, we are one," said Ardern.

One week after the Christchurch terrorist attacks, New Zealanders across the country stood together in two minutes' silence to remember those who had been killed while worshipping at two mosques last Friday afternoon.

Fifty people died in the terrorist attacks. An accused gunman was remanded in custody until next court hearing.

On Friday, events and vigils will be held around the country.

In Auckland, over 17,000 people are expected to attend the vigil for lives taken in Christchurch at 6 p.m. Friday afternoon.

The funerals of the 50 victims are expected to continue and a national memorial service will take place next week.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 11:57:33|Editor: Lu Hui

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BANGKOK, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) has geared up for regulatory reform by debuting the amendment of regulations on the temporary trading suspension "SP" sign in the case that listed securities have been posted the SP sign for an prolonged period and before delisting in light of investor protection.

In a statement released for media on Thursday, SET said they amended listing and disclosure rules to reduce duplication while aligning with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)'s regulations, after having conducted public hearings among stakeholders and having been approved by the SEC board, effective on April 1, 2019.

SET President Pakorn Peetathawatchai, quoted by the statement, said that in accordance with SET's strategic plan, the Regulatory Reform will eliminate duplicated processes and regulations to suit the current situation and benefit related parties while maintaining supervisory efficiency.

The amendment of regulations on the "SP" sign allows temporary trading after listed securities have been suspended for a certain period on grounds of failure to disclose material information, to submit financial statements, or the auditor issued an adverse opinion on the financial statements.

The temporary trading will enable investors to trade securities ahead of being posted "SP" sign later on if there is no progress of problem solving, while providing trading opportunity for investors prior to delisting. Definitely, there are measures to mitigate risks to alert investors to be cautious during the temporary trading period, added Pakorn.

Moreover, SET has also adjusted the information disclosure regulations to reduce the overlap and burden of listed companies. In addition, regulations concerning holding company and infrastructure company are also amended to match the current situation, in line with the SEC's regulations.

Meanwhile, the second phase of the regulatory reform will cover the regulations involving listed companies, securities trading and member companies, and is expected to be launched within 2019.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 12:02:34|Editor: Lu Hui

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RIO DE JANEIRO, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Brazil's former President Michel Temer was arrested on Thursday in a corruption investigation, according to local media.

The arrest was ordered by Judge Marcelo Bretas, who is in charge of the Operation Car Wash investigations on corruption in the government.

Seven others were arrested, including Moreira Franco, who served as minister of Mines and Energy in the Temer government and retired Colonel Joao Baptista Lima Filho, a close friend of Temer.

The former president has been mentioned in several different cases of corruption, but was arrested for a particular case of bribe-taking.

He is accused of taking 1 million reals (about 262,000 U.S. dollars) in bribes from construction company Engevix, in exchange for favoring the company in a contract with nuclear power plant Angra 3.

Franco and Lima are accused of having acted as middlemen in the case.

According to the prosecution office, participants of the scheme, including Temer, committed crimes of corruption, embezzlement and money laundering, which involved other companies and governmental contracts as well.

Temer is "the head of a criminal organization" which has been active in Rio for decades, said Judge Bretas.

Temer, the predecessor of current President Jair Bolsonaro, left office last year. He is the second Brazilian president that has been arrested for corruption, following Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is currently serving a 12-year-and-one-month prison sentence for corruption and money laundering.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 12:27:38|Editor: 

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SRINAGAR, India-controlled Kashmir, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Two militants were killed and three troopers were wounded in a fierce gunfight between them in restive India-controlled Kashmir, police said on Friday.

The gunfight broke out Thursday morning at village Kalantara Kandi in Baramulla district, about 47 km west of Srinagar city, the summer capital of India-controlled Kashmir.

"Two militants were killed in a fierce gunfight with joint contingents of police and paramilitary at Kalantara here that concluded late in the night," a senior police official posted in Baramulla told Xinhua.

"While fighting these militants, three troopers were wounded and they have been removed to hospital," the police said.

The bodies of the militants have been retrieved and police said their identities were being ascertained.

According to police officials, the village was cordoned off Thursday morning following specific intelligence information suggesting presence of militants.

In adjacent Warpora village of Sopore, two policemen including an officer were wounded on Thursday after militants hurled a grenade towards them during a cordon and search operation in the area.

Meanwhile, another gunfight was underway in Hajin Bandipora, police said.

Authorities have suspended mobile internet service in both districts and closed roads leading to the gunfight sites.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 12:27:38|Editor: Lu Hui

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UNITED NATIONS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Sandra Uwiringiyimana, a Congolese massacre survivor and writer, shared Thursday her story of living between conflicts and her vision for the future of her home community.

At the United Nations Bookshop at UN headquarters in New York, Uwiringiyimana, the author of How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child, met the readers of her book and shared her life journey.

She recalled her childhood, spent in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as full of discrimination against her minority background and constant flight from conflicts.

However, because of her supporting parents and loving community, she did not feel her unstable life was any abnormal, he said.

The 2004 massacre at a refugee camp in Burundi, however, traumatized her as her family, residents of the camp, had to escape from a flaming home and gunpoint for life.

After immigrating to the United States through a UN program, Uwiringiyimana said she had faced "a lot of added trauma," including discrimination for her African descent, which she has been dealing with.

Turning to her home community, she said: "I'm from a community that still doesn't have roads. It takes about three days to walk to the nearest health center."

"I'm from a community where young girls are still married from very young age, a community where women are still not allowed to own property."

Being an activist, she said the programs she runs are addressing questions like "why I ended up here in the first place, which was the conflict and the discrimination."

In the question and answer session, many readers appreciated the courage and optimism Uwiringiyimana had shown them through her book and at this meet-up.

Thursday's event was organized by the UN Department of Global Communications on the occasion of the 63rd session of the Commission on the Status of Women.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 12:42:42|Editor: 

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LONDON, March 21 (Xinhua) -- An operations room in an underground bunker at the Ministry of Defense (MoD)'s Central London headquarters has been readied to handle a no-deal Brexit, reports said Thursday.

The nuclear bunker, said to be deep in the bowels of the MoD offices in Whitehall, will be used as a control center to coordinate efforts if Britain leaves the European Union without a deal.

The Independent newspaper in London said the military mission called Operation Redford was activated at the beginning of this week and that it could see armed forces working to transport food, fuel and other essentials around Britain.

"We are always willing to support wider government planning for any scenario, and we have committed to holding 3,500 troops at readiness to aid contingency plans. We will consider any requests from other government departments if they feel defense capability could contribute to their no-deal planning," said a spokesperson for the MoD.

Defense Minister Mark Lancaster said in January that reservist military officers could be called up for a year of service as part of government plans for a no-deal Brexit.

The bomb-proof bunker has been used by British armed forces in wartime and during responses to national disasters such as flooding.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 13:17:47|Editor: Xiaoxia

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NAIROBI, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Kenya's Health Ministry on Thursday signed a framework agreement on sharing expertise and technologies needed to achieve universal health coverage in the African country.

Sicily Kariuki, cabinet secretary for health, said Kenya will draw on Thailand's successes in areas such as health financing, innovation and capacity building, in efforts to ensure all citizens can access quality healthcare services.

"Our collaboration with Thailand will be focused on improving the health and well-being of our citizens," Kariuki said, adding, "Many countries including Kenya look up to Thailand as an example" in achieving universal health coverage.

She said Kenya is interested in Thailand's experiences in capacity building, use of technology and innovative financing in boosting people's access to affordable and quality healthcare services.

"We are also willing to domesticate Thailand's successful lessons on capping price of drugs and evidence-based research to inform interventions on killer diseases," said Kariuki, adding that Kenya's health ministry will send technical personnel to Thailand for training courses.

On the bilateral cooperation, Thai Minister of Public Health Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn said, "We have made strides in the implementation of universal health coverage because of political commitment and motivation of healthcare workers. Kenya can take a cue from those lessons to ensure healthcare services are inclusive."Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 13:22:48|Editor: Yang Yi

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NEW YORK, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A prominent U.S. financier and property investor has attributed the recent rise in property construction costs in New York City to the extra tariffs imposed by the federal government on the materials imported from China.

"We're seeing a lot of that. Included in that is the result of tariff increases and getting materials," said Marc E. Berson without specifying the cost rise.

Berson said the trade dispute with China, with ensuing tariffs on imports from China, is just one of the reasons that push up the costs of house building, but apparently the prime one.

"It's hard to identify it simply as a result of the trade war, but when you have the amount of activity that ties up construction workers and construction equipment as people are busier, they tend to increase their prices," said Berson, a well-known philanthropist, lawyer and entrepreneur with a focus on business and real estates.

U.S. commercial website Crain's New York Business once undertook a cost study of a completed 90-story building at the Hudson Yards Development Corp., in an effort to capture the impact on the construction industry from the tariffs against China imposed by the Trump administration.

"The building was completed prior to the introduction of tariffs. However, if it were being built now, the cost of the core and shell construction alone would have increased by 75 million to 100 million (U.S. dollars) because of tariffs on the steel structure, aluminum curtain wall and other building components," it said in "Tariffs are driving city construction costs even higher," which was published online in December.

Turner & Townsend's 2018 International Construction Market Survey has revealed that, once again, building in New York City was more expensive than anywhere else in the world during 2017.

ONGOING SLOWDOWN

The New York Times on Thursday quoted Jerome H. Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and his colleagues as telling a Wednesday press briefing in Washington that "growth appeared to be slowing from last year, under the weight of the Trump administration's trade war (with China and some other countries)."

A study released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last Friday estimated that an escalation of U.S.-China bilateral tariffs will shave off 1 trillion dollars from the U.S. economy in a decade.

"Escalation of bilateral tariffs results in lower GDP, lower employment, lower investment, and lower trade flows for the United States," it added.

EXIT TO NEW JERSEY

Berson has been the chairman of The Fidelco Group since he founded it in 1981, which is a private investment owner-developer of residential, commercial, retail and industrial properties in New York, New Jersey, Florida and Ohio markets.

He noticed very clearly that the costs of imported raw materials are going up and consumers are paying the price for the trade disputes.

Such a change is even forcing developers to transfer to the neighboring state of New Jersey, where the overall payment is more controllable than in New York City, he added.

Aisha Glover from Newark Alliance echoed Berson's view, saying, "When you look at the city of Newark, just given our industrial heritage, given the proximity to the port, it is still our No. 1 demand if you will (agree)."

"Inquiries overall are up about 30 percent in the city within the last 18 months," she added.

Newark Alliance is a leading nonprofit organization dedicated to the ongoing economic revitalization of Newark, the most populous city in New Jersey, "striving to transform our city into a better and safer place to work, live, learn, play and do business," according to its website.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 13:32:49|Editor: Liangyu

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WASHINGTON, March 21 (Xinhua) -- China's wildcard player Wang Xiyu lost to seventh seed Kiki Bertens of the Netherlands 6-4, 6-1 in the second round of the Miami Open on Thursday.

The 17-year-old Wang dropped serve once in the opening set and lost at 6-4. In the second set, the Chinese teenager looked rusty as she found it hard to hold serve and lost the set at 6-1.

Bertens needed just one hour and nine minutes to finish off the match.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 13:37:50|Editor: Yang Yi

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VIENTIANE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Laos will continue to closely work with Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) countries to move LMC cooperation forwards to a higher level.

The message came on Friday as Lao Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith congratulated LMC countries on a three-year anniversary since the sub-regional cooperation mechanism was launched in 2016.

LMC has become a platform for effective cooperation in the sub-region and has significantly contributed to the socio-economic development of member countries, the Lao foreign minister said, quoted by local daily Vientiane Times.

Saleumxay said that on this occasion, "I would like to express my sincere appreciation to" all Mekong countries, especially to China for its continued support, assistance and constructive engagement.Flight 1549 Capt. Chesley Sullenberger has weighed in on the MAX 8 discussion but from a crew training and experience perspective. The pilot who deadsticked an A320 into the Hudson River after a dual engine failure 10 years ago with the help of First Officer Jeff Skiles said in a Facebook post on Saturday that the FO on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 602 lacked the experience to play a meaningful role in dealing with the in-flight emergency. The FO is reported to have had only 200 hours of total flight time, a level of experience Sullenberger called absurdly low for someone with responsibility for the safety of an airliner full of people. A cockpit crew must be a team of experts, not a captain and an apprentice, Sullenberger said. The 28-year-old captain had 8,000 hours and was considered a senior captain at Ethiopian Airlines.

On Flight 1549, Skiles was on his second flight in an A320 but had more than 30 years of cockpit experience in a variety of aircraft. He was pilot flying when multiple bird strikes knocked out the engines. Sullenberger assumed control while Skiles ran the checklists and other support cockpit duties. In extreme emergencies, when there is not time for discussion or for the captain to direct every action of the first officer, pilots must be able to intuitively know what to do to work together, Sullenberger said in his post. They must be able to collaborate wordlessly. Someone with only 200 hours would not know how to do that or even to do that. Sullenberger qualified his comments by noting that its not known what influence pilot experience had on the Ethiopian crash.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 13:57:52|Editor: Yang Yi

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Executives from China's leading automakers have called for efforts in developing infrastructure, standards and technologies related to the internet of vehicles(IoV), China daily reported Friday.

"China should establish a unified standard on IoV, without which, each automaker will have to have its own interface to connect with the intelligent network, and that will be a serious waste of resources," the newspaper quoted Zhu Huarong, president of Changan Auto, as saying.

IoV refers to the network made up of cars that are intelligent and connected, which is an important foundation of the future smart vehicles, especially for autonomous driving, Zhu said.

China is striving to cultivate a globally competitive internet-connected vehicles industry, planning to have more smart cars with partial or fully autonomous functions.

By 2020, the market scale of the country's intelligent connected vehicles is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan (12 billion U.S. dollars), said Miao Wei, minister of industry and information technology, earlier at the World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference.

Meanwhile, China has gained momentum in intelligent connected vehicles with almost all major carmakers including SAIC Motor and Zhejiang Geely Holding Group as well as internet giants such as Tencent and Baidu having increased efforts.

"Geely will step up efforts to make AI-enabled, internet-connected smart cars. Such cars will become more intelligent where mobile terminals can be connected to the network and drivers can talk to the system in the car," said the newspaper, quoting Shen Ziyu, vice-president of the Geely Automobile Research Institute.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 15:08:03|Editor: xuxin

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ULAN BATOR, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Poaching of the endangered snow leopards is increasing in Mongolia as their bones may be used as substitutes for tiger's in traditional Asian medicine markets, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)-Mongolia director said Friday.

"Poaching is one of the major threats to snow leopards in Mongolia," Dorjgurkhem Batbold told Xinhua, saying four such cases have been recorded this year.

Previously, the country recorded one or two such cases per year connected with the snow leopard fur trade only, said Batbold.

"The recent rise in snow leopard illegal hunting in Mongolia may be related to the much increased and improved tiger conservation efforts in all tiger range countries," Batbold said, adding that carcasses and bones of snow leopards may be used as substitutes for those of tigers in traditional Asian medicine.

He stressed that the Mongolian government should work closely with other countries to stop illegal hunting of the endangered animal.

In addition, conflict between local herders and snow leopards is another concern for WWF experts, according to Batbold.

"Local herders sometimes kill snow leopards in retaliation for attacking their livestock using different tools including steel-jaw traps," Batbold said.

Experts have been taking various measures to handle the conflict, including asking local herders to hand in traps in exchange for household utensils, he added.

WWF experts are working in 12 mountains in Mongolia to determine the population and distribution of snow leopards, and explore ways to protect them, said the director.

It is estimated that only 800 to 1,200 snow leopards remain in Mongolia, while the exact figure of the elusive animal is difficult to determine.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 15:08:04|Editor: xuxin

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MAIMANA, Afghanistan, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Afghan forces launched a spate of military operations leaving at least four militants loyal to the Taliban dead and nine others wounded in the country's northern Faryab province, a provincial police spokesman said Friday.

"Joint Afghan forces including police, the national spy agency and the national army launched a series of clearance operations late on Thursday night in Qaisar district, killing four Taliban militants and seriously wounding nine others, including their local leader Qari Aref," Abdul Karim Yurash told Xinhua.

Several villages have also been retaken from the militants and no security forces sustained casualties during the operations, said the spokesman.

Taliban militants are yet to make comments.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 15:43:11|Editor: ZX

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Both companies and consumers in China will benefit from massive VAT cuts that will be implemented next month.

On Thursday, the Ministry of Finance and two other government departments announced detailed measures to implement VAT reform to reduce the corporate tax burden.

Starting on April 1, companies that are subject to the 16-percent VAT rate on their taxable sales or imported goods will enjoy a 13-percent VAT rate, while those who are subject to the 10-percent VAT rate will only need to pay 9 percent, reads a ministry statement.

The cuts are a part of the total tax and fee cuts of "nearly 2 trillion yuan" (around 299 billion U.S. dollars) to be made this year, according to the government work report delivered by Premier Li Keqiang to the annual national legislative session earlier this month.

"This year's VAT rate adjustment is unprecedented," said Gao Peiyong, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

As VAT is an indirect tax, the rippling effect of VAT reduction will be transmitted through the deduction mechanism layer upon layer, Gao said.

VAT is tax levied on the difference between the cost of production and the price of a commodity on the market. It contributed roughly 40 percent of the country's tax revenue last year.

Regional experiments on VAT reform in China started in the beginning of 2012, and such reform was expanded throughout the country in May 2016. Last year, China cut the VAT rates for the 17-percent tier to 16 percent, and the 11-percent tier to 10 percent.

For Fujian-based SKSHU Paint Co., the 1-percentage-point drop last year resulted in a tax reduction of 9.45 million yuan, said the company's chairman Hong Jie.

This year, the 3-percentage-point VAT cut will save more than 40 million yuan for the company, Hong said. "Lower VAT rate means 'real money' for enterprises."

Guangxi Liugong Machinery Co. will see total tax and fee reductions of 136 million yuan this year, among which 121 million yuan will come from VAT reduction.

Premier Li said Thursday at a symposium the country should accelerate the implementation of tax cut measures to unleash the vitality of companies, keep the economy running within a reasonable range, and promote high-quality development.

"All industries will see their taxes go down, not up," Li said.

With companies enjoying lower tax rates, consumers will also receive the benefits as companies tend to share the gains from tax cuts.

Several automobile brands, including Mercedes Benz, BMW, and Volvo, have already responded with prices cuts, although the new tax VAT cuts have not taken effect.

China Railway Corporation also announced that it will lower freight rates to reduce railway logistics costs as the VAT rate in the transport industry will fall.

"The tax cuts will be effective only when market entities enjoy concrete benefits," Li said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 16:13:20|Editor: ZX

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Xu Qiliang, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, said on Friday that the Chinese military was willing to strengthen pragmatic exchanges and cooperation with the Republic of Korea (ROK) in various fields to help the development of bilateral relations.

Xu made the remarks when meeting with visiting Chief of Staff of the ROK Army Kim Yong-woo.

The two sides should maintain high-level exchanges and properly handle relevant sensitive issues, Xu said.

He noted that in face of complex international and regional situations, the two sides should look to the world and be future-oriented, meet each other half way and forge ahead together in order to inherit friendship and write a new history.

Kim said the ROK side was willing to work together with China to comprehensively implement the important consensus reached between leaders of the two countries and deepen pragmatic cooperation in all fields.

The two armies should enhance exchanges at all levels and in all areas, and strengthen communication and coordination to contribute to the development of relations between the two countries, Kim said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 16:13:20|Editor: xuxin

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NEW DELHI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Delhi police on Friday claimed to have arrested a man allegedly linked with proscribed terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and maintained close contact with the mastermind of the Feb. 14 Pulwama attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Identified as Sajjad Khan, the man is the resident of India-controlled Jammu and Kashmir, and had been hiding in the Indian capital city since the Pulwama attack on Feb.14, which killed 40 security personnel belonging to the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF).

The special cell of the Delhi Police arrested Sajjad Khan from near the Red Fort in Old Delhi area on Thursday night, police sources said.

Sajjad Khan was learnt to be in contact with the mastermind of the Pulwama attack Mudassir Ahmed Khan who was believed to have been killed on March 11. It has been found that Sajjad Khan moved to Delhi before the Pulwama attack and had been living here as a shawl-seller.

He reportedly possessed the details of the Pulwama attack. His two brothers were also Jaish terrorists and killed by the Indian security forces.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 16:28:22|Editor: xuxin

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SUVA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Three Fijian high school students have died from suicide over the past week alone.

According to Fiji Broadcasting Corporation (FBC), Lifeline Fiji Officer in Charge Jeremaia Merekula said Friday that suicide can be prevented if family members and friends took a few minutes of their time to talk to people who seemed unhappy.

The youngest person to call in for help recently was an 11-year-old girl, Merekula said, adding that they also received calls from people with disabilities and senior citizens who tend to be suicidal because of loneliness.

Merekula said Lifeline Fiji provided a listening ear to their callers and helped them overcome their feelings of suicide by understanding their situation and providing the necessary help.

Most people who called Lifeline Fiji to seek help were between the ages of 15 to 28 years, said Merekula.

Lifeline Fiji is a suicide prevention helpline and counselling service in the South Pacific island nation.

From 2013 to 2018, 630 Fijians were victims of suicide.

National Committee on the Prevention of Suicide (NCOPS) member Mohammed Hassan Khan said earlier that Fiji should look at the economic costs of untreated mental illness and its cost to society.

"These alarming figures cannot be treated as statistics given some high profile cases involving professionals and students,"said Khan."This is a huge loss of youth."Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 16:33:24|Editor: Yang Yi

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Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (2nd R) meets with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe (4th R), in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, March 21, 2019. (Xinhua/Li Xiaowei)

ABU DHABI, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan pledged on Thursday his commitment to bolstering the relationship between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and China.

The crown prince made the remarks when meeting with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe.

During the meeting, Sheikh Mohamed recalled the historically close cooperation between the two countries along the ancient Silk Road, adding that the bilateral relationship has grown in recent years.

He hailed the successful visit to the UAE by Chinese President Xi Jinping last July, during which the two sides laid a solid foundation for the long-term development of bilateral ties by agreeing to enhance cooperation in all fields.

For his part, Wei said that President Xi's visit to the UAE last year has put bilateral ties onto the fast track of development as the two sides agreed to elevate the China-UAE ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership.

China attaches great importance to the development of its relations with the UAE and regards the Middle Eastern country as a natural partner for joint construction of the Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China, Wei said.

In recent years, military ties between the two countries have witnessed rapid and in-depth development, demonstrated by the frequent mutual visits by top military officials and the fruitful cooperation in related areas, Wei said.

He added that China is willing to work with the UAE to promote bilateral military ties to a higher level and implement the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries.

Wei also met with Minister of State for Defense of the UAE Mohammed bin Ahmed Al Bowardi.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 16:38:25|Editor: xuxin

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SEOUL, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) withdrew from the joint liaison office with South Korea in the DPRK's border town of Kaesong, Seoul's unification ministry said Friday.

The ministry said in a statement that the DPRK side notified South Korea on Friday morning of its decision to pull out of the Kaesong liaison office according to instructions from the superior authorities.

All of the DPRK officials, who had stayed in Kaesong for the round-the-clock communications with the South Korean counterparts, withdrew from the office.

The inter-Korean liaison office opened in Kaesong last September as agreed upon by South Korean President Moon Jae-in and top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un during their first summit in April in the truce village of Panmunjom.

The DPRK allowed South Korean officials to stay and work in the Kaesong liaison office. The Seoul officials planned to work in Kaesong over the weekend.

The Seoul ministry said the DPRK's withdrawal decision was regrettable, expressing the hope that the DPRK side would rapidly return to the office and normally operate it as agreed upon by the two Koreas.

South Korean vice unification minister Chun Hae-sung told an emergency press briefing that it came to get difficult to make detailed discussions on the video reunions of Korean families, separated by the 1950-53 Korean War.

Seoul had prepared to consult with the DPRK on the video reunions and the exchange of video messages between the separated families as agreed upon by Moon and Kim during their third summit in Pyongyang last September.

South Korea recently won sanctions waiver from the UN Security Council to send necessary equipment to the DPRK for the video reunion event.

The families of the two Koreas have been banned from meeting and contacting their relatives on the other side of the Korean Peninsula since the Korean War ended with armistice in 1953.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 17:13:35|Editor: ZX

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DAMASCUS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian Foreign Ministry on Friday strongly condemned the recent remarks by U.S. President Donald Trump about Israel's sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, according to the state news agency SANA.

Trump's remarks prove the biased stance of the U.S. to the Zionist occupation, said the statement, stressing that the remarks of Trump are irresponsible and will never change the fact that Golan Heights will remain an Arab and Syrian territory.

Trump wrote on a tweet on Thursday that "After 52 years, it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the state of Israel and regional stability!"

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria during the Six-Day War of 1967 and formally annexed the territory in 1981.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry said in the statement that the stance of the U.S. toward the Golan Heights reflects the flagrant violation of the international legitimacy and the UN Security Council Resolution 497 of 1981, which rejects the Israeli occupation in the Golan Heights.

The U.S. reckless policies "which is controlled by the mindset of hegemony and arrogance" have become the primary reason behind straining the situation and threatening international peace and stability, it added.

Recognizing the Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights has been recently a demand by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which comes months after the Trump administration moved the U.S. embassy in Israeli from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.Tafadzwa Ufumeli/Getty Images(BEIRA, Mozambique) -- Thousands of people, some seen clinging to rooftops and tree branches, still await rescue from rising floodwaters in Mozambique, one week after an intense tropical cyclone walloped the southeast African nation.



Nearly 350,000 others are at risk of becoming trapped in the coming days as remnants of tropical cyclone Idai dump rain over low-lying areas already inundated with swelling rivers and bulging dams.



Some 100,000 people may need to be rescued from the town of Buzi alone, according to a spokesman for Mozambique's Ministry of Land, Environment and Rural Development.



"We have a critical situation in Buzi," the spokesman, who asked not to be named, told ABC News via telephone Thursday. "If the rainfall increases, then those 100,000 need to be rescued. Levels of the dam are going high."



The heavy rain let up in Buzi and the hard-hit port city of Beira on Thursday, but showers are expected to return in the coming hours and days. Aid agencies worry additional rainfall will impede rescue missions.



The cyclone made landfall near Beira late last Thursday and slowly moved inland over the weekend, leaving a trail of destruction across central Mozambqiue, southern Malawi and eastern Zimbabwe. The storm brought torrential rain and wind gusts up to 105 mph to the region, where drought conditions allowed for widespread flooding.



An estimated 1.7 million people were in the cyclone's path in Mozambique, which bore the brunt of the storm, while another 920,000 people in Malawi and "thousands more" in Zimbabwe were also affected, according to World Food Program spokesperson Herve Verhoosel.



Now, "the biggest challenge" is reaching stranded residents and others in need, Verhoosel told reporters Tuesday, especially in areas where overflowing rivers have created "inland oceans extending for miles and miles."



Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi declared a national state of emergency and three days of national mourning beginning Wednesday.



The storm has been blamed for the deaths of at least 217 people in Mozambique, according to the spokesman for the country's Ministry of Land, Environment and Rural Development -- though Nyusi has warned that as many as 1,000 could be dead. Another 1,440 people were injured, according to Mozambique's National Disasters Management Institute.



In Zimbabwe, at least 139 people have died, 144 others were injured, 136 were marooned and 189 were reported missing as of Wednesday, according to a spokesperson for the country's Ministry of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting.



At least 56 cyclone-related deaths have been reported in Malawi.



Some 400,000 people were internally displaced by the storm in Mozambique, while an estimated 82,500 were displaced in Malawi, according to the United Nations. More than 4,300 were displaced in Zimbabwe, according to the country's Ministry of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting.



The United Nations' Central Emergency Response Fund announced Wednesday it has allocated $20 million to ensure aid reaches those most affected.



Jamie LeSueur, who is leading response efforts in Beira for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said while the scale of devastation is still emerging, the situation he's seen on the ground is catastrophic.



"This is the worst humanitarian crisis in Mozambiques recent history. It is a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of central Mozambique," LeSueur said in a statement Tuesday. "Large parts of Beira have been damaged, entire villages and towns have been completely flooded. Rescuers are scrambling to pull people trapped on rooftops and in trees to safety. Many, many families have lost everything."

Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.More than 4,500 people attended Women in Aviation Internationals (WAI) 30th Annual International Women in Aviation Conference last week. Southwest Airlines captain and former F/A-18 Hornet pilot Tammi Jo Shults, SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell and tactical mission lead on the Mars Curiosity Rover at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory Nagin Cox were among the conferences keynote speakers. Representatives from 33 countries were present and the exhibit hall hosted 170 separate companies and organizations at the three-day event, which took place in Long Beach, California.

In addition to educational sessions, workshops and Girls in Aviation Day, the conference saw new inductions into WAIs International Pioneer Hall of Fame. This years inductees included Leanne Caret, president and CEO of Boeings Defense, Space and Security unit; Mary Golda Ross, the first known Native American female engineer, first female engineer at Lockheed and one of the 40 founding engineers of companys Skunk Works; and the U.S. Coast Guards First Women Aviators and Aviation-Related Enlisted Women, a group of three officers and six enlisted women who opened the door for future generations of women to pursue their military aviation dreams.

156 scholarships totaling $875,065 were also distributed at the conference to WAI members for academic use, lifestyle enhancement and flight training. The 2019 scholarships put the total money awarded since 1995 at more than $12 million. Next years conference will be held March 5-7, 2020, at Disneys Coronado Springs Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 17:13:35|Editor: ZX

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PHNOM PENH, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Cambodia handed over 24 automatic weather stations and 29 automatic hydrological stations to Cambodia's Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology on Friday, said a UNDP's statement.

"The handover of the stations brings the Cambodian government one step closer to adapting to climate change, in line with Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts," the statement said.

Reliable climate information and forecasting is important in any country, particularly a country like Cambodia in which around 80 percent of the population lives in rural areas, with many reliant on weather-dependent livelihoods in agriculture and fisheries, it said.

Since 2015, with the financial backing of Global Environment Facility-Least Developed Countries Fund, the project "Strengthening Climate Information and Early Warning Systems in Cambodia to Support Climate Resilient Development and Adaptation to Climate Change" has been supporting the Cambodian government in boosting climate information and early warning systems within the country, it said.

"Our aim is to equip Cambodia with reliable infrastructure, including new and upgraded weather and hydrological stations, for improved data capture, forecasting and sharing of information for planning as well as disaster preparedness," said Project Manager Muhibuddin Usamah.

"Real-time climate and environment data can be used to detect adverse trends, predict potential climatic impacts and analyze ongoing weather patterns," he said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 17:18:36|Editor: ZX

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SHANGHAI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The treatment rate of household wastewater in rural areas of Shanghai has reached 75 percent, thanks to a series of measures the city has adopted in recent years.

According to the municipal water authority, Shanghai initiated a pilot program in 2007 to treat rural household sewage. As of the end of 2018, it had put into place facilities for treating sewage from 749,000 rural households.

In 2018 alone, 189,000 rural homes were connected to the sewage collection and treatment system.

The city has also strengthened supervision over the quality of water generated by treatment facilities in rural areas.

Since the second half of last year, under a "river chief" mechanism, Shanghai carried out an examination of household sewage treatment in its suburban districts. The district governments were informed of the problems found and urged to solve them within a deadline.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 17:18:36|Editor: xuxin

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Rolando Lopez, a political counselor of Cuba's embassy in China in 1974-1978 and ambassador in Beijing in the 1980s, introduces his book "100 questions about China" at the Confucius Institute of the University of Havana in Havana, Cuba, March 20, 2019. "I felt that obligation because of the historical links with China," he said, and for that reason he wrote a book "100 questions about China" to encourage Cuban readers to learn more about the Asian country, including its peculiarities, history and traditions. (Xinhua/Joaquin Hernandez)

by Raimundo Urrechaga

HAVANA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- "I have always felt a debt to the country that has made an enormous contribution to the development of humanity," said Rolando Lopez, a political counselor of Cuba's embassy in China in 1974-1978 and ambassador in Beijing in the 1980s.

"I felt that obligation because of the historical links with China," he said, and for that reason he wrote a book "100 questions about China" to encourage Cuban readers to learn more about the Asian country, including its peculiarities, history and traditions.

The 187-page book was presented on Wednesday at Havana's Confucius Institute, where Lopez shared with students and professors his personal anecdotes in the Asian country.

Written in 2014, "100 questions about China" was part of a collection called "100 Questions," an idea which emerged from the Cuban publishing house, Gente Nueva, based on the needs of children and teenagers on the island to learn about countries around the world.

However, Lopez's health problems and logistical issues delayed its printout until this year, when it was first published in the 28th edition of Havana's International Book Fair on Feb. 7-17.

"Choosing only 100 questions about China was very difficult because one would like to say so many things. What I tried was to give a general idea of the country, (such as) its geography ... literature, science, traditions, cuisine, martial arts, horoscopes, etc," he said.

Although Lopez is eighty-two years old, he boasts an extraordinarily good memory. The names, dates, places or circumstances he encountered in China never escaped his descriptions.

In 1959, Lopez visited Beijing for the first time on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. In September 1960, late Cuban leader Fidel Castro announced the establishment of diplomatic relations with China at Havana's Revolution Square.

Moments, which are remembered amongst his most cherished memories, became Lopez's personal commitment to provide an instructive, entertaining, and curious approach to Cubans about China's millenary civilization.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 17:18:36|Editor: Xiang Bo

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SEOUL, March 22 (Xinhua) -- South Korean Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon will visit China next week to attend an annual conference of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA), Lee's office said Friday.

Lee will make a two-day visit to Boao, a coastal town in China's southern island province of Hainan, from March 27 to attend the BFA annual conference.

The BFA annual conference will be held in Boao from March 26 to 29 under the theme of "Shared Future, Concerted Action, Common Development."

It would mark the first South Korean prime minister's participation in the BFA annual conference since 2014.

The South Korean prime minister will also make a three-day visit to China's southwestern city of Chongqing.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 17:23:37|Editor: Xiang Bo

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SUVA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Fijian government is working to revive the ailing coconut industry in the rural parts of the island nation, government officials have said.

According to a Fijian government release on Friday, Fiji's Minister for Agriculture, Rural and Maritime Development, Waterways and Environment Doctor Mahendra Reddy delivered speech while attending the Coconut Day Celebrations on Taveuni, the third-largest island in Fiji on Thursday.

With the theme "Nutrition, Health and Wealth", the event was held to provide an opportunity to celebrate and promote, create interest in, and strengthen Fiji's ailing coconut industry.

Reddy said that the Ministry of Agriculture acknowledged the importance of the coconut industry, which is also known as the tree of life for rural Fijians.

"Through its Crop Extension Services and Research Division, the ministry promotes the overall development of coconut as part of a farming system, whilst focusing on the rehabilitation of existing fields and plantations," Reddy said.

Apart from generating income and alleviating poverty, coconuts help to sustain household food needs and nutrition security, he said, adding that around 120,000 of Fiji's rural population depended on the coconut industry as their main source of food and livelihood.

Low production has been attributed to senile plantations as 40 percent of trees in Fiji were unproductive. Other factors leading to the ailness of the industry include fluctuation in copra prices, high production costs, shortage of copra cutters, lack of interest among the younger generation, frequent cyclones and other catastrophic weather events, and competition from other lucrative cash crops.

The production of Virgin coconut oil (VCO) on the other hand was rapidly gaining popularity in rural and maritime communities. Copra remains the most traded coconut commodity in the country as Fiji has around 10 million coconut trees scattered around an area of approximately 65,000 hectares of land.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 17:28:39|Editor: ZX

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WELLINGTON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The New Zealand Police are investigating death threats sent to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on social media, local media reported on Friday.

A Twitter post containing a photo of a gun and caption "You are next" was sent to the prime minister.

The post had been up for more than 48 hours before the sender's Twitter account was suspended after it was reported by various people.

The suspended account contained anti-Islamic contents and white supremacist hate speeches, according to the report.

Terror attacks hit New zealand's Christchurch last Friday, killing at least 50 people and injuring 50 others.

In the aftermath of the terror attacks, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern vowed to change the gun law in the country.

Ardern announced on Thursday that military style semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles are to be banned in New Zealand.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 17:33:41|Editor: ZX

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CANBERRA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has denied that he tried to stoke fears about Muslim immigration during a party room meeting in 2010.

In an interview on Network Ten television with host Waleed Aly on Thursday night, the prime minister rejected the idea that the governing Liberal-National party coalition (LNP) has an Islamophobia problem.

According to Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), in his editorial, Aly cited media reports of a senior Liberal in a shadow cabinet meeting in 2010 suggesting the party use community concerns about Muslims failing to integrate as a political strategy to gain votes.

The Prime Minister's Office strongly criticised that report and claimed aspects of it were defamatory.

Morrison on Thursday night said the discussion took place while the Liberal Party was in opposition but said his contribution was in trying to "lower" community fears.

"I was the shadow immigration minister at the time and I was very concerned about these issues and the way people were feeling in the community," he said in the interview.

"What I'm saying is that I was concerned about those fears in the community and that it has always been my practice -- as I've demonstrated to you outside the Parliament and inside the Parliament -- to seek to address those."Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 17:48:44|Editor: Xiang Bo

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ISTANBUL, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump's "unfortunate remarks" on the Golan Heights could trigger a new crisis in the region.

"We cannot allow the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights," Erdogan said at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Istanbul over terror attacks on two mosques in New Zealand's Christchurch on March 15 that left 50 people dead.

He also said Turkey and the OIC cannot keep silent in the face of such a sensitive issue when the peace and the right to life of Muslims are targeted by some critical incidents and attacks.

"Each of these attacks is important for both Turkey and the organization," he stressed, urging the OIC to take more initiative and responsibility than ever during these tense times.

A day earlier, Trump tweeted that "after 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

Israel seized the Golan Heights in a war in 1967 and annexed it in the 1980s, but the international community has never recognized the move.

"Defending the rights of Palestine in the face of attacks of Israel is a must for us," said Erdogan.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 17:58:46|Editor: Xiang Bo

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by Jian Ping

CHICAGO, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Students from several grades at Kenwood Academy High School in Chicago Thursday gathered in a class to learn Chinese art and culture. They focused intensely on the hands-on activity of carving images on eggshells.

Shan Mengbo, who is 70 years old and an award-winning artist from China's Shandong province, was the teacher. The artist specializes in carving, and the raw materials he uses a range of materials from eggshell and pencils to porcelain plates.

"This is so challenging and interesting," said Azaria, a 7th grader.

Azaria told Xinhua that she had been learning Chinese for seven years and had done paper-cutting and other activities before, but "had never done anything like this," referring to eggshell carving.

"This is so different ... we normally just learn Chinese in class, this is about culture," said Kroi, who is also in the 7th grade.

Kroi said he is very interested in China and Chinese culture and wants to visit the country some day.

Eggshell carving isn't easy. One student crushed his eggshell. He received a replacement and was told to proceed with more care.

Shan demonstrated some raw materials used in his artwork, including empty cans, fallen leaves, discarded pencils and eggshells.

"We can use daily waste to make art," said Shan.

Shan showed students artwork made of waste can foil, and passed porcelain plate carvings, with portrait images from Confucius, Mona Lisa, Bill Gates, to Hemingway, all figures students could easily identify.

The program was organized by the Beijing Language and Culture University Press.

Shan, as well as Chen Heling, a language professor from Shandong University, were invited to Chicago for the program. They visited 20 schools and held 40 workshops over a 10-day period.

Chen carried out conversations with the students in Chinese, conveying the cultural background and stories behind Shan's artwork.

"Mr. Shan is good at relating to students," said Chen. "Our approach is to let students learn from experiencing culture and language together."

Chen said eggshell carving has a long history in China. "By showcasing carvings of Chinese images as well as Western iconic figures, it strikes a cord with students when they can recognize and relate to what they see," she said.

"It's my first time to the United States," Shan said. "I'm very glad to see so many students are interested in Chinese culture and artwork."

"It's a great experience for our students to interact with an artist from China in our classrooms," said Jennifer Chang, the Chinese language teacher at Kenwood Academy.

"Different from focusing on language only ... we are expanding language learning through culture and art," said Tony Yuan, chief operating officer of Beijing Language and Culture University Press branch in Chicago.

Yuan said that they are in the process of releasing a series of books teaching Chinese with folk art and culture, and the first book on paper-cutting has already been released.

Alonda, a 10th grader, moved her carving knife to chip off a thin layer of her eggshell. Shan bent over to show her how to move the eggshell instead of the carving tool to create the image she had drawn on the shell.

"This year's program has gone extremely well," Jane Lu, director of the Confucius Institute in Chicago, told Xinhua. "Mr. Shan and Ms. Chen have met with approximately 2,000 (program) students. Their new approach of combining culture, art and language is well received by both teachers and students."Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 18:03:46|Editor: ZX

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NEW DELHI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Pilots of India's private airline "Jet Airways" have written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu, urging them to instruct their company's management to give them their pending salaries.

Speaking to Xinhua over the phone, Vice-President of the "National Aviator's Guild" (NAG) Captain Asim Valiani said that there are around 1,500 pilots and nearly 400 engineers who have been affected due to non-payment of salaries for over three months now.

The NAG is the registered trade union of the Jet Airways pilots of Indian nationality, with a total official membership of around 1,135 pilots.

"The airline's management says that the company is facing financial crisis and is not able to pay salaries to their pilots and engineers as they draw big packages every month," Valiani said and added that the rest 18,000 low-paid employees were getting their regular salaries.

"Pilots too have a family to support. Marriages of children have been postponed due to non-payment of salaries," the pilots wrote in their letter addressed to the civil aviation minister, a copy of which was also sent to the prime minister.

Urging both the minister and the prime minister to intervene and get their salaries released, the pilots mentioned in the letter that they feared that the airline was on the "verge of collapse" which would leave thousands of employees unemployed.

This would change the dynamics of aviation in the country as air fares will increase due to the "reduction in capacity and travelling public will face major convenience", added the pilots' letter.

Two days ago, the agitated pilots threatened to stop flying from April 1 if their pending salaries are not cleared by March 31.

"We are waiting for the management to respond to our demands by March 31. We hope the matter would be resolved by this date. If not, we will chalk our next course of action," said a senior pilot working with the airline.

Jet Airways has been facing the worst financial crisis of its 25-year existence with more than one billion U.S. dollars of debts. The carrier is said to have delayed payments to banks, suppliers, and aircraft lessors.

Meanwhile, according to the office of the country's Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the current fleet of Jet Airways is likely to operate only about 140 flights a day, down from an average of about 650 flights a day in March 2018. Nearly a third of the airline's 120-plane fleet has been grounded. .          -    .          .       UFC 269,       .     ,              .     ,...Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 18:03:46|Editor: xuxin

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Farmer Ismael Salih (L) walks on his farm land in al-Namrud area in Nineveh, Iraq, March 7, 2019. (Xinhua)

BAGHDAD, March 22 (Xinhua) -- "My family and I are determined to work hard to regain our life on our old farm after the rehabilitation of the nearby canal," said Ismael Salih, a farmer from a village in the al-Namrud area to the southeast of Iraq's northern city of Mosul.

Salih, like many farmers in his area, left his home after the extremist Islamic State (IS) militant group seized the area in 2014 and damaged the Al Zab irrigation canal after they damaged its water pumps.

The farmers started to return to their villages and farmland because of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP)'s project in collaboration with Samaritan's Purse International Disaster Relief (SP) to restore a vital irrigation canal.

The canal draws water from the Great al-Zab River to vast agricultural lands southeast of Mosul.

Dressed in traditional Arab clothes, scrutinizing his field which now resembles a bright green carpet, Salih is expecting a good harvest of wheat for this winter season, the first harvest season since the canal was cleared and water started flowing again.

"I am preparing to plant nine dunams (22,500 square meters) of tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, eggplants and sunflowers for the summer season, now that WFP has provided us with much-needed water (from the canal) and assets to resume working in our farms," Salih said.

He received some 2,000 U.S. dollars to buy seeds and other agricultural equipment.

Sally Morson, agriculture and livelihoods program manager at non-governmental organization Samaritan's Purse, said the canal was pretty much destroyed.

"You can see the remnants of the other pumps, different parts and motors were removed," he said.

"In this project, we installed three new pumps and then rehabilitated other parts of the operation system. The plan is to continue the rehabilitation to restore its full capacity with five pumps," Morson added.

According to Salih, agriculture in his area has been greatly affected by the IS militants. Farmers couldn't even sell their crops to other parts of the country outside the IS control, which led to a sharp drop in crops prices, pushing many farmers to leave their lands.

The WFP and SP are cooperating on this resilience program designed to prompt the families of displaced farmers to return to their homes and rebuild their livelihoods.

They repaired the irrigation system, offered assistance to overcome farmers' difficulties resulting from the destruction of their farms after three years of being under IS control, as well as hands-on work opportunities to clear the rubble and physically rebuild the devastated waterways.

The initiative was welcomed by villagers who were encouraged to return to their work in the fields.

"Under the WFP program, we have cleaned the canals of the irrigation project and other remains of the battles against the IS," Yasir Tahir, an engineer working for SP, told Xinhua, explaining that more than 1,000 workers participated in the cleaning and repairing of the 69-km-long canal.

"We have purchased and installed three water pumps with a pumping capacity of one meter per second," Tahir said.

Tahir explained that the restored water system is now working efficiently and that farmers can irrigate their winter crops whenever they need.

The WFP will soon hand over the project to Nineveh's Water Resource Directorate.

Ali Abdullah, a foreman who supervised the cleaning process of the canals, said that hundreds of villagers have financially benefited from the project. With irrigation water restored, returnees are now able to resume their normal life in their farms.

"Recently, more than 100 families returned to their villages. Although most of their houses were destroyed, the availability of water from the canal gives them hope that they can go back to their normal life," Abdullah said.

With the al-Zab water channeled through the canals into the fields again, agriculture is reviving in the area. Farmers are able to cultivate grains and vegetables and market their products in nearby towns.

Among the returnees is Haider Ghayyeb, a displaced farmer who lived for several months in Debekha Camp for Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Erbil province.

Ghayyeb said that he is not the only one that benefited from the project, as farmers from 15 villages have gained benefits from the irrigation revival scheme, which has brought renewed livelihoods.

"We have also received expertise and guidance on the prevention and control of plant diseases," Ghayyeb said.

In 1991, the al-Zab Irrigation Scheme was constructed by Nineveh's Department of Water Resource and was later developed and expanded in 2007.

Until the emergence of the IS group in 2014, the irrigation system had been fully functional, drawing water from the Great al-Zab River and channeling it almost 30 km through the main, upper, and lower canals.

These main canals then branched into 31 km of sub-canals, covering a total of 3,000 hectares, watering farmlands along the way.

The latest figures from the International Organization for Migration showed that some 1.74 million displaced people remained uprooted due to security concerns and a lack of shelter and livelihood opportunities.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 18:13:49|Editor: Xiang Bo

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KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia on Friday broke ground for the construction of a 2-billion-U.S.-dollar Chinese-invested expressway, connecting capital Phnom Penh to the southwestern seaport province of Preah Sihanouk.

Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen and visiting Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou presided over the ceremony here, which was attended by about 10,000 people.

Hun Sen said the 190-km expressway is the first of its kind in Cambodia, saying that the huge project was made possible thanks to the excellent ties between China and Cambodia.

He added that the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) invested about two billion U.S. dollars for the thoroughfare, which will take four years to be constructed, starting from March 2019 to March 2023.

"On behalf of the Cambodian government, I'd like to express my profound gratitude to the Chinese government for supporting this project, and to the CRBC for investing in the project," Hun Sen said.

The four-lane expressway will be built on the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) form, he said.

"This expressway is very important to connect the country's first economic pole, Phnom Penh, to the second economic pole, Sihanoukville," Hun Sen said. "We believe that it will be an importantly strategic road that will contribute to boosting Cambodia's economic growth."

Kong Xuanyou said as a good brother, friend, partner, and neighbor of Cambodia, China attached great importance to the development of relations with Cambodia based on the principle of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.

"I believe that the Phnom Penh-Sihanoukville expressway will not only provide enormous benefits to the Cambodian people, but also be a road of friendship and cooperation between China and Cambodia," he said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 18:18:55|Editor: ZX

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced that a Sino-European joint space mission known as SMILE was launched Friday.

The Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer is a comprehensive collaboration between the CAS and the European Space Agency (ESA). Satellites will be launched by 2023 to study the impact of solar activity on the Earth's environment.

Wang Chi, director of National Space Science Center under the CAS, said the SMILE program would create images of interaction between solar winds and the Earth's magnetosphere with innovative X-ray and ultraviolet technologies.

It will achieve an overall imaging of large-scale structure of the Earth's space, which plays an important role in predicting and mitigating weather disasters, according to Wang.

SMILE has gathered the world's leading resources in space weather. The UK Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency will also participate.

China and Europe are responsible for the construction and operation of the application system. The data obtained by satellites in orbit will be available to all participating countries.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 18:23:58|Editor: xuxin

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Tricia Hairston (R), principal of Paint Branch Elementary School, tries to perform Fujian Puppetry at Paint Branch Elementary School in the Prince George's County, Maryland, the United States, March 20, 2019. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

by Xiong Maoling, Jin Yuelei

WASHINGTON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- When Chen Lihui, the performer of Fujian Puppetry, a Chinese performing art, deftly maneuvered an 18-inch puppet to move his head back and forth, perform a high kick, and wipe the dust off his hat, nearly 200 kids in the room burst into laughter, unable to refrain from exploding with excitement.

Chen, from Zhangzhou city, Fujian province of China, performed the fascinating traditional art to the students and faculty of Paint Branch Elementary School in the Prince George's County of the U.S. state of Maryland Wednesday.

"It's almost (as if) you can have a connection to the puppets. He tells his stories through arts and movements," Tricia Hairston, principal of the school, told Xinhua.

Fujian Puppetry, which dates back to more than 1,500 years ago, is listed as a national intangible cultural heritage, Chen said. As one of the major genres, Zhangzhou puppet show features Peking opera characters expressed through exquisite wood carvings and lifelike performances.

Chen, who is especially adept at playing clown characters, said he was overwhelmed by the kids' enthusiasm.

"It's the first time they saw traditional Chinese puppet show. They were so curious about it, they kept saying wow, wow, wow!" he said.

After the performance, Chen invited a few students to try for themselves, offering them dozens of different puppets, which filled the large suitcase he brought all the way from China. Kids from pre-kindergarten through third grade shot a volley of questions. "What is this character?" "Do you have to remember all the moves?" "How many years have you been doing this?"

Chen began learning puppetry at a local art school in Fujian in the early 1980s.

"You have to practice on basic skills for three years before you can touch a puppet," he said, adding that one of the most important skills is to move fingers precisely as needed.

In a prior session, Chen performed puppetry to higher-grade students at the elementary school. He also held a workshop for a few teachers on the same day.

"I'm very excited," said the principal. "It allowed teachers to really embrace a new way of integrating the arts into the Chinese culture and really help our students have a robust, rigorous learning program."

About five years ago, the school started its Chinese immersion program.

Prince George's County is one of the seven Maryland counties on Chen's 11-day U.S. trip that concluded Thursday. The artist also visited universities, schools and local art councils in counties including Cumberland, Wicomico and St. Mary's.

"The puppets came to life and Mr. Chen was fantastic at enabling this," said Betty McGinnis, president of the non-profit World Artists Experiences, the organizer of these events, adding that the beautiful art form captured people of all ages.

"Children's eyes would light up. Giggles abound. This made his programs magical. Adults too, became wide-eyed and childlike as they played with the puppets," she said.

McGinnis said what struck her most was how the Chinese artist became one-with-the-puppet while he was performing.

Chen stayed with local host families during the trip, and went to attend a musical at a college in Allegany County, making the experience memorable for the artist, who had traveled to over 20 countries to perform his puppet show.

"In the past, when the performance was over, I immediately left, the audience didn't know me, nor did I know them. This time, I was able to interact with so many people, and to experience real American life. It feels so different," Chen said.

"Everyone would like to have had him for a longer time," McGinnis said. "Everyone realized that in this age of technology, this is a wonderful way to step aside and both enjoy and learn in life."

McGinnis said that locals realized that the puppet arts could be a great means of communication, calling Chen a beautiful artist, a powerful teacher and communicator.

"We hope for his return someday," she said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 18:28:59|Editor: ZX

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TOKYO, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Okinawa prefectural government on Friday filed another lawsuit against the central government to retract approval given for landfill work for the relocation of a controversial U.S. base within Japan's southernmost prefecture.

The landfill work, which is vehemently opposed by the Okinawa government and the people, is part of the central government's plans to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps Futenma Air Station from Ginowan, to the pristine coastal area of Henoko, also in Okinawa.

The lawsuit was filed with the Naha branch of the Fukuoka High Court and seeks for the cancellation of the land ministry's reversal in October of Okinawa retracting a permit given for the central government to proceed with the controversial land reclamation work.

Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki, a staunch opponent to the base move, in talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday, insisted that the landfill work be suspended.

He maintained that more time was needed to negotiate the sensitive situation following the majority of local citizens in Okinawa, in a national referendum held recently, voting against the relocation plan.

Despite the contrary stance of the Okinawa prefectural government and citizens in Japan's southernmost prefecture, the central government said it will forge ahead with the land reclamation work regardless, but that it was "open" to more dialogue on the situation.

Okinawa hosts the bulk of U.S. military facilities in Japan, yet the tiny sub-tropical island accounts for just a small fraction of Japan's total landmass.

Anti-U.S. sentiment has been rising on the island, with locals insisting that the central government pay heed to the results of the referendum and move the base out of Okinawa and Japan altogether.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 18:28:59|Editor: ZX

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KAMPALA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Uganda's National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) has dispatched a team of experts to the eastern district of Ngora to investigate possible volcanic activity.

Naome Karekaho, the spokesperson for NEMA, told Xinhua by telephone on Friday that they had sent the experts to Ngora Town Council to ascertain whether the Moru Otukei rock was experiencing volcanic activity.

"We cannot confirm that it is volcanic activity but the district environment office has reported some boiling sound, a crack on the rock, a smell and blue fumes or smoke coming from under the rock," Karekaho said.

Earlier, a letter from the district environment team indicated that they had carried out inspection of the rock and reported that "the community concern was true in that volcanic activity is taking place evidenced by the boiling sound associated with heat, which increases as you advance towards the rock."

Community members were advised not to go near the rock, "since the signs of heating and cracking could be dangerous".

Ngora district is located about 75 km from Mount Elgon, which is an extinct shield volcano on the border of Uganda and Kenya.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 18:49:05|Editor: xuxin

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Machines line up during a groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of a 190-km expressway stretching from capital Phnom Penh to the deep-sea port province of Preah Sihanouk in Kampong Speu, Cambodia, March 22, 2019. China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) is investing about two billion U.S. dollars for the project, which will be taken four years to be constructed, starting from March 2019 to March 2023. The expressway will have two lanes for each direction and vehicles can travel with a speed of 100 km per hour. (Xinhua/Mao Pengfei)

by Nguon Sovan, Mao Pengfei

KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen said here on Friday that the 2-billion-U.S.-dollar Chinese-invested expressway will play a crucial role to boost the economic development of Cambodia and to improve people's livelihoods.

Speaking at a groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of a 190-km expressway stretching from capital Phnom Penh to the deep-sea port province of Preah Sihanouk, Hun Sen said the super highway is the first of its kind in Cambodia.

He said the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) is investing about two billion U.S. dollars for the project, which will be taken four years to be constructed, starting from March 2019 to March 2023.

"On behalf of the Cambodian government, I'd like to express my profound gratitude to the Chinese government for supporting this project, and to the CRBC for investing in it," he said.

The expressway will be built on a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model, he said, adding that when it is operational, the firm will collect tolls from road users based on the sizes and types of vehicles.

"This expressway is very important to connect the country's first economic pole, Phnom Penh, to the second economic pole, Sihanoukville," Hun Sen said.

"We believe that it will become an importantly strategic road that will contribute to boosting Cambodia's economic growth."

The prime minister said that the thoroughfare will increase logistics efficiency in the country, and reduce cost of goods transportation and travel period.

"Currently, travel between the two destinations takes about five hours, but when the expressway is built, it will take only two and a half hours," he said.

Meanwhile, Hun Sen said China's progress has not only given direct benefits to the Chinese people, but also provided advantages to other developing countries, especially those along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Speaking at the event, visiting Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou said as a good brother, friend, partner, and neighbor of Cambodia, China attached great importance to the development of relations with Cambodia based on the principle of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.

"I believe that the Phnom Penh-Sihanoukville expressway will not only provide enormous benefits to the Cambodian people, but also be a road of friendship and cooperation between China and Cambodia," he said.

Kong said China has so far built more than 3,000 km of roads and eight large bridges in Cambodia and that Chinese aid and investment to Cambodia are "sincere", aiming at supporting the country's socio-economic development and poverty reduction.

He said the super highway project was born of cooperation between China and Cambodia under the BRI.

Cambodian Minister of Public Works and Transport Sun Chanthol said the expressway will connect Phnom Penh's Pursenchey district to the southwestern coastal province of Preah Sihanouk through Kandal, Kampong Speu, and Koh Kong provinces.

"It is a strategic road and is the most important breath of Cambodia's economy," he said.

He said the super highway will reduce traffic from National Road No. 4, which is the busiest road connecting Phnom Penh to the deep-sea port province of Preah Sihanouk.

"It will play an important role in enhancing the efficiency of goods transportation and logistics system in Cambodia," Chanthol said.

"Also, it will facilitate companies and people in transporting their products to local markets or to international markets through the international deep-sea port."

The expressway will have two lanes for each direction and vehicles can travel with a speed of 100 km per hour.

When it is open for traffic, the firm will not collect tolls for all kinds of vehicles for the first month, and then, it will offer a 20-percent discount for the first year, the minister said.

CRBC's chairman Lu Shan said the project is a testament to the solid friendship between China and Cambodia, and is the alignment between China's BRI and Cambodia's Rectangular Strategy.

During the construction, the expressway will create 6,000 jobs for Cambodians, and in the operational period, it will provide more than 2,000 jobs, he said.

Lu said the project will be environment-friendly and the company will train local staff in the majors of road construction and maintenance, and business administration.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:09:12|Editor: xuxin

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JAKARTA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Three members of an Islamic State (IS)-linked homegrown terrorist organization were killed in a military-police security operation in Indonesia's Central Sulawesi province, a senior police officer said on Friday.

The terrorists were killed in a shootout on Thursday afternoon in the province's regency of Parigi Moutong, Head of Central Sulawesi Police Headquarters Lukman Wahyu Hariyanto said.

The three killed terrorists are identified as Andi Muhammad from Makassar, Jaka Ramadhan from Banten and Alhaji Kaliki from Ambon, he said.

According to Lukman, the task team also managed to arrest two other terrorists after the shootout.

"Their force should be decreasing at present as they have lost three ones with two others arrested by the task team. We estimated nine are still left remaining in the organization at present," he said in the province's capital of Palu.

He said police and military troops joining Tinombala operation now are combing the jungles located in the regency's mountainous areas to hunt the remaining members of East Indonesia Mujahidin (MIT).

The joint military-police Tinombala operation has killed MIT leader, Santoso alias Abu Wardah, in July 2016 through a shootout in Tambarana village located in the province's regency of Poso.

Refusing to surrender, MIT members fled to jungles in the province's mountains since then to continue their existence.

Tinombala operation was set up in 2016 to end activities of MIT which carried out several attacks against police and public offices with its aim to establish Islamic state in Indonesia. MIT also organized illegal travel for domestic fighters eager to join IS in Syria.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:09:14|Editor: xuxin

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NAIROBI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Sometime back, when Kenyans wanted to buy a middle-end smartphone that has a larger screen, good camera, longer battery life and big storage capacity, they had to part with up to 20,000 shillings (200 U.S. dollars).

Today, however, to get such a phone, one only needs between 80 dollars and 100 dollars, and Kenyans have Chinese phone makers to thank.

The entrance of Chinese brands in the east African nation's market has intensified competition not only amongst themselves, but also with other brands making smartphones affordable.

Chinese brands in the Kenyan market include Tecno, Oppo, Xiaomi, Huawei, Lenovo and Infinix, all which have intensified rivalry amongst themselves by constantly unveiling new models as they seek to outclass each other with trendier gadgets.

Phone brands from other manufacturers outside China are Samsung, iPhone and Nokia, among others.

Until the coming of Chinese brands, starting with Huawei, the Kenyan market was dominated by the other brands whose prices were way above the reach of majority of Kenyans.

But currently, the Chinese brands have dwarfed their peers as they drive prices of trendy smartphones in the east African nation to an all-time low.

A survey in mobile phone shops in the capital Nairobi on Thursday indicated that Chinese phone makers have not only taken over the market, but they have also made Kenyans happy by enabling them access cellphones affordably.

At two newly opened phone shops on Moi Avenue, Tecno, Infinix, Huawei and Oppo stand out, with an attendant at Mobile House saying they are the fastest-moving thanks to their affordability.

"Many young people are buying the Chinese brands because they are really affordable and offer much more," said Susan Nderitu, the attendant.

As other sellers of mobile phones across Kenya, Nderitu said due to the affordability, it is easier to sell the Chinese brands to customers than the others, a thing that keeps them in business.

Bernard Mwaso of Edell IT Solution said Chinese gadgets have pushed prices of smartphones down not only in the Kenyan market but also globally.

"If you go to Asia and Europe, prices of smartphones have fallen significantly due to the Chinese brands like Huawei, Xiaomi and Tecno, which have taken over the market as they offer just as much as the other brands. Nokia and Samsung, among other brands, have had to offer relatively similar prices for them to compete," he said.

A survey by online store Jumia released last week notes that prices of mobile phones in Kenya have declined in the last four years following increased entry of gadgets from China.

According to Jumia, the average amount Kenyans are spending on smartphones has declined from 185 dollars in 2014 to 86 dollars currently.

The report notes of a continuous decline in smartphone average prices as more Chinese brands join the Kenyan market, with the cost of the gadgets ceasing to be the major hindrance to acquisition.

The online store, which sells Chinese brands among others, says gadgets from the Asian nation have made smartphone market extremely competitive in Kenya and across Africa.

"What is making Chinese brands popular besides the cost is that the phones offer all that what most smartphone users want, that is, larger screen size, better camera resolution, bigger storage capacity, 4G network and twin SIMs, among others," said Mwaso.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:15:45|Editor: xuxin

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Visitors walk past the booth of Amazon Publishing during the 2019 Leipzig Book Fair in Leipzig, Germany, March 21, 2019. The four-day Leipzig Book Fair kicked off on Thursday, attracting over 2,500 exhibitors from more than 50 countries and regions all over the world. (Xinhua/Kevin Voigt)Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:14:16|Editor: xuxin

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ABUJA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A policeman was killed and five others abducted from a mining site in Nigeria when a group of gunmen invaded a village in the northern part of the country, local authorities said on Friday.

The gunmen stormed Sunke village in Anka area of the northern state of Zamfara on Wednesday, disarming the policemen who were deployed to provide security at the mining site operated by expatriates, said Mustapha Gado, chairman of Anka local government area.

Gado confirmed one of the policemen was killed amid heavy shooting. The remaining five were taken away but released unhurt by the gunmen on Thursday.

Upon their return, however, all their rifles had been taken from them.

None of the expatriates operating the site was taken away or hurt by the gunmen. The reason for the attack remains unclear.

Gado said his office has ordered the immediate close down of the mining site due to the attack but the operators had refused the order. As of Friday morning, the machinery used on the site was still there, the local government official said.

"We consulted the relevant authorities on the need to close down the sites and we got the approval. We served them with quit notice but those operating the sites have gone ahead to source for more security operatives to man the sites for them," he added.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:19:18|Editor: xuxin

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COLOMBO, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka's Meteorology Department, on Friday re-issued an extreme heat advisory for several districts of the island country as temperatures were expected to soar as high as 41 degrees celsius in the coming days.

The Meteorology Department, in a statement issued the severe heat advisory for Mannar in the north, Puttalam and Kurunegala in the north west and Monaragala in the Uva Province.

"In such extreme situations, it may be possible to have heat cramps and exhaustion. Continuous activity could also result in heat stroke," the department said.

Several other areas including capital Colombo were also warned to remain cautious due to the extreme heat.

The department also advised the public to remain hydrated and not to leave children and elderly unattended in the coming days.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:19:18|Editor: xuxin

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ABUJA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Thirteen children have been confirmed killed following an outbreak of measles in Nigeria's northern state of Borno, local authorities said on Friday.

In a statement reaching Xinhua, the Borno State Primary Health Care Agency said the airborne disease has spread across 25 local council areas in the state.

The disease, a leading killer in developing countries like Nigeria, is showing a steady rise in Borno, with 4,693 people already infected, the government agency said.

"Thirteen council areas are most affected by measles in 33 wards," the statement said.

On Thursday, Babagana Abiso, a director of disease control in the state, said efforts were ongoing to contain the spread of the disease.

Measles is a childhood infection caused by a virus. It can be serious and even fatal for small children.

Abiso said due to the outbreak, 1.7 million kids are to be immunized against the disease.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) would provide technical support for the 10-day immunization exercise, the official said.

"Immunization remains one of the most effective ways to protect children from killer diseases," he said, explaining that children of ages six months to 10 years are targeted for the immunization.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:19:18|Editor: xuxin

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ISTANBUL, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday praised the reactions of New Zealand's government and its people to the recent terror attacks on two mosques which left 50 people dead.

"(New Zealand's) Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's reaction to the terror attack, empathy and solidarity with all Muslims should be a model for all the leaders," Erdogan said at a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member states in Istanbul.

Erdogan voiced his appreciation of the presence of Winston Peters, New Zealand's deputy prime minister and foreign minister, at the meeting.

"It is great to have the New Zealand's officials here, which is very meaningful to us, to all the Muslims as well as the families of the victims," he said, adding that "I would like to convey my gratitude to each one of you."

Erdogan also urged Western media outlets and politicians to avoid marginalizing Muslims and demonizing the refugees, saying the OIC cannot be indifferent to incidents that threaten the future of all humanity and the Islamic world.

"Just as humanity fought against anti-Semitism after the Holocaust disaster, it should fight against rising Islamophobia in the same determined fashion," he said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:29:20|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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by Ronald Ssekandi

KAYUNGA, Uganda, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Working at Isimba Hydropower Plant construction site, Alyce Nakisita told Xinhua that her job is demanding and she has to meet tight deadlines set by her Chinese supervisors.

Nakisita, who has been working as a secretary here for the last two years, told Xinhua on Thursday that all this is preparing her for a better future because she has acquired the necessary skills in working in different environments where deadlines are a norm.

On Thursday, the Chinese-built Isimba Hydropower Plant was inaugurated by Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni on the Victoria Nile in the central part of the African country.

Addressing the inauguration, Museveni thanked the Chinese government for financing his country's transport and energy infrastructure projects, which are expected to put the country onto the fast track of development.

Nakisita is among the hundreds of Ugandan youths who have worked on Chinese financed infrastructure projects under the proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

"This initiative is very good because it is set to improve our infrastructural development in terms of railways, factories, and roads. I believe it is going to create a lot of jobs and improve our economy," she said.

The BRI, proposed by China in 2013, aims to build trade and infrastructure networks connecting Asia with Europe and Africa on and beyond the ancient Silk Road routes. The initiative comprises the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

Uganda and China signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation within the Framework of the BRI last September, following the 2018 Beijing Summit of Forum on China-Africa Cooperation.

According to Zheng Zhuqiang, Chinese ambassador to Uganda, the embassy is working with its Ugandan counterparts to implement the BRI.

"We are trying our best to ensure that Uganda can effectively seize opportunities of obtaining benefits," Zheng said on Thursday at the commissioning of Isimba Power Plant.

Nakisita said that the BRI is critical in solving the unemployment problem faced by many youths in Uganda and across Africa.

At the peak of the construction of the Isimba Hydropower Plant, there were over 3,000 workers, of which 85 percent were Ugandans, according to China International Water and Electric Corporation (CWE), the construction contractor of Isimba.

Several Ugandan engineers were brought to China to receive further training, while those who remained were also able to have hands on experience.

"These promising and qualified technical personnel would confidently play an important role in the future development of hydropower in the country," said Jiang Shouguo, CWE's vice president.

At the peak of the power crisis in 2014, Uganda's government resorted to using diesel generators to power the country's economy, which raised the cost of power which then forced some of the manufacturers to increase the price of their products and later rendered their products not competitive because of the high price.

Economists warned that the inadequate power supply was a key bottleneck to unlocking the country's economic potential.

Uganda's government then resolved to increase hydropower generation in a bid to increase power supply and also reduce its cost.

The construction of the 568-million-dollar power plant started in 2015, along the Nile River, after the east African country secured a loan from the Export-Import Bank of China.

Another Chinese funded key green energy project is the 600 MW Karuma Hydropower Plant, also constructed along the Nile in northern Uganda.

Government data shows that once Isimba and Karuma power supplies to the national grid, the electric generation capacity will increase from 975 MW to 1,758 MW and the power tariffs will drop by 17.45 percent.

President Museveni is optimistic that once there is adequate and cheap electricity coupled with the enabling of government policies, Uganda's massive industrialization will kick off. The country has already created over 20 industrial parks in different parts of the country.

Museveni also said that once there is affordable electricity, farmers can also start adding value to their agricultural produce.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:29:20|Editor: ZX

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ROME, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Italy is very important and will boost the two countries' commercial relationship, a senior Italian official said Thursday.

In an interview with Xinhua, Michele Geraci, undersecretary of state for economic development, said his country wants to enhance economic ties with China for mutual benefits.

During Xi's visit, which started Thursday, the two sides are expected to sign intergovernmental cooperation documents in such fields as diplomacy, economy and trade, and culture, as well as commercial areas concerning infrastructure, machinery and finance, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

"We hope Italian and Chinese companies get to know each other more, and explore more business opportunities for mutual advantages," said Geraci, who heads the Italian government's Task Force China.

Launched in October, Task Force China aims to boost economic relations with China by pursuing "more access to the Chinese market, better quality products, and more investment."

Geraci said the new body helps Italian firms, particularly small- and medium-sized enterprises, better understand the Chinese market by informing them of new cooperation opportunities as well as changes in Chinese policies and laws.

"We will try to organize business meetings for Italian and Chinese companies, so they can go down into more details and explore some opportunities," said the undersecretary, who used to be an investment banker and spent around 10 years in China.

The expanding middle class in China wants good-quality food, and "there are good producers of food and agricultural machinery in Italy," which can lead to closer cooperation in agricultural business, said Geraci.

Meanwhile, "we want to attract investment; that is beneficial to our economy," added the Italian official. "Chinese investments are very much welcome."

He stressed that a plan has been made to attract Chinese investments, particularly green-field ones, which will bring much more than just new employment.

"Chinese companies may be interested in Italian ports," he said. "We are planning to expand the capacity of existing ports," like Trieste in northeast Italy and Palermo in Sicily.

Geraci said similarities in Chinese and Mediterranean culture are good starting to further bilateral economic cooperation.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:29:20|Editor: xuxin

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BEIRUT, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Lebanese President Michel Aoun said Friday that he is worried about the international community's approach towards the Syrian refugees' crisis, Lebanon's presidential website reported.

"We worried about the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland. The international community is postponing their return to an unknown timing," said Aoun.

The international community is very much aware of the dire circumstances in which Syrian refugees live in camps, he said.

"Also, Lebanon's infrastructure including electricity, water, hospitals and schools have been tremendously impacted by this crisis," the president added.

Lebanon is hosting 976,000 registered Syrian refugees, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while the Lebanese government estimates the true number of Syrian refugees in the country at 1.5 million.

The Lebanese authorities said on Wednesday that the number of refugees who have returned to their homeland from Lebanon had reached 172,046 by March 19.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:34:21|Editor: xuxin

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TEHRAN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Iranian Foreign Ministry on Friday condemned U.S. President Donald Trump's recent comments about the sovereignty of Israel over the occupied Golan Heights.

"The Zionist (Israel) occupying regime does not have sovereignty over any Arab or Islamic lands," The Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qasemi said in a statement.

"Based on the the resolutions adopted by the United Nations and the UN Security Council, the Golan Heights is part of Syria which has been occupied, and its occupation should be stopped," said Qasemi.

Trump said Thursday on Twitter that "it is time for the United States to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights."

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria during the Six-Day War of 1967 and formally annexed the territory in 1981. But that annexation has not been recognized by the international community.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:39:22|Editor: xuxin

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TOKYO, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Okinawa prefectural government on Friday filed a new lawsuit against the central government to retract approval given for landfill work for the relocation of a controversial U.S. base with Japan's southernmost prefecture.

The landfill work, which is vehemently opposed by the Okinawa government and the people, is part of the central government's plans to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps Futenma Air Station from Ginowan to the pristine coastal area of Henoko, also in Okinawa.

The lawsuit was filed with the Naha branch of the Fukuoka High Court and seeks for the cancellation of the land ministry's reversal in October of Okinawa retracting a permit given for the central government to proceed with the land reclamation work.

Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki, a staunch opponent to the base move, in talks with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo on Tuesday, insisted that the landfill work be suspended, in the latest indication he and the people of Okinawa will not kowtow to the central government's plans made in cahoots with the United States to move the base.

He maintained that more time was needed to negotiate the sensitive situation following the majority of local citizens in Okinawa, in a national referendum held recently, voting against the relocation plan.

Despite the contrary stance of the Okinawa prefectural government and citizens in Japan's southernmost prefecture, the central government said it will forge ahead with the land reclamation work regardless, but that it was "open" to more dialogue on the situation.

Reclamation work, involving the dumping of large boulders, sand and sediment into pristine waters off Henoko, may restart as early as Monday, the central government indicated.

"I want to take seriously the feelings of the people in the prefecture, but we must avoid the Futenma base remaining in its current place," Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya said Friday, adding that he was disappointed that Okinawa had filed a fresh lawsuit.

The overall plans for the new base involve 157 hectares of land being reclaimed from immaculate waters off the Henoko area and the building of a V-shaped runway.

Officials in Okinawa have stated that the reclamation work runs contrary to the National Biodiversity Strategy of Japan as it is damaging an ecosystem unique to the region.

Environmentalists have also voiced concerns about the materials used for the reclamation work introducing invasive species to the region.

The waters of Oura Bay are, in addition, the last home of the highly-endangered Japanese dugong, which is a large marine mammal and cousin of the manatee. Environmentalists are certain of the species' extinction if the central government's construction continues.

One of the endangered dugong was found dead earlier this week by fishermen in Okinawa, local media reported.

The mammal, which has been designated as a national treasure, has been listed as being "critically endangered" by the Environment Ministry.

Only a few of them are thought to still exist, according to a local probe, in waters which include its habitat off Henoko, that will disappear under the central government's planned land reclamation work.

Prefectural authorities in Okinawa have also claimed that the base-linked construction work legally infringes on the rights granted to local fishermen in the coastal region.

Okinawa hosts the bulk of U.S. military facilities in Japan, yet the tiny sub-tropical island accounts for just a small fraction of Japan's total landmass.

The local people in Okinawa have, for decades, been victims of U.S. base-linked workers' criminal activities, which span minor disorderly offenses such as driving under the influence of alcohol, to heinous instances of rape and murder.

They have also been forced to put up with a steady flow of accidents and mishaps involving U.S. military aircraft.

Anti-U.S. sentiment has been rising on the island of late, with locals insisting that the central government pay heed to the results of the referendum and move the base out of Okinawa and Japan altogether.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:39:22|Editor: xuxin

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BEIRUT, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Walid Bukhari said Friday that Lebanon will witness a big number of Saudi tourists this summer, the National News Agency reported.

"We have already started witnessing the arrival of Saudi tourists to Lebanon and we expect a summer full of brotherhood and love," Bukhari was quoted as saying during an event marking World Down Syndrome Day.

Bukhari said that Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri has appointed a committee to follow up all the needs of Saudi tourists.

Hariri said Tuesday that 12,000 Saudi tourists had visited Lebanon last weekend directly following the lifting of a Saudi travel warning in February.

In Nov. 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait warned their citizens against traveling to Lebanon because of a Lebanese-Saudi crisis caused by Hariri's controversial resignation in Riyadh which he rescinded soon after.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:39:22|Editor: xuxin

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The international community on Friday expressed concern over U.S. President Donald Trump's unexpected announcement on the necessity to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Syria condemned Trump's announcement on Friday, calling it "irresponsible" and a failure to recognize international law.

Trump's announcement confirmed "the blind bias of the United States to the Zionist entity (Israel)," Syria's SANA news agency cited a foreign ministry source as saying.

It won't change "the fact that the Golan was and will remain Arab and Syrian," the source said.

"The American position towards Syria's occupied Golan Heights clearly reflects the United States' contempt for international legitimacy and its flagrant violation of international law," it said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also said on Friday that Trump's statement was bringing the Middle East region "on the brink of a new crisis."

"We cannot allow the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights," Erdogan said in a speech at an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Concurring with Turkey, Iran also criticized the move, saying such decision could bring about "a new wave of conflicts" in the Middle East.

"The Zionist regime is occupational and has no sovereignty over any Arab or Islamic territories," Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said Friday.

"Iran will closely follow all further changes and adopt a corresponding political line in consultations with the Syrian government and other states," he said.

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Friday that it would violate United Nations (UN) resolutions if the United States unilaterally recognizes Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

"Russia, as you know, advocates the principled position on the Golan Heights belonging to Syria. It is enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 497 in 1981. Our assessment of Israel's decision to assume sovereignty over the Golan Heights and enact this decision into a law in 1981 as illegitimate is unwavering," Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Kommersant FM, a local news radio station.

"Changing the status of the Golan Heights bypassing the UN Security Council is a direct violation of UN decisions," she said.

Trump said Thursday on Twitter that "after 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

Israel seized the land in a war in 1967 and annexed it in the 1980s, but the international community has never recognized the move.

A UN peacekeeping force tasked to patrol the buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights was deployed in 1974 to separate Syrian and Israeli forces. The buffer zone had remained quiet until the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 19:49:25|Editor: xuxin

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CAIRO, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Egypt stressed on Friday its fixed stance of considering the Syrian Golan Heights "an occupied Arab territory," Egyptian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

"Based on the resolutions of international legitimacy, Israel's impose of its laws and administration on the occupied Syrian Golan is deemed nullified and illegitimate decision," the statement said.

The statement cited the UN Security Council Resolution 497 of 1981 which rejected Israel's annexation of the territory.

Egypt confirms "the importance that everybody should respect the resolutions of international legitimacy and the United Nations Charter in respect of the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force," the statement added.

On Thursday, Secretary General of the Arab League (AL) Ahmed Aboul-Gheit said U.S. President Donald Trump's recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights is "irrelevant and illegal."

The AL completely supports the Syrian rights, noting the U.S. move constitutes dangerous repercussions towards the Israeli-Arab conflict, he added.

Trump tweeted on Thursday that "after 52 years, it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

Israel seized the Golan Heights in a war in 1967 and annexed it in the 1980s, but the international community has never recognized the move.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 20:04:31|Editor: zh

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People inspect a house damaged in a gunfight at Hajin village of Bandipora district, about 40 km north of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, March 22, 2019. Six militants and a 12-year-old boy were killed in three separate fierce gunfights in restive Indian-controlled Kashmir, officials said Friday. (Xinhua/Javed Dar)

SRINAGAR, Indian-controlled Kashmir, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Six militants and a 12-year-old boy were killed in three separate fierce gunfights in restive Indian-controlled Kashmir, officials said Friday.

While two militants were killed in village Ratnipora in Shopian district, two others and a 12-year-old boy were killed in Hajin of Bandipora district.

According to police, the 12-year-old boy was held hostage by the holed up militants in Hajin.

"Two people were held hostage by the militants inside the house. One man managed to escape, while the 12-year-old boy was not allowed to come out despite repeated requests from our side," a police officer said. "The militants kept targeting our positions, thereby evoking retaliation. During the intense firefight the militants were eliminated."

"In Shopian two militants were killed and their identity is being ascertained," a police officer posted in the district said.

Eyewitnesses said while the gunfight was underway locals clashed with government forces in a bid to help militants escape. Police fired dozens of tear smoke shells and warning shots to chase protesters.

Health officials said 10 civilians were wounded during clashes and brought to hospital.

Locals said three residential houses were damaged in the exchange of fire.

On Thursday night, two militants were killed in village Kalantara Kandi of Baramulla district. While fighting these militants, three troops were wounded in the stand-off.

According to police and army officials, the villages were cordoned off following specific intelligence information suggesting presence of militants.

Meanwhile, on Thursday in Warpora village of Sopore, two policemen including an officer were wounded after militants hurled a grenade towards them during cordon and search operation in the area.

Police officers said earlier on Friday that an exchange of fire between militants and government forces has begun.

"The firing is going on and details are awaited," a police official posted in Sopore said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 20:04:32|Editor: xuxin

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N'DJAMENA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- At least 23 Chadian soldiers lost their lives in an ambush by the terror group Boko Haram in the night from Thursday to Friday, on the shores of Lake Chad, according to military sources quoted Friday by the Chadian information website Alwihda Info.

According to the sources, the jihadists crossed the Niger-Chad border before launching the attack in a locality called Dangdala in the area of Lake Chad against a military base of the Chadian military.

Boko Haram elements were also killed in the Chadian army's counterattack, sources said, adding that reinforcements have been dispatched to the area to purge the terrorists.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 20:04:33|Editor: ZX

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- China on Friday urged the United States to stop arms sales to Taiwan and its military links with the island.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang made the remarks in response to reports that the U.S. government had approved a request by Taiwan to buy more than 60 F-16 fighter jets.

Geng said China's resolute opposition to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan is consistent and firm, and the country has lodged solemn representations with the United States over the issue.

The U.S. side should fully recognize the high sensitivity and severe harm of relevant issue, abide by the one-China principle and the three Sino-U.S. joint communiques, especially the Aug. 17 Communique, according to Geng.

He urged the U.S. side to stop arms sales and military contact with Taiwan, and prudently handle Taiwan-related issues to avoid severely damaging the Sino-U.S. cooperation in important spheres as well as the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 20:09:37|Editor: ZX

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CHENGDU, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan instructed local authorities to provide policy support and make concrete actions to improve education and healthcare service in impoverished regions.

During an inspection tour to Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture of southwest China's Sichuan Province from Wednesday to Friday, Sun asked local governments to try every effort to reduce the dropout rate, spend more resources in building boarding schools in townships and village schools and raise the salary of rural teachers.

She also told the local authorities to equip rural hospitals and clinics with better facilities and medical personnel, step up prevention and control of AIDS and reduce the cost of medical service for needy patients.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 20:29:45|Editor: xuxin

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MADRID, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has handed out a stern message regarding Britain's departure from the European Union, Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on Friday.

Sanchez was one of the leaders at the meeting of the European Council on Thursday, who insisted that the British Parliament has to decide whether it supports a deal for the so-called Brexit or run the risk of crashing out of the EU without an agreement, it said.

The leaders at the European Council had agreed to grant Britain a delay to Brexit until May 22 if Britain lawmakers finally support the Brexit agreement proposed by British Prime Minister Theresa May.

However, if May fails to win Parliamentary support for the deal which had been rejected twice already, Britain will have to leave the EU on April 12.

"We are at a critical moment in European construction. History will judge the events of the coming weeks," said Sanchez, who handed a clear warning to May.

"Spanish citizens in the UK and British citizens in Spain must know that the Spanish government is ready for a disorderly exit," he said in statements published by El Pais.

A study published by the Bank of Spain earlier this week estimated that a "no-deal" Brexit would cost Spain around 9 billion euros (10.2 billion U.S. dollars) and knock around 0.8 percent off Spain's GDP over the next five years.

However, patience has clearly run out with the UK and elections for the European Parliament are scheduled for the end of May. Sanchez said that the unity of the EU is more important that the UK leaving the bloc with an agreement.

"We have to safeguard the EU's legal safety, with or without the UK's participation in the elections, and we need to protect institutions like the European Parliament," he commented.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 20:34:47|Editor: ZX

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- China on Friday expressed strong dissatisfaction with and firm opposition to a recent U.S. report on the Hong Kong Policy Act, urging "prudent words and acts" on issues related to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The remarks came as Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang commented on the annual report released by the U.S. Department of State concerning the Hong Kong Policy Act.

Geng said at a press briefing that since China resumed the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong, the principles of "one country, two systems" and "Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong" with a high degree of autonomy have been earnestly carried out. The entitled rights and freedom of Hong Kong residents have been fully guaranteed according to law.

"The Chinese government will stay resolutely committed to administering Hong Kong in strict accordance with the Constitution and the Basic Law and implementing the 'one country, two systems' principle in a comprehensive and accurate manner," said Geng.

"Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China. Hong Kong affairs are China's internal affairs and no foreign country is entitled to meddle in them," said the spokesperson.

Geng said that China is strongly dissatisfied with and firmly opposes the U.S. side's making irresponsible remarks on Hong Kong affairs and making groundless accusations in its report against China's central government and the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

"We demand the U.S. side cease their wrongdoings and practice prudence on words and acts over Hong Kong-related issues," he added.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 20:44:50|Editor: ZX

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists and education experts have gathered to discuss the in-depth integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and education as well as innovative development in this regard at a symposium.

Representatives and scholars from the Ministry of Education (MOE), Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), Chinese Academy of Sciences and several Chinese universities attended the symposium, according to the MOE website.

The symposium is part of a research program on intelligent education strategy, jointly initiated by the MOE and the CAE last year.

The work on intelligent education should be put into the big picture of education modernization to achieve better development in this regard, said Vice Education Minister Zhong Denghua.

He also called for greater support from the government and relevant institutions to encourage more scientists and scholars to take part in intelligent education development.The body of a victim is being transferred by a military helicopter in Chimanimani, Manicaland Province, Zimbabwe, March 21, 2019. (Xinhua/Shaun Jusa)

HARARE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The death toll from Cyclone Idai in Zimbabwe has risen to 139 with 189 still missing, the government said on Thursday.

The Ministry of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services said in a tweet that as of Wednesday, the number of injured people was 144 while 136 are marooned.

About 4,000 people have been displaced, the ministry added.

The cyclone, which hit the country from neighboring Mozambique, mainly affected eastern and southern parts of Zimbabwe.

Chimanimani in the eastern part of the country has been the worst affected and so far has the highest number of deaths at 127, followed by Chipinge with six deaths.

The cyclone induced landslides and floods that severely damaged infrastructure such as roads and bridges and left thousands of people homeless.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa visited Chimanimani and Chipinge this week to assess the damage and meet with the affected communities.

Meanwhile, donations continue to pour in for victims of the cyclone, with individuals and local firms making contributions while China, the U.S. and the European Union have also made donations.

The government on Monday released 50 million dollars for emergency relief and infrastructure restoration.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:09:54|Editor: ZX

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor Wang Yong has led officials from departments of the State Council to head toward the explosion site in east China's Jiangsu Province to guide the rescue and emergency response work and visit the injured people.

Wang was assigned to the site by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, and Premier Li Keqiang, on behalf of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council.

Forty-seven people were killed and 90 others seriously injured after the explosion ripped through a chemical factory located in an industrial park in Xiangshui County of Yancheng City at about 2:48 p.m. Thursday.

Xi on Friday demanded that all-out efforts be made to search those trapped, and the injured be timely treated and relief work be well done to maintain social stability.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:19:55|Editor: xuxin

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KABUL, March 22 (Xinhua) -- More than three dozens including two U.S. forces have been killed in Afghanistan in recent clashes, officials said Friday.

The government forces, according to Ghulam Hazrat Karimi, an army spokesman in the northern Kunduz province, launched operations against Taliban hideouts in Talawka locality outside Kunduz city the capital of the restive province early Friday and so far up to 20 insurgents have been killed and over a dozen others injured.

The official, however, refrained from informing on the casualties of security personnel, saying the operations would last until the area is cleansed of the insurgents.

A villager on condition of anonymity said that six civilians had been killed in the firefight. Rejecting the claim, Karimi asserted all those killed in the operations were militants.

According to locals, five Afghan security personnel have been killed and five others injured in the ongoing fighting there around Talawka area.

Taliban militants who have increased activities are yet to make comment on the situation.

The villager also claimed that two U.S. service members were also killed and two others injured during the operations launched by Afghan forces in Talwaka locality.

Earlier in the day, the NATO-led Resolute Support (RS) mission in a brief statement released here without providing more details confirmed, "Two U.S. service members were killed while conducting an operation March 22."

Fighting between government forces and the Taliban fighters have claimed the lives of four militants in northern Faryab, six more insurgents in Samangan and two more Taliban fighters in Lalpur district of the eastern Nangarhar province respectively since Thursday, officials said.

Fighting in Afghanistan often gets momentum with the herald of spring which is locally branded as the fighting season.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:24:56|Editor: xuxin

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KIEV, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said on Friday it has prevented a terror attack in a metro station in Ukraine's eastern city of Kharkiv and detained the individual suspected of plotting the attack.

According to a statement on the SBU website, the suspect planned to plant an explosive device stuffed with striking elements equivalent to 600 grams of TNT inside the "Industrialna" metro station.

The plotted attack was aimed at causing "numerous human casualties and destabilizing the socio-political situation in the country on the eve of the presidential elections," the SBU said.

The presidential elections in Ukraine are scheduled for March 31.

In February 2015, four people were killed and nine others wounded in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, when an explosive device was thrown from a moving car into a crowd attending a peaceful march. The SBU has classified the incident as a terror act.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:35:00|Editor: xuxin

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ISTANBUL, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Islamic world on Friday urged all governments to take "genuine" measures to prevent the rise of Islamophobia and promote tolerance and understanding.

In a statement issued after an emergency meeting in Istanbul, the foreign ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member states acknowledged that Islamophobia is on the rise in many parts of the world.

The Islamic world is "deeply worried" about the resurgence of racist movements and related terror attacks in some regions with the intention to incite phobia, hatred and hostility against migrants and individuals from Muslim countries, the statement said.

The foreign ministers urged all countries with Muslim communities to refrain from all policies, statements and practices that associate Islam with terror, extremism and threats to society.

"The brutal, inhumane and horrific outcomes of Islamophobia require genuine, comprehensive and systematic measures," they said in the statement.

Additionally, the ministers urged world countries to take "serious and effective" measures to promote tolerance, mutual respect and understanding mainly through education, media and civil society with the participation of all stakeholders.

They also called on the United Nations and other international and regional organizations to adopt March 15, the day when mass shootings on two mosques in New Zealand left 50 dead, as the International Day of Solidarity Against Islamophobia.

The OIC is the second largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations, with 57 member states spreading over four continents.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:40:00|Editor: Yang Yi

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Bangladesh Awami League (AL) Chairperson and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (R) meets with Song Tao, minister of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on March 21, 2019. (Xinhua/Liu Chuntao)

DHAKA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh Awami League (AL) Chairperson and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina met with Song Tao, minister of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), here on Thursday.

Song said during the meeting that the CPC is willing to join hands with the AL to implement the consensus reached by leaders of both sides, boost the exchange of experiences on governance and make new contribution to the China-Bangladesh relations and the pragmatic cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative.

Hasina said Bangladesh cherishes the friendship with China and highly appreciates China's contribution to regional peace and development.

She expressed the willingness to comprehensively promote the relations between the AL and the CPC, expand the cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, get on board of the fast train of China's development to achieve common development.

Song, during his visit, also met with leaders of other major political parties of Bangladesh.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:45:02|Editor: xuxin

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MANILA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Recent clashes between Philippine security forces and insurgents have displaced nearly 50,000 villagers in the southern island of Mindanao, according to data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

In Maguindanao province in central Mindanao, fighting between the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and a faction of Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) led by Abu Turaifie displaced 35,235 persons from four municipalities.

"The IDPs (internally displaced persons) are sheltered in schools and madrasas," OCHA said in a recent report.

It said the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) Humanitarian Emergency Action Team has responded with food packs.

The local municipal authorities from the area have also provided food assistance, OCHA said.

The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and non-governmental organizations are planning to respond with shelter materials, water and sanitation, school supplies to augment the government response, OCHA added.

Renewed fighting on March 11 and March 14 between AFP and remnants of the Maute armed group in the province of Lanao del Sur displaced a total of 8,911 people or 1,782 families, OCHA reported.

"The population displaced from two municipalities are sheltered in schools, madrasas and home based with relatives," OCHA said.

It said the ICRC carried out rapid assessment of the needs and are planning to provide assistance including food packs, mats, jerrycans, blankets, mosquito nets and hygiene kits. The local authorities have distributed food packs to the displaced families.

The Maute terrorists are responsible for the conflict of Marawi City in May 2017 that triggered a five-month urban battle that displaced thousands.

Fighting between the AFP and the Abu Sayyaf armed group displaced 5,160 persons in Sulu province on Feb. 25, according to OCHA.

OCHA said this has affected the municipalities of Patikul and Tongkil where the group is believed to be also holding foreigners for ransom.

"Due to high risk of kidnapping, access remains limited," OCHA said.

The Sulu provincial government has provided food packs to the displaced population. UNHCR working with local NGOs has distributed kitchen sets, mats and tarpaulins to the IDPs. The local Red Cross and Women Organization (Matau Katsi) have provided food packs.

One year and five months after the Marawi was liberated from the clutches of the militants, OCHA said a total of 66,000 people displaced from Marawi conflict remain sheltered in evacuation centers, transitory sites and home-based locations.

Of these, OCHA said 4,500 people are in evacuation sites and 8,600 people are in transitory sites. The government plans to transfer 364 families to new Boganga Transitory Site before end of March this year, it said.

Water and sanitation remain a priority in various sites as water supply is insufficient given the limited actors providing water interventions, OCHA said.

Citing reports, the ICRC said in a separate report that clashes over the past several weeks also caused casualties and injuries among parties to the conflict and among the civilians.

"Despite complex access due to the fighting, the ICRC teams from different offices on the ground have been assessing the humanitarian needs on the ground, and have started to provide direct response, working in coordination with other actors, notably the Philippine Red Cross (PRC)," the ICRC said in a statement.

The ICRC said that around 180 families in the municipalities of San Fernando and Malaybalay in Bukdinon province have fled their villages since February due to clashes.

"Living conditions are dire for the evacuees who sleep on the floor without mats and blankets. Access to water and sanitation facilities are constrained," the ICRC added.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:45:04|Editor: ZX

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HONG KONG, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The government of China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), on a recent U.S. report, reiterated Friday that "foreign governments should not interfere in any form in the internal affairs of the HKSAR."

"Since the return to the motherland, the HKSAR has been exercising 'Hong Kong people administering Hong Kong' and a high degree of autonomy in strict accordance with the Basic Law. The 'one country, two systems' principle has been fully and successfully implemented," a spokesman for the HKSAR government said in response to the Hong Kong Policy Act Report issued by the U.S. Department of State.

Hong Kong has always been a vibrant and open region, the spokesman said, noting that the Heritage Foundation of the United States has ranked Hong Kong as the world's freest economy for 25 consecutive years.

Hong Kong ranks first in Asia in terms of judicial independence, and is also one of the safest places in the world, the spokesman said.

The spokesman said that human rights and freedom in Hong Kong are fully protected by the Basic Law, the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance and other legislation, adding that "HKSAR government attaches great importance to them and is determined to safeguard them."

Relevant international human rights conventions and court cases have clearly pointed out that freedom of speech is not absolute, said the spokesman.

The Basic Law clearly stipulates that the HKSAR is an inalienable part of China, and any suggestion for "Hong Kong's independence" is a blatant violation of the Basic Law and a direct affront to the national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity, the spokesman said.

"Hong Kong's independence" runs counter to the implementation of "one country, two systems" and undermines the HKSAR's constitutional and legal foundations as enshrined in the Basic Law, said the spokesman.

On other issues mentioned in the report, including the prohibition of the operation of the Hong Kong National Party, a visa application case, the Legislative Council by-election in November 2018 and the 2019 rural ordinary election, the HKSAR government emphasized that it has always been handling Hong Kong affairs strictly in accordance with the "one country, two systems" principle, the Basic Law and the laws of Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, the Office of the Commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in HKSAR also rejected the U.S. report on Friday by saying that "we stand firmly against the United States' interference in Hong Kong affairs and China's domestic affairs by issuing the so-called report."

A spokesperson of the office said since Hong Kong's return to the motherland, the principles of "one country, two systems," "Hong Kong people administrating Hong Kong" and a high degree of autonomy have been faithfully implemented, adding that Hong Kong residents enjoy extensive rights and freedom never seen before, which is a universally-recognized fact.

"In the so-called report, the U.S. side made unwarranted comments on Chinese central government's policies towards Hong Kong under the pretext of human rights and freedom. It also made groundless accusations against the legitimate and lawful measures taken by the HKSAR government to fight against forces for 'Hong Kong independence,' safeguard national sovereignty and security and uphold the rule of law in Hong Kong," the spokesperson said.

"The United States is distorting the facts and causing confusion. We urge the U.S. side to stop viewing one country, two systems' in a selective manner through colored glasses, refrain from commenting irresponsibly on Hong Kong affairs and put an end to its interference in China's domestic affairs," the spokesperson said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:45:06|Editor: Yang Yi

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An injured person receives medical treatment at a hospital in Xiangshui County of Yancheng City, east China's Jiangsu Province, March 22, 2019. An industrial park explosion killed 47 people and seriously injured 90 Thursday. Thousands of firefighters and medical workers and hundreds of ambulances and fire trucks have joined an all-out rescue after the explosion rocked a chemical plant in Jiangsu. (Xinhua/Ji Chunpeng)

NANJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Thousands of firefighters and medical workers and hundreds of ambulances and fire trucks have joined an all-out rescue after an explosion rocked a chemical plant Thursday in east China's Jiangsu Province.

The blast has killed 47 people and left 90 others with severe injuries, according to the rescue headquarters. A total of 640 people are receiving medical treatment in hospitals.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, demanded all-out efforts to search for trapped victims, timely treat the injured and maintain social stability. Xi also demanded environment monitoring and early warning systems be strengthened to prevent pollution as well as secondary disasters.

Premier Li Keqiang required that efforts must be made to minimize the casualties while forceful measures on hazard control must be taken to prevent secondary accidents.

The explosion happened at about 2:48 p.m. Thursday following a fire that broke out in a plant, owned by Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical Co. Ltd., in a chemical industrial park in Xiangshui County in the city of Yancheng.

Around 930 firefighters and 192 fire engines from across the province had arrived at the site and managed to put out the fire on Friday morning.

More than 4,000 people have been evacuated to safe areas, and all companies in the industrial park have ceased operations.

Health authorities in Jiangsu have mobilized around 3,500 medical workers and 90 ambulances from 16 hospitals to treat the injured.

The Ministry of Emergency Management has dispatched a team of experts to the site, and the National Health Commission has dispatched three groups of medical experts on burns, neurosurgery, psychological intervention, intoxication and public hygiene to help with rescue and relief work.

The province's armed police headquarters said they had sent more than 650 officers to the site to search for those trapped and help with medical treatment and environmental monitoring.

Huang Xiaofeng, who was cut by debris and broken glass and suffered hearing damage from the blast, is receiving treatment at a hospital in Xiangshui County, which has received hundreds of injured patients.

"I was about 70 to 80 meters away from the explosion site. I ran away quickly when I saw the blaze, but was knocked down by the shockwave. Then I passed out," Huang said.

Zhu Yinxia's home is 1 km away from the plant. Her mother suffered face and head injuries from broken glass. "The street was a mess. Doors and windows were broken or out of shape."

More than 200 residents volunteered to donate blood at a blood collection site in Xiangshui on Thursday and Friday, having donated over 60,000 milliliters of blood so far.

The local environmental department has launched comprehensive environmental monitoring to assess air and water quality.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:50:08|Editor: ZX

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SHENYANG, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Researchers have developed an intelligent manufacturing solution to satisfy the demands of customization.

When designs of products need to go through changes during manufacturing process according to client preference, the current manufacturing system cannot rapidly adjust itself according to modification.

Meanwhile, the cost of manufacturing system transformation is high. Thus more flexible production modes are needed.

To meet the demands of mass customization, researchers from Shenyang Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a German company SAP jointly developed an intelligent manufacturing solution.

The intelligent solution aims to improve manufacturing efficiency and reduce production cost. A 60 square meters simulated workshop is made up of independent modules with network control platform, mobile robots and an operating platform.

The product assembly process is manipulated by robots. If the products need adjustment during the manufacturing process, the response time can be shortened to several minutes from tens of days.

With the help of the new solution, clients can track the status of the orders for the whole course.

It is expected to be applied in the manufacturing of automobiles, elevators and smartphones.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:54:07|Editor: xuxin

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Jidi Majia, a noted Chinese poet, reads his poem at the Cork International Poetry Festival in Cork, Ireland, March 21, 2019. The five-day Cork International Poetry Festival was held in Ireland's southern city of Cork to mark the World Poetry Day, which falls on March 21 every year. (Xinhua/Zhang Qi)Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 21:55:09|Editor: xuxin

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SOFIA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Bulgarian authorities have arrested three members of an international organized crime group for drug trafficking from Africa to Western Europe, the Prosecutor's Office said in a statement on Friday.

The three, including one Bulgarian and citizens of Tanzania and Somalia temporarily residing in Bulgaria, were arrested on Tuesday in Sofia on the basis of a European arrest warrant issued by Germany, the statement said.

"The evidence gathered indicates that their function within a large international criminal network was to recruit and send to African countries Bulgarian "mules" to traffic drugs especially to Italy and Germany," the statement said.

A mule usually refers to a person who personally smuggles contraband across borders for a smuggling organization.

The procedure for their extradition to Germany is ongoing, it added.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 22:00:16|Editor: Yang Yi

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Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, presides over a symposium during his inspection at the Ministry of Ecology and Environment on March 22, 2019. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng on Friday called on officials to tackle key issues to win the battle against pollution.

Han, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks at a symposium held during his inspection at the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

The country should establish and improve the scientific mechanism for finding problems while focusing on the major ones, Han said.

Efforts should be made to efficiently implement the action plans on air, water and soil pollution control, he added.

The country should continue to push air pollution control in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and surrounding areas while rectifying the ecological and environmental problems in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, he said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 22:05:18|Editor: xuxin

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HARARE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese government has decided to donate 800,000 U.S. dollars in cash as emergency humanitarian assistance to Zimbabwe to help the country with its disaster relief efforts, an envoy said Friday.

China will provide assistance in line with the need of the southern African country hit by Cyclone Idai, Chinese ambassador to Zimbabwe Guo Shaochun said.

Speaking at a press conference at the embassy, Guo said Chinese government will join the Zimbabwean government and people in the reconstruction efforts.

The Chinese community in Zimbabwe, he added, also took swift action and managed to mobilize supplies worth about 310,000 dollars.

"On Wednesday, 11 trucks fully loaded with those supplies including maize, cooking oil, bottled water, tents, quilts, blankets, arrived in disaster-stricken area and reached the people in bad need," Guo told the journalists.

"As a brother of Zimbabwe, China deeply feels how the Zimbabwean people are feeling and are always standing side-by-side, ready to offer maximum possible support," Guo said.

He said the Chinese government will provide more grants, more loans and encourage more investments in the affected regions under the framework of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and the Belt and Road Initiative.

Cyclone Idai, which hit the country from neighboring Mozambique, mainly affected eastern and southern parts of Zimbabwe.

The Ministry of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services said as of Wednesday, the death toll from Idai in Zimbabwe had risen to 139 with 189 still missing, 144 people injured while 136 were marooned.

More than 4,300 people had been displaced, the ministry added.

As rescue and search efforts are under way, donations of relief supplies to the victims continue to pour in from local people, companies, regional governments and international aid agencies.File Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump (L) meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, on May 22, 2017. (Xinhua/JINI/POOL/Marc Israel Sellem)

WASHINGTON, March 21 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday on Twitter that it is time for the United States to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria in 1967.

Trump's unexpected announcement, which came on the heels of controversies over U.S. planned withdrawal from Syria, may further complicate the situation and escalate tensions in the region, U.S. experts said.





SURPRISE TWEET

In a surprise tweet, Trump said that "after 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

In response, Israeli Prime Minister Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has asserted that the Israeli presence in the Golan is "thwarting" Iran's ambitions of expansion, tweeted that "at a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights."

U.S. Mideast envoy Jason Greenblatt also tweeted that Trump's move is "another bold, courageous, and historic decision" and the U.S. president "understands Israel and its security needs."

Israel seized the Golan Heights in the third Middle East war in 1967 and annexed it in the 1980s, but the international community never recognized the move.

Middle East nations and the parties concerned reacted strongly to Trump's tweet. Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said the group fully supports Syrian sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu also said that the U.S. attempts to legitimize Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights are not in line with the international law, and will only lead to more violence and pain in the region, Russia's RT reported.

The European Union (EU) also said that it does not think the lands occupied by Israel since 1967, including the Golan Heights, belong to Israel, and this position of the EU has not changed despite Trump's remarks.





MAINLY GEARED TOWARD ISRAELI ELECTION

It is noticeable that the White House said Trump will host Netanyahu next week. Netanyahu is seeking to be re-elected for a fifth term in the April 9 elections, yet he also faces a tough fight from Israel's former Chief of General Staff Benny Gantz, and a series of allegations over fraud and bribery.

David Pollock, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Xinhua in an interview that Trump's tweet "doesn't officially change U.S. policy, and so this is just an informal personal statement that doesn't go through the formal process."

"I think probably the main intent is actually to help Netanyahu get re-elected," he said. "And another possibility is this it's intended to underline that for the foreseeable future, that there will not be U.S. agreement for the demand that's out there for all foreign forces to leave Syria. Because until there's a political settlement that would remove Assad from power, which is not anywhere on the horizon, the U.S. believes it's premature to talk about foreign forces leaving Syria."

"But I think the main objective (of Trump's tweet) is to give Netanyahu more evidence that he can use....that he has such strong support from the Trump administration," Pollock added.

In the eyes of Christopher Galdieri, assistant professor at U.S. Saint Anselm College, Trump "has two goals here: Give Netanyahu a boost in the upcoming Israeli elections, and shore up his own support with his evangelical Christian supporters."

It remains unclear how effective Trump's approach will be in achieving the first goal, but "domestically this probably helps Trump with that segment of the electorate much the same way recognizing Jerusalem did," the expert said.

Ford O'Connell, a Republican strategist, told Xinhua that Trump is "one of the few people who's pretty outwardly pro-Israel," and "when it comes to Israel, Trump wants to come up with a solution there."

"And remember, he's the first person after five presidents who said we were going to move the embassy (to Jerusalem), who actually moved the embassy. For him, this is a long term project," he said.





SEVERE CONSEQUENCES MAY FOLLOW

Although the State Department had insisted before Trump's tweet announcement that "there's been no change in U.S. policy with respect to" the U.S. position on the Golan Heights issue, recent signs have shown otherwise, as a latest human rights report unveiled earlier this month used the term "Israeli-controlled" instead of "Israeli-occupied" to describe the status of the Golan Heights, sparking wide speculation and worry among observers.

When asked if the U.S. government will recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday in Jerusalem that "we've considered many things when it comes to how to treat different challenges in Syria."

"Literally from Iraq to Lebanon, the place that I'm traveling next, the challenges that are faced are real. The Islamic Republic of Iran is at the center of most of those challenges and we're determined in each of those places to put America and Israel in a better place in the coming weeks and months," he added.

Speaking of Trump's tweet, Richard N. Haass, head of U.S. think tank Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted that "now NOT the time 4 US to recognize Israel sovereignty over Golan Hts," since "no Arab govt would make peace w Israel & would violate UNSCR 242 which rules out acquiring territory by war and serves Israel as it says all states have right 2 live in peace."

David Pollock also told Xinhua that Trump's tweet "will be taken seriously in the region and will probably provoke some limited rhetorical reaction, for example at the Arab Summit that's coming up in a week or so."

"It probably will complicate the atmosphere, which was already very complicated, if the Trump administration does decide after the election to release its peace plan," the expert said. "But in between now and then, there's a lot of time and a lot of room to kind of back away from this position. (There will be time) to say 'well this was not an official change of policy and it's up for negotiation' or something like that. But that part is unclear."

Speaking of other players in the region, Pollock noted that "I'm pretty sure Iran will seize on Trump's statement in a very negative way ... it would be actually pretty risky for anybody to react with more than words at this point. And I hope and I expect that people will limit themselves to rhetoric and not make things even more tense than they already are."

(Matthew Rusling also contributed to the story)Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 22:15:20|Editor: ZX

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- China on Friday urged all concerned parties to settle the territorial dispute concerning the Golan Heights in accordance with relevant agreements of the United Nations.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang made the remarks at a press briefing responding to relevant reports.

According to reports, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that it was time for the United States to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which is of strategic and security importance to Israel and regional stability. A spokesperson for the European Union (EU) said the EU's position on sovereignty over the Golan Heights remained unchanged and did not recognize it as part of Israel's territory.

On the issue of the occupied Arab territories including the Golan Heights, there are clear provisions in the UN Security Council in its resolutions 242 and 338, Geng said.

China always supports relevant parties in properly settling disputes through negotiation in accordance with relevant UN resolutions and norms of international law so as to eventually achieve comprehensive, impartial and long-term peace throughout the Middle East, the spokesperson said.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 22:25:24|Editor: ZX

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ERDENET, Mongolia, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A groundbreaking ceremony for the China-funded expansion of a thermal power plant was held in Erdenet, the capital city of the northern Mongolian province of Orkhon on Friday.

Mongolian Energy Minister Tserenpil Davaasuren, director general of the power plant Legtseg Erkhbaatar, Economic and Commercial Counsellor of the Chinese Embassy to Mongolia Song Xuejun and relevant officials of the project executor, China's Hunan Industrial Equipment Installation Co. Ltd, attended the ceremony.

The expansion of the thermal power plant will improve its overall capacity by 35 megawatts (MW), Davaasuren said at the ceremony.

Erdenet is one of the fastest growing cities in Mongolia, he said, expressing confidence that the expansion of the Erdenet thermal power plant will contribute greatly to not only the future development of the city, but also to the development of the national energy sector.

For his part, Song said: "It is a historic moment of bilateral relations and cooperation between our two countries. I am very happy to have witnessed this historic event."

He said that with the Belt and Road Initiative and Mongolia's Development Road Initiative being linked, major cooperation projects between the two countries are being continuously implemented.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

"In this important year of the 70th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries, it is all the more important for us to work together to promote bilateral relations to a new level and to benefit the peoples of the two countries through enhanced cooperation," Song said.

Hunan Industrial Equipment Installation Co. Ltd. is the same company that previously conducted the expansion of Thermal Power Plant No.3 in the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator.

The expansion of the Erdenet thermal power plant is scheduled to be completed within a year, according to the company.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 22:25:24|Editor: xuxin

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ADDIS ABABA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- African experts and ministers of finance, planning and economic development on Friday extolled Ethiopia for ratifying the instrument instituting the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

The Ethiopian House of People's Representative, the Ethiopian parliament's lower house, on Thursday ratified the continental free trade pact, making the East African country the 21st African country to ratify the free trade pact that requires 22 ratifications for entry into force, the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) said.

The East African country's decision to ratify the agreement, which came as the continent marked the first anniversary of the signing of the agreement by some African countries in Kigali, Rwanda's capital, was applauded by those who gathered under the ECA's umbrella for a continental meeting, the ECA said.

They expressed positive remarks regarding AfCFTA's progress during a continental meeting hosted by the ECA in Marrakech, Morocco, the ECA said in a statement.

Experts and policymakers also hailed ECA's support to the African Union (AU) and its member states in formulating, negotiating, and adhering to the agreement.

"After keenly following a report by ECA's Executive Secretary on the activities of the Commission since its session in Addis Ababa last year, representatives from several countries enjoined ECA to accompany their countries to fully appropriate the continental trade arrangement so as to benefit from it," an ECA statement on Friday read.

Deputy Executive Secretary of the ECA, Giovannie Biha, said that the ECA "is going to popularize the AfCFTA and make it handy for frontline policy implementers across the continent."

Biha, who assured delegates that ECA's African Center for Statistics (ACS) has been leading in the rebasing of statistics on GDP, also emphasized the need to increase efforts on investing more in data and statistics among African countries so as to realize continental targets, including the AfCFTA.

ECA's Director of the Regional Integration and Trade Division, Stephen Karingi, and Chief of Evaluation at ECA, Eskedar Nega, also assured African delegates that the ECA is already accompanying 15 countries in drawing up their AfCFTA strategies and that this support would be extended to other countries on a request basis.

The AfCFTA mainly aspires to create a single continental market for goods and services, with free movement of business persons and investments, and thus pave the way for accelerating the establishment of the Continental Customs Union and the African customs union.

It also envisaged to expand intra-African trade through better harmonization and coordination of trade liberalization and facilitation regimes and instruments across RECs and across Africa in general, according to the AU.

According to figures from the AU, some 52 African countries have so far signed the free trade pact.

Adam Elhiraika, Director of the Macroeconomics and Governance Division of the ECA, also indicated that AfCFTA "is a game-changer, with a potential to transform Africa's economic growth trajectory."

According to the AU, the free trade pact, once operational, will resolve the challenges of multiple and overlapping memberships and expediting the regional and continental integration processes.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 22:35:25|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The City of London and the China Chamber of Commerce in the UK (CCCUK) have joined hands in supporting a poverty alleviation project in China.

The UK-China Charity Initiative, initiated by the CCCUK and the City of London, donated 190,000 yuan (about 28,381 U.S. dollars) on Thursday to help a rural school in northwest China's Shaanxi Province build a multi-media room for its students.

The multi-media space allows students to "engage in remote teaching and digital exchange," and prepares them for the digital age, according to Peter Estlin, Lord Mayor of the City of London, who is on a six-day working visit to China.

The room will be used for academic reports, video conferences, and cultural events for teachers and students in the school, seeking to help poor students in rural areas expand their international horizons.

It also aims to promote the establishment of friendly ties between schools of the two sides, integrate international resources, and develop innovative ideas in poverty alleviation, according to the initiative.

"UK-China Charity Initiative is a prime example of the mutual benefit that comes from strong partnerships between our two countries," Estlin said at the donation ceremony in Beijing.

The UK-China Charity Initiative was launched in December 2018 to create a platform for charity with the theme of "Building Harmony Together."

The initiative also seeks to build a bridge between China and Britain through charity, encouraging British-Chinese companies to contribute to the public welfare in both countries.

It showcases "a new type of partnership" between China and Britain with "long-term commitment that will carry on many years and many projects," said Wu Lin, secretary general of CCCUK.

"Partnership is not limited to trade or investment areas, and we are also thinking about the broad scope including charity and public welfare," she added.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 22:40:26|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ADDIS ABABA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) on Friday urged African countries to look for additional alternatives to public sector financing of railway infrastructure projects.

"An alternative to public sector financing of such infrastructure, which departs from past traditions of direct state commitments, is therefore seen as the way forward," the ECA said on Friday.

ECA's call came ahead of its high-level meeting that aimed to kick-start solid arrangements for the innovative financing of railway vehicles that would ply the African Integrated High Speed Railway Network, a flagship infrastructure programs on AU agenda.

The Network, if implemented, will be vital in ensuring the timely movement of goods, services and people across national capitals and business hubs of the continent, acting as a further stimulator of production, trade and inclusive growth, the ECA said in a statement on Friday.

"It is also expected to relieve the congestion of current transport systems, such as roads, as well as future systems across the continent," the ECA said.

The upcoming meeting is expected to connect leading development and financing organizations in Africa, think tanks, and senior officials from African ministries of finance, economic planning and transport with heads of major railway authorities across the continent, according to the ECA.

The event is also expected to seek how to leverage the Protocol to the Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment on Matters specific to Railway Rolling Stock, also known as the Luxembourg Protocol, to fund the acquisition of railway vehicles for AU's flagship development agenda.

According to the ECA, the Luxembourg protocol has the potential to facilitate the provision of capital from banks and other funders for rolling stock procurement through secured credit and leasing of railway vehicles to operators without the need for state guarantees.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 22:45:29|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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RIYADH, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) regretted on Friday the announcement made by U.S. President Donald Trump about Golan Heights.

The GCC General Secretary Abdullateef Al Zayani highlighted in a statement that Trump's announcement undermines the chances of achieving a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East.

The reality that the Golan Heights is Syrian land occupied by Israel military force in 1967 should not be changed, it said.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday on Twitter that it is time for the United States to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria in 1967.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 22:55:32|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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PRAGUE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A helicopter crashed and caught fire in Slavonov, eastern Bohemia of the Czech Republic, Friday morning, killing two people.

The helicopter, Enstrom 480, was conducting a training flight when the crash happened, said the website of aviation firm DSA, which operates the helicopter. It added that two crewmen were onboard.

"At this point we have no further information on the circumstances of the air disaster and we work closely with the competent authorities to identify the causes of the accident," the firm said on its website.

The victims were a foreign pilot who was undergoing training and a Czech instructor from the DSA, according to local media reports.

Local people said the helicopter had crashed in the middle of a field about 200 meters from the nearest residential house in the village.

"When the firefighters came to the incident, the helicopter was burning. Locals were trying to extinguish the fire by fire extinguishers, but it was not enough," firefighters spokeswoman Martina Gotzova was quoted as saying.

"The firefighters eventually extinguished the fire by a high-pressure stream of water," Gotzova said.

Enstrom 480, produced by the U.S. Enstrom Helicopter, is a one-engine, four-seat helicopter. It is used for the transport of passengers, pilot training, filming and observer flights.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:05:35|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BERLIN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The leader of the German Social Democrat (SPD) youth organization (Juso) Kevin Kuehnert Friday called on Germans to participate in major demonstrations on Saturday against a planned European copyright reform.

The demonstrations, which have been announced in more than 50 German cities and many more throughout Europe, aim to convince undecided members of the European Parliament to vote against the proposed European Union (EU) copyright reform, Kuehnert told the German newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine.

The chairman of the young SPD did not, however, question the planned copyright reform as a whole. "Users need to be made aware that not everyone on the net can use other people's products as they please," Kuehnert told German media.

The controversial copyright reform Article 13 would create significantly more copyright protection obligations for platforms such as YouTube. Although the use of upload filters has not been explicitly prescribed in the law, critics feared that these filters would be the only way for platforms to comply with the requirements.

"As a result of Article 13, numerous platforms would have to automatically filter all content before it is published and block an upload in case of doubt," said Bernhard Rohleder, president of the German digital association Bitkom.

The group Save the Internet initiated the call for Europe-wide protests against the controversial copyright proposal. According to the group's website, "the planned EU copyright reform threatens to massively restrict the free exchange of opinions and culture via the Internet".

Save the Internet also appealed to the German government "to adhere to its coalition agreement, which explicitly rejects the use of upload filters as disproportionate".

Julia Reda from the German Pirate Party, a well-known opponent of the controversial law in Germany, has criticized the copyright reform as an "attack on the free internet" and as a "danger for small publishers, authors and internet users". Reda called on her followers on Twitter to protest against the copyright reform, and wrote "it is time to show up in droves at the protests on Saturday".

In order to protest the planned copyright reform, Wikipedia, a multilingual web-based free encyclopedia based on a model of openly editable and viewable content, went offline on Thursday. Wikipedia said that the proposed EU copyright law would be a potential danger for the liberty of the internet and Wikipedia's model.

Meanwhile, organizations like the German music rights agency GEMA have been trying to mobilize supporters for the reform including through the #Yes2Copyright campaign, which was supported by well-known German musicians such as Lena Meyer-Landrut and Mark Forster.

Negotiators from the European Parliament and the EU member states had agreed on a legal text in mid-February. The European Parliament will debate and vote on the proposal next Tuesday.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:05:35|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GAZA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Clashes broke out on Friday afternoon between Palestinian protesters and Israeli soldiers in eastern Gaza Strip close to the border with Israel as part of the one-year rallies, better known as "the Marches of Return."

During the weekly anti-Israel protests, protesters waved Palestinians flags, burned tires and threw stones at the soldiers stationed at the border, said eyewitnesses.

The Israeli soldiers fired dozens of tear gas canisters, rubber bullets and live gunshots at the demonstrators to keep them away from reaching the barbed wire of the border's fence.

Ashraf al-Qedra, spokesman of the Health Ministry in Gaza, told reporters that Israeli soldiers fired several tear gas canisters at a medical booth east of al-Bureij Refugee camp in central Gaza Strip.

Dozens suffered suffocation due to inhaling strong tear gas, he said, adding that dozens of else were shot and wounded by the Israeli soldiers' gunfire, including two young men were seriously injured.

Gaza Health Ministry officials said earlier that the Israeli army shot and killed more than 260 Palestinians and wounded 29,000 others.

The Highest Commission for the Marches of Return has been calling on Palestinian demonstrators to head to the eastern area of the Gaza Strip near the border with Israel for demonstrations, rallies, protests and clashes.

The Marches of Return won't stop until Israel ends 12 years of blockade which had been imposed on the coastal enclave since 2017, said the Islamic Hamas movement who rules the Gaza Strip.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:10:36|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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MOSCOW, March 22 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump's proposal to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, seized by Israel from Syria, may escalate tensions in the Middle East, Russian authorities said Friday.

"Such statements, and not only this, but numerous statements made irresponsibly, in our opinion, can really have a negative impact," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

"Indeed, they can destabilize (the situation) even more," she told Russia-24 TV channel over the phone.

On Thursday, Trump tweeted that it was time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, "which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and regional stability."

"These statements are in line with the policy of the current U.S. administration, which seeks to revise the generally accepted international legal framework for settling the situation in the Middle East," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Russia's position on this issue that the Golan Heights are Syrian territory remains unchanged, the ministry said.

Israel seized the land in a war in 1967 and annexed it unilaterally in 1981, but the international community never recognized the move.

The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution in December 1981 declaring the Israeli decision null and void.

So, changing the status of the Golan Heights is a direct violation of the resolution of the United Nations, Zakharova said.

In a separate development, the Kremlin also expressed concern that Trump's statement may considerably destabilize the already strained situation in the Middle East.

"In any case, such ideas by no means contribute to the implementation of the tasks and reaching the goals of the Middle East settlement, but they do quite the reverse," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

He also wished the statement would remain just a proposal and not be underpinned by actual deeds.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:10:36|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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DHAKA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Holi, the Hindu spring festival also known as the "festival of colors", was celebrated on Friday for the second consecutive day by the Hindu community in Bangladesh capital with traditional and religious fervor.

The festival has brought hundreds of Hindu people to the temples in the old part of Dhaka.

On Thursday, Hindu people were seen got drenched in color, singing and dancing together.

Hindus believe that Holi brings a message of unity and friendship and bridges the communal divide.

Revellers spray colored powder and water at each other and dance as well as distribute sweets during the celebrations which signal the end of winter and the arrival of spring.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:35:45|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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INDHOEK, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Namibia's President Hage Geingob on Friday said his country was working on adding Kenya to its list of export destinations.

Geingob made the remarks at the official welcoming event for Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta held at State House in Windhoek.

Namibia currently exports beef, fish, dates, grapes, diamonds, gold, uranium, marble and salt to countries in Africa, Europe and Asia.

"We are working hard to add other countries to our list of export destinations and will be delighted to have Kenya in that exclusive list," Geingob said.

He added that Kenya and Namibia should look at enhancing cooperation in the transport and logistics sector in order to foster realization of the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:40:50|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BERLIN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Inconsistent attitudes towards free trade and protectionism of the European Union (EU) citizens are "a matter of lacking knowledge of political issues," a newly published study by the German Economic Institute (IW) has found.

The study published on Thursday examined how EU citizens could hold the contradictory views of supporting free trade and protectionism at the same time. A 2018 Eurobarometer survey showed that almost 75 percent of EU citizens expressed positive views of free trade, while 39 percent simultaneously approved protectionism.

According to the IW, EU citizens were more likely to support protectionism when their national economy was doing well, and to reject protectionism if their economy was not doing so well.

The IW study found that the level of knowledge of EU citizens was directly related to their level of education. The better educated a respondent was and the more frequently they informed themselves about European policy issues, the less likely they were to give contradictory answers.

Perceptions of protectionism were a "result of socio-economic factors, ideology, the economic situation in the home country and the extent of media consumption," the German Economic Institute found.

"This shows us that many EU citizens are not well enough informed," said Galina Kolev, senior economist at the IW and the study's author. "We urgently need better information."

An "intensified" public discussion about international economic subjects could "be helpful in addressing the issue of emerging protectionist views," the study said. A broad information strategy on international economic topics launched on multiple media channels, particularly radio, newspapers and the internet, would be one possible way to address the knowledge gap, the study recommended.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:40:51|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (L, front) and his Italian counterpart Sergio Mattarella (R, front) hold talks in Rome, Italy, March 22, 2019. (Xinhua/Ju Peng)

ROME, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Italian counterpart, Sergio Mattarella, held talks here Friday, and agreed to jointly push for greater development of the China-Italy comprehensive strategic partnership in the new era.

The two heads of state agreed to guide the direction of bilateral ties from a strategic height and long-term perspective.

During their talks, Xi noted that both as countries with an ancient civilization, China and Italy have profound historical relations.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the China-Italy comprehensive strategic partnership, and the two countries will celebrate the 50th anniversary of their diplomatic relations next year, Xi said.

He recalled that for nearly half a century, China and Italy have respected, trusted and helped each other, enhanced high-level exchanges and strategic mutual trust, facilitated communication, cooperation and convergence of interests, and deepened mutual understanding and traditional friendship.

As the world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century, China is willing to carry forward the spirit of cooperation with the Italian side, strengthen strategic communication, encourage the international community to seek common ground while reserving differences and promote development through cooperation, so as to contribute new wisdom and strength to building a better world, Xi said.

The Chinese president arrived in Rome Thursday for a state visit to Italy.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:50:52|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BERLIN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Germany's 10-year bond temporarily turned negative for the first time since October 2016 on Friday as the prices of securities rose significantly which in turn depressed the yield on government bonds to -0.001 percent.

A subdued mood in German industry drove investors on the German stock exchange DAX away. Germany's lead index turned negative, losing more than half a percent to 11,475 points on Friday morning as fear of an impending economic dip spread once again.

The relative safety of German government bonds stems from the "black zero" policy of a balanced federal budget adopted in 2014.

The ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social (CSU) and German Social Democrats (SPD) made a formal commitment in their coalition agreement to abide by this "black zero" doctrine and to run a permanently-balanced official household.

German 10-year bonds are the most important source of funding for the Federal Government, according to the German financial agency.

Historically, Germany's 10-year bond reached an all-time high of 10.80 in September 1981 and a record low of -0.19 in July 2016.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:50:52|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BAGHDAD, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Iraq's High Commission for Human Rights (IHCHR) on Friday announced the reasons behind the sinking of a ferry that killed 93 people in Tigris River in the city of Mosul, capital of Iraq's northern province of Nineveh.

IHCHR attributed the sinking to the fact that the crossing on the river is old, which was established in 1979, and the old ferry is made of iron plates, Ali al-Baiyati, member of IHCHR, said in a statement.

The capacity of the ferry was 75 people, but there were around 200 people when the incident occurred, according to the ticketing report, al-Baiyati said.

"The ferry is moving with ropes or wires bound to the other side of the river bank," al-Baiyati added.

He also said that IHCHR will file a complaint against the governor of Nineveh province, Nawfal al-Akoub, as he is the head of the provincial government who is responsible for the safety of the people.

The incident took place on Thursday afternoon when a ferryboat carrying dozens of people capsized while crossing from the bank of the river to a small tourist island called Um al Rabeein in northern Mosul, some 400 km north of the capital Baghdad.

A civil defense source said that the ferryboat owned by a tourism office was overloaded with more than 100 people, while the ferryboat is originally designed to carry some 30 people.

An Interior Ministry source said that some 93 people, mostly women and children, drowned in the river and their bodies were recovered, while 55 others were rescued, including 19 children.

The search operation is expected to continue in the coming days.

Meanwhile, a statement by the Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council, said Mosul investigation court has decided to arrest nine workers responsible for the ferry.

"The court also issued an arrest warrant for the owner of the ferry and the owner of the island," the statement added.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:50:52|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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LUSAKA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Authorities have arrested 37 illegal gold miners in eastern Zambia's Lumezi district as the government tries to root out illegal mining in the country, a government official said on Friday.

Joseph Bwalya, National Parks and Wildlife Ranger said the suspects were arrested on Tuesday when wildlife officers who were on patrol in a national park found them setting a camp so that they could embark on mining without documents, according to state-run news agency, the Zambian News and Information Service.

He however said 12 juveniles aged between 10 and 15 were released.

He said officers recovered various items from the suspects, such as picks, shovels buckets and axes.

The suspects are currently detained and will appear in court after being charged with illegal entry into a park with intent to conduct illegal mining.

Zambia has experienced increased levels of illegal mining, which has sometimes resulted in deaths because of the unsafe mining methods being applied by the illegal miners.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-22 23:55:53|Editor: Yang Yi

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Li Zhanshu (2nd R), chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), meets with a delegation of the U.S.-China Working Group from the U.S. Congress in Beijing, capital of China, March 22, 2019. (Xinhua/Shen Hong)

BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Li Zhanshu, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), on Friday met with a delegation of the U.S.-China Working Group from the U.S. Congress in Beijing.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and the United States. Li said that history has proved that cooperation is the best choice for both China and the U.S.

The two sides should promote the stable development of bilateral ties and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation, Li said.

He said the consensus reached by the two heads of state during their meeting in Argentina has mapped out the direction for the development of China-U.S. ties. The two sides should work together to expand cooperation on the basis of mutual benefit, control their differences on the basis of mutual respect, and actively promote the development of bilateral relations with coordination, cooperation and stability as the defining features.

Hailing the contributions the U.S.-China Working Group has made in promoting exchanges between the two countries, Li said the Chinese NPC attaches great importance in strengthening exchanges with the U.S. Congress and hopes the two legislatures will pursue shared goals and contribute to deepening mutual trust and mutually beneficial cooperation.

Rick Larsen and other U.S. Congressmen spoke highly of China's foreign investment law and expressed willingness to continue to play a constructive role in promoting bilateral ties.

Wang Chen, vice chairperson of the Standing Committee of the NPC, also met with the delegation on Friday.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 00:10:55|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ADDIS ABABA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) on Friday warned that drought will worsen in parts of Horn of Africa due to persisting dry conditions and unusually high temperatures.

"In some parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia persisting drought is affecting water availability, grazing pastures and food security," the East African bloc said in a statement on Friday.

According to IGAD, poor October to December rains that followed by abnormally high temperatures since January are leading to rapid deterioration of pastoral resources and have started affecting livelihoods.

Noting that dry conditions are persisting into March, IGAD said that the tropical cyclone observed across the coast of Mozambique during the first and second week of March partially contributed to the current dry conditions.

Areas of concern due to rainfall deficits include southern and eastern Ethiopia, semi-arid areas in Kenya and Uganda, as well as northern and eastern Somalia, it was noted.

"In these areas, drought and higher than usual temperatures are affecting forage and water availability for people, livestock and wildlife," an IGAD statement read.

The tropical cyclone has affected Uganda by delaying the start of rains to the end of March, while the dry conditions have "a high likelihood of affecting maize, bananas and sorghum production in the country," it was noted.

IGAD, through its Climate Prediction and Applications Centre, provides regional updates on regular basis while the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services provides detailed national and sub-national updates.

The statement also indicated that drought conditions are "likely to worsen during April and May 2019."

"Rainfall deficits are still expected during the month of April," IGAD said, adding that areas of concern include the Greater Rift Valley and northern Somalia.

There is a high chance of drier than usual conditions over western Kenya, Turkana region, southern and southeastern Ethiopia, central and northeastern Somalia, coasts of Tanzania and Kenya, much of Uganda and South Sudan, IGAD said.

"This poses a significant stress on water availability and may worsen the current situation," the statement read.

The East African bloc also urged the provision of water and fodder to areas affected by the drought to reduce the impacts on lives and livelihoods.

Health sector actors are also urged to strengthen surveillance, monitor basic supplies for diagnosis and treatment and improve alert system to ministries of health and local health facilities.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 00:15:55|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BERLIN, March 22 (Xinhua) --- The German government intends to continue to consider the Golan Heights to be occupied territory, deputy government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer announced in Berlin on Friday.

The German position remains unchanged and in accordance with Resolution 497, which was unanimously adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 1981, said Demmer.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said that it was time to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the region -- a declaration that was criticized by the Arab League, Russia, Syria, Turkey and Iran. A spokeswoman for the European Commission has also rejected Trump's statement.

Demmer pointed out that the United Nations does not recognize the Israeli annexation of the area, and she warned against intensifying tensions.

Israel seized the land in a war in 1967 and annexed it unilaterally in 1981, but the international community never recognized the move.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 00:20:57|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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LUSAKA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Zambian government said on Friday that it has started mobilizing resources to help people affected by Cyclone Idai in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Vice-President Inonge Wina, said as a good neighbor, Zambia has an obligation to help those affected because disasters could strike any country.

"It is only human to sympathize with fellow humans, friends and neighbors who are experiencing the sad effects of the cyclone," she said during a question and answer session in parliament.

On Thursday, President Edgar Lungu said the government will sit down to discuss how to help people affected by the cyclone in the three countries.

Lungu said Zambia has enough maize in its reserves which could be shared with people affected by the cyclone.

Parts of Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have been devastated by the powerful cyclone that had led to a humanitarian crisis.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 00:25:58|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GAZA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- At least two Palestinians were shot dead on Friday afternoon by Israeli gunfire during the weekly anti-Israel protests, better known as "the Great March of Return," a medic told reporters.

A 29-year-old Palestinian was killed in east of al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, close to the borders with Israel, while another one, who was 18 years old, was shot dead in east of Gaza city, Ashraf al-Qedra, spokesman of the Health Ministry in Gaza, said.

More than 30 others were wounded, including two who are still in critical condition.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 00:31:00|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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By Naftali Mwaura

NAIROBI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Sarafina Lorriakwe was born and raised in the vast plains of Samburu County in northwestern Kenya where girls have no option but to develop a thick skin thanks to injustice sanctioned by a patriarchal society.

The 20-year-old undergraduate at a Nairobi-based private university has defied archaic beliefs and economic marginalization to pursue a course in pure mathematics in the hope it will make a difference to girls in her nomadic Samburu community.

Lorriakwe is among hundreds of girls who are beneficiaries of a Huawei supported mentorship program implemented at the Samburu Girls Foundation where she found refuge from early marriage five years ago to realize her vocational dreams.

"I am lucky to have escaped the stranglehold of harmful cultural practices like under-age marriages to pursue education up to tertiary level," said Lorriakwe.

She spoke on the sidelines of a mentorship session for beneficiaries of Samburu Girls Foundation hosted by Huawei technologies in Nairobi on Friday.

Dozens of girls from the rescue center have benefitted from devices and mentorship sponsored by Huawei to motivate them to pursue technology related courses that would transform their lives and that of the wider society.

Lorriakwe aspires to become a data analyst after clearing her bachelor's degree in pure mathematics and hopefully secure employment in a multinational technology firm.

"Having gone through a rough patch in the early stages of my childhood, I have developed the fortitude required to overcome life's hurdles and hope to become savvy in application of technology to make a difference in the lives of girls from nomadic communities who often lack a role model," said Lorriakwe.

She was only five years old when her mother died and emotional detachment from her biological father who later remarried forced her to run from home and seek shelter among relatives.

The bubbly youngster found herself at the Samburu Girls Foundation that caters for girls rescued from forced marriages and female genital cut at the age of 14 years thanks to intervention of a well-wisher.

Jeremiah Kipainoi, a communications officer at Samburu Girls Foundation, said that material and technical support from Huawei has been a game changer in the lives of Lorriakwe and her youthful peers.

"Our girls are determined to become the next generation of technology leaders thanks to support from Huawei. Majority of them are now conversant with computer applications," said Kipainoi.

Huawei technologies responded to an appeal made by the United Nations Population Fund 18 months ago to support an initiative that would make a difference in the lives of girls from the Samburu community.

Adam Lane, an official with Huawei technologies, said that the mentorship program domiciled at Samburu Girls Foundation has been a catalyst for transformation in a remote outpost synonymous with high levels of illiteracy.

"The desire to be part of the solution to challenges faced by Samburu girls resonates with our ethos of dedication and service to communities where we work," said Lane.

He said that creating a critical mass of young girls from nomadic communities who are technology savvy will have positive ripple effects in the country.

Nancy Loisiodo, an 18-year-old high school graduate who was rescued from forced marriage when she was an adolescent and managed to pursue high school education courtesy of Samburu Girls Foundation, looks forward toa engineering major at the university.

"I loved mathematics and science subjects while in high school and hope to pursue engineering related courses in the university," said Loisiodo.

"As a beneficiary of Huawei mentorship program, I am committed to motivating younger girls in my community to take up technical courses given the potential to transform their lives," She added.

Rael Jinais, another 18-year-old high school graduate who was also rescued from a forced marriage said that Huawei mentorship program has boosted her digital literacy and life's skills.

"I feel relieved now that I have basic knowledge on how to operate devices like computers and tablets. This is a rare feat for a girl from a community that has historically never seen the value of educating us," Rael said.

She vowed to be a role model for the girls in the nomadic Samburu community by pursuing an undergraduate degree course that has a technical bias but can guarantee her gainful employment.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 00:36:01|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ADDIS ABABA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Ethiopia Attorney General Office (AGO) on Friday said it has charged six soldiers with murder in connection to a deadly shooting incident on March 10 last year that left at least 10 civilians dead.

In a press statement, the AGO said the six soldiers are charged with committing first degree murder related to the incident in the Ethiopian border city of Moyale.

The AGO said the six soldiers have been brought before court in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa this week for preliminary hearings with the case adjourned for next Thursday.

The Ethiopian government had said the shooting happened when an army unit deployed around Moyale city on the border with Kenya to intercept suspected Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) fighters allegedly opened fire on civilians on a basis of mistaken information.

Moyale is in Oromia regional state, which had been in a state of unrest since late 2015.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 00:41:04|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BANGKOK, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Northern Thailand has been blanked by hazardous dust recently leading to a decline of visitors.

The PM 2.5 pollutants in the region have reached extremely hazardous levels for almost a week. The PM 2.5 readings in the north stood at 76 to more than 300 micrograms per cubic meter. The maximum safe threshold is 59 micrograms per cubic meter.

The worst reading of air quality was recorded in Chiang Rai on Friday. The air quality index of the province stood at 316.

Local officials said the number of visitors to Tham Luang cave complex, one of Chiang Rai's famous destinations, has decreased by half from around 3,000 daily to 1,500 following reports about the haze.

Forest fires have sent air quality in nine provinces to a level considered harmful to people's health, as cities in the north like Chiang Mai registered air quality that was among the world's worst last week.

Provincial authorities have been strictly controlling the burning of rubbish, farm waste and clearing of scrubland to ease the air pollution.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 00:51:06|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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HELSINKI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Helsinki Appeals Court on Friday increased the fines given to Finns Party MP Teuvo Hakkarainen for sexual harassment and assault.

Hakkarainen had attacked conservative female MP Vera Ruoho in the parliament building in December 2017. At the time, parliament was debating the budget and MP Ruoho had gone to the parliamentary cafeteria to get coffee, when fellow MP Hakkarainen had attacked her.

The court said on Friday it increased the verdict as the violence targeted the head of the victim and took place at her workplace. Fines nearly doubled to 5,440 euros.

Prosecutor Eija Velitski had demanded imprisonment and considers appeal to the Supreme Court. Talking to the media, she said that such a grip on the neck could kill. Hakkarainen told local paper Keskisuomalainen on Friday he is not going to appeal.

The conviction is the second during Hakkarainen's parliamentary career. In early 2017 he was fined for "instigation against a population group" in a social media entry.

The increased conviction seems to have no restrictive impact on the re-election campaign of Hakkarainen and he remains the most prominent Finns Party candidate in the Central Finland district in the upcoming general election due on April 14.

Finland has a multi-MP constituency system. Hakkarainen is running in Central Finland that can elect 10 MPs. Political observers have noted the Finns Party will get one seat and Hakkarainen is the likeliest to get it.

Local commentators have said his conviction does not undermine his popularity as his voters are largely people who identify with his attitudes, lifestyle and strong language. The Finns Party Central Finland district nominated him for re-election unanamously when the current process was already on.

Hakkarainen's current re-election campaign has raised questions about the legality of his automobile stickers demanding "all asylum tourists out".

Kimmo Nuotio, professor of criminal justice at Helsinki University, told national broadcaster Yle that the words used by Hakkarainen in the ads are "on the brink", but he is not sure whether they would be sufficient for a criminal case.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 00:51:06|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NEW YORK, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Experts, scholars, entrepreneurs and practitioners in the field of education will gather in New York on Saturday for a two-day forum on issues facing the current development of education in China, the United States and the world at large.

2019 U.S.-China Education Forum, scheduled for March 23-24 at Lerner Hall, Columbia University, sets up six panels on the theme of "Explore, Innovate, and Implement," including STEAM Education, Innovative Schools, Educational Technology, Early Childhood Education, Teacher Development and Educational Investment, according to the event organizers.

The forum aims to provide a platform for exchanges and interactions in education between China and the United States, promote innovative educational developments, and provide intellectual support for students to gain global perspectives and cultivate talents needed for today's ever-changing society, the organizers said.

The annual event is jointly hosted by 2019 Columbia University Teachers College Chinese Student and Scholar Association (TCCSSA) and Global China Connection (GCC).

TCCSSA, founded in 1913, is the largest student organization in Teachers College, Columbia University and dedicated to bridging U.S.-China conversations through education.

GCC, founded in 2008 at Columbia University, is a nonprofit organization for university students and young professionals of all nationalities looking to engage China's emergence in the world. GCC is today present in more than 60 universities worldwide.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 01:01:07|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BLANTYRE, Malawi, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Malawi President, Peter Mutharika, has expressed shock over the death of 20 people in a road accident on Friday.

The accident occurred at a place called Kampepuza in Ntcheu district, about 250 km south of the capital. Every Friday is a market day in that place.

It is established that a truck which was coming from Lilongwe direction going down south towards Balaka lost its brakes and hit people and stationary commuter minibuses at a crowded roadside market place in Kampepuza.

A statement released Friday afternoon signed by the President's Press Secretary and Spokesperson, Mgeme Kalilani, says Mutharika and the First Lady, Gertrude Mutharika, are very saddened with the loss of 20 lives and the injury of several others in the accident.

"The President and the First Lady express their heart-felt condolence to the believed families for the loss of their loved ones in this tragic accident," reads the statement.

The statement further assures all the families affected by the tragic accident that government will provide them with all the support they need in the difficult time.

While praying for the souls of the departed to rest in peace, the statement says Mutharika and the First Lady joins all Malawians in praying for the quick recovery of those injured in the accident.

Seventeen people died on the spot of the accident while 3 more died at the hospital where they were rushed to for medical attention.

Meanwhile, government's spokesperson, who is also minister of Information and Communications Technology, Henry Mussa, has told the local media that government will release a report on what really caused the tragic accident.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 01:01:07|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BAKU, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Two people were killed Friday in a car accident in the western Azerbaijani region of Goranboy, according to the Ministry of Emergencies.

A passenger car burst into flames after colliding with a truck. Emergency and firefighting crews recovered two bodies from the passenger car, and authorities are now identifying the victims. The fire was extinguished before it spread to the truck.

Authorities have launched an investigation into the cause of the accident.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 01:06:10|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIRUT, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Hungarian Ambassador to Lebanon Geza Mihalyi emphasized Friday the need to activate his country's bilateral agreements with Lebanon, the National News Agency.

"We want to activate bilateral agreements with Lebanon in addition to increasing agricultural trade between the two countries and boosting religious tourism," Mihalyi was quoted as saying during his meeting with Lebanese Minister of State for Foreign Trade Hassan Mourad.

Mihalyi and Mourad also agreed to activate the role of the joint Lebanese-Hungarian economic committee.

The two officials discussed the importance of the agriculture exhibition that takes place in Budapest every year.

Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil had visited Budapest in 2017 to open new markets for Lebanese agricultural and industrial production in Hungary, especially wine, honey, carob, olive oil, apples and preserves.

Meanwhile, former Minister of Agriculture Ghazi Zeaiter signed late last year a memorandum of understanding with his Hungarian counterpart touching on the agricultural sector.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 01:06:10|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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UNITED NATIONS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was "deeply saddened" to learn about the loss of life and injuries caused by the explosion at a chemical plant in Yancheng City, Jiangsu Province of China, his deputy spokesman said Friday.

"He extends his sincere condolences to the families of the victims and wishes those injured a speedy recovery," Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the secretary-general, said in a statement.

"The secretary-general expresses his heartfelt sympathies to the people and Government of China," he added.

Thursday's explosion reportedly killed at least 47 people and injured hundreds of others, 90 of them seriously.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 01:11:11|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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LUSAKA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Zambia's Finance Minister Margaret Mwanakatwe held a meeting with officials from the Bank of America in order to brief them on the country's fiscal and monetary reform program, her office said on Friday.

Others who were part of the meeting included investors from both Europe and America, according to a release from her ministry.

The Zambian minister said the meeting was one of the most engaging economic management meeting and praised the visiting delegation on their approach and sound technical competence.

She said she updated the delegation on the progress of Zambia's fiscal reform program as well as the monetary thrust so far.

"I assured the investors that the government will continue striking the right notes in the economic stabilization and growth program so that the nation grows and sustains both local and foreign investors interest in our economy," she said.

The Zambian government is making significant strides to enhance the most important inter-sectoral goal of improving the much needed conducive business environment for foreign direct investment, she added.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 01:41:17|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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HELSINKI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The construction of the planned Arctic data cable connecting Asia and Europe via Finland appears to be delayed, media reports said here on Friday.

The majority state-owned Cinia Ltd. that implements Arctic Connect has confirmed to Xinhua earlier media reports that the project's completion date cannot be specified.

Anne Berner, the Finnish minister of transport and communication, said last August that the 10,500-km data cable via the Northeast Passage was to be built between 2019 and 2022.

The Finnish business weekly Talouselama quoted Cinia CEO Ari-Jussi Knaapila on Friday as saying that he "no longer wants to estimate when the cable would be ready."

Cinia started laying cables in 2015 at the request of the Finnish government.

Knaapila told Talouselama that the company has not yet been able to find a commercial partner in Russia. "We have several negotiations ongoing and one of them has been in a good phase for some months. But nothing that we can publish now," Knaapila said.

The Northeast Passage cable would reduce data transmission delay between Europe and Asia data by around 40 percent (from 250 milliseconds to 150 milliseconds). Knaapila underlined though that for security reasons it is more important to build an alternative data route than to make connection faster.

Currently, the best part of data traffic between Asia and Europe goes through cables traversing the Suez Canal. "Some five years ago, three of the four cables were damaged by a dropped anchor," he recalled. It caused major, albeit temporary, problems.

The Arctic Connect project is estimated to cost between 600 million and 900 million euros (677 million - 1 billion U.S. dollars). Knaapila told Talouselama he expects the project's final ownership structure to be versatile.

Knaapila said financing of the cable project would not be a problem. Work would take off only when the main customers have been confirmed.

Cinia is already operating a direct cable link between Finland and Germany. Known as C-Lion1, the 1,173-km submarine cable became operational in 2016.

The Finnish state owns 77.5 percent of Cinia. The other owners are the insurance company Ilmarinen and the OP Financial Group.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 01:46:18|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NICOSIA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Cyprus said on Friday that unregulated immigration is getting out of hand in the eastern Mediterranean island and accused the European Union of being unable to find answers to the problem.

Interior Minister Constantinos Petrides told foreign correspondents in Nicosia during a working breakfast that Cyprus receives the highest rate of unregulated immigrants, with about 1,000 people arriving in the country each month.

"Cyprus is number one among European countries and probably in the world, receiving annually unregulated migrants who exceed one percent of its population, according to the latest statistics", Petrides said.

He said that Cyprus, with a population of 1.2 million, managed migration well until now despite the numbers, but the problem is getting out of control.

"More than 1,000 people arrive each month, by the end of the year we will have 10,000 more", he said.

Petrides said that 10,000 asylum applications are pending and added that people who arrived in Cyprus over the past few years number more than 30,000.

Petrides said that migration is a painful issue of discussion at the European Union Council, with its president pointing out that the problem is threatening to blow up the foundations the EU was built on.

"For the first time in Europe borders are being built since the 1950s. We see national borders being build up, we see extreme right wing groups strengthened because of migration", he said.

He stressed that this is "because of the inability of the European Union itself to find an answer either to the external dimension of the matter, the problems of Syria and the Middle East, or the internal dimension of the subject, which is how to administer at an EU level this phenomenon in the best possible way".

Petrides said that front countries like Cyprus, Greece and Malta receive all the burden and they press for a system of automatic distribution of migrants among member states.

He blamed some EU Commissioners of trying to portray the crisis as being over.

"The crisis is not over...And yes, there are social dangers, let alone the economic dangers in countries that have already exceeded their capacity a long time ago regarding the reception of these unregulated flows. And yes, there are security threats." Petrides warned.

Most immigrants arriving in Cyprus are Syrians who fled the fighting in their country and sought refuge in Turkey, according to local media.

They pay people traffickers more than 2,500 euro each to bring them to the Cypriot shores in flimsy boats or they travel to the part of Cyprus controlled by Turkish troops and are directed by local people traffickers, walking over the dividing line into the government controlled region of the island.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 02:31:28|Editor: Yurou

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Lebanese President Michel Aoun (R) meets with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Beirut, Lebanon, March 22, 2019. (Xinhua/Dalati & Nohra)

BEIRUT, March 22 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday that the U.S. will continue to use all peaceful means to deter Hezbollah and Iran's influence in the region, local TV Channel OTV reported.

"Hezbollah is stockpiling its rockets in Lebanon to use them against Israel. It is working under the authority of Iran, while Iran believes that Lebanon's stability threatens its dominance in the region," Pompeo said during a joint press conference with Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil.

The press conference was held on the occasion of a two-day visit for Pompeo to Lebanon to meet with Lebanese officials and discuss matters of interest to both countries.

Pompeo said that Iran's support for Hezbollah is causing harm to Lebanon while it is limiting the chances of peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

For his part, Bassil argued that Hezbollah was a Lebanese party and it should not be labeled as "terrorist" because it was elected by the Lebanese people.

"Listing Hezbollah as a terrorist group by the U.S. is none of Lebanon's business. We are keen to maintain our national unity while we are also eager to keep good ties with the U.S. We do not want our relations with the U.S. to be harmed," Bassil said.

Bassil said that the two sides should work on finding a solution on how to look at Hezbollah and how to deal with it.

"It is our right to protect our territories against any aggression or occupation," he added.

The two officials also discussed the Syrian refugees crisis. Bassil emphasized the need to help refugees' return to their homeland to alleviate the burdens off Lebanon.

Pompeo reiterated Bassil's remarks, saying that the U.S. supports a fast return of Syrian refugees to their country.

They also negotiated the need to demarcate Lebanon's maritime borders with Israel.

Lebanon has an unresolved maritime border with Israel that involves a triangular sea area of about 860 square km extending along the edge of three of its 10 offshore energy blocks.

The U.S. top diplomat arrived in Lebanon on Friday and headed directly to meet Interior Minister Raya Haffar El Hassan as the two discussed internal security challenges facing Lebanon.

Pompeo also met with Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri and Prime Minister Saad Hariri before his meeting with President Michel Aoun at the Baabda presidential palace.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 03:06:32|Editor: zh

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Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops on the Gaza-Israel border, east of Gaza City, March 22, 2019. At least two Palestinians were shot dead on Friday afternoon by Israeli gunfire during the weekly anti-Israel protests, better known as "the Great March of Return," a medic told reporters. (Xinhua/Yasser Qudih)

GAZA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- At least two Palestinians were shot dead and more than 62 injured by Israeli soldiers' gunfire in clashes with hundreds of demonstrators in eastern Gaza Strip on Friday afternoon, medics said.

Ashraf al-Qedra, spokesman of the Health Ministry in Gaza, told Xinhua that 29-year-old Nidal Shatat was killed in east of al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, close to the borders with Israel, while 18-year-old Khaled al-Akhsham was shot dead in east of the city.

Clashes broke out on Friday afternoon between Palestinian protesters and Israeli soldiers in eastern Gaza Strip as part of the one-year rallies, better known as "the Great March of Return," which have been going on for 51 weeks now.

Eyewitnesses in various areas in eastern Gaza Strip said that clashes broke out during the weekly anti-Israel protests, where they waved Palestinians flags, burned tires close to the fence of the borders with Israel and threw stones at the soldiers stationed on the borders.

They said that the soldiers fired dozens of tear gas canisters at the protesters, as well as rubber bullets and live gunshots to keep them away from reaching the barbed wires of the border fence.

Israeli media reported that hundreds of Palestinian demonstrators threw around 200 homemade bombs at the Israeli army forces stationed on the borderline area with the Gaza Strip, adding that no injuries were reported among the soldiers.

Al-Qedra, told reporters earlier on Friday that Israeli soldiers fired dozens of tear gas canisters at a medical booth east of al-Bureij Refugee camp in central Gaza Strip.

He added that dozens suffered suffocation because of inhaling strong tear gas, adding that more than ten were shot and wounded by the Israeli gunfire including two young men who were seriously injured.

The scenes of clashes with Israeli soldiers in eastern Gaza Strip have been going on since the start of the marches of return on March 30 last year.

Health Ministry officials said earlier that the Israeli army shot and killed more than 260 Palestinians and wounded 29,000 others. Around 40 percent of them were injured by Israeli army gunfire.

Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas movement's chief, participated on Friday afternoon with several Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders in the weekly anti-Israel marches of return held in eastern Gaza city.

He stressed that "the marches of returns will continue until their objectives are achieved, and the occupier must understand the message. Otherwise, the next one is more difficult, and all parties must shoulder their responsibilities."

Dawood Shihab, spokesman of the Islamic Jihad and member of the highest commission of the marches of return, announced that next Friday "there will be no marches of return."

"'The Great March of Return will be on Saturday (March 30), to mark one year for the marches of return and on the occasion of the Palestinian Land Day anniversary," he told the pro-Hamas al-Aqsa Satellite TV Station.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 03:56:43|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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AMMAN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Jordan on Friday said that the Golan Heights is an occupied Syrian territory in line with all international resolutions, the state-run Petra news agency reported.

Jordan's Minister of Foreign Affairs Ayman Safadi made the remarks after the announcement made by U.S. President Donald Trump about Golan Heights.

Trump said on Thursday on Twitter that it is time for the United States to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria in 1967.

"Lasting and comprehensive peace requires Israel's withdrawal from all occupied Arab territories and the Golan Heights is part of these occupied lands," Safadi said.

He said that the UN resolution 497 for 1981 rejects Israel's decision to annex the Golan Heights.

The minister stressed the need that the international community should abide by the international legitimacy resolutions in this regard.File Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump displays a signed presidential memorandum at the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on May 8, 2018. U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, a landmark agreement signed in 2015. (Xinhua/Ting Shen)

WASHINGTON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Department of the Treasury said on Friday that it had slapped sanctions on Iranian individuals and entities for their involvement in a defense research organization of Iran that assisted Tehran's past nuclear weapons program.

The United States imposed sanctions on 14 individuals and 17 entities in connection with Iran's Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND), which has provided support to designated Iranian defense entities and whose key personnel played a central role in Iran's past nuclear weapons effort, according to a statement issued by the Treasury.

"The United States will continue applying maximum pressure to the Iranian regime, using all economic tools to prevent Iran from developing weapons of mass destruction," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement.

"Anyone considering dealing with the Iranian defense industry in general, and SPND in particular, risks professional, personal, and financial isolation," he added.

As a result of the sanction, all property and interests in property of the designated individuals and entities are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from transacting with them.

Moreover, the statement noted that "any foreign financial institution that knowingly facilitates a significant transactions for any of the individuals or entities designated today could be subject to U.S. sanctions."

The move came amid Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's ongoing trip in the Middle East, during which he called on joint efforts by regional countries to counter "Iran's threat."

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meets with people of Qom, in Teheran, Iran, Jan. 9, 2019. (Xinhua/REUTERS)

The Trump administration abandoned the Iran nuclear deal, also known as JCPOA last May and imposed various sanctions against Tehran. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Thursday that his country would defeat the United States in the latter's anti-Iran "economic war."

A report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last month demonstrated that Iran has remained within the key limits on its nuclear activities imposed by the nuclear deal.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 04:26:53|Editor: zh

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on the South Lawn before departing from the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, March 22, 2019. Donald Trump said Friday he has "no idea" about when Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who's leading the Russia probe, will turn in his report. (Xinhua/Ting Shen)

WASHINGTON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday he has "no idea" about when Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who's leading the Russia probe, will turn in his report.

"I have no idea about the Mueller report," Trump responded on the White House lawn to the question from reporters if he expected the Mueller report to be submitted on Friday, before he left for meetings at his Florida estate. "We're going to see what happens."

Those remarks were made as Washington braces for the highly-anticipated report by Mueller, whose nearly two-year investigation has focused on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow during the 2016 presidential elections and whether the president obstructed justice.

Trump on Friday continued to claim that there was neither collusion nor obstruction, calling the wide-ranging inquiry a "big hoax" and "witch hunt."

The president added that Attorney General William Barr, whom he nominated late last year to replace Jeff Sessions, "ultimately will make a decision" about the report's release.

The public has been speculating that the Russia probe is coming to an end after several high-profile departures from Mueller's office recently.

Mueller, who was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May, 2017, is required to submit a report to Barr at the conclusion of his investigation. Barr, in turn, is required to notify Congress about Mueller's findings.

According to the Department of Justice's special counsel regulations, the report must explain Mueller's "prosecution or declination decisions" but may not be comprehensive to lawmakers.

Trump has been ramping up efforts to discredit the Mueller report widely believed to be in its final stages.

"I have a deputy, appoints a man to write a report on me, to make a determination on my presidency," Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network aired Friday morning. "People will not stand for it."

Earlier this week, Trump told reporters he didn't understand why Mueller was writing a report, but that he wanted the general public to see it anyway.

Mueller's team has brought charges against 34 people, including six Trump associates, and three companies. The special counsel hasn't made a direct allegation of collusion.

Russia has denied any meddling in the U.S. 2016 presidential election.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 04:51:55|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Italian counterpart Sergio Mattarella meet with representatives attending the meetings of the China-Italy Entrepreneur Committee, China-Italy Third Party Market Cooperation Forum and China-Italy Cultural Cooperation Mechanism in Rome, Italy, March 22, 2019. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

ROME, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday urged personages of business and cultural circles in China and Italy to contribute more wisdom and strength to the cooperation between the two countries.

Xi made the remarks when speaking to representatives attending the meetings of the China-Italy Entrepreneur Committee, China-Italy Third Party Market Cooperation Forum and China-Italy Cultural Cooperation Mechanism, which are being held in parallel in Rome.

While offering congratulations on the simultaneous convening of the three institutional meetings for the first time that showcases the China-Italy practical cooperation, Xi thanked the personages of business and cultural circles from the two countries for their long-time efforts and contributions to promote bilateral economic and trade cooperation, deepen mutual understanding between the two peoples and enhance the friendship between the two countries.

Xi said that China and Italy both boast a time-honored history and highly value carrying forward their own civilization, which lay the foundation for the two countries to enjoy mutual understanding and lasting friendship.

He praised the China-Italy relations as being strategic partners featuring mutual respect and trust, cooperative partners featuring mutual benefit and win-win result, and cultural exchange partners featuring mutual learning.

China and Italy enjoy a solid political foundation for bilateral exchanges and cooperation, as the two sides can accommodate each other's core interests and major concerns, Xi said.

The two-way trade has developed steadily and the bilateral investment has grown rapidly, bringing tangible benefits to the two peoples, he said.

On cultural front, the two countries have witnessed splendid exchanges, taking the lead in cultural exchanges and cooperation between China and the West, he said.

"I am full of confidence in the prospect of the development of China-Italy relations," the Chinese president said.

Xi noted that as next year marks the 50th anniversary of China-Italy diplomatic ties, the two sides will hold year of culture and tourism in each other's country, and they will embrace new opportunities in cooperation in various areas.

China stands ready to work with all walks of life in Italy to push for a steady and long-term development of the bilateral relations on the path of mutual benefit and win-win result, and to make new contributions to boost the China-Europe connectivity and global development and prosperity at large, Xi said.

"I hope that personages of business and cultural circles in China and Italy contribute more wisdom and strength in your own fields to the cooperation between our two countries," he told the representatives.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella, who also spoke at the meeting with the representatives, agreed that both Italy and China are countries with an ancient civilization, which is the root of their profound relations.

The two countries enjoy a traditional friendship and a long history of trade and cultural exchanges, he said, noting that under the new circumstances, the Italian government supports the business community of the two countries in deepening economic, trade and investment cooperation, and supports cultural circles in carrying out all-ranging exchanges.

The two sides should work together to elevate their economic and trade cooperation to a new level, and expand cooperation on cultural Silk Road, in a bid to bring greater benefits to the two peoples, jointly respond to the challenges facing the world today, and lift the bilateral ties to a new height, he added.

Xi arrived in Rome Thursday for a state visit to Italy, the first stop of Xi's three-nation Europe tour, which will also take him to Monaco and France.Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 04:56:58|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NEW YORK, March 22 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday warned that social media is being exploited as a platform for bigotry.

"Hate speech is spreading like wildfire. Social media is being exploited as a platform for bigotry, and public discourse is being coarsened," the UN chief said at an event held at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York.

"Many political movements are either openly admitting their neo-Nazi affiliation, or lip syncing their words, and cutting and pasting the symbols and images," the UN chief said, adding "that cancer is spreading. It is our duty to find the cure."

The secretary-general noted that the media has an important role to play.

He cited a recent study by researchers at Georgia State University and the University of Alabama as finding that over roughly the last decade, attacks in the United States by those claiming to be Muslim received 357 percent more coverage than attacks carried out by others.

"We need, at all costs, to avoid this kind of discrimination," he said.

"We need to act against extremism in all its forms -- whether it targets mosques, synagogues, churches or anywhere else," the secretary-general said, a week after the terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand killed 50 people.

"Here today, in the peace of this holy space, I am making a global call to reaffirm the sanctity of all places of worship and the safety of all worshippers who visit revered sites in a spirit of compassion and tolerance," he added.

"Around the world, we have seen ever-rising anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Semitism, hate speech and bigotry," he said. "I have repeatedly warned about those dangers."Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 05:27:04|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ATHENS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A candidate with Greece's ruling SYRIZA party in the forthcoming European Parliament elections in May quit the race on Friday amid public furore over cashing her dead mother's pension for more than five years.

Myrsini Loizou, 53, continued receiving the pension of Maria Loizou, who had passed away in August 2007, until July 2012, totaling 52,000 euros (58,760 U.S. dollars) over 69 months -- a debt against the state which now stands at 94,000 euros after taxes, the Greek national news agency AMNA reported.

In a press statement on Friday, Loizou claimed that she had notified the authorities about her mother's death, but due to bureaucratic reasons the pension continued to be deposited in her bank account.

She thanked SYRIZA party for trusting her and voiced her intention "to continue her struggle for a fairer society."

Media reports exposed on Friday a criminal record indicating that in February 2017 Myrsini Loizou was sentenced by the Athens Appeals Court to a two-year suspended term for the pension case. (1 euro = 1.13 U.S. dollars)Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-23 06:37:20|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (L, front) and his Italian counterpart Sergio Mattarella (R, front) hold talks in Rome, Italy, March 22, 2019. (Xinhua/Ju Peng)

ROME, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Italian counterpart, Sergio Mattarella, held talks here Friday, and agreed to jointly push for greater development of the China-Italy comprehensive strategic partnership in the new era.

The two heads of state agreed to guide the direction of bilateral ties from a strategic height and long-term perspective.

During their talks, Xi noted that both as countries with an ancient civilization, China and Italy have profound historical relations.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the China-Italy comprehensive strategic partnership, and the two countries will celebrate the 50th anniversary of their diplomatic relations next year, Xi said.

He recalled that for nearly half a century, China and Italy have respected, trusted and helped each other, enhanced high-level exchanges and strategic mutual trust, facilitated communication, cooperation and convergence of interests, and deepened mutual understanding and traditional friendship.

As the world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century, China is willing to carry forward the spirit of cooperation with the Italian side, strengthen strategic communication, encourage the international community to seek common ground while reserving differences and promote development through cooperation, so as to contribute new wisdom and strength to building a better world, Xi said.

China stands ready to join hands with Italy to firmly keep the direction of bilateral relations in the new era, carry out closer high-level exchanges and upgrade the quality and level of bilateral practical cooperation, he said.

Xi said he agrees with Mattarella that Italy and China should be partners with inclusive interests and common development, adding that China is willing to enhance the comprehensive strategic partnership with Italy.

The two sides need to strengthen communication on visions, consolidate political mutual trust, continue to extend mutual understanding and support on issues of each other's core interests and major concerns, and strengthen communication and cooperation between their governments, legislative bodies and political parties, Xi said.

He encouraged the two sides to create highlights in bilateral cooperation, jointly build the Belt and Road, and promote the synergy of their development strategies and the planning of practical cooperation.

China is willing to import more high-quality products from Italy and encourage more capable Chinese enterprises to invest and start business in Italy, Xi said.

He also urged the two countries to boost cultural and people-to-people exchanges, and enhance communication and cooperation in such fields as culture, education, film and television, and media, so as to consolidate the popular support for friendship between the two peoples.

On China-Europe relations, Xi said his country has always supported the European integration and respected the European Union's efforts in solving its problems.

Xi said he hopes that Italy will continue playing a positive role in promoting EU-China partnership for peace, growth, reform and civilization, Xi said.

China is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with the Italian side on major issues such as the United Nations affairs, global governance, climate change and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, jointly promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, and jointly push economic globalization in the direction of becoming more open, inclusive, balanced, win-win, and beneficial to all, he said.

Mattarella warmly welcomed Xi, saying he still has a vivid memory of his visit to China in 2017.

The frequent high-level exchanges between Italy and China, especially President Xi's visit this time, demonstrated the high level of bilateral relations, Mattarella said, calling China a close and important partner of Italy.

Italy admires China's development achievements, appreciates China's adherence to the opening-up strategy, and has confidence in the prospect of Italy-China cooperation, he said.

Italy is willing to take the opportunities of the 15th anniversary of the Italy-China comprehensive strategic partnership this year and the 50th anniversary of Italy-China diplomatic relations next year to expand the mutually beneficial cooperation in various fields such as economy and trade, investment, science and technology, and innovation between the two countries, Mattarella said.

Italy and China were at the two ends of the ancient Silk Road which had been a bond closely linking the two countries, Mattarella said.

Italy supports Xi's initiative on jointly building the Belt and Road and believes that it will be conducive to Eurasian connectivity and common development, as well as to reviving the ancient Silk Road in modern times, Mattarella said.

Calling the Belt and Road a cultural exchange road, the Italian president said his country is willing to boost communication and cooperation with China in culture and tourism.

Both as countries with an ancient civilization, Mattarella said the peoples of Italy and China have wisdom to address the challenges facing human society today.

Italy believes that China's rejuvenation will make new historic contributions to the world's peace and prosperity, he said, adding that Italy is committed to promoting in-depth development of EU-China ties.

Italy is willing to enhance communication and coordination with China in multilateral institutions such as the UN and the Group of Twenty, jointly safeguard multilateralism and trade liberalization, and meet challenges such as climate change and international security together, Mattarella said.

The two presidents held a joint press conference after the talks.

Before their talks, the Italian president held a grand welcoming ceremony for Xi.

The Chinese president arrived in Rome Thursday for a state visit to Italy, the first stop of his three-nation Europe tour, which will also take him to Monaco and France.Check concentrate feeder accuracy

WITH the cost of dairy cow concentrates rising farmers have been urged to check the accuracy of their feeders to ensure they are not overfeeding, or indeed underfeeding, their livestock.Cat de inteligenti sunt cainii, de fapt. Cate cuvinte inteleg patrupezii, descoperirea specialistilor

Pentru un stapan de animalut, fie ca vorbim despre caini, pisici, papagali sau hamsteri, companionul sau este cel mai frumos si cel mai destept din lume. Atunci cand ne referim la catei, [citeste mai departe]Ukraines Cabinet of Ministers has rejected the idea of changing the head of the board of the NJSC Naftogaz, national oil and gas company of Ukraine, and extended the contract with its CEO Andriy Kobolev for another year. The decision was made under pressure from the ambassadors of the G-7 countries, who had previously met to discuss this issue with PM Volodymyr Groysman. On the one hand, having achieved the displacement of Kobolev, as our sources say, Groysman could play to at least four centers of influence, behind which well-known oligarchs and politicians who have an interest Naftogaz stand. On the other hand, it would be awkward for the PM to quarrel with influential representatives of the international community. Preserving Kobolev as head of Naftogaz means that, at least until the end of the year, the situation on the gas market in Ukraine will not change: we will observe a rise in gas prices for the population and a confrontation with Russia's Gazprom. But what would happen after 2020, after two presidential and parliamentary elections, after the transit contract with Gazprom expires?

Open source

The decision of Ukraines Cabinet of Ministers to extend the contract with Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolev during a government meeting was not a big surprise. Our own sources in diplomatic circles reported that the prime minister had already changed the decision on Kobolev, and the government cancels the decision to hold a competition for the choice of the new CEO of Naftogaz after meeting with ambassadors of the G7 countries. Kobolev himself called the governments decision "a compromise that is a sign of a constructive and effective dialogue." He did not comment on the terms on which the contract will be extended to him, promising to do so after receiving a written decision of the Cabinet of Ministers.

In early March, PM Groysman stated that the Cabinet intended to replace the Naftogaz board. Although, it was clear that his aim was the dismissal of Kobolev, with whom he had a conflict. Groysman has recently openly criticized Kobolev and the top management of the entity.

Thus, the head of the government did not like the unreasonably high salaries of Kobolev and other top managers of Naftogaz. It is known that the Naftogaz Supervisory Board recommended the Cabinet to extend the contract with Kobolev, appointing him a salary of 72,000 USD. Kobolev was also criticized for disrupting the 20/20 program, which meant increasing gas production by the state companies to 20 billion cubic meters by 2020 (and 27,6 billion cubic meters by all gas producers of the country). This would allow Ukraine to abandon gas imports and become less volatile (Ukraines annual need for gas amounts to 32 billion cubic meters), depriving Russian Gazprom of potential levers of pressure on the economy. In reality, Naftogazs affiliated company Ukrhazvydobuvannia is hopelessly lagging behind the plan. In 2018, it was to produce 16,5 billion cubic meters of gas. In fact, the company practically did not receive new licenses and produced only 15,5 billion cubic meters.

Another topic of confrontation between Groysman and Kobolev is connected with unbending. The Cabinet insisted on transferring the gas transportation system to the Trunk Gas Pipelines Company, but under the influence of the Energy Community, whose representatives listen to Kobolev, was forced to admit that it could not be fulfilled (at least until the end of this year), until the expiration of the contract with Gazprom.

The most striking is the conflict between the current Naftogaz leadership and Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Firtash owns the Regional Gas Company (RGC), which includes 20 out of 44 gas distribution network operators. Naftogaz has a fierce dispute with the companies in the courts over the debts owed to the state company.

At the beginning of March, Kobolev accused gas sellers of reselling gas, which is supplied at a lower price to commercial companies for the population (they must buy gas at a higher price, which corresponds to the market price).

Ukraines MP Oleg Lyashko has made a scene in the Cabinet in protest against the statement of the Cabinet on the intention to extend the contract with Kobolev for another year.

There are some reasons for the conflict with Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, who is a minority shareholder in Ukrnafta (part of Naftogaz). In particular, Naftogaz and minority shareholders disputed Ukrnaftas corporate governance issues (on the distribution of powers to appoint supervisory board members) in the London Arbitration. For several years now, disputes in relation to the disputed 10 billion cubic meters of gas have been considering in the Stockholm arbitration and in the Ukrainian courts. Ukrnafta (its minority shareholders) are demanding monetary compensation in accordance with the market price of gas. March 28, Naftogaz has announced the replacement of Mark Rollins, the head of the board of Ukrnafta company, often accused of acting in the interests of oligarch Kolomoisky.

How can the current president benefit from the dismissal of Andriy Kobolev? It might be a part of election maneuvers. The society is dissatisfied with Kobolevs high salary, a scandal with the bonuses, obtained by the company managers for winning the Stockholm arbitration. Kobolevs dismissal could add a couple of percent to the presidential rating.

In addition, Kobolev has rather uneasy relations with Energy Minister Ihor Nasalyk, who is considered close associate of Poroshenkos good friend Igor Kononenko, one of the leaders of his party. Nasalyk said recently that "Kobolev has failed everything that he could fail." Naftogaz CEO has also harshly criticized the minister.

Most financial-industrial groups are dissatisfied with Kobolev, our sources in coalition factions assure. According to them, his reluctance to share causes irritation. He believes that he has only one employer, our sources say, hinting that the appointment of Kobolev as head of Naftogaz in 2014 was lobbied by American businessman George Soros.

According to our sources, Yuriy Vitrenko was considered as a candidate who could be suitable for the current Supervisory Board. Until recently, he was a close associate of Naftogaz head, but after Andriy Favorov, former co-owner of ERA Trading, one of the largest gas traders, was appointed the head of the gas division, Vitrenko and Kobolev had a little on edge with each other.

Vitrenko has become the executive director of Naftogaz, and a war broke out between his team and Favorovs people for control over the direction of gas trade. Vitrenko initiated a compliance investigation into Favorov, allegedly in connection with transactions that allowed him to receive the undue benefit of ERA Trading. So far, the results of the investigation remain unknown.

Experts believe that the current situation with the attempt to remove Kobolev means that politics still affects the situation in Naftogaz. Today, Naftogaz is the most efficient economic company in Ukraine. At the same time, due to the influence of the political component, it has already lost one of its most efficient managers  Oleh Prokhorenko, Newfolk Oil and gas consulting center CEO Andriy Zakrevsky complained.

Naftogaz is now quite different than it was under Kobolevs predecessors. Previously, a political force that received the most electoral support usually appointed its head of the Naftogaz, and this person led Naftogaz in the context of the interests of the appointed political force, we have been observing a different situation since 2014. The state-owned company really ceased to be a cash cow for certain political forces, as it was before," Hennagiy Kobol, ExPro Consulting CEO, says. At the same time, according to him, Kobolev is not a perfect candidate: "Unbundling is stopped. The transition to the daily balancing of the gas market has been postponed several times, including due to the unavailability of the software product (the platform on which it runs)."

Kobolev remains on his position, and this means that we would continue observing the processes, typical for Naftogaz. In particular, in the near future, the focus will be shifted to the topic of liberalization of gas prices for the population.

According to ExPro Ukraine CEO, the gas market in Europe is safe from being shuttered by a high supply in the near future. Even if Gazprom sharply reduces gas supplies to Europe, other suppliers will quickly take its place. Like Qatar, Norway, USA. Gazproms share is not growing due to high competition in the European market. Last years results were 33%. Gazprom is struggling to maintain its share, reducing prices. Gas supply in Europe is simply enormous: it has grown even more since Japan sharply reduced LNG consumption by resuming operation of its nuclear power plants. LNG share in Europe (from 2016 to 2018) doubled from 8 to 16%," the expert assures.

According to him, there would be no prerequisites for a sharp increase in gas prices at least until mid-summer. However, this might happen closer to the fall. It is known that it is a possible rise in prices that is the main deterrent for the government. And Ukraines PM recognizes it. Commenting on the Naftogaz offer, the prime minister called it a trap. "They say that they offer us to cancel the price limit. And if we cancel the limit of 8.55, tomorrow Naftogaz can say that the price should be 10 or 11 thousand UAH (360-400 USD). I cant let this happen," Groysman stated.

In this regard, experts cannot predict the governments decision on the liberalization of gas prices for the population. In addition, the prospects for the gas market are still misty after 2019.

Taking into consideration Kobolevs comments, it is obvious that he lauds the idea of the extension of his powers until the end of this year. And this is quite logical. It is now incredibly difficult to imagine what would happen in Ukraine, including its gas industry, after January 1, 2020. Too many variables are involved, Kobal notes: The fate of Nord Stream 2 is unknown (it will allow Russia to send significant volumes of gas to Europe bypassing the Ukrainian gas transport system, - ed.).There is a small chance that the construction of Nord Stream 2 will still be stopped, although with each month these chances decrease. Therefore, the fate of the transit contract with Gazprom, which will end at the end of the year, is also unclear."

Related: Ukraine's corruption schemes are called gas independenceThe Cossacks in Ukraine, who are concentrated in the south and east and number upwards of a million, are among those most likely to identify themselves not as Russian Orthodox but as just Orthodox

Cossacks in Ukraine and Russia are not the unquestioning soldiers of empire and repression that Moscow, Hollywood and the Western media routinely portray them as being. Certainly, some of the neo-Cossacks that President Vladimir Putin has created to more or less surreptitiously carry out the Kremlins agenda at home and abroad do fit that model. But the overwhelming majority, who outnumber these official Cossacks by more than four to one ( Kaluga24.tv , March 18, 2019), want freedom for themselves and respect the freedom of others, choosing to defend Ukraine rather that help Putin dismember it (Rufabula.com, June 4, 2014; Krymr.com, June 5, 2018; Windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com, June 5, 2014 and June 5, 2018 ).

This should come as no surprise: Many Cossacks have long had close links with Ukrainians given that their largest host lives astride the Russian-Ukrainian border. In Russias Kuban region, for example, Ukrainian was, in early Soviet times, the official language; and many Kuban Cossacks still speak it and thus are still part of the extended Ukrainian cultural community. Such cultural links are even stronger among most Cossacks living in Ukraine itself, with many identifying with the Ukrainian nation or even believing that most Ukrainians are Cossacks (Svobodnaya Pressa, May 11, 2017; Russian7.ru, April 17, 2018; Windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com, May 14, 2017 and April 17, 2018 ).

The Cossacks in Ukraine, who are concentrated in the south and east and number upwards of a million, are among those most likely to identify themselves not as Russian Orthodox but as just Orthodox. Such a characterization serves as a means for the Ukrainian Cossacks to stress their own nationhood. Moreover, that self-identity idiosyncrasy becomes an important halfway house toward making the transition to the autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Universal Patriarch in Constantinople officially granted a tomos of autocephaly (independence) to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church earlier this year. Though the exact numbers of Ukraines Cossacks who reject the Russian Orthodox label are unknown, the trend is clearespecially now that more than 500 parishes of the Moscow Patriarchatelinked Church in Ukraine have changed sides ( Dsnews.ua , June 1, 2017; UNIAN, March 19, 2019).

To the extent it continues, this development will help Kyiv in its drive to build a national church and solidify the countrys independence. However, an even more important echo of Ukrainian autocephaly is now sounding within the borders of the Russian Federation, where the All-Cossack Social Center has formed its own Cossack Orthodox Apostolic Church and announced that it will seek a grant of autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople just as Kyiv has.

That may strike many as unthinkable: it certainly is for Putin partisans. But it has deep and completely understandable roots in the Soviet past. The Kremlins propaganda notwithstanding, Orthodoxy in Russia today is, if anything, even more divided than Orthodoxy in Ukraine. In the Russian Federation, there exist, of course, the officially supported but hollow Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and the largely tolerated and much more committed Old Believer communities. But there is also a popular and semi-underground catacomb church, which rejects the Soviet-captured and Kremlin-supported official Orthodox structure. The catacomb church is subject to increasing attackand that has widespread support among Cossacks ( Ostrova.org , accessed March 19; Windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com , March 11).

Behind this link up of the catacomb church and Cossacks in Russia is the rejection by the latter of the Moscow Patriarchates notion that Orthodox believers are slaves of God. Cossacks have never been anyones slaves, the organizers say; and they point to the existence of a separate and distinct Cossack church since the 18th century, when Russian rulers completely destroyed the sovereignty of this special people, Artur Priymak of NG Religii says ( NG Religii , December 18, 2018).

Members of the Cossack church, the journalist continues, view Ivan Mazepa as a hero, want to canonize Bohdan Khmelnitsky, and insist on the rehabilitation of Grigory Semenov, Gerasim Vdovenko, Petr and Semen Krasnov, Andrey Shkuro, Gelmut von Pannwitz and many other Cossack heroes killed by the Bolsheviks. Its leaders expect to receive autocephaly from Constantinople Patriarch Bartholemew on the model of Ukraine. According to Priymak, the leaders of this church movement say that the main population of Ukraine consists of ethnic Cossacks [and the] Cossack church will not interfere in Ukrainian affairs. The Cossacks of the Russian Federation are now ready to conclude an alliance with any political force that calls for the recognition of the rights of the Cossack people, a nation some estimate to include as many as five million in all. That makes the Cossacks the third largest nation in Russia, after the ethnic Russians and the Tatars ( NG Religii , December 18, 2018).

The Cossack church does not yet have its own building, given Russian government opposition to it. But it has announced plans to build one in Podolsk not far from the private Museum of the Anti-Bolshevik Resistance, which is largely devoted to the efforts of the Cossacks to defeat Joseph Stalin during World War II, Priymak writes. For many in Russia and the West, this may seem an ethnographic curiosity, amusing but not terribly important. However, it is anything but. This is almost certainly the most likely and powerful way that the independence of the Ukrainian Church will undermine the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate within the Russian Federation.

Were this independent Cossack church to legally take shape, it would deprive the Moscow Patriarchate of hundreds if not thousands of parishes, in addition to those the Russian Church is currently losing in Ukraine. Moreover, it would give Ukraine a powerful ally within Russia, one that would make it more difficult for the Kremlin to continue its aggression against Ukraine and its repression at home. And it would give Cossack nationalism a boost.

For all those reasons, Moscow is certain to crack down on the Russian Cossacks catacomb church. Yet, the consequences may go against the Russian authorities intent: The catacomb church will simply go more deeply underground, and its Cossack adherents will see this as yet another manifestation of the liquidation of their ancestors that Moscow conducted in the first decades of Soviet power. That will further raise non-official Russian Cossacks interest in developments in Kyiv (and vice versa) as well as provide one more reason to look to the Ukrainian model for the future.A transition similar to the one underway in Kazakhstan has been actively discussed in Moscow

An aging leader steps down as president but keeps a firm grip on the reins of power. For many in the Kremlin, the choreographed events unfolding in neighboring Kazakhstan are a model for Russian President Vladimir Putin to consider.

Unlike his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev, however, nobodys certain Putin could pull off a transfer of power without triggering destabilizing infighting among rival Kremlin camps that currently is held in check by his rule. The political and personal risks to Putin are high.

A transition similar to the one underway in Kazakhstan has been actively discussed in Moscow, said Andrei Kolyadin, a former presidential administration official who now works as a political consultant for the Kremlin. The Nazarbayev scenario could suit the political elite, which wants to have an arbiter who can influence the process after the successor takes over, he said.

This weeks decision by Nazarbayev, 78, to hand the presidency to a trusted ally, while retaining key powers as Kazakh security council chief and leader of the nation for life, has thrown the issue into sharp relief. Putin, 66, won a fourth and presumably final term with a record 77 percent in elections last year. Hes crushed political opposition and centralized power in his own hands since he was first elected in 2000, becoming so dominant that many Russians find it hard to name potential successors even as his popularity has declined.

Putin, whose term ends in 2024, hasnt anointed anyone as his heir, while saying repeatedly that he wont change the constitution to extend his rule. That didnt stop Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russias lower house of parliament, raising the possibility of constitutional reform in December.

Some within the ruling elite are pressing the Russian leader to remain president for as long as possible, three people close to the Kremlin said, asking not to identified discussing internal matters. Options being explored include pressing neighboring Belarus into uniting with Russia to create a new state so that Putin can sidestep constitutional term limits. Theres no agreed scenario for a transition, the people said.

Even so, Putin cant stay on forever - hes mortal, said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies Russias ruling elite at the State University of Administration in Moscow If he doesnt prepare the ground for succession it will end badly. Everyone will be at each others throats.

Putin already once engineered a handover of the presidency to his protege Dmitry Medvedev to comply with the constitutional ban on more than two consecutive terms. Medvedev was president from 2008-2012 and Putin took over his role as prime minister, continuing to run the country until he returned to the Kremlin after four years.

This time, Putin could transfer key presidential powers to the security council or an advisory body called the State Council, both of which he heads now, then use them to exercise influence once he leaves the Kremlin, according to political analysts in Moscow.

Such thought exercises have nothing to do with whats discussed in the Kremlin, Putins spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on a conference call Thursday. Officials have a busy working agenda aimed at implementing the presidents campaign promises for the end of his term, he said.

The Kremlin will monitor how much control Nazarbayev exercises in Kazakhstan and how power gets redistributed under the new arrangement, said Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Russia and Kazakhstan have a similar economic structure and type of authoritarianism, he said.

Still, there are doubts whether Russias feuding elites would continue to respect Putins authority if he handed the presidency to someone else, said Sergei Markov, a political consultant to the Kremlin. While Kazakhs may allow Nazarbayev to be a mentor figure like Singapores founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, in Putins case, if he left, he would face an immediate challenge, he said.

Its impossible to repeat Nazarbayevs strategy because the Russian political system is more complicated than the Kazakh one, said Arkady Dubnov, a political expert based in Moscow who specializes in central Asia.

Protect Legacy

The election of Nazarbayevs eldest child, Dariga, as the Kazakh Senates new chairwoman on Wednesday, putting her first in the line of succession to the presidency under the constitution, is an example Putin has signaled hes unlikely to follow with his own daughters.

Resistance in Belarus to being absorbed by Russia also makes it hard for the Kremlin to pursue the option of Putin leading a new state, said Kryshtanovskaya.

Already the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Putin will face increasing pressure to protect his legacy as the clock ticks down on his fourth term. The former KGB officer may find himself caught between a desire to preserve political legitimacy by making way for a successor and the challenge of keeping control of the system of power hes built up over nearly two decades.

Putin can only envy Nazarbayevs actions, Dubnov said. It wont work for him.He was arrested for two days due to resisting police workers

Yuriy Meshkov, former president of Crimea Krym.Realii

Ex-president of Crimea Yury Meshkov was released after two days of arrest as Crimea.Realii reported citing Serhy Akimov, the leader of so-called Crimean Cossacks.

The arrest of Meshkov ended on March 21.

I feel OK. I interpret my arrest as a police operation, Meshkov said.

He also emphasized that he was going to continue the political fight against the improper leadership of Crimea.

Earlier, the Kremlin-controlled Central District Court of occupied Simferopol arrested the ex-president of Crimea. The man ended up behind the bars, as they detained him for 'resisting police workers'.

The actual detention took place on March 18, as an unknown person contacted the local law enforcers, stating that Meshkov was under the influence of some psychoactive substance. They took him in and examined him; according to Meshkov himself, no traces of alcohol or drugs were found in his blood.

In late February, ex-president of Crimea Yuriy Meshkov criticized the incumbent pro-Kremlin government of Crimea for 'treachery' against Russia during the annexation of the peninsula in 2014.

Meshkov, born in Dnipropetrovsk region, is a former Crimean politician and lawyer. In 1994-1995, he served as the first and the only president of Crimea, and also as the federal representative of the Council of Ministers of Crimea in 1994.The price per a quarter could be lower but it is too early to discuss a particular price

From left to right: Gazprom head Alexey Miller, Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev, Ukrainian presidential candidate Yuriy Boyko and Viktor Medvedchuk. Gas talks on March 22, 2019 Government of th Russian Federation

Russias Gazprom is ready to hold direct negotiations on the concluding of a new contract for the Russian gas supply to the Ukrainian market. Alexey Miller, the Head of company made such statement during the meeting with the Delegation of Political Party Opposition platform  For life headed by Viktor Medvedchuk, the chairman of political council and Yuriy Boyko, the founder of the party and presidential candidate, and Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev.

Of course, it is early to talk about particular price and contract. But, knowing about the high level of price for the end-consumers, which is present at the Ukrainian market today, it is possible to say that the price at the new contract will be lower for quarter for the end-consumer in Ukraine in comparison with the current level, Miller said.

In his turn, Medvedev noted that Gazprom Head publicly, in the presence of mass media, made very important statement. Lets continue the discussion of these issues, which are really sharp, especially in the current situation. I mean the cooperation in the gas sphere, prices at the inner market and current state of affairs in the trade and economic cooperation between our countries, the Russian Prime Minister said.

Earlier, Boyko stated that the direct supplies of the gas to Ukraine without intermediaries is the main issue at the negotiations.The e-mail, where the fake messages were sent from was created in the Russian Federation. The messages contained the fake rules of the election procedure

The hackers from the Russian Federation have spread some fake messages on the behalf of Arsen Avakov, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. In these messages, they supported one of the presidential candidates in Ukranian elections. The Cyber Police reported this on Facebook.

Those fake messages from the police workers encouraged the officers to pay special attention to the violations of the legislature by the members of the election commission and observers from the opponents side of the candidate the messages supported, - the report said.

According to the report, the e-mail, where the fake messages were sent from was created on the territoriy of the Russian Federation on March 21, 2019. Besides, the culprits used anonymous means to prevent their identification by police workers.

Earlier, Ukraines Security Service informed about prevention of a large-scale cyber attack on the website of the Central Election Commission.

It was noted that the cyber attack was targeted at the computer equipment, which provides the work of the commissions official website.

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko stated that the Central Election Commission of Ukraine had suffered the cyber attack from Russia on February 24 and 25.The convict set an explosive on the platform of Industrialna station, as crowds of people amassed on it; the culprit was taken in immediately

Bomber arrested in Kharkiv metro, March 2019 SBU

Workers of SBU, the state security service of Ukraine reported that a man was detained in Kharkiv underground while preparing a terrorist attack. The malefactor set an explosive charge on the station's platform as a large crowd of people amassed there.

'The man was recruited by the Russian special service in order to organize and execute the terrorist act at an underground station. According to the plan of his curators, the explosion was supposed to lead to numerous casualties, resulting in the destabilization of the political situation in the country shortly before the presidential election', the message says.

According to the SBU report, the Russian special service passed the convict a 600-gram TNT charge, which was supposed to be activated with a phone call. The Russian agents also provided the culprit with instructions on how to prepare the attack and paid him USD 15,000 for the crime.

In Kharkiv, the malefactor bought nails, bolts and screws, which he planned to use to fill the charge, in order to boost its devastating effect.

The SBU opened a criminal case under respective articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The criminal faces from five to ten years behind the bars.The date will be chosen by the families of the deceased ones

Open source

The Ministry of Veteran Affairs of Ukraine plans to appoint the Commemoration Day of the participants of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The press service of the Ministry of Veteran Affairs reports this.

According to the Ministry, the families of the deceased servicemen will choose the accurate date.

The Ministry supports the initiative to appoint the separate date of the commemoration of the deceased soldiers and to set the Commemoration Day in Ukraine. This date should be appointed by the families of the deceased soldiers. Their propositions will be taken into account and will be represented to the higher authorities, said Oksana Havryliuk, the Deputy Minister of Veteran Affairs of Ukraine.

The decision to poll the families of the deceased ones was taken during the session of the Ministrys working group. The representatives of the Ministry will conduct those polls in each region of Ukraine separately. The results will be represented to the higher authorities.Boryspil International Airport will be hosting KBP Runway Run, the major sport event on Sunday. On March 24, runners will participate in the large-scale race, dedicated to the beginning of the spring and summer navigation season. The team of 112 Ukraine TV channel is going to join the race, a big sport family festival.

The distance will be set on Runway 2. The runners will be able to complete the distance of their choosing, either 3.5 or 10 kilometers. The 5-km Nordic walking contest will be taking place simultaneously.

The overall audience of KBP Runway Run makes some 4,000 people, with about 2,700 getting ready to run. The organizers of the event marked that anyone could join the race, regardless of age or physical fitness. Every participant will get a symbolic memorial trophy.

General Director of Kyiv Boryspil Airport Pavlo Ryabikin added that thanks to this festival, passengers will remember their flights from Boryspil, the holiday mood and nice surprises related to the race.

The organizers remind the participants that in order to enter the airport's premises, one needs to carry the passport.The tourists will need a foreign passport to cross this country's border; the period of visa-free stay amounts up to 30 days. Otherwise, they will need to get a visa via the respective diplomatic establishment

Since April 14, Ukrainian citizens will be able to visit Thailand without the need to process visas - granted that the period of visa-free stay does not exceed 30 days. The Department of Consulate Service of Ukraine's foreign ministry posted that on Facebook.

'One will need a foreign passport (biometric or non-biometric); the period of visa-free stay amounts up to 30 days', the authority reported. 'For the period of stay of more than 30 days, regardless the purpose of the visit, one will need to get a visa in the respective diplomatic office or the consulate', the Foreign Ministry reported.

Ukraine is currently negotiating on the visa-free regime with 22 countries. So far, Ukraine enjoys the visa-free regime with 128 countries worldwide.

Previously, we reported that since March 1, Ukrainians have the opportunity to travel to Georgia, using their ID cards.Military equipment and uniforms did not have any marking plates on them, which pointed to their belonging to Russia

Oleg Belaventsev, Russian President Representative to annexed Crimea Open source

The operation on taking over Crimea began in December 2013. 10,500 Russian servicemen participated in it, reads the verdict of Kyiv Svyatoshynsky District Court for Oleg Belaventsev, Russian President Representative to annexed Crimea.

The judge Serhiy Dyachuk announced the verdict on March 18. The document was published in the Unified Registry of court decisions on March 21.

In total, within the period from February 20 till March 16, 2014 some 10,500 Russian servicemen were illegally transported from Russia to Crimea through Kerch Strait ferry line by railways, water and air transport, the courts verdict says.

The document reads that there were ten tanks, eight missile launchers, 80 tools, 25 self-propelled field artillery, 80 air defence systems, 16 front-line bombers and some 640 trucks.

As it was reported, military equipment and uniform did not have any marking plates, which pointed to their belonging to Russia.

The court noted that many pro-Russian movies are posted on the Internet, which have records of damaged military equipment, airfield equipment, blockage of Ukrainian Navy vessels.

Kyiv District Svyatoshynsky Court sentenced Russian citizen Oleg Belaventsev to 13 years of imprisonment. He is accused of violating the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, incitement to state treason and aggressive war against Ukraine.The 28-countries bloc stated that the Ukrainian doctors should be allowed to see him

Pavlo Gryb, the Ukrainian political prisoner Hromadske

The Press Secretary of the EU Diplomatic Service commented on the sentence of 20-year-old Ukrainian Pavlo Gryb who has been illegally kept in the Russian prison. The respective claim was published on their website.

The European Union expects Mr. Gryb to be immediately released and granted access to the special medical treatment he needs. For so long as he remains in detention, Ukrainian doctors must be allowed to see him as required by a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights, - the report said.

As we reported earlier, on March 22, the Russian court sentenced Ukrainian Pavlo Gryb to six years in standard regime penal colony for terrorism. Pavlo Gryb announced a hunger strike.

As is known, Pavlo Gryb is the son of the former Ukrainian border guard Ihor Gryb. Russian special agency detained the 19-year-old boy on August 25, 2017, when he went to Gomel (Belarus) to meet his friend. Later, he was convoyed to Russia. The Russian law enforcers suspect Pavlo Gryb of preparing a terrorist attack at a school in Sochi (a city in Krasnodar Krai, Russia, located on the Black Sea coast, - 112 International).

Pavlo Gryb was not allowed to see his mother and the Ukrainian consul. Russia promises to give permission to the meeting with the consul, but only after the verdict. Yet, the consular convention signed between Ukraine and Russia does not provide for such refusal.

On March 21, Ukrainian political prisoner Pavlo Gryb delivered his last plea in North Caucasus military court in Rostov-on Don, Russia.Pavlo Gryb, the Ukrainian political prisoner Hromadske

Ihor Gryb, the father of Pavlo Gryb and ex-officer of the Border Guard Service has commented on the decision of Russias court, which sentenced his son to six years in the prison for urges to commit the terrorist acts in Sochi, comparing it to the death sentence as 112 Ukraine reported.

It was predictable; we did not count for some acquittal. Six years were asked by the prosecutor. and the court completely granted the request, he said.

At the same time, the father of the Ukrainian prisoner emphasized that he had no illusions about the appeal and reconsideration of the verdict. I can state that is the death verdict. Pavlo needs urgent surgery, which will allow him to continue living. This term is the automatic delivering of the death verdict, he added.

Commenting information about the hunger strike of Pavlo, his father said that it would accelerate his death: He cannot starve; he categorically cannot starve and I, of course, stand against it. A week, or two, or three - I do not know how long it will take before Pavlo dies.

According to him, the Russian side is informed for a long time about the necessity of surgery for Pavlo Gryb; however, it does not assume any actions for it.

I saw my son before the abduction on August 24, 2017, for the last time; in other words, 19 months ago. I could not come to Rostov-on-Don, the Russian Federation, so I see him only on TV as all of you, Ihor Gryb said, adding that his son got only one letter from him during the illegal arrest.

On March 22, the Russian court sentenced Ukrainian Pavlo Gryb to six years in standard regime penal colony for 'terrorism'. Gryb announced a hunger strike.

As is known, Pavlo Gryb is the son of the former Ukrainian border guard Ihor Gryb. Russian special agency detained the 19-year-old boy on August 25, 2017, when he went to Gomel (Belarus) to meet his friend. Later, he was convoyed to Russia. The Russian law enforcers suspect Pavlo Gryb of preparing a terrorist attack at a school in Sochi (a city in Krasnodar Krai, Russia, located on the Black Sea coast, - 112 International).

Pavlo Gryb was not allowed to see his mother and the Ukrainian consul. Russia promises to give permission to the meeting with the consul, but only after the verdict. Yet, the consular convention signed between Ukraine and Russia does not provide for such refusal.

On March 21, Ukrainian political prisoner Pavlo Gryb delivered his last plea in North Caucasus military court in Rostov-on Don, Russia.

Related video:Zolote checkpoint will be opened in the morning of March 24

The Ukrainian side intends to open the checkpoint Zolote in Luhansk region at the border with occupied territories on March 24. This checkpoint should facilitate the work of Stanytsia Luhanska, the only checkpoint in the region as Interfax-Ukraine reported citing Iryna Gerashchenko, the representative of Ukraine at Trilateral Contact Group.

Zolote checkpoint will be opened on Sunday morning, Gerashchenko reported.

In his turn, Ukraines representative at the Trilateral Contact Group Yevhen Marchuk reminded that the opening of Zolote checkpoint was provided by Normandy Four decision in Berlin in 2016.

According to him, the issue of the opening of this checkpoint was raised a few times at the sessions of the Trilateral Contact Group.

There were different arguments, even absurd, not to open Zolote checkpoint, Marchuk noted.

He also said that the Ukrainian side repeatedly held all necessary engineering and technical works: demining, repair, clearance of the roadside; it prepares people for work (doctors, border guards, other specialists), preliminary informing the other side, first of all Russians, about the readiness to open Zolote.

The Ukrainian side spent over $260,233 for these preparation works, Marchuk said.

He specified that almost 135,077 people live on both sides of the demarcation line near Zolote checkpoint: 77,000 at the side controlled by Ukraine and over 57,000 at the opposite side. According to him, almost 38,000 people per day pass six working checkpoints.

According to the predictions of Marchuk, the number of people, who will pass all checkpoints on Easter and memorial days, is going to increase to 50,000 people per day.

By opening Zolote we simplify the pass for people, he emphasized.

Checkpoint Stanytsia Luhanska is situated in 120 km from Zolote and Mayorske is in 80 km.

The previous attempts of Ukraine to open Zolote checkpoint ended unsuccessfully due to the constant refusals and obstacles of the militants.

As we reported the entry-exit checkpoint Novotroitroitske in Donbas was closed for 24 hour.

Earlier, all checkpoints at the boundary line in Donbas switched to the spring work schedule from March 1, and the new schedule was established.Pavlo Gryb, the Ukrainian political prisoner Hromadske

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine strongly protests because of the unlawful decision of the North Caucasus Regional Military Court to sentence Pavlo Gryb to six years in prison under the fake accusations in terrorist activity on March 22. It is stated in the claim of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.

The Russian party severely violated the norms and principles of international law, starting with the brutal detaining of Pavlo Gryb in the city of Gomel (Belarus) on August 24, 2017, then refusing to give the information on his whereabouts for a long time, illegally putting him into custody in Krasnodar and Rostov-on-Don, not providing him with the necessary medical treatment and the unlawful sentencing by the court. The facts on the falsified charges, threats, physical and psychological violence from the Russian security forces, which Gryb testified during the court hearing, were defiantly rejected by the court, - the report said.

According to the Ministry, the Russian party severely violated human rights, including the right on the faircourt hearing and the right for life, with this decision.

Gryb cannot withstand the transfer and arrest in inhuman conditions of the Russian penalty system because of his obtained extremely severe illnesses. Pavlo Gryb needs the constant high-quality supervision of doctors, a regular comprehensive medical examination and hospitalization, - the report said.

The Ministry of the Foreign Affairs of Ukraine demands from Russia to cancel the verdict in Grybs case and to provide him with medical treatment that he could be safely transferred to Ukraine. Besides, the Ministry called for the international society to put pressure on Russia in order them to stop the severe violations of human rights and to release illegally detained Gryb.

Ukraine continues to use all the possible political and diplomatic means in order to release Pavlo Gryb and other detained citizens of Ukraine, who were illegally convicted because of the political motives on territories of the Russian Federation and in Crimea, the report added.

Pavlo Klimkin, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, called for the whole civilized world to apply pressure on Russia for the soonest release of Pavlo Gryb. The aggressor state does not know what mercy, humanity, and dignity mean. The Russian fake fair court system sentenced seriously ill Pavlo Gryb to six years-long imprisonment. Instead of medical care and surgery, which he critically needs, Pavlo was sentenced to six years of the colony, like according to the best Stalinist traditions. This is how the Russian judiciary system works, - Klimkin stated.

Earlier, on March 22, the Russian court sentenced Ukrainian Pavlo Gryb to six years in standard regime penal colony for terrorism. Pavlo Gryb announced a hunger strike.

As is known, Pavlo Gryb is the son of the former Ukrainian border guard Ihor Gryb. Russian special agency detained the 19-year-old boy on August 25, 2017, when he went to Gomel (Belarus) to meet his friend. Later, he was convoyed to Russia. The Russian law enforcers suspect Pavlo Gryb of preparing a terrorist attack at a school in Sochi (a city in Krasnodar Krai, Russia, located on the Black Sea coast, - 112 International).Artem Sytnyk confessed that sometimes in his private conversations, he could mention some media publications about interference in the U.S. election process as a joke

Artem Sytnyk, the Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine focus.ua

Ukraines National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) had no influence on the presidential elections in the U.S. in 2016. NABU Head Artem Sytnyk said so in his statement broadcasted by 112 Ukraine.

Neither me, nor the workers of the anti-corruption bureau had influenced the election process in the U.S. I will not comment on the legitimacy and authenticity of the recordings of my personal conversations; at the same time, I can say that I have mentioned publications in the media about some alleged interference in the presidential elections in the U.S. as a joke, Sytnyk stated.

NABU Head added that he had nothing to hide; therefore, he was ready to confirm this to any competent authority.

March 14, the Ukrainian MP Boryslav Rosenblat accused NABU Head Sytnyk of leaking black accounts of the Party of Regions to the headquarters of the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. Rosenblat gave a USB flash drive with audio records of Sytnyks conversation.

The leaks of black accounts in the U.S. media led to Manaforts resign. It also lead to one of the main accusations in the investigation of collusion with Russia. This probe against Trump has been carried out for over two years now.Thank's for the fish. -- Douglas Adams

Come back again sometime. Thank you for visiting.PLEASE NOTE!

Due to the March 23, 2020 NM DOH Public Health Order, These Event Listings Are Not Accurate!

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(One day some of these events will be rescheduled or will resume, but they are not happening now!)Welcome to followthemedia.com The article or material you have chosen...

Michael Hedges March 22, 2019 -

The out-of-service sign has been hung on the term fake news. Collins English Dictionary anointed it word of the year in 2017 after a tsunami of fake news, fake ads and fake video created a vast undertow. People were drowning in it, for it and with it. Then in that most post-modern way clever dictators usurped the term, changing it into criticism of criticism. Fake news has always been about creating confusion. Now we talk about disinformation. Names Change, Truth At RiskMichael Hedges March 22, 2019 - Follow on Twitter The out-of-service sign has been hung on the term fake news. Collins English Dictionary anointed it word of the year in 2017 after a tsunami of fake news, fake ads and fake video created a vast undertow. People were drowning in it, for it and with it. Then in that most post-modern way clever dictators usurped the term, changing it into criticism of criticism. Fake news has always been about creating confusion. Now we talk about disinformation. ...is available for restricted access. You may access this specific article or material for 4 If you are an ftm Member, please go to the home page HERE and log in ftm Members can access all site material at no additional charge. You can JOIN ftm here The ftm newsletter available at no charge to all with registration To register click here.Hong Kong: HK the prime Belt-Road platform

Hong Kong is the prime platform for Hungarian enterprises in partake in the Belt & Road Initiative, Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Edward Yau said.

Speaking to over 100 Hungarian business leaders and chamber representatives at a reception in Budapest, Mr Yau said Hong Kong has all along maintained close bilateral ties with Hungary, which is Hong Kong's largest trading partner in the Central and Eastern European region.

With Hong Kong's unique advantages under "one country, two systems" as well as its traditional strengths as a maritime, trade, financial and services hub, Hong Kong enterprises and professionals can offer world-class services to Hungarian enterprises and explore the Belt & Road opportunities together, he added.

Leading a delegation comprising more than 30 business people and professionals as well as representatives of start-ups to visit Hungary, Mr Yau met Magyar Nemzeti Bank Deputy Governor Ferenc Gerhardt, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs & Trade Levente Magyar, and State Secretary for Financial Affairs Gabor Gion to learn about Hungary's monetary and fiscal policy, economic development plans as well as the overall investment and business environment in the region.

The delegation also visited Rail Cargo Hungaria Zrt - the subsidiary of a leading rail logistics specialist in Europe that links trade routes within Europe and from Europe to Asia - to understand the logistics infrastructure development there.

This story has been published on: 2019-03-22. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.In addition to the fact that limousine travel is very glamorous, it is also the most comfortable trip you can...Bleubeard and I welcome you

Art, including the journey, background techniques, sewing on both paper and fabric, new experiments, photos, failures, and successes will be shared on this site. I have removed my e-mail address until such time as I can get it to work again. Thank you for understanding. You can always leave a note on my blog and I will visit you.



Please check out my Previous Collaborations link above to see what projects I have been involved in over the past ten years. Current and ongoing projects only are shown below.



Occasionally, Silent Sunday will showcase photos of my home, neighborhood, or community. A picture is often worth a thousand words.



Feel free to drop by every second Thursday of the month for my Second Thursday Tutorials. They are interspersed with my other Tutorials found at the link above.

YEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Armenias state agencies are preparing to properly host Iranian tourists during their New Year  Nowruz.

The Tourism Committee of Armenia told Armenpress that they attach importance to the strengthening and development of the Armenian-Iranian cooperation, as well as providing favorable conditions to Iranian tourists. The Committee informed that this year as well it has requested the instructions of the Armenian Prime Minister. According to them, mobile ambulance service will operate in certain parts, mainly visible sites of Yerevan-Meghri highway during the Nowruz days.

The ministry of transport, communication and information technologies will ensure the lighting and improvement of the Yerevan-Meghri highway. Iranian tourists will be provided with the updated version of Persian journals on Armenia and Yerevan at the border checkpoints. The Police of Armenia will ensure enhanced traffic control on the Yerevan-Meghri highway. At the same time, a proposal was made to the Mayor of Yerevan to ensure the launch of fountains of the Republic Square during the Iranian New Year.

The Tourism Committee informs that in recent years activeness has been registered in the Iranian tourist visits to Armenia. Staring from 2014, including 2017 as well, the visits from Iran to Armenia have dynamically increased. In 2014 116.324 Iranians visited Yerevan, in 2015  144.160, 2016  188.851, 2017  220.147. But in 2018 a decline was registered, the number of Iranians visiting Armenia comprised 160.645. The Committee said this decline is linked with the economic situation in Iran.

At the same time its worth noting that the tourism season has already been extended in Armenia, and the active season starts in March instead of April, mainly thanks to the visits from Iran to Armenia. Iranians celebrate their New Year in March and prefer to spend their holidays in Armenia.

Armenia and Iran signed a Memorandum of Understanding on June 5, 2016 relating to the visa-free visits which has been ratified by the Armenian Parliament on June 17, 2016.

The actions carried out within the framework of the cooperation aim at strengthening the future tourism partnership of Armenia and Iran, ensuring growth in tourist visits between the two countries, forming an Armenia-Iran joint regional tourism result and properly presenting this in the international market. In particular, a cognitive visit has been organized for the Armenian and Iranian tour operators and specialized journalists.

By the support of the Tourism Committee, EXPO Group plans to hold the 6th InTour Expo 2019 international tourism exhibition in Yerevan from April 26 to 28. On the sidelines of the Armenia-Iran public-private partnership, an invitation will be send to the Iranian side to participate in the EXPO by providing a pavilion for free.

Reported by Anna Gziryan

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Within the frames of Clean Armenia program, on March 23, from early morning the republic-wide clean-up will be started in Yerevan, the City Hall told Armenpress.

On this day it is planned to clean up all public areas, lawns, parks and squares. Tree pruning will also be continued, besides, tree planting is also provided for, noted acting head of the Department of Nature Protection Khachik Hakobyan.

Tree planting will be carried out in concrete irrigated areas.

On March 23, about 5000 trees are to be planted. Besides traditional sorts of trees it is planned to plant flowering trees as well.

The action will be accompanied by festive events. Via phone numbers functioning in all administrative districts citizens can get information on the addresses where the actions will be carried out.YEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The traffic department of the Georgian ministry of infrastructures told Armenias ministry of transport, communication and information technologies that on March 22, as of 10:00, the Stepanstminda-Lars highway is open for all types of vehicles, the ministry told Armenpress.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The international community celebrates March 22 as World Water Day. The day has been declared by the UN decision in 1993, aimed at valuing the importance of this resource for life.

The Veolia Water told Armenpress that this years slogan is Leaving No One Behind which is very relevant and also obliging for the company the leadership of which today is holding its annual meeting to discuss the 2018 results and outline the programs for 2019.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia on March 22 put into circulation the Galouste Gulbenkian-150 collector coin, the CBA told Armenpress.

The collector coin has been designed by Haroutiun Samuelian (obverse) and Vardan Vardanyan (reverse). It has been minted in the Lithuanian Mint.

Obverse: the monument symbolizing the collective image of Armenian benefactor (Alley of Armenian Benefactors memorial complex) and bilingual inscription GRATITUDE.

Reverse: the portrait of Galouste Gulbenkian and his signature.

Nominal value 10 000 dram

Metal and alloy gold 900

Weight 8,6 g

Diameter 22,0 mm

Quality proof

Edge ribbed

Quantity 1000 pcs

Galouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955), a renowned Armenian businessman and philanthropist, was the leading authority in the oil industry at the beginning of the 20th century and one of the most influential figures in oil diplomacy. He had good knowledge of oil reserves of Mesopotamia and dealt with oil exporting. In 1930 he was elected as president of the Armenian General Benevolent Union in Paris. According to Gulbenkians will, the Calouste Gulbenkian foundation was established in Lisbon in 1956, which has since provided financial support to the Armenian cultural associations, Armenian schools and churches of the Diaspora and bestowed scholarships to Armenian schoolchildren and students. Gulbenkian owned a rich collection of works of art, coins and art books, which is exclusively presented in the galleries of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.

Notice

Collector coins are made of precious metals and are issued to present to the society the national, international, historical and cultural, spiritual and other values of the country, to immortalize these values in the metal and to meet the demands of the numismatic market. Like any other currency the collector coins have face value which makes them the means of payment. However, the face value of these coins is much lower that their cost price which includes the cost of the precious metal used for manufacturing of the coin, mintage and other expenses. Low face value and high cost price allow these coins to be considered as the items of collection and not the means of payment used in money circulation. The collector coins have also the sale price set by the Central Bank of Armenia. As the items of collection the collector coins are issued in very restricted quantities and are not reissued. Numismatists, collectors and all interested persons can buy the Armenian collector coins in the sales salon Numismatist which is in the building of the Central Bank of Armenia and is open for everyone.YEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian held a telephone conversation with President of Kazakhstan Kasim-Zhomart Tokayev to congratulate him on assuming office, the Presidential Office told Armenpress.

President Sarkissian expressed confidence that the current friendship and traditions of mutual respect between the two countries and peoples will continue to serve as a reliable base for the further development and deepening of the mutually beneficial cooperation between Armenia and Kazakhstan.

The Armenian President wished Kasim-Zhomart Tokayev good health and all the best, and peace and prosperity to the good people of Kazakhstan.

Armen Sarkissian also sent a congratulatory letter to Kasim-Zhomart Tokayev which in particular says: I am confident that we will be able to give new impetus to raising the effectiveness of inter-state cooperation with joint efforts.

Nursultan Nazarbayev has resigned from the post of President of Kazakhstan on March 19.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian had a telephone conversation with new chair of the Senate (upper house of parliament) of Kazakhstan Dariga Nazarbaeyva to congratulate her on assuming office, the Armenian Presidents Office told Armenpress.

During the phone talk the Armenian President expressed confidence that Dariga Nazarbaeyvas rich experience and knowledge will serve at best to the future progress of friendly Kazakhstan, as well as the development of the Armenian-Kazakh inter-parliamentary ties.

President Sarkissian wished Nazarbaeva health, energy and success in her responsible activity, and peace and welfare to the good people of Kazakhstan.

Armen Sarkissian also sent a congratulatory letter to Dariga Nazarbaeyva, where he expressed hope that the current friendly ties and mutual respect between the two peoples will contribute to deepening the effective cooperation of the parliaments of the two states.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The Luys (Light) faction of the Yerevan City Council wants the Irina Rodnina Figure-Skating School to be renamed. The party has launched an initiative seeking to rename the school, which operates since 2015, to Armenian-Russian Figure-Skating School.

Irina Rodnina is a renowned retired Russian figure skater and politician.

The Luys faction said during todays City Council meeting that they want the school to be renamed after Rodninas controversial statements made in Azerbaijan.

The bill is ready, and we propose the other two factions to join it, which will enable brining the issue to the agenda, councillor Ani Khachatryan from Luys said.

The two other factions agreed to include the issue in the agenda.

Edited and translated by Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan on March 22 had a meeting with the representatives of the "Artsakh Small and Medium Entrepreneurship Development Association" NGO to discuss diverse issues on the development of small and medium business in Artsakh, the Presidents Office told Armenpress.

President Sahakyan spoke of the importance of enhancing the role of small and medium entrepreneurship for the development of the economy and holding such discussions.

State minister Grigory Martirosyan and other officials took part in the meeting.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Director of the National Security Service of Armenia Artur Vanetsyan assures that a lot of money will be returned to the state budget within the frames of several scandalous cases that are under investigation, he said during the session of the parliamentary standing committee on defense and security affairs, asked whether there are predictions in connection with the money to be returned to the budget in 2019, reports Armenpress.

In this context the forecasts for the year are ungrateful job, but I assure that a large sum of money will be returned to Armenias state budget. As the Prime Minister always states in his remarks, what has been stolen from the state should be returned. We do our job on this path, and you will see its results during the year, the NSS chief said.

The NSS is investigating a number of scandalous cases of major embezzlement by former officials.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Armenian President Armen Sarkissian has expressed condolences to Iraqi President Barham Salih on the March 21 tragic incident that took place in Mosul, claiming numerous human lives, Sarkissians Office said in a news release.

Armen Sarkissian expressed his condolences and sympathy to the Iraqi president, wishing patience and fortitude to the families and friends of the victims.

Nearly 100 people have drowned after a ferry capsized in the Tigris River near Mosul in Iraq on March 21.

Edited and translated by Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Deputy prime minister of Armenia Tigran Avinyan received the delegation of Sweden led by Minister for International Development Cooperation Peter Eriksson, the deputy PMs Office told Armenpress.

Welcoming the guest, the deputy PM said Armenia has recorded a great progress in democracy, human rights, rule of law, fight against corruption and highlighted Swedens assistance to the process of ongoing reforms in the country.

He said Armenia has established effective mutual partnership with Sweden both at bilateral and multilateral formats, in particular, within the frames of the EU Eastern Partnership.

In his turn the Swedish minister thanked for the reception and stated that significant positive changes took place in Armenia, and they want to contribute to strengthening Armenias democracy. Peter Eriksson said Sweden is ready to implement bilateral support programs for Armenia.

The sides also touched upon the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as the activities of Armenias National Innovation Center for Sustainable Development. In this context Avinyan introduced the priorities of the governments action plan which is based on the inclusive growth model and the upcoming actions.

The opportunities of cooperation in IT, alternative energy, waste management sectors were discussed during the meeting.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of Parliament of the Republic of Artsakh Ashot Ghulyan on March 22 sent a letter of gratitude to member of the House of Commons of Canada, Mrs. Rachael Harder, for the creation of a parliamentary friends group with the people of Artsakh in Ottawa on March 19 led by her, the Artsakh Parliament told Armenpress.

Dear Mrs. Harder,

On behalf of the Artsakh Parliament and personally myself, I express gratitude to you and the members of the group for the desire and determination to develop friendly relations with the people of Artsakh.

This initiative is a new institutional level of our cooperation which began two years ago by your visit to Stepanakert.

I am sure it will become an effective platform for expanding the mutually beneficial ties between Artsakh and Canada, in particular, in the sphere of humanitarian cooperation.

Ashot Ghulyan also sent a gratitude letter to executive director of the Armenian National Committee of Canada Sevak Belyan for assisting the formation of the friendship group.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The Board of Trustees of the Military Insurance Fund held its first session of 2019 today at the Defense Ministry headquarters in Yerevan, chaired by Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan, the defense ministry said in a news release.

Tonoyan also serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the fund.

During the session executive director of the fund Varuzhan Avetikyan delivered a summarized report on the annual activities regarding compensations and donations. He said that currently the collected funds have exceeded 14 billion drams and a total of 941 million was paid in compensations.

The Board of Trustees unanimously approved to also provide compensations to the families of soldiers who were killed or sustained disabilities during service in 2008-2014. The compensations process will start from April 1.

The fund is also considering providing compensations for incidents that took place even before 2008.

Edited and translated by Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) President Liliane Maury Pasquier will make an official visit to Armenia from 26 to 28 March 2019, PACE said in a press release.

During this visit, she is due to meet President Armen Sarkissian, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Speaker of the National Assembly Ararat Mirzoyan, Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and the Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Zaruhi Batoyan.

Meetings are also scheduled with leaders of political groups and Chairpersons of various parliamentary committees, as well as the Armenian delegation to PACE.

Maury Pasquier will also participate in a round table on gender issues with the Human Rights Defender and civil society representatives.

A press point is planned on Wednesday 27 March at 1 pm in parliament.

Edited and translated by Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, 22 MARCH, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 22 March, USD exchange rate down by 0.24 drams to 485.86 drams. EUR exchange rate down by 5.23 drams to 549.22 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate down by 0.06 drams to 7.58 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 3.67 drams to 636.57 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price up by 82.11 drams to 20456.95 drams. Silver price up by 3.32 drams to 242.75 drams. Platinum price up by 196.44 drams to 13621.3 drams.YEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The delegation led by Speaker of Parliament of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan being on an official visit on March 18-21 in the Federal Republic of Germany, on March 21 had meetings in Saarland University and in the Landtag (State Legislature) of the state of the Saarland, the Armenian Parliament told Armenpress.

The members of the Armenian delegation in Saarland University got acquainted with the research centres of the higher educational institution, the works being done, discussions were held between the professors of the University and their Armenian colleagues. At the end of the meeting an Agreement was signed between Saarland University and Yerevan State University.

The President of the Parliament Stephan Toscani received the members of the Armenian delegation in the Landtag (State Legislature). Welcoming the delegation led by Ararat Mirzoyan he has informed that it is a great honour for him to host the parliamentarians of Armenia. The members of the delegation got familiarized with the works of the parliament, exchanged thoughts on the activation of the inter-parliamentary relations, and the implementation of the joint programs in the Armenian-German economic, cultural and educational spheres.

Speaker Mirzoyan left a note in the Book of Honourable Guests of Parliament of the Saarland.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Law enforcement agencies in Armenia do not avoid parliamentary supervision, National Security Service Director Artur Vanetsyan told reporters today.

Vanetsyan was asked by reporters to express his opinion regarding the proposals on changes of status of the National Security Service and the national police force whereby the two would become ministries.

Currently, the NSS and the police are functioning and are subordinate directly under the prime minister.

We will comply in the event of a political decision being made, he said. But I would like to emphasize that if the purpose of this is parliamentary supervision, then today is a bright example that we are not avoiding it [parliamentary supervision]. We can come and answer the questions of lawmakers at any time, in both open and closed formats, Vanetsyan said.

Vanetsyan said the prime minister doesnt ever issue political orders to them, and the NSS is functioning by law.

I think the positions of NSS Director or Police Chief should not be politicized, because if we were to become ministers we will be officials holding political office and want it or not we will serve the interests of a given force.

Edited and translated by Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan received newly appointed Ambassador of the USA to Armenia Lynne Tracy.

ARMENPRESS was informed from the Office of the Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan welcomed Lynne Tracy, congratulated her on the appointment and wished her success in the diplomatic mission. The PM emphasized that the Armenian Government highlights the continuous development and expansion of partnership with the USA, including in political and economic spheres. The Head of the Executive noted that Armenia confidently moves in the direction of development and strengthening of democracy, fight against corruption and monopolies, protection of human rights and freedom of speech and underlined the cooperation with the USA in the mentioned direction.

Thankful for the warm welcome, Lynne Tracy said she was honored to meet with Prime Minister Pashinyan and reaffirmed the U.S. Governments strong commitment to assisting sovereign Armenia in implementing its democratic agenda and anti-corruption efforts, dealing with economic and regional bottlenecks, as well as in matters of international security. The U.S. Ambassador assured that during her tenure she would make all necessary efforts to promote the development of bilateral economic cooperation.

During the meeting, the parties discussed a number of issues on the agenda of the Armenian-American relations. Nikol Pashinyan and Lynne Tracy exchanged views on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement process and other regional issues of mutual interest.

Edited and translated by Tigran SirekanyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The results of the EUR 3.3 million project "Organic Agriculture Support Initiative (OASI)" funded by the European Union and co-funded and implemented by the Austrian Development Agency were wrapped-up on March 22. The project launched in 2015 for the development of organic agriculture in Armenia and was implemented close cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Armenia, ARMENPRESS was informed from the Organic Agriculture Support Initiative (OASI).

The closing event was combined with the presentation of the upgraded Green Training Centre (GTC) in Dzoraghbyur (Kotayk) and the opening of the new GTC in Archis (Tavush), where the project provided brand new machinery, tools and equipment to enhance the demonstration capacities of both centers. During the event, Ambassador, Head of the European Union Delegation to Armenia H.E. Mr. Piotr Switalski cut the ribbon to mark the re-opening of the Green Training Centre (GTC) and planted an organic tree.

The European Union supports agriculture as one of the main sectors of the Armenian economy contributing about 18% to the GDP and providing about 36% of the labour force. Agriculture and rural development are among the cornerstones of the broader sustainability agenda - as it is stated in the current Armenia Development Strategy 2014  2025. Organic agriculture could be a niche in Armenia, and that it is in line with the local context to rely on the high quality of products instead of the quantity. The EU's Organic Agriculture Support Initiative (OASI) has contributed to implementation of the Armenian Sustainable Agricultural Development Strategy by supporting the revision of the Law on organic agriculture and other regulatory documents. Among the activities of the programme was the promotion of organic extension services, raising awareness on organic production and products, increasing market access for the producers and promoting agricultural education sector, said Ambassador Switalski.

With the financial assistance of the European Union, the OASI project has provided about EUR 1 million directly to 45 Armenian farmers and processors to start or expand their organic production. An organic agriculture curriculum was integrated into Armenian agricultural colleges to educate future agronomists, and respective schoolbooks and training manuals were developed. The project also provided concrete input to the government to improve the legislative and regulatory framework for organic production and trade.

The organic products were provided with new branding and packaging and promoted at local and international markets. Through campaigns like Organic September the awareness on the advantages of organic food among the population in Armenia has increased by 40%. While creating 680 permanent and seasonal jobs, the turnover of the organic producers has significantly increased.

We embarked to this journey in 2015 with the goal to consolidate, strengthen and grow the organic sector in Armenia. I am delighted that since then, the number of organic producers has doubled. Tasty Armenian organic products also caught the attention of international buyers at exhibitions in Dubai, Germany, and the UK, resulting in contracts worth over 0.5 Million Euros, - said the OASI Project Team Leader Mr. David Muckenhuber (ADA).

Another project milestone was the founding of the Organic Armenia Association, which was created to provide a strong and unified national voice for domestic certified organic farmers and processors and to build and support a producer-led national organic movement and national policy platform.

Every end is a new beginning  through the good work of the project ADA could prove itself as trusted partner of the EU in the field of agriculture, and soon we are to launch a EUR 11.7 million project on Green Agriculture Development in Armenia with the generous support of the EU, emphasised Gerhard Schaumberger, ADA Head of Office for the South Caucasus.Far away in Port Moresby a bizarre event was in train. Young Patrol Officer Tony Redwood was called to headquarters at Konedobu, told [he] had been selected to lead the May River patrol [and] was sent to Police headquarters to select 12 native police from anywhere in the Territory, the best [he] could identify.

He had wide shoulders, a barrel chest and no neck  attributes he credited to his long line of furniture-removalist forebears. But, despite his stature, Mert was light on his feet and the life of the party when he would sashay from behind a screen, straw boater in one hand, cane in the other, tap dancing through his own sung-rendition of Father In His Life Was Neer A Quitter.

Mert Brightwell became a Cadet Patrol Officer in June 1947 following war service as a RAAF Wireless Operator/Air Gunner. Posted to Ambunti, in 1954, when it was still a Patrol Post in the Angoram Sub-district, he spent months escorting an oil-search expedition to the Sepik headwaters, before assuming control of the newly created Ambunti Sub-district, in June 1956.

Jones was to lead a dawn raid to capture the last of ringleaders in 1954. Following long-leave and marriage, he took over Lumi at the end of January 1956.

Jones, in charge of the Lumi Sub-district, during his previous term as ADO Telefomin, had crisscrossed the ranges and valleys in pursuit of the murderers of patrol officers Harris and Szarka and policemen Buritori and Purari, after another notorious incident.

Meanwhile George Oakes was recalled from a patrol west of Lumi to accompany Assistant District Officer Frank Jones to the Sepik River, which they reached on 28 August 1956. There they waited for ADO Mert Brightwell to arrive, by boat from Ambunti so they could travel to the crime scene of the mass slaughter.

Robertson was sentenced on Friday 31 August and, because the gaol had no suitable accommodation, spent the weekend in the gaolers residence with Inspector George Gough and his wife while works department carpenters worked around the clock ... erecting accommodation  at Bomana Gaol near Port Moresby.

It was a bizarre event, a white woman, a teletype operator employed by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, had been sent to gaol, and the town of Port Moresby was horrified.

An Administration post-office employee, Patricia Robertson, was sentenced today to three months' imprisonment  charged with having disclosed the contents of an official radiogram  [she] had sent the Sun a message about the murder of 28 natives in the Lumi area.

One native, with a gaping wound in the forearm staggered into Lumi  He told the Lumi District Officer that the victims were members of a fishing party.  The witnesses who brought the story back to Lumi carried bundles of sweet corn to indicate the numbers of men and women who had died.

Under the headline Head-hunters kill 28 in New Guinea massacre, the Sydney Morning Herald of 22 August 1956 reported:

About the beginning of August 1956 some bodies were found floating in the Sepik River with parts ... cut out. They were identified by their tattoos as coming from a long way up the Sepik River.  About the same time, Kit Kitson, a recruiter... returned to Lumi with the story that some Yellow River people had been killed and eaten by May River people.

Oakes returned to PNG as a Cadet Patrol Officer in January 1954, and was first assigned to Mendi. Two years later, he was posted to Lumi.

Oakes, born in New Britain in 1934, had, along with his mother and younger brother, been evacuated to Sydney on the Macdhui in July 1941. His father, the Rev Dan Oakes, died on the Japanese prison ship Montevideo Maru when it was torpedoed in July 1942.

Patrol Officer George Oakes, 22 was based at Lumi where, in his second year of service, he had been thrown in the deep end, including solo patrols into the Yellow River area.

They neglected to tell their guests that they were to be the main item on the menu and, on a Sepik River sandbank, they slaughtered at least 29 Yellow River people and cooked and ate them.

IN AUGUST 1956, THE PEOPLE FROM MAY RIVER, a right-bank tributary of the mighty Sepik River, invited their upstream neighbours, from the Yellow River to a feast.

It was bizarre because, less than three years earlier, in November 1953, the Department had been publicly criticized when junior patrol staff Harris and Szarka and two police constables were butchered near Telefomin.

This led to a headquarters edict, in force in 1956 and for many years after, that Telefomin patrols must comprise at least two officers, one an experienced Patrol Officer, Assistant District Officer, or District Officer. The May River headwaters were in the Telefomin sub-district.

Redwood had just commenced his second term, was posted to the District Office in Port Moresby and was located more than 1,200 travel kilometres from May River. He had no river experience, and he no special attributes other than youthful exuberance.

By contrast, there were ten seasoned patrol officers and two others of Redwoods vintage readily available in the Sepik District. One of the latter, Oakes, had just completed a 44-day patrol of the Yellow River, and knew the area.

The instruction to select 12 native police from anywhere in the Territory, the best [he] could identify - at Police headquarters  was also bizarre.

Redwood could only have undertaken a cursory search of some of the 3,500 members files - a random paper exercise. But he was lucky; one of the constables selected proved to be outstanding.

Redwood related that several days later [he] was on the plane to Wewak, where [he] spent a week organizing supplies and assembling [his] police group as they arrived from all over.  flew into Ambunti  and left there several days later in the workboat for the three-day trip up the Sepik to the May River.

George Oakes tells us that Redwoods patrol took 93 days. My own records show that he established May River Post on 1 November 56, and left it on 18 January 1957, when he contracted hepatitis.

Redwood recalls that it took [him] about a month to capture the culprits (about 42 he recalled). In fact, 40 men from the May River were sentenced on 11 February 1957 and went to prison for long terms.

The Yellow River people were spoiling for revenge, the mountain-dwelling Mianmin were poised to strike, the May River community had been left defenceless; May River Patrol Post had to become permanent.

By March 1957, Brightwell was about to go on leave, and I had just arrived at Ambunti. Peter OSullivan, in Wewak, had drawn the short straw and was posted to May River.

Brightwells plan was simple. We would take OSullivan to May River, and, at the same time, re-supply the post. We would then head upstream, visit Green River Patrol Post, and turn around at the Dutch border - 1,000 km from the mouth of the Sepik. Brightwell would then go on leave.

Anything that could not get wet had to go inside the cabin; bags of rice, sugar, salt and wheatmeal - tea, ships biscuits, twist tobacco. And on either side of the stern, a 44-gallon drum - one benzene, the other kerosene.

The overflow, cargo that could withstand rain, and police, a medical orderly, some wives, went into the 50-foot (plus) canoe strapped to the starboard side.

We slept on board, on canvas bed sleeves stretched over the cargo. We were into bed before dusk, before the mosquitoes, and we stayed under the net till morning. Then, with still no room in the cabin, it was up to chairs on the wheelhouse roof, and breakfast cooked on a single-burner brass primus.

There were no home comforts on the workboat. The river was churning mud and we floated on it, we drank it and we washed with it. A canvas flap at the stern gave some privacy for the morning shower - a bucket, tossed into the river, filled with water and retrieved with a rope. The hangout seatless toilet: a thick rope with numerous large knots and tied to a cleat.

Redwood described May River as a desolate place  [the] base camp on the highest ground in the area, on the river bank. The rest was swamp, all movement was by canoe, and all villages had elevated houses.

And the operation: Hard slogging. Early morning raids to trap them in the mens house, pursuits for hours through the swamp, and the like. Millions of mosquitoes, and croc ridden. My nearest colleague, Max Allwood at Green River.

Redwood did not use enough words - it was much worse than he described. He had only had four months to get to May River and build a base at the end of a shaky supply line - three and a half days travel by workboat from Ambunti.

At the same time, he had to establish the detail of murders, victims and culprits, and then thrash through the swamps to catch the murderers.

Not surprisingly, May River was not much of a station. The bush material houses, hemmed in by jungle, perched above a tepid stream and a muddy bank. The atmosphere was hot, humid and dank. The myriads of daylight mosquitoes seemed to have teeth. At dusk, they seemed a different breed: they were stingers.

Compared to May River, the dreaded patrol post at Green River was a tourist resort with a weekly aircraft, regular mail, groceries  even frozen meat and fresh bread. There was a permanent material house, tank water and solid ground to walk on.

A few months later I was asked to deliver an urgent letter upriver to Peter OSullivan. Another upset. It was a Dear John letter from his friend Sue Rowlison, soon to become Sue Becker, later Australian TV fitness guru and host of the BBC program Boomph with Becker.

Redwood was back in the limelight in May 1957 when a question was put in the Australia Parliament:

Will the Minister confirm or deny reports that 24 New Guinea natives who were sentenced to death by the Supreme Court at Wewak yesterday were defended by a patrol officer who had participated in the apprehension of the accused? Are patrol officers generally regarded as legally qualified and as being sufficiently competent to defend persons accused of murder and was the defence counsel in this case so qualified to appear for 25 natives on a murder charge?

The Administrator telexed his advice to the Minister:

Accused defended by Patrol Officer Redwood who did not participate in any way in apprehension  Patrol officers are not legally qualified legal practitioners but undergo legal training and have considerable experience in presiding over legal proceedings as magistrates.

The Minister had a final waspish word, however, noting on the file:

I think the Administrators action in leaving the defence of the accused in the hands of a 22-year old officer with three years experience is indefensible ... in future more senior and more qualified experienced officers and, in major cases, qualified counsel should be engaged for the defence.

Redwoods clients, the Mianmins, were the graziers and their neighbours were the herd, which the Mianmins periodically culled, slaughtered and ate - saving only the comely females for breeding stock.

Their foray into the Atbalmin in December 1956, when they killed and ate 17 men women and children and abducted two females, provoked a strong patrol.

ADO Ron Neville, Patrol Officers Geoff Booth and Paul Conroy, Medical Assistant Allan Kelly and 34 police undertook an operation in January and February 1957 during which the patrol was twice attacked, a police constable wounded, two Mianmin shot and 27 taken into custody.

ADO Len Aisbett and CPO Jim Fenton established the link between Telefomin and the May River Post in July-August 1958 - a 40-day patrol that worked its way through the Mianmin in the May River headwaters then travelled for three and half days in no-man's-land before meeting up with PO John Cochrane and his powered canoes some 50 km upstream from May River Patrol Post.

The Mianmin - garbed only in narrow cane waist bands, 15 centimetre working-dress phallocrypts, testicles in the breeze - considered the May River people to be under-clad bush kanakas - their attire being a small marine shell perched snail-like on the end of the penis.

Some six months after Aisbetts patrol had passed through, a group of Mianmins made the next foray, selecting the small settlement of Suwana in the Abaru group near May River Patrol Post.

It took the raiding party the best part of five days, trekking, then drifting down the river on rafts and then trekking again to reach their objective.

The Miamin surrounded the village at dawn, killed three men and one woman, cut up the bodies and set off for home with seven female captives and the butchered bodies - leaving only the heads and entrails behind.

One of those women had difficulty keeping up so she was killed and parts of her body taken to be eaten.

Another of the abducted women subsequently escaped and reported to May River Patrol Post.

We sent a small expert team from Telefomin to Ambunti by air: Patrol Officer Jim Fenton, Interpreter Suni and Constable Kusinok (a Telefomin). Their brief was to proceed to May River post and assist the OIC, Jack Mater, in the investigation and pursuit of the Mianmin raiding party.

Hopefully, that would save many days of slogging through the Telefomin ranges, give the Mianmins a lesson about the governments reach and accord with the headquarters edict of patrols by two officers.

Using outboard motor powered canoes, Mater led the patrol to the headwaters of the May River, and then they took to the hills. In all, it only took 14 days to reach the Mianmin settlement and surround it.

At dawn, they apprehended the 15 Usage men involved in the massacre, including the men who did the killings.

The operation went without incident and, thanks to their A510 portable receivers, District Officer Des Clancy in Wewak and me in Telefomin kept in daily radio contact with Mater and Fenton.

Mater later paid tribute to Senior Constable Augwis role in the operation, saying he was the most outstanding NCO I have seen  largely responsible for the successful arrests of nine of the 15 prisoners.

He may not have known that Augwi was also very well travelled, having visited London as part of the RP&NGC 1953 Coronation contingent. Augwi had sailed to England via Sydney in April 1953, returning by air to Sydney from London in June, and travelling back to Port Moresby by the MV Shansi.

Interpreter Suni MBE LSM, originally from Olsobip but adopted by an Eliptamin, missed accompanying only one Administration patrol to the Mianmin: Jim Taylors in December 1939. Instead, as a youthful camp follower, he had accompanied John Black from Telefomin to Wabag.

Suni did not see Telefomin again until a brief wartime stint when he and Mick Leahy were part of the US team that was dropped in by gliders. He next visited Telefomin, by a special Qantas flight from Goroka in December 1948 to join Des Clifton-Bassett at the newly opened government station.

That assignment, supposed to last for six months, continued for more than 30 years. Suni was to visit the Mianmin on many occasions, including with the first ever patrol to focus on the Mianmin led by Harry West in May 1950.

Nautical footnote

In October 1964, Captain Wally Blumenfeld RAE (32 Small Ship Squadron) took the AV1354 Brudenell White - an ex-World War II US LSM - up the Sepik River to the May River junction  a distance he calculated to be 595 km. The vessel was 62 metres long, with a beam of 10.4 metres, and no other ship of that size had ever reached so far up this river.

Blumenfeld recorded that the deepest water under the keel was 30 fathoms (55 metres) when the vessel was passing through the Yambon gate, 11 km upstream from Ambunti, where there was a 5 to 6 knot current. Overall the current varied between 1 and 6 knots and was 2.47 knots at the May River Junction.

A Tony Redwood footnote

While I was the Patrol Officer at Kainantu in the Eastern Highlands (Harry West was Assistant District Officer), the Police Sergeant Major, a veteran of the 1936 Hagen-Sepik patrol, reported a rumour that the station carpenter, from the Mekeo, had a revolver in his house.

At my behest, the brand new Cadet Patrol Officer Tony Redwood and the Sergeant Major investigated. The carpenter did not have one revolver, he had two, and, as the officers arrived, he stormed from his house waving the weapons.

Redwood took off. Almost six feet tall, with some puppy fat, he was a large, fast-moving target, but he could not outrun the fusillade. Fortunately, the carpenters Wild West gunslinger style sent the bullets in all directions and Redwood survived to later participate in the May River expedition.

Sources

This memoir is drawn in part from May River Cannibals by George Oates (Una Voce No 3 September 2009) which describes the prelude to the establishment of the May River Patrol Post. Oakes put that story together from his patrol reports, his memory, and from an email he received from Tony Redwood.

I have also drawn on Jim Fentons records and communications (including his copy of Ambunti Patrol Report 13 of 1959-60), on my own records and on other archives.

W T (Bill) Brown MBE is a former District Commissioner with the Administration of Papua New Guinea. He now lives in SydneyBali police have shot dead a Russian man after a violent robbery at a money exchange office, officials said Friday, with two more accomplices arrested and several others on the run. The killing happened Tuesday on the Indonesian holiday island after police responded to calls about a robbery and confronted the armed trio, officials said. Three men, including the man who was later killed, broke into a currency exchange office and beat several employees inside, knocking them unconscious. When they woke up, they were tied with their mouths taped, police said, adding that the employees eventually freed themselves and called the authorities. The police managed to locate the suspects who had fled, but when they wanted to arrest the men one of the suspects wanted to attack the officers. "Our unarmed officer tried to fight back, but because the situation was very dangerous to our members, another officer who was armed took strict measures against the suspect... he then died," Denpasar police chief Ruddi Setiawan told reporters. The Russian embassy confirmed one of its citizens was shot dead in Bali. "During a fight with police who were trying to arrest them, one Russian citizen was shot dead," it said on its Facebook account. "Two others -- one Ukrainian and one Russian -- were detained." The arrested Russian was also wounded, the embassy said, adding that four others linked to the crime are still on the run, but "their nationality is unclear". The embassy said the gang was suspected of robbing another money changer in December and, separately, stealing weapons. It did not elaborate. Nearly $70,000 in Indonesian rupiah and US currency were reportedly stolen, according to police, who named the dead man as 45-year-old Alexei Korotkikh. Foreigners are often arrested for drugs offences in Bali, which attracts millions of visitors to its palm-fringed beaches every year. But arrests for violent crime are more rare. In January, Bali police apprehended four Bulgarians accused of skimming bank card data at several ATM machines in the capital Denpasar. Employees at this Bali money exchange were beaten and tied up in the violent robberyBrazil's ex-president Michel Temer was the leader of a "criminal organization" involved in embezzlement and money laundering over decades, the federal prosecutor alleged Thursday, after the former leader was arrested as part of a sprawling anti-corruption probe. Police detained Temer, the 78-year-old predecessor of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, in Sao Paulo and transferred him to Rio de Janeiro -- the latest ex-leader of the Latin American country to be caught up in the so-called Car Wash investigation that has claimed scores of political and corporate scalps. The investigation into Temer had uncovered "the existence of a criminal organization in full operation, involved in concrete acts of clear gravity," the federal prosecutor's office said in a statement. Former mines and energy minister Moreira Franco was also arrested along with several others. Temer, Brazil's most unpopular leader ever, faced several corruption accusations on leaving office last year. Brazil's Congress voted to dismiss two allegations in 2017, cementing his reputation as the ultimate survivor in one of the world's messiest and scandal-ridden democracies. A third accusation was filed days before Bolsonaro's mandate started on January 1, leaving Congress no time to evaluate the charge. "Justice is for everyone and everyone answers for their actions," Bolsonaro told reporters in Chile, where he is on an official visit. The prosecutor's statement Thursday described a "sophisticated criminal system" which by the end of 2014 had made illicit payments of some one million reais (the equivalent of $500,000 at the time) in connection with the construction of a nuclear power plant that was never completed. Investigations suggest the group may have committed "various crimes" with public agencies and state-owned companies involving 1.8 billion reais ($470 million), the statement said. Starting as an investigation into money laundering at a car wash in the capital Brasilia in 2014, the probe expanded to uncover a vast graft operation involving state oil firm Petrobras and major construction companies and bribes to politicians of several parties. More than 150 people have been convicted and hundreds more charged. The scale of the corruption uncovered has stunned Brazilians weary of graft among their leaders. - Live coverage of arrests - Temer is just the latest former president caught up in the probe that has rocked Brazil's business and political elites. The center-right politician of the PMDB party took over as a caretaker figure after the last Workers Party president, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and removed from office in 2016, accused of cooking the government's books. While Rousseff was not directly implicated in the Car Wash scandal, she was damaged by association, having chaired the board at Petrobras between 2003-2010, when much of the alleged corruption was flourishing. Former leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is serving a lengthy jail term after being convicted in two corruption cases. Far-right leader Bolsonaro campaigned on a hard line against corruption and crime and his victory in October's election was in part attributed to the Car Wash investigation. Temer did not contest the ballot. The probe was originally overseen by Brazil's current justice minister, former judge Sergio Moro, who jailed Lula. He has been replaced by Gabriela Hardt. Local TV channels broadcast live coverage of the latest arrests -- much to the delight of many ordinary Brazilians, who welcomed the detentions. "I think that is super right. In my opinion it took too long," Maria Celia de Castro, a retired history teacher in Brasilia, told AFP. As president, Temer was deeply unpopular. Whenever he spoke on television, horn honking and pot banging could be heard in major cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. He was booed loudly at Maracana stadium when he opened the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Michel Temer, pictured in November 2018, was Brazil's most unpopular leader ever

A Melbourne couple are appealing for help to bring home a heroic homeless dog who protected them from monkeys in Thailand.

Matty Miles and his fiancee Aprille Hughes were in Rawai, in Phukets south, in January to train in Muay Thai for a couple of weeks.

They decided part of their training would be walking a five-kilometre trail to the Phuket Big Buddha also known as the The Great Buddha of Phuket.

Aprille Hughes is pictured with the hero Thai ridgeback named Burt. Source: Supplied

They drove to the top of the track via a moped to scope it out but after travelling through the mist of a hazy Phuket morning encountered a pack of angry monkeys.

There was fog everywhere, it was like something out of a horror movie, Mr Miles told Yahoo7.

I dont know why but these monkeys, there were about seven of them, got really angry with us. I think they might have wanted our bags and they started hissing and raising their shoulders.

I kept thinking, theres no way Im getting bitten by a monkey and getting rabies on this trip.

Matty Miles (right) with Burt at the vet and (left) Ms Hughes sits on steps with Burt near the Buddha statue. Source: Supplied

The monkeys began to hiss and grow more aggressive and thats when a stray dog named Burt stepped in.

Burt protected us, she got between us and the monkeys, he said.

Aprille was freaking out but the dog stayed by her side.

The monkeys continued to follow the couple around the hills as they walked around Buddha but the Thai ridgeback wouldnt leave their side.

She kind of guided us, walked in front of us and made sure we were OK, Mr Miles said.

Mr Miles said he and his fiancee have spent more than $1800 on vet bills for the dog. Source: Supplied

The dog also gave Ms Hughes renewed optimism after her father was diagnosed with stage four cancer.

Aprille told me, she did more than protect us  she put the fire back in my heart, Mr Miles said.

I think Burt gave her some renewed hope.

It was from there the couple, who continued training on the trail daily, visited Burt over a period of more than week  feeding her and giving her water to deal with the heat.

Burt protected us, she got between us and the monkeys, Matty Miles said.

Mr Miles, on one occasion, decided to get even closer to the pooch. He tested her with Dentastix and played with her to see how she would react.

Story continues

I played tug-of-war with her, he said.

I realised shes quite clever and playful too.

Bringing Burt home

The pair decided to take the pup to a vet. Mr Miles said she had a cut about 5cm wide on her back and wanted it treated.

A taxi driver who took the dog down the mountain and a local veterinarian told the couple she was homeless. Theyve also had the dog checked for microchips and found nothing.

They decided she wouldnt be homeless for the rest of her life and estimate shes about two years old.

We want to bring her back to Melbourne, Mr Miles said.

Weve spent about $1800 on vaccinations, blood testing and other treatments to get her ready.

But the couple need more money to pay Jetpets, a worldwide pet travel service, to bring Burt to Australia.

Ms Hughes has bought a number of items for the dog back home in Elwood. Source: Supplied

Meanwhile, Burts being fed at an animal shelter in Thailand which the couple have been donating to.

Mr Miles said theyre prepared to bring her into a loving home.

Aprilles bought a heap of dog stuff for her, he said.

It feels like theres more dog stuff in our place now than human stuff.

The couple have started a crowdfunding page to bring Burt to Victoria.

Do you know more or have a story tip? Email: y7newsroom@yahoo7.com.au.

You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter and stay up to date with the latest news with Yahoo7s daily newsletter. Sign up here.Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft will be outfitted with a warning light for malfunctions in the anti-stall system suspected in October's fatal crash in Indonesia, an industry source told AFP Thursday, standardizing a feature previously sold as an optional extra. The development comes as the manufacturer struggles to cope with the fallout from both the Indonesia crash and another in Ethiopia this month, which have cast a spotlight on the safety certification process and shaken confidence in a plane that is crucial to its future plans. Known as a "disagree light," this safety feature will become standard and is among the modifications the company will present to US authorities and clients in the coming days, the source said on condition of anonymity. Neither the Lion Air aircraft which crashed in Indonesia, nor the Ethiopian Airlines jet, had the feature, the source said. More than 300 people perished in the two cases. American Airlines, which operates 24 737 MAX 8, had bought the option, anticipating potential malfunctions, a source close to the matter told AFP. So too had Southwest Airlines, the plane's biggest customer, which also bought an additional "Primary Flight Display" option, according to a spokesperson. Modifications are in the final stages but Boeing wants to be certain this meets the expectations of regulators and customers, the industry source said. Neither Boeing nor the Federal Aviation Agency offered comment when contacted by AFP. - 'Should be standard' - But an industry expert, Scott Hamilton from Leeham Company, said the system should have already been included. "Instrument disagree warnings should be standard and they are important for pilots to know when instruments disagree with each other," he said. "Boeing made this an option because it could, and make money by selling it. Simple as that." The warning light will be activated if sensors transmit incorrect data to the plane's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which is intended to detect and correct stalls by reducing the aircraft's pitch. Preliminary results in the investigation into October's Lion Air crash in Indonesia indicate an "angle of attack" sensor, which feeds data to the MCAS, had malfunctioned. But despite malfunctioning, the sensor continued transmitting data to the plane's onboard electronics, including the MCAS. That system takes control of the aircraft, pointing its nose downward, even if the pilot resists, so long as the system is not deactivated, something the Lion Air crew did not know. - Criminal investigation - US and Ethiopian authorities have said this month's crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET302 near Addis Ababa bore "similarities" to last year's Lion Air crash. The Ethiopian Airlines crash led to the global grounding of 737 MAX aircraft. A criminal investigation is currently underway in the United States, with authorities reportedly scrutinizing how the plane received safety certification from US aviation regulators. Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, called Wednesday for a hearing of the Commerce Subcommittee on Aviation and Space, for March 27, with three transportation officials, notably the acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration. Cruz intends to hold a second hearing to question Boeing officials as well as pilots and others in the industry. The investigations will likely zero in on the FAA's program of outsourcing its certification process to airplane manufacturers themselves. The trend has accelerated due to budget cuts and the increasing volume of air travel, industry sources told AFP. In the case of the 737 MAX, Boeing expressed a case of urgency because of its medium-haul competition with the Airbus A320Neo that launched shortly before, the sources said. Although it has suspended deliveries of the 737 MAX, Boeing has decided to continue production. Boeing is struggling to cope with the fallout from two deadly crashes that have cast a spotlight on the safety certification process and shaken confidence in its 737 Max 8 model that is crucial to its future plans

A cyclist has been threatened with a knife and secateurs during a confronting road rage event in North Melbourne.

A 33-year-old man on a bike and two men in a car were involved in a verbal altercation while both parties were stopped at a set of lights on Haines Street on Thursday, about 3.45pm.

The cyclist subsequently took a photo of the silver Commodore after its occupants threw an object at him.

The car stopped and a struggle began, with the cyclist kicked in the leg and forced to let go of his bike.

A cyclist alleges he was threatened with a knife and secateurs by two men who threw his bike to the ground and stomped on it in North Melbourne on Thursday afternoon. Source: Getty Images (file pic)

The alleged offenders then threatened the victim with a knife and secateurs before throwing the bike to the ground and stomping on it a number of times, police said.

Investigators are looking for the car, with registration 1GW 8YD, and its occupants who are described as Caucasian and aged in their late 20s.

One man has a solid build, brown hair, brown goatee and a tattoo on his upper right arm.

The other is small, with brown hair tied back and a distinctive skin condition on his nose.

Anyone with information about this incident is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or use the online reporting page.

With AAP

Do you have a story tip? Email: y7newsroom@yahoo7.com.au.

You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter and stay up to date with the latest news with Yahoo7s daily newsletter. Sign up here.Parties for and against Thailand's junta rallied across Bangkok Friday, as election fever grips the country ahead of the first poll in eight years. The boisterous final push before the March 24 showdown was infused with rarely seen levels of excitement and backlit by symbolism from afar, with the family of ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra holding a politically star-studded wedding in Hong Kong the same night. The generals who seized power in 2014 are hoping to hold on through the ballot box with the help of military-appointed senators who can vote for prime minister, and coup leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha made his first appearance at a rally for his Phalang Pracharat party. But he faces several parties linked to the influential Shinawatra family, which has won every election since 2001. Thaksin was ousted in a 2006 coup and his sister Yingluck's administration was toppled by the army in the 2014 power grab. Thailand is broadly divided between pro-Shinawatra factions and an elite aligned with the military, which has portrayed itself as a stabilising force and defender of the country's monarchy. But loyalties are more complex now with more than seven million first-time voters aged 18-25 and new parties in the mix. The most prominent is Future Forward, led by charismatic frontman Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, a 40-year-old billionaire popular with millennials. Thousands of young Future Forward supporters decked out in the country's trademark orange colours waved flags and glow sticks at a stadium in Bangkok Friday night ahead of Thanathorn's appearance, as their hero prepped backstage. "You win the ideas first and then you win the war and then you can change," Thanathorn told reporters before his speech. - Final countdown - Political buzz galvanised multiple rallies across the Thai capital as the sun went down. Even the famously gruff Prayut, the army man who led the 2014 putsch, took to the stage in Bangkok. Wearing a white shirt and slacks and holding roses, he ascended the stage and spoke for about five minutes, jabbing his finger to punctuate points. "Thank you for all the support given me, I will give back with my life and my heart," he said. But it remains to be seen whether his Phalang Pracharat can make a dent in the electoral machine of Pheu Thai, the Thaksin-affiliated party that still taps loyalty from the poor but populous rural north and northeast. "They are strong with all people," said Sharpay Janperng, 26, manager at an education company, at a packed rally for the party. Pheu Thai's top candidate for prime minister, Sudarat Keyuraphan, told the crowd that "happiness and a good economy depend on your pen." - Numbers game - Future Forward and Pheu Thai, whose rallies were held 100 metres apart, both oppose the junta. But pro-democracy forces need to overcome the built-in advantage of the 250 appointed senators. That means Phalang Pracharat and other military-aligned parties need only 126 votes in the 500-seat Lower House to elect a prime minister. In a thinly veiled jibe at the stacked deck, Thai hip-hop sensation Rap Against Dictatorship, whose last anti-junta song racked up nearly 60 million views on YouTube, named their next release "250 sycophants". By contrast, Pheu Thai would need to cobble together 376 votes to gain the upper hand. That raises the prospect of a long road ahead of political horsetrading after preliminary results are announced Sunday night. Analysts believe the loyalties of Bhumjaithai, which finished third in 2011 and is run by the fantastically wealthy Anutin Charnvirakul, will be in high demand. Anutin said Friday his party would support a "stability" government but is leaving his options open. Thaksin, a billionaire telecoms mogul, has been in self-exile since 2008 to avoid a jail term on corruption charges. But he still sits at the heart of Thailand's politics. Earlier this month the dissolution of one of his parties -- Thai Raksa Chart -- hampered an election strategy to cobble together votes under a party list system. Thai Raksa Chart had proposed Princess Ubolratana as its candidate for premier, but King Maha Vajiralongkorn struck down the move calling it "highly inappropriate". Ubolratana was seen at Thaksin's daughter's wedding in Hong Kong on Friday night. When reporters asked him who will win the election as he arrived at the luxury hotel, Thaksin replied: "I don't know." The Pheu Thai party taps a deep sense of loyalty from the poor but populous rural north and northeast Future Forward Party leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit is popular with millennials and others weary of Thailand's old divides Supporters for Phalang Pracharat turned out in force in Bangkok in the run-up to the general election Factfile on five people who could become Thailand's next prime ministerTwenty years ago, Zoltan Dani achieved a miraculous military feat: wielding outdated missile equipment, his army unit shot down an American F117 "stealth fighter" flying over Serbia as part of NATO's 1999 air strike assault. The David-vs-Goliath victory was one of the most surprising achievements of the Serbian side as it was battered by NATO bombs that began dropping 20 years ago on Sunday, in a bid to halt Belgrade's war with Kosovo. But in perhaps an even more remarkable twist, the retired army officer is now close friends with the American pilot whose Nighthawk he brought down. "Bingo," Dani, now 62, recalls saying when he first learned he had struck the American aircraft, which was touted as invisible to radar. The downing of the F117 three days into the NATO assault earned Dani national hero status. It was the first and only time a F117 has been shot down in combat, leading celebratory Serbs to print shirts and posters with the slogan: "We didn't know it was invisible!" After three months of air strikes, Serbia was forced to withdraw its troops from Kosovo, where its forces had been battling ethnic Albanian separatists. While the NATO intervention is celebrated as the basis of Kosovans' liberation today, traumatic memories of the bombs remain deeply etched in Serbia's public memory. But Dani and his US counterpart, Air Force pilot Dale Zelko, managed to put their past behind them. Around a decade ago, they started exchanging emails. "It was important, among other things, to learn what kind of man he was," Dani, who is part of Serbia's Hungarian minority, told AFP from his home in eastern Skorenovac. "After two to three years we decided together that it was time to meet." - 'Message of peace' - That 2012 encounter, filmed in a documentary called 'The Second Meeting', saw Zelko travel to Dani's home where he had opened a bakery after retiring from military service. "When he arrived... I handed him an apron, he took it and we worked together," recalls Dani with a grin. In the documentary, the two men are seen rolling out pastry dough together before visiting a Serbian museum where tattered pieces of the F117 are on display. "Hey, that's my stuff," Zelko jokes, pointing at the display. They also visit the field where the American pilot landed after he ejected from his aircraft in a parachute. "As soon as I saw those missiles I thought, oh man, they got me," Zelko says standing in the field. At a screening of the film in Belgrade in 2012, Zelko addressed the room. "I am sorry for your suffering and sorrow, loss and anguish," he said, visibly shaken. "War is not between normal, average people, it is between the governments," he added. Dani says he was initially hesitant about making contact with his former war foe, but ultimately decided it would "be an opportunity to send a common message of peace and understanding". The following year he visited Zelko and his family at their home in New Hampshire. Now they still talk "once or twice a week by email", reports Dani. Near his computer is a large chunk of dark metal -- another recovered piece of the F117 -- leaning against the wall. Dale Zelko (C) and Zoltan Dani began exchanging emails about ten years agoHungarian police on Friday arrested a Syrian man suspected of being a high-ranking IS leader who organised suicide attacks and executions, following a European cross-border investigation. The man was arrested in a detention centre in eastern Hungary, Budapest chief prosecutor Tibor Ibolya told the M1 public television channel, describing him as a senior Islamic State (IS) leader. The 27-year-old had been a member of the group since 2016, said a statement by Ibolya's office. The man was awaiting deportation from Hungary to Greece -- where he had received refugee status -- when he was arrested after a probe that involved Hungarian and Belgian agencies. The investigation linked the suspect to the execution of 20 family members in the Syrian city of Homs in 2016. The victims were beheaded after refusing to join IS, the prosecutor's office said. "There are reasonable grounds for suspicion that the man personally took part in the execution," it said. The arrest was coordinated by Eurojust, the EU's judicial cooperation unit. "Due to the evidence from Belgium, the suspect can now be held by the Hungarian authorities on suspicion of committing terrorist activities," Eurojust said in a statement. The suspect was first detained at Budapest airport in December last year after he and a woman travelling with him were caught in possession of false identification documents. He was convicted of human trafficking and other crimes and handed an expulsion order from Hungary, before his arrest on Friday over the new claims. Hungarian police arrested a man whom the Budapest chief prosecutor described as a senior Islamic State leader in a detention scentre the east of the countrySyria, its allies, and fellow states in the region Friday condemned US President Donald Trump's pledge to recognise Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights slamming the move as a violation of international law. Trump said Thursday it was time for Washington to recognise Israel's sovereignty over the strategic territory, which it seized from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and annexed in a move never recognised internationally. His abrupt tweet triggered delight in Israel, but outrage from other countries in the region as well as powerhouses such as Russia and Turkey. Moscow warned the policy U-turn could spark new conflicts. "Such appeals can considerably destabilise an already tense situation in the Middle East," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. "Hopefully it will remain (just) a call." Any such move would break with UN Security Council resolutions and with more than half a century of US foreign policy, which treated the Golan as occupied territory whose future would be negotiated in talks with Syria on a comprehensive peace. The territory's return has always been a key Syrian national demand, championed by government and rebels alike throughout the bloody civil war that has ripped the country apart since 2011. In an angry retort, the Syrian government said Trump's comments disregarded international law. "The American position towards Syria's occupied Golan Heights clearly reflects the United States' contempt for international legitimacy and its flagrant violation of international law," a foreign ministry source told the official SANA news agency. Trump's comments showed the extent of his administration's "blind bias" towards Israel. "The Golan was and will remain Arab and Syrian," the source said. The foreign ministry sent a letter to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, urging him to reiterate the UN's rejection of Israeli claims over the Golan, SANA said. - 'National commitment' - Turkey, which hosted the last indirect peace talks between Israel and the Syrian government in 2008 but has backed Syrian rebels, said the change risked plunging the region into a "new crisis". "We will never allow the occupation of Golan Heights to be made legitimate," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted he was "shocked by @realDonaldTrump continuing to try to give what is not his to racist Israel." And France added its voice to the chorus of outrage, saying the Golan had been "occupied by Israel since 1967" and it did not recognise Israel's annexation. In his tweet, Trump said the Golan was "of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" "After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognise Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights," he said. The Arab League said Trump's comments were "completely outside international law". The Gulf Cooperation Council said Trump's statement would not change the internationally recognised fact that the "Golan heights are Syrian lands forcefully occupied by Israel". Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said lasting peace in the region requires Israel to withdraw from all Arab territories it occupies, including the Golan. Egypt urged "respect (for) legitimate international resolutions and the United Nations Charter on the unacceptability of land appropriation by force". Following decades of calm along the Golan armistice line after the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973, tensions flared with the eruption of civil war in Syria in 2011. Israel provided medical assistance to wounded rebel fighters and repeatedly struck government positions in response to stray fire across the frontier. It has also targeted suspected positions of Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, which have intervened militarily to back President Bashar al-Assad. - Israeli thank you - Since the Syrian government decisively defeated rebel fighters near the armistice line last year with Iranian and Hezbollah support, Israel has repeatedly vowed to prevent its arch enemies from establishing a long-term military presence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is seeking re-election next month, swiftly thanked Trump for his announcement. "At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognises Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights," the right-wing prime minister wrote on Twitter. Leon Panetta, a veteran Democrat who served as CIA director and defence secretary among other roles, blasted Trump for "tweeting out another policy that obviously has not been worked out with our international partners". The Golan move is Trump's latest diplomatic bombshell as he seeks to redraw the fraught Middle East in Israel's favour. In 2017, Trump went against decades of practice in recognising the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, rather than the previously accepted Tel Aviv. An Israeli flag flutters over the wreckage of an Israeli tank overlooking the armistice line on the Golan Heights Map locating the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights lies at a strategic chokepoint in the Middle East and through successive rounds of negotiations Syria has demanded its return as the price of peace with Israel President Donald Trump has upended decades of US policy over the Golan Heights Israelis in the annexed Golan Heights watch the progress of fighting on the other side of the armistice line in July 2018 as pro-Damascus forces seize the upper hand over rebelsThe United States on Friday slapped sanctions on a key Venezuelan bank, BANDES and four affiliates over their support for President Nicolas Maduro. The US move came just hours after Maduro's regime defied the United States and arrested a top aide of opposition leader Juan Guaido, whom Washington recognizes as the crisis-hit country's interim leader. Venezuelan Interior Minister Nestor Reverol accused the aide, Roberto Marrero, a 49-year-old lawyer who serves as Guaido's chief of staff, of leading a "terrorist cell" bent on attacking the government's leadership. The companies sanctioned are BANDES, a state-controlled bank; Banco Bandes Uruguay; Banco Bicentenario del Pueblos; Banco Universal SA Banco de Venezuela; and Banco Prodem SA, of Bolivia. "All property and interests in property of these entities, and of any entities that are owned, directly or indirectly, 50 percent or more by this entity, that are in the United States or in the possession or control of US persons are blocked and must be reported to OFAC," the Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) statement said. "Maduro and his enablers have distorted the original purpose of the bank, which was founded to help the economic and social wellbeing of the Venezuelan people, as part of a desperate attempt to hold onto power," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said. "Roberto Marrero and other political prisoners must be released immediately," Mnuchin stressed. National Security Advisor John Bolton said on Twitter that "BANDES bank is to Venezuela?s financial sector what PDVSA is to its oil sector. This action will severely affect any attempted currency movements by Maduro and his cronies moving forward. Do not test the resolve of this Administration." The United States has repeatedly warned Maduro's government against arresting Guaido or his close aides, saying it would face unspecified repercussions. US President Donald Trump reiterated this week he was considering "all options" at his disposal to see Maduro dislodged and Guaido installed in power, implying military action if he deemed it necessary. US Vice President Mike Pence said in an op-ed in the Miami Herald Friday that "Nicolas Maduro must go." A UN spokesman Thursday expressed "concern" at the arrest, urging "all actors in Venezuela to take immediate steps to lower tensions and refrain from any action that could lead to further escalation." Venezuelan opposition deputy Dennis Fernandez (L) requests information on the detention of Roberto Marrero, the chief of staff of opposition leader and self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido, at the entrance of the intelligence service (SEBIN) headquarters in CaracasAUBURN  For the third time, the Auburn City Council has voted to extend the terms of agreement with a medical transportation company to keep its services afloat.

Thursday, the council voted to extend a contract between the city and TLC Medical Transportation Services Inc., the company responsible for the city's ambulance services.

In June 2013, TLC entered a five-year agreement with Auburn that was set to expire in June 2018. By the end of the five years, both the city and TLC were in ongoing negotiations, requiring more time to come to a new agreement.

In the meantime, TLC was granted a three-month extension until new terms would be announced. But when the three months were up, a new contract still hadn't been negotiated, so in September 2018, the council voted to extend the same agreement from 2013 until March 31, 2019.

Before the second extension was up, the council voted Thursday to once again give the negotiations more time.

"We've been trying to get through a couple of details on that agreement, but along the way, in order for (TLC) to be able to legally bill Medicare and Medicaid, they have to have a legally-binding agreement," said Auburn City Manager Jeff Dygert. "We've been doing these extensions so that they can continue to be in business."

Rather than providing ambulance services itself, Auburn contracts with TLC. According to TLC's website, the company was first awarded an ambulance service contract with Auburn in 2004.

Thursday's unanimous vote has extended the city's agreement with TLC until the end of the year. Dygert is hopeful that an agreement will come before then.

"Honestly it's a little embarrassing when you extend, extend and extend again," he said. "If we get the successor agreement in the next couple of months, then that will take place. It doesn't necessarily mean it'll wait until December, it just gives us some wiggle room."

In other news

 The council voted to commit to prioritizing projects to construct a public safety complex and a State Street Plaza  two proposals under the Downtown Revitalization Initiative. The city is still competing for state funding for both projects.

 The city's Capital Improvement Program, a five-year plan to improve public infrastructure, was adopted by council.

Staff writer Dan Orzechowski can be reached at (315) 282-2239 or dan.orzechowski@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @OrzechowskiDan.

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Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.AUBURN  An Auburn man will spend time in prison for biting a police officer.

In August, Rian Glover, 41, was running around in people's yards and banging on doors in the area of Grove Avenue in Auburn when he resisted arrest and bit and injured an Auburn Police Department officer.

Glover, of 35 Augustus St., was sentenced in Cayuga County Court Thursday for second-degree attempted assault, a class E felony. At the time of his January plea, Glover said he was on synthetic drugs the night of his crime.

"Overall, he's a good guy," said Ben Susman, Glover's defense attorney. "These drugs have impacted his life and I'm hoping this is (a) wake-up call."

"I just want to apologize to the court, community and especially the police officer involved," Glover said.

Judge Thomas Leone sentenced Glover to 1 1/3 to four years in prison with a shock camp order, which is a six-month program involving intense structure, substance abuse treatment and group counseling. He will also have to pay nearly $1,300 in restitution for property damage caused.

Also in court:

 An Auburn man pleaded guilty to, and was sentenced for, his connection in a November meth lab bust.

Eight people were initially charged following the Nov. 9 drug bust at 54 Orchard St., Auburn. The Finger Lakes Drug Task Force executed a warrant and found multiple people "actively engaged in the production of methamphetamine," the Cayuga County Sheriff's Office reported at the time.

Thomas M. Hutton, 28, was arraigned on nine criminal charges in February. Hutton and his brother, Jonas, were both arrested Jan. 28 in connection to the Orchard Street incident.

Although initially due back in court in April, Thomas pleaded guilty to two class A misdemeanors Thursday in satisfaction of his entire indictment which also included three drug-related felonies and four misdemeanors for endangering the welfare of a child and criminal use of drug paraphernalia.

Hutton, through a sworn-in American Sign Language interpreter, pleaded guilty on Thursday to fifth-degree conspiracy (reduced from a felony conspiracy charge) and second-degree criminal possession of meth manufacturing materials. He admitted to gathering and being in possession of Sudafed.

Hutton, with his brother and mother in the courtroom, was sentenced to three years of probation.

 After sitting in jail for seven months, an Auburn man facing eight drug-related charges pleaded guilty to all his crimes in light of a promised probationary sentence.

Karlsten Thomas, 44, admitted conspiring with and helping others sell crack cocaine. He said that when the doorbell would ring at the Auburn apartment, he'd go downstairs to answer the door. He'd receive money, bring it upstairs to the drug dealer, and then bring the drugs downstairs to the person.

In a Finger Lakes Drug Task Force raid in August, Thomas was found in possession of more than 49 grams of crack cocaine. He also had small bags to package cocaine, a digital scale and about $3,700 in cash.

He pleaded guilty Thursday to five class B felonies including: Three counts of third-degree criminal possession of narcotic drugs with intent to sell, one count of third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance and one count of third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance. He also pleaded guilty to fourth-degree conspiracy, a class E felony, and two counts of second-degree criminal use of drug paraphernalia, class A misdemeanors.

Seeing as though Thomas, of 3 Burt Ave., had no criminal history and spent the last seven months in jail, Leone offered a five year probationary sentence in exchange for Thomas pleading guilty to the entire indictment. Leone said Thomas would have to wait in jail until his May 23 sentencing.

 An Auburn man was sentenced to prison for possessing narcotics.

After an early morning traffic stop in June, Antwoin Anderson, 35, was found in possession of nearly seven ounces of marijuana, close to two ounces of cocaine, a black starter pistol with ammunition and more than $1,850 in cash, according to the Auburn Police Department.

In court Thursday, Anderson, of 35 Catlin St., was sentenced for third-degree criminal possession of a narcotic drug with intent to sell, a class B felony. He was sentenced to four years in prison with a shock camp order and three years of post-release supervision. He previously forfeited about $1,800 in cash and a BMW car.

 An Auburn man faces up to three years in prison for strangling a woman.

Daquan Richardson, 22, was sentenced Thursday for charges of second-degree attempted strangulation, a class E felony, and two counts of second-degree criminal contempt, class A misdemeanors. He pleaded guilty to the crimes in January.

Police: Auburn man strangled girlfriend, held her captive for hours An Auburn man was arrested early Thursday following an hours-long domestic incident at an ap

Alberto Pola, his defense attorney, said he thought Richardson needed a shock camp order or a drug treatment sentence to break the cycle of violence and substance abuse in his life. The Cayuga County Probation Department indicated to Leone that it didn't oppose that, although Senior Assistant District Attorney Heather De Stefano said she opposed a shock camp order.

"I'm ready to turn my life around," Richardson said.

Richardson was sentenced to one to three years in prison with a shock camp order for his felony charge, and one year for his misdemeanor charges.

 An Auburn man pleaded guilty by waiver to two felonies.

Hector Cabrera, 37, of 28 Florence St., pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal contempt and aggravated family offense, both class E felonies. In exchange for his plea, he will likely be sentenced to two to four years in prison.

He admitted to grabbing a female victim from the throat and neck, making it difficult for her to breathe. In doing this, he violated an order of protection. He also violated the order when he called her on the phone after the incident.

Cabrera, a second-felony offender, also admitted to violating his probation. At the time of his offense, he was on probation for a felony criminal contempt conviction. For violating his probation, he will likely be sentenced to 1 1/3 to four years in prison.

He is due back for sentencing May 23.

Staff writer Megan Ehrhart can be reached at (315) 282-2244 or megan.ehrhart@lee.net. Follow her on Twitter @MeganEhrhart.

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Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.The town of Brutus is close to losing a $418,000 state grant after another project partner, the town of Mentz, completely withdrew from an intermunicipal effort to rewater the Erie Canal.

The planning grant for a Erie Canal Rewatering and Trail Connections Project was originally awarded to the village of Port Byron by the state Regional Economic Development Council. The grant would help plan, design and create a project for rewatering an old section of the canal from Port Byron to Brutus.

Also involving Mentz and Brutus, the three municipalities working together was the foundation for the grant that made it really competitive in the eyes of the state, said grant writer Sharon Lilla.

But in May, the village of Port Byron Board of Trustees pulled out of the project and voted not to participate, Brutus Supervisor Jim Hotaling said. The village had concerns about its significant flooding issues, he added, saying officials there could not come to understand that part of the grant was specifically dedicated to addressing the issues through flood mitigation.

In addition to flooding issues, Port Byron Mayor Ron Wilson previously told The Citizen money and time were other factors for opting out. The project would  over a three-year period  involve a total contribution of about $47,000 from each municipality.

In a Feb. 11 meeting, the Brutus Town Board voted to accept lead applicant responsibility for the canal project. Meeting minutes indicate Brutus assumed lead agency because the "project provides great economic opportunity, long term community benefits and potential quality of life improvements to residents of the communities of Brutus, Mentz and Port Byron."

'We've just got to move forward': Brutus plans to lead Erie Canal project The town of Brutus plans to assume the lead agency role of a project to rewater the Erie Can

It came as a surprise to Brutus when, about two weeks later on Feb. 26, Mentz voted to exit the canal rewatering project. Lilla said she attended the meeting with a letter from Brutus that clarified what would be needed for the project to move forward. The towns had to do certain things to overcome Port Byron's withdrawal, she said. Those times were set out in the letter that Brutus hoped Mentz would sign. The state wanted a contract from the towns by April.

Instead, with the letter in hand, the Mentz Town Board entered an executive discussion to discuss litigation, Lilla said. After about a 40-minute discussion, Lilla said the town formally voted, unanimously, to completely withdraw from the project. Calling it a loss for the communities, she noted it's especially rare for municipalities to have a shovel-ready project for tourism.

Mentz Supervisor Richard Nielens Jr. said last week that the town determined in an executive session that it no longer wanted to participate. Nielens offered no other comments about the withdrawal.

"Right now the project is on life support, but it's not completely dead," Lilla said, adding that Hotaling  who she described as a visionary  "is going to do all he can to find another way to save this project."

"What happened to Mentz, I have no idea," Hotaling said. "I just know that I think the rewatering project has great potential for the (municipalities) plus the county."

On Monday, Hotaling said that while the state was OK with the two municipalities going forward, now that it's only Brutus, the state has indicated the grant will be lost if Brutus were to go forward on its own. Hotaling said the state indicated that if Cayuga County were to assume the lead the agency role of the project, however, that might be the grant's only chance at survival.

"To me, that's very heartbreaking," Hotaling said of the potential loss of an opportunity to stimulate economic growth and bolster tourism in the communities. "I didn't want to lose the money. ... Some people just don't have a vision for growth."

Hotaling has sent a letter to the Cayuga County Legislature. He's also reached out to local and state officials, and the ones who have responded haven't given him much hope. If the county doesn't assume lead agency, "then I guess it's dead in the water," he added.

County Administrator J. Justin Woods said in a Wednesday email that the county is aware of the challenges caused by municipalities withdrawing from the project, but that he had just received a copy of Hotaling's letter Tuesday night. He said county staff was preparing a briefing but he hadn't yet spoken with Hotaling or the county Legislature.

"It's in limbo right now, it'd be a shame to lose it," said Brutus legislator Christopher Petrus. He said there are "very preliminary discussions" at the county level, but "I don't know if it's going to get enough traction to get off the ground."

He's working behind the scenes to see if he can rally support before he brings it to the floor, he said. As far as he knows, it's not on any agenda at this point. Petrus plans to do what he can to preserve the grant, not only for the economic development aspect, but he said the flood mitigation portion of the grant is "one of the main reasons we might want to keep it afloat."

"I don't think the citizens (of Port Byron) know what they lost," Hotaling said.

As a homeowner, Michael Riley is also concerned about flooding. A flood in January 2018 affected Mentz and Port Byron, he said, ruining a few village homes and numerous basements. With the potential of another flood likely, he's concerned that no one is addressing the problem  one the grant would have addressed.

"They're saying 'no' to everything, but they don't have a plan," he said.

Riley: Port Byron's new park is huge opportunity Some 60 years ago, the businessmen of Port Byron, writing as the Chamber of Commerce, sent a

As Mentz's town historian and the president of the American Canal Society, Riley said he's an advocate for the restoration of old canals in general, and that this project was especially primed for success due to resources, grants and state parks that already attracted natural traffic.

He pointed to the $10 million Erie Canal Heritage Park in Port Byron, which the state funded and opened in fall 2016. The large park has access from both the state Thruway and the village. Failing to tap into the large revenues made in canal tourism by expanding and capitalizing on the park, he said, "is very shortsighted."

"I just think it's a huge loss," he said. "I think it's going to hurt the town and the village."

Staff writer Megan Ehrhart can be reached at (315) 282-2244 or megan.ehrhart@lee.net. Follow her on Twitter @MeganEhrhart.

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Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.ALBANY  New York state's ban on personal ownership of stun guns is unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Friday in the latest in a series of court decisions that have led to the loosening of restrictions on the weapons in several states.

The decision came in a lawsuit filed by Matthew Avitabile, of Schoharie County, New York, who said he wanted to buy a stun gun for self-defense in his rural upstate home.

His lawyers argued that New York's longstanding ban on civilian ownership of stun guns violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms. U.S. District Judge David Hurd agreed.

"New York's sweeping prohibition on the possession and use of tasers and stun guns by all citizens for all purposes, even for self-defense in one's own home, must be declared unconstitutional," Hurd wrote in his decision.

The lawsuit named the superintendent of the state police, the agency that enforces New York's weapons laws. New York attorney general's office, which defends the state in lawsuits, referred questions to state police or Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office. Cuomo adviser Richard Azzopardi said that state lawyers are reviewing the decision and that the governor is reserving comment.

Illinois' Supreme Court made a similar stun gun ruling Thursday, deciding in favor of two men charged with carrying the weapons.

In New Jersey, a resident and the New Jersey Second Amendment Society sued the state in 2016 after Taser International declined his order for a Taser Pulse model because the state bans the sale of such merchandise. The following year the state's attorney general conceded the state's ban on electronic arms is unconstitutional.

A Massachusetts court struck down that state's stun gun ban last year, also ruling that banning civilian possession of the weapons violates the U.S. Constitution's right to bear arms.

"After that, the domino fell in the right way, and the rest of these cases became much more likely" to end with state bans overturned, said Alan Beck, of San Diego, one of two attorneys who filed Avitabile's lawsuit.

The other, Stephen Stamboulieh, of Madison, Mississippi, said in all the cases the judges ruled that stun guns are "bearable arms" and therefore covered under protections guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

"A right's a right," he said. "If it's a Taser, a billy club, a handgun, it's all protected by the Second Amendment."

Stamboulieh said he and Beck have also filed lawsuits aiming to overturn stun gun bans in Hawaii and Rhode Island.

Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0Governor Cuomo and the New York state legislature have indicated their intent to legalize recreational cannabis. New Yorks neighboring states and provinces have done so, or are in the process and the industry in New York is estimated at up to $3.5 billion per year. Although a commercial approach has been promoted in all U.S. states with legal recreational cannabis, New Yorkers would do well to consider nonprofit options, such as a state-run monopoly. Our neighbors to the north in the province of Quebec use this approach, and New Mexico is considering it as well.

Most people agree prohibition has failed to curb use of a drug not that different than alcohol. Decriminalization sounds appealing to many, but drug income is left in the hands of the illicit market. Cannabis income could be used to combat the health risks and educate the public about potential harms of cannabis. A state-run monopoly with a public health emphasis could focus on limiting access and the violent illicit market.

No one knows the safest way to legalize cannabis. For lessons on commercializing addictive drugs, we can turn to the alcohol and tobacco industries.

Tobacco and alcohol cause 480,000 and 88,000 deaths each year, respectively, in the U.S. After recent decreasing rates of tobacco use in youth, companies are aggressively rebranding themselves through electronic delivery of nicotine. About one in four children report "vaping" nicotine and one quarter of those say they "vape" cannabis.

Drugs and alcohol are wildly profitable and very expensive to taxpayers. Tobacco profits in the United States are $124 billion per year, and costs to society are $300 billion, including $170 billion in direct medical care. Income from alcohol in the United States is $223 billion and cost to the taxpayer is $249 billion.

Corporate profits result from targeting vulnerable populations, such as daily users, the mentally ill and youth. Colorful advertising, branding, fruit flavors and candy cannabis are particularly alluring to younger consumers. If the state sells cannabis, it can be done with an eye to ban these products and advertising, while providing cannabis in a limited, boring way.

The state is best positioned to avoid harms of commercialization, and minimize use of the illicit market. The state could sell non-combustible cannabis pills that wont harm the lung at the county public health department. Addiction treatment could be available at point of sale. A perpetual public health campaign should be started before cannabis is legalized to stress risks, including to a pregnant womans fetus, those with addiction, mental illness and youth.

The current proposed approach from Governor Cuomo would likely lead to multiple pot shops on the street and a tax on a fraction of income. Commercialized models have led to increased cannabis use such as in the proliferation of Dutch coffee shops. Turning profits over to private entrepreneurs leaves taxpayers to pay medical costs of treating addiction, medical illness and car accidents.

Multiple competitors selling a drug that is cheap to grow will likely lead to low prices. Lack of risk of prosecution or seizure by authorities also lowers cost. Cheap pot would encourage higher usage, which is best combated by avoiding a focus on profits. The state can set prices high enough to discourage use, but low enough to limit usage of the illicit market. Only state control favored by monopoly best opposes inevitable, relentless, anti-regulation lobbying by industry. In Colorado, this relentless industry lobbying was described with even mild proposed pesticide safety rules. Another example of industry power is how the alcohol and tobacco industries have protected themselves from legal prosecution.

Harms from cannabis use are focused on daily users who commercial enterprises focus sales on. 1/10 cannabis users will become addicted, a figure that increases to 1/6 in adolescents. A study showed 48% of those with severe cannabis use disorder were unable to maintain emplyment. Cannabis use can cause psychosis and increases risk of chronic psychotic illness, such as schizophrenia, in vulnerable persons. Costs of treating schizophrenia are estimated at $156 billion in the U.S. Additional costs are expected to be the care for in utero exposure, hyperemesis, the pulmonary damage caused by using the lung to get cannabinoids to the brain, more addiction, accidents caused by intoxication and increased emergency visits for emotional complications of intoxication, such as panic.

Medical cannabis for pain has little rigorous evidence. Patients insist their chronic pain, anxiety and moods are improved despite opposing or contradictory evidence in the few studies available.

Cannabis legalization in New York appears imminent. Whether or not you support legalization, we all need to be informed about the options for legalization. Taxpayers would do well to advocate for public health, non-profit approaches to cannabis legalization, so we can avoid the harms of commercializing a drug in widespread use.

Drs. Sunny P. Aslam and Brian Johnson are addiction and pain psychiatrists in Syracuse.

Love 0 Funny 4 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0The world is grieving after last Fridays attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The terrorist gunned down 50 worshippers, women and children included, as 50 others were injured. It was an unprecedented but premeditated atrocity that gripped the usually peaceful nation of New Zealand, leaving it, and the world, in mourning, shock, and a state of terror.

The attack was harrowingly publicised on social media. Using a body or helmet camera strapped to his head, the terrorist live-streamed the killings in shameful arrogance and posted the footage on Facebook.

The Washington Post described the footage as showing the gunman driving to the mosque clad in tactical gear, his car full of weapons. It shows the shooting from his perspective, a chilling record of mass violence that police have warned people not to share. The shooter fires hundreds of rounds of bullets at defenceless worshippers inside and outside the Al-Noor Mosque, where the majority of the bloodshed occurred, retreating at one point to his car for another weapon. He doubles back on injured victims to make sure they are dead. The violence lasts about six minutes.

As their country grieves, New Zealanders are trying to make sense of what happened. The naivete associated with the phenomenon of it cant possibly happen here has been shattered as the protective bubble has burst.

The prime minister of New Zealand called the attacker an extremist right-wing terrorist, describing the attack as one of New Zealands darkest days. She also said that those with extremist views had no place in her country or the wider world. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said that the atrocity was the work of an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist.

The world has been inundated with similar massacres. What came as a surprise this time round was the immediate designation of terrorist of a non-Muslim attacker. The world had earlier fallen into the trap of believing that terrorism was limited to radical Islamists and that it happened in particular locations  Europe, the Middle East, and maybe the US  but this attack throws such stereotypes by the wayside. Contrary to what has been considered the norm, this was an attack by a non-Muslim against Muslims, people of peace in the midst of prayer.

In reality, Muslims have suffered as much if not more than non-Muslims as far as terrorist attacks are concerned. Simultaneously, and according to many specialists, terrorism is inflicted by fewer Muslims than others, while terrorist acts by Muslim perpetrators receive the most media coverage. In Sri Lanka and Burma, Buddhists kill Muslims with terrible frequency, and Israeli settlers commit crimes against Palestinians on a daily basis, and yet we hardly hear of such tragic events in the mainstream media.

In 2015, a bomb was set off in a mosque in Kuwait, killing at least 27 people and wounding hundreds of others. In 2017, gunmen attacked a mosque in Arish in Egypt and also set off a bomb, killing 235 people and wounding over 100 others. In 2017, an assault on a Quebec City mosque in Canada took the lives of six Muslim worshippers and injured 19 others, leaving the country reeling in shock.

There are far-right extremists who, like the attacker in Christchurch, have proven to be even more sadistic. Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extremist responsible for the deaths of 77 people in Norway in July 2011, was at first considered to be a terrorist. However, once he was identified as a white male, he was referred to as a deranged extremist instead.

One definition of the term terrorism is the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims. The definition does not specify the gender, ethnicity, colour, or religion of the doer. It specifies the act itself, and the Christchurch massacre falls into the category of a terrorist act.

One thing is certain: whether they are Muslim extremists, anti-immigrant fascists, far-right white supremacists, or Ku Klux Clan lunatics, the crazed come in different shapes and sizes. This has always been the case, and it is high time we recognised this and stopped identifying terrorism with Muslims alone.

According to journalist Dean Obeidallah in the US Daily Beast, the media simply do not cover non-Muslim terror attacks with the same gusto. Why? Stories about scary others play better. Its a story that can simply be framed as good versus evil, with Americans being the good and the brown Muslims the bad. Muslims at large are being tarred by one incriminating brush because the media intentionally and consciously stereotypes Muslims as evil-doers and those capable of the worst of actions.

Hate speech, white supremacist jargon, and attempts to brand all Muslims as terrorists and ban some from travelling to the US are fear-mongering tactics that incite the crazed and instill Islamophobia. They create an atmosphere against Muslims, asylum-seekers, and immigrants and embolden those who seek revenge.

Yet, some still dont appear to see this reality. After the Christchurch massacre, US President Donald Trump said that he did not see white nationalism as a rising threat around the world. Then an independent Australian MP, Fraser Anning, sparked outrage for blaming the immigration of Muslims for the Christchurch mosque shooting.

Anning said that while any form of violence could never be justified, the growing fear of the increasing Muslim presence was behind the massacre. 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, he said.

Yet, the vigils held around the world in memory of the victims prove that there is still empathy in the world today. Christchurch residents have been shocked to the core and been seen weeping profusely as they leave flowers in solidarity. Political leaders from around the world have denounced the massacre. The Eiffel Tower in Paris was blacked out in solidarity. As for the above-mentioned Australian MP, the countrys prime minister has moved to censure him for victim-blaming Muslims.

Let us mourn the dead, while at the same time realising that there are crazed terrorists amongst us.Scottish food ingredient manufacturer Macphie won a duo of awards at two separate events last night (21 March).

The company was recognised as employer of the year at the Scottish Rural Awards in Edinburgh, as well as taking home the Best Foodservice Product award for its vegan-certified cake mix range at the North East Scotland Food Awards in Aberdeen.

The Rural Employer award acknowledges companies that actively seek to attract, invest in, retain and reward talent. The awards judges said they chose a business that reflects its rural values by fostering a true sense of belonging and community in the workplace.

The Best Foodservice Product award recognised Macphies development of what it describes as the first vegan-certified cake mix range for use by industry professionals both in the UK and internationally.

Macphies charmain Alastair Macphie said that the duo of award wins was absolutely brilliant.

The award for our new vegan product is important as we are very proud of our track record in innovation and exploring the new. Keeping focused on the future helps us identify opportunities in the ever-evolving food industry as we deliver inspirational solutions for our customers, he added.

We are committed to cultivating a diverse, rewarding, employee culture so it is particularly gratifying to be recognised as employer of the year. We are lucky that the passion of our people is one of our greatest strengths.BLACK REPUBLICAN BLOG - The Republican Party is the party of civil rights and the four Fs: faith, family, freedom and fairness. The Democratic Party is the party of the four Ss: slavery, secession, segregation and socialism (Quote By Author Michael Scheuer).This year in most of the world, the Jewish feast of Purim lasts from sundown on March 20 to sundown March 21. Here are the facts you need to know:

What is Purim?

Purim (pronounced pooh-REEM) is a celebration of the deliverance of the Jewish people from genocide in the Persian kingdom. This story, as recorded in the Book of Esther, says in brief that King Ahasuerus (Xerxes I) had a servant named Haman, who became incensed when a Jewish citizen named Mordechai refused to bow to him. In revenge, Haman convinces the king that a certain people living in the kingdom are disloyal. The king agrees to give Haman the right to exterminate the Jewish people, unaware that his new queen, Esther, is Jewish. She eventually confronts the king. Since no royal decree can be revoked, he issues a new proclamation giving the Jewish people the right to defend themselves. On the day marked for their extinction, the Jewish people wipe out their attackers. This took place in the fifth century B.C.

When is Purim celebrated?

Purim is a joyous Jewish festival celebrated every year on the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Adar. On 13 Adar, the Jews defeated their enemies, then feasted the next day. However, in Jerusalem and a few other walled cities like Shushan, the feast is observed on the 15th day of the month, because the Ketuvim says walled cities did not win their battles until 14 Adar. (See Esther 9:13-19.)

The dating of Adar is confusing, since seven out of every 19 years contains two months known as Adar, one of which occurs during these leap years. In those years, Purim is held in Adar II. (The same day in Adar I is the minor feast of Purim Katan.)

What does Purim mean?

The name Purim is the Hebrew word for lots, because Haman cast lots to determine the day he would eradicate the Jewish people from the kingdom (Esther 3:6-7).

How is Purim celebrated?

Observant Jews prepare to celebrate this joyous holiday by fasting from daybreak until sundown on the day before Purim in what is known as Fast of Esther (Taanit Esther), based on Esther 4:16. Purim begins that evening.

There are four commandments (mitzvot) for Purim, three of which are found in Esther 9:13-25:

Listen to the full Megillah (the entire Book of Esther) in the synagogue, or read it, twice: once in the evening and again during the next calendar day, commemorating Gods deliverance. Each one of the 54 times Hamans name is mentioned, the congregation will make noise (often by twirling a gragger) or yelling curses as a way to drown out his name;

Give charity to the poor (Matanot LaEvyonim) to at least two poor people. In some places, no one is denied charity on this day;

Send a ready-to-eat food to at least two friends (Mishloach Manot). By tradition, this is to be delivered by a third party, so streets in Jewish neighborhoods are often clogged during this time of year; and

Eating and drinking a festive meal, which often includes generous servings of wine.

What other customs traditionally mark this holiday?

Purim is one of the most joyous celebrations of the Jewish calendar. People of all ages wear masquerade costumes and have parties. Families eat hamantaschen (or oznay Haman)  triangular-shaped pastries filled with poppy seeds or sweet filling, intended to represent Hamans tricornered hat (or in some tellings, his ears)  although, as with other religions, modern speculation has attempted to vulgarize its symbolism. Some burn Haman in effigy. The day concludes with a family meal shared with friends. One rabbi said that those celebrating the festival should drink wine at dinner until he cannot tell the difference between cursed be Haman and blessed be Mordecai.

Is there a special prayer for the occasion?

A prayer known as Al HaNisim. An English translation says:

In the days of Mordechai and Esther, in Shushan, the capital, when Haman, the wicked, rose up against them and sought to destroy, to slay, and to exterminate all the Jews, young and old, infants and women, on the same day, on the thirteenth of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, and to plunder their possessions; But You, in Your abundant mercy, nullified his counsel and frustrated his intention and caused his design to return upon his own head and they hanged him and his sons on the gallows.

Is there a specific greeting for Purim?

Jews may greet each other with the Hebrew phrase chag Purim sameach or the Yiddish phrase Ah freylichen Purim, which translate to Happy festival of Purim!

What is the message of Purim?

The holiday began as a way of publicizing the miracle of Gods preservation of His people (Megillah 18a). As centuries of anti-Semitic persecution unfolded, the holiday took on new depths of meaning. Modern Jews see a Purim miracle in the fact that Josef Stalin had a stroke on Purim (March 1, 1953); he died four days later. In 1945, American soldiers held a Purim celebration, a few days late, in a castle that once belonged to Joseph Goebbels.

For lovers of liberty, this Jewish feast is also a holiday celebrating religious liberty and tolerance, as God triumphs over government persecution.

Related:

FAQ: What is Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles?

FAQ: What is Yom Kippur?

FAQ: What is Hanukkah?

A Jewish perspective on justice, for Rosh Hashanah

Further resources from the Acton Institute on Judaism and economics:

Judaism, Law & the Free Market: An Analysis by Joseph Isaac Lifshitz

Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality by Corinne Sauer and Robert M. Sauer

(Photo credit: Public domain.)

Yahoo! JAPAN



Yahoo! JAPANHouse Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings says Abbe Lowell has confirmed that President Donald Trump's son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner has been using the encryptable/disappear-able messaging WhatsApp to communicate with leaders of foreign nations.

"Mr. Lowell could not answer whether Mr. Kushner's communications included classified information."

Mr. Kushner's attorney disputes the claims in the Cummings letter.

-Jared used WhatsApp to communicate with foreign persons, probably including MBS

 Ivanka still uses a home brew server she shares with Jared for emails about official business

 KT McFarland used an AOL email to participate in Flynn's shady nuclear deal https://t.co/mnCrg8JhOF pic.twitter.com/a0wYfW7D1X  southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) March 21, 2019

Kushner's the tip of the iceberg  the House attention to this is about a number of additional White House senior staff communicating in the same manner. If true, we are talking about many people committing violations of federal record-keeping laws. If they're doing so to hide their involvement in other possibly criminal shenanigans, we are talking even more serious business.

From new reporting Manu Raju and Lauren Fox at CNN:

House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings said Thursday his committee has obtained new information that several senior White House officials have used personal email and messaging accounts to conduct government business, asserting that President Donald Trump's son-in-law communicated with foreign leaders through a private messaging application that appears to lack adequate safeguards. In a Thursday letter to the White House, the Maryland Democrat alleged that Jared Kushner, who is also a senior White House adviser, had been using WhatsApp, a popular messaging application, to "communicate with foreign leaders"  something he said that Kushner's attorney had confirmed in a private meeting. He also contended that Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump, also a senior adviser, may be in violation of the Presidential Records Act by her use of private emails. The allegations from Democrats that some of Trump's closest confidants  as well as former officials Steve Bannon and K.T. McFarland  used personal email come as Trump continues to attack Hillary Clinton for using a private email system when serving as secretary of state.

In the letter, Cummings revealed that his panel learned the new information in a private meeting in December with Abbe Lowell, an attorney for both Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Lowell referred inquiries to the White House and National Security Council about whether Kushner communicated classified information through WhatsApp, something that Cummings said would constitute a "major security breach." "For example during a meeting with Mr. Kushner's attorney, Abbe Lowell, Mr. Lowell confirmed that Mr. Kushner has been using the messaging application WhatsApp as part of his official White House duties to communicate with foreign leaders. Mr. Lowell could not answer whether Mr. Kushner's communications included classified information," Cummings wrote. According to Cummings, when pressed how Kushner was backing up his communications in order to assure that he wasn't violating the Presidential Records Act, Lowell responded that Kushner took "screenshots" and forwarded them to his official White House email account or to the National Security Council. According to Cummings, when Lowell was asked if Kushner ever communicated classified information on WhatsApp, Lowell responded, "That's above my paygrade."

More: Elijah Cummings: White House officials using personal accounts to do official work [CNN]South Asia is a hotbed of brilliant science fiction writing, as well as writings in all the related genres capture by the Bengali word "kalpabigyan (encompassing literature that is "science-dependent," "science-based," "science mystery" and "science"), and there have been many brilliant anthologies of science fiction from the region; the latest entry to the field is Gollancz's new Book of South Asian Science Fiction, edited by Tarun K. Saint, the subject of a fascinating review by Gautham Shenoy in Factor Daily.

The anthology includes "Planet of Terror," written by Adrish Bardhan, who is credited with coining "kalpabigyan," as well as 27 other stories and poems (and by all accounts the poetry is outstanding).





Shenoy finds fault with one element of the book though: it only features writers from the "partitioned three" (Pakistan, India and Bangladesh), with no contributors from "Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives or the Tibetan Community in exile." Shenoy calls on Gollancz to revisit the book as a series with contributions from these other nations and literatures.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the anthology, Sami Ahmad Khan returns to his fictional universe featuring the antagonistic reptilian aliens, the Qa'haQ, with his standalone story, 15004, with a tale with a very high body count brought about by an invading species which seeks to eliminate heterogeneity in India, for starters. The people of Karachi grapple with the sea stolen from them and its consequences in Asif Aslam Farrukhi's Stealing the Sea (Samandar Ki Chori; Translated from by Syed Saeed Naqvi), while a family comes to grip with their past, their expectations and their heritage in unexpected fashion and with unintended consequences as enter an immersive VR theme park called Partition World 2047 in the story by this collection's editor and partition scholar, Tarun K. Saint. Clarke Prasad (aka Suraj Prasad) in his story, Mirror-Rorrim portrays a bhumandala couple in a quantum-entangled multiverse. And speaking of time, Manjula Padmanabhan in her first contact story, Flexi-Time gives readers a glimpse at the implications of IST (not Indian Standard Time, but Indian 'Stretchable' Time) as an impatient global council tries to come to grips with the "chronological otherness" of the aliens, while Anil Menon's story, Shit Flower, touches upon what immortality and multiple identities could be like against a future Bombay facing a brownout by way of a sewage flood, brought as a result of AIs telling themselves jokes. Capping the anthology is a climate fiction story about the language of Gaia herself  which in itself is worth the price of admission  by the author of Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, Vandana Singh, Reunion which is at once a meditation on where the future of cities and urban living lies in the context of a sustainable future and set in a climate-world world where Mumbai has become an archipelago. All of which makes this anthology a book worthy of being on the shelves of any reader who enjoys good stories  SF or otherwise.



Lota, not toilet paper: The eclectic dreams of The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction

[Gautham Shenoy/Factor Daily]





(via Beyond the Beyond)Amazon is the biggest online shopping platform in the globe with a wide array of products ranging from electronics, books, personal care items, clothes, beauty products, kitchen appliances, and jewellery among several others. Before placing an order on this e-commerce platform, one must ask themselves, is it safe to order from Amazon to South Africa? Well, is it?

Parcels from online shopping giant Amazon. Photo: Kyodo News

Source: Getty Images

Amazon, based in Seattle, Washington, is a multinational technology firm that is known mostly for providing e-commerce services. Online shopping has become a trend worldwide since it is convenient and has several other advantages. Like any other offline business, scammers have made people doubt the reliability of this online platform, and citizens cannot help but wonder, how reliable is amazon shipping to South Africa 2021? Here are answers that will help you understand how shopping online via this company works.

Can you order from Amazon in South Africa?

Does Amazon operate in South Africa? Yes, one can order from the e-commerce platform while in SA. However, the e-commerce company only ships specific goods to South Africa. As such, when you create your account on Amazon, you need to fill in your South African address and that way the website will filter out only the products available for shipping to your country.

How do I ship from Amazon to South Africa?

In the past, Amazon shipping to South Africa was conducted via third-party sellers willing to do so, and delivery was through the South African Post Service (SAPO). Currently, things have changed as one can purchase items directly from the firm's website and have them shipped to their physical address with ease. The multinational company ships products internationally via the AmazonGlobal service. On this platform, one can see the products available for shipping in their country, the shipping costs, and fees which are dependent on the delivery address of the order.

How to place an order on Amazon from South Africa

Does Amazon deliver to your door? To know the answer, you have to first understand how to purchase on the online platform, and how the item(s) will be shipped.

Go to Amazon.com

Select all your preferred items by moving them on to your shopping cart.

After you are done, go to checkout and input your address.

At this point, the company will calculate all your fees and import duties and have all your items delivered by Aramex courier services. Aramex is reliable as compared to the South African Post Service (SAPO) used in the past.

One of the easiest ways to buy goods on Amazon is through the desktop interface which is more friendly and easy to navigate as opposed to the mobile interface.

How much is Amazon shipping to South Africa?

Shipping charges with Amazon South Africa are determined by the total number of goods, item type, weight, and volume of the products in the cart. You can view the basic guidelines for shipping costs.

There are no hidden or extra fees with Amazon shipping to South Africa, what you see on the site is what you end up paying for. Furthermore, the Amazon Global site calculates an estimated customs fee before checkout. In the event you are undercharged, the company absorbs the cost of the error while if you are overcharged, you will get a refund of the excess amount.

What options do you have for Amazon payments South Africa? The other convenient part about shipping goods from this e-commerce to the country is that one can conveniently pay for the goods with their local credit cards, something that was unheard of in the beginning.

How fast is Amazon shipping to South Africa?

Delivery duration to the country has been made easier due to the fact that Amazon uses Aramex courier instead of SAPO, where goods remained held up for long and even got lost. Secondly, Amazon pays all the customs duties upfront so that the items are not held up at the customs office.

According to the company's site on shipping times to Africa, the standard time to ship items to SA is 10 to 14 business days. For expedited shipping, it may take an approximate of 8 to 16 business days to get your products. The other option is priority shipping that takes 2 to 7 working days, and you pay more for your goods to arrive faster. Note that this period may extend due to various circumstances.

Amazon opened its first South African office in Cape Town CBD in 2006 where the e-commerce giant set up an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Because of this, the company has managed to enhance its services in SA.

In as much as there have been complaints on various social media platforms regarding the fees and the period taken to get goods shopped online into the country, the company may take into consideration and improve its services in the country. All in all, Amazon shipping to South Africa has never been as easy and convenient as it is now, and if customer complaints are addressed, then shopping online at Amazon while in South Africa will be much more reliable in 2021. Happy shopping everyone!

DISCLAIMER: This article is intended for general informational purposes only and does not address individual circumstances. It is not a substitute for professional advice or help and should not be relied on to make decisions of any kind. Any action you take upon the information presented in this article is strictly at your own risk and responsibility!

Source: Briefly.co.zaFinding the best colleges in South Africa is one of the priorities for the most students that want to pursue higher education. Once you are done with the basic level education, the next big thing is to find out which college or university you will be joining, depending on the course you want, and qualifications that you have made.

Image: pexels.com

Source: UGC

Even as you check out the best universities in South Africa you already know that the decision of which college you will be joining is as crucial as the course you choose to pursue. In fact, choosing the right college is like making the first step towards a successful career. Employers sometimes look at the school you attended since every school comes with a reputation, more so when it comes to specialized courses. This said, check out the following schools before you make the ultimate decision.

Which are the best universities in South Africa?

Consider the top universities in South Africa when choosing a place to study. This is because such institutions have a solid reputation from having gone through the test of time. In fact, most of them have been in existence long enough and have been around for quite a while hence have a solid background. Most employers identify with such institutions and in fact, some prefer graduates from certain institutions when selecting employees. Check out the following top 10 institutions whenever you want a place to study.

1. Cape Town

UCT as it is commonly known ranks first in the list of best universities in South Africa for a reason. With over 20,000 students from all over the world, this institution is able to maintain this position for several years in a row because of the quality of education. The insistence on quality standards continues to set the school apart. In addition to that, it has a world standing which continues to prove that quality matters everywhere.

2. Witwatersrand

Wits is an establishment that has stood the test of time and definitely is one of the best colleges in South Africa. Having been established in the late 1800s, the school as home to some of the world's greatest men including Nelson Mandela. It may have started as a simple mining school but has over the years risen to one of the best establishments, not only in South Africa but the world at large. It has over 33,000 students from Mzanzi and outside. CWUR ranks it as the 230 in the world. It is still the trusted expert in mining and mineral engineering studies.

3. KwaZulu-Natal

This may be a young institution that came into existence as a result of the merging of Durban-Westville and Natal universities in 2004. Even so, it continues to be one of the best-performing in South Africa. It holds position 402 worldwide according to CWUR rankings. It stands out because it holds the Center for AIDS Research in South Africa which is located at the school in Kwazulu-Natal.

4. University of Pretoria

This is an old institution that turned 111 years in February of 2019. Maybe it is because of its longevity that has one of the largest student populations in South Africa. It has more than 55000 students taking various courses at the school. It stands out since it is the only college in the country that owns a faculty of veterinary science. This school has over 1800 courses offered both in Afrikaan and Zulu. CWUR ranks it as 438 worldwide.

5. Stellenbosch University

This establishment from 1918 is found in Cape Town and is rated 448 in the world. Its highly regarded and has some of the best programs in Agriculture, religious studies, theology and development studies. It has over 30 thousand students comprising of both local and foreign students.

READ ALSO: Top universities in South Africa 2018-2019

6. University of Johannesburg

For a recent institution that was established in 2005, this institution has an impressive ranking of 790 globally. Chances are that this rank for a new establishment is because of the triple merger of Technikon Witwatersrand, Rank Afrikaans University and a section of Vista University. Either way, it is doing quite well for a young school.

7. North-West University

Ranked 964 in the world, the North-West University came into existence as a result of a merger. This seems to be a trend for schools that are doing very well. The merger that occurred in 2004 between University of North-West, and Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education led to the formation of one off the largest higher learning institutions in South Africa. The school has over 64000 students in its 3 campuses namely: Mahikeng, Vanderbijlpark and Potchefstroom. This institution is well respected for its innovations.

8. Rhodes University

This institution was established in 1904. It is one of the institutions in South Africa with the least student population with the majority being from other countries. It is best known worldwide for two subjects that is the English and Literature course as well as communication and media studies.

9. University of the Western Cape

Unique is what can be said for this college. It was established in 1959 and has been a champion of equality as it fights against racism. As such, this student population is one of the most diverse because of the special role it plays in giving all South Africans an equal opportunity. It also has a great relationship with other international institutions.

10. University of the Free State

The institution has been existence since 1904 when it was first established. It started out as Grey College and currently has close to 40 thousand students in its 3 campuses. Being an old college, some of the most respected people in South Africa are its alumni.

Other universities in SA worth noting

Apart from the top 10, you can also try your luck n any of the following institutions. They are still very highly regarded in different areas. With fewer universities available and more students seeking to join, not everyone can get a chance in the best. This does not mean giving up when there are other alternatives that are equally okay. These include:

Nelson Mandela University

Tshwane University of Technology

Durban University of Technology

University of Limpopo

Cape Peninsula University of Technology

University of Fort Hare

University of Venda

Now that you know which are the best colleges in South Africa to consider, do your research well. Find out if any of these institutions offer a course you are interested in. Make sure that your decision is right from the start. After all, your career depends on it.

READ ALSO:

All Business Management courses in South Africa 2019

All Real Estate courses in South Africa 2019

List of all Boston College courses and fees 2019

Source: Briefly.co.zaIn case you were not aware, the International Day of Happiness is marked every year on March 20. In order to mark this day, the UNs Sustainable Development Solutions Network in partnership with Ernesto Illy Foundation releases the list of the happiest countries in the world. Naturally, a corresponding country economy world happiness index is constantly updated.

Image: canva.com (modified by author)

Source: UGC

This year, the 7th World Happiness Report was from a survey that mainly focused on the community. Over the years, the happiness of people has evolved, therefore, the survey took into account factors like social norms, conflicts, technologies, and government policies that have contributed to those changes. The report provides an interesting perspective that has nothing to do with common measurement standards but instead, ranks the countries based on how happy their citizens believe themselves to be. So, how happy are we as South Africans? Find out this as well as the list of happiest countries in the world 2019.

READ ALSO: South Africa ranked 125th on the world's peaceful countries list

How happy is South Africa?

Now that you know a bit about the report, you must be curious about the happiness position of South Africa in 2019. Unfortunately, according to the report, South Africa does not even make it into the top 100. Apparently, out of the 156 countries surveyed, SA is position 106, with a happiness index of 4. 722. Last year, South Africa was ranked in the 105th position with an index of 4. 724. This year, the report of the happiest countries 2019 took into account the following variables:

Income Freedom to make decisions in life Trust Social support from family and friends Healthy life expectancy Generosity

A higher score in these variables, which support the well-being of people, means a higher ranking for a country. So what does this report mean for South Africa? Unfortunately, it is not a good indicator. To begin with, one of the most developed countries in Africa has been outdone by at least five other African nations that made it to the top 100 of this list. These countries include Libya, Nigeria, Ghana, Mauritius, and Algeria. This decline can be mostly attributed to the steep decline in the quality of life and satisfaction among South Africans.

This decline has not just happened overnight. On a scale with 10 points, the trend over the last few years shows that the average respondent from South Africa is growing unhappier. On a larger scale, these figures show that South Africa is the 21st biggest loser. People in South Africa have been dejected over time due to a number of things although the most notable one is arguably poor leadership. Particularly, the leadership of the previous president, Jacob Zuma, left a big hole in service delivery.

What are the 10 happiest countries in the world?

It would not be a list of the happiest countries in the world if we do not mention the happiest countries 2019. Here is the ranking from the top most happiest nation:

Finland Denmark Norway Iceland The Netherlands Switzerland Sweden New Zealand Canada Australia

This ranking has remained relatively unchanged for a while now. The Nordic countries are always occupying those top positions.

Which is the saddest country in the world?

On the other end of the spectrum, the unhappiest countries in order of unhappiness are:

South Sudan The Central African Republic Afghanistan Tanzania Rwanda Yemen Malawi Syria Botswana Haiti

We can conclude that Finland remains the happiest country in the world 2019, while Haiti is the unhappiest country in the world as per the 2019 report.

READ ALSO: List of richest countries in Africa - South Africa is 6th

The list of the happiest countries is by no means a final indicator of the economy. However, you can get a good idea of the amount of faith that the citizens have in their country. In this age and time, that is vital information for governments to have and use to better the lives of its citizens.

READ ALSO

7 reasons why Africa is still poor

10 best family things to do in Johannesburg

Top 10 beautiful houses in South Africa

Top 10 things to do in Durban in 2019

Human Rights Day South Africa 2019: 10 important facts with pictures 2019

Source: Briefly.co.zaFormer president Jacob Zuma is adamant that he had been on the right path, pushing for a nuclear deal with Russia. Zuma feels that the deal would have allowed South Africa to avoid the current electricity crisis which has resulted in severe load-shedding.

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Ex-president Jacob Zuma still stands by his bid to introduce nuclear energy to South Africa, which is currently embroiled in an energy crisis thanks to defunct Eskom.

In a recent interview, Zuma lamented his failed attempt to build the nation nuclear power plants. According to Times Select, the former ANC leader claims that Russia would have been 'understanding' if South Africa had not been able to repay the R1 trillion loan.

When President Cyril Ramaphosa had come into power following Zuma's resignation, one of his first moves had been to end talks of deals with Russia, claiming that it had been unaffordable.

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READ ALSO: Ex-Eskom CEO Brian Molefe claims nuclear deal would have benefited SA

His energy minister, Jeff Radebe, has said that nuclear power remains an option as South Africa struggles to stabilise its electricity supply.

Energy experts were not so sold on Zuma's plans, warning that the proposed programme would cost South Africa over R1 trillion.

PAY ATTENTION: 20 Funny Wedding Memes That Describe Almost Any Wedding

Nevertheless, Zuma remains convinced that nuclear energy would have been a cleaner and more reliable form of power:

We know they (Russia) are trusted people. We know they will never sink us. They will lift us.

Former Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene claimed under oath that he was fired because of his reluctance to sign off on the expensive deal back in 2015.

Zuma, who has yet to admit that this had been the cause of cabinet reshuffles, still believes that he had been acting in the best interests of the country when he had relentlessly pushed for the alternative energy programme.

Enjoyed reading our story? Download BRIEFLY's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major South African news!

Source: Briefly.co.za- The EFF leader has compared South Africa unfavourably to Zimbabwe

- He also defended his party's stance on land expropriation

- Malema added that the EFF was not trying to please white South Africans

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Julius Malema has said that South Africa is worse than Zimbabwe.

He made the comments while addressing supporters in Sharpeville on Thursday.

Malema was speaking in support of the land reform policies in Zimbabwe which notoriously contributed to its economic collapse.

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During his speech, Malema also said that he calls Human Rights Day "Sharpeville Day", and that he could never forgive white South Africans for the Sharpeville massacre.

Malema is no stranger to controversial public statements, but he seemed to be gearing up in this speech as the elections draw nearer. He reiterated his support for the style of land reform that was implemented in Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe's government.

This is despite the land reform in the country being widely-condemned and seen as a failure, as it damaged food security and undermined the Zimbabwean economy.

Nevertheless, Malema still insisted that Zimbabwe was better off than South Africa. According to The South African, he said that both South Africans and Zimbabweans were both poor, but that at least Zimbabweans owned their land.

READ ALSO: Andile Mngxitama calls for Brian Molefe's return to embattled Eskom

Malema went on to insist that the EFF was not trying to please white South Africans with its stance on land reform.

The EFF leader was also in full campaign mode, claiming once again that only his party could turn South Africa around.

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Source: Briefly.co.zaThe gorgeous Ayanda Thabethe took to social media recently to share snaps of her solo vacay to the Maldives in celebration of turning 33.

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According to OkMzansi, the TV personality celebrated her 33rd birthday with family and a few close friends in an intimate get-together before jetting off on a solo vacation to the dreamy Maldives.

She definitely deserved this trip for being the special person she is. She shared some dreamy photos that will inspire anyone to work as hard as her, to save up and get that great bikini body before they book that paradise dream holiday.

She picked the perfect location and stylish beachwear to enhance her hot summer bod - the best combination for a picture-perfect Instagram snap. Check out the photos from her solo vacation in the Maldives below.

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Here are more pics from Ayanda's Instagram account. They are too die for.How we wish we could go on a dream holiday like this?

READ ALSO: Lerato Kganyago responds to Heavy K: "Don't deejay like a woman"

Four days ago, Briefly.co.za reported that Ayanda Thabethe gifted her mom a brand new car for her 60th birthday.

Nothing beats the feeling of seeing a huge smile on your mother's face, so it must have been a really special feeling when Ayanda Thabethe saw her mother's reaction after she revealed her 60th birthday present, a brand-new car.

She took to her Instagram account on the weekend to show off the beautiful Honda she bought for her mother.

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Source: Briefly.co.za- 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."* Trump hinted US would recognize Israeli sovereignty on Golan Move condemned by Arab League, Iran, Turkey, Russia

* Russia: Change to Golan status would violate UN resolutions

* Iran calls Trump's remark illegal and unacceptable

* U.S. secretary of state in Beirut, warns on Hezbollah (Updates with Pompeo comments during Beirut visit)

By Tom Perry

BEIRUT, March 22 (Reuters) - The Syrian government vowed to take back the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as its allies and enemies alike condemned U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday for moving to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the territory seized in war.

Trump's statement on Thursday marked a dramatic shift in U.S. policy over the status of a disputed area that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East conflict and annexed in 1981 - a move not recognized internationally.

Against this backdrop of hostility towards the U.S. move, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Beirut where he took aim at Israel's main regional foes - Hezbollah and its backer Iran - and declared the success of U.S. sanctions against them.

Trump's declaration is the latest U.S. step to fuel anger in the region, both in states that are hostile to Israel and others that have relations with it and are allied to the United States.

It follows the U.S. recognition in December 2017 of Jerusalem as Israel's capital - a decision that also stirred international criticism as the city's disputed status remains at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Russia, an ally of President Bashar al-Assad with forces in Syria, said Trump's comments risked seriously destabilizing the region, and it voiced hope the statement was just declaratory.

Iran, Assad's main regional ally and which also has forces in Syria, condemned the statement as illegal and unacceptable.

"The personal decisions of Trump...will lead to crisis in the region," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said.

Story continues

Turkey, a U.S. ally and an adversary of Damascus, also said the move had brought the Middle East to the edge of a new crisis and the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights could not be allowed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for his gesture "at a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel." It could help Netanyahu in the midst of a tough re-election battle, analysts said.

The Syrian government said the Golan was an "indivisible" part of Syrian territory and recovering it "via all means guaranteed by international law is still a priority."

It said United States with its "stupidity and arrogance" had no right to decide the fate of the area and any move to recognize Israeli sovereignty over it was "an illegal action with no impact."

After remaining calm for decades since a 1974 armistice monitored by U.N. peacekeepers, Golan re-emerged as a flashpoint for regional tensions during the Syrian war. Last May, Israel accused Iran's Revolutionary Guards of launching a rocket salvo into its territory from the Syrian side of the truce line.

Israel, which has mounted numerous air strikes against what it has called Iran-backed targets in Syria, has demanded Russia keep forces allied to Tehran away from the boundary.

The Syrian side was held by rebel forces for years until pro-government forces recovered it in July.

U.S. OFFICIAL: ISRAEL "COULD NOT GIVE UP THE GOLAN"

Jason Greenblatt, a senior White House adviser, said on Twitter that "under any conceivable circumstance, Israel could not give up the Golan ... To do so would endanger Israel's very existence."

But Fouad Mundhir, a Syrian whose home village is in Israeli-occupied Golan, said Trump was "canceling the will of an entire nation.

"You say you are carrying the flag of democracy. Okay, Mr. Trump, have you taken into account the will of the people of the Golan?" he told Reuters in Jaramana, near Damascus.

In the Golan itself, Druze Arabs also rejected the move, while Israeli settlers welcomed it.

The European Union said its position on the status of the Golan Heights was unchanged and that it did not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the strategic plateau.

Germany said any change in borders should be "done through peaceful means between all those involved," while France said it did not recognize the Israeli annexation of the Golan and any recognition was contrary to international law.

The Arab League, which suspended Syria in 2011 after the start of its civil war, said Trump had paved "the way for official American recognition" of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan and called this "completely beyond international law."

Egypt, which made peace with Israel in 1979, said it still considers the Golan as occupied Syrian territory.

Israel says Syria's civil war has reaffirmed the need to keep the plateau - coveted for its water resources and fertile soil - as a buffer zone between Israeli towns and the instability of its neighbor.

In Lebanon, Pompeo said the United States would continue to use "all peaceful means" to choke off funding that "feeds Iran and Hezbollah terror operations."

"Lebanon faces a choice: bravely move forward as an independent and proud nation, or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future," he said.

Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese leaders including President Michel Aoun told him the group was a Lebanese party with popular support. The group has three cabinet ministers and together with its allies controls more than 70 of parliament's 128 seats.

The United States is a major donor to the Lebanese army but its allies, including the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, have been weakened as Iran's role has deepened through Lebanon, Iraq and Syria and Saudi influence has receded.

Washington has reintroduced sanctions on Iran and imposed new financial sanctions on Hezbollah which Lebanon's Hezbollah-aligned president, Michel Aoun, said on Thursday were hurting all Lebanese. (Reporting by Ali Abdelaty in Cairo/Tom Perry in Beirut, Maria Kiselyova in Moscow, and Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, Yousef Saba in Cairo, Ezgi Erkoyun and Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul, Kinda Makieh in Damascus, Joseph Nasr in Berlin, Robin Emmot in Brussels, Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Mark Heinrich)The aftermath of a powerful cyclone which lashed southern Africa one week ago is being felt thousands of kilometres away, in communities across Alberta.

On March 14, Cyclone Idai tore through the continent, triggering devastating floods which submerged villages and destroyed farmlands.

Joymore Muyambo nephew's son was among the victims.

She said the local African community has been watching the disaster unfold from afar. Many are desperate to help their family members still back home.

"I'm in Edmonton. I couldn't help my family. I couldn't talk to them," Muyambo said in an interview Thursday with CBC Radio's Edmonton AM.

"It was heartbreaking."

Cyclone Idai, one of the most destructive storms to strike southern Africa in decades, left a trail of destruction in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

At least 200 people have been killed, but the death toll is expected to rise significantly as more bodies are recovered from the receding flood waters.

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi, who declared three days of national mourning, believes the death toll could rise to more than 1,000.

Josh Estey/Care International/Reuters

'We want to help'

Muyambo's young relative, Munashe Jena, was at school in the mountainous Chimanimani district of Zimbabwe when the rocky hillside  weakened by torrential rains and 120 km/hour winds  gave way, burying the building in rubble and mud.

Munashe, 13, was laid to rest on Thursday.

Muyambo wonders whether his death could have been prevented. The situation on the ground grows more dire every day and there is little help for the survivors, she said.

"I'm not sure whether these people were warned. I think our government could have done a lot more to help our people," Muyambo said.

"A lot of people have lost their homes, roads have been damaged. Some bridges have collapsed, schools have been damaged. And some people, they don't know where their families are, they are still searching for their loved ones."

Story continues

Wallis Snowdon/CBC

'Give hope'

Cyclone Idai lashed the Mozambican port city of Beira with winds of up to 170 kilometres per hour last Thursday, then moved inland to Zimbabwe and Malawi, flattening buildings.

Thousands of survivors remain stranded. Helicopters have been ferrying people out of the most dangerously flooded areas. The United Nations has been coordinating food drops.

"I feel angry and sad about the whole situation," Muyambo said. "We want to help our loved ones back home."

The Zimbabwe Cultural Society of Alberta is fundraising for aid relief and appealing for monetary donations and contributions of clothing, bedding, toiletries, and canned food.

The society also plans to collect more donations during an Independence Day event from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. on April 13 at South Edmonton Sejong Multicultural Centre.

"As a community we are devastated especially by the loss of life and homes," said society chairperson Siba KhumaloIn in an open letter.

"In one spirit, we urge the community to come together and reach out a hand and give hope to those affected."ROME  Steve Bannons whirlwind tour of three continents took him to Italys capital on Thursday, to deliver a head-spinning diatribe on world events, economics, the environment and the prospects of Donald Trumps reelection, about which he characteristically managed to be both cryptic and definitive at the same time.

If Trump can last the next six months, and thats a big if, Bannon said, he will win bigger than in 2016.

Bannon, who has been spending much of his time lately in Europe, promoting an alliance of populist right-wing parties, was in Japan less than two weeks ago, praising Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as Trump before Trump before jetting off to Cincinnati, then Detroit, to rally support for privately funding the Great Mexican Wall, with attendees nearly outnumbered by protesters outside.

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon arrives to deliver a speech at Rome's Angelica Library, March 21, 2019. (Photo: Gregorio Borgia/AP)

Two days ago, he was in Washington, D.C., along with the son of visiting Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, partying with conservatives at the Trump International Hotel. And here he was in Rome, speaking before a group of around 150 journalists at the 17th century Biblioteca Angelica, a gorgeous high-ceilinged building lined with a million old books.

The stunning library was built in 1604, he noted, three years before the British set foot in Virginia, my home state, a remark whose significance was lost on most of the Italian journalists present, and the Americans. Chinese President Xi Jinping is making secret deals with Pope Francis, he asserted, without citing evidence except that Xi was also in the Italian capital that evening. The Catholic Church in North America will soon go broke and Chinese tech giant Huawei is a Trojan horse that will bring the world to data wars. The 5G rollout of Huawei will give them complete domination of manufacturing, he said. Their concept is to absolutely break the Westphalian system, he added, in a reference to the 1648 treaties that ended the Thirty Years War. He went on to pass along the little-known fact that the yellow jacket movement in France was a result of forcing ordinary citizens to pay for Chinese pollution.

Story continues

Pope Francis holds a live-stream conference with all the Scholas Occurrentes headquarters around the world, March 21, 2019. (Photo: Vatican Pool/Getty Images)

The environmental movement is a new religion, a theology, not a science, he went on. And the reason its reared up is conservatives have ceded power in education and allowed progressives to instill cultural Marxism in the schools.

There was much more in his rambling hourlong talk, sponsored by the Italian press association, Lettera 22, followed by an equally uninformative hourlong question-and-answer period.

About the 2020 election in the U.S., he gave his opinion that the most potent Democratic combo would be Sen. Kamala Harris and former Rep. Beto ORourke. But he also predicted that Hillary Clinton might yet enter the race, since the vampire hasnt had a stake driven through her heart. The late Arizona Sen. John McCain, who has been the object of a sustained attack by President Trump over the last week, would never have won his last Senate race if Trump hadnt endorsed him, said Bannon, who went on to echo Trumps grievance over McCains deciding vote to kill Obamacare repeal in 2017.

And even though Russia was thuggish, it should be embraced, because the world would need its help against China, whose president, along with the pope, seems to have become one of Bannons newest targets.

Eyes grew glazed, yawns were stifled and when the show was finally wrapped up, photographers surrounded Bannon, nearly mobbing him, until in an instant he had disappeared into the night and, hopefully, into a bed for what appears to be much-needed sleep.

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon at Rome's Angelica Library, a gorgeous high-ceilinged building lined with a million old books, on March 21, 2019. (Photo: Gregorio Borgia/AP)

Melissa Rossi is an American journalist based in Western Europe.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:Chinese importers are unwilling to purchase Canadian canola seed at the moment, the group that represents the industry in Canada says.

Earlier this month, Chinese customs authorities revoked the sales licence for a major Canadian canola distributor, Richardson International. Officials said the move was related to "dangerous pests" such as fungi in the crop, an allegation the company has strongly denied.

Against the backdrop of escalating trade tensions with China, there is much speculation that pushing back against a major Canadian crop was an attempt to send a political message.

China tore up a bilateral trade deal with Norway and restricted imports of salmon from that country after Norway awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese political prisoner Liu Xiaobo in 2010.

"China always links its trade diplomacy with its foreign policy," said Meredith Lilly, the Simon Reisman Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University, and an associate professor on international trade.

"They've made this claim before," she said, referring to the allegations Canadian canola is somehow unsafe, "because to not make one with a legal justification would be an outright admission that this is just about geopolitics."

Regardless of China's true motivations, Richardson is no longer the only Canadian canola seller being shut out of the Chinese market. There are 18 members of the group that represents the industry in Canada, including Viterra Inc., Louis Dreyfus Company, Cargill Ltd. and Parrish & Heimbecker Ltd. All of them say their contracts to sell in China are just drying up.

"While there was some initial optimism that Chinese concerns with canola trade could be resolved quickly, technical discussions to date have not indicated an immediate resolution is possible," said the Canola Council of Canada (CCC). "Canola seed exporters report that Chinese importers are unwilling to purchase Canadian canola seed at this time."

Story continues

Canola seeds can be crushed to produce an oil used in food and cooking. The "can" in Canola stands for Canada, since the specific variety of the plant known as rapeseed that has a bright yellow flower was invented by Canadian researchers in the 1970s.

A spokesperson for the canola group says that to their knowledge, oil and meal are not subject to the same "challenges" that the seeds are having in China.

CBC

About 40 per cent of Canada's canola seed exports last year went to China, worth about $2.7 billion. Canada also sent about $1 billion worth of canola oil to China, and about $500 million worth of canola meal, which is the name for canola seeds after they have been crushed and separated from their oil, leaving a product that is used as animal food.

Up until the recent disruption, Chinese demand for Canadian canola has been strong, the group says.

"We urge the government of Canada to continue to intensify efforts to resolve the situation," CCC president Jim Everson said.

Canada's Minister of Agriculture Marie-Claude Bibeau said China only recently agreed to have scientists assess the claim that they have found organisms in Canadian canola, after they claimed that about Richardson's.

"Officials from both countries will continue to engage in order to find a science-based solution to this issue as quickly as possible," Bibeau told CBC News on Friday. "We are working closely with industry stakeholders on this matter, and we will continue to keep them informed as additional information becomes available."

The sudden canola clash has sent prices for the crop plunging. For delivery in May, it has fallen almost $10 to $458 a tonne on Friday, only slightly ahead of the multi-year low of $455 it hit earlier this month.

Lilly said Canadian government officials should do their utmost to solve the dispute, but ultimately she suspects they may not have enough tools at their disposal to make that happen quickly.

"Canada does not have currently a great deal of levers to reverse this situation."

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley weighed into the dispute on Friday, noting how important the industry is to the province she leads, and calling on the Federal Government to "work very hard" to resolve the issue.

"If they are unsuccessful at doing that, then all Albertans will be looking to the federal government to supply relief to our canola industry just as they would to SNC-Lavalin, just as they would to GM, just as they would to any other industry in the country that is in jeopardy because of  international actions outside of our border," Notley said.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe echoed concerns over the reports in a statement and said the provincial government remains hopeful that the federal government will continue to engage with Chinese officials on a technical level.

"We have also requested that the federal government elevate their engagement to a diplomatic level to rectify this situation as soon as possible."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called it an important issue on Friday when speaking with reporters.

"So, we're going to roll up our sleeves and work with the Chinese officials to demonstrate that canola should continue to flow safely from Canada to China," he said, adding the government is optimist it'll be able to make headway this year.Transparency International Canada claims in a new report that criminals are "snow-washing" billions of dollars through anonymous purchases of luxury homes in the GTA.

What does that mean?

"Bring your dirty money to Canada and it will be cleaned like the pure white snow," explains James Cohen of Transparency International.

The anti-corruption group, along with Canadians for Tax Fairness and Publish What You Pay Canada, presented their report on the risks of widespread money laundering at a news conference at Queen's Park on Thursday.

The report's authors looked at some 1.4 million residential property transactions dating back to 2008. Among the group's chief concerns is that privately-owned corporations have spent $28.4 billion on luxury residential homes (those worth between $7-10 million) over that timeframe and didn't provide information about their beneficial owners.

Graeme Roy/The Canadian Press

Those companies also appear to have paid $9.8 billion in cash for homes, something that could allow them to dodge the scrutiny of financial institutions.

When they did require mortgages, half of the borrowing done by corporations was through unregistered lenders that are not subjected to anti-money laundering provisions, Transparency found.

CBC

The report says between 2008 to 2018, $25.4 billion in residential mortgages in the GTA fell under this category.

Report author Adam Ross noted that the Toronto housing market has ranked among the least affordable in the world, with rental properties in short supply and buying a home in the city out of the reach of many.

"Dirty money exacerbates this affordability crisis by adding extra demand from buyers who have a perverse incentive to overpay for properties in order to wash more dirty money through a transaction," said Ross.

"None of us wants to live next door to a criminal or to a property that sits empty and unmaintained."

Story continues

Ontario's previous Liberal government brought in a foreign-buyers' tax in 2017 and instituted audits to discourage speculation, however it's unclear if that's cutting down on the activity.

Ross says lax enforcement of suspected money laundering has encouraged criminals to come here, as such cases rarely go to trial and are often settled out of court if they do.

But he said he was glad that the federal budget tabled on Tuesday added $16.9 million in funding for the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), the country's intelligence unit devoted to detecting, preventing and deterring money-laundering.

Most transactions are transparent, real estate board says

The Toronto Real Estate Board says there are already mechanisms to detect and deter money laundering in the real estate market, and that everyone involved must comply with federal rules, which are regularly audited by FINTRAC.

"It is also worth pointing out that the vast majority of the more than half a trillion dollars worth of transactions over the past decade were transparent in nature," TREB CEO John DiMichele said in a statement to CBC Toronto.

DiMichele said there's nothing wrong with property owners wanting to remain anonymous if they choose to. Ontario's land registry system allows companies or trusts to hold the title to property to accomplish that.Saint Mary's University in Halifax has received an $18-million gift from David Sobey, the Sobey Foundation and Sobeys Inc., the largest donation in the institution's 217-year history.

"It really is a wonderful day for our university and for our school of business," university president Dr. Robert Summerby-Murray said Thursday.

Half of the money is a personal gift from David Sobey, a former Sobeys chairman and former chancellor of the university.

"Our gift is a deliberate reinvestment in the Sobey School of Business and Saint Mary's University, inspired by our belief and confidence in the university, its leadership, its students and its bright future," Sobey said.

Summerby-Murray said $5 million will create scholarships for students studying business at an undergraduate and graduate levels.

"The gift today will include the support of 150 student scholarships over the next 10 years, which will be designed to get the brightest and best students to come to Saint Mary's, to come to the Sobey school, and to attract them here with a high level of nationally significant support for them as students," Summerby-Murray said.

Undergraduate students could receive up to $40,000 over the course of their degree program.

The gift includes $7 million earmarked to endow two chairs at the Sobey School of Business and to create five new professorships lasting 10 years each.

"This is a stepping up that allows us to ensure that our business school is well positioned as one of the leading schools in the country. And this gift will allow us to transform our approach to attracting the brightest and best faculty members," Summerby-Murray said.

The remaining $6 million is earmarked to build a 43,000-square-foot expansion to the Sobey School of Business called the Sobeys Entrepreneurship & innivation Hub.

The Nova Scotia government has committed $11 million to building the Hub. Saint Mary's is seeking support from further donors before it begins construction.

Summerby-Murray said Thursday's donation will set Saint Mary's business education offerings apart from other schools in Canada, and strengthen its focus on knowledge creation, business education, entrepreneurship and innovation.

MORE TOP STORIESNesreen Nassleh, an immigrant mother who moved to Vancouver from Syria, used to watch Michelle Obama's speeches and admire the former U.S. first lady for her empowering messages to women.

Now, Nassleh is helping spread that message herself.

She's opening the show for Obama's talk in Vancouver at Rogers Arena on Thursday evening, one of five women sharing their stories with the audience.

"Every time I saw her on television, I felt, 'That's a woman who is empowering all women,'" Nassleh said.

"And I was lucky enough to have this chance to go to her event."

Nassleh will be speaking about her experience as an immigrant mother in Canada and how she's raising her four children in a multicultural community.

"I'm teaching them to be respectful and accept all religions and culture in this country," she told CBC's The Early Edition.

"[But also] so they are proud of their religion and their culture."

Submitted by Nesreen Nassleh

'We try to meet in the middle'

Nassleh, who is originally Palestinian but worked as a biomedical engineer in Syria, moved to Canada in 2005.

Her four children, two boys and two girls who range in age from 14 to three-and-a-half, were all born here.

"They are Canadian," she said.

"Sometimes, I feel like I'm talking in a way and they are in different ways, but we try to meet in the middle."

It's important for Nassleh to make sure her children learn Arabic and attend Islamic studies classes. But, at the same time, she wants them to fit in with their friends and the wider community.

"That's how we try to keep our culture and religion while also embracing other cultures and religions," she said.

Submitted by Nesreen Nassleh

Facing intolerance

Her family hasn't faced any Islamophobia, she said, but it's something she's discussed with her children after the terrorist attacks on a mosque in New Zealand last week. Fifty people were killed while they prayed.

Story continues

"It was awful and very painful for everybody to see that," Nassleh said.

"I told my children  you never can fight hate with hate. We fight hate with love and forgiveness."

If the day ever comes when her children face discrimination or hate speech, she has a message for them:

"I tell them that this is the person's problem; whoever does this is flawed," she said.

"It's not the whole community or the whole area we live in."MOSUL (Reuters) - At least 79 people died when an overloaded ferry carrying families on an outing sank in the Tigris river in Mosul in northern Iraq, medical sources told Reuters on Thursday. Most of the casualties on the ferry were women and children who could not swim, said the head of Mosul's Civil Defence Authority Husam Khalil. He said the ferry had been loaded to several times its capacity. "It can normally carry 50 people. There were 250 on board before the incident," he said. Five ferry workers were arrested after late on Thursday, security sources said. Rescue workers were still looking for missing passengers. The boat was ferrying people to a man-made island used as a recreational area by families, according to one witness. "I was standing near the river back when suddenly the ferry started to tilt left and right, and passengers began screaming before it capsized," said Mohamed Masoud, a local civil servant. "I saw women and children waving with their hands begging for help but no one was there to rescue them. I don't know how to swim. I couldn't help. I feel guilty. I watched people drown." Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi ordered an inquiry into the accident and said on Twitter that those responsible would be held accountable. Mobile phone footage showed the ferry sinking into the muddy water and people shouting for help. Among the dead were some 19 children and at least 52 women, medical sources said. Reconstruction of Mosul, much of which was destroyed in a military campaign to recapture the city from Islamic State militants in 2017, has barely begun and is haphazard. Residents say they feel abandoned by the central government, but have returned and started to rebuild their own homes. The city's infrastructure remains largely damaged. The rescue team was retrieving survivors and had rescued 12 people so far, Khalil said. Police and medical sources said earlier at least 40 people had drowned. A source in a nearby hospital and another in a morgue said the toll had risen to 79. The accident took place to the north of the city, near a recreational area popular with families. (Reporting by Jamal Al-Badrani and Salih Elias; additional reporting by Hesham Hajali in Cairo, Writing by Ahmed Rasheed and John Davison, Editing by Janet Lawrence, William Maclean)(If you would like to repost this article to Facebook, please use this link as LOTL's url is currently blocked from FB)

WASHINGTON, DC  The pro-Israel, pro-peace group J Street launched a new series of videos today highlighting the dangerously similar rhetoric and ideology shared by President Trump and Israels Prime Minister Netanyahu. Released as targeted digital ads just a week before the two leaders are expected to meet in Washington, DC on the sidelines of the AIPAC conference, the videos urge pro-Israel Americans who are opposed to Trump to also speak out against Netanyahus similar bigotry and anti-democratic tendencies.



By attacking democratic institutions and targeting vulnerable minorities, Trump and Netanyahu are borrowing from the same far-right playbook  undermining the core values and interests of both the US and Israel, said J Streets president Jeremy Ben-Ami. Patriotic Americans have mobilized impressively against Trump here at home. Those of us who care about Israels future need to speak out against Netanyahus destructive leadership as well.



Over the past two years, both the president and the prime minister have incited against vulnerable minorities, attacked the free press and de-legitimized the judiciary and the rule of law. Both face serious investigations into alleged criminal conduct. 

The politics of these two leaders is part of a broader global challenge to liberal democracies rooted in respect for civil society and tolerance of ethnic diversity. Now, the world faces a wave of rising right-wing ethnonationalism with anti-democratic tendencies.



The xenophobia and authoritarianism that the two leaders are fanning is anathema to millions of Americans and American Jews. While Netanyahu, Trump and their allies may get standing ovations at AIPAC, their views and actions couldnt be more out of touch with most of the American Jewish community, Ben-Ami said.

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.

.

..Abu Yehuda..22 March '19..I think my interest in J Street could once have been called obsessive. I wrote numerous blog posts a few years ago, pointing out that the supposedly pro-Israel, pro-peace organization received financing from George Soros, mysterious billionaires in Hong Kong, and people associated with Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab-American Institute. I noted  along with then Ambassador Michael Oren  that it consistently (one could say) took positions opposed to almost any reasonable interpretation of Israels interests. I objected to its guiding principle, which seemed to be that it knew what was good for Israel far better than Israelis did, especially since following its recommendations would negatively impact Israels security. I wondered at the close coordination between J Street and the Obama Administration, which tried to anoint it as the voice of American Jewry toward Israel. And more.Since I moved back to Israel in 2014, Ive been less concerned with J Street, which is, after all, an American phenomenon. We have plenty of interesting politics right here. But recently I became aware of a new J Street initiative , targeting PM Netanyahu, just before the election:Theres no doubt that liberal and progressive American Jews hate Trump passionately, and theres no better way to attack Netanyahu among that group than by associating him with their. The first J Street video is here . Its very professional and probably didnt come cheap. The question is, why did J Street spend a considerable sum of money on such a campaign? Americans dont vote in Israeli elections (although J Street probably wishes they did). Why attack Netanyahu in the USA?Its not a simple question and I dont have a simple answer. Unfortunately, the position papers of J Streets psychological warfare experts arent public. But I have some ideas.J Streets primary goal, like that of the numerous other anti-Israel organizations in the US, including the nominally Jewish If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as explicitly antisemitic ones like If America Knew, is to create antipathy and distrust for Israel, so that Americans will oppose pro-Israel actions by the US government  for example, the recognition of Israels possession of the Golan Heights that is rumored to be on the table now.In the event of war, they want to prime Americans to believe Palestinian atrocity propaganda against Israel, to make it more difficult for a pro-Israel administration to support Israel, or easier for an anti-Israel one to criticize her or even cut off critical supplies  as Obama did during the 2014 Gaza war.How does attacking PM Netanyahu accomplish this? The answer has several parts.First, J Street presents Netanyahu as anti-democratic and dictatorial, as if he is entirely responsible for Israeli policy; so it becomes possible for an American Jew who still feels some loyalty to Israel to separate the country from its Prime Minister, and blame him for supposedly anti-democratic or racist policies, without being forced to make the jump to disliking Israel the nation.Second, and conversely, Netanyahu has been PM since 2009 and  at least as of today  it is likely that he will receive yet another term. He is Israel in the minds of many Americans. An attack on Netanyahu as racist and anti-minority, and in other ways that particularly resonate in America, also creates negative perceptions of the state of Israel herself.Third, attitudes in America, as expressed in the media, do have some influence on Israeli elections. There is no doubt that the forces behind J Street would like to see Netanyahu defeated in the coming election. Netanyahus political opponents can point to anti-Netanyahu expressions in the US and say, look, Netanyahu has wrecked our relationship with the US. J Streets theme that Netanyahu and Trump are both corrupt, anti-democratic racists will find a fertile field in the progressive media such as NPR and the NY Times that are favored by J Streets constituency. Because the campaign bashes both Trump and Netanyahu, it will certainly be amplified in those media, which are always ready to take a swipe at Trump.Fourth, closely associating Trump with Netanyahu minimizes the significance of Trumps pro-Israel actions like moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, cutting funds to the Palestinian Authority, downgrading the East Jerusalem consulate, and  I devoutly hope  recognizing Israels annexation of the Golan Heights.J Streets attack on both Trump and Netanyahu is couched in the universalist, anti-nationalistic (and therefore anti-Zionist) language that finds favor with the progressive Left:This exposes the true agenda behind J Street, which is actually only one piece of a much larger enterprise opposing nationalism and ethnic particularism, favoring open borders and multiculturalism, and proudly trumpeting extreme cultural relativism. If you think that agenda is a positive one for civilization, look at the ongoing destruction of native European societies like Sweden, for example.Netanyahu  and Israel, an ethnic nation-state  represent the precise opposite of the agenda, and as such have drawn down upon themselves the wrath of J Street and other such groups, which tendentiously accuse them of being undemocratic, authoritarian, racist, and more. But in fact the ethnonationalism that J Street so decries stands opposed to a non-ethnic but much more vicious Islamofascism, which is far less democratic, more authoritarian, and viciously bigoted along religious lines.The global challenge to liberal democracies does not come from nationalism, either in Israel or Eastern Europe, or from Americans who support Trump. It comes from Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood, and so on. Netanyahu has a sense of history, and understands all this. And I think that Trump, for all his flaws, does too.Updated 2021-06-10

Wait, what do you mean make my app/site work in China? I dont have to do anything to make my app work in the US or Singapore or Kenya or anywhere else, and I didnt make the Chinese government angry, so it should just work in China, right? Sadly, its not so simple. If your app/website servers arent hosted from within China, then, for all intents and purposes, its blocked. I mean, it will probably technically load, but will be excruciatingly, unusably slow. And sometimes it will just not load at all for hours at a time. This is true for all services hosted outside of the firewall, even in Hong Kong.

The Firewall

Any time a request needs to go from within China to the outside world, or from the outside world into China, the request crosses the Chinese Great Firewall. When this happens, theres a lot of latency that gets added, and theres a high chance the request will randomly fail. Requests through the firewall may appear to work most of the time, but then suddenly get fully blocked for several hours. The firewall doesnt seem like its implemented uniformly across China either, so its possible that if you test in Shanghai your request may go through but a user in Changsha will have their requests blocked.

Basically, if requests need to pass through the firewall to reach your servers outside of China youre in for a bad time.

ICP License

If you want to have any infrastructure working in China, you need to apply for an ICP license from the Chinese government. All the techniques below require that you have this license. Its quite a pain to apply for, and takes several months, but theres no way around it. You can find more info about registering for an ICP license here. Alicloud also has a lot of info on registering for an ICP here.

Option 1: Cloudflare China Acceleration

The easiest option to get your services partially working in China is to go use Cloudflares China acceleration. Cloudflare partnered with Baidu to extend their acceleration network with points inside of China itself. This method will give you a CDN inside of China, but requests through the firewall may still potentially fail since Cloudflare doesnt do any proxying of request through the firewall. Static assets will be fast though, and the overall experience for users in China will still be a big improvement. Cloudflare China acceleration requires an enterprise account as well, so its going to be pricey.

Using Cloudflare does effectively allow you to host your infrastructure outside of China, but depending on your business it might not be entirely legal. Thats because China has strict data protection laws, and in many cases you must store Chinese users data inside of China. If youre not a huge company or dont have much sensitive data on Chinese users this may not be an issue, but its something to be aware of.

If most of your customers are outside of China and you just want to make sure your app/website loads reasonably in China, and are OK if it has occasional poor performance, then this is likely the best option for you.

Option 2: Make a Separate Chinese Version of your App/Website

The most direct way to make your app/website work in China is, of course, to host your servers themselves in China. You can do that using a Chinese cloud provider like Alicloud or Tencent cloud, or using the AWS China region. If you use AWS, you should be aware that the China region requires setting up a different account, and isnt even run by Amazon!

The most technically correct way to be in compliance with the Chinese governments data protection laws is to have a separate Chinese version of your app/website and run a separate version of your infrastructure in China. This allows all data for your Chinese users to stay in China and not be transferred abroad. No requests ever have to cross the firewall, so everything remains fast. Of course, its practically quite annoying to run 2 separate but identical versions of your infrastructure and apps.

Option 3: Proxy Requests on a Chinese Cloud Provider

Chinese cloud providers like Alicloud and Tencent cloud have fast connections between their datacenters through the firewall that you can make use of. You can create a VPC inside of China and a VPC outside of China and then connect them using a form of VPC peering. This gives you a high-speed connection through the firewall which you can use to proxy requests. If you host your main infrastructure in a Chinese region then youll be in compliance with Chinas data protection laws, while still being able to serve requests outside of China via the proxied connection.

Option 4: Use a Chinese Cloud Provider Acceleration Service

If youre hosting your infrastructure on Alicloud or Tencent cloud in China, you can accelerate requests to your infrastructure globally using their acceleration services. These work similarly to the Cloudflare option above, but in reverse. Alicloud calls their service Global Acceleration, and Tencent cloud calls their GAAP. This allows users globally to make requests to your servers in China and still have them be fast.

3rd Party Services

No matter which option you go with, you still need to test that your service is working in China. Even if youre running on Chinese infrastructure or using Cloudflare China acceleration you may still be relying on APIs that arent supported in China, like Facebook Login or Google Recaptcha. If your server in China needs to make API calls to services that arent optimized in China you may find that a lot of those requests fail as well.

Good luck!Christopher Whiteside MBE is Conservative County Councillor for the Egremont North and St Bees Division of Cumbria County Council. The division includes St Bees, Bigrigg, Wood End, Moor Row, part of the Mirehouse area of Whitehaven, and surrounding countryside. He is also Chairman of the North-West region of the voluntary wing of the Conservative party. Chris lives and works in Copeland with his wife and family.Our lives often consist of battles, battles which take place over the entire length of ones life and shape us into who we are and who we can potentially become. The Christian life on the other hand consists of battles which will shape us for serving in eternity, and these are often fights that define how we perceive God. In our ignorance, we focus on the battles that have not yet taken place, and we often face our present circumstances vastly unequipped and with our focus on things that have not yet happened.

Defining battles

In every waking and non-waking moment, we are facing various kinds of circumstances, and it is in these circumstances that our character is defined. Take for example the Jews who spent 40 years wandering the wilderness, they were afraid to fight and stand against all that was in the way of them claiming the promise land and as a result an entire generation had to die off in order to proceed. The choice they made in that moment, that particular battle, cost them an entire generation and 40 long years.

Each obstacle, every action and re action in the countless fights we face as believers is a defining moment. It is a moment that is filled with some form of victory or one that forces the battle to prolong further until we are defined in the right way, Gods way. The sooner we come to the realisation that every battle, every choice we make, every small victory defines a piece of who we are, that is the moment we begin to live truly for God.

Perceiving God

There are times when we are often faced with such an horrific defeat, it is usually in those moments we begin to see God in a negative light. My life has been one constant defeat and I have faced many harsh defeats and circumstances, it is a result of not partnering with God and allowing Him to fight on our behalf. In every challenge, trail and toil we often choose to take control and as a result we are utterly defeated or barely survive, yet if we were to partner with God and see Him win the victory He has promised to win, it is only then we will experience true success.

It is how we perceive God that heavily determines how we approach the fights of life. If we view Him in as negative or distant we will enter every fight and either lose or barely make it through. If we see Him as He is, we will prepare properly and partner with Him and as a result even though we may suffer, itll be a victory we reap in eternity.

One at a Time

As I mentioned before, we as humans have this innate ability to go against 100 different things at once and writing from experience it often results in a miserable defeat and an unnecessary amount of stress. We can learn from the example of the Israelites again, they conquered the promise land one battle at a time, one victory after the other partnered with God.

It is essential in learning from that example and applying it in the sense that we can only ever proceed successfully one step, one victory after the other.

We are not capable of dealing with multiple assaults, but we are capable of facing one at a time. David had to overcome countless obstacles to become king, and once he was king more it didnt stop. The point is the fighting never stops, but with God and taking it one separate battle at a time, victory is assured, because in plain terms God is good.

Ashley lives in Kingaroy, Australia. He is currently, studying teaching at Christian Heritage College and newly married. During his free time Ashley can be found, reading an old book or collecting new ones.

Ashley Menelaws previous articles may be viewed at http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/ashley-menelaws.htmlPhoto - Newspaper clipping

My late mother, who died in 1995 aged 75, was an aspiring writer. Although, like many of her generation, she had been unable to complete her formal education, she had continued to educate herself about history, politics and world affairs by devouring newspaper articles and any other information she could get her hands on.

I recently I came across a major article that she had kept from 'Truth', dated April 2nd, 1939 which was entitled: "Defence and Employment must go hand in hand".

She had written many articles herself, analysing the situation and explaining her reasoning and intuition about the forthcoming war. These are also in the archives, although none were published because, she often told us, the editor felt that but printing such articles might create public panic and cross delicate diplomatic negotiations. Today, such writings would be placed on a Blog on the Internet; or on Twitter, and all could discuss and argue the points she would have made a or agree with her.

The article that was published, that my mother kept, itself is interesting and these 71 years later deserves some closer inspection.

It reads: "Defence of Australia is a prime consideration at the moment, and the daily news is full of proposals and counter-proposals, controversies are raging as to the merits and demerits of a standing army as opposed to a militia army. Everyone is concerned over the national compulsory register.

"But there is one army that has received scant consideration, that is the unemployed army which official figures in this State show has reached 51,000. In each State the unemployed army is growing to amazing dimensions.

"Expenditure of 63 million pounds on defence was put forward as a partial solution to the unemployed situation. It was to provide jobs in thousands; but how many jobs has the defence programme created? a.."

The Great Depression has an historical 1929-1934 period but throughout the western world the after effects were still being counted in such areas as unemployment. The military and build up of armaments were two means that could increase employment, it was thought, as many people surmised that war was coming. This article reflects this consideration.

Photo - My late mother in the WWII Land Army driving a tractor at Batlow

Just War

Theologians have long discussed the subject of a 'Just War' in a Biblical climate from Old Testament where the Israelites were instructed to engage in war to ensure the theocracy was in no way impacted by foreign religions. And from the New Testament where for example, Jesus never condemned the Centurion for his occupation and himself spoke of wars and rumours of wars as a forerunner to His return.

The reader is invited to type in 'Just War' into any search engine for a wider discussion on this subject. It was Edmund Burke (1729 to 1797) who is quoted as first saying: Evil prevails when good men do nothing. en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke

Photo - My sister Susette beside the grave of our maternal grand father  1914-18 War Grave.

Dr Mark Tronson is a Baptist minister (retired) who served as the Australian cricket team chaplain for 17 years (2000 ret) and established Life After Cricket in 2001. He was recognised by the Olympic Ministry Medal in 2009 presented by Carl Lewis Olympian of the Century. He mentors young writers and has written 24 books, and enjoys writing. He is married to Delma, with four adult children and grand-children. Dr Tronson writes a daily article for Christian Today Australia (since 2008) and in November 2016 established Christian Today New Zealand.

Mark Tronson's archive of articles can be viewed at http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/mark-tronson.htmlMumbai

On March 13, 2017, Mihir Bhansali, and his wife allegedly purchased an apartment at 50, Riverside Boulevard, New York, for $7.1 million. The deal has come under the scanner of the sleuths who are investigating the Rs 13,000-crore PNB scam. Bhansali, 41, allegedly a US-based aide of key accused Nirav Modi, was a former CEO of the jeweler's Firestar Group of companies in the US.



The apartment was purchased around 10 months prior to the detection of the fraud case in which both Modi and Bhansali are accused. On February 28, 2018, by when Central Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement Directorate had initiated their probes in the case, Bhansali allegedly transferred his 'ownership interest' in the apartment to his wife, Rakhi Bhansali, for just $10, according to the findings of a separate US judicial probe.



The US probe held that the "timing" of the transaction, wherein the ownership was transferred "just two days" after three US-firms allegedly controlled by Modi filed for bankruptcy in view of the scam's probes' adverse impact on their business, was suspicious.



"The timing of the transfer of the apartment is suspect, and further information is needed to determine if the apartment was funded by fraudulent proceeds," said a report by John J Karney, an Examiner appointed by the US Bankruptcy Court of Southern District of New York to determine if the three US firms indirectly owned by Modi and their officers/ directors were involved in the scam alleged in India. "On February 28, 2018, just two days after the bankruptcy filing, Mihir Bhansali granted his ownership interest in the apartment to Rakhi Bhansali for $10. Bhansali asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when asked about the transfer of property in his deposition," the US report said.

"For the same reason, Bhansali did not produce any documents in response to the Examiner's document subpoena," it said. "Other than identifying himself at the deposition, Bhansali asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination as to every question asked by the Examiner," it said. The US report is part of the supplementary charge sheet in the case submitted recently by the ED in a city court.



The US report alleged that Bhansali managed the shell firms using an electronic communication that automatically deletes messages and his "computer appears to have used a software programme designed to prevent the recovery of deleted data" in a bid to hide/destroy information. The US report referred to Bhansali as an alleged "distant cousin" of Modi and the "sole Director of the US Firestar entities." After graduating from Mumbai's HR College of Commerce and Economics in 1995, Bhansali then received a BSc in Business from Babson College, the US in 1998, after which he worked for a few years in Mumbai before shifting to the US.



As part of the scam, a substantial chunk of funds worth over Rs 6,400-crore allegedly obtained fraudulently from PNB by three Indian firms of Modi via Letters of Undertaking (LoU) were diverted to 17 overseas shell firms located in Hong Kong, Dubai and USA since 2011 in the guise of dubious export-import of jewellery, according to ED's probe. Referring to the shell firms, the US report said, "Bhansali was having financial control over these companies through his trusted associates."



The US report cited the statement of a then Firestar director in Hong Kong, who "admitted that he did not do anything as a director except sign paperwork when asked". The US report said that notwithstanding Bhansalis alleged non-cooperation with the Examiner's probe, It recovered from his computer a single-page spreadsheet that "appears to be the control board of the fraudulent LOU" scheme.



Apart from Bhansali, ED has also charge-sheeted Modi and the US-based Firestar group of companies through the accused have denied any wrongdoing. Modi was arrested by UK authorities, acting on an ED extradition request against him.

Abhishek Sharan, Economic Times, MumbaiKinky Friedman, Cousin Nancy (Nancy Parker-Simons) and Tony Simons founded Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch in '98. Friends Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver, Spike Gillespie, Richard Pryor, Jerry Jeff Walker, Molly Ivins, Dwight Yoakam support the ranch. We primarily rescued dogs. Nancy, author of "The Road to Utopia: How Kinky, Tony & I Saved More Animals Than Noah" by UT Press '06 utopiarescue.com.  cousin nancy blog 2021 by Cousin Nancy All rights reserved.Share this: Twitter

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British freelance journalist and blogger Alice Taylor, who writes for various international publications and for the Albania-focused news website Exit, has been targeted in a smear campaign by pro-government news outlets in Albania and had her residency permit renewal denied, the journalist told CPJ.

Taylor told CPJ that pro-government news outlets have been publishing personal attacks against her since February 24, 2019, following her comments one day earlier on anti-government protests and allegations of corruption against the government in Albania on RT, the international television network funded by the Russian government.

On February 24, an article in the Albanian daily Gazeta Tema accused Taylor of being linked to Russia because her articles appeared on the Russia-focused news website Tsarizm, and of publishing propaganda against Albania. The next day, the daily Tirana Post accused her of spreading rumors about Albania on Russia-backed outlets and accused her Albanian partner of working for the leader of the Democratic Party of Albania opposition party. On February 27, news website Lexo.al published similar allegations along with a photo of Taylor and her partner.

Taylor told CPJ that she was listed as a contributor on Tsarizm due to an agreement between the website and Exit for republishing content. She denied that she or her partner worked for the opposition party in any capacity.

Taylor filed a complaint to the Albanian Media Council, an independent media ethics group, on March 3 alleging defamation and harassment, she told CPJ. On March 8, the council issued a statement supporting Taylors claims and condemning the news organizations for publishing misleading information, breaching privacy, and inciting crime or violence against the journalist.

On March 1, Taylor was informed by the Albanian immigration authorities that the renewal of her residence permit was refused, although she had previously been told that it was approved, she told CPJ.

According to a report by the U.S.-funded Voice of Americas Albanian service, authorities allege that Taylors visa renewal form was not filed properly, and its cancellation was unrelated to her work.

Albanian Minister of the Interior Sander Lleshaj told Gazeta Tema that Taylor`s visa problems are merely a legal issue.

CPJ emailed the director of communications of the Albanian government but did not receive a response.Share this: Twitter

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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.

John Otis, CPJs Andes correspondent, reports on Venezuelas internet blackout and the impact it has had on Venezuelans ability to access news and information.

Three journalists have been killed in the last week, in Afghanistan, Honduras, and Mexico.

CPJ Asia Program Research Associate Aliya Iftikhar recently returned from a reporting mission to the Maldives, where she spoke with the families of abducted blogger Ahmed Rilwan and murdered blogger Yameen Rasheed about their pursuit of justice, and with authorities about the progress and challenges in the cases.

Global press freedom updates

 CPJ Safety Advisory: Covering the aftermath of Tropical Cyclone Idai in Southern Africa

 Widow of slain Mexican journalist Javier Valdez targeted by spyware

 Mission Journal: In Iraqi Kurdistan, journalists are victim of political tension

 Vietnamese blogger Truong Duy Nhat, who disappeared in Thailand, imprisoned in Vietnam

 Hamas detains at least 3 Palestinian journalists after Gaza cost-of-living protests

 Polish reporter Tomasz Surdel assaulted in Venezuela

 German freelancer Billy Six freed, leaves Venezuela after four months in prison

 Read the latest Turkey Crackdown Chronicle, CPJs weekly round-up of press freedom violations in the country

 In the U.S., CPJ and others request meeting with Sacramento police over treatment of journalists at protest

Spotlight

The One Free Press Coalition is made up of 11 news organizations from around the world working to highlight global threats to journalists. (Credit: One Free Press Coalition)

CPJ is part of the new One Free Press Coalition, an initiative bringing together leading news organizations to highlight some of the most pressing cases of journalists under threat around the world. On the first of every month, members of the coalition will publish a 10 Most Urgent list of journalists across their platforms, compiled by CPJ and the International Womens Media Foundation (IWMF).

Some of the cases highlighted this month include CPJ Gwen Ifill awardee Maria Ressa, slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Mauritanian blogger Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed, Cameroonian reporter Thomas Awah Junior, and Vietnamese blogger Tran Thi Nga.

What we are reading

 Reckless VII: Wife of Journalist Slain in Cartel-Linked Killing Targeted with NSO Groups Spyware  John Scott-Railton, Bill Marczak, Siena Anstis, Bahr Abdul-Razzak, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, and Ron Deibert, Citizen Lab

 This journalist fears death if hes deported  but thats what an immigration court has ordered  Tom Jones, Poynter

 They Think They Can Silence Us. How Nicaragua is Waging a War on Journalists  Ciara Nugent, Time

 Press freedom in Ethiopia has blossomed. Will it last?  The Economist

 Congress must probe governments monitoring of journalists covering the migrant caravan  Alexandra Ellerbeck, CPJ North America Program Coordinator, The Hill

Do you have an Amazon Alexa-enabled device? Enable CPJs flash briefing skill to stay up to date with the latest press freedom news from around the world.

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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.Share this: Twitter

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Mission journal: Journalists in Iraqi Kurdistan are under pressure from authorities in the autonomous northern Iraqi region, with news outlets shuttered and critical reporters arrested. With government formation talks underway, CPJs Middle East and North Africa representative Ignacio Miguel Delgado travels to Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Duhok to hear from local journalists on how the partisan divide in Iraqi Kurdistan makes them vulnerable to attacks and harassment.

In Other Languages  

It was not the first time that Rugesh Sherwanis husband, the Kurdish freelance journalist Sherwan Sherwani, had been in jail. Thats perhaps why nothing in her gestures showed anxiety or fear. Quite the contrary. She was composed and determined when she received me in the living room of her house on the outskirts of Erbil in February. As she detailed her efforts to visit Sherwani in jail and bring international attention to his case, Rugesh held a sleepy child who, oblivious of our conversation, sucked his thumb and stared intently at his mother.

Since the Red Cross saw him in jail two weeks ago, neither relatives, nor lawyers have been able to visit him. Three days ago, I went to Zirka Prison in Duhok, but the prison officials told me Sherwan wasnt there, she said, referring to a detention center in a northwestern Iraqi Kurdistan city. He hasnt yet been taken to court to give testimony or allowed to see the evidence against him. Other journalists have been released on bail and forced to sign documents promising to cut all ties with Sherwan. I have met U.N. and U.S. embassy officials to ask them to put pressure on the Kurdish authorities to release Sherwan.

Even the journalists young son, Shaheen, who sat next to his mother during our meeting, has joined the efforts, posting a video on social media calling passionately for his fathers release.

Freelance journalist Sherwan Sherwani. Authorities detained Sherwani, who live streams protests in Duhok. (Sherwan Sherwani)

Sherwani was arrested by security forces affiliated with the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) on January 28, while on his way to a protest in Duhok over the Turkish presence in Iraqi Kurdistan. The journalist takes photos and live streams videos at protests, which he shares on Facebook with over 10,000 followers.

Sherwani said she was convinced that her husbands previous arrests, in 2007 and 2012, for reporting on a teacher allegedly mistreating a student and for writing critically about the brother of former Kurdish President Masoud Barzani, were linked to his arrest.

Sherwan has written critically of the Barzani family and his live streaming videos on Facebook are one of the main problems behind his arrest. He names important people and denounces corruption. His brother has been approached by KDP members and asked to convince Sherwan to give up journalism for good, Rugesh Sherwani said.

The Kurdish authorities denied that her husbands arrest was related to his journalism or social media activity.

A few minutes before meeting Dindar Zebari, the Kurdistan Regional Governments international advocacy coordinator, on February 26, his assistant handed me an official statement. It accused Sherwani and four activists of working to create chaos and violence under the guise of supporting a protest at a Turkish military facility in Shilazdeh, following a Turkish airstrike that killed four people.

The statement said that the detainees had access to lawyers and relatives, but were not eligible for bail because they were arrested under Article 165 of the Iraqi Penal Code rather than the Kurdistan Press Law. Article 165 states that mobilizing a military force against a foreign country without the authorization of the government or joining forces with another country at time of war is punishable with life imprisonment.

Dindar Zebari, the Kurdistan governments international advocacy coordinator, left, and CPJs Ignacio Miguel Delgado Culebras. (Bijar Aziz)

Sherwani is neither a professional journalist, nor a member of the press syndicate. He has been previously convicted for defamation. He is sick. He has been accused of inciting violence in Duhok through back channels and being a threat to national security, Zebari told me in his office, which is decorated with dozens of photos of him with heads of state and international organizations.

Zebari added, He is sabotaging the country and is supported by non-Iraqi foreign agencies to destabilize the country. Sherwani has misused his freedom and is making up stories to become famous. Asayish told me that he has confessed to committing acts against the state.

Pressure and impunity in Kurdistan

Sherwanis attorney, Reving Yassin Nabi, not only disagreed with Zebari, but said he believed there were larger issues at stake that show the state of press freedom in Kurdistan.

This case may be twice as political as it is legal. The protest was an excuse to arrest activists and journalists. The accusations against Sherwani are directly related to his previous work as a journalist, Nabi told me, during a meeting in a hotel lobby in Duhok on March 1. The main goal of imprisoning him is to intimidate him and prevent him from reporting on those in power.

Nabi, an experienced human rights lawyer, didnt stop looking over his shoulder while we spoke in the near-deserted lobby. He explained that journalists with no party affiliation and who report on corruption are in trouble, just like lawyers. Those, who take on these human rights cases, himself included, see other cases they work on being delayed or are told by the lawyers syndicate that they risk having their licenses revoked. This happened, he said, to some of the volunteer attorneys in the team defending Sherwani.

Pressure on journalists has reached a degree that many journalists are considering quitting their jobs to stop living a life of threats and fear, Nabi added.

The Kurdistan Lawyers Syndicate did not immediately respond to CPJs request for comment.

His views resonate with those of Asos Hardi, the founder of the independent Kurdish newspapers Awene and Hawlati. At his austere office in the eastern Kurdistan city of Sulaymaniyah, he dissected with scalpel-like precision the problems facing journalists in Kurdistan.

The NRT newsroom in Sulaymaniyah, in February 2019. Authorities raided the outlets Dohuk office in January and detained staff. (CPJ)

Journalist are the first victims of tensions between political parties. They can be attacked with full impunity. No security officer or public official has ever been prosecuted for attacks on journalists, he said.

Kurdistan also lacks an independent judiciary. We have laws, including the press law or the access to information law, but these laws, which either lack clear definitions or are vaguely worded, are either never implemented or used in accordance with the moods of those in power. Finally, journalists have no access to public information. Authorities exert full control over the information and leak it conveniently to their affiliated outlets, he said.

Despite the bleak picture he painted and that his publication, Awene had to discontinue its print edition in 2018 because of financial problems, Hardi remains optimistic.

Theres still room for press freedom Its not a rosy picture, but it isnt a dark one either. Independent media is struggling, but social media is booming. Fortunately, no party is so powerful that it can fully abolish press freedom, he said.

CPJs Ignacio Miguel Delgado Culebras, left, with Rahman Gharib, director of the Metro Center for Journalists Rights and Advocacy in Sulaymaniyah. The center documented over 300 press freedom violations in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2018. (Muhamad Tayyib)

In line with Hardis assessment are the accounts of other local journalists with whom I met and the conclusions of a 2018 report by the independent Sulaymaniyah-based press freedom organization Metro Center for Journalists Rights and Advocacy.

The metro center documented 349 press freedom violations in the region in 2018, including security forces impeding coverage, assaults and threats, seizure of equipment, and detentions without a court order.

I asked Zebari, the government advocacy coordinator, about some of these incidents, including the detention of NRT reporters and the closure of its offices in January. Like with Sherwanis case, he defended the authorities action.

Sherwani freed from jail

As my reporting trip was drawing to an end, Ragaz Kamal, the co-founder of the local human rights organization 17Shubat for Human Rights, told me that Sherwanis brother had visited him in jail, along with his lawyer, Nabi.

Physically he is good, but the conditions at the jail where he is being held are tough. Theres no hot water and he is being held with inmates convicted of terrorism at the Asayish-run side of Zirka prison, Nabi told me, referring to Asayish, the Kurdistan security agency.

Nabi said that international organizations needed to apply pressure to prevent Sherwani being sentenced to life imprisonment. But, he said, authorities often release detainees by surprise to give the impression that international pressure and lawyers have nothing to do with the release.

A week after my trip, Sherwani and the activists he was arrested alongside were released on bail, although charges are still pending.

Communicating through a translator after his release, Sherwani told me, The director of Asayish said he had talked to the judge and I was going to be freed. It sounded to me as a political decision rather than a legal one.

Sherwani, who said he would continue reporting, added, It felt good finally being able to see my family after 42 days in detention. What made me really happy though was that we hadnt been left alone. Volunteer lawyers and international organizations worked hard to secure our release.New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced a ban on all military-style semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. New Zealand has decided to overhaul gun laws in the country in the backdrop of the Christchurch mosque shootings.

It is estimated that there are about 1.2-1.5 million guns in New Zealand which has a population of about 5million people. There were no official data about the number of assault rifles in circulation and there are roughly 13,500 military-style semi-automatic weapons in New Zealand.

Christchurch Mosque Shootings

Christchurch mosque shootings refer to two consecutive terrorist attacks at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday Prayer on 15 March 2019. The first attack was at the Al Noor Mosque in the suburb of Riccarton at 1:40 pm and the second one was at the Linwood Islamic Centre at about 1:55 pm. The attacks were linked to white supremacism and alt-right extremism movements.

New Zealand police are investigating a manifesto, the 28-year-old suspect allegedly wrote and posted on social media shortly before the shooting began. This manifesto espouses far-right and white nationalistic views, specifically targeting Muslims and immigrants and praises mass murderers Dylann Roof, who attacked a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and Anders Breivik, who killed dozens of young people at a summer camp for Norways left-leaning political party.Last Friday, tens of thousands of school students went on strike, imploring politicians to finally Get Serious about climate change policies, and urging a switch to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030.Can't be done, they were told.Readers may remember, however, that ANU researchers Andrew Blakers and Matt Stocks in February saidthat if Australia continued at its current rate of wind and solar deployment, then enough to meet the equivalent of 100 per cent of the country's electricity needs could be delivered by 2030.Now, new research from the Norway-based research company Rystad says the pipeline of wind, solar and storage projects in Australia will likely reach 100GW before the upcoming federal election in May, including those in concept stage, and those seeking development approvals, already have DAs, have won contracts, are under construction, or are already built.Of course, not all these projects will be built at the scale envisaged. There may be local issues, connection hurdles, financing challenges and market headwinds. But if they were, they would deliver enough megawatt-hours to deliver Australia's current demand.Of course, getting to 100 per cent renewables for electricity is not simply a matter of building lots of solar and wind farms. As Blakers and Stocks noted, it needs a plan, and it depends on where this capacity is built, and how it is connected. It also depends on how much storage there is, in both capacity and duration.And such a dramatic switch would require a wholesale review of market rules and practices to deal with the new technology, and fast-response batteries in particular. Given that many developers could probably construct a small solar farm in the time it takes for regulators to agree on the change of a paragraph in the National Electricity Rules, this looms as a major hurdle.And, it should be noted, even though nearly every utility and energy expert accepts that the energy transition is inevitable, there is still great debate about how quickly it could or should be done.Still, the existence of such a huge pipeline of projects underlines the global and national interest in what is happening in Australia, and the depth of resources that can be exploited if the other issues are resolved.Rystad describes the 100GW level as a symbolic milestone and says it follows a blistering start to the new year in which 6.65GW of new capacity from 62 assets were added to its data-base in January and February  more than double the capacity and number of assets that were added in the same period last year.'This clearly shows the confidence investors have in Australia's renewable future and possibly where the renewables sector sees the election outcome going,' says senior analyst David Dixon.These new projects include an additional 2.9GW (AC) of large-scale solar, and another 1.4GW of wind. But it is the 2.4GW of storage (a rise of 25 per cent) that catches the eye.The breakdown of the Rystad data base is as follows, and is also illustrated in the graph above. There is just over 40GW of solar in the pipeline, including 9.6GW of concept, 11.4GW awaiting DA approval, and 19.2GW approved. And about 5GW already built or under construction.There is just under 30GW of wind in the pipeline, with 19.4GW in concept, 1.8GW in DA application and 8.5GW in DA approved. The difference in numbers shows the switch to solar technologies as it matches wind in price, and usually has less DA issues.Storage is the big new player and is split between pumped hydro (PHES) and lithium-ion batteries. For PHES, there is 3.5GW in concept (which includes Snowy 2.0 because it has yet to get DA approval), another 500MW awaiting DA, and 500MW if DA approved.Lithium-ion batteries have 1.2GW in the concept stage, another 2.3GW awaiting DA approval, and another 2.9GW with DA approval. The battery pipeline has grown exponentially, Dixon says.The state break down clearly demonstrates that NSW is leading the way in aggregated totals, Queensland is dominated by solar projects, and South Australia  even though it is already at more than 50 per cent wind and solar  also matches Victoria and W.A.South Australia is predicted, by the market operator, to install another wind and solar capacity to deliver the equivalent of 100 per cent of its demand as early as 2026 or 2027.The concept projects include what might be described by some as thought bubbles and land and network prospecting.But it also includes mostly serious ventures such as the giant Asia Renewable Energy Hub project in the Pilbara,backed by Vestas, Macquarie Group and CWP  which aims for some 11GW of wind and solar that could be exported to Asia, either directly via a sub-sea cable, or via a transportable fuel such as ammonia.Other projects include the 4GW Walcha project in NSW,proposed by Energy Estate and Mirus Wind, which aims to combine huge amounts of wind, solar and storage for the biggest project proposed so far for the main grid, and the 2GW Star of the South offshore wind project in Bass Strait.Would all of this be enough for 100 per cent renewables energy for Australia's electricity needs?Easily, says Ben Elliston, a co-author of one report into 100 per cent renewable energy options published by the UNSW three years ago.Elliston says, however, there are a lot of different answers to what 100 per cent renewables might look like, and the work of his team has possibly been over-run by unexpectedly quick cost reductions in solar. I would expect to see less wind and more PV if (the study) was repeated today.The ANU's Blakers and Stocks say that 100GW should be sufficient, but reaching 100 per cent renewables will ultimately depend on the mix and the location, and to the amount of storage, and transmission available.The amount of storage we need to support this is well short at present, Blakers says. We need an additional 450GWh of energy with 20GW of power, which can come from a combination of pumped hydro, batteries and demand management.We also need quite a lot more transmission. However, the cost of this additional storage (+ associated transmission) is only about $25/MWh (considerably less than the cost of the PV & wind that it supports).And, there will also likely to be a need for more electricity, as electric cars become the main form of transport and as heat pumps and other technologies push oil and gas heating our of buildings.Giles ParkinsonGiles Parkinson is founder and editor of Renew Economy, and is also the founder of One Step Off The Gridand founder/editor of The Driven. Giles has been a journalist for 35 years and is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review.Drinking hot tea may be a common habit, but a new study reveals a link between scalding tea and an increased risk of esophageal cancer.While previous papers have already linked hot tea and esophageal cancer, it's the first time that scientists have examined the connection with a specific temperature in mind.Burning Tea Doubles Cancer RiskThe new study, publishedin the International Journal of Cancer, followed 50,045 individuals in Iran who ranged from 40 to 75 years old for an average period of 10 years.Among the participants, 317 cases of esophageal cancer were identified during the follow-up.Researchers discovered that people who drink more than 700 ml of teahotter than 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) every day are at a 90 percent higher risk of esophageal cancer than those who drink less and prefer their cups at cooler temperatures."Many people enjoy drinking tea, coffee, or other hot beverages. However, according to our report, drinking very hot tea can increase the risk of esophageal cancer, and it is therefore advisable to wait until hot beverages cool down before drinking," Dr. Farhad Islami, lead author from the American Cancer Society, saidHeat Likely The Factor Behind LinkIn the study, the team explains that their findings support the link between hot beveragesand esophageal cancer. However, they also recommend further studies on the reason behind the connection.Stephen Evans, a professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who was not involved with the study, theorizes that heat was the factor rather than the nature of the beverage."In fact, it is probably anything hot: Microwaved jam has been known to cause esophageal injury. It is possible that the trauma leads to cell changes and hence to cancer," Evans tellsthe Science Media Centre, according to CNN.About Esophageal CancerAs of 2019, the American Cancer Society estimatesa total of 17,650 new cases of esophageal cancer and 16,080 deaths from the disease.While this type of cancer makes up just 1 percent of all cancers diagnosed in the United States, it's a lot more common in other countries such as Iran, China, southern Africa, and India. Specifically, esophageal cancer is the eighth most common cancer in the world, accordingto data from the International Agency for Research on Cancer.Survival rate has improved over the years. In 2019, about 20 percent of all patients with esophageal cancer now survive at least five years after diagnosis.Nokia fans waited for years for the first Nokia-Android handsets to arrive, and it finally happened two years ago, when HMD Global unveiled its first Nokia 6 handset, after acquiring the right to use the brand. Since then, HMD unveiled a variety of Nokia handsets, culminating with the Nokia 9 PureView a few weeks ago.However, the old Nokia has nothing to do with the Nokia phones we're seeing today, and all these devices are made in China by Foxconn. This brings us to HMD's first China-related issue, as some Nokia phones have apparently sent data to servers in the region without consent from users.A Reutersreport saysthat Finland will investigate the HMD phones, looking at whether they breached data rules. It all started with Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, which reported the breach on Thursday. A Nokia 7 Plus owner was told that his phone contacted a particular server, sending data packages in an unencrypted format.According to NRK, Nokia had admitted that 'an unspecified number of Nokia 7 Plus phones had sent data to the Chinese server,' without disclosing who owned the server.'We can confirm that no personally identifiable information has been shared with any third party,' HMD told Reuters. 'An error in software packaging process in a single batch of one device model' caused the issue.'Such data was never processed and no person could have been identified based on this data,' HMD added, saying that the error was fixed in February and nearly all devices had installed the update. It's still unclear what kind of data was sent to the server, and why it happened in the first place. Finland's ombudsman Reijo Aarnio told Reutershe would investigate whether the breaches involved 'personal information and if there has been a legal justification for this.'As absurd as it seems, the anti-vaccination movement isn't just peddled in sketchy online forums and creepy Facebook groups; some politicians have also joined the fight, arguing that vaccinations for childhood diseases shouldn't be mandatory for anyone. Recently, a Texas lawmaker (incorrectly and inexplicably) suggestedthat vaccines should be optional since antibiotics exist, and now a conservative politician in Italy has joined the fight. Unfortunately, he brought chickenpox along with him since he had never been vaccinated, landing him in the hospital for several days.Various news outletsin Italy have covered the bizarre but oh-so-fitting plight of Massimiliano Fedriga, who has spent a portion of his political career fighting against mandatory vaccine laws. Fedriga, who claims to be 'in favor' of vaccines in practice but refuses to support legislation that would allow the preventative treatments to have the greatest impact, spent a total of four days in the hospital after coming down with the chickenpox.Scientists and doctors have long promoted vaccines as a way of protecting public health, since contagious diseases can be completely eradicated in a population if enough of the individuals have been vaccinated against them. That's exactly what happened in the United States decades ago, when the measles vaccine effectively eliminated the disease.Now, with a growing number of parents refusing to vaccinate their children, the disease has made a huge comeback, forcing schools to take measures against unvaccinated students for the protection of the student body.Like the measles vaccine, the chickenpox vaccine has been working fine for decades, and it prevents the disease completely in over 95% of people who receive it. Unfortunately, the safe and affordable treatment has become tangled in the anti-vaccination web and, as Fedriga just learned, contracting the disease as an adult is no fun at all.In Fedriga's defense, the chickenpox vaccine was only made widely available in the mid-to-late 1980s. At 35 years of age, it's likely Fedriga  who says he received a full battery of available vaccinations as a child  didn't even have the vaccine available to him as a youngster.Nevertheless, it's a clear reminder that being unvaccinated can come back to bite you later in life, as diseases like chickenpox can be significantly more serious for adults than for children. It's not likely that coming down with chickenpox as an adult will change Fedriga's position on mandatory vaccinations against common diseases, but that's the nature of politics.Political prisoner, activist, journalist, hymn-writer, emerging think tanker, aspiring novelist, hanger on of academia, parliamentary candidate for North West Durham, Shadow Leader of the Opposition, Speedboat, proudly banned from Twitter so officially more dangerous than the Taliban, eagerly awaiting the second (or possibly third) attempt to murder me.Karnataka; Fishermen from Chikkamagaluru allege threat in Dakshina Kannada

March 22,2019 | Source: The Hindu

For over a month, traditional fishermen hailing from Chikkamagaluru, who have been staying in thatched huts on the banks of the Netravathi at Jeppinamogaru here, are living in the fear of attack by local fishermen.



We are being forced to lay our nets in a way that local fishermen do not notice them, rued 35-year-old Venkatesh, who is among the fishermen who is facing the threat. As my wife was with me in a coracle few days ago, I was not harmed. But others have been hit. A couple of our fishing nets have also been taken away by some local fishermen, he alleged while speaking to The Hindu.



Mr. Venkatesh is among the 40 members from the Shillekyata fishing community, a Scheduled Caste, hailing from Kadur taluk of Chikkamagaluru, who have been fishing here. He said they have been fishing in the Netravati using their coracles for over three decades. We lead our life from small catch from the river. We move in a group while laying the net, said Ravi, 55, another member of the community.



While the fish catch has substantially come down in the river, Mr. Ravi said local fishermen blame them for the reduction. The net they use is of 50 mm and they catch only big marine species. In the last few days, they are getting only crabs that fetch ?200 a kg in market, he added.



Rajappa said local fishermen were asking the community members to use nets made by them and do fishing in the way they are doing. They are also asking us to relocate to Kadur. How can we move to our native place where fishing is now literally non-existent because of drying of waterbodies, he said.



Lokesh, 42, said they had reported about the threats to local peoples representatives and also to the Fisheries Department. We do not have anything against local fishermen. But we want the district administration to help us earn our livelihood in peace, said Mr. Lokesh. He and other community members accompanied by Democratic Youth Federation of India district secretary Santosh Bajal submitted a memorandum to Deputy Commissioner Sasikanth Senthil S. here on Monday.



Dakshina Kannada Traditional Fishermens Association president Sharat Guddekoppala said those troubling fishermen from Shillekyata community cannot be called as fishermen. We do not trouble fellow fishermen, he said, and asked Shillekyata community members to report the harassment to the coastal security police.Odisha: A womens squad in Odisha defends its forest for 20 years

by Sahana Ghosh

March 22,2019 | Source: Mongabay

For close to 20 years after a supercyclone ravaged Odisha, a group of women along the coast has been standing sentinel over their beloved storm-shielding forest and mangrove cover. Deftly swinging and beating their sturdy bamboo sticks, 75 women in Gundalba village in the famed temple district of Puri in the Mahanadi delta, have been taking turns to literally blow the whistle on potential timber smugglers and tree cutters in this sandy strip of the coastal woodland.



We beat our sticks and keep vigil in groups of 10. We spread out inside the forests and blow whistles. Anyone with an intent to harm the local biodiversity flees on hearing our whistle and the banging of our sticks on tree trunks, 52-year-old Charulata Biswal told this visiting Mongabay-India correspondent about their rotational patrolling or thenga pahal. Biswal is the secretary of the Pir Jahania Van Surakhya Samiti, nurtured by women who came together voluntarily in response to the devastation after the 1999 Odisha supercyclone battered the northern Indian Ocean. In 2012, the group won the maiden UNDP India Biodiversity Award in the community stewardship category for their efforts to rejuvenate the natural heritage of their village.



Skirting past the feathery branches of the casuarina and low spreading cashew trees, Biswal and her group point out the sea, just half a kilometre away from the village, located along the Astaranga beach in the states Puri district. The calming sound of waves gently lapping the shore near the Pir Jahania shrine and the gorgeous sunflower fields belie the destruction unleashed by the cyclone on October 29, 1999.



All of India and the rest of the world knows about the cyclone. Our homes and standing crops were destroyed and the casuarina plantations were affected. The soil had turned saline. There was no food for days and our children had no clothes to put on, recalled Biswal. But we realised that it was because of the surviving forest (including the mangrove species) that we were still alive. We pledged that we will protect the forest in return and restore the biodiversity, said a resolute Biswal. Narrating the inception of the protection squad, Biswal said 70 women came together in 2001 to form the women forest protection committee with representations from every household to revive and manage the biodiversity of the 75-hectare forest area. The village, close to the Devi river mouth, now has 103 households.



Men had a supporting role in the Samitis initial days but now it has evolved to include male members, primarily the spouses of the women torchbearers, explained Sovakar Behera, honorary wildlife warden of Puri, who has been assisting the group in its biodiversity management initiatives. The men were busy shoring up supplies, rebuilding houses and re-establishing livelihood in the aftermath of the supercyclone. The women took it upon themselves to take care of the natural resources, Behera told Mongabay-India. It is the women who make up the protection and monitoring squad to look after these resources.



We go for rotational patrolling twice a day. After wrapping up our daily chores we do one round of monitoring from 7.30 am and then return to our homes. After our lunch and ensuring the house is in order, we again leave for the late-afternoon vigil, a beaming Biswal said. But dont they feel scared in the jungle? No, why should we? The forest is an extension of our home. Though we do not have rights over it we still feel protective towards it, elaborated Biswal, likening each tree to a child.



Wont it hurt to see your children suffer? This is how a mother feels and for us, the trees are our legacy and we are doing something that comes to us naturally, Biswal added in modesty. It also gives them a chance to catch up on whats going on in each others lives.



The vigilantes use mobile phones these days to alert one another. We have caught several people over the years and several cases have been lodged against those indulging in illegal activities. Sometimes we have had to use our sticks to threaten these thieves, said Rahima Bibi. The members of the committee formulated and passed resolutions for a set of regulations for the management of the forest, including practices that help them avoid conflicts with neighbouring villages who depend on the same patch of forest for their stock of firewood.



For instance, the womens committee has fixed one day each month during which all the households in the village are allowed to collect fuelwood from the forest. Neighbouring villages gather firewood on a fixed, different day (usually after three or four days after the villagers of Gundalba have collected). We cooperate with the forest department as well but we do realise that department officials come and go so we are in command of our own vigilantism, beamed Rahima Bibi also emphasising on the unity between the Hindu and Muslim communities.



At the outset, the women invested time and energy in generating awareness on the importance of the forest cover, said Behera, elaborating on the role of the mangrove forest as a bio-shield. They essentially pose as wind-breakers. The casuarina trees and other species stop the salt-bearing wind from entering the agricultural land and also thwarts the advance of moisture-laden wind from wreaking havoc on farms. The mangroves also prevent soil erosion along the coastal belt and overall the forests preserve the wildlife, Behera said. In the supercyclone, around 30,000 casuarina trees were uprooted. Mangroves were inundated, the women said.



About 70 percent of the tree cover was lost in the supercyclone. The mangrove leaves had started decomposing but their roots were intact and local community members started salvaging the decomposing mangrove plants and still-standing casuarinas as also native species, Behera elaborated.



A concerted effort of the local communities, spearheaded by the Samiti, led to the regeneration of mangrove vegetation (Avicennia officinalis, Avicennia alba, Aegiceras corniculatum, Ceriops decandra, Acanthus illicifolius, Bruguiera gymnorrhiza, and Excoecaria agallocha) in the river system.



And the forest cover (especially of mangroves), went up by 63 percent from 2.58 sq km in 1985 to 4.21sq km in 2004, as per the India Biodiversity Award citation. Gradually the forest came back to life. Birds started nesting and we heard bird calls once again. Now the deer are so many in number that they sometimes they raid our crops, said Biswal. Biswal and Rahima Bibi underscore that the recovering forest has made their village more liveable.



One section of the village that is close to the forest has freshwater. This is because the mangroves and other tree species prevent intrusion of saltwater. Our agricultural fields are safe from the influence of storm surges and ferocious winds, said Rahima Bibi. The committee is confident that it is well-prepared to tackle disasters.



Our experience from the 1999 cyclone has taught us that the villages that were shielded by mangroves had better protection from the disaster. We are now preparing to register our group with the forest department for community forest management, said Biswal. Rahima Bibi and others are also aware of the legacy of cyclones in Odisha.



According to a study that analysed 122 years (18771998) of tropical cyclone frequency in the north Indian Ocean, approximately four times as many tropical cyclones occur in the Bay of Bengal compared to the Arabian Sea.



Cyclones occur most often in May, October and November, with an average of five to six tropical cyclones every year. In the 122 years studied, the frequency of tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal during November has doubled. Odisha has been struck by recorded 128 tropical cyclones in the past 200 years (1804 to 1999). Included in these strikes was the supercyclone of October 28 to 30, 1999, which killed approximately 10,000 people and had a 7.5-metre storm surge.



Cyclonic flooding in the Bay of Bengal is associated with storm surges, high tides and high water levels due to the heavy rainfall. A 2019 study by the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University highlights in coastal Odisha districts, the risk of severe cyclones ranks above heavy floods. Agriculture, the main livelihood of these districts (71 percent) is impacted adversely making the Mahanadi delta community vulnerable to such extreme events. Biswal added: Now it up to the younger generation to join in and help us create a legacy that can work towards better management of resources in the future.Karnataka: Migrant fishermen likely to take break to go to hometowns to vote

by Arockiaraj Johnbosco

March 22,2019 | Source: The New Indian Express

The fishing hubs of coastal Karnataka  Mangaluru, Malpe and Karwar  are typically a multi-lingual set up as the mechanised fishing here heavily depends on workforce hailing from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and also from north India. There are around 50,000 migrant fish workers here who usually visit their native places mainly during the fishing ban season between June and July or during major occasions like festivals.



This time, however, they are likely to take a break in view of the upcoming Lok Sabha election and go back to their hometowns to vote. A majority of fishermen here are from Odisha and Jharkhand. A good number of them have already left to their native states as we have moored the boats as there is not much fishing, says Mohan Bolashettykar, a fishermen leader at Karwar. It is up to them. If the boats are docked back after fishing expeditions, they are free to go to their native and vote, says Vinish, a boat owner from Malpe.



Fishermen Bernard Shaw and Anthony from Thangachimadam in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, have decided to take a couple of days break and go and vote on April 18. With the prevailing political situation in Tamil Nadu, we feel that it is important that we vote there, the duo said. Prakash from Ramatheertham in Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh is also planning to vote. Most of us will go and vote, the fisherman says. I am not sure how many will go and vote because of the cost incurred in travelling, says Shereef, a boat owner from Mangaluru. But boat owner Keshav Moger (from Bhatkal in Uttara Kannada, and based in Malpe fishing harbour) is willing to halt his fishing and take his entire crew, mostly hailing from Uttara Kannada, back to their native to exercise their franchise.



Apart from fishermen, there are migrant workers at fishing harbours like women cleaning the fish for a fee. For instance, a good number of them at Mangaluru fishing harbour are from Tamil Nadu. Nothing much is going to change if we vote or not ... but we feel it is our duty to vote. So I will go back to my native and vote, says Chinnathayi from Salem district in Tamil Nadu.Pakistan: Sixth National report to the UN convention on CBD

March 22,2019 | Source: Technology Times

Ministry of Climate Change and IUCN Pakistan co-organized a workshop to validate and finalize the 6th National Report (6NR) of Pakistan to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at a local hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan. The report reflects the progress made by Pakistan on the Biodiversity since the last report. Pakistan is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity and hence regularly reports the progress on the conservation of the Biodiversity.



The workshop was chaired by the Inspector General of Forests, Syed Mahmood Nasir and honored by the participation of Secretary Forest and Wildlife Sindh Mr. Abdul Rahim Soomro. Key stakeholders, policy makers from federal and provincial governments, academia, national and international development partners joined the event and contributed progress of their respective federating units.



Syed Mahmood Nasir, Inspector General Forests, Ministry of Climate Change appreciated the participation of all the provinces in the development of this report. He also acknowledged the commitment and efforts of IUCN in compiling a quality document to be presented at the global level. He highlighted the importance of this obligatory requirement of Pakistan. While elaborating the two major issues that need to be addressed on priority basis, he shared the efforts made by the Government in plant conservation and prevention of the illegal wildlife trade in Pakistan.



Mr. Abdul Rahim Soomro, Secretary Forest and Wildlife Sindh acknowledged great work done by the provinces and highlighted the need for continued efforts. He appreciated the participation of all departments and ensured that the Sindh Government provides a comprehensive feedback for finalization of this report. He suggested developing the academia-industry partnerships for inclusion of the latest research carried out by university students. He acknowledged the presence of relevant government departments coming together for a common national cause.



Ms. Fauzia Bilqis Malik, Manager IUCN Islamabad Office acknowledged the input provided by the participants in compiling this report and thanked them for the participation at the validation workshop. She highlighted that this report will reflect the progress of Pakistan at the global level, hence must include all the significant progress. Dr. Rizwan Irshad, Deputy Director, Biodiversity Directorate, Ministry of Climate Change provided an overview of the process followed in developing the Sixth National Report.



Mr. Abdul Munaf Qaimkhani presented a brief overview of the 6th National Report. He highlighted that the 6NR will establish the global biodiversity outlook of Pakistan and plays a key role in enhancing global biodiversity. The report comprises of seven major sections, out of which there are 2 optional sections. A joint team of IUCN consultants and officers of Biodiversity Directorate, Ministry of Climate Change initiated a country wide consultative process in December 2018, to collect the data and information from various stakeholders regarding implementation of National Biodiversity and Action Plan (NBSAP) and the progress made towards achieving 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets (ABTs) during reporting period (i.e. July 2014  December, 2018), so that the actions taken in support of biodiversity conservation and its sustainable use could be assessed and reported to CBD Secretariat under Sixth National Report (6thNR). The same is an obligation under Article 26 of the convention.



The national report has a combination of information and data available at the country level which includes: information on the targets being pursued at the national level; implementation measures taken and assessment of their effectiveness; assessment of progress made towards each national target; description of the national contribution to each of the global ABTs; description of the national contribution to Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC); contribution of indigenous peoples and local communities to ABTs and updated biodiversity country profiles.



Provincial Forest, Wildlife and Environment departments from Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Balochistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Gilgit Balitistan, Pakistan Forest institute, National Agriculture Research Council (NARC), Punjab Fisheries Department, WWF, WCS shared their feedback and input to the report. In her concluding remarks, Ms. Fauzia Malik, Manager IUCN Islamabad Programme Office thanked all the stakeholders for their valuable contributions in making the 6th National Report a quality, authentic and futuristic document.Myanmar: All the fish died: Kachin communities alarmed at impact of banana plantations

by EMILY FISHBEIN

March 22,2019 | Source: Frontier Myanmar

On the afternoon of February 6, fish started dying in two streams near a banana plantation in Kachin States Waingmaw Township. Residents of two nearby villages, Aung Myay One and Aung Myay Two, collected and ate the fish, which were taken from the Nam Myin Hka and Nan Lone Hka streams.



On February 15, the Kachin State Environmental Conservation Department tested water in the streams as part of an investigation into the cause of the fish deaths that did not include an inspection of chemical use on the plantation. The assessment concluded that the water was contaminated and suggested that villagers had killed the fish for their own consumption.



Residents of the two villages, about 25 kilometres south of the Kachin capital Myitkyina on the highway to Mandalay, began renting land to a company for growing bananas last year as part of a boom in cultivating the fruit in the state that Frontier investigated in an article published in January, Kachins plantation curse.



Villagers fetch water from the streams for daily household use, and for supplying drinking water for themselves and their livestock. Other villagers rely on wells not far from the streams for their drinking water. In wells closest to the streams, dead fish also appeared. At first, when all the fish started dying, no one knew what was happening, said U Ting Ying, a retired watermelon farmer who lives in Aung Myay Two village. A lot of villagers collected dead fish and ate them.



Ting Ying has emerged as a spokesperson for his community and by speaking to the media he hopes to put pressure on the company running the banana plantation to investigate the issue. Communicating with the company is difficult because it has no senior representatives in the area, he said. They sprayed insecticide on the plants and then there were no fish left. All the fish died. All the villagers felt depressed, he told Frontier.



We cant say for sure whether its [because of] the company, but the incident happened around the company area. We asked a company supervisor but he said he didnt know anything about it. U Na Lawn, a watermelon farmer at Aung Myay Two, said, We want to take legal action against [the culprit]. We dont want to let it happen again. . . It killed all the fish in the water. Ting Ying said about 500 acres (200 hectares) in the two villages had been rented to a Chinese company called Jinhgpaw Nadi. Frontier could not verify the ownership of the company, but Ting Ying said the supervisors he had encountered spoke Chinese.



He estimated that the company had so far established banana plantations on about 200 acres. Last year, when the company arrived in the area, a Baptist church leader in one of the villages began encouraging villagers to rent land on which they had previously farmed diverse crops including sesame, corn, watermelon and oranges. Most villagers refused but about one-third of the 80 households agreed, according to Ting Ying.



But one or two villagers had difficulty making a living and so to generate income, they rented their land. More people followed, he said. Ting Ying said villagers had signed leases for up to three years, at an annual rate of K200,000 an acre, but a year had passed and they had yet to be paid anything.



Off the books



The area around Aung Myay One and Aung Myay Two accounts for a tiny fraction of the banana plantations established in Waingmaw Township, which borders China. The plantations grow what is known as tissue culture bananas, which are propagated in laboratories from the cloned tissue of selected plants to ensure uniformity.



The Myitkyina-based Land Security and Environmental Conservation Networking Group, a coalition of eleven civil society groups, recently released a report on tissue culture banana plantations in Kachin. The report included extensive interviews with the residents of six villages in Waingmaw, Bhamo and Myitkyina townships, as well as satellite mapping of plantation areas in Waingmaw Township.



LSECNGs report says banana plantations were first established in Kachin in 2006 and in Waingmaw Township have spread to cover more than 142,000 acres, or 12 percent of its area. Of respondents who rented their land, the report found that 59 percent did so because of pressure, threats, deception or duress. Companies have been accused of employing brokers to pressure people displaced by conflict in Kachin to rent the land they had left behind or risk having it seized by the government and rented out to investors under the 2012 Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Lands Management Law, as reported by Frontier in January.



A comprehensive investigation into the environmental and health hazards associated with tissue culture banana plantations has yet to be undertaken. However, LSECNG has noted concerning incidents in recent years, including cows dying after drinking water downstream from plantations, pigs dying after eating banana flowers and villagers developing respiratory problems seemingly because of prolonged exposure to chemicals.



LSECNG members told Frontier that most villagers in the area around Aung Myay Two rent land to companies for about K100,000 to K200,000 an acre per year, and sometimes for as low as K50,000 or K60,000, with delayed payments being common. Villagers tempted to work on the plantations would do so for a day-rate of K8,000-12,000 at harvest time, but are undercut by migrant workers from lower Myanmar and Rakhine State who are often willing to work for about K5,000 a day. Meanwhile, a company could earn K8 million an acre per harvest, which can be reaped twice in a year, an LSECNG source said.



The banana plantations have become increasingly contentious in Kachin and speaking out publicly about them can be dangerous. LSECNG personnel interviewed by Frontier were not willing to be identified because the government had disputed their findings. On February 26, two reporters from the Myitkyina News Journal were allegedly detained and physically abused by staff of Tha Khin Sit Mining Company over an article published the previous day in which villagers expressed concern over the companys alleged plans to clear land for banana plantations.



The day after the incident, the reporters sued six of the companys employees for assault, wrongful restraint and other offences under the Penal Code. On March 13, the managing director of Tha Khin Sit Mining Company, Ding Sau, sued Myitkyina News Journal executive directors Brang Mai and Zau Khun and journalist Moon Moon Pan for defamation under the Penal Code.



Much of the banana plantation industry in Kachin is opaque. Most companies are widely believed to be either Chinese-run or joint ventures between Myanmar and Chinese investors, but government records give little or no information about the companies or their output. Many operate in areas controlled by non-state armed groups, where government approval can be bypassed along with legally mandated environmental impact assessments. The LSECNG report estimates that about 40 companies operate banana plantations in Kachin. However, companies are not required to list all of their activities when they register with the Directorate of Investment and Company Administration and only one company registered with DICA has said it operates banana plantations in the state.



The company was registered in 2016 as a nationally-owned company named Kachin Star. With the entry of Chinese investors, the company registered as a foreign joint venture, Kachin Tian Hu Company Limited, in August 2018. Though Ting Ying said the company running plantations near the two Aung Myay villages is called Jinghpaw Nadi, the only business with that name registered with DICA is a travel and tour company with no discernable link to banana plantations.



Gaps in the record



In a March 1 interview at the Myitkyina office of the Environmental Conservation Department, the assistant director for Kachin State Daw Nwe Nwe Aye willingly shared the contents of the departments report on the fish deaths with Frontier, saying, Transparency is of the utmost importance. Asked about the plantation operator, Nwe Nwe Aye said she did not know the name of the company but assumed it was Chinese-owned like others in the industry. As well as information about the company and its operations, the chemicals used on its plantation next to the Nam Myin Hka stream were also missing from the report. The ECD says in its report that it sent four staff to investigate the fish deaths. They took water samples upstream and downstream from where the fish died and interviewed villagers. The water was tested according to thirteen criteria, including temperature, pH, oxidation reduction potential and total dissolved solids, and was found to be within safe ranges in all criteria except for water turbidity, which is a measure of particle suspension.



The ECD investigators found the remains of a campfire and some beer cans near the stream. The fish had been removed or had decomposed by this time but, citing the villagers, the report said that all the dead fish were found downstream from the campfire site.



The report also said that fish had died in the same stream in 2013 and an investigation at the time had found that villagers had used herbicides and explosives to kill them to eat. Based on this circumstantial evidence, the report concluded that while it was not possible to determine who or what caused the fish deaths, villagers were the most likely suspects. It is their habit to kill fish, Nwe Nwe Aye said, adding that while blame could not be established, the assessment found that the villagers often kill and catch the fish, so it is the most likely possibility.



Nwe Nwe Aye said some villagers interviewed for the ECD investigation claimed the fish could not have been killed by chemical runoff from the plantations because it was not the spraying season. However, this appears to contradict Ting Yings statement to Frontier and a February 26 report by the Kachin News Group, which quoted villagers as saying they believed the fish were killed by pesticide runoff  [from a] China-backed tissue culture banana plantation two miles away.



Although the plantation was excluded from the ECDs investigation, the report recommended monitoring and regulating the use of chemicals on banana plantations and raising awareness among communities about the risks and dangers of chemical use.



Asked if the ECD planned to inspect the plantation near the Nam Myin Hka stream, Nwe Nwe Aye said it first needed a formal request from DICA or another government office. She said the ECD had so far received only one such request for a banana plantation, involving Kachin Star/Kachin Tian Hu, the company mentioned by DICA.



LSECNG, meanwhile, is advocating that the government be more proactive on environmental regulation and in responding to chemical contamination. We dont want to kill the banana plantations, said an LSECNG member, who requested anonymity. We want to find a way for the local people to share in the profits [] and promote sustainable, ecological farming. Local people rely on the soil and water. If it is damaged, where will they go? Where will they live?PETALING JAYA (THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - A Malaysian convicted of murder in 2015 was executed at Singapore's Changi Prison on Friday (March 22) morning.





Michael Garing, 29, who is from Kapit, Sarawak, was convicted of murder by the Singapore High Court in 2015.





His appeal was thrown out by the Republic's Court of Appeal in 2017.





Garing and another Sarawakian, Tony Imba, were part of a gang that went on a robbery spree, severely injuring three victims and killing a fourth man in 2010.





The man they killed suffered a fractured skull, a severed left hand, a slash wound across his neck and a back wound so deep that his shoulder blade was cracked.





Imba was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the robbery.





The Malaysian government had said that it would submit a letter to Singapore to urge it to commute Garing's death sentence.





Garing's parents had also petitioned the Singapore Government for clemency.

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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The campaign for Ann Roe, who is running for Congress against Lyin' Bryan Steil has come out with the best one-liner of this cycle so far: I can't argue...

5 weeks agoThe Guardian to note "residual unease among some liberal operatives that Brock's conversion story fits into a American Bridge is a SuperPAC founded by David Brock, one of the oddest ducks in American politics. Once a right-wing journalistic assassin-for-hire and purveyor of Bill Clinton conspiracy theories, he turned against the GOP after coming out of the closet and was reborn as some kind of super-operative for the Republican-wing of the Democratic Party. Despite being one of the least trustworthy characters in American politics, he has been allowed to infiltrate multiple layers of the Democratic Party establishment to a degree that nearly every Democratic failure since the early 2000s has his fingerprints on it. Brock has been an especially effective Bernie saboteur and Edward Helmore used an article into note "residual unease among some liberal operatives that Brock's conversion story fits into a pattern of opportunism and self-promotion rather than ideological transformation ." I don't know if he's a Republican mole or not, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out he's been enriching himself while sabotaging the Democratic Party from within for years.





Of the $20,460,398 American Bridge 21st Century collected in 2018, almost nothing was spent helping candidates, while $13,864,849 was spent on salaries, close to $3 million of administrative costs and over a million and a half on consultants. Everything about their balance sheet screams SCAM. It was the same pattern in 2016-- $19,894,876 raised; $143,186 to help candidates; $12,598,727 for salaries; and the rest for consultants, administrative costs and so on.





Yesterday, NBC News reported that one of his operations, American Bridge "is embarking on a $50 million effort designed to soften President Donald Trumps support among the group that cost Democrats the White House in 2016-- white working-class voters in the Upper Midwest." Reaching out for cash from naive, wealthy Democratic donors , his memo states that "We understand that we may not win these voters back entirely, but if we dont make inroads into these areas, we will win the popular vote, lose the Electoral College, and the Senate could be lost for a decade." He plans to drain $80 million from legitimate Democratic Party vehicles into his own super-shady SuperPAC, a $50 million expansion he claims will help the Democrats win rural and exurban voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and possibly Florida via commissionable and very profitable paid advertising campaigns on TV and radio and via digital dissemination.





The NBC News piece was written by an exceptionally inept reporter, Alex Seitz-Wald, who's never successfully grappled with the distinction between journalism and p.r.

"We're going to focus on real-life testimonials and putting them in front of voters," Brock said.



Trump has already spent tens of millions of dollars on his reelection campaign and held dozens of rallies while Democrats are just beginning the year-and-half-long process of selecting their nominee.



"While the strongest Democratic field in history brings their messages to primary voters and the American people, we are going to take the fight to Donald Trump, who has sold out hard-working Americans," said Andrew Gillum, the former Tallahassee mayor who ran for Florida governor last year.



Gillum is joining the board of American Bridges 501(c)4 non-profit arm, which is chaired by former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. New additions also include former DNC Chair Ed Rendell and operative Jessica Mackler, who ran the independent expenditure arm of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in last year's midterm elections.



Since Hillary Clinton lost the formerly solidly blue Midwest states, Democrats have debated whether to focus on winning back those voters or doubling down on their more diverse base.

Progressives within the Democratic Party have instead focussed on making sure the party's next nominee is not another version of Hillary Clinton-- so an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders (or even a Mayor Pete) rather than a Biden or Beto or Gillibrand. In other words, someone whose policy agenda will appeal to those Midwestern blue collar voters rather than chase them to a carnival barker like Trump again.Adam Millstein is a super-wealthy-- and crooked -- Israeli real estate developer who moved to the U.S. in 1981 when he was 30 and took out American citizenship while holding onto his Israeli citizenship as well. He is the founder and chairman of the Israeli-American Council and has founded multiple groups to push right-wing Israeli positions disguised as "Jewish." He is one of AIPAC's biggest donors and a member of their National Council. Immediately after a deranged white nationalist murdered 50 Muslims praying in 2 mosques in New Zealand, Millstein asserted on his Twitter account-- which has been rated one of the 25 most influential accounts on "Jewish Twitter" -- that two members of the U.S. Congress, Ilan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both have been getting multiple death threats and neither is in any way connected to the Muslim Brotherhood or any of the other organizations Millstein has been smearing them with. Although AIPAC bumped him from the speakers roster, they have refused to kick him off their National Council.





Millstein makes his political contributions through his firm, Hager Pacific Properties. Last cycle He gave $50,436 to Republicans and $22,300 to right-wing Democrats. His top recipient was Kevin McCarthy. It was the same pattern in 2016-- most money going to Republicans and Kevin McCarthy getting the biggest amount.













Although their are literally dozens of congressmembers lined up to speak, the headliners at this year's AIPAC conference will be indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with back up on the podium by knee jerk supporters of his policies from both parties: Mike Pence, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, McTurtle and Kevin McCarthy. MoveOn polled it's members and found that an overwhelming 74.3% agree that progressive candidates for president should skip the conference.













These were the facts on which MoveOn based its decision to do the poll and they are the facts they shared with the members:

 AIPAC spent tens millions of dollars in 2015 to defeat the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama along with our European and international allies-- a historic diplomatic agreement that Trump has tried to derail since taking office.

 This year's AIPAC conference is headlined by Benjamin Netanyahu  who has been indicted on bribery and fraud charges, and recently made a deal to bring the "Israeli KKK" ... party into the next government.

 AIPAC has ... been known to peddle anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric while giving platforms to Islamophobes.

 AIPAC has refused to condemn the antisemitism of Republicans, such as Trump's friend and advisor Steve Bannon. Bannon's wife reported that he had their kids removed from a school because of "the number of Jews that attend", and that "he didn't want the girls going to school with Jews. While many groups condemned Bannon, Politico reported that AIPAC "declined to weigh in.SK Group plans to invest in Vingroup in April 2019. Photo by Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji

South Korean conglomerate SK Group plans to acquire a $1 billion stake in Vietnams largest private conglomerate Vingroup, Bloomberg reported.

SK plans to make the investment as early as next month, it said, quoting South Koreas Maeil Business Newspaper.

Vingroup recently sought its shareholders vote on a plan to raise at least VND25 trillion ($1.08 billion) through a private placement to five foreign investors.

It plans to sell the shares at a minimum price of VND100,000 ($4.32) and stipulate a lockup period of one year, during which time the shares cannot be resold by the buyers.

It plans to use VND10 trillion ($432.34 million) of the proceeds to restructure its debts, VND6 trillion ($259.41 million) to invest in its auto company VinFast, technology firm VinTech and smartphone maker Vinsmart.

Vingroup is Vietnams largest listed company by market capitalization and is worth VND377 trillion ($16.23 billion).

Last September SK Group acquired a 9.5 percent stake in Vietnams diversified business Masan Group for $470 million.The Trung Luong-My Thuan expressway will connect to the existing HCMC-Trung Luong highway. Photo by VnExpress/Xuan Hoa.

The government has decided to use public money to finish the much-delayed Trung Luong - My Thuan Expressway in southern Vietnam.

The decision to switch the build-operate-transfer (BOT) projects source of funding from toll collection was recently announced by the Government Office to resolve the difficulties delaying the work and ensure it is completed as scheduled in 2020.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc stressed the expressway needs to be completed on time to meet the inter-regional transport needs and serve the socio-economic development of the Mekong River Delta, a major agricultural hub in southern Vietnam.

Southern Tien Giang Province will now oversee the work after taking over from the Ministry of Transport. The PM instructed the locality to ensure the project breaks even in no more than 15 years so that tolls do not need to be collected after the 15th year.

When completed, the expressway will link up with the HCMC - Trung Luong Expressway between HCMC and Tien Giang Province.

Construction of the 51-kilometer expressway that will run through five districts in Tien Giang first began in 2009, but suffered delays as one investor after another pulled out.

In 2014 the project was approved to be built under the BOT model with supplemental funding from toll fees collected on the Ho Chi Minh-Trung Luong Expressway.

Construction restarted in February 2015, but the work again lagged behind schedule when financers halted funding after one of the investors was implicated in criminal proceedings.

The work is budgeted to cost VND9.67 trillion ($415.23 million). A joint venture between six investors will contribute 30 percent of the cost (VND2.8 trillion or $120.23 million) while the rest comes from bank loans.Ho Chi Minh City authorities want the Ben Thanh - Suoi Tien metro line to run in 2021. Photo by VnExpress/Huu Khoa

Ho Chi Minh City has approved advance payment from its coffers while awaiting central funds to pay contractors building its first metro route.

The city will give the Management Authority for Urban Railways (MAUR), which manages the project, VND2.15 trillion ($91.78 million) to pay off dues, including payment for work already done by Japanese contractor Sumitomo Corporation.

This is the fifth time since 2017 the city will be making an advance payment. City authorities last week said the long-delayed metro line needs to be up and running in 2021 though the contractors were not sure.

The Ben Thanh  Suoi Tien metro line runs 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) through districts 1, 2, 9, Binh Thanh, and Thu Duc in HCMC and Di An District in the neighboring province of Binh Duong.

Work began in August 2012, and 63 percent has been completed so far.

An increase in its cost from VND17.4 trillion ($747.6 million) to VND47.3 trillion ($2 billion) was approved in January.Airplanes are seen at the Noi Bai International Airport in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo by Shutterstock/Bayurov Alexander

The Transport Ministry wants ACV to pay for runway repairs at countrys two largest airports and be reimbursed later.

Transport Minister Nguyen Van The said Thursday that the reason he has proposed that the Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) pays first for the repairs is because the state cannot immediately disburse VND4.2 trillion ($181.27 million) for the work.

The minister proposed that ACV, which runs 23 airports, also pays for the related constructions at the Tan Son Nhat International Airport and Noi Bai International Airport, and the state would reimburse them later.

In Vietnam, runways are managed by the state, while the ACV manages terminals and parking lots.

"Waiting for the states budget would take too long. We are planning to use ACVs budget, and ACV will supervise and be responsible for the investment," The said.

ACV had said earlier that 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. The repair, set to begin in a few months, is expected to take four months to complete.

Last September, the Transport Ministry had warned that the two runways needed "extremely urgent" repairs.

Tan Son Nhat airport's runway 25R/07L is designed to handle B777-300 ERs (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, and upgrades have been 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.More foreigners are learning Vietnamese to communicate with the locals. Photo courtesy of Nguyen Thanh Lan

Language classes are attracting increasing numbers of people who need to communicate with locals at work or just want to understand the culture.

A new customer at Dom cafe in Hanoi might be surprised to see four non-Vietnamese sitting around a table and speaking to each other in Vietnamese. But the sight is hardly a surprise to frequent visitors to the cafe on Dao Tan Street, where many expatriates come every day for Vietnamese lessons.

Daniel Nyilas, one of the four, has been learning Vietnamese from a private tutor for a year and was seeking to improve his language skills further with the group.

"I just have a need to understand locals more instead of talking like a monkey with my hands," the Hungarian, 31, told VnExpress International.

Nyilas is among an increasing number of foreigners striving to learn Vietnamese for their work or just daily conversation in a country that is steadily opening up its economy to the world.

Vietnam attracts billions of dollars in foreign direct investment every year, and with it come foreign managers who need to learn Vietnamese to communicate with their local employees. Samsung, one of the largest foreign companies in Vietnam, requires its South Korean managers and specialists to learn Vietnamese for a year. They are frequently tested for their communication skills.

For this reason, Vietnamese language centers are attracting an increasing number of students. Nguyen Thi Phuong Dung, general manager of 123Vietnamese, said new students sign up every week but there are times during the year when the center, despite having almost 80 part-time and full-time teachers, has to turn some of them away.

The center, which has 600 students in six cities and provinces, regularly receives requests to organize classes near industrial areas where Japanese and Koreans work.

Dung said: "The demand is huge and there are areas that we havent covered. We want to expand."

Vo Thi Thanh Binh, director of HCMC-based Vietnamese Language Studies, said the number of foreigners coming to her center has been increasing year after year and reached 670 last year. Besides those who come to learn Vietnamese for work, there are also research students who need to understand Vietnamese for their projects.

Vietnamese centers publish their own textbooks for foreign students. Photo by VnExpress/Dat Nguyen

Language barrier

But learning Vietnamese is not easy. Beginners, even intermediate students, have a hard time with the pronunciation and tones, Nguyen Thanh Lan of language class Tieng Viet Oi said.

"Foreign students at any level struggle because Vietnamese often speak fast. Because of the tones, many students cannot recognize even words they know."

Nyilas knows these challenges. Having been in Vietnam for over two years, he has been studying "on and off" for about a year because of the difficulties. "It wasnt rewarding at first. Even if I know what I wanted to say, people wouldnt understand me because of my pronunciation. At the beginning I had no success."

Even foreigners with close relationships with locals have a hard time learning the language.

Briton Greg Ashby, 37, is married to a Vietnamese and lives in Da Nang, but since his wifes English is very good they dont speak Vietnamese often. "Listening is a challenge. When I talk to my wifes family they always speak so fast, I can only get a word here and there."

Other students have trouble finding time for the courses. Marshall Presnick, 49, took the first Vietnamese course nine months after coming to Hanoi from the U.S., but his busy English teaching schedule prevented him from being a diligent student.

He said: "I lived in Spain for three years and I can say anything I want in Spanish. But thats not the case with Vietnamese though Ive been here for seven years."

However, he, like many others, has persevered. He is taking regular classes to improve his Vietnamese to show he cares about his fiancee and her culture.

He plans to try out his new vocabulary when he meets his future parents-in-law next weekend.

"I think those who live more than a year in Vietnam should learn Vietnamese. Life is just easier when you do."Farmers are at the receiving end of asymmetric information in an imperfect market, and this needs to change.

Agriculture expert Lam Trong Nghia

After graduating from college in 2009, I have spent most of my time working in the fisheries bureau of the agriculture department in Dong Thap, a Mekong Delta province. Where I work, Tam Nong District, is one of the places chosen for piloting a project to reform the province's agriculture sector. My work means I met a lot of farmers, and can see firsthand the hardship they are put through to create the food we eat.

These days, prices of paddy in the Mekong Delta have fallen sharply and what has happened with the tra fish is no better, with prices dropping steadily over the past month.

I get upset when some people say that all this happens because farmers do not take care to learn about market demand and thus cultivate more produce than needed.

This argument is not correct. Farmers these days are much more aware. Bui Van Hoa is an example. In his 40s, Hoa has 20 years of experience in growing snakehead fish in Tam Nong.

Hoa says he always studies market trends through the media and the internet every time he starts a new season. "I raise the new breeds and calculate the time to harvest the fish when it is not in season so that I can get higher market prices," he says.

In 2016, Hoa earned more than VND1 billion ($43,000) in profit from a snakehead farm of two hectares (5 acres).

And Hoa is not the only one. There are more farmers like him in Dong Thap. They not only know how to gather information from different sources on the internet but also organize clubs where they meet and discuss market trends.

Those clubs are an idea that local farmers came up with on their own. Every week, those that cultivate the same produce get together at least once to share information, analyze the market and their plans. Indeed, at all the farms I have been to, I could find no farmer who was too lazy or too passive to arm themselves with updated information.

But one thing is undeniable: stories of farmers losing crops and suffering losses can be found almost everywhere across Vietnam. Figuring out prices and market demand for agricultural produce has always been a tricky task for farmers, despite their work contributing the most to the countrys success in international markets, as well as in meeting domestic food needs.

So Hoa is not a superman. The profit he earned in 2016 could not make up for the loss he suffered in 2017, when prices of snakehead fish dropped by VND10,000 (43 cents) to VND28,000 per kilo.

There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, all information about the farming sector is not shared widely, fully and accurately. Even if they spend the whole day searching and reading on the internet, people like Hoa can only see a part of the whole picture, not to mention receiving inaccurate information from unreliable sources.

Secondly, troubles like natural calamities and epidemics, which are also factors in the demand and supply balance, have become more and more unpredictable.

Lastly, complicity between traders and companies to distort the market price when they work with farmers have a lot to do with the distress that the latter suffer.

Farmers harvest fish in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Photo by VnExpess/Hoang Nam

If the market is perfectly competitive, the price will stay balanced based on the interaction between supply and demand. In this basic economic scenario, the right price is determined when the quantity supplied is equal to the quantity demanded.

The supply-demand rule has been, for a long time, pinned as the major reason for agricultural prices hurting farmers in Vietnam. Throughout the nation, at forums, conferences to daily talks with farmers, the supply-demand rule is mentioned more than once. And while this is not wrong, its not enough to explain why it is so difficult to predict prices of agricultural produce in the country.

A more important reason, in this case, is because Vietnam is yet to have a perfect market for agriculture. There are many failures that render the market mechanism inactive and case prices to be pulled away from the equilibrium point.

One such failure is asymmetric information, a situation in which one party to an economic transaction possesses greater material knowledge than the other.

We can verify this theory by applying it to the case when farmers chopped down their dragon fruit cactuses last year.

While local firms could not find raw material, farmers had to accept selling their dragon fruit to traders at very low prices for export to China. It is obvious that "demand" was still very high, but "supply" was redundant. Traders, as buyers, knew more about the market and the distributors, so they were able to set up a wide and sustainable consumption network. Farmers failed, despite trying to get updated information. They were disadvantaged right from the beginning.

In such instances, the government has to show what it can do. As an outsider able to look at the whole picture, and with tools like policies and regulations in its hands, the government can save the agricultural market for the farmers, in particular.

Independent market analyzing centers should be established in each locality to save farmers from one-sided information. These centers should collect and analyze data inside and outside the local market and make forecasts about short and mid term market trends. Market predictions should be coherent and easy to access.

A model of such a center was established last year in Dong Thap, bringing together a group of experts and insiders. This group provides farmers with updated information and analysis, and their contributions have received positive feedback.

For now, it's hard to say that the scenario of farmers enjoying a good harvest but not being able to sell their produce will not be repeated. The agriculture market is still far from perfect, and solutions to improve this situation lie in the hands of relevant state agencies.

If farmers get valid, credible information and other forms of support that prevent their being in a disadvantaged position from the get go, they will gain confidence about making cultivation choices and deciding their own fate.

And this will decide our fate as a nation as well.

*Lam Trong Nghia is an agricultural expert working in the Mekong Delta province of Dong Thap. The opinions expressed are his own.A Vietnamese fishing boat from central Vietnam is sunken by a Chinese vessel near the Paracel Islands on May 26, 2014. Photo by VnExpress/Nguyen Dong

Vietnam wants China to take action against the Chinese vessel that sank a Vietnamese fishing boat and pay compensation to the fishermen.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday handed over a diplomatic note to representatives from the Chinese embassy in Hanoi to protest the Chinese vessels action this month of using a water cannon to drive off the Vietnamese fishing boat off the Hoang Sa (Paracel) Archipelago, according to an official statement made by the ministry on Thursday.

On March 6 Chinese vessel numbered 44101 rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat while it was fishing in the Da Loi (Discovery) Reef off the Paracel Archipelago, according to the National Committee for Incident, Natural Disaster Response and Search and Rescue.

The boat from the central province of Quang Ngai sank and the five fishermen on board clung on to it until they were rescued by another Vietnamese fishing boat.

The fishermen said after returning to shore that the Chinese vessel chased after them, sprayed water cannons and forced their boat into a reef. They suffered estimated losses of VND3 billion ($129,200).

The ministrys consular department said Chinas action infringed on Vietnam's sovereignty over the Paracel Archipelago and endangered the lives and properties of Vietnamese fishermen.

It demanded that the embassy should inform Chinas Foreign Ministry and other relevant authorities so that they take strict action against the Chinese vessel and refrain from repeating such acts in future.

It also demanded proper compensation from China for the damage caused to the Vietnamese fishermen.

The Vietnam Fisheries Society recently called on the Government Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government agencies to ensure China pays compensation to the Vietnamese fishermen for sinking their boat.

China seized the Paracel Islands from South Vietnam by force in 1974, and has since been illegally occupying them.

In 2012 it built the so-called Sansha City with Woody Island as its seat, and has since built a runway capable of handling military aircraft and other supporting structures.

The so-called city also extends to a number of reefs in Vietnam's Spratly (Truong Sa) Islands that China seized by force in 1988 as well as the Scarborough Shoal, which is claimed by the Philippines.

In 2014 China brought an oil rig, Haiyang Shiyou 981, and installed it in waters off the Paracels, changing the status quo in the waters. Soon after that Chinese ships chased after, fired water cannons at and rammed many Vietnamese fishing vessels near the islands.Vietnam has denounced Taiwan's live-fire drill plan near Itu Aba Island in the Spratly Archipelago as a serious violation of its sovereignty.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said Thursday: "The fact that Taiwan, despite Vietnams protest, has repeatedly performed live-fire drills in the seas surrounding the Ba Binh (internationally known as Itu Aba) Island in the Truong Sa (Spratly) Islands of Vietnam is a serious violation of Vietnams sovereignty over the archipelago."

"It threatens peace, stability, safety, and maritime security as well as inducing tension and complicating the situation in the East Sea," Hang said at a press briefing, using the Vietnamese name for the South China Sea.

Taiwan's coast guards announced on March 12 to perform live-fire drills on the Itu Aba Island from March 20 to 21, using 120 mortars, 40 anti-air cannons and anti-armor AT4 weapon.

Hang said that Vietnam has full legal grounds and historical evidence to assert "indisputable sovereignty" over the Spratly and Paracel archipelagoes in accordance with international law.

"Once again, Vietnam vehemently protests and asks that Taiwan not perform similar actions."

Ba Binh, the largest naturally occurring island in the Truong Sa Archipelago, which Vietnam asserts sovereignty over, is currently occupied by Taiwan.

Vietnam had earlier voiced against Taiwans live-fire drills around the island in March and November last year.China needs to pay compensation for sinking a Vietnamese fishing boat earlier this month, the Vietnam Fisheries Society said Monday.

On March 6, Chinese vessel numbered 44101 rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat while the latter was fishing in the Da Loi (Discovery) Reef off the Hoang Sa (Paracel) Archipelago, according to the National Committee for Incident, Natural Disaster Response and Search and Rescue.

The boat, from the central province of Quang Ngai, sank with only its bow remaining above the water and the five fishermen on board clung on to it until they were rescued by another Vietnamese fishing boat.

The fishermen, coming back to shore on Sunday, said the Chinese vessel chased after them, sprayed water cannons and forced their ship into a reef. They estimated to suffer damage worth VND3 billion ($129,200) from the incident.

In a document issued to the Government Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other governmental institutions, the Vietnam Fisheries Society said that Chinas action "was inhumane and endangered the lives and properties of Vietnamese fishermen."

It asked authorities to vehemently object and demand that China stop impeding, attacking and sinking fishing vessels operating in waters under Vietnams sovereignty, to devise methods against Chinas "contrarious, irrational" actions, and to ask China to compensate for damage caused to Vietnamese fishermen.

Authorities should heighten patrolling at sea to support and safeguard Vietnamese fishermens lives and properties in time, and to put a stop to similar actions targeting Vietnamese fishermen, it added.

The society and local authorities also advised fishing vessels to go in groups and warn each other of any attack by Chinese vessels.

Nguyen Viet Thang, President of Vietnam Fisheries Society, said that China has been initiating similar collisions in Vietnam's traditional fishing grounds in recent years, especially around the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa Islands. "When Chinese boats find Vietnamese boats fishing near the islands, they would sink the boats without issuing warnings as they did before," Thang said.

"Every time a Vietnamese fishing boat is sunk or damaged, we would send messages to the Chinese embassy, and via the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ask Chinese authorities to compensate. But we have never received any response," he said.

China seized the Paracel Islands from South Vietnam by force in 1974, and has since been illegally occupying them.

In 2012 it built the so-called "Sansha City" with Woody Island as its seat, and has since built a runway capable of handling military aircraft and other supporting structures.

The so-called city also extends to a number of reefs in Vietnam's Spratly (Truong Sa) Islands that China seized by force in 1988 as well as the Scarborough Shoal, which is claimed by the Philippines.

On May 1, 2014 China brought an oil rig, Haiyang Shiyou 981, and installed it in the waters off the Paracels, changing the status quo in the waters. Days after that, Chinese ships had chased after, fired water cannons at and rammed many Vietnamese fishing vessels near the islands.Heavy traffic outside Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City on January 2019. Photo by VnExpress/Huu Khoa

Minister of Transport has instructed consultants to Long Thanh Airport to design a dedicated route to Tan Son Nhat Airport that would bypass the city.

At a meeting Thursday to review Long Thanh Airport's progress, Minister Nguyen Van The asked the consultants to consider its feasibility.

Le Do Muoi, deputy head of the ministry's Transport and Development Strategy Institute, said there is already a plan to build a light rail route between HCMC's Thu Thiem Ward and the new airport being built in neighboring Dong Nai Province.

The consulting agencies have called for immediate investment in construction of Cat Lai Bridge, Dong Nai's Highway 25 and Belt Road 3 to boost connectivity between Long Thanh Airport and the rest of the province and the Mekong Delta.

"If these projects are completed on schedule before 2025 then they would well connect the southeastern and southwest regions with Long Thanh Airport," Muoi said.

The consultants also agreed to submit a proposal from the Transport Engineering Design Inc. (TEDI), which is building a 40-kilometer (25-mile) road that would run along Dong Nai's Provincial Highway 25C and into a planned monorail in HCMC.

They expressed concern that a light rail would be the optimal solution, but its construction would be complex and time-consuming and so unlikely to be ready before Long Thanh Airport's planned opening in 2025.

Minister The therefore instructed them to study construction of a road, or even an exclusive route, for vehicles going between the two airports.

"70-80 percent of foreign visitors will be traveling from one airport to the other. We need to have a dedicated route for these passengers. Foreign visitors would not be able to use buses and urban railways as this would be difficult even for domestic passengers."

The minister emphasized the fact this dedicated route must be separated from normal roads, be off-limits to other vehicles to prevent congestion and avoid downtown Ho Chi Minh City.

Long Thanh Airport, 40 kilometers east of HCMC, will be built in three phases over three decades with an estimated cost of VND336.63 trillion ($16.03 billion).

The first is scheduled for completion in 2025, when it can handle 25 million passengers a year. The next two phases will run from 2030 to 2035 and from 2040 to 2050.

Experts have warned that the cost of the countrys largest airport could double every five years.

The airport is expected to ease the pressure on the countrys largest existing airport, HCMCs Tan Son Nhat.

Once completed, Long Thanh will have an annual capacity of 100 million passengers and five million tons of cargo.US announces first new North Korea sanctions since failed summit

The flag of North Korea flutters in front of its embassy in Rome, Italy, January 3, 2019. Photo by Reuters/Alessandro Bianchi

The U.S. imposed sanctions on Thursday on two Chinese shipping companies it says helped North Korea evade U.S. and international sanctions over its nuclear weapons program.

This marks the first such steps since U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Uns summit collapsed last month.

The U.S. Treasury Department also issued an updated advisory that listed 67 vessels that it said had engaged in illicit transfers of refined petroleum with North Korean tankers or were believed to have exported North Korean coal.

The department identified the newly sanctioned firms as Dalian Haibo International Freight Co Ltd and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co Ltd, both based in China.

The move prohibits U.S. dealings with the designated companies and freezes any assets they have in the United States.

Washington announced the measures three weeks after a second meeting between Trump and Kim broke down over conflicting demands by North Korea for relief from sanctions and from the U.S. side for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

The United States has led international efforts to press North Korea through sanctions to give up its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

"The United States and our like-minded partners remain committed to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea and believe that the full implementation of North Korea-related U.N. Security Council resolutions is crucial to a successful outcome," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.

"Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk."

The latest sanctions showed there was some "leakage" in North Korea sanctions enforcement by China, but Beijing was mostly abiding by U.N. resolutions, a senior U.S. official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official said that financial as well as shipping companies risked U.S. action if they were found to be in violation of sanctions.

The official insisted, however, that Thursdays announcement was meant to maintain sanctions enforcement on North Korea rather than intensify the pressure.

While declining to say whether Washington was trying to send a post-summit message to Pyongyang, the official said Trump "has made clear that the door is wide open to continuing the dialogue with North Korea."

Limbo

U.S.-North Korean engagement has appeared to be in limbo since the Feb. 27-28 summit in Hanoi, despite U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying on March 4 he was hopeful he could send a team to North Korea "in the next couple of weeks."

Washington has said it aims to re-engage with Kim, but North Korea has warned it is considering suspending talks and may rethink a freeze on missile and nuclear tests in place since 2017 unless Washington makes concessions.

On Monday, two senior U.S. senators called for the Trump administration to correct a slowing pace of American sanctions designations on North Korea, saying there had been a marked decline in such actions during the past year of U.S. diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang.

They pointed to a 2019 U.N. report that found that North Korea continued to defy U.N. sanctions with an increase in smuggling of petroleum products and coal and violation of bans on arms sales.

The Treasury statement said Dalian Haibo was targeted for dealings with Paeksol Trading Corp, a company previously designated by U.S. sanctions on North Korea.

It said Dalian Haibo shipped cargo from Dalian, China, to Paeksol in Nampo, North Korea, in early 2018 aboard North Korean-flagged vessels.

The statement said Liaoning Danxing had "routinely used deceptive practices" to enable the work of North Korean procurement officials based in the European Union.

The Treasury statement said evasion tactics employed by North Korea included disabling or manipulating automated identification systems, physically altering vessels, transferring cargoes between ships and falsifying cargo documentation.

It said ports visited by vessels involved in ship-to-ship transfers included those in Taiwan, China, Russia and South Korea.

The Treasury Department said that in 2018, North Korean ports received at least 263 tanker deliveries of refined petroleum via U.N.-prohibited ship-to-ship transfers.

It said that if the tankers were fully laden, North Korea would have imported 3.78 million barrels - more than 7-1/2 times the 500,000 barrels a year allowed under a U.N. resolution.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.Mina Bissell, a distinguished scientist at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has been selected to receive two prestigious awards for her pioneering contributions to breast cancer biology and medicine.

In recognition of her lifetime achievements, including her extraordinary insights into how a cell's local environment impacts gene expression and tumor formation, the American Philosophical Society (APS) has chosen Bissell as the recipient of the Jonathan E. Rhoads Gold Medal for Distinguished Service to Medicine. The honor is given only once every three years.

Past recipients include celebrated and highly decorated scientists such as Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Murray, National Medal of Science winner Thomas Starzl, and French Legion d'honneur recipient Elias Zerhouni. The medal will be presented Nov. 8, at the APS's 2019 Fall meeting in Philadelphia.

In recognition of her trailblazing career as a woman in STEM, Bissell was selected by the Weizmann Institute of Science as one of two recipients of the 2019 Weizmann Women & Science Award. She will accept the award and give a lecture at a ceremony in Israel later this year.

"I am extremely honored to be the recipient of these important awards," said Bissell, "and I look forward to thanking my colleagues in person in Philadelphia and Israel."

Bissell came from a highly educated family and was ranked as the top high school student in her native country of Iran, which earned her a fellowship to attend college abroad. Despite her father's urging that she go to Cambridge or Oxford universities in England - he told her that America was a young country and did not yet know how to educate women - she chose to study at Radcliffe College, a women's institution that was the sister school to formerly all-male Harvard College.

After completing a chemistry degree, she was one of only three women admitted to Harvard Medical School, alongside 200 men. Despite social pressure to put her higher learning on hold when she had her first child, Bissell continued her studies and continued to excel. She earned a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in 1969 and then joined a cancer cell biology lab at UC Berkeley. In 1972, she was hired as a staff biochemist at Berkeley Lab and given the opportunity to lead her own team.

Her subsequent research challenged existing dogma by showing that malignant cells behave much differently in a culture than they do in a body. Bissell's "Dynamic Reciprocity" model asserts that the support molecules within tissues communicate directly with local cells, thus altering gene expression. Though it faced considerable initial skepticism, her model has amassed impressive supporting evidence in the 40 years since it was first proposed, and has led to an ever-growing number of advances in the understanding and treatment of cancer.

Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 13 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab's facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.Eguana Technologies (TSX.V: EGT) (OTCQB: EGTYF) and PurePoint Energy are pleased to announce that the Evolve - Home Energy Storage System is immediately available to residences located in Connecticut.

The Evolve Energy Storage system allows new or existing residential solar system owners to store excess solar power generation for use in the evening, maximizing their solar investment while increasing their level of energy independence. In the event of grid failure, the Evolve Energy Storage system will keep the solar system operating while managing the home loads, ensuring that power is available in the event of either short or long duration power outages.

"PurePoint Energy's residential clients are looking for affordable modular energy storage solutions that offer reliability, as well as flexibility. In addition to having backup power, PurePoint and our clients alike will appreciate the service that is provided post installation with Eguana technical support," stated Tom Wemyss, VP Business Development at Pure Point Energy. "Priding ourselves on having earned a five-star rating in service, we are thrilled to know that Eguana's technical support team will give an extra piece of mind and comfort to homeowners when purchasing an energy storage unit."

"Traditional standby generators are well integrated into the residential market throughout New England. It is becoming an increasingly popular trend for homeowners to install advanced energy storage systems in conjunction with solar PV systems to replace these traditional solutions. The Evolve Energy Storage system, when coupled with a new or existing solar system, offers a perpetual, low-cost, clean backup power source. Further, the system will allow the homeowner to increase their energy independence by storing excess solar power for use in the evening," said Livio Filice, Director of Sales, North America, "PurePoint is a well-established, market leading provider of high-quality solar systems with over a decade of experience in Connecticut. We are thrilled to be working with a company that is focused on quality and customer satisfaction."

PurePoint is scheduled to become an Eguana certified installer in April with initial installations to commence shortly thereafter. Evolve energy storage systems will continue to be deployed throughout the balance of this year.

Evolve - Home Energy Storage Systems

Evolve is a fully-integrated residential energy storage system that includes the company's proprietary power electronics system, LG Chem low-voltage battery modules, and a comprehensive user interface. The system is rated at 5KW AC output with a modular battery design based on a 6.5 kWh battery, which is scalable from 13 to 39kWh in storage capacity. The NEMA 3R wall-mounted package is suitable for indoor and outdoor installations. The package is backed by a 10-year standard warranty.

The Evolve supports grid-connected solar self-consumption, time of use, and backup power. It is now available in the United States and in Caribbean markets, with certification standards matching UL1741, California's Rule 21, and Hawaii's Rule 14H.

About PurePoint

Located in Norwalk, CT, PurePoint Energy is a local leader in agricultural, commercial, and residential solar design and installation. We hang our hats on excellent customer service, and choose to only offer the highest quality and best performing products. Our energy solutions are turnkey and fully customizable. Our mission is to help our clients become more energy independent, lower their cost of energy consumption, and reduce their carbon footprint to improve the environment.

About Eguana Technologies Inc.

Based in Calgary, Alberta Canada, Eguana Technologies (EGT: TSX.V) (OTCQB: EGTYF) designs and manufactures high performance residential and commercial energy storage systems. Eguana has two decades of experience delivering grid edge power electronics for fuel cell, photovoltaic and battery applications, and delivers proven, durable, high quality solutions from its high capacity manufacturing facilities in Europe and North America.

With thousands of its proprietary energy storage inverters deployed in the European and North American markets, Eguana is one of the leading suppliers of power controls for solar self-consumption, grid services and demand charge applications at the grid edge.

To learn more, visit www.EguanaTech.com or follow us on Twitter @EguanaTech

Company Inquiries

Justin Holland

CEO, Eguana Technologies Inc.

+1.416.728.7635

Justin.Holland@EguanaTech.com

Forward Looking Information

The reader is advised that some of the information herein may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning assigned by National Instruments 51-102 and other relevant securities legislation. In particular, we include: statements pertaining to the value of our power controls to the energy storage market and statements concerning the use of proceeds and the Company's ability to obtain necessary approvals from the TSX Venture Exchange.

Forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and involves a number of risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause the Company's actual results, performance or achievements, or future events or developments, to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information, which speaks only as of the date hereof. Readers are also directed to the Risk Factors section of the Company's most recent audited Financial Statements which may be found on its website or at sedar.com. The Company does not undertake any obligation to release publicly any revisions to forward-looking information contained herein to reflect events or circumstances that occur after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as may be required under 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.

Contact:

Eguana Technologies

Livio Filice

Director of Residential Sales, North America

Livio.Filice@EguanaTech.com

+1.905.929.7522

PurePoint Energy

Michael Dowling

Business Development Manager

mdowling@purepointenergy.com

+1.203.642.4105Albioma Solaire France - the subsidiary that owns and operates the photovoltaic power plants acquired from Eneco in December 2018 - has contracted a long-term loan for 61 million.

This non-recourse project loan refinances the existing assets and includes an amount for funding the construction of a portfolio of small- and medium-power photovoltaic power plants. This funding secures the growth of the Group's solar power business in metropolitan France on very attractive terms.

The lenders are Natixis Energeco and Unifergie.

As part of our commitment to the energy transition, Albioma announced the acquisition of Eneco France in December 2018, to strengthen the Group's market position and expand our solar power business in metropolitan France, supplementing our existing installed capacity of 8 MW.

Next on the agenda: revenue figures for the first quarter of the 2019 financial year, on 24 April 2019 (before trading).

About Albioma

An independent renewable energy producer, Albioma is committed to the energy transition thanks to biomass and photovoltaics.



The Group, which is established in Overseas France, Mauritius and Brazil, has developed a unique partnership for 25 years with the sugar industry, to produce renewable energy from bagasse, a fibrous residue from sugar cane.



Albioma is also the leading generator of photovoltaic power overseas where it constructs and operates innovative projects with integrated storage capabilities.

Albioma shares are listed on NYSE EURONEXT PARIS (sub B) and eligible for the deferred settlement service (SRD) and PEA-PME plans (ISIN FR0000060402 - ticker: ABIO). www.albioma.com

Contacts

Investor

Julien Gauthier

+33 (0)1 47 76 67 00



Media

Charlotte Neuvy

+33 (0)1 47 76 66 65

presse@albioma.com

Today (3/21), Vectren Energy Delivery of Indiana - South (Vectren), a CenterPoint Energy company, announced it has received approval from the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) to build a 50-megawatt (MW) universal solar array in eastern Spencer County as part of Vectren's long-term electric generation transition plan. The solar farm will be located near Troy, Ind., on approximately 300 acres and will consist of about 150,000 solar panels. Today's approval marks the next step toward Vectren's carbon reduction plan of lowering carbon emissions by 60% over 2005 levels by 2024.

"We are pleased to receive authorization from the IURC as the final step in the process to adding more solar electric generation to our portfolio," said Lynnae Wilson, chief business officer, Indiana electric. "This significant renewable resource, a key piece of Vectren's Smart Energy Future vision, will be among the largest single-sited solar farms in the state and will serve Vectren customers for decades to come."

Vectren's 4 MW of solar generation already in service and this planned facility, which should be fully operational in the fall of 2020, are expected to generate enough power to meet the needs of more than 12,000 households per year. When including Vectren's 80 MW of wind power purchased through contracts with the Benton County and Fowler Ridge wind farms and its 3.2-MW landfill gas facility in Pike County, there will be enough renewable energy in Vectren's portfolio to power more than 35,000 homes.

In October, Vectren reached an agreement with the Indiana Offices of Utility Consumer Counselor (OUCC) and the Citizens Action Coalition to create a customer-friendly rate mechanism that maximizes the available tax incentives associated with solar projects and spreads all costs evenly over a 35-year period.

Construction to support the solar farm is expected to begin later this year. First Solar, a leading global provider of comprehensive photovoltaic (PV) solar systems, will build the solar farm. Vectren worked with Orion Renewable Power Resources LLC, a joint venture between Orion Renewable Energy Group and MAP Renewable Energy, to select, secure and develop the property.

This news release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based upon assumptions of management which are believed to be reasonable at the time made and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Actual events and results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Any statements in this news release regarding future events, such as CenterPoint Energy's expected decreases in carbon emissions and the timing of such decreases, the anticipated timing of completion of the project and any other statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. Each forward-looking statement contained in this news release speaks only as of the date of this release. Factors that could affect actual results include timing and impact of future regulatory and legislative decisions, weather variations, changes in business plans and other factors discussed in CenterPoint Energy's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018 and other reports CenterPoint Energy or its subsidiaries may file from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

About CenterPoint Energy

Headquartered in Houston, Texas, CenterPoint Energy, Inc. is an energy delivery company with regulated utility businesses in eight states and a competitive energy businesses footprint in nearly 40 states. Through its electric transmission & distribution, power generation and natural gas distribution businesses, the company serves more than 7 million metered customers primarily in Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas. CenterPoint Energy's competitive energy businesses include natural gas marketing and energy-related services; energy efficiency, sustainability and infrastructure modernization solutions; and construction and repair services for pipeline systems, primarily natural gas. The company also owns 54.0 percent of the common units representing limited partner interests in Enable Midstream Partners, LP, a publicly traded master limited partnership that owns, operates and develops strategically located natural gas and crude oil infrastructure assets. With approximately 14,000 employees and nearly $29 billion in assets, CenterPoint Energy and its predecessor companies have been in business for more than 150 years. For more information, visit CenterPointEnergy.com.

Media Contact: Natalie Hedde, (812) 491-5105 or nhedde@vectren.comSpain is joining a global race to adopt proton beam therapy, a form of cancer treatment hailed as a less-aggressive alternative to conventional X-ray radiation.

Two private hospitals are building facilities in Madrid; the first one is due to open in the last quarter of this year, and the second one in March 2020. Meanwhile, a scientific society has just issued guidelines to fill a void in the use of proton therapy in Spain, and a small group of independent doctors has created a second-opinion network to raise awareness about an option that they say patients are rarely told about because of hospitals own business interests.

A worldwide boom

Proton therapy received widespread media attention in 2014 when a little boy named Ashya King was taken out of a UK hospital by his parents against their doctors advice to seek treatment in Prague after first fleeing to Spain.

The Ashya King case In 2014 the parents of Ashya King took him out of Southampton General Hospital in the United Kingdom against his doctors advice to seek proton therapy treatment in Prague. The family first fled to southern Spain, where they were held for 72 hours. Ashya, who suffered from a brain tumor, eventually received his treatment and in March 2018 he was declared free of all signs of cancer. The following month, proton therapy was administered for the first time in the UK at a new private facility in Newport, South Wales. The National Health Service has since opened a unit at the Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester, and is building another one at University College London Hospital (UCLH) NHS Foundation Trust, scheduled to open in the summer of 2020.

Facilities have boomed worldwide in the last decade, propelled by shrinking technology and lower investment costs. By the latest count there are more than 20 proton treatment centers in Europe and 27 in the United States, with many more in the pipeline. And some industry sources say the current global figure of around 60 could double in the next five years.

Quironsalud, Spains largest hospital group, is building the countrys first proton therapy center in Pozuelo de Alarcon (Madrid) at a cost of around 40 million. And Clinica Universitaria de Navarra (CUN), the hospital of Spains prestigious University of Navarra, is opening another center in Madrid after investing a similar amount of money and shipping in Hitachi equipment from Japan. While the upfront costs are high, they are still significantly lower than the approximately 200 million that would have been required just a few years ago.

Who could benefit?

Supporters of proton therapy note that the technology has been used for decades, and that it is the clear choice in pediatric tumors and those near highly sensitive spots such as the brain, spinal cord or eyes. This is because the beams of proton particles zero in on the tumor with great precision, causing little radiation to the surrounding healthy tissues, and lowering the risk of developing new malignancies. In classic radiotherapy with photons, the beams continue to release energy as they cross the body.

According to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), up to 60% less radiation can be delivered to the healthy tissues with proton beams, which may also allow for a higher dose to the tumor itself while avoiding the more severe side effects of conventional radiotherapy.

A rendition of what Quironsalud's proton therapy center will look like.

This makes it a particularly good choice for children because you preserve their normal tissues better, and since children are probably going to be long-term survivors, you need to minimize any possible side effects of long-term treatments, says Dr Felipe Calvo, who will head the new proton therapy unit at CUN. This dosimetric advantage also benefits patients with tumors near sensitive organs that could be damaged by collateral radiation, and those requiring re-irradiation in a previously treated area.

The scientific community is still divided over the superiority of proton therapy for more common malignancies such as prostate or breast cancer, and some experts suggest more clinical trials are needed to recommend a treatment whose cost per patient runs into the tens of thousands of euros. Critics point to the US, where patients have had trouble getting their insurance to cover some forms of proton treatment due to this lack of consensus, although studies are underway that could soon expand the current range of indications.

On March 14, the Spanish Association of Radiotherapy and Oncology (SEOR) issued new recommendations to fill the void in a country with no prior guidelines for the use of proton therapy, a void that has not been filled by central or regional health authorities even though a good number of patients get sent for treatment outside our borders every year.

Traveling for treatment

Some Spanish patients who have had negative experiences with traditional therapy have decided to try proton treatment even if, for now, it means going abroad. J. L. was diagnosed with lung cancer in October 2017, and underwent several cycles of chemotherapy as well as 40 sessions of radiotherapy. This caused him terrible side effects, including pneumonitis and esophagitis that required hospitalization.

At that moment, we began searching for alternatives and discovered proton therapy. We contacted the Rinecker Proton Therapy Center in Munich and decided this could be the solution we were looking for. He and his wife are planning to travel to Germany to try a treatment without the undesirable side effects of conventional radiotherapy, which ravages your body.

How it works The technology involves a particle accelerator known as synchrotron or cyclotron that speeds up protons, creating high energy. A gantry system guides a moving beam to irradiate the tumor from different angles while the patient remains immobile on the treatment table. The first treatments were performed in the 1950s with enormous particle accelerators used for physics research. The recently deceased James S. Slater was instrumental in the creation of the worlds first hospital-based proton beam center in 1990 at Loma Linda University Health in California, which remained the only center to offer proton therapy in a hospital setting until the early 2000s.

There are no reliable figures on how many Spanish patients are going abroad for treatment, either privately or through the public health system. In Spain, powers over healthcare are devolved to the regions, which are in charge of decisions regarding treatment and cost coverage. A Health Ministry spokeswoman said that public healthcare patients who are approved for proton treatment are being sent to nearby countries such as France.

SEOR president Carlos Ferrer says there were several attempts to develop public centers in Spain in the past, but they never gelled because the technology was expensive at the time, and there wasnt as much consolidated evidence as there is now. And then the economic crisis hit and everything came to a standstill. We should be grateful that the private sector is pushing this forward; if not for these initiatives, Spain would be at the same level as Portugal or Greece.

Last December, the right-of-center Popular Party (PP) and Ciudadanos (Citizens) party rejected a budget amendment that would have earmarked 21 million to help create a public proton center in the Madrid region. One month later, Ciudadanos said it would push for a national proton treatment center. In the meantime, Quironsalud and CUN say they are open to treating patients from the public health system through agreements.

Patient vs hospital

Dr Martin Edlinger, who runs his own private practice in Alicante province, believes there are additional reasons why proton therapy is still not widely known about or recommended in Spain. It is purely for economic reasons. No oncologist, unless he or she is self-employed, is allowed to send patients somewhere else if the cancer treatment available at their own hospital makes a profit and is legal, he says. Diagnosis is often calibrated to the needs of the hospital.

Dr Martin Edlinger has started a second opinion network. Angel Garcia

Edlinger has teamed up with several other practitioners from Spain and Portugal to create a second-opinion network called Consilium and a website offering information, because there is a real need for independent answers when people are badly ill and confronted with an operation or life-threatening treatment.

I would never recommend proton therapy if not convinced 100% that it was the best choice for a patient at that moment, says Edlinger. But people should at least know their options.

Needs in Spain

The SEOR, using conservative criteria based on experience in European countries such as the Netherlands or Italy, has calculated that in the short term, between 750 and 1,000 people a year could benefit from proton therapy in Spain, but this figure could grow to around 17,000 as the evidence consolidates. Right now it means that Spain needs three treatment rooms, a number that could progressively grow.

Calvo, of CUN, notes that these units, known technically as Unique Scientific and Technical Infrastructures (ICTS), are so expensive and require so many highly trained personnel, that it is unlikely that Spain will experience a sudden explosion of centers the way that countries such as the United States have. I think there will be more of them, but not by the dozens or hundreds. There also needs to be an element of innovation and research involved in this kind of investment: it doesnt make sense to simply do what wealthier countries were already doing 20 years ago.Pedro Sanchez in Brussels. Pier Marco Tacca (Getty Images)

Spain has been taking a hard line on Brexit since November, when disagreements emerged over the wording of an article of the UK Withdrawal Agreement that could affect Gibraltar, the disputed British Overseas Territory in the south of the Iberian Peninsula.

On Thursday, after emerging from a European Council summit in Brussels that discussed the deadline for Britains departure from the European Union, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez raised the tone a notch, aligning himself with Brexit hardliner Emmanuel Macron of France.

We are at a critical moment in European construction. History will judge the events of the coming weeks

Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez

Visibly exhausted, Sanchez said that the EU has gone as far as it can and that the ball is now in the British parliaments court: if members of parliament reject the deal, there will be a disorderly exit and the responsibility will lie with them.

We are at a critical moment in European construction. History will judge the events of the coming weeks, said Sanchez, of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE). Spanish citizens in the UK and British citizens in Spain must know that the the Spanish government is ready for a disorderly exit.

Spain, like other EU members, would prefer an orderly departure, but Sanchez made it clear that all scenarios are being contemplated. The new key date is April 12, when European Parliament elections will be called and the UK will have to decide whether to participate in these polls or not.

British PM Theresa May speaks to the media as she arrives at the EU Council summit. Sean Gallup (Getty Images)

We have to safeguard the EUs legal safety, with or without the UKs participation in the elections, and we need to protect institutions like the European Parliament, said Sanchez. Spaniards living in Britain will have the right to vote in the European elections.

Spanish sources familiar with the EU Council meeting reported that there had been very tough talks on Thursday, during which British PM Theresa May heard criticism and a series of demands to explain what could happen in the House of Commons next week. May is reported to have given evasive answers and offered no guarantees.

After she left, the meeting ran on much longer than expected, as leaders discussed what options to offer the UK. In remarks following the meeting, EU Council President Donald Tusk explained that the UK is being given two deadlines for two different scenarios.

In the first scenario, that is, if the Withdrawal Agreement is passed by the House of Commons next week, the European Council agrees to an extension until May 22. In the second scenario, that is, if the Withdrawal Agreement is not approved by the House of Commons next week, the European Council agrees to an extension until April 12, while expecting the United Kingdom to indicate a way forward.

Spanish sources insisted that Sanchez does not want the UK to reach a cliff-edge situation, but noted that the margin for maneuver is shrinking. We have had a constructive attitude, we wanted to safeguard the unity of the EU, said the Spanish PM.

English version by Susana Urra.U.S. Embassy in Ukraine concerned with changes to Naftogaz's charter

The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine is concerned about the decision of the Ukrainian government to change the charter of national joint-stock company Naftogaz Ukrainy and potential consequences of the changes, the press service of the embassy has reported.

"We are closely reviewing the unexpected changes to Naftogaz Ukrainey's charter and are concerned about the potential consequences of these changes," the press service said on Twitter.

As reported, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine has amended the charter of Naftogaz, authorizing shareholders to elect and dismiss the chairman and members of the board without proposals of the supervisory board.

The Cabinet of Ministers also said in the document that the date of expiration of contracts with members and the head of the board is the day of their dismissal.

The new regulations also provide for the conversion of Naftogaz from a public to a private joint stock company.

Naftogaz Ukrainy unites the largest oil and gas producing enterprises in the country. The holding is a monopolist for transit and storage of natural gas in underground storage facilities, as well as for oil transportation through the country.The European light launch vehicle (LV) Vega with a Ukrainian engine has successfully placed in orbit Italy's Earth remote sensing satellite PRISMA.

According to the press release of the Pivdenne (Yuzhnoye) Design Bureau, the satellite aboard Vega LV lifted off the European spaceport of Kourou (French Guiana) at 0350 on March 22, 2019. This was the fourteenth launch under the Vega program and the first in 2019.

PRISMA spacecraft with 879 kg weight is a small satellite of the Italian Space Agency (ASI). PRISMA is equipped with an innovative electro-optical instrumentation. The instrument is able to work in numerous, narrow and contiguous bands arranged from the visible to the near infrared (VNIR, Visible and Near InfraRed) and up to the infrared shortwave (SWIR, Short Wave InfraRed). The mission will help in monitoring agricultural activities, water resources and studying main environmental processes. PRISMA began a five-year operational mission.

The Vega was developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) in cooperation with the Italian Space Agency (ASI). It is intended for launching into a solar-synchronous orbit with a height of 1,200 km satellites weighing up to 1,200 kg or into a polar orbit with a height of 700 km satellites weighing up to 1,500 kg.

The propulsion engine for the 4th stage of the PH RD-868P was developed by the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau and manufactured the Yuzhmash PO (both from Dnipro, Ukraine). According to the developer, the new liquid engine is based on the intercontinental ballistic missile carrier (ICBM) RS-20.

A successful test run of the Vega rocket was carried out in February 2012. Since May 2013, ESA has begun commercial operation of the new launch vehicle. Some 30 satellites have been launched into orbit for customers.

In July 2017, Ukrainian participants in the Vega program cooperation extended the contract signed in 2012 with a European contractor - Italian Avio SpA - for the supply of production engines for the Vega rocket until 2020.

The government of Ukraine and the ESA signed an agreement on cooperation in the peaceful uses of outer space in 2008.

The structure of the ESA includes 17 European countries.

Ukraine is currently preparing the creation of an information hub for the implementation of the cooperation agreement with the EU signed in May 2018 in the European space monitoring program Copernicus.Ukraine in January 2019 imported 188.299 million cubic meters of natural gas for a total of $56.791 million, according to the State Statistics Service.

Thus, the average price of gas imported by the country in January 2019 was $301.6 per 1,000 cubic meters against $283.8 in December 2018.

The main contractors in January were companies from Switzerland with 76.398 million cubic meters of gas for $22.213 million, Poland with 36.514 million cubic meters for $10.57 million, Germany with 26.623 million cubic meters for $7.506 million, Austria with 19.095 million cubic meters for $6.802 million, Luxembourg with 15.165 million cubic meters for $5.52 million, and Hungary with 14.504 million cubic meters for $4.181 million.

Ukraine did not import gas from the Russian Federation during this period.Russia's hybrid military forces mounted seven attacks on Ukrainian army positions in Donbas in the past 24 hours, with one Ukrainian soldier reported as killed in action and another two as wounded in action, the press centre of the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) has reported.

"On March 21, the enemy violated the cease-fire regime seven times, while using arms banned by the Minsk agreements four times, and launched 40 mines of 120 and 82-mm calibers. machine guns and small arms ... Also, the Russian occupation forces shelled our positions with weapons from an infantry fighting vehicle, grenade launchers, large-caliber machine guns and small arms ... One Ukrainian serviceman has been killed and another two wounded in hostilities," the JFO staff said on its Facebook page on Friday morning.

In the action zone of the operational-tactical grouping Vostok (East) and Sever (North), Russian occupation forces opened aimed fire from 82mm and 120mm mortars, weapons installed on infantry fighting vehicles, grenade launchers of various types, heavy machine guns, and small arms to attack Ukrainian defenders of the town of Shyrokyne, Avdiyivka, Khutir Vilny, Zolote-4, Pivdenne, Krymske, and Stanytsia Luhanska.

The staff said that three enemy troops were killed and another six were wounded.

"Since Friday midnight, Russian-led forces have attacked Ukrainian positions near the village of Zolote-1, using hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and small arms. As a result of the shelling, one our defender was injured," reads the report.Presidential candidate of Ukraine, showman Volodymyr Zelensky allows for bilateral negotiations with Moscow to end hostilities in eastern Ukraine.

"I would like to do everything to stop shooting in the east of Ukraine, so that our people won't die anymore. (...) We must carry out the offensive on the diplomatic front, and not wait for it to be done for us. We need to negotiate. We need to resume meetings in the Normandy format and involve the United States and the United Kingdom in multilateral negotiations. If we recognize it necessary, together with our allies and partners, then it may be necessary to conduct bilateral negotiations with Russia," Zelensky told the Novoye Vremia magazine, responding to questions of the edition in the framework of the project "The Moment of Truth."

According to him, Ukraine needs "strong diplomacy, economic growth, a strong army and an active information policy" to be able to win. At the same time, the main principle should be preserved: "no one has the right to decide something regarding Ukraine without Ukrai ne's participation."

"And there can be no concessions in matters of independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity. At the same time, we need to advance with Ukrainian initiatives to end the hostilities, de-occupy Donbas and return Crimea. In fact, there have been no Ukraine initiatives since the Minsk agreements. Political will is needed," the candidate voiced his vision.

Zelensky called a strong economy another pledge of peace: "We must attract investments from all over the world to Ukraine. If enterprises with foreign capital work in our country, this is the best guarantee against any war."

He also focused on making a powerful army.

"Integration into NATO is primarily a way of reforming the army and ensuring Ukraine's sovereignty. I believe that NATO membership should take place only through an all-Ukrainian referendum. But the army needs to switch to NATO standards, learn from NATO specialists. Salaries of soldiers and social protection should be at the level of NATO armies," said Zelensky.

In addition to solving the conflict in Donbas, he called two more of his priorities as president: the fight against corruption - "the main internal enemy of Ukraine" - and the roads. "I really want Ukraine to finally have normal roads with cement concrete pavement. We, with the Kvartal, are constantly touring the country in all regions. I know about the condition of Ukrainian roads not from the news," the presidential candidate emphasized.Ukrainian Pavlo Hryb, whom the court in the Russian Federation had sentenced to six years in prison, launched a hunger strike, the Hromadske ezine has reported.

As reported, the North Caucasian District Military Court brought in the verdict of guilty to Ukrainian Pavlo Hryb. By decision of the court, Hryb is sentenced to six years in a penal colony.

At the March 21 debates, Hryb pronounced his last statement in which, in particular, he said that he did not recognize the accusations of the FSB of the Russian Federation for assistance in terrorist activities.

As reported, ex-Ukrainian State Border Guard Service official Ihor Hryb said on August 28, 2017, that Russian special services had abducted his 19-year-old son Pavlo during a visit to Gomel, Belarus, where he went on August 24 to meet a girl whom he had met and talked to only on social-networking sites. It was agreed that Pavlo would return the same day. After he failed to return the next day, Ihor Hryb travelled to Gomel to look for him.

He said that in Belarus he had learned that Pavlo was on a Russian list of wanted persons in connection with a terrorist attack, and that a search had been initiated by the Russian Federal Security Service's Directorate for the Krasnodar region in Sochi.

On November 7, 2018, the North-Caucasian District Military Court extended the arrest of Hryb to April 24, 2019.

Due to deteriorating health, Hryb needs urgent medical care, including surgery.Nearly two dozen attacks on water supply systems in Donbas recorded since year's start  UNICEF

Since the beginning of 2019, some 19 attacks on water supply systems in Donbas have already been recorded. The UN Children's Fund UNICEF has called to stop the aggression.

"In 2018 alone, water supply systems were disrupted 89 times by the ongoing hostilities causing sufferings of millions of local people. Another 19 such cases have already been recorded in the first three months of 2019 ... UNICEF calls on governments and partners to stop attacks on water supply facilities and employees," the UNICEF Ukraine said on Friday.

The UN Children's Fund noted that the ongoing hostilities create obstacles to the necessary repair of water supply systems in Donbas.

"Over 30 water workers have been killed or injured since the beginning of the conflict," the fund said.

Ukraine has been included for the first time in the global report of the Children's Fund on drinking water issues.

"Every day, over 3.6 million people in conflict-affected Donetsk and Luhansk regions are threatened with losing their access to safe drinking water. Continuous direct and indirect shelling of essential infrastructure hinders people's access to water. Lack of clean water and proper sanitation gravely affect children and their future," the UNICEF said.

"With support from the Government of Germany, UNICEF and its partners are providing emergency assistance, and carrying out critical repairs and upgrades to keep water running in eastern Ukraine," the fund said.According to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), its detectives did not collect and hand over to any party any proof of U.S. political consultant Paul Manafort's illegal activities.

"NABU detectives did not collect and hand over any proof of U.S. political consultant Manafort's illegal activities, because this lies outside the competence of the national bureau," the NABU said in a statement posted on its website.

On March 15, 2019, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said on the television program Pravo na Vladu (Right to Power) that non-affiliated Verkhovna Rada member Borys Rozenblat submitted a report claiming that NABU chief Artem Sytnyk had handed over to the United States the so-called "black ledger" of the Party of Regions to support Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.

U.S. media leak of the so-called "black ledger" of the Party of Regions caused Manafort's removal from U.S. President Donald Trump's electoral campaign. According to The New York Times, Manafort's name is mentioned 22 times in "the secret ledger." Altogether, he was mentioned with regards to payments totaling $12.7 million in 2007-2012.

"It is hard to imagine a situation where a law enforcement agency re-established in the country after the revolution could have an impact on the election in the U.S.," the NABU said.Prominent Ukrainian businessman Ihor Kolomoisky has denied allegations that he is providing financial support to Ukrainian presidential candidates Volodymyr Zelensky and Batkivschyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko.

"There are contractual relations with Zelensky: between the television channel in which I am a stakeholder and his production studio. I believe the 1+1 television group is really interested in a contract with Zelensky's Kvartal, for which he is the front man. This is all about our relations. We have no common business," Kolomoisky said in an interview with BBC News Ukraine posted on Friday.

"A man with a lower IQ and erudition cannot influence a more intelligent and talented one. Therefore, I can say that he is independent enough, even absolutely independent," Kolomoisky said.

A lack of political experience is not a problem for Zelensky, Kolomoisky said. "A change of generations is always a painful process. It always seems: how can we allow younger ones to take the steering wheel, they have no experience and can't do anything, and it makes sense to leave experienced politicians. But this gives no result," he said.

Kolomoisky also denied providing financial support to either Zelensky or Tymoshenko. "You can rule out financial support outright. Even if I wanted to support [them] financially, I couldn't, because I am restricted with the assets having been frozen by the High Court of Justice in London," he said when asked whether he has given financial support to the two candidates.

Asked whether Tymoshenko could be a good president, Kolomoisky said, "I believe that, even though she doesn't belong to the young generation of politicians, this is a person who's gone through fire and water and seen rises and falls [...] She would definitely be better, but we should make way for the young," he said.

As regards incumbent President Petro Poroshenko, Kolomoisky said, "I don't want him to get another term. I believe the first term has been five years of frustration because of his rule."

Kolomoisky, who is currently staying abroad because of problems with the incumbent authorities, said he might come to Ukraine soon. "I am thinking of coming to Ukraine before the first round [of the election] or between the first and the second, so as to make our distinguished Petro Oleksiyovych [Poroshenko] happy," he said.Resolution of Russian-Ukrainian gas issues could be sped up  Ukrainian opposition politicians after meeting with Medvedev, Miller

The Russian authorities are demonstrating the mood to resolve gas supply issues with Ukraine swiftly and favoring the idea of setting up a joint gas transit consortium, Yuriy Boiko, a Ukrainian presidential candidate and the leader of the Opposition Platform-For Life, said after meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Friday.

The meeting, which focused on bilateral gas cooperation, also involved another Ukrainian politician, Viktor Medvedchuk, and the Gazprom chief Alexei Miller.

"Judging by the mood of the Russian Federation and of the head of government, Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, and the Gazprom chief, we are moving forward very fast and efficiently for the benefit of Ukrainian and Russian citizens," Boiko said when asked about temporal parameters relating to a return to supplying Ukraine with Russian natural gas and the two countries setting up a gas transit consortium.

Both sides are keen on it, he said. "At any rate, from our side this initiative was, is and will be," the presidential candidate said.

For his part, Medvedchuk noted that this depended on the parties' political will.

"What started today  the negotiating process  I think it could be sped up if all parties realize that there is no other way. We understand that and will try to inform any government that this is an extremely vital need for the country," Medvedchuk said.Exclusive interview with Blerta Cela, UNDP Deputy Country Director in Ukraine

How do you assess the current procurement of medicines for the state, especially in the area of oncology?

From 2016, when the Ministry of Health of Ukraine asked us to step in, UNDP started procuring medicines for oncology programmes. While before there were some challenges, we can now see the situation getting better with medicine procurement, and particularly with drugs to treat cancer.

The engagement of our organization has played a big role  it brought more transparency and openness to the procurement process. According to the Aid Transparency Index, UNDP is one of the most transparent and open organizations. Due to these characteristics, we managed to engage the international market and break a corruption cycle. Its important to understand that the international markets, where most of the medicines for the treatment of cancer were procured, were closed to Ukraine before this due to unscrupulous intermediaries. However, we managed to change the situation and to conduct the procurement of medicines on the international markets.

Moreover, it was done with a lot of savings. Thanks to our ability to work directly with international and local manufacturers, in just three years (2016-2018) we saved around $66 million, of which $33 million was saved on oncology medicines. In 2018 alone, the savings came to $25 million. These are not just some figures  this is money that had gone into the pockets of intermediaries and corrupt people, which can now be used to procure more medicines. For instance, were providing some oncology medicines five-times cheaper than theyre being sold on the European market.

How was such a price reduction achieved?

There are a couple of reasons. First of all, we entered the international market, and because we did it transparently, more and more companies are applying for tenders, which means that prices are falling.

Also, were able to reach out directly to international drugs manufacturers. All our procedures are always open, transparent and can be checked online. Any company that has a right to produce medicines and to sell them on the market can participate in the tenders.

Weve been conducting training for our suppliers and shown them how we go about procuring medicines, so more and more companies are expressing a willingness to take part in the tenders.

Furthermore, theres another crucial factor that allows to cut prices: we sign long-term agreements when procuring medicines.

How many long-term agreements for medicines have you signed?

Over two years, UNDP Ukraine has signed long-term agreements for about 230 medicines under 27 programmes. That includes other programmes, not only oncology. Here, were talking about getting the best prices only. We look into how competitive a price is, not only in Ukraine but also at the international level.

The average term of the contracts is up to three years. To be more precise, we sign a contract for one year, with the possibility of extending it up to three years  but it depends on the trend analysis of the market environment. The use of long-term agreements gives us a chance to procure and deliver medicines effectively and faster.

How is the price established in long-term agreements?

Quite a low price is indicated in the agreement at the moment of its signing. Were constantly doing market research, and we have the option to re-announce procurement if the market situation changes. UNDP has experience of working in 170 countries and territories all over the world, so were quite aware of how to conduct such monitoring effectively.

Prior to the start of UNDPs procurement for oncology programmes, it was run by Crown Agents, a British company. How do you assess the work of your forerunners?

I have to say that Crown Agents faced some obstacles, which they had to overcome. Then procurement was transferred to UNDP, and now were coping with this task, in my opinion. The sum of savings, amounting to $33 million, speaks for itself. Our success is down to our experience and our reputation of being a transparent organization. We are, as a part of UN structure, different from companies  were not doing business, our relations with the government, civil society organizations and other institutions are built on the basis of partnership. UNDP doesnt just assist in the procurement of medicines, but supports the reforms that are placed on the agenda. We work actively with patients organizations and representatives of civil society, we help them to develop and strengthen all the required skills by conducting training, during which we share knowledge and empower them with tools and techniques.

Lets go back to the procurement of medicines under the oncology programmes. Have all the programmes under the 2018 state budget finished, and when will procurement under the 2019 state budget start?

The programmes under the 2017 state budget were 92 percent completed, and for the 2018 budget we have delivered 50 percent, with almost everything going according to schedule.

Talking about procurement under the 2019 state budget, weve sent the Health Ministry our proposals, and were waiting to sign an agreement with them.

When will the remaining eight percent under the 2017 state program be delivered? Or will these funds will be transferred to other programmes?

Firstly, I want to clarify that the initial request by Health Ministry was fully completed, and now were talking about deliveries that we have gained due to savings, where the amount remaining for delivery is eight percent. According to our agreement with the Health Ministry, pharmaceuticals bought with these saved funds will be delivered by the end of June. The delay is due to a global shortage of some active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) for the production of these medicines.

So, you will wait until API appears?

Contracts with producers have been signed. So were waiting for delivery within the agreed terms, as indicated in the agreements.

When will all the medicines and medical products for the 2018 state budget be delivered?

As per the agreement with the Health Ministry, the procurement process is expected to be conducted in two stages. In terms of the first part of the agreement, the deliveries are all done. The additional agreements are to be implemented soon. I believe the medicines under these agreements will be delivered by the end of the year.

There is often an issue with tracking medicine stocks during procurement under the state budget. How do you track the stocks of medicines in health centres and at storehouses?

UNDP procures medicines rapidly and effectively. Since our efforts are directed at covering as many of the patients needs as possible, we also implement various additional initiatives. In particular, weve been monitoring the delivery, availability and use of medicines on the ground, and helped to develop the E Liky platform, with which patients can see whether medicines are in stock at health centres. Moreover, were supporting the developing of a digital stock management system for medicines and medical products that will allow us to see whats happening at storehouses. Weve already announced a tender for the respective software, and were waiting for a contract to be signed soon. UNDP has conducted a serious of consultations with potential participants, with the participation of international companies and experts. We want this software to be the best and the most modern, able to resolve issues with the stocking of medicines procured under the state budget.

Currently, a national procurement agency  SOE Medical Procurement of Ukraine  has already been established. How do you assess the process of its establishment?

We were involved in the process of establishing this institution. Medical Procurement of Ukraine has already started to conduct procurement using funds from the Global Fund. Its difficult to say how long it will take to fully establish this agency, but I want to confirm that our groundwork on medicine procurement and our solid experience are always available to them. We will support the Health Ministry and Medical Procurement of Ukraine until we see that the Ukrainian national procurement agency can work on its own. Then we will understand that our mission has been completed.

Today, a lot of processes are stalled because of political risks. Are there any risks that something will change within international procurement due to the upcoming elections?

I know that a lot of reforms are standing still because of various political events, but when were talking about medicine procurement, this process has to go on continuously, because were talking about peoples lives and health. I dont think that Ukrainians and the Ukrainian government will let international procurement collapse. I believe that no matter who comes to power, they will consider this an important area, and will do everything to ensure that the needs of Ukrainians for medicines are met.Interfax-Ukraine to host press conference 'The Last Spurt before End of Election Campaign. Whose Chances Prevail'

On Monday, March 25, at 12.30, the press center of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency will host a press conference entitled "The Last Spurt before End of Election Campaign. Whose Chances Prevail." Participants include Director of Ukraine's Institute for Global Strategies Vadym Karasiov, expert of the Gardarica Strategic Consulting Corporation Kostiantyn Matviyenko, and Director of the Ukrainian Barometer Sociological Service Viktor Nebozhenko (8/5a Reitarska Street). Press accreditation and registration at the event by press cards.KYIV. March 22 (Interfax-Ukraine)  The Intergal-Bud construction company (Kyiv) is preparing for the implementation a project to resettle families of three buildings with 240 apartments built in 1950-1960s (Khrushchov-era buildings) located at 1, 19, 19A, Makarivska in the Shevchenkivsky district with the purpose of dismantling them and build a new residential complex with a total area of 90,000 square meters, Intergal-Bud Commercial Director Hanna Layevska has said.

"Since the program of housing renovation in Ukraine does not work, we talked to the residents about how to ensure the residents move with own resources. We offer to exchange existing housing for apartments in our new residential complexes. We guarantee that the exchange will take place only at the moment when the housing is ready, or built in a new house in Makarivska Street, or in any other residential complex of the Intergal-Bud company, where apartments will be offered already renovated by the developer," Layevska said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Thursday.

According to Head of the project management team at Intergal-Bud Roman Lyoshenko, the exchange factor for old and new apartments will be 1.1-1.2. Moreover, when the area of apartments is very small (for example, in a dormitory located at 1, Makarivska Street), the developer will offer a larger factor. In particular, in new apartments, the owners of such apartments will receive 10-20% more space.

At the same time, according to Layevska, the company will provide a bank guarantee to secure meeting obligations to residents. First, the developer will enter into preliminary contracts, later  the main contracts (with dimensions).

"We have our own land parcel next to the site, where no buildings are located and on which we plan to build the first houses of a comfort class with a total area of 90,000 square meters, with underground parking area and a stylobate part of the buildings," Layevska told Interfax-Ukraine, adding that subject to the demolition of the houses, the company will be able to build another 30,000-35,000 square meters of housing.

In the first house, the company will design apartments with layouts that are not available in other residential complexes of the developer, in order to ensure the relocation of some residents who have small apartments.

"Unfortunately, we do not always have the format of apartments, which we can provide to the residents of these houses. For example, we do not have smart-format apartments, but we are ready to redesign the second section of the first house in order to meet the needs of all residents," Lyoshenko said.

According to him, the company received permission to carry out the preparatory work and is in the process of getting building permits.

The Intergal-Bud company will soon begin the process of resettlement of residents, with the exception of owners of unconventional apartments, who do not have funds for making payments for additional meters, and complete it in no more than four months, Lyoshenko said.

"After obtaining the consent of all residents, we plan to resettle all residents into new sections that will be built within our land parcel and in the future carry out the demolition of old buildings that are located near our site," he said.

The representative of the developer also added that the project will begin with the construction of supporting pillars and walls of 800 square meters, "to stabilize the slopes and ensure the future safe operation of the complex."

As part of the project, the company will also expand and repair the existing road along Makarivska Street and the road that connected this area behind the Podilsky descent.

"That is, the second transport highway will be provided, which will allow connecting this area with another part of the city. The utility networks will also be fully repaired and re-installed, which will not only provide communications to the new residential complex, but also reconnect existing buildings to new utility networks. In addition, the developer took upon himself the responsibility of building two communal kindergartens in the complex: one- to replace the existing one, and the second  an additional one for more than 100 children," Layevska said.

Intergal-Bud construction company LLC was founded in 2006. It is subsidiary of Lviv subsidiary established in 2003.Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the ultraconservative former President of Iran, has traditionally been dismissive of domestic media, so the three interviews he gave to reformist newspapers in March came as a surprise.

Explaining his aversion to Irans press, Ahmadinejad told the pro-reform daily Arman March 19 you make every discussion superficial, with no link to the people's demands, so this leaves me with no motivation to take part in an interview.

Ahmadinejad, who left office in 2013, has become an outspoken critic of the Islamic Republics ruling establishment, and his remarks, as well as those of reformist former President Mohammad Khatami, have been mostly censored by Irans tightly controlled state media.

Denied any other platform, Ahmadinejad took to social media to harshly attack Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former Judiciary Chief Sadeq Amoli Larijani and his brother Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani, as well as President Hassan Rouhani.

Criticizing Khamenei is a taboo for the media. They cannot publish any such criticism, even from someone as high-profile as Ahmadinejad. The tolerance for criticism of the Judiciary Chief is also very limited. But they can publish all the criticism of the Rouhani administration they like. Khamenei and his hardliner friends may even be pleased to read such criticism, as they have come up against Rouhani on several issues of foreign and domestic policy recently.

This could explain the publication of Ahmadinejad's harsh criticism of the Rouhani administration in his recent interviews with Etemad, Sharq, and Arman newspapers, in which he questioned the presidents accountability and use of his power.

Nevertheless, both Ahmadinejad and the state censors still seem to be exercising caution. Arman noted that during the interview, Ahmadinejad's office made a video recording, possibly to make sure that his comments would not be distorted by reporters.

Meanwhile, like others who have published Ahmadinejads criticisms, Arman noted that there was a gap of several weeks between the time of the interview and the date of its publication. The state censorship may have been weighing Ahmadinejad's comments for a while before allowing their publication.

In the interview, Ahmadinejad questioned the Iranian Parliament's efficiency during the lifetime of the Islamic Republic.

"How many essential economic bills have been ratified by the parliament during its past 10 sessions?" he asked, saying that parliament has unlimited authority and no accountability.

He also demanded more transparency in the voting process, and that the public be allowed to see MP voting records.

Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad insisted that every Iranian should receive a monthly cash subsidy of 9000,000 rials, twenty times more than the current subsidy paid to most Iranians. The amount people get now has been eroded because of devaluation. They receive just $3.5 in open market exchange rate, while Ahmadinejad is proposing $70. That is more than half of the minimum monthly wage in Iran.

He also stressed that resources should be equally divided among all Iranians rather than excluding parts of the population when it comes to benefits.

"Can the government spend national resources in any way it wishes? Who has given this permission to the government to distribute resources in a discriminatory way?" Ahmadinejad asked.

Ahmadinejad challenged Rouhani to a public debate over the way the country's resources are being used.

He claimed that he wrote a letter to Khamenei in 2009 asking him privately to pardon all those who had been arrested following the disputed presidential election in that year.

Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad insisted that he has his own ways of increasing the price of oil, and he is prepared to do that again with "learned management and courageous diplomacy."

It is not clear how he plans to increase oil prices. Iran has little control over market, which is swayed mainly by large producers, such as Saudi Arabia, the United States and Russia.

During his presidency, some of Ahmadinejad's comments such as the one about "wiping Israel off the map" perhaps led to occasional hikes in the price of oil, but at the same time escalated the chance of regional conflicts and isolated Iran.Violent clashes between residents of neighboring cities in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, southwest Iran, have left several wounded, state-run media reported March 20.

Images and video clips circulated on social media purport to show the scene of the confrontation on the border of the two ancient cities, Andimeshk and Dezful.

The governor of Khuzestan Province, Gholamreza Stariati, says the conflict stems from the relocation of a sign marking the boundary between the two cities.

Gunshots were heard at the scene, according to Irans official news agency, IRNA. "Nearby Jondishapour University was damaged during the clashes, and several people were injured, IRNA reported.

Based on the 2016 census, the population of Andimeshk is 135,116, while Dezful, ten kilometers (approximately six miles) to the south, has 264,709 inhabitants.

Stariati said the dispute began eleven months ago when a sign setting the boundary between the two cities collapsed in a storm. Last February, when Dezful municipality re-installed the sign, people of Andimeshk rushed to the scene to prevent the installation and violence ensued. Residents of Andimeshk claimed the sign was placed on their own territory.

The Friday Prayer Leader of Dezful, cleric Mohammad Ali Qazi, condemned this act, saying that there were pictures of "martyrs" who had died in Syria on the sign.

Qazi was referring to the images of Afghans hired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Qods Force to fight alongside forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Footage of clashes circulated on social media shows a half-burnt sign with the images of the Islamic Republic's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Other images show security forces firing tear gas canisters into the crowd.

Radio Farda could not independently confirm the authenticity of the images.

According to unconfirmed reports, the security councils of both cities have held a meeting to try to resolve the conflict, and Governor Stariati traveled to the area.

Furthermore, IRNA reported that Dezful's Prosecutor, Mansour Mohammadi Khabbaz, has insisted in a meeting with the governor that the sign be installed on the disputed spot. Residents of Andimeshk say that the spot is 500 meters (approximately 0.3 miles) into their city's territory.PARIS, March 21 (Reuters) -

France told Iran on Thursday that European efforts to keep a nuclear deal alive did not mean Tehran had a blank check to violate the human rights of its citizens, after lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh received a long prison sentence.

An internationally renowned human rights lawyer jailed in Iran, Sotoudeh was handed a new sentence on Monday that her husband said was 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.

"There has been global indignation over the case of Mrs Sotoudeh and this government shares this indignation fully," French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves le Drian told lawmakers.

Sotoudeh has represented opposition activists including women prosecuted for removing their mandatory head scarf. She was arrested in June and charged with spying, spreading propaganda and insulting Iran's clerical supreme leader.

"We have made considerable efforts with Iran to keep the nuclear accord (signed by Tehran and world powers) despite the American withdrawal," Le Drian said. "(But) our effort to keep the Vienna accord is not a blank check for Iran and certainly not with regard to human rights, and that's why France will do everything to secure Mrs Sotoudeh's freedom."

She was originally jailed in 2010 for spreading propaganda and conspiring to harm state security - charges she denied. She was then released after serving half her six-year term. The European Parliament awarded her the Sakharov human rights prize.

France rarely comments publicly on human rights issues in Iran. It has been working with Britain and Germany to save the 2015 agreement on Iran's nuclear program, which was thrown into disarray when U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the accord in May and reimposed economic sanctions on Iran.

Even so, tensions between Paris and Tehran have grown in recent months as President Emmanuel Macron and his government have become increasingly frustrated with Iran's ballistic missile tests, and a foiled attack on an Iranian exile group in France, which Paris says Iranian intelligence was behind.

Both countries only reappointed ambassadors to each other's capitals last month after more than six months without envoys.LONDON, March 4 (Reuters)

A closed-door speech last year by Iran's Supreme Leader voicing doubt about the Iranian government's diplomatic overtures to Europe was released on Monday in a sign of feuding over foreign policy that led to a brief resignation by the foreign minister.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's address in mid-2018 appeared to forecast European difficulties in honouring pledges to protect trade with Iran from new U.S. sanctions after Washington's repudiation of world powers' 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran.

The publication of Khamenei's speech eight months after the fact showed that while President Hassan Rouhani was trying to save the nuclear deal with European powers, who remained committed despite the U.S. exit, Khamenei was not optimistic.

The Europeans would naturally say they are protecting Iranian interests with their package but the Iranian government "should not make this a main issue", Khamenei, an anti-Western hardliner, was quoted as saying by his official website.

He said the nuclear deal did not resolve any of the economic problems of Iran. He predicted that a mechanism proposed by the EU to shield business with Iran against the U.S. sanctions would also be no panacea for Iran's economic hardship.

"(The Europeans) are bad. They are really bad. I have a lot to say about the Europeans; not because of their current policies, but their mischievous nature over the last few centuries," said Khamenei. "Do not tie the Iranian economy to something that is out of our control."

BRIEF RESIGNATION

His speech, made in a meeting with the cabinet, were published a week after Rouhani rejected the resignation of Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, a U.S.-educated veteran diplomat who championed the nuclear deal.

Khamenei's comments cast doubt on the efficiency of Zarif's past and present efforts to keep the agreement alive.

Zarif, who retracted his resignation after Rouhani refused to accept it, said on Monday he had acted in order to preserve the dignity and credibility of the Foreign Ministry, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

"It should be sensed in the world that the words of the Foreign Ministry are the words of the entire country and its leaders," Zarif said, according to Fars news agency.

"And this ministry is responsible for the foreign relations of the whole country. It's not that any body inside or outside the government has its own foreign policy, and we're only responsible for the foreign policy of the foreign ministry. In that case, there would be no need for a foreign ministry."

Iran and six big powers struck the nuclear deal in 2015 after over a decade of negotiations. Sanctions imposed by the United States, European Union and United Nations were lifted in return for Iran agreeing long-term curbs on a nuclear programme the West suspected was geared to developing an atom bomb.

ROWS OVER RELATIONS WITH WEST

Iranian politics has long been riven by factional struggles, especially on fraught relations with the West.

While Rouhani and his moderate camp still back the nuclear deal and seek rapprochement with the United States and Europe, hardliners, echoing Khameneis stance, reject any yielding to foreign pressure as inimical to Islamic revolutionary values.

Khamenei, who has the final say on all major Iranian domestic and foreign policy and only reluctantly backed the nuclear negotiations, warned Rouhani's government on Monday not to be deceived by European countries and their "smiles".

France, Germany and Britain opened a new channel for non-dollar trade with Iran in January, although diplomats say it is unlikely to enable the big transactions Tehran says are needed to keep a nuclear deal afloat.

On Monday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi praised the proposed EU mechanism, known as Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), as a "late but important step". Qasemi, however, warned that the Islamic Republic would accept no conditions from the EU.

"The European countries know we do not accept conditions and we do not seek permission for our foreign policy."

France has called on Iran to stop all activities linked to its ballistic missile programme or face sanctions.

Iran has threatened to pull out of the 2015 deal itself unless EU powers demonstrably protect its economic benefits. The Europeans have promised to help companies do business with Iran as long as it abides by the deal.

The new sanctions imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump have largely succeeded in persuading European companies to shelve business projects with Iran.

The Trump administration says that although Iran has met the deal's terms, the accord was too generous, failing to rein in ballistic missile testing or to curb Iranian involvement in regional conflicts such as Syria and Yemen.

(Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Babak Dehghanpisheh Editing by Mark Heinrich)

The conflicting reports about the length of jail term of Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh seems to have been resolved.

Her husband Reza Khandan told AFP on Tuesday that she will be serving 10 years of the 33 he had announced yesterday on his Facebook page and in an interview with Radio Farda.

Initially, there was confusion about a seven-year term an Iranian Judge had announced and 33 years her husband disclosed. Now, Khandan says that the ten years added to the 5 years she is currently serving is the longest of seven different verdicts totaling 33 years.

Sotoudeh is an award-winning rights activist who was arrested last June and told she had been found guilty in absentia of espionage charges and sentenced to five years.

In another development, the EU on Tuesday condemned the jail sentence imposed on Sotoudeh, calling for an "immediate review" of the case.

The bloc said the Iranian rights defender had not had a fair trial at Tehran's Revolutionary Court and insisted her right to appeal must be respected.

The EU said it "expects an immediate review of her sentence as well as the conviction of her husband Reza Khandan, who was sentenced to six years' imprisonment in January 2019".

The United Nations' top expert on human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, said the reported conviction was "a crystal-clear illustration of an increasingly severe state response".

"There is an increasing concern that the civil space for human rights lawyers and defenders is being reduced," he told journalists in Geneva.

Before her arrest, Sotoudeh, 55, had taken on the cases of several women arrested for appearing in public without headscarves in protest at the mandatory dress code in force in Iran.

She also spent three years in prison after representing dissidents arrested during mass protests in 2009 against the disputed re-election of the ultra-conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

With reporting by AFPThe peak electricity demand in Iran and its neighbor clients Afghanistan and Iraq happens in warm months, but during this period last year Islamic Republics exports plunged due to high demand at home.

Its electricity imports from Armenia and especially Turkmenistan have been declining dramatically since September. This is possibly due to U.S. banking sanctions, which restrict Irans ability to pay its bills.

During international sanctions prior to the nuclear deal (2011-2016), Iran was also unable to pay for Turkmen gas and electricity imports, running up $2bn in debts.

Power Generation

Iran increased nominal power generation capacity by 2.3% last year; less than half of projected growth, but its actual electricity generation increased by only 1% to 312 TWh, a fifth of projected plan.

The growth rate for actual power generation is far below nominal capacity, because the countrys hydroelectric generation decreased by about 60%, pushing actual production down. In other words, a significant amount of Irans hydroelectric generation capacity was idle during the last fiscal year.

Iran suffers from water shortage, which is considered by many international and domestic experts the most serious crisis the country will face in the future.

Thermal power plants shared 92% of total power generation, Bushehr nuclear power plant about 2.3% and the rest of came from renewables and hydroelectric plants.

One of the most serious problems in the countrys thermal power plants is their low efficiency, which stands at 36.4%. The index for modern and progressive power plants in the world stand at 60%. Iran has had a decade-old plan to improve the efficiency of thermal power plants. But annual improvements amounted to only small fraction (0.2%) since 2008 due to sanctions-related restrictions on Irans access to foreign investments and modern technology.

Money-Losing Power Sector

Irans power sector is a losing industry due to low electricity prices and poor efficiency of power plants.

According to estimates by Iranian Parliament Research Center, the cost of electricity generation in the country would reach 294 trillion rials ($2.6 billion, based on open market USD exchange rate) during the current fiscal year. That is about 3 trillion rials less than total revenues (including 42.12 trillion rials in exports).

Therefore, generation of electricity is a loss for the government that controls the whole network.

Thermal power plants receive subsidized fuel from government ($8.3 per 1000 cubic meters of gas, while the regional gas price is about $250) and sells electricity at a very low price (2 cents per a kilowatt hour, against up to 13 cents/kwh in U.S. or 12-35 cents/kWh in EU).

According to the International Energy Agency, Iran with $45.1 billion fossil-fuel subsidies, ranked first in the world in 2017. Almost one-fourth of this huge subsidy, $12.3 billion was allocated to the electricity sector. The is far behind other countries in the Middle East.

For a country like Iran, which according to the International Monetary Fund, has a GDP of $333.6 billion for 2019, this amount of subsidies is extremely high. Iran holds the fourth highest proven oil reserves in the world.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

Trend:

Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops 30 times, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said March 22, Trend reports.

The Armenian armed forces were using heavy machine guns.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

Trend:

The unequivocal position of the world community, reflecting the unchanged format of the negotiation process on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, serves as a serious message for Armenia, as stated in the commentary of Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry.

Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry made the remarks in light of a statement by the Prime Minister of Armenia saying that that "the proposal to return Nagorno-Karabakh to the negotiating table is not a proposal to change the format, but to restore the negotiation format, Trend reports.

The assertion of the Prime Minister of Armenia that the proposal to return Nagorno-Karabakh to the negotiating table is not a proposal to change the format, but to restore the negotiation format requires explanation, since there are no documents and decisions that could support its reasonableness."

"In light of this, the latest statement of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs should be reiterated, in which they unequivocally supported the invariance of the format of the negotiation process. Similar statements were made by high-ranking officials of the EU. This position of the world community serves as a serious message for Armenia, and also testifies to the support of the grounded position of Azerbaijan," the commentary says.

It is noted that nevertheless, in order to clarify the realities of the negotiation process, it is considered necessary to pay attention to the following issues:

"First, UN Security Council resolutions 822, 853, 884 and 884 unequivocally confirm the sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability of the international borders of the Republic of Azerbaijan, and also demand the immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of Armenian occupying forces from the territories of Azerbaijan. These resolutions form the legal basis of the resolution of the conflict."

"Second, let us take a look at the decision of the additional meeting of the CSCE Council of Ministers in Helsinki from March 24, 1992. As is known, in this document, the OSCE Chairman-in-Office is charged to convene a peace conference in Minsk on the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and in this regard, the document states: "Elected and other representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh will be invited to the Conference as interested parties by the Chairman of the Conference after consultation with the States participating at the Conference." The elected and other representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh mentioned here are referring to both the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of our country, and it is these communities that are mentioned in the document as interested parties. Let us remind that in the latest statement of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, there is a reference to both communities precisely as to the parties concerned. As to inviting interested parties to the Minsk conference, which is supposed to be convened after the withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, the invitation of both communities of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of our country as interested parties can be considered, of course, when an appropriate agreement is reached."

"Third, we cite an exact quote from the decision of the OSCE Budapest Summit of 1994: "Deploring the continuation of the conflict and the human tragedy involved, the participating States welcomed the confirmation by the parties to the conflict of the cease-fire agreed on 12 May 1994 through the mediation of the Russian Federation in co-operation with the CSCE Minsk Group. They confirmed their commitment to the relevant resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and welcomed the political support given by the Security Council to the CSCE's efforts towards a peaceful settlement of the conflict," the commentary says.

"It is emphasized that the cease-fire agreement reached on May 12, 1994, referred to in the Summit decision, was confirmed by Azerbaijan and Armenia as parties to the conflict, in accordance with the above-mentioned decision of the CSCE Council of Ministers in Helsinki from March 24, 1992, as well as the leaders of Azerbaijan and the Armenian community of the Nagorno Karabakh region of Azerbaijan as "interested parties" in the resolution of the conflict."

"As such, absolutely no reference to Nagorno-Karabakh as a separate party is made in this decision. Moreover, support is expressed for the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council. In this regard, we would also like to recall that, a time schedule was worked out under the cease-fire agreement for the withdrawal of Armenian troops from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, which serves as a special supplement to this agreement. In accordance with this schedule, the withdrawal of the occupying forces of Armenia from the territories of Azerbaijan was to be ensured."

"Let us recall that back in 1992, when some unfounded claims made by Armenia seriously impeded the peace process, the Chairman of the Minsk Group made a statement on the equality of the Azerbaijani and Armenian communities of Nagorno-Karabakh: "The chairman from Italy did not identify a consensus among the other states of the Minsk Group regarding the thesis of Armenia, according to which the mandate from March 24 allows it to give the Armenian side of Nagorno-Karabakh a formal priority over the Azerbaijani side or even call the first side elected representatives" (CSCE Information Letter No. 279, Prague, September 15, 1992). Evidently, clarity was brought on this issue back in 1992, at the initial stage of the emergence of the Minsk Group, when it was stated that both communities of Nagorno-Karabakh had equal rights."

"Finally, in its decision on the case of Chiragov and Others v. Armenia, the European Court of Human Rights, putting an end to Armenias continued denial of its responsibility, confirmed that the separatist regime established in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan exists because of military, political, financial and other support of Armenia, and also pointed out the fact of the exercise by Armenia of an effective control over the occupied territories of Azerbaijan."

"The time spent on searching for such unfounded allegations nullifies the efforts made for the advancement of the negotiation process, undermining the success of the peace process and ensuring the sustainable development of the region. Currently, we are experiencing the very moment when the Armenian leadership should clearly demonstrate what it prefers to spend time on," the commentary says.Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 22

Trend:

A meeting was held between the Azerbaijani and Pakistani defense ministers Colonel-General Zakir Hasanov and Pervez Khattak, Trend reports referring to the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan.

Pervez Khattak noted that friendly relations have historically formed between the peoples of the two countries. Stressing that relations in various spheres were sufficiently strengthened while developing, the Pakistani minister noted the great potential for military cooperation between the two countries.

Colonel-General Zakir Hasanov noted that the friendly relations between Azerbaijan and Pakistan have deep roots. Referring to the military-political situation in the region, the Minister of Defense provided detailed information about the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Noting that Azerbaijan and Pakistan support each other in international organizations, he stressed that this is an indicator of partnership relations that come from the will of the peoples of both countries.

During the meeting, the parties discussed the development of cooperation in the field of security, as well as military, military-technical, military-educational and other spheres, and also exchanged views on many other issues of mutual interest.Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 22

By Samir Ali  Trend:

Attempts by the President of the National Assembly of Armenia to achieve his goals in the Bundestag failed, chief editor of the Baku Khabar newspaper and political expert Aydin Guliyev told Trend.

On March 18, the 7th symposium on the topic "Security and Stability in the South Caucasus  German-Azerbaijan Cooperation Perspectives", dedicated to the 27th anniversary of the Khojaly genocide, was held in Germanys Bundestag. It was attended by members of the Bundestag, a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, journalists, public and political figures. During the same period, meetings were also held in the Bundestag with the President of the National Assembly of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan.

As Guliyev noted, after Armenias attempts to establish close ties with the European Union failed, a similar situation can be observed in relations with some leading European countries as a whole.

According to him, participation in discussions during the German-Azerbaijani symposium of German MPs, officials of the country's Foreign Ministry, public and political figures, and representatives of the press not only increases the authority of the event, but also negates the effectiveness of the meetings held with the President of the Armenian National Assembly.

Earlier, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was unable to achieve his goals in Brussels, whose attempts to get financial assistance did not bring results, Guliyev noted.

"The European Parliaments adoption of an official document unequivocally supporting the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan was another blow to Armenian diplomacy," the expert said.

Guliyev went on to say that the efforts of the President of the Armenian National Assembly in this direction, apparently, were also not crowned with success.

He also said that it is no coincidence that the events dedicated to Khojaly in the German parliament and discussions on security in the Caucasus were held at the same time as the meetings with the President of the Armenian National Assembly. This is one of the manifestations of Azerbaijans diplomatic superiority over Armenia, he added.

"This fact once again demonstrates that Armenias attempts to achieve recognition of the results of its aggressive policy have been completely exposed," the expert noted.Details added (first version published at 13:09)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 22

Trend:

Pakistan supports the fair position of Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, as said by the President of Pakistan Arif Alvi during a meeting with a delegation of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense in Pakistan, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry.

Expressing gratitude for the reception, Azerbaijani Minister of Defense Colonel-General Zakir Hasanov conveyed warm greetings and best wishes from President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev to Arif Alvi. Noting that Azerbaijan attaches great importance to relations, particularly to military cooperation with Pakistan, the Minister of Defense stressed the importance of expanding cooperation in the field of security, as well as military, military-technical, military-educational and other spheres.

President of Pakistan Arif Alvi, in turn, asked to convey his greetings and feelings of deep respect to the President of Azerbaijan. The President of Pakistan, noting the high level of interstate relations, as well as friendly relations between the two nations, stressed the importance of developing cooperation in defense, military-technical and other fields.

Arif Alvi, expressing satisfaction with Pakistans support for Azerbaijan in the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and noting that this will continue in the future, stressed that Pakistan does not recognize Armenia as a state due to its occupation of Azerbaijani lands. He noted the importance of resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

The parties also exchanged views on many other issues of mutual interest during the meeting.Baku, Azerbaijan, March. 23

Trend:

Azerbaijani Defense Minister, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov met with the Commander of the Land Forces of this country, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said March 22, Trend reports.

During the meeting, the sides expressed satisfaction with the development of relations between Azerbaijan and Pakistan, both in bilateral and multilateral formats, in particular, the expansion of military cooperation, as well as the level of strategic partnership.

The sides, also noting the importance of organizing mutual visits and holding meetings, once again stressed the need to expand relations in the field of security, including in the military, military-technical and military-educational spheres.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:

The project company ICGB successfully completed the public procurement procedure with subject "Selection of Owners Engineer for the Greece-Bulgaria natural gas interconnector project (IGB)", Trend learned from the company.

After launching an open procedure, the Commission assigned by ICGB selected the consortium "TIBEI" as a contractor.

The consortium has offered the most economical price for the main package of services - EUR 5 670 000.00. "TIBEI" is a consortium of foreign and Bulgarian companies including the following members: Tractebel Engineering S.A (Belgium), Tractebel Engineering SRL (Italy), INTBER GMBH (registered in Austria), Ipsilon Consult OOD (Bulgaria) and Engineering EAD (Bulgaria).

The selection of Owners Engineer is one of three key tenders for the completion of the project.

The owners engineer is key for management and control of the realization of the IGB project in the preparation phase and during the implementation of the construction process. The commitment involves assisting the Contracting Entity in the implementation of the project during the construction phase until the pipeline enters into operation and management of all the main contracts related to the project - including the contract for the supply of line pipes and the contract for the award of design, procurement and construction.

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 via which gas from the Shah Deniz field will be delivered to the European markets.

The initial capacity of IGB will be 3 billion cubic meters of gas.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_ZeynBaku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 22

Trend:

An auction for the placement of medium-term state bonds of Azerbaijans Ministry of Finance worth 15 million manats and a maturity period of 1092 days was held at the Baku Stock Exchange (BSE) on March 19, Trend reports referring to the BSE.

Eight investors made 10 appeals for bonds worth almost 22.84 million manats. Bonds worth 15 million manats were sold during the auction.

The applications were made within the price range of 97.5871 manats (with a yield of 9.95 percent) and 100.3102 manats (8.8799 percent).

Stop-out price on competitive bids was 100.129 manats (8.95 percent) and the weighted average price was 100.2246 manats (8.913 percent).

The deadline for the payment on bonds is March 15, 2022.

($1=1.7 AZN on Mar. 22)Tehran, Iran, March 22

Trend:

The Governor of Central Bank of Iran has announced the official launch of the Special Trade and Finance Institute (STFI) in the country, a mechanism similar to the EUs INSTEX trade channel.

"This institute can cooperate with its European counterpart to facilitate trade between Iran and Europe and resolve the limitations that are caused by the US sanctions," said CBI governor Abdolnasser Hemmati, Trend reports citing IRNA.

"The people of Iran expect to see the mechanism operates as soon as possible and establishing this STFI is an important step by Iran to hasten the process," he added.

Hemmati said that Iran's banking network and the Central Bank of Iran are using all the solutions to meet the needs of business companies and the financial mechanism is one of them.

The official expressed hope that Iran would have positive role in the mechanism in the current Iranian year (started March 21,2019).

"The Iranian mechanism has been established with $238,000 and the volume of financial resources for STFI would increase according to its needs," he added.

On Jan. 31, three European countries  France, Germany and the UK (shortened as E3)  officially announced the creation of the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), a special purpose vehicle, to allow them bypass US sanctions on trade with Iran.

INSTEX facilitates non-dollar trade with Iran, allowing European companies to trade with the Islamic Republic without being hit by the sanctions.Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif left Tehran for Istanbul, Turkey to attend the extraordinary meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Trend reports citing IRNA.

The meeting will review the recent terrorist attack against two mosques in New Zealand which claimed the lives of tens of Muslims and left 50 others injured.

The OIC extraordinary meeting is slated for Friday in Istanbul.

Earlier, following the brutal incident, he called his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, who is the rotating head of the OIC and asked for an extraordinary meeting of the OIC.

During his phone talk with Cavusoglu last week, Zarif strongly condemned the killing of Muslims and the terrorist attack in New Zealand while calling for taking an appropriate reaction by Muslim countries towards the horrific crime.

At least 49 people were killed, and 50 others seriously injured, after gunmen opened fire at two mosques in the New Zealand's city of Christchurch earlier in March when hundreds of Muslims had gathered to say their prayers.

A group of senior international figures, including Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif, the Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani together with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) have so far condemned the heinous terrorist attacks.At least 12 people were killed on Thursday after a gas tank exploded at an Egyptian fertilizer factory on the Red Sea port of Ain Sokhna, according to security sources, Trend reports citing Reuters.

No final numbers of the casualties in Ain Sokhna have been officially confirmed, but medical sources told AFP 10 bodies had been received at a nearby morgue following an incident.

Egypts official news agency MENA said a total of 15 have been killed and wounded.Syrias Homs province is ready to receive refugees, including those from the Rukban camp, and ensure decent living conditions for them, Homs Deputy Governor Amir al-Khalil told reporters, Trend reports citing Reuters.

"I would like to point out once again that the Homs provincial administration is ready to receive refugees, particularly from the Rukban camp, and provide them with all necessary assistance. We know that people are suffering from inhuman conditions in that camp so we need to do everything possible to stop it," al-Khalil said.

In particular, the provincial authorities are ready to provide refugees with accommodation and jobs. Most of those refugees come from the Homs province and want to return home. Homs was one of the first Syrian provinces seized by militants so hundreds of thousands of civilians had to flee their homes. As many as seven million people left Syria during the war and now the country is facing labor shortages.

Authorities say about 5,000 homes for refugees are ready. Schools are opening after renovations, teachers are working to compile intensive courses to help students make up for the lost time. "More than 1,300 schools have been reconstructed in the Homs province, they are ready to receive students, particularly children from the Rukban camp," the provincial deputy governor noted.Chinese authorities reported that the chemical plant blast in Yancheng climbed to 44 people, while 32 people are still in critical condition and 58 sustained grave wounds, Trend reports citing Sputnik.

"As a result of the incident at the Tianjiayi plant, 44 people died, 32 people are in critical condition and 58 people are in grave condition," the city mayor Cao Lubao told reporters on Friday.

Previously, the local fire department said in a post on its official Weibo account that at least 12 people who were injured in the explosion on Thursday have been rescued by firefighters, while 6 died.

Meanwhile, the China Earthquake Networks Center said on its official Weibo account that it detected a 2.2 magnitude earthquake at 2:48 p.m. local time at the site of the blast.A driver rammed his car into a crowd in China's central province of Hubei, local media reported on Friday, adding that seven people, including the attacker, were killed and seven others were injured in the incident, Trend reports citing Sputnik.

The incident took place early on Friday in the Taiping area of the city of Zaoyang, the CCTV broadcaster reported.

After the police responded to the reports of a person driving his car into the crowd and arrived at the scene, the officers shot down the driver.

There have been no reports about the perpetrator's motives.

Last month another car plowed into a group of pedestrians at one of the crossroads in China's biggest city, Shanghai, injuring a total of 10 people, one of whom later succumbed to his injuries. A 31-year old man behind the wheel of the car was believed to have lost control of the vehicle.An explosion at a pesticide plant in eastern China has killed 47 people and injured more than 600, state media said on Friday, the latest casualties in a series of industrial accidents that has angered the public, Trend reports citing Reuters.

The blast occurred on Thursday at the Chenjiagang Industrial Park in the city of Yancheng, in Jiangsu province, and the fire was finally brought under control at 3.00 a.m. on Friday (1900 GMT), state television said.

Survivors were taken to 16 hospitals with 640 people being treated for injuries. Thirty-two of them were critically injured, it said.

The fire at a plant owned by the Tianjiayi Chemical Company spread to neighboring factories. Children at a kindergarten in the vicinity were also injured in the blast, media reported.

The cause of the explosion was under investigation, but the company - which produces more than 30 organic chemical compounds, some of which are highly flammable - has been cited and fined for work safety violations in the past, the China Daily said.

President Xi Jinping, who is in Italy on a state visit, ordered all-out efforts to care for the injured and to earnestly maintain social stability, state television said.

Authorities must step up action to prevent such incidents from happening and find out the cause of the blast as quickly as possible, Xi added.

There have recently been a series of major accidents, and all places and relevant departments must fully learn the lessons from these, the report cited Xi as saying.

The Jiangsu environmental protection bureau said in a late Thursday statement the environmental monitoring station in the area had found no abnormal concentrations of toluene, xylene or benzene.

Concentrations of acetone and chloroform outside the perimeter of the explosion zone were also within normal limits, it added.

Jiangsu will launch inspections on chemical producers and warehouses, according to an emergency notice published by official media on Friday.

The notice, published on the news website of Jiangsu provinces Communist Party, said the government would shut down any chemical firms found not complying with regulations on dangerous chemicals.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

Trend:

Turkey has condemned US intention to recognize Golan Heights as part of Israel, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Chavausoglu said.

Cavusoglu noted that territorial integrity is a fundamental principle of international law.

"Attempts by the United States to legitimize Israels actions against international law will only lead to more violence in the region," the Turkish Foreign Minister said.

He also added that Turkey supports the territorial integrity of Syria.

Earlier, US President Donald Trump said it was time to back Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability! Trump wrote on Twitter.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on Thursday that the United States would step up financial and political pressure on Iran's theocratic regime as it seeks to "extend its reach" across the Middle East, Trend reports citing Fox News.

"You've seen us now designate [Iran-backed] militias inside of Iraq [as terror groups]," Pompeo told "Fox News at Night" host Shannon Bream. "You've seen us designate senior leaders inside the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]. You've seen us designate financial institutions, financial agents engaged in moving illicit money in support of the Houthis [in Yemen], in support of Hamas, in support of Hezbollah. This administration has taken serious efforts across ... a broad range of efforts [by] Iran to extend its reach."

Pompeo spoke to Fox News from Jerusalem, where he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the latter's planned visit to the White House next week. The visit coincided with Trump's support for recognizing Israel's control of the disputed Golan Heights. Last week, the State Department dropped the phrase "Israeli-occupied" from the Golan Heights section, instead calling it "Israeli-controlled."

Pompeo's visit is likely to further infuriate Palestinians, who have already severed ties with the US over Trump's decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem last year. However, the secretary of state expressed optimism that the Trump administration could broker a lasting peace agreement.

"This administration has created the conditions which ultimately may well get us to a place where we can achieve the very peace that everyone in the world wants," he said. "A better life for the Palestinian people, a better life and less conflict risk between the Palestinians and the Israelis."

Pompeo also discussed the ongoing crisis in Venezuela, where opposition leader Juan Guaido's chief of staff was arrested and detained by disputed President Nicolas Marrero's intelligence forces.

"We think we understand how this went down, we think we understand those who were involved," Pompeo said. "We will make sure that the world knows who those people were. ... We will do all that we can to hold the individuals accountable, those who conducted this activity and those who ordered it.."U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said he was ordering the withdrawal of recently announced North Korea-related sanctions imposed by the U.S. Treasury Department, Trend reports citing Reuters.

It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large-scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea, Trump said on Twitter. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!

It was not immediately clear what sanctions Trump was referring to. There were no new U.S. sanctions on North Korea announced on Friday but on Thursday the United States blacklisted two Chinese shipping companies that it said helped North Korea evade sanctions over its nuclear weapons program.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders did not specify which sanctions Trump spoke of but said: President Trump likes Chairman Kim (Jong Un) and he doesnt think these sanctions will be necessary.

The sanctions on the Chinese shippers were the first since the second U.S.-North Korea summit broke down last month. Hours after the sanctions announcement, North Korea on Friday pulled out of a liaison office with the South, a major setback for Seoul.

North Korea said it was quitting the joint liaison office set up in September in the border city of Kaesong after a historic summit between leader Kim Jong Un and South Koreas President Moon Jae-in early last year.KYODO NEWS - Mar 22, 2019 - 23:15 | Feature, All, Japan

A gay Taiwanese man in his 40s who lived with his partner in Japan for 25 years, partly illegally after overstaying his visa, has had his deportation order revoked and a special residency status granted by the Justice Ministry, his lawyers said Friday.

"It's the first time special permission to stay in the country has been given to a foreign gay partner of a Japanese citizen," said one of the lawyers, although the ministry denied its decision was based on the man's sexual orientation.

(The Taiwanese man granted special permission to remain in Japan (foreground) and his partner (background) at a press conference in Tokyo on March 22, 2019.)

"We didn't put special weight that he had a relationship with a Japanese male. We went through our usual determination process, looking holistically at their situation, including residency and their actual lives," an immigration bureau official from the ministry said.

The Taiwanese man said at a press conference he is "grateful for the (ministry's) generous discretion," while his teary-eyed Japanese partner said he will "look forward to starting now."

According to the Taiwanese man's defense team, he came to Japan on a one-year student visa in September 1992 to enroll in a Japanese language school and re-entered the country on a three-month visa in October 1993 to prepare for a language proficiency test. He started a relationship the next month with his Japanese partner, now in his 50s.

In June 2016, his illegal residency was discovered and deportation was ordered. The man filed a petition with the Tokyo District Court the following year to revoke the deportation.

With his new residency status, which took effect March 15, the man has now withdrawn his petition.

The Justice Ministry's decision came almost a month after 13 same-sex couples sued the government for not recognizing marriage equality, arguing it is unconstitutional and discriminatory.

Non-recognition means that couples involving foreign partners cannot gain residency similar to straight couples. Same-sex couples have said it causes them stress as they worry about possible deportation for the foreign partner if a visa cannot be obtained.

The concern is well-known to a German-Japanese couple who have been together since 2011 and who are one of the 13 plaintiffs against the government. To live with her Japanese partner, Kristina Baumann, 32, has had to continuously enroll in schools to obtain student visas at a cost of several hundred thousand to a million yen ($9,000) a year.

Her partner Ai Nakajima, a 40-year-old office worker from Yokohama, called the ministry's decision a "historical first step."

However, she cautioned that "future decisions on similar cases will differ by couple" and that the decision does not indicate government recognition of marriage equality.

"We'd like marriage equality itself to be recognized," she emphasized.

Gon Matsunaka, representative of an NGO supporting LGBT causes called Good Aging Yells, says that although he does not know how the ministry came to its decision, he believes it wanted to protect gay rights.

"This could have a positive impact on the court cases," he said.

He also said that the ministry's decision could encourage LGBT people who felt society does not change despite raising their voice.On Thursday, massive rescue operations continued late into the night after an 18-month-old child fell into a 60 feet deep borewell in Haryana's Balsamand village, officials said. A team of Army experts and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) officials are being assisted by civil and police authorities as the rescue efforts continued for 24 hours after the infant fell into the borewell on Wednesday evening. The authorities have also started digging a parallel well, about 20 feet away from the borewell, and also plans to dig a tunnel to bring out the child safely, they said.

However, the child's movements are being monitored by a Night Vision Camera which had been dropped inside the borewell. During the day, the rescuers tried to pull out the child with the help of a net, but had to shelve the plan after facing some difficulties, officials said. Hisar Deputy Superintendent of Police, Joginder Singh said "The rescue operations are still on. We are hoping to bring out the child safely. NDRF personnel and Army experts are being assisted by local authorities. The child's movements are being monitored and he is safe,". According to a local, the child, identified as Nadim, was playing with some friends when he suddenly fell into the borewell. His family members and villagers later informed the police.

Here it is worth mentioning that the child's father is a labourer. Earthmovers and other equipment have been pressed into service, even as oxygen tubes were dropped to help the child breathe. Biscuits and juices are being supplied to the child. A medical team has also been deployed at the incident site, they said. Deputy Commissioner Ashok Kumar Meena said legal action will be taken against the person who dug the borewell without taking permission from the department concerned.

also read India will turn down Pakistan invitation in Pakistan National Day reception

To be noted that the accident has once again brought to the fore the dangers posed by uncovered borewells, which have turned into death traps for children. In 2006, a massive operation was launched to rescue. 5-year-old Prince, who had fallen into a borewell in a village in Kurukshetra. He was pulled out safely nearly 48 hours later.

also read Indian Television Academy Awards 2019 : Check out complete winners listThe Congress party on Thursday announced a list of candidates of 3 Lok Sabha constituencies and 45 assembly constituencies in Andhra Pradesh. According to the list issued by party general secretary Mukul Wasnik, the party has given ticket from Visakhapatnam Lok Sabha constituency in Andhra Pradesh to Ramna Kumari Pedda, Vijayawada to N Narasimha Rao and Nandayal to Lakshmi Narasimha Yadav. With this, the Congress has named its candidates for all the 25 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state.

also read: China deployed its troops just 90 km away from India-Pakistan Border

The party has released this seventh list of Lok Sabha candidates. Earlier, Congress has announced a total of 146 candidates for Uttar Pradesh and some other states including Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. Polling in the state will be held on April 11. Both the Lok Sabha and legislative assembly polls will be held in the state simultaneously on this day. Counting of votes will take place on May 23.

The Congress leader said, "People have rejected the BJP leadership. They are presenting their report card at the time of election but they are not speaking anything to fulfill the promises made to the people during the last Lok Sabha election because they (BJP) have not done anything for the public. Punia alleged that BJP was only engaged in harassment of people. Public works such as demonetization, GST did not do anything to the people, but because of demonetization, people had to lose their jobs.

also read: BJPs 6 Lawmaker was not in the first candidate's list for LS pollIn a recent turn, according to a report of Indian intelligence agencies, China has deployed its troops in Sindh region of Pakistan to protect the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The report noted that China has deployed the troops of People Liberation Army (PLA) for the security of coal mines in Sindh's Thar region. Located in Tharparkar district of Pakistan, Thar region is only 90 kilometers away from Indo-Pak border. Several Chinese projects are going on in Sindh and most of these projects are facing stiff resistance from local people. It seems that China has decided to deploy its troops for securing the CPEC fearing such protests.

An intelligence officer said ''The Border Security Forces (BSF) deployed at the Indo-Pak border have also noticed the movements of Chinese troops close to the border. It seems that due to the opposition of Chinese projects by locals in Sindh and Balochistan regions China has deployed its troops,". The CPEC project is around three thousand kilometer long and Pakistan has already deployed 17,000 of its troops for the security of CPEC. It is learnt that out of these 17,000 soldiers, 4000 are from special forces of Pakistani Army.

also read India shows as one of the fastest growing large economies in the world: IMF

However, it seems that China does not have much faith in the Pakistani army and this is the reason why Beijing has decided to send PLA troops too. It may be recalled that Pakistan's army chief had visited China in July last year and met with Chinese Prime Minister emier Li Keungang and vice president Fen Changlong. During the meeting, China had thanked the Pakistani Army for the security of CPEC and Pakistani Army Chief had also assured China of providing full security to CPEC.

also read Adopt these dental hygiene habits on world oral health dayKarnataka Assembly Speaker Ramesh Kumar was surrounded by an insensitive statement last month. Again this time he has given a controversial statement. Responding to a statement of a Congress leader, he said that he does not like sleeping with men. He made this bizarre statement in response to Muniyappa's comment that "Like husband and wife, we don't have any issues over Lok Sabha tickets." This statement of the Speaker has become a matter of political dissatisfaction. On the other hand, people are tight-lipped about this statement on social media too.

also read: Pakistan: Student stubbed professor to death over anti-Islamic view

On Thursday when journalists asked for a response from Kumar through this question, then they gave this controversial statement. Kumar said, 'I do not sleep with men. I have my own wife. It may be that he is interested in it, but I am not interested in it." According to sources, there are reports of differences between Kumar and Muniyappa regarding the 2019 Lok Sabha election ticket. This is the reason why such statements are coming out from both the leaders.

From past some time, Ramesh Kumar is opposing Muniyappa's candidature along with Congress MLAs from Kolar Lok Sabha constituency who also started bringing pressure on party high command, not to give the ticket to Muniyappa. Earlier, in February this year, he had given an insensitive statement during the debate in the House. The controversial audio tape went viral on the internet.

also read: BJP Amit Shah will contest on the seat of LK Advani from GandhinagarWashington: On Thursday, india has been one of the fastest growing large economies in the world, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said, asserting that the country has carried out several key reforms in the last five years, but more needs to be done. Responding to a question on India's economic development in the last five years at a fortnightly news conference here, IMF communications director Gerry Rice Thursday said, "India has of course been one of the world's fastest growing large economies of late, with growth averaging about seven per cent over the past five years."

also read India will turn down Pakistan invitation in Pakistan National Day reception

He said "Important reforms have been implemented and we feel more reforms are needed to sustain this high growth, including to harness the demographic dividend opportunity, which India has,". Details about the Indian economy would be revealed in the upcoming World Economic Outlook (WEO) survey report to be released by the IMF ahead of the annual spring meeting with the World Bank next month, he said.

This report would be the first under Indian American economist Gita Gopinath, who is now IMF's chief economist. Rice said "The WEO will go into more details. But amongst the policy priorities, we would include accelerate the cleanup of banks and corporate balance sheets, continue fiscal consolidation, both at centre and state levels, and broadly maintain the reform momentum in terms of structural reforms in factor markets, labour, land reforms and further enhancing the business climate to achieve faster and more inclusive growth,".

also read BJPs 6 Lawmaker was not in the first candidate's list for LS pollNew Delhi: On Friday, India will not send any representative at the Pakistan National Day reception that will take place at the Pakistani High Commission. The reason behind not sending its representative is that the High Commission has invited Hurriyat representatives to the reception, irking New Delhi. Pakistani national day is marked on March 23 every year.The development comes in the backdrop of Pulwama terror attack on February 14 whose responsibility was claimed by Pakistan based United Nations listed Jaish-e-Mohammad. The attack, the worst on Indian security personnel in two decades, killed more than 40 Indian CRPF personnel.

also read BJPs first list of 182 candidates announced for LokSabha Election 2019...list inside

Here it is to be noted that Pakistan national day is the day when the Muslim League passed the Lahore resolution calling for the formation of Pakistan on March 23, 1940. Pakistan on March 23, 1956, also adopted its first constitution. This year Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad will be the chief guest at the Pakistan Day Parade in Islamabad. In the last few years, India has sent Minister of state in the ministry of external affairs Gen VK Singh, former minister of state in the ministry of external affairs MJ Akbar and minister of state in agriculture ministry Gajendra Singh Shekhawat as its representatives to the national day.

However, it is part of a diplomatic tradition that a host country is invited to importation national events by any embassy or high commission and the host country deputes a political representative according to the nature of relationship it has. India has been taking a strong stance when it comes to Pakistan's outreach to Hurriyat. In January this year, India summoned the Pakistani high commissioner Sohail Mahmood after Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi spoke to Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq.

also read Malaika Arora looks like a total diva In a little white dress and holographic heelsIn a University campus of Pakistan's Bahawalpur city an another shocking case of radicalisation gone skewed has surfaced from its Punjab province. As per source reports, the shocking incident happened on Wednesday when a third-year student, at Bahawalpur's Government Sadiq Egerton College allegedly fatally stabbed a professor over what he considered "anti-Islam" remarks. The deceased Khalid Hameed is an Associate professor and the head of the English department. He had arrived at the college campus with his son who was parking the vehicle while the professor walked to his office. Professor Hameed was seated inside his office at the college when he was allegedly accosted and attacked with a knife by the student, reports Dawn.

Here it is to be noted that over the arrangements of a 'welcome party' that was to be held on Thursday 21 March the alleged killer - Khateeb Hussain is reportedly a 5th-semester student enrolled in the English department who had sparred with the deceased early that morning for the freshers arriving at the college. The suspected killer objected to the organising of the event as he considered the mingling of male and female students at the function as "un-Islamic". He had held a heated exchange of words with the professor over the issue.

However, the source reports that Waleed Khan, the son of the deceased professor, saw the attacker hiding behind a pillar and then suddenly charging at the professor. As my father was about to step into his office, the guy attacked him with a knife, hitting him on his head and stomach, Dawn quotes, citing AFP as the source. The son reportedly added My father then fell down and I rushed to him; the student held his knife and started shouting 'I have killed him, I had told him that a gender mix reception is against Islam',.

also read China deployed its troops just 90 km away from India-Pakistan Border

To be noted that the attacker was eventually subdued by people on the campus and handed over to the police, along with the murder weapon. He now faces proceedings over the FIR under Pakistan Penal Code's Section 302 (intentional murder) and Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. He is remorseless, says the Dawn report, which also adds that the killer skipped the legal way of protest as he believes that "the country's laws are "freeing the blasphemers (gustaakhon)". Murders over alleged blasphemy acts (insult to Islam or the Prophet) - a legacy of the 1980s Zia-ul-Haq regime days - are not a new thing to Pakistan. Punjab governor Salman Taseer was killed by his own bodyguard - Mumtaz Qadri - an elite commando of the Punjab police - over the Guv defending the legal rights of a woman from the minority community convicted on blasphemy charges.

also read Blast at Pesticide plant in China, 600 injured and 44 killed" " Are the aggression and ruthlessness associated with the stereotypical paparazzo due to a gender imbalance in the industry? Caiaimage/Tom Merton/Getty Images

If you enjoy tuning in to the bottomless pit of human despair that is the TMZ afternoon television show, have seen the movie "Nightcrawler," or just happen to live in one of the select few places where the rich and famous do their thing, you might be forgiven for assuming that the business of chasing and photographing celebrities without their consent is a dudes-only affair. Every time we see a Tom Cruise, Selena Gomez or William H. Macy (sure, why not?) out in public, they seem to be flanked by a flock of camera-toting bros.

The truth is that the paparazzi field is definitely male heavy, but there are at least a handful of ladies who have also turned snapping shots of Hollywood stars into a professional obsession. And their jobs ain't easy.

Advertisement

Jennifer Buhl worked as a "pap" in Southern California for three years before chronicling her experiences in the book "Shooting Stars." She has some advice for aspiring femme photogs thinking about getting in on the action. In addition to understanding how to frame up a shot and use a camera, Buhl says you also need a little street savvy and the ability to anticipate your subject's next move so you can beat the competition there.

She also says female paparazzi can expect to get the second class treatment from both their colleagues and the people they're photographing. Buhl told Cosmopolitan that she's been pushed, spit on and driven off of roads by fellow photographers, most of whom never said a thing to her.

That's just a little different experience than one unnamed female pap had when she ran into Kylie Jenner in 2015. The reality TV star apparently called the woman a nasty name and told her that ladies shouldn't sling photos in the Hollywood gutter.

That said, with the aggressive and misogynistic atmosphere cultivated by the camera scrum following many celebrities, it's a tough industry for a woman to break into. After all, Buhl has said she only knows a handful of female paparazzi  and yes, if we were going 100 percent Italian, that should probably be paparazze  currently working in the U.S. industry.

" " Female paparazzi aren't common, but they do exist. Caiaimage/Tom Merton/Getty Images

Now That's Interesting The term "paparazzi" comes from an Italian photographer named Paparazzo in the classic film "La Dolce Vita." Director Federico Fellini said he wanted the character's name to sound like the noise a bug makes when it's flying around.March 21, 2019 - Infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria are a global public health threat causing serious illness and even death. Strains of the bacterium Enterococcus faecium (E. faecium) are generally harmless in healthy people, but can be pathogenic in immunocompromised or severely ill patients. E. faecium strains from hospital environments have acquired resistance to commonly used antibiotics, including those used to treat serious infections, making these infections especially challenging to treat.

In a study published today in Genome Research, researchers conducted a survey of 20 municipal wastewater plants in England, and isolated drug-resistant E. faecium from all sites in both untreated and treated wastewater plants except three, which use ultraviolet light disinfection. Importantly, drug-resistant E. faecium counts were significantly higher in untreated wastewater from plants that were direct recipients of hospital sewage. A genomic comparison of E. faecium isolates from wastewater and bloodstream isolates of infected patients revealed two major lineages, with ampicillin-resistant bacteria in clade A1 and A2 and vancomycin-resistant bacteria exclusive to clade A1. Further genetic analysis revealed the presence of shared antibiotic, metal, and biocide resistance genes in clade A1 isolates from bloodstream, hospital sewage, and municipal wastewater.

This study demonstrates close genetic relatedness of drug-resistant E. faecium isolates released into the environment with those that cause serious human disease. Further research is needed to determine the public health implications of exposure to healthcare- and waste-associated pathogens. Terminal ultraviolet light disinfection of wastewater is one solution that would reduce environmental contamination with drug-resistant bacteria.

###

Researchers from the University of Cambridge, Public Health England, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, University of Oslo, and Mahidol University contributed to this work. The study was funded by grants from the Health Innovation Challenge Fund, Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellowship, Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Postdoctoral Fellowship, and European Research Council.

Media Contacts:

The authors are available for more information by contacting Craig Brierley, University of Cambridge; +44 (0)1223 766205) and Sam Wynne, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Interested reporters may obtain copies of the manuscript via email from Dana Macciola, Administrative Assistant, Genome Research; +1-516-422-4012).

About the article:

The manuscript will be published online ahead of print on 21 Mar 2019. Its full citation is as follows: Gouliouris T, Raven K, Moradigaravand D, Ludden C, Coll F, Blane B, Naydenova P, Horner C, Brown N, Corander J, Limmathurotsakul D, Parkhill J, and Peacock S. 2019. Detection of vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium hospital-adapted lineages in municipal wastewater treatment plants indicates widespread distribution and release into the environment. Genome Research doi: 10.1101/gr.232629.119

About Genome Research:

Launched in 1995, Genome Research is an international, continuously published, peer-reviewed journal that focuses on research that provides novel insights into the genome biology of all organisms, including advances in genomic medicine. Among the topics considered by the journal are genome structure and function, comparative genomics, molecular evolution, genome-scale quantitative and population genetics, proteomics, epigenomics, and systems biology. The journal also features exciting gene discoveries and reports of cutting-edge computational biology and high-throughput methodologies.

About Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press:

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press is an internationally renowned publisher of books, journals, and electronic media, located on Long Island, New York. Since 1933, it has furthered the advance and spread of scientific knowledge in all areas of genetics and molecular biology, including cancer biology, plant science, bioinformatics, and neurobiology. The Press is a division of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, an innovator in life science research and the education of scientists, students, and the public. For more information, visit our website at http://cshlpress.org.University of Otago scientists have discovered a way to view the immune cell "landscape" of bowel cancer tumours, paving the way towards more individualised medicine and treatment for many other diseases in future.

In a paper recently published and featuring on the cover of the Journal of Immunology, the scientists have shown the incredible diversity of immune cells that are inside a colorectal tumour. Immune cells are known to protect against cancer growth and this work provides new information on the types of cells present and how they might be beneficial for the patient.

Lead researcher Associate Professor Roslyn Kemp explains they are using a new technology called high dimensional mass cytometry to identify cells in the tumours of people with bowel cancer.

"It can be thought of as taking a higher resolution 'photo' of the inside of the tumour. The photo may reveal new types of cells that may or may not be targetable by drugs, or reveal different composition of immune cell populations in individuals that could be used to predict the course of the disease."

Associate Professor Kemp says results of their study have shown there is huge diversity in the type of immune cells that infiltrate the tumour, which means that any one, or more likely a combination of many immune cells, could have an effect on patient outcomes.

The technique could be used to study a number of different diseases, she says.

"It demonstrates the use of a new technology to study the immune response in much more detail than other methods currently used, providing new types of information for patients," Professor Kemp explains.

"It is a step towards personalised medicine, sometimes referred to as precision medicine, since each patient's tumour could be looked at with this amount of detail."

The next step is to carry out a similar study with a slightly different technique to further investigate where all the cells are in the tumour and how that might affect cell function and relationships between types of cells and patient data like stage of disease and patient survival.

###

The research is supported by the Cancer Research Trust, Lotteries Health Research, the University's School of Biomedical Sciences with Associate Professor Kemp supported by the NZSO Roche Translational Cancer Research Fellowship.

Caption: This high-dimensional analysis reveals the T cell signature in people with bowel cancer. The new analysis groups cells together so all cells can be viewed at once. In the past cells would be considered individually to work out what they were doing.

For further information, contact

Associate Professor Roslyn Kemp

Department of Microbiology and Immunology

Mob +64 21 026 0599

Email Roslyn.kemp@otago.ac.nz

Liane Topham-Kindley

Senior Communications Adviser

Tel +64 3 479 9065

Mob +64 21 279 9065

Email liane.topham-kindley@otago.ac.nzWeather Alert

WIND ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 4 AM EST SUNDAY * WHAT...Southwest winds 15 to 25 mph with gusts up to 50 mph expected. * WHERE...Portions of northeast New Jersey, southern Connecticut and southeast New York. * WHEN...Until 4 AM EST Sunday. * IMPACTS...Gusty winds could blow around unsecured objects. Tree limbs could be blown down and a few power outages may result.On

Friday, March 22, at 6pm,

Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and current Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the New York University School of Law and host of the podcast

Stay Tuned With Preet

, will be the featured speaker at the Dr. Krishna Gujavarty Seminar on Leadership and Values seminar at Stony Brook University. Bharara was nominated for his U.S. Attorney position by President Barack Obama in May 2009, and earned a reputation as one of the nations most outspoken and aggressive prosecutors. Drawing on experiences during his storied legal career, Bharara will discuss issues in leadership, corporate responsibility, ethics and compliance.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.



After a two-month crowdsale period, the AMR token has had approximately 80% of its sale allocation sold, between its public crowdsale on the Singularity exchange and private sales to institutional clients. After a successful crowdsale administered by FORK, Ammbr is also releasing some important business updates, including the status of the large-scale infrastructure deployment of Ammbr's technologies in India, and the new prospect of developing a wireless mesh network in northern Canada in a joint venture with FORK.

Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2019) - GLOBAL BLOCKCHAIN MINING CORP. (CSE: FORK) (OTC Pink: GBCHF) ("FORK" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the AMR crowdsale concluded yesterday, and in this time approximately 320,000,000 AMR tokens were sold between the public crowdsale on the Singularity Exchange, as well as private sales to institutional clients. FORK's client Ammbr Foundation Pte Ltd. ("Ammbr") considers FORK's work on the sale of AMR to have been a definitive success, with approximately 80% of the sale allocation having been purchased (~320,000,000 out of 400,000,000 tokens), with proceeds collected in a range of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). FORK first announced its partnership with Singapore-based Ammbr in a press release dated October 23 2018. FORK extends its congratulations to Ammbr and its team for its many significant accomplishments in just under six months of working together.

Moving into the post-crowdsale stage of Ammbr's deployment, FORK issues the following updates on behalf of Ammbr:

Ammbr Infrastructure Deployment in India

It was announced in January 2019, that Ammbr's US-based affiliate company AmmbrTech, Inc. ("AmmbrTech") had secured a large-scale infrastructure deployment contract with India-based Internet service provider Smartware Technologies Pvt Ltd. ("Smartware"), with rollouts planned across 53 cities and more than 15,000 villages in India. As of this writing, AmmbrTech is beginning production on the first volume production order of Ammbr network hardware for India, which will underpin full commercial deployments beginning in May 2019.

Story continues

Wireless Mesh Service Joint Venture in Northern Canada

FORK and AmmbrTech are presently exploring the prospect of launching a wireless mesh network under a joint venture in northern Canada, to service the resources industry and to provide Internet connectivity for disadvantaged communities. At this time, the Company and AmmbrTech are working on a letter of intent to solidify this arrangement, with a definitive outcome likely to materialize in mid-Q3 2019.

Project Oversight

The blockchain space has been adversely impacted by numerous failed or fatuous projects over the past months. In order to avoid doubt, and better align the interests of the Ammbr project with those of its token holders, FORK and Ammbr have placed the proceeds of the crowdsale under the management of a separate fiduciary organization. Proceeds will be released according to clear performance metrics such as the deployment of Ammbr network infrastructure in various locations. This includes subsidy schemes for disadvantaged communities, thereby accelerating the project's goals by ensuring greater affordability of infrastructure. Details of such subsidy schemes and other incentives will be published at a later date.

AMR Listing on Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Upon conclusion of the AMR crowdsale, and the positive metrics shown, Ammbr is working to arrange to have AMR listed on large-scale cryptocurrency exchanges. Negotiations are presently in motion, with firm listing agreements set to be established before the end ofMay, 2019.

Derick Smith, Managing Director of Ammbr, said, "We are most pleased with the outcomes of working with FORK so far. They have brought about great results in conducting sales of AMR, and cultivated new business opportunities, including a unique arrangement in which we can build wireless mesh networks on Ammbr for northern Canada. With 80% of the sale allocation of AMR sold, we are confident that we have the support of a multitude of users in the early stages of Ammbr, and we look forward to seeing how that will turn out in the course of 2019 with multiple international deployments already set to take place, and even more in the works."

FORK President and CEO Shidan Gouran commented, "We are thrilled to announce the success of the AMR crowdsale, and we congratulate Mr. Smith and his team for developing a scalable and dynamic wireless mesh networking solution using blockchain technology. As big believers in Ammbr's technologies, it is clear to us from how these technologies have been received, that there is a very strong base of AMR supporters right from the beginning, and we are working on many more related developments in the background. We thank all AMR token purchasers, and all prospective partners for their interest, and we believe there are many exciting opportunities on the horizon for Ammbr and AmmbrTech."

On behalf of the Company:

Shidan Gouran, President and CEO

info@globalblockchain.io

For more information please contact:

Global Blockchain Mining Corp. Investor Relations

ir@globalblockchain.io

1-888-983-4771

About Global Blockchain Mining Corp.

With blockchain technology rapidly re-shaping the models of many companies, industries, and their business processes, Global Blockchain Mining Corp. ("FORK") places a focus on the common needs of early-stage blockchain adopters. Originally founded with a focus on crypto-mining, FORK has recently diversified its offerings by placing an emphasis on professional services such as developing and administering launches of tokens and digital assets. Adapting to changes in blockchain technology, FORK is also now utilizing its computing power to provide consensus services, such as the operation of masternodes, servicenodes, and witnesses which are alternative methods to cryptocurrency mining for generating and acquiring digital assets. Investors, through their investment in the Company, are provided with exposure to these tokens, cryptocurrencies and digital assets without the lengthy, and complicated process that interested investors must undergo in order to gain exposure to these cryptocurrencies and digital assets.

The Company is listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange ("CSE") and its common shares trade under the ticker symbol "FORK". Additional information relating to the Company is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com, the CSE at www.theCSE.com as well as on the Company's website at: www.forkcse.com

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Forward-Looking Information: This news release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". The use of any of the words "anticipate", "continue", "estimate", "expect","may", "will", "would", "project", "should", "believe" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. These statements speak only as of the date of this News Release. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks including various risk factors discussed in the Company's disclosure documents which can be found under the Company's profile on www.sedar.com

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.

Corporate Logo

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43603The U.K. will be offered a Brexit delay until May 22 if lawmakers support Prime Minister Theresa May's twice-rejected Withdrawal Agreement.

May had asked EU leaders to agree to delay Britain's departure until June 30.

Belgium's Prime Minister Charles Michel told reporters on Friday that Brexit was in the hands of Britain's Parliament.

European Union leaders have warned Britain that it has one final opportunity to leave the bloc in an orderly fashion, after agreeing to delay the departure date beyond March 29.

The U.K. will be offered a delay until May 22, if lawmakers support Prime Minister Theresa May's twice-rejected Withdrawal Agreement next week.



But, if Parliament votes against May's embattled template to leave the bloc, the EU will support a shorter delay until April 12. This is designed to allow the U.K. time to get the deal through or indicate another way forward.

"This is perhaps the last chance for Britain to say what it wants for the future," Belgium's Prime Minister Charles Michel told reporters on Friday.

"More than ever, this is in the hands of the British parliament," Michel said, as he arrived for the second day of an EU summit overshadowed by talks over Britain's departure.

'This is it'

May, who had asked to be able to delay Britain's departure until June 30, said British lawmakers now faced a "clear choice."

They could either support her Brexit deal, deliver on the referendum result and exit the EU in an "orderly manner" or face the prospect of having to stand candidates in the European Parliamentary elections three years after a small but clear majority voted for Brexit.

On Thursday, EU leaders spent seven hours discussing a host of options regarding Brexit, saying that while they regret the country's decision to leave, they are eager to move on with the process.

Eventually, the bloc decided a May 22 departure date would apply if Parliament rallies behind the prime minister next week. Otherwise, Britain must decide whether to offer a new plan or leave the EU without a deal on April 12.

Story continues

"In case of no vote (in Parliament) it will guide everybody to a no-deal for sure," French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters on Thursday.

"This is it. We are ready," Macron said.

'How can you prepare for something terrible?'

The French premier reportedly told EU leaders in the room on Thursday that before coming to Brussels he had thought May only had a 10 percent chance of winning a third meaningful vote.

But, after listening to the prime minister speak on Thursday, he had cut his estimate to just 5 percent, Reuters reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the discussions.

Many market participants are fearful a no-deal Brexit, sometimes referred to as the "cliff-edge" scenario, could hammer both economic growth and jobs in the world's fifth-largest economy.

"If next week, there is no vote or the vote is negative, then we have already agreed that the cliff-edge then becomes, in a sense, April 12," Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins told CNBC's Willem Marx in Brussels on Friday.

When asked whether he had the impression that EU leaders were now fully prepared for a no-deal scenario, Karins replied: "How can you prepare for something terrible?"

"We don't want this but we realised a while ago that we had better be prepared and this has probably happened in all member states."





More From CNBC

U.S. cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin has won $75.8 million in a civil case against the man who defrauded him of his cryptocurrencies last year, Reuters writes.The post U.S. crypto investor wins $75 million civil case appeared first on The Block.

The founder of crypto company AriseBank has pleaded guilty for scamming his investors, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Office wrote. Jared Rice Sr. pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud, having defrauded $4.2 million. Rice told his investors their accounts would be insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and they would receive Visa credit cards. However, AriseBank was not have FDIC insurance or a contract with Visa. Moreover, it didnt even have authorization to operate in Texas. Rice admitted to having spent the money.

According to the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Office, His plea makes this case one of the first in which an individual has pleaded guilty to securities fraud involving a cryptocurrency in U.S. federal court.

Rice was arrested by the FBA in November. He was originally charged on three counts of securities fraud and three counts of wire fraud. If found guilty, he still faces up to 20 years in federal prison. He is also expected to repay his investors.

Last year, Rice was also subject to a lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly running a fraudulent ICO.Investing.com - The crypto market turned bearish as the week came to an end in Asia, with cryptocurrency prices generally dropping and Bitcoin retreating below the $4,000 level.

On Friday morning, Bitcoin slid 1.20% to $3,989.9 by 11:06 PM ET (03:06 AM GMT). The digital coin lost steam after reaching a one-week high the day before. It continues its struggle to break past the $4,000 level.

Other coins also traded in the red. Ethereum lost 2.79% to $135.35, XRP went down 2.89% to $0.30974 and Litecoin dropped 2.80% to $58.634.

Crypto mining giant Bitmain received some attention in the crypto space today. The company reportedly planned to set up 200,000 units of mining equipment in China, where hydroelectric power is cheap. The equipment could cost Bitmain between $80 and $100 million.

The expansion in China is contrary to its downsizing efforts around the globe. Bitmain shut down its development centre in Israel last December then downsized its operations in the Netherlands a month later. The mining giant also failed to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Elsewhere, Canada is looking to introduce a regulatory framework for crypto-asset trading platforms.

The Canadian Securities Administrators and Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada released a consultation paper on a Proposed Framework for Crypto-Asset Trading Platforms. It aims to provide clarity for crypto asset trading platforms, greater market integrity and protection for investors.

Currently, no platforms are recognized as exchanges in Canada. Regulators there are soliciting comments until mid-May.

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EOS update: Dan Larimer sends EOS/USD above DMA200

Bitcoin Cash lead developer labels Bitcoin Unlimited a sad joke

Crypto Rises; Bermudas Premier Stresses Strong RegulationThomas McThenia, shareholder, left, and Richard Markow, law clerk, right, with GrayRobinson in Gainesville, Florida.



For the casual observer, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals in the 20th century occurred in a staid and established world carefully controlled and choreographed by Wall Street investment bankers and lawyers. Like poorly behaved school children, new technologies and intellectual property (IP) are increasingly disrupting the M&A establishment. Digital and data technologies revolutionized transactions in the 1970-80s; intellectual property came to the forefront as a source of significant value and collateral in the 1990s and, Internet technology created vast wealth in the early 2000s.



Cybersecurity has become the latest disruptive newcomer to the M&A party. As expanding technology allows companies and platforms to capture, store and distribute critical enterprise, supplier and customer information, attacks are spreading. Traditional M&A due diligence processes struggle to keep pace with increasing cybersecurity problems.





Cybersecurity: The New Kid on the M&A Due Diligence Block





The unique ways that information moves through the networks and channels of entities and M&A participants exposes new vulnerabilities during the M&A process. Interconnected networks extend connectivity and access beyond a single companys control. Comprehensive cybersecurity due diligence is required to consider the processes and systems that protect the integrity and value of proprietary data, personally identifiable information (PII), and business and financial information. Hacks and cyber threats occur at all stages of M&A deals. The present material risks to impact the value of the deal and the companies involved. Considerations for cybersecurity due diligence are different at each stage of the M&A process.



Verizons recent acquisition of Yahoo! illustrates the need to start cybersecurity due diligence before a deals announcement. Verizon was caught unaware learning about two unreported data breaches of Yahoo which occurred pre-announcement. The unexpected breach information resulted in Yahoo! being devalued by $350 million and caused significant delays in closing the deal. The liability did not end there. Post-deal, Yahoo!s successor entity was ordered to pay $85 million to settle a class-action and was subject to FTC remediation measures. A comprehensive cybersecurity due diligence process conducted before the announcement could have alerted deal makers to the materiality of the issue enabling them to better mitigate risks before announcing the deal.



A deal announcement can also become the impetus for hacking. In 2005, shortly after the acquisition of Seisint, Reed Elsevier learned that a hacker had compromised a computerbelonging to a police officer in a small town in Florida. Once behind the firewall of the police departments network, hackers were able to access records at Accurint, a database service of Seisint. By executing a Cross-Site Scripting attack they were able to fold malicious content into the content being delivered from the police department site to Accurint. Accurint provided a path for hackers into the Reed Elsevier Lexus database. This allowed hackers to steal passwords, names, addresses, Social Security and drivers license numbers of 310,000 people. Reed Elseviers share price fell 1.03% on news of the breach. Cybersecurity due diligence before the deal announcement would have identified Accurints vulnerability.





Story continues

Breaches During Deals Can Be Game-Changers





A breach which occurs during an M&A deal process can be equally devastating. Consider as an example, TripAdvisors acquisition of Viator. TripAdvisor paid $200 million for Viator. Less than two months after the deal closing, Viators credit card payment processor informed them that the credit card information of over 880,000 customers had been stolen. Forensic analysis determined that an additional 550,000 customers had their PII exposed. TripAdvisors stock then dropped 4%, resulting in a $580 million decrease in market capitalization. Additionally, remediation costs were estimated to be over $350 million. A site scan and forensic analysis could have dramatically reduced, if not eliminated, this breach and its impact



M&A due diligence should further consider and account for opportunities for dormant breaches. By way of example, a dormant breach occurred in a 2017 merger of healthcare providers Womens Health Care Group of PA and the Regional Womens Health Group of northern New Jersey. A virus had been hidden on a server and workstation of Womans Healthcare Group prior to the merger, but was not discovered until after closing. By activating this dormant breach on the post-merger network, a hacker gained system-wide access  exposing 300,000 patient records and resulting in the second largest healthcare industry ransomware data breach.





Cybersecurity Due Diligence for Merged Cultures





Along with new data, a merger or acquisition brings different corporate and IT cultures together. New systems and offerings of the merged entity increase information being pulled across diverse and/or incompatible systems using unproven processes, by unfamiliar employees, partners and customers who do not know what to expect. For example, a system that may have been designed to integrate seamlessly with another may not due to an undocumented custom installation or configuration, the addition of a long-forgotten application programming interface (API), or from the failure to install an upgrade or fix to a bug. Cybersecurity due diligence will need to adjust to consider the different corporate and IT cultures and systems prior to, during and after the merger.



Beyond physical systems, human factors play a significant role in M&A cybersecurity. Mergers of two organizations change processes, internal employee and customer relationships and reporting hierarchies. Departments, functions and locations have less familiarity, forcing employees to deal with people, places, systems and processes that are unfamiliar to them. Hackers use this change and lack of familiarity to launch social engineering attacks, like phishing scams or ransomware, attempting to trick employees into defeating security measures or divulging confidential information.



In 2005, a hacker convinced Wachovia bank employees to sell account information on more than 676,000 customers by claiming to be a collection agency. Within a short period, employees that normally performed 50 account searches a day began searching up to 500 accounts, copying and selling the data. Wachovia was not alone. Merged and acquired entities are particularly vulnerable to employee breaches when entities fail to rationalize employee identity and access controls. In this case, security protocols should have flagged a 10-fold increase in account searches without a corresponding increase in need.





Next Steps for M&A Professionals





The M&A industry may benefit from considering disruption from past technological innovations in analogous legal processes. As a new lawyer in the early 1990s, I spent months overseeing the manual review and cataloging of truckloads of bankers boxes of documents for litigation discovery. E-discovery brought new methods and means to identify, preserve and catalogue documents for use in litigation which are now norms for professionals in litigation. Likewise, in recent years, M&A processes have focused on privacy issues and the risks associated with reporting data breaches. M&A professionals would benefit from considering needed changes for the M&A process to account for cybersecurity in addition to data privacy and breach. Richard Harroch, managing director and global head of M&A for VantagePoint Capital Partners, cautions that traditional M&A lawyers may lack awareness of the broader cybersecurity issues and need to add new capability to their teams  such as IT and cybersecurity expertise. M&A professionals will need a degree of education as to the technical risks and possibilities to consider impact on their processes.



Regulatory concerns are also prompting this new consideration of cybersecurity. The SECs recent guidance on cybersecurity disclosures requires companies to disclose material cybersecurity risks and incidents. Materiality considers, among other things, harm to a companys reputation, financial performance, and customer and vendor relationships, as well as the possibility of litigation or regulatory investigations or actions, including regulatory actions by state and federal governmental authorities and non-U.S. authorities.



To comply with privacy and consumer protection laws, along with regulatory and industry standards, M&A teams will need to develop organizational cybersecurity maps and risk assessments that consider the type and means of data collection, storage and access as well as legal assessments of policies, procedures and contracts. The due diligence will also be wise to consider the post-M&A entities and realities of cybersecurity in considering post-closing deal considerations and attribution of liability and value.



Risks associated with human factors need to be addressed. Considerations can include: technological controls, rationalizing employee identity, background checks and access controls to systems and information, as well as policies and legal agreements such as intellectual property policies and agreements, non-disclosure agreements, non-compete agreements and severance agreements.



Due diligence may also need to consider system testing including independent assessments and Dark Web style penetration tests, reviews of past breaches for remediation measures and ongoing obligations from both a technical as well as a legal perspective.



The due diligence process also would benefit from considering crisis management, continuity plans, disaster recovery, hosted solutions providing employees with resources and instruction for responding as well as guidance on who to direct inquiries to in the event of a breach or crisis during the M&A process or after a merger. This would include a legal appraisal of underlying contractual, liability and governance agreements for these issues not typically addressed in many M&A situations.





Analysis





In short, comprehensive cybersecurity due diligence recognized the new and changing world being formed by cyber threats and cybersecurity. M&A processes will continue to need to quickly adapt to consider and integrate cyber awareness with legal risks and opportunities to provide a comprehensive appraisal and solution to cyber-related vulnerabilities associated with systems, humans, data processes, impact on value and legal and industry considerations.



Thomas McThenia is a shareholder and managing director at GrayRobinsons Gainesville office where he practices in cyberlaw, intellectual property, technology, licensing, M&A and commercial transactions. He represents a wide array of clients including multinational corporations, nonprofit organizations, universities, start-up and emerging-growth companies, technology and internet companies, and individual entrepreneurs. He may be contacted at tom.mcthenia@gray-robinson.com.



Richard Markow is a law clerk and currently pending Florida Bar Admission.SAO PAULO, March 21 (Reuters) - A Brazilian court in the city of Nova Lima, Minas Gerais state, ordered mining company Vale SA to halt operations at the iron ore complex of Dique III in the state, according to a court document seen by Reuters on Thursday.

There was no immediate comment from Vale regarding the decision or any information on potential impact on iron ore production. Vale has been targeted by several court verdicts related to mines that use dams similar to the one that burst in the town of Brumadinho in January, killing over 300 people. (Reporting by Marta Nogueira; Editing by Christian Plumb)SAO PAULO, March 21 (Reuters) - Brazil's state owned oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA is reevaluating a partnership with the China National Petroleum Corporation to build a refinery in Rio de Janeiro state, newspaper Valor Economico reported Thursday, citing an anonymous source.

Petrobras would be having second thoughts on the refinery, which is known as Comperj, because the oil company's new Chief Executive Officer Roberto Castello Branco thinks they should aggressively divest from the oil refining business.

Petrobras did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The oil company is undergoing an ambitious divestment program meant to reduce its high debt levels.

(Reporting by Marcelo Rochabrun Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)The future of classrooms is coming to Flanders.

Today, the Flanders region of Belgium signed a deal with Century Tech, a British AI platform for schools and universities that uses learning science, neuroscience, and data to personalize learning for kids. The technology will be rolled out to all 700 regionally funded Flemish schools over the next five years.

The deal is the first time a government will apply AI in such a large number of classrooms, Century says. It is in negotiations with other governments.

The goal is to move from a one-size-fits-all model of education where teachers try, but often struggle, to teach to varying levels in the classroom, to one in which an AI platform helps tailor lessons to each individual students. That includes identifying the areas students know or dont know, where they feel confident or shaky, how they feel about different kinds of work (which they report to the system with emojis, of course), and even how long it takes a student to store information in their long-term memory. Its a continual diagnostic on a childs progress, with the machine trying to learn how the child learns, and adapt lessons and feedback accordingly.

While it seems the goal may be to automate teachers out of existence, Priya Lakhani, Centurys founder, says it is exactly the opposite. The company was founded to free up teachers from mindless tasks74% of teachers are considering quitting in three years, with the majority of them saying its because of admin such as marking grades. By freeing up the teacher from these tasks, they can focus more on helping kids who need it, and devote more time to substantive class work. At the same time, kids interact with lessons that are more tailored to their ability and learning style.

The most important person in the classroom is the child, but the most powerful one is the teacher, says Lakhani.

Story continues

Century was founded in 2015 and spent $7 million building its platform, which is being used in hundreds of schools, including Beacon Hill Academy in Birmingham, Passmores Academy in Essex, and a number of special education schools.

Schools upload their content into Centurys system and then the platform breaks it down into nuggets or micro-lessons. Kids take a quick assessment to see what they know. Then, the system can deliver lessons based on what needs to be worked on, and areas of weakness.

Lakhani says the average time the AI platform is used is 20 minutes a week in primary schools and 40 minutes a week in secondary schools. I do not want C3PO teaching my child, she says, to emphasize that the point is not to have kids spend more time in front of screens. Teachers report that the system frees up six hours a week, time which Lakhani says can be invested in the creative arts and physical education, which are often marginalized in favor of academics in service of students heavy testing burdens.

Unlike other adaptive learning technologies, which are rules-based (run on instructions that are manually entered by programmers, typically involving a series of if-then functions), Century uses AI, which learns and adapts its knowledge about the student through the data it collects every time its used.

Century also incorporates basic tenets of neuroscience and learning science to assess students focus and difficulty levels; the pace and best time for learning; how long it takes for information to move from short- to long-term memory; or how resilient a learner is. This analysis then feeds into machine-learning algorithms.

No personal data is stored about the children; just their interactions with the platform. Personal information is needed to log on, but it is not used by the AI.

For decades, technologies like artificial intelligence have been disrupting and improving sectors across the worldwith education remaining largely untouched, says Lakhani.

Century is battling the inglorious past of failed EdTech in classrooms. While governments spend billions on everything from laptops to tablets, the OECD has found that this has no effect on learning.

Jim Knight, a former UK education minister, says Centurys deal in Belgium is exciting because the nature of the technology has improved so much. We are going through phases, from a wave of hardwarelaptops and whiteboards through to software to help kids pass teststo software that is much more about helping individuals learn at their pace and give them the right amount of stretch, he says, which is a much more exciting development than the previous phase.

Knight says that ministers will need reassurance that childrens data is protected, and that teachers will need confidence that algorithms can make sensible judgments about what kids need. These are the same questions Century has been asking, he adds.

One key concern for governments is dependence: if the AI works, they become dependent on one private company, whose key functions will be hard to monitor or even really understand.

As for why the Flemish are diving into tech? Because they believe their students deserve it, says Raymonda Verdyck, managing director of GO!, the government group that organizes education for Flanders. Every GO! pupil is considered to be a unique person with specific interests, ambitions and talents, she says. GO! schools and institutions1,000 in allstand for equal and maximum chances of education and personal development for every individual.

Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief, our free daily newsletter with the worlds most important and interesting news.

More stories from Quartz:Investors are increasingly seeing sustainable practices as strategic for positive returns, according to business leaders who spoke Thursday at CNBC's Managing Asia: Sustainable Entrepreneurship conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Sunny Verghese, CEO of global commodity giant Olam, said his employees feel better and proud to work for a company with values, and that translates into better productivity.

Many investors now see sustainable practices as strategic for positive returns in the long run, business leaders said on Thursday.

An advocate of such practices, Sunny Verghese, who is the CEO of global commodity giant Olam OLAM-SG , said that wasn't always the case. His company, whose largest investors are Singapore's Temasek Holdings and Japan's Mitsubishi 8058.T-JP , is known for pushing the sustainability agenda.

Before Olam found shareholders with the same vision, however, it was a tough sell, Verghese explained during CNBC's Managing Asia: Sustainable Entrepreneurship conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

"Several years ago, shareholders from all over the world ... were consistently telling me, 'If you are feeling some kind of guilt because your children are telling you (that) you are not doing the right thing and you want to use the company's assets to redeem yourself, we will not allow you to do it,'" he said.

It took time and effort to not just look for investors with values that resonate with Olam, but also effort to prove and convince others that "doing good also means doing well," he said.

In recent years, Olam has launched various initiatives to track commodities from farmers and right through middlemen and the supply chain  thus ensuring customers they are buying sustainable produce.

Employees also feel better and proud to work for a company with values, and that translates into better productivity, he added.

Garment maker TAL Group's chief technology officer, Delman Lee, said a staff survey at his company showed that sustainability was a priority for workers  so making strides toward that goal will help win hearts and improve staff retention. TAL Group is a member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition.

Story continues

After all, consumers who buy products do want to feel that they are buying from a socially responsible company, as Actress Nanette Medved-Po's Generation Hope proves. That social enterprise builds classrooms across the Philippines with the proceeds of sales from its bottled water, "Hope in a Bottle."

When Medved-Po first started, she struggled to find partners for her project, as many were concerned about the bottom line from a social enterprise, she said at the "Managing Asia" event.

Medved-Po now counts names like Starbucks SBUX , 7-Eleven and Holiday Inn as partners, proving that a product can be both commercially viable and socially responsible.

A Malaysian minister who spoke at the event also championed the cause as a business case not just for companies themselves but as a potential whole industry, such as green services.

"Whenever we talk about sustainability, people are thinking 'it's about saving the world.' I would think that it's not only about saving the world; it's a business opportunity," said Yeo Bee Yin, Malaysia's energy, science, technology, environment and climate change minister.





More From CNBC

BEIJING, March 22 (Reuters) - China's major automobile and internet companies, including Chongqing Changan Automobile , Alibaba and Tencent, are setting up a 9.76 billion yuan ($1.46 billion) joint venture to invest in ride-sharing industry, Chongqing Changan Automobile said on Friday.

Chongqing Changan Automobile has invested 1.6 billion yuan ($238.70 million) in the investment company in Nanjing with partners such as Alibaba's investment firm, Tencent's affiliate, Suning's investment unit, FAW, and Dongfeng Motor.

Changan, Dongfeng, and FAW will each have a 15 percent stake in the investment firm, while Suning will be the biggest shareholder with a 19 percent stake, Changan said in an exchange filing.

Alibaba and Tencent's investment units will together hold the remainder shares with some other funds, according to the stock exchange filing.

The joint venture will invest in ride-sharing industry with focus on new energy vehicles. It will set up a ride-sharing company. The firm will not engage in other businesses, according to the filing. ($1 = 6.7031 Chinese yuan renminbi) ($1 = 6.7044 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Yilei Sun and Brenda Goh in Beijing; Editing by Shreejay Sinha)HONG KONG, March 21 (Reuters) - CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd , the ports-to-telecoms arm of retired billionaire Li Ka-shing, said on Thursday it would support Temasek Holdings' plans to offload a part of its stake in beauty and health retailer A.S. Watson.

CK Hutchison is not considering to sell its stake in A.S. Watson, the company said.

Singapore state investor Temasek is in talks to sell a small portion of its 24.9 percent stake in A.S. Watson, a source said in January. Temasek invested about $5.7 billion in the company in 2014. (Reporting by Donny Kwok and Clare Jim; Editing by Shreejay Sinha)Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia lacked two safety features in their cockpits because the company charged extra to install them.

The features could have helped the pilots detect erroneous readings, which some experts believe might be connected to the planes' failures, the New York Times reports.

Boeing will now make the disagree light free of charge on all new 737 Max planes, the paper said.

Boeing BA jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia lacked two safety features in their cockpits because the company charged extra to install them.

The features could have helped pilots detect erroneous readings, which some experts believe might be connected to the planes' failures, the New York Times reports .

Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which crashed within five months of each other, were brand new but were not equipped with an angle of attack indicator or an angle of attack disagree light, the paper said. The angle of attack indicator determines how much the plane's nose is tilted, and the disagree light is activated if the jet's sensors are giving contradictory signals.

Boeing will now make the disagree light free of charge on all new 737 Max planes, after the deadly crashes caused all 737 planes to be grounded, according to the New York Times. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can purchase, the report said. The company is also planning a new software update.

Neither safety feature was mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration, but experts say it is key to flight safety.

"They're critical, and cost almost nothing for the airlines to install," Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at the aviation consultancy Leeham, told the Times. "Boeing charges for them because it can. But they're vital for safety."

Boeing did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. Ethiopian Airlines said in a statement on Thursday that their pilots had been following FAA and Boeing guidance.

Story continues

"Ethiopian Airlines pilots completed the Boeing recommended and FAA approved differences training from the B-737 NG aircraft to the B-737 MAX aircraft before the phase in of the B-737-8 MAX fleet to the Ethiopian operation and before they start flying the B-737-8 MAX," the airline said in a statement.

"We urge all concerned to refrain from making such uninformed, incorrect, irresponsible and misleading statements during the period of the accident investigation. International regulations require all stakeholders to wait patiently for the result of the investigation," it said.

It's still unclear what caused the crashes. Investigators are looking into whether a new software system added to combat stalls in Boeing's 737 Max series might have been a trigger, as well as faulty data from sensors on the Lion Air plane that might have caused a system malfunction.

Dennis A. Muilenburg, Boeing's chief executive, said the company was working on making the 737 Max safer.

"As part of our standard practice following any accident, we examine our aircraft design and operation, and when appropriate, institute product updates to further improve safety," he said in a statement Sunday.





More From CNBC

Denbury Resources Inc. DNR and Penn Virginia Corporations PVAC $1.7-billion acquisition deal has been called off via mutual agreement. For each Penn Virginia stock, Denbury was supposed to pay $25.86 in cash and 12.4 shares of its common stock. There will be no termination fee involved in the process, per the agreement.

Denbury made the merger agreement as Penn Virginias Eagle Ford assets were expected to have a low breakeven point, which could have complemented its portfolio. The acquisition could have brought in opportunities of short cycle development to the companys medium cycle development assets. The combined entity was expected to have an enterprise value of $6 billion. Following the closure of the transaction, Denbury stockholders were expected to hold around 71% of the combined entity. However, opposition from shareholders of Penn Virginia, like Mangrove Partners, led to the termination.

Activist investment fund Mangrove Partners, a major shareholder of Penn Virginia, has been very vocal against the merger since the very beginning. Last year, it increased its active stake in Penn Virginia to 10.7% from 9.5% and called on the termination of the merger deal, which was expected to be closed in the first quarter of 2019.

The cash-and-stock merger deal was signed at the end of last October. Oil price plunged more than 30% during the October-December period from more than $76 per barrel level to $42. This hurt most of the explorers and producers across the globe. Moreover, the merger agreement, which assumed Penn Virginias debt-burden,was also not appreciated by Denburys investors. Eventually, the company declined 55.1% while Penn Virginia descended 19.4% compared with the industrys fall of 13.9%. Notably, Denbury jumped 5.6% in pre-market trading, following the announcement of the merger-deal termination.

The company now plans to pursue other opportunities to expand business, per its strategic plan. Moreover, the company wants to keep its disciplined operating process intact, which is expected to help it generate $100 million of free cash flow this year.

Story continues

Zacks Rank and Stocks to Consider

Currently, Denbury has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). Investors interested in the energy sector can opt for some better-ranked stocks as given below:

Denver, CO-based Antero Resources Corporation AR is an exploration and production company. For 2019, its top line is expected to grow 10.9% year over year. The company currently holds a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

El Dorado, AR-based Murphy Oil Corporation MUR is an upstream energy company. Its bottom line for 2019 is expected to increase 3.2% year over year. The company delivered average positive earnings surprise of 6% in the trailing four quarters. The stock currently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Breakout Biotech Stocks with Triple-Digit Profit Potential

The biotech sector is projected to surge beyond $775 billion by 2024 as scientists develop treatments for thousands of diseases. Theyre also finding ways to edit the human genome to literally erase our vulnerability to these diseases.

Zacks has just released Century of Biology: 7 Biotech Stocks to Buy Right Now to help investors profit from 7 stocks poised for outperformance. Our recent biotech recommendations have produced gains of +98%, +119% and +164% in as little as 1 month. The stocks in this report could perform even better.

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Antero Resources Corporation (AR) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Denbury Resources Inc. (DNR) : Free Stock Analysis Report



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Penn Virginia Corporation (PVAC) : Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment ResearchDragonchain has announced its new partnership with humanitarian group M2030 in a bid to fight malaria with blockchain. Dragonchain was originally developed at Disneys Seattle office in 2015. In 2016, it was part of Disneys private blockchain platform before its release as open source software under the Apache 2 license in October 2016. M2030 is a Singapore-based humanitarian group created by Asia Pacific Leaders Malaria Alliance (APLMA). M2030s corporate partners can use the companys brand for awareness-raising campaigns. In return, M2030 pledges funds to fight malaria in numerous countries. Its aim is to eliminate malaria in Asia by 2030. Dragonchain announced the new partnership in a Medium post. As M2030s technology partner, Dragonchain will be providing blockchain-based services and the capabilities of the

Dragonchain has announced its new partnership with humanitarian group M2030 in a bid to fight malaria with blockchain.

Dragonchain was originally developed at Disneys Seattle office in 2015. In 2016, it was part of Disneys private blockchain platform before its release as open source software under the Apache 2 license in October 2016.

M2030 is a Singapore-based humanitarian group created by Asia Pacific Leaders Malaria Alliance (APLMA). M2030s corporate partners can use the companys brand for awareness-raising campaigns. In return, M2030 pledges funds to fight malaria in numerous countries. Its aim is to eliminate malaria in Asia by 2030.

Dragonchain announced the new partnership in a Medium post. As M2030s technology partner, Dragonchain will be providing blockchain-based services and the capabilities of the Dragonchain platform to help tackle malaria  starting with Vietnam.

These services and capabilities will improve the donation process and should help bring transparency to contributions, which will enable organisations and individuals to track the use of their donations.

Patrik Silborn, co-founder of M2030, commented: We are excited to partner with Dragonchain in Vietnam. By using their services and capabilities, we can enhance the trust in M2030.

By working with Dragonchain, we will be able to onboard some of the best businesses in Vietnam, and ultimately end malaria once and for all, added Gerard Toeh, co-founder of M2030.

This isnt the first time blockchain technology has been used in the healthcare sector.

Shidan Gouran, CEO and president of investment firm Global Blockchain, believes end-to-end encryption can help remedy many issues with privacy and consent in the healthcare industry.

Interested in reading more about blockchain and healthcare? Discover five ways blockchain technology could transform the healthcare system here on Coin Rivet.

The post Dragonchain partners with humanitarian group M2030 to help fight malaria with blockchain appeared first on Coin Rivet.A family member reacts 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)

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.

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.

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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By Kane Wu and Anshuman Daga

HONG KONG/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Murphy Oil Corp is nearing a deal to sell its Malaysian oil and gas assets to Thailand's PTTEP PCL, people familiar with the matter said, in the latest energy M&A transaction in the Southeast Asian nation.

The independent U.S. oil and gas exploration and production company could announce a deal, valued at just over $2 billion, with the Thai energy company as early as Thursday, said one source, who declined to be identified as the news is not public.

Reuters reported in November, citing sources, that Murphy Oil was in talks to sell the assets after an unsolicited bid that could fetch between $2 billion to $3 billion.

Murphy Oil, which has been in Malaysia for two decades, could not be reached outside regular U.S. business hours. There was no immediate response from PTTEP to a Reuters query.

(Reporting by Kane Wu in HONG KONG and Anshuman Daga in SINGAPORE; Additional reporting by Chayut Setboonsarng in BANGKOK; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee and Tom Hogue)"Look at this," says Lawrence Quigley, pointing to a photograph on the wall of his Brooklyn apartment. "The composition, the symmetrythat's just a beautiful photograph."

The photo in question is actually part of a paired exposure. The two images each show a young man in period attire from at least a century agoone shot showing him in profile, the other facing the camera. On the back of the photo we learn that this is one Peter M. Vivancos, a 5'6" Cuban student who was arrested in New York on April 4, 1907, on charges of being a "furnished room thief."

The photos of Vivancos are among more than 100 old police mug shots that Quigley, a soft-spoken artist and web developer who lives in Prospect Heights, has collected over the past 20 years. Some, like Vivancos's, are from the NYPD, but many others are from various police departments across the country. Quigley displays them on the wall just inside the door to his apartment, forming a literal rogues' gallery of faces that greets his visitors.



Mug shot collector Lawrence Quigley (Paul Lukas)

Quigley isn't a professional curator or gallerist. His mug shots form one of the many unusual collections that New Yorkers, with their offbeat sensibilities and obsessions, keep in their homes. And since many of those homes are small and cramped, the collections are often of small items, displayed in creative ways. Taken together, these collections form a sort of composite museum hiding behind our neighbors' doorways.

Mug shots, with their ready-made sense of film noir-style spectacle and visages of people who are, shall we say, not having such a great day, are an evocative collecting category. The author Mark Michaelson, writing in his 2006 book, Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots, seemed to revel in the seediness of it all, referring to vintage mug shots as "central casting for the late-late-show of unvarnished reality."

Quigley isn't immune to the lure of the sordid, but his interest in mug shots is less voyeuristic than aesthetic. "I'm interested in photography, especially good photography that's out of context, so the image matters to me more than the arrest details," he says. "And then on top of that, you have a slice of history. That's what these photos are." He points to another pair of shots, this time of a somewhat haggard but nonetheless bright-eyed woman named Evelyn Richardson, who was arrested in 1948. "This is just a great photograph. Imagine it blown up to, like, four feet by four feetit's almost Avedon-esque, or Chuck Close. It's that good."

Evelyn Richardson's mug shot doesn't indicate what she was arrested for, but most of Quigley's photos do. The alleged infractions range from the mundane ("larceny"; "shop lifter"; "stole a case of quarts of syrup") to the lurid ("molesting girls"; "fagworker""That means a gay male prostitute," says Quigley). There's also a woman who was arrested for being an "abortionist"a reminder that reproductive rights were a battleground long before Roe v. Wade. But of course none of these people had yet stood trial or been convicted, and Quigley repeatedly notes that he doesn't "make any assumptions about guilt or innocence."

Quigley, who says he's never been arrested himself, bought his first mug shots, a pair of 1907 images of a guy named Morris Bueroff ("P.P."  presumably short for pickpocket), at a Manhattan flea market in the late 1990s and soon found himself hooked. Over the ensuing two decades he's acquired about 130 more of them, mostly at flea markets and on eBay, never paying more than $35.

He tends to collect older specimens, so the arrestees are almost certainly deceased by now. Has he considered researching what happened to them, or contacting their descendants? "I'm curious, of course," he admits. "But it's a segment of their lives that they may not want to relive, so I haven't tracked anyone down. Also, I don't like to break the fourth wall."

For some collectors, you can draw a straight line between their interests and what they like to collectthe cinema buff who collects vintage movie posters, for example, or the seamstress who collects buttons. But Quigley isn't particularly interested in pulp novels or police work, and there's plenty of non-mug shot vintage photography out there, so how did he end up with this collecting niche?

A clue comes from one of Quigley's artistic habits: He keeps his hand and eye sharp by sketching people's faces while riding the subway. "Musicians do scales," he says. "I do this." He flips through one of the dozens of sketchbooks he's saved over the years, revealing an endless variety of New Yorkers from the shoulders up. How long has he been doing this? "More than 20 years," he says. Since before he started collecting the mug shots? "Yes, but not by much."

And suddenly it all makes sense. "I guess you could say I acquire faces," Quigley says. It turns out he's a bit of a facial specialist. One of his art projects involves painting portraits of regional salesmen onto nickels. Even at life-drawing classes, which he attends regularly to hone his chops, he tends to focus on the faces, not the figures.

Still, why mug shots? "It's true, I could have collected antique photographs of, say, weddings," he says. "But that's almost too codified. The mug shots are people who were yanked off the street, so they're less posed, less staged. Some are giggling, some look grim. There's an emotional topography to it that I like."

Some collectors never lose the itchthey have that compulsion to keep acquiring. Does Quigley feel that way?

"Not exactly," he says. "It's not so much that I must always be collecting. But sometimes I'll see an image and think, 'I must have that one.'"

Are you a New Yorker with an interesting collection? If so, we'd like to hear from you. Contact Collection Agency here.Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, gestures as he speaks during the presentation of the Renault's new Alpine sports concept car "Vision" in Monaco Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, gestures as he speaks during the presentation of the Renault's new Alpine sports concept car "Vision" in Monaco February 16, 2016. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard/Files

By Naomi Tajitsu and Tim Kelly

TOKYO (Reuters) - The lawyer of ousted Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn on Monday said he was optimistic the detained executive could win bail with a promise to submit to surveillance, and that he would pursue a fresh strategy to defend against financial misconduct charges.

Junichiro Hironaka, known as "the Razor" for his successful defence of high-profile cases, told a briefing that his three-person legal team appointed last month would not be bound by the strategy of Ghosn's previous lawyers, whose rebuttal of the charges failed to secure the executive's bail.

Ghosn has been in custody since his initial arrest in late November over allegations he under-reported his compensation at Nissan Motor Co Ltd for nearly a decade through 2018. He also has been charged with aggravated breach of trust.

The ex-chairman of Nissan, Mitsubishi Motors Corp and France's Renault SA has denied wrongdoing.

"I believe it's possible he could be released in the near future," Hironaka said in a more optimistic outlook than former lead lawyer and one-time chief prosecutor Motonari Otsuru, who had suggested Ghosn could remain in custody in Japan for months.

"We haven't known each other for long but I hope to build up a relationship of trust," said Hironaka, who acknowledged a language barrier with his client but added that he had read books authored by Ghosn to get to know his client better.

Ghosn and his legal team are currently waiting for the Tokyo court to decide whether to grant his third request for bail submitted late last week.

This time, Ghosn has said he is willing to submit to severe restrictions including video surveillance and communications monitoring to secure freedom before his trial, Hironaka said. His previous offer to hire security guards and wear an ankle monitoring bracelet failed to convince judges who cited a risk of evidence tampering when they rejected two previous bail applications.

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Meanwhile, the defence team has begun holding pre-trial discovery meetings with prosecutors and judges to review evidence and submit lists of witnesses to be presented at trial, Hironaka said, a process which could take several months.

RAZOR SHARP

The appointment of Hironaka, nicknamed for his combative style, is widely seen as move to adopt a more aggressive legal strategy.

"I am now 73 years old, but I want to test how sharp my razor still is," Hironaka told reporters, without revealing details of the legal strategy he and is colleagues will pursue.

Since taking over Ghosn's defence team, Hironaka has argued the allegations should have been resolved as an internal company matter without the involvement of prosecutors, and blasted the judicial system for keeping his client in jail.

The former Nissan boss faces a criminal justice system where only three of every hundred defendants pleading not guilty are acquitted. In Japan, there is no plea deal mechanism that would allow Ghosn to agree to lesser charges for a lighter sentence.

The executive, credited with reviving Nissan in the early 2000s, was one of the auto industry's most powerful figures as head of the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi alliance, whose combined vehicle sales rank it as one of the world's biggest automakers.

Ghosn had been seeking a full merger, an idea many Nissan executives opposed. However, his arrest has since muddied the outlook for the alliance, which is based on a web of cross-shareholding and operational integration.

(Reporting by Naomi Tajitsu and Tim Kelly; Editing by Christopher Cushing)(Bloomberg) -- Google has requested a meeting with a top U.S. general as political tension rises over the internet giants artificial intelligence work in China.

General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that Google "indirectly benefits the Chinese military" and is planning to meet with the company over the matter. The Pentagon official cited a Google AI lab that opened in Beijing in 2017 as a cause of concern.

"In my judgment, us assisting the Chinese military in advancing technology is not in U.S. national interests," Dunford said on Thursday at an Atlantic Council event. "So its a debate we have to have."

Dunford is "tentatively scheduled" to meet next week with a senior Google official in Washington, at Googles request, Colonel Patrick Ryder, a military spokesman, wrote in an email.

Googles relationship with the Pentagon has been strained since it retreated from an AI defense contract last year following employee protests. The tech giant has faced criticism in Washington for plans to launch a search engine in China, where Google pulled most of its commercial services in 2010. At a Senate hearing last week, Dunford said Google was indirectly helping Chinas military. Days later, U.S. President Donald Trump repeated the critique in a tweet.

In response, Google issued a statement on Sunday denying the claim. "We are not working with the Chinese military," the Alphabet Inc. unit said. "We are working with the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense, in many areas including cybersecurity, recruiting and healthcare.

On Thursday, a Google spokeswoman declined to comment on the tentative meeting with the general. The companys Beijing lab is focused on developing software including TensorFlow, one of the most popular AI tools, along with education initiatives, "research on natural language understanding and market algorithms," the spokeswoman wrote in an email.

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TensorFlow is a critical part of Googles expansion strategy. TensorFlow has been downloaded 17 million times with more than 2 million of those coming from China-based users, Google engineering director Rajat Monga said at a September conference backed by the Chinese government. TensorFlow is free, open-source software, so Google doesnt control who uses it.

--With assistance from Tony Capaccio.

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Bergen in San Francisco at mbergen10@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Alistair Barr, Andrew Pollack

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

2019 Bloomberg L.P.Dennysse Vadell sits between her daughters Veronica, right, and Cristina holding a digital photograph of father and husband Tomeu, who is currently jailed in Venezuela, in Katy, Texas. Tomeu Vadell is one of six executives from Houston-based Citgo who has spent 15 months jailed in Venezuela on what their families say are trumped-up corruption charges. (AP Photo/John L Mone, File, File)

Dennysse Vadell sits between her daughters Veronica, right, and Cristina holding a digital photograph of father and husband Tomeu, who is currently jailed in Venezuela, in Katy, Texas. (AP Photo/John L Mone, File)







When the Trump administration paved the way for Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to name a new board to run the U.S. affiliate of Venezuela's state oil company, it was a rare glimmer of hope for the American families of six oil executives jailed for over a year without a trial in the politically turbulent South American nation.



But a month later, the families complain they are still being left to fend for themselves as much as ever by the men's employer, Houston-based Citgo, which until the takeover had been the U.S. subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil giant known as PDVSA.



Citgo, the eighth-largest refiner in the U.S. and Venezuela's biggest foreign asset, has emerged as a major prize in the battle for power in Venezuela between President Nicolas Maduro and Guaido, who heads the opposition-controlled National Assembly and is recognized by the U.S. and about 50 other governments as the country's legitimate leader. The families insist their loved ones are collateral damage in that high-stakes fight  first imprisoned on trumped-up charges by Maduro's government and now overlooked by a U.S. administration hell-bent on regime change while Citgo is hounded by creditors and battered by U.S. sanctions on PDVSA.



Their travail began the weekend before Thanksgiving in 2017, when the six executives got a call from the head of PDVSA summoning them to Caracas for a last-minute budget meeting. Once there, armed and masked security agents burst into a conference room and arrested them on embezzlement charges stemming from a never-executed proposal to refinance some $4 billion in Citgo bonds by offering a 50 percent stake in the company as collateral. Maduro himself accused them of "treason," though they have not been charged with that crime.



Their families of the "Citgo 6"  five of them American citizens and all with deep roots in Texas and Louisiana  complain the men are being held in inhumane conditions, sharing overcrowded basement cells in a military counterintelligence prison and suffering severe weight loss in a country plagued by food shortages. Even worse, their case shows no sign of advancing. A preliminary hearing has been postponed 13 times by Judge Rosvelin Gil for little apparent reason, with the latest session set for Friday.



Citgo when under Maduro's control provided almost no support to the jailed executives or their families despite an indemnity agreement that obligates it to act on the men's behalf. In the months following their arrest the company even terminated their pay although they were never fired.



Now, the families feel snubbed by Maduro's opponents as well.



Several emails and an upbeat letter sent Feb. 26 by certified mail to new Citgo chairwoman Luisa Palacios requesting a meeting to discuss the company's plans to facilitate the executives' release and mitigate the economic hardships the families have endured went unanswered, the families say. Other efforts to contact Citgo board members have also failed, including calls to vice president Rick Esser, the sole holdover from the previous board and someone the families say is intimately familiar with their plight.



"I feel like they're making a complete fool of me," said Maria Elena Cardenas, who has had to apply for food stamps to pay for mounting medical bills after the jailing of her husband, Gustavo Cardenas, who had been working as Citgo's head of public relations. "It's almost inhuman not to even acknowledge receipt."



Citgo did not reply to a request for comment.



The families did meet briefly in Houston last week with Guaido ally Carlos Vecchio, who is recognized as Venezuela's ambassador by President Donald Trump's administration.



"Our actions have always been guided by the goal of freeing political prisoners and denouncing torture and mistreatment," said Vecchio, who fled Venezuela to escape what were widely seen as made-up charges of inciting violence during 2014 anti-government protests. "If there's one party in Venezuela that has suffered firsthand human rights abuses, it's us."



Still, Guaido himself hasn't directly commented on the case, even when pressed by Fox Business Network's Trish Regan in two interviews last month.



Much to the families' frustration, the Trump administration has taken a hushed approach that contrasts with the very public diplomatic push that secured the release last year of Joshua Holt, a Utah man who was held for more than two years in a Caracas jail on weapons charges that were also seen as bogus. Maduro's decision to break off diplomatic relations with the U.S. and the departure this month of the last American diplomats in Caracas is likely to make it even harder to get the men freed or win them access to medical care.



The State Department said it continues to closely monitor the case and work through third countries to ensure the Americans' welfare while they remain in jail.



Cardenas believes that Guaido, like others, has been misled into believing the jailed executives were complicit in widespread corruption by government insiders that gutted Venezuela's oil industry under Maduro. But most of the families had lived in the U.S. for years, some even before the start of Hugo Chavez's socialist revolution two decades ago, and occupied midlevel jobs removed from the high finance positions where the crimes allegedly took place.



Meanwhile, she is getting desperate. With mounting medical bills for her 18-year-old son, who suffers from a rare metabolic disease that has stunted his growth, she is looking to sell the home outside Houston, where she raised three children. Without her husband's paycheck, she has to send via courier at great cost the food her husband is fed in jail, an expense that she said Citgo at a minimum should be able to pick up for the anguished families.



"I know Citgo might not be able to win their release but at least they could come out and say we know they're innocent," she said of Citgo's new board. "Instead, they've left us on the streets. The only thing Citgo cares about is covering its legal back."



Joshua Goodman reports for the Associated Press.TULSA, Okla., March 21, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Helmerich & Payne, Inc. (HP) today announced that John Lindsay, President and CEO, Mark Smith, Vice President and CFO, Todd Benson, President of H&P Technologies, and Dave Wilson, Director of Investor Relations will attend the Scotia Howard Weil 47th Annual Energy Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana on Monday, March 25 and Tuesday, March 26, 2019. John Lindsay and Todd Benson will present on behalf of the Company on Monday, March 25, 2019, at 1:15 p.m. U.S. Central Time.



The investor slides to be used during the conference will be available for download on the Companys website .

About Helmerich & Payne, Inc.:

Founded in 1920, Helmerich & Payne, Inc. (H&P) (HP) is committed to delivering industry leading drilling productivity and reliability. H&P operates with the highest level of integrity, safety and innovation to deliver superior results for our customers and returns for shareholders. Through its subsidiaries, the Company designs, fabricates and operates high-performance drilling rigs in conventional and unconventional plays around the world. H&P also develops and implements advanced automation, directional drilling and survey management technologies. For more information, visit www.hpinc.com .

IR Contact:

Dave Wilson, Director of Investor Relations

918-588-5190

investor.relations@hpinc.com



(Bloomberg) -- Want the lowdown on European markets? In your inbox before the open, every day. Sign up here.

Faced with a U.S. indictment, British tech supremo Mike Lynch had a simple choice: Focus on the criminal trialwith a possible sentence of 20 years in prisonor fight a civil lawsuit first.

The former Autonomy Corp. chief executive officer chose the latter, surprising many including those at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., which brought the $5.1 billion suit and believed hed fight the American charges first. Wed rather get on with it, Lynch said in January.

The nine-month trial between HP and Lynch is set to start Monday in Londons High Court, with at least three ex-CEOs expected to testify. The computer giant has accused Lynch of being the architect of a massive accounting fraud at Autonomy, once the U.K.s second-biggest software company. Lynch counters by saying that HP, which under Meg Whitman pulled a U-turn on its software ambitions, simply ran his firm into the ground.

Autonomy was HPs unwanted stepchild, Whitman is alleged to have told her senior management.

The case centers on HPs 2011 purchase of Autonomy for $10.3 billion, a 60 percent premium to its share price. Lynch himself made $815 million from the deal and his reputation prospered, with appointments to advise the government and a new career as startup investor soon following.

All that fell apart when HP took an $8.8 billion writedown of the business just a year later. Whitman, the newly appointed boss at HP, accused Lynch of misstating Autonomys financial performance. The Palo Alto, California-based company has pursued the executive ever since, culminating in the current lawsuit that has already encompassed more than 100 million pages of documents.

The Key Players

Mike Lynch Age: 53 CEO of Autonomy from March 1996-2011 The founder of Autonomy will be under the spotlight over how much he knew about the companys accounting practices. Even his own auditors, Deloitte, said Lynch was seen to exercise a very unusual level of control for a FTSE 100 CEO. His legal team says he wasn't an accountant and had little involvement in the day-to-day detail. Meg Whitman Age: 62 CEO of HP from September 2011-February 2018 Whitman took over HP as the Autonomy transaction was closing, with a mandate to refocus the firm on its existing businesses. But Autonomy was HPs unwanted stepchild, shes alleged to have told senior management at the firm, according Lynchs legal filings. Leo Apotheker Age: 65 CEO of HP from November 2010-September 2011 The former SAP SE executive lasted less than a year at HP. Hired to help the computer giant move away from its low-margin hardware business, Apotheker orchestrated the Autonomy buyout. In September 2011, he told then-HP chairman Ray Lane: If Autonomy and more software isnt the solution, what is the alternative? Cathie Lesjak Age: 60 CFO of HP units from September 2007-July 2018 The HP veteran was one of the few executives to voice objections to the Autonomy deal, the day before the transaction was announced. Lesjak was later picked to oversee a forensic look at the software firm's accounting, which led to the $8.8 billion writedown.

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U.S. Charges

For Lynch, the decision to fight the British lawsuit first was taken against the backdrop of the swift conviction of his longtime Chief Financial Officer Sushovan Hussain in April. The U.S. has filed similar charges against Lynch, saying he used false and misleading statements from 2009, 2010 and early 2011 to make Autonomy more attractive to a potential purchaser like HP, according to the indictment.

But staying in Britain means that Lynch could be served with an American extradition request in the middle of the civil trial, something his legal team is already preparing for. Lynch has repeatedly sought to maintain that the dispute is solely about a British company operating under U.K. law and doesnt belong in the U.S.

The case will focus on HPs allegations that Lynch and Hussain, who is also a defendant, oversaw accounting practices that artificially inflated Autonomys sales. The software firm sold around $200 million in loss-making hardware, something that HPs lawyers have argued should have been fully disclosed. The way in which Autonomy packaged its services with other resellers and then booked revenue is also likely to come under scrutiny  with HP calling them contrived.

Lynch isnt an accountant and had little involvement in the day-to-day detail, his lawyers said in their most recent filing.

Lynch has countersued HP for $160 million, saying that he suffered significant reputational damage that led to private equity funds dropping proposed investments in his new fund Invoke Capital, he said.

With the Autonomy deal, the storied computer makers then-CEO, Leo Apotheker, sought to transform itself into a higher-margin software firm to rival Oracle Corp. Lynchs argument is that HP under Whitman reversed course and failed to integrate Autonomy correctly, causing the wipeout in value.

HP was beset by political infighting following the Autonomy deal, Lynch said. In one email to Whitman in February 2012, he asked if she would appoint a craziness Czar to deal with all HPs processes. Someone needs to start shutting them down.

HPs legal case, he said, is a culmination of a campaign by the company to deflect and shift blame onto him and his associates for a deal it shouldnt have done.

(Updates with Lynch calling for craziness czar in penultimate paragraph)

To contact the author of this story: Jonathan Browning in London at jbrowning9@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Elser at celser@bloomberg.net, Jillian Ward

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

2019 Bloomberg L.P.The U.S. and China will ultimately sign a trade deal, according to Jackson Wong, associate director at Huarong International Securities.

The ongoing market rally, may "consolidate around the current level for about maybe a few weeks," he said. But from there, Wong predicted, markets will be set for another leg up once Trump and Xi reach an accord.

Despite all the back and forth between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping negotiating teams, the U.S. and China will ultimately come to a trade agreement, according to one investor.

When that happens, markets could soar 15 percent or more for the rest of the year, said Jackson Wong, associate director at Huarong International Securities.

"The rumor is (that by the) end of April, the deal would be 90 percent done. And, by end June, (the) deal would be signed," Wong told CNBC's "Street Signs" on Friday.

Wong's prediction follows the market rally that began at the beginning of this year, roughly coinciding with investors' increasing expectations that a U.S.-China trade deal could be inked.

"Now the investors in China or around the world are expecting a deal to be done. They have been expecting since the end of last year. So I think the market has been rallying from that point on," he said.

The ongoing rally, he said, may continue a bit, but there is also a chance it could "consolidate around the current level for about maybe a few weeks." From there, Wong said, markets will be set for another leg up once Trump and Xi reach an accord.

Such a deal could also have a positive impact on the real economy worldwide, he said.

His analysis comes amid the ongoing trade war between the world's two largest economies that began about one year ago. That escalating fight has seen rounds of tariffs imposed on items ranging from soybeans to steel, attempts at reconciliation, and Trump declaring the benefits of a trade war on Twitter. Tensions have eased since the presidents of both nations agreed in December to pause any further tariffs while negotiations continued.

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Donald Trump tweet: Tariffs are the greatest! Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It's as simple as that - and everybody's talking! Remember, we are the "piggy bank" that's being robbed. All will be Great!

The negotiations are focused on both reducing the U.S. trade deficit with China and eliminating some of the systemic impediments to foreign firms succeeding in Asia's largest economy.

Wong acknowledged that there have been differences of opinion on both sides, but he said he remains positive that both parties will be able to reach a consensus.

"Talks are going not bad," Wong told CNBC. "The main differences, in my point of view, (are) solvable. China wants all tariffs lifted, and the U.S. wants a say in the new intellectual property theft and transfer policies."

"If both countries give in a little bit, so maybe, you know, the tariffs will stay a little bit longer, and then China would give (the U.S.) more control over policies, then they can have a final deal," he said.

Nonetheless, Wong said, the U.S.-China relationship is still rather weak.

"Both countries are standing on very fragile grounds and any sudden move on either side would break the trust on each other," he said. "Investors are still cautious and nervous about that until they can decide a date that Donald Trump and Xi Jinping can meet. Otherwise, anything can be a wildcard."





More From CNBC

ROME, March 21 (Reuters) - An Italian junior minister with strong ties with China said on Thursday a Chinese airline could be involved in the rescue of ailing Italian carrier Alitalia.

"I don't rule out that China could be involved," Junior Industry Minister Michele Geraci said in a television interview with Sky Italia, when asked about possible help for Alitalia less than two weeks before a deadline to save it.

Geraci spoke as Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Rome for a three-day visit during which he will sign an accord drawing Italy into his giant "Belt and Road" infrastructure plan. Geraci, who lived in China for a decade, helped to prepare the deal.

The CEO of Delta Air Lines has flown to China to discuss with China Eastern the possibility the Chinese carrier could take part in Alitalia's rescue, Italian daily La Stampa reported on Thursday. (Reporting By Gavin Jones)Former Rep. John Delaney smiles a lot, considering that he was the first Democrat to enter the race for president and that after campaigning for 20 months he is barely a blip in the polls.

He smiles, not in an unctuous Howard Dean way, but in the eager manner of a man unafraid of questions and excited to answer them. In a 35-minute interview with Yahoo News, he outlined a full slate of policy ideas: the future potential and pitfalls of technology as it relates to national security, climate change and jobs. He didnt flinch at questions about the autonomous-weapons race with China, regulation of Big Tech and whether the looming deficit or poverty is a more urgent issue (he said poverty). Delaney believes many of his policy proposals could win support from moderate Republicans, and he has hammered home the need for bipartisanship to achieve solutions to the nations greatest problems.

But he has something else going for him in the race besides his policy expertise. Delaney appears to be positioning himself to run as the Democrat who best embodies the rank-and-files rage at Donald Trump.

Delaneys demeanor changed when he talked about the president, whom he called utterly petty for his recent attacks on the late Sen. John McCain. The son of a working-class New Jersey family, Delaney, 55, clearly can envision himself on the debate stage against Trump, and he is eager for the fight.

John Delaney speaks in Knoxville, Iowa, on Feb. 17. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Delaney describes his rise from blue collar roots to millionaire status as the classic American dream. Neither of his parents went to college, and it was a scholarship from his fathers labor union that helped fund Delaneys attendance at Columbia University. After earning a law degree from Georgetown and briefly practicing law, he went into the world of finance and founded two companies -- the first, a lender to health care companies, and the second a lender to small and medium-size businesses. The only thing my dad helped me do was carry in the furniture, he said about the help he received when starting his first company. In 2012 he gave up his business career and ran for Congress in Marylands Sixth District, a gerrymandered swath that includes more conservative western Maryland as well as the liberal and wealthy Washington suburbs of Montgomery County. He served three terms, but gave up his seat to run for president. Delaneys background stands in stark contrast to Trump, the son of a wealthy real estate developer who a New York Times investigation revealed was given $413 million over his lifetime by his father.

But his humble beginnings arent the only area where he could be a foil for Trump. Conservative columnist George Will recently wrote that Democrats who want to defeat Trump should take Delaney seriously: He speaks with the calm confidence of one who understands, as the man he hopes to displace does not, that the lungs are not the seat of wisdom.

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Delaney may not be the loudest person in the room, but he says he wouldnt hesitate to punch back if hes given the opportunity to run against Trump.

Listen, bullies are weak, he said. Theyre totally weak. They have insecurities. Whenever theres a fight, theyre the first to the doors, and I think Trump is that way, which is why he avoided serving in Vietnam because of his bunions and all that garbage, right? Hes not really a tough guy.

Delaney has seized on Trumps continued feud with the late senator and war hero McCain to underline his case about the presidents temperament. He issued a statement after Trumps weekend twitter attacks, describing the president as unfit for the office of the presidency and a stain on our nation. Trump is not decent, and doesnt have a moral compass, Delaney said to Yahoo News. Hes lawless, hes attacking the separation of powers.

Theres no reason to doubt Delaneys sincere disdain for Trump, but his new emphasis may reflect a reality about the 2020 Democratic race: After 20 months of campaigning on policy issues with little support to show for it, Delaney needs a new tack. His task now will be to convince Democratic voters not just how different he is from Trump  but that he is the one who can beat him.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:A pair of Jet Blue pilots, as well as the airline itself, are being sued by two flight attendants who say the pilots drugged and raped them during a layover in Puerto Rico last year. According to the lawsuit, a pilot told one of the women, "Thank you for making my fantasy come true."

The lawsuit, filed earlier this week in the Eastern District Court, details how the two plaintiffsidentified as "Jane Doe #1" and "Jane Doe #2" plus another flight attendant, met two pilots, Eric Johnson and Dan Watson, on a San Juan beach on May 9th. Johnson allegedly gave a can of beer one of the flight attendants, who shared it with the other women. "The beer was laced with a drug, and after that point, the rest of the night became a blur for Doe # 1, Doe # 2 and the other crewmember," the lawsuit says. "Plaintiff Doe # 1 did not remember when or how, but the group left the beach and headed back" to the Intercontinental Hotel. "Plaintiff, in a haze from being drugged, next became aware that she was in bed with Defendant Johnson and her fellow crewmembers."

While describing the rape in the lawsuit, the woman said also "felt the influence of the drug that Defendant Johnson laced the beer with," and she "was unable to react to the situation, but was simply aware that it was happening. Plaintiffs flashes of memory included Defendant Johnson having sexual intercourse with the other crewmember who was also under the influence of the drugs." Johnson allegedly told her, "Thank you for making my fantasy come true."

After worrying that she might have been exposed to a sexually transmitted disease, the plaintiff got tested and found she had HPV; the lawsuit states that Johnson "intentionally gave" her HPV.

The lawsuit says the three women were were nauseous and vomiting throughout the night. The other plaintiff said that the pilots drugged her "and intended to rape" her, but "did not when [she] began vomiting which was a turnoff," according to the lawsuit, which notes that the third flight attendant said she was raped as well.

The two plaintiffs say they reported the incident to Jet Blue, but the company never put the pilots on leave or suspended them. Abe Melamed, an attorney for the flight attendants, told the NY Times, "The allegations in the complaint are obviously very serious and what happened to these women is horrific, but the bigger concern is how JetBlue handled it and the fact that no corrective action was taken."

Further, Melamed said, "One of the plaintiffs has continued to bump into one of the pilots and has an immediate visceral reaction and goes to the bathroom and vomits every time it happens. They feel like this is a large part of what airline culture is. It lends itself to these sorts of issues." The two women are suing for unspecified damages and legal fees.

A Jet Blue spokesperson told the Washington Post that while it cannot discuss pending litigation, they take "allegations of violent or inappropriate behavior very seriously and investigates such claims thoroughly... We work to create a respectful workplace for all our crewmembers where they feel welcome and safe."

No attorney information was listed for the pilots.After a 34-year absence, Levi Strauss slid back into the public stock market as easily as, yes, putting on an old pair of blue jeans.

Levi Strauss, which retreated from the stock market after going private in 1985, staged the biggest U.S. IPO so far in 2019 when it sold 36.7 million shares priced at $17 a share, above the proposed range of $14-to-$16 a share. Once trading began, Levi Strauss opened at $22.22 a share before closing the day at $22.41 a share, or 32% above its offering price. At that price, Levi Strauss had a market cap of $8.7 billion.

In an apparel industry that is seeing some top brands struggle, Levi Strauss saw its revenue rise 13.7% to $5.6 billion while posting a net profit of 73 cents per diluted share. Three-quarters of that revenue came from pants, mostly the companys iconic blue jeans, with sales especially strong in overseas markets like China and India.

We believe we have a significant opportunity to deepen our presence in key emerging markets, such as China, India, and Brazil, to drive long-term growth, Levi Strauss said in its prospectus, which noted that its sales in the U.S. has grown at a compound rate of 2% a year since 2015, while non-U.S. sales have grown by 13% a year.

Levis Strauss may soon lose its status as the biggest U.S. IPO of the year when ride-sharing companies Lyft and Uber go public. Lyfts IPO is expected to arrive next week and could value it as high as $23 billion. Ubers IPO will likely follow a month or so after with its valuation anticipated between $100 million and $120 million.

Founded in 1853, Levi Strauss has struggled at times in recent decades against fashion trends that favored rival jean makers, although the companys die-hard customers have helped the brand endure. Global jean sales have grown steadily at the gradual rate of about 3.5% a year during the past decade. To surpass that rate, Levi Strauss will not only need to focus on overseas markets, but also other clothing categories.

Theyve really improved the position of the business, Michael Zuccaro, a bond analyst at Moodys told Bloomberg. Nonetheless, they are still concentrated in pants and mens jeans, which is still a concern.MOSCOW, March 21, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mechel PAO (MOEX: MTLR, NYSE: MTL), one of the leading Russian mining and metals companies, announces 2018 operational results.

Mechel PAOs Chief Executive Officer Oleg Korzhov commented on the 2018 operational results:

Global coking and thermal coal prices remained at a fairly high level in this accounting period. This trend was due to two key factors  a stable demand for steel and so for steel commodities in Asia Pacific as well as occasional problems with supply from exporter countries due to infrastructure limitations. Experts expect that global coal trade turnout will go up 10% in the nearest 8-10 years. India, China and several other Asia Pacific states will continue to be this markets key drivers.

In response to circumstances caused by an overall shortage of gondola railcars and thus stock accumulation, as well as the necessity of conducting stripping works at an accelerated rate to catch up with the lag of the past few years, operations at our mining facilities in the second half of 2018 and early 2019 were planned as to yield best results in mid-term perspective. In this accounting period our stripping volumes greatly exceeded 2017 results as mining and sales somewhat declined. At the same time we took advantage of a favorable market situation and redirected our coal sales to more profitable markets. For example, in 4Q2018 we diverted our coking coal concentrate in favor of more marginal consumers  Japan and South Korea, increasing our quarter-on-quarter sales to each country by 15%. We also redirected our thermal coal exports to Vietnam, South Korea, India and Thailand. Our sales to Vietnam in particular went up by record 400%. In 4Q2018 we also increased anthracite sales to France by 84% and Germany by 110%.

By early 2019, the railcar situation stabilized, which enabled us to start decreasing our accumulated coal product stocks. Our technical upgrade program continues which helps revamp our mining fleet and replace aged mining machines, to ensure efficient operations at our mining assets.

Story continues

Elga Coal Complex has demonstrated significant growth on all key counts. We brought mining volumes up to 4.9 million tonnes (+19% as compared to 2017). Sales volumes amounted to 3.2 million tonnes, which is a 14-percent increase.

At Korshunov Mining Plant which faced a shortage of rolling stock and the need for a major increase in stripping, we decided on a path similar to those of our other mining assets  of redirecting resources in favor of boosting stripping works. Our production and sales of finished products reflected this as iron ore concentrate sales went down by 21%. The plant also reduced sales to Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Plant, which had less need of iron ore due to equipment repairs.

The steel division also demonstrated a minor decline in last years operational results due to major repairs conducted at Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Plant and Izhstal. This year the repair program will continue, but is not likely to have a negative impact on our production and sales results.

With our steel production reduced, we focused on more marketable products. For example, in the second half of 2018 we more than quintupled stainless steel output as compared to the first half of the year. We see ample opportunities for import substitution in this segment and plan to continue restoring our position in the stainless steel market.

We also focused our efforts on producing and selling sections which are currently more profitable than rails. In 2018 our universal rolling mill mastered output of 17 new profiles which brings the total of those mastered since 2013 to nearly 70. Worthy of note is that most of these profiles are new for Russia and enable us to successfully substitute imports. In 2019 we plan to master production of 10-11 profiles more.

Stable demand for railroad axles creates a good basis for increasing supplies of components for rolling stock production and repairs. In 2018 Urals Stampings Plant boosted stampings sales to wagonbuilders by half.

The minor decline in hardware sales (-5%) was mostly due to a decrease in sales of third-party products. In 2018, Beloretsk Metallurgical Plant completed the investment project launching production of import-substituting multi-strand polymer-coated wire ropes, which will enable the plant to expand its position on the domestic hardware market. Polymer-coated ropes are due to replace their imported counterparts for Russias mining and oil industries as well as bridge construction and shipbuilding.

Last years situation in the ferrosilicon market was characterized by good prices and stable high demand. Bratsk Ferroalloys Plant was working at nearly its full capacity, which also led to an 11-percent increase in its overall sales volumes. The increase was noted in both domestic sales and exports.

Electricity generation by our power facilities went down by 5% in 2018 due to repairs at South Kuzbass Power Plant. The three-percent increase in heat output was due to a colder winter and an extended heating period.

Production and sales for 2018

Production: Product Name 2018,

thousand

tonnes 2017,

thousand

tonnes % 4Q2018,

thousand

tonnes 3Q2018,

thousand

tonnes % Run-of-Mine Coal 18,813 20,638 -9 4,341 4,781 -9 Pig Iron 3,600 4,029 -8 872 889 -2 Steel 3,881 4,274 -9 905 925 -2 Electric power generation (thousand kWh) 3,250,599 3,427,430 -5 882,525 625,884 +41 Heat power generation (Gcal) 5,741,320 5,581,204 +3 1,799,234 665,938 +170

Sales: Product Name 2018,

thousand

tonnes 2017,

thousand

tonnes % 4Q2018,

thousand

tonnes 3Q2018,

thousand

tonnes % Coking coal concentrate 7,149 7,942 -10 1,747 1,881 -7 Including coking coal concentrate supplied to third parties 4,258 4,797 -11 990 1,207 -18 PCI 1,237 1,465 -16 245 312 -22 PCI supplied to third parties 1,237 1,465 -16 245 312 -22 Anthracites 1,169 1,613 -28 291 230 +26 Including anthracites supplied to third parties 968 1,400 -31 244 183 +33 Thermal coal 5,290 6,141 -14 971 1,298 -25 Including thermal coal supplied to third parties 4,538 5,404 -16 819 1,144 -28 Iron ore concentrate 1,972 2,510 -21 574 551 +4 Including iron ore concentrate supplied to third parties 140 30 +362 98 24 +301 Coke 2,440 2,686 -9 609 616 -1 Including coke supplied to third parties 697 771 -10 195 196 -1 Ferrosilicon 74 67 +11 20 17 +18 Long rolls 2,731 2,919 -6 621 699 -11 Flat rolls 481 581 -17 91 119 -24 Hardware 622 651 -5 143 165 -13 Forgings 44 45 -3 11 11 +6 Stampings 143 96 +48 33 38 -13

Key investment projects progress

Universal rolling mill: 2018,

thousand

tonnes 2017,

thousand

tonnes % 4Q2018,

thousand

tonnes 3Q2018,

thousand

tonnes % Sales of rails 244 357 -32 61 90 -32 Sales of sections 282 268 +5 71 69 +3





Elga coal complex: 2018,

thousand

tonnes 2017,

thousand

tonnes % 4Q2018,

thousand

tonnes 3Q2018,

thousand

tonnes % Run-of-mine coal 4,923 4,154 +19 1,024 1,359 -25



Mechel PAO

Ekaterina Videman

Tel: + 7 495 221 88 88

ekaterina.videman@mechel.com





Mechel is an international mining and steel company. Its products are marketed in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa. Mechel unites producers of coal, iron ore concentrate, steel, rolled products, ferroalloys, heat and electric power. All of its enterprises work in a single production chain, from raw materials to high value-added products.

Some of the information in this press release may contain projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of Mechel, as defined in the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. We wish to caution you that these statements are only predictions and that actual events or results may differ materially. We do not intend to update these statements. We refer you to the documents Mechel files from time to time with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Form 20-F. These documents contain and identify important factors, including those contained in the section captioned Risk Factors and Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements in our Form 20-F, that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements, including, among others, the achievement of anticipated levels of profitability, growth, cost and synergy of our recent acquisitions, the impact of competitive pricing, the ability to obtain necessary regulatory approvals and licenses, the impact of developments in the Russian economic, political and legal environment, volatility in stock markets or in the price of our shares or ADRs, financial risk management and the impact of general business and global economic conditions.* Murphy will focus on Western Hemisphere after transaction

* PTTEP expects deal to add sales volumes, operating cash flow

* M&A activity picking up in Southeast Asia energy sector (Recasts with comment from PTTEP, analyst, other details)

By Shradha Singh and Nivedita Bhattacharjee

March 22 (Reuters) - Murphy Oil Corp is exiting Malaysia with a $2.13 billion sale of its oil and gas assets there to Thailand's PTTEP and said it will use the proceeds to pay down debt, buy back shares and fund potential deals in the United States.

Besides the enterprise value of the sale, PTT Exploration and Production Public Co Ltd (PTTEP), a unit of state-owned PTT PCL, will also pay Murphy Oil up to $100 million as a bonus if certain exploration projects show results before October 2020, the companies said on Thursday.

The deal between Murphy and PTTEP comes as M&A activity is heating up in Malaysia's oil and gas sector, where global companies pursuing expansion plans are spotting opportunities.

Reuters reported that Murphy was nearing a deal to sell its Malaysian assets to PTTEP earlier on Thursday.

"Like many Asian national companies, PTTEP suffers from a maturing domestic portfolio. To improve its production outlook the company has been on the hunt for licence extensions and counter-cyclical M&A opportunities, with a focus on Southeast Asia," said Alex Siow, a research analyst at energy research firm Wood Mackenzie, in an email.

"This is the biggest oil and gas deal in Southeast Asia for over five years, and supports our view that 2019 is set to be a big year for M&A activity in the region," he said.

Reuters reported in November, citing sources, that Murphy was in talks to sell its Malaysian assets after an unsolicited bid.

Sources had said Spanish oil major Repsol, whose presence in Malaysia is focused on the upstream sector, or other global majors could be potential buyers for Murphy's assets.

Murphy had proven reserves of 816 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe) in 2018, of which 129 million boe were from Malaysia. Those assets produced over 48,000 boe per day for Murphy last year.

The deal follows moves by other U.S. oil majors to turn investment to high-yielding shale fields at home, where output has soared to more than 12 million barrels per day (bpd), rising over 2 million bpd since early 2018.

Story continues

WESTERN FOCUS

Murphy, which also has operations in Canada, Brazil and other regions, said it will focus on the Western Hemisphere - mostly on the Eagle Ford basin in Texas and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico - for future exploration and production deals.

"We expect to generate approximately $1.2 billion of free cash flow at a flat $55 West Texas Intermediate price," CEO Roger Jenkins said on a call with analysts.

Futures for light crude were trading at around $60 per barrel on Friday.

Murphy shares rose as much as 1.8 percent before closing at $30.97 on Thursday.

PTTEP said the deal is expected to promptly raise sales volumes by 15 percent and operating cash flow upon completion.

"This diversified self-funded portfolio will add a mix of production, development and exploration assets that will provide immediate revenue stream, production and reserves for both short and long term," PTTEP said in a statement.

Malaysian state-owned Petronas partners Murphy in Malaysia, which has seen M&A pick-up in the energy sector.

In September, Austrian oil and gas company OMV agreed on a joint venture with Sapura Energy Bhd, paying $540 million for a 50 percent stake in the exploration assets of the Malaysian firm.

In August, citing sources, Reuters reported that U.S. company Hess Corp's Southeast Asian offshore natural gas assets had attracted bid interest from PTTEP and OMV. Hess later said it had no plans to sell its Southeast Asian assets.

Murphy also announced a $500 million share buyback as well as debt reduction of about $750 million. The company had about $3 billion in debts as of December 2018.

The deal on the Malaysian assets is expected to close by the end of the second quarter.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch served as advisor to Murphy on the sale, while Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co was the financial advisor. Jefferies Group LLC was the financial advisor to PTTEP. (Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Shradha Singh in BENGALURU; Kane Wu in HONG KONG and Anshuman Daga in SINGAPORE; Editing by Arun Koyyur and Tom Hogue)North Korea's Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump walked away from the negotiating table in Hanoi without a deal in late February 2019 (AFP Photo/Saul LOEB)

Washington (AFP) - In Hanoi, Donald Trump overturned the widely held assumption he would be willing to settle for an interim agreement on North Korea's denuclearization.

But despite the breakdown of the summit and the atmosphere of skepticism that now abounds, the US president seems determined to stick with his "all or nothing" approach, betting on his personal "chemistry" with Kim Jong Un to save the day.

Trump insisted Friday his relationship with Kim "remains good" even as his aides attempted to paper over the collapse of the high-stakes second summit which concluded last week without even a modest deal on reducing Pyongyang's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

"Nobody in the administration advocates a step-by-step approach," a senior State Department official told reporters this week.

In other words, Washington wants what administration officials have called a "big deal" -- "the complete elimination of their weapons of mass destruction program," the State Department official said.

In return, Washington would ease the pain of the crippling sanctions that have strangled the isolated North's economy.

"It really seems there's an all or nothing approach right now from the administration," Frank Aum, a former advisor to the Pentagon, said at a recent meeting hosted by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP).

"That seems to be backtracking" which "the Kim regime would not be very happy about," Aum added.

It's a position that has taken many observers by surprise given how, in the run-up to the summit, the administration dropped numerous hints it was willing to take a more incremental approach to the talks.

"In no rush" was how Trump repeatedly described his stance -- a position echoed by his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who emphasized: "Weve always known this would be a long process."

Story continues

The administration's point man on North Korea, Stephen Biegun, said the US would be prepared to pursue commitments "simultaneously and in parallel" while suggesting there was room for maneuver when it came to sanctions.

That created the impression that Washington could be willing to countenance the step-by-step disarmament and sanctions relief sought by Pyongyang.

- Trust deficit -

But when Kim proposed dismantling the Yongbyon nuclear complex in exchange for lifting the main sanctions, Trump refused.

"It has very much been characteristic of past negotiations to take an incremental approach to this that stretches it out over a long period of time, and quite honestly, has failed on previous occasions," the senior State Department official said.

In Washington, the new line has been interpreted as a victory for National Security Advisor John Bolton, long a hawk on North Korea, over Pompeo and Biegun.

Even as Washington increasingly turns its attention toward next year's presidential election, the administration exhumed a goal that has long been buried and seen as unrealistic by experts: the total denuclearization of North Korea by the end of Trump's term in 2021.

For Jenny Town of the 38 North think tank, the lack of even a partial accord has meant "we have lost that momentum" created by last year's rapprochement.

"You already see things starting to spiral downwards," Town said.

Satellite imagery analyzed by her organization revealed that Pyongyang has begun rebuilding a long-range rocket launch site it had promised to dismantle, and North Korea's official news agency has now overtly blamed the US for the failure of the summit.

The "all or nothing" approach has "always failed because (of) two mutually distrustful actors," Town said at a recent conference.

The Kim dynasty has long seen nuclear weapons as a security guarantee against what it perceives as the hostile, bellicose intentions of the United States.

"What this administration tries to do is to show that there is no hostile intent," Joseph Yun, a former US special representative for North Korea policy, said at the USIP meeting.

"But that's a tough thing to prove and we're kind of stuck at that, which is why the North Koreans are asking that we go on a step-by-step approach to have a better foundation on that trust fact."

- What happens now? -

So what next? Washington hopes to resume working-level talks as soon as possible, and has reacted in a measured way to revelations about the rebuilding of the rocket test site.

US officials say the main goal for now is to make sure the North Koreans do not resume testing in any way, including of space launch vehicles.

Trump is even ready for a third summit -- he is convinced, as ever, that his personal relationship with Kim will be the difference at the end of the day.

For Town, this represents an "opportunity" for the North Koreans, who "are very aware that this is an unconventional president," seeing as "they didn't have a good track record with the conventional presidents."FILE PHOTO: An oil pump is seen operating in the Permian Basin near Midland, Texas, U.S. on May 3, 2017. REUTERS/Ernest Scheyder/File Photo

By Jessica Resnick-Ault

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil fell nearly 1 percent on Thursday, but held near 2019 highs, supported by a tightening of global stocks, OPEC production cuts and U.S. sanctions on key producers Iran and Venezuela.

Brent crude futures fell 64 cents, or 0.9 percent, to settle at $67.86 a barrel. U.S. crude fell 25 cents to $59.98 a barrel after hitting an intraday high of $60.33, its highest since Nov. 12.

"The market is getting a little hesitant up at these levels," said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago.

Absent news events, the market will pull back, he said. As a result, Friday's U.S. oil rig count for this week will be closely watched as a forward-looking production indicator, he said.

U.S. energy firms last week reduced the number of oil rigs operating for a fourth week in a row with drilling slowing to its lowest in nearly a year, according to Baker Hughes energy services firm.

However, global trade tensions remained a worry.

"Why are oil prices not rallying through the roof? We suspect the sword of Damocles hanging over the market is currently called U.S.-Chinese trade talks," Tamas Varga, analyst at brokerage PVM, said in a note.

The market found some support in bullish U.S. employment figures. The number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits fell more than expected last week, pointing to still strong labour market conditions, though the pace of job growth has slowed after last year's robust gains.

STOCKS RUN DOWN

Crude prices have been pushed up by almost a third since the start of 2019 by supply cuts led by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, as well as U.S. sanctions against Iran and Venezuela.

The drop in production has led to a tightening in global inventories. Consultancy JBC Energy estimated stocks had run down by a "solid" 40 million barrels since mid-January.

That followed a 10-million-barrel fall in U.S. crude stocks last week, the largest drop since July, due to strong export and refining demand, according to the U.S. government.

U.S. sanctions are disrupting supply.

Story continues

"Venezuelan exports to the U.S. have finally dried up, after the sanctions were placed on them by the U.S. administration earlier this year," ANZ bank said.

Iranian oil shipments have slumped. The United States aims to cut Iran's crude exports by about 20 percent to below 1 million bpd from May by requiring importing countries to reduce purchases to avoid U.S. sanctions.

OPEC will likely decide to extend its production-cutting deal with Russia at the organisation's next meeting in June, RBC Capital Markets said in a note.

"With the driver of the OPEC bus, Saudi Arabia, showing no signs of wavering in the face of renewed pressure from Washington, we believe that OPEC is likely to extend the deal for the duration of 2019," RBC said.

OPEC's crude output fell from a mid-2018 peak of 32.8 million barrels per day (bpd) to 30.7 million bpd in February.

However, crude output production in the United States, the world's biggest producer, returned to its record of 12.1 million bpd last week.

For a graphic on OPEC oil production, see - https://tmsnrt.rs/2FiS2y3

For a graphic on U.S. crude oil production & exports, see - https://tmsnrt.rs/2ULQiTd

(Additional reporting by Ron Bousso in London, Henning Gloystein in SINGAPORE and Colin Packham in SYDNEY; Editing by Dale Hudson and Marguerita Choy)A coalition of Lower East Side and Chinatown community groups are suing the city to stop a multi-billion dollar mega development of four high-rise towers that some locals fear will greatly exacerbate gentrification.

Its the people versus the city of big real estate, Zishun Ning, an activist at Lower East Side Organized Neighbors, told a crowd of about 70 protesters. Nings group was one of several plaintiffs in the case that organized a press conference on Friday morning.

The lawsuit, which is expected to be filed in state Supreme Court Friday, charges the city with illegally approving the plans for the four buildings, one of which will be a 1,008-foot supertall, by failing to follow the neighborhoods zoning rules. In December, the City Planning Commission voted 10-3 to approve the application for the three projects  consisting of four buildings by three developer teams, which the city said amounted to a minor modification of zoning rules.

Led by JDS Development Group, a joint venture of L+M Development Partners and CIM Group, and Starrett Development, the estimated $4.5 billion development in the area known as Two Bridges will have over 2,700 new residential units, of which 25 percent, or 690 units, will be affordable, and 11,000 square feet for retail. Two hundred of the affordable units will be set aside for seniors.

The complaint marks the second legal challenge to the Two Bridges plans. In January, the City Council and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer sued the city for allowing the project to proceed without undergoing the citys Uniform Land Use Review Process, which would require a City Council vote. As an example, both parties have pointed out that JDSs supertall project at 247 Cherry Street sits on a parcel that had a deed restriction. It states that the property is to be used in perpetuity only as housing for low-income elderly and disabled individuals.

But the new lawsuit's plaintiffs, which also include National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, Youth Against Displacement and Chinese Staff and Workers Association  are arguing that the permits for the plan should simply be yanked.

Ken Kimmerling, the legal director for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which is handling the case, said the plan should have been stopped at the City Planning Commission.

They should have held hearings about the impact of these buildings, he said. If they had been forced to make findings itd have been clear that these buildings are not consistent with zoning regulations.



(Courtesy of Handel Architects)

The developers and city planning officials have stressed that the projects include significant private developer contributions, including $12 million in funding to the public housing complex Rutger Houses, an estimated $40 million toward to the East Broadway subway renovation, and an estimated $15 million in upgrades to three local public parks.

At a time when projects delivering tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in community investment are being opposed by anti-development sentiment across the city, its important to remember whats at stake here, all proposed after years of community consultation, public review and environmental analysis, and in compliance with zoning thats been in place for more than 30 years," the development team said in a statement on Friday.

Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesperson for the citys Law Department, issued the following statement: The city stands by its review and approvals for this project which is expected to add hundreds of affordable housing units and improve transit infrastructure for the community. We will review the case when we are served.

At Fridays press conference, some protesters expressed a broader outrage at Mayor Bill de Blasio, who many accused of failing to deliver on his promise of fighting gentrification. Among the signs was one that read, "Tale of Two Bridges," a reference to the mayor's original campaign platform decrying the city's growing income divide.

Around 70 protesters showed up for a press conference on a lawsuit filed by an LES community group against the Two Bridges project, a 4 tower mostly luxury residential project. This is happening all over, said Francisca Benitez. pic.twitter.com/ePZDRaiKsp  Elizabeth Kim (@lizkimtweets) March 22, 2019

Francisca Benitez, an artist who is a member of the Coaltion to Protect Chinatown and the Lower East Side, said the Chinatown community has been fighting for a decade to get the city to address the threat of overdevelopment. Community activists have also expressed concerns about the towering presence of Extells One Manhattan Square, a 823-foot luxury condominium that is nearing completion along the Lower East Side waterfront.

Theres proof that people have been asking the city government to address this. And what do we see? Nothing, she said. What kind of city they want to make? This city for oligarchs with glass towers?

UPDATE: A clarification was made to describe the Two Bridges mega development as three separate projects, consisting of four buildings, by three developer teams.Investing.com - Oil prices were little changed on Friday in Asia as traders remained cautious amid the latest news on the Sino-U.S. trade war.

U.S. Crude Oil WTI Futures was unchanged at $59.98 by 1:49 AM ET (05:49 GMT). International Brent Oil Futures edged up 0.1% to $67.92.

The U.S. crude benchmark rose above the $60 resistance earlier this week after the Energy Information Administration announced a surprise crude inventory drawdown of nearly 10 million barrels last week versus expectations for a 300,000-barrel build.

Oil prices in general were supported by supply cuts led by the he Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and non-affiliated allies such as Russia.

U.S. sanctions on Iran and Venezuela were also cited as a tailwind for the oil market.

Traders are closely monitor the latest news on the ongoing Sino-U.S. trade war. Analysts are concerned that Chinese oil demand, which represents over 12 percent of total world demand, might be negatively affected if the trade war drags on.

Uncertainty surrounding a potential trade deal increased earlier this week after U.S. President Donald Trump said hell keep tariffs on China for a substantial period of time.

Were not talking about removing them, were talking about leaving them for a substantial period of time, because we have to make sure that if we do the deal with China that China lives by the deal, Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.

Theyve had a lot of problems living by certain deals.

High-level officials from the U.S. and Chinese are set to begin a new round of trade talks next week in Beijing. U.S. officials are aiming to reach a deal with China by the end of April, reports said.

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Oil Prices Rise Amid Venezuelas Second Major Blackout; Growth Concerns Cap Gains* Friday call to prayers broadcast nationally

* PM Ardern tells mourners "we are one"

* Headscarves a sign of solidarity

* NZ bans military style semi-automatic weapons

* Mass burial begins in Christchurch (Adds report of threat to PM Ardern on social media)

By Tom Westbrook

CHRISTCHURCH, March 22 (Reuters) - The Muslim call to prayer sounded out over Christchurch and around New Zealand on Friday, as thousands gathered to remember the 50 people killed by a lone gunman at two mosques a week ago.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern joined about 20,000 people standing quietly at Hagley Park, in front of the Al Noor mosque where most of the victims were killed during Friday prayers last week.

"New Zealand mourns with you. We are one," she said in a short speech, followed by two minutes of silence.

Ardern, who swiftly denounced the shooting as terrorism, has announced a ban on military-style semi-automatic and assault rifles.

The country is under heightened security alert since the attack, and police said on Friday they were investigating a threat made against Ardern on Twitter.

New Zealand Herald reported that a Twitter post containing a photo of a gun and captioned "You are next" was sent to the prime minister. Reuters could not verify this independently.

The report said the account was suspended.

Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected white supremacist, has been charged with one murder following the Christchurch attack and was remanded without a plea.

He is due back in court on April 5, when police said he was likely to face more charges.

Most victims of New Zealand's worst mass shooting were migrants or refugees from countries such as Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Somalia, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

"We are broken-hearted, but we are not broken. We are alive, we are together, we are determined to not let anyone divide us," Imam Gamal Fouda told the crowd at the Al Noor mosque, many wearing headscarves in support of the grieving Muslim community.

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"To the families of the victims, your loved ones did not die in vain. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope," he said in prayers broadcast nationally.

Tens of thousands of people paid their respects around the country with some forming human chains in front of mosques. Others said silent prayers at schools, cafes and even offices.

Relatives and other mourners thronged into a Christchurch cemetery where 26 victims of the attack, and one person who died in a car crash that was unrelated to the mosque shooting, were laid to rest in a mass burial.

This is a special janazah. We dont do these every day," one mourner said over a microphone, referring to an Islamic funeral prayer.

"We dont bury 27 of our brothers and sisters every day.

The first to be laid to rest was Naeem Rashid, who was hailed as a hero, killed trying to tackle the gunman at the Al Noor mosque.

ISLAMOPHOBIA

Ardern, surrounded by ministers and security officials at Hagley Park, wore a black headscarf and a black suit. Female police at the park also wore headscarves, with a red rose on their uniforms.

In a powerful speech that lasted about 20 minutes, the imam, Fouda, said through its love and compassion, New Zealand was unbreakable.

"We are here in our hundreds and thousands unified for one purpose  that hate will be undone, and love will redeem us," he said.

He thanked Ardern for her compassion, saying: "It has been a lesson for world leaders."

Fouda also denounced Islamophobia, saying it had killed people.

"Islamophobia is real. It is a targeted campaign to influence people to dehumanise and irrationally fear Muslims. To fear what we wear, to fear the choice of food we eat, to fear the way we pray and to fear the way we practice our faith," he said.

Muslims account for just over 1 percent of New Zealand's population.

Many women wore headscarves in New Zealand as a sign of support to the community, and a #headscarfforharmony movement was trending on Twitter.

"We are wearing headscarves showing our support, love and solidarity, and hope that by everybody doing this it will demonstrate to Muslim women ... that they are one with us," said Robyn Molony, 65, with a group of friends wearing headscarves at Hagley Park.

Residents of Christchurch are still recovering from a devastating earthquake that hit in 2011, killing 185 and injuring thousands.

"Since the earthquakes, weve gone through a lot as a city and were a lot more caring and looking out for one another, said James Sheehan, 62. (Additional reporting by Charlotte Greenfield, Joseph Campbell Writing by Praveen Menon Editing by Lincoln Feast and Michael Perry)MANILA, March 22 (Reuters) -

* The Philippines' Department of Agriculture on Friday sought a temporary ban on palm oil imports from Indonesia and Malaysia, saying local coconut and oil palm farmers are hurting from "extremely low" prices due to "dumping" of the commodity by the two biggest producers

* Palm oil imports from Indonesia and Malaysia have increased by 900 percent over the last three years, Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Pinol said in a Facebook post

* The Department of Agriculture also asked the Department of Energy and the National Bio-Fuels Board to raise the coconut oil component of biodiesel to 5 percent from 2 percent

* Pinol did not specify any timeframe for the ban

(Reporting by Enrico dela Cruz; Editing by Tom Hogue)ASTANA/ALMATY, March 22 (Reuters) - Police detained dozens of anti-government protesters at rallies in Kazakhstan's two major cities on Friday, days after the surprise resignation of veteran leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, Reuters correspondents reported.

The protests were organised by Nazarbayev's foe, fugitive banker and opposition politician Mukhtar Ablyazov, who has accused the 78-year-old politician of planning a dynastic succession that would see his daughter Dariga succeed him.

Dariga Nazarbayeva was elected speaker of the upper house of parliament earlier this week after the Senate's previous speaker, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, was made interim president.

The oil and gas-rich Central Asian country is expected to hold a presidential election next year.

Dozens of supporters of Ablyazov, who lives in France, took to the streets of Almaty, the biggest Kazakh city, and Astana, the capital, which is in the process of being renamed Nur-Sultan at Tokayev's proposal.

Some carried blue balloons long used by the group as an emblem of opposition.

But police, including officers in full riot gear, quickly detained virtually all the protesters who shouted "Shame!" as they were bundled off. Public rallies are illegal in Kazakhstan without the authorities' permission.

Nazarbayev, who retains significant powers as chairman of the Security Council, has not exited the Kazakh political stage despite his resignation and spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone on Thursday together with Tokayev. (Reporting by Tamara Vaal in Astana and Mariya Gordeyeva in Almaty Editing by Andrew Osborn)The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in Manhattan is facing accusations of "betrayal" after agreeing to host a gay conservative group whose members support President Trump and oppose nonbinary identities. [UPDATE: The event has been cancelled. Scroll down for more.]

The town hall event, scheduled to take place Thursday, March 28th, will be headlined by New York resident Brandon Straka, founder of the controversial social media campaign #WalkAway, which calls on the LGBTQ+ community to leave the Democratic party. The movement received praise from President Trump, Fox News, and Sarah Palin in the lead-up to last year's midterm elections. But others have criticized the campaign as an astroturfing operation that routinely misrepresents its popularity and relies on Russian bots.

Out first reported on the backlash to the panel after Jason Rosenberg, an activist with Act Up, shared an ad for the event on Twitter. Speaking to the magazine, Rosenberg called the invitation a "betrayal and testing of trust," and expressed concern that it could undermine the movement building that takes place at the self-described "heart and home of NYCs LGBT community."

As the magazine points out, the event features conservative YouTuber Blaire White, often described as a member of the alt-right, who's made a name for herself railing against so-called social justice warriors with videos like "There Are Only 2 Genders" and "Fat Acceptance is Stupid." She's also worn blackface, and frequently interacts with and boosts messages from white supremacist figures like Richard Spencer, Laura Southern, and Milo Yiannopoulos.

"This is incredibly egregious that youd host an event where panelists have used queer slurs and stood behind policies that put the community at great risk, Rosenberg wrote on Twitter. "Stand for something."

Beyond its right-wing goals, the #WalkAway campaign has faced scrutiny for its apparent reliance on fake accounts, and for expensive events that, according to Think Progress, bear all the hallmarks of a "grifting operation." The account behind one of the hashtag's most popular tweets appears to be a bot, and several memes promoting the campaign were found to feature stock photographs of people claiming they'd left the Democratic party.

CNN's David A. Love has referred to the group as "pure propaganda, a psychological operation, while a Washington Post analysis found "little actual evidence to suggest that #WalkAway represents a mass conversion of millions  or even thousands  of Democrats to the Trump Train."

Via @placeboasis, here's another fake account trying to make #WalkAway happen. 16k RTs for "Sofia Vargoros," a bot with a profile pic stolen from -- I am not kidding -- a book about getting rich from penny stocks. pic.twitter.com/FHWPjaABaX  Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) July 1, 2018

On Wednesday, the Center addressed the backlash, tweeting that they did not "support or endorse activities held by groups renting our space," while standing by the decision to host the event nonetheless.

"We acknowledge the diversity of our communitys perspectives, and while we may be disgusted by or reject the ideas some groups espouse, we will not stand in the way of their right to say them," the statement continued. "Our responsibility is to provide space for connecting and organizing across our diverse viewpoints, not to censor."

That message only prompted further outrage and disappointment, including from an LGBTQ+ center in South Carolina, which responded with a Karl Popper quote reading, in part: "Defending tolerance requires to not tolerate the intolerant."

In an open letter delivered to the Center on Thursday, a host of queer and left-wing groups denounced the decision, and called on the organization to cancel the event: "The Center must not cede an inch of space to those who question the validity of trans* and non-binary identities, peddle Islamophobic conspiracy theories, or stoke the fires of anti-Blackness."

No @LGBTCenterNYC no.

Youve been a safe haven for us & this is a betrayal. Allowing this event to happen perpetuates messages of hate, threatens our safety as well as our progress. There are PLENTY of other spaces for them to use. Cancel it. https://t.co/5vK8FOeINS  Javier Munoz (@JMunozActor) March 21, 2019

UPDATE: The event has been cancelled. In a statement posted to their website, the Center said they'd reversed their position on the town hall after "learn[ing] that certain of the panelists announced for this event have made repeated, well-documented past statements that violate our mission, values and the spirit of inclusiveness for all individuals and identities that is core to our work and who we are."

The statement continued: "We extend our deep appreciation and thanks to the community members that have reached out and brought this important information to our attention, and we deeply regret the hurt and harm this booking has caused."(Bloomberg) -- SoftBank Group Corp. has promoted Lydia Jett to partner at its $100 billion Vision Fund, the second woman to join the ranks of a group that oversees the worlds largest technology investments.

Jett joined SoftBank four years ago, leading and managing global investments in consumer internet and e-commerce companies. Shes a board member of Tokopedia and Coupang, the largest online marketplaces in Indonesia and South Korea, respectively. She sat on the board of Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart before Walmart Inc. acquired the company last year.

The promotion empowers me and my team and other women of the Vision Fund to continue the work that we do, said Jett, who was a vice president at the private equity firm M/C Partners before joining SoftBank. It puts another woman in the room. The work is the same work Ive been doing for years, which is being laser focused on finding the best companies, and building and mentoring the team.

With an unprecedented amount of capital, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son and the Vision Funds partners are powerful forces in Silicon Valley. All the managing partners are men, with several coming from banking backgrounds. Rajeev Misra, who made his name building up trading operations at Deutsche Bank AG, is chief executive officer of SoftBank Investment Advisers, which oversees the Vision Fund.

Misra said last year that hes leading an effort to hire more women, including as managing partners. In December, the fund announced the hiring of Facebook Inc. executive Kirthiga Reddy as its first female partner to focus on frontier and enterprise technology globally, working closely with Senior Managing Partner Deep Nishar. Jett, who previously worked as an investment banker at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and in private equity at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., will continue to work closely with Managing Partner Colin Fan.

William Tanuwijaya, the founder and CEO of Tokopedia, said that Jett has been instrumental in helping the company close its billion dollar-plus fundraising rounds over the past several years and introducing his e-commerce startup to other companies in SoftBanks portfolio. She is very honest, the no BS type, Tanuwijaya said in an email. She is always there when we need her and supports us -- whether its day or night, by phone or in person, regardless of timezone.

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Jett said she identifies and vets companies globally that should be part of the fund, and brings her decisions to Son and an investment committee. Sometimes it takes little convincing, and sometimes it takes a lot, she said. Jett was a board member of Indian e-commerce startup Snapdeal from 2016 to 2017, when she was also observing the massive growth at Flipkart. After Snapdeal walked away from a proposed merger with its rival, Jett worked with Son to make the funds $2.5 billion investment in Flipkart in 2017. It was very controversial when the outside world saw this as a market that Amazon was going to win, she said.

Jett started spending time with Coupang in 2015. The e-commerce company is a rare success story in a country where 10 family-run conglomerates control more than a quarter of all business assets. Today, the company says that more than half of South Koreas population has downloaded its mobile app. SoftBank invested $1 billion in the company in 2015, and another $2 billion late last year.

Bom Kim, the founder and CEO of Coupang, said Jetts advice has been critical in guiding the company through difficult decisions. With the first cash infusion from SoftBank, Coupang built its own fulfillment and last-mile delivery infrastructure.

I credit her with a big role for us getting where we are, Kim said. She spent countless hours with me and the company to really understand the numbers at the ground level.

The Vision Fund has dozens of stakes in startups involved in everything from ride-hailing, to indoor farming and cancer detection. Son has said he plans to raise a new $100 billion fund every two to three years, pitching his unprecedented strategy as one that would get the worlds best startups to cooperate.

Theres been skepticism about whether SoftBank can corral its giant portfolio of companies to work together. Jett said the support most investors give to startups isnt close to what the Vision Fund can offer. For example, Coupang and Fanatics, another SoftBank portfolio company, announced last month they were partnering to sell U.S. sportswear and merchandise to consumers in Korea through a 10-year deal. Jett said she introduced leadership at the two companies at the NFLs Super Bowl last year, and from there SoftBank worked to facilitate the contractual relationship.

Jetts appointment in noticeable in an industry under heightened scrutiny for its lack of diversity. Only 9 percent of U.S. venture capitalists are women, and about three-quarters of venture capital firms dont have a single female partner, according to All Raise, a nonprofit advocacy group. Female-founded companies receive 15 percent of total venture investments, and the growth rate of funding to female-founded firms has plateaued over the last four years, according to an analysis by the group.

The Vision Fund has invested about $70 billion into companies, according to a person familiar with the matter. Nearly all of the companies are founded and run by men, according to the funds publicly listed portfolio. Jett said shes focused on working with her portfolio companies to bring in women at the highest levels.

We have not yet done a good job of backing female-founded companies. Thats a focus area where I think youll see us continue to try and source, Jett said. Were backing these big, scaled, fast-moving organizations. If we empower women to be at the senior ranks of the companies, they will become founders.

(Updates with the investment process in the seventh paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Selina Wang in San Francisco at swang533@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack, Robert Fenner

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

2019 Bloomberg L.P.Thailand is holding its first election after years of military rule. Here's what you need to know

Voters in Thailand will choose their next government on March 24  after five years of living under military rule.

The outcome of the election is unpredictable and could reignite tensions between supporters of the different political fractions in Thailand, said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political science professor at Chulalongkorn University.

Such uncertainties are clouding Thailand's economic outlook, economists from consultancy Capital Economics wrote in a recent note.

Voters in Thailand are set to choose their next government on Sunday after five years of living under military rule.

The March 24 vote comes after the ruling junta repeatedly postponed general elections after it overthrew an elected government in 2014. Thais have reacted enthusiastically to the long-awaited vote: Around 87 percent of the 2.6 million people registered for early voting cast their ballots in the last few weeks, according to various reports.

Several political analysts predicted that total voter turnout could exceed 80 percent to reach an all-time high in Thailand. But a change in the country's constitution and electoral rules that favor pro-military political parties mean Thailand still has a long way to go to shed the influence of its powerful army, analysts said.

"The rules have been written to maintain military supervision over Thai politics," Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political science professor at Thailand's Chulalongkorn University, told CNBC's Sri Jegarajah on Friday.

Even then, the outcome of the election is unpredictable and could reignite tensions between supporters of the different political fractions in Thailand, added Pongsudhirak. Southeast Asia's second-largest economy is no stranger to military takeovers and another coup cannot be ruled out if violence and protests break out once again after the vote, the professor said.

The predictions

The Sunday vote will determine 500 members of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Thailand's legislative branch. The ruling-junta will appoint the 250-member Senate, or the upper house.

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The election is set to be a contest between three main political fractions: A pro-military camp, an anti-military group and parties that are neutral or undecided about the side with which they would align.

Harrison Cheng, associate director and lead analyst for Thailand at consultancy Control Risks, outlined his predictions for the major party in each of the fraction:

The pro-military Palang Pracharat Party, which named current Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha as its candidate to lead the country, is expected to win up to 70 seats.

The anti-military Pheu Thai Party, which is linked to exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, will likely be the best performer with 130 to 200 seats.

The neutral Democrat Party, led by another former prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, is forecast to secure between 80 and 120 seats.

None of the parties are expected to single-handedly win enough seats in the House to form a government, partly due to the way votes will be counted after a change in the constitution in 2017. So, the 250 appointed senators will join their colleagues in the House to select the next prime minister to lead the next government.

That means Prayuth is likely to remain in office even if the party supporting him does not win big in the election. Assuming the current prime minister has the backing of all 250 senators, he will only need 126 supporters in the House to be take the helm again.

Election meddling

Even then, Prayuth's return to office will likely not be a smooth process, noted Pongsudhirak.

If the retired general assumes the role without a clear mandate from voters and against the backdrop of overwhelming support for anti-military parties, Thailand could run into a constitutional crisis, the professor said.

"Nothing is straightforward in this election. I think there'll be a lot of controversies" even before the final election results are announced, he said.

Thailand's Election Commission has until May 9 to finalize the outcome of the March 24 vote. In between, the current ruling junta led by Prayuth is still in power and election candidates could still be banned or have their votes invalidated, noted Cheng.

Such meddling by the junta is likely if the largest anti-military party, Pheu Thai, is found to be to leading in the votes, he added.

"More radical possibilities include nullifying the entire election results and setting a new date for a national revote, or worse, a military coup that seeks to delay the return to civilian rule," he explained. "Even if the military accepts the reality of a (Pheu Thai)-led winning coalition, it would be tempted to delay the formation of a new government."

The Thai economy

The uncertainties surrounding the upcoming general election are clouding Thailand's economic outlook, economists from consultancy Capital Economics wrote in a recent note.

"Whoever wins, the shift towards economic populism is likely to continue, delaying reforms needed to raise productivity growth and deal with the worsening demographic outlook," they said.

The economists added that, if a civil unrest breaks out, the country's key tourism sector  which generates 18 percent of gross domestic product  could be severely hit. Violent protests could also affect business and consumer confidence, and cause financial markets to fall sharply, they said.

If there's one silver lining for the Thai economy, it is that the new constitution requires the next government to stick to the junta's 20-year national strategy plan, noted economists from Australian ANZ. The plan includes infrastructure spending and initiatives to lift Thailand up the production value chain.

That arrangement could provide the policy continuity that investors seek regardless of the election outcome, ANZ said.





More From CNBC

(Adds quotes from Kudlow, details on successor, background on Willems)

By Jeff Mason

March 22 (Reuters) - Clete Willems, a top trade official in President Donald Trump's White House who has been a key figure in negotiations with China, is leaving in the coming weeks to spend more time with his family after the birth of a new baby, he said on Friday.

Willems, a deputy to Trump's top economic adviser Larry Kudlow, is departing his post as trade talks between the world's two biggest economies drag on past the initial goal of a deal by the end of March.

He will be succeeded by Kelly Ann Shaw, currently Trump's senior director for international trade, investment and development, Kudlow said.

"As my top international deputy, Clete has helped the president change the global conversation on trade and make exceptional progress in negotiations with China, the EU, Korea, and reform of the international trading system," Kudlow said in a statement.

Willems has been a constant presence during U.S. talks with China, which have faced stumbling blocks over Washington's demands for a strong enforcement mechanism and for China to change its habits on intellectual property and technology transfers from American companies doing business there.

The talks are being led by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Willems, who has made repeated trips to Beijing as part of the U.S. delegation, served in a more behind-the-scenes role.

The Wisconsin native told Reuters that he and his wife had just had a second child and made clear he was not leaving the White House because of any dissatisfaction with his work.

"I love my job, but I love my family, too," he said.

Willems expressed pride in the administration's work on trade.

The 39-year-old lifelong Republican, known for a cheerful smile and colorful socks, got his start in politics and in trade policy working for Representative Paul Ryan, driving the then-lawmaker around their home state and rising from intern to a top legislative aide.

Story continues

He studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and then law at Georgetown University, studying at night while working for Ryan during the day.

Willems worked as a lawyer for the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, including a stint in Geneva, before joining the Trump administration. In addition to working on China trade issues, he served as the U.S. sherpa for the G7 and G20 in his role as deputy assistant for international economic affairs.

He has accepted a position in the private sector, a White House official said. (Additional reporting by Philip George in Bengaluru; editing by David Gregorio)The oil market will soon swing into undersupply, supporting Brent crude above $75 a barrel, Morgan Stanley forecasts.

The bank is now convinced that OPEC has the determination and capability to further tighten the market with output cuts.

Morgan Stanley also sees sanctions on Iran tightening after a key deadline to extend import waivers in May.

OPEC's supply cuts and U.S. sanctions against Iran and Venezuela will push the oil market into undersupply and boost the cost of crude in the coming months, Morgan Stanley forecasts.

The investment bank previously said oil prices were more likely to fall after Brent crude topped $65 a barrel last month. But Morgan Stanley now sees the international benchmark for oil prices rising to $75 by the third quarter.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley say they changed their minds after last week's CERAWeek by IHS Markit energy conference in Houston. They are now more convinced that OPEC has the determination and capability to drain oversupply from the oil market.

"Conversations with several OPEC officials left us with the impression that Brent in the mid-$60s is not where the cartel would like to see it," Morgan Stanley global oil strategists Martijn Rats and Amy Sergeant wrote in a research note on Tuesday.

"We assume that OPEC will extend  or even deepen  production cuts to support the oil market at the next meeting in June."

OPEC and its partners aim to keep 1.2 million barrels per day off the market. On Monday, the alliance canceled an April meeting intended to review the supply deal, leaving the output cuts in place until the June gathering. Members of the pact believe the market will remain oversupplied through the first half of the year, making the April meeting unnecessary.

Morgan Stanley also believes output disruptions from Venezuela will accelerate following this month's power outages and U.S. sanctions on state oil giant PDVSA. The bank cited estimates from oilfield services firm Schlumberger at CERAWeek that Venezuela's production might have plunged to roughly 600,000-700,000 barrels per day this month.

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Comments at CERAWeek from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, also indicate that the U.S. will allow fewer Iranian barrels to hit the market , Morgan Stanley says. The Trump administration allowed eight countries to continue importing some Iranian oil when the U.S. restored sanctions on the Islamic Republic in November.

Morgan Stanley expects the administration to roll over waivers for China, India and Turkey in May and tighten exemptions for Japan and South Korea. It forecasts the U.S. will allow 900,000 to 1 million bpd of Iranian exports under the waivers, compared with about 1.2 million bpd in November.

On the demand side, Morgan Stanley says fears that oil consumption would slow sharply this year now appear to be overblown. That view also underpins Goldman Sachs' view that Brent will top $70 a barrel.

Those dynamics will soon push the oil market into deficit, Morgan Stanley projects. The bank sees the market undersupplied by 500,000 bpd in the second quarter, with the deficit expanding to 800,000 bpd in the third quarter. That will support Brent crude at $75 a barrel in the third quarter.

Watch: CNBC's exclusive CERAWeek interview with Mike Pompeo and Rick Perry





More From CNBC

A former New York City police sergeant was indicted in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Friday for allegedly planting a knife at at the scene where he shot a man in the face, the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office says.

Ex-cop Ritchard Blake, 40, was off-duty when he shot Thavone Santana, 22, in the face when he was off-duty on August 2nd, 2018. Security camera video subsequently showed Blake having a conversation with Santana before shooting him. In the video, Blake can be seen taking a knife from his pocket, then dropping it next to Santana's body. Apparently noticing the security camera, Blake then picked up the knife again.

Originally, Blake claimed that Santana had tried to rob him during the early morning standoff, but the investigation proved that wasn't the case. It turns out that Blake and Santana had spoken before, and were possibly involved in a love triangle with one Debbie Lima. The two had a verbal altercation several hours before the shooting on Livonia Avenue, according to the District Attorney's office.

In a lawsuit filed in January, Santana states that he and Blake live in the same neighborhood, and the former sergeant "attempted to murder him." In the suit, he states that the dispute stemmed from Lima borrowing Santana's phone charger (he says he was at a friend's house across the hall playing video games). Santana apparently came to get his charger hours later, at 4 a.m., when Blake answered the door. He "began cursing and screaming" at Thavone, who "smelled a strong odor of alcohol" coming from Blake. The suit goes on to say that Santana went out to the convenience store to get another charger, and Blake, following him, began "shouting at [him] to stay away from his girl, Debbie."

Blake had his badge and gun stripped of him following the shooting, and was fired later in August.

The entirety of the evidence in this case was presented to a grand jury, which considered all of the defendants actions and returned an indictment charging him with tampering with evidence," said District Attorney Eric Gonzalez in a Friday press release. "This is a shocking offense, especially given the defendants obligations as a police officer, and we intend to hold him accountable for his alleged conduct.

Blake is charged with two counts of tampering with physical evidence, and was released without bail. If he's convicted, he could spend up to four years in prison.

Santana survived the incident, but his jaw has been wired shut since, and one of the bullets remains lodged in his spine, ABC7 reports.

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks in Parliament following the vote on Brexit in London, Britain, March 13, 2019. UK Parliament/Mark Duffy/Handout via REUTERS

By Elisabeth O'Leary

LONDON (Reuters) - British government ministers have asked executives at leading companies to use their influence to boost support for Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal, one of the executives said, as a deadline looms for Britain to leave the European Union.

The request to give backing to the deal -- which has already been rejected by parliament twice but looks set to be put to a third vote -- was made in a conference call on Brexit on Wednesday that was "uncomfortable" and "awkward", said the executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Business minister Greg Clark, junior trade minister George Hollingbery and Jim Harra, a senior official in the UK tax office, asked business leaders on the call to try to persuade the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and other lawmakers to swing behind May's position, the executive said.

A Treasury official declined to comment on the details of the call.

Britain is due to leave the world's largest trading bloc in just over two weeks but has no firm divorce agreement yet.

On Wednesday, lawmakers voted to rule out leaving without a deal, but it is still far from clear what Brexit, potentially the biggest change to Britain's business environment in almost 50 years, will mean, and firms are clamouring for certainty.

Earlier on Wednesday, the government said it would remove tariffs on many goods coming into Britain in the event of a no-deal Brexit, exposing domestic producers to more competition.

But British exporters would face new trade barriers in the European Union and beyond.

Ministers indicated on the call that financial support would be available for companies threatened with closure due to the changes in import tariffs after Brexit, the executive said.

A government source said they did not recognise that interpretation of the contents of the call.

Finance minister Philip Hammond has said he has nearly 27 billion pounds of "fiscal headroom" that he could use to help Britain's economy cope with the shock of a no-deal Brexit, but the executive said government help might come too late:

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"I'm afraid that, for some businesses in our supply chain for example, the businesses will fail before the help gets there."

May's minority government needs DUP support to survive - but the DUP's 10 lawmakers oppose her Brexit plan.

They say May's deal opens the possibility of Northern Ireland, which shares a land border with EU member Ireland, being treated differently from the rest of the United Kingdom.

On the call, a Northern Irish beef farmer said he sent meat across the Irish border to be processed in the Irish Republic before shipment to Britain. After a no-deal Brexit, that meat risked being subject tariffs each time it crossed the border.

Hollingbery, the junior trade minister, described the situation as "sub-optimal", and there was an awkward silence, the executive said.

(The story corrects to show, in paragraph 10, that the government source who did not recognise interpretation of the call was referring to financial support for companies, not to efforts to win over lawmakers. )

(Reporting by Elisabeth O'Leary; additional reporting by William James; Editing by William Schomberg, Georgina Prodhan and Kevin Liffey)GREENWICH, Conn. - March 21, 2019 - XPO Logistics, Inc. (XPO), a leading global provider of transportation and logistics solutions, has been named by Forbes magazine as one of the Forbes 50 best companies to work for in Spain. Employees from the 900 largest companies in Spain were independently surveyed about their company`s culture, work environment, human resources policies and professional development opportunities.

Malcolm Wilson, chief executive officer of XPO Logistics Europe, said, "We`re honored to be recognized for the quality of our culture, particularly as it reflects the voice of our employees. We never forget that our talented people are the most important reason for our success."

XPO has been named one of the World`s Most Admired Companies by Fortune magazine for two consecutive years and is ranked first in its category for 2019. In the UK, Glassdoor has ranked XPO as one of the top three Best Places to Work and one of the top 20 companies with the best workplace culture and leadership.

About XPO Logistics

XPO Logistics, Inc. (XPO) is a top ten global logistics provider of cutting-edge supply chain solutions to the most successful companies in the world. The company operates as a highly integrated network of people, technology and physical assets in 32 countries, with 1,535 locations and more than 100,000 employees. XPO uses its network to help more than 50,000 customers manage their goods most efficiently throughout their supply chains. XPO`s corporate headquarters is in Greenwich, Conn., USA, and its European headquarters is in Lyon, France. xpo.com

Contact





XPO Logistics, Inc.

Erin Kurtz

+1-203-489-1586

erin.kurtz@xpo.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: XPO Logistics, Inc. via GlobeNewswire

HUG#2239286

A soaking wet sheep was rescued after it was found tied up to a tree in a park in Brooklyn, and police don't have any idea what it was doing there.

According to Farm Sanctuary, the rescue group who adopted the animal today, the "dirty, overgrown, matted white" sheep was corralled by NYPD officers after someone reported finding him tethered to a tree in Coney Island Creek Park on Thursday around 9:45 p.m. He was initially taken to Animal Care Centers of NYC (ACC) in Manhattan.

Farm Sanctuarys Emergency Rescue Team, with help from frequent rescue partner, Tracey Stewart, picked up the sheep this morning. They took him to Cornell Universitys Nemo Farm Animal Hospital for a full medical exam before heading to Farm Sanctuarys 300-acre shelter for abused and neglected farm animals in Watkins Glen.

"Farm animals like this sheep do not belong in New York City, and until we stop viewing living, feeling animals as unfeeling commodities, they will continue to be commoditized and transported into the city, where they will suffer terrible stress and cruelty," said Farm Sanctuary National Shelter Director Susie Coston. "Science has shown that sheep, and all farm animals, are emotionally and cognitively complex individuals."

They add that this is at least the fifth incident involving a farm animal in NYC in the last week or so (and Stewart's second animal rescue this week as well), including a "loose lamb" who was seen darting along the Gowanus Expressway and a brown baby cow who was found running near the Major Deegan Expressway. Back in 2014, a wayward sheep was found roaming on the Metro-North tracks as well.

In the past, animal remains, including parts of goats, have been found around various NYC parks. Some of those incidents have been linked to Santeria rituals.Turkmenistan's president has pardoned 2,028 prisoners, state media reported.



Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov was quoted March 21 as saying that the amnesty was linked to the Norouz new year holiday.

Berdymukhammedov, an authoritarian ruler who controls all aspects of Turkmen society, has issued such decrees several times a year, usually on the eve of state holidays.



His predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, issued similar amnesty decrees once a year during Ramadan.



Norouz is the pre-Islamic Persian New Year celebration of spring that starts on the vernal equinox, which usually occurs around March 20. It is marked in many countries in Western and Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Black Sea Basin, and the Balkans.



Berdymukhammedov's previous act of clemency, announced in December, pardoned 796 inmates to mark the International Day of Neutrality.



Turkmenistan has been recognized by the United Nations as a permanently neutral state since December 1995.



Such acts of clemency usually do not cover political prisoners.

With reporting by turkmenistan.gov.tmA lease between the city of Colorado Springs and Amazon shows that the online giant has bigger plans for the Springs, including the conversion of a temporary facility that opened in November into a permanent delivery station that could employ several hundred workers.

The lease, that was signed in August and began Sept. 1, allows Amazon to use a site at the Colorado Springs Airport for erecting, furnishing, equipping and maintaining a modular delivery center for receiving, assembling, shipping, distributing, preparing and selling products, materials, food, grocery and liquor items. The property is south of the airports passenger terminal near rental car facilities.

Amazons expansion to the Springs comes as the company grows its footprint across Colorado and nationwide to get merchandise to customers more quickly, sometimes within two hours. To speed deliveries in Colorado, the company opened a robot-aided distribution center in Thornton last summer with plans for up to 1,500 employees.

Amazon employs more than 2,000 statewide at the Thornton center, a sorting center near Denver International Airport, another delivery station in Aurora, an engineering operation in Boulder focused on digital advertising and cloud computing, and a retail store in Park Meadows mall.

The Gazette obtained the new information through a Colorado Open Records Act request for the lease, which covers 4 acres at 7704 Milton E. Proby Parkway, where Amazon.com Services opened a 17,000-square-foot temporary facility in November with 150 employees. Amazon is paying $10,000 a month for the land through March 31, 2020.

Amazon opened the temporary station at the airport as the final step in delivering merchandise to customers through either companies or individuals under contract to make deliveries for Amazon, spokeswoman Amanda Ip told The Gazette in November. She declined then to discuss plans for a permanent facility.

However, a paragraph in the lease allows Amazon to extend the lease for two years if it signs a lease or development agreement for a new facility of at least 50,000 square feet in the airports Peak Innovation Business Park.

The citys Planning & Community Development Department approved plans last month from TC Pursuit Services for a 66,780-square-foot building in the business park at 4303 Grinnell Blvd. that is listed as a proposed delivery station. A building permit is pending.

TC Pursuit Services is in real estate giant Trammell Crow Co.s downtown Denver office. Trammell Crow has marketed and developed property around the nation where Amazon has built distribution centers, including a 2.4-million-square-foot facility on 80 acres in Thornton.

Shone Jemmott, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in an email she could not confirm the companys expansion plans.

Jeff Greene, chief of staff for Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers, declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement on the temporary delivery station and the project in the business park.

The proposed delivery station would be built on one of two parcels in Peak Innovation Business Park that the Colorado Springs City Council agreed in November to sell to a Fortune 500 company for a pair of warehouse-distribution facilities that would generate a significant number of jobs, according to information presented to council members. During discussion of the sale, Councilman Bill Murray referenced Amazon as a possible user of the distribution facilities.

No plans have been submitted for the second, larger parcel in the park.A motion to hire two employees who have been temporarily in charge of Harrison School District 2 as dual superintendents failed Thursday night on a 2-2 vote of the Board of Education.

A no-consensus vote died on the table, so well go back to deliberations, board President Steve Seibert told a stunned audience expecting to hear who would become the next leaders of the Pikes Peak region's fourth-largest school district.

The five-member board has one vacant seat, following the departure of Josh Hitchcock which was announced at the Nov. 15 meeting.

Two long-standing members, Seibert and board Vice President Linda Pugh, voted yes to offer the states first dual-superintendent model of leadership to Wendy Birhanzel and John Rogerson.

Two newer members, Jeannie Orozco and Kelley Pomis, voted no.

Birhanzel and Rogerson, who were made co-chief operating officers nine months ago following the May departure of the former superintendent, remain in those jobs, with their contracts running through June, Seibert said.

Board members now will identify the next steps, he said.

Elizabeth Domangue, an assistant professor at the University of Northern Colorado, is the third finalist.

All three finalists named earlier this month following a community forum with five top candidates have worked in Harrison D-2.

Birhanzel was the curriculum, instruction and assessment officer, and Rogerson had been principal of Fox Meadow Middle School before being promoted last summer as interim district leaders.

Domangue had worked in D-2 for eight years, including as principal at Panorama Middle School, before leaving last fall for the university.

Board members said Thursday that the decision has been difficult and not one they take lightly.

We deliberated their skills, backgrounds and achievements. There was very little that separated all three of them, Seibert said. They all have areas of growth, areas of opportunity and strengths.

Neither Pomis nor Orozoco explained why they opposed hiring Birhanzel and Rogerson, or who they preferred instead.At least 111 positions, including teachers and administrators, could be eliminated next school year as a consequence of this years large enrollment decline, the seven-member Colorado Springs School District 11 Board of Education was told Thursday.

A preliminary 2019-20 budget for the Pikes Peak regions largest public school district proposes eliminating 35 elementary school teachers, 20 high school teachers, nine middle school teachers, six administrators, three assistant principals and other staff.

Most, but not all, of the teaching positions will be cut through attrition, Deputy Superintendent and Chief Financial Officer Glenn Gustafson said during his preliminary budget presentation to the board at the work session.

"Everybody is going to be impacted by this; there are no sacred cows," said Superintendent Michael Thomas.

Also on the table is closing two alternative programs at the Roy J. Wasson Academic Campus  Springs Community Night School and Tesla Middle School, restructuring school library media support, increasing busing radiuses and taking other measures to trim at least $9 million and as much as $11 million from the budget that takes effect July 1.

That equates to 3 percent to 4 percent of the districts general operating budget, which is normally around $220 million, Gustafson said.

Youre going to see some depressing stuff, some challenges for the district, but Id like you to look at it as how do we use this to realign the resources to drive the direction for the future, he said.

No decisions have been set in stone at this point, said Thomas, who took over leadership of the district on July 1. Board members will analyze, discuss and hash out a new budget through May.

This is our first conversation with the board to understand the priorities and will of the board, and also hear from leadership as well as our staff representatives to formulate what will become our proposed budget, Thomas said.

While rumors have been swirling for weeks, as some employees received letters from administrators about impending layoffs and program reductions, Thursday was the first time specifics were made public.

Were not choosing between something thats good and something thats bad, were choosing between something thats good and something thats good, Thomas told board members. We just cannot do all of the things we want to do.

Enrollment in D-11 has been declining for years, but this years drop of 1,032 students, according to the Colorado Department of Education official October headcount, was the largest ever. Typical losses in recent years have been 300 to 400 students, Gustafson said.

A loss of 723 students is projected for next school year, he said.

Officials have cited lower birth rates, aging demographics, little to no new home building in its boundaries and state-authorized charter schools in D-11 boundaries enrolling more than 4,000 students as reasons for the trend.

The amount of teachers has not decreased proportionately to match enrollment decreases, Gustafson said, leading to smaller-than-average class sizes.

Board member Mary Coleman said she wants the district to be sensitive to the fact that some people will lose their jobs, which could be a hardship.

Thomas said district leaders are aware that "people are behind these conversations, and we need to keep integrity high and support staff through these challenging times."

While D-11 voters approved a $42 million mill levy override in November 2017, that money cannot be used to balance the budget; its earmarked for specific uses, such as capital projects, increasing district security measures and improving technology, officials said.

D-11 is creating a new strategic plan, which should be finalized in May. Proposed budget cuts, as well as proposed program additions totaling $1.5 million, were based on investing in programs that will increase enrollment and improve student achievement, according to the presentation.

Gustafson said he sees a great path forward as the district creates a new direction and already has seen academic improvements this year, reducing the number of schools on the two lowest rungs of achievement from 14 to three.

Weve got to make some investments to turn the path to be a viable district, the best Colorado Springs district, he said.

Questions are being answered at https://www.d11.org/cms/lib/CO02201641/Centricity/Domain/181/BudgetFAQs.pdf.Yes, I found a better job

Yes, but I'm still looking for a new job

Yes, I retired

Yes, I started my own business

No, I like my current job

No, but I'm currently looking for a new job

Vote

View ResultsFormer Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper says he would suspend the federal death penalty if elected president and he accused President Donald Trump of fanning the flames of hatred.

Hickenlooper made his remarks during a CNN Town Hall broadcast from Atlanta on Wednesday night.

The 67-year-old Democrat declared that health care should be a right, not a privilege  its a position hes championed since the early 1970s  and described how his collaborative approach as governor yielded strict regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, drawing cheers when he said the White House should be occupied by someone who understands science.

He also called his face blindness  a medical condition called prosopagnosia that impairs the ability to recognize familiar faces  a blessing, saying its encouraged him to greet everyone he meets as an old friend.

But it was a quip about women presidential candidates and a lengthy description of the time he took his mother to an X-rated movie that appeared to strike a chord with viewers.

The affable former brewpub owner cut a mostly centrist path as he responded for an hour to questions from the audience and host Dana Bash, CNNs chief political correspondent.

Hickenlooper used some questions as an opportunity to tell stories about tackling problems as Denvers mayor and when he governed Colorado, often involving bringing opponents to the table to hammer out solutions.

He used others to illustrate his unconventional political biography, like how growing up a skinny kid with thick, Coke-bottle glasses and a funny last name taught him how to deal with bullies. In Trumps case, Hickenlooper said hed show how ridiculous he is rather than trying to punch back and fight tooth and nail, which he argued only drives people further into their corners.

Near the end of the broadcast, however, Hickenlooper veered into an awkward pair of exchanges that threatened to overshadow his debut in the national spotlight.

Asked by Bash whether he would put a woman on the presidential ticket, like some of the other male Democrats have vowed, Hickenlooper responded, Of course. Then he turned the tables, asking her: How come were not asking, more often, the women, Would you be willing to put a man on the ticket?

The question drew groans of disdain from the audience and both mockery and derision from online viewers, though Hickenlooper and a campaign spokeswoman told CNN after the town hall that the former governor was merely pointing out that failing to ask women candidates the question amounted to discounting their chances of wining the nomination.

They are never asked that question. Or at least maybe I have missed it, but women I know feel that is a form of discounting, the they are less likely to win the nomination, Hickenlooper told CNNs Dan Merica, adding: People can take it out of context.

After a commercial break, Bash asked Hickenlooper about an episode recounted in his 2016 memoir, The Opposite of Woe, when he took his mother to a theater to see the X-rated movie Deep Throat.

In great detail, Hickenlooper described how lonely his widowed mother had become after he left for college, so when he arrived home to a big meal shed prepared one night, he asked whether she wanted to join him and a friend, who had planned to go see the iconic and notorious 1972 sensation.

I didnt know what an X movie was. We thought it was a little naughty, but we didnt think it was that bad, Hickenlooper said. You have to understand, I was 18 years old.

Saying he knew it was a mistake once the movie started, Hickenlooper acknowledged his mother must have been mortified but declined his repeated suggestions that they exit the theater  she didnt go to movies often, and once shed paid, she was going to stay. On the way home, by the dim green light of the dashboard, he said she praised the lighting in the film.

Hickenlooper brought the same disarming self-deprecation to the other questions, arguing that his experience going from a laid-off geologist to brewpub founder to unlikely politician  he didnt run for office until he was in his 50s  sets him apart from more than a dozen other Democrats seeking the nomination. He also drew sharp contrasts with some of the other candidates.

Although he stressed that he supports efforts to achieve universal coverage  calling the goal our north star  Hickenlooper distanced himself from the Medicare for all single-payer health care proposal advocated by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and others on his partys left flank.

Pointing to bipartisan policies that achieved coverage for almost 95 percent of Coloradans by expanding Medicaid and establishing a robust health insurance exchange, Hickenlooper said he supports a public option but cant imagine doing away with the coverage 150 million Americans have through their employers.

As for the death penalty, Hickenlooper said he used to support it  an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth  but a conversation with a Catholic archbishop and months consulting experts changed his mind. (As governor, he stayed the execution of one of Colorados inmates on death row, saying he was opposed to the death penalty.)

It makes no sense, he said. Its not a deterrent. Its expensive. It prolongs misery. And the worst thing is, it is random. Depending on where that crime occurs, and in many cases whether the killer is African-American or Latino, that has a lot to do with who gets tried on a death penalty charge. And the random injustice of that is something that this country should never stand for.Pikes Peak Library Districts stories of personal struggle, triumph and identity will come to life this weekend with its third annual Human Library event.

Between noon and 4 p.m. Saturday, patrons at the districts East Library at 5550 N. Union Blvd. will be able to check out any of 13 people from various backgrounds for a 20-minute conversation about their life and background.

The goal of Human Library is to create a space for open dialogue between people with very different life experiences, said Heidi Buljung, senior librarian for Pikes Peak Library District. It is our hope that by allowing people to have judgment-free conversations in a safe environment, they can come away from the experience with new perspective about a topic they maybe didnt previously understand or empathize with.

The titles include addict, autism, cerebral palsy, refugee and Serbian concentration camp survivor, and transgender. Nancy Perez is titled immigrant and will be available to talk with visitors about her experience immigrating to Texas from Mexico in 1999 when she was 10 years old.

Oftentimes when people meet me, the dont see me as the image of an immigrant, said Perez, who runs a podcast called Life Cope. But there is no image of an immigrant, and these conversations will give people an opportunity to learn about my experience as an immigrant and create general connectivity.

Connectivity, Perez said, is lacking in todays political and online climate.

Were stuck on...what people in our immediate circle are saying and are less willing to listen to those that are different than us, she said. We can judge a person on their feed or online presence, but thats such a small subset of who they are.

Twitter: @lizmforster Phone: 636-0193Activists rallied outside the venerable White Horse Tavern on a rainy Thursday afternoon in a call to action against the historic bar's new landlord, as well as for the interior landmarking of the institution. The White Horse has been around since 1880, making it the second-oldest continuously-running bar in New York City. It's served as a notable hangout for cultural, political, and social movers and shakers, including Jane Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Dylan Thomas, among many others.

News broke earlier in March that the building, along with several others on the block, had been sold to Steve Croman, a landlord with a reputation for scare tactics, harassment, and pushing out tenants from rent-controlled apartments. Croman recently emerged from Rikers, after spending 8 months behind bars for tax and mortgage fraud, and was ordered to pay $8 million in restitution to former tenants. He apparently bought the properties on the Hudson Street block for $14 million, which includes the White Horse Tavern and the apartments upstairs, many of which are rent-stabilized.

The sale also brought news that restaurateur Eytan Sugarman, known for ritzy establishments such as midtown's Hunt & Fish Club and Southern Hospitality, signed a 15-year lease on the White Horse Tavern. In recent weeks, Sugarman has spoken both to the press and in front of a local community board meeting about not wanting to change anything about the place, save for amending the menu and making repairs as needed. A smattering of New Yorkers are nonetheless alarmed about what the future might hold for the bar, and are already eulogizing it.

Thursday afternoon's rally, organized by the Stop Steve Croman Coalition and featuring a cadre of Croman's current tenants, locals, and lawmakers, preceded (but wasn't explicitly connected to) an "Irish wake" for the White Horse.

Wasim Lone, the Director of Housing Services of the grassroots organization Good Old Lower East Side, kicked off the rally by speaking about previous cases where Croman allegedly harassed tenants with threats and deprivation of basic servicesand that his reach extended to razing businesses, too.

"Hes responsible for gentrifying our neighborhoods, yuppie-fying our neighborhoods, and cleaning out businesses as well," Lone said. "This is not the first business, as we call it, that has been 'Cromanated.'"



A protester at Thursday's rally. (Gretchen Robinette / Gothamist)

Cynthia Chaffee, the co-founder of the Coalition, is a 20-year tenant of Croman's on East 18th Street. She describes the experience as "hell," and claimed she developed asthma living in the building. Hes so abusive, he torments his tenants," she tells Gothamist. "He doesnt give heat, he doesnt give hot water, he doesnt give us our leases. You name it, he does it. Chaffee said that she hasn't spoken to the tenants who live upstairs, but that she, as well as the organization, intend to reach out and help.

On Thursday, a group of local and state legislators, including Council Speaker Corey Johnson and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, penned a letter to the Landmarks Preservation Chair bolstering the recent calls to landmark the bar's interior (the exterior has been a protected landmark for 50 years).

"How can a convicted felon, how can a notorious landlord, how can someone who seems to break the law as a process of doing businesshow can he purchase this building and wreak havoc on more small business owners?" State Senator Brad Hoylman said at the rally, citing long-gone local businesses including Mitali East, Caffe Vivaldi, and Snackdragon, which eventually shuttered after Croman purchased their respective buildings. "We have a lot to be concerned about in Steve Croman and we need to use every legislative, regulatory, and every bit of protest power that we have to make certain that this landmark remains and it flourishes," he said.



State Senator Brad Hoylman. (Gretchen Robinette / Gothamist)

"All we have left of this history is attempts at it, its a hall of mirrors, and its disgusting," said New York City tour guide Charlie Walden at the rally. "At best this will become like Fraunces Tavern... a theme park impression of what history really was." Speaking to Gothamist, Walden cited the likes of Minetta Tavern, which now have extensive wait times and astronomically-priced burgers, that don't cater to neighborhood locals anymore. "[The White Horse] will likely become a $25 cheeseburger place that is beneath places where they hope famous people will live," he said.

An Irish wake, intended to celebrate the life and death of the White Horse, immediately followed the rally at the back of the bar. Peter Carlaftes, a regular at the bar since the mid-1970s who co-runs the indie press Three Rooms, and the organizer of the wake, ruminated on change in front of the crowd. "Why does this change?" he asked. "Why does this capitalistic society change so much quicker than the things that we need, like social justice...these guys get richer and thats the way it is! So lets just celebrate by doing what the Irish do and try to find the joy in every minute of were here right now. Thats what were going to do, and thats it."

He then brought on the Irish-American poet Malachy McCourt, who spun yarns, sang traditional folk songs, and read poetry from the likes of W.B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas, including the latter's well-known "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "I see the boys of summer." McCourt, who is 87, told the rapt crowd about coming to the White Horse in 1953, and hanging out with the Clancy brothers. "Let's have a cheerful song," he said, before leading the pack in singing: "Look at the coffin, with golden handles / Isn't it grand, boys, to be bloody-well dead? Let's not have a sniffle, let's have a bloody-good cry."

While much of the crowd had convened to see McCourt read at the back, many locals posted up to swill drinks at the bar as they usually did. Carlaftes tells Gothamist that he intended for the "wake" to be a small gathering, but with more attention, it ballooned into a full-on event. "What we were doing isnt really attached to anti-Croman or anti-Sugarman [rallying], the change is coming," he said of the wake. "And we were here to nod the hat to what we had here and what we still have in this moment."



(Gretchen Robinette / Gothamist)

The prevailing mood among White Horse regulars on Thursday evening seemed to be that change was inevitable, and that it was more that it was too soon to tell what the imminent wave of new ownership might bring. "[They] will be starting to make ends meet, and what that process entails is not known at this point," Carlaftes said of the new guard. "I'm not sure what will happen, but in no way, shape, or form could it be this any longer. It's just not possible."

One barfly who lives in the neighborhood but declined to be identified tells Gothamist that much of the public outcry has been perpetuated by people who don't frequent the bar, and that misinformation has been rampant. "This is really two different stories," the person said. "This is the story of a landlord, whos the worst landlord in the world according to his history, they say. Then theres the story of a guyyeah hes a young guy, hes a little slickbut I think he gets the mystique of where we are and why this place is unique. So I think we have to embrace that and not be so fearful." The regular added that it's a better alternative that the White Horse stays open than it becoming another vacant storefront.

"We know Croman paid a lot of money for these buildings and hes sure to try to recoup that investment, fair or not fair," warned Harry Bubbins, of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, at the rally. "He should know that well be watching."Because of TABOR, Colorado became one of the best business environments in the country. -- Economist Barry Poulson (Gazette file)Colorado Springs is on the hook for tens of millions of dollars after the city settled a second lawsuit in six months over its shortcomings in complying with state and federal accessibility standards.

Although the city department responsible for complying with the Americans with Disability Act has historically been understaffed and underfunded, Mayor John Suthers said hes confident the city can handle the cost of installing 15,000 curb ramps throughout the city over 14 years. Others, though, arent so sure the city can come up with the money.

The class-action lawsuit was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Denver and settled Thursday morning.

We had no choice, Suthers said of the settlement. We would not have won a lawsuit.

The brevity of the lawsuit stems from more than two years of investigation and negotiation between the city and the plaintiffs, said attorney Tim Fox, who represents the Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center. The center and Campins Benham-Baker represent two individual plaintiffs and all others with different access needs.

Under the agreement, the city must install at least 1,100 curb ramps annually for the next 14 years, conduct a comprehensive survey of all its intersections with sidewalks and conduct yearly accessibility training program for employees responsible for road and sidewalk planning, design, construction or inspection. The settlement agreement, obtained by The Gazette, acknowledges that the work will likely cost tens of millions of dollars.

The vast majority of that construction work could be covered by revenue from 2C, a 0.62 percent sales tax approved by voters in 2015 to fund road repairs throughout the city, Suthers said.

City Council members, who approve the annual budget, have their doubts 2C money will be so readily available.

Suthers confidence relies on several assumptions, the first being that 2C will be renewed. The tax was approved with a five-year sunset and city officials have said they plan to ask voters for another five years in 2020 at a lower rate of 0.57 percent.

If voters approve another five years of 2C, the tax would still have to be renewed another two times to last the duration of the citys settlement.

Councilman Don Knight said even at a lower rate, the tax is still anticipated to net the city some $55 million annually. But its limited to certain uses.

Council President Pro Tem Jill Gaebler acknowledged that 2C could cover some, but not all, of the more than 15,000 curb ramps.

Theres no magical funding source, Knight said. Were going to be looking for every pot of money that we can legitimately, Ill stress legitimate, use to do this.

If a sidewalk near a park is needing a ramp, Knight said perhaps the citys parks budget could then cover that work. But the city must be deliberate and accurate in that approach. The work must be considered on a ramp-by-ramp basis, he said.

But the two-year survey and annual training cannot be covered by 2C. Knight said.

Whatever the other funds dont do will come out of the general fund, Knight said. And theres only X amount of dollars in there.

If voters extend 2C another five years, the work could then extend to the citys residential streets, Knight said. Crews on existing projects already ensure sidewalks and streets are in compliance with accessibility standards.

City inspectors are charged with ensuring new development meets those standards as well.

Were not just going to trust the developers, Knight said. Were going to go out and look at them.

Thats where Colorado Springs failed in the past, Knight said. Now the city is in the painful but necessary position of having to do it retroactively.

This is a must-pay bill, he said. It doesnt matter how you feel, its a fact of life.

Gaebler said ensuring the city s streets and sidewalks are accessible to all residents is the right thing to do and its a better than paying civil fines or an expensive court judgment.

The now-mandatory work was inevitable one way or the other, said Patricia Yeager, CEO of The Independence Center, an organization that advocates for the disabled in El Paso, Teller and four other Colorado counties.

This is what happens when the powers that be ignore the law, Yeager said. Its similar to the EPA wastewater issue where everybody punted. People didnt want to pay the tax, didnt want to do the work, so they just punted it down the years and now were going to have some consequences.

The systemic noncompliance with accessibility standards far precedes Suthers administration, however, Yeager said. She praised him and other city officials willingness to revitalize Colorado Springs streets and sidewalks.

This is going to open up peoples lives. This isnt just for decoration, Yeager said. By the end of the (14 years) were going to have a city where people using any kind of mobility device will be able to get from point A to point B and theyre going to be able to spend money.

Enacted in 1990, the ADA requires governments to provide equal access to facets of public life for the disabled, including schools, schools, workplaces and transportation

By 2015, Colorado Springs and El Paso County had fallen well short of the spirit and letter of the ADA, The Gazette reported. Buildings and pathways were inaccessible to the then-estimated 66,000 people with disabilities in the county. The backlog of instances of noncompliance seems to have grown since then.

The city is moving in the right direction, however, Yeager has said. Last year the City Council approved spending $300,000 to hire five ADA inspectors, an administrator and a human resources staffer to bring the city better into compliance with accessibility standards.

conrad.swanson@gazette.com @conrad_swansonThanks for visiting !

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2. No Nivul Peh. Profanity will be deleted.UPDATE: And the winner is: CHARLIZE HERON. Thank you to commenter DirkMcQuickly for your inspired suggestion.

When the Mandarin Duck came to town last year, we gave it a name that seems to have stuck: Mandarin Patinkin. Now that New York City's newest, hottest birdCentral Park's Great Blue Heronhas gone mainstream (it's even got a song), we figured it's time to come up with a moniker of his/her own (since the two sexes look alike, it's unclear if this creature is male or female).

Here are a few choices we came up with: Gil Scott-Heron, Heron Brockovich, Keith Heron (as a tribute to New Yorker Keith Haring), and Hardof Heron (sorry). We'll declare a winner here next week, and we reserve the right to pick a completely new name not even based on this poll, because we like to live in the moment. (Please leave suggestions in the comments!)

It's time to name New York City's newest, hottest bird: the Great Blue Heron. https://t.co/HcAUGkLff5  Gothamist (@Gothamist) March 22, 2019

Here is some more inspiration (along with a more accurate color of the bird):" " A worker gets a cup of coffee during Vulture Festival in New York City. Everyone reacts to caffeine differently but why? Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Vulture Festival

Most of us can't get going without a morning cup of Joe. But some people need two or three cups before they feel alert. What accounts for the difference? Genetics play a crucial role in the way you process coffee.

A June 2018 report authored for the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee by physician J.W. Langer found most coffee drinkers fall into one of three major groups, depending on the way they metabolize caffeine, the stimulant found in coffee.

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Caffeine doesn't stay in our bodies but is metabolized (broken down) in the liver. The main enzyme in the liver that does this is called CYP1A2. Different people have different versions of this enzyme depending on their genetic makeup and the type you have determines how quickly or slowly caffeine remains in your liver. This genetic variability also affects the binding of caffeine to your brain receptors, which influences how alert or tired you feel after, say, one cup of coffee.

Here's how Dr. Langer broke down the three groups:

High Sensitivity : These folks get wired from small amounts of caffeine and can have trouble sleeping because of this. Their livers metabolize caffeine at a snails pace, while their central nervous systems (comprising brain and spinal cord) go into high alert. Only a few people fall into this category.

Regular Sensitivity : People in this category can down two to five cups a day and still sleep just fine  as long as they skip an evening dose.

Low Sensitivity: These coffee drinkers metabolize caffeine very quickly. They can have several cups of coffee, and even a night-cap cup without feeling jittery or having their sleep disturbed. But to get the jolt of alertness from caffeine that people in the other two categories do, they have to drink a lot more coffee. (Health professionals caution against drinking more than five cups a day.)

"It's common for people to ask their doctor questions such as why they are kept awake by one cup of coffee, while their partner easily falls asleep after five cups," said Langer in a press statement. "The answer is that we are all unique coffee drinkers. Our genetic make-up programmes our reaction to caffeine, just as it programmes our hair colour and eye colour."

Now That's Stimulating Coffee can have an almost magical effect on teamwork. Researchers at Ohio State University found that caffeine made people more alert, helped them stay on-topic and resulted in positive group performance reviews. Those who drank decaf coffee didn't get those benefits." " Ohio resident Tyler Williams selects marijuana strains to purchase at a Denver, Colorado, dispensary on Jan. 1, 2014, the first day recreational marijuana use was legally allowed under state law. Theo Stroomer/Getty Images

Colorado has allowed the legal use of recreational marijuana for more than two years, drawing a number of visitors to the state. New research has found that out-of-state visitors to Colorado who consume marijuana are increasingly going to the hospital due to adverse effects.

The new joint study from Northwestern Medicine and the University of Colorado School of Medicine, will be published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday, Feb. 25.

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"Emergency room visits related to cannabis use have increased more dramatically among out-of-state visitors than among Colorado residents," said lead investigator Dr. Howard Kim in a press release preceding the study's publication. "This may indicate that out-of-state visitors are unprepared for the adverse effects of marijuana use."

" " The results of a recent study show a significant difference in ER visit rates due to marijuana. HowStuffWorks

From 2012 to 2014, the amount of out-of-state visitors going to the ER with marijuana-related concerns rose 109 percent (from 78 to 163 per 10,000 overall emergency visits), while the instance of Colorado residents increased only 44 percent (from 70 to 101 per 10,000). About 1.2 million people per year visit Colorado hospital emergency departments, according to the Colorado Health Institute.

The negative effects of cannabis over-consumption can include anxiety, hallucination, an increased heart rate, high blood pressure, abdominal pain and vomiting.

The researchers didn't look into whether ER visitors consumed edible or smoked cannabis, though Kim pointed out that edibles have a highly variable potency and their effects can often take longer to kick in, which can lead to accidental overconsumption by inexperienced users.

A December 2015 study by the Colorado Tourism Office found a significant number of visitors to the state indicated pot's legality was a major influencer in their decision to visit. Only 8 percent of the visitors surveyed said they actually visited a dispensary, though, and officials in the state's tourism office clarified that they consider marijuana tourism a niche market.

" " Passengers smoke on a bus tour of marijuana dispensaries in Denver, Colorado. Jeff Rotman/Getty Images

"Anecdotally, we noticed that most out-of-towners were in Colorado for other reasons, such as visiting friends or on business," Kim said. "They ended up in the ER because they decided to try some marijuana."

The researchers credit the state's "Good to Know" education campaign as a factor behind why resident ER visits increased at a lower rate than that of out-of-towners, and recommend public health education campaigns for any states liberalizing their marijuana policies. Recreational marijuana use is currently legal also in Alaska, Oregon and Washington.

Now That's Interesting In 2015 a Nevada politician proposed a bill to allow medical marijuana use for sick pets; the bill was unsuccessful." " Laparoscopy involves making small incisions into the body part, and inserting a device fitted with a tiny camera that broadcasts images on a screen, so the surgeon can see and navigate the area. bymuratdeniz/Getty Images

Surgery isn't exactly something to look forward to, but you're likely to dread it less if the incision is smaller and the recovery time is quicker. Laparoscopy (laparoscopic surgery), also known as minimally invasive or "keyhole" surgery, is now the standard of care whenever possible these days. That's because it's just so much easier on the body than traditional open abdominal surgery.

It might surprise you to learn that this technique has been around for a very long time. Pioneering physicians Dimitri Ott, Georg Kelling and Hans Christian Jacobeus are some of the docs credited with exploring the potential for minimally invasive surgery way back in the early 1900s. As is often the case with major scientific developments, laparoscopy progressed slowly, with just some doctors daring to dabble in the practice, although usually for diagnostic, rather than surgical, purposes. Finally, the late 1980s, some physicians began performing successful laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal) procedures, inspiring scores of other surgeons to reevaluate the potential for this game-changing technique.

Nowadays, laparoscopy is the surgery style of choice for dozens of diagnostic and surgical procedures. Diagnostically speaking, laparoscopy is used to confirm a particular diagnosis or to figure out what's going wrong when X-ray, ultrasound and other non-invasive imaging efforts just aren't cutting it. Many painful gynecological conditions are diagnosed and/or treated using the method, including ectopic pregnancy, pelvic inflammatory disease, endometriosis and ovarian cysts.

On the surgical side, laparoscopy can be employed to remove problematic organs, like the appendix or gallbladder, and repair hernias and ulcers. Many patients turn to laparoscopy for hysterectomies and even weight-loss surgeries, and minimally invasive techniques are also helpful for suspected cancer biopsies.

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How Laparoscopic Surgery Is Done

When it comes to surgery, size actually does matter. Laparoscopy usually involves small incisions ranging from 0.2-0.4 inches (0.5-1 centimeter), up to no more than about a half an inch (1.27 centimeters) in length. This is tiny compared with standard open surgery incisions of several inches, or even more! A tube-shaped instrument called a trochar is inserted into each incision, and it's through these devices (sometimes more than one is used) that other instruments can be inserted.

One of these is the aptly named laparoscope, which is a long, skinny device fitted with a tiny camera that broadcasts images on a screen, so that the surgeon can adequately see and navigate the area. The area is inflated using carbon dioxide gas to allow for better visibility when the surgery starts. Sometimes, additional incisions are necessary to be able to insert instruments like scissors or biopsy forceps, but those cuts are also very small in size.

" " Laparoscopy is used to remove problematic organs, like the appendix or gallbladder, and repair hernias and ulcers, as well as to perform gastric bypass. thelinkeGetty Images

So how do surgeons get an organ, like an appendix or gallbladder, out through those tiny incisions? We asked Dr. Gerald M. Fried, surgeon-in-chief at McGill University Health Center in Quebec to explain. "The appendix is usually small enough to bring either into a 10-12 mm [0.4-0.5 inch] diameter trocar which we usually place at the belly button," Fried says in an email interview. "Otherwise, we put the appendix in a plastic bag, remove the trocar and bring the appendix out through the incision. This sometimes requires mild stretching of the incision."

And the gallbladder? "[It] is bigger but is filled with liquid (bile). It is pear-shaped. We first pull out the narrower part of the 'pear,' then as we pull further the pressure pushes the liquid from the part of the gallbladder that is in the abdomen out into the portion that is outside the abdomen, allowing the remaining gallbladder to collapse and be removed. If the gallbladder contains stones larger than 12 mm, we use the bag and stretching technique described above, " he adds.

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Risk vs. Reward of Laparoscopy

The success rates and reduced pain associated with minimally invasive surgery have turned laparoscopy into the preferred surgical method whenever possible. It produces less bleeding, less pain and scarring, as well as shorter hospital stays than regular surgery, according to studies. It's also associated with a lower infection risk, which is key because surgical site infection is linked to higher risk of death, as well as lengthier hospital stays and associated costs.

Amanda Marshall, a customer service representative in Brookhaven, Georgia would definitely choose laparoscopy over the more typical surgery, having experienced both. "Laparoscopic was significantly easier. The only discomfort I felt were gas pains in my shoulders and back immediately following but it couldn't even be considered 'pain,'" she recalls, noting that she had surgery on Thursday, spent the night at the hospital, and was back to work on Monday. "I never had any discomfort that couldn't be managed with Advil or Tylenol."

Laparoscopy isn't totally without risk, though. Often, the surgeries take longer to perform than traditional surgeries, which means that patients are under anesthesia longer, and therefore at greater risk of complications. Other possible problems can include infection, internal bleeding, hernia and/or bleeding at incision sites, and even damage to internal organs or blood vessels.

Not everyone is a prime candidate for laparoscopy, however. Fried notes that the technique is not advised for unstable trauma patients because bleeding can cover the lens and make visualization impossible. He also says that people with extensive prior abdominal surgeries are typically not candidates.

"In these cases scarring (adhesions) from the previous surgery may make it difficult or impossible to appropriately view the abdominal contents to do the surgery safely," he explains. Large tumors that require bigger incisions for removal will also exclude laparoscopy as an option.

Now That's Cool Laparoscopy is poised to get even better in the coming years thanks to improved training technique using simulations. "This is now embedded in all residency training programs," Dr. Gerald Fried explains, adding, "these simulation programs have been shown to shorten the learning curve for the surgeon to become proficient at laparoscopic surgery. Simulation will continue to improve and make laparoscopic surgery more widely available and safer."" " An artificial womb, recently tested with fetal lambs, could transform care for extremely preterm human babies. Children's Hospital of Philadelphia/Screenshot: HowStuffWorks

Premature births are a big health problem in the U.S., where one in 10 infants is born before completing 37 weeks of development inside the womb, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Premature babies account for 36 percent of all infant deaths, and those who survive often experience breathing problems and difficulties with feeding, and are at higher risk to develop cerebral palsy, developmental delays, and vision and hearing problems.

But that may all eventually change thanks to researchers' development of a plastic womb. This new invention simulates the prenatal fluid-filled environment of a natural womb, giving premature infants additional time to develop their lungs and other organs. So far, the researchers have been able to support fetal lambs  whose lung development is similar to that of humans  for up to four weeks inside the artificial womb.

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The "extra-uterine support device," as it's called, is described in a recent article in the journal Nature Communications. The system uses a plastic fluid-filled container called a "biobag" to provide a temperature-controlled, sterile environment. This allows the fetal lambs to breathe amniotic fluid as they would normally do inside their mothers. At the same time, their hearts pumped blood though their umbilical cords into a gas-exchange machine outside the biobag. Electronic monitors attached to the lambs monitored their vital signs, including blood flow.

Dr. Alan W. Flake, director of the Center for Fetal Research in the Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Treatment at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and the study's lead researcher, explained in a press release that the system could make a big difference in the futures of the smallest premature infants. Those babies, born as early as only 22 to 23 weeks of gestation, often weigh only about a pound (0.45 kilograms), and have a 30-to-50-percent chance of survival. And of those few who do survive, 90 percent risk developing chronic lung disease and other ailments.

"These infants have an urgent need for a bridge between the mother's womb and the outside world," said Flake. "If we can develop an extra-uterine system to support growth and organ maturation for only a few weeks, we can dramatically improve outcomes for extremely premature babies."

While more work is necessary, Flake envisions that a decade from now, premature infants will continue to develop inside such artificial wombs instead of being maintained in incubators and attached to ventilators. In addition to saving lives, the technology also could help significantly reduce the economic cost of premature birth, currently estimated at $43 billion annually in the United States alone.

Now That's Interesting The researchers say that the artificial womb wouldn't lower the age of viability  that is, the ability to survive outside the womb  to earlier than 22 to 23 weeks. Before that point, "there are likely physiologic and technical limitations that will increase the risk and reduce the potential benefit of this therapy," they concluded in the study.colorectal cancer with avelumab*(BAVENCIO), conducted under a clinical collaboration agreement between eFFECTOR, Pfizer and Merck KGaA. This fresh capital will also enable company to advance eFT226 into the clinic (FY2018) and discovery pipeline, along with a program targeting eukaryotic initiation factor 4E (eIF4E), which is expected to enter preclinical development in 2018



After this financing, Dr. Elaine V. Jones, Vice President, PVI will join eFFECTORs board of directors. PVI is delighted to further support eFFECTORs efforts to develop a promising novel class of investigational compounds for the treatment of cancer by leading this Series C financing, avers Dr. Jones.



eFFECTOR Therapeutics is pioneer in the discovery and development of selective translation regulators as a new class of small molecule therapeutics for cancer. The companys investigational compounds are designed to restore translational control to halt underlying disease mechanisms while preserving healthy physiological processes. Company also has additional selective translation regulator programs (discovery & development) and maintains global rights for all of its development programs. Our successful fundraising validates the potential we see for selective translation regulators as a new class of cancer treatment and eFFECTOR is well-positioned to capitalize on the opportunity created by this exciting technology, claims Dr. Steve Worland, President & CEO, eFFECTOR Therapeutics.

First, we introduced the MediBuddy+ hospital portal that allows hospitals to eliminate faxes and emails, and raise all preauthorization requests online. We then introduced the CareRanger program where we visit patients by the bedside during their stay at the hospital. eCashless is our next initiative to enable a superior experience even before our members walk into the hospital.



With eCashless, Medi Assist members are able to plan their hospitalization comfortably from home or office using their MediBuddy mobile app. Members raise a request for preauthorization for treatment at their preferred network hospital and also indicate their preferred room type. The network hospital receives this request from Medi Assist online, confirms availability of room and provides an estimate for the treatment. Based on the confirmation from the hospital, Medi Assist sends a passcode-protected provisional preauthorization letter to the hospital. Simultaneously, the member receives a secure passcode on the mobile app confirming the provisional approval.



The use of the secure passcode ensures full security of the transaction. The hospital unlocks the provisional preauthorization only upon receipt of the secure passcode and after due validation of the patient with a valid photo ID proof at the time of walk-in. This significantly reduces the wait time at the TPA desk on the date of admission.



Members can subsequently track their claim in real-time, anytime and from anywhere using MediBuddy.Brief Encounter (1945) is considered one of the best British films ever by those of a certain age. It is based on the play Still Life (1936) by Noel Co...

1 day agoAs of August 26th, 2021 Yahoo India will no longer be publishing content. Your Yahoo Account Mail and Search experiences will not be affected in any way and will operate as usual. We thank you for your support and readership. For more information on Yahoo India, please visit the FAQCopyright Amendment Bill, opening the way for the Bill to be sent to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) for concurrence and, subsequently, for Presidential assent. See here for all the versions of the Bill. In December 2018, South Africas National Assembly approved the redrafted version of the, opening the way for the Bill to be sent to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) for concurrence and, subsequently, for Presidential assent. Seefor all the versions of the Bill.





February and earlier this month with the Committee of the NCOP resolving to adopt the final report by 20th March. Since coming up before the NCOP, the bill was considered inandwith the Committee of the NCOP resolving to adopt the final report by 20th March.



The Bill provides inter alia for accreditation of Collecting Societies; fair use of copyright works; and exceptions for educational and academic activities, libraries, archives, museums and galleries. As with almost every copyright legislative reform, the Bill has attracted both strong support and criticisms. One of the most debated provisions in the Bill is Clause 13  relating to fair use.



According to Mpuka Radinku, an executive director of Publishers Association of South Africa, it is unlikely the bill would deliver on its aim of benefiting the creators of materials as a result of its overly extensive copyright exceptions and fair use provisions going far beyond the limited circumstances described in the bills explanatory memorandum for not requiring permission to reproduce or adapt copyright works. Conversely, Professor Sean Flynn (American University Washington College of Law) and Nontando Tusi (ReCreate policy fellow) argue that the fair use provisions are balanced and will permit uses necessary for further creativity. For them, all creators are also users and need fair access to protected works. According to, an executive director of Publishers Association of South Africa, it is unlikely the bill would deliver on its aim of benefiting the creators of materials as a result of its overly extensive copyright exceptions and fair use provisions going far beyond the limited circumstances described in the bills explanatory memorandum for not requiring permission to reproduce or adapt copyright works. Conversely, Professor Sean Flynn (American University Washington College of Law) and Nontando Tusi (ReCreate policy fellow)that the fair use provisions are balanced and will permit uses necessary for further creativity. For them, all creators are also users and need fair access to protected works.





The fair use provision

Clause 13 of the Copyright Amendment Bill seeks to insert a Section 12A - General exceptions from copyright protection. It provides that:



(a) In addition to uses specifically authorized, fair use in respect of a work or the performance of that work, for purposes such as the following, does not infringe copyright in that work:

(i) Research, private study or personal use, including the use of a lawful copy of the work at a different time or with a different device;

(ii) criticism or review of that work or of another work;

(iii) reporting current events;

(iv) scholarship, teaching and education;

(v) comment, illustration, parody, satire, caricature, cartoon, tribute, homage or pastiche;

(vi) preservation of and access to the collections of libraries, archives and museums; and

(vii) ensuring proper performance of public administration.



(b) In determining whether an act done in relation to a work constitutes fair use, all relevant factors shall be taken into account, including but not limited to



(i) the nature of the work in question;

(ii) the amount and substantiality of the part of the work affected by the act in relation to the whole of the work;

(iii) the purpose and character of the use, including whether

(aa)such use serves a purpose different from that of the work affected; and

(bb)it is of a commercial nature or for non-profit research, library or educational purposes; and

(iv) the substitution effect of the act upon the potential market for the work in question.



(c) For the purposes of paragraphs (a) and (b) the source and the name of the author shall be mentioned.





Canada, US and Israel. However, unlike the US general, case law-generated fair use provision, the proposed South African fair use provision has a closed (but flexible) list of purposes to which it applies. The proposed fair use provision is similar to the fair use exceptions (fair dealing in Canada) in other jurisdictions such asand. However, unlike the US general, case law-generated fair use provision, the proposed South African fair use provision has a closed (but flexible) list of purposes to which it applies.





Obviously, the Bill (including section 12A) is a compromise between many interests and stakeholders and many further voices screaming to be heard. This post is not meant to argue for or against the proposed section 12A. Rather, it is focused on how the provision might apply in practice.





Aims and objectives of the Bill

The Bill has come a long way and inexorably, so has Clause 12A. One of the objectives of the Bill is to protect the interests of rightholders and to promote accessibility to users in a balanced manner. To achieve this, the Bill includes flexibilities that acknowledge global advancements in the digital space.





The Bill also seeks to align South Africa with international treaties (WIPO Copyright Treaty, the Beijing Treaty for Audio Visual Performances and the Marrakesh Treaty).



The main concerns to the fair use provisions are: Theare:

(a) That the fair use provisions are too broad and they would override exceptions;

(b) That the provisions would not protect domestic authors and would undermine the copyright market;

(c) That it would lead to substantial loss of income for authors, book publishers and the publishing industry generally, and

(d) That the drafters of the Bill would have failed to take the three-step test in drafting the fair use provisions and other copyright exceptions in the Bill.

Republic of South Africa



In response to these concerns, the Department of Trade and Industry has stated that (a) the provision is apt for a developmental state such as South Africa; (b) the provision has inbuilt safeguards and tries to balance the interests of rights-holders and that of authors; (c) the provision is informed by examples of other jurisdictions that have had success with similar provision and (e) the provision would encourage innovation to boost job creation. In, the Department of Trade and Industry has stated that (a) the provision is apt for a developmental state such as South Africa; (b) the provision has inbuilt safeguards and tries to balance the interests of rights-holders and that of authors; (c) the provision is informed by examples of other jurisdictions that have had success with similar provision and (e) the provision would encourage innovation to boost job creation.



How could the fair use exception be applied?

Where an author and/or copyright owner institutes an action for copyright infringement, the defendant in such action might put up a defence and allege that his use of such work amounts to fair use and is therefore, not infringing. It will then be left for the court in such instance to decide whether the defendants use of the work is fair, taking into consideration, the circumstances listed in the proposed section 12A.



There are two ways to leverage on the fair use exception under the proposed section 12A. First, where the use is for research, private study, criticism, scholarship, teaching and education etc. or any of the purposes specifically mentioned in the proposed Section 12A(a), and the factors mentioned in the proposed section 12A(b) are present, it may be presumed that the use is fair. Secondly, any use of a protected work may be considered fair use if the factors mentioned in the proposed section 12A(b) are present even if such use is not specifically mentioned in section 12A(a). The next paragraphs deal with each approach.





Purposes mentioned in section 12A(a) + section 12A(b) factors  A defendant may argue that his use of the protected work was for the purpose of research, criticism, illustration or any of the specific purposes stated in section 12A(a). In such circumstances, the court, taking into account the factors stated in section 12A(b) may conclude that such use was fair. Much would depend on how the court construes the concepts of research, criticism and the like. The court may take an expansive or restrictive view.





Copyright Act. See section 12(1). Fair dealing is not defined under the Act. The fair dealing exceptions contemplated by s 12(1) of the Copyright Act have not been subject of judicial interpretation until the case of Moneyweb (Pty) Limited v Media 24 Limited and Another. In that case, the High Court (Gauteng Local Division) stressed that while it may be guided by relevant decisions from other jurisdictions, it must be mindful of the peculiarities of the South African environment and laws particularly its Constitution. See paragraph 103. Some of these concepts - research or private study; criticism or review; reporting current events  are currently recognised within the fair dealing exception provision of the current. See section 12(1). Fair dealing is not defined under the Act. The fair dealing exceptions contemplated by s 12(1) of the Copyright Act have not been subject of judicial interpretation until the case of. In that case, the High Court (Gauteng Local Division) stressed that while it may be guided by relevant decisions from other jurisdictions, it must be mindful of the peculiarities of the South African environment and laws particularly its Constitution. See paragraph 103.





Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada v Bell Canada 2012 SCC 36, where the plaintiff challenged as infringing, the activities of the defendant in permitting its customers to listen to 30-second preview of songs to enable them make a decision regarding downloading the full song for a fee. The Canadian Supreme Court agreed with the defendants argument that 30-second song previews could be treated as consumer research and would therefore qualify as fair dealing. On the other hand, Canadian courts have shown that it is possible to stretch the meaning of specific fair dealing exceptions to accommodate the activities undertaken by a defendant. See for example, the case ofwhere the plaintiff challenged as infringing, the activities of the defendant in permitting its customers to listen to 30-second preview of songs to enable them make a decision regarding downloading the full song for a fee. The Canadian Supreme Court agreed with the defendants argument that 30-second song previews could be treated as consumer research and would therefore qualify as fair dealing.





The point being made from the foregoing is that where the notion of fairness is not defined, the court has a wider discretion to consider everything relevant to the copyright owners rights and the public interest, in the specific context of the facts of each case, before reaching a decision as to whether an infringement occurred.





Now, where the court accepts that the use of the work falls within the specified context, will it consider the section 12A(b) factors on its own motion (suo motu)? Who needs to raise the consideration of those factors? Is the burden of proof on the claimant or defendant? Will the exception operate as an affirmative claim or as a defence? This brings me to the second point.



Other uses not mentioned in section 12A(a) + section 12A(b) factors - In considering the claim that any use is fair, the Bill couches these factors in both limiting and broad languages. The factors are listed with and suggesting a cumulative interpretation, at least for the factors which are specifically listed.



The factors are also listed using including but not limited to indicating that other relevant factors may be considered. What those relevant factors might be is not stated but one may safely presume that a court may more readily admit a use as fair if the use is for the specific purposes listed in section 12A(a) and the factors listed in section 12(A)(b) are found to be present.



Comments

Corollary to the foregoing, nothing is cast in stone (yet) and it will be for the courts to decide whether or not an alleged infringing use is fair. There are arguments that similar provisions and significant reliance on judicial interpretation are what makes jurisdictions like Canada and the US stand out. And that this approach will lead to increased uniformity in access to copyright works. However, while this Africa Correspondent acknowledges that there are benefits to broad copyright exceptions, it is always advisable to provide as much clarity as possible in statutes. The copyright law reform process presents an opportunity to provide that clarity even amidst broad exceptions.





Chief Rotimi Williams. The learned silk had vehemently argued against one position in a matter in which he represented the respondent. In a subsequent matter, the learned silk argued strenuously in favour of that same position on behalf of the appellant who was his client in the matter. When counsel on the other side reminded the court that the learned silk had argued against the same position in a previous matter, the learned silk said, My lords, we have changed our position. As a judge of the law students association moot court, this Africa Correspondent was told of courts proceedings which involved learned silk, the late. The learned silk had vehemently argued against one position in a matter in which he represented the respondent. In a subsequent matter, the learned silk argued strenuously in favour of that same position on behalf of the appellant who was his client in the matter. When counsel on the other side reminded the court that the learned silk had argued against the same position in a previous matter, the learned silk said, My lords, we have changed our position.The system, purportedly a mechanism to facilitate transactions that evade US sanctions on Iran, was established as part of an effort by the three European signatories to support the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, from which the US withdrew last year. But although INSTEX has been formally established with a headquarters in France, it has yet to actually become functional. And this has helped to spur Iranian statements suggesting that the Europeans have not done enough to convince Iran of the economic benefits of remaining a party to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Al Monitors recommendations ostensibly set the stage for addressing these Iranian criticisms. But at the same time, the rhetorical nature of those criticisms raises serious questions about the level of receptiveness that Iran will find among its prospective Iranian trading partners. At the same time, the overall commentary emanating from Tehran may undermine the European impulse to provide Iran with additional incentives and to continue defying American efforts to build consensus around a strategy of maximum pressure on the Iranian regime.

Iranian foreign policy has been more openly belligerent toward the Western world in recent months, and the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution was marked in February by the acceleration of an Iranian military buildup consisting of the unveiling of new ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, submarines, and more. Various public statements surrounding the introduction fo these weapons emphasized resistance against Western regional influence, and at least one Iranian naval officer stated that the armed forces were ready to dispatch a flotilla to the Atlantic Ocean as a specific counterbalance against American naval assets in the Persian Gulf.

Related rhetoric has continued long past the end of ceremonies marking the anniversary of the revolution. And Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the ultimate authority in all matters of Iranian policy, has played a leading role in promoting such messaging. This was evident on Thursday when he highlighted the themes of resistance and mistrust of the West in televised remarks that coincided with the nations celebration of Nowruz, the holiday marking the advent of spring and the start of the Iranian calendar year.

As part of that speech, Khamenei declared that the Islamic Republic would continue to pursue development of its military capabilities and would do so in a spirit of explicit defiance of Western pressures aimed at constraining Irans ballistic missile program. The United Nations Security Council resolution that implemented the JCPOA called upon the Iranian regime to avoid all work on nuclear-capable missiles, yet Iran has openly rejected that provision with one IRGC officer even going so far as to say that there might be a commitment to 50 tests per year for the foreseeable future.

Irans ballistic missile posture was a major justification for the White Houses withdrawal from the JCPOA, but it is not only the United States that has been at odds with Tehran over this matter. France has often been credited with especially strong criticism of the Iranian missile program, even in spite of having agreed to host the sanctions-busting INSTEX mechanism.

The tension between these policies seemingly creates openings both for those who wish to convince the European Union and its member states to exert more pressure on Iran and for those who wish to encourage more conciliatory policies and an expansion in trade relations. But while the Trump administration is certainly exerting pressure for the former outcome from Washington, one might question whether Tehran is comparably pursuing the alternative.

The actual trends in Iranian-European relations encourage such questions. Earlier this week, it was reported that newly-imposed French sanctions had caused the cancelation of flights to France by Irans Mahan Airlines, a carrier that has been accused of smuggling weapons and personnel on behalf of the IRGC. Then, on Thursday, Reuters reported that the French government had issued a statement explicitly highlighting the presence of certain limits on its commitment to preserving the JCPOA.

The statement in question declared that the nuclear agreement does not provide Iran with a blank check for violations of human rights within its own territory. The supposedly rare French commentary on Irans domestic affairs was apparently motivated by the recent news that Iran had handed down a sentence of 33 years in prison plus 148 lashes for the renowned human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, in connection with her defense of women who protested against Irans forced veiling laws last year.

But the Reuters report also underscored the fact that tensions have grown between France and the Islamic Republic, particularly over the past year. Irans defiance of the UN resolution regarding ballistic missile testing has certainly been a sore spot for French policymakers, but the imperative for action against Iran was much more widely recognized after June 30, 2018, when Iranian agents attempted to carry explosives to the international gathering that was organized just outside Paris by an Iranian opposition coalition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

The French turn toward policies of pressure on the Islamic Republic is unlikely to be discouraged by the Iranian Supreme Leaders Nowruz message, which not only reaffirmed the regimes rejection of limits on ballistic missiles but also conveyed a much broader anti-Western message, even seeming to reject the prospect of strengthening Iranian-European trade relations via INSTEX.

Khameneis speech referred to that payment mechanism as a bitter joke, as reported by Agence France-Presse. Furthermore, Khamenei decried the policymakers behind INSTEX as savages and insisted that the European Union had betrayed Iran over implementation of the JCPOA and the reversal of years-long sanctions policies. And despite blaming this betrayal for the economic situation that he identified as an urgent crisis for the Iranian people, the supreme leader also counterintuitively declared that the Islamic Republic had successfully resisted the pressure of foreign entities.

In this way, Khamenei appeared to be pushing for lesser engagement between Iran and the West. His description of European partners as not to be trusted may thus set the stage for more political pressure in favor of purely domestic control over Iranian industries. And this is certainly something that hardline entities within Iranian government and society have been actively promoting already.

The Financial Times reported upon that trend on Thursday, noting that the IRGCs construction firm, Khatam al-Anbia has reportedly positioned itself to fill the vacuum in the energy sector that has been created by the failure of Western partners to enter or remain within Iranian markets following the signing of and subsequent Ahttps://www.ft.com/content/ff6184bc-4af0-11e9-8b7f-d49067e0f50dmerican withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. The Guards have specifically moved to take over for a French firm, Total, after it pulled out of a development project involving the South Pars gas field.

The same article noted that Khatam al-Anbia and the IRGC more generally have long been impediments to foreign investment, and that their deeper involvement in the Iranian economy would only exacerbate Irans isolation. The intelligence network of the Iranian opposition group the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran has determined that the IRGC already effectively controls well over half of the nations gross domestic product.

Khameneis speech on Thursday seemed to preemptively blame the lack of foreign investment on a betrayal that consists of France, Britain, and Germany refusing to make INSTEX operational. But there is a credible argument to be made that Iran could effectively encourage the active use of that system by coming into compliance with universal standards of international exchange that have been highlighted by the European signatories to the JCPOA.

In February, the Islamic Republic surpassed a deadline for adopting the anti-money laundering standards laid out by the Financial Action Task Force. The Iranian parliament had introduced multiple pieces of legislation reflecting those standards and has consequently received a June deadline extension. But hardline entities including both the IRGC and the supreme leader have openly opposed FATF compliance despite it being a stated prerequisite for use of INSTEX, because that compliance would impede Irans financial support of Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.

Meanwhile, the hardline faction has faced little to no pushback from moderate political rivals associated with President Hassan Rouhani. In fact, the president seemed to echo Khameneis anti-Western rhetoric in his own Nowruz remarks, reiterating the supreme leaders doubts about the future of Iranian-European relations. These problems began with the oath-breakers and those who have recently reached power in Washington, Rouhani said in reference to Irans worsening economic crisis, before highlighting the principle of unity across the entire Iranian political establishment, in defiance of Western enemies.New Braunfels, TX (78130)

Today

Cloudy skies. Windy this morning. High 59F. Winds NNE at 20 to 30 mph. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low around 35F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.- Imee Marcos claimed that she graduated as the class valedictorian from the Santa Catalina School in California

- However, a school official said that Marcos did not graduate from the institution

- The CV of Marcos was also taken down from the site of the House of Representatives

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Ilocos Norte Governor Imee Marcos included in her curriculum vitae (CV) that she graduated as the class valedictorian from the California boarding school, Santa Catalina School. However, KAMI learned that this claim has been debunked by Rappler.

Aside from graduating as the valedictorian, Marcos claimed that she had an advanced placement in English, history, and arts. She also included that she attended in International School of Manila, London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Royal Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in London, and Convent of the Holy Child Jesus in England.

Screenshot from Rappler

Source: Facebook

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Screenshot from Rappler

Source: Facebook

You may check the entire CV here.

The CV was uploaded on the website of the House of Representatives. However, they already removed it from the site.

In a report by Rappler, Santa Catalina Schools assistant head of school John Aime said that they do not hold any record that can show Marcos actually graduated from that school.

While the student you inquired about attended our school for a brief period in the fall of 1972, she is not a graduate, Aime said.

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However, the school official did not give further information on why Marcos left the school because they are not allowed to discuss it without the students permission.

KAMI reported before that the claim of Marcos that she graduated from the Princeton University and University of the Philippines College of Law has been debunked as well.

Marcos insisted that she graduated from both of the prestigious universities as far as she knew. She also provided photos which claimed that she attended her graduation ceremony in UP.

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 "Sinok"? What is your favourite tricky question in this episode? Maybe about the province of smiles? Or the acronym? Or maybe about sinok? Check out all of our exciting videos  on KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel!

Source: Kami.com.ph- President Rodrigo Duterte commented over the issue involving former govt officials and Chinese President Xi Jinping

- Duterte believes that the case wont affect the relationship between the PH and China

- He added that the former officials are entitled to file a case since the PH is a democratic country

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President Rodrigo Duterte has broken his silence about the recent court case filed by former government officials and local fishermen against Chinese President Xi Jinping and other Chinese officials.

KAMI learned that the President believes that the case will not affect the relationship between the Philippines and China, as reported by the Inquirer (author Nestor Corrales).

No, Im sure it wont, the President said.

The Philippine chief executive also stated that the former officials are entitled to file a case since the Philippines is a democratic country.

Remember, China is not a member of the ICC, Duterte added.

PAY ATTENTION: Celebrities Who Won't Do Nude Scenes

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KAMI reported before that former Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario and former Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales along with other local fishermen, have filed a complaint against Xi and his officials.

They claimed that the Chinese President and other officials of allegedly committed crimes against humanity. The communication was submitted few days prior to the official withdrawal of the Philippines from the International Criminal Court (ICC) took effect.

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 "Sinok"? What is your favourite tricky question in this episode? Maybe about the province of smiles? Or the acronym? Or maybe about sinok? Check out all of our exciting videos  on KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel!

Source: Kami.com.ph- Anne Curtis lauded her sibling Jasmine Curtis-Smith for her acting in Sahaya

- She also made a request to GMA-7 regarding the roles of her sibling

- Anne made the statement through a recent post on social media

PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed

Anne Curtis unhesitatingly took to social media her appeal to the Kapuso network regarding the roles of her sister Jasmine Curtis-Smith.

KAMI learned that the younger Curtis signed a contract with GMA-7 few months ago and she is now a part of the new teleserye entitled Sahaya.

Jasmine initially shared a scene from her new drama series which showed her dramatic performance as the mother of Bianca Umali.

The post of the Kapuso actress was retweeted by her sister and she even commended Jasmine for her acting skills.

Anne also mentioned GMA-7 on her tweet and she humbly made a request to the said network to give her sister more of that kind of role.

Watched this highlight video of my Sestra for her performance in Sahaya, she wrote.

Hi, GMA. More roles like this for my amazing actress of a Sestra. Love you! Napakahusay mo talaga!!!! she added.

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In a previous article by , Anne got pranked by actor Luis Manzano during her birthday.

Anne Curtis is considered as one of the most prominent celebrities in the Philippines. She starred in 3 big movies last year including Buybust, Sid & Aya, and Aurora.

She is now serving as a regular host in the noontime program, "It's Showtime."

POPULAR: Read more news about Anne Curtis!

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!

What Is The English Of "Sinok? We have included one of the interesting challenges in this channel. Do you enjoy watching street interviews and listening to different opinions?  on HumanMeter!

Source: Kami.com.phThe Federal Court of Canada [2019 C 29] recently saw a battle between two wax seal jewellery manufacturers: Pyrrha Design, and Plum & Posey. Pyrrha Design sued Plum & Posey for copyright infringement of the design of nine of its pieces of wax seal jewellery. : Pyrrha Design, and Plum & Posey. Pyrrha Design sued Plum & Posey for copyright infringement of the design of nine of its pieces of wax seal jewellery.





The Federal Court of Canada, Phelan J., dismissed the claim of copyright infringement, stating that even if Pyrrha Design owned the copyright in the designs, Plum & Posey did not infringe it.





The main questions raised by the Court in this case are the following:

Does copyright subsist in any of the Pyrrha Designs because they are original artistic works?

Are any of the works of the Plum & Posey that were similar to the nine designs so as to constitute copyright infringement?

Facts





Wax seals jewellery techniques have been around since the 1960s. Jewellery is created by transferring the image from a

-existing wax seal tool to make metal jewellery. In this case,

Design does not claim ownership of copyright in the process of making the wax seal jewellery but copyright in the





Pyrrha Designs Creations



significant creative work. The pieces were finished by a process of oxidisation and polishing. Pyrrha Design creations are available on line and in catalogues.





Comparison of some of the alleged infringing jewellery Pyrrha Designs' creations were made between 2004 and 2012. Over this period 300-400 designs were manufactured based on antique wax seals and antique seal tools. The imagery in the wax seals used in the jewellery was not created nor modified, as the method of casting used (lost wax casting) did not involveThe pieces were finished by a process of oxidisation and polishing.Pyrrha Design creations are available on line and in catalogues.





Plum & Posey Jewellery





Plum & Posey's Jewellery was created between 2009 and 2013. The wax seal jewellery was made using Plum & Posey's own wax seals and wax seal tools, and no evidence was brought as to prove that the jewellery was made by copying Pyrrha Design's pieces. Overtime Plum & Posey's method of creating the jewellery changed but the source remained the same, i.e., the collection of wax seals. Plum & Posey mostly sells its merchandise through on line shop Etsy.





Previous Litigation



It is not the first time the two parties had faced each other in court: among other instances, in 2012 Pyrrha Designs filed for copyright and trade mark infringement against Plum & Posey for other pieces of jewellery compared to the ones at hand. This litigation resulted in the parites signing a Settlement Agreement in 2013, whereby Plum & Posey acknowledged Pyrrha's copyright on those wax-seal pieces of jewellery.





Analysis



Does copyright subsist in any of the Pyrrha Designs because they are original artistic works?



The Federal Court answered "yes".



In order to enjoy copyright protection under the Canadian Copyright Act [Paragraph 5(1), RSC 1985, c C-42], the work, wax seal jewellery in this case, must be (1) protected expressions of an idea and (2) original.





According to Canadian case law, for copyright to subsist in a work, it must be a fixed expression of an idea. This means that it must be expressed in some material form, capable of identification and have permanent endurance. Therefore, ideas, concepts or methods are not protected by copyright in and of themselves. In this case, the Court found that the designs at issue were specific expressions of a certain seal image, thus they are a fixed expression, even if the method of creation belongs to the public domain.





C CH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada, 2004 SCC 13 at para 16, [2004] 1 SCR 339, para 28):

Pyrrha's cat wax seal design....

The Court also made reference to the 2013 Settlement Agreement, which according to Pyrrah was evidence of Plum & Posey's acknowledgement of the general existence of copyright in their designs. The Court found, first, that Posey's acknowledgment in that circumstance cannot confer copyright under the Copyright Act. Secondly, that acknowledgment related only to the specific pieces of jewellery under scrutiny in that case. The Court further noted that Pyrrah's decision to commence the litigation at hand shortly after the 2013 Settlement agreement constitutes evidence on the clear distinction between the two cases.



Are any of the works of the Defendant similar to the nine designs at stake as to constitute copyright infringement? Furthermore, the Court found that Pyrrha's jewellery was original because it fulfilled the following three elements(i) the work originated from the author; (ii) the work was not copied; and (iii) the work was the product of the exercise of skill and judgment. Expanding on this last point, the Federal Court noted that Pyrrha's skill is expressed in the following ways: (i) the ability to work with wax to create the borders and finishing; (ii) in the selections of seals to be used; and (iii) in the expression of the seal's image in metal. Furthermore, the fact that Pyrrah used common techniques should not prevent the product from being eligible for copyright protection. The Federal Court also pointed out that the bar for establishing originality is low.



The Federal Court answered "No".



Under Canadian copyright law, in order to establish copyright infringement, the following needs to be established: direct proof of copying (which is not the case here) or two elements of infringement, namely similarity between the works and evidence of access to the work or connection between the two works.



In the Cinar case ( Robinson, 2013 SCC 73, [2013] 3 S.C.R. 1168)



....and Plum & Posey's In undertaking the substantial similarity test, the judge examined pictures of the wax seal jewellery, and the items themselves. Given the simplicity of the jewellery, the bar for substantial similarity was set quite high. In adopting the holistic and qualitative approach, Phelan J. first singled out all the similarities and then determined whether those similarities represented "a substantial part of the author's skill and judgement". The similarities in the imagery did not form part of the author's skill and judgement as it is part of the public domain. Furthermore, the judge found that Plum & Posey's designs were not a "colourable imitation" of the Plaintiff's, as the similarities were more plausibly the result of using similar image sources and then choosing to modify the jewellery a little differently.



Phelan J. further underlined how the original features of Pyrrha's designs relate to the skill and judgement performed in the process of oxidization by Pyrrha. However this process is commonly used in jewellery making and therefore, if held to be infringing, would be contrary to the purposes of the Act, which is to encourage creativity in using elements in the public domain. What can be protected is only "the specific way oxidization is used in each Pyrrha Design in combination with the rest of the features of the specific piece".



As regards access , Phelan J.established that Plum & Posey had had access to the designs prior to creating its own jewellery but that access on its own does not establish infringement: They might have been inspired by Pyrrha in starting its wax seal jewellery designs but Pyrrha does not have copyright either in the idea of this type of jewellery neither on the process to create it.



Therefore, no infringement was found.



This Kat finds the approach adopted in this case very interesting, especially the function of the substantial similarity test, which has in fact the opposite function of finding similarities in trade mark confusion cases, as also underlined by the judge: the need is to assess whether a substantial part has been copied and not whether a layperson is able to recognise the similarities.



The Federal Court answered "No".Under Canadian copyright law, in order to establish copyright infringement, the following needs to be established: direct proof of copying (which is not the case here) or two elements of infringement, namelybetween the works and evidence ofto the work or connection between the two works.In thecase ( Cinar Corporation v. it was established that an infringing work will be deemed to have copied a "substantial part" where "it has recreated a substantial part of the originality in the copyrighted work" and whether the similarities are "a substantial part of the author's skill and judgement". This exercise needs to be carried out looking holistically and qualitatively at the copyrighted work and at the alleged infringing work.In undertaking thetest, the judge examined pictures of the wax seal jewellery, and the items themselves. Given the simplicity of the jewellery, the bar for substantial similarity was set quite high. In adopting the holistic and qualitative approach, Phelan J. first singled out all the similarities and then determined whether those similarities represented "a substantial part of the author's skill and judgementThe similarities in the imagery did not form part of the author's skill and judgement as it is part of the public domain. Furthermore, the judge found that Plum & Posey's designs were not a "colourable imitation" of the Plaintiff's, as the similarities were more plausibly the result of using similar image sources and then choosing to modify the jewellery a little differently.Phelan J. further underlined how the original features of Pyrrha's designs relate to the skill and judgement performed in the process of oxidization by Pyrrha. However this process is commonly used in jewellery making and therefore, if held to be infringing, would be contrary to the purposes of the Act, which is to encourage creativity in using elements in the public domain. What can be protected is only "the specific way oxidization is used in each Pyrrha Design in combination with the rest of the features of the specific piece"As regards, Phelan J.established that Plum & Posey had had access to the designs prior to creating its own jewellery but that access on its own does not establish infringement: They might have been inspired by Pyrrha in starting its wax seal jewellery designs but Pyrrha does not have copyright either in the idea of this type of jewellery neither on the process to create it.Therefore, no infringement was found.This Kat finds the approach adopted in this case very interesting, especially the function of the substantial similarity test, which has in fact the opposite function of finding similarities in trade mark confusion cases, as also underlined by the judge: the need is to assess whether a substantial part has been copied and not whether a layperson is able to recognise the similarities.

prePyrrha. In brief, the OD decision for the CRISPR case was in line with the large body of EPO case law on priority. The case law states that

the right to claim priority from an earlier application a

Article 87 EPC ccording to

is afforded to the applicant of the earlier application and to no other party.





Another radical approach to priority The Article 87 EPC) should not be interpreted as meaning that all persons named on a first application must be named on the subsequent application claiming priority. Third, the Broad argued that the requirements of priority should be interpreted according to national law and US law in the case in question. The 94 page appeal submissions from the Broad put forward three arguments in support of their right to claim priority from the US provisional. First, the Broad argued that the EPO should not be competent to assess entitlement to priority. Second, the Broad argued that Article 4 of the Paris Convention (corresponding to) should not be interpreted as meaning that all persons named on a first application must be named on the subsequent application claiming priority. Third, the Broad argued that the requirements of priority should be interpreted according to national law and US law in the case in question.

Final thoughts





Given the undeniable commercial importance of CRISPR, the Broad appealed the OD decision (T0844/18).The Broad's Statement of Grounds of Appeal (and the Opponents' responses) are a thought-provoking read for anyone with an interest in the concept of priority in Europe.For a full background of the case and the EPO's established approach to priority, seeThe Broad's CRISPR EP patent ( EP2771468 ) was based on a PCT filing ( WO 2014204729 ) claiming priority from a number of US provisional applications. One of the US provisionals named an inventor-applicant who was not named on the PCT application. The EP patent was thus revoked in view of an invalid priority claim.The Broad's first argument focused on the entitlement to claim priority as a property right. The Broad argued that the entitlement to priority is an ownership issue. The Broad further asserts that the EPO was never intended to have jurisdiction over such issues. The EPO does not, for example, have jurisdiction in determining entitlement to the patent or application itself. Entitlement is determined by the relevant national state ( Article 60(3) EPC ). In conclusion, the Broad argued, the EPO should not have the authority to revoke a patent in view of an assessment of priority entitlement.The Broad further argued that "the same applicant" test used by the EPO to assess entitlement to priority, is an injustice in violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention of human rights (Right to Property). The argument was that the right to priority, and thus the validity of a patent, is often lost because of a faulty transfer of ownership. An issue over transfer of a property right can therefore be used to destroy the actual property (the patent) itself. The same is not true in issues of entitlement, where the issue of title does not affect the existence of the patent. The Broad views this destruction of property as an injustice that was "certainly ...not the intention of the priority system set forth in the Paris Convention" (para. 78.).The Broad argues that the term "any person" inandmeans that any one person who duly filed the priority application can validly claim priority, in contrast to the "all applicants" approach normally taken by the OD. The Broad's argument focuses on interpretation of the term "any applicant" in. Does this really require all applicants of the first application to be named on the subsequent application claiming priority?The Broad provided a lengthy discussion on this issue, starting with the appropriate interpretation of treaties as governed by the Vienna Convention of the Law of Treaties 1969. The initial discussion was followed by linguistic analysis of the ordinary meaning of the term "any person" in French, English and German. The Broad argued that all versions of the EPC provide for an open, permissive meaning of the term "any", namely "one or some indiscriminately". Lord Neuberger here entered the fray, providing in a declaration a summary of the statutory interpretation of the word "any" in a number of House of Lords decisions. Lord Neuberger concluded that "the natural meaning of Article 87(1) is such that one of a group of applicants for a patent is within the ambit of the Article" (para. 115.).The Broad further argued that the EPO's interpretation ofin the form of the "all applicants" test, conflicts with the object and purpose of the priority right. The Board again elaborated on why the "all applicant test" does not have grounding in the Paris Convention or the EPC, and is effectively an extra requirement for priority introduced by the EPO on their own initiative.Finally, the Broad submitted the familiar argument that national law should govern priority entitlement, and particularly the identity of the "any person" specified in. National law may be used to assess whether an application has been duly filed, according to the requirement of. The Broad argued that similarly, "[t]he right to claim priority in a subsequent application is a right of the applicant. The status as applicant is necessarily linked to the country of origin, as this is where the priority right arises" (para. 222). US law does not require all of the applicants of a provisional to be named on a subsequent application claiming priority.The reply of the opponents to the Broad's appeal are similarly lengthy. Below are some of the most salient points raised by the first opponent. Opponent 1 argued in summary that the Broad repeatedly conflated the issue of examination of entitlement to an application with the different issue of who has the right to claim priority. The Opponent further notes that the Broad is demanding numerous changes to practice of not only the EPO but also the national courts, in disregard of a mountain of case law. The Opponent thus asks, "should everyone else change, or just the Patentee?"Responding directly to the Broad's first argument, the Opponent argued the EPO should and does have competence to examine priority claims. The Opponent asserted that Broad's characterization of the EPO's competence as restricted to technical matters, as "a miserly mis-characterisation of the EPO's capabilities". The EPO must be competent to determine the valid priority date (and thus whether priority has been validly claimed), the opponent argued, in order that the EPO can correctly determine the state of the art and thereby the novelty and inventiveness of a claimed invention. The reference to Article 60(3) EPC (Entitlement) was dismissed as irrelevant by the Opponent.The Opponent further argued that, contrary to the Broad's assertion, the loss of a priority claim does not result in the loss of an item of property (i.e. the patent), "because this argument pre-supposes that the Patentee owned the priority right in the first place - Patentee didn't!" (8.83). Additionally, the Opponent argued that a priority application for a patent does not fall under the scope of protection of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention of human rights (Right to Property). Particularly, the Opponent argued, the priority application in question did not give rise to a legitimate expectation of obtaining an assert, as is required for protection by the protocol.In response to the Broad's second argument, Opponent 1 submitted their own lengthy discussion of the correct interpretation of the word "any". The main thread of the Opponent's argument is that the term should not be interpreted in abstract or by reference to the decision of the English courts in relation to property rights. The Opponent favors the French interpretation of the relevant provision, arguing that the French text of the Paris Convention is the authentic text.On the question of the applicability of national law to the question of the right to claim priority, Opponent 1 argued that is it is simply not necessary to look into the substantive national law of any one country, and to do so would be unworkable. One merely is required, the Opponent argued, to look at the designated applicant of the priority application.The Broad has also argued for referral of the question of the right to claim priority to the Enlarged Board of Appeal, but will have to convince the board of appeal that that the referral is necessary in order to ensure uniform application of the law, or is a point of law of fundamental importance ( Article 112(1) EPC ).The above is a brief and far from complete summary of the arguments on both sides. Interested readers are encouraged to read the submissions by the other opponents, and the Broad's arguments in full. The Broad certainly faces an uphill battle in persuading the appeal board to disregard a considerable body of case law. The Opposition Division were of a clear view as regards to the merits (of lack of) of the Broad's arguments, given the EPO's well-established approach in such cases. Is the Board of Appeal likely to be persuaded? Oral proceedings has been set for. As in the case of the Opposition hearing, a packed room of interested parties is expected.African Americans More Likely to Be Misdiagnosed with Schizophrenia, Rutgers Study Finds

African Americans with severe depression are more likely to be misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia, according to a new Rutgers study.

The study, which appears in a recent issue of the journal Psychiatric Services, examined the medical records of 1,657 people at a community behavioral health clinic that included screening for major depression as part of its assessment for schizophrenia in new patients.

By definition, schizophrenia is a diagnosis of exclusion: Clinicians must rule out other potential causes of symptoms, including mood disorders, before the diagnosis of schizophrenia is given, said Michael Gara, a professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a faculty member at Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care. However, there has been a tendency for clinicians to overemphasize the relevance of psychotic symptoms and overlook symptoms of major depression in African Americans compared with other racial or ethnic groups.No studies show that African Americans with schizophrenia are more likely to also have major depression.

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The study, which looked at 599 Blacks and 1,058 non-Latino Whites, found that clinicians failed to effectively weigh mood symptoms when diagnosing schizophrenia among African Americans, suggesting that racial bias, whether conscious or subconscious, is one factor in the diagnosis of schizophrenia in this population.

Other factors include genetics, poverty and discrimination, as well as symptoms caused by infections and malnutrition early in life. Individuals from a racial minority group also might feel hopelessness or mistrust when being assessed by someone from a racial majority group, which could affect how they act and how the clinician interprets symptoms, Gara said.

The findings suggest that clinicians put more emphasis on psychotic than depressive symptoms in African Americans, which skews diagnoses toward schizophrenia even when these patients show similar depressive and manic symptoms as white patients.

Inaccurate diagnosis can have serious consequences, Gara said. Mood disorder treatments differ from those for schizophrenia, and the prognosis for these conditions is typically more positive than for schizophrenia. These patients who may have major depression with psychotic features or bipolar disorder and who are misdiagnosed with schizophrenia do not receive the optimal treatment, putting them at risk for the worsening of the underlying disease process or for suicide. Also, the side effects of medication taken for schizophrenia, such as diabetes and weight gain, can be serious.

The researchers recommend that screening for major depression be required when assessing black patients for schizophrenia.

The study supports extensive previous research done by co-author Stephen Strakowski of Dell Medical School on how overemphasis of psychotic symptoms in African Americans can contribute to misdiagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

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Additional Rutgers authors included Shula Minsky, Steven Silverstein and Theresa Miskimen.As a More Severe Flu Strain is Spreading, African Americans are Under-Vaccinated

Its a disturbing fact! The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that a more severe strain of the flu virus is spreading widely across the nation, adding that influenza activity remains elevated in the United States.

According to the CDC, African Americans are a disparate population that receive low flu vaccinations, yet experience disproportionately higher rates of chronic health conditions such as asthma, diabetes and heart diseases, as well as extreme obesity. These conditions place them at higher risk for severe influenza complications.

It is important for African-Americans to get an annual influenza vaccine because of their increased health risk factor, said Margaret M. Khoury, MD, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Kaiser Permanente Baldwin Park Medical Center.

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The most effective strategy for reducing the effect of the flu within the African American community is to get vaccinated, and its not too late.

Unfortunately, many choose not to get the flu vaccine because of myths they believe about the disease or the vaccine, Dr. Khoury said. One popular myth is that getting the flu shot will give you the flu. Its simply not true! Contrary to that myth, not getting the vaccine makes them especially vulnerable to catching the flu. As health professionals, we are concerned that there are myths prevalent in the African American community that might discourage them from getting vaccinated.

Getting vaccinated can reduce flu-related illnesses, doctors visits, missed school and work due to the flu. Influenza vaccination in high-risk individuals has also been linked to favorable health outcomes, including fewer flu-related hospitalizations and death. High-risk individuals include children, the elderly, immuno-compromised individuals and those with severe chronic conditions.

For more information about preventing or treating the flu, visit www.kp.org/flu.Billy James Releford, Sr. Inspired Many Lives

Billy James Releford, Sr., the fourth of 13 children of Levin and Aslee Releford, was born on September 17, 1939, in Wagoner, Oklahoma. This was the beginning of an incredible journey that would touch and inspire the lives of countless people.

Dreaming Big Dreams in Wagoner, Oklahoma was no easy task for a young man living during that time. Billy graduated from Lincoln High School in Wagoner in 1957. The incomparable work-ethic instilled in him by his father, the unwavering love of his mother and the life lessons from Aunt Rosie, who affectionately called him Tunny Boy, created the fire and the desire to succeed in life. These family lessons became the foundation for self-reliance and self-determination.

Billy would often tell the story of his father, a construction worker, telling him never to work for anyone, to have and create his own business. These became prophetic words that were realized when he moves to Los Angeles in 1960. After working at Washington Tire Service for several years, Billy, with passion, hard work, and a lot of faith, decided to start his own business. This was the birth of Universal Karpet.

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Universal Karpet ultimately grew to be one of the largest floor-covering companies in Southern California boasting highly coveted contracts with the aerospace industry, the Veterans Administration, the County of Los Angeles, as well as the United States Military. Universal Karpet became a powerhouse with business partner Louis Smith and sister-in-law Joerena Evans. Billy used his business as an incubator to train his children about the importance of hard work and self-determination and entrepreneurship.

After retiring from the floor-covering business, Billy founded the Non-Profit Organization, Our Community Works aka OCW, to address the disproportionate number of minorities marginalized from participating in government construction contracts. Through his efforts, OCW created jobs and trained numerous men and women.

Billy was an active member of 100 Black Men of Long Beach, Toastmasters International, The Rotary Club as wells as The New Frontier Democratic Club. He loved the blues and found comfort in listening to B.B. King and Ray Charles.

Billy is survived by his loving wife Doris, his sister Rosie Darlene, brother-in-law Adam and brother Kenneth Wayne, his children Billy Jr., Kimberly, Harold, Jackie, Craig and Charla, and his Aunt Ida Mae Smiles. He was preceded in death by his father Levin, his mother Aslee, his daughter Patricia, his siblings Willie Gene, Leon Rollins, Mary Francis, Willie Jr., Joe Vernon, Katie Mae, Joyce Faye, James Benjamin, Rodney Elijah, and Levin Victor, Jr.

Billy was affectionately known as Poppy to his grandchildren Amirh, Justin, Barry Jr., Bria, Dejae, Akilah, Ayanna, Deion, Akai, Jahsai, Bella and Savannah, his great-granddaughter. He was loved and admired by numerous nieces and nephews. Sister-in-laws Wanda, Bobbie, Teresa, and Kathy Releford would often share memories of Oklahoma and old times. This would always bring a smile to his face.

Billys life will always be cherished and remembered for his legacy of unwavering love, hard work, and self-determination. We celebrate the life of Billy James Releford, Sr. who passed from life to life on December 9, 2018.

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On March 31, Billy and Doris would be celebrating their wedding anniversary with love and honor.Black Writers On Tour and Southern California Black Business Expo 2019

Dr. Rosie Milligan invites you to attend Black Writers On Tour & Southern California Black Business Expoall under one roof, Saturday, March 30, 2019 From 9 to 6p.m. Carson Community Center, 801 E. Carson Street, Carson, CA. Writers from across the country, 7 writers seminars Learn How To Write Your Book and much more, Children Writers Showcase Competition. Let The Elders Speak Forum presents Celebrity speaker Desreta Jackson-Battle, she starred as Young Celie in The Color Purple Movie.

General admission & parking is FREE. There are 9 FREE seminars for the general public. The Self-made Millionaire & Business Guru Mr. Ivy Stokes from Atlanta, GA is keynote speaker

323-750-3592 visit www.blackwritersontour.com

ADVERTISEMENTBoth Applause and Outrage Follow Govs Decision to Halt Death Penalty

Last week Gov. Gavin Newsom, by executive order, placed a moratorium on the death penalty in California.

The move he has described as a moral decision sparked outrage across the state, particularly in some quarters of the states Republican establishment and among some victims families and a large number of county prosecutors. Many of them have been vocal advocates of capital punishment over the years.

Its always better to be rich and guilty, than poor and innocent, the governor said during his announcement, referring to the uneven way the death penalty has been applied historically. I cannot sign off on executing hundreds of humans knowing some of them are innocent.

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Some African American families of murder victims across the state understand the governors position. Although they carry the bitterness and grief that typically follow losing a loved one to murder, for them, the governors move is a step in the right direction. It is an attempt to fix a flawed system that has killed too many innocent people, particularly African Americans, much like the senseless cycle of criminal violence that claimed most of their relatives lives.

I dont believe in street justice and I dont believe in state-sanctioned violence, said Aqeela Sherrills, an African American victims rights activist who is the National Training Director of the Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice.

In 2003, Sherrills lost his own son to a murder. Like many murder victim family members, Sherrills says he still feels the shock and pain of his sons death as if did not happen nearly two decades ago.

Unlike most of the families his organization supports, though, he wholeheartedly applauds the governors decision.

There is no closure in watching someone be murdered, said Sherrills who once negotiated a truce between the Bloods and Crips gangs in Los Angeles.

Sherrillss son Terrell, a college student from Watts, was only 17 years old when an unknown gunman fired five shots at him from the back, taking his life. The teen, on Winter break from Humboldt State University in St. Arcata, was hanging out with a group of high school friends in Ladera Heights after a party when he was killed. No arrests have been made, no murder weapon found, and police have not followed up with the victims family since the murder.

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A study published in the Santa Clara Law Review found that murderers who kill Whites are three times more likely to be sentenced to die as those who kill African Americans.

Other research conducted by the Innocence Project, a group that uses DNA evidence to re-investigate death row cases, helps to rationalize Gov.s Newsoms decision. Evidence presented by the organization has helped to overturn a total of 364 sentences around the country. Many of those exonerated were doing life sentences or on death row for murders they did not commit. And according to the National Academy of Science, 1 in every 5 felons facing the death penalty in the United States is innocent.

It has provided no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent. It has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. But most of all, the death penalty is absolute, irreversible and irreparable in the event of a human error, said Newsom in a press statement.

In California, there are 737 death row inmates, the largest number in the United States. People of color make up a disproportionate 66.4 percent of that number and the majority of those convicts come from Riverside and Los Angeles counties where there are large minority populations. Only 24 felons of the total number on the states death row have exhausted their appeals process and were condemned when Gov. Newsom banned capital punishment last week. Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, the state has only executed 13 felons. 120 others have died of natural causes or suicide.

Newsom also emphasizes the high cost. The death penalty system, including the appeals process, has cost the state $5 billion since 1978, he said. That number breaks down to about $150 million every year. He said that money would be better spent in other areas, such as restorative justice.

The governor was surrounded by state legislators who supported the decision when he made the announcement. Since his order can constitutionally only put a temporary halt on the death penalty, the governor said some legislators want to put the death penalty question on the ballot in 2022 for Californians to decide during statewide elections.

Opponents say the last three times ending the death penalty was introduced as a measure on the ballot, Californians voted to uphold it.

Not only did Newsom defy voters with his brazen and dangerous act, he defied candidate Gavin Newsom as well. He campaigned for governor in 2016 and in 2017 on not letting his opinion undermine the will of the voters, said a statement by the California Republican Party. By standing with criminals, he disrespected the memory of victims and their families.

According to the GOP press release, 25 of states death row inmates are responsible for killing six or more people.

On the other side of the aisle, many Democrats are cheering the governors move. Members of the California Legislative Black Caucus (CLBC) support it, too.

Nobody understands more than the African-American community the troubling injustices in a system that has sentenced both the guilty and the innocent to death, said the CLBC in a press statement that called the governors decision historic and long overdue. Californians should no longer be burdened with the death penalty; a policy that does not deter crime, that costs taxpayers billions of dollars and that serves no discernible public good.

On a conference call with reporters Feb. 19, Newsom said that he respects the point of view of Californians who dont agree with his decision but explained that, ultimately. he has to sign the death warrants and he has to do it in good conscience. He also empathized with the families of murder victims and stated that his order is not intended to diminish the gravity of their loss.

Newsoms moratorium on the death penalty, which will last through his term as governor, will not commute the sentences of the people currently on death row. Instead, they will be converted to life sentences without parole, he told journalists.

The decision affects several African-American inmates, including the high-profile case of Kevin Cooper, a Black man who was convicted of a quadruple murder in 1985. Even though Cooper has been on death row for more than 30 years, the details of his case remain publicly disputed.

In February, Newsom requested new DNA testing in Coopers case.BPRW Women Grow Strong and Black PR Wire to Host a Fashion Webinar with I Am CHIC on March 26th

Do you have a passion for fashion? Women Grow Strong and Black PR Wire encourage you to stay in style during Womens History Month and all year round! The organizations are partnering up with Christie Grays, the Commander-In-Chic of I Am Chic, to hold a fashion forward webinar on Tuesday, March 26, 2019 from 2:00  3:30 PM (ET). The webinar is entitled Be CHIC on Purpose: Style Tips and Spring Trends and will be presented by Grays.

We encourage all of our current or aspiring fashionistas to join us for this fun and informative webinar, said Bernadette Morris, president of Women Grow Strong and Black PR Wire. Christie will drop some helpful jewels and gems on how to find your style and display your passion for fashion. Spread the word and lets have some fashion fun!

During the webinar, Grays will discuss:

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How to dress for success, find your style and be authentically YOU!

How to add flair to your basic wardrobe!

Hot fashion tips and spring trends found on the runway that can translate into your wardrobe!

And much more!

All registered webinar participants will receive a FREE press release posting on Black PR Wire (a $500 value), and the first 50 registrants will also receive a free Wing Bling gift from Women Grow Strong.

Women Grow Strong, Inc., (also known as WINGS for Women in Need Growing Strong), is a not-for-profit support group that serves to help develop, build and sustain womens contribution, purpose and goals in society. It provides educational training, counseling and business development initiatives for young adults and adults. Topics range from health and fitness to fashion and etiquette are also provided. WINGS workshops, conferences and symposiums serve to help empower women nationwide. The organization has also created the Total Woman Puzzle  A fun and exciting tool that showcases key jewels for the journey of life.

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Black PR Wire, Inc. is a premier news distribution service center that delivers to the very core and pulse of the Black community. The company holds a comprehensive listing of over 1,200 Black-owned publications and media, as well as provides services to social service and grassroots organizations and influential leaders throughout the United States and the Caribbean. The company provides services in both English and Creole.

I Am CHIC is a lifestyle consulting company that helps you dress to impress. The company specializes in wardrobe and closet consulting to make your What should I wear decisions easier. As the Commander-In-Chic, Christie takes you from having nothing to wear to having everything to wear; from a messy closet to an organized closet; and from looking blah to looking chic! I Am CHIC offers a wide array of services for active individuals who like to look classy and chic. Individual clients include on-air television personalities, senior level executives, attorneys, political candidates and philanthropic socialites. Corporate clients include American Express and City College. Clients range from Size 0 to Size 24. I Am CHIC has clients in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Maryland and Virginia.

To register for the Fashion Webinar with I Am CHIC, click on this link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fashion-webinar-with-i-am-chic-tickets-58679689531

For additional details and information on the Womens History Month Fashion Webinar, call 1-877-BLACKPR.Head: Yardie Film Review

Elba Makes Directorial Debut with Jamaican Coming-of-Age Drama

Dennis D Campbell (Aml Ameen) had the misfortune of growing up in the slums of Kingston, Jamaica in the Seventies at a time when the hood was infested with drugs. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by an older brother he admired, Jerry (Everaldo Creary).

Besides serving as a surrogate father, Jerry was a peacemaker who risked his life pressuring the gangs ruining the community to end their bloody turf war. But Dennis was left traumatized at 13 when his sibling was senselessly shot dead by Clancy (Raheem Edwards), a young member of the Tappa crew.

Fast forward a half-dozen years and we find D doing the bidding of King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd), the leader of Spicer, Tappas rival gang. When he is asked to smuggle a kilo of cocaine on a plane bound for London, he leaps at the opportunity because not only does Clancy live there now, but so too does Dennis daughter (Myla-Rae Hutchinson-Dunwell). So, the risky assignment will afford him an opportunity to avenge his brothers murder while reuniting with loved ones.

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That is the intriguing set up of Yardie, a coming-of-age drama marking the noteworthy directorial debut of Idris Elba. Adapted from Victor Headleys 1992 novel of the same name, the film is narrated by its intrepid protagonist, a conflicted soul eternally torn between good and evil.

A gritty tale of survival slightly marred by a tendency to telegraph its punches.

Very Good (3 stars)

Unrated

Running time: 101 minutes

Production Companies: Warp Films / BFI Film Fund / Studio Canal

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Distributor: Rialto Pictures

To see a trailer for Yardie, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qItW6evHbE8

Yardie (Unrated) Idris Elba makes his directorial debut with this adaptation of Victor Headleys crime caper of the same name, set in the Seventies, about a young Jamaican (Aml Ameen) hired by a local drug kingpin (Sheldon Shepherd) to smuggle a shipment of cocaine to a British gangster (Stephen Graham) located in London. With Shantol Jackson, Fraser James and Akin Gazi.L.A. County Halts Use of Popular Weed Killer on County Property

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors directed all departments to stop using a popular weed killer until more is known about its potential health and environmental effects.

Supervisor Kathryn Barger recommended the moratorium on glyphosate a main ingredient in the herbicide brand Roundup.

I am asking county departments to stop the use of this herbicide until public health and environmental professionals can determine if its safe for further use in L.A. County and explore alternative methods for vegetation management, Barger said.

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Roundup was developed decades ago by Monsanto Co., now owned by Bayer, and is believed to be the most widely used herbicide worldwide.

The motion, co-authored by Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, cites a growing body of scientific study of herbicide safety and the potential for negative impacts.

In a 2015 study led by 17 experts from 11 countries, the World Health Organizations International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded that glyphosate should be classified as probably carcinogenic to humans, Kuehl said. That conclusion makes it imperative that we question any long- term use of this controversial herbicide, and thats exactly what this motion

calls for.

The WHO finding has been disputed by Monsanto, and other governmental agencies have stopped short of reaching the same conclusion.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency says the weed killer has low toxicity for humans and concluded in 2017 that it is not likely to cause cancer in humans. California disagreed and tried unsuccessfully to force the company to label the weed killer with a warning.

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The European Food Safety Agency does not agree with the WHO. However, a recent court ruling requires EFSA to disclose the details of its own studies.

A jury in a federal lawsuit brought against Bayer by a Sonoma man concluded that his non-Hodgkins lymphoma was caused by exposure to Roundup, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. That panel will now hear evidence related to whether the company should be held liable.

The Board of Supervisors directed the Department of Public Works to coordinate with public health and other personnel to survey current use of the chemical and explore alternatives, including identifying best practices followed by other jurisdictions.

A report is expected back in 30 days.L.A. County Looks to Expand Welfare Payments to Residents Living in Cars

Aiming to assist more homeless individuals who live in their cars, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors indicated its intent today to expand eligibility for county general relief benefits.

About 80,000 residents of the more than 10 million countywide receive general welfare benefits from the county. Those who typically qualify are single adults, ages 19-40, who live alone, have no income or resources, and are unable to work but are ineligible for federal or state programs, according to the Department of Public Social Services.

Supervisors Hilda Solis and Mark Ridley-Thomas co-authored a motion in February seeking recommendations for helping more indigent residents.

General relief is the last resort, Solis said. Here in L. A. County, were saying were standing up for people.

DPSS recommended raising caps on property owned by applicants seeking help.

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Current county code caps the value of a vehicle owned by a would-be beneficiary at $4,500. DPSS recommended raising that limit to $11,500 for individuals who live in their vehicles.

Caps on liquid assets would be raised from $50 to $100 for individuals and from $100 to $200 for families. Eligible applicants would be allowed tokeep personal property worth up to $2,000  four times the current $500 limit. DPSS said raising the limits would help welfare recipients to become self- sufficient.

The department estimated that 3,037 people would become eligible for benefits under the new rules, costing the county up to $8 million annually.

Monthly benefits of $221 for one person allocate $136 for rent, $65 for food, $11 for other personal needs and $9 for clothing.

If were going to have a straight-ahead anti-poverty agenda here, we need to really, deeply look at those things that are standing in our way, Ridley-Thomas said. Poverty is hugely costly to this county, poverty is hugely costly to taxpayers.

DPSS will work with county counsel to draft the necessary changes to county code, to be voted on at a future meeting.Why Georgia is the Place for Black Migration and Politics

Georgia has symbolized freedom in the Black imagination since the arrival of enslaved Africans in the 1700s. Its dense forest and coastal islands gave safe haven to thousands of people fleeing bondage for better conditions.

The gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Stacey Abrams rekindled a desire for an autonomous space in the thinking of many people. The possibility came close to fruition, but for alleged voting shenanigans.

The question now for Black leaders is, where to go from here? Clearly, the Congressional Black Caucus has an obligation to investigate claims of voter suppression and to promote a stronger Voting Rights Act.

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But just as importantly, the CBC has a role to play in developing a strategy to win the state. A key component to any strategy is to grow the Black voter base  and a tactic for growing the base is to promote a new migration to Georgia. Heres how a coordinated migration might work, and why Black leaders should promote it.

The midterms revealed that the margin for victory in Georgia is within reach. Abrams lost to Republican Brian Kemp by about 55,000 votes out of nearly 4 million votes cast. Clearly, a surge in the size of the Black voter base could close such a gap and end a drought in state representation dating to Reconstruction.

A Georgia migration would tie in with a pattern of migration to the region since the 1990s. According to a 2004 study, The New Great Migration: Black Americans Return to the South, 19652000, published by the Brookings Institute, many students and professionals flocked to colleges and jobs in Washington, Atlanta, Charlotte and Orlando, among other southern cities. Older migrants were drawn to the culture and family ties of the South.

A new migration could build on this trend with an eye towards maximum political impact. Promoting Georgia as a destination for Black retirees would help to develop sustainable growth in a voter base of over 30 percent today.

A migration project would require an effective ad campaign to the desired market  people nearing retirement with stable incomes from pensions, Social Security benefits and other assets. This generation understands the importance of voting from the civil rights movement.

The ad campaign would have to appeal to the ideals of freedom and resistance in the Georgia territory. Even before the founding of Savannah in 1733, defiant Africans had run away from the rice plantations of Charleston, S.C., to create free settlements in its dense woodlands and isolated islands. These were known as maroon colonies. They teamed with indigenous Indian societies such as the Yamassee in raids against the British.

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After the Civil War, the emancipated slaves of the Georgia Sea Islands gained temporary ownership of coastal lands. In 1865, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 to break up the plantations and present ex-slaves with plots of land in compensation. The discredited President Andrew Johnson stopped the reparation policy before it could take root.

During the Civil Rights Movement, the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a network of churches founded by Martin Luther King in 1957, was a powerful symbol of Black cooperation. In 1968, The Republic of New Afrika was a controversial proposal to create a Black nation in the South. The Malcolm X Society, influenced by anti-colonial movements in Africa, imagined a new country carved from territory of 10 southern states including Georgia. And lets not forget the 1973 Gladys Knight recording of the iconic song, Midnight Train to Georgia.

In short, Georgia holds a special place in African American folklore and its appeal could be used to market the state as a destination.

Any ad campaign should target the black media outlets of northern centers  television shows, talk radio, news websites and newspapers in cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, and St. Louis, and in less politically competitive southern states. Stakeholders with an interest in serving a moneyed black retiree clientele could underwrite the advertisements.

To promote cities outside of Atlanta, the ads should tout the cost of living advantages of Macon, Savannah, Athens, Augusta, Columbus, and many smaller municipalities. Politically, it makes sense to encourage the spreading out of new residents and the utilization of the states open primary system.

Black retirees can help to grow the voter base, but it will take younger people with roots in the community to handle state affairs. People need to understand why state governance matters and why young people should seek offices. No doubt it will pose a challenge to depict state service in an attractive way.

Black congressional leaders have an obligation to discuss this proposal. Perhaps Reps. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) could introduce the question: What are the merits of a program of coordinated migration to achieve black political autonomy?

Roger House, is an associate professor of American studies at Emerson College in Boston. The op-ed is reprinted from The Hill.A California city has been caught unprepared by people coming to experience a colorful super bloom of desert flowers.

We reported last week on this rare event happening in areas around southern Californias Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The park sits about 250 kilometers southeast of Los Angeles. The area is usually a dry desert.

A super bloom is when huge amounts of desert flowers open, or bloom, at the same time. This years happening came after heavy rainfall during the winter. The rainy period was followed by warm, sunny conditions at the start of spring.

In the past, super blooms have only happened about once every 10 years. But this years event marked Californias second super bloom in just two years.

The areas desert flowers include several different kinds of poppy plants. Park officials say among the blooming flowers are sand verbena, desert sunflower, brown-eyed primrose and desert lilies.

Large bursts of colorful blooms have also covered hillside areas and areas along roads in several communities. One such community is Lake Elsinore, a small city about 110 kilometers from Los Angeles.

Lake Elsinore has a population of about 60,000. Local officials say the super bloom has brought up to 50,000 people per day to the hillsides around the city.

One reason for the huge crowds is that so many people are sharing their pictures of the super bloom on social media. In fact, the hashtag #superbloom has been used more than 100,000 times on Instagram. Pictures are also being shared widely on Twitter and Facebook.

In the past two weeks, many super bloom fans came to Lake Elsinore to follow a hiking path through the local hillsides. The tens of thousands of visitors have caused problems for people who live and work in the area.

The most serious problems have involved traffic. Local officials say the large crowds have made it difficult or even impossible for some local people to leave their homes.

Nicole Dailey is a spokeswoman for the city of Lake Elsinore. She told Reuters that, this year, the area saw a large increase in both blooming flowers and the number of visitors. We did not expect the crowds that we saw, Dailey said. Our freeways and our cities are not designed for crowds that you see in Los Angeles."

At one point last weekend, officials decided to close the hillside trail in Lake Elsinore to stop the flood of people. The city sought help from state and local police agencies to help deal with the traffic around the hillsides, where no public parking exists.

The mayor of Lake Elsinore, Steve Manos, wrote on Facebook Saturday that a city employee was struck by a hit-and-run driver in the area. He also said a visitor to the area was bitten by a rattlesnake. Manos told the Associated Press that the situation had been insane, even describing it as a poppy apocalypse.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Bryan Lynn wrote this story, based on reports from the Associated Press, Reuters and online sources. 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

freeway  n. a long, wide road, usually used by traffic travelling fast over long distances

insane  adj. shocking or outrageous

apocalypse  n. a great disaster or event that causes much fear, loss, or destruction

Flooding remains a serious problem in Southern Africa more than a week after Cyclone Idai hit the area.

Idai is one of the most destructive natural disasters in the areas history. The storm left hundreds of people dead and extensive damage in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

Floodwaters are moving across central Mozambique. Many homes, some towns and villages are still underwater. The water has created an inland sea -- more than 2,500 kilometers wide -- in an area where there used to be farms and villages.

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi estimated that the cyclone may have left as many as 1,000 people dead nationwide. There are fears the death toll could jump sharply when rescuers reach the countryside.

Heavy rainfall stopped Thursday, and floodwaters began to subside in the port of Beira and in the countryside, the Mozambican government said. Aid groups were working without rest to rescue families holding onto trees or standing on building tops to escape the water.

On Thursday, 910 people were rescued by the humanitarian community, said Caroline Haga of the International Federation of the Red Cross in Beira. She spoke to The Associated Press.

Aid organizations are trying to get food, clean water and clothing to the areas hardest hit by the storm. They estimate more than 400,000 people across Mozambique are now homeless.

The countrys environment minister, Celso Correia, said the government plans to build two large camps to house people who have lost their homes.

Gerald Bourke is the United Nations World Food Program. He said it was unclear how the government would get people to those camps. Theres talk of usinghelicopters and boats.

It will be days before the water in Mozambique drains toward the Indian Ocean. It will be longer before officials fully understand the level of destruction.

In neighboring Malawi, at least 56 people are confirmed dead and more than 900,000 are homeless.

The search for survivors is finished.

Zimbabwes eastern mountains also were hit with heavy rain.

Aid has been slow to reach affected villagers because many roads and bridges were destroyed.

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa visited affected areas on Wednesday. Government officials have said that as many as 350 people may have died in the flooding. The force of the water pulled some victims from Zimbabwe down the mountainside into Mozambique, officials said.

In one area, the district of Chimanimani, 90 percent of homes and property suffered major damage, the World Food Program said. It estimated that 200,000 people would need food assistance over the next three months.

Philemon Dada has been rebuilding his life in Chimanimani, once a beautiful town.

With a few tools, he began pulling long sticks from the water to build a shelter for his family. He believes it will be difficult to rebuild his life after Cycone Idai. He lost everything  his home and his animals.

Some people are living with neighbors and others with their religious leaders.

I can say I am a bit lucky, my wife and son are still here with me but for everything else, I have to start (over), he said.

It may take a year, maybe even more years just to get back on my feet, he added.

I'm Susan Shand.

The Associated Press reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

Words in this Story

cyclone  n. an extremely large, powerful storm with high winds

toll  n. the number of deaths or injuries resulting from an event, such as a natural disaster or war

subside  v. to go down to a lower level

drain  v. to flow into, away from, or out of something

district  n. a part of a city or countryAn Open Letter To Senators Lindsey

Graham, Marco Rubio, Et. Al

From Chuck Baldwin. March 21st 2019

IMPORTANT - PLEASE SHARE WIDELY.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to begin conducting hearings next Tuesday, March 26, on Senate Bill 7, the Extreme Risk Protection Order and Violence Prevention Act of 2019otherwise known as a national red flag gun confiscation bill. The bill was introduced in the Senate by Marco Rubio (R-FL). If this gun confiscation bill passes the U.S. Senate, it will most certainly pass the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, and President Donald Trump absolutely WILL sign it into law.

I am writing this open letter to Senators Rubio and Graham, President Trump and the untold numbers of legislators, judges and lawmen that will be working together to facilitate and execute the confiscation of the arms of innocent American citizenscitizens who have not even been charged with a crime. .....

As has been stated before more than once, this law is perhaps the most dangerous to ever be formulated - one that could lead to widespread gun confiscations with no due process. Chuck Baldwin's open letter needs to be circulated as widely as possible.

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French electronics maker Archos was one of the first companies to release an Android tablet way back when Android was a smartphone-only operating system that didnt officially support tablets.

In recent years company has become better known (if its known at all) for making cheap phones and attempting to get in on the smart home space.

But the latest Archos product is another Android tablet. Sort of.

The Archos Play Tab is a slate with a full HD touchscreen display that runs Android 9 Pie. Its expected to be available in Europe in time for the back to school season this summer or fall and itll sell for 249 (about $280). But its not exactly a tablet in the traditional sense  the Play Tab has a 21.5 inch display.

Archos says the Play Tab is designed as something you can lay flat on a table so that two or more people can play games using on a single board.

On the one hand, that kind of makes sense  the Archos Play Tab takes up less space than a stack of board games, and it could theoretically save you some money over time if digital versions of games like Scrabble, Settelers of Catan, or Monopoly are cheaper than physical versions (they often are).

On the other hand, Im not entirely sure how youre supposed to prevent other players from seeing your cards, tiles, or other items if youre all playing on the same board.

Anyway, if youre in the market for a 21.5 inch Androidt ablet for one reason or another Archos says its model has a 5,000 mAh battery, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and support for the Google Play Store.

Theres no word on the processor or other specs.

via Android PoliceIt is often asserted that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 proved that HWA was right and he really did see the future.

This of course is nonsense. Herbert W. Armstrong said that Christ would return within twenty years in his book Mystery of the Ages. (PCG has since deleted those words so someone in there knows HWA spoke nonsense.) How convenient for them to forget this.

Also Herbert W. Armstrong never said the Soviet Union would collapse. He thought it would survive intact until a few years after Christ's return. It shows how biased some many in the COGs are that they never seem to notice this. This inconvenient truth is just tossed into the memory hole.

It is true that HWA said that some Eastern European states would break away from Moscow's orbit and join the European Empire he said would arise at any moment. But he never talked of the Soviet Union collapsing. He did not teach that. Also he portrayed the rise of the European Empire to be far quicker then what has actually happened. In Mystery of the Ages Christ was supposed to return by 2005 at the most.

So assertions that the fall of the Berlin Wall somehow prove that HWA was right is just complete nonsense spread by people who, for whatever reason, are still in denial that HWA was a false prophet who merely talked out of his own "human reasoning".An Open Letter To Senators Lindsey

Graham, Marco Rubio, Et. Al

From Chuck Baldwin. March 21st 2019

IMPORTANT - PLEASE SHARE WIDELY.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to begin conducting hearings next Tuesday, March 26, on Senate Bill 7, the Extreme Risk Protection Order and Violence Prevention Act of 2019otherwise known as a national red flag gun confiscation bill. The bill was introduced in the Senate by Marco Rubio (R-FL). If this gun confiscation bill passes the U.S. Senate, it will most certainly pass the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, and President Donald Trump absolutely WILL sign it into law.

I am writing this open letter to Senators Rubio and Graham, President Trump and the untold numbers of legislators, judges and lawmen that will be working together to facilitate and execute the confiscation of the arms of innocent American citizenscitizens who have not even been charged with a crime.

I have purchased a full-page ad in the capital city newspaper in my home State of Montana, the Helena Independent Record, in which the following letter will appear this Sunday, March 24. I urge readers to feel free to use, copy, promote, publish, etc., this open letter in an attempt to bring this information to the attention of as many people as possible.

The GOP faithful are mostly in denial about what Donald Trump and many Republican senators are up to. They refuse to acknowledge that Trump, Graham, Rubio, et. al are about to enact a gun confiscation bill that rivals anything in Nazi Germany or Stalins Russia.

If S.7 becomes law, NO gun owner (and that means YOU) will be protected from the seizure of their firearms. It will not matter that they have not committed a crime; it will not matter that they have not been charged with a crime; and it will not matter that they have never even threatened to commit a crime. And they wont even realize that its happening until the SWAT team bangs on their door at 5am to seize their guns.

The letter below is an in-depth, passionate appeal to everyone involved to STOP S.7 from becoming law. The letter speaks for itself.

Again, I urge everyone to take this open letter and get it into the hands of as many people as you can. If the American people do not arise in massive numbers against this bill, it WILL pass. We are getting NO HELP on this from the NRA or the vast majority of so-called pro-Second Amendment Republicans. Ron Paul, Gun Owners of America (GOA) and a few others are trying to warn the American people about this communistic bill. But thats about it.

I beg you, folks, distribute this open letter to your friends, your family members, your neighbors, your sheriffs, your chiefs of police, your legislators, your local judgesdistribute this letter to EVERYONE. We dont have much time. And I mean that literally.

[Start open letter]

Marco Rubio

I know I am speaking for tens of thousands of my fellow Montanans and tens of millions of my fellow Americans when I say what Im about to say.

Red flag gun confiscation laws violate every principle of liberty upon which our country was founded. There is no due process associated with red flag laws. A judges order to seize the firearms from an American citizen who has not been accused of a crime, charged with a crime, convicted of a crimeor who never even threatened to commit a crimebased on the accusation of a single individual is anything but due process.

Our accuser could be a disgruntled employee, a bitter ex-spouse or relative, a vengeful neighbor, an anti-gun liberal or even an anti-gun policeman. By definition, red flag laws use mere suspicion of what one might do as justification to seize a persons firearms. Tactics such as these have been used in virtually every despotic regime of history. In the name of protecting society, the rights and liberties of individuals were denied. Eventually, these repressive governments included political or religious persuasion as triggering red flags, which led to their disarmamentall in the name of public safety, of course.

You know as well as I do that when the rights of ONE American are abridged, the rights of ALL Americans are abridged. This is not yet a communist nation where the rights of the stateor even the rights of a majority of citizenssupersede the rights of the individual.

Furthermore, it is a fallacy to suggest that a mental health diagnosis, by itself, indicates that someone is automatically a threat to himself or others. Dr. Ann Bukacek, a highly respected medical doctor in the community in which I live, recently wrote:

Mental health diagnoses given by physicians or other mental health care workers do not predict firearm violence. As a physician for over 30 years who has treated many patients with mental health diagnoses and some autistic spectrum patients, I have not had one of those patients commit an act of gun violence. I did have a patient who bludgeoned a man to death with a blunt object, and that patient carried no mental health diagnosis. Psychopaths with no conscience, especially the more intelligent ones, usually escape detection and/or a particular diagnosis.

This doctors examination of the issue reflects reality.

Besides, under these red flag laws, exactly who is it that determines that someone is crazy? Is it one judge, who bases his or her conclusion on the accusations of just one individual? Is it up to politicians or government bureaucrats to define who is and who is not crazy?

There are some people who believe that anyone who would even own a firearm is crazy. Others believe ones political or religious beliefs qualify him as crazy. Heck! We have all read the documentation of various governments (local, State and federal) that have assigned all kinds of crazy (even dangerous) definitions against people based on their interpretation of Bible prophecy or their association with political candidates such as former Congressman Ron Paul or their opposition to politically correct ideologies, etc.

Does the judge who issues a warrant to seize a persons firearms under a red flag law provide the accused with an opportunity to defend himself BEFORE violating his constitutional and Natural rights? No. Does the judge provide an opportunity for a close examination of the accusations against the accused (including investigating the accuser) BEFORE violating his constitutional and Natural rights? No. Does the judge allow the accused to face his accuser BEFORE violating his constitutional and Natural rights? No.

Red flag laws turn the Bill of Rights and the fundamental legal doctrine that a man is innocent until proven guilty completely upside down. Red flag laws are a mockery to every constitutional principle of liberty since the Magna Carta. Seizing a citizens firearms by force (and thereby rendering him defenseless) without a crime being committedor even the accusation of a crime being madeis old-fashioned TYRANNY. Such an act presumes a person is guilty until proven innocent.

Then there is this: After the guns are seized, it could take years for the victim to prove his innocence (or competence) and have his guns returnedand in what condition would they be when (and IF) returned? Furthermore, will you legislators, judges and police officers who collaborate to strip an innocent persons ability to defend himself accept any responsibility when the real bad guys take advantage of this persons vulnerability and invade his home and bludgeon or rape or even kill his family? Of course you wont. But mark it down: You will be held responsible in the eyes of Almighty Godand in the eyes of the citizens you have victimized.

And are you really going to try and tell us that police officers are more competent and mentally stable than the rest of us? Are you kidding? The examples of improper, unsafe, careless and even homicidal acts of cops with guns are ubiquitous.

It was an FBI agent who was armed at a nightclub in Denver and then started gyrating and dancing like a madman until his handgun fell on the floor, discharged and wounded a fellow patron. But no official even questioned this officers fitness to possess a firearmeven AFTER that event took place.

Then there is the case of the Dallas police officer who walked into the wrong apartment and shot and killed the man who lived inside. Where was the red flag regarding this officer? And what about the two police officers in St. Louis who used a revolver to play Russian roulette, and one of the two wound up shooting and killing the other one? Why wasnt a red flag raised about these nincompoops? These stories could go on forever.

Where are the red flag laws for the policemen and sheriffs deputies in this country? The only difference between them and the rest of us who are being victimized by these draconian red flag laws is that they wear badges, and we do notand the other difference is the vast majority of private citizens who carry firearms are not nearly as stupid and incompetent as the policemen mentioned above.

So much for equal justice under the law.

It has taken many of us a lifetime of hard work and labor to be able to obtain our gun collections; we have successfully passed FBI background checks and local and State requirements and obligations for responsible gun ownership, yet our guns are going to be confiscated overnight on the word of someone (an anonymous someone, at that) who claims we might be unsuitable to own a gun? Again, such an act turns American history and our Bill of Rights upside down.

Kris Kobach is the former Secretary of State of Kansas. He is a former professor of constitutional law at UMKC School of Law. He wrote an excellent analysis of the constitutional violations of these red flag laws:

1. The seizure of guns without any hearing at all. The laws all contain an ex parte provision that allows the state to temporarily seize a persons guns without even notifying the gun owner or giving him a chance to be heard. This is the quintessential denial of due process. The Fourth Amendment makes clear that a person cannot be denied of liberty (to exercise ones constitutional right to bear arms) without due process of law. This confiscation is temporary, but it can easily lead to long-term or permanent confiscation. 2. Based on the testimony of one unrelated person. The confiscation order can be based on the testimony of only one person claiming that the gun owner poses a risk to the safety of himself or others. The law [proposed in Kansas] deceptively says that it has to be the testimony of a family member. But family member is defined to include former dating partners and anyone who has ever lived with the defendant. So a jilted former boyfriend or girlfriend, or even a roommate from years ago, could easily set in motion the disarming of a lawful gun owner. 3. Using a very low standard of proof. The standard for obtaining an ex parte order against a gun owner is absurdly low  one need only show reasonable cause to believe that the person may pose a risk. Thats even lower than the probable cause standard for obtaining a search warrant. In addition, the judge is forced to rush his decision and issue the confiscation order on the same day of the ex parte hearing. Within two weeks of the ex parte hearing, a hearing with the gun owner present must occur; the purpose is to put in place a long-term confiscation order. But even at that hearing, the standard of proof is far below the beyond a reasonable doubt standard used in criminal trials. Rather, it need only be shown by a preponderance of evidence that the person poses a risk of injury to self or others. What kind of evidence? Things like the reckless storage of firearms and drinking habits can be considered. If you keep a handgun in the bedside table and drink beer regularly, you may [be] in trouble. 4. Shifting the burden of proof to the gun owner. The long-term confiscation order lasts up to a year, but may be renewed indefinitely. Once it is in place, it becomes very difficult to remove. To have the confiscation order lifted, the gun owner must prove he does not pose a threat to himself or others. Proving a negative is nearly impossible. Adding insult to injury, the bill even authorizes local law enforcement to charge the gun owner a storage fee for confiscating and storing his guns.

The implementation of red flag laws (at any level) is unconscionable and totally unacceptable. And I am here to warn you that there are millions of Americans who will never submit to such oppression. None of us wants to see acts of violence committed against law enforcement personnel in America, but when law enforcers begin carrying out these draconian red flag laws, they will begin lighting the matches of resistance in the hearts of freedom-loving people in this country like hasnt been seen in over 150 years.

We have already heard about Gary Willis, the Maryland man who was killed by police officers in his own home as they attempted to carry out a red flag order to seize his guns. This man had committed no crime; he had not been accused of committing a crime; he was given no hearing and no due process. Mr. Willis did not attempt to harm the officers; he merely resisted their efforts to disarm him, and he was killed on the spotin his own homeby police officers who had taken an oath to protect the liberties of this poor innocent man.

I assure you, Mr. Willis will not be the last American to resist the attempted confiscation of his firearms.

Do you legislators, judges, county sheriffs, chiefs of police, sheriffs deputies and city policemen not realize that red flag laws are tantamount to a declaration of war against the American people? Are you so far removed from the laws of Nature and Natures God that you cannot see this? Do you not realize that in spite of all of Great Britains abuses of power, our colonist forebears did not openly rebel against the Crown until King George sent troops to Lexington and Concord to confiscate the colonists firearms? You do understand that, right? And you do understand, do you not, that the blood of the colonists flows in the veins of we Americans?

At what point do the American people come to believe that you truly do NOT wish to honor your oath to the Constitution or behave in a manner that truly honors Americas Second Amendment and the heritage of liberty that we all share as Americans? At what point do we Americans lose all respect for our civil magistrates and peace officers? For many Americans, that point will come when policemen bang on their doors at 5am and attempt to seize their guns.

Do you not realize that every single instance of an innocent person being subjected to a red flag gun confiscation order will only magnify and strengthen the resentment and animosity in the hearts of the community against these lawsand against the ones who are creating and implementing them? Do you not understand that this is a powder keg that could explode into all-out rebellion at any time? Do you want that? I dont want that! I dont want that for my wife and me, my children and grandchildren, my friends or my community.

Why would you legislators, judges and policemen even think about doing such a thing?

In the name of all that we hold dear, in the name of the brave men at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, in the name of every American who has given his life in defense of the principles contained in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and our Bill of Rightsincluding many of our brave police officers and sheriffs deputiesand in the name of the Natural Laws of our Creator, please STOP this madness before you literally tear our communities and our country apart.

As a legislator, you must not pass any semblance of a red flag law; as a judge, you must not issue a gun confiscation warrant on the basis of a red flag law; as a sheriff or chief of police, you must not order your officers to confiscate a citizens guns on the basis of a red flag warrant; and if you are a sheriffs deputy or city policeman, you must not obey an order to confiscate your fellow citizens guns on the basis of a red flag law.

I beg you to realize what you are doing. I beg you to refuse to participate in this madness. I beg you to join your fellow churchmen, clubmen, neighbors, friends and townsmen and help us turn back this dastardly attempt to transform our constitutional republic into another repressive regime that, in the end, would require The People to tear it down.

Again, I beg you to think about what you are doing, about the pain you are causing, about the lives you are ruining and about the potential harm you are inflicting on our country.

Red flag laws are on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of our Constitution, the wrong side of liberty and on the wrong side of the laws of God.

[End open letter]

And here is a short video of this letter on my YouTube channel. Feel free to share the video version of this letter as well.

Folks, please take this seriously. Our libertiesand maybe our liveshang in the balance.

 Chuck Baldwin

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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.It is recommended that local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) be more eco-friendly business if they want to operate in the Greater Bay Area, Agnes Lam told the Times on the sidelines of a seminar yesterday.

The full text of the Outline Development Plan for the Greater Bay Area is more than 27,000 words long, with 35 references to ecology, eight references to environmental protection, and 2,300 words directly related to ecological environmental protection.

If you read the paper from the central government, it is clearly stated that nothing that is highly polluting will be allowed [in the GBA]. So they encourage environmental protection or environmentally-friendly business only, Lam told the Times.

In Lams opinion, local SMEs dont pay special attention to environmental protection measurements.

They are not buying the idea of how important that will be, Lam stated. They dont see the market potential for doing green business.

People, especially middle- class people who live in the Greater Bay, care more about environmental protection since the area is the wealthiest in China, according to Lam.

This is the richest region in China, so we potentially have a big enough group of middle-class people, and traditionally, they are more open to environmental controls, said Lam.

However, the lawmaker criticized Macaus mentality of thinking of itself as more advanced than other regions.

In Macau, we think that we are more advanced here, in terms of policy. But actually, if you are talking about environmental protection, you may not be correct, Lam indicated.

According to statistics from the Small and Medium Enterprise Bureau of Guangdong province, in 2017, Guangdong had approximately 10 million SMEs, ranking first in the country.

Questioned by the Times, Lam expressed no concerns about local SMEs survival due to GBA integration.

Actually, I dont really [worry] about their survival because of the Greater Bay Area. I think whats really hurting them is globalization, said Lam. If they are able to brand themselves, maybe there will be more chances for them. They need to know their advantages as a Macau enterprise. We are not just talking about going there and opening a shop.

When we talk about the Greater Bay Area, [companies] from the nine mainland cities, they would like to work with capitalism. They want to work with Hong Kong and they also want to work with Macau, Lam stated, referring to the free port status of the two Special Administrative Regions.

The Macau SAR government has highlighted that the local government is seeking to enhance Macau youths understanding of the development and opportunities available in the Greater Bay Area and enhance their interest in working on the mainland side.

However, the government has rarely discussed local SMEs with respect to the Greater Bay Area. The lawmaker also complained about the fact that local SMEs are excluded from the local governments ambition for the Greater Bay Area.

I think the government, when they are talking about the Greater Bay Area, they need to include SMEs. They should not just include young people, said Lam. SMEs should be our strategic partner. I think they need to think about how they are going to help SMEs, and how to bring them into the project and let them grow.

Because if they grow, they are not going to leave Macau; they are going to make Macau bigger, said Lam.The chairman of Indonesias transportation safety agency confirmed yesterday that a third pilot was in the cockpit of a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 on a troubled flight the day before the aircraft crashed on Oct. 29, just minutes after takeoff.

However, Soerjanto Tjahjono, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Committee, yesterday disputed reports citing recordings of cockpit discussions during the aircrafts final flight.

He suggested the reports fabricated details from the recordings.

The third pilot, who has not been identified, was qualified to fly Max 8s and was deadheading aboard the Oct. 28 flight from Balis Denpasar airport to Jakarta. The aircraft encountered the same problems that appear to have caused it to crash a day later. Some reports, citing unnamed sources, said the extra pilot had some experience with the problem and advised the two in charge of the flight on how to stop the plane from automatically pointing its nose downward, in line with Boeings operating instructions.

It remains unclear if the pilots fully shared their difficulties handling the plane with safety regulators, the airline or the pilots who perished in the Oct. 29 flight.

Tjahjono said the NTSC interviewed the pilot but legally cannot publish its findings.

Indonesian investigators say they are still analyzing conversations from the Oct. 29 flight recorded by the cockpit voice recorder that was only recovered from the sea bed in January.

Interest in the investigation into the crash off Indonesias coast, which killed all 189 people aboard, has intensified following a crash of another Boeing 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia earlier this month that killed 157 people.

The Lion Air plane had issues on several flights before it crashed, with terrifying episodes of loss of altitude possibly related to an automated anti-stall system.

An earlier report issued by Indonesian aviation regulators describes technical problems aboard the planes penultimate flight. It does not mention that a third person was in the cockpit along with the pilot and co-pilot.

Tjahjono said NTSC investigators have visited Boeing to carry out a reconstruction of that next-to-last flight. The agency will publish results of its investigation in August or September, he said.

Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft have been grounded in many countries following the two crashes.

A preliminary report from Tjahjonos agency issued in December stopped short of declaring a probable cause of the Oct. 29 crash. But it provided details about pilots earlier struggles to fly the highly automated jet and Lion Airs difficulties with fixing sensors on the plane. Niniek Karmini, Jakarta, APVietnamese police have arrested eight Chinese suspected of drug trafficking after seizing 300 kilograms of methamphetamine worth up to USD26 million.

The state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper says the alleged ring leader was arrested Wednesday when he received the drugs in Ho Chi Minh City from three Vietnamese accomplices who had transported them in a pickup truck from Dak Nong province on the Laos border. It says seven other Chinese were also arrested.

The newspaper says Huang set up a garment factory as a cover for drug trafficking. Authorities believe the drugs originated in Laos and were to be sent to Taiwan in cartons of garments.

Vietnam has some of the worlds toughest drug laws. Trafficking more than 100 grams of heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine is punishable by death. APThe HNA group has divested the 9 percent stake that it indirectly held in the share capital of TAP  Air Portugal by selling its subsidiary Hainan Airlines Civil Aviation Investment Ltd, the group said in a market filing.

Hainan Airlines Civil Aviation Investment Ltd, a subsidiary of Chinese group HNA, was sold to Global Aviation Ventures LLC fund and Brazilian airline Azul for USD55 million, the group said in a statement to the market.

The company was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hainan Airlines (Hong Kong) Co., which is also 100 percent controlled by the HNA group and its assets are a 20 percent stake in Atlantic Gateway, SGPS, which in turn held a 45 percent stake in TAPs share capital.

Following a privatization process, the Atlantic Gateway consortium, owned mostly by Brazilian air carrier Azul, held 45 percent of TAPs capital, with the remaining 55 percent divided into 5 percent for workers and 50 percent for the Portuguese state.

The subsidiary of the Chinese group was sold in two lots  one of 54.55 percent to the Global Aviation Ventures LLC fund for USD30 million and a remainder of 45.45 percent to airline Azul for USD25 million, according to the statement released in Shanghai.

The HNA group had, for less than a month, increased its stake in Atlantic Gateway from 12 percent to 20 percent at a time when it was already experiencing liquidity problems and is currently under the supervision of a group of creditors led by the China Development bank.Prithvi Man Shrestha is a political reporter for The Kathmandu Post, covering the governance-related issues including corruption and irregularities in the government machinery. Before joining The Kathmandu Post in 2009, he worked at nepalnews.com and Rising Nepal primarily covering the issues of political and economic affairs for three years.The leader of Thailands oldest political party said if he becomes prime minister after Sundays elections, he will make forceful but careful efforts to undo undemocratic provisions in the constitution imposed by the military government that seized power in 2014.

Abhisit Vejjajiva, head of the Democrat Party and a former prime minister, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the polls, the first since the coup, give Thailand a chance to halt military interventions in politics and respond effectively to challenges such as technological disruptions, an aging society and high inequality.

Sundays general election is important for the whole country. Its a chance now to get the country out of the cycle of dictatorships and corrupt governments, he told AP on Wednesday.

The army toppled an elected government in 2014 after months of sometimes-violent street protests that paralyzed Bangkoks streets. The army said its goal was to restore stability but ruled with a heavy hand and for much longer than it had promised.

It has cracked down on its critics while imposing a new constitution and election laws that give its allies a powerful advantage in the balloting and increase the chances of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, the coup leader, remaining in office.

Abhisit noted irregularities by Prayuth and the party backing him. Referring to campaign-like activities by Prayuth that are treated as official business, he said they are obviously not held to the same kind of rules and standards as other parties. But with four days to go before the vote, he said he was hopeful the election would proceed smoothly.

My appeal to the people involved is lets not make this an election that is unacceptable, he said. Lets not make this election unfree or unfair. Not because one side would benefit over the other. But because we need to maintain the integrity of the system.

Many political parties have heavily criticized the 2016 constitution pushed through by the military government, with some saying it should be completely rewritten.

Abhisit agreed there is much in the constitution that needs to be addressed but said battles should be carefully chosen.

The way we go about it is, I think, we have to identify and be clear about what kind of issues that need to be amended, particularly the undemocratic aspects of the constitution, he said. Build a consensus around it. Gain public support to put pressure on senators to accept that amendments are needed.

He warned that a call for wholesale change might be risky.

If you say you rewrite or revamp the whole constitution, there continues to be a deep distrust that politicians might also use this to rid themselves of the various checks and balance mechanisms, he said.

A view of politicians as a corrupt element of society contributes to the cycle of elections followed by coups, Abhisit said, noting that one of the clearest conditions for previous coups has been rampant corruption.

The Democrat Party shares the conservative, royalist viewpoint of the military but also professes adherence to democratic principles, leading to sometimes uneasy alliances. Abhisit became prime minister in 2008 with the political backing of the army, and was forced to rely on it to put down violent protests in 2009 and 2010 against his government.

He said he hopes to end the militarys influence in politics by using the power of persuasion rather than antagonism. Several other parties contesting the polls have attracted attention with campaign promises to slash the military budget, an idea that has drawn scorn from military leaders.

He said reducing the military budget can be done by talking to the military, using reasoning, looking at the fiscal situation, assessing the necessity of their proposed projects.

I dont see the value of being deliberately confrontational. I dont see the value of creating political controversy about these issues, Abhisit said. My government was one that actually succeeded in reducing the defense budget. We didnt make any noise about it. We didnt make it a conflict with the military. We just have to work professionally.

Ive learned from experience, Abhisit said. The challenges facing the country have changed. Weve now got many more new challenges. Technological disruptions, an aging or fast-aging society, a high degree of inequality  these need to be met head on. Preeyapa T. Khunsong & Tassanee Vejpongsa, Bangkok, APTwo former Philippine officials have taken the bold step of filing a complaint with the International Criminal Court accusing Chinese President Xi Jinping of crimes against humanity over his governments assertive actions in the disputed South China Sea, which they say deprived thousands of fishermen of their livelihood and destroyed the environment.

Former Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario and chief anti-graft prosecutor Conchita Carpio Morales said yesterday that they filed the complaint with the tribunal last week, before the current Philippine presidents move to withdraw the country from the tribunal took effect last weekend.

They accused Xi and other Chinese officials of turning seven disputed reefs into islands in a massive engineering feat, causing extensive environmental damage, and of blocking large numbers of fishermen, including about 320,000 Filipinos, from their fishing grounds.

This has seriously undermined the food and energy security of the coastal states in the South China Sea, including the Philippines, del Rosario and Carpio Morales said in a statement.

Chinas island building, which started in 2013 in an effort to construct air and naval bases in the disputed waters, reportedly destroyed large expanses of coral reefs and endangered fisheries. It presents one of the most massive, near permanent and devastating destruction of the environment in humanitys history, they said.

Though widely publicized, these atrociously inhumane actions of Chinese officials in the South China Sea and within Philippine territory remain unpunished, and it is only the ICC that can exact accountability on behalf of Filipinos and the international community, they said.

There was no immediate reaction from China.

Chinese officials have long claimed virtually the entire waterway, one of the worlds busiest, with the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei also contesting ownership of parts of the strategic waters, where a large amount of world goods and the oil that fuels Asias bustling economies transit.

When he was the Philippines top diplomat, del Rosario questioned the legality of Chinas massive claims and other actions in a landmark international arbitration case against Beijing which the Philippines won but was ignored by China.

The arbitration tribunal declared in its July 2016 ruling that Chinas claims based on historical grounds were invalid and that Chinese forces have unlawfully prevented Filipino fishermen from disputed Scarborough Shoal. The tribunal also ruled that China breached its obligation under a 1982 U.N. treaty to protect the environment by undertaking island-building works and tolerating illegal fishing by Chinese nationals.

Despite the arbitration ruling and a 2002 accord with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to stop occupation and constructions in the disputed region, Beijing behind the scenes planned and later constructed the islands in the disputed territory, the complaint said. This has placed billions of dollars worth of natural resources, including fish, fossil fuels and shipping lanes, under Beijings control, it said.

The complaint outlined Chinas increasingly assertive actions through the decades, starting in 1974, when it forcibly dislodged Vietnamese forces from the Paracels, to 1995, when it seized Philippine-claimed Mischief Reef, and 2013, when it started its island building.

Aside from Xi, it named as perpetrators Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Chinese Ambassador to Manila Zhao Jinhua.

The legal offensive against China contrasts with President Rodrigo Dutertes rapprochement with Beijing since he took office in mid-2016 while often criticizing the security policies of the United States, a treaty ally.

Duterte has lashed out against Washington for raising alarm over his anti-drug crackdown, which has left thousands of poor suspects dead and sparked two complaints charging mass murder before the ICC.

Duterte decided to withdraw the Philippines from the ICC in a move that took effect last Sunday, prompting del Rosario and Carpio Morales to file their complaint ahead of that date. Dutertes move has been challenged by human rights advocates before the Philippine Supreme Court. Jim Gomez, Manila, APThis website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. AcceptTaiwan President Tsai Ing-wen left yesterday on a tour of diplomatic allies in the Pacific that will end with a stopover in Hawaii.

Taiwan has struggled to shore up its dwindling roster of allies as countries are choosing instead to establish relations with Beijing, which considers the self-governing island part of Chinese territory.

Tsai will visit Palau, Nauru and the Marshall Islands, Taiwans official Central News Agency reported.

The agency said she will transit through Hawaii on March 27 on her way back from the Marshall Islands, but did not give further details.

Only 17 mainly small, developing countries still recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation. The island split from mainland China amid a civil war in 1949. Beijing has recently ratcheted up its rhetoric around re- unifying Taiwan with Communist Party-ruled mainland China.

China is particularly sensitive to cooperation between Taiwan and the U.S. When the latter approved the sale of USD330 million of military equipment to Taiwan last September, China warned of severe damage to bilateral relations.

Chinas foreign ministry said yesterday that it has complained to the U.S. about Tsais Hawaii stopover, mirroring its action toward a similar trip in 2017.

Any attempt to create two Chinas or one China, one Taiwan, will be opposed by all Chinese people, ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a daily briefing. We urge the U.S. to abide by the one China principle [] and to not grant a stopover for Tsai Ing-wen, and to not send wrong messages to Taiwan independence forces.

Tsais trip coincides with a visit to mainland China by Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu, whose election last November ended 20 years of rule by Tsais independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party in the southern Taiwan port city. The DPP lost significant representation to the Nationalists, Hans party, in the local races, raising doubts about Tsais prospects for re-election in 2020.

Han has said Taiwan should be more open to peace negotiations with China, in contrast to Tsai, who has dismissed Beijings overtures.

Han is to visit the southern cities of Shenzhen and Xiamen, as well as the semi-autonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau, from today March 28. Yanan Wang, Beijing, APAn in-depth look at how to find the right Mac setup for you.Action against Chand outfitbut how and under which laws?

The governments decision to crack down on the Communist Party of Nepal, led by Netra Bikram Chand, and its activities is marred by ambiguities and experts say the move was made on the basis of assumptions rather than realistic assessment and that instructions to initiate action against the group lack clarity.As Ansari takes oath, questions arise over necessity of hearing committee

In the first ever case since the provision of parliamentary hearing was introduced in the country a decade ago, Samim Miya Ansari on Thursday became the chief of a constitutional body without being endorsed by the Parliamentary Hearing Committee.Cultivation of cut flowers gains popularity in Nepal

Farmers are gradually getting attracted to the cultivation of cut flowers as demand for flowers continues to soar both domestically and overseas. Cut flowers are flowers that have been cut from the main plant to be used as decoration.Introducing The Main Index

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In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.

He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. ~Credit: CC0 Public Domain

New research led by Cancer Council Queensland and Curtin University has investigated the patterns and trends of a rare group of blood cancers known as myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) for the first time in Australia.

The research, published in the American Journal of Hematology, explored the impact of MPN, which affects more than 5000 people in Australia currently, and found that the diagnosis and survival rates of these blood cancers are very similar to those found in recent studies in Europe, the United States and Asia.

Between 2003 and 2014, 8604 Australians were diagnosed with a classic MPN, with a median age of diagnosis of 68 years. About 80% of people diagnosed with MPNs will still be alive five years later.

Co-author Professor Peter Baade, from Cancer Council Queensland's Viertel Cancer Research Centre, explained that prior to the study there had been no Australian data describing the burden of MPN in Australia.

"Our study adds to a body of data from multiple countries, showing an apparent change in incidence patterns of myeloproliferative neoplasms," Professor Baade said.

"While the incidence of MPN has been declining since 2003, which is mostly due to a declining incidence of one type of MPN, polycythemia vera, the rates have increased for another subtype, essential thrombocythemia.

"The reason for these observed trends, particularly the declining diagnosis rate of polycythemia vera, are still unexplained, but may reflect changes in clinical investigation and registry reporting practices rather than a true change in incidence."

Study co-author John Curtin Distinguished Professor Lin Fritschi, from the School of Public Health at Curtin University, explained that changes in testing for specific genetic mutations may explain some of the trends.

"The specific gene mutations in MPNs have only been identified in the last decade and we now have tests for these genes; this has meant that many of the cases of MPN are diagnosed with blood tests and are not always picked up by the cancer registries," Professor Fritschi said.

"This change in practice may be responsible for a reduction in reported MPN rates.

"Further research using accurate population-based data, including the collection of genetic information, is needed to assess the impact of changes in clinical practice in Australia."

The research also involved researchers from University of Adelaide, Queen's University and Northern Ireland Cancer Registry and Gosford Hospital.

The research paper, "Changing incidence of myeloproliferative neoplasms in Australia, 2003-2014," is published in the American Journal of Hematology.

Explore further Patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms have a significantly increased risk for arterial and venous thrombosis

More information: Peter D. Baade et al. Changing incidence of myeloproliferative neoplasms in Australia, 2003-2014, American Journal of Hematology (2019). Journal information: American Journal of Hematology Peter D. Baade et al. Changing incidence of myeloproliferative neoplasms in Australia, 2003-2014,(2019). DOI: 10.1002/ajh.25407African-American women give birth prematurely at a higher rate than white women, a trend a University of Washington study suggests is attributable to racial discrimination and PTSD. Credit: University of Washington

African-American women are nearly twice as likely to give birth prematurely as white women. Such births often coincide with low birth weight, and together are linked to other developmental delays and health effects believed responsible for almost one-fifth of infant deaths nationwide.

The trend holds up regardless of socioeconomic factors. That means, for example, that a black woman with a college degree and a comfortable income has a greater chance of giving birth prematurely than a white woman who didn't graduate high school.

Past research has pointed to other contributing factors to the difference, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. In a paper in winter issue of the Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice, Amelia Gavin, an associate professor in the University of Washington School of Social Work, connects racial discrimination to PTSD, and thus to preterm birth.

"Pregnancy is a stress test for the body. If you've been stressed during your life through discrimination, poverty and residential segregation, then the likelihood of having a healthy birth outcome has been compromised," Gavin said.

A typical pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks; a birth before the end of the 37th week is considered "preterm." According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 10 percent of babies born in the U.S. in 2016 were born prematurely  a slight uptick that year, following a steady decline for several years prior. While the CDC attributed that decline to the decrease in the number of teen mothers, the agency noted a consistent difference in the rates of preterm birth among African-American versus white women. In 2016, the preterm birth rate among African American women was 14 percent, compared to 9 percent for white women. There are medical causes of preterm birth, "but the majority of cases have an unknown cause," Gavin said.

Research over the years has examined behavioral and biological risk factors for preterm birth, including access to prenatal care, substance use and stress. PTSD, associated not only with combat experiences, but also other traumatic events such as natural disasters, assault and abuse, affects more women than men. Several studies have linked PTSD with a higher risk of preterm birth.

When broken down by race and ethnicity, PTSD affects African-Americans more than any other group, and more African-American women than men.

Meanwhile, studies have tied racial discrimination to poor health, and to African-American women's health, in particular. The daily experiences of discrimination, as well as the legacy of racism  neighborhoods with higher crime and fewer resources, generational poverty and limited access to health care  can lead to stress and engagement in unhealthy behaviors.

Gavin drew a hypothesis from those connections: If discrimination is associated with PTSD, and PTSD is associated with preterm birth, then racial discrimination, via PTSD, also can be tied to preterm birth.

The racial disparity among preterm birth sparked her research interest in graduate school, Gavin said. By studying childhood poverty and abuse, as well as maternal depression, Gavin honed in on PTSD.

"I'm trying to unpack, from a life course perspective, how risk factors in black women's lives can have an impact on the next generation," she said. "Exploring the mechanisms by which racial discrimination affects the next generation is really important, and that means taking into consideration maternal mental health status. When we talk about racial disparities in health outcomes, we have to think about how we construct mental health, the role of PTSD and how different racial and ethnic groups experience it."

One challenge has been how PTSD is defined, generally by members of the mental health community, Gavin said. PTSD isn't always related to one physically or emotionally devastating event; events can recur and continue to affect a person over the long term. There has been little research into how racial discrimination could manifest as PTSD and influence an early childbirth, she said.

Further research could more definitively demonstrate the role of PTSD as the conduit between racial discrimination and preterm birth, Gavin said.

In the paper, Gavin and her co-authors recommend that health-care providers start screening all pregnant women for prenatal PTSD, in order to spot those at risk for preterm birth. Pursuing the role of racial discrimination, of course, requires more wide-ranging, social-justice-oriented strategies. The authors suggest greater government investment in the quantity of and access to affordable housing, and in funding for K-12 education and health care. By addressing such social factors, the authors write, the health of African-American women and their offspring can improve.

Explore further PTSD, major depressive episode appears to increase risk of preterm birthCredit: CC0 Public Domain

Smoking during pregnancy is understood to pose risks to both baby and mother. Now, new research led by the University of Glasgow has found further evidence that maternal smoking poses a risk to baby and child health.

The study, published today in BMJ Open, reveals more detailed evidence about the association between maternal smoking in pregnancy and childhood hospitalization, as well as birth conditions which can lead to lifelong ill health and devastating outcomes such as meningitis and sudden infant death syndrome.

The authors studied births in Scotland from 1997 to 2009, with child health records followed until 2012. From the data, the researchers have been able to provide robust estimates of the current impact of maternal smoking on infant and child health.

Key findings of the study include estimates that 7 percent of deaths in the first month of life and 22 percent in the first year are related to maternal smoking during pregnancy. Researchers also found that 28 percent of babies born small for gestational age, and 9 percent born before 37 weeks, were attributable to maternal smoking.

Analysing data relating to children under the age of 5 years, the study found that 12 percent of hospital admissions for bacterial meningitis, 10 percent for bronchiolitis, 7 percent for asthma and 7 percent of admissions under 1 year for 'acute respiratory' illness were also attributable to maternal smoking.

The rare but life-threatening condition bacterial meningitis was 49 percent more likely to occur among children five and under born to mothers who smoked

Professor David Tappin, Professor of Clinical Trials for Children at the University of Glasgow, said: "Our research provides further evidence of the harmful effects of maternal smoking in pregnancy.

"This study provides evidence that could be used to estimate the current cost of maternal smoking, and to assess the cost-effectiveness of current smoking cessation strategies for pregnant women."

The study also found that, among babies whose mothers were current smokers during pregnancy, the odds of neonatal mortality in the first month after birth were a third higher than those whose mothers were non-smokers.

The odds of infant mortality between one month and one year-old were more than two times higher among babies whose mothers were current smokers. While the odds of being born small for gestational age was also two times higher.

The researchers concluded that more than 20 percent of post-neonatal deaths, many of which would be defined as Sudden Unexpected Deaths in Infancy (SUDI), may be related to smoking in pregnancy. This result is consistent with the findings of a study of over 3 million births in the US which reported a 40 percent higher infant mortality among the children of mothers who smoked, with a dose-dependent relationship with the number of cigarettes smoked.

Professor Tappin said: "We know that 25 percent of current smokers at maternity booking do not admit to their smoking habit. Therefore the figures we have calculated may be an underestimate of the real effects of maternal smoking on outcomes."

The study, "The impact of maternal smoking on early childhood health: a retrospective cohort linked dataset analysis of 697,003 children born in Scotland 1997-2009," is published in BMJ Open.

Explore further Smoking during pregnancy doubles the risk of sudden unexpected infant death, study warns

More information: Richard Lawder et al. Impact of maternal smoking on early childhood health: a retrospective cohort linked dataset analysis of 697 003 children born in Scotland 19972009, BMJ Open (2019). Journal information: BMJ Open Richard Lawder et al. Impact of maternal smoking on early childhood health: a retrospective cohort linked dataset analysis of 697 003 children born in Scotland 19972009,(2019). DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-023213Men are dying after opioid overdoses at nearly three times the rate of women in the United States. Overdose deaths are increasing faster among black and Latino Americans than among whites. And there's an especially steep rise in the number of young adults ages 25 to 34 whose death certificates include some version of the drug fentanyl.

These findings, published Thursday in a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, highlight the start of the third wave of the nation's opioid epidemic. The first was prescription pain medications, such as OxyContin; then heroin, which replaced pills when they became too expensive; and now fentanyl.

Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid that can shut down breathing in less than a minute, and its popularity in the U.S. began to surge at the end of 2013. For each of the next three years, fatal overdoses involving fentanyl doubled, "rising at an exponential rate," said Merianne Rose Spencer, a statistician at the CDC and one of the study's authors.

Spencer's research shows a 113 percent average annual increase from 2013 to 2016 (when adjusted for age). That total was first reported in late 2018, but Spencer looked deeper with this report into the demographic characteristics of those people dying from fentanyl overdoses.

Increased trafficking of the drug and increased use are both fueling the spike in fentanyl deaths. For drug dealers, fentanyl is easier to produce than some other opioids. Unlike the poppies needed for heroin, which can be spoiled by weather or a bad harvest, fentanyl's ingredients are easily supplied; it's a synthetic combination of chemicals, often produced in China and packaged in Mexico, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. And because fentanyl can be 50 times more powerful than heroin, smaller amounts translate to bigger profits.

Jon DeLena, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA's New England Field Division, said 1 kilogram of fentanyl, driven across the southern U.S. border, can be mixed with fillers or other drugs to create 6 or 8 kilograms for sale.

"I mean, imagine that business model," DeLena said. "If you went to any small-business owner and said, 'Hey, I have a way to make your product eight times the product that you have now,' there's a tremendous windfall in there."

For drug users, fentanyl is more likely to cause an overdose than heroin because it is so potent and because the high fades more quickly than with heroin. Drug users say they inject more frequently with fentanyl because the high doesn't last as longand more frequent injecting adds to the risk of overdose.

There are several ways fentanyl can wind up in a dose of some other drug. The mixing may be intentional, as a person seeks a more intense or different kind of high. It may happen as an accidental contamination, as dealers package their fentanyl and other drugs in the same place.

Or dealers may be adding fentanyl to cocaine and meth on purpose, in an effort to expand their clientele of users hooked on fentanyl.

"That's something we have to consider," said David Kelley, referring to the intentional addition of fentanyl to cocaine, heroin or other drugs by dealers. Kelley is deputy director of the New England High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. "The fact that we've had instances where it's been present with different drugs leads one to believe that could be a possibility."

The picture gets more complicated, said Kelley, as dealers develop new forms of fentanyl that are even more deadly. The new CDC report shows dozens of varieties of the drug now on the streets.

The highest rates of fentanyl-involved overdose deaths were found in New England, according to the study, followed by states in the Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest. But fentanyl deaths had barely increased in the Westincluding in Hawaii and Alaskaas of the end of 2016.

Researchers have no firm explanations for these geographic differences, but some experts watching the trends have theories. One is that it's easier to mix a few white fentanyl crystals into the powdered form of heroin that is more common in Eastern states than into the black-tar heroin that is sold more routinely in the West. Another hypothesis holds that drug cartels used New England as a test market for fentanyl because the region has a strong, long-standing market for opioids.

Spencer, the study's main author, hopes that some of the other characteristics of the wave of fentanyl highlighted in this report will help shape the public response. Why, for example, did the influx of fentanyl increase the overdose death rate among men to nearly three times the rate of overdose deaths among women?

Some research points to one factor: Men are more likely to use drugs alone. In the era of fentanyl, that increases a man's chances of an overdose and death, said Ricky Bluthenthal, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine.

"You have stigma around your drug use, so you hide it," Bluthenthal said. "You use by yourself in an unsupervised setting. (If) there's fentanyl in it, then you die."

Traci Green, deputy director of Boston Medical Center's Injury Prevention Center, offers some other reasons. Women are more likely to buy and use drugs with a partner, Green said. And women are more likely to call for helpincluding 911and to seek help, including treatment.

"Women go to the doctor more," she said. "We have health issues that take us to the doctor more. So we have more opportunities to help."

Green noted that every interaction with a health care provider is a chance to bring someone into treatment. So this finding should encourage more outreach, she said, and encourage health care providers to find more ways to connect with active drug users.

As to why fentanyl seems to be hitting blacks and Latinos disproportionately as compared with whites, Green points to the higher incarceration rates for blacks and Latinos. Those who formerly used opioids heavily face a particularly high risk of overdose when they leave jail or prison and inject fentanyl, she noted; they've lost their tolerance to high levels of the drugs.

There are also reports that African-Americans and Latinos are less likely to call 911 because they don't trust first responders, and medication-based treatment may not be as available to racial minorities. Many Latinos said bilingual treatment programs are hard to find.

Spencer said the deaths attributed to fentanyl in her study should be seen as a minimum numberthere are likely more that weren't counted. Coroners in some states don't test for the drug or don't have equipment that can detect one of the dozens of new variations of fentanyl that would appear if sophisticated tests were more widely available.

There are signs the fentanyl surge continues. Kelley, with the New England High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, notes that fentanyl seizures are rising. And in Massachusetts, one of the hardest-hit areas, state data show fentanyl present in more than 89 percent of fatal overdoses through October 2018.

Still, in one glimmer of hope, even as the number of overdoses in Massachusetts continues to rise, associated deaths dropped 4 percent last year. Many public health specialists attribute the decrease in deaths to the spreading availability of naloxone, a drug that can reverse an opioid overdose.

Explore further Overdose deaths from fentanyl soaring: report

2019 Kaiser Health News

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.A Wright's stained bone marrow aspirate smear of patient with precursor B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Credit: VashiDonsk/Wikipedia

Genetic mutations that drive the development of a common type of childhood leukaemia can be traced back to errors by the immune system during the production of antibodies.

The discovery by scientists at the University of Leeds could lead to new ways to treat a number of childhood blood cancers.

The immune system needs to generate millions of different antibodies every day to fight a vast number of potential infections. To meet this demand, the white blood cells that make antibodies 'reshuffle' their DNA by cutting and re-joining it to produce unique antibodies.

The Leeds team have identified a new way that mistakes in this process can lead to childhood leukaemia. The research, which was primarily funded by the blood cancer research charity Bloodwise, is published in the journal Molecular Cell.

During antibody production DNA is cut and joined by enzymes called 'recombinases' and the unwanted regions of DNA in between the required gene segments are then 'kicked out' of the genome.

The researchers found that recombinase enzymes sometimes bind with these DNA by-products  creating highly dangerous enzyme/DNA complexes that cause random DNA cuts throughout the genome, leading to cancer. They have named the process 'cut and run'.

It has been previously shown by researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, that the most common type of childhood blood cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), starts with a genetic mutation in the womb.

This initiating genetic mutation alone cannot directly cause leukaemia  cancer will only develop if secondary genetic mutations take place during early childhood. For example, the ETV6/RUNX1 chromosomal translocation is found in around a quarter of cases of childhood ALL, but only around one in 100 children born with the ETV6/RUNX1 translocation go on to develop leukaemia.

The Leeds researchers showed that the 'cut and run' process can explain how some of these secondary mutations take place in ETV6/RUNX1 leukaemia.

They added the enzyme/DNA complexes to cells derived from cancer patients in the laboratory. The resulting genetic mutations that formed were located on the genome using DNA sequencing, sophisticated computer programmes and a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which can make multiple copies of specific regions of DNA.

28 of the chromosome changes caused by 'cut and run' were also present in children with leukaemia with the ETV6/RUNX1 mutation. Not only this, but the DNA breaks caused by 'cut and run' occurred in the same cancer-causing genes that are frequently mutated in ETV6/RUNX1-positive leukaemia and other leukaemias.

Dr. Joan Boyes, who led the research at the University of Leeds' School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, said: "The price we pay for such an effective immune system is that occasionally mistakes can be made that can cause blood cancers to develop. Now that we know exactly how this process works, we may be able to stop it  leading to new drugs to treat children in the future."

Dr. Alasdair Rankin, Director of Research and Patient Experience at Bloodwise, said: "We know that childhood leukaemia needs at least two steps to develop and some evidence suggests that the second trigger occurs when a child's immune system reacts in an abnormal way to infections. As important research like this helps build a more complete picture of what causes childhood leukaemia, we can begin to think about ways to stop it happening in the first place."

The University of Leeds researchers received additional funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the China Scholarship Council, Yorkshire Cancer Research and the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs). As part of their commitment to the principles of the 3Rs (the replacement, reduction and refinement of animals in research), the Leeds team used cancer cell lines in the laboratory for their research, with the goal to replace some experiments on mice.

Explore further Immune system development linked to leukemia

More information: Christopher M. Kirkham et al. Cut-and-Run: A Distinct Mechanism by which V(D)J Recombination Causes Genome Instability, Molecular Cell (2019). Journal information: Molecular Cell Christopher M. Kirkham et al. Cut-and-Run: A Distinct Mechanism by which V(D)J Recombination Causes Genome Instability,(2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2019.02.025Electron micrographs of hepatitis C virus purified from cell culture. Scale bar is 50 nanometers. Credit: Center for the Study of Hepatitis C, The Rockefeller University.

There are currently more than three million people in the United States with hepatitis C, a condition that can lead to serious and even deadly liver complications. In the U.S. prison system, the prevalence of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is currently 10 times higher than the national average. And while new HCV treatment drugs are very effective, their high cost along with very limited healthcare budget in prisons impedes universal treatment in prisons. However, new research in the INFORMS journal Operations Research, has identified new protocols that could substantially decrease HCV infection in the U.S. prison system.

The study, "Prioritizing Hepatitis C Treatment in U.S. Prisons," was conducted by Turgay Ayer of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Can Zhang of Duke University, Anthony Bonifonte of Denison University, Anne C. Spaulding of Emory University, and Jagpreet Chhatwal of Harvard Medical School.

While the prevalence of HCV infection in the general population is only 1-2 percent, within the prison system the prevalence of antibodies to hepatitis C jumps to 17 percent. This is primarily due to the fact that many HCV-infected people are current or past injection drug users (IDU). Nearly 80 percent of all HCV transmissions are IDU-related transmissions, and most Americans who inject drugs have been incarcerated at some point during their lives.

Currently the biggest barrier to treating persons in prison with HCV is that while the newest medications have a higher than 95 percent cure rate (versus a 50 percent cure rate of previous treatments), the cost of treatment is outrageously high. When the new treatments were approved in 2015, their cost was $84,000 per treatment course. Since then, the prices have come down to around $25,000. However, even at this price, treating incarcerated persons could cost $3.3 billion. Because the healthcare budget is very limited, only 1-13 percent of HCV-infected persons in prison receive treatment currently.

Because of the cost/budget constraints, prisons often prioritize patients for HCV treatment. The current approach emphasizes liver stage , and often ignores other factors such as their risk of transmission, age, etc. The study's authors identified a new protocol to prioritize treatment among HCV-infected persons in the prison population to optimize the effect of HCV treatment on overall society's well-being. Their solution systematically considers factors including liver health state, remaining sentence length, propensity to inject drugs, age, disease progression over time, and reinfection rates.

"We found that by simultaneously considering health state, remaining sentence length, IDU status, and age in prioritization, decisions can lead to a significant decrease in hepatitis C-caused mortality and infections both in correctional health systems and in the community," said Ayer.

This new system offers an alternative to the current controversial patient prioritization protocol, which focuses on liver status, or the level of scarring on the patient's liver. "Ideally, prisons would be allocated enough resources to treat everyone infected," said Spaulding, a public health physician-researcher, who has been working with incarcerated persons living with HCV since 1996. "In the meantime, this algorithm is designed to maximize the public health outcome of treatment."

"Due to the simplicity in implementing prioritization policy, our work is appealing to multiple stakeholders within the U.S. prison system, including medical directors and policy makers at the prisons," continued Ayer. "Ultimately, by reducing the prevalence of hepatitis C in the prison population, we are reducing the chances of persons spreading the disease in the general population once they return to society."

Explore further Lowering drug costs for hepatitis C would increase treatment in prisons, researchers suggest

More information: Turgay Ayer et al, Prioritizing Hepatitis C Treatment in U.S. Prisons, Operations Research (2019). Turgay Ayer et al, Prioritizing Hepatitis C Treatment in U.S. Prisons,(2019). DOI: 10.1287/opre.2018.1812Disgusting bureaucrats

Demands for commissions forced the Melamchi contractor to leaveAlyssa Peckham specializes in helping individuals who suffer from opioid-use disorder. Credit: Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University

In 2017 alone, 47,600 Americans died from opioid overdoses. That's 130 people every day.

The rate of opioid prescriptions has dropped steadily since 2012, but it is still at 59 prescriptions per 100 Americans, which means 191 million prescriptions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And the opioid epidemic has continued to ravage families and communities around the country.

At the very least, Americans need to change the way we think about, and address, the opioid crisis.

"We need to reframe our mindset in understanding addiction," says Alyssa Peckham, a clinical assistant professor in Northeastern's Bouve College of Health Sciences. "It's a chronic illness, rather than a moral failure."

On Wednesday, Peckham, who is also an addiction specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, discussed the evolving opioid crisis and what we can do to help.

How has the opioid epidemic changed?

We're technically in phase three of our opioid crisis.

There was a time where a lot of our opioid-overdose-related deaths were related to prescription opioids. But then that transitioned into heroin. Most recently, it's really become our synthetic opioids. We're almost exclusively calling it a fentanyl crisis. A lot of our products now have a synthetic opioid called fentanyl in them. And then even more recently, we are seeing carfentanil, which is an even more potent opioid.

When you have a product that you believe to be heroin, that now has certain amounts of fentanyl, which is more potent, or even carfentanil, which is even more potent, you're at an increased risk of overdose because your flooding your opioid system.

New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand suggested in a recent tweet that limiting the length of opioid prescriptions would get at the "root causes" of abuse. Is the solution as simple as cutting back on opioid prescriptions?

Where we really need to afford our efforts here is focusing on the patients that are in the throes of suffering. We have patients that have opioid use disorder, we have patients that are really treatment-resistant, have barriers to accessing care, and things like that. And we have thousands and thousands of patients that have already passed away.

What we need to do is rev up the access to treatment so that we can stop any further progression of their disease course, rather than bottle necking the prescription opioid supply. Because when you do that, you're forcing people that have a legitimate need for that pain relief to seek those products elsewhere. And that's when we introduce misuse of opioids.

I do think reframing how we have prescribed opioids is certainly a component of helping this whole crisis, but it is not going to solve the situation entirely. We really need to start increasing access and getting better treatment for these patients.

Are opioids the best way to treat pain?

That's been the major target of our opioid-prescribing reformreally taking a look at where do opioids have their place in pain management. I think we fell into this practice of prescribing opioids for a wide range of pain, even where there weren't studies to support their use or perhaps where you could have tried a less potent agent or maybe a non-opioid agent first.

I think that's been the biggest push amongst the prescribing community: Let's take a look at the pain. Let's review our pain goals. Can we start somewhere slower? Are we progressing towards adequate pain management?

Opioids don't always have to be the answer, though they are oftentimes a component of pain management.

What would you tell someone who has relative or friend who's suffering from opioid-use disorder?

Stemming from years of stigmatizing a chronic illness, we've kind of thrown these patients into the shadows and really made them shameful of this chronic illness that they've had. And a lot of times, family members are embarrassed as well. It's really nothing to be embarrassed about. It's a chronic illness. When patients are engaged in treatment and have these medications on board, there's actually good data to support how efficacious and effective these medications are. We just need patients to stay in treatment and stay engaged.

We can have a whole other conversation about how we don't have enough access to treatment or things like that. But for family members, we need you to support those patients. Oftentimes there's a lot of tarnished relationships in their lives and pushing someone further and further into social isolation can provoke depression, provoke anxiety. They're going to surround themselves with others that share similar lifestyles, other users. And once they get wrapped up in that world, it's really hard to get them back without that framework of support.

Don't give up on them and stay connected in their lives. Because family is oftentimes the biggest support that they have.

Explore further Dual receipt of opioids tied to increased risk for OD deathChildren and young people told us they were often overwhelmed by the risks that surrounded them. Credit: shutterstock.com

In recent months, we have been confronted by events that make the world seem unsafe. Among these are the horrific stories of child sexual abuse, the rise in Aboriginal youth suicide and the tragedy of mass killings at the hands of an Australian terrorist in Christchurch.

Many of us feel anger, despair, hopelessness and grief as we are hit by what feels like a constant barrage of bad news. It's important to take care of our mental health during such times, but it's also vital to think about how children and young people are experiencing and responding to difficult events, and the ensuing emotions.

During the life of the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse, we conducted a study to better understand how children and young people conceptualise and experience safety. We wanted to know what they believed adults might do to both keep them safe and help them feel safe.

We spoke to 121 children and young people aged 4-18 in the ACT, Victoria, NewSouth Wales and Queensland. The participants represented various institutional contexts, including having attended early learning centres, schools, sporting groups, holiday camps, church groups, out-of-home care and hospitals.

Below are some key messages children and young people wanted to get across to the adults in their lives.

Children know the risks, but might misjudge the extent of the danger

In addition to snakes, ghosts, escaped tigers and bullies, participants raised concerns about child abusers and abductors, online dangers, wars and terrorism. They said they learnt about these threats by hearing things directly from parents, siblings and peers (including quiet discussions that weren't for them), the television and radio, and social media.

Many children and young people felt they were exposed to so much information about risk, they often found it difficult to determine how pressing the danger was. When their parents, teachers and other trusted adults failed to talk to them about the issues, they said they often imagined the worst-case scenario.

Young people said: "Sometimes we freak out when we don't need to. We might have heard something and now we think that it's a huge risk but it could turn out that we've heard the wrong thing or that it's not really a problem."

No one really talks to kids about what really could happen or tell them not to worry when the thing they're scared about ain't gonna happen. So kids are all stressing about the wrong things and they don't know what to do if something real bad happens, because no one talked to them about it.

Young people believed children lacked the ability to accurately assess threat. When news reporting was coupled with fictional movies and urban legends, and when children were not given context, their perceptions were skewed.

Help children articulate and process their fears

Children and young people told us they were often overwhelmed by the risks that surrounded them. Young women, in particular, said they were constantly worried about threats to their physical and emotional safety.

Children felt this lack of safety in their bodies  they sweated, felt butterflies in their stomachs, found it hard to settle and concentrate, and were easily frightened. They demonstrated these fears in their behaviours  by being restless, feeling tired and fighting with others.

They said it was often difficult to articulate their emotions and they needed adults to help them find the words. They needed help to understand the links between their lack of security and their response.

Don't downplay children's concerns

Children and young people felt adults often too readily dismissed their concerns and downplayed the impact their fears were having on them. One young person said: "Not everything they (children) fear is imaginary. That's what parents get wrong. They think that cause they're little they're not telling the truth or they've imagined it but most of the time they're telling the truth but people don't believe them because they're little. And anyway it's real to them so adults should listen."

Participants said trusted adults should listen and acknowledge their feelings, and take their fears and concerns seriously. They wanted adults to let the child voice their thoughts and feelings before trying to solve them and to respect the child's experience.

They felt it was sometimes appropriate for adults to distract a child to help them calm down. But they also believed adults should return to the conversation when the child was calm to help them make sense of their fears and feel acknowledged.

Tell young people what is being done to protect them

Participants observed the information they were given was often restricted to the risk or danger, but they weren't being told what was being done to protect them.

Participants said they had heard a lot about the threat of child abduction, for instance, but no one had told them there were more police stationed around schools, that teachers were more vigilant and that policies were in place to reduce the likelihood a child could be harmed.

Young people reflected that when adults didn't inform them of how they were responding, children had little confidence adults fully appreciated the risk or were adequately equipped to keep them from harm.

Many participants also believed adults could not always be around to help protect them and it was important for children and young people to be skilled to deal with issues themselves. This was seen as particularly important for older young people who were more likely to be alone and who would more likely want to deal with issues themselves rather than seek support.

They advocated for more classes on how to assess and respond to risks, giving examples of drills, role plays and lessons from others who had confronted similar challenges. It was important the recommended strategies were effective because young people felt the consequences of doing the wrong thing when they were unsafe would be significant. "They've gotta get it right or we're fucked, you know. It's better to feel scared and to watch out for things than to feel comfortable because someone has told you not to worry and then you end up in a bad situation because you got the wrong advice."

Ultimately, children and young people need adults who are there for them, who discuss their fears, provide them with enough information to deal with potential threats but not cause them unnecessary worry, and help them understand how other adults and the community around them are keeping them safe.

The study in this article was commissioned by the Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse. It was conducted by the Australian Catholic University, and peers from Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology.

Explore further What parents need to know about the signs of child sexual abuse

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.In this Monday, March 4, 2019, Nancy Simpson, left, speaks with Dr. Allison Magnuson, Geriatric Oncology and Breast Oncology at Wilmot Cancer Institute, at the Pluta Cancer Center in Rochester, N.Y. Simpson, 80, says she "wanted to do the maximum I could handle" to fight her disease. (AP Photo/Adrian Kraus)

Before she could start breast cancer treatment, Nancy Simpson had to walk in a straight line, count backward from 20 and repeat a silly phrase.

It was all part of a special kind of medical fitness test for older patients that's starting to catch on among cancer doctors. Instead of assuming that elderly patients are too frail for treatment or recommending harsh drugs tested only in younger patients, they are taking a broader look.

Specialists call these tests geriatric assessments, and they require doctors to take the time to evaluate physical and mental fitness, along with emotional and social well-being. They also take into account the patient's desires for life-prolonging treatment regardless of how much time might be left.

An avid walker with a strong network of nearby family and friends, Simpson, now 80, says she "wanted to do the maximum I could handle" to fight her disease. She scored high enough in her 2017 evaluation to proceed with recommended surgery and chemotherapy.

"It gave me encouragement. Then I felt like I am OK and I can get through this and will get through this," said Simpson, who lives in Fairport, New York, near Rochester.

These tests are sometimes done with other illnesses but only recently have been recommended for cancer. In new guidelines , the American Society of Clinical Oncology recommends the evaluations for patients aged 65 and up, particularly before making decisions about chemotherapy. The idea is to find ways to help patients tolerate treatment, not rule it out.

For example, if walking tests show balance problems that chemotherapy might worsen, patients might be offered physical therapy first. Relatives or friends might be called on to help cook for seniors who live alone and would become too weak to prepare meals during chemo. And for those who want to avoid the hospital no matter what, treatment that could put them there would be avoided.

In this Monday, March 4, 2019 photo, Dr. Allison Magnuson, left, speaks with patient Nancy Simpson at the Pluta Cancer Center in Rochester, N.Y. Before she could start breast cancer treatment, Simpson, 80, had to walk in a straight line, count backward from 20 and repeat a silly phrase. It was part of a special kind of medical fitness test for older patients. (AP Photo/Adrian Kraus)

Almost 1 million U.S. adults aged 65 and older will be diagnosed with cancer this year, the American Cancer Society estimates. Nearly two-thirds of all cancer patients are in that age group. And yet, most cancer treatments stem from studies on younger, often healthier patients. That leaves doctors with limited information on how treatments will affect elderly patients. Geriatric assessments can help bridge that gap, said Dr. Supriya Mohile, a specialist in geriatric cancer at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

These tests may require 15 to 30 minutes or more and recent research has shown they can accurately predict how patients will fare during and after cancer treatment, Mohile said. Older patients who get chemo and have other health problems are more vulnerable to falls and delirium and at risk for losing independence.

"We hear all the time about 'decision regret,'" she said, meaning patients who got harsh treatment but weren't unaware of risks and other options and who say, "I wish someone had told me this could happen."

Mohile co-authored a recent study that found just 1 in 4 U.S. cancer specialists did the assessments. She said doctors say it takes too long and that patients don't want it. But she hears from patients and caregivers: "I'm so happy you're asking me about these things. Nobody ever asked me.'"

One of Mohile's colleagues did Simpson's evaluation, which showed she was strong enough to endure a standard, aggressive three-drug chemotherapy combo for breast cancer. She chose a variation that was gentler but extended the treatment by several weeks.

The evaluation showed "I wasn't in as that bad of shape as my age would indicate," Simpson said.

Her walking buddy and four attentive children gave her strong social support, and she lived independently, doing her own cooking and cleaning.

In this Monday, March 4, 2019 photo, Dr. Allison Magnuson, Geriatric Oncology and Breast Oncology at Wilmot Cancer Institute, right, speaks with patient Nancy Simpson at the Pluta Cancer Center in Rochester, N.Y. Instead of assuming that elderly patients are too frail for treatment or recommending harsh drugs tested only in younger patients, cancer doctors are taking time to evaluate their physical and mental fitness, along with emotional and social well-being. (AP Photo/Adrian Kraus)

Treatment left Simpson with hair loss, fatigue and excruciating mouth sores. She knew about the risks but has no regrets.

Cancer "gave me a different perspective on what is important in life and what isn't and I'm still adjusting to that," Simpson said.

Dr. Hyman Muss, a geriatrics specialist at the University of North Carolina's Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center says there's no question the evaluations are important but insurance coverage is sometimes a problem. Medicare will pay for yearly physical exams but not geriatric assessments, he said. Doctors can sometimes squeeze the tests into other office visits, but there is no billing code for the exams, he said.

Advocates note that the evaluations can include questionnaires that patients can fill out at home to shorten time in the doctor's office.

Beverly Canin, 84, of Rhinebeck, New York, became an advocate after declining chemotherapy following surgery for early breast cancer 20 years ago. She didn't have an assessment, and says her doctor dismissed her concerns about harsh side effects and refused to consider other options.

A 2015 medical report Canin co-authored told of a patient who had the opposite experience. The 92-year-old man with rectal cancer entered hospice care after he declined surgery, the only treatment his primary care doctor recommended. The doctor determined the man would not tolerate rigorous chemotherapy and radiation because of his advanced age. A specialist approved the treatments after the man had a geriatric evaluation and declared he wanted care that would control his symptoms and prolong his life.

The patient managed well and was cancer-free two years later. Canin said his stress and treatment delay could have been avoided if a geriatric evaluation had been done first.

"The risks with older adults traditionally are overtreatment and undertreatment. What we need is more precision treatment," she said.

Explore further Some primary care doctors not prepared to help with cancer treatment decisions

 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.With several patients in local hospitals struggling to recover, public health officials are warning San Diego doctors to be on the lookout for signs of a deadly infection linked to weight-loss surgeries performed in Tijuana.

The county Health and Human Services Agency this week alerted the medical community that four patients have popped up in local hospitals with drug-resistant superbug infections of the same type that prompted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue a travel advisory in early January.

The CDC has continued to caution those who travel to Tijuana for surgery, as the number of cases have more than doubled. Most are connected to patients operated on at Grand View Hospital near the U.S.-Mexico border.

To date, CDC officials said, a total of 25 cases of drug-resistant pseudomonas aeruginosa have been detected among U.S. citizens who crossed the border, usually for "gastric sleeve" surgery that significantly reduces the size of the stomach, accelerating the pace of weight loss.

Pseudomonas is listed among the CDC's top threats among microbes that can resist antibiotics. According to a 2013 report, the bug kills about 440 people per year in the United States and infects about 6,700.

In January, CDC officials said that the subspecies detected among Tijuana weight-loss patients is particularly nasty due to its ability to destroy carbapenems, one of the most effective and broadly-acting classes of antibiotics available to modern medicine.

Maroya Walters, a CDC epidemiologist with a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology, said Tuesday that while the world's foremost public health agency saw its last Grand View case in late January, additional infections have continued to surface among patients who were operated on at other as-yet-unnamed Tijuana hospitals. The most recent case was detected on Feb. 12.

The current rate of new cases, she said, has not reduced enough for the CDC to remove or change the travel advisory it issued in January.

"Right now, we don't have any assurance that the infection control issues have been addressed," Walters said.

In San Diego, Dr. Eric McDonald, medical director of the county public health department's epidemiology and immunization services branch, said that his office became aware of two local cases, one in October and one in January, after his office issued a preliminary notice to doctors on Jan. 16. Neither of those cases, he said, is a San Diego County resident, with one residing elsewhere in California and another living out of state.

He said two more patients, both who live in San Diego County but who had weight-loss surgeries at Tijuana hospitals other than Grand View, were admitted to area hospitals with pseudomonas infections in late February.

Three of the four cases, he added, remain hospitalized today and are being treated under special protocols designed to keep infectious diseases from spreading.

"At this time, we have no evidence of secondary infections associated with these hospitalized cases," McDonald said Monday.

He said that having four cases pop up in San Diego hospitals made it important for his office to let all local doctors know that they need to be proactive, asking about surgery in Mexico and responding with extra precaution, including patient isolation, where appropriate.

"We just wanted to reiterate that you shouldn't wait until after you know that a person has this organism to begin taking contact precautions," McDonald said. "If you know someone is coming in with an infection, and you know they've had surgery in Mexico, then you should take these precautions right away."

Eighteen of the 25 cases20 have been confirmed and five are suspectedoccurred in patients who were operated on at Grand View Hospital, according to CDC epidemic intelligence officer Ian Kracalik.

He said Mexican health officials told the agency they detected lapses in the procedures used to sterilize medical devices used in weight-loss surgeries. Kracalik said additional information on exactly which devices were improperly handled was not made available by the Mexican health agency that conducted the Grand View investigation.

Initially, he added, Mexico's La Comision Federal para la Proteccion contra Riesgos Sanitarios or federal commission for the protection against sanitary risks, told the CDC that it had shut down the surgical areas of Grand View on Dec. 19. But there were strong indications that the surgical center near the U.S. border remained open, with several new infections appearing after patients underwent surgeries at Grand View after Dec. 19.

"It is clear there was an ongoing risk during that period when the hospital's surgical area was not supposed to be operational," Kracalik said.

Health authorities in Mexico said they were not available to discuss the developments Tuesday.

Kracalik added that the CDC received word that Grand View shut down "sometime after Jan. 31," which was the last date on which the CDC received a report of an infection case linked to the hospital.

Most of the cases, the CDC representatives added, are associated with Dr. Mario Almanza, a surgeon whose website declares that he is the "leading bariatric weight-loss surgeon in the world." Almanza received significant media attention in 2018 when he was named in a class-action lawsuit by former patients, including a lead plaintiff who said her procedure left her with complications including internal bleeding, according to coverage by Channel 10 News and others.

Almanza, contacted through weightlossagents.com, the stateside travel agency whose phone number the doctor lists on his website, did not return a request for comment Tuesday.

With Grand View apparently shut down, CDC officials said they noticed that Weight Loss Agents had begun referring weight-loss surgeries to another Tijuana hospital called the "Obesity Goodbye Center." Reached through their promotional Facebook page Tuesday, the company said that while Almanza "performed procedures for a couple of days at our facility always following our sanitation protocols," he is not affiliated with the hospital in any way. The center said its own sanitation practices "exceed international standards."

An attorney for Weight Loss Agents, Glenn Krinsky, said the company has done everything it can to cooperate with the CDC, including providing information on 700 patients it had referred to Grand View since August.

The CDC's Walters said the agency is following up with those patients to better gauge the spread of pseudomonas or other surgical infections.

Explore further Robotically assisted devices not approved for cancer surgery

2019 The San Diego Union-Tribune

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Government to dangle $24 billion worth of potential projects before investors

The government plans to dangle nearly 70 potential projects with a combined estimated value of $24 billion before foreign and domestic investors at the Nepal Investment Summit slated for next week.Indian foreign secretary arriving next week to discuss India-funded projects and regional issues

Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Keshav Gokhale is arriving in Kathmandu on March 28 for a two-day visit during which he will hold delegation level discussions with Nepali officials on a wide range of bilateral issues, including the India-funded projects in Nepal." " The typical version of UBI does away with all welfare programs and replaces them with cash grants. Vladimir Godnik/Getty Images

Are you up for getting flat money from the government, just by virtue of being alive? If universal basic income (UBI) advocates have their way, this idea could eventually become reality. The concept of UBI is to increase the standard of living by giving people  usually regardless of income or employment status  a set amount of cash every month.

"The main argument is that everyone, regardless of their personal situation, should have enough resources to meet their basic needs," says Kul Bhatia, professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, via email. "For employed people, a minimum wage is a step in that direction although it invariably falls short of 'a living wage.' The living wage idea, extended to the unemployed or the underemployed, would be like UBI."

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The typical version of UBI does away with all welfare programs and replaces them with cash grants. These are given to every person in the city or country, regardless of income. Some UBI proposals modify this basic idea. For instance, cash payments may be given alongside certain benefits. Or UBI recipients may be limited to those who fall below a certain income level.

The Canadian province of Ontario decided to hop aboard the UBI bandwagon in 2016. The three-year program is designed to benefit people typically bypassed by the current welfare system, such as those who make slightly too much to qualify for welfare, or parents who stay at home to raise their children. Participants are guaranteed either $CA 16,989 (U.S. $12,180) per year if they are single, or $CA 24,027 ($17,230) per year if they are a couple. Every dollar a participant earns through employment means they lose 50 cents from their basic income payment.

Universal basic income has been tried in other parts of the world, like India, where UNICEF recently funded three experiments to positive results. Researchers report significant improvements in quality of life, such as general health, nutrition, school attendance and elevated economic activity. Switzerland will hold the first referendum in the world on this issue in June. The majority of Swiss politicians are against basic income, although polls show that 49 percent of Swiss citizens are in favor.

What are the arguments in support of UBI? "People currently receive relatively significant subsidies across a range of services (like food stamps, Section 8 rental assistance or they may be treated in an ER without having the means to pay for it)," emails Harris Levine, founder of Ker-twang, a U.S. organization that designs programs to help underserved populations. "My sense is that basic income is a nonpaternalistic way of delivering the same or more assistance  you let people make the best decisions about their own lives."

Levine adds that a lot of money is spent in the current U.S. system to prevent welfare abuse. "There's a large amount of overhead that goes into means testing," he says. With universal basic income, that expense would be eliminated. "In my experience, most people are not trying to game the system. A big problem with means testing is that it often prevents the people who need help the most from getting it. Basic income should simplify things [in] that it removes the need to determine who is really deserving of help."

Of course, not everyone agrees. "Some people oppose such programs because ... they feel that there are enough welfare programs already for those likely to benefit from UBI," Bhatia explains. "They are also concerned that UBI might discourage recipients from upgrading their skills or trying hard to find work."

And paying for it is obviously a big concern. "I've rarely seen such a poorly researched idea get so much traction in public debate," says University of British Columbia economics professor Kevin Milligan via email. "Of course it depends on the specifics, but most UBI schemes I've seen are far in excess of what is spent on existing programs  it is really not even close. As an example, in my province of B.C., we spend [CA]$1-2 billion [$759 million to $1.5 billion] on welfare (depending on how you define it) but a UBI with, say, $15K per person would cost around $50 billion or more. The numbers aren't that different with other jurisdictions. UBI schemes really don't survive scrutiny when math is brought out."

So, could a similar program flourish in the U.S.? Critics say that the current welfare programs appear to do little to change the circumstances of the 46.7 million Americans living in poverty, 21.1 percent of whom are children under age 18.

Bhatia thinks UBI could work well in the U.S. "It will have to replace, or consolidate, existing programs which are designed to help those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder," he says. But even though it might be feasible economically, political will is another thing. "In the current political climate, I doubt that anyone (except perhaps an extreme left politician) would argue for it."

Update: Canada prematurely ended its UBI experiment after 17 months to "focus resources on more proven approaches," according to PBS. But one study of 217 participants found they had improved mental wellbeing and reduced hospital visits. Finland experimented with UBI over two years (2017-2019) and found that participants reported being happier but they weren't more likely to seek out employment, even though they wouldn't lose the benefit if they did, reported the Guardian. The 2016 Swiss referendum also failed, with 77 percent of voters rejecting the plan, said the BBC.

Now That's Cool Fans of UBI claim that it could be an "end to poverty" in the U.S. One estimate holds that it would require $2.14 trillion to bring every American of working age above the poverty line, but that much of that expense would be canceled out by the elimination of low-income assistance programs.

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Originally Published: Mar 28, 2016" " What are the tax implications of a short sale? James Martin/iStockphoto/ThinkStock

Listen, you thought when you clicked on this article that you would be getting a glimpse into the exciting world of real estate taxes. But you're in for a real treat, because before we lift the veil on those, you get a crash course in mortgages. You're welcome!

When you owe more for a house that it's worth, you have what's called an upside down mortgage. Your loan balance, in other words, is more than the price of your home. While a lot of people default on the loan and the house goes into foreclosure, there is occasionally another option: a short sale. A short sale involves asking the mortgage lender to basically write off the unpaid debt, and just take the market value for the house in the sale. And despite its name, it's anything but quick  it takes a lot of negotiation and wrangling between the buyer, seller and lender.

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Here's the not-so-hot news for those who are selling a house in a short sale: In general, the Internal Revenue Service considers the loan forgiveness or cancellation to be taxable income [source: Koontz & Associates]. That means that if you borrowed $350,000 for a house and then sold it for $200,000, you still have to pay taxes on $150,000 as if it was income.

After the financial crisis of 2007, there was a growing need to acknowledge that many homeowners needed a little help when it came to their underwater mortgage. The Mortgage Debt Relief Act excluded debt cancellation as taxable income. This was a huge boon to those who sold their house through a short sale; up to $2 million of debt forgiveness could be excluded from income.

The act was passed in 2007 and renewed through 2013. If you have a calendar in front of you, you might see the issue: 2013 is long gone. Congress has not, as of October 2014, renewed the Mortgage Debt Relief Act for 2014, which put a lot of homeowners with underwater mortgages in the tenuous position of either shouldering the debt of a staggering mortgage or accepting the hefty taxation from a short sale. Short sales, formerly about 10 or 12 percent of all real estate transactions, were cut in half in 2014.

All hope isn't lost. It's possible that Congress could retroactively pass an updated extension of the Mortgage Debt Relief Act for 2014. But if not? Expect that short sale to result in a sizable tax bill.Finding an excellent source of income is possible if you know how to make money with Airbnb. Millions of people across the world are making big money with Airbnb. It is possible to join this ever growing number.

You might believe that giving a room for guests is the only way to make money with Airbnb. There are 12 different ways to make money with Airbnb including renting out accommodation.

Making Money with Airbnb

There are several things that need to be done before you make money with Airbnb. These include finding rates of hotel rooms in your area, getting a room, apartment or house ready to match Airbnb standards and lots of other groundwork.

1. Work for Airbnb

Working for Airbnb is the surest way to make money from this company. Currently, Airbnb has more than 3,000 people around the world on its payroll.

Airbnb has head offices in San Francisco, California. However, the company has extensive operations worldwide. And offices in several countries outside the US.

Airbnb requires staff at its various offices, locations and destinations as well as remote workers or telecommuters.

Additionally, Airbnb hires temporary staff at every location, especially during peak travel seasons. They also offer internship programs in certain categories for students.

The company has a constant need for new staff in various specialized and general fields. Whether you are a lawyer or engineer, travel expert, management expert or a trainee, Airbnb has a job that matches your education and skills.

Further, average salaries of Airbnb range between $ 30,000 and $ 210,000 per year, depending upon your skills, location and designation.

2. Host with Airbnb

Hosting with Airbnb is very profitable. Thousands of people worldwide earn more than $ 10,000 per month simply by joining Airbnb as host.

Some have become millionaires, according to various reports.

To become a host with Airbnb, you need to rent out a furnished apartment, home or room to guests arriving at your city from distant locations. These guests are domestic or foreign travellers.

Any person of 18 years or older and located anywhere in the world can register as host on Airbnb for free. Once Airbnb confirms your registration as host, login to your account and list the room, apartment or house you wish to rent out as host.

Upload excellent images of the property. Write its brief description. Tick on various amenities such as free Wi-Fi, free parking etc. that you will offer.

Also list your terms and conditions on the listing and of course, the price for the accommodations.

If you are hosting, Airbnb offers several features. They allow you to control the types of guest you want. Means, you can choose the profile of guests.

Airbnb has a strict No Discrimination policy. This means you cannot discriminate guests on the basis of their religion or nationality, race and gender, among others. Therefore, make sure you read their terms, conditions and policies carefully before registering as host.

Further, Airbnb has a very transparent, two-way review policy: the guest and host review one another. This ensures you get a fair review.

Money for your premises is taken by Airbnb. You get the money if the guest has no complaints with the property and finds it matches your posting.

If any complaints do arise, Airbnb gives you an opportunity to rectify the problem quickly.

They also protect you against last minute cancellations by giving you part of the money the guest would pay as rent.

3. Airbnb Insurance

These are not really ways to make money with Airbnb. However, you can get some money under the clauses of this insurance. However, these would be unfortunate and undesirable situations.

For every confirmed booking of your property, Airbnb offers Host Guarantee, a $1 million property damage protection. This means, your property is safe against any damages that a guest may cause.

Additionally, your host gets a $1 million accident cover under Host Protection Insurance. This means, your guest has insurance for treatment of any injuries or accidents they might sustain while living on your premises.

Generally, these covers supplement your homeowner insurance. Airbnb insurances are in force as long as a guest stays on your property.

4. Airbnb Arbitrage

Airbnb Arbitrage is a system that allows you to become a host and make money with Airbnb without owning property. There is no such official Airbnb system. Yet, it is a good way to launch a startup that works to make money with Airbnb.

Generally, arbitrage is a system where an investor makes money on the price difference in the market.

With Airbnb Arbitrage system, you can rent a furnished room, apartment, condo or house at a top destination. You enter into a long term lease agreement with the landlord or the property owner.

Get explicit permissions from the owner to allow leasing the property through Airbnb. Once you have such property at a hot destination, put it up for hosting on Airbnb at a higher price.

Usually, the system works well for destinations which are in demand among Airbnb customers. Hence, you will have to do some research to find and shortlist the hottest destinations.

But there are major flipsides to Airbnb Arbitrage. You will have to put money upfront while leasing accommodation. Also, the agreement has to be long-term to get better rates from the landlord.

And most destinations are not in demand round the year. Which makes getting customers difficult during off-peak season while you lose money on the lease.

You need to make really big money during the peak season. This will cover up any losses due to fever or no guests during off-peak season.

5. Offer Extras to Guests

Once you become a host, there are more ways to make money with Airbnb. Include extras such as breakfast and other meals, travel services, Virtual Assistance, guided tours and sightseeing, airport-home transfers, tickets to events, currency exchange services and opportunities to host a party or celebration, among others.

You can charge extra money for these services.

If you wish to offer these extra services, mention them explicitly on your Airbnb post. This helps guests to book the services before arrival.

Some hosts charge guests for cleaning. However, this can be a major put-off. A guest chooses your accommodation over a hotel for several reasons. And hotels do not charge you for cleaning the room.

6. Host an Experience

This is the latest addition to Airbnb services. You can host an experience. Simply put, it means you host a visitor at home and provide them a unique experience that is not available from regular travel companies.

You can offer a wellness and fitness experience or teach cooking your native cuisine. Teach someone to paint or draw or show them how to create exquisite wines and other beverages. Or take them on an adventure which you are fond of.

Hosting an experience is very enjoyable for both- the guest and you as the host. Airbnb experiences cost more. Since you are offering a rare experience, it is possible to quote a better price. It allows the guest to experience a place like a local.

7. Airbnb Referral Program

Airbnb has a fantastic referral program, just in case you are unaware.

You can earn up to $ 5,000 per year simply by inviting relatives and friends to join Airbnb as hosts. Invite relatives, friends and social contacts to join Airbnb. You need to send them your unique referral code by email, Facebook or Twitter. You also need to send Airbnb credit with this referral code.

When a relative, friend or contact travel with Airbnb, you get back 50 percent of your Airbnb credit. And much more credit when they host someone. Airbnb referral program is very generous.

You can earn lots of Airbnb credit when your referees host or travel. Airbnb credit gets you free stays for your holidays. Or they can be used for a relative who is travelling.

8. Airbnb Affiliate Program

There are two distinct affiliate programs to make money with Airbnb. One is the Guest Affiliate Program. Other is Host Affiliate Program.

Guest Affiliate Program: If you have a blog or website, register as a Guest Affiliate. You get handsome commissions if someone books accommodations or experience through Airbnb using your affiliate link.

If you have a blog or website, register as a Guest Affiliate. You get handsome commissions if someone books accommodations or experience through Airbnb using your affiliate link. Host Affiliate Program: You have to highlight your experiences as Airbnb host and encourage others to register. You get paid when someone uses your link to sign-up as host with Airbnb.

Both of these Airbnb affiliate programs are very popular. You can join one immediately and make money with Airbnb.

9. Airbnb Events

Airbnb Events works in two ways: for the event organizer and for Airbnb hosts.

While hosting an event, you would definitely look at attracting the highest attendance. Sign-up with Airbnb and provide few details of your event. Airbnb will create a custom event page and widget especially for you.

As host, you can also use Airbnb Events. If there is some major event being held in your city, provide your accommodations for event organizers and visitors.

You can increase the price if the event is really large and hotels in your city would be unable to cope with the rush and demand for rooms.

10. Train Airbnb Hosts

Training is an excellent way to make money with Airbnb. Most people are unaware about how to host with Airbnb. Hosting with Airbnb is not merely offering your room for guests.

There are several other factors you have to consider. One among these is hotel room rates, the other is how to get the highest price for your accommodation. And there are several more.

Prices start from $50 for courses that train people on hosting with Airbnb. Understandably, course fees will depend upon its content and duration, your location and of course, the provider.

Udemy.com lists several courses to learn hosting with Airbnb. Others are offered by individual trainers on own websites.

If you are already a registered host and want to make more money with Airbnb, create a course with your own experience.

Sell it online. There is a huge demand for such courses since millions of people worldwide are looking for a side gig to make more money.

11. Airbnb Open Home

Airbnb Open Homes is a new addition. You cannot make too much money with Airbnb Open Homes. However, the advantage is, you need not offer plush rooms to host with Airbnb Open Home.

Open Homes is a charity initiative by Airbnb. It allows you to host recovering patients, refugees, newcomers to your city, fresh migrants and others who are low on budget or have no money to pay.

Airbnb partners with several charities to offer Open Home. Under this system, a charity will send you a guest. The charity pays some money for the accommodation unless you opt to give it free.

12. Airbnb Stocks

Airbnb is not yet a public company. However, millions of investors in the US and elsewhere are awaiting Airbnb to launch it's Initial Public Offering (IPO). Financial analysts anticipate Airbnb will launch an IPO soon, possibly after April 1, 2019.

Though you cannot invest directly in Airbnb now, their IPO will provide an opportunity to make money. However, you will have to wait for the IPO for a few months. The news of Airbnb is expected anytime.

Wrap Up

The demand for quality accommodation and unique experiences will always remain evergreen. Hence, these avenues to make money with Airbnb will continue for long. You too can make good money with Airbnb using any of these techniques.Arjun Poudel is a health reporter for The Kathmandu Post. Before joining the Post, he worked for Sagarmatha Television, Naya Patrika, Republica and The Himalayan Times.Cell C has pulled its sponsorship of the Miss South Africa pageant as it looks for new opportunities that are in line with it strategic focus as a business.

Cell C has been the main sponsor of the pageant for 5 years.

The company told MyBroadband that it is exceptionally proud of its sponsorship of Miss South Africa, which was done in partnership with Sun International.

During the past 5 years of our involvement, Miss South Africa has turned out an incredible calibre of winners, including the crowning of two international title winners, it said.

The mobile operator added that Miss South Africa has become a force to be reckoned with, and locally, it contributes to national pride.

It continues to be a platform for young women to realise their dreams and be positive role models for millions of South Africans, Cell C said.

The company said its decision to withdraw as sponsor follows a review of its various sponsorship properties.

Cell C as a brand has evolved and we are looking at new opportunities that are in line with our strategic focus as a business, it said.Fibre Internet connections are becoming increasingly popular in South Africa as infrastructure continues to roll out and users migrate from ADSL lines.

One of the big advantages of fibre packages compared to ADSL is the increased connection speeds.

These high-speed fibre products can be quite expensive, however, especially if you opt for an uncapped package to make the most of your upgraded bandwidth.

One year of 100Mbps uncapped fibre can cost anywhere between R13,000 and R18,000, making the connection a serious investment.

MyBroadband spoke to local ISPs about the uptake of uncapped fibre packages among local customers to determine whether South Africans were happy to pay more for unlimited data usage.

Webafrica

Webafricas Greg Wright told MyBroadband that the vast majority of the ISPs new fibre sales are uncapped products.

Recently, as much as 99% of all our fibre sales pertain to uncapped packages, Wright said.

He added that across the companys customer base, approximately 80% of fibre customers are on uncapped packages.

Wright also noted a trend towards the adoption of uncapped fibre packages regardless of speed, especially on the Openserve network.

Prior to the launch of our entry-level uncapped packages on the Openserve network, capped packages were very popular, Wright said.

As soon as we launched we saw a significant shift toward uncapped.

While we still offer a limited number of capped packages on Vumatel, Octotel, and Frogfoot, the sign-up rate pales in comparison to uncapped sign-ups, he said.

MWEB

MWEB marketing manager Karin ODonoghue told MyBroadband that the company has seen a steady migration to uncapped packages.

Yes, weve seen a swing to uncapped, ODonoghue said. We believe that this is due to the convenience of uncapped and the changes made by providers that allow us to offer no-threshold products.

She added that the ratio of customers with uncapped fibre packages versus those with capped packages vary according to provider.

Overall, it is roughly 60/40 for us at the moment.

ODonoghue said that the trend towards uncapped fibre packages is not affected by the speed of the fibre line in question.

Cybersmart

Cybersmart CTO Laurie Fialkov told MyBroadband that there is a major trend towards uncapped packages.

Cybersmart only offers a single capped fibre package  a 10GB package which is available for free.

More than 90% of customers choose uncapped packages, Fialkov said.

In fact, they will rather go on a 20Mbps uncapped package than a large capped package at 500Mbps, even though it would be highly unlikely that they exceed the cap on the 500Mbps package.

He speculated that this movement towards uncapped data products may be due to the increasing popularity of streaming services.

People do not want to worry about, calculate, or ration their data usage, so it is just much easier for them to buy uncapped, he said.

Now read: How much 1 year of uncapped fibre costs in South AfricaTeresa Ann Drake passed away unexpectedly on March 11, 2019 at her home in Napa. She was born April 19,1955.

Teresa was the daughter of Mary Van der Vieren of Bella Vista, Arkansas, and Mother to children Ashley Armstrong and Jonathan Drake.

Teresa was born and raised in Florida and attended North Miami Senior High School. She later graduated Nursing School from Pacific Union College in Angwin.

After working as a nurse in hospitals she transitioned into Hospice Nursing. This was where she truly found her passion and she would spend the remainder of her life working in various roles of hospice, most recently at Kaiser.

Family was the most treasured and important part of life for Teresa. Family gatherings always centered around delicious food, wine and lots of laughter.

Teresa leaves behind her Mother, Mary Van der Vieren, children, Ashley Armstrong and her husband Jim, and her son Jonathan Drake, Grandchildren Reese, Katie and Caleb.

A memorial service will be held on Friday March 29th at 11am at Tulocay Cemetery Chapel.The Napa Police Department is looking to partner with local business owners to keep a closer eye on the downtown area.

The surveillance project, dubbed Napa Cams, is still in the testing phase. The department seeks to expand its network of 15 to 20 cameras by tapping into live feeds of cameras in downtown Napa that have already been set up at businesses, churches or other places, with the owners permission, said Officer Aaron Medina, head of the project.

The idea is to have a comprehensive camera network that allows police to monitor the downtown area without actually being there. The city used to rely on a patrolling security guard, but that didnt work because trouble would resume as soon as the officer left the area, Medina said. Surveillance cameras tend to cause crime to drop, he said.

Its creating this safe environment where everybody can enjoy Napa, residents [and] business alike, Medina said. Napa Cams is just one more piece of that.

Officers have already made an arrest for drug possession and at least two arrests of wanted people who had a warrant out for their arrest during the trial period, Medina said. The departments first opportunity to pilot the cameras during a public event was last years Lighted Art Festival, he said.

Napa Police has been using surveillance cameras since 2010, when it began installing cameras in parks, parking lots and other public areas to combat vandalism, Medina said.

Napa has its own distinct challenges from a law enforcement perspective because it sees millions of visitors from around the world. and events such as BottleRock draw even more people to the city, he said.

Law enforcement agencies in places such as Detroit, Chicago, New York City and Atlanta already use such systems with success, he said. In Las Vegas  where Chief Robert Plummer spent nearly 30 years of his career  The Strip is lined with cameras.

Napa Police may not have as large of a budget as those departments, but Medina said the city has a unique strength.

What we do have is a great community that works well together, he said.

Plummer has also expressed interest in setting up surveillance cameras along the Vine Trail, Medina said. Last month, Napa resident Douglas Davis Jr. was killed along a dark section of the path while riding his bike home from work

To those who may say that streets lined with live surveillance cameras sounds Orwellian, Medina says that everyone has a right to photograph or film in public places. The cameras would be pointed only at public areas, not inside businesses, he said.

Michael Holcomb, who owns several downtown properties, was an early adopter of Medinas vision. He mounted four cameras atop some of his downtown properties nearly a decade ago, he said. He hopes to be proactive, not reactive, in reducing downtown crime around his properties, he said.

Holcomb said he believes other downtown businesses would be amenable to the idea. Cameras give business owners the ability to catch a possible intruder and keep the downtown area safer, he said.

People come to drink in Napa, Holcomb said. Theres much more nightlife now than there was years ago and visitors might be more inclined to act in a way that they normally wouldnt while visiting the city, he said.

Its our city, its our town, Holcomb said. I like our kids to come down here and feel safe.

Anyone with questions about Napa Cams can contact napacams@cityofnapa.org.

Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.A historic Napa homes possible future hosting vacationers may not have universal support from its neighbors  but it will gain a city permit.

Two months after delaying a decision on refashioning the George E. Goodman Jr. house into a bed-and-breakfast inn, the Planning Commission on Thursday voted in favor of the conversion, despite the opposition of neighbors who argued the incursion of more tourists would erode their quality of life in a historic neighborhood.

The 3-1 decision by Napas land-use authority keeps alive the plan by San Francisco resident Patty Theodorides and her family, who have owned the 129-year-old mansion at 492 Randolph St. since 2016, to open it to overnight guests  a step they consider the only way to pay for its long-term preservation.

Nonetheless, the bed-and-breakfast project faced close scrutiny from commissioners who called for more documentation to ensure the buildings integrity  particularly because of its links to Napas 19th-century past and to the surrounding Napa Abajo-Fuller Park Historic District, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

I am not asking the applicant to provide anything we wouldnt ask any other applicant to provide, said Paul Kelley before casting the only dissenting vote against a B&B permit.

But because of its historic environs, he added, it needs to be held to a higher standard. Not a single historian has looked at this. They said there wont be any external changes  we dont know that.

While Alex Myers ultimately voted for the permit, he too urged the owners to take the homes historic integrity more seriously.

Ive heard things in the tone of Ive checked all the boxes, now give me my permit, or asking forgiveness instead of permission, he told Pattys son George Theodorides.

Im hearing the words historic preservation, but other than saving the bones, Im not seeing what makes it unique and special thats being restored.

Theodorides and her family earlier brought their plans for the Goodman house to the citys Cultural Heritage Commission, which must approve changes that may affect a buildings historic character. However, the heritage agency did not rule on the B&Bs historic appropriateness but only on granting owners a property-tax break through the Mills Act, a California program that abates taxes in exchange for owners preserving historic properties.

The Goodman house project did not require a certificate of appropriateness because it included no exterior changes, only interior renovation, according to Planning Manager Erin Morris.

The family has spent more than $1.5 million dollars renovating the mansion on top of the $1.3 million it paid to former owner Charles Knill three years ago, Patty Theodorides daughter Kiki said in January. Work has included a new foundation, repairing dry rot and fresh paint, along with new electrical, plumbing, climate control and sprinkler systems.

While agreeing that plans for a B&B will need better documentation, Commissioner Beth Painter was content to let the citys planning staff work with owners to fill the remaining holes  possibly including a fuller accounting of the buildings past.

I know theres more you need to do, she said before joining Myers and Michael Murray in voting for the project (Gordon Huether was absent). I would rather put it in the hands of staff to move it forward.

In January, various Old Town residents urged the commission to block the arrival of a B&B at the Goodman mansion, warning it would permanently chip away at the areas residential character and deprive the city of badly needed rental housing. The home had been subdivided into seven units in the 1930s but was damaged in the 2014 earthquake, and city officials have said a return to rental use would require a new permit because of the neighborhoods zoning for single-family homes.

Planners at the time accepted a B&B as the most practical reuse of the landmark but held off on a decision, instead asking the Theodorides family to come back with a revised plan containing fewer guest rooms and more interior detail.

The updated plan features nine rooms instead of the original 12, and includes space for seven vehicles on-site to reduce the demand on curbside parking spaces on the block  changes Patty Theodorides said she made after meeting with local homeowners.

Still, at least one area resident remained unmoved by the changes, despite the smaller capacity of the proposed inn. We should view it as going up from seven units and not down from 12, David Graves told commissioners, referring to the mansions longtime use as apartment dwellings.

The prospective B&B did have its defenders, including Karen Lynch, who followed a similar path in restoring a 19th-century Napa home one block south of the Goodman mansion.

I understand the money, the time, the stress it takes to take a historic property in Napa and restore it to its glory, she said of her own experience buying the circa-1860 Hannah Moore House and renovating it into the Inn on Randolph. Its a fabulous, fabulous job and I think it will do Napa proud.

The three-story home dates to 1890 and is named for the son of George Goodman Sr., founder of the Goodman Library on downtown First Street. After his marriage, the younger Goodman and his bride moved into the Randolph Street mansion and lived there until his death in 1903 from tuberculosis at age 35.

Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.If you defend unequal citizenship rights, you are plain insecure

The defence of unequal citizenship rights is a defence of the Khas-Arya mans status, and not a question of state sovereignty.SACRAMENTO  Lawmakers, policymakers, scientists, fire officials, plus tech experts and companies from around the state, nation and beyond gathered at Sacramento State University in the wake of a couple of devastating wildfire seasons in the state, which killed 138 people in 2017 and 2018. On the agenda: how technology might help in forecasting, prediction and prevention of wildfires, plus ways to improve response, decision-making and communication with first responders and the public.

Preparing for the future requires understanding the causes of todays wildfires and learning from the past, so the 650 attendees of the summit also heard from climate scientists and historians. Officials and others from San Diego shared lessons from the first mega fires in the state that happened in that region during the mid-2000s, and the changes that have been adopted since then.

California is a harbinger of whats to come, said Ed Struzik, author of Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future and a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queens University in Canada.

He reminded the summit about some of the important effects of wildfires: changes in forests, degradation of water quality, impact on fish populations, possible reduction in visits to national parks, poor air quality.

The magnitude, scale and scope of wildfires in the West is unreplicated, said Jeff Johnson, chief executive of the Western Fire Chiefs Association. The solutions will come from the West, he added, and identified California as the leader of that push.

Technology can help in many ways.

Mary Glackin, vice president of Science and Forecast Operations at IBM, which was on the steering committee that helped the California Public Utilities Commission put on the summit, was scheduled to be a panelist Wednesday afternoon with some meteorologists and an official from the U.S. Forest Service about the potential of using technology  including machine learning and artificial intelligence  for wildfire forecasting. IBM, which is already in the business of predicting the impact of storms, is one of the companies studying detection and prediction of wildfires, she said.

Our high-tech tools have paid off by providing insights and situational awareness, said Caroline Winn, chief operating officer of San Diego Gas & Electric, who said the data the tools  including mountaintop cameras  collect help the utility make day-to-day decisions, including when to turn off power when theres high fire danger.

Communication is critical, too. Residents need to be alerted about dangers and evacuations, and firefighters need access to real-time data to help them do their jobs.

Michael Picker, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said only 6 percent of the states residents relying on landline phones anymore. A majority of Californians rely on their mobile phones.

Those fail, Picker said.

Fellow panelist Mark Ghilarducci, director of the California Governors Office of Emergency Services, agreed, saying that the state needs reliable, resilient cellphone networks.

Thursday, the summit will explore topics including risks posed by power lines, and what utilities can do to identify problems and solutions.

Besides IBM, the California Office of Emergency Services, Sacramento State University, UC San Diego were on the steering committee for the event.A car crashed into a Starbucks on Travis Air Force Base Thursday afternoon, injuring six people.

A civilian drove a car through the wall of the base's mini-mall, injuring themselves and five other people, according to a news release issued by Travis Air Force Base.

Three of the victims were taken to Northbay Medical Center in Fairfield and three others were taken to David Grant Air Force Medical Center, according to the release.

Base officials currently believe the driver did not intentionally crash the car into the building, but the crash is still under investigation, according to the release.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Gavin Newsom is fond of making grandiloquent, headline-grabbing gestures couched in moralistic terms.

His tendency first surfaced in 2004 when, as the newly elected mayor of San Francisco, he directed officials to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of a state law passed by California voters just a few years earlier.

I had no right to do this, Newsom to an interviewer last year, when he was running for governor. We didnt have the formal authority. But we tried to exercise our moral authority and challenge the laws.

Although his action was quickly slapped down by the courts, it made him a national political figure.

Last week, Newsom did it again, ordering reprieves for the more than 700 inhabitants of Californias death row and, in effect, launching a campaign to persuade California voters to overturn capital punishment.

That, like the same-sex marriage decree 15 years earlier, was well orchestrated for maximum media attention, including videos posted on Twitter and photos of San Quentins capital punishment chamber being dismantled.

Once again, Newsom is defying the demonstrated will of California voters, who twice in this decade rejected ballot measures that would have ended the death penaltyand if theres a political price to be paid, it would be for that defiance.

Although his opposition to capital punishment was no secret, Newsom on several occasions had pledged to honor those two votes.

In a 2016 interview with the Modesto Bees editorial board, Newsom said he would be accountable to the will of the voters if elected governor. I would not get my personal opinions in the way of the publics right to make a determination of where they want to take us.

While campaigning last year, Newsom said that while he was fervently opposed to the death penalty, he didnt want to get ahead of the will of the voters and wanted to give the voters a chance to reconsider.

So last weeks action was definitely a flip-flop. He justified it by saying, The will of the voters is also entrusted in me on the basis of my constitutional right as governor to grant a reprieve to condemned prisoners.

Ive had to process this in a way I didnt frankly anticipate . A few months ago, it was an abstract question, he told reporters. Now, its a very real question, he added, citing legal maneuvers over the states current mode of execution, lethal injection.

There is a very cogent argument to be made against capital punishment, even on non-moralistic grounds. It makes little sense to continue sending killers to death row if the state is to continue what has been a de facto moratorium on executions. None has been performed since 2006, two governors ago.

However, despite its being a very blue state, California voters have twice declared their support for capital punishment and its somewhat unseemly for a governor to, in effect, thumb his nose at them, especially after pledging not to do so.

Newsoms predecessor, Jerry Brown, was no less opposed to capital punishment, and it cost him politically during his first stint as governor, contributing to a failed 1982 bid for the U.S. Senate, which short-circuited his presidential ambitions.

During his second governorship, Brown bowed to capital punishments popularity and refused, despite pleas from death penalty opponents, to issue a blanket reprieve.

Newsom has set himself apart from Brown on several high-profile issues, and this is another. His gay marriage gesture in 2004 turned out to be a political plus, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. Morality aside, this is another political gamble.

CALmatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how Californias state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary.UK urges allies to seek alternatives to Russia natural gas

168.am: Armenia ex-police chief hospitalized

NBC: US holds back additional military aid to Ukraine to avoid tension

Person, 26, found dead in Armenia water pit

Criminal case launched into killing of Armenia soldier

Man found dead in Yerevan

At least 2 killed from tornado in Arkansas

Investigative Committee: Staff left combat positions and fled as a result of which adversary invaded Armenia territory

Jill Biden comments on talks about US President's mental fitness

Poland PM issues ultimatum to Russia

30 new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Media: Islamic State takes responsibility for 2 blasts in Kabul

France presidential candidate Eric Zemmour to visit Armenia

US to sell 18mn barrels of oil from its strategic reserve

Famous Armenia singer declared wanted

Bright Armenia Party leader: ECtHR obliges Azerbaijan to pay 30,000 to Badalyan as moral damage compensation

Psaki: US seeks diplomacy in context of situation between Russia and Ukraine

290 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Biden believes leaders of all other countries would like to be in his place

Armenia PM: Internal patriots do not calm down because their foreign partners do not consider the mission over

Peskov: Russia concerned about NATO military equipment transfer via Greece port

Esplanade of Armenia opens in Paris

Armenia soldier dies, 2 others wounded

Newspaper: Bill that pampers Armenia banks to have very serious consequences

Newspaper: What to expect from Armenia parliament special session next week?

Boris Johnson threatened with resignation due to parties during pandemic

Kopirkin: Russia is ready to make all efforts to contribute to normalization of Armenia-Azerbaijan relations

Armenia MFA: '3+3' platform needs to refrain from duplicating formats with mandate to settle conflicts

RT: US may build facilities in Georgia and Armenia to support its 'defense activities'

Armenia 2nd President: We will continue the struggle, all the phony cases will be crushed

MFA: Armenia calls on Azerbaijan to refrain from provocative rhetoric

Hero of 44-day Karabakh war Garik Hovakimyan's sister Mariam is born

Republican Party of Armenia Executive Body holds session chaired by Serzh Sargsyan

Iranian Embassy: Iran supports '3+3' platform during meeting held in Moscow

Armenia ex-defense minister on Prosecutor General's Office imposing attachment on his assets

Alen Simonyan: Armenia is in one of the most crucial stages in its history, and opposition is demanding my resignation

PM: Armenia is committed to contributing to global mission of strengthening democracy, and we hope we're not alone

Armenia MOD: Soldier who was injured from gunshot fired by fellow serviceman has regained consciousness

Armenia Deputy PM: Omicron variant is not sufficiently explored

First meeting within scope of '3+3' regional platform held in Moscow

NEWS.am daily digest: 10.12.21

Armenia soldier killed while resisting Azerbaijanis' attack, 8 are injured, 6 of whom are in severe condition

Armenia PM introduces new Head of State Supervision Service Romanos Petrosyan

Armenia human rights activists: There were cases when POWs were brought to territory under Azerbaijan's control

The book Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman was translated and published on the initiative of Ardshinbank

Armenia regional governor, IFRC Secretary General discuss return of Armenian POWs originally from Shirak Province

Armenia human rights activist: Number of Armenian POWs in Azerbaijan is 80 more than the confirmed one

Pashinyan: Environmental sphere is of strategic importance for Armenia

Armenia President: We must understand that we are entering completely different era for humanity

Dollar goes up somewhat in Armenia

Armenia State Revenue Committee chief meets with French Development Agency Regional Director

Opposition 'Armenia' faction MPs Artur Sargsyan and Mkhitar Zakaryan released from penitentiary institution

Head of Armenia's Norabak village: Azerbaijan has military post that is 2 km from us

Armenia finance minister receives France Ambassador and French Development Agency Regional Director

Armenia opposition MP Ishkhan Zakaryan leaving 'With Honor' faction

Russian and Armenian Deputy FMs meet in Moscow

Armenia PM highlights importance of speedy conclusion of full-format agreement between Iran and EEU

Armenia opposition MPs Mkhitar Zakaryan and Artur Sargsyan to be released without court decision today

Armenian opposition MP Armen Charchyan is released

Armenia MOD: Armenian side has one casualty, few soldiers are injured, exchange of fire is over

Armenias Pashinyan: High-tech component development also important in Eurasian integration context

Armenia Deputy PM dismisses his two assistants

Nazarbayev says Azerbaijan can become observer country in Eurasian Economic Union

Head of Armenia village: The Azerbaijanis tried to advance in direction of Sotk, but our soldiers didn't let them

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YEREVAN.  The bill on compensation for damages caused to the lives or health of people during the events that occurred on March 1-2, 2008 in capital city Yerevan was to be submitted Thursday to the agenda of the Government of Armenia, and with the respective conclusion by the Ministry of Justice, Hraparak (Square) newspaper reported.

There were rumors that the ministry will give a negative view, but yesterday it was not submitted to the government session.

Justice Minister Artak Zeynalyan told us: The persons behind [the bill; that is, National Assembly (NA) deputy speakers Alen Simonyan and Lena Nazaryan] have recalled it to edit the drafttaking into account the proposals presented by us.

He noted that it will be a law on assistance, not compensation, since the NA is not authorized to give such authority to the executive power. The executive power is not authorized to enter the domain of the judicial power, Hraparak wrote.

On March 1 and 2, 2008 the then authorities of Armenia used force against the opposition members who were rallying in downtown Yerevan, and against the results of the presidential election on February 19, 2008. Eight demonstrators as well as two servicemen of the internal troops were killed in the clashes. But no one had been brought to account for these deaths, to this day.Seti Zonal Hospital tense after new mother dies

Dhangadhi-based Seti Zonal Hospital remained tense throughout Friday due to the protest over the death of a new mother.WASHINGTON, DC  The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) today reaffirmed its principled opposition to the Madrid Principles, a deeply flawed and recklessly asymmetrical proposal advanced by the OSCE Minsk Group regarding Artsakhs status and security.

The ANCA statement reads as follows:

The ANCA supports the OSCE Minsk Group negotiations as a constructive platform for continued talks, but rejects its current proposal (known as the Madrid Principles) as a deeply flawed and ultimately counter-productive plan that sets back the cause of peace and raises the risks of renewed war.

 The Madrid Principles are profoundly asymmetrical, demanding upfront, strategic, and irrevocable concessions of land and security from Artsakh in return for only vague, deferred, and reversible promises regarding status from Azerbaijan.

 The phasing of the Madrid Principles front-loads all the risk on Artsakh and all the rewards on Azerbaijan. This flawed formula will not lead to peace, but, rather, sets the stage for continued conflict and regional instability.

 The Madrid Principles would force Artsakh, a predominantly Christian nation, under a violent Azerbaijani regime that has recruited extremists (including Afghanistan Mujahideen and ISIS militants from Syria) to fight its anti-Armenian war.

 Azerbaijan has, over the past 25-years, consistently violated its obligations under its 1994 tripartite cease-fire agreement with Armenia and Artsakh, calling into serious question whether its current or future leadership would, in actual practice, respect Bakus commitments under a Madrid Principles-based peace plan.

 The Madrid Principles run counter to our core American belief in democratic self-determination. A democratic and durable settlement should be based on the right of free citizens to live under a government of their own choosing.

 The Madrid Principles do not address or even acknowledge Azerbaijans occupation of Ardzvashen (Republic of Armenia) and parts or all of Shahumyan, Martakert and Martuni (Republic of Artsakh).

There is no basis  in the context of Armenian history, Azerbaijans stated policy, democratic principles, international law, or conflict-resolution precedent  to believe that:

 Artsakh surrendering vast areas of its sovereign territory will somehow make Artsakh more secure or Azerbaijan less aggressive.

 Artsakh making upfront strategic land concessions will be followed by Azerbaijan forfeiting its claim of sovereignty over Artsakh.

 International peace-keepers deployed around Artsakh would actually prevent or even discourage renewed Azerbaijani attacks.

The free citizens of the independent Artsakh Republic, having built a thriving democracy following decades of Soviet rule and Azerbaijani aggression, deserve the same democratic freedoms and human rights that we cherish as Americans.

Artsakh is, at its heart, a very American story, representing the victory of a free people over foreign rule.

The citizens of the Republic of Artsakh, through their democratically elected government, are entitled to make decisions regarding their destiny, including through Artsakhs full return to any and all international talks regarding status and security issues.

Artsakh  a democratic, Christian, pro-Western republic, standing strong against the forces of intolerance, deserves strong American support.

We encourage the United States to exercise continued leadership in the OSCE Minsk Group and encourage all parties to:

1) Set aside the failed Madrid Principles and abandon this deeply-flawed phased and asymmetrical approach to conflict resolution,

2) Develop a new, democracy and self-determination driven approach that addresses  on a horizontal basis and in a package-based format  outstanding status and security issues between the republics of Artsakh and Azerbaijan, and

3) Join with Armenia in demanding the full restoration of the Republic of Artsakhs participation in all peace talks, negotiations, and decision-making regarding its future.Tarai celebrates the festival of colours

Holi, the festival of colours, was celebrated in various Tarai districts on Thursday. The festival was also marked by the people of Madhes origin living in various Hill districts including Kathmandu, where the colourful revelry was observed on Wednesday.The UN Human Rights Council condemned apparent intentional use of unlawful lethal and other excessive force by Israel against peaceful demonstrators in Gaza and urged to bring those responsible to justice, Reuters reported.

The Council adopted the relevant resolution introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The resolution was adopted with 23 votes in favor, 8 against, 15 abstentions.

It is about Palestinians who were killed by Israeli snipers during protests at the Gaza Strip and Israel last year. According to the UN, 189 Palestinians were killed, 6,100 were injured.

The US did not participate in the vote

The United States quit the UN Human Rights Council last year. Washington accused the Human Rights Council of bias against the United States and Israel.

White House National Security Adviser John Bolton told Fox News last June that Washington did not need advice from the UN or other international organizations.

Justifying the US withdrawal, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the UN Human Rights Council "has become an exercise in shameless hypocrisy  with many of the worlds worst human rights abuses going ignored, and some of the worlds most serious offenders sitting on the council itself." "But when organizations undermine our national interests and our allies, we will not be complicit. When they seek to infringe on our national sovereignty, we will not be silent," said Pompeo. According to him, the United States "will not take lectures form hypocritical bodies and institution as Americans selflessly give their blood and treasure to help the defenseless."

Moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and killing Palestinians

Last year, the United States moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem after Donald Trump recognized it as the capital of Israel. The opening of the embassy took place against the backdrop of protests on the border with Gaza. Only on that day (May 15, 2018), more than 60 Palestinians were killed, more than 2,000 were injured.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the actions of the military self-defense against the radical Hamas group, which controls Gaza and aims to destroy Israel.

As it was noted, the United States blocked the draft UN Security Council resolution proposed by Kuwait, condemning what was happening and demanding an independent investigation of the clashes.Sherpa is pursuing a masters in environmental management in New Zealand.YEREVAN.- Consultation on the demographic situation in Armenia was held on Friday in the government led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, the PMs Office reported.

The Prime Minister noted that the purpose of the consultation was to record the current demographic situation in Armenia, to discuss the existing issues and future plans.

"Of course, it is clear that the issues linked with the demographic situation do not have a solution separately, and they must be viewed in the context of the development of socio-economic situation in the country. The economic reforms and their successful process first of all must contribute to the inclusive economic growth, and the economic development policy should first of all contribute to the change of the demographic situation. We need to view this as the main tool for changing the situation. But in any case, this important field has some features, nuances, and of course, there are also targeted actions which must make the effect of this overall context on the concrete field more targeted.

Therefore, during todays discussion we will talk about the possible impacts of this general context, the concrete programs, opportunities and their effects. I mean not only solving the problem but also trying to understand what concrete and targeted actions we can carry out to improve the demographic situation,"said Nikol Pashinyan.

Minister of labor and social affairs Zaruhi Batoyan, minister of healthcare Arsen Torosyan, chairman of the Statistical Committee Stepan Mnatsakanyan and UNFPA Armenia Office representative Tsovinar Harutyunyan introduced the results and tendencies of the analysis and studies conducted over the demographic situation. In particular, they touched upon the migration, demographic challenges, as well as the social factors.

It was noted that according to the results of late December, 2018, the number of permanent residence in Armenia comprised 2 million 972 thousand. Positive trends in terms of demographic situation have been recorded in 2018, in particular the difference between departures and arrivals in 2017 was minus 26,897, and in 2018 it was plus 15,313. The negative balance of migration also has declined.

During the consultation the sides also touched upon the main factors affecting the demographic picture, opportunities and actions aimed at improving the demographic situation, as well as several proposals.

Prime Minister Pashinyan attached great importance to the implementation of measures to improve the demographic situation in our country and gave appropriate instructions to the responsible persons. Nikol Pashinyan also instructed the National Council on demographic situation improvement under the leadership of the Prime Minister.Waling Municipality says it will sue Michael Kobold if the fire truck is not delivered

Waling Municipality Mayor Dilip Pratap Khand says his office is ready to take German watchmaker Michael Kobold and his associates to court if the latter dont fulfill an agreement signed between the two parties last year.On 21 March, the delegation led by Speaker of the National Assembly of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan, who is on an official visit to the Federal Republic of Germany on 18-21 March, had working meetings at Saarland University and in the Landtag (Parliament) of Saarland, reports the news service of the National Assembly, according to NEWS.am.

At Saarland University, the members of the Armenian delegation were introduced to the universitys research centers and the activities under implementation and held discussions with the universitys professors and the partners from Armenia to further intensify the partnership. The meeting ended with the signing of a cooperation agreement between Saarland University and Yerevan State University.

In the Landtag of Saarland, the members of the Armenian delegation were received by parliamentary speaker Stephan Toscani. Greeting the delegation led by Ararat Mirzoyan, Toscani informed that it was a great honor for him to host the parliamentarians from Armenia. The delegates were introduced to the parliaments activities and exchanged views on the intensification of inter-parliamentary ties and the implementation of joint programs in the economic, cultural and educational sectors.

The speaker of the National Assembly left a note in the guests of honor book of the Landtag of Saarland.On 22 March, the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Armenia and Ukraine held political consultations at the level of deputy foreign ministers in Kiev, reports the official website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to NEWS.am.

During the consultations, the delegations led by Deputy Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Ukraine Shavarsh Kocharyan and Vasil Bodnar discussed the perspectives for enhancement of cooperation in the bilateral and multilateral formats, emphasizing several regional and international issues.

The parties discussed in detail the perspectives for the deepening of trade and economic relations and the strengthening of inter-parliamentary cooperation between the two countries, as well as the expansion of the legal-contractual field between the two countries.

During the meeting, the parties highlighted the importance of regular consultations at different levels and between different subdivisions of the ministries of foreign affairs. Based on this, Deputy Ministers of Foreign Affairs Shavarsh Kocharyan and Vasil Bodnar initially signed the draft 2019-2020 plan for consultations between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Armenia and Ukraine which will soon be signed by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Armenia and Ukraine.Wildfire spreading at several community forests in Chure region

Forest fires have destroyed vegetations and affected wildlife habitat across several community forests of the Chure region in Udayapur for the past week, raising concerns among the locals in the district.Story Highlights Support for Palestine independence climbs to 50% for first time since 2012

62% of Democrats favor an independent state, 33% of Republicans

34% view Israeli-Palestine conflict as a critical threat to the U.S.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- For the first time since 2012, at least half of Americans favor the establishment of an independent Palestinian state "on the West Bank and the Gaza strip."

Support for an independent Palestinian state has been edging upward each year since 2015 when it stood at 42%. The highest level of support -- 58% -- was reached in May 2003, at a time when Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had endorsed a peace plan calling for a Palestinian state within three years.

Growing support among Americans for an independent Palestine is occurring amid a national debate in the U.S. about Israel's handling of the conflict and the U.S. government's ongoing support for Israel. Freshman Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar drew strong criticism for her recent remarks that pro-Israel advocates "push for allegiance to a foreign country," although several prominent members of her own party defended her.

Gallup measured Americans' support for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state sporadically from 1994 to 2009 and has asked it annually since 2012. Support for an independent state has always been higher than opposition, although the margin between the two shrank to three percentage points in 2017. Low levels of support in the first years the question was asked -- 39% in 1994 and 36% in 1998 -- were partly the result of a high number of Americans expressing no opinion on the subject (41% in 1994 and 38% in 1998).

As first reported by Gallup earlier this month, Americans are more likely to sympathize with the Israelis (59%) than with the Palestinians (21%) in the longstanding Mideast conflict, but there has been a closing of the gap this year. Republicans (76%) are much more likely than Democrats (43%) to sympathize with the Israelis, as has been the case throughout Gallup's trend.

Republicans (33%) and Democrats (62%) also differ significantly in their support for the establishment of an independent Palestine, but that has not always been the case. There was little difference between Republican and Democratic support for Palestinian independence in 2002 and 2003 -- a time of intensive international negotiations during the Republican administration of George W. Bush, that offered some hope that a permanent resolution to the conflict might be achieved. Since 2009, however, there has been a clear partisan gap, with a majority of Democrats supporting independence each of the nine times Gallup has asked the question, while Republicans have always been more likely to oppose it than support it.

Fewer Concerned That Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Threatens U.S. Interests

Even as more Americans now favor an independent Palestinian state, fewer than in the past are concerned that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a critical threat to the United States. For the second year in a row, fewer than 40% see it as a critical threat (34% now, 36% in 2018) to the nation's vital interests -- the first times it has dropped below 45% in the eight times it has been asked since 2004. The percentages saying it is an important but not critical issue have been the highest ever in the past two years (48% in 2018, 49% now), and the 14% saying in each of the last two years that it is not an important threat at all have also been the highest ever for the question.

Concern that the conflict is a critical threat has lessened among both Republicans and Democrats since Donald Trump became president in January 2017, but the change has been more pronounced among Republicans. Only 36% now say the conflict is a critical threat, a decline of 22 percentage points from 58% in 2016. Among Democrats, 43% in 2016 considered the conflict a critical threat, now 36% feel that way.

Bottom Line

Public opinion in the United States still favors Israel, with a large majority of the public viewing the country favorably and sympathizing more with the Israelis than the Palestinians in that conflict.

While the level of support for Israel among the American public has ebbed and flowed through the years, polls have always shown a solid majority of Americans feeling warmly toward Israel.

Nevertheless, there is also room at the table for Palestinian aspirations, as half of Americans, the most in seven years, now back the idea of Palestinian statehood. At the same time, Americans have become less likely to believe the conflict is a critical foreign issue for their nation. Whether that benefits the Palestinians or the Israelis depends on whether it gives American political leaders less reason to lead diplomatic efforts to help solve the conflict or causes the U.S. to retreat somewhat from the region, including military support for Israel.

View complete question responses and trends.

Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.The University of Miami Law Schools Immigration Clinic, along with a coalition of immigrant rights organizations, filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida, seeking release and a stay of deportation for immigrant rights activist Claudio Rojas.

According to the lawsuit, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Rojas on Feb. 27 when he appeared for a routine immigration appointment. His abrupt detention came at the heels of the Sundance Film Festival premiere of a documentary film, The Infiltrators, which features Rojass activism and criticism of ICE detention policies.

The case, Rojas v. Moore, is awaiting a decision on an emergency motion before Judge James Lawrence King, with ICE poised to deport Rojas as soon as March 30. An emergency request for a temporary stay and release order is pending.

ICEs power is not limitless, said Professor Rebecca Sharpless, director of the Immigration Clinic, who argued the emergency motion. When ICE rushes to deport someone without following the law, courts must act. The stakes are just too high.



Rojass detention has already had a chilling effect on the immigrant rights and documentary film communities. The Infiltrators centers on Claudios brave voice and the people he inspired to take action, said Cristina Ibarra, one of The Infiltrators filmmakers, who submitted a declaration in support of Rojas. He spoke out about detention and now he has been re-detained. That is the very definition of abuse of power.



ICEs actions, the lawsuit contends, are illegal. The rule of law in this country includes, first and foremost, the Constitution, said Alina Das and Jessica Rofe of the New York University Immigrant Rights Clinic, co-counsel on the suit. ICE is not above the law. The First Amendment protects activists like Claudio from being targeted for detention and deportation because they speak out. No one wants to live in a country where the government can so easily silence dissent.



Rojass detention and imminent deportation also threatens his pending applications for immigration status. A victim of a labor trafficking scheme by a former employer, Rojas had been working with the U.S. Department of Labor in its investigation. Congress sought to protect victims of trafficking and crime from deportation. ICE cant ignore those protections, or prevent other government agencies from investigating workers rights abuses, said co-counsel Sarah Gillman and Gregory Copeland of NSC Community Legal Defense.



Rojas remains in Krome Service Processing Center, where he has been separated from his wife, two sons, and his grandson. Sandy R. Pineda and Francisco Lopez, Rojass immigration lawyers from Angel F. Leal, Jr., P.A., said, Detaining Rojas is cruel, illegal, and unnecessary. ICE has never once suggested that Rojas is a flight risk or danger. His family needs him home.



DreamActivist and several other organizations has been organizing for Rojass release and an end to efforts to deport him.For some University of Miami students and faculty, spring break resulted in field trips to the Caribbean.

Associate professor William Pestle, a bio-archaeologist in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Anthropology, spent the week with 13 UM students in Cabo Rojo in southwestern Puerto Rico, where he led them on an archaeological dig. Pestle said the trip helps him advance a multi-year research project documenting the relationship between climate change and human inhabitation in Puerto Ricos most arid region.

Over the last several thousand years, sea levels have risen dramatically and rainfall has fluctuated, pushing this area to conditions that would have made agriculture impossible without irrigation, said Pestle, who is also director of the Latin American Studies program at UM. We are trying to determine how humans living on the island [of Puerto Rico] have changed their behaviors in response to those changes in the climate.

UM students Carlos Mora, Chelsea Nielsen, Jessica Joseph, Elise Herschlag, Alan Martin, Valeria Botero, and Stefanie Suarez along a salt flat in the Cabo Rojo National Wildlife Refuge.

Yet the trip, which is part of Pestles spring classField Studies in Anthropologyalso gives the students experience in basic archaeological techniques. Pestle said students interested in doing archaeology nearly anywhere in the world can use the methods they learned in Cabo Rojo. In the four years he has been taking classes to Puerto Rico, Pestle said UM students have been able to locate 43 new excavation sites.

Senior Tamia Medina, an anthropology major, said she loved participating in a dig and learned how ancient Puerto Rican natives used natural resources such as shells to make tools.

One of my life goals is to have taken part in an archaeological dig, and this course helped me do that while also learning about a culture and a profession, she said.

Meanwhile, associate professor of biology Kathleen Sullivan Sealey, who heads the Coastal Ecology Laboratory, spent the week on the island of Great Exuma in the Bahamas with four students. While biology Ph.D. candidate Jacob Patus examined the impact of sea level rise on coastal wetlands, Ph.D. candidate Zoi Thanopoulou investigated the influence of climate change on coral distributions.

Ph.D. candidate Zoi Thanopolou in Great Exuma during spring break.

In addition, masters candidate Krystle Young and junior Caitlin Camarena, an ecosystem science and biology double major, also assisted Sealey to continue mapping the wetlands of the island and to document the impacts of pollution on fish habitats. They also examined the impact of the hurricanes in 2015 (Joaquin), 2016 (Matthew) and 2017 (Irma) on Great Exuma.

With sea level rise and global warming trends, the Bahamas may be facing an increasingly large number of severe storm events in the future, Sealey said. Young people who have the opportunity to learn about hurricane impacts on their shorelines now will be able to incorporate this information in the future for their personal safety and protection.The requested page is currently unavailable on this server.

Back to [RTHK News Homepage]World Languages Day is back with new activities and exhibits for everyone

by Hannah Erickson

CARBONDALE, Ill.  New exhibits, shows, lectures and presentations are on tap for the 45th World Languages Day at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

After a two-year hiatus, the event, formerly known as Foreign Language Day, is back with more than 500 students registered to join the fun. Scheduled for April 4 at the SIU Student Center, the day works to expose high school students to language and culture in a fun and educational way.

Media Advisory

Reporters, photographers and news crews are welcome to cover the April 4 event, which begins at 9 a.m. and includes the Global Talent Show. The special exhibits and guest lecture at 3 p.m. on April 1 at Morris Library may also be of interest. For more information, contact Maria Bell at 618/453-5431 or mbell@siu.edu.

Global Idol Talent Show

The all-new Global Idol Talent Show is bringing a fun and entertaining element to this years event. The show allows individual students or student groups to highlight skits, poetry readings, songs and approved presentations in the language of choice.

Each performance is limited to five minutes, with judging based on creativity, stage presence, audience response and fluency in the target language. First, second and third place winners will receive trophies at the conclusion of the contest.

Virtual reality and other activities

The excitement continues with virtual reality demonstrations set to help with the mastery of linguistics. With state-of-the-art Vive Pro Headset and accompanying equipment, students can experience language in a completely new way.

Other activities include a Linguistic Puzzle Room, which offers an Egyptian themed escape room for students to try to crack. With support from the Craft Shop, students will find interesting artifacts to spice up the panic room.

Students can also experiment with origami and Chinese paper cutting demonstrations. Additionally, the traditional Your Name In activity will be back, allowing participants to translate their name into languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and more.

The information fair is ongoing throughout the day, allowing students to learn about a variety of campus departments. Some of the participating departments include languages, culture and international trade, linguistics, criminology and criminal justice, admissions, study abroad, law school and more.

A variety of cultural presentations will also take place throughout the day. Some of the topics include:

Learn to Dance Japanese Bonodori.

French Chef! How to Make Two Delicious French Pastries.

SALSA! Basic Steps with Demetri and Madeline.

Bilingualism and Global Market (Aisin Manufacturing, Marion).

Tapas: The Art of Snacking Well in Spain.

Your Intercultural IQ: Are You Ready to Study Abroad?

ZUMBA! A Mini-Lesson with Liz and her Latin Rhythms.

A Quick Japanese Lesson (SIU Japanese Club).

Navigating through Philippine Traffic: A Glimpse of Filipino Culture and History.

Learning Malagasy in the Jungle: Exploring Madagascar.

Can Animals Talk? My Experience with Signing Chimpanzees in Canada.

ASL Song Workshop: "Where is the Love?" by The Black Eyed Peas.

And many more.

Special lectures, exhibits and collections

In addition to the World Language Day event, several exhibits and guest lectures are available through the month and highlight exceptional individuals from history. All exhibits and lectures will be at Morris Library, and are free and open to the public.

The World Languages in SIU Library Special Collections, will feature texts from the medieval to present in Latin, French, Spanish, German, English, Swedish, Dutch, Quechua, Nahuatl, Japanese, Arabic, Urdu and Farsi. Presented by assistant professor of German, Jacob Haubenreich, this exhibit will include the Lords Prayer in seven languages, a page from the Gutenberg Bible and a miniature edition of Cervantes Don Quixote, among others.

The Long Live Freedom! exhibit highlights youth resistance in the Third Reich, and is open April 1-19 at Morris Library. Created by the Research Institute for the Study of German Resistance 1933-1945, the exhibition travels to schools and universities throughout Germany and the United States.

To accompany the exhibit, a free lecture from Sister Carol Marie Wildt, archivist for the School Sisters of Notre Dame and the Congregational Office of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, is set for 3 p.m. on April 1 at the Guyon Auditorium. The lecture will highlight the courageous actions of Josefa Mack and other youth who risked their life to resist the Nazi regime.

Full schedule for April 4

Hosted by the languages, culture and international trade department at SIU, all events are free and open to the public.

Schedule includes:

8:30-9:15 a.m.  Registration and information fair in Corker Lounge.

9:30-9:50 a.m.  Welcome Session in Ballroom D.

10 a.m.12 p.m.  Cultural presentations, Global Idol Talent Show, exhibits at Morris Library, activities and information fair.

12:05-12:20 p.m.  Closing ceremony in Ballroom D.

For more information about World Language Day or the accompanying exhibits, contact Maria Bell at 618/453-5431 or mbell@siu.edu.(Recasts, adds quotes, details)

BEIJING, March 22 (Reuters) - China warned on Friday against attempts to bring "misfortune" to the annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank in China next week, after the United States threatened to pull out if Beijing refused to let a representative of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido attend.

The Washington-based IADB, the biggest lender to Latin America, voted last week to replace Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's board representative with Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, who is backed by Guaido.

Several sources familiar with the situation told Reuters that China - one of the Venezuelan government's few remaining international allies - had proposed not inviting representatives from either the Maduro or Guaido camps to "de-politicize" the meeting.

A senior official in U.S. President Donald Trump's administration - which has backed Guaido as Venezuela's legitimate ruler - said the United States and its regional allies would "pull quorum" from the meeting in Chengdu if Hausmann was excluded.

The move likely would derail the meetings, which bring together finance and development ministers from the lender's 48 member countries.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said China attaches great importance to hosting the bank meeting and hopes the event can be successful.

The meeting should focus on financial cooperation and "avoid introducing sensitive political topics," he told a daily news briefing.

"It should avoid being politicized," Geng added.

The issue of the participation of the Venezuela delegation should be "appropriately resolved on the basis of flexibility and pragmatism," he said.

"If relevant countries deliberately damage the preparatory process for the annual meeting and cause misfortune for the meeting then they should accept the consequences of this," Geng said, without elaborating.

Story continues

Geng reiterated that China opposes foreign interference in Venezuela's internal affairs and supports the government and opposition to seek a political resolution via talks.

It is the first time the IADB is holding its annual meeting in China, which has become a major player in Latin America and has poured more than $50 billion into Venezuela over the past decade in oil-for-loan agreements.

With relations between Washington and Beijing marred by an acrimonious trade dispute, U.S. officials have expressed concern in recent months at China's growing influence in Latin America - a region Washington has long regarded as its backyard.

Guaido, who heads Venezuela's national assembly, invoked the constitution to assume the interim presidency in January, saying Maduro's election was not legitimate. Most Western countries, including the United States, have backed Guaido as Venezuela's head of state.

Maduro, who still has the support of Venezuela's military, has clung to power with the support of Russia, China and Cuba. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)(Updates record height of latest crest, 5th paragraph)

By Karen Dillon

ST. JOSEPH, Mo., March 22 (Reuters) - Record floodwaters that submerged vast stretches of Nebraska and Iowa farmland along America's longest river reached a new crest on Friday at the waterfront city of St. Joseph, Missouri, forcing chaotic evacuations of thousands from low-lying areas.

With emergency sirens blaring as the Missouri River rose to the top of the three-story-high levee wall in St. Joseph, about 55 miles (88 km) north of Kansas City, Missouri, sheriff's deputies rushed door-to-door urging residents to flee to higher ground.

About 1,500 residents and 6,000 employees of neighboring businesses were ushered out of the southern end of town, a city official said. Most of the evacuated dwellings were trailer homes interspersed among factories, warehouses and stockyards along a stretch of the riverfront known as "the Bottoms."

Many residents appeared stunned as they scurried out of their homes with armloads of hurriedly gathered belongings to throw into their vehicles before joining a steady stream of cars, pickup trucks, SUVs and tractor-trailers.

The abrupt evacuation, coming as the river rose just over 15 feet (4.57 meters) above flood stage - slightly exceeding the previous record of 32.1 feet (9.78 meters) - appeared to take authorities and residents by surprise.

"We don't have anywhere to go. This is overwhelming," said Linda Roberts, 70, as she and her husband, John, 66, packed their SUV, their dog sitting uneasily in a pet carrier.

With police doing their best to direct gridlocked traffic and with helicopters whirring overhead, dust billowed up from packed roadways for hours, mixed with the odors of livestock and chemicals, as the mass exodus proceeded in slow motion.

The St. Jo Frontier Casino, about 5 miles to the north, was already surrounded by water, and roadways along the river were submerged, officials said.

Story continues

The flood crest was expected to reach the Kansas towns of Atchison and Leavenworth, about 35 miles farther downstream, on Saturday, and Kansas City as early as Sunday, officials said.

FLOOD RECORDS BROKEN

Missouri River flooding was triggered by last week's "bomb cyclone" storm, which killed at least four people, drowned livestock and closed dozens of roads across a large swath of Nebraska and Iowa. Property and financial losses for the two Midwestern states were projected to surpass $3 billion.

Torrential showers over hundreds of square miles of melting snowpack produced record volumes of runoff that poured into the Missouri just above the Gavins Point Dam where the river divides Nebraska from South Dakota, nearly 400 miles upstream from Kansas City. The dam is operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Water entering the reservoir from that storm marked the greatest volume measured there in 120 years of recordkeeping, said John Remus, chief water manager for the Army Corps' Missouri River basin.

The downstream flow, breaking flood stage records at several locations along the river, has placed enormous strain on the region's system of flood-control levees. Nearly 50 levee breaches have been confirmed in the Army Corp's Omaha district alone, encompassing the hardest hit parts of Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri, officials told a news briefing.

Nebraska farmers were digging out of flooded fields and coping with cut-off highways on Friday.

"The biggest thing right now is the transportation. We're right between Loup and Cedar River, and transportation is nearly impossible," said Ryan Sonderup, 36, of Fullerton, Nebraska, who has been farming for 18 years.

Officials downstream were carefully watching flood gauges in Atchison, Kansas, a community of about 10,000 residents where a handful of riverfront properties and roads were under threat of flooding.

Missouri Governor Mike Parson declared an emergency on Wednesday as high water forced evacuations of several small farm communities in the northwestern corner of his state.

President Donald Trump on Thursday approved a disaster declaration for Nebraska, making federal funding available in nine counties ravaged by last week's floods. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds on Friday requested a presidential disaster declaration for 57 flood-stricken counties in her state.

The threat of extensive flooding lingers over the wider Midwest and could grow dire in coming weeks with additional rainfall and melting snow runoff, putting more than 200 million people at risk, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said on Thursday. (Reporting by Karen Dillon in St. Joseph, Mo.; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Leslie Adler)(Adds comments from Irish minister, EU diplomat, context)

By Richard Lough

BRUSSELS, March 22 (Reuters) - France said on Friday that Britain would crash out of the European Union on April 12 if it fails to ratify the Brexit withdrawal agreement and present a new plan, putting it at odds with other member states which adopted a softer stance.

President Emmanuel Macron has been the most forthright among EU leaders in wanting to draw a line under Britain's Brexit crisis quickly to refocus on pushing forward the bloc's agenda. Some, including Germany, have instead stressed the need to make every effort to ensure a chaotic exit is avoided.

A day after EU leaders in Brussels handed Britain a final chance to leave the bloc in an orderly fashion, disagreement broke out over the definitive deadline.

Under Thursday's deal, May 22 will be the departure date if the British parliament finally approves next week Prime Minister Theresa May's withdrawal agreement after twice resoundingly rejecting it. If it does not, Britain must present a new plan by April 12 or leave the EU without a treaty.

An official in Macron's office said there would be no further extensions, even to implement the exit: "No, April 12 is the leave date." European Commission officials said that April 12 was "the new March 29th" -- the previous exit date.

Others said the summit conclusions were not so clear-cut.

"If there is no indication that they are going to run European elections... there is no ability to extend further," Irish European Affairs Minister Helen McEntee said. "But at the same time, it doesn't mean that on April 12 that is the end date."

"It means that they have to give a timeline for what it is that they are doing or set out exactly what it is that they have planned. It takes away the possibility of a cliff-edge in 24 hours."

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the legal deadline, assuming Britain does not participate in the May 23-26 European Parliament elections, was June 30 - the date the British prime minister had originally sought an extension until.

A senior EU diplomat echoed the view that there could be wriggle-room for further delays.

"My reading is rather in the direction that April 12 is the new March 29," the diplomat said. "The door is left open for another extension." (Reporting by Jean-Baptiste Vey, Richard Lough and Gabriela Baczynska; Writing by Richard Lough, editing by Thomas Escritt and Gareth Jones)* Erdogan's comments on shooting sparked diplomatic spat

* NZ foreign minister dispatched to 'set record straight' (Adds Peters, Erdogan comments at OIC)

By Sarah Dadouch and Bulent Usta

ISTANBUL, March 22 (Reuters) - New Zealand on Friday defended its reaction to its worst mass shooting, telling Muslim countries meeting in Turkey that the police response to the killing of 50 people was "instantaneous" and the perpetrator would spend life in prison.

Speaking to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters was responding to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan who has said Turkey would make the suspected attacker pay if New Zealand did not.

Erdogan's comments at a series of election campaign rallies - including calling on New Zealand to restore the death penalty and repeatedly showing video footage of the shootings that the alleged gunman had broadcast on Facebook - triggered a diplomatic dispute between the nations.

"This person will face the full force of New Zealand law, and will spend the rest of his life in isolation in a New Zealand prison," Peters told the OIC, meeting in emergency session to discuss Islamophobia and the March 15 shootings in Christchurch.

"Our police have started the largest investigation in our history," said Peters, who had earlier condemned Erdogan's airing of the footage as risking endangering New Zealanders abroad.

The OIC meeting in Istanbul was also attended by Erdogan, who briefly met Peters on the sidelines. No other heads of state or government attended the gathering. Iran was represented by Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Saudi Arabia by its ambassador to Turkey.

Addressing the conference separately, Erdogan struck a conciliatory tone, saying the empathy and reaction displayed by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern since the incident "should be an example to the world."

Story continues

Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected white supremacist, has been charged with one murder following the attack and is likely to face more charges.

Erdogan, who is seeking to drum up support for his Islamist-rooted AK Party in March 31 local elections, again showed footage of the shooting at a rally on Thursday.

For nearly a week he has described the mass shooting as part of a wider attack on Turkey and threatened to send back "in caskets" anyone who tried to take the battle to Istanbul. He has also shown extracts from a "manifesto" posted by the attacker and later taken down, drawing condemnation from New Zealand and Australia.

Ardern has said Peters went to Turkey to "confront" Erdogan's comments, and she repeated on Friday he was there to "set the record straight."

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison earlier this week called Erdogan's comments "deeply offensive" and summoned Turkey's ambassador for a meeting, though on Thursday he said progress had been made and "we've already seen the moderation of the president's views."

The OIC groups together Muslim countries to protect the interests of the Muslim world. Peters told the gathering "an attack on one of us observing their beliefs is an attack on all of us." (Additional reporting by Daren Butler, Ezgi Erkoyun and Tulay Karadeniz in Ankara, Editing by Jonathan Spicer, William Maclean)(Adds details, background, quotes from energy secretary)

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON, March 22 (Reuters) - The U.S. Energy Department on Friday finalized up to $3.7 billion in loan guarantees to finance the construction of two reactors at the delayed Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, tapping a program zeroed out in President Donald Trump's latest budget.

The financing for Vogtle, the first new nuclear power plant to be licensed and begin construction in the United States in more than three decades, was first announced in 2017. The decision brings the federal government's total in loan guarantees for Vogtle to $12 billion, some of which was provided in 2014 and 2015, during the administration of President Barack Obama.

Up to $1.67 billion will go to Georgia Power Co, a subsidiary of Southern Co; up to $1.6 billion will go to Oglethorpe Power Corp; and up to $415 million will go to three subsidiaries of the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia.

"This is the real new green deal, that's what we're looking at here folks," Energy Secretary Rick Perry told workers and politicians at a ceremony at the plant. Perry was apparently referencing the Green New Deal, a non-binding resolution in Congress introduced by Democrats that aims to spark ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions and boost investments in renewable energy, but leaves the door open for nuclear power.

Perry conceded that the U.S. nuclear industry has suffered recent challenges, but declared that nuclear power was back and said the world would be looking to the United States for nuclear technology and workers for the supply chain.

U.S. nuclear power has struggled amid rising costs for safety upgrades and in the face of competition from solar and wind power and plants that burn cheap and abundant natural gas. In 2017 utilities abandoned two unfinished reactors called V.C. Summer in South Carolina that were once hailed as the start of a U.S. nuclear power renaissance.

Story continues

The reactors at Vogtle are years behind schedule, and the construction cost has soared to $20 billion or more.

Trump's budgets, including the one submitted earlier this month to Congress, have called for axing the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program that has supported numerous renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. But the previous requests never became law and this one has less of a chance with the takeover of the House of Representatives by Democrats in last year's elections.

Critics of subsidies slammed the loan guarantees, saying that taxpayers would foot the bill if Vogtle fails. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Leslie Adler)(Adds details, quotes and context)

By Marianna Parraga and David French

March 21 (Reuters) - Citgo Petroleum, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Venezuelan state-run oil firm PDVSA, is seeking to raise $1.8 billion through a three-year term loan to cover operating expenses and to refinance existing debt, three people close to the deal told Reuters on Thursday.

The financing would help Citgo fund operations and replace an existing revolving credit line, following U.S. sanctions and its split from the parent company, which remains under control of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and a military-led management team.

Washington imposed sanctions and barred U.S. firms, including Citgo, from importing Venezuelan crude as part of a strategy to starve the Maduro government of oil revenue and force his ouster.

Since Venezuelan congress head Juan Guaido invoked the constitution to assume interim presidency in January, saying Maduro's re-election was not legitimate, a fierce battle has emerged for control of Citgo, Venezuela's largest foreign asset, which has been valued at $8 billion to $13 billion.

A first round on U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela in 2017 stopped Citgo from paying dividends to its parent and limited its ability to raise financing, leaving much of an about $900 revolving credit untapped.

A portion of Citgo's equity separately was used by PDVSA in 2016 as collateral for a $1.5 billion loan from Russian energy giant Rosneft. Another portion of its equity backs PDVSA's 2020 bonds, the only Venezuelan bonds that have not entered default.

At the end of September, Citgo had $3.4 billion in financial debt and $490 million in cash. Its net income was nearly $500 million, from gross revenue of $23 billion in the first nine months of 2018, according to a person with access to the quarterly report.

Citgo did not reply to a request for comment.

The refinancing does not include Citgo's bonds, according to the people.

Story continues

Citgo board's chairwoman, Luisa Palacios, last week said U.S. sanctions imposed on PDVSA in January were "a shock" for the firm as it is no longer able to import Venezuelan crude that historically fed two of its three refineries, but a contingency plan has helped it weather the storm.

FRESH MONEY

Money from the new three-year loan is expected to be used by Citgo mainly to replace its existing revolver, which would expire in July. It is also expected to settle over $200 million in accounts receivable that had been converted into financial debt.

Citgo's refinancing operation had a slow start, but attracted many proposals in recent days, according to two of the sources. The company was looking to raise $1.2 billion, but recently increased the amount of the loan by $600 million, one of the sources said.

"Coupon should be around 4.5-5.5 percentage points above Libor (rate)," that source said. "That's not great, but it is good enough for Citgo under these circumstances."

An announcement on the refinancing results is expected to be made by Citgo by the end of the month, when the company plans to have a call with investors, one of the sources said. (Reporting by Marianna Parraga and David J. French, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien and Marguerita Choy)(Adds Chinese comment; paragraphs 8-10)

By Khanh Vu

HANOI, March 22 (Reuters) - Vietnam has lodged an official protest with China following the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat which was being chased by a Chinese maritime surveillance vessel in the disputed South China Sea, Vietnam said late on Thursday.

Vietnam and China have for years long been embroiled in a dispute over the potentially energy-rich stretch of waters, called the East Sea by Vietnam.

The fishing vessel was moored near Da Loi island in the Paracel archipelago on March 6 when a China Maritime Surveillance Vessel chased it and fired water cannon at it, Vietnam's foreign ministry said in a statement.

The boat sank after hitting rocks while it was being chased. All five fishermen on board were rescued by another Vietnamese fishing boat, the ministry said.

A Vietnamese rescue agency said earlier that the Chinese vessel rammed the fishing boat.

"The Chinese vessel committed an act that violated Vietnam's sovereignty over the Hoang Sa archipelago, threatened the lives and damaged the properties and the legitimate interests of Vietnamese fishermen," the ministry said in the statement, referring to the Paracel islands by their Vietnamese name.

Vietnam had lodged a protest with China's embassy in Hanoi and demanded that China deal strictly with its Maritime Surveillance agency to prevent similar incidents and to compensate fairly the fishermen for their losses.

In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the Paracel Islands were China's and Vietnam must immediately stop illegal fishing activities in the vicinity.

The fishing boat had already struck a reef and sunk before the Chinese vessel arrived, he added.

"We hope the Vietnamese side can stop making things up."

China claims 90 percent of the South China Sea, where it has steadily expanded military and other installations on artificial islands and reefs, unnerving the region and angering Washington.

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In addition to Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have claims to parts of the sea.

Separately, the Vietnamese government on Friday denounced Taiwan's military drills on and around Itu Aba, an island in the South China Sea, that Vietnam calls Ba Binh.

Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said the drills were "a serious violation of Vietnam's sovereignty over the (Spratly) archipelago, threatening peace, stability, and maritime safety and security, stressing and complicating the situation in the East Sea."

"Vietnam resolutely opposes (the drills) and demands that Taiwan not repeat similar actions," Hang said in a statement on the government website. (Reporting by Khanh Vu; Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in BEIJING; Editing by Robert Birsel and Michael Perry)Apple stock's price target is going up.

After a rough start to 2019 that included a guidance cut and multiple analyst downgrades, Apple (ticker: AAPL) stock has bounced back and appears to once again be on the right track. Investors appear optimistic about an end to the trade war with China that the company blamed for its guidance cut. Even with Apple stock up 17 percent already this year, Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan recently upgraded AAPL stock to "buy" and raised his price target from $180 to $210. Here are 10 reasons Mohan says investors should be buying Apple stock.

Industry trends are positive.

One of the major concerns for AAPL investors is the health of the company's iPhone inventory given media reports of price cuts in China. IPhone channel inventories grew by about 4 million units in the fiscal first quarter, according to Bank of America estimates. However, Mohan says inventories likely declined by 4 million units in the month of January alone thanks to price cuts, completely eliminating the first quarter build. The price cuts certainly cost Apple some margin in China. But looking ahead, Mohan says lower inventory levels are a net positive for investors and could help drive iPhone order stability.

China price cuts are deceptive.

Any time a company cuts prices on a product, investors immediately get concerned about demand. Mohan says Apple has likely been monitoring a couple of key developments in China that have given the company the opportunity to lower prices. First, the U.S. dollar has weakened in 2019 compared to the Chinese yuan, which is a positive for Apple and provides some wiggle room on pricing. Second, China recently announced an aggressive cut to its value added tax. In the past, Apple has taken the opportunity to lower prices and attempt to gain market share following tax cuts.

There's an Apple Services opportunity in China.

AAPL investors are looking to the company's services segment to pick up the slack as iPhone unit revenue growth flattens. Unfortunately, services revenue growth in China has been a problem for Apple. Mohan says that dynamic may soon change. He says the Chinese government has once again begun approving mobile games after putting gaming approvals on hold throughout most of the second half of 2018. Mohan says newly approved games helped drive 10.7 percent China App Store revenue growth in the first two weeks of February, up from just 4 percent growth in January.

Story continues

Gross profit trends are positive.

Year-over-year growth in gross profit dollars for Apple has been an excellent leading indicator for Apple stock over the past five years. After peaking at around 20 percent in late summer of 2018, Apple's gross profit dollar growth took a nosedive along with Apple's share price. However, Mohan says gross profit dollar growth is currently in the process of bottoming at around negative 9 percent in the March quarter and is headed back up to around 15 percent within the next year or so. Mohan says investors can expect significant gross profit dollar growth starting in the second half of 2019.

Wall Street is bearish on hardware sales.

The bear case against Apple is that hardware sales will drift lower in coming years. However, Mohan says Apple stock seems to be priced as if lower hardware sales will also drag services revenue growth into negative territory as well. He says that scenario is way too pessimistic. Instead, Bank of America projects hardware revenue growth will be mostly flat in coming quarters, while services revenue will grow in the mid-teens. Based on his growth scenario, Mohan assigns roughly $78 per share in value to Apple stock from the hardware business and $116 in per-share value from the Services business.

Earnings estimate cuts were too deep.

When Apple slashed its guidance to kick off 2019, many Wall Street analysts followed up by cutting their own earnings and revenue estimates for Apple. Mohan says some of these cuts were too deep, especially in the longer term. Bank of America's fiscal 2019 EPS estimate of $11.55 is only slightly above Wall Street consensus. However, Mohan is calling for fiscal 2020 EPS of $13.39 and fiscal 2021 EPS of $16.05, well above consensus estimates of around $13 and $14.50, respectively. Mohan said investors should anticipate meaningful upward earnings estimate revisions for 2020 and 2021.

Apple can still gain market share.

Apple has a dominant market share in the high-end of the smartphone market. Bank of America estimates Apple has 93.7 percent market share of smartphones priced above $900 and 99.9 percent market share of devices priced more than $1,000. However, Apple has less than 34 percent market share for devices priced in the $500 to $599 price range and just 22.8 percent share of devices below $500. Mohan says falling prices of older iPhone models, such as the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models, should soon give Apple quality offerings on the lower end of the price scale.

Apple users are extremely loyal.

Bank of America estimates Apple has an iPhone user base of around 900 million people worldwide, and Mohan says Apple has extremely high user satisfaction rates. In addition to being satisfied with their iPhones, Mohan says switching operating systems creates potential difficulties in transferring data, preferences and contacts. He predicts iPhone user churn will remain in the low single digits even as competitors roll out new products this year. In a recent survey of 151,000 global smartphone users, Bank of America found much higher loyalty rates for iPhone users than any other leading smartphone.

Apple has revenue growth catalysts.

Mohan says Apple has multiple incremental revenue growth opportunities coming in the years ahead. In the near term, he says Apple will likely launch both news and video streaming services sometime in 2019. Apple is expected to announce its streaming service at a special event scheduled on March 25. In addition, Mohan says investors should expect Apple to launch new devices (potentially wearables) at some point. Apple users appear to be more willing to try new devices given the high initial adoption rates of recent launches, including the Apple Watch and AirPods.

World demographics bode well for user base growth.

Global demographics trends suggest Apple could expand its massive user base in the coming years. In particular, Mohan says the rise of the middle class in emerging markets such as China, India, Russia and Brazil has resulted in a huge new segment of the global population with disposable income for the first time. Disposable income per capita in China has been steadily rising for decades. In addition, while smartphone penetration in the U.S. is now around 80 percent, penetration in Brazil and Russia remains below 60 percent. In India, smartphone penetration is only around 25 percent of the population.

Why Apple stock is a good buy now.

Here are 10 reasons experts say investors should buy AAPL stock:

-- Industry trends are positive.

-- China price cuts are deceptive.

-- There's an Apple Services opportunity in China.

-- Gross profit trends are positive.

-- Wall Street is bearish on hardware sales.

-- Earnings estimate cuts were too deep.

-- AAPL can still gain market share.

-- Apple users are extremely loyal.

-- Apple has revenue growth catalysts.

-- World demographics bode well for user base growth.PLOVER, Wis.  A 150-year-old Bible, which has survived two major church fires in its lifetime, is serving as a symbol of strength and perseverance to members of a Wisconsin church.

The Springs  Your United Methodist Community in Plover was severely damaged Monday in a fire.

"It's a great testament to our faith that stands strong even in the midst of this (fire)," said pastor Tim O'Brien.

Firefighters were able to recover the Bible, which was displayed in a glass case at the time of the fire, said Yvonne Chojnacki, director of administration and mission for The Springs. The Bible also survived a fire at the former St. Paul's Methodist Church in downtown Stevens Point, which burned down in the mid-1900's, O'Brien said.

The 150-year-old Bible sitting on the table survived two church fires. "It's a great testament to our faith that stands strong even in the midst of this (fire)," said Pastor Tim O'Brien, who led a vigil outside the Springs  United Methodist Church in Plover, Wisconsin, on on Tuesday, March 19, 2019.

More than 50 people gathered Tuesday afternoon in the parking lot of the fire-ravaged church. Church members shared memories of Sunday services, weddings, baptisms, youth groups and service projects that occurred inside of the church, which was constructed in 1964, according to Portage County Historical Society.

Trisha Moody, 44, of Nekoosa, said she has a long history with the church. Growing up, she attended youth groups and participated in the youth choir and Christmas programs. She was baptized and confirmed in the church and also had her son baptized there. As an adult, she said she taught Sunday school.

"I'm overwhelmed with feelings," said Moody. "I have lifetime friendships that happened because of this church."

The Springs merged with St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Stevens Point in 2014 and the two congregations now function as one church. The Plover location has about 50 members, Chojnacki said.

March 5: 'Odds were against us, God was not': Firefighters say Bibles survived West Virginia church fire

Oct. 22: Museum of the Bible removes Dead Sea Scrolls after lab tests show they may be fake

O'Brien, who has been pastor of The Springs and St. Paul's for the last eight months, said the whole experience has been a bit of a shock.

Story continues

He said the church's board of trustees will need to evaluate the future of the Plover building, but is glad people still have the option to attend services at St. Paul's.

Emergency crews responded to a report of smoke coming from the church Monday morning. Plover Deputy Fire Chief Ken Voss said light smoke was showing when they arrived, but heavy smoke and flames developed shortly after. The building is likely a "total loss," he said.

The cause of the fire is still unknown, Voss said.

Tonya Kowalski of Stevens Point said she has been a member of St. Paul's for 21 years and said she believes this will only make their church community stronger.

"People make the church," Kowalski said, "not the building."

Follow Melissa Siegler on Twitter: @Marie2Melissa

This article originally appeared on Stevens Point Journal: A 150-year-old Bible has miraculously survived two church fires in a small Wisconsin townA Dallas man was caught on video violently attacking a 24-year old woman on a street corner Wednesday night. The assailant, 30-year-old Austin Shuffield, reportedly lashed out because his car was blocked in a parking lot.

A video of the attack taken by a witness shows Shuffield knock LDaijohnique Lees phone out of her hands. After she reaches to hit him, he punches her in the face repeatedly.

It didnt have to go that far Why you put your hands on me like that? You literally sat there and beat me like I was a man, Lee told WFAA.

LDaijohnique Lee said she was beat like a man for blocking someones car in a parking lot. (Photo: WFAA)

She explained that Shuffield was holding a pistol when he first approached her and knocked her phone to the ground when she tried to call the police.

Lee spoke to local broadcast station CBS DFW while on her way to the hospital Thursday night, saying she believed Shuffield ruptured her eardrum.

Shuffield, a bartender, was charged with aggravated assault, interfering with an emergency call and public intoxication. According to CBS, he was still in jail as of Thursday night. He was also fired from his job.

From the video itself it shows an aggravated assault to our eyes, Braxton Martin, Shuffields former boss, told CBS. That is something needs to be dealt with quickly and swiftly and thats what were trying to do and make sure its handled properly.

Yahoo Lifestyle has reached out to the Dallas Police Department for comment.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.Hartford Funds, a segment of The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. (HIG), has total assets of around $104.8 billion under management (as of Dec 31, 2018). The company claims to manage at least 50 mutual funds across a wide range of styles and asset classes. Hartford Financial Services was founded in 1810 and is a well-recognized insurance company in the United States.

Hartford Funds focuses on meeting and even exceeding traditional industry benchmarks through human-centric investing. The company believes that human-centric investing can help in creating solutions, products and advisor tools, which help in strengthening the bottom line and improving advisor-client relationships.

Below we share with you three top-ranked Hartford 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 Hartford funds.

Hartford Small Company HLS HDMBX invests in common stocks of companies that have strong capital growth potential. HDMBXs sub-adviser, Wellington Management Company, LLP, invests a huge chunk of its assets in common stocks of companies within the range of both the S&P SmallCap 600 and Russell 2000 indices. The fund may also invest around one-fifth of its assets in foreign companies. Hartford Small Company HLS has three-year annualized returns of 20.6%.

As of January 2019, HDMBX held 103 issues, with 2.47% of its assets invested in Insulet Corp.

Hartford Core Equity A HAIAX seeks appreciation of capital. HAIAX invests the lions share of its assets in common stocks of companies across a broad range of market capitalization. The funds advisor, however, generally focuses on companies with market capitalization similar to those companies listed on the S&P 500 index. Hartford Core Equity A has three-year annualized returns of 14.3%.

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Mammen Chally has been one of the fund managers of HAIAX since 1998.

Hartford Core Equity R4 HGISX seeks capital growth. HGISX invests a huge portion of its assets in common stocks. The fund maintains a diverse portfolio by investing in different companies and industries, with the fund adviser focusing on large-cap companies that have market-cap similar to those included on the S&P 500 index. Hartford Core Equity R4 has three-year annualized returns of 14.2%.

HGISX has an expense ratio of 0.79% compared with the category average of 0.95%.

To view the Zacks Rank and past performance of all Hartford mutual funds, investors can click here to see the complete list of funds.

Want key mutual fund info delivered straight to your inbox?

Zacks free Fund Newsletter will brief you on top news and analysis, as well as top-performing mutual funds, each week. Get it free >>



Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report



Get Your Free (HDMBX): Fund Analysis Report



Get Your Free (HAIAX): Fund Analysis Report



Get Your Free (HGISX): Fund Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment ResearchGrowth stocks are attractive to many investors, as above-average financial growth helps these stocks easily grab the market's attention and produce exceptional returns. But finding a growth stock that can live up to its true potential can be a tough task.

By their very nature, these stocks carry above-average risk and volatility. Moreover, if a company's growth story is over or nearing its end, betting on it could lead to significant loss.

However, it's pretty easy to find cutting-edge growth stocks 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.

Our proprietary system currently recommends American Assets Trust (AAT) as one such stock. This company not only has a favorable Growth Score, but also carries a top Zacks Rank.

Research shows that stocks carrying the best growth features consistently beat the market. And for stocks that have a combination of a Growth Score of A or B and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy), returns are even better.

While there are numerous reasons why the stock of this real estate investment trust is a great growth pick right now, we have highlighted three of the most important factors below:

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 American Assets Trust is 6.4%, investors should actually focus on the projected growth. The company's EPS is expected to grow 5.3% this year, crushing the industry average, which calls for EPS growth of 0.6%.

Impressive Asset Utilization Ratio

Asset utilization ratio -- also known as sales-to-total-assets (S/TA) ratio -- is often overlooked by investors, but it is an important indicator in growth investing. This metric exhibits how efficiently a firm is utilizing its assets to generate sales.

Story continues

Right now, American Assets Trust has an S/TA ratio of 0.15, which means that the company gets $0.15 in sales for each dollar in assets. Comparing this to the industry average of 0.13, it can be said that the company is more efficient.

While the level of efficiency in generating sales matters a lot, so does the sales growth of a company. And American Assets Trust is well positioned from a sales growth perspective too. The company's sales are expected to grow 1.5% this year versus the industry average of 0.7%.

Promising Earnings Estimate Revisions

Beyond the metrics outlined above, investors should consider the trend in earnings estimate revisions. A positive trend is a plus 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 American Assets Trust have been revising upward. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has surged 0.8% over the past month.

Bottom Line

American Assets Trust has not only earned a Growth Score of B based on a number of factors, including the ones discussed above, but it also carries a Zacks Rank #2 because of the positive earnings estimate revisions.

You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

This combination indicates that American Assets Trust is a potential outperformer and a solid choice for growth investors.



Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report



American Assets Trust, Inc. (AAT) : Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment ResearchAs she leads a nation still grieving over 50 killings at two mosques, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Thursday declared a ban on military-style rifles, which includes assault rifles, high-capacity magazines and military-like semi-automatic rifles.

Since the attacks in Christchurch, Ardern has become the face and voice of New Zealand to the world and she's used her platform to denounce the hateful attacks. Her appeal has translated into a fandom dubbed "Jacindamania."

Here are four things to know about Ardern:

She's New Zealand's youngest leaders in decades

Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern was born on July 26, 1980 in Waikato, about an hour's drive south of Auckland, New Zealand's largest city.

She is the third woman to become New Zealand's prime minister and, at 39, is the youngest New Zealand leader since the 1850s, according to her official government biography.

"Ardern had the most meteoric rise to power of any New Zealand PM  three months prior to being sworn in, she was not even leader of her party," the biography read.

Profile of a leader: Jacinda Ardern leads New Zealand in aftermath of killings police say could have been worse

Ardern, a member of the Labour party, graduated from the University of Waikato with a bachelors of communications studies in public relations and political science. She also worked in Britain's Cabinet and Home offices.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, center, leaves after a visit to the Kilbirnie Mosque in Wellington, New Zealand, on March 17, 2019.

New Zealand: Hells Angels, street gangs vow to defend mosques as NZ braces for Friday prayers

'I was the last person to get out alive': Narrow escape from the New Zealand mosque

She refuses to give the shooter notoriety

Ardern promised her nation's parliament that she will not permit notoriety of the man who killed and wounded those at Christchurch. His name has been stricken from all of her future conversations, she said.

"He is a terrorist, he is a criminal, he is an extremist, but he will, when I speak, be nameless, and to others I implore you: Speak the names of those who were lost rather than the name of the man who took them. He may have sought notoriety but we in New Zealand will give him nothing  not even his name."

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She promised tougher gun laws

Ardern said the March 15 attack "demonstrated the weakness of New Zealand's gun laws" and therefore she vowed to end the "easy availability" of weapons used in the attack.

"The guns used in this attack had the power to shoot continuously. The times for the easy availability of these weapons must end. And today, they will," she told her nation in a live television announcement Thursday.

As a result, an amnesty and buyback program will be in place for New Zealand's citizens. However, "tightly regulated" exemptions would be offered for hunters and farmers.

"We just want the guns back. ... It's about all of us. It's in the national interest, and it's about safety," Ardern said.

She's a mom

As Ardern began her new role as prime minister, she was also about to give birth.

She became the first elected head of state to take maternity leave.

Later, she and her partner, Clarke Gayford, a television host, journeyed to New York City with baby Neve for a United Nations meeting.

"I don't want to ever give the impression that I'm some kind of wonder woman," Ardern said, adding: "Or that women should be expected to do everything because I am. I'm not doing everything."

For her 9 month birthday today we received the gift of crawling.

While her mum got her the gift of having a safer country to grow up in. pic.twitter.com/FiCSTn0PM8  Clarke Gayford (@NZClarke) March 21, 2019

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 4 things to know about Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand's prime minister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

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Industrial automation is an area that can thrive regardless of how the economy looks. When times are good, companies are able to invest more in technology to put themselves ahead of the competition. When times are bad, companies look to get leaner - which means substituting human personnel for cost-saving factory automation systems. (Businesses facing the threat of closure quickly get religion on changes.)

With the threat of recession growing in 2019, industrial automation stocks may prove a great opportunity. In fact, the current market environment might prove doubly important for factory automation companies. Trade conflict, such as the one between the U.S. and China, can put pressure on manufacturers to move their operations - a costly process that entices companies to make their relocated facilities more cost-efficient.

As industry expert Rick Blaisdell has written, the next wave of industrial automation (as well as several other industries) is based on the "Internet of Things" - the interconnectivity of devices past traditional products such as computers and smartphones. IoT solutions using sensors, networks and software can help operate machines, improve quality control, cut down on analytical errors and enhance safety. Thus, many automation plays will be IoT plays, too.

Here are six top stocks to buy if you want to gain exposure to the potential all-weather opportunity of industrial automation.

SEE ALSO: 20 Top Stock Picks the Analysts Love for 2019

ABB Ltd.

Courtesy ABB Ltd.

Market value: $39.8 billion

Dividend yield: 4.3%

Zurich, Switzerland-based ABB Ltd. (ABB, $19.30) has been shrinking for years, but it now looks primed to grow again.

ABB specializes in robotics, electrical equipment, power solutions and automation technologies. Its industrial automation segment serves a host of heavy industries, from oil and chemicals to utilities to pharmaceuticals and food.

ABB late last year announced it would sell 80.1% of its power grid unit for $11 billion in a deal that should close in 2020. That influx of cash will help ABB continue to invest in producing high-tech equipment such as parts-assembly robots, optical sensors and renewable-energy systems.

Story continues

These investments have ABB on a path to growth, which is why Citigroup upgraded the stock from "Neutral" to "Buy" last September. After years of declining revenues, ABB turned it around with a marginal uptick in 2017, followed by a 4% improvement in 2018. Analysts now expect 5.5% top-line growth this year, followed by another 3% in 2020.

This attractive international dividend stock currently trades at just 16 times future earnings estimates and a price-to-sales ratio of 1.4 - both metrics are cheaper than the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. It also yields more than twice as much as the index.

SEE ALSO: 19 Best Retirement Stocks to Buy in 2019

Eaton

Getty Images

Market value: $33.9 billion

Dividend yield: 3.5%

Eaton (ETN, $82.01) - another international player, this one based in Dublin, Ireland - makes industrial electrical systems, fuel systems for airplanes, and car and truck parts. It also has become a leader in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), It provides sensors, switches and artificial intelligence for factory equipment to do things such as improve power management and maintain equipment before anything breaks down.

Eaton, like ABB, is expecting modest but steady growth in the years ahead. Analysts are modeling a 3.6% bump in revenues this year followed by 2.2% in 2020, which should result in 9% and 6% growth in profits, respectively.

Speaking of the analyst community, the "pros" have gotten more optimistic about Eaton of late. ETN received an upgrade from KeyBanc analyst Jeffrey Hammond in mid-March, to "Overweight" (equivalent of "Buy") from "Sector Weight" (equivalent of "Hold"). The analyst says shares trade at an "unwarranted discount" to its peers, and believes that its product mix and focus on organic growth puts it in a place where it can grow regardless of the broader economic environment.

Eaton also offers a nice dividend that yields 3.5% on a 71-cent quarterly payout that has been growing for years and should continue to expand. The company is projecting earnings of $5.70 to $6 per share for the current year; even at the low end, Eaton would be using less than half its profits to fund the dividend.

Honeywell International

Getty Images

Market value: $114.0 billion

Dividend yield: 2.1%

A half-century ago, Honeywell International (HON, $158.45), was failing to beat International Business Machines (IBM) in mainframe computing. Following a checkered career that included merging into defense contractor Allied Signal, Honeywell today is an industrial conglomerate preparing to break itself up. The company will spin off two new entities - Resideo Technologies (security and home) and Garrett Motion (transportation systems).

The new Honeywell will be primarily an industrial business focused on making cities as well as factories work more efficiently.

Honeywell's industrial automation products include instruments, smart sensors and whole integrated systems that control and monitor processes, manage emissions and deliver critical data to better manage their facilities. The company's "predictive maintenance" systems, in which sensors pass data to computer systems for analysis, share a market growing at 24% per year, with manufacturing the biggest niche.

Edward Jones has a "Buy" rating on the stock, and analyst senior equity analyst Jeff Windau considers it a good buy for long-term investors. "There are long-term opportunities to grow sales" in many of its industrial markets, he writes.

Mike Bailey, director of research at FBB Capital Partners in Bethesda, Maryland, says Honeywell is betting on increased demand for automation worldwide by purchasing Transnorm, a European developer of warehouse automation products, for about $500 million.

The company also is using its own products, Bailey says, adding sensors and Internet of Things technology "from the front door to the back door" of its Greer, South Carolina, aerospace factory.

PTC

Getty Images

Market value: $11.1 billion

Dividend yield: N/A

PTC Inc. (PTC, $94.96), originally called Parametric Technology Corp., is the smallest play on this list of factory automation stocks to buy ... but it also might be the most exciting.

PTC is a software and services company that started out in computer-aided design (CAD) software and a product lifestyle management product. Since then, it has expanded heavily into the industrial Internet of Things and is a key player in industrial automation.

The company's ThingWorx - which it bought for $112 million in 2013 - is an IIoT platform with several apps that help manufacturers and other industries implement IoT, augmented reality and other technologies into their processes. The platform helps connect devices and sensors in a way that companies can harvest useful data, then can help them analyze that data, which can educate changes to make processes and systems more efficient. Its augmented-reality software lets industrial designers model how new factories will operate, not just how they look.

The company has grown steadily through other acquisitions, too. For instance, in 2018, it bought Frustum - a Colorado-based creator of design software it will plug into its Creo design system - for $70 million.

The company still has more than $300 million in cash against $643 million in debt, which isn't ideal, but it's manageable. The company also pays no dividend but is the healthiest growth prospect of the group. Analysts expect 6.2% revenue growth this year and 13.1% in 2020. That should fuel a 23% jump in profits for 2019, and a 44% leap next year.

Rockwell Automation

Courtesy Rockwell Automation via Business Wire

Market value: $20.6 billion

Dividend yield: 2.2%

Milwaukee's Rockwell Automation (ROK, $177.02) sells both industrial automation hardware and software. Perhaps its best-known brand is its Allen-Bradley line of automation components and integrated control systems that include monitoring products, lighting and motion control, networks security and infrastructure, sensors and power supplies.

Rockwell has been branding itself as creating "the connected enterprise" in advanced manufacturing and signed a strategic partnership with PTC in June that is already delivering products to the market.

Analysts are expecting decent growth looking forward - 4% sales increases both this year and next, but significantly better 11% and 8% bottom-line improvements in 2019 and 2020. It is a bit on the pricey side, however, trading at more than 17 times future estimates and three times sales. The yield isn't much better than the market, either, at just 2.2% in yield. But it makes up for it in dividend growth; the payout has ballooned by 67% over the past five years.

Edward Jones currently has a "Hold" rating on the stock, and Windau says that "Rockwell's business is heavily influenced by the health of the industrial economy." If trade friction forces companies to make more goods in the U.S., he says, business could pick up this year.

SEE ALSO: 13 Stocks With Big Future Potential

3M Co.

Getty Images

Market value: $118.9 billion

Dividend yield: 2.8%

Industrial conglomerate 3M (MMM, $209.61) isn't a pure play on anything, and that includes industrial automation. Its businesses are wide-reaching, and in fact, most people recognize 3M for its consumer brands, which include Post-it notes, Scotch-Brite and 3M-branded window insulation. But 3M makes everything from traffic signs to health information systems, including software used in the production of food and drugs.

It also has a hand in industrial automation, but mainly through components. For instance, its 3M Link Connectors, Mini-Clamp II Plug and Power Clamp Connectors are typically applied in factory automation and industrial controls. The company also has partnered with Eckhart to develop an automated robotic taping system, leveraging 3M's adhesives expertise. And many of its products find their way into factories regardless of the level of automation, whether it's abrasives, filtration or even just lightweight futuristic materials.

Bailey of FBB Capital Partners says, "3M could see more rapid growth coming out of the other side of a recession as cyclical customers ramp up orders."

3M also is a true dividend superstar. The company not only is in the ranks of the Dividend Aristocrats, which boast a minimum of 25 consecutive years of annual dividend increases. But at 60 years counting, it owns one of the longest dividend-growth histories among all dividend stocks.

EDITOR'S PICKS



Copyright 2019 The Kiplinger Washington EditorsMorgan Freeman, Mike Myers and Gary Busey were all on-set divas.

Its not easy being an actor. Theyve got to show up to glamorous locations, remember stuff, and eat free food, while being paid exorbitant amounts of money. Its tough, its tough.

So its probably not surprising that some of them occasionally kick off on set, make unreasonable demands, or just generally act like proper divas. Heres our selection of the most memorable / deplorable.

Warning: Dont try any of the following in your office.

Gary Busey  Quigley (2003)

Gary Buseys heavenly Quigley (credit: Gaiam  Entertainment)

Okay, so this is maybe the most ridiculous entry on this list  and were not even talking about the films plot (Gary Busey dies and comes back to his family as a dog).

No, its the silliest diva strop because it involves Gary Busey angrily trying to convince his coworkers that not only had he been to heaven, he knew exactly what it looked like, down to very specific details. Thats according to his Quigley co-star Curtis Armstrong.

After showing up on a set made to look like heaven, Busey examined the production design and said, I cant play this scene, Armstrong recalled.

According to Armstrong, Busey said: Its nothing like this. Ive been to heaven and it doesnt look like this. That sofas all wrong. That mirror is ridiculous. They dont even have mirrors!

Heaven-forbid they get Gods sofas wrong!

Read more: 10 worst movies by Oscar-winning actors

Christian Bale  Terminator Salvation (2009)

Christian Bale turned down Terminator Salvation three times

Youve all heard the tape, Christian Bales temper-tantrum on the set of Terminator Salvation has achieved more long-lasting notoriety than anything in the movie.

Annoyed by the fact his director of photography was adjusting lights during a scene (which is a bit unusual, to be fair), Christian Bale unleashed his full Patrick Bateman on the unsuspecting technician.

The exchange was taped, leaked, and Bales diva strop became one of the most quoted and parodied quotes of the year.

All together now: NO! NO!

Jared Leto  Suicide Squad (2016)

Jared Letos Joker was annoying in more ways than one (credit: Warner Brothers)

Jared Leto was dedicated to staying in character as the Joker on the set of Suicide Squad to such an extreme extent Will Smith said I literally have not met him yet, during the shoot.

Story continues

Unfortunately, the Joker appears to be a bit of an immature diva, forcing everyone to live in his weird world. Leto used his method acting as an excuse to bring a dead pig to set to gross out the crew, send Margot Robbie a box containing a live rat, and to make the rest of the cast recieved gifts of anal beads and used condoms, because Well, who knows. We really dont remember the used condoms episode of Batman: The Animated Series, but maybe it was one we missed.

Leto also insisted on being referred to as Mr J on set, and visiting journalists were advised not to look him in the eye or address him directly, because Again, who knows. Maybe he would have killed us? That probably would have taken him to the top of this list.

Read more: Jared Leto may never play the Joker again

Mike Myers  The Cat In The Hat (2003)

In character, sans chocolate (credit: Warner Brothers)

Woah boy. Back in 2016, one of Mike Myers Cat In The Hat co-stars Amy Hill described working with the actor as a horrible, nightmarish experience, due to the Austin Powers stars diva behaviour.

It was just a horrible, nightmarish experience Hill said. I dont think [Mike] got to know anybody. Hed just be with his people and walk away. People would come and then hed stand there. There was a guy who held his chocolates in a little Tupperware. Whenever he needed chocolate, hed come running over and give him a chocolate. Thats what divas are like, I guess. Or people who need therapy.

Ouch.

Wesley Snipes  Blade Trinity (2004)

Wesley Snipes shortly before composing a Post-it note (credit: Warner Brothers)

Now, we love Wesley Snipes. And we also love the first Blade movie. The third Blade movie, Blade: Trinity, not so much. And it sounds like it was about as much fun to make as it is to watch, mostly because of Wesley Snipes diva behaviour, according to Snipes co-star Patton Oswalt.

According to Oswalt, Snipes sat down with director David S Goyer and said: I think you need to quit. Youre detrimental to this movie.

Apparently, Goyers response was Why dont you quit? Weve got all your close-ups and we could shoot the rest with your stand-in.

And that freaked Wesley out so much that, for the rest of the production, he would only communicate with the director through Post-it notes. And he would sign each Post-it note From Blade.'

Read more: Controversial interviews that nearly killed careers

Morgan Freeman  Clean and Sober (1988)

Morgan Freeman and Michael Keaton in Clean and Sober (credit: Imagine Entertainment)

When Michael Keaton was cast alongside Morgan Freeman in Glenn Gordon Carons 1988 drama Clean and Sober, he probably thought he was going to get to chill out listening to one of the most soothing voices in showbiz during the off-camera moments during the shoot. He was wrong.

We were in between setups for a scene, Keaton said years later. The cast were all laughing and joking together and enjoying themselves, when all of a sudden Morgan gets loud and upset about something. He throws this tantrum and its like Whoa, Jesus.

He was sitting there by himself in his chair a bit later on, so I went up to him and said, Hey are you all right, are you upset about anything? And he was like, What are you talking about? So I just said, You know, the thing earlier?, and he goes Nahh! I just did it on purpose.

I was like, Are you kidding?, and he just said he thought everybody was getting too comfortable, which you dont want on a movie like this, you need to have a little bit of edge. So he threw a fake tantrum, which is really cool.

Really cool? Or a bit weird? You decide! Were pretty sure pretending to be a diva to get your way, is pretty much the same thing as actually being a diva, but who are we to judge?



MONTGOMERY, Ala.  Alabama residents would be allowed to donate some of their state income tax refunds toward the construction of a border wall with Mexico under a bill approved by the state Senate on Thursday.

The legislation, sponsored by Republican Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh, passed 23-6.

Marshs bill authorizes people to send money to We Build The Wall Inc., a nonprofit set up to raise money for construction of the wall, a key promise made by President Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign.

This bill is about sending a message to Washington that we support President Trump and his mission to secure our southern border, Marsh said in a statement.

The Alabama State Senate during the 2019 Alabama Legislature's organizational session at the Alabama State House in Montgomery, Ala., on Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2019.

Whether the money raised will get to Washington is another question. Congress must vote to accept money raised by private organizations, and such a vote to accept money from We Build The Wall seems unlikely as long as Democrats control the U.S. House of Representatives.

Democrats in the state Senate questioned the wall project and said it would do little for the state of Alabama. Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton cited a recent report that said money for a $5.2 million project for the Anniston Army Depot, in Marsh home district, was being diverted for Trumps efforts to pay for the border wall.

Im going to be on the right side of this issue, he said. And the right side is not the Trump side.

The bill moves on to the Alabama House of Representatives.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Alabama bill would allow donations from taxpayers to fund border wallEven before she took office in January, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has been the subject of constant scrutiny from Fox News. AOC recently accused Fox of spreading misinformation about her, and on Late Night With Seth Meyers, she revealed one of the side effects of some of her colleagues believing everything they hear. It is funny because one of the side effects of, kind of this Fox News lunacy is that other actual members of congress, like, believe it and see it uncritically, AOC said. One story that was false yet widely circulated among conservative media, was that AOC had signed a $10 million deal with Netflix. Though true that Netflix had bought the distribution rights to a documentary featuring AOC, called Knock Down The House, she did not, and will not see a penny. Still, this led to a colleague asking her about it at a place that left her with a question of her own. So I was on the floor once, and this guy came up to me and he was like, Is it true that you got $10 million from Netflix? And I was like, No, AOC said. And it was in the well, and we were, like, voting on gun reform. And Im like, What else do you not know? This is concerning. In fact, AOC doesnt really understand why she is the subject of so much Fox News coverage in the first place. I mean, its weird, AOC said. Like, why are so many grown men just obsessed with this 29-year-old?Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has received death threats frequently enough that her staff stiffens every time someone knocks on the door of her office.

The realities of Ms Ocasio-Cortezs time in Congress as the US representative of New York's 14th congressional district have been revealed in a new Time profile, which displays the youngest-ever Congresswoman on the cover.

According to the profile, the outspoken Congresswoman has made many fans and enemies in her first few months in office, with the latter leading Capitol Police to train her staff in performing risk assessments of all visitors - even those just leaving positive Post-it notes.

The immense public attention shes acquired since being elected in 2018 has also slightly taken a toll on the 29-year-old, who told the magazine that she misses being able to go outside without being watched.

I miss being able to go outside in sweats, she said. I cant go anywhere in public and just be a person without a lot of people watching everything I do.

But, as she told the magazine this month, despite the frequent backlash from both sides of the political spectrum, Ms Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, is dedicated to pushing for legislation that will have a lasting impact.

Acknowledging that the process of approving new legislation can often take years, she said: So everything we introduce needs to have 2025 or our kids in mind.

The profile also discusses her background, growing up in the Bronx, and the death of her father during her sophomore year of college at Boston University.

After shed graduated, Ms Ocasio-Cortez slowly found her way into politics, through grassroots community organising to electoral organising.

It was a trip to Flint, Michigan, and then to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation that proved transformational for the Congresswoman - as she saw first-hand the effects of environmental degradation.

Story continues

The trip galvanised her and encouraged her to take more risks.

From there, Ms Ocasio-Cortez started her run for Congress, and eventually succeeded.

But despite her persona online as someone willing to stand up to anyone, includingPresident Trump, in person she is reportedly much more reserved, according to one congressional source, who described her as quiet as a mouse.

However, there are some things the activist Congresswoman will not back down on, such as saving the planet, her hope with the Green New Deal.

I dont think that we can compromise on transitioning to 100 per cent renewable energy, she said. We cannot compromise on saving our planet. We cant compromise on saving kids.

We have to do these things. If we want to do them in different ways, thats fine. But we cant not do them.By Tracy Rucinski CHICAGO (Reuters) - American Airlines pilots will test Boeing Co's 737 MAX software fix on simulators this weekend, the pilots' union told Reuters on Thursday, a key step in restoring confidence in the jet after two fatal crashes. Boeing has been working on a software upgrade for an anti-stall system and pilot displays on its fastest-selling jetliner in the wake of the deadly Lion Air crash in Indonesia in October. Similarities between the flight path in the Lion Air incident and a fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10 have raised fresh questions about the system. The two crashes killed a total of 346 people. American is the second-largest U.S. operator of the MAX in the United States with 24 jets, behind Southwest Airlines with 34. "This airplane can be a safe airplane, and there have been great strides on getting a fix in the works, but I'll have a better feel after we can test it out," said Mike Michaelis, safety committee chairman of the Allied Pilots Association (APA), which represents American Airlines pilots. Michaelis said one APA pilot and one pilot from American's management team would test the software fix in Renton, Washington, where Boeing builds the MAX and has two simulators. "We have been engaging with all 737 MAX operators and we are continuing to schedule meetings to share information about our plans for supporting the 737 MAX fleet," Boeing spokesman Paul Bergman said. MAX jets were grounded worldwide in the wake of the Ethiopian crash. Boeing has indicated it would deploy the software update by April or sooner, though it was unclear how long it would take to get the jets flying again. Pilots must complete FAA-approved computer-based training on the changes, followed by a mandatory test, and some pilots have said more may be needed. After Lion Air, American pilots met with Boeing executives in Fort Worth, Texas and demanded to know why the manufacturer had not told them about the new system, known as MCAS. They also questioned whether a 56-minute iPad course on the MAX had been sufficient. MAX simulator training is not required, partly because few simulators exist. Southwest and American expect to receive MAX simulators later this year. The main simulator producer, Canada's CAE Inc, said it has delivered nine of the simulators, which are now in high demand but take about a year to build. CAE expects to deliver 20 more in 2019. "When it comes to safety issues, it has to be a full-course meal, nothing a la carte," said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the American Airlines pilots' union and a 737 pilot. (Reporting by Tracy Rucinski; additional reporting by Allison Lampert in Montreal and Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; editing by Darren Schuettler and Nick Zieminski)By Karen Dillon

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Reuters) - Floodwaters that devastated swaths of Nebraska and Iowa rolled downstream along America's longest river on Thursday, swamping more Midwestern farmland as waterfront communities in Missouri and Kansas hurried to shore up strained levees.

Flooding of the Missouri River triggered by last week's so-called "bomb cyclone" storm has already inflicted damage estimated at nearly $1.5 billion in Nebraska, killed at least four people in Nebraska and Iowa and left a man missing below Nebraska's collapsed Spencer Dam.

Missouri Governor Mike Parson declared a state of emergency for his state as high water forced evacuations of several small farm communities. Larger towns from St. Joseph to Kansas City braced for additional flooding forecast through the weekend.

"The rising floodwaters are affecting more Missouri communities and farms, closing more roads and threatening levees, water treatment plants and other critical infrastructure," Parson said in a statement.

The declaration allows state resources and assistance to be provided directly to counties and municipalities in need, said Mike O'Connell, spokesman for the Missouri Public Safety Department.

Authorities say continued flooding in the days ahead is unlikely to reach the widespread, catastrophic scale seen in Nebraska and Iowa - as excess flow dissipates along the length of the river and water breaches or flows over the tops of levees.

But the threat of extensive flooding lingers over the wider region through May and could grow dire in coming weeks with additional rainfall and melting snow runoff, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials said on Thursday.

"This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk," Ed Clark, director of NOAA's National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, said on Thursday in the agency's spring outlook.

Story continues

Scientists said on Thursday that climate change played a hand in the deadly floods, while a Trump administration official said more study was needed before making that link. [L1N2181FI]

LEVEE BREACHES

Floodwaters have already swamped large stretches of Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa, drowning livestock and damaging crop land along the Missouri. A state of emergency has been declared in all or parts of the three Midwestern farm states.

The river's next major flood crest is forecast to hit St. Joseph, Missouri, early Friday morning and a day later in Kansas City, Missouri, 55 miles (90 km) to the south.

With no more rain forecast until next weekend, authorities hope flood levels will abate. Still, the inundation has strained the system of dams and levees built and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the region.

More than 40 levee breaches have been confirmed in the agency's Omaha district, encompassing the hardest-hit parts of Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri, officials told a news briefing.

Nine more instances of levee breaches and spillovers have occurred farther downstream in Missouri and Kansas, including one near St. Joseph that was last topped in 1993, said Jud Kneuvean, the Corps' emergency management chief in Kansas City.

The disaster's epicenter had shifted by Thursday to northwestern Missouri, where roughly 40,000 acres of farm land in Holt County alone was under water and a population of about 500 was at risk, Kneuvean said.

The Holt County farming town of Craig, home to about 250 people, was evacuated. So too were some 200 residents of Lewis and Clark Village in neighbouring Buchanan County after a nearby levee failed, officials said.

In Forest City, downstream from Craig in Holt County, residents young and old hurried to fill sandbags to bolster their local levee, hoping to stave off disaster.

"This is our last line of defence," South Holt County Assistant Fire Chief Bill Killin told area media.

TRUMP APPROVES FEDERAL FUNDING

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday approved a disaster declaration for Nebraska, making federal funding available in nine counties there that bore the brunt of last week's floods.

More than 2,400 homes and businesses in Nebraska have been destroyed or damaged, with 200 miles (320 km) of roads unusable and 11 bridges wiped out, according to authorities.

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts estimated the floods caused at least $439 million in damage to public infrastructure and other assets, and $85 million to private property. He put agricultural flood damage for the state at nearly $1 billion.

Mark Hamilton, 59, a retired military officer, has lived in a mobile home in Arlington, Nebraska, for the last 23 years but was forced to flee when it flooded. He said he lost his house, motorcycle and truck at a total cost of about $150,000.

"We've had floods nine, 10 years ago, but it was nothing like this," Hamilton said. "That entire trailer park needs to be removed now; nobody can live there."

(Additional reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta, Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee and Steve Gorman and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Cynthia Osterman)Mosul (Iraq) (AFP) - The capsizing of a Tigris River ferry packed with families celebrating Kurdish New Year in Mosul left at least 100 people dead, mostly women and children, the Iraqi interior ministry said on Friday, as grief and anger swept the city.

Residents of Iraq's second city, scarred by years of jihadist rule, demanded justice as Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi decreed three days of national mourning following Thursday's accident.

Mosulites had resumed the annual festivities this year for the first time since Iraqi forces ousted the Islamic State group following years of brutal jihadist rule.

But the celebrations turned to tragedy when the overcrowded vessel ran into trouble as it headed to a popular picnic site across the River Tigris.

Mosul security officials blamed the accident on high water levels and overcrowding on the boat.

Hundreds of relatives of victims and residents gathered Friday at the scene of the accident, where prayers were held for the dead.

Many said the disaster could have been avoided, and chanted "corruption is killing us!"

"We want those responsible to be brought to justice," said Mohammed Adel, 27, whose father was among those who died.

He accused officials of failing to enforce safety standards.

Abu Salem, who lost his wife and two children in the accident which also coincided with Mother's Day in Iraq, pinned blame for the tragedy on profit motives and the corruption that is endemic in Iraq.

The managers of the picnic site were "criminals... I want them to pay up and I won't leave here until they do", the 50-year Iraqi said.

Hundreds of demonstrators later gathered at the city's amusement park to stage an impromptu protest against "the thieves" running the city.

Reflecting the popular mood, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, in his Friday sermon accused "the authorities in charge of supervision of not doing their job".

Story continues

Transparency International ranks Iraq in 12th place in its list of the world's most corrupt countries.

- 'Investigation must produce results' -

Video footage from cameras at the picnic site, posted online, showed a severely overcrowded vessel beginning to list as water comes aboard.

As it capsizes completely, it traps dozens of people under its hull.

Authorities had warned people to be cautious after several days of heavy rains led to water being released through the Mosul dam, causing the river to rise.

Videos showed a fast-flowing, bloated river and dozens of people floating in the water or trying to swim around the partly submerged boat.

Abdel Mahdi announced Friday that a crisis team was being set up, comprised of top provincial officials but not the governor of Nineveh, of which Mosul is the main city.

The team would have "executive powers... to carry out an investigation as quickly as possible, punish those responsible and decide on compensation", the prime minister said.

He and President Barham Saleh have visited the site of the accident as the search continued for bodies, some of which were carried far downstream by the strong current.

While war and jihadist attacks have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Iraq in recent years, such accidents are relatively rare.

But corruption and the dismal state of public services in Iraq were triggers for widespread protests last year.

IS turned Mosul into its de facto capital after sweeping across much of the country's north in 2014.

The city spent three years under the group's iron-fisted rule until it was recaptured by Iraqi troops backed by a US-led coalition in 2017.

Survivors of Thursday's disaster were treated in hospitals heavily damaged by the months-long military campaign against the jihadists.

A mortuary was receiving bodies wrapped in white shrouds, many bearing the names of women.

A forensics official said many had yet to be identified.

Iraq's justice ministry said it had ordered the arrest of nine ferry company officials and banned the owners of the vessel and the picnic site from leaving the country.

Officials implicated in various scandals have fled Iraq in recent years.The bunker is underneath the Ministry of Defence (PA)

A team from the armed forces have set up a Brexit bunker under the Ministry of Defence as the government prepares for Britain to leave the European Union without a deal.

The team will help direct some 3,500 military personnel at very high readiness mode, who have been put on standby to help the government if needed in the event of disruption caused by a no-deal departure, Sky News reported.

From next Monday, troops will be ready to be deployed at a days notice, under something called Operation Redfold, which covers several areas of government.

Control of overall planning in the event of a no-deal will shift from the Cabinet Office to the governments emergency committee Cobra.

There will be near 24-hour manning of critical departments most at risk from any disruption.

The teams will cover areas such as health, transport and defence to divert resources or deploy manpower where required, reported Sky News.

Operation Redfold is the military side of no-deal contingency preparations.

Read more:

Brexit petition to revoke Article 50 tops two million signatures to become fastest growing in history

Theresa May urges country to get behind her Brexit deal as she refuses to delay beyond June 30

Jean-Claude Juncker: Ive given up on Brexit

The army could be used to help transport food, fuel and other goods into and around the country.

A 200-strong team of military personnel is ready to drive fuel tankers to petrol stations if required.

Military bases could also be used to park lorries and other vehicles backed up at ports if there are delays with customs checks at the borders.

Preparations are being made for a no-deal Brexit across the UK, including at Ramsgate Port in Kent (PA)

The nuclear-proof bunker, called Pindar, is deep underground, beneath the MoDs main building in Whitehall. It is the facility used by the armed forces at a time of war or national emergency.

We are always willing to support wider government planning for any scenario, and we have committed to holding 3,500 troops at readiness to aid contingency plans, said a MoD spokesman.

Story continues

Military chiefs have already spent at least 23m on stockpiling food, fuel, spare parts and ammunition at bases overseas in case supply lines are disrupted.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UKNew York (AFP) - The humble cassette -- that tiny little plastic rectangle containing the homemade mixtapes of yesteryear -- is back, joining vinyl as a darling of audiophiles who miss side A and side B.

But as top musicians including Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber release their music on tape and demand continues to climb, the niche revival has faced a global shortage of music-quality magnetic tape needed for production.

Now, two facilities -- one in the American Midwest and the other in western France -- have stepped in to meet the need.

"It's a good place to be -- there's plenty of business for both of us," said Steve Stepp, who founded the National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri with his father 50 years ago.

He said that around 2000 the "imperial hegemony of the CD" cut his business, which stayed alive as a major manufacturer of books on tape that remained popular.

But despite the astronomical rise of streaming, Stepp said rock bands like Pearl Jam and The Smashing Pumpkins began seeking to manufacture anniversary tapes in the mid-2000s, launching a cassette comeback tour.

"That convinced major record labels that there was still life in the cassette as a music form," he said.

Several years ago National Audio bought 300,000 reels of tape from a South Korean company that gave up music-grade tape production.

As that stockpile began to shrink, his facility in November 2016 was faced with a choice: either make reels, or fold.

His business invested several million dollars buying up old equipment from defunct production facilities, and last year National Audio manufactured 18 million audio cassettes, Stepp said, selling to 3,500 record labels globally.

"I think it's got a bright future," Stepp told AFP of the cassette market. "It died in 2000, as far as conventional wisdom was concerned, and it has made a strong comeback since."

"Reports of its death were greatly exaggerated."

Story continues

- '90s vibes' -

Since November, Mulann -- a small French company near Mont Saint Michel -- has also rebooted production, the country's first manufacturing of music-grade tape in two decades.

Already selling magnetic tape for metro tickets or military recording studios, the Mulann group acquired a plant to produce analog audio tapes under the trademark Recording The Masters.

For Jean-Luc Renou, Mulann's CEO, there's still a place for analog sound in today's ephemeral music world.

"Take the example of heating: you have radiators at home. It's comfortable, it's digital -- but next to you, you can make a good fire."

"Pleasure" is the goal, he said: "That's the cassette or vinyl."

The company sells tapes for 3.49 euros each, producing them by the thousands each month and exporting 95 percent worldwide, according to commercial director Theo Gardin.

The 27-year-old admits he didn't know in his youth the joys -- and pains -- of the Walkman personal tape player, or the delicate strip of tape that tangles up and must be rewound with, say, a pen. Or a finger.

According to Stepp, it's precisely 20-somethings like Gardin fast-forwarding demand, as young people seek something tangible in the internet age.

Urban Outfitters -- an American clothing brand catering to hipster types that also sells electronics -- on its site spells out the mixtape process.

"If you've never spent 3-5 hours sitting by the radio, waiting for that one Hanson song to come on so you could add it to your mixtape, get pumped: you can now relive that experience," it says.

"Let those '90s vibes wash over you, man."

- 'A uniqueness' -

Cassette tape album sales in the US grew by 23 percent in 2018, according to tracker Nielsen Music, jumping from 178,000 copies the year prior to 219,000.

It's nothing compared to 1994 sales of 246 million cassette albums, but significant considering the format was all but dead by the mid 2000s.

"As an old fogey I don't want to imagine a world with no analog," Stepp said. "The world around is analog; our ears are analog."

"Digital recordings are very clean and sharp but there are no harmonics. These are digital pictures of audio recordings, if you will."

Bobby May, a 29-year-old buyer at Burger Records in southern California, said that while "physical media in itself is a totally antiquated idea," cassette sound has what he called a uniqueness.

"The consumer public is fickle and trends always change, but for the foreseeable future, I know tons of people will stay pretty crazy for records and vinyl."

Last year vinyl saw revenues hit their highest level since 1988, totaling $419 million -- an eight percent jump from the previous year.

Though vinyl's sound quality is unquestionably superior to cassettes, May said tapes' low cost makes them ideal for collectors.

"I still like stuff pilin' up around me," May laughed, adding that he probably has 500 tapes from Burger.

In addition to the homemade and indie cassettes, he cherishes several mainstream albums as well.

"I have a prized 'Baby One More Time' cassette," he said, referring to pop princess Britney Spears' debut album. "It looks great on my shelf."Cryptocurrency trading is nothing if not risky, and one exchange in the spine-tingling volatile digital asset market is looking to support a trading feature that'll make it riskier.

Binance, one of the largest exchanges in the market, facilitates the trading of over 100 coins and tokens for a client base largely composed of retail investors. Now, the firm is preparing to offer margin to those traders, according to sources close to the situation. That is to say, the firm will allow users to borrow money to trade, a bold move as some regulators around the world are looking to ban or implement stricter rules around the practice.

A spokeswoman for Binance did not respond to a messages seeking comment. To be clear, the firm is in the early stages of supporting margin and it might not fully roll out for months. Internally, there have been talks about requiring BNB, Binances native token, to stake in order to unlock margin.

Margin trading, essentially, is trading with borrowed money. In U.S. equities, a broker offers a client the ability to trade on margin in order to increase their buying power. Still, it comes with risk. "The downside to using margin is that if the stock price decreases, substantial losses can mount quickly," as the Securities and Exchange Commission notes in a nifty explainer on the subject. The losses can be more than what you originally invested due to the leverage applied.

In U.S. equities, rules around margin trading are well established to protect consumers from the risks associated with it. Furthermore, brokers have their own rules and standards on top of those set forth by agencies such as FINRA, which requires a trader to deposit a minimum margin amount, for instance. In crypto markets, which aren't for the faint of heart, the risk of trading on margin is amplified, experts tell The Block.

"There's higher risk in these unregulated markets because of the lack of regulation," one source said. "And then layer in the fact that the assets themselves are functionally unregulated in that marketplace, price manipulation continues." That could allow exchanges to trade against their leveraged clients, the source added.

Story continues

Brad Koeppen, head of trading at crypto trading firm CMT Digital and a former trader on the floor of Cboe, told The Block in an interview that his firm trades on margin, but it is careful about engaging in the practice. "When we are putting on a position we generally do not want the exchange they will liquidate for you," he said. "We don't want to leave it up to them."

And some times they're not very transparent either, he added. "There's a reason for [regulators] to be concerned about leverage. If you invest $1,000 the most you can lose is $1,000, but once you add leverage to that you can lose more. And the risk is greater than some people probably understand." Still, regulators aren't necessarily concerned about firms like CMT Digital. They're concerned about mom-and-pop day traders.

"I think in general a lot of these regulations that read like these are tied to consumer protection type concerns," Koeppen said, referring to a proposal by Canadian regulators to ban crypto margin trading temporarily and recent news out of Japan that its regulators would implement stricter rules on crypto margin trading, requiring exchanges to register to offer the service. "This has more to do about the exchanges themselves than crypto," said Jeff Dorman, CEO of Arca. "Charles Schwab and other retail brokers have very stringent procedures to open up a margin account. If you are trying to do options, they're going to grill you to make sure you know what you're doing."

So what does this mean for Binance? To be clear, the firm wouldn't be alone in extending margin to its clients. Other exchanges including Kraken, Bitfinex, and most notably futures platform BitMEX offer margin and other forms of leverage to traders as well. Still, Binance caters to a massive retail audience and offering those types of inexperienced traders such capabilities could raise the concerns of regulators. When it comes to regulating cryptocurrencies, to-date, regulators have largely been concerned with consumer protection.

However, Binance has mastered the art of regulatory arbitrage, successfully circumventing regulatory burdens in the past as they've moved from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Data from The Block shows that during the current cryptocurrency bear market, the firm has gained significant market share relative to other players through aggressive expansion and novel offerings such as their newly launched issuance platform, Binance Launchpad.

Indeed, by launching a full-stack product, Binance could further stand out in a crowded industry as the one-stop shop for both institutional and retail traders. Margin functionality is an essential part of this transition.

"Offering more services makes the gap between Binance and the rest of the market even larger," Dorman said.

Still, there are those regulatory risks.

"Any trading activity that is confusing, insufficiently explained or hyper-predatory is bound to leave unhappy customers, who may complain to regulators," a source said.A month has gone by since the last earnings report for Boston Beer (SAM). Shares have lost about 3.1% in that time frame, underperforming the S&P 500.

Will the recent negative trend continue leading up to its next earnings release, or is Boston Beer due for a breakout? Before we dive into how investors and analysts have reacted as of late, let's take a quick look at the most recent earnings report in order to get a better handle on the important catalysts.

Boston Beers Q4 Earnings & Revenues Beat Estimates



Boston Beer reported impressive fourth-quarter 2018 results, wherein earnings and revenues outpaced the Zacks Consensus Estimate. This marked the companys second straight earnings and sales beat.



Q4 Highlights



Boston Beers fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.84 per share surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.77. Including tax benefits, earnings per share came in at $1.86, down from $2.57 mainly due to tax benefits in the year-ago period.



Net revenues advanced 9.2% year over year to $225.2 million and edge past the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $223 million. This outperformance can be primarily attributed to a 6.3% improvement in shipment volume to nearly 958 thousand barrels. Excluding excise taxes, the top line rose 8.5% year over year to $239.2 million.



Additionally, depletions grew 11% in the quarter mainly backed by major innovations, quality and strong brands alongside solid sales execution and support from distributors. Moreover, increases in Twisted Tea, Truly Hard Seltzer and Angry Orchard brands aided depletion growth, which was partly offset by fall in the Samuel Adams brand.



Depletions for the year-to-date period through the six weeks (ended Feb 9, 2019) are anticipated to have grown nearly 12% from the comparable year-ago period.



Costs & Margins



Gross profit improved 8.2% year over year to $116.9 million, while gross margin contracted 50 basis points to 51.9%. Elevated processing costs due to increased production at third-party breweries and higher temporary labor at company-owned breweries as well as escalated packaging costs resulted in gross margin decline. These factors were partly negated by price increases, cost-savings at company-owned breweries and lower excise taxes.



Furthermore, advertising, promotional and selling expenses decreased nearly 14% to $63.1 million, mainly on fall in spending on media advertising and point of sale marketing, somewhat compensated with improved local marketing, higher salaries and benefits expenses along with increased freight to distributors on escalated rates and volumes.



However, general and administrative expenses grew 32.4% to $24.9 million driven by higher salaries and benefits costs as well as stock compensation expenses.



Financials



As of Dec 29, 2018, Boston Beer had cash and cash equivalents of $108.4 million and total stockholders equity of $460.3 million.



During 52 weeks (ended Dec 29) and the period between Dec 30, 2018 and Feb 15, 2019, Boston Beer bought back about 350,000 shares worth roughly $88.3 million. With this, it had nearly $90.3 million remaining under its $931-million share buyback authorization as of Feb 15, 2019.



Outlook



Boston Beer remains impressed with robust depletions and shipment growth. Further, the company is confident about its investment plans for the Angry Orchard brand this year. Moreover, it is on track to launch three more brands namely, 26.2 Brew, Wild Leaf Hard Tea and Tura Alcoholic Kombucha to address health and wellness prospects. Also, it remains committed toward cost savings and efficiency initiatives.



Further, management updated guidance for 2019. It estimates depletions and shipments percentage growth of 8-13% along with national price increases between 1% and 3%. The company expects double-digit growth in revenues and robust increase in operating income as well.



Gross margin is still anticipated to be 51-53%. Investment in advertising, promotional and selling expenses is envisioned to increase $20-$30 million. Notably, this guidance excludes any changes in freight costs for the shipment of products to the company's distributors.



Moreover, adjusted effective tax rate is estimated to be roughly 27% for the year. Also, adjusted earnings per share are envisioned between $8.00 and $9.00. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 earnings stands at $8.22. Furthermore, the company continues to expect capital spending of $100-$120 million.



For the first quarter of 2019, the company expects shipments growth to be considerably higher than depletions.

Story continues

How Have Estimates Been Moving Since Then?

Analysts were quiet during the last two month period as none of them issued any earnings estimate revisions.



Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report



The Boston Beer Company, Inc. (SAM) : Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.Theresa May has been granted a short extension to Article 50 to May 22 (PA)

After Thursdays agreement to delay Brexit, Britains EU withdrawal is taking place to a new timetable. But what happens next?

The Prime Minister has persuaded EU leaders to extend the Article 50 process to June 30. While the EU27 agreed to an extension of Article 50, she was granted a delay of just two weeks from the original deadline day of March 29.

Mrs May now has until April 12 to gain the backing of MPs and pass her withdrawal deal through parliament  meaning she faces a race against time to lock in a new Brexit withdrawal date of May 22.

The UK would then remain in a transition period until December 31, 2020, with the time used implement changes to legislative changes highlighted in her withdrawal deal.

Mrs May must now win the backing of MPs before the May deadline day  or the UK will leave the EU empty handed (PA)

But if the Prime Minister cannot win over MPs the UK will crash out of the EU bloc without a deal. Here are the key points in Mrs Mays new Brexit timeline:

Time is ticking for the Prime Ministers last attempt to pass her agreement through Parliament (PA)

Friday March 22

Theresa May cuts short her attendance at the European Council summit in Brussels to return to the UK and embark on a drive to win over at least 75 MPs to her Brexit plan.

Saturday March 23

Large crowds of opponents of Brexit are expected to line the streets of London for a march titled Put It To The People, demanding a second referendum.

Monday March 25

Parliament debates an amendable Government motion on the Brexit deal, which gives MPs a chance to put their favoured outcomes to a vote.

Mrs May could table secondary legislation which must go through the Commons and Lords by Friday to remove the date of March 29 from Brexit legislation.

Mrs Mays defacto deputy David Lidington has promised to introduce a process for MPs to debate potential Brexit outcomes over the following two weeks.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn discussed alternative Brexit deals in Brussels on Thursdsay. He will continue to push the Prime Minister towards a soft Brexit (PA)

Tuesday March 26

Possible date for the third meaningful vote  known in Westminster as MV3  on Mrs Mays Withdrawal Agreement. Downing Street says that no date has yet been fixed for the vote, which must come by the end of the week.

Wednesday March 27

MPs led by Sir Oliver Letwin hope to seize control of parliamentary time to force votes on Brexit options.

Story continues

Read more:

Brexit petition to revoke Article 50 tops two million signatures to become fastest growing in history

Theresa May urges country to get behind her Brexit deal as she refuses to delay beyond June 30

Jean-Claude Juncker: Ive given up on Brexit

Friday March 29

No longer Brexit withdrawal day. Leave-backing walkers who have taken part in the Brexit Betrayal march from Sunderland are due to arrive in London.

April 11

Final date for the UK to take steps to enable European Parliament elections to take place.

April 12

If Mrs May has failed to secure Commons support for her Withdrawal Agreement, this is the final day on which the UK can set out its next steps to the European Council, if it wishes to be granted a longer extension. If it does not do so, the UK would leave the EU without a deal.

May 22

If the Commons has approved Mrs Mays deal, the UK formally leaves the European Union on this date with a Withdrawal Agreement, entering a transition period during which it will continue to observe EU laws but have no representation in EU institutions.

The new European Parliament will hold its first session in July, where it will confirm a new commission and president to replace Donald Tusk (PA)

May 23-26

European Parliament elections take place across the EU, with or without the UK.

July 1

The first session of the new European Parliament gets underway, whose first task is to confirm a new commission and president.

December 31 2020

If the UK has left with a deal, this will be the end of the transition period. London and Brussels have both said they hope to have an agreement on future trade and security relations completed by this point.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UKOn Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order to protect against a electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that has the potential to disrupt, degrade, and damage technology and critical infrastructure systems.

The order added that man-made or naturally-occurring EMPs can affect large geographic areas, disrupting elements critical to the Nations security and economic prosperity, and could adversely affect global commerce and stability. The Federal Government must foster sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective approaches to improving the Nations resilience to the effects of EMPs.

TJ Gray, a Vietnam veteran and self-sufficienist, recently told us that EMPs are perhaps what worries him most in terms of a catastrophe that society would not be able to handle.

Probably one of the greatest logical fears that I would personally have would be either a solar solar flare, which has happened, Gray said. They said the biggest one we've had was ... about 1850, and they said if that solar flare hit today, it would take out virtually every electrical device in America. And that happened, it already happened once set, there wasn't much electricity around then.

TJ Gray in his bunker. (Source: Yahoo Finance)

Gray, who explained that he served in the Air Force and worked on chemical and biological warfare unit, added that today we've got enemies that could hit us with a high altitude nuclear weapon that would give off an electromagnetic pulse that would fry all the computers in the cars, all of our electronic stuff. Your camera, your toilet. I mean it would knock everything out. It would knock out your water supplies, your fuel supplies. You're grocery stores would be empty within two hours probably.

In the 1970s I had one of the largest Preparedness Companies in the USA

Gray first showed up on our radar from an internet forum devoted to Preppers in Texas. He was known to be the lead moderator on the site, and other users said he had his own secret bunker somewhere in the Lone Star State. So Yahoo Finance reached out.

Story continues

A quote from one of our emails:

In the 1970s I had one of the largest Preparedness Companies in the USA, and the media loved the negative tern [sic], Survivalist. Designed to make you a weird wacko. I demanded the term Self sufficienist, so as not to fall into their pre planned negative spin. I hope you are self aware enough to understand that this is a common sense approach for those at this stage of their life, to take on this endeavor.

After weeks of correspondence via email, he agreed to an interview and would let us film the bunker he built with his family in 1980 after he returned from the war in Vietnam.

TJ Gray in his bunker. (Source: Yahoo Finance)

However there was a catch.

He wouldnt reveal the location. Gray said if we met him in person we could get in his car, and hed drive us to the undisclosed location of his hidden bunker. So, at 1pm on a Wednesday in February we met Gray outside a closed bar in Dallas, TX.

He pulled up in a 1999 Toyota Camry, rolled down the window, and said, You look like a bunch of Yahoos to me.

We hopped in Grays car and headed out of Dallas, traversing access roads for about two dozen miles before reaching a long gravel road.

What really affected my future thinking

The bunker is larger than you might expect, about 20,000 square feet according to Gray. The structure is half above ground, half below ground  reminiscent of those eco-friendly houses that were briefly popular in California during the 70s.

I built it with my first wife and kids, Gray said. I wanted it to be something that was around long after I was gone.

When pressed for a number, he estimates it will stand for at least 200 years. If thats true, the bunker will most likely outlive his children too.

TJ Gray's bunker from the outside. (Source: Yahoo Finance)

All of them are grown now and have families, but some of them have also developed the self-sufficient mindset as theyve gotten older, he said about his kids.

The utilities have long been turned off in his bunker: Theres currently neither running water nor electricity. And no, there is no cellphone service either.

Gray has lived in town for the last few decades. But back in his bunker  and near what can only be described as a shipping box full of 1,000,000-volt stun guns  he began to open up.

The chemical-biological warfare position [in the Air Force] was what really affected my future thinking. Gray said.

He said he visit a handful times a year nowadays.

One of Grays biggest fears is not nuclear bombs but large electromagnetic pulses or solar flares. They say the biggest flare weve had was in 1850  if that solar flare hit today it would take out virtually every electrical device in America, says Gray.

I mean it would knock everything out, he said. It would take out your water supplies, your fuel supplies, your grocery stores would be empty in two hours probably 

A space beneath the floor of the bunker that Gray did not want to discuss (Source: Yahoo Finance)

$5,000 would be a minimum

What if one person wanted to prepare themselves as effectively as possible for at least one year? Gray says,

I would think $5,000 would be a minimum, he said. If you put away food and bought long-term storage food that was nitrogen-packed, the cost is going to be higher but more secure. Ive probably spent $130,000 in the 1980 terms.

Thats around $400,000 in 2019.

Gray worries less day-to-day about his grown children. In fact, hes now debating whether or not to sell the bunker. He said he brought a property appraiser to view it in 2017 and the person estimated that the property was worth about $600,000.

TJ Gray in his bunker. (Source: Yahoo Finance)

In any case, Gray currently lives in his local town and keeps the bunker.

After our bunker tour, we got dropped back off at the bar by Gray and called an Uber back to the hotel.

Its a wonderful new technology, Uber  and as pointed out by Gray earlier in the day  one solar flare away from vanishing.

WATCH MORE: Fitness apps are solving the biggest problem with going to the gym

Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit.SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to charge California water customers up to $10 per month to help clean up contaminated water in low-income and rural areas, but he will face resistance from some legislative Democrats hesitant to impose new taxes.

The Democratic governor says up to 1 million California residents have some type of contaminated or unclean water coming through their taps that can cause health issues. He has called it "a moral disgrace and a medical emergency."

"The fact that in California, in the fifth-largest economy, we have people who cannot drink their water, people who can't even bathe in their water, there's something absolutely wrong," Democratic Assemblywoman Eloise Reyes said Wednesday during a hearing on Newsom's plan.

The fee on water customers would affect households and businesses  an idea that lawmakers killed last session. Newsom wants to combine it with fees on animal farmers, dairies and fertilizer sellers to raise about $140 million per year.

A competing proposal by Democratic Sen. Anna Caballero would use money from the state's multibillion-dollar surplus to create a trust fund to pay for water improvements.

Newsom's plan could be difficult to pass because tax and fee increases require support from two-thirds of lawmakers.

Democrats hold 75 percent of the legislative seats, but some who represent moderate or agricultural districts may balk at the proposal, particularly after voters recalled a Democratic senator last year after he voted to raise the gas tax. Caballero, for example, represents an agricultural district previously held by a Republican.

There was broad agreement at Wednesday's hearing that the lack of access to clean water for so many is a stain on the state, but lawmakers acknowledged a political solution has been elusive.

"I would be foolish, based on the history of this issue, to make promises about where we're going to end up at the end of this cycle," said Assemblyman Richard Bloom, chairman of the budget subcommittee. "But I will commit to doing my damnedest to bring this to a conclusion."

Story continues

Newsom's plan starting next year would charge water customers from 95 cents to $10 a month, based on the size of their water meter, with exceptions for people in poverty.

Animal farmers, dairies and fertilizer producers and handlers also would pay a fee because their operations contribute to nitrate in groundwater.

The money raised would help public water systems, including those that serve schools, treat contaminated water, improve long-term maintenance and test the water quality of domestic wells.

Dozens of residents from the Central Valley testified in support of the fee, saying it would be a small price to pay to ensure access to water that wouldn't make them sick.

"We are the poorest families, and we are willing to pay the tax because we spend a lot more money than the tax buying water bottles for our families," said Lucy Hernandez, a resident of Tulare County in the Central Valley.

Water districts broadly oppose the user tax, instead calling on lawmakers to pass Caballero's plan. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office said most people who would pay the fee would not directly benefit from it.

"We don't think it makes sense to tax a resource that is essential to living," said Cindy Tuck of the Association of California Water Agencies.



By Kim Bo-eun







BNP Paribas, a leading French financial group, has urged corporations and investors here to join a global wave to bolster business sustainability in the financial market, at a forum held in Seoul, Friday.







"The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is estimated to create $12 trillion of business opportunities in the world by 2030, and $5 trillion in the Asia Pacific region," Philippe Noirot, country head of BNP Paribas Korea, said at the lender's "Sustainable Future Forum" held at the Millennium Hilton Seoul.







"Both public and private sectors, both corporations and institutional investors' roles will be critical to deliver on these future expectations."







Around 150 corporate and institutional clients attended the forum, which was held to share information and ideas about a sustainable finance market.







BNP Paribas Korea has played a leading role in sustainable finance here, leading deals involving seven environment, social and governance (ESG) bonds. Sustainable finance seeks to increase the contribution of finance to sustainable and inclusive growth.







In Korea, the bank ranked no. 1 in the international ESG bond league table last year.







BNP Paribas has integrated the UN Sustainable Development Goals into its strategic business plan and put in place tangible goals and performance indicators in areas such as renewable energy, diversity and working with the public sector.







It has doubled its financing goal for renewable energy to $17 billion by 2020 and will be investing $1.1 million in start-ups specializing in the energy transition.







The bank became carbon neutral in terms of CO2 emissions arising from its own operations, by the end of 2017.







BNP Paribas was named the "world's best bank for sustainable finance" by Euromoney and won the "sustainable investment house of the year" by Asia Risk Awards last year.







Since the first BNP Paribas Sustainable Future Forum was held in Singapore in 2016, the bank has been holding the event in South Korea, the U.S. and France.

By Alwyn Scott and Eric M. Johnson

NEW YORK/SEATTLE (Reuters) - Much like tapping the brake pedal in a car to disengage cruise control, a sharp tug on the controls of older models of Boeing Co's 737 used to shut off an automatic trim system that keeps the plane flying level, giving the pilot control.

But Boeing disabled the "yoke jerk" function when it brought out the 737 MAX, the latest version of its top-selling jet - and many pilots were unaware of the change, aviation experts told Reuters.

(Understanding controls on the Boeing 737 MAX: https://tmsnrt.rs/2OjLSAt)

(Boeing 737 MAX deliveries in question interactive: https://tmsnrt.rs/2Hv2btC)

(Ethiopian Airlines crash and black boxes: https://tmsnrt.rs/2ChBW5M)

The difference may help explain why pilots struggled to keep their aircraft climbing after takeoff on two fatal 737 MAX flights less than five months apart that killed 346 people.

Pilots of a Lion Air flight that crashed in October scoured a handbook for answers as the plane repeatedly lurched downward in the first minutes of flight, Reuters reported.

An Ethiopian Airlines flight that went down on March 10 showed "clear similarities" to the Lion Air accident, aviation authorities said after seeing black-box data.

A pair of switches on the center console between the pilots will turn off the automatic trim and a mechanism, new on the 737 MAX, known as the Maneuver Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, that is suspected of playing a role in both disasters.

TRAINING MATERIAL 'NOT CLEAR'

But pilots would have needed to know that MCAS existed, that it had unusual power to force the plane down and that "a hard pull on the yoke" would no longer turn off the automatic trim that uses MCAS, John Hansman, an aeronautics professor at MIT, said in an interview.

"That wasn't clear to the pilots flying the airplane," Hansman said. "The training material was not clear on that."

Story continues

Boeing declined to comment. In the aftermath of the Lion Air crash, Boeing pointed to long-established procedures that pilots could have used to handle a malfunction of the anti-stall system, regardless of whether the pilots knew MCAS existed.

That checklist tells pilots to switch off the two stabilizer trim cutout switches on the central console, and then to adjust the aircraft's stabilizers manually using trim wheels.

An American Airlines flight manual mentions MCAS only in a table of acronyms, according to an October 2018 edition of the 1,400-page book seen by Reuters. Pilots have raised questions about why more detail on MCAS was not included.

The American Airlines manual's two-page description of trim controls describes a "trim circuit," but not how MCAS could be triggered by a faulty sensor reading, which is also suspected in the two crashes.

PREVENTING A DANGEROUS STALL

The MCAS system was designed to counteract the effect on the plane's handling caused by new larger 737 MAX engines, which had to be placed farther forward and higher on the wings because the 50-year-old 737 design sits relatively low to the ground. That move gave the MAX a tendency to nose up into a stall, a dangerous position in which a plane loses lift as too little air flows across its wings.

MCAS, essentially a few lines of computer code in the flight control system, relies on data from two small, blade-shaped sensors near the nose of the aircraft that measure the angle of air flow. Faults in the sensors are not uncommon, and MCAS relies on only one sensor at a time during flight. In the Lion Air crash, investigators found a faulty reading led the plane's computer to believe it was stalled and to push the nose down.

Boeing later issued a bulletin reminding pilots how to respond to such a faulty reading. An optional warning light could have alerted pilots to the faulty sensor.

MAINTENANCE, TRAINING UNDER SCRUTINY

Investigators unraveling the Lion Air crash are looking at maintenance records and whether the pilots had enough training to handle the emergency, among other factors.

The 737 MAX can fly without MCAS, so the feature was not considered "flight-critical" even though it has extraordinary power to steer the plane, said an industry expert with knowledge of the system who spoke on condition of anonymity. MCAS controls the large horizontal wing on the plane's tail known as the stabilizer, while the pilot controls smaller flaps or "elevators" on the stabilizer.

Over several minutes, the stabilizer can shift position enough that the elevator controls can no longer counteract the downward direction of the plane, the source said.

"They gave more control power to the automation than to the pilot," the source said of the MCAS design.

The Lion Air pilots flew for about five minutes by using the elevator to counteract the stabilizer every 15 or 20 seconds, said Hansman, based on readings from the flight data recorder. After that, the pilot tried pulling back hard on the controls.

"That's what suggests that the crew didn't understand the system. They thought they were shutting MCAS off and didn't," Hansman said. "Whereas any time during the entire sequence, they could have reached to the middle console and just shut it off."

(Reporting by Alwyn Scott in New York and Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Nick Zieminski)BEIJING, March 22 (Reuters) - China has lodged stern representations with the United States over sanctions on Chinese firms related to North Korea, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily news briefing on Friday.

The United States imposed sanctions on two Chinese shipping companies it says helped North Korea evade sanctions over its nuclear weapons program, the first such steps since a U.S.-North Korean summit collapsed last month.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)With her late husband under attack by President Donald Trump, Cindy McCain is calling on his supporters to "protect John's legacy" by donating money to a non-profit that supports the issues and programs that he considered priorities.

Cindy McCain opens her fundraising letter by invoking Sen. John McCain's path of service, from the U.S. Navy to a prisoner of war, and finally, to the U.S. Senate.

"Friends, the legacy and record of John McCain are under attack," Cindy McCain wrote. "Through the years, many of you heard John say, 'a fight not joined is a fight not enjoyed.' Today, the fight we are fighting is for John's integrity, his record and his legacy."

She asked supporters to donate to the McCain Institute Foundation, a charitable group that supports the work of the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University, which McCain helped get started in 2012 with unspent money from his 2008 presidential campaign.

Cindy McCain: Senator's wife tweet aggressive message she received about husband and daughter

'You are a child': Bridget McCain blasts Trump on Twitter

Meghan McCain:: Senator's daughter fires back at Trump and his 'pathetic life'

Cindy McCain is chair of the institute, which focuses most of its work on foreign policy, global security and policies that promote human dignity  such as combating human trafficking.

Her email comes after several days of Trump criticizing McCain, the six-term senator from Arizona who died Aug. 25, 2018. Trump's fury continues to burn over McCain's 2017 vote against a GOP effort to undo the Affordable Care Act and his passing along of a dossier detailing unverified information about Trump's alleged ties to Russia.

"... They gave it to John McCain who gave it to the FBI for very evil purposes," Trump said in a Fox Business Channel interview set to air Friday. "Thats not good. And the other thing, he voted against 'repeal and replace.' Now, hes been campaigning for years for repeal and replace. Im not a fan. After all of this time, hes  think of this  repeal and replace."

Story continues

Over the past several days, Cindy McCain and her daughters, Meghan McCain and Bridget McCain, have defended John McCain in social media posts and on TV. Bridget, who has never spoken publicly about Trump's attacks on her dad, reminded the president that her father died just seven months ago.

With her fundraising email, Cindy McCain sought to use the feud to benefit the work her husband stood for. She did not mention Trump by name.

"John never gave up the fight, and neither will we," Cindy McCain wrote in an email to supporters. "Now more than ever, John would not want us to back down from a fight. He never did. The values John fought for weren't just his, they are and remain American ideals. When our leaders threaten those most cherished ideals  it's time for all of us to fight for them again."

Her email followed a fact-sheet that the McCain Institute is distributing that seeks to accurately portray the senator's military service and his policy positions on immigration, campaign finance reform and the Iraq War.

The genesis of Trump's latest broadsides against McCain seem to be newly unsealed court records, which revealed that a McCain associate distributed the explosive dossier to multiple reporters. That associate, David Kramer, was deposed in December 2017 as part of a legal battle waged by a Russian businessman Aleksej Gubarev over BuzzFeeds publication of the dossier.

Kramer is a former State Department official, an expert on Russia, and is an affiliated senior fellow at the McCain Institute.

McCain previously had acknowledged getting a copy of the dossier, which was a compilation of memos written by former British spy Christopher Steele, and delivering it to then-FBI Director James Comey.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Cindy McCain fundraises to 'protect' John McCain's legacy after latest Trump's attacksBy Timothy Gardner

(Reuters) - Climate change played a hand in the deadly floods in the U.S. upper Midwest that have damaged crops and drowned livestock, scientists said on Thursday, while a Trump administration official said more homework was needed before making that link.

The "bomb cyclone" that dumped rain on Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri and killed at least four people now threatens a wider region downstream of swollen rivers and smashed levees.

Manmade greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the oceans and making the air above them more humid, scientists said. When a storm picks up and eventually spits out that moisture, it can be devastating for people caught below.

"The atmosphere is pretty close to fully saturated, it's got all the water it can take," said Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Big storms like the bomb cyclone and Hurricane Harvey, which smacked Houston in 2017 with record downpours, are where the impact of climate change can most clearly be seen, he said, adding that climate change's fingerprints were all over the recent storm.

"I don't think it's a starring role, but it's a strong supporting role," said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally-funded office, of climate change's role in the Midwest floods.

He said the bomb cyclone was carrying vast amounts of moisture from the Pacific up to 1,500 miles (2,400 km) away.

Wehner said the flooding was consistent with projections in a government report issued last November, the National Climate Assessment Volume II, that said climate change would boost costs in industries from farming to fisheries and energy production by increasing the frequency of powerful storms.

That report, mandated by Congress, was compiled by 13 federal departments and agencies, but was called inaccurate by the White House.

Story continues

President Donald Trump has cast doubt on mainstream climate change science and announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris agreement, an international accord to fight climate change, saying it is too costly.

The White House National Security Council has also been considering the formation of a panel to assess science used in military and intelligence reports, which have angered Trump by concluding climate change poses a national security threat.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the link between climate change and the storm.

'FOOL'S ERRAND'

Deke Arndt, chief of climate monitoring at the National Centers for Environmental Information, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that the type of heavy precipitation that immediately led to the upper Midwest floods is generally increasing over time.

But trying to link the role of climate change to an individual event is a "fool's errand" akin to trying to determine the cause of a car crash while the wheels are still spinning, he told reporters on a conference call.

More research needs to be done to find a definitive answer on climate's link to the floods, Arndt said.

NOAA officials said on the call they expect the floods to continue through May and get more dire as snow melts and water continues to flow downstream.

Donald Wuebbles, a professor of atmospheric sciences at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, agreed that climate change likely made the Midwest floods worse.

But he said that investments in levees and other infrastructure to deal with changes have not kept up, making communities more vulnerable.

"People have developed infrastructure for the way the climate was in the past, and haven't really been able to evolve to the climate of now and the future," said Wuebbles.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington; additional reporting by Nichola Groom in Los Angeles; editing by Richard Valdmanis and Rosalba O'Brien)New York (AFP) - Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft will be outfitted with a warning light for malfunctions in the anti-stall system suspected in October's fatal crash in Indonesia, an industry source told AFP Thursday, standardizing a feature previously sold as an optional extra.

The development comes as the manufacturer struggles to cope with the fallout from both the Indonesia crash and another in Ethiopia this month, which have cast a spotlight on the safety certification process and shaken confidence in a plane that is crucial to its future plans.

Known as a "disagree light," this safety feature will become standard and is among the modifications the company will present to US authorities and clients in the coming days, the source said on condition of anonymity.

Neither the Lion Air aircraft which crashed in Indonesia, nor the Ethiopian Airlines jet, had the feature, the source said. More than 300 people perished in the two cases.

American Airlines, which operates 24 737 MAX 8, had bought the option, anticipating potential malfunctions, a source close to the matter told AFP.

So too had Southwest Airlines, the plane's biggest customer, which also bought an additional "Primary Flight Display" option, according to a spokesperson.

Modifications are in the final stages but Boeing wants to be certain this meets the expectations of regulators and customers, the industry source said.

Neither Boeing nor the Federal Aviation Agency offered comment when contacted by AFP.

- 'Should be standard' -

But an industry expert, Scott Hamilton from Leeham Company, said the system should have already been included.

"Instrument disagree warnings should be standard and they are important for pilots to know when instruments disagree with each other," he said.

"Boeing made this an option because it could, and make money by selling it. Simple as that."

The warning light will be activated if sensors transmit incorrect data to the plane's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which is intended to detect and correct stalls by reducing the aircraft's pitch.

Story continues

Preliminary results in the investigation into October's Lion Air crash in Indonesia indicate an "angle of attack" sensor, which feeds data to the MCAS, had malfunctioned.

But despite malfunctioning, the sensor continued transmitting data to the plane's onboard electronics, including the MCAS.

That system takes control of the aircraft, pointing its nose downward, even if the pilot resists, so long as the system is not deactivated, something the Lion Air crew did not know.

- Criminal investigation -

US and Ethiopian authorities have said this month's crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET302 near Addis Ababa bore "similarities" to last year's Lion Air crash.

The Ethiopian Airlines crash led to the global grounding of 737 MAX aircraft.

A criminal investigation is currently underway in the United States, with authorities reportedly scrutinizing how the plane received safety certification from US aviation regulators.

Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, called Wednesday for a hearing of the Commerce Subcommittee on Aviation and Space, for March 27, with three transportation officials, notably the acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Cruz intends to hold a second hearing to question Boeing officials as well as pilots and others in the industry.

The investigations will likely zero in on the FAA's program of outsourcing its certification process to airplane manufacturers themselves.

The trend has accelerated due to budget cuts and the increasing volume of air travel, industry sources told AFP. In the case of the 737 MAX, Boeing expressed a case of urgency because of its medium-haul competition with the Airbus A320Neo that launched shortly before, the sources said.

Although it has suspended deliveries of the 737 MAX, Boeing has decided to continue production.Cryptocurrency mutual funds are not as well-known as traditional investment funds, but that doesnt mean they are any less important.

In traditional terms, a mutual fund is a professionally managed company that pools money from many investors and invests that money into securities such as stocks or bonds. In the case of cryptocurrency mutual funds, it would be exactly the same, but investing in cryptocurrencies instead of stocks.

Cryptocurrency mutual funds make it easy for new investors to navigate this new market. In simple terms, a mutual fund will buy and trade a coin instead of the investor directly purchasing and trading them.

Why use a mutual fund?

From shares to commodities, investment funds have always provided exposure to asset classes. However, they are more of a recent phenomenon in the world of cryptocurrencies. There are several reasons why investors may consider buying crypto through mutual funds.

Expert management

One advantage of a mutual fund is the benefit of having expert management. Having this allows investors to hand control of their portfolio over to a professional. This then enables them to have more free time as they do not need to dedicate their time and effort to researching different currencies and watching the market. Instead, investors can let the experienced fund manager make all the decisions and do all the hard work.

Avoiding confusion

This leads on to the second benefit of mutual funds, which is reducing and even avoiding any crypto confusion. If youre new to cryptocurrencies, it can be hard to understand all the terms and how they work. However, using a crypto fund avoids the hassles of transacting on exchanges and dealing with the risks of hackers and theft.

Increased buying power

Using a mutual cryptocurrency fund offers increased buying power for investors. This is due to the higher capital amount being invested. A crypto fund can reach digital currency funds that are out of financial reach for individual investors. It is also more cost effective to have a mutual fund and easier to maintain a diverse portfolio.

Story continues

What are the risks of investing in mutual funds?

Just like all types of investments, there is a certain level of risk when investing in crypto funds. Some of the factors you as an investor will need to look out for are:

There is a risk of loss of control when handling all of your investments over to someone else, and this becomes a large stumbling block for many.

Volatility is also a large risk. However, this is a risk with cryptocurrencies in general. If youre someone who is looking for a stable investment with low risk, then a mutual crypto fund may not be for you.

Fees are also something to be aware of when investing in a mutual fund. You need to make sure you are fully aware of all the costs before you sign up as this may impact your returns and losses.

First Block Capital

First Block Capital is a Canadian crypto and blockchain investment company. It is the first of its kind to have launched in Canada and achieve mutual fund status. It allows investors to place funds in registered accounts such as a tax-free savings account or a registered retirement savings plan.

The company was launched late last year with the trust being made available on distributed platform NEO Connect. It is available to accredited investors only. Advisors can then trade the fund with the same ease as trading with ETFs.

The trust gives investors exposure to Bitcoin without having to hold or manage actual Bitcoins. It has also been approved by the BCSC and marks the first and only product approved of its kind in Canada.

Final thoughts

Whilst the rise of cryptocurrency funds is good news for digital assets, it is important to remember all of the risks and do your own research before committing. With this in mind, by reading this article, hopefully you now have more of an idea if you are wanting to invest in a cryptocurrency mutual fund.

For guides on cryptocurrencies, exchanges, and blockchain technology, click here. Make sure you take a look at all the latest crypto and blockchain news.

The post What is a cryptocurrency mutual fund? appeared first on Coin Rivet.I do not consent: Brian Harvey shares video of arrest as he asks to take care of his dogs and call his mother

Former E17 frontman Brian Harvey is still in police custody after his arrest for sending malicious communications, his ex Danniella Westbrook has confirmed.

Former Eastenders star Westbrook revealed the news when replying to a tweet from boxer and mental health advocate Frank Bruno.

Bruno had tweeted: Very sad to hear about Brian Harvey this morning, Im unsure of the full story but am aware hes suffering & in a dark place. I hope he gets the help & right support he needs. Too many people are unsupported and left suffering #mentalhealthmatters #peoplematter 

He hasnt @frankbrunoboxer he was let go from hospital and arrested again straight away and is still sat in a cell in east London . The NHS mental health team at that hospital sucks .. its tragic to be honest x We all just want him to be ok x https://t.co/2ZfJ8p026Z  Danniella Westbrook (@westbrookdanni) March 22, 2019

Westbrook then quoted his tweet and commented: He hasnt @ frankbrunoboxer he was let go from hospital and arrested again straight away and is still sat in a cell in east London . The NHS mental health team at that hospital sucks .. its tragic to be honest x We all just want him to be ok x

Read more: East 17s Brian Harvey arrested over alleged malicious communications

Harvey has been arrested over allegations he sent malicious communications.

Scotland Yard said they had been called to a house in Walthamstow, east London after reports that a man was threatening to harm himself.

He did not suffer any injuries.

Read more: East 17s Brian Harvey hospitalised after worrying YouTube livestreams alert police

Police said they had performed a welfare check on a man in his 40s, and then arrested him. Following a physical examination where he was deemed fit, he was taken into police custody.

Story continues

In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said: Following a mental health assessment at hospital, the man has been taken into police custody where he remains.

In a now deleted video, Harvey live-streamed his arrest and showed police arriving at his property, asking him if they could go inside and talk to him.



By Karen Dillon

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (Reuters) - Record floodwaters that submerged vast stretches of Nebraska and Iowa farmland along America's longest river reached a new crest on Friday at the waterfront city of St. Joseph, Missouri, forcing chaotic evacuations of thousands from low-lying areas.

With emergency sirens blaring as the Missouri River rose to the top of the three-story-high levee wall in St. Joseph, about 55 miles (88 km) north of Kansas City, Missouri, sheriff's deputies rushed door-to-door urging residents to flee to higher ground.

About 1,500 residents and some 6,000 employees of nearby businesses were ushered out of the southern end of town, a city official said. Most of the evacuated dwellings consisted of trailer homes interspersed among industrial plants, warehouses and a stockyard along a stretch of the riverfront known as "the Bottoms."

Many residents appeared stunned as they scurried out of their homes with armloads of hurriedly gathered belongings to throw into their vehicles before joining a steady stream of cars, pickup trucks, SUVs and tractor-trailers.

The abrupt evacuation, coming as the river rose about 9 feet above flood stage, appeared to take authorities and residents by surprise.

"We don't have anywhere to go. This is overwhelming," said Linda Roberts, 70, as she and her husband, John, 66, packed their SUV, their dog sitting uneasily in a pet carrier.

With police doing their best to direct gridlocked traffic and with helicopters whirring overhead, dust billowed up from packed roadways for hours, mixed with the odors of livestock and chemicals, as the mass exodus proceeded in slow motion.

CRESTING IN KANSAS CITY

The St. Jo Frontier Casino, about 5 miles to the north, was already surrounded by water, and roadways along the river were submerged, officials said.

The flood crest was expected to reach the Kansas towns of Atchison and Leavenworth, about 35 miles farther downstream, on Saturday, and Kansas City as early as Sunday, officials said.

Story continues

Missouri River flooding was triggered by last week's "bomb cyclone" storm, which has killed at least four people in Nebraska and Iowa, left a man missing below Nebraska's collapsed Spencer Dam, and inflicted an estimated $1.5 billion in damages in Nebraska.

Torrential showers over hundreds of square miles of melting snowpack produced record volumes of runoff that poured into the Missouri just above the Gavins Point Dam where the river divides Nebraska from South Dakota, nearly 400 miles upstream from Kansas City. The dam is operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Water entering the reservoir from that storm marked the most ever measured there since recordkeeping began 120 years ago, said John Remus, chief water manager for the Army Corps' Missouri River basin. The downstream flow also broke flood stage records at three locations along the river.

Nebraska farmers were digging out of flooded fields and coping with cut-off highways on Friday.

"The biggest thing right now is the transportation. We're right between Loup and Cedar River, and transportation is nearly impossible," said Ryan Sonderup, 36, of Fullerton, Nebraska, who has been farming for 18 years.

DISASTER DECLARATIONS

Officials in Atchison, Kansas, were watching flood monitors carefully on Friday.

"For the most part, the city of Atchison is much more fortunate than some of the other communities along the Missouri River," the city's assistant manager, Justin Pregont, told Reuters. Still, floodwaters were threatening a handful of properties and roads along the riverfront in the community of 10,000, he said.

Missouri Governor Mike Parson declared an emergency on Wednesday as high water forced evacuations of several small farm communities in the northwestern corner of his state.

President Donald Trump on Thursday approved a disaster declaration for Nebraska, making federal funding available in nine counties that had born the brunt of last week's floods.

The threat of extensive flooding lingers over the wider region and could grow dire in coming weeks with additional rainfall and melting snow runoff, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said on Thursday.

"This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk," Ed Clark, director of NOAA's National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, said in the agency's spring outlook.

(Reporting by Karen Dillon; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Bill Tarrantand Leslie Adler)The index traversed yet another volatile week but still managed to notch up strong gains. The Federal Reserve hinted that it was unlikely to announce any rate hike this year, following signs of economic weakness. But investors remained concerned over the lack of clarity on the status of trade talks. Sharp movements from shares of Apple AAPL and Boeing BA largely determined the direction of the index.

Last Weeks Performance

The index gained 0.5% last Friday as optimism around a U.S.-China trade deal boosted investor sentiment. Further, Chinas pledge to counter its economic woes also boosted indices. Gains for the 30-stock index were buoyed by a 1.5% surge in the shares of Boeing after reports surfaced that the aerospace giant was planning to initiate a software upgrade for its 737 Max model.

The index increased 1.6% over last week. This was the Dows best weekly gain since Feb 15. Meanwhile, the UK parliament voted against a no-deal Brexit and President Donald Trump said that he was ready to give more time for a trade deal with China.

In other news, Fed chair Jerome Powell remained bullish about the U.S. economy. On Mar 10, in an interview with 60 Minutes, Fed chairman Jerome Powell said that the U.S. economy will continue to grow in 2019 albeit at a slower pace.

However, investors remained anxious about the delay in sealing a U.S.-China trade deal. Moreover, weak earnings data from the United States and China also dented investors confidence.

The Dow This Week

The index increased 0.5% on Monday ahead of the Federal Reserves two-day policy meeting. The Dow registered its fourth consecutive close in the green. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors began scrutinizing the development of Boeings MAX 737 jetliner.

The Dow also posted its best close since Mar 1. Gains for the 30-stock index were buoyed by a 1% rise in the shares of Apple. However, gains for the index were capped by steep losses for Boeing.

Story continues

The index lost 0.1% on Tuesday after reports surfaced that trade talks between the United States and China had hit a rough patch. Following this, the three major benchmarks pared early gains. Shares of Apple declined 0.9% and were the biggest drag on the 30-stock index.

The index lost 0.6% on Wednesday following a decline in bank stocks after the Fed indicated that further rate hikes in 2019 were largely unlikely. Following the central banks statement, yields on various government bonds took a nosedive. Moreover, conflicting news from the trade war front also dampened investors spirits.

The index gained 0.8% on Thursday, enjoying its best daily gain since Feb 15. Stocks were propelled higher after the Fed hinted earlier this week that it was unlikely to raise rates this year. Gains for the index were powered by shares of Apple which gained 3.7% after being upgraded by Needham.

Components Moving the Index

Apple updated its iPad and iMac devices, prior to the much-anticipated Mar 25 event, where the iPhone-maker is set to launch video streaming and news subscription services.

The new ultra-thin iPad Air measures 10.5 inches diagonally and is supported by Apple Pencil. Moreover, iPad Air performance is expected to be 70% better, due to the A12 Bionic chip and Apples Neural Engine.

Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) Apple also launched the new 7.9-inch iPad mini that delivers three times the performance and nine times faster graphics. The device is 25% brighter and has the highest pixel density among any of the iPads, powered by the advanced Retina display with True Tone technology.

The new iMac features Intels INTC 8-core 9th-generation processors and Radeon Pro Vega graphics from Advanced Micro Devices AMD. (Read: Apple Updates Portfolio Prior to Streaming Service Launch)

Exxon Mobil Corporation XOM and TOTAL SA TOT have reached an agreement related to increased gas exports from Papua New Guinea (PNG).

Per the plan, the capacity of Zacks Rank #3 ExxonMobil-operated PNG liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant will be increased to around 16 million tons per annum (mtpa) from its current capacity of 6.9 mtpa. According to analysts, the move will enable the company to compete with Australias biggest LNG projects.

The cost of the expansion is valued at about $13 billion, lower than the initial cost projection of $19.5 billion. The cost per ton is less than 50% from Chevron Corps CVX Gorgon LNG plant in Australia.

The expansion will include the addition of three new LNG trains with a capacity of 2.7 mtpa each on the existing PNG LNG plant site. Two of these trains will be supported by gas from the Elk-Antelope fields, which is managed by TOTAL. (Read: ExxonMobil to Increase Export From PNG LNG Plant)

Boeing recently won a $327 million contract to upgrade the P-8A aircraft. The contract was awarded by the Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Maryland.

Per the terms of the deal, the aerospace giant will develop, integrate and test Increment 3 Block capabilities into the P-8A aircraft for the Navy and the government of Australia. Majority of the work related to the deal will be performed in Puget Sound, WA. The entire task related to the deal is expected to be completed by March 2024.

Boeing will utilize fiscal 2019 research, development, test and evaluation (Navy) funds and Cooperative Engagement Agreement funds for completing the task. The stock has a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Goldman Sachs GS, through its subsidiary Goldman Sachs Asset Management ("GSAM"), has agreed to acquire Standard & Poor's Investment Advisory Services LLC ("SPIAS"), a wholly owned subsidiary of S&P Global SPGI. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2019.

SPIAS manages portfolios using Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and mutual funds, as well as equity portfolios produced employing a rules-based investment process. It is a provider of non-discretionary advisory services to institutional clients on a global level.

As of Dec 31, 2018, it advised on more than $33 billion in assets across multi-asset, equity, and fixed income strategies.

Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) Goldmans ETFs sales are likely to get a boost from this acquisition, which will expand the units multi-asset offerings and rules-based equity strategies. The expansion is in sync with the growing demands of customers. (Read: Goldman Sachs to Acquire S&P's Investment Advisory Services)

Pfizer, Inc. PFE and partner Merck KGaA announced the discontinuation of a late-stage study evaluating a combination of its PD-L1 inhibitor, Bavencio and its new PARP inhibitor, Talzenna (talazoparib) for first-line ovarian cancer. Pfizer has a Zacks Rank #4.

The phase III JAVELIN Ovarian PARP 100 study (n=998) evaluated Bavencio (avelumab) + chemotherapy followed by a maintenance treatment of avelumab + Talzenna versus an active comparator for previously untreated advanced ovarian cancer.

The companies said several factors led to the decision to end the JAVELIN Ovarian PARP 100 study, which did not include safety reasons. First, the degree of benefit observed with avelumab in frontline ovarian cancer in the JAVELIN Ovarian 100 study did not support continuation of the JAVELIN Ovarian PARP 100 study, the companies said or for that matter evaluating an immunotherapy in ovarian cancer itself.

Also, the approval of AstraZeneca/Mercks PARP inhibitor, Lynparza in the first-line maintenance setting for ovarian cancer in December last year has raised competitive pressure in the PARP inhibitor market. (Read: Pfizer/Merck KGaA End Bavencio+Talzenna Ovarian Cancer Study)

JPMorgan Chase JPM has started offering low-fee checkless accounts. The new account, called Secure, does not require any minimum balance and has access to the companys mobile app, branches and ATMs for $4.95 a month. The news was first reported by Reuters. JPMorgan has a Zacks Rank #4.

These accounts are no-overdraft accounts but come with debit cards, digital payments and free check cashing. Moreover, these accounts charge $60 annually, which is significantly below the charge of $200-$500 per annum at check cashing and money order services. (Read: JPMorgan Offers Checkless Accounts for Low-Income Customers)

Performance of the Top 10 Dow Companies

The table given below shows the price movements of the 10 largest components of the Dow, which is a price-weighted index, over the last five days and during the last six months. Over the last five trading days, the Dow has gained 0.6%.

Next Weeks Outlook

Boeings woes are far from over and will continue to trouble the Dow for some time to come. However, the stocks fundamentals are in place and such volatility could be short term at best. Further, investors will be relieved that a rate hike has been more or less been ruled out for the year.

However, concerns over trade negotiations continue to linger and will likely keep investors guessing next week. If crucial economic data, such as upcoming GDP numbers are encouraging, stocks could receive the impetus required for steady gains in the days ahead.

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) : Free Stock Analysis Report



S&P Global Inc. (SPGI) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Pfizer Inc. (PFE) : Free Stock Analysis Report



The Boeing Company (BA) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Apple Inc. (AAPL) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) : Free Stock Analysis Report



The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Chevron Corporation (CVX) : Free Stock Analysis Report



TOTAL S.A. (TOT) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Intel Corporation (INTC) : Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment ResearchBy Richard Lough BRUSSELS (Reuters) - France's wartime hero Charles de Gaulle twice vetoed Britain's attempts to join the European Economic Community in the 1960s, convinced the country was a poor fit for Europe. Five decades later, President Emmanuel Macron seems to have concluded that de Gaulle was right and has emerged as a leading proponent of a swift British exit from today's European Union. At a two-day summit in Brussels that ended on Friday his message to Britain was blunt - ratify our hard-won divorce deal, present a new plan or leave without a deal on April 12. Britain had sought an extension until June 30. An ardent Europhile, Macron is deeply frustrated by how the festering Brexit crisis has distracted the EU from pursuing deeper cooperation and reconnecting with increasingly disillusioned voters. He also fears that a postponed Brexit will mean Britain has to take part in European Parliament elections in late May and that this could boost populist, euroskeptic parties in France and elsewhere. With a seat still at the table, Britain could also hamper progress in EU budget discussions and other issues. "The European project must not remain hostage to Brexit," Macron said on Friday after EU leaders handed British Prime Minister Theresa May a final chance to leave the bloc in an orderly fashion. "FRANCE DIDN'T CHOOSE THIS" Even as Ireland, Germany and others adopted a softer tone during a fraught seven-hour debate on Thursday, Macron was adamant: "We are ready for Brexit. France didnt choose this, the British people did. We can feel sorry about it, but we have had time to prepare for it." Macron's comments, some EU officials said, seemed to reflect a belief that the bloc might be better off without Britain, which has long resisted moves toward closer European integration, for example by staying out of the euro currency and the passport-free Schengen zone. Commenting on Macron's European ambitions, one senior EU diplomat even compared the French centrist leader to Charlemagne, the mediaeval emperor who united much of western and central Europe in a polity that did not include Britain. "The tragedy is, he cannot be Charlemagne," he said, in a reference to the many divisions dogging the modern EU, "but he can be a de Gaulle (by saying 'non' to London)." Macron is also very aware that a no-deal Brexit would badly hurt France and other northern EU states as well as Britain by disrupting business and raising restrictions to trade. But a second EU diplomat said a centuries-old rivalry between France and Britain might be resurfacing. "It doesn't make sense economically but is driven by the illusion of returning to their (French) dominant role in the 1950s," the diplomat added. In the 1950s, France took the lead in setting up, with five other countries, what would eventually become today's 28-nation EU, while Britain declined an invitation to join. Britain finally joined in 1973, after de Gaulle had died. (Reporting by Richard Lough and Jan Strupczewski; Editing by Gareth Jones)SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP)  El Salvador's Supreme Court has approved making an extradition request for ex-President Mauricio Funes, who is living with his family in Nicaragua and is being sought by Salvadoran prosecutors for an array of alleged corruption-related crimes.

The extradition request itself will be made to Nicaragua's representatives in El Salvador at a later date but will likely have little effect since Nicaragua granted Funes and his family asylum in 2016.

Funes called the action "irrelevant" Thursday via Twitter.

Salvadoran prosecutors allege that during Funes' 5-year administration from 2009-2014, some $351 million in government funds were diverted to accounts tied to him and family members.The five largest publicly listed oil and gas majors have spent $1 billion since the 2015 Paris climate deal on public relations or lobbying that is "overwhelmingly in conflict" with the landmark accord's goals, a watchdog said Friday.

Despite outwardly committing to support the Paris agreement and its aim to limit global temperature rises, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and Total spend a total of $200 million a year on efforts "to operate and expand fossil fuel operations," according to InfluenceMap, a pro-transparency monitor.

Two of the companies -- Shell and Chevron -- said they rejected the watchdog's findings.

"The fossil fuel sector has ramped up a quite strategic programme of influencing the climate agenda," InfluenceMap Executive Director Dylan Tanner told AFP.

"It's a continuum of activity from their lobby trade groups attacking the details of regulations, controlling them all the way up, to controlling the way the media thinks about the oil majors and climate."

The report comes as oil and gas giants are under increasing pressure from shareholders to come clean over how greener lawmaking will impact their business models.

As planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions hit their highest levels in human history in 2018, the five companies wracked up total profits of $55 billion.

At the same time, the International Panel on Climate Change -- composed of the world's leading climate scientists -- issued a call for a radical drawdown in fossil fuel use in order to hit the 1.5C (2.7 Fahrenheit) cap laid out in the Paris accord.

InfluenceMap looked at accounts, lobbying registers and communications releases since 2015, and alleged a large gap between the climate commitments companies make and the action they take.

It said all five engaged in lobbying and "narrative capture" through direct contact with lawmakers and officials, spending millions on climate branding, and by employing trade associations to represent the sector's interests in policy discussions.

Story continues

"The research reveals a trend of carefully devised campaigns of positive messaging combined with negative policy lobbying on climate change," it said.

It added that of the more than $110 billion the five had earmarked for capital investment in 2019, just $3.6bn was given over to low-carbon schemes.

The report came one day after the European Parliament was urged to strip ExxonMobil lobbyists of their access, after the US giant failed to attend a hearing where expert witnesses said the oil giant has knowingly misled the public over climate change.

"How can we accept that companies spending hundreds of millions on lobbying against the EU's goal of reaching the Paris agreement are still granted privileged access to decision makers?" said Pascoe Sabido, Corporate Europe Observatorys climate policy researcher, who was not involved in the InfluenceMap report.

The report said Exxon alone spent $56 million a year on "climate branding" and $41 million annually on lobbying efforts.

In 2017 the company's shareholders voted to push it to disclose what tougher emissions policies in the wake of Paris would mean for its portfolio.

- US donations -

With the exception of France's Total, each oil major had largely focused climate lobbying expenditure in the US, the report said.

Chevron alone has spent more than $28 million in US political donations since 1990, according to the report.

AFP contacted all five oil and gas companies mentioned in the report for comment.

"We disagree with the assertion that Chevron has engaged in 'climate-related branding and lobbying' that is 'overwhelmingly in conflict' with the Paris Agreement," said a Chevron spokesman.

"We are taking action to address potential climate change risks to our business and investing in technology and low carbon business opportunities that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

A spokeswoman for Shell -- which the report said spends $49 million annually on climate lobbying -- said it "firmly rejected" the findings.

"We are very clear about our support for the Paris Agreement, and the steps that we are taking to help meet society's needs for more and cleaner energy," they told AFP.

BP, ExxonMobil and Total did not provide comment to AFP.Beverly Fulkerson never thought she would win.

But the former preschool teacher from Osgood, Indiana, is now the owner of a remodeled and fully furnished home in Whitefish, Montana as part of HGTV's 2019 Dream Home Giveaway. Fulkerson has entered the HGTV Dream Home Giveaway contests almost daily since 1998, according to a press release.

Fulkerson beat out 135 million other entries. The prize package, valued at $2.3 million, also includes a 2019 Honda Pilot Elite and $250,000.

Fulkerson found out about the news while meeting with her family in Cincinnati under the guise that her daughter had won an award.

More: HGTV star Christina El Moussa is expecting a baby with new husband Ant Anstead

The reveal, filmed by HGTV, shows designer and host Tiffany Brooks walking out to Fulkerson and introducing herself. Fulkerson looks confused. Brooks takes Fulkerson's hand and shares the happy news. Fulkerson's eyes and mouth widen as she brings her hand to her mouth. Tears start to form, and a confetti cannon shoots off.

HGTV host Tiffany Brooks suprises Beverly Fulkerson of Osgood, IN. that she is the grand-prize winner of the HGTV Dream Home 2019 located in Whitefish, Montana.

"You're kidding!" Fulkerson exclaims. "Oh my goodness!"

"This is the largest prize package in HGTV history," Brooks says.

The 3,560-square foot house was designed by HGTV's Brian Patrick Flynn, described as "mountain modern" located on the edge of Glacier National Park.

The floor-to-ceiling accordion windows offer views of the Rocky Mountains and Whitefish Lake. It features three bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, massive master closet, a hot tub, chef's kitchen, lodge room, multiple guest rooms, fireplace and upper deck.

HGTV host Tiffany Brooks suprises Beverly Fulkerson of Osgood, IN. that she is the grand-prize winner of the HGTV Dream Home 2019 located in Whitefish, Montana.

The press release says that Fulkerson and her husband will be able to see the house for the first time in the coming weeks.

Watch the full surprise ambush on HGTV's "HGTV Dream Home 2019 Giveaway Special," airing 1 p.m. EST on May 24.

More: HGTV buys, plans to restore 'Brady Bunch' house and Lance Bass is cool with it

Follow Kellie Hwang on Twitter: @KellieHwang.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: After entering for 20 years, Indiana woman wins largest HGTV Dream Home Giveaway in historyTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday called on the world to fight back against Islamophobia in the same way it responded to anti-Semitism after the Holocaust, following the deadly attacks on two New Zealand mosques.

The Turkish leader has presented the mosque attacks, by a self-avowed white supremacist who killed 50 people, as part of a wider assault on Islam and has demanded the West do more against anti-Muslim sentiment.

"Just as humanity fought against anti-Semitism after the Holocaust disaster, it should fight against rising Islamophobia in the same determined fashion," Erdogan told an emergency meeting of ministers from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul.

"Right now we are facing Islamophobia and Muslim hatred," he said.

In the March 15 attack in Christchurch, alleged gunman Brenton Tarrant killed 50 men, women and children -- the victims aged between three and 77 years old -- in a massacre that sparked global revulsion.

He livestreamed much of the killing and spread a manifesto on social media claiming it was a strike against Muslim "invaders".

Erdogan has angered New Zealand by showing excerpts of the footage at campaign rallies for local elections this month.

- 'Genuine measures needed' -

Representatives from the OIC, which groups Muslim countries, said in a statement that "genuine, comprehensive and systematic measures" were needed to tackle the "affliction" of Islamophobia.

They called on countries with Muslim communities and minorities to refrain from statements and actions that associate Islam with "terror, extremism and threats."

In his hate-filled "manifesto" before the mass killing, the accused killer suggested neo-Nazi ideology and immigration prompted his action and mentioned other right-wing extremists.

He also referenced Turkey, and Istanbul's landmark Hagia Sophia, that was once a church before becoming a mosque during the Ottoman empire and is now a museum.

Story continues

- No stone unturned -

New Zealand's government on Friday reassured Muslims living in the country they would be "safe and secure" despite the deadly attacks in Christchurch.

"Ensuring Muslim communities in New Zealand feel safe and secure is a particular focus," New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters told the OIC meeting.

Peters said New Zealand authorities would make sure "no stone stays unturned" in the prosecution of the attacker.

"This person will face the full force of New Zealand law and spend the rest of his life in isolation in a New Zealand prison," he said.

Erdogan, campaigning for local elections this month, had angered New Zealand's government by repeatedly showing the video made by the alleged gunman, an Australian who was arrested after the massacre.

The Turkish leader also angered Australia with comments about anti-Muslim Australians being sent back in "coffins" like their grandfathers at Gallipoli, a bloody World War I battle.

More than 8,000 Australians and nearly 3,000 New Zealanders -- part of forces known as ANZAC -- died fighting Turkish forces at Gallipoli, which has a prominent place in Australia's collective memory.

On Friday, the tone was more conciliatory. Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu praised New Zealand authorities and their "sincere solidarity messages".

"We are here to show we are one body against Islamophobic actions across the world," he said.

Peters said he did not feel a need to discuss the Turkish leader's use of the attack video as he understood the president had stopped using it. But he said he had been reassured on Erdogan's Gallipoli comments.

"We are returning home to New Zealand with grateful reassurance that our people who come here to commemorate ANZAC will be as welcome as they always were," he told reporters.

Shortly after Peters spoke, Erdogan again showed footage from the massacre video at a political rally, with translated excepts from the killer's manifesto as well as images of a Turkish opposition leader.

He also called a far-right Australian senator a "terrorist" after his remarks blaming the attack on Muslim immigration to the country.

The Muslim call to prayer rang out across New Zealand on Friday followed by two minutes of silence nationwide to mark a week since the attack. Thousands of people -- including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern -- stood silently in a park opposite the mosque where the killing began.By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU lawmakers will vote next Tuesday on whether to endorse an overhaul of the bloc's two-decade old copyright rules as Google and internet activists stepped up their criticism of a requirement to install copyright filters.

The European Parliament's approval is the final step in a process which the European Commission kicked off two years ago with a proposal to protect Europe's cultural heritage and ensure publishers, broadcasters and artistes get fair compensation from big online companies.

The proposed rules would force Google and other online platforms to sign licensing deals with musicians, performers, authors, news publishers and journalists to use their work online.

A requirement for Google's YouTube, Facebook's Instagram and other sharing platforms to install filters to catch copyright violations known as Article 13 has triggered protests, with an online petition http://www.savetheinternet.info garnering more than 5 million signatures so far.

The article could prompt online platforms to over-block content to limit legal risks, Google senior vice-president for global affairs Kent Walker wrote in a blog post earlier this month.

"Article 13 could impact a large number of platforms, big and small, many of them European. Some may not be able to bear these risks," Walker said.

EU lawmaker Julia Reda from the Pirate Party, who has spearheaded opposition to certain elements of the reforms, urged opponents to take part in Europe-wide protests on Saturday.

Critics say filters are costly and could lead to erroneous blocking. Last month, Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Poland refused to back the reforms.

Artists including film producers Pedro Almodovar and Michel Hazanavicius, Benny Andersson from Abba and author Ali Smith have come out in support of the overhaul.

Europe For Creators, which represents people and organisations from the creative industries, urged lawmakers to back the overhaul without any changes.

"Any amendment would mean breaking the trialogue agreement, leaving no time to reconsider a new text before the European elections, and leaving European citizens, businesses and the creative sector adrift in the Digital Single Market," it said.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Jan Harvey)By Philip Blenkinsop and Robin Emmott BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders called for an end to naivety on Friday in relations with Beijing and said China was a competitor whose markets were not sufficiently open, although they did not spell out specifically what they planned to do. The bloc has sought to avoid taking sides in a multi-billion dollar trade war between Washington and Beijing. But it has become increasingly frustrated by subsidies and state involvement in the Chinese economy, and what it sees as a slow pace of opening up. It plans to raise these issues at an EU-China summit on April 9 after years of granting China almost unfettered access to EU markets. French President Emmanuel Macron, among the most vocal EU critics of Beijing, said that he recognized there was a divergence of views in the bloc but that letting Chinese companies buy up EU infrastructure such as ports had been a "strategic error". "The period of European naivety is over," Macron told a news conference. "The relationship between EU and China must not be first and foremost a trading one, but a geopolitical and strategic relationship," he said. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Europe should consider China as much a competitor as a partner, a view echoed by her Austrian counterpart Sebastian Kurz and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. EU leaders had been intending to discuss China on Thursday at their summit, but their schedule was blown off course by a long day of talks over how to deal with Britain and its looming departure from the bloc. The discussion on China was long, but did not produce a formal conclusion. ITALIAN RIPPLE The goal of presenting a united front on China was complicated by a simultaneous visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Italy, whose euroskeptic government was due to sign an accord drawing the country into China's giant "Belt and Road" infrastructure plan. Other largely eastern EU countries have also signed up to the plan. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said other EU leaders did not appear to have a problem with Rome's Belt and Road plans. Italian officials said Rome would comply with EU rules, such as on fair procurement and the environment. "As far as he explained it, I have nothing to criticize for now, but have already discussed that it is even better if we act together," Merkel said. Brussels, like Washington, is questioning why China is regarded under World Trade Organization rules as a developing country given special treatment, while being on course to become the largest economy in the world. "We need fair rules and naturally also protection for intellectual property and know-how from Europe and proper treatment of our investors in China," Kurz said. In signs the European Union wants to end unfettered access to Chinese business, it is about to introduce a system to screen foreign investments, particularly those affecting vital infrastructure or technology. The European Commission, which coordinates trade policy for the 28 member nations, has also urged leaders to back its plan to limit access to EU public tenders worth 2.4 trillion euros ($2.7 trillion) to companies from countries whose procurement markets were not open. Pro-free trade countries such as the Nordics and the Netherlands say the plan could unfairly restrict commerce and amount to a surcharge for taxpayers by shutting out cheaper providers. The EU leaders also discussed Huawei Technologies Co and whether it should be allowed to provide equipment for future high-speed 5G networks. The U.S. government has said the equipment could be used to spy on the West. "I think we need a base of rules to be respected by anyone who wants to do 5G in Europe," Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said. The European Commission has said it will come up with a recommendation about 5G after the EU summit. (Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop and Robin Emmott; Additional reporting by Robin Emmott, Francesco Guarascio, Andreas Rinke, Thomas Escritt, Anthony Deutsch and ; Editing by Hugh Lawson)BRUSSELS (AP)  European Union leaders on Friday pushed back a decision on the bloc's long-term efforts to fight climate change, with some countries opposing a pledge to end most emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Leaders meeting in Brussels agreed to discuss the issue again at their next gathering in June, ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change in the fall. The delay frustrated environmental campaigners, who argue that the EU should lead global efforts to meet the 2015 Paris accord's most ambitious target of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century.

"European governments are kicking the can down the road on climate change," said Sebastian Mang, a policy adviser with Greenpeace.

Mang cited warnings from scientists that sharp cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are needed in the coming decades to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of warming by the end of the century.

"Young people get this," he said, referring to recent rallies in cities around the world that drew hundreds of thousands of students calling for leaders to tackle climate change.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who two years ago launched the "One Planet Summit" aimed at speeding up the implementation of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, said Friday that the bloc's efforts at fighting climate change "were eminently insufficient."

"Today, we are not giving a clear answer to the commitments we made in Paris in 2015, to the scientific challenges pointed out by the best experts, and to the legitimate impatience that youngsters are expressing in demonstrations every week in our capitals," Macron said. "We will need to wake up, but we have not really seen that yet."

Much of the two-day EU meeting in Brussels was taken up with haggling over the bloc's future relationship with Britain. But on the second day, leaders were able to address a number of other issues, including the EU's ties with China, industrial policy and global warming.

Story continues

Some countries, including France, Spain and the Netherlands, had proposed that leaders agree "an ambitious long-term strategy by 2020 striving for climate neutrality by 2050" in line with the Paris accord's climate warming goal. Climate neutrality would require countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to the level that can be absorbed again and is sometimes referred to as "net zero."

Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic were among those EU nations reluctant to explicitly cite the year 2050 for curbing emissions, according to position papers obtained by The Associated Press.

Still, a lead author of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent report on limiting global warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial times said that while the EU declaration was vague, it addressed important points.

"They sharpened the commitment to 1.5 (Celsius)," said Daniela Jacob, director of the Climate Services Center in Hamburg, Germany.

The European Parliament recently voted in favor of raising the targeted emissions cuts to 55 percent by 2030, but leaders of the bloc's 28 members have so far refrained from following suit.

In Norway, which is not an EU member but cooperates closely with the bloc, local media said at least 36,000 people across the country took part in climate protests Friday. Oslo city council expressed its support for the approximately 10,000 young people who had gathered outside the Norwegian Parliament, Stortinget, as part of the global climate protests by students.

"The school strikes for the climate are a clear signal from the younger generation that we have to act now," city council member Raymond Johansen said. "We are the first generation that can see the climate changes with our eyes and are probably the last generation that has the possibility to do something about it."

___

Jordans reported from Berlin. Jan Olson in Copenhagen contributed.

___

Read more AP climate news here: https://www.apnews.com/ClimateThe EUs Donald Tusk (PA)

European Council president Donald Tusk has reignited his attack on some Brexiteers, claiming there was a lot of space in hell for those who pushed for Britain leaving the EU without a plan.

He was speaking after Brussels agreed, following seven hours of negotiations, to extend Britains leaving date from March 29 until at least April 12.

At a press conference afterwards, Mr Tusk was asked about comments he made last month in which he said he had been wondering what the special place in hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan with how to carry it (out) safely.

He was quizzed about whether this special place should be extended to MPs who vote against the Withdrawal Agreement next week.

According to our pope, hell is still empty, it means there is a lot of space, he replied.

He was speaking alongside European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, who added: Dont go to hell!.

Mrs May at the Brussels Summit (PA)

Following talks, Britain has been offered a plan that moves its departure date.

Under the deal agreed by Prime Minister Theresa May, Britain will now stay a EU member state until 12 April  if her controversial withdrawal agreement is rejected, as predicted, by MPs at the third time of asking next week.

If MPs say no next Tuesday, the government can then seek a longer extension if it can both indicate a way forward and also agree to hold European elections.

Or, the other scenario by the April 12 date is that Britain leaves without a deal.

Pro and anti-Brexit demonstrators outside Parliament (PA)

However, if Mrs May wins the backing of the House of Commons next Tuesday, the UK will remain a EU member state until 22 May to allow necessary withdrawal legislation to be passed.

What the decision today underlines is the importance of the House of Commons passing a Brexit deal next week so that we can bring an end to the uncertainty and leave in a smooth and orderly manner, said Mrs May after the latest summit.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UKWashington (AFP) - Former FBI director James Comey said in a New York Times op-ed published Thursday that he neither knows nor cares what the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation will be -- so long as the probe was conducted properly.

US President Donald Trump abruptly fired Comey in 2017, triggering a series of events that led to Mueller being named to investigate allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and that the Trump campaign colluded in that effort.

"I have no idea whether the special counsel will conclude that Mr. Trump knowingly conspired with the Russians in connection with the 2016 election or that he obstructed justice with the required corrupt intent," Comey wrote.

"I also don't care. I care only that the work be done, well and completely."

The highly-anticipated Mueller report has been said to be imminent for several weeks. One element of the investigation is whether Trump's firing of Comey amounted to obstruction of justice.

Since his dismissal, Comey has emerged as an outspoken critic of Trump -- including publishing a book last year that detailed his soured relationship with the president.

But in the op-ed, he stopped short of joining many Trump critics in calling for his impeachment -- arguing that would deepen political divisions even further in an already fractured US society.

"Even though I believe Mr. Trump is morally unfit to be president of the United States, I'm not rooting for Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that he is a criminal," he wrote, an argument he has also made previously.

"I'm also not rooting for Mr. Mueller to 'clear' the president," he added.

"I am rooting for a demonstration to the world  and maybe most of all to our president and his enablers  that the United States has a justice system that works."By Lesley Wroughton and Roberta Rampton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Inter-American Development Bank on Friday called off next week's meeting of its 48 member countries in China after Beijing refused to allow a representative of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to attend, two sources with knowledge of the decision said. The sources said the decision was made in Washington on Friday at a meeting of the executive board of the IADB, Latin America's largest development lender, after China refused to change its position. The sources said the board would vote within 30 days to reschedule the annual meeting for another date and location. On Thursday, the United States threatened to derail the March 26-31 meeting unless Beijing granted a visa to Guaido's representative, Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann. The meeting, slated to bring together finance and development ministers from the lender's members, was meant to mark the bank's 60th anniversary. Guaido invoked the constitution to assume Venezuela's interim presidency in January, saying the re-election of President Nicolas Maduro was not legitimate. Most Western countries have recognized Guaido as head of state, but Russia and China, among others, back Maduro. One source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters on Thursday that China had proposed that no representative from either Maduro's or Guaido's camps attend the meeting to "depoliticize" the gathering. The White House was not immediately available to comment, and China's embassy in Washington did not respond to an emailed question on the IADB's decision. The Washington-based IADB was the first multilateral lender to replace a Maduro-selected representative with one backed by Guaido. The move would eventually open lines of credit to Venezuela should Maduro step down. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have so far not made a decision on whether to recognize Guaido officially as head of state. Had the annual meeting taken place next week, it would have been the first time the IADB held it in China. The Asian country has become a major player in Latin America and has poured more than $50 billion into Venezuela over the past decade in oil-for-loan agreements. Trump administration officials have called on the IADB since last year to hold the meeting in the Americas, where all of its borrowers are located. With relations between Washington and Beijing marred by an acrimonious trade dispute, U.S. officials have expressed concern in recent months at China's growing influence in Latin America - a region Washington has long regarded as its backyard. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and Roberta Rampton; editing by Leslie Adler and Rosalba O'Brien)By Stefanie Eschenbacher and Dave Graham ACAPULCO, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexico's central bank is working to include ride-hailing firm Uber Technologies Inc in a new mobile payments system at the heart of its financial inclusion strategy, the bank's chief said on Friday, building on overtures to Amazon.com Inc . In an interview, Banco de Mexico Governor Alejandro Diaz de Leon said the bank was seeking to get more companies on board, including San Francisco-based Uber. The central bank has already been in touch with Amazon and its Argentine rival, MercadoLibre, about adopting the system, the bank's head of payments told Reuters. Uber in Mexico did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The payment system, known as CoDi, will allow customers to make payments through smartphones free of charge using QR codes. While the bank is still figuring out how to include companies, the program will be defined as broadly as possible, Diaz de Leon said. "For us it is very important in this phase of pilot tests to give more information about what is CoDi and how it works, and try to identify all the possible uses ... that it can have for different companies and different users," said Diaz de Leon. Mexico's new leftist government under President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is betting on financial technology to help lift people out of poverty in a country where an estimated 42 million people lack bank accounts. Broad acceptance of CoDi would mark an important step in its financial inclusion strategy. Phone-based banking is popular in other emerging markets such as China, India and Kenya, and has been driven by user-friendly, affordable apps from private companies. (Reporting by Stefanie Eschenbacher and Dave Graham; Writing by Julia Love; editing by Marguerita Choy, Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)By Jan Wolfe WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The closure of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election does not mark the end of legal worries for President Donald Trump and people close to him. Other ongoing investigations and litigation are focusing on issues including his businesses and financial dealings, personal conduct, charitable foundation and inaugural committee. These investigations, pursued by prosecutors at the federal and state level, could result in charges beyond those brought in Mueller's investigation or civil liability. The special counsel on Friday submitted his confidential report on the investigation to U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who must decide on how much of it to make public. The U.S. Justice Department has a decades-old policy that a sitting president cannot face criminal charges, so such a case against Trump would be unlikely while he is in office even if there were evidence of wrongdoing. Some legal experts have argued the department is wrong and that a president is not immune from prosecution. Either way, Trump potentially could face charges once he is out of office. Here is an explanation of some criminal investigations and civil lawsuits still underway. MUELLER'S CRIMINAL CASES Mueller charged 34 individuals and three companies. Several of those cases resulted in guilty pleas and one case went to trial, with former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort convicted in August 2018 of eight criminal counts, including bank fraud and tax fraud. Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone was indicted in January of this year and pleaded not guilty, but his trial is still pending. There are other cases involving indicted Russians that have not gone to trial. Other prosecutors within the Justice Department will likely take over criminal cases begun by Mueller, legal experts said. BUSINESS PRACTICES AND FINANCIAL DEALINGS Trump may face significant peril from federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to legal experts. His former personal lawyer Michael Cohen said in Feb. 27 congressional testimony that the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York is examining Trump's business practices and financial dealings. Cohen already has implicated Trump in campaign finance law violations to which he pleaded guilty in August 2018 as part of the Southern District investigation. Cohen admitted he violated campaign finance laws by arranging, at Trump's direction, "hush money" payments shortly before the 2016 presidential election to porn film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy magazine model Karen McDougal to prevent damage to Trump's candidacy. Both women said they had sexual relationships with Trump more than a decade ago. He has denied that. Prosecutors said the payments constituted illegal campaign contributions intended to influence the election. Under federal election laws, such donations cannot exceed $2,700 and need to be publicly disclosed. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, received $130,000. McDougal received $150,000. The New York investigation has involved longtime Trump ally David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid newspaper, who admitted to paying McDougal for the rights to her story and then suppressing it to influence the election, an arrangement called "catch and kill." During his Feb. 27 congressional hearing, Cohen said he was in "constant contact" with federal prosecutors in Manhattan, and said other crimes and wrongdoing by Trump are being investigated by them, though he did not offer details. Cohen said he could not testify about the nature of his last conversation with Trump in early 2018 because it was under investigation by the federal prosecutors in New York. NEW YORK STATE CHARGES AGAINST MANAFORT The Manhattan district attorney's office is exploring criminal charges against Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, over financial crimes related to unpaid state taxes and possibly loans. In cases bought by Mueller, Manafort in 2018 was convicted of tax fraud, bank fraud and failing to disclose foreign bank accounts in Virginia and pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges in Washington. He was sentenced to a combined 7-1/2 years in prison in the two cases. Trump has not ruled out granting Manafort a pardon. The president would not be able to pardon Manafort if he is convicted of charges brought by the Manhattan district attorney because they would not be federal crimes. However, New York has broad double-jeopardy protections that usually prevent the state from prosecuting a person for crimes arising from the same criminal conduct the federal government has prosecuted before. SUMMER ZERVOS DEFAMATION LAWSUIT A defamation lawsuit against Trump by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on his reality television show "The Apprentice," continues in New York state court after a judge in 2018 allowed it to proceed. Zervos sued Trump after he called her and other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct liars and retweeted a post labeling her claims a hoax. Trump has agreed to provide written answers to questions from Zervos by Sept. 28, according to a court filing. Zervos accused Trump of kissing her against her will at his New York office in 2007 and later groping her at a meeting at a hotel in California. More than a dozen women have accused Trump of making unwanted sexual advances against them years before he entered politics. Marc Kasowitz, a lawyer for Trump, had argued that the lawsuit unconstitutionally impedes the president from performing his duties. An appeals court rejected that argument on March 14 by a 3-2 vote. Kasowitz said he would appeal the decision to the state's highest court. Separately, two lawsuits against Trump brought by porn star Stormy Daniels were dismissed. THE TRUMP FOUNDATION A lawsuit filed by the New York state Attorney General's Office has already led the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which was presented as the charitable arm of Trump's business empire, to agree in December 2018 to dissolve, and the litigation continues. The state is seeking an order banning Trump and his three eldest children from leadership roles in any other New York charity. Trump has said the lawsuit was concocted by "sleazy New York Democrats." The state's Democratic attorney general accused the foundation of being "engaged in a "shocking pattern of illegality" and "functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump's business and political interests" in violation of federal law. The attorney general's office alleged Trump and his family members used the charity to pay off his legal debts and purchase personal items. The foundation agreed to dissolve and give away all its remaining assets under court supervision. "EMOLUMENTS" LAWSUIT Trump is accused in a lawsuit filed by the Democratic attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia of violating anti-corruption provisions of the U.S. Constitution through his businesses' dealings with foreign governments. The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on March 19 in the Trump administration's appeal of U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte's 2018 rulings allowing the case to proceed. The Constitution's "emoluments clause" bars U.S. officials from accepting payments from foreign governments and the governments of U.S. states without congressional approval. The lawsuit stated that because Trump did not divest himself of his business empire, spending by foreign governments at the Trump International Hotel in Washington amounts to unconstitutional gifts, or "emoluments," to the president. The three appeals court judges, all appointed by Republican presidents, expressed approval toward Trump's arguments in the case and signaled they might dismiss it, but did not issue a ruling. Some experts have said the case will eventually be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. TRUMP INAUGURAL COMMITTEE Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether the committee that organized Trump's inauguration in January 2017 accepted illegal donations from foreigners, misused funds or brokered special access to the administration for donors. Federal election law prohibits foreigners from donating to U.S. political campaigns or inaugural committees, and corruption laws ban donors from making contributions in exchange for political favors. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said in December 2018 that the president was not involved in his inaugural committee. The $107 million raised by the committee, which was chaired by real estate developer and investor Thomas Barrack, was the largest in history, according to Federal Election Commission filings. IMPEACHMENT Under the Constitution, the president, vice president and "all civil officers of the United States" can be removed from office by Congress through the impeachment process for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." The House of Representatives acts as the accuser - voting on whether to bring specific charges such as obstruction of justice - and the Senate then conducts a trial with House members acting as prosecutors and the individual senators serving as jurors. A simple majority vote is needed in the House to impeach. A two-thirds majority is required in the Senate to convict and remove. (Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Bill Trott and Jonathan Oatis)Brie Larson and Samuel L Jackson share a laugh in Unicorn Store

The first trailer for Unicorn Store, Brie Larsons directorial debut, which also just so happens to star Captain Marvel herself, has been released ahead of its release on Netflix. And it is an utter delight 

Well, doesnt the world just instantly seem a little better?

Written by Samantha McIntyre, Unicorn Store sees Larson play a whimsical painter who is kicked out of art school and has to take a dull office job as well as move back in with her parents. But a chance encounter with a spectacular looking Samuel L Jackson suddenly gives Larson the opportunity to adopt a unicorn, which is obviously her life long dream.

Want to be charmed some more? The tagline for the film is, Everyone needs a little magic. Even if theyre all grown up.

Read more: Captain Marvel surging towards $1 billion

Despite looking colorful, uplifting and being packed to the brim with bona-fide movie stars, which as well as Larson and Jackson includes Joan Cusack and Bradley Whitford, it has actually taken a while for Larsons Unicorn Store to reach audiences. It premiered all the way back at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.

Brie Larson, hopefully smiling at a unicorn

Netflix eventually picked up its rights in January of this year. They then made the rather sensible decision to delay the release of Unicorn Store until after Larson and Jackson had wowed the world with Captain Marvel, which has so far grossed over $820 million worldwide and is already a cultural phenomenon.

Read More: Captain Marvels Gemma Chan says she should be able to play white characters

But while the instant re-teaming of the Marvel stars is obviously an attraction for movie fans, the fact that Unicorn Store pairs Bradley Whitford and Joan Cusack as Larsons parents will be just as appealing for other cinephiles. As The West Wing and Working Girls actors are clearly the best mother and father that the movies can buy.

Unicorn Store will be released on Netflix on April 5.Americans are searching the internet to see what wild crime story from Florida is associated with their birthday. And there are reasons why Florida has become the butt of this viral joke.

There's no simple explanation for the phenomenon, according to accounts from local journalists, a prosecutor and a First Amendment advocate.

Crime stories are relatively easy to report in the state. That means when a Florida man does (allegedly) commit a crime with salacious details, it's not difficult for reporters to find out.

But the culture of the state can't be discounted, other experts will say. You'll hear descriptions of Florida ranging from "diverse" to "crazy"  few would describe it as a boring place.

Here's are three major reasons why Florida has become the home of the "Florida man" meme.

Crime stories are easy to report in Florida

In Florida, there are few barriers that would keep a reporter from writing a "Florida man" story, Assistant State Attorney Ryan Butler told USA TODAY on Thursday.

That's because of the state's general approach toward government records: "Florida starts with the premise that every document ... is a public record," Butler said. Everything is open unless there's an exception that says it isn't, he said.

That's not the case in all states.

So when the Miami New Times attempted to explain the "Florida man" phenomenon in 2015, they pointed to the state's "proud open government laws."

The publication detailed the streamlined process of obtaining information about a suspect from authorities before bluntly saying, "For journalists in many other states, it's not that easy."

'There's a general craziness here'

Everyone explains it differently, but few deny the state that is home to the Conch Republic has a real affinity for the off-beat.

It's prompted Tampa Bay Times reporter Craig Pittman to write a book titled "OH, FLORIDA! How Americas Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country."

Story continues

And when Treasure Coast Newspapers columnist and Florida transplant Gil Smart tried to explain "Florida Man" last year, he did so this way:

There's a general craziness here that's almost palpable. Maybe it's because so many people  like me  aren't from here. They're expats of sorts; they come here to hide, to escape, to forget their past, to reinvent themselves.

A Tuesday opinion column in the University of Florida student newspaper "The Independent Florida Alligator" (a very Florida name) admitted the state has no shortage of odd behavior to report, before explaining the role of the state's Sunshine Laws in crime reporting:

We can try to attribute some of the bizarre stories to the suffocating humidity or a few bad cases of sun poisoning, but in reality, Florida just has some strange people doing some strange things.

The 'Florida man' cycle

A final explanation offered by the President of Florida's First Amendment Foundation: The popularity of the meme has encouraged the spread of new "Florida man" stories.

"It's kinda sad, in one sense, that Florida gets such recognition," Barbara Petersen told USA TODAY on Thursday.

She said one clue that something is amiss: the phrase "Florida woman" hasn't gotten such viral attention.

Petersen believes the attention on the Florida man trope makes such stories more interesting, more likely to be reported. It becomes a cycle.

Florida Man has become a myth, she said. But a myth "based in reality, as most myths are."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Googling Florida man for the viral birthday challenge? Why there are so many wild crime storiesBy Makiko Yamazaki

TOKYO (Reuters) - When Japan Display Inc broke ground on a new factory in central Japan in 2015, the future looked bright for one of the world's top vendors of liquid crystal display (LCD) panels.

The plant would strengthen the company's position as the primary screen supplier for Apple Inc as sales of the iPhone 6 soared. And the U.S. smartphone juggernaut said it would front most of the $1.5 billion in costs, with Japan Display paying it back with a percentage of screen sales, according to two company sources.

Four years later, Apple's shifting fortunes have brought Japan Display to its knees and threaten to end Japan's long run as a leader in display technology.

A slowdown in iPhone sales, combined with a proliferation of new iPhone models - many of which use newer organic light-emitting displays (OLED) - have left Japan Display's new factory running at half capacity.

But it still owes Apple a majority of the construction cost, one of the company sources said. He declined to give the exact amount.

Desperate for capital, Japan Display is looking to an investor group, led by China Silkroad Investment Capital, for a bailout, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. The deal would give the Chinese group a near-majority stake in exchange for an investment of $500 million to $700 million, the sources said.

The group plans to build an OLED panel plant in China using Japan Display's technology, according to those two sources.

The company's woes show how weak iPhone sales and a broader slowdown in the smartphone business are causing pain across the Asian electronics supply chain.

"In retrospect, the new plant was unnecessary," one of the sources with direct knowledge of the bailout talks said. "But the decision wasn't wrong back then. Japan Display started to pick up steam thanks to Apple at the time, and Apple wanted the new plant."

Japan Display wasn't alone in betting on robust growth in iPhone sales, which looked especially attractive because of Apple's now-abandoned strategy of offering few variations in each product cycle.

Story continues

"We were all thrilled to see lifetime sales of a single iPhone model reaching 100 million units," a source at another Apple parts supplier said.

"Supplying components for just one model in massive volume is extremely cost-efficient," he said. "At the same time, we exposed ourselves to huge volatility risks."

Japan Display has built relationships with other smartphone vendors, including Chinese powerhouses Huawei, Xiaomi, and OPPO.

But it is losing their orders too as sales growth softens and the Chinese players switch to domestic panel makers such as BOE Technology and Tianma Microelectronics, which have sharply improved the quality of their screens.

Japan Display supplied almost a third of Huawei's smartphone screens in 2015, but its share had plunged to 4 percent by the third quarter last year as the Chinese company turned to BOE and Tianma, according to researcher IHS Markit.

Sources at Japan Display and other Apple suppliers interviewed for the story declined to be identified as they are not authorised to talk to the media. Suppliers rarely speak about business with Apple on the record because of strict non-disclosure agreements.

NON-APPLE BUSINESSES

Japan Display was formed in 2012 in a government-backed merger of the ailing display units of Sony Corp, Toshiba Corp and Hitachi Ltd.

It boasts strength in so-called thin-film transistor technology (TFT), crucial for making high-resolution images on both LCD and OLED panels. In addition to its Apple business, which accounted for more than half the company's revenue over the last four years, it's a top supplier of dashboard panels for major automotive component companies such as Continental.

But Japan Display has struggled to navigate the fast-changing display business.

Its new LCD factory was still under construction when Apple informed Japan Display in autumn 2015 that it planned to move quickly away from LCD to the newer OLED technology, two former company officials said. It was too costly by then to abandon the half-completed plant, one of them said.

Japan Display's management at the time, led by former Sanyo Electric executive Mitsuru Homma, promised to start mass-production of OLED panels by 2018.

In the meantime, the management shut down older, unprofitable LCD lines to shift resources to OLED, but its main investor, a state-backed fund, blocked plans for drastic job cuts for fear of public backlash, one of the former officials said.

Unexpectedly weak sales of the iPhone 6s created a cash crunch in 2016, and Homma resigned early the next year after the company took a $640 million bailout from the state-backed fund.

The new chief executive, Nobuhiro Higashiiriki, declared a full-on shift to OLED. But the company was already behind rivals, notably Samsung Electronics, and still needed more cash for OLED investment. Disappointing sales of the iPhone XR, the only LCD model in Apple's 2018 lineup, were yet another blow.

"The company now looks exhausted, with many engineers leaving," one former employee said.

Some board members have expressed concerns about technology transfer that may follow the proposed Chinese investment, sources familiar with the talks said. But the government investment fund has run out of patience.

"We don't have any other option," one of the company sources said, adding that the government has been quiet about the bailout plan. "They could argue that display technologies are not something Japan must keep and protect, when Chinese panel makers are ramping up more display plants."

($1 = 111.0200 yen)

(Reporting by Makiko Yamazaki; additional reporting by Yoshiyasu Shida; Editing by Jonathan Weber)Istanbul (AFP) - For Muslims in China's re-education camps, indoctrination starts with early morning patriotic songs and sessions of self-criticism, and often ends with a meal of only pork, according to one exiled former detainee.

UN experts say China holds one million Muslims in camps in the heavily policed Xinjiang region where most of the country's ethnic Uyghur, the largest Muslim minority, live.

Beijing has rejected the accusations and says it runs education training centres as part of its fight against Islamist extremism in the Muslim-majority region.

The sites are a kind of "campus", according to China's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Yucheng speaking last week.

For Omir Bekali, an ethnic Kazakh who says he spent several weeks in a camp in Karamay in Xinjiang before fleeing to Turkey a year ago, it was more about trauma than education.

The camps had only one objective, he said, to strip detainees of their religious belief.

"Every morning, at 0700 to 0730, we had to sing the Chinese national anthem. We sang together, 40 or 50 people, facing the wall," Belaki told AFP, recalling the scene in his modest Istanbul apartment.

"I never really wanted to sing, but because of the daily repetition, it sinks in. Even a year later, the music is still resonating in my head," he said, adjusting the traditional patterned cap worn by Kazakh men.

- Eat pork, speak Chinese -

Born in Xinjiang to ethnic Uyghur and Kazakh parents, Bekali like many minorities from China, left for Kazakhstan in 2006 to look for work. There, he got Kazakh nationality.

His troubles began in March 2017 when he was arrested in Xinjiang after he returned on a business trip for his Kazakh travel agency.

After spending seven months in prison on charges of aiding "terrorism", he was sent to a re-education camp.

Among the obligations for detainees of all ages he says was to eat pork on Fridays, which is a holy day for Muslims. Consumption of pork is prohibited by Islam's religious restrictions.

Story continues

He said the "students" -- as officials called them -- were also forbidden to speak a language other than Chinese and to pray or grow a beard, which authorities interpreted as a sign of religious radicalisation.

Bekali said he was able to leave after nearly two months in the camp, he believes, because of an intervention by Kazakhstan authorities.

The former detainee has been visiting overseas conferences to tell his story as one of the few survivors able to speak out. Most prefer to keep quiet, for fear of endangering their loved ones in China.

Bekali has no news of his parents and his three brothers and sister, who remain in China. After being released, he left Kazakhstan to settle in Turkey with his wife and children. He said he wanted to "put more distance" between himself and China.Menaka (Mali) (AFP) - Storm clouds may lie over Britain's future relations with Europe, but British and French military chiefs say they are determined not to let this affect their cooperation in fighting jihadism in the Sahel.

A hundred British military personnel and three heavy-lift Chinook helicopters are in Mali to help the French military mission in the troubled region -- a presence that France has singled out for high praise.

"Within Europe our closest bilateral relationship is with France," British General Nick Carter told AFP in Gao, in the centre of Mali.

Carter was accompanying his French counterpart, General Francois Lecointre, for a West African tour scheduled to end in Nigeria on Friday.

The countries signed a defence cooperation agreement at Lancaster House in London in 2010 -- a pact that both sides have repeatedly said will not be affected by Brexit.

"Between us we are working hard to see how we can take it to another level," said Carter.

- Heavy lifting -

The Royal Air Force (RAF) Chinooks, deployed in Mali since July 2018, have been hugely appreciated by France's 4,500-man Barkhane mission in the Sahel.

The twin-rotor helicopters can haul nearly four tonnes of supplies and more than 30 troops -- a vital contribution in a region where road access to frontline troops is long, exhausting and dangerous.

They have notched up more than 750 hours of flying time, transported around 4,200 French personnel and 252 tonnes of supplies

France sent troops into Mali in 2013 to help drive back Islamist insurgents who took control of the north of the country.

Operation Barkhane remains in place, helping to support poorly-equipped local military forces, but at a hefty cost that France's European Union allies have only partially eased.

"Here, very concretely, we feel European solidarity," said Lecointre before he and Carter flew to a small advance position held by French troops at Menaka, near the border with Niger.

Story continues

"The challenge now is to carry on nurturing this flame and to make Europeans aware of the scale of our shared responsibility across the Sahel."

- Brexit 'turmoil' -

France is hoping Britain will extend the Chinooks' mission in Mali beyond the scheduled end of their deployment, in December.

But this request is a delicate one, given the toxic political brew of the Brexit saga.

"The British are in complete turmoil. This is not the right time to carry out calm, long-term planning," a French government source said.

Denmark has said it will send two transport helicopters as a substitute for the Chinooks, but this needs to be approved by the Danish parliament.

"The military may have a view of things, and in this perspective, we and General Carter are completely aligned. But I certainly wouldn't want to speak for the British government," Lecointre said prudently.

Carter added: "Our politics is somewhat complex at the moment.

"Bringing all these sorts of decisions at this point in time in our political cycle doesn't necessarily mean you'll get the answer you might want to get.

"We are not going to make a decision very quickly but we'll make it in good time so that we don't let anybody down. I am here to provide unfettered military advice so when I get back to the UK I will provide our politicians with advice on how important this capability is and what it is doing in support of this mission."

Jihadist insurgencies in Mali and Nigeria have spread to neighbouring Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad, sparking fears of a domino effect in the West Africa coastal states of Benin, Togo and Ghana.

Carter pointed to Boko Haram's bloody campaign in northeastern Nigeria as a source of concern.

"The Nigerians undoubtedly need some sort of support," he said.

"There is a longer term, a more chronic problem, which is about building the capacity of the Nigerian institutions, in particular their security institutions, to be able to deal with over a long period of time.

"But of course, as we all know, much of it is about how you defeat the sorts of ideas spread by organizations such as Boko Haram (and) ISIS West Africa."General Dynamics Corp.s GD business subsidiary, National Steel and Shipbuilding Co. (NASSCO), recently secured a $465.2-million contract related to CVN aircraft carrier. The deal was awarded by the Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, DC.



Details of the Deal



Per the deal, General Dynamics will provide repair, maintenance and modernization services, including non-nuclear boundary control efforts, to support the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility.



Work related to the deal will be performed in Bremerton, WA and is expected to get completed by March 2024. The company will utilize fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance (Navy) funds to finish the task.



A Brief Note on General Dynamics NASSCO



General Dynamics NASSCO has been designing and building ships since 1960. It focuses on designing and building supplementary and support ships for the U.S. Navy, and oil tankers and dry cargo carriers for the commercial markets. NASSCO also specializes in conducting full-service maintenance and surface-ship repair operations for the Navys global force.



Our View



Earlier this year, the company has already secured two substantial contracts. One of the contracts was related to the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) super carrier ship, and the other to provide modernization and repair works for the USS Arleigh Burke DDG 51 ship. In 2018, the company delivered four of its Expeditionary Sea Base (ESB) auxiliary support ships and expects to deliver the fifth ship in 2019. Such consistent contract flow reflects solid demand growth for NASSCO served ships, thereby showcasing the subsidiarys potential in generating revenues for General Dynamics.



Notably, the fiscal 2019 defense budget provisioned for shipbuilding investment worth $18.4 billion. With General Dynamics being a prominent shipbuilder in the United States, such budgetary developments should benefit its NASSCO unit.



Interestingly, per Technavio, the global naval shipbuilding market is expected to see a CAGR of 2% from 2019 to 2023. This, in turn, should increase demand for technical services required to upgrade different variants of ships, including aircraft carriers. NASSCO will most likely benefit from such favorable projections, going forward.



Price Performance



Shares of General Dynamics have plunged about 22.2% in a year compared with the industrys growth of 1.8%.

Story continues







Zacks Rank & Key Picks



General Dynamics 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 risen 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 5.9% to $2.14 in the past 90 days.



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To read this article on Zacks.com click here.By David Shepardson

(Reuters) - General Motors Co confirmed on Friday it will invest $300 million in a suburban Detroit assembly plant, adding 400 jobs to build a new Chevrolet electric vehicle.

The largest U.S. automaker has come under heavy criticism from President Donald Trump in recent days over its decision to end production at its Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant earlier this month.

GM officials said the announcement was planned well before Trump's series of angry GM tweets that started on Saturday. Trump called GM CEO Mary Barra on Sunday to urge her to reverse the decision to end production at the Ohio plant, which is in a crucial state for the 2020 presidential election. He again ripped the company in a speech in Ohio on Wednesday.

Barra, speaking to reporters after an event at the plant in Orion Township, outside Detroit, with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announcing the investment, said GM is focused on ensuring that all of the hourly workers at Lordstown find new jobs at other plants. But she has shown no indication it will reverse course and reopen the Lordstown plant.

She declined to say if she thought there was more tension between GM and Trump.

"We want to create jobs, good paying jobs," Barra said, saying her talks with Trump had a "business focus." She said GM needs to remain "strong" in order to continue to add jobs.

Reuters reported on Thursday on GM's investment plans for the plant.

Last year, GM said it would end production at five North American assembly plants and eliminate about 15,000 jobs, prompting outrage and a two-day visit by Barra to Capitol Hill to answer questions about the job cuts.

GM did not disclose the name or timing of the new GM EV but said it would be built on the same platform as the existing Chevrolet Bolt EV. GM did not disclose the name of the new EV or the timing of production.

The automaker said in total it is investing $1.8 billion in its U.S. manufacturing operations this year, creating 700 new jobs and supporting 28,000 jobs across six states.

Story continues

Additional product information and timing for the new Chevrolet EV will be released closer to production.

Barra said after event that GM "supports" the proposed United States, Mexico and Canada Agreement "and we are making adjustments because we will comply" with new rules requiring additional North American content.

Reuters reported Thursday that GM was initially considering building the new EV in China.

In February, GM disclosed that it had hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm run by Brian Ballard, a fundraiser for Trump's presidential campaign. The company has been eager to try to smooth over relations with the White House after Trump first began harshly attacking GM last year.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Additional reporting by Rebecca Cook in Orion Township, Michigan Editing by Dan Grebler)General Motors plans to spend $300 million to build a new electric car at its Orion Assembly Plant north of Detroit, the company said Friday.

It plans to add about 400 workers at the factory, which builds the electric Chevrolet Bolt, autonomous vehicles for GM's Cruise unit, and the Chevy Sonic compact car.

GM CEO Mary Barra made the announcement at a meeting involving other GM leaders, UAW officials and a range of elected officials, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, gathered at the 4.3 million-square foot plant in Lake Orion, which employs about 1,166 people.

"GM is absolutely committed to investing in and growing good-paying manufacturing jobs in the United States," Barra said. She said the car would be a Chevrolet and the company would provide further details closer to the vehicle's production.

Barra said provisions of the proposed new trade agreement among the United States, Mexico and Canada helped persuade GM that the vehicle should be built in the United States.

Spring house hunting: Homebuyers to get springtime boost from lower-than-expected mortgage rates

GM's investments and cuts

The news comes as GM faces harsh criticism over its plan to idle five plants in North America this year and early next year, affecting some 6,200 jobs. GM has said the cuts are part of its restructuring and will save it $2.5 billion this year. The plants mostly build sedans, which have seen sales decline as consumers shift to buying SUVs and pickups.

Two of those plants are in Michigan: Detroit Hamtramck, which is expected to become idle in January 2020, and Warren Transmission, slated to go idle this year.

But the one in the media spotlight has been GM's Lordstown Assembly in Lordstown, Ohio.

President Donald Trump unleashed a series of tweets critical of GM for idling the plant, and urging GM reopen the facility, which had built the Chevrolet Cruze until March 6.

Barra launched a vigorous defense of GM's investments in its U.S. plants.

Story continues

Last month, GM said it would put $20 million into its propulsion plant in Romulus, Michigan, to increase the plants capacity for future 10-speed transmission production. Romulus currently builds V6 engines and 10-speed transmissions used in several GM cars, trucks and crossovers.

A day earlier, it said it would invest $36 million in its plant in Lansing Delta Township in Michigan, where it builds the Buick Enclave and Chevrolet Traverse SUVs.

Barra said GM still has 4,000 employees at four plants in Ohio, and noted that Ohio is second only to Michigan in GM presence. She promised announcements soon about more workers shifting to Ohio operations.

Workers and politicians have been angered that GM will build its revived Chevy Blazer SUV in Mexico and is not assigning new vehicles to U.S. plants. On Tuesday this week, GM also said it plans to invest $2.7 billion in two of its plants in Brazil over the next five years.

The UAW's GM vice president, Terry Dittes, followed Barra to the podium at the plant, underscoring that the union disagrees with the U.S. plant cuts and "expects" more U.S. investment and a solution for displaced workers, while still hailing Friday's good news.

The union starts talks this summer on a new contract with Detroit automakers, with

Building robo-cars

GM builds the electric Bolt, used for GM's autonmous cars, at Orion. GM sold 18,019 Bolts in 2018, down 22.7 percent from 2017. Still, the cars are important to GM, which has said it envisions an "all electric" future one day.

It is also making a big play in self-driving cars, having vowed to bring the robot cars to a major metro market in the form of ride-hailing sometime this year.

GM bought GM Cruise, its self-driving car unit, in 2016. It was a 40-person start-up in San Francisco. Today, GM Cruise employs more than 1,000 people and is valued at more than 10 times the $1 billion GM paid for it. Employment at Cruise is expected to double in the next year.

GM's investment in robot cars is massive. In June 2018, SoftBank, a large technology investment company with stakes in such companies as Uber, aid it was investing $2.25 billion in GM Cruise and GM will invest $1.1 billion in it.

Then, in October 2018, Honda said it would invest 2.75 billion in Cruise over 12 years to fund and develop a "purpose-built" self-driving car for Cruise that can serve a "wide variety of use cases and be manufactured at high volume for global deployment," GM said.

Federal regulators this month asked for public comment on GM's proposal to put fully autonomous cars  with no steering wheels or pedals  on public streets.

GM wants "exemptions from U.S. vehicle safety rules largely written decades ago that assume human drivers would always be in control of a vehicle," Reuters reported. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration will take public comment for 60 days "on a detailed list of questions about the issues surrounding deploying vehicles without human controls."

Contact Jamie L. LaReau at 313-222-2149 or jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: GM plans to make new electric car, spend $300M, hire 400 workers in Lake Orion



Good Morning Britain host Ben Shephard was forced to apologise on Wednesday 22 March when Susannah Constantine said f**k live on air.

The former What Not To Wear presenter was invited on to the show to discuss the benefits of sleeping in a separate bed to your partner. Fellow guest Michelle Heaton was of the opinion that those moments of intimacy before getting some shut-eye are important to share with your significant other.

Read more: Jade Goodys mum urges women to go to cervical screenings in chaotic GMB interview

Arguing her case, Constantine made reference to her own marriage with husband Sten Bertelsen, saying: We will go to bed together and will have that conversation and Ill go off if I am tired and need a good nights sleep.

A good nights sleep is the bedrock for everything  The anxiety goes down, the household is happier, Im a better wife, Im a better mother. I can write better.

GMB host forced to apologise as Susannah Constantine drops F-bomb live on air

But also we have been married for nearly 24 years and I think its very important, or it was for us, for our children to see us going to bed and sleeping together and having the united family unit, she continued. Now they are older and they understand, I am like, F**k sake excuse my language. It just popped out.

Apologies to anyone who heard Susannah express herself. Shephard quickly interjected before joking, Its the wrong time of the morning to be doing that. He kept the lightheartedness going by then asking Constantine whether she managed to rest well last night.

Read more: Good Morning Britain faces backlash for airing homophobic LGBT education debate

While not completely opposed to separate sleeping arrangements under the right circumstances, Heaton said that she felt a bit of wriggling shouldnt get in the way of the commitment married couples make to one another.

She also opened up about how her husband sleeping next to her seems to have a calming influence on her and helps her with anxiety.The New York Times informs us that the helicopter parent  the hovering, nervous ball of anxiety  is out. Constant surveillance of children is not enough. Now we have snowplow parents, who rush ahead of their children and clear out all obstacles in their paths. Its an article of the How We Live Now genre that exists so that New York Times readers can deplore each other and themselves. And I certainly enjoyed hating its subjects, and fearing how much I might one day resemble them.

The article touched on the now infamous college-admissions scandal, in which parents were caught Photoshopping their useless offsprings faces onto stock photos of student athletes. Others were found to be paying off admissions consultants and proctors to doctor school records or feed their kids answers to test questions.

But the practice extended into the earliest days of childhood, in which parents intervened constantly. And this left their children crippled. One psychologist said she regularly handles students from elite colleges who must come home because they dont have the minimal kinds of adult skills that one needs to be in college. Skills like figuring out how to feed themselves food they like at their own colleges cafeteria.

There is an alternative to the arms-race-style parenting. The free-range childhood movement has been championing the kind of parenting I experienced, and the type of childhood I experienced, one where I was free to organize my own play with other kids in the neighborhood. A childhood where I was free to get myself home from school on public transportation. It was spearheaded by Lenore Skenazy. She also does great work promoting efforts to make sure that states dont criminalize or regulate a free-range childhood out of existence. The concept has also been championed by author and researcher Jonathan Haidt, who has attributed the sense of fragility and anxiety among young college students to their lack of normal unsupervised socialization at crucial childhood ages.

Story continues

Ive had doubts about free-range childhood, at least where I live, though. And they are only intensifying as my kids get closer to the age when they should be put outside. Skenazy has encouraged me to overcome the doubts and send my kids on little missions around their neighborhood. That will come, but will anyone else allow them to be out there?

My childhood neighborhood had silent guardians, the old Italian-American ladies who watched the streets and intervened in the play of children when property or limbs were in danger of being broken. There were also the stay-at-home moms who felt a duty to our kids, the kids of the neighborhood, whether they really knew the parents or didnt. And the kids themselves wanted to be outside, and called each other to come out. Sometimes shouting up to bedrooms, other times calling on the phone, or knocking on the door to ask if I was home and could come out to play. There was a social expectation that kids would be outside and the world had to accommodate them.

That social expectation does not exist where I live. As Samuel Hammond, a researcher for the Niskanen Center, put it to me, theres been an enclosure of the parental commons in our lifetime. For those who dont remember their AP European History basics: The commons were lands that, well, commoners could use. They could find streams to fish in, or pastures to graze their cattle in, or to cut turf out of its bogs for fuel. The enclosure of the commons entailed kicking the commoners off the land and bringing it under greater commercial control by the owner or lord of the land, usually with massive gains of income for the lord, and the loss of a safety net for many commoners.

Something akin to this is happening to parenthood. The helicopter and snowplow parents with means have withdrawn their children from the street, and often their homes from the parental commons, the system of expectations and resources that were held in common by members of a neighborhood that allows it to support its own kids socialization without intense supervision and micromanagement.

By the time kids are old enough to go out on their own, parents have usually had a number of unforgiving interactions in which adults made them and their children feel unwelcome in any public space. So they fear Child Protective Services or other agencies getting called on them for allowing their kids what used to be a normal level of independence. I know Ive already seen other parents react with concern and horror at seeing my own kids alone for even a few seconds before they notice that Im just 20 yards away myself. And the kids themselves have lost some of the motivation. Screen culture allows teens and tweens some measure of private socialization even as they remain under the watchful eyes of Big Father, Big Mother, or Big Sitter. The result is great for child minders, after-school clubs, day care, and the people who profit from teen social networks and YouTube. Its great for commerce; Im not sure its great for parents or children.

Maybe I can improve this slightly by sending my own kids out on their own and inviting others out. I know it is not universal. There are poorer neighborhoods that still function as neighborhoods used to. Ive seen neighborhoods function the old way in Europe. But, in our New York suburbs and those nearby, the absence of children playing is now universal. Just about every day that I get in the car I drive past a sign that says, Caution: Children at Play. In a decade, Ive never seen a child at play on that street.

More from National ReviewWhat's the difference between good afternoon and good night? In South Korea's cutthroat politics, it can be a furious political row and the foreign minister apologising to parliament.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in visited Malaysia earlier this month and greeted his audience at an afternoon press conference with Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad using the phrase "selamat sore".

The line is more commonly used in Indonesia -- although the neighbours' languages are so similar they are generally mutually intelligible.

At the time, Mahathir smiled and appeared amused, while senior Malaysian senior ministers laughed, but Moon's South Korean critics slammed him for not using the correct Malaysian greeting "selamat petang".

And his use of that phrase, meaning "good afternoon", at a dinner beginning at 8pm -- rather than "selamat malam", or good night -- triggered another round of fury in Seoul.

Opposition lawmakers and newspapers lined up to excoriate Moon, with headlines calling it a "diplomatic disaster".

The Korea Times assailed the "incompetence" of the presidential protocol team on Friday.

"The absence of a protest from the host country does not excuse the unbelievable carelessness," it added, saying it was one of a series of incidents demonstrating a "serious lack of professionalism and ethics" in the Blue House.

South Korea's foreign minister Kang Kyung-wha has apologised to parliament, admitting that her ministry had made a "painful mistake".

"I apologise for causing concerns," she told the national assembly on Wednesday.

But an aide for the Malaysian prime minister's office told AFP that "selamat sore" was usable in Malaysian too.

"We were happy and amused when the President said it," he told AFP. "Personally, it is a non-issue."Investors seeking strong returns may allocate to assets in stocks with strong liquidity. Liquidity is an important yardstick that indicates a companys capability to meet debt obligations by converting assets into cash.

A company with a favorable liquidity position has the potential to provide higher returns as liquidity drives growth. However, one should exercise prudence before investing in such stocks. While a high liquidity level may imply that the company is meeting its obligations at a faster rate than its peers, it may also indicate that the company is failing to use its assets efficiently.

Hence, one may consider the efficiency level of a company in addition to its liquidity to identify prospective winners.

Measures to Identify Liquid Stocks

Current Ratio: It measures current assets relative to current liabilities. This ratio is used for measuring a companys potential to meet both short- and long-term debt obligations. Thus, a current ratio  also known as working capital ratio  below 1 indicates that the company has more liabilities than assets. However, a high current ratio does not always indicate that the company is in good financial shape. It may also mean that the company has failed to utilize its assets significantly. Hence, a range of 1 to 3 is considered ideal.

Quick Ratio: Unlike current ratio, quick ratio  also called acid-test ratio" or "quick assets ratio"  indicates a companys ability to pay short-term obligations. It considers inventory excluding current assets relative to current liabilities. Like the current ratio, a quick ratio of greater than 1 is desirable.

Cash Ratio: This is the most conservative ratio among the three, as it takes into account only cash and cash equivalents, and invested funds relative to current liabilities. It measures a companys ability to meet its current debt obligations using the most liquid of assets. Though a cash ratio of more than 1 may point to sound financials, a higher number may indicate inefficiency in cash utilization.

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So, a ratio greater than 1 is desirable at all times but may not always appropriately represent a companys financial condition.

Screening Parameters

In order to pick the best of the lot, we have added asset utilization, which is a widely used measure of a companys efficiency, as one of the screening criteria. Asset utilization is the ratio of total sales over the past 12 months to the last four-quarter average of total assets. Though this ratio varies across industries, companies with a ratio higher than their respective industries can be considered efficient.

In order to ensure that these liquid and efficient stocks have solid growth potential, we have added our proprietary Growth Style Score to the screen.

Current Ratio, Quick Ratio and Cash Ratio between 1 and 3 (While liquidity ratios of greater than 1 are desirable, significantly high ratios may indicate inefficiency.)

Asset utilization greater than industry average (Higher asset utilization than the industry average indicates a companys efficiency.)

Zacks Rank equal to #1 (Only Strong Buy-rated stocks can get through). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Growth Score less than or equal to B (Back-tested results show that stocks with a Growth Score of A or B when combined with a Zacks Rank #1 or 2 handily beat other stocks.)

These criteria have narrowed down the universe of more than 7,700 stocks to only seven.

Here are four of the seven stocks that qualified the screen:

Tinton Falls, NJ-based Commvault Systems, Inc. CVLT is a provider of Unified Data Management solutions for data protection, universal availability and simplified management of data in complex storage networks. The company has an attractive Growth Score of A and came up with average four-quarter earnings surprise of 15.3%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2019 earnings of $1.83 has been revised nearly 2% upward in the last 30 days.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, Fortinet Inc. FTNT is a provider of network security appliances and Unified Threat Management (UTM) network security solutions to enterprises, service providers and government entities worldwide. The company has a Growth Score of A and delivered average four-quarter positive surprise of 18.77%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 earnings has been stable at $2.07 in the last 30 days.

Headquartered in Baltimore, MD, Medifast MED is one of the major providers of healthy living products. The company has a Growth Score of A and came up with average four-quarter beat of 10.45%.The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 earnings per share has moved 11.5% north to $6.52 over the last 30 days.

New York City, NY-based Evercore Inc. EVR operates as an investment banking company, providing advisory services to multinational corporations on mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, restructuring and other corporate transactions. The company has a Growth Score of A and pulled off average four-quarter positive surprise of 36.76%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 earnings has been steady at $8.14 over the last 30 days.

Get the rest of the stocks on the list and start putting this and other ideas to the test. It can all be done with the Research Wizard stock picking and back testing software.

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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Zacks Investment ResearchIndonesia's national carrier Garuda has told Boeing it will cancel a multi-billion-dollar order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 jets after two fatal crashes involving the plane, in what is thought to be the first formal cancellation for the model.

"We have sent a letter to Boeing requesting that the order be cancelled," Garuda spokesman Ikhsan Rosan said.

"The reason is that Garuda passengers in Indonesia have lost trust and no longer have the confidence" in the plane, he said, adding that the airline was awaiting a response from Boeing.

The spokesman told AFP that Boeing officials will visit Indonesia next week to discuss Garuda's plans to call off the order.

Garuda had already received one of the planes, he said, part of a 50-aircraft order worth $4.9 billion at list prices when it was announced in 2014.

Garuda is also talking to Boeing about whether or not to return the plane it has received, the spokesman told AFP.

The carrier had so far paid Boeing about $26 million, while the company's head told Indonesian media outlet Detik that it would consider switching to a new version of the single-aisle jet.

"In principle, it's not that we want to replace Boeing, but maybe we will replace (these planes) with another model," Garuda Indonesia director I Gusti Ngurah Askhara Danadiputra told Detik.

- 'Probably not the last' -

Shukor Yusof, head of Malaysia-based aviation consultancy Endau Analytics, said Garuda's announcement appeared to mark the first formal plans by a carrier to cancel an order for the 737 MAX 8.

It "will probably not be the last. There is a risk that Garuda's rival Lion Air, which also has many 737 MAX 8 orders, might make the same decision," he said.

"That is a risk. This has been made public by the Lion Air CEO. He stated publicly that he is considering" a cancellation.

He added that it was difficult to predict whether more major carriers would follow suit.

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"There are many unanswered questions and each airline has specific needs," Yusof said. "Each airline needs to deliberate how they want to strategise their fleet management."

This month, Lion Air said it was postponing delivery of four of the jets after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board.

Budget carrier Lion -- Southeast Asia's biggest airline by fleet size and a major Boeing customer -- said the planes had been on order for delivery this year, but the company was re-evaluating the situation.

Lion Air operates 10 Max 8 jets, part of a then-record $22 billion order from Boeing made in 2011.

The airlines are the only two that use the Max 8 in Indonesia.

The Ethiopian tragedy came after a Lion Air jet of the same model crashed in Indonesia in October, killing all 189 people on board.

Both planes reportedly experienced erratic steep climbs and descents as well as fluctuating airspeeds before crashing shortly after takeoff.

Investigators have honed in on an automated anti-stalling system introduced on the plane that is designed to point the nose of the plane downward if it is in danger of stalling.

Boeing's state-of-the-art model will be outfitted with a warning light for malfunctions in the anti-stall system, an industry source told AFP Thursday, standardising a feature previously sold as an optional extra.

The development comes as the US manufacturer struggles to cope with the fallout from the two crashes, which have cast a spotlight on the safety certification process and shaken confidence in a plane that is crucial to its future plans.Thank you for reading!

Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading.Indonesia's national carrier Garuda has told Boeing it will cancel a multi-billion-dollar order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 jets after the model was involved in two fatal crashes.

The move could spark more cancellations from other major carriers, an aviation analyst said, as Boeing and US federal regulators get set to face their first public grilling by Congress since the deadly incidents.

"We have sent a letter to Boeing requesting that the order be cancelled," Garuda spokesman Ikhsan Rosan said.

"The reason is that Garuda passengers in Indonesia have lost trust and no longer have the confidence" in the plane, he said, adding that the airline was awaiting a response from Boeing.

Boeing officials will visit Indonesia next week to discuss Garuda's plans to call off the order, he told AFP.

Garuda had already received one of the planes, Rosan said, part of a 50-aircraft order worth $4.9 billion at list prices when it was announced in 2014.

Garuda is also talking to Boeing about whether or not to return the plane it has in its fleet, the spokesman said.

The Indonesian carrier had so far paid Boeing about $26 million, while the company's head told local media outlet Detik that it would consider switching to a new version of the single-aisle jet.

"In principle, it's not that we want to replace Boeing, but maybe we will replace (these planes) with another model," Garuda Indonesia director I Gusti Ngurah Askhara Danadiputra told Detik.

A Boeing spokeswoman in Singapore told AFP on Friday: "We do not comment on customer discussions."

- 'Probably not the last' -

Shukor Yusof, head of Malaysia-based aviation consultancy Endau Analytics, said Garuda's announcement appeared to mark the first formal plans by a carrier to cancel an order for the 737 MAX 8.

It "will probably not be the last. There is a risk that Garuda's rival Lion Air, which also has many 737 MAX 8 orders, might make the same decision," he said.

Story continues

"That is a risk. This has been made public by the Lion Air CEO. He stated publicly that he is considering" a cancellation.

But he added that it was difficult to predict whether more major carriers would follow suit.

"There are many unanswered questions and each airline has specific needs," Yusof said.

This month, Lion Air said it was postponing delivery of four of the jets after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board.

The Ethiopian tragedy came after a Lion Air jet of the same model crashed in Indonesia in October, killing all 189 people on board.

Budget carrier Lion -- Southeast Asia's biggest airline by fleet size and a major Boeing customer -- said the now-postponed planes had been on track for delivery this year.

Lion did not immediately respond to AFP's request Friday for comment on its current plans following Garuda's announcement.

Lion Air operates 10 Max 8 jets, part of a then-record $22 billion order from Boeing made in 2011.

The airlines are the only two that use the Max 8 in Indonesia.

Both crashed planes reportedly experienced erratic steep climbs and descents as well as fluctuating airspeeds before crashing shortly after takeoff.

Investigators have honed in on an automated anti-stalling system introduced on the plane that is designed to point the nose of the plane downward if it is in danger of stalling.

From now on, all Boeing's state-of-the-art model will be outfitted with a warning light for malfunctions in the anti-stall system, an industry source told AFP Thursday, standardising a feature previously sold as an expensive optional extra.

The development comes as the US manufacturer struggles to cope with the fallout from the two crashes, which have cast a spotlight on the safety certification process and shaken confidence in a plane that is crucial to its future plans.

Boeing and the US Federal Aviation Administration are under investigation by the Transportation Department for how the rollout of the jet was handled, including the anti-stall system.Iron Mountain Incorporated IRM sold the full-service, valet consumer storage business  Stashable  to storage company MakeSpace. Further, it will offer $30 million as funding for MakeSpaces expansion plans.



This partnership enabled Iron Mountain to strengthen consumer offering and leverage on MakeSpaces technology platform that was needed for expanding operations.



Further, facilities and operational efficiencies of Iron Mountain will enable MakeSpace to provide best-in-class, scalable technology in new markets, with opportunities to penetrate other markets in the long term. Moreover, MakeSpace will likely witness efficiencies at existing locations in Chicago, New York City, Washington, DC and Los Angeles.



In fact, Iron Mountains robust network of storage, transportation and logistics operations will help MakeSpace to immediately expand offering in 20 new markets, including San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, Seattle, Philadelphia and Toronto. This brings MakeSpaces total footprint to 24 markets. Moreover, MakeSpace will become a customer for Iron Mountain by initially delivering 2.1 million cubic feet of consumer storage.



Per Iron Mountains management, its scale and expertise in managing valuable assets combined with MakeSpaces prominent brand value and front-end customer platform will enable to deliver higher value across Iron Mountains storage network.



MakeSpaces CEO, Rahul Gandhi noted that Iron Mountains significant global storage footprint combined with MakeSpaces proprietary technology offers it a competitive edge over peers to capture consumer demand for hassle-free storage.



In fact, going by statistics, one out of 10 Americans presently use self-storage facilities. As urban apartment sizes shrink and a higher number of Americans shift between cities, the demand for storage space is expected to continually increase. Hence, leveraging this favorable trend, this partnership looks promising.



Encouragingly, Iron Mountain has witnessed growth in storage rental revenues at a CAGR of 15.7% over the past 29 years. The companys initiatives to expand the core storage business will likely lead to sustained top-line growth over the long term.



However, the companys Service revenues remain modest due to falling activity rates as stored records are becoming less active. Continued fall in service revenue activity level is expected to impact organic growth in the upcoming quarters.



Over the past three months, shares of this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company have gained 15%, underperforming the industrys rally of 20.2%.





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Stocks to Consider



Investors can consider some better-ranked stocks from the same space like Terreno Realty Corporation TRNO, Cousins Properties Incorporated CUZ and Boston Properties, Inc. BXP, currently carrying a Zacks Rank of 2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here



The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Terreno Realtys 2019 funds from operations (FFO) per share remained unchanged at $1.42 over the past month. Further, it has a long-term growth rate of 8.40%.



Cousins Properties Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 FFO per share was revised 12.7% upward to 73 cents over the past month. Also, it has a long-term growth rate of 3.2%.



Boston Properties 2019 FFO per share estimates for the ongoing year were revised marginally north to $6.92 in 30 days time. Additionally, it has a long-term growth rate of 6.20%.



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Zacks Investment ResearchParis (AFP) - France's foreign ministry said Friday that it had summoned the Israeli government's representative in Paris over what it called an "intrusion" by Israeli forces at its cultural centre in Jerusalem.

In a rare move, police entered the building Thursday to cancel an event with a women's group which Israel claims is sponsored or financed by the Palestinian Authority.

A diplomatic source said France's consul general had immediately protested the police's entry to the centre in east Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed in a move not recognised by the international community.

"Such actions are a serious and unacceptable infringement to the functioning of our cultural network in Jerusalem," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

It said the Israeli charge d'affaires had been called to meet with French officials for "necessary clarifications".

"France intends to maintain and develop its deep and longstanding relations with Palestinian civil society," it added.

Israel's foreign ministry said in a statement Friday said that the charge d'affaires had "protested" at the meeting "about the holding of an event funded and supported by the Palestinian Authority at the French Institute in Jerusalem".

It said that under accords with the Palestinians "any activity of a diplomatic or governmental nature by the PA is prohibited" in areas where the authority has not been assigned control.

"The Israeli representative made it clear that we would not agree to the holding of PA events in Jerusalem and that we also expect our friends to respect the rules," it added.

Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be its sovereign capital.

The French consulate in Jerusalem could not confirm Thursday if the women's association was indeed financed by the Palestinian Authority.

But Palestinians who were to participate in the event said the allegation was false.

"It was an event related to Mother's Day" and to sell crafts made by women from Jerusalem, said one of the women who was to participate, declining to give her name.

Similar events occur on a near-monthly basis, she said.Jade Goodys mother Jackiey Budden appeared on Good Morning Britain to urge women to get their f*****s checked

Ten years on from her death, Jade Goodys mother Jackiey Budden and widow Jack Tweed appeared on Good Morning Britain on 22 March to encourage women to attend cervical screenings. But some viewers claimed they had to turn the interview off because it was messy and embarrassing.

An emotional Budden kicked off the segment by acknowledging fans of Goody who still send her letters of support and cards on anniversaries such as this one, before addressing the fact that the number of women skipping smear tests are at a 21-year high.

She said that women shouldnt be ashamed of getting themselves checked as nurses and doctors are likely to have seen your fanny or willy regardless. You cant be scared for five minutes, she added. Its your life.

Read more: Jeff Brazier talks about life with Jade Goodys sons

GMBs resident GP Dr Hilary Jones noted that if all women attended their screening, wed save about 83 per cent of cervical cancer deaths in this country. Budden replied: The boys can have it now so I think if you have a son or a daughter, why cant you get your son to protect him from passing it?

And the girls, we cant have a smear test until were 25 now, which is a liberty.





Later, Budden pointed at co-host Charlotte Hawkins and demanded, Who are you? When fellow presenter Kate Garraway claimed that she must have seen Hawkins on television before, Budden admitted that she had but no one had introduced her to her on the day.

Viewers took to Twitter to state that they thought the manic nature of the interview was a shame, as the show could have got a really good message across otherwise. One user wrote: I had to turn over. Women NEED to get checked, they NEED to stop worrying about a 2 minute life saving procedure. But seriously this was car crash TV. Squirming and embarrassed. Fancy putting this woman on live tv.

I had to turn over. Women NEED to get checked, they NEED to stop worrying about a 2 minute life saving procedure. But seriously this was car crash TV. Squirming and embarrassed. Fancy putting this woman on live tv. #awkward  Jules (@Juliedewdrops) March 22, 2019

Goody died of cervical cancer on the 22 March 2009. she had two children with former partner Jeff Brazier. Tweed, who married Goody just one month before she passed away, also talked about his attempts to find love again during the recent GMB interview.

Story continues

I did try and move on but I think I rushed into it trying to find a replacement, he said. It didnt seem to work, it wasnt the right thing to do.

Read more: Cervical cancer home-test kits could be a game-changer

That same feeling I had for Jade, I cant really feel that for anyone else, he continued. I dont think its the right thing to do, its not fair on the other person.

Budden interjected, insisting that her daughter wouldve wanted Tweed to be with someone, be happy and have a life.17-year-old Jodie Chesney was stabbing in the back as she listened to music with friends in Harold Hill, east London, on March 1 (PA)

Detectives investigating the murder of 17-year-old girl scout Jodie Chesney in an east London park have arrested a teenage boy on suspicion of her murder.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed a 17-year-old suspect remains in custody in connection with the killing, which took place in Harold Hill, Romford on March 1.

Two men and a boy have already been charged with her murder.

Manuel Petrovic, 20, of Highfield Road, Romford, 18-year-old Svenson Ong-a-kwie of Hillfoot Road in Romford, and a 16-year-old who cannot be named are due to face trial at the Old Bailey in September.

Another three people  including a 50-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman, both from Dagenham, and a 17-year-old boy  who were arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender have all been released under investigation.

Ms Chesney was listening to music with a group of five friends before she was approached by two males, one of which stabbed her in the back, before the pair fled the scene.

Jodie was found suffering from a stab injury at about 9.25pm. She was pronounced dead at the scene an hour later.

A post-mortem ruled the cause of death as trauma and haemorrhage.

Ms Chesney was the 18th person to be killed in London this year and the first teenage female victim.

On Friday a Met Police spokesman said: A 17-year-old male was arrested on Friday, 22 March on suspicion of murder.

He was taken to an east London police station where he remains in custody.

Police were called by the London Ambulance Service at 21:25hrs on Friday, 1 March, to reports of a stabbing in a park close to St Neots Road in Harold Hill.

Officers attended and found Jodie suffering from a stab injury. She was pronounced dead at 22:26hrs.

Investigations are continuing and police are urging people to come forward with information.

This is a developing story. More to follow.Get ready for a Us history lesson (credit: Universal Pictures)

Okay, so if youre reading this, youre one of the millions of people who saw Us this weekend. Its the new horror film from the Oscar-winning Jordan Peele, who won audience and critical acclaim with the masterful Get Out. It stars Black Panthers Lupita Nyongo and Winston Duke as a married couple who come face to face with their evil doppelgangers while on holiday in their remote lakeside summer house. Their bloodthirsty lookalikes appear on their doorstep one night, hellbent on terrorising the couple and their two children, and things rapidly go from bad to what the f*** just happened?!

If you havent seen Us yet, then what are you doing here?

Go away, and come back when youve seen it. We may have problems with it, but we dont want to ruin it for you.

Us spoilers coming up





If you have seen it, and youre a bit baffled by what you saw, we totally understand, thats because the plot-threads are a bit untethered, so the story doesnt fully make sense. But were going to explain what its supposed to mean, then go into why its all a bit confusing, before bringing it all together for what its probably saying about society.

Read more: Black Panther star auditioned with fake scripts

THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE BEFORE WE HIT THE SPOILERS

At the end of the film its revealed that, when Lupita Nyongos Adelaide Wilson wandered into the hall of mirrors during the opening flashback sequence, she coincidentally met her shadow, Red, who took the opportunity to kidnap her and switch places with her. When you see the little girl in the psychiatrists office, thats Red.

Us movie: UK release date, trailer and everything you need to know about the new Jordan Peele film

Now, theres several reasons this is a bit confusing. The first is that, if the tethered are unsupervised, and able to wander up to the hall of mirrors, then why didnt the real Adelaide just escape the moment she had her first opportunity? You know, as opposed to doing ballet.

Potentially, its because when the characters switched, the power dynamic also shifted, which means that the surface version was now in control, and so Adelaide couldnt escape.

Story continues

But thats not made clear in the movie, and also doesnt make sense as an explanation  because if thats the new power dynamic, then Adelaide wouldnt be able to lead a revolution to the surface.

If, somehow, close proximity between the surface people and their shadows leads to more autonomy for the shadows, why would surface Lupita ever agree to a holiday to the one place shed be avoiding for her entire life? This is definitely one of the most baffling elements of the whole thing.

But the major element that really doesnt make any sense is the sequence where shadow Lupita gives the big exposition dump in her croaky voice. She wasnt a baby when they switched, she was a communicative child, fully aware that shed been switched.

So, rather than telling that whole once upon a time story that totally suggested shed been born into the underground lab, why wouldnt she go into that house and say You stole my life! Why wouldnt she immediately bring this up, rather than saving it for another big exposition dump later in the movie?

Lupita Nyongos dual role in Jordan Peeles Us

Theres one explanation that could tie everything together, but you need to do a bit of hard work to apply it to the movie. The film could be a metaphor for the return of the repressed, where basically surface Lupita has repressed the memory of how she escaped the underground bunker.

Similarly, underground Lupita may have gone through so many traumatic experiences, that she became so disturbed, she might as well have been born among the shadow people. Thats certainly inferred.

Still, while we understand it was very rubbish down there, if Red was able to blend in with overground society (outside of not speaking for a bit), were not entirely sure why literally every single tethered is a total psycho when they come up to the surface. It might make sense if they were killing their originals, but the news broadcast makes it clear that they start randomly killing people.

Read more: Jordan Peele hailed modern day Hitchcock

But, as far as we can tell, the ending is supposed to mean this:

Young Adelaide was switched with young Red. Red had such a nice upbringing she became a good person. Adelaide had such a terrible time she became a bad person.

While Red started a family, Adelaide was somehow able to break the tethered connection to gather the entire underground populace into a revolution, inspired by a TV broadcast of the Hands Across America movement (in which people were encouraged to hold hands to bring attention to hunger and poverty  6.5 million took part, so were probably meant to assume thats the scale of the tethered protest, thats what that very last shot is all about, which means Red has been very busily organising a lot of people who can only communicate in grunts and screams!)





This revolution is partly inspired by the fact Adelaide can do ballet (this is probably a metaphor for how art can free the spirit, but doesnt really make sense on a practical level  the tethered mimic whats going on overground, so they would have seen ballet before?), and by a Hands Across America t-shirt she brought into the underground bunker (which makes us wonder, where do the tethered get their clothes from if theyre so impressed by this t-shirt? Do their clothes just manifest? Where does the dude pretending to work in the fairground get his Thriller t-shirt from?)

Anyway, around 30 years after the switch, Adelaide leads the revolution overground, and decides to go and confront her shadow, and her shadows family. Presumably because shes not an original tethered, she decides to toy with Red, whereas every other tethered immediately kills everyone they meet (seeking out their originals in some cases, and in some cases not).

This gives Red the opportunity to rally her family (who are also special  because theyre half human, half tethered, which probably explains why theyre able to survive and fight back, where everyone else dies).

Then, we hit the end sequence  and the look between Red and her son. This is presumably meant to suggest that they share a secret, the secret thats at the heart of the movie  that theres a very fine line between the tethered and human, and they are both now in touch with their dark sides, following the events of the film.

Then we get the final moments of the movie, the Mirror World Hands Across America tracking shot, the tethereds performance art protest that demonstrates that the underclass are now in control of America (were Americans.) and the world is now chaotic (bit of a weird message, but okay!) as a result.

So, make sure you keep repressing your dark side folks! And definitely make sure to keep those pesky mentally challenged / disturbed / underclass citizens / people who work with scissors in sweatshops in place, or things will get crazy!

Us is in UK cinemas now, and you should see it to make up your own mind.



White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway and her husband George Conway - REUTERS

White House aide Kellyanne Conway publicly backed Donald Trump on Wednesday after an extraordinary 48-hour Twitter row between the president and her husband came to a head.

Mrs Conway used a cable news interview to insist she would not resign and rebuked her husband George for airing his views in public.

It follows two days during which Mr Conway and Mr Trump have traded blows on twitter in a war of words that has generated a slew of headlines.

It began earlier this week with Mr Conway, a prominent conservative lawyer, suggesting the president suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder in a string of tweets, adding "his condition is getting worse every day".

It led Mr Trump to issue a scathing response on Wednesday, tweeting: "George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wifes success & angry that I, with her help, didnt give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!"

George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wifes success & angry that I, with her help, didnt give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!

 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2019

In front of the cameras later Mr Trump added: "I dont know him. Hes a whack job, theres no question about it. I think hes doing a tremendous disservice to his wonderful wife. Kellyanne is a wonderful woman".

Asked to untangle the situation on Wednesday, Mrs Conway told Fox Business: "I appreciate the president defending what he thinks is unfairness. Ill leave that up to him. I was raised, though, in a household of strong Italian Catholic women who taught me that you air grievances like that in private, so it is very surprising to see it be so public".

Story continues

Video: Trump Calls Kellyanne Conways Husband Total Loser

For more news videos visit Yahoo View.

She also ruled out leaving her position, although she said her husband would like her to step down. "Im not being asked to choose between my marriage and my job. The president has never made me feel that way".

You seem determined to prove my point. Good for you! #NarcissisticPersonalityDisorderhttps://t.co/ZSpb3UXVPC

 George Conway (@gtconway3d) March 20, 2019

"What message would that send to the feminists everywhere who pretend theyre independent thinkers and men dont make decisions for them?" she said. "They can talk it, and I can walk it. I can live it." She added that Mr Trump had largely avoided retaliating to her husbands barbs in the past because he is "protective" of her.

Mr Trump relied heavily on Mrs Conway, a longtime Republican pollster and strategist, to help steer his presidential campaign to victory in 2016 and she remains a trusted member of his inner circle.

Mrs Conway has so largely avoided commenting on her marriage and said she wants to protect the couples four school-age children.

Appearing pained at times during the interview, she said: "My husband has been very critical of the president publicly, which is unlike him because hes usually a very private person." "I dont know when the feminists are going to write this story about the unusual situation of a man getting power through his wife but thats what we have here," she added.

Mr Conway had at one time been friendly with Mr Trump and contemplated taking a job within the administrations Department of Justice.

He later said he withdrew himself from consideration for the role because he watched Mr Trump attack the departments leaders and then fire then FBI director James Comey in May 2017.

In recent months he has been a frequent critic of the president in recent months, even while his wife goes on television to defend her boss.

His attacks on the president increased in the last few days in response to a weekend "tweet storm" by the president in which he attacked the late senator John McCain, Google and the Russia investigation.

In an interview with the Washington Post this week, Mr Conway said he tweets about Mr Trump in order to avoid taking his frustrations out on his wife.

"The tweeting is just the way to get it out of the way, so I can get it off my chest and move on with my life that day. Thats basically it. Frankly, its so I dont end up screaming at her about it."

Sign up for your essential, twice-daily briefing from The Telegraph with our free Front Page newsletter.TIRANA, Albania (AP)  Kosovo's parliament has voted to suspend all casinos and betting shops.

Lawmakers voted 74-0 for a resolution suspending gambling activities until a draft law the government will prepare in 30 days is approved. It did not say what the new law will change.

Avdullah Hoti, a lawmaker with the Democratic League of Kosovo party who proposed the resolution, said "betting games have grabbed the citizens and no one has become rich with the betting shop businesses."

In a post on his Facebook page, Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj said he is looking for Cabinet approval next week.

In 2018, the government gained 16 million euros ($18 million) from gambling receipts.

After neighboring Albania closed all casinos and betting shops last year, many of them moved to Kosovo.WASHINGTON (AP)  The Latest on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation (all times local):

10:45 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has closed his long and contentious Russia investigation with no new charges, ending the probe that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trump's presidency but launching a fresh wave of political battles.

The report's details remain a mystery, accessible to only a handful of Justice Department officials while Attorney General William Barr prepares to release the "principal conclusions" soon.

The Justice Department said the report was delivered by a security officer Friday afternoon to the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and then it went to Barr. Word of the delivery triggered reactions across Washington, including Democrats' demands that it be quickly released to the public and Republicans' contentions that it ended two years of wasted time and money.

__

7:20 p.m.

The Democratic chairs of six House committees are demanding that the Justice Department release "without delay" the full report it has received from special counsel Robert Mueller. They say they expect Attorney General William Barr also to turn over all evidence Mueller has uncovered.

The Democrats say since the Justice Department asserts a sitting president can't be indicted, Barr's failure to release evidence of criminal or other misconduct by President Donald Trump "would raise serious questions about whether the Department of Justice policy is being used as a pretext for a cover-up of misconduct."

The six chairs are Jerrold Nadler of Judiciary and Eliot Engel of Foreign Affairs; Elijah Cummings of Oversight and Reform; Adam Schiff of the Intelligence Committee, Maxine Waters of Financial Services and the Ways and Means Committee's Richard Neal.

___

6:40 p.m.

President Donald Trump's lawyers want an early look at special counsel Robert Mueller's findings before they are made public.

Story continues

That's according to Rudy Giuliani, Trump's attorney. He says Trump's legal team hasn't received any assurances that they'll get the early look they want, though.

Mueller notified Attorney General William Barr on Friday that he had concluded his probe of Russian election interference and any possible coordination with Donald Trump's campaign.

Now, Barr will review the findings and determine how much to make public.

___

6:38 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller will be concluding his government service in the "coming days."

That's according to special counsel spokesman Peter Carr.

Carr says in a statement that a "small number" of the office's staff will remain "to assist in closing the operations of the office." He did not provide a specific timeline for when that might occur. As of Friday, 11 prosecutors were still employed by the special counsel's office.

The statement comes just hours after Mueller turned in his confidential report closing his probe of Russian election interference and possible coordination with Donald Trump's campaign.

___

6:35 p.m.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff says his panel will issue subpoenas if special counsel Robert Mueller's report  and its underlying evidence  are not released to Congress for further review.

The California Democrat said on CNN that Congress needs to know "and so does the country."

He said he's willing to subpoena Mueller as well as Attorney General William Barr, if needed, to push for disclosure.

House Democrats now see the Mueller investigation as a starting point for their own probes of President Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mueller delivered his final report to Barr on Friday.

___

6:15 p.m.

One top Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, says the findings of the special counsel's Russia investigation must be made public to end the "speculation and innuendo" that hangs over President Donald Trump's administration.

The former Judiciary Committee chairman says while it's clear the Russians "tried to meddle in our democratic processes," he still hasn't seen any evidence of collusion.

Grassley says Attorney General William Barr Attorney General must provide the findings from special counsel Robert Mueller's report to Congress and the American people "to finally put an end to the speculation and innuendo that has loomed over this administration since its earliest days."

___

5:58 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is not recommending any further indictments in the Russia investigation.

That's according to a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the confidential recommendation.

Mueller notified Attorney General William Barr on Friday that he had concluded his probe of Russian election interference and any possible coordination with Donald Trump's campaign.

By Eric Tucker

___

5:57 p.m.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham expects that he and the panel's top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, will be briefed "in the coming days" about special counsel Robert Mueller's report.

The South Carolina Republican says he was notified by the Justice Department that Mueller's report has been turned over and that Attorney General William Barr "will pursue as much transparency as possible."

Graham says he expects to be "more thoroughly" briefed. He says he believed it was important for Mueller to do his job "without interference, and that has been accomplished."

___

5:55 p.m.

Attorney General William Barr says the Justice Department did not block special counsel Robert Mueller from taking any action during his Russia investigation.

Barr is required to disclose to Congress any instance in which he or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided an action Mueller proposed should not be pursued.

Barr said in his letter to members of Congress on Friday that "there were no such instances during the Special Counsel's investigation."

The attorney general notified four key lawmakers that he may update them over the weekend.

___

5:50 p.m.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he welcomes news that special counsel Robert Mueller has completed his investigation into Russia's efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections.

McConnell says he and other Republicans have long believed that Russia poses a significant threat to American interests, adding that he hopes Mueller's report will "help inform and improve our efforts to protect our democracy."

The Kentucky Republican says he hopes that Attorney General William Barr, who received Mueller's report on Friday, will "provide as much information as possible" on the findings, "with as much openness and transparency as possible."

Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said he expects the Justice Department to release the report to the committee without delay "and to the maximum extent permitted by law."

___

5:40 p.m.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer say it's "imperative" to make the full report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller public.

The top congressional Democrats say, "The American people have a right to the truth."

In a joint statement, they say Attorney Gneral William Barr must not give President Donald Trump his lawyers or staff any "sneak preview" of the findings or evidence.

"The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public," they say.

__

5:39 p.m.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee says Congress should receive the full report from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler says in a statement that "We look forward to getting the full Mueller report and related materials." He adds that "transparency and the public interest demand nothing less" because the public needs to have faith in the rule of law.

Attorney General William Barr wrote in a letter to Nadler and other committee chairmen that Mueller had finished his investigation and delivered his report to Barr. The attorney general said he would update Congress as soon as this weekend, but it wasn't clear now much of the report would be shared with lawmakers or with the public.

__

5:38 p.m.

Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that Attorney General William Barr make Robert Mueller's report on Russia public.

Minutes after Barr notified members of Congress Friday that Mueller had delivered his report, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tweeted that the attorney general should "release the Mueller report to the American public. Now."

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted that the report "should be made public immediately."

The Trump administration's handling of Mueller's report foretells big fights to come, from the presidential campaign trail to, in all likelihood, the federal courts.

__

5:25 p.m.

President Donald Trump's lawyers say they are "pleased" that special counsel Robert Mueller has delivered his report on the Russia investigation.

Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow issued their joint statement within minutes of Attorney General William Barr's letter to key members of Congress confirming the delivery and suggesting he could update lawmakers as soon as this weekend.

They say: "We're pleased that the Office of Special Counsel has delivered its report to the Attorney General pursuant to the regulations. Attorney General Barr will determine the appropriate next steps."

Mueller's report, still confidential, sets the stage for big public fights to come, including in all likelihood, in federal court. It's not clear how much of the report will become public or provided to Congress.

__

5:20 p.m.

Responding to the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's report, the White House says the next steps are "up to Attorney General (William) Barr."

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says "we look forward to the process taking its course."

She adds, "The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsel's report."

For 22 months, Mueller has probed allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and other potential misdeeds by those in President Donald Trump's orbit.

Barr has said he will provide updates on Mueller's still-confidential findings to Congress as soon as this weekend.

__

5:15 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's report concluding the Russia investigation was delivered by a security officer early Friday afternoon to the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

That's according to Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec. It was then delivered within minutes to Attorney General William Barr.

The White House was notified around 4:35-4:40 p.m. that the Justice Department had received the report.

The letter was scheduled to be delivered at 5 p.m. to staff members on Capitol Hill.

Rosenstein was expected to call Mueller on Friday to thank him for his work in the last two years.

__

5:07 p.m.

Attorney General William Barr says he could update Congress as early as this weekend about special counsel Robert Mueller's findings in the Russia investigation.

The Justice Department confirmed late Friday that Barr received Mueller's final report. The report concludes Mueller's nearly two-year-long investigation of Russian election interference and possible coordination with President Donald Trump's campaign.

__

5:03 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination with associates of President Donald Trump.

The Justice Department says Mueller delivered his final report Friday to Attorney General William Barr, who is reviewing it.

Mueller's report, still confidential, sets the stage for big public fights to come. The next steps are up to Trump's attorney general, to Congress and, in all likelihood, federal courts.

It's not clear how much of the report will become public or provided to Congress. Barr has said he will write his own report summarizing Mueller's findings.

The nearly two-year probe has shadowed Trump's presidency and resulted in felony charges against 34 people including six people who served on Trump's campaign.Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily!

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Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.PITTSBURGH (AP)  The Latest on the homicide trial of a white Pennsylvania police officer in the shooting of an unarmed black 17-year-old (all times local):

6:40 p.m.

The second day of the criminal homicide trial of a white officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager has ended for the day with compelling witness testimony that included a neighbor saying he heard the officer say "I don't know why I shot him."

Former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld's trial will continue Thursday.

A neighbor said he was on his porch when Rosfeld fired three bullets into 17-year-old Antwon Rose II after pulling over an unlicensed taxicab suspected to have been used in a drive-by shooting minutes earlier.

Rosfeld's attorney says the former officer was justified in shooting Rose.

Rosfeld was charged, investigators said, after his story changed about whether he saw or believed a gun was in Rose's hands.

___

4:10 p.m.

A police officer who responded to the East Pittsburgh shooting death of an unarmed black teenager said the white officer who shot him asked if he "saw the gun."

Allegheny Housing Authority officer Charles Rozzo testified Wednesday at the second day of the trial of former Officer Michael Rosfeld.

Rozzo said he approached a distraught Rosfeld, who asked him how 17-year-old Antwon Rose II was doing.

Rozzo said Rosfeld then asked if Rozzo saw the gun. It's unclear what gun Rosfeld was referring to. Rosfeld was charged, investigators said, after his story changed about whether he saw or believed a gun was in Rose's hands.

Authorities have said two guns were inside the vehicle and an empty ammunition clip was in his pocket.

Rozzo said Rosfeld then asked him to call his wife.

___

1:50 p.m.

A witness who was in an East Pittsburgh senior center a white police officer entered after fatally shooting an unarmed black teenager says he heard the officer say, "Why did he take that out of his pocket?"

Story continues

Patrick Shattuck testified Wednesday as the second day of the trial of former Officer Michael Rosfeld resumed.

Shattuck said that about five minutes after 17-year-old Antwon Rose II was shot, Rosfeld went into the building with swollen, red eyes saying, "Why did he do that? Why did he do that? Why did he take that out of his pocket?"

East Pittsburgh Mayor Louis J. Payne was also there for a council meeting. He said he heard Rosfeld say, "Why did he do that?" but not the comment about the pocket.

___

11:50 a.m.

A witness says he saw a white officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager in Pittsburgh panicking on the sidewalk, saying, "I don't know why I shot him. I don't know why I fired."

Neighbor John Leach testified Wednesday as the second day of the trial of former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld resumed.

Leach lives a couple houses away. He said he was on his front porch when Rosfeld fired three bullets into 17-year-old Antwon Rose II after pulling over an unlicensed taxicab suspected to have been used in a drive-by shooting minutes earlier.

Leach says he saw other police officers consoling Rosfeld. Leach says Rosfeld was bending over crying, hyperventilating and looked like he was about to pass out.

A second witness video was also played in court.

___

10:10 a.m.

The mother of an unarmed black teenager who was fatally shot by a white former police officer is urging prosecutors to show what a "kind, loving and funny" person her son was.

Michelle Kenney's letter to prosecutors was released Wednesday, as the second day of the trial of former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld resumes in a Pittsburgh courtroom.

In the letter, Kenney asks prosecutors to paint a picture of her son Antwon Rose II as the loving, exceptional person that he was. She says they must counter the defense's portrayal of the 17-year-old high school student as "just another thug."

She says he taught children in the neighborhood how to roller blade and skateboard and would give away his skates to kids in need. She calls him a "rose that grew from concrete."

In June, Rosfeld fired three bullets into Rose after pulling over an unlicensed taxicab suspected to have been used in a drive-by shooting minutes earlier.

Rose was shot as he fled the car.

___

3 a.m.

Video that showed a white police officer shooting to death an unarmed black teenager is among the evidence presented during the first day of the former cop's criminal homicide trial.

More testimony is expected Wednesday when the trial of former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld resumes in a Pittsburgh courtroom.

The 30-year-old Rosfeld is accused in the June death of 17-year-old high school student Antwon Rose II.

Rosfeld fired three bullets into Rose after pulling over an unlicensed taxicab suspected to have been used in a drive-by shooting minutes earlier.

Rose was a front-seat passenger in the cab and was shot as he fled.

A neighbor who recorded the confrontation said the tone of Rosfeld's voice is what got her attention.Fox News host Laura Ingraham called out New York Universitys journalism school for hiring what she callsradical anti-conservatives and little journo-terrorists.

On Thursdays The Ingraham Angle, the host criticized the hiring of Talia Lavin, who resigned from The New Yorker last year after mistakenly accusing an ICE agent of having a Nazi tattoo. Ingraham also referenced last years NYU hiring of former Teen Vogue columnist Lauren Duca.

They dont want to argue. They dont want to win the debate. They want to search and destroy. Thats what they do, Ingraham said of the journalists. Thats why Fox viewers are so loyal to this network because we refused to bow, refused to cave into these kind of terroristic tactics. And thats what they are. Theyre little journo-terrorists.

Lavin responded to Ingrahams segment on Twitter:

Heres Laura Ingraham displaying my face to 2.5 million viewers and calling me a little journo-terrorist. I am 29.

I have no full-time job.

I am teaching a single course, for $7k, as an adjunct. This is insane. And irresponsible. It is incitement. It is not okay. pic.twitter.com/4tyj9Bktr2  Talia Lavin,  (@chick_in_kiev) March 22, 2019

However, Lavins tweet was met with a mixed response from those who support her, and those who dont really for sorry for her.

Reprehensible but exactly what one would expect from her. Take care of yourself, be cautious.  Mary M (@angry_gram) March 22, 2019

Im so sorry Talia. Sending all kinds of love & strength your way.  [] (@awSAMM) March 22, 2019

When I first saw you post about them putting your face out there like that I wont lie I got a bit scared, these people are lunatics. Be safe.  Rose DF (@_Astro_Nerd_) March 22, 2019

Didnt you smear a guy as a Nazi cause you misunderstood a tattoo? I dont think people are gonna feel that bad for you.  PhilThatRemains (@philthatremains) March 22, 2019

Your lack of self awareness has me dead. It is too early for this much irony pic.twitter.com/7JcGwegdcV  Rigor Morton (@WeirdNPissdOff) March 22, 2019

Good for Laura.  swebs (@swebs) March 22, 2019

You sound lazy. Good prospects get hired. Do some self-reflection. Your life is what YOU make of it.  Sheilas (@Sheilas11) March 22, 2019

Meanwhile Duca, who is also at the center of a recent hit piece on Jezebel, simply had this to say to, well, everyone:

Story continues

The Ingraham Angle airs weeknights at 10 p.m. on Fox News.

See how Twitter responded after CNN posted a flattering video package about Kellyanne Conway:

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or leave your comments below.

Want daily pop culture news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here for Yahoo Entertainment & Lifestyles newsletter.Levi Strauss & Co. LEVI went public yesterday opening at $22.22, trading as high as $23.24 and as low as $22.00.

Levi Strauss is an American clothing brand that has been a household name for as long as jeans have existed. In fact Levi Strauss actually created the first pair of jeans in 1873. This company started in 1853 in San Francisco. Jeans gained its fame in the dude ranch era in the early 1900s and were quickly adopted by younger edgier generations until they became the societal norm we see today, with Levi leading the charge in this culture shift. Now Levis can be found in 50,000 retail stores across 110 countries.

Now after 166 years of operation they decide to open up ownership of the company to the public, again. They went public initially in 1971 to give the heirs of this empire a chance to cash out raising about $50 million. The family decided to take it private in 1985 through a $1.7 billion leveraged buyout, making it the largest buyout ever at the time. This 2019 IPO, raising $623.3 million and valuing the company at $6.55 billion, couldnt have come at a more opportune time for Levi considering that their operational performance appears to be at an all-time high. Levi has had consistent top-line growth over the past 4 years as well as a 167% bottom line growth over the past 5 years. What some retail investors dont know is that an IPO is most beneficial when a company is valued at its highest because the company only receives capital on the day of the IPO. An enterprise doesnt collect on a soaring stock price. Only the shareholders do. With market valuations high, this appeared to be an ideal time for Levi to recapitalize.

As a potential shareholder we need to ask ourselves if this is the peak, or does Levi Strauss still have room for growth. This surge of $623.3 million into their balance sheet should help innovative CEO Charles V. Bergh further diversify Levis portfolio and reduce inefficiencies in its supply chain. This company has already been working to grow beyond its leading category of mens bottoms and will further invest in tops and womens apparel. Levi plans to dig its nails deeper into its emerging markets business, specifically China and India where they plan to open new stores and build rapport with their consumers. Just like every other retail business, they will focus on building out their e-commerce sites. Levi is also going to reduce time to market for new products to stay in front of trends.

Story continues

One risk associated with any retail-apparel business is the amount of consumer discretionary spending that the economy has to spend. With unemployment close to the lowest its been in 50 years, and steady wage growth, businesses that rely on consumer discretionary spending dont have anything to worry about yet. One thing that we can all agree on is that jeans arent going out of style anytime soon.

Stitch Fix SFIX is another retail-apparel company that just went public in November of 2017. Stitch Fix is an online business that helps consumers pick their wardrobe that fits their style and who they are. SFIX is up 85% since its IPO and looks to have room to grow based on its Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). As you can see below estimates for three consecutive quarters following the current quarter EPS estimates have been revised up. This a signal for consumer discretionary spending growth as well as a positive sign for an apparel IPO.

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Zacks Investment ResearchInvestors seek growth stocks to capitalize on above-average growth in financials that help these securities grab the market's attention and produce exceptional returns. But finding a growth stock that can live up to its true potential can be a tough task.

By their very nature, these stocks carry above-average risk and volatility. Moreover, if a company's growth story is over or nearing its end, betting on it could lead to significant loss.

However, 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, makes it pretty easy to find cutting-edge growth stocks.

La-Z-Boy (LZB) 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 for stocks that have a combination of a Growth Score of A or B and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy), returns are even better.

While there are numerous reasons why the stock of this furniture company is a great growth pick right now, we have highlighted three of the most important factors below:

Earnings Growth

Arguably nothing is more important than earnings growth, as surging profit levels is what most investors are after. And for growth investors, double-digit earnings growth is definitely preferable, and often an indication of strong prospects (and stock price gains) for the company under consideration.

While the historical EPS growth rate for La-Z-Boy is 13.2%, investors should actually focus on the projected growth. The company's EPS is expected to grow 20.6% this year, crushing the industry average, which calls for EPS growth of 7.9%.

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 La-Z-Boy is 3.7%, which is higher than many of its peers. In fact, the rate compares to the industry average of 2.3%.

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 12.4% over the past 3-5 years versus the industry average of 8%.

Promising Earnings Estimate Revisions

Beyond the metrics outlined above, investors should consider the trend in earnings estimate revisions. A positive trend is a plus here. Empirical research shows that there is a strong correlation between trends in earnings estimate revisions and near-term stock price movements.

There have been upward revisions in current-year earnings estimates for La-Z-Boy. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has surged 3.6% over the past month.

Bottom Line

La-Z-Boy has not only earned a Growth Score of A based on a number of factors, including the ones discussed above, but it also carries a Zacks Rank #2 because of the positive earnings estimate revisions.

You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

This combination indicates that La-Z-Boy is a potential outperformer and a solid choice for growth investors.



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La-Z-Boy Incorporated (LZB) : Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.LyondellBasell Industries N.V. LYB recently announced that its Hostalen Advanced Cascade Process (ACP) technology was selected by Lianyungang Petrochemical Co., Ltd for building a 400KT per annum high density polyethylene (HDPE) plant at Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province, China. Lianyungang Petrochemical is a company owned by Zhejiang Satellite.



With this contract, LyondellBasell has licensed more than 1 million tons of Hostalen ACP capacity this year. The move highlights the importance of this process technology for the production of high-performance multimodal HDPE products. The process technology produces high-performance, multi-modal HDPE resins, which has industry-leading stiffness balance, high stress cracking resistance and processing advantages, blow molding, impact resistance as well as pipe applications.



Moreover, the companys low-pressure slurry process in petrochemical complex will enable Zhejiang Satellite to produce high-quality products economically and reliably.



The Hostalen ACP line marks its 10th project licensed in China. With this license, the total design and operating capacity of Hostalen ACP line in the country is likely to exceed 3.4 million tons per annum.



Shares of LyondellBasell have lost around 17.1% in the past year compared with the industrys 14% decline.





LyondellBasell witnessed normalization of markets with higher polymer demand and modest improvements in the discount for Maya crude oil during the first few weeks of 2019. The company expects growth to accelerate in 2019, courtesy of the planned startup of the Hyperzone polyethylene facility and construction of the new PO/TBA plant.



Per the company, global polyethylene capacity additions are likely to be moderate in 2019 and 2020. This is expected to provide support for high industry operating rates and ethylene chain profitability.



Zacks Rank & Key Picks



LyondellBasell currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).



A few better-ranked stocks in the basic materials space are Kirkland Lake Gold Ltd. KL, Ingevity Corporation NGVT and Materion Corporation MTRN, all currently sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.



Kirkland has an expected earnings growth rate of 8.8% for 2019. The companys shares have surged 120.3% in the past year.



Ingevity has an expected earnings growth rate of 17.9% for the current year. The companys shares have rallied 42.7% in a years time.



Materion has an expected earnings growth rate of 12.6% for 2019. Its shares have gained 10.8% in a years time.



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Zacks Investment ResearchBrussels (AFP) - European Union leaders failed to do enough Friday to pursue a pledge to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 under the Paris climate agreement, French President Emmanuel Macron said.

The leaders stressed the need for the EU to submit an "ambitious long-term strategy by 2020 striving for climate neutrality" in line with the 2015 Paris deal, which calls for zero net emissions by mid-century.

But Macron pointed out the summit conclusions did not explicitly mention the 2050 target.

Macron accused his EU counterparts of not only failing to follow through on their pledges under the Paris agreement but also ignoring the demands of thousands of students who have marched in European streets.

"I believe today's (summit) conclusions regarding the fight against climate change are clearly insufficient," Macron told a news conference at the end of a two-day summit in Brussels.

"We cannot be satisfied with conclusions that do not dare recall that we must achieve carbon neutrality by 2050," Macron said.

He added France will "do its part" to achieve the goal as part of upcoming energy legislation.

"We are not responding clearly today to the commitments taken in 2015, to the scientific challenges outlined by the best experts, or to the legitimate impatience of our young people who are demonstrating every week in our capitals and elsewhere," Macron said.

The summit conclusions said the EU "reiterates its commitment to the Paris Agreement and recognises the need to step up the global efforts to tackle climate change in light of the latest available science."

The 195-nation UN pact sealed in Paris calls for capping the rise in Earth's temperature at "well under" two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and 1.5C if possible.

The summit also pointed to a major recent report by the UN climate body that concluded in October that Earth's rise in temperature must be capped even lower -- at 1.5C -- to avoid the danger of runaway warming.

Story continues

In announcing its bid to strive for climate neutrality, or zero carbon emissions, the leaders also said they were "taking into account member states specificities and the competitiveness of European industry."

This appeared to refer Poland's concerns about protecting an economy heavily reliant on coal and Germany's concerns to keep its economy competitiveness.

The leaders stressed the need to reap the "significant opportunities" to create more jobs, become more competitive and develop new technologies in the transition to a green economy.

But they added the transition must be fair and socially balanced.By Steve Holland and Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday it was time to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights that Israel seized from Syria in 1967, marking a dramatic shift in U.S. policy and giving a boost to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the middle of his re-election campaign.

The disputed area was captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981 in a move not recognised internationally. Netanyahu has pressed the United States to recognise its claim and raised that possibility in his first White House meeting with Trump in February 2017.

"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognise Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" Trump wrote on Twitter.

Trump's move appeared to be his most overt yet to help Netanyahu, who is locked in a closely contested race in the April 9 election while also fighting allegations of corruption, which he denies.

Netanyahu arrives in Washington next week to meet with Trump and address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, lobbying group.

Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network's "Mornings with Maria" that he did not intend his move as an explicit election boost for Netanyahu.

"I hear hes doing okay. I dont know if hes doing great right now, but I hear hes doing okay. But I would imagine the other side, whoevers against him, is also in favour of what I just did," Trump said.

Trump, whose decision last year to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv angered Palestinians, faced some criticism for his latest move.

"Neither America nor Israel, neither Trump nor Netanyahu, will change the historical fact that the Golan lands are Syrian lands and they will remain Syrian lands," Ayman Abu Jabal, a member of the Druze community in the Israeli-occupied Golan, said by phone.

Story continues

Netanyahu thanked Trump for the Golan Heights gesture.

"You've made history," Netanyahu told Trump in a phone call after the announcement, according to the prime minister's office.

Netanyahu had been expected to raise the issue again with Trump during his visit to Washington, an Israeli official said.

"At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognises Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump! @realDonaldTrump," Netanyahu wrote in a tweet.

Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said Trump's announcement was "completely beyond international law." "The Arab League stands fully behind the Syrian right to its occupied land," he said in a statement published by Egypt's state news agency MENA.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Twitter that Turkey "supports Syria's territorial integrity." He said Washington's "attempts to legitimize Israels illegal acts will only lead to more violence in the region."

At the United Nations, a spokesman for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declined to comment.

'CYNICAL MOVE'

The United States had foreshadowed the decision last week when the State Department issued its annual human rights report The report revised its usual description of the Golan Heights from Israeli-occupied to Israeli-controlled.

A senior administration official said the president had been discussing his Golan move over the last few days with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House national security adviser John Bolton, senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, Mideast envoy Jason Greenblatt and U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

Officials waved away any concerns about Israel's elections, the official said.

"Every single person was supportive of the idea," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

There was no clarity from the White House on when formal paperwork would be issued confirming Trump's tweeted decision.

Richard Haass, a former senior State Department official who is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on Twitter that he strongly disagreed with Trump's Golan decision.

Haass said the move violates U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, "which rules out acquiring territory by war and serves Israel as it says all states have right 2 live in peace."

The resolution, passed after the 1967 war, called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories and guaranteed the right of countries in the region to live peacefully within secure and recognised borders.

J Street, a liberal Jewish-American lobbying group, criticized Trump's action, saying that premature U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty of Golan is a needlessly provocative move that violates international law.

"Its clear that this cynical move by Trump is not about the long-term interests of the U.S. or Israel, but rather about handing yet another political gift to Prime Minister Netanyahu in the hopes of boosting his chances for re-election next month," said J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami.

Trumps announcement could complicate his administrations plans to roll out its long-delayed Middle East peace plan after Israels election.

The plan, which has drawn widespread scepticism even before its unveiling, is intended not only to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table but also draw Israel closer to its U.S.-allied Arab neighbours. Those states, however, have long rejected Israels annexation of the Golan.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu, Steve Holland and Matt Spetalnick in Washington and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem; Additional reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara and Yousef Saba in Cairo; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Grant McCool)goldfish (SWNS)

A man who was filmed swallowing a goldfish at a funfair and then washing it down with half a pint of lager has avoided jail.

Josh Coles, 27, was caught when his girlfriend filmed the incident and posted it on Snapchat with the caption: He ate my fish

In the 14-second clip, he can be seen holding the live fish in his flattened palm before throwing it in his mouth, taking a gulp of lager and swallowing it down.

The tree surgeon then proudly opens his mouth and pokes his tongue out to prove he has downed it.

The video of him swallowing the fish was posted on Snapchat (SWNS)

The video was widely shared and reported to the RSPCA by those concerned about what they had seen.

Magistrates heard how the fish would have been under stress and would be caused unnecessary suffering as it went slowly through his digestive tract before death.

Coles, of Tiverton, Devon, pleaded guilty to avoid a trial.

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The court had earlier been shown the video of Coles placing the small goldfish in his mouth and washing it down with a half a pint in a plastic cup at Bridgwater Carnival in September last year.

He received a 12-month community order and was banned from keeping fish for five years.

He was ordered to undertake 200 hours of unpaid work and up to five rehabilitation activity days to consider decision-making and alcohol consumption.

He must pay an 85 victim surcharge and 300 court costs.

Coles received a 12-month communtiy order (SWNS)

Lindi Meyer, prosecuting, told the court the fish would have suffered injuries to its scales when it was handled.

She added that the acidic environment of his stomach would cause further pain and the fish would be deprived of oxygen.

There was never going to be any other outcome but death from his actions, she told the court.

Jeremy Tricks, mitigating, asked magistrates to consider the amount of cases that dont come to court which are more serious.

Story continues

He said: Im not saying its only a fish, Im a big fish fan myself.

Addressing the video, he told the court: There are people egging him on and he does it with not thought whatsoever. Its idiotic.

He added: He accepts he did something which is very stupid.

Speaking after the case RSPCA inspector John Pollock, who investigated for the animal welfare charity, said: I believe that any reasonable person would be aware that swallowing live animals would cause those animals to suffer.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UKMeghan Markle is one of the most talked about women in the world and theres no doubt that she has boosted interest in the British Royal Family globally since marrying Prince Harry.

An American divorcee with an acting career and a vocal advocate of womens rights, she has been hailed as a breath of fresh air, for the monarchy.

Despite husband Harry being sixth in line to the throne, who will inevitably move further down once his nephew Prince George has his own family in future, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are two of the most popular members of the Royal Family.

But royal author Anna Pasternak thinks that Meghan should be cautious about retaining the spotlight.

Speaking to Yahoo UKs The Royal Box, she says: I think what Meghan has got to realise is that she cannot live life in the Royal Family like a A-list Hollywood star and that within the monarchy, it demands a very different set of behaviour.

The interest in Meghan (pictured at Canada House) is huge [Photo: PA]

Pasternaks latest book Untitled: The Real Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor explains why Simpson was maligned in history. Edward VIIIs relationship with the American divorcee led him to abdicate from the throne in 1936.

READ MORE: Meet the woman whos going to handle the Markles for Harry and Meghan

Much to the disapproval of the courtiers, the couple married in 1937 and spent the rest of their lives in France.

Pasternak thinks the attitude and power of the courtiers hasnt changed since that period.

She says: I think shes [Meghan] heading for a very tricky situation because I think actually very little has changed in the last 80 years in terms of the power of the courtiers.

Meghans surprise appearance at WE Day with Harry provoked huge screams from the audience [Photo: PA]

And what Ive discovered in my research in my book on Wallis Simpson and Princess Diana is that the one goal of the monarchy, the ultimate goal is survival and for that, the spotlight has to be on the monarch or the heir apparent.

The author, who broke the story about Princess Dianas affair with James Hewitt in 1994, adds that while Meghan wants to modernise and set her own agenda, she cant have it all.

Story continues

You cannot have your freedom and this privilege, Pastenak says.

She cannot be this international star on a global stage. That is the monarch, the Queen, then Charles, then William and Kate, they have to be the stars, thats what ensures continuity of the monarchy.

The House of Windsor has done incredibly well to stay together when many other European royal houses have collapsed and theyve done it because they recognise who has to be the main event.

READ MORE: What you need to know about Meghan and Harrys new royal household

Meghan and Harry are set to move to Frogmore Cottage in Windsor ahead of their babys birth, expected in April. Its thought that their new home will give them more privacy with their newborn.

And despite being weeks away from the birth, it has not been revealed where the duchess will give birth or whether the couple will choose to have a photo opportunity on the famous steps of the Lindo Wing, like the Duke and Duchess have with their three children.

Kensington Palace also confirmed last week that the pair will have their own royal household, based at Buckingham Palace, splitting from their joint one with the Cambridges.



Post: #2 RE: TREASON: The True Legacy Of John McCain

This is how I will always remember John McCain.







Meghan McCain is upset at Trump for revealing his true feelings about John McCain. It is a good thing she did not ask me, because you are reading the words of a citizen who was the victim of John McCains illegal actions against my small community. I thank the President for his honesty. Here is my answer to Meghan McCain. Your father was a traitor to this country. Your father did not respect the law of this nation nor its citizens. He was a total treasonous globalist.





Under John McCain American Patriotism Died: In your Face Globalism



John McCain came out of the closet in his final years. The globalists are out of the closet. They are publicly advancing their New World Agenda and it is fully out in the open. Recently, John McCain received a meaningless award that globalists like to give each other and in his aceptance speech, he made the following dig at Trump for being a patriotic American:



To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain the last best hope of earth for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history, McCain said.



[Quoted by Breitbart]

THANK YOU JOHN MCCAIN FOR EXPOSING YOUR GLOBALIST AGENDA



John McCain was one of them. He was a self-admitted globalist who was working for the destruction of the American people and their country. By default, he is a disciple of globalist Ted Turner who told Audubon Magazine that the population of the earth needs to reduced by 95%. McCain supports giving away American sovereignty to international bodies whose goal is to advance globalism AT THE EXPENSE OF AMERICAN LIBERTIES, NATIONAL SECURITY AND JOBS.



In retrospect, this should not be surprising. The late McCain, along with the late Ted Kennedy co-sponsored the Central American Free Trade Agreement which gave away much of Americas sovereignty, jobs and allowed millions of illegal aliens, including ISIS and MS-13, to enter the United States with impunity.

The 21st Century of Benedict Arnold



When John McCain was elected to the Senate by the people of Arizona, he placed his right hand on the Bible and swore to protect America from enemies both foreign and domestic. McCain has become that domestic enemy that he swore to protect the country from.



When Benedict Arnold committed his treason, he was trying to give away the plan for West Point. McCain is giving away the entire country. I ask you, who is worse?

McCain Supports Terrorism



Everyone from former Army psyop, Scott Bennett to Fox News has noted that Obama is and has been chummy with ISIS. In fact, in his role as the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, McCain oversaw the illegal abandonment of American military equipment in Iraq in order that ISIS could confiscate this equipment. Federal law mandates that all American military equipment left behind in a theater of war be blown up. McCain et al actions were treasonous to say the least as this Senator fueled the rise of ISIS.

Anti-American to Supporting Antifa



McCain supported free trade agreements that steal millions of American jobs. McCain supported the TPP which would have destroyed whats left of the sovereignty in America. It is obvious that McCain hates America and Americans.



I was once at a town hall meeting in Mesa, AZ., when an elderly gentleman asked McCain how is it that you work for me and you have better health care than I do? McCains thuggish security team, who looked liked type-cast mafiaso thugs, very roughly threw the frail man out for asking the question as McCain mocked the man. At the same meeting, he was asked why he supported Agenda 21 policies and he stated I have never heard of Agenda 21 policies. I witnessed these events with my own eyes.



Read the rest at the link below

https://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/sorry...hn-mccain/ Meghan McCain is upset at Trump for revealing his true feelings about John McCain. It is a good thing she did not ask me, because you are reading the words of a citizen who was the victim of John McCains illegal actions against my small community. I thank the President for his honesty. Here is my answer to Meghan McCain. Your father was a traitor to this country. Your father did not respect the law of this nation nor its citizens. He was a total treasonous globalist.Under John McCain American Patriotism Died: In your Face GlobalismJohn McCain came out of the closet in his final years. The globalists are out of the closet. They are publicly advancing their New World Agenda and it is fully out in the open. Recently, John McCain received a meaningless award that globalists like to give each other and in his aceptance speech, he made the following dig at Trump for being a patriotic American:To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain the last best hope of earth for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history, McCain said.[Quoted by Breitbart]THANK YOU JOHN MCCAIN FOR EXPOSING YOUR GLOBALIST AGENDAJohn McCain was one of them. He was a self-admitted globalist who was working for the destruction of the American people and their country. By default, he is a disciple of globalist Ted Turner who told Audubon Magazine that the population of the earth needs to reduced by 95%. McCain supports giving away American sovereignty to international bodies whose goal is to advance globalism AT THE EXPENSE OF AMERICAN LIBERTIES, NATIONAL SECURITY AND JOBS.In retrospect, this should not be surprising. The late McCain, along with the late Ted Kennedy co-sponsored the Central American Free Trade Agreement which gave away much of Americas sovereignty, jobs and allowed millions of illegal aliens, including ISIS and MS-13, to enter the United States with impunity.The 21st Century of Benedict ArnoldWhen John McCain was elected to the Senate by the people of Arizona, he placed his right hand on the Bible and swore to protect America from enemies both foreign and domestic. McCain has become that domestic enemy that he swore to protect the country from.When Benedict Arnold committed his treason, he was trying to give away the plan for West Point. McCain is giving away the entire country. I ask you, who is worse?McCain Supports TerrorismEveryone from former Army psyop, Scott Bennett to Fox News has noted that Obama is and has been chummy with ISIS. In fact, in his role as the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, McCain oversaw the illegal abandonment of American military equipment in Iraq in order that ISIS could confiscate this equipment. Federal law mandates that all American military equipment left behind in a theater of war be blown up. McCain et al actions were treasonous to say the least as this Senator fueled the rise of ISIS.Anti-American to Supporting AntifaMcCain supported free trade agreements that steal millions of American jobs. McCain supported the TPP which would have destroyed whats left of the sovereignty in America. It is obvious that McCain hates America and Americans.I was once at a town hall meeting in Mesa, AZ., when an elderly gentleman asked McCain how is it that you work for me and you have better health care than I do? McCains thuggish security team, who looked liked type-cast mafiaso thugs, very roughly threw the frail man out for asking the question as McCain mocked the man. At the same meeting, he was asked why he supported Agenda 21 policies and he stated I have never heard of Agenda 21 policies. I witnessed these events with my own eyes.Read the rest at the link below "A Nation Of Sheep Soon Begets A Government Of Wolves"



"When Injustice Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty"



"For what are fifty, what a thousand slaves, match'd to the sinew of a single arm that strikes for Liberty?"



" Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?"

Galatians 4:16 (KJV)

ACAPULCO, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexico's deputy finance minister said on Thursday the government was considering using part of a $15.4 billion public income stabilization fund to pay some debt obligations for heavily leveraged state oil company Pemex.

The finance ministry is working on a new design for the fund to make it counter cyclical, deputy minister Arturo Herrera said in an interview with TV network ADN40, during a banking conference in Acapulco.

Grappling with Pemex's financial health has been a key challenge for President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office in December. The entity holds roughly $106 billion in financial debt, the highest amount of any state oil firm in Latin America.

"We'd like to design it as a counter cyclical fund, like the copper funds in Chile are designed, where the resources are used not when the government wants to, but when the economy makes them necessary... In times of abundance, you put money into these resources," he said.

"As a second part of the fund, we'd like to use it to pay some of the debt obligations that Pemex has," he said.

Pemex has some $16 billion of debt payments due by the end of next year. Herrera said Mexico's fund has a generous margin that could be put to helping Pemex.

Herrera said he expected to make an announcement in the next two or three weeks on the plan to use the public income stabilization fund, which holds about 290 billion pesos ($15.4 billion).

Rating agency Fitch downgraded Pemex's credit rating in late January to one level above junk status, citing the company's high leverage and tax burden.

In February, Mexico said it would inject $3.9 billion into Pemex, promising to strengthen its finances and prevent a further credit downgrade. Investors largely saw the plan as only a short-term fix.

Chile has two sovereign wealth funds. Unusual for Latin American countries, they were created to help finance pensions and as a "rainy day fund" for times of economic stress.

(Reporting by Dave Graham and Stefanie Eschenbacher in Acapulco; and Adriana Barrera and Frank Jack Daniel in Mexico City; Writing by Daina Beth Solomon)Moped muggers Joshua Scales, 18, and James Hicks, 20 (SWNS)

A pair of moped muggers who left a young woman in a coma while using her bank card to buy ice cream and vodka have been jailed for a total of 14 years.

James Hicks, 20, and Joshua Scales, 18, carried out the robbery on a stolen moped in June last year as their victim walked home from a tube station.

Hospital pharmacist Piruntha Palarasa was listening to music on headphones at around 9pm when she was hunted down on a quiet residential street in Edgware, north London.

The 25-year-old bravely struggled to keep hold of her handbag and phone as the moped mounted the pavement and both thugs tried to grab her belongings.

Joshua Scales was described as dangerous by the judge (SWNS)

Scales then punched her in the head causing her to fall onto the pavement and fracture her skull, Harrow Crown Court was told.

Prosecutor Louise Oakley told the court Miss Palarasa made a miraculous recovery after being kept in an induced coma for nearly three weeks.

Miss Palarasa said in a statement that she had to learn to walk and speak again after coming out of her induced coma and still suffers from nightmares and double vision for which she wears glasses. She previously had 20:20 vision.

Within 10 minutes of the attack, Hicks and Scales were using her cards.

Sentencing them, Judge Rosa Dean said: She was minding her own business listening to music on her phone and on a residential street and she  in her words  was hunted down by you both.

You both decided to go for her bag, pulling it even though she was shouting at you to get away. You were shouting at her to give it up.

Read more:

Bodies of 300 climbers who died on Mount Everest begin emerging as snow thaws

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The moped muggers both pleaded guilty with Hicks also admitting six counts of fraud relating to the use of her bank cards after the attack and Scales admitting to three.

Hicks also admitted two other robberies on May 25 last year.

Story continues

Scales additionally admitted one count of theft relating to money stolen from a safe at his childrens home on May 11 and possession of cannabis when he was arrested three days after the June 4 robbery.

James Hicks (SWNS)

CCTV of the incident shows Scales and Hicks passing by the woman before coming back around and mounting the pavement to chase her.

Scales, of Newham, east London, was handed an extended sentence after the judge ruled he was dangerous.

Judge Dean said: It seems to me sadly that your behaviour has now been out of control for many years. Your criminal record is serious. Court orders in the past have had no control over you.

He was jailed for a total of six years and four months with an extended licence period of three years.

Hicks, of no fixed address, was jailed for seven-and-a-half years.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UKNow that weve all had a good airing of grievances about elite colleges and their attendant injustices, lets get some perspective.

While the numbers of high-school graduates heading off to college have increased in recent years, the percentages graduating with a four-year degree have not increased much. Many students, especially those who are the first in their families to attend college, drop out before receiving a degree. (They cannot drop out of student-loan payments, though.)

Data from the Lumina Foundation show that among Americans aged 2564, 52.4 percent have no more than a high-school diploma (though 15.4 percent of them attended college for a while). An additional 5.2 percent received a certificate of some kind, and 9.2 percent obtained an associates degree. What most people think of when you say college is a four-year institution. Only 21.1 percent received bachelors degrees, and another 12.2 percent also earned graduate degrees. Adding the last two categories brings the fraction of Americans with college or graduate degrees to just over one-third.

While most of the conversation in the past week has focused on highly selective colleges such as Yale and Penn, its important to remember that only a small number of Americas colleges are selective. As FiveThirtyEight has reported, more than 75 percent of undergrads attend colleges that accept at least half of all applicants. The number who attend selective colleges  i.e., schools that accept 25 percent or fewer  is just 4 percent. And the number who attend schools in the very top tier, colleges that reject 90 percent or more, can be counted on your fingers and toes. You can probably guess most of them. (Though not all. On this U.S. News list, Pomona College came in at No. 11, and the Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute came in first.) Less than 1 percent of college students attend these elite schools.

Most students attend commuter schools, which tend to be community colleges. Even among those at four-year institutions, almost 25 percent attend part-time. Half of college students are also working, not getting plastered at frat parties.

Story continues

Theres a healthy debate in policy circles about whether our current cultural preoccupation with college for all is a good thing. Some people who are funneled toward college might be a better fit for vocational training, apprenticeships, or other life paths; and while there is no doubt about the association between college completion and higher income, there is uncertainty about the causal relationship.

Rather than gnash our collective teeth about whether Jason or Jessica can get into MIT, we might want to focus on all students, those who are headed for college and those who are not. Every student in elementary and high school should be learning about the success sequence. The phrase was introduced by Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution and has lately been reinforced with a study by W. Bradford Wilcox and Wendy Wang of the Institute for Family Studies.

What theyve found is that students have it within their power to virtually guarantee a middle- or upper-class income if they follow three steps. Those three basics are 1) finish high school, 2) get a full-time job, and 3) get married before having children. Young people who follow all three steps have only a 3 percent likelihood of living in poverty when they reach young adulthood. Eighty-six percent of Millennials who put marriage first had incomes in the middle or upper third, compared with 53 percent who had children before marriage. The success sequence works for those born into poverty, too. Seventy-one percent of Millennials who grew up in the bottom third of the income distribution were in the middle or upper third by young adulthood if they followed the three steps. Among African Americans, 76 percent who followed the success sequence achieved the middle class or above, and among Hispanics, the percentage was 81 percent.

With all of the emphasis on a tiny sliver of the top 1 percent of students, most young people can get the impression that they are doomed to a lesser life. In fact, avoiding a few pitfalls like dropping out of high school, having a baby out of wedlock, and failing to find employment is a ticket to success.

Theres a bias among writer types to pay attention to Princeton and Columbia. But thats not really where the action is in helping most Americans.

 2019 Creators.com

More from National ReviewBy Rania El Gamal, Alex Lawler and Dmitry Zhdannikov

DUBAI/LONDON (Reuters) - Budget needs are forcing Saudi Arabia to push for oil prices of at least $70 per barrel this year, industry sources say, even though U.S. shale oil producers could benefit and Riyadh's share of global crude markets might be further eroded.

Riyadh, OPEC's de facto leader, said it was steeply cutting exports to its main customers in March and April despite refiners asking for more of its oil. The move defies U.S. President Donald Trump's demands for OPEC to help reduce prices while he toughens sanctions on oil producers Iran and Venezuela.

The export cuts are designed to prop up prices, sources close to Saudi oil policy say. Saudi officials say the kingdom's output policies are merely intended to balance the world market and reduce high inventories.

"The Saudis want oil at $70 at least and are not worried about too much shale oil," said one industry source familiar with Saudi oil policy.

Another source said Saudi Arabia wanted to "put a floor under oil prices" at $70 or slightly lower, and added: "No one at OPEC can talk about output increases now."

Officially, Saudi Arabia, which plans to raise government spending to boost economic growth, does not have a price target. It says price levels are determined by the market and that it is merely targeting a balance of global supply and demand.

Even a price of around $70 a barrel would not balance Saudi Arabia's books this year, according to figures cited by Jihad Azour, director of the International Monetary Fund's Middle East and Central Asia department in February. For that, he said, Riyadh needs oil prices at $80-$85 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, also wants to make sure it avoids a repeat of the 2014-2016 oil price crash below $30 per barrel, sources familiar with Saudi policy said.

LOSS OF MARKET SHARE

Saudi Arabia plans to reduce March and April oil production to under 10 million barrels per day -- below its official OPEC output target of 10.3 million bpd.

Story continues

A Saudi official told Reuters this month that despite strong demand from customers, state oil giant Saudi Aramco had cut its allocations for April by 635,000 bpd below nominations -- requests made by refiners and clients for crude.

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said such swings were not unusual because last year the kingdom had raised output and exports above targets to avoid imminent shortages.

Saudi Arabia has also been advocating an extension of OPEC-led supply cuts beyond June until the end of 2019.

Russia, which is not an OPEC member but is cutting output in tandem with OPEC, can balance its budget at oil prices of $55 per barrel and has not made clear yet whether it is prepared to extend them when OPEC next meets in June.

"With budget needs at above $85 per barrel, the Saudis desperately need prices at above $70 per barrel," said Gary Ross, CEO of Black Gold Investors and a veteran OPEC watcher.

"They also need to convince Russia that the strategy of output cuts makes sense despite the loss of market share to the United States," he said.

The United States and Russia produce 12 million and 11 million bpd respectively. Unlike Russia, the United States pumps at will via its commercial energy sector, led by shale. The International Energy Agency forecasts its output will soar by another 4 million bpd in the next five years.

Those increases would be likely to outpace the growth of global demand and give Washington an even bigger share of the global market, making it a bigger exporter than Saudi Arabia.

PRESSURE FROM TRUMP

Riyadh has long been a close ally of the United States and the two countries have coordinated oil policy more closely since Trump became president than under his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Trump has supported Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite a global outcry over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government, and has made clear he expects OPEC to help lower global oil prices.

Last year, Saudi Arabia raised output steeply under pressure from Washington. But it later heard that the United States had granted Iranian oil customers unexpectedly generous waivers and the price of oil subsequently fell to $50 per barrel.

On Monday, OPEC and its allies, led by Russia, scrapped a planned meeting in April and will decide instead whether to extend output cuts in June, once the market has assessed the impact of new U.S. sanctions on Iran due in May over its non-compliance with a deal to curb its nuclear program.

"We have to wait and see what the Americans will do first," a second OPEC source said.

There is, however, no guarantee Saudi policy will remain unchanged if Washington puts pressure on Riyadh to raise supply.

"They (the Saudis) do care about Trump, but they can't do whatever he says every time," an OPEC source said.

(Editing by Timothy Heritage)Not even Mount Everest appears immune to global warming. And a new concern has emerged as a result of glacial melting: exposed bodies.

Melting ice and snow on Everest caused by higher temperatures is revealing the bodies of dead climbers, CNN reported.

Ang Tshering Sherpa, former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, told CNN that climbers are finding the bodies as a result of climate change, because "snow and glaciers are fast-melting."

Bodies are being removed from the Chinese side of Everest as the spring climbing season is about to begin, BBC reported.

Start the day smarter: Get USA TODAY's Daily Briefing in your inbox

The Expedition Operators Association of Nepal told BBC that removing the bodies has been difficult because of a law requiring the involvement of government agencies.

Mount Everest peeks through the clouds in this Sept.

CNN reported more than 200 people have died on Everest's peak since 1922.

"This issue needs to be prioritized by both the government and the mountaineering industry," Dambar Parajuli, president of the expedition operators association, told BBC.

Removing the bodies also is expensive. According to a 2016 report from The Washington Post, it can cost $30,000 to $70,000 to retrieve a body from the mountain.

Most deaths on Everest occur in the "death zone," a portion of the mountain above 26,000 feet, the Post reported.

A report released in February spells out fears of glacial melting in the Himalayas. The report from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development says that if global warming continues, two-thirds of Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2100 and that the melting ice could cause major floods and destroy crops.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mount Everest glaciers are melting. And it's exposing the bodies of dead climbersWASHINGTON (AP)  Special counsel Robert Mueller closed his long and contentious Russia investigation with no new charges Friday, ending the probe that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trump's presidency but launching a fresh wave of political battles over the still-confidential findings.

The report's details remained a mystery, accessible to only a handful of Justice Department officials while Attorney General William Barr prepared to release the "principal conclusions" soon. But the closure of the 22-month probe without additional indictments by Mueller was welcome news to some in Trump's orbit who had feared a final round of charges could ensnare more Trump associates, including members of the president's family.

The Justice Department said the report was delivered by a security officer Friday afternoon to the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and then it went to Barr. Word of the delivery triggered reactions across Washington, including Democrats' demands that it be quickly released to the public and Republicans' contentions that it ended two years of wasted time and money.

The next step is up to Barr, who is charged with writing his own account of Mueller's findings and sending it to Congress. In a letter to lawmakers , he declared he was committed to transparency and speed. He said he could provide details as soon as this weekend.

The White House sought to keep some distance from the report, saying it had not seen or been briefed on the document. Trump, surrounded by advisers and political supporters at his resort in Florida, stayed uncharacteristically quiet on Twitter.

With no details released at this point, it's not known whether Mueller's report answers the core questions of his investigation: Did Trump's campaign collude with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of the celebrity businessman? Also, did Trump take steps later, including by firing his FBI director, to obstruct the probe?

Story continues

But the delivery of the report does mean the investigation has concluded without any public charges of a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, or of obstruction by the president. A Justice Department official confirmed that Mueller was not recommending any further indictments.

That person, who described the document as "comprehensive," was not authorized to discuss the probe and asked for anonymity.

That's good news for a handful of Trump associates and family members dogged by speculation of possible wrongdoing. They include Donald Trump Jr., who had a role in arranging a Trump Tower meeting at the height of the 2016 election campaign with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was interviewed at least twice by Mueller's prosecutors. It wasn't immediately clear whether Mueller might have referred additional investigations to the Justice Department.

All told, Mueller charged 34 people, including the president's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and three Russian companies. Twenty-five Russians were indicted on charges related to election interference, accused either of hacking Democratic email accounts during the campaign or of orchestrating a social media campaign that spread disinformation on the internet. Five Trump aides pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with Mueller and a sixth, longtime confidant Roger Stone, is awaiting trial on charges that he lied to Congress and engaged in witness tampering.

It's unclear what steps Mueller might take if he uncovered what he believes to be criminal wrongdoing by Trump, in light of Justice Department legal opinions that have held that sitting presidents may not be indicted.

In his letter to lawmakers, Barr noted the Justice Department had not denied any request from the special counsel, something Barr would have been required to disclose to ensure there was no political inference. Trump was never interviewed in person, but submitted answers to questions in writing.

The mere delivery of the confidential findings set off swift, full-throated demands from Democrats for full release of Mueller's report and the supporting evidence collected during the sweeping probe. As Mueller's probe has wound down, Democrats have increasingly shifted their focus to their own investigations, ensuring the special counsel's would not be the last word on the matter.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared it "imperative" to make the full report public, a call echoed by several Democrats vying to challenge Trump in 2020.

"The American people have a right to the truth," Schumer and Pelosi said in a joint statement.

Democrats also expressed concern that Trump would try to get a "sneak preview" of the findings.

"The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public," they said in a joint statement.

It was not clear whether Trump would have early access to Mueller's findings. Spokeswoman Sarah Sanders suggested the White House would not interfere, saying "we look forward to the process taking its course." But Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, told The Associated Press Friday that the legal team would seek to get "an early look" before they were made public.

Giuliani said it was "appropriate" for the White House to be able "to review matters of executive privilege." He said had received no assurances from the Department of Justice on that front. He later softened his stance, saying the decision was "up to DOJ and we are confident it will be handled properly."

The White House did receive a brief heads-up on the report's arrival Friday. Barr's chief of staff called White House Counsel Emmet Flood Friday about 20 minutes before sending the letter went to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate and House Judiciary committees.

The chairman of the Senate panel, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, was keynote speaker Friday night at a Palm Beach County GOP dinner at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

The president and first lady Melania Trump stopped by the dinner and made a few minutes of remarks but didn't mention the Mueller report, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share details of the event, which was closed to the press.

Barr has said he wants to make as much public as possible, but any efforts to withhold details is sure to prompt a tussle between the Justice Department and lawmakers who may subpoena Mueller and his investigators to testify before Congress. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., threatened a subpoena Friday.

Such a move would likely be vigorously contested by the Trump administration.

The conclusion of Mueller's investigation does not remove legal peril for the president . Trump faces a separate Justice Department investigation in New York into hush money payments during the campaign to two women who say they had sex with him years before the election. He's also been implicated in a potential campaign finance violation by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who says Trump asked him to arrange the transactions. Federal prosecutors, also in New York, have been investigating foreign contributions made to the president's inaugural committee.

No matter the findings in Mueller's report, the investigation has already illuminated Russia's assault on the American political system, painted the Trump campaign as eager to exploit the release of hacked Democratic emails and exposed lies by Trump aides aimed at covering up their Russia-related contacts.

The special counsel brought a sweeping indictment accusing Russian military intelligence officers of hacking Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign and other Democratic groups during the 2016 campaign. He charged another group of Russians with carrying out a large-scale social media disinformation campaign against the American political process that also sought to help Trump and hurt Clinton.

Mueller also initiated the investigation into Michael Cohen, the president's former lawyer, who pleaded guilty in New York to campaign finance violations arising from the hush money payments and in the Mueller probe to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. Another Trump confidant, Stone, is awaiting trial on charges that he lied about his pursuit of Russian-hacked emails ultimately released by WikiLeaks.

Mueller has also been investigating whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation. Since the special counsel's appointment in May 2017, Trump has increasingly tried to undermine the probe by calling it a "witch hunt" and repeatedly proclaiming there was "NO COLLUSION" with Russia.

But one week before Mueller's appointment, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, later saying he was thinking of "this Russia thing" at the time.

___

Associated Press writer Jonathan Lemire in New York contributed to this report.By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday handed in a confidential report on his investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election and any potential wrongdoing by U.S. President Donald Trump, setting off a clamor from lawmakers in both parties for the document's quick release. Marking the end of his nearly two-year investigation that ensnared former Trump aides and Russian intelligence officers and cast a cloud over the Republican businessman's presidency, Mueller submitted the report to Attorney General William Barr, the Justice Department said. It was not known if Mueller found criminal conduct by Trump or his campaign, beyond the charges already leveled against several aides. In all, Mueller brought charges against 34 people and three companies. Mueller, a former FBI director, had been examining since May 2017 whether Trump's campaign conspired with Moscow to try to influence the election and whether the Republican president later unlawfully tried to obstruct his investigation. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction. Russia has denied election interference. Trump has sought to discredit the investigation, calling it a "witch hunt" and accusing Mueller of conflicts of interest. But he said on Wednesday he does not mind if the public is allowed to see the report. Mueller did not recommend any further indictments, a senior Justice Department official said, in a sign that there might be no more criminal charges against Trump associates arising from the investigation. But it was not immediately clear whether the special counsel had any sealed indictments that could later be disclosed. The report was not immediately made public. Barr, the top U.S. law enforcement officer and a Trump appointee, will have to decide how much of it to disclose. Barr told lawmakers in a letter he may be able to provide the "principal conclusions" of Mueller's findings to Congress as soon as this weekend and added that he was "committed to as much transparency as possible." Under regulations governing special counsel investigations, the attorney general must share an outline of Mueller's report with Democratic and Republican leaders of the judiciary committees in Congress but it is largely up to him what to make public. THE TRUMP QUESTION The big question now is whether the report contains allegations of wrongdoing by Trump himself. Key aides of Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, national security adviser Michael Flynn and personal lawyer Michael Cohen, have already either been convicted or pleaded guilty to charges brought by Mueller. Lawmakers from both parties called for prompt release of the report to key congressional committees and to the public. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer - the two top Democrats in Congress - said it was "imperative" the full report be made public, that Barr not give Trump and his team a "sneak preview" of the findings and that the White House not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts are made public. They said the investigation focused on questions that "go to the integrity of our democracy itself: whether foreign powers corruptly interfered in our elections, and whether unlawful means were used to hinder that investigation." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in Congress, said, "The attorney general has said he intends to provide as much information as possible. As I have said previously, I sincerely hope he will do so as soon as he can, and with as much openness and transparency as possible." The White House has not received or been briefed on the report, spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said. "The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course," Sanders added. When the Justice Department announced the arrival of the report, Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he met on Friday with a group of Caribbean leaders. Staff members at the private club were setting up for a Lincoln Day dinner fundraiser for a local branch of the Republican Party. Programs for the event featured an image of a $5 bill with 19th century President Abraham Lincoln sporting a red Trump campaign hat with the slogan "Keep America Great" on it. Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son, posted a picture on Twitter of his family on a fishing trip. "Great day on the water with my little men for their spring break," he wrote. Even if the Mueller report exonerates Trump, that may not spell the end to his legal troubles. Cohen pleaded guilty in August to campaign finance violations in a case overseen by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who said in court filings that Cohen carried out the crimes at the direction of Trump. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan is also looking at the spending of Trump's inaugural committee and business practices at the Trump Organization, the family's company. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Moscow meddled in the election with a campaign of email hacking and online propaganda aimed at sowing discord in the United States, hurting Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and helping Trump. Mueller's investigators have looked into a large number of contacts between people associated with Trump's campaign and Russia such as a meeting in New York's Trump Tower between members of the president's inner circle including his eldest son and a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer five months before the election. Mueller sought to determine whether the campaign coordinated with Moscow, though it was not immediately clear whether the special counsel found evidence of a conspiracy. QUESTIONS ABOUT OBSTRUCTION Mueller also examined whether Trump committed obstruction of justice by trying to hinder the investigation, looking into acts such as urging FBI Director James Comey to drop a probe of Flynn's contacts with Russia, the subsequent firing of Comey, his attacks on the special counsel, dangling of pardons for former aides and the ouster of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Mueller's team already has signaled the direction of the investigation through indictments and hundreds of related court filings that have offered extensive details about Russian interference in the election. Trump fired Flynn in February 2017 after it emerged he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and the FBI about his dealings with the then-Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. In May 2017, he ousted Comey, whose agency had been leading the Russia investigation. Comey's firing led the Justice Department to appoint Mueller to take over the probe. Congressional Democrats, who took over control of the U.S. House of Representatives in January, have said they plan to push for a release of the full Mueller report and said they would subpoena it and file suit if necessary. A small number of House Democrats have pushed for Congress to impeach Trump and remove him from office but the party's leadership including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged caution. No president has every been removed from office via impeachment. Several House committees in the meantime are conducting aggressive investigations of Trump and people around him. The last president to be impeached by the House, Democrat Bill Clinton, was acquitted by the Senate in 1999 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, meaning he was not removed from office. In prosecuting Manafort, Mueller showed how the former campaign chairman made millions of dollars working for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, while also exposing his ties to a consultant who the special counsel said was connected to Russian intelligence. Manafort in the two cases prosecuted by Mueller's team was sentenced to 7-1/2 years in prison. The special counsel's case against Cohen revealed that Trump was negotiating to build a skyscraper in Moscow late into the 2016 campaign, contradicting statements from Trump at the time that he had nothing to do with the Russians. The special counsel also indicted longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, a Republican operative and a self-proclaimed political "dirty trickster." Stone is accused of telling members of Trump's campaign that he knew in advance of plans by the WikiLeaks website to release emails damaging to Clinton that were stolen by Russia (Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld and Steve Holland in Washington, Nathan Layne in New York and Roberta Rampton in Florida; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Will Dunham)San Juan Teotihuacan (Mexico) (AFP) - Thousands of people dressed in white flocked to Mexico's ancient pyramids Thursday, seeking to soak up the rays of the spring equinox sun in body and spirit.

The equinox held special significance for many of Mexico's pre-Columbian peoples, who built their architecture around it in some cases.

Famous examples include the Mayan pyramid of Kukulkan, in the ancient city of Chichen Itza, where at the moment of the equinox, the sun's rays generate a shadow of seven triangles that look like a serpent descending the stairs.

Also on the Yucatan peninsula, at the Temple of the Seven Dolls in Dzibilchaltun, the sun aligns precisely with a pair of east- and west-facing doors this time each year, illuminating the structure with a burst of light.

Dressed in traditional indigenous garb, dancers performed ceremonies at these and other sites, including the nearly 2,000-year-old sun pyramid of Teotihuacan, near Mexico City.

Such ancient customs have mingled with New Age spirituality to draw white-clad visitors from around the world seeking to recharge their energy with the rays of the spring sun.

Others are simply seeking the perfect selfie atop the stunning pyramids.

"'Teotihuacan' means 'the place where men become gods,' so we're here to steal a little bit of its energy," said Alfonso Martinez, 53, a Mexican man who had traveled from the eastern state of Veracruz.

Silvia Torres, 71, said she was there because "it fills me with energy, fills me with strength, fills me with power, fills me with wisdom."

"As human beings, we are energy, and I agree that we can charge ourselves with energy," added Erick Gonzalez, a 37-year-old nurse.Lunaticoutpost.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program , anaffiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.Amazon, the Amazon logo, MYHABIT, and the MYHABIT logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.Don't be a pest to the forum.No profanity in thread-titles or usernamesNo excessive profanity in postsNo Racism, Antisemitism + HateNo calls for violence against anyone..This website exists for fun and discussion only. The reader is responsible for discerning the validity, factuality or implications of information posted here, be it fictional or based on real events. The content of posts on this site, including but not limited to links to other web sites, are the expressed opinion of the original poster and are in no way representative of or endorsed by the owners or administration of this website. The posts on this website are the opinion of the specific author and are not statements of advice, opinion, or factual information on behalf of the owner or administration of LunaticOutPost.Com. The owners or administration of this website can't be hold responsible for content hosted on sites that posters link to in; including, but not limited to, posts, signatures, private messages and such. This site may contain content not suitable for minors and if you feel you might be offended by such content, you should log off immediately.This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Users may make such material available in an effort to advance awareness and understanding of issues relating to civil rights, economics, individual rights, international affairs, liberty, science & technology, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.In accordance with industry accepted best practices we ask that users limit their copy / paste of copyrighted material to the relevant portions of the article you wish to discuss (no more than 50% of the source material) provide a link back to the original articleIf you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe a post on this website falls outside the boundaries of "Fair Use" and legitimately infringes on yours or your clients copyright please contact [email protected] This website is owned by :Marco ZwaneveldDrijfriemstraat 522516 XR The HagueNetherlands.I will not rent, sell, share or otherwise disclose your personal information to any third party.We might contact you from time to time regarding your purchases or the services (like forums and announcement lists) you have subscribed to.Some of the 3rd party advertisers on lunaticoutpost.com may use cookiesto track peformance and/or to serve relevant ads.If you wish to read more and/or opt out of such cookies, please visit: http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/Seoul (AFP) - North Korea pulled its staff out of an inter-Korean liaison office Friday, Seoul said, weeks after leader Kim Jong Un's summit with US President Donald Trump ended without agreement.

The office in the Northern city of Kaesong was opened in September as the two Koreas knitted closer ties, but the South's vice unification minister Chun Hae-sung told reporters Pyongyang had "notified the South they are pulling out of the liaison office".

The decision had been taken "in accordance with an order from an upper command", he said, adding: "They said they didn't care whether we stayed at the liaison office or not."

The South's President Moon Jae-in was instrumental in brokering talks between the nuclear-armed, sanctions-hit North and Washington, Seoul's key security ally.

Moon has long backed engagement with the North to bring it to the negotiating table, and has been pushing the carrot of inter-Korean development projects, among them the restarting of an industrial zone also in Kaesong and lucrative cross-border tourist visits by Southerners to the North's picturesque Mount Kumgang.

But the sanctions currently in place effectively block their resumption, while a preliminary study for a plan to renovate the North's decrepit rail system was repeatedly delayed.

Questions were even raised over whether supplies provided to set up the liaison office were a sanctions violation.

The failure by Kim and Trump to reach agreement in Hanoi last month on walking back Pyongyang's nuclear programme in exchange for relaxation of the measures against it has raised questions over the future of the wider process.

In Vietnam both sides expressed willingness to talk further, but it has since emerged that Washington presented Kim with a wider definition of what it regards as denuclearisation.

A senior Pyongyang diplomat told reporters last week that the North was considering suspending nuclear talks with the US.

Story continues

Analysts said Friday's decision could be a sign Pyongyang felt Seoul was unable to exert sufficient influence on Washington.

"With the pull-out, the North is pressuring the South to do more as a middle man between Pyongyang and Washington after it didn't get the resumption of the Kaesong industrial complex and Mount Kumgang tours," said Yoo Ho-yeol, professor of North Korean studies at Korea University.

"It could be seen as either pressure, or a warning," he told AFP. "Internally, Pyongyang could use the withdrawal as a propaganda message to its people that it is taking a lead when it comes to inter-Korean relations."

The North has recently summoned several of its top diplomats around the world back to Pyongyang.

Cheong Seong-chang, a senior researcher at the private Sejong Institute, said that move and Friday's pull-out could signal "that the North is considering a shift in denuclearisation strategy and foreign policy".

It was "hard to rule out a hardline statement", he added.

In his New Year speech -- a key political event in the North -- Kim said without giving details that Pyongyang might see a "new way for defending the sovereignty of the country and the supreme interests of the state" if the US persisted with sanctions.

- 'Round-the-clock consultation' -

Seoul sought to keep the door open to more contact.

"We regret the North's decision," vice minister Chun said. "Though North Korea has pulled out, we will continue to work at the liaison office as usual."

The facility opened three months after Kim signed a vague pledge at his first summit with Trump in Singapore to work towards "denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula", and shortly before Moon went to Pyongyang for his third summit with Kim last year.

It stands in a city that was initially part of the South after Moscow and Washington divided Korea between them in the closing days of World War II, but found itself in the North after the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.

The four-storey building includes separate Northern and Southern offices and a joint conference room.

When it opened Seoul's unification ministry said it would become a "round-the-clock consultation and communication channel" for advancing inter-Korean relations, improving ties between the US and the North, and easing military tensions.

But the Hanoi summit took place without the usual several rounds of preliminary negotiations between lower-rank officials, and broke up without even a joint statement.

A top security adviser to Moon, Moon Chung-in, told AFP last week that Pyongyang needed to take "actual action" on denuclearisation to persuade the US to grant concessions.

The South's presidency held an emergency meeting of the National Security Council after the North pulled out of the liaison office on Friday.North Korea pulled its staff out of an inter-Korean liaison office Friday, Seoul said, weeks after leader Kim Jong Un's summit with US President Donald Trump ended without agreement.

The office in the Northern city of Kaesong was opened in September as the two Koreas knitted closer ties, but the South's vice unification minister Chun Hae-sung told reporters Pyongyang had "notified the South they are pulling out of the liaison office".

The decision had been taken "in accordance with an order from an upper command", he said, adding: "They said they didn't care whether we stayed at the liaison office or not."

The South's President Moon Jae-in was instrumental in brokering the talks process between the nuclear-armed, sanctions-hit North and the US, Seoul's key security ally.

Moon has long backed engagement with the North to bring it to the negotiating table, and has been pushing the carrot of inter-Korean development projects, among them an industrial zone also in Kaesong and cross-border tourism for Southerners.

But the failure by Kim and Trump to reach agreement in Hanoi last month on walking back Pyongyang's nuclear programme in exchange for relaxation of the measures against it has raised questions over the future of the process, despite both sides' expressed willingness to talk further.

In his New Year speech -- a key political event in the North -- Kim said without giving details that Pyongyang might see a "new way for defending the sovereignty of the country and the supreme interests of the state" if the US persisted with sanctions.

Seoul sought to keep the door open to more contact.

"We regret the North's decision," Chun said. "Though North Korea has pulled out, we will continue to work at the liaison office as usual."Coming to work when sick is a bad idea. Photo: PeopleImages/Getty

If youre ever come down with a bad cold on a weekday, the chances are youve dosed up on painkillers, stuffed tissues into your bag and headed into work anyway. And like the likelihood is, youve infected the person next to you, and the person next to them.

In the UK, the number of days taken off because of sickness dropped to a record low last year. The Office for National Statistics found the average number of sick days taken by UK workers fell to 4.1 days in 2017, a sharp decline from the 7.2 days recorded in 1993 when the data was first collected.

So are we really just a healthier workforce, or are there other reasons why we arent calling in sick  perhaps when we should?

Whether were sick enough to take a day off is a source of contention among workers, as theres no specific rulebook which states just how unwell you should be. In many workplaces, though, stigma surrounding taking time off due to illness prevents many people from staying at home to recover.

Presenteeism, or people coming into work when they are ill, has more than tripled since 2010, according to a 2018 survey by CIPD and Simply Health. The research found 86% of over 1,000 respondents said they had observed presenteeism in their organisation over the last 12 months, compared with 72% in 2016 and just 26% in 2010.

There are several reasons why employees are coming into work when they are physically or mentally unwell. Fears over job insecurity or a lack of pay when absent are key issues, as is the fear of looking lazy or a heavy workload. If youre afraid of losing your job or earning less money when youre ill, youre more likely to force yourself into the office.

Sickness absence is low because presenteeism is high, Sir Cary Cooper, a professor at Manchester Business School, said in response to the ONS data.

Given the aftermath of the recession and with Brexit looming people are frightened to be off ill, so they show facetime when ill or feeling low or job dissatisfied. They do not want high levels of absenteeism on their HR record, which they feel will make them vulnerable.

Story continues

Moreover, only a handful or companies are addressing the issue. Only a quarter of those who responded to the CIPD survey saying they have experienced presenteeism said their organisation has taken steps to discourage it over the last year.

This is, however, to the detriment of organisations. People are significantly less productive when they are unwell, and coming into work and posing a risk to other staff too. And if youre ill, youre more likely to make mistakes, too.

As a result, presenteeism can actually be more expensive for a business. Research from Nottingham Business School (NBS) in 2017 found that the average UK employee spends almost two weeks a year at work while ill  costing firms more than 4,000 per person due to low productivity.

Struggling into work despite feeling under the weather may be applauded by some, but some survey respondents said they were functioning at as little as 20% of average workplace capacity during presenteeism.

Employers need to be proactive and address presenteeism by encouraging the employee to report health problems theyre experiencing, then take steps to help them progress back to full productivity rather than going in the opposite direction and taking more time off. Work can be good for health, but only if its well managed, said Zara Whysall, senior lecturer in business and management at NBS.

Measures such as improvements to the workplace and how tasks are designed and managed, an open discussion between employer and employee on health concerns as well as encouragement to seek early treatment can all enable employees to continue working without exacerbating health.SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea on Friday pulled out of a liaison office with South Korea just north of their armed border, in a setback for South Korean President Moon Jae-in's effort to end hostility and in the wake of a failed summit between the North and the United States. North Korea conveyed the decision during a weekly meeting with the South on Friday morning saying it was on "instructions from a higher level," South Korea's Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung told a news briefing. (Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; Editing by Jack Kim & Simon Cameron-Moore)David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk Political Research Center, takes a look at the new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll.

Voters disillusioned with Americas major parties could be the deciding factor in the 2020 presidential election.

The latest Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll shows 38.5 percent of voters would choose to reelect President Trump; 35.9 percent plan to vote for the Democratic nominee; 11 percent of voters would vote for a third-party candidate; and 14 percent were undecided.

The third-party preference was particularly strong among independents: 26 percent of self-described moderate independent voters said theyd take that route, and 33 percent of independent voters who consider themselves liberal prefer a third-party candidate. Pass the Tums.

Poll: Democrats care more about victory than ideology in 2020 nominee

The big shots in the Democratic and Republican parties are going to spend the next year or so ignoring third-party candidates as each tries to define its core values and key issues for 2020. Over the next year youll hear third-party candidates wont decide this election, people will either vote for or against Trump and third-party candidates very rarely get on all 50 state ballots.

As challengers, Democratic candidates will need to reconcile positions not just on a host of traditional issues, including the economy, health care and education, but also on progressive issues like the Green New Deal, taxing the wealthy, breaking up tech companies and free college tuition.

President Trump will be focused on insulting his way through what projects to be token Republican opposition, and he will use the GOP primaries to run up big margins in various states and tweet about them.

If history is any guide, the last 90 days of the presidential campaign will show us a Democratic and Republican nominee abandoning their far-left and far-right political bases and tacking to the center in order to win over swing voters and independents.

Story continues

Meanwhile, third-party candidates won't find many potential voters among those who trust cable news outlets like CNN, MSNBC or FOXNEWS: 4 percent to 10 percent of these viewers prefer independent candidates. However, 16 percent of voters who trust traditional network newsABC, NBC and CBSwould choose a third-party candidate.

And then there are the third-party candidates. You dont need a long memory to know that the presence of third-party candidates can play a big role in determining an elections outcome.

Third-party votes in 2016 surpassed Trumps or Clintons margins of victory in many states. For example, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 10,704 votes in Michigan, while 250,124 votesnearly 25 times the margin of victorywere cast for third-party candidates. In Minnesota, Clinton defeated Trump by 44,765 votes, while 226,883 were cast for third-party candidates. In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22,748, while 153,180 votes were cast for third-party candidates. And this just didnt happen in the blue wall states. Independent voters exceeded margins of victory in a total of 13 states, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Virginia. Even in New Hampshire, Clinton defeated Trump by 2,736 votes, while 38,900 votes were cast for third-party candidates.

This isnt anything new. In 1992, independent Ross Perot won almost 20 million votes, and in 1996, he won 8 million, which was enough to keep the popular President Bill Clinton under 50 percent in his landslide win over Republican Bob Dole. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore beat Republican George W. Bush by about a half million votes nationally, while nearly 4 million people voted for third-party candidates. And in the disputed Florida count, Bush prevailed over Gore by just 537 votes after more than a month of counting ballots, while more than 135,000 votes went to other candidates, resulting in the election being tipped to Bush.

Today you can be assured that both Democrats and Republicans will agree on one important item come debate time: making it impossible for an independent candidate to reach the debate stage. And the League of Women Voters and other debate sponsors will oblige by setting rules to block out everyone else.

In this weeks poll, Trump, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party all had higher negatives than positives. For survey respondents, the third-party nominee is an outlet for disdain.

According to the U.S. Elections Project, about 90 million Americansall eligible to votedid not cast ballots in the 2012 and 2016 Presidential elections, either because they were not registered to vote or because they were registered and just skipped voting. Suffolk University polled nonvoters last year. Asked whether the two major political parties do a good job representing Americas views or if a third party or multiple parties are necessary, 22 percent said that the two parties are good enough, while 30 percent said a third party is necessary, and nearly 27 percent said multiple parties are necessary. Thats 57 percent crying out for more than two party choices. No wonder they dont vote.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Paleologos on the Poll: Will third-party voters decide the 2020 presidential election?Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - The Palestinian Authority faces a suffocating financial crisis after deep US aid cuts and an Israeli move to withhold tax transfers, sparking fears for the stability of the West Bank.

The authority, headed by President Mahmud Abbas, announced a package of emergency measures on March 10, including halving the salaries of many civil servants.

The United States has cut more than $500 million in Palestinian aid in the last year, though only a fraction of that went directly to the PA.

The PA has decided to refuse what little US aid remains on offer for fear of civil suits under new legislation passed by Congress.

Israel has also announced it intends to deduct around $10 million a month in taxes it collects for the PA in a dispute over payments to the families of prisoners in Israeli jails.

In response, Abbas has refused to receive any funds at all, labelling the Israeli reductions theft.

That will leave his government with a monthly shortfall of around $190 million for the length of the crisis.

The money makes up more than 50 percent of the PA's monthly revenues, with other funds coming from local taxes and foreign aid.

- Risk of 'explosion' -

While the impact of the cuts is still being assessed, analysts fear it could affect the stability of the occupied West Bank.

"If the economic situation remains so difficult and the PA is unable to pay salaries and provide services, in addition to continuing (Israeli) settlement expansion it will lead to an explosion," political analyst Jihad Harb said.

Abbas cut off relations with the US administration after President Donald Trump declared the disputed city of Jerusalem Israel's capital in December 2017.

The right-wing Israeli government, strongly backed by the US, has since sought to squeeze Abbas.

After a deadly anti-Israeli attack last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would withhold $138 million (123 million euros) in Palestinian revenues over the course of a year.

Story continues

Israel collects around $190 million a month in customs duties levied on goods destined for Palestinian markets that transit through its ports, and then transfers the money to the PA.

Israel said the amount it intended to withhold was equal to what is paid by the PA to the families of prisoners, or prisoners themselves, jailed for attacks on Israelis last year.

Many Palestinians view prisoners and those killed while carrying out attacks as heroes of the fight against Israeli occupation.

Israel says the payments encourage further violence.

Abbas recently accused Netanyahu's government of causing a "crippling economic crisis in the Palestinian Authority."

The PA also said in January it would refuse all further US government aid for fear of lawsuits under new US legislation targeting alleged support for "terrorism".

- US 'political decisions' -

Finance Minister Shukri Bishara announced earlier this month he had been forced to "adopt an emergency budget that includes restricted austerity measures."

Government employees paid over 2,000 shekels ($555) will receive only half their salaries until further notice.

Prisoner payments would continue in full, Bishara added.

Nasser Abdel Karim, a Ramallah-based economics professor, told AFP the PA, and the Palestinian economy more generally, remain totally controlled by and reliant on Israel.

The PA undertook similar financial measures in 2012 when Israel withheld taxes over Palestinian efforts to gain international recognition at the United Nations.

Abdel Karim said such crises are "repeated and disappear according to the development of the relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Israel or the countries that support (the PA)."

Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including now annexed east Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967 and Abbas's government has only limited autonomy in West Bank towns and cities.

"The problem is the lack of cash," economic journalist Jafar Sadaqa told AFP.

He said that while the PA had faced financial crises before, "this time is different because it comes as a cumulative result of political decisions taken by the United States."

Abbas appointed longtime ally Mohammad Shtayyeh as prime minister on March 10 to head a new government to oversee the crisis.

Abdel Karim believes the crisis could worsen after an Israeli general election next month "if a more right-wing Israeli government wins."

Netanyahu's outgoing government is already regarded as the most right-wing in Israel's history but on April 9 parties even further to the right have a realistic chance of winning seats in parliament for the first time.

Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts have been at a standstill since 2014, when a drive for a deal by the administration of President Barack Obama collapsed in the face of persistent Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank.Washington (AFP) - The annual Templeton Prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions to "affirming life's spiritual dimension," was awarded Tuesday to Brazilian Marcelo Gleiser -- a theoretical physicist dedicated to demonstrating science and religion are not enemies.

A physics and astronomy professor whose specializations include cosmology, 60-year-old Gleiser was born in Rio de Janeiro, and has been in the United States since 1986.

An agnostic, he doesn't believe in God -- but refuses to write off the possibility of God's existence completely.

"Atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method," Gleiser told AFP Monday from Dartmouth College, the New Hampshire university where he has taught since 1991.

"Atheism is a belief in non-belief. So you categorically deny something you have no evidence against."

"I'll keep an open mind because I understand that human knowledge is limited," he added.

The prize is funded by the John Templeton Foundation -- a philanthropic organization named after the American Presbyterian who made his fortune on Wall Street, and who set on "seeking proofs of divine agency in every branch of science", as The Economist put it.

Gleiser joins Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and dissident Soviet author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as recipients of the prize, first awarded in 1973. At 1.1 million ($1.5 million), the prize money well surpasses that of the Nobels.

The physicist focuses on making complex subjects accessible. He has written on climate change, Einstein, hurricanes, black holes, the human conscience -- tracing the links between the sciences and the humanities, including philosophy.

The author of five English-language books and hundreds of blog and press articles in the US and Brazil, Gleiser has also explored in depth how science and religion both try to respond to questions on the origins of life and the universe.

"The first thing you see in the Bible is a story of creation," he said. Whatever your religion, "everybody wants to know how the world came to be."

Story continues

This fundamental curiosity unites science and religion, though each provides very different answers: science has a methodology, where hypotheses are eliminated.

"Science can give answers to certain questions, up to a point," Gleiser pointed out.

"This has been known for a very long time in philosophy, it's called the problem of the first cause: we get stuck," the physicist, a father of five, said.

"We should have the humility to accept that there's mystery around us."

- Scientific arrogance -

So, what does he think of people who believe that the Earth was created in seven days?

"They position science as the enemy ... because they have a very antiquated way of thinking about science and religion in which all scientists try to kill God," he said.

"Science does not kill God."

On the other hand, he accuses the "new atheists" of doing a disservice to science by making an enemy out of religion: notably British scientist Richard Dawkins -- who called for the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI over pedophilia in the Catholic Church -- and the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, who criticized Mother Theresa.

For Gleiser, who grew up in Rio's Jewish community, religion is not just about believing in God: it provides a sense of identity and community

"At least half of the world population is that way," he said.

"It's extremely arrogant from scientists to come down from the ivory towers and make these declarations without understanding the social importance of belief systems."

"When you hear very famous scientists making pronouncements like ... cosmology has explained the origin of the universe and the whole, and we don't need God anymore. That's complete nonsense," he added.

"Because we have not explained the origin of the universe at all."Fox News

Actor Jussie Smollett was found guilty last week after he claimed he was the victim of a hate crime in 2019 and, of all things, a Subway sandwich was a key piece of evidence in the case against him, the former Chicago police Superintendent said, according to reports.(AP Photo/Mark Thiessen, File)

Monthly spending at Canadian cannabis stores fell for the first time since recreational legalization, Statistics Canada reported on Friday.

The agencys latest retail trade sales figures show January sales totaled $53.4 million, a 4.7 per cent decline from $55.9 million in December. StatCan started tracking sales at cannabis stores in October 2018, the month recreational sales were legalized nationwide.

Month-over-month sales declined in 10 provinces and territories in January. Data for Nunavut was not included in the report.

The largest negative swings were in Northwest Territories and Newfoundland and Labrador, where sales dropped 29.8 per cent and 25.6 per cent respectively.

British Columbia and Ontario were the only regions to report an untick. Sales in B.C. climbed 58.43 per cent in January compared to December. Ontario saw sales rise 2.6 per cent.

Canadas legal cannabis market is a patchwork of public and private online and brick-and-mortar sales, operating to varying degrees of consumer satisfaction.

In Ontario, for example, physical stores will not be able to open their doors until April 1.

Black market sales currently command the lions share of cannabis spending, according to StatCan.

Pot shops in Alberta raked in the most money in January with $14.0 million in sales. The province has allowed a robust private brick-and-mortar retail environment to develop since recreational legalization last October.

The sales slowdown at cannabis stores factored into broader retails sales weakness. StatCan reported that retail sales dropped for the third consecutive month in January, due in large part to weak auto sales.

The retail numbers add to the evidence that rising debt service costs and slower housing markets are slowing household spending growth, RBC Economics senior economist Nathan Janzen wrote in a note to clients on Friday. Household spending can no longer be counted on to drive above-trend economic growth in Canada.

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android.spo snouou

Vocem sine nomine audivit!

User ID: 350320

03-22-2019 09:14 AM



Posts: 67,593











Post: #1 Make it stop

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https://www.revealnews.org/article/us-go...-children/



The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government agency that cares for unaccompanied minors, has never made the shelters existence public or even disclosed them to the minors own attorneys in a landmark class-action case.



It remains unclear how many total sites are under operation, but there are at least five located in Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Virginia, holding at least 16 boys and girls for the resettlement agency, some as young as 9 years old. Minors being held at the facilities were initially placed at known shelters around the country but were later transferred to these off-the-books facilities that specialize in providing for youth with mental health and behavioral challenges. ORRs own standards state that the agency makes every effort to place children and youth within the ORR funded care provider network. But it makes room for out-of-network transfers.



What weve uncovered appears to violate long-held standards of the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 pact that sets the standards for how unaccompanied minors are treated while detained and calls for their swift release. Under the agreement, the federal government is supposed to provide attorneys representing detained children with a regular and detailed census of each minor in ORR custody. Holly Cooper is an attorney who represents the class of unaccompanied minors in ORRs care. She says the government failed its obligation to report every minors location.



"Detained unaccompanied children with mental health issues are some of the most vulnerable children, and when the government does not provide access to their whereabouts, it calls into question the basic underpinnings of our democratic institutions," she said. Heres what we know about the facilities so far  Millcreek Behavioral Health in Fordyce, Arkansas, operates as a residential treatment center and is holding at least eight children in ORR custody.



Its inspection reports do not show any serious state violations.



But Rolling Hills Hospital, in Ada, Oklahoma, does have a record of problems. Patients there complained of broken bones, along with allegations of sexual harassment and physical abuse. A 2017 inspection report describes multiple violations, including unreported deaths, failure to provide staff orientations and a lack of necessary assessments.





Source document contributed to DocumentCloud by Aura Bogado (Center for Investigative Reporting).



https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/...eport.html Rolling Hills 2017 inspection reportSource document contributed to DocumentCloud by Aura Bogado (Center for Investigative Reporting).



Both Millcreek and Rolling Hills are owned and operated by Acadia Healthcare. Weve determined that 50 of Acadias facilities  operating in 23 states and Puerto Rico  provide residential care for minors. Its unclear how many of those facilities serve youth in ORR custody. In November, a critical investor detailed a litany of abuse allegations at Acadia-run facilities including Rolling Hills. A





Weve also confirmed that a non-profit behavioral health organization called Devereux is housing children in one of these off-the-books shelters. Its board includes James H. Schwab, who according to his LinkedIn profile was the president of @VICE until December. Our team of immigration reporters remain focused on investigating how children are treated in the immigration system.



They put together a weekly newsletter to make it easy to keep up with the story and their work.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/11080...58336.html The federal government is relying on a collection of black sites to hold unaccompanied minors, in possible violation of the long-standing rules for the care of immigrant children.The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government agency that cares for unaccompanied minors, has never made the shelters existence public or even disclosed them to the minors own attorneys in a landmark class-action case.It remains unclear how many total sites are under operation, but there are at least five located in Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Virginia, holding at least 16 boys and girls for the resettlement agency, some as young as 9 years old. Minors being held at the facilities were initially placed at known shelters around the country but were later transferred to these off-the-books facilities that specialize in providing for youth with mental health and behavioral challenges. ORRs own standards state that the agency makes every effort to place children and youth within the ORR funded care provider network. But it makes room for out-of-network transfers.What weve uncovered appears to violate long-held standards of the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 pact that sets the standards for how unaccompanied minors are treated while detained and calls for their swift release. Under the agreement, the federal government is supposed to provide attorneys representing detained children with a regular and detailed census of each minor in ORR custody. Holly Cooper is an attorney who represents the class of unaccompanied minors in ORRs care. She says the government failed its obligation to report every minors location."Detained unaccompanied children with mental health issues are some of the most vulnerable children, and when the government does not provide access to their whereabouts, it calls into question the basic underpinnings of our democratic institutions," she said. Heres what we know about the facilities so far  Millcreek Behavioral Health in Fordyce, Arkansas, operates as a residential treatment center and is holding at least eight children in ORR custody.Its inspection reports do not show any serious state violations.But Rolling Hills Hospital, in Ada, Oklahoma, does have a record of problems. Patients there complained of broken bones, along with allegations of sexual harassment and physical abuse. A 2017 inspection report describes multiple violations, including unreported deaths, failure to provide staff orientations and a lack of necessary assessments.Both Millcreek and Rolling Hills are owned and operated by Acadia Healthcare. Weve determined that 50 of Acadias facilities  operating in 23 states and Puerto Rico  provide residential care for minors. Its unclear how many of those facilities serve youth in ORR custody. In November, a critical investor detailed a litany of abuse allegations at Acadia-run facilities including Rolling Hills. A December 2017 lawsuit accused Acadia and Rolling Hills of permitting ongoing sexual abuse inside a facility for children , destroying video evidence and refusing access to a state investigator.Weve also confirmed that a non-profit behavioral health organization called Devereux is housing children in one of these off-the-books shelters. Its board includes James H. Schwab, who according to his LinkedIn profile was the president of @VICE until December. Our team of immigration reporters remain focused on investigating how children are treated in the immigration system.They put together a weekly newsletter to make it easy to keep up with the story and their work.WASHINGTON  President Donald Trump appeared to overrule his own Treasury Department on Friday and withdrew new sanctions aimed at North Korea because, the White House said, the president "likes" the reclusive country's leader, Kim Jong Un.

Treasury officials announced Thursday they were sanctioning two shipping companies based in China that have helped North Korea evade international sanctions. The U.S. has been increasingly pressuring Chinese firms doing businesses with Kim's regime.

Less than 24 hours after those sanctions were announced, Trump abruptly announced on Twitter that he had ordered the withdrawal of "additional sanctions."

"It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea," Trump posted on Twitter. "I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!"

It was not immediately clear which sanctions Trump was referring to and White House officials did not respond to questions seeking clarity.

President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesnt think these sanctions will be necessary, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

The stepped up Treasury sanctions followed a high-profile summit between Trump and Kim last month in Vietnam in which the two leaders failed to reach an agreement toward denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. Trump left the summit early and Kim has since threatened to restart missile and nuclear tests.

The move comes as the Trump administration is also negotiating a new trade deal with Beijing to lower tariffs that both countries have imposed on each other's products.

It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2019

The two Chinese-based companies targeted by the Treasury Department are Dalian Haibo International Freight Co. Ltd. and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co. Ltd.

Story continues

Treasury officials said both companies were involved in selling or transporting prohibited goods for North Korea and the sanctions highlighted "the deceptive methods that the North Korean regime uses to circumvent international and U.S. sanctions."

President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam.

Trump has said he can size up world leaders within a few seconds and quickly decide whether he will be able to negotiate with them. Heading into the Hanoi summit, Trump said he and the North Korean dictator "fell in love" because of Kim's "beautiful letters." Trump's approach to foreign policy has often been personal and transactional.

When the summit fell apart, Trump and other U.S. officials repeatedly said the relationship with Kim remains strong.

Still, the decision to abandon the sanctions so quickly after they had been proposed drew surprise from experts.

Harry Kazianis, director of Korean Studies at the Center for the National Interest, has been generally supportive of Trumps engagement with Kim. But he expressed disbelief on Friday with Trumps decision to rescind the Treasury sanctions.

What are we doing on #North Korea?" he tweeted on Friday. "Help.

Kazianis said in an email that Trump's move may be an appeal to Kim not to abandon the denuclearization negotiations.

"No matter what happens now, you can bet the North Koreans will only want to deal with Trump from now on considering this action, he said, a reference to the harder line that Trump's advisers have taken in the negotiations.

More: Donald Trump says his 'friend' Kim Jong Un can learn from Vietnam

More: Vietnam summit: For Donald Trump, relations with foreign leaders tend to get personal

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: President Trump abruptly yanks sanctions on North Korea because he 'likes' dictator Kim Jong UnIt never fails. Whenever a Republican president makes a controversial or contentious move to support Israel  such as moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, or yesterdays decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights  youll see various explainers and other stories that purport to inform progressives why the American Evangelical community is so devoted to the nation of Israel.

The explanation goes something like this  Evangelicals believe that the rebirth of Israel is hastening not just the second coming of Christ, but a particular kind of second coming, one that includes fire, fury, and war that will consume the Jewish people. The pithy, tweet-length version of this analysis comes from progressive Young Turks host Cenk Uygur:

You know what's REAL anti-semitism? Right-wing Evangelical Christians supporting Israel because they think it will bring about the End Times where all of the Jews die. Worst anti-Semitism in the world!  Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) March 7, 2019

Thus, the political marriage between American Evangelicals and Israelis represents a cynical form of mutual exploitation. Evangelicals support Israel to hasten the apocalypse, while Israelis (who obviously dont believe Christian eschatology) are happy to humor the Evangelical community and milk that support for tourist dollars and political power.

But the true narrative of American Christian support for Israel is substantially different. The intellectual and theological roots of Christian Zionism do not rest in end-times prophesies but rather in Old Testament promises. Last month Samuel Goldman at Tablet wrote an outstanding piece explaining the centuries-old history and legacy of Christian support for Jewish claims to the Holy Land. After tracing Christian support for a Jewish Israel to the Reformation, he writes this:

Story continues

These arguments were products of the emphases on the plain meaning of Scripture and the theological significance of covenants that characterized Calvinism. Before the Reformation, most Christians read prophecies like Ezekiels as allegories for the transformation of the carnal Israel descended from the patriarchs into the spiritual Israel represented by the Church. Calvin and his followers, by contrast, insisted that allegorical interpretations were permitted only when literal ones made no sense. But why was it nonsensical to believe that the Jews might be reconstituted as a nation and return to their own land?

In addition, Id argue that Romans 11 has enduring significance in the American Christian mind. It begins, I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! Paul declares that God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. The chapter continues with the assertion that Gentiles have now been grafted in to the same spiritual tree, and it concludes with the promise not that all Israel will be burned up in the apocalypse, but rather with the statement that all Israel will be saved.

Now, the precise theological meaning of these verses has been and will be debated for some time, but the practical impact in contemporary American Christian culture has been to create a bond between American Christians and Jews that would be utterly mystifying to the vicious Christian persecutors of Jews in the not-so-distant European past.

The end result is a community  including a political community  that believes two things with firm conviction. First, God has reserved Israel as the Jewish homeland, and second, that the creation of modern Israel was an act of divine providence. While there are many Christians who believe this act of divine providence may be a prelude to the Second Coming (whenever that may be), that is miles and miles away from the belief that Jews will burn in a fiery apocalypse.

These beliefs are then reinforced by experience and basic morality. Its difficult to overstate the profound impact that a visit to the Holy Land has on a believing Christian. Ill never forget my time in Israel. Not only was it moving to stand where Jesus stood and to walk where Jesus walked, other aspects of the visit bring the miracle of Israels rebirth into sharp focus. How can you visit the ruins of the fortress of Masada and not grasp the improbability of the journey from total destruction to diaspora to renaissance?

Then theres basic morality. As Ive written before, from the very moment of its founding, Israel has been subject to repeated, genocidal threats to its existence. It has defended itself in the face of overwhelming odds, faced enduring terrorist threats that we in the United States cant imagine, and built an imperfect but well-functioning democracy that grants all its citizens (Jewish and Arab) a greater degree of individual liberty than the citizens of any other Middle Eastern nation.

The pernicious persistence of anti-Semitism heightens the moral case for supporting Israel. There is zero justification for the U.N.s obsessive focus on alleged Israeli crimes. Actual genocidal tyrants face less condemnation by the U.N. Human Rights Council than does the state of Israel. The Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement proudly holds Israel to higher standards than it holds the entire rest of the Middle East and most of the rest of the world. Some of its founders and leaders hope to eradicate Israel as a Jewish state.

Finally, the fact that Evangelical support for Israel is rooted in part in Christian biblical interpretation does not mean that it is somehow less legitimate than purely secular support. In a nation full of believers, religious arguments have always been a part of our national life, and they always will be. They should be weighed and measured just like any other belief. Nor are religious arguments a right-wing phenomenon. There are liberal religious arguments for gun control, for laxer immigration policies, and for welcoming refugees, to take just a few, easy examples. And who can forget the mighty power of the Christian argument in the American civil-rights movement?

Yes, you can find Christians who obsessively focus on the end times and try to match each and every significant news story in Israel with biblical prophecies. Those people are out there, no question. But the vast bulk of Evangelical support for Israel rests on faith in ancient promises, wonder at modern miracles, and a deep conviction that evil forces must not prevail against the Middle Easts most vibrant democracy.

More from National ReviewBamako (AFP) - Hundreds of wives and children of Mali soldiers slain in a spate of jihadist attacks rallied in two central towns Friday, calling for more support for the military.

The towns of Segou, a regional capital, and Sevare saw the victims' relatives gather to urge more government backing, participants told AFP.

Th rally came after an attack in the central city of Dioura killed 26 people, according to a latest official army toll, with Bamako decreeing three days of official mourning from Friday.

President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has demanded a tough security line but that has failed to pacify the victims' families.

The rally at Segou saw a group of women block traffic by sitting down in the middle of the road while children who had lost fathers to attacks set tyres ablaze, witnesses said.

"We've been told helicopters have been bought for the army -- where are they? Why don't they use them?" demanded one woman, Fatoumata, who said she had lost her husband in the Dioura attack.

"Hundreds of women and children are here to demonstrate at Segou to denounce a lack of resources for the army," said Oumar Toure, a teacher.

"We don't want our husbands to keep dying like this," other women chanted at a rally at Sevare, near Mopti, another central capital in the country's centre.

Some protesters at Sevare called for the president to resign, local media quoted them as saying.

A group of associations meanwhile drew around 1,000 people to a meeting in the capital Bamako to urge solutions to a crisis in education after repeated strikes by public sector teachers demanding better conditions.

"There's been no school for months -- the government and teachers must urgently find common ground, organiser Mohamed Kimbiri said, adding that the parlous security situation in Mali was a further major worry.

In further proof of that, at least four civilians were killed and two injured Friday when armed assailants attacked the village of Diombolo, near the central town of Bandiagara and carried off food and livestock, locals said.

Story continues

Hama Dengu, a resident, said the attack was the work of an ethnic Fulani group earlier seen riding around the area.

UN sources blame violence between ethnic groups in central Mali for over 500 deaths last year.

A military source told AFP that troops had deployed to the area after the attack and came across a boobytrapped motorcycle, which exploded, killing one local man for a fifth fatality on the day.



In death as he was in life, John S McCain is an American patriot and hero, regardless of what Donald Trump may think or say. As the Vietnam war raged, McCain was held for five years as a prisoner of war at the so-called Hanoi Hilton. Rather than trade on his familys connections  his father and grandfather served as navy admirals  the young McCain elected to stay with his fellow prisoners, and was brutalized for his sense of duty and honor.

While Trumps nonstop effort to mar the late senators memory should surprise no one, the response of McCains Republican Senate colleagues to Trumps posthumous onslaught is both telling and disgraceful. The barons of the Senate live in fear of the president and his base. When Trump told Iowans in early 2016 that he could stand on New Yorks Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and still not lose voters, he knew of what he spoke.

Senator Lindsey Graham, McCains best friend and a naval reserve officer, is the most obvious case in point. Graham would only offer up tweeted mush in defense of his one-time Amigo: As to @SenJohnMcCain and his devotion to his country: He stepped forward to risk his life for his country, served honorably under difficult circumstances, and was one of the most consequential senators in the history of the body. We are comforted.

Sign up to receive the latest US opinion pieces every weekday

Later, Graham told reporters, I think the presidents comments about Senator McCain hurt him more than they hurt the legacy of Senator McCain. Im going to try to continue to help the president. We know you are.

Graham continued, My job is to represent the people of South Carolina. They want me to work with the president where I can. Ive gotten to know the president. We have a good working relationship. I like him. In other words, Graham is scared silly of Palmetto State Republicans.

And yet politically, who can blame Graham for going full weasel?

The polls tell the story, namely that embrace of Trump is a surefire way to defuse a prospective GOP primary. To illustrate, in 2017 Graham had one of the highest disapproval ratings in his home state of any senator, 40%. By January 2019, Grahams disapproval numbers had dropped to 32%.

Story continues

Playing Trumps hatchet man at the Kavanaugh confirmation clearly paid off for Graham, and with McCain lying soundly in the grave, their friendship could lie there too. Said differently, if Graham could stand idly by as Trump trashed McCain, it was a green light for others to do the same.

McSally offered up the same anodyne gruel as McConnell, heaping praise upon the late senator, without mentioning Trumps conduct

Take Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. McConnell gushed: It was a blessing to serve alongside a rare patriot and genuine American hero in the Senate. On the other hand, not a word about the presidents posthumous offensive.

Ditto the Arizona senator Martha McSally, who filled the vacant Senate seat left by McCain. McSally offered up the same anodyne gruel as McConnell, heaping praise upon the late senator, without mentioning Trumps conduct: John McCain is an American hero and I am thankful for his life of service and legacy to our country and Arizona. For the record, the names Graham, McConnell and McSally will each appear on the November 2020 ballot.

By contrast, two senators who wont be running for re-election are Georgias Johnny Isakson and Utahs Mitt Romney. Isakson faces the voters in 2022, Romney is newly elected, and their distance from the ballot box showed.

Isakson called Trump out by name: The McCain family deserves better, I dont care if hes president of United States, owns all the real estate in New York, or is building the greatest immigration system in the world. For good measure, Isakson later labeled Trumps comments deplorable.

As for Romney, he posited this rhetorical question: I cant understand why the president would, once again, disparage a man as exemplary as my friend John McCain: heroic, courageous, patriotic, honorable, self-effacing, self-sacrificing, empathetic, and driven by duty to family, country, and God. No other Senate Republicans have come close to seconding Isakson or Romney.

As for decorum, it didnt make a difference in 2016, and dont expect it to make a difference now. The bottom line is that Trump has recast the Republican party in his own image. He embodies and channels the partys core  not McConnell in his bankers shirts. As Trump sees it, and the Senate GOP tacitly acknowledges, without the president the GOP would probably be lost.Almost 300 people were charged late last month with soliciting prostitution in conjunction with a massive human sex trafficking investigation in Florida. The Palm Beach State Attorney's Office said this week that it offered New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and 24 other men a standard diversion program traditionally given to first-time offenders. The program requires the men concede their guilt, attend a class about prostitution, perform 100 hours of community service, and pay a fine of $5,000 per count. And the charges will be dropped.

Kraft denies committing a crime. Whether he accepts the plea deal or not, Palm Beach should not have made the offer.

The state attorney's decision to possibly forgo fully prosecuting these men is an all too common byproduct of misunderstandings about human trafficking and prostitution.This was clear in the disturbing share of the media coverage expressing sympathy for the men charged, proclaiming the entire operation a waste of resources, and advocating for legalization of prostitution. Not only do such opinions diminish the grotesque human rights violations alleged in this case, they ignore the pivotal role the demand for commercial sex plays in perpetuating human trafficking.

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft

Read more commentary:

Technological tricks can help end sex trafficking: Former IBM vice president

Hollywood Madam: Want to stop human trafficking? Legalize consensual sex for money.

When human trafficking victims live right under our noses, how can we stop it?

During this investigation, several massage parlors from Orlando to West Palm Beach were targeted as potential hotbeds for trafficking in the Sunshine State. Authorities recovered a series of victims and found most had been living out of the illicit businesses, cooking on hot plates and sleeping on what were likely the same massage tables where they allegedly engaged in commercial sex to repay their traffickers for debts incurred traveling from China to America.

Story continues

Yet some in the media sympathized with the men charged with soliciting prostitution. Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports went on Fox News Tucker Carlson Tonight to protest that the entire investigation was a conspiracy to bring down the Patriots NFL team, insisting that Krafts actions had no relation to human trafficking. ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith told listeners he supported Kraft and flippantly dismissed the incident as a public relations blemish."

The authorities who took part in this this multijurisdiction investigation expressed the importance of charging the demand for commercial sex. Jupiter Police Chief Daniel Kerr noted that "if there are customers, then these types of business can flourish. Sheriff Deryl Loar of Indian River County said the sex buyers involved in this sting "either knowingly or not knowingly were certainly supplying the funds to perpetuate" human sex trafficking. Sheriff William Snyder of Martin County said the monsters are the men who patronized these businesses.

Misguided sympathy for the buyer

That's not how some media figures see it. For instance, Michael Smerconish used his CNN segment to compare the legalization of marijuana to prostitution. After a comment about consenting adults exchanging money for sex, he said prostitution should be cleaned up, regulated, so that those working in the industry are healthy and being paid fairly. He went on to condemn traffickers who force women into this line of work, only to juxtapose the charging of Kraft as a waste of police resources due to his status as a 77-year-old widower.

Eliciting sympathy for the men charged in this investigation to bolster support for full legalization is an attempt to overshadow the symbiotic relationship between human trafficking and prostitution. It is a proven fact that trafficking increases in places where prostitution is legalized. Not to mention, this viewpoint reinforces the patriarchal idea that men are entitled to womens bodies and that boys will be boys.

Moreover, those who buy sex have comparatively more power and privilege than those who sell it. A study by Cook County, Illinois  described as "a window into sex trafficking"  found that those who buy sex are mostly white, educated and employed. Those who sell sex, by contrast, are more likely to be of color, coerced into prostitution under the age of 20, and struggling with mental illness.

These disparities show an obvious imbalance of power in every commercial sex interaction, regardless of whether human trafficking is involved. As Will Bunch wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The real scandal here is the gross imbalance of power involving women who were held in a form of human bondage to serve as objects of gratification for powerful men intoxicated by their belief they can get away with anything.

Stop buying lies about prostitution

The decision by Palm Beach to offer Kraft and 24 others a plea deal that would ultimately rid them of their solicitation charges encapsulates this disgusting imbalance in a nutshell. Those with privilege and power are getting a slap on the wrist for their role in exploiting those who do not share the same advantages.

The age-old trope that there is no harm in a man paying for a commercial sex act is an example of the ignorance that has allowed sex trafficking to thrive across the world for so long. Lets get this straight: There would be no trafficking without the persistent demand for commercial sex. The actions of Kraft and the other persons arrested in this investigation, their supportive commentators and even the Palm Beach State Attorneys Office do not exist in a vacuum. They are a part of a widespread refusal to acknowledge the connections between sex trafficking and prostitution, and the inherent structural inequalities that permeate the commercial sex industry.

As a society, we must face the reality that buying sex is far from a victimless crime, and that validating arguments to the contrary has dangerous ramifications.

Shea M. Rhodes is director and co-founder of the Villanova Law Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation. Jamie L. Pizzi is a Justice for Victims fellow at the institute. Fellow Sarah Robinson and research assistant Stephanie Mersch also contributed to this column. Follow them on Twitter: @ShMrnRhds, @PzJamie @msskrobinson

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Robert Kraft's plea deal offer for prostitution charges hinders real progress on sex traffickingAlthough the 66-year-old comedian still believes ABC had it out for her before she sent that racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, Barr is adding a new cohort to the mix as to why the series was axed. In an interview with the Washington Post, Barr says it was co-star Sara Gilberts reaction that destroyed the show  and her life.Moscow (AFP) - Russia on Friday convicted a "disabled" Ukrainian man on terrorism charges and sentenced him to six years in prison, prompting the European Union to call for his immediate release.

Pavlo Gryb, 20, who suffers from cirrhosis of the liver and partial vision loss, urgently needs surgery and may die in a Russian prison, his family says. The EU has described him as disabled.

A spokeswoman for a military court in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, Alyona Katkalo, told AFP Gryb had been convicted of "complicity in terrorism".

Gryb disappeared in August 2017 in ex-Soviet Belarus where he went to meet a young Russian woman he had corresponded with on social media, his family says. He later resurfaced in a Russian pre-trial detention centre.

Russian prosecutors claim that Gryb sought to convince the woman to blow up an explosive device in Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Gryb -- who has criticised Russian authorities for the annexation of Crimea on social media -- denies the charges.

Kiev says the Russian authorities have abducted the young man, denied him medical treatment, and convicted him on "fabricated charges."

The European Union has called on Moscow to free the "disabled" Ukranian, saying Russia detained him "without any clear charges".

On Friday, the EU said in a statement it expected Gryb "to be immediately released and granted access to the special medical treatment he needs."

- Urgent treatment needed -

His father said Pavlo suffers from portal hypertension, which causes cirrhosis of the liver, and urgently needs medical treatment.

"Given Pavlo's deadly disease, it's a death sentence," Igor Gryb told AFP, referring to the conviction.

"He requires urgent surgery or he will die."

His father added that his son had not received proper medical treatment during his trial despite having a fever during the hearings.

Gryb's lawyer Marina Dubrovina said the Ukrainian had gone on hunger strike, adding that he demanded treatment.

Story continues

The Ukrainian foreign ministry said on Friday that Moscow "crudely violates human rights including a right to a fair trial and a right to life."

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said on Twitter: "Mercy, humanity, dignity -- Russian invaders, Russian aggressors are not familiar with these words."

Ties between Kiev and its Soviet-era master Moscow were shredded after a popular uprising in Ukraine ousted a Kremlin-backed regime in 2014. Russia retaliated by annexing Crimea and supporting a separatist uprising in the east of the country.

The conflict has claimed some 13,000 lives.

Dozens of Ukrainians are held in Russian prisons, including filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who is serving a 20-year sentence and refused food for 145 days last year.Username: Password: or Register

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"Ghost town" of Elizabethtown, NM From 7,000 to a Few silversides

The bare necessities of life

User ID: 148291

03-22-2019 02:09 PM



Posts: 32,014









Post: #1 "Ghost town" of Elizabethtown, NM From 7,000 to a Few

Advertisement

12 million dollars in gold was mined here....

However they never mined or found the exact right place and maybe billions of dollars in gold remains.

This town has a very colorful history.



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Elizabethtown, NM









https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pJfbbNgPQY



Quote: Mostly a ghost town now, Elizabethtown began in 1866 with the founding of area gold mines and the Mystic Copper Mine. It was New Mexico's first incorporated town. Founded by the commander of Fort Union (north of Las Vegas, New Mexico), Captain William H. Moore, and named for his daughter, Elizabeth Catherine Moore. Nicknamed "E-Town," the town grew to over 7000 residents at its height of prosperity in 1870, and it was designated the first seat of the newly formed Colfax County. In 1872 there were only about 100 residents left as the mines dwindled, and the county seat was moved to Cimarron. The town revived somewhat when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad passed nearby in the early 1890s, making mining feasible once again. The village was also part of the Colfax County War. A fire took most of the town in 1903, and the town mostly died out by 1917 with the decline in the mines.

Serial killer Charles Kennedy lived between Elizabethtown and Taos, luring weary travelers to dine and stay with him at his cabin; he may have killed 14 or more people.[1] Kennedy was killed by a group of angry vigilantes, led by the notorious Clay Allison.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabethtown,_New_Mexico



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Train Robber  Black Jack Ketchum



Stories of the Century BLACK JACK KETCHUM









https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM4FZrGWCCA



In his Emmy Award-winning series, Jim Davis stars as a Railroad detective hunting down infamous outlaws and bringing justice to the Wild, Wild West!



BLACK JACK KETCHUM: With his gang wanted throughout the southwest for murder, robbery, assault, and extortion, Black Jack decides to lay low at a ranch, where the widow and son of a gang member still live. The woman fears her son will be shot and killed just like her husband, as Black Jack wants to involve the kid in an extortion scheme.



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Stories of the Century CLAY ALLISON free full length episode









https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tisnbI5ct4



This is another episode of Stories of the Century starring Jim Davis as Railroad detective Matt Clark .This public domain episode is from season 1 episode 26 original air date was July 15 of 1954 . This series won an Emmy Award in 1955 for Best Western Adventure. Fillming locations were Iverson Ranch and Republic



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The Mysterious Deaths of Billy the Kid and Sheriff Pat Garrett | Nightshade Diary









https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1bXAxlxaCE Mele Kalikimaka

Elizabethtown, NM has never reached 0 population however it is very low.12 million dollars in gold was mined here....However they never mined or found the exact right place and maybe billions of dollars in gold remains.This town has a very colorful history.---------------------------------------Elizabethtown, NM---------------------------------------Train Robber  Black Jack KetchumStories of the Century BLACK JACK KETCHUMIn his Emmy Award-winning series, Jim Davis stars as a Railroad detective hunting down infamous outlaws and bringing justice to the Wild, Wild West!BLACK JACK KETCHUM: With his gang wanted throughout the southwest for murder, robbery, assault, and extortion, Black Jack decides to lay low at a ranch, where the widow and son of a gang member still live. The woman fears her son will be shot and killed just like her husband, as Black Jack wants to involve the kid in an extortion scheme.---------------------------------------Stories of the Century CLAY ALLISON free full length episodeThis is another episode of Stories of the Century starring Jim Davis as Railroad detective Matt Clark .This public domain episode is from season 1 episode 26 original air date was July 15 of 1954 . This series won an Emmy Award in 1955 for Best Western Adventure. Fillming locations were Iverson Ranch and Republic---------------------------------------The Mysterious Deaths of Billy the Kid and Sheriff Pat Garrett | Nightshade Diary piequal3because14

Angel of Love from Heaven

User ID: 491165

03-22-2019 06:07 PM



Posts: 29,380









Post: #2 RE: "Ghost town" of Elizabethtown, NM From 7,000 to a Few

Meh .During economic crisis things like this happen.



Communities grow and degenerate accordingly.



Look into my eyes to see a Paradise of Love



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqtHu0XFal0



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo7PY4vbQLE



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTm9ui-26F0

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MOSCOW (AP)  A Russian court on Friday sentenced a Ukrainian teenager to six years in prison for plotting a bombing in a Russian school.

Pavlo Gryb is one of many Ukrainians who have been put on trial in Russia in the past years for various crimes since Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.

Yet Gryb's case stands out, as the 19-year-old was kidnapped in summer 2017 in Belarus where he had traveled to meet a girl he met online. He later surfaced in a Russian prison.

Gryb claims he was having an online romance with the girl but says it turned out to be an officer from the Russian intelligence services who was messaging him on her behalf shortly before his trip.

Investigators claimed that Gryb was messaging the student online and was trying to get her to plant an improvised explosive device in her school in southern Russia. Gryb denies the charges.

The teenager has a grave liver condition that has deteriorated during his time in custody, and Ukrainian authorities have long argued for his immediate release, saying that Gryb may not survive the transportation and imprisonment in the high-security prison he is being sent to.

"Instead of urgent surgery that Pavlo needs because his life is in real danger, he has received this idiotic sentence of six years," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told The Associated Press in Kiev on Friday.

Klimkin said he would continue to raise Gryb's case with all his foreign counterparts.

"We have to save Pavlo, we have to help him," he said.The Penarth lifeboat picks up one of the Russian sailors (RNLI Penarth)

Three Russian sailors had to be rescued off the Welsh coast after they went on a drinking trip in a dinghy and got lost.

The tipsy trio ended up on the tiny deserted island of Flat Holm, in the Bristol Channel, home to one lighthouse and few buildings.

They had been drinking in Barry Island, the Welsh resort made famous by the hit TV sitcom Gavin and Stacey.

Flat Holm island (PA)

But their problems began when they tried to get back to ship, a Dutch-registered cargo coaster called Alana Evita, which was anchored two miles off the coast of Minehead, Somerset.

The Russians apparently got lost in fog on the way back to the boat, ending up on Flat Holm.

A major search and rescue operation was launched after the sailors went missing.

Read more:

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The sailors had been drinking in Barry, the Welsh resort made famous by the James Corden comedy, Gavin and Stacey (PA)

Five lifeboats were launched from Minehead, Burnham-on-Sea, Barry Dock and Penarth together with a Coastguard helicopter to find the sailors.

The incident happened overnight on Wednesday and Thursday.

They went drinking in the evening, left Barry Island at 3.45am but the alarm was raised when the Russians had not returned to their ship by 7am.

A pier on the island (PA)

The three had attempted to make their way back from Barry to Minehead but got lost in foggy conditions in the channel, said a RNLI spokeswoman.

The sailors were found safe but very cold on Flat Holm Island at around 8:30am by Penarth RNLI volunteers.

After being assessed by the RNLI volunteers the Coastguard 187 helicopter landed on the island to further assess the casualties but it was decided they were well enough to return to land by lifeboat.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UKSkorenovac (Serbia) (AFP) - Twenty years ago, Zoltan Dani achieved a miraculous military feat: wielding outdated missile equipment, his army unit shot down an American F117 "stealth fighter" flying over Serbia as part of NATO's 1999 air strike assault.

The David-vs-Goliath victory was one of the most surprising achievements of the Serbian side as it was battered by NATO bombs that began dropping 20 years ago on Sunday, in a bid to halt Belgrade's war with Kosovo.

But in perhaps an even more remarkable twist, the retired army officer is now close friends with the American pilot whose Nighthawk he brought down.

"Bingo," Dani, now 62, recalls saying when he first learned he had struck the American aircraft, which was touted as invisible to radar.

The downing of the F117 three days into the NATO assault earned Dani national hero status.

It was the first and only time a F117 has been shot down in combat, leading celebratory Serbs to print shirts and posters with the slogan: "We didn't know it was invisible!"

After three months of air strikes, Serbia was forced to withdraw its troops from Kosovo, where its forces had been battling ethnic Albanian separatists.

While the NATO intervention is celebrated as the basis of Kosovans' liberation today, traumatic memories of the bombs remain deeply etched in Serbia's public memory.

But Dani and his US counterpart, Air Force pilot Dale Zelko, managed to put their past behind them.

Around a decade ago, they started exchanging emails.

"It was important, among other things, to learn what kind of man he was," Dani, who is part of Serbia's Hungarian minority, told AFP from his home in eastern Skorenovac.

"After two to three years we decided together that it was time to meet."

- 'Message of peace' -

That 2012 encounter, filmed in a documentary called 'The Second Meeting', saw Zelko travel to Dani's home where he had opened a bakery after retiring from military service.

Story continues

"When he arrived... I handed him an apron, he took it and we worked together," recalls Dani with a grin.

In the documentary, the two men are seen rolling out pastry dough together before visiting a Serbian museum where tattered pieces of the F117 are on display.

"Hey, that's my stuff," Zelko jokes, pointing at the display.

They also visit the field where the American pilot landed after he ejected from his aircraft in a parachute.

"As soon as I saw those missiles I thought, oh man, they got me," Zelko says standing in the field.

At a screening of the film in Belgrade in 2012, Zelko addressed the room.

"I am sorry for your suffering and sorrow, loss and anguish," he said, visibly shaken.

"War is not between normal, average people, it is between the governments," he added.

Dani says he was initially hesitant about making contact with his former war foe, but ultimately decided it would "be an opportunity to send a common message of peace and understanding".

The following year he visited Zelko and his family at their home in New Hampshire.

Now they still talk "once or twice a week by email", reports Dani.

Near his computer is a large chunk of dark metal -- another recovered piece of the F117 -- leaning against the wall.FERNDALE, Michigan  Its two-story, modern design stands out in the older neighborhood of many ranches and bungalows.

Inside the front door, a floating staircase tailored from wood and steel leads up to the living room, dining room and kitchen. The bedrooms and laundry are on the first floor.

Floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors at one end of the second-storys open floor plan lead onto a balcony that overlooks the backyard. The kitchen features tiled backsplashes and a custom-made island made of reclaimed wood.

It's a home built for entertaining guests.

The features in this contemporary house can be found in many of newer high-end homes in suburban Detroit and throughout the country. But the construction might surprise you.

The newly completed house is made of 5 shipping containers  the rectangular, corrugated steel boxes that can hop from a freighter to a freight train to the back of a tractor-trailer. It carries a price tag of $450,000. A garage is optional.

The house is part of what appears to be the latest trend.

Our goal is to set the standard in quality in this type of construction. You have no idea its made out of shipping containers, said Stephanie Coyle, co-founder of Forever Home, who partnered with Dee Tignanelli, owner of Alpha to Omega Properties LLC, to build the house  their first made from shipping containers.

Its more standard-looking to appeal to more of the masses, Tignanelli said as she sat inside the 1,808-square-foot home.

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Coyle said she hopes their house will "remove the stigma that can sometimes be attached" to such homes, which are found throughout the world, but are a new concept to many.

"Its just a different way to build a home, said Coyle. Show people this type of construction can be beautiful, and lets show you it can actually look and blend into a community.

Story continues

Growing trend

Shipping containers have been used for residential and commercial projects around Detroit and across the country.

Scott Worthington, Ferndale building official, said the city has a handful of homes made from shipping containers that are either completed or in some stage of construction, which he said is "more specialized."

A new construction made from 5 and half shipping containers is for sale for $450,000 in Ferndale, Mich. photographed on Thursday, March 14, 2019. The home was built on an empty lot.

Coyle said shipping container homes can be made on large and small scales, can fill an affordable housing gap, in-fill vacant spaces and be built in communities struggling for development.

Their features and craftsmanship can vary widely, just like for a traditional home, from ceiling height to whether they have a finished look complete with fixtures and other extras to a more industrial look with exposed duct work.

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Fitting in

J. Michael Kirk, a principal with the Detroit studio of Neumann/Smith Architecture, said shipping containers are pretty versatile and are a pretty good component to do housing from.

Its a unique housing form, Kirk said, adding that there has been talk of these types of homes for 15 to 20 years.

Kirk said these types of homes probably would work in transitional neighborhoods  those situated between industrial use and single-family residential use.

He said that he believes the quality is equal to or superior to wood-frame construction and with spray insulation, studs and drywall, they can look like a traditional residential unit.

Those who build structures from shipping containers say they are a stronger and more durable construction (maybe even rodent-proof), more energy efficient and more sustainable.

On the second story there is a Trex balcony that is 320 square feet overlooking the neighborhood in Ferndale, Mich. photographed on Thursday, March 14, 2019.

Coyle estimates dozens of trees were saved with the structure of the house being made of waterproof steel instead of wood.

In one of the three bedrooms, Coyle said, they did a small build-out to show that traditional construction can pair with shipping containers.

Worthington said that there can be neighbor concerns with shipping container homes, but they often come when the home is in the rough stages. A neighbor may ask whats that Dumpster doing out there? he said when the containers first arrive, but concerns may fade once the house becomes more complete.

Arthur Kraus, 79, lives just down the street from the new shipping container house.

Kraus said when the house was first put together, he thought, My gosh, I have no idea what that is gonna look like."

I watched how they made that house. It was interesting how they made it, he said. I think its good. Not everybody liked it, but I liked it.

Contact Christina Hall: chall@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @challreporter.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Shipping container homes spring up with modern designs in latest housing trendOur general cheeriness has neither improved nor worsened from last year, according to this years World Happiness Report, where Singapore retains its rank as the 34th happiest country globally.

Though the city-state didnt make it as the happiest country in Asia  a title joyfully held by Taiwan  Singapore is still considered the most content Southeast Asian nation, well above the regional likes of Thailand (#52), Philippines (#69), Malaysia (#80) and Indonesia (#92).

Released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations on the International Day of Happiness (yeah we didnt know that, too) yesterday, the annual list analyzes data from various surveys across 156 countries, logging in details such as life expectancy, freedom, social support, income, and generosity.

Based on those variables, Nordic nations came up tops in being the happiest bunch. Finland holds steady at the top of the list, followed by Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand Canada and Austria making it to the top 10.

Its true that last year all Finns were happier than rest of the countries residents, but their immigrants were also happiest immigrants in the world, said the reports co-editor and professor emeritus of economics at the University of British Columbia John Helliwell told CNN. He pointed out that its citizens trust their government and pay high taxes for a social safety net, on top of being generous with each other.

Thats the kind of place people want to live.

The report also studied the prospects of alternative sources of information to improve predictions of well-being, including digital footprints on social media and facial-detection technology, of which Singapore and China are highlighted as having spent billions of dollars in.

Singapore, of course, is not shying away from making public its plans to install lamp posts that are smart enough to carry out facial matching against databases. Though its a serious concern for privacy matters in an already highly-monitored country, the majority of Singaporeans arent that bothered by it.

Story continues

The report also pointed out that the United States is less happy this year, having dropped a spot since 2018 and a total of five spots since 2017. Its not just them though  overall world happiness has fallen over the past couple of years.

Its a no brainer, but the countries that occupy the bottom of the World Happiness Index are nations ravaged by unrest and war. South Sudan is found to be the unhappiest country in the world, with the Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Rwanda and Yemen trailing behind.

This article, Singapore retains 34th spot in World Happiness Index; still the happiest country in Southeast Asia, originally appeared on Coconuts, Asia's leading alternative media company. Want more Coconuts? Sign up for our newsletters!Madrid (AFP) - Spain's Socialist cabinet on Friday approved a plan to persuade some of the roughly one million workers who left the country during its 2008-2013 economic slump to return home.

Among the 50 measures included in the two-year plan are scholarships and grants for scientific researchers and lower social security payments for selected workers, the government said in a statement after cabinet approved the programme.

The plan also calls for the creation of an online search engine for job opportunities in Spain and a web-site which will make it easier to complete the bureaucracy related to moving back to the country.

The plan will cost 24.2 million euros ($27.5 million) and the government hopes it will lead 23,000 Spanish workers to move back to Spain, government spokeswoman Isabel Celaa told a news conference.

"These people left, with their talent and training which Spain gave them, most of them seeking opportunities that they could not find in their own country," she added.

The number of Spaniards registered as living abroad jumped by around one million since 2009, according to government figures, as unemployment soared in Spain due to a steep recession sparked by the global financial crisis.

The majority were young doctors, engineers, scientists and other skilled workers. While the government plan "mainly" focuses on skilled workers, it could also allow people with "other profiles" to return, Celaa said.

The government, which is facing an early general election on April 28, first announced in November that it would introduce the plan.

Over 2.5 million Spaniards live abroad, according to government statistics. The majority, 1.5 million, are in the Americas, mainly in the countrys former colonies in South America, with another 900,000 in Europe.Thousands of nonviolent inmates are getting out of prison early thanks to President Trump, who worked with a bipartisan group in Congress to pass into law the First Step Act, the biggest prison reform in decades.

But these newly freed Americans still face enormous challenges.

Employers are leery of hiring people with criminal records. Historically, three in four former inmates have been unable to find employment a year after release. Without gainful employment, many fall back into their old lives of crime. Those who do find jobs are paid up to 20 percent less than the average employee.

President Trumps prison reform wont be truly complete until he ensures that these former inmates can find good jobs. The easiest way to do so? Crack down on illegal immigration  and also scale back legal immigration. By shrinking the number of foreign workers pouring into our country, the president could engineer a tighter labor market that forces businesses to hire ex-convicts and other Americans on the margins of the work force.

Each year, more than 600,000 Americans are released from prison and begin searching for jobs. These men and women hope to become contributing members of society. But too often, bleak economic prospects leave them suffering in poverty  and they often turn to illegal activity. Nearly 68 percent are reincarcerated within three years.

Loose labor markets make it harder for former inmates to find jobs, because employers can be more selective about whom they hire. This could mean hiring an illegal immigrant, whose criminal record is unknown in the United States, over Americans looking for a second chance. Its no wonder many African-American men become disillusioned with the American dream when theyre treated as second-class citizens in their native land.

And its outrageous that employers who hire illegal immigrants are almost never charged with crimes.

Decades of lax immigration enforcement have oversaturated the labor market. Figures are debated and hard to verify, but at least 11 million illegal immigrants live in the United States. (Researchers from Yale and MIT recently gave an average of 22 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S.) Over 70 percent hold jobs. And more are coming every month. U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan told reporters that, in February alone, 76,000 foreigners were arrested or turned back at the southern border. This is more than twice the number of border apprehensions during the same period of time in 2018. Many more have slipped through undetected.

Story continues

High levels of legal immigration have likewise swamped the job market. America doles out roughly 1 million lifetime work permits each year. Many permits go to recent immigrants unskilled family members, who receive preferential treatment due to chain migration laws. The government also hands out hundreds of thousands of temporary work permits to guest laborers.

Many of these foreigners, especially ones who crossed the border illegally or came here on seasonal H-2B visas, have limited skills. So they flock to manual labor or service industries  the same fields that former convicts look to for jobs. In the past two decades, immigrants without high-school diplomas have increased the size of the low-skilled work force by nearly 25 percent.

Competition with immigrant laborers  both legal and illegal  drives down less-skilled Americans wages by as much as $1,500 each year, according to Harvard economist George Borjas.

A number of proposed immigration reforms could relieve the pressure on American workers.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) recently introduced a bill that would require all employers to use E-Verify. This free online system cross-references the employment documentation submitted by newly hired laborers and determines whether theyre authorized to work in the United States. E-Verify normally gives an answer in just seconds, so its not a burden on businesses. Its the most effective way to deter illegal immigration.

The Trump administration is also trying to eliminate an Obama-era policy that awards H-4B work visas to the spouses of certain guest laborers. Many of these H-4B visa holders occupy entry-level hospitality, food-service, and secretarial jobs that could otherwise be filled by recently released prisoners.

Tightening the labor market would boost Americans wages and job prospects.

Just look what happened in Chicago last year. An investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement found that the popular Cloverhill Bakery had employed roughly 800 illegal workers. After those illegal laborers were terminated, the bakery immediately filled the positions with American workers  mostly minorities  and raised some employees pay by $4 per hour.

Tight labor markets force companies to get creative to fill open positions. Look at Dane County, Wis., which has an unemployment rate of just 2 percent. Businesses have turned to minimum-security prisons to find workers. Firms employ inmates through pre-release work programs and pay them market wages, empowering convicts to reintegrate into society even before theyre released.

President Trump deserves immense credit for supporting prison reform. But to ensure that former convicts truly get a second chance at life, the president ought to curb both legal and illegal immigration  and thus force businesses to hire ex-offenders and other struggling Americans.

More from National ReviewBy Lin Taylor

LONDON, March 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - More than 3,000 suspected victims of slavery who were trafficked into Britain from outside of Europe languish in the system, and are far less likely than their local counterparts to receive timely assistance, according to anti-trafficking charities.

The two-tiered system leaves African and Asian victims at greater risk of fresh exploitation than Britons and fellow Europeans, several campaigners said, as the longer victims must wait for help, the more likely they are to be enslaved again.

"All victims of modern slavery deserve timely and good quality decisions - irrespective of their national origin," said Victoria Marks, director of the Anti Trafficking and Labour Exploitation Unit (ATLEU), which provides legal aid for victims.

Official data shows that people from outside the European Union (EU) who say they have been enslaved or trafficked into Britain are far less likely to have their cases processed by the government compared to their British or EU counterparts.

Overall, about 7,000 possible slavery victims were uncovered in Britain last year - up a third on 2017 - shows data released this week by the National Crime Agency, and exclusively revealed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation last month.

Those who say they have been enslaved can enter the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) and access support, be it healthcare, housing or legal aid, while the British government decides whether or not to recognize them as victims.

Possible victims are given 45 days to recover while their cases are considered, and government guidelines say a decision should be made "as soon as possible" thereafter.

Although 4,500 people from non-EU countries were referred to the NRM in 2018, almost 65 percent of its cases, just 6 percent were identified as being trafficked last year. More than 3,000 of these cases are still awaiting a final government decision.

In comparison, about 35 percent of those from Britain or EU countries were identified as slaves, and just 700 cases belonging to EU and British nationals were pending last year.

Story continues

"SYSTEMIC PROBLEM"

ATLEU called the discrepancies "systemic," with some non-EU nationals having to wait three years for a decision.

"The problem is systemic. The quality of decision-making this group experiences is extremely poor and needs to be addressed urgently," Marks said in emailed comments.

A Home Office (interior ministry) spokesman said it had more than doubled the number of case workers to address the backlog.

"We are reforming the NRM to improve the support available to victims before, during and after the NRM process," he said.

The Home Office in 2017 announced several reforms to the NRM, including extra shelter and support, drop-in services and an overhaul of the decision-making and review processes.

Labour exploitation - from men working in car washes to children forced to carry drugs - remained the most common form of modern slavery, with most suspected victims from Britain, Albania and Vietnam, the same as in 2017, the NRM data revealed.

Vicky Brotherton, an anti-slavery researcher at the University of Nottingham, said the backlog meant that victims, who are unable to work or move on with their lives, were left "languishing in the system" and at risk of abuse once more.

"There have been cases of people having to go back into exploitative conditions just so they can pay their way."

Kate Roberts, head of the Human Trafficking Foundation that works to boost victim support, questioned the logic of putting people into a system that leaves them "in a state of limbo."

Despite once being hailed as a global leader in the anti-slavery drive, Britain is undergoing a review of its landmark 2015 law amid criticism that it is not being used fully to jail traffickers, drive firms to stop forced labor or help victims.

Britain is home to at least 136,000 modern slaves, according to the Global Slavery Index by rights group Walk Free Foundation - a figure 10 times higher than a government estimate from 2013. (Reporting by Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths and Kieran Guilbert. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking and slavery, property rights, social innovation, resilience and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)BERLIN (Reuters) - The Swiss government said on Friday Britons will be exempt from visa requirements to enter Switzerland in case Britain leaves the EU without a withdrawal agreement. "In return the UK has confirmed that Swiss nationals will also be exempt from the requirement to obtain a visa once the UK leaves the EU, both for short and longer stays in the UK," the Federal Council added in a statement. Statement: https://bit.ly/2OmxF5J (Reporting by Thomas Seythal)SYNNEX Corporation SNX is slated to release first-quarter fiscal 2019 results on Mar 27.

Notably, the company surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate in each of the trailing four quarters, the average being 5.53%.

In the last reported quarter, the companys earnings and revenues beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate and also its guided range. Moreover, the top and the bottom line recorded a year-over-year improvement.

For the fiscal first quarter, SYNNEX expects revenues in the range of $5.225-$5.425 billion. The Zacks Consensus Estimate is pegged at $5.29 billion, which is 16.1% higher than the figure reported in the year-ago quarter.

Non-GAAP earnings per share are projected in the band of $2.70-$2.8. The Zacks Consensus Estimate stands at $2.73, representing a year-over-year increase of 27.8%.

Lets see how things are shaping up prior to this announcement.

Factors to Consider

SYNNEX is benefiting from a solid performance in both its businesses, stable marketplaces and a solid execution. Further, leverage from the companys scale and its recent investments are driving its bottom line.

Moreover, in order to improve the business mix, the company is replacing lower margin services with higher value-added opportunities. Although its strategy to move away from top customers to focus on more profitable businesses is an overhang on the top line, it is still proving to be beneficial to the bottom line.

The companys acquisition of Covergys last October is a key growth driver. New business wins backed by its expanding footprint and increased capabilities of the new consolidation are key catalysts.

Notably, in the earlier reported quarter, Concentrix revenues were $972 million, up 82% from the prior-year quarter on the back of the Convergys acquisition.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the Concentrix segment in the fiscal first quarter is pegged at $1.04 billion, reflecting a whopping 104.9% increase from the figure reported sequentially.

Story continues

However, seasonality in the Concentrix business and the impact of weakness in the telco segment on the purchased Convergys makes us anxious.

On the last earnings call, management noted that Technology Solutions year-over-year gross-to-net revenues accounting revenue headwind of around $150-$200 million associated with increased sales in software, cloud and security products, is reflected in the guidance. The effect of ASC 606 adoption is also taken into consideration.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the Technology Solutions segment is pegged at $4.23 billion, 4.4% up from the figure reported in the year-earlier quarter but 9% lower than the preceding quarter.

SYNNEX Corporation Price and EPS Surprise

SYNNEX Corporation Price and EPS Surprise | SYNNEX Corporation Quote

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Zacks Investment ResearchDonald Trump has called for the United States to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights - AFP

President Donald Trumps call for the United States to recognise Israeli sovereignty over occupied territory in the Golan Heights prompted global anger Friday, with Syria warning it would recover the area "through all available means".

The call broke from decades of US foreign policy and a United Nations resolution, which treated the Golan Heights as occupied territory whose future would be negotiated in talks with Syria on a comprehensive peace.

While Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, thanked the president in a phone call, telling him "you've made history", Damascus, its allies and fellow states in the region criticised the move as provocative.

Syrias foreign ministry said it showed the blind bias of the United States towards Israel but would not change the fact that the Golan was and will always be a Syrian Arab territory.

"The Syrian nation is more determined to liberate this precious piece of Syrian national land through all available means," the ministry statement said.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, tweeted he was "shocked by @realDonaldTrump continuing to try to give what is not his to racist Israel."

While the Israeli Prime Minister thanked Trump, other regional leaders criticised the move as provocative Credit: JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

Turkey, which hosted the last indirect peace talks between Israel and the Syrian government in 2008 but has backed Syrian rebels in the civil war, said the change risked plunging the region into a "new crisis".

"We will never allow the occupation of the Golan Heights to be made legitimate," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

Russia warned that the policy U-turn could spark new conflicts.

"Certainly, such appeals can considerably destabilise an already tense situation in the Middle East," Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman, said. "It's just a call for now, hopefully it will remain a call."

The Arab League said Mr Trump's comments were "completely outside international law".

Some even accused the US president of interfering with a close upcoming election in Israel in order to help ally Mr Netanyahu.

Story continues

Israeli army Merkava tanks gather in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights Credit: AFP

The White House endorsement of Israeli sovereignty over the plateau, which was seized from Syria in 1967, fulfills a request from Mr Netanyahu and came less than three weeks before the countrys April 9 vote.

Mr Trump denied that was his intention, telling Fox News. I wouldnt even know about that. I have no idea. I hear he is doing okay, adding that he had been thinking about it for a long time.

The UN Human Rights Council yesterday criticised Israeli settlement expansion in the Golan Heights.

The UN rights forum adopted an annual resolution on the Syrian Golan, brought by Pakistan on behalf of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), with 26 states in favour, 16 against and five abstentions.

European members including Britain voted against it.Damascus (AFP) - Syria, its allies, and fellow states in the region Friday condemned US President Donald Trump's pledge to recognise Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights slamming the move as a violation of international law.

Trump said Thursday it was time for Washington to recognise Israel's sovereignty over the strategic territory, which it seized from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and annexed in a move never recognised internationally.

His abrupt tweet triggered delight in Israel, but outrage from other countries in the region as well as powerhouses such as Russia and Turkey.

Moscow warned the policy U-turn could spark new conflicts.

"Such appeals can considerably destabilise an already tense situation in the Middle East," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

"Hopefully it will remain (just) a call."

Any such move would break with UN Security Council resolutions and with more than half a century of US foreign policy, which treated the Golan as occupied territory whose future would be negotiated in talks with Syria on a comprehensive peace.

The territory's return has always been a key Syrian national demand, championed by government and rebels alike throughout the bloody civil war that has ripped the country apart since 2011.

In an angry retort, the Syrian government said Trump's comments disregarded international law.

"The American position towards Syria's occupied Golan Heights clearly reflects the United States' contempt for international legitimacy and its flagrant violation of international law," a foreign ministry source told the official SANA news agency.

Trump's comments showed the extent of his administration's "blind bias" towards Israel.

"The Golan was and will remain Arab and Syrian," the source said.

The foreign ministry sent a letter to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, urging him to reiterate the UN's rejection of Israeli claims over the Golan, SANA said.

Story continues

- 'National commitment' -

Turkey, which hosted the last indirect peace talks between Israel and the Syrian government in 2008 but has backed Syrian rebels, said the change risked plunging the region into a "new crisis".

"We will never allow the occupation of Golan Heights to be made legitimate," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted he was "shocked by @realDonaldTrump continuing to try to give what is not his to racist Israel."

And France added its voice to the chorus of outrage, saying the Golan had been "occupied by Israel since 1967" and it did not recognise Israel's annexation.

In his tweet, Trump said the Golan was "of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognise Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights," he said.

The Arab League said Trump's comments were "completely outside international law".

The Gulf Cooperation Council said Trump's statement would not change the internationally recognised fact that the "Golan heights are Syrian lands forcefully occupied by Israel".

Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said lasting peace in the region requires Israel to withdraw from all Arab territories it occupies, including the Golan.

Egypt urged "respect (for) legitimate international resolutions and the United Nations Charter on the unacceptability of land appropriation by force".

Following decades of calm along the Golan armistice line after the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973, tensions flared with the eruption of civil war in Syria in 2011.

Israel provided medical assistance to wounded rebel fighters and repeatedly struck government positions in response to stray fire across the frontier.

It has also targeted suspected positions of Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, which have intervened militarily to back President Bashar al-Assad.

- Israeli thank you -

Since the Syrian government decisively defeated rebel fighters near the armistice line last year with Iranian and Hezbollah support, Israel has repeatedly vowed to prevent its arch enemies from establishing a long-term military presence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is seeking re-election next month, swiftly thanked Trump for his announcement.

"At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognises Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights," the right-wing prime minister wrote on Twitter.

Leon Panetta, a veteran Democrat who served as CIA director and defence secretary among other roles, blasted Trump for "tweeting out another policy that obviously has not been worked out with our international partners".

The Golan move is Trump's latest diplomatic bombshell as he seeks to redraw the fraught Middle East in Israel's favour.

In 2017, Trump went against decades of practice in recognising the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, rather than the previously accepted Tel Aviv.DAMASCUS, Syria (AP)  From Syria to Turkey and beyond, President Donald Trump's abrupt declaration that Washington will recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights drew strong condemnation on Friday.

The Syrian government called it "irresponsible" and a threat to international peace and stability, while Iran's foreign ministry said it plunges the region into a new crisis.

The Foreign Ministry in Damascus said Trump's statement confirms "the blind bias of the United States to the Zionist entity," referring to Israel, and added that it won't change "the fact that the Golan was and will remain Arab and Syrian."

The ministry also said Damascus is now more intent on liberating the Golan, "using every possible means."

Trump's announcement the day before was a major shift in American policy and gives Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a political boost a month before what is expected to be a close election.

The administration has been considering recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the strategic highlands, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967, for some time and Netanyahu had pressed the matter with visiting U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week.

Israel unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. The U.N. Security Council resolution 497, issued after the annexation, refers to Israel as "the occupying power" and says Israel's attempt to "impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect."

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said the United Nations had no comment on Trump's tweet.

"But if you're asking what the U.N. policy on the Golan Heights is, it's very clear," he said. "It's the policy reflected in the resolutions of the Security Council and the relevant resolutions as well of the General Assembly."

Story continues

Damascus also said Trump's statement "clearly shows the U.S. disdain to the international legitimacy and violates its resolutions, especially Security Council resolution 497" while also threatening "international peace and stability."

Syria's Foreign Ministry later announced that a letter was sent to the presidents of the U.N. Security Council and United Nations over Trump's "irresponsible and dangerous statements over the Golan." The statement urged the U.N. secretary-general to confirm the organization's stance regarding Israeli occupation of the Golan.

In a Friday tweet, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif took aim at the U.S., saying that if it believes that "persistently violating int'l law, bullying sovereign nations & milking its clients projects strength. It does not. Its recklessness just displays panic of an empire in decline."

Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit also criticized the American stance, saying it "comes outside the international legitimacy and no country, no matter how important it is, can make such a decision."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Trump's "unfortunate" declaration has brought the region "to the brink of a new crisis and new tensions."

"We will never allow the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights," Erdogan added.

Egypt also issued a statement, saying the Golan is occupied Arab territory and calling for respect for international resolutions.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Trump's comments "can destabilize the already fragile situation in the Middle East."

"The very idea is not helping the goals of the Middle East settlement, quite the other way round," he said. "Right now, it's merely a declaration. Let's hope it will stay this way."

In Germany, government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said there was no change to Berlin's position on the Golan Heights, pointing to the 1981 U.N. resolution. She said Germany opposes "unilateral steps," but is well aware of the territory's significance to Israel.

"A peace settlement would have to take account of Israel's very justified security interests and of course stop once and for all the potential dangers to Israel from the Golan Heights," Demmer said. "But for the present, the tensions that already exist should not be deepened."

The U.S. will be the first country to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, which the rest of the international community regards as territory occupied by Israel whose status should be determined by negotiations between Israel and Syria. Attempts to bring Israel and Syria to the table have failed.

It was not immediately clear how a U.N. peacekeeping force that is in place in the Golan might be affected by the U.S. move. That force's mandate expires at the end of June.

There had been signals that a U.S. decision was coming. Last week, in its annual human rights report, the State Department dropped the phrase "Israeli-occupied" from the Golan Heights section, instead calling it "Israeli-controlled."

___

Associated Press writers Maggie Michael in Cairo; Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey; Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow, Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran; Geir Moulson in Berlin and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.By Tom Perry

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Syrian government vowed to take back the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as its allies and enemies alike condemned U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday for moving to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the territory seized in war.

Trump's statement on Thursday marked a dramatic shift in U.S. policy over the status of a disputed area that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East conflict and annexed in 1981 - a move not recognized internationally.

Against this backdrop of hostility towards the U.S. move, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Beirut where he took aim at Israel's main regional foes - Hezbollah and its backer Iran - and declared the success of U.S. sanctions against them.

Trump's declaration is the latest U.S. step to fuel anger in the region, both in states that are hostile to Israel and others that have relations with it and are allied to the United States.

It follows the U.S. recognition in December 2017 of Jerusalem as Israel's capital - a decision that also stirred international criticism as the city's disputed status remains at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Russia, an ally of President Bashar al-Assad with forces in Syria, said Trump's comments risked seriously destabilizing the region, and it voiced hope the statement was just declaratory.

Iran, Assad's main regional ally and which also has forces in Syria, condemned the statement as illegal and unacceptable.

"The personal decisions of Trump...will lead to crisis in the region," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said.

Turkey, a U.S. ally and an adversary of Damascus, also said the move had brought the Middle East to the edge of a new crisis and the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights could not be allowed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for his gesture "at a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel". It could help Netanyahu in the midst of a tough re-election battle, analysts said.

Story continues

The Syrian government said the Golan was an "indivisible" part of Syrian territory and recovering it "via all means guaranteed by international law is still a priority".

It said United States with its "stupidity and arrogance" had no right to decide the fate of the area and any move to recognise Israeli sovereignty over it was "an illegal action with no impact".

After remaining calm for decades since a 1974 armistice monitored by U.N. peacekeepers, Golan re-emerged as a flashpoint for regional tensions during the Syrian war. Last May, Israel accused Iran's Revolutionary Guards of launching a rocket salvo into its territory from the Syrian side of the truce line.

Israel, which has mounted numerous air strikes against what it has called Iran-backed targets in Syria, has demanded Russia keep forces allied to Tehran away from the boundary.

The Syrian side was held by rebel forces for years until pro-government forces recovered it in July.

U.S. OFFICIAL: ISRAEL "COULD NOT GIVE UP THE GOLAN"

Jason Greenblatt, a senior White House adviser, said on Twitter that "under any conceivable circumstance, Israel could not give up the Golan ... To do so would endanger Israel's very existence".

But Fouad Mundhir, a Syrian whose home village is in Israeli-occupied Golan, said Trump was "cancelling the will of an entire nation.

"You say you are carrying the flag of democracy. Okay, Mr. Trump, have you taken into account the will of the people of the Golan?" he told Reuters in Jaramana, near Damascus.

In the Golan itself, Druze Arabs also rejected the move, while Israeli settlers welcomed it.

The European Union said its position on the status of the Golan Heights was unchanged and that it did not recognise Israeli sovereignty over the strategic plateau.

Germany said any change in borders should be "done through peaceful means between all those involved", while France said it did not recognise the Israeli annexation of the Golan and any recognition was contrary to international law.

The Arab League, which suspended Syria in 2011 after the start of its civil war, said Trump had paved "the way for official American recognition" of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan and called this "completely beyond international law".

Egypt, which made peace with Israel in 1979, said it still considers the Golan as occupied Syrian territory.

Israel says Syria's civil war has reaffirmed the need to keep the plateau - coveted for its water resources and fertile soil - as a buffer zone between Israeli towns and the instability of its neighbour.

In Lebanon, Pompeo said the United States would continue to use "all peaceful means" to choke off funding that "feeds Iran and Hezbollah terror operations".

"Lebanon faces a choice: bravely move forward as an independent and proud nation, or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future," he said.

Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese leaders including President Michel Aoun told him the group was a Lebanese party with popular support. The group has three cabinet ministers and together with its allies controls more than 70 of parliament's 128 seats.

The United States is a major donor to the Lebanese army but its allies, including the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, have been weakened as Iran's role has deepened through Lebanon, Iraq and Syria and Saudi influence has receded.

Washington has reintroduced sanctions on Iran and imposed new financial sanctions on Hezbollah which Lebanon's Hezbollah-aligned president, Michel Aoun, said on Thursday were hurting all Lebanese.

(Reporting by Ali Abdelaty in Cairo/Tom Perry in Beirut, Maria Kiselyova in Moscow, and Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, Yousef Saba in Cairo, Ezgi Erkoyun and Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul, Kinda Makieh in Damascus, Joseph Nasr in Berlin, Robin Emmot in Brussels, Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Mark Heinrich)Four teachers were led into a room, told to kneel and then were shot with a pellet gun execution style and injured during an active shooter training at an Indiana elementary school in January, according to the Indiana State Teachers Association.

The association revealed the violent training tactic, which took place at the Meadowlawn Elementary School in Monticello, while testifying in support of House Bill 1004, which addresses school safety, before the states Senate Education Committee on Wednesday.

In an interview with the Indianapolis Star published Thursday, two of the teachers injured during the fake execution said local law enforcement, which was facilitating the training, told them to kneel against a wall in a classroom. They said they were shot with plastic pellets without warning.

The teachers injuries in the training including welts and bleeding, the union said. About 30 teachers were involved in the training, according to BuzzFeed.

They told us, This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing, one teacher told IndyStar, which did not name the teachers. They shot all of us across our backs. I was hit four times. ... It hurt so bad.

During active shooter drill, four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles - resulting in injuries to the extent that welts appeared, and blood was drawn.  Indiana State Teachers Association (@ISTAmembers) March 20, 2019

The state teachers association said in a tweet that teachers were brought into the classroom to repeat the exercise four at a time. Teachers waiting outside heard screaming from the room, but the ones who had been shot were told not to tell anyone what happened.

An @ISTAmembers just testified to the Senate Education Committee that teachers have reported being shot with pellet guns during school safety training. Gail Zeharalis said teachers reported hearing "screaming" and the bullets resulted in welts and blood...  Carter Barrett (@carter_barrett) March 20, 2019

The union is urging state lawmakers to include language in the bill that would ban schools or districts from conducting or authorizing an active shooter drill where any school employee or student may have any type of projectile fired at their person, ISTA Vice President Keith Gambill said in a statement Thursday.

Story continues

The White County Sheriffs Department, which conducted training at Meadowlawn Elementary School on Jan. 4, told the IndyStar that it stopped using airsoft guns during teacher training after receiving complaints.

Gambill described the use of airsoft guns during the active shooter training as fear-based and injurious.

Educators should never have to endure being fired at with pellets in an active shooter training, he said.

The Indiana State Teachers Association didnt immediately respond to HuffPosts request for comment.

House Bill 1004 seeks in part to boost mental health and emotional support services offered to students in the states public schools.

Schools across the U.S. have increased active shooter drills in response to the rise in mass shootings, including horrific events that took place last year at schools in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, which resulted in a total of 27 deaths.

Some active shooter drills have ended in controversy as the threat of school shootings have become more common for students. In December, school officials in Altamonte Springs, Florida, were criticized for holding an unannounced shooter drill, causing panic and confusion at the school.

Related Coverage

Good Job, America. Gun Violence Is Driving Up PTSD Among Children.

All The Things The NRA Has Blamed For The Texas School Shooting

School's Active Shooter Drill Sparks Controversy Over Chaos, Panic That Followed

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Telecom stocks witnessed an uptrend for the bulk of last week as the United States and China are reportedly closing toward a landmark trade deal. The U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer are scheduled to travel to Beijing later this week to meet a Chinese delegation led by Vice Premier Liu He for further discussions. As the two countries aim to bridge the trust gap, President Trump upped the ante by hinting that the $250-billion U.S. tariff on Chinese exports will continue to remain suspended even if the deal is inked.



The countries seem eager to walk the extra mile to reach a consensus decision that honors domestic obligations as well as international commitments. The bilateral trade negotiations presently seek to solve some lingering issues on Chinas subsidies, cyber theft, public sector enterprises, IP rights and so-called forcible technology transfers. A final date for the formal meeting between the two state heads is yet to be decided as China aims to avoid the humiliation of a failed deal like that of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump also hinted that the U.S. tariffs will not be withdrawn altogether and will continue to remain suspended in order to maintain pressure on China.



As the industry awaits further clarity on policy issues and its aftereffects with no official statement release, there is an element of uncertainty in the domestic market. Meanwhile, the bill introduced by the Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate to reinstate the net neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission had repealed in 2017, was in cynosure. Titled Save the Internet Act, the bill aims to discourage blocking or throttling content and consider Internet access as a utility under Title II of the Communications Act. The Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives will vote on the bill in April. Although it is expected to pass the House, stiff resistance is apprehended in the Senate where Republicans hold the majority. Moreover, the bill is likely to be vetoed by Trump as he had been vocally skeptical of net neutrality in the past.



Regarding company-specific news, 5G launch, trial verdicts, strategic hires, product launch and collaborations primarily took center stage over the past five trading days.



Recap of the Weeks Key Stories



1. Verizon Communications Inc. VZ has upped the ante against its rivals by aiming to launch the 5G Ultra Wideband network in Chicago and Minneapolis on Apr 11. As the company gears up to increase the tally of 5G Ultra Wideband mobility cities to 30 in 2019, it is offering an exclusive 5G moto mod by Motorola Solutions, Inc. MSI to power moto z3  the worlds first 5G-enabled smartphone  to enable users to fully utilize the network features.



The 5G Ultra Wideband network hinges on three fundamental drivers to deliver the full potential of 5G technology. These include massive spectrum holdings, particularly in the millimeter wave bands for faster data transfer, end-to-end deep fiber resources and the ability to deploy large numbers of small cells. (Read more: Verizon to Launch 5G in April With Exclusive Moto Mod)



2. The battle is won, but the war continues for Qualcomm Incorporated QCOM as it received the first favorable U.S. court verdict from a federal judge in San Diego for a long-standing patent dispute against the iPhone manufacturer. Per the judgment, Apple Inc. is liable to pay $31.6 million in damages to Qualcomm for three patent infringements.



Pertaining to a lawsuit filed on Jul 6, 2017, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California observed that Apple had unlawfully utilized the patents in some of its iPhone models to add innovative features. (Read more: Qualcomm Gets 3 Favorable Patent Verdicts From U.S. Jury)



3. AT&T Inc. T is currently focusing on the European markets with new hires as it aims to concentrate on the digital ad market, per media reports. The AppNexus division, which forms an integral part of its advertising unit Xandr, is hiring about 60 persons across the U.K., France, Germany, Spain and Italy to augment the companys position within the digital ad realm, the reports suggest.



Over the years, AT&T has evolved from a telecom firm to a leading player in the U.S. communications sector with significant media assets. The company now aims to leverage the inherent potential of Xandr and WarnerMedias Turner business to offer enriching advertising content and data analysis to customers. (Read more: AT&T Aims to Focus More on European Markets With New Hires)



4. NETGEAR, Inc. NTGR launched Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR300 WiFi Router at the SXSW Gaming Expo. The networking equipment makers latest member in the leading-edge product family has been categorically designed to lessen ping and latency on Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, PCs and mobile devices.



Notably, the XR300 router leverages gaming dashboard powered by DumaOS, which is crucial for an augmented online gaming experience. Moreover, with the growing popularity of online games like Fortnite, Apex Legends and PubG, the Nighthawk Pro Gaming Dashboard focuses on Internet speeds for faster online gaming and smoother streaming, while reducing lag with ultra-low ping rates. (Read more: NETGEAR Unveils Gaming Router for Superior Experience)



5. Ericsson ERIC announced that it has been chosen by TDC  the largest telecommunications company in Denmark  to roll out nationwide commercial 5G as part of the latters network overhaul program. Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed. Notably, this Swedish firm has been investing in its competitive 5G-ready portfolio to enable communications service providers to seamlessly migrate to 5G.



Along with R&D innovation, the strengthened partnership is likely to allow TDC to fulfill Digital Denmark objectives. This move is likely to empower a digital economy while boosting Denmarks position as a digital leader by helping mobile broadband subscribers and industries to capitalize on 5G technology, Internet of Things and the fourth industrial revolution. (Read more: Ericsson Collaborates With TDC to Support Digital Denmark)



Price Performance



The following table shows the price movement of some of the major telecom stocks over the past week and the past six months.

Story continues





In the past five trading days, Qualcomm was the biggest gainer with its stock rising 3.1% while Motorola lost the maximum at 1.7%.



Over the past six months, SBA Communications has been the best performer with its stock appreciating 17.2% while Qualcomm declined the most with its shares falling 28.7%.



Over the past six months, the Zacks Telecommunications Services industry has inched up 0.2% while the S&P 500 fell 2.3%.





Whats Next in the Telecom Space?



In addition to product launches and deployment of 5G technologies, all eyes will be on how the United States and China continue their trade negotiations.



Breakout Biotech Stocks with Triple-Digit Profit Potential



The biotech sector is projected to surge beyond $775 billion by 2024 as scientists develop treatments for thousands of diseases. Theyre also finding ways to edit the human genome to literally erase our vulnerability to these diseases.



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NETGEAR, Inc. (NTGR) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Ericsson (ERIC) : Free Stock Analysis Report



QUALCOMM Incorporated (QCOM) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Motorola Solutions, Inc. (MSI) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) : Free Stock Analysis Report



AT&T Inc. (T) : Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment ResearchHome sales and prices have shot up in Canadas biggest real estate markets despite the economic ravages of COVID-19, and bidding wars are back, so having a good realtor at your side can be a godsend.

It isnt for everyone, but if youre thinking about selling without the help of a realtor to save the commission, there are a few ways to make the process smoother.

Monica de Leon has sold two houses, once with a realtor and once without.

We went without the first time because we knew, we didnt want to pay the fee because it was just too much and we wouldve lost a lot of money, De Leon told Yahoo Finance Canada.

Also we didnt like all the rules.

De Leon listed her home on Comfree, which has since been rebranded as Purple Bricks. She said the process was easy, inexpensive, and she received all the information she needed. De Leon says she felt confident about going it alone.

We knew we had a nice house and we knew it would be sold quickly and easily and it did, said De Leon.

De Leon says she sold her second home through a realtor, who she knew and was also representing the seller of the home she was buying. She says she checked Comfree again, but prices had gone up and some new rules had been implemented.

Advice for selling without a realtor

Even if youre selling without a realtor, youll still need to hire a lawyer to seal the deal. Youll also need a lot of know how.

De Leon says you have to be very knowledgeable about the market. She says she was lucky enough to have realtor friends she could turn to for advice and a brother-in-law whos sold a home without a realtor. De Leon says getting out there and talking to people who have done it is a great way to learn about the process.

John Pasalis, President and Broker of Record at Realosophy Realty also has a few tips for anyone thinking about taking the plunge, starting with pricing it right.

One mistake sellers often make when trying to sell their home themselves is that they list their home at the price they want - not necessarily a price that is close to market value, Pasalis told Yahoo Finance Canada.

Story continues

Pasalis says offering a commission to the buyer's agent can tilt the odds in your favour.

Hiring a stager also goes a long way. Pasalis says highlighting your homes best features can hide its small deficiencies.

Preparing for a bidding war is another important consideration.

If it's the type of home that might receive a lot of interest, sellers want to think about what strategies they are taking to maximize their return and odds of a great offer on their offer night, says Pasalis.

Pasalis says the choice to sell without an agent depends on your personal situation. He says he always hires another agent when leasing commercial properties.

I don't specialize in commercial real estate and while I could, in theory, do it myself to save money, I value the advice they bring to the table throughout the process.

Earning their keep

Hiring an agent to sell your home can save sellers a lot of time and grief. Going it alone means taking on a realtors workload.

This includes researching and pricing their home competitively, listing the home on property listing websites (often done via a flat-fee MLS listing service), and marketing the property using for-sale signs, James Laird, Co-Founder of Ratehub, told Yahoo Finance Canada.

In addition to managing all of the tasks associated with preparing for and facilitating a sale, real estate agents are able to contribute their expertise in pricing strategy, advise on an optimal listing launch date, and provide market analysis that can help homeowners navigate the selling process easily.

Laird says DIY sellers often let emotions get in the way, by asking for too much money and letting the property sit on the market for too long.

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android.Cervical screening attendance is at a 20 year low [Photo: Getty]

On the tenth anniversary of Jade Goodys death, doctors warn that the number of women attending their cervical smear tests has hit a 20-year low.

Jade tragically died on March 22, 2009, at just 27, after being diagnosed with advance with cervical cancer.

Before her death the mum-of-two campaigned to raise awareness of the importance of having a cervical screening, having herself ignored a letter saying abnormal cells were found on her cervix.

And initially her pleas to get tested had an impact with the number of women attending screening rising by half a million.

Sadly, however, the so-called Jade Goody effect seems to be wearing off with stats released last year revealing just 71% of women are attending regular screenings.

Whats more the lack of attendance is spanning all generations. Previous research by Jos Cervical Cancer Trust and Gransnet found that one in three women over 50 has delayed or not attended their cervical screening test, with the average delay being of more than two years, while 10% delayed having a smear test for over five years.

Cervical screenings, better known as smear tests, are free on the NHS for all women aged between 25 and 64 and can detect the early signs of cervical cancer before the abnormal cells become cancerous.

But putting off or not attending a smear could have serious consequences as the charity also predicted that by 2040 cases of cervical cancer could increase by 16% among 60-64 year olds and by 85% among 70-74 year olds if screening uptake remains at the same level.

READ MORE: Woman has smear test on live TV

So how do we re-encourage women to get over their smear fear?

Jos Trust previously asked what would encourage more women to attend a screening: 21% said more flexible GP opening hours, 38% said being sent an appointment time with their cervical screening invitation, 31% wanted more information relevant to their age, 23% said more information about the risks of not attending.

Meanwhile almost one in four (23%) who had delayed attending said they would like the opportunity to HPV self test.

Story continues

Interestingly, that last request may well be a possibility.

DIY testing

In a bid to encourage women to take a smear test, DIY self-sampling kits (that can be taken at home) could soon be available to women as part of NHS England.

The kit, which tests for human papillomavirus (the virus which causes 99% of cervical cancer cases), will be sent to women by post.

I think if we find it is successful, it might well be able to reach people who arent being reached by the current service, Professor Sir Mike Richards, the governments former cancer director for England and who is leading a review of cancer screening, told MPs at the Commons Public Accounts Committee.

We need to improve the convenience for patients  better access in terms of out-of-hours services, better access in terms of [clinics] close to where people work  but on top of that we may get to a different segment of the population by offering HPV self-sampling sets through the post.

Cervical screening attendance is at a 20 year low [Photo: Getty]

The celebrity effect

In a bid to raise more awareness about the importance of attending appointments, Public Health England has launched a national campaign using TV and digital adverts to try and reverse the smear-skipping stats.

And many celebrities are jumping on board.

Earlier this year Michelle Keegan vlogged about going for her smear test to prove to her followers that its really not anything to be scared of.

The Our Girl star admitted she put off having smear tests as she urged women to be screened for cervical cancer.

Posting a string of videos on Instagram in which she talked about having her test done she wrote: Its time to talk cervical screening examinations AKA the dreaded SMEAR (horrible word) test!

So, smears been done. I was in the room five minutes, on the bed for two.

It was really quick, really easy. It wasnt painful at all, just a little bit uncomfortable, she continued.

I know it can be daunting going for a smear, but these doctors and nurses do it every single day.

So ladies, Im urging you to book in your smear. Go and get it done and tell all your family and friends as well to do the same, because it is so important and its so easy.

Proving the message may have got through, some of Michelles fans responded to say theyd decided to take action. Going to book mine today, wrote one user, while another added: Thank you for reminding us all!

Rebranding the smear

Part of PHEs new campaign involves trying to rebrand how women think about smear testing. This means medical professionals will now refer to the test as a cervical screening rather than the traditional smear test.

It is about breaking down barriers, the PHEs director of screening Anne Mackie told the BBC. She believes the new term will normalise the procedure.

The campaign shows how cervical screening is a vital preventative test which can identify potentially harmful cells and treat them before they have a chance to develop into cancer, giving us the opportunity to stop cancer before it starts, she adds.

Kate Sanger, a representative for Jos Cervical Cancer Trust, told Yahoo UK the smear test is no longer an accurate reflection of the way smear tests are conducted,

The term smear test comes from the old process of processing samples, which involved literally smearing cells onto a glass plate to be looked at under a microscope. This is no longer the way that samples are processed. This means that cervical screening is a better description of what happens in the test.

READ MORE: Theresa May discusses smear test experience

So while the screening impetus witnessed straight after Jade Goodys death has definitely waned, it seems were getting back on track in terms of encouraging women to take their gynaecological health seriously.

And with two people a day already dying from cervical cancer in England, and 2,900 diagnosed each year, its proof we have to keep going to make sure her cervical screening legacy doesnt fade completely.

You can contact Jos Trust on their free, confidential helpline on 0808 802 8000, or visit the Jos Trust website for more details on what to expect from your cervical screening.Nebraskas Platte River flooded after heavy rain and snowmelt breached a levee near Thomas Lakes in Ashland, Nebraska, resulting in downed power lines and reduced water supplies on Sunday, March 17, according to the City of Lincoln.

A timelapse from a camera at a wellfield near Thomas Lakes in Ashland, Nebraska, shows water rushing through the area after the levee breach, causing immediate erosion and toppling two electricity poles, which sparked.

The flash flooding near the wellfield prompted an issue at the water treatment plant, temporarily limiting access to water in Lincoln, the city said.

Water levels in both the Platte and Elkhorn River reached an all-time high Friday and have caused historic flooding in Nebraska. US Vice President Mike Pence surveyed the flood damage in Nebraska during a visit on March 19. Credit: City of Lincoln via StoryfulDuterte expresses gratitude to FFCCCII

posted March 22, 2019 at 11:05 pm by Vito Barcelo March 22, 2019 at 11:05 pm

President Rodrigo Duterte expressed his appreciation to Filipino-Chinese business leaders for supporting his administrations fight against illegal drugs, criminality, and corruption and for their contribution to the countrys economy. The President, who graced the 32nd Biennial Convention of the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry Inc. on Thursday, also extended his appreciation to the group for their disaster relief efforts, medical missions, and other interventions during calamities and the construction of thousands of school buildings and drug rehabilitation facilities. The FFCCCII was established more than 63 years ago with a vision to achieve economic prosperity to the whole nation and alleviate poverty.Over the years, the federation has achieved its visions to promote business growth, social development, and collaborative partnerships with the government, business groups, and communities. Duterte also took note of the FFCCCIIs effort in the disaster relief efforts, medical missions, and other interventions during calamities and the construction of thousands of school buildings and drug rehabilitation facilities.

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.(Reuters) - Here is a timeline of significant developments in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and whether President Donald Trump's campaign conspired with Moscow. 2017 May 17 - U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appoints former FBI Director Mueller as a special counsel to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election and to look into any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and people associated with Republican Trump's campaign. The appointment follows President Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey on May 9 and days later Trump attributed the dismissal to "this Russia thing." June 15 - Mueller is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, the Washington Post reports. Oct. 30 - Veteran Republican political operative and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who worked for the campaign for five pivotal months in 2016, is indicted on charges of conspiracy against the United States and money laundering as is his business partner Rick Gates, who also worked for Trump's campaign. - Former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos pleads guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials. Dec. 1 - Michael Flynn, Trump's national security adviser for less than a month who also had a prominent campaign role, pleads guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his discussions in 2016 with the Russian ambassador to Washington. 2018 Feb. 16 - Federal grand jury indicts 13 Russians and three firms, including a Russian government propaganda arm called the Internet Research Agency, accusing them of tampering to support Trump and disparage Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The accused "had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election" according to the court document filed by Mueller. - An American, Richard Pinedo, pleads guilty to identity fraud for selling bank account numbers after being accused by prosecutors of helping Russians launder money, buy Facebook ads and pay for campaign rally supplies. Pinedo was not associated with the Trump campaign. Feb. 22 - Manafort and Gates are charged with financial crimes, including bank fraud, in Virginia. Feb. 23 - Gates pleads guilty to conspiracy against the United States and lying to investigators. He agrees to cooperate and testify against Manafort at trial. April 3 - Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch son-in-law of one of Russia's richest men, is sentenced to 30 days in prison and fined $20,000 for lying to Mueller's investigators, becoming the first person sentenced in the probe. April 9 - FBI agents raid home, hotel room and office of Trump's personal lawyer and self-described "fixer" Michael Cohen. April 12 - Rosenstein tells Trump that he is not a target in Mueller's probe. April 19 - Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump supporter in the election campaign, joins Trump's personal legal team. June 8 - Mueller charges a Russian-Ukrainian man, Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort business partner whom prosecutors say had ties to Russian intelligence, with witness tampering. July 13 - Federal grand jury indicts 12 Russian military intelligence officers on charges of hacking Democratic Party computer networks in 2016 and staged releases of documents. Russia, which denies interfering in the election, says there is no evidence that the 12 are linked to spying or hacking. July 16 - In Helsinki after the first summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump publicly contradicts U.S. intelligence agencies that concluded Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election with a campaign of hacking and propaganda. Trump touts Putin's "extremely strong and powerful" denial of meddling. He calls the Mueller inquiry a "rigged witch hunt" on Twitter. Aug. 21 - A trial jury in Virginia finds Manafort guilty of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. - Cohen, in a case brought by U.S. prosecutors in New York, pleads guilty to tax fraud and campaign finance law violations. Cohen is subsequently interviewed by Mueller's team. Aug. 31 - Samuel Patten, an American business partner of Kilimnik, pleads guilty to unregistered lobbying for pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine. Sept. 14 - Manafort pleads guilty to two conspiracy counts and signs a cooperation agreement with Mueller's prosecutors. Nov. 8 - U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigns at Trump's request. He had recused himself from overseeing the Mueller inquiry because of his contacts with the Russian ambassador as a Trump campaign official. Trump appoints Sessions' chief of staff Matthew Whitaker, a critic of the Mueller probe, as acting attorney general. Nov. 20 - Giuliani says Trump submitted written answers to questions from Mueller, as the president avoids a face-to-face interview with the special counsel. Nov. 27-28 - Prosecutors say Manafort breached his plea deal by lying to investigators, which Manafort denies. Trump says he has not ruled out granting Manafort a presidential pardon. Nov. 28 - Giuliani says Trump told investigators he was not aware ahead of time of a meeting in Trump Tower in New York between several campaign officials and Russians in June 2016. Nov. 29 - Cohen pleads guilty in the Mueller investigation to lying to Congress about the length of discussions in 2016 on plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. "I made these misstatements to be consistent with individual 1's political messaging and out of loyalty to individual 1," says Cohen, who previously identified "individual 1" as Trump. - The president criticizes Cohen as a liar and "weak person." Dec. 12 - Two developments highlight growing political and legal risks for Trump: Cohen sentenced to three years in prison for crimes including orchestrating hush payments to women in violation of campaign laws before the election; American Media Inc, publisher of National Enquirer tabloid, strikes deal to avoid charges over its role in one of two hush payments. Publisher admits payment was aimed at influencing the 2016 election, contradicting Trump's statements. 2019 Jan. 25 - Longtime Trump associate and self-proclaimed political "dirty trickster" Roger Stone charged and arrested at his home in Florida. Stone is accused of lying to Congress about statements suggesting he may have had advance knowledge of plans by Wikileaks to release Democratic Party campaign emails that U.S. officials say were stolen by Russia. Feb. 21 - U.S. judge tightens gag order on Stone, whose Instagram account posted a photo of the judge and the image of crosshairs next to it. Feb. 22 - Manhattan district attorney's office is pursuing New York state criminal charges against Manafort whether or not he receives a pardon from Trump on federal crimes, a person familiar with the matter says. Trump cannot issue pardons for state convictions. Feb. 24 - Senior Democratic U.S. Representative Adam Schiff says Democrats will subpoena Mueller's final report on his investigation if it is not given to Congress by the Justice Department, and will sue the Trump administration and call on Mueller to testify to Congress if necessary. Feb. 27 - Cohen tells U.S. House Oversight Committee Trump is a "racist," a "con man" and a "cheat" who knew in advance about a release of emails by WikiLeaks in 2016 aimed at hurting rival Clinton. Trump directed negotiations for a real estate project in Moscow during the campaign even as he publicly said he had no business interests in Russia, Cohen testifies. March 7 - Manafort is sentenced in the Virginia case to almost four years in prison. The judge also ordered Manafort to pay a fine of $50,000 and restitution of just over $24 million. March 13 - Manafort is sentenced to about 3-1/2 more years in prison in the Washington case, bringing his total prison sentence in the two special counsel cases to 7-1/2 years. - On the same day, the Manhattan district attorney announces a separate indictment charging Manafort with residential mortgage fraud and other New York state crimes, which unlike the federal charges cannot be erased by a presidential pardon. March 22 - Mueller submits his confidential report on the findings of his investigation to U.S. Attorney General William Barr. (Compiled by Grant McCool in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)By Jeff Mason (Reuters) - Clete Willems, a top trade official in President Donald Trump's White House who has been a key figure in negotiations with China, is leaving in the coming weeks to spend more time with his family after the birth of a new baby, he said on Friday. Willems, a deputy to Trump's top economic adviser Larry Kudlow, is departing his post as trade talks between the world's two biggest economies drag on past the initial goal of a deal by the end of March. He will be succeeded by Kelly Ann Shaw, currently Trump's senior director for international trade, investment and development, Kudlow said. "As my top international deputy, Clete has helped the president change the global conversation on trade and make exceptional progress in negotiations with China, the EU, Korea, and reform of the international trading system," Kudlow said in a statement. Willems has been a constant presence during U.S. talks with China, which have faced stumbling blocks over Washington's demands for a strong enforcement mechanism and for China to change its habits on intellectual property and technology transfers from American companies doing business there. The talks are being led by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Willems, who has made repeated trips to Beijing as part of the U.S. delegation, served in a more behind-the-scenes role. The Wisconsin native told Reuters that he and his wife had just had a second child and made clear he was not leaving the White House because of any dissatisfaction with his work. "I love my job, but I love my family, too," he said. Willems expressed pride in the administration's work on trade. The 39-year-old lifelong Republican, known for a cheerful smile and colorful socks, got his start in politics and in trade policy working for Representative Paul Ryan, driving the then-lawmaker around their home state and rising from intern to a top legislative aide. He studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and then law at Georgetown University, studying at night while working for Ryan during the day. Willems worked as a lawyer for the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, including a stint in Geneva, before joining the Trump administration. In addition to working on China trade issues, he served as the U.S. sherpa for the G7 and G20 in his role as deputy assistant for international economic affairs. He has accepted a position in the private sector, a White House official said. (Additional reporting by Philip George in Bengaluru; editing by David Gregorio)Jakarta commuter Irnawati can spend up to four hours daily in her car, but now she and millions of others may get some relief as the traffic-clogged Southeast Asian city opens its first mass rapid-transit system.

On Sunday, Jakarta will inaugurate the $1.1 billion project seen as crucial to tackling some of the world's worst congestion, which can turn commutes into hours-long endurance tests.

For Irnawati, the new line means she might now be able to move back to her suburban home on the edge of the Indonesian capital.

After getting fed up with the gridlock, she resorted to renting a room near the office during the week rather than face a torturous drive in the vast metropolis of 30 million.

"I can hardly wait until the MRT starts operating," the 36-year-old, who goes by one name, told AFP.

"It'll save me lots of time and make my commute much more convenient and safe."

Over the past decade, rising incomes in the country of 260 million has created a ballooning middle class and sent vehicle ownership soaring.

But it's also brought hazardous air pollution and costs billions annually in economic losses as cars crawl along its roadways in the steamy tropical heat -- alongside an underused bus system.

The 16-kilometre (10 mile) line will stretch from central Hotel Indonesia to Jakarta's south, almost six years after construction began on the Japanese-backed project.

It aims to cut travel times between the two points to just 30 minutes from about two hours.

Construction on a second line linking downtown to Jakarta's northern port is also kicking off Sunday with completion set for around 2024, with more lines envisioned in future.

A separate elevated rail network is being built to link satellite cities with Jakarta, nicknamed the Big Durian after the pungent fruit that bitterly divides fans and its detractors.

- 'Changing the culture' -

The public transit projects are part of a sweeping infrastructure push that president Joko Widodo hopes will boost Indonesia's fortunes -- and get him re-elected in national elections next month.

Story continues

But transport analysts cautioned that the new line and cheap prices won't be a cure for a city with few decent sidewalks and a vehicle friendly culture.

"The MRT won't immediately ease the traffic because changing the culture and attitudes isn't easy," said Hendi Bowoputro, a public transit expert at the University of Brawijaya.

And the 130,000 expected daily passengers for the line represents only about 10 percent of those who already cram into a decades-old commuter rail network.

Incentives to cut down on vehicle use -- or punitive measures such as increased parking costs and expanding Jakarta's odd-even license plate system which restricts cars on certain days -- could create lasting change, analysts said.

Environmentalists hope that the new line will cut traffic-linked carbon emissions by about half.

It could also make a dent in annual economic losses of some 65 trillion Rupiah ($4.6 billion) linked to road congestion, according to government figures.

Once the second line is completed, Jakarta might be closer to a city like Paris, where residents spend a small chunk of their monthly income on public transit, creating a strong incentive to ditch their vehicles, said Djoko Setijowarno, a transport analyst at Soegijapranata University.

"But for this to happen, all of the public transit would need to be integrated with residential areas," Setijowarno said.

Despite high hopes among enthusiastic commuters, even Irnawati has some doubts about how well connected she'll be to public transit.

"I'd probably end up paying to take a motorbike taxi from the last station to my house," she said.

"That would be pretty inconvenient and not very comfortable, especially when it rains."Wilsher has been jailed for a minimum of 33 years for the vicious attack on OAP Arthur Gumbley (PA)

*WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT*

A truly wicked traveler who inflicted horrific fatal injuries on an 84-year-old pensioner while burgling his home was jailed for life today.

Arthur Gumbley was beaten black and blue by traveller Jason Wilsher, 20, after approaching his killer in a friendly way to ask why he was inside his home.

The OAP, who walked with the aid of a stick, was punched in the face and kicked on the floor at his bungalow in Little Aston, Sutton Coldfield, in November 2017.

It is believed the pensioner was dragged across the carpet, due to burns on his back, and had a watch forcibly pulled from his wrist, tearing his skin.

Wilsher held previous convictions for burglary, battery and affray and escaped jail for a similar burglary offence (PA)

The attack, which left Mr Gumbley with a skinned hand and four fractured ribs, was described by a judge as callous, cowardly and ruthless.

Mr Gumbley died about three weeks after the break-in as a result of his injuries.

During sentencing at Stafford Crown Court, Wilshers criminal history was read out by the judge, which included a similar attack on an 86-year-old man in his own home.

Wilsher, of Barlestone Road in Bagworth, Leicestershire, had recently avoided prison before murdering Mr Gumbley, after being handed a suspended sentence for kicking and stamping on a prison guard in a serious and sustained attack.

Wilshire also holds convictions for burglary, battery and affray, all of which were committed across the Midlands.

Mr Gumbley, 87, was viciously attacked in his own home in Little Aston, Sutton Coldfield (PA)

On Thursday, jurors unanimously concluded Wilsher had ransacked Mr Gumbleys bungalow after they heard how DNA found on a cupboard drawer at the property was an 860 million-to-one match.

Telephone analysis also linked Wilsher to a mobile handset central to the case, as well as the purchase of a blue Mazda car bought for 1,700 for criminal purposes.

On Thursday, a jury panel at Stafford Crown Court convicted the traveller of murder and conspiracy to rob.

Wearing a white shirt in the dock, Wilsher showed no emotion and looked straight ahead as he was handed his mandatory life sentence.

Story continues

On Friday, Judge Michael Chambers QC told the defendant: It was senseless.

Mr Gumbley, who was left with four broken ribs and a skinned hand following the attack, died from his injuries (PA)

He was a vulnerable, elderly man. There was no need to commit this act. It was pointless.

To be attacked in ones own home is everyones worst nightmare. To target elderly victims in their own homes is truly wicked.

This was a well-prepared and professional crime. I am quite satisfied that it was part of the intention to use serious violence in order to achieve your aims.

This was, in any view, a cowardly and callous act.

In victim impact statements read out by prosecutor Jacob Hallam QC, Mr Gumbleys children described the attack as a night we will never forget.

Mr Gumbleys son, Michael, said: Theres not a day goes by where I dont think about how my dad died.

The jury decided Mr Gumbleys bungalow was ransacked during the violent burglary at his house (PA)

I dont understand why another human being would want to kick or punch an elderly pensioner. To lose someone you love in the way we have is devastating.

Mr Gumbleys daughter Sandra Bromley also expressed her sadness at her fathers death, saying: He was a brave man. We love him and we miss him daily.

Every night I go to ring him but the only way I can hear his voice now is on a tape from his hospital bed.

Another daughter of Mr Gumbley, Susan Boyes, said the attack had made her an emotional wreck and it makes her cry every night.

The conspiracy to rob charge was related to another elderly man, Dennis Taylor, who lived in the Creswell area of Derbyshire and suffered injuries at the hands of burglars.

The 82-year-old told police he had his head banged on the hearth of a fireplace four days after Mr Gumbley was attacked.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UKPresident Trump announced Friday that he had cancelled new sanctions on North Korea.

It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2019

Trump said in a tweet that he had ordered the withdrawal Friday of additional large scale sanctions which would have been added to the existing heavy sanctions on North Korea. Neither the Treasury Department nor the Justice Department announced new sanctions Friday, leading to confusion at Trumps tweeted claim to the contrary. But the president appeared to be referencing sanctions announced by Treasury officials on Thursday, which targeted two Chinese shipping companies accused of doing business with North Korea in violation of existing sanctions.

President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesnt think these sanctions will be necessary, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement after Trumps tweet.

The presidents decision comes after he abruptly left his second summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, Vietnam last month. Trump said at the time that Kim had asked for all U.S. sanctions on his country to be removed in exchange for retiring North Koreas main nuclear-weapons site, and that he had found the request unacceptable.

Just days after the summit, satellite images emerged indicating that North Korea has begun reconstructing some structures at the Tongchang-ri missile-launch facility. An engine-test stand apparently underwent reconstruction and new walls and a roof were added to a rail-mounted transfer building on the launch pad between February 16 and March 2 of this year.

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Trump said after the images emerged that he would be would be very, very disappointed in Chairman Kim if the North Korean regime was indeed secretly ramping up its nuclear program.

More from National ReviewPresident Trump on Friday accused Democrats of being anti-Jewish when asked about top Democratic presidential candidates refusal to attend the upcoming American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference.

The Democrats have proven to be anti-Israel, and its a disgrace, Trump told reporters on the White House lawn as he prepared to depart for Mar-a-Lago. Frankly, I think they are anti-Jewish.

"Frankly, I think they are anti-Jewish," @realDonaldTrump said of Democrats this morning https://t.co/tfNAjgspFE pic.twitter.com/sRuQSRIT0I  Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) March 22, 2019

Trumps comments come one day after the Associated Press reported that Senators Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), Kamala Harris (D., Calif.), and Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) would not attend the annual AIPAC conference at the end of the month, and a spokesman for Beto ORourke told NBC News that the former Texas congressman also plans to skip the event.

The candidates decisions to skip the conference came after the liberal advocacy group MoveOn called for them to boycott the event due to AIPACs perceived opposition to progressive ideals.

Its no secret that AIPAC has worked to hinder diplomatic efforts like the Iran deal, is undermining Palestinian self-determination, and inviting figures actively involved in human rights violations to its stage, Iram Ali, campaign director for MoveOns political action committee, wrote in a post on the groups website. We asked our members what they think so that we can make more informed decisions  and over 74% agreed that progressive presidential candidates should skip the AIPAC conference. This should also give a clear insight to 2020 candidates on where their base stands instead of prioritizing lobbying groups and policy people who rarely step outside of D.C.

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This years conference will feature speeches by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The controversy over Democratic opposition to AIPAC comes amid recent allegations of anti-Semitism leveled against freshman Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), who has divided the caucus by publicly indulging in anti-Semitic tropes and by suggesting that the ensuing criticism was the result of anti-Muslim bias on the part of her Jewish colleagues.

More from National ReviewOver the past two years, President Trumps protectionism has drawn opposition from assorted pundits who claim that it rejects basic economic wisdom. But is the presidents reevaluation of free-trade policies in the context of the current global economy  and specifically, in the context of our issues with China  really the harbinger of disaster these critics claim? As ongoing trade talks between the U.S. and China near their conclusion, it is worth pointing out that the administrations hard-nosed approach has won the U.S. some important victories.

As Paul T. Haenle, a former China adviser on the George W. Bush and Obama National Security Councils, reportedly put it: Early on, the Chinese had a very simple narrative that all this trade stuff was about Trumps short-term political objectives, about getting a tweetable victory. . . . Now, theyre at the other end of the spectrum. Now its all about the U.S. trying to block Chinas rise.

Many of the higher-ups in Beijing have proven strategically inept in meeting the threat posed by the new battery of American tariffs, causing an administrative frustration among Chinese policymakers that has been widely covered by the media in recent months. After spending considerable time struggling to understand U.S. motives, China now stands to lose greatly if it does not cooperate with America on trade. While certain American industries have been affected by the trade war, the administrations retaliatory tariffs have hurt Chinas economy far more than our own.

Several economic analysts have noted the disparity. Patti Domm of CNBC reported in September that economists say Chinas growth could be slowed next year by as much as 0.6 percent due to tariffs. China, her article continued, is likely to take a bigger hit to its economy than the U.S. from the escalating trade wars, because of its much greater vulnerability to exports and its business cycle. Ethan Harris, the head of global economics at BofA Securities, explained in the same article that, if you put tariffs across the board on both countries, . . . its a four-times bigger hit to China because they export four times as much as they import. . . . The tariffs announced so far could have as much as a half-percent impact on Chinese growth.

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That forecast depended in part on the administrations ultimate willingness to follow through on its threat to impose retaliatory tariffs. While, after months of escalation, the trade war was placed on hold as part of a 90-day truce announced in December, the tariffs already in place, combined with the prospect of a tariff increase, proved enough to bring the Chinese government to the negotiating table.

What concessions might the U.S. secure from China in these ongoing talks? In fact, it has already secured one: At the recent G-20 summit in Argentina, where President Trump and President Xi Jinping agreed to the 90-day truce, China also agreed to reduce its tariff on U.S. cars, which had stood at 40 percent. Meanwhile, Chinese officials have said that they will continue to negotiate [with the U.S. over] lingering disagreements on technology transfer, intellectual property and agriculture, a significant development given that resolving the former two disputes is one of President Trumps key goals. President Xi has also promised to classify Fentanyl  a key engine of the U.S. opioid crisis  as a controlled substance, suggesting, according to CNBC, that people selling the drug to parties in the U.S. would be subject to stiff penalties in China.

And finally, amid Trumps threat to more than double current tariffs on China, the White House has announced that China will agree to purchase a not yet agreed upon, but very substantial, amount of agricultural, energy, industrial, and other product from the United States to reduce the trade imbalance between our two countries. While it is true that our trade deficit with China has reached record highs even as the administrations trade war continues, it has increased more slowly than our trade deficit with the rest of the world, and it will matter little if China is ultimately brought into line.

It should be clear at this point that Trumps hard-line negotiating stance has had an undeniable impact on China. The trade war can be understood only in the context of the Chinese Communist partys unscrupulous campaign for international dominance. His tariffs, combined with the decision in May to exclude the Chinese military from joint RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) exercises after its destabilizing actions in the South China Sea, have gone a long way toward discouraging Chinas anti-social, aggressively expansionist economic and military policies.

But there are also more fundamental, structural issues playing out in the background of Americas set-piece trade competition with China. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Benjamin R. Mandel has said in Current Issues in Economics and Finance, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, approximately 12 percent of the value of goods shipped globally originated in the United States; by 2010, the share had dropped to only 8.5 percent. As our share of the global marketplace shrinks, the capitalism-induced democratization of China that was promised for decades has not materialized. The Chinese Communist party has largely managed to harness Chinas economic boom to entrench itself in power.

Does economic development lead to the development of representative government over the long term? In the postWorld War II age, it has generally seemed to. But at what cost, if a decade-long dictatorial nightmare has to come and go first? Better to keep a despot powerless  at least until a reasonably sane government replaces him  or, failing that, to at least stop his regime from taking economic advantage of us, just as President Trump is now attempting to do with Xi.

America is facing a challenge to its preeminent place in the community of nations from an ascendant China, much as traditionally free-trading Britain faced such a challenge from the more protectionist German Empire at the turn of the last century. Foreign powers are ramping up protectionism and neo-mercantilism to challenge us as the leading, free-trade practicing global power, and we ought to explore the full array of economic and policy options available to meet this challenge, even if we have to go against conventional wisdom in the process. In a postCold War world where American dominance is giving way to a more multipolar environment, we should reconsider our approach to the global economy. It would, indeed, be wrongheaded to deny the healthy growth of other nations, even if that means America no longer dominates the landscape in the precise way it once did. But, by the same token, we need to react properly to the changing 21st-century trade landscape, demand justice in the international economy, and back that demand up with unquestioned strength.

We ought simply to evaluate the administrations trade policies toward China on these terms. Until the day China drops its own unfair industrial and trading practices, and until its ruling government ceases its inhuman crimes and repressions, we should be wary of trade with Chinese companies and of Chinas economic growth, and affirm the good that the presidents approach has achieved thus far. Instead of pursuing either neoliberal purism or complete autarky, we would do well to consider the possibility that integrating both free-trade and protectionist principles in an adaptive economic strategy might offer advantages that a more one-sided strategy could not.

More from National ReviewGermany and France have led a global backlash against Donald Trump after he said it was time to recognise Israels sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights.

Iran, Turkey and Russia joined European powers in sharply criticising the US president, while Syria vowed to recover the area using all available means.

Mr Trump took many  including the Israeli government  by surprise on Thursday when he tweeted his backing for Israels claim over the territory, marking a dramatic shift in policy over the status of an area captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

A German government spokesperson said Berlin rejected unilateral steps to redraw national boundaries, adding: If national borders should be changed it must be done through peaceful means between all those involved.

Echoing those concerns, the French foreign ministry said it did not recognise the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights and Mr Trumps statement was contrary to international law.

[[gallery-0]]

As worldwide condemnation continued to build, an EU spokesperson repeated the blocs longstanding policy not to recognise Israels sovereignty over the region.

It came as a Syrian foreign ministry source described Mr Trumps statement as irresponsible and said it showed contempt for international law.

The Golan was and will remain Syrian, Arab, the source said, according to Syrian state media, describing it as a precious piece of Syrian national land.

The Palestinian leadership were quick to blast Mr Trumps decision, saying it undermined the chance for peace in the region.

Palestinian spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh said any action take on the decision would mark a a violation of the UN resolutions, have no value whatsoever and would remain mere ink on paper.

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Executive Committee, meanwhile called it an assault on international law.

Now that [Mr Trump] recognised Israels theft of Jerusalem and destroyed the chances of peace with Palestine, hes enabling Israel to steal the Golan Heights and destroy the chances of peace with Syria, she wrote on Twitter. How exactly does that serve Israels security and regional stability?

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Meanwhile Fatah, the Palestinian group which dominates the Palestinian Authority, accused Mr Trump of supporting colonialism and slavery and said his statement would not change the fact [the Golan] is an occupied territory.

According to newspaper Haaretz, leaders of the Arab Druze minority, who are largely based in the Golan Heights, condemned the announcement, saying it was a delusional declaration of a delusional man.

The decision changes nothing in terms of the status of the Golan according to international law or for the Druze residents and was clearly meant to help prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu politically, the statement, as quoted by the paper, read.

There was similar dismay in Gaza. Hamas the militant group which runs the Strip said Mr Trumps announcement reflected Americans willingness to generally support Israeli occupation and it would not serve security and stability in the region.

Israeli soldiers stand guard at the Quneitra crossing in the Golan Heights (EPA)

Turkey said the statement brought the region to the edge of a new crisis, and Russia said a change in the status of the Golan Heights would be a direct violation of UN resolutions.

In a speech at a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: We cannot allow the legitimisation of the occupation of the Golan Heights.

The Kremlin said Russia hoped Mr Trumps call to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights would remain just that, and not be enacted.

It is just a call for now. Lets hope it will remain a call, said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. He also said such calls risk seriously destabilising the Middle East and harm efforts to find a peace settlement in the region.

An Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson called the move illegal and unacceptable while Egypt said the territorial claim went against international law.

In a tweet on Thursday, Mr Trump said that, after 52 years, it was important for the US to fully recognise Israels control over what he claimed was an area of critical strategic and security importance to ... Israel and regional stability.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who faces an election on 9 April, had been pressing for the US to recognise its claim to sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Arab-Israeli lawmakers, who were less vocal in their criticism of the statement, accused Mr Trump of timing the announcement to bolster Mr Netanyahus chances in the elections, which he will likely win making him the longest serving prime minister in Israels history.

The recognition comes days before Mr Netanyahu arrives in Washington to meet with Mr Trump and address the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

US and Israeli officials said they had not expected a decision until next week, during his visit to the US.

Mr Netanyahu, who has accused Iran of attempting to set up a terrorist network to target Israel from the Golan Heights, thanked Mr Trump for his support.

At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, president Trump boldly recognises Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump, Mr Netanyahu tweeted.

The international community considers the Golan Heights to be occupied territory, and Syria has demanded its return as a condition for any future peace agreement.

After an eight-year civil war, peace talks with Israel are unlikely anytime soon. Throughout the war, Israel has carried out scores of airstrikes in Syria to prevent Iran from establishing a permanent military presence there.Donald Trump again attacked John McCain during a speech at an Ohio tank factory on Wednesday, complaining in a lengthy digression that he wasnt thanked for the deceased senators funeral and declaring the Arizonan had harmed U.S. foreign policy and American veterans.

Trump enumerated a list of grievances against McCain, who died in August, including that he had wrongly supported the war in Iraq, failed to get the job done for veterans and badly hurt the Republican party and the nation by voting against repealing Obamacare.

The president also complained that McCain had turned over the so-called Steele dossier to federal authorities during the 2016 presidential campaign instead of alerting Trump himself. The dossier is a private and uncorroborated intelligence report alleging ties between Trump and the Russian government.

He got it, and what did he do? He didnt call me, he turned it over to the FBI hoping to put me in jeopardy, Trump said.

Trump revisited his long-running feud with the late senator beginning with tweets over the weekend. Senior Republican lawmakers have offered implicit and explicit criticism of the president for his remarks, and McCains daughter, Meghan McCain, has lambasted Trump in her own tweets and in television appearances.

Senate Veterans Affairs Chairman Johnny Isakson called Trumps attacks deplorable in an interview with Georgia Public Broadcastings Political Rewind radio program earlier on Wednesday.

Thats what I called it from the floor of the Senate seven months ago, Isakson said, when the senator criticized the Trump administration for lowering the White House flag to half-staff for only a single day following McCains death. It will be deplorable seven months from now if he says it again and I will continue to speak out.

The flag was returned to half-staff following Isaksons criticism.

Trump recalled the controversy over McCains memorial services during his remarks Wednesday, claiming that he gave him the kind of funeral he wanted but didnt get a thank you. McCain laid in state at the U.S. Capitol  a decision made by congressional leaders, not Trump  before his burial last year.

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Other Republican senators also weighed in on Trumps fresh attacks on McCain, the former Armed Services Committee chairman who died of brain cancer. McCain, an Arizona Republican who had served in Congress since 1983, was a onetime Navy pilot who was North Vietnams most prominent prisoner of war.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell praised McCain in a tweet Wednesday that didnt mention the president or his criticisms. McConnell of Kentucky wrote that he missed McCain every day and added, It was a blessing to serve alongside a rare patriot and genuine American hero in the Senate.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who was just elected to a six-year term, said on Twitter, I cant understand why the President would, once again, disparage a man as exemplary as my friend John McCain.

Senator Lindsey Graham, long McCains best friend in the Senate, tweeted praise for McCain without mentioning Trump. Graham of South Carolina has become perhaps Trumps most important ally in the Senate, changing his tune dramatically from before Trumps election when the senator predicted that he would destroy the Republican Party.

Most Republicans go to great lengths to avoid criticizing Trump, to keep from also becoming targets of a presidential tirade on Twitter. Trump remains immensely popular among Republican voters, which makes such a move especially risky. Former senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee both tussled with Trump and retired rather than face tough Republican primary challenges in 2018.

Isakson of Georgia is somewhat insulated from political pressure because he won his third Senate term in 2016 and wont be up for re-election until 2022. Still, he needs Trump for issues important to his state, such as a disaster-relief package scheduled to be on the Senate floor next week.

Were all Americans, Isakson said on the radio program. There arent Democratic casualties and Republican casualties on the battlefield, there are American casualties, and we should never reduce the service that people give to this country.

Trump as a candidate in 2015 picked a fight with McCain, declaring that the Navy veteran was not a war hero for spending five years being tortured in a Vietnamese prison and refusing advantages offered to him because his father was a prominent military leader. I like people who werent captured, Trump said at the time.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on Twitter he will re-introduce his legislation to rename the Russell Senate Office Building after McCain, whom he called an American hero. The building was named in 1972 after Georgia Democratic Senator Richard Russell, a proponent of racial segregation who fought the Civil Rights Act.

Isakson rejected Schumers call to rename the Russell building, saying Schumer is just playing politics.A party-list lawmaker on Friday condemned the death of an overseas Filipino worker in Australia as he vowed to help the bereaved relatives seek justice and the truth to the death of their family member. Jerwin Royupa, 21 years old, left his hometown of Calasiao, Pangasinan to work at a farm in Australia last February. The relatives discovered later on that he was having trouble with his employer who allegedly also took his passport. The news report said that Royupa was supposed to go back to the Philippines this March, only for his family to be told by the employers that he has died after reportedly jumping off from a moving vehicle. The migrant workers employer informed the family that Royupa died from critical bleeding in the head, chest, and abdomen.We send our deepest condolences to the family of Jerwin Royupa and we will work closely with concerned agencies and the government of Australia to personally find out what really happened to Jerwin while he was working there, ACTS-OFW Party-list Rep. John Bertiz III said. The ACTS-OFW lawmaker has said that he will get in touch with Jerwins relatives in the Philippines to gather more information and provide assistance to his immediate family.By Steve Holland WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he does not mind if the public is allowed to see the report that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is preparing about his investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and any possible links to the Trump campaign. "Let it come out, let people see it, that's up to the attorney general ... and we'll see what happens," Trump told reporters at the White House. "We'll see if it's fair," he added. Mueller is preparing to submit a report to U.S. Attorney General William Barr on his findings, including Russia's role in the election and whether Trump unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction. Russia has denied interfering in the election. Barr already is coming under pressure from lawmakers to make the entire document public quickly, though he has wide latitude in what to release. The U.S. House of Representatives voted 420-0 last week on a non-binding resolution calling for Mueller's report to be released both to Congress and to the public, but it is not clear how the measure will fare in the Senate. Asked if the public should be allowed to see the report, Trump said: "I don't mind." He said he had no idea when it would be released. As he has before, Trump questioned the legitimacy of Mueller's investigation. "I had the greatest electoral victory - one of them - in the history of our country, tremendous success, tens of millions of voters and now somebody's going to write a report who never got a vote," he said. Mueller was appointed to handle the Russia investigation in May 2017 after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who had been overseeing the effort. Mueller has previously held several senior positions in the Justice Department, including FBI Director. (Reporting by Steve Holland; writing by David Alexander and Andy Sullivan; editing by Tim Ahmann and Jonathan Oatis)President Donald Trump on Thursday recognised Israels sovereignty over the Golan Heights, in an abrupt reversal of longstanding US policy on the contested area.

In a tweet on Thursday, Mr Trump said that after 52 years it was important for the United States to fully recognise Israels control over what he said is an area of critical strategic and security importance to ... Israel and regional stability.

The recognition of the disputed area marks a major shift in US policy, a week before Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Washington to meet with Mr Trump and address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

The move is likely to be seen as a campaigning boost for Mr Netanyahu, who faces an election in Israel on 9 April, and who has been pressing for the United States to recognise its claim to sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Israel captured much of the Golan from Syria in a 1967 war and annexed it, a move not endorsed internationally. Mr Netanyahu raised the possibility of US recognition in his first White House meeting with Mr Trump in February 2017.

The Israeli prime minister has accused Iran of attempting to set up a terrorist network to target Israel from the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967. He has used the incident to repeat his goal of international recognition for Israels claim on the area.

Mr Netanyahu thanked Mr Trump for his tweet on Thursday.

At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognises Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump! Mr Netanyahu tweeted.

Mr Netanyahu later said: President Trump has just made history  Ive thanked him on behalf of the people of Israel. He did it again. First he recognised Jerusalem as Israels capital and moved the US embassy. And then he pulled out of the disastrous Iran treaty and reimposed sanctions. And then he did something of equal historical importance. He did so at a time when Iran is trying use Syria as a platform to attack and destroy Israel. The message is: America stands besides Israel.

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The Israeli prime minister said: We are deeply grateful for the US support, we are deeply grateful for the unbelievable and unmatchable support for our security and our right to defend ourselves. There is no greater friendship than the one between the US and Israel.

Thank you President Trump, thank you United States, Mr Netanyahu added.

Mr Trumps tweet came as secretary of state Mike Pompeo was in Jerusalem. Mr Pompeo referred to the Israel-US partnership as a remarkable relationship between our two countries.

He called the Golan hard fought real estate for Israel and said Mr Trump made a bold ... important decision, it will be truly be historic. Mr Pompeo also spoke of the Israeli heroism in the battles to take Golan.

The international community considers the Golan to be occupied territory, and Syria has demanded its return as a condition for any future peace agreement.

After an eight-year civil war, peace talks with Israel are unlikely anytime soon. Throughout the war, Israel has carried out scores of airstrikes in Syria to prevent Iran from establishing a permanent military presence there.

Mr Trumps announcement comes just under three weeks before the general election where Mr Netanyahu is hoping to secure a fourth consecutive term in office, becoming the longest-serving premier in the countrys history.

This is despite the fact the right-wing leader is competing for the position under the shadow of indictment on corruption charges.

The Golan announcement will likely see his popularity soar in the polls after weeks of speculation that his Likud political party would be ousted by a new centrist coalition headed by his former and popular army chief Benny Gantz.

Gilad Erdan, Mr Netanyahus minister of public security and strategic affairs, was quick to call it another huge achievement for the state of Israel, the Likud party and the prime minister and again thanked Mr Trump for his tremendous support.

Moshe Kahlon, head of the Kulanu Party, which could be an important coalition partner for Netanyahu if he is called to form the next government, said it was an an important accomplishment for the state of Israel.

Our neighbours will know that reality is settled and that there is a price for their refusal to recognise Israel, he added.

Naftali Bennett, the countrys education minister, head of the New Right party and another key coalition partner that Mr Netanyahu needs to keep on board, thanked Mr Trump.

The land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel. And Israel has no greater friend than the USA. The Golan Hights [sic] forever, he wrote on Twitter.

Support for the decision was also expressed by Israels allies in the States.

Trumps Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt tweeted that Trumps announcement was another bold, courageous, and historic decision.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who had visited the Golan just last week and vowed to lobby for recognition of Israels control over the Golan, called it strategically wise and overall awesome.

He promised to encourage Congress to follow suit.

However, Israeli analysts, while welcoming the move, were quick to point out the problematic timing of the decision, calling it electioneering.

Michael Koplow, director of the Israel Policy Forum, a Washington-based think tank, wrote that there was no reason to announce this now other than to give Netanyahu a giant undeclared campaign gift.

Additional reporting by agenciesWashington (AFP) - President Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States should acknowledge Israeli sovereignty over the hotly-contested Golan Heights, in what amounted to a major pre-election gift for his ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights," Trump said in a tweet.

Trump called the Golan -- a strategic area seized from Syria and annexed in a move never recognized by the international community -- "of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

About 20,000 Israeli settlers live in the Golan, which overlooks Syrian territory.

Trump's abrupt announcement was immediately cheered by Netanyahu, who faces a tough reelection battle and visits Washington next week.

"At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights," the right-wing prime minister wrote on Twitter. "Thank you President Trump!"

There was also quick approval from the senior Republican in the US Senate, Lindsey Graham, who is pushing for Congress to recognize Israeli control over the Golan.

"President Trump's decision to recognize the Golan as part of Israel is strategically wise and overall awesome. Well done, Mr. President!" Graham tweeted.

Trump's announcement coincided with a visit by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Jerusalem, where he became the first high-ranking American official to visit the Western Wall alongside an Israeli prime minister -- another boost for Netanyahu.

However, Leon Panetta a veteran Democrat who served as CIA director and defense secretary, among other roles, blasted Trump for "tweeting out another policy that obviously has not been worked out with our international partners."

- Diplomatic bombshell -

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The Golan recognition is only the latest diplomatic bombshell dropped by Washington, which is Israel's principal backer, in seeking to redraw the fraught Middle East map.

In 2017, Trump also went against decades of practice in recognizing the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, rather than the previously accepted Tel Aviv.

The Golan Heights move was hinted at a week ago when the State Department changed its usual description of the area as "occupied" to "Israeli-controlled."

The Trump State Department has likewise dropped previous definitions of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as being "occupied" by the Jewish state.

Israel occupied the Golan Heights, West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War. It later annexed the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem in moves never recognized by the international community.

During Pompeo's Jerusalem trip, there was also speculation that his Western Wall visit with Netanyahu could be interpreted as tacit approval of Israel's claim to sovereignty over the site. The wall is one of Judaism's holiest spots, but located in mainly Palestinian east Jerusalem.

- Netanyahu election ploy? -

Trump will host Netanyahu at the White House next Monday and Tuesday. The Israeli leader will be in Washington for the annual conference of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) pro-Israel lobbying group.

Running for reelection under threat of indictment for corruption, Netanyahu is widely believed to be hoping that such strong US diplomatic backing will help push him over the finish line.

"This decision is intensely political," said Robert Malley, president of the Crisis Group consultancy, and "in disregard of international law."

But Trump denied trying to influence the Israeli election in Netanyahu's favor, telling Fox Business Network: "I wouldnt even know about that."

"I have no idea, I hear (Netanyahu's) doing okay. I don't know if he's doing great right now, but I hear he's doing okay. But I would imagine the other side whoever's against him is also in favor of what I just did."

Trump's latest shakeup also comes ahead of the delayed unveiling of a White House plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Palestinian leaders, who broke off contact with Washington after the recognition of Jerusalem by Trump, say they expect the plan to be blatantly biased in favor of Israel.

Panetta, who was speaking on CNN, said the Golan recognition "gives up one of the chips that everyone thought would be part of a Middle East peace agreement deal."

"It's going to create real problems with our Arab partners in that part of the world," he said.ISTANBUL, March 22 (Reuters) - The Istanbul chief prosecutor said on Friday it had ordered the detention of 126 suspects employed in the judicial system with alleged links to the network of Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who Turkey says orchestrated a July 2016 coup attempt.

About 250 people were killed in the failed putsch, in which Gulen, a former ally of President Tayyip Erdogan, has denied involvement. Gulen has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999.

Turkey says that along with its military and state institutions, its judiciary was infiltrated by members of Gulen's network. Since the coup, thousands of prosecutors and judges have been dismissed.

The prosecutor's office said the suspects had lived in houses where the network trained individuals for work in the judicial system. The network then sought to place those who passed the exam in the judicial system as prosecutors or judges, while the rest became part of the network's lawyer organization.

Of the 126 suspects, 108 were lawyers on active duty, eight were judge or prosecutor candidates who were previously removed from their positions and one was a judge or prosecutor candidate on active duty, the prosecutor's office said.

Addresses of 12 of the suspects could not be determined or records showed they had left the country, it said, adding that operations spread over 37 provinces to detain the remaining 114 people were continuing.

In a separate operation on Friday, Ankara chief prosecutor's office said it ordered the detention of 18 suspects accused of links to Gulen who were working as engineers for the defense industry company Havelsan.

More than 77,000 people have been jailed pending trial since the coup and widespread arrests are still routine. Authorities have suspended or sacked 150,000 civil servants and military personnel.

Turkey's Western allies have criticized the crackdown, with Erdogan's critics accusing him of using the putsch as a pretext to quash dissent. Turkish authorities say the measures are necessary to combat threats to national security. (Reporting by Ali Kucukgocmen and Mert Ozkan, Editing by William Maclean)When Abdulweli Ayup, a Chinese ethnic Uyghur, fled his home in 2015 after he was jailed, he found refuge like other exiles in Istanbul where Turkey's government prides itself as a defender of oppressed Muslim minorities.

After years of frustration, Ayup, who was imprisoned for promoting his native Uyghur Turkic language in schools at home, says Turkey finally appears to be fulfilling a promise to take up the banner for China's minorities.

Last month Turkish authorities broke several years of silence and launched a blistering attack on China over how it treats its Muslim population, reviving hopes among exiles in Turkey that change had come.

"I was so happy when Turkey reacted," said Ayup. "Hopefully they will do more... they can do more."

A UN panel of experts says nearly one million Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking minorities are being held in extrajudicial detention in camps in Xinjiang, where most of China's more than 10 million Uyghurs live.

Beijing at first denied the allegation, but later admitted running "vocational education centres".

After initially championing the cause, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government recently toned down criticism of China as Ankara deals with economic troubles and its increasing isolation from the West after a run of diplomatic disputes.

Now rights groups and critics are once again bringing up the plight of Chinese minorities, pressuring Erdogan's government to balance the economic benefits from closer ties with China against a rights issue that stirs passions in Turkey.

Turkish officials in February had described as a "shame for humanity" the "systematic assimilation policy" employed against ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking minorities in China.

Those remarks rekindled hope in the large community of minority exiles in Istanbul who have been divided between disappointment and anger and want Ankara to do more.

Story continues

"I have never asked the government to go to war for us or to give us money. The only thing I asked was that they make some fuss," said Omir Bekali, an ethnic Kazakh who fled a year ago after being released from a Chinese re-education camp.

- Turkish dilemma -

Turkey's position contrasts with Egypt, where rights groups say hundreds of ethnic Uyghur have been rounded up in the last few years, questioned about their beliefs and some sent back to China.

The plight of the Uyghurs has in the past provoked virulent reactions in Turkey, from protesters burning Chinese flags in front of the Chinese embassy to South Korean tourists getting beaten up in the street after being mistaken for Chinese.

In 2009, Erdogan even accused Beijing of committing a "kind of genocide" against the Uyghurs.

Turkish reactions have since been more muted.

Since 2016, when Turkey faced an attempted coup, crises with the West and worsening economic difficulties, Ankara has been drawing closer to Beijing, says Selcuk Colakoglu, at the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies in Ankara.

In 2017, Turkey promised to "eliminate" anti-Chinese forces from its territory, a reference to pro-Uyghur activists.

Last December, Erdogan's party blocked a proposal in parliament calling for the creation of a commission to examine the situation of Uyghurs in China.

Erdogan "faces a dilemma: to defend the economic interests of the country or respond to this concern of voters," Colakoglu said referring to the minorities.

- Price to pay -

Turkey's reaction last month was triggered by the announcement in some media, denied by Beijing, about the death of a famous Uyghur poet, Abdurehim Heyit.

The Muslim world in particular had been conspicuously quiet over the issue, possibly to avoid Chinese diplomatic or economic retaliation.

Turkish officials said they had learned that Heyit died serving an eight-year prison sentence "over one of his songs". China rejected that, calling the Turkish statement "vile".

Turkey's government is already aware the price could be high if it goes too far: after that criticism last month, Beijing temporarily closed its consulate in Izmir and called on its citizens to "strengthen their vigilance" in Turkey.

Turkey's voice will be important, Ayup said, because it can influence public opinion in other Muslim countries, which have remained silent on the issue.

"We do not want Turkey to cut relations with China," he said. "But that does not mean that it has to turn a blind eye to a humanitarian disaster."

gkg /ezz/pma/bocBy Andy Sullivan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) exposed 2.3 million disaster survivors to possible identity theft and fraud by sharing sensitive personal information with an outside company, according to an internal government watchdog. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) said FEMA had shared financial records and other sensitive information of people who had participated in an emergency shelter program after being displaced by hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria and the California wildfires in 2017. The Inspector General's office said FEMA had shared participants' home addresses and bank account information with the contractor, along with necessary information like their names and birthdates. That "has placed approximately 2.3 million disaster survivors at increased risk of identity theft and fraud," the Inspector General's office said in a report. The name of the contactor was redacted. In a statement released on Friday, FEMA spokeswoman Lizzie Litzow said the agency had found no indication to suggest survivor data had been "compromised." She said the agency has removed unnecessary information from the contractor's computer systems. But FEMA's review only found that the contractor's computer systems had not been breached within the past 30 days because it did not keep records beyond that point, OIG said. FEMA told the watchdog it will not be able to completely resolve the problem until June 30. It is not the first time OIG has found that FEMA has mishandled personal information. A 2015 review revealed that agency personnel at a disaster-response center in California stored disaster survivor records in open, unsecured cardboard boxes. Investigators also found the agency mishandled data in 2013. FEMA awarded contracts to 1,660 different entities in the last fiscal year, according to federal contracting data, covering everything from food to construction equipment. The privacy breach is likely to prompt further criticism of an agency that was stretched to its limit in the second half of 2017 as it responded to a string of record-breaking hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters. In particular, FEMA struggled to deliver food and water in a timely fashion to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria killed nearly 3,000 people and left the island's 3.7 million residents without electricity for several months. FEMA director Brock Long faced criticism last fall when DHS determined that he had inappropriately used government vehicles to commute between Washington and North Carolina. He resigned in February, capping an 18-month tenure during which the agency responded to more than 220 declared disasters. (Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Sandra Maler and Diane Craft)Defence secretary Gavin Williamson. Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Archive/PA Images

Defence secretary Gavin Williamson has signed a 1.5bn ($1.98) deal to purchase five E-7 early warning radar aircraft, the UK government announced on Friday.

According to the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the E-7 fleet will replace the current Sentry aircraft and ensure the continued delivery of the UKs Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) capability.

Named Wedgetail by the Australian Department for Defence, the E-7 aircraft can fly for long periods of time and manage the battlespace from the sky.

READ MORE: India Joins Nations Blocking Boeing Aircraft  737 Max Update

Williamson, who signed the deal on Friday morning, said it will strengthen the UKs military partnership with Australia, which he described as vital.

The E-7 provides a technological edge in an increasingly complex battlespace, allowing our ships and aircraft to track and target adversaries more effectively than ever, Williamson said.

We will operate state-of-the-art F-35 jets and world-class Type-26 warships, and this announcement will help us work even more closely together to tackle the global threats we face.

READ MORE: Irish authorities temporarily ban Boeing 737 MAX aircraft

The new fleet will be able to track multiple airborne and maritime targets at the same time, using the information it gathers to provide situational awareness and direct other assets such as fighter jets and warships, the MOD said.

It added that the aircraft will be modified in the UK, providing over 200 jobs at Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group in Cambridge. There will also be opportunities for British suppliers to be involved in future training and support arrangements.

Stephen Hillier, cheif of air staff and air chief marshall, said: Along with Defences investment in other cutting-edge aircraft, E-7 will form a core element of the Next Generation Air Force, able to overcome both current and future complex threats.* Vote on annual resolution comes a day after Trump move

* OIC resolution easily adopted; European countries split

* Syrian envoy says U.N. text "sends a clear message"

*

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, March 22 (Reuters) - The U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday criticized Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights a day after U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the disputed territory.

The U.N. rights forum adopted an annual resolution on the Syrian Golan, brought by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), with 26 states in favor, 16 against and 5 abstentions.

European members including Britain voted against it. The United States, which quit the Council last year accusing it of an anti-Israel bias, does not participate.

"Voting for such a resolution should send a clear message... to the occupying power and to all who support Israel inside this Council and outside," Syria's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Hussam Edin Aala, told the talks.

"The United States is justifying the practices by the Israeli occupation and ignoring Security Council resolutions," he said. "The occupied Syrian Golan was and shall remain Arab and Syrian."

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East conflict and annexed the area in 1981 - a move not recognized internationally.

The resolution called on Israel to stop building settlements, to stop imposing Israeli citizenship and Israeli identity cards on Syrian citizens in the Golan, and to cease repressive measures.

Israel's ambassador Aviva Raz Shechter rejected the resolution, among five condemning it on Friday, including one on its killing of Palestinian protesters in Gaza. It said the council was biased against Israel and needed reform.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Angus MacSwan)The inauguration of the members of the Bangsamoro Transition Authorityand its first Session as a parliamenthas been postponed several times to make sure that President Rodrigo Duterte will be able to attend the event. BTA officials and members had already taken their oaths last month. According to Interim Chief Minister Murad Ebrahim, they had postponed the inauguration date from March 25 to 29 to accommodate the President. Sources said that even before the March 25 date, there had been an agreement among BTA members for the inauguration to take place on March 21, but the date was moved to March 25 because Duterte could not make it on the 21st because of his many activities.(that day, he had 3 events in Metro Manila). Actually, the first tentative date was set March 11 or some 2 weeks after BTA members took their oath on Feb. 22, but the date was eventually moved to March 18, according to sources. Some Bangsamoro advocates have said, however, that the inauguration and first session should take place with or without Duterte, as a way to show the BTAs independence. They said that delaying the two ceremonies would also delay the BTA from accomplishing its tasks such as passing administrative and local government codes and formulating a transition plan.Murad acknowledged this sentiment but said it is worth waiting for Duterte to attend the event. True, but the attendance of the President will also send strong signal for his support to BARMM [Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao], he said. Murad is also counting on Dutertes support to ensure no hiccups in the passage of BARMMs budget and block grant next year. The Bangsamoro Parliament resulted from a successful plebiscite held in January this year where Cotabato City and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao ratified the Bangsamoro Organic Law. The BARMM will now replace ARMM, one of the key demands of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in its peace agreement with the previous Aquino administration. In its first session, the Bangsamoro Parliament is expected to finalize its house rules and rules of procedure, necessary for it to begin formal deliberations on critical laws. The inauguration, meanwhile, will likely include the presentation by the MILF of the names of its 12,000 troops to be decommissioned as part of its deal with the government.By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Twelve days after being named special counsel to investigate Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Robert Mueller delivered a speech to his granddaughter's high school graduating class at Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts. In this rare public appearance in May 2017, Mueller did not bring up President Donald Trump or the investigation, but offered a clear message stressing the importance of honesty and integrity. "You could be smart, aggressive, articulate, indeed persuasive, but if you are not honest, your reputation will suffer," Mueller said. "And once lost, a good reputation can never, ever be regained. The saying goes: If you have integrity, nothing else matters, and if you do not have integrity, nothing else matters." On Friday, Mueller handed in the long-awaited report on his investigation. Mueller, a 74-year-old decorated Vietnam War veteran and former FBI director known for his tough, no-nonsense leadership style, has faced unremitting attacks by Trump on his integrity as the Republican president has tried to discredit the investigation and the special counsel himself. Trump declined to sit for an interview with the special counsel's team. Mueller has remained silent about the inquiry but has spoken loudly through court filings and the indictments of 34 people, including several key Trump aides as well as Russian intelligence officers and three Russian companies. Mueller, a longtime Republican, was named by the Justice Department's No. 2 official, Rod Rosenstein, to take over the Russia investigation after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, whose agency had led the probe. Mueller has looked into whether Trump's campaign conspired with Russia and whether the president has unlawfully tried to obstruct the investigation. Trump, facing political peril from the inquiry, has used Twitter, campaign-style speeches and comments to news media to assail Mueller, accusing him of running a politically motivated, "rigged witch hunt;" going "rogue;" surrounding himself with "thugs" and having conflicts of interest. "It's all a big hoax," Trump said on Friday. Mueller has been a fixture in American law enforcement for decades and is considered the architect of the modern FBI, serving as its director from 2001 to 2013. He was first appointed to the post by Republican President George W. Bush, then his appointment was extended by Bush's successor, Democrat Barack Obama. Mueller took over as Federal Bureau of Investigation director a week before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by al Qaeda militants that killed about 3,000 people. By the time Mueller left the position, his tenure was exceeded only by J. Edgar Hoover's 48-year stint. 'BOBBY THREE STICKS' Mueller was known by some as "Bobby Three Sticks" because of his full name - Robert Mueller III - a moniker that belies his formal bearing and sober approach to law enforcement. He was credited with transforming the premier U.S. law enforcement agency after Congress and an independent government commission determined the FBI and CIA had failed to share information before the Sept. 11 attacks that could have helped prevent them. Mueller revamped the FBI into an agency centered on protecting national security in addition to law enforcement, putting more resources into counterterrorism investigations and improving cooperation with other U.S. agencies. He put his career on the line in 2004 when he and Comey, then the deputy attorney general, threatened to resign when White House officials sought to reauthorize a domestic eavesdropping program that the Justice Department had deemed unconstitutional. The two rushed to a Washington hospital and prevented top Bush aides from persuading an ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft, recovering from gall bladder surgery, to reauthorize the surveillance program. Comey succeeded Mueller as FBI director in 2013. After graduating from Princeton University, Mueller served in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, leading a rifle platoon and receiving commendations including the Bronze Star. His became a federal prosecutor in 1976 and remained in public service until his FBI retirement, with the exception of a couple of short stints with law firms. He became a U.S. assistant attorney general in 1991 and was a key player on high-profile federal prosecutions such as the 1992 convictions of former Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega and New York Mafia boss John Gotti and the investigation into the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Mueller's Russia investigation already has yielded a series of guilty pleas and a conviction in the only trial held to date. Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted on eight charges and pleaded guilty to two others, receiving a 7-1/2-year prison sentence. Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and former campaign aides Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos have entered guilty pleas. Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone has pleaded not guilty to charges. The big question is whether Mueller will present evidence of criminal conduct by Trump himself. Such findings could prompt the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to begin the congressional impeachment process laid out in the U.S. Constitution for removing a president from office for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." While Trump has hammered away at Mueller, others have defended the special counsel's integrity, including some formerly associated with the president such as former White House attorney Ty Cobb. "I think," Cobb said in an ABC News podcast interview, "Bob Mueller is an American hero." (Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Bill Trott and Jonathan Oatis)The marijuana industry has strong potential especially after legalization for recreational and medicinal use. Moreover, the industry is getting benefits of expansion into other industries like food, beverage, tobacco and cosmetics. Growing legalization of recreational or medical marijuana is likely to bolster investors confidence in this industry.



Legalization Considered a Boon for the Industry



Legalization has long been considered a boon for the marijuana industry. Canada has become the first major world economy and the second country after Uruguay to legalize recreational use of marijuana. Effective Oct 17, 2018, Canadians can legally buy and consume marijuana.



Cannabis is getting official approval from many U.S. states for recreational uses, in addition to medical usage. Though pot remains entirely illegal at the federal level, currently 33 U.S. states have greenlighted medical use marijuana, while 10 states have allowed recreational use of marijuana.



Hemp-CBD Market: A New Growth Area



There is growing demand for uses of CBD, a non-psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, in food, drinks and cosmetics. The Hemp Business Journal estimated that sales in the hemp-CBD market will reach to about $1.3 billion by 2022.



The U.S. cannabis companies are still under regulatory prohibitions. Canadian operators are looking for ways to expand their reach by mergers and acquisitions. The hemp-CBD market offers lucrative opportunities for expansion. This is because the 2018 Farm Bill subjects hemp and its derivatives to the agricultural products category rather than controlled substances.



Strong Market Potential



Research firm Euromonitor has estimated that the American market for legal marijuana products will reach $20 billion by 2020 from a mere $5.4 billion in 2015. According to the Arcview Market Research, the U.S. legal cannabis market is expected to reach $23 billion by 2022. Research firm Cowen projected that the market size of the U.S. legal cannabis industry will reach $75 billion in by 2030, surpassing the carbonated soft drink market in 2017.



Per a study conducted by Colorado cannabis consulting firm Freedman & Koski, Illinois annual marijuana market could be between $1.69 billion and $2.58 billion. Overall, U.S. consumer spending on legal cannabis is expected to reach $22.2 billion by 2022, while Canadian spending is estimated to hit $5.9 billion, per a January report by Arcview Market.



Extremely Volatile Industry



The marijuana industry is considered as extremely volatile. Most of these companies are in their early stages of development and characterized as risky for investors. However, this industry had been providing fabulous returns to investors in 2018 before legalization in Canada.



Since the industry is in its nascent stage, even a minor negative may become the cause of major stock price fluctuations. Notably, in October 2018, the news of supply shortages resulted in panic selling as investors look to offload risky stocks. According to some industry experts, 5-10% share price volatility daily should not be considered as unnatural for this industry.



Major Gainers



Major U.S.-listed marijuana companies are likely to gain from the industrys early-stage boom. As an evidence of strong demand in the United States, pot companies have engaged in deals of late.



In the last one year, share prices of major marijuana companies such as Tilray Inc. TLRY, Cronos Group Inc. CRON, Canopy Growth Corp. CGC and GW Pharmaceuticals plc GWPH have jumped 213.8%, 175%, 77.8% and 51.7%, respectively. GW Pharmaceuticals carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy)stocks here.



The chart below shows price performance of four major marijuana stocks in the last one year.

Story continues

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Zacks Investment ResearchWASHINGTON  Two U.S. troops were killed Friday during combat in Afghanistan, the NATO command in Kabul announced.

Their deaths bring to four the number of American service members killed in the longest conflict in U.S. history. There are about 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the force split between troops advising local forces in their fight against Taliban militants and counterterrorism forces fighting elements of al Qaeda and ISIS.

The names of those killed Friday will be released following notification of their families.

In December, President Donald Trump had considered cutting in half the U.S. troop presence there. That, along with his announcement in the reduction of forces fighting ISIS militants in Syria and his dismissive attitude toward U.S. alliances, were among the reasons that then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned abruptly from his post.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also been encouraging peace talks between the Afghan government and Taliban forces to end the conflict that began in 2001. At that time, U.S.-backed forces helped topple the Taliban government that had sheltered al Qaeda militants responsible for Sept. 11 terror attacks.

U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad ended talks earlier this month with leaders of the insurgency without resolution. Draft agreements, according to Khalilzad, would see U.S. troops withdraw from the country and guarantees that Afghanistan would not harbor terrorist groups.

More than 2,400 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. Thirteen troops died there in 2018.

Earlier in his administration, Trump had been persuaded to boost the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 4,000.

"My original instinct was to pull out and, historically, I like following my instincts," Trump said. "But all my life Ive heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office."

That decision represented a break from the rhetoric Trump embraced during his 2016 campaign. Trump, at the time, frequently questioned the nation's involvement in Afghanistan, at one point describing it as "a complete waste."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: US military says 2 American soldiers killed in AfghanistanWashington (AFP) - The United States on Friday slapped sanctions on a key Venezuelan bank, BANDES and four affiliates over their support for President Nicolas Maduro.

The US move came just hours after Maduro's regime defied the United States and arrested a top aide of opposition leader Juan Guaido, whom Washington recognizes as the crisis-hit country's interim leader.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Nestor Reverol accused the aide, Roberto Marrero, a 49-year-old lawyer who serves as Guaido's chief of staff, of leading a "terrorist cell" bent on attacking the government's leadership.

The companies sanctioned are BANDES, a state-controlled bank; Banco Bandes Uruguay; Banco Bicentenario del Pueblos; Banco Universal SA Banco de Venezuela; and Banco Prodem SA, of Bolivia.

"All property and interests in property of these entities, and of any entities that are owned, directly or indirectly, 50 percent or more by this entity, that are in the United States or in the possession or control of US persons are blocked and must be reported to OFAC," the Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) statement said.

"Maduro and his enablers have distorted the original purpose of the bank, which was founded to help the economic and social wellbeing of the Venezuelan people, as part of a desperate attempt to hold onto power," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.

"Roberto Marrero and other political prisoners must be released immediately," Mnuchin stressed.

National Security Advisor John Bolton said on Twitter that "BANDES bank is to Venezuelas financial sector what PDVSA is to its oil sector. This action will severely affect any attempted currency movements by Maduro and his cronies moving forward. Do not test the resolve of this Administration."

The United States has repeatedly warned Maduro's government against arresting Guaido or his close aides, saying it would face unspecified repercussions.

Story continues

US President Donald Trump reiterated this week he was considering "all options" at his disposal to see Maduro dislodged and Guaido installed in power, implying military action if he deemed it necessary.

US Vice President Mike Pence said in an op-ed in the Miami Herald Friday that "Nicolas Maduro must go."

A UN spokesman Thursday expressed "concern" at the arrest, urging "all actors in Venezuela to take immediate steps to lower tensions and refrain from any action that could lead to further escalation."By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Vodafone will receive a warning from EU regulators about possible anti-competitive effects from its $22 billion deal to buy Liberty Global's German and eastern European assets, two people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

The warning, via a statement of objections setting out the European Commission's concerns, is expected to be conveyed to the companies shortly, the sources said, ahead of a June 3 deadline for the EU executive's regulatory approval.

The world's second-largest mobile operator and U.S. cable pioneer John Malone's Liberty announced the deal in May last year in a move that would help Vodafone to compete with rival Deutsche Telekom in its home market.

Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso and Vodafone declined to comment.

The EU antitrust enforcer opened a full-scale investigation in December last year, saying that the deal could hurt competition in Germany and the Czech Republic.

Vodafone is expected to offer concessions to address EU concerns about the deal.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Additional reporting by Paul Sandle in London; Editing by David Goodman)Per a report from The New York Post, Wells Fargo & Company WFC is mulling to replace its current CEO Timothy Sloan with Harvey Schwartz, former president and co-chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs GS.

Sloan took reins in October 2016 when the Wall Street biggie was facing public and political outrage, following breakout of the fake accounts scandal. Wells Fargo seems to have made modest progress under his leadership so far. However, the bank still lacks regulators confidence, due to which restriction on asset growth is yet to be lifted.

Last week, Sloan was questioned by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, post which the regulator commented to be disappointed with the bank and said that it has inability to execute effective corporate governance and a successful risk management program.

Per the article, talks with Schwartz are being held up, with the consideration being that he does not want to relocate to Charlotte or San Francisco. Notably, Wells Fargos East Coast headquarters are located in the Charlotte area.

Following the lapse of non-compete agreement with Goldman, Schwartz has been looking for other opportunities such as starting a family investment office with Pablo Salame, ex co-head of Goldman Sachs securities unit.

However, a Wells Fargo spokesperson informed Reuters that there was no validity to the rumors that the bank was in talks with potential candidates for the CEO position.

OurTake

Wells Fargos move to hire its leader from outside might help it gain public and regulators confidence. Also, it would provide a fresh approach to managing the problems that are currently being faced by the bank.

The banks focus on achieving previously laid down financial targets, with support from improving economic backdrop, might help it overcome the negatives.

Shares of Wells Fargo have lost 4.9% over the past 12 months compared with 5.5% decline recorded by the industry.

Story continues

Currently, the stock carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

A few stocks from the finance space worth a look are Fifth Third Bancorp FITB and M&T Bank Corporation MTB. Both these stocks are currently carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Over the past 60 days, Fifth Third Bancorp has been witnessing upward earnings estimate revision for the current year. Its shares have gained more than 10% in the past three months.

M&T Banks earnings estimates for 2019 have been revised upward over the past 60 days. Shares of the company have gained more than 15% in the past three months.

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Zacks Investment ResearchWASHINGTON  Democrats say they are planning their "next steps" after the White House on Thursday rejected a request for documents pertaining to President Donald Trump's communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Earlier this month, the Democratic-led House intelligence, foreign affairs and oversight committees sent a letter requesting for the substance of Trump and Putins conversations in person and by phone. They also asked for any documents related to the conversations, information on whether the talks had any impact on U.S. foreign policy and information on whether Trump tried to conceal any evidence of them.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone rejected the request on Thursday, arguing longstanding precedents prevent Congress from obtaining such documents and conducting oversight of the president's communications on foreign affairs.

"The president must be free to engage in discussions with foreign leaders without fear that those communications will be disclosed and used as fodder for partisan political purposes," Cipollone writes, adding that "No foreign leader would engage in private conversations with the president, or the president's senior advisers, if such conversations were subject to public disclosure."

No detailed record: President Trump went to 'extraordinary lengths' to hide details of Putin meetings, report says

'A whole big fat hoax': After news reports scrutinizing Russian ties, President Trump declares: 'I never worked for Russia'

In a joint statement, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel and House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings hinted that the fight over the documents was not over and called the denial just part of a "troubling pattern by the Trump administration of rejecting legitimate and necessary congressional oversight."

"We are also concerned by the disingenuous assertions and representations in the letter. In previous Democratic and Republican Administrations, the White House made officials available for interviews and produced to the Congress all manner of internal documents and communications regarding 'the conduct of foreign relations' by the President and White House and National Security Council staff. In fact, the Obama Administration produced records describing the President and Secretary of States calls with foreign leaders. The Congress also received voluminous records from agencies involved in the conduct of U.S. foreign relations, such as the State Department, Defense Department, and other agencies."

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The Democrats ended saying, "President Trumps decision to break with this precedent raises the question of what he has to hide. We will be consulting on appropriate next steps. Congress has a constitutional duty to conduct oversight and investigate these matters, and we will fulfill that responsibility."

'We may have no choice': Trump-Putin meeting: Top Democrat says he's considering subpoena for interpreter's notes

Their March request included asking for interviews with "linguists, translators or interpreters" who in any way listened to Trump and Putins conversations. The two leaders met privately in Helsinki in July for more than two hours with only interpreters present, and the White House has not said what they discussed.

In his Thursday denial, Cipollone cited specific court cases, including Supreme Court rulings, arguing against releasing such documents and information. He said that Trump "must be free to consult with his senior advisers  to ask frank questions, solicit and receive recommendations, weigh options, and debate policy alternatives."

Cipollone argues if these documents were released it could affect foreign relations and set a bad precedent with future presidents. He says in the letter that the request is unfair and seems to be a set up for critics to scrutinize the administration.

"It appears that the practice of the committees has been to request information that the committees have no legal entitlement to receive and then unfairly criticize the White House for simple adhering to consistent bipartisan past practice in its response," he writes.

Contributing: Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: White House rejects Democrats' request for information on Trump's talks with PutinWhat is the Golan Heights and what is its current status?

The Golan Heights is a narrow strip of mountainous land, roughly 1,800sq km, bordering Syria, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon.

It has officially been recognised as part of Syria since 1944  when the country was recognised as an independent republic  but was captured by Israeli forces in the 1967 Six-Day War, thereafter becoming Israeli-occupied territory.

No country in the world has recognised Israels annexation of the Golan Heights  which might change soon, following Donald Trumps call for recognition.

Syria tried to get it back in a surprise attack in the 1973 Arab-Israel War, but was defeated in a huge tank battle and forced to sign a ceasefire deal.

A UN peacekeeping force has been deployed in the Golan Heights since that time to monitor the ceasefire and patrol the demarcation line between Syrian and Israeli-controlled areas.

The United Nations considers the Golan Heights as part of Syria, and passed UN Resolution 242, which calls on Israel to withdraw from all territory it occupied in the 1967 war  including the Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank. Israel has refused to do so.

How much control does Israel have over the Golan Heights?

Israel occupies two-thirds of the territory, and in 1981, formally recognised it as part of the country.

It has also  in violation of international law  began construction in the territory and moved settlers there.

Initially secret talks began in the late 2000s between Syria and Israel that reportedly included the possibility of Israel returning the territory in exchange for a peace deal with Damascus, but negotiations collapsed after Israel launched a war in Gaza in 2008.



Why do both Syria and Israel want sovereignty over the Golan Heights?

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that the Golan Heights will always be part of Israel, and Syria, which does not recognise Israel, wants the territory back.

It is a strategically important territory for the two enemy countries with its elevated position  nearly 3,000m above sea level  allowing a viewpoint into southern Syria, northern Israel and southern Lebanon.

Story continues

When Syria had control of the Golan Heights, its military was able to use positions to shell Israeli communities below.

But Israels possession of the land also gives its military a clear view into Syria, all the way to the capital Damascus some 60km away.

It is also resource-rich and borders the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus allegedly walked on water.

The sea is an important freshwater source and Israels largest reservoir  once accounting for 30 per cent of the countrys water sources.

But it is starting to dry up, which is having a knock-on effect on the Jordan river, which it feeds into, and the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea.

Why has the US made this announcement about the Golan Heights now?

The US, in line with international law and consensus, had refrained from accepting Israels claim to sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

But although Mr Trumps announcement is controversial, it is unlikely to have taken many by surprise.

It follows a series of moves that have delighted Israel but infuriated the Arab world, including recognising Jerusalem as Israels capital and moving the US embassy there.

This announcement has also reportedly been in the works for some time.

According to a Reuters interview with the countrys intelligence minister Yisrael Katz in May 2018, the matter was topping the agenda in bilateral talks, with Israel pressing the Trump administration to recognise its sovereignty over the territory as part of the US pushback against perceived regional aggression by Iran.

Iran is a key ally to Damascus and its military support in the Syrian war has been crucial to giving Syrian president Bashar al-Assad the upper hand.

This is the perfect time to make such a move. The most painful response you can give the Iranians is to recognise Israels Golan sovereignty  with an American statement, a presidential proclamation, enshrined [in law], Katz said.



Who lives in the Golan Heights now?

Today more than 40,000 people live in the Golan Heights, according to Israeli government estimates.

The population is a mix of Syrians and Israeli settlers. Most of the Syrian residents are those that fled there during the 1967 war and are members of the Druze faith.Government authorities should prosecute the lawyers, prosecutors and judges linked to illegal drugs, instead of shaming them by revealing who they are, the Integrated Bar of the Philippines said on Friday. We encourage our law enforcement operatives to prosecute and spare no one, not even lawyers, prosecutors or judges, who are into drug possession and use, as this continues to be an offense penalized under the Anti-Drug Act, IBP national president Abdiel Dan Elijah S. Fajardo said in a statement. The countrys mandatory lawyers organization made the call after the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency Director General Aaron Aquino revealed there are lawyers, prosecutors, and judges in the agencys drug watchlist. The malefactors may also be held administratively liable for misconduct, and must be proceeded against before the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, the Department of Justice, or the Supreme Court, as the case may be, the IBP president stressed. Fajardo said the IBP is strongly objecting to public disclosures of the drugs list that publicly shame prosecutors who dismiss drug complaints for insufficiency of evidence, and judges who acquit drug suspects on constitutional grounds. Government agents are not licensed to perverse or relax constitutional standards on buy-bust and search and seizure operations and a defeat in the legal arena on such basis must not be interpreted as drug coddling or protection, he pointed out.Last week, President Rodrigo Duterte named 46 alleged narco-politicians which included 35 mayors, seven vice mayors, one provincial board member, and three lawmakers. The Department of the Interior and Local Government has already filed administrative complaints against these alleged narco-politicians before the Office of the Ombudsman. Aquino recently said the PDEAs drug watchlist also included judges, prosecutors and even celebrities and members of the media. Nonetheless, Aquino assured the public that the PDEA cannot release yet the names in the watch list as it has to go through some extreme, stringent, and careful scrutiny, reevaluation, and validation.By Jan Wolfe WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An intriguing area of focus in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Kremlin's role in the 2016 U.S. election is a proposed Moscow real estate deal that Donald Trump pursued while running for president despite denying at the time any links to Russia. The special counsel has revealed in court filings numerous details about the project, which never came to fruition. Further information has come from Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer who was instrumental in the negotiations, in congressional testimony and in his guilty plea to a charge of lying to Congress about the project. Mueller's team said in a December 2018 court filing that "the Moscow Project was a lucrative business opportunity that sought, and likely required, the assistance of the Russian government. If the project was completed, the Company (the Trump Organization) could have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues." The project is significant because it shows Trump was chasing a lucrative business deal in Russia at the same time that President Vladimir Putin's government, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, was conducting a hacking and propaganda campaign to boost his candidacy. The project also coincided with Trump's positive comments as a candidate about Putin and his questioning of U.S. sanctions against Russia. Mueller is preparing to submit to U.S. Attorney General William Barr the report on his investigation into whether Trump's campaign conspired with Russia and whether the Republican president has unlawfully tried to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction. Russia has denied election interference. Here is an explanation of the Trump Moscow tower project and what the president has said about it. WHAT IS TRUMP'S HISTORY IN MOSCOW? Trump, a wealthy New York real estate developer, had discussed expanding his business empire into Russia for more than three decades. In 2013, after visiting Russia and hosting his Miss Universe pageant there, he wrote on Twitter: "TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next." The Trump Organization's longtime partner in the project was Felix Sater, a Russian-born, Brooklyn-raised real estate developer, according to company emails released to congressional investigators. WHAT WAS THE TRUMP TOWER MOSCOW PROJECT? Trump in October 2015 signed a non-binding letter of intent to move forward with a Moscow tower project with a Russian development firm. The firm, I.C. Expert Investment Co, agreed to construct the skyscraper, and the Trump Organization agreed to license its name and manage the building's operations. The letter of intent described a building in a Moscow business district with 250 luxury residential condominiums, at least 150 hotel rooms and a luxury spa. Sater, who has served prison time in the United States for assault and later became an FBI informant on organized crime, assured Cohen in a November 2015 email he could get the Russian government to support a Trump property in Moscow. "I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this," Sater told Cohen in that email. Trump had announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015. In testimony last month to the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee, Cohen said Sater came up with a "marketing stunt" of offering Putin a free penthouse in the tower to drive up unit prices, "no different than in any condo where they start listing celebrities that live in the property." Cohen's House testimony portrayed Trump as keenly interested in completing the deal even as he campaigned for president. "Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project," Cohen testified. In his guilty plea, Cohen admitted he had lied to Congress in a 2017 letter that claimed he had only discussed the negotiations with Trump three times and that the project talks ended in January 2016. Cohen said he lied to Congress to minimize links between Trump and the project and give the false impression that the proposal had ended before key early milestones in the 2016 race to determine the Republican presidential nominee. Cohen in his guilty plea said the project was discussed within the Trump Organization multiple times and that he spoke with Sater about obtaining Russian governmental approval as late as June 2016, after Trump had clinched the Republican nomination. WHY DID THE NEGOTIATIONS END? Legal filings in Cohen's plea deal did not make clear why the negotiations ended. But June 2016 was the month when the Washington Post first reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the Democratic National Committee's computers, a cyber operation that was a key part of Moscow's interference in the presidential race, as described by U.S. intelligence. One of Trump's lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, indicated in January 2019 that the Moscow tower discussions had continued through the November 2016 election, though he later backtracked. WHAT HAS TRUMP SAID? Trump's public statements about business dealings in Russia have evolved over time. In July 2016, Trump told a news conference: "I have nothing to do with Russia." Nine days before becoming president, Trump wrote on Twitter, "Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!" In November 2018, after Cohen's guilty plea, Trump told reporters that in 2016 he was in a position "to possibly do a deal to build a building of some kind in Moscow." Trump added, "There would be nothing wrong if I did do it. I was running my business while I was campaigning. There was a good chance that I wouldn't have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business. And why should I lose lots of opportunities?" Cohen told the House panel Trump made clear to him that he should lie about when the negotiations ended. Trump and his allies have called Cohen a liar trying to reduce his prison time after pleading guilty to a series of federal criminal charges. WHAT ROLE DID TRUMP'S CHILDREN PLAY? Cohen told the House panel that he briefed the president's son and daughter, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, about the tower negotiations. Donald Trump Jr., an executive at the Trump Organization, told Congress in September 2017 he was only "peripherally aware" of the talks during the campaign. Ivanka Trump, a former Trump Organization executive, told ABC News last month she knew "literally almost nothing" about the project, saying there were "40 or 50 deals like that were floating around, that somebody was looking at." (Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)A smart beta exchange traded fund, the WisdomTree International Hedged Quality Dividend Growth Fund (IHDG) debuted on 05/07/2014, and offers broad exposure to the Broad Developed World ETFs category of the market.

What Are Smart Beta ETFs?

Products that are based on market cap weighted indexes, which are strategies designed to reflect a specific market segment or the market as a whole, have traditionally dominated the ETF industry.

Investors who believe in market efficiency should consider market cap indexes, as they replicate market returns in a low-cost, convenient, and transparent way.

If you're the kind of investor who would rather try and beat the market through good stock selection, then smart beta funds are your best choice; this fund class is known for tracking non-cap weighted strategies.

These indexes attempt to select stocks that have better chances of risk-return performance, based on certain fundamental characteristics or a combination of such characteristics.

The smart beta space gives investors many different choices, from equal-weighting, one of the simplest strategies, to more complicated ones like fundamental and volatility/momentum based weighting. However, not all of these methodologies have been able to deliver remarkable returns.

Fund Sponsor & Index

The fund is managed by Wisdomtree. IHDG has been able to amass assets over $442.48 M, making it one of the average sized ETFs in the Broad Developed World ETFs. IHDG, before fees and expenses, seeks to match the performance of the WisdomTree International Hedged Quality Dividend Growth Index.

The WisdomTree International Hedged Quality Dividend Growth Index is designed to provide exposure to the developed market companies while at the same time neutralizing exposure to fluctuations between the value of foreign currencies and the U.S. dollar.

Cost & Other Expenses

Since cheaper funds tend to produce better results than more expensive funds, assuming all other factors remain equal, it is important for investors to pay attention to an ETF's expense ratio.

Story continues

Annual operating expenses for IHDG are 0.58%, which makes it one of the more expensive products in the space.

The fund has a 12-month trailing dividend yield of 0.19%.

Sector Exposure and Top Holdings

Even though ETFs offer diversified exposure that minimizes single stock risk, investors should also look at the actual holdings inside the fund. Luckily, most ETFs are very transparent products that disclose their holdings on a daily basis.

When you look at individual holdings, Novo Nordisk A/s (NOVOB) accounts for about 7.43% of the fund's total assets, followed by Diageo Plc (DGE) and British American Tobacco Plc (BATS).

IHDG's top 10 holdings account for about 35.87% of its total assets under management.

Performance and Risk

So far this year, IHDG has added about 15.67%, and is up roughly 4.90% in the last one year (as of 03/22/2019). During this past 52-week period, the fund has traded between $26.92 and $33.03.

The fund has a beta of 0.76 and standard deviation of 12.14% for the trailing three-year period, which makes IHDG a medium risk choice in this particular space. With about 266 holdings, it effectively diversifies company-specific risk.

Alternatives

WisdomTree International Hedged Quality Dividend Growth Fund is not a suitable option for investors seeking to outperform the Broad Developed World ETFs segment of the market. Instead, there are other ETFs in the space which investors should consider.

IShares Core MSCI EAFE ETF (IEFA) tracks MSCI EAFE Investable Market Index and the iShares MSCI EAFE ETF (EFA) tracks MSCI EAFE Index. IShares Core MSCI EAFE ETF has $59.97 B in assets, iShares MSCI EAFE ETF has $65.03 B. IEFA has an expense ratio of 0.08% and EFA charges 0.31%.

Investors looking for cheaper and lower-risk options should consider traditional market cap weighted ETFs that aim to match the returns of the Broad Developed World ETFs.

Bottom Line

To learn more about this product and other ETFs, screen for products that match your investment objectives and read articles on latest developments in the ETF investing universe, please visit Zacks ETF Center.



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WisdomTree International Hedged Quality Dividend Growth Fund (IHDG): ETF Research Reports



iShares MSCI EAFE ETF (EFA): ETF Research Reports



iShares Core MSCI EAFE ETF (IEFA): ETF Research Reports



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Zacks Investment ResearchTech industry not doing enough to get more women into the sector, a survey has found. Photo: Getty

Britains technology sector isnt doing enough to promote gender equality, according to the women working in it.

A survey of over 6,000 women in tech by travel company Booking.com, released on Friday, found less than half (48%) believe the industry as a whole is prioritising gender diversity as part of its agenda.

On top of that, only slightly more (52%) think the company they work for is doing enough to get women into roles, according to survey.

READ MORE: Women not part of story in UK tech, says coding chief executive

The industry has long been under fire for its lack of women on company boards and staff. Last year, a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) revealed just 17% of all jobs, and 5% of leadership positions in tech are held by women  far lower than most other sectors.

Despite economic pressures to get more women into tech, particularly on company boards and in leadership positions, women said they do not believe current efforts are enough.

Significantly, three in five female re-entrants to tech  those who took break and returned to the industry  said taking a career break has been detrimental to their individual progression, and almost two-thirds (65%) criticised the industry for not doing more to support their re-entry to the field.

READ MORE: Women in tech  report reveals sobering lack of female leaders

However, a rise in re-entry schemes is raising hopes. Over three in five (64%) women said these returnships  focused on training, re-skilling, upskilling and mentorship  are key to overcoming re-entry challenges, allowing them to build from their previous experience rather than starting from the bottom.

While two in five of those who have returned to the field said regular upskilling opportunities have been essential to their success in tech (35%), far more (64%) said they gave them the confidence to overcome re-entry issues.

Driving greater gender diversity in tech is as much about unearthing untapped talent as it is about supporting women who have already built the skills, knowledge and expertise in our sector, said Gillian Tans, CEO of Booking.com.

Story continues

READ MORE: These are the top 10 cities for women in tech in 2019

Over the last 10 years there have been significant changes to drive positive progress towards making the tech industry a more gender diverse place to work. We need to make sure that we continue this momentum. Companies that prioritise inclusivity at every level and tap effectively into the existing talent pool as well as encouraging new talent will continue to grow and thrive.

The tech industry needs to work more closely together to align on strategies to encouraging women to pursue a career in tech, Tans added.

Women bring tremendous value that can positively impact both tech companies and the industry globally and should be part of proactive initiatives focused on inclusivity, retention and skills development.(Adds Garuda CEO, Norwegian Air comments)

* Garuda cancels 737 MAX order with list price of $6 billion

* Boeing to retrofit older planes with safety alert - sources

* Flight control system MCAS at center of investigations

* Ethiopian Airlines emphasizes modernity of its systems

By Cindy Silviana and Terje Solsvik

JAKARTA/OSLO, March 22 (Reuters) - Indonesian airline Garuda plans to cancel a $6 billion order for Boeing 737 MAX jets, it said on Friday, saying some passengers would be frightened to board the plane after two fatal crashes, although analysts said the deal had long been in doubt.

The news came as another 737 MAX customer, Norwegian Air , played down the significance of a move by Boeing to make a previously optional cockpit warning light compulsory.

Norwegian said that, according to Boeing, the warning light would not have been able to prevent erroneous signals that Lion Air pilots received before their new 737 MAX plane crashed off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people.

Indonesia's national carrier Garuda is the first airline to publicly announce plans to scrap an order since the world's entire fleet of 737 MAX planes was grounded last week, following an Ethiopian Airlines crash that left 157 people dead.

"Many passengers told us they were afraid to get on a MAX 8," Garuda CEO Ari Askhara told Reuters on Friday.

However, the airline had been reconsidering its order for 49 of the narrowbody jets prior to the Ethiopian crash, including potentially swapping some for widebody Boeing models.

Southeast Asia faces a glut of narrowbody aircraft like the 737 MAX and rival Airbus A320neo at a time of slowing global economic growth and high fuel costs.

"They have been re-looking at their fleet plan anyway so this is an opportunity to make some changes that otherwise may be difficult to do," CAPA Centre for Aviation Chief Analyst Brendan Sobie said.

Indonesia's Lion Air has also said it might cancel 737 MAX aircraft, though industry sources say it is also struggling to absorb the number of planes on order.

Story continues

Both crashes are still being investigated. But regulators have noted some similarities between the two, and attention has focused on whether pilots had the correct information about the "angle of attack" at which the wing slices through the air.

No direct link has been proven between the accidents.

RETROFITS

Boeing now plans to make compulsory a light to alert pilots when sensor readings of the angle of attack do not match - meaning at least one must be wrong -, according to two officials briefed on the matter.

Investigators suspect a faulty angle-of-attack reading led the doomed Lion Air jet's computer to believe it had stalled, prompting the plane's anti-stall system, called MCAS, repeatedly to push the plane's nose down.

The Lion Air plane did not have the warning light installed because it was not compulsory. Ethiopian Airlines did not immediately comment on whether its crashed plane had the alert.

But the Ethiopian carrier, whose reputation along with Boeing's is at stake, issued a statement on Friday emphasizing the modernity of its safety and training systems, with more than $500 million invested in infrastructure in the past five years.

The Ethiopian crash has set off one of the widest inquiries in aviation history and cast a shadow over the Boeing 737 MAX model intended to be a standard for decades.

Boeing did not comment on the plan to make the safety feature standard, but separately said it was moving quickly to make software changes and expected the upgrade to be approved by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in coming weeks.

Chicago-based Boeing will also retrofit older planes with the cockpit warning light, the officials told Reuters.

Experts said it could take weeks or months to be done, and for regulators to review and approve the changes. Regulators in Europe and Canada have said they will conduct their own reviews of any new systems.

Norwegian said its 18 737 MAX jets did not have the cockpit warning light, but it would follow any recommendations made by Boeing and aviation regulations. The airline said last week it would seek compensation from Boeing for the cost of grounding its 737 MAX planes, which makes up 11 percent of its fleet.

Since the Ethiopian crash, Boeing shares have fallen 12 percent and $28 billion has been wiped off its market value.

Pressure has mounted on the company from U.S. legislators, who are also expected to question the FAA. The company faces a criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department as well.

Several lawsuits have already been filed on behalf of victims of the Lion Air crash referring to the Ethiopian accident. Boeing declined to comment on the lawsuits.

(Additional reporting by Jamie Freed in Singapore, Bernadette Christina Munthe in Jakarta, Maggie Fick and Jason Neely in Addis Ababa, Tim Hepher in Paris, and Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Writing by Sayantani Ghosh, Georgina Prodhan and Ben Klayman; Editing by Mark Potter)For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL March 22, 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: Boeing BA, Lockheed-Martin LMT and Textron TXT.

Here are highlights from Thursdays Analyst Blog:

Buy Boeing (BA) and Other Aerospace Stocks Despite Trade War Pullback

Aerospace-Defense

Aerospace and Defense are far from mature with innovation being the bedrock for this industry. I see only growth for those companies leading in this space. Over the past year, this industrys equity prices have been up and down ending up close to flat for the year. I think that this underperforming industry has an enormous amount of potential for growth in 2019 as trade tensions lighten. Defense contracts being a hefty portion of revenues gives investors in this space a bit more security as well.

Boeing

Boeing, the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world, was recently devastated by two Boeing 737 MAX crashes within five months, with the most recent accident on March 10th causing a 15% drop in stock price. There is still litigation concerning these crashes underway that may have a material effect on the stock price (if the 15% drop didnt already price this in). This drop I believe has given investors a buying opportunity. Boeing has already made many steps to resolve any underlying issues with the aircraft and airlines are still flying the 737 MAX, confident the problem isnt systemic.

Over the last two years, BAs bottom line has risen 53% on a year over year average with decreasing margins. In the Net Income BNRI (adjusted net income) graph below you can see that profits have never been higher. This lean operating company has also significantly grown its free cash flow to over $13 billion at the end of 2018 giving Boeing a considerable amount of financial flexibility for acquisition and internal innovation/growth.

Story continues

Boeing is currently trading at an 18.10 price to earnings ratio (P/E) which is a very reasonable valuation considering this multiple got as high as 30.63 in January of last year before trade tensions hit the fan (shown on the graph below). With Boeing being the US largest exporter its valuation got walloped when the trade war with China began. Every day the tensions seem to be diminishing, with a deal looming on the horizon I am confident that a resolution is near. Getting in before this multiple adjusts up to pre-trade war levels could turn out to be a very profitable trade. With lowered multiples and raising EPS, this has placed the continuously profitable company as Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

Lockheed-Martin

Lockheed Martin is Boeings biggest competitor for government aerospace contracts being the largest defense contractor in the world. LMT has a niche portfolio of military aircraft that has won them many government contracts; most notably their F-35 program which is considered their primary growth driver is 20% of total revenue and growing. The F-35 program is incredibly expensive though, and the US government is pressuring them to reduce costs which could negatively affect the bottom line. LMTs broader portfolio is under intense competition with almost all of their revenue coming from defense contracts. Meanwhile, competitors like Boeing who only have 22% of revenue relying on these contracts have a distinct diversification advantage. These concerns lead me to agree with Zacks Ranks #3 (Hold) for LMT.

Textron

Textron is a multi-industry conglomerate that operates five segments: Bell, Textron Systems, Textron Aviation, Industrial and Finance. Over 60% of their revenue comes from their aerial transportation segments (Bell Helicopters and Textron Aviation). They have won a number of contracts this year most notably a $912 million order for 12 AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters to the Royal Bahraini Air Force.

TXT is currently trading 28% below its 52 week high that it reached in September of last year (shown below). This drop is due to the systemic issues stemming from trade tensions as well as the overall market sell-off at the end of 2018. The company shows inconsistent top and bottom line growth because of the competitive nature of the space. There have been a few upwardly adjusted EPS estimates that have pushed the stock into a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) spot. With trade tension easing, a diverse portfolio, and EPS estimates on the rise, this buy ranking accurately reflects how I view a position in TXT.

Conclusion

Each of these three aerospace and defense stocks have a beta above 1 meaning that they will on average outperform a bull market and underperform a bear market. This high beta is a double-edged sword and should be considered before investing in any of these stocks. When a trade deal is finally made between the US and China, I am confident that these equities should all see a substantial rally because of how much each of these companies relies on exports.

Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019

In addition to the stocks discussed above, would you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year?

Who wouldn't? Our annual Top 10s have beaten the market with amazing regularity. In 2018, while the market dropped -5.2%, the portfolio scored well into double-digits overall with individual stocks rising as high as +61.5%. And from 2012-2017, while the market boomed +126.3, Zacks' Top 10s reached an even more sensational +181.9%.

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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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Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMT) : Free Stock Analysis Report



The Boeing Company (BA) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Textron Inc. (TXT) : Free Stock Analysis Report



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Zacks Investment ResearchFor Immediate Release

Chicago, IL March 22, 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: REV Group Inc. REVG, Hertz Global Holdings Inc. HTZ, ZTO Express (Cayman) Inc. ZTO, Hub Group Inc. HUBG and Expeditors International of Washington Inc. EXPD.

Here are highlights from Thursdays Analyst Blog:

Will the Bull Run Continue for Transport Services?

The transportation sector seems poised well for both the near and the long term due to robust freight demand on the back of a strong economy. Substantial surge in manufactured goods, massive tax hauls and business-friendly policies of the government are anticipated to fuel the transportation sectors growth.

Consequently, the companies offering equipment financing and leasing, logistics and supply chain management services to transporters are also likely to perform well in the near future.

Robust Industry Data

Industry bodies of several transportation industries, such as freight rail, airlines, trucking and shipping have forecast strong growth.

In February 2019, the Association of American Railroads, the industry body of the class 1 freight railroad operators, expressed optimism that rail traffic growth rate will continue in the near term. The most important growth driver will be the intermodal segment.

Growth of intermodal volumes in recent years is anticipated to drive railroads top line. Volumes at this key revenue generating unit rose 5.6% in 2018, thanks to an increasing number of freight conversions from highway to rail owing to limited truck supply.

In December 2018, the International Air Transport Association predicts global net profit of $35.5 billion for the industry in 2019. This is much higher than the profitability of $32.3 billion in 2018. This bright projection can be attributed to strong demand for air travel.

Story continues

In its 2018 freight transportation forecast, the American Trucking Association has predicted that there will be persistent growth for truckers driven by manufacturing, consumer spending and international trade over the next 12 years.

Moreover, recent positive developments on the U.S.  China trade war front and decision of the Chinese authorities to stimulate the economy will be major catalysts for the shipping industry. In 2019, the shipping industry will be driven by growth in world trade, especially demand from newly-industrialized emerging economies.

Strong U.S. Economic Fundamentals

The Conference Boards Consumer Confidence index for February surged to 131.4, its highest level in four months. The consensus estimate was 124.8. Moreover, the future expectation index (which track consumers expectations for next six months) jumped 103.4 from 89.4. In February, wage rate grew 0.4% compared with the consensus estimate of 0.3%. The unemployment rate also declined to the historic low level of 3.8% from 4% in January.

On Mar 13, the Department of Commerce reported that new orders for manufactured durable goods rose $0.9 billion or 0.4% to $255.3 billion in January from December. This was the third straight month of growth for durable goods orders. Notably, the consensus estimate for factory orders in January was for a decline of 0.4%.

More important information from the report is that the core durable goods order (which excludes defense aircraft) jumped 0.8% in January after witnessing a sharp fall in the previous two months. This also reflects the highest monthly gain of core factory orders since July 2018. Economists view the core durable goods order data as business investment plans by U.S. corporates.

Performance of Major Transport Services Providers

As of Mar 19, the transportation services industry has grown 9.3% this year. However, major companies in the industry witnessed better performances. Year to date, REV Group Inc., Hertz Global Holdings Inc., ZTO Express (Cayman) Inc., Hub Group Inc. and Expeditors International of Washington Inc. gained 42.3%, 24.2%, 17.7%, 12.5% and 11.9%, respectively.

Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019

In addition to the stocks discussed above, wouldn't you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year?

From more than 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank, these 10 were picked by a process that consistently beats the market. Even during 2018 while the market dropped -5.2%, our Top 10s were up well into double-digits. And during bullish 2012  2017, they soared far above the market's +126.3%, reaching +181.9%.

This year, the portfolio features a player that thrives on volatility, an AI comer, and a dynamic tech company that helps doctors deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs.

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To read this article on Zacks.com click here.ISTANBUL, March 22 (Reuters) - New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said on Friday that he did not ask Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to stop showing at election rallies video footage of last week's shooting in Christchurch because he understood it has stopped.

"No, I did not ask that question because I felt that I did not have to ask it, because they are not doing that anymore," Peters told reporters at a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, where he had met with Erdogan.

At a series of rallies over the last week, including on Thursday, Erdogan has shown footage of the New Zealand shootings that the alleged gunman had broadcast on Facebook. That triggered a diplomatic dispute between the nations.

Peters said Erdogan reassured him that the citizens who are coming to Turkey will be welcomed as before and that the initial "misinterpretations" were all cleared up.

(Reporting by Sarah Dadouch Writing by Ezgi Erkoyun Editing by Jonathan Spicer)WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND  Every New Zealander will remember where they were and what they were doing when they first learned about the Christchurch terror attack.

Brooke Metekingi works part-time at a security company in Porirua and got a phone call from a friend concerned about her well-being.

Isadore Campbell was watching the news while working from home and saw the breaking-news alert about police activity in Christchurchs Hagley Park neighborhood  a foreboding report that contained little hint of the horrors to come.

Imam Mustenser Qamar had just finished his own Friday prayers in his Lower Hutt community when he got a text message from a Christian friend who he had met through his Meet a Muslim initiative. Are you ok? the text read. Hearing about this shooting and its terrible praying for all of you.

The shootings at two mosques in Christchurch March 15 that left 50 dead and dozens more injured have forever changed New Zealand.

Students display the New Zealand national flag next to flowers during a vigil in Christchurch on March 18, 2019, three days after a shooting incident at two mosques in the city that claimed the lives of 50 Muslim worshippers.

Government officials have promised swift action on gun control with the backing of every major party in Parliament  the center-right opposition National Party even says the proposed new legislation doesnt go far enough.

Meanwhile, major private and public corporations are lashing out at tech companies like Facebook and Google for not doing enough to stop people from sharing footage of the shootings.

More: 4 things to know about Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand's prime minister

Rallying around the nation's Muslims

Domestically, Kiwis have rallied around the Muslim community, offering to provide escorts so Muslims feel safer and depositing thousands of flowers at mosques around the country.

These responses, although quick and sweeping, were not immediate.

First, there was shock.

I was absolutely horrified when I realized the extent of what was actually happening, Campbell told USA TODAY. Campbell, a mixed-race immigrant from South Africa whose family were incarcerated for fighting against apartheid, found herself experiencing flashbacks to the racism she had experienced in Cape Town.

Story continues

Qamar had similar thoughts.

I could have been there that day. It could have been any of us, the imam found himself thinking. Thats the shocking thing about it. Id been to one of the mosques a couple of months ago and I even prayed there. It has indirectly affected all Muslims across New Zealand.

In the evening, the nation tuned in to the radio and television to watch Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern address the nation.

We, New Zealand, we were not a target because we are a safe harbor for those who hate," she said. "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.

Her words struck a chord.

I was completely grief-stricken. I once again had the television on and I found myself weeping unconsolably for hours, Campbell said of her reaction.

As the day progressed, however, that mourning transformed into a desire to take action and embrace the Muslim community in its grief.

More: A look at New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern

More: 'You won't hear me speak his name': Ardern urges public to deny accused gunman's quest for fame

'We love our Muslim communities'

On Facebook, hundreds of people offered to walk with local Muslims to school, to work, or even just to the grocery store. Metekingi, 27, was one of those.

Any Muslim women in Porirua who feels unsafe pls PM me. As tangata whenua [an indigenous New Zealander], I do not want you to feel unsafe! she wrote online.

Around the country, graffiti, posters and stickers appeared championing New Zealands Muslims. We love our Muslim communities, one spray-painted message read in Lyall Bay.

Others took action in unorthodox manners. In Australia, 17-year-old Will Connolly cracked an egg on the head of Australian Senator Fraser Anning. As news of the shooting was still filtering out last Friday, Anning had tweeted, in a since-deleted post: Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?

Connollys actions went viral and provided a bit of much-needed levity in New Zealand. Scrolling through the Egg Boy trending stream brought one of the only smiles of the day to the face of the immigrant Muslim in my house, Kiwi commentator Tze Ming Mok wrote of her husbands reaction to the footage.

By Sunday, the country was united and resolved to address the shootings head on. At a vigil at Wellingtons Basin Reserve, refugee rights campaigner Gayaal Iddamalgoda took issue with New Zealand security services response to the attack. Why was our secret service busy surveilling our Muslim neighbors and not the extremists who sought to victimize them? he asked during his speech.

When will politicians left and right own up to the fact that they have for years scapegoated and blamed migrants and refugees for social and economic problems that they are not responsible for? Iddamalgoda continued.

The crowd roared in agreement.

Social media companies slammed

In a news conference, Ardern began to raise questions about the way major tech companies responded to the attack. The shooter livestreamed his actions on Facebook and the footage was left up for an hour. Since then, it has been distributed across the internet.

New Zealand returned to work last week, with questions unanswered, issues unresolved. In Wellington, the buses kept running, ferrying commuters past bus stops whose electronic advertisements had been replaced with the image of New Zealands flag in a heart.

At the Parliament buildings, police armed with assault rifles stood guard  an unusual sight in a country where most law enforcement carry no firearms at all. That day, Ardern promised to announce new gun control legislation within 10 days of the shooting.

In New Zealand, handguns and many military-style semiautomatic weapons are already strictly regulated. However, an AR-15 can be purchased with the most basic gun license and Radio New Zealand reported on Sunday that 99.6 percent of license applications were approved in 2017.

The AR-15  the gun of choice for mass killers  can be combined with a high-capacity magazine to become a potent weapon. Gun owners with basic licenses are allowed to have only low-capacity magazines in their rifles, but high-capacity ones are not regulated.

However, New Zealanders own guns for very different reasons than Americans. While American gun owners list protection as their top motivation, that isnt even a valid option on New Zealands license application. Instead, the application focuses on recreational ownership.

Owning a handgun in New Zealand requires joining a gun club, waiting out a six-month probationary period, providing two references and undergoing a police interview . Even then, handguns can only legally be fired at target ranges.

More: We examined the gun laws of a dozen countries to show how they compare to New Zealand's new ban on semi-automatic weapons

Halting the sale of some firearms

Already, major firearms retailers had pulled semi-automatic weapons from the shelves. TradeMe, New Zealands $1.7 billion version of eBay, announced it would stop selling all semiautomatic guns.

Hunting & Fishing, an outdoor and sporting goods retailer with 37 outlets throughout the country, pulled military-style semiautomatic weapons March 15 and ended online sales of the guns the next day.

Meanwhile, Gun City, which claims to be New Zealands largest firearm retailer, took advantage of a wave of panic buyers ahead of the anticipated reforms. Chief executive David Tipple refused to bow to online criticism and has continued to sell semiautomatic weapons online and in stores, despite the fact that Gun City sold the Christchurch shooter four weapons and ammunition.

Tipple did not respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.

Gun owners voiced their frustration with the coming gun legislation, announced Thursday by Ardern. The ban will be on all assault rifles, high-capacity magazines and military-style semiautomatic rifles.

Mike Loder, a 48-year-old gun rights enthusiast, told USA TODAY that he thought the government was moving too quickly with its plans for gun reform.

If gun laws will keep me safe, I support them. But right now were coming up with a solution when we dont even know what the problem is. We havent had time to launch an investigation and we arent waiting for the results of it before taking action, he said.

Other gun owners reacted differently. John Hart, a farmer and Green Party politician, said he had owned a gun for years. After the shooting, however, he went to his local police station and turned the weapon in.

More: New Zealanders turn in guns as prime minister promises tighter restrictions

Campbell agrees with the governments quick action on guns. Often I have sat in horror watching the news unfold from the United States and Ive wondered when on earth they would change their gun laws.

The shooting and its aftermath have had a unifying effect on New Zealand. When Ardern announced the details of the gun law changes on Thursday, all but one Parliamentarian came out in support.

Displays of national unity are common

This is just the first round of legislative changes. Details about a plan for the government to buy back the guns from firearms owners have yet to be released. A national firearm registry has the support of the center-right National Party.

Such displays of national unity are not common in New Zealand. The Federated Farmers organization, which represents a major bloc of gun owners, came out in support of the new laws as well.

Christchurch, March 15 has changed everything, the groups security spokesman, Miles Anderson, said in a statement.

Gun laws aren't the only focus. A coalition of major New Zealand companies, including telecommunications firm Spark NZ, locally-owned Kiwibank, and Burger King all pledged to pull advertising from Facebook and Google after the video was distributed.

Public organizations also are protesting the tech companies. KiwiSaver, the countrys public savings program made up of private investment funds, has begun dumping millions of dollars of Facebook stock. Police have also arrested and charged individuals in the country for sharing the footage of the shooting.

Metekingi said she thinks social media needs to be held accountable. She said that Facebook should do a better job of moderating its live-streaming feature or else shut it down.

The live-stream video made the whole event that much more horrific, Metekingi believes.

I havent seen it and I hope to never see it, she said of the footage. It just makes what he did a lot worse.

At 1:32 pm on Friday, the Muslim call to prayer was broadcast nationwide and followed by two minutes of silence. New Zealand was a totally different country than it had been a week before.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New Zealand ends a week of grief with action and embrace of Muslim community after shootingsREAD: Mayor Sara upbeat on chances of seven HNP senatorial bets

The top quality that Filipino voters look for in a senatorial candidate is not corrupt, according to a Social Weather Stations survey commissioned by the private think tank Stratbase ADR Institute. READ: Rody admins rating soarsSWS Stratbase ADR Institute, through its project Democracy Watch, commissioned the survey on the Qualities that One is Looking for in a Senatorial Candidate of the Philippines. The survey was conducted on Dec. 16 to 19, 2018, using face-to-face interviews of 1,440 adults nationwide, of which 1,363 were registered voters. The survey showed that 25 percent of the respondents listed will not be corrupt as among the qualities they were looking for in a senatorial candidate. By area, 25 percent of the respondents in the National Capital Region, 26 percent in the rest of Luzon, 27 percent in the Visayas and 22 percent in Mindanao said they were looking for candidates who will not be corrupt. The candidates who have concern for the poor emerged as the second top quality (22 percent) that respondents were looking for in the senatorial candidates. The third top quality was good personal characteristics that was listed by 21 percent of the candidates, while the fourth top quality was trustworthy. We deserve leaders who are not corrupt, have good character and are trustworthy, said Dindo Manhit, Lead Convenor of Democracy Watch and president of Stratbase ADR Institute. The other qualities cited by respondents were has concern/helpful to those in need with 20 percent; walks his talk/fulfills promises with 14 percent; can give solutions to the problems of the country with 9 percent; approachable with 7 percent; has good leadership qualities with 6 percent; knows how to listen and confer with other people with 5 percent; has faith in God with 5 percent; has political will with 3 percent; and educated/intelligent/bright with 3 percent. Filipinos always call for reducing poverty, create more jobs and fight graft and corruption in the government. None of these concerns come as a surprise since they affect the daily life of every Filipino, Manhit said. READ: Gloria hits campaign trailsenatorial bets in tow As these concerns have been consistently identified. It is time to ask the aspiring candidates what they aim to do to address such national issues. Among the eligibility requirements for candidacy in the House of Representatives and the Senate under the 1987 constitution are that the candidate must be a natural born citizen of the Philippines, at least 25 years of age, literate and a registered voter.Manhit said Filipino voters should carefully elect members of Congress whose legislative power went beyond the creation of laws. The Congress has power over the president in times of national emergency and a state of war; impeach and hold constitutionally mandated public officials accountable; propose charter change; and even, conduct necessary hearings in the process of creating laws. As open the eligibility is, voters must understand the demands of this responsibility, of being a public servant, he said. Analyzing a candidate's credibility, competence and integrity is a responsibility therefore of a voter. These can be measured by looking into their education, experience, records and advocacies/platforms. Stratbase ADR Institute said that, since the passage of Republic Act No. 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act and Malversation on July 12, 1991, the plunder law had only convicted one public official. Others who were accused, some of whom were from the Senate, were pardoned, acquitted or on trial but still running for elections. This raises the question, are the anti-corruption laws in the Philippines strong enough to keep public officials in check of their duty? If not, then shouldn't we elect officials who show integrity and commitment to even start discussion or discourse on the amendment of these laws? Laws should be initiated and amended to promote transparency so that the people are included in the discourse and may participate further, Manhit said. Claudette Guevara, secretary general of Democracy Watch, said another important issue in the election was the continued toleration of political dynasties in the Philippines Guevara said while the anti-political dynasty law was stated in the 1987 constitution, it had only been explicitly implemented or made into law under the Sangguniang Reform Act of 2016 and the Local Government Code. The Anti-Political Dynasty bill (and all its different version) had been passed from Congress to Congress since 1987 and still remained pending, she said. In a study conducted from 2007 to 2016, political dynasties comprised about 75 percent of the government. More accurate data showed a rise from 75 percent to 78 percent among district representatives; from 70 percent to 81 percent among governors; and from 58 percent to 70 percent among mayors. From the reports of the Office of the Ombudsman, corruption is rampant among LGUs and Congress. While they enrich themselves further by abusing the power vested in them, poverty increases, the quality of social services decreases and the people suffer, Guevarra said. READ: Senatorial bets kick off campaign candidatesNew Zealand is not known for gun violence or mass shootings. Its a peaceful, tranquil country, says domestic terror expert Daryl Johnson, owner of DT Analytics and author of the upcoming book Hateland: A Long Hard Look At Americas Extremist Heart.

But last week, it had one of the worst terrorist attacks against Muslims in the civilized world, Johnson says, New Zealand shows us that no country is immune. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.

Fifty people were killed in two mosque attacks on Friday, with 36 people hospitalized as of Saturday, New Zealand Police wrote on Twitter.

Courtesy Humera Khan; 3MI Photography

A 28-year-old suspect, Brenton Tarrant, who according to multiple reports was a bodybuilder from Australia, has been charged with murder in the attack. According to The Washington Post, he did not enter a plea in court on Saturday.

Hate crimes have been increasing every year, Johnson notes. FBI data released in November shows a nearly 20 percent increase in hate crimes from the year before. There is a rising tide of hate, Johnson says.

RELATED: Grieving New Zealand Shooting Survivor Says He Knew Everybody Who Died at Mosque

Attacks by white supremacists arent new, confirms Humera Khan, co-founder and President of Muflehun, a nonprofit that works to combat hate, extremism and violence.

This has been ignored, Khan says. Its not just one attack and one attempt. Its been happening for years and years.

Most people, she says, remember the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh. Other examples of right-wing violent extremism include the trio in Kansas stopped by the FBI before they could take down a Somali apartment complex, as well as Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine people in the Charleston, SC church massacre.

Theyre trying to create an Aryan nation, Khan says. These are like the grandchildren of Hitler.

White power extremists dont just hate Muslims, Khan says  they hate everyone who isnt exactly like them: Its a spectrum.

Story continues

What people have ignored in the New Zealand assailants manifesto, Khan says, is that he wants to see a Civil War in America.

Thats one of his goals: to see America fall apart, she says. He wants to have a single race rule everyone else. Hes against any sort of diversity. Hes against any sort of difference.

 With reporting by K.C. Baker and Greg FultonHome | News | General | Nigeria more divided than during civil war - Obasanjo laments over state of disunity in country

- Chief Olusegun Obasanjo has lamented over the current state of disunity in Nigeria

- The former president said even during the civil war, the country was not as divided as it is currently

- Obasanjo added that Nigeria is in danger if it doesnt take its partnerships with Africa and the rest of the world seriously

Nigerias former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, has lamented over the current state of disunity in Nigeria.

Obasanjo expressed his feelings while speaking during the 2019 annual retreat/conference and general meeting of members of the Association of Chief Audit Executives of Banks in Nigeria (ACAEBIN) in Abeokuta, Ogun state on Thursday, March 21, Vanguard reports.

READ ALSO: There was no militarisation of 2019 polls - Buratai

Legit.ng gathers that the former president stated that even during the civil war, the country was not as divided as it is today.

He said: When we look at this country today, even during the civil war, we were not as divided as we are today.

He added: Today, we are in danger if we dont take partnership serious. Partnership within our people, within Africa and the rest of the world.

PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app

Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that Chief Olusegun Obasanjo explained why he would not comment on the outcome of the February 23 presidential election, adding that speaking about the election would be subjudice.

Obasanjo said this on Tuesday, March 19, at the Shehu Musa Yaradua Centre Abuja, at the launch of a book written by Abdullahi Shehu, titled Election in Nigeria: The Long Road To Democracy.

Speaking further about why he has not spoken about the outcome of the election, Obasanjo said: "I will not dabble into the details of what I call current aspect of Prof Shehus book because since the emphasis was on the national election, particularly the presidential election, and the presidential election is now taken to court.

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service!

Chief Olusegun Obasanjo explains why Nigeria needs to be treated like love - on Legit TV:

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CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | There was no militarisation of 2019 polls - Buratai accuses critics of using allegations against Army to justify their inability to rig

- Lt Gen Tukur Buratai insists that the Army did not engage in militarisation of the 2019 elections

- Buratai said people were using the word militarisation without defining it and that the Army only supported the police during the elections

- The Army chief said critics were using the military in order to justify their failures and their inability to rig the exercise

The Nigerian Army has pushed back against allegations that it engaged in partisan interference during the 2019 general elections.

The chief of Army staff, Lt Gen Tukur Buratai, in an interview with Vanguard, stated that the military were involved in the elections in a supporting role for the police.

READ ALSO: FG closes case against Walter Onnoghen

Legit.ng notes that Buratai further kicked back against the term, militarisation; stating that people were using the word without defining it.

He said: Militarisation has to be defined. What do you mean by militarisation? How exactly did the military take part in the elections? Generalisation is not the best. People just use the word militarisation without defining it.

Was the so-called militarisation everywhere across the country? Why are people making so much noise about it? They are giving the impression that the military was involved in the entire process in the whole country. It is just probably a definition they only restricted to Lagos or where?

People cannot just use the word militarisation in general terms to say the security agencies were involved. Who are the people involved? What does the constitution say about the role of the military? We have the constitutional provision.

We have made it very clear; we are not part of these elections, we are only supporting the police. Anything we do there is helping the police who are representing the civil authority in law enforcement and it is very clear that we have been called out to support the civil authority. That does not mean militarisation.

And once we go out there, we are performing police role, it is not a military role, we are supporting the police essentially; that is very clear. The military was called out to come and support the police.

So, they are just using the military in order to justify their failures, to justify their inadequacies, to justify their inability to rig because the security forces provided the needed security to prevent massive rigging, ballot box-snatching and so on.

But strictly, the use of the word, militarisation is misplaced, it is wrong. We were there to perform our responsibilities based on the invitation to support the police which is legitimate."

PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app

Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the All Progressives Congress (APC) was accused by Buba Galadima, a spokesperson for the Atiku Campaign Organisation, of using the military to intimidate voters and rig the 2019 elections.

Galadima said the events in Rivers state were evidence of the intimidation.

He said: It is not an accusation; the military are good candidates of the International Criminal Court. I saw it on television where they were going to houses, killing people.

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service!

What has changed in Nigeria since the last election? - on Legit TV:

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CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | I need only 2000 votes to defeat PDP in supplementary election - Governor Lalong

- The Plateau governor, Simon Lalong, says he only needs 2000 votes out of 49000 to defeat his challenger, Jeremiah Useni, from the PDP in the state supplementary governorship election

- Lalong notes that he is sure of victory in the governorship election because the odds are clearly in his favour

The Plateau governor, Simon Lalong of the APC has expressed the confidence that he would emerge victorious in the state supplementary election scheduled for Saturday, March 23, as he only needs 2000 votes out of 49000 to defeat his challenger, Jeremiah Useni, of the PDP.

Lalong told journalists on Thursday, March 21, in Jos, that he was sure of victory because the odds are clearly in his favour, Vanguard reports.

READ ALSO: Tribunal orders INEC to allow Shehu Sani inspect election materials

The coast is very clear for me. I am going for just 2000 votes.

It will be stupid for me to lose election with 2000 votes with the popularity of the All Progressives Congress (APC) on ground and what I have done for the state.

We have 49000 registered voters in the places that the election will be conducted and I am leading with almost 45000. What magic will they do in the places? he asked.

The Independent National Electoral (INEC) declared the Plateau governorship election inconclusive, because the vote difference between Lalong and his challenger, Senator Jeremiah Useni, was less than the cancelled votes.

PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app

In another report INEC on Thursday, March 21, announced that supplementary governorship and others elections would hold in 18 states on Saturday, March 23.

This was contained in a document released by INEC showing supplementary governorship polls will hold in five states including Bauchi where the exercise would be held in 14 local government areas.

In Benue, the exercise will hold in 22 LGAs; in Plateau, 9 LGAs; in Kano, 29 LGAs and in Sokoto, 22 LGAs.

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service!

2019 elections: Do you still trust INEC to conduct fair elections? - Nigerians speak| - on Legit TV

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CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | Police, Nigerian Army release fresh joint statement on just concluded general elections

- The Nigerian Police Force said a total number of 1,119 people were arrested and are in its custody

- Police said the offenders were arrested on crimes bordering on various electoral offences during elections

- The force also refuted the rumours that the police and the military were at loggerhead due to the violence characterising the general elections

The Nigerian Police Force (NPF) said a total number of 1,119 people were arrested and are in its custody over crimes bordering on different electoral offences in the recently held general elections.

Frank Mba, the force's spokesperson, made the disclosure in a statement released on Thursday, March 21, during a joint media briefing with the Nigerian Army at the Defence Headquarters, Abuja, The Guardian reports.

Mba, who refuted the rumours that the police and the military were at loggerhead due to the violence characterising the general election, maintained that there is a strong partnership between the two forces, hence the progress recorded on the security across the country.

READ ALSO: Obasanjo laments over state of disunity in Nigeria

Legit.ng gathers that Akwa Ibom, Imo and Kaduna states have the highest number of arrests.

The police spokesman, however, disclosed further that the electoral offenders were arrested by the army and handed to the police for prosecution.

On its part, the Nigerian Army denied allegation of militarisation of electoral exercise levelled against it, adding that large presence of military personnel in some states were as a result of the ongoing internal security operations across the country.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported the police command in Kano state had restricted movement of motor vehicles, tricycles and all other means of transportation across the 44 local government areas of the state.

According to the police, the measure was to ensure free and fair gubernatorial supplementary election scheduled for Saturday, March 23, in the state.

2019 Election: New IGP Speaks Tough | Legit TV

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CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | World | Africa | Zimbabwean women abused in the United Kingdom

She arrived in London from Zimbabwe last year to join her husband, she married in Harare.

Makanaka was thrilled at the prospect of a new life in the UK.

But soon after she moved in with her husband and his family in Croydon, she said, they started treating her like a servant.

Her husband revealed that he loved another woman.

When Makanaka complained, her sister-in-law beat her while her husband looked on and did nothing to stop the beating.

"I can't even remember how many times I got a black eye," said Makanaka (22) who is so fearful that she asked that her last name not be published.

"I didn't know I could call the police. I was so sure my case was classified as domestic and could not be taken seriously by the police," she said.

Most women have suffered domestic violence but are still afraid to report it.

In some ways, the United Kingdom can be worse than Zimbabwe for abused women.

Many find themselves isolated in the new country, far from their families, and entirely dependent on husbands and in-laws.

Most are unaware of their legal rights or fearful of the authorities.

And many Zimbos in the Diaspora, resistant to full assimilation, hold on to traditional practices even tighter than they would in their home country  even in families that immigrated decades ago.

"All my relatives in the UK are more conservative, religiously and culturally, than my relatives in Zimbabwe," said Mandinema Nezi, executive director of a group which runs a network of women's shelters in London.

Domestic abuse is common in many cultures and the belief that women are their husbands' property is an age-old convention still in existence.

In the UK where many people of Zimbabwean descent live  10 percent of them in London according to statistics  the law provides many more protections for abuse victims.

But these measures may not feel like enough to Zimbabwean women, for whom turning against one's in-laws, particularly families long established in UK, can be terrifying.

Ten abuse victims agreed to be interviewed for this article; most asked to have their names not published because they feared retribution from their families and to be stigmatised back home.

Growing up in a working-class family in Harare, Makanaka was aware of domestic violence; her father once rescued a woman from an abusive husband and brought her to live with them.

But Makanaka said she never imagined such things could happen in the UK.

She had envisioned a quiet life raising children and perhaps continuing the education she had ended at Ordinary Level.

When the abuse began, she felt trapped.

She knew no one in the country and was reluctant to tell her parents in Zimbabwe and fly back home because she did not want to bring shame to herself and to them.

Zimbabwean women say the presumption of guilt in a failed relationship usually falls on the woman.

"If I went back to Zimbabwe," Makanaka said, "everybody would blame me. They'll say I am a bad girl."

While most victims of domestic violence are brutalised by their husbands, advocates say other family members sometimes join in.

After one particularly brutal beating by her sister-in-law, Makanaka was hospitalised with head and abdominal injuries.

She said the family intimidated her into lying to hospital officials about the cause of her injuries; she told them she had fallen down the stairs.

She was told if she revealed the truth she would be deported.

After another attack, last August, Makanaka sought refuge in a neighbourhood park.

There, a stranger approached her and put her in touch with a Zimbabwean nurse who connected her with the women's centre.

The centre gave her shelter in its network of safe houses and helped her get an order of protection against the family.

She also found part-time work as a baby sitter, enrolled in college and filed for divorce.

But her nightmare was not over.

In December, under a police escort, she returned home to pick up her belongings and, in front of the officers, her husband berated and threatened her, she said.

He was arrested and charged with obstructing governmental administration work.

In Zimbabwe, family problems have historically been resolved through the mediation of religious and tribal leaders, sometimes in the form of village or family meetings.

Pastor Denias Chihwai said in the past few years, he had counselled about 35 couples with domestic violence problems.

"We have to sit with them.

"We have to try to solve the problem before going to the police or the courts," said Chihwai.

The women's centre has also sought his help with two clients who wanted to resolve disputes through other means.

Some women are enduring abuse because they feel it is better than living alone or returning to Zimbabwe where they fear being ridiculed for being divorcees.

Women from Zimbabwe, especially those just arriving and not familiar with the UK laws, are always threatened with deportation if they resist the various forms of abuse they experience.

For views and comments, contact : Vazet2000@yahoo.co.uk

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: AfricaREAD: Resumption of peace talks with Reds slimLorenzana

The military on Friday urged communist rebels to abandon the armed struggle and return to the fold of the law, shortly after President Rodrigo Duterte said he was no longer interested in peace talks with their leaders in exile. READ: Reds arrest leaves no space for peace talks We have troops addressing the armed groups and the local government units are also helping in the promotion and conduct of local peace talks, said the Public Affairs Office chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Col. Noel Detoyato. But now that it is formally declared by the President, the AFP will be relentless in pursuing the armed groups not only with arms but with offers for them to abandon the armed struggle and avail of the benefits offered by Task Force Balik Loob and the counterpart benefits from the LGUs, Detoyato said. Task Force Balik Loob is the government body tasked to implement the Enhanced Comprehensive Local Integration Program (E-CLIP), a community-based national program to address the security, economic, social, and psychological rehabilitation needs of former members the Communist Party of the Philippines-New Peoples Army-National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF). READ: CPP junks localized talks Surrendering rebels can get P15,000 in immediate assistance, P21,000 to defray the cost of meals, support for relocation, security for the former rebels and his family, P50,000 in livelihood assistance, temporary shelter, PhilHealth enrollment, medical assistance package, housing assistance or housing units, modified conditional cash transfer, legal assistance, and livelihood materials. Detoyato said Executive Order 70, which institutionalized a whole-of-nation approach in attaining peace and created a National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, would address the void left by the termination of the peace talks with the communist rebels. The local and international sources of funds fueling the armed rebellion and the groups fronting for them are now being addressed. With this, we are confident that this 50-year-old [CPP founder Jose Maria] Sison-induced insurgency is nearing its irreversible downward trend towards irrelevance, he said. READ: Local peace talks weaponize civilians vs. RedsJoma Duterte on Thursday night officially announced the permanent termination of the peace negotiations with the CPP-NPA-NDF during the 122nd Philippine Army founding anniversary in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City. Duterte said he is no longer interested in peace talks with the rebels and bluntly told the leaders of the CPP to talk to the next president of the Philippines, as they continued to attack government security forces despite the ongoing peace talks. Id like to announce that I am no longer entertaining any interventions or maybe persuasions in this democratic state of the Republic of the Philippines, the President said. The Chief Executive also said that the CPP could talk to the next president, indicating that there would be no more discussions under his administration. I already told the communist rebels, you do not know how to distribute lands. I have been at it actually ever since I became President, he said. Duterte also announced that during his remaining years as the head of state, he would finally put an end to the war against the Abu Sayyaf and illegal drugs. God willing, wed be able maybe just not really completely eradicate it but reduce the activities or the illegal trade and the fighting to the barest minimum, the President said. The CPP and NPA have been fighting the government since 1969. The NPA concentrates its attacks in rural areas and small-scale skirmishes with the military. Previous attempts to forge a peace pact with the communist rebels have failed. Also, during the event, Duterte congratulated the uniformed men and women of the Philippine Army for their significant milestones. Your accomplishments in both internal security and civil-military operations in many parts of the country are a testament to your unwavering commitment to defend our institutions and our democratic way of life, the President said.Duterte also commended the 550,000 successfully conducted operations of the Philippine Army that led to the recovery of almost 6,000 firearms, the neutralization of more than 600 enemies of the state, and the apprehension of more than 1,700 criminals. He then reiterated the governments unwavering commitment to improve the uniformed personnels capabilities through the Second Horizon of the Revised AFP Modernization Program and to continue to promote their welfare, as well as their families welfare, through housing programs. I assure you that we will continue to pursue these programs as an expression of the Filipino peoples appreciation for all that you have done for our country, he said. Senate President Vicente Sotto III said he believed the localized peace talks would have a better chance of success since the rebels on the ground no longer listened to Sison and other CPP leaders. Senator Panfilo Lacson said localized peace talks were a more practical and logical shift. It doesnt make sense to address the peace talks at the national level. After all, Joma Sison on many occasions has not shown control over the local insurgents still actively operating in the country, Lacson said. Meanwhile, NDF peace consultants Renante Gamara and retired priest Arturo Joseph Balagat were subjected to inquest proceedings at the Department of Justice in Manila on Friday following their arrest in Imus, Cavite. The Philippine National Police brought Gamara and Balagat before Assistant State Prosecutor Florencio dela Cruz for inquest proceedings for illegal possession of firearms, ammunition, and explosives in violation of Republic Act 10915. The case filed against the two respondents by the PNP is deemed submitted for resolution after they decided to waive their right to undergo preliminary investigation. Following the inquest proceeding, they were brought to the detention facility in Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig City. Gamara and Balagat were arrested Wednesday by police and soldiers in Poblacion II-A in Imus, Cavite. During the operation, authorities said they seized a cal. 9mm pistol with magazine, two hand grenades, several electronic devices and gadgets containing subversive information, several documents and P90,000 in cash. Gamara was already arrested in 2012 in Las Pinas City based on two arrest warrants, one concerning the kidnapping with murder of a soldier and the other for frustrated murder. He was eventually allowed temporary release to participate in peace talks in Oslo, Norway in 2016. But Gamara went into hiding after Duterte terminated the peace talks in 2017 and then ordered the arrests of consultants who had been freed to join in the negotiations. Bagong Alyansang Makabayan Secretary General Renato Reyes on Friday hit the Duterte administration for ending talks with the NDF. Reyes also said localized peace talks do not present a clear framework for socioeconomic and sociopolitical reforms which form the substance of the peace talks and are doomed from the start. READ: Palace dares Joma: Lets talk peaceAustralian sporting identity Anthony Mundine has vowed to learn from New Zealands response to the Christchurch terror attack.

The Muslim former rugby league player and boxer flew to the heartbroken city to pay his respects to the 50 victims and many survivors of last weeks terror attacks.

He visited some of the wounded in hospital.

I decided to fly to Christchurch this week because I feel it is my obligation as a Muslim to support those who are facing catastrophe and adversity, he wrote for News Corp.

That is our duty.

I have met many survivors of the terrorist attack in Christchurch and I am amazed by their strength and resilience.

Anthony Mundine met with members of the community at Hagley Park and outside the Al Noor mosque. Pic: AAP

Mundine met with members of the community at the Al Noor mosque where the first attack took place, after local businesses rallied to help reopen its doors on Friday.

He was later one of around 20,000 who took part in the call to prayer at the nearby Hagley Park.

The 43-year-old said he had been inspired by the nations response to the tragedy, including Ardern for honouring Muslims in so many ways.

The prime minister has been widely praised for her leadership across the past seven days.

Anthony Mundine joined in the call to prayer at Hagley Park. Pic: AAP

I wish Jacinda Ardern was Australias Prime Minister, Mundine said.

The amount of respect, honour, compassion and empathy she has shown to the Muslim people has touched my heart.

If Scott Morrison, or any other Australian politician, had any respect they would have flown to New Zealand and acted like the big brother were supposed to be to our neighbours.

Mundine promised to take Arderns empathy and respect for Muslims and Indigenous people with him back to Australia.

The prime minister was among those at the Hagley Park service.

Jacinda Ardern (centre) attended the call to prayer on Friday. Pic: Getty

The Prophet Mohammed, sallallahu alaihi wasallam (Peace be upon Him) said: The believers in mutual kindness, compassion and sympathy are just like one body, she said in a short speech.

When any part of the body suffers, the whole body feels pain. New Zealand mourns with you. We are one.

Story continues

Most victims of New Zealands worst mass shooting were migrants or refugees from countries such as Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Somalia, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

We are broken-hearted, but we are not broken. We are alive, we are together, we are determined to not let anyone divide us, Imam Gamal Fouda told the crowd, many wearing headscarves in support of the grieving Muslim community.

To the families of the victims, your loved ones did not die in vain. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope, he said in prayers broadcast nationally.

with ReutersBig Pivot In Energy Is Gaining Momentum

For years, the oil and gas industry has boasted about the longevity and durability of oil and gas reserves despite growing signs that peak oil demand is around the corner. Many companies shrugged off the threat. Suddenly, however, there appears to be a scramble underway by energy companies to begin preparing for the peak and to transition to cleaner forms of energy. The tone at the IHS CERAWeek Conference in Houston was glaringly different than in years past, with one oil executive after another talking up the need to address climate change and prepare for a low-carbon world. To some degree, this is lip service. Very few, if any, companies are making proactive decisions to leave their reserves in the ground and unburned. But we seem to be in the midst of a major change in the industry, and one that is not just about a shift in rhetoric. Norways $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund recently recommended divesting from upstream oil and gas companies, a move that sent shockwaves through the industry. Other signs of change abound. Many oil companies are suddenly backing methane regulations. Shareholders are pressuring companies to acknowledge their long-term risks to climate change. Royal Dutch Shell is aiming to reduce carbon emissions by 2 to 3 percent between 2016 and 2021, the first specific target laid out by the company. Importantly, executive pay will be linked to those goals.

Occidental Petroleum plans on doubling its Permian production to 600,000 bpd within the next five years. But the companys chief executive also said that she wants Occidental to become carbon neutral. We believe if youre not addressing these [climate] issues today, youre going to be behind the game, Vicki Hollub, Occidentals CEO, told the FT. We feel like thats the key to sustainability of our business over time, she said. If you dont have that, you almost dont need to be in operation. Occidental wants to capture its CO2 and reinject it underground into reservoirs, which, not coincidentally, could lead to more oil production.

Moreover, even as the oil majors continue to scale up their shale operations, they are increasingly turning to renewable energy to power those same operations. BP is only the latest company to turn to solar because it is the cheapest option. Its a no brainer for them to play in solar, Katherine Ryzhaya, the CEO of Lightsource BP, a solar company partially owned by the oil company, told Bloomberg. Theyre doing it for financial reasons. Last year, Exxon singed a deal for 500 megawatts of solar and wind to power its Permian operations.

Separately, the worlds largest oil trader, Vitol, said that it expects oil demand to reach a peak within 15 years. That is not at the most aggressive end of the peak demand forecasts, but it is notable because of who is saying it. Vitols business is moving oil around  7.4 million barrels per day in 2018  so a peak is an existential problem. The FT says that Vitols admission about peak demand is the most detailed yet from a trading company whose views are closely tracked in the industry.

We anticipate that oil demand will continue to grow for the next 15 years, even with a marked increase in the sales of electric vehicles, said Russell Hardy, Vitols CEO, according to the FT. But that demand growth will begin to be impacted thereafter. Vitol is looking at cleaner fuels, energy storage, and wind power. Thats worth repeating  the worlds largest oil trader is beginning to explore a pivot into clean energy. Its only marginal, and not consistent with the climate targets set out by the scientific consensus, but it reveals that the oil industry itself is beginning to see the writing on the wall.

Behind much of this shift is the clear recognition that the oil and gas industry has some complicated financials. The oil majors are posting profits, but a lot of their earnings come from petrochemicals, refining, LNG and conventional oil fields. They are going big in U.S. shale, but those operations are by and large not posting positive cash flow yet.

Smaller shale companies are mostly unprofitable and running out of time. They are scaling back drilling as the oil majors push them out of the Permian. A review of 29 publicly-traded oil and gas companies in the U.S. found $6.7 billion in negative free cash flow in 2018, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and the Sightline Institute. That came despite the fact that U.S. oil production hit a record high last year. [T]hese results hid a grim irony: record-setting production didnt lead to financial success. To the contrary, Americas frackers spilled alarming volumes of red ink in 2018, the reports authors wrote.

Shale drillers continue to believe that profits are around the corner as they improve technology and lower costs. Perhaps. But the industry faces a bigger and longer-term problem as peak oil demand looms. Some companies are beginning to prepare for that. Others are not.

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE. Speaker Gloria Arroyo, accompanied by Manila Water officials led by president Ferdie dela Cruz, MWSS administrator Rey Velasco and Mandaluyong LGU officials, inspects Friday the water pipeline and open the static water tanker in case of emergency in Barangay Addition Hills in Mandaluyong City. Manny Palmero

Manila Water said Friday it is studying a government proposal that it did not charge its customers in Metro Manila and Rizal province who have suffered service interruptions for more than two weeks now. In an interview with the GMA news network, Manila Water president and chief executive Ferdinand dela Cruz said they would meet with the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System on Monday to discuss the proposal. I have given instructions to my team to look into this matter seriously. Thats why we are studying it carefully, and we will discuss the results with chief regulator Patrick Ty on Monday, Dela Cruz said in a mix of English and Filipino. He acknowledged the call for rebates was strong from its customers, particularly those who have suffered the loss of water service for more than 24 hours or a few days, which he said is quite not normal. On Thursday, the MWSS said it would convince Manila Water not to charge its 6.8 million customers until services return to normal. The MWSS, meanwhile, said it is confident that it can solve the water crisis, after President Rodrigo Duterte told its administrator, Reynaldo Velasco, to shape up or ship out. We can deliver as far as I know. But if we fall short, who are we? That is the call of the President, he told the GMA news network. On Tuesday night, the President met with MWSS officials and executives from the two private concessionaires and berated them for failing to anticipate the water shortage and doing something about it. He threatened to fire the MWSS officials and terminate the contracts of the concessionaires, which end in 2037. Their concession agreement, however, allows the President to terminate their contracts if essential water and sewerage services are jeopardized. Manila Water on Friday said water supply has been restored to 96 percent of its customers in the east concession zone. Water from the tap is now available to 96 percent of Manila Waters customer base compared to 80 percent last week with water supply available from 8 to 12 hours, at least at the ground floor level of their residences, the water service provider said. Manila Water has significantly improved water services when it began adopting a rotational water supply scheme for all its customer on March 14 allowing the 28 reservoirs to recover and refill, it added. Macapagal Arroyo lauded the MWSS, Manila Water, Maynilad and local government officials for working together to solve the problem in the area. READ: Water supply woes worsen On Friday, water started to flow, albeit with interruptions, in Addition Hills after more two weeks of no water. The MWSS and the Manila Water have installed faucets to distribute water in the area during service interruptions.The MWSS also installed six 10,000-gallon tankers around Addition Hills to supply additional water. Velasco said they have installed similar water tanks in 11 barangays in the East Zone that are still experiencing water interruptions. Arroyo said if water service is restored, there would no longer be any need for hearings in Congress. Also on Friday, Senator Juan Edgardo Angara said there must be wide-ranging reforms in the water sector to ensure the availability across the country at all times. The problem brings to light the urgent need to put in place an integrated water resource master plan for water security, Angara said. READ: Water shortage probe begins With the dry spell getting severe each year, climate change and increasing population, it is imperative that we secure all available and accessible water resources, he said. Residents of Metro Manila and Rizal have been grappling with water service interruptions since March 6, with officials from government and private concessionaires unable to provide convincing explanations for the service interruptions. They also failed to present a master plan to deal with the shortage. Every year the country struggles with severe El Nino events. Every year our water dams drop to critical levels. Unless we address these and come up with long-term and integrated solutions, we are all in trouble, Angara said. Meanwhile, the environmentalist group Ecowaste Coalition urged candidates and political parties to enlighten voters on their positions regarding the water shortage and the steps they would take if elected to ensure peoples access to clean water. The groups plea for water champions coincided with the observance of World Water Day on Friday, which focuses on Sustainable Development Goal 6, which is to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. READ: Rody orders release of water from AngatA senior U.S. government official has told Indian media that private local refiners had stopped importing crude oil from Venezuela, noting the cooperation of Indian companies in this respect.

"My understanding is that Indian private companies, who were importing Venezuelan oil, have stopped," the official, whose name was not disclosed, said as quoted by Business Standard. He added "The Indians have been cooperative in communicating to the private companies."

India is one of the largest importers of Venezuelan crude, but it has been concerned about sanction violations as Washington's pressure on Caracas increases, with the Trump administration asking importers to stop taking in Venezuelan oil in a bid to cut off the Maduro governments access to oil money.

India has been a priority target in this push to reduce Venezuelan exports. Earlier this month, the U.S. envoy for Venezuela Elliott Abrams told Reuters in an interview, We say you should not be helping this regime. You should be on the side of the Venezuelan people, commenting on talks with New Delhi on the topic.

Yet in February, Reuters reported the Indian government had advised at least one company buying Venezuelan oil to avoid paying for the commodity through the U.S. banking system, but not to stop buying Venezuelan oil altogether.

The company in question, which has remained unnamed, expressed concern that there could be a problem in payments to PDVSA, so we have advised them to move away from the U.S. banking and institutional mechanism, Reuters quoted an Indian government source as saying at the time.

Earlier this week, media reported on a statement from Azerbaijans energy ministry that quoted Venezuelas oil minister as saying the country had suspended shipments of crude to India. The statement added that Manuel Quevedo had said Venezuela was looking for new markets to keep the oil flowing.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:In the latest chapter of the Big Data in the oil industry tale, oil traders now can monitor operations at oil refineries using geolocation data from cell phones to estimate how many workers are at a refinery site compared to the typical number of staff, which can provide early clues into potential unplanned outages at facilities.

Oil traders, investors, and analysts are now looking for clues about oil and oil products supply everywhere, while analytics companies are offering inventive ways to use the surging volumes of data in todays digital world.

Earlier this week, geospatial analytics company Orbital Insightwhich tracks oil inventories around the world using satellite image of tank roofs said that it was launching a new product to help the energy market participants to monitor U.S. refinery activity.

The company uses geolocation data to objectively identify relevant staffing changes at the refinery plant level and compares that to planned maintenance forecasts of refinery operators, which plan routine turnarounds years in advance, Orbital Insight said in a statement.

The so-called refinery outage service will report to the hour turnaround crews, overtime hours, and extra weekend shifts with simultaneous coverage of over 15.5 million barrels per day, which accounts for more than 85 percent of U.S. refining capacity, according to the company.

Related: One Last Warning For The U.S. Shale Patch

For oil traders, knowing where the workers are and how many there are will absolutely help traders know how much output the refinery is producing, Claire Curry, BloombergNEFs head of digital industry, told Bloomberg.

For those concerned about privacy, Orbital Insight says that it does not receive any Personal Identification Information (PII) from its geolocation suppliers, and data aggregation removes any pseudo-anonymous data, resulting in large quantities of unidentifiable pings.

Orbital Insight also tracks global oil stocks, and said last week that according to its oil tank-monitoring data, global oil stocks are up despite OPEC cutting supply for nearly three months now.

Other companies also use anonymized aggregated smartphone geolocation data for insights about businesses and economies. For example, Thasos Group, founded at MIT in 2011, is processing data to measure economic activities, such as how many people visit a store, go to work or travel, or how many man-hours are spent in a factory. Thasos also tracked location signals from the cell phones at Teslas Fremont factory in California to track the EV makers progress with Model 3, The Wall Street Journal reported last year.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:Exxon could lose its lobbying access to the European parliament after no company representative showed up at a hearing on climate change denial, the Guardian reports.

A member of the European parliament from the Green party has already submitted a request to ban the company.

This is the company that denied the science, despite knowing the damage their oil exploitation was causing; which funded campaigns to block action on climate and now refuses to face up to its environmental crimes by attending todays hearing. We cannot allow the lobbyists from such corporations free access to the corridors of the European parliament. We must remove their badges immediately, Molly Scott Cato wrote in her request.

The company, however, said it was prevented from attending the hearing because of ongoing climate change-related litigation in the US. In a statement sent to the British daily, Exxon elaborated: We reject the false allegation that ExxonMobil suppressed scientific research on climate change. News reports that claim we reached definitive conclusions about the science of climate change decades before the worlds experts are simply not accurate and have long since been debunked.

Exxon has been targeted by environmentalists and other anti-oil groups at home, and just recently two municipalities in CaliforniaSan Francisco and Oaklandrenewed their fight to return their lawsuit against the supermajor and four other Big Oil companies to court.

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. Last week, they approached a federal appeals court with a request to reinstate their lawsuits against the Big Oil companies, which a U.S. District Judge dismissed last year.

In Europe, Exxon has spent more than US$35 million on lobbying at the European Parliament since 2010, according to figures from the Corporate Europe Observatory cited by the Guardian.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:Five U.S. Democratic presidential hopefuls would re-joinif elected presidentthe Iranian nuclear deal, from which U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew last year imposing sanctions on Irans oil industry, Al-Monitor reports, citing direct communication with spokespersons and aides for the Democrats who have declared they would run to win their partys nomination.

The five Democrats who would work to re-enter the nuclear deal include Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, a mayor from Florida, Wayne Messam, and spiritual leader Marianne Williamson, Al-Monitors congressional correspondent Bryant Harris writes.

Other Democratic candidates were either more evasive on their stance on Iran and the nuclear deal or didnt return Al-Monitors request for comment. Those who did not respond include Beto ORourke, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Tulsi Gabbard, all of whom had voted for the deal with Iran in 2015.

According to various advocacy groups who talked to Al-Monitor, re-entering a deal with Iran is generally viewed as an important policy point for any Democratic presidential candidate to challenge President Trump.

President Trump ended in May last year the United States participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as the Iran nuclear deal is officially known, saying that the deal is unacceptable and The Iran Deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.

The withdrawal of the U.S. from the deal meant the U.S. was re-imposing sanctions that had been lifted under the agreement between Iran and the global superpowers.

The U.S. re-imposed sanctions on Irans oil industry in early November and continues to target zero Iranian oil exports. Yet, Washington granted waivers to eight key Iranian oil customers which sent oil prices down because Saudi Arabia and Russia had preemptively boosted production to offset what was expected to be zero Iranian oil supply.

The waivers are set to expire in early May, and the general view of analysts is that the U.S. will extend at least some of the exemptions for some of Irans oil buyers to avoid a spike in oil prices.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:While Iranian customers have started negotiations with the U.S. on possible waiver extensions to continue buying oil from Tehran, Irans oil exports so far in March are down from January and February to average around 1 million bpd-1.1 million bpd, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing industry sources and ship-tracking data.

This compares to around 1.3 million bpd estimated Iranian exports for February.

The U.S. waivers for eight key Iranian oil customers, including China, India, Japan, and South Korea, expire in early May. While the U.S. Administration says that it continues to pursue zero Iranian oil exports, analysts expect Washington to extend waivers to at least a few of the currently exempted buyers, with reduced volumes allowed under the new waivers, as the Administration wouldnt want to push oil prices too high.

In January and February this year, Iranian crude oil exports were higher than expected, as several of Irans customers were using up their U.S. sanction waivers to continue importing Iranian oil, according to industry sources and shipping data, quoted by Reuters 10 days before the end of February.

According to tanker-tracking data from Refinitiv Eikon and a source at a company tracking Iranian oil flows, Irans exports in February averaged 1.25 million bpd, while the January exports were between 1.1 million bpd and 1.3 million bpd, higher than the previously expected below 1-million-bpd level, which was seen in December.

While tracking Irans oil exports has become an increasingly difficult task after the U.S. sanctions returned in early November, some of the key Iranian oil customers that received U.S. waivers resumed Iranian oil purchases in 2019 or increased imports to their respective ceiling allowed under the waivers, after an initial wait-and-see mode for November and December purchases amid uncertainties who is getting waivers.



Related: Tesla Lagging Behind Competitors In European EV Markets

As the waivers window will be shrinking as we approach early May, buyers may be rushing to buy what they can before April in order to be able to complete transactions before May in case waivers are not extended, according to analysts.

Japanese refiners, for example, are unlikely to continue buying Iranian crude from April onwards, the president of the Petroleum Association of Japan, Takashi Tsukuoka, said earlier this week, as quoted by Reuters.

However, Tsukuoka added that refiners would continue importing Iranian crude if Tokyo agreed on a sanction waiver extension, which it was currently negotiating with Washington.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:Reliance Industries has started selling oil products including the popular diluent naphtha to PDVSA from its Indian and European subsidiaries after it suspended oil product sales to the troubled Venezuelan company from its U.S. subsidiary to avoid getting punished for sanction violations.

Reuters reports, citing shipping data, that Indias largest oil refiner had sent at least three tankers with oil products to Venezuela in the last few weeks and has scheduled another one to carry a load of gasoil.

The news comes on the heels of another report from Reuters that quoted Azerbaijans energy ministry with a statement saying that Venezuela had stopped exporting crude to India, a key market along with China and Russia.

Russia and China are seen as the main destinations because of the suspension of oil exports to India, the statement said, adding [Venezuela Oil Minister] Quevedo said in order to prevent a sharp reduction, various measures are being implemented and diversification of the export market is underway.

The U.S. sanctions on Venezuelas oil at the end of January essentially cut off Venezuelan exports to the United States. Washington has also warned other countries against buying oil from Nicolas Maduros regime and has been pressing India to refrain from buying Venezuelan crude.

The U.S. cannot force other economies to completely stop buying Venezuelan crude under its sanctions, but this could happen if Washington imposes so-called secondary sanctions that would target companies based outside the United States.

Reuters reports Venezuela has been importing fuel and diluents at a daily rate of 160,000 bpd since the latest round of U.S. sanctions came into effect. It needs the diluents to make its extra-heavy oil liquid enough to be loaded on tankers. According to Reuters shipping data, there is a tanker at the Venezuelan Jose port right now about to start its journey to India despite Quevedos declaration of export suspension.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:As you can tell, this blog is totally screwed. Im really sorry about this but its totally out of my control. Until it gets fixed, Im blogging over at my...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...The Japanese government on Friday awarded grants to five local organizations totaling more than P41.78 million and added P15.4 million worth of emergency vehicles to 20 local government units in Luzon. Japanese Ambassador Koji Haneda signed the grant contractsfor a school building project, provision of medical equipment, improvement of the rural health center, and provision of post-harvest facilitieswith their respective recipients on Friday at the Embassy of Japan in Pasay City. In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said the projects are part of Japan-Bangsamoro Initiatives for Reconstruction and Development and funded through the Grant Assistance for Grassroots Human Security Projects implemented by the Embassy of Japan. The event was attended by various national government agencies and other organizations contributing to the peace and development efforts in Mindanao. Ambassador Haneda will also turn over 22 emergency vehicles to 20 LGUs in Luzon on Monday at the Bureau of Fire Protection National Headquarters in Quezon City. The approved projects include the construction of classrooms for Bayanga Norte Elementary School in the Municipality of Matanog in Maguindanao. Mayor Mohammad-Ali S. Guro was the proponent signatory for the project. GMA Kapuso Foundation Inc. executive vice president Luz Annalee Escudero-Catibog signed the contract as proponent for the construction of a school building of Datu Saber Elementary School in Marawi City.The Japanese government also allocated funds to repair and upgrade the main health center building and purchase of laboratory equipment in Dingalan, Aurora with Mayor Shierwin H. Taay as proponent signatory. Wilson V. Maralit signed the grant for the provision of medical equipment for rural health unit of Balete, Batangas. The Japan Embassy also provided funds for the procurement of post-harvest equipment and facility for the farmers of the municipality of Calintaan, Occidental Mindoro. Mayor Eric Labrador signed the grant contract. As the top official development assistance donor for the Philippines, Japan launched the Grant Assistance for Grassroots Human Security Projects in the Philippines in 1989 to reduce poverty and help various communities engaged in grassroots activities. At present, 538 grassroots projects in the country have been funded by GGP since it started in 2006. Japan believes that this project will not only strengthen the friendship between the peoples of Japan and the Philippines but also contribute to further fostering a strategic partnership between Japan and the Philippines towards the future, the embassy stated.If You Enjoy My Articles, Please Consider Supporting My Writing By Giving A Donation Of Any Amount. Thank you!Jamas nos callaran



Fisica y culturalmente



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Colombia Hoy



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LULA y su Pueblo



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Porky y el Nene (archiconocido narcotraficante)



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Mexico en 1794



Mas arrastrado imposible



Hasta cuando!



La pura verdad



Solidaridad con Palestina



Serie Capitalismo



Espejismos de la clase trabajadora



Asi es!



Comerciantes o delincuentes



No pasaran!



Asi es la vida



USA HOY



01/01/1959



La avaricia no tiene limites



AYUDA HUMANITARIA?



Chile Hoy



Asi son las cosas



Mapa Electoral de Venezuela



Patagonia argentina?



Un aniversario mas del mayor genocidio de la Humanidad



Retrato del franquismo en Espana



Visca Catalunya!



El Chulo de Madrid



Cuando la policia se roba la democracia



Una imagen dice mas que mil palabras



La purita verdad



Asi gobierna la maldita burguesia



Mi pobre clase media



Como Chavez nadie



Comparte La Colmena via twitter Twittear

Programa de la MUD



Asi o mas clarito



Por que Trump no ataco Corea del Norte?



Hace 15 anos Por que la OEA no se pronuncio?



Una verguenza nacional



La luz que nos guia



La Union Europea Premio Nobel de la Paz?



Feudalismo ayer y hoy



Obama, el mentiroso



Curiosa coincidencia



Un mundo de cerdos



No es extrano?



La Marioneta



Los ricos protestan, los pobres celebran



MARICORI Y OBAMA



Cuantas muertes este ano?



USA TODAY



USA HOY 6



USA HOY 5



USA HOY 4



USA HOY 3



USA HOY 2



USA HOY (1)



Insaciable



Cronologia de un agresor



Guarimbear en USA



Mexico hoy



Bolivar y Chavez



Primero Amargado



Dios los cria y ellos se juntan



USA hoy (III)



USA hoy (II)



USA hoy



Mexico hoy



Mexico hoy



Mexico hoy



Obama



La verdad sea dicha



Los ricos



Que no nos vea Obama



Pobre Obama



SOS PALESTINA



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Chavez Cuanto te queremos!



Por culpa de Chavez



Cerveza Polar







Algun dia Colombia volvera a la ideologia de Bolivar







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LOS REVOLUCIONARIOS NO TOMAN CACA-COLA No se trata solamente de un capricho, sino de una sana actitud en todos los sentidos. Desde la solidaridad con el pueblo colombiano donde la empresa Caca-Cola ha cometido los mas grandes abusos contra sus trabajadores incluyendo el presunto secuestro y asesinato de los dirigentes del sindicato, hasta la proteccion de la salud de nuestros hijos, enviciados por ese jarabe de cola y azucar, que les produce obesidad prematura. Pensemos tambien los revolucionarios, que ese dinero que gastamos en los refrescos es utilizado por esas empresas para financiar el terrorismo en nuestro pais. Es cierto, no se trata solo de la Caca-Cola, sino tambien de la cerveza, de los cigarrillos y todos esos articulos innecesarios y mas que eso, daninos para nuestra salud. Podriamos incluso pensar en un dia de parada para cada uno de ellos. Es cuestion de irnos organizando. Pero para empezar, que tal si dejamos de comprar Caca-Cola y sus similares?



























Cuando lo extraordinario se vuelve cotidiano...



Discurso del Acto de Grado en Barinas en 12 de Febrero del 2005 Queridos Graduandos:



Mas que un discurso, quiero dirigirles algunas palabras que escribi anoche, despues de visitar en las clinicas, a los estudiantes heridos, a consecuencia de los enfrentamientos con la policia de hace apenas dos dias.



Me ha tocado por razones del destino, ser la persona que les otorgue el titulo que bien merecieron con sus estudios. Y me siento sumamente orgulloso de serlo. Me consta que la Universidad de Los Llanos Occidentales Ezequiel Zamora, a pesar de lo dicho por los enemigos de esta universidad, es una universidad de primera.



No tendremos la mejor planta fisica, en los salones hace calor. En el comedor hace calor. Pero no es en lo material que las cosas deben valorarse. El mayor capital es el ser humano. Y en eso, nuestra UNELLEZ, lo digo con conocimiento de causa, esta sobrada. Los llaneros venezolanos son nobles, valientes, de coraje.



En la UNELLEZ hacen vida, en este momento, aproximadamente 67000 personas. El 97% de ellas son estudiantes. Jovenes que, como Ustedes hasta el dia de hoy, buscan ese titulo, que constata los anos de dedicacion y de estudio.



Los jovenes son el rio de la vida, ustedes graduados deben ser los capitanes de esos barcos que naveguen por el rio de la vida.



Nuestra Patria atraviesa momentos muy dificiles porque decidio dejar de ser esa matrona de edad vetusta y complaciente, para ser joven, rebelde y altanera. Nuestra imagen ya no es la de una acaudalada ricachona mayamera. En nuestro rostro brilla ahora la sonrisa del Che Guevara, con su diente delantero torcido, su pelo largo y su boina con la estrella.



Entender esto, a mi me ha tomado practicamente toda la vida. Tengo 53 anos, y ya perdi mi oportunidad de derramar sangre joven a causa de un ideal.



Ustedes son jovenes, estan en la flor de la vida. No cometan por favor el error de renunciar a su instinto de rebelion. El Che Guevara fue Ministro de a Economia en Cuba. Los billetes y las monedas se adornaban con su rostro. Nada de eso le importo. Primero fue a Angola donde paso un penoso ano de combate. Despues se fue a Bolivia, donde encontro la muerte. El Che era el ultimo que comia, el que cargaba la mochila mas pesada. Siempre se sacrificaba por los demas en un estoicismo que mas parecia fervor religioso que ideologia marxista.



Si quieren un modelo de vida. Ahi lo tienen.



Dije hace unos momentos que el 97% de la poblacion de la UNELLEZ es estudiante. Se imaginan Ustedes la Universidad que podriamos tener si todos los estudiantes tuvieran la abnegacion, la combatividad del Che?



Los momentos que se avecinan van a requerir de una gran unidad del pueblo venezolano. La alternativa de continuar siendo libres o regresar a la pobreza se nos planteara en los proximos dias de forma enmascarada, o quizas peor, desenmascarada, vestida con uniforme de soldado del Imperio.



Por nuestra parte podemos esperar lo mejor. La macroeconomia no podria ir mejor, la justicia social ha mejorado notablemente. Las misiones ocupan un papel muy importante en el pago de dicha justicia social. Aqui en Barinas ya hemos cumplido con dos de las misiones, la mision Robinson y la mision Sucre. No hay analfabetismo y no hay exclusion en la educacion superior, en estas tierras de Zamora.



Pero ay malhaya! Son precisamente estos exitos los que nos hacen mas antipaticos al Imperio. Para ellos, somos inclusive un mal ejemplo que se esta contagiando al resto del continente y cuidado sino al resto del mundo.



Nunca venceremos al Imperio. Estara siempre ahi, acechando. Por lo menos hasta que el mismo no se autodestruya. Porque, sepanlo senores, el neoliberalismo es canibal. Cuando le ataque el hambre, se devorara a si mismo.



Ustedes, queridos graduandos, a partir de hoy pasan a conformar la elite profesional que debe sostener este pais en los proximos cuarenta o cincuenta anos. Anos decisivos para el logro de nuestra libertad y del rescate de nuestra Soberania.



No se dejen comprar. No se dejen corromper. No se dejen gritar. No se dejen pisar. Que nadie les diga que comer, o que vestirse, o que leer. Sean siempre autenticos, rebeldes, contestatarios. Pero eso si, profundamente patriotas, dignos de ser hijos de Bolivar.



Muchas gracias y que Dios los bendiga.





Alguna duda?



Medio siglo de Holocausto Palestino



Oscar Zanartu Nacio en Caracas en 1960. Ha realizado exposiciones individuales en las galerias Minotauro, Clave y San Francisco, y en salas de Coro, estado Falcon, y Puerto Ordaz, estado Bolivar. En Paris su obra ha sido exhibida en el Centro Cultural Tanagra, en la Exposicion Cite Internationale des Arts, en las galerias De Mars y Arver Space, al igual que en la Galeria Municipal Levallois, en Levallois Perret (Francia). En muestras colectivas, su obra se ha expuesto en Belgica, Francia, Estados Unidos y Venezuela; en Caracas intervino en la exposicion "Del genesis a la memoria", 1995, organizada por la Fundacion La Previsora. En 1982 obtuvo el Premio Nacional Critven y en 1990 la Mencion de Honor Jose Antonio Paez, en la Embajada de Venezuela en Paris. En 1991 se le concedio el primer premio de Pintura Itinerante, en Levallois Perret, Francia.



OZ1



OZ2



OZ3



OZ4



Homenaje a Jason Galarraga



La Victoria de Samotracia



Odalisca



Mas fotos de la nevada del pasado agosto 2008



























La Sierra Nevada de Merida



Nuestro precioso Churum Meru



Homenaje a Picasso



Autoretrato



Sabes lo que bebes en una Coca-Cola?

La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.

Mi profesion?

Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.

Sal en la Coca Cola?

A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.

De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:

Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gusto

Acido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)

azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)

Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantas

Mucha Cafeina

Conservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o Potasio

Dioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebe

Sal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracion

El uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.

Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.

Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.

En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).

Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.

La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.

Bebidas Light?

Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el

Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.



Publicado por loretahur



En realidad, la formula secreta de la Coca-Cola se puede detallar en 18 segundos en cualquier espectrometro optico, y basicamente la conocen hasta los perros. Lo que ocurre es que no se puede fabricar igual, a no ser que uno disponga de unos cuantos millones de dolares para ganarle la demanda que te metera la Coca-Cola ante la justicia (ellos no perderian).La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gustoAcido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantasMucha CafeinaConservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o PotasioDioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebeSal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracionEl uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el aspartamo , despues de tres semanas mojado, pasa a tener gusto de trapo viejo sucio.Para evitar eso, se agregan una infinidad de otros productos quimicos, uno para alargar la vida del aspartamo, otro para neutralizar el color, otro para mantener el tercer quimico en suspension porque sino el fondo de la gaseosa quedaria oscuro, otro para evitar la cristalizacion del aspartamo, otro para realzar el sabor, dar mas intensidad al acido citrico o fosforito que perderia su sabor por el efecto de los cuatro productos quimicos iniciales... y asi sucesivamente.Un consejo final !!Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.Publicado por loretahur

MARGARINA o MANTEQUILLA La margarina fue producida originalmente para engordar a los pavos; cuandolo que hizo en realidad fue matarlos.Las personas que habian puesto el dinero para la investigacion quisieronrecobrarlo asi que empezaron a pensar en una forma de hacerlo.Tenian una sustancia blanca, que no tenia ningun atractivo como comestible,asi que le anadieron el color amarillo, para venderselo a lagente en lugar de la mantequilla.Que tal esa?... Ahora han sacado algunos nuevos sabores para vender mas alos incautos como usted y yo.CONOCE USTED la diferencia entre la margarina y la mantequilla?Siga leyendo hasta el final... porque se pone bastante interesante!Comparacion entre mantequilla y margarina:

1.- Ambas tienen la misma cantidad de calorias.

2.- La mantequilla es ligeramente mas alta en grasas saturadas: 8 gramos,comparada con los 5 gramos que tiene la margarina.

3.- Comer margarina en vez de mantequilla puede aumentar en 53% el riesgo deenfermedades coronarias en las mujeres, de acuerdo con un estudiomedico reciente de la Universidad de Harvard.

4.- Comer mantequilla aumenta la absorcion de gran cantidad de nutrientesque se encuentran en otros alimentos.

5.- La mantequilla provee beneficios nutricionales propios mientras lamargarina tiene solo los que le hayan sido anadidos al fabricarla.

6.- La mantequilla sabe mucho mejor que la margarina y mejora el sabor deotros alimentos.7.- La mantequilla ha existido durante siglos mientras que la margarinatiene menos de 100 anos.

Ahora... sobre la margarina:

1.- Es muy alta en acidos grasos trans. (Si, esos que recien ahora loscientificos descubrieron que son malisimos y los gobiernoscomenzaron a prohibirlos) .

2.- Triple riesgo de enfermedades coronarias.

3.- Aumenta el colesterol total y el LDL (el colesterol malo) y disminuye elHDL (el colesterol bueno).

4.- Aumenta en cinco veces el riesgo de cancer.

5.- Disminuye la calidad de la leche materna.

6.- Disminuye la reaccion inmunologica del organismo.

7.- Disminuye la reaccion a la insulina.

Y he aqui el factor mas inquietante (AQUI ESTA LA PARTE MAS INTERESANTE! ):A la margarina le falta UNA MOLECULA para ser PLASTICO...!!Solo este hecho es suficiente para evitar el uso de la margarina de porvida, y de cualquier otra cosa que sea hidrogenada (esto significaque se le anade hidrogeno, lo cual cambia la estructura molecular de lassubstancias).Usted puede ensayar lo siguiente:Compre un poco de margarina y dejela en el garaje o en un sitio sombreado.Dentro de unos dias notara dos cosas:

* No habra moscas; ni siquiera esos molestos bichos se le acercaran (esto yale debe decir a usted algo).

* No se pudre ni huele mal o diferente porque no tiene valor nutritivo; nadacrece en ella. Ni siquiera los diminutos microorganismos puedencrecer en ella.Por que? Porque es casi plastico!!



No a la guerra, Si a la Paz



Misterios de la ciencia...



Los costos de la guerra



medicos y capitalismo...



Capitalismo...



medicos (2)



Quien educa a nuestros hijos?



Los Medios...



Sin Palabras...



Chistes feministas

- Cual es el problema, Eva?

- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz...

- Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.

- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...

- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.

- Que es un hombre?

- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.

- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.

- Cual es el truco?.

- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.

- Cual?

- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.





Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas?  Porque todos son unos cerdos

Un dia, en el Paraiso, Eva llamo a Dios: Tengo un problema.- Cual es el problema, Eva?- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz... - Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.- Que es un hombre?- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.- Cual es el truco?.- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.- Cual?- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas?  Porque todos son unos cerdos

Ellas...



Ellas (2)...



Tres venganzas femeninas VENGANZA NUMERO 1

Hoy mi hija cumple 21 anos y estoy muy contento porque es el ultimo pago de pension alimenticia que le doy, asi que llame a mi hijita para que viniera a mi casa y cuando llego le dije:

-Hijita, quiero que lleves este cheque a casa de tu mama y que le digas que: Este es el ultimo maldito cheque que va recibir de mi en todo lo que le queda de su puta vida!!! Quiero que me digas la expresion que pone en su rostro.

Asi que mi hija fue a entregar el cheque. Yo estaba ansioso por saber lo que la bruja tenia que decir y que cara pondria.

Cuando mi hijita entro, le pregunte inmediatamente: -Que fue lo que te dijo tu madre?

-Me dijo que justamente estaba esperando este dia para decirte que no eres mi papa!



VENGANZA NUMERO 2

Un hombre que siempre molestaba a su mujer, paso un dia por la casa de unos amigos para que lo acompanaran al aeropuerto a dejar a su esposa que viajaba a Paris.

A la salida de inmigracion, frente a todo el mundo, el le desea buen viaje y en tono burlon le grita:

- Amor, no te olvides de traerme una hermosa francesita Ja ja ja!!

Ella bajo la cabeza y se embarco muy molesta.

La mujer paso quince dias en Francia.

El marido otra vez pidio a sus amigos que lo acompanasen al aeropuerto a recibirla.

Al verla llegar, lo primero que le grita a toda voz es:

- Y amor me trajiste mi francesita??

- Hice todo lo posible, - contesta ella - ahora solo tenemos que rezar para que nazca nina.



VENGANZA NUMERO 3

El marido, en su lecho de muerte, llama a su mujer. Con voz ronca y ya debil, le dice: - Muy bien, llego mi hora, pero antes quiero hacerte una confesion.

- No, no, tranquilo, tu no debes hacer ningun esfuerzo.

- Pero, mujer, es preciso - insiste el marido - Es preciso morir en paz.

Te quiero confesar algo.

- Esta bien, esta bien. Habla!

- He tenido relaciones con tu hermana, tu mama y tu mejor amiga.

- Lo se, lo se Por eso te envenene, hijo de puta!!!



machismo y cibernetica



Chiste machista La NASA ha enviado al espacio una mision experimental tripulada por dos monos y una mujer.Apenas abandona la atmosfera, se establece comunicacion con Houston.

-Atencion, simio 1, verifique sistemas hidraulicos, controle adecuada presion de los propulsores de arranque. A 60.000 pies disminuya un 25% la velocidad.

El simio hace la sena de OK.

-Atencion, simio 2, nivele al cruzar la estratosfera y active sistemas anticongelantes. No olvide monitorear sistemas de comunicacion e indicadores de presion. Comprendido?.

El simio hace la sena de OK.

-Atencion, Houston llamando a mujer: no se olvide.

-Mujer: Si, si, ya se! -interrumpe enojada- que no me olvide darles de comer a estos monos de mierda y que no se me vaya a ocurrir tocar nada!.



.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti.

Un abogado mantiene un romance con su secretaria.Al poco tiempo, esta queda embarazada y el abogado, que no quiere que su esposa se entere, le da a la secretaria una buena suma de dinero y le pide que se vaya a parir a Italia.Esta pregunta: Y como voy a hacerte saber cuando nazca el bebe ? El abogado responde: Para que mi mujer no se entere, tan solo enviame una postal y escribe por detras: Spaghetti. Y no te preocupes mas, que yo me encargare de todos los gastos.

Pasan los meses y una manana la esposa del abogado lo llama al bufete, algo exaltada: Querido, acabo de recibir el correo y hay una postal muy extrana viene desde Italia. La verdad, no entiendo que significa.El abogado, tratando de ocultar sus nervios, contesta:Espera a que llegue a casa, a ver si yo entiendoCuando el hombre llega a casa y lee la postal, cae al suelo fulminado por un infarto.Llega una ambulancia y se lo lleva. Ya en el hospital, el jefe de cardiologia se queda consolando a la esposa y le pregunta cual ha sido el evento que precipito tan masivo ataque cardiaco.

Entonces la esposa saca la postal y se la muestra diciendole: No me explico, doctor; el solamente leyo esta postal. Vea usted mismo lo que trae escrito.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti."Tres con salchicha y albondigas y dos con almejas



Gol !!!!



Chistes de Borrachos Entra un borracho a su casa todo manchado con lapiz labial por todos lados hecho un desastre, y la mujer le pregunta:-Hombre que te paso?Y el borracho le responde:-No me vas a creer, me pelee con un payaso!



Este es un borracho que entra en un bar y le dice al camarero:-Me da cinco copas de whisky?Al rato:-Me da cuatro?Al rato:-Me da tres copas?Despues:-Me da dos copas?Luego le dice:-Me da una copa?Y le dice al camarero:-Ves? Cuanto menos bebo, mas borracho estoy!

" " Collinwood Kid serves mulligan stew with park district employees at a 2007 hobo gathering at Deep Lock Quarry near Akron, Ohio. While the glory days of freight trains have long passed in America, there remains a loyal contingent of hobos and wannabes. CHUCK BOWEN/AFP/Getty Images

Connecticut Shorty's father is buried in the National Hobo Cemetery in Britt, Iowa. When a hobo dies, they say he's caught the Westbound. Shorty's father, Connecticut Slim, rode the rails for 44 years before catching the Westbound in 1990 to the hobo jungle in the skies. Shorty didn't fully understand the lure of the hobo lifestyle until she began hopping trains herself in 1993.

Shorty was in her mid-40s when she caught out on her first train from Dunsmuir, California to the legendary Roseville rail yard outside of Sacramento. A veteran hobo called Road Hog USA showed her the ropes  where to hide from the bulls (train yard cops), where the train stops or slows enough to hop on, what type of train cars to look for, and what to bring in your pack.

I've never been afraid, says Shorty. It's always been such a grand adventure for me. My longest trip was from Staples, Minnesota to Whitefish, Montana over the Rocky Mountains and back.

By the time she took the Rocky Mountain ride, Shorty was already in her late 50s. She and her traveling companion  a fella named Frog  hopped an intermodal container train. Those are the huge trains carrying double-stacked shipping containers, hardly the slow rolling boxcars of yesteryear. Shorty and Frog rode in the well or porch behind the shipping containers, exposed to the wind and dust and noise, but partially shaded from sun and rain.

It's not comfortable! Shorty laughs. Nothing's comfortable. You're sleeping on metal floor, after all. But it gets you where you're going. You cross the country, you're out there with nature, you go through Indian reservations, over mountains  it's a wonderful adventure, and you're seeing America for free.

For Shorty and her white-haired hobo friends, hopping trains is one of the last great traveling adventures. Shorty's not destitute or desperate. She has a home in Iowa and a winter refuge in Florida. For her, hoboing is a hobby and a way to honor her late father. But Shorty is only one type of modern American hobo.

Hobo culture is alive and well in the United States, but it's a far cry from the sanitized Halloween-costume version most of us are used to  the patched overalls, the charcoal beard and the red-bandana bindle (that's a bundle on a stick). Today's hobos are gutter punks and anarchists, crusty kids and societal dropouts trying to piece together an existence outside of civil society. And the best way to get there is to hop a train.

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The Original Hobos

Very few people ride the rails full-time nowadays. In an ABC News story from 2000, the president of the National Hobo Association put the figure at 20-30, allowing that another 2,000 might ride part-time or for recreation.

That's a far cry from what it used to be. The very first American hobos were cast-offs from the American Civil War of the 1860s. When many soldiers returned home, jobs were scarce, so hordes of young men took to the newly built railroads to find their fortunes elsewhere. The name hobo is believed to be a shortened form of hoe boy. The original hobos traveled from town to town looking for odd jobs and menial farm work.

The combination of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in the 1930s forced millions of Americans to become migrant laborers. According to one estimate, the hobo ranks swelled to 4 million adults and 250,000 teenagers between 1929 and World War II. These steam-engine hobos crisscrossed the country looking for paying work and a hot meal, hitching illegal rides between, on top, underneath and occasionally inside train cars.

It was during this hobo heyday that the famous hobo code was created. Since many hobos were illiterate, they developed a system of signs  scrawled on fence posts and train crossings  to communicate vital information to fellow travelers. A picture of a bird indicated a free telephone. A cross signified a free meal if you professed religious belief. There's some question whether or not the hobo code was widespread (or even real), but it's proven to be an irresistible bit of hobo folklore.

" " The hobo sign left at the entrance to this house (1934) means a hobo can get something to eat inside. ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Shorty's father Connecticut Slim was one of these steam-era hobos and stuck with the lifestyle even after the transition to faster diesel engines in the 1950s. Hobo numbers dropped in the more prosperous post-war era, but rose again in the 1970s and 1980s with an influx of disillusioned Vietnam vets. Some of these vets formed the notorious Freight Train Riders of America, a drug-fueled rail gang accused of beating and even murdering hobos that encroached on their turf.

Today's hobos look very different than their Civil War forefathers or the Depression-era migrants, but they also share some striking similarities. When you've hit rock bottom, it seems, the best way out is on the back of a train.

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Meet Dirty

That's not his real name, of course. All hobos have nicknames, but we chose this one to protect Dirty's true identity. Dirty started traveling when he was 19 and lived as a hardcore hobo for four years. You've probably seen people like him camped out in parks and panhandling outside bus stations. The look  overstuffed backpacks, filthy dreadlocks, ripped and patched clothes, skinny dogs, painful-looking piercings and tons of amateur tattoos. Yes, this is the face of the modern American hobo.

Maybe you've wondered, how did these kids get here? Are they homeless? Is this a lifestyle choice or is living on the streets their only option?

All of the above, Dirty says. Some kids like him grow up in a relatively stable middle-class environment and decide one day that's it's all a scam, so they head out in search of something different. Other kids are on and off the streets since childhood and have never known anything better. Even if the hobo lifestyle starts as a choice, though, it doesn't always stay that way.

After a certain point, there's nothing to go back to, Dirty explains. Even if people did have a family that supported them, if you start tattooing your face and smoking crack they're going to start looking at you different. A lot of people have been pushed away from their families, but they've found a lot in common with their friends out on the streets. And that's their family now.

Living on food stamps and handouts, sleeping in parks, getting wasted on cheap liquor and street drugs, and drifting from one city to the next, Dirty and his street family were drawn to the trains for the same reason all hobos are drawn to trains: they're free.

There are different segments of the traveling culture, Dirty says. You can either be a rubber tramper'  which means you have your own car  a classic hitchhiker or a train hopper. Only the train is completely free. Even when you're hitchhiking, it's still not free. You have to entertain the person that's driving with stories and stuff. Plus you have to stay awake in case they're a weirdo.

When you're traveling by train, Dirty says, you have total independence  assuming you get on the right train. Dirty and his hobo friends moved all over the country following a loose migration of crusty kids on the trail of music festivals and drugged-out blowouts. From Folklife Festival in Seattle to the Rainbow Gathering in Ocala, Florida to Halloween in New Orleans.

" " Pat 'The Roaming Dreamer' Mulkern stands between freight cars with copies of 'Hobo News', in Hastings, New York, circa 1940. Mulkern was editor of the newspaper, which was aimed at homeless migrant workers. Frederic Lewis/Archive Photos/Getty Images

The freedom and independence of the rails comes at a stiff price, though: serious physical danger. Dirty has friends who have lost limbs to trains. Others have lost their lives. Hopping on a moving train is hard enough, but even harder when you're drunk or high and hauling a huge backpack. The rule of thumb is to only hop a train if you can clearly make out each bolt on its spinning wheels. If it's too blurry  from speed or inebriation  catch the next one. Most modern train cars are sealed up anyway, so hobos nowadays tend to ride on the "porches" or spaces between containers, as Connecticut Shorty did.

Then there are dangers that have nothing to do with trains. Heroin overdoses, fights, muggings and even murder. Violence between hobos isn't the problem, but when you live on the streets beyond the protective bubble of society, you're exposed to all types of people, the good and the ugly.

Still, Dirty talks with pride about the hobo code, the set of community standards that guides life on the rails and offers a form of group protection. Never break into a boxcar, for example. It shows disrespect for the people who work the trains and it prompts tighter security. Hobos will tell you there's a difference between being a hobo and being a tramp: A hobo works and wanders, while a tramp only wanders.

Hobos look out for one another, especially for the women, and lay down street justice on offenders.

If there was any kind of sexual assault, you'd be lucky to get out alive, Dirty says. We take that kind of thing very seriously.

Dirty retired from the hobo game when he sobered up for a girlfriend, but he still stays in close contact with his extended hobo community. Hobos love Facebook, it turns out. And they have their own underground social networks like the (warning: not remotely safe for work) Tumblr Look at this f***ing Oogle. In between the obscene photos and drunken displays are some heartfelt pleas from fellow travelers. Have you seen this guy? We're worried about him. Call this number if you know where he is.

As much as he recognizes the depravity and danger of the hobo lifestyle, Dirty values the friendships he forged in the streets and on the trains. He describes his four years as a hobo like a tour of duty in the military.

We're all vets' out there, Dirty says. And my best friends are people who have been through the same experience. Those are bonds we can never break.

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Hobo Heaven

Every August, hundreds of hobos and hobo aficionados from across America gather in Britt, Iowa for the National Hobo Convention. The convention has been held in this tiny whistle-stop since 1900, when the town fathers welcomed three Chicago hobos looking for a new home for their annual get-together. In addition to the annual convention, the town celebrates Britt Hobo Days, a long weekend of parades, concerts, fair rides and fried food attended by more than 20,000 visitors.

Connecticut Shorty hasn't missed a National Hobo Convention in 25 years. She proudly mentions that she was elected National Hobo Queen in 1992 (her sister, New York Maggie, won the honor in 1994). Hobos start arriving in Britt a week a few days before the convention begins. They come in motor homes and on motorcycles, and some still ride the train, hopping off at nearby Mason City and hitchhiking to Britt. They set up a hobo jungle, a hobo encampment in a city park, and light a ceremonial fire that burns steadily through the whole weekend.

There aren't many real hobos at the National Hobo Convention. This is more about preserving history than passing the baton to the next generation. Shorty gives tours of the National Hobo Cemetery and shares the stories of steam-era hobos like her father, men who took to the rails out of necessity and found an odd sense of home and community in that rambling world.

The hobo lifestyle is a curious thing to celebrate, but it speaks to something quintessentially American  a spirit of rebellious independence, hardscrabble survival and the hope of something better a little further down the line. As grim and desperate as the lifestyle can be, as long as there are trains, there will probably be hobos.

Now Thats Cool The National Hobo Convention is held every August in Britt, Iowa. (In 2021, the dates were August 12-15). The king and queen are elected based on who gets the loudest applause after a two-minute speech. You might want to start preparing your remarks now.

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Originally Published: Feb 11, 2016" " Wayne Williams, then a suspect in the Atlanta Child Murders, is led away in handcuffs. Williams was later convicted, though many doubt he was responsible for all the killings. Bettmann/Getty Images

For more than 35 years, Wayne Bertram Williams has lived behind bars, shut away for kidnapping and slaying some 30 Atlantans between 1979 and 1981. The victims were typically male, black, poor, and between 9 and 14 years of age, and the crimes terrified Atlanta's African-American community. But did police nab the real murderer?

A lot of people don't think so. Many believe Williams killed some, but not all, of the victims. And Williams has always proclaimed his innocence regarding the child victims. In hopes of unearthing the truth, Payne Lindsey and Donald Albright created the 10-episode podcast Atlanta Monster. The duo, founders of Tenderfoot TV, already have had some success in this regard. Their 2016 true-crime podcast, Up and Vanished, elicited new information about the 2005 cold-case murder of Tara Grinstead, a Georgia teacher, that led to two arrests. Lindsey and Albright hoped Atlanta Monster would be as successful in this other case.

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And it looks like the first step to determining if Williams is the lone killer is now underway. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced in a press conference Thursday, March 21, 2019 that the City of Atlanta, Fulton County and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation will be taking another look at the decades-old child murders in hopes that new technology breakthroughs might provide evidence to who killed the children. The goal she said, is not to vindicate Williams, but instead, "to give some peace  to the extent that peace can be had in a situation like this  to the victims' families."

So what makes the Williams case murky? When the murders began in July 1979, boys were vanishing during the day in public locales; their bodies were later found dumped in remote areas. These common threads pointed to a single serial killer. But by the spring of 1981, the killer appeared to change strategies and started throwing the victims' bodies in the Chattahoochee River. Law enforcement officials began staking out the 14 bridges in Atlanta's metro area.

One night in May 1981, shortly before 3 a.m., a group on surveillance heard a splash. Then a car sped back and forth across the bridge. The driver was Williams, a 23-year-old African-American freelance photographer. With no evidence, the officials couldn't detain him. But when the body of a 27-year-old man was discovered downstream two days later, Williams became the prime suspect in not only that murder, but as the serial killer terrorizing greater Atlanta.

Williams had a shaky alibi, and investigators subsequently linked him to some of the victims through hair and fiber analysis. Eventually Williams was convicted of killing two adult men. However, the court also allowed the prosecution to connect the murders of 10 Atlanta boys to this case, even though Williams was never officially charged with killing them. Williams was imprisoned in 1982 and the murders of the young black boys stopped. Law enforcement officials later linked him to 20 more of the deaths, although the links were circumstantial.

Sounds pretty damning, but not everyone is convinced. Williams has steadfastly insisted he didn't kill the kids. And there never was enough evidence to convict him of any of their deaths. Hair and fiber analysis, especially as the basis of a murder conviction, has proven notoriously unreliable; according to a 2015 study by the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, at least 90 percent of FBI testimony on hair analyses contained errors.

In addition, while most of the Atlanta Child Murder deaths occurred in Fulton County, five happened in neighboring DeKalb County, and that police department has kept its investigations open. Authorities won't say why, or if they believe Williams is responsible. But their actions raise a question mark as to whether there were additional murderers and not one serial killer.

Perhaps most eyebrow-raising, though, is information from a 1986 article in SPIN. The piece says that a secret investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in 1981 resulted in strong evidence that the Sanders family, who were part of the Ku Klux Klan, had killed as many as 15 young black boys in the hopes of starting a race war. The evidence included tape from a wiretap in which one family member told another he was going out to look for "another little boy." But out of fear that this revelation would trigger racial violence in the city, the group terminated its investigation and sealed its findings. Thus, the Klan evidence was withheld from Williams' defense team.

NOW THAT'S INTERESTING The world's most prolific serial killer is believed to be Pedro Alonzo Lopez, who killed more than 300 girls and women.

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Originally Published: Jan 26, 2018" " It's much easier to program software to check spelling than it is to check grammar. bubaone/Getty Images

There's an old saying in robotics: Anything a human being learns to do after age 5 is easy to teach a machine. Everything we learn before 5, not so easy. That unwritten law of machine learning might explain why there are computers that can beat the world's best chess and Go masters, but we've yet to build a robot that can walk like a human. (Don't try to tell me that ASIMO walks like a human.)

This might also explain why the spellchecker on your computer works so brilliantly, but the grammar checker doesn't. We learn how to spell only when we're old enough to go to school, but the basics of language development can start as early as in the womb.

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Inference and Context

Spelling is a finite task with discrete right or wrong answers. English grammar, on the other hand, contains a near infinite number of possibilities, and whether something is grammatically correct or incorrect can largely depend on subtle clues like context and inference.

That's why certain English sentences are such a pain in the neck for automated grammar checkers. Les Perelman, a retired MIT professor and former associate dean of undergraduate education who ran the university's writing program, gave me this one: "The car was parked by John."

My admittedly dated version of Microsoft Word (Word for Mac 2011) is programmed to recognize and correct passive voice, a no-no in most grammar circles. When I type this sentence into Word, the program dutifully underlines it in green and suggests: "John parked the car." That would be fine if John had parked the car, but what if I meant that the car was physically parked near John?

Simple mistake, you might say, but look what happens when I change the sentence to "The car was parked by the curb." Word underlines it and suggests: "The curb parked the car." That's downright goofy, even for a computer.

"So much of English grammar involves inference and something called mutual contextual beliefs," says Perelman. "When I make a statement, I believe that you know what I know about this. Machines aren't that smart. You can train the machine for a specific situation, but when you talk about transactions in human language, there's actually a huge number of inferences like that going on all the time."

Perelman has a beef with grammar checkers, which he claims simply do not work. Citing previous research, he found that grammar checkers only correctly identified errors in student papers 50 percent of the time. And even worse, they often flagged perfectly good prose as a mistake, known as a false positive.

In one exercise, Perelman plugged 5,000 words of a famous Noam Chomsky essay into the e-rater scoring engine by ETS, the company that produces (and grades) the GRE and TOEFL exams. The grammar checker found 62 errors  including 14 instances of a sentence starting with a coordinating conjunction ("and," "but," "or") and nine missing commas  all but one of which Perelman classified as "perfectly grammatical prose."

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A Little History

The first automated spell checker shipped with an early version of WordPerfect in 1983, and the first computerized grammar checkers soon followed in both WordPerfect and Microsoft Word.

Mar Gines Marin is a principal program manager at Microsoft who's been tinkering with the Office grammar editor for the past 17 years. She says that in the early days, the best Word could do was parse a sentence into its component parts of speech and identify simple grammar errors like noun-verb agreement. Then engineers figured out how to parse a sentence into smaller "chunks" of two or three words to target things like "a/an" agreement. This is called natural language processing or NLP.

The next step was to introduce machine learning. Susan Hendrich is a group program manager at Microsoft in charge of the natural language processing teams working on Office. With machine learning, Microsoft engineers could go beyond programming each and every grammar rule into the software. Instead, they train the machine on a huge dataset of correct English usage and let the machine learn from the patterns it discovers.

Hendrich says that algorithms developed by Microsoft through machine learning are what drive Word's decisions about whether or not a sentence needs a question mark, or what types of clauses require a comma (pretty tricky stuff, even for us human writers).

But did it work? Daniel Kies, an English professor at the College of Du Page, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, once conducted a head-to-head test of various grammar checkers ranging from WordPerfect 8, released in the late 1990s, up to Word 2007. When checked against 20 sentences containing the most common writing errors, all the grammar checkers performed fairly miserably. No version of Word after 2000 caught any of the mistakes (oddly, Word 97 scored better) and WordPerfect only identified 40 percent of the errors.

While those numbers don't represent the latest versions of grammar checkers, they do point to one of the biggest challenges in creating a powerful and precise grammar engine that's built into a piece of software  space.

"We can make these big beautiful models that have a high precision accuracy, but they're too big to ship in the box with the product," says Hendrich at Microsoft. "So we have to slim our model down, and as we slim our model down we lose precision accuracy. So we have this balance point that we're willing to ship with."

Gines Marin defends Word's precision but admits that space constraints affected the level of "coverage" that Microsoft's grammar checker provided. When the model was slimmed down to fit into the software, it also needed to be dialed back in breadth so that it didn't flag lots of good text as mistakes.

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The Golden Squiggle

What's changed since the days of Word 2007 is the rise of Web-based software applications. Now engineers don't have to cram a large grammar engine into a package small enough to live on the user's hard drive. The grammar algorithms can live in the cloud and be accessed over the internet in real time.

Hendrich says that the web-based versions of Office already rely on robust grammar engines that are hosted in the cloud, and her team is currently in the process of moving all the old built-in critiques and grammar models to the cloud, too. The challenge going forward, says Hendrich, is to decide how much functionality to keep "in the box" and how much to deliver "through the service," as Hendrich calls Microsoft's cloud-based, software-as-a-service model.

The issue is cost. Every time Word calls up to the cloud for grammar advice, it costs a few fractions of a penny.

"If you're writing a 10-page document, do you call up to the service on every keystroke?" Hendrich asks. "When you start looking at the cost models, it can be quite large."

The latest version of Microsoft's grammar editor is far more robust than its predecessors. Errors come with multiple correction suggestions plus explanations for the grammar rules behind them. There's a built-in read-aloud function that's particularly helpful for people with dyslexia and for non-native speakers. And there's a new type of suggestion that Hendrich calls the "golden squiggle" that addresses writing style more than basic grammar.

If you write that the committee is looking for a new "chairman," for example, the golden squiggle will suggest that you use a gender-neutral term like "chairperson." If you're writing a memo to your boss that requires a certain degree of formality, the gold squiggle will flag words that seem too casual like "comfy."

One question that's important to ask is whether grammar checkers really need to be perfect. If Word suggests that the sentence should read "The curb parked the car," you can just ignore it. No big deal, right?

For native English speakers, a not-so-perfect grammar checker is a mild irritation. Even if you're not a grammar whiz, you can hear it when something sounds wrong. The real problem, says former MIT writing professor Perelman, occurs when English language learners rely on these tools to correct their writing.

"It really depends who the user is," says Perelman. "If the user is a native speaker, false positives aren't as dangerous as they are to a non-native speaker."

If Word tells an English language learner that "the curb parked the car," not only will their writing not make any sense, but they'll be learning bad grammar. Now that English has become the lingua franca of science and technology, Perelman says, businesses around the world are desperate for a truly reliable and accurate English grammar checker. That's why you see the rise of third-party, web-based grammar tools like Grammarly and Ginger, all trying to meet this international demand.

The good news is that the latest version of Word (2016) passes the "curb" test. Grammarly, however, flagged it as passive voice.

Now That's Cool Perelman, who already successfully lobbied to get rid of the 25-minute essay on the SAT  he proved that long-winded but nonsensical answers scored highest  now has his sights set on abolishing the robo-grading of essays on all standardized tests.President Rodrigo Duterte has banned the travel junkets and team-building activities of all government officials and employees abroad, according to an executive order signed by him. Malacanang said Duterte signed Executive Order 77 on March 15, and that it updates the rules and regulations and rates and allowances for the official local and foreign trips of government personnel. All forms of travel junkets shall be strictly prohibited. The conduct of strategic planning workshops or team-building activities abroad shall not be allowed, Section 19 of the EO says. Malacanang said the President had repeatedly expressed his disappointment over the unnecessary and expensive foreign trips by some government officials. The taking of a personal leave immediately before or after the official activity is highly discouraged, the EO says. If travel circumstances, such as the nature of activity, purpose, and itinerary, indicate that the trip is mainly intended for personal purposes, the EO says, no part thereof shall be considered official. Covered by the order, which is effectively immediately, are the personnel of national government agencies including state universities and colleges, government-owned- or -controlled corporations, government financial institutions, Congress, the judiciary, the constitutional commissions, the Office of the Ombudsman and local government units. Duterte says only certain officials are allowed to take business class for air travel and only for long-haul flights.Those allowed to take business class flights are department secretaries, undersecretaries, and assistant secretaries, but these officials still need the approval of the Office of the President. All government employees taking long-haul flights will have to take the economy class. For flights less than four hours, all government employees, including Cabinet secretaries, will have to take the economy class, which does not include premium economy class. In case the officials and employees authorized to travel abroad will not be provided with transportation by the host country or sponsoring organization, they will be allowed to take economy class flights but this does not include premium economy class. Official or personal travels must not be sponsored by private individuals, including suppliers or contractors, with pending request or application or future dealings with any branch or office of government. For the Filipino delegations that will represent the country at international conferences or conventions, they are also required to submit a report to the Office of the President through the department secretary, copy furnished the Foreign Affairs Secretary, 30 days after the closing of the event. The official or personal travels must not be sponsored by private individuals, including suppliers or contractors, with pending request or application or future dealings with any branch or office of government.TWO Korean nationals fell to their death from a hotel in Makati City Friday morning, March 22.Makati City Police Office Chief Rogelio Simon said the two Koreans, identified as Sang Ji Kim, 38, and Sang

TWO Korean nationals fell to their death from a hotel in Makati City Friday morning, March 22.

Makati City Police Office Chief Rogelio Simon said the two Koreans, identified as Sang Ji Kim, 38, and Sang Jun Kim, 35, were found dead around 5:50 a.m. in front of IM Hotel in Barangay Poblacion, Makati City where they were staying.

Simon said they have yet to determine if the two jumped off the building, or accidentally fell. (SunStar Philippines)Injured residents scrambled for medical help after a blast at a chemical plant in eastern Chinas Jiangsu province erupted with the force of a minor earthquake, killing at least 47 people.

In the hours before dawn on Friday, injured people streamed into the emergency ward at Xiangshui Peoples Hospital, one of the biggest hospitals in Xiangshui county, about 300km (186 miles) north of Shanghai.

Dozens of relatives waited anxiously outside the hospitals casualty area, which was guarded by the police.

Eight-year-old Xu Mengyao was discharged after being given 30 stitches in her forehead. The explosion had shattered the windows of her classroom at a school 20 minutes walk from the plant.

After the blast at the Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical plant in the township of Chenjiagang, all clinics were full. Xus parents took her to three clinics before they found one that could treat her injuries. They then took her to the Xiangshui hospitals emergency ward to treat a cough.

They clung together on a single bed and prepared to stay overnight, with Xu watching online videos of the explosion on a mobile phone.

Our home is in a mess, Xus father said. There is a giant hole in our kitchen. Broken glass is everywhere. This will cost me at least 100,000 yuan [US$15,000].

Nearby in the hospital, a worker who was pulled from the rubble of the factory was being flipped repeatedly onto his front and back to try to revive feeling in his legs.

At about 2am, a man coated in dust from the blast was pronounced dead soon after he was rushed into the emergency ward. A relative screamed at a police officer who had helped carry the man into the ward: Why couldnt you save him earlier?

The deceased mans wife sobbed over the body for more than an hour before staff had to clear the space for another patient.

Xu Meihua, 49, had arrived at the hospital soon after 7pm with a cough that worsened into breathing difficulties. She lives near the pesticide plant and was settling down for a nap when the facility exploded.

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Unable to consume anything but milk, she was diagnosed as being poisoned by smoke from the blast and put on an intravenous drip.

When we got out of our house and set off to the hospital, people were fleeing our village like refugees and desperately asking for rides on the streets, said Xu, whose shop was destroyed by the blast. We had explosions in the past, but never as deadly as this one.

After three IV bags and a CAT scan, she and her husband headed off to sleep in a student dormitory at a training centre, where a friend had allowed them to stay temporarily.

More from South China Morning Post:

This article China chemical plant explosion: relatives grieve and villagers flee like refugees first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2019.PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte has signed an executive order (EO), giving stricter rules and regulations, and specific rates of expenses and allowances for the official local and foreign travels of all government

PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte has signed an executive order (EO), giving stricter rules and regulations, and specific rates of expenses and allowances for the official local and foreign travels of all government workers.

EO 77, inked on March 15, covers official local and foreign trips of personnel of national government agencies (NGAs), including state universities and colleges (SUCs), government-owned or -controlled corporations (GOCCs), government financial institutions (GFIs), Congress, judiciary, constitutional commissions, Ombudsman's office, and local government units (LGUs).

Under the EO, a government personnel is authorized to travel abroad for international conferences, official missions, scholarships, fellowships, trainings, and studies abroad, invitations for speaking engagements, and for acceptance of awards.

In case of trips involving delegations, the authorized approving authority should ensure that the number of participants is "kept to the barest minimum," and the role of each delegation member is "clearly specified and justified in the travel application or proposal."

Official foreign travels and payment of travel expenses of department secretaries, chairs and members of governing boards, chief executive officers of GOCCs and GFIs, and heads of NGAs need the approval of the Office of the President (OP).

Department secretaries are given the authority to approve the official overseas trip of personnel in NGAs, GOCCs, GFIs.

Heads of agencies, GOCCs and GFIs are also authorized to approve the official foreign trips of their subordinates.

Water district directors need to secure the approval of Public Works secretary, while heads of SUCs have to get the nod of the Commission on Higher Education (Ched) chairperson.

The EO also grants the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda) chair to approve the official foreign travels of heads of technical and vocational heads.

As for the personnel in LGUs, the local government secretary is tasked to approve their official overseas travel.

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"Notwithstanding the foregoing approving authorities, the OP is not precluded from requiring any official or employee to secure authority to travel abroad from the said Office or from another approving authority to be designated by it," EO 77 read.

The approval of official foreign travels of personnel in the Congress of the Philippines, the Judiciary, Constitutional Commissions, and the Office of the Ombudsman shall be prescribed by the respective heads of those agencies.

Pre-departure expenses not exceeding P3,500 will be granted to cover miscellaneous expenses for taxicab fare, passport processing, immunization and medical laboratory fees, photographs, porterage, airport terminal fees, if any, and other related expenses.

The EO also allows the reimbursement of airport terminal fees imposed at the point of embarkation on the return trip to the Philippines.

Government personnel will likewise be given transportation expenses for the economy class, in case it will not be shouldered by the host country or sponsoring organization.

Subject to OP's approval, department secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries and those of equivalent ranks can avail of business class airfares for flights exceeding four hours without counting lay-overs.

The EO also grants clothing allowance of up to $400 for government worker who is on foreign travel in tropical countries for six months, and $400 who is on country with autumn or winter season.

However, the clothing allowance will not be granted, if donor institutions offer the same allowance that is equal to or higher than the indicated amount.

Those who travel abroad will also be granted the daily subsistence allowance, which will only start upon arrival at the country of destination and cease upon departure there from.

Personnel on foreign travel may be entitled to travel insurance at the minimum amount required by the country of destination, depending on the duration of the official travel or a travel coverage of P500,000, if there is no minimum coverage set by a country.

EO 77 emphasizes that "all forms of travel junkets shall be strictly prohibited."

"The conduct of strategic planning workshops or team building activities abroad shall not be allowed. The taking of a personal leave immediately before or after the official activity is highly discouraged," the order stressed.

"If travel circumstances, such as the nature of activity, purpose and itinerary, indicate that the trip is mainly intended for personal purposes, no part thereof shall be considered as official," it added.

The EO also mandated government personnel to fully disclose official foreign trips that are "partially of fully sponsored or funded by private corporations or private individuals."

EO 77 noted that no official or personal travel of government officials and employees should be funder "directly or indirectly, fully or partially," by private individuals, including suppliers or contractors, with pending requests or applications or future dealing with any branch, department, bureau, or office of the national government.

Meantime, official local travels of heads of NGAs; chairs of governing boards; and heads of SUCs, GOCCs, and GFIs need not to be approved by higher authorities.

Government workers embarked in official local travel to destinations beyond the 50-kilometer radius from the permanent official station will be granted transportation expenses and miscellaneous expenses, and daily travel expenses of up to P2,200.

The funds for local and foreign travels will be charged against the appropriation for traveling expenses in the annual agency budgets, in the case of government personnel in the NGAs, including SUCs.

For GOCCs, GFIs, and LGUs, funds for the purpose will be sourced solely from their respective corporate and local funds.

Palace released the copy of EO 77 on Friday, March 22. (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

"IT DEPENDS," President Rodrigo Duterte said on Thursday, March 21, when asked if honesty should be an election issue.

The President was quizzed, following the controversial remark of his daughter, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio, that honesty should not be an election issue because "everybody lies."

Speaking to reporters in Taguig City, Duterte said being honest would depend on its possible outcome.

He stressed that one can tell the truth, if it would benefit him, while he can also keep silence, if being honest would just sow trouble.

"It depends. It depends. If you're hanging by the thread of what good use would it be, or if it will just create trouble," the President said on the sidelines of the celebration of the Philippine Army's 122nd founding anniversary.

"There are things left unsaid, and there are things which you can answer correctly," he added.

Article 2, Section 27 of the 1987 Constitution states that, "The State shall maintain honesty and integrity in the public service and take positive and effective measures against graft and corruption."

In response to opposition senatorial candidates' accusation that the pro-administration bets are telling lies, Duterte-Carpio on March 6 said "everybody lies."

On March 7, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said honesty may not be one of the qualities the electorate are considering when choosing a poll candidate. (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

THE Philippine National Police (PNP) maintained Friday, March 22, that they are continuously monitoring and gathering intelligence information against the enemies of the state, as mandated by law.

Following the pronouncements of the President (Rodrigo Duterte), the PNP will not cease performing our duty to uphold public interest and guard the state against the real enemies. It is also a function of the state to uphold public interest over and above specific rights and privileges enjoyed by individuals and groups to privacy and expression, PNP spokesperson Colonel Bernard Banac said.

Banac made the statement amid claims of several left-leaning groups that the PNP, Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), and the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) are into partisan and political activities, system vilification and red-tagging of organization showing disagreement to the government.

The groups cited the incident in Aparri, during the campaigning of Gabriela party-list, where they claimed that state agents, in full combat gear, are taking pictures of the activities and were even tailing the candidates.

The groups said soldiers belonging to the 5th Infantry Battalion were distributing leaflets bearing actual pictures of Makabayan Bloc party-list candidates with "Huwag iboto ang partylist," "Kalaban ng gobyerno" and "Sila ay supporters ng CPP-NPA."

Banac said, though, that these are all normal operations of the PNP for the maintenance of peace and order.

Ironically, these shadowy organizations are taking advantage of our democratic processes and built-in institutions to establish foothold in the influential legislative branch of government, he said.

It is the duty of the PNP to keep the public informed on matters of public safety and security against terrorist organization and domestic threat groups, including the support systems that sustain their terrorist activities, Banac added.

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Earlier, the PNP ordered the reshuffling of 1,370 police officers affiliated with candidates in the coming May elections to ensure they will not engage in any partisan activities.

The reshuffle includes 121 provincial directors, city directors, mobile force commanders, and chiefs of police who have reached the maximum two-year tour of duty in their assignments.

The limited reshuffle of personnel is an administrative measure to ensure impartiality and non-partisan enforcement of the law by police personnel, particularly in areas where they have relatives running for local elective positions.

Meanwhile, AFP chief of the Public Affairs Office Colonel Noel Detoyato denied engaging in partisan activities, saying the accusation is only meant to tarnish the image of the law enforcement.

Detoyato said instead of throwing mud against the government, the left-leaning groups should concentrate on convincing the voters that they are not part of the group that wants to bring down the government through violent means. (SunStar Philippines)Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) and Suzuki Motor Corporation (Suzuki) have agreed recently to consider collaborating with one another in developing new products using their respective strengths.

This means that the collaboration between the two Japanese carmakers will concentrate on Toyotas strength in electrification technologies and in Suzukis strength in developing compact vehicles.

To be more specific, Toyota will look at the following:

Supply THS (Toyota Hybrid System) to Suzuki; Widely spread hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) technologies in India through local procurement of HEV systems, engines, and batteries; and OEM supply of two new electrified vehicles built on Toyota platforms (RAV4, Corolla Wagon) to Suzuki in Europe.

On the other hand, Suzuki will look at the following:

OEM supply of two compact vehicles built on Suzuki platforms (Ciaz and Ertiga) to Toyota in India; Toyota to adopt newly-developed Suzuki engines for compact vehicles. Such engines are to be supported by Denso and Toyota, and will be manufactured at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Poland; and OEM supply of Suzukis India-produced vehicles (Baleno, Vitara Brezza, Ciaz, Ertiga) to Toyota, targeting the African market.

Jointly, both Toyota and Suzuki are looking to do the following:

Draw upon Suzukis expertise in developing vehicles in India, a joint development of a Toyota C-segment MPV and OEM supply to Suzuki; and Production of the Suzuki-developed compact SUV Vitara Brezza at Toyota Kirloskar Motor Pvt. Ltd. (TKM) from 2022.

Akio Toyoda

Widespread acceptance is necessary for electrified vehicles to be able to contribute to Earths environment, said Toyota President Akio Toyoda. Through our new agreement, we look forward to the wider use of hybrid technologies, not only in India and Europe, but around the world. At the same time, we believe that the expansion of our business partnership with Suzukifrom the mutual supply of vehicles and powertrains to the domains of development and productionwill help give us the competitive edge we will need to survive this once-in-a-century period of profound transformation. We intend to strengthen the competitiveness of both our companies by applying our strong points and learning from each other.

At the time we announced our scope of cooperation in May last year, I spoke that we will strive for success globally, added Suzuki Chairman Osamu Suzuki. I have seen progress in the partnership since then, and it is my pleasure to be able to make this announcement today regarding the status of partnership on a global basis, including Europe and Africa. In addition, we appreciate the kind offer from Toyota to let us make use of their hybrid technology. We will continue our utmost efforts.

The post Toyota, Suzuki to Collaborate on Future Products appeared first on Carmudi Philippines.PHUKET, THAILAND  March 15, 2019  In celebration of International Womens Day and in recognition of the achievements and contributions of women from all walks of life, Khun Jira Worasarn, the Learning & Development Manager of Hilton Phuket Arcadia Resort & Spa, together with female team members, donated bras to Phuket Provincial Prison.

Over 200 bras have been donated by the team to the female inmates, coming in different sizes to accommodate the diverse body types of women.

It has indeed been a very meaningful way of celebrating and paying tribute to the successes women are capable of when they work together. The ladies behind Hilton Phukets bra donation are truly happy and grateful having been able to celebrate International Womens Day with a very simple but unique act of kindness and generosity.Feathers revealed in a ~125 million-year-old fossil of a bird hatchling shows it came "out of the egg running". Specimen MPCM-LH-26189 from Los Hoyas, Spain is preserved between two slabs of rock: (a) 'counter' slab under normal light (b) Laser-Stimulated Fluorescence (LSF) image combining the results from both rock slabs. This reveals brown patches around the specimen that include clumps of elongate feathers associated with the neck and wings and a single long vaned feather associated with the left wing. (c) Normal light image of the main slab. Scale is 5mm. Image Credit: Kaye et al. 2019

The ~125 million-year-old Early Cretaceous fossil beds of Los Hoyas, Spain, have long been known for producing thousands of petrified fish and reptiles (Fig. 1). However, researchers have uncovered an extremely rare, nearly complete skeleton of a hatchling bird. Using their own laser imaging technology, Dr. Michael Pittman from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Hong Kong and Thomas G Kaye from the Foundation for Scientific Advancement in the U.S. have determined the lifestyle of this ~3cm long hatchling bird by determining the previously unknown feathering preserved in the fossil specimen (Fig. 2).

Chickens and ducks are "precocial," walking and foraging within hours of hatching (Fig. 3). Pigeons and eagles are "altricial," remaining in the nest and attended by their parents. Scientists have one method to determine the type for a given fossil specimen: examining the feathers. When precocial birds hatch, they have developed down feathers and partly developed large feathers, and can keep warm and move around unassisted by parents. "Previous studies searched for but failed to find any hints of feathers on the Los Hoyas hatchling. This meant that its original lifestyle was a mystery," says Dr. Pittman.

Pittman and Thomas Kaye brought new technology to the study of Los Hoyas fossils in the form of a high-power laser. This made very small chemical differences in the fossils become visible by fluorescing them different colours, revealing previously unseen anatomical details. They recently had success with the first discovered fossil feather, which they disassociated from the early bird Archaeopteryx by recovering the chemical signature of its fossil quill, a key part of the feather's identification that had been previously unverified for ~150 years.

The new results on the hatchling bird finally answered the question about its lifestyle, as it did, indeed, have feathers at birth (Figs. 2, 4) and was thus precocial. The feathers were made of carbon, which has low fluorescence under laser-stimulated fluorescence (LSF), but the background matrix did glow making the feathers stand out in dramatic dark silhouette (Fig. 2). "Previous attempts using UV lights and synchrotron beams failed to detect the feathers, underscoring that the laser technology stands alone as a new tool in palaeontology," added Tom Kaye, the study's lead author.

A bird hatchling leaving its nest shortly after birth ~125 million years ago. This baby bird lived in a lake environment and may have been born on the ground like some other extinct enantiornithine birds. Credit: Julius T Csotonyi / HKU Vertebrate Palaeontology Laboratory.

This discovery via new technology demonstrates that some early birds adopted a precocial breeding strategy just like modern birds. Thus, in the time of the dinosaurs, some enantiornithine bird babies had the means to avoid the dangers of Mesozoic life, perhaps by following their parents or moving around themselves.

"One of the feathers discovered was of a substantial size and preserves features seen in other hatchlings. It indicates that our hatchling had reasonably well-developed flight feathers at the time of birth," says Jesus Marugan-Lobon, a co-author from the Universidad Autonoma of Madrid, Spain (Figs. 2B, 4). This and other "illuminating" discoveries are adding to our knowledge of ancient life with details surviving in the fossil record that were never thought possible even a couple decades ago.

Las Hoyas, Spain is known for spectacular fossils preserved in 126+ million-year-old rocks deposited in a lake environment. Credit: HKU MOOC / HKU Vertebrate Palaeontology Laboratory.

Explore further First discovered fossil feather did not belong to iconic bird Archaeopteryx

More information: Thomas G. Kaye et al, Fully fledged enantiornithine hatchling revealed by Laser-Stimulated Fluorescence supports precocial nesting behavior, Scientific Reports (2019). Journal information: Scientific Reports Thomas G. Kaye et al, Fully fledged enantiornithine hatchling revealed by Laser-Stimulated Fluorescence supports precocial nesting behavior,(2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-41423-7Fire ant stings can be deadly to people who have an allergic reaction to their venom. Credit: Forest and Kim Starr/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Tropical fire ants (Solenopsis geminata), originally from central and South America, are a highly aggressive, invasive ecological pest. Our new research has shed light on how they successfully establish new colonies.

While we don't know exactly how widespread tropical fire ants are in Australia, they are well established around Darwin and Katherine, as well as on Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef. Disturbing one of their nests will result in many workers inflicting painful stings on the intruder, and can trigger an allergic reaction in some people.

When invasive ants move to a new region, the pioneers may be one or a few colonies. Because these pioneers are isolated, they often inbreed, which causes genetic problems in their offspring. But our new research, published in Scientific Reports, reveals how tropical fire ants use cannibalism to survive and spread, despite their low genetic diversity.

Sons and daughters

Founding new colonies is how fire ants spread. Queens fly off to start their own colonies just after they have mated. It is a perilous journey  they need to avoid predators and find a good spot to start laying eggs. If queens do not quickly rear daughters that can forage, called workers, they will starve to death.

Queens can lay two different types of eggs: fertilised eggs, which will develop into workers, and unfertilised eggs, which will develop into males. Therefore, female workers have two copies of each gene (diploid), while males have a single copy of each gene (haploid). However, when an ant queen and her mate are closely related, a flaw in the sex determination system of ants causes half of the fertilised eggs to develop into diploid males instead of workers.

The role of males is only to mate with queens  they do not forage, and they die after they have mated. Queens founding a colony have no interest in producing males, because males will not feed them. What's more, diploid males are often sterile, and their larvae are larger than worker larvae. Therefore, queens can waste precious resources feeding fat useless sons instead of workers.

We wanted to find out how common diploid males are in field colonies, and how queens could successfully start colonies despite them. Understanding how tropical fire ants spread, we hope, can help us stop them expanding their range.

Abandoned and eaten

Our field sampling of tropical fire ant colonies around Darwin revealed eight out of ten colonies produced diploid males.

An allergic reaction to painful tropical fire ant bites. Credit: Pauline Lenancker, Author provided

We collected 1,187 queens that had just mated, and assigned them to start colonies on their own or with other queens.

We observed that in 34% of colonies producing diploid males, diploid male larvae were placed in the colony trash pile by the queens instead of being kept with the worker larvae. It is usual for ants to keep dead individuals away from the rest of the colony, but when we looked at some of these abandoned larvae under a microscope, we realised they were still alive.

Queens not only abandoned their sterile sons, they ate them. Three-quarters of the 109 sterile male larvae disappeared from the colonies within 12 days of when we first observed them. Because the queens were the only adult ants present in the colony, this means the queens were eating their diploid males or feeding them to their worker larvae.

This cannibalistic behaviour allowed the queens to redirect nutrients towards themselves or productive members of their colony. Diploid male larvae require more food than worker larvae to develop, so we expected queens from diploid male producing colonies to lose more weight than queens from colonies that only produced workers, but we found that was not the case. Queens with diploid males lost less weight or as much weight as queens from regular colonies, probably because they ate their sterile sons.

We also found queens who worked together in groups to start a colony reared more workers. Therefore, queens in groups would likely have a better chance of survival even if they produced sterile males. But in 6% of colonies, queens did not tolerate having housemates and dismembered other queens.

A queen dismembered by a rival. Pauline Lenancker, Author provided

For tropical fire ants, cannibalising sterile sons and cooperative brood rearing among queens are two behavioural mechanisms for avoiding inbreeding costs. A third possible mechanism for the queens is to "sleep around".

Promiscuity would increase the chance of mating with a genetically different male, and reduce the likelihood of producing diploid sons.

Queens only mate right before starting their colony and store the sperm in an organ called the spermatheca. We genetically analysed sperm from the spermatheca of 40 queens, but found no evidence queens had mated with more than one male.

Tropical fire ants are currently established on Ashmore Reef, a protected Australian Marine Park which is an important breeding site for seabirds and turtles. The invasive ant threatens this sanctuary by attacking seabird and turtle hatchlings. Accidental spreading of tropical fire ants to suitable habitats in the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia would threaten invaluable ecosystems as well as our health and lifestyles.

The current eradication program for the closely related red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) in Queensland has been granted A$411 million over ten years, and failure to eradicate red imported fire ants could cost Australia A$1.65 billion per year in damaged crops, livestock harmed and people treated. The more we learn about invasive ant biology, the closer we are to new methods of preventing their spread.

Explore further Ant larvae fight the offspring of parasitic queens

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.COCCON (Collaborative Carbon Column Observing Network) network of column sensors to measure excess columns of methane (CH4) during tests atop the NCAR Foothills Laboratory. Credit: Mahesh Kumar Sha/KIT/BIRA-IASB

With natural gas booming across the Front Range, drilling rigs may operate within feet from cattle farms. That shared land use can confound attempts to understand trends in methane, a greenhouse gas and air pollutantthe gases emitted from these different sources blend together.

To untangle them, a CIRES-led team has innovated a new, cost-effective technique to efficiently measure methane and a cocktail of associated chemicals in the atmosphere, and to create a kind of chemical identification tag for methane sources.

"Methane is an important greenhouse gas. But it has a high global concentration so it can be challenging to see its specific sources," said Natalie Kille, CIRES Ph.D. student and lead author on the study published today in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters. "This technique allows us to remove the background methane concentrations in our analysis to clearly see unique chemical tracers."

"Tracers" are chemicals unique to a single source: ethane is a great tracer for oil and gas operations, for example; and ammonia is a tracer for cattle farms, responsible for that unmistakable cow smell. Measuring levels of those two tracers helped the team disentangle sources of methane produced locally by both agriculture and oil and gas operations.

Using instruments that sit on the ground and measure the air above, they can instantly capture a snapshot of chemical concentrations for methane and its tracers in the column of air reaching from the surface all the way up to the top of the atmosphere. The team then uses this information to remove the methane backgrounda concept known as "excess column"so that the tracers can take center stage.

"This was the first study to measure excess columns of all these molecules simultaneously," said Rainer Volkamer, CIRES Fellow, CU associate professor of chemistry, and corresponding author on the study. "This gives us a better handle to separate and quantify methane sources on a regional scale."

The team set up a network of these small instruments across Colorado's Front Range. Frank Hase and Thomas Blumenstock with the German Karlsruhe Institute of Technology developed a novel, portable spectrometer capable of highly precise methane measurements. And CIRES/CU Boulder provided Volkamer's University of Colorado "CU mobile Solar Occultation Flux" instrument that measured the chemical tracers ethane and ammonia. Both devices harness sunlight to identify each molecule by its light absorption fingerprint.

In Colorado, oil and gas operations sit within feet from cattle farms. Credit: Frank Flocke/NCAR

"These two instruments were set up side-by-side in Eaton, Colorado, within what we call the 'methane dome' of the Denver-Julesburg Basin," said Volkamer. "In the areas where natural gas and cattle farming sites are present, methane is emitted, and mixes together from both sources, forming a bubble inside the atmospheric boundary layer that expands and contracts as if its breathing."

To measure the background concentrations of methane, the team set up two additional KIT instruments (one operated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research) outside the methane dome, in Boulder and Westminster, each about 60 miles away from Eaton. These data helped Kille' calculateand then removethe background concentration of methane to isolate locally produced methane and those two key chemical tracers.

In previous work to untangle sources of methane, scientists have often collected flask samples of air, either from the ground or by aircraft, for detailed analysis back in a laboratory. But some chemicals, including ammonia, can stick to the insides of some canisters, creating challenges.

In this work, the small and portable instruments could be deployed almost anywhere for real-time measurements of the open atmosphere. In Eaton, the team set up in the parking lot behind a bed and breakfast.

Based on data from five days' worth of measurements in 2015, the team found oil and natural gas operations were responsible for most of the methane produced in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, with agricultural sources providing an important but minor source.

The study also uncovered some baffling observations that will require further exploration: for example, when methane concentrations are very low, the agricultural sources are relatively more significant.

These results could help natural gas operators, cattle farmers, and their regulators make more informed decisions about methane mitigation.

In the future, the researchers hope to generate a long-term time series over multiple seasons to see how methane sources in the region change over timea feat that becomes possible with low-cost, autonomous sensor networks like this. Scientists could also work towards comparing these data with those gathered from satellites, to develop best practices to inform satellite observations, said Volkamer.

Explore further Wetlands the primary source of Amazon Basin methane

More information: Natalie Kille et al. Separation of methane emissions from agricultural and natural gas sources in the Colorado Front Range, Geophysical Research Letters (2019). Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters Natalie Kille et al. Separation of methane emissions from agricultural and natural gas sources in the Colorado Front Range,(2019). DOI: 10.1029/2019GL082132

This story is republished courtesy of AGU Blogs (http://blogs.agu.org), a community of Earth and space science blogs, hosted by the American Geophysical Union. Read the original story here.Foreign terrorists are attempting to enter the country despite the strict security measures being implemented in the tri-boundary of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the Armed Forces of the Philippines said Friday. Eight out of 10 foreign terrorists who were monitored to have entered the Philippines have been tracked in Central Mindanao, AFP Western Mindanao Command spokesperson Col. Gerry Besana said. This developed as President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday urged graduates of the Philippine National Police Academy to contribute to the administrations war against illegal drugs, terrorism, and corruption. I enjoin our fresh graduates to support and contribute to the administrations fight against illegal drugs, terrorism and corruption. Now, more than ever, the Philippines needs optimistic and brave men and women like you who have the qualities to be effective and efficient public servants, Duterte said in his speech during the PNPAs 40th Commencement Exercises for Sansiklab Class of 2019 in Silang, Cavite. Also on Friday, the PNP said it would continue to monitor and gather intelligence about enemies of the state, amid accusations from leftist groups that the police were red tagging them and engaging in partisan politics. Besana said the AFP is closely coordinating with its counterparts abroad over the possible entry of foreign terrorists through Philippine airports and backdoor channels. We do not discount the possibility that they might use our airport here. How will you know that people sitting or standing beside you is a terrorist? Not unless he is holding a gun, carrying explosives or anything that will also indicate that he is a terrorist, he said. Five of the terrorists being tracked have been identified, Besana said, including Iraqi national Abdul Rahmanwho allegedly brought an Islamic State flag in the countryalong with two Indonesian nationals and a Singaporean named Mauwiya. Mauwiya is believed to be a protege of Zulkilfli Binhir alias Marwan, the Indonesian terrorist killed by PNP Special Action Force commandos during the controversial Mamasapano encounter in January 2015. Weve been trying to account all of them, but, of course, as Ive said, it is so hard. Nobody can tell who the terrorist is if they simply pose as ordinary people, not unless those are high-value targets reported by our foreign counterparts, Besana said. Meanwhile, the President told PNPA graduates to uphold integrity, patriotism, and compassion in their work as public servants. As you leave the halls of the academy, bring with you the principles of integrity and loyalty as well as the values of patriotism and compassion that your alma mater has instilled in you. These will serve as your guideposts as you perform your duty to our people and nation, he told the PNPA graduates. Never be deceived by power nor by fame. What is important is that you honor, for it is your badge towards genuine success, he added.Duterte vowed to support the programs of the Philippine National Police, Bureau of Fire Protection, and Bureau of Jail Management and Penology. The ceremony had 201 graduates who earned their Bachelor of Science in Public Safety degree from the PNPA. PNP spokesperson Colonel Bernard Banac said the police monitoring was aimed at maintaining peace and order. Ironically, these shadowy organizations are taking advantage of our democratic processes and built-in institutions to establish a foothold in the legislative branch of government, he said. It is the duty of the PNP to keep the public informed on matters of public safety and security against terrorist organization and domestic threat groups, including the support systems that sustain their terrorist activities, Banac added. In Aparri, the Gabriela party-list said state agents, in full combat gear, were taking pictures of their campaign activities and were distributing leaflets bearing photos of leftist party-list candidates with captions telling people not to vote for them and branding them the enemies of the government. Meanwhile, detained Senator Leila de Lima accused the President of giving terrorists a platform by appeasing Moro National Liberation Front leader Nur Misuari. This is what Duterte is doing now to Nur Misuari. Misuari is nothing more than a criminal under the protection and patronage of Duterte, she said. Have we forgotten how Misuari ordered the hostile takeover of Zamboanga City, which claimed the lives of many Filipinos? Do they not deserve justice for the atrocities Misuari and his men committed? she asked. She said Misuari now roams around, scot-free, without even a hint of remorse or regret for the lives they destroyed in their failed attempt at rebellion. She said this is all because Duterte refuses to serve the arrest warrants that would force him to face the charges against him.The ecological and hydrological data collected yearly from three rivers in Arizona map information on how to best manage water resources in a changing climate. Credit: University of Oklahoma

A University of Oklahoma-led project is showing how citizen science programs provide valuable data on rivers in southwestern United States. The datasets of ecological and hydrological data obtained from intermittent rivers (rivers that dry at some point in space or time) in Arizona are input into a nationwide network. Trained citizen scientists are mapping three rivers in Arizona: the San Pedro River, Cienega Creek and Agua Fria River. The wet and dry data collected yearly from these programs map information on how to best manage water resources under a changing climate.

"It is difficult to get good quality data about how much water is in intermittent rivers. Most of our existing infrastructure for measuring river flows in the United States is geared towards monitoring water levels of perennial rivers, which are those that always flow. Citizen science groups provide valuable contributions to the field of river science, as the data they produce would not be available otherwise. Without that data we wouldn't be able to answer basic research questions like how the length of wet river reaches in these rivers has changed over time, and what these changes might mean for fish that live in these rivers," said Daniel Allen, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, OU College of Arts and Sciences.

In this study, these three groups of citizen scientists divide up and measure the river using a simple method that includes measuring the river from where it begins to where it ends in places where there is at least 30 feet of water. The three long-term wet and dry datasets produced by citizen science river monitoring programs describe landscape drying patterns, examine how they vary over time and use models to quantify landscape drying patterns and temperature, precipitation, stream flow and drought metrics.

While trained citizen scientists conducted the wet and dry surveys on each of these rivers, Friends of the Agua Fria National Monument organize the Agua Fria River surveying effort. The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management organize the upper Cienega Creek surveys, and the Pima County Association of Governments organize surveys of the lowest reaches of Cienega Creek. The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management organize surveys on the San Pedro River.

The data from these surveys is used to generate maps on long-term trends in the three rivers. Two of the rivers measured in this study, the Cienega Creek and the Agua Fria River, showed significant decline. The San Pedro is the only one of three rivers did not decline, which may be due to a groundwater management resource plan in effect. It may be that the declining rivers have no protection and groundwater use has increased during the recent droughts in the area, leading to surface water declines.

Changes in landscape drying patterns in intermittent rivers have strong implications for fish connectivity and bird migration. Drying patterns are likely to decrease connectivity for native fish who need long stretches of unbroken river to reproduce. Rivers in this region are important for the millions of birds that migrate from South America and stop in the region on their way north. The cottonwood and willow trees where they roost during resting periods are typically only found next to rivers where there is water year round. The southwestern United States has experienced large droughts over the past several decades, and the extent of river drying will likely continue as a result of climate change.

Citizen science programs focused on mapping wet and dry sections of rivers and streams are valuable and could be expanded unmonitored intermittent rivers. New technologies, such as smartphone applications, are being developed to improve efforts and aid in integrating data collected by different programs. This type of program could be expanded across the United States to study the variables impacting intermittent rivers in different climates and by different intensities of human water use.

Explore further When the river runs high

More information: Daniel C. Allen et al, Citizen scientists document long-term streamflow declines in intermittent rivers of the desert southwest, USA, Freshwater Science (2019). Daniel C. Allen et al, Citizen scientists document long-term streamflow declines in intermittent rivers of the desert southwest, USA,(2019). DOI: 10.1086/701483Young people protest for climate action with a sign reading 'Save the World Now" during a 'Friday for Future' demonstration in Berlin, Germany, Friday, March 22, 2019. (Christoph Soeder/dpa via AP)

European Union leaders on Friday pushed back a decision on the bloc's long-term efforts to fight climate change, with some countries opposing a pledge to end most emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Leaders meeting in Brussels agreed to discuss the issue again at their next gathering in June, ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change in the fall. The delay frustrated environmental campaigners, who argue that the EU should lead global efforts to meet the 2015 Paris accord's most ambitious target of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century.

"European governments are kicking the can down the road on climate change," said Sebastian Mang, a policy adviser with Greenpeace.

Mang cited warnings from scientists that sharp cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are needed in the coming decades to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of warming by the end of the century.

"Young people get this," he said, referring to recent rallies in cities around the world that drew hundreds of thousands of students calling for leaders to tackle climate change.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who two years ago launched the "One Planet Summit" aimed at speeding up the implementation of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, said Friday that the bloc's efforts at fighting climate change "were eminently insufficient."

Students gather for a protest against politicians who they allege are not doing enough to halt climate change, during a mass demonstration near the parliament building in central Oslo, Norway, Friday March 22, 2019. (Tom Hansen/NTB scanpix via AP)

"Today, we are not giving a clear answer to the commitments we made in Paris in 2015, to the scientific challenges pointed out by the best experts, and to the legitimate impatience that youngsters are expressing in demonstrations every week in our capitals," Macron said. "We will need to wake up, but we have not really seen that yet."

Much of the two-day EU meeting in Brussels was taken up with haggling over the bloc's future relationship with Britain. But on the second day, leaders were able to address a number of other issues, including the EU's ties with China, industrial policy and global warming.

Some countries, including France, Spain and the Netherlands, had proposed that leaders agree "an ambitious long-term strategy by 2020 striving for climate neutrality by 2050" in line with the Paris accord's climate warming goal. Climate neutrality would require countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to the level that can be absorbed again and is sometimes referred to as "net zero."

Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic were among those EU nations reluctant to explicitly cite the year 2050 for curbing emissions, according to position papers obtained by The Associated Press.

Still, a lead author of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent report on limiting global warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial times said that while the EU declaration was vague, it addressed important points.

Students gather for a protest against politicians who they allege are not doing enough to halt climate change, during a mass demonstration near the parliament building in central Oslo, Norway, Friday March 22, 2019. (Tom Hansen/NTB scanpix via AP)

"They sharpened the commitment to 1.5 (Celsius)," said Daniela Jacob, director of the Climate Services Center in Hamburg, Germany.

The European Parliament recently voted in favor of raising the targeted emissions cuts to 55 percent by 2030, but leaders of the bloc's 28 members have so far refrained from following suit.

In Norway, which is not an EU member but cooperates closely with the bloc, local media said at least 36,000 people across the country took part in climate protests Friday. Oslo city council expressed its support for the approximately 10,000 young people who had gathered outside the Norwegian Parliament, Stortinget, as part of the global climate protests by students.

"The school strikes for the climate are a clear signal from the younger generation that we have to act now," city council member Raymond Johansen said. "We are the first generation that can see the climate changes with our eyes and are probably the last generation that has the possibility to do something about it."

Explore further Dutch lawmakers pass ambitious law to reduce emissions

 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.Normal faults at the western margin of the Ririba rift. Credit: Giacomo Corti, National Research Council Italy

Continental rift valleys are huge fractures on the surface of the planet that progressively break continental plates with the eventual development of new oceans. The African rift valley between Ethiopia and Kenya is a classical example of this geodynamic process. There, volcanism, earthquakes and fracturing of the Earth's surface result from the enormous forces that tear the eastern portion of the African continent apart. This system of linear valleys extending for thousands of kilometers is believed to result from the growth and propagation of isolated rift segments that evolve into a continuous zone of deformation. However, this process is poorly understood, although it was instrumental in driving the climate and biosphere of that region, which in turn may have influenced habitats and the pattern of migration of human species in East Africa, and possibly even conditioned hominin evolution.

In a study published in Nature Communications and funded by the National Geographic Society, an international group of scientists from universities and research institutions from Ethiopia, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, of which Sascha Brune from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences was a part, has shed new light on the recent evolution of the African rift valley. Its focus was on the spatial and temporal sequence of the propagation, interaction and linking of the Ethiopian rift section with the Kenyan part of the rift fracture.

By conducting fieldwork in a remote area at the border between Ethiopia and Kenya and integrating the results of that field campaign with laboratory analysis of volcanic rocks, analysis of the seismicity, morphology and numerical modelling, the authors have been able to reconstruct the geological history of an almost unknown sector of the African rift valley: the Ririba rift in South Ethiopia. The scientists showed that the Ririba trench formed about 3.7 million years ago as the southernmost advance of the Ethiopian rift segment.

Sascha Brune says, "In my research group at the GFZ we were able to substantiate the geological observations with numerical experiments. To this end, we brought together regional structures, deformation laws and basic physical equations to modelling in a supercomputer. In this way, we were able to show how the focusing of the rift valley contributed to a direct connection between the Kenyan and Ethiopian Rift."

Explosive volcanic crater (maar) with small lake at the bottom close to Dilo. Credit: Giacomo Corti, National Research Council Italy

In contrast with previous theories of rifting in the region, the new data indicate that the southward growth was short-lived and aborted around 2.5 million years ago. At this time, deformation migrated westward into the Lake Turkana region, where the Ethiopian and Kenyan sectors of the rift valley are now directly connected. A later phase of volcanism, expressed by numerous lava flows and impressive explosive volcanic craters (maars), have since affected the Ririba area; however, this volcanic activity was unrelated to tectonic activity, opening new questions on how volcanism and faulting interact during rifting.

Overall, the results of this work provide new insights into the break-up of continents: "In the East African rift, we can observe processes that are important far beyond the region," says Sascha Brune. "The same dynamics that determine the rift development in East Africa led to the opening of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans many millions of years ago and thus had a decisive influence on the face of the Earth."

The East African Rift System stretches from the Red Sea to Mocambique. It is marked by the African Great Lakes and is currently the largest rift of the world. Credit: S. Brune; Kartengrundlage: Nasa-World-Wind

Explore further Africa is splitting in two

More information: Giacomo Corti et al, Aborted propagation of the Ethiopian rift caused by linkage with the Kenyan rift, Nature Communications (2019). Journal information: Nature Communications Giacomo Corti et al, Aborted propagation of the Ethiopian rift caused by linkage with the Kenyan rift,(2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09335-2Women played a role as both readers and authors in the history of science writing. Credit: Shutterstock/Africa Studio

Three centuries ago, when modern science was in its infancy, the gender disparity in education was not a gap but an abyss: few girls had any decent schooling at all.

The emerging new science was clearly a male enterprise.

But it arose from a sense of curiosity, and women, too, are curious. If you look closely enough, it's clear women played an important role, as both readers and authors, in the history of science writing.

New vs old ideas

Both science and science writing were up for grabs in the 17th century. Technology was rudimentary and researchers struggled to obtain even the simplest observational evidence, and then searched for ways to make sense of it.

You can see this struggle in the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei's famous Dialogues of 1632 and 1638. He painstakingly and somewhat tortuously tries to justify his arguments for heliocentrism  in which the planets go around the Sun  and the nature of motion and gravity.

Tortuously, not only because he was bending over backwards to please the censors  heliocentrism was held to defy scripture  but especially because most of the experiments, methods, and even the mathematical symbolism of modern science did not yet exist.

So although yesteryear's scientific content was simple compared with today's overwhelming complexity, Galileo's Dialogues show that the lack of data, methods and scientific language presented its own problems for science communication.

Translated from the original French: l newtonianismo per le dame ovvero dialoghi sopra la luce e i colori. Credit: Google Books

Conversation in science

Galileo resorted to the Socratic device of a conversation, in which he debated his ideas in a long dialogue between an innovative philosopher, Salviati, and two (male) friends.

In trying to convince even the least scientifically learned of his interlocutors, Galileo was writing what we might call popular science (although the more complex parts of the 1638 Dialogue read more like a textbook).

There were no scientific journals then, and there wasn't quite the same distinction between the announcement of scientific discoveries to colleagues and the communication of those ideas to a wider public.

Perhaps the first mass-market popular science book was another dialogue related to heliocentrism, Frenchman Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's 1686 Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds.

It was a runaway success that helped non-specialists accept the Copernican system  a Sun-centred solar system  rather than the time-honoured, seemingly self-evident geocentric one with Earth at the centre.

The hero of Fontenelle's story, too, is a male philosopher  but this time he is conversing with a pretty marquise, who is spirited and quick to grasp new facts. Although its style was flirtatious, Fontenelle's book was a significant recognition that women are curious and intelligent.

Science gets complex

Then, the very next year, everything changed. The English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton published his monumental Principia Mathematica. Suddenly science became a whole lot more complex.

An oil painting of Madame Du Chatelet at her desk. Credit: Wikimedia

For instance, Fontenelle's explanation of the cause of heliocentrism had been based on Frenchman Rene Descartes' notion that the planets were swept around the Sun by gargantuan cosmic ethereal vortices.

Newton replaced this influential but unproven idea with his predictive theory of gravity, and of motion in general, which he developed in 500 dense pages of axioms, observational evidence, and a heap of mathematics.

Principia provided the modern blueprint for experimentally based, quantitative, testable theories  and it showed the fundamental role of mathematics in the language of physics.

The trouble was that only the best mathematicians could understand it. It was so innovative (and tortuous in its own way) that some of the greatest of Newton's peers were sceptical, and it took many decades for his theory of gravity to become universally accepted in Europe.

Science writers played a key role in this process.

Something 'for ladies'

The earliest popularisations of Newton's work were short or semi-technical, such as that by the French mathematician Pierre-Louis Moreau Maupertuis.

In the 1730s, Maupertuis tutored a real-life marquise, Emilie du Chatelet, but she was of a very different calibre from Fontenelle's fictional student  or indeed the curious but rather flighty marquise in another mass market popularisation: the Italian Francesco Algarotti's Newtonianism for "the ladies".

Newtonianism here referred not just to Newton's theory of gravity. As its somewhat patronising title might suggest, it focused mostly on his more accessible 1704 work, Opticks, which explains his experiments on the behaviour of light and the nature of colour. But these, too, were controversial, and Algarotti was an expert in optics.

Oil painting of Mary Somerville who was a largely self-taught in science. Credit: National Galleries of Scotland

He had been inspired to address "the ladies" by two outstanding female contemporaries: his French mathematical friend Emilie du Chatelet, and the Italian physicist Laura Bassi. But both women disliked his book's flirtatious style.

Du Chatelet and her lover Voltaire were writing their own more serious (and non-gendered) popularisation of Newton's work. Du Chatelet later wrote a very successful popular synthesis of the scientific ideas of Newton and his German rival Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz  Bassi used the Italian translation of it in her own teaching.

Du Chatelet then went on to produce the first translation of Principia outside Britain  an insightful work that is also interesting in the context of popular science writing. She appended a 110-page commentary, summarising Newton's method in everyday language, and explaining more recent applications of his theory.

The self-taught science writers

Nearly a century later, the Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville felt the same compulsion to reach out to the non-specialist reader  male and female  in the introduction to her book explaining the latest developments of Newton's theory, Mechanism of the Heavens.

It is worth celebrating the fact that Somerville's Mechanism was used at Cambridge as an advanced textbook in celestial mechanics  and at a time when women were not allowed to attend university.

Like Du Chatelet, Somerville was mostly self-taught. She understood the importance of science writing in educating the public, especially those denied formal education, and went on to write two best-selling popular science books: On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences and Physical Geography.

Another successful British female science writer in the early 19th century was Jane Marcet. Unlike those of Du Chatelet and Somerville, Marcet's two books  Conversations on Chemistry and Conversations on Natural Philosophy  were aimed particularly at women.

They were built around conversations between two teenage girls and their female teacher. Unlike Fontenelle's and Algarotti's works for "the ladies", these books were down-to-earth, non-patronising attempts to educate women in practical chemistry and physics.

Do women and men have different brains? An interview with Gina Rippon

But like those of Fontenelle and Algarotti, Marcet's books proved popular with male lay readers, too  including the self-taught British physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, who went on to become co-discoverer of electromagnetism.

Biology was also progressing in the 19th century, but this had a downside for women. The discovery that women had smaller brains was used to reinforce the stereotype that women were incapable of intellectual study.

Somerville wrote movingly on how this affected her life. She would have been thrilled to read this year's book by female neuroscientist Gina Rippon, The Gendered Brain, which asserts that brain plasticity and connectivity should displace old notions of gendered brains.

Rippon's is one of a growing number of female-authored popular science books on all aspects of science, and it is also an example of how women can contribute important new perspectives to scientific topics.

Another example is the ecological perspective of pioneering biologist and science writer Rachel Carson, whose 1962 Silent Spring played a leading role in launching the modern environmental movement.

Scientific understanding is often driven initially by a reductionist approach, and Carson was the first to clearly point out the role of artificial pesticides on the whole food chain.

Then there's the question of ethics in science. Rebecca Skloot's 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the little-known story of the 1951 illegal harvesting and selling of cells from poor black farmer Henrietta Lacks.

Having diverse voices of all kinds in science and science writing is a good thing for science, as even a brief look at history shows. As far as women's participation goes, we've come a long way.

But we still need more women to help shape and tell the story of science.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.Scientists have found a way to use "optical tweezers" by employing lasers, a mirror and a light modulator to anchor a crystal in solution. The "tweezers" have made it possible to conduct X-ray diffraction measurements of a crystal suspended in solution. Credit: Robert Horn/Argonne National Laboratory

Understanding how chemical reactions happen on tiny crystals in liquid solutions is central to a variety of fields, including materials synthesis and heterogeneous catalysis, but obtaining such an understanding requires that scientists observe reactions as they occur.

By using coherent X-ray diffraction techniques, scientists can measure the exterior shape of and strain in nanocrystalline materials with a high degree of precision. However, carrying out such measurements requires precise control of the position and angles of the tiny crystal with respect to the incoming X-ray beam. Traditionally, this has meant adhering or gluing the crystal to a surface, which in turn strains the crystal, thus altering its structure and potentially affecting reactivity.

"With optical tweezers, you can capture a single particle in its native state in solution and watch its structural evolution," said Linda Young, Argonne distinguished fellow.

Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago have developed a new technique that combines the power of nanoscale "tractor beams" with high-powered X-rays, enabling them to position and manipulate crystals in solution that are not in contact with substrates.

The tractor beam technique is known as "optical tweezers," which was also coincidentally awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics, because it allows samples to be manipulated using only light.

While ordinary optical tweezers involve a single focused laser beam, the holographic optical tweezers used in the study involve lasers precisely modified with a spatial light modulator. These lasers are reflected off a mirror to create an interference pattern of "hotspots" that are both more localized than a simply focused laser beam and have rapidly reconfigurable locations. The electric field gradient of these focused hotspots attracts the polarizable crystal and holds it in place.

With a pair of tweezers engagedeach at one end of the crystalthe Argonne scientists could manipulate the semiconductor microcrystal in three dimensions with high precision in the presence of a liquid solution and without exposing it to other surfaces.

"Usually, when people look at microcrystals using X-ray diffraction, they're glued onto a sample holder, which causes a distortion," said Argonne distinguished fellow Linda Young, a corresponding author on the study. "But now, with optical tweezers, you can capture a single particle in its native state in solution and watch its structural evolution. In principle, you can add reactants, capture dissolution or reaction and monitor changes at an atomic level."

By gaining the ability to manipulate the sample using only light, Young and her colleagues were able to take advantage of the coherent X-rays produced by Argonne's Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Using a technique called Bragg coherent diffraction imaging (CDI), the researchers were able to examine the crystal's structure under real conditions and from a number of different angles.

By pairing optical tweezers with Bragg CDI, scientists now have a new way to explore materials in liquid media, explained Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) scientist Yuan Gao, the first author of the study. "Our discovery comes from a combination of different techniquesincluding pairing lasers with the coherent beam from the APS," he said. "To make the experiment work, we needed the nanofabrication technique at the Center for Nanoscale Materials to make the sample cell as well." The Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) is also a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

According to Young, the technique might be useful for a wide range of future studies, including nucleation and crystal growth. "Typically, people look at isolated nanocrystalline samples in air or in vacuum. We wanted to be able control such objects in the liquid phase. For example, we wanted to be able to watch catalysis or crystallization unfold in real time with the precision that is afforded by X-ray crystallography," she said.

Gao pointed to the stability afforded by the optical tweezers as a primary advantage for future coherent X-ray experiments. "Coherent diffraction is very sensitive to position and orientation of the sample, and this experiment demonstrated the possibilities of this new technique," he said. Because of the stability of the technique, investigators were able to obtain coherent diffraction data, which allowed them to reconstruct the sample with sub-nanometer accuracy, revealing sub-nanometer scale defects and grain boundaries within the ostensibly crystalline ZnO microcrystal.

"As we look toward the upgrade of the APS, which will increase the brightness of the X-ray beams by orders of magnitude, these measurements will be much faster and provide even more exciting insight into how samples change in time," added Ross Harder, an Argonne physicist at the APS who is an author on the paper.

Eventually, the researchers would like to extend the technique to capture the ultrafast evolution of the crystal when it is excited by a laser pulse, said University of Chicago chemistry professor Norbert Scherer, another author of the paper. "This is the first step in achieving our larger ambition, which is to visualize the time-dependent structural dynamics of how the lattice changes," he said.

To carry out the experiment, the researchers relied on the creation of microfluidic components at CNM. Electrodynamics simulations were also carried out at CNM's Carbon high-performance computing cluster. University of Chicago researchers contributed their expertise on the holographic optical tweezer technique.

A paper based on the study, "Three-dimensional optical trapping and orientation of microparticles for coherent X-ray diffraction imaging," appeared in the February 11 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Explore further Research paves the way for next generation of optical tweezers

More information: Yuan Gao et al, Three-dimensional optical trapping and orientation of microparticles for coherent X-ray diffraction imaging, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Yuan Gao et al, Three-dimensional optical trapping and orientation of microparticles for coherent X-ray diffraction imaging,(2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1720785116Dr Egon Heiss with an Italian Crested Newt (Triturus carnifex), whose chewing behaviour was examined. Credit: Friedrich Schiller University Jena

The Italian Crested Newt  Triturus carnifex  eats anything and everything it can overpower. Earthworms, mosquito larvae and water fleas are on its menu, but also snails, small fish and even its own offspring. A research team led by Dr. Egon Heiss of Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (Germany) has studied the newt's chewing behaviour and has made an astounding discovery.

Triturus carnifex is an amphibian of the order Caudata and is a true salamander. "According to the textbooks, amphibians swallow their prey whole, but we have been able to refute this," says Heiss. Together with doctoral student Daniel Schwarz and Dr. Nicolai Konow of the University of Massachusetts, Heiss has succeeded in proving that the crested newts do actually chew their prey, but in a way that is different from that of most other land-based vertebrates. The researchers have now presented their findings in the specialist publication Journal of Experimental Biology.

Palatal teeth kill prey

"This newt uses what are called its palatal teeth to kill its prey and also to break it up," explains Heiss. This means that the jaw teeth are mainly used to catch or hold the prey. With the help of the tongue, the prey is then rubbed rhythmically against the palate. The palate is equipped with very sharp teeth, around 0.5 to one millimetre long, which are constantly replaced by new teeth. These teeth can, for example, tear open the extremely tough cuticula of fly maggots. "This kills the prey and, at the same time, helps the digestive secretions to take effect," says Heiss. For the newt, this is also a form of life insurance: some insect larvae have such a strong bite that they would be able to bore through the predator's body.

The first impetus for the surprising research result came on a research visit to Antwerp (Belgium), when Nicolai Konow and Egon Heiss observed a newt feeding. The biologists were intrigued by the amphibian's head, jaw and tongue movements after it had seized its prey. "The newt actually appeared to be chewing," says Heiss. The researchers were able to obtain a clear idea of what was happening with the help of the X-ray video unit at the Institute of Zoology and Evolutionary Research of the University of Jena.

Salamanders chew like primeval land-based vertebrates

The newt's chewing behaviour prompts the question of how it can be explained in the context of evolution. "We can assume that real palatal teeth were present in early land vertebrates, and we suspect that the 'tongue against palate' chewing mechanism, as seen in newts, is something that goes back to the early days of land-based vertebrates," says Heiss.

Very similar chewing mechanisms can indeed be found in ancient mammals such as the echidna and the duckbilled platypus, but also in the manatee. Although in these animals the palatal teeth have been replaced by rough keratin structures, the creatures still rub their food against the palate.

The tongue originated when vertebrates came onto land

From the point of view of evolution, the move from water to land brought about change in animals' chewing apparatus. A key role is played by the tongue, which only developed after vertebrates left the water. It is crucial for enabling chewing, as it moves food to the right place in the mouth. "With fish, the water current helps to do this," explains Heiss. A similar change occurs in amphibian larvae; during metamorphosis, the gills of amphibians transform into a tongue when the larvae leave the water.

The findings now presented are the first results from the research project "Form, Function and Evolution of Food Manipulation in Urodela," which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and was launched at the beginning of 2017. The project runs until the end of 2019 and maybe during that time, Triturus carnifex will be persuaded to reveal more secrets.

Explore further UK wild newt species free from flesh-eating fungus for now

More information: Egon Heiss et al. Chewing or not? Intraoral food processing in a salamandrid newt, The Journal of Experimental Biology (2019). Journal information: Journal of Experimental Biology Egon Heiss et al. Chewing or not? Intraoral food processing in a salamandrid newt,(2019). DOI: 10.1242/jeb.189886Scientists find that incorporating the current decadal climate prediction would significantly improve decadal prediction skill of terrestrial water storage over global major river basins. Credit: Enda Zhu

Terrestrial water storage (TWS) includes all phases of water over land (e.g., surface and groundwater, snow, etc.) and comprises an important freshwater resource. It is a critical component of the terrestrial water cycle, so reliable TWS decadal prediction would be beneficial for a sustainable water resources management, especially in a changing climate.

"Hydrological predictability mainly comes from two sources: the memory in initial hydrological conditions and the predictability of boundary meteorological forcings." says Prof. Xing Yuan from Institute of Atmospheric Physics at Chinese Academy of Sciences. "Scientists have been debating whether more efforts should be devoted to improving the accuracy of initial hydrological conditions or to decadal climate forecasts. And we still don't know the TWS baseline forecast skill that considers the dynamical forecast skill from the state-of-the-art climate models."

Yuan and his Ph.D. student Enda Zhu provide a new perspective to tackle these issues, now published in Nature Communications. They find that incorporating the current decadal climate prediction would significantly improve the baseline skill of TWS prediction over more than 25 percent of global river basins at one to four years lead time, and up to 47 percent for river basins at seven to 10 years lead time.

They performed 2,200-year global land surface hydrological ensemble simulations, and used a skill elasticity framework to analyze the impacts of two predictability sources with various degrees of uncertainties to the TWS decadal predictability over 32 global major river basins. Furthermore, they obtained a new TWS benchmark skill by considering decadal climate prediction skill with the elasticity framework, which is "a new norm to assess whether different strategies for future upgrades in the climate-hydrology approach are beneficial for decadal hydrological prediction," according to one of reviewers.

The result suggests that improving observation to reduce the uncertainty of initial hydrological conditions is an effective way to improve TWS prediction over arid and semiarid regions at one to four years lead. However, with the growth of lead time, improving the accuracy of boundary conditions gradually plays a key role in the improvement of TWS decadal prediction. Compared with the skill from the traditional hydrological forecast that is based on the initial memory, the new benchmark skill is significant higher over 25 percent basins at one to four years lead, and up to 47 percent basins at seven to 10 years lead.

"The benchmark skill estimated in our study can be regarded as a new reference for verifying the usefulness of decadal hydrological forecasts, regardless of using complicated dynamical or statistical downscaling approaches. This paper analyzed TWS decadal predictability and benchmark skill, but it can be applied to other hydrological variables (e.g., streamflow, soil moisture) from sub-seasonal to decadal time scales." says Yuan.

Explore further Predicting water storage beyond 2-5 years over global semiarid regions

More information: Enda Zhu et al, Benchmark decadal forecast skill for terrestrial water storage estimated by an elasticity framework, Nature Communications (2019). Journal information: Nature Communications Enda Zhu et al, Benchmark decadal forecast skill for terrestrial water storage estimated by an elasticity framework,(2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09245-3Credit: George Hodan/public domain

There is an effective formula for unlocking employees' creative potential, according to new research from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin and the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Employers should incentivize workers to produce an abundance of ideaseven mediocre onesand then have them step away from the project for an "incubation period."

The researchers found that people who were rewarded simply for churning out ideas, whether good or bad, ultimately ended up producing more creative ideas than people who did not receive pay incentives or those whose pay incentives were based on the quality of their ideas instead of the quantity. All the study participants stepped away from the initial task for a time and returned to it later.

"Creativity is not instantaneous, but if incentives promote enough ideas as seeds for thought, creativity eventually emerges," said Steven Kachelmeier, the Randal B. McDonald Chair in Accounting at Texas McCombs and co-author of the study in the Accounting Review.

It has been well established in the academic literature that creative performance is enhanced by an incubation period, but this research looked at a new question: What happens when you add incentives for idea generation to the equation?

Kachelmeier and his co-authors, Laura Wang (McCombs BBA/MPA '05, Ph.D. '14) and Michael Williamson, of the University of Illinois, conducted two experiments. In the first, they asked study participants to create rebus puzzlesriddles where words, phrases or sayings are represented using a combination of images and letters.

Some participants were offered pay based on the number of ideas they generated, some only for ideas that met a standard for creativity, and others a fixed wage of $25, regardless of the quantity or quality of their puzzle ideas.

Initially, none of the incentivized groups outperformed the fixed-wage group in measures of creativity, as judged by an independent panel. Creativity incentives, it would seem, do not work instantly. But in a subsequent return to the creativity task 10 days later, those who had originally been paid to come up with as many ideas as they could had "a distinct creativity advantage," outperforming the other groups in both the quantity and quality of ideas, Kachelmeier said.

Having an incubation period after participants put their minds to work was key to their success, the researchers said. Combining mass idea generation with a rest period results in much more creative productivity than when either of the two strategies is used in isolation.

How much time is needed? That's the question the researchers tackled in a second experiment, paying half the participants a fixed amount and half for the number of ideas they produced. As before, the pay-for-quantity participants yielded more, but not better, initial ideas than the fixed-pay group.

But after researchers led participants on a quiet, 20-minute walk around campus, the pay-for-quantity group once again produced more and better puzzles.

"You need to rest, take a break and detach yourselfeven if that detachment is just 20 minutes," Kachelmeier said. "The recipe for creativity is tryand get frustrated because it's not going to happen. Relax, sit back, and then it happens."

"Incentivizing the Creative Process: From Initial Quantity to Eventual Creativity," by Steven J. Kachelmeier, Laura W. Wang and Michael G. Williamson is published in the March 2019 issue of the Accounting Review.

Explore further Managers who listen boost staff creativity, study saysThe team monitored a slump-calving event at Helheim glacier, east Greenland. The black arrow shows ice flow direction. The ice cliff and slumped ice are labeled in red. Credit: Credit Byron Parizek and colleagues

Glaciers that drain ice sheets such as Antarctica or Greenland often flow into the ocean, ending in near-vertical cliffs. As the glacier flows into the sea, chunks of the ice break off in calving events. Although much calving occurs when the ocean melts the front of the ice, and ice cliff above falls down, a new study presents another method of calving: slumping. And this process could break off much larger chunks of ice at a quicker rate.

The ice-cliff research was spurred by a helicopter ride over Jakobshavn and Helheim glaciers on Greenland's eastern coast. Helheim ends abruptly in the ocean, in near-vertical ice-cliffs reaching 30-stories high (100 meters). On the flight, scientists viewed large cracks (called crevasses) on top of the ice that marched towards the end of the glacier.

"Geologists have spent decadescenturiesworrying about slumps," says Richard Alley, co-author of the new paper in Geology. A slump occurs when mass of rock or sediment loses some of its strength, breaks away from its neighboring land, and slides down a slope. Typically, slumps are marked by a steep scarp where the material broke away, followed by a block of material moved downslope.

Alley says the research team noted that features on Helheim glacier are typical of what you might see in a slump-prone terrestrial landscape and they wondered if ice might suffer the same fate. "You've got a crevasse that serves as a head scarp and then you've got the stresses [within the ice] maximized down at the water level," he says.

To test if slumping occurs on ice cliffs, the team monitored Helheim glacier during a calving event, using real-aperture terrestrial radar interferometery. They measured speed, position, and motion of the calving ice. The researchers observed an ice-flow acceleration just before an initial slump, followed by a rotating, full ice-thickness calving of the glacierincluding the entire remaining ice-cliff, reaching both above and below the water line.

Removing the weight of the upper ice by slumping encourages the underlying ice to pop upward. "Because it's still attached at the back, it's going to rotate a little bit," says Alley. The rotation causes a crack to form at the bottom of the glacier as the ice flexes. In turn, the crack can weaken the ice, creating a large calving eventall triggered by the initial slump on top of the ice cliff.

After observing the slump-triggered calving event, the team modeled when slumping events were most likely to occur on an ice cliff. The modeling looked at tensile, shear, and compressive failure for ice cliffs, and included characteristics of the ice. The scientists found that cliffs reaching more than 100 meters of ice above water were likely to have slumping occur.

Alley says regular calving events happen relatively slowly, such as when the ice front melts over time, undercutting the ice and weakening the cliff. "But that's not going to go really, really, really fast because you have to wait for the melting to undercut it," he says.

With slumping, the calving occurs without waiting for the melt. "We'll go slump... basal crevasse... boom," he says, noting that when the calving happens it will take the 100 meters of ice above the waterand the 900 meters below the watervery quickly.

And 1000 meters of ice calving at once isn't the limit. Alley says that in some places in Antarctica, the glacial ice bed can be 1500 to 2000 meters below sea level, creating a much taller cliff above water. He says the worry is that taller cliffs are even more susceptible to slumping. "The scary thing is that if pieces of west Antarctica start doing what Helheim is doing then over the next hundred years models indicate that we get rapid sea level rise at rates that surpass those predicted," says Alley.

Understanding the slump-break process has been a collaborative effort, Alley says, and more investigations are planned for the near future. "We want to understand what are the rules for [ice] breakage by this process and others," says Alley, adding that they hope to collect more observational data as well as refine their models to better understand the slump-break process. "There's still work to be done."

Explore further Cracks herald the calving of a large iceberg from Petermann Glacier

More information: Byron R. Parizek et al. Ice-cliff failure via retrogressive slumping, Geology (2019). Journal information: Geology Byron R. Parizek et al. Ice-cliff failure via retrogressive slumping,(2019). DOI: 10.1130/G45880.1In the six decades since the Shippingport Atomic Power Station near Pittsburgh began operating as the nation's first commercial nuclear reactor, the industry has built ever larger plants to improve the economies of scale. A typical commercial reactor now produces about 20 times as much electricity as the first Shippingport unit in 1958.

So it may seem counterintuitive that the industry sees the future not in building gargantuan plants, but in small modular reactors, or SMRsfactory-built units with fewer parts, designed to be installed underground with passive cooling systems that the industry says are "inherently safe."

Unlike large nuclear units, which are designed to operate full-tilt all year, SMR designers say the small units are flexible enough to be cranked up as needed to fill gaps in production from wind and solar-powered plantsa critical role as some see nuclear power as a carbon-free bridge between fossil fuels and renewable energy. The worldwide market for such reactors is expected to reach $100 billion by 2035, according to the Nuclear Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization based in Paris.

Among U.S. developers, NuScale Power of Corvallis, Ore., has surpassed its competitorsincluding Holtec International of Camdento advance its design closer to the finish line. Supported with $275 million in U.S. Energy Department grants, NuScale has invested about $800 million to design a 75-foot-tall cylindrical reactor that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected to approve next year. NuScale aims to begin producing power at its first plant in 2026.

"There's a good case for SMRs in a lot of markets, both in the U.S. and throughout the world," said John Kotek, vice president of policy development and public affairs for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group.

But not everyone is sold on their promise.

"SMRs seem to be a fad, as far as I can tell," said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, who wrote a widely cited paper questioning the economics of small reactors. "There's very really little substance to its motivation, other than the private sector can't afford ordinary sized reactors."

'SAFER, COST-EFFECTIVE'

Each NuScale reactor would produce 60 megawatts of powerthe same as the original Shippingport reactor, which was decommissioned in 1989. The company says its units can be installed individually, or in groups. The initial plant at the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory would contain 12 reactors. Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems is the primary customer.

The smaller reactors will be cost-effective because they can be mass-produced at existing U.S. manufacturing facilities, dramatically reducing onsite construction costs and times, said Tom Mundy, NuScale's chief commercial officer.

SMR designers say the plants will need fewer operators, and because the design is safer, they have also asked the NRC to reduce the 10-mile emergency planning zones now required for larger commercial reactors to an area confined to the plant site. Critics such as the Union of Concerned Scientists have opposed the request, saying the plants and their accumulated on-site spent fuel still pose a significant risk.

"They argue the reactors are so safe that terrorists won't be able to effectively cause a massive radiological contamination event, and I beg to differ," said Lyman.

The initial markets for SMRs are expected to be primarily overseas, where electricity costs are higher and nuclear energy can compete, NuScale says. Some water-starved Middle Eastern countries have expressed interest because some units can be configured to produce steam, rather than electricity, to power a nearby water desalinization plant.

ANTIDOTE TO CLIMATE CHANGE

The industry is also positioning carbon-free nuclear plants as an antidote to climate change. They cite a recent study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology that found that it would cost less to deploy nuclear power along with renewable energy to reduce carbon emissions, than it would to rely solely upon wind, solar and battery storage to cut emissions.

"Both domestically and internationally, there's a realization by many that in order to achieve carbon climate objectives that are being set, nuclear has to be part of the equation," said Mundy, who worked for Exelon Generation in Kennett Square before joining NuScale in 2012. He lives in Chester County.

Despite the climate benefits, many environmental advocates fiercely oppose any expansion of nuclear energy's role, including skeptics who cite safety issues exposed by the accident 40 years ago this month at Three Mile Island Unit 2 in Pennsylvania, which put the brakes on the industry's growth in the 1980s. In the last 20 years, just one new commercial plant has begun operations in the United States, and only two are currently under construction.

Lyman said the industry would need to produce "hundreds or thousands" of units in order to cut costs and reduce the need for government assistance.

But NuScale says it will need to produce only 12 reactor units, and build three power plants, to develop the experience needed to bring down costs. "Clearly, we're not talking about hundreds, and clearly not thousands," said Mundy. "There's nothing complicated about its construction, compared to large gigawatt plants."

Nuclear power's cost is at the heart of a debate that officially launched in Pennsylvania last week with the introduction of a proposal to give the nuclear industry $500 million in annual subsidies, paid by electric customers. Nuclear operators have threatened to shut down several Pennsylvania reactors because they are unable to compete in low-price electricity markets awash in cheap power from natural gas plants.

Exelon Generation says it will shut down Three Mile Island Unit 2, located next to the partly dismantled Unit 1, unless state lawmakers come to the rescue by June. TMI employs 675 people and produces more carbon-free power than all the state's solar, wind, and hydroelectric plants combined. First Energy Corp., which operates two reactors at the Beaver Valley Power Station in Western Pennsylvania, has also announced plans to retire the reactors in 2021.

While the industry is contracting, hope springs eternal among nuclear advocates, whose true believers are driven by the promise of harnessing the vast amount of energy locked in radioactive fuel.

LOCAL CONNECTIONS

Dozens of companies are working to develop new nuclear reactors, including so-called Generation IV reactors that are cooled with such materials as molten salts, inert gases, or even liquid metals.

Several companies have focused on developing SMR designs. Holtec International, a private company in Camden whose core business is managing spent fuel at nuclear reactors and decommissioning old reactors, has developed a 160-megawatt reactor design it calls the SMR-160. The project's status is unclear, and Holtec did not respond to written questions.

"I haven't seen evidence of it really advancing," said Lyman, of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Westinghouse and BWX Technologies Inc., which both have long histories of building reactors, abandoned their SMR projects.

NuScale in September chose BWXT to build its SMR. BWXT, which built many of the small reactors used to power U.S. Navy ships and submarines, plans to subcontract component manufacturing to Precision Custom Components of York, Pa.

Mundy said by outsourcing the manufacturing to existing plants, NuScale can keep costs down compared with building a new factory. NuScale's majority owner is the giant contractor Fluor Corp.

Mundy says the NuScale design is not a smaller version of a larger reactor.

"We have features that are different, that you're not going to find in the competition, and we have very strong customer interest in our technology," he said.

DISASTER-PROOF DESIGN

Each reactor vessel is surrounded by its own high-pressure steel containment, and immersed in an eight-million-gallon pool of water, so there is no need for a hardened containment building.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan was triggered when the six plants lost off-site power after an earthquake, and the on-site emergency generators that powered the plant's cooling water pumps failed because they had been inundated by a tsunami. The operators were unable to restore cooling water before four reactors melted down, spewing radioactive contamination over the countryside.

"Our technology doesn't require the need for offsite power," Mundy said. "In an event where the station loses all power, our reactors will automatically shut down, and they will self-cool for an indefinite period of time without the need to add any water, without the need to have the operators take any additional action, or for the need to restore AC or DC power."

Lyman said that he is worried that multiple modular reactors would fail in NuScale plant, but that the NRC will accept more risk because it is under pressure to not impede the licensing process.

"If everything works just right, the reactor will be safely cooled," he said. "There are a number of ways that picture could end up not so pretty."

Explore further The nuclear industry is making a big bet on small power plants

2019 Philly.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC."How irresponsible can our mainstream media be on such a vital issue as water?" "How irresponsible can our mainstream media be on such a vital issue as water?"

Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Teddy Boy Locsin, Jr. pretty much said it all when he said during his visit to his counterpart in China, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, that I speak for my country which wants to see much to hope for, and nothing to fear from the rise of a new power... Its clear that many more countries in the world is agreeing with our foreign secretary, like Italy which is signing an MOU to join the multi-Trillion, visionary Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) connect 65 countries to date (and more to come) by land, sea and the digital highway to push global prosperity and peace. While the Philippines and China are on the way to establishing joint oil and sea exploration in the areas of the Spratlys that have overlapping claims of the two countries as well as more investments in the Philippines, Italy is looking forward to boosting its access to the Chinese market with the MOU on the BRI. Despite the brickbats and road blocks detractors of China and its far-sighted multi-trillion global infrastructure, investment and connectivity crusade continue to overcome the short-sighted and often deliberate negativity to the BRI unfolding such as false accusations of debt traps and land grabs. The proof of the worlds acceptance of Chinas best intentions is the latest global Gallup polls showing China's global leadership image rating rising to its highest in almost a decade, climbing higher at 34 percent than the U.S. at 31 percent. The approval ratings of China's leadership rose dramaticallyby at least 10 percentage points or morein over a dozen countries, while losing in relatively only a few. This improvement is despite the countless campaigns to denigrate Chinas global soft power by detractors from the West. This development casts doubt on local Philippine surveys putting a negative spin on Filipinos views of China.Evidence of the deliberate distortions of Chinas intentions by media is clear in the reportage of the mainstream media outfits of controversies in our recent water supply crisis. It is a historical fact that the Kaliwa Dam plans to supply additional water to Metro Manila were drawn up way back in the 70s but it is being made to appear now that it is a project set up for the convenience of China by the Duterte administration. Thats a total lie. The project has also been submitted to many financial institutions like the World Bank but protests from the usual Church and activist groups delayed it without end. Then theres the weir-d Japanese proposal that popped up the last minute as the Duterte government pushed to fast track the Chinese funding for the Kaliwa Dam recently. The Japanese private company Global Utility Development Corporation (GUDC) claiming its weir dam proposal is cheaper at $410 million and would supply Metro Manila with 550 MLD versus the Chinese plan its claims cost $800 million for only 600 MLD, and newspaper like the Inquirer in its editorial even cited the $800-million figure in questioning the China proposal. The truth is, as MWSS pointed out, the China proposal is actually only $248 million. Consider the design, Chinas proposal which was vetted by our own Filipino engineers and experts, specify a 73-meter concrete dam with a water impounding capacity of 600 MLD while the Japanese GUDC weir is not mainly for impounding water but, as the Wikipedia explains for simplicity, specifically designed to alter the river flow characteristics for control of invasive species, watermills, flood control and altering river conditions. A weir is filled only while rain and other sources of water feeds it but it does not store water for lean water months. How irresponsible can our mainstream media be on such a vital issue as water? Going back to Italys pact with Chinas BRI dream, as milestone has been achieved here as Italys the first G7 country to join and over the vocal objections of the United States and some EU countries: US Official suggests Italy avoid China's Belt and Road plan quoting U.S. national security adviser spokesman Garrett Marquis last March 10: Italy is a major global economy and great investment destination. No need for the Italian government to lend legitimacy to China's infrastructure vanity project ..." But Italy for its own national interest went ahead with cooperation with China and the BRI. If Chinas standing in the global leadership echelons is rising it is because Locsin, though an American Boy all his life, has learned the new reality of the 21st century, the more and more in the world see much to hope for, and nothing to fear from the rise of a new power.An enhanced image of some of the galaxies from AstroQuest for the ones with multiple galaxies. Credit: ICRAR

Scientists are appealing for public help on one of the biggest astronomy projects of the next ten years.

In a new citizen science project launched todayknown as AstroQuestresearchers are looking for volunteers to study images of galaxies and figure out which light is coming from which galaxy.

"When you go outside and look up at the night sky, there's a lot of black with all of the stars dotted around," said astrophysicist Dr Luke Davies, from the University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

"But when you look with a really powerful telescope for a long time, you actually see that there are galaxies and stars everywhere, all over the sky.

"It's really, really crowded, and all of these galaxies and stars overlap with each other."

Dr Davies helps lead WAVESor the Wide Area Vista ExtraGalactic Surveya million-dollar international project and the biggest spectroscopic galaxy evolution survey ever undertaken.

He said WAVES needs to accurately measure the light coming from millions of galaxies.

"We use sophisticated computer algorithms to make sense of where the light is coming from in these crowded regions," Dr Davies said.

An image of AstroQuest galaxy alongside how it looks in the AstroQuest platform once a citizen scientist has helped the computer to identify what belongs to the main galaxy and what doesnt. Credit: ICRAR/AstroQuest

"But the computer often gets it wrong. It's simply no match for the human eye and brain."

Dr Davies said professional astronomers have previously looked through all the galaxies and fixed the computer's mistakes.

"But as more and more galaxies are surveyed, there simply aren't enough people on our team to do it," he said.

ICRAR citizen science project officer Lisa Evans said AstroQuest asks volunteers to take over from professional astronomers and check the computer's work.

An image of an AstroQuest galaxy alongside how it looks in the AstroQuest platform once a citizen scientist has helped the computer to identify what belongs to the main galaxy and what doesnt. Credit: ICRAR/AstroQuest

Where the computer has gotten it wrong, volunteers are asked to fix it.

"There's never been a citizen science project quite like this before," Ms Evans said.

"This is the first time we've got people actually painting over the galaxies and drawing in where they are."

Ms Evans has also added game features to AstroQuest, including leaderboards, quests and achievements.

An image of an AstroQuest galaxy alongside how it looks in the AstroQuest platform once a citizen scientist has helped the computer to identify what belongs to the main galaxy and what doesnt. Credit: ICRAR/AstroQuest

Dr Davies said knowing the amount of light that comes from a galaxy can tell us things like how many stars the galaxy currently has, how many stars it's forming and how much dust is in it.

He said the team is ultimately trying to learn more about how galaxies in the early Universe evolved into the galaxies that we see today.

"If you map out millions of galaxies and measure all of their properties you can actually see how galaxies change as the Universe gets older. You can then explore how things like where a galaxy lives in the Universe and if it's crashing into other galaxies affect how it evolves with time," he says.

AstroQuest is a chance for anyone who's interested in astronomy to be involved in one of the biggest scientific projects of the next ten years, Dr Davies said.

"You can essentially be at the forefront of scientific research and help out a huge million-dollar international project just by being at your computer and drawing over pictures of galaxies," he said.

An image of an AstroQuest galaxy alongside how it looks in the AstroQuest platform once a citizen scientist has helped the computer to identify what belongs to the main galaxy and what doesnt. Credit: ICRAR/AstroQuest

Explore further Hubble's dazzling display of two colliding galaxies

Provided by ICRARThe book cover of the second edition of "Deterring Nuclear Proliferation: The Importance of IAEA Safeguards," a textbook for students and professionals in the field of nuclear nonproliferation that was first published in 2013. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory published the second edition of Deterring Nuclear Proliferation: The Importance of IAEA Safeguards. The textbook provides a history of the origins of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and an introduction to the ways in which IAEA verifies nation states' nuclear nonproliferation commitments.

"This book will benefit students studying or professionals working in the field of nuclear nonproliferation, and it will give anyone entering the field a running start," said primary author and Brookhaven Lab contractor Michael Rosenthal, who formerly served as head of Brookhaven's Division of Nonproliferation and Safeguards and as a member of the Senior Executive Service within the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Rosenthal and the other co-authorsLeslie Fishbone, Linda Gallini, the late Allan Krass, Myron Kratzer, Jonathan Sanborn, Warren Stern, Barclay Ward, and Norman Wulfare all experts in nuclear nonproliferation and international security. They have played key nonproliferation roles at the IAEA, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Brookhaven, and universities.

The new edition describes important changes to the implementation of IAEA safeguards since the first edition was published in 2013. Safeguards are technical measures for verifying that states are honoring their international legal commitments to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Traditionally, the safeguards approach focused primarily on the monitoring of nuclear facilities. Today, the IAEA has adopted a state-level approach, which takes into account a state's nuclear, and nuclear-related, activities and capabilities as a whole.

The second edition also chronicles the IAEA's role in implementing safeguards in Iran. The section includes a historical look at the sequence of events that culminated in the negotiation of a multilateral agreement that places strict bounds on Iran's nuclear program. The IAEA continues to verify that Iran is complying with its international and multilateral commitments to limit its nuclear program to peaceful purposes.

The book has been praised by several leaders engaged in efforts to ensure the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.

"Today, policymakers and practitioners who lack basic understanding of the history, rationale, and technical details of the complex architecture of the international nuclear nonproliferation regime and the role of the IAEA safeguards system are grappling with urgent proliferation challenges with one arm tied behind their back," said Ambassador Susan Burk, former Special Representative of the President of the United States for Nuclear Nonproliferation. "Fortunately, Deterring Nuclear Proliferation: The Importance of IAEA Safeguards, fills that knowledge gap. It is a unique resource for understanding the IAEA and is a must-read for security professionals developing and implementing U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy, and for anyone interested in understanding how the nonproliferation regime that we take for granted works to reduce nuclear dangers."

According to Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association and publisher of the journal Arms Control Today, "The latest edition of Deterring Nuclear Proliferation: The Importance of IAEA Safeguards is an invaluable, comprehensive guide to the evolving nuclear safeguards system that undergirds the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. Whether you are a scholar or researcher, a diplomat, a regulator, a student, or an expert practitioner, you will find this book to be a valuable and authoritative resource."

And Christian Kessler, who was a senior U.S. State Department official and nuclear expert, adjunct professor at the University of Washington and Stony Brook University, and member of the U.N. Security Council's Panel of Experts on Iran, wrote, "Deterring Nuclear Proliferation: The Importance of IAEA Safeguards examines the legal, political, and technical factors that shaped evolution of the international system to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, written by a team of experts who helped shape that evolution. Both detailed and comprehensive, it is a unique and uniquely authoritative resource for scholars, educators, and students seeking to learn how we got from Hiroshima to today."

Provided by Brookhaven National Laboratory



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3 Dependable Dow Stocks to Buy in December

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Read ArticleUPDATE: Reporters Without Borders issued a release on March 28, and both OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Harlem Desir and the Committee to Protect Journalists posted tweets on March 22 on Current Time TV journalist Svetlana Glushkova's detention while covering a protest in the capital, Astana.

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WASHINGTON -- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reporter Svetlana Glushkova was detained during protests today in Kazakhstan, the fourth such incident in recent weeks involving one of the companys journalists.

Glushkova, a correspondent for Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with Voice of America, was covering a protest in Astana against the government's decision to rename the city after former President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who unexpectedly resigned earlier this week. Dozens of protesters in Astana, Almaty, and Shymkent were arrested.

At the same rally, Glushkovas cameraman, Ganizat Ospanov, was attacked by people who appeared to be pro-government provocateurs, sustaining a leg injury that required hospitalization and a cast. Young men and women in costumes to mark the Norouz holiday used newspaper to try to cover the camera of another RFE/RL correspondent, and surrounded several others to prevent them from reporting on the arrests, shouting, "It is Norouz! Report about us!"

RFE/RL correspondents covering protests in Almaty reported similar incidents. In addition, Almaty bureau chief Kuanyshbek Kari was urgently summoned to the city administration, where a representative of the administration, together with an official of the Almaty prosecutors office, accused the Kazakh Service of producing one-side coverage of political events and inciting hatred.

RFE/RL Acting President Daisy Sindelar condemned these actions, calling them a blatant attempt to control media coverage of political events and intimidate independent journalists.

Glushkova is expected to appear before a court in Astana on as-yet unknown charges on March 23.

The March 22 rallies were organized online by the leader of the banned Kazakhstan's Democratic Choice (DVK) movement, Mukhtar Ablyazov, a vocal critic of Nazarbayev and his government, who lives in self-imposed exile in France.

Kazakh Service correspondent Saniya Toiken was detained by authorities three times this month in the restive city of Zhanaozen, where she has been covering ongoing public demonstrations.

----

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Joanna Levison in Prague (levisonj@rferl.org, +420.221.122.080)

Martins Zvaners in Washington (zvanersm@rferl.org, +1.202.457.6948)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Representatives of several Tunisian firms operating in the health sector are expected in Mauritanian next week to explore investment opportunities in the Maghreb country.

The visit will take place on March 25 and 26.

The companies operating in the pharmaceutical, para-pharmaceutical and medical equipment will meet with Mauritanian importers and retailers including medical practitioners.

Mauritania boasts GDP growth put at 5 per cent and possesses untapped medical market.

Tunisia ranked last month second country in Africa with the best health system on Bloomberg 2019 Healthiest country index.

The health industry of the North African country is reckoned as the leading on the African continent. The Tunisian government has paved way for Tunisian companies in the health industry to conquer the rest of the continent. Tunisia signed deals with several Western African countries including Senegal, Mali, and Cote dIvoire to enable companies to export the Tunisian know-how.South Africa: SA Express adds flight to DRC route

With increasing passenger demand, South African Express will add another return flight between Johannesburg and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The introduction of this additional frequency is in response to high passenger demand on the route, and SA Express is most grateful for the overwhelming support that it is receiving on this destination, said SA Express Interim Chief Executive Officer Siza Mzimela on Thursday.

The additional return flight between Johannesburg and Lubumbashi will apply on Saturdays and come into effect on 30 March 2019.

The additional weekend service between the two cities will see flights departing Johannesburgs OR Tambo International Airport (ORTIA) at 9:20am and arriving at Lubumbashi Airport 11:45am.

The return flights on the same day will depart Lubumbashi at 12:30, landing at ORTIA at 3pm.

The airline operates a 70-seater regional jet CRJ 700 on the route.

Indeed, the airline continues to make major strides overall, and is firmly en route to achieving commercial sustainability as we accelerate the implementation of our new business strategies, she said.

Meanwhile, April 2019 will see the airline commemorating 25 years of connecting secondary destinations to main airport hubs in South Africa and the region. The Silver Anniversary coincides with the celebrations of South Africas 25 years of democracy.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2019-03-22. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.President Abdelaziz Bouteflika will surrender power to future elected Algerian President, Foreign Minister and Vice-Prime Minister has told Russia, reports say.

Algeria has been embroiled in political crisis since February after countrys leader, Bouteflika announced his plans for a fifth term in office.

The oil-rich country has witnessed repeated massive demonstrations even after the ailing President scrapped his plans and announced a political transition while postponing the April 18 elections.

Visiting Russia Tuesday, Foreign Minister who also doubles as Vice-Prime Minister Ramtane Lamara told Russian authorities that 82-year old Bouteflika will hand over power to Algerias future President.

Lamara speaking at joint press conference with his Sergei Lavrov, said that Bouteflika will not run for the elections.

The President withdrew his candidacy as result of mounting street pressure. In a written address to the nation, the one who has been in power since 1999 said he did not intend to seek a fifth term in office and announced the postponement of the elections sine die. The move fueled Algerians anger who stage daily demonstrations.

Algerians believe that their leader and his entourage are playing with time in view of extending his fourth term in office.

Several world powers have called on the Algerian regime to set a date for the elections to defuse internal tension.2005-2021 All contents of this blog are the property of Bonnie K. Hunter, and cannot be reproduced in any way without prior written consent.Vice-Prime Minister Maya Tskitishvili about the Anaklia Deep Sea Port project

By Levan Abramishvili

On March 21, the Vice-Prime Minister and the Minister of Regional Development and Infrastructure of Georgia, Maya Tskitishvili, gave a speech at The Parliament of Georgia that was followed by the discussions regarding the Anaklia Deep Sea Port. The Vice-Prime Minister thanked the Parliament for the opportunity to present the position of the Government regarding the Port.In the past month, the issue of the Port has become widely discussed topic. There were many statements, questions and speculations that lacked real substance and may be harmful for the project  said Tskitishvili.She reminded the public that it was the Government who initiated the project initially, has been trying to support the consortium in fulfilling the project and is currently interested in successful implementation despite the difficulties. She made it clear that it is not only timely completion of the project that matters for the government, but also attitude of ADC foreign investors and overall investment climate of the country , since this project will largely determine investment appetite of future investors .In her speech, Tskitishvili made it obvious that the Anaklia port construction is not under threat and expressed hope that a consensus will be achieved to guarantee the timely completion of this landmark for the country project.The Vice-Prime Minister said that the Government is fully informed about the work that the Anaklia Development Consortium has done so far. Special government commission worked on overseeing the initial works that were conducted. The master plan, preliminary design and the stages are all agreed between parties as of today. She also confirmed that dredging and reclamation works were conducted in September and preliminary construction works began on December 24, 2018.Tskitishvili also touched upon the responsibilities that the Government took regarding the Anaklia Deep Sea Port. The Government is obliged to provide rail and road infrastructure before the port starts operating with the total cost of GEL 200 million and GEL 120 million respectively. The tender was launched in February 2019, four different companies applied and we are in the process of selection. By the end of March this process will be completed  said Tskitishvili. She also mentioned that even though the deadline for fulfilling these obligations is April 9, 2021, the government is planning to complete the work before the set date.Overall, message of the Vice-Prime Minister was very straightforward  Anaklia Deep Sea Port project is a breakthrough project for the country, its timely completion is in strategic and economic interests of the Georgian Government and they are willing to do everything possible to make it happen.Blog Archive December 2021 (29) November 2021 (72) October 2021 (67) September 2021 (59) August 2021 (56) July 2021 (57) June 2021 (66) May 2021 (63) April 2021 (75) March 2021 (73) February 2021 (61) January 2021 (69) December 2020 (62) November 2020 (62) October 2020 (70) September 2020 (51) August 2020 (52) July 2020 (60) June 2020 (57) May 2020 (79) April 2020 (56) March 2020 (52) February 2020 (50) January 2020 (69) December 2019 (58) November 2019 (64) October 2019 (44) September 2019 (49) August 2019 (71) July 2019 (71) June 2019 (71) May 2019 (67) April 2019 (74) March 2019 (85) February 2019 (64) January 2019 (73) December 2018 (66) November 2018 (81) October 2018 (87) September 2018 (66) August 2018 (76) July 2018 (84) June 2018 (86) May 2018 (64) April 2018 (83) March 2018 (78) February 2018 (69) January 2018 (69) December 2017 (82) November 2017 (87) October 2017 (89) September 2017 (77) August 2017 (75) July 2017 (76) June 2017 (90) May 2017 (86) April 2017 (59) March 2017 (61) February 2017 (82) January 2017 (92) December 2016 (90) November 2016 (80) October 2016 (75) September 2016 (95) August 2016 (104) July 2016 (93) June 2016 (96) May 2016 (98) April 2016 (99) March 2016 (113) February 2016 (82) January 2016 (98) December 2015 (113) November 2015 (94) October 2015 (93) September 2015 (98) August 2015 (97) July 2015 (105) June 2015 (103) May 2015 (95) April 2015 (100) March 2015 (102) February 2015 (93) January 2015 (114) December 2014 (110) November 2014 (103) October 2014 (105) September 2014 (96) August 2014 (96) July 2014 (112) June 2014 (119) May 2014 (109) April 2014 (116) March 2014 (117) February 2014 (109) January 2014 (116) December 2013 (117) November 2013 (121) October 2013 (125) September 2013 (93) August 2013 (115) July 2013 (110) June 2013 (102) May 2013 (115) April 2013 (113) March 2013 (119) February 2013 (108) January 2013 (119) December 2012 (132) November 2012 (115) October 2012 (121) September 2012 (115) August 2012 (124) July 2012 (102) June 2012 (121) May 2012 (121) April 2012 (127) March 2012 (130) February 2012 (112) January 2012 (131) December 2011 (129) November 2011 (118) October 2011 (118) September 2011 (110) August 2011 (138) July 2011 (146) June 2011 (139) May 2011 (144) April 2011 (127) March 2011 (140) February 2011 (116) January 2011 (134) December 2010 (133) November 2010 (136) October 2010 (148) September 2010 (128) August 2010 (155) July 2010 (129) June 2010 (138) May 2010 (152) April 2010 (161) March 2010 (119) February 2010 (149) January 2010 (155) December 2009 (177) November 2009 (171) October 2009 (176) September 2009 (159) August 2009 (156) July 2009 (170) June 2009 (157) May 2009 (185) April 2009 (179) March 2009 (183) February 2009 (170) January 2009 (181) December 2008 (189) November 2008 (183) October 2008 (164) September 2008 (164) August 2008 (177) July 2008 (179) June 2008 (170) May 2008 (191) April 2008 (175) March 2008 (195) February 2008 (162) January 2008 (188) December 2007 (187) November 2007 (189) October 2007 (194) September 2007 (156) August 2007 (194) July 2007 (163) June 2007 (176) May 2007 (190) April 2007 (177) March 2007 (192) February 2007 (165) January 2007 (170) December 2006 (182) November 2006 (177) October 2006 (185) September 2006 (180) August 2006 (156) July 2006 (160) June 2006 (177) May 2006 (173) April 2006 (157) March 2006 (158) February 2006 (146) January 2006 (144) December 2005 (135) November 2005 (138) October 2005 (128) September 2005 (141) August 2005 (136) July 2005 (133) June 2005 (119) May 2005 (143) April 2005 (52)Education Reporter

Mathew Burciaga is a Santa Maria Times reporter who covers education, agriculture and public safety. Prior to joining the Times, Mathew ran a 114-year-old community newspaper in Wyoming. He owns more than 40 pairs of crazy socks from across the globe.If youre using non-woven plastic bags, you have less than two weeks to trash them.

Days after Kenyas environment authority NEMA banned the low-quality carrier bags, a date has been set for a major crackdown. The National Environmental Management Authority on Wednesday announced that a crackdown on non-woven bags begins on April 1.

According to Director General Geoffrey Wahungu, the extended notice given to manufacturers and users expires on March 31.

Last November Nema met manufacturers of the bags and gave notice. On December 13 they met again and were given a three-month extension expiring on March 31, Wahungu said.

Noting that there are no standards to guide the modification of the bags, the Director-General said bags gauge is yet to be tested and their tensile strength determined.

The busting strength and toxicity of the material will be checked before we have a standard, he said.

NEMA is working with the Kenya Bureau of Standards and Kenya Forest Research Institute to set the required standards.

Wahungu noted that Nema is taking precautions to avoid a runaway situation. He said the standards that were allowed into the market have been eroded.

He said the banned bags are common in Western Kenya owing to porous borders through which they are smuggled.

We have taken a multi-agency approach to manage the borders and stop infiltration of plastics. We noticed a new trend on how the bags are being sneaked in  stashed under eggs and milk. Some are carried on bicycles, he said." " This NASA map shows the path of the Monday, Aug. 21, 2017, solar eclipse. The dark line along the middle is the path of the totality. NASA

On Monday, Aug. 21, people throughout North America  and in some parts of South America, Africa and Europe  will have a chance to observe a celestial phenomenon that's fascinated humans for thousands of years. A total solar eclipse, in which the moon moves between Earth and the sun, casting a shadow across our planet and briefly blocking out the sun's light.

" " A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun. Learn how the moon blocks the sun's light to Earth during an eclipse.

From most parts of North America, observers will be able to glimpse a partial eclipse, where the moon only covers a part of the sun. But along the path of totality  a band 70 miles (113 kilometers) wide that will move across the U.S.  people will be able to witness a total solar eclipse, in which the sun is completely blocked out by the moon for approximately two minutes.

The earliest documentation of a total solar eclipse dates back to March 4, 1223 B.C.E. The last total solar eclipse to cast a shadow across the continental United States happened in 1979, though partial eclipses have happened since then. And it's been 99 years since a total solar eclipse traversed the entire width of the continental United States, making this a particularly momentous event for U.S. residents. The United States will next see total solar eclipses in 2024, 2045 and 2052, but none that crosses the entire country like this year's.

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Where Can I See the Eclipse?

According to NASA's Eclipse 101 website, the total eclipse will begin in Lincoln Beach, Oregon, at 9:05 a.m. Pacific time, and make its way across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina, before finally ending near Charleston, South Carolina, at 2:48 p.m. Eastern time. Lucky eclipse watchers in Carbondale, Illinois, will get the longest time in the totality, at two minutes and 40 seconds.

" " The last time a total solar eclipse crossed both the East and West Coast of the United States was in 1918, as this map from the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for the Year 1918 shows. This is a scan from the copy of the almanac held by the NASA Goddard library. NASA

If you want to see the total solar eclipse, you can pick the most convenient spot by consulting either NASA's downloadable map or interactive map of the path of totality, which shows how it will move across the country in 10-minute increments. GreatAmericanEclipse.com, an independent site set up specifically for this event, also offers a chart of 10 choice viewing spots across the nation. If you have to work or prefer to stay close to home, Google offers this simulator which will show you the time that either the partial or the total solar eclipse will occur in your area. And NASA is partnering with public libraries all across the country to host eclipse viewing events.

If you're planning to head to a viewing in the path of the totality, make sure to monitor weather conditions, and cross your fingers for a clear sky.

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How Can I Safely Look at the Eclipse?

"The only time that the Sun can be viewed safely with the naked eye is during a total eclipse, when the Moon completely covers the disk of the Sun," says NASA. "It is never safe to look at a partial or annular eclipse, or the partial phases of a total solar eclipse, without the proper equipment and techniques. Even when 99 percent of the Sun's surface (the photosphere) is obscured during the partial phases of a solar eclipse, the remaining crescent Sun is still intense enough to cause a retinal burn, even though illumination levels are comparable to twilight."

" " A man uses protective glasses to view the moon passing in front of the sun, in Vigo, Spain, on March 20, 2015. Miguel Riopa/AFP/Getty Images

So if you're not in the path of totality, do not look at the sun. If you are in the totality, before you look, be sure to protect your eyes. As the American Academy of Ophthalmology explains, looking directly at the sun, even for a short time, can damage your retinas permanently, and even cause a type of blindness called solar retinopathy.

The only safe way to look at the sun is through special solar filters (not to be confused with ordinary sunglasses) that are used in eclipse glasses or hand-held eclipse viewers that meet the ISO-12312 international safety standard. The American Astronomical Society provides this handy guide for telling whether your eclipse glasses are safe, which includes a list of certified manufacturers. Additionally, more than 2 million eclipse glasses will be available for free at public libraries throughout the country.

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What Will It Look Like?

According to the American Astronomical Society, total solar eclipses cause a host of wonderfully bizarre phenomena. In the 15 minutes prior to totality, as more than half of the sun is covered, daylight becomes noticeably dimmer, takes on an odd tint, with shadows becoming sharper and more detailed. As the sunlight dims and darkness sets in, clouds on the horizon will go dark, as the lunar shadow sweeps over them. You may see undulating ripples of darkness and light called shadow bands appear on buildings.

In the 30 seconds before totality, viewers will get the first glimpse of the solar corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun, and strange sights such as Baily's beads and the diamond ring, as points of light remain on the edge of the moon. When totality starts, the chromosphere  the thin middle of the solar atmosphere  briefly becomes visible as a red arc. Then, the corona comes into better view, and careful viewers can observe details such as loops and arcs that indicate the sun's magnetic fields.

If you're in a place where only the partial solar eclipse will be visible, it still can be a pretty spectacular sight, with the sun appearing to morph from a ball into a crescent. Here's a YouTube video of how a partial solar eclipse appeared in Minnesota in October 2014.

But a total solar eclipse can be truly mind-blowing, as you'll see from this video shot from a beach in Australia that was in the path of totality in November 2012.

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Opportunities for Learning

But the total solar eclipse is more than an amazing sight. Williams College astronomy professor Jay M. Pasachoff, who chairs the International Astronomical Union's working group on solar eclipses, explained in an email that the event provides scientists with an opportunity to view an entire area of the solar atmosphere  the lower and middle corona  that isn't visible even to spacecraft.

Scientists have observations planned that will help to answer important questions about the corona. "We are studying how the corona changes over the 11-year sunspot cycle," says Pasachoff, "how the magnetic field around sunspots leads to the shapes of streamers and plumes we see in the corona, which of several possibilities of how the sun's magnetic field heats the corona to over a million degrees, and how fast eruptions that might hit the Earth come out of the sun."

In addition, says Pasachoff, scientists will study how the total solar eclipse affects Earth. "We will see how shutting off sunlight abruptly affects the temperature, density and humidity, and how it might generate waves in the atmosphere," he says.

" " A view of the total solar eclipse captured from Indonesia on March 9, 2016. Bambang Prastowo/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images

Now That's Interesting If you're really, really into solar eclipses and being able to watch one for a few minutes isn't enough, you can try to win a seat on an Alaska Airlines charter flight that will take off from Portland, Oregon, on the morning of Aug. 21 and chase the eclipse across the U.S. The contest begins on July 21 on the airline's social media channels.What's new this weekend: Oddities from the U.S. and Asia.

Critters: A New Binge

Now streaming on Shudder.

"I'm not angry, just disappointed."

Although I enjoyed Stephen Herek's original film in 1986, I missed out on the three sequels, so I was mighty curious to see what a reboot might be like. Exclusively available on Shudder, the series consists of eight episodes, running 8-11 minutes each.

Like the first film, the two episodes I've seen are silly and crude and entirely disposable, which makes them perfect appetizers for an evening of genre viewing. Per the official synopsis, "Pursued by intergalactic bounty hunters, the Critters return to Earth on a secret mission and encounter Christopher, a lovelorn high-schooler, his best friend Charlie, his crush Dana, and his mom Veronica - whose past will come back to bite them. Who will survive? And who will be eaten?"

Summing up: Light and deliciously chewy.



Green Door

Now streaming on Netflix.

"For a dead person, you're looking very healthy."

The Taiwanese series is blocked in mainland China, per THR, but it's available elsewhere around the world on Netflix. I've sampled the first of six episodes, which begins with the rather arid introduction of a struggling psychologist who was educated and has now returned to Taiwan to start his practice. His bluff, impolite manner has driven away practically every patient that's been referred to him by his well-connected girlfriend, so she challenges him to find his own clients.

Before you can say Gender Identity Disorder, the psychologist stumbles upon a low-level, would-be gangster who was killed by his criminal associates; somehow, the spirit of the gangster has transferred to a very confused woman. Their first session is ridiculous and funny, and then the episodes retreats to a more dramatic treatment of the premise.

Judging by the trailer and the short official synopsis, it appears that the psychologist will take on more ghosts as clients, though I imagine that collection of bills will become an issue for him.

Summing up: From the first episode alone, the tone appears to be all over the place, but there's enough promise in the premise to explore it further.



My Husband Won't Fit

Now streaming on Netflix.

"My husband's penis won't fit," is what she wants to say, but she can't imagine anyone she can tell about the little ... challenge she faces.

An (apparently) dramatic series has instead been produced. The ten episodes range in length from 28 to 47 minutes; I made it through about six minutes of the first episode (which I'm told is about average) before moving on in search of something more genre-friendly. From the title, I thought that perhaps the show would quickly reveal itself to be a wacky comedy, but no.

Instead, we follow Kumiko, who is from a rural area in Japan, as she moves to attend college and quickly meets fellow education major Kenichi. Once they begin dating, "they discover a problem" and the series goes on from there.

Summing up: Er, not for me. I shouldn't dismiss a show so quickly, I know. But I felt compelled to share my admiration for the title!



 "Reduce prison populations by reducing life sentences" | Main | California Gov Newsom, on heels of execution moratorium order, now talking up halt to any capital prosecutions 

March 22, 2019

Philly DA looking to curtail duration of probation and parole

Many years ago, I heard an academic a lot smarter than me say that the US would never make a serious dent in mass incarceration if and while we still had an even more massive number of persons subject to criminal justice supervision. He suggested that it was unavoidable that some percentage subject to community supervision would end up going back to prison, and so to reduce incarceration levels we had to also reduce supervision levels.

This story is salient this morning because of this notable new press report from Philadelphia headlined "Philly DA Larry Krasner: We took on mass incarceration. Now were addressing mass supervision." Here are the basics (with this from the original):

Over his first year in office, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner rolled out a series of internal policies described as an effort to end mass incarceration": seeking shorter sentences, diverting low-level offenses from the justice system, and charging crimes at a lower level. Now, hes looking to the next step. One of our big priorities this year," he said, "is to try to address mass supervision  which, of course, would be both probation and parole. Philadelphia counted 42,000 people on county supervision at the end of 2017, or one in 22 adults. Statewide, Pennsylvanians are under correctional control at the second-highest rate in the nation, behind Georgia, and has the highest rate of parolees. I think people instinctively believed too much supervision is not enough. But it turns out too much supervision is too much. ... It does tremendous harm, and it costs a fortune, Krasner said in an interview outlining policies to be announced Thursday. Nationally, about 40 percent of people on probation are reincarcerated, making community supervision a major driver of incarceration. About 40 percent of Philadelphias jail population is being held on a detainer for a violation of probation or parole. His plan? To put his offices weight behind a push to drastically curtail terms of supervision, which can stretch on for years or even decades, long after prison and jail sentences have been concluded. Under the new policy, on top of any sentence of incarceration for a felony, assistant district attorneys will seek community supervision terms averaging 18 months, with a ceiling of three years. For misdemeanors, theyll seek probation or parole terms around six months, not to exceed one year of combined community supervision.

March 22, 2019 at 09:03 AM | Permalink

Comments

Federal is the worst case for supervised release.

Your criminal history category is still in tact and major prong.

So if you do the same minor irritating factor that someone in Cat 1 does and your in cat 6, your going to get hammered. By being in cat 6, youve already done 5-10 times more prison time than the cat 1 dude.

Drug and especially alcohol abusers build up a lot if history points. Owis, assault if only verbal ut all counts the same, speeding (radio full throttle) on & on. Weve all seen these types in the papers.

But do they deserve a lifetime of prison? The feds do, cause it gets these worthless do nothing never held a job people re-elected...

Am I right?

Posted by: MidWestGuy | Mar 22, 2019 10:37:00 AM

Post a commentAlexander Vinnik, alleged to have laundered billions of dollars as a bitcoin exchange operator wants to go home. | Source: Shutterstock

One of the operators of BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange and leading suspect in multi-billion money laundering scandal, Alexander Vinnik, is seeking to be extradited to Russia from Greece rather than to the United States or France.

According to Greek publication Kathimerini, Vinnik filed an appeal with a court in the port city of Piraeus seeking to be released or extradited to his home country. The Russian national who has been on a hunger strike for three months cited humanitarian reasons in his plea.

Alexander Vinnik

Alexander Vinnik, in frail condition following hunger strike. Photo shown by his lawyers at a press conference in Athens, Greece. | Source: Associated Press

Per his lawyers Vinniks life is endangered. Besides claiming that the charges he is facing are unfounded, his lawyers also argue that he has been held for longer than the law allows. Vinnik was arrested nearly two years ago in Greece while on vacation.

Alexander Vinnik, the Russian Sought by Elite U.S. Law Enforcement Agencies

This was at the behest of U.S. law enforcement agencies including Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN):This undated photo made available by the Fayette County Department of Corrections shows Mikhy K Farrera Brochez under arrest. (PHOTO: Fayette County Department of Corrections via AP)

Over 90 per cent of Singaporeans feel that the Republic should continue to have a compulsory HIV registry for contact-tracing purposes, according to findings from an online survey commissioned by Yahoo News Singapore.

39 per cent of 908 Singaporeans polled strongly agreed with having a HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) registry for Singapore, while 52 per cent somewhat agreed. Only 2 per cent strongly disagreed.

The survey was conducted by market research consultancy Blackbox Research from 14 to 26 February, less than a month after the Ministry of Health (MOH) made known to the public about the online leak of confidential data belonging to 14,200 HIV-positive individuals and 2,400 others who were identified through contact tracing.

The leaked data from the HIV registry included the affected individuals names, identification numbers, contact details, HIV test results, and related medical information.



An American conman, Mikhy K Farrera Brochez, was identified as the culprit behind the HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, registry leak.

The 34-year-olds Singaporean partner, Ler Teck Siang, who headed the MOHs National Public Health Unit (NPHU) from March 2012 to May 2013, was authorised to access information in the HIV registry.

Brochez later alleged on Facebook and in a media interview last month that the HIV registry was used to target gay men. The MOH had called these allegations untrue.

(INFOGRAPHIC: Blackbox Research)

While they expressed strong support for the registry, an overwhelming majority of respondents were also concerned about workplace discrimination for the affected HIV-positive persons.

87 per cent of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement: Im worried that people on the HIV-positive list that was leaked might face discrimination in their workplace.

This is despite 55 per cent strongly or somewhat agreeing that HIV-positive people in Singapore are generally not discriminated against.

67 per cent also strongly or somewhat agreed that the social stigma associated with HIV has reduced significantly with better public understanding of the disease.

Story continues

Minister for Health Gan Kim Yong in Parliament had on 12 February said that some patients who are affected by the HIV registry leak have reported to medical social workers about feeling suicidal.

In the aftermath of the leak, groups such as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) advocacy group Pink Dot SG had called for the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation to support HIV-positive individuals.

The survey respondents were evenly split between men and women, with those aged 50 years and above being the biggest group at 38 per cent.

78 per cent were Chinese, 14 per cent were Malay, 7 per cent were Indian, while the remaining 12 per cent were of other ethnic origins.

The same respondents were also surveyed on:

 the transparency of the Singapore Armed Forces in reporting training-related casualties

 length of national service period

 level of government protection for personal data

Related Singapore stories:

HIV data leak: Mikhy Brochez Facebook account removed for violating user policies

American behind HIV data leak a pathological liar who made baseless allegations: Singapore authorities

Singapores HIV data leak: A recap of what we know so far

COMMENT: HIV data leak  What is your excuse now, MOH?The new Beijing-friendly mayor of Taiwans third-largest city has arrived in Hong Kong for a rare visit to meet with top officials and promote trade.

Han Kuo-yu, a star in Taiwans opposition Kuomintang (KMT), was expected to have a historic meeting with Wang Zhimin, the director of Beijings liaison office in Hong Kong.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor met with Han and hosted a lunch for him at Government House on Friday. Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Patrick Nip Tak-kuen, and Undersecretary for Commerce and Economic Development Bernard Chan Pak-li were also present.

It was the first time the citys leader had met a mayor from Taiwan since June 2014, when then chief executive Leung Chun-ying met visiting Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin at Government House.

During their meeting, Lam said Hong Kong and Taiwan have frequent trade, economic and people-to-people exchanges, and called the two places major trading partners and sources of tourists for each other.

Hong Kongs leader also said she would welcome more high-quality agricultural and fisheries products to be exported from Kaohsiung to Hong Kong, or re-exported via Hong Kong to other places in the future.

Han arrived in the city at 9.13am and dozens of journalists from Hong Kong, Taiwan and foreign media outlets were waiting for him as he and his delegation left Hong Kong International Airport about an hour later. He did not speak to them.

Roy Tang Yun-kwong, the top civil servant from the Hong Kong governments Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau, and Lam Lung-on, president of the Hong Kong Chinese Importers and Exporters Association, were at the airport to greet him.

About 30 local and Taiwanese members of the KMTs local support groups, carrying small replicas of the Taiwan flag, also came to welcome him.

Good morning, mayor, they chanted affectionately.

Han boarded a tour bus after greeting his supporters.

Story continues

Two of his supporters carried placards calling for him to run in next years presidential election in Taiwan.

For our international airports, Kaohsiungs debts and free trade, run for the presidency, one of the placards read.

Tommy Chang Juo-ming, a trader who left Kaohsiung 30 years ago to work in Hong Kong, said he hoped Han could be the islands next leader.

Hes our hope, he said. Kaohsiung was very quiet before he won, now there have been a lot more tourists already. I hope he can revive Taiwan as well.

May Cheung, a Hong Kong woman also came with a doll made in the image of Han.

I admire him because hes a very capable and eloquent man, and he won the election last year, she said.

Before leaving Taiwan, Han told local media that Hong Kong and the three other Chinese cities he is visiting  Macau, Shenzhen and Xiamen  are very important to Kaohsiung.

Asked if he believe that the Hong Kong government had followed the highest level of protocol in welcoming him, Han said: I dont know. But if it was the highest level, Id feel sorry because I dont deserve that.

He said he just wanted to promote his city so that the whole world can see Kaohsiung.

The mayor added that Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia are also important targets of his campaign to promote trade.

Some Taiwanese media had previously reported that Liu Jieyi, director of Beijings Taiwan Affairs Office, would come from Beijing to meet Han in Xiamen.

But Han declined to comment on that, and said he would respect whatever arrangements had been made by mainland authorities.

Han previously said economic matters would be the focus of his trip, but commentators said the visit underlined Hong Kongs crucial role in the cross-strait relationship.

Analysts said the trip could help promote Beijings one country, two systems principle, even though the governing system had not been recognised by the KMT as a solution to the Taiwan question. Under the principle, Hong Kong was guaranteed a high degree of autonomy after it was returned from Britain in 1997.

Han was expected to attend Fridays signing of an agreement between the Hong Kong Chinese Importers and Exporters Association, and business groups from Taiwan. He was also expected to meet property tycoon Robert Ng Chee Siong, chairman of Sino Group.

In 2017, Taiwan was Hong Kongs third-largest trading partner. Trade between the two economies that year reached HK$419 billion (US$53.3 billion), with Hong Kong mostly importing electrical machinery and agricultural products from the island.

Kaohsiungs major exports to Hong Kong included fruit, vegetables, fish and other produce.

The arrival of Han, along with a delegation of about 30 politicians and businessmen, came four months after he gained fame for an upset win in the mayoral race for Kaohsiung, a stronghold of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and a major port in southern Taiwan. The trading hub has a population of 2.8 million.

In the past, Han has declared his support for the 1992 consensus  the understanding between unofficial representatives of Beijing and Taipei that there is only one China but that each side can have its own interpretation of what constitutes China. The 1992 consensus model between mainland China and Taiwan was suspended when the DPP came to power in 2016.

Han will travel to Macau on Saturday across the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge. He will also visit Shenzhen, mainland Chinas technology hub, and Xiamen before returning to Kaohsiung on Thursday.

More from South China Morning Post:

This article Beijing-friendly Taiwanese mayor Han Kuo-yu arrives in Hong Kong for historic meeting first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2019.Deputy President William Ruto has called out professionals in various sectors over the rise in graft, urging them to lead by example through ethical practices.

Speaking at the first Inter-Professionals Summit in Mombasa on Wednesday, Dr Ruto also said the war on corruption has been politicized.

There has been an attempt to hijack the war on corruption and turn it into a war against specific individuals. In the attempt to wage this convoluted version of the war on corruption, many government programmes and projects, as well as many innocent public servants, have become casualties, Ruto said.

The DP observed that the war must uphold integrity war and said he was surprised that some individuals have a problem with his assertion that the war must be fact-led and evidence-based.

A war on corruption that lacks integrity ceases to be a war on corruption and becomes corruption itself. A war that lacks integrity is impunity. An integrity war waged selectively, using convenient half-truths, with political outcomes in mind, is impunity, he added.

Ruto further called on professionals to promote ethics and integrity in public service as they drive their agenda and policies.

Our most vexing problems as a nation have a strong professional component. And they relate to our professionals failing to rise to their highest standards and full potential.

Corruption involving misappropriation and embezzlement of public funds entails an understanding among and between accountants, auditors, economists and such professionals to see to it that budgets are diverted and misused.

Accountants who manipulate numbers, occasioning loss of value in the public and private sectors; surveyors and planners who facilitate expropriation of public land in shoddy and corrupt schemes; human resource managers who skew interviews and promotions and sacrifice merit at the shrine of tribalism, and qualification on the altar of nepotism are to blame for corruption, declared the DP.

The Kenyan Judicial system was also not spared in DP Rutos lecture. The DP said wayward lawyers promote judicial corruption, adding that a bad decision procured for a valuable reward requires lawyers willing to negotiate terms and coordinate modalities by which the justice is perverted.

Judges who auction justice to the highest bidder, consigning innocent people to untold suffering and media practitioners who file fake stories influenced by brown envelopes are part of the mess in this country.

Also castigated by the DP were road engineers who compromise designs, allow poor supervision, permit shortcuts, or approve substandard work. He said bad roads are a direct consequence of corrupt dealings.

To manage these problems, it is important that our professionals organise within national professional organisations, which can provide peer assessment, call out unprofessional colleagues and provide continuous all-round improvement, said Ruto.

According to Dr Ruto, the countrys human resource capital is highly regarded worldwide and should be the biggest driver of public service, national development, and national discourse.Philippine passport

MANILA, Philippines  President Rodrigo Duterte has banned government officials and employees from travel junkets and team-building activities outside of the country.

Section 19 of the Executive Order No. 77 signed on March 15 states that: All forms of travel junkets shall be strictly prohibited. The conduct of strategic planning workshops or team building activities abroad shall not be allowed.

The order was released to the members of the press on Friday (March 22).

The President also emphasized in the EO that the taking of a personal leave immediately before or after the official activity is highly discouraged and if travel circumstances, such as the nature of activity, purpose and itinerary, indicate that the trip is mainly intended for personal purposes, no part thereof shall be considered official.

The order also required all Cabinet secretaries, chairpersons and board members of Government-Owned and Controlled Corporations (GOCC), and heads of national government agencies to get the Presidents approval for their official travels abroad.  Marje Pelayo

The post New EO bans travel junkets for govt officials, employees appeared first on UNTV News.A French jihadist arrested in December after years of fighting in the Middle East has been charged with the 2011 kidnapping of three French aid workers in Yemen, judicial sources said Wednesday. Peter Cherif, 36, had been facing terrorism conspiracy charges for joining Al-Qaeda when he managed to escape during his trial in Paris in March 2011. His name surfaced again when it emerged Cherif was close to the brothers who massacred staff members at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. In 2017, investigators opened a new investigation into his activities in Yemen, where he joined the senior ranks of the local branch of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). French authorities finally arrested him three months ago when he was caught in Djibouti after arriving from Yemen carrying fake ID documents. Cherif was charged with the Yemen kidnappings last month by anti-terror judges investigating his case, the judicial source told AFP. The three aid workers for the French NGO Triangle Generation Humanitaire, aged 25 to 30, were seized on May 28, 2011, and held for five months before being released. Cherif, also known as Abou Hamza, was placed on the US blacklist of foreign terrorists in 2015. He was first arrested in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but managed to escape and go to Syria, where he was again caught and extradited to France. He has been a figure of interest for French police investigating a trio of attacks in January 2015 that left 17 people dead, including at Charlie Hebdo's offices and a kosher supermarket in Paris. But despite media reports suggesting he may have played a role in the attacks, he has not been formally charged in the Charlie Hebdo probe. The attack on the magazine marked the start of a wave of jihadist attacks in France which have claimed more than 240 lives.QUEZON CITY, Philippines  Indigenous peoples (IP) group in Infanta, Quezon province and in Tanay, Rizal traveled to the city to air their grievances against the construction of the controversial Kaliwa Dam project.

The Kaliwa Dam project is being eyed as solution to the recurring problems in water supply in Metro Manila that has been triggered by the persistent El Nino.

Carrying empty pails and water gallons, the Dumagats, led by Marcelino Tena, call on the government to stop the project as it would affect thousands of lives and would destroy the serenity of the Sierra Madre mountain range.

The group argued that aside from losing their livelihood, the project would pose great danger to the environment as it would increase the risk of flooding and landslide in addition to the damaging effects of global warming.

The indigenous group also denounced the idea that the project is the only solution to the recurring water crisis because the water level in Angat Dam, the main source of water in Metro Manila, remains normal.

But the MWSS maintained that experts already proved the efficiency and safety of the dams construction therefore, the IPs in the area have nothing to worry about.

Kaliwa Dam is a 73-meter water project to be erected in the mountains if Infanta, Quezon.

From Infanta, Quezon, a tunnel will be constructed towards Teresa town in Rizal where a water treatment facility will be erected.

The dam is expected to augment water supply in Metro Manila.

The project is worth US$248 million equivalent to P14.5 billion and will be funded under the Chinese Official Development Assistance.  Marje Pelayo (with details from Joan Nano)

The post Kaliwa Dam project will destroy us, our homes Dumagat tribe appeared first on UNTV News.For failure to pass nationality requirements in the countrys foreign ownership laws, the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) denied the application of Velox Technology Philippines, Inc. to operate as a Transport Network Company (TNC) in the Philippines

Velox Philippines is a local subsidiary of Indonesian ride-hailing service Go-Jek.

The LTFRB decision was pursuant to Article XII, Section 11 of the 1987 Philippine Constitution, which states that no franchise, certificate, or any other form of authorization for the operation of a public utility shall be granted to corporations or associations that are not at least 60 percent Filipino-owned.

The Pre-Accreditation Committee of the LTFRB observed that based on the Deed of Absolute Sale of Shares of Stock, only 20.4 percent of the 1.2 billion common shares of Velox Philippines parent company, Velox South-East Asia Holdings Pte. Ltd. (Velox SEA), was actually sold to local shareholder Pace Crimson Ventures Corporation (PCVC).

Further, based on LTFRB Resolution No. 2019-015, Velox Philippines also failed to present necessary documents such as Proof of Payment Capital Gains Tax (CGT) and Proof of Payment of Subscribed Shares allegedly subscribed by its shareholder, PCVC.

LTFRB Chairman Martin Delgra III maintained that the Board simply affirmed the Pre-Accreditation Committees resolution denying the application of Velox Philippines.

We need to follow the 60-40 requirement of the law for TNCs to operate in the country. Kailangan po natin sumunod sa batas, Delgra said.

Additionally, Undersecretary for Road Transport and Infrastructure Mark Richmund De Leon pointed out that the Department of Transportation (DOTr) has not taken any part in the accreditation process of Velox Philippines, emphasizing it is well within the mandate of the LTFRB to solely decide on such matters.

The DOTr does not intervene with the decision of the LTFRB during that phase of deliberation. If Velox Philippines wishes to appeal, they can do so before the DOTr, through the Franchising Review Staff, De Leon said.

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De Leon added that the DOTr and its sectoral and attached agencies continue to abide by the tenets of transparency and accountability, as espoused by Secretary Arthur Tugade, in vital government dealings such as TNC accreditation that involve the safety and security of Filipino commuters.

Para po kay Secretary Tugade at sa buong hanay ng DOTr, pinakamahalaga po ang buhay at kaligtasan ng ating mga pasahero. Kaya tinitiyak po natin, kasama ang ating mga attached agency, na tumatalima tayo sa batas at mga regulasyon upang matiyak ang pananagutan para sa ating mga commuter, De Leon added.

The post LTFRB Rejects Indonesias Go-Jek Bid to Operate in PH via Local Subsidiary appeared first on Carmudi Philippines.SINGAPORE (Mar 22): PUB says it will terminate the water purchase agreement with Hyflux subsidiary Tuaspring Pte Ltd (TPL) if the water treatment firm is not able to fix its defaults by April 5.

In addition, PUB says it will also start the process of taking over its Tuaspring desalination plant, given it has the operational capabilities, experience and manpower to run the plant.

"PUBs role is to safeguard Singapores water security. Singapores desalination plants are integral to our water security," says the republics national water agency in a Thursday press release.

Earlier this month, PUB said Tuaspring had failed to keep the plant reliably operational as required under the water purchase agreement signed with PUB in 2011.

Under the water purchase agreement, Tuaspring has to deliver up to 70 million gallons of desalinated water per day to PUB for a 25-year period from 2013 to 2038.

In addition, the purchase price for the Tuaspring desalination plant will be determined by an independent valuer.

Given the current valuation of the purchase price of the desalination plant is negative, there is a likelihood that TPL will have to pay PUB a compensation sum if PUB bought only the desalination plant.

In a media release however, PUB says it is willing to waive any compensation it could have claimed from Hyflux and purchase only the desalination plant at zero dollars.

PUB's Thursday response was made after Tuaspring sought clarification on Wednesday, asking if PUB will purchase the entire Tuaspring integrated water and power project, or only the desalination plant.

Separately, PUB notes that SM Investments has issued a notice to remedy to Hyflux, stating PUB's default notice as an event that TPL will need to cure within two weeks under the restructuring agreement between Hyflux and SM Investments. If not, SM Investments may assert its rights to terminate the restructuring agreement.

Last Oct, SM Investments -- a consortium between Indonesias Salim and Medco groups -- came to Hyfluxs rescue by offering $400 million in exchange for a 60% stake once it has settled all its debts. The consortium is also granting Hyflux a shareholder's loan of a principal amount of $130 million, as well as a $30 million loan to help finance it through the restructuring.The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) has released public properties estimated at Sh780 million to their respective caretakers in Nakuru and Bomet counties.

Led by EACC chief executive officer Twalib Mbarak and chairman Eliud Wabukala, the anti-graft agency handed over 11 recovered public properties at Sarova Woodlands in Nakuru on Thursday.

Chairman Eliud Wabukala said the successful recovery was as a result of the new strategy that the commission has opted to use in order to overcome challenges in the judicial and prosecutorial processes.

EACC has taken a proactive approach to prevent corruption by conducting Corruption Risk Assessments to seal corruption loopholes and Disruption of corruption. In particular, the Commission has averted loss estimated at Kshs. 7.4 Billion in 2018/2019 Financial Year, said Wabukala.

Wabukala said the commission can authoritatively report success in the use of the mechanism which has greatly facilitated the recovery of assets worth billions of shillings through negotiated settlements.

The commission resolve to fight corruption through various strategies has been strengthened through the policy, legal and institutional framework on Anti-Corruption in line with the provisions of the Constitution. The commission recently put into place a policy on Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanism of mediation, negotiation and conciliation in the exercise of its mandate.

In Nakuru, recovered property included Nakuru Municipality Block 4/226, 4/227, 4/228 and 5/246 measuring approximately 0.0975 hectares each and valued at a total of Kshs. 74.2 Million.

The total number of public officers residences which have been recovered so far is Twenty-Seven (27) and Nakuru Municipality Block 13/245 and 13/246 measuring approximately 0.1643 hectares each and are valued at Kshs.42 million.

The (2) parcels of land were reserved for a Survey Camp by the Department of Survey in Nakuru County.

Also recovered was Nakuru Municipality Block 5/9 belonging to the Postal Corporation situated at Nakuru town Centre along Kenyatta Avenue. It has an estimated value of Kshs. 150 million.

In Bomet county, EACC recovered Sotik Township Block valued at KShs. 4.2 million which was initially reserved for the construction of a stadium.US-led warplanes bombed the north bank of the Euphrates River in eastern Syria early Friday to flush out holdout jihadists from the last sliver of their crumbling "caliphate". Friday's bombardment ended two days of relative calm on the front line in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had paused its advance while it combed a makeshift jihadist encampment it overran on Tuesday. An SDF official who asked not to be named said that warplanes of the US-led coalition resumed airstrikes on suspected jihadist positions in the early hours of the morning. Top SDF commander Jia Furat said his forces were engaging with the jihadists on several fronts while the coalition warplanes provided air support. The US-led coalition said the "operation to complete the liberation of Baghouz is ongoing". "It remains a hard fight, and Daesh is showing that they intend to keep fighting for as long as possible," it said using an Arabic acronym for IS. The SDF launched an assault against the jihadists' last redoubt in the village of Baghouz on February 9. On Tuesday, they cornered diehard fighters into a few acres of farmland by the Euphrates River, after forcing them out of the encampment where they had been hold up. The six-month-old operation to wipe out the last vestige of IS's once-sprawling proto-state is close to reaching its inevitable outcome. But the SDF said on Thursday that a declaration of victory would be made only after mopping up operations had been completed. IS declared a "caliphate" in June 2014 after seizing a vast swathe of territory larger than Britain straddling Iraq and Syria. The loss of the Baghouz enclave would signal the final demise of the "caliphate" in Syria, after its defeat in Iraq in 2017. But IS has already begun its transformation into a guerilla organisation, and still carries out deadly hit-and-run attacks from desert or mountain hideouts. The war in Syria has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions since it erupted following the repression of anti-government protests in 2011.(Repeats story that ran on Thursday)

By Tom Lasseter

CHRISTCHURCH, March 21 (Reuters) - Ibrahim Abdelhalim was at his mosque last week in the Linwood neighborhood of Christchurch, New Zealand, delivering a prayer as he usually does on Friday afternoons. The 67-year-old grandfather had already spoken about "tasting the sweetness of faith" as a Muslim obedient to God and willing to serve humanity.

He heard a pop-pop-pop in the distance.

The sounds got louder. Abdelhalim realized they were gunshots, but he continued. Abruptly ending the holy words mid-sentence would show a lack of respect in the face of God, he thought.

Abdelhalim immigrated from Egypt to Christchurch in 1995. The small city in a far-away island nation, some 16,000 kilometers from the poverty and corruption of Cairo, gave his family a better life. It sits in a tableau of pristine mountains and rolling fields, a place where he often forgot to lock his front door at night. Whatever was happening outside would probably be okay. Still, there were more than 80 people in the room in front of him and so, he said, "I tried to finish the prayer quickly."

Then the bullets came crashing through the window of the mosque. They sprayed into bodies. People screamed, diving atop each other in jumbled piles. Abdelhalim saw his son but could not make it to where he lay. Further back, at the partition for women, Abdelhalim's wife was also pinned down by gunfire, shot in the arm. Bullets thudded into a friend next to her, killing the woman. In the land that had become his sanctuary, Abdelhalim suddenly feared he was about to watch his family be slaughtered.

Police later named Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, as the alleged shooter in the massacre last Friday, which claimed 50 lives and left as many wounded.

Tarrant posted online a screed espousing white supremacist ideology and hatred of immigrants, authorities say. So far charged with one murder, Tarrant was remanded to custody without a plea Saturday, and is due back in court next month, when police say he is likely to face more charges.

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The country's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, described a very different New Zealand in an address after the carnage. "We represent diversity, kindness, compassion," she said, her voice at times cracking with emotion. "A home for those who share our values. Refuge for those who need it."

Many victims in Christchurch had sought just that  leaving Somalia, Pakistan, Syria or Afghanistan for a better life, often with little in their pockets. Abdelhalim spoke of the city as a dream made real.

In Cairo, Abdelhalim said, he'd worked as a judge specializing in inheritance and tenancy cases. He lived in a well-heeled suburb, his parents a teacher and a government employee, his brother an officer in the Egyptian military. But he did not see the future he wanted for his three children in Egypt. Cairo had witnessed a president being assassinated by Islamic militants in 1981, and a string of bombs exploding in and around the city in 1993.

So the family moved to Christchurch, and Abdelhalim took the only job he could find, as a clerk at Work and Income, the government agency for employment services and financial assistance. "I tried to study law, but found it was very hard to begin again," he said.

Nevertheless, his children were going to good schools and his family moved into a small brick home, where he still lives, with roses in the well-trimmed yard. A neighbor invited him over for tea, he said, "nearly every day." The family got to know the woman at the post office, a local shopkeeper and just about everyone else.

Far from the chaos of Cairo, Christchurch is a place where men in straw hats and vests take tourists down the placid waters of the Avon River. It is a city of parks with birds chirping and a streetcar clanking past Cathedral Square.

Abdelhalim's life grew along with the city. He opened a restaurant, named for his old home, Cairo. He became active in the Muslim community, working as the imam at a mosque called Al Noor.

When terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001, Abdelhalim was the head of a local Islamic association. At the time, he said, there was a flare up of young people yelling at Muslims and trying to grab women's headscarves. Abdelhalim responded by organizing community events at the mosque. In 2017, he took part in opening a multi-faith prayer space at the airport. "My only weapon," he said, "is my tongue."

He also helped start and agreed to be the imam, the religious leader, of the Linwood mosque as its doors opened early last year, though it was across the city from his house. The building, a former community center, sits amid signs for the Salvation Army, a pawnshop, the Super Liquor and the Value Mart. Its presence was a marker of growth in the city's still-small Muslim community.

It was at another mosque, Al Noor, that the gunman first began shooting. He shot at men, women and children as he emptied one clip of ammunition and then the next, circling back to shoot once more just to be sure he'd killed as many Muslims as possible. He took more than 40 lives there. The gunman then got into his car and drove to Linwood, where Abdelhalim, a man with a carefully cut white beard, was beginning to pray.

In the back of the mosque, a 27-year-old man from Afghanistan named Ahmed Khan peeked out a window. The plump-faced Khan and his family had arrived in Christchurch 12 years earlier, leaving behind a nation torn by war.

"Someone called 'help!' and when I looked out the window, somebody was laying down, bleeding," he said. Khan's eyes flitted across the driveway and spotted a strange figure  a man wearing a helmet, standing in broad daylight with a rifle in his hands.

The man squeezed the trigger, Khan said, and a bullet flew through the window. Khan recalls calling out, "There's someone with a gun!"

In the prayer area, where Abdelhalim had stood reciting holy words just moments before, people flung themselves on the ground in panic. Khan recalls cradling a man in his arms one moment and then, the next, the gunman "shot him when I was holding him, in the head. And he was dead."

There was another Afghan in the room who rushed toward the door. In the gunfire that followed, seven people were killed. Khan said the toll almost certainly would have been higher if this second Afghan - Abdul Aziz, a short, muscular man who runs a furniture shop - hadn't confronted the shooter.

Aziz grabbed a credit card machine and hurled it at the gunman, dodging bullets. He later chased the gunman with an unloaded shotgun that the shooter dropped as he went back for another weapon, then hurled it like a spear through his car window. With four of his children in the mosque, Aziz later said, he acted to protect his own piece of adopted homeland. "I didn't know where my own kids were  if they are alive, if they are dead," he said.

They'd survived, with one of his sons laid over a younger brother, protecting the smaller boy's body with his own. Abdelhalim's wife and son also made it out alive.

Now, in the aftermath of 50 dead in his city, Abdelhalim is trying to keep his family and his people together. They are left to navigate an issue that has confronted communities around the world after mass shootings: How, in the midst of suffering and rage, does normalcy and the peace they once knew return, if at all?

On Saturday afternoon, about 24 hours after the massacre, Abdelhalim walked out of a crisis response center in Christchurch. On the wall, there was a Wi-Fi login and password written on a piece of white paper: youarewelcome. A group of motorcycle club members had parked their bikes on the grass in a show of support. Burly men in black leather jackets milled about. A young man with the club's name tattooed across the side of his face  "Tribesmen"  chatted with reporters. Police stood by with assault rifles.

Abdelhalim made his way carefully through the crowd in a dark suit with light pinstripes. Everyone was asking, he said, "can the peace of Christchurch come back?"

The gunman's manifesto, released shortly before the attacks, said he was motivated to fight back against the "invasion" of immigration by non-whites. The actual number of Muslims in New Zealand is small - about one percent of the populace. At the 2013 census, the most recent figures available, the government reported a 28 percent rise in Muslims since 2006, along with jumps in Hindu and Sikh numbers.

On Sunday morning, Abdelhalim opened his front door at 9, wearing board shorts, flipflops and a worn collared shirt, instead of the suits he favors in public. He was exhausted. City authorities released a list of the dead past midnight at the Christchurch Hospital. Abdelhalim was there to speak with the bereaved. He'd gotten home from the hospital at some time after 2 a.m. and had barely slept.

The next day, standing on the other side of police tape from the mosque in Linwood, Abdelhalim was asked by a reporter for details of the shooting. Abdelhalim said he'd rather not say.

"I don't need to repeat the story of what happened," he said. "Because it breaks my heart." (Reporting by Tom Lasseter; Editing by Philip McClellan and Peter Hirschberg)News this morning from the Malaysian High Commission confirmed what many had been lobbying to halt: Sarawakian Michael anak Garing was executed at Singapores Changi Prison early this morning.

Michael had previously been found guilty of a 2010 murder in 2015, which he later repealed, only to have his conviction confirmed by the courts again in 2017.

Born in the town of Kapit, his remains will be flown to Sibu Airport tomorrow. The High Commission told national news agency Bernama that they are currently trying to assist his family.

Earlier this week, both of Michaels elderly parents had petitioned for clemency from the Singapore government, trying to commute his sentence from death penalty to life imprisonment instead.

Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Ensiring anak Garman and Garing anak Kanyan are said to be devastated with their sons death.

While in prison, reports have emerged that Michael converted to Islam, and had changed his name to Muhammad Arif Sufi.

In 2010, at the age of 21, Michael took part in a gang robbery on the islands Kallang Road. During the incident, a 41-year-old construction worker, Shanmuganathan Dillidurai was killed, and three other individuals were seriously injured.

Although the heavy arm of the law came down on Michael, ultimately seeking his own life in retribution for the victims death, his three other accomplices were convicted with lighter sentences. Tony Imba received a life sentence, and 24 strokes of the cane, and Hairee Landak was given a 33-year prison term, as well as 24 strokes of the cane. Another man, Donny Meluda went on the run from police, successfully avoiding them for six years before being caught. He too was given a 33-year sentence, and 24 strokes.

This article, Sarawakian Michael Garing executed this morning at Changi Prison, Singapore, originally appeared on Coconuts, Asia's leading alternative media company. Want more Coconuts? Sign up for our newsletters!Syria, its allies, and fellow states in the region Friday condemned US President Donald Trump's pledge to recognise Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights slamming the move as a violation of international law. Trump said Thursday it was time for Washington to recognise Israel's sovereignty over the strategic territory, which it seized from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and annexed in a move never recognised internationally. His abrupt tweet triggered delight in Israel, but outrage from other countries in the region as well as powerhouses such as Russia and Turkey. Moscow warned the policy U-turn could spark new conflicts. "Such appeals can considerably destabilise an already tense situation in the Middle East," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. "Hopefully it will remain (just) a call." Any such move would break with UN Security Council resolutions and with more than half a century of US foreign policy, which treated the Golan as occupied territory whose future would be negotiated in talks with Syria on a comprehensive peace. The territory's return has always been a key Syrian national demand, championed by government and rebels alike throughout the bloody civil war that has ripped the country apart since 2011. In an angry retort, the Syrian government said Trump's comments disregarded international law. "The American position towards Syria's occupied Golan Heights clearly reflects the United States' contempt for international legitimacy and its flagrant violation of international law," a foreign ministry source told the official SANA news agency. Trump's comments showed the extent of his administration's "blind bias" towards Israel. "The Golan was and will remain Arab and Syrian," the source said. The foreign ministry sent a letter to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, urging him to reiterate the UN's rejection of Israeli claims over the Golan, SANA said. - 'National commitment' - Turkey, which hosted the last indirect peace talks between Israel and the Syrian government in 2008 but has backed Syrian rebels, said the change risked plunging the region into a "new crisis". "We will never allow the occupation of Golan Heights to be made legitimate," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted he was "shocked by @realDonaldTrump continuing to try to give what is not his to racist Israel." And France added its voice to the chorus of outrage, saying the Golan had been "occupied by Israel since 1967" and it did not recognise Israel's annexation. In his tweet, Trump said the Golan was "of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" "After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognise Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights," he said. The Arab League said Trump's comments were "completely outside international law". The Gulf Cooperation Council said Trump's statement would not change the internationally recognised fact that the "Golan heights are Syrian lands forcefully occupied by Israel". Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said lasting peace in the region requires Israel to withdraw from all Arab territories it occupies, including the Golan. Egypt urged "respect (for) legitimate international resolutions and the United Nations Charter on the unacceptability of land appropriation by force". Following decades of calm along the Golan armistice line after the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973, tensions flared with the eruption of civil war in Syria in 2011. Israel provided medical assistance to wounded rebel fighters and repeatedly struck government positions in response to stray fire across the frontier. It has also targeted suspected positions of Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, which have intervened militarily to back President Bashar al-Assad. - Israeli thank you - Since the Syrian government decisively defeated rebel fighters near the armistice line last year with Iranian and Hezbollah support, Israel has repeatedly vowed to prevent its arch enemies from establishing a long-term military presence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is seeking re-election next month, swiftly thanked Trump for his announcement. "At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognises Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights," the right-wing prime minister wrote on Twitter. Leon Panetta, a veteran Democrat who served as CIA director and defence secretary among other roles, blasted Trump for "tweeting out another policy that obviously has not been worked out with our international partners". The Golan move is Trump's latest diplomatic bombshell as he seeks to redraw the fraught Middle East in Israel's favour. In 2017, Trump went against decades of practice in recognising the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, rather than the previously accepted Tel Aviv.FILE PHOTO: Israeli soldiers stand on tanks near the Israeli side of the border with Syria in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights FILE PHOTO: Israeli soldiers stand on tanks near the Israeli side of the border with Syria in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Israel May 9, 2018. REUTERS/Amir Cohen/File Photo

By Tom Perry

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Syrian government vowed to take back the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as its allies and enemies alike condemned U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday for moving to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the territory seized in war.

Trump's statement on Thursday marked a dramatic shift in U.S. policy over the status of a disputed area that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East conflict and annexed in 1981 - a move not recognized internationally.

Against this backdrop of hostility towards the U.S. move, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Beirut where he took aim at Israel's main regional foes - Hezbollah and its backer Iran - and declared the success of U.S. sanctions against them.

Trump's declaration is the latest U.S. step to fuel anger in the region, both in states that are hostile to Israel and others that have relations with it and are allied to the United States.

It follows the U.S. recognition in December 2017 of Jerusalem as Israel's capital - a decision that also stirred international criticism as the city's disputed status remains at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Russia, an ally of President Bashar al-Assad with forces in Syria, said Trump's comments risked seriously destabilizing the region, and it voiced hope the statement was just declaratory.

Iran, Assad's main regional ally and which also has forces in Syria, condemned the statement as illegal and unacceptable.

"The personal decisions of Trump...will lead to crisis in the region," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said.

Turkey, a U.S. ally and an adversary of Damascus, also said the move had brought the Middle East to the edge of a new crisis and the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights could not be allowed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for his gesture "at a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel". It could help Netanyahu in the midst of a tough re-election battle, analysts said.

Story continues

The Syrian government said the Golan was an "indivisible" part of Syrian territory and recovering it "via all means guaranteed by international law is still a priority".

It said United States with its "stupidity and arrogance" had no right to decide the fate of the area and any move to recognise Israeli sovereignty over it was "an illegal action with no impact".

After remaining calm for decades since a 1974 armistice monitored by U.N. peacekeepers, Golan re-emerged as a flashpoint for regional tensions during the Syrian war. Last May, Israel accused Iran's Revolutionary Guards of launching a rocket salvo into its territory from the Syrian side of the truce line.

Israel, which has mounted numerous air strikes against what it has called Iran-backed targets in Syria, has demanded Russia keep forces allied to Tehran away from the boundary.

The Syrian side was held by rebel forces for years until pro-government forces recovered it in July.

U.S. OFFICIAL: ISRAEL "COULD NOT GIVE UP THE GOLAN"

Jason Greenblatt, a senior White House adviser, said on Twitter that "under any conceivable circumstance, Israel could not give up the Golan ... To do so would endanger Israel's very existence".

But Fouad Mundhir, a Syrian whose home village is in Israeli-occupied Golan, said Trump was "cancelling the will of an entire nation.

"You say you are carrying the flag of democracy. Okay, Mr. Trump, have you taken into account the will of the people of the Golan?" he told Reuters in Jaramana, near Damascus.

In the Golan itself, Druze Arabs also rejected the move, while Israeli settlers welcomed it.

The European Union said its position on the status of the Golan Heights was unchanged and that it did not recognise Israeli sovereignty over the strategic plateau.

Germany said any change in borders should be "done through peaceful means between all those involved", while France said it did not recognise the Israeli annexation of the Golan and any recognition was contrary to international law.

The Arab League, which suspended Syria in 2011 after the start of its civil war, said Trump had paved "the way for official American recognition" of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan and called this "completely beyond international law".

Egypt, which made peace with Israel in 1979, said it still considers the Golan as occupied Syrian territory.

Israel says Syria's civil war has reaffirmed the need to keep the plateau - coveted for its water resources and fertile soil - as a buffer zone between Israeli towns and the instability of its neighbour.

In Lebanon, Pompeo said the United States would continue to use "all peaceful means" to choke off funding that "feeds Iran and Hezbollah terror operations".

"Lebanon faces a choice: bravely move forward as an independent and proud nation, or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future," he said.

Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese leaders including President Michel Aoun told him the group was a Lebanese party with popular support. The group has three cabinet ministers and together with its allies controls more than 70 of parliament's 128 seats.

The United States is a major donor to the Lebanese army but its allies, including the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, have been weakened as Iran's role has deepened through Lebanon, Iraq and Syria and Saudi influence has receded.

Washington has reintroduced sanctions on Iran and imposed new financial sanctions on Hezbollah which Lebanon's Hezbollah-aligned president, Michel Aoun, said on Thursday were hurting all Lebanese.

(Reporting by Ali Abdelaty in Cairo/Tom Perry in Beirut, Maria Kiselyova in Moscow, and Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, Yousef Saba in Cairo, Ezgi Erkoyun and Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul, Kinda Makieh in Damascus, Joseph Nasr in Berlin, Robin Emmot in Brussels, Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Mark Heinrich)A 12-year-old boy was among six people killed in three separate gun battles between rebels and security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir, the police and army said Friday. Clashes have raged in the restive mountainous region since the deaths of 40 Indian troops in a suicide bombing last month provoked tit-for-tat air strikes between India and Pakistan. The boy was killed after militants were trapped in his home in the northern town of Hajin and engaged in a two-day gun battle ending Friday, police told AFP. His father escaped. Police later claimed the boy was "kept hostage" by the rebels. "Despite repeated requests by community members and police for his release, he was brutally killed by the terrorists," a police statement said, referring to the two killed rebels identified as Pakistani nationals. Two more militants were "eliminated" late Thursday in the frontier district of Baramulla, Kalia added, while one soldier and two policemen were injured. Another militant died in a clash with soldiers in the south of the Kashmir valley, army spokesman Colonel Rajesh Kalia said. At least a dozen villagers were wounded when government forces clashed with protestors near the site of the fighting, firing metal pellets and live bullets to push them back. Three of the villagers were taken to hospital in Srinagar and were in critical condition, a local police officer and hospital sources said. Entire neighbourhoods in Kashmir often march towards sites of gun battles between rebels and government forces, attempting to rescue militants. Scores of civilians have died during such clashes. Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since British colonial rule ended in 1947. Both claim it in full and have fought two wars over the territory. India has about 500,000 soldiers in the part it controls, where armed groups are fighting for independence or a merger with Pakistan. Last month's suicide blast was claimed by a militant group based in Pakistan, and New Delhi has long accused Islamabad of backing a 30-year insurgency that has left tens of thousands of people dead, mostly civilians. The death in police custody Tuesday of teacher Rizwan Asad Pandit -- one of around 1,000 people detained in recent weeks -- has further enraged locals. Pandit's family claimed the young man was tortured, saying his bones and even his spine were broken and that his body bore cuts and clear signs of torture. An investigation is ongoing, but police have registered a case alleging he attempted to escape from custody, prompting angry demonstrations across Kashmir in recent days.Another study, from 2008, showed a fully-grown tree can sequester as much as 20 kilogrammes of particulate matter

Finland, the happiest country in the world, has launched what you could call a summer internship that will teach tourists the secrets to their happiness.

It's become the 21st century version of the holy grail, that elusive quest for happiness.

This week, in the latest World Happiness Report published by the UN, Finland topped the charts for the second year in a row to claim the title of happiest place in the world.

Finland is capitalizing on the renewal of its reputation as a tourism strategy to bring tired, harried, and stressed-out visitors to the land of happy with a "Rent a Finn" program that pairs ordinary Finns with tourists.

For three days this summer, select candidates will travel to remote, quiet patches of Finland's wilderness where they'll forage for wild berries and mushrooms, build fireplaces, roast sausages over open flames, and dip into a traditional Finnish sauna with their local Finnish hosts -- also known as Happiness Guides.

Because the secret, Finns say, is actually quite simple.

"Our secret is in our nature, very literally. When others go to therapy, Finns put on a pair of rubber boots and head to the woods," reads the promotional material for the campaign.

To be selected for the free three-day trip, applicants are asked to film a short video about why they want to visit Finland. Contest closes April 14 and the trip is for June - August.

The strategy is not unlike a campaign launched back in 2011, when Iceland popularized the concept of pairing tourists with locals by encouraging Icelanders to open their homes to visitors. The campaign was led by the country's president himself.

In 2016, Sweden became the first country in the world to launch an open phone line connecting callers with random Swedes. Callers could ask locals for restaurant recommendations, tourist activities, or just shoot the breeze.

Can't make it to Finland? The tourism office also shared these six steps to being as happy as a Finn:

Sweat it out in a sauna.

Take a walk in the forest.

Swim in icy waters.

Go berry picking.

Watch the Northern Lights.

Seek out large spaces.Reparations have become a hot-button topic in the 2020 election, as more than a few of the growing legion of Democratic candidates pledge to address persistent racial inequities with some form of accountingincluding possible compensation for descendants of slaves. Once deemed radical, the idea of reparations has been gaining political momentum on the left, with candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg vowing to consider the idea.

The right has proven less receptive, offering up a host of excusesfrom the problem of how to calculate the reparations to the claim that slavery happened too long ago to warrant redress. And some, as Trevor Noah pointed out on The Daily Show, are even suggesting that American slavery isnt that bad in the context of slavery in general, since the US eventually abolished it.

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That is one of the dumbest arguments Ive ever heard, said Noah. You dont get credit for doing a bad thing less than someone else. Thats like R. Kelly saying, Guys, get over it, have you seen the Michael Jackson documentary? Noah also calls out the hypocrisy of conservatives dismissing slavery as ancient history while defending Confederate monuments as, well, ancient history that matters.

Get Slate Culture in Your Inbox We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again. Please enable javascript to use form. Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Sign Up Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

As for the question, raised on Fox News, of whether newly-immigrated Nigerians would benefit from reparations, Noah knows thats absurd: Thats just a stupid question. Nigerians dont need reparations. Theyve already been paid by Jussie Smollet.The position of U.S. ambassador to Mexico has always been something of a riddle. Despite Mexicos evident geopolitical, social, and economic relevance for the United States, presidents have generally used the job as a convenient gift for friends of the administration, an experiment of sorts for diplomats in the making or, worse, a launching pad for calamitous conspiracies. During the Mexican Revolution, William Howard Tafts ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, played a role in the violent plot to overthrow the democratically elected government of Francisco I. Madero. The president was eventually murdered by forces Lane Wilson abetted. Of course, not every American ambassador has played such a sinister part in Mexican history, but they havent been particularly constructive either. In part, at least, this has to do with the way American governments have chosen their emissaries.

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America has rarely appointed undisputable experts on Mexico to the massive embassy along Paseo de la Reforma, just across the street from the symbolic Angel de la Independencia, in the heart of Mexico City. This, of course, is not entirely uncommon in U.S. foreign policy. Caroline Kennedy, for example, was neither an experienced diplomat nor a Japan specialist when Barack Obama nominated her as head of the American Embassy in Tokyo. But there are examples of more sensible choices, especially in diplomatic posts of urgent relevance or peculiar tension for the United States. Take Russia. In 2012, the Obama administration chose Michael McFaul as its ambassador to Russia. McFaul, who had been studying Russian life since college, had already spent more than three decades obsessively scrutinizing the country and its complicated idiosyncrasies by the time he arrived in Moscow. It would have been difficult to find anyone more qualified to represent the interests of the United States before Vladimir Putins authoritarian regime. And yet, even with his remarkable understanding of the country, McFauls Russian odyssey met a complicated end, proof of the complexity and importance of an ambassadorship in a country so relevant to Americas interests.

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When it came to Mexicoarguably, every bit as significant as Russia for American foreign policyObamas team chose quite a different path. Obama first picked Carlos Pascual, a man with diplomatic experience but no prior knowledge of Mexicos complex political dynamics, and then named Earl Anthony Wayne, another career diplomat with broad experience in places like Afghanistan but limited specific acquaintance with Mexico. After Waynes departure, the Obama administration considered appointing Maria Echaveste to the post. A well-regarded academic and community leader, Echaveste nonetheless had almost no diplomatic experience to speak of and little familiarity with some of the most relevant issues that drove the bilateral agenda. With just a few months left in office, Obama finally made the right choice: He nominated Roberta Jacobson, his assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. Jacobson, perhaps the most sophisticated and erudite Mexican ambassador of the past half-century, became a beloved figure in Mexico, comfortable both in the highest circles of power and among ordinary Mexicans, with whom she partook often and joyfully.

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Jacobson stayed on for the beginning of the Trump administration but left her post in May reportedly distressed by President Donald Trumps nativist and increasingly anti-Mexican rhetoric. Not coincidentally, Jacobson departed just a few weeks after fellow career diplomat and Latin American expert John Feeley quit his position as American ambassador to Panama over his profound differences with Trumps policies (Jon Lee Anderson would document Feeleys decision in an extensive New Yorker profile soon after).

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The identity of Jacobsons replacement as ambassador to Mexico has been the subject of intense speculation. Would Trump turn to a real expert in a country that, perhaps more than any other, has captured the presidents morbid imagination, or would he fall prey to some of the same mistakes made by his predecessors and choose someone ill-suited for a position that requires someone with Jacobsons or Feeleys capacity for nuance and empathy? The answer, it turns out, is an extreme version of the latter.

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Trump is expected to nominate D.C. attorney Christopher Landau as the next ambassador to Mexico. While an accomplished lawyer, Landaus credentials for the Mexico assignment are virtually nonexistent. Other than being the son of former American ambassador to Paraguay, Chile, and Venezuela, George Landau, Trumps potential nominee has no practical foreign policy experience to speak of. He has never held any sort of diplomatic post, nor is he an expert on Mexico, its politics, its culture, or its current troubles. Apparently, Landaus only qualifications for the Mexico City post are his supposedly fluent knowledge of Spanish and his work on Latin America as an undergraduate student, credentials shared by conceivably hundreds of thousands of Americans.

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If confirmed, Landau would be the least experienced American diplomat to occupy the Mexican ambassadorship in a generation, an indefensible decision at a crucial juncture for the two countries. On the other hand, perhaps Landaus appointment is merely symbolic. After all, when it comes to Mexico, the Trump administration seems to trust only one man: Jared Kushner.

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Just a couple of days ago, the presidents son-in-law traveled to Mexico City, where he had dinner with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Marcelo Ebrard, the countrys foreign minister, at the private residence of television executive Bernardo Gomez. During the meeting, which wasnt disclosed by Lopez Obradors office until the morning after, Kushner and Mexicos president reportedly reviewed the future of the embattled USMCA trade deal and even discussed potential new American commitment on aid for Central America. With a de facto ambassador and self-styled Secretary of State Jared Kushner at hand, who needs a proper and knowledgeable ambassador?The man charged with sending more than a dozen pipe bombs through the mail to high-profile Trump critics last fall, igniting a national panic, pleaded guilty in a federal court Thursday. Officials said Cesar Sayoc, who had been living out of a van in Florida, sent a total of 16 improvised explosive devices to 13 people in October, including former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, setting off a public frenzy in response to what federal officials characterized a domestic terror attack.

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The 57-year-old entered the guilty plea after pleading not guilty initially, averting a trial that was set to begin this summer. Sayoc apologized in court for sending the explosive packages that included powder from fireworks and glass. He told the court he did not intend for the bombs to detonate but knew there was a possibility they could. I know that these actions were wrong and I am extremely sorry, he said. None of the bombs went off or even reached their intended recipients, which included the CNN newsroom, billionaire activist George Soros, and actor Robert De Niro as well as nowDemocratic presidential candidates Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.

Authorities quickly tracked Sayoc down and arrested him in South Florida last year, where he had been living in a van plastered with stickers of President Donald Trump and threatening images of Trump opponents, including some of those he sent explosive packages to. Sayoc, who has been held since his arrest, is facing life in prison and is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 12.In the week since a gunman attacked two mosques in Christchurch, killing 50 people, the worlds eyes have been on New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Faced with national tragedy, Ardern has demonstrated poise, compassion, and resolve.

Six days after the massacre, Ardern announced a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles, and high-capacity magazines. For spectators in the United States, the speed with which Arderns coalition government enacted gun control legislation was unfamiliarand for our purposes impossible. Whereas New Zealanders dont have a constitutional right to bear arms, Americas Second Amendment isnt going anywhere.

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But the lesson of Arderns response to the attack extends far beyond her legislative solutions; this episode illustrates how in addition to wise policy-making, democratic governance requires the mediation of public emotion to promote the flourishing of political and social life. In response to terrorist violence, the prime ministers job was not only to address policy-related concerns, but also to address the hearts of the nation (and world) in a manner conducive to successful democratic politics. Whats remarkable is just how successful Ardern has been at this task.

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In her recent book, The Monarchy of Fear, philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that two emotions in particular are corrosive to democratic politics: fear and anger. Fear, Nussbaum writes, is intensely narcissistic. It turns us away from others and is easily manipulated by political leaders. She notes that a rational fear of terrorism can easily turn into an irrational fear of Muslims. When irrational fear runs rampant, the political climate will suffer from mistrust, division, and instability.

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Arderns response to the Christchurch shooting exemplifies an alternative to a politics of irrational fear and anger in times of national crisis.

Anger, Nussbaum argues, is an offspring and accomplice of fear. Although not inherently irrational, anger has the potential to be corrupted into something retributive when fueled by fear. Public retributive anger contains a burning desire for payback, as if the suffering of someone else could solve the groups or the nations problems. For Nussbaum, retributive anger is a problem because it is a kind of irrational magical thinking, and because it distracts us from the future, which we can change, and often should.

Behind Nussbaums arguments about emotion in politics is the understanding that rhetoricespecially the rhetoric of political leadersmatters in the mediation of public emotion. How leaders talk about crisis, tragedy, and injustice plays a decisive role in determining a communitys emotional response. Depending on a leaders words, these emotions can either uplift or degrade the state of democratic politics.

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Arderns response to the Christchurch shooting exemplifies an alternative to a politics of irrational fear and anger in times of national crisis. That alternative is grief and compassion. Anger and grief are both emotional responses to the pain of losing something valuable in life; but Ardern chose grief over anger in order to heal rather than infect the wound the Christchurch attack left in New Zealand.

On her first visit to Christchurch, Ardern donned a black headscarf in a sign of respect to the Muslim community. Moving videos of her pausing to hug and console the families of victims in Christchurch have been widely shared online. Ardern began her first address to Parliament since the attack with the Islamic greeting, as-salaam alaikum. In that speech, she vowed never to publicly say the gunmans name:

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He will, when I speak, be nameless. And to others, I implore you, speak the names of those who were lost rather than the name of the man who took them. He may have sought notoriety, but we in New Zealand will give him nothing, not even his name.

Arderns refusal to utter the gunmans name is significant not only as an effort to prevent the spread of his white supremacist ideology, but as a rejection of what Nussbaum calls payback or retributive anger. As Nussbaum put it, anger typically does contain a sort of strike-back tendency, and that is what differentiates it from compassionate grieving. Arderns response vindicates the value of collective grief as an alternative to anger and fear because of its potential to unify rather than divide in the aftermath of disaster.

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One of the messages that I want to share to our young people in particular is that its OK to grieve. Its OK to ask for help, Ardern said on Wednesday, while visiting a high school that lost two students in the attacks. At that event, one student asked Ardern a simple question: How are you? Ardern responded: How am I? Thank you for asking. I am very sad. Not angry, not afraidbut sad.

For comparison, we need only look at the response of Australian Sen. Fraser Anning who, following the attacks, tweeted: Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence? In another statement released on Twitter, Anning wrote: 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. Following his statement, Anning was filmed punching a teenager after the teenager smashed an egg on the senators head. These remarks (and their retaliatory aftermath) are clear exemplars of the irrational politics of fear and anger as Nussbaum describes them. Ardern denounced him as a disgrace.

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Arderns public emphasis on grief has led New Zealanders to engage in public acts and rituals of consolation and compassion. Across New Zealand, people have been performing the haka, a traditional Maori dance, as a sign of respect. Rival motorcycle gangs performed the haka outside the Al Noor Mosque, the site of most of the killings. The dance was also performed by students at New Zealands largest Muslim school. This morning, Ardern joined thousands for a nationally broadcasted call to prayer and two-minute moment of silence in Hagley Park, across from the Al Noor Mosque. There she remarked, New Zealand mourns with you. We are one.

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Whereas fear manifests itself narcissistically and internally, grief fueled by compassion turns us outward. These public acts of consolation are evidence of how grief can promote and protect democratic ideals in times of crisis by fostering mutual respect and understanding, cooperation, and civic engagement.

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Some may object that anger is a sensible and often necessary response to grave injustice; not only does outrage drive protest and progress, but it is a way for people to affirm their dignity and self-respect. They are no doubt correct that anger, in certain forms, can be productive. Ardern, in her first statement following the attacks, was right to issue a defiant denunciation of the attackers: You may have chosen us, but we utterly reject and condemn you. Moreover, by many accounts, anger is itself a component of the process of grieving. Grief, in its most democratically valuable form, must be moderated by compassion and love to avoid the poisonous effects of untamed anger and resentment.

In times of crisis, the potential for anger and fear to be inflamed and corrupted by political rhetoric and in turn undermine democratic politics gives us reason to exercise great caution. What Arderns response in recent days has shown is that grief is a viable alternative to anger. Active grief, not vengeful anger, must be the foundation of change and the source for hope. When grief is fueled by compassion, it too can serve the purposes of uplift and affirmation; and it too can motivate the condemnation of injustice. It does so with the aim of easing rather than inflicting pain. And it does so while leaving the fabric of our democracy intact.Listen to Slates The Gist:

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Listen to The Gist via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

On The Gist, who paid for those two Chinese-born tech magnates to take photos with Trump?

In the interview, Vanderbilt professor Jonathan Metzl is here to discuss his new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing Americas Heartland.

In the Spiel, litigating Joe Bidens past.

Join Slate Plus! Members get bonus segments, exclusive member-only podcasts, and more. Sign up for a free trial today at Slate.com/gistplus.

Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook.

Email: thegist@slate.com

Twitter: @slategist

Podcast production by Daniel Schroeder and Pierre Bienaime.This post has been updated with breaking news developments.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel tasked with investigating Russian interference into the 2016 election, has delivered his report to Attorney General William P. Barr, according to a letter Barr sent to Congress. Mueller is not recommending any further indictments, a senior Justice Department official told reporters after the news broke.

The news means an apparent conclusion to nearly two years of investigation by Muellers office. While we do not yet know how much of the reporta comprehensive summary and explanation of his investigationthe public will be allowed to see, Barr has promised to be as transparent as possible with Congress about its details. Anything given to Congress, it is assumed, will then be shared with the public.

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According to the Washington Post, Barr said he was reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the special counsels principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.

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In his letter to the leaders of the House and Senate judiciary committees, Barr said that he would confer with Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Departments long-standing practices and policies. He also said that Muellers office had not proposed any action during the investigation that was inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices.

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House Democrats, now in the majority, will determine what next steps to take.

While the contents of the report are still secret, the general areas of inquiry are thought to be known in large part because of indictments Muellers team has already secured from the grand jury. While Muellers investigation began by looking into the work of Russian hackers, it has expanded to cover a range of issues beyond the question of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, including potential obstruction of justice by the president.

We cannot know if the report includes much beyond the crimes described in the 34 indictments we have already seen, but as Slate has noted, those indictmentsof Trump campaign officials and other former aides, as well as of Russian intelligence officers and other Russian nationalsfollowed by a number of other convictions have already indicated a level of success from the investigation.

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The reports completion does not mean a tidy and comprehensive wrapping up of all lines of inquiry, according to the New York Times. Someincluding one investigation into former Trump campaign manager Paul Manaforts handling of campaign polling dataremain open and active and may, according to the Times, be carried over with Muellers investigators when they are moved back to their old jobs. According to BuzzFeed News, the Department of Justice has said that Mueller and a small contingent of staff will remain in their positions to close out some of the offices remaining work, until a point determined by Barr.

In response to the news, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted, The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course. The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsels report.Mulling: Folks, the Mueller report has been delivered! You can read the full text of the letter Attorney General William Barr sent to Congress after receiving it here. And Simon Lazarus makes the argument for why Barr should release the report to the public immediately.

American hustle: Who is Tucker Carlson, really? Is he a once-legitimate conservative journalist lead astray by the sensational nature of TV punditry? Is he the ultimate devils advocate? Is he an unserious contrarian? Its all this and much more: Hes the epitome of the rich American huckster, so often portrayed in pop culture and upheld by a mass media in love with its own power and voice. Lili Loofbourow takes a deep look at this troubling man of many contradictions.

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Another way: Instead of demonizing minorities or calling for revenge, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern responded to the Christchurch mosque shootings with grief and compassion. Danny Li says this model for public emotionnot fear and angeris the way to preserve and bolster democratic politics.

A filthy past: The Dirt, the new biopic about rock band Motley Crue based on the book of the same name, premieres today on Netflix. Christopher R. Weingarten examines how the film feels like a time capsule of a troubling past era, when the mass celebration of rock star behavior ignored how often women were treated terribly by these hard-partying public figures.

For fun: The outrage over a Google tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach to the future,

NitishThe chaos inside Donald Trumps White House has hit a new peak, and we dont need Maggie Haberman, Bob Woodward, or their bevy of unnamed sources to uncover it. No, its out in the open, in the main players own words.

On Thursday, the U.S. Treasury Department tweeted the following:

Treasury designates two shipping companies for attempted evasion of North Korea sanctions https://t.co/Y0W8al1dgb  Treasury Department (@USTreasury) March 21, 2019

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National Security Adviser John Bolton then tweeted, approvingly:

Important actions today from @USTreasury; the maritime industry must do more to stop North Koreas illicit shipping practices. Everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Koreas sanctions evasion. https://t.co/AVnOPrWbH6  John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) March 21, 2019

But then, on Friday morning, Trump tweeted this reversal:

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It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2019

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Far from the first time, the worldfriends, foes, and bemused or appalled observersmust be wondering: WTF?!

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One former U.S. official who has worked on Korean issues emailed me after I sent him Trumps tweet for comment (at the time, neither of us had seen the earlier tweets by Bolton and the Treasury):

Good Lord. His national security team must be apoplectic. Those sanctions would only have been approved after thorough vetting through the NSC, State, DoD, and the Intelligence Community. Bolton, Pompeo and Mnuchin would all have known and approved. I would be stunned if Bolton didnt tell Trump first. Either he told him and Trump didnt understand  or maybe he tried to slip it past him?

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To make matters worse, these mixed signals are going out just as Kim Jong-un is demonstrating that he knows how to play a wicked long game. Most leaders, even most dictators, would have been ousted from power after failing so miserably at last months summit in Hanoi. Kim expected Trump to lift all sanctions against North Korea and to acknowledge its status as a nuclear powerbut, instead, came home empty-handed. And yet, four weeks later, Kim has regained the upper hand in the complex politics of his relations with South Korea and the United States.

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Still, theres huge risk in Kims stratagems, especially when hes up against a player as voluble as Trump, whose unpredictability and pressureson display in Fridays tweet, in unusually bizarre formhe clearly doesnt fully understand.

On Thursday, in his latest move of this high-stakes game, Kim pulled out his staff from the liaison office that he and South Korean President Moon Jae-in had agreed to set up near the two countries borders, in their own seemingly historic summit last April.

Moon, an ardent advocate of closer ties with the North, has touted the liaison office as a political and personal triumph. It was Moon who engineered the summits with Kimboth his own and Trumpsand as a result, his stake in the new detentes success is as deep as anyones. He launched the campaign in the summer of 2017 after Trump threatened to pummel North Korea with fire and fury like the world has never seen in response to Kims repeated tests of long-range missiles and nuclear weaponsa duel that Moon (and others) feared would escalate to war on the Korean Peninsula.

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Kim and his spokespeople have blamed Trump for the debacle in Hanoia ploy lent some credence by the fact that Trump was the one who walked out of the talksand, so, have portrayed their own walkout from the liaison office as a protest of resumed U.S. hostility.

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Moon may not quite buy Kims deflection of blame, but he needs peace, desperately wants warmer relations with the North, and doesnt trust Trump to make things right, mainly because Trump has shown such indifferenceat times hostilityto the U.S.South Korean alliance.

That being the case, in order to lure back Kims minions, so the two Koreas can keep pursing the projects that theyd planned, Moon may pull away from Washingtons orbit.

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Heres the danger in trying to put one over on a delusional narcissist: He might suddenly realize hes been taken for a ride and respond in anger.

Splitting off South Korea from the United States has been the main goal of North Korean foreign policy since the nation was created shortly after the Second World War. Kims grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the nations revolutionary founder and its Great Leader until his death in 1994, likened his tiny, impoverished country to a shrimp among whales. There are two ways a shrimp can thrive in a sea surrounded by whales: bulk up or play the whales off one another. Kims grandfather and fatherKim Jong-il, the nations second leaderwere masters at the latter game; the current occupant of the throne is following their pattern, fortified by his possession of a small atomic arsenal, the likes of which his forebears had only dreamed of.

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Meanwhile, in his overrule-by-tweet of his Cabinets upping of sanctions, Trump has revealed not only that he doesnt know how to govern (this much is hardly new) but also that he doesnt get what game Kim is playing.

Topping it all, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders explained Trumps reversal as follows: President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesnt think these sanctions will be necessary.

Kim, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Bashar al-Assadthe whole lot of Americas adversariesmust be shaking their heads, laughing, and wondering what lucky stars have aligned to give them an American president as foolish as this one.

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But heres the danger in trying to put one over on a delusional narcissist: He might suddenly realize hes been taken for a ride and respond in anger.

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A second bit of news should make us a bit more nervous still. At a recent closed-door speech in Seoul, Andrew Kim, former chief of the CIAs Korea Mission Center, said that the Hanoi summit broke up, in part, because Kim Jong-un explained that denuclearization meant dismantling not just North Koreas nuclear weapons but also all of the United States nuclear-capable weapons in the region. This would have entailed withdrawing aircraft and barring submarines from Guam and Hawaii.

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This North Korean definition of the term has been known for at least six months. Trump must have heard it from his intelligence briefers. The fact that he went ahead with a summit, anyway, is appalling. But heres whats more alarming: If Kim thought that any American presidenteven Trumpwould have accepted such terms, essentially forfeiting such major strategic assets in the Pacific, then he doesnt understand U.S. politics. And if he doesnt understand U.S. politics, on top of miscalculating Trumps psychology, then he might take his rhetorical threats and dares a step too far.

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In other words, Kims pullout from the liaison office, which was meant to aggravate tensions between Seoul and Washington, could backfire. If he goes a step further and resumes testing missiles, as the recent repair of North Korean launch pads suggests he might, Trump could lash out; we might find ourselves zapped back to the fire and fury days of August 2017 and this time, it might be hard for Kim to turn the peace charm back on: The pivot might strain credulity, might aggravate Trumps sense of betrayal and humiliation, might make him feel like a cuckold (We fell in love, Trump cooed at a rally shortly after their first summit in Singapore last June); thats a feeling Trump has never felt before, and who knows how he might lash out?

Foreign policy is hard. Formulating policy toward a cauldron of deceit like North Korea takes particularly subtle finesse, deep learning, and steady nerves. Kim knows exactly what he wants; Trump has no idea what he wants; and they deeply misunderstand each othertheir motives, their limits, and their breaking points. The combination makes for a dangerous situation.Rep. Steve Kinga man who makes news with openly racist, white supremacist, and otherwise offensive comments often enough that his own party finally stripped him of his committee assignmentsdredged up an old racist complaint while speaking at a town hall in the overwhelmingly white city of Charter Oak, Iowa, Thursday night:

[H]eres what FEMA tells me: We go to a place like New Orleans, and everybodys looking around saying, Whos going to help me? Whos going to help me? We go to a place like Iowa, and we go see, knock on the door at, say, I make up a name, Johns place, and say, John, you got water in your basement, we can write you a check, we can help you. And John will say, Well, wait a minute, let me get my boots. Its Joe that needs help. Lets go down to his place and help him.

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While King, in praising Iowans for their response to the recent flooding along the Missouri River, did not say explicitly why he singled out residents of New Orleans 14 years ago, the majority-black city has long been subject to racist tropes about laziness and reliance on government handouts.

King, who in his comments boasted that he had visited New Orleans after the hurricane and participated in relief efforts, was one of a small number in Congress to oppose a bill providing federal aid to the victims, according to the Washington Post. Hurricane Katrina was the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. in nearly eight decades: According to CNN, at least 1,833 people, mainly in Louisiana, died from the storm and its floods; nearly half of those who died in Louisiana were older than 74. The government estimated the cost of damage at $125 billion.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards called Kings comments disgusting and disheartening on Thursday. When communities are affected by disasters, we come together to help each other, not tear each other down, he tweeted.

U.S. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, who represents a suburban New Orleans district, also quickly condemned Kings statement. His comments about Katrina victims are absurd and offensive, he told the Advocate. [They] are a complete contradiction to the strength and resilience the people of New Orleans demonstrated to the entire nation in the wake of the total devastation they experienced.The following article is a written adaptation of a recent episode of What Next, Slates new daily news podcast. Listen to What Next for free every day via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher, Overcast, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Some of your favorite presidents have changed the makeup of the Supreme Court, and the idea is gaining more momentum as the 2020 election season gets underway.

Its not just cranks anymore, says Mark Joseph Stern, a journalist and attorney who covers the Supreme Court for Slate. We have Mayor Pete of South Bend. We have Kirsten Gillibrand. Kamala Harris has floated it. Those are big names. Those are not Redditors who are resistance moms freaking out.

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This idea of increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court is known as court packing. Supporters of the concept argue the tactic ensures that the court will become more politically balancedand right now, frankly, that means more liberal.

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I asked Stern to tell me how court packing may work in the future on What Next, the new daily news podcast I host for Slate. It might surprise you, but the Constitution actually says nothing about court packing.

The Constitution says that there shall be one Supreme Court, but it does not say how many justices are supposed to be on the court, Stern says. Throughout history, we have gone from as few as six [justices] all the way up to 10, but it has been fixed at nine for quite a long time, since the later part of the 1800s.

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He continues: Nine is the number weve all come to know and expect and maybe love, so I think, for lots of Americans, even though theres no constitutional bar on expanding it past nine, it feels weird and it feels like something that we should think really carefully about doing before we jump into the waters.

This entire idea has gotten tricky for a lot of people in elected office. Michael Bennet, the Colorado senator who is thinking about running for president, was asked by a reporter about court packing. The Washington Post reported that he literally banged his head on the table four times in response to the question. Needless to say, it can be a political minefield.

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Hes got that standard sort of politician response to court packing, which is, Well, we dont want to politicize the courts, which doesnt really answer the question of what to do if you think the courts have politicized themselves, or that theyve already been so politicized in one direction that they pose a legitimate threat to democracy and self-governance, says Stern.

One of President Donald Trumps goals when he took office was to remake the federal judiciary. By most accounts he is succeeding. Working hand in hand with the Republican Senate, the Trump administration has given lifetime appointments to 91 overwhelmingly white, male, and deeply conservative jurists.

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If you see this as a problem, remaking the Supreme Court might look like a solution. And Stern makes the case that court packing isnt actually an extreme tactic.

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Thats the funny thingIt sounds radical. It sounds like the kind of thing technocrats and American liberals would hate because it goes way far out on a limb, he says. But the truth is that its definitely the simplest and definitely the most easily obtainable [solution] from where we are right now.

The people who are advocating for this idea of court packing are spoiling for a fight. Over the summer, Tucker Carlson had academic Ian Samuel on his show to talk about the idea. The two men took turns sneering and giggling at each other.

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What Im really in favor of is returning the Supreme Court to being a sort of nonpartisan institution that is set way from the sort of fray of ideological politics, but we cant do that until we add some seats to correct the balance that weve lost, really, Samuel said.

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I love it, Carlson laughed in response.

"None of this is new. Were reviving an age-old debate at a time when it feels especially pertinent and topical.  Mark Joseph Stern

Stern says you can tell how serious these court-packing advocates are simply by paying attention to the language they use. They know that conservative critics are going to pounce on them for trying to fill the judicial branch with liberal judges. They dont try to get away with talking about expanding the Supreme Court or opening up the judiciary. Theyve embraced the idea of packing the courts. Its a way to neutralize criticism before it happens. Or maybe its just a way to throw the first punch.

When you tweet, Pack the court, how is increasing the partisan Democratic representation on the court indeed nonpartisan? Carlson asked his guest.

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Well, you know, when you encounter a jewel thief, you must steal things back, Tucker, Samuel replied.

Stern says that this idea of expanding the Supreme Court started to be discussed more earnestly after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as an associate justice.

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After Kavanaughs confirmation, groups like Pack the Courts really became a prominent part of the conversationno longer fringe voices, he says. People started to recognize that we now have five extremely conservative justices on the Supreme Court for the first time in a really long time, since the early 1900s. Rather than wait for the court to inflict terrible damage on democracy, these so-called court reformers are trying to figure out how to fix the problem before it even really begins.

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Heres one issue with this idea: that terrible damage to democracy is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, this is a victory.

Especially people who supported the Senate blockade of Merrick Garland in 2016, says Stern. After Justice Scalia died, President Obama still had nearly a year left in office, and of course Republicans led by Mitch McConnell created this new rule that no Supreme Court justice can be appointed within the last year of a presidents term.

Merrick Garland was this real compromise choice in a lot of ways. But GOP lawmakers wouldnt budge.

He was a foolish choice in a lot of ways too, because President Obama was unable to recognize just how obdurate Republicans would be, Stern says. He was definitely a moderate compromise choice. He would not be the selection to push the court into a new liberal golden age. He was a moderate, and still Republicans refused to even give him a hearing.

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Merrick Garland was supposed to be this peace offering to the Republicans, and President Barack Obama still had no success.

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A lot of Democrats feel like not only did Obama get screwed over, but he got screwed over after being the most reasonable man in the room, and instead Neil Gorsuch, a very far-right conservative, got that spot, says Stern. I think a lot of these people pushing for court reform are saying, We tried being moderate. We tried being reasonable. We tried the peace offering. None of it worked, so its time for hardball politics.

Hardballthats what court packing is. And in many ways, it seems kind of like a classic authoritarian move. But Stern argues that authoritarianism is also in the eye of the beholder.

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Weve long had this struggle in American democracy between the power exercised by the courts and the Supreme Court and the democratic branches, he says. Andrew Jackson famously, perhaps apocryphally, said, Chief Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it. The presidency of Abraham Lincoln was in some ways defined by a refusal to comply with court orders and a sort of rejection of the Supreme Courts legal authority.

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Stern continues: Those tussles are famous but not necessarily famous examples of American authoritarianism. I think weve come to view them, or most of us have come to view them, as a kind of formative point in the courts development at a time when it was not as clear as it is today that the Supreme Court gets to say what the law is, and the other branches are supposed to just automatically respect that.

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I was surprised, when I looked into it, how flexible the number of Supreme Court justices was over the years. George Washington had six, and then Thomas Jefferson added some people. Abraham Lincoln added one with the pure motive of getting through policies he wanted in regard to slavery. And Stern says thats an important note to remember.

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We dont really look back on them adding seats and say, Wow. What a couple of authoritarians they were. How dare they mess with the divinely ordained number of justices to sit on the Supreme Court. None of this is new. Were reviving an age-old debate at a time when it feels especially pertinent and topical, he says.

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Stern is painting this picture of a flexible court, with different presidents adding and subtracting justices as they go. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the last president to really try to change the composition of the Supreme Court.

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FDR came into office with these New Deal reforms that dramatically expanded the size of the federal government, and also generally the governments power over employers, says Stern. At that point, the Supreme Court was still in its so-called Lochner era, when it would strike down basically any federal law that tried to regulate working conditions and employment and anything outside of direct shipment of interstate commerce. Also, it would strike down really basic protections like minimum wage laws and maximum hour laws. FDR saw a lot of his early reforms either clipped or struck down entirely by the Supreme Court.

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But when FDR won in a landslide election in 1936, he devised a plan, largely in secret, to expand the court to up to 15 members.

The idea was basically to either push the old conservatives off the court or infuse the court with young blood, says Stern. There are a lot of reasons why this plan failed. I would say that one of the main reasons is that FDR never correctly articulated what was at stake. He never actually came out and said, Our entire democracy, the power of the people to regulate and govern themselves, is at stake.

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Instead, Stern says that FDR essentially slandered the justices as elitist, grumpy old men, which led to some negative repercussions.

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This massive backlash, which accused him correctly of being super disingenuous, eventually gave Congress the thumbs-up to vote this down by a very lopsided majority, Stern says.

For Stern, the lesson of what happened with FDR is that politicians who want to pack the court really have to communicate why it is a necessary change.

A lot of people who study it highlight that this was probably FDRs most dictatorial move, and it wasnt just because of the substance of the proposal, Stern says. It was the way that he conceived it in total secrecy. He told very, very few people and then just sprung it on the world and presented it as a fait accompli, as though there could be no serious debate and that all of his totally bogus pretextual reasons for it should be taken at face value.

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He continues: I mean, even [Louis] Brandeiswho was the most liberal justice on the court at the timebasically came out against it because he was also the oldest justice. He said, Look, FDR. Im an old man and Im doing my work just fine. If you want to pack the courts, please dont malign us as lazy old dudes because were doing our work. Its not our work pace that you dislike. Its what were churning out.

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When I read about FDR and what he did with the Supreme Court, what stood out to me was that he was trying to get the New Deal throughthat was a very, very big piece of legislation, and it ran into a lot of opposition from the Supreme Court. And now were again at this moment when were talking about another New Deal, and were talking about ways to do big things in Washington.

At this point, I think its fair to say, given the precedent set under Obama and Trump, pretty much anything Democrats pass if they ever get power back is going to be blocked by a lower court, and its going to go to the Supreme Court, Stern says.

But court packing is rarely discussed in a vacuum. Whenever people bring up the idea, theyre also talking about other things, like giving statehood to Puerto Rico, or somehow changing the calculus of who has a voice in American democracy. But when you say these ideas out loud, to some people, they sound extreme and scary. But Stern says the public should think of things differently.

In terms of the broader constitutional reforms, if somebody proposed the [idea of the] Senate today and it didnt already exist, we would all think that they were totally crazy, he says. We have a basic principle of one person, one vote in this country, and yet the Senate converts a resident of Vermonts vote into a bunch more votes than a resident of Texas vote  the people who are saying, Lets reform the Senate and reform the court while were at it to make sure it sticks, theyre trying to have everybody take a step back from the status quo and say, Look how we got here. Is this really where we want to be? Is this the place that America should be? The only Western democracy that still has this extreme malapportionment? If not, what are the vibrant ideas that we can engage with to try to fix the problem?

He adds, If we get too into the weeds with originalism and we have this love affair with how everything is right now, or how it was in 1789, then we kind of forget that were supposed to be growing, and when democracy stands still its kind of like a shark, right? It just dies.As TV talking heads go, Tucker Carlson was, even before the Media Matters recordings aired, less a respectable polemicist than an exhausting archetype. His persona has long been the debate guy. You know the one: Hes the dude in college who liked to play devils advocate by defending unpopular or terrible ideas on the grounds that real philosophical inquiry demands it. But its actually a game to be won to him, and he takes obvious pleasureeven pridein keeping a cool head while watching people with genuine investments get irrationally worked up. And he acted the part. Most of Carlsons signature movesthe blinky open-mouthed listening, his gently patronizing now hold on, the chuckles at his guests frustration when he interrupts, the borrowed dignity with which he furrows his browsare gestural shortcuts for reasonableness. And theyre part of a Carlsonian tool set thats frankly pretty derivative: Carlson yells like a younger Bill OReilly and spars like a slower Jon Stewart, all while carefully insisting hes not defending everything from Trump to Christopher Columbus to the Daily Stormer.

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Still, the recently unearthed racist, misogynistic bilge he spewed between 2006 and 2011 during his discussions with radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge Clem alarmed plenty of peopleand provoked a backlash to his showpartly because Carlson was thought, even by those who remember his embarrassing Crossfire encounter with Stewart, to exist on a slightly higher plane than Fox News Jeanine Pirros and Sean Hannitys.

It should arguably have been clear that the Carlson who presents himself as a judicious devils advocate shares an awful lot with the Carlson who thinks child rape is a thought experiment. Both treat real, enormous human suffering as if it were irrelevant and abstract. The rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different, Carlson says in the unearthed recordings with Bubba, in a conversation about Mormon fundamentalist leader Warren Jeffs marrying a 14-year-old, against her will, to an adult. If you listen, youll hear him taking a condescending, last-adult-in-the-room tone in this exchange. Lets be honest, he adds. Its cunning framing: He, the guy challenging the blinkered but popular idea that child rape is wrong (even when the rapist marries his victim), is the honest one.

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The exchange sheds light on how hard he has leaned on that reasonable-guy affect, because that tone shows up on his show all the time. Its a crutch, of course; the real debate Carlson ostensibly craves is just a shell game the guest is doomed to lose. I dont ever want to hurt people or cause them pain or anything like that. Im interested in debating ideas, he told Erik Wemple in 2017, little suspecting that a video of him melting down and swearing when Dutch historian Rutger Bregman actually did debate him would go viral a couple of years later. Bregman released it after Carlson refused to air it.

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America has spent generations strenuously ignoring the contradictions of people like Carlson.

The debate-guy persona is a fraud, but Carlsons strategy of projecting it has mostly worked. At the heart of his success is a strategic refusal to commit to any one identity, even within the same show. He bills himself as the devils advocate, the just-for-the-sake-of-argument dude with no real investment in an arguments outcome. At other times he acts like a moralizing truth teller. These identities should theoretically be at odds. That they arent, and that both are in any case obviously fictions, has not seemed to matter to his viewers. How did the guy who called Elena Kagan ugly and child rape a lifestyle successfully bill himself a defender of American families? Why has this shabby schtick worked?

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America has spent generations strenuously ignoring the contradictions of people like Carlson, usually on the grounds that an ethical posture this contorted iswithout being coherent or righttoo common to be objectionable. Curiously, this joking/not-joking posture isnt generally seen as cowardly. Tradition in fact encourages us not just to embrace the rough edges of such men but to equate their conventional but obscene reflections with blunt speaking and freethinking.

Our learned tolerance for this sort of contradiction partly explains why Carlson can appear to be both outraged and blase on his show: His modus operandi is to inflame his viewers to howling heights of anger while excoriating sincerity of any kind as preening and insisting that nothing he says really matters. Theres this illusion, and its created by the people who live here, that everything is meaningful, everything important, Carlson told GQ. Its not. This is less a humble admission of irrelevance than a deflection of responsibility, and its a strategy he shares with much of the far right, which has spent the past two years insisting that the things the president says and tweets dont actually matter (except, of course, when they do).

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But Carlson does have one unique gift, and its the remarkable sleight of hand with which he transitions from a sputtering Daffy to a rascally Bugs without letting his viewers notice the Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. His sincerity (like his outrage) is a game, so he whizzes from one affect to another, and the effect is confusing enough that viewers start to see actual hate speech as coextensive with dickish jokes. So what if he says immigrants make America poorer and dirtier. So what if he called Iraqis semiliterate primitive monkeys years agoor alluded two months ago to some obscure Middle Eastern hellhole our leaders claim we should be policing forever. He put a chyron up while Michael Avenatti was talking that called him a creepy porn lawyer! What a scamp.

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Carlson is basically a rich huckster, and America loves few things more than the jolly rule bender who winks while he cheats. This figure is all over the place in American culture, from Frank Abagnale to Saul Goodman to crooked televangelists to, of course, our current presidenttalking people into bad decisions via confusion and charisma, bombast and speed. The huckster can turn on a dime to be surprising, funny, aggressive, demanding. Hell tap into wells of fear and fellow feeling, find a way to earn your trust, make you feel hes on your side, and then the con is on. Now that hes facing criticism and losing advertisers, Carlson issued a statement: We will never bow to the leftist mobs attempts to silence us, he said, the millionaire posing as an embattled Everyman. Only a practiced grifter could capably reframe his real selfish and grasping messagemy problems are yoursinto a martyrs your problems are mine.

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Carlson is like a kind of morbid bellwether for exactly how our culture has changed.

For many media types, the conventional-wisdom read on Carlson has long been that he was once a good reporter, has an interesting mind and a knack for performance, and might not actually believe what he says. The bigotry and fearmongering could just be a spectacle for ratings. After all, this is a guy who, in 2009, urged conservatives to be more careful with facts and suggested that the right-wing media should aspire to the standards of the New York Times. That this has earned him some plausible deniabilitycausing many to regard him more as a polemical clown whose actual ideology is hard to divine rather than a bona fide white supremacistis a testament to just how available this grift has historically been to men predisposed to exploit it.

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It makes sense that Carlson said this stuff in conversation with a shock jock. Shock jocks were once a demoralizing and inescapable plague if you happened to be a radio listener. They used to be everywhere, these bros braying into microphones across the country, laughing at the same tired jokes that stepped over the same trampled lines and crowing at their own courage. The shock jocks basic con, which Carlson happily participated in, was to say stuff that every bit of mainstream culture sanctioned and reinforced and laughed atunder the fiction that this was awesome comedy and brave convention-busting.

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In this context, the garbage Carlson said, horrifying though it was, passed as almostalmostnormal. This is a point David French makes well in his spirited defense of Tucker Carlson: At the time, [Tuckers words] passed through the media ether without notice or comment. French sees this as evidence that Carlsons words werent  hurtful or offensive in the truest sense. French is right that Carlsons words did go unremarked upon by the mediain other words, by those with the power to object.

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This strikes me less as evidence that the words werent truly hurtful, though, than indicative of just how blinkered the media was back then, and of how little power those who didnt think child rape or drooling over teenagers was especially funny had to register their views. Consumers were expected to absorb the lesson that denigrating women wasnt just smart, edgy, and hilariousit was what free inquiry looked like. The vastly different reaction to Carlsons comments now versus when they first aired doesnt prove the banality of the original comments; it just makes Carlson seem like a kind of morbid bellwether for exactly how our culture has changed.

But in the end, despite the backlash, Carlsons career will surely be fine. Tempting though it may be to investigate whether he is actually a racist or simply plays one to an audience thats radicalizing across the globe, puzzling over how his public invective squares with his real beliefs seems like a dead end. What matters is that now, the slippage and plausible deniability people like Carlson have cultivated for years between dickish jokes and white supremacy (or jokes and actual child rape) are leading to real-life consequences. That handy joking/not-joking loophole has become an ugly part of our politics. Americans still tend to let men get away with this slippery both-anding as if they were uniquely morally separable from their theatrical utterances. Men are the one demographic for whom saying objectionable crap scans not just as cool gladiatorial edge but alsoparadoxicallyas healthy social adaptability. For them and them alone, saying the outrageous and cruel thing without being saddled or defined by it is so normal it has a name: locker-room talk.Thursdays Google Doodle celebrated the 334th birthday of famed composer Johann Sebastian Bach, with a twist: It was the first Doodle to incorporate machine learning. Users could create a melody, then the Doodle would automatically generate custom harmonies to produce a full composition in Bachs style. It was delightful for many Google users, but it also stepped into a controversy that has been brewing in musical circles for years.

Google says in its Behind the Doodle video that it chose Bachs music as the subject of the first A.I. Doodle because he had a characteristic style and composed with a set of musical rules in mind. This formulaic quality made his work an ideal subject for a machine-learning algorithm to train on. But Google is far from the first group to undertake this type of musical A.I. hybrid project. Its something that alarms some music academics and composers, who dislike that an algorithm can distill whatever music it analyzes into mechanical tropes, without being able to fully capture the creative, thoughtful qualities of human-composed art.

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The results of the Google Doodle were also particularly grating to Bach specialists. The algorithm made a lot of mistakes that even a first-year music student learning about counterpoint (the set of rules Bach and others used in composition) would know to avoid. I found the Doodle to be a bit of an odd tribute to Bach because the results bore so little resemblance to Bachs style, says Christopher Brody, a Bach scholar and music theorist at the University of Louisville. It would be hard to think of a single generally true fact about Bachs idiom that the A.I. seems to have accurately observed and manages not to break almost constantly. Christopher White, a music theorist who studies algorithmic and computational approaches to music at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, points out that a machine-learning algorithm like the one in the Doodle is generally composing off of hybrid rules it extrapolates in its own way, rather than the formalized concepts that humans study as the underpinnings of learning composition.

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At Google, the person who led development of the Doodles machine learning algorithm is Anna Huang, an A.I. specialist who originally trained as a composer. To her, the Doodle attempts to mediate the inherent tension between creative musical development and the more formulaic attributes of machine learning. As a composer, I find myself operating in different modes, she told Slate. Sometimes I want to work out an idea very precisely in all its details, other times I write down notes just as a placeholder so that I can see the overall shape of the piece. Sometimes I hear an idea from within, sometimes I wish there were raw material that I could sculpt. Machine learning can offer us ways to explore the spaces in between.

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Skeptical academic music theorists had fun experimenting with trying to stump the Doodles algorithms by feeding in bizarre melodies from experimental 20th-century music. They even tried inputting a melodic snippet from Ushers Yeah. (That one was actually pretty cool.)

When I saw the Bach-lash begin, I decided that as a music theory researcher and teacher, I needed to plug in my own melody and grade the machines efforts.

The melody I fed to the Doodle was meant to be in the key of C major, but the Doodle produced a composition in A minor. This key is closely related to C major, so I understand how the Doodle may have misinterpreted it. But the harmonization was funky from the start because I hadnt put any A notes in my melody, meaning the composition ended up feeling disjointed, as if two people had written the melody and the harmonies without fully communicating.

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This is a rare democratization of classical music that has value in its reach.

The Doodle also made a number of basic Bach faux pas, like adding in the voice leading error known as parallel fifths and octaves. This happens when two of the parts move in the same direction by the same interval. The Doodle also produced a composition that had overlaps between voices, another no-no in Bachs baroque style. These errors might go unnoticed to a non-musician, but to those trained in Bachs style, all the errors in the example I created sound like nails on a chalkboard.

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But then I realized: So what? I teach Bach every year to students who struggle to emulate his style and precision. I had cringed at the idea that a computer could replace years of intensive composition study to generate great music. I noticed, though, how many people outside of musical communitieson Twitter and friends outside my academic circleseemed to engage with the Doodle. The Doodle was designed so anyone could play around with it and plug in some notes, even if they arent familiar with music notation. And they would produce a lovely little composition that wasnt always technically correct for Bachs style, but sounded nice. This is a rare democratization of classical music that has value in its reach.

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Its still a shame, though, that there were so many errors packed into the short excerpts.

Since most people wouldnt recognize them, it means that what might be one of their only experiences with this style of composition was not really representative of Bach, despite Googles attempts to emulate the baroque master.

Academic music communities will continue to spar about the value of using machine-learning techniques to create music. But the reality is that these tools exist and appeal to lay people. If these technological developments can create opportunities to collaborate and expand academic discussions beyond conservatories and ivory towers, thats something the community should celebrate and welcome.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.This story was originally published by Undark and has been republished here with permission.

This piece has been republished as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

With every incongruous 50 degree Fahrenheit day in Boston this winter, I noticed the same transformations in the people around me: Revelers shed their layers of clothing, smiled more, and made polite small talk about what a great, beautiful, or perfect day it was. Im always on the outside looking in on these interactions. Whereas my fellow Bostonians take delight in the warm, snowless days, I find them inescapably grim this time of year. In light of what we know about climate change, I feel as though Im clutching onto a season that is systematically disappearing from my part of the worldand that few others care.

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In a report called Most Like It Hot, the Pew Research Center found that 57 percent of Americans prefer to live in a city with a hot climate, and only 29 percent prefer cold locales. (The rest dont have a preference.) Even human psychoses reflect this preference for warmth. Almost always, the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder are triggered during the cold, dark winter months. Only 10 percent of people with seasonal affective disorder suffer symptoms during the summer. And if you track growth in American cities since the early 1900s, a clear pattern emerges: The biggest upward trends are in places known for warmth.

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Most peoples experience of [a heat wave] was not unequivocally awful  some people quite enjoyed it.  Leo Barasi

I have always known that my disdain for warm weather makes me an outlier, but lately Ive been wondering if it also has something to do with the inertia Ive witnessed when it comes to addressing global warminga term, by the way, that has always evoked hell to me, though maybe not to others. Although most of us are now well aware that the potential dangers of global warming go beyond weatherdevastating natural disasters, famine, the re-emergence of centuries-old diseases from melting permafrostperhaps a collective preference for warmth has dulled our response to these larger threats that come with climate change. Would there be more urgency and better compliance with initiatives like the Paris climate agreement if we were facing the threat of an ice age instead?

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Its not a completely outlandish thought experiment. From roughly the mid-1300s to the mid-1800s, there was a prolonged period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. Glaciers around the world grew robustly, and average temperatures dropped by about 1 degree Celsius from those of the preceding medieval period. The cooling climate struck Europe first and hardest: Reportedly, it was so cold in some areas that wild birds could be seen dropping dead out of the sky as they flew, and major European rivers like the Thames and the Rhine froze over for such significant chunks of the year that they became reliable roads for carts and horses. 1816 was famously dubbed the year without summer, a dubious accolade shared by the year 1628.

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So how did people respond to this onset of perpetual winter? Basically, they spent 300 years just completely freaking out. Then reason and social progress prevailed.

To most people, life during the Little Ice Age was horrible beyond measure. Catastrophes like widespread crop failure, livestock death, famine, and epidemics were common, and child mortality rates climbed. Someone had to take the blame. Witcheswho, according to the Bible, had the power to bring on calamitous hailstorms and other weather-related disasterswere widely cast as scapegoats. Present-day economists have shown a correlation between the most active years in witchcraft trials and the coldest spells in the region. In May of 1626, after a brutal hailstorm in southern Germany was followed by Arctic-like temperatures, 900 men and women deemed responsible for the weather shift were tortured and executed.

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But this systematic killing wasnt changing anything, and people saw that. The cold marched on relentlessly. And so while the first half of the Little Ice Age was characterized by fanaticism, chaos, disease, death, and famine, the 18th century saw a turn toward a new, multipronged attempt at problem-solving, spurred by the Age of Enlightenment.

Across Europe, there was a broad move away from beleaguered agrarian societies, whose livelihoods were inextricably linked to practices, like small-scale farming, that climate change could easily topple. Instead, societies began to embrace institutions that were meant to imbue order, stability, reason, and understanding amid climatic chaos: science academies that explicitly excluded theologians, university systems that swelled in size, and improved roads and canals that facilitated the spread of education, medical care, and global trade. This era also saw the publication of books on science-based agricultural reform that would become virtual gospel on subjects like crop rotation, fertilization, and bumper crop storage for hundreds of years to come.

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These new systems were put to the test by subsequent cold waves that continued into the 18th century and extended beyond Europeto places like New York City, where in 1780 the harbor froze so solidly that you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Improved clothing, heat-retaining architecture, widespread international trade, and the increased knowledge about disease management coming out of the universities and science academies all worked to keep death and famine at levels far lower than those that Western societies had previously experienced.

Admittedly, the comparison between our reaction to climate change and those who came before us is imperfect; the people who lived through the Little Ice Age didnt really understand the science behind what they were experiencing. But their passionate and sometimes extreme cultural, political, and religious responses to the effects of climate change suggest that had they been able to directly and intentionally stop global cooling, they probably would have.

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Yet here we are, armed with the knowledge our forbears were missing, having nonetheless just closed the books on the fourth-warmest year since 1880. Instead of marshalling the ingenuity of an Age of Enlightenment, as our predecessors did, weve spent the past few decades in an Age of Complacency.

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Leo Barasi, an author who has written extensively about climate change apathy, captured a sentiment shared by many Britons after a heat wave swept through the U.K. last summer. They believe [the heat wave] was definitely a sign of climate change, just as the science says, he told the Independent, but most peoples experience of it was not unequivocally awfulnot like a massive forest fire or a terrible hurricane. Some people quite enjoyed it.

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Of course, the fact that most people remain unbothered by warm weather is neither the sole nor most significant reason were now nearing the end of the runway for wholesale mitigation of climate change. Its not that simple, and weather and climate are not one and the same.

But at the most basic human level, our gut feelings about our day-to-day experiences with weather do matter. They inform our inclinations about preserving the long-term patterns of climateand preserving those patterns means protecting the winters that some people hate. Its time to reckon with what that means for the future of our climate.San Francisco is on a bit of a banning spree. Last year, it was electric scooters. Now, the city is considering a bill to get rid of cashless stores and legislation that could effectively ban vaping. That last bit of proposed legislation hinges on the idea that we dont yet know enough about e-cigarettes to allow them. Its not an outright ban; its a proposed ban of vapes that have not undergone review by the Food and Drug Administration. But at the moment, thats all of them.

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The vaping ban is meant to protect youth from e-cigarettes, according to a press release put out by City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who is proposing it along with Supervisor Shamann Walton. Its of a piece with the recent outcry over the epidemic of teen vaping, as outgoing FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has described it (he led his agency in restricting the sale of vaping cartridges in flavors like mango and sour gummy). Worry over e-cigs has been building since research last year showed a rise in teen vaping. Juul, the only brand named in the San Francisco press release, is a bit of a phenomenon with teens: The products early ads featured young people, and its Urban Dictionary definition notes that the device is commonly mistaken for a USB stick, making it easy to conceal at school.

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Cutting down on teen vaping is a fine goal. Like all tobacco products, e-cigarettes cannot be sold to those under 18 years of age (though some states have upped that to 21). But calls like this one show how moral panic over teen e-cigarette use tends to obscure e-cigarettes potential as an essential harm reduction tool and a safer alternative to cigarettes, a known cancer causing agent.

The lawmakers behind the San Francisco proposal say they just want the FDA to move faster on evaluating e-cigarettes role in public health. Its true that the FDA has not vetted e-cigarette productsbut it has a plan to do so by 2022 (a deadline it pushed back for good reason, as Jacob Grier has argued in Slate). Requiring vaping to be regulated right now or else also stands in contrast to the comparatively lax requirements for cigarettes: As Herrera pointed out to me in an email, there is no legal requirement for the FDA to conduct that type of review for traditional cigarettes, which were on the market before that law went into effect.

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In the meantime, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has already issued a nearly-300-page surgeon general report on vaping. After reading it, physician Jeremy Samuel Faust concluded that e-cigarettes are nowhere near as harmful for most people as traditional cigarettes or chewing tobaccoboth of which clearly cause cancer and a host of other long-term serious medical problems, as he wrote in Slate. And even with the recent rise in teen vaping, its worth noting that use of tobacco products among teens is about where it was in 2011, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (it did dip and then rise again in that window). But the net situation has improved, because consumption has swayed toward a less harmful version of the product.

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The problem with the proposed ban is that it wouldnt just keep vapes away from teens; it would also keep them from an essential audience: adult smokers. Smoking is uniquely deadly, and the evidence we have so far suggests electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) with nicotine may help you quit, a 2018 report in the BMJ argued. The surgeon generals 2016 report says that the evidence showing that vapes work as an overall nicotine cessation tool is extremely weak, though the science is still evolving. Either way, we know that using a Juul is less harmful than smoking a cigarette. Being an alternative to adult smoking is incidentally Juuls current purported goal, and where its advertising dollars seemed to be aimed.

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In the end, the proposal raises the question: Why not just add old-fashioned cancer-causing cigarettes to the list of things not allowed in San Francisco, too? I think this reveals the concepts flaws. There are social reasons not to go the whole mile on tobacco: Its not a zeitgeisty issue, and even though cigarettes do still affect teens, they dont hold the same youthful connotations as Juuls. But a ban on cigarettes would also look obviously paternalistic and kind of ridiculous, standing out as a clear way to unfairly control people living with addiction, rather than offering them help and resources and the right to manage vices as they wish. A vaping ban would do the same thing; its just slyer about it.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.This was one unique Airbnb. You opened the front door and were greeted by a 5-foot-tall gorilla statue sitting quietly on a bench in the entry way. Then you walked into the living room that had a tree in the corner with branches and paper leaves that stretched across the ceiling. Two giraffeSlovakia feels younger, Switzerland seems more colourful, says Swiss Ambassador Alexander Hoffet.

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Returning from a posting in China, Swiss Ambassador to Slovakia Alexander Hoffet is back in central Europe. His first-ever diplomatic posting was as a culture attache in Prague in the early 1990s, so he has first-hand experiences associated with the break-up between the Czech Republic and Slovakia over a quarter of a century ago.

The Slovak Spectator (TSS): What are your impressions of Slovakia so far?

Alexander Hoffet (AH): Comparing my impressions from the 1990s and now, the changes have been dramatic and positive. Bratislava is a much brighter and more attractive city than it was then. After some difficult beginnings following the separation, there has been sound and promising economic development, and there is a whole new generation of young people who hardly remember the time before the 1990s.

TSS: What differences do you see between Slovakia and Switzerland?

AH:Slovakia feels like a much younger country. Of course, with globalisation and the changes that happened in between, like the financial crisis, there have been a lot of changes in Switzerland too. But the transformation here has been much more disruptive, with the challenges of the new political and social model introduced.

On the other hand, Switzerland seems like a much more colourful country. About one quarter of our population are immigrants from both EU countries and countries outside Europe. Here, it feels very homogeneous. The attitude towards immigration is quite different here than in Switzerland.

TSS: What are the similarities you see between our two countries?

AH:There are quite a few. We are of similar size, we both have beautiful nature and rich resources in tourist spots and attractions, mountains and valleys. And there is a similar mental landscape behind it. Maybe both countries have a mountainous mentality to some extent. Generally, people in both countries are quite pragmatic, down to earth. At least those are my first impressions here.

TSS: Switzerland is an important destination for Slovak migrants even now, but it was particularly important in 1968. Many Czechs and Slovaks found their new homes in Switzerland after the Prague Spring was crushed here. How are these immigrants seen now?The attacker, Juraj Hossu, remains in prison.

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The District Court Bratislava I has started the hearings of witnesses in the case of the murdered Filipino Henry Acorda. He succumbed to his injuries in late May 2018, after being attacked by Juraj Hossu on Obchodna Street in Bratislava.

The first hearings started on March 19 and continued on March 21. Hossu, who is charged with manslaughter, remains in custody.

Not aggressive when drunk

The court heard the first group of nine witnesses on March 19.

At first, he was surprised by what he had done, a woman who witnessed the attack said to the court when describing Hossus behaviour, as quoted by the Sme daily. He then approached him [Henry Acorda] and said It serves you right. So he probably did not regret it much.

Subsequently, two more witnesses, who were not present on the spot, were heard. Hossus former classmate and his partners friend said that he is friendly. They also denied that he would behave aggressively when drunk.

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Read also: I am not an aggressor, claims the man accused of Filipinos manslaughter Read more

Other witnesses were invited to testify on March 21. A doctor commented on the health of Henry Acorda. Even though, he he had not examined him personally, he evaluated his CT scan that revealed an aneurysm of a brain artery.

It is common in the case of 1-3 percent of the population of the adult age, the doctor told the court, as quoted by the TASR newswire.

If the aneurysm broke, it could result in various consequences, ranging from a headache to death. He was of the opinion that the aneurysm was there before the attack.

Policeman spotted a group of screaming people

A policeman who was on duty that night was also heard by the court. As he noted, he saw a group of screaming people at Obchodna Street and one person laying on the ground. They checked the situation.

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Read also: The man accused of the Acorda killing stays in prison Read more

We talked most with two foreigners and learnt that the man on the ground was attacked and kicked in the head, he said, as quoted by TASR. The perpetrator confessed, I do not remember the details. He said something like the person injured was a pimp and he was only protecting the women. I dont remember whether the accused man underwent a breathalyser test. We did a security check and found a knuckle-duster in his pocket, I think.

Disputable aneurysm?

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Read also: US report on human rights: Jan Kuciak, Henry Acorda and Trinh Xuan Thanh mentioned Read more

The head of the hospital's law department claimed that a doctor allegedly wrote down aneurysm as the cause of the death but this was unwarrented. However, there are four CT scans and one excludes it.

The preliminary autopsy protocol states that a blunt-force blow caused the death.

The trial will continue on May 14 and 16, 2019. Other witnesses will be heard on May 14 and other experts and doctors on May 16, Sme wrote.

Hossu will stay in custody. The court refused his request to set him free.The Province of Ontario and Ontario Lottery & Gaming (OLG) announced on Thursday (March 21) that they will now provide $10 million in annual funding to Ontario's existing Horse Improvement Program.

The announcement was made at Georgian Downs in Innisfil, Ont. on Thursday (March 20) by Minister of Finance Vic Fedeli and Stephen Rigby, OLGs President and CEO.

The release from the Province of Ontario appears below.

Ontario's Government is putting people first by supporting rural communities through new investments to help the province's horse racing industry create and protect good jobs.

The government will provide $10 million per year to support programs for breeders and horsepeople through the Horse Improvement Program (HIP). This will support breeding and industry development for Ontario-bred horses and will be administered by Ontario Racing, replacing the Enhanced Horse Improvement Program previously administered by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

"Our horse racing sector plays a vital role in our rural communities and is an important part of Ontario's heritage. This investment will help support Ontario's breeders and horsepeople, and ensure the province's horse racing community is open for business, and can create and protect jobs," said Vic Fedeli, Minister of Finance.

The government has also worked with its industry partners to reach agreements on packages through the Optional Slots at Racetracks Program (OSARP) that includes operational funding for eligible racetracks. These packages are designed to directly support the horse racing industry and rural communities.

In addition to this funding through OSARP, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) will provide financial support to the sector through the long-term funding agreement, beginning April 1, 2019. The agreement includes funding for racetrack operations and purse support of up to $105 million per year for up to 19 years.

"Our government is committed to providing stable long-term support to help the horse racing industry build a more sustainable future for the rural businesses, jobs and communities that depend on it. This is a vital part of Ontario's heritage and our government is proud to stand behind our rural communities that rely on this industry," concluded Fedeli.

The Province of Ontario has also assembled a backgrounder to its March 21, 2019 announcement. To read the backgrounder, click here. The announcement from the Province of Ontario also contained quotes from OLG President and CEO Stephen Rigby, Ontario Racing Independent Chair John Hayes, Standardbred Breeders of Ontario Association President Walter Parkinson, and Grand River Raceway Director of Operations Jamie Martin, among others.

OLG is providing nearly two decades of funding to ensure racetracks, breeders and horsepeople have the confidence they need to guide the future of the industry, said Rigby. This support will help promote long-term, responsible management of the horse racing industry in the province.

The amended long-term funding agreement demonstrates how committed this government is to the citizens of rural communities across Ontario and respects the economic development horse racing generates in the province, said Hayes. The added support will provide racetrack operators, breeders, owners, trainers, caretakers, grooms and others who dedicate their lives to the sport a level of confidence in the long-term sustainability of the industry.

This announcement gives breeders the confidence they need to make business decisions that will ensure the health of our industry for years to come, said Parkinson

The amended long-term funding agreement gives our industry the foundation we need to work together to make decisions about whats best for the future of our industry, said Martin.

Rigby released the following statement on new funding support for horse racing in Ontario.

"The Ontario government has announced additional funding for the horse racing industry that will help more racetracks, breeders and horsepeople access support.

"Under an amended Long-Term Funding Agreement (LTFA), OLG will contribute $10 million annually to support programs for breeders and horsepeople. The LTFA also solidifies agreements with racetracks that have chosen to receive funding to support operations under the Optional Slots at Racetracks Program.

"Beginning April 1, 2019, OLG will provide nearly two decades of stable funding to help build a sustainable industry in the province. It is a comprehensive package of support that was designed to reach all areas of the industry and reaffirms OLGs commitment to invest in a sector of Ontarios gaming marketplace that provides a great deal of value to the province.

"The Agreement includes mechanisms for greater reporting, accountability and transparency, and will encourage the industry to work collaboratively on self-governance.

"Strengthening Ontarios horse racing industry will help protect thousands of jobs and provide economic benefit to rural communities across the province."

(with files from the Province of Ontario / OLG)When Delightfulmemphis wheeled first-over on heavy favourite Bettor Joy in the Blue Chip Matchmaker Series first leg on March 15, trainer Nifty Norman didnt have high hopes. As rain poured down and the track quickly changed from fast to sloppy, Bettor Joy brushed to the front and cruised untested through a half in :56.1. With Jason Bartletts whip on her tail, Delightfulmemphis worked within 1-1/2 lengths passing the three-quarters, but appeared to stall around the final turn as Tim Tetrick confidently handled the leader.

I was quite happy to be second, I thought that would be just fine; come first-over and finish second, that would be great, Norman said. I knew that other mare was a very nice mare and I didnt expect to beat her.

Luckily for Norman, Bartlett didnt concede that easily. Turning for home, the tracks leading driver kicked out the plugs and went to a strong right-handed stick. Delightfulmemphis straightened out, bore down, and inched closer and closer. The mares crossed the wire together and Delightfulmemphis got her nose in front in time to win the $40,000 series split.

I thought it was fantastic. I thought turning for home, she had no shot, but shes one of those horses who can just hang around and stay close, Norman said. Once shes in the straights, she gets wound up a little bit and right at the wire, she just lunged at that other mare. Jason said on the turns, she struggles a little bit, loses a little ground, but if you can just keep within half-a-length of another horse, she tries like hell.

Despite her first-leg series win, which boosted her seasonal record to 5-for-8 with $92,250 earned, the most of any horse so far this season, the Matchmaker wasnt the target for Delighfulmemphis all along.

Since she began her stateside career for Norman last July, the Australian Group 3 winner and Group 1 and 2 placed mare racked up wins in the conditioned ranks and Harrahs Philadelphia and the Meadowlands. However, the Bettors Delight daughter was 0-for-6 at Yonkers, including two tries in the distaff open.

To be honest, I thought she was probably a big track horse, Norman said. I thought she was a closer and I thought youd have to race her at the Meadowlands or Mohawk. I raced her at Yonkers a couple times and she got around it pretty good. I still dont really think its her forte because she likes to get home good. Shes not a great front-runner, which was sort of against her at Yonkers; shes a little bit lazy in front. But Jason has done a good job driving her. Because of Jasons help, shes worked it out and if you dont use her too hard early, she can really come a good back three-quarters.

I didnt think she was a Matchmaker horse, really, but shes gotten better and better.

The turning point came February 1 when Delightfulmemphis scored her first local victory in a $29,000 overnight. The uncharacteristic front-stepping win prompted Norman to nominate her to the series, which closed February 15. Delightfulmemphis won her first local feature that evening and finished second in the Filly and Mare Open Handicap March 8.

I only sent the cheque in right before they were due, Norman remembered. She won a non-winners of $30,000 the week before and I said, you know what, why not? You might as well be in it and she had just won, so that helped pay for the starting fee, so thats when I decided.

Although she established herself as one to watch with her first-leg win, Delightfulmemphis will still have her work cut out for her in week two. She drew post two in the fourth and final division Friday night (March 22), which features fellow first-leg victors Shartin and Seaswift Joy, who drew posts eight and seven, respectively. Feelin Red Hot finished second to Seaswift Joy last week and drew post five while Obvious Blue Chip, compromised by post seven last out, will start along the pylons. Dudesalady, Angels Pride, and Sell A Bit complete the lineup.

Its a good race. Obviously Shartin is probably the best mare in the country, so shes tough to beat any time. I think were in a good spot there with post two to not do too much work early and just hope we can get a good run at the end and pick up a good cheque, Norman said.

Apart from Shartin, I think shes probably competitive with most of the others. Its a tough series. Id actually like to get another top-two finish so you could maybe give her a week off somewhere along the way. Having a good draw helps, so well just see how it works out.

Friday nights card features four divisions of the Matchmaker Series Second Leg while the George Morton Levy Series goes with six splits Saturday, March 23. Monday nights card features the $58,000 Petticoat Series Final and the $60,200 Sagamore Hill finale goes Tuesday night.

Live harness racing is featured at Yonkers Raceway every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. First post time is 6:50 p.m.

(SOA of NY)We have used your information to see if you have a subscription with us, but did not find one. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription.University of California Los Angeles

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) offers an Executive MBA program that students can complete over 22 months by attending weekend courses. Students can either choose a biweekly program in which they would meet on Fridays and Saturdays every other week or a monthly program that would only require one in-person weekend per month in addition to online components. This program requires that students complete a number of core courses that cover topics like organizational behavior, comparative business policy, and managerial accounting, in additional to student-selected electives. Between the first and second years of the program, students also must complete a week-long business residential along with faculty and classmates. Additionally, students interested in more global experience can select a global immersion from the list of possible elective courses.

Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles

The Executive MBA Program at Loyola Marymount University is divided into four modules that students complete over a 20-month time frame by attending class each Saturday. Each module includes coursework that is broadly categorized by that module's theme. These themes cover topics like foundational business concepts, global business, and organizational performance. In addition to typical coursework, this program also involves a number of other components, some of which entail traveling. During the summer session between the first and second year, students will learn about entrepreneurship and other topics in business by taking a trip to Silicon Valley and Sacramento. The last module of the program also involves travel, but to an international location where students will spend 10 days learning about global business concepts. The program also kicks off with an Executive Leadership Retreat during which time students will meet their classmates, faculty members, and prepare for the next 20 months.

University of Southern California

Another option for students is the Executive MBA program at the University of Southern California. This program is structured on a biweekly schedule, which requires students to attend courses on Fridays and Saturdays two times per month for 22 months. The curriculum of this program is split into ten different themes, five of which are explored during each year of the program. These themes cover a wide variety of topics, from strategic planning to market performance, and they are designed to provide students with both a broad and in-depth understanding of a variety of topics in business. This program also includes international travel during the seventh theme, as students will participate in a six-day trip to a foreign location where they will learn about local businesses and focus specifically on the rule of the executive of large multi-national business and corporations.

Pepperdine University

The Pepperdine Executive MBA program is 19 months in length and requires that students meet on-campus every three weeks. This program's curriculum is made up of 45 total credit hours, most of which are completed through the coursework. In addition, the Pepperdine program also requires that students design and complete an Applied Strategic Plan, which entails choosing a business, analyzing its current state, and making a strategic plan for its future and developing various goals. Beyond coursework, students will participate in a four-day residential workshop as well as an international trip that is eight days in length in order to learn about practical skills that can be applied in the global arena.University of San Francisco

One option for students seeking an Executive MBA in the San Francisco area is the program at the University of San Francisco. In this program, students must complete 60 credit hours split among 20 courses over a time period of 20 months. Students will meet for in-person courses one weekend every month on a consecutive Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Each course is completed over two or three weekend sessions and courses may cover topics like strategic marketing, data analysis, negotiations, and ethics and social responsibility. Before the mid-program summer break, students are also required to participate in a global business practicum during which time they will spend 11 days visiting two different international locations where they will learn from different businesses and corporations operating abroad.

University of California Berkeley

Another option for students is the Executive MBA program at the University of California Berkeley, which can be completed in five academic terms. In this program, students are required to complete 10 core courses that cover areas in business like financial accounting, finance, operations management, and macroeconomics. After completing the core courses, students are able to pursue elective courses according to their interests and are able to select courses that are specifically intended for the Executive MBA program, as well as other courses that are taken by students enrolled in other Berkeley graduate programs, depending on whether they fit with a student's schedule. In addition to coursework, students are required to participate in one experiential learning immersion experience each term. These experiences take place both locally and in California, as well as in Washington D.C. and an international location.

San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University also offers an MBA for Executives program that enrolled students can complete in two years on a part-time basis by attending weekend courses twice per month. During these sessions, which meet on Friday afternoons and evenings and all day Saturdays, students will meet with the same cohort of classmates at the downtown San Francisco campus throughout the entire program. Over the course of the program, students will complete 16 total courses, or 48 credit hours.

University of Pennsylvania San Francisco

The University of Pennsylvania's business school, the Wharton School, has a San Francisco location that offers an Executive MBA program. This program entails attending immersive Friday and Saturday weekend classes every other weekend for a duration of two years. Additionally, students enrolled in this program are expected to participate in Global Business Week, which takes place in September and involves traveling to an international location. In terms of curriculum, students in this program will take core required courses in addition to elective courses. It is also possible for students to pursue a major within the program if they wish to organize their interests in one area, such as strategic management, finance, or marketing.

Golden Gate University

Golden Gate University also offers students an Executive MBA program that can be completed in a total of 16 months by attending courses every other Saturday. Students must also complete other program components online through the school's virtual learning platform. There are 13 courses that students must complete in this program, which are categorized into four different areas. These areas broadly cover topics in business knowledge, management skills, critical analysis, and business processes. Additionally, students are required to complete a capstone course that focuses on the development and implementation of a business plan.One-year programs in California generally require a combination of theoretical courses, curriculum courses, and fieldwork as a student teacher. You can choose from on-site, online, or blended programs, depending on your schedule. Prospective teachers who plan to teach at the elementary school level must earn the preliminary multiple subject teaching credential. Those interested in teaching at the middle or high school level must earn the preliminary single subject teaching credential in the subject they plan to teach. Each credential is good for five years. Some programs could lead to a Master of Science in Education, and other programs offer an additional bilingual authorization, such as Cantonese, Mandarin, and Spanish.

Coursework

These programs typically require at least 36 units of coursework taken over a full year, usually including the summer months before and after the school year. Courses can cover topics such as teaching diverse populations, planning for inclusive classrooms, and use of computers and technology in a classroom setting. Other topics could include foundational theory, teaching methods, and curriculum development. Students in a single subject credential program will also learn methods of teaching their chosen subject.

Fieldwork

A major part of the teaching credential program is the fieldwork component. Programs usually require that students gain experience in a real-world classroom setting as a student teacher. These internship opportunities can account for 12 credits and take up to a semester of full-time work. Some programs may also require students to complete a field observation component before they student-teach.Click the image above to view slideshow

Bright, large and full of colour is how some people would be inclined to describe last nights supermoon.

The moon marked the autumn equinox, which happens every year on March 21.

That is when the direct sun rays fall on the equator as it slowly moves further north, says a Facebook post from MetService New Zealand.

This happens twice a year. The second being in September when the suns direct rays migrate back to the southern hemisphere and brings warmer days to New Zealand. Read more here.

Jenny Lucey from Aongatete took some stunning photos of last nights moon.

Three shots that I managed to get last night of the red moon, she said in an email to SunLive this morning.

Plus a shot of the three cruise ships at Tauranga Port yesterday.

If you have any photos of the supermoon, wed love to see them.

Email them to newsroom@thesun.co.nz

Images by Matt Snookes Photography.Visitors from Arab countries have risen sharply in recent months, while tourists from European countries are also starting to explore the country writes Al-Watan.

Syrias Deputy Tourism Minister, Bassam Barsik. said that a number of French tourist groups had visited the country at the start of the year, adding that more groups were expected later in the year and called for the necessary measures to be taken for that.

Barsik told Al-Watan that some Spanish tourism offices were doing visits to the country because they are equipped to send full tourist groups. The same thing applies to Italian tourism. He added that there were some Italian offices which were equipped to send tourist groups and that a large number of French companies had expressed their desire to work with Syria and had sent Syrian tourism and travel offices the names of delegations and the necessary identity papers to receive tourism delegations.

He said that other tour groups from the Netherlands, Switzerland and elsewhere had come, but not continuously. He said that it was expected that French, Italian and Spanish tour companies had the ability to send tour groups all year round, and noted the importance of Syria reentering the international tourism market.

Barsik said that Arab tour groups were currently limited to religious tours. He said that most of them came from Iraq, Lebanon and that some tourism came from Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. He said that more than 100,000 Jordanian visitors had entered over the last two months of 2018, coinciding with the reopening of the Nasib border crossing. He said with the end of 2018, there were tourism arrivals for recreation and shopping, especially from neighboring countries such as Lebanon. He denied that there was progress being made to entice Egyptian tourists.

Barsik said that an Italian company had met with the Syrian tourism offices to obtain offers for tours inside the country, noting that the messages from the company indicated that it was ready to send tour groups soon.

Barsik said that the Ministry was following up on the work of the tourism and travel offices through reports it requests from tour guides for each tour, as well as securing the necessary official documents and paperwork, and the necessary approvals for each office in coordination with the relevant authorities.

He said that the Ministry had signed an annex to the agreement with the Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization to increase the number of religious tourists coming from Iran, as well as participating in foreign conventions, preparing for tourist days in some countries that could be sources of tourism. There are also meetings being held with tourism and travel offices and airlines to attract investment. He added that there was cooperation with foreign offices, inviting them to visit the country with the costs of their tours inside the country covered. He noted that all these measures were within the framework of tourism promotion.

He said that 1.8 million visitors had entered Syria last year, adding that some of them came for tourism purposes and others entered for a single daythat is, they entered and exited on the same day, most of them holding Lebanese citizenshipand some were for other non-touristic purposes.

Barsik said that conditions did not allow for statistical surveys, especially with regards to border crossings. It was also not possible to allocate budgets for this purpose or to send people to conduct surveys. He added that work had begun to restore work on statistical surveys in order to obtain precise figures. He said that figures on the number of visitors could be used now, since they give information on the numbers and the country of origin of those arriving.

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.Syrian businessmen are taking advantage of the large amount of scrap metal in the country and the high price it garners on the market reports Asharq al-Awsat.

Syria has been witnessing a growing rivalry among wealthy pro-regime businessmen to share the spoils of war by buying and re-manufacturing iron scrap collected from devastated areas that were regained by regime forces.

The Syrian army has been able to recover many areas, which fell under the control of the armed opposition factions, ISIS or Al-Nusra Front, after fierce battles caused the near complete destruction of many cities, as in the eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo (North), the old city of Homs (central), Daraya in Rif Dimashq (Damascus countryside province), and Yarmouk refugee camp south of Damascus.

Well-informed sources told Asharq Al-Awsat that officers, who had led military operations to regain areas falling under the control of armed factions, agreed on a division of shares by installing themselves as de facto rulers of self-drawn sectors.

The sources pointed out that laborers and military personnel were working to dismantle doors and windows and to remove iron bars from destroyed roofs, under the armys supervision and the officers orders.

The government has turned a blind eye to the sale of scrap metal by those who control these areas, including officers and pro-regime militiamen, the sources remarked. It is as simple as that.

They said that the iron was exclusively sold to Damascus-based Hamsho International. They refrained, however, from mentioning the amounts of metal that is collected daily and sold to the company.

According to eyewitnesses who spoke to Asharq Al-Awsat, dozens of trucks loaded with iron scrap have crossed on a daily basis the eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo towards the south of the country.

During the war, the price of a ton of high-tensile iron used in construction increased from 45,000 Syrian Liras in 2010 to 340,000 Liras presently (1$=535 Syrian Liras), due to the suspension of work at a number of iron factories.

Mohammad Hamsho is currently Secretary of the Damascus Chamber of Commerce, Secretary of the Federation of Syrian Chambers of Commerce and member of the Peoples Assembly (Parliament) of Damascus. He has been subject to US sanctions since 2011.

In December 2015, Prime Minister Wael Al-Halaki issued a decree establishing the Syrian Council for Metals and Steel, headed by Hamsho, and appointing a board of directors of 17 members.

Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.Regime bombardments have struck areas that were designated as demilitarized zones in the Idleb agreement reports Smart News Agency.

In the space of just one month, 750 families were displaced from the al-Huwayz village north of the city of Hama to Idleb province, as a result of the heavy bombardment by Assad regime forces, which caused major destruction of civilian homes.

Local activists said that as a result of the regimes repeated bombardment, a large number of village residents were displaced, with only 200 families remaining. The displaced headed to the Atmeh and Deir Hassan camps as well as the Jabel Zawiya area.

In a statement to Smart, the head of the villages local council, Mohamed Khitab, said that before the bombardment the village had been home to 8,250 people, including 1,750 displaced people.

Regime forces are continuing to strike liberated areas, especially those that there included as part of the demilitarized zone, following the Idleb agreement. The bombardment of al-Howija village, north of Hama, recently wounded a woman and caused damage to homes.

Cities and villages of the northern Hama countryside have seen widespread displacement as as result of the bombardments. The Humanitarian Response Team said that 88,942 people, most of them women and children, had been displaced from Khan Sheikhoun alone.

Local media said that civilians fleeing the bombing had mostly headed toward the camps near the Turkish border. The head of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, Abdurrahman Mustafa, condemned the continuous bombardment by regime forces on the areas included in the Idleb agreement, and asked what role the United Nations had to play toward protecting Hamas civilians, in addition to the role of Assads guarantors in stopping his criminal and terrorist behavior.

Assads forces also struck the Markaba village north of Hama without causing any damage. Regime forces deployed in the town of Shathah also bombarded the village of Bas al-Taqa north of Hama with rockets, without any dead or wounded.

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 Syrian Trading Establishment has said that they will be offering a number of electrical and household goods, which can be bought as gifts reports Business2Business.

The Syrian Trading Establishment has announced that all state employees will be offered a loan of 50,000 Syrian pounds, which can be paid back over 10 months, on the occasion of Mothers Day and Teachers Day.

The general director of the company, Ahmed Najm, said that state employees could take advantage of the offer during March, adding that the Syrian Trading Establishment would provide in all its trade halls and branches in the province a wide selection of consumer, food and electrical supplies and household goods.

Commenting on this, Huwaida, a university student, told Business2Business that this loan was for state employees, and as a university student she couldnt take advantage of it, and so she would try to buy a simple symbolic gift for her mother.

Samih, a government employee, said that he would not spend 10 months paying off a loan to buy an expensive Mothers Day gift, adding that the gift would be replaced by a small amount of money, since the occasion couldnt pass without his mother receiving some gift.

Noha, a housewife, told Business2Business that she would not wait for a gift from her children because she knew their economic situation. She added that she had invited them to eat together on the condition that no one was to bring her a gift, so as to not put them into a financial crisis.

To monitor prices of the main Mothers Day gifts, a Business2Business team went to some markets in the capital to see the situation and hear the views of residents.

A number of Damascus goldsmiths noted the weak demand for gold ornaments this year. A member of the Goldsmiths and Jewelry-makers Association in Damascus, Elias Malkiyeh, said that the market was still stagnate, despite Mothers Day approaching, a time when sale conditions would usually improve, citing the weak purchasing power among residents as the main reason for the downturn.

Karim, an owner of a household goods shop, said that buying and selling was weak this year compared to last year, noting the increased prices and low income of individuals, which has led to limited interest in gifts.

Adel, owner of a clothing shop, agreed. He told Business2Business that there was no demand for buying clothes for Mothers Day and that the weak buying and selling was a shock for traders, since Mothers Day is considered an important season for sales.

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.On the anniversary of the start of the civil war, France, Germany, UK and US have reiterated their condemnation of the Assad regime and attacks on civilians.

The government envoys to Syria of France, Germany, UK and US have released a statement on the 8th anniversary of the Syrian conflict. Below is the text of the statement.

Eight years ago today, tens of thousands of Syrians took to the streets to claim the right to express themselves freely, call for reform, and demand justice. The Assad regimes brutal response, and role in the conflict that followed, resulted in the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II.

We recognize the brave men and women from across Syrias diverse society who have worked towards a better future for all Syrians. We also remember the countless civilians who have lost their lives from torture, starvation, and attacks by the regime and its backers. Over 400,000 men, women, and children have been killed. Tens of thousands have been disappeared into Assads prison system, where many have been tortured and killed. Countless families still have no news of the relatives they have lost, and have no closure.

Whilst the Assad regime and its backers try to convince the world that the conflict is over and that life has returned to normal, the reality is that the regimes suppression of the Syrian people has not ended. Approximately 13 million Syrians are now in need of humanitarian assistance, many of them still denied safe and unhindered humanitarian access by the regime. Over 11 million  half of Syrias prewar population  are displaced, unable to return home. The violence in Idlib has recently increased, and airstrikes have taken the lives of civilians and humanitarian workers.

The military solution the Syrian regime hopes to achieve, with backing from Russia and Iran, will not bring peace. The only way to end the violence and economic hardship as well as to secure a lasting settlement to the conflict is a negotiated political solution. And only a political solution can provide the necessary guarantees for all components of Syrian society as well as for Syrias neighbors.

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, and to consolidate the gains achieved by the liberation of territory from ISIS. We will continue to pursue accountability for the crimes committed in the Syrian conflict in order to achieve justice and reconciliation for the Syrian people. 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. Russia and Syria must respect the right of Syrian refugees to return home voluntarily and safely, end pretenses that conditions are right for reconstruction and normalization, and we call on them to engage seriously in the negotiations that alone can bring peace to Syria.

Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Syrian Observer.Click the photo to write a caption and have a chance to win a free subscription to the Norfolk Daily News.

Photo shows the area on the Coast Guard cutter Spencers diesel engine where the MIT-developed Dashboard detected damage that could have caused a fire. The damage was hidden under the brown cap at center. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A new system devised by researchers at MIT can monitor the behavior of all electric devices within a building, ship, or factory, determining which ones are in use at any given time and whether any are showing signs of an imminent failure. When tested on a Coast Guard cutter, the system pinpointed a motor with burnt-out wiring that could have led to a serious onboard fire.

The new sensor, whose readings can be monitored on an easy-to-use graphic display called a NILM (non-intrusive load monitoring) dashboard, is described in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, in a paper by MIT professor of electrical engineering Steven Leeb, recent graduate Andre Aboulian MS '18, and seven others at MIT, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Naval Academy. A second paper will appear in the April issue of Marine Technology, the publication of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.

The system uses a sensor that simply is attached to the outside of an electrical wire at a single point, without requiring any cutting or splicing of wires. From that single point, it can sense the flow of current in the adjacent wire, and detect the distinctive "signatures" of each motor, pump, or piece of equipment in the circuit by analyzing tiny, unique fluctuations in the voltage and current whenever a device switches on or off. The system can also be used to monitor energy usage, to identify possible efficiency improvements and determine when and where devices are in use or sitting idle.

Inspection showed that some of the diesel engines water heating coils, at right, were severely corroded. An uncorroded coil is shown at left. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The technology is especially well-suited for relatively small, contained electrical systems such as those serving a small ship, building, or factory with a limited number of devices to monitor. In a series of tests on a Coast Guard cutter based in Boston, the system provided a dramatic demonstration last year.

About 20 motors and devices were being tracked by a single dashboard, connected to two different sensors, on the cutter USCGC Spencer. The sensors, which in this case had a hard-wired connection, showed that an anomalous amount of power was being drawn by a component of the ship's main diesel engines called a jacket water heater. At that point, Leeb says, crewmembers were skeptical about the reading but went to check it anyway. The heaters are hidden under protective metal covers, but as soon as the cover was removed from the suspect device, smoke came pouring out, and severe corrosion and broken insulation were clearly revealed.

"The ship is complicated," Leeb says. "It's magnificently run and maintained, but nobody is going to be able to spot everything."

An overview of the Coast Guard cutter Spencer, where the MIT-developed Dashboard spotted problems that could have led to an electrical fire, in time to avert the danger. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lt. Col. Nicholas Galanti, engineer officer on the cutter, says "the advance warning from NILM enabled Spencer to procure and replace these heaters during our in-port maintenance period, and deploy with a fully mission-capable jacket water system. Furthermore, NILM detected a serious shock hazard and may have prevented a class Charlie [electrical] fire in our engine room."

The system is designed to be easy to use with little training. The computer dashboard features dials for each device being monitored, with needles that will stay in the green zone when things are normal, but swing into the yellow or red zone when a problem is spotted.

Detecting anomalies before they become serious hazards is the dashboard's primary task, but Leeb points out that it can also perform other useful functions. By constantly monitoring which devices are being used at what times, it could enable energy audits to find devices that were turned on unnecessarily when nobody was using them, or spot less-efficient motors that are drawing more current than their similar counterparts. It could also help ensure that proper maintenance and inspection procedures are being followed, by showing whether or not a device has been activated as scheduled for a given test.

The monitoring system provides an easy-to-read display to show crew members the condition of the various electrical devices being monitored. As long as the needle stays in the green area, the device is operating normally, but if it goes to the orange or red segments, it means theres an issue that needs to be checked. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"It's a three-legged stool," Leeb says. The system allows for "energy scorekeeping, activity tracking, and condition-based monitoring." But it's that last capability that could be crucial, "especially for people with mission-critical systems," he says. In addition to the Coast Guard and the Navy, he says, that includes companies such as oil producers or chemical manufacturers, who need to monitor factories and field sites that include flammable and hazardous materials and thus require wide safety margins in their operation.

One important characteristic of the system that is attractive for both military and industrial applications, Leeb says, is that all of its computation and analysis can be done locally, within the system itself, and does not require an internet connection at all, so the system can be physically and electronically isolated and thus highly resistant to any outside tampering or data theft.

Although for testing purposes the team has installed both hard-wired and noncontact versions of the monitoring systemboth types were installed in different parts of the Coast Guard cutterthe tests have shown that the noncontact version could likely produce sufficient information, making the installation process much simpler. While the anomaly they found on that cutter came from the wired version, Leeb says, "if the noncontact version was installed" in that part of the ship, "we would see almost the same thing."

Explore further Power savings: ONR research helps Navy curb kilowatts

More information: Andre Aboulian et al. NILM Dashboard: A Power System Monitor for Electromechanical Equipment Diagnostics, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (2018). Andre Aboulian et al. NILM Dashboard: A Power System Monitor for Electromechanical Equipment Diagnostics,(2018). DOI: 10.1109/TII.2018.2843770

This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.Morocco-India Joint Committee has convened its 6th meeting in New Delhi to look into ways of boosting cooperation between the two countries in industry, agriculture, tourism, fisheries, railways, rural development, health, the pharmaceutical industry, telemedicine, energy, mining, sustainable development, higher education and scientific research.

The meeting was chaired by minister of Industry, Investment, Trade and Digital Economy Moulay Hafid Elalamy and Indias Minister of State for Commerce and Industry and food, C. R. Chaudhary.

The Joint committee pledged to build a sustainable economic partnership, end double taxation and set up a joint working group on tariff and non-tariff barriers in order to bolster trade exchanges.

Morocco-India talks also focused on cooperation prospects in justice, security, health, culture, social economy, vocational training, youth and sports.

The Moroccan delegation led by Moulay Hafid Elalamy took part in the 14th CCI-Exim Bank Conclave on India held March 17-19, with the participation of delegations from 21 African countries.

Under the theme India and Africa: Shaping a Global Partnership for a Better World, the event sought to lay the ground for more Indo-African cooperation, enabling Indian industry to play a bigger part in Africas manufacture renaissance.

Relations between Morocco and Indi gained momentum following the visit paid by King Mohammed VI to India in 2015 during which the Sovereign and Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to build a Strategic Partnership. The King had then participated in the third India-Africa Summit Forum.

Morocco-India trade relations have scored a steady growth. In 2014, trade between the two countries stood at $1.3 billion, with Indias exports to Morocco amounting to $500.5 million, while imports were valued at $855.8 million.

The balance of trade is generally in favor of Morocco because of Indias imports of phosphates. India sources a large chunk of its rock phosphates and phosphoric acid requirements for its fertilizer industry from Morocco, the worlds biggest phosphate exporter.Kevin is Just another X Ray Technician trying to get into blogging and help individuals interested in an amazing career for xray tech.

Register for options trading expo to get the best stock market education.Learn about bettertrades mission,methods and pledge here.

Please note. I welcome any and all comments from any political perspective. I will not stand or approve any swearing, and personal attacks will likely also not be approved.

Sudan Thursday said it summoned Egypts ambassador to protest concessions tenders issued by Egypt in the disputed Halayeb triangle.

The foreign ministry summoned the Egyptian ambassador Hossam Eissa on Thursday to protest against the tenders issued by the Egyptian oil ministry for areas under the sovereignty of Sudan, Sudans foreign ministry said in a statement.

Egypt on March 10, through its state-owned South Valley Egyptian Petroleum Holding, invited bids for 10 oil and gas exploration blocks in Halayeb triangle, France24 reports.

Egypt considers the triangle washed with mineral as part of its territorial waters in the Red Sea while Sudan has, shortly after independence in 1956, claimed sovereignty over the area.

The Sudanese foreign ministry called on Egypt to forsake tenders adding that it can take measures to prevent any company from operating in this area.

Saad al-Deen Hussein al-Bishri, minister of state at Khartoums Oil Ministry had lambasted on Wednesday Egypt noting that the call for bids is a direct intrusion into the authority of the Sudanese Oil and Gas Ministry in granting exploration licenses in that area.

It is considered an illegal operation that carries legal consequences which will be borne by the entities carrying out this operation, state-own news agency SUNA quoted the minister as saying.Mauritania has banned at least 12,000 Senegalese fishermen from fishing in its waters despite the agreement signed with its neighbor last December.

They want zero foreigners in the boats, Cheikh Sidath Ndiaye, member of the National Council of Social Dialogue said early this week in reference to Mauritanian authorities.

The decision bars at least 12,000 Senegalese fishermen from entering Mauritanian waters for fishing activities.

The move is U-turn from the Mauritanian side. The two countries reached a deal in December, defusing the tension that had erupted after Nouakchott detained dozens of Senegalese fishermen and their trawlers over violating its national waters.

The December deal allows Senegalese fishermen catch 50,000 tons of fish per year, under 400 licenses.

Mamadou Wade, spokesman of Senegalese fishermen in the Mauritanian town of Guet-Ndar said the deal was subject to conditions including inspection and weighing of every catch.

The Senegalese government will ensure the strict enforcement of the agreement, said Minister of fisheries and maritime economy, Oumar Gueye.The parties to the Sahara conflict Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and the separatist Polisario front will convene a third meeting to discuss a realistic, political, lasting and mutually acceptable solution to the over-four decade conflict, the UN Personal Envoy to the Sahara said.

Delegations engaged courteously and openly in an atmosphere of respect, said the UN envoy Horst Kohler in a statement at the end of the second roundtable held at Le Chateau Le Rosey in Bursins, near Geneva, March 21-22 with the participation of the parties to the conflict.

Delegations held in-depth discussions on how to achieve a mutually acceptable political solution to the question of Western Sahara, he said.

The UN statement underscored that the solution should also be realistic, practicable, enduring and based on compromise in line with Security Council Resolution 2240 which stressed the need for the participation of Algeria in negotiations.

Algeria, which arms, hosts and backs the Polisario separatist front diplomatically has refused in the last four decades to pull its head out of the sand as it continues to deny any responsibility in the Sahara conflict.

The statement clearly puts the third round on the track of finding a mutually acceptable solution, which de facto overrules the unfeasible option of a referendum for independence pushed for by the Polisario and its mentor, Algeria.

The Moroccan delegation, led by foreign minister Nasser Bourita, made it clear that the autonomy initiative offered by Morocco to settle the conflict since 2007 is in line with the UN Security Council resolution to find a realistic and mutually acceptable solution.A blog for students in my introductory classes in government, and any interested passersby. You'll find news items and random stories that illustrate any of the topics we cover in class. Special attention will be paid to the constitutional issues associated with contemporary issues and disputes. Feel free to send me stories you find important. Please note that due to spam, I'm limiting the ability of people to comment on these pages. My apologies.Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.The opening of the new shopping centre in Cloche d'or will provide many job openings.

An opportunity for Luxembourg's unemployed and equally a challenge for the employers, who are looking to recruit a lot of people.

The clock is ticking for both builders and recruiters. The new shopping centre in Cloche d'or is scheduled to open mid-May.

130 shops, more than 20 restaurants, and a large supermarket are therefore looking for employees.

As a result, the National Employment Agency (ADEM) organised a Jobday all about the different jobs available at the shopping centre. Only 35 out of more than 100 shops and restaurants attended the event, but they were looking to fill 700 different jobs.

More than 900 job-seekers had signed up for the event in advance via ADEM. According to estimates, up to 2000 people attended the Jobday on 7 March.Finding a lasting and mutually acceptable solution to the Sahara would benefit the whole region of the Maghreb, the UN Personal Envoy for the Sahara Horst Kohler said in a statement at the end of the second round of negotiations held at Le Chateau Le Rosey in Bursins, near Geneva, March 21-22 with the participation of delegations from Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and the Polisario.

The Maghreb integration remained in limbo due to Algerias support for separatism in Morocco. Algerias stance over the Sahara conflict left the Maghreb one of the least integrated regions in the world.

Borders between Morocco and Algeria are maintained closed since 1994 despite repetitive calls by Morocco to move forward in bilateral ties.

In contrast to other regions in Sub-Saharan Africa such as the ECOWAS where countries agree on common currencies and trade zones, Algeria digs deeper ditches and concrete walls rise on both sides, hijacking the dreams of their peoples to a regional integration and making hard the lives of families on the borders.

Algerias hegemonic schemes, its closed-border policy and support for separatism in the Sahara have been factors that hampered the achievement of the Maghreb Union. The economic cost is tremendous. The low performance of this regional block is evidenced in an intra-Maghreban trade not exceeding 4.8% of the Maghrebs trade volume representing less than 2% of the sub-regions combined GDP.

If the five Maghreb countries were integrated, each would gain a minimum 5% rise in GDP, the World Economic Forum said in a report published in late 2017.

Deeper integration, including the liberalizing of services and reform of investment rules would have increased the per capita real GDP between 2005 and 2015 by 34% for Algeria, 27% for Morocco and 24% for Tunisia.

However, the reality and future prospects of the union are dim in light of an ailing Algerian leadership espousing an ideological anachronism and teetering on the verge of economic collapse.

Today, more than 29 years after its creation in 1989, the north African regional grouping failed to achieve its main goals: a customs union which was due to be launched in 1995 and an economic market by 2000.

The fact that the last summit of the five countries heads of state took place in 1994 is indicative of the stalemate in Maghreban regional cooperation.In February 2019, 182 people requested asylum in Luxembourg, increasing the number of requests to 408 so far in 2019.

Most requests for international protection last month came from people originating from Eritrea (57).

The second largest group of 21 individuals were from Syria, followed by 15 from Iraq, and 14 from Afghanistan.

In February, 88 individuals were granted refugee status.

Eleven individuals had to return to their country of origin, of which three had to be forced to return.Over the course of the last few days, customs officers were able to uncover a large drug network in the south of the country.

Following three months of investigating a drug network, customs were able to catch two drug dealers who were mostly active in the south of Luxembourg.

Officers confiscated 5kg of heroin, some cash, cocaine and hashish.

During a later raid of a house, they fund an additional 220 grams of heroin and supplies to make heroin balls.

The market worth of the confiscated drugs exceeds 100,000.

A third person - an accomplice - was also detained and presented to the judge.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Moroccan economy & finance minister, Mohamed Benchaaboun, conferred Thursday in Brussels with the European Commissioner for economic & financial Affairs, taxation and Customs, Pierre Moscovici who praised Moroccos effort to promote tax good governance.

The EU-Morocco economic cooperation prospects were also tackled at this meeting, which was an opportunity for both sides to reiterate the shared commitment of Rabat and Brussels to enhance further their partnership in various sectors.

Following his meeting with the EU finance chief, Benchaaboun said the EU commissioner welcomed Moroccos commitment to comply with the rules of good governance, citing in this regard the Moroccan framework draft law setting out the main principles of taxation and good fiscal governance.

The EU official also commended Morocco for changing its tax regimes and hailed its cooperation with the EU in this field. The Commissioner will visit Morocco soon to deepen further the EU economic cooperation with the North African country, saying the bilateral fisheries and agricultural agreements will come into force very soon.

Morocco is a country on which we rely a lot, added the European Commissioner.

Mohamed Benchaaboun took part Thursday at a high-level conference on sustainable finance held in Brussels, on global approach to sustainable finance.

He seized the opportunity to present Moroccos experience and achievements in this field.

He told the media afterwards that the conference touched on the experience of solar power plants, the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (MASEN) and its agreement with the African Development Bank (AfDB). The Triple A initiative launched by Morocco to adapt African agriculture to climate change, and the work done by the banking system in relation with sustainable finance, were also brought up, he said.

The Moroccan experience was highly appreciated by the European Union and all participants in this conference, mainly Asian countries such as Japan and India, which take keen interest in Africas contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The 2nd edition of the high-level conference on sustainable finance is organized at the initiative of the European Union, and is aimed at setting up a coherent international financial system capable of directing private capital towards sustainable projects.Going down? Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Indonesias Garuda announced earlier today that it was cancelling its $6 billion, 49-plane order for the 737 MAX, and was in discussions with Boeing about returning the one aircraft of that order already delivered. This is the first cancellation of a 737 MAX order since the worldwide fleet was grounded on March 13. (Lion Air, another Indonesian carrier, reportedly decided to switch a $22 billion, 200-plane order to rival Airbus after losing a 737 MAX in a crash in October.)

The reason is that Garuda passengers in Indonesia have lost trust and no longer have the confidence in the plane, a company spokesman said.

Fifty planes is a drop in the bucket compared to the 5,000 orders that Boeing now has on the books, but it raises the prospect that other carriers may follow suit. The possibility that the 737 MAX could be a toxic brand is a terrifying prospect for Boeing. The 737 family is the best-selling plane the company has ever built, with over 10,000 sold since its introduction in 1967. Today 737 MAX sales account for a third of Boeings profits. If the model has to be written off, it could cost the company more than $5 billion. Could Boeing survive the loss of its flagship product?

The Garuda move is just the latest in a string of hits Boeing has taken since Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed on March 10. Last week, airlines and aviation regulators around the world grounded the plane, forcing the FAA to do the same. Then came a string of embarrasing revelations, including the fact that FAA managers had pushed its safety personnel to delegate assessment of the planes safety to engineers at the company.

On Wednesday the Seattle Times reported that the FBI had joined a criminal investigation into the certification of the 737 MAX that had been launched by the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Transportation.

Yesterday it was revealed that neither the Lion Air nor the Ethiopian Airlines plane had been supplied with two optional safety features that would have provided the pilots visual cues regarding the key sensor whose failure is believed to have triggered the crash. The Times reported that Boeing will start providing one of those features as standard equipment.

Boeing has endured furors over aircraft flaws before. Shortly after it introduced its most recent all-new design, the 787, the fleet was grounded for four months after several planes lithium-ion batteries caught fire. But no passengers were injued in those incidents, and as they faded into the background they came to seem like the kinds of teething pains you often see in an all-new design.

To find an aircraft that has had such a pall cast over it, you have to go back to the de Havilland Comet, an early passenger jet that first flew in 1949. A design flaw caused two of the planes to break up in midair, killing everyone onboard, and even after the problem was fixed the Comet had a reputation as a death trap. Orders dried up, and in 1960 de Havilland was absorbed by Hawker Siddeley.

Boeing is a corporation of a different order of magnitude than de Havilland ever was, though. A product of an age of consolidation, it in recent years has swallowed up competitors such as McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell International, and joined with rival Lockheed Martin to form the space-rocket builder United Launch Alliance. With $100 billion in annual revenue, it ranks as the United States largest exporter. And it has enormous political pull: The acting secretary of defense, Patrick Shanahan, was an executive at Boeing for 30 years. Reportedly Trump didnt make his announcement about the grounding of the 737 MAX fleet until after Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg gave him his approval over the phone.

If any company has the wherewithal to weather a storm it is Boeing. But at this point theres no way to know how big the storm could become.

As veteran aviation journalist Jon Ostrower points out on the website the Air Current, Boeings short-term future is clouded by the fact that it is coming off a decade of overproduction fed by low oil prices and rapid airline growth around the world. Now that that breakneck growth is cooling, the global aviation industry might have more airliners than it needs. The last time demand collapsed, amid the post-9/11 recession, Boeings deliveries fell by more than half from its 1999 peak and stayed low for three years. Even that wasnt as bad as the early 70s, when it went more than a year without receiving any new orders from a U.S. airline and wound up laying off half its workforce.

Still, amid all that turmoil, Boeing survived. So you could read the lessons of history as showing just how bad things could get. Or you could take them as showing how much punishment Boeing can absorb and still keep soldiering on.Coffee sales in Vietnam are slowing due to low prices, while supply rose in Indonesia as produces from a mini harvest reached the market earlier than expected.

Farmers in Vietnam have sold 60-70 percent of their beans harvested in the 2018-19 crop year that began on Oct. 1.

Sales are slowing as farmers are complaining that prices are too low now, said a trader based in the Central Highlands, Vietnams largest coffee growing area.

Farmers in the Central Highlands sold coffee at 31,900 - 33,300 dong ($1.38-$1.44) per kg on Thursday, compared with 31,900-33,700 dong last week.

They are refraining from selling further as current prices are only slightly above the production cost, the trader added.

Another trader said low prices also discouraged farmers to water their coffee trees already suffering from a drought in the region.

Its still too early to say if the drought will hurt the output of the next crop year, because if it rains when the trees are blossoming after the drought, it will be perfect for the next crop year, the second trader said.

Traders in Vietnam offered 5 percent black and broken grade 2 robusta at a $55-$60 per tonne discount to the May contract, compared with $50 last week.

In Indonesia, supplies from the mini harvest in the southern part of Sumatra came slightly ahead of expectation of around April.

A trader in the Lampung province in Sumatra said supplies this week rose 10-15 percent from last week.

Premium for the grade 4 defect 80 robusta was steady on last week at $70-$80 to the May contract on Thursday, the trader said.

May robusta coffee settled down $13, or 0.9 percent, at $1,495 per tonne on Wednesday, giving up some of the previous sessions gains.A high school in Ho Chi Minh City has allowed more than 200 students to apply geography knowledge to real life situations by having them calculate the circumference of the Earth, rather than merely learning whats in the textbooks.

The extracurricular activity, something rarely seen among schools in the Southeast Asian country, was held on Thursday morning by District 5-based Tran Khai Nguyen High School for its students and other high schools in the area, including Tran Huu Trang, Hung Vuong, and Suong Nguyet Anh.

Over 200 high school students were joined by physics and geography teachers in the extracurricular activity deliberately held on Equinox Day, a day which occurs twice a year when the plane of Earths equator passes through the center of the Sun.

During the outdoor session held on the grounds of Tran Khai Nguyen High School, the students were asked to calculate not only the circumference of Earth but also the distance from Ho Chi Minh City to the Equator.

Students calculate the circumference of the Earth at Tran Khai Nguyen High School in Ho Chi Minh City, March 21, 2019. Photo: Nhu Hung / Tuoi Tre

The activity helped students understand the fundamental concepts of meteorology such as the shape of the Earth, how the Sun moves in the sky, how shadows change across the days in different seasons, according to Ngo Hung Cuong, vice headmaster of Tran Khai Nguyen High School.

More importantly, the session was an opportunity for students to implement the theories they learnt in different subjects including geography, meteorology, physics, and math into practical contexts, while also boosting their creativity and passion for science.

Through this outdoor session we were able to place our knowledge into practical contexts, while it was also a good opportunity for us to learn from students from other schools, Tran Quang Huy, a student from Thuc hanh Sai Gon High School, said excitedly.

Here are some of the photos of the session taken by Tuoi Tre's Nhu Hung:

An expert from the meteorology club of Ho Chi Minh City instructs students how to measure the Earths circumference at Tran Khai Nguyen High School in Ho Chi Minh City, March 21, 2019. Photo: Nhu Hung / Tuoi Tre

A teacher (left) helps students calculate the circumference of the Earth at Tran Khai Nguyen High School in Ho Chi Minh City, March 21, 2019. Photo: Nhu Hung / Tuoi Tre

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!Vietnamese textbooks fail to sufficiently stimulate and motivate students, while teachers in Vietnam face several uphill challenges in regard to curricula, a former British teacher has said.

Alan West, chief executive of the British Company Exscitec Ltd., told Tuoi Tre News in an interview that the biggest challenge that Vietnamese teachers meet at the moment are the shortfalls of the current curricula imposed by the Ministry of Education and Training, particularly in that the program does not allow sufficient time for students to do their best in classes.

This is the main cause for the lack of creativity present at most Vietnamese schools with regard to teaching methods, the Briton underlined.

West, a former chemistry teacher in the UK, is in Vietnam to introduce a new teaching method to local teachers that aims to increase students performance and critical thinking.

Alan West advises Vietnamese teachers on how to help their students convert theory into practice during a training session in Ho Chi Minh City, March 13, 2019. Photo: Ha My / Tuoi Tre News

Having a good foundation

West has so far worked with nearly 1,000 teachers from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City at training sessions designed to help Vietnamese teachers integrate new teaching techniques and approaches into Vietnams standard curriculum.

According to the expert, in the UK many teachers do not specialize in the subject they teach, unlike in Vietnam, where a teacher has a specific understanding of the subject they teach.

As a teacher usually teaches only one subject, this allows more flexibility and implementation of the subjects knowledge into practice thanks to their in depth understanding, West told Tuoi Tre News.

Teachers lacking a sufficient understanding of the material are usually only one textbook page ahead of their students, according to the British executive.

He added that without a proper understanding of a subject, teachers cannot be confident in stepping outside their comfort zone and are unable to apply knowledge in practical contexts.

Additionally, because of the long-embedded tradition and mindset that teachers are knowledge providers, many are still lacking in the bravery to say, I dont know. How can we find out?, when they do not have answers to a problem.

This is an unrealistic concept especially in this tech-driven world, West said, indicating that it is high time teachers in Vietnam moved from their traditional role to a more modern one.

According to West, teachers should show students how and where to find answers rather simply just regurgitating facts.

While teachers need to adapt to their new roles, students must also change from being 'passive' receivers of 'given knowledge' to proactive seekers of the knowledge they need to solve problems, West said.

In Vietnam, succeeding on an exam is usually a students ultimate goal, so teachers feel safer by closely following the guidelines of the education ministry instead of going off the beaten track.

The teachers we have worked with are keen to embrace change but are anxious about teaching situations that are more open rather than prescribed, the former chemistry teacher elaborated.

Time is also a challenge for teachers  many say there is simply not enough time to stray from the curriculum and ensure that their students are prepared to take different exams.

Pressure also comes from parents who do not yet fully understand the benefits of raising students motivation and prefer teachers who spend time focusing on exams to guarantee good results.

Another challenge Vietnamese teachers face, according to West, is a lack of collaboration among schools and teachers.

We hold these training sessions where teachers from different schools gather, West explained.

This is one of the rare opportunities for them to sit down and talk to one another.

West said his training sessions are a starting point for Vietnamese teachers to share their experiences and offer one another advice.

Alan West asks Vietnamese teachers for what they have done in class to help their students covert theory into practice during a training session in Ho Chi Minh City, March 13, 2019. Photo: Ha My / Tuoi Tre News

Textbooks are slowly changing

While Vietnamese teachers have the full capability to adapt to new, more practical teaching methods, West thinks that Vietnamese textbooks still fail to connect theoretical knowledge with practical contexts seen in everyday life.

This has a negative impact on students as it severely demotivates them, for they do not see why they are learning such knowledge.

This phenomenon is particularly seen in the social science subjects including geography, foreign languages, and history, which have been stigmatized against implementation of new teaching techniques.

Another issue with Vietnamese textbooks, according to West, is that overlapping sections of different subjects are not discussed.

Right now, this serves as an advantage to us because we can use it to implement new interactive teaching methods and save time, he said.

New textbooks are changing, but the process of change is slow, West commented, adding that new teaching methods focus on improving students experience in real time, instead of teachers waiting for changes to curricula and textbooks.

He also noted that the most significant change he has witnessed is putting context before knowledge instead of just providing theories like the books originally did.

One of the best immediate solutions to this problem is for teachers to be more active in taking photos of real-world situations which are related to their lessons in order to provide students with a better context for what they are studying.

For instance, while an electricity transformer is a commonly seen sight on the streets, physics textbooks only provide students with a diagram and they are not aware of what that diagram looks like in reality.

So they cannot visualize how common it is, giving a false impression that this knowledge is unimportant.

While such efforts can significantly change a students performance, it should not be too demanding of the teachers, West said.

Vietnamese teachers tell Alan West what they have done in class to help their students apply theory to reality during a training session in Ho Chi Minh City, March 13, 2019. Photo: Ha My / Tuoi Tre News

Currently, Exscitec is working with the Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam to implement STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), a process for solving problems linked to improving human life or understanding it. The new teaching method is believed to motivate students and boost their performance. Several pilot programs and training workshops have been conducted in order to instruct teachers on how to provide more stimulating, motivational, and exciting lessons that increase students curiosity  a key feature in improving their performance. The system has already been implemented in UK schools for over three decades and it has been a contributor to positive changes in the curriculum.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!Malaysian photographer Edwin Ong Wee Kee is taking serious heat as behind-the-scenes shots of a purportedly staged photo that won him the grand prize at an international completion began popping up online.

The photo in question, a stunning portrait of a Hmong woman carrying two children, was taken by Kee during a trip to northwestern Vietnam.

But just one week after the photo earned him the US$120,000 grand prize at the prestigious Hamdan International Photography Awards (HIPA) on March 13, reports and photographs refuting the artists claim that the photo was unplanned began circulating around the internet.

Kee has since doubled down on his claim that the photo was taken spontaneously in a statement he gave to a Malaysian newspaper on March 20, but the controversy has since reignited a longstanding discussion centered around ethics in photography and the dangers of exploiting Vietnams rural dwellers and ethnic minorities for artistic gain.

This photo captures a Hmong woman and her children. Photo: Edwin Ong Wee Kee

Photography tours, trips designed for amateur photographers and photography enthusiasts to visit pre-selected locations to snap shots of particular subjects, like the one Edwin Ong Wee Kee was on when he took his award-winning photo, are not a new concept in Vietnam, according to Vietnamese professional photographer Ha Dao.

Participants of these trips usually 'romanticize' the life and culture of people in Vietnams mountainous regions, according to another industry insider.

The source said that customers on these tours all take the same photos from the same angles, putting little effort into creating something unique and original. They all follow the same creative pathway. They think they are showcasing their skills but really theyre just recreating images that already exist and are quite popular, he said.

In a separate post on a photography website, Dao, referring to works by French photographer Rehahn, pointed out that he seems to place a particular emphasis on the round eyes and dirty faces of rural children looking up toward his camera.

Though Dao admitted that Rehahns photos show brilliant techniques and vibrant colors they are safe and simply satisfy the tastes of the majority.

The French photographer has lived in the central town of Hoi An since 2011 and is famous for many photos of people in Vietnam.

The portrait of Bui Thi Xong taken by French photographer Rehahn

Those photos and conceptual pictures are meant to portray a particular subject or situation in exactly the same way as what the photographer wants, instead of serving as an accurate reflection of real life.

Dao wrote in the post that she is concerned that this practice instills misconceptions and prejudices about both ethnic Vietnamese communities and the country as a whole.

She also wrote that romanticized and sympathy-seeking images that dig into the differences of minority cultures, and those that are not representative of ethnic communities, continue to be honored at some photo contests, with Edwin Ong Wee Kees grand prize award at HIPA being only the latest instance.

In the written congratulations to Kee, HIPA said his snap documented an intense humanitarian moment.

The feelings of a Vietnamese mother whose speech disorder did not prevent her from feeling hopeful and evoking a sense of strength for her children.

In her post, Ha said that ethnic minority groups are normally said to live old-fashioned, passive styles, though that is not necessarily the case. This means photographers who wish to portray them should avoid worsening the misconception, simply by snapping their shutter responsibly.

The portrait of a Vietnamese girl of the Cham ethnic minority in the south-central province of Ninh Thuan taken by French photographer Rehahn

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!Around 50 Vietnamese joined hands with Canadian tourist Cameron Beardley in collecting garbage that littered a famous beach in south-central Vietnam on Thursday morning.

Beardley said that he enjoys visiting the Quy Hoa beach in Quy Nhon, the capital of Binh Dinh Province, to swim or read, but he was disappointed when he returned to Vietnam from a three-month trip to the Philippines and saw Quy Hoas sand littered with garbage.

Ready to take action, he called up several of his friends in Vietnam and got a small crew together to collect litter from the beach.

But as the hours of cleaning wore on, a shocking realization hit  it was no longer just him and his friends picking up the trash.

About 50 professionals, students, and patients and doctors from the Quy Hoa National Leprosy Dermatology Hospital nearby and people from all walks of life were joining in to make a difference.

People pick up trash on the Quy Hoa beach in Quy Nhon City, south-central Vietnam, March 21, 2019. Photo: Vietnam News Agency

The hospitals director, Vu Tuan Anh, said the institution often takes trips to clean up the beach but it is not equipped to handle all garbage left by so many beachgoers.

The hospital will provide bags, gloves and other tools to collect trash if the cleanups become a regular thing, he added.

Though Beardley believes that environmental awareness cannot be taught overnight, he does say that actions should be taken to gradually generate positive cumulative effects for the future.

His efforts are part of a new trend of foreigners and young Vietnamese doing their best to curb the countrys litter problem.

Many people have taken up the Trash Collection Challenge, a meme in which a user posts photos taken before and after they pick up trash at the same place to raise public awareness of environmental protection, since it started going viral in Vietnam.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!Eight children drowned on Thursday while swimming in a river in Hoa Binh Province, directly southwest of Hanoi.

Ten middle school students from the same village in Hoa Binh were enjoying themselves on the bank of the Da River before entering the water for a swim in the afternoon, police said.

I saw the children playing for a while but then I didnt see them anymore, an eyewitness said.

I thought something bad had happened so I ran down but only saw their shoes still on the riverbank.

Eight of the childrens bodies were found an hour and a half later.

Some of the victims parents collapsed in tears when they saw their childrens bodies being carried on shore.

A man falls after finding out his child was a victim, March 21, 2019. Photo: Manh Hung / Tuoi Tre

An official told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that the students went to school in the morning and had no classes in the afternoon.

The two survivors were too overcome with fear to talk about the event, the official added.

Vietnamese Deputy Prime Ministry Vu Duc Dam extended his condolences to the bereaved families the same day.

He urged authorities nationwide to step up their efforts to prevent future child drownings.

Vietnam recorded around 2,000 child drownings in 2018, according to the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Affairs.

Currently, swimming is not a compulsory subject in many schools in the Southeast Asian country.

The scene where eight children drowned in Hoa Binh Province, northern Vietnam, March 21, 2019. Video: Hai Tran / Tuoi Tre

Rescue workers board boats to search for eight children who drowned in the Da River in Hoa Binh Province, northern Vietnam, March 21, 2019. Photo: Dam Quang / Tuoi Tre

People search for the children who drowned during a swim in the Da River in Hoa Binh Province, northern Vietnam, March 21, 2019. Photo: Hai Tran / Tuoi Tre

Vehicles are parked near a river where eight children drowned in Hoa Binh Province, northern Vietnam, March 21, 2019. Photo: Hai Tran / Tuoi Tre

Rescue worker ready themselves to find eight missing children in a river in Hoa Binh Province, northern Vietnam, March 21, 2019. Photo: Hai Tran / Tuoi Tre

Police work at the scene where eight children drowned in a river in Hoa Binh Province, northern Vietnam, March 21, 2019. Photo: Hai Tran / Tuoi Tre

People gather around the ambulance that took away the drowned children near a river in Hoa Binh Province, northern Vietnam, March 21, 2019. Photo: Hai Tran / Tuoi Tre

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!A man has been fined VND5.5 million (US$237) and had his drivers license revoked for two months for illegally parking his automobile to take a group photo with his friends on an expressway in northern Vietnam.

The traffic police division under the Ministry of Public Security confirmed on Thursday they had imposed the penalties on Ngo Ba Kha, 26, a resident of the northern province of Bac Ninh, for illegal parking on an expressway.

Kha admitted that he was the driver of the automobile bearing the license plate 99A-196.53 and that he had parked the vehicle on the hard shoulder of the Hanoi-Hai Phong Expressway to snap a photo with his friends on March 7.

Officers considered Khas actions a threat to traffic safety and made their decision in accordance with the law.

Ngo Ba Kha works with an officer in this photo supplied by the traffic police division under the Ministry of Public Security.

The case first captured public attention when a photo of Kha and seven other men was posted to social media and quickly went viral.

The management of the expressway later confirmed that the group of men had parked their two cars on the hard shoulder of the road at around 9:15 am.

Only one of the automobiles belonged to Kha, who stepped forward after the photo circulated online.

The other vehicle bore the license plate 30E-114.23, whose owner has yet to show up at the police station.

The group left the expressway after taking the photo.

CCTV footage of the incident was submitted by the expressway management to the traffic police division under the Ministry of Public Security.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!Vietnamese police have captured and launched criminal investigation against three more people suspected of raping and murdering a female college student, which shocked Vietnam last month, bringing the total number of suspects to eight.

Five men accused of directly raping and killing the young woman had been previously arrested and held under a criminal probe in the same case.

Cao My Duyen, 22, whose mother runs a poultry stall at a wet market in Dien Bien Province, was found dead kilometers from her home on February 7, days after she went missing while delivering live chickens to a male buyer.

The man turned out to be one of the five main suspects accused of holding the young woman hostage for days, taking turns to rape her before killing the victim, police said on February 18 as they wrapped up a week-long probe into the case that sent shockwaves through the country.

The men  Vuong Van Hung, Bui Van Cong, Pham Van Nhiem, Luong Van Hung and Luong Van La  were arrested between February 10 and 15 on charges of murder, rape, property appropriation, possession of narcotics, and illegal detention of a person.

On Thursday, Dien Bien police launch legal proceedings against and made the arrests of Pham Van Dung, Cam Van Chuong and Bui Thi Kim Thu for alleged roles in the same case.

Bui Thi Kim Thu, accused of covering up Cao My Duyens murder, is seen at a police station in Dien Bien Province after her arrest. Photo: Vietnam News Agency

Dung, 44, and Chuong, 45, were held on the same charges as the five initial suspects, which means they are suspected of participating in the kidnap, rape and murder of Duyen.

Thu, 44, is Cong's wife and was the first to discover Duyens body and reported her finding to police officers.

She is found to have known about the others alleged crimes beforehand and actively made up false details about the case to veer the investigation off course.

Thu is charged with covering up a crime.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!Defund the left? Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The American political system is dominated by a two-party duopoly that uses its control over election laws to suppress challenges to its power. That statement might sound like Nader-ite agit-prop, but it is a plain fact, widely recognized by scholars of comparative politics. Perhaps the clearest case of overt partisan manipulation of [election] rules is the United States, where Democrats and Republicans appear automatically on the ballot, but third parties and independents have to overcome a maze of cumbersome legal requirements, Pippa Norris, the McGuire lecturer in comparative politics at Harvards Kennedy School of Government  and former director of democratic governance at the United Nations Development Program  wrote in 2005.

Meanwhile, thanks to partisan polarization, most American voters live in congressional districts where there is no serious two-party competition, and most American states are effectively governed by one-party rule.

These conditions are decidedly less than ideal, from a democratic perspective. But they can nevertheless be reconciled (at least, to an extent) with competitive elections and government accountability  so long as voters can vigorously contest power within each major party. A Democratic House incumbent representing a district in New York City will be all but invulnerable in a general election. But if Democrats encourage intraparty democracy, then that incumbents constituents will still be able to hold him or her accountable in a contested primary.

Unfortunately for our republic, the House Democratic leadership signaled Thursday that it believes democracy has no place within the Democratic Party. As the National Journal reports:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is making an early move to deter primary challenges against sitting incumbents in the caucus with a new policy aimed in part at protecting the new majority.

The campaign arm on Friday sent out a list of hiring standards to more than 100 political firms, including one provision that made clear it will neither contract with nor recommend to House candidates any political vendors that work to oust sitting members of Congress.

The new protocol, intentionally debuted early in the off-year before most campaign hiring begins, presents a stark financial deterrent to the countrys top firms that provide essential services ranging from polling to TV advertising to strategy. It could cripple would-be primary opponents ability to entice top talent to join their staff. The DCCC independent-expenditure arm doles out millions in contracts to consultants and drives more revenue toward them by connecting campaigns with vetted operatives.

The DCCC is often times the gatekeeper for consultants to get to candidates, said Ian Russell, a campaign media strategist and former top official at the committee. Unless you have a steady stream of income coming from another source, it would be very difficult to navigate the House world if you were shut out by the DCCC.

The DCCCs rationale for this move is straightforward: The organization exists to maximize the Democratic Partys chances of holding congressional majorities  and since (all else being equal) incumbents are much more likely to win general elections than newcomers, protecting incumbents is a core part of its mission.

This argument may be coherent, but it is not credible. For example, if preserving majorities were its sole concern, the DCCC could discriminate against vendors who assisted primary challenges in competitive districts, while welcoming those that aided progressive insurgents in safe blue ones. This isnt an idle point. Two of the progressive groups that are currently recruiting 2020 primary challengers  Justice Democrats and Data for Progress  have declared their intention to target moderate Democrats in (relatively) safe districts, like Texas representative Henry Cuellar, and Massachusettss Stephen Lynch. You dont need an across-the-board blacklist to protect Democratic majorities, only to insulate Democratic incumbents from intraparty competition.

Whats more, its far from clear that the DCCCs policy will even succeed on its intended. The small-dollar donor armies that have freed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the burden of fundraising  and filled the coffers of Bernie Sanderss nascent 2020 campaign  arent going anywhere. And neither are progressive interest groups like NARAL Pro-Choice America, which backed Marie Newmans attempt to oust pro-life Illinois Democrat Dan Lipinski last year. The DCCC cant eliminate the demand for political operatives who are willing to assist left-wing primary challenges. And by limiting the supply, the Democratic establishment threatens to give a monopoly to its most ideologically committed adversaries, and thus, accelerate the growth of upstart firms like Grassroots Analytics and Data for Progress.

Last week, Dan Lipinski opposed legislation that would have banned discrimination against LGBT people.



This week, the DCCC is threatening to punish anyone who works to oust him. https://t.co/PT4GOkO3rG  were going to pass AVR  (@SeanMcElwee) March 22, 2019

But all these considerations are secondary. The principal problem with the DCCCs policy is that  in a political system where interparty competition is already severely limited  suppressing intraparty competition in all House races is an unforgivable infringement on democracy.

There is no equivalence between the two major parties attitudes toward democracy. And for supporters of self-government, there is no viable alternative to vying for power beneath Team Blues tent. But a Democratic Party that uses its market power to suppress electoral competition does not deserve its name.Vietnam has presented a diplomatic note to China to express its objection and demand for compensation after a Vietnamese fishing boat was run after by a Chinese coast guard vessel and eventually sank near the Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelago earlier this month.

The Consular Department under Vietnams Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed on Thursday it had met with representatives of the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi to present a diplomatic note on Wednesday.

The document showed Vietnams protest against the action, which violated Vietnamese sovereignty over Hoang Sa, threatened the lives of the Vietnamese fishermen, and damaged their property and legitimate interests.

In the note, the department requested the Chinese Embassy to inform Chinas foreign ministry and relevant agencies about the incident in order to strictly deal with the crew members of the vessel, and to prevent similar situations from happening in the future.

The Southeast Asian country also demanded China make proper compensation for the damage done to the Vietnamese fishers.

At around 10:00 am on March 7, the fishing boat from the central province of Quang Ngai, carrying five crew members, was anchoring in the vicinity of Da Loi Reef in Hoang Sa when it was approached by the coast guard vessel from China.

The Chinese ship started firing its water cannon at the boat and then chased it away.

During the pursuit, the fishing boat crashed into a reef and sank in an area about 0.5 nautical miles northwest of Da Loi Reef.

No one was injured in the incident and the fishermen managed to cling onto the prow until they were rescued by another Vietnamese fishing boat at 1:00 pm the same day.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!I bring this up in light of the media's current coverage of the "defeat" of ISIS in Syria. According to the media and punditry meme, this is the result of vigorous and persistent action by U.S. ground forces in Syria and that 2000 brave men (and very few women) have flushed ISIS into the bowels of history. No one dare mention the fact that the United States is violating international law by carrying out military operations on Syrian territory. Nope. Don't fit the meme.

I wish we could say that the lies and self-deception that are the core of U.S. policy and actions in Syria are an isolated incident. Sadly, no. On almost every issue--from the Russian threat to the 12 doom countdown on climate change--Americans are being fed a steady stream of bullshit and there is virtually no pushback or derision.

Nearly a third of territory reclaimed from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since 2014 has been won in the past six months, due to new policies adopted by the Trump administration, a senior State Department official said Friday.

Brett McGurk, the State Departments senior envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, said that steps President Trump has taken, including delegating decision-making authority down from the White House to commanders in the field, have dramatically accelerated gains against the militants.

Trump has worked this miracle with a measly 2000 Special Ops and Special Forces troops. Or so we are told. Now for the facts:

The United States ground forces have not carried out nor spearheaded a single major ground campaign or attack in Iraq. If you recall the assault on Fallujah during the early days of the war in Iraq, the US Marines employed 15,000 marines in that effort. Two thousand troops can defend a fixed position but are virtually useless as a military force going up against an entrenched enemy. The 2000 U.S. military personnel have been involved for the most part in training and intel collection. When U.S. assets were employed it involved almost exclusively air attacks from drones, fixed wing and helicopters. Oh yeah--EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE AIR OPERATIONS WERE COORDINATED WITH THE RUSSIAN MILITARY COMMAND FROM THE CAOC (COMBINED AIR OPERATIONS CENTER) IN AL-UDEID AIR FORCE BASE IN QATAR.

But facts matter little when it comes to dishing out propaganda to a largely clueless American public. Conveniently excluded from our mythical account of the defeat of ISIS is the critical role played by Russia and Iran in bolstering Syria's military capabilities and carrying out a decisive ground campaign that is the real cause of the death of ISIS.

Despite our supposedly decisive victory, we are still being told that we must keep ground forces in Syria. Donald Trump's initial instinct in 2015--i.e., we should not be in Syria--has been trumped by die hard neocons like John Bolton with the help self-serving twits in Congress and the media. That list includes the disgraced and deceased Senator John McCain. When McCain was still emitting flatulence and helping speed the doom of the planet from climate change, he was a leading cheerleader for invading a country, Syria, which had not attacked us.

Why care about international law when we, as a nation, seem so content to embrace the illegal and the immoral. A true head scratcher.Rebecca Potter, director of the University of Dayton sustainability studies program and associate professor of English, was a panelist discussing sustainable education last week at the United Nations Environmental Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya.

The assembly, comprised of environmental ministers from all 193 U.N. member states, is the world's highest-level decision-making body on the environment.

The panel discussion sponsored by the U.N. Science and Technology Working Group  "Can Sustainability Education Impact Sustainable Consumption and Production?"  identified the role education can play in furthering the U.N.'s sustainable development goals, transforming lifestyles and inspiring new career paths.

"I discussed the need for open dialogue and broad participation by educators in developing core competencies in sustainability for higher education," Potter said. "Our session attracted interest from more than a dozen nations."

She attended the assembly as part of this year's National Council for Science and the Environment delegation. The council advances environmental policy and decision-making through scientific research, assessment, information-sharing, training and curriculum development.

Potter, who is working on the launch of an undergraduate major and graduate program in sustainability at the University of Dayton, has examined engaged-learning at the master's and undergraduate levels. Her current research project  The Cassandra Effect  is working to understand the public response to climate change. The study examines narratives of doubt, uncertainty, risk, skepticism and denial of climate change, and the challenges of moving social concern to social and political actions that address climate change and its impacts.

For interviews, contact Shawn Robinson, associate director of news and communications, at srobinson1@udayton.edu or 937-229-3391.Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar. Photo: PA

The Irish prime minister warned on Thursday that Ireland would need to hold a referendum following a Brexit extension if the UK decided not to elect representatives to the European Parliament.

Prime minister Theresa May is in Brussels to attend a European leaders summit, during which she will make a case for a Brexit extension until 30 June.

But the EU has warned that any extension that goes beyond 23 May  the date of European elections  would mean that the UK would be forced to elect new members to the blocs parliament.

If the UK decides not to elect these members despite remaining a full member of the European Union, the bloc would be forced to change its treaties, Varadkar said.

We all know how complicated that is. It would even require a referendum in Ireland, Varadkar said in Brussels.

Treaty changes in the EU require the approval of every single member state, each of which have different procedures.

In Ireland, this procedure involves a referendum. In most other countries, changes can be approved by national parliaments.

The treaties that established the European Union say that European citizens have a right to be represented in the European Parliament, he said.

So if the United Kingdom is still a member state, and British citizens are still European citizens, they have a right to representatives in the European Parliament. It cant be taken away from them.

The Irish government famously held two votes on the approval of the EUs Lisbon treaty, after 53% of voters rejected it in a 2008 referendum. It was approved by more than 67% of votes in 2009.BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders must show flexibility on Britain's Brexit plans given the "chaos" currently reigning in London, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said, adding that Britain would have to give a valid reason for the time extension it was seeking.

As leader of the country that will be most directly affected if Britain leaves as scheduled on March 29 without a withdrawal agreement to regulate things, Varadkar's views carry considerable weight among his EU colleagues.

"The situation in London is somewhat chaotic at the moment," he said ahead of a Brussels summit on Thursday that will deal primarily with Britain's departure from the EU.

"We need to cut the entire British establishment a little bit of slack on this and support their request ... for a short extension. No deal will only ever be a British choice."

With just days to go before Britain's scheduled departure, British Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday requested an extension to the so-called Article 50 period, which Varadkar said the EU was open to.

"I think there is an openness to an extension across the board but we cant have a situation whereby we have a rolling cliff edge, where we just put off decisions and deadlines every couple of months," he said.

"Brexit will require some very hard choices for the United Kingdom. It was never going to be all good and no bad."

(Reporting by Robin Emmott and Alastair Macdonald, writing by Thomas Escritt, editing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Raissa Kasolowsky)By Alastair Macdonald and Elizabeth Piper

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday began the mammoth struggle of persuading a deeply divided parliament to back her Brexit deal after an EU summit granted her more time but little to help change minds at home.

After a bruising day in Brussels, May secured a two-week reprieve to try to get the deal she negotiated in November through parliament at a third attempt or face a potentially chaotic departure from the European Union as soon as April 12.

EU leaders were clear that it was now up to the British parliament to decide the fate of Brexit -- to leave with a deal in a couple of months, depart without an agreement, come up with a new plan or possibly remain in the bloc.

While the Brexit deadline may have moved from March 29, however, parliament shows no sign of budging.

In fact, incensed by comments from May on Wednesday night that pinned the blame for the Brexit chaos on them, many British lawmakers have now hardened their resistance to the deal she is due to bring back before them next week.

In an appeal to MPs, May said in Brussels: "Last night I expressed my frustration. I know that MPs (members of parliament) are frustrated too. They have difficult jobs to do. I hope we can all agree, we are now at the moment of decision."

She needs to change the minds of 75 more MPs to get her deal through after it was overwhelmingly rejected twice before. In a letter to British lawmakers on Friday, May hinted she to might not hold a third vote on the deal at all if it was clear it would not be passed.

"If it appears there is not sufficient support to bring the deal back next week, or the House rejects it again, we can ask for another extension before April 12," she wrote in the letter published on Twitter by a BBC reporter.

While EU leaders were keen to heap pressure on the British parliament, some -- with the notable exception of France --suggested Britain could still win more time to prepare for a no-deal Brexit if MPs fail to approve the divorce deal by April 12.

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"HOPE DIES LAST"

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar summed up the mood in Brussels when he spoke of overwhelming Brexit fatigue.

European Council President Donald Tusk said: "The fate of Brexit is in the hands of our British friends. We are, as the EU, prepared for the worst but hope for the best. As you know, hope dies last."

French President Emmanuel Macron took a potshot at Brexit advocates. "Brexiteer leaders told people leaving would be easy. Bravo."

Leaders doubted whether May could get her deal through parliament, which like the country itself is deeply split over how, or even if, Britain should leave the EU after a 2016 referendum when 52 percent backed Brexit against 48 percent.

One senior EU official said a no-deal Brexit was more likely. "We are in general well prepared. But we can use these few weeks to prepare more for the rather likely no deal scenario," the official said on condition of anonymity.

NEW VOTES

Parliament will start next week with another vote on Brexit, which business minister Greg Clark said would open the way "for parliament to express a majority of what it would approve".

Those May must win over -- eurosceptic MPs in her Conservative Party and the DUP, the Northern Irish party that props up her minority government, plus wavering members of the opposition Labour Party -- did not seem to be softening.

The DUP's Nigel Dodds said May had missed an opportunity to put forward proposals to EU leaders to improve the prospects of an acceptable deal, describing it as a "disappointing and inexcusable" failure.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said it was time for parliament to take over Brexit and for MPs to make their own decisions about Britain's future.

His deputy Tom Watson said he was prepared to back May's deal, however -- but only if she agreed to holding a second referendum, something she has repeatedly ruled out.

With parliament deadlocked, the lack of certainty is encouraging some Britons to try to influence politicians.

Hundreds of thousands are expected to march through central London on Saturday calling for a second Brexit referendum, while an online petition demanding May revoke the EU leave notice and stop Brexit has got more than 3.5 million signatures.

Seven hours of summit brainstorming on Thursday kept a host of options open for the EU leaders, who say they regret Britain's decision to leave but are eager to move on from what they increasingly see as a distraction.

Now a May 22 departure date will apply if parliament rallies behind the British prime minister next week. If it does not, Britain will have until April 12 to offer a new plan or decide to leave the European Union without a treaty.

In the case of a longer extension, the main idea is for one year, EU officials said. That would give Britain time to hold an election, and possibly a second referendum, and avoid an even longer delay that would complicate negotiations for a new long-term EU budget.

(Additional reporting by William James, Gabriela Baczynska, Robin Emmott, Philip Blenkinsop, Richard Lough, Francesco Guarascio, Andreas Rinke; Writing by Elizabeth Piper and Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Janet Lawrence and Catherine Evans)Irish premier Leo Varadkar has insisted a specialist taskforce has not been set up to address the issue of the border on the island of Ireland in a no-deal scenario.

But Mr Varadkar acknowledged discussions are happening between EU leaders about how a hard border can be avoided if the UK crashes out of the EU.

The Taoiseachs comments came in response to a request from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the EU ramp up its plans to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland in the event of a no-deal scenario.

Good to meet up with the Norwegian, Icelandic and Liechtenstein PMs. All in the single market for 25 years but not in the EU. Sensible solutions are possible once red lines dont restrict them https://t.co/ivDVGpLPdV  Leo Varadkar (@campaignforleo) March 22, 2019

Ms Merkel asked EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier to examine a fall-back plan to uphold the Good Friday Agreement in a no-deal situation.

The discussion between the pair and a number of other leaders took place on Thursday during the EU summit in Brussels.

It is understood it was the first time that EU leaders had discussed what would happen to the border if the UK crashes out of the EU.

Asked about the discussions Irish premier Mr Varadkar said no taskforce was being set up to address the border issue.

But he said talks had taken place.

Theres no taskforce being set up or anything of that nature, he said.

What that derives from is something that weve spoken about before, is that what will happen in a no-deal scenario, how we will uphold the Good Friday Agreement, keep the border with Northern Ireland open and still fulfil our obligations in European treaties to protect the single market and make sure Ireland is still fully a member of the single market and that the border doesnt become a backdoor to the single market.

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Its of that nature, those types of discussions that we would have to have.

He made the remarks at the end of the two-day summit in the Belgian capital.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (Michelle Devane/PA)

It comes as Irish European Affairs Minister Helen McEntee said avoiding a hard border in a no-deal Brexit scenario would be very difficult.

But Mr Varadkar said special arrangements would have to be made if the UK leaves without the deal and that those special arrangements would look like the backstop.

He said in a no-deal scenario the British government intended to treat Northern Ireland differently, not to apply tariffs and not to apply the kinds of enforcement measures that it would in other areas.

There is a rolling acknowledgement that the only way you can avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland is special arrangements, and it is the detail of those well need to work through, he said.

But if you want to know what they look like, they look like the backstop.

Minister of State for European Affairs Helen McEntee (Brian Lawless/PA)

On Friday morning Ms McEntee said the risk of the UK leaving the EU without an agreement remained very strong, but insisted Ireland was still not planning for border checks.

Ms McEntee said the Dublin government would only enter into negotiations with the UK and EU Commission on how a future border would work when, or if, it became clear that a no-deal is the only option.

If a no-deal scenario is the only option left and looking like that is going to happen, then we need to sit down with the Commission and with the UK and we need to understand and work with each other, and essentially this is negotiation as to how we can avoid borders on the island of Ireland and, be under no illusion, its very difficult without a deal, she told RTE Radio One.

We are not planning for a hard border and we have always said that.

When it gets to the point, and if it gets to the point, and we hope it does not, that if a no-deal scenario is the only likely and possible outcome then we need to engage with the UK and with the Commission as to how we would do that, but until that happens we will not be planning for a border.Eventually Democratic candidacies will disappear. But how quickly? Photo-Illustration: Konstantin Sergeyev and Jed Egan/Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

There are at present 15 candidates in the Democratic presidential field for 2020 that are serious enough that they will likely make the cut for the first official debate in June. According to the New York Times, there are three others likely to run, (Biden, Bullock and Swalwell) and another four who might (Bennet, McAuliffe, Moulton and Ryan). The odds are good this will be the largest presidential field ever in either party (Republicans had 17 candidates in 2016, while Democrats had 15 in 1972 and 16 in 1976).

Eventually, of course, one candidate will win the nomination at the national convention in Milwaukee a little over 15 months from now. But how is the field going to get from here to there? What, to use the popular term, will winnow candidates from the race, and how soon will a likely nominee emerge?

One thing to remember in trying to apply historical precedents to these questions is that the Democrats current rule requiring that delegates be awarded in strict proportion to the popular vote in any given state (after a 15 percent threshold is met) wasnt in place before 2008, and isnt how Republicans (who still allow winner-take-all primaries) operate even now. So theres no entirely predictable process for quickly winnowing out candidates.

Here are some scenarios that could make it easier to reduce the field pretty quickly:

1. A front-runner emerges and takes flight. Part of the reason for the crowded 2020 field is that theres no early front-runner or inevitable nominee that very few rivals want to take on  like, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016. But by the time voters begin to vote, its possible someone  either the already familiar and strongly polling Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, or some newer figure who captures the imagination of media and voters alike  has caught fire and starts winning from the get-go, pushing more and more rivals below the 15 percent threshold for winning delegates and starving others of media attention and funds. A relatively front-loaded calendar like 2020s, with a lot of big states (including the biggest, California) voting by March, makes this take-the-country-by-storm scenario more plausible.

2. A front-runner emerges and is upset and then replaced by a rival. This variation on the automotive-racing phenomenon of a car drafting on and then booming past a lead car actually happens more often that you might think. In 1972, one of those large-field Democratic cycles, Ed Muskie was the early front-runner. But then the lightly regarded George McGovern held Muskie below expectations (didnt beat him, mind you, but just did better than expected) in New Hampshire, and in less than a month, the South Dakotan was the clear front-runner. The same thing happened in 2004, when John Kerry (ironically, the very early front-runner who was all but left for dead before the actual voting started) upset front-runner Howard Dean in Iowa, and never looked back. A variation occurred among Republicans in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was in deep trouble after losing Iowa to George H.W. Bush, but then trounced Bush in New Hampshire and romped to a relatively easy victory thereafter.

3. A candidate strategically outflanks the field. One scenario for a radical reduction of the field is a candidate winning in the right places at the right time, closing off paths to the nomination to others. If, for example, Kamala Harris develops early overwhelming strength among African-Americans, she could doom Cory Bookers campaign and endanger Joe Bidens. The fact that her gigantic home state, California, votes right after the first four contests on March 1 means she could build a near-unsurmountable delegate lead that would only begin to materialize after Iowa and New Hampshire. This is in some respects how Jimmy Carter won his surprise nomination in 1976  which had the largest Democratic field before the current one. Carter was left alone by most rivals, who wanted him to get rid of the terrifying George Wallace in the South. When he did so, Carter built such a head of steam and won so many delegates from the South and southern-inflected border states that he became unstoppable.

4. Candidates drop out after running bad campaigns. Its sometimes forgotten that many candidates who look strong on paper just arent when things get real. Two recent Republican candidates who didnt even make it to the formal starting line in Iowa, Tim Pawlenty in 2012 and Scott Walker in 2016, are good examples. Rick Perry in 2012 also looked like a world-beater until a terrible debate performance sent his campaign into a spiral from which it never recovered. In other words, some people who see the next president of the United States in every mirror winnow themselves.

But there are also developments that can prevent the field from shrinking very quickly.

5. Buyers remorse about front-runners. Time and again presidential candidates have taken big leads but lose steam and nearly succumb to late challenges. Jimmy Carter attracted late opposition from Frank Church and Jerry Brown (yes, that Jerry Brown) in 1976 and lost some primaries. In 1980, after trouncing Ted Kennedy in most early contests, Jimmy Carters popularity steadily sank and Kennedy beat him in several late primaries, emboldening anti-Carter forces to attempt a convention maneuver to deny Carter pledged delegates. Similarly, Gary Hart won a host of late primaries against Fritz Mondale in 1984; only Mondales support from unelected superdelegates enabled him to nail down the nomination. A large field makes it easier for voters to shop around  and for a front-runners rivals to tackle her or him from different directions in different places.

6. Guerrilla campaigns that just wont die. Very ideologically motivated campaigns often dont give in even when their odds of victory become slim, as Bernie Sanderss (and for that matter, Ted Cruzs) 2016 campaign showed. Persistence can also be fed by relatively low-cost social-media efforts and broad-based, reliable small-donor resources. And even beyond the formal defeat of primary candidacies, some candidates and their backers can prove troublesome at party conventions, like Ron Pauls forces in 2012.

7. Post-primary candidacies aimed at contested conventions. The huge 2020 field and the proportional representation rules have led more than one observer to suggest that the Black Swan phenomenon of a contested convention might finally happen next year. One reason is that superdelegates, who no longer vote on the first ballot, would spring to life on and subsequent ballots, and could decide the whole thing. As noted earlier, there have been efforts in the past to change the rules at conventions to wrest away an apparent nomination from the putative winner. In 2020, it could happen without skullduggery if no one has a majority of delegates going in, and that could affect candidate strategies in the late stages of the primary season. One variable as well could be a putative nominee whos beginning to look like a general-election loser. Given the panic likely to seize Democrats if that happens heading toward the fall of 2020, you could see extraordinary efforts to produce a better ticket.

All in all, the odds of 2020 producing that sort of wild scenario are relatively low. More likely than not, some one or two or three candidates will quickly emerge in the early contests and the field will shrink rapidly, leading to a reasonably decisive victory for someone before the weather turns brutally hot. But its not a sure thing, and Democrats who see the crowded stages of a two-day candidate debate in June will be right to feel nervous about the sheer humanity of it all.Fashion retailer Next says a no-deal Brexit could save it up to 15m thanks to lower tariffs and that it would pass on "modest" savings to shoppers.

The fashion retailer also said consumers appeared "numb" to the latest debates around Britain's departure from the EU and there was no evidence that uncertainty around it was affecting their shopping habits in the sector.

Next made the comments as it reported a 0.4% fall in pre-tax profits to 722.9m for the year to January - which it said was in line with guidance - despite total sales growing by 2.6% to 4.22bn.

It comes as other retailers from Marks & Spencer to Bonmarche complain of gloomy high street conditions while the wider economy stutters, and business groups sound the alarm over the potential impact of a cliff-edge departure from the European Union.

But setting out his view of the year ahead, Brexit-supporting Next chief executive Lord Wolfson pointed to the potential benefit from a plan to slash the majority of tariffs on imports to zero if there is no deal.

He said: "In the (seemingly unlikely) event that these provisional rates are introduced in the near future, we estimate that there would be a net reduction in the tariffs we pay of around 12m to 15m.

"In the medium term, our intention would be to pass on cost price improvements to customers, in the form of better pricing.

"In the context of 1.7bn of stock purchases, the savings would be relatively modest."

A no-deal Brexit would see the UK have to impose a new set of tariffs which would apply to goods from the EU as well as the rest of the world.

Under plans announced last week , it would slash duties on the majority of goods entering the country.

For a fashion retailer such as Next, the benefit of lower duties on clothes sourced from countries such as Bangladesh outweighs any higher tariff costs on imports from Europe.

Next's annual results showed retail sales in its stores fell by 7.9% while online revenue grew 14.7%.

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The cost of shifting more of its revenues online - while still paying shop rents - suggested a further "marginal decline" in profits for the coming year. Shares fell 3%.

But Lord Wolfson was relatively bullish about the wider trading environment.

He said: "Whilst our relationship with the EU remains uncertain, other economic indicators for the consumer look less worrying than at this point last year."

"Our feeling is that there is a level of fatigue around the subject that leaves consumers numb to the daily swing in the political debate.

"It appears to us that consumer behaviour (in our sector) will only be materially changed if the UK's departure from the EU (or continued uncertainty around this subject) begins to affect employment, prices or earnings.

"It does not seem to be having any adverse effect on these variables at the present time."

Next has previously set out preparations for leaving the EU and the transition to a new customs regime.

It said in the latest set of results that it had little reliance on Dover or Calais - where disruption and delay is feared in the case of a no-deal scenario.

But it still has contingency plans "to route more stock through alternative, lower risk, ports of entry if needed".FILE PHOTO: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman visit the border between Israel and Syria in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights FILE PHOTO: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman visit the border between Israel and Syria in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, March 11, 2019 REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun/File Photo

By Tom Perry

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Syrian government vowed to take back the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as its allies and enemies alike condemned U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday for moving to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the territory seized in war.

Trump's statement on Thursday marked a dramatic shift in U.S. policy over the status of a disputed area that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East conflict and annexed in 1981 - a move not recognised internationally.

Against this backdrop of hostility towards the U.S. move, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo landed in Beirut on Friday after visiting Israel. He is expected to raise pressure on the government to curb the influence of the Iran-backed Hezbollah.

Trump's declaration is the latest U.S. step to fuel anger in the region, both in states that are hostile to Israel and others that have relations with it and are allied to the United States.

It follows the U.S. recognition in December 2017 of Jerusalem as Israel's capital - a decision that also drew international criticism as the city's disputed status remains at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Russia, an ally of President Bashar al-Assad with forces in Syria, said Trump's comments risked seriously destabilising the region, and it voiced hope the statement was just declaratory.

Iran, Assad's main regional ally and which also has forces in Syria, condemned the statement as illegal and unacceptable.

"The personal decisions of Trump...will lead to crisis in the region," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said.

Turkey, a U.S. ally and an adversary of Damascus, also said the move had brought the Middle East to the edge of a new crisis and the legitimisation of the occupation of the Golan Heights could not be allowed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for his gesture "at a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel". It could help Netanyahu in the midst of a tough re-election battle, analysts said.

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The Syrian government said the Golan was an "indivisible" part of Syrian territory and recovering it "via all means guaranteed by international law is still a priority".

It said United States with its "stupidity and arrogance" had no right to decide the fate of the area and any move to recognise Israeli sovereignty over it was "an illegal action with no impact".

After remaining calm for decades since a 1974 armistice monitored by U.N. peacekeepers, Golan re-emerged as a flashpoint for regional tensions during the Syrian war. Last May, Israel accused Iran's Revolutionary Guards of launching a rocket salvo into its territory from the Syrian side of the truce line.

Israel, which has mounted numerous air strikes against what it has called Iran-backed targets in Syria, has demanded Russia keep forces allied to Tehran away from the boundary.

The Syrian side was held by rebel forces for years until pro-government forces recovered it in July.

U.S. OFFICIAL: ISRAEL "COULD NOT GIVE UP THE GOLAN"

Jason Greenblatt, a senior White House adviser, said "under any conceivable circumstance, Israel could not give up the Golan". "To do so would endanger Israel's very existence," he wrote on Twitter.

But Fouad Mundhir, a Syrian whose village is in Israeli-occupied Golan, said Trump was "cancelling the will of an entire nation". "You say you are carrying the flag of democracy, okay, Mr. Trump, have you taken into account the will of the people of the Golan?" he told Reuters in Jaramana, near Damascus.

In the Golan itself, Druze villager Sheikh Mahmoud Nazeeh, also rejected the move.

"Trump can make his statements and say he wants to make the Golan part of Israel. But we know this will stay Syrian land," the 70-year-old said.

The European Union said its position on the status of the Golan Heights was unchanged and it did not recognise Israeli sovereignty over the area.

Germany said any change in borders should be "done through peaceful means between all those involved", while France said it did not recognise the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights and any recognition was contrary to international law.

The Arab League, which suspended Syria in 2011 after the start of its civil war, said Trump had paved "the way for official American recognition" of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan and called this "completely beyond international law".

Egypt, which made peace with Israel in 1979, said it still considers the Golan as occupied Syrian territory.

Israel says Syria's civil war has reaffirmed the need to keep the plateau - coveted for its water resources and fertile soil - as a buffer zone between Israeli towns and the instability of its neighbour.

In Lebanon, Pompeo is expected to flag U.S. concerns about Shi'ite Muslim Hezbollah's growing role in government: the group has three cabinet ministers and together with its allies controls more than 70 of parliament's 128 seats.

The United States is a major donor to the Lebanese army but its allies, including the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, have been weakened as Iran's role has deepened through Lebanon, Iraq and Syria and Saudi influence has receded.

Washington has reintroduced sanctions on Iran and imposed new financial sanctions on Hezbollah which Lebanon's Hezbollah-aligned president, Michel Aoun, said on Thursday were hurting all Lebanese.

(Reporting by Ali Abdelaty in Cairo/Tom Perry in Beirut, Maria Kiselyova in Moscow, and Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, Yousef Saba in Cairo, Ezgi Erkoyun and Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul, Kinda Makieh in Damascus, Joseph Nasr in Berlin, Robin Emmot in Brussels, Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Mark Heinrich)By Patpicha Tanakasempipat and Panarat Thepgumpanat

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand's election contest between military-backed government and opposition parties played out in duelling images on Friday, two days before the first vote since a 2014 army coup.

Junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha crooned to voters at a rally in Bangkok where he made his final pitch for staying on as prime minister. Almost simultaneously, exiled former leader Thaksin Shinawatra, whose affiliated parties remain hugely popular, spoke at his daughter's wedding reception in Hong Kong.

"We will win for sure," Thaksin, a telecommunications tycoon whose loyalists have won every election since 2001. He did not elaborate in the video clip put online by Thai media outlet Khaosod English but urged guests at the reception to vote.

Seated beside Thaksin was the elder sister of King Maha Vajiralongkorn, Princess Ubolratana Rajakanya Sirivadhana Barnavadi, who shocked the country last month by accepting a Thaksin-linked party's nomination for prime minister.

She was quickly disqualified by the election commission and the party was later banned from the race for breaking a taboo of involving the monarchy in politics.

Sunday's general election has been cast as a high-stakes contest between democracy and military rule, but critics say a new army-backed constitution gives junta-appointed officials a large say in the next government.

"SAVE THE COUNTRY, SAVE THE MONARCHY"

Junta leader Prayuth appeared for the first time at an official campaign event, waving as a massive television screen showed a video of his years as the junta leader, harvesting rice and hugging children.

Singing to the crowd and collecting roses from supporters, he promised to "save the country, save the religion, save the monarchy" and lead the country out of divisive politics of the past 15 years.

The army has stepped in twice in a decade to end mostly middle-class, urban and royalist protests against Thaksin-linked governments who accuse the populist politician of undermining traditional Thai values embodied by devotion to the king.

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Backers of the military have warned Thailand could be plunged back into political unrest in case of a return to power for Pheu Thai, which has been under investigation for "outside influence" by Thaksin, an inquiry that could see it disbanded.

Palang Pracharat adopted a new slogan ahead of the vote that features Prayuth's nickname, "Choose peace, choose 'Uncle Tu'."

Thaksin, who was toppled as prime minister in the earlier coup of 2006, has lived in self-imposed exile after a court convicted him of corruption in 2008.

Several pro-Thaksin parties are contesting Sunday's election, including the Pheu Thai party whose government was overthrown in 2014 by Prayuth, who was then army chief.

Pheu Thai, is leading the charge for a "democratic front" of parties against Palang Pracharat, a new military proxy party backing Prayuth.

"We are here to lift you out of despair," its main prime ministerial candidate, Sudarat Keyuraphan, told cheering supporters.

"VOTE STRATEGICALLY"

Pheu Thai's long-time rival, the Democrat Party, also held a final rally in Bangkok.

Pro-establishment and pro-business, it hopes to hold the key to power in case of an inconclusive election, returning its leader, Abhisit Vejjajiva, to the prime minister's office that he held unelected from 2008 to 2011 after a previous pro-Thaksin party was dissolved by a court.

Polls indicate Pheu Thai will again be the top vote-winner, and it hopes with its allies to make up the largest bloc in the 500-seat House of Representatives.

But that may not matter, because the new constitution written by the junta allows parliament's upper house, the 250-seat Senate, to vote with the lower house to choose the prime minister - and the Senate is entirely appointed by the junta.

Under those rules, pro-military parties would probably need to win only 126 seats in the House of Representatives to win a majority in a combined vote while opposition parties would need 376 seats.

Pheu Thai urged voters to take a strategic view.

"The rules in this election are designed to put the people at a disadvantage... you need to vote strategically," it said in a Facebook post on Friday.

Parties and candidates are allowed to campaign until 6 p.m. (1100 GMT) on Saturday. Polls will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (0100 GMT to 1000 GMT).

(Additional reporting Panu Wongcha-um and Kay Johnson.; Editing by John Chalmers and Clarence Fernandez/Mark Heinrich)The Muslim call to prayer rang out across New Zealand on Friday followed by two minutes of nationwide silence to mark a week since a white supremacist gunned down 50 people at two mosques in the city of Christchurch. As the call was broadcast around the country, thousands -- including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and wounded survivors -- stood in a park opposite the mosque where the killing began, as the nation of 4.5 million came to a standstill.New Zealand is still in shock following the killings by alleged shooter Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian national who had hoped to foment an ethnic war with his attacks.But horrified Kiwis have responded with outpourings of love, with many embracing their Muslim neighbours on Friday in moving scenes across the country.A muezzin in white skullcap issued the call to regular Friday prayers at 1.30 pm (0030 GMT) with chants of "Allahu Akhbar" (God is greatest) as thousands listened in Christchurch's Hagley Park, across from the Al Noor Mosque.The country then fell silent for two minutes, with public gatherings in Auckland, Wellington and other cities.In neighbouring Australia, people stopped in the streets and in shops to mark the moment.Al Noor imam Gamal Fouda then took to the lectern at Hagley Park to denounce the "evil ideology of white supremacy" and praise Kiwis for their support.Unbreakable"I look out and I see the love and compassion in the eyes of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and human beings from across the globe," Fouda said."This terrorist sought to tear our nation apart with an evil ideology... But, instead, we have shown that New Zealand is unbreakable."The Al Noor mosque remains closed as workers repair bullet-pocked walls and clean blood-spattered floors.But after Friday's prayers, the sombre mood outside lightened markedly as non-Muslims approached the mosque to lay flowers or embrace and take selfies with Muslims.Koro Tini, a 46-year-old Maori man with elaborate traditional facial tattoos and ceremonial native cloak, embraced and touched noses with a man who was among a group of Muslim worshippers."We weren't meaning to pose for pictures but people wanted to do it after the prayers. There's a sense of joy and rejoicing," Tini said.'Hate cannot win'Many women across the country wore headscarves in solidarity with Muslims."I can take my scarf off if I feel afraid. They cannot," said Kirsty Wilkinson, who came to Hagley Park with two friends, all in make-shift hijabs."The message I want to send is that hate cannot win."Tarrant took advantage of relatively lax New Zealand gun laws to acquire military-style weapons that he used to mow down 50 men, women and children -- ranging in age from three years to 77 -- and leaving dozens injured in an attack live-streamed online.New Zealand police revealed on Friday that in October 2017 they met with Tarrant at his home and conducted a "security inspection" as part of the gun licence approval process.The "correct process" was followed and the licence was granted, a police statement said.Tarrant is in police custody and has been charged with murder.Ardern on Thursday announced an immediate ban on assault rifles and military-style semi-automatic weapons, making good on a pledge to rid the country of the kinds of weapons the gunman used.Police said that by Friday morning more than 1,000 people had contacted them about handing in firearms now in private possession, which are now outlawed and must be turned in under a government buyback scheme.Prayers and pauseMajor New Zealand newspapers published special tributes on Friday, with the front page of Christchurch daily The Press bearing the Arabic word "Salam" (Peace) and the names of the 50 killed.The national mourning and moment of silence were broadcast on television networks, radio and across multiple local media websites."We are so happy that this prayer will be broadcast to the entire world so that everyone can be part of it," Mustafa Farouk, president of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, said in a statement announcing the prayer session.Burials also resumed Friday in Christchurch, with 26 people expected to be laid to rest, ranging from three-year-old Mucaad Ibrahim to 77-year-old Muse Awale.Salwa Mustafa, who lost her husband Khalid and 15-year-old son Hamza in the massacre, had defiant words despite her devastating loss."People say that... Muslims are terrorists. The whole world saw who is the terrorist," she said of the shooter."Muslims are people of peace and love, not terrorists. And I hope the whole world now can understand the real Islam, the reality of Islam."(AFP)

The Muslim call to prayer rang out across New Zealand on Friday followed by two minutes of nationwide silence to mark a week since a white supremacist gunned down 50 people at two mosques in the city of Christchurch.

As the call was broadcast around the country, thousands -- including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and wounded survivors -- stood in a park opposite the mosque where the killing began, as the nation of 4.5 million came to a standstill.

New Zealand is still in shock following the killings by alleged shooter Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian national who had hoped to foment an ethnic war with his attacks.

But horrified Kiwis have responded with outpourings of love, with many embracing their Muslim neighbours on Friday in moving scenes across the country.

A muezzin in white skullcap issued the call to regular Friday prayers at 1.30 pm (0030 GMT) with chants of "Allahu Akhbar" (God is greatest) as thousands listened in Christchurch's Hagley Park, across from the Al Noor Mosque.

The country then fell silent for two minutes, with public gatherings in Auckland, Wellington and other cities.

In neighbouring Australia, people stopped in the streets and in shops to mark the moment.

Al Noor imam Gamal Fouda then took to the lectern at Hagley Park to denounce the "evil ideology of white supremacy" and praise Kiwis for their support.

Unbreakable

"I look out and I see the love and compassion in the eyes of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and human beings from across the globe," Fouda said.

"This terrorist sought to tear our nation apart with an evil ideology... But, instead, we have shown that New Zealand is unbreakable."

The Al Noor mosque remains closed as workers repair bullet-pocked walls and clean blood-spattered floors.

But after Friday's prayers, the sombre mood outside lightened markedly as non-Muslims approached the mosque to lay flowers or embrace and take selfies with Muslims.

Story continues

Koro Tini, a 46-year-old Maori man with elaborate traditional facial tattoos and ceremonial native cloak, embraced and touched noses with a man who was among a group of Muslim worshippers.

"We weren't meaning to pose for pictures but people wanted to do it after the prayers. There's a sense of joy and rejoicing," Tini said.

'Hate cannot win'

Many women across the country wore headscarves in solidarity with Muslims.

"I can take my scarf off if I feel afraid. They cannot," said Kirsty Wilkinson, who came to Hagley Park with two friends, all in make-shift hijabs.

"The message I want to send is that hate cannot win."

Tarrant took advantage of relatively lax New Zealand gun laws to acquire military-style weapons that he used to mow down 50 men, women and children -- ranging in age from three years to 77 -- and leaving dozens injured in an attack live-streamed online.

New Zealand police revealed on Friday that in October 2017 they met with Tarrant at his home and conducted a "security inspection" as part of the gun licence approval process.

The "correct process" was followed and the licence was granted, a police statement said.

Tarrant is in police custody and has been charged with murder.

Ardern on Thursday announced an immediate ban on assault rifles and military-style semi-automatic weapons, making good on a pledge to rid the country of the kinds of weapons the gunman used.

Police said that by Friday morning more than 1,000 people had contacted them about handing in firearms now in private possession, which are now outlawed and must be turned in under a government buyback scheme.

Prayers and pause

Major New Zealand newspapers published special tributes on Friday, with the front page of Christchurch daily The Press bearing the Arabic word "Salam" (Peace) and the names of the 50 killed.

The national mourning and moment of silence were broadcast on television networks, radio and across multiple local media websites.

"We are so happy that this prayer will be broadcast to the entire world so that everyone can be part of it," Mustafa Farouk, president of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, said in a statement announcing the prayer session.

Burials also resumed Friday in Christchurch, with 26 people expected to be laid to rest, ranging from three-year-old Mucaad Ibrahim to 77-year-old Muse Awale.

Salwa Mustafa, who lost her husband Khalid and 15-year-old son Hamza in the massacre, had defiant words despite her devastating loss.

"People say that... Muslims are terrorists. The whole world saw who is the terrorist," she said of the shooter.

"Muslims are people of peace and love, not terrorists. And I hope the whole world now can understand the real Islam, the reality of Islam."

(AFP)Two female JetBlue crew members claim they and a third women were drugged by two pilots for the airline, and that one of those pilots also raped them and intentionally passed on a sexually transmitted disease, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

The plaintiffs, referred to in the suit as Jane Doe 1, of Riverton, Utah, and Jane Doe 2, of Fort Worth, Texas, say the incident occurred in San Juan, Puerto Rico in May 2018. The women had just completed their shift on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Puerto Rico, and checked into the Intercontinental Hotel in San Juan. They then headed to the beach together, where they met Eric Johnson and Dan Watson, the defendants. After a brief chat, they learned the men were JetBlue pilots.

Related: A 24-year-old woman assaulted a flight attendant and now she could go to jail for 21 years

According to the suit, Johnson then pulled an opened beer from his lunchbox and offered it to Jane Doe 1, who drank some and shared it with Jane Doe 2. A third crew member, who is not named as a plaintiff, also allegedly drank some of the beer. The rest of the night became a blur for the women, who claim the beer must have been laced with a drug.

At some point, the women found themselves back at the hotel with the pilots, but they have no memory of going there. Jane Doe 1 says she was aware of Johnson getting on top of her and having sex with her against her will, but because she was in a haze, she couldnt fight him off. She also references having flashes of memory of Johnson raping Jane Doe 2. She claims Johnson then told her, Thank you for making my fantasy come true.

Jane Doe 1 describes feeling groggy and numb the next day. She discussed the evening with the third crew member, who acknowledged she had also been drugged and raped; they say they were stunned by the incident. Upon boarding their return flight to Newark, N.J. that day, the three women claim they were nauseous and vomited in the bathroom. They say it was an effect they had not felt before despite having consumed alcohol previously, according to the suit.

Story continues

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Upon arriving at New Jerseys Newark airport and departing the flight, the three women reconvened and confirmed once again they all had identical memories of the nightmarish experience  including the inability to consent or even react to sexual intercourse and huge gaps in their memories of the evening. They then researched the symptoms of date rape drug intoxication, and the descriptions rang true to the women; they were all convinced they had been drugged and raped by the pilots.

Jane Doe 1 also developed a tremendous fear that she had contracted an STD from the rape, says the lawsuit. The pilot promised her he would get tested. In the meantime, Jane Doe 1 went to the hospital to get screened for drugs and STDs; the doctors later confirmed she had contracted human papillomavirus, or HPV, for which she had previously tested negative.

She also contacted JetBlues New York headquarters, where she was employed, and reported sexual assault, rape and sex and gender discrimination, according to the suit. She was told the airline would investigate the matter, but she claims no action was ever taken against Johnson and Watson. So she contacted a lawyer.

The ensuing lawsuit alleges that the drugging Jane Doe 1 experienced, the rape she endured and the HPV she contracted have left her extremely humiliated, degraded, victimized, embarrassed and emotionally distressed. The suit also states the woman will experience ripple effects including loss of income and loss of salary, bonuses, benefits and other compensation which such employment entails, as well as future monetary losses, emotional pain, humiliation, suffering, inconvenience and loss of enjoyment of life.

When contacted by Yahoo Lifestyle, a representative for JetBlue said, While we cannot comment on pending litigation, JetBlue takes allegations of violent or inappropriate behavior very seriously and investigates such claims thoroughly. We work to create a respectful workplace for all our crewmembers where they feel welcome and safe.

The women are asking for $75,000 in damages, according to the suit, plus attorney fees and costs. Yahoo Lifestyle has also reached out to the womens attorneys at Derek Smith Law Group for further comment.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.With his second call with the Argentine National Team, Gonzalo 'Pity' Martinez met for the first time Lionel Messi and the Atlanta United player revealed a conversation he had with the Barcelona star.

During the last practice Argentina had ahead of the match against Venezuela, Martinez and Messi were caught talking, a conversation that 'Pity,' talked about.

"I was surprised at how good of a person he is, he came to talk to me and asked me about the MLS, about how is it and so. The fact that he comes to talk to you and is one more of the group makes you very happy," mentioned Martinez.

In an interview with TyC Sports, the Atlanta United player also spoke about his experience of sharing a dressing room with Messi, "it's a pleasure to share a workout, a dive, a warm-up. I enjoy all the time, I tried to observe the things he does, and it's impressive, we have to get used to the pace he has on the field to make him feel comfortable."

What will happen in case of a penalty?

The 25-year-old player will be able to play on the FIFA date match after Angel Di Maria's injury, and when questioned about who would kick a possible penalty he did not hesitate to answer.

"If there is a penalty, I will pick up the ball, take it and leave it at the point, and then I'll go 200 meters from it, the penalty kicks are for the 10, (which is Messi's number)" stated Martinez.Brady Bell, the executive producer and head writer on "The Bold and the Beautiful" is hinting that some exciting episodes are coming soon. He promises the baby swap will be revealed but not without some unexpected twists and turns along the way. Now that Thomas is back, Bell says he will stir the pot and bring drama into the lives of Hope and Liam. The action will heat up around the time Jacklyn Woods, who portrays Steffy returns from maternity leave. Taylor has already expressed to Ridge her desire to see their son with Brooke's daughter, so with her interference and Brooke attempting to shut her down, almost anything can happen.

Hope, Liam, Steffy again plus Thomas

On Tuesday, Taylor saw Hope in the kitchen comforting little Douglas whose mother Caroline just passed away. She immediately told Ridge that their grandson needs a mother and Brooke's daughter needs a child. Ridge pointed out that Liam is Hope's husband and his ex-wife began to go on and on about how their daughter should be with the father of her little girl Kelly. Steffy is in Paris now because Jacklyn Woods is on maternity leave but will return to find her mother will have caused a lot of trouble.

According to Celeb Dirty Laundry, Bradley Bell is promising viewers that the love triangle with Hope, Steffy, and Liam will heat up and that Thomas will now be involved. When Ridge and Taylor's son left LA for New York he was with Caroline and had broken Sally's heart.

On Tuesday he revealed to his parents that he and Ms. Spencer were only living together for the sake of their son and were not romantically involved. Although Sally is dating Wyatt, it's possible that "Tally" may still have feelings for each other which would complicate matters greatly.

Discuss this news on Eunomia

The baby swap reveal will change life for Hope

More than likely Thomas will find himself caring about Hope once more as he watches her bond with Douglas, but when the baby swap comes to light things may change. Liam's wife will begin bonding with her own child and desiring the family unity with her husband that never should have been broken.

CDL says Bradley Bell assured fans that Phoebe is indeed Beth, so that is one twist that no one has to worry about.

Soap Dirt is reporting that Taylor will indeed play matchmaker for her son and the daughter of her rival. The spoiler teases that Hope will fall in line, defend her time with Thomas, and once again tell Liam they have no future. By the time Steffy returns and the baby swap is revealed, there will be no telling who is going to end up with whom. While Hope is leaning on Thomas, Sally may do the same because Wyatt has a past with Flo. Be on the lookout for updated "B&B" spoilers as Bradley Bell reveals more of the chaos to come.Why bother? Photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA/REX/Shutterstock

They dont want to argue, Laura Ingraham complained on Thursday night. They want to search and destroy. Thats what they do. Thats why Fox News viewers are so loyal because we refuse to bow, refuse to cave into these kind of terroristic tactics and thats what they are. They are little journo-terrorists and people are sick of it. The target of Ingrahams tirade was Talia Lavin, a left-wing, freelance journalist recently hired by New York University to teach a single course on covering the far-right.

Here's Laura Ingraham displaying my face to 2.5 million viewers and calling me a "little journo-terrorist."



I am 29.

I have no full-time job.

I am teaching a single course, for $7k, as an adjunct.



This is insane. And irresponsible. It is incitement. It is not okay. pic.twitter.com/4tyj9Bktr2  Talia Lavin,  (@chick_in_kiev) March 22, 2019

Lavin is not a particularly newsworthy subject, as she notes herself. But this isnt even the first time Fox has put her face on its network. The channel first fixated on her months ago, when she mistook an ICE agents military tattoo for a white supremacist symbol in a photo, and tweeted an accusation to that affect. Lavin wasnt the only person to make that error, but her tweet went viral, and she resigned as a fact-checker for The New Yorker amidst a deluge of anti-Semitic harassment. Her resignation didnt remove her from Foxs blacklist. So here we are, watching one of the most widely viewed networks in the U.S. perpetuate the notion that a 29-year-old freelance writer is a journo-terrorist, which is a clarifying slur. Ingraham didnt criticize Lavins body of work. Instead, she told her viewers that Lavin is a threat. (Fox has also exhaustively covered NYUs decision to hire Lauren Duca, a liberal writer, for a different adjunct course.)

Ingraham ran her segment the same day that Cesar Sayoc pled guilty to mailing pipe bombs to critics of Donald Trump. Sayoc, too, believed that critics were threats, and while we shouldnt discount the role mental health may have played in his plot, he also did not dream up his list of targets in a void. Neither did Christopher Hasson, the Coast Guard lieutenant now on trial for a terror plot that, like Sayocs, targeted perceived enemies of the president. In this climate, Foxs fixations are especially meaningful. Not only does the channel do Donald Trump a service by demonizing his critics to their viewers, the president returns the favor. Fox and Trump are a human centipede; when its hosts spew, the result tends to appear on the presidents Twitter account. Its not always clear when language crosses into incitement, but the channels obsession with Lavin, and Ingrahams decision to call her a terrorist, credibly fits the definition.

Which leaves liberals with a familiar quandary: should they appear on Fox News. The argument that they should has some validity: It exists, and its large audience should hear a different perspective. This is much how Democratic pundit Donna Brazile has defended her decision to work for Fox. Feeling right and righteous is a comfortable place to be. In a bubble, you dont have to listen  or even think, Brazile argued in an op-ed for the channel. But with Ingraham stirring up viewers against journalists and immigrants and whoever else the far-right agrees to despise, with Tucker Carlson defending white nationalists on air, its less and less certain that Foxs platform can be co-opted for good. Fox shows arent all created equal, but the channel allows its most toxic voices to flourish. As the state channel of a far-right presidential administration, it fulfills exactly the function that Roger Ailes intended for it. Its not interested in legitimate journalism as much as its interested in promulgating right-wing nationalism, and this raison detre means that attempts to puncture the bubble are self-defeating. The narrow goal of a liberal, or a credible reporter, who appears on the network may be to present an alternative, factual viewpoint, but within the Fox ecosystem they can only function as foils, cast to lend the network credibility it doesnt deserve. Journalists who try to break through walls of the Fox News echo chamber can only end up reinforcing them.The greatest president ever, according to a third of Americans. Photo: Andrew Spear/Getty Images

Every day, the evidence piles up that Trumps presidency is a failure on its own terms, let alone anyone elses. And every day, it becomes clearer that this really doesnt matter at all.

A politically successful policy catastrophe? Thats one way of putting it. Let us count the ways. On trade, we have a record deficit in goods  precisely the opposite of what Trump promised. On immigration, we are facing the biggest crisis since the Bush years  a huge jump in migrants from Central America that is now overwhelming the system. Trump, for his part, is now enabling what he calls catch and release on a massive scale. On economic growth, the huge tax cut for the rich has failed. It will not boost growth to levels of 4 or 5 percent  even the presidents own advisers think its likely to be a shade less than 3 percent this year and will decline thereafter. The Fed thinks well be lucky to get a little more than 2 percent.

Meanwhile, the budget deficit now looks likely to be more than a trillion dollars annually for the indefinite future, and public debt is hitting new, stratospheric levels. Trump pledged hed balance the budget. On entitlements, Trump is beginning to backtrack on his promises to protect the safety net. On climate, the denial of reality is exposed almost daily. In just the last week, weve seen catastrophic flooding in the Midwest and what could become the Southern Hemispheres deadliest cyclone on record.

And what consequences do we see for these massive failures? Staggeringly stable polling numbers. A year ago, Trumps approval-to-disapproval rates were 40.6 to 53.4; today theyre 41.6 to 53.1 percent. Nothing seems to move them. A new survey of Fox News viewers shows that 78 percent of them think that Trump has accomplished more than any other president in history. More than Lincoln, FDR, or Washington, for Petes sake. And the enthusiasm of Trumps base now exceeds that of the Democrats. The usual reassurance  that hes still underwater, widely unpopular, and easy to defeat next year  is getting less reassuring. When you actually break out the head-to-head polls, you find Trump remains highly competitive. Bernie bests him by just two points right now  and thats before the GOP attack machine has even gotten started. Everyone else is also neck and neck, although a new poll shows Biden with a ten-point lead. Maybe Biden will save us. I think he would have in 2016. But he failed at both his previous presidential runs, has a huge message-discipline problem, will have a hard time inspiring the grassroots, and looks to be a little too handsy with women for comfort. Im not saying he cannot win. Im just saying its obviously going to be tough.

And the cult is deepening. For me, the grimmest reality is Congresss likely inability to override Trumps veto on wall spending. Here you have a bedrock principle of constitutional conservatism  separation of powers, Congresss sole power of the purse  and it has been tossed out the window. This is not some minor development. Handing the president the ability to make up national emergencies in order to appropriate funds for purposes Congress has explicitly ruled out  well, its textbook authoritarianism. It makes Obamas attempt to juggle priorities in who gets deported look positively meek.

There is also a collapse in a functioning, accountable government outside the small royal court that has effectively replaced the cabinet. Foreign policy has become a matter of authoritarian whim, or family connection. Yesterday, Trump tweeted  yes, tweeted  an attack on the basis of international law: He recognized Israels seizure of the Golan Heights as legitimate and permanent. That piece of land is now, for the U.S., part of Israels Sovereignty. Reversing decades of policy only took a few seconds.

Trumps rationale is the idea that the Heights are of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability! So if a state decides to annex the territory of a neighboring state, because such an occupation helps the strategy and security of the aggressor nation, the U.S. has no problem with that. What principle is left to oppose Putins annexation of Crimea? Why did Trump do this? No one really knows, as is usually the case with monarchs of old. Probably he was trying to please evangelicals, support Bibis reelection, and nudge along the son-in-laws harebrained Mideast scheme. (Yes, the mute dauphin who uses his WhatsApp for official business, and hangs out with the Saudi torturer, MBS.)

Trumps dominance routine has also become more effective the longer it has gone on. Look at the miserable examples of Lindsey Graham or Ben Sasse, eunuchs at the Royal Court. Or think of Trumps Twitter assaults on George Conway, a man pointing out the bleeding obvious  that Trump is so mentally and psychologically sick that he is unfit to run a lemonade stand. And, for her part, Conway defends Trump rather than her husband! This is Stalinesque. Or think of the insane indecency of Trumps continued flaying of the ghost of John McCain. Yes, some Republicans have demurred. But primarily those whose own careers are over, time-limited, or beyond accountability because their seats are so safe. Mitt Romney is reduced to saying he cannot understand why Trump would do this. Again: the former nominee, safe Senate seat, Mormon rectitude, long Republican loyalist. And he pretends merely to be baffled?

Talk about ripe for tyranny! And that, it seems to me, is the real salience of the tweets. Trump is showing his foes and friends that he can say anything, abuse anyone, lie about anything, break every norm of decency, propriety and prudence  and suffer no consequences at all. Its all a dominance ritual. And just think about what he has actually claimed: that the heads of the FBI and DOJ engaged in treasonous and illegal activity; that Russia, despite the unanimous judgment of U.S. and Western intelligence, did not attempt to intervene in the 2016 election; and that the opposition party cannot legitimately win an election. The latter  repeated over the years  is a direct assault on liberal democracy, and on the integrity and legitimacy of the entire system. It opens up the very real possibility that Trump will not concede an election he loses. In any functioning democracy, such statements would end any politicians career. They merely burnish Trumps hold.

In this post-truth world, where Trump has allied with social media to create an alternate reality, lies work. This week, he approached the press corps simply repeating, No Collusion! No Collusion! And he will continue to say this regardless of what the Mueller report may reveal, because it doesnt matter what actually happened. Whatever Trump says will become the truth for 40 percent of the country, while the expectations of the opposition, troubled by pesky empiricism, may well be deflated. Fox, a de facto state propaganda channel, will do the rest.

This remains a surreal state of affairs, does it not? Life goes on; politics has the forms of democracy, even if the substance is now monarchical; and the economy continues to grow. And how did we respond to his usurping the power of the Congress with an emergency declaration, or his marshaling of the military for an election-eve stunt on the border, or his refusing any cooperation with the House committees, or his two-hour, delusional rant at CPAC, or his response to white nationalist mass murder by pivoting to an invasion of the U.S., or the blizzard of simply deranged tweets last Sunday? How did we react when he said, in the context of a fight with Democrats, I have the military. For what? Mr. President. What plans do you exactly have in mind?

Yes, were numb. Yes, this has become normal. And yes, as far as liberal democracy is concerned, this is an extinction-level event.

Deal or No Deal?

We all knew the Brexit endgame would be a cliff-hanger. But this? Seriously. The United Kingdom, a country known for its punctuality and pragmatism, is on the brink of jumping into the complete unknown. It is paralyzed and yet also in pain. The parliament cannot find a compromise; even the cabinet cannot reach one. And because the square cannot be circled, what we have is the biggest game of chicken the E.U. has ever seen.

It has been perfectly clear for quite a while now that Prime Minister Theresa Mays strategy was to stick to her flawed deal with the E.U. (the only serious compromise on the table) and force the House of Commons to back it at the last minute to avoid the economic disaster of crashing out of the E.U. without any deal at all. And shes not blinking.

But two interventions have complicated this strategy. The first was from the Speaker of the House, the rather bumptious John Bercow who is as deeply in love with the sound of his own voice as he is with the arcane details of parliamentary procedure. Bercow ruled last week that the Commons would not consider a third meaningful vote on Mays deal, because two rejections in one parliament is quite enough.

The ruling  which goes back to 1603  is based on the nostrum that no government can railroad the parliament, by sending it the same bill again and again until it relents. That kind of executive bullying is what parliament was worried about when it came to a new king, James I, they didnt fully trust. And so it is four centuries later with the Weekend at Bernies premiership of Theresa May: no coercion allowed. This matters because if May cannot get a majority vote for her deal next week, the U.K. will be forced to crash out of the E.U.. The Commons has already voted to invoke Article 50, which mandates an exit by 11 p.m. next Friday, and it hasnt repealed that vote. And it is very hard to see how Article 50 could be revoked altogether without a massive public outcry.

The E.U. agreed last night to an extension only till May 22, if the deal passes by next Friday; if the deal cannot win a majority, the deadline will be April 12  a swift kick out the door. Theyve left a tiny space for the Brits to come up with something out of the blue, in which case they might grant a longer extension.

If necessary, the French will be the bad cop, and Macron will try to force the U.K. to make a decision. That would, in some ways, be a fitting end to Britains E.U. membership. De Gaulle originally vetoed Britain entering what was then the Common Market, and now his successor will veto any attempt to delay an exit. Macrons Europe minister, Nathalie Loiseau, takes the prize for the best metaphor for how her fellow French see the situation. She said that if she had a cat, she would name it Brexit: It wakes me up meowing because it wants to go out. When I open the door, it sits there, undecided. Then it looks daggers at me when I put it out.

The other wonderful metaphor for this ghastly ordeal came from the journalist Hugo Rifkind. He suspects that Mays brinkmanship will work, that even hard-line Tories will balk at precipitating an economic swoon, and that the Labour party will also come around to a version of Mays deal. Its still a crap deal, as one of his Twitter respondents replied, but we voted to crap ourselves in 2016 and have to sit in the mess. To which Rifkind responded, I fear we may look back on two years of trying to push a shit back in.

But can they push it back in? I have to say I doubt it. Mays short speech Wednesday night focused on the growing sense of Brexit fatigue among British voters, and frustration at Parliaments indecision. Just getting it over with is beginning to sound better than any possibly endless extension. A brutal, clear Brexit is also quite simply the only way to honor the referendum if the Commons cannot agree on a compromise.

I also suspect that, in a pinch, May would prefer no deal to ever more wrangling. I also suspect that the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, may also be fine with a crash out. He has long opposed the E.U. because of its neoliberal economic rules which would hamper a future socialist governments ability to command the British economy. And with 30 or 40 Tory MPs eager for no deal, it would take a huge shift for Parliament to approve a compromise. I just cannot see that happening  unless someone somewhere suddenly blinks. This weekend, huge marches are planned in London to pile on the pressure. A petition has appeared with a million signatures calling for the U.K. to revoke Article 50 and just stay in. But the mood in the Leave camp is still furious and intransigent. They believe that the shock of a no deal Brexit has been hyped. They were told of doom as soon as a referendum passed, and yet unemployment in the U.K. just reached 40-year lows. They want to call the catastrophists bluff.

What youre hearing is the inability of a country to find a workable political compromise in the new populist era. If no deal is the result, it will be just as foreboding for Americas future as Brexit was for the 2016 election. It will mean that in a divided developed country, the populist right may well keep on winning.

Truth and Transgender Science

An open debate on transgender issues seems to me vital if we are simply to get things right. The trouble is: Many trans activists dont want a debate. They believe sincerely that such a discussion will inevitably tend toward the question of whether transgender people actually exist. (This is not debatable  they do.) The other trouble is: Many social conservatives dont want to have a debate either, and they actually do assert that trans people do not exist. They claim that trans people are lying or are mentally ill, despite mounds of empirical evidence proving that transgender identity is real, and unchanging, if only for a small number of people (as of 2016, 1.4 million Americans  or 0.4 percent of the population  identified as transgender). In the middle of this gulf, the truth certainly lies. And it says something about this moment in our culture that the truth doesnt seem to matter at all.

Hence the absurd correction of a study by Brown professor Lisa Littman published by the open-access science journal PLOS One. It was the result of a second peer review of the article that, in the end, changed not a jot of its data or conclusions. It merely reframed the article, and added some more context. Two cheers for academic freedom, I guess. Except that the ordeal sends a red flare up to other researchers: Dont enter this field. Its trouble.

The study itself examined how a sudden embrace of trans identity during adolescence (where none had been suggested in childhood) might be a function of peer pressure, Internet exposure to transgender materials, a majority-trans peer group, and withdrawal from parents. Littman proposed a description of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, or ROGD:

[T]hat is distinct in etiology from the gender dysphoria observed in individuals who have previously been described as transgender  The worsening of mental well-being and parent-child relationships and behaviors that isolate teens from their parents, families, non-transgender friends and mainstream sources of information are particularly concerning. More research is needed to better understand this phenomenon, its implications, and scope.

Thats all Littman was arguing for: more research, please. (And shes right: her study was limited. Its respondents were all parents, not trans kids; and they were recruited from websites where many families were concerned about a sudden change in a daughter or son. Much more research is needed.)

And it is surely conceivable that trans identity can be, in some cases, mistaken, especially when it seems to come out of nowhere in the midst of puberty. People who detransition later on life absolutely do exist, and they are often unable to reverse permanent alteration of their bodies and endocrine systems. And if teenage trans identity suddenly surges in popularity, its surely possible that faddishness or other psychological issues could be at work. The language of contagion and cluster outbreaks used in the paper does rub the wrong way  because it would seem to imply that being transgender is some sort of disease. But when you think about it more deeply, you realize that the contagion is not being transgender but being deluded into thinking you are.

And that seems especially possible given a sharp increase in trans identity among young women, mainly lesbians:

The adolescent and young adult (AYA) children described were predominantly natal female (82.8%) with a mean age of 16.4 years  Forty-one percent of the AYAs had expressed a non-heterosexual sexual orientation before identifying as transgender. Many (62.5%) of the AYAs had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder or neuro-developmental disability prior to the onset of their gender dysphoria.

What youre seeing in other words is a big chunk of these women who would previously have become adult lesbians, suddenly deciding in adolescence that they have been male all along. Immediately we are in a zero-sum game: Among these teenagers, transgender identity is replacing lesbian identity. It doesnt surprise me that some lesbians see this as a form of lesbian and female erasure.

But what truly baffles me is why transgender activists would not want this relatively new phenomenon to be studied. Surely its in the interests of transgender people that the diagnosis, whether trans or cis, be accurate  especially when it can lead to permanent, irreversible changes in the physical body: removing genitalia, or flooding a teen girls endocrine system with testosterone. And the only way to discover who will or will not be rendered happier by transition is to observe unhappy transitions as well as the liberating kind, to be aware of the mistakes as well as the successes  rather than create an ideological chilling effect, in which we end up learning less. The last thing you want is for there to be a wave of de-transitioning in the future, because so many adolescent diagnoses were wrong. That would set back trans rights a very long way.

My fear is a very old one: that attempts to squelch free inquiry can only, in the end, discredit a good and humane cause, and that when orthodoxy trumps or chills empirical research, we have lost any reliable way to uncover the truth about the world. And, yes, I mean objective, empirical truth.

Some odds and ends. Sorry about missing last week. I had a nasty bout of bronchitis. And I dont want to let Bret Stephenss Twitter charge of lazy and untrue to stand on the question of my item on aid to Israel. He argues that a comparison between aid to Israel and South Korea does not take into account the armed forces we have in Korea.

First, there is nothing untrue in the item. Its stats come from USAID. No corrections were made because none were needed. Secondly, the money we spend in South Korea is for our own troops and to maintain our commitment at the end of the Korean War to protect the South. Even then, of the $2 billion we spend on defending South Korea and our Pacific allies, Seoul repays us close to $1 billion annually. So even if you concede Stephenss point, Israels near$4 billion in aid dwarfs South Koreas net $1 billion. Per capita, its not even close.

South Korea, moreover, faces a nuclear enemy in Kim Jong-un, as well as over a million North Korean conventional troops near its border. Israel dominates its region militarily, has no foreign troops on its borders, and has a nuclear weapon in its arsenal, the ultimate deterrent; while its enemy, Iran, has none.

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meal she had when Richard Byron finally caught up with her and ordered dinner.

One day I'd love to do a series of trips based on some of Mary Stewart's books. I've been to Corfu, where Mary Stewart and also Gerald Durrell were very much in my mind, but I'd love to recreate the journey her character Charity made in Madam Will You Talk , which starts in Avignon in Provence. I've been to Avignon (but did not dance on the bridge) but what I'd like to do is take a car, as her heroine did, or better still hire a driver to take me to all the places she visited. While rereading the book. Or possibly listening to an audio version while I gazed at the scenery.

Anne here, pondering the idea of literary pilgrimages. I've just flown a thousand miles north, to Brisbane, to attend a multi-author book signing, but though it's a book event, it's not a literary pilgrimage. The kind of pilgrimage I mean is one to a place where either a beloved author wrote, or wrote about. I'm more in favor of the place written about, than the place where someone wrote. This post was what got me thinking about it.

I remember still those exquisite fluted silver dishes, each with its load of dainty colours . . . there were anchovies and tiny gleaming silver fish in red sauce, and savoury butter in curled strips of fresh lettuce; there were caviare and tomato and olives green and black, and small golden-pink mushrooms and cresses and beans. The waiter heaped my plate, and filled another glass with white wine. I drank half a glassful without a word, and began to eat. I was conscious of Richard Byrons eyes on me, but he did not speak.

The waiters hovered beside us, the courses came, delicious and appetizing, and the empty plates vanished as if by magic. I remember red mullet, done somehow with lemons, and a succulent golden-brown fowl bursting with truffles and flanked by tiny peas, then a froth of ice and whipped cream dashed with kirsch, and the fine smooth caress of the wine through it all. Then, finally, apricots and big black grapes, and coffee. The waiter removed the little silver filtres, and vanished, leaving us alone in our alcove.

And possibly I would travel with a copy of Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking as well. . .

Mary Stewart's books would provide the background to some wonderful trips  she did loactions so well -- Thunder on the Right and Spain, The Gabriel Hounds, Damascus, Airs Above the Ground and Austria, the list goes on. It's an idea for a tour company, I think -- the Mary Stewart Tour company . . . I'd sign up like a shot.

But there are so many other places I'd visit. I would love to go once more to Rye, in England, where so many of EF Benson's wonderful "Lucia" books were written. And his fictional town of Tilling is, in fact, Rye, and you can walk the cobbled streets past the Mermaid Inn, and visit the church, and look at Lamb house where he wrote, and which is first Mapp's and later Lucia's house, and find all the locations mentioned in the books.

When I first vitited Rye, many years ago, I met an American girl staying at the same B&B, and of course were talked books and she said, "So you've come here because of EF Benson."

"Who?" I said.

She was horrified, and dragged me up to the local bookshop and forced me to buy the first "Lucia" books. I enjoyed it, but wasn't a devotee until a few months later when I was on Corfu and found some books in English, The little shop had all the Lucia books by EF Benson. I bought another one -- simply because it was in English and I was out of reading matter. I devoured it that night and went back and bought the rest of the series. And instantly wanted to go back to Rye and look at the town properly.

That same year I travelled through Greece and was awe-inspired standing in the ruins of Delphi, and looking down the valley where Sophocles' Oedipus drove after consulting the Oracle who predicted he'd kill his father and marry his mother. I wasn't long out of university and all those ancient Greek tales were vivid in my mind everywhere I went in Greece.

Jane Austen is an author who inspires a lot of literary pilgrimages. I've been to Bath several times, and had a lovely time exploring, but I was inspired as much by Georgette Heyer's Bath-set novels as Jane Austen and her books and history there. And I confess, I've never been to Bath and Chawton, the house where she lived and wrote. But I will one day.

Speaking of Georgette Heyer, I've done the Georgette Heyer Walk with the wonderful Jenny Haddon (who invented it.) It was a true joy to walk the London streets and have Jenny point out this location and that, while we reminisced about the books and various characters. I blogged about it here.

I grew up on AA Milne's poetry and Winnie the Pooh, and I had a rush of blood to the head some years back when I saw that his house was for sale. It's right beside all the places in the stories -- the forest that became the Hundred Acre Wood, the bridge where Christopher Robin played Pooh sticks and more. Sadly I couldn't buy it, but a visit to the district is definitely on the list next time I go the the UK.

A place in the USA I'd love to visit is the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In that, I'm inspired by a historical romance called the Warfield Bride by Bronwyn Williams, which evokes that environment beautifully. I once shocked an author who I learned lived in that area by saying to her "Tell me about where you live." She thought I meant her to descibe her house, but once I explained she laughed. She knew Bronwyn Williams (the name Dixie Browning and her sister wrote historicals under) and happily obliged me.

My mother grew up reading the books of Zane Grey, and when I told her I was visiting Montana, she was so thrilled. She'd always wanted to go. I came home with a big book of photos and she pored over them again and again.

I could continue listing the many places I'd love to visit, inspired by books and writers I love, but maybe it's time I stopped, and let you wenchly readers tell me about some of the literary pilgrimages you've made or would like to make.Tallinn Architecture Biennale TAB 2019 has announced the winning projects of the TAB 2019 Vision Competition "New Habitats, New Beauties".

The competition received 80 proposals from all over the world. The 1st prize was awarded to the entry by the name Lines Rehab, followed by 2nd prize Voxel Valley and 3rd place Eatable.

Five honourable mentions are: 4LifeBuildings, Postforest, Relation Hood, Self-sufficient Habitat and Tallinn Tetris. At this stage, only the titles of the winning proposals are being revealed: the names and teams behind the proposals will be announced during the Opening Week of TAB in September.

Image courtesy of the artist of Lines Rehab

According to Yael Reisner, TAB 2019 Head Curator and the competition's advisor, the jury was impressed by the level and number of the finalist proposals. Most of the entries reflected on the engagement with the subject, and revealed how young generations, architects and students, approach architectural design.

The authors of Lines Rehab, Voxel Valley and Eatable will be invited to TAB Opening Week and to take part of TAB Symposium in September 2019. TAB Vision Competition entries will be exhibited as part of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale Main Programme.

Image courtesy of the artist of Lines Rehab

TAB 2019 Vision Competition "New Habitats, New Beauties" was announced in September 2018. The competition focused on the east side of Kopli, part of Kalamaja, an urban area in the North of Tallinn. The curatorial team asked the proposals to escape the bland globalisation of standard developer architecture and find new concepts in keeping with the alternative lifestyles of Kalamajas inhabitants.

The jury of the competition included Kjetil Trdal Thorsen (Snhetta, Norway), Margit Mutso (Eek & Mutso, Estonia), Jaak- Adam Looveer (Tallinn City Planning Department, Estonia).

Image courtesy of the artist of Lines Rehab

The designer of Lines Rehab developed the project based on rotation concept of swing bridge located on a Site, the designer's project switches site space to create a new communication.

"Master plan proposal is a kind of new rails that contribute to new type of communication between districts. Preserving and extending the connection of Kungla and Volta streets over the site enhances urban interaction in this area."

"Rethinking two basic materials - wooden housing and industrial architecture of the district - we bring new aesthetic approach. Defining wood for living space and metal for public space as an trace of industrial legacy, we unite them in one structure. Certain material intuitively provides certain activity to happen," added the designers.

Grid structure of solid lines and open space yards offers functional flexibility and mutual space interaction. Diversity of private and public space relations, which appear in between structure, helps to involve different types of inhabit practices. Grid is open to contain both local services for constant habitats like shared offices, cultural centres, libraries () and elements of urban significance as well.

2nd prize winner named as Voxel Valley. Image courtesy of the artist

"The Voxel Valley is a diverse settlement complex for multi-family residential homes combined with office and co-working spaces.

The design aims to marry architecture with nature to compose a nest of sheltered homes that provides high quality, resilient and

energy efficient spaces," explained the designers.

"The Voxel Valley is comprised of 4x4x4 meters modules that create a matrix of multiple public, semi-public and private spaces,

interlinked by horizontal and vertical pathways. As opposed to typical apartment building with common staircase, this complex

contains from modules, which can be accessed independently."

3rd prize winner named as Eatable. Image courtesy of the artist

"Eatable town. A post-something agro-urban environment." "A beautiful evening."

"It is almost time for the Thursday evening drink with the neighbours at the elementary school [1]. I look through my window. Kids are skateboarding [2]. Someone is picking up fruit at the cooperative [3]. People like to meet there after work to socialize with the urban farmers [4]. A man cycles [5] through the blossoming orchards [6] and passes the new houses [7]. Most of them feature an integrated greenhouse providing families with fresh herbs and vegetables. A woman comes out of the grocery store [8] and walks straight to the kindergarten [9]  both housed in a former residential building. I take a look at the long gallery [10] that crosses the whole neighbourhood connecting various cultural venues, and I notice people gathering at the entrance of the shiny Arts centre  there is a show tonight. I should hurry to get there on time so I take the cupcakes I promised to the old ladies from the co-housing [11] next door and leave."

TAB 2019 Opening Week will take place from 11-15 September 2019. TAB is organised by the Estonian Centre for Architecture.

"Beauty Matters: The Resurgence of Beauty" is the topic for the next Tallinn Architecture Biennale TAB 2019. The winning proposal was selected from the international curatorial call for the 5th installment of the biggest architecture event in the region. The selected head curator is Dr Yael Reisner, a registered architect in Israel, who works and lives in London. The winning proposal focuses on the subject of how beauty matters again, reflecting on a cultural shift, after nearly eighty years of dormancy, as beauty was a tabooed, denigrated subject. Curators assistants roles in the TAB curatorial team has been appointed to architect Liina Soosaar (Tallinn), who has recently graduated from Architecture and Urban Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts and architect Barnaby Gunning (London).

Top image: 1st prize winner "Lines Rehab", courtesy of the artist of Lines Rehab.

> via TAB 2019Were still just getting started. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Nearly two years after Special Counsel Robert Mueller launched his investigation, were finally going to see what he turned up. On Thursday, Attorney General William Barr will send Congress the redacted Mueller report between 11 a.m. and noon. In what appears to be an attempt to spin the release, Barr will hold a press conference prior to the reports release at 9:30 a.m., frustrating those who believe the attorney general is acting as Trumps fixer in the Justice Department.

The biggest revelation from Barrs four-page summary of the report was that Mueller is not recommending any further indictments. In countless tweets and public statements, Trump has insisted that there was no collusion with Russia, and if Barr is to be believe, Mueller hasnt produced any evidence to the contrary. However, the Mueller probe has already yielded ample evidence of Russias efforts to make sure Trump won the 2016 election, and the connections between Trump associates and Russia  plus other crimes that fall under Muellers mandate.

As we await a full run down of whats in Muellers very comprehensive report, heres everything we already know.

George Papadopoulos, center in a dark tie, at a meeting with Trump during the campaign. Photo: @realdonaldtrump/Instagram

George Papadopoulos lied to the FBI about Russian contacts

 In October 2017, court documents revealed that George Papadopoulos, a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, had been arrested as part of the Mueller investigation in July 2017. He pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with the Russians  specifically, the timing, extent and nature of his relationships and interactions with certain foreign nationals whom he understood to have close connections with senior Russian government officials.

 The court documents say Papadopoulos claimed he met a London-based professor with extensive ties to Russian government officials (who reports identified as Joseph Mifsud) before joining the Trump campaign. Mifsud actually took an interest in Papadopoulos shortly after he joined the Trump campaign, and during a meeting in April the professor told him about the Russians possessing dirt on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails, according to prosecutors. The conversation happened weeks before the Democratic National Committee revealed it had been hacked, and about a month after Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was targeted with a phishing attempt.

 Around the same time, Papadopoulos met a Russian woman that he believed had ties to the Russian government as well. Over several months, Papadopoulos repeatedly tried to use his new associates connections to set up a meeting between top Trump campaign and Russian government officials  making it clear that Putin was interested in meeting Trump personally.

 Sometimes campaign officials ignored or rebuffed Papadopoulos, but at one point a high-level campaign official (believed to be then-campaign manager Paul Manafort) emailed another top official: Lets discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.

 In August 2016 another top campaign official (said to be national campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis) urged Papadopoulos to meet with Russians to foster ties with their government, saying, Make the trip, if it is feasible.

 Papadopoulos repeatedly lied to investigators in January 2017. It cost them the chance to catch Mifsud, the London-based professor, before he fled the U.S. Even after his guilty plea, a prosecutor said, Papadopoulos only made begrudging efforts to cooperate. In September of last year, he was sentenced to 14 days in prison.

Paul Manafort. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Paul Manafort and Rick Gates allegedly laundered millions, conspired against U.S.

 On October 30, 2017, the same day Papadopouloss plea deal was unveiled, the special counsel announced charges against Manafort and his longtime business associate Rick Gates, who was also his deputy on the Trump campaign. The 12-count indictment included charges of conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading FARA statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.

Prosecutors described an elaborate bank fraud and money laundering scheme linked to Manafort and Gatess work for pro-Russian political parties in Ukraine. They said this went on from 2006 to at least 2016, but the charges were not linked to their work on the Trump campaign. (Conspiracy against the U.S. sounds dramatic but it can mean making false statements about your work with a foreign government.)

 In February 2018 Mueller filed new charges against Manafort and Gates, accusing them of laundering $30 million, failing to pay U.S. taxes for almost a decade, and using their real-estate holdings to fraudulently secure $20 million in loans.

 Muellers attempt to turn up the pressure worked  on Gates, at least. In February 2018 he agreed to cooperate with the special counsel and pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of making false statements to FBI agents. Nearly two dozen more serious charges were dropped, and in January 2019, Mueller asked for a delay in Gatess sentencing, citing his ongoing cooperation in several ongoing investigations.

Alex van der Zwaan. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A Dutch lawyer already served time

 Alex van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his connection to Gates, and was sentenced to 30 days in prison and a $20,000 fine. He is the first person sentenced in the probe and is currently serving his prison sentence at a low-security facility in Pennsylvania.

Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about the Russian ambassador

 On December 1, 2017, former national-security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition period. Court documents reveal that despite what Flynn told agents in January 2017, his talks with Kislyak were part of a coordinated effort by the Trump team to influence foreign policy before the inauguration.

 The documents say that a very senior member of the transition team (reportedly Jared Kushner) directed Flynn to discuss a United Nations resolution with Kislyak. Flynn admitting to asking Kislyak on December 22, 2016, to delay or defeat a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel for its settlement policy. The Obama administration opted to abstain and the resolution passed.

 Flynn also admitted to talking with Kislyak on December 29 to urge Russia not to retaliate when President Obama imposed new sanctions over Russias election meddling. The court documents say he conferred with other top members of the Trump team several times, but its not clear what Trump himself knew. The next day President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would not retaliate against the U.S. for the sanctions.

 Since Flynn pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, his sentencing has been delayed several times. Both sides are set to give a status report on March 13, 2019.

Russians engaged in an elaborate scheme to sway the election in Trumps favor

 On February 16, 2018, Mueller charged 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies with engaging in propaganda efforts intended to disrupt the 2016 election. While the indictments support the U.S. intelligence agencies conclusion that Russia was working to help Trump, the court documents do not address the hacking of Democrats. Instead, they focus on a Russian social-media push that began in 2014 with the goal of stirring division and shaking peoples faith in the U.S. election system, but eventually shifted to backing Trump.

 Court documents allege that the Internet Research Firm, a Russian troll farm, set out to conduct information warfare against the U.S. The company had a hundreds of workers and a multimillion-dollar budget, supplied by companies linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg businessman with ties to Putin.

 Russians impersonated American citizens on social media and occasionally in person, posing as activists online, buying ads, and organizing rallies.

 Some of the Russians were in contact with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign, but no Americans were accused of knowingly participating in Russias scheme. Mueller reached a plea deal with Richard Pinedo, a California man who committed identity fraud when he unknowingly sold bank-account numbers created using the stolen identities of U.S. citizens to Russians.

 None of the Russians are in custody and its unlikely that they will ever be tried. Naming them makes it harder for them to continue their secretive work, or travel abroad. Plus, it theoretically refutes the claim that Russias election meddling was a hoax  though of course, Trump cherry-picked from the indictment, falsely claiming that it proved the results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong  no collusion!

Paul Manafort tried to get in Muellers way

 One of the charges against Manafort was related to payments hed made to former politicians in Eastern Europe. Manafort allegedly continued lying about the details, at least into February of last year  and tried to convince his former PR colleagues to go along with his story, which would amount to a separate crime of witness tampering. One of those colleagues talked to the FBI instead. A few months later, in June 2018, Mueller stacked extra charges onto Manaforts case.

 At the same time, Mueller revealed the identity of Manaforts longtime partner in Ukraine: Konstantin Kilimnik, an interpreter trained by the Russian Army. He revealed that Manafort and Kilimnik had stayed in touch throughout Trumps campaign. Manafort was in debt to a Russian oligarch  he apparently owed at least $10 million  and Manaforts emails to Kilimnik in 2016 have made it clear that he wanted to use his role with Trump to trade political favors instead of paying the debt in cash. Kilimnik was the intermediary.

 Mueller has charged Kilimnik, too, with witness tampering, but the translator is safe in Russia and may never stand trial here.

Manafort kept on lying after pleading guilty

 In September 2018, Manafort admitted to obstructing the investigation and running a conspiracy operation in Ukraine. He promised complete cooperation with Mueller to avoid a trial that was on the brink of starting. But then he kept on lying to the FBI, Mueller announced two months later. What about? We dont know yet, but Mueller said hed explain it all in a memo before Manaforts sentencing  which is scheduled for March.

The Russians tried to crack Hillary Clintons servers the very day Trump asked them to

 Remember that invitation Trump gave during a 2016 news conference? Russia, if youre listening, I hope youre able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, the candidate said onstage. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.

Russia tried to hack her teams emails that very same day, according to documents Mueller filed in July of last year. The announcement came as Mueller indicted 12 officers of Russias military-intelligence agency. He also chronicled many other espionage attempts by them: for instance, he said, they hacked state election boards, stealing information on 500,000 voters from one state alone. The indictment said they funded their work with cryptocurrency.

Michael Cohen continued lying after the campaign, too

 Michael Cohen, Trumps lawyer, lied to Congress in August 2017 about business dealings Trump had with Russia during the campaign. Plans had been in the works for a Trump tower in Moscow, but Cohen claimed the negotiations had been cut off before the Iowa caucuses. They hadnt. In reality, they continued at least until that summer, according to documents that have since come to light  and may have continued all the way to the election.

 In November 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. A week later, Mueller announced that Cohen had turned into an extremely helpful witness and had sat through seven meetings with the special counsels office, some of which were lengthy. Another revelation was that Cohen had kept Trump in the loop about those Russia negotiations all along.

Roger Stone allegedly made false statements to Congress

 Roger Stone, the brazenly amoral strategist who worked on Trumps campaign briefly in 2015, communicated with anonymous Russian hackers and WikiLeaks during the period when they were working on Trumps behalf. This isnt news; the big revelation from Stones indictment on January 25, 2019 was that Stone allegedly lied to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 about his contact with WikiLeaks. He also tried to interfere with a witness, the radio host Randy Credico, according to the indictment. He was arrested at his home in Fort Lauderdale early Friday morning, while still wearing his pajamas.

 The indictment also said that someone high up in Trumps campaign was ordered to get in touch with Stone and ask him about what WikiLeaks could offer. It does not, however, lay out a clear narrative or time line of Stones contact with WikiLeaks and the anonymous hackers.

This post was originally published on the one-year anniversary of Muellers investigation. It has been updated throughout.Ian Black in The Guardian:

Outside the window of Tim Mackintosh-Smiths home in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, are reminders of the long sweep of Arab history  child soldiers mourning martyrs of the countrys ongoing war, rocket salvoes, sectarian rivalries, hypnotic slogans and a mosque dating back to the seventh century and the rise of Islam in the Arabian peninsula. The view is simultaneously rich, bleak and thought-provoking: for three millennia, dynasties have come and gone, from the Sabaeans and Himyaris to the Umayyads of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad. Later came the al Saud  the family that gave its name to a still powerful kingdom. Interactions between desert (badu) and town (hadar), semi-nomadic tribes and settled peoples, strong men and weak institutions, are a constant theme. Language, faith, and loyalty come together in complex and far-flung combinations.

Arabs retells a familiar story in unexpected ways. It focuses first on the social and economic changes (the domestication of the camel was key) that shaped the pre-Islamic world before the transformation that began in Mecca in AD622. Perfumes and gems were the precursors of the petroleum and gas of modern times. In the background were always challenges from Assyrians, Persians, Romans and Mongols, narrated and fought by a colourful cast of oracles, orators and commanders of dogged, lightly equipped horse-mounted warriors. Mackintosh-Smith is an unusual Englishman abroad: a writer who lives, as he puts it, in a land not a library, experiencing history in situ. He combines deep learning with penetrating insights delivered with dazzling turns of phrase and illuminating comparisons.

More here.Shadi Hamid in Foreign Policy:

It is reasonable that we would want to cast such an attack outside the realm of rationality, to tell ourselves that expressions of evil are random and unpredictable; its the same impulse many had when faced with the brutality and terror of the Islamic State and other jihadi extremists. To rationalize evil as something irrational makes it easier to take on horrifying news. But to do that here would be a mistake.

I wont link to the accused shooters manifesto. But I think its important for analysts and government officials to read it carefully. This is what many of us did when the Islamic State would release its recordings and statements. We tried to understand why young Tunisians would travel to Syria to fight in disproportionate numbers for a group that seemed so ostentatious in its savagery. In the process, the analytical and policy community was able to reach a fairly sophisticated understanding of not just the groups objectives but also of its particular way of looking at the world, including the end times. In dealing with an apparent global rise in violent white supremacism, we may, once again, be obliged to immerse ourselves in a disturbing, sometimes terrifying universe of thought that will, at least at first, seem foreign.

More here.Getty Images

En espanol | Around 1 in 10 older Americans report hiding cash in places around the house, including under the mattress, according to a survey from market research firm Edelman Intelligence. But experts say treating your house like a savings account isnt doing people  or their money  any favors.

The survey of 6,000 U.S. adults, conducted on behalf of banking firm PurePoint Financial, found that 11 percent of those 55 and older reported hiding money at home. This might be because older adults are diligent savers overall: The results showed that 72 percent of them are constant savers who put money aside on a regular basis, not just to meet a short-term goal.



PurePoint President Pierre Habis says history has shaped older adults tendency to stash cash. They have seen and experienced some of the most devastating financial crises, he wrote in an email to AARP, and he suspects that many are fearful another Great Recession is looming.



But keeping money at home, he says, not only means missing out on financial growth from the interest that savings accounts offer, it also makes people vulnerable to loss from theft, fires, floods and accidents.



Patrick Daniels, director of financial planning at Precedent Asset Management, Indianapolis, says keeping cash hidden away poses additional problems, since secret stores can be forgotten by the person who hid them in the first place, or overlooked by relatives in the event someone passes away.



Daniels recommends that his clients keep a modest amount of cash (no more than $1,000, or the maximum covered by your homeowners or renters insurance policy) at home in a known but secure location, like a fireproof safe. The American Red Cross and other disaster-preparedness organizations also recommend keeping a small sum packed in your homes emergency kit for immediate needs, like gas money, in case of a natural disaster.



This at-home stash, Daniels says, should not be confused with maintaining a true emergency fund  enough money for three to six months of living expenses  in a savings account. Both Daniels and Habis recommend looking for high-yield accounts that offer 2 percent interest, available at many online banks.



For savers who worry that the bank wont be able to guarantee their funds in the event of a financial crisis, Habis recommends learning more about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which protects the deposits you make to a savings account.

And remember, Daniels says, being smart about cash doesnt mean you have to ban the stuff at home. Theres no problem with hanging onto what he calls pizza money, a collection of small bills or loose change to use for movie tickets or a nice dinner out. Just dont keep it under the mattress or in the freezer.The BJP has released first list of 184 candidates for the Lok Sabha elections 2019, with big names like Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party President Amit Shah contesting polls from Varanasi and Gandhinagar, respectively. The list includes names for the seats where the first phase of voting will be held. 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 activities, with prominent leaders holding several rallies every day. 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 complete timeline of all the updates related to the General Elections 2019 through our blog.

3.55pm: "Absolute nonsense, disgusting and desperate efforts by @INCIndia to release such fake dairy, prove it at the earliest or face defamation case," says the BJP leader.

Absolute nonsense, disgusting & desperate efforts by @INCIndia to release such fake dairy, prove it at the earliest or face defamation case. pic.twitter.com/h1Cr8WgQR4  Chowkidar B.S. Yeddyurappa (@BSYBJP) March 22, 2019

3.30pm: BS Yeddyurappa on the diary row: "They have planted the story in the media to gain mileage in the upcoming elections. Issues raised by Congress leaders are irrelevant and false. I'm discussing with the senior advocates to file a defamation case against the concerned person also."

BS Yeddyurappa, BJP: Congress party and its leaders are bankrupt of ideas, they are frustrated with growing popularity of the Modi ji, they have lost the battle before it began. I-T Department officials have already proved that the documents are forged and fake. pic.twitter.com/v8lzDIfyMA  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

3.13pm: The Congress had released a leaked video of Yeddyurappa in 2017, alleging its links with the diary row, following which the anti-corruption bureau of Karnataka had registered a case against Yeddyurappa. As per The News Minute, the alleged video contained the voices of Yeddyurappa and BJP leader Anath Kumar, in which Yeddyurappa allegedly claimed he gave money to "the high command but not Rs 1,000 crore".

2.58pm: YSR Congress chief YS Jagan Mohan Reddy files his nomination from Pulivendula of YSR Kadapa district. "Every vote that is cast will be a vote not just for Jagan but also for the future of Andhra Pradesh," says Jagan.

2.51pm: The Congress leader cites a report by The Caravan magazine, alleging Yeddyurappa paid bribe in crores of rupees to the party's central panel leaders, several judges and advocates.

2.30pm: Surjewala says the BJP leader had recorded these alleged payouts, written in Kannada, in a diary of a Karnataka MLA in 2009.

2.15pm: Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala, during a press briefing, alleges BJP leader BS Yeddyurappa paid over Rs 1,800 crore to the BJP's national leaders during the BJP's government in the state. He alleges Yeddyurappa's signatures were found on every page of the diary.

1.45pm: FM Arun Jaitley says "Sam Pitroda believes what the government did was wrong. No country in the world said this, not even the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) said this, only Pakistan was of this view."

1.30pm: Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley takes a jibe on SamPitroda's airstrike remark: "Agar Guru aisa ho to shishya kitna nikamma niklega ye desh ko aaj bhugatna pad raha hai."

#WATCH Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on #SamPitroda's airstrike remark, says, "Agar Guru aisa ho to shishya kitna nikamma niklega ye desh ko aaj bhugatna pad raha hai." pic.twitter.com/14DqGDbSyX  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

1.15pm: He has kick-started Pakistan National Day celebration on behalf of Congress: PM Modi on Sam Pitroda's remarks on the Balakot strike.

Pitroda in an interview to a news agency ANI questioned the death toll in the Balakot airstrike.

Pitroda said,"If they (IAF) killed 300, it's ok. All I am saying is can you give me more facts and prove it."

Opposition insults our forces time and again.



I appeal to my fellow Indians- question Opposition leaders on their statements.



Tell them- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics.



India stands firmly with our forces. #JantaMaafNahiKaregihttps://t.co/rwpFKMMeHY  Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 22, 2019

1.00pm: According to BJP sources, Gautam Gambhir may be fielded from the New Delhi constituency, currently represented by the party's Meenakshi Lekhi, reported PTI.

12.45pm: Andhra Pradesh CM N Chandrababu Naidu's son Nara Lokesh to file nomination shortly. Nara will contest from Mangalagiri constituency in Amaravati.

Nara Lokesh,Andhra Pradesh IT Minister and son of CM N Chandrababu Naidu to file nomination shortly. He will contest from Mangalagiri constituency in Amaravati. #AndhraPradeshAssemblyElectionspic.twitter.com/CL4qv1JBXv  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

12.30 pm: I am influenced by PM Modi's vision, said Gautam Gambhir.

Gautam Gambhir: I am joining this party(BJP) after getting influenced by PM Narendra Modi's vision. I am honoured to get the opportunity to join this platform pic.twitter.com/barD8XA7W9  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

12.15pm: Gautam Gambhir joins Bharatiya Janata Party in the presence of Union Ministers Arun Jaitley and Ravi Shankar Prasad

Delhi: Former Cricketer Gautam Gambhir joins Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) in the presence of Union Ministers Arun Jaitley and Ravi Shankar Prasad pic.twitter.com/EYmhfSSMy7  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

12.00pm: NCP chief Sharad Pawar and BSP president Mayawati's opting out of the Lok Sabha polls is a clear indication of NDA's victory: Shiv Sena

11.45am: The Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) headed by TTV Dhinakaran has announced its second and final list of 14 candidates for the Lok Sabha election, reported PTI.

11.30am: Rahul Gandhi to lead 'Congress special press conference' today at 1 pm.

Congress special press conference today which was scheduled to be addressed by Rahul Gandhi, has been deferred to 1 pm from 10.15 am  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

11.15am: Former Cricketer Gautam Gambhir likely to join BJP today, reported ANI.

8.51am: "People wanted me to contest from here again, I'm thankful to Amit Shah ji and Modi ji for choosing me again," says Hema Malini.

Hema Malini, BJP MP from Mathura: People wanted me to contest from here again, I'm thankful to Amit Shah ji and Modi ji for choosing me again. I will work hard and bring development to the area. I'm not like other politicians, people here like my work. pic.twitter.com/kXL6Es1Vd1  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) March 21, 2019

8.46am: The Congress party has also released the seventh list of candidates for Andhra Pradesh.

The Congress Central Election Committee announces the seventh list of candidates for the ensuing elections to the Lok Sabha and the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly. pic.twitter.com/EWbhjPmcgp  Congress (@INCIndia) March 21, 2019

8.39am: The BJP has also released the list of candidates for the Assembly elections in Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim.

List of BJP candidates for ensuing general election to the legislative assembly 2019 of Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim finalised by BJP CEC. pic.twitter.com/zkKEY4hkMs  BJP (@BJP4India) March 21, 2019

8.35am: The Central Election Committee of the BJP has decided the names of 100 BJP candidates for the Odisha Assembly polls.

The Central Election Committee of the Bharatiya Janata Party has decided the names of 100 BJP candidates for the ensuing General Elections to the Legislative Assembly of Odisha. pic.twitter.com/zOMPV1nTOe  BJP (@BJP4India) March 21, 2019

8.20am: "It would be a matter of pride for me to strengthen the BJP in Parliament by offering a lotus from Amethi," says Union minister Smriti Irani.

8.15am: "I am thankful that the party has once again chosen me from the Nagpur Lok Sabha constituency. We'll again win with record margin from Nagpur," says Nitin Gadkari.

                                          ,    pic.twitter.com/zMw1BEuU1j

 Chowkidar Nitin Gadkari (@nitin_gadkari) March 21, 2019

8.09am: The party has announced names of its 28 candidates from UP. It has dropped six incumbent MPs this time, including Union minster Krishna Raj from Shahjahanpur and Scheduled Caste (SC) Commission head and Agra MP Ram Shankar Katheria. Actor-turned-politician Hema Malini will contest from Mathura.

8.05am: Union ministers VK Singh, Mahesh Sharma, Kiren Rijiju, DV Sadananda Gowda, and Babul Supriyo have been given tickets from Ghaziabad, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Arunachal West, Bengalore North and Asansol, respectively. They had won on all these seats in the last elections.

8.00am: The biggest surprise of the BJP's first list is senior leader Lal Krishna Advani. The 91-year-old party stalwart, who called the shots in the BJP for decades before Modi's rise eclipsed him, has been replaced by Amit Shah from Gandhinagar. Advani has been representing Gandhinagar in the Lok Sabha since 1998.

The Central Election Committee of the Bharatiya Janata Party has decided the names of 184 candidates for the ensuing General Elections to the Parliamentary Constituency of different States. The list is available at https://t.co/e4p2u9v3Hcpic.twitter.com/mlCPsciKnI  BJP (@BJP4India) March 21, 2019

7.45am: Union minister Smriti Irani will reprise her electoral battle with Congress President Rahul Gandhi from Amethi, where she lost to him in 2014 but was seen to have put up a spirited fight.

7.30am: BJP heavyweights such as Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari have been fielded from Lucknow and Nagpur seats respectively with the party reposing its faith in all but one Union minister from the constituency they had won in 2014.

Edited by Manoj SharmaPolice: 3 arrested, 1 sought after botched drug deal, burglary

Three people have been arrested and another is sought after a burglary that resulted from a botched drug deal, according to Watertown police.The BJP Thursday announced names of its candidates for 99 of the 147 Assembly seats in Odisha which will go for a simultaneous polls along with Lok Sabha in four phases beginning from April 11.

The list was released by the party following the BJP's Central Election Committee meeting in New Delhi. Earlier, the party had announced names of its candidates for Odisha's 10 of the 21 Lok Sabha seats.

The BJP, which has set a 120-plus mission for Odisha, has fielded many new entrants who joined the BJP after resigning either from the ruling BJD headed by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik or the Congress.

The prominent BJD leaders who recently joined the party and given ticket are Damodar Rout (Balikuda-Ersama) and Kusum Tete (Sundergarh).

Congress MLA from Salipur Prakash Behera, who too joined the BJP recently, has been named as the party's candidate from his own constituency.

The party has also nominated its senior leaders to contest from different assembly segments. While former minister Samir Dey has been named as the BJP candidate from Cuttack-Barabati assembly segment, former minister Jaynarayan Mishra will contest from Sambalpur seat.

BJP's state general secretary Prithviraj Harichandan will contest from Chilika assembly segment, while Padmapur MLA Pradeep Purohit has been re-nominated from the seat.

Leader of the BJP Legislature Party K V Singhdeo will contest from his Patnagarh assembly segment, while his wife Sangeeta has been named as a BJP candidate to contest from Bolangir Lok Sabha seat.

The BJP's Brajrajnagar MLA Radharani Panda has been named as the party candidate from her own seat. Remuna MLA Gobind Das has also been made a candidate from his constituency.

BJP Mahila Morcha president will contest from Nimapara assembly segment, while former minister Surama Padhi will contest from Ranpur. Irani Ray and Bharati Behera will contest from Nayagarh and Khalikote assembly seats respectively.

In the first list, the BJP fielded nine women.Comedian-turned-filmmaker Jordan Peele earned an Oscar for Get Out, his debut feature film, so the stakes are high for his follow-up, Us. Since it premiered to primed audiences at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, the reviews have been raves for Peeles latest, and its a pleasure to report they are correct. Theres no sophomore slump to be found here, and Peele remains one of the most exciting American filmmakers  in any genre  to come around in a long time.

Us is signature Peele  a 70s-inspired horror flick that wears its references on its sleeve, grapples with Big Ideas and crawls with genuinely creepy tension, lightened with dashes of well-earned humor. This is a family horror melodrama that ponders huge philosophical questions about our own existence and identity. But it doesnt just pose conspiracy theories and ask what if? Us brings all those nightmares to life and visualizes the worst-case scenario.

Like so many of the great classic horror films of the 70s  The Exorcist, Rosemarys Baby, Carrie, Halloween, etc., Peele uses the horror genre to explore the meaning of family and our postmodern fractured sense of self. Our unsuspecting picture-perfect American family is the Wilsons: Gabe (Winston Duke), Adelaide (Lupita Nyongo) and their children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). They arrive in Santa Cruz, Calif., at their family summer home ready to enjoy the beach town  even though Adelaide is troubled by disturbing memories of her childhood there.

Us is a classic home invasion thriller, but its so much more than that. It traffics in dangerous doppelgangers, body doubles and twins. When a strangely identical version of the Wilson family  clad in red jumpsuits and wielding sharp scissors  shows up in their driveway one night, it turns out this is a soul invasion. As both Adelaide and Red, the matriarch of the photocopied Wilson family and leader of the attack, Nyongo anchors Peeles film with a horrifyingly spellbinding and bone-rattling dual performance. Red is a horror hall-of-fame scary mommy unlike any youve ever seen.

Nyongo is virtuosic, transcendent in her performance, and Peele demonstrates a mastery over filmmaking craft and tone much in the same way he did with Get Out. He has tapped It Follows cinematographer Michael Gioulakis to lens Us, using long, slow camera movements that build slow, creeping dread, while composer Michael Abels combines classical composition with pop and hip-hop to create a score and soundtrack that reflect the blend of traditional and irreverent that has become Peeles hallmark.

But while the script for Get Out felt like a tightly wound watch, gears catching just so, every detail in place, Us, feels bigger, broader and yes, messier. Peele has widened his scope from one communitys terrible secret to the entire country, dabbling in ideas of governmental mind control and total societal collapse. It at once feels like a home invasion thriller, a zombie movie, an apocalypse film and ultimately, an identity crisis. Its incredible that Us manages to be all those things with style and grace, but theres a looseness that feels like it hasnt fully set yet.

Despite any wobbles in the scope of the script, Peele is a devastatingly effective horror filmmaker, wringing tension from the slightest moments, and his storytelling ambition and creativity are astonishing. However, it wouldnt be as truly terrifying as it is without the jaw-dropping performance from his leading lady Nyongo, and with this collaboration they have created another whip-smart modern horror classic.

Us

3.5 stars

RATED: R (for violence/terror, and language)

WHEN: Opens today

WHERE: AMC 12, Century 14 Downtown, Century Rio 24, Cottonwood, High Ridge, Icon Cinemas, Winrock 16, Starlight Cinema 8 (Los Lunas), Premiere (Rio Rancho)Nineteen dance companies from five states will arrive in the Duke City.

The ensembles are taking part in the Regional Dance America Southwest festival, which is being held in Albuquerque for the first time.

Festival Ballet Albuquerque is one of the companies representing New Mexico.

This really is a pretty big and historic event for Albuquerque dance, says Patricia Dickinson Wells, Festival Ballet Albuquerque director. The city of Albuquerque and Visit Albuquerque are supporting and have seriously backed this event.

The national nonprofit aims to elevate the future of dance in America  giving dancers experience and directors perspective.

The organization works to honor its legacy, connect experiences, foster creativity, promote excellence, provide opportunities and reach beyond.

Each year, the organization hosts its regional festival. The Southwest is representing teams from Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and New Mexico.

Dickinson Wells says there will be more than 500 dancers in this festival.

Part of the programming for dancers will be master classes with New Mexico resident and New York City Ballet alum Jock Soto.

Christine Spizzo, Antoinette Peloso and New Mexico resident Evelyn Cisneros will also be conducing master classes.

There will be three evening performances at the Kiva Auditorium beginning Thursday, March 28, and running through March 30.

All 19 companies will be performing as part of the festival.

On Thursday, March 28, the theme for the night is Emerging Choreographers.

These are young choreographers from each company, she says. On Friday night, there is a showcase of different companies. On Saturday night, there will be the gala event, where Festival Ballet Albuquerque will open the night with Robert Mirabal.

There will also be another event with just Mirabal at 6 p.m. Saturday, March 30.

Dickinson Wells says Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller has proclaimed Thursday, March 28, Festival Ballet Albuquerque Regional Dance America Southwest Day.

This is such a huge honor for the dance scene in New Mexico, she says. Its also the first time Albuquerque has had the honor of hosting this wonderful festival.LOS ANGELES  From skin-care lotions to bottled water, cannabis companies are rolling out a growing array of consumer products infused with a chemical found in marijuana called cannabidiol, or CBD.

The compound doesnt have the ingredient that gives marijuana users a high. Instead, CBD product makers say they promote general health and well-being.

The U.S. retail market for CBD is projected to swell from an estimated $2 billion last year to $16 billion by 2025, according to a report by equity analysts at Cowen.

A key factor in that forecast is the growing variety of CBD products that companies are bringing to market, such as drinks, capsules, gummies, topical lotions and tinctures, which are liquid extracts.

The number of hemp oil products offered by Amazon has roughly quadrupled in the past six years to more than 20,000, for example.

Nutraceuticals  foods that include additives with a purported health benefit  along with topical lotions and beverages will drive much of the CBD growth, Cowen says.

Tinctures are currently the most popular CBD product, making up around 43 percent of the market, according to a Cowen consumer survey in January. Beverages account for about 20 percent.

CBD products are sold online and in specialty shops across the U.S., though cannabis companies must navigate various state and federal limitations.

Products infused with CBD derived from marijuana can be legally purchased in the 10 states that allow cannabis for medicinal and recreational use. The sale of products with CBD derived from hemp is legal in most other states.

Proponents say CBD can relieve pain and anxiety, along with other health benefits. Other industry watchers say more research is needed.

Cowen analyst Vivien Azer estimates that CBD use could grow to 10 percent of U.S. adults, or about 25 million consumers, by 2025.

While many cannabis companies are involved in the CBD products market, Cowen has Outperform ratings on the stocks of three: Canopy Growth (WEED), Tilray (TLRY) and Turning Point Brands (TPB).

Tilray signed a $100 million deal with Budweiser maker Anheuser-Busch InBev last year to research cannabis-infused drinks for sale in Canada, which legalized recreational adult marijuana use in October.

Canopy Growth also made a splash last year after wine, liquor and beer company Constellation Brands announced a $4 billion investment in the Canadian cannabis producer.

Shares in Canopy Growth are up about 68 percent so far this year, while Tilray is down 1.1 percent. Turning Point shares are up 79 percent.Loading the player...





Fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi, arrested by Scotland Yard on behalf of the Indian authorities, will be held at a prison in south-west London considered one of England's most overcrowded jails. The 48-year-old, who appeared in the dock at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London on Wednesday in a sombre white shirt and trousers, was taken to Her Majesty's Prison (HMP) Wandsworth after he was remanded in custody until March 29 by District Judge Marie Mallon.





SBI asks Naresh Goyal, his wife, two directors to step down from Jet Airways board as airline's financial woes deepen





It may soon be an end of the road for cash-strapped Jet Airways, as it fails to come out of the existing financial crises. After reports that Etihad was more interested in exiting the company than helping it revive, state-owned State Bank of India (SBI) has now said it would be in everybody's interest that Jet Airways continues to fly. The bank has asked Naresh Goyal and three other company directors to step down from the Jet Airways board. SBI has, however, not shown much enthusiasm in buying 24 per cent stake reportedly offered by Jet's UAE-based partner Etihad. The Gulf carrier, a jittery participant in recent bailout discussions, signalled its decision to exit Jet after a meeting between its CEO Tony Douglas and SBI Chief Rajnish Kumar.





Lok Sabha elections 2019: BJP releases first list of 184 candidates; Narendra Modi to contest from Varanasi





Prime Minister Narendra Modi will contest the Lok Sabha election from Varanasi, the seat he represents in Parliament, BJP president Amit Shah will fight from Gandhinagar in place of veteran leader L K Advani as the party Thursday announced its first list of 184 candidates for the general election.











At a time when Jet Airways is facing financial difficulties, India's budget carrier IndiGo has said that it continues to engage in recruiting expat as well as "out of job" pilots in India. IndiGo is facing acute shortage of commanders amid aggressive expansion of its fleet. The carrier has more than 210 planes in its fleet. It is offering jobs to pilots of Jet Airways along with compensation for overdue salaries from the cash-strapped full service airline, IndiGo said on March 12. Shortage of trained and experienced pilots has been an issue for domestic airlines amid capacity expansion to meet rising passenger traffic.





Christchurch mosque massacre: New Zealand bans military type semi-automatic weapons after its worst mass shooting





New Zealand will ban military-style semi-automatic and assault rifles under tough new gun laws following the killing of 50 people in the country's worst mass shooting, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Thursday. In the immediate aftermath of last Friday's shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, Ardern labelled the attack as terrorism and said New Zealand's gun laws would change.









No political campaign will be allowed to run on major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, in the last 48 hours before polling ends, according to a voluntary code of ethics prepared by such platforms. These platforms submitted the code to the Election Commission (EC) on Wednesday.Students, primarily those in advanced courses, may see an increase in the cost of their education, and University of New Mexico employees could be in store for a raise, though a smaller bump than the one recommended by legislators.

A budget proposal for the universitys main campus for the 2020 fiscal year calls for students to see their overall costs increase by about 2 to 5.5 percent, depending on their course load.

The university is planning to increase the premiums for upper level courses and certain mandatory student fees. UNM is not proposing an across-the-board tuition increase, said Nicole Dopson, the director of financial operations for academic affairs.

If youre an incoming freshman, you are not seeing a tuition increase, she said.

The proposal was crafted by a budget leadership team comprised of faculty, staff, students and other university officials. It isnt binding, as the Board of Regents will have final say on next years budget.

The recommended increases would mean about $75 more per semester for a student with 15 hours of low-level courses and a $225 semester increase for a student with 15 hours of advanced courses, according to budget documents.

Upper-level courses cost more than entry-level ones because the classes are smaller and they are usually taught by more experienced professors, said interim Provost Richard Wood.

As for university employees, New Mexico legislators recommended a 4 percent pay increase for faculty and staff in next years state appropriation to the university.

The recommended budget proposal, however, calls for a 2 percent pay increase for all university employees. That is because the university typically spreads pay increases across all employees and not just those funded with state appropriations.WASHINGTON  When General Motors idled its auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, this month, President Trump adopted a familiar strategy: He issued a nasty string of tweets blaming other people and promised, in effect, that he would restore the past.

Trumps angry, backward-looking approach may still appeal to some Rust Belt voters. But in the Ohio and Pennsylvania towns that helped win the presidency for Trump in 2016, his vow to turn back the clock hasnt worked out very well, and there are signs the Rust Belt may be corroding for him politically.

Lordstowns struggles, like those of other nearby mill towns, illustrate the harsh fact that manufacturing is a dynamic process. Old jobs are disappearing because of changes in technology or consumer preferences; trying to resist change is usually a fools game. Rust Belt communities that are succeeding are the ones that have adapted by embracing new technologies and innovation.

Presidential leadership in this period of technological transition should focus on the future, rather than the past. But Trump seems almost a technophobe. Axios reported this week that he thinks driverless cars are crazy. He tweeted March 12, after the crash of a high-tech Boeing jetliner: Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly  I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better.

Trumps response to Lordstown was to attack David Green, the UAW local president, implying that he was at fault along with GM, and demanding he get his act together and produce. Green had sent letters to Trump in July 2018 and February 2019 warning about threats to the plant. Trump didnt respond.

After Trumps Twitter tirade, Rep. Tim Ryan, the Ohio Democrat who represents the Lordstown area, fired back: The Presidents tweet  is offensive and does nothing to help bring back the manufacturing jobs he promised to my district.

Ryan argued that the best thing is to help GM renovate Lordstown and perhaps build electric vehicles there. Local residents said much the same thing to the Youngstown Vindicator this month: GM or a new owner should focus on new technology and making products people want to buy, rather than restore production of the low-selling Chevrolet Cruze.

Trump is vulnerable in the Rust Belt because he made such extravagant promises when he successfully wooed voters in 2016. He won this area  a largely Democratic area  and he has not said a word yet, and thats just pathetic, warned Jim Graham a former UAW leader at Lordstown, in an interview with the Vindicator back in November, when GM said it planned to halt Cruze production there.

Local residents remember Trumps proclamation at a July 2017 rally in nearby Youngstown: Those jobs (that) have left Ohio, theyre all coming back  Dont sell your house. Tommy Wolikow, a Lordstown worker, told the Vindicator: I kind of turned into a Trump supporter at that time. I believed what he said.  Almost two years later, Im seeing nothing but job losses.

Homeowners in Youngstown certainly havent seen a boom. According to Zillow, the online realty broker, the median price for a house in Youngstown is $39,900. The national median price of homes currently listed is $279,000. Browse the real estate ads for mill towns across Ohio and Pennsylvania and youll see just how tough it is to be a Rust Belt resident, trapped in a downward cycle.

Whats the right answer for Rust Belt towns where the old manufacturing base has disappeared? An interesting example is Erie, Penn. Most big factories there have closed in recent years, but the city is rebuilding itself around its local universities and a big insurance company. Profits from a big gambling casino in Erie County are funneled partly to innovation spaces at four local campuses.

Erie may have lost manufacturing jobs, but its above the state average in advanced industries, says Ben Speggen, a local journalist who helps run a think tank in Erie called the Jefferson Educational Society. There has been a real shift in understanding that our Rust Belt economy is not solely tied to manufacturing, he says.

Another key to success is welcoming foreigners. About 10 percent of Eries population is refugees, according to James and Deborah Fallows in their recent book, Our Towns. One of the 10 characteristics they found in successful local communities adapting to change is that they make themselves open.

One more lesson from Erie County, in the heart of the Rust Belt: Trump won there in the 2016 presidential election, but in the 2018 midterm congressional election, the county voted Democratic.

E-mail davidignatius@washpost.com.  2019, Washington Post Writers Group.Call it making the best of a bad situation.

Its been several years now since allegations that New Mexico public schools were failing to provide an adequate education gave rise to the Yazzie/Martinez v. state of New Mexico lawsuit.

After the states public education system went on trial in 2017, Santa Fe District Judge Sarah Singleton ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, agreeing that New Mexico public schools were woefully underfunded to the point where it was hurting children, especially those from minority and low-income backgrounds.

Remedies have yet to be decided.

Then-outgoing Gov. Susana Martinez wanted to appeal the ruling, a move the Journal supported since there was no indication of how Singletons ruling would be enforced, how much it might cost or whether it might work.

Current Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, however, indicated before she took office that she wasnt inclined to file an appeal.

This week, Lujan Grisham reiterated that stance, noting that she agrees with the spirit of the ruling: that New Mexicos public education system is in fact violating the constitutional rights of its most vulnerable students. But, she said, she plans to litigate aggressively to make sure her administration has a hand in placing the goalposts.

The Journals original concern about Singletons ruling was that nobody knew what compliance actually meant. We editorialized that it would have been better to appeal the decision and ascertain a higher courts ruling on the case, complicated as it was by issues of constitutionality and separation of powers.

But aggressive, point-by-point litigation is the next best course for Lujan Grisham to take.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs may be inclined to push the suit as far as it will go by coming up with a never-ending list of demands.

Dont believe it? Consider the quote in Tuesdays Journal from Gail Evans, the lead counsel for the Yazzie plaintiffs, who said she believes legislators short-changed the public school system in spending this year. Apparently, the fact that lawmakers this month closed the book on a budget that increased K-12 education by some 16 percent  to more than $3 billion-with-a-b  was not good enough.

So what is?

Without the governors close scrutiny of every motion, and willingness to act aggressively, there is the potential for the state to keep writing blank checks.

The governor said she doesnt want the states education system to come under a consent decree. Its worth considering that, in a way, its already happened. A single judges yea or nay now decides whether New Mexicos public school system is up to snuff.

Lujan Grisham didnt want to appeal Yazzie/Martinez in its entirety. Fine. As fixes start to take shape, though, she can and should remember theres nothing preventing her from appealing individual parts piecemeal.

Lujan Grisham didnt start this fight; she inherited it. But in a courtroom thats likely to be rife with competing interests, its now her job to make sure that the remedy focuses on outcomes rather than rhetoric.

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 foster child of a man busted in a child sex sting will not be removed from the suspects home, according to the New Mexico Children Youth and Families Department.

CYFD spokesman Tripp Stelnicki said Thursday that the department planned to remove the foster child when Joshua Saavedra, 45, was arrested Wednesday. CYFD decided against it after doing a wellness check and determining that Saavedra would no longer be living there.

Saavedra is currently behind bars on charges of child solicitation by electronic communication device, trafficking controlled substances and sexual exploitation of children by prostitution.

Agents with the Attorney Generals Officer arrested Saavedra after he allegedly tried to trade drugs and cash for sex with a 13-year-old girl during an undercover operation.

Saavedra has a detention hearing in District Court on Monday that will determine whether he will stay behind bars until his trial.Funding for projects at four New Mexico military bases may instead be used to construct a barrier on the border with Mexico under President Donald Trumps national emergency declaration.

The White House released a Department of Defense list on Monday of construction projects where funding could be diverted for use to construct a border wall. When declaring a national emergency last month, Trump announced up to $3.6 billion could be used for the wall. Six projects totaling $187.5 million from the states military installations are on the list.

New Mexico projects on the list include:

 $40 million for an information systems facility at White Sands Missile Range;

 $42 million for dangerous cargo pad relocation at Cannon Air Force Base;

 $7 million to upgrade the Wyoming Gate and $9.3 million to replace Fire Station 3 at Kirtland Air Force Base; and

 $85 million for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) training facility and $4.2 million for a UAV control station facility at Holloman Air Force Base.

Funding for the projects has been appropriated, but contracts have not yet been awarded, U.S. Sen. Tom Udalls office said Tuesday.

The Cannon project is expected to be awarded in August. Contracts for Holloman are expected to be awarded in May this year and March 2020.

The contract for Kirtland for the Wyoming gate is expected in July 2020. The contract for the fire station replacement is expected in August of this year.

The contract for the White Sands project is expected in February 2020.

Udall, D-N.M., a member of the Appropriations Committee, said funding for the projects were appropriated deliberately, and to help our bases and military installations fulfill their essential missions.

Potentially raiding critical funding from White Sands, Holloman, Cannon and Kirtland will only make us less safe and less secure, Udall said. The president is playing politics with military readiness and putting his border wall ahead of our safety and our service members.

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich and Rep. Deb Haaland, both Democrats, also condemned the possible diversion of funds from military construction projects.

Threatening the readiness of our men and women serving in our military endangers our national security, Heinrich said in a statement. We cannot allow President Trump to raid taxpayer dollars meant to help our military defend our nation to pay for a wall that New Mexicans dont want or need. I will do everything I can to oppose this effort to steal from our military to build a wasteful border wall under the false pretense of a national emergency.

Haaland said, President Trump is putting military families in my district at risk for a political ploy, and its unacceptable. Military families in our state deserve better than to be added to the list of people President Trump has taken hostage for his senseless border wall.

The presidents proposed budget for fiscal 2020 would restore that money for military construction and provide an additional $3.6 billion in case additional emergency funding is needed for the border, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said in a Bloomberg News story.

In the same story, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said no programs scheduled to start before the end of September are affected.

Theres no list of projects that are absolutely going to not be funded so that the wall can be, Mulvaney said.The old mattresses and abandoned boats dumped on Valencia Countys east llano have been joined by piles of coyote carcasses.

After a friend posted pictures of what she believed to be dead dogs on Facebook, Los Lunas resident Elizabeth Dicharry went out to North El Cerro Loop to take a look.

She thought it was a dump site from dog fighting, Dicharry said. But theyre coyotes.

When she went out to the mostly uninhabited area east of Valencia High School on Wednesday, Dicharry said she found a second pile of carcasses.

One pile has about 15 to 20 small fairly fresh coyote carcasses, she said, many of which have silver duct tape wrapped around their muzzles. There is writing on the tape which she says indicates the date and time the animals were killed in a contest.

Only one of them was skinned, she said. The other pile is quite deteriorated, its mostly bones. It looks like there was a lot more skinning of those, so maybe they were trapped.

Late Thursday morning, on a second visit, Dicharry said there was a third pile of fresh carcasses that wasnt there the day before, which also appear to be contest kills.

In 2012, when Gunhawk Firearms in Los Lunas sponsored a coyote bounty hunt, Dicharry became involved in the push to ban the hunts.

This is not what hunting is about. They are an unregulated species that some consider varmints. I do not, she said. I do own livestock and if I, or anyone, have a predator get into my animals or on my property, I can take care of it. I can shoot it. Thats not what happens during these contests.

Currently, coyote hunting contests are permitted on private land, but Senate Bill 76, which passed both chambers of the Legislature during this years session, would ban them altogether.

(It) only prohibits contests, Dicharry said. You can still go hunt, you can go out and shoot them. These contests are so atrocious because they target any coyotes, anywhere, even those not causing problems.

Dicharry said there are 25 to 30 contests in New Mexico a year, with four to five of those held in Valencia County.

If you register and become a contestant, you can kill them anywhere you want  you can go down to the Ladrones, out to the Sandias, she said. Its not like youre protecting anybodys ranch. Im not a fan of fur  but theyre not even saving the fur.

Earlier this year via executive order, New Mexico Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard banned coyote killing contests on land managed by the agency.

Because coyotes are not a protected or monitored species in New Mexico, hunters dont need licenses to kill them and there is no established season.

Dicharry reported the piles of carcasses to Valencia County Code Enforcement on Wednesday.

Gabe Luna, the countys interim community development director, who oversees code enforcement, said two code enforcement officers went out to the location.

We did find the piles of coyotes, some skinned, some not, Luna said. We opened a case and under our ordinances, the way they are written, this is considered illegal dumping.

Luna said that because of the number of carcasses and their proximity to the high school and residential areas they would be removed by a private contractor soon.

We understand the publics concerns and want to get this resolved, he said.

As a nurse, Dicharry said she was concerned about the large number of decomposing animals so close to people.

Its not healthy, she said. And this is animal abuse. They do gut shots. Its not ethical. When my husband hunts, he wants to take the animal down quickly, humanely. We have no idea what these coyotes went through.

Luna said anyone with information about the dumping of carcasses can call Valencia County Code Enforcement at 866-2054.Copyright  2019 Albuquerque Journal

EL PASO  In a major shift, the Department of Homeland Security is about to begin sending asylum-seekers who crossed the border in the El Paso region back to Mexico, where they will wait for their cases to be heard.

The changes under the migrant protection protocols are set to start by the end of the week. Currently, families seeking asylum usually are released within days and allowed to remain in the United States for months, and sometimes years, for their cases to wind through the court system.

In recent weeks, several hundred asylum-seeking migrants a day have been crossing through the El Paso sector, which includes all of New Mexico. Most crossed illegally  often waiting for and waving down Border Patrol  while a few dozen of those waiting to cross at the border checkpoints were allowed in each day. In the Journals 8 hours on the border series published earlier this month, the Border Patrol recounted how the influx of families has stretched their resources.

The series also reported how Ciudad Juarez is struggling to care for the thousands of migrants waiting there to enter the U.S. through a port of entry.

Its a crisis because we are not ready as a city, Jorge Munoz, migrant relief coordinator at a makeshift shelter in Ciudad Juarez, said of the change. The shelter lies just across the border from El Paso.

Authorities in Mexico were notified in meetings this week about the U.S. plan to expand the migrant protection protocols along this stretch of border.

Under the plan the Trump administration first called Remain in Mexico, asylum applicants will be sent south of the border to wait while their cases move through immigration courts in the U.S. The protocols are already in place on the California border in the Mexican border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali and now have been expanded to include Ciudad Juarez.

Its going to be a crisis in security, a humanitarian crisis, a public health crisis, a housing crisis, a public services crisis, because we dont have the capacity as a city or funding as a city or state to keep attending to the large migration flow, Munoz said.

Thousands of migrants waiting in Ciudad Juarez remain on a waiting list to file an asylum claim at an official port of entry in El Paso while more arrive daily. The State of Chihuahua opened the Colegio de Bachilleres gym to migrants when the main shelter, Casa del Migrante, run by a Catholic charity, reached capacity.

Burden on the state

The Chihuahua state government is paying for food, water and basic medical care for more than 600 people at the gym shelter with help from some donations. Staff like Munoz have also been reassigned from their regular jobs to coordinate the relief effort.

Its a lot, and the most worrisome thing is this is not budgeted, Munoz said. Mexicos federal government, which agreed to the U.S. Migrant Protection Protocols, so far has not provided any money to help Ciudad Juarez.

The U.S. side of the border has been stretched thin as well.

Nonprofit organizations and churches in El Paso, Las Cruces and southern New Mexico have stepped in to provide respite centers for thousands of migrant parents and children.

Shelters in the region have been so overwhelmed, the nonprofit Annunciation House bused several hundred migrants last week to charities in Albuquerque that agreed to help provide temporary shelter.

Some of those migrant parents with children have come through official ports of entry. Others crossed the border illegally and turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents in Sunland Park and other areas of the New Mexico border. Most have been processed and released by U.S. authorities while waiting for ruling on their asylum claims in immigration court.

Most migrants only need temporary shelter for a day or two while waiting for sponsors, usually relatives in the U.S., to buy bus tickets to other cities or make other travel arrangements. Many are Central American families seeking asylum to live with relatives or friends in the U.S. while their cases slowly wind through U.S. immigration court.

By the end of the week, this will change. Most asylum-seekers will be sent back to Mexico as soon as they are processed.

The vast majority are from Central America, with others coming from Cuba and Brazil.

Reason for change

The Border Patrol told the Journal that many of the migrants they encounter hired human smugglers to bring them to the border. The smugglers advised them that once they reached U.S. soil and asked a Border Patrol agent for asylum, they would be allowed to remain in the U.S.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen in a statement announcing the policy in late January said, This humanitarian approach will help to end the exploitation of our generous immigration laws. The Migrant Protection Protocols represent a methodical commonsense approach, exercising long-standing statutory authority to help address the crisis at our Southern border. During her visit to the south Texas stretch of border Thursday, Nielsen reiterated theres a crisis on the border.

But immigrant advocates expressed concern about making migrants applying for asylum in the U.S. wait in Mexico in a joint statement released by the Hope Border Institute, a grass-roots, faith-based organization working in the El Paso, Las Cruces, Ciudad Juarez region.

Whatever the scale or scope of this program here, by forcing asylum-seekers to make their case on the other side of the border, and thus on the other side of safety and security, it will endanger too many lives and strain the resources of our sister city of Ciudad Juarez, according to the statement released Wednesday by the Hope Border Institute.

The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the policy in court and a hearing is scheduled for today.



8 hours on the border by Albuquerque Journal on ExposureMIAMI  Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship.

They pay anywhere from $20,000 to sometimes more than $50,000 to brokers who arrange their travel documents, accommodations and hospital stays, often in Florida.

While the cost is high, their children will be rewarded with opportunities and travel advantages not available to their Russian countrymen. The parents themselves may benefit someday as well.

And the decidedly un-Russian climate in South Florida and the posh treatment they receive in the maternity wards  unlike dismal clinics back home  can ease the financial sting and make the practice seem more like an extended vacation.

The Russians are part of a wave of birth tourists that includes sizable numbers of women from China and Nigeria.

President Donald Trump has spoken out against the provision in the U.S. Constitution that allows birthright citizenship and has vowed to end it, although legal experts are divided on whether he can actually do that.

Although there have been scattered cases of authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies for visa fraud or tax evasion, coming to the U.S. to give birth is fundamentally legal. Russians interviewed by The Associated Press said they were honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even showed signed contracts with doctors and hospitals.

There are no figures on how many foreign women travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter immigration laws, estimated that in 2012, about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the U.S., then left the country.

The Russian contingent is clearly large. Anton Yachmenev of the Miami Care company that arranges such trips, told the AP that about 150 Russian families a year use his service, and that there are about 30 such companies just in the area.

South Florida is popular among Russians not only for its tropical weather but also because of the large Russian-speaking population. Sunny Isles Beach, a city just north of Miami, is even nicknamed Little Moscow.

With $30,000, we would not be able to buy an apartment for our child or do anything, really. But we could give her freedom. Thats actually really cool, said Olga Zemlyanaya, who gave birth to a daughter in December and was staying in South Florida until her child got a U.S. passport.

An American passport confers many advantages. Once the child turns 21, he or she can apply for green card immigration status for the parents.

A U.S. passport also gives the holder more travel opportunities than a Russian one; Americans can make short-term trips to more than 180 countries without a visa, while Russians can go visa-free only to about 80.

Traveling to the U.S. on a Russian passport often requires a laborious interview process for a visa. Just getting an appointment for the interview can take months.

Some Russians fear that travel opportunities could diminish as tensions grow between Moscow and the West, or that Russia might even revert to stricter Soviet-era rules for leaving the country.

Seeing the conflict growing makes people want to take precautions because the country might well close its borders. And if that happens, one would at least have a passport of a different country and be able to leave, said Ilya Zhegulev, a journalist for the Latvia-based Russian website Meduza that is sharply critical of the Kremlin.

Last year, Zhegulev sold two cars to finance a trip to California for him and his wife so she could give birth to their son.

Trump denounced birthright citizenship before the U.S. midterm election, amid ramped up rhetoric on his hard-line immigration policies. The president generally focuses his ire on the U.S.-Mexico border. But last fall he mentioned he was considering executive action to revoke citizenship for babies born to non-U.S. citizens on American soil. No executive action has been taken.

The American Civil Liberties Union, other legal groups and even former House Speaker Paul Ryan, typically a supporter of Trumps proposals, said the practice couldnt be ended with an order.

But others, like the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, said the practice is harmful.

We should definitely do everything we can to end it, because it makes a mockery of citizenship, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an outspoken Russian lawmaker, said the country cant forbid women from giving birth abroad, and many of them also travel to Germany and Israel.

Trump is doing everything right, because this law is used as a ploy. People who have nothing to do with the U.S. use it to become citizens, Zhirinovsky said.

Floridians have shown no problem with the influx of expectant mothers from Russia.

Yachmenev, the agency manager, says he believes its good for the state because it brings in sizable revenue.

Svetlana Mokerova and her husband went all out, renting an apartment with a sweeping view. She relished the tropical vibe, filling her Instagram account with selfies backed by palm trees and ocean vistas.

We did not have a very clear understanding about all the benefits of a U.S. passport, she said.

We just knew that it was something awesome, added Mokerova, who gave birth to a daughter after she was interviewed.

Zemlyanaya said that even her two nights in the hospital were a treat, like a stay in a good hotel.

In contrast to the few amenities of a Russian clinic, she said she was impressed when an American nurse gave her choices from a menu for her meals.

And then when she said they had chocolate cake for dessert, I realized I was in paradise, Zemlyanaya added.

She even enjoyed how nurses referred to patients as mommies, as opposed to rozhenitsa, or birth-giver  the unpleasant words they use in Russian birth clinics.

Zemlyanaya said she was able to work remotely during her stay via the internet, as were the husbands of other women, keeping their income flowing. Yachmenev said his agency doesnt allow any of the costs to be paid by insurance.

Most of the families his agency serves have monthly incomes of about 300,000 rubles ($4,500)  middling by U.S. standards but nearly 10 times the average Russian salary.

Yachmenev said he expects that birth tourism among Russians will only grow.

Business declined in 2015 when the ruble lost about half its value, but now we are coming back to the good numbers of 2013-14, he said.

___

Associated Press writers Curt Anderson in Miami and Varya Kudryavtseva in Moscow contributed to this report.SANTA FE  A former Mesa Vista High School teacher was convicted Thursday for raping a student between 2012 and 2013, according to a press release from the Santa Fe District Attorneys Office.

A Rio Arriba County jury found 37-year-old Miguel G. Garcia guilty of two counts of criminal sexual contact of a minor and five counts of criminal sexual penetration of a minor.

In July 2016 Garcia was indicted on five counts of criminal sexual penetration of minor, two counts of criminal sexual contact of a minor and two counts of child solicitation by an electronic device, according to court records. The indictment indicates that there was one victim.UbiQD Inc. CEO Hunter McDaniel said winning the South by Southwest Pitch competition this month in Austin for his companys greenhouse-boosting technology has immensely raised company visibility.

Its a little overwhelming, McDaniel said. I have investors coming at me left and right. Its hard to over emphasize how big SXSW is.

The Pitch competition is the marquee entrepreneurship and startup track event at the annual SXSW conference. UbiQD Inc. was one of 50 companies selected to pitch from a record-setting 800-plus that applied worldwide.

Companies competed in 10 different categories in front of about 500 people and a panel of judges. UbiQD, which McDaniel launched in 2014 in Los Alamos, won in the Hyper-Connected Communities category for its red-light emitting window film for greenhouses.

The company says the film can boost crop yields by 10 percent or more by using quantum dots that shift sunshine into a red-light-emitting spectrum that mimics late-summer sun year-round. Thats considered the most potent time of year for plants because they sense winter coming and grow faster.

The company uses a low-cost, low-toxic process for making quantum dots, which are tiny, three-dimensional structures that manipulate light in unique ways.

UbiQD began selling its quantum-dot-coated UbiGrow film to greenhouses last year as a simple retrofit that attaches to the underside of windows. Its now installed at commercial operations in four states and in Spain.

The company also set up a new greenhouse trial this month in the Netherlands, plus a pilot project for cucumbers in northern New Mexico.

UbiGro is the companys first commercial product. Its also developing photovoltaic window coatings to generate electricity for buildings.

To date, the company has received about $5.7 million in grants and private investment. Its now raising its first institutional, Series A venture investment, targeting about $6 million that it hopes to close on this summer.

Publicity from SXSW could strengthen those efforts.

It really got people talking, McDaniel said. Im getting pinged now by venture investors almost daily as a result.

Raising visibility, market access and funding opportunities for startups are primary goals, said SXSW Pitch event producer Chris Valentine.

Its kind of a global platform for startups, Valentine told the Journal. Its an opportunity to get in front of a global audience.Richard Childress Racing and Red Robin Partner to Celebrate 50 Years

Posted by: newsla on Mar 21, 2019 - 06:49 PM Richard Childress Racing and Red Robin Partner to Celebrate 50 Years



Richard Childress Racing (RCR) announced today a promotional partnership with Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and Brews. The popular, casual dining restaurant chain, and RCR, the storied NASCAR racing organization are both celebrating 50 years of business this year.



Red Robin's marketing campaign, uniquely entitled "50 Years of YUMMM," will utilize RCR team and showcar assets in support of in-market events held at local Red Robin restaurant properties. In addition, the brand will utilize a custom-built food truck to sample their famous steak fries both at in-market events, as well as at Martinsville Speedway and Texas Motor Speedway during upcoming NASCAR race weekends.



"Red Robin is proud to celebrate 50 years in business this year and it makes it even more special to mark our milestone alongside RCR who shares a long, rich history," said Denny Marie Post, president and chief executive officer of Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and Brews. "We look forward to bringing our beloved Bottomless Steak Fries(TM) to racing fans in the coming weeks to give them a taste of what made Red Robin famous."



"It seems only fitting for Red Robin and RCR to partner in 2019 with both our companies celebrating our golden anniversaries," said Torrey Galida, President of RCR. "We're thrilled to align ourselves with an iconic brand in Red Robin as well as to support their 50th Anniversary campaign."



PaddockTalk Perspective



WASHINGTON  Special counsel Robert Mueller closed his long and contentious Russia investigation with no new charges Friday, ending the probe that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trumps presidency but launching a fresh wave of political battles over the still-confidential findings.

The reports details remained a mystery, accessible to only a handful of Justice Department officials while Attorney General William Barr prepared to release the principal conclusions soon. But the closure of the 22-month probe without additional indictments by Mueller was welcome news to some in Trumps orbit who had feared a final round of charges could ensnare more Trump associates, including members of the presidents family.

The Justice Department said the report was delivered by a security officer Friday afternoon to the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and then it went to Barr. Word of the delivery triggered reactions across Washington, including Democrats demands that it be quickly released to the public and Republicans contentions that it ended two years of wasted time and money.

The next step is up to Barr, who is charged with writing his own account of Muellers findings and sending it to Congress. In a letter to lawmakers , he declared he was committed to transparency and speed. He said he could provide details as soon as this weekend.

The White House sought to keep some distance from the report, saying it had not seen or been briefed on the document. Trump, surrounded by advisers and political supporters at his resort in Florida, stayed uncharacteristically quiet on Twitter.

With no details released at this point, its not known whether Muellers report answers the core questions of his investigation: Did Trumps campaign collude with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of the celebrity businessman? Also, did Trump take steps later, including by firing his FBI director, to obstruct the probe?

But the delivery of the report does mean the investigation has concluded without any public charges of a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, or of obstruction by the president. A Justice Department official confirmed that Mueller was not recommending any further indictments.

That person, who described the document as comprehensive, was not authorized to discuss the probe and asked for anonymity.

Thats good news for a handful of Trump associates and family members dogged by speculation of possible wrongdoing. They include Donald Trump Jr., who had a role in arranging a Trump Tower meeting at the height of the 2016 election campaign with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, and Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was interviewed at least twice by Muellers prosecutors. It wasnt immediately clear whether Mueller might have referred additional investigations to the Justice Department.

All told, Mueller charged 34 people, including the presidents former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and three Russian companies. Twenty-five Russians were indicted on charges related to election interference, accused either of hacking Democratic email accounts during the campaign or of orchestrating a social media campaign that spread disinformation on the internet. Five Trump aides pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with Mueller and a sixth, longtime confidant Roger Stone, is awaiting trial on charges that he lied to Congress and engaged in witness tampering.

Its unclear what steps Mueller might take if he uncovered what he believes to be criminal wrongdoing by Trump, in light of Justice Department legal opinions that have held that sitting presidents may not be indicted.

In his letter to lawmakers, Barr noted the Justice Department had not denied any request from the special counsel, something Barr would have been required to disclose to ensure there was no political inference. Trump was never interviewed in person, but submitted answers to questions in writing.

The mere delivery of the confidential findings set off swift, full-throated demands from Democrats for full release of Muellers report and the supporting evidence collected during the sweeping probe. As Muellers probe has wound down, Democrats have increasingly shifted their focus to their own investigations, ensuring the special counsels would not be the last word on the matter.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared it imperative to make the full report public, a call echoed by several Democrats vying to challenge Trump in 2020.

The American people have a right to the truth, Schumer and Pelosi said in a joint statement.

Democrats also expressed concern that Trump would try to get a sneak preview of the findings.

The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public, they said in a joint statement.

It was not clear whether Trump would have early access to Muellers findings. Spokeswoman Sarah Sanders suggested the White House would not interfere, saying we look forward to the process taking its course. But Trumps personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, told The Associated Press Friday that the legal team would seek to get an early look before they were made public.

Giuliani said it was appropriate for the White House to be able to review matters of executive privilege. He said had received no assurances from the Department of Justice on that front. He later softened his stance, saying the decision was up to DOJ and we are confident it will be handled properly.

The White House did receive a brief heads-up on the reports arrival Friday. Barrs chief of staff called White House Counsel Emmet Flood Friday about 20 minutes before sending the letter went to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate and House Judiciary committees.

The chairman of the Senate panel, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, was keynote speaker Friday night at a Palm Beach County GOP dinner at Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort.

The president and first lady Melania Trump stopped by the dinner and made a few minutes of remarks but didnt mention the Mueller report, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share details of the event, which was closed to the press.

Barr has said he wants to make as much public as possible, but any efforts to withhold details is sure to prompt a tussle between the Justice Department and lawmakers who may subpoena Mueller and his investigators to testify before Congress. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., threatened a subpoena Friday.

Such a move would likely be vigorously contested by the Trump administration.

The conclusion of Muellers investigation does not remove legal peril for the president . Trump faces a separate Justice Department investigation in New York into hush money payments during the campaign to two women who say they had sex with him years before the election. Hes also been implicated in a potential campaign finance violation by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who says Trump asked him to arrange the transactions. Federal prosecutors, also in New York, have been investigating foreign contributions made to the presidents inaugural committee.

No matter the findings in Muellers report, the investigation has already illuminated Russias assault on the American political system, painted the Trump campaign as eager to exploit the release of hacked Democratic emails and exposed lies by Trump aides aimed at covering up their Russia-related contacts.

The special counsel brought a sweeping indictment accusing Russian military intelligence officers of hacking Democrat Hillary Clintons campaign and other Democratic groups during the 2016 campaign. He charged another group of Russians with carrying out a large-scale social media disinformation campaign against the American political process that also sought to help Trump and hurt Clinton.

Mueller also initiated the investigation into Michael Cohen, the presidents former lawyer, who pleaded guilty in New York to campaign finance violations arising from the hush money payments and in the Mueller probe to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. Another Trump confidant, Stone, is awaiting trial on charges that he lied about his pursuit of Russian-hacked emails ultimately released by WikiLeaks.

Mueller has also been investigating whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation. Since the special counsels appointment in May 2017, Trump has increasingly tried to undermine the probe by calling it a witch hunt and repeatedly proclaiming there was NO COLLUSION with Russia.

But one week before Muellers appointment, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, later saying he was thinking of this Russia thing at the time.

___

Associated Press writer Jonathan Lemire in New York contributed to this report.BLOUNTSVILLE, Ala.  Police arrested a substitute teacher in Alabama on Friday after his gun went off in a first-grade classroom.

No one at Blountsville Elementary School was injured in the incident. But authorities tell news outlets that Henry Rex Weaver, 72, is in custody and will face charges.

Blount County Sheriff Mark Moon said students were in the classroom with Weaver when a gun that was in his pocket discharged.

It (the sound) alerted administrators, Moon said. The sheriff said Moon was detained and later jailed.

Blount County District Attorney Pamela Casey said Weaver will face charges of reckless endangerment, third-degree assault and possession of a firearm on school grounds, Al.com reported.

Obviously Im concerned about a substitute teacher bringing a gun to school, and what we can do to prevent that in the future, Moon said.

Records arent yet available to show whether Weaver has a lawyer who could speak on his behalf.BUTTE COUNTY, Calif.  With a grant from the Department of Health Care Services, Northern Valley Harm Reduction Coalition (NVHRC) has been given 1,600 doses of Naloxone, or more commonly Narcan, the opioid overdose reversal drug, to disperse to drug users and those around them in Butte County.

A community training will be held on Friday, March 22, at 6 p.m. Those who attend the training will learn how to administer the reversal drug and will also receive a box containing two doses of Narcan. The training on Friday will be held at Blackbird Cafe located at 1431 Park Avenue in Chico.

In 2017, there were 17 deaths due to opioid-related overdoses, with most by prescription painkillers and heroin, according to the California Department of Public Health.

Narcan works to reverse an opioid overdose almost immediately after given by friends, family and even drug users themselves.

The coalition is providing free Narcan and brief trainings to individuals and groups on how to identify an overdose and administer the reversal drug.

The grant was given in October and since then over 500 boxes of the reversal drug have been given out with multiple trainees saying it has been successful.

The coalition encourages anyone who uses opioids or is around someone who does to go to one of the emergency community trainings.

Stay with Action News Now for updates on future community trainings.TEHAMA COUNTY, Calif.  Union Pacific Railroad will be working on a railroad crossing that will likely affect traveling between Redding and Chico.

This is one of several crossings along the tracks between Lincoln, in Placer County, and Lakehead, in Shasta County, that is planned to be worked on.

The maintenance will be on South Avenue between Stephens and Rowels roads in Tehama County.

This will begin Tuesday, April 2, at midnight, and is expected to be done by Friday, April 5.

Those driving on I-5 to and from Redding and Red Bluff can take Highway 36 and Highway 99 to get to Chico and back.

Motorists may also use I-5 and Highway 32 to get to Chico and back.

An increase in traffic is expected.Dr Mahathir Mohamad arrived in Islamabad

Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad arrived in Islamabad on Thursday evening for a three-day visit to Pakistan. According to Radio Pakistan, the Malaysia premier is visiting on the invitation of Prime Minister Imran Khan, and will be the chief guest at the Pakistan Day parade on March 23. Mahathir was accompanied by a high-level delegation, including several leading businessmen.



He was received at Nur Khan airbase by the prime minister, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Minister for Planning, Development and Reforms Khusro Bakhtiar and was given a 21-gun salute upon his arrival.



Pakistan is set to sign deals worth $900 million in telecoms, information technology during a three day visit by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, a senior official said on Thursday.



The memoranda will cover deals in IT, telecom, power generation, textile, agriculture, and halal food industries, according to Radio Pakistan.



The Malaysian prime ministers bilateral engagements also include a call on President Arif Alvi, and a one-on-one meeting with Prime Minister Imran Khan, followed by delegation-level talks, state radio network reported. The two prime ministers are scheduled to speak at the roundtable meeting of the chief executive officers, who desire to invest in Pakistans automobile and telecommunication sectors.



Meanwhile, Foreign Office Spokesperson Dr. Muhammad Faisal, in a statement said the visit of the Malaysian prime minister will further cement the existing brotherly and friendly relations between the two countries.



He said the focus of the visit will be on enhancing economic, trade, investment, and defence ties for the mutual benefit of the peoples of the two countries.



Pakistan, facing an economic crisis due to depleting foreign reserves and a widening current account deficit, has been searching for investment since the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan took office in August.



Razak Dawood, the prime ministers advisor on commerce, said memoranda of understanding covering $800-$900 million worth of investments with Malaysian investors would be signed on Friday.



We believe Malaysia will be an opening for us to the ASEAN countries, he said, referring to the Association of South East Asian Nations.



Pakistan has been seeking financial assistance and calling for investment from friendly countries, while also negotiating a bailout package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).MARYSVILLE, Calif. - Two Marysville teens are facing first-degree murder charges for the death of an elderly Idaho woman.

The Yuba County Sheriff's Office said Dustin Garrett Alfaro, 18, and a 17-year-old boy are accused of killing Arlyne Koehler, 87, in Pocatello, ID, Tuesday.

They were captured by Yuba County Deputies in Olivehurst on Wednesday in the area of 8th and Olivehurst Avenues. Deputies had been conducting an investigation into a separate threat incident involving the two teens in Linda and were actively searching for the vehicle.

Authorities are investigating the motive for the killing and why the teens were in Idaho.

Alfaro was booked into the Yuba County Jail with a bail of $1 million, and the 17-year old was booked into juvenile hall.

Yuba County Detectives are working with Pocatello Idaho police as the case remains under investigation.2 U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan

Two U.S. service members were killed in Afghanistan early Friday morning. NATO said they were killed as a result of enemy action. Their identities have not been released.

Marysville teens charged in Idaho murder case

Two Marysville teens are being charged with first-degree murder Friday morning. Authorities say 18-year-old Dustin Alfaro and a 17-year-old boy killed an 87-year-old woman in Pocatello, ID. They are now behind bars in Yuba County awaiting extradition to Idaho.

Debris removal deadline approaching

Butte County has sent out nearly 1,000 courtesy notices to property owners within the Camp Fire burn scar about the deadlines to enroll in the debris removal program. That deadline is April 15.

Paradise Hope Center offers supplies to Camp Fire evacuees

The Paradise Hope Center is working to rebuild Paradise by getting survivors back on their feet. The center has potable water they are inviting people to fill up for free. It is on the Skyway just across from Feather River Hospital.

Caltrans announces millions in road repairs for California

Caltrans has announced more than $758 million in road repairs across the state. Locally, $36 million will be allocated for State Route 20 and the Feather River Bridge in Marysville. More than $7 million for the Highway 70 expansion in Butte County.

Downtown loop project in the works for Redding

The Downtown Loop Project is in the works for Redding. The work would create a vital link for pedestrians to the Sacramento River Trail from the Diestlehorst Bridge. There is no word yet on when construction will begin.PhonePe, Indias fastest growing payments platform today announced Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan as the face of its brand. PhonePe is also an official co-presenting sponsor for the television broadcast of VIVO IPL 2019, and will be launching a series of new TV ads featuring Aamir Khan during this season. Aamirs presence in the TV ads and his mass appeal as a national icon will help PhonePe create awareness about the benefits of digital payments for users across India.

Commenting on the announcement, Sameer Nigam, CEO and Founder, PhonePe said, Aamir Khan is among the worlds biggest superstars today. He is a highly renowned actor who is known for doing path-breaking work in his industry. In his personal capacity too, Aamir has been instrumental in creating awareness about many important social issues in India. His name is synonymous with sincerity, hard work and dedication to his craft. These are values that are completely in sync with PhonePes ethos of trust, security and reliability, therefore we felt that Aamir is the perfect brand ambassador for our company as we look to introduce Digital Payments to a billion Indians.



We are also very excited to be part of VIVO IPL 2019. Cricket is the most popular sport in the country and VIVO IPL is the biggest sporting event of the year. Thus, we feel it is a great platform for us to launch our new brand campaign with Aamir and create awareness about the PhonePe platform. he added.

PhonePe stands for innovation and trust and has been instrumental in simplifying digital payments for millions of Indians in a very short span of time. I have closely been following PhonePes amazing journey and am delighted to be a part of their phenomenal growth trajectory. said Aamir Khan.CLUB FM UAE 99.6, UAE popular radio station from Mathrubhumi Group is all set to host the most popular music festival on 5th April, Bollywood Parks, UAE. Mojo rising, music fest has been curated by the makers of the celebrated indie show Music Mojo in Kappa TV.

The much- awaited musical extravaganza will feature 5 music bands including Agam, Karthik, The Local Train,Avial & Lagori. The tickets for the show can be purchased on www.platinumlist.net and dubaiparkandresorts.com. The ticket process for the event are 49 AED

The venue for the musical festival, BOLLYWOOD PARKS Dubai, part of Dubai Parks and Resorts, is the largest integrated theme parks destinations in the Middle East. The theme recreates the Bollywood experience through themes attractions and rides spread across five zones: Bollywood Boulevard, Mumbai Chowk, Rustic Ravine, Royal Plaza and Bollywood Film Studios featuring Hall of Heroes. The park also offers six themes restaurants that capture India's mouth-watering culinary offerings and eight retail outlets stocking quintessential filmy fare.

The sponsors of the show include Bollywood Park Dubai, Toshiba, Dubai Consumer Protection, Zam Zam Mani Restaurant, Thumbay hospital day care etc.

M V Shreyams Kumar, Jt Managing Director, Mathrubhumi Group said It has been said that all arts aspire to the state of music. So its little wonder that it brings disparate people together. While Club FM has brand-defined the young Keralitss taste in music, our UAE sation is numero uno in the Gulf. We believe in celebrating music in all its forms. Mojo Rising promises to collapse the distance between the stage and the audience, where the energy of music, musicians and music lovers become a fused whole. We invite the audience to come and partake of the magical night.





Search remains a key channel across the digital funnel, from raising awareness to driving conversions, but many brands have failed to keep pace with its rapid evolution. Best-in-class brands actively manage their investments across an ever-expanding search ad landscape while effectively managing their digital presence  including on Googles self-managed knowledge panel and business listings.

The inaugural Gartner L2 Intelligence Report: Search 2019 evaluates the SEO and SEM performance of 771 brands with the focus on search visibility, white space assets (For example, knowledge panels, Google Maps store profiles) and ad extension tactics.

As search continues bifurcating into top-of-funnel activity on Google and product specific-searches on retailer platforms such as Amazon, brands must prioritise search investments across all channels. To both navigate the hyper-competitive search landscape and strike the right balance between paid versus organic, brands must pull select levers, increasing overall visibility against relevant queries while also boosting relevancy in conversation.

Leading brands diversify their search strategies by maintaining robust site hygiene, relaying well-structured data to Google and leveraging features that support popular ad formats. There is room for improvement  only 8 per cent of brands take advantage of Googles Shopping ad and text ad extensions, which can display additional information that aids click-through. Some brands have discovered pockets of opportunities less concentrated with competitors, adjusting their keywords to take advantage of factors such as seasonality, sales, fashion and behavioural trends.

Rise of Mobile Search

Consumers attachment to mobile devices is reflected in mobile searchs meteoric rise. Relative to desktop, smaller screens have prompted a paradigm shift in the interplay between SEO and SEM for businesses. To monetise the sift to mobile, Google continues to experiment with different ad formats at the expense of organic results, given that paid results dominate above-the-fold real estate on mobile. Brands, therefore, cannot rely solely on relevancy and other SEO best practices to insulate themselves from competitive bidding and placement opportunities.

A steady investment into paid search continues (18% YOY increase in Q4 of 2018) as click growth accelerated more than cost-per-click (CPC), which indicates how marketers deploy effective search strategies as high relevancy ties into decreasing CPC. To avoid escalating CPC and bolster search visibility, brands must periodically refine search strategies, to both support high priority objectives and scope out white space opportunities where retailers do not already hold major stakes  including terms related to broader consumer trends, education and product launches.

To capitalise on keyword opportunities, brands can derive site content categorisation based on queries of interest, as well as diversify their investments in ad formats and features. Shopping ads  which comprise a majority of desktop and mobile paid search inventory  see higher conversion rates, while text ads can be impactful for brands concerned with awareness and reach. For brands with well-established relationships with retail partners regarding search, maintaining distinguished keyword focuses and understanding where retailers offer existing support are critical factors.

Text ads  a viable alternative

Google Shopping Ads and text ads offering differing strengths and weaknesses, but clear variances exist in terms of how brands in various sectors invest. Brands and retailers lean more on Google Shopping Ads to bolster search visibility, as they offer better click-through rates, given the ads prime real estate.

In Q4 of 2018, Google Shopping Ad investment grew by 42 per cent  the highest growth rate since mid-2016, while text ad investment has seen a steady decline, dropping by 9 per cent. However, text ads are still a variable alternative for brands facing intense retailer competition, especially considering the more expensive format of Shopping Ads, and that text ads offer more variation to marketers trying to target a wider audience.

For brands with limited search budgets, it is crucial to remain cognizant of terms less cluttered with competition and diversify ad formats to defend turf.Indias fastest growing multiplex operators INOX Leisure Ltd announced that they have become the official partners with Rajasthan Royals. Under the partnership, INOX will have its logo presence on the team attire. INOX has been consistently undertaking exciting initiatives for its viewers to redefine the cinema experience in the country, blending top class luxury, impeccable services and best-in-class technology with its irresistible offers for its viewers. The strategic partnership with Rajasthan Royals will further lend a touch of royalty and offer its patrons an extraordinary experience beyond cinemas.

INOX has introduced a special offer for its guests across the country enabling them to win a free trip to Jaipur to watch a Rajasthan Royals match during this years Indian Premier League. INOX viewers will have to book their movie tickets through INOXs mobile application or through its website www.inoxmovies.com in the month of March to be eligible to win the all-expenses-paid trip to Jaipur. Those guests buying a Rajasthan Royals Popcorn Tub will also be eligible for winning the coveted trip. Along with free match tickets, INOX will offer free return air tickets from their place of residence, a 2 Nights-3 Days stay and sightseeing at Jaipur to the winning viewers. The eligible viewers also stand a chance to win the Rajasthan Royals jerseys, autographed merchandise and a chance to meet the Rajasthan Royals players.

Rajasthan Royals have re-launched themselves in its new color Pink with first Royal, Shane Warne as its brand ambassador. Having donned various hats with Rajasthan Royals, Shane Warne, the brand ambassador of Rajasthan Royals said, during a recently held interactive session at INOX Atria at Mumbai, Thank you INOX for getting on board with the Rajasthan Royals. Its a terrific family to be a part of. I am privileged to have witnessed such a beautiful cinematic experience today.

Alok Tandon, CEO - Inox Leisure Limited adds With a clear focus on curating the best experience for our patrons, we have continously been working on partnerships, allowing us to take their cinema experience to new levels. The partnership with Rajasthan Royals adds a royal touch to our brand offering. We invite our patrons across the country to come forward and win a chance to experience the royalty of Rajasthan Royals from close quarters. We would also like to thank Shane and the entire Rajasthan Royals leadership for coming on-board with INOX.

On his recent visit to INOX Atria at Mumbai, Shane Warne set the partnership rolling as he addressed the top management of INOX Leisure Ltd and shared his life experiences on how teamwork, respect within the team, and leadership matters for any sport or an organisation to be successful.Ipsos India has bagged top honour at the recently concluded 28th Annual Market Research Society of India (MRSI) seminar, The Changing Face of Market Research, held on March 18-19, 2019 at Westin, Mumbai  the Research Paper titled Experience Death Through the Living was adjudged best under the Audience Poll Category.

Authored by Ashwini Sirsikar, Country Service Line Leader, Ipsos UU and Shelly Jain, Associate Director, Ipsos UU  the research paper showcased adaptation of counselling techniques for better understanding of deeply personal and sensitive issues.

The entry featured under the Session: Greatest Impact.

Qualitative research works on the principles of psychology and human understanding. However often our enquiry is limited to consumer understanding and not on deeply personal human issues and emotions. Hence, we thought of extending the principles of qualitative research and specifically counselling techniques to develop a framework for understanding deeply personal, sensitive and emotional issues, elaborated Sirsikar.

Further, Ipsos also presented a research paper jointly with Coca Cola, titled, Together we can move Mountains. Neetu Bansal, Client Officer, Ipsos India and Ankita Mahana from Coca Cola  for Coca Colas Share a Coke campaign using Ipsos Duel (using key attributes of Appeal & Passion) for shortlisting, was lauded by the audience.

Ipsos UU  Bringing Life to life

With 1000 world-class researchers in over 80 countries, Ipsos UU is the worlds leading qualitative community, with the biggest share of insights. Always striving to bring Life to life, at Ipsos UU we love the power of context to explore real people in real life. Ipsos UU is founded on intellectual generosity, powered by strategic thinking and built for change.Network18, Indias most diversified media conglomerate yesterday concluded the eighth edition of the Sony Better Photography Wedding Photographer of the Year 2018-19 Awards. The awards were presented by Better Photography Magazine in association with Sony.

Special guest, Mr. Boman Irani, who once was a wedding photographer himself, addressed the audience at the beginning of the ceremony, and also announced the grand prize winner alongside Hiroyuki Tokuno-san (Head-Digital Imaging Business, Sony India), Prakash Tilokani (celebrated wedding photographer), Joseph Radhik (celebrity wedding photographer and the Sony Global Ambassador from India), Krishna Madhavan Pillai (Chief Editor, Better Photography), and Amit Seth (Publisher  Better Photography, OVERDRIVE, and Better Interiors). There were also Luv (actor and photographer) and Kush Sinha (photographer and short filmmaker) who presented the Joy of Light award along with Dhaval Soni (Managing Director of Photoquip), and Mr. Madhur Shroff (accomplished commercial photographer).

The Sony Wedding Photographer of the Year Awards are a celebration of photographic excellence and represent the pinnacle of Indian wedding photography. Year after year, we are amazed by the quality of entries received and how wedding photographers find new ways of seeing the world through their images and creating powerful lasting impressions on the viewer, said Amit Seth.

The contest was open for entries from 13 December 2018 to 30 January 2019, and the submissions were made online, via the Better Photography Wedding Photographer of the Year awards website. This edition witnessed an astounding number of entrants with 7126 participants and 29185 entries. In addition to the six regular categoriesBride & Groom Portraiture, Family & Friends, Emotions, Behind the Scenes or Offbeat, Finer Wedding Details or Still Life, Photoseries on a Single Weddingthis year, a seventh category was introduced called The Joy of Light by Photoquip.

As a genre, wedding photography is one of the most significant ones as it holds the memories of a lifetime. In this regard, the Sony Better Photography Wedding Photographer of the Year Awards are very important, as they recognise the talent and the hard work behind the photographs that make generations smile. Sony applauds the spirit and commitment of these very special photographers, said Hiroyuki Tokuno.

The entries were open to a diverse judging panel comprising 56 national and international jurists. We had professional photographers from various genres, national photo editors, as well as newly married couples. These 56 jurists were responsible for the top ten nominees. This year, Better Photography added an additional stage of judging, called the Portfolio Submission round. With the addition of this round, we ensured that only the best all-round contenders made it as winners in the top six categories of the contest. These winners then moved on to the final face-off round, which was held from 13-17 March, where they were taken on a cruise to make photographs. The winning photographs from the face-off were then chosen by Prakash Tilokani, Indias one Indias most successful wedding photographer, and Joseph Radhik, Sonys Global Imaging Ambassador and Indias biggest celebrity wedding photographer.

The Sony Better Photography Wedding Photographer of the Year Awards goes beyond just celebrating wedding photography. It is a medium to show creativity, experience, and new techniques from which photographers of various fields can learn. Sony, as a company, with some of the best photographic gear, especially for this genre, is devoted to wedding photographers around the country, said Mukesh Srivastava, Product Marketing Head, Digital Imaging Business, Sony India.

The Grand Prize Winner, Divyam Mehrotra, was awarded the Sony A7R III, along with a lens kit, a Manfrotto Befree GT Carbon Alpha tripod, a Manfrotto Backpack, a Lowepro DSLR Video Fastpack, and a Joby Gorillapod, courtesy of Vitec Imaging. He was also given the Elinchrom D-Lite FX 2 Kit by Photoquip, and a 500GB Rugged Thunderbolt hard drive courtesy of Seagate, along with a B2 size customisable coffee table book from HP.

The individual category winners are as follows; Divyam Mehrotra won in the Bride & Groom Portraiture category, while in the Family & Friends category the winner was Rishika Brahma. The award for the Emotions category was bagged by Abhimanyu Sharma, and Prasheila Lookhar won in the Behind the Scenes or Offbeat category. While Harsheen Jammu took home the prize in the Finer Wedding Details or Still Life category, Gautam Agarwal did so in the Joy of Light by Photoquip category. Finally, Pon Prabakaran was awarded in the Photoseries on a Single Wedding category.

The associate partners of the event were Photoquip, Adobe, Lacie, Printing PartnerHP, Imaging PartnerVitec Imaging Solution, Styling partnerLibas and Gangji Jewels, Face-off partnerAngriya, and Live Streaming Partner - LiveUThe latest campaign for Womens Horlicks by FCB India encourages women to recognise their real physical strength. Women are always known for their mental/ emotional strength for being the backbone of the family, but rarely for their physical strength. Womens Horlicks wanted to break this very notion through its latest campaign  Stories of Strength.

The campaign celebrates women who dared to follow their unconventional dreams and showed the world that they are not just mentally but physically strong too. The campaign also urges strong women to take care the very thing that makes them strong from within: their bones. The brand firmly believes that if women become as strong in mind as they are in mind, they can go out and conquer whatever they set their eyes on. Bone health is extremely important, as every 1 out of 2 Indian women are at a risk of low bone mineral density (BMD) which can lead to osteoporosis.

Adding more depth to the Stand Strong narrative and to celebrate and support physical strength amongst women, Womens Horlicks collaborated with:

Dr Seema Rao  Indias first women commando trainer

Ratna Singh  Indias first female naturalist

Uma Das  Indias first woman Dhaki player

These women explain the challenges and difficulties they faced in their unique career choices along with the physical and mental strength it required to fulfil their dreams.

With this campaign, Womens Horlicks empowers women to breakdown the misconception that women cant be physically strong. It also aims to engage, encourage and equip women with the physical strength that is needed to follow their passions.

Womens Horlicks encouraged women to write their own stories of strength and share them at #StandStrong. Physical strength is displayed by women in various facets of life. But it is not talked about, not encouraged or celebrated. Now it is time to celebrate their stories of physical strength too.

Elaborating on the campaign, Vikram Bahl, Executive Vice President - Marketing, GSK Consumer Healthcare India, said, Women in India are often celebrated for their emotional solidarity and not physical strength. With Stories of Strength, we wanted to break this misconception and enable women to be physically, emotionally and mentally strong. As a brand that challenges stereotypes, we believe that for this it is our responsibility to encourage women to invest in strengthening their body and mind, so that they can pursue their dreams and aspirations.

Swati Bhattacharya, CCO, FCB Ulka, added here, Every story of bravery, every story of strength and every story of courage, is often a mans story, we dont hear a womans stories of courage. Women stories are about sacrifice, being vulnerable or being rescued. So, with Stories of Strength we thought of changing the narrative, so that when we think of strength, we dont just think of men.

The film is the latest product from FCB FuelContent. Speaking on the occasion, Debarpita Banerjee, President - North and East, FCB Ulka and Head FuelContent India, said, Each of these women have stories with plenty of strength and equal proportions of soul in it. And balancing the two visually was an interesting challenge. At FuelContent, we feel lucky to partner brave brands such as Womens Horlicks, that ware wanting to connect and create conversations differently.

Campaign Credits:

Client: Womens Horlicks (GSK Consumer Healthcare)

Creative Agency: FCB India

CCO: Swati Bhattacharya

Creative Team: Anusheela Saha, Gayatri Sriram, Sumitra Sengupta, Amna Rahman, Anamika Kumari, Sreya Basu, Swati Singh, Ushna Chowdhuri, Tushar Singh

Account Management: Debarpita Banerjee, Sareesh James Kutty, Swati Mongia, Abhijeet Nagar

Planning: John Thangaraj, Tanvi Arora, Archita Ghosh

Director (of the TVC): Surjo Dutt

Executive Producer: Mayuk Hazarika

Production House: FuelContentSBPto receive 15 billion yuan loan from China

The Ministry of Finance has said that the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) will receive a 15 billion yuan loan ($2.1 billion) from China by Monday. A spokesperson for the ministry, Dr Khaqan Najeeb Khan, said that all procedural formalities for the transfer of the loan being provided to Pakistan by the Chinese government have been completed.



He said that the funds will be deposited to the SBP account by March25. The loan facility, the spokesperson said, will further strengthen foreign exchange reserves and ensure balance of payment stability.



Following a meeting in Beijing between Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Prime Minister Imran Khan in November 2018, China had said that it was willing to offer assistance to Pakistan to help it weather its current fiscal woes but that the terms of such aid were still being discussed.



Shortly after, Chinese Consul General Long Dingbin had said during an interview that in order to boost Pakistans economy, Beijing is investing in multiple sectors and launching business ventures instead of providing loans.



In February this year, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lu Kang had tentatively acknowledged that it was extending financial assistance to help Pakistan.



The Chinese side has offered and will continue to offer its best through assistance, trade, investment and all-around practical cooperation to support and boost Pakistans economic and social development, Kang had said.



The Ministry of Finance has said that the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) will receive a 15 billion yuan loan ($2.1 billion) from China by Monday.



A spokesperson for the ministry, Dr Khaqan Najeeb Khan, said that all procedural formalities for the transfer of the loan being provided to Pakistan by the Chinese government have been completed.



He said that the funds will be deposited to the SBP account by March25. The loan facility, the spokesperson said, will further strengthen foreign exchange reserves and ensure balance of payment stability.



Following a meeting in Beijing between Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Prime Minister Imran Khan in November 2018, China had said that it was willing to offer assistance to Pakistan to help it weather its current fiscal woes but that the terms of such aid were still being discussed.



Shortly after, Chinese Consul General Long Dingbin had said during an interview that in order to boost Pakistans economy, Beijing is investing in multiple sectors and launching business ventures instead of providing loans. In February this year, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lu Kang had tentatively acknowledged that it was extending financial assistance to help Pakistan.Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier?

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Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page.Protesters throughout Algeria again took to the countrys rain-soaked streets for the fifth weekend running to voice their unequivocal rejection of the latest bid by the countrys 82-year-old president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, to retain his faltering grip upon the reins of office.

In the face of relentless demonstrations, fueled by the weakness of the regime and its succession of qualified compromises and superficial reversals, protests have grown to the point where they are effectively paralyzing the country. On March 18, Bouteflika reiterated his position, issuing a letter underscoring his determination to remain within the presidential palace until the process of constitutional reform was complete.

However, after nearly three decades in office, the offer of reform has convinced few. Instead, demonstrators have dismissed the de facto extension of his fourth term as a ploy to buy time for the enfeebled presidents shadowy coterie of advisers  known as the pouvoir  to conceal decades of corruption gained from their position at the heart of the presidency.

The people no longer want to be represented by a president who is seriously ill and can no longer assume his duties, and who is surrounded by clans working in [the shadows], which has given birth to a corrupt system, a spokesperson for the group I Am Algerian told Al-Monitor.

It was a message that echoed throughout the countrys streets, as Algerians from all walks of life braved the rain to peacefully voice their rejection of the pouvoir and all it entailed. "We stay here until the whole system goes," Mahmoud Timar, a 37-year old teacher, told Reuters. Another teacher, Rachid Zemmir, 55, told the agency, "We are close to victory. The system is divided."

From the initial small-scale protest that began 200 kilometers from the capital in Bordj Bou Arreridj on Feb. 13, to the movement that now dominates Algerias entire political conversation, the protests have grown beyond anything its originators could have imagined. The demonstrations are nationwide, Algerian freelance journalist Massinissa Benlakehal told Al-Monitor, adding, The country has never seen such a demonstration of popular force in its post-independence history, that is a fact."

Demonstrators are taking it to the streets in various cities of the country, northern coastal side, inside the country as well as in the Sahara cities. Demonstrations are filled by young people, children of both gender, elders, women, men, he said, noting, however, that it is Algerias youths that drive the movement.

Over the past week, many within Algerias ruling cabal have seemingly switched their loyalties from the government they supported to the thousands of Algerians protesting their role within its rule. On March 20, the countrys ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) appeared to side with the protesters, before qualifying its position a day later, stressing the partys moral and political commitment to Bouteflika's decisions. The same day, the influential Democratic National Rally (RND), itself part of the ruling coalition, broke ranks to side with the swelling numbers of protesters. Elsewhere, while on a tour of army bases, the countrys army chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Gaed Salah also praised the demonstrators noble aims and pure intentions.

However, what reception such latecomers may receive within the popular movement is unclear. For these groups, they had no choice, Benlakehal said. If their opposition and desertion [from the government] was true, they would have done it at the very beginning of the popular protest movement against the fifth mandate of Bouteflika. Instead, Benlakehal speculated, the ruling elites newfound loyalties sprang more from political opportunism than any underlying sense of principle. Theyve waited almost three weeks after the movement kicked off to show their support, because they dont want to find themselves on the losing side when this movement reaches its goal: to get rid of the entire system, he said.

As the demonstrations gathered momentum, a tentative leadership was reported as emerging from the crowds in the shape of the Coordination Nationale pour le Changement, an organization allegedly made up of jurists, civil society activists and members of the countrys opposition. In its opening statement, titled "Platform of Change," the group called upon the president to step down after his mandated term ended in April and for the army to limit themselves to their "constitutional role."

However, even here, ambiguity exists. Nobody knows where it came from," reporter Mahrez Rabia told Al-Monitor. The main names that appear in the document deny having signed it, or claim not to have even been aware of this platform.

Nevertheless, deserted by allies within government and unsure of the support of the security services, Bouteflika and his inner circle obstinately hold on to power. Its basically inertia thats keeping him there, James McDougall, a professor at Trinity College Oxford, told Al-Monitor. Theyve had weeks, decades even, to choose a successor, but they havent really decided one way or another.

One of the key challenges facing the pouvoir, McDougall explained, was the traditional way that power within the Algerian elite was distributed across various centers, from business to the security services, making the challenges of granting the presidency to any single individual fraught with risk.

Similarly, finding any individual able to broker with the protesters on an equal footing after the widely derided appointment of octogenarian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi has also proven beyond the governments traditionalist mindset. In the past, they could call upon these old figures from the war of independence to mediate, but theyre all dead now," McDougall said. Moreover, with the Coordination Nationale pour le Changement potentially amounting to little more than a chimera, its not really obvious who they could negotiate with.

However, in the face of the protesters who have flooded city centers across Algeria in the hundreds of thousands to voice their rejection of the president and his regime, how long Bouteflika can continue to dominate the political process is far from certain.

As one Harry Potter-inspired placard would have it, Algeria has no master. Algeria is a free country.CAIRO  The Egyptian governments National Press Authority (NPA) is implementing a reform and restructuring plan for national press institutions to pay back their debts accumulated over the years.

According to an article published by Youm7 on April 25, 2018, the plan includes exploiting the unutilized assets of these institutions, such as the rental of vacant buildings, reducing the costs of newspaper issues and increasing revenues from advertising. The aim is to close the funding gap of these institutions.

On March 5, Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly discussed the plans for the development of government-affiliated press institutions, as well as their dues to government agencies with the ministers, including Minister of Social Solidarity Ghada Wali, Minister of Planning Hala al-Saeed, Minister of Finance Mohammed Moeit, Minister of Business Sector Hisham Tawfik and the head of the National Press Organization, Karam Gaber.

On the same day, Madbouly issued a statement noting that these institutions owe a lot of money to the states taxing authority and the social security authority. He called on those in charge of these institutions to show a willingness to improve since the state has provided them with significant financial support.

NPA representative Abdullah Hassan noted on April 25, 2018, that the total debt of the national press institutions amounted to 19 billion Egyptian pounds ($1.10 billion).

According to the latest statistics on newspapers by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, published in 2015, Egypt has eight national press institutions, which publish 56 printed newspapers and magazines.

Government spokesman Nader Saad said in a March 5 TV interview with Sada Elbalad that some reforms the national press institutions must undertake include reducing the number of publications for each press establishment, investing in electronic journalism and exploiting the assets of these institutions to deal with arrears accumulated over the years.

Journalist Muhammad Hassan al-Banna published a study Dec. 11, 2018, in which he said that the most prominent problems national press institutions are undergoing are accumulated debts, surplus employees, reduced sales, lack of advertising resources and absence of proper staff training.

This requires real reform instead of temporary remedies and aid from the state since the latter cannot provide unlimited support forever. Self-reform is required, Saad said, noting that a meeting will be held soon  without specifying a date  between Madbouly and NPA head Karam Gabr to discuss optimal utilization of the assets of these institutions to help solve their issues.

The NPA will be in charge of implementing the national press reform plan, according to Article 212 of the Egyptian Constitution, which stipulates that the National Press and Media Association is independent, manages state-owned press and media institutions, and undertakes their development and assets, ensuring independence, neutrality and adherence to sensible professional, administrative and economic standards.

Mahmoud Alamuddin. journalism professor at Cairo University and NPA member, told Al-Monitor that the press industry in Egypt is facing a severe crisis, suffering a sharp drop in the distribution figures compared to the beginning of this century, as well as a decline in advertising revenues and lack of credibility and influence compared to todays social media, and television and radio before that.

He explained that the plan to develop the Egyptian newspapers includes press content so that it can address the real needs and interests of readers, especially the young generations, and staff working in this field. In addition, modern printing and publishing methods, through national training centers in cooperation with international consulting firms, would be adopted.

Alamuddin stressed the need to modernize the production structure of the press industry, particularly related to electronic publishing systems, creating websites and online newspapers, instead of relying entirely on the paper press, and to conduct in-depth studies on the Egyptian public and how it uses traditional and new media. In addition, existing equipment should be replaced with new equipment.

The NPAs reform plan has raised concerns among some journalists about the possibility of merging newspapers that suffered financial losses.

The government took a shortcut when it came to structuring national press institutions instead of taking proper development routes. The government spokesman announced the possibility of merging some newspapers while he ought to have taken reform measures for the development of institutions at the administrative and editorial level, member of the Journalists Syndicate Amr Badr told Al-Monitor.

He said, Merging or shutting down some newspapers within national institutions would be applying for the first time NPA law No. 179 of 2018, which we had opposed when it was being discussed in parliament.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ratified this law on Aug. 31, 2018. The law gave the NPA the right to merge or shut down newspapers, in accordance with the provisions of Article 21 of Chapter II, which provided for merging institutions and shutting down or merging newspapers within the same institution.

Badr added, National press institutions are capable of reform, but we must start by developing the editorial material published by these newspapers in order to reflect the citizen in a realistic way, as well as increasing sales and advertising. But officials in these institutions never paid enough attention to this matter.

The NPA has not yet announced a proposal to merge any newspapers.

Badr called for the Journalists Syndicate to be a party to any steps to merge some newspapers or shut down others to ensure the rights of journalists.

Sherif Darwish Allabban, deputy of the faculty of journalism at Cairo University, told Al-Monitor that national press institutions have several issues when it comes to funding. He explained that they also offer the same discourse and readers do not have access to different newspapers offering different views to choose whatever suits them best.

Content is almost identical in all national newspapers and does not show any effort to address real topics of interest to citizens. They no longer offer different news coverage as they did in the past and this is why newspapers are no longer selling as much, nor are they improving, he said.

Allabban supports merging some newspapers that have similar content or even shutting down others if they are no longer selling, to make sure there is enough funding for successful newspapers.

These institutions should be developed with the will of their staff that needs to focus on new types of journalism," he concluded.The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has launched a program to support Egyptian women in the field of green energy by creating more employment opportunities for them and supporting their small and medium-sized enterprises in the sector.

According to an EBRD statement, the program aims to identify challenges that prevent womens participation in the sector and potential [skill gaps], and will work with the Egyptian authorities to overcome these issues. The Program for Supporting Renewable Energy and Promoting Gender Equality in Egypt is one aspect of the $7 million joint technical cooperation initiative co-funded by the bank and the Green Climate Fund.

The EBRD is putting women at the center of its commitment to Egypts transition to a green economy with a new initiative that supports the countrys vast potential for renewable energy, the statement read.

Women's rights activists, economists and energy experts have praised the banks program, saying that it will boost Egyptian women entrepreneurs in the field and include women in Egypts strategy to achieve energy self-sufficiency.

The EBRD program will open the way for more sustainable energy financing as this will help create a green economy market, which is good for the business in Egypt and the whole planet, said Galal Othman, head of the Egyptian Wind Energy Association.

The program will reinforce the role of the private sector in climate investment, reduce emissions and build a resilient environment. It will also support efficient and environmentally sustainable investments by providing attractive funding solutions, coupled with training and capacity-building, to foster the implementation of projects in this vital area, Othman told Al-Monitor.

The bank said in its statement that the aim of the program is to enhance renewable energy integration, policies and planning to support the country in meeting its target of 20% renewable energy generation by 2022 and 42% by 2035.

Egypt has witnessed a rapid increase in energy demand and has therefore identified the country's capacity to provide renewable energy as a strategic priority.

Economists believe that with a government drive to rely on renewable energy as one of its main resources, the renewable energy sector will create new job opportunities, giving women a chance to join the growing industry.

It is a very good step to provide support to those in need of it, most importantly women. This is one of the most important roles of international banks, to provide support for developing countries, said Rashad Abdo, head of the Egyptian Forum for Economic and Strategic Studies.

Women in Egypt are politically and economically empowered as they are well represented in the parliament, ministries, courts and also in the business sector. However, there are still a lot of marginalized women. There are a lot of private-sector companies that do not employ women, so it is very important to spread the culture of gender-aware businesses represented in start-ups, Abdo told Al-Monitor.

The Egyptian government has also been making efforts to support women entrepreneurs in Egypt. At a conference for businesswomen in February this year, Minister of Investment and International Cooperation Sahar Nasr said that the share of grants given to women-led micro enterprises has reached 80%.

The ministry is working on increasing the percentage of women who will be given funding and grants in coordination with development partners. The funding to women entrepreneurs in general currently stands at 50% in light of the success achieved by women in small and medium enterprises, Nasr told the conference.

Randa Fakhr el-Deen, the executive director of a union of nongovernmental organizations working together to protect women and children, told Al-Monitor, Women are the foundation of sustainable development. When you empower women socially and economically, you are empowering the whole society.

However, Fakhr el-Deen said that training is crucial for the success of women entrepreneurs or those looking to join the renewable energy sector. The state should work on empowering women to become decision-makers and successful entrepreneurs. Financial support is not enough if it is not combined with training, Fakhr el-Deen added.

The EBRD approach comes as part of its commitment and that of the Green Climate Fund to integrate gender initiatives in their investments and projects. The Green Climate Fund has included gender equality considerations in its projects since its establishment in 2010.

The EBRD program Women in Business focuses on gender equality in the workplace. The program aims to create entrepreneurship opportunities for women by matching them with financing for their small businesses, according to the EBRD, whose website reports that the program has allocated over 480 million euros (about $545 million) across 18 countries, reaching more than 35,000 women  women like Tamara Chigogidze, the founder and CEO of Georgias largest radio broadcasting company.

According to its website, the EBRD is one of the major financiers of climate projects in the regions it operates in, investing nearly 30 billion euros (around $34 billion) in green economic transformation projects since 2006 and 5.2 billion euros ($5.8 billion) in renewable energy.

The bank has allocated more than 4.8 billion euros ($5.4 billion) to finance 91 projects in Egypt, including 16 renewable energy projects.When US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in May 2018 and reinstated harsh sanctions on Iran, many feared that Irans tourism sector, which has been continuously growing in recent years, would take a hit.

But while the number of tourists, mainly from Europe, has declined, the devaluation of the Iranian rial  triggered by sanctions and exacerbated due to poor management  lured many more foreign tourists to Iran, especially from neighboring countries. The rial lost more than 60% of its value in 2018, making Iran, already a price-competitive tourist destination, even cheaper. Intensified pressures also prompted both the government and the private sector to fast-track projects long in the pipeline.

Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies have recently become hot-button topics in Iran, more so after US sanctions were reimposed. Many high-profile projects are currently in the works in Iran.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the intersection of tourism and cryptocurrencies is being seriously eyed by both the government and the private sector.

If Iran manages to successfully tap into existing potentials in this area, it could prove to be a turning point for the countrys underdeveloped tourism sector and a source of much-needed hard currency. Iran feels a deep void in terms of money transactions in its tourism sector due to decadeslong restrictions that mean foreign tourists have to pay for almost all tourism facilities in cash due to a lack of access to international payment methods.

Efforts by the Iranian government to utilize digital currencies in the tourism sector are led by the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization (CHTO), whose head, Ali Asghar Mounesan, reiterated in early February that digital currencies are an ongoing focus for the organization. The CHTO chief had in late July 2018 proposed forming a joint digital currency fund with India to develop tourism ties. Also in July, chairman of the board of the Iran Electronic Tourism Association, Hassan Ansari, announced that after securing approval from Mounesan, the proposal to establish a state-run digital currency for the tourism sector is currently being reviewed by top-level authorities, including First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri, then-Central Bank of Iran head Valiollah Seif and Minister of Information and Communications Technology Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi.

No further details have been publicized by the government yet. That is possibly because Irans digital currency scene has witnessed several high-profile developments in recent months on the state level that could impact the proposal. For one, a sovereign cryptocurrency backed by the rial and relating blockchain infrastructures are nearing completion under the auspices of the central bank. On the other hand, the central bank released an early draft regulatory framework on cryptocurrencies in late January that needs to be finalized before any state projects can begin work in earnest.

Blockchain technologies could facilitate tourism in a variety of areas, from security and identification at airports and other venues to payments, reservations, luggage tracking and income management. But actually realizing such uses requires extensive research and technological infrastructures, whereas Iran still struggles with providing necessary physical and digital infrastructures for its tourism sector. Therefore, any short-term attention directed by the Iranian government to this area will be focused on facilitating payments through digital currencies.

But while the government ponders its next move, a vastly nimbler private sector has already seen tangible results, albeit on a small scale.

IranByBit is a small travel startup consisting of several enthusiastic millennials that offers a host of services and accepts payments both in bitcoin and cash on arrival. At the moment, they offer tours, accommodations and Iranian SIM cards and debit cards.

A state-run crypto doesn't have the potential to address any of the problems of accessibility, acceptability and reliability of the local currency in tourism, IranByBit research and development head Ziya Sadr told Al-Monitor.

On the other hand, a widely accepted and accessible cryptocurrency such as bitcoin could help small businesses in the tourism sector to allow a wide range of customers from anywhere in the world to use their coins inside Iran, he said.

In the few months they have been active, the companys bitcoin-fueled tourism has begun serving travelers from around the world. As Sadr sees it, the private sector is the natural choice that can excel in the tourism sector. As it stands, the central bank draft regulatory framework has no effect on their work since IranByBit does not serve travelers inside Iran.

But naturally a more lenient and open approach adopted by the regulatory framework would be much more desirable for the whole bitcoin ecosystem inside Iran, Sadr said.

Among other things, the draft regulatory framework proposes prohibiting the use of global cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin as methods of payment inside Iran. The local cryptocurrency community is actively working to shape a lighter regulatory touch and reverse some of its restrictions.

Other private sector players are also entering what could soon turn into a lucrative niche market. During the 12th Tehran International Tourism Exhibition held Feb. 12-15, the Rmoney cryptocurrency exchange, which started operating less than a year ago after obtaining a central bank license, unveiled a tourism digital currency system. The system allows all firms active in the tourism sector to sign up and receive their money from their foreign customers in cryptocurrencies without paying any fees. They can then change their cryptocurrency incomes to rials using Rmoney.

The goal of designing the tourism digital currency system is to resolve issues relating to foreign payments, Rmoney CEO Mehdi Naseri said in a recent interview. As payment obstacles in this sector are resolved, we will certainly witness facilitation of processes in attracting foreign tourists, which, in addition to generating foreign currency revenues, will create many job opportunities.SC accepted Rs 460 billion Bahria Town Karachi offer

The Supreme Court on Thursday accepted a Rs 460 billion Bahria Town Karachis offer for lands it occupies in the Malir district of Karachi and restrained the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) from filing references against it.



Last week, the top court had reserved its verdict on whether or not to accept a fresh offer by the Bahria Town (Pvt) Limited to settle a case pertaining to its Malir or Karachi Super Highway project in lieu of payment of Rs450 billion.



Bahria Town Karachi will have to pay the entire amount over seven years. In its ruling, the top court ordered Bahria Town Karachi to pay Rs 25 billion by August this year. From September onward, it will have to pay monthly instalments of Rs2.25bn for the next three years. If the company fails to deposit two instalments, Bahria Town Karachi will be considered a defaulter.



After three years, it will have to pay a four per cent markup in case of late installments. The company will also be required to give a 99-year lease to everyone who purchased a plot in Bahria Town Karachi housing project and will mortgage parks, cinemas and other assets owned by it.



Sindh government, which had insisted during the entire course of the case that it did not incur any losses, told the court that it should be the recipient of the funds that are to be obtained from the builder.



The funds havent come yet but squabbles have started already, Justice Saeed remarked. We know where the money has to go. The court further said that NAB would not file references against Bahria Town Karachi as long as the latter complies with the order.



Malir Development Authoritys (MDA) counsel also requested the court to discard cases against Sindh governments officials.



Do you want that references should not be filed against those who misused their authority? Justice Faisal Arab asked. The matter has [only] been settled with Bahria Town, clarified Justice Saeed, adding that if NAB wants to file references against other officials, it can petition the court. We will decide after hearing both the parties.The top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, earlier this week declared that Iran has trained 100,000 voluntary forces to share experiences and know-how with the Iraqi and Syrian militaries. In this vein, Jafari also asserted that Irans strategy in the region has been far more effective in containing the Islamic States (IS') terrorism compared to that of the United States, which has spent a hefty amount for the same purpose.

The appreciation for these collaborative efforts was manifested in the recent official visit of Irans President Hassan Rouhani to Iraq, which attracted international attention. Rouhani arrived in Baghdad at the invitation of his Iraqi counterpart. The visit was publicly announced. His plane touched down in the capital in broad daylight, and high-ranking authorities warmly received him. During his three-day tour of the country, he met with virtually all top officials in Iraq  and also the highest religious authorities, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

The trip stood in glaring contrast to that of US President Donald Trump, who at the end of December 2018 paid a secret visit to Iraq that involved landing at a US military base with plane lights turned off and with no Iraqi officials at hand to welcome him. The Iraqi president, prime minister and speaker of parliament all refused to meet with him.

The root causes of these contrasts lie in the divergent regional strategies of the United States and Iran.

For some analysts both in the Middle East and beyond, Irans 1979 Islamic Revolution is taken to be the landmark juncture from which many of the regional developments are engendered. One of the notable features of post-revolutionary Iran has been its contumacious and trouble-ridden relations with the United States. As many have argued in the past, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that in some crucial areas, the national interests of Iran and the United States systematically converge. For instance, both the United States and Iran found the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein of Iraq to be their shared nemeses. Similarly, both Washington and Tehran presently find IS as well as an extensive network of extremist groups such as al-Qaeda, al-Nusra and Boko Haram to be their top priority national security threats.

However, the question is why such a convergence of national security interests does not pave the way for a resumption of bilateral relations between Iran and the United States. One could, of course, argue that the answer lies in the dogmatism and shortsightedness in the making of foreign policy of successive US administrations, such as consistent support of allies in the region who reportedly bolster terror. There are indeed many US intelligence reports that confirm the persistent financial and logistical support of Saudi Arabia for terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda, al-Nusra and IS. In other words, the ideological sustenance and financial resources of these extremist groups come directly from US allies. Similarly, the United States is providing political and military support to supposed Arab allies that are responsible for instability in the region via disastrous wars such as the one in Yemen.

But perhaps a more important reason for the absence of constructive relations between Tehran and Washington is that consecutive US administrations have viewed their national interests as best served by only capitalizing on allied states as opposed to nations in the Middle East. From the toppling in 1953 of the government of democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh  who nationalized Irans oil industry from colonial forces  to supporting authoritarian regimes in the region, the United States consistently supports unpopular and undemocratic states as anchors to protect its interests. The latter include the shah of Iran, Arab totalitarian monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, and the autocracies of North Africa such as Egypts Hosni Mubarak and Tunisias Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

In contrast, the Iranian leaderships regional security strategy is focused on nurturing ties with nations rather than just states  a strategy that it commenced at home. Entrenched in a protracted eight-year war of aggression that Saddam Hussein waged against Iran and faced with a shortage of human resources in the Iranian national army, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, ordered the establishment of the Basij  an army of 20 million ordinary Iranians, to fight off the Iraqi army. This new yet increasingly militarized force played a significant role in safeguarding the territorial integrity of Iran.

Induced by nationalistic tendencies, Iranians from all walks of life volunteered to defend their country in an illegitimate war of aggression that dragged on between 1980-88. Over the past four decades, this model has been replicated elsewhere in the region. In the early 1980s, Lebanons Hezbollah movement was established with Irans assistance and training to safeguard Lebanese borders from Israeli aggression. With the rise of IS, the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) in Iraq were formed in response to a religious edict  a fatwa  issued by Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the supreme religious authority in Iraq. The PMU, with its tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis, played a vital role in the defeat of IS in Iraq. Hence, the Iraqi governments reliance on popular forces to deal with national security threats was inspired by the Iranian model of the Basij.

The United States is in a difficult relationship with Baghdad and the PMU amid tensions with Iran. Despite the fact that the US military has praised the PMU as a capable partner in retaking Iraq from IS, Washington deems the Iran-backed Shiite force a menace to the United States. Nevertheless, the Pentagon has stressed that the mission of the US military in Iraq is the defeat of IS, not combating Iran-allied fighters. Therefore, the United States would not attack the PMU since it is a popular Iraqi movement and the hope for the future of Iraq.

In short, the United States and Iran pursue two distinct and divergent strategies in the Middle East. The former invests in maintaining relations with solely regional states, while the latter additionally tries to engage with nations and when necessary help organize popular forces. This divergence of strategies in the region has implications for the bilateral US-Iran relationship  or better put, for the absence of it. For as long as the United States ignores the voices of regional publics, confronts grassroots movements and undermines the will of nations in the Middle East  including the Palestinians  it will only intensify the resentful sentiments in the region.BAGHDAD  Iraqi media reported in recent days that the Iraqi judiciary has completed the procedures for the return of former Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, former Ninevah Gov. Mosul Atheel al-Nujaifi, former Finance Minister Rafi al-Issawi and Sheikh Ali Suleiman. The reports said that legal cases against these Sunni figures have been dismissed as part of a political deal within the scope of the political reconciliation.

But the Iraqi judiciary quickly denied any arrangements for the return of Hashemi, Nujaifi, Issawi and Suleiman. In a statement, it said, The news carried by a satellite channel on arrangements for the return of persons wanted by the judiciary based on political deals is not true. Sunni and Shiite political parties expressed various positions on this issue.

Hashemi is accused of terrorism dating to 2011 while Suleiman faces terrorism charges dating to 2013 related to bringing the Islamic State (IS) in to Iraq; Issawi and Nujaifi face separate charges of corruption dating to 2013.

Despite the denial by the judiciary, Nujaifi told Al-Monitor, There are quick and ongoing legal steps that are being taken before the Iraqi courts to drop charges against me and against former Minister of Finance Rafi al-Issawi. I do not know anything about the legal cases against Hashemi and Suleiman.

Nujaifi added, This is just a legal and judicial procedure and does not fall within the framework of political deals, as was recently reported. However, President Barham Salih and Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi are the ones who paved the way for these procedures. They are convinced that our return is much needed at this time to fill the political vacuum in Mosul [capital of Ninevah] and Anbar.

Nujaifi continued, Some of the Sunni parties who fear our return are trying to put spokes in the wheels. Meanwhile, the Shiite parties that opposed us have realized the need to put things back in order and work with Sunni leaders who enjoy true popularity rather than with contingent leaders. Out of 15 cases against me, six cases had been settled and the rest are being settled under the amnesty law.

The return of Nujaifi and Issawi seems possible because of the nature of the charges against them. Their cases can be covered by the general amnesty law. However, Hashemi and Suleiman are accused of terrorism-related charges, which are not covered by this law. They both have yet to make any comment on the news about their return to the Iraqi political scene.

Al-Monitor learned from a well-informed judicial source who said on condition of anonymity that the announcement of the return of legally wanted Sunni figures was made at this particular time to prepare for a political reconciliation being orchestrated by the Iraqi president and prime minister. The reconciliation primarily aims to restore stability in Sunni regions.

The source added, Hashemi and Suleiman were mentioned at first but at a later stage their return was denied. This is to suggest that there is no political deal taking place away from the judiciary, as had occurred with a group of Sunni politicians, including Mohammed Daini and Mishan Jubouri.

The news about the return of Sunni figures accused of terrorism and corruption was heavily criticized in Iraq, most notably by an influential Shiite bloc that particularly opposed the return of Hashemi, the former leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party.

The spokesman for Asaib Ahl al-Haq Naim Aboudi said on Twitter, Hashemis return is impossible. The enemy exploits any fabricated news in order to distract us from our basic issues.

Leaders in the Al-Binaa Alliance, which is composed of the Fatah Coalition and the State of Law Coalition, opposed any deal occurring behind the back of the judiciary in relation to cases of terrorism and corruption.

Sunni blocs are also divided on the issue. The former member of parliament for the province of Ninevah, Abdul Rahman Alloizi, told Al-Monitor that the situation is very complicated. In order for the defendants to be covered by the amnesty law, all plaintiffs, and they are many, must waive their personal right, especially in terrorism cases.

Alloizi said Osama al-Nujaifi, the leader of the Mutahidoun bloc and the brother of Atheel al-Nujaifi, looks forward to the return of his brother and Issawi to the political scene as they are leaders of his bloc; the rest of the Sunni blocs reject their return.

In a tweet March 2, the leader of the Sunni bloc al-Hall (the Solution), Mohammed al-Karbouli, who appeared enraged by the news of the return of the four figures, said any such return must include all Iraqis against whom politically motivated judicial decisions are issued, in particular members of the Sadrist movement.

But Ahmed al-Jabouri, a leader in the parliamentary National Axis Alliance, said in tweet, Rafi al-Issawi, who was ousted from the political scene in ambiguous and unconvincing circumstances and against whom multiple sentences were issued in absentia, can today return and by his mere appearance before the judiciary all previous judgments against him would be dismissed. The judiciary takes its final decision in his regard and the same goes for Tariq al-Hashemi. The matter is judicial in the end.

The news of the return of the four Sunni figures accused of terrorism and corruption, even if we assume that it is not part of a political deal or a political reconciliation, is a trial balloon launched by the political blocs to which they are affiliated. It aims to gauge reactions both in the street and in political quarters.

In both cases, the Iraqi judiciary will again be the subject of controversy. Any amnesty or acquittal of any accused person could remain tainted by suspicions of being part of a political deal.Labor chief Avi Gabbay is claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discriminates against Jews of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) origin. But the Once a racist, always a racist campaign slogan hes been using recently is offensive to Gabbays own Mizrahi community that he hopes to represent. It is a major political error.

Labor under Gabbays leadership is not doing well in pre-election polls. Gabbay has already led the party to the lowest point in its history, with just nine seats on a good day. Yet on March 20, he pulled out the ethnic card, assuming it would help him win over Likud voters offended by Netanyahu. He was acting like a bull in a china shop, causing even more damage to his party. Historically, Labor has been seen as having discriminated against the Mizrahi community during the days when its Mapai faction was in power. In contrast, the Likud offered Mizrahim social mobility.

Late Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin was the first national figure to bring Mizrahi leaders from the periphery into the circle of decision-makers with influence over the national discourse. Chief among these leaders was former Foreign Minister David Levy. Throughout the '60s, '70s and '80s, the Likud became the political home to many members of the Mizrahi community living in the countrys social periphery, even though the partys leadership had always been and continued to be led by Ashkenazi (of European origin) men: Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu. While it is a paradox, it is easy to understand why it happened. When running as the Labor candidate for prime minister in the 1999 election, Ehud Barak recognized the historic injustice perpetrated by his own party and apologized to the Mizrahi community.

Gabbay is the child of Moroccan immigrants he says voted Likud their entire lives. He of all people should have known that treating Likud supporters like a blind herd would have been seen as patronizing even if it came from him, a Moroccan Jew. It certainly would not win him votes. After he was elected chairman, quite a few people heard Gabbay say that his Moroccan mother alone was worth seven Likud seats. The results tell a different story. Mizrahi voters were in no rush to follow him long before Blue and White head Benny Gantz even entered the political arena. Gabbay never managed to foster a sense of identification among Likud supporters. Why? Because his efforts werent authentic. They were just a means to an end.

According to his own account, the decision to attack the prime ministers racism toward the Mizrahi community came about when he watched an interview with Culture Minister Miri Regev after she was left out of a photo of the Likuds leadership. Without her, the image consisted entirely of Ashkenazi men. Regev is both Mizrahi and a woman. As the person holding the number-six slot on the partys list, she was offended. In an interview, she claimed that she was left out because the prime minister wanted to attract voters from the center. It is no secret that voting patterns in Israeli society are geared toward Ashkenazi men from the white tribe, she said. Once they realize that, they feature the top seven candidates, who they think will bring them votes from the center, the left and the right. I am happy that the Likud voting pattern is different. Its been 10 years since I was elected to fifth place at the partys primaries.

The next day, Gabbay claimed in an interview with Meet the Press that Netanyahu was a racist. This week, he was already attributing racist patterns of behavior to the prime minister. Among other things, he used the disparaging remarks that Netanyahu made to Orna Peretz, a social activist from the Moroccan community who lives in Kiryat Shmona. When she interrupted him during an October 2018 speech, he turned to her and said, Youre not interesting. You are boring us, in front of the entire audience.

Gabbays Once a racist, always a racist campaign just shows that he is no less cynical than Netanyahu. The way he used Peretz for his campaign without first getting her permission was nothing more than populist grandstanding, and it was ugly. Peretz, who quit the Likud after the incident with Netanyahu and joined Moshe Kahlons Kulanu Party, was furious that Gabbay exploited what happened to her. She attacked him in a March 21 Facebook post, writing, You are using me in your election campaign to let the ethnic genie out of its bottle and put ethnic issues up on the agenda. I would have expected you to ask me first. What if I find it offensive? What if Im not interested?

In an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth published March 22, Gabbay claimed, There is only one person who decides who gets into his photos, based on whether they are Mizrahi or Ashkenazi, and that person is Netanyahu. Its repulsive. Its disgusting. Its the most racist thing imaginable. The only person in all of Israel who still judges people based on the color of their skin is Netanyahu. Gabbay was interpreting Regevs words about the white tribe in a way that suited him. She had referred to a well-known fact familiar to anyone who has studied voting patterns in Israeli society over the last few years. The white tribe really refers to the largest voter base in the center-left, including Labor, most of whom are Ashkenazi.

There are quite a few examples, but former Labor Party chairman Amir Peretz, a Mizrahi, can testify to one personally. In 2005, he defeated Shimon Peres in the primaries for the Labor leadership. Peres then left for the new Kadima Party. A poll conducted at the time found that Ashkenazi Peres took eight seats with him. Peretz also said that in 2006, he prevented the late Lova Eliav, another senior Labor member, from launching a campaign to win back the Ashkenazim. Peretz told Eliav, The wound that you would leave festering after the election will be permanent. I have a sense of responsibility. I want to heal society instead. It was this approach that won Labor new seats from the periphery and the Mizrahi neighborhoods.

At a Labor meeting this week, Peretz tried to convince Gabbay to tone down his rhetoric. Among other things, he told Gabbay that such a sharp and extreme statement has no chance of influencing voters. Instead, he suggested, Labor could say that the Likud has been ungrateful to Mizrahi Jews, or that Netanyahu doesnt take them into consideration. Besides, he added, given the partys political history, it would be hard for Mizrahi Likud supporters to vote for Labor. Even if they are somehow convinced that Netanyahu is a racist, it would still be easier for them to vote for Blue and White instead. That is why, Peretz explained, he doesnt understand the logical behind the campaign. It's all the more true after Blue and White gave Gabbay a big present. The partys right-leaning diplomatic platform should make it easier for Gabbay to win back voters who fled Labor.The Israeli courts have been brought into the ongoing pre-election tensions over access to a site within Al-Haram al-Sharif/Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Israeli prosecution has asked the courts to help resolve the conflict that has left the Old City of Jerusalem in constant tension ever since Muslim worshipers decided they are not obliged to accept the unilateral Israeli ban on using the site.

Since the newly appointed and expanded Islamic Waqf Council held prayers at Bab al-Rahmeh on Feb. 14, the issue of who has the right to use the location  which lies within the UNESCO World Heritage site  has been a source of controversy.

Israeli political and security officials have been battling with worshipers who insist on their right to use the facility as they see fit. Israel claims that turning the site into a mosque is a violation of the status quo.

The Israeli government petitioned the Jerusalem Magistrates Court to issue an interim injunction closing the site. In the court's ruling approving the closure of Bab al-Rahmeh, Judge Dorit Feinstein wrote that the site may only be used with prior coordination with Israeli security.

The March 17 decision gave the Islamic Waqf Council 60 days to respond before the temporary closure becomes permanent. No details justifying the decision were made public. Most of the deliberations were held behind closed doors. Israeli courts have often accepted information from the security authorities that is not made public.

Jordan, which administers Islams third holiest site, has refused since 1967 to recognize the jurisdiction of Israeli courts on the rights of Muslims to their own mosque in Jerusalem. Jordans top official on this matter, Wasfi Kailani, told Al-Monitor that Jordan and the Islamic Waqf Council will not respond to an illegal occupational system even if they're confident they would win the case.

Kailani, director of the Royal Hashemite Fund for the Restoration of Al-Aqsa, gave two reasons for Jordans refusal to engage Israels courts: International law states that all Israeli post-1967 legislation and actions in East Jerusalem are null and void and must be rescinded. He added that according to Sharia, The mosque can never be under a non-Muslim law/court system.

Kailani argued, If Israel is truly keen to preserve the status quo, freedom of worship and respect of its treaty with Jordan, it must not follow the agenda of extremist Jews who announced their aggressive plan to occupy Bab al-Rahmeh and convert it into a synagogue.

Israeli courts are supposed to give the injured party in a decision sufficient time to prepare a rebuttal to its interim decisions. Sources told Al-Monitor that the 60 days are also meant to allow the situation to calm as well as bypass the upcoming Israeli elections.

But Ofer Zalzberg, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group who specializes in Jerusalem issues, told Al-Monitor that the courts 60-day window has invited pressures from radical Israeli activists on this issue. He believes that these elements are using the election season to pressure the sitting government to act against the Waqf Council.

The Regavim movement [a pro-settler Israeli NGO] petitioned the Israeli High Court of Justice asking that it instruct the prime minister, the police commissioner, the attorney general and the Israel Antiquities Authority to take all possible measures against the Waqfs illegal takeover of the Bab al-Rahmeh area and prevent it from establishing a mosque there, Zalzberg said.

Khaled Abu Arafeh, former minister of Jerusalem for the Palestinian Authority, told Al-Monitor that the Israelis are approaching a dead end and trying to buy time for the popular uprising Jerusalem to fade. They are coordinating between the courts and the prosecutors on one hand and on the other, they are trying to reach a political understanding with Jordan, which has the legitimate custodianship over religious sites in Jerusalem, with the aim of provoking the Waqf Council into engaging with them in the courts.

Abu Arafeh said that Israel has very few options. They can continue arresting activists and keep them away while giving open opportunities to extremists, but these efforts will not succeed.

Daniel Seidmann, an Israeli lawyer working in Jerusalem, told Al-Monitor that the Israeli government typically hides behind the court and the court hides behind government. No one wants to be responsible for making a decision or its consequences.

Seidmann said that the lack of communication between the leaders of Israel and Jordan and the absence of US brokerage has forced both sides to harden their positions. The courts have tried to defer a decision until after the April 9 elections with the hope that cool heads will prevail. But until then, we are on a collision course. Israel is in a defiant mood before the elections that are so crucial for Netanyahu, and the youth of Jerusalem have been empowered and will not give in. We are dealing with a ticking bomb that can blow up any minute.

The last time Jordans King Abdullah and Netanyahu held talks was in July 2017, Jordanian and Israelis sources confirmed to Al-Monitor.

Hanna Issa, the secretary general of the Palestinian Authority's Islamic-Christian Council for Jerusalem and the Holy Places, told Al-Monitor that the Israeli court decision is a violation of the rights of Muslims to their mosque. Al-Aqsa Mosque is for Muslims alone and they have the right to all of its locations, mosques and prayer areas.

By shifting from intimidation of Islamic leaders and activists to using the courts to justify their actions, the Israeli authorities are clearly trying to appease right-wing elements in Israel. These extremists understand the vulnerability of Netanyahu, who is in the fight for his political life. Netanyahu needs to win at any cost to deal with his corruption indictments from a strong position. But any misstep in this closure could blow up into a major confrontation that would be difficult to control, regardless of the timing of the Israeli elections.The last time someone named Pompeo visited Jerusalem, it didnt end well, joked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on March 21. Netanyahu was, of course, referring to the Roman military leader Pompey the Great, who conquered the Holy Land some 2,000 years ago and with whom Pompeo shares a name. Netanyahu made this remark during a visit by the two men to Jerusalems Western Wall. Unlike the Roman general whose name he shares, Pompeo had only good news for Netanyahu. It was the kind of news that the prime minister desperately needs just two weeks before the upcoming election.

H.S., a senior figure on Likuds strategic team, told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that Netanyahu has one answer in response to all the [police] suspicions leveled against him and to new information about the profits he allegedly earned from his steel company stocks, which rose because of the sale of German submarines to Israel. The answer can be found in the diplomatic arena. According to this claim, apart from former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni  who recently resigned from politics  Netanyahu is the only person to have experience in this particular arena. His rivals, Blue and White seniors Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, are trailing far behind him, with no real experience in foreign affairs or geopolitics.

The Likud party did, in fact, begin its campaign with the slogan Netanyahu is a whole different league, accompanied by video clips featuring his diplomatic achievements. Now, in the last two weeks of the campaign, Netanyahus diplomatic blitz is reaching its climax. There is, for example, a visit to Israel March 31 by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Before that, Netanyahu will be flying to the United States to address the AIPAC conference on March 25, as well as for a meeting and a festive state dinner at the White House with President Donald Trump. Unlike his predecessor, former US President Barack Obama, who refused to meet with Netanyahu right before the 2015 election, Trump has left the door wide open for the Israeli prime minister. Back then, Obama even tried to help Netanyahus then rival, Zionist Camp party chair Isaac Herzog, by sending his own Secretary of State John Kerry to meet with him right before the election. Next weeks meeting between Netanyahu and Trump will take place at the same time that Netanyahus current political rival, Benny Gantz, is scheduled to address AIPAC. What this means is that the Israeli media will be focused mainly on what happens with Netanyahu at the White House.

Pompeo arrived in Israel as part of a larger visit to the region, which included stopovers in Kuwait and Lebanon. His meetings with Netanyahu focused on the Iranian issue and, even more prominently, on preparations for the US withdrawal from Syria and growing concerns about increased Iranian involvement in that country.

The US State Department denies that the visit was intended to send a message before Israels upcoming April 9 election. It was, said the State Department, intended mainly to participate in the summit between the leaders of Israel, Greece and Cyprus over the issues of natural gas and strategic military cooperation between the four countries. In a briefing for reporters before the trip, a senior American official rejected the claim that the trip was actually helping Netanyahus campaign, saying: We have major US interests with Israel. Those interests dont go away. They dont go into suspension because of the electoral cycle in Israel any more than they do for Israel and other states when were in an electoral cycle. Then he added that Pompeo would not be meeting with the other candidates in the election because the meeting with the prime minister is in his capacity as prime minister of Israel.

Pompeo and Netanyahu did, in fact, meet on March 20 with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades to discuss moving ahead with the East-Med Pipeline connecting Israel with Europe. At the meeting, Pompeo promised US backing for the project as part of his countrys support for regional alliances in the Eastern Mediterranean basin.

The second meeting between Netanyahu and Pompeo took place the next day. Here the focus was on Iran and Syria, with Pompeo hinting that Trump would be issuing a statement about the need for the United States to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. President Trump did, in fact, issue [in a tweet] such a statement shortly afterward. Following the tweet, Pompeo said that President Trump made a bold decision to recognize that, an important decision for the people of Israel  the people of Israel should know that the battles they fought, the lives that they lost on that very ground were worthy and meaningful and important for all time.

Pompeo also granted interviews to the Israeli media, at which he was asked whether there was some connection between the timing of his visit and the upcoming election in Israel and the support shown by the US administration to Netanyahu. Among other things, he was asked why he did not meet with Netanyahus rival, Benny Gantz. Pompeo responded that the relationship between the two countries runs very deep and is very strong. He said that during the course of this visit, he indeed did not meet with Gantz  noting that Gantz has met with other American leaders. Pompeo added that the people of Israel will make their choice in just a few days. They will make a decision, and the United States and Israel will continue to press forward.

He also said that he was visiting the region to deal with international issues that were very urgent and sensitive and could no longer be delayed. These do not operate on the basis of Israels election calendar, he explained. It is our task to work together with Israel against these common threats. [Qasem] Soleimani [commander of Irans Quds Force] doesnt care about the election. He will continue to advance his own interests. So will Hezbollah, said Pompeo.

Despite these explanations and denials, it is obvious that this administration  the most supportive of Israel and Netanyahu ever  is making every possible effort to accede to the prime ministers requests and help him win in the upcoming election. Even if these meetings and statements reflect American foreign policy, it is doubtful their timing is coincidental. That is why it looks like in the two weeks left until the election, we will likely see more decisions and statements intended to bolster Netanyahus status as a major statesman and regional leader and to highlight his achievements to Israeli voters. During this visit to Israel, Pompeo provided even further grounding to Netanyahus stature as a leader with direct ties to the White House. His political rivals are having a hard time coming up with a response to this, so they are focusing on Netanyahus weak points instead. These include the investigations and suspicions concerning the prime minister, and particularly the personal benefits he allegedly derived from the German submarine deal.Three weeks before the April 9 elections, crunch time for the prime minister, a disaster struck Benjamin Netanyahu: The so-called submarine affair, considered by many the most serious corruption case in the countrys security history, resurfaced at the worst possible time. If there was one issue that Netanyahu tried hard to keep out of the public debate in his run for a fifth term, it was the suspected corruption involving Israels purchase of submarines from Germany. Now, it's all people are talking about. The result was a rare drop for Netanyahu in the polls, with some showing his rival Blue and White Party once again pulling ahead of the Likud by as many as five Knesset seats.

Although many of Netanyahus close associates and relatives are up to their necks in this scandal, Netanyahu himself had emerged relatively unscathed so far. At the start of the police probe into the case, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit ruled that Netanyahu was not a suspect. The police did not question Netanyahu under caution and eventually cleared him. Yet in Israel, nothing is final. Surprising developments have brought the scandal to the fore once again and the prosecution is reportedly considering re-opening the submarine case, or at least part of it.

An investigation would focus on Netanyahus holdings in steel conglomerates controlled by his wealthy cousin, American-Israeli executive Nathan Milikowsky. It seems that one of his other companies supplied steel to ThyssenKrupp, the German shipbuilder at the center of the submarine affair. It's the last thing Netanyahu needs at this point in his stormy re-election campaign as he faces three former military chiefs well versed in Israels defense needs. With the latest revelations, Netanyahu lost control of the campaign agenda, swept up by a wave of unsettling reports.

In response, Netanyahu deployed two strategic weapons. The first was an affair involving the cell phone of his chief rival, Blue and White leader Lt. Gen. (res.) Benny Gantz, supposedly hacked by Iran about six months ago. Netanyahu went live to demand that Gantz reveal what was on his phone and what sensitive information Iran has on him. But the diversion may have backfired. It reminded Israelis of Netanyahus panicked dash to a television studio in 1993 to admit he had been unfaithful to his wife and complain he was being blackmailed over the affair. At the time, Netanyahu feared that a compromising videotape about his liaison would be published.

His second strategic weapon is the president of the United States. At the height of the submarine uproar, Donald Trump tweeted on March 21, After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights. It was a generous and unexpected gift of historic proportions to Israel, mainly Netanyahu. Both the president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who visited Israel this week, deny US intervention in Israeli politics. Not a single Israeli buys it, and all attribute the achievement to Netanyahus tight relationship with the White House. Trump is a gift that keeps on giving. Netanyahu will arrive to Washington March 25 to address the annual AIPAC convention and meet with Trump. The White House will accord him a superheros welcome. Trump will embrace him, endorse him, host him like a king and lavish more presents on him. The Israeli government is now focusing its efforts on getting Trump to lift the US court-imposed restrictions on American spy Jonathan Pollard and allow Netanyahu to take him back to Israel when he leaves.

But Netanyahu might find it hard to pull off such a stunt. Former senior officials have now revealed that Netanyahu personally gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel the OK to sell Egypt the same kind of state-of-the-art subs it was selling Israel. Netanyahu has denied giving his approval to Merkel behind the back of the Israeli defense establishment. However, Lt. Gen. (res.) Gabi Ashkenazi, number four on Blue and White's Knesset slate, said in response to this revelation that Netanyahu had damaged Israels strategic advantage over its Red Sea neighbors.

Despite Israels peace treaty with Egypt, defense experts are greatly troubled by Egypt possessing the sophisticated ThyssenKrupp subs, which the Germans would not have sold to Egypt without Israeli approval. Now it turns out that none other than Netanyahu had given Germany the nod, and his rivals link it to his cousin, lawyer David Shimron, being one of the middlemen in the deal.

At the same time, ThyssenKrupps former Israel agent, Mickey Ganor, who turned states evidence in the case, recanted his testimony March 19, setting off a maelstrom. The prosecution is considering revoking the deal with Ganor, making it easier for the attorney general to order the case re-opened. Although it is hard to link Netanyahu directly to the case, he might end up paying an electoral price for the prevailing disgust and concerns over the latest developments, as suggested by this weeks polls.

The prosecution is now focusing on the latest revelations about Netanyahus various deals and holdings in two steel companies, SeaDrift and GrafTech. Prosecutors are looking into Netanyahus reporting to tax authorities, to the state comptroller and the Knesset, and they may seek information from US tax authorities. They are also examining Netanyahus 2010 sale of SeaDrift shares for $4.3 million at a time when the company was performing poorly, shares he bought three years earlier for $600,000. Also under review is the link between ThyssenKrupp and GrafTech.

The entire affair stinks to high heaven. No one knows how it will play out, whether an official probe will be launched and what it might turn up. But Israelis go to the polls in about two weeks, and no one on earth can mask the stench  except, perhaps, Trump.Israeli security forces have noticed increased efforts by Hamas over the last few months to restore and reinvigorate its operational infrastructure in the West Bank. These include the resurrection of cells under the control of the movements military wing in Gaza and the establishment of a command hierarchy similar to what it had there during the second intifada (2000-05). Assessments that the West Bank is heating up have gained momentum in the wake of recent events.

On March 19, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed Omar Abu-Laila, who two days before had shot and killed Sergeant First Class Gal Keidan and Rabbi Achiad Ettinger in an attack near the Ariel settlement. On March 20, IDF soldiers shot to death two Palestinian youths after they tossed explosive devices from a vehicle at Israeli troops near Josephs Tomb, in Nablus. In addition, at the entrance to the village of al-Khadr, near Bethlehem, IDF soldiers killed a Palestinian youth whose family later said that he was not involved in any hostile activities and had been killed in cold blood. The IDF claimed that the young man had been throwing rocks at passing vehicles and says that the incident is under investigation. Even before this last incident, the various Palestinian factions had already called for a day of rage on the West Bank on March 22 and encouraged Palestinian youths to demonstrate and clash with IDF troops.

According to IDF data, there were fewer terror attacks in the West Bank in 2018 (87) than in 2017 (97) and 2016 (169). There was also a slight drop in the number of Israeli casualties as a result of such attacks in 2018 (16) compared to in 2017 (20) and 2016 (17). Most attacks in 2018 were by groups of young people acting without organizational oversight or direction, though the leaderships of Hamas and Islamic Jihad provided some with moral support. As a rule, the attacks launched over the last few years involved no support, training, guidance, or equipment from Hamas' military wing.

There has been no comprehensive overhaul or reorganization of Hamas' operational infrastructure in the West Bank since the end of the second intifada. Every so often, on important anniversaries, Hamas' leadership has called for a new intifada in the cities of the West Bank, but without any active involvement by the movements military wing. There are many different reasons for this, but the main one seems to be successful cooperation between the IDF and the security forces of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in thwarting attacks. The PA regards Hamas as an enemy striving to overthrow President Mahmoud Abbas' government, which means that it has two distinct reasons for preventing such violence: to avert an escalation in the struggle against Israel in the West Bank and to keep Hamas from reestablishing itself in the West Bank for fear it could lash out at the PA itself.

Israeli security forces believe that despite occasional calls by Hamas to launch a new intifada, the movement did little to upgrade the infrastructure of its military wing in the West Bank. The main concern in Hamas has been that if it were to assume responsibility for a series of mass attacks on the West Bank, it might not only lead to war with the PA, but could also result in a harsh Israeli response in Gaza. This led to a strategic decision by Hamas to limit attacks, so as not to put Gaza and its senior leadership at risk. Over the last few months, however, something changed.

Last October, the Shin Bet uncovered new Hamas infrastructure in the West Bank created specifically for launching attacks. This February, a Hamas unit in Gaza was exposed attempting to recruit activists in the West Bank to engage in terrorist activity against Israel. The Israeli security establishment believes that Hamas' leaders now realize that their efforts to save Gaza from collapse by agreeing to some kind of arrangement with Israel, when implemented, will restrict its military activity for years to come. Even now, Hamas is coming under fire for abandoning jihad in exchange for Qatari dollars or to preserve its dubious power.

The movement that once waved the banner of jihad and drew strength and support from that will have a hard time justifying its existence to the Palestinian public if it abandons armed struggle; it will certainly be hard-pressed to explain why it folded. If the movement reaches an agreement with Israel, Palestinians are likely to respond that there is no further need for Hamas. They could even argue that they would be better off under the PA since they would experience some degree of economic growth at the least.

Daniel Sirioti reported in Yisrael HaYom on March 20 that one of the Egyptian proposals in the most recent round of talks on a Hamas-Israeli arrangement was the near-total demilitarization of Gaza in exchange for Israel and Egypt lifting their closures and initiating programs to improve the situation in the enclave. There has been no official confirmation of the report, and it is reasonable to assume that Hamas will reject such a far-reaching offer, which it would consider tantamount to declaring defeat. Nevertheless, it is clear to everyone that any arrangement and any easing of the closure would only go into effect if there is a total cessation of attacks against Israel and of demonstrations along the border fence. That is why, as far as Hamas is concerned, the right thing to do now is to bolster its organizational and operational infrastructure in the West Bank in preparation for the day after the arrangement.

Even as the PA ridicules Hamas for folding in Gaza, the organizations military wing could defend its battered image. Nothing is more important than image to Hamas' leadership, and while it has lost its luster considerably, Hamas is still perceived as having led the armed struggle against Israel. Without that, there can be no justification for the movement's continued existence. If it loses its raison detre, it will be hard-pressed to recover.

On March 30, Gaza will mark the one-year anniversary of the demonstrations along the border fence. Hamas is planning a huge rally at which it will highlight its achievements to date. No one can deny the organization the accomplishment represented by the series of demonstrations, which succeeded in expediting finding a long-term solution for Gaza. Hamas regards the demonstrations as a nonviolent popular uprising and is marketing them to the Palestinian public as the peoples struggle against an army that has no reservations about firing at and even killing unarmed demonstrators.

The West Bank is a totally different story. As far as Hamas is concerned, that is where it will keep the flame of jihad against Israel alive after reaching an arrangement for Gaza. Will Hamas be strong enough to face off against the PA? How will Israel react to Hamas attacks in the West Bank after an arrangement for Gaza is in place?

When dealing with Hamas, it is important to remember the one consideration that guides the movements leaders: Everything depends on the level of force and their ability to control the intensity of the flame. Within Hamas, this is called sabar, which means demonstrating patience and restraint but not conceding or surrendering. Never.The latest buzzword in Lebanon is combating corruption. Nearly every political party, most notably Hezbollah, is preaching this mantra. The Lebanese public and international donors are complaining about political corruption, as the country grapples to survive a grave economic and fiscal crisis. Yet there are questions concerning the depth and seriousness of these efforts.

This campaign has been massive in recent weeks, tackling suspects in the judicial branch, the security sector and professional unions, among others. The Ministry of Justice has accelerated the processing of corruption cases and there is a media frenzy feeding this narrative with regular scoops unveiling new corruption charges.

There are three major motivations driving this anti-corruption euphoria: the countrys near economic collapse, the publics growing grievances and the governments commitments to international donors.

This anti-corruption campaign seems to deflect the attention away from decadeslong mismanagement of public resources, the sectarian nature of the patronage system and the high economic cost of the countrys political instability.

The economic numbers are staggering. In January, the national debt reached $85.32 billion  nearly 150% of the gross domestic product  an increase of $4.93 billion compared to January 2018. At the CEDRE conference in Paris in April 2018, international donors committed $11.8 billion  90% as loans  to revitalize the economy, while the Lebanese government pledged in return to combat corruption and reform the public sector.

This anti-corruption campaign is primarily going after public employees. Parliamentarians have a de facto immunity under Lebanese law, while prosecuting presidents, prime ministers and ministers require the consent of the Supreme Council for the Trial of Presidents and Ministers, which includes eight of the most senior national judges and seven deputies selected by the parliament.

This council has tackled two cases only since 1992, and its most high-profile one was threatening to prosecute former President Amin Gemayel when he considered returning from exile in the early 1990s. Prosecuting any official in this body is very difficult to achieve as it requires two-thirds of the parliaments vote.

The directorate general of the Finance Ministry reviewed and documented all the missing financial accounts between 1993 and 2017. Within this context, the government of former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, an ally of current Prime Minister Saad Hariri, is suspected by the March 8 coalition, which includes Hezbollah, of wasting $11 billion in extra budgetary spending during his premiership between 2005 and 2009, most notably when the Shiite ministers resigned from the Siniora government in November 2006.

A member of Hezbollahs parliamentary bloc, Hassan Fadlallah, called on the Finance Ministry  currently led by Ali Hassan Khalil, a member of parliament Speaker Nabih Berris Amal bloc  to make this report available to the parliament, and called on the public prosecutor to investigate these charges.

Siniora and the Finance Ministrys Director General Alain Bifani held separate press conferences to set the record straight regarding the missing financial accounts, while Hariri affirmed through Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdel-Latif Derian that going after Siniora is a red line.

While President Michel Aoun, Hariri and Berri are encouraging measures to combat corruption, going after high-level figures like Siniora might undermine their efforts. The main entities that can investigate the subtle charges against Siniora  the audit bureau and the financial prosecutor  are appointees close to either Aoun or Berri, and both seem reluctant to prosecute Siniora for political calculations.

For Hezbollah, there are three advantages in taking this anti-corruption route. First, it answers major grievances of its base given the groups shrinking resources and inability to meet their socio-economic demands.

Second, this issue drives a wedge between Aoun and Hariri, since it puts them at odds on how to combat corruption. We are already seeing friction between the two sides of the presidential deal that elected Aoun in 2016, and these tensions benefit Hezbollah and Berri who have been wary of the close Aoun-Hariri alliance.

Third, the anti-corruption platform seems a reaction to the growing US pressure on Hezbollah. By raising corruption charges against the Siniora government, Hezbollah does not directly break the truce with Hariri, while simultaneously putting pressure or rather empowering the hawks in Hariris circle who are close allies of the United States. One might predict that Hezbollahs anti-corruption platform will persist until the US pressure on Hezbollah weakens.

The missing major components of this anti-corruption campaign are addressing the patronage system and the current unsustainable trends in the national budget. Since freezing employment in the public sector in a law passed in 2017, 15,200 illegal full-time staff and contractors were hired. At least 45% of the state budget is allocated to salaries, plus pensions and benefits, 31% goes to debt service and 12% to electricity, which now has an annual deficit of $2 billion. The agencies that are most burdensome on the budget are the salaries and benefits of the military  currently at 115,000 personnel  and the Ministry of Education.

Lebanese official sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told al-Monitor that it is not clear yet what kind of reforms this government will follow. These sources noted that short of a gradual cut in the public sector and the elimination of some unnecessary agencies, balancing the budget is a futile exercise.

The sources said that international donors are focused on reducing the deficit more than advancing a specific shortlist of achievable reforms, affirming that the CEDRE conference could either be very good or catastrophic, depending on how Lebanese officials absorb the incoming investments and loans from international donors.

If anti-corruption becomes an excuse to settle scores and reforms an incentive to amplify the deficit, the Lebanese government is heading in the wrong direction. The US-Iranian rivalry  via Hezbollah in Lebanon  might undermine the reform agenda that was theoretically linked to the CEDRE conference. Major powers that influenced Lebanese politics in the past decade obviously prioritized the loyalty of their allies instead of combating corruption and balancing the budget. In return, the Lebanese ruling class used their foreign enablers to preserve their own interests. This trend seems to be continuing in the foreseeable future.Ramtane Lamamra, the foreign minister as well as deputy prime minister of Algeria, visited Moscow March 19. His talks with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov seemed like a conversation between two old friends who have a lot to reminisce about. However, at the final press conference the Algerian guest passionately describing the changes coming up in his country while the Russian minister remained solemn. Discussing the issues of Algeria, Lavrov maintained his objections to foreign powers intervening in the matters of other countries.

The topic of foreign intervention into Algerias internal affairs became Lavrovs focus during the public part of the talks  the opening ceremony and the final press conference.

The first thing Lavrov said in greeting his counterpart was, We are obviously concerned with the events currently taking place in your country. We see the attempts to unsettle the situation, and we strongly object against any intervention into this process. I can safely assume that the people and the government of Algeria are certainly capable of finding solutions based on the national constitution.

During the press conference, Lavrov made similar statements in support of the plans Algerian government had drawn up to stabilize the situation.

We expect them to help with the stabilization process in your nation, which Russia views as a close partner. The reconciliation should be based on the national dialogue held in accordance with the constitution of Algeria and, obviously, under the condition that all interested parties respect the norms of international law and the UN Charter, the Russian minister said.

Lavrov has repeatedly cited the UN Charter, saying, It is crucial that all other nations hold its requirements sacred to implement, and deeming it "absolutely unacceptable to intervene into the internal affairs of sovereign nations.

The minister has never specified who he believes is trying to meddle in Algerian matters. However, the gist of his press conference speech made it clear that he primarily meant the West. Lavrovs statements expanded to include the entire region of the Middle East and North Africa.

For instance, his reply to a journalists question about comparing the current protests in Algeria to the Arab Spring was rather harsh.

The Arab Spring, this poetic expression, turned out to be a blatantly ugly interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, such as Libya or Syria," Lavrov snapped. "The people of Algeria will solve their problems on their own. They will manage their national affairs based on their constitution and according to international law.

Although the Algerian authorities often dwell on the topic of foreign interference, Lamamra was less eloquent on the issue than his Russian counterpart, simply pointing out that Russia and Algeria have common approaches to international issues.

We are indeed friends. Algeria and the Russian Federation share common principles  respecting the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of all nations, said the North African politician, adding that Algerias problems should remain within the countrys internal, domestic life, while acknowledging that changes are necessary.

Lamamra emphasized that it was actually young Algerians who had voiced the need for reforms in the political, economic and social fields, meaning that the unrest had not been caused by foreign intervention. This aspect, in Lamamra's view, means the leadership is in a position to work with the protesters and calm the situation. The Russian authorities, for their part, are wary of protests in general. At the same time, Lamamra looked to Moscow for support of the national dialogue projects the government had created. Russia strives to see such a prospect in every conflict-ridden place, from Libya to Syria.

The North African nation can safely assume that Russia will not have to mediate or otherwise intervene in the political confrontation. The Algerian minister did not ask his counterpart for anything and from the outside, the talks seemed to be a dialogue between equals. Lamamra did not get to meet Vladimir Putin, as the Russian presidents schedule at the time was too tight, and had to hand the message he brought from Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for Putin to Lavrov.

Nevertheless, Lamamra was pleased to visit Moscow, where, as he pointed out, his diplomatic career had started, and to talk with Lavrov, who had previously been his counterpart as a national representative to the United Nations. The Algerian politician mentioned that even though that period had been rather difficult, the two countries shared common views on international law and both he and Lavrov had repeatedly faced challenges together.

The diplomats agreed that the Russian-Algerian partnership, established back in early 2000, must be further developed. Algeria and Russia agreed to create a high-level action group of foreign ministers and their deputies to coordinate approaches to general international issues. This group will supplement cooperation venues that already exist, like dialogue between the countries' national security councils as well as action groups for cybersecurity. Lavrov specifically stressed the expansive, deeply rooted military-technical cooperation between Russia and Algeria.

Despite the urgency of political issues, the topic of bilateral cooperation was prominent as well. Algeria is one of Russia's principal partners among African and Middle Eastern nations, being the second-largest market in the region after Egypt. According to the statistics from the Russian Economy and Development Ministry, in 2017 the trade flow between Russia and Algeria amounted to around $4.6 billion. However, more than two-thirds of it involved military equipment. Another 30% includes ferrous metals, vehicles and industrial equipment ($1.3 billion). During the negotiations, both ministers commended the successful work of the Mixed Intergovernmental Commission for Trade, Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation that had met in Moscow in January and the Intergovernmental Commission for Military-Technical Cooperation that had gathered in the Russian city of Tula in October 2018.

In the last 12 years, Moscow and Algiers have signed contracts amounting to $10 billion in total. The largest was concluded in 2006. In exchange for forgiveness of its debts to the Soviet Union, Algeria bought 28 Su-30MKA and 34 MiG-29SMT fighter aircrafts, 16 Yak-130 jet trainers, three S-300PMU-2 missile systems, 38 Pantsir-S1 anti-aircraft weapons, 185 T-90S tanks, 216 Kornet-E anti-tank missiles, eight Krasnopol guided artillery systems and two 636M submarines. All supplies were purchased successfully except for the MiG-29SMT installment, which Algeria refused, presumably due to quality issues.

Later, Algeria purchased more than 120 T-90S tanks (200 more were constructed locally), 30 Su-30MKA fighters, 42 Mi-28NE and six Mi-26T2 helicopters. The most significant deal took place in 2017, when Russia supplied Algeria with a brigade package of Iskander-E ballistic missile systems. The North African nation thus became the second country to receive this weapon after Armenia had purchased it a year earlier.

According to the Kommersant newspapers sources in the Russian military industry, the high level of military-technical cooperation has stemmed directly from Bouteflikas views and decisions.

We find it crucial that the next Algerian president continue the practices established by Bouteflika. This market is highly promising, and many actors are ready to drive us out of it, one source said.

Something else Russia considers significant is that Algerian elites maintain long accepted views in other fields, from foreign policy to trade and coordination with Russia in the world gas market.

There is still hope that the contacts will be maintained, not only because the old elites stay in power, but also due to Russias intensively promoted stance of noninterference in the Algerian conflict. It resonates not only with the Algerian authorities but also with the protesters. Like many other young people across the Middle East, some of the young Algerians who spoke to Al-Monitor said they actually appreciated Vladimir Putin as a strong national leader. Moscow will likely exploit that point of view to maintain its position in Algeria.On March 17, Khaled al-Mishri, president of Libya's High Council of State (HCS), arrived in Moscow at the invitation of the Federal Council, Russias upper house of parliament, to discuss bilateral relations and ways to tackle Libya's ongoing political crisis. Mishri was received by Valentina Matvienko, speaker of the Russian council, and also held talks with Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, special presidential envoy for the Middle East and Africa. The Foreign Ministry issued a press release in which it cited Russia's support for a conference of all the Libyan parties under the auspice of Ghassan Salame, the UN secretary-general's special representative for Libya.

Lev Dengov, head of the Russian Contact Group on Libya at the Foreign Ministry and the State Duma, denied an assertion in the Libya Observer that Russia is supportive only of Gen. Khalifa Hifter, leader of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), head of the House of Representatives (HoR) in Tobruk and a longtime adversary of Mishri. Russia favors any side that is capable of positively impacting Libyan developments, Dengov said. The environment in the country is replete with numerous opposing camps.  As for us, we are working to help Libya agree on a single policy and restore peace without intervention in its internal affairs.

The visit by Mishri, as head of the Tripoli-based body charged with advising the UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), should be considered evidence of Russia maintaining a balanced policy on Libya. It was reported in Al-Monitor in October that Moscow was shifting away from a strategy of maintaining equal distance between itself and Tripoli and Tobruk and instead developing closer ties to Hifter, a Tobruk ally. This was symbolized by Hifter's visit to the Russian capital last November, during which he had discussions with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, in the run-up to the Palermo conference on Libya that same month. Since that time, there had been no significant meetings between Russian officials and Hifter's Tripoli-based opponents. Thus, Mishri trip to Moscow should serve to demonstrate that Moscow remains flexible in its approach to resolving the Libyan conflict.

One should bear in mind that Mishri and Hifter are longstanding opponents. The Hifter-led HoR does not recognize the HCS's authority over it despite the council's mandate to that effect under the Libyan Political Agreement. Also, throughout most of Mishri's political career, he has been a member of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood Group and its affiliated Justice and Construction Party, while Hifter has opposed the Muslim Brotherhood and voiced his commitment to eradicating it in Libya. Mishri resigned from the Brotherhood in January, but has stated that he still respects the organization and defends its role in Libyan society. Of note, Russia has designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization within its borders.

Mishris Moscow visit comes amid successful operations by Hifter's LNA in the southwestern Fezzan region that allowed Tobruk to assume control over the oil fields at el-Fil and el-Sharara, the largest in western Libya. The LNA has also gained sway over the strategic junctions of the trans-Saharan trade routes of al-Ghat, Murzuq and Sabha. The operation has significantly bolstered Hifters position on the ground and has also boosted his political standing, an outcome he had sought from the Abu Dhabi talks in late February when he met Fayez al-Sarraj, prime minister of the GNA and chair of the Presidential Council.

Meanwhile, the Military Council of Misrata, one of the largest military factions in western Libya, has rejected agreements reached in talks thus far between Sarraj and Hifter, and supporters of Libya's grand mufti, Sadiq al-Ghariani, have taken to the streets to protest against Sarraj. At the same time, Hifter has stepped up preparations for an offensive against Tripoli.

Amid these developments, Mishri traveled to Doha in early March to secure Qatari backing for Tripoli. Sarraj had preceded him with a visit of his own. While in Moscow, Mishri had sought certain assurances about red lines for a Hifter offensive on Tripoli, which might follow the generals successful campaign in Fezzan. Russian diplomatic sources indicate that Cairo and Abu Dhabi may have given Hifter a green light for a Tripoli operation. It had been Egypt and the United Arab Emirates to which Mishri was referring in Moscow when he at one point cited external interference as the main impediment to resolving the Libyan conflict.

A campaign against Tripoli could trigger unpredictable consequences despite Hifters recent successes, including the country relapsing into a new protracted civil war, a war of all against all, as in 2014, with unclear prospects. The United States has already set a red line for Hifter, deeming the military campaign against Tripoli unacceptable, according to Western diplomats.

Although Russia expects a payoff from backing Hifter, Moscow's support has been palpably limited. Moscow is wary that the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France will reap the most gains from Hifter acquiring a significantly strong position in Libya since they have bet on him alone and have invested much more in his success than Russia has. In turn, Russia would certainly benefit from maintaining a balanced position in Libya. In this way, Moscow could exploit the ties it has managed to preserve with all the parties to the conflict more effectively. This refers to the smaller actors as well as to Tripoli and Tobruk.

Mishris visit to Moscow had an economic component as well involving Mishri and Libya's parallel central banks.

Jalel Harchaoui, a Libya-focused research fellow at the Hague-based Clingendael Institute, provided backdrop to Al-Monitor, noting, When the country almost split in 2014, the [central bank] governor  one of Libyas most powerful officials  stayed in Tripoli and refused to follow the anti-Islamist camp in the east. As a result of this perceived loyalty to the Muslim Brothers and the city of Misrata, the eastern faction has been determined to sack [Governor] Sadiq al-Kabir.

Harchaoui further stated, A year ago, Mishri began his tenure as the new head of the High Council of State and de-facto representative of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. As such, he discussed in detail with the eastern Libyan camp the potential removal of Kabir. The idea broached last year was a quid pro quo with the eastern faction: the High Council of State would have allowed Kabirs removal, and in return, the east would have accepted a Brotherhood-leaning deputy as the new central bank governor. The east refused. The deal fell through.

As for Russian involvement, Harchaoui said, When it comes to the Central Bank conflict in Libya, Russia has been against Tripoli and in favor of Hiftar since 2016. He noted, In 2016, Moscow delivered 4 billion dinars ($3 billion) worth of banknotes to Hiftars camp. In total since 2016 Russia, has delivered 10 billion dinars ($7.5 billion) to Hifter.

The Libya Observer reported that on the issue of Russia printing money for Tobruk's central bank, Mishri had told Bogdanov that Moscow should break relations with parallel institutions in eastern Libya given the damage inflicted on Libya's economy by printing dinar banknotes in Russia.Tehmina Janjua termed Samjhota Express bombing case a historic injustice

Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua has termed the acquittal of four of the individuals accused in the Samjhota Express bombing case a "historic injustice", the Foreign Office (FO) said on Thursday.



A day after a special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in India's Haryana state acquitted the quartet, Janjua "briefed the diplomatic corps in Islamabad on the injustice done to the 44 Pakistani victims of the 2007 Samjhota Express terrorist attack".



As per the FO press release, the foreign secretary questioned how the Indian court could acquit the suspects, including Swami Aseemanand, whom the FO branded the "mastermind of the heinous attacks and an activist of the Hindu terrorist organisation, RSS who had publicly confessed his involvement".



In February 2007, alleged Hindu extremists had bombed the Samjhota Express, killing 68 people, at least 42 of whom were Pakistanis.



The explosions ripped through the train during its transit through Panipat on its way to Lahore from Delhi. Janjua today recalled that the NIA had itself earlier issued charge sheets to the perpetrators of the attack.



Additionally, she said that the Indian media had extensively reported about the connections between the Samjhota Express terrorist attack and "Hindu extremists including Lieutenant Colonel Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, who were subsequently arrested in October 2008, including [the] provision of RDX (research department explosive)."



"On 18 December 2010, Swami Aseemanand, the mastermind of the attack confessed publicly before the New Delhi court that Hindu terror outfits were behind the blasts," the press release added.



The foreign secretary stressed that despite Pakistan's repeated requests for a fair trial and "expeditiously bringing the perpetrators to justice," after a lapse of over 11 years, Indian courts had exonerated the accused. The press release noted that Pakistan had already registered a "strong demarche" with the Indian high commissioner yesterday against the acquittal.



"The Indian decision to gradually exonerate and finally acquit the perpetrators despite the presence of clear evidence against them, is a reflection of Indias callous insensitivity to the plight of the 44 families of the deceased Pakistanis, who have been waiting for more than a decade to see these terrorists brought to justice. It also demonstrates how India protects terrorists who publicly confessed their odious crimes," the press release stated.



It added that the acquittal was also reflective of the Indian state policy of "promoting and protecting terrorists". "This state patronage of extremist Hindutva ideology is not only detrimental to the lives and liberty of all minorities in India, but is also dangerous for peace and security in the region."



Janjua also expressed "great concern" that India continued to commit "gross human rights violations" in the Indian-occupied Kashmir. Furthermore, she expressed concern that a "frenzy" was created against Pakistan to "gain benefits in domestic politics", the Foreign Office said in its statement.Palestinian-Saudi ties have grown stronger in recent weeks, which some Palestinians welcome and others reject.

On March 11, Manssour bin Mussallam, a Saudi citizen who is head of the Switzerland-based NGO the Education Relief Foundation, visited the West Bank. He was received by recently resigned Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, who praised ongoing Saudi support for the Palestinian cause, and called on Arabs to visit more often.

Bin Mussallam met with Palestinian Minister of Education Sabri Saidam. A Palestinian official close to President Mahmoud Abbas told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, Bin Mussallams visit focused on signing an educational partnership agreement with the Palestinian Ministry of Education and strengthening Palestinian relations with Saudi Arabia. The two sides will form a joint action committee to carry out training programs and exchange visits.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas arrived Feb. 12 in Riyadh on a visit that hadn't been unannounced publicly. He met with Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to discuss the current political situation and developments relating to the Palestinian cause and Jerusalem.

It appears the visits concern many Palestinian citizens, who oppose the Saudis' growing coziness with Israel and fear the meetings could hasten the normalization of Arab-Israeli relations. Any Arab visit requires permission from and coordination with Israeli authorities, who control the border crossings. Some Palestinians argue that such coordination reflects a recognition of Israels control over the Palestinian territories.

Palestinians are against the Saudi visit, as well as all visits by any Arab officials to their lands, because they pave the way to Arab-Israeli normalization," Hani al-Masri, director general of the Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies-Masarat, told Al-Monitor. "A Saudi-Israeli rapprochement has been taking place recently, and bin Mussallams visit couldn't have happened without prior coordination with Israel."

Abdel Sattar Qassem, a political science professor at An-Najah National University in Nablus, told Al-Monitor, Bin Mussallams visit aimed to contain the Palestinian and Arab anger at any normalization with Israel should Saudi officials decide to visit Jerusalem under the pretext of praying [in the citys holy sites]. With bin Mussallams visit, Saudi Arabia is attempting to obtain a formal Palestinian cover for possible future normalization with Israel.

But Abdullah Abdullah, a member of Fatahs Revolutionary Council and head of the Political Affairs Committee in the Palestinian Legislative Council, told Al-Monitor the visits are transparent and not efforts to obscure Arab interactions with Israel. This visit correlates with King Salmans historical ties with the Palestinian leadership and his personal contacts with President Yasser Arafat and now President Abbas," Abdullah said.

"We need official Arab support to provide a financial safety net, and Saudi Arabia supports us regularly. We need to increase support out of fear of financial bolts out of the blue due to Israeli and US sanctions. We never give Arab officials who visit us any cover to normalize their relations with Israel.

Last month, just one day after Abbas' visit, Riyadh announced it was transferring $60 million to the Palestinian Authority (PA) for its usual contribution to the Palestinian budget for November, December and January. This is to help make up for the Palestinian budget deficit in light of the US aid cuts and Israels withholding of the PAs share of customs taxes.

Almost 37% of the total of foreign grants to the Palestinian budget in 2018 came from Saudi Arabia, amounting to 794 million shekels ($216 million) of the total budgeted grants of 2.16 billion shekels ($570 million). Saudi Arabia is committed to providing the PA with an average monthly value of $20 million, according to Palestinian Finance Ministry data released in January.

Before bin Mussallams visit, al-Khaleej Online news had quoted high-ranking Palestinian sources claiming Saudi Arabia was pressuring the PA to accept the Mideast peace plan expected from the administration of US President Donald Trump. Al-Khaleej didn't identify the sources, who also said Abbas was caught by surprise when the Saudi king asked him, during Abbas' February visit to Riyadh, to give US efforts a chance and go along with the unseen peace initiative. Palestinians fear the plan will favor Israel heavily.

Mohammed Abu Jiyab, editor-in-chief of Al-Eqtesadia newspaper in Gaza, told Al-Monitor, Bin Mussallams visit followed statements by [Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser] Jared Kushner on Feb. 25, in which he stressed the economic aspects" of the peace deal.

Bin Mussallam's visit "could pave the way for breaking the stalemate in Saudi-Israeli relations with the help of the PA," Jiyab said. "I believe bin Mussallam came to discuss some issues that are more sensitive than a simple educational agreement, which could be related to joint Palestinian-Saudi-Israeli meetings."

The Education Relief Foundation for its part released a statement stressing that the visit aimed solely to advance the educational initiative, was not related to political activity and was coordinated solely with the Palestinian authorities.

Update: March 26, 2019. This article has been updated with a comment from the Education Relief Foundation.Kobane: No enmity with regime

Mazlum Kobane, commander in chief of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the US militarys Syrian ally in the battle against the Islamic State (IS), laid out his demands for reconciliation with the Syrian government in an exclusive interview with Amberin Zaman at al-Omar oil field in Syria.

Kobane said, We are ultimately part of Syria. We do not wish to separate from Syria. If there is to be a lasting solution for this region, it needs to be with Damascus. Negotiations with the regime are inevitable, and these need to happen.

We have two principal demands, Kobane said. One is that our autonomous administrations here be preserved and accorded legal status. The second is that the SDF be preserved. The security of the territory east of the Euphrates River should be left to the SDF. These are our red lines. We are willing to engage in all kinds of negotiations with the regime on this basis.

Kobane added that while he is not personally involved in talks with Damascus, Our political delegations are meeting. We always were in dialogue with the regime. In fact, actual negotiations started, but they are now deadlocked. We are very clear. We presented them with a road map. And if they refuse to accept our demands, even if we are left on our own, even if the coalition withdraws, we will fight. We will fight to the death for our rights.

Kobane stressed, We need to make a deal with the regime, for sure. But it needs to be in alliance with the Arabs within the framework of a united Syria. The regime now talks about reconciliation. First of all, we did not go to war with the regime. The regime pulled out of these territories and was unable to defend them. So we defended them. Given that there is no enmity between the regime and ourselves, there is no need for us to reconcile with the regime.

"We need to make a deal with the regime, for sure. But it needs to be in alliance with the Arabs within the framework of a united Syria." -Mazlum Kobane

Syrian Defense Minister and Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces Gen. Ali Abdallah Ayoub noted March 18 that the SDF is the last remaining card held by US troops, and Syria will deal with them either through reconciliations or by liberating the land, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency.

Kobane said he understood why the Donald Trump administration wants the Kurds to hold off on talks with the Syrian government, saying, We, too, want governments in Syria to be democratically elected. We will respect whichever government is democratically elected to lead Syria because we are a part of Syria. This may seem far-fetched for now, but sooner or later it will come to pass.

The SDF commander also said that a Turkish military intervention could unleash the second great war in Syria  and we have prepared for one." He continued, "Its not easy. This isnt Afrin. Its a large area and there are many forces. And the intersection of international interests is different here. In Afrin, Turkey did a deal with the Russians. The Americans sat on their hands. Everyone is interested in this region. There are Russians in part of Manbij, in Arima. If Turkey intervenes, everyone will intervene. The situation will get extremely complicated. Turkey failed to get the green light from anybody to intervene here so far and will fail to do so in the future. But as I told you earlier, we are not in favor of any war with Turkey. After eight years of war in Syria, we want peace.

State Department: No place in Iraq for "mafia-like" groups backed by Iran

In an exclusive interview with Al-Monitor, US Assistant Secretary of State for Conflict and Stability Operations Denise Natali and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iran and Iraq Andrew Peek acknowledged that Iraq could, and should, have "normal" relations with Iran, but that those ties do not include "mafia-like" armed actors that undercut Iraqi sovereignty.

Natali said that while the United States appreciates the courageous efforts of the Iraqi Security Forces, the Kurdish peshmerga and Hashid Shaabi [also known as Popular Mobilization Forces] in defeating Daesh (IS), there has been a proliferation of undisciplined armed actors that are not under the control of the state. That does not mean all Popular Mobilization Forces. They have officially been incorporated into the Iraqi government in 2016. I am talking about those armed actors that are not. I think it is important to differentiate between the disciplined and the undisciplined. That has been a useful way that Iraqis themselves can refer to this problem and then target the problem. But where there are undisciplined armed actors not under the control of the state  that has become one of the biggest impediments to stabilization assistance moving forward, in addition to the lack of security or the lack of services.

The IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] is in so many of Iran's industries that people need to be very careful, the Iraqis included, about who they do business with, Peek told Al-Monitor, adding, If they are doing business with an IRGC business, they are liable for sanctions. So while we [the United States] want a normal relationship, this is something that in terms of legally that they [Iraq] just have to keep in mind.

The focus on the IRGC and "undisciplined armed actors" walks back previous broad-brush criticism by Washington of all the PMU as beholden to Iran. Such characterizations often made life harder for Iraqi leaders, who seek to stay out of the crossfire between the United States and Iran. Many of the PMU also have popular standing in Iraq for their role in the fight against IS.

Iran may be getting the message that Iraq prefers more normal engagement with Iran. This may have been one of the outcomes of Iranian President Hassan Rouhanis visit to Iraq March 11-13. Omar Sattar suggests that as more factions within Iraqs [PMU] are being designated as terrorists by the US administration on account of their close ties with the Iranian side, Tehran is moving toward pulling the Iraqi file from the [IRGC] and leaving it with the Foreign Ministry, local reports say.

This reported shift in Iranian policy would seek to address a number of critical concerns  none more important, perhaps, than protecting the PMU, added Sattar, which is striving to repurpose itself as a fully fledged security institution, especially after Washington explicitly told Iranian authorities that supporting militias in Iraq must come to end as part of 12 requirements outlined by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in November for the lifting of US sanctions.

There is also the continuing threat from IS terrorists in western Iraq, including those who have fled the fighting in Syria. The Iraqi security forces have expanded their operations to track down members of IS in the vast Western Desert, Hamdi Malik reported. Joint Iraqi military divisions and the local tribal regiments are conducting a security sweep in the Western Desert of Anbar.Chick-fil-A, the popular chicken-focused fast-food eatery, could be selling sandwiches and biscuits inside Mobiles Government Plaza soon.

A memorandum of understanding between Mobile County and Chick-fil-A RSA, will be voted on by the Mobile County Commission on Monday. If commissioners approve, the restaurant could set up an additional distribution point (ADP) on the ground floor area of the downtown government building.

It would be the first time a chain has located inside the county-owned Government Plaza since Starbucks, which closed about a decade ago. A small convenience mart, serving hot dogs, has been the only remaining permanent food service inside Government Plaza.

Everyone is excited about it, said Mobile County Commissioner Connie Hudson. You have to think about it, when you have 500 jurors who come in on some Mondays, when they break for lunch, this will be a convenience for them to stay inside the building.

The agreement is temporary, and allows Chick-fil-A to set up its operations for only one week, with the option to extend up to three additional weeks. Hudson said the hope is for a permanent relationship with Chick-fil-A inside Government Plaza.

Chick-fil-A will serve Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., and from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. or until food is sold out.

The eatery will not cook on site, but will transport prepared food items from its only downtown location inside the RSA Battlehouse Hotel at 12 N. Royal St.

The menu is limited and includes the following:

Breakfast: Chick-fil-A biscuit $3.25, yogurt $4, orange juice $3 and an unspecified canned drink $2.

Lunch: Chick-fil-A sandwich 4.50, side salad $3.95, market salad $10, and a canned drink $2.

Chick-fil-A has an additional distribution point model which theyve done elsewhere where they have points set up with a limited menu, said Hudson.

She said the concept could spark the potential of a food court inside Government Plaza, which first opened in 1995.

I think there is the possibility that others, who have this type of model with additional distribution points, that if we wanted to look at a food court type of operation, that it would be something to work well with what Chick-fil-A is doing, Hudson said.

The proposed agreement calls for Chick-fil-A to pay the county a commission in the amount of 10 percent of pre-tax sales. Payments will be made bi-weekly as Chick-fil-As sales cycles are closed, the agreement states.

Were not trying to make a big profit off of this, Hudson said. Were trying to do it for convenience mostly, for our employees and for our jurors who filter here on a regular basis.

Hudson said the food will be sold inside the former absentee election office, and that there will be ample seating.

Government Plaza once housed several restaurants, including Cafe 205, which was operated by Alec Naman Catering Inc., and closed in 2000.

There is plenty of competition for lunch business nearby, with a host of restaurants just a few blocks away on Dauphin and Royal streets.

Hudson said that Government Plaza has a lot of foot traffic, which should make the Chick-fil-A concept appealing. She said there are at least 600 employees inside the building that houses city, county and judicial governmental services. The addition of hundreds of jurors also increases the number of people who walk through the complex on a daily basis.

Chick-fil-A, based in Atlanta, is among the most popular fast-food chains in the U.S., but also has been subject to government scrutiny and criticism for the companys supposed views opposing same-sex marriage.

The San Antonio City Council, on Thursday, rejected the inclusion of a Chick-fil-A inside the San Antonio International Airport after a councilman alleged that the company donated $1.8 million to organizations that discriminate against the LGBTQ community.

This story was updated at 4:59 p.m. on Friday, March 22, 2019, to clarify that Mobile County hopes to establish a more permanent relationship with Chick-fil-A following its temporary trial run at Government Plaza in Mobile.A man was killed and a woman was injured in a shooting Thursday night in southwest Birmingham after three adults got involved in a dispute between children, police said.

Police arrived at the 1400 block of Pineville Road around 7:23 where they found a man with a gunshot wound, according to Birmingham Police Capt. Sean Edwards. Authorities found the injured woman with a gunshot about 1  blocks down the road.

The preliminary investigation into the shooting found that children were engaged in a dispute and that adults later got involved, leading to one adult firing at the two other adults, Edwards said.

Both victims were taken to the hospital, where the male victim later died. The condition of the female victim, who escaped the scene in a car and crashed down the road, was not disclosed.

Its unfortunate it had to go to this extreme, Edwards said. We had adults get involved when it initially involved children and you would hope that the adults couldve came to a different resolution as it relates to someone unfortunately losing their life.

The names of the suspect, who is in custody, and the victims were not immediately released, but Edwards said the adults were estimated to be in their mid-30s.

Police are still investigating the nature of the dispute, but Edwards said it may have transpired in Rozelle Reynolds Park, across the street from the scene.A nearly 15-month journey filled with distrust and a recent lawsuit over the split of Gulf Shores from the Baldwin County School System, ended Thursday with an agreement that will allow the new city school to begin on June 1.

Both Gulf Shores city and Baldwin County school officials, along with Republican state Sen. Chris Elliott, announced the agreement during a news conference in Robertsdale.

It was the first time the two sides were publicly together in months.

Were happy and looking forward, said Gulf Shores City School Superintendent Matt Akin.

Im excited for their journey, said Baldwin County Schools Superintendent Eddie Tyler. We are excited for this.

Getting this done

The agreement, officially approved later in the evening by both school boards, prompted Alabama State School Superintendent Eric Mackey to withdraw his final order from last month. It will presumably lead to a dismissal of Baldwin Countys lawsuit against the state superintendent, the Gulf Shores city schools and the Baldwin County Commission.

Mackeys initial order, unveiled in January, had prompted outrage among county school officials and led to the lawsuit.

Mackey, in a statement Thursday afternoon, praised Akin and Tyler. He later called them heroes during an interview with AL.com.

I have to say how happy I am when I was able to talk to the superintendents individually, with no attorneys present, and those superintendents were committed in getting this done, said Mackey. We had hurdles along the way, and even in the last 24 to 48 hours, we had new hurdles.

Terms of the agreement included a half-dozen items, and do not involve either school system paying the other side any upfront costs related to the split:

-The citys debt payments to the county are waived for five years, until June 2024. The city school system estimates the total savings at around $2.85 million in debt obligations for a variety of projects such as roof replacements and HVAC work, that previously occurred to school facilities in Gulf Shores.

- The county will handle payroll obligations for positions assigned to Gulf Shores city schools through the end of their current contractual periods. The city will then be responsible for their own payroll no later than Sept. 1.

-The county will receive all countywide sales tax until Oct. 1, and pay no start up costs.

- Both systems will be responsible for transporting their students.

- Both systems agreed to work together to resolve personnel situations fairly and equitably. Equipment, materials, supplies and other personal property will remain in Gulf Shores, according to the city school system.

For Tyler and Baldwin County Schools, the agreement ended concerns they had last month over Mackeys 19-page decision in which county school officials claimed would have cost the school system $7 million this year in payment for Gulf Shores payroll.

Gulf Shores city school officials countered that by saying that Baldwin County had misinterpreted Mackeys ruling.

The money would have been taken away from what was already budgeted in the 2019 fiscal year, said Tyler. What would we have to do, as a school system of close to 32,000 students, had we had to handle proration in the middle of the school year. That was a concern. Through (this) settlement, it is not a concern.

The settlement came from negotiations involving Elliott, the local superintendents, Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft and others. Mackey was not involved in the recent talks.

We settle things better here among ourselves than we do in Montgomery, Elliott said. That was part of the problem. It was time for the state superintendent to step back. There were politics getting caught up in this that did not need to be involved in the conversations.

Mackey said his office worked with a lot of parties during the negotiations including Craft and Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon, whose city will be opening a new middle-high school in the 2019-2020 school year.

Mackey credited the State Department of Educations involvement in the split, saying that had his office not gotten involved, it would have gone to court.

It wouldve been a lengthy and extremely expensive lawsuit, said Mackey, whose statement earlier in the day credited the Department of Education for being ultimately instrumental in leading to the agreement. Im proud of the work the department did, especially over the last month. I think it did help smooth the way.

Lessons learned

Mackey said, in hindsight, he wished hed gotten involved more in the talks earlier on and shortly after he became state superintendent in April. He said he only met once with both sides last summer, and only more recently had gotten deeply involved toward the competition of his final order.

Mackeys order was criticized by Tyler and the county school system, who argued that it could establish a precedence in incentivizing cities statewide to break away from their county school systems.

I learned a lesson out of this, Mackey said. When the next time a city tries to split from a county, I will know  shouldve personally gotten involved much earlier and pushed much harder. Had I to do this over, I wouldve gotten involved back in June and instead of saying work this out, within a matter of weeks, we would have had a resolution.

He added, I was trying to stay out of it. That was a mistake on my part in staying out as long as I did, personally.

Elliott said he wished the split had been settled sooner, though he understands why an agreement wasnt reached months ago.

I think everyone was acting in what was in the best interest of their system, he said. I dont fault the superintendents or the schools in defending their system or what they (felt) was right. It came to a point where it was clear that these two parties needed to get together and work out some differences and get the ball across the goal line and get the (state) superintendents office to take a step back.

Mackey apologized for the teachers, students and parents in Gulf Shores and elsewhere in Baldwin County for the anxiety the split talks caused.

Im sorry they had to go through that, he said.

Gulf Shores is the 10th Alabama city to break away from a county system since 2000. In Alabama, there are 71 other city districts and 67 county districts.

Mackey said there are no other cities actively looking at breaking away, but the issue has gotten attention from state lawmakers. State Sen. Linda Coleman-Madison, D-Birmingham, introduced legislation last month that would block cities with a population of 15,000 or under from breaking away from their county school systems.

Gulf Shores, with a population slightly below 12,000, would have been unable to split under Coleman-Madisons bill.

But those issues and others are not a concern among Gulf Shores city school officials, who are itching to get started with Baldwin Countys first city school district.

City school officials, on March 12, held a big reveal event attended by around 400 people inside the Erie H. Meyer Civic Center in which plans were introduced detailing about $5 million to $7 million in construction projects slated to take place this summer. Those projects are unrelated to the agreement negotiation between the city and the county school system.

Our destiny is our own, said Akin, who reiterated the school systems motto, Makin Waves.

Mackey said there were concerns that without an agreement, the lawsuit would have loomed over Gulf Shores as it moved toward starting its school year.

There couldve been some risks, Mackey said, referring to the lawsuit potentially interfering with the start of the Gulf Shores school year in August.

County and city school officials, in recent weeks, said the lawsuit would not have interfered with the start of the school year.

We had to figure out the transfer of property, said Mackey. Even though both sides agreed, and Baldwin said they were OK with (the city starting the school year in August), there were no agreements on how properties would be transferred. They could not legitimately start school in the fall without the transfer of those deeds.

Mackey added, Ive been to the (Alabama) Supreme Court with cases before, and we know how long it takes. We didnt want to do that.When OCarrs in downtown Birmingham opened Feb. 1, 2017, it was a revelation for fans of the iconic Homewood restaurant renowned for its chicken salad plates, milkshakes and warm cheesecake with chocolate filling in the center.

But all good things must come to an end.

Cameron and June Carr, the owners of OCarrs, will close their downtown restaurant on Friday, March 29. It will be open Monday through Friday next week from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The Carrs bought the two downtown buildings that OCarrs occupies a decade ago, when the ground floors housed a barber shop and a beauty shop. The barber and beautician kept operating another seven years.

The Carrs had renovated the buildings to also feature three lofts, and the couple moved in to one of them and rented the other two out.

But in November 2018, they sold the two buildings and four-car garage to Matthew Gregory, owner of Gregory Dream Homes, for $1.75 million. The Carrs moved out of their downtown loft in December after two years there, and bought a house in Bluff Park.

While Cameron has been running the downtown OCarrs, June has had to carry a heavier weight running the Homewood location. The couple has been married for 46 years, and business partners all that time.

Cameron, 67, said he needs to go back to the Homewood location full-time to help June. She is worn out, he said.

It was our dream to come downtown, he said. Theres a community downtown. Ill miss being part of the vibe.

There could possibly be another restaurant to follow in the downtown location across 18th Street North from the Alabama Theatre at Third Avenue North. I sold him all the contents of the restaurant, Carr said. Gregory moved in to their old loft and continues to lease the other two lofts, Carr said.

The Carrs opened OCarrs in 1975 in Homewood, 2909 18th St. South, as an ice cream shop, then started offering sandwiches and soups, then became a deli. They catered the VIP section of City Stages from 1985-95 and during that time developed the chicken salad recipe that became the cornerstone of the OCarrs menu.

Its been such a huge item for us, he said. At City Stages we fed 4,000 people a day. Chicken salad is now 45 percent of our sales. Its a monster. It was just intended to be another menu item. We serve thousands of pounds of chicken salad a week.

After next week, loyal OCarrs customers will have to go to Homewood to get it.Four Alabama military construction projects  one at Fort Rucker, one at Anniston Army Depot and two at Maxwell Air Force Base are on a list of work that could be cut to fund President Trumps border wall.

The Pentagon released a 20-page list of $12.9 billion in unobligated military construction money that could be used to fund a portion of the wall. The projects on the list wont necessarily be cut and, if the Department of Defenses 2020 budget request is met, there would be no delay or eliminations of the projects, the Pentagon said.

If not, some $3.6 billion in unobligated military construction funds would be used to help fund a portion of the wall. Military housing, previously awarded projects or those set to be awarded this fiscal year wont be considered.

The four Alabama projects on the list are:

$5.2 million for a weapons maintenance shop at Anniston Army Depot

$38 million for a training support facility at Fort Rucker

$15.5 million for expansion of the Judge Advocate General School at Maxwell Air Force Base

$18 million for air traffic control tower at Maxwell Air Force Base

The Anniston project, set to be awarded in March 2020 is likely at the greatest risk due to the timing. The work at Fort Rucker and Maxwell is likely safe, since the projects are set to be awarded within this fiscal year.

Sen. Doug Jones, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he is opposed any cuts to Alabama military projects in order to pay for a wall.

I will be perfectly clear here: there are no circumstances under which it would be acceptable or appropriate, Jones said. These projects are critical to the national security and to the state of Alabama, and I will oppose every attempt to delay or otherwise negatively impact them in any way.

The Pentagon has not released a timeframe for the announcement of any eliminated projects. The Alabama Senate has approved a bill to abolish judge-signed marriage licenses as some conservative probate judges continue to object to giving marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Senators approved the bill Thursday on a 26-0 vote. It now moves to the Alabama House of Representatives.

Under the bill, couples would still get a form at the local courthouse to get married, but it would not be called a license.

A few Alabama probate judges for years have refused to issue marriage licenses to anyone so they do not have to give them to gay couples.

Republican Sen. Greg Albritton of Range, who has worked on the bill for several years, said he is trying to reach a compromise so marriage licenses can be issued in all counties.

Albrittons bill has passed the Senate in previous years but has died in the House. The senator said he was optimistic about it passing this year.The Alabama Supreme Court has upheld the dismissal of a defamation lawsuit filed by state Board of Education member Ella Bell of Montgomery against Advance Local Media, the company that owns AL.com, and columnist Cameron Smith.

The court upheld the decision Montgomery County Circuit Judge Truman M. Hobbs issued in July 2018.

Bell said today she was not surprised by the decision and did not expect any justice from the court.

Bell filed the lawsuit in October 2017 over a column Smith wrote that was posted on AL.com in August 2017.

The column concerned comments Bell made at a state Board of Education meeting in June 2017.

At that meeting, Bell asked if it would be legal to establish an academy for special education students so that the overall test scores of schools arent pulled down by the scores of the special ed students.

Smiths column about her comments carried the headline: Alabama School Board Member Considers Institutionalization for Special Ed Students.

Bells lawsuit claimed the headline and column made false accusations against her because she did not use the words institutionalize or institution in her comments at the board meeting. Bells lawsuit claimed the column was intended to mislead the public and cause harm to Bell by evoking images of Alabamas history of warehousing mentally ill patients in institutions. Bell sought compensatory and punitive damages.

In dismissing the case, Hobbs wrote that the column included the actual words used by Bell in quotation marks and did not defame Bell by also using the word institutionalize.

The author discloses the actual words used by Bell and editorializes by converting her use of academy into institutionalize, Hobbs wrote. Because Bell is an elected official, she is fair game for such commentary.

The Supreme Court upheld Hobbs decision in an opinion written by Justice Brad Mendheim. He wrote, "The fact that Bell does not believe Smiths interpretation of her comments was fair does not make such commentary defamatory.

Chief Justice Tom Parker and Associate Justices Greg Shaw, Tommy Bryan and Jay Mitchell concurred.Alabama lawmakers are weighing a measure that would ban drivers from holding a cell phone when they are behind the wheel.

What will it mean for drivers? Heres a look:

Whats the current law?

Alabama law currently bans writing, reading or sending a text while driving but there is no prohibition against using a cell phone in general. A new measure, sponsored in the House by Rep. Allen Farley, R-McCalla, would expand the law to include holding a cell phone while driving.

A similar bill has been introduced in the Senate by Sen. Jim McClendon, R-Springville.

What does the proposal include?

The proposal would make it illegal to drive and physically hold or otherwise support with any part of the persons body a wireless telecommunication device or standalone electronic device while operating a motor vehicle. The bill doesnt prohibit someone from having a phone conversation while driving, they would just be required to use a hands-free device.

Are there exceptions?

The bill includes several exceptions, including calls to law enforcement and first responders or using a cell phone as a navigational device.

What are the penalties?

A first offense would make the driver subject to a $50 fine. The fine would increase to $100 for a second offense and $150 for a third and subsequent offense. The bill includes a provision that would allow first-time offenders to have their charge dismissed if they present evidence to a judge theyve obtained a Bluetooth or other wireless device.

What do other states do?

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 16 states and Washington, D.C. prohibit all drivers from using hand-held cell phones while driving.

No state bans all cell phone use for drivers, but 38 states ban all cell phone use by novice or teen drivers and 21 states and D.C. prohibit any cell phone use by school bus drivers.

Forty-seven states ban text messaging for all drivers.

Dangers of distracted driving

According to the National Safety Council, cell phone use leads to 1.6 million vehicle crashes every year, causing 3,450 fatalities in 2016.

Whats the current status of the bill?

The bill has passed House committee, clearing the way for a vote before the full House before moving to the State Senate.Trump hopes to meet Pakistani leaders soon

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump hopes to meet Pakistani leaders soon as he acknowledges that relations between the two countries are now very good.



President Trump made this surprise announcement at the end of a White House press talk on Wednesday afternoon when a journalist asked him to comment on the current situation between India and Pakistan. Pakistan  well be meeting with Pakistan [leadership]. I think our relationship right now is very good with Pakistan, he said.



Mr Trump made these comments hours after a senior administration official warned at a news briefing in Washington that the United States remained concerned about India-Pakistan tensions as their militaries were still on alert nearly three weeks after their most dangerous confrontation in decades.



The official also warned that another terrorist attack in India could be extremely problematic for Pakistan and it would cause a re-escalation in tensions.



The briefing followed media reports that both India and Pakistan had deployed additional forces on the Line of Control (LoC) and had also put their air forces on high alert.



Several news outlets claimed that India had not only deployed missiles along the LoC but the Indian Air Force (IAF) has also asked its government to urgently purchase more missiles. India has continued to maintain a high level of operational alert since last months clashes and the Indian Army also has moved up emergency purchases of stock-up ammunition, the reports added.



The reports noted that Pakistan has responded by deploying its fighter jets close to the disputed border in Kashmir and has scattered its aircraft across the country. The PAF was also conducting night flights and other exercises and had put its air defence network on alert, the reports added.



The Bloomberg news agency reported that India also sent nuclear submarines, an aircraft carrier battle group and dozens of other navy ships to the Arabian Sea after a tense military stand-off with Pakistan.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is reportedly considering Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams as his running mate.

Axios reported Abrams, who lost the Georgia gubernatorial race in 2018, could be introduced as soon as a campaign launch announcement ahead of the 2020 presidential campaign. Biden, 76, has not announced plans to run but has indicated he will.

Biden did not run in 2016, citing the recent death of his son. The former vice president under Barack Obama met with Abrams in Washington last week, according to Axios.

Abrams, 45, lost the governors race to Republican challenger Brian Kemp but has maintained a high profile, including delivering the Democratic response to President Trumps State of the Union address in February.We see you, Senator.

We see you Sen. Del Marsh (R-Anniston), looking like that hand-raising emoji.

We see you trying to stand out among the maybes coyishly eyeing the U.S. Senate seat a lot of folks believe Sen. Doug Jones is just keeping warm for whatever Alabama Republican survives the lip-smackin gauntlet and faces him next year.

We see you trying to jump to the head of the line.

At the expense of our children.

At the expense of myriad educators throughout the state showing up every day to try to reach and teach them.

So, suddenly, you have the answer: Scrap Common Core, which is little more than a commitment to hold students to the highest standards, to strive to put them in position to obtain the best jobs, to be viable, productive citizens.

A commitment to help them win.

But to heck with that. Lets go backwards. Lets tell the rest of the country we dont need their education standards. Were good.

All because you want to win. Because you want to curry favor with voters in the state who still associate Common Core with former President Barack Obama, with little justification.

Who associate it with books they believe our children should not read because they deal with actual history (real, not re-imagined or revised) or the real world in which they must exist.

We see you.

We see you dropping a surprise billlike a booby-trap or grenadeon your legislative colleagues while theyre still settling in for the current session and re-introducing themselves to each other.

We even see your super-majority Republican colleagues in the state senate rallying to pass this morass of a bill on Thursday when most of them likely didnt even know about it when they went to church last Sunday.

You cant tell me this is actually better for our childrennot when you essentially took education out of the hands of educators.

When you didnt speak to them, engage them, respect their in-the-trenches perspectives.

When you seem to have only flimsy data, if any at all, to back the need for this move.

When business leaders rail on about how bad scrapping Common Core will be for our state, which still struggles among the bottom feeders in way too many categories.

The bill that passed on Thursday included amendments that at least hit the pause button on this sillinessdelaying any change in Common Core for three years (starts in 2021-22) and allows us to keep the current math and reading standards in place, a victory educators applauded.

That the tweaks were needed only validates, Senator, that you didnt think this through. You didnt consider the unintended consequences any viable, erudite legislator would have researched and acknowledged.

You just pulled the clip and tossed the grenade.

Even you said your bill will cost us almost $11 million, which meanslike any construction project (or in this case, deconstruction)itll probably cost twice as much.

Or worse.

Itll cost our teachers and administrators, who already feel like you and other lawmakers dont recognize and appreciate teaching as a profession.

Itll cost local and state superintendents who were shocked, disappointed and concerned about repealing Common Core without having a rigorous replacement plan in place.

And, too, we know now, itll all but strip the members of the states Board of Educationwe know theyre far from perfect, bless their heartsof any say-so because the bill puts final approval of any changes in education in the hands of your and your legislative colleagues, almost none of whom have spent more than a few nights homework studying education and all its nuances.

We see you, Senator. Now, hopefully, the legislature will turn the other way.

Youre on spring break now, so you and your colleagues wont reconvene until April, when, hopefully, our state representativesthe super-majority Republican House, lets be frankwont try to fool us into thinking they actually believe dropping Common Core is a good thing.

For our children.

For our teachers and administrators.

For our state.

We see you, Senator. And well keep watching.

Column was updated on Monday, March 22 at 8:35p with information about the bill giving final say over education decisions to the state legislature.

Roy S. Johnsons column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Hit me up at rjohnson@al.com or catch me at twitter.com/roysjA Democratic state representative became angry on the floor of the Alabama House of Representatives today, calling her Republican colleagues cowardly and screaming at House Speaker Mac McCutcheon after he cut off her microphone.

Rep. Juandalynn Givan, D-Birmingham, shouted at McCutcheon for several minutes. Alabama Public Television taped the incident.

The Associated Press reported that Givan left the chamber with security behind her. House Clerk Jeff Woodard said Givan voluntarily left after McCutcheon called security, AP reported.

Givan later said she only raised her voice after she was interrupted and should have been allowed to finish speaking.

The incident happened while the House was considering sunset bills, which are generally noncontroversial bills concerning state boards.

Givan stepped to the microphone and began talking about her interactions with the Republican leadership in the GOP-controlled House.

I refuse to stay on the plantation, Givan said. Now anyone else who chooses to, thats up to them. I dont have to. Because I dont need anything from the Republican Party. I dont care if I dont pass a bill. I dont care whatever. Its fine with me.

Later, she said, Im going to tell the truth when I stand at this microphone. Not like my cowardly Republican colleagues for the last two years who have dogged me out.

At that point McCutcheon struck his gavel.

And I have a right to say what Im saying, Givan said, raising her voice.

No maam, McCutcheon responded.

You can hit that gavel all you want to Mac, Givan said.

At that point, McCutcheon cut her microphone off.

I am not going to sit here and let you degrade this institution with this," McCutcheon said. "Why are you bringing this up? This is not the conduct that we need on this floor."

McCutcheon told Givan he would meet with her to address her grievances but said the House floor was not the right forum.

Please, please, this is not the place for this, Representative Givan. You and I can talk and Ive always been open to your conversations. But this is not the place for this."

The incident lasted several minutes before the House went into recess. Givan left the chamber and then the State House.

In a telephone interview on Friday morning, Givan said she never raised her voice until McCutcheon struck his gavel to interrupt her.

My pitch was no different than it normally is, Givan said.

Givan said people should ask why McCutcheon did not let her finish making her points.

What happened in that exchange that was so bad that he shut the microphone down? she said.

McCutcheon answered questions about the incident after the House adjourned on Thursday.

It turned into a decorum issue, the speaker said. Addressing people by name in a tone that was not appropriate for the House of Representatives chamber. So, that was the issue and where that came from and how it got started, Im really not sure.

McCutcheon said there would be no long-term disciplinary action.

We had just said dont come back on the floor with this kind of decorum, McCutcheon said. "That was the only thing."

Givan issued a statement Friday saying her exchange with McCutcheon the day before was part of her efforts to resist racisim and sexism. It read, in part:

I am a proponent of protocol and decorum most especially, when these rules are extended equally to everyone regardless of their race or sex. I wont be marginalized or silenced regardless of the party. I am staying in the fight for equal treatment and access for all.

This story was updated at 7:46 a.m. with comments from Rep. Givan. Updated at 6:40 p.m. on March 22 with statement from Givan.A 74-year-old substitute teacher is behind bars after a gun in his pocket discharged inside a first-grade classroom Friday.

The incident happened midday at Blountsville Elementary School, said Blount County Sheriff Mark Moon. Blount County District Attorney Pamela Casey said one student was struck by a fragment and checked out by the school nurse.

Moon said the teacher - Henry Rex Weaver  had the gun in his pocket when it discharged. There were students in the classroom at the time.

It (the sound) alerted administrators, Moon said. He was detained until we could get him in our jail.

Moon said authorities are investigating. He is charged with reckless endangerment, third-degree aggravated assault and possession of a firearm on school grounds.

Obviously Im concerned about a substitute teacher bring a gun to school, the sheriff said, and what we can do to prevent that in the future.

This story will be updated as more information becomes available.With the help of city officials, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin provided an update Thursday on the progress of his 92-point strategic plan to improve the city.

The plan, dubbed The Woodfin Way, was released a year ago and included goals in areas ranging from public safety to workforce development to social justice.

Public Safety

The city has a goal of having 1,000 officers on the street by the end of 2020, when Birmingham will host the World Games, Police Chief Patrick Smith told the crowd at the Dorothy Jemison Theatre.

To reach that goal, the city swore officers from three police academy graduations and Birmingham should have four police academies next year so that were keeping up with attrition, Smith said.

Meanwhile, 30,000 new LED streetlights are being installed in the city to eliminate dark areas and curtail crime.

The city is also working on a real-time crime center that utilizes the citys shot spotter technology, license plate reader technology and body cameras to make policing more efficient. Half of the fourth floor of police headquarters is now dedicated to the real-time crime center.

Officers are no longer responding without sufficient information, and once complete, well be able to tell our officers not just Its the white Nissan that went westbound, Smith said. We can tell them its the white Nissan with a blue door and a donut on the right-hand side. Heres a picture, and by the way, the license plate number is XYZ.

Infrastructure improvements

The city is at work on several projects, ranging from street, sidewalk and drainage improvements to flood control, parks and libraries, said Edward Revell, director of the city Department of Planning and Permits.

Birmingham is projected to spend about $8 million in 2019 on street resurfacing, patching and sidewalk improvements.

Millions of dollars are being invested, and its our goal to make sure that its done in a way that we add to the quality of each neighborhood and that each of the people in those neighborhoods are fully engaged, fully investedto be good neighbors and to make sure that we deliver on the promise, Revell said.

Birmingham also implemented coordinated code enforcement, where every major ordinance enforcement now has a dedicated contact person who will be part of public outreach.

We are extremely committed to making sure that all of our neighborhoods are healthy, thriving and diverse, Revell said.

Woodfin said party of that strategy is addressing food deserts in the city.

Healthy food has to be a part of the conversation, and I presented a proposal, a food ordinance, to the council to recruit grocery stores or expand existing grocery stores, the mayor said.

Although he said three grocery store chains rejected the citys outreach, Woodfin said he will wade through as many nos as possible until I get to a yes.

Employment, education and workforce development

Woodfin noted that Birmingham has the 16th highest unemployment rate among young people  a statistic that drove his labor and education initiatives.

Rachel Harmon, deputy director of talent and development for the city, noted the Birmingham Can Code initiative  a partnership with Apple, Birmingham City Schools and Lawson State Community College  was completed. The effort trained 100 students in the Swift programming language.

The partnership led to the creation of coding camps at every middle and high school in the city; the goal is to reach 400 Birmingham students this year.

Other initiatives include a program through the Womens Fund of Greater Birmingham that provides workforce training and childcare and housing assistance for women in poverty.

Birmingham has also been tapped as the first microsite of a partnership with Southern New Hampshire University and LRNG, where city residents will be able to access free online learning curricula. The microsite, to be located at a to-be-decided Birmingham library, will offer classes such as literacy, social justice and design that are structured similar to music playlists where participants will earn badges for completing lessons, Harmon said.

Woodfin said another component of his goals in this area is the Birmingham Promise Initiative, which will offer different pathways to Birmingham City Schools students, including an apprenticeship program with an employer.

That is one of the best investments we believe we can make as a city, the mayor said. Were going to continue to invest in our young people and make workforce work for this community.

Business diversity

In a move to transform make Birminghams business community more reflective of demographics, the city launched a 21-member Small Business Council, noted Tene Dolphin, director of business development for the city.

Were designing policy for women and minority businesses with the voices of small businesses at the table, Dolphin said.

Smart government

Woodfin said running a smart government involved the basics of customer service.

When I drill down the fundamentals, the blocking and tackling of municipal government, you got to get the basic services down right, the mayor said. Before you talk about the Hail Mary or the trick play or the wildcat, you got to get the tackle.

Cedric Sparks, chief of staff for the city, said the administration instituted cultural norms to foster a positive work environment.

We said we desired to be an administration that dealt with no mess, no junk and no drama. And if u brought it, it had to go, and you had to go with it, Sparks said.

Among the citys non-negotiables was the way in which city employees engaged with people.

We believe in calling people back. We believe in responding to folks emails, he said.

Additionally, the administration underwent national, executive-level searches to hire department and division heads and required those leaders to live in the city.

Sparks said the city also had a plan to make government more efficient.

We instituted Operation Stop Doing the Dumb Stuff where if you know it does not work, quit doing it, he said.

On transparency, the city unveiled its open checkbook portal, which makes city expenditures open to the public.

Simply put, we want you to see what we see and know what we know regarding the citys spending, he said.

Social justice and racial equity

The city recently launched the Office of Social Justice and Racial Equality.

The office is ready and eager to use our collective energy and talent to advance equitable outcomes for all Birmingham residents, said Denise Gilmore, the offices senior director.

Among the offices duties was to appoint a diverse group to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institutes advisory task force, which will advice the mayor on the management agreement the city made with the institute after the fallout from the institute revoking an award from activist Angela Davis.

The office is also working on a Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument with the National Parks Service and the Jefferson County Memorial Projects lynching memorial.

Also on the offices plate is the restoration of the A.G. Gaston Hotel, where civil rights leaders including Fred L. Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King Jr. gathered in a room to plan the 1963 civil rights campaign.

The predevelopment phase, including mockups of the renovations, are underway, with Phase I of the restoration set to begin in July, Gilmore said.Three Army generals who helped lead Huntsvilles recent growth have a message for Alabama lawmakers: Leave Common Core alone, they say.

I just dont understand it, Maj. Gen. James Rogers (Ret.) said Thursday of the issues return. Its crazy.

Ending Common Core would throw sand in a machine that is creating tens of thousands of jobs in Alabama and sending hundreds of millions in tax dollars to Montgomery, the generals say.

"We cant continue the successes weve had if we cant maintain the standards, Lt. Gen. Tony Jones (Ret.) said Thursday.

Weve already fought this fight, and were making progress, said Maj. Gen. Jim Myles (Ret.) This isnt moving forward. Its moving backward.

All three are surprised the issue has risen again after being defeated in the Alabama Legislature in 2013. This week the Alabama Senate approved a bill to repeal the Common Core standards in Alabama public schools. The bill is sponsored by Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh, R-Anniston.

The generals say the repeal wouldnt be fair to thousands of families who have decided to move to Alabama for jobs at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Airbus in Mobile, and the various automobile plants around the state. And it isnt fair to families who arent moving anywhere, they say, but whose children might.

Myles helped recruit civilian workers from Northern Virginia to Alabama during the Armys last Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) more than a decade ago. There were three things they asked about, Myles said Friday. Whats the education system like? Whats the medical system like? Whats the (road) structure like? The No. 1 issue was education, and the question was about the quality of education and the transfer of standards.

The generals use the phrase transfer of standards to refer to education milestones that allow students to transfer between states and remain in the same grade with their peers. We moved every 1- to 2 years, Rogers said of his family while he was in the Army. The biggest challenge was finding schools with the same standards.

Jones, Rogers and Myles were leaders in the Army and at Alabamas Army posts. Jones was chief of staff at U.S. Army Headquarters in Europe and commanded the Army Aviation Warfighting Center at Fort Rucker, Ala., among other commands. After retiring, he ran Boeings operations in Huntsville.

Our children had to retake certain subjects, Jones said, because some states were behind. He doesnt want to see that happen to Alabama.

Jones mentioned the skilled FBI employees moving from Washington now to a new campus in Huntsville. The FBI has already announced 1,350 moves, and local leaders expect 4,000- to 5,000 new FBI jobs before the move is done.

Rogers and Myles both commanded Redstone Arsenal itself. Rogers is a vice president at Lockheed Martin today, and Myles has his own consulting company.

Youve got a lot more engineers, scientists, business management people here, Myles said. They bring a certain pedigree and DNA inside of them. They realize the educations important so, naturally, they want their kids to have the same input (they had).

Alabama Senators passed the bill earlier this week by a vote of 23-7 along party lines, with most Republicans supporting it and and most Democrats voting no.Former Alabama Sen. and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions returned to Washington, D.C., on Thursday, where former colleagues and current Justice Department officials heaped praise on Sessions and gifted him the chair he used in Cabinet meetings.

Sessions, who was joined by his family, was received with a standing ovation and included appearances by his successor, Attorney General William Barr, and Rod Rosenstein, his deputy at the Justice Department who was initially supposed to leave his post this month but is staying on a little longer. Richard Moore, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, was also in attendance.

Unexpected developments always arise, but Jeff Sessions stayed true to his values, Rosenstein said, according to CBS News. Jeff Sessions always aspired to the higher values."

Addressing Sessions grandchildren, Rosenstein said: [H]e never forgot who he was and where he came from" through his rise in politics.

Barr, who became Sessions permanent replacement last month, saluted his predecessor and thanked Sessions for his leadership, CNN reported.

Agency officials presented Sessions with the chair he used in Cabinet meetings with President Trump and was given another standing ovation, according to CBS.

I want to thank all of you for your hard work, your sacrifice, he said, adding his tenure as attorney general included some of the most meaningful months in my professional life, for sure.

Sessions, who was the first sitting senator to support Trump during the GOP primary, was nominated by Trump for attorney general in 2017. They had a falling out over Sessions decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, culminating in Sessions resignation in November.Manchester, UK  In the early hours of Thursday, five mosques in the English city of Birmingham were damaged  the latest in a string of Islamophobic attacks in the UK.

The spate of vandalism came just days after a gunman killed 50 worshippers during Friday prayers at two mosques in New Zealand, placing Muslim communities in the UK and around the world on heightened alert amid concerns over the safety of their communities.

While security has been stepped up at mosques across Britain amid a police investigation into the incidents in Birmingham, Muslims in the UK say more needs to be done to prevent such attacks from happening.

Al Jazeera spoke to members of Britains Muslim community on Friday to get their views.

Abdullah Saif, 33, Birmingham resident

Abdullah Saif says the incidents are a continuation of previous Islamophobic attacks in the country [Abdullah Saif/Al Jazeera]









As bad as the Birmingham attacks were, they are a continuation of previous incidents, many of which were much worse. With the incidents being on the back of the New Zealand attacks, peoples fears are more heightened.

Every single one of us who goes to the mosque could picture themselves in that mosque in New Zealand, living those exact moments. With guys going around Birmingham smashing up mosques, it brings it a bit [closer to] home.

People will continue to join congregational prayers at their local mosques, but conversations about increasing security have become more urgent. Since these incidents, several Birmingham mosques have beefed up their security and are holding conversations about what more needs to be done.

Nasar Mahmood, 68, trustee at Manchester Islamic Education Trust

Nasar Mahmood, trustee at the Manchester Islamic Education Trust says parents are worried about their childrens security [photo courtesy of Nasar Mahmood]

There is a big concern among parents with regards to the security of their children at schools. They want to make sure we have measures in place to avoid what happened in New Zealand repeating itself here.

We have since increased security and CCTV on our premises and are looking with the police at other protective measures we can take ensure everyones safety and security.

Saleha Islam, London, independent consultant

As a woman who is visibly Muslim, Ive felt somewhat apprehensive and vulnerable over the past week. People need to understand that what they say has an impact on what happens on the streets  and the media has a huge responsibility to play in that regard.

Also, while the response in New Zealand has been overwhelming support for the Muslim community, the response in the UK seems to be more clinical, and there are always explanations to justify what happened.

Following the [2017] attack at Finsbury Park Mosque in north London for example, we did get support but there wasnt an outpour of sympathy and an understanding for what we were experiencing as a community.

Azhar Qayyum, 41, Birmingham, Midlands regional manager at MEND

One of the things that people are waking up to [since the incidents] is that Islamophobia exists and is growing. People are starting to ask where is it [Islamophobia] coming from and what is going to be done about the anti-Muslim narrative in the media and rhetoric among politicians.

Such incidents are not going to go away until these issues are addressed.

Samayya Afzal, 27 community engagement manager at Muslim Council of Britain

Samayya Afzal says the government needs to provide more funding for securing mosques and community centres [Al Jazeera/Salma Haidrani]





Muslim communities around the UK have long been complaining about the rise of Islamophobia and fears of attacks like this.

This fear isnt just restricted to the rise of the far right; its also about mainstream media outlets reporting inaccurately and unfairly about Muslims; its about 31 percent of schoolchildren thinking Muslims are taking over the UK; its about the fact that over 50 percent of hate crimes in the UK are directed towards Muslims.

Wider societal Islamophobia dehumanises and readies Muslim communities as targets for hate.

The government has made some commitments to increase funding, but this is not proportional to the risk that Muslims are feeling.

As Ramadan approaches, Muslims will be hyper-visible and will visit mosques in more numbers and more frequently. The funding needs to be increased, it needs to be immediately available and more easily accessible for mosques and other Islamic community centres to apply for.The German political establishment has come after BDS just as viciously as Israel has.

Against the backdrop of Israeli efforts to falsely equate Zionism with Judaism and dismiss any criticism of the Israeli state as anti-Semitic, Germany is also leading a relentless campaign to ostracise pro-Palestinian activists and delegitimise their protest campaigns.

The German state has traditionally viewed protection of and unconditional ideological support for Israel as part of its raison detre  a way to atone for the Holocaust.

Historically, this pillar of German politics has justified the countrys unconditional support for Israel and silence on Israeli abuses of Palestinian rights. More recently, it has also made the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement, which Israel sees as an existential threat, the primary target of smear campaigns and relentless persecution in the country.

The German authorities have categorised the peaceful movement as anti-Semitic and have taken action to prevent it from having any meaningful influence in the country.

In a January 2018 resolution on fighting anti-Semitism, for example, the German parliament equated calls for a boycott of Israel with insults towards Jews, and urged the German government to take decisive action against BDS. Previously, in December 2016, Germanys leading party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) condemned BDS as anti-Israeli and coarse anti-Semitism, comparing it to the Nazis economic strangulation of Jews.

Outside the central government, representatives of many major German cities also openly attacked the movement, and similarly equated BDS to Nazi policies.

In August 2017, Frankfurts mayor Uwe Becker passed legislation to ban municipal and city-owned funding for BDS individuals, activities, or groups. He told Israeli media that he believes BDS is a deeply anti-Semitic movement seeking to deeply delegitimise Israel using the same language that the Nazis used in the darkest chapter of German history.

A month later, Berlins mayor, Michael Mueller said he would personally work to ensure that representatives of the BDS movement would not get funding from the city or be allowed to use its public spaces, claiming the movement employed unbearable methods from the Nazi era. The intelligence agencies of several German states have designated the BDS movement as an anti-Semitic danger.

The German authorities have also taken steps to prosecute pro-BDS activists in an attempt to make an example out of them and deter others from speaking up in favour of the movement.

Three Berlin-based BDS activists, for example, are currently facing criminal charges raised by the state of Berlin. Known as the Humboldt 3, Jewish Israelis Stavit Sinai and Ronnie Barkan and Gaza Palestinian Majed Abusalama are accused of trespassing and assault after they peacefully protested during a public anti-BDS speech by Knesset member Aliza Lavie at Berlins Humboldt University in June 2017. Lavie was part of Israels ruling coalition during the 2014 war on Gaza.

In February 2019, the trio received an award from Copenhagens co-mayor, Ninna Hedeager Olsen, for their activism. The mayor stressed that they have worked tirelessly to reveal the Apartheid-like nature of the Israeli regime and its systematic violation of international law.

Yet, in Germany, they are prosecuted.

Abusalama told me that he views the charges brought against them as a clear sign that there is an expansion of Israeli apartheid in Germany. He asserts that due to restrictions on free speech, many Palestinians feel threatened and unsafe in Germany.

The criminal case has affected Abusalamas status in Germany, with the permanent residency he was supposed to receive being withheld pending the end of the trial.

While the BDS movement and its supporters appear to be the main target of the anti-Palestinian campaign in Germany, other groups and movements have also been targeted by the German state and politicians for supporting the Palestinian struggle.

For example, a smear campaign was recently launched against the Berlin-based association Jewish Voice for Just Peace in Near East (JVP), which campaigns for equal treatment of Israelis and Palestinians.

The attacks against the group intensified after it was announced as this years recipient of the Goettingen Peace Prize.

Among the opponents of the decision to award JVP was lawyer Felicitas Oldenburg, leader of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) in the Goettingen city council. Oldenburg urged the prize selection committee and the institutions sponsoring the prize  the city of Goettingen, Goettingen University, and the Sparkasse Bank  to revoke their decision. In a letter, she dismissed BDS as anti-Semitic and called JVP an extreme faction that represents unjust, absolute minority positions. She even put the adjective Jewish in the groups name in quotation marks and accused the association of sailing under a false flag.

In response to the attacks by Oldenburg and others, all three involved institutions rescinded their support for the peace prize. However, the selection committee did not back down from its decision and still presented the prize to the in March.

In an official statement, JVP said its members felt shocked and alienated as a result of the slander campaign launched against them and asked, With what authority this lawyer and leader of the FDP parliamentary faction dares to question our Jewish identity? The association said Oldenburgs claim that they are sailing under a false flag was in itself anti-Semitic, and compared it to the common anti-Semitic trope that Jews pretended outwardly to be peaceful and law-abiding citizens, but beneath their beards and yarmulkas hid their alleged conspiracies and claims for power.

JVPs director Iris Hefets told me that she believes the smear campaign they faced in relation to the Goettingen Peace Prize was a symptom of recent widespread majoritarian efforts to suppress the freedom of expression and silence minority point of views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Germany.

That we, as Jews, are defamed as anti-Semites by German Christians, comes with a denial of history, Hefets explained. The majority incites against a minority and engages in political persecution. This is dangerous because it aggravates totalitarian tendencies.

The alarming nature, and the possible overarching implications, of the smear campaign against the JVP was also underlined in an open letter written in support of the group by over 90 Jewish scholars, including Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler.

The letter said it is worrying sign that representatives from the German state, finance sector and academia have come together to make a judgement about whether or not a group of Jews and Israelis, many of them descendants of Holocaust survivors, are anti-Semitic.

As German officials, politicians, bureaucrats, and academics target BDS activists and other supporters of the Palestinian struggle, they perpetuate anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews and Orientalist depictions of Palestinians. In this way, they help Israel cover up its crimes and silence Palestinians.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.The Chief Executive officer of the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan, Mr. John Kumah has asked the Spanish Government to invest in the growth and development of entrepreneurship in Ghana by supporting Governments National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan at the Spain Ghana Forum.



As part of the forum, the Minister for Business Development, Hon Ibrahim Mohammed Awal engaged with Spains Secretary of State for trade, H.E. Mrs. Xiana Mendez and also with the President of the Confederation for Employers and Industries of Spain, Marta Blanco.



Addressing Spanish Government Officials and business leaders at the Spain Ghana Business forum in Spain, the NEIP CEO highlighted that the Nana Addo Government through the Ministry of Business Development has given NEIP $10m USD seed fund to leverage on to raise $100m USD to support start-ups, micro, small and medium scale businesses in Ghana.



According to Mr. John Kumah, NEIP has been able to leverage on the $10m USD to raise $50m USD, indicating that the $100m USD target set by the President is achievable and necessary to open up opportunities and markets for Ghanaian start-up businesses.



In the past two years we have supported more than 10,000 businesses with a number of services, we are inviting you to support the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Plan as we race towards raising the $100 million dollars, we want to give life to the numerous brilliant business ideas we receive on a daily basis and you can make it happen he told officials of the Spanish Government and members of the business community.



The Spain Ghana Business forum was organized by Ghanas High Commission to Spain, H.E Elizabeth Agyei in partnership with the Spanish Business Community.

Source: Daniel Adu Darko/Peacefmonline.com/[email protected]









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Featured VideoSecurity sources say the assailants crossed over from neighbouring Niger before launching the overnight attack.

Boko Haram fighters have killed at least 23 Chadian soldiers, according to military sources, in what appeared to be the deadliest such attack inside Chad by the armed group.

The assault in the early hours of Friday took place in the town of Dangdala, near the banks of Lake Chad, two security sources told the Reuters news agency.

The attackers were believed to have crossed the border from neighbouring Niger before launching the attack.

Boko Haram elements attacked the Chadian army position at around 1am (00:00 GMT), killing 23 troops, a military official told AFP news agency.

Boko Haram has been fighting for a decade to carve an Islamic caliphate out of northeast Nigeria, and has carried out regular raids over loosely guarded frontiers into neighbouring Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

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The violence over the past decade has killed an estimated 30,000 people and forced about two million to leave their homes.

Chadian soldiers are part of the G5 Sahel Force, a US-trained West African task force deployed to counter Boko Haram.

In southeastern Niger, meanwhile, eight civilians were killed late on Thursday in a Boko Haram attack in Karidi, in the Gueskerou district, a local official told the AFP news agency on Friday.

Gueskerou lies in the Diffa region, which borders Lake Chad, and is one of the worst-hit areas for attacks in Niger.

A total of 16 troops were killed in attacks on February 16 and March 9, while Nigers armed forces said it had killed 33 terrorists on March 12.Brandishing flags and chanting slogans, thousands gather in the capital to demand Abdelaziz Bouteflika step down.

Tens of thousands of Algerians have once again taken to the streets of the capital to demand that ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika quit immediately.

Carrying Algerian flags and chanting anti-Bouteflika slogans, protesters on Friday braved cold weather and light rain as they gathered in central Algiers, the site of weekly demonstrations since February 22.

Amid growing pressure, Bouteflika on March 11 abandoned his bid to seek a fifth term at the helm of Algeria, a key petrol exporter. His announcement that he would not seek another term caused instant celebrations.

But the protesters joy was short-lived as the president also announced that elections scheduled for April 18 would be postponed and declared his intention to preside over a transition period  both moves that prompted critics to accuse the 82-year-old of attempting to prolong his 20-year rule.

Noureddine Bedoui, who was named prime minister earlier this month, has since struggled to form a cabinet that has been tasked with managing the transition.

Protesters converged in central Algiers on Friday to demand Bouteflika step down [Bensemra/Reuters]

According to the Maghreb Emergent news website, Bedoui has reached out to more than 300 people since his appointment.

They have called academics, trade unionists, civil society actors, doctors, journalists, lawyers, businessmen, artists and even a few activists from the popular movement, a source close to the prime ministers office was quoted as saying.

Whats being said is that these people have all refused politely.

This comes as analysts are noting a change of tone in the discourse of powerbrokers, including the countrys powerful military.

After initially warning of looming chaos, chief of staff Lieutenant General Ahmed Gaed Salah on Wednesday expressed support for the noble aims of the youth-led protest movement.

In recent days, members of the ruling National Liberation Front have also thrown their weight behind the protesters, in an apparent move by some members of Algerias old political guard to cut ties with Bouteflika, who has been confined to a wheelchair since suffering a debilitating stroke in 2013.Pompeo warns of groups destabilising actions but officials respond group is part and parcel of Lebanese politics.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned Lebanons leaders of what he called Hezbollahs destabilising activities in the country and across the region, in comments that put him at odds with his Lebanese hosts.

Pompeo, who is on a Middle East tour to drum up support for Washingtons harder line against Iran, urged Beirut on Friday to pick a side as his country sought to build a united front against Tehran and its Lebanese ally.

Lebanon and the Lebanese people face a choice: bravely move forward as an independent and proud nation or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future, Pompeo said standing alongside Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil during a joint news conference.

The US will continue to use all peaceful means, everything at our disposal to choke off the financing, the smuggling, the criminal network and the misuse of government positions and influence, he added in a veiled reference to the fact the Lebanese armed group holds three cabinet posts.

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Pompeo also said that US sanctions on Iran and Hezbollah were working, citing a speech this month by the latters leader, Hassan Nasrallah, asking the groups supporters for funds as evidence of the punitive measures efficacy.

Our pressure on Iran is simple. Its aimed at cutting off the funding for terrorists and its working, Pompeo said, adding that Iran gave Hezbollah as much as $700m annually. We believe that our work is already constraining Hezbollahs activities.

The United States has branded Hezbollah a terrorist organisation.

Hezbollah a Lebanese party





While a few inches separated Washingtons top diplomat from his Lebanese counterpart, their positions on the topic seemed to be anything but similar.

Hezbollah is a Lebanese party, not a terrorist group, and it enjoys a wide popular base, said Bassil, who is a political ally of the group.

Lebanons presidency also said President Michel Aoun had similarly told Pompeo during a meeting that Hezbollah was Lebanese party, suggesting that it enjoyed all the rights and prerogatives afforded to political organisations.

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Preserving national unity and civil peace is a priority for us, Aoun told Pompeo, the presidency said on its Twitter feed.

We dont want our ties with America to be affected and we want to work together to solve problems, including the issue with Hezbollah, he added, stressing that Lebanons stability is of mutual interest to both states.

A Lebanese foreign ministry official said a question and answer session with the media was cancelled at the behest of the Americans.

Pompeo also met Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, with the men discussing among others the need to maintain calm along the boundary between Lebanon and Israel, Robert Palladino, deputy spokesman of the US State Department, said.

Lebanon and its southern neighbour Israel are still technically at war, even after Israeli troops withdrew from the south of the country in 2000. Israel and Hezbollah fought a devastating month-long war in 2006, and skirmishes still erupt along a UN-patrolled demarcation line.

Hezbollahs Ali Damush questioned the timing and purpose of Pompeos visit during his Friday sermon.

What are the Lebanese expecting from America and its foreign minister after these two announcements that are totally biased in favour of Israel, except for inciting (Hezbollah) and turning Lebanese against each other?.

Hezbollah fighters have backed government forces in neighbouring Syria in the war that broke out there in 2011.





Separately, Pompeo and Prime Minister Saad Hariri discussed the importance of the US-Lebanese security partnership and the need for continued support for Lebanons legitimate state security institutions, particularly the Lebanese Armed Forces, Palladino said.

Pompeo commended the Lebanese people for hosting more than one million Syrian refugees.

In a meeting with Interior Minister Raya al-Hassan, Pompeo discussed regional and internal security challenges facing Lebanon and how the United States can help support the interior ministrys efforts.

Hassan became the first woman interior minister in Lebanon and the Middle East in a cabinet line-up unveiled in late January following an eight-month delay.Explosion inflicts the latest mass casualties in a series of industrial accidents that has angered Chinas public.

A massive explosion at a pesticide plant in eastern China killed 44 people and injured more than 600, state media said on Friday.

The blast  which registered as a small earthquake in Jiangsu province  inflicted the latest casualties in a series of industrial accidents that has angered the public.

The explosion occurred on Thursday at the Chenjiagang Industrial Park in the city of Yancheng, and the resulting fire was finally brought under control at 3am on Friday (19:00 GMT), state television reported.

Children at a kindergarten in the vicinity were also injured in the blast.

Survivors were taken to 16 hospitals with 640 people being treated for injuries. Thirty-two victims were critically injured, it said. More than 3,500 medical workers were mobilised to assist.

Major accidents

President Xi Jinping, who is in Italy on a state visit, ordered all-out efforts to care for the injured and to earnestly maintain social stability, state television said.

Authorities must step up action to prevent such incidents from happening and find out the cause of the blast as quickly as possible, Xi added.

There have recently been a series of major accidents, and all places and relevant departments must fully learn the lessons from these, the report cited Xi as saying.

The fire at a plant owned by the Tianjiayi Chemical Company spread to neighbouring factories.

Smoke billows from fire behind a damaged building following the explosion [Reuters]

Nearly 1,000 area residents were moved to safety as of Friday as a precaution against leaks and additional explosions, the city government said in a statement posted to its official microblog.

Here we have people living almost by cheek to jowl with this vast complex where some of the most dangerous chemicals known to man are produced, said Al Jazeeras Adrian Brown, reporting from Beijing.

The cause of the blast was under investigation, but the company  which produces more than 30 organic chemical compounds, some of which are highly flammable  has been cited and fined for work-safety violations in the past, the newspaper China Daily said.

Gas concentrations

The Jiangsu environmental protection bureau said in a statement late on Thursday the environmental monitoring station in the area had found no abnormal concentrations of toluene, xylene or benzene.

Concentrations of acetone and chloroform outside the perimeter of the explosion zone were also within normal limits, it added.

Jiangsu will launch inspections on chemical producers and warehouses, according to an emergency notice published by official media on Friday.





The notice, published on the news website of Jiangsu provinces Communist Party, said the government would shut down any chemical firms found not complying with regulations on dangerous chemicals.

Public anger over safety standards has grown in China over industrial accidents ranging from mining disasters to factory fires that have marred three decades of swift economic growth.

In 2015, 165 people were killed in a series of explosions at a chemical warehouse in the northern city of Tianjin.

The explosions at Tianjin, one of the worlds busiest ports and not far from the capital, Beijing, were big enough to be seen by satellites and register on earthquake sensors.

Despite repeated pledges by the government to tighten safety, chemical plants, in particular, have been plagued by disasters.

In November, a series of blasts during the delivery of flammable gas at a chemical manufacturer killed 23 people.Christchurch, New Zealand  A nationwide moment of silence was observed in New Zealand on Friday  ushered in by the Muslim call to prayer  a week after 50 people were killed and scores of others wounded in an attack on two mosques.

The prayer and two-minute reflection were broadcast live on national media outlets and came as an estimated 20,000 people, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, gathered metres from the Al Noor mosque in the city of Christchurch for Muslim Friday prayers.

Al Noor was one of the two places of worship targeted in the city during the worst mass shooting in New Zealands modern history, allegedly carried out by Australian-born Brenton Tarrant, along with the Linwood mosque.

Imam Gamal Fouda, prayer leader at the Al Noor mosque who was present during last weeks attack, told mourners in Christchurch he saw hatred and rage in the eyes of the terrorist.

Today, from the same place, I look out and I see the love of and compassion in the eyes of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and human beings from across the globe, Fouda said.

We have shown that New Zealand is unbreakable, and the world can see in us an example of love and unity. We are broken-hearted, but we are not broken.

A woman wearing a headscarf as tribute to the victims of the mosque attacks [Reuters]

Fouda called on New Zealand and governments around the world to bring an end to hate speech saying the attack on Friday was the result of anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim rhetoric by some political leaders, some media agencies, and others.

Tarrant appeared to publish an overtly white-supremacist online manifesto, which called for violence against immigrants, minutes before Fridays attack

Last weeks event is proof and evidence to the entire world that terrorism has no colour, has no race, and has no religion, Fouda said.

The rise of white supremacy and right-wing extremism is a great global threat to mankind and this must end now.

A special day

Prior to Foudas speech and the Friday prayers, Ardern quoted the Prophet Muhammad during a brief address to the crowd.

When any part of the body suffers, the whole body feels pain, said Ardern, wearing a black headscarf. New Zealand mourns with you, we are one.

Many of those who arrived to pray in Christchurch had travelled from all over New Zealand, home to about five million people, and elsewhere across the world.

Their shoes, lined up along low makeshift barriers in the open-air prayer areas, were too many to count.

According to local council estimates, as many as 5,000 Muslims attended the prayers, nearly a tenth of the countrys total Muslim population.

Participant Imran Khan, who arrived from Auckland on Friday morning with four friends, said it was important to be present as a show of support for his friend Ashraf Azads family. Azad was one of the 50 shot dead last week, in what Ardern has labelled a terrorist attack.

Whenever you look at the mosque you get the picture of what it must have been like for the people that were here at that moment [of the attack], Khan told Al Jazeera, his voice trembling with emotion.

[But] the support we are getting from other groups in society is unbelievable  It shows that religion is not everything, its the love and the unity that matters, people are standing up for that, he added.

"My husband and my son  were brave people." Naeem Rashid and his son were both killed during the New Zealand mosque mass shootings. Al Jazeera spoke to their family. pic.twitter.com/L0jc4pbG3T  Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 19, 2019

Others, such as Christchurch local and regular Al Noor attendee Ahmed Osman, said the event proved that Fridays gunman had failed to achieve his self-stated aim of sowing societal division.

The thing has happened but we will always be together  From now on we are going to be more supportive of each other and more together; we are looking forward now, Osman, whose uncle was among those killed on Friday, told Al Jazeera.

Today is a special day for our hearts  The people of Christchurch will stand together, he added.

New Zealanders in support

Thousands of non-Muslims attended the ceremony, forming a sea of silence behind the prayer areas while Muslims worshipped, close to a police cordon restricting access to the mosque.

Among them, many women of all backgrounds opted to wear headscarves in a show of solidarity with the Muslim community, which numbers no more than a few thousand locally and about 50,000 nationally.

Christchurch resident Jeanine Benson said she had chosen to wear the garment as a show of respect to the citys Muslims, adding it was important to come together as one in New Zealand.

I know everyone goes on about this [attack] isnt New Zealand, but this shouldnt happen anywhere, Benson told Al Jazeera.

I used to drive past this mosque [Al Noor] every single day going to work, and to think what happened there makes me feel physically ill, she added.

For everyone, this is not the end, this is just the start of a healing journey.





Mosques set to reopen

The gathering came after another victim of the shootings, which also saw the nearby Linwood mosque attacked, was laid to rest earlier on Friday.

At least 26 more burials were expected to take place later in the afternoon, Christchurch Council said in a statement.

Both the Linwood and Al Noor mosques are also expected to reopen on Saturday, a spokesperson for New Zealand Police told Al Jazeera.

[Both] have been restored and will be handed over to the community, the spokesperson said. The community will communicate their plans for prayers going forward.

A March for Love rally is also scheduled to take place in Christchurch on Saturday. Thousands of people are expected to attend.Dozens of victims of New Zealand mosque attacks laid to rest in Christchurch amid day of national mourning for the dead.

Christchurch, New Zealand  At first, the victims of last weeks Christchurch mosque attacks went to their graves in ones and twos.

From Wednesday onwards, bodies were slowly released from coroners to relatives eager to say a final goodbye to their loved ones.

But on Friday, shortly after the Muslim call to prayer sounded out across New Zealand, followed by a moment of silence, victims were laid to rest in a mass burial.

We have never had, in the history of New Zealand, such an incident, a speaker told an estimated 5,000 mourners, the equivalent of a tenth of the countrys total Muslim population, gathered in the late afternoon autumnal sunshine at Christchurchs New Park Cemetery.

We did not expect this, but it is not we who decide, it is [God]  [and] behind every decision of [God], there is a wisdom, the speaker said.

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At least 50 Muslim worshippers were killed on March 15, when Christchurchs Al Noor and Linwood mosques were targeted by a suspected white supremacist in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has branded a terrorist attack.

Overall, 41 victims were buried in the city this week, including the 26 who were laid to rest on Friday, with nine repatriated or taken elsewhere in New Zealand.

Mourners line route to graves

Inside the New Park Cemetery, the procession of the dead was relentless.

Community leaders overseeing the proceedings announced the names of the victims in batches, allowing for family members to collect bodies from a temporary marquee and carry them to a sprawling burial site on the other side of the cemetery.

Mourners eager to pay their respects gathered alongside a makeshift thoroughfare lining the families route. Some cried Allahu Akbar, or God is the greatest, as they walked; others wept in silence.

New Zealand has rarely seen public mourning of the kind witnessed since Fridays attack [Jorge Silva/Reuters]

Among the names called out in one clutch was three-year-old Mucaad Ibrahim, the youngest victim of the attack.

His uncle, Abdullah, said the pain of putting his baby nephew into the grave was unimaginable.

It is very sad to say goodbye to the little boy and to not see him again, Abdullah told Al Jazeera. He was new to this world.

190319104526942

Abdullah recalled how Mucaad loved the Al Noor mosque, where he was shot dead, and how he hoped his nephew would have grown up to be an imam.

We are upset  but our boy today, God willing, is in paradise, Abdullah said, adding he had been too distraught to help prepare Mucaads body for burial.

Father and son buried

Amid the movement of bodies, wisps of dust were whipped up by those filling the graves with soil from nearby mounds, which themselves towered above the row-upon-row of gaping holes in the earth.

Above them still sat the loudspeakers put in place across the burial site, which continued to reverberate with name-after-name of the dead.

Many victims were carried to the grave alongside flowers, flags or personal mementos [Edgar Su/Reuters]

Father and son Naeem Rasheed, 51, and Talha Naeem, 21, were two of them.

Covered with a customary white shroud, Pakistani-born Talha was draped in Pakistan and New Zealand flags for the journey before they were removed and he was buried on sand, as were all else.

Others were carried to the grave alongside flowers or personal mementos.

Forgiveness can bring hearts together

One of those laid to rest was Husna Ahmed, 45, who was shot dead at Al Noor mosque while trying to usher other women out.

Her husband, Farid, told Al Jazeera he had no hatred towards his wifes killer, suspected to be Australian-born Brenton Tarrant, as Islam had taught him to be compassionate.

About 5,000 people, equivalent to one-tenth of New Zealands total Muslim population, attended the burials [Jorge Silva/Reuters]

In the minutes before the massacre, 28-year-old Tarrant allegedly published a rambling, racist and overtly white-supremacist online manifesto, which called for violence against immigrants.

He is my human brother and he made a mistake and I pray for him that he will learn [from that], Farid said.

Forgiveness can bring hearts together, retribution doesnt.

Islamophobia kills

Earlier on Friday, Imam Gamal Fouda, prayer leader at Al Noor mosque and present during last weeks attack, told mourners in Christchurch he saw hatred and rage in the eyes of the terrorist who is alleged to have carried out the mass shooting.

In a speech to thousands gathered near the mosque for Friday prayers, Fouda warned, Islamophobia kills.





We call upon governments around the world including New Zealand and the neighbouring countries to bring an end to hate speech and the politics of fear, Fouda said.

The martyrdom of 50 people and the injury of 42 did not come overnight; it was the result of the anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim rhetoric of some political leaders, media agencies and others, he added.

Muslims have felt its pain before. It has killed people in Canada and it was used against us in Norway and against innocent people in the UK, USA, and other countries around the world.

On Friday, Christchurchs Muslim community felt that pain acutely once more.

190321021013662

Shortly after the final bodies were collected, at about 6pm, a small crowd of men gathered in one corner of the cemetery to pray as the sun slid down in the east.

One sported a New Zealand flag, draped over his shoulders and the upper reaches of his thobe.

Alongside him, his fellow worshippers knelt just metres from a pile of discarded, empty caskets which had minutes earlier housed so many of their friends and relatives on their final journey to the grave. Each unique, and yet the same.Many people here are subsistence farmers, whose food for the year ahead was destroyed by the cyclone and the ensuing floods.

The United Nations has described the floods in Southern Africa as hugely complex and has said it would require an even more complex response.

Devastation can be seen everywhere. Strong winds and heavy rains have destroyed houses and crops. About 15,000 people, many of them ill, are still stranded more than a week after cyclone Idai struck.

Al Jazeeras Malcolm Webb reports from one of the worst-hit areas  the Sussundenga district in western Mozambique  close to the border with Zimbabwe.Abhisit Vejjajiva told Al Jazeera his party, the countrys oldest, wants to move beyond the conflicts of the past.

Bangkok, Thailand  The leader of the Democrats wants Thailands oldest political party to be at the core of government after Sundays election, the first since the military seized control of the country in 2014 after months of street protests.

Abhisit Vejjajiva told Al Jazeera his party wants to move beyond the conflicts of the past and that a new civilian government would be able to make changes to the system put in place by the military under General Prayuth Chan-ocha.

The generals have introduced a new constitution, revised the electoral system and drawn up a 20-year development plan that is supposed to be followed by any new government. The measures, as well as the continued existence of repressive laws, are likely to ensure the militarys continued influence over Thai politics.

Prayuth is hoping to remain in power as a civilian prime minister.

Abhisit, who was prime minister with military backing in 2008 and was in charge during a bloody crackdown on protesters two years later, insists the Democrat Party has no interest in playing the role of kingmaker.

Al Jazeera: You have ruled out working with Prayuth, but you have indicated you are willing to work with Palang Pracharat, the military-backed political party. Explain your reasoning?





Abhisit Vejjajiva: When Prayuth is removed from the equation what you are left with would be a party of elected MPs. None of which will include any of the ministers of the current government. Thats why were not ruling out the possible talks with them because left to themselves these elected MPs can break away from being part of the current regime.

Al Jazeera: But given the way the constitution is structured and the 20-year plan, can anyone truly break away?

Abhisit Vejjajiva: In these days of very rapid change anyone who can stick to a 20-year plan without any flexibility must be fooling themselves. We are confident we can convince people when changes are necessary to the plan and if necessary we can amend the laws related to this matter. We shouldnt begin a new government by thinking what we cannot do. We should set out clearly what we need to do and try to achieve that. We believe the priorities now are to revive the economy quickly, to put in place changes that will equip Thailand to face technological disruptions, to handle an ageing society, to deal with structural inequality.

Al Jazeera: The Democrats are Thailands oldest political party, but this election has seen quite a buzz around Future Forward. How confident do you feel about Sunday?

Abhisit Vejjajiva: We welcome the competition. Thats what democracy is about isnt it? We offer not just a progressive platform economically and socially, but we also offer a platform that is not confrontational because want to get things done. I think Thailand has had enough of, shall we say, political grandstanding, that leads to conflicts. We have lost more than a decade in terms of opportunities because of the political conflicts. We need to move beyond that.

Al Jazeera: You say the point of conflict in Thailand is shifting. In what sense?

Abhisit Vejjajiva: The source of conflict in the past may be between supporters of different political parties, but its clear to us that the next source of conflict might come from the attempt, if seen by the public, of the current regime trying to extend their rule by unfair means. Thats what we need to be careful about. Put simply, elections needed to be free and fair and at the moment there is clearly different treatment that we get from the party that is supporting the current regime. So we dont want a government that is set up that is seen by the people to have taken advantage of these things because it could create dissatisfaction, even frustration and anger. And if even the senators are brought in to try to tip the balance of power that will fuel the kind of negative feeling even more.

Al Jazeera: So isnt the new constitution just a recipe for greater instability?

Abhisit Vejjajiva: Potentially, yes, and thats why we are offering a way out. We are saying why not support parties that will not support this new source of conflict, and also avoid the old conflicts where even elected governments come in, abuse power, get involved in corrupt practices, destroy the checks and balances and the faith that people have in the parliamentary system and then the whole system deteriorates to a point where a coup detat takes place. We need to avoid those pitfalls.

Al Jazeera: But arent the Democrats also part of that history?

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Abhisit Vejjajiva: Everybody is part of that history, even the new players because they were part of that political process also. Everybody needs to rethink, reassess, learn from the past and use that to move forward.

Al Jazeera: So how many seats do you think the Democrats can get on Sunday?

Abhisit Vejjajiva: Its difficult to work out because its a new system. We have to estimate the popular vote against the total number of votes and so on. But we hope to retain much of the support we had in 2011 despite increased competition. We would be happy with seats of around, say, round numbers, of 150.

Al Jazeera: The Democrats have been described as the kingmaker 

Abhisit Vejjajiva: Thats not what we want to be. We want to be at the core of the next government. We want to lead the country out of the current economic situation and into a new political era.

Al Jazeera: In view of that, given any government will require a coalition, could you, despite the past, work with Pheu Thai in the national interest?

Abhisit Vejjajiva: I think we need to preserve the trust of the people. If people feel politicians will do whatever is convenient just to gain power that doesnt serve the system well. Ive said for many years that if Pheu Thai would just step out of the shadow of the former prime minister [Thaksin Shinawatra] and convince us that they are going to work for the people rather than the interests of the few, then we are open to talks. But their recent actions over the past few months suggest they have not been able to do that.

Al Jazeera: But if the alternative were a military-style government?

Abhisit Vejjajiva: Its not. Its us at the core of the government. Thats what Im saying, which is why Im not interested in this kingmaker role. Neither side is offering a realistic chance for the country to move ahead.Turkish leader calls for fight against Islamophobia that is like the one against anti-Semitism after the Holocaust.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday called on the world to fight rising Islamophobia as they did against anti-Semitism after the Holocaust, following the attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand that killed 50 people.

Just as humanity fought against anti-Semitism after the Holocaust disaster, it should fight against rising Islamophobia in the same determined fashion, Erdogan told an emergency meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

In a speech at the meeting of Muslim foreign ministers in Istanbul, Erdogan also praised the sensitivity shown by the New Zealand government and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in the wake of the attack.

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The empathy and solidarity shown by Ardern towards Muslims should be an example for all world leaders, he said.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters reassured the gathering that Muslims living in the country would be safe and secure despite the deadly attacks in Christchurch.

Police stand guard at every mosque to ensure people can pray in peace. And theres an elevated police presence throughout the country. There are new strict gun control measures already announced and well confront the way that social media is used to spread vile hate, he said.

Sincere solidarity

Turkeys Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu praised New Zealand authorities and their sincere solidarity messages.

We are here to show we are one body against Islamophobic actions across the world, he said.

Erdogan, campaigning for local elections this month, has presented the attack as an assault on Islam and has demanded the West do more to counter Islamophobia.

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He has angered New Zealand by repeatedly showing a video made by the attacker during the Christchurch shootings.

Erdogan has also angered Australia with comments about anti-Muslim Australians being sent back in coffins like their grandfathers at Gallipoli, a World War I battle.

The accused gunman, a self-avowed white supremacist from Australia, livestreamed much of the attack and spread a manifesto on social media claiming it was an attack against Muslim invaders.Thousands of people evacuated as cyclones may cause widespread flooding in Northern Australia.

Two tropical cyclones, named Trevor and Veronica, are heading towards Northern Australia, one to the northeast and another to the northwest.

Tropical cyclone Trevor crossed northern Queensland four days ago and is now rapidly intensifying in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

A state of emergency has been declared in the Northern Territory and thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes.

The storm is expected to make landfall around 9:30am local time on Saturday (00:00 GMT) and batter northern coastline with winds gusting up to 275 kilometres an hour.

Trevor is a large cyclone, with destructive winds reaching 300km/h from its centre, so threatens a huge swath of the coastline. Mercifully this part of Australia is sparsely-populated.

Trevor is expected to remain at tropical cyclone strength for at least 24 hours after landfall, meaning communities situated hundreds of kilometres inland could also experience flooding and wind damage.

Evacuation centres have been set up in Darwin and Katherine for people who have been evacuated from the path of the cyclone.

Earlier on Friday, torrential rain in Darwin added to the misery and swamped a tent city set up for those at risk from the storm.

The other cyclone threatening the Australian coastline is Tropical Cyclone Veronica, which is currently a more powerful system. Veronica is still intensifying, but fortunately, it is expected to weaken slightly before it makes landfall on the coast of Western Australia.

However, when it hits land around 00:00 GMT on Sunday, it will still be a strong system with wind gusts of approximately 225km/h.

As the storm is moving incredibly slowly, it is expected to bring with it a huge storm surge. This is on top of the eight-metre waves that the system will be generating.

Coastal flooding is, therefore, a major concern, but so is flooding from the rain. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has forecast as much as 500mm rainfall is expected in some places.

The average rainfall for the entire year is 304mm, so this would be an exceptional amount of rain to a part of the coastline that is not equipped to deal with this amount of water.

Veronica is expected to land somewhere between the iron ore mining towns of Karratha and Port Hedland, where residents are currently sandbagging their homes and stockpiling provisions.

The Pilbara Ports Authority has cleared all large commercial vessels from harbours at Port Hedland, Ashburton and Port of Dampier.

Cyclones in Australias north are fairly common, but to have two such large cyclones to be making landfall in quick succession is rare. If both make landfall with gusts of over 225km/h (an Australian category 4), it would only be the second time in its history.Speaker of Ghanas Parliament, Professor Mike Aaron Ocquaye has once again expressed displeasure at the seeming lack of interest by Members of Parliament in the business of the legislative House.



According to him, the consistent poor attendance tells the public that MPs are not serious about the legislature and their work in the House.



The visibly unhappy Speaker met less than thirty MPs in the house when he entered the chamber this morning [Thursday].



I will pray that we take this obligation seriously, we have to take our nation seriously because it is by the combined effort of all of us doing our bit that there can be progress and development in our country, the Speaker admonished MPs.



It appears the practice of MPs not showing up in Parliament has been ongoing for some time now.



The First Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Joe Osei Owusu recently expressed similar concerns over the attendance of MPs.



He had earlier called on MPs to attach some urgency to the business of the House.



85 MPs absented themselves from parliament without permission  Report



Many have complained about some MPs seeming apathy to the work of Parliament as they continue to absent themselves for sittings.



Ministers of State who double as Members of Parliament were the worst culprits of absenteeism without permission during the First and Second sittings of the Seventh Parliament, 2017.



The Ministers, including deputies, absented themselves from at least 15 sittings without the permission of the Speaker of Parliament.



This was contained in a report by Odekro; a civil society organization focused on activities of the legislature.



According to the report, the guilty MPs consisted of 18 Ministers and 21 Deputy Ministers.



Speaker meets empty Parliament; scolds MPs for lateness



The Speaker of Parliament, Prof. Mike Oquaye, in October 2017 was angry at Members of Parliament for being late for meetings of the House.



His comments followed the presence of fewer than five MPs on their seats, at the time proceedings were scheduled to begin at 10:00 am.



Disappointed by the emptiness of the House, Prof. Oquaye rebuked the MPs and charged leaders of the House to get members on the floor to do business on time, saying the taxpayers do not expect lateness from them.



Our people who pay us expect that work should be done, so let us at least take the opportunity to see how we can contain the situation to ameliorate the problem rather than taking advantage of it and going home, he added.

Source: Today









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Featured VideoLocals have attributed the Tigris River accident to overcrowding, saying vessel only had a 50-passenger capacity.

Grief-stricken residents in Iraqs northern city of Mosul are demanding justice after the sinking of a ferry packed with families killed more 100 people, including children.

The vessel, which was carrying people celebrating both the Nowruz holiday and Mothers Day, capsized on Thursday in the Tigris River.

The number of casualties has risen to 103, while an estimated 50 more remain missing, Ghazwan al-Daoudi, a member of Ninevehs provincial council, told Anadolu Agency on Friday.

We believe the ferryboat was carrying about 200 passengers when it sank, he added.

In the early hours of Friday, local authorities said 55 survivors had been pulled from the river near Mosul, the regional capital of Nineveh province.

According to al-Daoudi, the council will convene an emergency session later in the day in which all those involved in the incident would be present.

Brought to justice

Earlier on Friday, relatives of the victims went to local hospitals to collect bodies of their loved ones in advance of funerals. Some chanted: No to corruption! and They are all thieves.

How can a ferry sail with no means of rescue available, asked Dalia Mahmoud, a woman who was standing outside the coroners office.

At the scene of the accident, where prayers were held for the dead, many said the disaster could have been avoided.

We want those responsible to be brought to justice, said Mohammed Adel, 27, whose father was among those who died. He accused officials of failing to enforce safety standards.

A relative of one of the victims who died after an overloaded ferry sank in Tigris river near Mosul, cries during his funeral at Mosul cemetery [Ari Jalal/Reuters]

PMs visit

Although no official statements have been issued regarding the cause of the accident, local residents have attributed it to overcrowding, saying the ferry only had a 50-passenger capacity.

After visiting the scene of the accident alongside President Barham Saleh, Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi declared three days of national mourning. He said the justice system must do its job and the investigation must produce results on the reasons for this shipwreck.

According to a statement released late Thursday by Iraqs Supreme Judicial Council, nine people have been detained so far in connection with the incident.

Meanwhile, witnesses told Anadolu Agency that angry local residents, including several relatives of the victims, chanted slogans and hurled shoes at Nineveh Governor Nofal al-Akoub following his arrival to the site of the ferryboat accident.

As al-Akoubs convoy attempted to flee the scene, two people  both relatives of the victims  were run over in the confusion, according to witnesses. The extent of their injuries remains unknown.

Calls for accountability

The spiritual leader of Iraqs Shia majority Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for accountability for those responsible for the sinking and urged officials whose ministries were linked to the tragedy to resign.

Al-Sistanis message was delivered by his representative Ahmed al-Safi in the Shia holy city of Karbala.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis sent a telegram of condolences to Iraqi authorities, expressing his prayerful solidarity with all those who lost loved ones.

The sinking of the ferry was a tragic blow to Mosul, Iraqs second-largest city that is still struggling to overcome the devastation wreaked by ISIL.

The armed group, also known as ISIS, captured Mosul it in the summer of 2014, making the city its main stronghold in Iraq. After US-backed Iraqi forces retook it three years later, in July 2017, much of Mosul was left in ruins.

We lost a lot because of Daesh and we will not accept to lose more, said Mahmoud, using an Arabic name to refer to ISIL.15,000 people, many of them ill, are still stranded more than a week after Cyclone Idai struck.

Residents of the Mozambican port city of Beira continue to desperately wait for aid in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai, as fears rose that the death toll could soar.

Beira, a low-lying city of 500,000 residents, was the worst hit by the tropical cyclone which struck with winds up to 170 kilometres per hour last Thursday, before moving inland to Zimbabwe and Malawi.

The situation in Beira was desperate as residents suffered shortages of food, water and other essentials one week after a devastating cyclone.

The number of deaths in Mozambique could be beyond the 1,000 predicted by the countrys president earlier this week, said Elhadj As Sy, the secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

In addition to worries about the number of dead, As Sy told The Associated Press news agency that the humanitarian need is great.





Al Jazeeras Fahmida Miller, reporting from Beira, said the rescue operations were ongoing but not at the pace that people want.

Aid agencies are doing whatever they can to help, but there are a number of challenges. Reaching some of the areas is very difficult because the area is just so vast.

The number one concern here is water; the water here has been contaminated. We expect that emergency personnel will continue to find the bodies of people in the water as well as of animals, so the need for [clean] water is very dire as well as food.

Simply horrendous

Rescue teams and the government were deciding how best to help them, she said, either by airlifting them to safety or dropping supplies.

As Sy described the situation as simply horrendous.

Three thousand people who are living in a school that has 15 classrooms and six, only six, toilets. You can imagine how much we are sitting on a water and sanitation ticking bomb.

Roads leading to Beira are damaged or washed away altogether which is complicating aid efforts [Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP]

The only reliable way into Beira is by air or boat. Roads and bridges have been washed away. Stranded cross-border truck drivers said they had been told that road repairs could take anything from 10 days to a month.

A worker at a Chinese firm rebuilding one route who did not want to be identified said progress was slow.

Thousands of people were making a grim voyage towards the city of Beira, which although 90 percent destroyed has become a centre for frantic rescue efforts throughout the region.

Some walked along roads carved away by the raging waters a week ago. Others, hundreds of them, were ferried in an extraordinary makeshift effort by local fishermen who plucked stranded people from small islands.

Death toll soars

The death toll in the three southern African countries had exceeded 500 by Thursday night. Mozambiques environment minister, Celso Correia, said 242 people have been confirmed dead in Mozambique.

Zimbabwes defence minister said more than 120 bodies had been washed into neighbouring Mozambique, where they had been buried, bringing the countrys total deaths to at least 259.

In Malawi, around 56 were known killed.

Around 15,000 people were still missing in Mozambique, Correia said late on Thursday.

Zimbabwe has declared two days of mourning beginning on Saturday.

Briefing his team late on Thursday night, Connor Hartnady, rescue operations task force leader for Rescue South Africa, said Beira residents were becoming fed up with shortages.

A handout photo made available by the NASA shows a Terra/MODIS satellite image of cyclone Idai as it hits Mozambique[EPA]

There have been three security incidents today, all food related, he told his team, without giving further details.

Cartnady also said a group of 60 people had been discovered trapped by flood water in an area north of Beira during a reconnaissance flight.

The storms torrential rains caused the Buzi and Pungwe rivers, whose mouths are in the Beira area, to burst their banks.

Most of the city remains without power.

Zimbabwes Ministry of Information said at least 30 students, two headmasters and a teacher from three schools were missing in the eastern region of the country.

In the capital Harare, there were shortages of diesel, leading to long queues following reports earlier this week that a control room for the pipeline in Beira that transports fuel to Zimbabwe had been damaged.The buses were carrying about 50 passengers each at the time of the crash in the Bono East region.

At least 60 people have been killed in a head-on collision between two buses in southern Ghana, police said.

The crash happened on Friday at about 2:00 am (0200 GMT) in the Bono East region, some 430km by road north of the capital, Accra.

The vehicles were travelling in separate directions when the collision occurred, police commander Joseph Antwi Gyawu told AFP news agency.

At least 60 people have been confirmed dead and one of the buses caught fire with the other seriously mangled, he added.

Each bus was carrying about 50 passengers at the time of the crash.

Emergency services were at the scene, including firefighters to put out the blazing vehicles.

Kwame Arhin, a doctor at the Kintampo Government Hospital, said 28 people were being treated for injuries.

Seven out of the 28 passengers who were rushed here are in critical condition, Arhin told AFP news agency.

We have referred four. Most of them had head injuries. Ive seen a few being taken to the morgue, he added.Chimanimani, Zimbabwe  A week since Cyclone Idai made landfall in eastern Zimbabwe, authorities and aid groups are stepping up relief efforts on the ground as the hardest-hit areas are slowly becoming more accessible.

The government and humanitarian agencies have dispatched food supplies and emergency response units in the region to assist thousands of people struggling to survive following the destructive storm.

As relief aid and medical and sanitation kits arrived in Chimanimani, a remote mountainous town that was unreachable by road until recently, hundreds of displaced residents took up refuge in a primary school, while others moved to the churches on higher ground for safety.

Jennifer Mahembe, one of those sheltering in one of the classrooms at Ngangu Primary School, said that since last Fridays storm, she had been unable to go back to her destroyed home.

My house is full of mud, everything sank in there and some of my property was taken by the rain, the 48-year-old told Al Jazeera.

I cant walk to my house, I want to go, but I cant. I stood in the water for too long so my legs hurt, she said.

Everything was buried in the mud. Even the clothes Im wearing are borrowed from other people and the blankets I use to sleep arent mine, I have nothing. We are not getting enough here, we have something but we need more, added Mahembe, expressing hope the inflow of aid would greatly improve the limited food rations.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Lindo Sithole, left, a volunteer doctor visit a patient injured in the cyclone at Chimanimani Rural District Hospital on Wednesday [Tendai Marima/Al Jazeera]

Along with Zimbabwe, Cyclone Idai has also affected Mozambique and Malawi, with the collective death toll extending into the hundreds. Numbers are expected to rise in all three southeastern African countries as flood waters recede and community efforts to recover bodies that may have been swept downstream intensify.

On Friday, Zimbabwes President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who visited the Chimanimani area on Wednesday, declared Saturday and Sunday as national days of mourning.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) has meanwhile warned that there is heightened potential for a communicable disease outbreak such as cholera or malaria in Zimbabwes cyclone-affected region, particularly in the Chimanimani area where the water supply system and power lines have been seriously damaged.

The UN is in the process of establishing temporary reception centres equipped with emergency medical supplies as well as primary healthcare kits in various areas of displaced groups.

Everything was taken

Rosa Mukamba, 72, said three of her relatives had been swept away by landslides, while she had been forced to seek refuge at a temporary centre at Skyline, a low-range mountain summit 20km from Chimanimani, because her belongings and medication were swept away by the muddy rains.

My children were taken by the water; their homes arent there more. Me I dont have anything so Im here, she said.

We have no fields left any more; our home, our pots, my pills, everything was taken.

Further away, at Chimanimani Rural District Hospital, volunteer doctor Lindo Sithole said water purification tablets and chronic medicines were in short supply.

Currently, we dont have drugs to treat people with chronic illnesses, but there are people with diabetes, high blood pressure or hypertension whose medicine got lost when their houses got flooded, he told Al Jazeera.

We dont have enough drugs to assist them.

Follow Tendai on Twitter and Instagram: @i_amtenIn first such step since US-North Korean summit failed last month, two Chinese companies are slapped with new sanctions.

The United States imposed sanctions on Thursday on two Chinese shipping companies it says helped North Korea evade sanctions over its nuclear weapons programme.

In the first such step since a US-North Korean summit collapsed last month, the Treasury Department also issued an updated advisory that listed 67 vessels that it said had engaged in illicit transfers of refined petroleum with North Korean tankers or were believed to have exported North Korean coal.

The department identified the newly sanctioned firms as Dalian Haibo International Freight Co Ltd and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co Ltd, which it said had helped North Korea evade international sanctions.

The move prohibits US dealings with the designated companies and freezes any assets they have in the country.

Washington announced the measures three weeks after a second meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un broke down over conflicting demands by North Korea for relief from sanctions and from the US side for Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons.

Washington has led international efforts to press North Korea through sanctions to give up its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.

The United States and our like-minded partners remain committed to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearisation of North Korea and believe that the full implementation of North Korea-related UN Security Council resolutions is crucial to a successful outcome, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.

Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk, he added.

China and UN resolutions

The latest sanctions showed there was some leakage in North Korea sanctions enforcement by China, but Beijing was mostly abiding by the UN resolutions, a senior US official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity, according to the Reuters news agency.

The official said that financial as well as shipping companies risked US action if they were found to be in violation of sanctions.

The official insisted, however, that Thursdays announcement was meant to maintain sanctions enforcement on North Korea rather than intensify the pressure.

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While declining to say whether Washington was trying to send a post-summit message to Pyongyang, the official said Trump has made clear that the door is wide open to continuing the dialogue with North Korea.

US-North Korean engagement has appeared to be in limbo since the February 27-28 summit in Hanoi, despite US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying on March 4 he was hopeful he could send a team to North Korea in the next couple of weeks.

Washington has said it aims to re-engage with Kim, but North Korea has warned it is considering suspending talks and may rethink a freeze on missile and nuclear tests in place since 2017 unless Washington makes concessions.The JKLF is the second separatist group to be banned by India this month in the disputed region.

Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir  Indias government has for the second time this month banned a top pro-independence organisation in Indian-administered Kashmir, accusing it of supporting extremism and militancy.

In a statement on Friday, the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs said the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was involved in anti-national and subversive activities intended to disrupt the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India.

JKLF is supporting and inciting claims for the secession of a part of the Indian territory from the Indian union and supporting terrorists and separatist groups fighting for this purpose, the statement said.

The ministry added that if JKLFs activities were not curbed, it was likely that the group would continue advocating the secession of the state of Jammu and Kashmir from the Union of India.

The central government is of the opinion that having regard to the activities of JKLF, it is necessary to declare the JKLF to be an unlawful association with immediate effect.

The group was banned under an anti-terror law for a period of five years.

Its leader, Yasin Malik, was arrested last month and charged on March 8 under the Public Safety Act (PSA), which stipulated that a person can be jailed for up to two years without bail.

Regional tensions

The move on Friday followed a ban imposed in the first week of March on Jamaat-e-Islami, a socioreligious political organisation in the disputed region. More than 300 of the groups leaders have been arrested.

The crackdown on the separatist groups, which demand an independent state or a merger with Pakistan, comes after a suicide attack on a convoy of Indian paramilitary troops in which 42 of them were killed.

The February attack, which was claimed by the Pakistani-based rebel group Jaish-e-Muhammad, escalated tensions between India and Pakistan.

India accuses JKLF of supporting terrorism [File: Danish Ismail/Reuters]

Though the situation calmed down after days of rising tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, deadly violence has continued in Kashmir.

At least five fighters and a 12-year-old boy have been killed in three separate gun battles across the region since Thursday.

Cannot be silenced

Originally founded in the 1970s, the JKLF has repeatedly called for the independence of Jammu and Kashmir.

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In 1988, as scores of youngsters from Indian-administered Kashmir crossed the border to get arms training in Pakistan, JKLF was one of the first groups to start an armed campaign in the disputed territory.

In 1994, the JKLF disbanded its military wing, with Malik committing himself to a political struggle to achieve independence for the entire region of the former princely state.

In comments made to Al Jazeera, a senior JKLF leader condemned the ban and accused India of seeking excuses to unleash terror on people.

They are looking for small reasons to jail us for years. Everyone cannot be silenced. In the 1990s, too, we faced all kinds of situations, including the worst torture, the leader said on condition of anonymity.

The authorities are likely to seal the office of the group, located in the main city of Srinagar.

Open prison

Mehbooba Mufti, the former chief minister of the state, criticised the ban and said, It will turn Kashmir into an open-air prison.

Yasin Malik renounced violence as a way of resolving J&K issue a long time ago, she said in a tweet. What will a ban on his organisation achieve? Detrimental steps like these will only turn Kashmir into an open-air prison.

A senior separatist leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, also denounced the ban, saying that such anti-Kashmir tactics will not change the reality of the Kashmir issue not the urgency to resolve it.Airline says it has lost trust and no longer has confidence in the model after two deadly crashes in five months.

Indonesias national carrier Garuda has told Boeing it will cancel a multibillion-dollar order for 49 Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets after two fatal crashes involving the plane, in what is believed to be the first formal cancellation of the troubled model.

We have sent a letter to Boeing requesting that the order be cancelled, Garuda spokesman Ikhsan Rosan said.

The reason is that Garuda passengers in Indonesia have lost trust and no longer have the confidence in the plane, he said, adding the airline was awaiting a response from Boeing.

Boeing officials will visit Indonesia next week to discuss Garudas plans to call off the order.

Garuda already received one of the planes, Rosan said, part of a 50-aircraft order worth $4.9bn at list prices when it was announced in 2014.

The airline is also talking to Boeing about whether to return the plane it has received, the spokesman said.

The carrier has so far paid Boeing about $26m, while the companys head told Indonesian media outlet Detik it would consider switching to a new version of the single-aisle jet.

In principle, its not that we want to replace Boeing, but maybe we will replace [these planes] with another model, Garuda Indonesia director I Gusti Ngurah Askhara Danadiputra told Detik.





Probably not the last

Shukor Yusof, head of Malaysia-based aviation consultancy Endau Analytics, said Garudas announcement appeared to mark the first formal plans by a carrier to cancel an order for the 737 MAX 8.

[It] will probably not be the last. There is a risk that Garudas rival Lion Air, which also has many 737 MAX 8 orders, might make the same decision, he said.

That is a risk. This has been made public by the Lion Air CEO. He stated publicly that he is considering a cancellation.

He added it was difficult to predict whether more major carriers would follow suit.

There are many unanswered questions and each airline has specific needs, Yusof said. Each airline needs to deliberate how they want to strategise their fleet management.

This month, Lion Air said it was postponing delivery of four of the jets after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board.

Budget carrier Lion  Southeast Asias biggest airline by fleet size and a major Boeing customer  said the planes had been on order for delivery this year, but the company was re-evaluating the situation.

Lion Air operates 10 Max 8 jets, part of a then-record $22bn order from Boeing made in 2011.

The airlines are the only two that use the Max 8 in Indonesia.

Erratic descents

The Ethiopian tragedy came after a Lion Air jet of the same model crashed in Indonesia in October, killing all 189 people on board.





Both planes reportedly experienced erratic steep climbs and descents as well as fluctuating airspeeds before crashing shortly after take-off.

Investigators have honed in on an automated anti-stalling system introduced on the plane, which is designed to point the nose of the plane downward if it is in danger of stalling.

The development comes as the American manufacturer struggles to cope with the fallout from the two crashes, which have cast a spotlight on the safety certification process and shaken confidence in a plane that is crucial to its future plans.US Defense Department tells Trump ISIL no longer holds any territory in Syria, a White House spokeswoman says.

The US Defense Department said on Friday that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) no longer holds any territory in Syria, according to a White House spokeswoman.

US Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan briefed President Donald Trump as he was travelling to Florida on Air Force One, spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

She said that the territorial caliphate has been eliminated in Syria. Responding to a question regarding whether the armed groups territory had been 100 percent eliminated, Sanders said Yes.

She directed other questions regarding the announcement to the Pentagon.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has not commented on the White Houses announcement.

On Friday, Mustafa Bali, the head of the SDF media office said on Twitter that heavy fighting continued around Baghouz to finish off whatever remains of ISIS.

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The SDF has been battling for weeks to defeat ISIL in Baghouz in southeastern Syria at the Iraqi border. It was all that remained of the territory the armed group ruled, which once spanned a third of Syria and Iraq.

A Reuters journalist in Baghouz could hear air raids there on Friday afternoon and saw smoke rising.

ISIL not gone

Al Jazeeras Alan Fisher, reporting from Washington, DC, said that difficulty, however, is that ISIL hasnt gone away and everyone knows that.

Trump will undoubtedly get the victory that he wanted  but the group hasnt gone away, Fisher said.

Shortly after Sanders made the comments to reporters, Trump tweeted, ISIS uses the internet better than almost anyone, but for all of those susceptible to ISIS propaganda, they are now being beaten badly at every level.

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Trump had been teasing Fridays announcement for days. On Wednesday, he said the group would be gone by tonight, showing reporters two maps that he claimed to show the reduction of ISILs territory since he was elected president in 2016.

In December, Trump unexpectedly announced that he was pulling all 2,000 American troops out of Syria, declaring that ISIL had been defeated.

He walked back that announcement, however, as military generals and politicians expressed fear that such a move would allow the group to re-emerge. He was then persuaded to leave about 400 troops in Syria.Ministry of Health says 62 Palestinians also wounded by Israeli forces in 51st weekly protest in besieged enclave.

Two Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli forces during the weekly Friday protests in the besieged Gaza Strip, according to officials.

Ashraf al-Qidra, spokesperson for the health ministry, said the two male demonstrators  aged 18 and 29 -were shot in separate incidents near the Israeli fence east of the Gaza Strip.

Jihad Harara was shot in the head east of Gaza City, while the older man, Nidal Shatat, was hit in the chest near the al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, al-Qidra wrote on Twitter.

At least 62 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli forces, al-Qidra said, adding that there were at least three instances in which medical personnel and ambulances were directly targeted by Israeli tear gas at the encampments set up along the fence.

Ali Jadallah, an Anadolu Agency photojournalist, was reportedly among those wounded and was transferred at a nearby hospital for treatment.

The Israeli army did not comment on the deaths but said approximately 9,500 rioters and demonstrators gathered in various locations, hurling explosive devices, hard objects and rocks at troops.

Troops were firing in accordance with standard operating procedures, a spokeswoman said.

Use of excessive force

Also on Friday, the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned Israels apparent intentional use of unlawful lethal and other excessive force against civilian protesters in Gaza, and called for perpetrators of violations in the enclave to face justice.

On the final day of a four-week session, the Geneva-based forum adopted a resolution on accountability, brought by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation. The measure was backed by 23 states in favour, with eight voting against and 15 abstaining. One delegation was absent.

The resolution called for cooperating with a preliminary examination opened by the International Criminal Court in 2015 into alleged Israeli human rights violations.

The measure was based on a report by a UN inquiry which said that Israeli security forces may have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in killing 189 Palestinians and wounding more than 6,100 at weekly protests last year.

The targeting of civilians is a serious matter that should not be condoned, Ibrahim Khraisi, Palestines ambassador said, citing the reports findings. The toll included 35 Palestinian children, two journalists and medical workers, he added.

More than 250 protesters have been killed since Palestinians began holding regular demonstrations along the Gaza-Israel buffer zone in March of last year.

Demonstrators demand the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in historical Palestine from which they were ethnically cleansed from in 1948 to make way for the new state of Israel.

They also demand an end to Israels 12-year blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has gutted the coastal enclaves economy and deprived its roughly two million inhabitants of many basic commodities.After years of imprisonment, Anwar Ibrahim has made a political comeback in his newly formed coalition with Malaysias current Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad  who supported Anwars first conviction and imprisonment.

Mahathir led them to election victory in May.

The 71-year-old Anwar, who was pardoned of a sodomy conviction that put him behind bars for a third time in 2015, is the designated successor to Mahathir.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Anwar talked about the new era of governance after his return, the importance of free media, and the $250bn debt that Malaysia has incurred.

Al Jazeera: What is it that you are offering to Malaysians?

Anwar Ibrahim: We need to focus on the economy of the country so to ensure that there is fair distribution and also look particularity at the poor and marginalised.

Al Jazeera: You were sacked by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, but you did a deal to work with him. How do you trust him?

Anwar Ibrahim: I have worked extremely well him recently and fought hard against him as well. But at one point we realised that we were struggling because of the decline in our economy and essentially a very corrupt system. We both felt the interest of the nation so we agreed that we should be prepared to work together for a common cause.

Two considerations: number one in our work, of course, there has some level of trust, and I have no reason to doubt or question his goodwill. We have extremely good rapport, we meet casually every week, at times even twice a week. And secondly the ruling coalition has made it very clear that its not Anwars or Dr Mahathirs decision, its the decision of the ruling coalition based on the mandate given during the last elections.

The mandate that was given was that Dr Mahathir will assume the premiership, after which Anwar will take over for the rest of the term until the next elections where the people will finally decide.

We need to focus on the economy of the country so to ensure that there is fair distribution, Anwar says [Sorin Furcoi/Al Jazeera]





Al Jazeera: What is that common cause?

Anwar Ibrahim: We have spelt that out in a common platform, a manifesto, on what we term as a democratic transition: free media, independent judiciary, political leaders with integrity and institutions to combat corruption and abuse of power. These are the guidelines that both Dr Mahathir and myself and the party and the coalition have agreed to do and to be fair to Mahathir, he has undertaken that responsibility in this new term to affect these changes and the reform we have agreed upon, although I must concede it will certainly take some time because the country has been used to the same system of the past 60 years.

Al Jazeera: How would you define free media for Malaysia?

Anwar Ibrahim: By free media I mean not to be condescending that the leaders know best and extend that with corruption and abuse power. So free media to my mind, of course, means a responsible media, which means certain rules which they have to observe, but this doesnt have to be decided by the ruling power. Instead, it should be through an ethics committee run both by the media and authorities.

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So free media certainly means that people will have to speak up their mind where they are able to express their agreement or disagreement with the policies and the government. So to put those in power in strict scrutiny and check whether the judiciary is truly independent, or if the political powers are making decisions based on their interest.

Al Jazeera: Tell us about your recent visit to the United States?

Anwar Ibrahim: I had a session with World Movement for Democracy and Islamic Cultural Center of New York, and of course took the opportunity to express my take on number of issues, including democratic transition in the Muslim world, whether Islam is compatible to democracy, the rise of Islamophobia in the West. And I am pleased because these exchanges are important.

Al Jazeera: In relation to your answer, what do you think about New Zealands worst-ever attack that killed 50 people in two mosques?

Anwar Ibrahim: I concur fully with the New Zealand prime minister [Jacinda Ardern], it is important to call a spade, a spade. If it is terrorism it is not only confined to Muslims or the developing countries. It can also [be] perpetrated by the white supremacy and this has been an ongoing trend. The victims are not only the Muslims in the mosque, its the Sikhs in gurdwaras and Christians in church. But the West has been rather muted on this new trend although we have seen such a rise in racism in Europe, and of course the Islamophobia and [white] supremacists in the US.

So we must clearly attribute to a particular trend and ideology which is against mainly Muslims and also the migrants. What the New Zealand authority has done must be fully supported.

Al Jazeera: Can you tell us a bit about your stance on Malaysias foreign policy, including how you would finance the countrys under-resourced military to address security challenges.

Anwar Ibrahim: Well, this is the same leadership with the same platforms and some of my colleagues are in the government, so I am not departing from what is generally a known policy. The emphasis may differ, the focus may change, otherwise, we conform to what has been agreed upon.

On foreign policy, we embark on a very aggressive diplomatic stance and not necessarily considering military strength, while we should do what we can to strengthen and to make the armed forces more efficient and strategic, we cannot embark on a massive militarisation because the country cannot afford it.

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Al Jazeera: The agreement you reached with Dr Mahathir was that he would become the prime minister if your coalition won the elections of 2018. What is the clear plan of succession between you and Mahathir?

Anwar Ibrahim: Dr Mahathir as announced repeatedly that he must not stay beyond two year and for now we should give him the space and latitude to govern and in the right occasion I will inshallah assume office.

Al Jazeera: What will be the new era of politics after you assume premiership?

Anwar Ibrahim: It is a much difficult time now because its an immediate transition, I will certainly have to continue that reform agenda that Dr Mahathir has began. I dont foresee many radical departure from what was agreed upon because he is acting upon what was agreed upon in the manifesto in the ruling coalition.

Al Jazeera: What is the latest on the massive $250bn debt that Malaysia has incurred in the scandal?

Anwar Ibrahim: We will have to mend the economy, attract foreign investment, and ensure we are more efficient but at the same time we cannot afford to ignore the concerns and difficulties encountered by the masses, so it is very precarious position that we are in now, but I think given the problem or predicament of the president I think we are able to shoulder on and navigate and I just hope things will be much better in the next one or two years.

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Some cases are in the court, trial will commence next month, on the 1MDB funds we are working with the department justice US, Switzerland and other international authorities to get back some of the losses but I dont think we can get everything back but we are determined to get major portion back.

Al Jazeera: What do you think about a diverse political structure, racially inclusive?

Anwar Ibrahim: It has been quiet inclusive, we have a Malay deputy prime minister, Chinese finance minister, and Christian chief judge. I mean, finance is the most important portfolio other than the PM and that goes to the Chinese and minister of communication with digital economy goes to a Sikh. So thats Malaysia  its a multi-racial country.

Al Jazeera: How does it feel like to be free?

Anwar Ibrahim: Ecstatic! To taste freedom, only when you have been unfree either in prison or denied basic freedom for you to appreciate the meaning and value of freedom. For me, I rejoice this. One cannot imagine the situation where you cannot eat what you want, wear what you want, sleep when you want, you are denied access to your family your loved ones, so freedom means a lot.National Organizer of the New Patriotic Party,(NPP) Sammy Awuku says his association with Bright Ernest Akomeah aka Double does not disqualify him from being employed into the National Security or anywhere his services will be needed.



He confirms that he has known Double for a long time because he (Sammy Awuku) lived in the same area with Double.



The NPPs National Organizer was speaking in an interview with some Journalists in Bolgatanga, after the launch of the Upper East Regional Youth Wing of the NPP.



Bright Ernest Akomeah aka Double is said to have led some National Security operatives connected to the violence that erupted at the Ayawaso West Wuogon Constituency in the Greater Accra Region, during the recent by-election, which the NPPs candidate, Lydia Alhassan won.



The action of the said National Security operatives and the related violence have widely been condemned, thereby necessitating the formation of a Commission of Inquiry to find out what really happened.



According to Sammy Awuku, Double despite being his friend may have been recruited into the National Security because he qualified to be and not because he was he(Sammy Awuku) friend.



Mr. Awuku said even though they have been friends for almost 10 years, he realized that Double distanced himself from him(Sammy Awuku), after he was recruited into the National Security.



because you are known to be Sammys friend you shouldnt be given employment; it doesnt make sense. He said.



Touching on how Double qualified to be recruited into the National Security from being a mobile phone dealer, Sammy Awuku said, it is an act of naivety and gross ignorance on the part of the people who think the fact that you sell mobile phone you cant be an operative or be recruited into the National Security. Let me tell you, National Security recruits all manner of persons; its all about the kind of task you want the operative to do for you. Its all about intelligence gathering.



On the recent invasion of the office of the Criminal Investigations Department of the Ghana Police Service by members of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) for the release of their National Chairman, Samuel Ofosu Ampofo, the NPP National Organiser, Sammy Awuku said the action of the Police towards the NDC supporter was charitable.

Source: Daily Guide









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Featured VideoMueller concludes probe into whether Trumps campaign conspired with Russia to try to influence the 2016 US election.

US Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday turned over his long-awaited final report on the contentious Russia investigation that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trumps presidency, entangled Trumps family and resulted in criminal charges against some of the presidents closest associates.

The report, still confidential, marks the end of Muellers probe but sets the stage for big public fights to come. The next steps are up to Trumps attorney general and Congress, as well as potentially the federal courts.

The Justice Department said Mueller delivered his final report to Attorney General William Barr and officially concluded his probe of Russian election interference and possible coordination with Trump associates.

Mueller had been examining since 2017 whether Trumps campaign conspired with Moscow to try to influence the 2016 presidential election and whether the Republican president later unlawfully tried to obstruct his investigation.

Trump has denied collusion and obstruction, repeatedly calling the investigation a witch-hunt. Russia has denied election interference.

Let it come out, let people see it

Barr released a letter on Friday noting his plans to write his own account of Muellers findings.

The White House released a statement saying it had not seen or been briefed on the document. Barr said he could release his account to Congress as soon as this weekend.

Next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, said White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

Trump said earlier this week that he does not mind if the public is allowed to see the report.

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Let it come out, let people see it, Trump said. Lets see whether or not its legit, he added.

The mere delivery of a confidential report set off immediate demands, including in the Democratic-led House of Representatives, for the full release of Muellers findings.

Barr, a Trump appointee, has said he wants to make it as much public as possible, and any efforts to withhold details will prompt a tussle between the Justice Department and politicians who may subpoena Mueller and his investigators to testify before Congress. Such a move by Democrats would likely be vigorously contested by the Trump administration.

The House voted 420-0 last week on a nonbinding resolution calling for Muellers report to be released both to Congress and to the public, but it is not clear how the measure will fare in the Senate.

Key questions

With no details released at this point, its not known whether Muellers report answers the core questions of his investigation: Did Trumps campaign collude with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 presidential election in favour of the celebrity businessman? Also, did Trump take steps later, including by firing his FBI director, to obstruct the probe?





But the delivery of the report does mean the investigation has concluded without any public charges of a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, or of obstruction by the president.

Its unclear what steps Mueller will take if he uncovered what he believes to be criminal wrongdoing by Trump, in light of Justice Department legal opinions that have held that sitting presidents may not be indicted.

The conclusion of Muellers investigation does not remove legal peril for the president. Trump faces a separate Justice Department investigation in New York into hush money payments during the campaign to two women who say they had sex with him years before the election.

He has also been implicated in a potential campaign finance violation by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who says Trump asked him to arrange the transactions. Federal prosecutors, also in New York, have been investigating foreign contributions made to the presidents inaugural committee.

Thirty-four people charged

Mueller will not recommend any further indictments in the Russia investigation, the Associated Press news agency reported, citing a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorised to speak publicly about the confidential recommendation.

No matter the findings in Muellers report, however, the investigation has already illuminated Russias assault on the US political system, painted the Trump campaign as eager to exploit the release of hacked Democratic emails and exposed lies by Trump aides aimed at covering up their Russia-related contacts. Over the 21-month investigation, Mueller has brought charges against 34 people, including six aides and advisers to the president, and three companies.

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The special counsel brought a sweeping indictment accusing Russian military intelligence officers of hacking Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clintons campaign and other Democratic groups during the 2016 election. He charged another group of Russians with carrying out a large-scale social media disinformation campaign against the American political process that also sought to help Trump and hurt Clinton.

Closer to the president, Mueller secured convictions against a campaign chairman who cheated banks and dodged his taxes, a national security adviser who lied about his Russian contacts and a campaign aide who misled the FBI about his knowledge of stolen emails.

Cohen, the presidents former lawyer, pleaded guilty in New York to campaign finance violations arising from the hush money payments and in the Mueller probe to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. Another Trump confidant, Roger Stone, is awaiting trial on charges that he lied about his pursuit of Russian-hacked emails ultimately released by WikiLeaks. Its unclear whether any of the aides who have been convicted, all of whom have pleaded guilty and cooperated with the investigators, might angle for a pardon. Trump has left open the idea of pardons.

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Shifting goalpost

Along the way, Trump lawyers and advisers repeatedly evolved their public defences to deal with the onslaught of allegations from the investigation. Where once Trump and his aides had maintained that there were no connections between the campaign and Russia, by the end of the probe, Trumps lawyer Rudy Giuliani was routinely making the argument that even if the two sides did collude, it was not necessarily a crime. The goalpost shifting reflected the administrations challenge in adopting a singular narrative to fend off allegations.

Equally central to Muellers work is his inquiry into whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation. Since the special counsels appointment in May 2017, Trump has increasingly tried to undermine the probe by calling it a witch-hunt and repeatedly proclaiming there was no collusion with Russia. But Trump also took certain acts as president that caught Muellers attention and have been scrutinised for possible obstruction.

One week before Muellers appointment, Trump fired James Comey as FBI director, later saying he was thinking of this Russia thing at the time.

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He strongly criticised then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing from the Russia investigation two months before Mueller was named special counsel, a move that left the president without a perceived loyalist atop the probe. And he helped draft a misleading statement on Air Force One as a Trump Tower meeting between his eldest son and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was about to become public.

The meeting itself became part of Muellers investigation, entangling Donald Trump Jr in the probe. Muellers team also interviewed the presidents son-in-law, Jared Kushner, multiple times.

Even as Trump blasted Muellers team, the White House and the campaign produced thousands of documents for the special counsel, and dozens of his aides were interviewed. The president submitted written answers to Mueller regarding the Russia investigation, but he refused to be interviewed.

Mueller was appointed in May 2017 with widespread bipartisan backing in Congress, four months into Trumps turbulent presidency. Mueller has previously held several senior positions in the Justice Department, including the FBI director.Raut, who had been campaigning for the secession of Madhes region, has signed a deal with the government.

A prominent secessionist leader from Nepal earlier this month agreed to give up his demands for an independent Madhes state, averting the chances of conflict in the countrys south.

Chandra Kant Raut signed an 11-point agreement with the government led by the Nepal Communist Party (NCP), pledging to honour the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country.

Raut-led Alliance for Independent Madhes has been running a campaign for an independent state for the historically marginalised people from the southern region, also known as Terai, bordering India.

In return, the government headed by Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli has committed to dropping all charges against Raut, who was released from jail a day before the signing of the deal, whose details have not been made public.

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Raut, who has been in and out of jail a dozen times on charge of anti-state activities, denounced violence and agreed to join mainstream politics in a major boost to the Oli government that has faced peoples discontent from the southern region.

The Madhesi people, who have been underrepresented in Nepali state structures, have accused the northern hilly people of discrimination.

No ground for separatist movement

Part of the southern region was given to Nepal by the British colonial rulers in the 19th century.

There is no ground for separatist movement in Nepal. The government offered him to surrender at once, he needs to support the sovereignty and integrity of the country, Deputy Prime Minister and Health Minister Upendra Yadav told Al Jazeera.

We are watching carefully to note whether or not he will follow the agreement.

Raut had campaigned against the state, accusing it of racial discrimination against Madhesi people. With a deep attachment to Madhesi issues, he returned to Nepal in 2011 from the United States where he worked as a scientist.

Analysts say the agreement might help Raut to establish his own political party, and if he does, he might strengthen Madhesi movement.

In 2007, people in the Terai region launched an agitation demanding proportional representation system and federalism. The agitation ended after their demands, including recognition of Madhesi culture and language, were accepted.

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 championing the rights of Madhes would be one of the main political agendas among others, Bhaskar Gautam, a political scientist associated with North South Collectives, a centre for social and policy research, told Al Jazeera.

One of the main agendas for Madhesi parties has been the amendment of the constitution passed in 2015 as part of Nepals democratic transition following the end of the decade-long civil war in 2006.

Constitution amendment

Nepal adopted its first democratic constitution in 2015, which saw the unitary state divided into seven provinces.

The Madhesi groups and an indigenous group, Tharu, rejected the constitution, saying the provincial divisions should be based on the ethnic populations spread east to west. The promises made to the Madhesi groups in 2007 were watered down, sparking fresh protests.

Constitution amendment in Madhes is a genuine call. Recently, Madhes-based political parties have instrumentalised this call mainly to gain power, thus making the call weaker and without significant organised voices to back it up, Gautam said.

But Vijay Kant Karna, a political science professor at Tribhuvan University in the capital, Kathmandu, says the agreement between Raut and the government has nothing to do with the issue of Madhes or Madhesis.

The agreement was done in prison under threat. He also had personal pressure regarding his family and future. He signed it to escape imprisonment of 10 to 20 years, Karna, a former ambassador of Nepal to Denmark, told Al Jazeera.

Anti-national

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The deal is silent on discontent and constitutional issues, Karna, who is in possession of the agreement, said.

Madhesi parties refused to accept the constitution and protested against [it]. The people of Madhes have raised these issues since many years through several phases of movement. It doesnt even talk about the demand of autonomous Madhes and Tharuhat.

Some opposition parties have condemned the deal calling it anti-national.

The agreement reached by the government with CK Raut is seen to support a cessationist, Sher Bahadur Deuba, the president of the main opposition Nepali Congress, said at a press conference last week in the tourist city of Pokhara.

Such agreement poses a risk to the nations unity.

Raut, who holds a PhD degree from Cambridge University, has announced the formation of his own political group  the Janamat Party (Referendum Party)  which will continue its struggle to safeguard the rights of the people in line with the constitution of Nepal.

Will he be able to help the Madhesi cause  something other mainstream parties have failed to achieve so far?

He would try to establish a party in Madhes to vouch for the rights of Madhes. However, this agreement between him and the government is not going to benefit Madhes.

There is a strong suspicion that he has surrendered to the government, Karna said.They thought Brexit could protect them from new waves of immigration, but now, want to change their minds.

The UKs second largest city voted to leave the EU by a tiny margin and remains divided over Brexit.

Now, people on both sides of the debate say theyre disappointed with the countrys politicians.

Al Jazeeras Neave Barker reports from Birmingham, where many from the large South-Asian community that initially backed Brexit are now changing their minds.Weeks after Kim-Trump summit ended without agreement, Pyongyang abandons the liaison office in Kaesong.

North Korea has pulled out its staff from an inter-Korean liaison office, according to the South Korean officials, weeks after leader Kim Jong Uns summit with US President Donald Trump ended without agreement.

Chun Hae-sung, South Koreas unification minister, said that Pyongyang informed Seoul of its decision during a meeting at the liaison office at the North Korean border town of Kaesong on Friday.

The decision had been taken in accordance with an order from an upper command, he said, adding: They said they didnt care whether we stayed at the liaison office or not.

It was not clear whether North Koreas withdrawal of staff would be temporary or permanent.

Chun told reporters that South Korea plans to continue to staff the Kaesong liaison office normally and that it expects the North will continue to allow the South Koreans to commute to the office.

He said Seoul plans to staff the office with 25 people on Saturday and Sunday.

We regret the Norths decision, Chun said.

It was not clear whether North Koreas move would be permanent [Korea Pool/Getty Images]

The office was opened in September as the two Koreas knitted closer ties.

It is the first such Korean office since the peninsula was split into a US-backed, capitalistic South and a Soviet-supported, socialist North in 1945.





The Koreas had previously used telephone and fax-like communication channels that were often shut down in times of high tension.

The town is where the Koreas now-stalled jointly run factory complex was located.

It combined South Korean initiatives, capital and technology with North Koreas cheap labour.

Both Koreas want the US to allow sanctions exemptions to allow the reopening of the factory park, which provided the North with much-needed foreign currency.

Last month, the second US-North Korea summit in Vietnam collapsed due to disputes over US-led sanctions on the North.

In his New Year speech  a key political event in the North  Kim had said without giving details that Pyongyang might see a new way for defending the sovereignty of the country and the supreme interests of the state if the US persisted with sanctions.Prosur will replace Unasur, which fell apart last year following divisions over how to address the Venezuela crisis.

A group of South American leaders have signed a declaration creating a regional bloc of nations that they say is open to any country, regardless of ideology, to collaborate on solving regional problems.

Presidents from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru attended a summit on Friday in Santiago, Chile where the declaration was signed.

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera and Colombias Ivan Duque had led the push for the new political grouping after more than half the members of the previous regional bloc, Unasur, left last year, saying it had failed to take action on Venezuela.

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The new seven-nation bloc, known as Prosur will have a firm and clear commitment to democracy, freedom and a respect for human rights, according to Pinera who spoke at a press conference during the summit.

In a tweet on Friday, Pinera said the forum would allow South American countries to move together towards better freedom, integration and development.

Damos inicio a #Prosur, un foro sin ideologia ni burocracia, pero con total compromiso con la libertad, democracia y DDHH, para q los paises de Sudamerica podamos dialogar, colaborar y hacer escuchar nuestra voz y avanzar juntos hacia una mayor libertad, integracion y desarrollo. pic.twitter.com/UzsmfpWDb9  Sebastian Pinera (@sebastianpinera) March 22, 2019

TRANSLATION: We are starting #Prosur, a forum without ideology or bureaucracy, but with total commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights, so that South American countries can have dialogue, collaborate and make our voice heard to move together towards better freedom, integration and development.

The Venezuela question

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was not among the leaders invited to meet in Santiago on Friday, prompting some leaders to criticise the organisers who invited Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido instead.

Guaido is recognised by all of Prosurs members and several other countries as Venezuelas legitimate interim-president until new elections can be held, following the controversy surrounding the reelection of Maduro in May 2018. Guaido declared himself interim president in January in a move Maduro described as an attempted coup.





Guaido did not attend the summit, nor send a representative as had been expected.

Also absent were Bolivian President Evo Morales  a close ally of Maduro  and Uruguays President Tabare Vazquez. Uruguay had, along with Mexico been urging regional powers to work with the Maduro administration to find a solution to Venezuelas multiple crises, but changed gear in February, calling for new elections.

Al Jazeeras Lucia Newman, reporting from Santiago, said Prosur was already facing criticism from some who see it as a right-wing rebranding of Unasur.

There are a lot of people of think that the point of Prosur, at least in the short term, is to be yet another forum, another mechanism for putting pressure on Maduro and forcing him out of power.

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A lot of people who are even critical of Maduro say that this organisation, rather than favouring and defending multilateralism, seems to be playing into this new right-wing populist wave in the region, she said. They say it must be pluralistic because governments change, but institutions should not.

Unasur was created in 2008 when the leftist populism advocated by Maduros predecessor Hugo Chavez was at its strongest in South America, but in recent years, the bloc has been paralysed by divisions as centre-right governments have risen to power.It says Trumps stand shows blind bias of the US towards Israel and vows to recognise sovereignty over Golan Heights.

Syria has condemned US President Donald Trumps statement that it is time to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, while its close military ally Russia said changing the status of the territory would violate the United Nations agreements.

Syrian state news agency SANA cited a foreign ministry source on Friday as saying Trumps statement showed the blind bias of the United States towards Israel.

It did not change the reality that the Golan Heights was and will remain Syrian, Arab, the source said.

The Syrian nation is more determined to liberate this precious piece of Syrian national land through all available means, the source told Reuters news agency, adding that Trumps statement was irresponsible and showed contempt for international law.

Syrias main opposition grouping has also condemned Trumps comments.

The Syrian Negotiations Commission voiced its rejection of this decision and its national commitment to Syrias right to retrieve all its occupied territory.

The territorys return has always been a key Syrian national demand, championed by government and rebels alike throughout the bloody civil war that has ripped the country apart since 2011.

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Another close Syrian ally, Iran, also upbraided Trump for the comment he made on Thursday, which marks a dramatic shift in the US policy over the status of a disputed area that was captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981  a move not recognised internationally.

To the edge of a new crisis

Last week, the US dropped Israeli-occupied designation in its annual human rights report, though the State Department insisted the wording change did not mean a policy change.

Iran said the statement was unacceptable. This illegal and unacceptable recognition does not change the fact that it belongs to Syria, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman was cited as saying by state TV.

Turkey, which is heavily involved in the eight-year-old Syrian conflict, said that Trumps statement has brought the region to the edge of a new crisis.

We cannot allow the legitimisation of the occupation of the Golan Heights, President Tayyip Erdogan, who is opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, said in a speech at a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul.

Both Iran and Russia have deployed forces in Syria in support of Assad during the Syrian conflict, with Iran sending its own forces and backing regional Shia militias such as Lebanons Hezbollah that have helped Damascus.

Russia has warned that the US policy U-turn could spark new conflicts.

Certainly, such appeals can considerably destabilise an already tense situation in the Middle East, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Its just a call for now, hopefully it will remain a call.

Meanwhile the Arab League said Trumps comments were completely outside international law.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) said Trumps statement would not change the constant fact, recognised internationally, that the Golan Heights are Syrian lands forcefully occupied by Israel.

The two Arab countries with official diplomatic relations with Israel have also voiced their displeasure at the US presidents statement.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said lasting peace in the region requires Israel to withdraw from all Arab territories it occupies, including the Golan, while Egypt has urged respect (for) legitimate international resolutions and the United Nations Charter on the unacceptability of land appropriation by force.

Victory for Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pressed the US to recognise its claim and raised that possibility in his first White House meeting with Trump in February 2017.

Al Jazeeras Stefanie Dekker, reporting from the occupied Golan Heights, said it was a major political victory for Netanyahu.

He has been working hard throughout the years to get the Americans to recognise the Golan Heights as Israeli. Now it pretty much happened, she said.

We are largely expecting that announcement to be made officially when the Israeli prime minister will be in the United States next week.

The American president seems to be throwing his weight behind Netanyahu in what is very tightly contested election in Israel.Restrictive laws have hobbled Thai media since General Prayuth Chan-ocha took control of the government in 2014.

Bangkok, Thailand  Journalist Sirote Klampaiboon is one of the most popular presenters on Thailands Voice TV, a digital broadcaster that has been penalised at least 20 times for its reporting since the military seized control of the country five years ago and clamped down on freedom of expression.

Last month, the military government said it would suspend Voice TV for 15 days claiming two of its programmes  Wake Up News and Tonight Thailand  included material that was confusing and seditious.

But after the channel fought back, a court ruled the action illegal.

The TV stations talk shows have long made people in high places feel uncomfortable, Sirote said, adding that that was the reason he disappeared from screens for a month in September.

But the election campaign has opened some room for debate.

Its a more chaotic situation so you can find the space to report things more openly and be more aggressive, Sirote told Al Jazeera.

The sources now are everywhere, so they (the government) dont know how to deal with it.





A slew of restrictive laws has hobbled the Thai media since the armed forces under General Prayuth Chan-ocha took control of the government in 2014 and cracked down on freedom of expression.

But while the removal of restrictions on political activity in December has allowed parties to campaign, there has been no move to relax draconian regulations surrounding the media.

Theres an expectation from the public for journalists to do more, said Tess Bacalla, executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance.

But from the media side, they have resorted to self-censorship. They are very cautious. How much can you do when you are basically gagged.

Authority to censor

A series of special orders passed between 2014 and 2016 by the National Council for Peace and Order  the official name for the military government  ban the media from covering issues seen as undermining national security, insulting the monarchy and criticism of the administration.

The decrees also cover disinformation and defamation, allowing authorities to censor media content.

190322015124230

Prayuths administration has far broader powers over the media than any previous military government, according to Chakrit Permpool, an adviser to the Thai Journalists Association.

The group urged the military last December to cancel the decrees to establish a genuine, democratic environment and help voters make an informed decision.

Thailand has at least 20 broadcasters, some state-owned and others are private.

Since the election was called, broadcasters have been holding regular debates among the election candidates, although Prayuth has declined to participate.

At the end of February, a state-owned broadcaster booked 10 novice politicians for its weekly election show to discuss the key issues.

They matched the young politicians with a young audience, inviting 100 first-time voters into the studio and giving each of them a thumbs-up or thumbs-down card to hold up to indicate their thoughts on the issues being debated.

Orawan Choodee, a veteran political journalist, fielded questions on a range of topical issues  from what the young people thought about Prayuths decision not to participate in the debates to their views on the military governments 20-year national plan.

A few days later, Orawan posted on Facebook that she had been suspended from the channel.

The broadcaster later said it was a misunderstanding about scheduling.

Thailands elections wont be considered credible if the media is gagged and critical commentary about military rule is prohibited, Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement this week.

The junta should understand that an election that is little more than a preordained victory for military rule will only be treated as a mockery of democracy.





It is not only the traditional and mainstream media that are struggling under restrictive laws.

Digital and social media also operate under strict rules that cover not only reporters, but the parties and candidates who want to use those platforms to expand the reach of their campaign.

Under new electoral rules they must register their social media handles with the authorities, and risk disqualification, jail and political bans if they do anything more than discuss policies.

190319015907067

Some 50 million Thais are on Facebook, so politicians cannot ignore the platform, but at the same time, it also carries significant risk.

Facebook is being used as an arena to disarm political rivals, said Aim Sinpeng, who researches Southeast Asias digital politics at the University of Sydney.

This is in stark contrast to the 2011 election where cyberspace was much more open. Today, its no longer possible for political parties not to be on social media, but by being on it, it opens up a wide array of potential liabilities not all political parties can afford.

An election war room has been set up to trawl through hundreds and thousands of posts to make sure they do not breach any of the rules.

Sawang Boonmee, the deputy secretary-general of the Elections Commission of Thailand, told the Reuters news agency his team was looking for posts that spread lies, slander candidates or use rude language.

Nevertheless, not all media outlets have retreated into self-censorship.

190317053333287

Despite the repressive environment, media such as Matichon Group, a publicly listed publisher of three national newspapers including Khaosod whose online edition has attracted a huge following, and Prachathai, an independent non-profit online paper, have continued to question and investigate.

Voice TV is owned by Pathongthae Shinawatra, son of fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, but Sirote said Pathongthae takes no part in editorial decisions.

I never consider him to interfere in our work, Sirote said, noting that they are critical of Shinawatra successor party Pheu Thai, too.

It never happened, not even for a single minute. The content comes from my judgement all the time.

SEAPAs Bacalla urged Voice TV to take legal action over last months attempt to close the station down. In court, she gave evidence, pointing out that as a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Thailand had an obligation to safeguard freedom of expression and opinion.

It was a victory not just for Voice TV, but for the rest of the media, too, she said.

In trying to push back they managed to make a statement.The military-backed Palang Pracharat is hoping to defeat the Pheu Thai party, which has won every election since 2001.

The main candidate of Thailands Palang Pracharat Party has said that the people have moved on from the past of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and are concerned with their day-to-day lives.

Thaksins Pheu Thai Party, which has won every election since 2001, is drawing support from those who have said they want democracy and an end to military rule.

The odds seem to favour the Pheu Thai Party in the popular vote on Sunday, but the military will still hand-pick 250 seats in the upper house of Parliament, which may make it hard for the Pheu Thai to form a government.

Al Jazeeras Florence Looi reports from Chiang Mai.Thousands of Yemenis have been detained without cause, and some are forcibly disappeared without a trace.

Thousands of people have been jailed by the warring sides in Yemen.

A prisoner exchange was agreed to in Sweden three months ago but it hasnt materialised.

And the relatives of those detained have once again called for the agreement to be honoured.

Al Jazeeras Osama Bin Javaid reports.Ghanaian songstress, Deborah Vanessa Owusu Bonsu, known in showbiz as Sister Derby, has asked Ghanaians to be patient with President Nana Akufo-Addo and give him enough time to solve the countrys problems, since, according to her, he inherited a lot of mess from the previous administration.



According to the songstress, the president cannot solve all the countrys problems within a short period, as he came to meet those problems.



She told Ayeeko Ayeeko on Accra 100.5FM hosted by Nana Romeo on Wednesday, 21 March 2019 that:



The truth is that you cant expect the government to solve all the problems so soon, so, we have to give them [government] time. Its not fair and also they came to meet issues, they are also humans like us, so, it is difficult. We just have to give them [government] time.



I am affected because recently we travelled to South Africa together, buying the dollar to go is a headache. I wanted to cry. It is very bad. I dont know whats happening. The cedi is in serious crisis."



"I read something on the internet that in the whole of Africa, the Ghana cedi is the weakest and this is not good for the Black Star of Africa, its sad, she added.











Source: Classfmonline.com









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Featured VideoThere was a superb column at The Federalist on Wednesday by George S. Bardmesser: "Every Time Democrats Talk, I Want to Vote for Trump Twice." It is as hilarious as it is frightening. It is also a courageous confession, especially for a lawyer who lives in D.C. Let's hope he has personal security.

I am betting there are millions of us, many more millions than voted for Trump in 2016, who agree with the man. He was a reluctant Trump-voter but is now completely on board the Trump train. Why? Because the current crop of Democrat candidates are moonbats all, with the possible exception of Howard Schultz, who has yet to officially throw his hat in the ring. Mr. Bardmesser addresses in passing the election of Mlles. Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, and the presidential candidacies of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden. Each of them, as that author points out, is a thorough socialist nutjob. Each of them is trying to out-fanaticalize the others. Each of them is absolutely clueless about the American people outside the far-left bubbles all of them inhabit.

Mr. Bardmesser neglects to mention the bizarre, phony, and disturbing "Beto" O'Rourke; Kirsten Gillibrand; and Andrew Yang.

O'Rourke, who has zero accomplishments as a Texas congressman, has captured the hearts of some mindless citizens and millions of Hollywood dollars, to which effect he got close to beating Ted Cruz in 2016. But he has a creepy history of weird behavior: he was part of a hacking conclave, he eats dirt, he plays vicious pranks even on his wife, and he wrote about running down happy children when he was a teen. He was arrested for burglary, for a DUI, and for leaving the scene of an accident. The Democrats don't care about such things, since the Kennedys were guilty of all that and much more. But clearly, this man is not presidential material. His only stated policy is to legalize marijuana and invalidate all arrests for crimes related to use or sale of it.

Then there is the thoroughly insubstantial Kirsten Gillibrand, who has never held a position longer than politically convenient. Now she is so pro-illegal immigration that she even wants to reward illegal aliens' law-breaking with Social Security. This woman's character is as ephemeral as a puff of smoke. She also sounds like a little girl who never developed an adult voice, rather like Ocasio-Cortez.

But even Gillibrand is not as silly as Andrew Yang. One of his core issues is circumcision! He is against it! He is also for giving money away in the form of a "universal basic income."

Like the rest of the Left, all of these people's plans require taxing people beyond sanity  the kind of taxation that would destroy the country.

Pete Buttigeig is the current mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He is openly gay with a stellar resume, including the fact that he is a veteran. His particular issue is "intergenerational justice," whatever that is. He is clearly a smart guy but, like all the others, makes catastrophic climate change part and parcel of his agenda.

Curiously, in a recent survey of Millennials that sought to determine the top twenty things that worry them, climate change did not make the list. And to anyone paying attention, global cooling is very likely a graver danger.

Why are Ocasio-Cortez's approval ratings falling? Aside from the fact that she knows nothing about anything, her Green New Deal is a pathetic joke.

Oh, yes, and they all suddenly want to abolish the Electoral College! Had HRC won, they would be singing its praises.

That anyone thinks Joe Biden has a chance in hell of being elected is mystifying. The man has so many skeletons in the closet that he can't remember them all  plagiarism; racism; corruption; and a penchant for fondling young girls, even in public on camera. Like Bernie Sanders, he is too old. They both seem decades older than Donald Trump, even though they are just a few years older. They are without Trump's energy.

Then there is the forgettable John Hickenlooper, who just the other night needlessly confessed to taking his mother to a porn film years ago.

Kamala Harris has a sketchy record as California's A.G. She apparently took bribes to let Herbalife off the hook; Heather Podesta lobbied her on behalf of the company. She is known for having "slept her way to the top" as the mistress of former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. Like O'Rourke, Cory Booker, and Gillibrand, she is not ready for prime time.

As Mr. Bardmesser wrote, Bernie Sanders is just an old pretend-socialist ne'er-do-well hypocrite.

Elizabeth Warren? She is perhaps the most self-unaware candidate of the bunch. After faking her way onto the Harvard faculty by claiming to be American Indian, when asked if she had sympathy for the parents who bought their way into chi-chi colleges, she replied, "Zero." When asked even now about her ancestry, she insists she "learned her family history from her family." And while quite wealthy herself, she intends, if elected, to tax wealthy Americans into extinction. She wrongly thinks that by stealing what others have earned, she can fund her dream of a socialist state. She needs to read Thomas Sowell's book Basic Economics.

Along with their support for open borders, all the declared candidates are vowing their support for reparations, of course. There are no living persons who were slaves. It is a ridiculous agenda issue, completely unworkable. They all know this, but like all the Democrats in D.C., they really do believe that the rest of us are idiots, easily fooled by nonsense claims and promises. That is why they claim to support Ocasio-Cortez's plan to rid the nation of planes, cars, and all things fossil-fueled. As we all know from watching all the climate alarmists in Congress and in Hollywood, they will not, do not intend to ever change the fossil-fueled lifestyle they enjoy. No. Their brand of socialist tyranny will apply to only the rest of us.

Chinese-Americans are already seeing the specter of Mao in this crop of candidates. So, as Mr. Bardmesser advises, do anything and everything you can to convince those less politically aware that if any one of the declared Democrats wins in 2020, America as we know it will be relegated to the ash heap of tragic history along with our precious Constitution.Recently, Elizabeth Warren and a number of other Democratic candidates for president have suggested that the Electoral College be abolished. Right now, a candidate for president must win a majority of Electoral College votes regardless of the outcome of the national popular vote.

President Donald Trump in 2016 and President George W. Bush in 2000, did not win the popular vote, but they did win a majority in the Electoral College. The Dems claim that this is not fair and that the president should be elected by popular vote. In fact, a number of states are trying to change their Electoral College votes based on the national popular vote rather than the vote within their state.

In theory, a democracy or a constitutional republic makes major decisions based on the desires of the majority of the people. Indeed, it was rule by a generally elite minority, rather than the majority, that was the basis for the founding of our country. However, our forefathers also recognized that the United States of America, while honoring rule by the majority, also realized that individual states must have basic rights and a should have a voice in presidential elections.

Why did our forefathers establish two chambers of Congress?

When Congress was formed there were two bodies created: the House of Representatives and the Senate. Realizing that it would be impossible to have a direct democracy where each citizen voted on each issue, a representative democracy was established. In theory, voters elect representatives who will vote in Congress on issues in a manner that reflects the views of their constituents.

The House of Representatives was set up to reflect the majority of the population so that heavily populated states like California have 53 votes while lightly populated states like Wyoming have only 1. The total of 435 seats is reallocated after each census to reflect the current population. While this configuration ensures that votes passed in the House reflect the majority of the national population, it does ignore what the majority of states may want.

The Senate was established to correct this. Each state, regardless of population, has two votes in the Senate. This means that Wyoming, with just over half a million people has the same voice as California, with nearly 40 million people. This ensures that a majority of states must approve of a law before it is passed.

While this protects states rights, it is possible that 82 senators from 41 states vote to approve a law with those senators representing less than 50% of the population, even though that total represents a large majority of states.

Thats because the population of the nine largest states (18 senators) is about 51% of the total U.S. population. If the 18 senators from those nine states are the only ones to vote no on a bill, the bill passes with less than 50% of the populations support.

The Electoral College recognizes both needs.

The Electoral College was established to try to balance the popular vote with the need for states rights. There are 538 electors in the electoral college. Each state is given one elector for each member of the House of Representatives (435 in total) plus one additional electors for each of the two senators (100 in total). The District of Columbia gets three electors.

If the Electoral College was abolished and the president elected simply by a majority in the national vote, the majority of people from smaller, less populated states would lose their voice in presidential elections. A number of states have already considered having their electors vote for the candidate who gets the majority of the national vote. This would mean candidates would campaign mostly in densely populated states while ignoring the less populated states.

The Electoral College process has worked very well for the U.S. With a few exceptions the Electoral College vote reflected the will of the majority of American voters. For the few exceptions, the results reflected the design of our Constitution by giving all states a voice in the electoral process.

Our legislative system with two chambers of Congress to determine national laws and with the Electoral College to determine the president of the United States has worked well in the past. This system reflects the will of the majority of the people, while allowing for all states to have a voice in the presidential election. There is no reason to change.Colorado has bought into the popular vote mythology in presidential elections and the need to nationalize the process of electing presidents. Although wrong-headed, the right of the Colorado Legislature to make these changes is constitutional.

Republicans ought to use the power of those state governments they control to enact real reform by providing that the electoral votes of the state be cast by the state Legislature directly and not by voters choosing those electors. I proposed this in November 2016, and nothing has changed since then, except, unfortunately, the overwhelming majority that Republicans had in state governments was eroded somewhat by the 2018 midterm elections.

Control of both houses of the Legislature and the governor is required to pass a law reverting power to the state Legislature to cast the electoral votes of a state, but once that becomes the law, only control of the state Legislature would be required to cast the state's electoral votes in all future elections.

Republicans control both houses of the state Legislature and the governor in 23 states, counting unicameral Nebraska. Democrats control both houses of the state Legislature and the governorship in 14 states. Only three of those fourteen would ever conceivably vote for a Republican presidential candidate in the popular vote  Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico. But consider some of the states that would go Republican if state legislatures cast electoral votes: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.

There is not a single state the Democrat candidate in a presidential election would have won if this change had been implemented in the states in which Republicans held the power. Prior to the 2016 election, in three states in which Republicans then controlled, but do not now control, the governorship  Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan  the Republican candidate would have won every single state that President Trump carried without any popular vote in those states at all.

But the reform would be about much more than simply Republicans winning a presidential election. This change would make state legislative elections vitally important in national politics, and it would restore to state governments the powers intended for them in the Constitution. Washington would become much less important, and our political pox, "Capitolism," would begin a long cure.

Moreover, this could serve as the springboard for re-asserting state power in amending the Constitution by convening and maintaining a Constitutional Convention. The first amendment passed should be to provide for election of United States senators by the Legislature of the state. The next amendment, perhaps, should be to take away from all federal courts the power to effectively bully state governments.

The beauty of having state legislatures regularly meet in an official capacity is that each state Legislature gains in power if power is taken from Washington and given back to the states. State legislative members also must either stand for the rights of their states against an over-grasping Washington or face a crippling political position that would sound to their constituents something like this: "I and the other members of our state legislature know far less about how to solve our problems than distant and arrogant Washington insiders. After all, we yahoos in the backwaters are not nearly as smart as the sophisticates of the Beltway."

Finally, this would expose those "conservatives" who profess to care about our values and the preservation of our republic but who are just as much "Capitolists" as the most lickspittle leftist, the "conservatives" who view America as a land in two parts, one of which stretches from Boston to Washington and the other from San Francisco to San Diego, with a vast stretch of colonial territories between these two  those "conservatives" whose lives are politics or law or some career of prostitution, who would have nothing to do if states governed themselves without the unwanted "help" of Washington.

Restoring the rights and powers of the sovereign states is the linchpin of everything we need to begin to solve our problems. The power of state legislatures remains in the language of the Constitution, and those rights ought to be given life again. If that happens, we can begin the peaceful revolution our nation needs. It is doable and ought to be done. Nothing keeps Republican state legislatures from beginning the process but the guts and grit of their own members  and there is no reason for delay at all.After a crazed gunman murdered 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, he told police that his motive was to avenge "the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by foreign invaders in European lands throughout history, [and] the enslavement of millions of Europeans taken from their lands by the Islamic slavers."

This statement was an attempt to justify his homicidal attack. But are his words consistent with the history of the last 500 years? The record shows that it was population dynamics and intra-European conflicts that played the key roles in the struggle between the West and the rest.

Between 1492 and 1915, Europe  despite constant warfare, epidemics, and emigration  increased from 50 million people to 500 million, growing to 27 percent of the world's population. This skyrocketing birth rate provided the millions of soldiers and settlers who made it possible for the Occident to conquer quite a lot of the Earth.

The accused killer denounces "Islamic slavers," but the fact that European and Western societies are now a third of their former 27 percent of the global population is, at best, only indirectly due to Muslims. Between 1900 and 2018, they increased by a factor of 12 from 150 million to 1.8 billion people and reached an awe-inspiring 23 percent of the world's population.

The demographically rampant Europeans of the Age of Imperialism feared, above all, other Europeans. Between 1914 and 1945 alone, they killed around 70 million of their peers through wars, Gulags, and genocides. Muslim deaths after 1945 were also mostly victims of fellow believers due to even more vigorous birth rates. This applies to 80 to 90 percent of the approximately twelve million who perished by violence.

A small percentage of these Muslim deaths occurred in the various attempts to destroy Israel. In this series of wars, Muslim states lost some 65,000 men, about half a percent  or five out of a thousand  of the total number of Muslim casualties after 1945.

However, the Jews killed by Muslims in the same conflicts not only failed to create significant outrage in the West, but garnered enough approval to sustain anti-Semitic factions in the West, notably in the U.K. and U.S.

Meanwhile, the press somehow failed to notice the Algerian civil war (19912002), in which strict Muslim believers battled moderates, a conflict that all by itself cost three times as many deaths as the Israeli-Muslim wars. Even more deadly was the combat in Syria, which since 2011 has taken seven times as many Muslim lives.

Tarrant's mass murder rampage was supposedly meant to prove 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" be conquered.

Now, it is not Islam's fault that the likelihood of "white" countries going to war has become practically nonexistent. Long gone are the days when high European birth rates easily compensated for losses on the battlefield. Today, each fallen European soldier erases a family line, because the soldier is probably an only child. The fact that the 2011 Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who was emulated by Tarrant in 2019, did not find any comparable imitators in the meantime, proves to be at least one beneficial consequence of Europe's aging and shrinking population, a disappearing culture with only 1.6 per children per woman's lifetime.

Moreover, Islam cannot help the fact that the world population share of Great Britain and its main colonies (AUS, CDN, NZ) slipped from 3.4 percent in 1919 (57 million) to 1.7 percent in 2019 (134 million). Nor is it due to any religion that, demographically, Germany is even more vulnerable than Britain. In 2019, Germany has 61 million so-called bio-Germans, the same number it had in 1919, but the average age has risen from 28 to 47 years. Today, only seven out of every thousand citizens of the world are indigenous Germans, down from 35 a century ago. Only with the help of over 20 million migrants can Germany's population threshold of 80 million be maintained.

No bloodthirsty would-be role model like the accused mass murderer will make up for the West's demographic vulnerability. Since 90 percent of Western job-seekers must compete for positions in the labour markets, they devote their time and energy to improving their qualifications for employment, not to having children. Therefore, Western birth rates will stay low.

In the Muslim world, similar changes are coming. By 2035, most Islamic states will experience a demographic decline that sharply reduces the number of potential soldiers, thereby making war and aggression much less likely. Murder and manslaughter in the name of the Highest will then decline, which of course does not justify any slackening of vigilance against Islamist attacks. Yet it is highly unlikely that the intra-Muslim death toll will ever reach or exceed the horrendous dimensions of the intra-European wars in the first half of the 20th century.

The manifesto writer's demographic ignorance is a worrying reminder of the pathetic level of European politicians. Today, these minions have to beg each other for a few hundred soldiers to fight in Mali or Niger. At the same time, they are convinced that only the European Union can stop its member-nations from reverting to old habits and attacking each other again with ferocious armies of millions. These politicians don't realize that such Western armies will never be available again  neither for a new European quest for world power nor for white supremacists. America as the heartland of such groups today has a war index of 1. The hot-headed lads of a Boston Tea Party of 1773, when the women had eight children (war index around 5), are simply not available. The rage may be still be sufficient for racist agitation and occasionally bloody terror, but there are no excitable youth masses for a civil war a la 18611865. "Old white men" over 50 years of age make up just three percent of the world's population. Not their power, but its loss is reflected in the endless tracts about their supposed horror.

New Zealand and Australia  the accused's home  are among the few nations that have turned themselves into strongholds of Western civilization with protected borders. Those who truly want to safeguard Western values will resist any call for "salvation" by killers, just as they will resist politicians who put countries at risk by weakening their borders. It is true that such politicians can enable Islamist bloodshed through gross negligence. But there can be no moral equation between incompetent politicians and the deluded mass murderers of Norway and Christchurch.

Gunnar Heinsohn teaches war demography at NATO Defense College (Rome/Italy).Albert Einstein observed, "If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew." His words are relevant today because anti-Semitism, briefly dormant, is alive again  in Europe and around the world. This "new form" of anti-Semitism claims to be different from the traditional racial and religious images. Its adherents say they are anti-Zionist, not anti-Semites. But their accusations mirror The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Only recently, a Belgian parade featured a float of grotesquely distorted Orthodox Jews in religious garb, perched on bags of money, a la the art of Nazi Julius Streicher. What makes this sickening display even more alarming is the official sanction given to it by the Mayor of Aalst, Christoph D'Haese, who stated, "It's not up to the mayor to forbid such displays" and that the carnival participants had "no sinister intentions." No sinister intentions? Adolf Eichmann also had no sinister intentions when he organized transportation to the death camps. After all, he himself had no part in the actual killing process; they just did their jobs.

We have our own anti-Semitic scandal with newly elected congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D), a Somalian hijab-wearing Muslim who tweets anti-Semitic tropes "without sinister intentions" or retractions. Democrat leadership won't condemn, censure, or remove her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, leftist Jews have defended her, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi excused her inadvertent offense. Yes, Congress passed a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and antieverything else, without singling out Omar and the Jews. Thus, the Democratic Party is falling farther left toward Islamic ideology.

Feeding the fire, in January 2019, the Palestinian Authority introduced in the U.N. a motion to reinstate U.N. Resolution 3379, first adopted in 1975, later revoked in 1991, that declared that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." No other people anywhere has ever been so distinguished. When South Sudan gained its independence in 2011, after years of bloodshed, no one proposed calling its citizens' nationalism "racist." The Kurds of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey also aspire to their own national homeland, but no one has called them "racist." Only Israel and the Jews have that distinction.

Make no mistake: anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. The two terms have become conflated. If you agree that Israel is evil, apartheid, fascist, and repugnant, then the only possible resolution is its total destruction, its Jews exiled or exterminated.

Slowly, surely, irrevocably, methodically, step by step, the constraints are removed from the unacceptable  adjusting the population to the various forms of anti-Semitism, from rhetoric to parade floats to refusing to seriously address the issue, defending the perpetrators such as Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, who called Jews "termites" to leftist media silence. Anti-Semitism is becoming mainstream. Jews are fleeing the ever increasing attacks in France, once home to the world's third largest Jewish population. Prime Minister Theresa May laments that Jews may have no future in Great Britain as the Labor Party's overtly anti-Semitic Jeremy Corbyn seeks increased power. American Jews seem oblivious to the tsunami of anti-Semitism engulfing Europe and poised to take America with the same intensity.

"We are safe here." "We are a civilized, cultured country with laws that protect us." So are Britain and France. So was Germany during the 1920s and early '30s, when it was regarded the most advanced scientifically, culturally, and artistically  the home of Beethoven, Bach, Goethe, and Heine. German Jews were patriots; 100,000-plus served in the German army during WWI, 30,000 decorated for bravery, yet also murdered in gas chambers. Meanwhile, the uninformed American Jews embrace their ancestral ideology  a combined Progressivism, ultra-liberalism, neo-Marxism, and the Jewish "tikkun olam." They ardently believe that the main threat to Jews today comes from the neo-Nazis and the KKK. While it is true that these groups exist, they constitute only a small percentage of the population.

There are leftist Jewish and non-Jewish groups who would disagree with these statistics. They choose to lump all Republican conservatives and anyone who disagrees with them into the category of right-wing hate-monger extremists. They ignore the real threat today that comes from an unholy red-green alliance  the Marxist left and Islam.

Using identity politics, victimhood, social justice, racism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism, the radical left seeks power and control. The new doctrine of "intersectionality" allows leftists to affiliate with other groups they perceive as "oppressed." This is why you see anti-Israel and anti-Semitic signs displayed by just about every radical-left group at demonstrations throughout the country. Therefore, Ferguson, Missouri activists' placards read, "From Ferguson to Gaza, the struggle continues." The vast majority of American Jews who accepted these policies are unable or unwilling to comprehend that their Progressive, liberal, neo-Marxist ideology now seeks to destroy the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

American Jewry is at a crossroads. The vast majority of American Jews will continue to cling to their familiar ancestral belief system; it's all they know. To change now would be to deny everything their family members and they, themselves, have lived for. But before they bury their heads in the sand once again, they should at least hear these simple truths. When our enemies came for us during the Holocaust, they did not ask if we were Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or secular Jews. Neither were they interested in any past service we rendered for the state. We were Jews. That was all that mattered. If history repeats itself, when our enemies come for us once again, they will not ask if we are Israelis or Zionists. They will not care if we marched in Selma, Alabama; protested against apartheid in South Africa; supported equal rights for women; advocated for the LBGTQ community; and campaigned for Hillary or Bernie. It will matter that we are Jews.

Today's anti-Semitism, unleashed by the Left and Islamists, is so visceral, virulent, vile, vicious, and vitriolic that it can no longer be justified under the guise of anti-Zionism. In form, content, and message, it is exactly what was seen and heard during the heyday of the Third Reich. It is what made the Holocaust possible. What begins with a parade float in Belgium inevitably ends in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. This is the fate our enemies want for us. This is why Tehran's Ayatollah Khamenei rejoices that more Jews are moving to Israel  for one grand target.

Meanwhile, most of the Jews will continue entrusting their safety to their religious and political leadership. They will continue to vote for, support, and finance the party and the ideology that will ultimately lead them to their own destruction and that of the state of Israel.

Vladimir Jabotinsky recognized that "[t]he Jew learns not by way of reason, but from catastrophe. He won't buy an umbrella merely because he sees clouds in the sky. He waits until he is drenched and catches pneumonia." History may yet prove that when it comes to the Jews, Jabotinsky was an optimist.

Caren Besner is a retired teacher who has written articles published by American Thinker, Sun-Sentinel, Jewish Journal, The Algemeiner, Jerusalem Post, IsraPost, The Jewish Voice, Independent Sentinel, San Diego Jewish World, The Times of Israel, Jewish Press, The Front Page, The Florida Veteran, Jootube, and The Moderate Voice.President Trump's pow-wow with Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro was a fairly good one, setting the stage for upgrading security ties between the two giants. Now an attempted theft of uranium in Brazil by armed gunmen demonstrates in spades why that's a good idea.

Here's the Reuters report of the incident:

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters)  Armed men shot at members of a convoy transporting uranium to one of Brazil's two working nuclear power plants on a coastal road in Rio de Janeiro state on Tuesday, police and the company managing the plant said. They said the truck carrying the nuclear fuel and its police escort came under attack when it was passing by the town of Frade, about 30 km (19 miles) from Angra dos Reis, where the reactor is located. Policemen guarding the convoy returned the attackers' fire, police said. They said there were no injuries or arrests and the armed men fled. The case is redolent of similar attempted robberies on Mexican medical trucks carrying nuclear supplies.

Similar attacks on medical trucks in Mexico carrying nuclear supplies have occurred  in 2013, 2015 (the BBC linked report says there were two unspecified incidents in 2014, as well), 2017, and 2018. Many of these cases have been dismissed as the work of clown-thugs who had no idea what they were taking, mainly wanting to steal just the truck. Often, it's perfectly true. Some cases have been solved, or rather, solved well enough (see the 2013 link above); others have not, or possibly not been covered by the press. These kinds of robberies have also happened in the U.S. Canada, according to this report, has reported 17 such thefts. VICE News reports that nuclear thefts are more common than anyone thinks, citing IAEA data.

But the Brazil case is interesting, because the country does seem to be a target, raising the possibility that terrorists are looking for some dirty bomb supplies.

Why do I think that? Because Hezb'allah has a lot of reported "bases" up north in Venezuela and elsewhere in the region. It might even have some in Brazil. What do they do? Why would a Middle Eastern terrorist group need a base, or spend money on such "bases," in this hemisphere? According to Stratfor:

South America is a strong base of operations for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which has had a presence in the continent dating back to the 1980s. The group established finance and logistical networks, which it used to facilitate two bombings in Argentina in the 1990s. The first bombing in 1992 targeted the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people and injuring 242 more. A second bombing in 1994 targeted the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 and injured over 300. Since then, Hezbollah has shifted its operational focus from terror attacks to criminal activity to raise money, entering South America's lucrative drug-trafficking business and dealing primarily with cocaine and heroin. Previously, we explored what Hezbollah now does in South America, and where it does it.

Now there's this sudden robbery attempt of nuclear supplies, in a nation with a large Hez'ballah presence in the country's tri-border area, and another large Hez'ballah presence up north in Venezuela, and yet another in Colombia. Maybe it was thugs. Maybe it was local terror group, such as the disgruntled holdouts from Colombia's FARC. Maybe it was Hezb'allah.

The Reuters report is a bare-bones story, but it highlights the nature of the security issues and why an alliance with the States might be helpful in sweeping Hez'ballah, or whoever is doing this, if the purpose is a dirty bomb, out. Brazil is a country still digging out from the rubble of extended socialism and all the lawlessness and terror-coddling that fosters, and it now has a sharp new president clear about his opposition to all of it. A U.S. security alliance with him would make sense. This report from Politico demonstrates the Trump administration's ferocious determination to get rid of Hez'ballah using every means necessary from the resources of the U.S. government. Politico of all places writes:

The renewed focus on Hezbollah's presence and operations in Latin America is long overdue. Hezbollah's last attempted international terrorism plot was in Peru, where a Lebanese Hezbollah operative, Mohammed Amadar, arrived in Peru in November 2013 and married a woman of dual Peruvian-American citizenship two weeks later. The U.S. connection got the attention of the FBI's Miami Field Office. Shortly thereafter, Amadar moved to Brazil, living in Sao Paulo until he returned to Lima in July 2014. Peru's anti-terror unit questioned him upon his arrival at the airport, put Amadar under surveillance, and arrested him for planning attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets that October. Hezbollah today is deeply invested in operations in South America. One of the most prominent operatives behind the AMIA bombing has now risen up the ranks of the organization and is personally overseeing Hezbollah operations in the region.

It leaps out at me now that Trump has allied with Bolsonaro on security. Combining U.S. and Brazilian resources and sharing intelligence on terrorist operations with dirty bomb dreams such as Hezb'allah, whose members are reportedly "up to no good" in the hemisphere, is a potential game-changer.

Now read this report from Susan Crabtree of Real Clear Politics, who covered the Trump-Bolsonaro meeting:

Beyond all the colorful mutual admiration, the real magnitude of the historic meeting should not be lost, especially when it comes to advancing U.S. security interests, regional experts stress. Brazilian political leaders have long held the U.S. at arm's length, harboring deep anti-imperialist suspicions since a 1964 coup, supported by the U.S. government, overthrew then-President Joao Goulart. The suspicions remained even after the country's shift to democracy in the mid-1980s. But Bolsonaro eschewed that past, pledging a new "chapter of cooperation" and a grand new alliance between the two most populous nations and largest economies in the Western hemisphere. He and Trump promised to work together to improve trade, oppose socialism and other leftist movements, and specifically to confront the political crisis in Venezuela. Trump and Bolsonaro also signed an agreement with U.S. companies on technical safeguards to allow commercial satellite launches in northern Brazil. Bolsonaro even stopped by CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to discuss "international themes in the region," according to his son, Eduardo, a Brazilian lawmaker accompanying the president on his first overseas trip.

And it may have implications for the fate of Venezuela. Besides being a failed state and socialist hellhole, it's also a Hez'ballah playground with a mafia-like criminal ruling coterie premised on the Hez'ballah specialty of drug-dealing. That's what's holding the Maduro regime together and keeping its military leaders loyal  the prospect of drug money, along with the support of distant imperial powers such as China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba.

Trump has stated that he's after the Maduro dictatorship to get out and allow Venezuela's legitimate leader, Juan Guaido, to govern. He also said he hasn't unsheathed his sharpest sanctions weapons against the Maduro regime, which, surprise, had been bruited about earlier as putting the country on the state sponsor of terrorism list.

Is there a plan with this new security alliance with Brazil? Does Trump know what he's doing? Sure looks like it. Together the two giants and their Latin American allies can squeeze kill-minded terrorists with dirty-bomb dreams  and their hosts  right out of the hemisphere.Young Politician and Law Student, Prince Amadu Anuwar-Sadat was adjudged the Most Promising Student at the Wisconsin International University College, Ghana SRC Excellence Awards, 2019.



Sadat beats off stiff competition from three (3) other brilliant students to win the top award.



The Most Promising Student award was designed by the SRC to award high performing students of the institution. It was moments of ecstasy when he was announced as the eventual winner last night at the forecourt of the SRC Secretariat at the well-attended and organised event.



In an interview with peacefmonline.com, the humble and well composed Prince Sadat said I am indeed humbled and honoured to receive this award. I wish to dedicate this award to all the people in my life whose continues support and prayers made this happen. A special mention must be made of my bosses Alhaji Abubakar Abdul-Rahman (ALHAJI SHORT) and Mr. William Ofori-Atta for they have always given me the room to realize my full potential. My brother and mentor NuhuBayorboMahama (former deputy National Organiser, NPP), you made this happen. To Hon. Dr. Ibrahim Mohammed Awal(Minister of Business Development) and Hon. Ken Ofori-Atta (Minister of Finance), may Allah bless you for your continues support. To my lecturers who guide me throughout my studies, especially, Dr. Peter Wiredu and Rev. RandulphSpaine, I say thank you. To my course mates who keeps me updated and supported me every step of the journey, I thank you all. Hamza Cisse you are indeed a brother. To LSU and TESCON, I am grateful for your support. H. E. Bridget Bonnie and the entire SRC Executive Committee, thank you. To the Upper West region, Team Short and the entire NPP, God bless you all. I cannot thank all my friends and family enough. You have all shown me enough love and support. To the numerous people who voted for me; may God bless you abundantly and replenish your effort in a million fold.



Our independent checks revealed that Prince took six courses in the period under review and excelled in all the six courses. The breakdown was as follows

CONSTITUTIONAL LAW I A

GHANA LEGAL SYSTEM & METHODS I B

LEGAL WRITING A

SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF GHANA A

ETHICS AND MORAL VALUES B

IT FUNDAMENTALS A



Prince A. A. Sadat is a student of the Law Faculty of the Wisconsin International University, College, Ghana offering a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B) degree. He is currently a Research Assistant at the Campaign Fund raising office of H. E. the President and also a Press & Media Aide to Alhaji Short (Board Chairman of GCMC and former National Chairman Aspirant of the NPP). He has previously worked for corporate giants like Vodafone Ghana, Fidelity Bank Limited, Glico Life Insurance Company Limited; and has over seven (7) years of work experience in corporate Ghana. He has also worked as Personal Assistant to some of the finest politicians in the country. And his contributions towards the 2016 victory of the NPP and H. E. Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo cannot be underestimated.



He is a prolific writer with over 50 publications on social and political issues of national interest to his name; and has received several awards both in the corporate space and in politics as well.



The SRC Excellence Awards was created to honour the most outstanding achievements of student professionals in their field. Other winners of the night includes FairuzaNabiaSuleman (Best Student Model), Ollennu Desmond (Most Vibrant SRC Executive), Whitefield Afreh (Most Popular Male Student), Lucia Chief Mensah (Most Popular Female)Marshall Bobobee (Student blogger/writer), Lydia Arthur (Student in Music), Frank Nomah (Best Student in Sports), Celestine Akpanoko (Student Photographer), Sylvester Adorboe (Most Vibrant Administrative Staff), WIUNMSA (Association of the year), Ambassador Kabral (Most Vibrant HOD), Bernard Benson Senyo (Student DJ of the year), Sadia Ahmed (Student Entrepreneur) and other honorary awards.





Source: Josephine Acheampomaa/Peacefmonline/[email protected]









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoNo place is safe from anti-Israel bias at The Washington Post. Even in the Book World section (3/15/19), in "West Bank. Brooklyn. It's all occupied territory for a woman," we read a review by Diana Abu Jaber, who can't help but spread this bias. In her review of A Woman is No Man, Abu Jaber weaves anti-Israel mudslinging into what is supposed to be a review of a book about an Arab woman in an arranged marriage.

In the review, Abu Jaber states that the Arab woman's father was "driven from his home [in Birzeit, West Bank] by the Israeli invasion." Israel, which represents 0.1% of the Middle East, never once launched an offensive invasion anywhere! Israel captured the West Bank in 1967 after it was attacked from that area by Jordan. Saying Israel invaded the West Bank is like saying America attacked Japan without mentioning Pearl Harbor. Repetitive, insidious bias such as this attempts to persuade uninformed readers that Israel was the aggressor, when that was never the case.

Abu Jaber, in describing the book, speaks of the horrendous treatment of Arab women by Arab men, describing Arab women as "virtual prisoners of the home." The female protagonist states, "[I]f a woman called the cops every time her husband beat her, all our men would be in jail." Abu Jaber then tells how the Arab men are "broken  by the occupation, by hardship, by bigotry  but what readers see, for the most part, is their assault on women." Does Abu Jaber really believe that readers of her review will be suckered into blaming Israel for the trend of Arab wife-beating? The fact that she thought she could get away with this hogwash is startling, but in a sense, she did in part because the Post actually chose to publish it!

To set the record straight, no matter how aggressively partisans worldwide indulge in Israel-bashing, Israel is not occupying any Palestinian territory. Israel gained the West Bank from Jordan  not the Palestinians. Since that is the case, what country is Israel occupying? The territory is disputed, and there is no final status solution to the conflict yet.

In conclusion, Abu Jaber states that a "potential concern for Arab authors writing for an American audience is how to portray Arab patriarchy with a Western milieu of Islamophobic and anti-Arab stereotypes." I have never seen these concerns by Christians writing about controversial Christian topics or Jews writing about sensitive Jewish topics. What malarkey!On the day Kurds celebrated Nowruz (the Persian new year) and Jews celebrated Purim (the defeat of the Persian who wanted to exterminate them), President Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights , and the Islamic State was defeated.

These milestones in the history of the modern Middle East are a testament to victorious foreign and military policies of America and Israel. The military outcome was presaged last year when Trump altered the rules of engagement , and the political outcome was presaged last week, when the State Department supplanted the official depiction of the Golan from Israeli-"occupied" to Israeli-"controlled" territory.

Although naysayers claim that the Islamic State went underground and the Golan remains occupied, these historic events illustrate the deep genetic and political bonds between Kurds and Jews , for, just as Israel is viewed as America's "canary in the coal mine," Kurdistan plays that role for Israel.

Meanwhile, some Democrats continue to self-marginalize, as dramatized by the AIPAC boycott by their presidential candidates. One, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who has met Syrian president Bashar Assad, has declined to say whether Assad is a war criminal while mounting a factually inaccurate defense of the Butcher of Damascus.

Predictably, Gabbard slammed this recognition of political reality, tweeting, "Another example of Trump and Netanyahu putting their own political interests ahead of the interests of our respective countries. Will escalate tensions and likelihood of war between Israel/US/Syria/Iran/Russia. Shortsighted."

To the contrary, the combination of defeating the caliphate (reversing Obama's defeatism) and empowering an American ally to defend herself (recalling that Syria had repeatedly attacked Israel from the Golan Heights) has transcended personal motivations, for promoting American ideals globally remains the major human rights initiative guiding Trump, secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and national security adviser John Bolton.

As Syria's civil war is turning into three new civil wars, it must be recognized that Kurds are the major force in all three theaters. This illustrates why, by mobilizing the "good guys," it is possible to adopt a flexible paradigm for a reconstructed Middle East, starting with honoring Kurds and Druze.

In fact, now that the precedent has been set that the artificial borders created by the century-old Sykes-Picot Agreement are no longer sacrosanct, territory can be carved from French mandate Syria. This will allow the Druze to be protected by the Israelis on the Golan and the Kurds to gain a homeland. In this fashion, the moderate Kurds would provide a model government, functioning to promote Western values in contrast with the Islamist Iranians and Turks.

Kurds have proven their grit in an effort to protect their culture. They merit assistance, for they are not seeking any nation-building funds. This will allow Trump to help the Kurds join efforts to prevent tyrants, terrorists, and thugs from attaining power internationally. It would also reverse undeniable trends in the postWorld War II era like the rise of violence promulgated by Hamas, Hezb'allah, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. The degrading of these forces is more likely to occur when allies work hand in glove, just as the Kurds worked with the Americans in Syria and Iraq.

The precedent has finally emerged. America should recognize a Syrian Kurdistan.

Sherkoh Abbas is president of the Kurdish National Assembly of Syria (KURDNAS). Robert Sklaroff is a physician-activist.The Great State of Illinois is going to have to come up with $300 million it doesn't have in order to bail out a state program that made unrealistic promises based on fantasies. But the budget that its governor has come up with to provide those funds is based on even more unrealistic fantasies. Both moves would raise the prospect of prosecution for fraud, had they been advanced by a private corporation responsible to shareholders. But we're talking about the state of Illinois, where imprisoned former governors are not at all uncommon, but fantasy predictions are never the reason.

Joe Cahill of Crain's Chicago Business explains the bailout:

It took a while, but Illinois legislators, who ought to know something about financial holes, seem prepared to apply that well-known principle the state's underfunded prepaid college tuition program. College Illinois has $300 million less than it needs to pay future tuition at Illinois universities for students whose parents bought prepaid contracts in the mistaken belief they were guaranteed by the state. In fact, the state has no legally enforceable obligation to cover the gap between College Illinois' promises and its cash. Yet marketing materials from the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, which administers College Illinois, created the false impression that Illinois stands behind the contracts. As my colleague Steve Daniels reported recently, bills pending before the Illinois House and Senate would oblige the state to honor College Illinois contracts. Both bills provide that "the full faith and credit of the State of Illinois is pledged for the punctual payment of such obligations." Another $300 million IOU is exactly what cash-strapped Illinois doesn't need. Yet the moral case for covering the College Illinois contracts is indisputable.

A private entity selling an insurance policy, an annuity, or any other financial instrument that could not deliver its promised benefits would be in deep trouble if negligence in making its financial calculations could be proved. If it created the impression that it was promising something that it actually was not guaranteeing, there might also be prosecution.

But the big-hearted legislators in Springfield are prepared to find the money to make good on those implied promises  from somewhere to be determined, because, as it turns out, the budget to be submitted to the Legislature is full of absurd assumptions, based on the tiny amount of information so far provided by the governor, Democrat Jay Pritzker. The Illinois Policy Institute reports:

After a full week of withholding details about the math behind his graduated income tax plan, the Pritzker administration on March 15 sent some of their assumptions to the Illinois Policy Institute in a one-page summary. While still refusing to release key details, Pritzker did reveal some of the politicized math he used to make his plan an easier sell. Specifically, he relies on overly optimistic assumptions about the state's growth, which means the governor will have to enact higher taxes than he proposed in order to generate his desired revenue. Pritzker's political math Because Pritzker's income tax plan would not go into effect until 2021 at the earliest, his administration makes assumptions about how much Illinois incomes will grow between 2016 (the most recent year of publicly available income tax return data) and 2021. If Pritzker assumes that growth is extraordinarily high, he can claim his tax plan raises more money than if he uses a more reasonable estimate and thus promise modest tax cuts. He can also claim he'll have a smaller deficit to paper over. The limited release from Pritzker's office shows that's exactly what he did. Pritzker's plan assumes Illinois will see average annual income growth of 3.61 percent. His administration claims this "conservative" estimate is both consistent with the state's recent performance and accounts for a one-year stagnation in income growth to account for a slowing economy. But Pritzker is wrong on both counts. According to the IRS, the average annual growth rate of Illinois' adjusted gross income over the past five years of available data has been 3.37 percent, meaning the administration fails to correctly account for the past. The governor also alleges that a one-year stagnation of income growth in his assumption is "conservative" and accounts for an economic slowdown. But Illinois' total income has not only stagnated, but declined in two out of the past four years on record. Not only are the governor's assumptions wrong given the state's recent performance (which he states are the basis for his claims), but they are wrong given the anticipated growth trajectory of Illinois and the U.S. economy as a whole. The governor's estimates don't account for the possibility of a slowdown or even a recession, which two-thirds of business economists in the U.S. expect before 2021, according to polling from the National Association for Business Economics. In the likely event of a recession, the revenue generated by Pritzker's plan is bound to come up short, meaning the governor will have to raise rates to generate his desired revenue.

When he was governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton used to joke that his state was grateful to Mississippi for preventing Arkansas from being in last place on lists of state performance for things like income and education. As a Californian, I am similarly grateful that Illinois  at least in a few dimensions  can arguably be more irresponsible than the Sacramento cartel.

Hat tip: Peter von BuolWith less than two weeks to go in the race for Chicago mayor, Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle and attorney Lori Lightfoot participated in a televised debate that featured telling blows delivered by both candidates from the outset.

Preckwinkle trails in the polls and in fundraising while Lightfoot, who finished first in the primary in February, has maintained her momentum, gathering key endorsements in the black and Latino communities. Preckwinkle pulled some ads this week, apparently hoping for a big push the last few days of the campaign.

It would be a mistake to characterize the race as one between the "machine" and the "reformer." The political machine that ran the city for seven decades is a shadow of its former self. And there has yet to be a "reformer" candidate who has ever been able to "reform" much of anything in the city.

Instead, this is a race to see who will have the opportunity to preside over the continued decline of a major city as it falls to street thugs and grasping businessmen.

The debate was about Preckwinkle's experience versus Lightfoot's "resolve" to reform the mess.

Chicago Tribune:

"Change is not simply words, it's action. Balancing a budget is a difficult, challenging process," Preckwinkle said to Lightfoot. "The city has a huge budget. What's the biggest budget that you've ever managed? It's a complicated, difficult process. How can people believe you can run this government, let alone change it?" Lightfoot responded by saying she helped manage many city budgets during her tenure as chief of staff in the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, as a chief oversight official in the Chicago Police Department and as the top deputy in the city's procurement department under former Mayor Richard M. Daley before becoming a partner at Mayer Brown, one of the nation's largest law firms. "I have a wealth of experience, not only as a senior executive in different departments in the city, but I've also, in my private practice life, helped small businesses, middle-market businesses really try to navigate the sometimes difficult world of city government," Lightfoot said. "But what I think is most important is it's not about our resume, it's about our resolve. It's about our resolve to form a city that is inclusive, that is responsive, and a city government that is open and transparent and is doing everything it can to move people forward."

"Moving forward" is difficult when the streets are a shooting gallery and grasping politicians are stealing the taxpayers blind. And neither candidate would offer solutions to the public pension bomb that may go off while she is in office:

WTTW:

Both Lightfoot and Preckwinkle were vague on solutions to Chicago's pension funding crisis, with Preckwinkle alluding to her support of a progressive income tax at the state level that should benefit Chicago with a piece of the extra revenue the state takes in. Lightfoot said emphatically that she would oppose a city soda takes [sic], calling it "offensive" that Preckwinkle had passed such a tax at the county level (it was swiftly repealed). Lightfoot also said that she would not talk about increasing large pots of city revenue until she had successfully made the case that there was no other alternative. Chicago faces the daunting task of finding $1 billion more to put into its four beleaguered pension systems in the coming years to prevent them from going insolvent.

Both candidates support more gun control to address the violence, while both candidates agree that the police department should be reformed. There: Problem solved.

One small note: Lightfoot, who is lesbian, became the target of some anti-gay flyers distributed in several wards. They were actually quite amusing:

"The GAY EQUALITY ACT!!! ITS [sic] OUR TURN," the flyers stated, followed by a series of statements saying, "I promise to enforce the Gay Equality Act" and that all bathrooms will be "gender-free," public schools will "teach Gay History by mandate," and "All churches will abide by the gay marriage laws." The flyers also boasted in all capital letters that all contracts, jobs, and employment opportunities would be "newly assigned exclusively to gay people!"

The fact that they were handed out near black churches highlights the split in the black community over Lightfoot's lesbianism, with many devout Christians appalled and others accepting. With two black women running, Lightfoot, who denounced the flyers, nevertheless benefits by this split.

She's going to need all the help she can get. Lightfoot is riding a wave of voter disgust at business as usual and appears to be well positioned to win.Almost all major Democratic candidates for president in 2020 will not attend next week's American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference after the radical left group MoveOn.org called for a boycott of the event.

The Hill:

"The influx of progressive candidates confirming they will not attend  even those who have gone in years past  shows how the momentum is shifting," Iram Ali, campaign director at MoveOn, said in a statement Wednesday. "AIPAC is clearly a partisan lobbying group that has undermined diplomatic efforts, and progressives want no part in it." As of Thursday evening, aides for at least eight candidates told The Hill or other news outlets they would not attend this year's conference: Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.); former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas); South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Washington Gov. Jay Inslee; and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro. An eighth candidate, former Rep. John Delaney (Md.), a centrist who is considered a long shot, is also not attending, but a spokesman said it was only due to a "scheduling conflict."

Former vice president Joe Biden, who spoke at the AIPAC conference in 2016, has not indicated whether he will attend or not.

AIPAC is not "clearly a partisan group," as it has welcomed speakers from both parties in the past. Indeed, the boycott seems to be over anti-Semitic remarks by Rep. Ilhan Omar  specifically, the rancid charge of "dual loyalties" by AIPAC members and other U.S. supporters of Israel. There was considerable criticism of Omar's nauseating anti-Semitism, including from several prominent Democrats.

But the boycott by Democratic presidential candidates shows an extremely worrying fact: the radical anti-Semites on the left fringe of the Democratic Party are gaining power and influence. There is already talk of pushing a "Boycott, Divest, Sanction" plank in the 2020 party platform, and how much do you want to bet that Rep. Omar and her fellow travelers will be featured speakers at the event?

AIPAC will be fine without the support of the anti-Semites, who have apparently terrified the 2020 Democratic field into not showing up. In the past, Democratic ambivalence on Israel has not led to much of a decrease in the Jewish vote. Jews are among the party's more reliable allies. But this is different, and thoughtful Democrats like Senator Chuck Schumer know it. Whether the shrinking pro-Israel faction in the Democratic Party can reassert its influence remains to be seen.As if the Democrats' Soylent Green "new deal" hasn't given us enough chaff to separate from wheat, Ohio state senator Tina Maharath (D-Columbus) has introduced Senate Bill 78 to criminalize smoking in a motor vehicle when children younger than age six are onboard.

The concerned senator considers exposure to tobacco smoke "child abuse," and so it well may be. The thrust of her mission is to "protect children who don't have the chance to make a choice for themselves." Well said, senator  well said.

The question arises as to whether Senator Maharath will consistently apply her argument to criminalizing late-term abortion in the State of Ohio. Will she with equal fervor apply her legislative passion to protect the lives of children in the womb (who undoubtedly do not have the "chance to make a choice for themselves")?

Should Senate Bill 78 eventually pass into law, a mother with a smoldering Marlboro clenched between her lips while navigating Ohio roads with her child in tow would be subject to a fine of $500 for the first such offense. Ironically, the same mother can lawfully choose to end the life of her child in Ohio with financial assistance from any number of government-supported programs.

Smoke from the fires of irony at the Ohio Senate may be more toxic than that inhaled secondhand from tobacco.Yesterday, President Trump pulled off one of his trademark policy surprises via Twitter and characteristically managed to outrage all the right people.

The president recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights almost 52 years after that nation acquired control over the vital escarpment overlooking much of Northern Israel during the Six-Day War.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

In that armed conflict, Israel was defending itself against the combined forces of its Arab neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, who were seeking annihilation of the Jewish State.

The key fact is that control of the Golan Heights means control over the northern part of Israel, for it provides an ideal gun platform from which to shell Israel. The view from the Heights is breathtaking, showing how much territory is a sitting duck for any hostile power  for example, the ruthless Assad regime of Syria that still claims sovereignty over the gun platform.



Photo credit: Yuri Loginov.



Photo credit: Masterpjz9.

The ability to claim legitimacy among Arabs by shelling Israel would be a lure for any renegade Arab dictatorship that cannot be dismissed. Israel must control Golan in order to survive. That is reality. All of the objections are based on theory, airy grand theory. President Trump's recognition of Israeli sovereignty merely recognizes Israel's right to survive.

Yet outrage is common among foreign diplomats, American pundits, and lovers of the United Nations. Because, you see, according to the United Nations Charter, territory should not be legitimately acquired by war.

Professor Eugene Kantorovich (hat tip: Legal Insurrection) pointed out last year the error of this view in the case of defensive wars:

The widely-repeated view that recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights would be contrary to international law is based on one fundamental assumption: that at least since the adoption of U.N. Charter, international law prohibits any acquisition of foreign territory by force. While such a formulation of the rule is largely accurate, it omits crucial exceptions quite relevant to the case of the Golan Heights. Whatever the current status of an absolute prohibition on territorial change resulting from war, there was certainly no such blanket prohibition in 1967, when the territory came under Israeli control. At the time, international law only prohibited acquisition of force in illegal or aggressive wars. This is evident from the source of the prohibition in the UN Charter, post-Charter state practice, and the understandings of international jurists at the time. There is simply no precedent or authoritative source for forbidding defensive conquest in 1967.

By reversing previous American policy denying Israeli sovereignty, President Trump thumbed his nose at the U.N.-as-world-government crowd and acknowledged the fundamental right of a sovereign nation to survive. Ultimately, the theorists of world governance by the U.N. seek to endow that body with life-and-death control over nation-states.

Despite Twitter not being exactly an official organ for proclaiming U.S. government policy, Israel's P.M. Netanyahu leaped at the opportunity to thank Trump:

At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump! @realDonaldTrump  Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) March 21, 2019





With Netanyahu facing voters in two weeks, and embroiled in an alleged scandal, this huge victory from Trump has upset his political enemies, who have been already tasting the joy of his prospective defeat.

Democrats, who have now become hostile to Israel and Jews, and whose declared presidential nominees are all boycotting the AIPAC meeting for the first time ever, now have an issue on which they can express their new open opposition to the Jewish state.The Roman Catholic Cemetery in Nehru Nagar, Agra, harks back to a time when the many princely states that eventually united to become India had merchants and settlers originating from all over Europe, before the British had a death grip on the subcontinent. These people migrated to India attracted by the remarkable religious freedom India offered, regular pay, and overall better prospects, and found employment under various Indian courts. Eventually, they became so attached to the local culture, they married local women and adopted many of their customs such as clothing, food and lifestyle. Even the tombs became a curious blend of European and late Mughal architecture.

Hessings Tomb. Photo credit: Roop_Dey/Shutterstock.com

One particular tombthe main attraction of the cemeteryis the tomb of John Hessing, commissioned by his wife, Ann Hessing. Built of red sandstone, the tomb was heavily inspired by the Taj Mahal with an identical square plinth and a large arch-shaped doorway, called an iwan, flanked by ornamental double alcoves on either side. This is topped by a large dome with a knobbed spire. Slender turrets rise from the four corners of the structure, crowned by beautiful square chhatris. The design is essentially Mughal, although John Hessing was Christian.

John Hessing was born in Utrecht in 1739. He entered the military service of the VOC (United Dutch East India Company) at an early age of thirteen and arrived in Ceylon in 1752. Five years later, Hessing went back to the Netherlands. But after a decade, in 1763, he returned to India and served under the Nizam of Hyderabad.

Related: Bibi Ka Maqbara: The Other Taj Mahal

Hessings epitaph gives a detail description of his military career:

In the year 1784;, he entered into the service of Madho Rao Sindhia and was engaged in the several battles that led to the aggrandizement of that Chief and wherein he signalized himself so by his bravery as to gain the esteem and approbation of his employer, more particularly at the battle of Bhondagaon near Agra in the year 1787, which took place between this Chief and Nawab Ismael Beg, when he then became a Captain, and was severely wounded. On the death of Madho Rao Sindhia in 1793, he continued under his successor, Daulat Rao Sindhia, and in 1798 he attained to the rank of Colonel and immediately after to the command of the Fort and City of Agra, which he held to his death.

At that time, it was common for Europeans mercenaries to serve in the army of Indian rulers. The pay was marvelous. General Jean-Baptiste Ventura, an Italian mercenary, who served under Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the early 19th century, reputedly earned 2,500 rupees a monthnearly five hundred times the pay of a regular Indian soldier. He retired to Europe a rich man and lived comfortably until his death in 1858.

John Hessing died in 1803 defending the Fort of Agra. On his death, his wife and his sons paid tribute by erecting a grand tomb in the shape of the Taj Mahal. Because of her limited funds, Ann Hessing wasnt able to afford marble. Instead, Hessings tomb was built with red sandstone, which earned it the name Red Taj.

Photo credit: clicksabhi/Shutterstock.comTelcos seem to be in an overly generous mood due to the dynamics of the market and also the recent tariff war. In India data has been flowing for free. In such a case where the users have a significant amount of data in their possession, they are unable to follow the consumption pattern. However, when 10GB of data disappears mysteriously, one might take notice of it.

It has come into notice only last month that Android users might be susceptible to losing mobile data. Not only this, but it might also be draining their phone battery. As per several experts, a fraud advertisement might have consumed data of millions of Android users and is having an effect on the battery life of the device, too. As per the report, this code is known as DrainerBot and without the knowledge of the user; it downloads gigabytes of advertisement video on the smartphone of users through apps which had been infected by the bot.

Research has stated there are hundreds of apps on Android that have been downloaded over 10 million times and had been affected by the fraud. The ad fraud caused by the bot has taken up over 10GB of added data every month.

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The code of the bot had been tracked back to Tapcore, a Dutch company. However, it has completely denied knowing anything about it. They have also stated that they are going to launch an internal investigation regarding the matter.

As this had been done through the apps that are available on Google Play Store, Google is also known to have blacklisted the apps which had been marked by the researchers. However, they have to say that there are still some apps which still exist on the Play Store.

The researchers have done their part and provided a list of things that you have to be aware of when it comes to this fraud. They have to say that you need to check if the phone is getting hot and your phone battery is draining pretty quickly even when the phone is not being used heavily.

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Moreover, you need to see if after you download some apps or an app, there has been an increase in the usage of data. In such a case, the fraud bot might be at work. If you notice that your smartphone has become sluggish or your apps are crashing every now and then, there is a chance that the bot is at work.

You might think about downloading an app that is related to CFD and will help you to know what is a CFD. Even in such a case, you will have to follow the instructions given above, to save data, as well as your phone battery. Do not download apps from any other websites as this might not be secure for your phone. Any kind of unethical apps might damage your phone and cause you to go through a lot of hassle.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.AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said hes ambivalent over the United States government row with Chinese technology giant Huawei. While he acknowledged the vast majority of Washingtons concerns regarding the Shenzen-based company and its ties to Beijing.

Still, the Trump administration has so far done an extremely poor job at articulating those arguments in favor of blocking the Chinese firm from doing business in the country, the industry veteran said during his appearance at this weeks The Economic Club of Washington DC, a global forum organized by an eponymous non-profit.

Mr. Stephenson, who hasnt spoken publicly on the subject of Huawei for over a year now, was still careful with his words, well-aware of the fact hes walking a dangerous line between burning bridges with what could still prove to be a valuable partner and provoking the wrath of both Capitol Hill and the White House.

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AT&T remains a holder of numerous lucrative contracts with the federal government and it was precisely those contracts that were figuratively waved in front of it just over a year ago when the company was close to announcing a retail partnership with Huawei meant to allow its Mate 10 series of Android flagships to enter the U.S. through the front door, backed by contracts and payment plans from the second-largest wireless carrier domestically.

Washington officials managed to dismantle the deal at the very last minute, reportedly around 24 hours before it was supposed to be announced at the 2018 edition of Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. What followed was a rarely seen impromptu speech from Richard Yu, the CEO of Huaweis consumer electronics division.

That episode was just a prelude into a year worth of troubles, with Huawei repeatedly finding itself under scrutiny and on the lips of American diplomats abroad, with Washington initiating a coordinated effort to convince its allies to drop the companys technologies from their 5G plans.

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Widely presented as the next big thing, not just in tech but the mankinds development as a whole, the fifth generation of mobile networks promises to enable sci-fi technologies such as self-driving cars, real-time mixed-reality experiences, and truly intelligent, connected cities that manage themselves. Its hence of critical importance for virtually every government in the world, let alone the one that has the status of the strongest economy on the planet to defend.

The U.S. sees Huaweis ties to the Far Eastern countrys communist government that go all the way up to its founder Ren Zhengfei as an insurmountable issue, especially when combined with the existence of Chinas National Intelligence Law enacted in July of 2017 which provides that very same administration with an essentially limitless authority when it comes to forcing private Chinese corporations into cooperating with its agencies and provide information or even actively spy on their foreign customers.

Huawei responded to those concerns with disbelief and occasionally even irony, with Mr. Ren recently remarking how the countrys existing wireless network doesnt appear to be particularly safe despite the fact that it doesnt rely on his companys gear.

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Wholl be the last one laughing after some two decades worth of unprecedented animosity remains to be seen; Huawei recently sued the U.S. government over its 2018 spending bill which outlaws the firms wireless technologies but Washington is presently trying to extradite Huawei CFO and Mr. Rens 46-year-old daughter Meng Wanzhou from Canada after charging her on several counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and a conspiracy to commit both so as to circumvent trade sanctions imposed on Iran.The Anglican Communions Director for Mission, the Revd Canon John Kafwanka, reflects on his recent visit to the Iglesia Episcopal de Cuba - the Episcopal Church of Cuba.

Many Anglicans and Episcopalians know about Cuba, and know it as a Communist country; but I dont think many of them know that there is an Anglican Church in Cuba, and if they do they probably know very little about the life and ministry of the Church.

The Episcopal Diocese in Cuba is one of those places where very little if any of what goes on there is reported or known in the Anglican Communion, and yet it is a Church that is mission focused, with a strong sense of purpose and confidence in the Gospel, very strong community engagement, and a (w)holistic outlook to mission, taking seriously all the Five Marks of Mission in mission and ministry.

My recent visit to Cuba has been a real revelation as well as enriching. There was so much to experience in the life of the Church that I kept asking myself, Why have we not heard of all these many inspiring ways the Episcopalians in Cuba live out their faith in Jesus Christ?

Many congregations engage with communities in all sorts of ways, including water purification projects that provide clean water to surrounding communities; agricultural programmes that enable communities to engage in sustainable agricultural methods and guarantees food security; support for elderly members of the community with food and clean water supply; savings projects that support communities to generate their income to sustain their family needs; environmental care activities; and youth programmes to support and develop skills and talents among children and young people in craft, music, visual and expressive art.

I must underline the point that these activities are not seen as projects but as ways members of the Church live out their faith and the love of Jesus in their communities. This is especially exemplified by a one middle-aged woman known as Martha at Holy Trinity Church. Martha wakes up every morning at 6.00 am and goes to collect empty containers from the elderly members of the community, fills them with purified water at the purification plant behind the Church and have them delivered back to owners. Martha also ensures that the responsible local government department delivers water to the purification plant on time.

Martha enjoys what she does and finds great fulfilment in serving her community. Martha does not see herself as a volunteer but as a member of the Church community that exists to express the faith in Jesus in everyday life, and in ways that has impact on the community.

This was beautifully summed by the Revd Juan Carlos from Holy Trinity Church who said "We are here to love the people in the community; all that we do we think of the community."

This sort of story was repeated in other congregations I visited, and each of these stories have very telling results behind them.

For instance, St Lukes Church in the eastern part of the country is a church that not many members of the community knew about. A story is told of how seven years ago a visitor who was looking for St Lukes Church asked local people to direct him to the church, but no one knew where it was. Today, a person looking for St Lukes is asked by members of that community if he or she was looking for the Church that provides support to the elderly, that which distributes clean water in the community, that which has lots of young people, and so forth.

Now, St Lukes Church draws people from the community to participate in the various social and community engagements the church undertakes. People in the community provide security against vandalism to the church infrastructure because of what the Church symbolises in that community  it is their church.

I also learnt that the youth Hands programme at Holy Trinity Church has been so successful that parents of children involved in the activities have made strong connection with the church and that some of them have even become members and become involved in the various church activities.

Performance by children and young people involved in expressive art started to attract people in the community, and due to public demand plays are repeated, and have had to move to a community hall, which is bigger and able to accommodate the growing interest from the community.

All these developments have happened under the stable, positive and confident leadership of Bishop Griselda Delgado del Carpio, whose passion is to see a Church that has vocation for all Gods people and at every level of membership.

After more than 50 years of separation, the Episcopal Church in Cuba is to become a diocese of The Episcopal Church following the passing of a motion at the US-based Episcopal Churchs General Convention in 2018.

Without a doubt the Episcopal Church in Cuba has a lot to gain from being a member of the Province, and has a lot offer to offer in return, not just to TEC but also to the Anglican Communion more widely.

Mine has been a privilege and honour to visit Cuba and thanks to Archbishop Fred Hiltz and the Anglican Church of Canada for facilitating the come and see invitation and the trip itself.Posted on: March 22, 2019 5:01 PM

A reasons for refusal letter sent by an official in Britains Home Office to an asylum seeker showed a profound misunderstanding of biblical texts, the Bishop of Durham, Paul Butler said. Bishop Paul made his comments after parts of the letter, sent to an un-named Iranian convert to Christianity, were shared on social media. In it, a Home Office official quotes passages from the Bible, including from Revelation, before describing them as filled with imagery of revenge, destruction, death and violence. The letter went on to say that These examples are inconsistent with your claim that you converted to Christianity after discovering it is a peaceful religion, as opposed to Islam which contains violence, rage and revenge.

Responding to the letter, Bishop Paul, the lead Church of England Bishop in the House of Lords on immigration, asylum and refugees, said that he was extremely concerned that a Government department could determine the future of another human being based on such a profound misunderstanding of the texts and practices of faith communities.

To use extracts from the Book of Revelation to argue that Christianity is a violent religion is like arguing that a Government report on the impact of Climate Change is advocating drought and flooding.

It is good that the Home Office has recognised that this decision is inconsistent with its policies and that its staff need better training. But the fact that these comments were made at all suggests that the problem goes deeper than a lack of religious literacy among individual civil servants and indicates that the management structures and ethos of the Home Office, when dealing with cases with a religious dimension, need serious overhaul.

I look forward to hearing what changes in training and practice follow from this worrying example.

He added: The Church of England has regularly raised the issue of the religious literacy of staff at all levels within the Home Office. This fresh case shows just how radically the Home Office needs to change in its understanding of all religious beliefs.

This afternoon (Friday), the un-named asylum seekers caseworker, Nathan Stephens, said that the Home Office had now rescinded its decision to reject the asylum claim and would reconsider. In a Tweet, Mr Stephens said that the Home Office had invited the asylum seeker to make further representations. It was a good start, but more change is needed, Mr Stephens said.Marysville, CA (95901)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this morning will become overcast during the afternoon. High 51F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy with rain developing after midnight. Low near 45F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch.Hateful faces", enraged countenances", scenes unheard of in decades of police work, with the Catalan police doing nothing or even getting in their way. Most Guardia Civil officers made similar claims while giving evidence relating to the referendum on the independence of Catalonia, on 1 October 2017, as did some of the officers who carried out searches from 19 to 20 September 2017 ahead of the vote, with the intention of preventing it from going ahead although the latter spoke of the Catalan polices cooperation. One of the officers who took part in an operation at a polling station in the town of Sant Andreu de la Barca described the voters who "verbally abused" the Spanish police officers as "criminals". "I dont know if they insulted me for carrying out a court order or because Im a Guardia Civil officer. What made an impact on me is the way they looked at me. I couldnt say if their eyes showed contempt or hatred". Staff sergeant G3772B (1) declared that he had "never been spat at before" for doing his job, before recalling the insults from around twenty individuals who were gathered inside the polling station. The only physical confrontation the officer claimed that actually took place was when a member of the public attempted to bite one of the officers hands, although the defence teams pointed out that it must have been another part of his body.

Once the public had been removed from the surrounding area, the officer stated that his unit entered the polling station, where they found some 300 people sitting on the floor, making it difficult for them to seize the 2,500 ballots and voting envelopes they found on the premises. According to the officer, they managed to advance by being careful not to step on the members of the public, who did nothing to stop them. Later they were able to return to their vehicles, which were parked about 40 meters away. The officer also spoke of the attitude of the eight members of the Catalan police [or Mossos dEsquadra] who "did not approach us" and merely watched on "passively", from "the other side of the street".

"The hatred was palpable"

Lieutenant U41506Z, who took part in an operation at another polling station in the town of Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, stated that "the hatred and rage were so palpable I dont know how they had managed to contain it for so long". He denied having seen any demonstrator being injured, even though that day a total of 14 members of the public required medical attention for having been dragged down a flight of stairs. He also admitted that he did not know if the public were warned of the possible use of force by the Guardia Civil, though in his opinion any use of force was "totally proportionate and reasonable". Finally, he admitted that he knew at least one officer due to appear before the High Court of Barcelona indicted over the police charges. Nonetheless, he emphasized that he has been "personally affected" by the events which took place that day, which explains why he filed a complaint about a protest in a school where his son was asked to participate.

With regard to the part played by the Catalan police, the officer declared that two officers had tried to prevent him from entering the polling station and "demanded I show them a court order". "They physically refused to step aside and we had to push them with our shields", he stated, before going on to say that later "uniformed firefighters" appeared to "occupy the front line of resistance".

Another witness, the Guardia Civil officer with badge number W6816J, participated in the operation at a polling station in the town of Sant Marti de Sesgueioles. According to her statement, her unit found a group of members of the public seated "intertwined" on the ground, who refused to stand up when asked to. The officer went on to say that they gained access through a side door after removing several desks and chairs, despite attempts to "overpower" the police line by "pushing and shoving" them. The Guardia Civil stated that when they managed to enter the premises they found a cardboard ballot box from 9-N [A non-binding Catalan self-determination referendum, held on 9 November 2014], before realising the towns mayor had posted on her Facebook wall that the vote had taken place in someones garage.

In reply to questions put to them by lawyers representing the Catalan political leaders who are on trial, the witness denied any knowledge of the presence of a plainclothes Guardia Civil officer, a demonstrator who was wearing a balaclava, who stood up during the incident and eventually left along with the other officers. She also denied having heard the audio recordings in which Guardia Civil officers refer to members of the public as motherf*****s, and one of them saying he would "beat them up like there is no tomorrow". She also claimed not to know why the footage that the Guardia Civil submitted as evidence had the audio track removed.

__________

Translators note:

(1) Lower-ranking Spanish police and Guardia Civil officers who take the witness stand in the trial of the twelve Catalan independence leaders are named by their badge number only.Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI) are the latest to announce participation joining the General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who will also be attending the event for the first time. Other Saudi companies attending the Dubai Airshow include GDC Middle East, Advanced Electronics Company (AEC), Middle East Propulsion Company (MEPC), Saudi Aerospace Company (SAC) and Saudia Aerospace & Engineering Industries (SAEI).

SAMI is a military industry company, launched in May 2017 to act as a sustainable platform to provide world-class military products and services to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its allies and forms a key part of the Kingdoms 2030 Vision, based upon increased investment to transform Saudi Arabia into a global hub.

According to GACA, Saudi Arabia has achieved unprecedented growth over the years in civil aviation, helping to drive development at the countrys airports including major developments in passenger transportation, air cargo, airport construction and equipment, air navigation and control.

The Dubai Airshow will once again include its renowned Delegations Programme, in which military and civil delegations from across the world are invited to participate, co-ordinated by show organisers, in conjunction with the UAE Ministry of Defence, Dubais Department of Civil Aviation Authority and the Government of Dubai. A significant number of the 279 delegations to the 2017 edition came from Saudi Arabia, with that number expected to increase in 2019.

Aviation is a key pillar in the diversification and expansion of the Saudi economy within its 2030 Vision," said Michele van Akelijen, managing director of organisers Tarsus F&E LLC Middle East. She continues, The Dubai Airshow is the ideal platform for Saudi companies to present themselves to the global aerospace industry.Amazing Vodka Martini Recipes You Need to Try

Bartenders Shake Up the Vodka Martini With 4 Original Cocktails

Lets be honest, sometimes theres nothing better than sitting down and unwinding with martini in hand. The seemingly simple cocktail began as a gin-based beverage, but has since evolved to include several variations, including the now beloved vodka martini. Unlike gin, which tends to have a more botanical and earthy flavor profile, vodka gives the classic cocktail a smoother, crisper, more modern feel.

RELATED: Martini 101

Furthermore, using a top-shelf vodka such as Ketel One, which is known for its freshness as well as its flavorful hints of citrus and honey, all but ensures your martini will be exceptionally soft, yet tasty.

While making a vodka martini isnt quite as complicated as say, remembering whos alive and whos dead on Game of Thrones, we consulted with four expert bartenders and mixologists to develop some of the best martini recipes around, because why settle for mediocrity when you can have something amazing?

And believe it or not, despite the years of experience and thousands of Instagram followers between these three, each recipe is easy enough to throw together in your own home in a matter of minutes.

Scroll down to see their distinct drinks, each of which has its own unique flavor profile thats enhanced by Ketel One.

Liquor Laboratory

Freddie Sarkis, chief cocktail officer of Liquor Laboratory in New York City, shared his take on the best smoky martini, which gets its woodsy notes from amontillado sherry and cherry bark bitters.

Named for a resort town in the lovely Costa del Sol in Spain, this distant cousin to the Adonis cocktail features a few Spanish flavors boosted with Ketel One vodka, he explains. The result? A perfect sip from mid-afternoon until the late evenings.

Smoky Marbella Martini

Ingredients:

1 oz Ketel One vodka

1 oz amontillado sherry

1 oz cocchi Torino vermouth

1 tsp absinthe

2 dashes cherry bark bitters

1 strip of citrus zest

Instructions:

Combine Kettle One vodka, sherry and vermouth in a glass and stir. Throw it in the Spanish style to mix. Season a chilled coupe glass rinsed with peat scotch. Pour the cocktail gently into the glass. Spray a light mist of absinthe on the drink, and express your citrus zest over the cocktail.

Ketel One Family-Made Vodka

Pam Wiznitzer, who goes by @pamwiz on Instagram, is a Columbia-educated bartender currently slinging drinks as a mixologist at New Yorks Henry at the Life Hotel. Her citrus-forward martini uses a dash of sea salt and a touch of orange blossom water to make the flavor of the Ketel One vodka really pop.

What I love about this martini is that it doesnt mess around or too far away from the original martini, but brings in culinary features  like the salt  to highlight the main ingredients of the Ketel One family-made vodka and vermouth, she explains. Her drink is called the Roo Two because kangaroo is another name for a vodka martini.

Roo Two

Ingredients:

Small pinch pink sea salt

3/4 oz vermouth

1 1/2 oz Ketel One

1 tsp orange blossom water, to rinse the glass

Orange or lemon peel, for garnish

Instructions:

Toss the pinch of pink sea salt into a tall mixing glass. Add vermouth and Ketel One vodka to the glass. Pour the orange blossom water in your martini glass and swirl it around so the water coats the interior of the glass. Set aside. Add ice to the mixing glass and stir. Add additional ice as you stir and set aside. Take your martini glass and swirl it again. Pour out the excess orange blossom water. Pour the liquid from the mixing glass into the martini glass using a strainer. Garnish with an orange or lemon peel.

District

Bar lead Tony Gonzales from District restaurant in Los Angeles went in a slightly spicer direction when formulating his Ginger Connection cocktail, but the result is a clean, balanced beverage.

The Ginger Connection is an awesome balance of citrus complemented by sweetness and spice, he explains. The spice from the ginger reacts really well with the creaminess of the egg white for a balanced, flavorful cocktail.

RELATED: Top 10 Manly Drinks

The Ginger Connection

Ingredients:

1 1/2 oz Ketel One vodka

3/4 oz lemon juice

3/4 oz ginger syrup

1 egg white

Rose water

Angostura bitters

Instructions:

Combine the Ketel One vodka, lemon juice, ginger syrup, and egg white in a cocktail shaker and shake. Add ice, and shake again. Pour into a martini glass carefully, holding back the froth until the end. Spray the drink with rose water and angostura bitters.

Muddling Memories

For something more seasonal, try this creation by Cody Goldstein, who was nominated as one of 2015s Best Bartenders by Timeout New York.

This riff on a wet martini combines two types of vermouth (blanc and dry), which give it herbaceous and floral note while still offering the sweet and tart notes, explains Goldstein, who founded Muddling Memories, of his cocktail creation. Saline solution is essentially a salted water which helps to bring out the aromas in the fortified wines. Instead of your average garnish of an olive or lemon peel, I went with a tomato on the vine which brings a freshness and brightens to the drink.

Essence of Spring

Ingredients:

3 ounces Ketel One

1/2 ounce blanc vermouth

1/2 ounce dry vermouth

Saline solution, to rinse

Tomato on the vine, to garnish

Instructions:

Combine Ketel One, blanc vermouth, and dry vermouth into a mixing glass. Grab your coupe glass, and with either a spray bottle or a bar spoon, add a saline solution into the coupe glass. Swirl around and discard liquid. Fill your mixing glass with ice and stir for 10 seconds. Strain ingredient from mixing glass and garnish with a tomato on the vine.

Now break out the bar cart and start shaking and stirring!

You Might Also Dig:Welcome Guest! You Are Here:To the First Nations of Australia:

Thank you for your Uluru Statement From the Heart, an invitation to Australia and the Australian people.

Thank you for your invitation to walk with you in a movement of all Australian people for a better future.

We recognise the Uluru Statement From the Heart as an historic mandate to create a fuller expression of Australias nationhood.

We hear and support your call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution and for a referendum as a national priority.The expanded relationship between Baker McKenzie and RACS will now include support for awareness-raising and fundraising activities for RACS and its work.

There are thousands of people in need of our support; support that couldnt be provided without the incredible generosity and leadership from organisations like Baker McKenzie, said Tanya Jackson-Vaughan, RACS executive director. This important commitment will ensure that we can advocate for and provide legal assistance to more vulnerable people within our community.

RACS is the only dedicated organisation in New South Wales that provides pro bono legal support to people asylum seekers. It has programs specialising on unaccompanied children, family separation, and stateless children.

Jackson-Vaughan said that RACS advocates for better policy and for justice, dignity, and respect for refugees.

We are proud and grateful to have the opportunity to work alongside Bakers McKenzie, a law firm who hold those same values and are integral in supporting our crucial work. We look forward to collaborating throughout the year ahead, and to seeing what we can achieve together, she said.Two University of Sydney Law School students have been given a leg up in a global legal innovation program, thanks to a technology developer and a national law firm.

BigHand, the dictation software maker that specialises in serving the legal industry, has teamed up with Barry.Nilsson. to support Cherie Chen and Sarah Bartrim, who represent their school in the LawWithoutWalls (LWOW) program.

LWOW is intended to develop current and future lawyers, transform professional collaboration, and solve problems at the intersection of law, business, and technology. Through the program, law and business students work with academics, entrepreneurs, and legal mentors for 16 weeks to solve a problem in the legal industry.We look forward to working with and supporting you, governments and all Australia to take this next step towards reconciliation.

A culmination of 13 regional dialogues held across the country for a year, the Uluru Statement from the Heart was released in May 2017 by delegates to a three-day constitutional convention of 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates. It outlined the desire of the First Nations to have their voice enshrined in the Constitution, as well as establish a Makarrata Commission, to better solve these communities concerns and problems.

Brooke Massender, head of pro bono at Herbert Smith Freehills, said on behalf of the firms: The historic consensus reached at Uluru was a major milestone in the journey towards achieving substantive constitutional reform. Through this broad collaborative response we are signalling clearly that First Nations voices matter and should be heard.

Joanna Renkin, pro bono and community partner at Lander & Rogers, said: The Uluru Statement represents an invitation for all Australians to come together in a national dialogue that will help to positively shape our national identity. As lawyers, we felt that we were well placed to respond to the Uluru Statement from the Heart and we were very keen to do so. We encourage other law firms, professional services firms and corporations across the country to join this important conversation.

Megan Davis, pro vice chancellor indigenous at UNSW and a member of the Referendum Council, said that endorsement of the statement by 18 of Australias leading law firms is a historic development toward the constitutional recognition of First Nations.On the opening day of Mapuas Engineering Week, both the Toyota Prius and Prius C served as the centerpiece of the festivities.

With manufacturers making a stronger push towards zero emissions, Toyota Motor Philippines (TMP) is bringing solutions closer to the younger generation. In a partnership with Mapua Universitys Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering (MME) Department, TMP kicked off its Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) campus tour. The Mapua grounds in Intramuros offered both students and faculty a firsthand look on the benefits of HEV technology through a symposium and an all-day test drive activity.

Our goal is to raise public awareness on the advantages of using HEV technology. There is no better way to start the advocacy than with our future engineers and craftsmen, who will shape our tomorrow, said TMP First Vice President Ms. Cristina Arevalo during the ceremonial ribbon-cutting which had student council leaders alongside her. The event also happened to coincide with the MME Departments 79th anniversary.

Conducting the symposium were technical experts from Toyotas Santa Rosa, Laguna manufacturing plant. In all three one-hour symposia, the environmental impact of emissions from various energy sources, and how fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles like the Prius contribute to minimizing carbon footprints were discussed. As for the test drive activity, a dedicated area welcomed students for a short route with the Prius C hatchback. With a Toyota technical representative sitting in-car, the activity was enjoyed by almost a hundred student-drivers.

Its a real eye-opener for us, said Paolo Napao, a 3rd year Manufacturing Engineering student. He is among the first to try out the Prius C and attend the educational seminar afterwards. You barely notice the engine starting because its so quiet, and the self-charging battery makes it very convenient, he added. Throughout the event, the students were able to break down the concept of synergy between the gas engine and electric motor plus battery of the Prius model.

With Mapua kicking off the tour calendar, Toyota will soon bring the HEV campus tour to other schools and universities. As of writing, the University of Santo Tomas and De La Salle University are slated to follow in the coming months. This TMP effort is aligned with the Toyota Environmental Challenge 2050, posed by Toyota Motor Corporation President Mr. Akio Toyoda himself to promote a sustainable approach to the future of mobility.This new legislation for motorcycle owners and riders was created out of a need to curtail criminal activity. The new Republic Act aims to achieve this goal by toughening up the rules regarding the identification of motorcycles -both two-wheeled and three-wheeled- by criminalizing the failure to register or transfer the ownership of a motorcycle, up to and including the installation of two, larger and more visible license plates; one in front and one in the back. Mind you, motorcycles don't typically have mounts for a front license plate.

In the last couple of weeks, there was one new piece of legislation that has gained notoriety among motorcyclists: doble plaka. Quite literally, it means double plate.

The need can be rationalized very easily: criminals require mobility, and given traffic, they resort to motorcycles that can easily maneuver in and out of even the heaviest of gridlocks and disappear. From simple snatch and grabs to armed robberies and tandem riding assassins carrying out dirty deeds typically motivated by money and/or politics, motorcycles are the most common denominator, and that's what our lawmakers targeted. And given that the President is, understandably, big on taking on criminal activity, a veto was never really on the cards.

Personally, I don't ride, but I feel for the millions of riders that are up in arms and are going to be unduly hassled by Republic Act 11235. But I think this law has some significant parallels with another law that was passed a few years ago: Republic Act 10591.

If you like to shoot or lawfully own a firearm, you'll know what it is: the Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act.

Some may wonder why we're relating the new motorcycle anti-crime law to the Philippine gun law, but let's take a look at the stipulations of the law on firearms first.

If you want a firearm, you first need to get a License To Own and Possess Firearms (LTOPF). The list of requirements is long, and they include things like a drug test, a neuropsychiatric test, a gun safety seminar, identification cards, your certificate of employment or business permit, clearances from the Philippine National Police and the National Bureau of Investigation.

They were very thorough, restrictive, and selective because, unlike in the United States, firearms ownership in the Philippines is a privilege, not a right protected by the constitution. And given the requirements costs of establishing a firearms importer or dealer, not to mention our import taxes among others, the price of owning good firearms is not just a privilege; it's a luxury. Prices are double (generally) compared to the US.

I know how expensive and time consuming it can be; I just got mine. And mind you, that's just to bring a new firearm home. If you want to be able to carry your firearm outside of your home to your place of business to protect yourself, you'll have to apply for a separate and much more expensive Permit To Carry Firearm Outside of Residence (PTCFOR) to be able to do so.

Honestly, I don't mind going through the hoops. That's the law, and the steps you go through -while definitely not hassle-free- does make the privilege of firearms ownership feel a bit more special, oddly enough.

Now perhaps you're wondering what the similarity is to the new motorcycle-related law, and my argument is simple: both Republic Act 11235 and 10591, while good in intentions is affecting the law-abiding majority to curtail the activities of (hopefully) just a few.

While the media publicizes stories about criminals that use motorcycles to get their nefarious jobs done and hype up firearms-related crimes, I believe that these incidents reflect the actions and intents of a few, and not the majority.

I believe that the majority of motorcycle riders are ordinary folks who need to get to work, attend meetings, make deliveries, go on dates or take a tour of the country on two wheels, much in the same way that I believe the majority of firearms owners in the Philippines are ordinary folks that own a gun to protect themselves, their homes and their families.

Actually there's something even more similar now to the doble plaka law and firearms ownership. If you thought it's annoying that your motorcycle now has to have two big plates for easier identification, based on a new set of implementing rules from 2018, PTCFOR holders now have to carry a firearm in a bag of some sort. A citizen can no longer carry a gun concealed in a holster inside the waistband or in their pocket. That makes drawing in an emergency situation a lot more complex, and also having a sling bag, clutch bag, or belt bag practically announces that you're armed. Think about it: no bag = no gun = potential victim.

I am of the opinion that the punishment or the measures to address the actions and intents of a few shouldn't be levied upon the majority. That is just not fair, much in the same way that I think there's something wrong when police checkpoints only really stop and check motorcycles, not automobiles. I wouldn't mind showing an officer my license and registration; nothing to hide here.

A new law wasn't really what was needed; enforcement and a much more visible police presence is what was needed.

They say a bad apple spoils the bunch, but it's a bit of a reach to apply it to people. But it seems our lawmakers are spoiling the conditions for the bunch, all because of a bad few.Image: Boeing

The FBI has reportedly joined a criminal investigation into the certification of the Boeing 737 MAX in the wake of the crashes of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Lion Air Flight 610, according to The Seattle Times. The report comes after Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Elaine Chao issued a memo (PDF) on Tuesday confirming a previous request for the DOTs Inspector General to conduct an audit to compile an objective and detailed factual history of the activities that resulted in the certification of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft. 346 people were killed in the two MAX crashes, which happened within five months of each other.

The investigation is being conducted by the DOT Inspector General and overseen by the criminal division of the U.S. Justice Department. It has also been reported that, based on information from the Lion Air crash, the MAX certification investigation may have begun prior to the Ethiopian Airlines accident. It is expected that investigators will be looking closely at how the FAA has regulated Boeing and safety certification work performed by company employees for the FAA. Boeing has previously stated that it will cooperate fully with the FAA, DOT and NTSB on all issues relating to both the Lion Air and the Ethiopian Airlines accidents.

As previously reported by AVweb, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said on Monday that a software update and new pilot training procedures to address concerns discovered in the aftermath of the Lion Air Flight 610 accident will be coming soon. Those updates will need to be approved by the FAA before the MAX stands any chance of being allowed off the ground. Regulators in Europe and Canada have said that they will conduct their own reviews of any fixes Boeing provides.We gotta admit, low flyovers are a huge thrill. The Army is asking itself if it knows how low is too low.The chill between First Ladies Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush was no secret, but USA Today's D.C. bureau chief Susan Page found fascinating new evidence for a biography, "The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty," out April 2 from Twelve.

Driving the news: The draft guest list for one of the biggest social events of the Reagan presidency  the White House dinner during a 1985 royal visit by Prince Charles and Lady Diana  shows that Nancy Reagan personally struck Vice President George H.W. Bush and his wife from the guest list.

Courtesy Twelve

The document shown above is being shared for the first time with Axios.

shown above is being shared for the first time with Axios. The dinner included "superstars of film, television, ballet, music, sports, science, the arts and New York society," the N.Y. Times reported.

Page interviewed more than 100 people for the book, including both Presidents Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, as well as numerous other family members, friends, and colleagues.

Page met with Barbara Bush five times, talked with her for hours, and was given rare permission to read all of her diaries, which go back to 1948.

with Barbara Bush five times, talked with her for hours, and was given rare permission to read all of her diaries, which go back to 1948. Her final entry was 12 days before her death, one year ago at age 92.

In "The Matriarch," Page tells about the time a hippo appeared ready to charge the former first lady while she was on a photo safari with two granddaughters, private equity titan David Rubenstein and a few others in Kenya.

While the Secret Service debated whether to move Mrs. Bush out of the way, she stood her ground.

debated whether to move Mrs. Bush out of the way, she stood her ground. "I think she thought she could out intimidate the hippopotamus," Rubenstein recalls. (Indeed, the hippo retreated.)

At the end of their first interview, Barbara Bush suggested a title for Page's biography: "The Fat Lady Sings Again."

Go deeper: Preorder Page's book.Brazil's last 3 presidents have not fared well legally, but its market has managed to remain stable.

Why it matters: The country's stock market has largely shaken off political turmoil as investors continue to believe in a widely unpopular pension reform current President Jair Bolsonaro has backed in an effort to repair Brazil's highly overleveraged and underfunded budget.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who led the country until 2010, is in jail on corruption and bribery charges.

Dilma Rousseff served until 2016 when she was impeached and removed from office.

Michel Temer, who replaced her and served until 2018, was arrested and charged with leading a "criminal organization" that diverted 1.8 billion reais ($475.6 million) in funds yesterday.

Driving the news: Brazil's benchmark Bovespa stock index fell by nearly 4% following news of Temer's arrest, but ended the day just 1.34% lower. The countrys 10-year bond yield rose 4 basis points to 8.76% and the real currency ended little changed at 3.79 per dollar.

Brazil's main bourse has more than doubled the performance of the S&P 500 since Rousseff's powers were suspended in May 2016, and a recent Reuters poll showed traders expect the Bovespa to rise 36.5% in 2019.

It has risen less than 7% so far.

Yes, but: Investors' faith is being tested as the far-right Bolsonaro is fast losing popularity. The president's approval rating has declined significantly since he took office in January, falling most recently to just 34%, according to a poll by Ibope.

The clock is ticking for the pension reform to be approved on the government's timeline. Council of the Americas reports that a survey by Metapolitica shows that to pass on time, the pension reform would have to be the fastest constitutional amendment in the history of Brazil's Congress.

Go deeper: Trump suggests Brazil could become NATO memberCountries around the world, including Russia and U.S. allies such as France, Germany and Egypt, criticized President Trump's announcement this week that the U.S. would recognize Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights.

Why it matters: At the moment, no country  other than Israel  has backed Trump's announcement. And most countries who came out against Trump's move stressed that it was a violation of international law and multiple UN resolutions.

What they're saying:

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Trump's announcement "may considerably destabilize the already strained situation in the Middle East." He added that Russia is still waiting to see if Trump will follow his tweet with any concrete steps.

France's Foreign Affairs Ministry said: "The Golan is a territory occupied by Israel since 1967. France does not recognize the Israeli annexation of 1981. UN Security Council resolutions had recognized the annexation as illegal."

Germany's Federal Foreign Office said: "The Golan Heights is a Syrian territory occupied by Israel. National borders should be changed only through peaceful means between all those involved. The government rejects unilateral steps."

European Council President Donald Tusk said the EU was maintaining its position on the Golan Heights despite Trump's announcement: "The European Union does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized Trump's move and said it "has brought the region to the edge of a new crisis."

Egypt's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: "Everybody should respect the resolutions of international legitimacy and the United Nations Charter in respect of the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force."

Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Trump's announcement was "unacceptable and illegal."

Syria's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: "Syria is determined to recover the Golan through all available means. The Golan was and will remain Syrian."

What's next: It's still unclear if Russia or other countries will try to bring the issue to the UN Security Council or General Assembly in order to try to isolate the U.S. After Trump's announcement that he would move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2017, the U.S. had to veto a resolution in the Security Council  and lost in a vote in the General Assembly as around 130 member states voted against the U.S. move.

Go deeper: Nikki Haley threatens to pull UN funding over Jerusalem voteIt was another day of diplomacy in the age of Twitter, with @realDonaldTrump tweeting: "After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

Why it matters: The presidents tweet calls for a change in U.S. policy toward the Golan Heights but does not actually declare it. There are many reasons for the president not to turn his tweet into policy. It would all but eliminate what little chance exists for peace between Israel and either the Palestinians or Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia.

Coming on the heels of the U.S. decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, it would eliminate any remaining ability of the Trump administration to act as an honest broker.

of the U.S. decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, it would eliminate any remaining ability of the Trump administration to act as an honest broker. A change in U.S. policy would not change the situation on the ground or improve Israeli security. Israel already occupies the Golan Heights, and there is no reason for it to give up an inch of it in the absence of a Syrian government prepared to live in peace with Israel.

in U.S. policy would not change the situation on the ground or improve Israeli security. Israel already occupies the Golan Heights, and there is no reason for it to give up an inch of it in the absence of a Syrian government prepared to live in peace with Israel. The only effect of a new U.S. policy then would be to increase the isolation of both Israel and the U.S.

The president's tweet is presumably meant to bolster his political standing as well as Bibi Netanyahu's in the run-up to the April 9 Israeli elections.

But it would come at a steep cost to Israel, as UN Resolution 242 has been the foundation of at times fruitful efforts to broker peace between Israelis and Arabs for more than half a century.

at a steep cost to Israel, as UN Resolution 242 has been the foundation of at times fruitful efforts to broker peace between Israelis and Arabs for more than half a century. The resolution asserts the right of every country in the region to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.

the right of every country in the region to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries. This is precisely what Israel and the U.S. have sought since Israels creation in 1948.

Richard Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "A World in Disarray."Mere days after President Trump's biting tweets about the closure of an Ohio General Motors factory, the auto company announced $300 million plans to add 400 jobs and manufacture a new electric vehicle at its Detroit-area plant, AP reports.

The backdrop: Last weekend Trump demanded that GM reopen or sell the plant, chastising the local union leader and expressing dissatisfaction with CEO Mary Barra. GM spokesman Dan Flores denies the growth announcements were in response to the president's tweets, adding the investments had been weeks in the making, per the AP.

Details: A battery-powered Chevrolet Bolt will be produced at the company's Orion Township plant, though GM has not yet revealed when production or sales will commence. Questions also remain around the schedule for hiring and whether the new workers will be among those who were laid-off at 4 U.S. factories that closed in January. GM announced on Friday an additional $1.4 billion investment in U.S. factories, with a potential 300 more hires, but did not provide any further details, according to AP.Indonesian airline Garuda is seeking to cancel the remainder of its $4.9 billion order for 48 more Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets, after at least 40 countries suspended the jets' operation due to 2 fatal crashes of the brand new aircraft in the last 6 months, the New York Times reports.

The big picture: Garuda's pullout is the latest blow to Boeing, as the loss of 2 brand new aircraft in 6 months has no precedent in modern aviation history and has threatened one of the company's main sources of revenue. Multiple investigations are now underway into how the 737 MAX was certified, including the Inspector General's office at the U.S. Transportation Department, the FBI, a federal grand jury and House and Senate committees.

In its most recent communication to airlines on Wednesday, the FAA said Boeing is working on a software fix that may address the cause of both crashes, but gave no timetable for its introduction and rollout.

Our thought bubble, per Axios' Andrew Freedman: It's not easy for an airline to cancel an aircraft order without paying penalties, and Garuda will have to negotiate with Boeing going forward. But this cancellation is noteworthy since the airline has a checkered safety history, having had multiple crashes in the past decade. So if they're bailing on the 737 MAX, it could encourage carriers with a better reputation to rethink their plans too.

Go deeper: Canada, Europe to conduct own reviews into Boeing 737 Max jetsIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is coming to Washington next week to meet with President Trump and speak at the annual policy conference of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group.

Why it matters: Beyond the official reasons for Netanyahu's trip, the embrace of Trump and other American supporters could be valuable to his political prospects. With an election only two weeks away, Netanyahu faces serious legal challenges and is behind in the polls  perhaps his most precarious electoral position in decades.

Context: The visit comes at a divisive moment around Israel among Democrats, highlighted by sparring between Rep. Ilhan Omar and senior Democratic lawmakers over her comments on the motivations of Israel supporters.

Trump has exploited this dynamic, labeling the Democratic party anti-Jewish, even though 79% of Jews voted Democratic in 2018. Watch for Netanyahu to back him, putting Democrats further on the defensive.

Netanyahu's AIPAC speech is likely to focus on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement  the group's top priority, after military aid to Israel and constraints on Iran. He may emphasize Israel's greater acceptance in the Arab world, but dont expect much fanfare about the Palestinian issue.

Flashback: In March 2015, Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress and attacked President Barack Obamas Iran diplomacy. That speech similarly doubled as a campaign ad for his re-election to the premiership.

Between the lines: Both leaders stand to gain from the visit, and Trump has given Netanyahu an additional boost by vowing to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Yet there are critical policy issues in play that can't be papered over:

Iran continues to expand its reach in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The Trump administrations attempt to isolate Iran by withdrawing from the nuclear deal has been ineffective at best; by undermining alliances, it's left the U.S. and Israel more alone in their efforts. Syria is dominated by Russia and Iran, with Assad firmly in power. Trumps Golan Heights decision will create new tensions as military activity between Israel and Iran continues. Jared Kushner's peace plan has no support from the Palestinians. While that will not advance Israel's long-term security, Netanyahu may benefit in the meantime, as his coalition partners panicked over reports Kushner could address borders. Now that Netanyahu has secured his most significant near-term ask  American recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital  prospects for two-state peacemaking under his leadership are dim.

The bottom line: Netanyahu's visit will likely do little to resolve Israel's most pressing security concerns, and could instead prioritize his political survival over policy.

Joel Rubin is president of the Washington Strategy Group and the former deputy assistant secretary of state for the House of Representatives.New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Thursday a national ban on all military-style semiautomatic weapons, just 6 days after attacks on 2 mosques in Christchurch killed 50 worshippers.

The big picture: Ardern's swift action to ban weapons that the killer used, stands in sharp contrast to the political stalemate and unwillingness to pass gun control measures in the U.S. Congress despite an alarming number of mass shootings in recent years. Already "More than a thousand people have notified Police using the online form that they wish to hand in their firearm," New Zealand Police said Friday afternoon local time. "Hundreds more have phoned them to notify them of their intentions. The gun amnesty will run until legislation has been amended."

What exactly Ardern wants to ban: As the AP notes, the ban includes any "military-style" semi-automatic guns, assault rifles and parts that can be converted into a semiautomatic weapon. Under New Zealand law, military-style semi-automatics are rifles with magazines exceeding 7 shots.

What's not included in the ban: "Semi-automatic .22 caliber or smaller guns that hold up to 10 rounds or semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns with non-detachable magazines that hold up to five rounds. The guns not banned are commonly used by farmers and hunters," per the AP.

What's next: An immediate sales ban went into effect Thursday to prevent stockpiling. The proposed laws are expected to encounter little opposition in Parliament as Arderns liberal Labour Party, the conservative opposition National Party and one of the country's largest largest gun retailers support the measures.One week from the Christchurch terrorist attack, New Zealanders came together in a national day of reflection to remember those who died while worshipping inside 2 mosques in the South Island city.

What she's saying: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressed thousands of people gathered at Hagley Park, Christchurch, saying: "New Zealand mourns with you. We are one."



Details: Just before 1:30 pm Friday local time (8:30 pm Thursday Eastern), the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, rang out across the country's TV and radio airwaves before people around the country gathered at vigils observed 2 minutes of silence.

The big picture: The events coincided with the Friday prayer, the Jumu'ah. Addressing the congregation at Haggley Park, Al Noor Mosque Imam Gamal Fouda said:

"This terrorist sought to tear our nation apart ... Instead, we have shown that New Zealand is unbreakable ... we are brokenhearted, but we are not broken. We are alive, we are together, we are determined to not let anyone divide us.

This evil ideology of white supremacy did not strike us first, but it struck us hardest ... but the solidarity in New Zealand is extraordinary. To the families of the victims, your loved ones did not die in vein. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope.

They are not just martyrs of Islam, but they are martyrs of this nation, New Zealand. Our loss of you is a gain to New Zealand's unity and strength.

"Our assembly here, with all the shades of diversity is a testimony to our join humanity. We are here in our hundreds and thousands unified for one purpose: that hate will be undone and love will redeem us."

Photo: Carl Court/Getty Images

The latest: Across the country, thousands of people held vigils to remember the Christchurch mosque attack victims. In Auckland, 4 mosques opened their doors to all New Zealanders. As a result, many non-Muslims attended Friday prayers there.

Following afternoon prayers at 4 pm local time, a combined funeral service was held for 26 people killed victims.

The youngest attack victim, Mucaad Ibrahim, 3, was among those buried Friday.

Several thousand people attended a vigil at the Auckland Domain at 6 pm  the oldest park in the country's most populous city.

Many people formed "human chains of love" around mosques across the country.President Trump raised eyebrows on Friday with a tweet declaring that he would be withdrawing "additional large scale Sanctions" on North Korea, which he said had been announced earlier in the day by the Treasury Department.

Between the lines: It's unclear what exactly Trump is talking about, though Treasury did announce sanctions yesterday on 2 shipping companies it said had attempted to evade North Korea sanctions. Per Fox News' John Roberts, the sanctions Trump said he is withdrawing are not in reference to the 2 shipping companies, but instead are referencing "new large-scale sanctions that were about to be announced by Treasury." White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters the decision was made because "President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesnt think these sanctions will be necessary."

Editor's note: This post has been updated with a Fox News report.Zhoghovurd reports that Yerevans prosecutor has asked Mayor Hayk Marutian to provide documents and data on construction or lease of property located in territories of common use in the city center. In fact, the law-enforcement system has finally got down to inspecting the legality of actions of the former Yerevan authorities, a move that many have been eager to see, because the center of the capital for years has consistently been distorted, the paper writes.

The editor of Aravot writes: In Armenia, no doubt, there are political groups and politicians that in one way or another associate their aspirations with the support of Russia. Many of them are working closely with the political circles of this country, receive or send messages. To hand over Nagorno-Karabakh to the Russian mandate is among such messages. The proposal, in my opinion, is unacceptable, because if you voluntarily give up some part of your sovereignty, the one who receives it will feel more free to impose on you one decision or another. I think that, on the contrary, one must strengthen the sovereignty of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh and in this regard the efforts of the prime minister to engage representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh in the negotiations are correct in principle.

Zhamanak reports on the statement of three political parties in the parliament of Nagorno-Karabakh where they speak about an independent and sovereign state and a prospect of a united Armenian state. The parties stress that other processes today are artificial and dangerous. The statement of the Nagorno-Karabakh parliamentarians, no doubt, concerns, on the one hand, the recent initiative of the Sasna Tsrer party to start the collection of signatures in support of Nagorno-Karabakhs incorporation into Armenia and, on the other hand, the statement of former Karabakh defense army commander Samvel Babayans statement about transferring the Nagorno-Karabakh issue to the Russian mandate, the daily concludes.

(Lilit Harutiunian)The Special Investigation Service (SIS) is looking into claims made recently by a former senior official about massive falsifications during the 1998 presidential election that allegedly gave victory to then Prime Minister Robert Kocharian, a spokesperson said on Friday.

Marina Ohanjanian said probing other assertions that former deputy defense minister Vahan Shirkhanian made in an open letter earlier this week, including that Nairi Hunanian, the leader of a group that carried out a deadly attack on the Armenian parliament in 1999, was a National Security Service (NSS) agent, is outside the scope of the SISs powers.

Meanwhile, earlier on Friday director of the NSS Artur Vanetsian neither confirmed, nor denied Shirkhanians claim that Hunanian was an agent, referring journalists to the SIS that he said led the relevant investigation. He also said that the entire related information will be published after a special procedure.

In his letter Shirkhanian, who occupied the senior Defense Ministry post in the 1990s and is now facing coup charges in a trial of a group of individuals arrested in 2015 and accused of plotting to seize power, claimed that the then head of the NSS Gorik Hakobian presented to Kocharian and military prosecutor Gagik Jhangirian a file with the case of NSS agent Nairi Hunanian, but that file later allegedly disappeared.

Hunanian led an attack in which then Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsian, Parliament Speaker Karen Demirchian and six other senior lawmakers and government members were killed. Hunanian and five other members of his group were convicted on charges related to the attack and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2003. Another member of the group was sentenced to 14 years in prison, but did not survive his term.

In his letter Shirkhanian also claimed that Kocharian falsified the outcome of the runoff of the 1998 presidential election with Demirchian, a former leader of Soviet Armenia who made a political comeback and reemerged as quite a popular figure less than a decade after the USSRs collapse.

Demirchian conceded defeat and later allied himself with then powerful defense minister Sargsian. The duo went on to win parliamentary elections the following year. Their tandem remained powerful in the country for several months until the October 27, 1999 terrorist attack in which both were assassinated.

Armenian opposition groups for years alleged that despite the arrest and trial of the immediate perpetrators of the attack its real mastermind has never been revealed.

Kocharian, who served as president for two consecutive five-year terms in 1998-2008, is currently in pretrial detention on charges of overthrowing the constitutional order in connection with the 2008 post-election crackdown on the opposition during which eight demonstrators and two security officers were killed.

Kocharian denies the accusations as politically motivated.The newly appointed ambassador of the United States to Armenia has reaffirmed her governments commitment to assisting sovereign Armenia as she was received by the South Caucasus nations Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian on Friday.

Thankful for the warm welcome, [Ambassador] Lynne Tracy said she was honored to meet with Prime Minister Pashinian and reaffirmed the U.S. Governments strong commitment to assisting sovereign Armenia in implementing its democratic agenda and anti-corruption efforts, dealing with economic and regional bottlenecks, as well as in matters of international security, a statement published on the Armenian premiers official website reads.

The U.S. Ambassador gave assurances that during her tenure she would make all necessary efforts to promote the development of bilateral economic cooperation, it adds.

According to the same source, welcoming the newly appointed U.S. ambassador, Pashinian emphasized that the Armenian government is interested in the continued development of partnership with the United States, including in the political and economic spheres.

The Armenian prime minister said that Armenia is consistently heading along the path of democratic reforms by fighting against corruption and monopolies, promoting human rights and freedom of speech.

In this respect, Pashinian stressed the importance of building closer ties of cooperation with the United States and implementing joint programs in the aforementioned areas, the statement reads.

According to the premiers official website, during their meeting Pashinian and Tracy discussed a number of issues that are on the agenda of U.S.-Armenian relations and exchanged views on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement process and other regional issues of mutual interest.By Trend

The unequivocal position of the world community, reflecting the unchanged format of the negotiation process on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, serves as a serious message for Armenia, as stated in the commentary of Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry.

Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry made the remarks in light of a statement by the Prime Minister of Armenia saying that that "the proposal to return Nagorno-Karabakh to the negotiating table is not a proposal to change the format, but to restore the negotiation format, Trend reports.

The assertion of the Prime Minister of Armenia that the proposal to return Nagorno-Karabakh to the negotiating table is not a proposal to change the format, but to restore the negotiation format requires explanation, since there are no documents and decisions that could support its reasonableness."

"In light of this, the latest statement of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs should be reiterated, in which they unequivocally supported the invariance of the format of the negotiation process. Similar statements were made by high-ranking officials of the EU. This position of the world community serves as a serious message for Armenia, and also testifies to the support of the grounded position of Azerbaijan," the commentary says.

It is noted that nevertheless, in order to clarify the realities of the negotiation process, it is considered necessary to pay attention to the following issues:

"First, UN Security Council resolutions 822, 853, 884 and 884 unequivocally confirm the sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability of the international borders of the Republic of Azerbaijan, and also demand the immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of Armenian occupying forces from the territories of Azerbaijan. These resolutions form the legal basis of the resolution of the conflict."

"Second, let us take a look at the decision of the additional meeting of the CSCE Council of Ministers in Helsinki from March 24, 1992. As is known, in this document, the OSCE Chairman-in-Office is charged to convene a peace conference in Minsk on the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and in this regard, the document states: "Elected and other representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh will be invited to the Conference as interested parties by the Chairman of the Conference after consultation with the States participating at the Conference." The elected and other representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh mentioned here are referring to both the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of our country, and it is these communities that are mentioned in the document as interested parties. Let us remind that in the latest statement of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, there is a reference to both communities precisely as to the parties concerned. As to inviting interested parties to the Minsk conference, which is supposed to be convened after the withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, the invitation of both communities of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of our country as interested parties can be considered, of course, when an appropriate agreement is reached."

"Third, we cite an exact quote from the decision of the OSCE Budapest Summit of 1994: "Deploring the continuation of the conflict and the human tragedy involved, the participating States welcomed the confirmation by the parties to the conflict of the cease-fire agreed on 12 May 1994 through the mediation of the Russian Federation in co-operation with the CSCE Minsk Group. They confirmed their commitment to the relevant resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and welcomed the political support given by the Security Council to the CSCE's efforts towards a peaceful settlement of the conflict," the commentary says.

"It is emphasized that the cease-fire agreement reached on May 12, 1994, referred to in the Summit decision, was confirmed by Azerbaijan and Armenia as parties to the conflict, in accordance with the above-mentioned decision of the CSCE Council of Ministers in Helsinki from March 24, 1992, as well as the leaders of Azerbaijan and the Armenian community of the Nagorno Karabakh region of Azerbaijan as "interested parties" in the resolution of the conflict."

"As such, absolutely no reference to Nagorno-Karabakh as a separate party is made in this decision. Moreover, support is expressed for the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council. In this regard, we would also like to recall that, a time schedule was worked out under the cease-fire agreement for the withdrawal of Armenian troops from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, which serves as a special supplement to this agreement. In accordance with this schedule, the withdrawal of the occupying forces of Armenia from the territories of Azerbaijan was to be ensured."

"Let us recall that back in 1992, when some unfounded claims made by Armenia seriously impeded the peace process, the Chairman of the Minsk Group made a statement on the equality of the Azerbaijani and Armenian communities of Nagorno-Karabakh: "The chairman from Italy did not identify a consensus among the other states of the Minsk Group regarding the thesis of Armenia, according to which the mandate from March 24 allows it to give the Armenian side of Nagorno-Karabakh a formal priority over the Azerbaijani side or even call the first side elected representatives" (CSCE Information Letter No. 279, Prague, September 15, 1992). Evidently, clarity was brought on this issue back in 1992, at the initial stage of the emergence of the Minsk Group, when it was stated that both communities of Nagorno-Karabakh had equal rights."

"Finally, in its decision on the case of Chiragov and Others v. Armenia, the European Court of Human Rights, putting an end to Armenias continued denial of its responsibility, confirmed that the separatist regime established in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan exists because of military, political, financial and other support of Armenia, and also pointed out the fact of the exercise by Armenia of an effective control over the occupied territories of Azerbaijan."

"The time spent on searching for such unfounded allegations nullifies the efforts made for the advancement of the negotiation process, undermining the success of the peace process and ensuring the sustainable development of the region. Currently, we are experiencing the very moment when the Armenian leadership should clearly demonstrate what it prefers to spend time on," the commentary says.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

Jewish holiday Purim was celebrated in Baku, Trend reports March 21.

The event was attended by the Ambassador of Israel in Azerbaijan Dan Stav, as well as representatives of the embassy.

Purim is a Jewish holiday that commemorates the saving of the Jewish people from Haman, who was planning to kill all the Jews. This took place in the ancient Achaemenid Persian Empire. The story is recorded in the Biblical Book of Esther.

The holiday begins with Fast of Esther during the 13th day of the month of Adar (the 12th month in the Jewish calendar) in memory of the fast imposed by the queen upon herself, on the servants, and on all the Jews of the city of Susa.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

A meeting was held between the Azerbaijani and Pakistani defense ministers Colonel-General Zakir Hasanov and Pervez Khattak, Trend reports referring to the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan.

Pervez Khattak noted that friendly relations have historically formed between the peoples of the two countries. Stressing that relations in various spheres were sufficiently strengthened while developing, the Pakistani minister noted the great potential for military cooperation between the two countries.

Colonel-General Zakir Hasanov noted that the friendly relations between Azerbaijan and Pakistan have deep roots. Referring to the military-political situation in the region, the Minister of Defense provided detailed information about the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Noting that Azerbaijan and Pakistan support each other in international organizations, he stressed that this is an indicator of partnership relations that come from the will of the peoples of both countries.

During the meeting, the parties discussed the development of cooperation in the field of security, as well as military, military-technical, military-educational and other spheres, and also exchanged views on many other issues of mutual interest.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

Attempts by the President of the National Assembly of Armenia to achieve his goals in the Bundestag failed, chief editor of the Baku Khabar newspaper and political expert Aydin Guliyev told Trend.

On March 18, the 7th symposium on the topic "Security and Stability in the South Caucasus  German-Azerbaijan Cooperation Perspectives", dedicated to the 27th anniversary of the Khojaly genocide, was held in Germanys Bundestag. It was attended by members of the Bundestag, a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, journalists, public and political figures. During the same period, meetings were also held in the Bundestag with the President of the National Assembly of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan.

As Guliyev noted, after Armenias attempts to establish close ties with the European Union failed, a similar situation can be observed in relations with some leading European countries as a whole.

According to him, participation in discussions during the German-Azerbaijani symposium of German MPs, officials of the country's Foreign Ministry, public and political figures, and representatives of the press not only increases the authority of the event, but also negates the effectiveness of the meetings held with the President of the Armenian National Assembly.

Earlier, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was unable to achieve his goals in Brussels, whose attempts to get financial assistance did not bring results, Guliyev noted.

"The European Parliaments adoption of an official document unequivocally supporting the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan was another blow to Armenian diplomacy," the expert said.

Guliyev went on to say that the efforts of the President of the Armenian National Assembly in this direction, apparently, were also not crowned with success.

He also said that it is no coincidence that the events dedicated to Khojaly in the German parliament and discussions on security in the Caucasus were held at the same time as the meetings with the President of the Armenian National Assembly. This is one of the manifestations of Azerbaijans diplomatic superiority over Armenia, he added.

"This fact once again demonstrates that Armenias attempts to achieve recognition of the results of its aggressive policy have been completely exposed," the expert noted.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

A petition calling for Theresa May to cancel Brexit by revoking Article 50 has passed a million signatures, Trendreports citing BBC News.

Parliament's petitions committee tweeted that the rate of signatures was "the highest the site has ever had to deal with", after the website crashed.

It comes as the prime minister is in Brussels to ask the EU for a delay to next Friday's Brexit date.

Downing Street said the prime minister "has said many times she will not countenance revoking Article 50".

The PM's spokesman added: "The PM has long been clear that failing to deliver on the referendum result would be a failure of democracy and a failure she wouldn't countenance."

Revoke Article 50 has been trending on Twitter as people were urged to sign it. At one point, the petitions committee said there were nearly 2,000 signatures a minute.

The petition's heat map shows the constituencies with the highest number of signatories, including seats in Bristol, Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford, London, Cambridge and Brighton.

It is not the most popular ever on the Parliament website. A petition for a second EU referendum in June 2016 attracted more than four million signatures and was debated in the Commons - but thousands of signatures were removed after it was discovered to have been hijacked by automated bots.

Another popular petition aimed to prevent US President Donald Trump from making a state visit, which attracted 1.8m signatures.

People signing petitions on the Parliament website are asked to tick a box saying they are a British citizen or UK resident and to confirm their name, email address, and postcode to sign.

Data from the petitions website on Thursday afternoon suggested more than 960,000 signatures were from people who said they were from the UK, nearly 9,000 from France, nearly 5,000 from Spain and nearly 4,000 from Germany, among others.

A Commons spokesman said signature patterns are investigated to check for fraudulent activity and suspect signatures are removed, including those that are "clearly bots".

He added: "Anyone who is a UK resident or a British citizen can sign a petition. This includes British citizens living overseas."

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif headed to Istanbul Thursday evening to attend an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on terrorist massacre of Muslims in New Zealand, Trend reports citing IRNA.

The meeting will be held on Friday to condemn the attack on two mosques in Christchurch, which left at least 50 worshipers dead and wounded dozens others last Friday.

Turkeys foreign ministry said in a statement on Thursday that Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu would chair the meeting.

Representatives from the UN, the European Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have reportedly been invited to the event.

The emergency meeting comes following a phone conversation between Zarif and Cavusoglu earlier this week, in which they censured the "heinous crime".

Among the victims of the terrorist attack were nationals from Syria, Jordan, India, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

Turkey has condemned US intention to recognize Golan Heights as part of Israel, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Chavushoglu said.

Chavushoglu noted that territorial integrity is a fundamental principle of international law.

"Attempts by the United States to legitimize Israels actions against international law will only lead to more violence in the region," the Turkish Foreign Minister said.

He also added that Turkey supports the territorial integrity of Syria.

Earlier, US President Donald Trump said it was time to back Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability! Trump wrote on Twitter.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

The Governor of Central Bank of Iran has announced the official launch of the Special Trade and Finance Institute (STFI) in the country, a mechanism similar to the EUs INSTEX trade channel.

"This institute can cooperate with its European counterpart to facilitate trade between Iran and Europe and resolve the limitations that are caused by the US sanctions," said CBI governor Abdolnasser Hemmati, Trend reports citing IRNA.

"The people of Iran expect to see the mechanism operates as soon as possible and establishing this STFI is an important step by Iran to hasten the process," he added.

Hemmati said that Iran's banking network and the Central Bank of Iran are using all the solutions to meet the needs of business companies and the financial mechanism is one of them.

The official expressed hope that Iran would have positive role in the mechanism in the current Iranian year (started March 21,2019).

"The Iranian mechanism has been established with $238,000 and the volume of financial resources for STFI would increase according to its needs," he added.

On Jan. 31, three European countries  France, Germany and the UK (shortened as E3)  officially announced the creation of the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), a special purpose vehicle, to allow them bypass US sanctions on trade with Iran.

INSTEX facilitates non-dollar trade with Iran, allowing European companies to trade with the Islamic Republic without being hit by the sanctions.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif left Tehran for Istanbul, Turkey to attend the extraordinary meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Trend reports citing IRNA.

The meeting will review the recent terrorist attack against two mosques in New Zealand which claimed the lives of tens of Muslims and left 50 others injured.

The OIC extraordinary meeting is slated for Friday in Istanbul.

Earlier, following the brutal incident, he called his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, who is the rotating head of the OIC and asked for an extraordinary meeting of the OIC.

During his phone talk with Cavusoglu last week, Zarif strongly condemned the killing of Muslims and the terrorist attack in New Zealand while calling for taking an appropriate reaction by Muslim countries towards the horrific crime.

At least 49 people were killed, and 50 others seriously injured, after gunmen opened fire at two mosques in the New Zealand's city of Christchurch earlier in March when hundreds of Muslims had gathered to say their prayers.

A group of senior international figures, including Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif, the Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani together with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) have so far condemned the heinous terrorist attacks.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzAn appellate court has overturned the 2015 murder conviction of a Bakersfield man who was found guilty of strangling his roommate after findinWhat they said

"You just have to think about building coalitions and fighting this together."  State Sen. Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield.

"We shouldn't give them (the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources) any more money  until they tell us how they're going to fix the problem" of unreasonably slow oil permitting.  Assemblyman Vince Fong, R-Bakersfield.

"Y'all saved the whales (by offering an alternative to burning whale fat). We don't talk about that. We need to talk about it."  Mark LaCour, director of oil and gas information company Modalpoint

"If you haven't heard  we are being labeled as the next tobacco. And what do you do with tobacco? You get rid of it."  John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil Co.Beaumont ISD trustees on Thursday approved the sale of $2.84 million in district-owned real estate following a bidding process.

The nine properties involved total more than 100 acres and include the long-shuttered Price Elementary School and the site of the since-demolished Tyrrell Park Elementary.

A 15.25-acre tract on Major Drive drew the highest bid, for $1.35 million. The largest plot of land, 62.52 acres in Lumberton, drew a $66,786.11 bid.

In another matter, associate superintendent of secondary schools Shannon Allen told board members that the Texas Education Agency intends to wait until after the May 4 municipal elections to make an appointment to the current board vacancy.

haley.bruyn@beaumontenterprise.comBelinda George, the Homer Drive Elementary School principal who breaks out her pajamas every Tuesday night to read a bedtime story to her students via iPhone video, will be featured on Good Morning America Friday morning.

It's the latest media exposure for the Beaumont educator since she was featured in an Enterprise last month.The Texas General Land Office is hosting three Southeast Texas intake events for the Homeowner Assistance Program.

The program is designed to rehabilitate or reconstruct homes damaged by Tropical Storm Harvey. It's the single largest housing program within the office's Harvey-recovery plan.

The General Land Office allocated $1.098 billion of federal disaster recovery funds to the program, which will go to 48 eligible counties, excluding Houston and Harris county.

The funds are first-come, first-serve.

Representatives from the General Land Office will be at the intake events to help homeowners complete applications or answer any questions.

>> Related: New funds available for Harvey housing help

The events will take place:

10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Saturday at the city of Orange Public Library, 220 Fifth Street in Orange

10 a.m. to 2 p.m. March 30 at the the John Davis Community Center, 3580 E. Lucas Dr. in Beaumont

10 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 6 at Vidor City Hall, 1395 N. Main St. in Vidor

A checklist for the program to determine which documents are required can be found here.Seguin, TX (78155)

Today

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy this afternoon. High near 60F. Winds NNE at 15 to 25 mph. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low around 35F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph.3 1 of 3 Jasper Police Department Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Jasper Police Department Show More Show Less 3 of 3





The Jasper Police Department is asking for the public's help in identifying two men suspected of burglarizing a Verizon store, according to information from the department.

The burglary is believed to have occurred on March 9 at midnight at the Verizon store located on West Gibson.Provided by Raising Cane's

Raising Cane's has donated over $1,500 to Sweetpups Dog Rescue & Sanctuary in Vidor as a part of its mission to help animals.

The chicken finger chain founded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana was named for its founder's yellow Lab, Raising Cane. Each year, the company sells plush Canes and puppy calendars to help raise money for nonprofits caring for animals in their community.An ASC operated by The Villages (Fla.) Regional Hospital has closed due to a lack of specialists, according to a report from Villages-News.

Four key notes:

1. The Villages Regional Hospital CEO said the outpatient surgical facility temporarily closed on March 1 because it did not attract enough specialists to continue operating as normal.

2. The hospital's administration plans to evaluate the closure in the fall and potentially reopen the facility if it makes sense. The report noted several new physicians have moved into the area.

3. Originally opened in 2015, the multispecialty ASC included ophthalmology, podiatry, dermatology, pain management and plastic surgery.

4. The closure occurred amid other issues at The Villages Regional Hospital, including a one-star rating from CMS.HCA Healthcare's West Florida Division in Palm Harbor is extending support to the 1,000-plus employees who lost their jobs when Tampa, Fla.-based Laser Spine Institute discontinued operations March 1.

HCA's West Florida Division held a recruitment event for former Laser Spine Institute employees in mid-March, according to HCA Healthcare Recruitment Marketing Specialist Linda Almanzo.

Displaced Laser Spine Institute employees were encouraged to seek clinical and non-clinical opportunities within HCAs 15 hospitals and 14 surgery centers in West Florida.

Tampa-based Physician Partners of America also held a job fair for former Laser Spine Institute employees March 6.FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, said the government should apply stronger regulations on EHRs to ensure patient safety, Kaiser Health News reports.

For the government to be granted EHR oversight, Congress would have to enact legislation to define when an EHR requires regulation, Dr. Gottlieb told KHN. EHR systems currently do not fall under the FDA's existing legislation to regulate items like medical devices and drugs. Under the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016, the FDA is prohibited from regulating EHRs as a medical device.

To introduce regulations, Dr. Gottlieb said the EHRs should be considered as medical devices once they hit certain abilities, according to the report. Patient risks, such as injuries and death, resulting from EHR software glitches or user errors are not the same as traditional medical devices implanted in a patient, Dr. Gottlieb told KHN.

"What we really need is a much more tailored approach, so that we have appropriate oversight of EHRs when theyre doing things that could create risk for patients," Dr. Gottlieb said.

Jeffrey Shuren, MD, director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, testified in a 2010 public hearing that the agency had determined six patient deaths and more than 200 patient injuries had occurred due to health IT causes. The findings were pulled from reports submitted to the FDA that suggested "significant clinical implications and public safety issues," according to KHN. Since 2010, numerous government and private repositories have associated EHRs with thousands of injuries, near misses and deaths, KHN reports.

Earlier this month, Dr. Gottlieb submitted his letter of resignation from the FDA. His last day at the agency will be April 5, according to the report.

To access the full report, click here.The following hospital and health system credit rating and outlook changes or affirmations occurred in the last week:

1. Fitch assigns 'AA-' long-term rating to WellSpan Health

Fitch Ratings assigned its "AA-" long-term rating to York, Pa.-based WellSpan Health's series 2019 revenue bonds.

2. Fitch assigns 'A' rating to CoxHealth's bonds

Fitch Ratings assigned its "A" rating to Springfield, Mo.-based CoxHealth's $115.5 series 2019 revenue bonds.

3. Fitch assigns 'A+' rating to Children's National Medical Center

Fitch Ratings assigned its "A+" issuer default rating to Children's National Medical Center, based in Washington, D.C. The credit agency also affirmed its "A+" rating on the hospital's outstanding bonds.

4. Fitch upgrades Washington Hospital to 'A'

Fitch Ratings upgraded its rating on Washington (Pa.) Hospital to "A" from "A-." The credit agency also assigned the hospital an issuer default rating of "A."

5. Moody's affirms 'A1' rating on Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Moody's Investors Service affirmed its "A1" rating on Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

6. Moody's assigns 'A3' issuer rating to Randolph County Health Care Authority

Moody's Investors Service assigned its "A3" issuer rating to Randolph County Health Care Authority, which owns and leases a 15-bed critical access facility to Carrollton, Ga.-based Tanner Medical System.

7. Moody's assigns 'A2' rating to WakeMed's proposed bonds

Moody's Investors Service assigned its "A2" rating to Raleigh, N.C.-based WakeMed's proposed $358 million series 2019 hospital revenue bonds.President Donald Trump named Michael Kratsios as his administration's first chief technology officer, Bloomberg reports.

Three things to know:

1. Mr. Kratsios, 32, currently serves as deputy U.S. CTO, a role he has filled since joining the Trump's administration's transition team in late 2016.

2. Prior to joining the Trump administration, Mr. Kratsios served as chief of staff at Thiel Capital, an investment management firm.

3. The U.S. CTO position leads work to shape technology policy and advises the president on tech-related issues.

To access the full report, click here.United Parcel Service is preparing to enter the healthcare industry by dispatching nurses to vaccinate adults in their homes, according to Reuters.

While UPS did not disclose which vaccines it would be offering, drugmaker Merck & Co. told Reuters it is contemplating partnering with UPS on the project.

Workers at the 1.7 million-square-foot UPS healthcare complex will package the vaccines and ship them to more than 4,700 UPS stores. At those stores, a home health nurse who is contracted by a UPS clinical trial logistics unit, called Marken, will gather the vaccines and transport them to the patients home. The nurse will administer the vaccine in the home.

The initial project is to test whether the packaging and delivery company can connect all these dots, according to Marken CEO Wes Wheeler, who is overseeing the vaccine initiative.

The UPS push into healthcare comes as the company braces for a slow economy and increased competition from rival Amazon. The UPS vaccine delivery project also may help reduce healthcare costs, as patients will no longer have to see physicians to have their vaccines administered.

Merck, a major healthcare customer of UPS, offers vaccines to treat illnesses ranging from shingles to the flu.Walmart's Chief Technology Officer Jeremy King will leave the company at the end of March, a few weeks after Mr. King highlighted Walmart's efforts to rebrand as a technology company, CNBC reports.

Mr. King's last day with the company will be March 29, after which he will join Pinterest, a social networking site, as head of its engineering division, according to CNBC. Mr. King worked with Walmart for almost eight years, leading the company's path toward a technology focus.

Mr. King recently highlighted Walmart's latest technology innovations during a presentation March 10 at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. He showcased the company's new virtual reality headsets and machine learning robots, which are designed to fill online grocery orders quickly in stores.

While Walmart pushed ahead with new technology, Mr. King told CNBC, before the SXSW conference, it was a challenge to get people to accept innovations.

"One of the hardest parts [about my job is] people all have their own perceptions of Walmart," Mr. King said. "For years now, I've wanted people to understand we are building a tech organization. I've got a machine learning team. We have some of the best apps in the world."

In the most recent quarter, Walmart's e-commerce sales rose 43 percent. The company also experienced a 40 percent increase in online sales throughout 2018.

Walmart's Senior Vice President of Customer Technology Fiona Tan will fill Mr. King's role in the interim while the company searches for a replacement.From a Maryland health system entering into a $35 million settlement to resolve kickback allegations to a physician receiving a seven-year prison sentence for his role in a false billing scheme, here are the latest healthcare industry lawsuits and settlements making headlines.

1. MedStar will pay $35M to settle kickback allegations

Columbia, Md.-based MedStar Health and two of its hospitals agreed to pay $35 million to resolve allegations that they paid illegal kickbacks to a cardiology group.

2. Connecticut physician sentenced in $5M billing fraud case

A Connecticut physician was sentenced March 18 to more than seven years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of healthcare fraud and one count of money laundering in September 2018.

3. CHI Franciscan settles antitrust case: 5 things to know

An antitrust lawsuit filed by the Washington state attorney general against Tacoma, Wash.-based CHI Franciscan will not go to trial.

4. Patient sues Northwestern Medicine after medical records posted on social media

A patient at Winfield, Ill.-based Northwestern Medicine Regional Medical Group is suing the health system and a former employee for allegedly accessing her medical records and posting them on social media.

5. Vanderbilt hit with $25.5M suit over wrong-site surgery

A Tennessee woman filed a lawsuit against Nashville-based Vanderbilt University Medical Center March 19, claiming surgeons operated on her wrong kidney.

6. Ex-CEO of Louisiana hospital's fundraising arm allegedly embezzled $810K

The former president and CEO of Our Lady of the Lake Foundation, the fundraising arm that supports Baton Rouge, La.-based Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, allegedly stole more than $810,000 of donations.

7. UW Health board sued over alleged unfair treatment of female physicians

An anesthesiologist at UW Health in Madison, Wis., filed a lawsuit March 13 against the health system's board of regents and the former head of the anesthesiology department, claiming the institution failed to provide equal opportunity and created a hostile work environment for female physicians.

8. AbbVie hit with class-action lawsuit over its 'patent estate' to protect Humira

A class-action lawsuit was filed against AbbVie for allegedly using patent thickets and colluding with biosimilar drugmakers to maintain a monopoly for its blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira.

More articles on legal and regulatory issues:

Former Texas hospital CEO pleads guilty to defrauding 3 major insurers

Pipeline Health accused of acquiring Illinois hospital under false pretenses

New York physician admits to orchestrating $16M false billing schemeThe Philadelphia-based nonprofit Safehouse is in negotiations to secure a building for the nation's first supervised injection site, reports WHYY.

A prominent developer whose son recently died of an overdose offered to lease Safehouse a facility for just $1 a year, according to former Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who is on the nonprofit's board.

Mr. Rendell shared the news March 21 at a conference in Washington, D.C. He did not identify the developer, who wishes to remain anonymous.

The deal has not been finalized, but Safehouse Vice President Ronda Goldfein told WHYY she is optimistic they will sign a lease soon.

The progress comes nearly two months after federal prosecutors in Philadelphia filed a civil lawsuit against Safehouse, seeking to block the nonprofit from opening its safe injection site. If the supervised injection site is deemed legal, Philadelphia would be the first city to open such a facility in the U.S.The House Oversight Committee asked Oxycontin-maker Purdue Pharma to hand over several documents that may help uncover more about the Sacklers, the billionaire family that owns the company, according to STAT.

In a letter to Purdue Pharma, Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the committees chairman, and Mark DeSaulnier, D-Calif., asked the company to provide a list of Sackler family members who have served on the board or worked as officers.

Lawmakers also requested documents prepared for the Sackler family about the marketing strategies for OxyContin and communications between company employees and family members.

While Purdue Pharma is facing hundreds of lawsuits for its alleged role in fueling the nationwide opioid crisis by misleading providers and patients about the safety of OxyContin, attention is shifting to the Sackler family as well.

A lawsuit filed in Massachusetts named the Sackler family as defendants. The lawsuit claims that family members were involved in the company's sales tactics and knew about the risks of its opioids.

Purdue Pharma denies the allegations.

Read the full report here.A Northern Ireland pharma firm has become the first business to float on the junior stock market this year.

Shares in Belfast-founded Diaceutics rose by 22% at the opening of the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) yesterday as it became the fourth company from here to be listed on the stock market.

The firm, which has offices in Belfast, Dundalk and Singapore, employing a total of 65 people, said its share rise implied a market capitalisation of 64.5m.

Diaceutics, which analyses data from patient records and insurance details for use in precision medicine, had raised more than 20m in advance of its initial public offering.

Around 21 institutional investors have signed up to back the company.

It provides services to 20 of the 30 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Founder Peter Keeling, who lives in Belfast, said the advance fundraising had been more successful than anticipated.

"We thought we would only raise 11m, but investors spoke to us about wanting to make sure we had the best wind behind us, so they encouraged us to draw down extra funds," he added.

Diaceutics works with pharmaceutical companies to analyse de-identified data drawn from health insurance claims in the US and from clinical labs.

It has worked to treat many forms of cancer as well as tuberculosis and hepatitis.

The firm's findings can be used to find gaps in treatments so that future treatments can be targeted more efficiently.

Mr Keeling said the precision medicine sector in which the firm operates was a strong one.

"It seems strange to do this within the midst of Brexit, but the success speaks to the strength of Diaceutics, and we are the first AIM initial public offering (IPO) of the year so far.

"Other people were wary of bringing forward an IPO, but people told us, 'Your story is good. Go through the various regulatory and compliance processes and we'll support you'.

"So, it's huge for Diaceutics and big for us in Northern Ireland as there's been four listings from Northern Ireland in the recent past."

Mr Keeling said the company was quickly outgrowing its Belfast home at offices in Adelaide Street. And he added he expected future growth would fuel expansion at all its sites.

The firm may also list on the Irish Stock Exchange in future and have dual-listing status.

Diaceutics has joined two other Northern Ireland firms on the AIM - First Derivatives and Fusion Antibodies. Belfast-based IT firm Kainos is listed on the main stock exchange.Gareth McAuley took part in full training with Northern Ireland on Friday as he bids to return for Sunday's game against Belarus.

The Rangers defender sat out Thursday's 2-0 victory over Estonia with a hamstring injury but assistant manager Jimmy Nicholl has confirmed that McAuley is fit to come into contention for the second game of the double-header.

Corry Evans (hamstring) and Gavin Whyte (thigh) remain injured after missing Thursday's game.

Nicholl cautioned against making too many changes to the side after the victory over Estonia.

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You can make these decisions based on fitness levels, but if you bring one out youve got to make sure the next one is going to contribute, he said.

Were not going to play them just because theyre fresh. Youve got to play them because they can do an equal job. I wouldnt like to think therell be too many changes to be honest.

Northern Ireland are determined to make it two wins from two in their Euro 2020 qualifying campaign on Sunday as they look to take a strong place in Group C ahead of later games against the fancied Germany and the Netherlands.Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out wasn't just a box-office success - it redefined the horror genre. A socially-conscious thriller, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2018, it explores what it means to be black in America, as a young black man uncovers a disturbing secret while meeting the family of his white girlfriend.

Now, New Yorker Peele is back with Us, another original nightmare that he has written, directed and produced.

"I wanted to explore something other than race and to show the wide range of horror films that I have," the 40-year-old suggests when asked about the inspiration behind the film.

"I have this fear of a doppelganger. And so when you have a real fear as a horror movie creator/director, then you know you have something that you can nurture and exploit for an audience."

Us follows Adelaide Wilson (played by Lupita N'yongo) as she returns to her North Carolina home with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex).

Meant to be a dreamy summer getaway, Adelaide starts to feel paranoid that something bad is going to happen to her family. And sure enough, they return from the beach one day to find silhouettes of four figures in their driveway.

But the creepiest thing? The monsters they're facing are doppelgangers of themselves.

One draw of the role for Mexican-Kenyan Nyong'o (36) was that it's so different from anything audiences will have seen her in before.

"Jordan was asking me to go to places I've never been and giving me two well-rounded, three-dimensional women to play at complete opposite ends of an argument," elaborates the actress, who won an Oscar for her film debut in drama 12 Years A Slave.

"And so to be asked to see something from one perspective and then the next day have to see it from the exact opposite perspective... I mean, it was an opportunity of a lifetime.

"And just this imaginative monster that he was creating, actually articulating a world from inside his head; I felt very, very fortunate to have that kind of task in front of me. And also very intimidated!"

Furthermore, Us is about a middle-class black family - something we don't see represented in cinema very much.

"I loved how unremarkable it was that they were black," Nyong'o notes, "because I often feel quite unremarkable; I don't live my life always considering the colour of my skin.

"And it was nice to have that - a family that we could project our own understanding of a family on to, no matter what colour our skin is, and that the paradigms to which they were navigating this particular monster had nothing to do with the colour of their skin. Yeah, that's refreshing."

Duke (32), who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, agrees that a very middle-class black family being placed at the centre of the film is, in itself, a "large statement".

They're also a family, he says, who are "wrapped in what we would call the American dream, this idea of American normality and class and privilege".

It would make sense that making a film as layered as this - there are a lot of different thematic elements to the piece - would raise questions for the stars involved.

So, what other messages did Duke - whose breakout role was M'Baku in Marvel's Black Panther, followed by Avengers: Infinity War - personally take from this role?

"For me, it was a lot of cultures of power; privilege, power, luxury. What is it and what's the cost of that?

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"It's about the speechless and the people you render invisible in your shadow, who carry the burden of your actions. For me, that really spoke volumes - it really made me question myself and see my experiences of privilege.

"I come from a historically oppressed background and I don't really see my life as one that is privileged, until you put it in the context of people who don't have as much as you, people who have to suffer to make your life as privileged as it is. So, it really put me into a different category of how I see myself."

Star Wars actress Nyong'o, who also appeared alongside Duke in Black Panther, admits she was taken aback by the script when she first read it.

She made sure to pick Peele's brain about the imagery and the social commentary on the US which is woven into the story, before going on set.

And it seems the idea "of recognising the monster in the man in the mirror" is one that has really stayed with her.

"There's a duality in all of us, there's a darkness that we often suppress and it is in suppressing that side of ourselves that it can become destructive, because we project it out of ourselves and onto other people and onto other things," she says.

"So, especially in this time when people are pointing a lot of fingers to the 'other' - the other gender, the other country, the other political faction, the other religion, the other ethnicity - we often fail to recognise the monster in ourselves, and this was a film that was anthropomorphising that monster."EU leaders have offered the UK a plan which would delay Brexit from March 29 to May 22, on condition that MPs approve Theresa Mays withdrawal deal in a vote next week.

If the deal is rejected in its third meaningful vote in the Commons, the UK would be given until April 12 to come to the European Council with its proposals for the way forward.

The possibility would be open for a further extension of several months if the UK agreed to take part in European Parliament elections in May.

European Council president Donald Tusk said that the response to Britains request for an extension to the Article 50 withdrawal process was agreed unanimously by leaders of the other 27 member-states.

EU27 responds to UK requests in a positive spirit and:

 agrees to Art. 50 extension until 22 May if Withdrawal Agreement approved next week

 if not agreed next week then extension until 12 April

 approves Strasbourg Agreement

 continues no-deal preparations  Charles Michel (@eucopresident) March 21, 2019

He went straight into a one-on-one meeting with Mrs May who has agreed to the plan.

Mr Tusk said that April 12 was a key date for the UK because if it decided not to participate in the European Parliament elections then a long extension would become impossible.

He said: April 12 is a key date in terms of the UK wondering whether to hold European Parliament elections.

If it is not decided do so by then the option of a long extension will immediately become impossible.

Expand Close European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (left) and European Council president Donald Tusk making a statement on Brexit in Brussels. Photo credit: ec.europa.eu/PA Wire PA / Facebook

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Asked how long the long extension eventually on offer to the UK could be, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker replied: Until the very end.

Mr Juncker said: Since the day of the referendum the position of the 27 members of the European Commission has been united and unequivocal.

We have worked tirelessly to negotiate the Withdrawal Agreement.

We have done everything we could to get it over the finishing line.

We were asked for clarifications in December, we gave it to them.

We were asked for assurances in January, we gave it to them.

I was asked for further reassurances last Monday in Strasbourg, notably with regard to the backstop, I gave it to them.

So I have to welcome that today, the 27 leaders endorsed the legally bonding clarifications and assurances that Prime Minister May and I agreed in Strasbourg.

This closes and completes the full package. There is no more that we can have.

I hope we can all agree that we are now at the moment of decision and I will make every effort to make sure we can leave with a deal and move our country forward. Theresa May

Speaking at a Brussels press conference after the announcement Mrs May said: "Firstly I welcome the Council's approval of the legally-binding assurances in relation to the Northern Ireland backstop, which I negotiated with President Juncker last week.

"This should give extra assurance to Parliament that in the unlikely event that the backstop is ever used it will only be temporary and that the UK and EU will begin work immediately to replace the backstop with alternative arrangements by the end of December 2020."

Mrs May said if Parliament does not pass her deal next week the European Council will extend Article 50 to April 12 when the UK would have the choice of no deal or to put forward an alternative plan.

She said if this involved another extension then the country will have to take part in the European Parliament elections.

Mrs May added: "I believe strongly it would be wrong to ask people in the UK to participate in these elections three years after voting to leave the EU."

Mrs May said she would be doing her utmost to ensure her deal was passed next week.

"What the decision today underlines is the importance of the House of Commons passing a Brexit deal next week so that we can bring an end to the uncertainty and leave in a smooth and orderly manner," she said.

"Tomorrow morning I will be returning to the UK and working hard to build support for getting the deal through."

The so-called flextension plan was drawn up in a meeting stretching over eight hours at an EU summit in Brussels, as EU27 leaders wrangled over possible final cut-off dates for Brexit.

The format increases pressure on Leave-backing MPs to row in behind Mrs Mays deal, for fear that if it falls the UK could find itself electing new MEPs and remaining for month or years within the EU.

But it also creates a breathing space of a fortnight if Mrs May reaches the end of next week without securing agreement for her package  or if Speaker John Bercow prevents her from tabling a motion which he regards as a repeat of those already defeated by 230 votes in January and 149 votes last week.

Parliament could use that time to try to take control of the process and force Mrs May towards a softer Brexit stance or second referendum.

The bulk of the meeting took place behind closed doors in Mrs Mays absence, after her plea for a longer extension to June 30 fell on deaf ears.

Mrs May had to leave the room after making her case in a 90-minute presentation to her European counterparts.

The Prime Minister was reportedly pressed on what she will do if MPs reject her deal for a third time but did not commit herself to a Plan B or rule out a no-deal Brexit.The court heard the couple intend to reconcile their differences.

A Belfast man threw his partner down stairs before emptying the contents of a colostomy bag over her, a court has heard.

Samuel Victor Hislop, 62, was given two years probation for an attack described by the judge as "nasty".

Hislop, a school car park attendant from Daphne Street in the city, pleaded guilty to a charge of common assault.

A prosecution lawyer said: "She stated the defendant became abusive towards her, threw her down the stairs and punched her on the cheek.

"The contents of a colostomy bag were thrown in her face and hair."

Police called to the scene observed a mark on the woman's cheek and lump to the back of her head.

She told officers that she had lifted a bottle to defend herself because of her fear.

During interviews Hislop claimed to have no memory of the incident.

Defence solicitor Pat Kelly acknowledged it had been a "highly unpleasant" episode.

"This is simply appalling and he (Hislop) would accept that," Mr Kelly said.

District Judge Fiona Bagnall was told the defendant abuses alcohol as part of a volatile relationship with the victim.

But according to Mr Kelly the couple intend to reconcile.

He also disclosed that Hislop works at a school in the south Belfast area.

Imposing two years probation, Mrs Bagnall said: "This is a nasty incident, but he is to be credited for entering a plea at the outset."Avoiding a hard border in Ireland in a no-deal Brexit scenario will be very difficult, the countrys European Affairs Minister has said.

Helen McEntee said the risk of the UK leaving the EU without an agreement remained very strong, but insisted Ireland was still not planning for border checks.

Ms McEntee said the Dublin government would only enter into negotiations with the UK and EU Commission on how a future border would work when, or if, it became clear that a no-deal is the only option.

If a no-deal scenario is the only option left and looking like that is going to happen, then we need to sit down with the Commission and with the UK and we need to understand and work with each other, and essentially this is negotiation as to how we can avoid borders on the island of Ireland and, be under no illusion, its very difficult without a deal, she told RTE Radio One.

We are not planning for a hard border and we have always said that.

When it gets to the point, and if it gets to the point, and we hope it does not, that if a no-deal scenario is the only likely and possible outcome then we need to engage with the UK and with the Commission as to how we would do that, but until that happens we will not be planning for a border.

I do believe the fact there is a very clear date of the European elections will focus people's minds.Helen McEntee

She said the prospect of the UK having to participate in European elections if the Withdrawal Agreement was not passed could focus minds at Westminster.

I do believe that things are changing, I do believe the fact there is a very clear date of the European elections will focus peoples minds, she said.

I dont know if this will pass next week, I dont know if minds are focused enough on this, but I do believe that we now have a very specific timeline and I think we now need to give the Prime Minister the time to try and see what she is doing next, and obviously if the Withdrawal Agreement can be passed in the House of Commons.

Ms McEntees government colleague Regina Doherty said she remained positive that a Brexit deal could be agreed during the Flextension period.

Social Protection minister Ms Doherty said in the meantime the Dublin government would continue to ready itself to absorb the impacts of a no-deal.

We will continue to prepare for a no-deal Brexit, she said.

Thats because we dont know whats going to happen and the outcome of the next few weeks. But we remain positive.A Belfast-born civil engineer whose pioneering skills brought water to Los Angeles nearly 100 years ago is to be honoured.

William Mulholland, who died in 1935, designed the US city's famous aqueduct, which has featured as a backdrop to many famous films.

On Monday his life will be marked with the unveiling of a blue plaque in his home city, at Donegall Street, beside St Patrick's Church. It will be unveiled by Deputy Lord Mayor of Belfast Emmet McDonough-Brown.

Born in St Patrick's parish, the self-taught engineer designed the 200-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct, bringing water to the fledgling city.

Built over five years and opened in 1913, the structure diverted water from Owens River and precipitated LA's economic and cultural growth.

Controversy dogged Mr Mulholland with the subsequent California Water Wars and later the St Francis Dam collapse, which killed more than 430 people.

He resigned in 1928, retired from public life and died in 1935, never knowing the dam collapse was due to a land fault which was discovered 57 years later.

However, LA's Mulholland Drive was named in his honour and he remains a pivotal figure in the city's history.

Chris Spurr, chairman of the Ulster History Circle, said: "William Mulholland was responsible for building the Los Angeles Aqueduct, opened in 1913, and the water supplied by this significant infrastructure has made the city become the largest in California.

"The Ulster History Circle is pleased to commemorate this leading civil engineer with a blue plaque on Donegall Street in the city of his birth.

"The Circle would particularly like to thank Belfast City Council for their financial support towards the plaque and Fr Eugene O'Neill for his assistance."

Northern Ireland Water will attend the unveiling of the blue plaque honour.

Brian McCalmont, who is head of water at the utility company, said: "NI Water is delighted to attend this event to mark an Irish civil engineer and his skill in bringing water to the city of Los Angeles.

"Much like William Mulholland's work on the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the people of Northern Ireland have also reaped the benefits of the foresight and talent of engineers in the past, with the construction of the Silent Valley Reservoir.

"To this day, the reservoir is heralded as an amazing triumph of engineering and is an integral part of water infrastructure in Northern Ireland," Mr McCalmont added.A parcel bomb was found at an Irish postal depot in Limerick (Garda/PA)

Police believe an explosive device found at an Irish postal depot is linked to four others sent to locations in Great Britain.

The latest package found in Limerick had been addressed to Charing Cross in London, in an apparent attempt to send it to the station.

Counter-terrorism police said on Friday evening that it appears to be connected to those sent to other major transport hubs in the capital, as well as to Glasgow University, earlier this month.

The package found on Friday was in similar white packaging and sent with the same stamps branded with a heart motif.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dean Haydon, senior national co-ordinator for counter terrorism policing said: Whilst it is still early, from the images weve seen and from speaking to our counterparts in the Republic of Ireland, it appears that the package found in Limerick is linked to those sent to London and Glasgow on March 5 and 6.

One line of inquiry is that the package found today in Limerick was returned there, having never reached the intended recipient in London.

It was addressed to Charing Cross, The Strand with a postcode of WC2N 5HF, which is listed on the Network Rail website as being the stations.

A group calling itself the IRA claimed responsibility for the earlier packages and said a fifth had also been sent.

Referring to the claim, Mr Haydon said: Whilst that remains a line of inquiry, we continue to keep an open mind on who may be responsible and any potential motivation.

I must also stress that we continue to urge the public to remain vigilant for any suspicious packages and to report anything suspicious to police.

Irish Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said we have reason to believe the latest package could be the fifth.

However, the group known to police as the New IRA had claimed on March 11 that the other parcel had been addressed to a British Army recruitment officer  not to Charing Cross.

Garda called army bomb disposal experts to the An Post depot in Dock Road on Friday morning after the suspicious package was discovered.

The Defence Forces said it was a viable improvised explosive device.

The first wave of packages arrived at Waterloo railway station and offices at Heathrow and London City airports on March 5 and 6.

They were posted with Irish stamps and had Dublin as the return address, prompting Irish police to join the investigation.

The latest also had the senders address as the republics capital, and added Irelan (sic) tourism.

Device found in Limerick, Ireland linked to ongoing investigation into small improvised explosive devices https://t.co/5impbrBN10 pic.twitter.com/QsZycx0I4J  Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) March 22, 2019

All the stamps appeared to be those issued by the Irish postal service for Valentines Day 2018, featuring a heart motif and the words Love Eire N.

Police Scotland said a controlled explosion was carried out as a precaution on a suspicious package found in the mail room at Glasgow University, after several buildings had been evacuated.

All packages were A4-sized white postal bags containing yellow Jiffy bags and appeared capable of igniting a small fire when opened.

Speaking in Brussels, Irish premier Leo Varadkar said: First of all I condemn the actions of whoever did this without reservation.

No matter what is happening in politics at the moment, its no justification for violence and certainly no justification for potentially exposing civilians to injury or potentially death.Politicians have called on police to act after four people were named at an inquest into the Birmingham pub bombings as being responsible for the atrocity.

A total of 21 people were killed and more than 220 were injured in the 1974 IRA attack at the Mulberry Bush and Tavern in the Town pubs in the city.

On Friday, a former IRA member identified as Witness O told the inquest he had been given permission by the head of the IRA in Dublin to name those involved.

He named Seamus McLoughlan as the officer commanding (OC) of the Birmingham IRA at the time and as the person responsible for selecting the targets.

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Witness O also named Michael Hayes, Mick Murray and James Gavin as members of the bombing team.

The four men have previously been named in connection to the bombings, however not in a formal setting.

Ulster Unionist justice spokesperson Doug Beattie called on police to act on the claims made at the inquest.

"Given that numerous Sinn Fein politicians have claimed that there is no IRA, you wonder just who is in sitting Dublin, claiming to be the head of it?" he said.

"The PSNI and the Garda need to give an assessment of this claim as a matter of urgency.

"Secondly, if any of these people named are still alive - and I understand at least one is - then they are liable to prosecution.

"If Soldier F can be lined up for prosecution for alleged offences in Londonderry in 1972 then so can alleged IRA members for alleged offences in Birmingham in 1974. Thats what is meant by equality before the law."

DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson said: "The PSNI have previously indicated that the IRA exists but is not involved in paramilitary activity. That stands in stark contrast to the assertions of Sinn Fein.

"Mary Lou McDonald needs to explain how the head of the IRA in Dublin can give permission for an individual to be named, when she tells us the IRA doesnt exist."

On Friday, Witness O also claimed he had given Seamus McLoughlan's name to police in the days after the bombings, but heard nothing more on the matter.Devastation at the scene of the fatal IRA bomb blast at the Mulberry Bush pub in Birmingham on November 21, 1974. Ten of the 21 people who died in the notorious pub bombings were at this venue

The head of the IRA has given permission for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombers to be named at an inquest, jurors have been told.

The blasts at the Mulberry Bush in the base of the city's Rotunda, and the basement Tavern in the Town in nearby New Street, killed 21 people and injured 220 more.

Bereaved families have waited 44 years for fresh inquests, which are now in their fourth week.

On Friday, in a dramatic turn, an anonymous ex-IRA volunteer giving evidence at inquests said he had been told by the current head of the IRA, six months ago in Dublin, that he could name those who he knew were involved.

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The man, identified only as Witness O and speaking over a secure video-link, named the officer commanding (OC) the Birmingham IRA at the time as Seamus McLoughlan, and as the person responsible for selecting the targets.

He added that Mick Murray was "one of the bombers", and claimed he recalled Murray telling him there would be "no harm" if similar bombings had been repeated, because of the "chaos" caused.

Pressed by Lesley Thomas, the barrister representing nine of the bereaved families, that another member of the bombings team was Michael Hayes, he replied: "Hayes, Hayes - I'll give it (the name) to you now."

He added, in apparent reference to the Good Friday Agreement: "But he can't be arrested.

"There is nobody going to be charged with this atrocity.

"The British Government have signed an agreement with the IRA."

Then asked about "James Gavin", he replied: "Well he was (involved), I met him in Dublin and he said he was."

All the men have been named before in connection with the bombings, but not in a formal setting.

Witness O, who was in jail at the time of the bomb attacks, described the bombings as "an atrocity".

He also claimed he had given McLoughlan's name to two police detectives while in HMP Winson Green just days after the bombings, but heard nothing more.

He added that two other men, who he identified as "Dublin Dave" and "Socks" had also been involved, but that he did not know either man's name.The RPG-7 launcher being sold by Whytes in Dublin may have been used by the IRA during the Troubles

The RPG-7 launcher being sold by Whytes in Dublin may have been used by the IRA during the Troubles

A Dublin auction house selling a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher which may have been used by the IRA during the Troubles has been accused of profiting from terror.

The RPG-7 is being exhibited as part of Whyte's eclectic collector sale on April 6 and comes with two inert rocket-propelled grenades, disabled booster rocket and accessories.

The catalogue of Lot 247 states that "the RPG-7 was used by the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1998" and even lists examples.

"Most notably in Lurgan, County Armagh, where it was used against British Army observation posts and the military base at Kitchen Hill in the town," it reads. "The IRA also used them in west Belfast against British Army armoured personnel carriers and Army forward operating bases (FOB)."

Kenny Donaldson of Innocent Victims United expressed disgust that "tools of destruction" are being marketed as special edition items because of their use by terrorists.

"At best Whyte's is guilty of profiting from prejudice and at its worst it is an accessory to the selling of an armament which was used to wage terror against the people of Northern Ireland," he said.

Whyte's website also points out that the anti-tank weapons were commonly used to target troops on Beechmount Avenue in west Belfast, which became known as "RPG Avenue" as a result.

The decommissioned Bulgarian-made launcher is estimated to be worth between 4,000 and 6,000 by the auction house.

However, similar weapons to those used in conflicts around the world since the 1960s sell for as little as 500.

One gun trader told this newspaper that RPG-7s have a value of between 500 and 1,000 and said the only justification for charging more would be if it was actually used in a historical context.

"You see it with any weapon, especially American guns which soar in value if you prove they were used in Vietnam," he said. "It's the same with any weapon but you have to be able to prove it, otherwise you are merely speculating."

Last night Ian Whyte, a director of Whyte's, said he has "no idea" if the weapon which came from "a well-known collector" was used by the IRA or not - he said the company makes no claim that it was.

"I understand that the Troubles are within living memory so people can be wary of items associated with it, but this is a piece of history," he added.

Mr Whyte did claim there was evidence it had been fired but no way to prove it was "in anger" as weapons are always test-fired.

Mr Donaldson also questioned why the IRA's "weapon of choice" has been valued so highly if there is nothing sinister about its past.

"Undoubtedly there is something very sinister in Whyte's marketing of the item," he said. "The product description is crass given the tool of death and destruction that the RPG-7 was in the context of this place."

The weapon was issued with a deactivation certificate by Birmingham Gun Barrel Proof House in 2013. A member of staff said there is no way to know if it was used in an attack.DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds has indicated that his party is unlikely to back Prime Minister Theresa May's withdrawal agreement after accusing her of "inexcusable failure" in the Brexit negotiations.

Mr Dodds was speaking ahead of an anticipated third vote on Mrs May's deal in the House of Commons next week.

If the deal passes, the UK will be granted a Brexit extension until May 22, but if it is rejected a third time Mrs May will have to return to Brussels with new proposals by April 12 or face a no-deal scenario.

Mrs May has vowed that she will work "night and day" to secure the support of the DUP's ten MPs for her deal.

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The DUP's Westminster leader said that Brexit talks in Brussels on Thursday were a "missed opportunity" with Mrs May failing to put forward changes "which could have improved the prospects of an acceptable withdrawal agreement and help unite the country".

However European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that the negotiations were over and that the EU had done everything possible to facilitate a deal.

This closes and completes the full package. There is no more that we can have, he said on Thursday.

Despite this, Mr Dodds said that he still believed further negotiations could have been possible.

"That failure is all the more disappointing and inexcusable given the clear divisions and arguments which became evident amongst EU member states when faced with outcomes they dont like," he said.

"As we have always said, negotiations with the EU inevitably go down to the wire and the Government has been far too willing to capitulate before securing the necessary changes which would get an agreement through the House of Commons.

"The Government has consistently settled for inferior compromises when they didnt need to and when there was, and is, more negotiating with the EU to be done."

North Antrim MP Mr Dodds accused the Prime Minister of "putting the blame on others" following a robust speech on Wednesday evening.

He said that it could not "disguise the responsibility her government bears for the current debacle and the fact that her agreement has been twice overwhelmingly rejected in Parliament".

Earlier this month a second vote on Mrs May's deal was rejected in the Commons by 391 MPs, with 242 supporting. All ten DUP MPs voted against the deal.

The DUP have opposed the deal from the start due to the controversial backstop plan, aimed to prevent a hard border in Ireland.

Mr Dodds accused the Prime Minister of agreeing to "to kick the can down the road for another two weeks and humiliatingly revoke her oft-stated pledge that the UK would leave the EU on 29th March".

He said that in the eyes of the DUP "nothing has changed" as the risk of the UK being "trapped in the backstop" had not been addressed.

"The DUP has been very clear throughout that we want a deal which delivers on the referendum result and which works for all parts of the U.K. and for the EU as well," Mr Dodds said.

"But it must be a deal that protects the Union. That remains our abiding principle. We will not accept any deal which poses a long term risk to the constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom."The funeral has taken place of Giselle Marimon-Herrera and her 15-year-old daughter Allison.

The pair were found dead alongside Giselle's partner Russell Steele at a flat in the Glin Ree Court area of Newry on March 7.

Their funeral took place at Roselawn Crematorium on Friday afternoon.

Three fundraising initiatives set up to help the victims' family in Colombia have raised more than 11,000.

A number of family members travelled to Northern Ireland to attend the service.

It is understood Ms Marimon-Herrera and her daughter died as a result of a murder-suicide.

Police believe that Steele (38), originally from Kilmarnock in Scotland, hanged himself after strangling Ms Marimon-Herrera and her daughter.

Expand Close Giselle Marimon-Herrera and her 15-year-old daughter Allison. Credit: PSNI / Facebook

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Ms Marimon-Herrera was from Colombia and had lived in Northern Ireland for around four years.

Her daughter Allison was born in Spain and had lived in Northern Ireland since 2017. She attended Newry High School.

Speaking at the time of their deaths Principal of Newry High School Iestyn Brown said that Allison would be fondly remembered by all at the school.

The entire Newry High School community is deeply shocked and saddened to learn of the passing of our Year 11 pupil Allison," he said.

"Allison was a talented, kind, courteous and well-mannered pupil with a beautiful smile. Both staff and pupils are profoundly saddened by her death and she will be remembered with great affection by her fellow pupils and staff alike.

"Our hearts go out to Allisons family circle; they are foremost in our thoughts and prayers at this sad time.The PSNI's handling of the arrest and subsequent 'de-arrest' of the owner of the Cookstown hotel at the centre of an investigation into the deaths of three teenagers has been branded a "blunder of the highest degree".

SDLP MLA Daniel McCrossan spoke out after a senior police officer yesterday defended the PSNI over the arrest of hotel proprietor Mickey McElhatton (52) on Wednesday on suspicion of drug dealing.

Two hours after the media was notified of the arrest, police revealed Mr McElhatton had been "de-arrested".

Fast-track forensic tests had shown that a white powder officers seized from Mr McElhatton's home in Moneymore was actually an "innocent substance".

The hotel owner said that the PSNI was trying to "blacken" his name, and police have refused to apologise.

Mr McElhatton was released yesterday on bail following his arrest four days ago on suspicion of manslaughter in connection with the deaths of 17-year-olds Lauren Bullock and Morgan Barnard and Connor Currie (16).

The teenagers were killed during a crush as they queued outside the Greenvale Hotel to attend a St Patrick's night disco on Sunday.

Despite calls from some politicians for the PSNI to apologise to Mr McElhatton, Chief Superintendent Raymond Murray said he would not say sorry.

"No, I'm not going to apologise. Everything that happened in relation to that arrest and seizure is what we would normally do," he explained.

"If you start at the point where you know the end result and look back, it's actually not a very helpful place to start.

"You have to start looking through the eyes of the officer at the front end, on the ground, who made the discovery."

"I have seen images of the discovery and we're talking about - white powder, in an unmarked, unbranded, clear plastic bag.

"Around that are a number of individual tinfoil pieces which are scrunched up and look like wraps. So the police officer sees that - and that is the threshold in law, and we don't have the luxury of time - and reasonably suspects that this is drugs and makes a seizure.

"The person is then arrested on drugs (charges), and that provides them with their rights, protections and a solicitor."

Chief Superintendent Murray stressed that the nature of the substance had yet to be determined but admitted forensic analysis had confirmed it was not a controlled one.

Mr McElhatton previously said the powdery substance was taken from the laundry room at his home, leading to speculation that the PSNI had seized washing powder.

But Mr Murray said: "How it was found and where it was located certainly didn't lend itself to being just a household agent."

Mr Murray also insisted the investigation was not about "blackening" people's names.

He emphasised the fact that officers moved "quickly" after the forensic results came in, demonstrating the PSNI's transparency in action.

Mr Murray said if police had delayed sending out the initial media update on the seizure and arrest, officers would have been facing questions on why they were holding back information.

"Police on the ground will never have that luxury of being able to work in hindsight. They have to work with what they reasonably and in good faith suspect at the time," he insisted.

"Do I want anybody to be inconvenienced? Do I want anybody to feel distressed? Of course I don't. But just because situations are uncomfortable doesn't mean in fact that they are wrong."

However, Mr McCrossan said the PSNI should have waited for forensic results to come in before making the drugs arrest.

"The actions by the PSNI over this arrest and subsequent de-arrest have done nothing but compound the hurt faced by the families of the victims. It was a blunder in the highest degree," he stressed.

"Rather than rushing to make unsubstantiated statements to the Press, the PSNI should have confirmed that their evidence was correct beforehand."

Alliance Party leader Naomi Long questioned why the arrest had been announced before forensic tests had established what the seized substance actually was.

"Surely the issue isn't that police investigated what those items were - they had to do that - but briefing to the Press and public about the arrest on suspected drugs charges prior to confirmation of the nature of substance?" she asked.

"It seemed premature. Why not await results?

"I genuinely think that was the error - and (it) does deserves an apology."Police investigating the Greenvale Hotel tragedy have identified more than 400 people who were at the scene, with nearly a quarter of those interviewed in just four days, a senior PSNI officer has revealed.

Chief Superintendent Raymond Murray said yesterday that detectives have had a successful response to Monday's appeal for witnesses to come forward.

He was speaking after Greenvale Hotel owner Mickey McElhatton was released on bail on Wednesday after being arrested on manslaughter charges.

The arrest was in connection with the crush outside the venue's doors on Sunday evening in which three teenagers died.

Mr Murray told a press conference yesterday that the interviewing process had been a "challenging" one, given the age of those involved.

"There's a lot of support being provided to witnesses because many of them are young," he said.

"We've now identified just over 400 people who were at the event, either in the queue or in the car park. Eighty-two of those people have now been completely interviewed.

"Those interviews are challenging because a lot of people are young and they are vulnerable and that has to be catered for. We have made firm arrangements already with 106 other people to interview them in the next few days.

"We will be reaching out to the remaining 200 people."

The senior officer said he was "heartened" that 72 people had turned up at the police facility established at Burnavon Arts Centre in Cookstown to obtain information from the public.

The police chief assured parents and young people that the investigation is not focusing on the age of the children involved.

Speaking ahead of the funerals of Lauren Bullock (17), Connor Currie (16) and 17-year-old Morgan Barnard - which will take place today, Mr Murray paid tribute to their families.

"Our thoughts continue to be with Morgan, Connor and Lauren. Their lives (were) lost very sadly and obviously their families who are struggling to come to terms with this," he said.

"You couldn't fail to be touched, saddened and grieved by the plight they are going through, trying to get their heads and hearts around what has happened."

Urging more witnesses to come forward, he said any information could be pivotal to the investigation.

"I would urge parents to talk with your children, support them and encourage them to come forward and tell their story to police so we can get an accurate picture of events that night," he added.

"Their account of events on Sunday night could be crucial to establishing how Connor, Lauren and Morgan died.

"There are a number of ways people can talk to police. Detectives can be contacted at the dedicated incident room at Dungannon police station by calling 101, extension 53055.

"You can visit the dedicated room at the Burnavon Arts Centre in Cookstown.

"Anyone with any information, images or footage can also pass it to police via the following link: https://mipp.police.uk/operation/PSNI19O08-PO1."[March 21, 2019] Clear C2, Inc. Receives 2019 CUSTOMER Magazine Product of the Year Award Clear C2, Inc. announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named C2CRM as a 2019 CUSTOMER Product of the Year Award winner. "As with previous years, we are honored and appreciative to receive the Product of the Year Award," says Mickey Patton (News - Alert) , President and CEO of Clear C2, Inc. Patton went on to say, "It serves as a validation that not only are we meeting our objective to deliver the best business solutions to our customers but continue to be recognized as a leader and innovator in the CRM space." The 2019 CUSTOMER Product of the Year Award recognizes vendors that are advancing the call center, CRM and teleservices industries one solution at a time. The award highlights products which enable their clients to meet and exceed the expectations of their customers. "On behalf of both TMC (News - Alert) and CUSTOMER magazine, it is my pleasure to honor Clear C2, Inc. with a 2019 Product of the Year Award," said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. "Its C2CRM solution has proven deserving of this elite status and I look forward to continued innovation from Clear C2, Inc. in 2019 and beyond." The 21st Annual Products of the Year Award winners will be published in CUSTOMER magazine online and on TMCnet. About Clear C2, Inc. Clear C2, Inc. was founded in 1993, focusing on publishing and delivering customer-driven technology solutions including C2CRM, a comprehensive middle-market CRM solution designed to integrate sales, marketing and customer service into one seamless, collaborative operation. It consists of several modules that span five solution sets: Relationship Managemnt, Sales Automation, Customer Service, Marketing Automation and Business Intelligence. C2CRM is offered as both an On-Premise and a Cloud-based ( SaaS (News - Alert) ) solution.

For more information about Clear C2, Inc., visit www.clearc2.com/ and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. TMC's CUSTOMER Magazine Since 1982, CUSTOMER magazine (formerly Customer Interaction Solutions) has been the voice of the call/contact center, CRM and teleservices industries. CUSTOMER has helped the industry germinate, grow, mature and prosper, and has served as the leading publication in helping these industries that have had such a positive impact on the world economy to continue to thrive. Through a combination of outstanding and cutting-edge original editorial, industry voices, in-depth lab reviews and the recognition of the innovative leaders in management and technology through our highly valued awards, CUSTOMER includes news and insights on the latest developments in agent training, analytics, ERP, IVR, social CRM solutions, mobile apps, workforce management and more. Please visit http://customer.tmcnet.com for more information. About TMC Through education, industry news, live events and social influence, global buyers rely on TMC's content-driven marketplaces to make purchase decisions and navigate markets. As a result, leading technology vendors turn to TMC for unparalleled branding, thought leadership and lead generation opportunities. Our in-person and online events deliver unmatched visibility and sales prospects for all participants. Through our custom lead generation programs, we provide clients with an ongoing stream of leads that turn into sales opportunities and build databases. Additionally, we bolster brand reputations with the millions of impressions from display advertising on our news sites and newsletters. Making TMC a 360-degree marketing solution, we offer comprehensive event and road show management services and custom content creation with expertly ghost-crafted blogs, press releases, articles and marketing collateral to help with SEO, branding, and overall marketing efforts. For more information about TMC and to learn how we can help you reach your marketing goals, please visit www.tmcnet.com and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, @tmcnet. For more information about TMC, visit www.tmcnet.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190321005750/en/

[ Back To SIP Trunking Home's Homepage ]Over 2,000 mourners at the funeral of Morgan Barnard were told that he will be buried with the crest of St Patrick's Academy on his heart.

Father Aidan McCann said the special gesture was because the 17-year-old student loved his friends and teachers at the school and they loved him.

As heavy rain fell outside St Patrick's Church in Dungannon during 10am Requiem Mass, tears flowed freely inside as Morgan's family and friends mourned the loss of the young man who, the priest said, will always be remembered for the smile on his face.

Young Morgan, from Springdale, in the Co Tyrone town, was one of three teenagers who tragically lost their lives in a crush while queuing for a St Patrick's night disco.

Archbishop Eamon Martin, head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, also remembered the other two victims of the March 17 tragedy - Lauren Bullock (17) and Connor Currie (16) - during a short address at the start of the 70 minute service.

Read More

Referring to "a valley of tears", he told the congregation that "the shocking events of Sunday remind us that life is very fragile".

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 Friends and family of teenager Morgan Barnard attend his funeral in Dungannon. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press PACEMAKER BELFAST 22/03/2019 Friends and family of teenager Morgan Barnard attend his funeral in Dungannon this morning. Morgan and two others were killed in a tragic accident at the Greenvale Hotel on St Patricks night. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press Mother Maria Barnard is held by her partner James Bradley as they follow the funeral cortege at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon after the funeral of their child, Morgan Barnard. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton The coffin of Morgan Barnard is taken from St Patrick's Church, Dungannon after his funeral. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA The coffin of Morgan Barnard is taken into St Patrick's Church, Dungannon for his funeral. Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Mourners at the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA The coffin of Morgan Barnard is taken into St Patrick's Church, Dungannon for his funeral. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Catherine McHugh (right), principal of St Patrick's College, Dungannon at the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Catherine McHugh (holding red and whit umbrella), principal of St Patrick's College, Dungannon at the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA PACEMAKER BELFAST 22/03/2019 Principal Catherine McHugh at St Patrick's College with Friends and family of teenager Morgan Barnard attend his funeral in Dungannon this morning. Morgan and two others were killed in a tragic accident at the Greenvale Hotel on St Patricks night. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press Archbishop Eamon Martin arriving for the the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Archbishop Eamon Martin arriving for the the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. Pic: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton The funeral cortege arriving at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon for the funeral of Morgan Barnard. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton Mourners gather for funeral of Morgan Barnard. 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton Morgan Barnard, 17, was one of three teenagers killed in a crush outside a St Patricks Day party (St. Patricks Academy Dungannon/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Friends and family of teenager Morgan Barnard attend his funeral in Dungannon. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

There were heart breaking scenes outside before the Mass when Morgan's mother Maria who, weighed down with her grief, had to be helped inside the chapel.

Morgan's cousin Elliot Barnard, said a Prayer of the Faithful, through tears telling him he would always be his best friend - and "No matter where he is, I'll love him forever."

Throughout the service, in a church that was packed to capacity, with scores of young people lining the aisles, sobbing could be heard as mourners young and old, struggled to deal with their sorrow.The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

PACEMAKER BELFAST 22/03/2019 Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill and Mary Lou McDonald attend the funeral of Conor Currie in Edendork this morning. Conor and two others were killed in a tragic accident at the Greenvale Hotel on St Patricks night. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

PACEMAKER BELFAST 22/03/2019 Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill and Mary Lou McDonald attend the funeral of Conor Currie in Edendork this morning. Conor and two others were killed in a tragic accident at the Greenvale Hotel on St Patricks night. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

Friends and family of teenager Conor Currie attend his funeral in Edendork this morning. Conor and two others were killed in a tragic accident at the Greenvale Hotel on St Patricks night. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

The funeral of Connor Currie takes place St Malachy's Church, Edendork on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

The coffin arrives for the funeral of Connor Currie at St Malachy's Church, Edendork. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

The hearse arrives at the funeral of Connor Currie at St Malachy's Church, Edendork. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 22nd March 2019 Funeral of 16-year-old Connor Currie at St Malachy's Church in Edendork, Co. Tyrone. Connor died along with Morgan Barnard(17) and 17-year-old Lauren Bullock after an incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown on St Patrick's night. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

Funeral of 16-year-old Connor Currie at St Malachy's Church in Edendork, Co. Tyrone. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

Mourners at the funerals of the three teenagers killed in the Greenvale Hotel St Patrick's disco horror heard of a "valley of tears" as communities across Tyrone and beyond came together to pay their respects.

Thousands lined the streets around Dungannon as one-by-one the funerals of Morgan Barnard, Lauren Bullock and Connor Currie took place on Friday.

Head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Archbishop Eamonn Martin attended all three services as did Sinn Fein leaders Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O'Neill, who lives in the community.

Referring to "a valley of tears", Archbishop Martin told the congregations that "the shocking events of Sunday remind us that life is very fragile".

"All that really matters, and makes a difference, is love and friendship and compassion," he said.

"And only faith can dare to speak into the darkness of these days to offer a glimmer of light and hope in this valley of tears."

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Connor (16) was the youngest of the three and his service was held last on Friday afternoon.

Ahead of the funeral mass at St Malachy's Church members of Edendork GAC formed a guard of honour to welcome him into the church.

Fr Kevin Donaghy said Connor's family have been "greatly comforted" by the memories shared with them by his friends and teachers.

"Friends have recalled how he lit up a room as he entered it and his infectious smile warmed everyones hearts," he said.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph Sinn Fein Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O'Neill at the funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph Sinn Fein Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O'Neill at the funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph A mass booklet from a memorial service in memory of Lauren Bullock rests with floral tributes at the entrance of The Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown Co. Tyrone were three teenagers died on the evening of St Patrick's Day. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Picture date: Tuesday March 19, 2019. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Lauren Bullock Photopress / Facebook

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Whatsapp The funeral of Lauren Bullock takes place St Patrick's Church, Donaghmore on March 22nd 2019 following a crushing incident at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

"Teachers remember him as a courteous and appreciative young student, always in the habit of saying thank you as he left the classroom - though he maybe let that be the passport that got him through an odd bit of mischief as well."

Earlier thousands lined the streets to pay their respects at the funerals of Greenvale Hotel tragedy teens Morgan Barnard and Lauren Bullock.

At the service at St Patrick's Church in Donaghmore for Lauren Bullock, mourners heard how she was "a girl who was happiest when she was doing things to help others".

They were told how the 17-year-old had too short a time on this earth and was described as a young woman who had been full of life, doing and enjoying all the things that made her happy.

Crowds gathered outside the church in the rain and shops closed as a community mourned.

An emotional service at St Patrick's Church heard Fr Moore pay a moving tribute.

He said: Aged only 17, Lauren was well in the process of making her mark on her home, her school, this community, her circle of friends. She was living the dream, energetic and full of life, doing and enjoying all the things that made her happy.

She was a girl who was happiest when she was doing things to help others and gave of herself and her time to do a good deed whenever and wherever she could.

Mourners at the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's in Dungannon heard how he was a "vivacious, charismatic and energetic young man" who nobody had a bad word to say about.

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 Friends and family of teenager Morgan Barnard attend his funeral in Dungannon. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press PACEMAKER BELFAST 22/03/2019 Friends and family of teenager Morgan Barnard attend his funeral in Dungannon this morning. Morgan and two others were killed in a tragic accident at the Greenvale Hotel on St Patricks night. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press Mother Maria Barnard is held by her partner James Bradley as they follow the funeral cortege at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon after the funeral of their child, Morgan Barnard. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends pictured as the coffin leaves St Patricks Church in Dungannon after paying respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day . Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton The coffin of Morgan Barnard is taken from St Patrick's Church, Dungannon after his funeral. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA The coffin of Morgan Barnard is taken into St Patrick's Church, Dungannon for his funeral. Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Mourners at the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA The coffin of Morgan Barnard is taken into St Patrick's Church, Dungannon for his funeral. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Catherine McHugh (right), principal of St Patrick's College, Dungannon at the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Catherine McHugh (holding red and whit umbrella), principal of St Patrick's College, Dungannon at the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA PACEMAKER BELFAST 22/03/2019 Principal Catherine McHugh at St Patrick's College with Friends and family of teenager Morgan Barnard attend his funeral in Dungannon this morning. Morgan and two others were killed in a tragic accident at the Greenvale Hotel on St Patricks night. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press Archbishop Eamon Martin arriving for the the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Archbishop Eamon Martin arriving for the the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. Pic: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton The funeral cortege arriving at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon for the funeral of Morgan Barnard. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton Mourners gather for funeral of Morgan Barnard. 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton 22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton Stephen Hamilton Morgan Barnard, 17, was one of three teenagers killed in a crush outside a St Patricks Day party (St. Patricks Academy Dungannon/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Friends and family of teenager Morgan Barnard attend his funeral in Dungannon. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

There were heartbreaking scenes outside before the Mass when Morgan's mother Maria who, weighed down with her grief, had to be helped inside the chapel.

"You could never pass him on the corridor in school and no doubt anywhere else without getting a warm look or a quick joke as he passed," said Father Aidan McCann.

"Morgan had a strong personality and didn't care too much about the opinion of others revealed in his various hair styles or indeed lack of hair, hair colours and his flamboyant choice of shirts."The Ulster Unionists have claimed Government inaction to end the stalemate at Stormont is "recklessly endangering people's lives" as Northern Ireland drifts into a political "twilight zone".

UUP peer Lord Empey was speaking yesterday as the Secretary of State introduced secondary legislation in Parliament to extend the period for devolved government to be restored by five months - from March 26 to August 25.

Karen Bradley is not legally obliged to call another Assembly election until after that date.

She said she had taken the decision after talking to Northern Ireland's five main parties and the Irish government.

The Secretary of State said she was proposing a "short, focused set of roundtable talks" to restore devolution, but she did not set a date for them.

Sinn Fein previously claimed Mrs Bradley told the party that discussions would be delayed until after May's council elections.

Lord Empey said: "There is no talks process. There is no direct rule either. Instead we have Northern Ireland left drifting in a twilight zone.

"Meanwhile, in the real world, hospital waiting lists continue to grow and half of our schools are in the red. The inaction of the Government is beginning to amount to the reckless endangerment of people's lives in Northern Ireland as a result of this paralysis."

SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said the Government must end "its apathy" on restoring devolution and announce a timetable for talks led by an independent chair.

"The British Government has shown nothing but disinterest in convening an all-party dialogue to address the challenges preventing the restoration of devolution," he said.

"They have become locked into a toxic mutual dependency with the DUP that is poisoning any hope of a resolution to the stalemate in Northern Ireland.

"Now we learn that Karen Bradley is to extend the deadline for a settlement for another five months.

"The Northern Ireland Secretary has clearly taken a leaf out of Theresa May's political strategy book - if in doubt, a delay is better than a decision.

"It's time for both governments to step up and call an all-party dialogue under the authority of an independent chair. We need some urgency injected into this process."

DUP MP Emma Little-Pengelly said her party wanted a functioning Executive and would work with Mrs Bradley to restore devolution.

"We would be back in government tomorrow morning with nothing but our mandate," she stressed.

"Sinn Fein continues to hold Northern Ireland to ransom, putting narrow interests ahead of waiting lists and our young people in classrooms.

"Four out of the five parties would restore the Assembly tomorrow - Sinn Fein is the only blockage.

"It is regrettable and hugely frustrating the Secretary of State is having to take these steps."

Alliance deputy leader Stephen Farry said Mrs Bradley must at least begin "preparatory work" on all-party talks and must indicate how discussions will be structured.

"Every day this impasse continues, people continue to suffer, while the lack of public confidence in politics to deliver for our community grows," Mr Farry said.

"Issues such as financial pressures in health and education continue, with no meaningful opportunity for MLAs to respond to them and reach better outcomes for those who elected us.

"We need clear direction and fresh energy at this point to have any hope of success, rather than more of the prevailing drift."

TUV leader Jim Allister added: "Our do-nothing Secretary of State has actually done something, but not something useful.

"She has extended the misery that is the Stormont shambles by throwing failure another lifeline.

"With no apparent appetite to fix Stormont, by sweeping away the serial failure of mandatory coalition, she should, of course, have shut it down and moved to British rule."

Speaking in the House of Commons, DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds said Mrs Bradley's decision to push back an Assembly election was the "right thing to do in the circumstances, regrettable though it is".

He added: "Could I suggest to her to do something a bit more radical and to take the initiative - what about calling the Assembly together?

"What about putting it up to the parties, who is prepared to go into government now and who wants to sit outside?

"Because my understanding is that four out of the five parties in Northern Ireland would go into government tomorrow.

"Instead of all the talk about wanting devolution, let's see who will actually vote for it."

The Secretary of State replied: "I am looking at what we can do over the next few weeks to get the parties together to start the dialogue, to make sure when a talks process does start that it has the best possible opportunity of succeeding."

Strangford DUP MP Jim Shannon raised concerns over budgets in Northern Ireland,

He what steps Mrs Bradley would take to enable "financial restrictions to be eased, including the confidence and supply monies that this party secured with your party".

The Secretary of State said the Treasury was releasing confidence and supply cash "as appropriate".A sign on the Irish border between Derrylin, Co Fermanagh and Ballyconnell, Co Cavan (David Young/PA)

Irish premier Leo Varadkar has insisted a specialist taskforce has not been set up to address the issue of the border on the island of Ireland in a no-deal scenario.

But Mr Varadkar acknowledged discussions are happening between EU leaders about how a hard border can be avoided if the UK crashes out of the EU.

The Taoiseachs comments came in response to a request from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the EU ramp up its plans to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland in the event of a no-deal scenario.

Good to meet up with the Norwegian, Icelandic and Liechtenstein PMs. All in the single market for 25 years but not in the EU. Sensible solutions are possible once red lines dont restrict them https://t.co/ivDVGpLPdV  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 22, 2019

Ms Merkel asked EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier to examine a fall-back plan to uphold the Good Friday Agreement in a no-deal situation.

The discussion between the pair and a number of other leaders took place on Thursday during the EU summit in Brussels.

It is understood it was the first time that EU leaders had discussed what would happen to the border if the UK crashes out of the EU.

Asked about the discussions Irish premier Mr Varadkar said no taskforce was being set up to address the border issue.

But he said talks had taken place.

Theres no taskforce being set up or anything of that nature, he said.

What that derives from is something that weve spoken about before, is that what will happen in a no-deal scenario, how we will uphold the Good Friday Agreement, keep the border with Northern Ireland open and still fulfil our obligations in European treaties to protect the single market and make sure Ireland is still fully a member of the single market and that the border doesnt become a backdoor to the single market.

Its of that nature, those types of discussions that we would have to have.

He made the remarks at the end of the two-day summit in the Belgian capital.

Expand Close Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (Michelle Devane/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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It comes as Irish European Affairs Minister Helen McEntee said avoiding a hard border in a no-deal Brexit scenario would be very difficult.

But Mr Varadkar said special arrangements would have to be made if the UK leaves without the deal and that those special arrangements would look like the backstop.

He said in a no-deal scenario the British government intended to treat Northern Ireland differently, not to apply tariffs and not to apply the kinds of enforcement measures that it would in other areas.

There is a rolling acknowledgement that the only way you can avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland is special arrangements, and it is the detail of those well need to work through, he said.

But if you want to know what they look like, they look like the backstop.

Expand Close Minister of State for European Affairs Helen McEntee (Brian Lawless/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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On Friday morning Ms McEntee said the risk of the UK leaving the EU without an agreement remained very strong, but insisted Ireland was still not planning for border checks.

Ms McEntee said the Dublin government would only enter into negotiations with the UK and EU Commission on how a future border would work when, or if, it became clear that a no-deal is the only option.

If a no-deal scenario is the only option left and looking like that is going to happen, then we need to sit down with the Commission and with the UK and we need to understand and work with each other, and essentially this is negotiation as to how we can avoid borders on the island of Ireland and, be under no illusion, its very difficult without a deal, she told RTE Radio One.

We are not planning for a hard border and we have always said that.

When it gets to the point, and if it gets to the point, and we hope it does not, that if a no-deal scenario is the only likely and possible outcome then we need to engage with the UK and with the Commission as to how we would do that, but until that happens we will not be planning for a border.The accused was released on 500 bail with conditions (stock photo)

A 22-year-old man has appeared in court charged with engaging in sexual activity with a girl aged between 13 and 16.

Ballymena Magistrates' Court was told that Atanas Petrov, of Ballymoney Road in the Co Antrim town, is alleged to have sexually touched the girl between New Year's Day last year and March 30.

The alleged victim's age was not given at the hearing.

The defendant was spoken to in court with the assistance of a Bulgarian interpreter.

A police officer said he believed he could connect the accused to the charge.

A defence solicitor said his client had been subject to bail conditions since last April.

The accused was released on 500 bail with conditions.

He is barred from contacting the alleged victim and from entering an area of Ballymena.

He also has to sign bail at a police station every Wednesday.

The case was adjourned until April 18.Floral tributes to the dead teenagers outside The Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone (Liam McBurney/PA)

A man arrested over the deaths of three teenagers outside a hotel disco has failed in a High Court bid to secure an immediate release from custody.

The 40-year-old is being detained on suspicion of manslaughter by police investigating the St Patrick's Day tragedy in Cookstown, Co Tyrone.

Lauren Bullock, 17, Morgan Barnard, 17, and Connor Currie, 16, died after a crush developed in the queue at the Greenvale Hotel.

The man, granted anonymity and referred to as XX, was arrested on Tuesday.

Under the Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) legislation he can only be held for a limited time before detectives must seek extensions.

The court heard that since being detained XX has been taken to hospital twice for psychiatric assessments - trips accounting for a combined period in excess of 17 hours.

It meant that by the time the legal challenge started he had only been subjected to a maximum of 60 minutes of interviews.

Lawyers for XX claimed a psychiatric assessment does not count as medical treatment which enables to clock to be stopped on the detention period.

Seeking an application for a writ of habeas corpus, they contended that the time he can be lawfully held ran out earlier on Thursday.

But Mr Justice McCloskey, sitting with Mr Justice Huddleston, said there was "a fundamental frailty" in the argument.

"We harbour no doubt that the words medical treatment must include, in the context of this challenge, psychiatric assessment or evaluation or examination," he held.

Dismissing the application, the judge confirmed: "We are in no doubt that there's no merit in the applicant's challenge."

With the three teenagers' funerals due to be held on Friday, Mr Justice McCloskey also offered condolences to the bereaved.

He said: "This was a quite appalling tragedy, and the court's sincere sympathies are extended to all of the circle of family members, friends and others who are suffering the aftermath of this truly dreadful loss of life."Police have issued an appeal after man was forced into the boot of a car by a men armed with a handgun.

The incident occurred in east Belfast on Thursday night and police believe it may be linked to a separate incident in south Belfast in the early hours of Friday.

In the first incident, in the Isoline Street area of east Belfast between 10pm and 10.30pm on Thursday night, a male driver was exiting his white Seat Ibiza car, when he was confronted by two men.

One of the men was reported to have been armed with a handgun. The driver was forced back into his car and then placed into the boot of his own car and driven to an address in the Glenside Road area of west Belfast where he was tied up and left.

The man managed to free himself a short time later however and contact police.

In the second incident at around 2.30am on Friday morning as two men exited a taxi in the Sandhurst Drive area of south Belfast, they were approached by three or four masked men.

One of the masked men proceeded to assault one of the males and a firearm was produced. Demands were then made for the assaulted man to hand over belongings including an iphone.

The masked males then made off in a white Seat Ibiza, which was found burnt out in Ardmonagh Parade in west Belfast at around 3.30am.

Detective Inspector Michael McDonnell appealed for anyone with information to come forward.

"I am appealing to anyone who witnessed the incident in Isoline Street, the robbery in Sandhurst Drive or who saw the white Seat Leon being abandoned and set on fire in Ardmonagh Parade to contact detectives at Musgrave on the non-emergency number 101, quoting reference numbers 113 and 147 22/03/19," he said.

"I would also ask anyone who has dash-cam footage of the Isoline Street area between 10pm and 10.30pm last night, the Sandhurst Drive area between 2.15am and 2.45am, or the Ardmonagh Parade area between 3:15am and 03.30am to contact us.

"Alternatively, information can also be provided to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111, which is 100% anonymous and gives people the power to speak up and stop crime.Two masked men threatened a shop worker with a hammer before making off with money and cigarettes in Dungannon.

The men entered a shop on Milltown Street at around 7.55pm. One of the men was armed with a hammer.

The suspects approached the staff member at the till and one of them jumped over the counter, grabbing a sum of money.

The two suspects then fled on foot with the money and a quantity of cigarettes.

The shop worker was not injured but was left shaken by his ordeal.

One of the suspects is described as being of medium to big build, around 5' 5'', and wore a black windbreaker jacket with the hood pulled tight around his face, and dark-coloured bottoms.

The second suspect is described as being slightly taller, and wore black tracksuit bottoms and a black windbreaker jacket.

Detective Sergeant Robinson said: "I want to appeal to anyone who was in the area just prior to the robbery or after it occurred, between 7.45pm and 7.50pm, and who saw two males in the area matching the description of the suspects, or who has information which may assist our investigation to call us on the non emergency number 101, quoting reference number 1227 of 21/03/19."

"Alternatively, information can also be provided to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111, which is 100% anonymous and gives people the power to speak up and stop crime."Catherine McHugh (right), principal of St Patrick's College, Dungannon at the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

The coffin of Morgan Barnard is taken into St Patrick's Church, Dungannon for his funeral. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

Mourners at the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

The coffin of Morgan Barnard is taken into St Patrick's Church, Dungannon for his funeral. Brian Lawless/PA Wire

Catherine McHugh (holding red and whit umbrella), principal of St Patrick's College, Dungannon at the funeral of Morgan Barnard at St Patrick's Church, Dungannon. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 22, 2019. Teenagers Lauren Bullock, Connor Currie and Morgan Barnard died after a crush at the Greenvale Hotel in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, on Sunday. See PA story ULSTER Cookstown. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

22nd March 2019 Family and friends gather at St Patricks Church in Dungannon to pay respects to teenager Morgan Barnard who sadly passed away in a tragic accident on St Patricks day Mandatory Credit :Stephen Hamilton

The community in Co Tyrone has circled the families of the Greenvale Hotel tragedy teens with love, faith, kindness and compassion, the leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland has said.

Archbishop Eamon Martin, addressed the funerals of Morgan Barnard and Lauren Bullock on Friday morning. The service for Connor Currie was to be held on Friday afternoon.

He told mourners: "Here in Co Tyrone this week - as families, parishes, schools and communities - weve been circling each other around with love and faith and kindness and compassion.

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"The shocking events of Sunday last have reminded us that life is very fragile; we need to cherish every moment and always look out for each other, and keep each other safe.

"Thank you all for being here today to offer your prayerful presence and support.

"In the days ahead, we will cherish the memories of these precious and gifted young people whose lives have been so suddenly wrenched from among us; we will continue to hold their families, and each other, close in love and faith, praying as the young Saint Patrick did, Christ behind me, Christ before me. Christ to comfort and restore me.

Communities in Co Tyrone have been left stunned by the tragedy that claimed the lives of Lauren Bullock (17), Morgan Barnard (17) and 16-year-old Connor Currie who tragically died as they waited to enter a St Patrick's event at the Greenvale Hotel on Sunday evening.Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang's Regular Press Conference on March 22, 2019

2019/03/23

Premier Li Keqiang of the State Council will attend the opening ceremony of the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2019 at invitation on March 28 in Boao, Hainan and deliver a keynote speech.

Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith of Laos, Prime Minister Xavier Bettel of Luxembourg, Prime Minister Jorge Bom Jesus of Sao Tome and Principe and Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon of the ROK will attend the annual conference at invitation.

Q: The Canadian canola council has said that Chinese importers are unwilling to purchase all Canadian canola seed at this time, not just canola seed from Richardson International. Canadian agricultural goods are facing strict customs inspections and this is causing the cancellation of purchase orders. Can you confirm that this is happening and is this a form of economic retaliation against Canada?

A: My colleague answered similar questions last week. The General Administration of Customs of China has issued relevant notice regarding this. I don't have any new information.

One point I would like to stress is that it is the bound duty of the Chinese government to protect the safety and interests of Chinese consumers as well as China's agricultural production and ecological security. Quarantine measures taken by China's customs are normal and for safety precaution. They are legitimate, reasonable and in compliance with Chinese laws and regulations as well as international practices.

Q: According to media reports, US President Donald Trump tweeted on the 21st that "it is time for the US to fully recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and regional stability". Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his thanks to President Trump over a phone call. An EU spokesperson said that the EU's position on the sovereignty of Golan Heights has not changed and that it is not considered part of Israel's territory. What's your comment?

A: UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 have clear provisions on the occupied Arab territories including Golan Heights. It is China's consistent position that parties concerned should abide by relevant UN resolutions and norms of international law and properly handle territorial disputes through negotiations for comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.

Q: Reports say the US Treasury announced that it will impose sanctions on two Chinese companies which, according to its words, helped the DPRK to evade sanctions. What's your comment?

A: China has all along been earnestly and strictly implementing all DPRK-related resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council. Chinese entities and individuals, once found involved in activities in violation of Security Council resolutions, will be punished in accordance with China's domestic laws and regulations.

Meanwhile, we firmly oppose any country imposing unilateral sanctions or "long-arm jurisdictions" on Chinese entities in accordance with its domestic laws. China has lodged stern representations with the US. We urge the US side to immediately stop its wrong action lest it should affect the cooperation between the two sides on relevant issues.

Q: A lot of attention has been drawn to the recent tropical cyclone that has caused major casualties and property loss in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. At the press conference on Tuesday, you said that the Chinese government will support and assist in their disaster relief efforts as its capability allows. Could you give us more details about what China will do to assist them?

A: China has been closely following the great casualties and property loss caused by the recent tropical cyclone in relevant countries. President Xi Jinping has sent messages of condolences to President Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique, President Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe and President Peter Mutharika of Malawi.

The Chinese government has immediately provided emergency humanitarian assistance to the government of the three countries and helped them with disaster relief and reconstruction work. The China International Development Cooperation Agency has issued a press release on this. Chinese enterprises and overseas Chinese in the three countries have also pitched in the disaster relief efforts by contributing manpower and making donations. China will give positive consideration to offering more manpower and material support as the governments and people of relevant countries need.

Q: We noted that in the past couple of days, a series of activities of the second Lancang-Mekong week are taking place in regional countries as well as in the Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Guangxi, etc. Could you shed some light on the considerations behind these activities? What's your opinion on the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation? Do you have any expectations?

A: In the second Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) Leaders' Meeting in January 2018, the week that March 23 falls in was designated the Lancang-Mekong week. In 2019, this week starting from March 18 to 24 is the second LMC week. Based on my information, central and local governments as well as overseas diplomatic missions of China and the five riparian countries will jointly hold over 50 celebratory events of various kinds to mark the second LMC week. This, I believe, speaks volumes of LMC's unique appeal and rich outcomes and the six countries' strong commitment to cooperation.

The LMC is the first new-type sub-regional cooperation mechanism established by the six riparian countries based on the principle of consultation and cooperation for shared benefits. Since its official launch in 2016, the LMC, staying true to the theme of "Shared River, Shared Future", has fully leveraged the six countries' geographical proximity, cultural affinity and economic complementarity and achieved fruitful results in institution building, practical cooperation and cultural exchange. People in the sub-region have reaped tangible benefits and bonds between the six countries have become closer, promising even brighter prospects. China stands ready to work with the riparian countries to develop an LMC economic belt and build an LMC community with a shared future for greater progress and prosperity in the sub-region.

Q: Vietnam has lodged official protest with China following the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat, which it says was chased by a Chinese maritime surveillance vessel in a disputed district of the South China Sea. I wonder if you have any comment on this?

A: Xisha Qundao is undisputed Chinese territory. We urge the Vietnamese side to immediately stop illegal trespassing and fishing activities in the internal waters and territorial sea of China's Xisha Qundao.

As to the incident on March 6 the Vietnamese side mentioned, China has released information on it. The Vietnamese fishing boat had already sunk after hitting a reef before the arrival of China's coast guard vessel. We hope Vietnam will not twist the facts.

Q: On next Tuesday President Xi Jinping will meet with the French President Macron and the German Chancellor Merkel when attending a forum. Do you have more details?

A: During President Xi Jinping's visit to France, China and France will jointly hold the Global Governance Forum, inviting people from all walks of life from China, France and the Europe to exchange views on a wide range of issue including upholding multilateralism and the multilateral trading system, improving global governance, addressing global challenges and jointly building the Belt and Road. President Xi Jinping will attend the closing ceremony of the forum along with French President Macron, German Chancellor Merkel and European Commission President Juncker and deliver a speech. State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will attend the opening ceremony of the forum together with French Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian.

Q: According to media reports, the US State Department released its annual Hong Kong Policy Act Report. Do you have any comment on that?

A: Since Hong Kong's return, the policies of "one country, two systems", "Hong Kong people administering Hong Kong" and a high degree of autonomy in Hong Kong have been earnestly implemented and Hong Kong people's rights and freedoms have been fully guaranteed. The Chinese government's resolve to handle all matters in strict compliance with the Constitution and the Basic Law and to fully and faithfully implement the policy of "one country, two systems" will not change.

I want to stress that Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China and Hong Kong affairs are purely China's domestic affairs. No foreign government has the right to interfere. The US report finds fault with Hong Kong affairs and wantonly criticizes China's central government and the Hong Kong SAR government in disregard of facts. We deplore and stand resolutely against it and urge the US to stop such erroneous practice and be prudent with its words and deeds on matters relating to Hong Kong.

Q: Bloomberg News reported that the US government has given approval to Taiwan's request to buy more than 60 F-16 fighter jets, according to people familiar with the matter. I wonder if you have any comment on that?

A: China resolutely opposes US arms sales to Taiwan, and this position remains consistent and firm. We have lodged stern representations to the US. We urge the US to fully recognize the highly sensitive and harmful nature of the relevant issue, abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiques, especially the August 17 communique, to stop arms sales to and military contact with Taiwan, and carefully and prudently handle the Taiwan-related issues lest it should seriously damage the cooperation between China and the US in important areas and the peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits.

Q: According to reports, the Japanese Foreign Ministry has lodged representations to China because of its exploration of the gas field in the East China Sea. I wonder if you have any comment on that?

A: China's oil and gas activities in the East China Sea are carried out in the undisputed waters under China's jurisdiction, and are entirely within the scope of China's sovereign rights and jurisdiction.

In addition, the so-called "median line" is only a unilateral claim by the Japanese side. The Chinese side resolutely opposes it and has never recognized it.

Q: I just got this news. This afternoon the DPRK unilaterally withdrew from the Inter-Korean Liaison Office located in Gaeseong area. What is China's reaction on this move?

A: I haven't seen the news you said and need to check on that.

With the concerted efforts of all parties, the current situation on the Korean Peninsula remains stable. We encourage all parties concerned to continue to engage in contact and dialogues, meet each other half way and advance denuclearization and the establishment of a peace mechanism on the peninsula.

Q: The explosion in Jiangsu Province has caused great casualties. I wonder if you have any information about any foreign citizens wounded or killed?

A: I have no information regarding what you asked about and I will try to check that for you later.The Hospice Shop in Antrim following an arson attack

Northern Ireland police have slammed a "senseless" arson attack at a charity shop.

The attack happened at the Hospice Shop in Antrim town's Castle Mall on Thursday evening.

Police said they suspected someone left bags of clothing for donation outside the premises, which were later set alight.

A PSNI spokesperson said: "This has caused considerable damage to the shop and will undoubtedly affect the services and support that the charity shop provides.

"I would ask anyone who considers these actions appropriate to reconsider and think about the consequences of senseless acts like this."

Anyone with any information regarding the attack has been urged to contact police on 101 quoting reference 1347 of 21/03/2019.Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said the claims by Witness O must be pursued by the police (Niall Carson/PA)

Police have faced calls to act on the testimony of an anonymous IRA bomber who claims he knows who was behind the Birmingham pub attacks.

Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland demanded a response from officers in the UK and the Irish Republic after the man, identified only as Witness O, outlined the names to the ongoing inquests into the deaths.

He said he had been given permission to reveal the names in court of four men, three of whom are now dead, by the head of the IRA in Dublin.

DUP MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said the claims by Witness O must be pursued by the police.

This further evidence demands a proper police investigation into his involvement in the murder of 21 peopleDUP MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson

The Lagan Valley representative insisted gardai in the Irish Republic had a role to play.

One of the individuals named today has previously admitted involvement in the Birmingham pub bombings, he said.

This further evidence demands a proper police investigation into his involvement in the murder of 21 people.

Sir Jeffrey also demanded answers from Sinn Fein, in particular its president.

Mary Lou McDonald needs to explain how the head of the IRA in Dublin can give permission for an individual to be named, when she tells us the IRA doesnt exist, he said.

He added: Mary Lou McDonald should step forward and state clearly whether she believes the actions of the IRA in Birmingham and elsewhere were criminal.

Ulster Unionist Assembly member Doug Beattie said: Given that numerous Sinn Fein politicians have claimed that there is no IRA, you wonder just who is sitting in Dublin, claiming to be the head of it?

The PSNI and the Garda need to give an assessment of this claim as a matter of urgency.

What are you doing about the current head of IRA still operating in your jurisdiction, Mr Varadkar? | https://t.co/eGKaMFM9EK https://t.co/g7Hyp5kwwg  Jim Allister (@JimAllister) March 22, 2019

Jim Allister, leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice party, asked: Have the four named persons been investigated fully by the police and what further steps will now be taken?

And, Mr (Leo) Varadkar, you who likes to mind everyone elses business, what are you doing about the continuing operation of the IRA in your capital city under a current head? What actions have you taken, and will take, to address this issue?

A West Midlands Police spokesman said: The pub bombing investigation has never closed.

Our approach is, where new facts come to light, they are scrutinised to see if people can be brought to justice.

The force will never lose sight of the tragic fact that 21 people lost their lives in the atrocities that took place in Birmingham in 1974.

Its not appropriate to make further comment at this stage while were in the middle of the coroners inquests.

A spokesman for the Garda in Ireland said: An Garda Siochana do not comment on named individuals and on matters before the courts in other jurisdictions.A professor who was sacked by Union Theological College (UTC) after comments he made in the media has said he will fight against the ruling.

Rev Laurence Kirkpatrick, who worked for the Presbyterian-run institution in Belfast for 22 years, is understood to be the first theological professor to be sacked by the Church.

He has also signalled his intention to launch an unfair dismissal claim with the Employment Tribunal.

Professor Kirkpatrick was "summarily dismissed" from his post at UTC which runs all undergraduate degree courses in theology for Queen's University.

But when contacted by the Belfast Telegraph, Prof Kirkpatrick said he will appeal the decision after a Church disciplinary panel found him guilty of "gross misconduct".

"Ironically, on the day I received my dismissal letter I spent the afternoon with a PhD student at her oral examination and she was awarded the degree, subject to some corrections," he said.

"I will appeal this dismissal within five working days and I also intend to launch an unfair dismissal claim with the Employment Tribunal."

The Presbyterian Church told this newspaper it would not be appropriate to comment on an individual's employment.

Former Alliance Party leader David Ford - who was ousted as a Presbyterian Church elder after supporting same-sex marriage - said he understood Prof Kirkpatrick's decision because "it seems to me that he has not be treated particularly well so far".

Meanwhile, retired Presbyterian minister Roy Simpson said he admired Prof Kirkpatrick's courage, adding that he hoped "that in due course justice will prevail in his case".

Prof Kirkpatrick was suspended following comments he made about the ages of his employer's staff while he was a guest on BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme last June.

When asked if there were any female lecturers at Union College, he replied that there were "some part-time".

He added: "I am, personally, totally conscious that at graduation we must look like escapees from an old people's home - getting on, (an) exclusively male full-time faculty."

It's understood the remarks angered some faculty members and led to the suspension on June 25 of Prof Kirkpatrick.

In a letter of dismissal, Prof Kirkpatrick was told six charges against him were upheld but only the two relating to his appearance on Talkback were adjudged to constitute "gross misconduct".

The letter added that Prof Kirkpatrick's comments had "contributed significantly to a fracturing of the relationship between your employer and Queen's University Belfast".

The disciplinary panel decided his participation in the programme and what he said on it amounted to gross misconduct and left them with no alternative but to dismiss him.

The other four charges upheld by the panel related to offences including entering UTC and attending a Queen's graduation ceremony after he had been suspended, as well as unauthorised access to the Presbyterian Church's IT systems on a specified date.

According to the panel these constituted degrees of misconduct, short of gross misconduct and would have led to one first and three final written warnings.

Queen's suspended recruitment of new students to UTC in December 2018.

The university said it has "no role in the staffing arrangements at Union Theological College and is not in a position to comment on specific cases".A man charged with murdering Belfast community worker Ian Ogle has been granted bail, pending the outcome of a prosecution appeal.

Glenn Rainey mounted a successful application after flight documents were produced to back claims he intended to return to Northern Ireland following a trip to Thailand.

However, the 32-year-old remains in custody pending the outcome of a prosecution appeal due to be heard early next week.

Mr Ogle, 45, died after being beaten and stabbed 11 times by up to five men shortly after praying with a pastor near his Cluan Place home in east Belfast on January 27.

Police have linked the killing to a long-running feud between the victim's family and others in the area.

Rainey, of McArthur Court in the city, is the second man to be charged with the murder.

He is allegedly linked by CCTV evidence which police assert shows him, with his face masked by a scarf, walking away from the scene minutes after the fatal attack.

Rainey was arrested at Manchester Airport earlier this month after arriving on a flight back from Thailand.

During his first court appearance bail was refused due to the risk he may attempt to abscond.

At that stage it was claimed he had no onward flight to Belfast booked, casting doubt on submissions that he was returning home to clear his name.

But defence lawyers secured a new hearing at Belfast Magistrates' Court on Thursday based on a change of circumstances.

Barrister Sean Devine, instructed by Bannon Crawford Solicitors, said documents were available to show Rainey was actually booked on a further flight back from Manchester.

Deputy District Judge Chris Holmes granted bail under strict conditions, including a requirement for the accused to surrender his passport and remain in Northern Ireland.

Rainey was also excluded from part of east Belfast, and ordered to abide by a curfew and electronic tagging.

Prosecutors immediately confirmed their intention to appeal the decision, leaving Rainey behind bars until the case goes before the High Court.A DUP MP has questioned the PSNI's reluctance to say if Martin McGuinness was questioned over reports that he was armed with a sub-machine gun on Bloody Sunday.

Gregory Campbell said he had been involved in two years of written correspondence with senior officers without receiving clear answers.

Mr Campbell's comments come after the Public Prosecution Service confirmed it was bringing murder charges against a former paratrooper, Soldier F.

Read More

The Army veteran will stand trial for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney. He has also been charged with four attempted murders.

Thirteen people were killed and 15 wounded after members of the Army's Parachute Regiment opened fire on civil rights demonstrators in the Bogside on January 30, 1972. A 14th person died in hospital.

In 2010 a report by Lord Saville concluded that Mr McGuinness was present at the time of the violence and "probably armed with a sub-machine gun" but did not engage in "any activity that provided any of the soldiers with any justification for opening fire".

At the time Mr McGuinness rejected claims he had been armed with a machine gun.

Mr Campbell said he wrote to the PSNI in the wake of the report to determine if soldiers were going to be questioned with a view to possible prosecutions.

He also asked if officers intended to question Mr McGuinness.

Writing in today's Belfast Telegraph, the East Londonderry MP says: "There followed more than two years of exchanges of correspondence between myself, as an elected Member of Parliament, and very senior police officers, who repeatedly declined to indicate whether they intended to question McGuinness about the issue.

"Martin McGuinness at this time was the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland.

"Given the protracted delay I eventually took the case to the Policing Ombudsman in August 2016. He indicated that they were in communication with the police as to whether there was a case to investigate of a failure by the police to conduct 'a thorough and impartial investigation into all areas of potential criminality arising from the publication of the Saville Inquiry'."

Mr Campbell said that following the "protracted delay", in August 2016 he took the case to the Police Ombudsman's office.

He added: "Despite five months elapsing by the time Martin McGuinness had taken ill and then passed away, no decision was communicated to me about the outcome."

Assistant Chief Constable George Clarke said: "Following the publication of the Saville Inquiry an investigation was commenced into the actions of a range of people involved on Bloody Sunday.

"The lengthy and complex investigation into the events of January 30, 1972 sought to painstakingly identify tangible and admissible evidence, evidence which was subsequently submitted in its entirety to the PPS.

"Whilst there are ongoing legal proceedings it would not be appropriate to comment further at this time."

A Police Ombudsman spokesman said: "In August 2016 we received a complaint that police had failed to provide information about their investigation into the circumstances of Bloody Sunday, and particularly about a specific line of enquiry.

"The Police Ombudsman found that there was no onus on police to provide information about their investigations, and did not uphold the complaint. In October 2016, an additional issue was raised with us. This resulted in the Police Ombudsman considering if there were grounds for calling himself in to examine whether the then ongoing police investigation was looking at all potential criminality arising from the Saville Report.

"Enquiries were undertaken and these indicated that the activities of all those believed involved in the events of January 30, 1972, including military and civilian, were being considered in the police investigation.

"The Police Ombudsman therefore did not find any grounds for initiating a full investigation into the thoroughness and impartiality of the police enquiries."Nearly 20,000 people in Northern Ireland have signed a petition for the UK Government to revoke Article 50 and remain in the European Union.

As of lunchtime on Friday 19,183 from Northern Ireland had signed the petition out of over 3million cast on the official parliament petitions website. Those petitions which receive over 100,000 signatures get scheduled for a debate in Parliament.

However, Prime Minister Theresa May has said she "will not countenance" revoking Article 50.

The top three constituencies in Northern Ireland with the most signatures were Emma Little Pengelly's South Belfast seat (2,802), Gavin Robinson's in East Belfast (1,438) and Lagan Valley (1,291) held by DUP whip Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP.

The Petitions Committee said nearly 2,000 signatures were being completed every minute over lunchtime on Thursday, leading to the website crashing because of unprecedented demand.

Expand Close More than three million people have signed the petition. / Facebook

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Whatsapp More than three million people have signed the petition.

Many took to social media claiming people who were not UK nationals or UK residents were signing the petition.

A House of Commons spokesman said: "Anyone who is a UK resident or a British citizen can sign a petition. This includes British citizens living overseas."

Commons leader Andrea Leadsom dismissed the petition as not being on the same scale as the pro-Brexit vote in the 2016 referendum, which saw 17.4m people vote to take the UK out of the EU.

"Should it reach 17.4 million respondents then I am sure there will be a very clear case for taking action," she told MPs.

She added: "It's absolutely right that people do have the opportunity to put their views and that can then spark yet another Brexit debate."

In December, the European Court of Justice ruled the UK can unilaterally revoke Article 50 of the Treaty of the EU. This means the UK Government can decided to stay in the EU without the consent of the 27 other member states.

Expand Close Nearly 20,000 people signed the petition in Northern Ireland. / Facebook

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Whatsapp Nearly 20,000 people signed the petition in Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland signatures:

East Antrim: 868

Strangford: 847

North Down: 1,285

South Down: 1,177

Newry and Armagh: 932

Upper Bann: 902

South Antrim: 1,006

North Antrim: 612

East Londonderry: 699

Foyle: 1,356

West Tyrone: 660

Fermanagh and South Tyrone: 708

Mid Ulster: 651

Lagan Valley; 1,291

Belfast South: 2,802

Belfast West: 810

Belfast North: 1,139

Belfast East: 1,438Officers from the paramilitary crime task force, who have made six arrests in early-morning raids in Belfast (PSNI/PA)

Police have made six arrests in early-morning raids targeting loyalist paramilitaries in Belfast.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) carried out six searches in what it described as a significant operation in a probe into the criminal activities of the East Belfast Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).

The raids were undertaken by the PSNIs specialist Paramilitary Crime Task Force.

The organisation posted an image on Twitter on Friday morning showing armoured vehicles parked in a residential area.

Officers said the operation was focused on the greater Belfast area.

A PSNI statement said: Officers from the Paramilitary Crime Task Force are conducting a significant operation in the Greater Belfast area into the criminal activities of East Belfast UVF.Police raided properties in east Belfast as part of investigations into the UVF.

Eleven men have been arrested as part of what police have described as a "significant operation" into the east Belfast UVF.

Officers from the Paramilitary Crime Task Force (PCTF) carried out 14 searches in the Greater Belfast, Ards and Comber areas on Friday morning.

The searches resulted in the seizure of 15,000 of suspected Class A drugs, a number of high value vehicles, high end jewellery, clothing and accessories and a significant quantity of cash.

Following the raids police arrested eleven men aged between 22 and 48, they are currently in custody being questioned by detectives.

Detective Superintendent Bobby Singleton said that the east Belfast UVF had been a priority for the PCTF since its inception "owing to the breadth and scale of criminality and the violence against and coercion of the community that goes hand in hand with it".

"Paramilitaries claim to protect local people but in reality they exploit them by supplying illegal drugs and using violence to try and control their markets," he said.

"East Belfast UVF are nothing more than a drugs gang who operate under a flag of convenience in an attempt to legitimise their existence.

"Working with our partners and communities we are determined to rid our communities of these parasites."

Detective Superintendent Singleton said Friday's investigation would likely lead to further action by the PCTF.

"PSNI clearly has a role to play in terms of tackling the criminality of these groups and thats why todays PCTF operation is significant," he said.

Expand Close Detective Superintendent Bobby Singleton PA / Facebook

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"Todays operation demonstrates what we can do when we have information about the activities of these groups. Id like to take this opportunity to thank those that are standing up to paramilitaries across Northern Ireland, your courage is an inspiration to us all, thank you.

"Anyone with any information no matter how trivial they may think it is, should bring that to police or to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.The barber shop which Newtownabbey man Dean McIlwaine planned to open before he died nearly two years ago has won a business award.

Dean's cousin, Jordan Malone (22), said his team at Dean Samuel Gentleman's Barbers were over the moon to have picked up the Glengormley Barbershop of the Year award last weekend.

The body of Dean (22) was found on Cavehill in July 2017 after a major search that lasted nine days and involved hundreds of volunteers.

Jordan, who grew up alongside Dean and his brother, Glen, trained as a barber under Dean and seemed a natural choice to run the business, although at the time the pain of his loss was so great that he was reluctant.

"Dean had everything ready," he said. "He had chosen the chairs and wallpaper and the only thing he was waiting on was the sign.

"The shop was ready to walk into, and when the family asked if I would run it I felt that I couldn't do it.

"His waistcoat and his cap were hanging in there and I just didn't think that I could bring myself to go down and look at that every day.

"Then I thought if the circumstances were reversed Dean would do it for me, so I decided to give it a go. It was awful at the start, but I had to get on with it.

"Winning the award means absolutely everything. After all the work we have put in for Dean, I can't even describe how good it is to get it.

"It made us all so happy for Dean. I know he would have done it himself and it was amazing for us to do it for him."

When Dean went missing, huge crowds gathered to help with searches.

Jordan, who always believed he would come back home, said he still had not accepted that he would not see his cousin again.

He described the support at the time as amazing, and to this day the family is being shored up by the caring concern of their local community.

"When Dean went missing, I never doubted he would walk in the door and I still feel that," Jordan said. "The barber shop has been my main focus and everything we do is for Dean."Your eyes are on 2020. One election is past and thoughts are on the next one: votes equal change, and youre ready for it. Youll be the next in a long line of changers, as youll see in the new book.

In the latter part of June, 1978, Harvey Milk, the Mayor of Castro Street, called former Army nurse and Castro Street fixture Gilbert Baker and asked him to make something special for the upcoming Gay Freedom parade. At that time, the rainbow flag was a rebel flag, but Baker subsumed it into a symbol of pride.

By the end of that year, Milk was dead and rainbow flags were still rare and exotic, as were openly gay politicians. Just a handful of LGB people were in office around the world at that time; it would be years before the first openly trans individual would be elected.

Here, Reynolds tells their stories, and others, world-wide.

He begins with a battle in New Zealands Parliament that was narrowly-won, followed four years later by marriage equality victory in nearby Australia. He writes of two gay politicians who squared off in Great Britain, noting that laws against buggery were still on the books when they did battle. He tells of a Dutch politician who, by mere months, preceded Harvey Milk as the worlds first openly gay man to serve in office. And he shares a story of politics in Ireland, the first country in the world to pass gay marriage by popular referendum.

Closer to home, Reynolds writes about Barney Frank, his first political battle for civil rights in Mississippi, and the undercelebrated woman who inspired him. Reynolds recalls the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and what it was like to be active in politics then. He writes of trans politicians Sarah McBride and Danica Roem, and the fierce but highly ironic story of Pauli Murray, whose great-aunts land donation helped build a university that ultimately denied bathroom access to trans individuals.

If you see The Children of Harvey Milk on a shelf somewhere, you may be confused by the title. No, author Andrew Reynolds isnt referring to small humans; his title instead refers to babes in political office, world-wide, who happen to be gay.

For some readers, that could present problems: fully half of Reynolds book is about politics overseas, and some of it wont make sense unless youve got basic knowledge of how other governments work. Without it, you may not fully appreciate the significance of what youll read  and if that makes you feel a tinge of regretful isolationism, know that, happily, Reynolds is a good teacher. Here, readers will easily learn, and what they learn is absolutely inspiring.

For political animals, this book is an easy choice. For the slightly clueless, its a know-your-history book that doesnt dwell strictly domestically. For a casual reader, it may be challenging but in the end, The Children of Harvey Milk could be the most informative book youll lay eyes on.

The Children of Harvey Milk: How LGBTQ Politicians Changed the World by Andrew Reynolds

c.2019, Oxford University Press $34.95 / higher in Canada 354 pages

Chick out this books homepage:

(Author: Andrew Reynolds)

or check this book out on AmazonGeorgina Lochrane has described her daughters killer as inhuman (Andrew Milligan/PA)

The mother of murdered six-year-old Alesha MacPhail said her killer is inhuman and should never be released from prison.

Aaron Campbell, 16, is beginning a life sentence with a minimum of 27 years for snatching Alesha from her bed, raping her and dumping her body on the Isle of Bute last summer.

Sentencing Campbell at the High Court in Glasgow on Thursday, judge Lord Matthews said the callous, calculating teenager had shown not a flicker of emotion during the nine-day trial that saw him convicted.

Expand Close Campbell was found guilty by a majority verdict (Police Scotland/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook

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There was further turmoil for Aleshas family in court as Campbells lawyer revealed he had since admitted the crime, telling psychologists that when he came across Alesha sleeping in her bed all I thought about was killing her.

Aleshas mother Georgina Lochrane, 24, told the Daily Record: A life sentence should be a life sentence. He should have no human rights and doesnt deserve anything because he is inhuman.

I will do whatever I can to make the parole board see that that cant be released back into society.

Ms Lochrane, from Airdrie, told the paper: He doesnt deserve to breathe the same air as my family. It rubs salt into our wounds the fact he is still alive and she isnt.

Scotlands top law officer said the sentencing is a matter for the judge but the length of sentence reflects the exceptional and truly dreadful nature of the crime.

Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC added: Im immensely proud of the work that was done by prosecutors in dealing with the case against Aaron Campbell.

The outcome reflects hard work by the police and prosecutors.

Alesha was a few days into a summer holiday with her father and grandparents, staying at the home they shared on Bute in the Firth of Clyde.

Father Robert MacPhail, who split from Ms Lochrane after Alesha was born, told the trial how he put his daughter to bed on July 1 and was woken the next morning by his frantic parents Calum MacPhail and Angela King saying she was missing.

Expand Close Members of the Bute community rallied to help find missing Alesha (John Linton/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Members of the Bute community rallied to help find missing Alesha (John Linton/PA)

A few hours later her naked body was found dumped in nearby woodland, with a post-mortem examination recording more than 100 injuries.

Detectives recovered clothes and a knife from the area, and further evidence came from Campbells own mother, who provided CCTV footage which showed her son coming and going several times in the early hours of July 2.

He had been drinking with friends at his house and wanted cannabis, so went to the home of Robert MacPhail who had sold him the drug in the past.

There he found the door unlocked and went into the first room on the left where Alesha lay sleeping.

He told psychologists Alesha was drowsy but wakened a bit when they went outside, and he gave her his top because she was cold.

She asked who he was, and the killer told her he was a friend of her fathers and was taking her home.

Expand Close Campbells clothes were recovered from the shoreline on Bute (Crown Office/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Campbells clothes were recovered from the shoreline on Bute (Crown Office/PA)

Campbell was said to be mildly amused in the days following the murder that he had not yet been arrested.

He told how he was quite satisfied with the murder and had struggled to contain his laughter during the trial.

Lord Matthews told Campbell at his sentencing: You are completely lacking in victim empathy, the social worker noting your cold, calculating manner.

The only sentence I can impose on you is detention without limit of time.Dutch PM Mark Rutte, Beligian prime minister Charles Michel, Prime Minister Theresa May and Sir Tim Barrow, the UKs Permanent Representative to the EU, with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Another week of Brexit drama in London and Brussels has done little to end the uncertainty over the UKs withdrawal from the EU. So what has happened and what will happen next?

Days to go

Certainly not 7, as the long-expected March 29 date of Brexit Day is now off the table. It could be 21, if the House of Commons rejects Theresa Mays deal and Britain decides to leave on April 12 without seeking a further extension. Or 61, if MPs back the Withdrawal Agreement and the UK leaves with a deal on May 22. Conceivably, it could be 284, if the EU grants a further extension to the end of the year, or even more if a longer postponement is agreed.

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Jean-Claude Juncker may have got it right when he answered the question of how long the UK could stay in: Until the very end.

What happened this week?

Theresa Mays plans for a third meaningful vote on her Brexit deal were scuppered by Commons Speaker John Bercow, who ruled on Monday that a 17th-century parliamentary convention meant the Government could not repeatedly bring back the same motion.

Expand Close John Bercow cited a convention dating back to 1604 as he told the Commons that ministers cannot repeatedly table the same motion (House of Commons/PA Images) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp John Bercow cited a convention dating back to 1604 as he told the Commons that ministers cannot repeatedly table the same motion (House of Commons/PA Images)

A fiery Cabinet saw Leave and Remain-backing ministers clash over whether the Prime Minister should seek a long or short delay to Brexit and ended without settling the matter. Mrs May began Wednesday with an early-hours decision to go for June 30 as the new departure day, and ended it with a much-criticised TV address from Downing Street in which she blamed MPs for failing to make their minds up and told frustrated voters: Im on your side.

On Thursday in Brussels, the other 27 EU leaders brushed aside Mrs Mays plans and took back control, deciding a new Brexit timetable while she waited outside the room.

What happens next?

Having lost its second meaningful vote (MV2) by a margin of 149 last week, the Government has to table an amendable motion on Monday which will allow MPs to force debates and votes on their own preferred outcomes. A cross-party group headed by Sir Oliver Letwin will seek to seize control of the parliamentary timetable on Wednesday to force legally binding votes on the way forward. Mrs May is expected to put her Brexit package to a third meaningful vote (MV3) on Tuesday or Wednesday, with the prize of an orderly exit on May 22 if MPs approve it. If they again reject it, the scene will be set for a series of indicative votes to establish if there is a plan the Commons can unite behind.

Good week

Emmanuel Macron

Expand Close Emmanuel Macron greets European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker as the EU27 debated Brexit in Brussels (AP Photo/Olivier Matthys, Pool) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Emmanuel Macron greets European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker as the EU27 debated Brexit in Brussels (AP Photo/Olivier Matthys, Pool)

The French president was the driving force behind the EU27s rejection of Theresa Mays timetable for a delayed Brexit. The package drawn up in Brussels takes the timing of departure out of the UKs hands and delivers a two-week breathing space for Britain to think again before driving off the cliff-edge of a no-deal withdrawal. And  most satisfactorily for the EU leaders themselves, who were not relishing the prospect of a rapid return to Brussels  it avoids the need for an emergency summit next week if Mrs Mays plan falls.

Bad week

The hardline Brexiteers

Leave-backing Conservatives were left howling about national humiliation as they saw their long-cherished dream of a no-strings-attached clean Brexit on March 29 vanish before their eyes. They are now torn between backing an agreement which they have long derided as Brexit in name only or taking the risk of a lengthy delay  or even death-blow  to Brexit itself.

Quote of the week

According to our Pope, Hell is still empty. It means there is a lot of space.  European Council President Donald Tusk, when asked if there will be a place in Hell for MPs who vote against Mrs Mays deal next week.

Expand Close Video grab from the European Council broadcaster ec.europa.eu of European Council president Donald Tusk making a statement on Brexit in Brussels Press Association Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Video grab from the European Council broadcaster ec.europa.eu of European Council president Donald Tusk making a statement on Brexit in Brussels

Tweet of the week

Following the news that Hastings Pier will remain closed past March, I update residents in my open letter below.

This apparently innocuous constituency message from Remain-backing Cabinet minister Amber Rudd had half of Westminster scratching its collective head. Was it a cryptic comment about delaying Brexit beyond the end of March? Was the long-standing structure stretching out from Britains shores towards continental Europe a metaphor for something? Or was it just a local gripe about an attractions doors being closed as the tourist season approaches? Few of those exchanging quips about it on Twitter really wanted to know the answer.

Following the news that Hastings Pier will remain closed past March, I update residents in my open letter below pic.twitter.com/WXM7C1nzwJ  Amber Rudd (@AmberRuddUK) March 21, 2019

Word of the week

Flextension

This hurriedly-invented phrase describes the multiple-option delay to the Article 50 process offered by the EU27, which could be short or could be long or could even go on for ever.Dr Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, will be honoured at Windsor Castle on Friday. (Kirsty OConnor/PA)

The great-granddaughter of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and the CEO of Greggs are among those due to receive honours at Windsor Castle on Friday.

The Queen will hand a CBE to womens rights campaigner Dr Helen Pankhurst for services to gender equality.

Dr Pankhurst is a senior adviser to charity CARE International and regularly speaks out on gender issues.

The activist, who is also a writer and academic, was installed as the first chancellor of the University of Suffolk in December.

Roger Whiteside, chief executive of the Greggs bakery chain, will be given an OBE for services to women and equality.

In 2016 he joined the Womens Business Council, which aims to tackle barriers to the career progression of women.

Expand Close Greggs chief executive Roger Whiteside will receive an OBE (Greggs/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook

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Microsoft UKs CEO Cindy Rose will also be given an OBE at the investiture ceremony for services to UK technology.

Prior to joining the US electronics giant, she led the consumer division at telecommunications firm Vodafone.

Skateboarder James Threlfall, who is an ambassador for mental health charity CALM, will be given an MBE for his work with young people in Wiltshire.

An OBE will be presented to Paul Lindley, who founded organic baby food manufacturer Ellas Kitchen, for services to food and drink exports and childrens welfare.

Jane Cummings, who is the chief nursing officer for England, will also receive a CBE at the ceremony.Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to march on Parliament calling for the public to be given the final say on Brexit.

Demonstrators will flood into the capital from across the country for the Put It To The People march in Parliament Square on Saturday.

The number of marchers calling for a second referendum could soar to more than one million after estimates for a similar rally in October were as high as 700,000.

Campaigners will march from Park Lane to Parliament Square from midday, followed by a rally in front of Parliament.

There, Labours deputy leader Tom Watson will tell crowds that he has reluctantly come to the view that the only way to resolve the current impasse is for people themselves to sign it off.

Brexit is stuck in the parliamentary pipework. The impasse works for neither Leavers or Remainers. I have come to the reluctant view that the only way to resolve this is for the country to have the final say. Tomorrow I will join the #PutItToThePeople march. pic.twitter.com/78abwJzqHF  Tom Watson (@tom_watson) March 22, 2019

Mr Watson will tell the crowds in Westminster: The current impasse is not working for people who voted to leave or people who voted to stay. I really dont think Parliament will be able to resolve this.

Thats why Ive come to the reluctant view that the only way to resolve this and have legitimacy in the eyes of the public is for the people themselves to sign it off.

It can only bring closure if were all involved in making the decision.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine and London mayor Sadiq Khan will also address the protest.

Ill be proud to speak at the @peoplesvote_uk march tomorrow. Scotland voted to remain in 2016 but people across the UK must have the chance to get out of this Brexit mess. Whatever Scotlands future - I hope independent - it is in all of our interests for UK to be in the EU.  Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) March 22, 2019

Other keynote speakers include former Conservative cabinet minister Justine Greening and former attorney general Dominic Grieve, former Tory turned independent MP Anna Soubry, Lib Dem deputy leader Jo Swinson, Green Party MP Caroline Lucas and SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford.

Campaigners will pour into London from across the country, with one embarking on a 715-mile journey on ferries, trains and buses from Orkney in Scotland.

Student Sorcha Kirker, 27, is the vice president for higher education of the Highlands and Islands Students Association, and studies archaeology at Orkney College UHI.

She said she will be joined by about 30 other students from the University of the Highlands and Islands.

She added: Personally I think its really unfair because predominantly students and young people dont want Brexit, and many were not old enough to vote in 2016, yet we are the ones whose futures it will affect for the longest.

The march comes on the same day pro-Brexit campaigners will continue their long hike from the North East to London, with former Ukip leader Nigel Farage re-joining the March to Leave when it sets off from Linby, near Nottingham, on Saturday morning.

The day of Remain and Leave demonstrations come at the end of a week when EU leaders agreed to delay Brexit to give Prime Minister Theresa May a final chance to get her deal through Parliament.

Under the plan set out at the EU summit, leaders agreed to extend Brexit to May 22 if Mrs May can finally get MPs to back her deal in a third Commons meaningful vote.

However, if she fails the UK will have to set out an alternative way forward by April 12, which could mean a much longer delay  with the UK required to hold elections to the European Parliament  or leaving without a deal at all.

A petition calling on the Government to halt the Brexit process had passed three and a half million signatures on Friday evening.Meterologists say the Northern Lights could be visible over Scotland this weekend (Owen Humphreys/PA).

A solar storm on its way to Earth could mean the Northern Lights might be seen from the UK on Saturday night, forecasters have said.

The Met Office said the phenomenon, known as the aurora borealis, may be visible in Scotland.

Expand Close The Northern Lights over St Marys Lighthouse and Visitor Centre in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, in February 2014 (Owen Humphreys/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp The Northern Lights over St Marys Lighthouse and Visitor Centre in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, in February 2014 (Owen Humphreys/PA)

Skies in Glasgow and Edinburgh are forecast to be cloudy on Saturday night, but there could be breaks long enough to reveal the lights.

Further north, in the Scottish Highlands, or east, in Dundee and Aberdeen, the sky is likely to be clearer.

The Northern Lights are created by disturbances in Earths magnetosphere caused by a flow of particles from the Sun, and are usually concentrated around the Earths magnetic poles.

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The southward shift of the lights on Saturday is caused by an ejection of plasma, known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) from the Sun, which followed a solar flare on Wednesday.

Bonnie Diamond, meteorologist at the Met Office, said: A Coronal Mass Ejection has happened and the effects of that are expected to arrive later tomorrow evening.

This type of active geomagnetic storm means that there is the possibility of the aurora borealis, commonly known as the Northern Lights.

CME forecast to arrive late 23rd March following C5 flare from sunspot AR2736. Active-minor geomagnetic storm periods possible with low risk of moderate storms. As a result, aurora may be visible in Scotland where cloud breaks. Latest forecast available https://t.co/JL4kEFnjRa pic.twitter.com/kxTtoqolDc  Met Office Space (@MetOfficeSpace) March 21, 2019

Whether or not you will see the Northern Lights depends on where you are and what the weather is like. Scotland is where youre most likely to see it.

Theres a couple of showers on the west coast of Scotland on Saturday evening, and with those showers there will be a bit of cloud.

However, the clearest skies are further east in Aberdeenshire, where there are plenty of clear skies. Further north, youre pretty likely to see something.

Expand Close The Northern Lights over Derwent Water, near Keswick, in the Lake District, in March 2015 (Owen Humphreys/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp The Northern Lights over Derwent Water, near Keswick, in the Lake District, in March 2015 (Owen Humphreys/PA)

The Met Offices Space account tweeted: CME forecast to arrive late 23rd March following C5 flare from sunspot AR2736. Active-minor geomagnetic storm periods possible with low risk of moderate storms.

As a result, aurora may be visible in Scotland where cloud breaks. Latest forecast available

NOAA, an American agency that monitors the atmosphere, said the Northern Lights could be visible as far south as Michigan and Wisconsin in the United States.Police investigating the arson murder of a seven-year-old boy at his family home last year have released new images of a man they want to speak to.

Joel Urhie died in a house fire in Deptford, south-east London, on the morning of August 7 2018.

Police believe the fire may have been started by a burning item being pushed through the letter box.

The boys mother and sister escaped the fire by jumping from a first-floor window.

A post-mortem examination found the cause of Joels death was consistent with fire and smoke inhalation.

A man the police wish to speak to was seen on CCTV filling a petrol can with fuel at a garage a few miles from Joel Urhies home, around an hour before the attack happened, police said.

The man is described as white, aged in his 30s or 40s, approximately 5ft 10in and of medium build.

He was dressed in blue jeans, blue deck shoes and a blue t-shirt with two words on it  the second of which was removals.

The man is known to have arrived and left the garage on a push bike.

Expand Close Joel Urhie died after his home in Deptford, south London, was set on fire (Met Police/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Detective Inspector Alison Cole said: The petrol station where these images were taken from is just a few miles from the Urhie family home in Adolphus Street, the location of the devastating attack which led to Joel losing his life.

We are asking for help to identify this individual as we would like to speak to him as part of our ongoing work  if only to eliminate him from our inquiries. If you are this man, or you know him, please contact us as soon as possible.

This terrible arson  one of the most horrific crimes I have seen in over 25 years of policing  claimed the life of an innocent child, a tragic loss his family will never get over, and we desperately need the help of the public to bring justice for Joels family.

Two other men, aged 21 and 29, were arrested in August on suspicion of murder.European Council president Donald Tusk said there was a lot of space in hell when asked about comments on those who promoted Brexit without a plan.

He was speaking alongside European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker after plans to push back Britains departure from the European Union were approved.

Mr Tusk was asked about comments he made last month in which he said he had been wondering what the special place in hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan with how to carry it (out) safely.

He was quizzed about whether this special place should be extended to MPs who vote against the Withdrawal Agreement next week.

According to our pope, hell is still empty, it means there is a lot of space, he replied.

Mr Juncker then added Dont go to hell! as the press conference drew to a close.Theresa May did not attend the second day of the EU Council summit (Stephan Rousseau/PA)

Theresa May has returned to face the fury of Tory MPs after EU leaders agreed to delay Brexit to give her a final chance to get her deal through Parliament.

Following late-night talks in Brussels, the Prime Minister said the plan would enable the UK to leave in an orderly manner in little over eight weeks time.

But amid signs her authority is crumbling, there were open calls for her to quit as MPs voiced their anger that Brexit will not go ahead on March 29 as planned.

One backbencher warned next week would be a defining moment for her premiership and urged her to consider her position.

It followed reports that the chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, visited her in No 10 on Monday to inform her of the discontent after being bombarded with texts calling for her to quit.

Meanwhile pro-EU MPs have launched a fresh attempt to take control of the Commons business in a bid to secure a softer Norway-style Brexit.

Under the plan set out at the EU summit, leaders agreed to extend Brexit to May 22 if Mrs May can finally get MPs to back her deal in a third Commons meaningful vote.

However, if she fails the UK will have to set out an alternative way forward by April 12, which could mean a much longer delay  with the UK required to hold elections to the European Parliament  or leaving without a deal at all.

Following defeats by 230 votes in January and 149 votes last week, both pro-EU MPs and Brexiteers warned that she was heading for another heavy reverse.

Nigel Evans, the pro-Brexit executive secretary of the 1922 Committee, said she had made a big error in agreeing to a delay, adding pointedly she needed to consider what would be her legacy if she failed to deliver Brexit.

It has become a bit of a farce, he told BBC News.

When she leaves Downing Street  and a lot of people think it is not going to be long now before she does  what sort of legacy is she going to leave behind?

The world would finally decide that the British and their political system had gone mad if we all broke off to have six weeks of a bloody leadership campaignTory grandee Ken Clarke

Backbencher Steve Double said the Prime Minister was isolated and that there were many people in the party at Westminster who now wanted her to go.

I think it is quite clear that she is not leading her party. She is isolated, sadly, from a majority of the parliamentary party now, he told the Press Association.

We need to find a way forward and I think that requires new leadership . I know that many people feel that next week is a defining moment and I would very much hope that she would reflect on her position.

Nigel Dodds, the deputy leader of the DUP whose votes are likely to be crucial if Mrs May is to get her deal through, said she had failed to secure any change to the Northern Ireland backstop, which it bitterly opposes.

Nothing has changed as far as the Withdrawal Agreement is concerned. We will not accept any deal which poses a long-term risk to the constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom, he said.

However Tory grandee Ken Clarke warned that a Conservative leadership contest at such a crucial moment would be highly damaging.

The world would finally decide that the British and their political system had gone mad if we all broke off to have six weeks of a bloody leadership campaign that would probably produce somebody who has no more chance than she has of unifying the party, he told BBC Radio 4s The World at One.

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Meanwhile, ministers moved to try to head off a fresh cross-party attempt by MPs to take control of the Commons order paper, amid fears the Government is facing another damaging defeat in a vote on Monday.

A group including Tory former ministers Sir Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve, and the Labour MP Hilary Benn, have tabled an amendment to allow the Commons to stage a series of indicative votes on the alternatives to Mrs Mays deal.

However, Business Secretary Greg Clark stressed that David Lidington, Mrs Mays de facto deputy, had already promised the Government would enable the House to come to a view on the various options if her deal is rejected.

The Government will provide that so there is no reason why the Government should be forced to do something which it is committed to do anyway, he told the BBC.

Earlier Brexit minister Kwasi Kwarteng said it would be surprising if MPs were not given a free vote in that situation, however the prospect produced a furious response from Tory Brexiteers.

Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the European Research Group, tweeted: National humiliation is imminent through these indicative votes.

Earlier aides confirmed Thursdays agreement meant a no-deal Brexit was no longer a possibility on March 29, but stressed that it remained on the table if MPs have not approved the Withdrawal Agreement by April 12.

The format increases pressure on Leave-backing MPs to row in behind Mrs Mays deal, for fear that if it falls, the UK could find itself electing new MEPs and remaining for months or years within the EU.

Downing Street was unable to say on which day the Government would seek to bring back the Withdrawal Agreement for a third meaningful vote  known in Westminster as MV3.

But sources confirmed that Mrs May will table secondary legislation to remove the date March 29 from Brexit laws.

Speaking at the end of the European Council in Brussels, French president Emmanuel Macron said Brexit is more a political lesson than a lengthy technical negotiation.

Mr Macron said the failure by Britain to deliver Brexit more than two years after deciding to leave the bloc proves that a proposition to leave Europe without a project leads to an impasse.

But he insisted that governments should listen to their people if they want to avoid a disaster.

He said: We should respect what the British people have decided. We need to hear our people, we need to address their fears. We cant play with fears, or simply tear up pages without offering anything else.

Mr Macron warned in the case of a no-deal Brexit, the first victims would be Britains less well-off.

We would continue to have a strong relationship with the United Kingdom, he said. Im not rejoicing at all. Its terrible.US President Donald Trump appears to have prematurely claimed defeat against the Islamic State terror groups last bastion in Syria.

The White House announced on Friday that its territory in the nation had been 100% eliminated, while the US president brandished a map to reporters apparently showing its destruction.

Just over two years ago, ISIS was considered one of the gravest threats to the future of the Middle Eastand to the peace and security of the free world.



Now, the self-declared caliphate has been obliterated off the map. Literally.



1600 Daily: https://t.co/A68ueVC88u pic.twitter.com/ip3xwESWKi  The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) March 21, 2019

But it is understood the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are not yet ready to claim victory in ISs final stronghold of Baghouz.

SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali went on to say heavy fighting continues around Baghouz to finish off the remnants of IS right now  some two hours after the White House announcement.

Heavy fighting continues around mount #Baghouz right now to finish off whatever remains of ISIS. pic.twitter.com/l6eHLcWM5h  Mustafa Bali (@mustefabali) March 22, 2019

Britain has supported an international coalition to destroy the group by delivering airstrikes on key targets with RAF jets and Reaper drones carrying out attacks, surveillance and reconnaissance.

British Army soldiers on the ground have also trained thousands of members of the Iraqi Security Services and provided Kurdish fighters with weaponry and ammunition.

Baghouz, which is on Syrias border with Iraq, is the last strip of territory left over from ISs so-called caliphate, which once stretched across swathes of both nations.

Mr Trumps press secretary Sarah Sanders had said he was briefed by acting defence secretary Patrick Shanahan, who travelled with him aboard Air Force One.

The president showed a map to reporters showing ISs apparent elimination, saying: Heres Isis on Election Day. And heres Isis right now, with no red marks for territory remaining.

It is not the first time he has spoken prematurely on the matter. On Wednesday he said Baghouz would fall that night.

The presidents latest claim was quickly disputed.

CNNs Ben Wedeman, who has been reporting from Baghouz, tweeted that airstrikes and heavy machine gun fire could be heard.

I guess not everyone heard the White House statement re 100 percent elimination, he added.Chinese President Xi Jinping has been received with full red-carpet honours by his Italian counterpart as he launched a two-day visit aimed at deepening ties through an ambitious infrastructure programme.

The visit to Rome has raised concerns among Italys US and European allies.

President Sergio Mattarella greeted Mr Xi in the courtyard of the presidential palace, overseen by the regal guard while a band played the Chinese and Italian anthems.

The Chinese leader was accompanied by his wife Peng Liuan, while Mr Mattarella was joined by his daughter Laura, who accompanies the widowed president on official engagements.

Expand Close Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan arrive at the Quirinale Presidential Palace in Rome (Giuseppe Lami/Ansa/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan arrive at the Quirinale Presidential Palace in Rome (Giuseppe Lami/Ansa/AP)

Mr Xi will attend a wreath-laying ceremony at Italys monument for the unknown soldier, visit parliament and attend a state dinner where Andrea Bocelli will perform.

But the centrepiece of the state visit will be Saturdays signing of a memorandum of understanding to make Italy the first major democracy to join Chinas Belt and Road initiative, a huge infrastructure project that aims to better connect China to the rest of the world, which critics say is a vehicle for Chinese political influence.

US officials are sceptical of the burgeoning new ties, which they say favour Beijings interests. Critics have also questioned the transparency of the initiative and the potential for corruption with state-directed investment.

European governments declined to sign a joint declaration on the Belt and Road, arguing it lacked standards on financing and transparency.

Expand Close Sergio Mattarella and Xi Jinping review the honour guard (Alessandra Tarantino/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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As though to underscore the concerns, European Union leaders were meeting in Brussels on Friday to devise plans to counter China, a country they describe as a systemic rival.

The European Council was discussing a 10-point strategy before an EU-China summit next month. The EU wants to fully address the distortive effects of foreign state ownership and achieve a more balanced and reciprocal economic relationship.

Mr Mattarella said Mr Xis visit was an expression of the solidity of the bond and mutual respect between the two countries which celebrates 50 years of diplomatic relations in 2020.

But the head of state also told Chinese state media that the framework for investments needs to secure transparency, security and equity.

Chinese investments in Italy have totalled 22 billion euros (19 billion), officials said, well below that of other European nations. Britain, for example, has received investments worth 68 billion.

Italian exports into China lag other nations by a decade or more, officials said, running at 13 billion euros (11 billion) compared with 20 billion euros (17 billion) for France and 87 billion euros (74 billion) for Germany.Last week more than 100 excited grassroots activists filled the halls of the Capitol to meet face-to-face with legislators during Equality Floridas Lobby Days.

The real work of protecting hard won gains and securing full LGBTQ equality is ongoing in Floridas Capitol. As Floridas Legislative Session enters its third week, there are early signs of progress, and also evidence that much work remains in the 60-day Legislative Session.

Grassroots activists gathered in Tallahassee March 11-12 to educate legislators on LGBTQ priorities for Equality Florida

State and national LGBTQ groups have focused their energy on stopping the dangerous impact that House Bill 3 (HB 3) could have on LGBTQ equality. Last Tuesday in the Capitol, Equality Florida held a major press conference with the Human Rights Campaign to explain how the bill threatens to undo existing LGBTQ protections for 13 million Floridians. All three out legislatorsReps. Shevrin Jones (D - Miami), Carlos Guillermo Smith (D - Orlando), and Jennifer Webb (D - Orlando)--spoke about the bills potentially devastating consequences.

Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith speaks at a press conference with Rep. Shevrin Jones and others in opposition to House Bill 3.

The bill could repeal decades of progress establishing local nondiscrimination ordinances, conversion therapy bans, and more in cities and counties throughout Florida. North Carolinas similar House Bill 2, which preempted local LGBTQ protections when it passed in 2016, led to more than $600 million in lost revenue for the state due to business boycotts, canceled conventions, and sporting events that moved to places like Orlando that do have such protections.

Last Thursday, HB 3 passed its second of three House committees on a party-line vote. Reps. Margaret Good (D - Sarasota), Adam Hattersley (D - Brandon), Dianne Hart (D - Tampa), Tina Polsky (D - Boca Raton), and Holly Raschein (R - Key West) all emphasized HB 3s potentially harmful unintended consequences. An amendment significantly narrowed the bills scope but failed to eliminate LGBTQ concerns. Legislators have already reported receiving hundreds of letters opposing HB 3. Advocates continue to call for public pressure to further amend HB 3 until it clearly presents no danger to LGBTQ protections.

Equality Florida Senior Political Director Joe Saunders testifies before the House State Affairs Committee on the risks of HB 3.

Last Monday Rep. Raschein advanced an appropriate bill to fund a Pulse National Memorial and Museum (House Bill 3583). The bill passed the committee unanimously, and has not yet been scheduled for a hearing in the final of its two committees.

The Florida Competitive Workforce Act (House Bill 485/Senate Bill 430 or FCWA) continues to garner unprecedented support, with the most sponsors and cosponsors of any proposed legislation this session. To date, a bipartisan group of 63 legislators--including 5 Republican first-time supporters, and all three out legislators--have signed onto the bill that would establish fully inclusive, comprehensive statewide nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community in housing, employment, and public accommodations.

Despite this support, securing a hearing for the FCWA is more challenging this session due to a competing nondiscrimination bill that would provideprotections only in the area of employment, and not in housing or public accommodations. The employment-only bill could attract support from legislators who claim to support the LGBTQ community, but in fact would not provide the same protections enjoyed by every other group under the Florida Civil Rights Act. As the comprehensive FCWA approaches the tipping point for passage, this new employment-only bill would exclude the LGBTQ community from equal protections in housing and public accommodation, and none of Floridas out legislators have signed onto it.

The third week of Session, which began on Monday, March 18, is already off to a fantastic start, with Representative Nick Durans HIV Modernization bill (House Bill 79) passing the House Appropriations Committee on Monday. Advocates with the Florida HIV Justice Coalition provided compelling personal testimony, and the Committee overwhelmingly passed the bill by a 26-3 margin. Floridas current HIV statutes have not been updated since they were drafted at the height of the epidemic and work against public health. House Bill 79 would bring the law into alignment with current science. The bill has great bipartisan momentum, having now passed two House committees.

Advocates celebrate with Rep. Nick Duran and Rep. Evan Jenne after the HIV Modernization bill passes the House Appropriations Committee on March 18, 2019. (L-R): Jon Harris Maurer, Equality Florida; Angelisa Austin, HIV advocate; Rep. Nick Duran, bill sponsor; Rep. Evan Jenne (D - Hollywood); and Michael Rajner, HIV advocate.

With almost six weeks remaining and so many moving bills that are critical to the LGBTQ population of Florida, there is much to be done. If you are looking for ways to get involved in state policy that matters to the LGBTQ community, please reach out to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.Facebook said it had fixed the issue after uncovering it in January (PA)

Facebook has admitted that it may have placed the security of hundreds of millions of accounts at risk.

The social media platform said it had stored huge numbers of passwords in plain text, instead of in an unreadable format, as is normally the case, potentially endangering the security of Facebook, Facebook Lite and Instagram accounts.

The company said it had fixed the issue after uncovering it in January.

However, for hundreds of millions of people and the company, the news will still be seen as a worrying development.

An investigation by the social network showed no evidence that anyone outside Facebook got hold of the passwords, nor were they abused by staff.People across New Zealand observed the Muslim call to prayer on Friday as the nation reflected on the moment one week ago when 50 people were killed at two mosques.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and thousands of others congregated in Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch to observe the call to prayer at 1.30pm local time.

New Zealand mourns with you. We are one, Ms Ardern said.

Thousands more were listening in on the radio or watching on television as the event was broadcast live. The prayer was followed by two minutes of silence.

Officials laid out a large area of light brown carpeting where hundreds of Muslim men sat in socks or bare feet readying for the prayer.

One man in the front row was in a Christchurch Hospital wheelchair.

The Al Noor mosques imam, Gamal Fouda, thanked New Zealanders for their support.

This terrorist sought to tear our nation apart with an evil ideology But, instead, we have shown that New Zealand is unbreakable, the imam said.

We are broken-hearted but we are not broken. We are alive. We are together. We are determined to not let anyone divide us, he added, as the crowd erupted with applause.

Later in the day, a mass funeral was held to bury 26 of the victims at a cemetery where more than a dozen already have been laid to rest.

Fridays burials included the youngest victim, three-year-old Mucaad Ibrahim.

Expand Close Imam Gamal Fouda, right, addresses Friday prayers at Hagley Park in Christchurch (Mark Baker/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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Fahim Imam, 33, of Auckland, returned to the city for Fridays service. He was born and grew up in Christchurch but moved away three years ago.

Its just amazing to see how the country and the community have come together  blows my mind, actually, Mr Imam said before the event.

As soon as I got off the plane, I saw a sign someone was holding that said jenaza, denoting Muslim funeral prayer. Others were offering free rides to and from the prayer service, Mr Imam said.

The moment I landed in Christchurch, I could feel the love here. Ive never felt more proud to be a Muslim, or a Kiwi for that matter. It makes me really happy to be able to say that Im a New Zealander, he added.

He called it surreal to see the mosque where he used to pray surrounded by flowers.

The observance comes the day after the government announced a ban on military-style semi-automatic firearms and high-capacity magazines like the weapons that were used in last Fridays attacks.

At least 42 people died at the Al Noor mosque and at least seven others at the nearby Linwood mosque.

An immediate sales ban went into effect on Thursday to prevent stockpiling, and new laws would be rushed through Parliament that would impose a complete ban on the weapons, Ms Ardern said.

Every semi-automatic weapon used in the terrorist attack on Friday will be banned, Ms Ardern said.

Expand Close New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as she leaves Friday prayers (Vincent Thian/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as she leaves Friday prayers (Vincent Thian/AP)

The gun legislation is supported not only by Ms Arderns liberal Labour Party but also the conservative opposition National Party, so it is expected to pass into law. New Zealand does not have a constitutional right to bear arms.

Among those planning to attend Fridays observance was Samier Dandan, the president of the Lebanese Muslim Association in Sydney and part of a 15-strong delegation of Muslim leaders that had flown to Christchurch.

It was an ugly act of terrorism that occurred in a beautiful, peaceful city, Mr Dandan said.

He said his pain could not compare with that of the families hed been visiting who had lost loved ones. He was inspired by their resilience, he said.

And Ive got to give all my respect to the New Zealand prime minister, with her position and her actions, and it speaks loud, he said.

Ismat Fatimah, 46, said it was sad to look at the Al Noor mosque, which was still surrounded by construction barricades, armed police officers and a huge mound of flowers and messages.

Were feeling stronger than before, and we are one, she said.Those who know me know that I'm slow to take offence. I don't go looking for reasons to be offended. I don't overturn rocks and stones in the search for something to offend me. I don't trawl through newspapers, websites and back issues of Hansard for a sentence or paragraph to get my blood boiling.

That's not to say that I don't, fairly regularly, see, read, or hear something and think to myself that it was probably unwise of one side or the other to say it, write it, or do it.

That's because I'm aware that many people are more sensitive than I am, and I'm also aware that far too many people do go out of their way to be offended. So be it: it goes with the territory of a society trying, albeit very slowly, to emerge from conflict.

Gregory Campbell's "curry my yoghurt" comment was always going to offend someone or other; as was the use of the Wolfe Tones' Celtic Symphony to introduce boxer Michael Conlan; as was the Alan Partridge spoof the other night and the rendition of Come Out, Ye Black and Tans and The Men Behind the Wire (which just made me laugh). Some of the offence is deliberate and some unintentional; but it's all grist to the mill for keyboard warriors on both sides.

But I was offended by the photograph of Mary Lou McDonald in New York on St Patrick's Day, standing behind a banner with the words "England Get Out Of Ireland" emblazoned on it.

A couple of years ago, I was a guest speaker at a Sinn Fein-organised event in Dublin's Mansion House. Mary Lou was on the panel.

I raised the question of how my unionist/British/UK identity would be protected and promoted in a united Ireland. Mary Lou said she recognised my legitimate concerns and assured me that my British citizenship would continue to be central to my identity and would be protected.

A few weeks ago, Mary Lou addressed a mostly unionist audience at a civic engagement at QUB: "In Derry last year, a young woman, a Highland dancer, asked would there be a place for her and her dancing in a united Ireland. It was a genuine and sincere question.

"I assured her that Highland dancers will be most welcome and I said, you are British today and you will be British tomorrow, regardless of whether the border exists or not. The right to British citizenship and all that entails is safeguarded. There can be no diminution of those rights in a new and united Ireland. You are as much a part of the discussion to shape a new Ireland as republicans and nationalists. I want to hear from the unionist community their fears, their needs and their ambitions in a united Ireland. To listen and to understand."

England is a key component of the constitutional entity known as the United Kingdom. I am, by birth and by continuing choice, a citizen of the United Kingdom.

It remains the backbone of my identity; that sense of who I am and who I want to be. So, when Mary Lou stands behind a banner saying "England Get Out Of Ireland", it sends a message to a UK citizen like me.

That message is simple and unambiguous: a key part of my present identity would not be welcome in the sort of united Ireland Sinn Fein wants.

When Sinn Fein posted the picture on social media, it was tagged with the words "no explanation needed".

In other words, it was taken as self-evident that, of course, Sinn Fein wouldn't want "England" having anything to do with Ireland.

But what about the English themselves? What about the hundreds of thousands of people in Northern Ireland who have long-standing links with England and the English? What about those of us who regard England and the English as a member of the same constitutional/citizenship family? How does Mary Lou stand over the promise that "the right to British citizenship and all that entails is safeguarded"?

From October 1972, the UK government, with support from the Irish government, stressed the necessity for the recognition of what became known as the "Irish dimension" in Northern Ireland politics. It was embedded in the Sunningdale Agreement, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Good Friday Agreement.

The right to identify as an Irish citizen was recognised.

Provision for a border poll was included in the 1998 Agreement. The continuing aspiration for Irish unity was recognised, along with "arrangements" to facilitate that aspiration, if demographics shifted in that direction.

So, what, exactly, would be the "British dimension" equivalent in a united Ireland? Northern Ireland wouldn't exist. England (which doesn't make sense if it doesn't include the English themselves) wouldn't be welcome. In what way could my identity and rights as a UK citizen be protected?

Mary Lou says there would be no "diminution of those rights in a new and united Ireland," but has yet to explain how Sinn Fein would prevent that process of diminution.

Sinn Fein thought no explanation was needed for the photograph; and judging by Mary Lou's silence, she thinks no explanation is necessary to those people (and it included Alliance, SDLP, UUP, Green representatives, too) who were offended by the photograph and the seeming, if unstated, message behind it.

What all of this does is raise the question about how serious she and Sinn Fein are about what they have described as "unionist outreach". There was, I think, a brief moment just after she became leader when it was thought she might be able to engage with unionists in a way that Gerry Adams, Declan Kearney and Martina Anderson (a former Sinn Fein director of unionist outreach who, interestingly, has blocked me on Twitter) have never been able to do. But it turned out to be a fleeting thought.

What's the point of inviting someone like me to speak at a Sinn Fein event, tell me that my identity will be promoted and protected in a united Ireland and then stand behind a banner that explicitly rejects a central component of my constitutional identity?

That's why I was offended. Some of Mary Lou's supporters have suggested my "offence" doesn't really matter, because I wouldn't stay if there was a united Ireland.

That used to be my view; but about 18 months ago, I wrote that, rather than up sticks come what may, I would take part in any debate and consider my options in the event that I found myself on the "wrong side" of a border poll result.

When Mary Lou says she wants to hear from unionists "their fears", I can tell her that one of those fears is that she isn't actually serious about accommodating us in her "new Ireland".Officials from the Chinese Communist Party and Bangladeshs Awami League exchange copies of a memorandum of understanding on boosting cooperation between the leading political parties of the two countries, in Dhaka, March 21, 2019.

Representatives of Bangladeshs Awami League (AL) and the Communist Party of China (CPC) on Friday signed the first-ever memorandum of understanding (MoU) between their countries ruling parties in an effort to boost cooperation, officials said.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who leads Awami, and CPC Central Committee minister Song Tao expressed hope during a meeting in Dhaka that the two parties would strengthen their ties in the days to come, national news agency Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS) reported.

The MoU has been signed to improve the relationship and communication between the two parties. It will help establish an exchange of visits and training at the party level in both countries, Hasina spokesman Md Nazrul Islam told BenarNews.

Islam said the prime minister sought support from China in repatriating to Myanmar Rohingya refugees to Myanmar who are sheltering at camps in southeastern Bangladesh, according to BSS.

More than 700,000 Rohingya from Myanmars Rakhine state fled to refugee camps in and around Coxs Bazar district since August 2017, when Myanmars military cracked down on members of the stateless ethnic minority in response to deadly attacks against army and police posts by a Rohingya insurgent group.

The two sides also discussed Chinese investment in infrastructure, energy and agriculture in Bangladesh.

China is very developed in the agriculture sector. So we want their cooperation for development of our agriculture, Islam quoted Hasina as saying, BSS reported.

Hasina said 700 acres had been allocated for Chinese investors to establish an economic zone in southern Chittagong district. In addition, China is establishing a gas pipeline in Myanmar and could tap into that line in the new economic zone, BSS said.

One Belt, One Road

The projects line up with the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) plan where China aims to link Beijing with Asia, Europe and Africa by building massive highways, railways, ports and other infrastructure.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is one of the major powerful men in the world and he wants to increase his countrys involvement under the OBOR policy incorporating India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal, Hasan Tareque, an official with the Communist Party of Bangladesh, told BenarNews.

Critics have complained that China wants these countries to become dependent on its economy through loan traps, he said.

Awami League, by signing this MoU, wants to give a message to the business community that it is business friendly. AL, at the same time, wants to lessen its dependence on the United States in terms of foreign policy and wants to take a multi-centric approach, Tareque said.

Meanwhile, economist Anu Muhammad said the two parties had a similar autocratic stance.

The Awami League government wants growth-based development at any cost. They are not bothering about devastation of land, forests, water, river, environment and the ecosystem, he told BenarNews.

China also has the same policy regarding business in Bangladesh. Most of the China projects in Bangladesh are devastating for the environment, he said.

The signing came just days after the Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry announced that bilateral trade with China totaled U.S. $12.4 billion (1 trillion taka) in 2017-2018 and was expected to reach $18 billion (1.5 trillion taka) by 2021, according to Bangladesh media reports.An HIV modernization bill, the (HB 79), cleared its second hurdle this week passing the Florida Houses Appropriations Committee overwhelmingly 26-3.

This is the second committee to give the bill a favorable recommendation. It recently passed the Houses Criminal Justice Subcommittee, 10-3.

Were really excited by the bipartisan momentum that we've seen for this HIV modernization legislation, said Jon Harris Maurer, Equality Floridas Public Policy Director. This is long overdue and it's exciting to see this being addressed as a criminal justice reform issue and a public health issue.

Michael Rajner, an HIV rights activist, attributes the newfound support to advocates, stakeholders and people living with HIV meeting with lawmakers to tell their stories.

Rajner said hes been working toward a bill like this for at least 8 years.

This is the third year this bill has been introduced and theres been a surge in support. This is also the furthest an HIV modernization has gotten in the Florida Legislature.

Regardless of which side of the aisle you sit on people want better public safety and better health outcomes and thats what this bill does, said Justin Klecha, Deputy Director of SAVE and a member of the Florida HIV Justice Coalition. This is a fantastic bill that takes a huge step forward reducing stigma around HIV.

Klecha said most of the opposition comes from a lack of knowledge.

Legislators dont know the current science around HIV, or how far weve come with the treatments, Klecha said.

HB 79 must now pass through the Judiciary Committee. While in the Senate, Jason Pizzo (D - Miami), has filed similar legislation (SB 846), but no hearings have been scheduled as of yet.

This is the first year the legislature is actually taking any actions and votes. We have a tremendous bill sponsor this year, Nick Duran out of Miami, who is incredibly passionate about this, Rajner said. We also owe a great deal of thanks to Dr. Hansel Tookes and the medical students at the University of Miami who have been doing a tremendous job of advocating for needle syringe exchange programs statewide and in that process have been educating legislators on HIV.

The current law does not take into account whether a person actually transmitted HIV. Nor does it matter if a condom was used, or if the person with HIV is on treatment and undetectable.

This new bill would revise the existing law such as defining "Substantial risk of transmission" as "a reasonable probability of disease transmission as proven by competent medical or epidemiological evidence." The bill would also update outdated language such as changing "sexual intercourse" to "sexual conduct."

I think the most profound change is that there would have to be actual intent and transmission of HIV to another individual during sex, Rajner said.

Other changes include allowing a person who has HIV to donate blood, plasma, organs, skin, or other human tissue as long as a medical professional deems it appropriate. Currently, there are no exceptions so if someone did make such a donation they would be committing a third-degree felony. HB 79 would downgrade the penalty to a first-degree misdemeanor.

This bill would help modernize Florida's HIV laws that were written in the mid-80s at the height of the HIV epidemic and haven't been updated to align with current science on treatment and prevention for HIV, Maurer said. I think most strikingly is that the law currently doesn't account for whether in fact there is any transmission of HIV. So under the current law, a person could be incarcerated for up to 30 years with a third-degree felony, even though there is no transmission of HIV, and scientifically there is no risk of transmission.Updated at 11:58 a.m. ET on 2019-03-23

Thailands top political parties homed in on support from voters in the capital Bangkok on Friday, as their leaders drew cheers from thousands while wrapping up their campaigns before Sundays general election, the first since a 2014 military coup.

Appearing for the first time at an official campaign rally, junta chief and incumbent Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha sang and accepted roses from supporters. He vowed to lead the Buddhist-majority nation out of divisive politics.

From now on, we must join together to carry on what we have done in the past five years to lessen conflicts, Prayuth, the leading candidate for PM of the pro-junta Palang Pracharact Party, told 4,000 supporters at Thephasdin Stadium.

As Prayuth urged his supporters to love the nation, religion and the monarchy, a giant TV screen displayed a video in which he was seen hugging children, harvesting rice and working during his years as chief of the junta, officially known as the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO).

Some 51.4 million Thais are eligible to vote in the March 24 election. Polls will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Eighty-seven percent of Thais who signed up to vote early on March 17 exercised their right, leading pundits to predict a heavy turnout on Election Day.

On Friday, opposition party leaders Abhisit Vejjajiva and Sudarat Keyuraphan separately pitched their electoral promises on the final day of campaigning in Bangkok.

Abhisit, leader of the Democrat Party, which has tried to position itself as the compromise choice, slammed the Pheu Thai Party, the main opposition party affiliated with exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

This party [Pheu Thai] doesnt talk honestly. But it takes the frustration and the discomfort of the people toward the unelected government to create tense atmosphere for its own purpose, Abhisit told a crowd of about 3,000 who gathered at Lan Kon Meaung square.

So it [Pheu Thai] doesnt focus on policy but it is determined to win in politics, he said as his supporters cheered.

Sudarat, the high-profile candidate of the main opposition Pheu Thai Party, underscored Thaksins financial skills during his term as prime minister from 2001 until 2006, when he was overthrown in a military coup.

As Prime Minister Thaksin took office, he shored up the economy quickly in the first year. And he paid off debt to the IMF [International Monetary Fund] before it was due in two years, Sudarat, 57, said.

She said her party would need only six months to solve the nations economic problems.

Sudarat co-founded the now-defunct Thai Rak Thai party, which literally means Thais love Thais, alongside Thaksin, a telecommunications billionaire. She also served in his cabinet twice.



Although Thaksin hasnt set foot in Thailand since 2008, he retains a loyal following, according to analysts. He is in self-imposed exile and lives with his younger sister, former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who was deposed in the 2014 coup. She fled the country in 2017 rather than face possible prison time in a criminal case related to a failed rice subsidy scheme.

Elsewhere in the Thai capital, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, the 40-year-old leader of the Future Forward Party and prime ministerial hopeful who has attracted a large following among young voters, also held his final campaign rally.

New rules

The vote on Sunday will determine the 500 members of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the bicameral legislature.

Of the 500 House seats, 350 will be directly elected on Sunday and another 150 party-list seats will be assigned based on overall results, under new procedures put in place by the junta.

A 2017 junta-drafted Constitution gives the NCPO the power to appoint all 250 members of the Senate, the upper house of parliament. Under the new rules, a minimum of 376 out of a total 750 seats from both houses of parliament are needed to select a new prime minister.

It is not yet clear when those Senate seats will be announced, although Prayuth has a deadline to propose senators for the kings signature by April 27.

Earlier this week, Election Commission chief Ittiporn Boonprakong said 95 percent of the votes would be counted three hours after the polls close on Sunday, due to new rapid reporting technology in use this year.

Official results are not due until May 9, just days after the royal coronation.

Political analysts say that apart from postponing polls at least five times since the May 2014 coup, the junta has taken moves during the past five years that skewed the system heavily in favor of a continuation of military rule.

The junta can clearly count on the 250-member appointed Senate to back them, according to BenarNews political analyst Zachary Abuza.

CORRECTION: An earlier version incorrectly stated the polls opening at 7 a.m. Sunday.

TB is one of the most formidable challenges to healthcare in India and needs to be tackled on multiple fronts

With 17.7% of the worlds total population, India is home to 27% of the tuberculosis (TB) patients in the world. Monumental efforts have been undertaken by the government since 1997 to eradicate this pandemic through large-scale TB elimination campaigns  however, satisfactory success continues to elude us.

Speaking on one of the major challenges, Dr M Udaya Kumar Maiya, Medical Director, Portea Medical said, About 40% of the population in India has latent TB, and have been infected by bacteria from active TB patients. On an average, about 10% of the untreated latent TB cases turn into the active form, and this is higher in people with a weaker immune system. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends treating only the active TB patients in countries like India where the burden is higher. However, reduction or elimination of this disease may not be possible until those with latent TB are also targeted. On a global scale, India has the highest burden of TB as well as Multi-Drug-resistant TB patients. The country is also placed second in terms of cases with highest HIV associated TB cases.

Dr Ramananda Srikantiah Nadig, Head of the Clinical Advisory Board, healthi said, One of the crucial determinants in the battle against Tuberculosis is the importance of a TB patient being fully cured after undergoing a full course of treatment since any residual bacteria might potentially evolve into a drug-resistant form of the disease. The drug-resistant or multiple drug-resistant form of TB is extremely challenging to cure and mandates a very concerted effort to prevent the loss of life. In the year 2015, 93,000 patients received treatment for drug-resistant TB as a part of the RNTCP. Another crucial factor is the identification of the precise form of TB that a patient is suffering from as an incorrect diagnosis can potentially lead to life-threatening situations.

Commenting on the way forward, Padma Shri Awardee, Dr KK Aggarwal, President, Heart Care Foundation of India said, Despite several efforts to address and combat the disease, tuberculosis (TB) continues to remain a public health emergency, especially in India. Commensurate with the theme for the World TB Day 2019, Its time, the need of the hour is to step up on the commitment made towards eradication of this disease through concerted efforts at all levels. Year 2025 has been set as the deadline for a (TB-free India by the honble prime minister, which is five years ahead of the global deadline set by the WHO. While the target sounds ambitious and promising, India must mobilize resources further to achieve this. Early diagnosis and complete treatment are extremely important to prevent and control TB. There is a need to notify every case and remove the stigma associated with the condition through awareness. The approach to all notifiable diseases should be based on DTR: Diagnose, Treat and Report; Diagnose early, using sputum GeneXpert test; Treat: Complete and effective treatment based on national guidelines, using FDC; and Report: Mandatory reporting."

TB is one of the most formidable challenges to healthcare in India and needs to be tackled on multiple fronts. The Government of India has been making tremendous efforts towards ending the epidemic. The need of the hour is introduction of new and effective drugs and tools, improved hygiene and nutrition as well as stronger emphasis on grass-roots level TB awareness and plan implementation all over the country. TB is a major challenge, but not one that India cant overcome with joint efforts by the public and private sectors.Buddha in Africa follows the personal story of a teenager growing up in a Chinese Buddhist orphanage in Malawi and the challenges he faces between his African roots and Chinese upbringing. Against the backdrop of China's global rise, the film provides a unique insight into Chinese soft power in Africa.

Buddah in Africa film.

Awards

Legacy of colonialism

The much-anticipated feature documentary by South African filmmaker, Nicole Schafer, has been selected for its World Premiere at the 2019 Hot Docs Canadian International Festival (April 25 May 5). The film will be presented in competition in the International Spectrum programme. The winner of the Hot Docs Best International Feature Documentary Award will qualify for consideration for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.The project received the IDFA Most Promising Documentary Award when it was first pitched at the Durban FilmMart in 2011.It and has since been awarded funding from several international funds, including the IDFA Bertha Europe Fund in the Netherlands, Hot Docs-Blue Ice Group Doc Fund and the Alter Cine Foundation in Canada, Chicken & Egg Pictures in New York, the South African National Film and Video Foundation and the KwaZulu-Natal Film Commission.In 2018, Buddha in Africa was selected to participate in the Cape Town International Film Festival and Market Works-in-Progress lab. It received the highest award, combining two weeks of Online by Monk and two weeks of Grading at Priest Post with the following motivation: For its unique subject and its meticulous patient development, for the crossroad of important themes, and for the different worlds that have overlapped and met in tangible captivating characters, the jury chose to give the combined two prizes to the very promising Malawi set film project Buddha in Africa by Nicole Shafer.The film is an international co-production between Thinking Strings Media in South Africa and Momento Film in Sweden. Renowned Paris-based company CAT & Docs will be representing the film internationally. AfriDocs is the African broadcast partner.When I first came across this story, I was struck by how this orphanage was strangely reminiscent of the Christian missions during the colonial era, said writer and director, Schafer, Only here African children have Chinese names and instead of learning about the West, they were learning about Chinese culture and history.I felt the orphanage would be the perfect metaphor to explore not only the impact of Chinese involvement in Africa, but also as a mirror for the legacy of Western colonialism that still exists on the African continent.David Herdies of Momento Film and co-producer, explained further: Buddha in Africa offers a new and unexpected insight into Chinas presence in Africa through the lens of the Buddhist temple, Amitofo Care Centre in Malawi,. Its an interesting way to look at this new type of colonisation that is going on, but in a non-judgmental and human way.The film will screen at the following dates and times at Hot Docs:Saturday, April 27, 6pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 3Monday, April 29, 1pm, SCOTIA 8Sun, May 5, 10:15 AM, Scotiabank Theatre.This company article has been removed.Acumen Media has collated the week's top stories on social media. Let's have a look.The ongoing load shedding has had many expressing their frustration; its mention on social media reached 70% of the week's most talked-about subjects. Despite President Cyril Ramaphosa's nation address, Human Rights Day didn't make much of an impact.The State Capture Inquiry also made a mark with additional information about Denel revealed. Thoughts and prayers were also shared with the victims of the Idai Cyclone in Mozambique as well as the shooting incident in New Zealand.The abuse case involving Babes Wodumo and Mandla "Mampintsha" Maphumulo remained in the news as he made a public apology this week. Other top stories included the Steinhoff Report, the murder of former ANC Youth League Secretary Sindiso Magaqa and Rachel Kolisi's outing of another woman sliding into her husband's DMs.In June of 2011 Michael Cruz, the former director of the then-named Pride South Florida, was convicted of embezzling $46,591 from the organization. Cruz was sentenced to one year in jail and ordered to make monthly payments of $400 to Pride to reimburse the organization. Although he repaid the majority of the funds, he still owed $13,000 when he died in 2017.

When questioned for this article about plans to recover the money, Pride Fort Lauderdale issued the following statement though its attorney, Our attorneys have advised us there are no legal options or mechanisms to collect any further monies from the estate of Mr. Cruz. While we regret we could not recover the full amount of monies we lost through his theft, we are grateful that through monthly restitution payments during his period of probation, Mr. Cruz paid back our community a substantial portion of our loss. Going forward, we will continue to jealously safeguard our treasury with new fiscal safeguards we have put in place."

Miik Matorell, the head of Fort Lauderdale Pride initially planned to regain the remaining funds. In an interview in 2016 he stated that, Theres a responsibility to the organization for the money owed. Its the communitys money. At this point, were probably going to have to hire a lawyer to get the rest of it.

When Cruz was convicted, a lien was placed against him by the court to ensure he paid Pride back. According to Broward property records, Cruz and a man named Emmanuel Stringos purchased a home in Fort Lauderdale in 2000 for $87,490. The home was sold in July of 2017 for $215,000, but Stringos was the only name on the title at the time of sale.

Last year Matorell started expressing doubt. Ive kind of hit a road block [on finding out about the remaining money owed to Pride], he said. Hopefully, after Pride, I can make this happen. It hasnt fallen off the charts. It just hasnt progressed.

It now appears Pride Fort Lauderdale has run out of options.The madras sport coat Jim Obergefell got married in, a red suit worn by U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), the sewing machine on which Gilbert Baker made the first rainbow flag  all that and much more are part of the recent Newseum exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.

Rise Up: Stonewall and the LGBTQ Rights Movement ed Friday, March 8 at the Newseum (555 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.) and runs through years end.

The exhibit explores the modern gay rights movement in the United States, marking the 50th anniversary of the June 1969 police raid of the Stonewall Inn in New Yorks Greenwich Village neighborhood. The protests following the raid are considered the catalyst that inspired the modern gay liberation movement. Its loosely part of an overall Newseum series From Selma to Stonewall that explores significant civil rights movements.

Patty Rhule, vice president of content and exhibit development at the Newseum, says the exhibit was a relatively easy one to conceive and execute. Its been in the works for a year or year and a half, she says.

Upon contacting potential contributors, Rhule says, I think people were excited. Theres a lot of excitement around this anniversary  and people were excited that we were planning such a big exhibit on this topic. Everybody we reached out to seemed enthused about the idea.

It opens with a section on LGBT portrayals in pop culture. Actors such as Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Modern Family), Cynthia Nixon (Sex in the City) and George Takei (Star Trek) appear in video installations talking about their experiences as LGBT actors.

Next is an extensive depiction through photos and text of what actually happened at Stonewall and how it was covered (barely) in mainstream media at the time.

I think it was the third day before the mainstream press even paid attention and then you see headlines  in The Daily News that use slurs, Rhule says.

She says Stonewalls impact on igniting the modern LGBT rights movement cant be overstated.

From this moment on, its propelling forward a movement that gets more militant, more radical and more demanding, says Rhule, whos straight. Its about demanding more than just tolerance, but demanding acceptance.

Theres also a pre-Stonewall section that depicts Harry Hay, The Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis, early 60s gay and lesbian groups that formed and protested in pockets around the country but lacked tailwinds since almost nobody was out at the time.

Young people today dont realize just how repressive it was back then, Rhule says. We have headlines from newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Daily News with horrible headlines, using horrible language that no one would ever use today just to give you an idea of what society and the accepted societal attitudes were. It kind of immerses people in that time.

Items from gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny (his typewriter), former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (buttons and photos from his same-sex marriage), Harvey Milk (an envelope with bullet holes that was in his jacket when he was assassinated) and more are part of the exhibit as is a wealth of media including two copies of the Washington Blade (founded 1969), The Ladder (a national lesbian publication from 1956-1972), Frontiers (a now-closed Los Angeles gay magazine) and more. (The Blade is a sponsor of the exhibit.)

The AIDS crisis is up next with an AIDS quilt panel from a trans woman who died in 2016, ACT UP newsletters, mainstream coverage of the epidemic and more.

Anti-gay quotes from Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant are countered with images of Bishop Gene Robinson (the first openly gay man consecrated Bishop in the U.S.) to show how religion has evolved on LGBT issues.

Rise Up closes with bringing the issues into the present, especially the ongoing battle for transgender rights. As you exit, a large panel features famous LGBT folks such as Janelle Monae, Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Adam Rippon, Ellen DeGeneres and more.

We really need to get that Oscar dress in here, Newseum PR Director Sonya Gavankar says, referring to out actor Billy Porters gown/suit. Wasnt that fabulous?

A team of about 15 worked on the exhibit along with a handful of contractors in various stages. Most are straight but some LGBT employees were part of the team and outside LGBT folks, such as the Blades veteran reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. were consulted on everything from appropriate language to essential issues to cover and include.

We knew we couldnt have an all-straight perspective on this, Maeve Scott, the Newseums director of collections and registrar, who worked on securing the items, says. We came up with a whole glossary and asked a lot of people in the community how they feel about it to make sure we were using the right language.

Scott says by seeking input from a lot of people with diverse backgrounds and relying on our experts, the exhibit was planned to be as unbiased as possible.

Its definitely something we keep in mind, she says.

Attempts were also made to make the display relevant to longtime activists as well as D.C. visitors who may know little or nothing about Stonewall and LGBT history.

There are always three types of museum visitors, Rhule says. Swimmers, skimmers and divers, people who read every word, she says. We try to make things look really compelling, give different access points and ways for people to interact.  We have selfie stations, people can pose behind a mic or with a protest sign. There are always going to be different levels of interest and understanding. Were trying to meet that in the middle.

Scott, also straight, hopes visitors will find Rise Up inspiring.

A lot of these people were just everyday people who used their First Amendment rights to enact change, she says. If this group did this, other groups can as well and this is not the end of the story.Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Chongqing Changan Automobile Co., Ltd announced on March 22 that it has signed an agreement in Nanjing with ten companies including Suning Investment, FAW Group, Dongfeng Motor Corporation, Tencent and Alibaba, etc., to build a partnership enterprise involved a total subscribed capital of RMB9.76 billion.

According to the announcement, the amounts of capital subscribed by Tencent, Alibaba and other three investors total RMB2.25 billion. Meanwhile, the subscribed capital contribution for Suning, Changan Automobile, FAW Group and Dongfeng Motor amounts to RMB1.7 billion, RMB1.6billion, RMB1.6billion and RMB1.6 billion respectively.

The partnership enterprise, dubbed Nanjing Lingxing Equity Investment Partnership Enterprise (Limited Partnership) for now, will invest in the NEV-focused car-sharing business, according to Changan Automobile. Besides, in the name of the partnership fund, a mobility service company will be jointly funded by three stated-owned automakersFAW Group, Changan Automobile and Dongfeng Motor, joining hands with some leading Internet, finance and retail companies.

The partnership is formed to build a new intelligent mobility ecosystem featuring connectivity and sharing and offer the public a more pleasant mobility lifestyle with higher quality, safety and efficiency.

On December 21, 2018, FAW Group, China South Industries Group Corporation (parent company of Changan Automobile) and Dongfeng Motor Corporation signed an agreement of intent in Beijing to build T3 technology platform joint venture that will research and develop the cutting-edge generic core technologies and platform of new energy intelligent vehicle industry and provide relevant supporting services. As three investors planned, the T3 technology platform company, aiming to become a pioneer of future forward-looking vehicle technologies to create a car ecosystem which is more environmentally friendly, safer and better, would be dedicated to developing the next-generation vehicle core systems, modules and platforms with new energy and intelligent connectivity as its focuses in order to realize a new round of upgrade and transcendence over vehicle technologies and promote the forming of core competency for next-generation vehicles.Want to take a trip to the center of the Milky Way? Check out a new immersive, ultra-high-definition visualization.

This 360-movie offers an unparalleled opportunity to look around the center of the galaxy, from the vantage point of the central supermassive black hole, in any direction the user chooses.

By combining NASA Ames supercomputer simulations with data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, this visualization provides a new perspective of what is happening in and around the center of the Milky Way. It shows the effects of dozens of massive stellar giants with fierce winds blowing off their surfaces in the region a few light-years away from the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* for short).

These winds provide a buffet of material for the supermassive black hole to potentially feed upon. As in a previous visualization [http://chandra.cfa.harvard.edu/photo/2018/gcenter360], the viewer can observe dense clumps of material streaming toward Sgr A*. These clumps formed when winds from the massive stars near Sgr A* collide. Along with watching the motion of these clumps, viewers can watch as relatively low-density gas falls toward Sgr A*. In this new visualization, the blue and cyan colors represent X-ray emission from hot gas, with temperatures of tens of millions of degrees; red shows moderately dense regions of cooler gas, with temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees; and yellow shows the cooler gas with the highest densities.

A collection of X-ray-emitting gas is seen to move slowly when it is far away from Sgr A*, and then pick up speed and whip around the viewer as it comes inwards. Sometimes clumps of gas will collide with gas ejected by other stars, resulting in a flash of X-rays when the gas is heated up, and then it quickly cools down. Farther away from the viewer, the movie also shows collisions of fast stellar winds producing X-rays. These collisions are thought to provide the dominant source of hot gas that is seen by Chandra.

When an outburst occurs from gas very near the black hole, the ejected gas collides with material flowing away from the massive stars in winds, pushing this material backwards and causing it to glow in X-rays. When the outburst dies down the winds return to normal and the X-rays fade.

The 360-degree video of the galactic center is ideally viewed through virtual reality (VR) goggles, such as Samsung Gear VR or Google Cardboard. The video can also be viewed on smartphones using the YouTube app. Moving the phone around reveals a different portion of the movie, mimicking the effect in the VR goggles. Finally, most browsers on a computer also allow 360-degree videos to be shown on YouTube. To look around, either click and drag the video, or click the direction pad in the corner.

Reference: Dr. Christopher Russell of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (Pontifical Catholic University) presented the new visualization at the 17th meeting of the High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) of the American Astronomical Society held in Monterey, Calif. [https://aas.org/meetings/head17].



Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.Editor's note: On March 23, 2019, the launch window for the AZURE mission will reopen after several attempts in March 2018 were scrubbed due to weather.

The new launch window extends to April 10, 2019. The original story about AZURE, published March 1, 2018, appears below.

From the ground, the dance of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, can look peaceful. But those shimmering sheets of colored lights are the product of violent collisions between Earth's atmosphere and particles from the Sun.

The beautiful lights are just the visible product of these collisions -- the kinetic and thermal energy released, invisible to the naked eye, are no less important. Understanding the contribution that aurora make to the total amount of energy that enters and leaves Earth's geospace system -- referred to as auroral forcing -- is one of the major goals of the NASA-funded Auroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment, or AZURE. The more we learn about auroras, the more we understand about the fundamental processes that drive near-Earth space -- a region that is increasingly part of the human domain, home not only to astronauts but also communications and GPS signals that can affect those of us on the ground on a daily basis.

AZURE is the first of eight sounding rocket missions launching over the next two years as part of an international collaboration of scientists known as The Grand Challenge Initiative - Cusp. These missions will launch from the Andya and Svalbard rocket ranges in Norway to study the processes occurring inside the Earth's polar cusp -- where the planet's magnetic field lines bend down into the atmosphere and allow particles from space to intermingle with those of Earthly origin -- and nearby auroral oval, which AZURE will focus on.

AZURE will study the flow of particles in the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of the atmosphere that acts as Earth's interface to space, focusing specifically on the E and F regions. The E region -- so-named by early radio pioneers that discovered the region was electrically charged, and so could reflect radio waves -- lies between 56 to 93 miles above Earth's surface. The F region resides just above it, between 93 to 310 miles altitude.

The E and F regions contain free electrons that have been ejected from their atoms by the energizing input of the Sun's rays, a process called photoionization. After nightfall, without the energizing input of the Sun to keep them separated, electrons recombine with the positively charged ions they left behind, lowering the regions' overall electron density. The daily cycle of ionization and recombination makes the E and F regions especially turbulent and complex.

AZURE will focus specifically on measuring the vertical winds in these regions, which create a tumultuous particle soup that re-distributes the energy, momentum and chemical constituents of the atmosphere.

Existing wind measurements from ground-based instruments show evidence of significant structure at scales between 6 miles and 60 miles wide in both the charged particle drifts and the neutral winds. But so far, the in-situ scientific measurements of winds have been limited to a small set of altitudes -- and already those measurements don't fit with what we would have predicted.

To better understand the forces at play, in early March the AZURE team will launch two sounding rockets near-simultaneously from the Andya Space Center in Norway. Waiting to launch until the conditions are just right, the rockets will fly up into space, making measurements of the atmospheric density and temperature with instruments on the rockets and deploying visible tracers, trimethyl aluminum (TMA) and a barium/strontium mixture, which ionizes when exposed to sunlight.

These mixtures create colorful clouds that allow researchers to track the flow of neutral and charged particles, respectively. The tracers will be released at altitudes 71 to 155 miles high and pose no hazard to residents in the region.

By tracking the movement of these colorful clouds via ground-based photography and triangulating their moment-by-moment position in three dimensions, AZURE will provide valuable data on the vertical and horizontal flow of particles in two key regions of the ionosphere over a range of different altitudes.

Such measurements are critical if we are to truly understand the effects of the mysterious yet beautiful aurora. The results will be key to a better understanding of the effects of auroral forcing on the atmosphere, including how and where the auroral energy is deposited.



Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.Robert Shepherd went to the front with Wildwild Men in Thursdays $8,500 Preferred 3 for trotters at Flamboro Downs, and they didnt look back en route to a narrow triumph in the featured affair.

Wildwild Men left hard from Post 4 and had the field chasing him through intervals of :28.4, :59.1 and 1:29. He then used a :30.1 closing frame to win by a half-length margin over Majestic Brayden in 1:59.1. Azucar tagged along to finish third.

Isabelle Darveau trains the six-year-old son of Muscle Mass-Seeyouinthecircle for Quebec partners Catheline Pelletier of Mirabel and Chantal Gravel of St-Cyrille-De-Wendover. Sent off as the odds-on favourite, the gelding won for the second time this season and for the 19th time in his career. Hes banked over $210,000 to date.

To view results for Thursday's card of harness racing, click the following link: Thursday Results  Flamboro Downs.The schedule for 'the Internets favourite harness racing handicapping show' North American Harness Update (NAHU), is set for Friday, March 22.

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. Along with the Pick 4 coverage, the three will preview the CanAm Pick 4, which launches tonight and forces bettors to pick two winners from Mohawk and two from the Meadowlands.

The three will also preview the second round of the George Morton Levy Series on Saturday, March 23 at Yonkers Raceway.

The Hanover Hustler Russ Adams from Rosecroft Raceway will also come on to preview racing action from Rosecroft for Sunday, March 24 including their signature Pick 3.

North American Harness Update airs Fridays from 9:00 - 11:00 pm (ET) 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 its website at nahupicks.com the day after it airs.

(with files from North American Harness Update)A group of Brandon high school students will join the rush of travellers at the Winnipeg airport today.

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This article was published 22/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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Crocus Plains Secondary School students Kimi Allan, Cayden Brown and Benjamin Bower, pictured in the school on Thursday, will join 22 of their peers by flying to Portugal today for a school trip. (Melissa Verge/The Brandon Sun)

A group of Brandon high school students will join the rush of travellers at the Winnipeg airport today.

Twenty-five Crocus Plains Regional Secondary School students are boarding a plane to Portugal, ready to tour historic buildings and absorb the culture.

It still feels like its too good to be true, said Kimi Allan, one of the students going on the trip.

"I dont think it will be quite real for me yet," Allan said. "Packing is pretty cool and exciting, but once Im in Winnipeg getting onto the plane, thats when its going to be like, Yesss."

As a design drafting student at the school, Cayden Brown said he was looking forward to seeing the architecture.

"It will be an eye-opening experience," Brown said. "Just from the valleys of Brandon to Portugal, and seeing how all the hillside and the communities how all the beaches are laid out and how they worked around all their natural landscape. Here we have hills, and over there they have to work around mountains."

They will make various stops around Portugal, heading from Porto, and working their way down to the Lisbon area in the south.

The school has been doing European tours for nine years now, Crocus Plains design drafting instructor Tara Hamilton said, adding that the trip changes the way her students view the world.

"When these guys leave here, I usually find that they feel like a big fish in a small pond," Hamilton said. "Then when they get there, they actually get to see how broad the world actually is."

The 10-day trip will give students a chance to experience the food and the architecture in a different country.

"We always arrange it so theyre trying local cuisine and trying to view their culture and be a part of their culture as much as they can," Hamilton said. "Theres so much we can get out of this, and Canada being such a young country really, we get to see architecture thats older then the foundation of our own country."

Grade 12 student Benjamin Bower had such a good time when he went on a trip with the school to Italy two years ago that he saved during his summer job so he could come on another trip this year.

"We had all these stories that we came back (with last time), it was something special," Bower said.

Students pay for their own way there, whether its a combination of fundraising or working, or a little of both.

When they have their next trip, Bower will have already graduated, but he said that other high school students should take the opportunity to go along.

"If you get the chance to go on it, you definitely should take it."

 mverge@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @Melverge5HALIFAX - The father of seven children who were killed in a ferocious fire remains in a coma, a month after flames engulfed their Halifax home.

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This article was published 22/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Police and firefighters investigate at the scene of a fatal house fire in the Spryfield community in Halifax on Tuesday, February 19, 2019. The father of seven children who were killed in a ferocious house fire remains in a coma, a month after flames engulfed their Halifax home in the deadliest house fire in recent Nova Scotia history. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese

HALIFAX - The father of seven children who were killed in a ferocious fire remains in a coma, a month after flames engulfed their Halifax home.

Muslim community leaders said on Friday that Ebraheim Barho has undergone multiple surgeries and remains in the intensive care unit of a Halifax hospital with his wife Kawthar at his side.

Sheikh Wael Haridy of the Nova Scotia Islamic Community Centre said the grief-stricken mother is struggling with the loss of her children, who ranged in age from three months to the mid-teens, while her husband remains uncommunicative.

"The mother now realizes the reality, she realizes what's real," he said in an interview. "She's alone now and her husband is still in a coma."

Imam Abdallah Yousri of the Ummah Mosque said the community continues to wait and pray for his recovery.

"I cannot say when he will be awake ... we are still waiting," he said, adding that it's been a very hard time for the community.

Although some relatives of the Syrian refugee family have arrived in Canada to offer support, efforts are still underway to bring more family members.

The Barho family came to Canada in September 2017. At first, they lived in rural Elmsdale, N.S., but they had moved to the Halifax neighbourhood of Spryfield to take advantage of immigrant services, including English-language training.

Early on Feb. 19, their relatively new rental home caught fire. The flames spread so quickly that only the parents managed to escape. The father was rushed to hospital suffering from extensive burns and was placed in a medically induced coma, where he remains.

The cause of the fire has yet to be determined.

Halifax deputy fire Chief David Meldrum said there are no updates on the investigation into the tragedy.

Once a cause has been determined, he said Halifax Fire and Emergency will hold a news conference to share the details with the public.

The home on Quartz Drive was torn down earlier this month. All that remains at the grim site is the concrete foundation.

Meldrum said he cannot comment on an ongoing investigation or the reason for any possible delay, but noted that "in the course of fire investigations generally, interviewing witnesses who may have information is an obvious item of importance to us."

Meldrum said the firefighters who responded to the fast-moving fire were exposed to significant trauma. He said some are doing OK, while others are seeking assistance.

He said the fire service is offering mental resilience training in Halifax next week.

"This is something we want to do anyway ... but certainly recent events highlight the critical importance of it," Meldrum said.

A GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $700,000 for the family.TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - A U.S.-Canadian team is preparing for another mission to relocate grey wolves to Isle Royale National Park in Michigan from a second Lake Superior island, where the predators are in danger of starvation after gobbling up a caribou herd.

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This article was published 22/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FILE - In this Feb. 28, 2019 file photo provided by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, the U.S. National Park Service and the National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation, a white wolf is released onto Isle Royale National Park in Michigan. Authorities are preparing for another mission to relocate gray wolves to Isle Royale National Park from a second Lake Superior island. The wolves would be moved from Michipicoten Island in Canadian territory, where they're in danger of starvation after gobbling up a caribou herd. The transfer planned for this weekend is part of a multi-year effort to rebuild wolf numbers at Isle Royale, which have plummeted in the past decade. (Daniel Conjanu/The National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation via AP, File)

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - A U.S.-Canadian team is preparing for another mission to relocate grey wolves to Isle Royale National Park in Michigan from a second Lake Superior island, where the predators are in danger of starvation after gobbling up a caribou herd.

The targeted pack is on Michipicoten Island on the eastern side of the lake, which was home to hundreds of caribou until ice bridges formed in recent years, enabling wolves to cross over from the mainland and feast on their helpless prey.

The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources airlifted some of the last surviving caribou to another island last year. Before long the wolves were the ones in trouble, with only small mammals such as snowshoe hare left to eat.

Their hunting prowess makes them prime candidates for Isle Royale, where a multi-year effort is under way to rebuild a wolf population needed to keep moose numbers under control, Superintendent Phyllis Green said.

"We can use the good skills of those wolves, and this will match them with a larger island that will give them a better opportunity," Green said.

Isle Royale now has eight wolves, including six that were brought there last fall and winter from Minnesota and Ontario. Two of the newcomers were from Michipicoten Island, including the pack's alpha male.

Around six are believed to remain on Michipicoten. A crew of pilots, biologists and others will try to capture at least some and fly them to Isle Royale in the next few days, weather permitting.

Officials had said earlier this month that no additional transfers were planned until this fall or next winter, partly because of a lack of money.

But two private organizations  the National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation and the International Wolf Center  kicked off a fundraising effort, fearing the Michipicoten wolves would run out of food before then.

"They're not going to make it," said Carol Brady, spokeswoman for the foundation.

The groups have pledged $75,000 between them and have started a GoFundMe campaign to produce the remaining $25,000 needed for a four-day airlift operation. The Ontario ministry granted approval Monday, Brady said.

As they've done before, crew members will trap the wolves with net guns fired from helicopters. They'll be examined by veterinarians, and those healthy enough for movement will be taken to their new home, where there will be no shortage of prey. Isle Royale's booming moose population is believed to exceed 1,500.

"If left unchecked, moose would over-consume the island's vegetation," said Rob Schultz, executive director of the wolf centre. "Apex predators like wolves are important components of any healthy, natural ecosystems."MONTREAL - A controversial concert scheduled for Friday night in Montreal by former Haitian president Michel Martelly has been called off at the last minute.

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This article was published 22/3/2019 (994 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Haiti's former President Michel Martelly looks at the camera after voting in the Petion-Ville suburb of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Sunday, Nov. 20, 2016. A group of Haitian Montrealers is appealing to federal and municipal authorities to block an upcoming concert by former Haitian president Martelly, citing what they say are his misogynistic comments aimed at women and his alleged complicity in corruption scandals THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP/Ricardo Arduengo

MONTREAL - A controversial concert scheduled for Friday night in Montreal by former Haitian president Michel Martelly has been called off at the last minute.

The show's promoter, Carl-Edward Osias, confirmed the cancellation to The Canadian Press.

Osias did not want to explain the reasons behind the move, saying he would leave that to Martelly.

Critics of Martelly, who performs as Sweet Micky, had called on municipal and federal authorities to block the show, citing what they say are his misogynistic comments and his alleged complicity in corruption scandals.

Martelly had a singing career before entering politics. He served as president of Haiti from 2011-16.

Osias said earlier this week that protests against the concert were being fuelled by Martelly's political opponents and those who don't understand that Sweet Micky is a stage persona.Blockchain and data analytics may help Ireland unlock the potential for community-led renewable energy generation, says Prof Tony Day, executive director of the International Energy Research Centre.

Developing a renewable energy supply model that is profitable for investors within communities will be one of the key topics when Tyndall UCC-based IERC hosts its national conference in Fota Island Hotel, Cork, on Thursday, April 11. Ireland has a distance to travel, but it is making real progress.

I began researching and teaching this stuff in London in the early 1990s, remarked Professor Day. Back then, most people thought it was just a pipe dream. Today, London has 50GW of solar panels installed. Irelands wind energy deployment is world leading.

Now, we are seeing that blockchain and improvements in power electronics are empowering real change in the sector. We still have a lot more to do, but we have come a long way. I am very optimistic about the future of renewable energy generation in Ireland.

Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) has invested heavily in supporting the third level research brain power needed to underpin the countrys future in renewable energy.

Earlier this month Ministers @HHumphreysFG and @JohnHalligan announced an investment of over 100 million in 6 new SFI Centres for Research Training. These centres are open for recruitment - postgraduate students across the country are encouraged to apply https://t.co/H2CugTlCjd pic.twitter.com/ntnbtwVVjY  SFI (@scienceirel) March 21, 2019

SFI is supporting IERCs energy project partnerships with industry leaders, the work of the UCD Energy Institute, and energy-focused research projects in Marei, the Marine Institute and others.

Two separate projects on the Dingle Peninsula give an insight into the role communities can play in driving renewable energy deeper into Irish society. Since 2018, ESB Networks has been partnering on smart network research projects and trials with almost 5,000 homes, farms and businesses on the peninsula.

Meanwhile, Solo Energy is engaging with local industries and communities, distributing battery stores, promoting the use of electric vehicles in homes and businesses. Solo Energy then brings these renewable assets together in a grid. It calls this shared digital network its virtual power plant, a network of shared energy assets taking on the societal role once occupied by a big industrial power plant.

Naturally, community-based projects are just one part of a bigger picture. The IERC and other renewable energy agencies are making progress on research projects with industry partners in wind, solar, heat, biomass and ocean energy etc. The starting point for discussion in Fota will be the opportunities for communities to aspire to 100% renewable energy self-sufficiency.

The question is how do you attach a value to renewable energy generated within the community, said Tony Day.

How do we move from the old model of energy generated in one plant far from the point of use? With that model, the energy goes in one direction, and the money goes in the opposite direction. How do we get to a model where the energy is generated locally, and the money stays in the community? This model would see people in the community trading with one another

Community-driven energy models are evolving rapidly in parts of Germany, Spain, Denmark and the UK.

While the first solar panels were expensive, in recent years less costly Chinese models have been snapped up by local community networks, with participants trading in shared grids.

The community model is in its infancy in Ireland, but the Dingle projects are proof positive that there is an appetite for more.

Individuals in rural communities who have invested heavily in solar, wind and biomass energy projects have criticised the Government for its failure to deliver on anticipated feed-in tariffs, the grant-aided model which gave the renewable sector a kickstart in Germany and elsewhere.

When the Department of Agriculture the unveiled 10m in grants for rural renewable energy projects under the TAMS environmental farm scheme, the IFA described this as a token amount in the context of what is needed to drive on the rapid expansion of Irelands circular bio-economy, which encompasses renewable energy.

Many businesses are driving on without waiting for greater state support. ABP this week teamed up with Natural Capital Partners with a plan to power all of its sites upon the island of Ireland exclusively from wind energy. It aims to be using 100% renewable energy by 2020. Other meat plants, dairy companies, beverage plants and distilleries are on a similar path.

Most companies once saw renewable energy as part of their CSR functions, now more and more are seeing renewable energy as key to the future of their business. Companies like Apple and Google have developing an environmental agenda, said Prof Day.

Ireland is making progress. Were seeing some great forward-thinking, and some great leadership coming from industries. A lot of people are also showing great interest in the energy projects in Dingle.

There are good examples of community renewable models all across Europe. In Ireland, were basically talking about just one set of wires and one set of pipes. Our focus is on developing efficient, profitable renewable energy models. Wed like to ask questions about how we can accelerate engagement in Irish communities.

And this question will be developed by industry leaders at next months IERC national conference in Cork. Energy tech experts from firms such as Energy Elephant and Climote will discuss sustainable security of supply of energy that is cost effective and competitive.

Industry experts from Ervia, ESB, Shell, Eirgrid as well as international speakers from IBM, Oakridge National Lab, Joule Assets, World Green Building Council and UCLA will deliver presentations and lead panel discussions on how to accelerate the commercialisation of energy research.

www.ierc.ie/news/ierc-2019-conference/Ireland soccer fans have started arriving in Gibraltar ahead of tomorrow night's game.

While players will be gearing up for their Euro 2020 opener, spectators get to enjoy the nation's attractions and meet the locals.

One group from Ballybrack and Shankhill took to monkeying around with some particular natives, the Barbary Macaques primate.

The gang took selfies with the apes, the only wild monkey population on the continent of Europe.

If Ireland win tomorrow night, the animals surely won't be the only ones running wild.

[gallery]68[/gallery]

Photos: INPHO/James CrombieBilly Kelleher has expressed his delighted at being added to the ticket by Fianna Fail to contest the forthcoming European elections in the Ireland South Constituency.

Six days after being defeated at a selection convention, Mr Kelleher was added by party bosses on Friday to run alongside Councillor Malcolm Byrne who beat him by eight votes.

As reported in the Irish Examiner two days ago, the Fianna Fail National Constituencies Committee met and confirmed Mr Kelleher's addition.

Galway East TD Anne Rabbitte has also been added in Midlands-North-West.

Speaking following the announcement, Mr Kelleher said he was delighted to be on the ticket even if it wasn't the way he envisaged.

Obviously one wants to lead from the front and get on the ticket through convention but it wasn't to be.

"But I am excited now to have the chance to contest for a seat and seek to represent Ireland South at European level, Mr Kelleher told the Irish Examiner.

Mr Kelleher was informed of the decision at 3.30pm on Friday afternoon by the party's general secretary Sean Dorgan.

Despite defying his party leader Micheal Martin, Mr Kelleher was seen by the party as its best hope of securing a seat in the Ireland South constituency.

Sources have said that Mr Martin and Mr Dorgan took a pragmatic view to add Mr Kelleher to the ticket.

Micheal clearly was not happy at Billy's decision to run but once he had that was that.

"The party needed someone from Cork to contest and it would have caused a civil war had Billy not been given the nod, said a senior party source.

Mr Kelleher was narrowly defeated by the Gorey-based Byrne by eight votes. Mr Byrnes final vote count was 451 to Mr Kellehers 443.The war on single-use plastic has begun in earnest in Ireland with businesses, environmental groups and a prominent GAA club joining in the battle to cut its use.

Building material group, Kingspan, has partnered with a foundation that removes plastic from the ocean and plans to reuse as much of the plastic recovered as it can in the production of insulation products.

Friends of the Earth has partnered with VOICE Ireland to empower communities to take action on single-use plastics while Youghal GAA has joined forces with Refill Ireland to encourage the use of reusable water bottles.

Kingspan plans to use 500 million recycled plastic bottles a year in its insulation products by 2023. The three-year partnership with the EcoAlf Foundation will see it help to remove up to 150 tonnes of waste from the Mediterranean each year.

"Today's announcement forms part of a longer-term strategy we are developing around supporting the circular economy and increasing our use of recycled materials," said Kingspan CEO, Gene Murtagh.

"With the construction industry contributing 30% of all the global waste that goes into landfill, it is vital that we find responsible ways to reduce waste at all points in the supply chain."

Friends of the Earth and VOICE Ireland have launched Sick Of Plastic, a nationwide campaign to cut the use of plastics. Pointing out that Irish companies, shops and households generate twice the EU average of plastic waste, the organisations want a nationwide deposit-return scheme, a tax on single-use cups and a ban on single-use plastics.

They are also demanding that supermarkets reduce plastic packaging. Last year the campaign mobilised thousands of consumers to leave their plastic packaging behind in supermarkets in protest against single-use, non-recyclable packaging.

However, the campaigners say that consumers are already doing their bit: When the plastic bag tax was introduced in Ireland in 2001, there was a 90% drop in plastic bag use. Yet the amoung of plastic packing used in Ireland has nearly doubled in the last five years and households are left to sort it and recycle what they can. It's not fair.

Meanwhile, Youghal GAA has joined the environmental initiative Refill Ireland to refilling reusable water bottles at refill stations and ditch single-use plastic bottles.

As a way of promoting the use of reusable water bottles, Youghal GAA is signing up to Refill Ireland to encourage club members, players, visitors and members of the public to fill their water bottles at its outdoor tap.

When this initiative was brought to our attention we didnt need much convincing that this is a very good idea for both the community and for our club," said Eochaill Og chairman, Hugh Dorrian.

"Its a great privilege to be able to play a small part in influencing young peoples' habits around the use of plastics. Im delighted that Youghal GAA has stepped up to reduce plastic-bottle waste, which ultimately will help to keep Youghal streets, beaches and water free of waste plastic.

According to Martha Doyle of Cork Environmental Forum: People want to help stop plastic pollution, and Refill puts the power in peoples hands to do that. We are very proud that Youghal GAA is coming onboard and showing itself to be a great community leader.A holidaymaker who broke her wrist when she fell on a ramp while leaving an apartment building has appealed a High Court decision to award her 25,000 for her injury.

Denise Rowley (34), of Drumlonagher, Donegal town, claims the High Court award did not address the ongoing injury she has suffered, particularly in relation to her duties as a dental nurse.

She sued Budget Travel, tour operator for the week-long package holiday she took to Gran Canaria, Spain, in 2008.

She claimed that on leaving her accommodation at Vista Oasis Apartments, Maspalomas, on the last day of her holiday, May 11, she was required to descend a dangerously defective ramp. She fell backwards, stretching out her hand and fracturing her right wrist and hurting her back.

Her wrist was put in a temporary cast locally and in a permanent one when she got home. She missed six weeks of work at the time when she was training to be a dental nurse.

Budget Travel denied her claim.

The Court of Appeal heard today that in the High Court case Budget had made an offer, or "tender", to Ms Rowley of 36,000 just before the hearing took place. This was not accepted and the case went ahead with the resultant 25,000 award by then High Court president Nicholas Kearns.

Jonathan Kilfeather SC, for Ms Rowley, said the High Court failed to attach sufficient weight to the evidence before it, particularly in relation to the fact that she suffered a considerable amount of pain and has ongoing consequences as a result of the fall. Four years after the accident, a doctor said her injury was permanent with a risk of arthritis in her wrist in the future.

As a dental nurse, her injury continued to affect her in relation to lifting and carrying because it was on her dominant hand, counsel said.

Noel McCarthy SC, with Shane English BL, for Budget, argued the High Court award should not be disturbed.

The High Court judge was in the best position to assess her demeanour, he said.

She had claimed, in her pleadings, problems associated with the back injury but there was no evidence to the High Court about this, he said.

It would appear the injury has not affected her ability to work, he added.

The three-judge Court of Appeal said it would give its decision next month but, Mr Justice Michael Peart, presiding, urged the parties to make an effort to settle it in the meantime.

While on one level it was a simple case, there were some difficult issues, he said.

The court proposed reserving its decision for up to three weeks but, in the meantime, there was perhaps "scope for discussion to take place" whereby it might not be necessary to give a decision at all, he added.A teenager who hit the director of a children's detention centre on the head with a metal bar and smashed up the centre has been jailed for four years.

Michael Ward (19) with an address at Gleann Riada, Strokestown Road, Co Longford, pleaded guilty to criminal damage, assault causing harm and assault while attempting to commit theft at Oberstown Children's Detention Campus, Lusk, Co Dublin, on May 29, 2017.

Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that Ward is currently serving a four-year sentence, with the final 12 months suspended, for offences of criminal damage also committed at Oberstown.

Garda Vincent Tierney told Pieter Le Vert BL, prosecuting, that on the evening in question Ward asked a staff member at Oberstown if he could use the bathroom.

On their way to the bathroom, Ward began jostling with the staff member who initially thought he was joking. Ward told him not to take this personally and they began to struggle.

During the struggle, Ward grabbed the man's security fob. He then pulled a broken piece of a ceramic plate from his shorts and said: Don't fucking come near me.

Ward and a number of other youths barricaded themselves in an office and armed themselves with metal table legs. The staff member observed Ward break a sink off the wall of the staff bathroom and smash it over the toilet.

Campus Director Pat Bergin arrived at the scene and attempted to prevent the removal of bars from the office door's smashed window. Ward reached through the window and swung the metal bar, hitting Mr Bergin in the head and causing him to start bleeding.

Ward removed a radiator from a wall and used it as a battering ram to get into a hallway. He and two others obtained an angle grinder from a maintenance shed and used it to cut their way through the campus fence.

He was brought back to Oberstown after the escape and told gardai that he had walked to his grandmother's home in Crumlin, Dublin after getting through the fence. He said that the incident was not planned and that he had not intended to strike Mr Bergin in the head.

The total cost of the damage done to Oberstown was 17,135.

Judge Patricia Ryan imposed a four-year sentence for the assaults and a concurrent sentence of five years for the damage. She suspended the last year of both terms after taking into consideration his effort to rehabilitate, his early guilty plea, his young age and his apology.

Ward has 56 previous convictions, including convictions for theft, burglary, handling stolen property, criminal damage and public order offences.

Gda Tierney accepted the assertion of Dean Kelly BL, defending, that while obviously the behaviour described in your evidence is appalling, Ward could be a charming young man.

Mr Kelly said the incident was not a prison break but was rather a case of three young men going wild. He said that Ward walking across Dublin in the dead of night to his grandmother's house was not the act of a master criminal.Update: March 23: Jamie Walsh has been found safe and well.

Gardai in Dublin are looking for the public's help to find a teenager missing from Rathfarnham since last Friday evening.

14-year-old Jamie Walsh is described as being 5' 4'' tall, of medium build with short brown hair.

When last seen he was wearing a black bubble jacket, black tracksuit, and black runners.

He's known to frequent the Tallaght, Clondalkin and City Centre area of Dublin.

Anyone who has seen Jamie or can help find him is asked to contact Rathfarnham Garda Station on 01 6666500, The Garda Confidential Telephone Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.A teenage boy who raped and sexually abused his eight-year-old half-sister should be placed in residential care while undergoing treatment, a court has heard.

The 16-year-old has pleaded guilty to five counts of oral rape and 44 counts of sexual assault, carried out between September 2016 and January 2017.

The teenager cannot be named to protect his identity and that of his half-sister. The abuse took place in the Munster area.

The Central Criminal Court heard previously that the boy told gardai he had been copying what he saw on a pornographic website, PornHub.

A garda told Imelda Kelly BL, prosecuting, that in January 2017, the teenager's mother walked into her living room to discover her son inappropriately touching her daughter's genitals.

The teenager was 14 at the time and his half-sister was aged eight. His mother made a complaint to gardai and the teenager was arrested.

During interviews with gardai, the teenager admitted removing his half-sister's clothes and masturbating. He said he touched her intimate areas, but denied penetration.

Today, the court heard evidence from psychologist Linda Cooney from NIAP, an inter-agency project that treats adolescents who sexually abuse.

Ms Cooney told the court that the accused boy moved out of his mothers house, where his half-sister lives, immediately after the abuse was discovered.

He is currently living with his father, but Ms Cooney said this emotional environment was not adequate to allow him to undergo successful psychological treatment.

She said the boy had below average abilities in perspective taking, making it difficult for him to understand the impact of the abuse on his half-sister.

Ms Cooney said the teenager was motivated to get help, but needed a care-giver who could be emotionally available and supportive to him for the next two years of treatment.

Treatment is hard. He will have to dig deep to connect with the consequences of his abuse of his sister, to enhance his victim empathy skills, she added.

Ms Cooney said she had concerns that the boy did not feel safe and had spoken about his father's anger, saying he needed to be careful and that as long as you keep your mouth shut, you're grand.

Ms Cooney said the boy's father had demonstrated poor communication and coping skills and had walked out of meetings with psychologists.

The court heard that the boy's mother was not ready for him to return to her house as she still felt very angry towards him, although she would like to build a relationship with him in the future.

In a victim impact statement previously read out in court, the mother of the injured party described the shock and horror she experienced upon discovering what her son had been doing to her daughter.

My daughter's innocence has been violated under the most cruel circumstances imaginable, she said.

I am grieving on two fronts; for my daughter and for my lost son, she said, adding that she was only beginning to contemplate some level of forgiveness for her son.

She said that her daughter had nightmares and worried about her half-brother reappearing to follow through on threats he made during the abuse. She said she hoped her daughter had not been damaged beyond repair.

Justice Michael White said he needed some time to structure a sentence but warned that he wasn't here to make a care order. The teenager was remanded on continuing bail for sentence on April 1.The Health Minister insists it is his intention to roll out HPV testing this year.

It had been due to be introduced in September but was delayed due to the backlog in the number of smear tests.The imminent March 29 Brexit cliff edge will be pushed back until May 22 if MPs back Theresa May's deal next week - and to April 12 even if it is rejected.

European Council president Donald Tusk and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker officially confirmed the vital delay after hours of intense EU summit meetings on Thursday night.

In a press conference confirming the decision in Brussels, Mr Tusk said confirmed the new dates, their conditions and said all options - including deal, no deal cancelling Brexit and a further extension - remain on the table.

Mr Tusk said he met British prime minister Theresa May "several times" on Thursday evening to be "sure" the deal details would be agreed.

And he was supported by Mr Juncker, who said the EU has worked "tirelessly" to secure the dates and that "this completes the whole package".

Asked how long a long extension may be, Mr Juncker said "until the very end".

In a separate question, Mr Tusk was asked about his recent comments at a previous EU summit where he said there is a "special place in hell" for people who promoted Brexit inaccurately, and if this special place should now be extended to MPs.

After pausing, Mr Tusk said "according to our pope, hell is still empty, so there is plenty of space" before Mr Juncker added "don't go to hell!".

An EU source later confirmed: "March 29 is over. April 12 is the new 29.

Under the deal, Ms May will seek to have the withdrawal agreement passed by the House of Commons next week. Should it pass, the deadline would move back to May 22.

If it is defeated again, the deadline would move to April 12 - a date which is the final cut off point for Britain deciding if it runs candidates in the MEP elections.

If it chooses to run candidates in the MEP elections, Britain will be effectively dragged into a lengthy Brexit delay Ms May has previously insisted she would not accept.

The EU offer to Britain was hammered out after hours of chaotic and frantic talks among EU leaders on Thursday evening.

Leaders were locked in discussions for several hours over proposals to postpone Brexit, amid wrangling over the final deadline for the UK to leave.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and 26 other EU leaders spent the day struggling to resolve how to solve the Brexit riddle, with dates of April 11, April 12, May 7 and May 22 being offered up as a means of pulling Britain back from the brink.

Ms May had earlier told Mr Varadkar in a "short" bilateral meeting she wants to avoid a no deal crisis and that her deal would be passed through parliament by now if it wasn't for House of Commons speaker John Bercow's intervention third vote veto threat.

However, her claim was given little sympathy, with EU leaders forming a brick wall of criticism by saying her preferred June 30 delay date is impossible and that she must find a way to end the crisis.

French president Emmanuel Macron went further, warning Britain "in case of no, it will guide to a no deal. For sure. This is it. We are ready".

European Council president Donald Tusk and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker tried to give the same no deal cliff edge threat message while stressing the EU is still ready to work with Britain to find a solution.

However, noting Ms May's failure to rule out a no deal Brexit and her commitment to finding a "short" extension, Luxembourg prime minister Xavier Bettel said Brexit is "like Waiting for Godot".Patrick Quirke told a social worker that Mary Lowry was leaving her three children unsupervised for long periods at weekends and had "lost the run of herself" after becoming fixated on a new relationship, the Central Criminal Court has heard.

Deirdre Caverley, giving evidence by video link from Boston, told prosecution counsel Michael Bowman SC that she worked for Tusla, the child and family agency, in 2011. On February 4 that year she received a call from Patrick Quirke expressing concern about Ms Lowry's three children.

His concerns, the witness said, were regarding their "well-being and safety". Mr Quirke told her they were being left unsupervised for long periods of time, mostly at weekends. He said she would leave them from 4pm until the early hours of the morning and added that this had been going on for about three months.

The wider paternal family, he told her, were concerned but afraid to address their concerns for fear of "repercussions". The children's grandmother, he said, was "especially" concerned.

He also told her that Ms Lowry had recently entered a new relationship and it was this new boyfriend that she was spending time with at the weekends when the children were left alone in the house. He further explained that Ms Lowry had been widowed about three and a half years earlier.

The witness said she took a note at the time that Mr Quirke told her: "She had lost the run of herself and become fixated on the relationship".

She also noted that he told her Ms Lowry was "failing to take into account the needs of her three children" due to this new relationship.

Ms Caverley said she suggested to Mr Quirke that Ms Lowry might be using childcare while she was away and asked whether their grandmother, who lived in a section of the house adjoining Ms Lowry's property, could be looking after them. Mr Quirke, she said, told her that the grandmother was not asked to look after the children.

Ms Caverley advised Mr Quirke to call gardai if there were immediate concerns at the weekend so they could look into it. She also told him that she would open up a report and look into the matter.

She called to Ms Lowry's home unannounced on February 10 but there was nobody home and no car in the drive. She saw a man there who did not identify himself. She spoke to him but he did not tell her when Ms Lowry would return. She said a colleague made a second home visit to Ms Lowry.

Mary Lowry

Under cross-examination, the witness agreed with Bernard Condon SC for the defence that Mr Quirke told her that Ms Lowry was "entitled to be in a new relationship".

Mr Quirke (50) of Breanshamore, Co Tipperary has pleaded not guilty to the murder of part-time DJ Bobby Ryan. Mr Ryan went missing on June 3, 2011, after leaving his girlfriend Mary Lowry's home at about 6:30am. His body was found in an underground run-off tank on the farm owned by Ms Lowry and leased by the accused at Fawnagown, Tipperary, 22 months later in April 2013. The prosecution claims Mr Quirke murdered Mr Ryan so he could rekindle an affair with Ms Lowry (52).

Earlier today, the jury heard that Ms Lowry's computer was used to search for Bobby Ryan's name the day before his body was recovered.

Ms Lowry gave her computer to gardai investigating Bobby Ryan's death and Detective Garda Paul Fitzpatrick of the Garda Cyber Crime Bureau received it in May 2015.

He told Patrick Quirke's defence counsel Bernard Condon SC that when he searched Ms Lowry's computer for keywords he found a search for "trace Ireland Bobby Ryan" carried out at 9:45pm on April 29, 2013.

Mr Ryan's body was discovered the following day by the accused man.

Mr Condon also asked the witness about a forensic analysis carried out on a computer seized during a search of Mr Quirke's home following the discovery of the body. Yesterday, the jury heard that the computer was used in December 2012 to search for "human body decomposition timeline" and "rate of human decomposition".

The witness agreed with Mr Condon that this computer did not have a password and he could not say who was using it at any given time. He further agreed that Google suggests search words when a person starts typing in the search bar and he couldn't say which search terms were input by the user.

The trial continues in front of Justice Eileen Creedon and a jury of six men and six women.The Tanaiste has denied there is growing frustration among other EU countries around Ireland's failure to prepare for a hard border in the case of a no-deal Brexit.

Speaking at the Fine Gael national conference in Wexford, Simon Coveney said he "doesn't accept" that Germany and other countries are losing patience with the Irish Government.

The comments came after a request from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the EU ramp up its plans to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland in the event of a no-deal scenario, with the creation of a taskforce.

Mr Coveney said: "First of all, I don't accept your assumption that there is clearly a frustration with Ireland. There isn't actually. There is an understanding across the EU that the border question is a very emotive and very political question on this island.

"That is why we have had so much solidarity and support from across the EU for solutions to that question. That is why we have the backstop as part of the Irish protocol within the Withdrawal Agreement."

Mr Coveney said there will be an "onus" on Ireland, the EU, and the UK to work together to find a way of preventing a physical border infrastructure which he said would cause unnecessary tension between the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland.

"We have clear commitments that go back to December 2017 and I think all parties will have an obligation to work intensively to come up solutions that can work. It's possible to do that, we have shown that in the context of the backstop, but there will have to three willing partners."

He added: "Even in a no deal scenario, that is why the commission and other EU countries will work with Ireland to ensure while we need to protect the integrity of the single market across the island we will also ensure that does not result in physical infrastructure between the two jurisdictions on this island.

"That has been a conversation that is well understood," Mr Coveney told reporters.The amount spent on advertising by the Taoiseach's department went up by over 250% last year.

There are reports this morning that it increased from 71,000 in 2017 to 1.8 million the following year.Latest: A parcel bomb found at a Limerick postal depot appears identical to a series of devices sent to Great Britain, gardai have said.

Gardai called Army bomb disposal experts to the postal sorting office on the Dock Road this morning after the suspicious package was discovered.

The Defence Forces later confirmed a viable improvised explosive device had been found contained in a plastic envelope.

Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said a stamp on the package found in the An Post depot was similar to those used on letter bombs sent to the UK earlier this month.

The Met's Counter Terrorism Command have released images of the suspect packages received at various locations across #London yesterday as the investigation into the devices continues. https://t.co/Ucmt4TB0gY pic.twitter.com/Y7jXIaFn7n  Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) March 6, 2019

He added: This is a despicable act.

The sending of incendiary devices like this is totally unacceptable. I hope the people responsible are brought to justice.

The building was evacuated during the security alert.

A spokesman for the Defence Forces said: A viable improvised explosive device contained in a plastic envelope was identified and made safe. The device was then handed over to An Garda Siochana for further investigation.

A group calling itself the IRA has claimed responsibility for parcel bombs sent to major transport hubs in London and the University of Glasgow.

The organisation, known to police as the New IRA, claimed one parcel addressed to a British Army recruitment officer may not have been discovered yet.

The group said it posted five devices to addresses in Britain, however only four had been discovered at the time the claim of responsibility was sent to a Belfast newsroom.

Mr Flanagan said the item found in Limerick could be the fifth.

We have reason to believe this could be the case, he said.

One of the packages was found at Waterloo station in London (John Stillwell/PA)

The packages that arrived at Waterloo railway station and offices at Heathrow and London City airports on March 5 and 6 were posted with Irish stamps and had Dublin as the return address, prompting Irish police to join the investigation.

The stamps appeared to be those issued by the Irish postal service for Valentines Day 2018, featuring a heart motif and the words Love Eire N.

The senders addresses were given as Dublin, with two having added coach operator Bus Eireann.

Police Scotland said a controlled explosion was carried out as a precaution on a suspicious package found in the mailroom at Glasgow University, after several buildings had been evacuated.

A controlled explosion was carried out on the package found at the University of Glasgow (Andrew Milligan/PA)

All packages were A4-sized white postal bags containing yellow Jiffy bags and appeared capable of igniting a small fire when opened.

No-one was injured in any of the incidents in Britain.

Today, a Garda spokesman said: This parcel appears to be identical to parcels  pending closer forensic and ballistic examination  discovered earlier this month in London and Glasgow.

An Garda Siochana continue to liaise with the UK authorities in relation to these investigations.- Press Association

Earlier (10:52am): Minister says suspicious package sent to Limerick post office could be linked to UK letter bombs

By David Raleigh and Vivienne Clarke

An army bomb disposal unit has removed a suspicious package from an An Post sorting centre in Limerick city, after it was discovered there early this morning.

Staff at the sorting office, located at the Docklands Business Park, Dock Road, alerted gardai after coming across a suspicious envelope at the depot shortly after 6am.

The premises and surrounding area were evacuated and staff sent home for the day.

Members of a Defence Forces Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team arrived around 9.50am to examine the package.

The EOD unit removed the package from the depot shortly before midday.

A garda source said the EOD team did not have to carry out any controlled explosion on the suspect package, and that the envelope has been removed to another location for further analysis.

Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan says that the security alert in Limerick may be connected to the letter bombs found in London and Glasgow in recent weeks.

Speaking on RTE radios Today with Sean ORourke, Mr Flanagan said that the sending of letter bombs was a despicable act and that that authorities in the UK had noted that there could be five such letter bombs and that this could be the fifth.

Asked whether there were similarities between the parcels delivered in the UK and the one found this morning, he said there were.

I understand thats the case with particular reference to the type of postage stamp that was used.

The Minister added: The sending of incendiary devices like this is totally unacceptable. I hope the perpetrators are brought to justice.

A garda spokesman earlier said: Shortly after 6am gardai in Henry St received a report of a suspect package at the An Post sorting office, Dock Road, Co Limerick. The building has been evacuated and the army EOD team have been notified.

No other information is available at this time.

A garda investigation is ongoing.A man in his 70s and woman in her 30s have both died after a fatal two-car crash in Drumcondra.

They have been removed to the Dublin City Mortuary, Whitehall where a post mortem examination will take place.

Gardai say that technical and forensic examination of the scene is underway.

Just after 11.30am, the road re-opened.

Update : The road has now fully reopened. Thank you for your patience.  An Garda Siochana (@GardaTraffic) March 22, 2019

Earlier: Gardai appeal for witnesses after serious crash in Drumcondra

Gardai and emergency services are currently at the scene of what is being described as a serious crash in Drumcondra.

The crash involved two cars and occurred at Drumcondra Rd Lower (junction of Hollybank Rd) around 6.30 this morning.

A man in his 70s and woman in her 30s, both the sole occupants of the cars, were seriously injured in the collision.

A technical and forensic examination of the scene is currently underway, gardai say.

Drumcondra Road Lower remains closed in both directions. Diversions are in place at Whitehall Church, Botanic Avenue and Richmond Rd. Buses and HGVs outbound are being diverted along Clonliffe Rd towards Ballybough.

Gardai are appealing to motorists with dashcams or anyone travelling on Drumcondra Rd Lower between 5.45am and 6.15am to contact Mountjoy Garda Station.

Drumcondra Road Lower (Fagan's pub to Quinn's pub) closed in both directions. Diversions in place at Whitehall Church, Botanic Ave and Richmond Road. Please use alternative routes.  An Garda Siochana (@GardaTraffic) March 22, 2019Latest: Wildlife experts say reports of a massive one-metre long rodent in the Royal Canal in Dublin are most likely a case of mistaken identity.

The semi-aquatic creature with orange teeth was originally thought to be an invasive rodent known as the Coypu.

Residents in West Dublin were warned not to approach the animal and to notify the authorities.

However, Waterways Ireland now believes the sighting is actually the native Irish otter.

They wrote on Facebook: "Earlier this week Waterways Ireland received notification of an unconfirmed report from the National Biodiversity Data Centre via National Parks and Wildlife Services of a Coypu on the Royal Canal.

"We are obliged to take this seriously, given the potential implications posed by a Coypu presence on Irish waterways.

"All evidence now leads us to believe that this was a case of mistaken identity and the report was likely that of native Otter, which are present on the Royal Canal.

"As there is a legal obligation to remove such invasive species from the wild, Waterways Ireland will continue to work closely with National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and the National Biodiversity Data Centre (NBDC).

"The public are encouraged to contact NBDC (www.biodiversityireland.ie) with any record of the invasive Coypu, preferably with a confirmation photo, if they happen to come across this species on any waterbody."

Earlier (12:37pm): Warning issued after large rodent spotted in Dublin

Waterways Ireland has issued an alert warning people in Dublin to be on the lookout for a large invasive rodent.

Sightings of the Coypu have been reported near the Ashtown area of the canal close to Castleknock.

This type of rodent - which has bright orange teeth and can grow up to one metre in length - weighs up to 9kg.

It can carry a number of diseases harmful to humans and domestic animals.

Ferdia Marnell from the National Parks & Wildlife Service is asking the public to report any sightings of the rodent:

"They're not aggressive, they're vegetarians, they only feed on aquatic vegetation really," he explained.

"But they are quite large and could be intimidating if they came across you unexpectedly."

Mr Marnell advised anyone who comes across the rodent to contact the National Parks & Wildlife Service.

"We are obliged under EU regulations to remove them from the wild," he added.After a chaotic 48 hours and more than a little political ducking and diving, next week's looming Brexit cliff edge has been pushed back - much to the relief of people who are in the direct firing line if it all goes wrong.

It is understandable then that, this weekend, EU leaders and British prime minister Theresa May will be trying to convince everyone all is right once again with the world.

But while their public confidence might be true, for now, the reality with the seemingly never-ending Brexit groundhog day is that even when one obstacle is - just about - avoided, several more are waiting just over the horizon.

While fears of a no deal crash out Brexit next Friday have evaporated, there is still no clarity on whether MPs will back the deal, if the delay is just the first in a series of endless "rolling" deadlines, and - crucially for us - how a no deal hard border will be avoided.

Questions over whether Ms May is secretly in favour of a crash out no deal, and separate confusion over Brexit's impact on the MEP elections, also remain on the agenda.

And although the EU is still pushing its united front in the face of a blatantly Disunited Kingdom, the frantic discussions over how long to agree to delay Brexit among leaders on Thursday night bear all the hallmarks of the first stress cracks in the EU wall.

HOUSE OF COMMONS CHAOS?

Having just about survived this week, Ms May faces another dance with political death next week when she tables her battered Brexit deal for a third time in the House of Commons, most likely on Tuesday.

If MPs back it, the May 22 Brexit date is a certainty and all is well with the world. But if they reject it, the deadline is cut to April 12.

French president Emmanuel Macron believes Ms May has just a 5% chance of pulling back her previous 149-vote deal defeat, hardly a ringing endorsement.

And this grim prediction may explain why she will also table seven "indicative" votes on a deal, no deal, revoking article 50, a second referendum, and other matters next week.

ROLLING DELAYS

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar insisted on Friday the two - count 'em - new Brexit deadlines do not equal a "rolling" Brexit cliff edge. But it sure doesn't look like a nice, calm hill to stroll down either.

Whether politicians like it or not, the reality is the absolutely firm March 29 deadline has - for good reason - now morphed into April 12 and May 22.

And while the EU insists "Brexit fatigue" means another extension is not going to happen, if you give someone an inch - or in this case a couple of months - it only encourages further delays.

DOES MAY WANT A NO DEAL?

The sneaking suspicion among EU leaders in Brussels this week was that Ms May is increasingly opening herself up to a no deal, a view emphasised by reports she "spooked" rivals on Thursday night by refusing to rule it out.

Ms May's first option remains a deal. But with Brexiteers now firmly getting their claws into the beleaguered prime minister who is desperately clinging to power by any means necessary, it is legitimate to ponder what her second option will be.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE MEP ELECTIONS?

While the Brexit delay caused cheers in most quarters, it also caused more than a few groans among officials responsible for organising the MEP elections.

The reason is simple: Britain must decide if it is running candidates by April 12, or it messes up the entire EU-wide May 23-24 election plans.

Leave, and Britain's seats are filled elsewhere. But remain - or at least daydream of wheat fields on the fence a little longer - and either the MEP plans are torn up or Britain will be told to stay in for far longer than planned.

NORTHERN IRELAND

As German chancellor Angela Merkel rightly pointed out in a private discussion on Thursday night, the EU has to find a way to avoid a no deal hard Irish border. And quickly.

With just three weeks until the next Brexit deadline, a solution must be found. It is isn't, Ireland's worst nightmare may yet come true.

IS THE EU STILL UNITED?

Of course, is the obvious answer. And, for now, there is no reason to doubt this long-term fact. However, the clear confusion over the delay dates on Thursday night - with EU leaders rowing over April 11-12, April 18, May 7, May 22, and June 30 - was hardly a symbol of togetherness.

There is nothing to worry about, just yet. But, with the pressure mounting, nothing to ignore completely, either.Kilkenny have included ten of their All-Ireland winning side in their team to face Laois at Nowlan Park in Sunday's National Hurling League clash.

DJ Carey will start in an unusual midfield role, with a league debut for Jimmy Coogan. Stephen Grehan is also recalled at wing forward.Sudan summons Egypt envoy over Red Sea oil bids

AFP, Khartoum :

Sudan summoned Egypt's ambassador to Khartoum on Thursday to protest Cairo's "illegal" call for oil and gas exploration bids in the Red Sea area of Halayeb, claimed by both countries.

Egypt's control of the Halayeb triangle, which lies in a mineral-rich border region, has for decades been a bone of contention between Cairo and Khartoum, despite an overall improvement in ties since an October summit.

On March 10, Egypt's state-owned South Valley Egyptian Petroleum Holding Company invited bids for 10 oil and gas exploration blocks in what it said were Egyptian territorial waters in the Red Sea.

"The foreign ministry summoned the Egyptian ambassador Hossam Eissa on Thursday to protest against the tenders invited by the Egyptian oil ministry for areas under the sovereignty of Sudan," Sudan's foreign ministry said in a statement. "Sudan is asking Egypt to stop all procedures concerning the tenders given the situation about the Halayeb triangle."

Sudan has regularly protested at Egypt's administration of Halayeb and the Shalatin border region near the Red Sea, saying they are part of its sovereign territory since shortly after independence in 1956.

On Wednesday, Sudan had warned Egypt against its offer of exploration blocks.

Sudanese minister of state for oil and gas Saad el-Deen el-Bushra said the move was "a direct intrusion" onto his ministry's authority to grant exploration licenses in the area.

On Thursday, the foreign ministry summoned the Egyptian ambassador and urged international companies working in the area to not to submit bids for the blocks.

"The government of Sudan can take measures to prevent any company from operating in this area," the ministry warned.

It did however call on Cairo to resolve the situation "through peaceful means" to avoid damaging the improving ties between the two countries.

Relations between Cairo and Khartoum had turned sour in early 2017, when Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir accused Egypt of supporting rebels in conflict zones, including Darfur in western Sudan.

Sudan in May 2017 banned the import of animal and other agricultural products from its northern neighbour.

But in October, it lifted the ban as ties improved following talks in Khartoum between Bashir and his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Egypt has this year repeatedly called for stability in Sudan after protests erupted on December 19 against Bashir's three-decade rule.

Demonstrations and deadly clashes erupted after a government decision to triple the price of bread.

Bashir has remained defiant, imposing a nationwide state of emergency on February 22.



Australia's homegrown children's stationery juggernaut, Smiggle, has put its hand up as the latest victim of Brexit chaos, saying the consumer slump in Britain has dented its global growth aspirations.

Despite trouble in the UK, Smiggle's owner, Premier Investments, was able to deliver a record first-half profit and dividend, after its apparel brands - Just Jeans, Jay Jays, Portmans, Jacqui E and Dotti - defied the prevailing retail sentiment to post strong sales growth.

Premier reported sales growth across all its brands. Credit:Adam McLean

Sales at Smiggle, which sells colourful pens, pencils and school equipment, grew at their slowest rate in 10 years, ticking up just 4.6 per cent in the first half to $179 million.

Premier put that down to the Brexit-induced retail slowdown in the UK, which is home to 141 of its 356 stores, especially during the crucial Christmas sales period.Australian shares closed a mixed week higher on Friday, as a firm rebound on the final day of trading offset a nervous start to the week.

The S&P/ASX 200 Index rose 20 points, or 0.3 per cent, to 6195.2 for the week while the broader All Ordinaries advanced 15.8 points, or 0.3 per cent, to 6280.9.

"Ahead of this weeks FOMC meeting, the concern was whether the Fed would be able to live up to the markets dovish expectations. But these concerns turned out to be misplaced as (Federal Reserve chairman Jerome) Powell at every turn managed to out dove expectations," said Saxo Capital Markets market strategist Eleanor Creagh.

The local market responded positively to the Fed on interest rates. Credit:AFR

"For now, equity markets like the prospect of more accommodative monetary policy and seem to have limited ability to grasp the fundamentals, which continue to deteriorate. This latest dovish chant could just be squeezing the last bit of juice out of an already extended rally."Exploring the Bonnefanten Museum's David Lynch retrospective in Maastricht, Someone Is in My House, one starts to conjure an image of Lynch's hands: they must never stop moving.

The American filmmaker known for macabre, enigmatic films such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, as well as his recently revived hit 1990s supernatural crime TV series Twin Peaks, seems to have a manic creative drive that has compelled him to explore every conceivable form of art: paintings, lithographs, black-and-white photographs, drawings, comics, collage, sculptures, stop-motion animation and even anthropomorphic design lamps.

David Lynch's dark imagination informs his films and artworks. Credit:Josh Telles

"Yeah, I love to work," Lynch said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he lives and has his studio. "Every medium is so beautiful but each in their particular way, and you learn about them by getting in there and working with them and talking with them."

More than 500 of Lynch's artworks are on display in the sprawling exhibition, which runs until April 28. A smaller version of the show will travel to HOME, a cultural centre in Manchester, England, where it opens on July 6.Homayra Himu wants to give direction

Sheikh Arif Bulbon :

Five years ago, popular TV actress Homayra Himu produced a telefilm titled Bhalobashi Othoba Bashi Bhalo. But producing that telefilm she faced financial crisis during that time. She was sufferer for this and later decided not to produce any work. But she is interested to give direction now.

Himu said, I have been engaged with acting for long time. I got support from my colleagues and directors while acting. After struggling I have come into present position. For this reason, I am grateful to my fans and those viewers who watch my acted plays and telefilms. Right now I am feeling necessity to give direction. If I want good producer then I will give direction. Overall, if there are good budget, story and producer then I will show my interest to give direction.

Now Himu is acting in several drama serials like Faridul Hasans Comedy 420 and Lucky 13, Jahangir Alam Sumons DB and Sajjad Hossain Doduls Chhayabibi.

Himu also informed that on March 29 and 30 she will work in Kamruzzamans faction play.

Himu acted in an important role in Morshedul Islams movie Aamar Bondhu Rashed. Now she is also working as director of YouTubes a reality show titled BD Singer of the Nation.

Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Selwa Anthony is ensconced on an avocado-green leather sofa, a chihuahua reclining on either side of her. The leading literary agent is small but commanding, a diminutive grande dame with sharp brown eyes and long purple fingernails. As always, she is carefully coiffured and glamorously dressed, as if her next appointment were a cocktail party. But Anthony's mood on this warm afternoon is more defiant than festive. "Everything I've done in my life has been boots and all," she says. Literary agents are behind-the-scenes people. Their job is to foster writers' careers and secure them good publishing deals: they rarely make news in their own right. Yet Anthony has had a central role in not one but two headline-grabbing court cases in the past year. First, she was in the thick of a battle over the estate of her friend Colleen McCullough, best-known as the author of the blockbuster outback saga The Thorn Birds. Then came the showdown with her former star client, bestselling mystery-romance writer Kate Morton. Anthony, who initiated the legal action against Morton, ended up feeling that her own professional reputation was on trial. In the witness box, she was grilled for hours. "It was terrible, terrible, terrible," she says, as sunlight streams into her harbourside Sydney apartment. Both courtroom dramas transfixed the Australian publishing industry. The story behind the McCullough case had all the ingredients of a rip-roaring airport novel: the literary lioness in failing health on a remote Pacific island, the estranged husband, the revoked will, the deathbed reconciliation. The story behind the second case was quieter but if anything more gripping, with an ending that few predicted. "I think the Kate Morton case has kind of surprised everyone," says Vanessa Radnidge, head of the non-fiction division at publishing group Hachette Australia. Radnidge corrects herself. "Shocked everyone." Selwa Anthony at home with her chihuahuas Ruby and Bella, on the sofa where she reads fresh manuscripts. Credit:Tim Bauer The chihuahuas, Ruby and Bella, look up from the sofa as Anthony's amiable husband, Brian Dennis, appears with a teapot and cups on a tray. "When I met him, he was a book sales rep," says Anthony. These days, Dennis's role might be described as Adoring Slave: he runs the household, chauffeurs Anthony and her authors around town, keeps the Selwa Anthony Author Management Agency accounts. In other words, he takes care of the practical necessities, freeing Anthony to peruse submissions from promising new writers and look after those already in her stable. She represents about 60 authors, she says. "I'd be working with at least 25 at any one time." Though she has an office in the apartment, she prefers to read manuscripts somewhere comfortable, such as the lounge or the sunroom. "I'm hoping to discover something fantastic when I start reading," she says. "I don't want it to be work." I'm hoping to discover something fantastic when I start reading. I don't want it to be work. Anthony rarely takes on established writers. For her, spotting and cultivating talent is where the thrill lies, even if she does little to encourage would-be authors to get in touch. Her agency website offers no email address or phone number: if you want to send her your work, your only option is to wangle her contact details out of someone in her network of friends and clients. "It felt like a back-door entry to a special club," says TV presenter and writer Andrew Daddo of his admission to the fold.

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You won't get through the door unless Anthony believes you have potential. But once you're in, you're in. While I research this story, several writers impress on me how thankful they are for her unshakeable faith in them and for her unstinting efforts on their behalf. Anna Romer, whose fourth novel comes out in May, was with Anthony's agency for 10 years before landing a book contract. During that decade, Anthony encouraged her to try her hand at different genres  thrillers, mysteries, romance, fantasy  and kept sending Romer's work to publishers, who kept rejecting it. "She'd say, 'Look, just keep going. You'll get there,' " says Romer. "She was steady as a rock." Literary agents work on commission. For successfully negotiating a publishing contract, an agent takes a percentage of the author's earnings from the book. Romer remembers feeling guilty that Anthony had championed her for so long for no financial reward: "I used to say to her, 'Let me pay something.' And she'd say, 'No, no, that will come when you sell a book.' " Kate Morton, now in her early 40s, was studying English literature at the University of Queensland when she made her first attempt at writing a novel almost 20 years ago. Anthony, who was given the manuscript, tells me she decided against passing it on to publishers: "The first one wasn't worth showing anyone." Morton's second manuscript was better, but the agent's attempt to find a publisher for it failed. Anthony respected Morton's determination to persevere. "When they get rejected a couple of times but they still want to keep writing, then it's not for me to tell them to stop," she says. "If I feel the passion is there, I stick with them." When writers get rejected a couple of times but they still want to keep writing, then it's not for me to tell them to stop. In late 2004, Anthony had a visit from Annette Barlow, a respected editor at the Australian publishing firm Allen & Unwin. Anthony says Barlow was scouting for new material. As it happened, the agent had a printout of Morton's third manuscript, an incomplete novel centred on a grand country house in England in the 1920s. "I gave it, just on a whim, to Annette," Anthony says. "I said, 'Take this, have a read and tell me if it's the type of thing you're looking for.' " Soon afterwards Anthony was able to relay exciting news to Morton, who was living in Brisbane with her husband, musician and composer Davin Patterson, and their first child: "I said to Kate, 'Allen & Unwin are interested. How long do you think it will take to do the last 50,000 words?' She said, 'About eight weeks.' I said, 'Do it in four. Get babysitters.' " The result was The Shifting Fog, published in Australia in 2006. Billed as "a rich and engrossing story of love, passion, secrets and lies", it sold well here. But Morton's big break came in 2007, when the novel, launched in Britain under the title The House at Riverton, was named "read of the year" by the Richard and Judy Book Club, the UK equivalent of Oprah's Book Club. British sales reportedly soared to more than 750,000. Morton is now the author of six international bestsellers, all of them intricately plotted historical mystery-romances. By last August, when Anthony v Morton was heard in the NSW Supreme Court, she had sold more than 11 million books. It seems to Hachette Australia's Vanessa Radnidge that both good management and good luck played a part in Morton's ascent to literary stardom. "It was like all the planets aligned," says Radnidge. "That's not denying Kate Morton's talent. But there are so many other writers equally as talented." Morton's sixth book, The Clockmaker's Daughter, got middling reviews when released late last year. The Washington Post called it "tedious" and "convoluted". But Morton has millions of fans around the world and one of them is Juliet Rogers, chief executive of the Australian Society of Authors (ASA). "You have to be good to be as successful as Kate is," says Rogers. "In her genre, she's a master."

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Before the lawsuits robbed Anthony of the will to celebrate, the highlight of her year  and one of the cheeriest events on the Australian publishing industry calendar  was the annual dinner at which she presented the SASSY (Selwa's Authors' Success Stories of the Year) Awards. A Good Weekend report on the 2012 awards noted that Anthony took a moment at the microphone to thank her hair stylist, florist, personal trainer and naturopath, along with the designer of her fabulous sequinned frock. In 2013, the winner of the ultimate prize  the Pink SASSY  was Morton, whose acceptance speech was delivered in her absence by Allen & Unwin chief executive Robert Gorman. The author thanked Anthony for believing in her in the lean unpublished years: "She answered my phone calls herself, read drafted manuscripts, offered words of encouragement and  when necessary  words that urged me to move on and write the next one." Morton added: "People say writing is a lonely profession, but I say they just haven't found the right agent." For Anthony, watching Morton's sales figures shoot skyward felt like the exhilarating culmination of her career. "She said Kate was the writer she'd been waiting for all her life," says one of her close friends, non-fiction author Sue Williams. "To have everything go so horribly wrong has been a huge blow for her." Kate Morton and Selwa Anthony at Anthonys SASSY Awards in 2010. Credit:Craig Peihopa A couple of years ago, Anthony tripped over a barrier that kept the chihuahuas out of her bedroom. She says her first thought as she hit the floor and felt her right wrist break was: "How am I going to put on my make-up?" Applying eyeliner and mascara left-handed proved so tricky that she had semipermanent false eyelashes affixed instead. Unlike some of her writers, who tell her they do their best work in pyjamas, she sees home-based employment as no excuse to let standards of personal presentation slip. "She will be completely done up any time you go around there," says Williams, adding that Anthony rarely goes out for meetings. "Everyone goes to her. The heads of publishing houses, even the heads of overseas publishing houses, all traipse to her place. She really holds court." Shona Martyn was a frequent visitor when she was publishing director at HarperCollins Publishers. "I tended to take little cakes or flowers," says Martyn, who nevertheless kept in mind that these were not social occasions. To be distracted by the dogs or the water views or Dennis and his tea tray would have been a mistake, because Anthony herself was thinking of only one thing: getting her writers the highest possible price for their manuscripts. "She was completely focused on the deal," says Martyn, now editor of Spectrum in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald. "She's a businesswoman, albeit one with purple nails." Since the 1980s, when Anthony started her agency on the advice of her confidante Colleen McCullough, she has dealt mainly in popular mainstream fiction, particularly fiction aimed at women  the kinds of books that rarely get reviewed in the arts sections of newspapers but nevertheless fly off bookshop shelves. "There was a gap in the market for somebody willing to develop that kind of writer," says the ASA's Juliet Rogers. "Many of the other agents were focusing more on the literary end." Lyn Tranter, director of Australian Literary Management, gives credit where it's due: "Selwa is very good at judging commercial work. They're not the sort of books I'd buy or I'd read, but hey, good luck to her."

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Anthony tells me she goes on gut feel. If she gets a craving for Smith's crisps when reading a manuscript, she takes it as a sign from the publishing gods that she has in her hands a possible bestseller. "Brian," she shouts to her husband, who has returned to the kitchen. "Open the cupboard. The one that has the Smith's chips in it." Four packets in stock, he reports. I'll jump up and down if a cover isn't right, because you do judge a book by its cover. And its title. Many agents step politely to one side after selling a manuscript to a publisher but Anthony takes a keen interest in every stage of the book's production. "To the point where publishers quail a little when she rings," says Shona Martyn. "Most publishers find dealing with Selwa quite challenging because she is so determined and so controlling about covers and so on." Overbearing, is the way some put it. "Nobody is in two minds about her," says Sue Williams. "They either love her or they find her too controlling and too difficult." Anthony is unrepentant. "I'll jump up and down if a cover isn't right," she says, "because you do judge a book by its cover. And its title." Geoffrey McGeachin, whose first novel was a comic romp about a bank manager's mid-life crisis, remembers Anthony's delight when the publishers agreed to the title she wanted: "Selwa rang and said, 'They're going with Fat, Fifty and Fed! I feel like I've won the lottery.' " McGeachin claims to have believed for a long time that he was Anthony's only client. "Because whenever you ring Selwa, you just get straight through," he says. He has a theory that she sees the entire world in terms of publishing opportunities. "You'll be discussing something, an event or a person, and Selwa gets this look in her eye and goes, 'Mmmm, there's a book in that.' " Ideas. She's got a million of 'em. "I have plots in my head that I give to authors," says Anthony, who likes her clients to send her a few chapters at a time, so she can give them feedback and help shape the narrative. Anna Romer tells me that in her new novel, Under the Midnight Sky, the protagonist was originally a beekeeper. "As the story developed, Selwa said, 'I think it might work better if you make the character a journalist.' " Romer resisted. She loved the beekeeping thing. "Then I remembered that Selwa is always right," she says with a laugh. Beekeeper out, journalist in. Selwa's not really in it for the money. She's in it for Australian writing. She's incredibly patriotic, much more than most people I know. The NSW Supreme Court heard that Morton had earned more than $17 million from global book sales, and that her agent had retained $2.8 million in commissions. By the standards of the local industry, these are astronomical sums. Anthony emphasises to me that her business hadn't previously been especially lucrative: that they live in a waterside apartment is due largely to Dennis's profitable dabbling in the real estate market. In any case, Sue Williams gets the impression the windfall from Morton's books was less important to Anthony than seeing her author conquer the world. "Selwa's not really in it for the money," Williams says. "I think she's in it for Australian writing. She's incredibly patriotic, much more than most people I know."

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The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, Anthony grew up in the NSW central-western town of Cowra. Her father, Abraham Tannous  he changed his surname to Anthony  started his life in Australia as a travelling salesman. Later, he and his wife, Josephine, opened a drapery store in Cowra's main street. They and their growing family  Anthony was the fourth of seven children  lived above the shop. Anthony says her parents, both avid readers, were fiercely proud of their adopted country. Abraham, inspired by the title of Ethel Turner's classic novel, referred to his kids as "seven little Australians". After Anthony left school, she moved to Sydney to work in the book department at David Jones. She was back in Cowra, aged about 19, when her father, "the most gentle man", shot himself in the drapery store's changing room. "It never leaves you," she says of the suicide. "It damages everybody." Her first marriage was unhappy, and she eventually walked out with her two children, Anthea, then seven, and Linda, three. To support them, she got a job with the Grahame Book Company, rising to be retail and merchandising manager of the Sydney chain's five stores. She adored bookselling. "Every day something new happened," she says. "A great book came in, or a celebrity walked in " One day in 1977 that celebrity was Colleen McCullough, on a promotional tour for The Thorn Birds. Anthony immediately hit it off with big, loud, clever McCullough, and the two became best friends. Anthony was executor to the estate of novelist Colleen McCullough. Credit:Danielle Smith Before meeting Brian Dennis, Anthony was single for a few years. "Had a couple of affairs, but they were kept secret," she says just as Dennis walks into the room. He affects shock: "You what?" They married in 1981. Three years later, McCullough tied the knot with Ric Robinson, a Norfolk Islander more than a decade her junior. "We'd laugh about the fact that we both married younger men," says Anthony (whose age is a mystery to all but a few intimates). As the years went by, she and Dennis became aware that McCullough's relationship with Robinson was rocky. "There were times when we knew she wanted to leave him," Anthony says, "and then there were times when she didn't." McCullough died aged 77 in January 2015 on Norfolk Island, a speck in the ocean between New Zealand and New Caledonia. Anthony, who was the executor of her estate  but never her agent  went to court to prevent Robinson from inheriting real estate and other assets worth about $2 million (as well as some debts). In July 2014, McCullough had written a will leaving everything to the University of Oklahoma, which had awarded her an honorary doctorate. Lawyers for Robinson said the so-called "Oklahoma will" was superseded by two documents  one signed by McCullough in October 2014 and the other two weeks before her death  which set out her intention to revert to her original plan of making her husband her only beneficiary. In evidence, Anthony recounted a conversation in which McCullough said of Robinson: "I've kicked him out for good this time. He has a mistress!" But McCullough's attitude to Robinson chopped and changed. She ended up taking him back, telling Anthony that her near-blindness and physical frailty meant she needed around-the-clock assistance, and she couldn't afford to pay a professional carer. That was the irony of the stoush over the estate: though The Thorn Birds sold more than 30 million copies (still a record for a novel by an Australian author) and McCullough published another couple of dozen books, among them a series of seven acclaimed novels set in ancient Rome, most of her money had been frittered away by the time of her death.

AdvertisementYoung's big "scoop", as it were, is challenging the homely origin myth of News Ltd, by speculating that its founders J. E. Davidson and Gerald Mussen were bankrolled in their original purchases of the Barrier Miner and the Port Pirie Recorder by Collins House  that fabled complex at 360 Collins Street where a number of Australian mining and manufacturing companies were headquartered, and at the peak of its tentacular reach between the wars when it involved such strong-willed personalities as W.L. Baillieu, Theodore Fink, W.S. Robinson and Colin Fraser. Young believes that Collins House, concerned about industrial unrest at their Broken Hill mother lode, was keen for a congenial press voice in the area. It's an interesting conjecture, because that's what it is  persuasive rather than definitive, a circumstantial case based on Davidson's seemingly limited financial resources and Collins House's concerns ahead of what became an epic 18-month strike. There's also a few issues with it, including that Collins House wasn't much minded by the strike, which coincided with a postwar commodities price plunge. Young as good as admits she can't be sure ("seems beyond doubt", "must have had other financial backers") but at length decides "the company's history now need to be rewritten", sniffily deriding Davidson as the "founder" in inverted commas. But where Collins House is concerned, Young proves rather prone to conspiratorial thinking. To be fair, Collins House is long overdue its own book  it was the nearest equivalent in Australian left-wing demonology to the Rothschilds in Europe and the Morgans in the US. It comes into Young's purview because of shares in the Herald and Weekly Times owned by Baillieu and Fink, Murdoch's friendship with the Baillieus and testier relations with Fink. As Young puts it in one of her rather involuted sentences: "The many different companies that comprised Collins House were part of a sprawling labyrinth of assets held in a remarkable web of family and friendship networks that revolved around the Baillieu family Collins House was made up of many loose and flexible alliance between these companies, alliances cemented through bonds of friendship and family."

The confusion of the metaphors  the labyrinthine web, the flexible cement  is evocative of her tangled thinking. Young tends to assume that Collins House moved monolithically like an American trust or a Japanese zaibatsu. She loves the word "linked" and uses it rather idly. "Collins House had been linked with British finance since the late 1890s," she says at one point. Well, yes, inasmuch as there was no independent Australian finance: our population and savings pool were too small to fund the country's development. In Young's version, the Herald and Weekly Times was the obedient promotional tool of Collins House. But she struggles to find the evidence. Sure, the HWT was pro-conscription during World War I, but the position was hardly outlandish. Many, rightly or wrongly, thought it would be a quicker way to win the war  which also hardly accords with Young's inference that Collins House favoured conscription because it would prolong profitable conflict. The best example Young can furnish of Collins House "propaganda" is support that the West Australian, then briefly controlled by an Murdoch-led syndicate, lent support to a gold bounty. But this policy would have enjoyed automatic popularity in Western Australia, not just at Collins House. There were also cases where the HWT argued against Collins House's interests, such as when it opposed tariff protection for newsprint at the time Collins House was trying to establish an indigenous industry. There is a simpler explanation for the HWT, and, indeed, other newspapers, writing about ventures associated with Collins House, which is that these were felt good for the country. Young's attempts to go all Woodward and Bernstein on "money trails", and to make Keith Murdoch a "puppet" of "money men", mainly exhibit the 21st century's incomprehension of an older, plainer patriotism. Young's sole allowance for this motivation is a condescending sneer: "Murdoch had promoted many Collins House ventures in the papers he controlled, but considered himself a patriot, and probably viewed his promotion of mining activities, aircraft manufacturing, banking, paper manufacturing and other ventures, to be in the national interest." Were they not?Bok Bok B'Gerk's hot-air balloon brooches.

The Canberra Balloon Festival is over but you can still keep it close to your heart with one of these funky hot-air balloon brooches.

They are the work of the brilliantly-named label Bok Bok B'Gerk (think chickens) which will have a stand at the Handmade Canberra Market on this weekend at Exhibition Park in Canberra.

The Ballarat-based business will be among 270 stalls at the markets, which are on Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4pm.

Handmade Canberra founder and owner Julie Nichols says 20 per cent of the stallholders are new to the March market.More than 1100 students have called on the ACT government to reinstate a bus route that travels through the Australian National University, amid fears a lack of transport would make it difficult for students to travel to and from the campus.

Disability advocates have also raised concerns about cutting the route, which travels between Belconnen and Woden and services the Canberra Institute of Technology campus at Bruce and the Calvary hospital.

ANU student advocates Zyl Hovenga-Wauchope, left, and Madhumitha Janagaraja are among more than 1000 students calling for the ANU bus service to be saved in the new bus network. Credit:Elesa Kurtz

Madhumitha Janagaraja, who has an immune condition and joint pain, lives on campus and has been using the Number 3 bus for the past three years. She is also ANU student association disability officer.

Unable to walk the one kilometre journey to the closest alternative bus in the city, Ms Janagaraja said she was unsure how she would get around Canberra when the Number 3 route was axed next month under the government's new bus network.Given the tragedy of the Christchurch shootings, Anzac Day 2019 may turn out to be one of the most moving yet, as it honours the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who served in the Gallipoli campaign and all who have fought and died in combat.

It also gives us a chance to once again remember the strong ties between the two countries, our shared history and regard for each other.

New Zealand students perform the haka during a vigil to commemorate victims of the Christchurch shootings. Credit:AP

We put the question to the Australian War Memorial on Friday: would be any greater emphasis on the New Zealand contribution this April 25, given the Christchurch tragedy? Perhaps a haka?

Wouldn't that be stirring? Uplifting? Beautiful?"Doesn't matter", "all the money's in Sydney": these are just some of the views of Queanbeyan punters have as the region around Canberra heads to the polls on Saturday.

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Two of the seats up for grabs across the ACT border are Goulburn and Monaro, the former generally regarded as a safe Liberal seat and the other considered a bellwether; whoever takes it, tends to take parliament.

Monaro's incumbent is Nationals MP and NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro, who is fighting for his third term against multiple parties, including Country Labor's Bryce Wilson.

But in the Tourist Hotel on Queanbeyan's Monaro Street, James Moffat and Chris "Sharky" Heap are sceptical of what anyone will bring to the border town.The silence spoke volumes. As the High Court closed the door on a legal bid to bring an alleged killer to justice for the murder of three Indigenous children on the NSW Mid North Coast, there was nothing to say in court but grieve.

Outside court, the silence turned to rage and tears. The families of Colleen Walker, 16, Evelyn Greenup, 4, and Clinton Speedy-Duroux, 16, have campaigned tirelessly for the man they believe is responsible for the children's deaths to be tried for the alleged crimes in a single case.

Friends and family of the victims of the Bowraville murders, including Ronella "Dolly" Jerome, react to the High Courts decision on Friday. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

On Friday, the High Court  Chief Justice Susan Kiefel and Justices Virginia Bell and Stephen Gageler  said it had "no reason to doubt the correctness" of a NSW Court of Criminal Appeal ruling refusing to make orders paving the way for a trial.

Clinton's aunt, Ronella "Dolly" Jerome, yelled in fury outside court about the 29-year "rut of injustice" the families have been stuck in since the disappearance of their children from the same road in Bowraville over five months from 1990 to 1991.Anna Alexandrova Palmer claims having no memory of why 130 million Swiss francs ($184 million) were transferred to a Bulgarian company owned by her husband, Clive.

Nor could she explain $40 million being transferred to Mr Palmer's political United Australia Party (UAP).

The two transactions by Mineralogy, while Ms Palmer was sole director of her husband's flagship mining company, were revealed as she gave evidence in the Federal Court in Brisbane on Friday.

Clive Palmer's wife leaves the Brisbane Federal Court after giving evidence. Credit:AAP

Ms Palmer, a chartered accountant and lawyer, faced the court for the second time to answer questions about her role with Mineralogy in 2016-18, having done so last week.Heads were bowed, eyes were closed and some were gripping their tissues while wiping away their tears as King George Square fell silent for one minute to remember the Christchurch terror attack victims.

About 700 people gathered in Brisbane's CBD for a vigil on Friday night, just one week after 50 Muslim worshippers were shot dead in what was believed to be an ideologically inspired terror attack.

One of the victims was the father of a Brisbane City Council staff member.

Muslima Fadia Shamseldin signing the condolence book for the Christchurch victims. Credit:Jocelyn Garcia

Lord mayor Graham Quirk said his thoughts were with the staff member who had flown to New Zealand to grieve with her family.Commuters were told to expect delays up to an hour after a train was towed at South Brisbane Station on Friday morning.

TransLink warned that people travelling outbound on the Cleveland line could endure 60-minute delays from 9am on Friday.

A Queensland Rail spokeswoman said the train had suffered a "rollingstock fault" and was towed to the main yard for testing.

She said it was not yet clear what caused the fault or if it was engine-related.Prince Charles heads to Cuba amid US tensions

AFP, Havana :

Britain's Prince Charles and his wife Camilla will make the first royal visit to communist-run Cuba on Sunday at a time when ally Washington is seeking to ramp up sanctions against the island.

The 70-year-old prince was asked by the British government to add Cuba to a long-planned tour of Caribbean nations as Brexit spurs it to seek alternative trading partners to the European Union.

"Royal visits are used as part of diplomacy in the British system. They're a useful way of sending messages, of making contacts and moving to next stages in diplomatic negotiations," said former British ambassador Paul Webster Hare.

The visit comes as US President Donald Trump threatens to tighten sanctions against Cuba, branding Havana part of a "troika of tyranny" along with leftist Latin American allies Venezuela and Nicaragua.

The White House is threatening to activate the long-dormant Helms-Burton Act which extended the 1962 US embargo to apply to foreign companies trading with Cuba. Charles's Clarence House headquarters said the trip to the socialist island had been organized at the behest of the British government, aimed at boosting "growing bilateral relations" and "cultural links".

"It's positive in terms of demonstrating the UK's wish to have closer relations with Cuba, that we have an independent policy to that of the United States," according to Caribbean Council head Chris Bennett.

President Miguel Diaz-Canel will host a dinner for the royal couple in Havana during the visit, but there are no official plans to meet his predecessor, Raul Castro, who still heads the Cuban Communist Party.

The prince is unlikely to raise the issue of human rights or Cuba's support for Venezuela's embattled regime of President Nicolas Maduro.

"I doubt it would be appropriate for him to make any public statement of that nature because he is not a political figure in that sense," said Bennett.



A man who strangled a Brisbane mother with whom he had a relationship before robbing her has been found guilty of her murder.

Robert Graham Thomas was convicted on Friday of 44-year-old Danielle Miller's murder after she was found dead in her Greenslopes home in October 2015.

After killing her, Thomas stole her bank cards and withdrew $2000 cash from her account.

He sent $350 cash to his wife in the Philippines and paid in cash for return flights there, the Brisbane Supreme Court trial heard.

Prosecutors believed Ms Miller and Thomas, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter but denied murdering her, may have been in a sexual relationship.A search is under way for a man believed to be missing in his vessel in the Lockhart River since last week.

The 54-year-old Lower Daintree man went to sea on March 16 in a 30-foot commercial fishing boat in the Portlands Roads area but had not been seen since.

Police believed he was heading in a southerly direction in the Lockhart River and hold concerns for his safety.

Queensland Police Service water police were searching for a missing fisherman.

Water Police with assistance from Lockhart River Police began to co-ordinate a full search at first light of the surrounding waters.David Roubin (left) and another national serviceman are met by a colonel at the start of a course at north-west Sydney's Scheyville Officer Training Unit. Credit:John Patrick O'Gready As an author, I had to empathise with all my characters, not just those who happened to be journalists, drinkers and novelists. If I failed to make any of them real  to the reader or myself  their words and mine would lie lifeless on the page. So I listened closely to bellicose patriots, opportunists and authoritarians, as well as disenchanted pacifists, bewildered victims, poets and cranks, and I tried to understand them. For the first 80 or so interviews, I asked every man the same questions: about where they were born, where their parents worked and where they went to school. As each man described his circumstances and upbringing, I came to realise that, given a similar background, I would probably have done the same thing as they did. This held true for almost everyone except the war heroes and the SAS guys. I knew I could never have become them, no matter how hard the Christian Brothers had belted me, or what my parents had told me about communism. My doctoral supervisor, Professor Jeffrey Grey from the University of NSW, was surprised that so many veterans were willing to speak freely with me, bearing in mind I was not a national serviceman, I had never been in the army and I did not fight in Vietnam. Grey, whose father, General Ron Grey, was a commanding officer of the infantry battalion 7RAR during the Vietnam War, told me a joke:

Q: How many Vietnam veterans does it take to change a light bulb?

A: You wouldn't know because YOU WEREN'T THERE! The accepted wisdom has it that Vietnam veterans will not talk about the war, for all kinds of dark and terrible reasons. And there was probably a time when they would not have spoken  just as a silence of returned men follows every war. The troops who came back from the world wars might never have talked about Kokoda, El Alamein or Changi with their children, but they often opened up in retirement, to their grandchildren. But when Vietnam veterans did not immediately tell their stories, it only served to intensify the suspicions of both sympathisers and detractors that they must have something awful to hide. Many of my friends knew a Vietnam veteran  one of my friends actually turned out to be a Vietnam veteran  and I started the project by interviewing them, along with some former soldiers I met at the National Vietnam Veterans Museum on Phillip Island. I eschewed regimental associations and, in the beginning, veterans' organisations, because I (wrongly) assumed they attracted a particular kind of veteran. My "snowball sampling" was successful to an extent but, once the snowball reached a certain size, it would generally melt away. So I started to look for men in the phone book. I isolated certain incidents, contacts or units that I hoped to investigate further, found the names of the soldiers involved in news stories or history books or lists on the internet, then searched for them in White Pages by their home state (with national servicemen, this was distinguishable from the first digit of their service number: the number one indicated NSW; three was Victoria; five was WA, and so on). If they had a moderately distinctive name, they were generally easy to track down. If they had a common surname but had returned to the town where they were born (as indicated on the Nominal Roll), it was not hard to find them, either.

Then I called them, out of the blue. A typical conversation would go something like this: Me: Hello, my name is Mark Dapin. Is that A Veteran? A Veteran (slowly and suspiciously): Ah, yeeeeeeah, mate. Me: The A Veteran who served in Vietnam? AV (hesitantly): Ah, yeeeeeah, mate.

Me: I know this is a bit of a strange phone call to receive out of the blue on a Thursday afternoon, but would you be willing to help me with a book I'm writing about national service and the Vietnam War? AV: Ah, yeeeeeah, mate. Me: Would I perhaps be able to interview you? AV: Ah, yeah, mate, but I'm off to the bowlo just now. Call me back in a couple of hours and we can have a yarn. Are you in Mukinbudin yourself? Do you want to come around to our place? We can fix you up with a feed. Only half a dozen men declined to talk. Most of the others acted as if they received such a call every day of the week and had already put the kettle on.

Some veterans believed unusual things. One man assured me that Vietnam was a Muslim country, for example. Another veteran, sadly, seemed to be in a manic stage of mental illness, and the curious statements he made were perhaps distorted by his condition. Two men seemed to have been pretending to have been to Vietnam. If it were at all possible, I would conduct the interview in person. I would be invited into the veteran's home, which often had some kind of elaborate security system, where I would be introduced to the veteran's wife, who was invariably concerned about whether I had eaten. She would make me a cup of tea and hand me a slice of cake, then generally leave the room, perhaps returning later with a cheese-and-tomato sandwich. In the absence of a spouse, the veteran might give me a slice of cake. I ate a lot of cake. In a couple of cases, we met at a pub or a bar, but it was usually too early in the day for most men to have a drink. Many veterans kept a small war room  or war alcove  in their homes, with a regimental crest on the wall and Paul Ham's Vietnam: The Australian War on the bookshelf. Most talked easily and fluidly and seemed to enjoy the conversation. At the end of the interview, they would usually put me in touch with a friend who, they thought, would be happy to talk to me  and he nearly always was. I did not ask my interviewees about their lives after the army, although many of them told me anyway. I did not ask any how they felt about the Vietnam War in retrospect. I felt there was something voyeuristic about exploring their feelings today, something pornographic and mean. A cowardly journalist saves the toughest question until last: "So, looking back, knowing what you know now, was a lost war really worth the death of your best friend ...?" My first Jewish veteran, the late and lovely David Roubin, told me he had agreed with the Vietnam War in the 1960s and he would let me know what he thought of it now when I, inevitably, raised the question. I never did  although he later said he believed it to have been a just war. The first two SAS men I interviewed both said they would have supported Ho Chi Minh had they been Vietnamese; another was convinced of the justice of the Communist cause; another described himself as "fairly left-wing", then and now. A former artillery officer who later marched in The Moratorium to End the War told me that, after contact with Americans in Vietnam, he concluded that "Ho Chi Minh might have some better ideas than these guys".

I listened to bellicose patriots, opportunists and authoritarians, as well as disenchanted pacifists, bewildered victims, poets and cranks. However, of those who expressed an opinion  on or off the record  the majority remained in favour of both national service and the Vietnam War. Some believed the war should have been fought to the last man, and that every Australian of military age should have been mobilised and deployed. Most would not go that far but were broadly nostalgic for some kind of conscription scheme to help young men grow up strong, fit and honourable. Another of my favourite veterans, who was twice blown up by mines in Vietnam, assured me that national service had never done him any harm. Gerry Dapin (left), the authors father, in about 1950. Credit:Courtesy of Mark Dapin Professor Jeffrey Grey was a fantastic doctoral supervisor: sceptical, analytical, scathing, encouraging, warm, funny and blunt. I ended up writing my thesis largely to please him. On the morning I emailed him my final abstract, I received a message headed "Passing of Professor Jeffrey Grey". I thought it meant he had passed the abstract. In fact, he had died of a heart attack, aged 57. Jeff's death brought me lasting personal sadness, but the source of my professional pain was the tears of my veterans. According to my notes  and I now find this hard to believe  about 60 wept at some time during our interview. As one eye welled up, they would tip back their face and pretend nothing was happening. The tear would grow and they would lean away still further, in the hope it might stay in place until they had finished speaking. But the weight of sadness would increase until it pulled down their heads and the tear would roll, free and unacknowledged, from cheek to chin. I was moved to see an Afghanistan veteran cry this same way on the 2016 ABC documentary series Afghanistan: Inside Australia's War.

When my interviewees cried, I felt as though I was bringing tears into their lives. It was as if I was a vampire feeding on their grief, sucking out their small stories to polish them and package them and make them into one big story for me. The crying became so commonplace that I began to warn men that it might happen. Invariably, they smiled and assured me that it would not. Then, halfway through their story, they would tip back their head. Sometimes they would be talking about the death of a mate or some other terrible trauma, but more often it was the recall of simple facts about ordinary life that seemed to sadden them. If I saw many men cry, I cried only once, in an interview with Jim Booker, who had served in the infantry with Barry Heard, the author of the accomplished 2004 national service memoir, Well Done, Those Men. I did not use that section of Booker's interview in The Nashos' War because it related to his life after national service. Booker was a beautiful man, too young and sweet for the army. When he was drafted, he was still playing with Meccano. He was posted to infantry but trained as a hygiene dutyman. In Vietnam, they called him "Blowfly", because part of his work was to clean the toilets and keep the blowflies away. He was proud of his nickname  it made him feel like he belonged  and disappointed when he learnt other men with the same job had traditionally been called "Blowfly", too. His wife, Carol, was within earshot in the kitchen as he told me, "We were down in Melbourne for a few days for a battalion reunion, and I caught up with Barry Heard for the first time since Vietnam. I wasn't really pleased with the way I was just whisked home for my discharge. I never had the chance to say, 'How can I contact ?' But at the reunion, I met guys I hadn't seen for ages, and  " As his breathing quickened, Booker's voice began to crack, but he struggled to keep talking. "Barry did say that he was hoping to catch up with me at the reunion, so that was good. We gave each other a big hug. There were a couple of other guys, and they said to Carol, when she was introduced, 'Here's Jim. When we came back to the camp after operations, we'd say, "Here's Jim. Oh good." ' I always had a cheery face for them." Tears spilled down Booker's cheeks. He asked Carol to join us and explain. "He was just moved by the fact people recognised him," she said. "More than one said, 'We looked forward to coming back to see you. You were always so kind.' You feel very humble in the  hygiene area."Thunderstorms, heavy rainfall and large hailstones pummelled Melbourne's eastern suburbs on Friday evening, and authorities are warning more could be on the way.

The Bureau of Meteorology earlier issued a severe thunderstorm warning for suburbs across Melbourne, stretching from Brunswick at the western-most point all the way to Croydon and Yarra Junction in the outer east.

The heaviest rainfall was recorded in Blackburn South, which was drenched with 30 millimetres of rain. Mooroolbark, Montrose and Surrey Hills all experienced falls greater than 22 millimetres.

While conditions had eased by about 8.30pm, authorities said further thunderstorms were still possible later in the night.The Catholic Archdiocese of Perth released a lengthy statement on Saturday to the media about the case. In the statement Reverend Timothy Costelloe said on late Thursday evening, he received a text message from the Vicar General of the Archdiocese asking him to contact him urgently. "I rang him immediately. The Vicar General informed me that Fr Tran had died earlier that day and that it appeared he may have taken his own life after being confronted by allegations of the sexual abuse of a young teenage girl," the Archbishop of Perth said. "I did not know at that time who had confronted him - the police, the complainant's family or someone else - but I was informed that the police had been at the Armadale presbytery at some time during the day and had searched Fr Tran's room. "My understanding now is that this took place after Fr Tran's body had been found."

Reverend Costelloe said on Friday Auxiliary Bishop Donald Sproxton went to the Armadale parish to provide support to the assistant priest and to the parish and school communities. "After informing the staff in my own office of Fr Tran's death, I went to the Whitford parish to provide what support I could there," he said. "Because the facts surrounding this tragic event were not clear to me at that time, we simply informed people that Fr Tran had died suddenly the day before and that we presumed his death would be investigated by the Coroner, which is the normal practice in these circumstances. "I was not seeking to hide anything. I could not share information which I had not yet been able to verify." Reverend Costelloe said the family of the young girl involved had done the right thing in ensuring

the matter was investigated by the police.

"Had we been contacted by the police we would have cooperated fully, as we always do," he said. "The Church in the Archdiocese of Perth has very clear protocols and procedures for dealing with these matters, and we follow them. "This news is heart-breaking for everyone involved. The young girl who with her family found

the courage to go to the police must be supported in every way, and the Archdiocese stands

ready to help in whatever way we can. "The parish communities of Armadale and Whitford, and the school communities with which Fr Tran was involved, will be especially dismayed and disoriented following this news. "The clergy of the Archdiocese, already suffering so much because of the terrible sexual abuse crisis in the Church, will struggle to know how to manage their own shock and disappointment while trying to provide what support they can for their people.

"I remain committed to doing everything I can to eradicate this evil from the Church in this

Archdiocese." A young woman has told WAtoday that her partner found Father Joseph's body in Southern River about 5pm on Thursday. "He was at the back of our property, his car was there and he was about 20m from his car," she said. "I called triple 000, I reported it and I had to make a statement to the police. "They (the police) blocked my street off for a few hours.Thousands of residents in Port Hedland's low-lying areas are being advised to evacuate inland as Tropical Cyclone Veronica edges closer to the coast, expected to bring with it a "very dangerous storm tide".

The Pilbara's top cop has also used a community briefing on Friday afternoon to condemn the "stupidity" of some people swimming in the ocean.

Surfers at Port Hedland make the most of the waves, as police warn residents to stay out of the ocean. Credit:Facebook

Department of Fire and Emergency Services superintendent John Newman said the category four system was expected to make landfall at the weekend during high tide.

"In the worst case scenario, which would be the system crossing the coast to the west of Port Hedland and aligning with high tide, there is a very real risk of tides four metres above the highest astronomical tide," he said.A light rail driver who was suspended after running a red light and nearly colliding with a car is back on the job, Canberra Metro has confirmed.

Meanwhile new footage has emerged of a Canberra driver illegally parked on the light rail tracks during a red light.

Canberras light rail is set to launch on April 20. Credit:Karleen Minney

Both the light rail consortium and Transport Minister Meegan Fitzharris are urging people to be careful around the tracks, ahead of the start of services on April 20.

Ms Fitzharris said "people are really taking notice of light rail now" with testing occurring along the entire Civic to Gungahlin route and a major community awareness program going on.A program designed to keep at-risk students at school, which is reported to help save taxpayers billions of dollars, has won overwhelming support from formerly despairing parents.

But 20 years after it began at a single school on the Mornington Peninsula, Hands On Learning still has no federal government funding.

Student Tahlia Heinrich (right) with teachers Shara Rose (centre) and head of the Hands on Learning program at Heywood Secondary College Elly Colley. Credit:Tony Wright

The program, which has spread to 90 schools, mostly in Victoria, aims to prevent disengaged students from dropping out by involving them, one day a week, in practical exercises outside the classroom to teach them responsibility, teamwork and problem solving.

A recent survey of parents of children involved in Hands On Learning at 21 of those schools found extraordinary support, with 99 per cent of parents reporting the program had given their children the chance to learn by doing real and meaningful projects.The cost of fighting tobacco giant Phillip Morris's challenge to Australia's plain packaging laws in an international tribunal has been revealed as more than $23 million.

And despite winning the six-year battle against big tobacco, court documents revealed under Freedom of Information laws show taxpayers were left to foot legal bills worth $12 million, after a the cigarette manufacturer was ordered to pay about half of the Commonwealth's legal fees.

Plain packaging laws have replaced branding with large health warnings on tobacco products. Credit:Nic Walker

"That's outrageous, given they were knocked out in the case," former Treasurer Wayne Swan, who had helped draft the plain-packaging laws and was called by Australia to give evidence during secret hearings in 2015, told the The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

"It's just another example of why investor-state dispute settlement clauses shouldn't be entered into," Mr Swan said.Yin Cao from Lilyfield is one of almost 300,000 people in NSW eligible to vote for the first time this Saturday.

The 52-year-old, who was born in China and last month became an Australian citizen after 13 years as a resident, is embracing democracy with enthusiasm.

Yin Cao, 52, is voting for the first time on Saturday and has embraced it with enthusiasm. Credit:Wolter Peeters

"I have the right to vote but I also think I have a responsibility to use it well," Ms Cao said. "Ive never seen a ballot paper before and Ive been warned it might be confusing. I don't want to go in and tick the wrong box and then waste my vote."

About 5.3 million NSW residents are enrolled to vote in the state election, almost 145,000 more than for the 2016 federal election, according to the Australian Electoral Commission and its NSW counterpart.Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson admitted that the company hugely underestimated demand for its plug-in hybrid cars and now is hard at work to increase the production capacity.

Currently, Volvo does not have enough batteries, motors and other components to produce all the plug-in vehicles that it could sell. Further expansion should increase sales by 20-25% by the end of this year. The capacity is expected to triple compared to 2018, which should give the Swedish manufacturer a little room for new and updated models.

"We are not happy because we could sell more [plug-in hybrids], he said. We underestimated the demand. We are tripling the capacity from what we had about a year ago to where we will be at the end of this year."

According to Samuelsson, plug-in hybrids account for 10-15% of particular models offered in ICE and PHEV versions, globally.

Volvo PHEV sales in Europe according to JATO Dynamics:7 more killed including college student

Staff Reporter :

At least seven persons including a college student were killed and eight others injured in road accidents in Barishal and Magura districts on Friday.

The accident took places on the Barishal-Swarupkathi highway in Banaripara upazila of Barishal on Friday morning when a bus collided head-on with a human hauler, said Abdur Rahman Mukur, Banaripara Officer-in-Charge.

The deceaseds were identified as Shila Rani Haldar, a first-year student of Mathematic Department of Barishal BM College, Parveen, 40, her daughter Tanni, 20, Khokan, 40, Manik, 45, and Sohel, 32, driver of the human hauler.

Four injured are now undergoing treatment at the Barishal Sher-e-Bangla Medical College Hospital (SBMCH) while seriously injured Tamim, son of deceased Parveen, was on the way to Dhaka Medical College Hospital as his condition deteriorated, said Arabinda Biswas, Sub-Inspector of the Barishal Airport Police Station.

The condition of the injured persons is stated to be critical. Two of them sustained severe head injuries in the accident, said Shifat, an emergency doctor of the SBMCH.

In Magura, an ambulance driver died and three of a family sustained injuries in a road accident in Maghir Dhal area on the Magura-Jashore highway at around 9:00am.

Deceased Abul Hossain hails from Tekerhat while the injured are yet to be identified.

The accident occurred when the Satkhira-bound ambulance driver lost control over steering while overtaking a motorbike. The ambulance hit a roadside tree, leaving the four injured, said Sadar Police Station Officer-in-Charge Sirajul Islam.

The injured were taken to Magura 250-Bed Hospital where Abul Hossain died.

Later, the injured were shifted to Khulna Medical College and Hospital as their condition deteriorated.A Melbourne-based company has launched a smartphone app it claims can help local councils combat illegal rubbish dumping at a fraction of the cost.

The Gemineye Android app uses proprietary artificial intelligence software to analyse feeds from its solar-powered camera, which can be mounted in dumping hotspots.

The Gemineye Android app uses proprietary artificial intelligence software to analyse feeds from its solar-powered camera.

If it detects illegal activity, the app automatically notifies council staff, saving them from manually combing through hours of footage to find incidents of interest.

SenSen Networks, whose technology also powers one-third of NSW's speed cameras, claims its app is smart enough to tell the difference between someone legally and illegally disposing of rubbish.London: The UK has been given a reprieve of at least a fortnight to try and work out what it wants from Brexit.

British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a media conference at an EU summit in Brussels. Credit:AP

The announcement comes as local media revealed that Britain's military is planning for a no-deal Brexit from a nuclear bunker below its government headquarters.

Brexit had been due to happen on March 29  next Friday  but after a marathon session in Brussels on Thursday evening EU national leaders agreed to grant British Prime Minister Theresa Mays request for a delay.

Until April 12 all options will remain open and the cliff edge date will be delayed, European Council president Donald Tusk said. The UK government will still have a choice of [Mays] deal, no deal, a long extension or revoking [Brexit].Palm Beach, Florida: President Donald Trump tweeted on Friday that he had reversed his administration's decision to slap new sanctions on North Korea, with his press secretary explaining that he "likes" leader Kim Jong-un and doesn't think they're necessary.

The President's tweet took US Treasury officials by surprise as they had only announced sanctions the day before.

"I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!" Trump wrote from his private club in Palm Beach.

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about which sanctions Trump was referring. No new action against North Korea was announced by the Treasury Department on Friday, though Trump this week did threaten that new ones could be added.In a city known for its leaks, Mueller pulled off a rare feat. He kept a tight lid on both his office and the evidence he was amassing in his highly sensitive investigation that has cast a cloud over Trump's presidency. And he did it even as Trump relentlessly criticised him, calling the probe a "witch hunt" and the special counsel's team "thugs" and "angry Democrats". The adviser and the Dodge Charger When former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo agreed to an interview with Mueller in May 2018, he was told he would be picked up at the hotel where he was staying in Washington. On the lookout for a black government four-wheel drive, Caputo and his lawyer were surprised when an FBI agent drove up in his personal car, a white Dodge Charger. "Then he drove us 15 blocks to their location and we went in through the garage so that nobody would see," Caputo said in an interview. Caputo was questioned about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Manafort's aide Rick Gates and long-time Trump adviser Roger Stone. When the interview was over, Mueller's team told him they would take him back to his hotel. Caputo said Mueller's team was not happy with what he said next.

"I said I'm meeting a TV crew downstairs so I won't need a ride," Caputo said. "They weren't upset that I was talking to the media, they were disturbed that I was doing it in [front of] the office." Loading "They were concerned ... that would put their agents and attorneys at risk," Caputo said, adding that he agreed to meet the news crew at a different location nearby. Former Trump campaign advisor Sam Nunberg said an FBI agent picked him up at the train station to take him to the office. "You put your phone and any electronic devices and leave them in a compartment out front," Nunberg added. "It was a very plain office."

Nunberg said he went into a conference room with three tables, and prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, a member of Mueller's team, came in with three FBI agents, one female and two males. Roger Stone, former adviser to Donald Trump, is among several people who have been indicted as a result of Mueller's investigations. Credit:Bloomberg The office's location was not publicly revealed but was discovered by journalists. Still, it has not been widely publicised. Mueller's team has asked media outlets not to publish the exact location for security purposes. "We are working in a secure location in south-west D.C.," Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, has said. Staying out of the news

"In a town where everybody and their mother is trying to get on the front page, Bob Mueller was always trying to stay out of the news," said Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department spokesman. "He wanted to be judged on actions, not press conferences." Corallo, who was briefly a spokesman for Trump's legal team, was interviewed by Mueller's team in February 2018. Corallo and other witnesses summoned for interviews by Mueller's team said they were picked up from their lawyers' offices and taken to a secure parking garage in the building in south-west Washington. Loading The team's office suite was anonymous with no plaque on the door to identify its occupants, said Washington lawyer A. Joseph Jay, who represented a witness he declined to identify.

More than once, Jay recalled, members of Mueller's team expressed their commitment to confidentiality. "They made it clear on a number of occasions, 'We don't leak. You don't have to worry about that with us'." "By keeping to their code of silence, they were professionals," Jay said. "They weren't reacting to the spin. They were doing their jobs. They spoke through a number of indictments. They spoke through a number of sentencing memos." Mueller has remained silent throughout the investigation and his office has issued only one statement. In that statement, issued this past January, spokesman Carr labelled as "not accurate" a BuzzFeed News account describing evidence collected by the special counsel that allegedly showed that Trump had directed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. BuzzFeed has stood by its story. Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, himself a former federal prosecutor, also remarked on Mueller staying out of sight. "Whenever we talk to them, they say, 'We'll take it to Bob'. He's like the Wizard of Oz," Giuliani said.

Giuliani said although he was suspicious of leaks to the news media, he acknowledged he knew of none for sure from the special counsel's team and that nothing he told Mueller's office was leaked. "Mueller doesn't talk to us. I don't know why he'd talk to the press," the former New York mayor added. Joseph Campbell, a former assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division who worked at the agency when Mueller headed it, said the special counsel knows how to handle sensitive investigations and ignores the attacks on him. Loading "He went through 12 years starting with 9/11 of extremely critical and sensitive investigations around the world," said Campbell, referring to the 2001 attacks on the United States. "This is right in his wheelhouse."

"He is not affected by external criticism or speculation," Campbell added. Robert Litt, former general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said any leaks about the investigation appeared to have come from witnesses or their lawyers. "There's nothing he can do about that," Litt said, referring to Mueller. Litt said Mueller, the 74-year-old former US Marine Corps officer and architect of the modern FBI, probably "cares little about the public perception of him". "He cares," Litt said, "about doing the job right."Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC

Canarsie

They brought the Irish cheer!

The O salutes Kings County Justices Lawrence Knipel and Matthew DEmic, who on March 18 traded their gavels for guitars to perform Irish songs and stories during a St. Patricks Day celebration for elder members of Canarsies Jasa Center at the Hebrew Educational Society.

Knipel and DEmic played classic tunes such as When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, Tura Lura Lura, and Danny Boy to the packed room, according to the senior centers director Sue Ann Partnow, who said the duo made its musical debut at the oldsters clubhouse with a rock n rollthemed show last year.

Following the concert, attendees feasted on a traditional St. Patricks Day meal of corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes, which the hosts concluded with a special dessert course.

The Seaview Avenue centers President Ruth Cohen thanked the judges for taking time out of their busy schedules to regale the elders, whom she said are looking forward to DEmic and Knipels next show.

 Moses Jefferson

Borough wide

Roll out the welcome mat

A big welcome to Michael Angelone, who joins Northfield Bank as Senior Vice President and Commercial and Industrial Lending Team Leader for its Brooklyn market.

Angelone has more than 25 years of lending experience in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Mr. Angelones leadership background and knowledge of the local market will be instrumental to our strategic objectives of expanding our commercial lending and deposit portfolio in Brooklyn, said David Fasanella, Executive Vice President and Chief Lending Officer for Northfield Bank.

He is a graduate of St. Francis College and is actively involved in local community and civic organizations.

Calling for interns

Catholics Charities is now accepting applicants for its paid internship in its Brooklyn and Queens offices.

The Intern and Earn Program, formerly the Young Adult Internship Program, offers youth a paid internship starting at $15 an hour for 25 hours a week. Interns will be matched with employment, education, and advanced-training services geared towards their career or academic goals. Eligible candidates should be 16 to 24 years old; a city resident; not in school, unemployed, and legally

eligible to work in the U.S.

The program also includes work readiness training, financial literacy education, and healthy living activities.

For more, contact (718) 7269790 ext. 3017 or (347) 9880181. Walk-ins are available Tuesday and Thursday at the Queens North Community Center located at 9-18 27th Ave., second floor, in Astoria.

Bath Beach

Big honor

A round of applause for Bath Beach resident Ralph Tramantano, who The Columbia Association of U.S. Customs and Affiliated Federal Agents will honor as one of its 2019 Men of the Year during its annual dinner dance on May 11 on Long Island.

Tramantano is Senior Director of supply chain at Stone Source, LLC., overseeing the global order placement, shipping, and delivery of all purchased products, as well as the management of other key special projects.

Tramantano is a full-scholarship graduate of New York University Stern School of Business, with a degree in MarketingRetail Marketing and International Business. He has been a licensed U.S. Customs Broker since Sept. 13, 2000. In addition, he is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt and a Notary Public for the State of New York.Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC

The city must give a raise to New Yorks Finest, according to a Sheepshead Bay councilman, who claimed local cops struggle to make ends meet with the wages they earn protecting and serving the Big Apple.

Mayor DeBlasio should pay them a salary that means police officers dont have to worry each day about how to pay their rent, buy essentials, care for their elderly, and put food on the table, said Councilman Chaim Deutsch at a March 19 rally outside City Hall.

Deutsch that day delivered a letter to Hizzoner demanding salary bumps for Police Department officers, which he signed along with 36 other councilmembers, including 11 of Brooklyns 15 representatives.

The missive came as leaders of cop union the Police Benevolent Association begin a new round of contract negotiations with the city, roughly two years after Hizzoner signed off on the last pay raise for local authorities in 2017. And the fact that a majority of councilmembers support boosting police paychecks should be reason enough for the mayor to allocate more cash to cops, according to Deutsch.

The support that we had for this letter is unparalleled, and it sends a strong message to the mayor that our side of City Hall supports the police, the pol said.

City cops currently receive a starting salary of $42,500, which rises to $85,000 after five-and-a-half years with the force  but Deutsch blasted those sums as paltry when compared to figures he claimed other authorities outside  and inside  the Empire State rake in.

By five-and-a-half years on the job, officers in other states are earning at least $15,000 more than that. And Suffolk County police earn a whopping $54,000 more than NYPD officers he said.

Some 16 percent of all city police officers live in Kings County, according to data published by a gadfly who sued the city to get the statistics. And that data shows Brooklyns 11229 zip code  which incorporates much of Sheepshead Bay and Gerritsen Beach, and is represented by Deutsch and Councilman Alan Maisel (DFlatlands)  is home to 154 cops, the highest amount by local zip codes.

Kings Countys median household income, however, is $52,782, according to the United States Census Bureau  almost 25 percent more than a city cops starting salary. The federal data also shows that households with a 11229 zip code earn a median income of $59,287  38 percent more than the city pays rookie officers.

Deutsch noted those disparities at the rally, where he used DeBlasios own words to accuse him of lowballing officers, citing Hizzoners 2017 announcement of his so-called New York Works plan to create 100,000 jobs with good wages  which the mayor then defined then as more than $50,000 annually.

When Mayor DeBlasio promised to create 100,000 well-paying jobs in New York City, he himself defined well-paying jobs as $50,000 or more per year, Deutsch said.

A rep for DeBlasio, who claimed local cops are some of the countys best paid, said the mayor is working with the police union to reach an agreement on pay increases.

New York City police officers are some of the best compensated in the nation, said Raul Contreras. We remain committed to working with the PBA to come to a contract agreement that is fair to police officers and taxpayers. We proved we can accomplish this across the bargaining table in 2017, and we can do it again now.Dear Reader,

Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

We, however, have a request.



As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed.



Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard.



Digital EditorSix killed in Myanmar's Rakhine state as army battles rebels

Reuters, Yangon :

Six villagers were killed and five injured in Myanmar's Rakhine state amid clashes between government troops and ethnic Rakhine rebels, a lawmaker and residents said on Friday, hours after peace talks failed to resolve an escalating crisis.

Clashes took place in Buthidaung township in the northern part of Rakhine late on Thursday shortly after rebels from the Arakan Army, battling for greater autonomy for the region, met representatives of the military in the capital, Naypyitaw.

Rakhine State came to global attention after the Myanmar army drove about 730,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims across the border into Bangladesh late in 2017, but ethnic Rakhine are largely Buddhist, like the majority of Myanmar's people.

Photographs taken by a Rakhine lawmaker and obtained by Reuters show the blood-smeared bodies of four people, including a young boy and a middle-aged woman, lying in a dusty pit.

"They are civilians who were hiding in a bomb shelter," said Maung Thar Phyu, a civil society activist in the area. "It is terrible."

Military spokesman Brigadier-General Zaw Min Tun told Reuters by telephone there had been a battle to the south of Say Taung village at around 9 p.m.

He said the rebel Arakan Army had initiated the clashes and the incident would be investigated further.

An Arakan Army spokesman did not immediately respond to telephone calls from Reuters to seek comment.

The Rakhine MP who traveled to the area on Friday said residents told him soldiers had surrounded the village late on Thursday and bombarded it with heavy weapons.

"We brought five bodies...to Buthidaung town now," said Maung Kyaw Zan, an MP for the area. Six people were injured, with one dying later in hospital, he said, adding that all the other villagers had fled.

About 7,500 displaced people are scattered across 29 sites in Rakhine, the Myanmar office of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.

For weeks, most humanitarian agencies have been blocked from delivering aid to vast areas across the state's north.

"It is estimated that at least 95,000 people ... have been affected by access restrictions in the five townships of Kyauktaw, Ponnagyun, Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Rathedaung," the U.N. agency said.The lenders to are yet to come to an agreement on firming up a rescue package for the airline, which is left with a skeleton fleet. While State Bank of India (SBI), leader of the lenders consortium, is working overtime to arrange emergency funds, many other banks are resisting such a move. After a meeting of banks on Friday on ways to make funds available immediately, a source in the know said lenders other than SBI and Punjab National Bank had not come on board so far to chip in with their funds.

A senior executive at SBI said, We have told the government that any rescue plan will have to meet our commercial objectives. In the last few days, it has become more complicated without airline partner Etihads participation. Etihad, which owns 24 per cent in the airline, offered to sell its stake in the ailing airline at Rs 150 a share to SBI on Tuesday.

Indicating that a rescue plan is extremely tough at this stage, an official in the civil aviation ministry said one should be ready for a scenario without At least in the near term, there is no sign of the airline reviving. Hence, we are preparing to redistribute and allocate airport slots held by Jet Airways, he said.

Industry executives also suggested that SBI, which is planning to hold a majority stake in Jet, will find it very hard to get a buyer. Banks do not have a good track record of finding buyers for in which they have done debt-equity restructuring.

That had prompted former SBI chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya to say that banks taking ownership doesnt work out unless they have an immediate plan to transfer ownership and a concrete plan about the roadmap of the company.





ALSO READ: Jet's new flight path

Jet Airways, on the verge of a shutdown, has been promised an infusion of around Rs 1,500 crore by the lenders provided its chairman Naresh Goyal, who holds 51 per cent in the company, steps down. But that emergency infusion will be barely enough to save Jet, argued a person tracking the developments. Infusion of Rs 1,500 crore will just defer the grounding for two months or so, said an executive opposed to the plan of bankers rescuing the airline.

Back of the envelope calculation shows Jet needs an immediate infusion of at least Rs 10,000 crore, said a banker involved in the process. The debt may be converted into equity, but what about the immediate payables and liabilities?, he asked.



ALSO READ: 10 unanswered questions in the Jet Airways drama

Rs 8,000 crore was the debt as of December 2018; the balloon has certainly grown bigger, another banker said. Payments to vendors itself will amount to several billion dollars, he added. The fact that the airline is operating in losses will further add to the burden of the company, according to the executive. Bankers had drafted a rescue plan in February on the basis of Etihad participating in the rescue plan to the extent of its equity holding. With Etihad out of the picture, the earlier plan does not hold.

Lenders in the consortium will need to get more details on the revised plan to take to their boards for approval, which can take time. Lenders are expecting SBI to take a decision on the package. This weekend will be crucial, said a public sector bank executive.





ALSO READ: Qatar Airways denies talks with Jet's Chairman Naresh Goyal, son Nivaan

Even if emergency funding comes from the lenders, attracting aviation professionals to manage the airline will be a challenge as the companys future is uncertain, according to an analyst. I have a safe job, replied a former airline executive (whose name is doing the rounds as bankers choice), when asked if he would like to manage the carrier.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has postponed roll out of the new accounting standards (IndAS) for the second time. It is awaiting amendments to the banking laws before adopting the norms. The central bank, however, did not specify the new date for its implementation.

In a late night statement, the RBI said the legislative amendments recommended by it are under consideration of the Centre. Accordingly, it has been decided to defer implementation of the IndAS till further notice. Earlier, at its first bi-monthly monetary policy for 2018-19 (on April 5, 2018), the RBI had ...General Motors committed to investing $1.8 billion at plants in six states and to creating 700 new jobs, as the largest US automaker looks to ward off months of criticism by the US President Donald Trump. The bulk of the new jobs will go to a factory in Michigan where GM plans to add production of another fully electric vehicle. The carmaker will spend $300 million and add 400 workers at the plant in Orion Township, north of Detroit, where the Chevrolet EV will be built alongside the Bolt model. Factories in states including Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas will also boost their ...Biman hijacking: Polash got infuriated after he was asked to take his seat

bdnews24.com :

Investigators have cobbled together a clearer picture of the attempted hijacking of a Biman Bangladesh Airlines plane by interrogating six crew members.

Polash Ahmed, a passenger of the BG-147 flight, had changed the seat and then a cabin crew requested him to take the allocated seat, which infuriated him. And then Polash brandished a 'pistol', according to the investigators.

Amid high tensions on Feb 24, the flight landed in Shah Amanat International Airport and then all the passengers and crew except one crew member were safely evacuated from the aircraft while Polash was kept busy in conversations with the pilot through the intercom.

Security personnel had surrounded the plane by then. After two hours, a commando blitz on the plane put an end to the hijacking in about eight minutes. Army and air force officials had said a suspect holding a 'pistol' had been killed.

Polash was carrying a locally made toy pistol, according to a report filed by the forensic department of Criminal Investigation Department.

The Chattogram-bound flight with 148 passengers on board was headed to Dubai after a stopover in Chattogram. But it made international headlines after landing in the Chattogram airport.

Civil Aviation Authority, Bangladesh later started a case over the 'attempted hijacking' of the flight. Chattogram Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Unit was tasked to investigate the case.

Rajesh Barua, the investigation officer of the case and counter terrorism unit inspector, told bdnews24.com that on that day there were seven crew members on the flight. Among them, pilots, first officer and four cabin crew have already been interrogated.

"Six crew, including pilot, came to our office on Wednesday and gave their statements, which were recorded. After recording the statement of the other person, we will go for the next task. "

"The cabin crew member-the last man who emerged from the plane- is now on duty abroad. That is why he could not be questioned on Wednesday. After coming to the country, he will be interviewed," said the investigating officer.

Quoting the cabin crew, he said the 17-D seat was allocated for Polash. When he changed the seat sometime after the flight took off, a cabin crew asked another crew to tell Polash to take his allocated seat.

"But Polash got angry and pulled out a pistol. The cabin crew Nimmi informed the pilot about it. "

After learning about the matter, the pilot switched the camera on and saw Polash kicking at the door of the cockpit. He also saw a pistol and an object like bomb in his hand, Barua said.

On the advice of the pilot, he said, First Officer Muntasir then informed the airport control room about the incident. Five to seven minutes before the scheduled time, the plane landed at the airport.

Then all the passengers and crew except one crew member were safely evacuated.

However, Barua did not want to say anything clearly about the reasons for 'hijacking aircraft'.

On being asked, he said he had already spoken to six people who were on the plane, and 10 Chattogram airport officials. He will interrogate more people for the investigation.General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that Google "indirectly benefits the Chinese military" and is planning to meet with the company over the matter. The Pentagon official cited a Google AI lab that opened in Beijing in 2017 as a cause of concern. "In my judgment, us assisting the Chinese military in advancing technology is not in US national interests," Dunford said on ...

Dear Reader,

Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

We, however, have a request.



As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed.



Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard.



Digital EditorAs she foreshadowed in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre last Friday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has just announced a ban in that country on specific military-style firearms. It will soon become an offence to own or possess semi-automatic firearms and shotguns with detachable magazines capable of firing more than five cartridges.

Later this month, the government will consider further changes to the law that will tighten licensing requirements and impose limits on certain types of ammunition. There will be a gun buy-back scheme in place in due course that will ...Indian techies living in the US are having a hard time as the US government has refused visa extensions. While some are still struggling over filing a new H-1B visa, many were left with no option but to return to India. Apart from the increase in outright denials, there has also been a sharp rise in the number of requests for evidence (RFE).

These are notices the US authorities issue to visa applicants seeking more information and documents on their applications. This not only delays the visa process but also increase costs for companies. An engineer, who returned to India ...The Uttar Pradesh Police on Friday seized 120 kg of gold worth around Rs 40 crore during the checking in Modinagar area of Uttar Pradesh. "We received information in the morning regarding the vehicle carrying over 100 kg gold. Following this, we nabbed the car during checking. The gold was being transported from Delhi to a factory in Haridwar," Ghaziabad (Rural) Superintendent of Police Anup Jadon told ANI.

Around four people, including an employee, driver and two security guards have been detained in the case.

"The four persons are in police custody. We are checking the documents they were carrying in the car. So far we have learned that the gold was taken to Haridwar for a jewellery firm Kundan," the SP added.

The Income Tax Department has been informed about the matter.

Further investigation is underway.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The state police have arrested five people in connection with the murder of BJP's panchayat unit president Sukhendu Das.

Das was shot dead while he was returning home after attending a party meeting on Tuesday night, police said on Wednesday.

All the five people arrested were on Thursday produced in a session court here.

Das, who was the president of Borkhola Hatichora panchayat unit, was fired at by unidentified gunmen near his residence on Tuesday night. Soon after the incident, he was rushed to Silchar Medical College Hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.

Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal had directed authorities to expedite the probe and arrest those responsible for Das' murder at the earliest.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Varsity student assaulted at Gawsia market, 3 held

Staff Reporter :

Three people have been detained on charges of assault on a university student at Gawsia market, beside New Market, on Friday afternoon.

According to police, a quarrel ensued between a shop owner and a female customer at Gawsia on Friday afternoon over bargaining of a product.

What could be known, the girl was a student of Jahangirnagar University.

At one stage of the quarrel, the shop owner physically assaulted the university student.

Police rushed to the spot and detained three shop employees for questioning.In an economic environment struggling and grappling with depleting margins and lower than natural growth, there is one industry which seems to be bullish and buoyant. The tourism industry across the globe has been seeing a steady rise in traction in the past 18 months in spite of the global slowdown.

SRAM Holidays, the travel arm of the SRAM & MRAM Group has announced its tie-up with CATA (Cambodian Association of Travel Agents) to augment and strengthen the tourism and travel industry of Cambodia.

Speaking at an event, Dr Hiranandani, Chairman, SRAM & MRAM Group emphasised that the challenges ahead for the Travel & Tourism industry in 2019 will be to figure out how to create tailored customer experiences when there is mass customization of experience across all travel operations across the globe vis-a-vis destination, advertising, and brands. "This will proliferate exorbitant amounts of data about their preferences, relationships, habits, locations, etc which would a great mining opportunity for big data analysists like SRAM to use this data to hyper target our customers with specific travel destinations as per the need, demand and preference of the customer along with advertising and optimize the customer experience based on the analytics provided by our data mining division. With this launch, we intend to enter the high octane travel and tourism industry in the ASEAN and specifically tailor-made packages for the Cambodian markets," he said.

Chhay Sivlin, President CATA, was all praise for both SRAM & MRAM for trying to transform the Cambodian Tourism Industry which she says is contributing the maximum to the overall Cambodian GDP. Silvin has been recently praised by none other than His Excellency, The King himself that she has been managing the entire operations of CATA so efficiently that the tourism figures have been steadily on the rise in the past 3 years since she has taken over, the company said in a press release. These figures need to go higher and this association will help the local talent pool to grow and showcase their wares and ensure they can be counted among the best in the near future, it added.

Sivlin, has also assured SRAM & MRAM group that she will provide the necessary permissions to conduct prayers and other ways of worship at the Kulan Mountains in Seam Reap, Cambodia a religious heritage site with over 1008 Shiva Lingas and also a religious site for Hindu tourists. She is happy that SRAM is willing to conduct road shows to promote Cambodia as a tourist destination and help Cambodia see an influx of tourists from across the world.

Rahul Shah, Director, Master Tours, and partner director in the SRAM & MRAM groups travel division praised the opportunity provided to them to expand their wings to Cambodia from their traditional European and ASEAN regions. As the current managing partner in SRAM Holidays, a travel and tourism portal in Cambodia and after having successfully launched and managed multiple destination management companies (DMC's), Rahul Shah said he was extremely positive about the prospects and proudly takes responsibility to increase the Cambodian Tourism contribution to the GDP by around 2% in the coming years. Rahul Shah added that for him attracting Hindu tourists from across the globe to come to Cambodia is his first priority. He wants to create awareness among the global Hindu Diaspora about Angkor Wat and Kulan Mountains.

Mary Mam, Director, SRAM & MRAM group, said that it has been the groups' endeavour to promote Hindu tourism as Cambodia and India share a rich cultural heritage. Rithy Leksin, Executive Director, SRAM & MRAM and the man behind creating the association between SRAM & CATA is extremely excited about the new development. He said the wheels of instruments need to move towards technology-driven tourism exchange between the various countries. Nitin Gupta, technocrat and inventor, and the man behind an energy revolution when he invented a dry cell-based technology has pledged to develop a tourism exchange in association with SRAM & MRAM to help promote and ease operation of the tourists and the members of CATA. SRAM has plans to invest heavily in IT, Infrastructure, construction and a host of other verticals and wants to contribute its might for the betterment of the Cambodian people as it has been doing for over a decade now.

This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) on Friday was dismissive about the papers which the Congress claimed to be parts of a diary, saying the loose sheets alleging payment of Rs 1,800 crore by former Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa to top BJP leaders prima-facie appear to be of a doubtful nature and were given by a Congress leader during a raid on him for tax violations.

"All efforts have been made by the Income Tax Office concerned to procure the originals of the disputed writings. However, the details about the place and custody of the original writings and, if the original writings exist, are not available," said Income Tax Commissioner Surabhi Ahluwalia in an official statement.

Earlier during the day, the Congress alleged that some top BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had received Rs 1,800 crore from Yeddyurappa, who rubbished the charges as "atrocious and malicious" and threatened to file a defamation case. He said that an inquiry had found the documents, cited by the Congress, as fake.

"Income Tax Department officials have already probed the issue and found that the documents and signature and handwritten notes are forged. The Congress leaders are apt in carrying out all these atrocious and malicious campaigns. They planted the story in the media to gain political mileage in the coming elections," the BJP leader said.

Ahluwalia said a search action under section 132 of the Income Tax Act 1961 was carried out on D K Shivakumar and group of cases on August 2, 2017 by the Income Tax Investigation Directorate of Karnataka and Goa. A large evidence of incriminating material against him and his company were found.

During the search, some loose papers were given to the raiding party. They were a xerox copy of Karnataka Legislative Assembly, Legislator's Diary pages of 2009 with details of numerical entries against some individual names. The original of these documents was never given.

Shivakumar had said this was a copy of diary, written by Yeddyurappa and the payments paid on his behalf to legislators, and received from various leaders, MLAs and ministers when they were in power.

On being asked as to how he got possession of the said loose sheets, Shivakumar said that, being a politician, he procures information about other parties, leaders and members and as the said loose sheets contain political information, he cannot disclose the source of information.

On November 25, 2017, Yedyurappa said in a statement that he was not in the habit of writing a dairy and that the loose sheets in question were not in his handwriting.

He further said that contents of the loose sheets were false and fabricated and his name has been used to malign his political career. He also provided a sample of his handwriting in order to verify the genuineness of the said loose sheets.

.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)BJP president Amit Shah on Friday lambasted Congress' Sam Pitroda for questioning the casualty figure in the Balakot air strike, saying, "their (Congress) heart beats for terrorists."

Taking to Twitter, Shah said, "Difference between Opposition and BJP is clear. They suspect our army, we are proud of our army. Their heart beats for terrorists, ours beats for the Tiranga. This election, through the power of your vote, do a surgical strike on the Congress culture."

His remarks came after Congress president close aide Pitroda said, "Don't know much about attacks, it happens all the time, attack happened in Mumbai also. We could have then reacted and just sent our planes but that is not right approach. According to me, that's not how you deal with world."

In an exclusive interview to ANI on Friday, Pitroda had questioned the death toll in the strike by the Indian Air Force in Balakot in Pakistan on February 26.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also slammed Pitroda, saying the "most trusted advisor and guide" of the Congress president has "kick-started the Pakistan Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress".

"The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning India's armed forces. Shame !" tweeted Modi.

Pakistan observes its Day on March 23.

Modi said, "Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Congress on Friday slammed the BJP for dropping party veteran LK Advani's name from its first list of Lok Sabha candidates.

Speaking to ANI, Congress leader PL Punia said, "An outstanding Parliamentarian like LK Advani will be replaced by Taripar Amit Shah. Now, people are clear that BJP is only run by Amit Shah."

Notably, Advani who contested the Lok Sabha elections from Gandhinagar seat for the first time in 1991 retained the constituency in 1998, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. In the ensuing elections, BJP president Amit Shah will be contesting from Gandhinagar constituency.

It was only once that Advani did not contest the elections in the year 1996 after his name found mention in Jain Hawala Diary Case.

The BJP on Thursday evening declared 184 candidates including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, party chief Amit Shah, Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Textiles Minister Smriti Irani for the ensuing Lok Sabha polls, beginning April 11 and concluding on May 19.

The counting of votes will take place on May 23.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)South African pacer Kagiso Rabada is a key component of Delhi Capitals in the Indian Premier League. The bowler has said that he is looking forward to playing this upcoming season of the league and is hopeful that the team would put up a better show this year.

"I think we have put together a great squad this time around. It is a fairly young squad and I feel there's a good mixture of overseas players along with the Indian players. We have some very exciting spinners as well along with good batsmen. Of course, the pace bowling is going to be one of our strengths and I am really looking forward to playing a part in my team's success this season," Rabada said during a media interaction.

"We know that the name of the franchise has changed and we will be playing in new colours. We have a new slate with new goals on it and I am excited to see how Delhi Capitals is growing to progress this season. What is essential is that it is a fairly young team that has kind of stuck together through a couple of seasons, and is now growing together to get valuable experience. I think we have the potential to be a powerhouse in the future," he added.

The 23-year-old has been on a spectacular run for South Africa and as a result, currently holds the third position in ICC Test bowler rankings and the fifth position in ICC ODI bowler rankings.

The bowler said the team has good pace bowling attack this time around and it can do wonders for the team. Ishant Sharma, Trent Boult, and Chris Morris all add up to the bowling line-up of Delhi Capitals.

"We are quite a strong unit. We have always had a good pace bowling attack since I have been here but this year it's a little bit different as we have added in some depth which shall help us in being even more effective as a unit," Rabada said.

Rabada has always been popular with the Delhi crowd and he had a message for Delhi's fans.

"I would like to thank all the Delhi Capitals' fans for the support they have shown the team and myself. I hope that this season they make Kotla the loudest stadium in the country and I am looking forward to seeing them in huge numbers at the stadium, to have a lot of fun because that is what we are here to provide them with," Rabada said.

Delhi would look to put up a spirited show in this year's edition of IPL. The team will take on Mumbai Indians in their first match on Sunday at Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Special Cell of Delhi Police arrested Jaish-e-Mohammad operative Sajjad Khan near Red Fort in the early hours of Friday.

The said operative was arrested following a month-long probe launched after the dastardly Pulwama attack on February 14, which was orchestrated by the Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM).

Khan is a close associate of the mastermind of the Pulwama attack Mudassir Ahmed Khan, who got eliminated in an encounter with the security forces in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama on March 11, police said.

Soon after the arrest, Khan was produced before the Delhi's Patiala House Court. The court has sent him to the custody of the Investigation Agency (NIA) till March 29.

As many as 40 CRPF personnel were killed in the terror attack when their convoy was targeted on the Srinagar-Jammu Highway in Pulwama district. Later, JeM took the responsibility of the attack.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A couple was rescued on Friday after being trapped for 70 hours under the debris of a collapsed under-construction building in Karnataka'sDharwad.

Officials said earlier that 14 people were killed in the incident.

The couple has been identified as Dhakalu and Sangeeta Kokare.

Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) (Fire and Emergency Services) Sunil Aggarwal told ANI that the condition of the couple is stable.

"Their condition is stable. They have been sent to the hospital. After the final assessment, we will see how to discard the debris," he said.

The Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) teams, along with fire and emergency service personnel, are continuing their rescue efforts. Heavy earth-movers and rescuers with specialised equipment have been deployed for the operation.

Meanwhile, an FIR was registered against five persons on Friday, the fourth day of the Dharwad building collapse.

Basavraj Nigadi, Ravi Sabrad, Mahabaleshwar Puradgudi and Gangappa Shintre, owners of the building, and Vivek Pawar, an engineer, have been named in the FIR, police said.

While the four partners of Renuka Construction surrendered before the police, the engineer was taken into custody from Maharashtra's Kolhapur, they said.

Deepa Cholan, Deputy Commissioner, Dharwad, told ANI, "A total of 14 people have died. Yesterday, we rescued two people. Three more people are trapped in the debris. We have given oxygen and ORS to them. The SDRF and NDRF teams are conducting the rescue operation."

Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy had visited the site on Thursday and told the media that several people were trapped under the debris.

The building, located in Kumareshwar Nagar, collapsed on March 19, following which the Indian Air Force airlifted two teams of NDRF personnel to Karnataka's Hubli from Hindon in Uttar Pradesh to assist in the rescue operation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)TTV Dhinakaran led Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) on Friday released the second list of nine candidates for Lok Sabha elections.

Thanga Tamilselvan will contest against O.Panneerselvam's son O.P.Ravindranath in Theni, Palaniappan will contest from Dharmapuri, and NG Parthiban will be fielded in Arakonam against DMK leader Jagath Rakshan among others.

The party had announced its first list of candidates for 24 Lok Sabha seats and nine by-election seats on March 17.

Lok Sabha elections and assembly bypolls would be held in Tamil Nadu on April 18 in the second phase of the seven-phased elections. Counting of votes will take place on May 23.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The number of passengers flying domestic airlines dropped to 113.49 lakh in February compared to 125.08 lakh in the previous month, according to data released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).

Private carriers flew 98.96 lakh passengers in February compared to 109.78 lakh in January. The number of passengers flown by government-owned Air India also dropped to 14.53 lakh as against 15.30 lakh in the same period.

Taken together in the first two months of calendar 2019, however, the number of flyers was 238.56 lakh compared to 222.09 lakh in January and February of 2018, marking a growth of 7.42 per cent.

The overall cancellation rate of scheduled domestic airlines for last month was 1.89 per cent, data showed. Air India had the highest cancellation of 8.15 per cent followed by Air Asia 2.46 per cent and Jet Airways 2.31 per cent.

Low-cost airline SpiceJet had the highest passenger load factor of 94 per cent in February, followed by GoAir at 92.6 per cent, AirAsia India at 91.8 per cent, Vistara at 89.1 per cent and IndiGo at 88.4 per cent.

"The passenger load factor in February has shown increasing trend primarily due to airlines offering promotional fares, resulting in increasing demand," said the aviation regulator.

Jet Airways, with mounting debts and nearly one-third of its fleet grounded, too recorded a passenger load factor of 89.4 per cent.

.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In the wake of the recent Christchurch shooting in New Zealand, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday called on the to fight against Islamophobia.

Comparing the threats of Islamophobia to anti-Semitism after the Holocaust, Erdogan urged people to fight it with the same determination, reported Anadolu Agency.

He went on to explain that the phenomenon does not only limit to politics, civil society or scholarship but also affects leaders' security forces and people in the streets.

Erdogan, while talking at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting, praised the empathy shown by New Zealand's government after the terror attack on Christchurch mosque that claimed at least 50 lives.

"New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's reaction to the terror attack, empathy, and solidarity with all Muslims should be a model for all the leaders," said Erdogan.

New Zealand on Thursday implemented a ban on the sale of assault rifles and semi-automatics across the country in the aftermath of the twin mosque shootings in Christchurch that killed at least 50 people.

At least five Indians, including three from Gujarat, died in the shootings.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In a bid to avoid a no-deal Brexit scenario, the European Union on Thursday (local time) came up with a two-part plan while approving the United Kingdom's request for a Brexit extension.

"EU27 unanimously agrees on its response to UK's requests," Donald Tusk, the President of the European council tweeted after a meeting here.

According to the plan, the EU agreed to an extension to Article 50 till May 22, provided the British Parliament supports the Withdrawal Deal next week when UK Prime Minister Theresa May will hold a meaningful vote.

If the deal is not approved next week by the Parliament, the UK will be given an extension only till April 12, according to Tusk.

While outlining the details of the deal, Tusk said EU leaders responded to the request in a "positive spirit."

Despite efforts to avoid a no-deal scenario, Tusk highlighted that the EU would be continuing no-deal preparations.

.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Brazilian Police on Thursday arrested former President Michel Temer on graft charges.

Al Jazeera reported that Temer was arrested under Operation Car Wash, launched by the Brazilian Police in March 2014, to detain corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

The former president was arrested while he was in his house in Sao Paulo and later flown to the Federal Police office in Rio de Janeiro.

Temer, who served as President from August 2016 to December 2018, was hit with alleged corruption charges regarding management contracts of several ports in Sao Paulo. Those charges were, however, blocked by Temer's allies in the National Congress.

Police said that Temer's arrest was made under new allegations related to "crimes of corruption, criminal organisations and money laundry" in the management of a nuclear plant in Rio, which Temer has repeatedly denied.

"I'm certain [Temer's] lawyers will file a habeas corpus request so he can continue to answer to authorities in freedom," Temer's lawyer Luiz Felipe Panelli was quoted as saying.

"This type of arrest only happens when there's immediate danger the suspect can flee or that he is still committing the crime," he added.

The Car Wash investigation has led to the arrests of other politicians, including former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and former Minister for Mines and Energy, Moreira Franco.

Meanwhile, Temer's party, Brazilian Democratic Movement, said in a statement that it "regrets the Justice [system] is moving forward with an inquiry in which it has been demonstrated there are no irregularities by the former president and former minister".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In a first, Google celebrated renowned German musician Johann Christian Bach with an AI-powered doodle.

Made in partnership with the Google Magenta and Google PAIR teams, the doodle, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), is an interactive experience encouraging netizens to compose a two-measure melody of their choice.

With the press of a button that is located at the bottom right corner, the doodle uses machine learning to harmonise the custom melody into Bach's signature music style.

Bach was born and raised in the German town of Eisenach in a large musical family. His father played multiple instruments and worked as director of the town's musicians, while his eldest brother was also a musician.

Primarily known as an exceptional organist during his lifetime, Bach also understood how to build and repair the complex inner mechanisms of pipe organs, a feature that has been incorporated into the interactive doodle.

Bach's reputation soared following the 19th century "Bach revival," as the music world gained a new appreciation for his innovative use of four-part harmony, modulations of key, and mastery of counterpoint and fugue.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The central government on Friday banned the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), saying the outfit led by former militant leader Yasin Malik is actively engaged in inciting secessionism and illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.

The government declared the outfit as "an unlawful association under Section 3(1) of the Unlawful Prevention Act 1967", Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba told reporters here.

The outfit, which had initiated a militant movement in Kashmir in 1988 and was involved in numerous acts of terror, had given up the use of gun in 1994 but continued its separatist activities.

Gauba noted that JKLF was involved in the killing of Kashmiri Pandits, which resulted in their exodus from the valley in 1990.

The outfit also was involved in kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in December 1989, as well as the killing of four IAF personnel besides several other acts of terror, he said.

At least 37 FIRs have been registered by the Jammu and Kashmir Police against JKLF, two cases, including the case of murder of IAF personnel, were registered by CBI. The NIA has also registered a case, which is under investigation, the Home Secretary said.

"Government is committed to relentlessly pursuing the policy of curbing the activities of secessionist organisations which are a threat to the unity and integrity of the country. The NIA and ED are taking strong steps against these organisations," he said.

"The JKLF has many serious cases registered against it," he said, adding the action has been taken in accordance with "the policy of zero tolerance against terrorism followed by the central government."

Gauba said the JKLF had spearheaded the separatist ideology in the Valley and has been at the forefront of separatist activities and violence since 1988.

He said that the murders of Kashmiri Pandits by the JKLF in 1989 had triggered their exodus from the Valley.

"Yasin Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley and is responsible for their genocide," he said while reading out the statement.

"This organisation, alongside, is also responsible for illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism. JKLF is actively involved in raising of funds and its distribution to Hurriyat cadres and stone-pelters to fuel unrest in the Kashmir Valley as well as for subversive activities," he added.

Gauba stated that the JKLF has been "actively and continuously encouraging, feelings of enmity and hatred against the lawfully established government as well as armed rebellion."

"It is evident from these that JKLF continues to be actively engaged in supporting and inciting secessionism and terrorism including terror financing," Gauba said.

He further stated that the government will continue reviewing the process of withdrawing security of separatist leaders.

Malik, who was detained on February 22, was lodged at Kothibagh police station. He was booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA).

In the aftermath of the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district, which claimed lives of 40 CRPF soldiers on February 14, the Jammu and Kashmir government withdrew the security cover of several separatists including Malik, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Shabir Shah and Saleem Geelani.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India is committed to expeditious extradition of fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi, said Raveesh Kumar, the spokesperson the Ministry of External Affairs on Friday.

Responding to a query during the weekly press briefing here, Kumar said, "We welcome the action taken by the UK Government. The UK Crown Prosecution service informed us on 18 March that a senior district judge in the Westminster Magistrate court issued an arrest warrant against Nirav Modi".

He added, "Nirav Modi was arrested by the Metropolitan police on the basis of the warrant issued against him. Next day, after a short hearing, he was taken in custody. The legal proceedings will take its course."

Addressing the concerns about the delay in the extradition process, he said, "We can confirm there was no delay which can be attributed to our side. The bail application, etc, belongs to the realm of proceedings."

Kumar also responded to a query regarding the Kulbhushan Jadhav case, saying, "The oral proceeding at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has already concluded. We have presented our case before the court. Now, it is for the ICJ to take a decision as to the way forward, so, we are waiting."

Talking about the internal listing of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar by the European Union (EU), the MEA spokesperson said, "France had issued a statement on the internal listing of Masood Azhar as a designated terrorist."

"In a telephonic conversation that French Foreign Minister Le Drian had with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, he had indicated that France would take up the matter pertaining to Azhar's listing with the EU. We understand that the EU will take a decision once there process is complete. It has to be a unanimous decision," he added.

He also responded to Pakistan's report on the so-called Hindu terrorism in India wherein, Kumar said that the report is Islamabad's futile attempt to deflect pressure building on its nation.

"I am not aware of this reports, however, I can generally say that this is an attempt to deflect pressure building on Pakistan and to deflect the tension of their community and people from the mess that country is in," he asserted.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Venezuela's Minister of Interior Nestor Reverol on Thursday stated that the arrested aide of Opposition leader Juan Guaido was part of a terror cell which planned attacks.

Venezuela's intelligence service had detained two of Guaido's associates, out of which one has been recognised as Roberto Marrero who had rifles and a grenade in possession at the time of arrest, reports Sputnik.

"Early today morning, two of the closest associates of Venezuelan National Assembly leader Juan Guaido, Marrero and Sergio Vergara, were detained at their homes. The detention was carried out in the El Cafetal neighbourhood of the Baruta municipality. Two rifles and a grenade were found in Marrero's house," sources told Russian state media.

While Vergara has been released ever since, Marrero continues to remain in custody.

The United States has slammed the arrests, with National Security Adviser John Bolton threatening to respond to the detention.

The Latin American nation has been in the throes of a political crisis ever since Guaido proclaimed himself as the President of the nation in January this year. Embattled President Nicolas Maduro, who came into power following largely rejected elections, refused to step down from his post.

The US was the first to recognise Guaido as the interim President of Venezuela, with countries like the Netherlands, UK, France, etc following suit. Maduro has slammed external interference in the nation, accusing US of plotting a coup to overthrow him.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 20-year-old man was arrested on Friday for allegedly raping and murdering a six-year-old girl.

The accused who is a resident of Bihar committed the crime during Holi celebrations.

Balanagar DCP PV Padmaja said, "The accused has confessed to committing the crime during interrogation. The weapon used (to murder) has also been recovered. The accused came to Hyderabad two months ago and was living here with his relatives."

The police received a complaint on Thursday night from the girl's father. The complainant said that his daughter who had gone out to play Holi has not returned yet and requested for necessary action.

Based on the complaint, a kidnapping case was registered at the Alwal Police Station. Crime team rushed to the scene and started searching for the missing girl.

In the meanwhile, a local informed about having seen the dead body of a girl. The police reached the site along with the girl's parents and recovered the body.

Upon further enquiry and information gathered by victim's relatives and neighbour Dharmendra Singh, it was found that the crime was allegedly committed by Rajesh Kumar, one of the attendees of the Holi party organised by Dharmendra.

Apparently, the accused noticed the victim playing with her brother in front of her house. He called her and took her towards the railway track and raped her.

Apparently, the victim's screams irritated the accused so much that he took an iron-wire piece and hit the victim's neck. He continued to rape her even after that.

When he realised that the victim had died, he fled the spot, throwing the wire piece at the scene of crime.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India on Friday decided to boycott the Pakistan National Day reception organised by the Pakistan High Commission here, citing invitation to separatists from Jammu and Kashmir as the reason behind the boycott.

However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent a message to his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan on the occasion.

"Received message from PM Modi: I extend my greetings & best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that people of sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive & prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence," the Pakistani Prime Minister tweeted.

Speaking on Prime Minister Modi's greetings, government sources told ANI that this is a customary unsigned letter which is sent to other heads of states on their National days as well. The sources further emphasised that the letter to Khan highlighted terrorism in South Asia.

India has been asking Pakistan to act against terrorists operating from its soil, reiterating that talks and terror cannot go hand in hand.

Tensions are high between the nations following the Pulwama terror attack last month which was followed by air strikes by India on Jaish-e-Mohammed training camp in Pakistan's Balakot.

Meanwhile, in another tweet, the Pakistan Prime Minister welcomed Prime Minister Modi's wishes and called for dialogue on all issues, including Kashmir.

"I welcome PM Modi's message to our people. As we celebrate Pakistan Day I believe it is time to begin a comprehensive dialogue with India to address & resolve all issues, esp the central issue of Kashmir, & forge a new relationship based on peace & prosperity for all our people," Khan tweeted.

Pakistani diplomatic sources say that the invitation to Hurriyat leaders is a regular feature of Pakistan National Day.

There are reports that individuals outside the Pakistan High Commission here, reportedly belonging to the government, were seen discouraging invitees from attending the event. Some guests even went back without attending.

Speaking to ANI here, an invitee, Jaan-e-Aalam, said he would not attend the event if the government directs invitees to do so.

"We are with our country's decision to boycott it (National Pakistan Day). We will not go to Pakistan Embassy if our government says that we don't have to go," he said.

Meanwhile, National Conference (NC) leader Omar Abdullah criticised Prime Minister Modi's decision to extend greetings to his Pakistani counterpart.

"If only the spooks & other interested players stopping people from attending the Pak National Day event had also stopped PM Modi from sending his greeting to PM Khan we wouldn't look so damn confused about our relations with Pakistan" he tweeted.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India on Friday rejected Pakistan's attempt to politicise the verdict in the Samjhauta twin-blast case.

Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said, "There has been no cooperation from Pakistan. We reject Pakistan's attempt to politicise the matter. It is being done to deflect attention from their failure in bringing perpetrators of several terrorist attacks in India and region to justice."

During the weekly press briefing, he said, "We demand that Pakistan should take immediate, credible and irreversible measures against cross-border terrorism without any discrimination and without resorting to such gimmicks."

His remarks came after Islamabad conveyed "concerns" regarding the acquittal of the four suspects in the 2007 Samjhauta Express blast case to several countries on Wednesday through its Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua.

Stating that Islamabad has no understanding of the Indian judicial process, Kumar said, "I think, there is a complete lack of understanding as to how our judiciary functions. In all the cases taken up in the court, a due process is followed, which has also been acknowledged by the international community. The same due course was taken in this case. Now, the court has given a verdict."

Janjua invited members of diplomatic corps to the Foreign Office and briefed them on the "historic injustice done to the 44 Pakistanis killed in the Samjhauta Express terrorist attack in 2007 in India," according to The Express Tribune.

A special NIA court had acquitted the four suspects - Swami Aseemanand, Lokesh Sharma, Kamal Chauhan and Rajinder Chaudhary - in the case on March 20.

"Pakistan has already registered a strong demarche with the Indian High Commissioner on March 20 against the acquittal of the perpetrators of Samjhauta terror attacks," the Foreign Secretary said.

On February 18, 2007, explosions hit the India-Pakistan trans-border Samjhauta Express in Panipat area of Haryana and 68 people died in the blast, including 44 Pakistanis.

Out of the deceased, 33 were men, 19 women and 16 children. Later, two unexploded bombs were also found from the site, India's Investigation Agency (NIA) had said.

The Indian side had earlier rejected Pakistan's remarks on the case verdict after its High Commissioner to Pakistan was summoned following the March 20 decision. It was put forth that due process of law was followed by the Indian courts and judicial system in a transparent manner, according to sources.

The High Commissioner had referred to the lack of cooperation from the Pakistan government, including in serving court summons to Pakistani witnesses in the Samjhauta blast case. The summons were not served and returned by Pakistan's Foreign Office, the sources said.

The High Commissioner had asked for an expeditious trial in 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks in which detailed evidence was given to Pakistan. He expressed disappointment that progress in these trials is held up and the perpetrators and prime accused continue to roam freely in Pakistan, they said.

He shared India's concerns over the lack of progress in investigations into the Pathankot airbase terror attack even when a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) visit was arranged to India and detailed evidence shared, they said.

It was also pointed out that Pakistan is yet to take credible and irreversible steps against Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and other terror entities and individuals, despite a detailed dossier having been shared after the Pulwama attack, the sources added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India is set to hold separate bilateral forums with Croatia, Bolivia and Chile during President Ram Nath Kovind's official visit to the countries from March 25 to April 2.

Kovind will be paying a state visit to Croatia from March 25 to 28, Bolivia from March 28 to 30 and Chile from March 30 to April 1.

"The large business delegations joining in the bilateral business forums organized as part of the visit of President, indicate the increasing interest of Indian companies in expanding business ties with these countries," the Ministry of External Affairs said in an official statement.

Kovind will be meeting with Presidents of all the three countries during his visit

India and Croatia are currently focusing on strengthening trade and investment linkages, according to the MEA.

"Bolivia's Lithium and our needs for eMobility and eStorage provide natural synergies. As Bolivia embarks on the industrialization of its resources, India is a willing partner for know-how, technology and skills. In the Financial Year 2017-18, the bilateral trade grew by 205% to reach US$ 772 million," the statement outlined.

Meanwhile, Kovind's visit to Chile comes at a time when the 70th year of establishment of India-Chile diplomatic relations is being celebrated.

"President's State Visits to the three countries would reinvigorate bilateral ties and provide new direction to multi-faceted development of our bilateral relations," the statement lastly noted.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India has decided not to send any representative to attend the Pakistan Day, confirmed Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar on Friday during the weekly press briefing.

"The decision was taken after Pakistan High Commission decided to call Hurriyat leader to the reception. In February we were very clear, any attempt by Pakistan High Commission or Pakistani leadership to engage with Hurriyat leaders will not be taken lightly," he added.

While Islamabad would be celebrating the occasion on March 23, the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi is organising events a day earlier on March 22.

Pakistan Day is celebrated to mark the Lahore Resolution on March 23 each year. The Lahore Resolution, which is also called Pakistan Resolution, passed on March 23, 1940, is considered a major milestone in the Muslim struggle for an independent Muslim state which was later called Pakistan.

India, time and again, has always objected to Pakistan's engagement with the separatist leaders.

Last month, India strongly objected against the telephonic conversation between Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and separatist leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, ahead of an event organised in London to mark Islamabad's solidarity with a Kashmir-related event.

However, the diplomatic relations between India and Pakistan have deteriorated after the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 security personnel were killed on February 14. The responsibility of the terror attack was claimed by Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad.

The tension got further escalated when 2000 Mirage fighter planes of the Indian Air force crossed the Line of Control and bombed the training camp of JeM located in Balakot on February 26.

Pakistan High Commissioner to India Sohail Mahmood returned to New Delhi on March 9 after he was recalled to Islamabad for consultations in the wake of escalating tension between the two neighbouring countries following the Pulwama terror attack.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Indonesia's national airline Garuda on Friday said that it is cancelling a multibillion-dollar order for Boeing 737 Max 8 passenger jet after two aircraft of the said model crashed in less than five months.

CNN quoted Garuda spokesperson Ikhsan Rosan as saying, "Our passengers have lost confidence to fly with the Max 8."

The spokesperson divulged that the carrier had ordered 50 of the planes in 2014 worth 4.9 billion USD. It has taken delivery of one of them but has now sent a letter to Boeing (BA) saying it no longer wants to receive the remaining jets on order.

Meanwhile, several countries have grounded these aircraft from the fleet over safety concerns following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed all 157 people on board earlier this month.

Ikhsan said, "Boeing representatives are planning to visit Jakarta on March 28 to discuss the cancellation request with the airline."

The United States Justice Department on Thursday issued multiple subpoenas as a part of criminal investigation into the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) certification and marketing of Boeing 737 Max planes.

Quoting sources, CNN reported that US Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao had asked the inspector general of the Justice Department to investigate Boeing's certification and safety procedures, including training manuals for pilots, along with how the company marketed the new aircraft.

The criminal investigation of Boeing planes was initiated after the Lion Air Flight 610 plunged into the Java Sea, off the coast of Indonesia, in October 2018.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Seattle office and Justice Department's criminal division in Washington are leading the investigation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In his maiden attempt to enter the Lok Sabha from Jammu and Kashmir in the upcoming elections, Raja Aijaz Ali of Peoples Conference party on Friday filed his nomination papers for the Baramulla-Kupwara Parliamentary seat.

Arriving at election office here in a procession, the Peoples Conference party leader said that his aim is to develop the state.

"My main agenda behind contesting for the Lok Sabha elections is to develop the state. We want the voices of the people of Jammu and Kashmir should be heard in the Parliament. I urge people to give us one chance and cast their ballot in favour of me," he said.

People's Conference chairman Sajjad Gani Lone too spoke on the same lines and said if voted to power they will make efforts to develop the region.

"If voted to power, we will raise the issues pertaining to this region in the Parliament situated in Delhi. People are very angry with the traditional political parties here. I am sure that we will win these elections," he said.

Sajjad also clarified that his political quarter will fight independently in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Apart from Raja Aijaz Ali, Conference (NC) legislator Muhammad Akbar Lone filed nomination papers for the Kupwara parliamentary seat. While speaking to media he assured the public that his party will make efforts to resolve the Kashmir issue if voted to power in April.

The NC and Congress have sealed an alliance for three Lok Sabha seats in the state and decided to go for friendly contests on three other seats.

In a meeting, Rahul Gandhi-led Congress agreed not to field any of its candidate against NC president Farooq Abdullah from Srinagar while NC left the seats of Jammu and Udhampur for its ally.

Six Lok Sabha seats of Jammu and Kashmir will go to polls in five phases.

Baramulla and Jammu constituencies will go to polls in the first phase while Srinagar and Udhampur constituencies will go to polls in the second phase.

Anantnag constituency will go to polls in third, fourth and fifth phases given the precarious security situation in the south Kashmir region. And Ladakh constituency will go to polls in the fifth phase.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan on Friday violated ceasefire in Poonch district at around 1545 hours by resorting to mortar shelling and firing from small arms along the LoC.

The CFV took place in Mendhar sector. Indian Army retaliated strongly to the unprovoked ceasefire violation.

An Army rifleman was killed on Thursday after Pakistan violated ceasefire along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir. The soldier was identified as 24-year-old rifleman Yash Paul.

"Pakistani forces on Thursday violated the ceasefire and resorted to heavy shelling with mortar along the LoC in Sunderbani and Nowshera Sectors in Rajouri district," officials had said.

More details awaited.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Airports are beyond travel now as they have turned into retail destinations with more and more luxury brands coming up with their stores. Travellers usually use their lag time to explore and shop at these stores, as they get different advantages like tax-free shopping for cosmetics, top-shelf liquor, premium quality chocolates etc. Lounges are actually the best option for people having connecting flights or experiencing flight delays.

Bhavya Kukreja, GM - PR & Marcom, Plaza Premium Lounge (PPL), the world's largest independent airport lounge network highlights why there has been a growing demand for these airport lounges. He also shares his views on the evolution and growth of PPL and its marketing plans.

Talking about the growing demand for airport lounges, Kukreja said: "The numbers of air travellers are increasing year on year basis which is a good sign for lounge With various corporate partners, lounging now has become the most preferable service at the airport. We have seen tremendous growth in the average footfalls of travellers in our lounges. Considering the current scenario, we are planning to expand in various cities in the coming time. Government's decision of privatizing airports will bring further opportunities for private players in the aviation industry. The aviation industry is at its peak and this considerably is the golden era."

On the inception of Plaza Premium Lounges and its growth, Kukreja said: "Plaza Premium Lounge was the first independent pay-in lounge introduced in India in 2008 in Hyderabad. With the rewarding response and after identifying the need of the travellers, the lounges then were opened in Delhi and Bengaluru as well. Last year PPL launched two new lounges at Ahmedabad and are now targeting to open at various tier II cities."

Plaza Premium Lounge in India is being run by the Joint Venture company Premium Port Lounge Management Company Private Limited (India) incorporated by Dinesh Jhunjhunwala and Song Hoi-see, Founder and CEO, Plaza Premium Group.

When it comes to strategies and marketing campaigns behind PPL, Kukreja has played a significant role in designing and strategising Plaza Premium Lounge's latest campaign which celebrates unique airport experiences with global travellers. It is named "My Airport Moment". Based on the concept of "Everyone is a Traveller," portraying the precious airport moments for solo travellers, travellers, and families and friends - it was promoted on brand's key strategic locations: Australia, Hong Kong, India, mainland China, Malaysia, the Middle East and U.K.

"The comfort of lounges has been an integral part of the traveller's lifestyle. We are already in the process of bringing our experiences to new locations and with the launch of this global campaign, we would like to invite the travellers to experience our premium service and share their unforgettable moments," said Kukreja.

On the service and offerings of Plaza Premium Lounge, Kukreja said: "The lounges provide a space with exquisite services and facilities for both domestic and international passengers. Few of the services include resting suites (napping area), Spa, Beauty Services, Power Shower, Wi-Fi, Centre etc. It also offers meet and greets service in India branded as 'Allways'. We will soon be launching our first ever playroom and also be rolling our family-friendly initiatives."

PPL also introduces special menus and they have recently come up with their Spring Special Menu. "Good food has no boundary so we have included the flavours from Thailand, Egypt, Spain, and Mexico along with famous Indian delicacies. Our objective has been to raise the expectation of a traveller from the airport and making it a destination in itself. Also, we will be launching a culinary journey global project for June globally for PPL," summed up Kukreja.

This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) MP and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao's daughter Kalvakuntla Kavitha filed nomination papers to contest from Nizamabad Lok Sabha constituency on Friday.

Along with Kavitha, as many as 40 farmers from Nizamabad also filed their nomination citing the alleged failure of the TRS in providing minimum support price for turmeric and red jowar (sorghum) producers.

A farmer who came to file nomination said, "Kavitha was our representative but nothing was done for the farmers in the state. That's why we have decided to file nomination against her. Around 1000 farmers will file nomination in the coming days. Farmers are facing a lot of problems in the state. Nobody from the state or central government came to help us. Even the regional political parties aren't paying attention to our issues."

"The basic price for turmeric is too less. We have requested the central government several times to help us, but no one paid any attention," added another farmer.

However, Kavitha, the sitting MP from Nizamabad, said she had raised farmers' woes multiple times before the Opposition, but her pleas fell on deaf ears.

"I've raised the issues of farmers multiple times in the Parliament. The main opposition party, Congress, wasn't interested in giving any solution to demands to increase the MSP and that's the reason why farmers are filing nomination and raising the issue on a level. I suggest all farmers file their nominations against Prime Minister Modi in Varanasi and Rahul Gandhi in Amethi. I think after that, they may realise the hardships of the farmers and at least think about farmers' welfare," she added.

Telangana will go to polls on April 11, and counting of votes will take place on May 23.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor turned politician Prakash Raj on Friday visited Ali Shah Dargah and offered prayers before filing his nominations papers for the upcoming Lok Sabha election.

Raj has in January announced that he will not join any political party and will contest the Lok Sabha polls from Bengaluru Central as an Independent. He will contest poll against BJP's PC Mohan, who has held Bengaluru Central seat since 2009.

Raj is known for his anti-BJP stance and has been very vocal in seeking justice for journalist Gauri Lankesh, who was shot dead outside her residence.

Karnataka will vote to elect its members of Parliament during the second and third phases of polling on April 18 and April 23, respectively. The counting of votes will take place on May 23.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on Friday took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders over 'mein bhi Chowkidaar' campaign and accused the Centre of hiding unemployment, poverty data ahead of ensuing polls.

Speaking to ANI, Mayawati said, "The Prime Minister is okay if the file on Rafale deal is lost, he is okay if the actual figures of unemployment, poverty, conditions of Dalits come out in public domain. Does nation want this kind of Chowkidar (watchman). PM Narendra Modi added Chowkidaar in front of his name after which a number of other BJP leaders and party supporters followed the suit."

The former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati also said that after the launch of 'Main Bhi Chowkidaar' campaign, state officials are in a dilemma whether to add 'Chowkidaar' in front of their names or not.

"In whole Uttar Pradesh, officials including Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath are in a dilemma whether to add Chowkidaar in front of their names or not. BJP can do whatever fashion they want to do it but they should work as a custodian of the Constitution. This is the only thing that people want from them," she said.

Recently, Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra also took a jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to add "chowkidar" (watchman) to his Twitter handle.

"It is their (BJP) choice what they want to add to their name. When I met potato farmers in western Uttar Pradesh, one of them told me, the rich have chowkidar, the farmers are their own chowkidar", she said while speaking to ANI in Prayagraj a few days ago.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Friday criticised the central government's decision to ban Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) which had kidnapped her sister Rubaiya Sayeed in 1989.

"Yasin Malik renounced violence as a way of resolving J & K issue a long time ago. He was treated as a stakeholder in a dialogue initiated by then PM (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee ji. What will a ban on his organisation achieve? Detrimental steps like these will only turn Kash (sic) into an open-air prison," Mehbooba, the chief of PDP, tweeted.

Earlier today, the central government banned the JKLF led by Malik, saying the outfit is actively engaged in inciting secessionism and illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.

The government declared the outfit as "an unlawful association under Section 3(1) of the Unlawful Prevention Act 1967", Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba told reporters here.

The JKLF was involved in the kidnapping of Mehbooba's sister Rubaiya Sayeed in December 1989, as well as the killing of four IAF personnel besides several other acts of terror.

The outfit, which had initiated a militant movement in Kashmir in 1988 and was involved in numerous acts of terror, had given up the use of gun in 1994 but continued its separatist activities.

Gauba noted that JKLF was involved in the killing of Kashmiri Pandits, which resulted in their exodus from the valley in 1990.

At least 37 FIRs have been registered by the Jammu and Kashmir Police against JKLF, two cases, including the case of murder of IAF personnel, were registered by CBI. The NIA has also registered a case, which is under investigation, the Home Secretary said.

"Government is committed to relentlessly pursuing the policy of curbing the activities of secessionist organisations which are a threat to the unity and integrity of the country. The NIA and ED are taking strong steps against these organisations," he said.

"The JKLF has many serious cases registered against it," he said, adding the action has been taken in accordance with "the policy of zero tolerance against terrorism followed by the central government."

"Yasin Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley and is responsible for their genocide," Gauba said while reading out the statement.

"This organisation, alongside, is also responsible for illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism. JKLF is actively involved in raising of funds and its distribution to Hurriyat cadres and stone-pelters to fuel unrest in the Kashmir Valley as well as for subversive activities," he added.Gauba stated that the JKLF has been "actively and continuously encouraging, feelings of enmity and hatred against the lawfully established government as well as armed rebellion."

"It is evident from these that JKLF continues to be actively engaged in supporting and inciting secessionism and terrorism including terror financing," Gauba said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Shiv Sena's mouthpiece "Saamana" on Friday said that NCP chief Sharad Pawar and BSP supremo Mayawati, the "two probable PM candidates", deciding not to contest the Lok Sabha polls is a signal that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's way to the power corridors for a second term is merely a cake-walk.

"Sharad Pawar is not going to contest. Mayawati is not contesting. The two probable candidates for prime ministership backing off simply shows the clout of NDA. Modi's way to the Prime Minister's post is a cake-walk and NDA victory is confirmed. This is a signal that emanates from Mayawati and Pawar backing off," Saamana said in its editorial piece.

It claimed that the politics of both Pawar and Mayawati were on a downward trajectory.

Saamana also slammed Pawar alleging he is promoting dynastic politics under the garb of encouraging the youth.

The former Union agriculture minister had claimed that he has decided not to contest because he did not want three members of the Pawar family in the fray at the same time.

"But there is a youth in his own house and he is contesting from Maval Lok Sabha constituency," the editorial said.

Pawar's daughter Supriya Sule is re-contesting from Baramati constituency. In 2014 Lok Sabha polls, she won from the Baramati seat which used to be Pawar's bastion. His grandson Parth Pawar is a candidate from Maval constituency.

The party is contesting the polls in alliance with Congress in Maharashtra where 48 Lok Sabha seats are at stake.

Referring to Mayawati, the editorial said that her decision against contesting is an "escape".

"Mayawati said that she is not contesting because she has to campaign nationwide. BSP has no presence outside Uttar Pradesh and her argument is an escape," it said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The campus building for Siddheshwar Public Campus in Bamti Bhandar of Ramechhap district was inaugurated in a public function organised jointly by the District Coordination Committee and Campus Management Committee.

The new infrastructure constructed with the Indian Government's grant assistance of NRs 35.50 million, is a three-storeyed campus building comprising 12 classrooms with one room each for faculty, principal, library, accounts section, meeting hall, lab, store and toilets for boys and girls on each floor.

The newly built infrastructure will not only boost the learning environment of students but also enhance access to for the needy, poor and marginalised students of Ramechhap district and adjoining area.

Established in 1963 and presently with 1000 students, Siddheshwar Public Campus is affiliated with Tribhuvan University and offers Under Graduate programmes from 2006 onwards.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Former Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Friday hit back at state BJP chief BS Yeddyurappa, asserting that no person will accept the allegations levelled against him or her.

Earlier during the day, the Congress alleged that some top BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had received Rs 1,800 crore from Yeddyurappa, who rubbished the charges as "atrocious and malicious" and threatened to file a defamation case. He said that an inquiry had found the documents, cited by the Congress, as fake.

"Income Tax Department officials have already probed the issue and found that the documents and signature and handwritten notes are forged. The Congress leaders are apt in carrying out all these atrocious and malicious campaigns. They planted the story in the media to gain political mileage in the coming elections," Yeddyurappa said earlier in the day.

Responding to his remarks, Siddaramaiah said, "Any person against whom allegations are made, have you seen the person owning it?"

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala alleged that there was a diary which had mentioned about payments allegedly made to the BJP's Central Committee which includes Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari, besides the Prime Minister.

The diary also purportedly contains Yeddyurappa's handwriting and signatures, Surjewala alleged.

Surjewala, basing his allegations and contentions on the media report, claimed that the diary is reportedly with the Income Tax department since August 2017 but no probe had been conducted so far.

"The diary is with the Income Tax department since August 2017. The officials of the department have even approached the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley with it, seeking an inquiry by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and for the forensic examination but nothing happened," said Surjewala.

"If it is true, then why Prime Minister Modi and all top leaders of BJP have not ordered an inquiry and get it investigated," he said.

The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) was dismissive about the papers which the Congress claimed to be parts of a diary, saying the loose sheets alleging payment of Rs 1,800 crore by Yeddyurappa to top BJP leaders prima-facie appear to be of a doubtful nature.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Imran Khan on Friday said that there was no room for any "jihadi outfits or culture" in Pakistan.

During an interaction with media persons in his office, Khan said that Pakistan is not only a peace-loving country but also made sincere efforts in eradicating the culture of "jihadism" and terrorism from the country through short-term and long-term policies.

In fact, no country in the could allow private militias to operate at will, Dawn quoted Khan as saying.

The statement by the Pakistan's Prime Minister comes at a time when the international pressure is mounting on him for not taking enough appropriate steps against the militancy breeding on the Pakistani soil.

In the wake of Pulwama terror attack, US Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, earlier this week in a radio interview, warned Pakistan that another terror attack on India in future will prove to be "extremely problematic."

Tensions between India and Pakistan have escalated in recent days after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) killed 40 security personnel in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14.

Prime Minister Khan, during the meeting however, denied to respond directly on Pompeo's remarks, but said, "Here is a situation that on the one hand India is wrongly blaming Pakistan for the Pulwama attack just because Jaish accepted responsibility, and on the other, even Iran is complaining that militant groups have been using our soil to carry out attacks."

Speaking further on counter-terrorism moves recently undertaken by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government, Khan stated that all parties had agreed to the implementation of National Action Plan (NAP) and proscribing militancy in the region.

The Prime Minister also promised to take action against the terrorist groups that "have existed since the days of the US-led Afghan war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and have operated from the Pakistani soil for decades."

In June 2018, the Financial Action Task Force (FAFT) had grey-listed Pakistan and given a 27-point action plan, which was reviewed for the second time in this month.

The international terror financing watchdog decided to continue the grey-listing of Pakistan for its failure to stop funding of terrorist groups, including Jaish-e-Mohammad, Jamat-ud-Dawa, and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)One person was detained from outside the High Commission of Pakistan here on Friday, where Pakistan Day was being celebrated.

The arrested person has been identified as Mohammad Hassan Antu with separatist leanings.

However, no separatist leader was seen inside the High Commission of Pakistan during the event.

Pakistan High Commissioner to India Sohail Mahmood, during the event, said that Kashmir is an important issue between the two neighbouring countries.

Earlier in the day, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar during the weekly press briefing on Friday confirmed that India has decided not to send any representative to attend the Pakistan Day.

"The decision was taken after Pakistan High Commission decided to call Hurriyat leader to the reception. In February we were very clear, any attempt by Pakistan High Commission or Pakistani leadership to engage with Hurriyat leaders will not be taken lightly," he had added.

Pakistan Day is celebrated to mark the Lahore Resolution on March 23 each year. The Lahore Resolution, which is also called Pakistan Resolution, passed on March 23, 1940, is considered a major milestone in the Muslim struggle for an independent Muslim state which was later called Pakistan.

India, time and again, has always objected to Pakistan's engagement with the separatist leaders.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Sam Pitroda, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi's close confidant, on Friday said he is "baffled" at the response of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who slammed Pitroda for questioning the death toll in the Balakot air strike in Pakistan.

"I just said as a citizen I'm entitled to know what happened. I don't understand what is the controversy here, I am baffled at the response. Shows how people react to trivial matters in India," he said.

In an interview to ANI earlier on Friday, Pitroda, also the chairman of Overseas Indian Congress, had questioned the death toll in the air strike by the Indian Air Force in Pakistan in retaliation to the Pulwama terror attack.

Reacting to the remarks, Prime Minister Modi hit out at Pitroda, tweeting that Pitroda "kick-started the Pakistan Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress".

Pakistan observes its Day on March 23.

"What is the problem in raising a question? As a citizen in democracy, discussion, dialogue, debate, discourse is a way of life," Pitroda said.

BJP president Amit Shah and several other party leader also lambasted Pitroda for his comments in the interview.

(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 condolence over the demise of Karnataka minister CS Shivalli.

Modi tweeted, "My condolences to the family and supporters of Karnataka Minister Shri CS Shivalli. Shri Shivalli will be remembered for his service to Karnataka. May his soul rest in peace."

Shivalli was rushed to a private hospital in Hubballi after he collapsed while interacting with people in Dharwad district. He died of cardiac arrest.

He was a three-time MLA from Kundagol constituency in Dharwad and won his first election as an independent candidate in 1999.

Shivalli joined the Congress and subsequently lost in the 2008 elections. He won again in 2013 and 2018 as the party candidate. He was given a Cabinet berth in the latest reshuffle by the Karnataka government.

(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 received greetings from Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Pakistan National Day.

"Received msg from PM Modi: "I extend my greetings & best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that ppl of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive & prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence," Khan tweeted.

While Islamabad would be celebrating the occasion on March 23, the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi organised events a day earlier on Friday.

India, however, did not send any representative to the event.

"The decision was taken after Pakistan High Commission decided to call Hurriyat leader to the reception. In February we were very clear, any attempt by Pakistan High Commission or Pakistani leadership to engage with Hurriyat leaders will not be taken lightly," said Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar.

However, no Hurriyat leaders were seen at the event.

Pakistan Day is celebrated to mark the Lahore Resolution on March 23 each year. The Lahore Resolution, which is also called Pakistan Resolution, passed on March 23, 1940, is considered a major milestone in the Muslim struggle for an independent Muslim state which was later called Pakistan.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Delhi court on Friday sent Sajjad Khan, an alleged associate of Pulwama terror attack mastermind Mudassir Ahmed Khan, to the Investigation Agency (NIA) custody till March 29.

Following a tip-off, Sajjad was arrested by the Delhi Police on Thursday night from an area near the Red Fort where he was allegedly pretending to be a shawl trader.

During in-chamber proceedings, Additional Sessions Judge Rakesh Syal allowed NIA to quiz him in the case.

The NIA questioned Sajjad inside the court for half-an-hour and thereafter requested the court to grant his custodial interrogation.

The NIA had requested for 10 days remand of Sajjad to unearth the deep-rooted conspiracy. Sajjad's defence counsel MS Khan, however, opposed it. The court gave seven days remand, till March 29.

Sajjad was presented before the court where Delhi Police handed over his custody to the NIA.

The accused is believed to be a close associate of Pulwama terror attack mastermind Mudassir Ahmed Khan who was gunned down by the security forces in an encounter in Jammu and Kashmir on March 11. Huge quantities of ammunition and automatic weapons were found during the encounter.

Forty Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama on February 14 after a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into their bus, which was a part of the convoy.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pyongyang removed staff from an inter-Korean liaison office just weeks after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's summit with US President Donald Trump ended abruptly without an agreement.

South Korean Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung said that Seoul was informed about the decision on Friday, during a meeting at the liaison office in Kaesong, reported Al Jazeera.

Chun told that the decision had been taken "in accordance with an order from an upper command".

Pyongyang asserted it did not care whether Seoul stayed at the liaison office or not, he added.

However, the permanency of North Korea's decision is unclear. According to Chun, South Korea will continue to staff the Kaesong liaison office while it expects North to do the same.

"We regret the North's decision," Chun said.

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un had failed to reach an agreement on the denuclearisation of North Korea during their second summit in Hanoi last month.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)New Delhi [India], Mar 22 (ANI): Close confidant of Rahul Gandhi and Chairman of the Overseas Indian Congress questioned the death toll in the Balakot airstrike conducted by the Indian Air Force in Pakistan in retaliation to the Pulwama terror attack.

"If they (IAF) killed 300, its ok. All I am saying is can you give me more facts and prove it," said Pitroda in a wide-ranging interview to ANI.

When asked on his views on the airstrike against the Jaish-e-Mohammad camp in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, he added that international news outlets had an alternate view of the impact of the air strike and that the people of India deserved to know the facts of the Air Force operation.

"I would like to know a little more because I read reports in the New York Times and other newspapers. Did we really attack? We really killed 300 people? I don't know that. As a citizen, I am entitled to know and if I ask it is my duty to ask, that doesn't mean I'm not a nationalist, That doesn't mean I am on this side or that side. We need to know the facts. If you say 300 people were killed, I need to know that. We all need to know that, people of India need to know that and then comes global media which says nobody was killed. I look bad as an Indian citizen," said Pitroda.

Pitroda, who is part of the Congress' manifesto committee for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and is considered a senior ideologue of the party, sought a dialogue with Pakistan. "I am a Gandhian, I believe in more compassion and respect. I believe in more dialogues personally. I think we should have a dialogue with everybody. Why just Pakistan? We are having dialogue with the whole world," added Pitroda.

Pressed further to clarify if talks with Pakistan was an option post the Pulwama terror attack which killed 40 CRPF jawans, Pitroda said that it would be naive to assume that if some people came here and attacked, every citizen of that nation is to be blamed. "I don't know much about (Pulwama) attack, it happens all the time, attack happen in Mumbai Taj hotel and Oberoi hotel. We could have reacted then and sent our planes but that is not the right approach according to me that's not how you deal with the World. Eight people come (referring to Mumbai 26/11 attacks) and do something, you don't jump on the entire nation," said Sam Pitroda in an interview to ANI.

When asked if he questioned the Indian Air Force's version of the Balakot air strikes, Pitroda clarified that an attack is different from making a claim of 300 dead. "We cannot be emotional. Data has to be neutral. So you come in today and say 'I killed 300 people' and I say wait a minute, the World is saying we didn't kill anybody or kill less or kill more.. I don't know," added Pitroda.

Sam Pitroda added a caveat to his remarks on the Pulwama terror attack and Balakot air strikes by saying that the views expressed by him were his personal views and not those of the Congress party. "I am talking as an individual. I am talking as a scientist. I believe in reason. I believe in logic. I believe in data. I don't believe in emotions," he added.

When asked if Dr. Manmohan Singh when Prime Minister was as decisive in his actions as PM Narendra Modi, Pitroda said that PM Manmohan Singh was one of the best Prime Ministers the country ever had. "A lot of people ridiculed, a lot of people have written articles, they have done movies. It is all bogus," he added. Pitroda also said that he disagreed with the way PM Modi acted post-Pulwama attack.

Pitroda went on to say in the interview that since 2014, a populist government had risen in both India and the United States. "The formula is to create fear by saying that there is enemy at the border. In India, it is Pakistan. In US, it is Mexican immigrants. Then say everything is bad because nobody is competent," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Latching on to Sam Pitroda's controversial comments on Balakot air strike, the BJP on Friday said the "alter-ego and chief strategist" of Rahul Gandhi had exposed the Congress to "ridicule" as he "does not believe the armed forces".

"It is BJP's charge that since morning Sam Pitroda has exposed the Congress to ridicule. He is not an ordinary person. He is the advisor, alter-ego and chief strategist of Rahul Gandhi. He (Pitroda) was very close to his (Rahul's) late father Rajiv Gandhi," BJP leader and Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters.

He was commenting on the remarks by Pitroda, a close confidant of Rahul and chairman of Overseas Indian Congress, who questioned the death toll in the air strike carried out by the Indian Air Force on Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) terror camp in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26 in retaliation to the Pulwama terror attack of February 14.

"He (Pitroda) does not believe the armed forces," Prasad said.

In an interview to ANI earlier on Friday, Pitroda said, "If they (IAF) killed 300 (terrorists), it's ok. All I am saying is can you give me more facts and prove it?"

Pitroda, while responding to questions on the Indian action in Balakot, also added that international news outlets had an alternate view of the impact of the air strike and that the people of India deserved to know the facts of the Air Force operation.

"I would like to know a little more because I read reports in the New York Times and other newspapers. Did we really attack? We really killed 300 people? I don't know that. As a citizen, I am entitled to know and if I ask it is my duty to ask, that doesn't mean I'm not a nationalist, That doesn't mean I am on this side or that side. We need to know the facts. If you say 300 people were killed, I need to know that. We all need to know that, people of India need to know that and then comes global media which says nobody was killed. I look bad as an Indian citizen," said Pitroda.

The Indian Overseas Congress chief said he didn't know much about the Pulwama terror attack.

Reacting to the remarks, Prime Minister Modi hit out at Pitroda, tweeting that Pitroda "kick-started the Pakistan Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress".

Later, Pitroda said that he was "baffled" at the response of the Prime Minister who slammed him for questioning the death toll in the Balakot air strike in Pakistan.

"I just said as a citizen I'm entitled to know what happened. I don't understand what is the controversy here, I am baffled at the response. Shows how people react to trivial matters in India," he told ANI.

BJP president Amit Shah and several other party leaders have also lambasted Pitroda for his comments in the interview.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Terming Sam Pitroda's recent comment on Balakot air strikes as "shameful", Union Minister for Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Friday said that Congress leaders are "dead people" and are not capable of becoming good leaders.

He further said that the Indian Air Force conducted the air strike on the terrorists in Pakistan but the pain was felt across the Congress ranks.

Speaking to ANI, Naqvi said: "Sam Pitroda statement is shameful for the nation. We were shocked to see that when terrorists were attacked in Pakistan Congress leaders were howling here. They are dead people. They do not have a sense what a leader should do for the country's safety and security."

Claiming that "no action" was taken against Pakistan after the 26/11 Mumbai attack by the Congress government, the union minister said: "Now everything is clear, Congress wanted that [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi government to follow their poor international policy, which they had during their rule."

He asserted that Prime Minister Modi's policy is different when it comes to the country's safety. "It is not in his blood. He will give a befitting reply when somebody will attack when it comes to country's safety and pride."

He further opined that people of Kashi, Uttar Pradesh will again vote of Prime Minister Modi. "PM Modi had contested from Varanasi last time and had done a lot of development in Kashi. People of Kashi wanted him back in the constituency this time as well," the minister said.

Sam Pitroda, chairman of Overseas Indian Congress, in an exclusive interview to ANI, questioned the death toll in the Balakot airstrike conducted by the Indian Air Force in retaliation to the Pulwama terror attack. "If they (IAF) killed 300, its ok. All I am saying is can you give me more facts and prove it," he said.

Pitroda was referring to international news outlets reporting a contrary view on the impact of the air strike and asserted that the people of India deserved to know the facts about the operation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Businessman Hitesh Patel, an accused in the Sterling Biotech group case, has been detained in Albania's capital city Tirana, Enforcement Directorate (ED) sources said.

Patel was detained by Crime Bureau-Tirana on March 20 after a Red Corner Notice was issued on March 11, ED sources said.

Patel is expected to be extradited to India soon. A prosecution complaint was filed by the ED in a special PMLA Court in India, they added.

Patel is the brother-in-law of Sandesara brothers -- Nitin and Chetan Sandesara, the main accused in the Sterling Biotech case.

Earlier, the ED had moved the special PMLA court in Delhi and filed the complaint under Section 4 of Fugitive Economic Offenders Act against four persons namely Nitin Sandesara, Chetan Sandesara, Dipti Sandesara and Hitesh Patel, ED sources said.

All the four accused are the promoters of Sterling Group and has fled the country to avoid criminal investigation, they said.

Patel was instrumental in getting dummy directors for shell companies used by Sandesaras, ED sources said.

This development comes after another fugitive businessman, Nirav Modi was arrested by the Scotland Yard in connection with a loan default case in India on Tuesday afternoon (local time). He was sent to HM Prison Wandsworth after his bail plea was rejected by the Westminster Magistrate Court in London.

Modi was remanded to judicial custody till March 29.

The fugitive diamond merchant, along with his uncle Mehul Choksi, is wanted for his alleged involvement in Rs 13,000 crore Punjab Bank (PNB) loan default case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Tata Power Strategic Engineering Division (Tata Power SED) on Friday announced the signing of a Rs 1,200 crore deal with the Ministry of Defence for supply of 23 ship-borne 3D air surveillance radars to Indian Navy over the next 10 years.

The contract was signed under the buy-and-make category of the Defence Procurement Procedure 2013. It will offer Indian Navy a proven solution with a production arrangement in India under transfer of technology. This will further substantive self-reliance for the country's defence requirements.

The contract will be executed by Tata Power SED as the prime contractor with foreign original equipment manufacturer partner Indra Sistemas of Spain, the company informed stock exchanges in regulatory filings.

Significantly, Tata Advanced Systems Ltd has entered into a strategic partnership agreement with Tata Power for purchase of Tata Power SED, subject to regulatory and other approvals.

In November 2017, Tata Power SED had signed a contract with the Ministry of Defence for supply of portable diver detection sonars for Indian Naval applications. This contract was also part of Make in India initiative and the second contract under the Ministry of Defence procurement category buy-and-make category.

Tata Power SED partnered with DSIT Solutions Ltd in Israel for the delivery of PointShield portable diver detection sonar systems under a transfer of technology arrangement. It was one of the largest orders in the world market.

.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Weather in the capital and its surrounding areas such as Gurugram, Faridabad, Noida and Ghaziabad was comfortable in March till Wednesday, on account of on and off rain and thundershowers making an appearance over northwestern plains. However, last 72 hours have registered sudden rise in the day's temperature.

On Friday, the mercury settled at 32 Degree Celsius in the morning. This increased substantially on Thursday and reached 31 Degree Celsius.

"We expect strong northwesterly winds to commence over Delhi and adjoining areas of Noida, Gurugram, Faridabad and Ghaziabad. Due to this, temperatures might drop slightly but day maximums would not go below 30 Degree Celsius. Hence, we can now announce the arrival of Summer season," said Skymet, a private weather forecasting agency.

"By the end of March, day temperature would reach 36 Degree Celsius and by second of week of April it would even tough 40-degree mark," it added.

However, with the rise of the temperature in Delhi, the air quality index (AQI) has also turned 'poor'.

According to the state-run SAFAR, the AQI of Delhi was docking at 225 at 9 n the morning, which falls in the poor category. The organisation has advised sensitive groups, which includes children and adults to reduce prolonged or heavy exertion.

In its advisory, it also stated that people residing in Delhi must take more breaks and do less intense activities. Asthematics have been asked to keep medicines ready if symptoms of coughing or shortness of breath occur.

"Heart patients, see a doctor, if get palpitations, shortness of breath, or unusual fatigue," SAFAR added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Villagers and Army men on Friday bid an emotional farewell to Rifleman Yash Paul of the Indian Army who died in Pakistan firing along the LoC yesterday.

Several army and civilian officers paid their last respects to the deceased who was cremated with full military honours.

"We are sad. His mother, brother, wife -- all of them are very sad," Yash's father Desh Raj said while demanding strong action against Pakistan.

One of his friends said, "While the country was playing with colours, Yash was playing Holi with bullets. When his family used to call him, he used to say don't worry, as long as I am here Pakistan won't be able to do anything.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The United Kingdom has put 3,500 troops on standby to "aid contingency plans" in the face of a probable no-deal Brexit, according to a spokesman for the British Ministry of Defence.

The spokesman told CNN that the contingency plans are part of Operation Redfold - the British military's crisis management operation in the scenario of a no-deal Brexit.

Apart from this, the UK's military bunker under the Ministry of Defence has become "operational" on Monday. Known as Pindar, the bunker is a defence crisis-management centre which is used to plan for operations deemed significant, like the 2012 London Olympics.

"We are always willing to support wider government planning for any scenario, and we have committed to holding 3,500 troops at readiness to aid contingency plans. We will consider any requests from other government departments if they feel defence capability could contribute to their no-deal planning," a Ministry of Defence spokesman told CNN.

European Union leaders are currently holding intense discussions in Brussels regarding the extension to Brexit which has been sought by the United Kingdom. Speculations are rife that extension may be granted till May.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Aurionpro Solutions announced that its subsidiary in Singapore has won a prestigious project, in Banking and Fintech space, from one of the largest banks in Singapore, having significant operations in Southeast Asia including in key markets of Malaysia and China.

lntegro Technologies (a wholly owned subsidiary of Aurionpro Solutions Ltd) has been awarded a contract by the said bank for the extension of REACH CUMS platform, its Loan Origination System Product Suite, to its network across more than 10 countries including Malaysia and China.

The Order is valued in excess of Rs 20 crore, the implementation will be completed in various milestones upto February 2020.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Headline indices of the Mainland China equity market closed marginally higher on Friday, 22 March 2019, with investor sentiments subdued on caution ahead of U. S.-China trade talks in Beijing next week. A U. S. trade delegation headed by Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will visit China on March 28-29 for the next round of negotiations, China's commerce ministry said on Thursday. At closing bell, the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index added 0.09%, or 2.69 points, to 3,104.15. The Shenzhen Composite Index, which tracks stocks on China's second exchange, rose 0.2%, or 3.45 points, to 1,700.94. The blue-chip CSI300 index dropped 0.08%, or 3.09 points, to 3,833.80.

Beijing confirmed on Thursday that trade talks will continue with the United States, with U.

S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin visiting China on March 28-29, and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He heading to Washington in April. However, U. S. President Donald Trump raised fresh concerns by threatening to leave the tariffs on Chinese goods for a "substantial period" to ensure that Beijing complies with any trade agreement.

CURRENCY NEWS: China's yuan softened against the U. S. dollar on Friday, on weaker mid-point fixing by central bank. Prior to market opening on Tuesday, the People's Bank of China set the midpoint rate at 6.6944, weaker than the previous fix of 6.6850. Spot yuan was changing hands at 6.7036 per dollar at midday, 38 pips weaker than the previous late session close and 0.14% softer than the midpoint.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Receives bids for 18.34 crore units

The initial public offer (IPO) of Embassy Office Parks REIT received bids for 18.34 crore units, as against 7.12 crore units on offer, as per the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) website data. The issue was subscribed 2.57 times.

The IPO opened for subscription on 18 March 2019 and it closed on 20 March 2019. The price band for the issue was fixed at Rs 299 to Rs 300 per unit. Minimum application was for 800 units (i.e., Rs 2.4 lakh at higher price and Rs 2.39 lakh as lower price) and in multiples of 400 units thereafter.

The institutional investors' category was subscribed 2.15 times. The other investors' category was subscribed 3.09 times.

Ahead of the opening of the IPO, the board of directors of the company at its meeting held on 15 March 2018, finalised allocation of 5.81 crore units to anchor investors at Rs 300 each.

The Embassy Office Parks REIT (Embassy) is an irrevocable trust and was registered with SEBI on 3 August 2017, as a real estate investment trust under Regulation 3(1) of the REIT Regulations. The Embassy REIT has been settled by the Embassy Sponsor. Subsequently, in August 2018, SEBI took on record the addition of the Blackstone Sponsor to the sponsors of the Embassy REIT. As of the date, the Embassy Sponsor and the Blackstone Sponsor are the sponsors of the Embassy REIT.

Embassy is the owner of a high quality office portfolio in India that serves as essential corporate infrastructure to multinational tenants and has significant embedded growth prospects. The company's portfolio comprises 7 best-in-class office parks and 4 prime city-center office buildings totalling 32.7 m sq feet as of 31 December 2018, with strategic amenities, including two completed and two under-construction hotels totalling 1,096 keys, food courts, employee transportation and childcare facilities.

Of the total 32.7 m square feet, around 60.5% is in Bengaluru, 16.2% is in Mumbai, 14.4% in Pune and rest 8.9% is in Noida.

The IPO proceeds will be utilized for repayment of loans and debts of Rs 3710 crore, Rs 460 crore towards acquisition of the Embassy One Assets currently held by EODPL and rest for general corporate purposes.

On a consolidated basis, Embassy Office Parks REIT reported total profit after tax (PAT) of Rs 285.11 crore on net sales of Rs 1375.98 crore in the nine-months ended December 2018.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Thursday, March 21, 2019 at 8:00PM

by Chris Feil

With his Academy Award winning debut feature Get Out, Jordan Peele distilled an expansive theme into one formidable package. His follow-up Us - a film as giddy to scare us as the kind of carnival house of horrors that its young Adelaide wanders into in the films opening moments - does the exact opposite. Here Peele builds upon a single idea, one that doesnt come into its clearest view until the final moments. Whether Peele is asking us to look inward or look outward, he has shown to be one of the sharpest modern storytellers when it comes to exploring an expanse of intertwined psychosocial ideas.

After her brief ominous prologue, we are reintroduced to the adult Adelaide Wilson, played by the immediately knighted scream queen Lupita Nyongo. Adelaide is beginning a summer vacation with her husband Gabe and two children, Zora and Jason, but she is seemingly ever at ease. After returning to the beach of her unspoken trauma brings her lingering paranoia to the surface, her family is visited upon by a doppelganger one. And each of these uninvited guests has brought a very large pair of scissors.

Us satisfies immensely in part because Peele is as concerned with developing Adelaides inner tension as he is in molding specific family dynamics. As oblique as some of the thematics at play in the film initially appear, Peele establishes them around what feels like a very real family unit, one crafted with believable petty annoyances and protective affection. And their center of gravity is the unacknowledged weight of Adelaides fear of the world around them, like a stone in their shoe they have learned to live with and adjusted their posture accordingly.

All of this is fully realized in the sensational performance that Lupita Nyongo gifts us with. As Adelaide, she is able to humanize a very tricky and internal psychosis, giving clarity to the sense that her fears have festered and solidified over time. Then as her mirror image Red, she becomes a terrifying manifestation of all of it and also something frighteningly unfathomable. Seldom does a single role in any genre demand a performer to flash this much range, and Nyongo delivers something unquestionably robust. Its a performance both moving and unsettling in its physical expressiveness, a Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter all in one and an unflinching headfirst dive into the films capacity for the deeply strange.

But the showcase provided for Nyongo is also reinforced by an equally adept ensemble playing their internal and familial roles to their capacity. As Gabe, Winston Duke emerges as our new quintessential cinematic dad, spouting dad jokes and feigning control with thoughtful comedic precision. With a performance as hilarious and comfortable with the many levels at play in Us, one can hope and easily imagine that we will see him everywhere after this.

Elsewhere, Shahadi Wright Joseph as Zora and Evan Alex as Jason bring smart, understated layers to the family dynamic (particularly in how they approach Adelaides baggage as a sibling unit) without the trappings of shrieking child horror performances. As Gabes married friends, Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker make the comedic and unsettling most out of limited screentime as a couple built on suppressed self-loathing.

In playing with the dualities of evil opposites that are also mirror reflections of our deepest concerns, Peele turns an individuals story into a tapestry of contemporary ailments. The target here is status and engineered societal divides, and the fear of dismantling - of the self, of our protective units, and especially of the barriers that separate us from them. Some of the films most fascinating aspects are how such ills extrapolate out from the personal to the global, and how we pretend to remedy it. Whether in forced niceties between acquaintances or large scale empty demonstrative shows of togetherness, here embodied through the Hands Across America moment of 1986 - a campaign whos cutesy logo visually depicted a literal divide across the map antithetical to its purpose. When asked who they are, Red flatly states Were Americans.

All of this allows Peele to create a very fun film that finds the sinister in the mundane and pushes the limits of mainstream for the bizarre. You can forgive the films slight overlength considering just how much the writer/director gives us to chew. Even as the film works in a traditional horror structure, its intellectual rigor makes it unpredictable. Its as daring an allegorical vision as Darren Aronofsky conceived with mother! but not nearly as haughty, and Peele never falls prey to pretension. Us is first and foremost a great time at the movies.

Perhaps most rewarding of all is that Us gives the audience the most special of delights for horror films: Peele leaves us with dozens of mysteries to be explored on rewatch. Trust that we will be unpacking the layers of meaning in this film - and the terrifying genius of Lupita Nyongos performance - for quite some time.

A-The Election Commission will set up 15 special polling stations at Kanhmun village along the Mizoram-Tripura border to help tribal refugees living in relief camps in Tripura exercise their franchise for the lone Lok Sabha seat in Mizoram, officials said on Friday.

The tribal refugees, however, have yet to decide whether they would go to Kanhmun village to cast their votes.

There are around 12,000 eligible voters, from among the 35,000 tribal immigrants from Mizoram, sheltered in northern Tripura's seven relief camps in Kanchanpur and Panisagar sub-divisions for the past 22 years after they fled from Mizoram in the wake of communal tensions.

"Like last year's Assembly elections, the Election Commission has decided to set up 15 special polling stations at Kanhmun village to facilitate voting by the tribal refugees during the Lok Sabha polls in Mizoram," Kanchanpur Sub-Divisional Magistrate Abeda Nanda Baidya told IANS on the phone.

He said: "The North Tripura district administration would arrange vehicles and security to help these tribals to cast their votes in these 15 special polling stations on April 11."

Meanwhile, the NGO Coordination Committee, a conglomerate of major civil society and student organisations, had earlier threatened to agitate if special arrangements were made for the tribal refugee voters to cast their votes in the special polling stations, instead of the normal polling stations in different districts of Mizoram.

A delegation of the Mizoram Bru Displaced People's Forum (MBDPF), the refugees' apex body, would meet the Election Commission in Delhi next week demanding setting up of polling stations inside the seven relief camps

"It would be very difficult for the aged, ailing and pregnant women to travel on an average of 35 km to Kanhmun village to cast votes. A three member MBDPF delegation would meet the Election Commission early next week to persuade the commission to accept our demands," Bruno Msha, General Secretary of MBDPF, told IANS.

Mizoram Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Ashish Kundra said in Aizawl that as per the Election Commission's directives, 15 polling stations - nine for Mamit district and three each for Kolasib and Lunglei districts - would be set up at the Mizoram-Tripura border village.

Kundra said that he is in close touch with the Tripura CEO regarding the logistical support to the refugee voters. He said that he will send a team to Tripura to discuss the arrangements.

Meanwhile, following an agreement signed in Delhi in July 2018, foodgrain and other relief supplies to the Reang tribal immigrants was to be stopped from October 1, 2018, to compel the tribal refugees to return to their respective villages in Mizoram.

However, following an appeal by the refugees, the supply was extended twice by the Union Home Ministry first till March 31 and then again till September 30.

"A Home Ministry letter to the Chief Secretaries of Tripura and Mizoram said that the refugees have to be repatriated by September 30. Free rations and other facilities will be stopped then," an official of Tripura's Revenue and Relief department said.

--IANS

sc/oeb/bc

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Kerala Excise officials on Friday seized Rs 13 crore worth of hashish oil and have taken into custody here five men in this regard, a top official said.

Excise officials acted following a tip-off and took into custody five carriers and the vehicle in which the rich haul of hashish was concealed. The seizure was effected near a school in the state capital.

Speaking to the media after effecting the seizure, Excise Commissioner Rishiraj Singh said that four of the arrested belong to Kerala, while one person is from Andhra Pradesh.

"The seizure was effected following inspection of the vehicle. The drug was concealed in the side panels of the vehicle," said Singh.

Enforcement officials in the state are on high alert as they feel that the supply of contraband drugs into the state is likely to increase with the elections scheduled for next month.

--IANS

sg/bc/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)South Indian multi-lingual actor Prakash Raj on Friday filed his nomination to contest the Lok Sabha elections from Bangalore Central constituency as an Independent.

Raj, 53, who hails from this tech city, is a popular actor in Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Hindi films.

"National parties like BJP and Congress have failed the people. I would like to be the voice of the people," Raj told the media after filing his nomination.

The actor will be contesting from the seat against BJP's outgoing MP P.C. Mohan, who too filed his nomination from Bangalore Central seat on Friday.

The Congress is yet to announce its candidate from the constituency.

Delhi's ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has announced its support to Prakash Raj.

--IANS

bha/oeb/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actress Alia Bhatt, who is playing one of the leading ladies in the upcoming film "Kalank", on Friday visited Mumbai's iconic Gaiety theatre for the first time in her life.

She was here to launch the film's song "First class".

The actress arrived alongside her co-star Varun Dhawan at the theatre, located in Bandra, one of the suburban areas of Mumbai city where thousands of her fans were waiting to catch a glimpse of their favourite star.

As the fans welcomed the duo with a loud cheer, Varun addressed them saying, "it is overwhelming to come and see the responses from all you guys."

He also shared that "Alia is visiting the theatre for the first time."

At the event, the fans demanded that Alia perform live on stage. So, Alia performed Kathak for her fans on the stage. Later, Varun also joined her and flaunted his dance moves.

After the event, they both entertained their fans outside the theatre. Varun and Alia stepped on the theatre's roof and wooed the crowd by grooving on their just launched song "First class".

The song also features Aditya Roy Kapur, Madhuri Dixit Nene and Kiara Advani. Composed by Pritam and written by Amitabh Bhattacharya, it is sung by Arijit Singh and Neeti Mohan.

"Kalank" is scheduled to release on April 17.

--IANS

aru/sim/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The New Zealand Police said on Friday that it was probing death threats sent to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on social media.

A Twitter post containing a photo of a gun and captioned "You are next" was sent to the Prime Minister earlier on Friday, The New Zealand Herald reported.

The post had been up for more than 48 hours before the sender's Twitter account was suspended before 4 p.m. after it was reported by various people.

Another post tagged to Ardern and the New Zealand Police had the same photo with "next it's you".

The suspended account contained anti-Islamic content and white supremacist hate speech.

A police spokesperson told The New Zealand Herald: "Police are aware of a comment made on Twitter and are making enquiries."

A Twitter spokesperson said the micro-blogging site's rules prohibit violent threats.

"We took action shortly after we received the first report on this tweet, and our teams continue to work pro-actively to remove violative and illegal content from the service in relation to the Christchurch attack.

"We also continue to cooperate with law enforcement to facilitate their investigations as required," the spokesperson said.

The development come a week after 50 people were killed on March 15 by a lone gunman who went on a shooting spree at two mosques in Christchurch.

--IANS

ksk/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)NDA ally and Union Minister for Social Welfare Ramdas Athawale senses an opportunity to wrest the Mumbai North-East Lok Sabha seat in the ongoing tussle between Maharashtra's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena coalition over the constituency, party sources indicated on Friday.

Due to huge differences with the Shiv Sena, the BJP has so far not announced the candidature for Mumbai North-East - currently represented by Kirit Somaiya - though it retained and declared the names of Poonam Mahajan (Mumbai North-Central) and Gopal Shetty (Mumbai North).

The Sena has made it clear that if Somaiya is nominated, it would not only campaign for his defeat but this could also hamper its statewide alliance with the BJP.

The cat-fight between the two allies is considered 'fortuitous' by Athawale, who has been clamouring for at least two seats for his Republican Party of India-A.

He has been lobbying hard for getting at least one seat in Mumbai and another elsewhere in the state from the BJP-Sena's quotas, but both have rejected his demands.

"While Shiv Sena feels the RPI should contest Mumbai North-East, the BJP wants to give us Mumbai South-Central seat," Athawale claimed last fortnight, on the seats held by BJP and Sena, respectively.

However, both parties are reluctant to give up their seats in the country's commercial capital represented by Poonam Mahajan (BJP) and Rahul Shewale (Sena), or elsewhere in the state to the RPI-A in the high-stakes elections.

A senior RPI leader pointed out how Athawale enjoys a great rapport with both Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Shiv Sena President Uddhav Thackeray and allotting the seats to the RPI-A could a win-win situation for all sides.

"If the BJP re-nominates Somaiya, it could be in danger of losing that seat as Sena will work against him. Athawale can be a formidable candidate as both parties will work with RPI-A and the huge Dalit population in that constituency will help," a party leader explained, requesting anonymity.

It maybe recalled that prior to the alliance, Somaiya had been a bitter critic of the Sena and once even threatened to throw its top leadership in jail if voted back to power.

The Sena hit back by opposing Somaiya's nomination and warned of heavy costs to the BJP, including losing the seat and even the alliance.

In this scenario, another senior aide said that Athawale could be an effective counter to the Prakash Ambedkar's Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh and AIMIM's Owaisi brothers which will contest elections for all 48 seats in the state under the banner of the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA).

The major opponent in Mumbai North-East will be former MP Sanjay D. Patil of the Nationalist Congress Party, which has only one seat in Mumbai, with the remaining five going to the Congress quota.

Patil could have an edge with campaign support from Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which is not contesting the Lok Sabha polls this time.

Maharashtra, which has 48 Lok Sabha constituencies, the second-highest in the country after Uttar Pradesh's 80 seats, was unilaterally carved out by the BJP-Sena last month, leaving all other smaller allies fuming.

The leaders of five parties small in the Maharashtra NDA even held a 'mini-conclave' and unanimously demanded an adequate number of seats for both the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.

After blowing hot and cold for over a year, the BJP-Sena last month entered into a pre-poll alliance in the presence of Thackeray and BJP President Amit Shah.

They will fight the parliamentary elections in the 25:23 ratio and contest the assembly elections later this year on a 50:50 basis, after seat allotments to the smaller alliance partners.

(Quaid Najmi can be contacted at q.najmi@ians.in)

--IANS

qn/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Australia said on Friday that it was keeping a watch on white supremacists, a week after an attack against two mosques in New Zealand left 50 people dead and another 50 wounded.

"You are on our radar and you will not be able to incite the racial strife that you seek," Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo said, while speaking to a parliamentary committee, reports Efe news.

Australian national Brenton Tarrant was identified as the sole suspect in the mosque attacks in New Zealand's Christchurch city on March 15.

Tarrant, who is due to appear in the High Court on April 5 charged with one count of murder, had fired indiscriminately with several semi-automatic guns at those gathered at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques.

"The scrutiny and pressure that you are under will only intensify," Pezzullo added, Australian broadcaster ABC reported.

However, he did not reveal the number of people with "extremist ideology of white supremacy" being monitored in Australia.

Tarrant had live streamed the attack through Facebook for 17 minutes, and had also published an anti-Muslim manifesto on social networks before the massacre.

Pezzullo said that the authorities were working together with the Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to investigate a man, who had allegedly helped Tarrant draft the manifesto.

There have been several assaults by white supremacists in Australia in recent years.

A neo-Nazi group formed in Melbourne in 2016, that idolizes Adolf Hitler on its website, is also being investigated.

--IANS

mr/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Friday told the Modi government not to pretend to be the Indian Army and said that governments which say they can't be questioned are dangerous.

"The sacrifices of our armed forces should never be questioned. To ask questions to politicians in a democracy is our fundamental right. This government needs to stop pretending to be the Indian Army," the former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister tweeted.

"Politicians who say they cannot be questioned are dangerous," he tweeted.

His remarks came soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused the opposition of insulting the defence forces and being the "natural habitat of terror apologists" and questioning the armed forces.

Modi's statement came in response to Congress President Rahul Gandhi's chief advisor Sam Pitroda's remarks that incidents like the Pulwama terror attack "happen all the time" and that the United Progressive Alliance government also could have sent planes across the border after the 2008 Mumbai terror attack but "that is not the right approach".

"Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew -- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India -- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest," Modi tweeted.

--IANS

aks/mag/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The candidates of Tripura's ruling BJP and its junior ally IPFT filed their nomination papers on Friday to contest each other in the Lok Sabha polls.

The Bharatiya Janata Party termed the IPFT's (Indigenous People's Front of Tripura) move as violation of "raj dharma" and "coalition etiquette".

After filing nomination by IPFT's Sukhla Charan Noatia, party chief Narendra Chandra Debbarma said: "To raise the statehood demand in Parliament, we are contesting the Lok Sabha polls."

Organising a big procession, Tripura Pradesh General Secretary Pratima Bhowmik submitted her candidature for the Tripura West Lok Sabha constituency.

Tripura Chief Minister and BJP's Tripura Pradesh President Biplab Kumar Deb, Deputy Chief Minister Jishnu Dev Varma, their ministerial colleagues and senior leaders led the rally before submission of the nomination by the 50-year-old woman saffron party leader.

Before the BJP, IPFT nominee Sukhla Charan Noatia submitted his nomination papers in the same constituency after holding a similar procession, which was led by party President and Revenue Minister Narendra Chandra Debbarma and General Secretary and Forest Minister Mever Kumar Jamatia.

According to the respective party sources, BJP's nominee Rebati Tripura and IPFT candidate Narendra Chandra Debbarma would submit their nomination papers for the Tripura East Lok Sabha seat on Monday.

The BJP has made a series of appeals to its junior ally to withdraw their candidates, but the IPFT leadership, who had earlier demanded to the dominant partner to leave the Tripura East seat to the tribal based party, remained firm about contesting the elections.

The Tripura East seat is reserved for the tribals.

The BJP's Chief spokesman Ashok Sinha while talking to the media, said that the IPFT has violated and dishonoured "raj dharma" (duty of governance) and "coalition etiquette".

Tripura Chief Minister also urged the IPFT to uphold the "raj dharma".

"The IPFT announced candidates without discussing the issue with us," Deb told the media.

BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav, Deputy Chief Minister Jishnu Dev Varma and Education and Law Minister Ratan Lal Nath held separate meetings with the IPFT leaders here last week, but the seat sharing hurdles remained unresolved as both sides are firm about fielding their candidates in the two Lok Sabha seats.

Tripura Chief Minister is now holding meetings with the Central party leaders in Delhi to finalise the candidates for the two Lok Sabha seats.

In last year's February 18 politically significant Assembly polls, the BJP and IPFT together won 44 seats in the 60 member Assembly with the dominant party alone bagging 36 seats.

The IPFT has two ministers in the nine member BJP-IPFT ministry.

Polling for Tripura West will be held in the first phase on April 11 and Tripura East in the second phase on April 18. Votes will be counted on May 23.

--IANS

sc/oeb/in

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A group of BJP activists on Friday protested against the nomination of Nisith Pramanik, who recently switched to the saffron party from the Trinamool Congress, as a candidate from Coochbehar constituency in West Bengal.

They vandalised furniture, ransacked the party office in Coochbehar, and heckled district chief Malati Rava on Thursday night, alleging that she took a bribe from Pramanik.

"We do not want any turncoat to be selected from Coochbehar. The party did not consider leaders who have been fighting against Trinamool for years. We are disappointed," a worker said.

Refuting all the allegations against her, Rava said the central leadership had nominated Pramanik and the district leaders had "no say" in it.

"We, from the district, have not recommended him... They (BJP workers) are unhappy and expressed their dissatisfaction. It is a natural phenomenon in a political party and everything would be sorted out," she told IANS over phone.

Taking strong exception to the protest, state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Dilip Ghosh said those not willing to accept the central leadership's decision may leave the party.

"We have gained in strength in West Bengal over the past two-three years... As a cadre-based and disciplined party, we have to accept the decision. Those who are opposing it can leave us," he added.

According to party sources, Dipak Barman, a long time party worker, may fight from the seat as an Independent candidate.

Rava, however, ruled out any such possibility.

--IANS

bdc/ssp/mag/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Friday, March 22, 2019 at 11:38AM

by Jason Adams

What scares us -- the communal us -- shifts through time. The 70s gave us Vietnam allegories like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, while in the 80s Slasher Movies were all the rage as divorce numbers went up and women asserted their rights. Then there was so-called Torture Porn, which was all the rage while Bush & Cheney were throwing their waterboarding parties. So what now? It's hard not to see Grief as the theme of our current moment -- the great horror films of our age, films like The Babadook and Hereditary, are profound ruminations on a world that's already slipped through our fingers -- a madness so close its breath is hot on your throat, and a knowledge that its our own failures, our own shortcomings, that brought this all down upon us.

Hotel Mumbai is technically not a horror movie (look to Jordan Peele's Us, which Chris just reviewed, for this weekend's official entry in that genre) but it sure operates like one...

We're introduced to a band of characters, some more broadly than others, and wait for the terrorists, the masked murders, to close in, hunting them down. Whether that's strictly moral -- turning real-life tragedy into a violent video-game -- has interested a lot of the reviewers reviewing this movie but it doesn't really interest me; Hotel Mumbai is hardly alone in that regard in our moment in time -- hello, Paul Greengrass.

What interests me more is how our moment in time is demanding these films, this particular catharsis.

The news this morning showed me photographs of women across New Zealand donning head-scarves to show respect to and solidarity with the Muslims who just suffered an act of devastation in their country -- a gorgeous act of humanity, of bringing people together to mourn and to present a united front. These movies, for all their comparative crudeness, are really giving us some of that same thing. A superficial stab at understanding, on an animal level, what the horror of today is, and a vision of its other side.

Hotel Mumbai , the first feature from director Anthony Maras, is relentless and grueling, but also particularly effective -- Maras has a real skill with the most vital aspect of this kind of enclosed space thriller (even if the "enclosed space" here is palatially ginormous) which is giving us a clear lay-out of where we are at every moment; he situates us somewhat masterfully among the many rooms and floors where this horror show plays out, making the terror of moving through it all the more compelling.

Also aiding us on that count is his cast, led by a deeply moving Dev Patel -- I've seen some complaints that the film foregrounds the white guests (that would be Armie Hammer and Jason Isaacs) over brown faces but the rigid Upstairs Downstairs dynamic, surviving alongside India's caste system, leads to some of the film's most fascinating (and I think purposefully troubling) dynamics. Who's put in the way of these guns and bombs wielded by brainwashed kids -- who lives and dies, who is asked to sacrifice, in this world? The film asks all these questions, and brushes up against a lot of uncomfortable truths as it does.The two crashes involving the same Boeing 737 Max model in a span of five months revealed some problems with the industry regulation as well as pilot training, according to an aviation expert.

"I believe this is the fundamental root cause of these accidents -- inadequate regulation and oversight to counter financial incentives (of the airline industry)," Douglas Moss, an aviation safety and security expert at University of South California, told Xinhua news agency on Thursday.

An Ethiopian Airlines Flight crashed on March 10, killing 189 people onboard. In October 2018, a Lion Air flight plunged into the Java Sea, killing 157 people.

The Chicago-headquartered Boeing Company, has since been put under spotlight and potential legal liability has been widely discussed, even though an investigation is still underway.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is mandated to guarantee airline safety via a certification process. But under its Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) programme, the FAA delegates to the manufacturer certain aspects of certifying the airplane -- making sure that the airplane design meets all the FAA requirements, according to Moss.

"There is evidence that Boeing failed to fulfil its duties under the ODA," said Moss. "They (Boeing) take their responsibilities for safety seriously."

But the financial risks and incentives for both manufacturers and operators are so large that they sometimes sway corporate judgement, he said.

"The company may make a corporate decision that undermines safety and there isn't enough governmental oversight or manpower to correct the issue," Moss explained.

He added the pilot training at airlines is "woefully inadequate".

"The 737 MAX pilots at American Airlines were given only a 56-minute iPad presentation to convey all the differences between the 737 MAX and its cousins," he said. "Certainly that is not enough to ensure that the pilots are now competent to fly this new plane with all the new changes incorporated into it."

In fact, most of the simulator time was devoted to administrative or rudimentary procedures instead of practicing how to handle emergencies, said Moss.

Another example he gave is the "poor documentation" that airlines give their pilots.

In the Lion Air accident, the pilots reportedly spent several minutes trying to find the right procedure in their emergency handbook to address their flight control problem.

"In my experience, the document writers at airlines are not pilots or human factors experts, and they follow mostly only rigid rules of format, with no concept of how the procedure will be used in the cockpit," said Moss.

"Hopefully all these will change for the better after these accidents."

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Brazil's former President Michel Temer was arrested on corruption charges, the media reported on Friday.

The arrest on Thursday was ordered by Judge Marcelo Bretas, who is in charge of the Operation Car Wash investigations on corruption in the government, reported Xinhua news agency.

Seven others were also arrested, including Moreira Franco, who served as the Minister of Mines and Energy in the Temer government and retired Colonel Joao Baptista Lima Filho, a close friend of Temer.

The former President was mentioned in several different cases of corruption, but was arrested for a particular case of bribe-taking.

He was accused of taking 1 million reals (about $262,000) in bribes from construction company Engevix, in exchange for favouring the company in a contract with nuclear power plant Angra 3.

Franco and Lima were accused of having acted as middlemen in the case.

According to the prosecution office, participants of the scheme, including Temer, committed crimes of corruption, embezzlement and money laundering, which involved other companies and governmental contracts as well.

Temer is "the head of a criminal organization" which has been active in Rio for decades, said Judge Bretas.

Temer, the predecessor of current President Jair Bolsonaro, left office last year. He is the second Brazilian President to be arrested on corruption charges, following Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is currently serving a 12-year-and-one-month prison sentence for corruption and money laundering.

--IANS

pg/bc

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Tesla CEO Elon Musk is prioritizing on meeting its first quarter goal of car deliveries before March 31.

Before the end of the quarter, Tesla needs to deliver 30,000 more cars to meet its internal goals, media reported.

Under the subject line "Vehicle Delivery Help Needed!", Musk reached out to his employees via an email sent on Thursday afternoon.

"Musk sent an email to all Tesla employees informing them that car deliveries should be everyone's top priority until the end of the quarter on March 31," Business Insider Malaysia reported on Thursday.

Last week, company Vice President Sanjay Shah sent an email to Tesla employees asking them to volunteer for extra shifts to deliver the vehicles on time.

"What has made this particularly difficult is that Europe and China are simultaneously experiencing the same massive increase in delivery volume that North America experienced last year," the report quoted Musk as saying in the email.

"In some locations, the delivery rate is over 600 per cent higher than its previous peak!"

Musk also highlighted supplier issues in Europe which had further complicated the company's delivery situation.

"According to the email, this is the 'biggest wave in Tesla's history' and 'won't be repeated in subsequent quarters'," the report said.

--IANS

rp/mag/bc

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The virtual collapse of seat adjustment talks between the Left Front and Congress ahead of the 2019 polls in Bengal may give an unprecedented advantage to the BJP in 12 to 14 Lok Sabha seats as it would amass a large chunk of the anti-incumbency votes in the state, a political analyst says - adding that the Left and the Congress might even end up empty handed.

"It is possible that the left and Congress will not get a single seat this year. The left may still hold its relevance with the help of its powerful mass organisations but the Congress will get wiped out from Bengal for this mistake. It is possible that their tally in 2021 state assembly polls will come down to five seats," Udayan Bandyopadhyay, an associate professor at the Bangabasi College, told IANS.

The prospects of any seat adjustment between the two forces seems almost nil, unless Congress president Rahul Ganhi during his visit to the state on Saturday forces a miraculous rethink among his party's state leadership.

As things stand now, allegations and counter-allegations are flying thick and fast from both sides, even as the first date of polling in the state is hardly 20 days away.

The talks had been bumping from one pothole to another since the outset. First, the Congress refused to let go Raiganj and Murshidabad, the only two seats won by the LF five years back.

After the Congress, which had four seats in the outgoing house, came around, following Gandhi's intervention, intense bargaining started over specific seats like Basirhat and Purulia, while LF constituents like AIFB, RSP and CPI adopted a rigid stance on releasing seats to the Congress from their quotas.

Things took a turn for the worst when the LF came up with a list of 25 candidates, that included the name of a renowned physician Rezaul Karim, the convenor of the state Congress medical cell.

Taking umbrage, the state Congress held an emergency meeting, informed the party high command of the situation, declared the talks had failed and that it would contest all the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

Since then there has been some drama bordering on the burlesque and farcial.

The LF came up with its second candidates list, leaving out the four seats won by Congress in the last general elections. The state Congress leadership rejected the "gesture', reiterating it would filed candidates in all the seats.

However, in a curious turn of events, the Congress decided to leave five seats for the Left as it announced candidates for 11 seats, but refused to withdraw its candidates from Raiganj and Murshidabad.

LF leaders lost no time in pointing out that the Congress had a vote share of a mere two to five per cent in the five seats. The combine put up candidates in two of the four seats the Congress won the last time.

According to political analyst Udayan Bandyopadhyay, the LF and Congress' failure to untie the seat sharing knot will practically diminish their chances of winning more than one Lok Sabha seat from the state while giving the BJP an edge in a "neck to neck battle" with the ruling Trinamool Congress in a number of seats, especially in north Bengal.

"If the left-Congress alliance collapses, it would be advantageous to the BJP. They would get the advantage in at least 12-14 seats in Bengal because a large chunk of the anti-incumbency votes against the ruling Trinamool Congress could go to them," Bandyopadhyay told IANS.

"These votes in a number of north Bengal districts could have gone to the Left-Congress. But now activists would be somewhat frustrated at the failure of the talks and and end up voting for the BJP," he explained.

Noting that the anti-incumbency vote share has always been higher in Bengal, he pointed out the erstwhile LF government could come back to power by obtaining over 50 per cent votes only twice in their reign of 34 years while the Trinamoool Congress has never achieved that feat since coming to power nearly eight years back.

"Trinamool Congress will get between 40-45 percent votes in Bengal while the Left and Congress will not get more than 15 percent votes if they contest separately. So, if the BJP gets the rest of the vote share, there will be neck to neck battle with the Trinamool Congress in at least 12 to 15 seats in Bengal," he said.

CPI-M state secretariat member and LF legislature party leader Sujan Chakraborty said the Left's idea of seat adjustment with the Congress emerged from the idea of consolidating the anti-BJP, anti-Trinamool votes in the state

"The precondition was that there is no mutual contest in six seats," Chakraborty told IANS.

"Our attempt was very sincere. We have not yet fielded candidates in those four seats. They also should not have fielded candidates in the two seats won by us. I believe, our sincere attempt should not be viewed as a weakness of the left but as a sense of responsibility, accountability towards the people of the Left. But they are missing the point," he said.

Accepting that the delay in announcing candidates due to the confusion over seat adjustment has "somewhat affected" the Congress campaign in Bengal, state vice president Om Prakash Misra said: "There is a need to reconsider the entire approach. We have also decided not to field candidates in five seats as a reciprocal gesture. The Left-Congress eat sharing unity was a political necessity. It is unfortunate that the negotiations did not reach a satisfactory conclusion," he said.

He, however, refused to comment on whether collapse of the seat adjustment effort would benefit Trinamool Congress or the BJP, stating it is for the people of the state to decide.

(Milinda Ghosh Roy can be contacted at milinda.r@ians.in)

--IANS

mgr/ssp/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The BJP on Friday accused the Congress of attempting to "separate terror from Pakistan" and said that while on one hand it blamed the Narendra Modi government for the air strikes in Pakistan, on the other, it was handing out a clean chit to Islamabad.

"Shame on Congress. Top Congress leader and Rahul Gandhi's chief advisor Sam Pitroda, on one hand, handing out clean chit to Pakistan, while on the other blames Modi government and India for the air strikes. Astonishing attempt by the Congress to separate terror from Pakistan," Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Sambit Patra tweeted.

Earlier, referring to the February 14 Pulwama terror attack, Pitroda had said that such incidents "happen all the time" and that the United Progressive Alliance government could have also reacted by sending planes across the border after the 2008 Mumbai terror attack but "that is not the right approach" to deal with the world.

He said one can't jump on the entire nation (Pakistan) if a few terrorists "come and do something" in India, and that it was naive to blame every citizen of that nation because of some people.

--IANS

vv/mag/ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Among ticket seekers from the Congress for Jharkhand's Lohardagga parliamentary seat which is reserved for the tribal community, a high profile couple is ready to try their luck.

"Former IPS officer and Congress in charge of Chhattisgarh Arun Oraon and his wife Geetasree are willing to get ticket from Congress for the Lohardagga seat," a party source told IANS.

"However, nothing could be ascertained right now," he said.

The constituency was represented by Union Minister and BJP MP Sudarshan Bhagat in the 16th Lok Sabha.

Arun Oraon sought voluntary retirement before the 2014 Lok Sabha election to contest the polls. He, however, could not get a ticket then while Geetasree served as Education Minister in the Hemant Soren government.

Two other Congress leaders -- former Central Minister and ex-IPS official Rameshwar Oraon and party legislator Sukhdeo Bhagat -- are also trying to grab a ticket from Lohardagga constituency.

Rameshwar Oraon won the 2004 Lok Sabha election from the constituency on a Congress ticket and served as a Union Minister in the Manmohan Singh government.

The Congress is likely to announce candidates for Jharkhand after a formal announcement of the grand alliance. The Congress, the JMM, the JVM-P and the RJD have entered into a seat sharing pact for the 14 parliamentary constituencies in Jharkhand. The formal announcement of the grand alliance may take place on March 24.

Voting will be held in the state in four phases -- April 29 and May 6, 12 and 19.

--IANS

ns/rs/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The fifth tranche of the Central Public Sector Enterprises Exchange Traded Fund (CPSE ETF) has raised more than Rs 20,000 crore over the base issue size of Rs 3,500 crore, and the government may exercise the entire Greenshoe option of Rs 10,000 crore in this current round, sources said.

Greenshoe option is a clause used during an initial public offering (IPO) wherein the underwriters get to buy an additional 15 per cent of the company's shares at the offering price. In this case, the government can retain or has the greenshoe option of up to Rs 10,000 crore from the excess subscription received.

In the fifth tranche, the CPSE ETF managed by Reliance Nippon Life AMC (RNAM) received subscription of more than Rs 20,000 crore till 5 p.m. against an issue size of Rs 3,500 crore. The CPSE ETF FFO4 was oversubscribed by six times in excess of Rs 20,000 crore.

Sources said the government may exercise the entire Greenshoe option of Rs 10,000 crore in the current round of the CPSE ETF.

On March 19, the anchor book was oversubscribed by 5.78 times against an anchor base issue size of Rs 1,050 crore and the RNAM had received applications worth Rs 6,072 crore.

The CPSE ETF has global and domestic investors such as Merill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund.

"We are proud to have contributed to the government's disinvestment programme by partnering for the CPSE ETF," said Sundeep Sikka, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, Reliance Nippon Life AMC.

"The RNAM is delighted with the participation of various foreign and domestic institutional investors such as alternative investment funds (AIFs), foreign portfolio investors, MFs etc., he said.

With this revenue generation, the government has surpassed the disinvestment target of Rs 80,000 crore.

--IANS

ana/arm/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Discontent is growing within the West Bengal BJP over its first list of candidates for the 2019 polls as a senior state leader on Friday resigned while a group of BJP activists protested against the nomination of former Trinamool Congress leader Nisith Pramanik, who joined the BJP, from the Coochbehar seat.

The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Bengal unit Vice-President RajKamal Pathak resigned from his post after not getting a ticket for the Lok Sabha polls. He will, however, continue to remain in the party.

"If I am not eligible to be a candidate, then there is no need for me to hold on to the post of the party. So I have resigned," he said.

Pathak said he wanted to contest from either Sreerampur or Hoogly or any other important seat and was assured that his name was on the top of the list of probable candidates.

"Those who have recently joined the party are more eligible and they are big leaders with a 'clean image'. They should also get a post within the party. That's why I have stepped down."

The saffron party on Thursday announced its candidates for 28 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal.

The party's women wing president Locket Chatterjee has been fielded from Hoogly and state youth wing (Yuba Morcha) chief Debojit Sarkar from Sreerampur.

A group of angry activists in the district vandalised a party office in protest against the nomination of Nisith Pramanik, who recently switched to the BJP from the Trinamool Congress.

The activists also heckled District Chief Malati Rava on Thursday accusing her of taking a bribe from Pramanik.

"We do not want any turncoat to be selected from Coochbehar. The party did not consider leaders who have been fighting against Trinamool for years. We are disappointed," a worker said.

Rava denied all allegations and said that the central leadership had nominated Pramanik and the districts leaders have "no say" in it.

State Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Dilip Ghosh said those not willing to accept the central leadership's decision may leave the party.

"We have gained in strength in West Bengal over the past two-three years... As a cadre-based and disciplined party, we have to accept the decision. Those who are opposing it can leave the party," he said.

Meanwhile, posters in protest against the candidature of state BJP general secretary Sayantan Basu could be seen in North 24 Parganas district's Basirhat.

A banner, which bore the names of the district BJP leadership, termed Basu as an 'outsider'.

Basu called it a "dirty political game" by the rival Trinamool Congress.

"Trinamool is habituated in playing such dirty games in Did Trinamool themselves not give any seat to the outsiders in a constituency? Basirhat falls under the North 24 Parganas district and I am also from the same district," Basu said.

--IANS

mgr/ssp/pg/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday arrested jeweller Abdul Kadir Najmudin Sathak here for assisting fugitive controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik by transferring funds of dubious origins from the UAE to him.

The agency said the funds were used to facilitate production of videos meant to spread communal hatred and radicalize a particular community.

Sathak was director of Global Broadcasting Corp FZE LLC, which owned the Peace TV channel which broadcast the "communal and inflammatory" speeches of televangelist Naik from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the Middle East and Africa, an ED statement said.

"Investigation revealed that Global Broadcasting Corp was controlled by Naik through Sathak who was his trusted aide."

The ED in December 2016 registered a criminal case against Naik and his Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) under money laundering laws after taking cognisance of a similar FIR lodged by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act against them in November 2016.

Naik, who has got permanent resident status in Malaysia, came on the security agencies' radar after some terrorists, allegedly involved in the attack on a cafe in Dhaka in July 2016, claimed they were inspired by his speeches.

On November 17, 2016, India declared Naik's Mumbai-based NGO IRF an unlawful association under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

--IANS

rak/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday arrested jeweller Abdul Kadir Najmudin Sathak here for assisting fugitive Islamic preacher Zakir Naik by transferring funds of dubious origins from the UAE to him.

The agency said that the funds were used to facilitate production of videos meant to spread communal hatred and radicalise a particular community.

Sathak was director of Global Broadcasting Corp FZE LLC that owned the Peace TV channel which broadcast the "communal and inflammatory" speeches of televangelist Naik from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the Middle East and Africa, an ED statement said.

"Investigation revealed that Global Broadcasting Corp (GBC) was controlled by Naik through Sathak who was his trusted aide."

As per the statement, the content for the said channel was made in India by Mumbai-based Harmony Media Private Limited, which was also controlled by the controversial preacher. He had placed his sister, Nailah Noorani and his close associate Aamir Gazdar as Directors.

The funds required to record the Peace TV content were routed through the GBC, Dubai.

"The source of fund remitted by GBC to Harmony Media is suspicious as there were no advertisement run on this channel and Sathak has not submitted any details of the same," as per the statement.

An arrangement was made to project the transfer of money from GBC to Harmony Media as a business transaction. Both entities were directly controlled by Naik through his trusted aides."

The ED further said that it was learnt during the course of investigations that these videos were also exported to the UK.

"There was no monetary transaction in respect of videos exported to UK, which further raises suspicion. Further investigations in the matter are under progress," read the statement.

The ED in December 2016 registered a criminal case against Naik and his Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) under money laundering laws after taking cognisance of a similar FIR lodged by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act against them in November 2016.

Naik, who has got permanent resident status in Malaysia, came on the security agencies' radar after some terrorists, allegedly involved in the attack on a cafe in Dhaka in July 2016, claimed they were inspired by his speeches.

On November 17, 2016, India declared Naik's Mumbai-based NGO IRF an unlawful association under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

Earlier, Rs 50.49 crore worth of properties belonging to Naik and properties acquired by him in the names of his relatives were attached provisionally by the ED.

--IANS

spk/in/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Garuda Indonesia, the country's flag carrier, announced on Friday that it was cancelling an order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 passenger jets after two planes of the same model crashed in a span of five months.

"Our passengers have lost confidence to fly with the Max 8," Garuda spokesperson Ikhsan Rosan told CNN.

The Indonesian carrier ordered 50 of the planes in 2014 for $4.9 billion.

It has taken delivery of one of them but has now sent a letter to Boeing, saying it no longer wanted the remaining jets on order, Ikhsan said.

Boeing representatives are planning to visit Jakarta on March 28 to discuss the cancellation request with the airline, the spokesperson added.

In response to the development, a Boeing spokesperson said the company does not comment on "customer discussions".

This is the latest blow to Boeing over the 737 Max, its bestselling passenger jet.

Aviation authorities around the world have grounded the 737 Max following the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed 189 people onboard and a second crash that took place in October involving a Lion Air flight that plunged into the Java Sea, killing 157 persons.

Many airlines have announced that they won't fly the planes until they know more about the circumstances surrounding the crash, CNN said.

The grounding is expected to cost Boeing billions of dollars.

Earlier this week, the US Justice Department prosecutors issued multiple subpoenas as part of an investigation into Boeing's certification from the US Federal Aviation Administration and the company's marketing of the 737 Max planes.

The criminal investigation, which is in its early stages, began after the Lion Air crash.

The FAA has said that data and physical evidence show similarities between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and the Lion Air disaster.

The agency said on Wednesday that Boeing has developed a software patch and pilot training programme to address issues with the 737 Max identified in the Lion Air crash.

The 737 Max jets are by far the most important product for the company. It has orders for nearly 5,000 of the aircraft, enough to keep production lines operating for years to come.

--IANS

ksk/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Garuda Indonesia, the country's flag carrier, announced on Friday that it's cancelling an order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 passenger jets after two planes of the same model crashed in a span of five months.

"Our passengers have lost confidence to fly with the Max 8," Garuda spokesperson Ikhsan Rosan told CNN.

The Indonesian carrier had ordered 50 of the planes and has already received one of them, according to Rosan.

It has sent a letter to Boeing saying that it no longer wants to receive the remaining jets on order, he said.

It's the latest blow to Boeing over the 737 Max, its bestselling passenger jet.

The planes have been grounded worldwide over safety concerns following the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed 189 people onboard and also a second crash that took place last October involving a Lion Air flight that plunged into the Java Sea, killing 157 persons.

Boeing representatives are planning to visit Jakarta on March 28 to discuss the request with the airline, Rosan told CNN.

A Boeing spokesperson said the company doesn't comment on "customer discussions".

The two incidents have also led to the US Department of Transportation to ask for an audit of the Federal Aviation Administration's approval of Boeing's 737 Max 8 planes, while the FBI has reportedly joined in a criminal investigation of the certification process for the jets.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Following his meeting with top BJP leaders in New Delhi on Friday, Goa's new Chief Minister Pramod Sawant allocated portfolios to his 11 cabinet ministers -- retaining their earlier ministries -- sticking to his predecessor Manohar Parrikar's formula.

The notification allotting portfolios was issued late on Friday by the state government's General Administration Department.

Sawant holds key portfolios of Home, Finance, Personnel, Vigilance, General Administration and others held by Parrikar, who died on March 17.

Key allies Sudin Dhavalikar of the Maharastrawadi Gomantak Party was re-allotted Pubic Works Department, Transport and River Navigation; while Vijai Sardesai of the Goa Forward has been re-allotted Town and Country Planning, Agriculture, among other portfolios.

Earlier, Sawant who was in the national capital, paid courtesy calls to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari.

Gadkari had played a key role in the formation of the new BJP-led coalition government with Sawant at the helm, with the Union Minister camping in Goa for more than 24 hours negotiating with allied political parties to form a government with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

--IANS

maya/in

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said it is "possible" that President Donald Trump was sent by God to save Israel from Iran.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network during a high-profile trip to Israel, he said it was his faith that made him believe that.

He also praised US efforts to "make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains", the BBC reported.

The comments came on a Jewish holiday celebrating rescue from genocide.

The holiday, Purim, commemorates the biblical rescue of the Jewish people by Queen Esther from the Persians, as the interviewer noted to Pompeo.

He was asked if "President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from an Iranian menace".

"As a Christian, I certainly believe that's possible," said Pompeo, a former Kansas senator and CIA director.

"I am confident that the Lord is at work here," he added.

Pompeo came under fire during his tour of the Middle East for holding a conference call and only inviting "faith-based" members of the media to join.

--IANS

vc

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Holi, the Hindu spring festival also known as the "festival of colours", was celebrated on Friday for the second consecutive day by the Hindu community in the Bangladesh capital with traditional and religious fervour.

The festival brought hundreds of Hindus to their temples in the old part of Dhaka, Efe news reported.

On Thursday, they were seen getting drenched in colour, singing and dancing together.

The Hindu community here believes that the Holi festival brings a message of unity and friendship and bridges the communal divide.

Revellers sprayed coloured powder and water on each other and danced and distributed sweets during the celebrations that signals the end of winter and arrival of spring.

--IANS

in

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Hurriyat Conference leader Syed Ali Geelani, who advocates Jammu and Kashmir's merger with Pakistan, has been booked under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) for illegally possessing foreign exchange of US $10,000, the Enforcement Directorate said on Friday.

Geelani had been fined Rs 14.40 lakh following the confiscation of the unaccounted foreign exchange from his premises in Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday, the agency said.

"The adjudication proceeding in case of Syed Ali Shah Geelani for the offence of illegally possessing foreign exchange was completed on March 20 by levying penalty of Rs 14.40 lakh on him along with confiscation of foreign exchange US $ 10,000," said an ED statement.

The ED took over the case following an Income Tax Department complaint against Geelani.

The agency said it will also impose a penalty and confiscate the illegal acquisition of foreign exchange recovered from another separatist leader Yasin Malik, former Chairman of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). The adjudication proceedings against Malik are in progress.

--IANS

rak/prs

(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.)Actor Jackie Shroff, who has joined the sets of the upcoming movie tentatively titled "Thalapathy 63", describes working with Tamil actor Vijay and the film's director Atlee as fabulous.

Asked about being a part of the film, Jackie told IANS over phone from Mumbai: "It's just fab to work with Vijay, who is the son of S. A. Chandrasekhar my director from the film 'Kudrat Ka Kanoon'. So, catching up with his dad and the superstar (Vijay)."

The 62-year-old actor called Vijay a "gentle giant and a nice guy".

Without divulging much about his role, Jackie added: "Also Atlee, (he's) a great director... I am rocking out there. They are looking after me like a child."

This will be Jackie's third outing in Tamil, his previous films include names like "Aaranya Kandam" and "Maayavan". He had also done a cameo in "Mupparimanam".

Jackie has been in the Hindi film industry for almost four decades and has also appeared in other language films such as Konkani, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu, Bhojpuri and Gujarati.

On the Bollywood front, Jackie will soon be seen in "Romeo Akbar Walter", "Prasthanam" and "Student of the Year 2".

--IANS

dc/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Beleaguered Jet Airways' pilots said on Friday they are suffering from massive financial stress caused by non-payment of salaries for the last three months, which has even forced some to mortgage jewellery and take short-term loans.

The pilots said even EMI payments on car and home loans might become difficult in the present circumstance.

Pilots said that they along with engineers and other highly critical segment of employees have not been paid three-month salaries from January 1 and that only 12.5 per cent of December pay has been given.

"Nearly all of us have financial responsibilities. We fear that a sudden collapse of the airline might be imminent. We need our dues to paid by March 31 and a clear road map for our company," National Aviator's Guild Vice President Captain Asim Valiani told IANS in Mumbai.

"We have decided that either the management lets us know about the progress of the resolution plan and the future of the company by March 31 or we will refrain from flying duties."

A New Delhi-based pilot of the airline, who has already applied to other airlines for recruitment, said his financial position has become untenable since his children's quarterly school fees are due in April.

"I am afraid I will not be able to make the payment without mortgaging jewellery or my car," said the pilot who holds the rank of a co-commander.

"I have also applied for jobs with other airlines, but given the industry's overall financial position, it might take sometime for me to secure a stable job."

The pilots' union NAG has appealed to the Prime Ministers' Office and Civil Minister Suresh Prabhu for urgent intervention

As per industry estimates, Jet's total debt of Rs 8,000 crore in addition to payables such as vendors' dues worth Rs 15,000 crore.

Additionally, the airline has also lost ground in terms of market shares, even as its pilots and crew are said to be approaching other airlines for employment.

On March 20, around 260 of Jet's pilots applied to join SpiceJet, even as investors such as public sector banks struggle to stitch a rescue up a plan for the airline.

"Out of the 260 pilots, 150 are senior commanders. The commonality of Boeing jets between the two airlines is the main draw for pilots to apply in SpiceJet," a source told IANS in Mumbai.

Jet currently has 1,900 pilots on its rolls. IANS had earlier reported that other airlines tried to poach the airlines commanders and co-pilots, luring them with lucrative offers with a stable monthly pay.

The apparent jostle of pilots to get out of comes as the airline's lessors offered 50 of its Boeing aircraft to SpiceJet.

Recently, regulator, the Directorate General of Civil (DGCA) said that has only 41 aircraft in its fleet for operations out of around 120 planes and that there may be further attrition in the fleet size and flights ahead.Kerala's Director General of Police Jacob Thomas, currently in suspension since December 2017, has put in his papers so as to to contest the Lok Sabha elections.

Thomas had another 18 months to go for retirement. The resignation has been forwarded to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's office and to the Centre.

According to Sabu M. Jacob, Managing Director of Anna-Kitex group of companies, based near here, who spearheads the Twenty20 Kizhakkambalam, a corporate social responsibility initiative of the Rs 1,500 crore Anna-Kitex, told IANS that Thomas will contest under the Twenty 20 banner from Chalakudy in Thrissur district .

Nineteen members of Twenty20 contested the Kizhakkambalam Panchayat elections in 2015 as independents, where the company is based, and 17 of them won.

Thomas was once the reputed blue-eyed boy of Vijayan. But he was suspended in 2017 on charges of violating the All India Service Rules.

Thomas is expected to announce his candidature on Sunday.

--IANS

sg/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Kigali Global Dialogue (KGD) will take place at the Marriott Hotel in Kigali, Rwanda, from July 3 to 5.

The event will be hosted by the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), in partnership with the Rwanda Convention Bureau, Republic of Rwanda.

The two-day KGD will serve as an annual Rwanda-based platform where established and emerging actors will convene to discuss global conversation on contemporary issues of development and growth.

The discussions will focus on climate change and sustainability, technological transformation of society and public health and human capital, while situating gender equality at their core.

"Indeed, Africa will be a crucible where new and equitable social contracts and development paradigms will be discovered and shared with all," said ORF President Samir Saran.

"The opportunity to engage in these critical conversations in Kigali with leaders and thinkers from around the world is invaluable to the global effort. We are delighted to partner with the Rwanda Convention Bureau to create an arena that catalyses new thinking and supports collective action," he added.

--IANS

arm/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati on Friday taunted the BJP's 'Main Bhi Chowkidar' campaign, two days after she accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of changing his profile from 'Chaiwala' to 'Chowkidar' only to get votes in the Lok Sabha polls.

In a series of tweets in Hindi, Mayawati said that ever since the campaign was launched, people like Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath were in a fix on whether they should remain people's representatives or become 'chowkidars'.

The four-time Chief Minister also warned the Bharatiya Janata Party leaders and workers to refrain from doing anything that was untoward and against the law and order.

In another tweet, she said that it was worrying that the union government was not allowing the release of data pertaining to poor employment, growing joblessness, increasing poverty, distress among farmers and labourers, just for the sake of losing votes and safeguarding their image.

"Does the country need such a 'chowkidaar'?" she asked.

Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, Modi last week tweeted a video with the hashtag '#MainBhiChowkidar' (I am also a watchman) and changed his Twitter handle to Chowkidar Narendra Modi.

The Prime Minister also called all those fighting corruption and social evils 'watchmen' and asked them to participate in the campaign for a better India.

--IANS

md/ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Microsoft is rolling out its Windows Defender anti-virus software to Apple's operating system MacOS, with full virus and threat protection along with the usual ability to perform quick or full scans.

Defender is currently built into Windows 10, offering anti-virus protection by default.

While in the process of creating a dedicated Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Mac, the software giant has renamed its Windows Defender ATP to Microsoft Defender ATP, the company informed via a blog-post on Thursday.

"We've been working closely with industry partners to enable Windows Defender ATP customers to protect their non-Windows devices while keeping a centralised experience," Eric Avena, Senior Content Developer, Microsoft wrote in the blog-post.

For businesses, a limited preview would be available for trying out the anti-virus protection in environments that have both Windows PCs and Macs.

"Now we are going a step further by adding our own solution to the options, starting with a limited preview today," Avena said.

To keep the client up to date on MacOS, the software giant is using its AutoUpdate software, available on devices running MacOS Mojave, MacOS High Sierra, or MacOS Sierra, The Verge reported.

As ATP is limited to businesses, it remains unclear if Microsoft is also planning to bring a consumer version of Microsoft Defender to the Mac.

--IANS

rp/mag/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Jammu and Kashmir authorities have place senior separatist leader Mirwaiz Umer Farooq under house arrest here on Friday.

The development comes ahead of post-Friday prayers protests called by separatists against the custodial death of Rizwan Asad Pandit, a 28-year-old private school teacher, on Monday.

On Thursday, National Conference leaders Ali Muhammad Sagar, Nasir Sogami and others took carried out a protest march from the Nawa-e-Subha party headquarters here demanding stern action against those responsible for Pandit's death.

According to the police, Pandit was arrested last week in connection with a militancy related case.

--IANS

sq/ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The security agencies went into a tizzy after Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) general secretary and Lok Sabha candidate from Raigad Sunil Tatkare received a purported death threat, official sources said here on Friday.

The anonymous threat letter, typed in Marathi and dated February 27, was received in the postal mail at his public relations office in Mhasla, Raigad on Friday after which a party leader Nazim Hasvare lodged a formal complaint with the local police.

The unsigned letter has named one Balasaheb Bhausaheb Satpute of Vadgaon-Tandli village in Ahmednagar district - who allegedly has a criminal background - and warns that some persons having previous enmity with Tatkare have conspired with him to eliminate the NCP leader.

The NCP has written to the district police to take serious cognizance of the letter and initiate steps to track down Satpute and book him, besides beefing up security for Tatkare during the poll campaign.

An aggressive and senior NCP leader, Tatkare, 64, has been a former Finance and Water Resources Minister and is now the party's national general secretary.

Last week, the NCP announced his candidature for the Raigad Lok Sabha seat, pitting him against Shiv Sena's strongman and Union Industry Minister Anant Geete, who had trounced him (Tatkare) by a wafer thin margin of around 2,000 votes in the 2014 parliament elections.

--IANS

qn/oeb/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US President Donald Trump on Friday said he has "no idea" about when Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who's leading the Russia probe, will turn in his report.

"I have no idea about the Mueller report," Trump responded on the White House lawn to the question from reporters if he expected the Mueller report to be submitted on Friday, before he left for meetings at his Florida estate. "We're going to see what happens."

Those remarks were made as Washington braces for the highly-anticipated report by Mueller, whose nearly two-year investigation has focused on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow during the 2016 presidential elections and whether the president obstructed justice, Xinhua news agency reported.

Trump on Friday continued to claim that there was neither collusion nor obstruction, calling the wide-ranging inquiry a "big hoax" and "witch hunt."

The president added that Attorney General William Barr, whom he nominated late last year to replace Jeff Sessions, "ultimately will make a decision" about the report's release.

The public has been speculating that the Russia probe is coming to an end after several high-profile departures from Mueller's office recently.

Mueller, who was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May, 2017, is required to submit a report to Barr at the conclusion of his investigation. Barr, in turn, is required to notify Congress about Mueller's findings.

According to the Department of Justice's special counsel regulations, the report must explain Mueller's "prosecution or declination decisions" but may not be comprehensive to lawmakers.

Trump has been ramping up efforts to discredit the Mueller report widely believed to be in its final stages.

"I have a deputy, appoints a man to write a report on me, to make a determination on my presidency," Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network aired Friday morning. "People will not stand for it."

Earlier this week, Trump told reporters he didn't understand why Mueller was writing a report, but that he wanted the general public to see it anyway.

Mueller's team has brought charges against 34 people, including six Trump associates, and three companies. The special counsel hasn't made a direct allegation of collusion.

Russia has denied any meddling in the US 2016 presidential election.

--IANS

vc

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Foreign Ministers of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member states met here on Friday on how to respond to hate speeches and violence against Muslims.

The meeting was called by Turkey in the wake of the March 15 mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 50 people, reports Xinhua news agency.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu described the gathering as a sign showing the Islamic world was not deaf in the face of the attacks Muslims were facing different parts of the world.

"Against racism, intolerance, exclusion and violence, today we will strengthen our solidarity with them," Cavusoglu said, stressing that taking effective measures against Islamophobia and the problems it creates was "a must".

The Minister urged the administrators, decision-makers and politicians in places where Muslims live to take practical steps against rising violence.

Yousef Al-Othaimeen, the OIC Secretary-General, also called for the world to take actions against hatred and intolerance toward Muslims, saying "terror has no language, religion or race".

Besides the Foreign Ministers, representatives from international organisations, including the UN, European Union and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, attended the meet

Turkey, the host of the meeting, currently holds the rotating OIC presidency.

--IANS

ksk/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Karnataka Transport Department on Friday suspended the licence of online cab aggregator Ola for six months in Bengaluru for running its bike taxis while possessing a licence for only four-wheelers, an official statement said.

The order from the Transport Department, dated March 18, issued to Ola operator ANI Technologies on Friday, stated that its licence in Bengaluru was cancelled for six months for violation of conditions under which permission was granted.

The ban order was issued for violating the Karnataka On-Demand Transportation Technology Aggregators Rules, 2016.

The Transport Department had impounded several of Ola's bike taxis over the last few months, the order said.

With this order, Ola's cabs and autos will have to keep off the roads for six months.

Terming the order "unfortunate", Ola said it was evaluating all options to find a solution so that its driver-partners could continue to work in the city.

"We have been closely working with the authorities on this topic, responding to queries and making proactive representations to the ministry," Ola said.

--IANS

bha/rs/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)National Conference (NC) President Farooq Abdullah on Friday said that the NC and the Congress have joined hands to save the nation from those who are trying to divide it on the basis of religion.

Abdullah was speaking at a joint election rally of the NC and the Congress for the Lok Sabha election in Jammu.

The NC has not fielded any candidate from Jammu parliamentary constituency in order to support the Congress.

Former state minister Raman Bhalla is the Congress candidate from the seat.

Vikramaditya Singh, son of Karan Singh and grandson of the state's erstwhile Maharaja, Hari Singh, is the Congress candidate for the Udhampur seat.

Speaking about his decision not to field candidates against the Congress in the Jammu and Udhampur constituencies, Abdullah said: "We have given this sacrifice to keep India secular and strong. There is no other aim."

"We have to live in this country and strengthen it and its secular ethos which was preached by Mahatma Gandhi", he said.

The NC and the Congress have decided to engage in a friendly contest in three out of the six Lok Sabha constituencies, Anantnag, Baramulla and Ladakh.

The Congress will not field any candidate against Abdullah in Srinagar while the NC will not field any candidate against the Congress for the Jammu and Udhampur seats.

--IANS

sq/rs/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan's Finance Ministry has announced that the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) will receive a $2.1 billion loan from China by March 25, the media reported on Friday.

Ministry spokesman Khaqan Najeeb Khan said on Thursday that "all procedural formalities" for the transfer of the loan being provided to Pakistan by the Chinese government have been completed, and "the funds will be deposited in the SBP account by Monday 25", Dawn news reported.

The loan facility, the spokesman said, "will further strengthen foreign exchange reserves and ensure balance of payment stability".

Following a meeting in Beijing between Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan in November 2018, China had said that it was willing to offer assistance to Islamabad to help it weather its current fiscal woes but that the terms of such aid were still being discussed.

Shortly after, Chinese Consul General Long Dingbin had said during an interview that in order to "boost Pakistan's economy", Beijing is investing in multiple sectors and launching business ventures instead of providing loans.

Besides the loan package, the Chinese government has also offered Pakistan market access for three commodities - rice, sugar and yarn - worth $1 billion for the current calendar year, a Commerce Division official told Dawn on Thursday.

The official said rice shipments to China have already begun as part of the deal which was agreed during the Prime Minister's China visit.

Under the agreement, exporters have been allowed to ship 200,000 tonnes of rice and 300,000 tonnes of sugar - total value of $300 million - to China in the ongoing calendar year.

Moreover, the agreement also includes preferential market access for around $700 million worth of yarn but it seems highly unlikely that Pakistan will have adequate surplus quantity of yarn to export to China as cotton production remains lacklustre.

This agreement will also be extended to calendar 2020. Pakistan's exports to China are expected to reach $2.2 billion in the ongoing calendar year and $3.2 billion in the next, according to official figures.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Telugu actor and Jana Sena leader Pawan Kalyan, who is making his electoral debut in next month's Andhra Pradesh Assembly polls, has declared assets worth over Rs 52 crore.

The actor, who filed the nomination from Gajuwaka constituency in Visakhapatnam district on Thursday, also revealed that his liabilities were to the tune of Rs 33 crore.

Kalyan, in the affidavit submitted to the Returning Officer along with his nomination papers, mentioned that his movable assets including bank deposits, vehicles and jewellery were worth Rs 12 crore. He had Rs 4.76 lakh cash in hand while his wife Anna Lezhneva had Rs 1.53 lakh cash.

The 50-year-old, who is contesting from two Assembly constituencies - Bhimavaram and Gajuwaka, revealed that his immovable assets were worth Rs 40.81 crore. His income during 2017-18 was Rs 9.60 crore, down from Rs 15.28 crore in the previous year.

Kalyan showed professional fee as hero in the films, agricultural income and interest on bank deposit as the sources of his income.

The actor's fleet of vehicles include Mercedes Benz R Class, Toyota Fortuner, Skoda-Rapid, Mahindra Scorpio, Volvo XC-90 and Harley Davidson-Heritage soft-tail, all valued over Rs 2.75 crore.

He owns 18 acre agriculture land near Hyderabad worth over Rs 5.70 crore while non-agriculture land in Hyderabad and Guntur is valued at over Rs 33 crore.

The actor, who showed his educational qualification as 10th pass, owns a flat in Banjara Hills, Hyderabad valued at Rs 1.75 crore. His wife has one-bedroom apartment in St Petersburg, Russia, worth Rs 40 lakh.

Kalyan has shown his liabilities at over Rs 33 crore that include bank loans and personal loans from film personalities, production houses and family members.

--IANS

ms/mag/ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The best bang for your buck! This option enables you to purchase online 24/7 access and receive the Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday print edition at no additional cost * Print edition only available in our carrier delivery area. Allow up to 72 hours for delivery of your print edition to begin. Print edition not available for Day Pass option.The Prime Ministers' Office on Friday took stock of the telecom sector's financial position, including two ailing PSUS, and is learnt to have asked Department of Telecom to support BSNL, currently going through a huge financial crisis leading to salary default, till a new government takes over in June.

The time has been sought as the PSU may find it hard to get the revenues up and going for meeting a huge monthly wage bill of Rs 1,200 crore, sources said.

Sources said with polls around, the government does not want 1.76 lakh employees should face any salary issues. The BSNL's VRS scheme amounting to Rs 6,535 crore will be taken up by the new goverment. The Prime Ministers's Office, according to highly placed sources, has asked DoT to support and take care of BSNL's wage bill in whatever ways till July.

Last month DoT had helped BSNL to meet its salary bill after the state-run operator defaulted on salary in 19 years of its existence.

BSNL has a net loss of Rs 8,000 crore and its revenues have declined to around Rs 27,000 crore, underlining the tough times ahead in a market of extremely low data tariffs and free voice calls.

The PSU is also struggling as it does not have LTE 4G servcies for lack of spectrum and now DoT has referred the matter of its spectrum proposal to TRAI for consultation as PSUs don't bid for auction to get spectrum.

BSNL's wage bill is 70 per cent of its revenues and with dwindling service incomes, it is extremely difficult for the ex-DOT servce arm to keep floating.

The last month salary was paid by the PSU on March 15 to all, after it had paid in tranches to some circles and lower level staff.

Earlier this month the government gave BSNL a letter of comfort for raising working capital loans of Rs 3,500 crore for paying electricity bills and other netowrk upkeep expenses such as towers.

BSNL's wage bill increases annually by 8 per cent and its revenues are stagnant.

The PMO's similar advice was on MTNL wage issues as well. MTNL has a monthly wage bill of Rs 200 crore stemming from its 23,000 employees. The DoT has been paying it since November under some service heads of previous payments.

In fiscal 2019, BSNL losses are expected to be over Rs 12,000 crore though in March, the financial position could be slightly better with realisation of billing from the enterprise businesses than in February, according to DoT sources, though it could not be ascertained since the fiscal is yet to end.

(Anjana Das can be contacted at anjana.d@ians.in)

--IANS

ana/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)One of the key accused in the PNB fraud case, Mehul Choksi, on Friday moved a fresh application in a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court in Mumbai seeking cancellation of a non-bailable warrant against him.

His application came three days after his nephew Nirav Modi, another key accused in the Rs 13,500-crore Punjab National Bank loan default case, was arrested in London.

In his application, Choksi, who had fled India in January 2018 months before the scam surfaced, has cited ailment and risk to his life. Choksi's lawyer Sanjay Abbot in the application said the jeweller has a long history of heart ailments and a blood clot in the brain.

He also mentioned in the application about Choksi's apprehension over his safety.

On May 22, 2018, after taking cognisance of the second chargesheet filed in the PNB case by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the special court had issued the non-bailable warrant against Choksi, owner of Gitanjali Group.

His move comes two days after the investigation agencies said that Choksi's extradition process has begun in Antigua where he has taken citizenship.

The court has adjourned the matter for April 9 for arguments.

Choksi's counsel submitted his detailed medical history citing his ailments constraining him from travelling and hence leading to his inability to return to India.

His counsel also placed 38 documents on record, including a latest prescriptions in which doctors recommend that Choksi should remain under continuous medical supervision in Antigua and should avoid travelling as his medical condition may deteriorate.

Choksi, along with his nephew and diamantaire Nirav Modi are accused of colluding with bankers to secure credit from overseas banks using fraudulent guarantees. Both have denied the allegations and have moved abroad.

Nirav Modi was taken into custody in London on March 19.

However, Choksi had secured a passport from Antigua and Barbuda, where wealthy foreigners can become citizens in exchange for investing in the country. He was granted citizenship on January 15, 2018.

He then deposited his cancelled Indian Passport No. Z3396732 and a mandatory fee of $177 for other formalities.

--IANS

rak/in/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A policeman was injured on Friday in a militant attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Anantnag town, police said.

Militants entered a municipal building in Anantnag in the afternoon and fired at the security guards of the Municipal Committee chairman.

"The security guard injured in the firing was shifted to hospital. The area has been cordoned off for search operations," a police officer said.

It was not clear immediately whether the intention of the militants was to attack the guard or they were looking for some high value target inside the complex.

--IANS

sq/in/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Delhi court on Friday sent Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Sajjad Khan, a close aide of Pulwama attack mastermind Muddasir Ahmed Khan, to NIA custody till March 29.

The National Investigation Agency sought the custody saying they needed to unearth the deep-rooted conspiracy behind the February 14 attack in Pulwama that left 40 CRPF troopers dead.

During the in-chamber proceedings Additional Sessions Judge Rakesh Syal allowed the anti-terror agency to quiz the 27-year-old Khan, who was arrested late on Thursday from near the Red Fort area.

Following a tip off, Delhi Police arrested Khan while he was masquerading as a shawl trader.

Investigations revealed that Sajjad Khan had knowledge about the February 14 Pulwama attack on the Central Reserve Police Force convoy. He was in close contact with Muddasir Ahmed Khan, who was eliminated by the Indian Army earlier in March, a police officer added.

The NIA told the court on Friday that the accused custody was required to unearth the deep rooted conspiracy. The NIA questioned Khan for half-an-hour inside the court and then requested for his custodial interrogation.

Sajjad Khan's defence counsel M.S. Khan opposed the plea, but following the court's order Delhi Police handed over his custody to the NIA.

--IANS

sp-akk/in/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)North Korea on Friday withdrew from a joint liaison office near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with South Korea, which was opened amid a warming of ties last year to facilitate talks with Seoul.

South Korea's Unification Ministry announced the move, saying the decision had been taken by the North on "instructions from the superior authority", CNN reported.

In its communication with the South, Pyongyang said it would not mind Seoul's representatives "remaining in the office," which is based in Kaesong, a part of North Korea near the de-facto border between the two countries.

Pyongyang said it would notify Seoul regarding "further practical matters in the future".

In response to the development, the Unification Ministry said South Korea regrets the decision, and urged the North to return soon and continue the work being done at the liaison office towards a full peace settlement.

The liaison office, which was established after North's Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met at the DMZ for a historic summit last year, had allowed officials from North and South Korea to communicate on a regular basis for the first time since the Korean War.

The staff constitutes of equal number from each side.

North Korea is yet to issue any direct public statement on the decision to withdraw.

The move comes after the US on Thursday slapped two Chinese firms with sanctions for doing business with Pyongyang, the first action taken by Washington since the second summit between Kim and President Donald Trump in Hanoi last month ended without an agreement.

--IANS

ksk/in

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) on Friday denied any suggestion that it ever sidestepped US sanctions in supplying products to Venezuela.

RIL's denial comes after a report said that the company has sidestepped US sanctions on Venezuela by selling fuel from India and Europe to the South American country.

According to the company, since the imposition of US sanctions, RIL has been in continuous communication with the US Department of State regarding its activities in Venezuela.

"Reliance has been transparent with US authorities and also has provided detailed feedback to the US Department of State as they were formulating and adjusting US policy regarding product shipments to Venezuela," the company said in a statement on Friday.

"Reliance not only has complied with US sanctions laws, but also has done its best to adjust its dealings with Venezuela on a voluntary basis to reflect the ongoing changes in US policy. Reliance stopped shipments of diluent naphtha to Venezuela, and has reduced its purchases of Venezuelan crude oil to well below its contracted levels."

In addition, the company clarified that its few transportation fuel shipments to Venezuela, treated as offsets for crude oil receipts, were committed and in-transit when there were no specific restrictions to such transactions and they were all fuels refined in India.

"Reliance will continue its transactions in full compliance of prevailing sanctions," the company added.

--IANS

rv/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Enhanced South-South Cooperation among developing countries fuelled by the rapid economic growth of some in their ranks should not be used as an excuse by developed countries of the North to cut back aid, India has said.

Attempts to include South-South cooperation in the overall international aid system "do no justice to either its historical heritage or its future potential" and are not helpful, India's Permanent Representative to the UN, Syed Akbaruddin, told the UN Conference on South-South Cooperation in Buenos Aires on Thursday.

"More and better South-South Cooperation now is on account of the global South enjoying more rapid and sustained economic growth," he noted.

Several countries at the meeting acknowledged India's contributions to them under its cooperation and aid programmes.

The conference looks back at the 1979 meeting's Buenos Aires Plan of Action for Promoting and Implementing Technical Cooperation among developing countries and ahead at how South-South Cooperation can be enhanced to promote the UN's sustainable development goals.

Since the first conference 40 years ago in the Argentine capital, India has emerged as a major force in South-South Cooperation and Akbaruddin detailed some of them ranging from aid and disaster relief to satellite facilities and education programmes.

He said that at the moment Indian Navy was running disaster relief operations from Port Beira for Mozambique that is reeling from Cyclone Idai that has killed over 200 people there and left 15,000 homeless.

King Mswari III of Eswatini thanked India at an earlier session for helping conduct a poverty assessment last year in the country formerly known as Swaziland to frame policy revisions and create new development programmes.

Ghana's Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs Charles Owiredu said inter-regional initiatives like the 2015 India-Africa Forum Summit should help implement US development goals.

Cape Verde's Foreign Minister Luis Filipe Lopes Tavares said that his country has benefited from working with non-traditional partners like India.

Akbaruddin said that during the last decade, India has extended lines of credit or loans worth $25 billion to more than 60 countries of the South. He said they "do not create unsustainable debt burdens and ensure skill and technology transfer to help local communities maintain and sustain assets created".

The India-UN Development Partnership Fund established in June 2017 and administered through the UN Office of South-South Cooperation has projects in 39 countries, he said.

India gives the least developed countries duty free access to its markets, he said.

India initiated the International Solar Alliance to help fight climate change, he said. Over 120 countries - most of them developing - are members of the group.

The South Asian satellite provides meteorology and communications services to members of the South Asian Association for Region Cooperation, he said.

The Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme trains 13,000 people from 161 countries every year, he added.

(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.)Russian hackers are targeting European government systems ahead of the EU parliament election in May, according to cybersecurity company FireEye.

In their attempt to gather government information, two state-sponsored hacking groups - APT28, also known as Fancy Bear, and Sandworm -- have been sending out phishing emails to officials, Engadget reported on Thursday, citing research from FireEye.

"The groups could be trying to gain access to the targeted networks in order to gather information that will allow Russia to make more informed political decisions, or it could be gearing up to leak data that would be damaging for a particular political party or candidate ahead of the European elections," FireEye's Senior Manager of Cyberespionage Analysis, Benjamin Read, said in a statement.

The Milpitas, California-headquartered firm said the campaigns by the two Russian groups are ongoing, but the firm did not say whether any sensitive data had been linked.

Microsoft last month warned that it detected recent activity targeting democratic institutions in Europe.

The software giant claimed to have recently detected 104 targeted accounts belonging to organisations, including the German Council on Foreign Relations, The Aspen Institutes in Europe and The German Marshall Fund.

It is believed that many of these attacks originated from a Russian hacking group.

--IANS

gb/bc

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Sensex reversed early gains and closed lower on Friday, as investors took to booking profit after gaining for eight straight sessions.

All sectors, except real estate index, on the NSE ended in the red. The Nifty banking index which touched an all-time high also succumbed to the overall decline.

Saurabh Jain of SMC Global said that Friday's decline is rather healthy. Investors booked profit after consecutive sessions of strong gain and we expect it to continue for two-three more sessions.

The BSE Sensex closed 222.14 points lower at 38,164.61 while the Nifty declined by 64.15 points or 0.56 per cent.

"Domestic market ended on a weak note as investors turned to profit booking given the sharp rally in last two weeks and weak global cues. US Fed has indicted that there will be no rate hike this year and ended its ongoing Quantitative easing (QE) tightening program due to concern over economic growth," said Vinod Nair, Head of Research, Geojit Financial Services.

"Besides, uncertainties over Brexit deal and delay in trade deal between US-China continued to impact global markets."

Nair also added that global bond yields were on decline as global central banks were tweaking their monetary policy to support growth. This is likely to benefit emerging markets like India in the medium term.

The Sensex pack saw Tata Motors (DVR) losing the most followed by Tata Motors, Reliance Industries, Maruti Suzuki and State Bank of India declining in the range of 1 to 3 per cent.

The top gainers were NTPC, up 3.67 per cent followed by Larsen and Toubro (L&T), Asian Paints, Tata Steel and Power Grid, which advanced up to 1.60 per cent.

--IANS

ravi/in

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)South Korea has proposed holding military talks with North Korea to implement a bilateral accord signed in 2018, but there has been no reply from Pyongyang yet, an official said here on Friday.

"Recently, (we) suggested South-North military talks and are currently waiting for a response," Yonhap News Agency quoted a South Korean Defence Ministry official as saying.

Last week, Defence Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo reported to South Korean President Moon Jae-in that the military plans to have concrete talks with North Korea to follow up on the Comprehensive Military Agreement that was aimed at easing tensions and building mutual trust.

The September 19, 2018, agreement was signed by defence chiefs of the two Koreas during the third summit between Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang.

The Koreas implemented some of the deals in 2018, including the trial pullout of frontline guard posts, disarmament of the Joint Security Area of Panmunjom and a joint survey of waterways in the Han River estuary.

--IANS

mag/ksk

(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.)Six militants and a 12-year-old boy were killed while seven security personnel and 18 civilians were injured in gun battles in the Kashmir Valley which started on Thursday, police said on Friday.

Two militants and the boy, who had been taken hostage, died in a gunfight in Bandipora district's Mir Mohalla area on Friday. The fighting had started on Thursday.

Both the militants were identified as Pakistanis and members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The police accused them of shooting the boy dead.

In Shopian district's Ratnipora village, the security forces killed two militants following a gunfight which started on Friday, the police said.

Clashes broke out between civilian protesters and security forces near the gunfight site.

The security forces used tear smoke and pellet gunshots to quell the protests, leaving a dozen persons injured.

"Some of the injured sustained pellet shots," doctors said in Shopian.

In another gunbattle in Sopore's Warpora area, two militants were killed at the same place where two policemen were injured earlier.

On Thursday, three militants were killed while seven security personnel and three civilians were injured in three different gun battles in the Kashmir Valley.

The police said the gunfight in Bandipora has ended while at the other two sites in Sopore and Shopian, searches were being carried out after firing exchanges stopped.

All educational institutions in Sopore were closed and mobile Internet services suspended as a precaution.

--IANS

sq/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union Minister Smriti Irani, who challenged Rahul Gandhi in his Amethi bastion in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, will again take on the Congress President from the high profile parliamentary constituency in the upcoming general elections.

In the last Lok Sabha polls, Rahul Gandhi had defeated Smriti Irani by a margin of over one lakh votes. However, his victory was far less impressive than in most earlier Lok Sabha elections in Amethi.

The Congress' vote share was reduced to 46 per cent in 2014 as against its earlier shares of 71 and 66 per cent in the 2009 and 2004 elections, respectively. The BJP, whose vote share in Amethi remained in the single digits in 2004, garnered 37 per cent of the votes cast in 2014.

The seat has long been a stronghold of the Congress, which hasn't been defeated here in the last three decades barring 1998, when the BJP's Sanjay Singh defeated Satish Sharma of the Congress by a margin of 23,270 votes. Amethi was regained by the Congress in 1999 when Sonia Gandhi was elected as MP from there.

In the past, Amethi constituency has been represented by Congress heavyweights like Sanjay Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi.

Things have become even more worrisome for the Congress after the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections in 2017, when the BJP managed to win four of the five Assembly seats under the Amethi Lok Sabha constituency.

The Congress has already declared Rahul Gandhi as its candidate from Amethi.

After Smriti Irani's name was announced on Thursday, she took to Twitter to thank Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the top BJP leadership for fielding her again from the seat.

"It will be a matter of pride for me to bloom Kamal (BJP's election symbol) in Amethi and strengthen the party in Parliament," she said, adding, "Kamal Ka Phool Khilana Hai, Naya Itihas Banana Hai (we have to make the lotus bloom and create new history)".

Irani continues to visit Amethi and keeps the party cadre in the parliamentary constituency motivated by keeping in touch with them.

Irani, who joined the BJP in 2003 and entered the Rajya Sabha in 2011, got a big boost when she was made the Human Resource Development Minister soon after the formation of the BJP-led government in 2014.

She was shifted to the Textiles Ministry in 2016 that led to speculation that her influence within the party had waned. There was similar speculation when she was moved out of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry after almost a year.

Irani, who joined after working in television serials, took on Congress heavyweight Kapil Sibal in Delhi's Chandni Chowk seat in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls and lost. She has served the party in various capacities, including as BJP national secretary and president of the BJP's Mahila Morcha.

--IANS

bns/oeb/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor Sooraj Pancholi will be donating the earnings of his upcoming film "Satellite Shankar" to army camps.

Directed by Irfan Kamal, the film is shot in different regions -- Punjab, the South and in Himachal near the China Border. He has decided to give his earnings to the army base camps in these three different regions so that the money can be used for their children and to arrange amenities for them.

"Its been such an incredible journey and experience shooting for this movie. Meeting the real jawans shooting at real locations meeting the family, all of it has been extremely beautiful," Sooraj said in a statement.

The actor calls it a "small deed".

"We are living here because of them. They live at borders to protect us. There are days where they don't speak to their families because of where they live. It's a very small deed from my end," added Sooraj, who is the son of actors Aditya Pancholi and actress Zarina Wahab.

"Satellite Shankar" is scheduled to hit the screens on July 5.

Directed by Irfan Kamal, the film is jointly produced by Bhushan Kumar, Murad Khetani, Krishan Kumar and Ashwin Varde.

--IANS

dc/bc

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Sri Lankan Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne said on Monday health authorities would introduce a colour coding scheme for packaged food, indicating levels of sugar, fat and salt, in an effort to curb non-communicable diseases.

Senaratne said the high use of sugar, salt and fat was causing many non-communicable diseases, including cancer. The Health Ministry has been gathering data and holding discussions with manufacturers for a year to introduce the colour coding scheme, reports Xinhua news agency.

"There are a large number of biscuit and sweets manufacturers in Sri Lanka. They sell over 80,000 tonnes products in the country. We need to reduce the use of sugar in these products," Senaratne said.

"Since a number of biscuit manufacturers export their products to around 55 countries, they agreed to introduce a colour coding scheme, which is internationally accepted."

In 2016, the Ministry had introduced a Traffic Light Labelling System on soft drinks and after that soft drink companies had reduced the use of sugar by 10 per cent in their products, he said.

"We think we can replicate that success here as well," Senaratne said.

According to the 2016 regulations, drinks that contained more than 11 grams of sugar per 100 milliliters was indicated with a red mark and if the sugar content was less than two grams it had a green mark.

Sugar content between these two amounts was indicated in amber.

--IANS

ksk/pcj

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan joined hands with superheroes Captain America, Iron Man and Thor to solve yet another riddle in Dubai's picturesque locale in his latest promotional campaign.

The 53-year-old superstar has been featuring in a series of videos that are part of Dubai Tourism's #BeMyGuest campaign.

The fourth video starts with Shah Rukh saying out a riddle: "With hammer, shield and armour, Earth's mightiest heroes gain their power."

The "Dilwale" star then goes to IMG World's Of Adventure, an indoor amusement park here and helps a woman find her lost son.

He wins a prize that says "on all the walk to everything you need, the white hat is your guide". The engraved metal piece brings him the second coin.

"There are three hidden coins in Dubai.... Where do you think I should go for the last one?" SRK ends the video.

The #BeMyGuest campaign consists of a series of films across social media and online platforms, highlighting iconic locations and sites in the posh Middle Eastern city.

--IANS

dc/in

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)It's been described as "an episode without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British empire. Not surprisingly, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 13, 1919, spawned a wealth of outporuing from Indian writers and poets that author-critic-literary historian Rakshanda Jalil has painstakingly brought together in a seminal volume that will be an eye-opener for the present generation for the lows to which a ruler can stoop.

"While a grat deal of scholarly work has been done on Jalianwala Bagh, it's reflection in Indian literature in the different bhashas and also in English has been overlooked.

"I was curious to see how an incident that stirred the conscience of millions, one that had far-reaching implications for the national freedom struggle, that made British colonial interests in India morally untenable, found its way through pen and paper to reach the nooks and cranies of popular imagination filtered through the mind of the creative writer," Jalil writes in the extensive introduction to "Jallainwala Bagh - Literary Responses in Prose and Poetry" (Niyogi Books/pp 227).

The book, she says, subjective as all such collections are by their very nature, "makes no pretence at being either exhaustive ot definite; it's only claim is to open a window into the world of possibilities that literature offers to reflect, interpret and occasionally analyse events of momentous historical import. At best, the prose and poetry included in this selection offers ways of 'seeing' history," Jalil says.

As is Jalil's wont, she is being much too modest. Where else, in one volume, will you come across the works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Mulk Raj Anand, Bhisham Sahani, Stanley Wolpert, Saojini Naidu, Muhammad Iqbal and Josh Mahilabadi, to name just a few of those featured.

What clearly comes out is the pain and anguish the Jallianwala Bagh massacre caused them and the burden of living under a brutal colonial ruler for whom justice and mercy didn't exist. And yet, the fire of freedom didn't die - indeed it was only reinforced.

Sample this from "Inquilab" by Abbas, about two friends, Anwar and Ratan, caught in the malestorm of the massacre: "A child was trying to wake up his mother who would be asleep forever; a boy of Anwar's own age lay flat and lifeless. Everywhere there was blood. Anwar's head reeled, his bowels contracted within him, he wanted to vomit but could not. He laid his head on the ground and saw the sky revolving and the stars dancing, a dance of death, and the crooked palm tree was dancing too. But before he yielded to unconsciousness, Anwar saw a glimpse of Ratan's face. It bore nor trace of sorrow or grief but a far-way look, he was biting his lip to choke his sobs, and his eyes were ablaze with the cold fury of revenge."

Then, there's "Panjab 1919" by Sarojini Naidu: "How shall our love console thee, or assuage/Thy helpless woe; how shall our grief requite/The hearts that scourge thee and the hands that smite/Thy beauty with their rods of bitter rage?

Lo! Let our sorrows be they battle-gage/To wreck the terror of the tyrant's might/Who mocks with ribald wrath they tragic plight/And stains with shame they radiant heritage!

O beautiful! O broken and betrayed!/O mournful queen!/O martyred Draupadi!/Endure thou still, unconquered, undismayed!/The sacred rivers of thy stricken blood/Shall prove the five-fold stream of Freedom's flood/To guard the watch-towers of our Liberty."

Jalil's work will ensure that the flame that Jallianwalla Bagh lit will never be ensured.

(Vishnu Makhijani can be reached at vishnu.makhijani@ians.in)

--IANS

vm/bc

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US President Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Michael Kratsios as the country's Chief Technology Officer, a post that has been vacant since the beginning of the administration, the White House said.

Kratsios, 32, currently serves as the Deputy US Chief Technology Officer and Deputy Assistant to the President for Technology Policy.

Trump will tap Kratsios to be an associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and designate him to be the Chief Technology Officer upon appointment, Xinhua news agency quoted the White House as saying on Thursday.

Kratsios has represented the administration as head of delegation at multiple international fora, including the G7 Technology and Innovation Ministerials in Turin, Italy, and Montreal, Canada, and the G20 Digital Economy Ministerial in Salta, Argentina, the White House said.

He has played a key role in the administration's policies on 5G, national broadband, drones and Artificial Intelligence, it added.

The South Carolina native graduated from Princeton University in 2008 with a degree in political science and a certificate in Hellenic studies. He was a visiting scholar at China's renowned Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Prior to joining Trump's transition team in late 2016, Kratsios was a principal at Thiel Capital, a San Francisco-based investment management firm, and served as chief of staff to entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

US Congress established the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1976 to offer advice on the scientific, engineering, and technological aspects of the economy, national security, homeland security, health, foreign relations, the environment and the technological recovery and use of resources, among other topics.

Aneesh Chopra, who served as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer under former President Obama, said he had hope for Kratsios's nomination, adding: "I've had no conversations with him that make me think he's partisan."

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty praised Kratsios's nomination as "great news", adding that the nominee is "strengthening America's leadership in technologies like quantum computing and artificial intelligence."

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US President Donald Trump says he has ordered the withdrawal of recently imposed sanctions against North Korea.

In a tweet on Friday, Trump referred to "additional large-scale sanctions" by the US Treasury that had been added to already existing restrictions.

It was not immediately clear which measures he was referring to, the BBC reported.

However on Thursday, the US Treasury blacklisted two China-based shipping companies for reportedly violating sanctions against North Korea.

US National Security Adviser John Bolton described the treasury sanctions at the time as "important".

In a tweet, he wrote that "the maritime industry must do more to stop North Korea's illicit shipping practices".

The US Treasury said it had acted because the companies had helped North Korea to evade international and US sanctions by engaging in ship-to-ship transfers with North Korean tankers or exporting North Korean coal.

Just hours after the announcement, North Korea withdrew from the inter-Korean liaison office. It is not known if the two events are connected.

The liaison office, located in the North Korean border city of Kaesong, had allowed officials from North and South Korea to communicate on a regular basis for the first time since the Korean War.

The North Korean pullout followed a failed summit between President Trump and North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, Vietnam, last month.

In a tweet on Friday, Trump wrote: "It was announced today by the US Treasury that additional large-scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea.

"I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!"

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders did not elaborate on which sanctions were being referred to by the president.

However, she added: "President Trump likes Chairman Kim [Jong-un] and he doesn't think these sanctions will be necessary."

North Korea has been the subject of a series of US and international sanctions over Pyongyang's development of nuclear weapons and missile tests.

--IANS

vc

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Two American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan were killed on Friday during an anti-terror operation, the US mission in the country said.

"Two US service members were killed while conducting an operation on March 22," the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission said in a brief statement without providing any further details.

The names of the killed soldiers would be withheld until 24 hours after the next of kin of the deceased has been notified of the death.

The coalition forces did not provide details about the nature of the operation or where it was conducted.

Insurgent attacks on Afghan and international security forces are common in Afghanistan, especially in the southern and eastern provinces where Taliban has a major presence.

According to latest figures, the US has approximately 14,000 military personnel stationed in Afghanistan.

A majority of these personnel are part of the NATO mission for training Afghan troops while the rest are involved in anti-terror operations.

Around 2,400 US troops have lost their lives in the Afghan war since it began in 2001.

--IANS

mr/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Creating political space in Sikkim has become nearly impossible for national parties, with the country's ruling BJP also failing to establish itself politically after its talks with the opposition Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM) broke down over acceptance of the local party's key demands.

From Lendhup Dorjee Kazi's Sikkim National Congress (SNC) to incumbent Pawan Kumar Chamling's Sikkim Democratic Front (SDF), Sikkim has the distinction of being ruled by regional parties since it became India's 22nd state after merging in 1975.

Ever since then, the regional political parties have been playing an important role in the state's developmental process. The regional parties, especially SDF, have been able to mobilise the traditional communities into The fear of negligence by national parties has also been one of the reasons why people always supported one or the other regional political parties in the state.

"I think no national political party is being able to fully convince the people of Sikkim on local issues. The sentiments and trust of the people of Sikkim are still with the regional parties", said Dichen Lepcha, 30, a government employee from Tadong in East Sikkim.

With the inception of democracy in Sikkim in 1975 it was expected that the national parties will flourish in the state. But this never happened.

Instead, the SDF of five-term Chief Minister Chamling has been able to bring the necessary development to the region and fulfil some of the people's basic aspirations.

"The Sikkimese people are so much socially interconnected that no national party will understand and can fulfill their aspirations like the regional parties," said a political leader who was not willing to be identified as he was not authorised to speak to the media.

After the SDF came to power, the social, economic and political rights of the people are seen to be well-secured for the last 25 years.

"Being with a national party with one seat in parliament, its voice may get lost in the national agenda. A local party ensures that the priorities are set straight," said Namrata Neopaney, 28,an aide of P.D. Rai, the MP from Rakdong in East Sikkim.

"Sikkim has a leader from the land who has given us peace, progress and prosperity. The 'Sikkimese Pride' that we carry is all because of him. We haven't witnessed any other party that has done this," Neopaney added.

The Sikkimese identity is a long-debated issue presented differently in the pre- and post-merger period. Also the fear of losing their special identity, rights like 371 of the constitution and fear of influx of outsiders are the biggest reasons for national parties being kept at bay by the Sikkimese people.

"There is a combination of reasons why the Sikkimese people habitually reject national parties. The most significant reason could be their love of and deep commitment to Sikkimese rootedness. Make no mistake about it - the Sikkimese people have accepted Indian nationality with a caveat of preserving their distinctiveness," political analyst Jiwan Rai said.

"A quick look at history will confirm what I am saying. The two longest serving CMs - the late N.B. Bhandari and (incumbent) Pawan Chamling are both from regional parties. The two cameo governments led by B.B. Gurung and Sanchaman Limboo were backed by the Indian National Congress and their brevity says it all. Also remember that Bhandari joined the Congress twice to no avail," Rai added.

"Lastly, as a Sikkimese I feel if we let the national party enter our domain then it will be the biggest threat to our special rights and we might end up like Jammu and Kashmir someday,"Asaid Dichen Ongmu Bhutia, 27, a journalist from Chandmari, East Sikkim. summing up in general the views of the people of the state.

(Sonam Yangchen Lepcha is the editor of Gangtok Times. He can be contacted at rukiarongmit@gmail.com)

--IANS

sonam/ssp/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Days ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, a political controversy erupted on Friday after a media report titled 'The Yeddy Diaries' published by news magazine 'The Caravan' alleged that former Karnataka Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa paid Rs 1,800 crore to some top BJP leaders with the Congress daring the government to order an investigation by the newly-appointed Lokpal.

The BJP refuted the allegations as "baseless".

The report alleged that Yeddyurappa paid as much as Rs 1,800 crore to top BJP leaders, including veterans L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley and Nitin Gadkari. The report also carried published handwritten notes purportedly written by Yeddyurappa.

Addressing reporters, Congress Spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala demanded to know who the "beneficiaries" of the money paid by Yeddyurappa were, saying, "It is a fit case to be investigated by the newly constituted Lokpal."

"There is an allegation of bribe of Rs 1,800 crore on the top BJP leadership. Is it true or false? The diary with B.S. Yeddyurappa's sign on it was with the Income Tax Department since 2017. If that is the case why did Modi ji and BJP not get it investigated?" Surjewala asked.

"Prima facie, this is a case of investigating all BJP leaders, right from the Prime Minister. It is a fit case to be investigated by the newly appointed Lokpal," he said.

The Congress leader claimed that the I-T department approached Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to find out whether there should be an inquiry but nothing happened.

"We are not here to do mudslinging like the BJP. We are here to tell people," he said.

Reading out a purported conversation between Yeddyurappa and late union minister Ananth Kumar alluding to the bribery, Surjewala said, "The Congress had raised the matter in 2017, when it released a video of conversation between Yeddyurappa and late Union minister Ananth Kumar. The two leaders talked about the money being paid to the top leadership of the BJP."

He said if there is no truth to this diary, then why the BJP did not get an inquiry done.

"If this is true, then is this not a first-hand report of BJP's corruption? Why is there no independent inquiry on this? Now there is also Lok Pal and other independent bodies in place. Chor-chowkidar is answerable for this," he said.

Yeddyurappa refuted the allegations as baseless, saying it "absolute nonsense, disgusting and desperate efforts" by the Congress. He also threatened with a defamation case.

"Prove it at the earliest or face defamation case," he said in Bengaluru.

"Congress and its leaders are bankrupt of issues and ideas. They donot have any development issues to discuss in public. They are frustrated with growing popularity of Prime Minister narendra Modiji and BJP," he said in a statement.

He said the Congress leaders have realized that their defeat in 2019 elections is imminent and have lost the battle before it has begun.

"All the issues being raised by Congress, including one raised by them today about alleged payment of crores of rupees, have been already inquired into. These documents have been found to be fake.

"IT department officials have already probed the issue to find that the documents and signatures and handwritten notes are forged one. Congress leaders who are apt in carrying out all these atrocious and malicious campaigns have planted this story in the media to gain political mileage in the coming elections. The issues raised by Congress leaders are irrelevant and false. The issue is a closed chapter,"

Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad slammed the Congress for spreading "a web of lies" and said the Congress is "desperate and has lost its balance".

"Karnataka Congress leader D. Shivakumar has been involved in such allegations in the past and he made his claims on the basis of a sheet of paper. The Income Tax Department department asked him if he had the original copy of the paper, but he could not present it," he said.

"The diary shown was just a photocopy. The Congress has lost his balance and has realized that their defeat in the 2019 elections is imminent. They have lost the battle before it has begun," he said adding that the issue was raised as part of Congress' attempt to divert people's attention from the embarrassment it faced due to remarks made by Sam Pitroda over Pulwama terror attack and Indian Air Force's strike in Balakot.

--IANS

bns/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)There are now two daily flights from New Delhi to Bikaner. Before that, one would have to board a train from a station called Sarai Rohilla somewhere in the vicinity of Karol Bagh. Since most of the snobbish New Delhi is unaware of Sarai Rohilla, it used to cause my friends no little mirth every time I told them I was off to visit my parents.

Especially since, on a junket, we had once asked a bunch of them along. At the time, the train used to take 12 hours on a metre-gauge track, and the bogies would lurch over sand banks. It was like being on a roller-coaster which, if you have motion ...With just over two weeks to go for the first phase of voting, how battle-ready does the Congress look? How is the josh of its generals and foot-soldiers? Who are these generals? We know that its been telling us for some time that the Modi government is the most corrupt, inept, divisive and disastrous in our history. But it isnt telling us how it plans to fix it.

Where does it stand on the key issues that matter to almost every voter this summer: Jobs and the economy, nationalism and social cohesion? At this point, let me confront you with another question. The spin on the ...Two Army jawans were injured as Pakistani troops violated the ceasefire by firing on forward posts and civilian areas along the Line of Control in Rajouri and Jammu districts, officials said Friday.

Pakistani troops continued night-long mortar shelling and firing in Pallanwala, Sunderbani and Nowshera sectors till Friday morning, they said.

The two Army jawans, who were injured in Pallanwala sector, were admitted to a hospital, the officials said.

On Thursday, an Army jawan was killed as Pakistani troops shelled forward areas and Indian posts with artillery and mortar bombs heavily along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district, they said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences Friday launched mobile methadone vans to provide treatment to opioid addicts in inner city neighbourhoods.

As a pilot project, the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre (NDDTC) of AIIMS has initiated the new service of delivering methadone through a mobile van in East Delhi.

Opioid addiction is a significant problem in India, professor at NDDTC Dr Atul Ambekar said, adding these people require medicines such as methadone or buprenorphine for getting rid of the addiction.

Methadone is a prescription drug given in a syrup form to patients as it helps in controlling the craving and withdrawals due to opioid addiction.

The drug usually comes in liquid form but is also available in powder and tablet variants. It is usually taken under the supervision of a doctor because of its potential for abuse, Ambekar said.

There are very few treatment centres providing these medicines while the need is very high. It is estimated that less than 2 per cent of the population addicted to opioids in India is receiving this treatment, which is recommended by various UN bodies and the World Health Organization (WHO)," Ambekar said.

A recently released government survey report "Prevalence and Extent of Substance Use in India", estimated that India has about 28 lakh people affected by addiction to opioids such as heroin, opium and various pharmaceutical products.

Since methadone is a highly regulated medicine, it is only provided as daily observed treatment. It is available in just about a dozen cities in India, in-charge of the methadone clinic at NDDTC Dr Ravindra Rao said.

"Patients often find it difficult to come to the clinic daily to receive methadone, which leads to them dropping-out of treatment midway," Rao informed.

The mobile methadone dispensing unit plans to bridge this gap and improve retention of patients into treatment enabling them to work and lead a healthier life, Dr Rao said.

Currently, such dispensing vans or buses are available in few select developed countries in the world, such as USA, Portugal, Spain, Canada and Netherlands.

With the launch of mobile delivery of methadone, India joins this elite club, he said. In fact, India is the first country in the South Asian region to initiate these services, Rao claimed.

The van will be parked at strategic places in East Delhi and adjoining areas for fixed time period in the day where the patients can come and receive their medicine without having to travel to the main clinic.

"In the trial run for the last two weeks, we already have more than two dozen patients enrolled in the facility and the response is very encouraging," he said.

Based on the success of this initiative, this new approach can be scaled-up in different parts of the city and country.

At the national level, the most commonly used opioid is heroin (used by 1.14 per cent of the people surveyed), followed by pharmaceutical opioids (used by 0.96 per cent of the people surveyed) and opium (used by 0.52 per cent of the surveyed), the survey found.

Approximately 60 lakh people are estimated to have opioid use disorders (harmful or dependent pattern) in the country, more than half are contributed by just a few states -- Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Albanian authorities say they have arrested an Indian citizen wanted in his country for money laundering.

A statement Friday by Albanian police said the individual, identified only as H.P., 59, was arrested at an airport trying to leave the country. The police say he is a resident of Nigeria.

A court in New Delhi, India, had issued an international arrest warrant for the individual for money laundering. Albanian authorities have started extradition procedures.

Albania's private Top Channel television station named the individual as Hiteshkumar Patel, the brother in law of Cetan Sandesaras.

Sandesaras and his brother Nitin own the Sterling Biotech company and borrowed SD 725 million before leaving India. Last year they got Albanian citizenship.

It is unclear whether the Sandesaras brothers are in Albania.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)EU Council President Donald Tusk said Friday that all Brexit options are on the table until the new April 12 deadline, including Britain cancelling its withdrawal.

Prime Minister Theresa May returned to Britain to try for a third time to persuade recalcitrant lawmakers to approve her EU withdrawal agreement after European leaders agreed to postpone the March 29 departure date.

If MPs back the accord, Britain will leave the EU on May 22, but if they vote it down again, London must say before April 12 what it plans to do, with a further delay only possible if it organises European Parliament elections.

Tusk said all options were still available -- including Britain cancelling its withdrawal, an idea backed by a petition in the UK that has now gathered almost three million signatures.

"Until April 12, anything is possible -- a deal, a long extension, if the UK decided to rethink its strategy or revoking Article 50, which is a prerogative of the UK government," Tusk said.

"The fate of Brexit is in the hands of our British friends. We are prepared for the worst, but hope for the best. As you know, hope dies last." German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that if May's deal is voted down again, the bloc's leaders would need another summit with May to discuss how to proceed.

"I think that this (April 12) is a very reasonable date. Of course we will meet again before that date -- certainly in the presence of the British prime minister," Merkel told reporters after the summit in Brussels.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)"Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans," wrote famous English writer John Lennon in his song 'Beautiful Boy' released in 1980.

Vishnudas Chapke, a Mumbai-based journalist, has lived that wisdom quintessentially, trotting the globe by road "unplanned" on an impecunious budget.

The 36-year-old scribe, who had set out on the journey exactly three years and three days ago from Thane railway station hear here, has returned to the Maharashtra city, covering 35 countries in Asia, South America, Central America, Europe and Australia.

Chapke, who has roots in a farming family from Parbhani in the Marathwada region, undertook the journey seeking inspiration from naval captain Dilip Donde's solo circumnavigation of the world by sea.

The scribe returned to India, crossing the border from Myanmar at Manipur last Friday. He reached Thane Thursday night.

"My mind was filled with uncertainty when I began the journey on March 19, 2016. It was an unplanned trip. But what unfolded over the next three years was an amazing and beautiful experience," Chapke said.

"Returning home after being away from family and friends for a long span is an extremely emotional experience," he added.

Chapke feels the trip has enriched him as a person.

The scribe added it taught him to live in tough and varying weather conditions as he went about vagabonding around the world.

But the tour had its share of unpleasant experiences.

Chapke recounted how two years ago he was allegedly mugged in Chile by a drug addict who decamped with his cellphone and money.

Practicing austerity at personal-level until before undertaking the journey came handy during the wayfaring, he added.

"This trip helped me connect with people belonging to different backgrounds culturally and religion wise and who speak different languages. Notwithstanding these barriers, I could become friends with them and that's an asset now," he added.

Chapke said he sought to flag the environment cause all along the trip, planting saplings with ministers and diplomats in at least 15 of the countries the journalist visited.

Among his memorable experiences was playing a volunteer during a forest fire in Chile in January 2017. His contribution towards relief work was appreciated by the South American country's then President Michelle Bachelet, Chapke said.

He also expressed gratitude towards those who helped him, iincluding organisations like Tata Trust, during the journey, which was demanding financially.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India has cautioned that attempts to "subsume" the South-South cooperation in the international aid architecture are not helpful and do no justice to the future potential of cooperation between developing nations.

SouthSouth cooperation is about developing countries working together to find solutions to common development challenges, according to the United Nations Office for SouthSouth Cooperation. It describes the exchange of resources, technology and knowledge between developing countries.

India's Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Syed Akbaruddin said: "More and better South-South cooperation now is on account of the global South enjoying more rapid and sustained economic growth. Yet, South-South cooperation retains its distinct nature and values, as well as diversity of forms and flows. It defies easy categorisation".

The trajectory of global growth and the declining share of ODA (official development assistance) during the last decade or so has seen attempts to subsume South-South cooperation in the international aid architecture, he said on Thursday at the second high-level United Nations Conference on South-South cooperation in Buenos Aires.

"Such efforts are not helpful. They do no justice to either its historical heritage or its future potential. Let us not venture to strait jacket South-South cooperation into a format that it cannot fit into," Akbaruddin said.

He told the conference that over the last decade, India has extended Lines of Credit of about USD 25 billion to more than 60 countries of the South.

All projects follow universally recognised norms and do not create unsustainable debt burdens while ensuring skill and technology transfer to help local communities maintain and sustain assets created, the envoy said.

These projects not only cover "traditional" sectors such as infrastructure, agriculture, education, health and rural development, but also new frontiers ranging from the "blue" economy to the "digital" economy, Akbaruddin said.

They encompass climate action activities such as through the International Solar Alliance and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief as is being undertaken by the Indian navy at Port Beira in Mozambique now, he said.

"The South Asian satellite is testimony that the sky is no longer the limit when it comes to India's efforts at South-South cooperation among like-minded countries," Akbaruddin said.

He stressed that the cardinal principle of South-South cooperation is that sharing valuable capacities, experience and knowledge amongst developing countries can be a catalyst for development.

"It does not substitute or supplant but only supplements North-South cooperation," the envoy said.

He noted that as opportunities for sharing the fruits of knowledge, technology and growth have changed, nations are now seeking new channels of cooperation, rather than conflict; new pathways for development, rather than destruction.

In recent years, India's development cooperation with fellow partners from the South has expanded and formats of consolidating partnerships have broadened, including Grant assistance, Lines of Credit, Small Development Projects, technical consultancy, disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, educational scholarships and a range of capacity building programmes, Akbaruddin said.

Under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme, about 13,000 training slots are provided annually to nominees from 161 countries. All Least Developed Countries are eligible for preferential market access in India under India's 'Duty Free Tariff Preference Scheme', he said.

Akbaruddin said that the India-UN Development Partnership Fund established in June 2017 is a new mechanism contributing to the achievement of SDGs of fellow developing countries.

The Indian envoy also participated at a signing ceremony for UNESCO South-South Cooperation projects, funded through the UN-India Development Fund.

"UNESCO has been quick to develop projects. This is South-South cooperation in its essence. The first project with UNESCO is taking off and we hope there will be many more to come," Akbaruddin said, adding that the Government of Gambia expressed appreciation to India for the project, saying in a tweet that "support of India and UNESCO can make a real difference in addressing capacity gaps, saving lives".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)PDP president Mehbooba Mufti Friday said ban on the Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front was a "detrimental step" that will turn Kashmir into an open air prison.

The JKLF was banned on Friday for "promoting" secession of the militancy-hit state from the Union of India, officials said in New Delhi.

"Detrimental steps like these will only turn Kashmir into an open air prison," Mehbooba said in a tweet.

Banning the outfit under various provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act after a high-level meeting on security chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, officials said the Centre is of the opinion that the JKLF is "in close touch with militant outfits" and is supporting extremism and militancy in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere.

They said the outfit claims "secession of a part of the Indian territory from the union" and supports terrorist and separatist groups fighting for this purpose.

Mufti said, "Yasin Malik renounced violence as a way of resolving J&K issue a long time ago. He was treated as a stakeholder in a dialogue initiated by then PM Vajpayee ji. What will a ban on his organisation achieve?" she asked.

Malik is at present lodged in Kot Balwal jail in Jammu, and is likely to face trial in the three-decade-old case of kidnapping of Rubaya Sayeed, the daughter of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, and gunning down of four IAF personnel in Srinagar.

The JKLF was founded by Pakistani national Amanullah Khan in mid-1970 at Birmingham in the United Kingdom and came into prominence in 1971 when its member hijacked an Indian Airlines plane flying from Srinagar to Jammu.

This is the second organisation in Jammu and Kashmir which has been banned this month. Earlier, the Centre had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Milton Cato Memorial Hospital is again in the news for all the wrong reasons.

As THE VINCENTIAN was going to press on Wednesday, there was still no comment, statement, no word whatsoever from the administration of the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital (MCMH) in relation to a case of a disappearing finger.



Listeners to last Wednesdays edition of the interactive morning programme on Hot FM, were shocked to hear a caller relating how the MCMH had "misplaced his finger he had severed, while on his job at Massy Stores, Kingstown, around 2pm on March 12.

In his call to the programme, the man, who we learned was 21-year-old Najee Burkley of Layou, described how on the day in question, after the accident at his work place, he went to the A&E Unit at the MCMH with his finger, which a nurse took from him and put in a liquid contained in a "see through plastic container, after he told her he wanted to have it "put back on.

This, after the said nurse had bandaged his wound and told him to "sit down and wait, a la the calypso by Marshie, the doctor will see him soon.

Time elapsed, during which the man regularly asked about when the doctor was going to come, only to be told on each occasion that he was busy and would be there soon.

It was around 8 in the evening, the man told the programme, when a nurse changed the bandage on his wound and told him to return in the morning to see the doctor.

When he returned in the morning, he did see a doctor who told him that he would have to undergo surgery, but seeing that the hospital was unequipped to cater to the surgery, he would have to have it done at his clinin in Arnos Vale, upstairs the ACE Hardware.

In preparation for the surgery, the man returned to the hospital to retrieve his finger, only to be told, in no uncertain language and without explanation, that they had misplaced it.

Obviously upset, he was noisy as he tried to get an explanation about his missing finger. None of the nurses with whom he spoke said anything to him, and he was told that the senior nurse was not available.

The young man had his surgery but did not have his finger reattached, which he was told could have been done.

When asked by one of the hosts of the programme what his next step was going to be, the man replied, "Ah planning to sue them for my finger.

(Source: Hot 97.1 FM)

It remains, even as the story will undoubtedly unfold further, a case of a disappearing finger, one which brings the MCMH into the beam of the spotlight, for another wrong reason.India's largest IT services company Tata Consultancy Services has teamed up with Barclays to launch a virtual platform to help children with neuro-muscular disabilities become more self-dependent.

The virtual habilitation platform, TCS VHAB, will be launched at ZEP Rehabilitation Centre, Pune.

This centre, established in 2008, carries out programmes to help improve the mobility of children with locomotor disabilities. These programmes are aimed at enabling development of daily skills, self-help skills, functional skills and academics.

"TCS has joined hands with Barclays to launch TCS VHAB platform at the ZEP Rehabilitation Centre in Pune...," the IT company said in a statement.

Under the partnership, REACH- the Barclays Disability and Mental Health Network, is providing the hardware and equipment, while TCS is deploying its VHAB solution, as per a regulatory filing.

VHAB solution is essentially a digital assistive platform that improves physiotherapy regimen for children with locomotor disabilities due to cerebral palsy or autism.

The platform uses motion sensors, progressive analytics, gesture analysis, finger mapping and real-time simulation in an immersive VR (virtual reality) environment to develop skills that enable the children to carry out tasks closely related to real life, the statement said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)It is not for nothing that Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has earned the the sobriquet of 'Chanakya' of Bihar politics.

Often deprecatively dubbed as 'paltu ram' (turncoat) by RJD boss Lalu Prasad, with whom he has had a love-hate relationship for long, Kumar, a mechanical engineer by training, has outmanoeuvred his rivals, much like the wise and wily advisor to emperor Chandragupta, to stay afloat on the choppy political waters of the Hindi heartland state.

Politically debilitated after his JD(U) was mauled at the hustings in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, barely a year after the party snapped its ties with the BJP at his insistence in the aftermath of Narendra Modi's anointment as the saffron party's prime ministerial face, he made friends with arch rival Lalu and halted the Modi juggernaut in its tracks in the 2015 Bihar assembly polls.

Less than two years down the line, the three-party grand alliance lay in tatters as he bolted out of it over allegations of corruption against Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, the younger son and heir apparent of Lalu, and resigned as the chief minister.

Twelve hours had not passed when he was back in the chief minister's chair, as sensing an opportunity to return to power in Bihar the BJP offered him support, which Kumar readily accepted despite the RJD crying foul and demanding that he seek a fresh mandate.

Kumar, known for his clean image, insisted the decision was in sync with his agenda of development and reflected zero tolerance to corruption.

The development proved his survival skills but was reviled by those who saw in him a potential challenger to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The backward class leader, who did not helm the party when it all happened, now faces the challenge of delivering Bihar to Modi at a time when he is the JD(U) president.

Though he invited jeers from RJD supremo Lalu Prasad and his son Tejashwi Yadav, who publicly called him "paltu ram", his loyalists hailed him for his personal integrity.

JD(U) national general secretary and chief spokesman K C Tyagi disagreed with the negative views of Kumar's rivals about the leader.

"Nitish Kumar is the only leader of his generation who has followed in the footsteps of Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and Karpoori Thakur in terms of personal integrity," he told PTI.

Kumar's detractors panned him over his return to the NDA, claiming it compromised his self-professed commitment to secularism.

Tyagi, however, insisted Kumar's commitment to secularism had not weakened a bit and that it was reflected in the body of work he had done for the minorities in the state.

"Besides, he has been able to maintain his independent stance on issues like article 370, Ram temple and uniform civil code," Tyagi said.

RJD vice president Shivanand Tiwari, a former associate of Kumar, said the JD(U) leader shirks challenges.

"You can point out a challenge to him only at your own peril. In 2009, when Kumar famously cancelled a dinner for BJP leaders including Narendra Modi, who was then the Gujarat chief Minister, I suggested to him that he should go for fresh elections as his personal popularity was at its peak, but he dithered.

"After he snapped ties with the BJP four years later, I told him it was not enough and something more will have to be done to surmount the challenge posed by Modi. Instead of paying heed, he unleashed his fury on me and I got expelled from JD(U)," Tiwari said.

Under Kumar's stewardship, the JD(U) will contest 17 Lok Sabha seats, a number equal to what BJP has kept for itself.

Kumar's detractors see it as a major climbdown for him as the JD(U) was the "senior partner" in the NDA in the state before it snapped its 17-year-old alliance with the BJP in 2013.

However, his supporters are quick to point out that considering the fact that the JD(U) had fared miserably in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, winning only two seats compared to BJP's 22, the bargain was no mean achievement, particularly since it required the saffron party to give up some seats it had won.

Moreover, unlike the BJP, which had to give up its claim on at least five of its sitting seats, the JD(U) retained both Nalanda and Purnea, besides securing for itself some prized ones like Munger, compelling the LJP to settle for Nawada.

Nawada was represented in the outgoing Lok Sabha by Union minister Giriraj Singh one of the fiercest critics of Kumar in the BJP and a Modi loyalist since the days when bitter rivalry between the Bihar chief minister and his Gujarat counterpart used to make headlines.

Singh, an influential upper caste Bhumihar leader, is unhappy at the prospect of having to shift to Begusarai despite the sizeable presence of his castemen in the constituency, saying he had developed an "attachment" to Nawada.

Political circles are rife with speculation that the RJD-led grand alliance might field Kanhaiya Kumar, the firebrand former JNU students union leader for the seat on a CPI ticket.

The upcoming general elections will also give an opportunity to Kumar to settle scores with friends-turned-foes Upendra Kushwaha of RLSP and HAM's Jitan Ram Manjhi, both of whom had rushed into the BJP's arms after falling out with the JD(U) boss. The two parties have walked out of the NDA and are now part of the grand alliance.

Kushwaha, who heads the RLSP, may seek re-election from Karakat, while HAM president Manjhi is eyeing Gaya. Both these seats have fallen into the JD(U)'s kitty.

Another important seat that has come the JD(U)'s way is Madhepura, offering Kumar a chance to get even with Sharad Yadav, the former president of his party who had fruitlessly dissented when the Bihar chief minister led his party out of the NDA in 2013.

Yadav, who had bitterly criticised Kumar when he realigned with the BJP, later floated the Loktantrik Janata Dal and is part of the grand alliance. He has represented Madhepura seat several times in the past.

A soft-spoken politician who is, nevertheless, known to suffer no fools, Kumar has earned the reputation of being the chief minister under whom an economically laggard Bihar turned the corner, recording double digit growth for several years, something which came in for praise even by the prime minister.

The performance of his party in the Lok Sabha polls would also determine, to a large extent, the esteem in which he would be held by political peers and the public when the state elects a new assembly next year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The BJP has denied tickets to three sitting veteran parliamentarians in Assam and included four new faces, the deputy speaker of the assembly and a state minister in its first list of candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

The list of 184 candidates across the country was announced by the party on Thursday evening and it included eight names from Assam.

While no candidates were announced for the Tezpur and Nagaon constituencies, The party offered Dhubri, Kokrajhar, Barpeta and Kaliabor seats to its state allies, the AGP and the BPF.

Veteran parliamentarian and former Rajya Sabha member, three-time Lok Sabha MP and former Union minister Bijoya Chakravarty has been denied ticket from the prestigious Gauhati constituency.

According to the list, a new face in the BJP, Queen Ojha, will contest from the Gauhati seat instead of Chakravarty.

Likewise, Dilip Saikia will contest from Mangaldoi constituency instead of Ramen Deka. Deka is the founding member of the party's state unit.

Deka has been a Lok Sabha MP for two consecutive terms since 2009. He was also the president of Assam BJP and held various posts at the party's national level.

On the other hand, sitting Lok Sabha MP Kamakhya Prasad Tasa has been dropped from the list for the Jorhat constituency and Assam Power Minister Topon Kumar Gogoi would contest the elections from the seat.

While Assam Assembly Deputy Speaker Kripanath Mallah has been nominated to contest from the Karimganj (SC) seat, debutant Rajdeep Roy Bengali will fight the elections from the neighbouring Silchar in the Barak valley.

In the Autonomous District (ST), Harensingh Bey, another fresh face, will be in the fray.

As per the last summary revision, over 2.17 crore voters, including at least 7.06 lakh first-timers, will exercise their franchise in a three-phase elections for electing 14 members to the Lok Sabha from Assam.

For the Dibrugarh and Lakhimpur seats, the current BJP members Rameswar Teli and Pradan Baruah have been re-nominated respectively to contest the polls.

Voting in Assam will take place at 28,143 polling stations on April 11, 18 and 23, and the counting of votes will take place on May 23 after completion of the entire seven-phase voting across the country.

During the first phase, voting will happen for Tezpur, Kaliabor, Jorhat, Dibrugarh and Lakhimpur constituencies at 9,574 polling stations with 75.16 lakh electorates.

Karimganj (SC), Silchar, Autonomous District (ST), Mangaldoi and Nawgong will go for polling in the second phase, in which 68.36 lakh persons will caste their vote at 8,992 booths.

Dhubri, Kokrajhar (ST), Barpeta and Gauhati seats will witness elections during the last phase across 9,577 polling stations, where 74.08 lakh people will vote.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The opposition Congress in Christian-majority Mizoram Friday accused the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF) of having a "secret understanding" with the BJP which is trying to establish a "Hindu Kingdom" in the country.

"Though the MNF had denied having any relation with the BJP and openly opposed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, it has a secret understanding with the BJP. It is a part of the NDA and the NEDA," State Congress president and former chief minister Lal Thanhawla said.

The BJP-led North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA) is a political platform of anti-Congress regional parties.

Addressing a party workers' meet here, Thanhawla claimed that the BJP's hidden agenda to set up a "Hindu Kingdom" was clear by the introduction of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and the saffron party's desire to impose the Uniform Civil Code which is nothing less than enforcing the Hindu way of life.

The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill that sought to provide Indian citizenship to non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan was passed in Lok Sabha but was not be tabled in Rajya Sabha. It is now destined to die a natural death.

The Congress's accusation of the MNF having a tie-up with the BJP came up again before the Lok Sabha elections. It had levelled similar charges ahead of the assembly election in the state last year. The Lal Thanhawla government was ousted from power by the MNF in that election.

Polling for the lone Lok Sabha seat in the state will be held on April 11.

MNF nominee C Lalrosanga has already filed his nomination while Independent candidate Lalhriatrenga Chhangte submitted his papers Friday.

The BJP announced its candidate, the party's state unit vice-president Nirupam Chakma, Thursday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Theresa May has accepted an offer of two options for short delays to the date of Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, EU president Donald Tusk said Thursday.

"I met Prime Minister May several times tonight to make sure the UK accepts the extension scenarios and I am pleased to confirm we have an agreement on this," the EU council president said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 67-year-old Briton was evacuated from a ocean liner in a medical emergency by the Coast Guard, an official said Friday.

Stephen Woodford, a British national, who was sailing to Abu Dhabi on trans-Atlantic ocean liner RMS MV Queen Mary 2, suffered a cardiac arrest on board following which the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC), Mumbai was alerted late Thursday evening, an official said Friday.

A Coast Guard interceptor boat C-158 was diverted towards the Bermuda-flagged ship along with ICGS Amal, a fast patrol vessel of the Coast Guard, the official said.

The passenger was deboarded from the liner and transferred to Manipal Hospital in Goa, he said.

The ocean liner was on its way from Kochi to Abu Dhabi, the official informed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The BJP's Karnataka chief B S Yeddyurappa on Friday rubbished as "atrocious and malicious" the allegation that he had paid



Rs 1,800 crore as bribe to the party top brass, after the Congress demanded a Lokpal probe into the issue.

The allegation has been already inquired into by the Income Tax department and it has been found that documents are "fake", the former Karnataka Chief Minister claimed, terming it as a "closed chapter". He accused the Congress of raising the issue as it was "frustrated" over its "imminent defeat" in Lok Sabha polls.

"To be frank all the issues being raised by Congress including one raised by them today about alleged payment of crores of rupees has been already inquired and it was found that documents are fake," Yeddyurappa said in a statement.

He said the Income Tax department officials found that the documents, signatures and handwritten notes were forged.

"Congress leaders who are apt in carrying out all these atrocious and malicious campaigns have planted this story in the media to gain political mileage in the coming elections," Yeddyurappa said.

"Above all issues raised by Congress leaders are irrelevant and false. The issue is a closed chapter," he added.

Citing a media report, the Congress on Friday sought an investigation by the Lokpal into allegation that bribes of Rs 1800 crore were paid by Yeddyurappa to the BJP's top brass.

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala, addressing a press conference in New Delhi, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi should come forward and clarify.

Accusing the Congress and its leaders of being bankrupt of issues and ideas, Yeddyurappa said, "They don't have any development issues to discuss in public.

"Congress leaders are frustrated with the growing popularity of the Prime Minister Narendra Modiji and BJP. They have realized that their defeat in the 2019 elections is imminent. They have lost the battle before it begun."



Surjewala said the report by Caravan magazine cited a diary containing details of the alleged pay-offs to senior BJP leaders and it was seized by the Income Tax Department during raids.

"Prima facie, this is a case of investigating all BJP leaders, right from the PM and downwards.

"It is a fit case to be investigated by the newly appointed Lokpal," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The death toll in the powerful explosion at a chemical plant in China climbed to 47 on Friday with President Xi Jinping demanding all-out efforts to carry out search and rescue operations.

The blast occurred after a fire in a fertilizer factory in a chemical industrial park in Yancheng, Jiangsu province on Thursday, according to the government of Xiangshui county.

Forty Seven people have been killed and a further 90 seriously injured, reported state-run China Daily.

President Xi, also the general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, demanded all-out efforts to search and rescue victims.

Xi, who is on his five-day tour of Europe, said that all-out efforts must be made to search those trapped, and the injured must be timely treated and relief work must be well carried out to maintain social stability.

Meanwhile, environment monitoring and early warning should be strengthened to prevent environmental pollution as well as secondary disasters, he said.

The explosion affected 16 surrounding enterprises. Open fire has been put out and air pollution indexes are within the allowed range.

Xi ordered that the cause of the accident must be identified as early as possible and that authoritative information should be timely released.

The Ministry of Emergency Management said 88 people have been rescued from the site of the incident.

Eye-witnesses said several workers were trapped after buildings were knocked down by the shockwave stated to be a mild tremor caused by the blast which took place in a pesticide plant. The blast also shattered windows of nearby residential houses.

The fire fighter brigade of Jiangsu has mobilised 176 fire trucks with 928 personnel to join the rescue mission, the Ministry of Emergency Management said.

A professor of applied chemistry at Beijing University of Chemical Technology, in an interview with CCTV, said the leak of toxic chemicals might have affected the people and environment in the surrounding areas.

According to the city's environmental protection authority, the explosion had a negative influence on the air quality in the chemical park and its surrounding areas within a 500-meter radius, but the strong winds are expected to lift the heavy smoke.

No residents live in the chemical park, while all people in nearby areas have been evacuated, officials said.

Yancheng's education department said school students were among those injured in the explosion. Online maps of the area indicate that there are at least 10 schools close to the site.

Beijing Youth Daily reported that the blast was caused by benzene and occurred in a production area of the plant.

Production at other plants in the area were not affected, the report said.

A witness surnamed Xie living about 1.5-km from the plant told Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that all her windows were shattered by the blast.

Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical Company, which owns the plant, was established in 2007. Its business includes the manufacture of chemical products such as hydroxybenzoic acid.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)China said Friday it will look into charges against two Chinese firms sanctioned by the U.S. because they are suspected of helping North Korea evade sanctions.

China upholds all United Nations Security Council sanctions against the North over its nuclear and missile programs, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a regular press briefing.

He said China will deal with any verified transgressors and "launch an investigation according to our domestic laws." However, Geng said Beijing opposes unilateral sanctions on Chinese firms such as those imposed by the US separate from those of the UN.

The Trump administration on Thursday sanctioned two shipping companies Dalian Haibo International Freight Co Ltd. and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co. Ltd. for using deceptive methods to circumvent international and U.S. sanctions and the U.S. commitment to implementing U.N. Security Council resolutions.

The US Treasury sanctions against the Chinese companies were the first targeted actions against Pyongyang since its nuclear negotiations with the U.S. in Hanoi last month ended without agreement.

Calls to Dalian Haibo and Liaoning Danxing rang without response Friday or were answered by people who immediately hung up the phone.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)China has stopped all new purchases of Canadian canola seeds in what some see as retaliation for Canada's arrest of a top executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei.

The Canola Council of Canada said late Thursday that exporters are reporting Chinese importers are unwilling to purchase the seeds at this time.

Relations between both countries have been tense since Canada arrested Chinese tech executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver in early December at the request of the US.

US prosecutors have filed fraud charges against Meng, who is Huawei's chief financial officer and the daughter of its founder.

China has warned of "grave consequences" if Meng is not immediately released. On December 10, it arrested two Canadians in an apparent attempt to pressure the government of Justin Trudeau.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Ambassador of Cuba in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, H.E. Vilma Reyes Valdespino (centre) with THE VINCENTIANS Managing Director Desiree Richards and Editor Cyp Neehall.

THE VINCENTIAN extended a warm welcome last Monday to resident Ambassador of Cuba in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, H.E. Vilma Reyes Valdespino.



The Ambassadors call on Managing Director Ms. Desiree Richards and Editor Cyp Neehall was a routine one, in keeping with her commitment to engage the media houses here.

As always, it was with purpose that the visit unfolded.

While noting that the media here has been open in its coverage of matters related to Cuba and its contribution to development of physical infra-structure and services in this country, Ambassador Valdespino noted, rather politely, a dearth of coverage as it related to Cubas new Constitution, which was approved by Cubans in a Referendum of February 24, 2019.

In that circumstance, it was incumbent upon her, she alluded, to bring media houses up to steam on this historic development.

In doing so during her visit with THE VINCENTIAN, Ambassador Valdespino said the new Constitution, with its 229 articles, replaces one from the Cold War era, that has been in place since 1976.

The new Constitution was the result of a long and extended process of consultations with the Cuban people, home and abroad, and the inclusion of many changes proposed to the draft new Constitution.

In fact, according to Ambassador Valdespino, the Constitution as approved, is representative of 50% of changes proposed by the people.

The Constitution, Ambassador Valdespino said, speaks to a new political structure. It is, she said, the supreme confirmation of the continuity of the revolutionary process in the new Cuban generations.

Of special significance to the Ambassador was the unapologetic inclusion of the words Socialism and Communism in the new Constitution. In fact, the people influenced the framers of the constitution to reinsert the aim of "advancing towards communism that was not included in the first draft.

Stepped up US aggression

In defiance of stepped up propaganda by the government of the USA, and its deliberate attempts to encourage disapproval of the Constitution, an estimated 97% of those eligible to vote turned out on Referendum Day, with 88% of those giving their approval to the Constitution.

And, in addition to addressing this new period in the continuing revolutionary process in Cuba, Ambassador Valdespino highlighted the continuing anti-Cuba rhetoric and actions by the USA.

She noted the curtailment of counselor services at the USA Embassy in Havana, with Cubans now having to travel to Guyana for processing of their visa applications for travel to and entry into the USA. A visa allowing entries for Cubans into the USA now has a mere 3-month tenure, and observers say that it is unlikely that the quota of 20,000 visas a year for Cuba will be realized in 2019.

Also noted was the reinforcement by the President Trump Administration of the Helms-Burton Act, originally signed into law by the USA Congress in March 1996.

The law extends, inter alia: sanctions to all non-USA companies that do business with Cuba; U.S. legislation right to punish foreign companies investing simultaneously in the United States and Cuba; and allows US citizens (including naturalized Cuban exiles) to sue foreign companies for dealing in confiscated pre-revolution US property in Cuba, something that has found fancy with a number of exiled Cubans.

She looks forward to continued good relations between SVG and Cuba.

This could well be expressive of the "generation of the Revolution, the Ambassador opined, as could be the support of an article that recognizes matrimony as the union between two people as opposed to the union between a man and a woman as obtained with the 1976 Constitution.All in all, the Ambassador is pleased with the expressions of support for Cuba generally, among Vincentians.Ambassador Valdespino is currently the Chairperson of the Diplomatic Corps in this country.The Congress on Friday sought an investigation by the Lokpal into allegations that Rs 1,800 crore bribes were paid by former Karnataka chief minister B S Yeddyurappa to top BJP leadership.

Citing a media report, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said Prime Minister Narendra Modi should come forward and clarify whether bribes to the tune of Rs 1,800 crore were taken by the top BJP leaders as mentioned in the diaries, allegedly of Yeddyurappa.

The BJP denied the charges, with party chief Amit Shah saying that after all the "fake issues" have collapsed, the Congress is now desperately relying on forgery.

"The Congress campaign is in shambles. Now even forgery can't save them. Few loose sheets given by a Congress minister is only as credible and reliable as (Congress chief) Rahul Gandhi's leadership skills," Shah said on Twitter.

Surjewala, while addressing a press conference, said it is for the prime minister to say whether contents of the diaries are correct, and if they are wrong, is he willing to get the matter investigated.

He also alleged that the Income Tax Department had the diaries since 2017 but it did not take action on them. He also asked whether a note in this regard was put up before then I-T Department, who had rejected it.

"The authenticity of this diary which is supposed to be signed on each page by B S Yeddyuruppa, prima facie reflecting corruption of Rs 1800 crore up to the top notch echelons of BJP leadership, has to be investigated," the Congress leader said.

Yeddyurappa claimed that the allegation was inquired into by the Income Tax Department and it was found that the documents were "fake". He termed it as a "closed chapter".

Surjewala said that each person named in this diary must come forward and say they are not guilty and are ready to undergo any kind of investigation.

"I think this is a fit case to be investigated by the newly appointed Lokpal as the first test case. It all lies in the court of the prime minister now to prove if the 'chowkidar' is a thief or if the 'chowkidar' ready for a probe," he told reporters.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi accused all BJP leaders of being "corrupt", citing a report by the Caravan magazine.

"All 'chowkidars' (watchmen) of the BJP are thieves,"he tweeted.

Surjewala said the report cited diaries containing details of the alleged pay-offs to senior BJP leaders and it was seized by the Income Tax Department during raids.

"Prima facie, this is a case of investigating all BJP leaders, right from the PM and downwards," he said.

The Congress spokesperson also read out a purported conversation between Yeddyurappa and a BJP leader alluding to the bribery.

Surjewala said a conversation was released by the Congress on February 14, 2017 purportedly between former Union minister Ananth Kumar and Yeddyuruppa, where they admitted to a payment of Rs 1,000 crore and the existence of a diary.

"Now that so-called diary is out, as they say, its authenticity is to be proved. Prima facie, the dairy reflects, and as the report also shows, signature of B S Yeddyuruppa on every page," he claimed.

Somebody has to go through the contents of the diaries and confirm if they are his signatures or not, the Congress leader said.

Meanwhile, Karnataka Congress chief Dinesh Gundu Rao separately met UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and demanded a thorough probe into the charges. He accused Modi of being "hypocritical", saying he talked against corruption but was allegedly involved himself.

Asked whether the Karnataka government or the Congress in the state would legally move forward on the issue of the diaries, he said the decision would be taken after discussions with the party leadership.

Surjewala also said, "All options were open" before the Congress, but it was up to the prime minister and top BJP leadership to come clean on the issue.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Jaish-e-Mohammed Sajjad Khan, a close aide of mastermind Muddasir was arrested in New Delhi, police said on Friday.

Sajjad Khan (27), a resident of Pulwama was arrested near the Lajpat Rai market late Thursday night, they said.

"Muddasir, the mastermind of was killed in an exchange of fire with security forces in Jammu and Kashmir recently," Pramod Singh Kushwah, Deputy Commisisoner of Police (Special Cell) said.

Sajjad was tasked by Mudassir to establish a sleeper cell in Delhi, the officer added.

Forty Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district after a JeM terrorist rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into their bus, which was part of a convoy going to Srinagar from Jammu in February.Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist Sajjad Khan, a close aide of Pulwama attack mastermind Mudasir Khan was arrested by the police here, officials said on Friday.

They said Sajjad Ahmed Khan (27), a resident of Pulwama is also suspected to be involved in the conspiracy of Pulwama attacks.

Sajjad, who was arrested near the Lajpat Rai market late Thursday night is believed to have been in regular touch with the terror strike mastermind before and after the attack, police said.

On Mudasir's instructions, Sajjad had moved to Delhi and lived here under the guise of a shawl vendor to establish a sleeper cell of JeM.

Mudasir was killed in an exchange of fire with security forces in Jammu and Kashmir recently.

Forty Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district after a JeM terrorist rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into their bus, which was part of a convoy going to Srinagar from Jammu on February 14.

The same day, Mudasir contacted Sajjad on whatsapp and informed him about the attack on CRPF convoy.

Mudasir sent him Sajjad a video of Adil Dar - the fidayeen who carried out the attack and later deleted it from his phone, Pramod Singh Kushwah, Deputy Commisisoner of Police (Special Cell) said.

"He was tasked by Mudasir to establish a sleeper cell here. He was specially sent here to carry out reconnaissance of important targets and to set up a hideout in Delhi," Kushwah said.

He was also tasked with radicalising and recruiting Muslim youth from Uttar Pradesh and other states, provide them weapons training, explosives and field craft, raising funds and collecting weapons, Kushwah added.

Mudasir instructed Sajjad to spot young Kashmiri youths for fidayeen attacks.

Sajjad then motivated and recruited Bilal, a resident of Gadpora in Jammu and Kashmir and Tanveer, a resident of Midura in Tral, he said.

NIA had recently registered a case in which Sajjad along with Mudasir Khan was named as accused. Sajjad's two brothers were slain JeM terrorists, Kushwah said.

The three brothers were initially engaged in stone pelting. In February 2015, Sajjad's brother Ishfaq was arrested under Public Safety Act (PSA) for stone pelting and remained in Srinagar jail for about nine months, he said.

In Srinagar jail, Ishfaq came in contact with JeM terrorist Noor Mohammad Tantarey. In 2017, Tantarey died in an exchange of fire with security forces in Jammu and Kashmir, the officer said.

After his release from the jail, Ishfaq initially worked as an over ground worker for JeM and later turned into an active JeM terrorist.

He remained active for about 18 months but died in an exchange of fire with security forces on April 25, 2018 in Lam in Tral, Pulwama along with two Pakistan terrorists, the officer said.

After his death, Mudasir Khan used to frequently visit his residence in Pulwama and motivated Showkat and Sajjad Ahmad Khan to join the JeM.

By the end of June 2018, Showkat also joined the JeM, he added.

"Showkat also subsequently died in an exchange of fire with the security forces in September 2018 in Chan in Tral, Pulwama along with Usman Haider, the nephew of Maulana Masood Azhar and son of terrorist Ibrahim Azhar - younger brother of terrorist Masood Azhar and mastermind of IC-814 hijacking to Kandahar", the DCP said.

After the death of Showkat, Mudassir started visiting the residence of Sajjad more frequently and motivated Sajjad to work as JeM Cadre.

Sajjad initially provided information about movement of convoys and cordon and search operations carried by Army, the officer added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Congress on Friday asked the prime minister's office (PMO) to confirm if Narendra Modi has exchanged greetings with his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan on the eve of their National Day after India boycotted a function at the Pakistan High Commission here.

Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi asked whether Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's claims that Modi extended his greetings to him on Pakistan's National Day was correct.

"I would hope the @PMOIndia clarifies that what Imran Khan has tweeted is the correct version of greetings exchanged or whether if they have been exchanged at all, especially after the function was boycotted in India by the govt. The nation would want to know...," she said on Twitter.

Imran Khan earlier tweeted, "Received message from PM Modi: "I extend my greetings and best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that people of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive and prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence."



Modi Friday sent a message to Khan, greeting people of the neighbouring country on the eve of its National Day, official sources said here.

The prime minister, in his message, said it was time for the people of the sub-continent to work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive and prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence, they said.

India, earlier in the evening, boycotted a reception at the Pakistan High Commission here to mark Pakistan's National Day, objecting to invites extended to several separatist leaders from Jammu and Kashmir for the event.

The External Affairs Ministry said no Indian representative will attend similar events in Islamabad as well. Over the years, India's representation at the annual event has been at the level of a Union minister.

"India has decided not to send any representative to attend the Pakistan National Day celebrations today. This decision was taken after the Pakistan High Commission decided to invite representatives of the Hurriyat Conference to the reception," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar earlier said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Top leaders of the NCP and the Congress will decide whether to join hands for the Lok Sabha polls in Gujarat, former state chief minister and NCP national general secretary Shankersing Vaghela said on Friday.

He also predicted that the BJP will not come to power in the country after the general elections.

Vaghela, who quit the Congress in July 2017, months ahead of the state Assembly election after being in the party for over two decades, had joined the NCP in January this year.

He said he has conveyed to his party that he was not keen on contesting the Lok Sabha election.

Talking to PTI, the 78-year-old leader also dismissed reports, which said that the NCP might field him from Panchmahal Lok Sabha constituency in central Gujarat.

"I am not in the race to contest the election, because I have made an entry at a late stage. Personally, I am not going to contest," he said.

Vaghela said he has informed NCP chief Sharad Pawar about his decision. "I have told Pawar saheb that I should not be fielded as a candidate...I am not so keen. But whatever is decided from the top is acceptable to me," he said.

The Congress and the NCP have so far not entered into an alliance in the state. On being asked about it, the veteran leader said it was for Pawar and Congress chief Rahul Gandhi to decide.

Polling for the 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat will be held in a single phase on April 23.

NCP sources said the party has demanded three seats, namely Panchmahal, Mehsana and Porbandar, from the Congress, but the latter is yet to respond.

Vaghela said that in neighbouring Maharashtra, alliance between the Congress and the NCP will make a difference.

"BJP-Shiv Sena will not win more than 30 per cent seats in Maharashtra, as the difference is clearly visible after the NCP and the Congress forged an alliance," he said.

"In Gujarat, if the Congress selects good candidates, it can win 12 seats. I am ready to campaign for other parties as long as the contest is against the BJP," he said.

Vaghela, who had served as a Union minister in the Manmohan Singh government at the Centre, said a united opposition was crucial to defeat the BJP, and he will continue with his efforts to pull together anti-BJP forces at the national level.

"My effort has been to hold talks with the leaders of political parties. I have been asking them to stick together, reduce differences and use proper language against each other during the election and fight the polls considering the possibility that they may have to come together," he said.

"Whosoever wins against the BJP should come together. So I asked them to refrain from using such a language that could become a roadblock in forming alliances after the results are announced," he said.

Vaghela said instead of contesting the Lok Sabha election, he would continue with his effort of bringing together like-minded parties and leaders against the BJP.

"We have made two-three rounds across the country in the last six months. As per the feedback that I have received, if like-minded parties put up one-to-one fight against the BJP, it will be reduced to 140-170 seats," he said.

"BJP will not come to power this time," he predicted.

The Congress and the NCP had contested the 2017 Assembly polls separately with the latter managing to win just one seat in the 182-member House.

Vaghela had quit the Congress before the 2017 Gujarat elections, after he and some of the MLAs supporting him voted against Ahmed Patel, Congress's candidate for the Rajya Sabha, and backed BJP nominee Balvantsinh Rajput.

Vaghela, however, did not join the ruling BJP and put up independent candidates in the state elections. However, all of them lost.

The former Gujarat chief minister recently visited various places, including Delhi, announcing that he would work against the BJP-led government at the Centre.

Vaghela started his career with the BJP, but in 1996 engineered a split in the saffron party after he was denied chief ministership a year earlier in favour of Keshubhai Patel.

In 1996, he became the state's chief minister with outside support from the Congress. He also served as the Gujarat Congress president and the leader of opposition in the state Assembly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Congress released its manifesto Friday for the April 11 general elections in Andhra Pradesh, promising to accord Special Category Status to the state on the first day of coming to power (at the Centre).

It also promised to implement all other provisions of the AP Reorganisation Act, 2014.

Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee president N Raghuveera Reddy, Manifesto Committee chairman Kanumuri Bapiraju and other leaders released the manifesto at the state party office here.

The main promises include waiver of loans up to Rs two lakh for all farmers, tenant farmers and women Self Help Groups; extension of interest-free loans to farmers, tenant farmers and SHGs; creation of a Rs 5,000 crore price stabilization fund to ensure remunerative prices for farm produce and introduction of a minimum income guarantee scheme.

All vacant government posts would be filled up within 100 days if the Congress came to power,the manifesto promised.

"We will implement a Bundelkhand-type special development package for backward districts in the state.

Prakasam will also be included in the backward districts along with four in Rayalaseema and three north-coastal Andhra.

We will establish a full-fledged railway zone in Visakhapatnam if voted to power," Raghuveera Reddy told reporters on the occasion.

The Right to Information Act and the Right to Education Act would be effectively implemented, he said.

While petrol and diesel would be brought under GST regime, the handloom sector would be exempted.

"We will bring out district-specific manifestos within a week, in tune with the wishes of the people.

We will ensure their implementation in five years," the PCC chief promised.

Old-age pension of Rs 2000 a month would be given to those aged under 60 years, Rs 2,500 up to 70 years and Rs 3,000 to those above 70 years.

Pension for differently-abled and single women would also be raised to Rs 3,000 a month, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee President Dinesh Gundurao on Friday said his party wants JDS Supremo H D Deve Gowda to contest elections from Bengaluru North constituency.

"I spoke to Deve Gowda ji and requested him to contest from Bengaluru North constituency... Congress has five and JDS two MLAs, who can ensure his victory," he told PTI.

Gundurao said the former prime minister's representation from Bengaluru North will have a huge impact in the region, given his stature in public life.

The 85-year-old JDS patriarch is yet to decide on contesting the Lok Sabha polls and has been thinking about his "usefulness" in the national capital.

Gowda has said he lacked the strength that he had in 1996, when he became the Prime Minister, but there is "enthusiasm".

Under a pact between ruling coalition partners for Lok Sabha elections in Karnataka, Congress has been allotted 20 seats while eight sets will be contested by Janata Dal-Secular (JDS).

Asked if actor-turned-politician Sumalatha Ambareesh, wife of late actor and Congress leader Ambareesh, can pose a challenge to the coalition partners due to a possible sympathy wave, Gundurao said winning as an independent is difficult with JDS having a strong presence in state assembly, zilla panchayats and municipalities of Mandya district.

Sumalatha is contesting as an Independent after she was denied ticket by the Congress from Mandya seat which had been allotted to the JD(S).

Gundurao also said that the Congress would make extra effort to see that Nikhil Gowda, grandson of Deve Gowda, registers a win from Mandya constituency.

Asked about the BJP's plan to make "instability" an electoral issue in Karnataka, Gundurao dismissed it as ridiculous saying Modi himself is leading a coalition government at the centre.

Also, the BJP is in alliance with NDA partners in several states including Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Punjab, he said.

If Modi and BJP are against coalition, they should do away with it, he added.

Gundurao said there have been some hiccups in the coalition setup, but the government has been stable.

"Congress-JDS alliance has given a stable government but unfortunately BJP has been making efforts to destabilise it by horse-trading," he alleged.

Taking a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the state Congress chief alleged that Modi "is diverting people's attention from real issues like failure of GST, demonetisation and joblessness, to emotional issues like Ram Mandir and nationalism".

The dialogue of nationalism is very divisive and dangerous as it has already cut India into pieces on grounds of religion, ideologies and nationalism, he said.

"We are seeing people taking law onto their hands and killing people including rationalists M M Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh," he said.

The Congress' efforts will be to expose Modi in all these fronts, he added.

Asked if the BJP was in an advantageous position due to declaration of Modi as the prime ministerial candidate, Gundurao said "the appropriate question is who should not be the prime minister as there are a huge number of people who do not want Modi to continue".

"It will not be easy for the BJP to sell the fake success stories perpetrated in media and social platforms to the people because the truth is that almost all the schemes including Ujwala has not done anything good to them," he claimed.

On the other hand, the Congress had helped people by implementing MREGA and bringing in legislations on food security and tribals right, besides Aadhaar, Gundurao added.

Rejecting suggestions that his offer to Congress president Rahul Gandhi to contest from Karnataka is due to any fear of loss in Amethi seat, Gundurao said it was aimed at strengthening the party in the south.

"There is no design in this. I wrote a letter to Rahul Gandhi suggesting he contest from Karnataka as it would strengthen the party in southern states and retrieve the lost charm from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Let us see what decision the party takes," he said.

Gundurao said Rahul Gandhi would address two rallies each in the two phases of Lok Sabha elections in Karnataka.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Militants shot at and injured a policeman in Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir on Friday, police said.

The injured cop, Arshid Ahmad, was rushed to a hospital, they said.

"Terrorists opened fire on a police official near Court Road at New Townhall in Anantnag district," a police spokesman said.

He said local police unit visited the spot and is investigating the incident.

A case has been registered in this regard, police added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Critics have questioned the timing of US President Donald Trump's tweet recognising Israel's sovereignty over the strategic Golan Heights, describing it as America's effort to intervene in Israeli elections to help a beleaguered friend at the cost of opening a "Pandora's box."



Trump took to Twitter on Thursday to state that it was time the US recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a territory the Jewish state occupied in the 1967 war.

Trump's declaration comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a closely fought general election on April 9, as well as a series of possible corruption charges.

"After 52 years, it is time for the United States to fully recognise Israel's Sovereignty [sic] over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and regional stability [sic]!'' the US President tweeted.

Trump's tweet was hailed by Netanyahu, stating that the former had "just made history" and thanking him on behalf of the people of Israel. The Israeli leader also noted that Trump is trying to send the message that Iran is trying to destroy Israel.

Several political analysts in Israel reacted in disbelief at the announcement noting the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to visit Washington next week.

"Why now? Since Netanyahu is flying to Washington, it would have made more sense for Trump to make the announcement standing by his side in the White House," Ha'aretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer said, arguing that the US President is not "even trying to pretend that he isn't intervening" in the Israeli elections.

Pfeffer said that the reason why Trump did not wait for Netanyahu's visit was because of the latter's worried and pale features at a press conference Wednesday where he stated that Iran has obtained embarrassing material from the phone of Benny Gantz, his main rival in the April 9 elections, that could be used to discredit him.

Former US Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller too argued that like so many actions taken by the Trump administration on Israel, US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over [the] Golan would be a political gimmick driven by domestic

It's unnecessary and ill-advised, he said.

Netanyahu, 69, faces the toughest political challenge after a decade at the helm of affairs, complicated also by recent revelations in graft related investigations against him that has strengthened the opposition's campaign.

Analyst at the Times of Israel (TOI), Rafael Ahren, quoted several American pundits and analysts, who criticised the move as "a solution in search of a problem," when there is none.

"After all, very few in the international community were seriously demanding Israel return the Golan to Syria, and making the annexation official could open a Pandora's box with unwanted side effects," Ahren asserted.

The Executive Director of The Washington Institute for Near-East Policy, Robert Satloff, was also quoted by the TOI as saying that he did not see any "wisdom" in the move.

As someone who advocated and endorsed the long-overdue move of the US embassy to Jerusalem, it is difficult to see urgency or wisdom in US recognition of Israel's sovereignty over [the] Golan, Satloff said.

Ilan Goldenberg, Director of the Middle East Security Programme at the Center for a New American Security argued that the recent development stirs a Hornet's nest that didn't need stirring.

Nobody cares about the Golan Heights right now or (neither is anyone) actively contesting Israel's position in the Golan. So why create this headache?" he said.

The announcement follows a surprise move by the State Department last week when it opted to scrap the use of word "occupied" in reference to the Golan Heights in its annual human rights report for 2018. The change, which now reads, "Israeli-controlled territory," is in stark contrast to the language used by previous US administrations.

Ofer Zalzberg, a Jerusalem-based analyst for the Crisis Group, argued that a formal US recognition of Israel's annexation of the Golan could weaken the administration's ability to oppose other instances of countries acquiring territory by force, such as Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Second, US recognition of Israel's annexation of the Golan could lay the ground for US recognition of future Israeli annexation of the West Bank or parts of it, Zalzberg added.

Trump's announcement in December 2017 recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital had a huge backlash with the UN General Assembly voting to dismiss the move "null and void" as 128 countries voted against Washington's move and only nine supporting it.

The US President's announcement on Golan did not evoke any earth shattering media coverage in the Arab world with most media houses focusing on other issues and this passing as just another development.

The Arab world has described the move as "illegal" and the Palestinian Authority has said that it will destabilise the region. PTI HM RS AKJ



ritu.sharma@pti.in ritu.sharma@pti.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Even as flood waters began to recede in parts of Mozambique on Friday, fears rose that the death toll could soar as bodies are revealed.

The number of deaths could be beyond the 1,000 predicted by the country's president earlier this week, said Elhadj As Sy, the secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies In addition to worries about the number of dead, As Sy told The Associated Press that the humanitarian needs are great.

"They are nowhere near the scale and magnitude of the problem," As Sy said. "And I fear we will be seeing more in the weeks and months ahead, and we should brace ourselves." Thousands of people were making a grim voyage toward the city of Beira, which although 90 percent destroyed has become a center for frantic rescue efforts throughout the region.

Some walked along roads carved away by the raging waters a week ago. Others, hundreds of them, were ferried in an extraordinary makeshift effort by local fishermen who plucked stranded people from small islands.

Helicopters set off into the rain for another day of efforts to find people clinging to rooftops and trees.

For those who reach Beira with their few remaining possessions, life is grim. Waterborne diseases are a growing concern as water and sanitation systems were largely destroyed.

"The situation is simply horrendous, there is no other way to describe it," As Sy said after touring transit camps for the growing number of displaced.

"Three thousand people who are living in a school that has 15 classrooms and six, only six, toilets. You can imagine how much we are sitting on a water and sanitation ticking bomb."



What moved him the most was the number of children without their parents, separated in the chaos or newly orphaned.

For residents of Beira, life staggered on. People salvaged the metal strips of roofs that had been peeled away like the skin of a fruit. Downed trees littered the streets. And yet there were flashes of life as it used to be. White wedding dresses stood pristine behind an shop window that hadn't shattered.

Zimbabwe was also affected by the cyclone and as roads began to clear and some basic communications were set up, a fuller picture of the extent of the damage there is beginning to emerge.

The victims are diverse: a mother buried in the same grave with her child, headmasters missing together with dozens of school students, illegal gold and diamond miners swept away by raging rivers and police officers washed away with their prisoners.

The Ministry of Information said 30 pupils, two headmasters and a teacher are missing.

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa said Thursday that officers and prisoners were washed way.

In Mutare, fear gripped residents even though they are more than 140 kilometers (85 miles) from Chimanimani, the worst-hit part of Zimbabwe. Maina Chisiriirwa, a city resident, said she buried her son-in-law, who had left the city to go to Chiadzwa diamond fields to mine illegally.

"There are no jobs and all he wanted as to feed his family. He was with his colleagues. They thought it would be easier to mine since the rains would keep the guards and the police away from patrolling," Chisiriirwa said. His colleagues survived but her son-in-law was swept away, she said.

A man who travelled several kilometers to a reception center for survivors in Chimanimani said several of his colleagues were swept away as they tried to cross a river while fleeing from a mountain known for rich gold deposits and frequented by hordes of illegal miners.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Left: Justice Stanley John, called in to hear the matter after the recusal of the original judge, found himself making an historic decision in a matter related to general elections in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Right:The smiles on these faces tell on which side of the petitions they were.

Justice Stanley John has sided with fellow High Court Judge, Justice Brian Cottle, in dismissing both 2015 general election petitions.

A number of persons walked out of the room as Justice John delivered his ruling, many looking disappointed particularly following the compelling evidence that came out during the trial which got underway on February 11, suggesting that there were in fact a number of irregularities during the election.

Justice John acknowledged on Thursday, while delivering his ruling on the matter, that there were a number of issues raised during the trial, inclusive of: Were the ballot boxes used in the 2015 general elections in compliance with the law? Were the ballots pre-printed with the specified markings? Were ballots cast exposed? Did the Supervisor of Elections provide polling station lists in accordance with the established practices? Was their failure to provide a proper paper trail?

"All these issues were canvassed, Justice John told the Court, but ruled that the court found insufficient evidence to support those issues.

"It (the court) therefore, finds and, the court decides...that the elections in North Windward and Central Leeward were conducted substantially in accordance with the laws as to the elections in the State of St Vincent and the Grenadines, the judge said in his ruling.

He further stated that, based on his deliberations, the actions of the presiding and returning officers, individually or collectively, did not have as much an impact to affect the results.

"Accordingly, both these petitions should be and are hereby dismissed, and the court declares that the two respondents, Montgomery Daniel and Sir Louis Straker have been validly returned, Justice John declared.

The judge ordered the usual arrangement for cost as per the ruling, i.e. that the petitioners pay the cost of the respondents  the amount having to be assessed if the parties do not reach a settlement.

As for the absence of in- person testimony by he Winston Gaymes, the returning officer in Central Leeward during the 2015 election, Justice John noted that written testimony given by Gaymes was contained in his ruling.

Before delivering the ruling, however, Justice John told the court that there had been a number of precedent cases both regionally and internationally.

In all the cases, however, Justice John explained that each case had to be decided on its own facts.

He said he analyzed the evidence given by those who were cross-examined, and considered the demeanor of those individuals.

The court acknowledged that mistakes were made during elections, but that it was for the court to determine if they were intentional.

Leader of the Opposition, Dr Godwin Friday reserved a detailed comment on the matter, saying that he preferred to take a look at the ruling first.

He did express his disappointment, however, saying that he came to the court confident that the petitions advanced would be upheld.

"I am very disappointed that the court did not see the evidence in the way that we and the majority of the Vincentian public did, Dr. Friday said.

Notwithstanding what he had said, Dr. Friday and a number of supporters of the New Democratic Party took to the streets of capital Kingstown, in a noisy and at times aggressive protest against the courts ruling, causing disruptions in the normal flow of vehicular traffic.

The police were called out, but were calm and calculated in their approach to the spontaneous street demonstration.Delhi BJP leader Vijender Gupta on Friday lashed out at AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal over his controversial tweet that depicted his party symbol, a broom chasing a "Hindu swastika", saying it is a violation of the model code of conduct and aims at disrupting communal harmony.

The Aam Aadmi Party should be invalidated and strict action should be taken against it for attempts to incite communal tension, Gupta said.

The tweet, posted late night on March 20, triggered an uproar on the social media, with the Twitterati slamming the Delhi chief minister for his post, prompting the ruling party to come out with a clarification saying it was not 'Swastik' but the Nazi symbol that the AAP leader had tweeted.

"It is not only an objectionable tweet aimed at disrupting the communal harmony but also a violation of the model code of conduct.

"What is the kind of message he (Kejriwal) wants to send out? We demand that their party is invalidated and strict action taken against them for attempts to incite communal tension," Gupta told reporters.

The Delhi BJP on Tuesday alleged that the AAP was trying to incite communal tensions by "politicising the cow" and said it would lodge a complaint with the Election Commission.

The BJP's reaction had come on a tweet by AAP Lok Sabha poll candidate Raghav Chadha in which he wrote "door to door campaigning by BJP" and posted a photo of a cow and a calf standing at the doorstep of a house.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)"Delhi Crime", based on Nirbhaya case files, explores the 2012 heinous gangrape and murder from the viewpoint of the Delhi Police team that probed the incident, but Netflix's new web series was shot with a non-judgemental eye, says director Richie Mehta.

The seven-part series, which starts streaming Friday, directed by the Indian-Canadian filmmaker follows the investigation to nab the six males who raped the 23-year-old physiotherapy intern on a cold December night in a moving bus in the national capital. She died of her grievous injuries 13 days later in a Singapore hospital.

Mehta said it was a family friend serving in Delhi Police who suggested him to make a film on the subject. He started the research in 2013 after a trial court convicted and gave death sentence to the four adult defendants.

After four years of research and writing, the director said he came up with a 170-page bible followed by 430-page script, wherein he has explored the perspective of "the people who were in the front lines".

"I realised they have a point of view on these things that we don't talk about. We had a very visceral reaction to this particular case and these are the people who are doing it every day. So why aren't we talking to them and getting their points of view?" Mehta told PTI in an interview here.

The director, known for films like "Amal" and "Siddharth", has not depicted the act of gangrape in the series neither in visuals nor audio.

"I was very clear from the beginning that I didn't want to showcase the rape scene because I wanted the series to be about the procedure, not the crime," he said.

Mehta said the team filmed the series as if they were a "bystander", sneaking up to see and listen in to what was happening.

"We would take point of view shots, bystander shots. Sometimes we took long shots, people are walking down the hallway and we're behind them or we are just a person listening in. This was part of the non-judgmentalness of it. The whole show was shot in that particular style."



He said the only time he changed tack was when DCP (south district) Vartika Chaturvedi, played by Shefali Shah, gets Jai Singh, the main rapist, to confess.

"In rest of the scenes, you're just sitting in the corner. The only time I broke that rule was when I needed to see both the people's eyes, it was that moment - behind Vartika's and Jai Singh's shoulders. This was not a bystander thing anymore," he said.

In a time when producers have become prompt in registering movie titles after an event of national importance occurs, Mehta said he did not go for the project soon after verdict was out as the wound was still fresh in the country's consciousness.

"I sensed it wasn't right to make a project on this then. Subjects like this are sensitive, especially when you have to tackle it from different points of view. It was going to take me a lot of time to understand all of that before I could dramatise it.

"I said to myself every day in those first four years that if somebody else does it, fine'. It will alleviate the pain I was going through. I would have been happy if somebody did the exact same show."



After Leslie Udwin's 2015 documentary "India's Daughter" and Deepa Mehta-directed drama "Anatomy of Violence" in 2016, "Delhi Crime" is the latest project to bring the highly publicised case, which led to a change in India's rape laws, on screen.

The filmmaker, who divides his time between New Delhi and London, said as he was researching, he kept his eyes and ears open.

"There was a presentation of similar viewpoints through TV or media. By the time I made the decision to go shoot this two years ago, it was after knowing that I had come upon a point of view which has not been expressed."



The show dramatises the incident and includes back stories of the cops, the condition of the police force, their power struggle with the bureaucracy and managing the scoop-hungry media.

Asked about the portrayal of the then Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit (though there is a gender swap) and the press, Mehta said, "What I'm saying is exactly what is presented there. So, I don't believe I'm presenting anything that people don't know."



The director said his vision was about presenting the police personnel in an empathetic manner while also identifying what they are tasked to do.

"We demand that they catch these people and so I thought let's actually look at what that means. There are cops who don't go home for months at a time or a sub-inspector may not have a vehicle to go to the crime scene. There are power cuts at the police station every day. These back stories are inspired by many people who are all real."



The series also gives a hat-tip to Bollywood songs from the 1960s-80s era and Mehta said the officers he met were so busy for the last 20 years they had no time to engage with pop culture.

"Whenever they turn the radio on, it's the old classics. It was evocative of something," he added.

"Delhi Crime" season two is afoot and the director said the series will be back with same characters in "more or less the same rank" and a different crime.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)PC maker Technologies is planning to expand its retail coverage across 1,300 cities and towns this year, a senior official of the company said.

"We are present in 1,000 cities and towns in and we are looking to increase our presence in 300 more cities and towns this year. We have 680 exclusive stores. This year, we plan to add another 100 stores," P Krishnakumar senior vice-president for consumer and small business division (Asia Pacific and Japan), Dell, told

He said is now reaching out to students in tier III and IV towns in where it is creating awareness around gaming PC and career options linked to it.

"People were seeing PC (personal computer) as tool for education but now education and gaming are blending together. We are reaching out to 100 colleges to educate youth in tier III and IV cities. All these markets need high-end machines. Today, people are not seeing gaming as frivolous time pass. It is being seen as path to the career," Krishnakumar said.

According to IDC, led the market with 31 per cent overall market share, followed by Dell (23 per cent), (20.6 per cent), (12 per cent) and (3.9 per cent) in 2018.

Krishnakumar claimed that Dell leads in the gaming PC segment with around 35-38 per cent share in as per industry estimates.

"Our gaming PC range starts from Rs 75,000 and it can go up to around Rs 5 lakh. Consumers looking for gaming PC in tier III and IV towns are spending to the tune of Rs 1-1.25 lakh a unit. We also offer them finance if they need it. More than affordability, it is about value they see in the gaming PCs," he said.

Last week, Dell unveiled first gaming laptop, Alienware, whose component can be changed like it is done in assembled desktop PC.

"The component will be of desktop grade category in Alienware. We have given consumers option to change configuration of laptop as per their requirement," Krishnakumar said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said he discussed the issue of Masood Azhar with close ally China, which blocked for the fourth time a proposal at the UN to designate the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief as a 'global terrorist'.

Qureshi who returned from Beijing on Thursday after attending the first strategic bilateral dialogue between the two all-weather allies, heaped praise on China.

"We take each other into confidence on all issues. Sometime they guide us and sometimes they change their policy after listening to us," he said after talks with Chinese Foriegn Minister Wang Yi.

Qureshi said he discussed the issue of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Azhar with China, which used its right of technical hold to stop a proposal by France, the US and the UK against him at the UN Security Council.

China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, for the fourth time blocked a bid in the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council to designate Azhar as a "global terrorist", saying it wanted "more time to examine" the proposal.

The technical hold is valid for up to six months and it can be again extended by up to three months.

India has described the outcome as "disappointing".

The JeM claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama suicide attack that left 40 CRPF personnel dead and raised tensions between India and Pakistan.

"As you know, China despite a lot of pressure used the right of technical hold in order to collect more information on the issue.... We talked what US, China and UK were thinking about it," Qureshi said.

He said the two sides held discussion on the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanction Committee but refused to share details. He said Pakistan was aware what the world wanted on the issue of Azhar.

"We are aware. We know what the world wants, what we should do, what are our interests, and what should be our policy. It (issue of Azhar) should be seen in larger context...It should be seen in the context of money laundering and what FATF is saying because it is all linked, he said.

Qureshi further said that discussion with China on the issue of Azhar will continue.

He also said that Pakistan was analysing the contents of the dossier given by India on Pulwama. "We are serious about it and are analysing the dossier and (will) present our findings to you (media) and to the world," the foriegn minister said.

Amidst the Indo-Pak tensions following the Pulwama terror attack by a JeM suicide bomber, Qureshi confirmed that Azhar was present in Pakistan but said he was "very ill."



He said Pakistan was committed to address militancy and eliminate it completely from the country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)BSP supremo Friday attacked the BJP using the 'chowkidar' jibe alleging while its leaders did not care about the files, they are shielding crucial data on unemployment and farmers' plight.

In a series of tweets, she took a jibe at Prime Minister Narendra and his colleagues for calling themselves 'chowkidar' (watchman) and alleged they are not bothered about files being "stolen", but are hiding data on "declining" employment rate, poverty and farmers' plight.

"They (the data) are to be hidden for vote/image. Does the country need such a chowkidar?" wrote.

           ,            ,   ,            /             ?  (@Mayawati) March 22, 2019

Prime Minister and his partymen have launched "Main bhi chowkidar (I too am a watchman) campaign to blunt Opposition's, especially the Congress', 'chowkidar chor hai (watchman is thief' slogan.



The former Uttar Pradesh chief minister further said while several BJP leaders and ministers declared themselves 'chowkidars' following the PM, CM Yogi Adityanath was not sure whether to announce himself as one or remain a public servant or a yogi (sannyasi).

"BJP leaders may adopt whatever fashion they want", but they should work as the 'watchman' of the law and Constitution, she said.

"People want just this much," she added.A drone was sighted at the airport, the highly sensitive Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and nearby Kovalam beach early Friday morning, prompting Southern Air Command and Military Intelligence to go on high alert.

Southern Air Command and Military Intelligence are on high alert after the drone was sighted, defence sources said.

"We are always on high alert. The present sighting of the drone is in the civilian area. We are not intervening in the current situation, but are monitoring the entire scenario," a defence spokesperson said.

The drone was first sighted at Kovalam beach early Friday morning by a night patrolling group of Kerala police, who searched the area for its operators.

As it started flying towards the north, where the airport is located, the team informed the airport authorities.

However, after two hours, the CISF team at VSSC found the drone flying there and informed the authorities concerned.

Police and the central intelligence agencies visited the VSSC and found that visuals of the drone was not available in any of the security cameras installed.

The Airport, Pangode Military camp and other security installations in the city have been put on high alert.

"We have monitored the radars installed at various areas and found that the drone might have been operated by some locals," a top police official said.

The senior official also said the drone was suspected to be flying on a low altitude, thus evading radars.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Enforcement Directorate (ED) Friday arrested a "trusted" aide of controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik from Mumbai in connection with a money laundering case against him and others, officials said.

Abdul Kadir Najmudin Sathak, a jeweller, has been arrested under the Prevention of Money Laundering (PMLA) for his role in "actively assisting Naik and aiding him in money laundering by transferring funds of dubious origin from the UAE to facilitate production and broadcasting incriminating videos for spreading communal hatred and radicalisation of a particular community", the agency said.

The agency will also soon file a fresh chargesheet in this case based on fresh evidence, they said.

The officials alleged that Sathak had directly sent about Rs 50 crore funds to Naik, which the preacher illegally routed and laundered.

Sathak was also the director of M/s Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC that owned Naik's Peace TV channel, they said.

He will be produced before a special PMLA court in Mumbai.

It said the company Global Broadcasting was "controlled" by Naik, who is stated to be in Malaysia at present, through Sathak, who was his "trusted aide".

"An amount of Rs 79 crore was received from GBC to Ms Harmony Media Pvt Ltd. But for these monies, it would not have been possible to produce these controversial speeches of Naik and reach wider audiences through Peace TV," the ED alleged.

It claimed that the source of funds remitted by GBC to Harmony Media is "suspicious" as there were no advertisements run on this channel and Sathak had not submitted any details in this context.

Naik has been under investigation since 2016, when the Centre banned his Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) for five years.

Indian security agencies have been monitoring him ever since allegations surfaced that he had inspired one of the militants involved in the Dhaka restaurant attack on July 1, 2016, which left 22 people dead.

Naik, wanted in India for terror-related activities and hate speech, reportedly left the country in 2016 and subsequently moved to largely Muslim populated Malaysia, where he was granted permanent residency.

The ED had registered a criminal case against Naik and others in December, 2016 after taking cognisance of a National Investigation Agency (NIA) complaint filed under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA)



The agency, which functions under the Union Finance Ministry, is looking into the charges of laundering of illegal funds in the case and the subsequent proceeds of crime thus generated.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor Emilia Clarke has revealed that in the early years of "Game of Thrones" she suffered from two brain aneurysms that nearly took her life.

In an essay for The New Yorker, published online on Thursday, Clarke said the health scares began soon after the success of the first season of the HBO epic-fantasy drama.

Clarke said just before she assumed her role as Daenerys Targaryen in 2011, she started feelng a "shooting, stabbing, constricting pain" in her head during a workout with her trainer.

"I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain. I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn't. Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain shooting, stabbing, constricting pain was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged."



The actor was rushed to the hospital where she had an MRI scan that showed an aneurysm requiring brain surgery. The then-24-year-old actor underwent a two-week recovery period, during which she could not remember her name, a result of a condition called aphasia.

"I'd never experienced fear like that a sense of doom closing in. I could see my life ahead, and it wasn't worth living. I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn't recall my name," Clarke said.

After recovering, Clarke returned to promote "GOT", but soon discovered that she had another smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain that could rupture any time.

Around the third season of the series, the actor visited the medical facility for regular brain scans and learned that the second aneurysm had doubled in size.

She had another surgery, but it did not go as successfully as the first one.

"When they woke me, I was screaming in pain. The procedure had failed. I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn't operate again. This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately," Clarke said.

"I looked as though I had been through a war more gruesome than any that Daenerys experienced. I emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head. Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium," she added.

The actor spent one month in the hospital, where she said she had "lost all hope."



"I felt like a shell of myself. So much so that I now have a hard time remembering those dark days in much detail. My mind has blocked them out. But I do remember being convinced that I wasn't going to live," she said.

Several weeks after the surgery, Clarke was back to work promoting the series at the San Diego Comic-Con with her castmates.

She kept the of her surgeries a secret until now, even denying a National Enquirer story that ran six weeks after the procedure.

The actor has assured that since the second surgery, she is "100 per cent better", and has created a charity for brain injury and stroke victims called SameYou.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The European Union has offered Britain a choice of short delays to its departure from the European Union, postponing Brexit, due March 29, until at least mid-April.

The bloc said it will extend the deadline until May 22 if Britain's Parliament approves Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal next week.

If it is rejected, the UK has until April 12 to "indicate a way forward." There has been no immediate response from May, who had been seeking a delay until June 30.

Earlier, European Council President Donald Tusk said the bloc has unanimously agreed on a response to Britain's request for a delay to Brexit, and Austria's leader said the bloc was offering an extension.

May has been seeking a three-month delay to Britain's departure. The EU has been considering shorter timeframes.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the bloc's decision averts the chance of a no-deal Brexit on March 29, the date scheduled for Britain's departure. He did not say how much time the bloc was offering.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Congress on Friday said the exit of five former Congress MLAs to join a regional party in Manipur will not "create any political loss" for the country's oldest party.

"We have efficient candidates in all the constituencies," a senior Congress leader told PTI.

The five former Congress legislators had resigned from the party on Thursday and joined the North East India Development Party (NEIDP).

The Congressmen who joined the regional party were R K Anand, E Chand, Dr Ng Bijoy, Dr I Ibohanbi and K Sarat.

The Congress leader said it was "good" that the former MLAs had left as some of them were "apprehensive about not getting party tickets for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections."



Ng Bijoy, who was appointed as the president of the NEIDP, told a press conference here that the Congress had "little interest" in regional issues.

He claimed that the five Congress members had joined the NEIDP to work for issues pertaining to the state.

Meanwhile, R K Anand was declared as the NEIDP candidate for the Inner Manipur Lok Sabha constituency and Ashang Kasar, for the Outer Manipur seat.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Despite the growing popularity of the annual Greiggs Heritage Festival, organisers are striving for greater impact, in terms of the awareness of the past.



Following another successful hosting of the festival last Thursday, National Heroes Day, at the Greiggs Central Playing Field, John Nero, Head of the Greiggs Garifuna Council, whilst accepting the many plaudits received from persons who attended the festival, said he wants to see more exposure of things indigenous.

"Again this year, we have gotten to a level of development in terms of the number of huts There was a larger crowd, but the crowd is not a validation, but I validate the quality of what is on offer, in terms of craft and things which are indigenous, Nero told THE VINCENTIAN.

"What we did not see was enough craft, not enough costumes, Nero lamented.

Nero said his organization, along with the other partners in the community, are holding on to the mantra of the Festival, which is Concept over Crowd.

The Festival, which once again attracted a large crowd, saw several delicacies provided, and which were lapped up with delight by patrons.

The Festival also was replete with cultural performances, inclusive of drumming, dances and skits, and involved presentations by First peoples groups from Honduras, Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, Nicaragua and others in attendance.

Nero disclosed that the Greiggs Garifuna Council will continue its programme of keeping in focus, the culture and history of the people of Greiggs.

In keeping with this thrust Nero shared, "On the 19th of June this year, marks 114 years since the Greiggians got the gift of the lands, and for us that is our independence Gift of land is a sign of independence.

Among those items which were high on demand were madungo, doucana, fungi, fish broth and roasted plantains.He assured that the Council was not going "to relent on passing on their heritage to the current generation, in its purest form.Female birds age more slowly and live longer when they have help raising their offspring, according to a research.

Studying the relationship between ageing and offspring rearing patterns in the Seychelles warbler, researchers at UK's University of Sheffield found that females who had assistance from other female helpers benefitted from a longer, healthier lifespan.

The findings help explain why social species, such as humans, which live in groups and cooperate to raise offspring, often have longer lifespans.

"It is well understood that one of the benefits of having relatives' help to raise offspring is that this improves the survival of the young," said professor Terry Burke, from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences.

"We have now shown that as parents age they decline in their ability to care for their offspring, but having helpers compensates for this effect, allowing the parents to continue to reproduce successfully into old age," Burke said.

The result helps to answer the question of why some animals assist others to reproduce, instead of raising their own offspring, Burke said.

"Finding out more about what causes biological ageing is really important. And, until now, there has been very little known about the relationship between sociality and ageing within species," said professor David S Richardson, from UEA's School of Biological Sciences.

The research team used more than 15 years of data on the breeding patterns of Seychelles warblers living on the small island of Cousin, in the Seychelles, to study associations between cooperative care giving and ageing.

As well as studying how quickly individuals' chances of dying increased as they grow older, the team also used the length of the birds' telomeres as a measure of their condition.

Telomeres are found at the end of chromosomes and act as protective caps to stop genes close to the end of the chromosome being damaged like the hard plastic ends of a bootlace.

"Our previous work has shown that telomere length can be a good indicator of an individual's biological condition relative to its actual age a measure of an individual's biological age so to speak. So we can use it to measure how quickly different birds are ageing," Richardson said.

In the Seychelles warbler the majority of helpers are female - and they assist with incubating the eggs and providing food for the chicks. This means that the parents do not need to do as much work when they have help, Richardson said.

The study was led by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, in collaboration with the universities of Sheffield, Leeds and Wageningen, and with Nature Seychelles.

"Our results suggest that for the older mothers, there are real benefits to cooperative breeding. Biologically speaking they stay 'younger' for longer, and they are more likely to live longer," said Martijn Hammers from the University of Groningen.

"These findings may help to explain why social species often have longer lifespans," Hammers said.

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications on March 21.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Five militants, including two of Pakistani origin who killed a 12-year-old boy held hostage by them, were gunned down in separate encounters with security forces on Friday in Bandipora and Shopian districts of Jammu and Kashmir, taking the number of ultras killed since Thursday to seven.

Two militants were killed in an overnight gunfight in Hajin area of Bandipora district, officials said.

The operation started on Thursday but the security forces had to proceed with caution as the ultras had taken two civilians hostage, the officials said.

While one civilian was rescued Thursday evening, the other -- a 12-year-old boy -- was killed by the militants, they said.

"Two Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists were killed in the Hajin encounter. From incriminating material, they were identified as Pakistani nationals, Aliand Hubaib," a police spokesman said.

He said while one hostage, Abdul Hameed, was rescued last evening, the second captive, Aatif Ahmad, "could not be saved and was brutally killed by terrorists".

Two unidentified militants were killed in an encounter with security forces in Shopian district.

Security forces launched a cordon and search operation in Imamsahib area of Shopian in south Kashmir following information about presence of militants there, an army official said.

He said the militants opened fire at security forces, who retaliated, triggering a gunfight.

Two militants were killed in the operation, the official said, adding the identity and group affiliation of the slain ultras was being ascertained.

Meanwhile, another gun battle broke out between militants and security personnel in Sopore area of north Kashmir Baramulla district in which one militant was killed, the official said.

He said a search operation was in progress in Warpora area of Sopore.

Two Jaish-e-Mohammad militants were killed in an encounter with security forces at Kalantara in Baramulla district on Thursday, while three security force personnel including an officer sustained injuries during the operation.

A police spokesman said while one of the slain militants was Amir Rasool, a local from Sopore, the other slain ultra was a Pakistani national.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)France has approached the European Union to designate Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist and the 28-member grouping is expected to take a decision on the issue based on the principle of consensus, the External Affairs Ministry said Friday.

"France has taken up the matter with the EU. We understand that the EU will take its decision once their process of designating a terrorist is complete," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

"It has to be a unanimous decision," he said. The EU functions under the principle of consensus.

The move by France, a member of the EU, came days after China blocked a bid at the United Nations to ban Azhar.

The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UNSC was moved by France, the UK and the US, in the wake of the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. JeM had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack.

Fourteen out of the 15 members of the UN Security Council supported the proposal, but China was the only country which did not go with the move.

Diplomatic sources said Germany is also in touch with several member-nations of the European Union to list Azhar as a terrorist by the grouping.

"Once the process by the EU is complete, they will make an announcement," said Kumar.

Azhar's listing by the bloc will result in his travel ban as well as freezing of his assets in all 28 countries of the EU.

On March 15, France imposed financial sanctions on Azhar and said it will work with its European partners to put the JeM chief's name on the EU list of persons and entities involved in terrorist acts.

The decision by France came two days after China put a hold on a fresh move to designate Azhar a global terrorist by the Sanctions Committee of the United Nations Security Council.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Lebanon on Friday amid regional condemnation of President Donald Trump's abrupt declaration that it's time the US recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Pompeo is to meet with a host of Lebanese officials, including allies of the Iran-backed militant Hezbollah group, during the two-day visit his first as secretary of state.

The visit is the last leg of a Mideast tour that took him to Kuwait and Israel, during which he lauded warm ties with Israel, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on at least three separate occasions and promised to step up pressure on Iran.

From Israel, Pompeo's plane travelling through the Cypriot airspace, as Lebanon, which is technically in a state of war with Israel, bans direct flights from Israel.

Once on the ground, Pompeo was taken to the Interior Ministry for a meeting with Raya El-Hassan, who was named earlier this year as the Arab world's first female minister in charge of security.

Pompeo hopes to step up pressure on the Shiite Hezbollah group, but could face resistance even from America's local allies, who fear that pushing too hard could spark a backlash and endanger the tiny country's fragile peace.

Hezbollah wields more power than ever in parliament and the government. Pompeo will meet Friday with President Michel Aoun and will also hold talks with Lebanon's parliament speaker and foreign minister all three of whom are close Hezbollah allies.

He will also meet with Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a close Western ally who has been reluctant to confront Hezbollah.

"We'll spend a lot of time talking with the Lebanese government about how we can help them disconnect from the threat that Iran and Hezbollah present," Pompeo told reporters earlier this week.

"Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. You ask how tough I am going to be? It is a terrorist organization. Period. Full stop," Pompeo said in Jerusalem on Thursday.

Trump's statement about Golan Heights on Thursday is a major shift in American policy. For some time, the administration has been considering recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the strategic highlands, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967. In a tweet that appeared to catch many by surprise, Trump said the time had come for the United States to take the step.

The U.S. will be the first country to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, which the rest of the international community regards as territory occupied by Israel whose status should be determined by negotiations between Israel and Syria. Syria, Iran and Turkey on Friday strongly denounced Trump's statement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Congress leader Sam Pitroda on Friday asked the government to come out with "more facts" on the Balakot air strikes, and said that he was "baffled" by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reaction to his question which he was entitled to ask.

Pitroda, chief of Indian Overseas Congress, also said it was good to have a debate, discussion, dialogue and discourse, and it does not amount to questioning anyone.

Earlier, Prime Minister Modi, using the hashtag 'Janta Maaf Nahi Karegi' (people will not forgive) in a tweet, attacked Pitroda for reportedly saying he wanted to "know more" about the Balakot air attack, including number of terrorists killed.

Several BJP leaders, including BJP chief Amit Shah, slammed Pitroda for his remarks.

"All I said is, can we get more facts, that's all. I don't know why this whole confusion... In democracy you are entitled to ask a question. It is good to have a debate, discussion, dialogue, discourse," Pitroda told PTI.

"My asking a question should not create the kind of reaction it has created, even at the level of the prime minister. I am baffled," the technocrat-turned-politician said.

Attacking Pitroda, Modi also said: "Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew -- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!."



He also asserted that he was neither questioning the armed forces as being alleged by the BJP and the prime minister nor the government.

"I am just saying give me more facts," Pitroda said.

Days after the Pulwama terror attack that claimed the lives of 40 CRPF jawans, Indian Air Force fighter jets bombed terror group JeM training camp near Balakot inside Pakistan on February 26.

Pakistan retaliated by attempting to target Indian military installations the next day. However, the IAF thwarted their plans.

He also asserted that his remarks were in his personal capacity and had nothing to do with the Congress.

Pitroda, a long-time friend of the Gandhi family, led the telecom revolution under Rajiv Gandhi when he set up the C-DOT. He worked on the Knowledge Commission and also founded National Innovation Council during the UPA rule.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav Friday said the sacrifices of the armed forces should not be questioned, but asked the government to "stop pretending to be the Indian Army".

Hitting back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his attack on rival parties over the Pulwama attack and the subsequent IAF strike in Pakistan, Yadav also said that in a democracy it was a "fundamental right" to ask questions of politicians.

"Politicians who say they cannot be questioned are dangerous," he said.

Yadav's remarks came after his party colleague Ram Gopal Yadav came in for heavy criticism from the PM for alleging that the Pulwama terror attack was a "conspiracy" to garner votes.

In a series of tweets, the PM also slammed Congress' Sam Pitroda for saying he wanted to "know more" about the Balakot strike and asking as to how many terrorists were killed in the operation.

In his attack, Modi termed the Opposition "the natural habitat of terror apologists" and accusing them of "insulting" armed forces.

Akhilesh Yadav's tweet came an hour after the Prime minister's.

"The sacrifices of our Armed Forces should never be questioned. To ask questions of politicians in a democracy is our fundamental right. This government needs to stop pretending to be the Indian Army," the SP leader said.

On Thursday, referring to the Pulwama attack, SP general secretary Ram Gopal Yadav had said, "This was a conspiracy...But, when there will be a change of government, investigations will be done and prominent people will come under the scanner, who had pushed our youth to death to garner votes."



PM Modi termed the statement reprehensible.

"Opposition is the natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners of our armed forces. This reprehensible statement by a senior leader like Ram Gopal Ji insults all those who have given their lives in protecting Kashmir. It humiliates the families of our martyrs," he said.

Meanwhile, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said Ram Gopal Yadav's comments were "big example of dirty politics" and



an "attempt to demoralise" security forces. He said the remarks can weaken the morale of jawans.

"He has questioned the sacrifices made by CRPF jawans. He must apologise for this comments."



Such statements will lower the morale of soldiers and raise the morale of terrorist organisations, Adityanath claimed.

On earlier occasion also, Akhilesh has accused the BJP of using the strike to "distract" people.

"The soldiers were martyred and there was an intelligence failure (in the Pulwama attack). What have they (BJP) done for the Army men? People of the country want 'ann' (food) not gun," he had recently said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi Police Friday posed various queries and sought details from guests attending a reception at the Pakistan High Commission on the eve of the country's National Day, according to several people who attended the function.

In an unusual move, police personnel posted outside the Pakistan High Commission stopped the guests and sought their names and phone numbers before allowing them to proceed, according to a number of guests.

The people who refused to share their phone numbers were not allowed to proceed for the event, several guests said, adding they were finally let in only after they gave their contact details.

When sought comments, a senior Delhi Police official said, "The government boycotted the event. However, there were people who came for it. In such circumstances, it was important to note the details of people who were present there and to ascertain reasons for their presence."



The Delhi Police personnel also asked several guests reason for their coming to the event when the Indian government has boycotted the reception.

India boycotted the reception, objecting to invites extended to several separatist leaders from Jammu and Kashmir for the event.

"I have been coming to Pakistan Day reception for the last several years. But for the first time I am facing such harassment. This is totally uncalled for," said a retired IAS officer who wished not to be named.

Another guest said, "Even after the Kargil conflict, we had not faced such harassment.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Madras High Court Friday dismissed a PIL seeking postponement of the polling date in Madurai Lok Sabha constituency in view of the



Chithirai festival.

Justices N Kirubakaran and S S Sundar dismissed the petition after the Election Commission submitted that it has extended the voting time in Madurai constituency by two hours.

Parliamentary polls are scheduled to be held in Tamil Nadu on April 18 in a single phase.

The court agreed with the EC's view and explanation and dismissed the petition filed by a Madurai-based advocate.

The petitioner said polling date clashed with the famous Chithirai festival which draws lakhs of people from all over Tamil Nadu and conducting elections on that day would affect the polling percentage.

Counsel for the Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer submitted that the polling time in Madurai would be extended by two hours.

The petitioner had submitted that the two major events of the Chithirai festivities were the car festival and 'ethir sevai', which clashed with the polling date and hence sought postponement of the election.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Madras High Court on Friday set aside the election of ruling AIADMK candidate A K Bose, who died last year, in a 2016 by-election, holding that there



were violation of norms in affixing of then party chief Jayalalithaa's thumb impression on his nomination papers.

Justice P Velmurugan gave the verdict allowing the election petition filed by P Saravanan, the losing DMK candidate in Thiruparankundram constituency.

He had challenged the victory of Bose in the November 2016 assembly by-poll on the ground that the thumb impression of Jayalalithaa was not genuine.

At the time of filing of the nomination papers for the by-poll, Jayalaithaa, also chief minister of Tamil Nadu, was hospitalised for various complications. She died in December, 2016.

Quoting Supreme Court judgments and provisions of the Representation of People Act, the judge said affixing the thumb impression in Form A and B (by which a party authorises the candidature of its nominee) was generally not permissible under law.

The Election Commission which had allowed it due to the medical condition of Jayalalithaa should have specified that the thumb impression be obtained in the presence of an officer belonging to an administrative service not below the rank of sub divisional officer, he said.

Also, no medical proof was attached vouching for the illness of Jayalalithaa before the thumb impression was obtained and none of the witnesses had stated about her physical and mental status, the judge said.

He said both the Commission as well as the state Chief Electoral Officer had not taken any effective steps to ascertain the physical and mental status of Jayalalitha.

Rapping the EC, the judge said that the Commission had instead permitted attestation of the thumb impression by a medical officer, which is contrary to the election laws laid down by the Supreme Court.

He observed that the EC had acted as the mouthpiece of the ruling party and the Returning officer of the constituency too did not follow the election laws and had accepted the nomination of Bose, knowing fully well it was materially defective.

"The Election Commission, being an independent body, it is very unfortunate; it was acting as mouthpiece of ruling party.

"Even, in evidence, no one has stated that they have seen Jayalalitha and no one stated about the treatment, which had been given to her," the judge said, adding since the former chief minister had died, there was no proof that she was in a conscious state of mind at that time.

At least, if she was alive, the court could have extracted truth regarding the thumb impression, he said.

The judge also faulted Balaji who was allowed to attest the thumb impression of Jayalalithaa, saying it was not done in the presence of the Returning Officer or the Presiding Officer or such other officer specified by the Election Commission.

Also, the attestation should have been videographed and produced before the Returning Officer and also before this court.

In the absence of any documents showing that Jayalalitha was in a conscious state and in view of the



non-compliance of mandatory provisions, the court was of the view that the Forms A & B are defective and materially affected, the judge said.

"This court is of the considered view that the Forms A & B are found defective as far as clause 13(c), (d) and (e) of the Election Symbols Reservation and Allotment Order, 1963," the judge held and set aside the election of Bose.

With the judge delivering the verdict in the election petition, the decks have been cleared for holding by-elections in the Thiruparankundram constituency.

The EC, while scheduling by-elections to 18 vacant assembly seats in Tamil Nadu along with the Lok Sabha polls, had withheld polls in three other segments, including Thiruparankundram, citing pendency of election petitions.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In what was earlier thought to be a hit-and-run incident in Sion in central Mumbai, has turned out to be a case of 'contract killing', police said on Friday.

A 33-year-old man, who was driving a water tanker that fatally knocked down a hawker in January 2014, has been arrested by the crime branch of Mumbai police, an official said.

The incident had taken place at Wadala Link Road in Sion, in which Iqbal Barkat Khan (40), a hawker, had died, he said.

"The police had initially registered a case of accidental death. However, during the probe, officials of Unit III of Mumbai crime branch suspected that it was a murder and started investigating in that direction," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Detection), Dilip Sawant, said.

During the probe, police gathered information about Iqbal Khan and found that he had some business rivals, he said.

"The crime branch later got information about the driver of the tanker, identified as Amol Tatyasaheb Pasoba," the official said.

"Pasoba was driving the vehicle when it run over the victim," he said.

During his interrogation, Pasoba admitted that the tanker owner had given him a 'supari' (contract) of Rs 40,000 to eliminate Khan on the instructions of two accused persons, who had a rivalry with Khan, he said.

The two accused had showed Khan to Pasoba and also done a recce of the route that the victim was using, he said.

Police have launched a hunt for other accused in the case and a probe is underway, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)(Sitting from left): Chairman of the OECS and Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines Dr. Ralph Gonsalves and the President of the Regional Council of Guadeloupe Ary Chalus formalize the associate membership of Guadeloupe to the OECS with their signatures.

The Caribbean island of Guadeloupe  an overseas Department of France, has formally joined the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS)  a regional grouping comprising the independent and non-independent countries of Antigua and Barbuda, Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, St Vincent and The Grenadines, British Virgin Islands, Anguilla and Martinique.



The Ceremony formalizing Guadeloupe as an Associate Member of the Organisation took place in Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe on Thursday, 14 March at 5 pm, at the University des Antilles, Basse-Terre.

OECS Chairman and Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Dr. The Hon Ralph Gonsalves said the accession of the French Territory was a momentous occasion in the life of the OECS, and in furtherance of the deepening and broadening of the regional integration of small Eastern Caribbean islands.

"Our geographical propinquity, shared history of European colonialism, and the reality of our Caribbeanness  the essence of our Caribbean civilization  all pre-dispose us to a closer union in the interest of our peoples humanization, said Prime Minister Gonsalves.

"The enlargement of the OECS, with the accession of Guadeloupe to associate membership, opens up tremendous possibilities not merely to survive but to thrive more markedly across the arenas of economy, society, culture, and polity.

President Chalus described the Accession as a historic moment in the life of the Territory.

"Our Caribbean region is a remarkable space, a cultural and natural wealth often praised, even envied, yet still underestimated, with an immense potential before it.

"Our shared history, geography, physical and human ties are self-evident in institutionalizing cooperation with our neighbours for the promise of a better future for our youth and the development of our people.

"Regional cooperation is not an accessory; we think it inseparable from political action and its even more natural that we share more than a geographical proximity.

"Shared education, training, health and realisation of our natural heritage and biodiversity strengthens our Territories capacities to respond to environmental challenges, improving public services and the resilience of populations to major natural hazards, said President Chalus.Cambodia broke ground Friday on a USD 2 billion Chinese-funded expressway - the country's first - as strongman premier Hun Sen denied his country was in danger of becoming a colony of Beijing.

Once complete in 2023 the expressway will connect the capital Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville, a southern resort and seaport that has become a honeypot for Chinese gamblers and investors.

The near 200-kilometre (124-mile) road is being constructed by the China Road and Bridge Corporation and is a part of China's ambitious Belt and Road project.

"This road will cost around USD 2 billion... this is a tremendous project," Hun Sen said during a groundbreaking ceremony in Kampong Speu province, adding the expressway is "the first one" in Cambodia.

But he defended the Chinese investment.

Critics say "China is colonialising Cambodia... although China wishes to control Cambodia, Cambodia will not let it do so," Hun Sen said.

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou, who attended the ceremony, also brushed off concerns over Beijing's influence.

"Some groups with ill-will have turned white-to-black, colouring Chinese investment as a trap," he said through a translator.

"In fact, the Chinese investment is not a trap, it is not even a threat, but it is a help" in Cambodia's development, he added.

Beijing's communist rulers have lavished the poor but strategically useful kingdom with aid and loans.

Hun Sen regularly praises Beijing's "no strings attached" aid, compared to help from the United States and European Union, which is often accompanied by calls to address corruption and human rights abuses.

The largest investor in Cambodia, China has pumped billions of yuan into the economy.

Hun Sen has also repeatedly denied rumours that a Chinese naval base is set to be established on Cambodian soil, giving ships ready access to the disputed South China Sea.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The government Friday decided to boycott the Pakistan Day event to be held at its high commission in New Delhi as Kashmiri separatist leaders were also invited, an official said.

Indian government officials will stay away from the reception scheduled on the eve of Pakistan Day, which is celebrated on March 23, the official said.

"The government of India has decided not to send any official representative to the Pakistan Day event at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi," the official said.

The decision has been taken because Pakistan has decided to invite separatist leaders from to the event, the official added.The government Friday decided to boycott the Pakistan National Day event to be held at its high commission here as Kashmiri separatist leaders were also invited, an official said.

Over the past few years, India's representation at the annual event has been at the level of a union minister.

This year, Indian government officials will stay away from the reception scheduled on the eve of Pakistan National Day, which is celebrated on March 23, the official said.

"The government of India has decided not to send any official representative to the Pakistan National Day event at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi," the official said.

The decision has been taken because Pakistan has decided to invite separatist Hurriyat leaders from Jammu and Kashmir to the event, the official added.

The decision comes in the wake of heightened tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours after the Pulwama terror attack and subsequent air strike by India on a training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26.

Pakistan retaliated the next day by unsuccessfully attempting to target Indian military installations. The JeM claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack.

India has been mounting diplomatic offensive on Pakistan since the Pulwama attack to corner the country internationally on the issue of terrorism.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India has decided to boycott a reception at the Pakistan High Commission here to mark Pakistan's National Day as several separatists leaders from Jammu and Kashmir have been invited to the event, the External Affairs Ministry said Friday.

It said no Indian representative will attend similar events in Islamabad as well.

Over the years, India's representation at the annual event has been at the level of a Union minister.

"India has decided not to send any representative to attend the Pakistan National Day celebrations today. This decision was taken after Pakistan High Commission decided to invite representatives of the Hurriyat Conference to the reception," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

Pakistan Day is celebrated to mark the Lahore Resolution on March 23 each year.

At a media briefing, Kumar also said that India is very clear that any attempt by the Pakistani High Commission or Pakistani leadership to engage with the Hurriyat Conference will not be taken lightly.

India has been strongly opposed to Pakistan engaging with separatists leaders of Jammu and Kashmir.

"Our High Commission in Islamabad will also not be attending the reception there," Kumar said, replying to a question.

Sources said last week India conveyed to Pakistan High Commission that it will not send any representative to the reception if Hurriyat leaders are invited to it.

They said India is boycotting the events for extending invitation to Hurriyat leaders and not because of any other issue.

Last year, the reception at the Pakistan embassy was attended by Union Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Gajendra Singh Shekhawat. Some low-ranking leaders from a number of separatist outfits from Kashmir also attended the reception.

India's decision to boycott the reception here and events in Islamabad comes in the backdrop of heightened tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours after the Pulwama terror attack and subsequent air strike by India on a training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26. The JeM had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack.

Pakistan retaliated the next day by unsuccessfully attempting to target Indian military installations.

India has been mounting diplomatic offensive against Pakistan since the Pulwama attack to corner the country internationally on the issue of terrorism.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India has extended Nepalese Rupees 35. 5 million as financial assistance for the construction of an educational campus in Nepal.

The campus building was jointly inaugurated by District Coordination Committee and Campus Management Committee on Friday.

India has extended a total of Nepalese Rupees 35.5 million as financial assistance for the construction of the three storied building for the Siddheswar Public Campus at Ramechhap district which has now been completed.

Established in 1963 the educational institution presently provides to 1000 students.

The new infrastructure constructed with India's grant assistance is a triple storied campus building comprising of 12 class rooms that also includes a meeting hall, a laboratory room and a library.

The newly built infrastructure will not only boost learning environment of students but also enhance access to to needy, poor and marginalised students of the district and adjoining area, according to a press release issued by the Indian embassy here.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The relationship between India and the US flourished under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an official in the Donald Trump administration has said, adding it expects the ties to improve after the Lok Sabha elections.

The senior official also said the first ever India-US two-plus-two dialogue, held in New Delhi last year, took the relationship forward.

Responding to a question on five years of the Modi government and the recent visit of India's Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale to the US, the official said, "US-India relationship has really flourished... since Modi took power."



"The highlight, I would say, was Prime Minister Modi's visit to the White House in the June of 2017 where a lot of progress was made on the relationship. I would just say that the visit by Foreign Secretary Gokhale was just the latest illustration of the positive trajectory that the relationship is on," the official said requesting anonymity.

"We look forward to working with whoever is elected in this (general) election," the senior official said, adding there is "a lot of strategic logic" to the India-US relationship.

The official said the US expects the ties to continue to improve and the country is looking for ways of cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region in particular on Washington's converging strategic interest in that part of the world.

Describing the recent visit of Gokhale to the US a milestone, the official said the visit of the top Indian diplomat began with a meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and concluded with National Security Advisor John Bolton.

During his three-day to the US visit last week, Gokhale had important foreign office consultation and strategic security dialogue at the state department. A wide range of bilateral, regional and global issues were discussed.

"They were able to talk about our shared vision for the Indo-Pacific, ways to strengthen our defense and security cooperation. Of course, they discussed Indian Pakistan situation as well as Afghanistan," the senior official said.Days after his arrest in London, India on Friday said it was working towards expeditious extradition of Nirav Modi, the main accused in the USD 2 billion PNB scam case.

Spokesperson in the External Affairs Ministry Raveesh Kumar also said that there was no delay in his arrest and that action was taken on completion of certain processes.

"There was no delay which can be attributed to our side. There were certain processes which had to be completed, and that is how he was arrested," he said at a media briefing.

"Government of India is committed to expeditious extradition of Nirav Modi," he added.

Nirav Modi was arrested by British authorities in London on March 19.

Kumar said the UK's Crown Prosecution Service informed India on March 18 that a senior district judge in the West Minister Magistrate's court issued an warrant against Nirav Modi.

The arrest warrant against the businessman was issued in response to a request by the Enforcement Directorate for his extradition in a money laundering case.

On Wednesday, a court in the UK remanded him in custody till March 29.

Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi are the main accused in the PNB scam and they both left India before the details of the fraud came to light in January 2018.

Nirav Modi was one of India's richest men, worth an estimated USD 1.75 billion, according to Forbes. He launched his own eponymous brand in 2010 and had stores across India, as well as in New York, London and Hong Kong.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An Indian national on Friday was sentenced to five years jail and 12 strokes of the cane for swinging a plank during a riot involving about 60 people outside a Gurudwara in Singapore.

Yadwinder Singh, 26, was the leader of one of the two groups of people who started fighting outside Silat Road Sikh Temple in Bukit Merah area in April, 2017, Channel Asia reported.

The two groups of men wielded wooden poles, planks and belts, spilling onto the road and disrupting traffic, the court heard.

The court did not specify the reasons behind the fight.

Footage from a public bus, played in court on Friday, showed Yadwinder brandishing a long wooden plank at members of the opposing group, the court heard.

The court heard that Yadwinder and his group gathered at the bus stop outside the Gurudwara after prayers that morning.

Some of them had armed themselves with wooden planks. They chased after the men from the opposing group, who were walking along Kampong Bahru Road after leaving the Gurudwara, shouting vulgarities at them before attacking them, the daily said.

Men from both sides attacked each other with poles, planks and belts in the melee. Yadwinder was seen hitting two men with his wooden plank, injuring one man' scalp and face.

After his arrest, Yadwinder plotted to leave Singapore illegally. He had already been jailed previously for rioting and unlawful assembly in 2016 and had committed this fresh offence while on remission. He was also on bail for another extortion offence.

Two weeks before his trial for rioting began, Yadwinder made plans to leave the country illegally, paying a man SGD 4,000 to flee Singapore in the cargo hold of a bus.

He carried out his plan in October 2018, after the first tranche of the trial, but was discovered by Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) officers at Tuas Checkpoint linking to southern Peninsular Malaysia.

He was arrested, along with the bus driver on being found hiding in the cargo hold of the vehicle.

After seeing how Yadwinder had been nabbed for trying to leave Singapore, three men accused of being involved in the riot stopped turning up for the trial, the court heard. Arrest warrants were put out for them and they have been at large since.

Yadwinder pleaded guilty after a five-day trial to rioting with a deadly weapon, failing to present travel documents upon departure and extortion with common intention.

Two months before the riot, he and four others extorted SGD 200 from a 21-year-old Indian national, according to the Channel Asia report. They threatened to report her to the public housing authority, Housing and Development Boar, for supposedly having more than the legal number of tenants in her flat.

Yadwinder, who was unrepresented, was sentenced to jail for five years and five months, along with 12 strokes of the cane.

District Judge Marvin Bay gave him an additional jail term of 129 days for committing a crime while on remission for earlier offences, the maximum possible for this case.

According to a list prepared by Deputy Public Prosecutor Jason Chua, Yadwinder had been committing crimes repeatedly since 2015, three years after arriving in Singapore to work in construction.

The judge granted Yadwinder 10 minutes to speak to his fiancee and friends who attended the hearing, as long as they "maintained a certain civility".

All of Yadwinder's co-accused have been dealt with in court. One of his opponents, Nirmal Singh, who had swung his belt during the riot, had his appeal against his 31-month jail sentence and caning dismissed by the High Court.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)IT company Infosys Friday said it would invest USD 10 million (nearly Rs 70 crore) in California-based artificial intelligence-focussed The House Fund II.

"The company announced today that it will be entering into an agreement with The House Fund II, LP, an AI-focused fund targeting start-ups from the University of California, Berkeley, committing to invest USD 10 million," the company said in a note.

The transaction is expected to be completed before the first quarter of the financial year 2019-20.

Minority holding in the proposed transaction will not exceed 20 per cent of the total fund size, the not said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Authorities in Ireland say a parcel bomb found at an Irish postal depot appears identical to a series of devices sent to Britain earlier this month.

Irish leader Leo Varadkar said it was found at a return mail office in Limerick. The Irish police, the Garda, called military bomb disposal experts after the package was discovered Friday morning.

Irish Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan says a stamp on the package was similar to small letter bombs sent to the UK earlier this month.

Those devices had been designed to cause fires at Waterloo rail station in central London, offices at Heathrow and London City airports, and the University of Glasgow. One of the devices partially burned when opened.

An Irish dissident group claimed responsibility.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)David Massiah, General Secretary of the Antigua and Barbuda Workers Union (ABWU)  that countrys most powerful union  remained deafeningly quiet on what new proposals LIAT shareholders were advancing for workers consideration.

David Massiah, the General Secretary of the Antigua and Barbuda Workers Union (ABWU) - and who attended a meeting with LIAT shareholders and others in St. Vincent and the Grenadines last week Monday, has called on LIAT to hold a meeting with all the trade unions representing the airlines workers across the region.



The appeal comes as LIAT workers could well be thrown into a situation of having to accept cost-cutting proposals designed to keep the airline financially viable, that could well see them being asked to make certain sacrifices.

The Antigua Observer reported Massiah as saying, on his return to Antigua, "I am going to be petitioning LIAT to ensure that we have a regional meeting of all the unions together to go over positions, to look at what is on the table, and to demonstrate our commitment to LIAT and job security.

Massiah told the Observer that his Union had until last Wednesday to converse with its membership about the proposal.

LIAT shareholder Prime Ministers, the airlines Directors, Management and even Massiah himself, all have remained tight-lipped about the proposals advanced at the St. Vincent meeting.

Citizens of the region who are asked, through their governments, to once again bailout the regional airline from financial difficulties, remain effectively in the dark about the real ongoing crisis.

Though, suffice it to say, some indication is perhaps given by Prime Minister of Antigua Gaston Browne, who has repeatedly called for a major restructuring of the airlines operations.

Massiah, readers will recall, had earlier this year, according to the Antigua Observer, reiterated that "management throughout the years remains the main cause of LIATs problems.

He said LIAT has failed to take this matter seriously, "even when repeatedly brought to its attention by the union.

He suggested LIAT had unnecessarily allowed itself to become the subject of legal proceedings which it had lost, resulting in huge financial awards against the airline, thus causing further increases to its debt load.

Shareholder governments, observers surmise, may just have come up with new proposals arising out of their study of a Caribbean Development Bank report they commissioned and the report from LIATs own Management on the operations of the airline; proposals they see as being able to set LIAT on a course to viability.Director Danny Boyle has opened up about his exit from "Bond 25", calling it a "great shame".

The Oscar-winning filmmaker had in August last year dropped out of the project along with his frequent collaborator, screenwriter John Hodge, over "creative difference" with the producers. He was supposed to start shooting in December.

Boyle was replaced by "True Detective" and "Maniac" director Cary Joji Fukunaga on the film.

In Empire Magazine's May issue, the 62-year-old director said he learned a lot about himself from his experience on the project.

"I work in partnership with writers and I am not prepared to break it up. We were working very, very well, but they didn't want to go down that route with us. What John Hodge and I were doing, I thought, was really good. It wasn't finished, but it could have been really good. You have to believe in your process and part of that is the partnership I have with a writer," Boyle said.

"So we decided to part company, and it would be unfair to say what it was because I don't know what Cary is going to do. I got a very nice message from him and I gave him my best wishes... It is just a great shame," he added.

"Bond 25" will mark Craig's fifth outing as famed British spy following "Casino Royale", "Quantum of Solace", "Skyfall" and "Spectre".

Actor Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris and Ben Whishaw will also reprise their roles in the film.

French star Lea Seydoux, who played psychologist Madeleine Swann in Sam Mendes' "Spectre", is also returning. The film will release on April 8, 2020.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Despite criticisms, Beijing has been steadily gathering support for its "Belt and Road" initiative, which aims to weave a network of ports, bridges and power plants linking China with Africa, Europe and beyond.

Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte has pledged to sign a memorandum of understanding this week on supporting the initiative during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has made the initiative a signature policy of his administration.

Italy's involvement would give China a crucial inroad into western Europe and a symbolic boost in its economic tug-of-war with the United States.

Italy would be the first member of the G-7, a group of seven major economies that includes the United States, to join Belt and Road, following Portugal's embrace of the initiative in December.



It appears to be driven partly by hopes that Chinese investment in Italy's ports might help revive the country's traditional role as a key link in trade between the East and West.

The Belt and Road program is a loosely defined umbrella for predominantly China-financed and usually China-built projects in more than 60 countries from the South Pacific through Asia to Africa and Europe.

As President Donald Trump squares off with China over trade and other issues, gaining Italy's support is a coup for Beijing.

"It's important for the Xi administration to show that you have Portugal and Italy, two well-known countries in western Europe breaking ranks with the western alliance in BRI," said Willy Lam, an adjunct professor of China studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

China says some 150 countries have signed Belt and Road related agreements since the program's launch more than five years ago. A major conference is planned next month in Beijing, marking further expansion of the initiative.

Beijing has marketed the initiative as a way to give some of the world's neediest countries a leg up, helping them gain access to more trade and investment. But it also helps Chinese companies tap new markets for their products while, inevitably, helping Beijing amass greater global influence.

Some governments including the United States, Japan and India worry that Beijing is trying to build a China-centered sphere of influence that would undermine their own sway, pulling developing nations into so-called "debt traps," that would give China ever-more control over their territories and economies.

China already has made inroads in Eastern Europe through investments in railways, ports and steel mills. That's stirred fears of a growing divide within the 28-member European Union between its wealthier and poorer members. Some also worry Chinese-led projects might undercut the bloc's standards on transparency.

As the U.S. takes on long-standing complaints of Chinese intellectual property theft and unfair trade practices, a Chinese win in Italy could boost Beijing's arguments that it is ultimately a force for good in the global economy.

China's official position is that Belt and Road is solely an economic initiative with no political motives. Xi said in a speech late last year that even as China moves closer to the center of the world stage, it will never seek hegemony.

"The Belt and Road Initiative in nature is an economic strategy," said Chu Yin, a researcher at the Center for China and Globalization, a think tank in Beijing affiliated with the government and with the ruling Communist Party.

"China has no intention to become a global hegemon and nor does China have such an ability," he said.

Launched in 2013, the initiative is at heart a business venture, not aid. China wants to attract non-Chinese investors but that has happened only on a few of the hundreds of projects, which range from oil drilling in Siberia to construction of ports in Southeast Asia, railways in Eastern Europe and power plants in the Middle East.

The initiative has run into some roadblocks in the past year, as the Chinese economy cooled and the US and others accused Beijing of saddling developing countries with too much debt.

Some governments including Thailand, Tanzania, Sri Lanka and Nepal have scrapped, scaled back or renegotiated projects amid complaints that they are too costly and give too little work to local contractors Last year, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad cancelled projects including a USD 20 billion railway he said his country cannot afford.

And in 2017, December, Sri Lanka sold control of its port of Hambantota to a Chinese state-owned company after falling behind in repaying USD 1.5 billion in loans from Beijing.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)This is not "jihad" (armed crusade) but "jahalat" (benighted), a village elder pleaded to Pakistani terrorists in North Kashmir's Hajin area while asking them to release a 12-year-old boy who was held captive and subsequently killed on Thursday.

Videos of the village elder of Mir Mohalla of Hajin surfaced on social media, showing him asking the two Lashker-e-Taiba terrorists, Ali alias Furkan and Hubaib, to release Atif Mir.

The incident took place 33 km north of Srinagar where the terrorists had taken shelter in the boy's house at gunpoint, police officials said on Friday.

The terrorists wanted to sexually abuse his sister but the family had helped her escape. This infuriated them and they started beating up the family members, including Atif and his old uncle Hameed Mir, they said.

Hearing their cries, other people in the locality informed the police.

After assessing the situation, the police started rescuing the family. They managed to secure the release of the parents and other family members till they were fired upon by the holed up terrorists.

"We knew that the boy and uncle were trapped inside and, so, we asked the villagers to appeal to the terrorists to release them," a senior official said.

Speaking in Kashmiri, the village head was the first to ask the terrorists to release the innocent boy. "Do whatever you want, but this is not Jihad but Jahalat. Please release the boy," he said.

The police also made an appeal through Aqeqa Begum, the wife of Hameed, who was virtually breathless as she asked the terrorists to release her husband and nephew.

Simultaneously, the police made a room intervention and brought Hameed out of the house. He told them that he was assaulted by the terrorists who hit him with iron rods and an AK rifle.

"I tried my best to get my nephew out of this. I begged them but they remained unmoved," Hameed told the police.

As pressure mounted on the terrorists, they killed the helpless Atif, the police said, adding that the security forces later mounted a heightened operation and killed both the Pakistanis.

Ali had been active in the area for long and was involved in the killing of a BSF personnel and others, including death of a man whose throat was slit in front of his son.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Janata Dal (S) will not be contesting Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra, a party leader said Friday.

JD(S) national general secretary Justice (retd) B G Kolse-Patil said neither he nor any candidate from his party will enter the fray in Maharashtra, which has 48 Lok Sabha seats, the second highest after Uttar Pradesh (80).

The former judge of the Bombay High Court criticised the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA), a front led by Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar, for failing to enter into a pre-alliance with the Congress-NCP combine in the state.

Kolse-Patil himself was a strong contender to contest from Aurangabad, a seat offered to him by Ambedkar a few weeks ago.

The VBA is contesting the polls in Maharashtra.

"Prakash Ambedkar failed to have an alliance with the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in the state. There was no point in going with VBA, it is going to help the BJP- Sena alliance, which is ruling as well as ruining the country," Kolse-Patil told PTI.

The former judge said he wanted to contest from Aurangabad only if the VBA had formed a pre-poll alliance with the Congress, the only party, he said, which can take on the BJP.

"Everybody knows about my stance against the Modi-Shah duo and my crusade against the RSS. By not having an alliance with the Congress in Maharashtra, we have lost an opportunity to prevent the BJP from coming to power again," the 77-year- old leader, said.

The Congress and the JD(S) are allies in the government in neighbouring Karnataka.

To a query, Kolse-Patil said there was no question of him campaigning for VBA candidates in the state.

The VBA is a political front launched by Ambedkar in alliance with the Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e- Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM).

The front has already said the AIMIM will field its candidates from the Aurangabad Lok Sabha seat.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Lenders of are likely to pick up a substantial stake in the debt-laden till a new promoter is roped in, sources said.

The process of getting a new promoter on board is likely to take another two to three months and once that happens, the banks would offload their stakes, they added.

The State Bank of India-led consortium of lenders is working on a resolution plan for the cash-strapped for the last five months. The full-service carrier has a debt burden of more than Rs 8,200 crore and needs to make repayments worth up to Rs 1,700 crore by March-end.

Sources said lenders of might pick up a substantial stake in the airline, a move that would provide comfort in the interim period till new promoters come in.

Current promoters of Jet Airways have to exit before a new investor can be roped in. The entry of new promoter is unlikely before two to three months, one of the sources said.

The lenders would ultimately sell their stake in Jet Airways to the new promoters as and when they are roped in, they added.

Jet Airways Chairman holds 51 per cent stake while Gulf carrier has 24 per cent shareholding in the airline, which has been in operation for over 25 years.

Earlier this week, SBI Chairman along with Civil Secretary and Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Nripendra Misra apprised Finance Minister about the developments at Jet Airways. The is flying just about a third of its fleet, defaulting on interest payments and delaying salaries to pilots.

The lenders are trying to revive the carrier by change in management as they feel collapse of the would not be good for consumers as well as competition in the industry. They have also decided against taking the airline through insolvency process.

On Tuesday, Jet Airways' pilots' union threatened to stop flying from April 1 if their salaries were not paid by March 31.

Earlier this week, the Directorate General of Civil (DGCA) said there may be "further attrition" of flights "in coming weeks".Actor Richard E Grant has said one of the reasons for Julianne Moore's exit from the film "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" was her decision to wear a fat suit and a fake nose to look like her character.

Moore was originally supposed to play the lead character of literary forger Lee Israel in the movie, a role that ultimately went to Melissa McCarthy.

Nicole Holofcener, who co-wrote the film's screenplay with Jeff Whitty, was set to direct the project.

The 58-year-old actor, however, left the film, while Holofcener vacated the director's chair for Marielle Heller.

Appearing on "Watch What Happens Live" earlier this month, Moore had said that she was "fired" by Holofcener from the film.

Grant, who was nominated for an Oscar for the film, said at an event on Wednesday that Moore was forced to leave the project as she wanted to wear a fat suit and a fake nose to embody the character, reported BBC.

"Julianne Moore wanted to wear a fat suit and a false nose to play Lee Israel and Nicole Holofcener said, 'You're not going to do that'," he said.

"Can You Ever Forgive Me?" follows Israel as she attempts to revitalise her failing writing career by forging letters from deceased authors and playwrights. The film was nominated for three Oscars at the recent 91st Academy Awards.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Delhi Police briefly detained Kashmiri human rights activist Mohammed Ahsan Untoo when he was about to enter the Pakistan High Commission on Friday, officials said.

Untoo, who runs International Forum of Justice and Human Rights, was invited among others, including separatist leaders, from the militancy-hit Jammu and Kashmir by the High Commission to attend an event to mark Pakistan's National Day.

Untoo was released after questioning.

"They were very nice to me. Misunderstanding cropped up and every thing was cleared," he told PTI after his release.

Separatists from the state, including moderate Hurriyat Conference chairperson Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and others, have been staying away from the function for the last three years.

Pakistan Day is celebrated to mark the Lahore Resolution on March 23 each year.

Untoo had recently met jailed JKLF leader Yasin Malik at Kot Balwal jail in Jammu. He has been taking up the cases related to alleged human rights violation at the State Human Rights Commission.

The government Friday decided to boycott the Pakistan National Day event to be held at its high commission here as Kashmiri separatist leaders were also invited.

India's representation at the annual event has been at the level of a Union minister.

The decision comes in the wake of heightened tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours after the Pulwama terror attack and subsequent air strike by India on a training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26.

Pakistan retaliated the next day by unsuccessfully attempting to target Indian military installations.

The JeM had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Delhi Police Friday detained Kashmiri human rights activist Mohammed Ahsan Untoo when he was about to enter Pakistan High Commission, officials said.

Untoo, who runs an organisation International Forum of Justice and Human Rights, had been invited among others, including separatists, from the militancy-hit Jammu and Kashmir by the High Commission to attend the Pakistan Day.

Separatists from the state, including moderate Hurriyat Conference chairperson Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and others, have been staying away from the function for the last three years.

Untoo had recently met jailed JKLF leader Yasin Malik at Kot Balwal jail in Jammu. He has been taking up the cases related to alleged human rights violation at the State Human Rights Commission.

The government Friday decided to boycott the Pakistan National Day event to be held at its high commission here as Kashmiri separatist leaders were also invited.

India's representation at the annual event has been at the level of a Union minister.

The decision comes in the wake of heightened tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours after the Pulwama terror attack and subsequent air strike by India on a training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26.

Pakistan retaliated the next day by unsuccessfully attempting to target Indian military installations.

The JeM had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Noting that lack of waste management in Bihar can lead to an emergency-like situation, the NGT has directed the Bihar chief secretary to submit a quarterly report on implementation of the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016.

A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel ordered that at least three major cities and three major towns in the state and three panchayats in every district may be notified as model cities, towns or villages.

They will be made fully compliant within the next six months.

"The remaining cities, towns and village panchayats of the state may be made fully compliant in respect of environmental norms within one year. A quarterly report be furnished by the chief secretary, every three months. First such report shall be furnished by June 30," the bench said.

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) directed the chief secretary to personally monitor the progress, at least once in a month, with all the district magistrates and it said that the officers concerned may be imparted requisite training.

"The district magistrates may monitor the status of compliance of environmental norms, at least once in two weeks. Performance audit of functioning of all regulatory bodies may be got conducted and remedial measures be taken, within six months," it said.

The green panel noted that as per reports, around 40 per cent districts of Bihar have arsenic in its groundwater and arsenic contaminated aquifers in a 5 km wide study belt along the banks of river Ganga in Patna, Bhojpur, Vaishali and Bhagalpur districts of Bihar, are used for both drinking and irrigation purposes.

"Due to high levels of arsenic, the cases of cancer in Bihar are increasing day by day. The air quality index (AQI) of the city surged from 402 to 423, putting Patna as the third highest polluted city in the country," the NGT said



"Muzaffarpur in terms of level of air pollution as the AQI of the north Bihar city was measured at 445.23. It was further reported that pollution level in Bihar is increasing by three per cent per year and blamed population and density as the major factor for the high pollution," it said.

The tribunal also noted that according to a study, it was found out that more than 4,000 people die every year due to air pollution-related diseases in Bihar.

"Unabated illegal sand mining in river beds is now being cited as the major cause for the flood havoc, which claimed over 60 lives in east and west Champaran districts of north Bihar. Damage was done to embankments at Sikta, Mainatand and Gaunaha areas where illegal sand mining was rampant," it said.

According to some experts, greatest contributor to air pollution in Gaya is suspended dust particles released by unregulated construction activities and illegal sand mining.

"There is lack of waste management in Bihar and it can lead to an emergency-like situation. No project has come up to harness methane gas from quarries. Data showed that the state government can produce 2MW of power from quarries that are filled with 750 tonnes of garbage every day and placed in fallow land," it said.

The tribunal had earlier slammed authorities for failing to act on reducing solid waste and asked chief secretaries of all states and Union Territories to appear before it with status reports of their actions and immediate future plans.

It had asked all states to display on their websites of their pollution control boards the progress made in complying with the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016, Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016 and the Bio-Medical Waste management Rules, 2016.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Sri Lanka's main Tamil party TNA on Friday called for allowing foreign judges and prosecutors to probe the alleged war crimes, a day after the UN Human Rights Council gave Colombo two more years to set up a credible investigation into the country's brutal civil war.

Sri Lankan troops are accused of killing at least 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians during former president Mahinda Rajapaksa's regime that brought an end to the three-decade long civil war with the LTTE in 2009, according to the UN.

According to the government figures, around 20,000 people are missing due to various conflicts including the civil war with Lankan Tamils in the north and east which claimed at least 100,000 lives.

The United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday approved giving two more years to the Sri Lankan government to set up a credible war crimes investigation into the civil war.

M A Sumanthiran, the senior Tamil National Alliance (TNA) spokesman, said that they would urge for "a tribunal which is entirely international".

"We will take the case to the International Criminal Court," he said while addressing Parliament.

Sumanthiran said the official position taken by Foreign Minister Thilak Marapana on Wednesday in Geneva that foreign judges cannot constitutionally operate in Sri Lanka was false.

"It is false to say that constitution does not allow foreign judges to function," he said.

Referring to a case precedent in 2001, Sumanthiran, a lawyer, said that the constitutional provisions do not curtail or restrict the operation of foreign judges in Sri Lanka.

He said that the UNHRC resolution adopted in October 2015, which was co-sponsored by Sri Lanka, Colombo is bound to allow an international investigation.

Sumanthiran said that when the government of Sri Lanka stands on one side with the militant group which fought for a separate state on the other side, only the foreign judges can ensure the impartiality of investigation.

"We Tamils have no alternative but to work towards an international judicial process. We prefer a hybrid judicial mechanism," he said.

In Geneva on Thursday, the UN's top rights body approved without a vote a resolution to postpone discussing the implementation of an official probe into crimes committed during the civil war.

The Sri Lankan government said that the resolution, which was adopted without a vote, had recognised the progressive steps already taken by Sri Lanka since 2015.

Its action to co-sponsor the resolution had shown the commitment on Sri Lanka to achieve reconciliation through accountability, the government said in a statement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Landfill operations in the Grenadines are ongoing, despite the marked variance between the cost to effect same and the fees collected from residents.

According to Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, a site has been identified at Campbell on the western side of Union Island, for the relocation of the landfill/garbage site on that Grenadine island.

This was revealed by Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves in response to a question from Parliamentary Representative for the Southern Grenadines, Terrance Ollivierre, at the March 11 sitting of Parliament.

The Prime Minister further stated that the Central Water and Sewerage Authority (CWSA), which is tasked with the collection and disposal of solid waste in this country, had begun clearing the land in preparation for final surveying and eventual land acquisition.

"This calls for the CWSA to demonstrate an acceptable cost of recovery to meet its expected debt recovery requirements and its post construction operating expenses, the Prime Minister said.

All of this comes within a situation of the CWSA having to write off EC$1.1 million in unpaid environmental fees by residents in the Grenadines, the PM told Parliament.

He proceeded to inform that it costs the CWSA EC$44,000 per month to provide environmental services to the landfill in Clifton, Union Island.

However, the company collects a mere $4,000 per month.

He did, however, reference an increased compliance with a legislated monthly environmental fee by residents, since the passage of legislation that allows for the environmental fee to be affixed to the monthly electricity bills issued by VINLEC.

Notwithstanding the increased compliance, the situation was far from satisfactory, with an estimated 31% of all liable residents of the Grenadines complying with the fee.

The Prime Minister was hopeful that payments will improve over the next year or so, and by that time, CWSA would have completed the land acquisition process at the new site on Union Island./ -- Lear Corporation (NYSE: LEA), a global automotive technology leader in Seating and E-Systems, today announced it has invested in an Israel-based venture capital fund managed by Maniv Mobility that is focused on advancing mobility technology.

The investment, which is being made through Lear Innovation Ventures (LIV), enables future collaboration and deepens Lear's involvement in the mobility technology ecosystem. Maniv Mobility's portfolio and investing activities are largely focused on Israeli start-up companies in the connected, autonomous, ridesharing and mobility sectors, as well as on investments in the U.S. and other markets.

"Maniv is recognized as one of the premier investment funds focusing on the key trends in the automotive market, which makes it a great opportunity for LIV," said John Absmeier, Lear's Chief Technology Officer. "This is an exciting time of transformation for the industry, and Israel is at the forefront of the flourishing auto tech sector. We look forward to this strategic partnership and the innovations that will come from both start-ups and established companies that are driving the future of mobility."



The partnership is not Lear's first mobility investment in Israel. In 2017, Lear acquired EXO Technologies, an Israeli developer of high accuracy vehicle positioning technology designed to meet the demands of the industry and drive change through increased accuracy, reliability and functional safety for ADAS and Autonomous driving applications.

About Lear Corporation



Lear Corporation Lear is one of the world's leading suppliers of automotive seating systems and electrical systems (E-Systems). Lear serves every major automaker in the world, and Lear content can be found on more than 400 vehicle nameplates. Lear's world-class products are designed, engineered and manufactured by a diverse team of approximately 169,000 employees located in 39 countries. Lear currently ranks #148 on the Fortune 500. Lear's headquarters are in Southfield, Michigan. Further information about Lear is available at lear.com or follow us on Twitter @LearCorporation. Lear is where passion drives possibilities.

About Maniv Mobility



Maniv Mobility is a leading venture capital fund dedicated exclusively to a new mobility future. Investing in early-stage startups, Maniv seeks out ideas around automotive connectivity and data, autonomous vehicle technologies such as sensors and software, and novel business models. With deep connections throughout the global automotive industry, policy and technology communities, Maniv leverages its network to provide hands-on support to its growing portfolio. For more information, visit www.maniv.com



Photo - https://photos.prnasia.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Gujarat Congress president Amit Chavda and his party colleague Paresh Dhanani Friday dropped their plan to go to New Delhi upon learning that a meeting of the party's screening committee to finalise Lok Sabha candidates for the state has been cancelled.

While the screening committee was supposed to meet Saturday morning, both the leaders were scheduled to leave for New Delhi Friday.

"The meet was scheduled for tomorrow morning and we were supposed to attend it. Now, that meeting stands cancelled.

"We may be called again by central leadership once the new schedule for the screening committee gets finalised," said Dhanani, who is also the Leader of Opposition in the Assembly.

Till now, the Congress had declared its candidates for four seats in Gujarat for the April 23 general elections.

While the state party unit has already sent names of all the probable candidates to the central leadership, a decision on remaining 22 seats is still pending.

According to Gujarat Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi, there is a possibility that candidates on some seats would be declared in coming days following an approval by the Central Election Committee (CEC).

Meanwhile, senior BJP leaders, led by Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, reached Delhi Friday to submit a list of probable Lok Sabha candidates in Gujarat to the party's central Parliamentary Board.

While the the BJP has already announced its president Amit Shah's name for the Gandhinagar seat, no announcement has been made yet by the party about the remaining 25 seats.

In the 2014 polls, the ruling party had won all the 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shah.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In another setback to the NCP ahead of next month's polling, its state unit vice president Bharti Pawar Friday joined the BJP, while Congress leader Pravin Chheda also returned to ruling party.

The two leaders joined the BJP in the presence of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and other senior functionaries of the party here.

Pawar had unsuccessfully contested the 2014 Lok Sabha polls from Dindori constituency against BJP's Harishchandra Chavan.

Chheda, a three-term corporator in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), had quit the BJP to join the Congress seven years ago reportedly due to his differences with the then local MLA Prakash Mehta, currently a minister in the Maharashtra government.

Speaking on the occasion, Fadnavis claimed that BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Kakade will continue to be in the party. His remark comes in the wake of reports that Kakade was unhappy with the BJP and that he was likely to join the Congress.

Without naming the opposition parties, Fadnavis slammed those "who speak the language of Pakistan and questioned the surgical strike" post Pulwama terror attack.

Earlier this week, son of NCP MP Vijaysinh Mohite-Patil, Ranjitsinh, had joined the BJP.

Polling will be held in Maharashtra in four phases next month.

Pawar said she was impressed by the developmental works carried out across the country and in Maharashtra under the leaderships of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Fadnavis respectively.

"Their works over the past five years have inspired me to join the BJP. I will work for the uplift of the poor and tribals," she added.

Expressing satisfaction on his return to the BJP fold, Chheda said he was impressed by the development works being carried out by the BJP governments.

He claimed that the Congress had offered him candidature from the Mumbai North East seat, but he ignored the offer and came back to the BJP instead.

"I will play the role the party wants me to play now," Chheda added.

Fadnavis said that leaders and workers doing good job in other parties were joining the BJP trusting Modi's performance and schemes being carried out by the Centre for the poor and farmers.

"Kakade is in the BJP. He was unhappy for some reason of late. The Congress contacted him then and offered a poll ticket from Pune...But after my meeting with him, he decided to end the animosity," Fadnavis said.

The chief minister said that Kakade has been asked to focus on campaigning for the party in western Maharashtra.

Fadnavis said the pride of the nation has awakened under Modi's leadership that isolated Pakistan in the world following the Pulwama attack last month.

"Sometimes I feel bad that nationalism is politicised. Some people questioned the surgical strike, while some are of late speaking the language of Pakistan.

"So, I have to tell them questions will be raised on your patriotism if there is no difference between the language you and Pakistan speak," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The opposition 'Mahagathbandhan' in Bihar on Friday announced its seat-sharing formula for the 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state, half of which will be fought by Lalu Prasad's RJD and nine by the Congress.

Former JD(U) president and NDA convener Sharad Yadav will contest on the RJD symbol and merge his party Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) with it after the Lok Sabha polls, RJD national spokesman Manoj Jha and RJD state president Ram Chandra Purve told newsmen.

Recent entrants to the 'Grand Alliance' - Upendra Kushwaha's Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) and Mukesh Sahni's Vikassheel Insan Party (VIP) will field their candidates in five and three seats, respectively, they said.

Former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustan Awam Morcha (HAM) has been given three seats.

The RJD leaders made the announcement in the presence of representatives from all alliance partners, including Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee president Madan Mohan Jha.

Top leaders like Tejashwi Yadav (RJD), Kushwaha (RLSP), Sharad Yadav and Manjhi were conspicuous by their absence though.

As per the analysis of the seat sharing formula, the RJD, which wanted to contest 20, had to part with one seat from its quota to the CPI(ML) Liberation, while the Congress, which had reportedly bargained hard for 11 seats, had to settle for nine with the assurance of a Rajya Sabha berth.

Among other constituents, the HAM, which claimed to have a "stronger support base than even of the Congress" and had insisted on more seats than at least the RLSP, had to settle for only three. The RLSP, which had walked out of the NDA following an offer of only two seats, was allotted five.

The biggest gainer was, surprisingly, the fledgling Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP), which was floated by former Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni less than six months ago. It got three seats to contest from which is equal to that of the HAM.

Candidates were also announced for the four Lok Sabha seats that will go to polls in the first phase. Filing of nominations for these seats will end on March 25 and votes will be cast on April 11.

These candidates include Manjhi himself, who will be contesting from Gaya, and RLSP state president Bhudeo Chaudhary from Jamui which is currently held by LJP's Chirag Paswan.

The other prominent candidates in the list are HAM's Upendra Prasad from Aurangabad and RJD's Vibha Devi, whose husband Raj Vallabh Yadav was recently disqualified from the assembly following conviction in a rape case, from Nawada.

The RJD leaders also announced that the Nawada assembly seat will be contested by Dhirendra Singh Munna of the HAM.

The Dehri assembly seat, where by-election has been necessitated by RJD's Mohd Iliyas Hussain losing the seat on account of conviction in the bitumen scam, has gone to his son Mohd Firoz Husain.

By-polls to the two assembly seats will be held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha elections in Bihar where it will be held in seven phases.

When reporters approached Sharad Yadav outside Rabri Devi's residence, where parleys had taken place for several hours before the announcements, he affirmed that he will be fighting on an RJD ticket and merge the LJD, which he had founded after falling out with Nitish Kumar, with the RJD.

The RJD leaders also announced that the party would give one seat to CPI(ML) Liberation from its quota but did not specify the constituency.

The Congress, they said, will get the first Rajya Sabha seat from the Mahagathbandhan whenever elections are held for the upper house.

The seat sharing announcement evoked angry outbursts at Sadaqat Ashram, the Congress headquarters in Bihar, as supporters of former Aurangabad MP, Nikhil Kumar, raised angry slogans in protest against the seat going to the HAM.

The agitators alleged that the seat was "sold" by Jha and AICC in-charge for the state, Shaktisinh Gohil.

The Aurangabad seat, known as 'mini Chittorgarh' by virtue of the strong presence of the Rajput caste in the area, has been a bastion for Nikhil Kumar's family.

His father Satyendra Narayan Singh had represented the seat many times before becoming the state chief minister for a brief period.

Shyama Singh, the late wife of Nikhil Kumar, who is a former Delhi Police chief, had also represented the seat.

The NDA has been winning the seat since the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A resident of Alibaug in Maharashtra has urged the Bombay High Court to ban the "derogatory" and "humiliating" phrase "Alibaug se aaya hai kya?" meaning "Are you a fool?".

As per the plea, the phrase is used commonly in Maharashtra to address someone who is considered "foolish" or naive.

The Public Interest Litigation (PIL) has been filed by Rajendra Thakur, a resident of Satirje village of Mapgaon in Alibaug. His father, Madhukar Thakur, is a former MLA of the Congress.

In his plea, Thakur has said the phrase is "unfair" and "humiliating" as it projected people of Alibaug as "illiterates".

Alibaug is a coastal town and a municipal council in Raigad district of Maharashtra, located around 95 kilometres from here.

Thakur's plea states that Alibaug is a well-to-do place, a major tourist attraction, and has several "good schools" and a high literacy rate.

It also says that Alibaug has a rich culture and history.

The plea was mentioned earlier this week before a bench of Chief Justice Naresh Patil and Justice N M Jamdar.

It is likely to be taken up for hearing after two weeks.

"Alibaug is bestowed with nature with scenic beauty. In spite of having such a rich background filled with history, culture, industry, tourism, medical facilities, nature and education, it is highly objectionable to ridicule the people of Alibaug by projecting them as 'illiterate' who do not have common sense," reads the plea.

"Every time the petitioner hears this dialogue, he gets hurt sentimentally. This phrase always makes an adverse emotional impact on the petitioner and every person of Alibaug," it said.

Thakur has urged the court to direct the state authorities to get the public to refrain from using this phrase.

He has also urged the court to ensure that films, documentaries, TV serials, etc, that have the phrase as part of their dialogues, are not granted the censor certificate.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)BSP chief Friday predicted the BJP's loss in the Lok Sabha elections, saying they can do "chowkidari" after losing the polls.

In a tweet, she said the BJP leaders were free to do whatever they want and amuse themselves but they should not insult the country and denigrate constitutional posts in any way.

"Let DM, CM & PM remain as per the provision of the Constitution. They can do chowkidari after losing polls," she tweeted.

alleged that while its leaders did not care about the files, they were hiding crucial data on unemployment and farmers' plight.

In a series of tweets, she took a jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his colleagues for calling themselves 'chowkidar' (watchman).

She alleged they are not bothered about files being "stolen", but are hiding data on "declining" employment rate, poverty and farmers' plight.

She claimed the data was being hidden for vote or image and asked if the country needed such a "chowkidar".

Modi and his partymen have launched the 'Main bhi chowkidar' (I too am a watchman) campaign to blunt the opposition's, especially the Congress's, 'chowkidar chor hai (watchman is a thief) slogan.

The former Uttar Pradesh chief minister claimed that while several BJP leaders and ministers declared themselves 'chowkidars' like the prime minister, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was not sure whether to announce himself as one or remain a public servant or a yogi (sanyasi).

The BJP leaders may adopt whatever fashion they want, but they should work as the 'watchman' of the law and Constitution, she said, adding that this was all that the people wanted.Prime Minister Narendra Modi Friday led a fresh BJP offensive on rival parties over the and the subsequent IAF strike inside Pakistan, terming the Opposition "the natural habitat of terror apologists" and accusing them of "insulting" armed forces.

Using the hashtag 'Janta Maaf Nahi Karegi' (people will not forgive) in a tweet, Modi attacked Sam Pitroda, who looks after Congress' overseas affairs, for reportedly saying that post the Mumbai terror attacks, India could have responded with air strikes, but "according to me that's not how you deal with world."



"Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!," Moid said.

"Opposition insults our forces time and again. I appeal to my fellow Indians- question Opposition leaders on their statements. Tell them- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics. India stands firmly with our forces," he added, using the hashtag.

BJP president Amit Shah also took to Twitter to hit out at the opposition, saying, while their "heart beats for terrorists, ours beats for the tiranga (the flag)."



"Difference between Opposition and BJP is clear. They suspect our army, we are proud of our army. Their heart beats for terrorists, ours beats for the Tiranga.""This election, through the power of your vote, do a surgical strike on the Congress culture," Shah tweeted.

Pitroda has also reportedly said he wanted to "know more" about the Balakot air attack and number of terrorists killed in it.

Senior BJP leader and Union minister Arun Jaitley slammed Pitroda for his remarks, saying such statements will be a hit on Pakistani news channels.

"He thinks what we did (Balakot air strike) was wrong. No other country has said that it was wrong. Even the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has not said such a thing. This is only the opinion of Pakistan. It is unfortunate that such people are role models for a political party," the Finance Minister said at a BJP press conference.

Earlier, in his tweets, Modi also slammed Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav, who alleged the was a "conspiracy" to garner votes.

"This was a conspiracy...But, when there will be a change of government, investigations will be done and prominent people will come under the scanner, who had pushed our youth to death to garner votes," he alleged Thursday speaking at a programme at Saifai.

PM Modi termed the statement reprehensible.

"Opposition is the natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners of our armed forces. This reprehensible statement by a senior leader like Ram Gopal Ji insults all those who have given their lives in protecting Kashmir. It humiliates the families of our martyrs," he said.

The PM in his tweets tagged the reported statements of Yadav and Pitroda.

Meanwhile, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav Friday said sacrifices of the armed forces should never be questioned, but advised the government "to stop pretending to be the Indian Army".

He also said that in a democracy it was the "fundamental right" of politicians to ask questions.North Korea has pulled its staff out of an inter-Korean liaison office, Seoul said Friday, weeks after leader Kim Jong Un's summit with US President Donald Trump ended without agreement.

The office in the Northern city of Kaesong was opened in September as the two Koreas knitted closer ties, but the South's vice unification minister Chun Hae-sung told reporters Pyongyang had "notified the South they are pulling out of the liaison office".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Janata Dal (Secular) Friday said names of nearly 40 lakh voters in Maharashtra have gone missing from the voters' list as part of a "conspiracy hatched by the BJP" for political gains.

Party's national general secretary Justice (retd) B G Kolse Patil, while citing the findings of a survey conducted by a Hyderabad-based firm, said that names of 39,27,882 or 4.6 per cent of the total number of voters- were missing from the voters' list.

"Out of the 39,27,882 names, 17 lakh voters are Dalits, while 10 lakh are Muslims. This is a conspiracy hatched by the BJP for political gains," Kolse-Patil, the former judge of Bombay High Court, said in a conference.

The survey was conducted by IT engineer Khalid Saifullah, founder of the Missing Voter App, to assess the number of missing voters. He claimed that names of approximately 12.7 crore voters in the country, including three crore Muslims, has gone missing from the voters' list, who may not be able to vote in the May 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

His team surveyed 69 of the total 288 assembly constituencies in Maharashtra.

Patil said there was still time to undo all these flaws and the Election Commission (EC) must do it.

Saifullah said his free mobile app, Missing Voters, has details of all the constituencies, the number of households on each street and the number of voters in each household.

"Considering the gravity of the issue, the state Election Commission must undertake a drive to take corrective steps, otherwise a large number of voters will be deprived of their right," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Jailed former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's family, including his mother and daughter, met him at the Kot Lakhpat jail here on Thursday, and voiced concern over his health, Pakistani media reported.

Sharif, 69, is in jail since December last year, serving a 7-year imprisonment in the Al Azizia Steel Mills graft case.

Sharif's mother Shamim Bibi and daughter Maryam Nawaz were accompanied by his brother and Leader of Opposition Shahbaz Sharif and personal doctor Adnan during their visit to the jail.

Maryam, daughter of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supremo, later tweeted that Sharif remains unwell with continuous angina.

"Just got out. MNS (Mian Nawaz Sharif) remains unwell with continuous angina. Today again during the meeting he had to use sublingual spray for the pain and breathlessness. Pls remember him in your daily prayers. Thank you all," she tweeted.

The family also brought food for the 3-time former prime minister, according to a report by dunyanews.tv.

The report said that Sharif's blood sugar and blood pressure were also recorded after which his personal doctor made slight changes in his medicines.

According to Dawn newspaper, no other leader from the party visited him after his daughter said that Sharif would not be seeing visitors owing to his ill health.

PML-N leaders gathered outside the jail and shouted slogans on the arrival of the family.

After meeting his son, Sharif's mother hoped that difficult time for him would be over soon.

My prayers are with my son and he will soon be released from jail, she was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

The National Accountability Bureau filed three corruption cases against Sharif on the orders of the Supreme Court following the publication of the Panama Papers.

Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law retired captain Mohammad Safdar were granted bail in September last year in the Avenfield properties case that involved buying of four luxury flats in London through fraudulent means.

He was acquitted in December last year in the Flagship Investments corruption case in the high-profile Panama Papers scandal.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A first indication of lands designated for cultivation of medicinal cannabis should be known soon.

Work aimed at identifying suitable lands for the cultivation of cannabis to be used in the medicinal cannabis industry here, is well underway.



Saboto Caesar, in addressing Parliament last week Monday, indicated that this work is being overseen by a special Cabinet committee, headed by the Montgomery Daniel, Minister responsible for lands, with the findings expected to be presented by the end of the month.

Parliamentary Representative for North Leeward, Roland Matthews had asked for the minister to state, among other things, the number of traditional farmers who have received lands, how many will receive licenses, and what areas will be made available.

Caesar explained that the operationalization of the medicinal cannabis authority was expected to commence last week.

And that work was now ongoing to establish areas for the cultivation of medicinal marijuana.

"Presently, traditional cultivators are submitting requests for land, with the intention to cultivate cannabis and other crops, Caesar said.

He, however, could not determine how many persons would be submitting such requests, but that the Medicinal Marijuana Act did not limit the number of traditional farmers who are eligible to receive licences.

The agriculture minister also said that the committee will be considering crown lands as possible sites for the cultivation of (medicinal) cannabis.

Areas currently being used for the cultivation of cannabis will also be considered, he said.

But he warned that areas designated for the cultivation of medicinal cannabis will be carefully demarcated. For example, he said, a plot of land next to a school will not be allowed to be used for the cultivation of medicinal marijuana.The NCP Friday named Solapur Zilla Parishad president Sanjay Shinde, who returned to the party, as its candidate from Madha Lok Sabha seat, and former state minister Ranajagjitsinh Patil as its nominee from Osmanabad constituency.

NCP chief Sharad Pawar made this announcement at an event in Baramati, where Shinde returned to the party fold five years after quitting it.

Shinde, a known critic of NCP's sitting Madha MP Vijaysinh Mohite-Patil, got elected to the Zilla Parishad as an independent and is backed by the Shiv Sena and BJP.

The NCP named Shinde from the seat after Mohite-Patil allegedly refused to contest the polls, to be held next month, despite the party offering him a ticket for the election.

Earlier this week, Mohite-Patil's son, Ranjitsinh, joined the BJP and the Parliamentarian said he had given his "consent" for the latter to join the ruling party. This had impelled the NCP to look for another candidate for Madha constituency.

"The NCP has nominated Sanjay Shinde from Madha Lok Sabha constituency. He had been with the NCP ideologically and will remain so. I am sure that people of Solapur will stand behind him," Pawar said the event.

Pawar also announced the candidature of former Maharashtra minister Ranajagjitsinh Patil for Osmanabad seat.

"He has used power in the interest of the people. Therefore, people should send these candidates working for them in the Lok Sabha," Pawar said.

The NCP has so far announced candidates for 19 constituencies, including the Lakshadweep seat. It has shared the Hatkanangale seat with ally Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana being represented by Raju Shetti.

Hit by the Narendra Modi wave in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the NCP had reported its lowest score in the election winning four seats. It had won the Bhandara-Gondiya constituency in a by-poll held in June last year.

The NCP will be contesting the election in Maharashtra, to be held in the state in four phases next month, in alliance with the Congress and other like-minded parties.

Maharashtra has 48 Lok Sabha seats.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Nepali national was arrested with 9.84 kg charas in Himachal Pradesh's Kullu district, police said Friday.

The woman was held during patrolling in Kasol under the Kullu police station area at 8.15 pm on Thursday, they said.

A case has been registered against her under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPS) Act, they said, adding further investigation was underway.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Three days after taking charge, Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant Friday called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, his office said.

This was Sawant's first visit to the national capital, where he also met some Union ministers, after being sworn-in as the chief minister following the demise of Manohar Parrikar on Sunday last.

"Chief Minister Pramod Sawant meets Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi," his office tweeted this evening.

During the day, Sawant also called on Union minsiters Rajnath Singh and Nitin Gadkari, who is also the BJP's Goa in- charge.

The 46-year-old BJP chief minister, who took oath in the wee hours of Tuesday, left for New Delhi a day later to meet Modi and other members of his Cabinet.

"The chief minister met Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in the afternoon and also Union Minister of Road Transport, Highways and Shipping Nitin Gadkari," his office said.

Gadkari had played a key role in holding talks with BJP's coalition partners on formation of the party-led govenment under the leadership of Sawant.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In a day without precedent, people across New Zealand observed the Muslim call to prayer Friday as the nation reflected on the moment one week ago when 50 people were slaughtered at two mosques.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and thousands of others congregated in leafy Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch to observe the call to prayer.

Thousands more were listening in on the radio or watching on television as the event was broadcast live. The prayer was followed by two minutes of silence.

Fahim Imam, 33, of Auckland, flew in Friday morning from New Zealand's largest city for the service. He was born and grew up in Christchurch but moved away three years ago.

"It's just amazing to see how the country and the community have come together blows my mind, actually," Imam said before the event.

"As soon as I got off the plane, I saw a sign someone was holding that said 'jenaza,' denoting Muslim funeral prayer. Others were offering free rides to and from the prayer service," Imam said.

"The moment I landed in Christchurch, I could feel the love here. I've never felt more proud to be a Muslim, or a Kiwi for that matter. It makes me really happy to be able to say that I'm a New Zealander," he added.

He called it surreal to see the mosque where he used to pray surrounded by flowers.

The observance comes the day after the government announced a ban on "military-style" semi-automatic firearms and high-capacity magazines like the weapons that were used in last Friday's attacks.

At least 42 people died at the Al Noor mosque and at least seven others at the nearby Linwood mosque after a white supremacist gunned them down.

An immediate sales ban went into effect Thursday to prevent stockpiling, and new laws would be rushed through Parliament that would impose a complete ban on the weapons, Ardern said.

"Every semi-automatic weapon used in the terrorist attack on Friday will be banned," Ardern said.

The gun legislation is supported not only by Ardern's liberal Labour Party but also the conservative opposition National Party, so it's expected to pass into law. New Zealand does not have a constitutional right to bear arms.

Among those planning to attend Friday's observance was Samier Dandan, the president of the Lebanese Muslim Association in Sydney and part of a 15-strong delegation of Muslim leaders that had flown to Christchurch.

"It was an ugly act of terrorism that occurred in a beautiful, peaceful city," Dandan said.

He said his pain couldn't compare with that of the families he'd been visiting who had lost loves ones. He was inspired by their resilience, he said.

"And I've got to give all my respect to the New Zealand prime minister, with her position and her actions, and it speaks loud," he said.

Ismat Fatimah, 46, said it was sad to look at the Al Noor mosque, which was still surrounded by construction barricades, armed police officers and a huge mound of flowers and messages.

"We're feeling stronger than before, and we are one," she said.

She said she prayed for the people who died.

"I'm just imagining what would be happening last Friday," she said. "People were running around so scared and helpless. It's just not right."



Erum Hafeez, 18 said she felt comforted by the overwhelming response from New Zealanders: "We are embraced by the community of New Zealand, we are not left behind and alone."



The imam of the Al Noor mosque, Gamal Fouda, said workers have been working feverishly to repair the destruction, some of whom offered their services for free. He expects the mosque to be open again by next week.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Muslim call to prayer rang out across New Zealand on Friday followed by two minutes of nationwide silence to mark a week since a white supremacist gunned down 50 people at two mosques in the city of Christchurch.

As the call was broadcast around the country, thousands -- including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and wounded survivors -- stood in a park opposite the mosque where the killing began, as the nation of 4.5 million came to a standstill.

New Zealand is still in shock following the killings by alleged shooter Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian national who had hoped to foment an ethnic war with his attacks.

But horrified Kiwis have responded with outpourings of love, with many embracing their Muslim neighbours on Friday in moving scenes across the country.

A muezzin in white skullcap issued the call to regular Friday prayers at 1.30 pm (0030 GMT) with chants of "Allahu Akhbar" (God is greatest) as thousands listened in Christchurch's Hagley Park, across from the Al Noor Mosque.

The country then fell silent for two minutes, with public gatherings in Auckland, Wellington and other cities.

In neighbouring Australia, people stopped in the streets and in shops to mark the moment.

Al Noor imam Gamal Fouda then took to the lectern at Hagley Park to denounce the "evil ideology of white supremacy" and praise Kiwis for their support.

"I look out and I see the love and compassion in the eyes of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and human beings from across the globe," Fouda said.

"This terrorist sought to tear our nation apart with an evil ideology... But, instead, we have shown that New Zealand is unbreakable." The Al Noor mosque remains closed as workers repair bullet-pocked walls and clean blood-spattered floors.

But after Friday's prayers, the sombre mood outside lightened markedly as non-Muslims approached the mosque to lay flowers or embrace and take selfies with Muslims.

Koro Tini, a 46-year-old Maori man with elaborate traditional facial tattoos and ceremonial native cloak, embraced and touched noses with a man who was among a group of Muslim worshippers.

"We weren't meaning to pose for pictures but people wanted to do it after the prayers. There's a sense of joy and rejoicing," Tini said.

Many women across the country wore headscarves in solidarity with Muslims.

"I can take my scarf off if I feel afraid. They cannot," said Kirsty Wilkinson, who came to Hagley Park with two friends, all in make-shift hijabs.

"The message I want to send is that hate cannot win." Tarrant took advantage of relatively lax New Zealand gun laws to acquire military-style weapons that he used to mow down 50 men, women and children -- ranging in age from three years to 77 -- and leaving dozens injured in an attack live-streamed online.

New Zealand police revealed on Friday that in October 2017 they met with Tarrant at his home and conducted a "security inspection" as part of the gun licence approval process.

The "correct process" was followed and the licence was granted, a police statement said.

Tarrant is in police custody and has been charged with murder.

Ardern on Thursday announced an immediate ban on assault rifles and military-style semi-automatic weapons, making good on a pledge to rid the country of the kinds of weapons the gunman used.

Police said that by Friday morning more than 1,000 people had contacted them about handing in firearms now in private possession, which are now outlawed and must be turned in under a government buyback scheme.

Major New Zealand newspapers published special tributes on Friday, with the front page of Christchurch daily The Press bearing the Arabic word "Salam" (Peace) and the names of the 50 killed.

The national mourning and moment of silence were broadcast on television networks, radio and across multiple local media websites.

"We are so happy that this prayer will be broadcast to the entire world so that everyone can be part of it," Mustafa Farouk, president of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, said in a statement announcing the prayer session.

Burials also resumed Friday in Christchurch, with 26 people expected to be laid to rest, ranging from three-year-old Mucaad Ibrahim to 77-year-old Muse Awale.

Salwa Mustafa, who lost her husband Khalid and 15-year-old son Hamza in the massacre, had defiant words despite her devastating loss.

"People say that... Muslims are terrorists. The whole world saw who is the terrorist," she said of the shooter.

"Muslims are people of peace and love, not terrorists. And I hope the whole world now can understand the real Islam, the reality of Islam.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)BJP general secretary Bhupender Yadav has sought to downplay the impact Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra may have in the Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh, saying she had been campaigning in the state even in the past polls.

Priyanka Gandhi has in the past campaigned for her brother and Congress president Rahul Gandhi (Amethi seat) and mother Sonia Gandhi who is a member of the Lok Sabha from Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh.

Asked what bearing her political entry can have on the elections, including in Uttar Pradesh, Yadav said, "I don't see any impact. She has been participating in poll campaigns earlier too."



"The people of this country have made up their mind to once again give their mandate to the decisive and progressive government led by Narendra Modi," Yadav told PTI-Bhasha.

He targeted the Congress and claimed the party's reputation has been declining.

"The Congress is going ahead with a negative agenda. The allegations levelled by the party leaders including its president Rahul Gandhi are proving to be false," he said.

Referring to the SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh and non-inclusion of the Congress in the combine for the Lok Sabha polls in the state, Yadav said, "Those left without any reputation are not being welcomed by any party for alliance."



Yadav said the opposition parties are "surrounded with contradictions" and claimed that their alliance in several important states is weak.

The BJP in-charge for Bihar termed as "misconception" the contention that the seat-sharing for the Lok Sabha polls in the state where the party is not contesting six seats that it won in 2014 reflected that it "bowed" to its ally JD(U) as seen by some analysts.

"There was nothing as such. This is a misconception," he said.

He said things such as poll percentage, seat-wise influence of parties and mutual agreement were taken into consideration by the BJP leadership to strengthen the alliance.

As per the seat-sharing agreement, out of the total 40 seats, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Janata Dal (United) headed by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar are contesting 17 seats each and the Lok Janshakti Party led by Ram Vilas Paswan in six.

Yadav rejected the allegations of the Opposition, including the Congress on issues such as Rafale fighter jet deal, saying "The charges have proven wrong. This is clear."



He expressed hope that the country will have a "stable, decisive and progressive government under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Kumkhop Trading Co. President Ri Jong Ho sweeps his hand over a table full of foods produced at his factory. There's a bowl of assorted candies and rice cakes, a plate of sausages and ham, slices of a French baguette and Russian dark bread. "We are doing fine," he says with a confident smile. "Just look."



But while model North Korean factories like Ri's, replete with a rooftop swimming pool ringed by banana trees, are filling the shelves of department stores in Pyongyang and elsewhere with ever better and fancier snack foods and sugary drinks, government officials and international aid organizations warn the nation could be on the verge of a major food shortage.

North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations, Kim Song, issued an unusual appeal for "urgent" food assistance last month.

North Korea blames the shortfall on a combination of bad weather and "barbaric" international sanctions. Critics argue the North is simply trying to use the situation to undermine support for sanctions without addressing the nuclear issues that led to them in the first place or the government's systemic economic problems.

Potential donors, meanwhile, face the old but still controversial question: should the world help a government that seems determined not to help its own people? ___



Kim, the ambassador to the U.N., said record-high temperatures, drought and flooding last year shaved more than 500,000 tons off of the 2018 harvest from the nearly 5 million tons produced in 2017. His statement was released just days ahead of Kim Jong Un's Feb. 27-28 summit with President Donald Trump in Hanoi.

He said North Korean farmers have been hamstrung by "dreadful" restrictions on imports of everything from tractors, harvesters and sowing machines to chemical fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and imports of refined petroleum. He also claimed that sanctions, or the fear of running afoul of them, are blocking or delaying legitimate assistance from possible donors and international organizations.

Humanitarian assistance from the U.N. agencies is "terribly politicized," he said, and sanctions against North Korea are "barbaric and inhuman." North Korea claims it is now "channeling all its efforts" to importing food and increasing the output of early and basic crops such as wheat and barley in coming months. Even if Pyongyang achieves its targets of importing 200,000 tons of food and producing 400,000 tons of early crops, supplies will still fall short by 1.486 million tons.

Hazel Smith, a North Korea expert at the University of London, believes food supplies in 2019 from all sources will only suffice to feed about three quarters of the population at the most basic survival level. But the shortage's severity likely won't be clear until July or August.

"Without substantial external aid ... it is difficult to see any outcome other than large-scale deaths from malnutrition-related causes this year," she wrote in a commentary earlier this month for the Pacific Forum policy research institute.

North Korea informed international organizations of the potential crisis in January.

Praveen Agrawal, the U.N. World Food Program's representative in Pyongyang, said the WFP and the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization are opening their own field assessment to determine if the North's figures are credible.

Sanctions have had both "indirect" and "unintentional" effects on the situation, he said.

Aid groups are hamstrung for a lack of support. The WFP, for example, has only gotten about $26 million for its operations in North Korea, less than half of its budget.

Humanitarian aid is explicitly exempted from sanctions, but getting virtually anything through customs has become slower and more cumbersome.

North Korea is chronically vulnerable to shortages.

In its statement to the U.N., the government said it has cut its average food ration per capita for a family of blue- or white-collar workers to 300 grams from the target 550 grams per person per day.

Agrawal said the government has never achieved that 550-gram target reaching closer to just 380 to 400 grams. With a population of about 25 million and food production that even at its peak in 2016 was only about 5.8 million tons, it has never had enough to go around.

"The situation can only get worse if they don't revisit and re-prioritize or help to address some of the issues through their ministries and technical areas," he said.

Smith, the North Korea watcher at the University of London, said North Korea has made progress in improving food security since the famines of the 1990s, and now has malnutrition levels well below those of much richer Asian countries, including India.

Agrawal said he has also seen more openness to engage and provide statistics over the past year as Kim has reached out to Beijing, Seoul and Washington. Smith believes the claim that the North doesn't deserve humanitarian help is fundamentally flawed.

"In all cases where humanitarian aid to stop people dying of starvation, disease and malnutrition-related illness is given everywhere in the world, it is given to the population precisely because of the failure of their government," she said in an email to The AP. "No government 'deserves' humanitarian aid but people do." All seem to agree the problem is real.

"Forty percent of this population is malnourished 11 million people," Agrawal said in an interview at his office in Pyongyang's diplomatic quarter. "That's a fact." ___ Back in the food factory, company president Ri said that over the past three years his directions have been to produce more, and better, products.

Kim has visited personally, twice, to drive that point home.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)New Zealand's deputy prime minister said the gunman accused of killing 50 people in two mosques in the South Pacific nation would spend the rest of his life in isolation in prison and called for solidarity to eradicate "hate-filled ideologies."



Winston Peters was speaking at an emergency session of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation's executive committee in Istanbul where he denounced last Friday's attacks as "an attack on all of us" in his country of "religious tolerance."



Australian Brenton Harrison Tarrant was arrested and charged with murder. Tarrant, 28, livestreamed the attack and released a manifesto describing his white supremacist views and how he planned the shootings.

Peters said "no punishment can match the depravity of his crime but the families of the fallen will have justice." He screened photographs of New Zealanders mourning the victims.

The comment appeared to be in response to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who during a speech earlier this week said: "If New Zealand fails to hold the attacker accountable, one way or another we will hold him to account."



Addressing the OIC meeting Friday, Erdogan thanked New Zealand for its "sensitivity and determined stance." He praised New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, saying her "reaction, the empathy displayed and her solidarity with Muslims" should serve as an example to all leaders.

Erdogan slammed populist politicians who he said encouraged attacks on Muslims and refugees.

"Politicians who pave themselves the road to power by alienating Muslims and creating enemies out of refugees, must pull themselves together."



He argued Muslims weren't the only ones affected by "rising cultural racism." But Erdogan himself has sparked outrage abroad by screening excerpts of Tarrant's video at campaign rallies to denounce Islamophobia but also to shore up Islamic and nationalist sentiments before the March 31 local elections.

Despite widespread criticism, Erdogan has continued showing the blurred out video with clear audio of automatic gunfire to thousands of people at rallies and broadcast live on Turkish televisions.

New Zealand has been trying to prevent the use of the video and Peters is expected to take up the issue. Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos of the shootings during the first 24 hours after the massacre.

Thousands of people gathered in New Zealand for Friday prayers and to pay their respects during a mass funeral.

Peters said the government was working to ensure Muslims' safety with an increased police presence, measures on social media and new gun control laws that already went into effect.

Erdogan called for measures to combat and outlaw Islamophobia. "We have to show our reaction in a strong way so that similar pains don't occur again and mosques are not turned into a bloodbath," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Bar Council of India has



suspended 5,970 advocates from practising law till they pay pending subscription of the Advocates Welfare Fund (AWF).

The Advocates Welfare Fund (BCI) Committee resorted to the action after giving several notices and warning to lawyers.

The Supreme Court has made it clear that lawyers who do not subscribe to the fund cannot be permitted to practice before any court in the country.

As per Rule 40, Chapter-II, Part VI of the Bar Council of India Rules, every person who enrols as an advocate is mandated to subscribe for the AWF.

The same must be renewed every three years.

From 1993, the subscription was converted for life time and it was collected mandatorily during enrolment.

However, advocates enrolled before 1993 still continue to pay the subscription on yearly basis.

As the number of defaulting advocates were found to be over 7,000, in November the bar council issued notices to all these lawyers and released the list of defaulting lawyers in the official website of the state bar council.

Despite the notices and warning, 5,970 advocates failed to make the pending payments of the subscription within the stipulated time, inviting suspension.

On March 21, the Advocates Welfare Fund Committee passed an unanimous resolution suspending the defaulting lawyers.

Subsequently, in a March 23 communication, C Raja Kumar, secretary to the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, officially informed them of the suspension.

"It is hereby informed that the Advocates Welfare (BCI) Committee has suspended the right of practice of 5,970 advocates in any court, tribunal or other authority till the payment of subscription under Rule 40, Part VI Chapter II of the Bar Council of India Rules vide Resolution No 242/2019 dated March 22," the communication said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistani troops on Friday resorted to fresh mortar shelling along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district, while two Army soldiers were injured in overnight shelling from across the border in Jammu and Rajouri districts, officials said.

"At about 1545 hours, Pakistani army initiated unprovoked ceasefire violation by shelling with mortars and firing of small arms along LoC in Mendhar Sector in Poonch district," PRO defence said.

The Indian Army is retaliating befittingly, he said.

Lt Gen Ranbir Singh, Army Commander, Northern Command accompanied by White Knight Corps Commander



Lt Gen Paramjit Singh on Friday visited forward posts in Rajouri and Reasi sectors to interact with soldiers and review the operational preparedness.

Pakistani troops continued night-long mortar shelling and firing in Pallanwala, Sunderbani and Nowshera sectors, officials said.

The two Army jawans, who were injured in Pallanwala sector, were admitted to a hospital, they said.

On Thursday, an Army jawan was killed as Pakistani troops shelled forward areas and Indian posts with artillery and mortar bombs along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister of St. Lucia Allen Chastanet telling reporters about his governments position as it relates to LIAT.

A request from LIAT shareholders governments for Saint Lucia to inject some US$600,000 into the operations of the cash-strapped airline, has been met with an element of rejection by that countrys Prime Minister.



Prime Minister Allen Chastanet last Monday, in a pre-cabinet briefing, when asked about whether St. Lucia would be willing to invest in the "loss-making regional airline, said his initial response would have to be, "No!

However, after a pause, he said that on a matter of principle, St. Lucia would consider providing support to the carrier, once specific conditions were met.

He spoke of the primary condition being that the airline undergoes significant restructuring, and that such restructuring must be in the interest of the region.

"Saint Lucias position is very clear. We would not consider doing any of those things (injecting cash into LIAT) unless there is a significant restructuring of LIAT, that we would know the cost of running LIAT is not going to be what it currently is, Chastanet said, according to LOOP News.

Prime Minister Chastanet went on say to reporters that any financial input by St. Lucia at this time had to be predicated on a restructuring that will see LIAT providing adequate service to the region "at the most effective and efficient cost structure.

He also expressed the position that there should be competition. In this light, he referred to Inter-Caribbean Airline flying into Saint Lucia from Dominica and the British Virgin Islands, and their desire to base two to four 30-seater planes in Saint Lucia, which he said would be able to fly to Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana and Antigua.

The call for more Caribbean countries to consider investing in LIAT was articulated by Antiguas Prime Minister Gaston Browne on behalf of his shareholder colleagues Barbados, Dominica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.A prominent Islamic scholar in Pakistan survived an assassination attempt on Friday as unidentified gunmen opened fire on his convoy, killing the cleric's two guards and injuring two others.

Maulana Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, who runs a religious seminary and is known for preaching tolerance, and his wife were in one of the two cars targeted by four gunmen on motorcycles near a flyover here.

In the firing, the cleric and his wife escaped unhurt but a police guard and a private guard were killed, police said.

The cleric's driver and a bystander were also injured in the attack, police said.

According to police officials, the religious scholar was the prime target but he remained completely unhurt.

Bullet shells of 9 mm pistol have been collected from the crime scene, police said.

Prime Minister Imran Khan condemned the incident and expressed his anguish at the killings of Usmani's guards.

"Scholars such as Mufti Usmani are assets to the country and the Islamic world," he said in a statement released by the PM House. "Provincial government should ensure the security of religions scholars."



The prime minister labelled the attack on Mufti Usmani a "deep and disgusting conspiracy" and ordered that "all possible measures be taken to expose it".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan held talks with his Malaysian counterpart Mahathir Mohamad here on Friday to strengthen bilateral economic and commercial ties.

The deliberations are part of Malaysian Prime Minister's ongoing 3-day visit to the Muslim-majority nation. He arrived in Islamabad on Thursday.

We deliberated on ways to enhance our economic relationship with Pakistan and there is no doubt that both of us stand to benefit from increased trade, Mahathir said during a joint press conference addressed by the two leaders.

He said that they have discussed the possibility of foreign direct investment and outlined other measures that the two nations need to take to boost trade.

Appreciating the Malaysian Prime Minister's stance against corruption and the country's development under his leadership, Khan said, "we firmly believe that nations are not poor and, rather, it is corruption that leads to a loss of resources. Corruption destroys institutions and negates efforts for human development.

The two leaders also spoke against rising Islamophobia and agreed to take steps to address this issue.

This is our priority. We must work to improve the perception of Muslims in the world. We must change the prevailing atmosphere of fear; we must also realise that fighting back does not always mean killing each other, Mahathir said.

Mahathir, 93, will be the guest of honour at Pakistan Day Parade on Saturday. He said, I am happy to join you in celebrating Pakistan Day.

The two sides are also expected to sign a Memorandum of Understanding worth USD 800-900 million of investments by Malaysian investors during the visit.

The two premiers would also speak at the round table meeting of the chief executive officers, who are interested to invest in Pakistan's automobile and telecommunication sectors.

The Malaysian Prime Minister will also meet President Arif Alvi and Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan and Malaysia Friday agreed to elevate their bilateral relation to strategic level and decided to strengthen economic and commercial ties as Prime Minister Imran Khan held talks with his Malaysian counterpart Mahathir Mohamad here.

The deliberations are part of Malaysian Prime Minister's ongoing 3-day visit to the Muslim-majority nation. He arrived in Islamabad on Thursday.

Mahathir held talks with Khan at one-on-one and delegation level, according to a joint statement.

"Both Leaders agreed that the existing relations between Pakistan-Malaysia be elevated to a strategic partnership. It marked a new level of the bilateral cooperation between both countries in various fields, namely trade in palm oil, agricultural products, food retail, halal products, automotive parts, energy, science and technology, and telecommunication investment," according to joint statement.

Both sides reaffirmed their shared desire to maintain close high-level contacts, deepen friendly exchanges of visits and cooperation in all fields, as well as, to actively promote Pakistan-Malaysia relations.

The two side agreed to promote cooperation in the automotive industry and the two Prime Ministers jointly officiated the symbolic ground-breaking ceremony of PROTON plant in Islamabad to boost the manufacturing and services industry for both countries.

The two nations reaffirmed the importance of the cooperation between the private sectors of both countries and both leaders witnessed the signing of agreements and Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs) for investment and cooperation, particularly in the telecommunication sector.

Earlier, Advisor to Prime Minister Khan on Commerce Razzak Dawood said that MoUs worth USD 800-900 million would be singed but their exact worth was not declared after signing ceremony.

However, Finance Minister Asad Umar told the media that MoUs were about five big projects. He also said that Malaysia was interested in buying JF-17 Thunder jets from Pakistan.

Umar also said that Pakistan would provide anti-tank missiles to Malaysia.

According to the joint statement, the two leaders acknowledged that MoU singed for the investment would serve to promote and strengthen the economic ties between both countries.

Malaysia expressed hope that Pakistan would continue to import more Malaysian palm oil and palm oil-based products, as well as, remove any non-tariff barriers on Malaysian goods and products.

Both stressed that terrorism cannot be associated with any religion or belief.

The two leaders also spoke against rising Islamophobia and agreed that steps should be taken to address this issue.

"Pakistan and Malaysia both understand the need to find ways to combat Islamophobia. This is our priority. We must work to improve the perception of Muslims in the world. We must change the prevailing atmosphere of fear. We must also realise that fighting back does not always mean killing each other," said Mahathir.

Mahathir will be the guest of honour at Pakistan Day parade on Saturday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India on Friday accused Pakistan of trying to politicise the court verdict in Samjhauta Express terror case to "deflect" attention from its "failure" to bring to justice perpetrators of several terror attacks in India and the region.

External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said there was a complete lack of understanding on the Pakistani side about how India's independent judiciary functions.

Last week, a special court in Panchkula in Haryana acquitted all four accused, including Swami Aseemanand, in the case. Sixty-eight people, mostly Pakistanis, were killed in the terror attack on Samjhauta Express in February, 2007.

On March 20, Pakistan Foreign Office summoned the Indian High Commissioner in Islamabad to protest against the verdict.

"We reject Pakistan's attempt to politicise the matter. It is being done to deflect attention from their failure in bringing perpetrators of several terrorist attacks in India and the region to justice," Kumar said at a media briefing.

He said due process was followed in the case and the court has given the verdict based on materials available to it.

"We respect the verdict of the court. We got no cooperation whatsoever from Pakistan including our request to serve summons to witnesses who are in Pakistan," Kumar said.

"We demand that Pakistan should take immediate, credible and irreversible measures against cross-border terrorism without any discrimination," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday used Congress leader Sam Pitroda's comments, questioning the government's aggressive action against Pakistan post-Pulwama terror attack, to tear into the Opposition, saying the remarks only reflect that Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror.

Leading the BJP charge, Modi said Pitroda, Congress president Rahul Gandhi's "most trusted advisor and guide", has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of his party, "ironically by demeaning India's armed forces".

Pakistan celebrates its 'National Day' on March 23.

Taking on the Congress while reacting to Pitroda's remarks, Modi posted a series of tweets using the hashtag 'Janta Maaf Nahi Karegi' (people will not forgive), and said, "Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!"



Pitroda, Indian Overseas Congress chief, had earlier told media that one cannot "jump on entire nation" (Pakistan) just because some people from there "came here and attacked".

In an apparent reference to Pulwama terror attack, the Congress leader said attacks happen all the time and then referred to the Mumbai terror attack in 2008 when the Congress-led UPA was in power, saying the then government could have sent its planes but that is "not the right approach".

He also sought more facts from the Modi government on Balakot air strikes last month while referring to international media reports questioning claims that over 300 terrorists were killed in these strikes.

BJP president Amit Shah and Union minister Arun Jaitley also targeted the Congress with Shah claiming that the opposition's heart beats for terrorists while his party's beats for the Tiranga (national flag).

Under attack by BJP's top leadership, Pitroda said he was "baffled" by Modi's reaction to his questions which he was entitled to ask, asserting that he was neither questioning the armed forces as being alleged by the Prime Minister.

"I am just saying give me more facts," Pitroda said.

With the BJP using the nationalism pitch to corner the Congress, the opposition party distanced itself from Pitroda's comments.

At a press conference, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said, "Whether it is Pitroda or any individual, such comments may be their personal opinion and the Congress has nothing to do with them.

He asserted that the Pulwama terror attack was a "grave national security failure" of the Modi government while the Balakot air strike was a shining example of the valour of the Indian Air Force.

"The truth is that Prime Minister Modi is hiding behind the valour and bravery of our Army and Air Force, and is playing on the opinion of an individual leader, which is his personal opinion and not of the party. He is playing such as he does not wish to reply on the charges of corruption against him and his government," Surjewala added.

Latching onto Pitroda's comments, Shah tweeted, "Difference between the Opposition and BJP is clear. They suspect our army, we are proud of our army. Their heart beats for terrorists, ours beats for the Tiranga. This election, through the power of your vote, do a surgical strike on the Congress culture."



Jaitley dubbed the Congress leader's remarks as "unfortunate" and a "blessing for Pakistan's narrative".

BJP leaders, including Modi, also latched onto Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav's claim that the Pulwama terror attack killing 40 CRPF personnel was a "conspiracy" and "big people will be caught if it is probed".

"Opposition is the natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners of our armed forces. This reprehensible statement by a senior leader like Ram Gopal Ji insults all those who have given their lives in protecting Kashmir. It humiliates the families of our martyrs," Modi said.

Jaitley said no country except Pakistan has criticised the surgical strikes or the air strikes conducted by India.

"The fact that senior Congress leaders are speaking the same language is unfortunate and also hurts the sentiments of the country. To say that the Pulwama attack was self-engineered is a blessing for Pakistan's narrative," he said.

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav Friday said sacrifices of the armed forces should never be questioned, but advised the government "to stop pretending to be the Indian Army".

He also said that in a democracy it was the "fundamental right" of politicians to ask questions.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An all-out political slugfest broke out on Friday after Congress leader Sam Pitroda questioned the government's aggressive action against Pakistan post-Pulwama terror strike, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi lambasting the Opposition, saying the remarks only reflect that the Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror.

Leading the BJP charge, Modi also said Pitroda, Congress president Rahul Gandhi's "most trusted advisor and guide", has kick-started the Pakistan's 'National Day' celebrations on behalf of his party, "ironically by demeaning India's armed forces".

Pakistan celebrates its 'National Day' on March 23.

Countering Modi's tirade, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said, "the truth is that Prime Minister Modi is hiding behind the valour and bravery of our Army and Air Force, and is playing on the opinion of an individual leader, which is his personal opinion and not of the party. He is playing such as he does not wish to reply on the charges of corruption against him and his government."



Pitroda, Indian Overseas Congress chief, had told media that one cannot "jump on entire nation" (Pakistan) just because some people from there "came here and attacked".

In an apparent reference to Pulwama terror attack, the Congress leader said attacks happen all the time and then referred to the Mumbai terror attack in 2008 when the Congress-led UPA was in power, saying the then government could have sent its planes but that is "not the right approach".

He also sought more facts from the Modi government on Balakot air strikes last month while referring to international media reports questioning claims that over 300 terrorists were killed in these strikes.

Taking on the Congress while reacting to Pitroda's remarks, Modi posted a series of tweets using the hashtag 'Janta Maaf Nahi Karegi' (people will not forgive), and said, "Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!"



BJP president Amit Shah and Union minister Arun Jaitley also targeted the Congress with Shah claiming that the opposition's heart beats for terrorists while his party's beats for the Tiranga (national flag).

Under attack by BJP's top leadership, Pitroda said he was "baffled" by Modi's reaction to his questions which he was entitled to ask, asserting that he was neither questioning the armed forces as being alleged by the Prime Minister.

"I am just saying give me more facts," Pitroda said.

With the BJP using the nationalism pitch to corner the Congress, the opposition party distanced itself from Pitroda's comments.

At a press conference, Surjewala said, "Whether it is Pitroda or any individual, such comments may be their personal opinion and the Congress has nothing to do with them."



He asserted that the Pulwama terror attack was a "grave national security failure" of the Modi government while the Balakot air strike was a shining example of the valour of the Indian Air Force.

Latching onto Pitroda's comments, Shah tweeted, "Difference between the Opposition and BJP is clear. They suspect our army, we are proud of our army. Their heart beats for terrorists, ours beats for the Tiranga. This election, through the power of your vote, do a surgical strike on the Congress culture."



Jaitley dubbed the Congress leader's remarks as "unfortunate" and a "blessing for Pakistan's narrative".

Union minister Sushma Swaraj also tweeted, "Sam Pitroda - I am shocked to see your remarks. The whole world is with us in our fight against terror except few like you and your patrons."



BJP leaders, including Modi, also attacked Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav's for his claim that the Pulwama terror attack was a "conspiracy" and "big people will be caught if it is probed".

"Opposition is the natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners of our armed forces. This reprehensible statement by a senior leader like Ram Gopal Ji insults all those who have given their lives in protecting Kashmir. It humiliates the families of our martyrs," Modi said.

Jaitley said no country except Pakistan has criticised the surgical strikes or the air strikes conducted by India.

"The fact that senior Congress leaders are speaking the same language is unfortunate and also hurts the sentiments of the country. To say that the Pulwama attack was self-engineered is a blessing for Pakistan's narrative," he said.

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav Friday said sacrifices of the armed forces should never be questioned, but advised the government "to stop pretending to be the Indian Army".

He also said that in a democracy it was the "fundamental right" of politicians to ask questions.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Congress president Rahul Gandhi Friday hit out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing him of not thinking about the welfare of watchmen, "behind whom you are hiding".

In a Facebook post, Gandhi tagged a media report about 10,000 watchmen protesting against poor wages.

"At least, think about those behind whom you are hiding," Gandhi said in the post, attacking the Prime Minister who has launched a campaign -- 'Main bhi chowkidar' (I too am a watchman).

The media report stated that 10,000 chowkidars in Jharkhand rue unpaid salaries.

Gandhi has been attacking the prime minister accusing him of "theft" in the Rafale deal and has used the slogan "chowkidar chor hai (watchman is thief)" to target him.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)There was no room for "jihadi outfits and jihadi culture" in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan has said amidst intense global pressure on his government to rein in the terrorist outfits operating from its soil after the Pulwama attack.

Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district in February 14.

India launched a counter-terror operation in Balakot. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured its pilot, who was handed over to India on March 1.

Talking to editors and senior journalists here, Khan said that India's NDA government wants to win the general election based on its of hatred against Pakistan, The Express Tribune reported.

He warned that the security risk at the Line of Control (LoC) persists until elections are held in India and asked the nation to be prepared at all times.

The armed forces of the country are ever ready and would give a befitting response in case of any military aggression, the prime minister said.

Khan said that all the political parties have agreed to the National Action Plan and by now the militant groups have been proscribed. Further action was being taken against them as his government could not allow any such activity on the soil of Pakistan.

Tracing the history of jihadi outfits and "jihadi culture", he said "these groups have existed since the days of the US-led Afghan war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and have operated from here for decades", Dawn reported.

He said that there was no room now for any such group in the country, as Pakistan would like the world to believe that it was not only a peace-loving country but it was sincere in eradicating this culture of "jihadism" and terrorism through short-term and long-term policies.

Khan said that India was trying to push Pakistan in the blacklist of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and if that happened, the country would be facing a lot of economic problems.

The international terror financing watchdog FATF last month decided to continue the 'Grey' listing of Pakistan for its failure to stop funding of terrorist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamat-ud-Dawa.

In June 2018, Pakistan was placed in the 'Grey' list and given a 27-point action plan by the FATF. This Plan was reviewed as the last Plenary in October 2018 and for the second time in this week-long meeting.

Speaking about the law and order situation in the country, Khan said that banned organisations should have been eliminated a long time ago, but it was his government which was taking action against them.

He said that the government was spending huge amount of money to bring them into the mainstream.

The US has warned Pakistan that another terror attack on India will prove to be "extremely problematic" as it asked Islamabad to take more "concrete and sustained" actions to rein in terror groups including the JeM and the LeT.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Congress on Friday said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP should stop using an individual's "personal opinion" to "spread venom", in an apparent reference to comments by Sam Pitroda on Balakot air strike which have triggered a political row.

Congress' chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said his party has "unequivocally" said the Pulwama terror attack was a "grave national security failure" of the Modi government.

Balakot air strike was a shining example of the valour of the Indian Air Force and Pakistan's terror outfits like JeM and LeT and others will never succeed in their evil design, he said.

"Modiji and BJP should stop using an individual's personal opinion to spread venom! Instead of hiding behind the sacrifice of our armed forces, PM must answer to Nation on -- jobs crisis, agrarian distress, demonetisation & GST disasters & economic downturn," Surjewala tweeted.

Prime Minister Modi, using the hashtag 'Janta maaf nahi karegi' (people will not forgive) in a tweet, attacked Indian Overseas Congress chief Pitroda for reportedly saying "Eight people(26/11 terrorists) come and do something, you don't jump on entire nation(Pakistan). Naive to assume that just because some people came here &attacked, every citizen of that nation is to be blamed. I don't believe in that way".

Tagging a report carrying Pitroda's remarks, Modi said, "The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning India's armed forces. Shame!"



"Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew -- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!."



Several BJP leaders, including BJP chief Amit Shah, slammed Pitroda for his remarks.

Amid the controversy, Pitroda on Friday asked the government to come out with "more facts" on the Balakot air strikes, and said that he was "baffled" by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reaction to his question which he was entitled to ask.

Surjewala too slammed Modi'd remarks and alleged that Prime Minister Modi was "busy shooting films in Corbett Park" and giving a speech as nation mourned Pulwama martyrs.

The Modi government was "clueless as RDX, MI carbines and rocket launchers were smuggled in to be used in Pulwama", the Congress' chief spokesperson said.

The BJP government released Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar and other terrorists, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Top US diplomat Mike Pompeo warned on Friday of Shiite militant group Hezbollah's "destabilising activities" as he visited Lebanon on the latest leg of a regional tour to build a united front against Iran.

He flew in from Israel a day after he became the first high-ranking American official to visit the Western Wall in annexed east Jerusalem with an Israeli prime minister.

His visit also comes just hours after US President Donald Trump said Washington should recognise Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, breaking with the policy of successive administrations as well as UN Security Council resolutions.

In a meeting with parliament speaker Nabih Berri, who is himself a Shiite, Pompeo warned of the "destabilising activities" of Hezbollah, an Iran-backed group that is targeted by US sanctions but holds cabinet posts in Lebanon.

"He highlighted US concerns about Hezbollah's destabilising activities in Lebanon and the region and the risks posed to Lebanon's security, stability and prosperity," US deputy spokesman Robert Palladino said.

Hezbollah has backed government forces in neighbouring Syria in the civil war that broke out in 2011.

Pompeo and Berri also discussed "the need to maintain calm along the boundary between Lebanon and Israel", Palladino said.

Lebanon and its southern neighbour are still technically at war, even after Israeli troops withdrew from the south of the country in 2000.

Israel and Hezbollah fought a devastating month-long war in 2006, and skirmishes still erupt along a UN-patrolled demarcation line.

The secretary of state then met Prime Minister Saad Hariri to discuss "the latest developments in Lebanon and the region", according to the premier's office.

Earlier, he met the country's first female interior minister.

"Pompeo met in Beirut today with Lebanese Minister of the Interior Raya al-Hassan," Palladino said.

They "discussed the regional and internal security challenges facing Lebanon and how the United States can help support the interior ministry's efforts to maintain safety and stability inside Lebanon."



Hassan became the first woman interior minister in Lebanon and the Middle East in a cabinet line-up unveiled in late January following an eight-month delay.

The United States considers Hezbollah a "terrorist" organisation, and has targeted it with tough sanctions.

Lebanon's new cabinet includes three posts for Hezbollah, including at the helm of the health ministry.

The Shiite movement is the only group that did not disarm after Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war.

Earlier this week, Lebanese intelligence said a Lebanese-Canadian dual national had been arrested on suspicion of spying for Israel.

Pompeo is expected to leave Lebanon on Saturday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)HRH The Duchess of Cornwall was captivated by the innocence and charm of our children.

Her Royal Highness, The Duchess of Cornwall, rallied support for 2019 edition of the Queens Commonwealth Essay Competition during her visit here.

She did so at one of the scheduled activities arranged during the brief visit made by Prince Charles and the Duchess on Wednesday.

The Duchess, who is also the Societys Vice- Patron, commended St Vincent and the Grenadines for boasting 37 entrants in the competition in 2018, up from one the previous year.

"So, I am hoping that this year you can double, or even triple that number, she said during her visit to the St Vincent Girls High School, one of the scheduled stops/activities for HRH.

She sat in with students representing various secondary school students in the country.

"It seems that St Vincent and the Grenadines is leading the way in this corner of the world, the Duchess continued.

She then urged young people here to encourage others to participate in the competition which is aimed at giving a voice to individuals under the age of 18 from across the Commonwealth.

The competition runs until June 1, 2019, when one winner and runner-up from both junior and senior categories will travel to London.

The 2019 competition was launched in Ghana last year, and entrants can write stories, poems or essays based on the theme: A Connected Commonwealth.

Top performers in last years competition received their certificates, and the Duchess made a donation of some books to the GHS and the New Grounds Primary School.

Earlier, she attended a small cultural presentation at the St Vincent and the Grenadines Community College at Villa.

During that stop, the Duchess also visited an exhibition comprising displays by a panel of female entrepreneurs, and was involved in a brief closed-door discussion with various groups (e.g. police, Soroptimist Intl.) on the issue of domestic violence.

The visit was part of a tour by Prince Charles, the successor to the throne, and HRH the Duchess of Cornwall to the Caribbean, which also included visits to St Lucia, Barbados, St Kitts/Nevis, Grenada.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says it's "possible" that President Donald Trump is like Queen Esther, who saved Jews in the Old Testament.

Pompeo made the statement in an interview with a Christian broadcast outlet this week on a trip to the Middle East.

The interviewer asked if Trump is "like Queen Esther," who interceded with her husband to save Jews in what was then Persia and is now Iran. Trump has backed new sanctions on Iran aimed at reducing its ability to threaten Israel.

Pompeo said in response that "As a Christian, I certainly believe that's possible." The secretary of state recently drew criticism for holding a briefing exclusively for "faith-based" journalists.

Pompeo on Friday vowed new measures against what he said was the "threat" from Iran.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)President Ram Nath Kovind will next week visit Croatia, Bolivia and Chile and hold talks with the leadership of these countries to strengthen ties in keys sectors such as trade, investment and renewable energy.

Kovind will first visit Croatia from March 25-28 in what would be the first visit by an Indian president to the European country, Vijay Thakur Singh, Secretary East in the Ministry of External Affairs, said at a media briefing.

During the visit, Kovind will participate in the India-Croatia Business Forum. He will also deliver an address at the University of Zagreb.

He will hold talks with his Croatian counterpart Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, Singh said.

From Croatia, Kovind will head to Bolivia on March 28 for a three-day visit, the first high-level visit to the Latin American country since the establishment of diplomatic ties, the secretary east said.

Kovind will hold restricted and delegation-level talks with Bolivian President Evo Morales during the visit.

He will also participate in a India-Bolivia business meet, address university students, and interact with Indian community members during his stay in Bolivia.

On March 30, he will head to Chile where he will hold talks with the restricted and delegation-level format with Sebastin Piera.

During the visit, Kovind will participate in a business meet, address University of Chile and interact with members of the Indian community, Singh said.

Renewable energy and defence cooperation will be on the agenda during Kovind's talks in Chile, she said.

"The president's visit to the three countries will have a full agenda...We are hopeful that the president's visit will reinvigorate our bilateral ties and provide new direction to our relationship with these three countries," she said.

Kovind will head back on April 2 and will make a transit halt in Cape Town in South Africa during which he will pay tribute to the late former South African president Nelson Mandela and interact with the Indian community.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Real estate consultant SILA group has entered into the property development business and is constructing a luxury housing project near Mumbai with an investment of about Rs 70 crore, a top company official said.

The Mumbai-based firm commenced operations in 2010 as an integrated facility management company, but later ventured into project and construction management as well as real estate advisory and consulting services.

"We see an unique opportunity in getting into real estate development business. With new realty law RERA and the GST, there is level playing field for new players," SILA group founder and MD Sahil Vora said.

"We have tied up with land owners to develop this luxury project at Alibaug comprising 64 units. The prices will be in the range of Rs 1.2-2 crore," he said.

Construction work and sales bookings would start next month. The project would be developed in two phases in the next four years.

Vora said the construction cost is estimated at Rs 70 crore and sales realisation at Rs 120 crore. The construction cost would be met through internal accruals and bank loans.

He said the company is in talks with land owners to acquire two large-sized housing projects in Mumbai and the deal could be finalised in 2-3 months.

On the overall business, he said the company's turnover could double this fiscal from about Rs 65 crore in the last financial year.

SILA has operations across the country with an employee strength of 6,000.

Under facility management, the company provides various services including housekeeping, security, and mechanical electrical and plumbing (MEP) maintenance.

Some of its big clients include J&K Bank, Mumbai International Airport (T2), ICICI Lombard, Adlabs Imagica, WeWork, Tata Sons, Piramal Enterprises, Hikal Lifesciences, Deltin Hotels, Polycab, Embassy, Featherlite Developers, HDFC and Ahuja Towers.

In 2015, SILA invested in Envocare Pest Control and launched an on-demand services vertical called 'Mr Homecare'.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Protests erupted in various parts of West Bengal after the BJP, in its first list of 28 candidates, nominated its veterans and defectors from the ruling Trinamool Congress to take on Mamata Banerjee's party in the state.

With old-timers being overlooked in favour of turncoats and newcomers, protestors gathered outside BJP offices in various parts of the state and, in some places, put up posters of rejected ticket aspirants outside the offices.

BJP state vice-president Raj Kamal Pathak submitted his resignation after he was denied a party ticket.

The saffron party, which bagged two Lok Sabha seats in the state in the 2014 elections, is now targeting 23 of the state's 42 constituencies.

Of its 28 candidates, nearly 25 are new faces, with a thrust on active political workers rather than greenhorns from the glamour world.

Unlike the TMC which had 18 new faces and a mix of



old-timers and greenhorns, hardcore politicians and personalities from the film industry, the BJP has put faith on its own leaders and defectors from other parties.

"If after serving the party for three decades and holding the post of vice-president do not make me qualified to get a party ticket, it is better to resign from the post," Pathak said.

The veteran BJP leader wanted to contest from Hooghly district, but he was overlooked in favour of a newcomer in the party.

BJP state president Dilip Ghosh said efforts will be made to pacify the dissidents.

"There can be resentment in some places, but everything can be sorted out through discussions," BJP state secretary Rahul Sinha said.

This is not the first time the BJP has faced such protests. During the Kolkata Municipal Corporation polls in 2015, several ticket aspirants staged protest rallies outside the party office.

Of the candidates, five had recently defected to the saffron party from the Trinamool Congress and one from the CPI(M).

Union minister and BJP MP from Asansol Lok Sabha constituency Babul Supriyo has been renominated from the same seat and is pitted against actor Moon Moon Sen of the TMC.

State BJP president Dilip Ghosh will contest from Medinipur seat against TMC leader Manas Bhunia.

BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha will take on TMC heavyweight Sudip Bandopadhyay in Kolkata North Lok Sabha seat.

State BJP vice-president and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's grandnephew, Chandra Kumar Bose will contest from Kolkata South Lok Sabha seat.

Former IPS officer Bharati Ghosh, once known to be close to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, will be fighting against TMC candidate and actor Dipak Adhikary, popularly known as 'Dev', from Ghatal Lok Sabha constituency.

The BJP has fielded former Trinamool Congress MLA Arjun Singh from Barrackpur Lok Sabha seat. Singh, who had recently joined the saffron party, has been pitted against TMC's Dinesh Trivedi.

In Coochbebar Lok Sabha seat, the party has fielded former TMC youth leader Nishith Pramanik, while in Jadavpur, expelled TMC MP Anupam Hazra will contest against TMC's Mimi Chakraborty, an actor by profession.

Another former TMC MP Soumitra Khan, who joined the BJP in January, has been given ticket from Bishnupur (SC) Lok Sabha seat.

Former CPI(M) MLA Khagen Murmu, who too had switched over to the BJP, will contest from Malda North seat against TMC's Mausam Benazir Noor, who had recently defected to the party from the Congress, in Malda Uttar seat.

Former TMC leader Sreerupa Mitra Chowdhury, who had contested elections on a TMC ticket from New Delhi, is the BJP candidate from the neighbouring Malda South seat.

There are four women candidates and one Muslim nominee in the first list.

The BJP in minority-dominated seats such as Malda South, Malda North and Basirhat did not field any candidate from the community.

"We do not believe in giving tickets just on the basis of religion. For us winnability is the biggest criteria," said a state BJP leader.

The Lok Sabha elections in the state will be held from April 11 till May 19 in seven phases.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Reliance Industries, operator of the world's largest oil refining complex, Friday said it has never sidestepped US sanctions against and has completely stopped supplying fuel to the Latin American nation.

Since the imposition of US sanctions, Reliance has been in continuous communication with the US Department of State regarding its activities in Venezuela, the company said in a statement.

"Reliance has been transparent with US authorities and also has provided detailed feedback to the US Department of State as they were formulating and adjusting US policy regarding product shipments to Venezuela," it said.

"Reliance not only has complied with US sanctions laws, but also has done its best to adjust its dealings with on a voluntary basis to reflect the ongoing changes in US policy."



The company said it has "stopped shipments of diluent naphtha to Venezuela, and has reduced its purchases of Venezuelan to well below its contracted levels."



On reports of its refineries in Jamnagar continuing to send fuel to in violation of sanctions, Reliance said "a few transportation fuel shipments to Venezuela, treated as offsets for receipts, were committed and in-transit when there were no specific restrictions to such transactions. They were all fuels refined in "Reliance will continue its transactions in full compliance of prevailing sanctions, it added.Their voices have thundered across this heartsick city, in parks and at flower memorials and schools. Day after day, the students of Christchurch have gathered, feet smashing the ground in unison as they chant the words of their nation's indigenous people in an outpouring of grief and love and support.

In the aftermath of last week's deadly shooting spree on two mosques blamed on a white supremacist, the young people of Christchurch have found solace in an old tradition: a Maori ceremonial dance called the haka.

To much of the world, the haka is largely associated with New Zealand's rugby team, the All Blacks, who perform it before games. That has led to a misconception that it is solely a war dance meant to inspire fear.

But though it may have started out that way, the haka has evolved to mean so much more.

"Whenever I haka, I feel like I am from the tribe, standing with them that all their spirits are with us," said high school student Georgia Horiana Myers Meihana, after she and her classmates finished reciting a karakia, or Maori prayer, at a flower memorial.

"To us, it doesn't feel like we're just shouting words." Millions around the world have viewed videos of the students' hakas over the past week, with many people commenting that they have been moved to tears, even if they don't understand what the Maori words mean. Such a reaction is not surprising, says Tapeta Wehi, founder of the New Zealand performance group The Haka Experience.

"I've performed haka around the world, and that's normal," Wehi says. "I remember performing it in Germany, and I had these big German guys coming up to me with tears in their eyes, wondering why they're crying.

It's the inner spirit that we portray." Though hakas were traditionally performed by the Maori people in preparation for battle, they are not all about war, Wehi says. Hakas are performed to celebrate and to mourn, and are often part of important events such as funerals or 21st birthdays.

In the aftermath of the shootings, Wehi says, people across New Zealand have performed hakas to show support and respect for the victims and their families.

For the students, the haka has served as a powerful form of healing after a harrowing week in which they lost friends and the sense of safety that came from living in a nation previously largely immune to mass gun violence.

Many New Zealand students learn how to perform hakas in school. Some schools have hakas specifically written for them; other schools teach traditional hakas.

On Monday, more than a thousand students gathered for a vigil in the park across from one of the mosques that was attacked. White and Maori, Catholic and Muslim, they stood and performed a haka that held a particularly poignant meaning: It is the haka used by Cashmere High School, which lost two students in the attack.

This haka, called Tahu Potiki, comes from the South Island Maori tribe Ngai Tahu, said Cashmere High Principal Mark Wilson. Tahu Potiki was an ancestor of Ngai Tahu, and the haka calls for his descendants to rise and claim their place in the new day, Wilson said. Being part of a haka group can be a powerful emotive moment, he said, one in which people are left uplifted and strengthened.

In some ways, the students' response to the attacks has been similar to the aftermath of last year's mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida, where it was the voices of the youth that rose above the din. The students of Parkland around 30 of whom actually visited Christchurch last year united to demand gun law reform. In Christchurch, the students have united in an utter rejection of the intolerance spewed by the white supremacist accused of the massacre.

"It melts my heart," 15-year-old Seraphim Tempest said after joining in Monday's performance of the Tahu Potiki. "It's just showing that everyone's the same here and we accept everyone." Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has encouraged students to turn to the haka in the wake of the attacks, particularly if they are struggling to express themselves.

"Never underestimate the power of just sending a message, looking out for someone, performing a haka," Ardern told students at Cashmere High after they performed the Tahu Potiki for her during a visit on Wednesday.

"There is power in that, because in doing that, you are sending a message of solidarity and of support." Fourteen-year-old Rayhan Satriawan was born in Indonesia, but later moved to New Zealand. Two of his friends were killed in the attack, something he is still struggling to understand.

He hopes the message behind the students' hakas will carry beyond Christchurch to the rest of the world that no matter how different people seem, he says, "we are one." "I want to stay strong," he says. "Everything that I do in my life is going to be on behalf of the people who have died."



And when the students stood to perform the Tahu Potiki at their vigil on Monday, their strength was clear in every stamp of their feet, every slap of their chest.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Markets regulator Friday exempted the central government from making an open offer for the shareholders of of India following

In February, the government proposed a of Rs 4,112 crore in the public sector lender through preferential allotment of shares.

The infusion is to meet certain regulatory requirements.

After the preferential allotment, the shareholding of the central government is likely to increase from 67.43 per cent to 73.98 per cent, an increase of 6.55 per cent, which is in excess of 5 per cent during the current financial year 2018-19 thereby attracting takeover provisions.



Under the takeover norms, the acquirer is required to make a public announcement of an open offer to acquire shares in case the existing stake goes beyond a certain threshold.

According to the (Sebi), there will be no change in control of the bank pursuant to the proposed acquisition.

Further, there will be no change in the number of equity shares held in lender by the public shareholders, pursuant to the proposed transactions.



Accordingly, it grants "exemption to the proposed acquirer, viz. the Government of India, from complying with the requirements of Regulation 3(2) of the Takeover Regulations with respect to the proposed acquisition of 6.55 per cent equity shares in the target company viz. of India," said.

In February, the lender had filed an application on behalf of the central government seeking exemption from the applicability of Regulation 3(2) of the SAST (Substantial Acquisition of Shares and Takeovers) Regulations.A man rammed his car into a crowd of pedestrians in China's central Hubei province, killing six persons and injuring seven others before being shot dead by the police on Friday.

Cui Lidong, 44, a restaurant owner, was reportedly involved in a domestic quarrel and attacked his wife and daughter before driving his car into the crowd, local government officials said.

The incident took place at around 6 AM (local time) in Zaoyang city, state-run CGTN reported.

While six pedestrians were killed, the police shot dead the driver.

The seven injured persons have been hospitalised, the report said.

A video published by portal Thepaper.cn showed several people lying on the ground.

One witness said that the car ploughed randomly into pedestrians and other vehicles.

"There were bodies everywhere on the street," another witness was quoted as saying by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.

Incidents of random attacks on civilians by disgruntled persons have become common in China in recent years.

Last September, three people were killed and 43 others injured when a man drove his SUV into a crowd and later went on a stabbing spree in China's Hunan province.

Some persons carrying knives targeted primary schools and mall to vent out their anger.

In March, the police arrested a man in Tangshan for attacking several pupils outside a primary school.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Travel services provider SOTC Travel Friday said it is focusing on an omni-channel approach for expansion and is taking a slew of initiatives to provide a consistent and seamless experience to its customers.

For this, the company is taking steps to strengthen both online and offline presence in the country. Currently its distribution centres operates in over 60 cities and towns across India, it said.

"As a part of our strategy to increase our online presence, the bulk of our investments are diverted towards streamlining our processes and investing in technology, in order to ensure omni-channel coherence," SOTC Travel MD Vishal Suri told PTI.

Currently the company sells about 15-18 per cent of its holidays solely through online sales, he added.

Highlighting that the customers also prefer to physically interact with the company for certain services, Suri said: "Be it visa, ticketing, or other information pertaining to documentation; customers are more comfortable visiting a brick and mortar store, which is conveniently and centrally located."



For this reason, the company will continue to invest in an omni-channel strategy, he added.

"As a part of our investment cycle in this approach, we already have a physical presence in major cities across the country, and will continue to expand in tier 2 and tier 3 markets," Suri said.

Given company's omni-channel approach, it has paid considerable attention to ensuring that while alternating between the online and offline models, the customers enjoy a seamless transition, and that the company is well-aligned with its offerings, he added.

On being asked about the business segments of the company, Suri said: "We have a Holiday Business, under which, we offer both domestic and international holidays, distributed online as well as offline. Being a B2C retail or consumer business, it has both physical and digital channels."



The company also has a significant presence in the Meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions (MICE) business and has recently pioneered the concept of incentive travel in India, he added.

"We are also a travel management company, and we deliver business travel and corporate travel solutions to large companies, administering the travel policy for them," Suri said.

Recently the company has also ventured into Foreign Exchange business. At this point in time, it has started foreign exchange activities in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai, he added.

When asked if the company was also looking at expanding its existing portfolio, Suri said SOTC Travel is essentially a travel and holiday business, and that's who it wants to be.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US-backed forces in eastern Syria said Friday they were still fighting to expel the last Islamic State group jihadists hunkering down in tiny pocket and refusing to surrender.

"Clashes are ongoing in Baghouz" village, said Syrian Democratic Forces spokesman Adnan Afrin. "Small IS groups refusing to surrender are launching attacks and our forces are responding."



He spoke after White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said "the territorial caliphate has been eliminated in Syria.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)CEO of the SVGTA Glen Beache confirmed that we have had to pay CAL to service SVG from the day of its inaugural flight (picture).

This country pays the Trinidad and Tobago-owned airline Caribbean Airlines (CAL) to provide a scheduled service in and out of the Argyle International Airport (AIA).



The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the St Vincent and the Grenadines Tourism Authority (SVGTA) Glen Beache made this known as he cleared the air as it relates to the sum of money paid by this country to CAL for operating here.

Minister of Tourism, Cecil McKie, in response to a question from Leader of the Opposition Dr Godwin Friday in Parliament earlier this year, said that a sum of money amounting to just over US$1 million was paid over to the airline, to cover a short fall in the revenue generated against the amount listed in the revenue guarantee.

The revenue generated amounted to US$2,858,766 and the revenue guarantee was US$3,918,049.

But Beache explained last week at a press briefing, that CAL operated in the same manner as airlines operating out of the United Kingdom, in that payment has to be made before they begin operating at a particular destination.

The contractual arrangement with CAL, according to Beache, obligated SVG to pay them (CAL) to come in, which he explained was nothing new as it related to the airline industry.

"That does not depend on the numbers, that is just how they operate, the CEO of the SVGTA explained.

"Different airlines have different ways of doing business  regardless of the numbers, we still have to pay, he said, further noting that the amount to be paid was dependent on the load factor.

According to Beache, letters of credit are with every single Caribbean country.

"No airline is going to take the risk of flying into a new destination and just have the risk fall on themselves 100 percent, he said.

Air Canada Rouge has been performing well with good numbers, and this country has not yet had to pay any fees to that airline.

Beache also said that since American Airlines started operating out of Miami in December 2018, those numbers are looking impressive thus far as well.

"We prefer to work along the lines of a letter of credit depending on the load factor, and we also prefer market support  which is something we have with American Airlines, Beache said.

It was explained that under the market support system, both entities put up collateral, and both parties benefit from the arrangement.The Congress in Telangana has decided to approach the Governor E S L Narasimhan to complain against the TRS government after nine of its MLAs announced their decision to join the State's governing party since the beginning of this month.

CLP leader Bhatti Vikramarka Mallu said a Congress delegation, which would comprise among others former Law Minister M Veerappa Moily, would urge the Governor at tomorrow's meeting at Raj Bhavan to 'come to the rescue of the Constitution and democracy.'



"Congress cadre has become more active and vigorous," he told PTI Friday, rejecting suggestions that the party workers have been demoralised after the string of defections ahead of the April 11 Lok Sabha elections.

The Congress won 19 seats in the 119-member Assembly in the elections in December last year which saw the ruling TRS returning to power with 88 seats.

K Kavitha, Nizamabad Lok Sabha member and daughter of TRS president and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, hinted a few days ago that two-thirds of Congress MLAs are likely to join her party.

"The way the state is progressing, many senior Congress party leaders and various people from the TDP, they all want to join the TRS."



"And when the number is more than two-third (of total strength), we have been encouraging them (to defect). Otherwise, single MLA... we are not encouraging the defections," Kavitha had said.

The Congress has alleged that the chief minister was "conspiring to eliminate the opposition as he lacked courage to answer their questions."



In the chief minister's first term (2014-2018), 12 of the total 15 TDP MLAs had joined the TRS.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Turkish-born suspect has confessed to terrorist charges over a shooting on a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht which killed three people, prosecutors said Friday.

Gokmen Tanis, 37, "confessed this morning to the examining magistrate the criminal offenses against him. He also stated that he acted alone," the Dutch prosecution service said in a statement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Three militants, including two Pakistanis, and a minor boy held hostage by the ultras were killed in separate encounters with security forces on Friday in Bandipora and Shopian districts of Jammu and Kashmir.

With the death of these three militants, the number of ultras killed in the state over the past 24 hours has risen to five.

Two militants of terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) were killed in an overnight gunbattle in Hajin area of Bandipora district, officials said.

The operation against the militants was started on Thursday but the security forces had to proceed with caution as the ultras had taken two civilians hostage, the officials said.

While one civilian was rescued Thursday evening, the other hostage -- a 12-year-old boy -- was killed during the operation, the officials said.

"Two Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists were killed in the Hajin encounter. From incriminating material, both the terrorists were identified as Pakistani nationals, Ali and Hubaib," a police spokesman said.

He said while one hostage -- Abdul Hameed was rescued Thursday evening, the second hostage -- minor boy Aatif Ahmad -- "could not be saved and was brutally killed by terrorists.".

An unidentified militant was killed Friday in an encounter with security forces in Shopian district.

The security forces launched a cordon and search operation in Imamsahib area of Shopian in south Kashmir following information about presence of militants there, the army official said.

He said the militants opened firing on the forces, who retaliated, triggering a gun battle.

One militant has been killed so far in the ongoing operation, the official said, adding the identity and group affiliation of the slain ultra was being ascertained.

Meanwhile, another gun battle broke out between militants and security forces in Sopore area of north Kashmir's Baramulla district, a police official said.

He said no casualties have been reported so far in the operation that is going on in Warpora area of Sopore.

Two Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) militants were killed in an encounter with security forces at Kalantara in Baramulla district on Thursday while three security force personnel including an officer suffered injuries during the operation.

A police spokesman one of the slain militants was Amir Rasool, a local from Sopore, while the other was a Pakistani national.

The JeM has claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama attack that left 40 CRPF personnel dead.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami Friday made a strong pitch for a second term for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lauding him for the air strikes on terror camps in Pakistan and saying he was the "only qualified" leader to ensure the nation's security.

Modi was an "efficient and strong leader", he said launching his campaign for the April 18 Lok Sabha elections in the state from here, his native district in west Tamil Nadu.

Palaniswami, also the joint co-ordinator of ruling AIADMK, took a dig at the DMK-led opposition, saying it was seeking votes in the absence of a Prime Ministerial candidate whereas the NDA was projecting Modi.

He also accused the DMK of doing nothing for the welfare of the people of the state despite having been a partner in the ruling coalitions for 11 years at the Centre.

For a large democratic nation like India, security was very important and to ensure this, it was imperative that the country had an "efficient and strong leader," Palaniswami, whose party is leading the NDA in Tamil Nadu, said.

"Mr Narendra Modi is the only capable leader to protect the country. Only if he is the Prime Minister (for a successive term), can the country achieve great growth in many spheres," he said.

Referring to the killing of the 40 CRPF jawans in the February 14 terror attack in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir last month, Palaniswami said the country responded to it by carrying out air strikes on terror camps in Balakot in Pakistan and credited Modi for the retaliatory action.

By this, Modi had brought "pride for India in the international arena," he added.

Without naming Indian Air Force fighter pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman from Chennai, who was captured by Pakistan following a dogfight, Palaniswami lauded Modi for ensuring his safe return, saying he came back home 'unscathed.'



Modi proved India's 'might' following the pilot's safe return, Palaniswami said.

"This (NDA) alliance has to secure a grand victory to ensure the country's safety and security," he added.

The AIADMK is heading the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry with the other partners being the BJP, DMDK, PMK, Puthiya Tamizhagamn and Puthiya Neethi Katchi in the state.

All India NR Congress is the NDA pick for the lone Puducherry segment.

The 40 seats up for grab in Tamil Nadu (39) and the union territory are considered key for both the NDA as well as the DMK-led United Progressive Alliance for government formation at the Centre.

The DMK-led coalition, which includes Congress among others, has been named Secular Progressive Alliance in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.

Taking a swipe at the DMK-led alliance, Palaniswami said its PM candidate was yet undecided.

"We are seeking votes by projecting Mr Modi as PM candidate. But they are doing so unaware who is their PM pick," he said.

Palaniswami said while DMK chief M K Stalin had earlier proposed Congress President Rahul Gandhi as the coalition's prime ministerial candidate, "he had later said that the PM will be decided after the polls."



Billing the AIADMK government as pro-people, he listed out its various welfare measures and questioned what the DMK had done for the people of the state.

"The DMK was part of the Central government for 11 years... Did it ever lend its voice for the rights of the people of Tamil Nadu. Did it solve issues by taking them up with the Centre. It did not," he charged.

People will reject them, Palaniswami said adding "for national security, and continuance of various welfare schemes, people should vote" for the party-led NDA."



Earlier, he began the electioneering after offering prayers at a Lord Vinayaka temple.

He was canvassing for AIADMK candidate from Salem, K R S Saravanan and ally DMDK's L K Sutheesh, who is contesting from the Kallakurichi Lok Sabha segment.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Former VHP leader Pravin



Togadia on Friday said his newly launched political party will contest on around 100 Lok Sabha seats across the country, including 15 seats in Gujarat.

Togadia, who recently floated the Hindusthan Nirman Dal (HND), released a list of 41 candidates.

He also said that he may contest the upcoming elections from either Varanasi, Ayodhya or Mathura in Uttar Pradesh.

The Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency is represented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is seeking re-election from the constituency.

Togadia said here the key focus of the HND will be construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya, better prices for farm produce and creation of jobs by focusing on agriculture and small industries.

In the first list released on Friday, HND announced candidates for 41 Lok Sabha seats spread over Uttar Pradesh (19), Gujarat (9), Assam (7), Odisha (5) and Haryana (1).

"We intend to field around 100 candidates in 12 states. The names for the remaining seats will be announced in phases.

"For Gujarat, we announced candidates for nine seats today. We may contest on 15 seats in the state," Togadia told reporters here.

"Many party workers have urged me to contest the polls from either Ayodhya, Varanasi or Mathura. I will hold a meeting with local party workers of UP in coming days. If everyone agrees, I will contest the Lok Sabha polls from any of these seats," he said.

The right-wing leader attacked Modi, alleging his policies have "ruined the economy" and led to unemployment.

"I want to tell the people that only HND can build Ram Temple (in Ayodhya), create new jobs and give better prices for farm produce.

"Unlike the BJP, we will fulfil our promises if voted to power," Togadia added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The toll in the at an industrial park in eastern China climbed steeply to 44 on Friday morning as a number of people succumbed to their injuries.

The occurred on Thursday following a in a fertilizer factory in a chemical industrial park in Yancheng, Jiangsu province, according to the government of Xiangshui county.

The death toll till early Friday morning was officially stated to be 44, reported state-run China Daily.

The blast left 32 people in a critical condition and while 58 were seriously injured, the local authority stated. The Ministry of Emergency Management said 88 people have been rescued from the site of the incident.

Eye-witnesses said several workers were trapped after buildings were knocked down by the shockwave stated to be a mild tremor caused by the blast which took place in a pesticide plant. The blast also shattered windows of nearby residential houses.

The fighter brigade of Jiangsu has mobilised 176 trucks with 928 personnel to join the rescue mission, the Ministry of Emergency Management said.

A professor of applied chemistry at Beijing University of Chemical Technology, in an interview with CCTV, said the leak of toxic chemicals might have affected the people and environment in the surrounding areas.

The residents should be evacuated from the place as soon as possible, the profesor said.

According to the city's environmental protection authority, the had a negative influence on the air quality in the chemical park and its surrounding areas within a 500-meter radius, but the strong winds are expected to lift the heavy smoke.

No residents live in the chemical park, while all people in nearby areas have been evacuated, officials said.

Yancheng's education department said school students were among those injured in the explosion. Online maps of the area indicate that there are at least 10 schools close to the site.

Beijing Youth Daily reported that the explosion was caused by benzene and occurred in a production area of the plant.

Production at other plants in the area were not affected, the report said.

A witness surnamed Xie living about 1.5-km from the plant told Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that all her windows were shattered by the blast.

Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical Company, which owns the plant, was established in 2007. Its business includes the manufacture of chemical products such as hydroxybenzoic acid.President Donald Trump has said the United States should acknowledge Israeli sovereignty over the hotly-contested Golan Heights, in what amounted to a major pre-election gift for his ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognise Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights," Trump said in a tweet.

Trump called the Golan - a strategic area seized from Syria and annexed in a move never recognised by the international community - "of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" About 20,000 Israeli settlers live in the Golan, which overlooks Syrian territory.

Trump's abrupt announcement was immediately cheered by Netanyahu, who faces a tough reelection battle and visits Washington next week.

"At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognises Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights," the right-wing prime minister wrote on Twitter.

"Thank you President Trump!" There was also quick approval from the senior Republican in the US Senate, Lindsey Graham, who is pushing for Congress to recognise Israeli control over the Golan.

"President Trump's decision to recognise the Golan as part of Israel is strategically wise and overall awesome. Well done, Mr President!" Graham tweeted.

Trump's announcement coincided with a visit by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Jerusalem, where he became the first high-ranking American official to visit the Western Wall alongside an Israeli prime minister - another boost for Netanyahu.

However, Leon Panetta a veteran Democrat who served as CIA director and defense secretary, among other roles, blasted Trump for "tweeting out another policy that obviously has not been worked out with our international partners."



The Golan recognition is only the latest diplomatic bombshell dropped by Washington, which is Israel's principal backer, in seeking to redraw the fraught Middle East map.

In 2017, Trump also went against decades of practice in recognising the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, rather than the previously accepted Tel Aviv.

The Golan Heights move was hinted at a week ago when the State Department changed its usual description of the area as "occupied" to "Israeli-controlled."



The Trump State Department has likewise dropped previous definitions of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as being "occupied" by the Jewish state.

Israel occupied the Golan Heights, West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War. It later annexed the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem in moves never recognized by the international community.

During Pompeo's Jerusalem trip, there was also speculation that his Western Wall visit with Netanyahu could be interpreted as tacit approval of Israel's claim to sovereignty over the site. The wall is one of Judaism's holiest spots, but located in mainly Palestinian east Jerusalem.

Trump will host Netanyahu at the White House next Monday and Tuesday. The Israeli leader will be in Washington for the annual conference of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) pro-Israel lobbying group.

Running for reelection under threat of indictment for corruption, Netanyahu is widely believed to be hoping that such strong US diplomatic backing will help push him over the finish line.

"This decision is intensely political," said Robert Malley, president of the Crisis Group consultancy, and "in disregard of international law."



But Trump denied trying to influence the Israeli election in Netanyahu's favour, telling Fox Business Network: "I wouldn't even know about that."



"I have no idea, I hear (Netanyahu's) doing okay. I don't know if he's doing great right now, but I hear he's doing okay. But I would imagine the other side whoever's against him is also in favour of what I just did."



Trump's latest shakeup also comes ahead of the delayed unveiling of a White House plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Palestinian leaders, who broke off contact with Washington after the recognition of Jerusalem by Trump, say they expect the plan to be blatantly biased in favour of Israel.

Panetta, who was speaking on CNN, said the Golan recognition "gives up one of the chips that everyone thought would be part of a Middle East peace agreement deal." "It's going to create real problems with our Arab partners in that part of the world," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India has been co-operating with the US on the Venezuelan sanctions and it is the "understanding" of the Trump administration that private have stopped importing oil from the Latin American country, a top official has said.

The US official's comment came as Washington ramps up actions on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's regime, which is battling to hold onto power in the face of heavy domestic and international pressure.

Venezuela is the third largest supplier of oil to India which is the world's third-biggest oil consumer.

The senior Trump administration official said: "My understanding is that Indian private companies, who were importing Venezuelan oil, have stopped".

These companies, which also have interest in the US, are unlikely to ignore the US sanctions, he told reporters on Wednesday.

Responding to a question on India's response to the US efforts against the "authoritarian regime" in Venezuela, the official said that India has been co-operative with the US.

"The Indians have been cooperative in communicating to the private companies," he said, adding that the issue has been part of India-US discussion.

"We value our relationship with India and the strategic partnership," the official said, adding that it is natural that Venezuela, which is very important right now, would be raised in its discussions with India.

Last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a meeting with the visiting Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale, said that he hoped India will not be the "economic lifeline" to the "authoritarian" regime of Maduro by purchasing oil from the Latin American country.

The Latin American country's Oil Minister and state-run oil company PDVSA's President Manuel Quevedo told reporters in Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh last month that his sanctions-hit country wants to sell more crude oil to India.

The US has slapped sweeping sanctions on PDVSA with a view to curb Venezuela's crude exports and put pressure on socialist President Maduro to step down.

Venezuela produces around 1.57 million barrels of oil per day, half of what it produced two decades back.

With the US stopping imports from Venezuela, PDVSA is seeking to retain buyers in other big consuming countries such as China and India.

Maduro is facing a challenge from opposition leader Juan Guaido who declared himself acting president in January.

The US views Guaido as Venezuela's legitimate leader and has imposed sanctions on the country's oil sector besides taking other actions targeting top government officials.A journalist of a TV channel was attacked with knives and seriously injured in an attack in a restaurant Ganeshguri locality here, police said Friday.

Chakrapani Parashar, a journalist of satellite channel News18/AssamNE, was stabbed by some workers of a restaurant adjacent to his office when he was on duty on Thursday night, police said.

Police have detained four accused in connection with the attack.

Parashar sustained serious injuries in various parts of his body and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he is stated to be out of danger, the police said.

Trouble began on Thursday afternoon when Parashar went with his unit to cover a fight between the main accused, who runs a restaurant in the same building as the channel and some youths while playing Holi, News18 Assam/NE Deputy Manager (Operations) Aparup Barua said.

"Though the news was not telecast, the restaurant owner started an argument with Parashar for covering the incident. In the evening when about five to six of our journalists, including Parashar, went to the restaurant to settle the matter amicably, the accused took out a dagger and stabbed him repeatedly," Barua said.

The accused has a criminal record and was arrested earlier too, he said.

Various political parties - national and regional and journalists organisations have condemned the attack on Parashar.

The Electronic Media Forum Assam (EMFA) has expressed concern over the attack and demanded stringent actions against the culprits. It also urged the state government to ensure security to media persons by enacting a special protection law at the earliest.

In a statement here on Friday, EMFA claimed that increasing instances of physical assaults are being reported from various parts of the country and the Centre should take the matter seriously.

It also appealed to all media persons across the country to be united over the issue.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Twenty-three soldiers were killed in southwestern Chad on Friday when they came under attack from Boko Haram jihadists, a military official told AFP.

"Boko Haram elements attacked the Chadian army position at around 1 am, killing 23 troops," the official said.

It is the deadliest attack on the Chadian military by Boko Haram, a jihadist group which launched an insurgency in Nigeria nearly 10 years ago that has spread to neighbouring Niger and Chad.

The Boko Haram revolt has claimed more than 27,000 lives and uprooted more than 1.7 million people.

The attack took place at Dangdala, on the northeastern bank of Lake Chad.

The assailants crossed over from Niger before launching the raid and "made off with military equipment," the source said.

In southeastern Niger, meanwhile, eight civilians were killed late Thursday in a Boko Haram attack in Karidi, in the Gueskerou district, a local official told AFP Friday.

Gueskerou lies in the Diffa region, which borders Lake Chad, and is one of the worst-hit areas for jihadist attacks in Niger.

A total of 16 troops were killed in attacks on February 16 and March 9, while Niger's armed forces said it had killed 33 "terrorists" on March 12.

Troops from Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria have been grouped into a mixed, multi-national force to fight Boko Haram.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)By Trend

The project company ICGB successfully completed the public procurement procedure with subject "Selection of Owners Engineer for the Greece-Bulgaria natural gas interconnector project (IGB)", Trend learned from the company.



After launching an open procedure, the Commission assigned by ICGB selected the consortium "TIBEI" as a contractor.

The consortium has offered the most economical price for the main package of services - EUR 5 670 000.00. "TIBEI" is a consortium of foreign and Bulgarian companies including the following members: Tractebel Engineering S.A (Belgium), Tractebel Engineering SRL (Italy), INTBER GMBH (registered in Austria), Ipsilon Consult OOD (Bulgaria) and Engineering EAD (Bulgaria).

The selection of Owners Engineer is one of three key tenders for the completion of the project.

The owners engineer is key for management and control of the realization of the IGB project in the preparation phase and during the implementation of the construction process. The commitment involves assisting the Contracting Entity in the implementation of the project during the construction phase until the pipeline enters into operation and management of all the main contracts related to the project - including the contract for the supply of line pipes and the contract for the award of design, procurement and construction.

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 via which gas from the Shah Deniz field will be delivered to the European markets.

The initial capacity of IGB will be 3 billion cubic meters of gas.Social media firm Twitter Friday welcomed the Election Commission's awareness programme on its platform starting with the launch of a new emoji for the upcoming polls.

"Committed to providing front row access to the election conversation, Twitter India welcomes the Election Commission of India's SVEEP onboard the platform. Twitter India is also launching a special election emoji, aimed at encouraging healthy participation in election-related discussions, and encouraging more people to go out and vote," Twitter said in statement.

Systematic Voters' Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) is a programme of the Election Commission to educate citizens, electors and voters about the electoral process in order to increase their awareness and participation in the electoral processes through various modes and media platform.

The handle was launched on Holi and one of their first campaigns on Twitter #DeshKaMahaTyohar is about ensuring no voter is left behind.

The #LokSabhaElections2019 emoji launched by Twitter will be available in 12 languages and will feature an image of the Parliament of India. It will be available till May 31, 2019, according to the statement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Two men were arrested Friday on suspicion of "racially aggravated criminal damage" after a series of attacks on mosques in the British city of Birmingham this week.

The attacks are believed to be linked after officers were called to reports of a man smashing windows with a sledgehammer at the Jame Masjid in Birchfield Road and then soon after to a mosque in Erdington area of the city with reports of a similar attack on Wednesday night.

A34-year-old man from Perry Barr has handed himself into a police station. A 38-year-old man from Yardley was arrested earlier after being detained by members of the community.

Both men were being held on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage, West Midlands Police said.

Britain's Counter-Terrorism Unit officers have joined forces with local police to investigate the matter.

The force began instant patrols in areas with mosques and came across further damage at similar Islamic places of worship in other areas. In the wake of the terrorist attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, last Friday that claimed 50 lives, West Midlands Police said it was working alongside counter-terrorism officers to uncover the motive behind the incidents.

"What I can say is that the force and the Counter Terrorism Unit are working side-by-side to find whoever is responsible," said West Midlands Police Chief Constable Dave Thompson.

"Since the tragic events in Christchurch, New Zealand, officers and staff from West Midlands Police have been working closely with our faith partners across the region to offer reassurance and support at mosques, churches and places of prayer, he said.

"Attacks of this nature have no place in our community and will not be tolerated. I want to reassure people that West Midlands Police is doing all it can to bring the perpetrators to justice," added West Midlands Police and Crime Commisioner David Jamieson.

The police said that its forensic officers are working to identify evidence and CCTV is being examined, while neighbourhood officers are carrying out proactive patrols and working closely with mosques around the West Midlands region of England.

UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid said in a Twitter statement: "Deeply concerning & distressing to see number of mosques have been vandalised in Birmingham overnight.

"@WMPolice [West Midlands Police] are investigating motive but let me be clear hateful behaviour has absolutely no place in our society & will never be accepted."



The Birmingham Council of Mosques said in a statement that the community was "deeply horrified" by the mosques being vandalised.

"Birmingham's mosques are a place of worship, serenity and a source of peace and tranquillity. We are appalled by such acts of hate/terror," the statement noted.

The UK government had enhanced its Places of Worship Fund earlier this week to offer places of worship the chance to apply for additional security related investment. With more than a third of the grants under the scheme being awarded to mosques, the additional GBP 1.6-million boost is expected to benefit even more mosques around the UK.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Two men were electrocuted to death in east Delhi's Mandawali area after they accidently touched a live wire hanging from a broken pipe while hugging each other during Holi, police said on Friday.

The duo, identified as Anal Mehto (30) and Jagan Nath Mehto (40), were residents of Motihari district in Bihar and died on Thursday.

The two men were greeting each other with a hug while standing on the staircase and came in contact with an electric wire hanging from a broken pipe, police said.

"They were rushed to Lal Bahadur Shastri hospital where they were declared brought dead," Jasmeet Singh, Deputy Commissioner of Police (east) said.

Both Anal and Jagan worked as labourers and stayed as tenants at Ganesh Nagar, he said adding the crime team at the spot found an electric wire hanging in staircase along a pipe.

The post-mortem of the bodies have been conducted while a case has also been registered, the police added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)JD(S) supremo H D Deve Gowda's grandson Prajwal Revanna, multi-lingual actor Prakash Raj and two sitting BJP MPs P C Mohan and Shobha Karandlaje were among 35 candidates who filed their nominations in Karnataka on Friday for the first phase of LokSabha polls in the state.

A total of 38 nominations have been received from 35 candidates on Friday, poll officials said, adding that cumulative nominations filed so far stands at 83 from 72 candidates.

While Prajwal Revanna filed his nomination from the family turf Hassan, Karandlaje filed her papers from Udupi-Chikmagalur and P C Mohan and Prakash Raj from Bangalore Central.

Marking the entry of the third generation of the Gowda family into electoral politics, Prajwal, son of PWD Minister H D Revanna filed nomination in the presence of his father, uncle and Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy and mother Bhavani Revanna, a Zilla Panchayat member in Hassan.

Prajwal was on a temple visiting spree ahead of his filing nomination as the Gowda family, especially Minister Revanna,is known for their strong belief in astrology and religious traditions.

After filing his nomination, Prajwal along with Kumaraswamy, addressed a huge gathering of supporters and public in Hassan.

Prajwal, who is the joint candidate of the Congress-JD(S)coalition, will take on BJP's A Manju.

Manju joined BJP on Sunday, unhappy with Congress' decision to cede Hassan seat to its coalition partner JD(S).

Manju was earlier with BJP before joining Congress and becoming Minister in the previous Siddaramaiah led government and again returning to the saffron party.

Shobha Karandlaje filed her nomination from Udupi-Chikmagalur in the presence of party local leaders, including former Minister Jeevraj.

Despite resentment locally, BJP had announced her ticket on Thursday.

P C Mohan filed his nomination from Bangalore Central in the presence of senior BJP MLAs R Ashok, Suresh Kumar and Arvind Limbavali.

Prakash Raj, known as a staunch critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, will take on Mohan, as an independent candidate from Bangalore Central.

AAP has extended its support to Raj in Bangalore Central.

While BJP has announced its list of 21 candidates, Congress and JD(S) who have entered into a seat sharing of 20 and 8 seats respectively, are yet to finalise their list.

Karnataka will go for the polls in two phases, 14 constituencies each, on April 18 and 23.

While the last date for filing of nominations for the first phase of Lok Sabha polls is on March 26, scrutiny will take place on March 27.

The last date for withdrawal is March 29.

For the second phase polls on April 23, notification will be issued on March 28.

The last date for nomination is April 4.

Scrutiny will take place on April 5 and the last day for withdrawal is April 8.

Counting of votes and announcement of results for both phases will be on May 23.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The UK's Ministry of Defence has reportedly taken over a nuclear bunker below its offices in central London to set up an armed forces command centre to fine-tune its military readiness of any chaotic fallout in the event that Britain and the EU fail to strike a deal for an orderly transition at the borders.

The room beneath Whitehall, which is already used for crisis management throughout the year, would be used to coordinate efforts in the event of a no-deal Brexit to ensure the smooth movement of goods and people.

The MoD's Operation Redfold is reportedly the military element of the wider UK government no-deal planning that is labelled Operation Yellowhammer.

It comes as Cobra, the UK government's emergency committee, has taken over control of Operation Yellowhammer from the Cabinet Office to start implementing contingency measures from Monday.

Almost 1,000 MoD civil servants are on standby to help other government departments, following formal requests for assistance.

An MoD spokesperson said the ministry was "always willing to support wider government planning for any scenario".

"We have committed to holding 3,500 troops at readiness to aid contingency plans. We will consider any requests from other government departments if they feel defence capability could contribute to their no-deal planning," the spokesperson said.

UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson had said in December last year that troops would remain at high readiness to assist with transport and logistics.

The sheer uncertainty of what might unfold in the event that the UK and EU fail to sign up to an agreed set of arrangements in time for Britain's exit has meant that the preparations have had to cover a broad range of subjects to ensure there is no disruption to the supplies of essentials regularly transported seamlessly across the borders of the 28 EU member-countries.

The UK has secured a short delay to the March 29 Brexit deadline after the EU leaders reluctantly agreed to offer embattled Prime Minister Theresa May time until May 22 to get the divorce deal through another House of Commons vote next week.

If the agreement, already defeated twice over the controversial Irish backstop clause, fails to clear the UK Parliament for a third time, the EU has set April 12 as the deadline for Britain to make up its mind on the next move.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The UK has secured a short delay to the March 29 Brexit deadline after the European Union (EU) leaders reluctantly agreed to offer embattled Prime Minister Theresa May time until May 22 to get the divorce deal through another House of Commons vote next week.

If the agreement, already defeated twice over the controversial Irish backstop clause, fails to clear the UK Parliament for a third time, the EU has set April 12 as the deadline for Britain to make up its mind on the next move.

While the EU's latest offer reduces the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit by the March 29 deadline, the UK could still leave without a deal if Prime Minister May fails to get the backing for her deal from MPs by April 12.

The UK government will still have a choice of a deal, no-deal, a long extension or revoking Article 50, said Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, soon after EU leaders agreed to May's plea for a short extension to the Brexit deadline at an ongoing council meeting in Brussels.

"April 12 is a key date in terms of the UK wondering whether to hold European Parliament elections. If it has not decided to do so by then the option of a long extension will immediately become impossible, said Tusk, on behalf of all EU member-countries.

If May's deal fails to clear the Parliament hurdle yet again next week, the UK would be expected to table its no-deal plans for crashing out of the 28-member economic bloc by April 12 or accept a longer extension to the Article 50 mechanism and contest the European Parliament elections scheduled for May 23.

"I hope that we can all agree we are now at the moment of decision. And I will make every effort to ensure that we are able to leave with a deal and move our country forward," May said, adding that Britain's MPs now had a clear choice.

She, however, did not repeat her vehement opposition to the prospect of a longer extension to Article 50, which is likely to come with many strings attached from Brussels.

In return for even more time for Brexit, should Britain go down that route, the EU will demand that the UK holds a general election or a second referendum. A longer extension on offer is believed to run until December 31 this year or beyond.

The BBC quoting Downing Street sources said that an agreement with the EU to extend the Brexit deadline would be a piece of international law and would take precedence even if Parliament rejected it.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A team of 10 students from a British university will visit India to provide medical and dental aid to the underprivileged people with limited access to basic healthcare facilities.

Led by Upen Patel and Ketan Patel, the dental students from the University of Birmingham, volunteering with the charity Satya Samaj UK, will arrive in Rishikesh for a four-day trip on Saturday.

They will provide medical and dental aid to the poor people of Rishikesh and the surrounding areas in the Himalayan region.

"The team will arrive in Rishikesh tomorrow and the volunteer activity camp takes places 9 am to 5 pm each day from Monday 25th to Friday 29th March," International Communications Manager, University of Birmingham Tony Moran told PTI.

The group plans to work with local doctors and dentists to look after more than 500 adults and children at a special five-day dental, diabetes and asthma health camp, the university said in a statement on Thursday.

"Maintaining good oral care is essential for everyone and it is unacceptable that there are people in the world who do not have access to the basic means of keeping their mouth healthy by reducing the risk of dental decay and gum disease," said Upen, Clinical Lecturer at the University of Birmingham.

"Students are looking forward to taking part in the health camp and helping the underprivileged people of Rishikesh and the surrounding Himalayan area to stay as healthy as possible," he said.

The dental volunteers will provide an oral health check and show each patient how to clean their teeth and gums effectively to prevent disease.

"This trip is a really amazing opportunity to see an area of the world that I wouldn't normally get a chance to see and a chance to help a large group of people who otherwise wouldn't get access to such vital care. I think we are really fortunate in the UK to have the services we do," said Louise Davis, a fourth-year dental student at the varsity.

Davis said the group will see over 100 patients a day, screen people for dental diseases, oral cancers, asthma, diabetes and give oral hygiene advice and donations.

"I hope the team will leave a lasting positive impression on the region of Rishikesh and the work we do over there will continue to benefit the community in the future," the student said.

In addition to oral health checks, the camp will also host a diabetes and asthma screening facility to aid diagnosis and provide lifestyle advice to help control these conditions and improve the quality of these people's lives.

Satya Samaj UK has been providing health camps for the past 15 years.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A senior UN official has welcomed Bangladesh's plan to move Rohingya refugees out of the country's congested camps, but said any move to transfer some 100,000 of them to a flood-prone island should be voluntary.

Volker Turk, an assistant high commissioner at the UN's refugee agency, said Thursday that the southeast Kutupalong camp, the world's largest and now home to some 600,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled neighbouring Myanmar, is highly overcrowded.

"If you have been in Kutupalong or various camps in Cox's Bazar area, it is clear that there is huge congestion," the UNHCR official told reporters in Dhaka after concluding a five-day visit to the country.

"So we welcome the fact that the government of Bangladesh has taken very active steps to identify alternative settlement (for the Rohingya refugees)." He added that the UN was still in "discussion" with the Bangladeshi authorities about the relocation of refugees to the island of Bhashan Char, in the Bay of Bengal, but said refugees must be willing to move and be able to continue their "livelihood" there.

International aid agencies including a UN rapporteur in January have raised concerns about the island's ability to withstand violent storms during the monsoon. Hundreds of thousands have died in Bangladesh from cyclones in the last 50 years, mostly in coastal areas.

A senior Bangladeshi minister last week said moving refugees to the remote island, which is an hour away by boat from the mainland, will start from next month as the majority of the construction work has finished.

Dhaka has spent some USD 280 million transforming the muddy silt islet that only emerged nearly two decades ago.

Local officials have pointed to a newly-constructed three-metre (nine-feet) embankment around the island that they say will keep out tidal surges in the event of a cyclone.

Many Rohingya have openly opposed the idea to migrate to the island, saying they would prefer to stay close to the Myanmar border.

About 740,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled a brutal military crackdown in Myanmar's northern Rakhine since August 2017, joining some 300,000 refugees already living in camps in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar district.

Bangladeshi officials said the relocation would "lessen pressure" on the squalid settlements, most of which were built after clearing acres of forestland at a wild Asian elephant sanctuary.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union ministers Piyush Goyal and Prakash Javadekar slammed Congress leader Sam Pitroda for his remarks questioning the government's aggressive action against Pakistan after the Pulwama terror attack, and demanded an apology from his party president Rahul Gandhi.

"He has shown to the people of this country the true ideology and mindset of the Congress. Sam Pitroda reflects absolutely deplorable mindset of Rahul Gandhi and Congress party. Rahul Gandhi should immediately apologise to the entire nation and to our armed forces and to those who have given up their lives to protect the sovereignty and integrity of India," Goyal told reporters in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Railways Minister accompanied his ministerial colleague Jitendra Singh, who filed his nomination papers as the BJP candidate from the Udhampur-Doda parliamentary constituency.

"It is a sad day for all of India...I think people of India will not forgive them. They will not forgive Rahul and his aide Sam," Goyal said.

Criticising Pitroda, Union HRD Minister Javadekar told reporters in Jaipur, "The statement by Rahul Gandhi's guru and main advisor Sam Pitroda is shocking which reflects the Congress mindset. They are absolving Pakistan from terrorism and they are blaming India for taking action against terrorism."



"They are also creating doubts about the action of India and about our brave soldiers. They will be more darling in Pakistan media today but the whole country is condemning it. This is absolute insult to India," he said.

Javadekar, who is in charge of BJP affairs in Rajasthan, said, "We will win all the 25 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state. People have confidence in Prime Minister Narendra Modi. People know that the country will be safe and development will take place under his rule."



In Dehradun, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat told reporters, "What Pitroda has said about Pulwama terror strike and the subsequent Indian retaliation against terror camps in Pakistan is an insult to the 125 crore 'rashtra bhakts'... It has become the nature of Congress to raise doubts about the valour of our armed forces.""We condemn it in the harshest of words," he said when he had accompanied Mala Rajya Laxmi Shah to file her nominations as the BJP candidate from Tehri parliamentary constituency.

Pitroda, the Indian Overseas Congress chief, earlier in the day told media that one cannot "jump on entire nation" (Pakistan) just because some people from there "came here and attacked".

In an apparent reference to the Pulwama terror attack, the Congress leader said attacks happen all the time and then referred to the Mumbai terror strikes in 2008 when the Congress-led UPA was in power, saying the then government could have sent its planes but that is "not the right approach".

He also sought more facts from the Modi government on Balakot air strikes last month while referring to international media reports questioning claims that over 300 terrorists were killed in the IAF action.

His remarks drew sharp reaction from Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The prime minister said Pitroda, Congress president Rahul Gandhi's "most trusted advisor and guide", has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of his party, "ironically by demeaning India's armed forces".

Pakistan celebrates its National Day on March 23.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US Border Patrol agents on Thursday fired tear gas at Central American migrants attempting to cross the border from the Mexican city of Tijuana, AFP journalists saw.

A group of migrants, including children, used an improvised rope to try to scale fencing installed on the beach between Tijuana and San Diego, California -- but were forced back with tear gas, which agents had not deployed since January 1.

An AFP journalist witnessed only one migrant cross the border, where he was immediately detained.

It marked the third time in a week that a group of Central Americans had tried to cross the border to ask for asylum on the grounds their lives were threatened by violence at home.

On the first occasion, a week ago, around 50 people made it across, with about 10 more crossing on Tuesday. All were detained by authorities.

"Someone brought them here, they train them because they know that upon crossing they must ask for asylum and that way they won't be deported and they have to be processed according to US laws," said one Tijuana policeman, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak.

Last November, hundreds of Central Americans that arrived from Honduras as part of a large caravan tried to cross en masse -- but only a few succeeded as the crowd was met with tear gas.

In recent months, thousands of Central Americans have arrived in Mexico in several caravans in the hope of finding a better life in the United States.

US President Donald Trump has branded such migrants a threat to national security, demanding billions of dollars from Congress to build a wall on the southern US border.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)By Trend

The Azerbaijani President`s Assistant for Public and Political Affairs Ali Hasanov has described Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan as the fraternal countries that share common history, culture and traditions. After independence was gained these traditional relations were maintained and even developed through efforts of national leader of the Azerbaijani people Heydar Aliyev and leader of the Kazakh people Nursultan Nazarbayev, Ali Hasanov told the special correspondent of Kazinform news agency, Trend reported.

We can say unambiguously that Nursultan Nazarbayev has played a decisive role in all positive changes in the public, political, socio-economic and cultural life of Kazakhstan in the past 30 years. It is thanks to his wise policy that Kazakhstan has grown into an influential player of international politics and an industrial state aiming to become one of the world`s rapidly developing and leading economies.

Nursultan Nazarbayev`s entire activity is dedicated to ensuring his people`s well-being. He is an outstanding political figure of not only the Kazakh people, but also the Turkic-Muslim world. So we are confident that Nursultan Nazarbayev`s decision will be a positive step in the fate of the Kazakh people.

Azerbaijan believes that this will ensure prosperous future of the Kazakh people. The Azerbaijani government will certainly remain committed to its path of friendship and partnership with Kazakhstan and its newly-forming official bodies, Ali Hasanov added.The United States on Friday slapped sanctions on a key Venezuelan bank, BANDES and four affiliates over their support for President Nicolas Maduro.

The US move came just hours after Maduro's regime defied the United States and arrested a top aide of opposition leader Juan Guaido, whom Washington recognizes as the crisis-hit country's interim leader.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Nestor Reverol accused the aide, Roberto Marrero, a 49-year-old lawyer who serves as Guaido's chief of staff, of leading a "terrorist cell" bent on attacking the government's leadership.

The companies sanctioned are BANDES, a state-controlled bank; Banco Bandes Uruguay; Banco Bicentenario del Pueblos; Banco Universal SA Banco de Venezuela; and Banco Prodem SA, of Bolivia.

"All property and interests in property of these entities, and of any entities that are owned, directly or indirectly, 50 percent or more by this entity, that are in the United States or in the possession or control of US persons are blocked and must be reported to OFAC," the Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) statement said.

"Maduro and his enablers have distorted the original purpose of the bank, which was founded to help the economic and social wellbeing of the Venezuelan people, as part of a desperate attempt to hold onto power," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.

"Roberto Marrero and other political prisoners must be released immediately," Mnuchin stressed.

National Security Advisor John Bolton said on Twitter that "BANDES bank is to Venezuela's financial sector what PDVSA is to its oil sector. This action will severely affect any attempted currency movements by Maduro and his cronies moving forward. Do not test the resolve of this Administration."



The United States has repeatedly warned Maduro's government against arresting Guaido or his close aides, saying it would face unspecified repercussions.

US President Donald Trump reiterated this week he was considering "all options" at his disposal to see Maduro dislodged and Guaido installed in power, implying military action if he deemed it necessary.

US Vice President Mike Pence said in an op-ed in the Miami Herald Friday that "Nicolas Maduro must go."



A UN spokesman Thursday expressed "concern" at the arrest, urging "all actors in Venezuela to take immediate steps to lower tensions and refrain from any action that could lead to further escalation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's regime defied the US on Thursday to arrest a top aide of opposition leader Juan Guaido, whom Washington recognizes as the crisis-hit country's interim leader.

Interior Minister Nestor Reverol accused the aide, Roberto Marrero, a 49-year-old lawyer who serves as Guaido's chief of staff, of leading a "terrorist cell" bent on attacking the government's leadership with the help of Colombian and Central American mercenaries as well as "acts of sabotage on public services to create chaos." He said weapons and foreign cash were found in a predawn raid on Marrero's home.

He added that Marrero's 34-year-old bodyguard, Luis Paez, was also arrested and faced the same charges and a search was on for "identified" collaborators.

Later, President Nicolas Maduro said he would "not be afraid to fight terrorist groups to put them in jail." The development triggered alarm internationally.

The United States, the European Union, and a grouping of Latin American nations plus Canada all denounced Marrero's arrest and demanded his immediate release.

The United States has repeatedly warned Maduro's government against arresting Guaido or his close aides, saying it would face unspecified repercussions.

US President Donald Trump reiterated this week he was considering "all options" at his disposal to see Maduro dislodged and Guaido installed in power, implying military action if he deemed it necessary.

A UN spokesman Thursday expressed "concern" at the arrest, urging "all actors in Venezuela to take immediate steps to lower tensions and refrain from any action that could lead to further escalation."



The arrest was denounced earlier Thursday by Guaido as a "vile, vulgar kidnapping." He said "we won't be intimidated." One opposition lawmaker who is a neighbor of Marrero's and whose home was also searched, Sergio Vergara, told reporters that Marrero had yelled out during his arrest that SEBIN intelligence officers had planted two assault rifles and a grenade in his place as a pretext.

"The United States condemns raids by Maduro's security services and detention of Roberto Marrero, Chief of Staff to Interim President @jguaido. We call for his immediate release. We will hold accountable those involved," US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Twitter.

"Maduro has made another big mistake. The illegitimate arrest of Roberto Marrero, Interim President Juan Guaido's aide, will not go unanswered. He should be released immediately and his safety guaranteed," added National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Maduro and Guaido both claim to be Venezuela's legitimate leader but Maduro, 56, retains the loyalty of the military brass and has control of state apparatus.

Guaido, 35, declared himself interim president on January 23 and has the backing of the US and more than 50 other countries.

So far their power struggle has hit an impasse, with Maduro railing daily about the US "imperialists" trying to dislodge him and Guaido touring the country to rally supporters and pledging he'll be taking over "very soon."



Maduro's forces have reinforced obstacles blocking a border bridge linking Venezuela and Colombia to prevent Guaido's supporters trucking in US aid. Extra shipping containers and concrete blocks have been moved into place on the bridge.

Vergara said Thursday's raid, which occurred around 2:00 am (local time), was carried out by around 15 officers of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, or SEBIN.

He said he was thrown to the floor and his own place "ransacked" for around two hours before the officers went a short distance to bang on Marrero's door and enter his apartment.

"The dictatorship is abducting citizens," Vergara said.

The Lima Group, which includes Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama and Peru, issued a statement "calling for Nicolas Maduro's illegitimate and dictatorial regime to immediately release Mr Marrero" and leave Vergara alone.

"We demand the end of harassment of Venezuelans upholding democracy and the systematic practice of arbitrary detention and torture in Venezuela," said the statement issued by Peru's foreign ministry.

The United States has cautioned Maduro against laying a finger on Guaido or National Assembly deputies, threatening unspecified repercussions.

In January, Bolton tweeted: "Any violence and intimidation against US diplomatic personnel, Venezuela's democratic leader, Juan Guaido, or the National Assembly itself would represent a grave assault on the rule of law and will be met with a significant response." The United States this month withdrew all its diplomats from Venezuela.

In just over a month, on April 28, increasingly harsh US sanctions on Venezuela will intensify to a critical level with a ban on all oil sales to the United States, Venezuela's main crude buyer.

The step is expected to worsen already dire economic conditions ravaging Venezuela, a once-wealthy South American nation that has become impoverished under Maduro.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Veteran Indian-origin politician Virendra Sharma, who has been a Labour Party MP in the UK Parliament for over a decade, has lashed out at a "malicious" attempt by a local group to try and deselect him.

Sharma, who represents the constituency of Ealing Southall in south-west London with a massive Punjabi-origin electorate, said he was proud to have been able to fight back an attempt to divide the community along racial lines by a local labour union branch.

"The malicious no-confidence motion in a first generation immigrant Member of Parliament by self-appointed anti-racist campaigners smacks of hypocrisy, said 71-year-old Opposition politician.

I am proud to continue to serve Ealing Southall as their MP with a majority of more than 22,000 votes, the largest of any MP here in history. The vast majority of members continue to support me as do voters locally, he said.

The no-confidence motion tabled by a local Unite labour union body, which forms part of the wider Labour Party membership, claimed 'Sharma has failed to work with the local membership or act as an adequate constituency MP'.

It is seen as part of wider moves within the Jeremy Corbyn led Labour Party to deselect MPs believed to be moderate and critical of some of the leadership.

Unite distanced itself from the local action and stressed that any deselection decisions are taken at a national level.

Unite has thousands of branches across the UK. Any decision on whether to support the deselection or reselection of MPs will be taken exclusively by Unite at a national level, a Unite spokesperson said.

Sharma believes the no-confidence vote took place because he refused to play local political games and have publicly criticised some Labour figures.

He said: The action today is motivated by religious and racial grounds, and those trying to split our local party do not represent our movement's vibrant history of anti-racist campaigning.

Today's racism is more subtle, better hidden, but old prejudices still linger. Southall is the most diverse area in the country, and should be represented by that diversity, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Sunitha Narreddy, daughter of former YSR Congress MP Y S Vivekananda Reddy, met the Chief Election Commissioner on Friday seeking a fair investigation into her father's death.

Sunitha said the investigation should not be under the state government and that she was planning to meet the Secretary of the Home Ministry regarding the same.

"This issue has been (made into) an election campaign by Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu. The head of the state, who is directly supervising the case, has made irresponsible statements. This is a huge conflict of interest," Sunitha said.

During her meeting with CEC Sunil Arora, Sunitha submitted a representation demanding a fair investigation be carried out into the "murder" of her father without interference by the state government.

Vivekananda Reddy, former minister and younger brother of former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, was found dead at his home in Kadapa on March 15.

In her submission to the CEC, Sunitha said the Andhra Pradesh chief minister was making "wrong statements" which could hamper the investigation by the Special Investigation Team (SIT).

She said Naidu's remarks blaming her cousin and YSR Congress chief Y S Jaganmohan Reddy for the "murder" might influence the SIT probing the matter.

"My father was killed a week ago. I have given a representation to the CEC because I am concerned about the way the investigation is being done. I have asked the CEC to ensure a fair investigation. The chief minister has been making repeated statements that the murder was done by a family member and Jaganmohan Reddy is responsible for the same.

"When SIT has not given its report, how is the chief minister able to know what the findings are and draw conclusions? How will there be a fair trial if the chief minister keeps making statements like these," Sunitha told reporters.

She also told reporters that her mother will soon move a petition in the Andhra Pradesh High Court for a fair investigation in the matter.

Sunitha had on Thursday met Andhra Pradesh Chief Electoral Officer Gopal Krishna Dwivedi, seeking the probe by the SIT be conducted in a transparent manner.

The police initially registered a case under section 174 of CrPC (unnatural death) when Reddy's body was found by his staff early in the morning.

After post-mortem at a local government hospital, the police confirmed that the case was altered to section 302 of IPC (murder).

The death has triggered a war of words between the ruling TDP and the YSR Congress ahead of the state and central polls in the state.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan on Friday said a key take-away from recent developments was that a lack of engagement creates "dangerous vacuum and serious risks" for Indo-Pak ties, and hoped that the "long winter" in bilateral relations would come to an early end.

Pakistan High Commissioner to India Sohail Mahmood, in his remarks at a reception here on the eve of Pakistan's National Day, said the release of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, return of the two High Commissioners to their respective Missions, and bilateral meetings on Kartarpur Corridor "are steps in a positive direction".

Coercive measures have not worked in the past and will not work in the future, he said and added diplomacy and dialogue remain indispensable for enhancing mutual understanding, addressing mutual concerns, and resolving long-standing disputes including Jammu and Kashmir.

The Pakistani envoy also claimed that in the fight against the scourge of terrorism, his country has "turned a corner".

"There is a real transformation underway in Pakistan," he claimed.

His remarks come amid Pakistan facing intense pressure from the global community to act against the terror sanctuaries operating from its soil.

A relationship based on sovereign equality, mutual respect and mutual interest is the best guarantee for a peaceful and prosperous future, the envoy said.

"We do hope the long winter in India-Pakistan relations would come to an early end," he said.

"The founding fathers of Pakistan and India had envisaged amicable relations between the two countries. However, the relationship has remained challenged, for most part of our history as free nations. In particular, the two countries passed through a very difficult time recently," he said.

"Prime Minister Imran Khan's decision to release Wing Commander Abhinandan, return of the two High Commissioners to their respective Missions, and bilateral meetings to develop modalities for operationalisation of the Kartarpur Corridor are steps in a positive direction," Mahmood said.

Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after Indian Air Force fighter jets bombed terror group JeM 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 Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama in which 40 soldiers were killed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal has said he will "certainly contest" from Delhi's Chandni Chowk seat in the Lok Sabha, irrespective of whether there is an alliance between his party and AAP.

Sibal had won twice from Chandni Chowk in 2004 and 2009 before losing to BJP leader Harsh Vardhan in 2014.

Asked about his views whether there should be an alliance between the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi, Sibal told PTI: "I don't know that is for the party to decide. There are two views within the party."



"I will certainly contest the Chandni Chowk seat, alliance or no alliance," the 70-year-old leader asserted.

Sibal, who has held various important portfolios as a Union minister under the UPA government, is currently a member of the Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh. He was elected to the Upper House in 2016.

NCP chief leader Sharad Pawar is making efforts for an alliance between the Congress and the AAP.

According to sources, the Congress leadership is also in talks with AAP leaders and is trying to convince Delhi Congress leaders for an alliance in the national capital. Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP also wants a seat-sharing understanding with the Congress in Haryana and Punjab.

Congress's in-charge for Delhi, P C Chacko, had said: "I am in consultation with Congress party leaders in Delhi on the possibilities of forging an alliance with AAP.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Four persons, including a woman, were arrested for allegedly killing a 79-year-old woman while committing robbery at her residence here, police said Friday.

The incident had taken place on Tuesday night when a group of robbers sneaked into the residence of senior citizen Vasanta Lakshminarayan at Matunga in Central Mumbai, police had said.

They strangled her to death before decamping with ornaments worth Rs 7.5 lakh, they said.

The four suspects - Akbar Badshah Shekh (35), Sameera Akbar Shekh (the woman-34), Mohammad Hasan Patari (25) and Mohammad Ainul Haque (29) - residents of Dahravi and Mahim areas, were nabbed by the Shahu Nagar police, an official said.

The incident came to light when neighbours spotted Lakshminarayan lying motionless in her ground floor residence, the official said.

During investigation, the police zeroed in on the gang and caught its members from Central Mumbai, he said, adding further probe was underway.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The skeletal remains of a woman were found on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad Highway in Vasai taluka of Maharashtra's Palghar district, police said Friday.

The skull and limb bones of the as yet unidentified woman were found Thursday in the bushes along the highway near Sativali village, a Valiv police station official informed.

"It has been sent for forensic examination. We believe the woman was killed a month ago and her body dumped in the bushes. We have registered a case of murder as well as destruction of evidence against unidentified persons," the official added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Women have occupied important positions of power in India but they continue to remain under-represented in Parliament, making up just 12 per cent of the elected representatives, India has said at a UN forum as the 900 million-strong electorate in the country gears up for the upcoming general elections.

Deputy Permanent Representative of India to the UN Ambassador Nagaraj Naidu said Thursday that the landmark 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution (1992) led to reserving 33 per cent of the seats for women at all grassroots level - village, block and district level institutions.

Today India has 1.4 million elected women representatives. Women constitute around 44 per cent of the total grassroots elected representatives and 43 per cent of the elected heads of villages in India are women, he said.

"At the national level, while women have occupied important positions of power, they continue to remain under-represented in the national Parliament. In the last general election, women made up just 12 per cent of the elected representatives," Naidu said at a side event organised by the UN Democracy Fund on the sidelines of the 63rd Commission on Status of Women Empowerment.

Naidu however added that the process of decentralisation has provided representation but representation does not necessarily lead to participation.

"Women still face a number of challenges for their engagement in political spaces such as inadequate education, lack of financial independence, burden of productive and reproductive roles and opposition stemming from entrenched patriarchal views," he said.

He told the gathering that 2,300 political parties will be vying for votes in the Indian general elections that kick off on April 11. The country's 900 million electorate will cast its ballot using over two million electronic voting machines.

"India's eligible voting population is almost three times entire population of the United States," he said.

Naidu also stressed that while democracies are not perfect, they are not imperfect either.

"It is this co-existence of the perfect and imperfect that make democracies relatable and, in some sense, glorious. Democracy is central to the idea of India. Managing the ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural diversity and complexity of disorder in India is only possible through a democratic system, where everyone woman or man, has a say," he said.

Naidu said that democracy requires an informed citizenry and transparency of information which are vital to its functioning and also to contain corruption and to hold Governments and their instrumentalities accountable to the governed.

India is a founding partner of the UN Democracy Fund and during the last decade, it has contributed USD 32 million to the fund, remaining its second largest contributor.

Naidu noted that India has moved from women development to women-led development. India's women population is more than 640 million, and more than 400 million of them live in rural areas, nearly 62 per cent of the total women population in India.

He informed the UN forum that the Government of India has initiated a capacity building programme for elected women representatives at the grassroots level with an objective of empowering them and participate effectively in the governance processes.

In the first phase of the programme (2017-18), a total 18,578 Elected Women Representatives in 14 States were trained and in the second phase, 15,030 elected women representatives in 18 states will be trained.

"While the discourse on women's empowerment is progressing from viewing women as recipients of welfare benefits to mainstreaming their concerns and creating space for them to assume leadership roles, challenges remain," he said adding that in such situations, the role of civil society becomes critical in socialising innovative solutions on method, means, and substance.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was banned on Friday for a series of violent acts and being in the forefront of separatist activities in the militancy-hit state since 1988, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba said.

Listing out its subversive and violent activities, Gauba said the JKLF spearheaded the separatist ideology in Kashmir Valley and the action was taken following the "zero tolerance" policy of the central government against terrorism.

"Murders of Kashmiri Pandits by JKLF in 1989 triggered their exodus from the valley. Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir Valley and is responsible for their genocide.

"The JKLF has many serious cases registered against it. This organisation is responsible for murder of four Indian Air Force personnel and kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of the then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in the V P Singh government," he told a press conference here after a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security took the decision to ban the separatist group.

Gauba said the central government has followed the policy of "zero tolerance" against terrorism and has acted strongly against terrorists and the securities forces have been given free hand to deal with terrorism.

"The central government, in its pursuit of strong action against terrorism, has today declared JKLF (Yasin faction) as an unlawful association under the provisions of Section 3(1) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967," he said.

Gauba said the central government is committed to relentlessly pursuing the policy of curbing the activities of secessionist organisations which are threat to the unity and integrity of the country and the NIA and the Enforcement Directorate are taking strong action against these organisations.

"The JKLF is also responsible for illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism. The JKLF is actively involved in raising of funds and its distribution to Hurriyat cadres and stone-pelters to fuel unrest in Kashmir Valley as well as for subversive activities.

"Activities of the JKLF pose a serious threat to the security of the country and are prejudicial to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of India. The organisation has been actively and continuously encouraging feelings of enmity and hatred against the lawfully established government as well as armed rebellion," he said.

Malik is at present lodged in Kot Balwal jail in Jammu, and is likely to face trial in the three-decade-old case of kidnapping of Rubaya Sayeed and gunning down of four IAF personnel in Srinagar.

The JKLF was founded by Pakistani national Amanullah Khan in mid-1970 at Birmingham in the United Kingdom and came into prominence in 1971 when its member hijacked an Indian Airlines plane flying from Srinagar to Jammu.

A total of 37 FIRs have been registered by the Jammu and Kashmir Police against JKLF and two cases, including that of murder of IAF personnel, were registered by the CBI.

The NIA has also registered a case against the JKLF, which is under investigation. It is evident from these that JKLF continues to be actively engaged in supporting and inciting secessionist and terrorist activities.

The organisation was also involved in the kidnapping and killing of Ravindra Mhatre, an Indian diplomat posted the UK, in 1984. A week later, India executed Maqbool Bhat, a JKLF activist, who had been sentenced to death.

This is the second organisation in Jammu and Kashmir which has been banned this month. Earlier, the Centre had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir.

Gauba said the review of security of Jammu and Kashmir-based separatists would continue. The government withdrew security of several separatist leaders in Jammu and Kashmir after a review recently.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)By Trend

Pakistan supports the fair position of Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, as said by the President of Pakistan Arif Alvi during a meeting with a delegation of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense in Pakistan, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry.

Expressing gratitude for the reception, Azerbaijani Minister of Defense Colonel-General Zakir Hasanov conveyed warm greetings and best wishes from President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev to Arif Alvi. Noting that Azerbaijan attaches great importance to relations, particularly to military cooperation with Pakistan, the Minister of Defense stressed the importance of expanding cooperation in the field of security, as well as military, military-technical, military-educational and other spheres.

President of Pakistan Arif Alvi, in turn, asked to convey his greetings and feelings of deep respect to the President of Azerbaijan. The President of Pakistan, noting the high level of interstate relations, as well as friendly relations between the two nations, stressed the importance of developing cooperation in defense, military-technical and other fields.

Arif Alvi, expressing satisfaction with Pakistans support for Azerbaijan in the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and noting that this will continue in the future, stressed that Pakistan does not recognize Armenia as a state due to its occupation of Azerbaijani lands. He noted the importance of resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

The parties also exchanged views on many other issues of mutual interest during the meeting.The Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was banned on Friday for "promoting" secession of the militancy-hit state from the Union of India, officials said here.

Banning the outfit under various provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act after a high-level meeting on security chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, officials said the Centre is of the opinion that the JKLF is "in close touch with militant outfits" and is supporting extremism and militancy in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere.

They said the outfit claims "secession of a part of the Indian territory from the union" and supports terrorist and separatist groups fighting for this purpose.

Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba said the JKLF has been banned as the government has a policy of zero tolerance against terrorism.

The JKLF has been at the forefront of separatist activities in J-K and was involved in the killings of Kashmiri Pandits in 1989 leading to their exodus from the valley, he said.

The home secretary said the government is committed to relentlessly pursuing a policy of curbing the activities of secessionist groups which are threat to the country.

The other reason for banning the outfit was that the cadres of the JKLF were indulging in activities intended to disrupt the territorial integrity of India, the officials said.

Malik is at present lodged in Kot Balwal jail in Jammu, and is likely to face trial in the three-decade-old case of kidnapping of Rubaya Sayeed, the daughter of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, and gunning down of four IAF personnel in Srinagar.

The JKLF was founded by Pakistani national Amanullah Khan in mid-1970 at Birmingham in the United Kingdom and came into prominence in 1971 when its member hijacked an Indian Airlines plane flying from Srinagar to Jammu.

As many as 37 FIRs have been registered against the JKLF by the Jammu and Kashmir Police, Gauba said.

The organisation was also involved in the kidnapping and killing of Ravindra Mhatre, an Indian diplomat posted the UK, in 1984. A week later, India executed Maqbool Bhat, a JKLF activist, who had been sentenced to death.

This is the second organisation in Jammu and Kashmir which has been banned this month. Earlier, the Centre had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir.

Gauba said the review of security of Jammu and Kashmir-based separatists would continue. The government withdrew security of several separatist leaders in Jammu and Kashmir following the Pulwama terror attack in February when 40 CRPF personnel were killed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was banned by the Centre under anti-terror law on Friday, officials said.

The outfit has been banned for alleged promotion of secessionist activities in Jammu and Kashmir, they said.

They said the organisation has been banned under various provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Its chief Yasin Malik is under arrest and at present lodged in Jammu's Kot Balwal jail.

This is the second organisation in Jammu and Kashmir which has been banned this month. Earlier, the Centre had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The BJP's Karnataka chief on Friday rubbished as "atrocious and malicious" the allegation that he had paid Rs 1,800 crore as bribe to theparty top brass, after the Congress demanded a Lokpal probeinto the issue.

The allegation has been already inquired into by the Income Tax department and it has been found that documents are"fake", the former Karnataka Chief Minister claimed, termingit as a "closed chapter".

He accused the Congress of raising the issue as it was "frustrated" over its "imminent defeat" in

The Lingayat strongman also said he was talking to legal experts on filing a defamation case.

"To be frank all the issues being raised by Congress including one raised by them today about alleged payment of crores of rupees has been already inquired and it was found that documents are fake," Yeddyurappa said in a statement.

He said the Income Tax department officials found that the documents, signatures and handwritten notes were forged.

"Congress leaders who are apt in carrying out all these atrocious and malicious campaigns have planted this story in the media to gain political mileage in the coming elections," Yeddyurappa said.

"Above all issues raised by Congress leaders are irrelevant and false.

The issue is a closed chapter," he told reporters, adding that "I'm consulting legal experts on this issue, I'm thinking about filing defamation case."



Citing a media report, the Congress on Friday soughtan investigation by the Lokpal into allegation that bribes of Rs 1800 crore were paid by Yeddyurappa to the BJP's top brass.

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala, addressing a press conference in New Delhi, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi should come forward and clarify.

Accusing the Congress and its leaders of being bankrupt of issues and ideas, Yeddyurappa said, "They don't have any development issues to discuss in public.

"Congress leaders are frustrated with the growing popularity of the Prime Minister Narendra Modiji and BJP.

Theyhave realized that their defeat in the 2019 elections is imminent. They have lost the battle before it begun," he said.

Surjewala said the report by Caravan magazine cited a diary containing details of the alleged pay-offs to senior BJPleaders and it was seized by theIncome Tax Department during raids.

"Prima facie, this is a case of investigating all BJP leaders, right from the PM and downwards. It is a fit case to be investigated by the newly appointed Lokpal," he said.

Meanwhile, Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy demanded a proper investigation into the issue.

Speaking to reporters in Hassan, he said, "This is not surprising to me. The information about this earlier..when they were running the government I have seen theirbehaviour.

A few people have misused Karnataka state as a green pasture. It should not happen, people also should understand this.. on one side they (BJP) speak about corruption and on the other side what they have done..reports have come in the media.

I demand a proper investigation into it.National carrier Garuda Indonesia has sent a letter to Boeing Co asking to cancel an order for 49 737 MAX 8 narrowbody jets, Garuda Chief Financial Officer Fuad Rizal said on Friday. The airline could switch the order, valued at $6 billion at list prices, to other Boeing models, Rizal told Reuters. He said negotiations with Boeing were ongoing and Airbus SE jets were not under consideration. Garuda is the first airline to publicly confirm plans to cancel an order for the troubled jets after the second crash of a 737 MAX 8, which killed 157 people in Ethiopia last ...Travel company MakeMyTrip (MMT) has filed a suit against EaseMyTrip, its travel rival, for trademark violation. MMT has moved the Delhi High Court, accusing Google along with EaseMyTrip for having used its brand name 'makemytrip'as adword on Google to increase the ranking of the latter.

According to a report by the Economic Times, this is the first time when the search engine giant has been made party to a legal suit in India. The case has led to MMT spending up more to come on the top of search results for promoting its own brand, which the company feels is an unfair attempt of diverting traffic to another platform.

Before this, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) had imposed a fine on Google for being 'search-biased' and abusing 'dominant position' after the marriage portal 'Matrimony' filed a complaint against it.

"The competitive bidding on brand's word mark raises the cost per click on Google platform by up to three-to-four times", the daily quoted as an industry executive as saying.

MMT in a recent meeting with the officials in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade has taken this matter to the government officials. Since the case is due for hearing, Google officials told the daily they couldn't comment on the matter.

MakeMyTrip has said that it had sent a 'cease and desist' notice in September to EaseMyTrip, however, the latter did not respond to the notice and had since continued using the ad- word "makemytrip". The court will hear the matter further on May 8, 2019, and has sought response from Google and EaseMyTrip.

(Edited by: Nehal Solanki)

Also read: Travel agent held for issuing fake air tickets worth over Rs 1 cr

Also read: Airbnb in talks to invest $100-200 million in OYO: ReportBengaluru-based digital wallet PhonePe had made waves in October 2017 when its parent Flipkart had announced a $500 million funding commitment to scale up its operations. This, incidentally, ranked among the largest single investment commitments in the Indian fintech payments space and was over and above the $75 million infused in the payments arm since its acquisition in 2015. The buzz is that yet another tranche of this promised amount has recently beefed up PhonePe's war chest amid intensifying competition in India's $200 billion digital payment market, expected to mushroom to $1 trillion in the next five years.

PhonePe, now a step-down subsidiary of US retailer Walmart, has received Rs 763 crore (approximately $111 million) from its parent entity in Singapore, The Business Standard reported. According to the company filings, PhonePe Singapore, previously known as Flipkart Payments, has infused the funds in the India entity by subscribing to 2,915,964 shares in the latter at Rs 2,450 apiece. This is the company's first fund infusion in 2019.

This fresh capital, coming on the heels of mega infusions in 2018 reportedly totalling Rs 3,280 crore from promoter entities, points to Walmart's larger goal of having a strong front in mobile payments in India. PhonePe, led by Sameer Nigam, has been looking to support user growth in a market heated up by the entry of deep-pocketed rivals like Google Pay and Amazon Pay, along with newer players like WhatsApp Payments, Reliance Jio and Xiaomi's Mi Pay. Then there is the market leader, Paytm, to contend with.

ALSO READ: From Oyo to Paytm, Indian e-commerce firms raised over $7 billion in 2018: EY

Experts told the daily that PhonePe is key to Walmart's e-commerce strategy in India. "Payment apps are both a proxy and a revenue driver for the key e-commerce players in India," said Vivek Durai, founder of Paper.vc, adding that players offering a seamless UPI-backed payment experience have seen a huge spurt in growth, including PhonePe and Google. "But Xiaomi's impending entry may encourage more FDI into India in the payments space in 2019. PhonePe's infusion is one such infusion," he added.

The new set of rules by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, among other things, mandates the e-commerce marketplace to not influence the pricing of the goods sold on their platforms, which technically means throwing discounts out of the window. But as Durai points out, e-commerce companies are still allowed to incentivise buyers to make payments via their respective platforms, "like with scratch cards". Basically, given the inherent nature of the business, users quickly switch to services offering better discounts on transactions, and hence the growing focus on payments apps to attract users.

ALSO READ: Probing Amazon, Flipkart for alleged violation of foreign exchange law: ED

In the past year, PhonePe, for one, rapidly expanded its user base through discounts, promotional offers and deeper merchant integrations - at the cost of Paytm and Mobikwik. In FY18, the company's total expenditure reportedly stood at Rs 840 crore, of which Rs 701 crore was categorised under 'other expenditure', including discounts, cash-back offers, and marketing expense.

The move has paid off. Last December, the company announced that it had crossed a billion transactions on the PhonePe app within 26 months of its inception, "making it the fastest pace at which any Fintech-Payments company in India has achieved this milestone". In addition, it claims a 750,000-strong merchant base using its service.

Moreover, in February, Walmart India's 23 Best Price Modern Wholesale "B2B Cash & Carry" stores went live with PhonePe as a payment option. "With over one million Best Price members, mainly kiranas, now being introduced to digital payment options, this will accelerate the push to drive offline transaction traffic for the adoption of digital payments in India," PhonePe said in a blog post.

Edited by Sushmita Choudhury AgarwalThe BJP has dropped senior leader Lal Krishna Advani from the party's first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha Elections 2019. The party's central election committee has decided to field Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah from Gandhinagar in Gujarat, a seat from where Advani won six times in the past. Advani, a veteran BJP leader, has been fighting elections from Gandhinagar since 1998, a time when Shah used to be his poll manager. However, there is no clarity if Advani will be given ticket from some other Lok Sabha seat or he has been kept out this time.

As per reports, Shah was chosen for Gandhinagar as his previous Assembly constituency, Naranpura, is located in Ahmedabad, and it also falls in the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency. He won from Naranpur before becoming a Rajya Sabha member after 2012. The BJP's state unit also wanted either Prime Minister Narendra Modi or Shah to contest from the seat this time. The BJP had sent observers on March 16 to seek the opinion of party workers and leaders in Gandhinagar, and most of them favoured Shah, party observer Nimaben Acharya told PTI.

Meanwhile, Advani's personal secretary Deepak Chopra told the agency that neither had the party approached him nor had he approached the party so far.

Advani served as Union home minister and deputy prime minister during the Atal Behari Vajpayee government. He had won from Gandhinagar for the first time in 1991, and retained the seat in 1998, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. He has been instrumental in the BJP's rise, especially in the late 80s and 90s along with Atal Bihari Vajpayee. During his time, the BJP grew from just two seats in 1984 to a full majority government in 2014.

He along with other senior leaders like Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh were moved out of the BJP's core decision-making body, Parliamentary Board, in 2014 to a so-called 'Margdarshak Mandal' (group of mentors), a body which has never held a meeting since then.

During an exclusive interview with AajTak, Union minister Nitin Gadkari said Advani was the party's margdarshak (a guiding light) and would continue to be so. He said that Advani had crossed 90 years of age, and the party had now decided to give others a chance.

Meanwhile, the Congress party has been quick in its reaction over Advani's exclusion from the candidates' list. "First Shri Lal Krishna Advani was forcefully sent to 'Marg Darshak Mandal and now his parliamentary constituency has been snatched. When Modi Ji does not respect elders, then why will he respect the people's trust? Get rid of BJP, save the country," Congress' chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said.

Also read: Lok Sabha elections 2019: BJP releases first list of 184 candidates; Narendra Modi to contest from VaranasiIndian Air Force (IAF) Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman has struck a chord with people for his utmost dignity and valour in the face of extreme situations he faced in Pakistan during his two-day captivity. In an attempt to pay tribute to the IAF pilot, an artist from Bengaluru has created a typewriter portrait of Abhinandan.

AC Gurumurthy fleshed out a black and white portrait resembling Abhinandan by typing letters, symbols, numbers and special characters on the keyboard. The artist said he took two hours over a period of two days to finish the portrait.

"Unlike heroes in film, Abhinandan is a real hero. He bought real laurels to the country. I has inspired me." Gurumurthy told ANI news.

Also Read: IAF pilot Abhinandan choked, beaten, sleep deprived as Pakistan tried to extract sensitive info: report

"I appreciate his bravery and the night he returned to India, I made this attempt." He added.

Bengaluru: Artist creates a portrait of Wing Commander Abhinandan using a manual typewriter. AC Gurumurthy, artist says, "He is the real hero, he brought real laurels for our country, this is what inspired me." #Karnataka pic.twitter.com/PFQC2E2gMu - ANI (@ANI) March 21, 2019

Coincidentally, Gurumurthy has also attempted portraits of other leaders and famous personalities in the past with his typewriter. The artist has created sketches of Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, former President APJ Abdul Kalam, Former US President Barrack Obama, former Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalalitha and a host of other eminent world personalities.

Also Read: 'Aisi Chai Ki Dushman Ko Bhi Dost Banaye': Pakistani tea seller puts a poster of IAF pilot Abhinandan on his stall

Gurumurthy, who used to work in a bank earlier, uses large scale white sheets to bring out his art with his unique talent on paper. The artist told the news agency he hoped to enter the Limca Book of Records and Guinness World Records with his feats.

IAF pilot Abhinandan was captured by the Pakistani army from Horran village (barely 7 km from the LoC) in Bhimber district of PoK after ejecting from his jet, which caught fire in an ensuing mid-air dogfight with Pakistani fighters.

However, it released the IAF pilot 60 hours after keeping him in captivity.

Also Read: IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman to go on a three-week sick leave before he joins dutyHitesh Narendra Bhai Patel, who is wanted by Indian authorities in the Rs 8,100-crore Sterling Biotech fraud case, has been arrested in Tirana, Albania. He was detained on Thursday after the Interpol issued a Red Corner Notice against him on the request of the Enforcement Directorate. The Indian agencies are now trying to extradite Patel, an US citizen, and are in touch with the Interpol and Albanian authorities to this end.

"Patel is an accused in the case and is the brother-in-law of the main accused in the case, the Sandesara brothers (Nitin and Chetan Sandesara). He is expected to be extradited to India soon," the PTI reported.

ALSO READ: Nirav Modi to be held in one of England's most overcrowded jails; may share cell with other prisoners

What is Sterling Biotech case?

Taking cognizance of a FIR by the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had registered a bank loan fraud case against Sterling Biotech and its promoters, Nitin Sandesara and Chetan Sandesara, in October 2017. The investigative agencies had also registered prosecution complaints against the Vadodara-based pharmaceutical firm's directors including Dipti Sandesara, Rajbhushan Omprakash Dixit, Vilas Joshi, chartered accountant Hemant Hathi, former Andhra Bank director Anup Garg and some unidentified persons for cheating banks of Rs 5,000 crore.

The case filed by the ED alleged that Garg had falsified accounts to help Sterling Biotech raise loans much larger than it would have been able to otherwise. The loans were sanctioned by a consortium of banks led by Andhra Bank, and comprising UCO Bank, State Bank of India, Allahabad Bank and Bank of India.

So far, various outstanding loan accounts worth about Rs 5,000 crore have turned non-performing assets. These accounts were in the name of various Sterling Group companies, including Sterling Biotech, Sterling Port, PMT Machines, Sterling SEZ and Infrastructure, and Sterling Oil Resources. After adding interest, the total defrauded amount stands at Rs 8,100 crore.

ALSO READ: NCLT raises suspicion over withdrawal of insolvency proceeding against Sterling Biotech

According to the ED, Patel was responsible for getting dummy directors for shell companies used by Sandesara brothers to route, divert and launder the money. The Sandesaras used to launder money by forming shell companies, manipulating balance sheets, inflating turnovers, insider trading, etc.

They had reportedly set up more than 300 shell firms in India and abroad. These bogus companies were controlled by the Sandesaras through dummy directors, who actually were employees of Sterling Group companies.

These shell companies reported bogus transactions among themselves, and with the Sterling group of companies in order to divert loan funds and inflate turnovers to obtain further loans from banks. These loan funds were then rotated in multiple layers through the various shell firms to conceal the source of such funds.

ALSO READ: Absconding Sterling Biotech promoters move Delhi court against NBWs

What has happened so far

After the case came to light, the Sandesara brothers, Chetan's wife Dipti, and their family members fled India to avoid prosecution. The ED had managed to obtain non-bailable warrants against the Sandesara brothers, Dipti Sandesara and Hitesh Patel. The agency has also moved a special court seeking fugitive tag for the absconding promoters.

The ED is also investigating various cross-border transactions undertaken by the Sterling Group. The Sandesaras have several business concerns in Mauritius, UAE, Nigeria, British Virgin Islands, Seychelles and USA, among other countries. More than 50 foreign bank accounts and several other assets and properties situated abroad, related to the Sterling Group, are also under watch.

ALSO READ: Court allows ED to send extradition request for Sterling directors to Albania in Rs 8,100-crore fraud

In May last year, the ED had attached movable and immovable properties worth Rs 4,700 Crores belonging to Sandesara brothers and their companies. The agency has carried out more than 50 searches at various premises in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Vadodara, Ahmedabad and Surat under the ongoing investigations.

Earlier this week, a Delhi court had allowed the ED to send extradition requests to Albania for the Sandesara brothers. Both directors of Sterling Biotech have reportedly obtained the citizenship of Albania and non-bailable warrants (NBWs) were issued against them earlier this year. Fresh NBWs have been issued and will be attached with the extradition request.

Edited by Vivek PunjIn bad news for music label T-Series, the Indian film production house, after clinching the top spot for a few hours on Thursday, has again lagged behind its rival YouTuber, PewDiPie, in terms of the number of subscribers. T-Series defeated the Swedish YouTuber by getting around 2 lakh more subscribers than PewDiePie but only for a brief period of time. The label had around 90.4 million subscribers around 11am on Thursday, more than PewDiePie's 90.3 million subscriber count. But today around 9.45am, the subscriber count of PewDiePie has gone up to 90,705,588 while T-Series subscribers are settled at 90,688,807.

The battle between the two channels is going on for long to bag the title of top YouTube Channel. In fact, T-Series Chairman and Managing Director Bhushan Kumar had started #BharatWins campaign on social media to help him make T-Series the world's most subscribed channel on YouTube.

Several Bollywood celebrities had also joined the YouTube battle in support of T-Series and pleaded netizens to subscribe the channel on YouTube. The T-Series opened its YouTube channel on March 13, 2006, and has a total of 29 sub channels.

On the other hand, the PewDiePie channel, run by Swedish-born vlogger and gamer Felix Kjellberg who makes comedy videos on YouTube, had maintained its lead throughout 2018. Prominent YouTubers, from MrBeast to Logan Paul, have also voiced their support for PewDiePie.

Lately, Kjellberg witnessed flak from several quarters after the culprit in the New Zealand terror attack, in a Facebook video of the massacre, urged netizens to subscribe to PewDiePie. Consequently, PewDiePie faced a decline in the number of subscribers. Following this, Kjeilberg condemned his name being targeted and showed sympathy towards the victims of the attack in a tweet.

"My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families and everyone affected by this tragedy", he tweeted.By Trend

The First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan - the Leader of the Nation Nursultan Nazarbayev has held a phone talk with President of the Turkish Republic Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trend reported citing Kazinform.

During the telephone conversation, the Turkish leader lauded Nursultan Nazarbayev's historical role in the formation and development of independent Kazakhstan.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan stressed that the fraternal people of Turkey highly appreciate Kazakh First President's work as a prominent representative of the Turkic world and global-scale politician.

He wished Nursultan Nazarbayev sound health and new success.

The sides exchanged their greetings on the occasion of Novruz holiday.The government clearly intends to make an example of Johnson & Johnson by directing the firm to pay hefty compensation to the first victim of a faulty hip implant it manufactured.

And, to deal with any future cases, the government may soon lay down norms for compensation, the Drug Controller General of India, Dr S. Eswara Reddy, told Business Today. The government, he said, was likely to introduce a provision within existing regulations for compensation in future cases of faulty medical devices and implants.

Meanwhile, a government committee is examining other cases relating to J&J hip implants for possible compensation. With J&J asserting that the matter is subjudice, this move by the government would be a step towards ensuring that compensation is legally enforceable.The Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crash that killed 157 people came as a rude shock for the global aviation industry. The second such tragedy - after Lion Air's October crash - in less than six months involving Boeing 737 MAX 8 has raised doubts about the technological changes in the new line of aircraft. In case of this aircraft, for instance, the placement of engines results in aircrafts sensors sending inaccurate signals to software and end up creating flight turbulence. Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have both not yet detailed the corrective measures to be taken to fix the problem.

The global ban in the wake of two tragic crashes, however, has rendered this aircraft's future uncertain for the time being. Boeing 737 MAX 8, and its controversial competitor Airbus A320neo, were touted as the most promising aircraft to enter the aviation scene in recent years. It promised fuel savings of 20 per cent and became the fastest-selling airplane in Boeing history with about 5,000 orders. In India, the fallout hit only SpiceJet that was operating 13 such airplanes. Instead of immediately banning the aircraft, the regulator, the DGCA, suggested a minimum 1,000 flying hours for pilots initially. But now the safety protocol for this particular aircraft will probably depend on the decisions taken by Boeing or FAA in the days to come.In the early trading session on Friday, the shares of Jet Airways rose almost 3 percent, a trend reversal after two days of consecutive fall amid reports that SBI-led consortium of lenders is set to reinitiate talks with Tata Group to invest in the ailing carrier.

It outperformed the airline sector by 1.23 per cent and touched an intraday high of Rs. 225, a 3.6 per cent jump against the previous close of Rs.218 on BSE. Similarly, on NSE, it rose 3.4% to today's high of Rs. 226.

Today, the stock is trading at a volume of 5.5 lakh on BSE and 50 lakh on NSE, respectively. At a volume-weighted average price (VWAP) of Rs. 223, the price band for the day quoted between Rs.240 to Rs.196 on both the exchanges.

With Etihad Airways looking to exit the beleaguered Jet Airways, lenders are set to re-initiate talks with the Tata Group as a possible new investor in the Indian airline. Tatas, who were keen to buy the airline and were in preliminary talks with Jet in November , have already been approached by the lenders and a formal offer is likely to be sent soon, said media reports citing top sources.

The recent developments on the country's biggest cash-strapped airline involve steps such as change in its existing management (Naresh Goyal, his wife Anita, and two nominee directors, Nasim Zaidi and Gaurang Shetty have been asked to leave the boar d ) and SBI's commitment to the revival of Jet Airways, with Etihad expressing a wish to sell its stake in the airline.

In fact, Abu Dhabi-based airline Etihad has offered to sell its 24% stake at a loss . A spokesperson for Etihad said that the airline "is working closely with Indian lenders, the company and key stakeholders to facilitate a solution for Jet Airways".

Jet Airways on Thursday approved a bailout plan that would allow its domestic lenders, led by State Bank of India (SBI), to convert their loans into equity under the Bank Led Provisional Resolution Plan (BLPRP), making them the largest shareholders of the cash-strapped airline.

Etihad Airways' CEO Tony Douglas also met SBI chairman Rajnish Kumar in Mumbai on March 18 to discuss Jet Airways' bailout plan . He has further asked SBI to buy Etihad's 24 per cent stake at Rs 150 per share, or about Rs 400 crore for the full stake.

Jet Airways is facing tough times with passengers demanding refunds on account of several flight cancellations and pilots threatening strike over unpaid salaries. The airline now flies only 41 of the 119 aircraft it had before the crisis, the aviation ministry said on Tuesday.

The stock not only trades lower than 5, 20, 50, 100 and 200-days moving average, but also has fallen over 65 per cent in one-year's term.

Jet Airways share price has been performing inconsistently on the back of escalated grounding of leased aircraft and restructural haggling between Etihad and SBI-major lender. On the contrary, its biggest competitors are on a consecutive rise after the negative media reports on the 25-year old airline. Today, the share price of Inter-Globe Aviation Ltd and Spicejet Ltd 's quoted 2.12 per cent and 14.24 per cent hike respectively.

Inter-Globe Aviation's share price touched an intraday high of Rs 1,453 today, that is 67 points away from its 52-week high. It has been consecutively gaining for the last 4 days and has risen 10.23 per cent in the period.

In the meanwhile, SpiceJet opened today rising 2 per cent above the previous close Rs 91.65 and scored an intra-day high of Rs 104.70 at a total traded quantity of 95 lakh on BSE (above 5,10,30-day average volume).

It lists among the top volume gainers with a turnover of Rs 96.83 cr at an 4.88 per cent volume change and also lists number one gainer in the BSE. It has been consecutively rising for the last 4 days and has risen 26.51 per cent during the period.

(Edited by Rupa Burman Roy)

Also Read: Jet Airways share falls over 6% on buzz about Etihad's exit

Also Read: Sensex rises over 150 points, Nifty crosses 11,550; Bharti Airtel, NTPC, L&T top gainersDigital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, 3D printing and blockchain are transforming the pharmaceutical industry world over. Indian pharma also undergoes similar changes, although at a slow pace. The Indian pharma industry will have to evolve fast and embrace new technologies to tackle the disruptive changes that the industry may face in the next decade, pointed out industry leaders speaking at the Business Today-PwC roundtable on 'Digitisation in Pharma Industry', held in January.

In his opening remark, late D.G. Shah (who passed away on February 22), Founder and Secretary General, Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA), said the industry has vastly changed in the last five decades. "When I joined a top multinational company in 1966, the capsule filling facility near Reay Road in Mumbai was partly manual. After 25 years, one of my projects was to import a high speed automatic capsule filling machine, which transformed production volume and quality standards," remembered Shah, citing an example of how slow the pharma industry is in adopting new technologies.

"The pharmaceutical industry, compared to banking, is relatively slow in adopting digital technology, but things have improved in the last three-five years," he said, emphasising that technologies like advance analytics will not only help in efficiency improvement, but also in manufacturing and quality processes.

A. Vaidheesh, Vice President, South Asia & Managing Director, GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals, and President of the Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India (OPPI), said the biggest fundamental challenge for India is unlike most developed countries, we lack an integrated healthcare system. In India, private healthcare accounts for 65 per cent of total healthcare in a non-insurance driven environment, primarily focusing on chronic diseases. Ayushman Bharat is a good beginning, but Ayushman Bharat 2.0 is required where everyone in the system knows what his or her role is.

"Tech companies like Infosys or TCS should help us fill the information and knowledge gap in the industry. We should have a comprehensive body like a Health Promotion Council reporting directly to the Prime Minister rather than having different ministries targeting the same problem," he said.

Kanish Malik, President and Global Head of Operations at Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, pointed out that a pull and push environment is required for any industry to evolve to the next level. So far, most segments have reached a foundation level such as the laboratory information systems, building management systems and the basic level of automation in the plants. On the quality side, there is a need for having controls and data integrity that drives the laboratory information systems. In manufacturing performance systems, a basic level of automation - about 60-70 per cent - has been done. A far more evolved system of data collection and management is there in R&D, the backbone of the entire Indian pharma system.

The push strategy from the regulator and competition forced the industry to invest money in digitisation. Now, a product needs to be traced back until the end. The data generated at the manufacturing level needs to be available for each product. "This will set in the foundation for a quite different evolution of the industry," he said.

Digital Formula

Lack of authentic data on drug trade is still an issue and technologies like mandatory barcoding for drugs can change the scenario, noted Vaijanath Jagushte, former joint secretary of the All India Organisation of Chemists & Druggists (AIOCD) and former managing director of MSCDA, the drug distribution company formed by traditional drug traders. "We started digitisation in 2010 by forming our own database company and started collecting data directly from the distributors i.e. the first leg of digitisation. The second leg is underway, but there are some restrictions as rules and laws are not clear," said Jagushte.

Sujay Shetty, Partner and Leader, Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences at PwC India, said that a vast amount of data is going to be produced using technologies like AI that can be utilised in areas such as retina recognition and in predicting various forms of disease patterns, but data privacy and fraud analytics are going to be an issue. It is already a subject of public debate and governments will have to come up with extensive privacy and data protection policies.

Prosenjit Datta, editor, Business Today, noted that with numerous health apps and wearable medical devices coming into the market place, it is imperative to monitor and regulate the efficacy of such next generation healthcare products.

Shah pointed out that India's drug exports are higher than domestic sales as the industry exports to over 240 countries. This could happen thanks to industry's proactive efforts and the compliance standards that they adopted. "One should never depend on the government for policy or subsidy benefits. Whatever you do, it should cater to the interests of patients," said Shah.

He further said that the period between 2014 and 2015 was an eye-opener for the Indian drug makers as they received maximum number of warning letters from the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA). Data reliability was the biggest issue, which they tackled with the help of data analytics. "In the last three years, the number of warning letters related to data issues has come down to 20 per cent from 50 per cent earlier."

Although the cost of compliance and upgrade to digitisation is far higher in pharma as compared to other sectors, Malik said cost should not be seen as a hindrance. "As long as you are able to afford the regulated cost of the change, it should be welcome," said Malik.

The biggest issue is that pharma is only one segment of the healthcare ecosystem. Jagushte noted that neither the government nor the industry has data on the exact number of manufacturers or drug brands sold in the country. Malik said data analytics can help retailers decide what to stock in various seasons. Vaidheesh noted that the vision behind e-pharmacies is not just to have some online medical shops, but to capture data for analytics of prescriptions and then create algorithms for the government to analyse disease patterns and disease burdens.

Shetty said healthcare industry is one of the most lucrative industries in the world, but full of frictions and anomalies and hugely protected by regulation. "It has not escaped the attention of some of the brightest minds in the world, the likes of Amazon and Berkshire. So, more technological and regulatory development would definitely pan out here," said Shetty.

A lot of action can be seen in India in digital tech. AI-powered tools and technologies use your phone as an interface for a variety of things in healthcare such as fertility treatments, predicting lung cancer and sleep pattern distortions. Large generic pharma and MNC pharma use these digital tools to improve efficiency and revenue growth.

Malik said besides tracing the product until the end, digital tech also provides a platform to generate information as to who bought what and at which location. "The evolution of the healthcare devices, monitoring systems and ability to handle huge data and analysis is happening. Micro dosage of individual drugs, and 3D printing of drugs and polypills are a reality. Therefore, the Indian pharma industry will have to transform itself aggressively to stay relevant in the future," concluded Malik.Employees of Bhushan Steel were staring at an uncertain future after the steelmaker started defaulting on loans three years ago. The stiff competition between Tata Steel and JSW Steel to buy the bankrupt firm last year was little consolation as most thought the acquirer would have no option but to trim the workforce to reduce costs. However, after buying Bhushan in an auction conducted under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, the 111-year-old Tata Steel took on board all 5,000-odd Bhushan employees, including those working on contract.

The reason was simple - Tata Steel considers employees as its competitive edge. This is especially true at Bhushan where it is targeting an increase in capacity and a fast turnaround. Tata Steel, a firm believer in on-the-job training and empowering people, feels handing pink slips is a sign of weakness. "The strength of an organisation lies in the loyalty of its employees. Our organisation has up to fifth generation employees and this is due to the confidence that generation after generation has placed in the organisation and its value-driven approach," says Suresh Dutt Tripathi, Vice President, Human Resources.

Apart from the legendary job security it provides to its employees, the steelmaker aims to be an equal opportunity employer by putting objectivity at every stage of an employees lifecycle right from hiring to career progression. The focus on improving lives of every stakeholder informs every decision that the company takes.

The Founding Principle

The core principle of Tata Group, ever since it was founded in the 19th century, has been improving the quality of life of people and communities. As part of that, Tata Steel has pioneered several worker welfare schemes and community initiatives. In India, these include the eight-hour workday at the Jamshedpur plant in 1912, leave with pay scheme in 1936 and workers' Provident Fund Scheme in 1920 - all these were subsequently adopted by the International Labour Organisation and later included in labour and other laws in India.

However, of late, the company's focus has been in restoring the work-life balance of employees. "Tata Steel is the employer of choice for the millennial populace and the Gen Z as it has been successful in enabling the young workforce to strike a balance between life and work," says Tripathi. Tata Steel was among the first company in manufacturing to implement the five-day work week and work from home, apart from a sabbatical policy, menstrual leave and paternity/adoption leave.

In 2018, the company started the 'Take Two' policy to provide a second career option to women. The representation of women in India's traditional industrial sectors has been 3-8 per cent. At Tata Steel, 11 per cent of the 7,000 employees (white collared) are women, up from about 8 per cent two years ago. The company has set itself a five-year target of 20 per cent. The steel maker has launched several programmes under a diversity and inclusion initiative called MOSAIC. There has been a lot of focus on recruiting more women. Hiring partners get special incentives for every successful female hire. The company has launched a scholarship programme, Women of Mettle, for attracting female talent, especially in technical fields. It also runs a cross company mentoring programme called 'Tata Mentors' that trains high potential women executives. It also runs structured mentoring programmes for women. The number of women in top leadership has increased since the inception of these programmes. "We have been creating an atmosphere for enriching the lives of the workforce by meeting their needs and empowering them to contribute," says Tripathi.

Skilled manpower has never been an issue for Tata Steel with its extensive modules and training facilities. "We are in continuously providing training and skills to employees. We recently launched a brand campaign, 'We Also Make Tomorrow', where the organisation has been positioned as contemporary, dynamic, youth oriented, to complement the conversations around disruption, innovation and new technologies," he says.

Tata Steel is endeavouring to nurture a culture of diversity, innovation, total quality management and employee care and respect. It believes that diversity will enhance capabilities. "In all our global operating locations, we pride ourselves on being an equal opportunity employer," says Tripathi.

Tata Steel encourages high-performance culture and supports it through various rewards and recognitions. "We strive to ensure a safe, healthy, clean and ergonomic working environment for employees, contractors and anyone affected by our activities," he adds.

Innovation has been a key element in the growth journey of Tata Steel. The employees' innovative ideas are routed through an innovation platform. The Innovation Club, started by the HR Capability Development Department, has incubated 120 innovation projects so far.One of the key problems for middle to senior level managers is that careers tend to stagnate, and newer jobs are less. The room for growth shrinks. But not at Microsoft India.

The company's HR was reserved about sharing details but some employees were willing to speak on condition of anonimity. Their comments give an indication of what makes Microsoft India an attractive place to work in. A software engineer who currently works with the company says, "There are hardly any other software product companies in India that offer opportunities to work in new product segments and on the latest technology even after 20-plus years of experience." He says the reason for that is simple: Microsoft has jumped into the fast lane and is catching up with other tech companies. An example of this is Microsoft's cloud-based services. Microsoft Azure is the fastest growing among the top players, and is closing the gap with market leader Amazon Web Services, while Google's Cloud Platform lags. According to TechCrunch, Azure's quarterly revenue growth was a healthy 76 per cent (for the December quarter). The overall Intelligent Cloud division, which includes Azure, brought in $9.4 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services grew 46 per cent to $7.4 billion in the same quarter.

Microsoft's success extends to digital transformation as well, where it has a good client base among the Fortune 1000 companies. "The company is working on the latest technologies and products that customers want to pay for. It is cash rich, is hiring a lot of people, paying them well and giving opportunities to work on latest technologies," says the employee. A former employee adds that the company is seen to be doing cutting edge work which is attracting bright engineers.

A culture of recognising employees' potential, pushing them to do challenging work and offering the space to innovate has put Microsoft among the top 10 in the Best Companies to Work For Survey.

Thought Reboot

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has re-oriented the company's strategy from being a products company to being a people's organisation. He was inspired by Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Kathleen Hogan, Chief People Officer and EVP, Human Resources, Microsoft, said in an earlier interview with BT that they had to move from "a 'know it all' culture to a 'learn it all' culture." It was essential for the organisation to adapt to the fast paced changes. But this would not have been possible with a 'fixed mindset' which was based on the idea that potential is predetermined and, therefore, it results in the desire to look smart and have all the answers, she said. They had to change that "to being way more focussed on learning, on curiosity, being open to different points of view," she said.

This is not just talk. The company has personalised and integrated learning modules on its platform called Microsoft Learning and LinkedIn Learning in addition to classroom learning sessions and on-the-job "stretch" opportunities for advancement. Along with that they have a series of mentorship programmes, such as 'Confluence' which allows employees to learn from industry leaders and engage with one another. The 'Reach Out' programme is a collaborative mentorship programme, along with other companies, to groom women for future leadership roles.

Microsoft is working to develop its own talent. Such opportunities to learn and grow keep employees with the company. "This growth mindset - which is continuously learning versus thinking you can come into a company with your degree and then never learn for the next 30 years - is a huge priority for us," Hogan said.The unprecedented existential crisis at Jet Airways has its harried and long-unpaid pilots looking out for jobs, which in turn has proved a silver lining for IndiGo. In mid-February the airline had announced that it will operate about 30 fewer flights each day till March-end due to the pilot shortage but these flights have now been taken out from the entire summer schedule that goes on till October. In addition, several senior expat pilots have reportedly quit their jobs at IndiGo in the last few months, impelling the airline to scout for new ones to fill in the vacant posts.

According to The Economic Times, Indigo is hiring more than 100 Boeing 737 commander level pilots, primarily those exiting Jet Airways. A source aware of IndiGo's hiring plans told the daily that it would take six months to train the Boeing pilots so that they could fly A320s, an aircraft type IndiGo operates. Even with the added cost of re-training, this option works out cheaper than hiring expatriate pilots, who charge salaries up to twice that of their Indian peers, with basic salaries reportedly standing at about $13,000 a month.

"We continue to engage in recruitment efforts both for expats and for the pilots who might be out of job in India to join us", William Boulter, IndiGo's Chief Commercial Officer said on Wednesday. The airline previously announced that it is offering jobs to Jet Airways' pilots along with compensation for their overdue salaries.

The beleaguered full-service airline has grounded more than 60% of its planes and has not paid its engineers, pilots and senior management since December. Given that pilots at full-service carriers get higher pay and other benefits, IndiGo's own staff has called the move an "injustice". In addition to poaching Jet's staff, IndiGo has already hired about 130 expatriate pilots.

The hiring frenzy, moreover, comes amid aggressive capacity expansion at IndiGo. "We are very excited to add 14 new flights to our network along with three new routes connecting Chennai, Raipur and Gorakhpur [from April]", Boulter said last week. The airline reportedly also aims to take delivery of 48 planes of the Airbus A320neo family this year, including 20-25 A321neo planes, which it plans to deploy on the medium-haul international routes. On Wednesday, it launched its flight on the Delhi-Istanbul sector, and announced plans to connect more Indian cities to countries such as China, Vietnam, Myanmar and Saudi Arabia.

"Once we get more A321s, we will do more longer routes", explained Boulter, adding, "We are still hoping to operating to London this year". For the record, A321neo aircraft has the capacity to carry around 230 passengers while A320neo carries around 180 passengers. IndiGo's order book still has 430 planes due for delivery.

The carrier currently has more than 210 planes in its fleet and a pilot strength of over 3,000, including more than 1,200 commanders, of whom 50 are expatriates. According to Sydney-based Centre for Aviation (CAPA), the current number of pilots in India stands at 7,963 and domestic airlines will have to hire 17,164 more in the next decade.

Meanwhile, SpiceJet, which has all its 12 Boeing Max planes grounded following the crash of an Ethiopian Airline plane early this month, is also looking to hire pilots for its expansion plans. The low-cost carrier conducted walk-in interviews in Mumbai on Wednesday, and an airline source told PTI that as many as 260 Jet pilots, including 150 captains, appeared for the interviews. Significantly, Jet Airways' lessors have offered 50 of its Boeing aircraft to SpiceJet.

(Edited by: Sushmita Choudhary)

Also read: IndiGo continues to recruit expat and 'out-of-job' pilots

Also read: IndiGo launches Delhi-Istanbul flight; plans for wider global expansionThe council of European Union leaders on Friday appointed Philip Lane, the current governor of the Irish central bank, to the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, where he is due to serve as Chief Economist, the council said in a statement.

Lane's eight-year term begins on June 1. The announcement, which was earlier ratified by the European Parliament and the ECB itself, was widely expected. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ieIt was announced this week that Excel Recruitment will be creating 100 new casual and temporary hospitality roles at their brand new office in Cork City.

Excel has continuously recruited for some of the biggest retail and hospitality groups in Cork and Munster since opening in 2001. The company will be running an Open Day in the Maldron Hotel Shandon on the 28th March, meeting candidates for specific contracts on their temp team.

Speaking this week, Excel Recruitment Director, Shane Mclave said, "With the employment and tourism markets as they are, our clients are looking for great staff- quickly. Our new base in Phoenix House will allow us to meet candidates on the ground in a central location at a time that suits them, speeding up the time to hire and streamlining the recruitment process for both clients and candidates while also allowing us to more seamlessly manage our temp and events team working at some of the biggest events and venues around Cork."

Source: www.businessworld.ieEuropean Union leaders have given Prime Minister Theresa May two weeks' reprieve, until April 12, before Britain could lurch out of the EU if she fails to persuade lawmakers to back the withdrawal treaty she concluded with Brussels.

But after seven hours of summit brainstorming on Thursday, her 27 peers kept a host of options open, ramping up pressure on parliament to support May, giving Britain an outside chance of staying in for much longer - but also preparing to deflect blame for the chaos of any no-deal Brexit.

May had wanted to be able to delay Britain's departure until June 30 to tie up legislative loose ends, and tried to reassure the EU that she could overturn two heavy defeats to clinch a last-gasp parliamentary ratification of her deal next week, so allowing a status-quo transition period to come into effect.

EU leaders had planned to endorse a shorter extension, to May 22, the eve of EU parliamentary elections, and leave any discussion of how to deal with May losing until next week. But diplomats said the prime minister singularly failed to reassure them she could win. Some sensed she did not believe it herself.

After May left the room, and with French President Emmanuel Macron pitching a surprise ultimatum for Britain to be out, deal or no deal, by May 7 -- the eve of a summit on the EU's post-Brexit future -- the meeting plunged into frantic debate.

The outcome, with which May declared herself satisfied, was that the May 22 date will apply if parliament rallies behind her next week. If it does not, Britain will have until April 12 to offer a new plan or choose to quit without a treaty.

That date corresponds to the six weeks' legal notice required for the EU election - which the Union would insist Britain hold on May 23 if it remains a member. If it does not hold the election, leaders said, the very last date Britain must leave would be June 30, before the new EU parliament convenes.

Until April 12, said summit chair Donald Tusk, "all options will remain open and the cliff-edge date will be delayed."

"The UK government will still have a choice between a deal, no deal, a long extension or revoking Article 50 (the withdrawal notice)," he told a news conference.

If Britain decides by April 12 against holding the EU election, it could then leave the EU without a deal at any time up to May 22.

May said she would not cancel Brexit or seek a long delay that would mean asking people to vote in EU elections three years after voting to leave. She insisted she could secure a deal next week.

Many in London doubt that, not least after she offended many lawmakers on Wednesday by publicly blaming them for the deadlock. She tried to soften those remarks somewhat on Thursday.

"What this decision tonight does is show the clear choice that is open to MPs," May said. "I think the choice is clear for people."

But May's stated belief in her strategy of a third vote did not communicate itself to the summit table.

"It did not go well," said one EU official familiar with the talks. "They basically realized that she doesn't really believe it herself. They don't want to be seen to be forcing the Brits out now. But they are looking for ways to end the agony."

While some brinkmanship from Brussels may be part of a strategy to bounce reluctant British legislators into backing May, there is also a growing impatience that efforts to avoid a messy Brexit are bogging the EU down when it has other priorities, from a weakening economy to rising nationalism.

Macron has led the charge, calling for Britain, long a thorn in France's plans for deeper European integration, to put up or shut up on Brexit. "We have come up with a response that protects our interests," he said.

"It is up to the British to sort out their own internal contradictions. As for us, we don't have any."

May's opponents at home range from hard-core Brexit supporters who say her deal gives the EU too much influence in Britain to others, inside and outside her own Conservative party, who would prefer to stay much closer to the EU or cancel Brexit.

Voicing the fears of business that a "no-deal" Brexit would hurt economies across the continent, German Chancellor Angela Merkel argued for caution, saying she would "work to the last minute" to avoid a disorderly departure.

By pushing the Brexit crunch toward Britain's April 12 deadline to declare its decision on holding an EU election, EU diplomats said, the leaders also dodged potential blame if they had simply allowed Britain to crash out next Friday.

"That way, Merkel and the rest of the EU can avoid blame for forcing the British out," one EU official said. "It will be up to the British themselves to say they are leaving with no deal."

The basic problems of Brexit remain, however. Britain could still crash out without a transition, disrupting business and souring relations before the sides sit down to negotiate a trade pact and decide how to manage their politically sensitive land border in Ireland.

"Today was a long seven hours that bought us two weeks," another EU diplomat said.

"It just lets us say with a clear conscience that we didn't throw them under the bus on March 29 ... But before April 12, we will face the very same questions as now." (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ieBy Trend

Turkey has condemned US intention to recognize Golan Heights as part of Israel, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Chavushoglu said.

Chavushoglu noted that territorial integrity is a fundamental principle of international law.

"Attempts by the United States to legitimize Israels actions against international law will only lead to more violence in the region," the Turkish Foreign Minister said.

He also added that Turkey supports the territorial integrity of Syria.



Earlier, US President Donald Trump said it was time to back Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability! Trump wrote on Twitter.Adviser to the Russian President Anton Kobyakov and Norwegian Ambassador to Russia Rune Resaland held a meeting in Moscow during which they discussed current issues concerning cooperation between the two countries as well as the format of joint work within the business programme of the Arctic: Territory of Dialogue 5th International Arctic Forum, which will take place at the ExpoForum Convention and Exhibition Centre in St. Petersburg on 910 April 2019.





Norway is committed to continuing a constructive dialogue and developing mutually beneficial relations with Russia. Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg will visit Russia for the first time since 2014. Along with the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ine Eriksen Sreide, they will take part in the work of the Arctic: Territory of Dialogue 5th International Arctic Forum, Resaland said.

For several decades, Russia and Norway have continued to cooperate in various fields, ranging from Arctic Council affairs and ending with environmental protection and radiation safety. We strive to maintain good neighbourly relations and welcome Erna Solbergs decision to attend the International Arctic Forum. I am certain that the Norwegian delegations active involvement in the Forums business programme will make a tangible contribution to the discussion of the pressing issues on the Arctic agenda. Ms. Solberg will join Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Vladimir Putin as part of the plenary session, Kobyakov said.

We hope that the visit will be a successful one. The Arctic plays a very important role for Norway, and we are actively working in this area. For us, this is a priority, and in many respects our views with Russia on the issues of the North are aligned. We are successfully cooperating in this area, so this event is very important to us, Resaland concluded.

This will mark Solbergs first working visit to Russia since attending the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi. During the visit, she plans to discuss the development of the Far North and cooperation between countries of the Arctic Council. The programme of events involving the Norwegian delegation, including summits, will be announced shortly.

The key theme of the Forum will be The Arctic. An Ocean of Opportunity. Three pillars will form the basis of the business programme: Coastal Territories, The Open Ocean, and Sustainable Development.

Official website of the event: forumarctica.ru

For reference:

Arctic: Territory of Dialogue 5th International Arctic Forum

The Arctic: Territory of Dialogue International Arctic Forum is one of the key platforms for the discussion, at a global level, of problems and prospects for the Arctic region. The Forum is an opportunity for members of the international community to pool their efforts to ensure the efficient development of the Arctic and higher living standards for populations living in Arctic territories. The Arctic: Territory of Dialogue Forum was first held in 2010 and was devoted to contemporary problems of the Arctic region. The second forum was held in 2011 and focused on issues of developing transport systems in the Arctic. In 2013the key themes considered included environmental protection, while in 2017 the Forums theme was People and the Arctic. The key theme of the forthcoming 5th International Arctic Forum will be The Arctic: An Ocean of Opportunity. Three pillars will form the basis of the business programme: Coastal Regions, The Open Ocean, and Sustainable Development.

The Roscongress Foundation is a socially oriented non-financial development institution and a major organizer of international conventions, exhibitions, and public events.

The Roscongress Foundation was founded in 2007 with the aim of facilitating the development of Russias economic potential, promoting its national interests, and strengthening the countrys image. One of the roles of the Foundation is to comprehensively evaluate, analyse, and cover issues on the Russian and global economic agendas. It also offers administrative services, provides promotional support for business projects and attracting investment, and helps foster social entrepreneurship and charitable initiatives.

The Foundations events draw more than 80,000 participants each year from 195 countries, with more than 10,000 media representatives working on-site at Roscongress various venues. The Foundation benefits from analytical and professional expertise provided by 2,500 people working in Russia and abroad. In addition, it works in close cooperation with economic partners from 75 countries worldwide.

www.roscongress.org

Disclaimer:

Sponsored content: The views expressed in the post are those of the author.Japanese lifestyle retailer Muji and Finnish autonomous driving company Sensible 4 have launched Gacha, the first autonomous driving bus for all weather conditions, which employ the Nokian Hakkapeliitta winter tyres.



Gacha possesses the unique ability to work reliably even under difficult conditions  in the dark as well as rain, snow, or slush, as the Nokian Hakkapeliitta winter tyres rolling under the bus do their part to ensure that passengers are safe and comfortable even under extreme conditions, said a statement.



So far, difficult weather conditions have prevented self-driving cars from operating, since they have been developed and tested under warm conditions. Gacha uses completely new steering technology that has been tested to work under the arctic conditions in Lapland. This provides it with a unique competitive advantage over other self-driving solutions.



Harri Santamala, chief executive officer, Sensible 4, said: We wanted to develop a self-driving bus that will operate reliably even in the worst weather.



Difficult conditions also demand a lot from the interface between the vehicle and the road. This made Nokian Hakkapeliitta winter tyres a natural choice for us and they complement our system in an excellent manner, he added.



Developed for extreme conditions, Nokian Hakkapeliittas were born from decades of experience in demanding and varying conditions. They are built for driving wherever sudden changes in weather are the norm. The safety of the winter tyres is fine-tuned in the snow, ice, and slush at White Hell, the world's largest testing centre for winter tyres.



Over 200 days of frost per year provide demanding, yet excellent conditions for testing and developing the world's safest winter tyres.



The tyre is a vehicle's only point of contact with the road, which makes it an important safety factor  even for self-driving cars. According to a recent study conducted by Nokian Tyres in Europe, nearly 60 per cent of drivers feel that winter tires are a car's most important safety accessory.



Jukka Kasi, senior vice president, products and technologies for Nokian Tyres, said: A lot will happen in the automotive industry in the near future. Traffic technology is networking and autonomous robotic vehicles will be an everyday thing.



The control systems of these self-driving vehicles require state-of-the-art tyres and versatile data on their operation in order to make driving proactive and safe under all conditions. Developing new types of services and smart tire technologies enables us to meet the changing needs of future traffic and clients, Kasi added.



The Gacha bus, fitted with non-studded Nokian Hakkapeliitta R3 winter tyres, was introduced to the public in March.



The plan is to start using the bus in passenger traffic in three Finnish cities during this spring. Sensible 4 and Muji aim to develop self-driving minibuses for public use and offer transportation services to consumers already in 2021.  TradeArabia News Servicenews, latest-news

One of the architects who designed Australia's Parliament House fears sections of the iconic building could one day be demolished so it can be expanded. Ric Thorp, who is speaking in Canberra on Monday, said if parts of the Australian War Memorial could be demolished, it was not beyond the realms of possibility to think sections of Parliament House could eventually face the wrecking ball as well. Anzac Hall is set to be knocked down as part of a $498 million redevelopment of the memorial. "When you read about the government so quickly approving a half-a-billion-dollar expansion to the War Memorial, which involves knocking down a reasonably built, huge, highly awarded building by Denton Corker Marshall, I see little to prevent that happening [to Parliament House], to be very honest with you," Mr Thorp said. "We live in difficult times with our political class, I suppose you might say." Parliament House, which opened 31 years ago in May 1988, was designed by Mitchell/Giurgola & Thorp Architects. The design was chosen from 329 entries in an international competition to design Australia's new seat of government. Mr Thorp said three decades after the building was opened, he was still happy with its design. "I have maintained an enormous interest and some involvement in it ever since," he said. "To be honest, the only thing that I ever have concerns about is the potential threat in the future, rather than anything that has happened to date. "How future additions or alterations are going to be handled ... I just feel that there's no certainty going forward about that. "We left behind, as part of our original competition submission, the required provision for future extension, but I would say that that's not necessarily being endorsed by the current occupants. "As yet, nothing has happened, so it's only a concern for the future." Mr Thorp is due to speak at an event organised by the Australian Institute of Architects' ACT chapter on Monday night at the ANU's University House, on the topic of untold stories surrounding the design and construction of Parliament House. Journalist Helen Pitt, author of The House, which details what went on behind the scenes in building the Opera House, is also speaking. The event is being recorded for Radio National's Big Ideas program with Paul Barclay. Now retired, Mr Thorp said Parliament still held the original designs from Mitchell/Giurgola & Thorp for any potential expansions. Apart from politicians, Parliament House is also a workplace for more than 5000 people during parliamentary sitting, and some say the time is ripe for an expansion. "The competition entry conditions required that you indicate how you would expand the executive government wing, the House of Representatives wing and the Senate wing, and we had those things in place," Mr Thorp said. Whether those extension plans will ever be used remains to be seen, but Mr Thorp does not believe politicians should decide on the best option if Parliament House is expanded. "I would like to see something set up where there is a safeguard in place. It could be the various government architects of the states and territories being made responsible to approve any changes ... get someone who is out of the loop," he said. As to the extra security that has been added to Parliament House, including a new fence, Mr Thorp said he was not overly concerned. "I am a realist in terms of security. These things have to be done," he said. "Anybody charged with the responsibility for making decisions at the Parliament House about security is going to take it seriously. "I think there's been an improvement in the quality of the work being done. I think early on, in the life of the parliament, there were some pretty shoddy fences and things put up, but more recently they've been a much better design quality and suited much better to the building." Romaldo Giurgola, who died in 2016, was the principal architect of Parliament House. In his will, he specified that the moral rights to the design of the building be managed by another of the Parliament House architects, Hal Guida, as well as public art consultant Pamille Berg - giving them the right to be informed of, and asked to comment on, any potential changes to the design. Mr Guida said on Thursday he believed the Department of Parliamentary Services had acted in good faith to date when dealing with the moral rights administrators. Mr Thorp agreed the department had the best intentions, but said he believed it could not withstand political force. He said he remembered the architects' original design for the members' and guests' dining room at Parliament House was changed without consultation at the last minute because some members did not agree with it. "This can happen. People ask 'why doesn't anyone know this?' Well, I'll tell them," he said. "Every opportunity I have, be it this talk or seminar, I will try to use to speak up for the future of the building. That it be treated with integrity and respect and overseen by outside forces or experts." Big Ideas - Untold Stories: New Parliament House + Sydney Opera House, Monday, March 25 from 5pm to 7.3pm. The Common Room, University House, Australian National University.

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/8a34bc93-1eff-44f3-b928-e4dbd2bb8dbe/r0_95_2000_1225_w1200_h678_fmax.jpgnews, latest-news

The potential for lone-actor right-wing terrorism should be on every intelligence agency's radar. For example, ASIO noted in its 2017-18 annual report: "While the threat of terrorist attacks conducted by lone actors continues, these threats are not isolated to Islamist extremists. Individuals motivated by other ideologies  such as an extreme left or right-wing ideology  may consider conducting an act of terrorism." ASIO said customers were generally happy with its reporting: "Our analysis of terrorism motivations, influences and trends in Australia was highly regarded, as were our biannual threat assessments of terrorism and violent protest and reports on right and left-wing extremism." By contrast, the equivalent New Zealand agency's annual report made no mention of right-wing concerns. The only recent ASIO-reported incidence of right-wing terrorism in Australia was Operation Fortaleza on August 6, 2016, when an extreme right-wing individual's alleged preparations were disrupted. The person was Phillip Michael Galea, 31, of Braybrook in Melbourne's west, who was charged in 2016 with "planning to commit a terrorist act and collecting material in connection to a terrorist act". The prosecution claimed Galea was targeting the Melbourne Anarchist Club in Northcote, the Resistance Centre in the CBD and Trades Hall in Carlton. Galea apparently wanted to produce what he called The Patriots Cookbook, which would show how to make bombs using potassium nitrate "for the advancement of extreme right-wing ideology to overcome the perceived Islamisation of Australia". Galea reportedly had links with right-wing extremist organisations such as Britain's Combat 18 and the United Patriots Front in Australia. In 2017, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on the conviction of "neo-Nazi" Michael James Holt, 26, who had threatened to carry out a mass shooting and considered targeting Westfield Tuggerah on the NSW Central Coast. Holt had made guns, knuckledusters and slingshots in his grandfather's garage. Subsequent raids on his mother's home and a hotel room discovered more weapons. The deadliest lone-actor right-wing attack in recent times was the July 22, 2011 bombing and shootings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik, aged 32. He set off a massive vehicle bomb in Oslo outside prime minister Jens Stoltenberg's office, killing eight people, and then went on to Utya island to shoot and kill 69 young members of the Labour Party who were meeting and holidaying there. Breivik's preparation and attack have become the blueprint for similar attacks. On the day of the attacks, he distributed electronically a compendium of texts titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, describing his militant ideology. His manifesto included details of how he played video games such as World of Warcraft to relax, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for "training-simulation". Breivik bought a semi-automatic 9-millimetre Glock 34 pistol legally by showing he was a member of a pistol club, and a semi-automatic Ruger Mini-14 rifle after buying a hunting license. He told a court he trained for shooting using a holographic device while playing Call of Duty. He said it helped him gain target acquisition. In 2012, the British home affairs committee warned of the threat of far-right terrorism in Britain, saying it had heard "persuasive evidence" about the potential danger and cited the growth of similar threats across Europe. In March 2018, Mark Rowley, the outgoing head of Britain's counter-terrorist policing, revealed that four far-right terror plots had been foiled since the Westminster attack in March 2017. In the United States, there have been 18 right-wing terrorist attacks since 2012, resulting in 51 deaths. The deadliest, on October 27, 2018, was a lone-actor right-wing attack by Robert Gregory Bowers, 46, at the Pittsburgh synagogue, where he shot and killed 11 worshippers. It was the most lethal attack on the US Jewish community. Bowers had earlier posted anti-Semitic comments against the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Shortly before the attack, he posted on "Gab" that "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in." (Gab is an ad-free social network "dedicated to preserving individual liberty, the freedom of speech, and the free flow of information on the internet".) Many of the shooter attacks in the US do not show a clear motivation. The FBI designated 50 shootings in 2016 and 2017 as "active-shooter" incidents. There is no assessment yet of numbers for 2018. Meanwhile, the Gun Violence Archive recorded 152 mass shootings in the US between 1967 and May 2018, averaging eight deaths per incident. The challenge for security organisations is to identify potential lone-actor right-wing attackers. Some options are monitoring gun clubs and their members, social media, extreme-right organisations and their members  and encouraging anyone with concerns about a potentially violent person to report them to the national security hotline. Effectively, it means using lots of resources for small returns. Police may pick up on some potentially violent persons through threat assessment centres, and it's important, of course, that police respond quickly to an active-shooter situation. It would also be desirable to have an armed police officer present on days of worship at mosques and synagogues (rather than armed civilian guards), and possibly one or more responsible members of likely target organisations trained to use a gun, with access to a weapon securely stored on-site. Australia also needs another gun buy-back scheme to reduce the number of firearms in the country (there are now 3 million registered guns plus an estimated 260,000 unregistered.) Clearly, as Brenton Tarrant showed only too well in Christchurch, the well-organised lone-actor extremist can be a deadly attacker. The law-enforcement challenge is that the perpetrator might not have done anything illegal until the attack begins. Clive Williams is a visiting professor at the ANU's centre for military and security law.

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/e812be3d-8f4c-4ed7-b618-07cebd1f1807/r0_224_3000_1919_w1200_h678_fmax.jpgUAE's leading telecoms services operator Etisalat said its shareholders have backed the boards recommendation to distribute cash dividends (Dh0.80 per share) for full-year 2018 at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) held recently.



Etisalat Group consolidated revenues reached Dh52.4 billion ($14.2 billion) while consolidated net profit after Federal Royalty reached Dh8.6 billion ($2.3 billion) up 2.4 per cent compared to the same period last year.



During the AGM held at the companys headquarters in Abu Dhabi, the shareholders also approved the proposal to lift restrictions on the voting rights of foreign shareholders.



Group Chairman Eissa Mohamed Al-Suwaidi said: "Our journey in 2018, marks another successful year for Etisalat in realising its vision towards driving the digital future to empower societies. As a group, we focused on strengthening our core business, expanding and enriching our digital portfolio, and diversifying into new growth opportunities. We have increased the effort on transforming Etisalat into an agile and more efficient company."



"With the emergence of the digital era, there have been dynamic changes and rapid developments in the global telecom sector. Etisalat maintained its leadership position as it continued to transition to a digital organisation both internally and externally," he stated.



"As Etisalat continues its journey, it allows new opportunities with every generation of technology that it adopts. Etisalat envisions 5G as a stepping-stone to unlimited potential, a technology that will enable new use cases, widen possibilities, and enhance value creation," remarked Al Suwaidi.



"Hence, we were the first to launch the first commercial 5G network in UAE and the region achieving another technological milestone for the company. The fifth generation of the network will fuel digital transformation, IoT, smart cities and the fourth industrial revolution," he added.



Group CEO Saleh Abdullah Al Abdooli said: "Etisalat Group made further progress this year in its efforts to lead in the digital space, to transform its operating model, and to enhance value and returns to customers and shareholders. 2018 was rich with accomplishments that will enhance the ability to achieve our vision as a group, which is to drive the digital future to empower societies."



"Our portfolio is the most valuable brand in MENA and the first and only brand to surpass the $10 billion, a great feat that puts Etisalat head to head with global renowned brands and ahead of many key regional brands," stated Al Abdooli.



According to him, Etisalats portfolio currently spans more than 15 countries while serving over 141 million customers.



"The technology that we provide and enable, brings individuals and societies closer at a local and global level, such firm belief was the drive behind launching our new brand direction "Together Matter" which embodies the power of technology in connecting and enriching peoples lives," stated Al Abdooli.



"Last year also witnessed the launch of e-SIM features for Apple watches, in which Etisalat UAE was the first Mena Telecom operator to offer such a service," he noted.



"While on a parallel track, we have affirmed our position as the preferred IoT provider with key projects like "Hassantuk", which is a landmark partnership with UAEs Ministry of Interior to deliver the first Smart Fire Alarm solution in the region," he added.-TradeArabia News ServiceAhmedabad, March 21 (IANS) Setting at rest all speculations, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday announced that its national president Amit Shah would contest the Lok Sabha elections from Gandhinagar, in place of veteran leader and incumbent MP L.K. Advani.

Ninety-one-year-old Advani who represented the Gandhinagar seat for six terms, except for 1996, won the 2014 elections with a huge vote margin of 4.83 lakh, next only to Narendra Modis 5 lakh-plus votes from Vadodara, which he vacated to retain the Varanasi seat in Uttar Pradesh.

In 1996, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (his first for a term of 13 days) had won the seat. Vajpayee vacated Gandhinagar seat later for Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh.

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BJP sources said the key aim of Shah contesting elections and that too from Gandhinagar was to rev up the party cadres across Gujarat with a goal to win all 26 seats in the state again. Secondly, Gandhinagar is the safest seat and the Congress has never won from here since 1989.

BJP spokesperson Prashant Vala said: The announcement of Shahs name has electrified the cadres and there is an atmosphere of celebration everywhere. There is no doubt about the BJP winning all the Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat.

Reacting to the news, Congress spokesperson Pragati Ahir said: It is the fear of loss of many seats in Gujarat that has prompted the BJP president to contest elections from Gandhinagar.

Just over a year ago, Shah was sent to the Rajya Sabha and now the party was rushing him to contest Lok Sabha polls, she said.

According to sources, BJP patriarch Advani who lifted the saffron party to national significance in the 1990s and whose charioteer during his famous Ayodhya Rathyatra was present Prime Minister Narendra Modi, neither expressed his wish nor was he asked if he would like to contest the elections.

Whats more, there had been a clamour for over a week from the band of Shah supporters that he should take the plunge from Gandhinagar. However, there was a parallel demand too from the camp of Shahs bete noire in Gujarat politics, Madhya Pradesh Governor and former Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel, that she or her daughter Anaar Patel should fight elections from Gandhinagar.

No sooner did demands start from Shahs supporters, with posters and banners cropping up in various areas, a matcher came from Anandiben Patels supporters when she visited the Gujarat capital and her posters were splashed across the city. She even held meetings with her supporters.

Albeit, Anandiben Patel and her daughter Anaar quickly denied speculations that either of them was in the race for the ticket. Sources said the display of strength was only to convey the message that if Shahs name was being discussed, she was also there.

Amid all this, another rumour started floating around that Modi may choose to contest from the Gandhinagar seat.

The BJPs state parliamentary board had finalised at least two names for all the seats, but there was no discussion on the Gandhinagar since the Gujarat party leadership would have no say on this.Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact.

Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here.

Care2 Stands With: humanitarians, animal lovers, feminists, rabble-rousers, nature-buffs, creatives, the naturally curious, and people who really love to do the right thing.

You are our people. You Care. We Care2.Importance Of World Water Day

World Water Day is celebrated across the world to learn about the issues related to water and take necessary actions. Annually, the UN-Water sets a theme for World Water Day corresponding to the future or current challenge.

World Water Day History

International Water Day or World Water Day is celebrated to grab the attention of people on the importance of freshwater besides gathering support for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.

The international day on March 22 was recommended at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) responded by designating March 22 as the World Water Day. The UNGA accepted this with the recommendations of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED).

World Water Day Theme

Every year, the UN will come up with a theme for World Water Day to make the difference. Check the World Water Day themes.

World Water Day 2019: Leaving No One Behind

World Water Day 2018: Nature For Water

World Water Day 2017: Why Waste Water

World Water Day 2016: Better Water, Better Jobs

World Water Day 2015: Water And Sustainable Development

World Water Day - Sustainable Development

The United Nations General Assembly in 2015 has rolled out 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the year 2030. Goal 6 in the Sustainable Development is very clear that ''Clean Water and Sanitation.'' Students should know about the eight targets and 11 indicators which are being used to monitor.

World Water Day  Key Facts

In order to stand out in the competitive entrance exam, candidates should also know some interesting facts which are usually asked in the general knowledge section.While the fact Facebook sold data without its users knowledge or consent is old news, new reports that federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals the social media platform struck with several of the largest technology companies have heightened the stakes.

Since these thoughts are being added to a series of articles focused on relationship management, I would like to begin by offering some observations regarding the relationship between Facebook and its more than 2.25 billion users.

If a relationship had an address, it would be located on a two-way street. In all but a few rare instances, relationships include a measure of reciprocity. If you give me a cup of coffee, I owe you, depending on our relationship, friendship, a good story, a cup of coffee tomorrow or $2.50.

Anyone who chooses to believe Facebook is free simply because it does not charge a subscription fee is not being realistic. Facebook provides a virtual meeting place, soapbox and photo album to its users at significant cost to the company. We must assume Facebooks more than 35,000 employees dont work for free. Add to that the cost of real estate, utilities, server farms and, of course, insurance.

Since Facebook doesnt charge a subscription fee, it must find other ways of paying its bills. Therefore, when I hear Facebook is selling ads to companies that track my online search behavior, I save my outrage for climate change, voter suppression and miscreants who dont pick up after their dogs.

Facebook and I have entered into an adult relationship in which I get something from them and they get something from me. We have willingly entered into a mutually beneficial relationship.

Of course, like all relationships, Facebook and its users must be able to depend upon the others good sense and proper behavior. When it comes to users, Facebook outlaws certain behaviors. For example, the companys Statement of Rights and Responsibilities prohibits hate speech.

Since Facebook speaks with one voice, the task of drafting a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities for users may be challenging but not inconceivable. Of course, this task would be inconceivable for Facebooks more than 2.25 billion global users. Consequently, Facebook must deftly determine what is right and wrong for users from a wide range of geographies and cultures.

The following, as reported by The New York Times, feels wrong: The sharing deals empowered Microsofts Bing search engine to map out the friends of virtually all Facebook users without their explicit consent and allowed Amazon to obtain users names and contact information through their friends. Apple was able to hide from Facebook users all indicators that its devices were even asking for data.

Each time Facebook strays beyond what its users should be able to reasonably expect from their relationship, it runs the risk of a trial separation and eventually a divorce. Users will migrate to alternate social media platforms or possibly even put down their personal devices and take a walk in the park.

Like Facebook, the carrier community gathers vast amounts of information from users. Carriers know insureds health histories, driving records, dates of birth, geography and claims histories. Carriers know if jewelry was stolen from an insured during a move, as recently happened to my daughter. Carriers know if the moving company damaged the insureds staircase during the move, as recently happened to me.

Carriers have a relationship with insureds. Insureds submit payment after receiving a premium notice, while carriers transfer risk and settle a claim following an unplanned event. Each party expects the other to act in good faith. When my daughter submitted a claim for lost jewelry, the carrier could reasonably expect she was telling the truth. My daughter reasonably expected the carrier to honor the claim after filing a police report.

Carriers must vigilantly guard the wealth of information provided by insureds and not treat it as a profit center. Facebook has taken undue liberties regarding its relationship with usersand it is paying the price with a diminished stock price and reputational damage. Carriers should consider Facebooks flogging in the courts of law and public opinion to be a free education.FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Soyia Ellison, soyia.ellison@cartercenter.org

GEORGETOWN, GUYANA  A Carter Center delegation led by Jason J. Carter, chairman of the Carter Centers Board of Trustees, has been in Guyana this week meeting with key stakeholders to learn about the current challenges facing Guyana and to assess whether the Center could assist Guyanese going forward.

The Centers visit comes at a critical moment. Guyana could move into a time of constitutional uncertainty after March 22, which marks the end of a three-month period following a contested vote of no confidence and the deadline to hold elections, unless there is a political agreement about the way forward and either a National Assembly vote or a court decision to approve an extension of the electoral timeline.

From its conversations with senior political leaders on both sides, the GECOM secretariat and commissioners, and a variety of other stakeholders, the Carter Center provides the following comments:

President David Granger and Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo have a shared desire to have elections in the shortest possible time, consistent with law and pending judicial decisions.

Because March 21, 2019, is a national holiday, under Guyanas Interpretation and General Clauses Act, the constitutional three-month period following the no-confidence vote would expire on the following day, March 22, 2019.

The Carter Center reiterates its support for Guyana and urges all sides to find an agreed-upon way forward to establish an early election date. The Carter Center hopes the National Assembly is able to convene no later than March 22 to authorize an extension of the election timeline and to avoid a period of constitutional uncertainty.

GECOM commissioners recognize that the current voters list is bloated. A primary concern is the likely inclusion of significant numbers of Guyanese living overseas. GECOM commissioners hold different views about whether or not to conduct a new house-to-house registration exercise to address this concern.

GECOMs chief electoral officer has prepared various scenarios for election timelines, and in the event that a new house-to-house registration is not required, elections could be organized in July or August. Conducting a new house-to-house registration would mean an election would not be possible until late November.

Give the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the vote of no confidence and the constitutional requirement for early elections, there are several steps that could be considered to try to mitigate concerns about the voter list while scheduling elections as early as possible, including: Using data from the Ministry of Immigration, GECOM could prepare a reference list of Guyanese who are currently overseas (for three months or longer) and also included on the voter registration list. The voters on the reference list would not be removed from the registration list (other than through already existing legal procedures like, for example, the claims and objections process). But the reference list would be made available to party agents and scrutineers to facilitate enhanced review of these names during the electoral process, both during the claims and objections period and on election day, serving as a deterrent to multiple or substitute voting. The reference list would supplement safeguards already in place in Guyanas electoral administration to protect against multiple voting. As The Carter Center has recognized in the past, Guyanas existing safeguards are strong and consistent with international standards for democratic elections. In addition, GECOM could consider providing resources to expand the number of political party agents and scrutineers who can monitor the electoral process before, during, and after election day. These efforts could be complemented by a strong presence of international observers and domestic citizen observers to enhance transparency.

The Carter Center is aware of pending decisions from the Court of Appeal and that these decisions may be appealed to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). In the event that final court rulings invalidate the vote of no confidence, elections would not need to be held this year.

Background. Prior to the delegations visit, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter spoke with President Granger and opposition leader Jagdeo, both of whom indicated they would welcome a Carter Center team. The delegation is led by Jason J. Carter, President Carters grandson and the chairman of the Carter Centers Board of Trustees and includes David Carroll and Brett Lacy of the Centers Democracy Program.

###

"Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope."

A not-for-profit, nongovernmental organization, The Carter Center has helped to improve life for people in over 80 countries by resolving conflicts; advancing democracy, human rights, and economic opportunity; preventing diseases; and improving mental health care. The Carter Center was founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, in partnership with Emory University, to advance peace and health worldwide.TCN News

On Friday 15th March 2019, Australian born terrorist Brenton Tarrant went on a killing spree targeting Muslim worshippers in two mosques of New Zealand Al Noor and Linwood mosque killing 50 persons. Tarrant even livestreamed the killings on social media.

The 50 persons who lost their lives that day spanned from different nations, many had migrated from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Jordan and Syria for livelihood, education or for safety. A few of them were are natives of New Zealand.

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There were 9 of them from India about whom we have gathered a little information.

Five persons were from Gujrat Mehboob Khokhar, father-son duo Asif Vohra and Rameez Vohra; Junaid Kara and Hafiz Musa Patel. One young woman from Kerala and three from Telangana state.

Mehboob Khokhar and his wife were in Christchurch visiting their son who lived there. Khokhar, 63 years was a retired state government employee in the electricity department and was living there from two months and was soon planning to come back home to Juhapur Gujrat, India before this fatal attack at the mosque.

Arif Vohra, 58 years hailed from Vadodara. He had gone to Christchurch with his wife to visit their son Rameez Vohra and also welcome the to be born grandchild as their daughter in law was expecting. And it was just a few days that Rameezs wife had delivered a baby girl. He and his son were at first reported to be missing but the next day Saturday their deaths were confirmed.

Rameez Vohra, 28 years, had become a father a few days back and had planned to get his wife and 9 day old daughter, discharged from the hospital after the Friday prayers. But he and his father Arif Vohra were shot dead at the Al Noor mosque. Rameez is said to be working in a supermarket.

Ansi Alibava, 25 year old, from Thrissur District, Kerala had gone with her husband Abdul Nazar for the Friday prayers. Ansi was in the womens section when she was shot. Her husband, who was near the emergency managed to escape. She had joined her husband recently after completing her masters in agribusiness management.

Ozair Kadir, was training to be a commercial pilot from the International Aviation Academy of New Zealand. Ozair, 25 years, was from Hyderabad and had moved to New Zealand to become a pilot like his older brother.

Junaid Kara, native of Adada village, Navsari in Gujrat was born in New Zealand and a native of Christchurch. He ran a general store. He visited India once a year. His family had helped in building the mosque in Christchurch. Junaid, 36 years is survived by his wife and three children.

Hafiz Musa Patel, 60 years, from Lunawara village in Gujarats Bharuch district had left India many years ago and was the Imam in a Fijian mosque. He was in New Zealand to spend time with children and friends. He is survived by his wife and five children.

Farhaj Ahsan, 30 years, was from Hyderabad, Telangana state and was living in New Zealand from the last 10 years, working as an electrical engineer. He is survived by his wife, Insha Aziz and 2 small children  a 3 year old daughter and 7 month old son.

Mohammed Imran Khan, 47 years, was from Karimnagar, Telangana state. He ran 2restaurants at Christchurch one of which was called  Indian Grill. He was at the Al Noor Mosque to offer prayers when he was shot. He was undergoing treatment but succumbed to the injuries.

41 victims were laid to rest in Christchurch city while some were repatriated to their families for the last rites.

The Prime Minister has brought changes in the gun laws by banning semi-automatic rifles and large ammunition magazines in New Zealand following this terrorist attack. This move has been appreciated by a large number of people across the globe.Photo: The Canadian Press Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

A new poll conducted by Leger for The Canadian Press suggests the governing federal Liberals have lost ground to the Conservatives over the past month.

Overall, 31 per cent of respondents polled after the federal budget was released Tuesday said they would vote for Justin Trudeau's Liberals if an election were held now, a decline of about three percentage points from February.

That compared with 37 per cent who said they would back the Conservatives under leader Andrew Scheer, a one-point increase from February, while 14 per cent said they would vote NDP and 10 per cent the Greens.

Scheer also jumped ahead of Trudeau on the question of who would make a better prime minister as the Tory leader got the backing of 25 per cent of respondents compared with 24 per cent for Trudeau, who has been struggling to contain damage from the SNC-Lavalin affair.

As for the budget, which the Liberals are hoping will help turn the page on SNC-Lavalin, 12 per cent of respondents said it was good and 19 per cent that it was bad, but 39 per cent said they didn't really know about it.

Leger's internet-based survey, which cannot be assigned a margin of error because online polls are not considered random samples, was conducted March 19 and 20 using computer-assisted web-interviewing technology and heard from 1,529 Canadians who are eligible to vote and were recruited from the firm's online panel.Greece and France confirmed this Saturday (11) that they had concluded negotiations for the purchase of three French warships by...Turkish and Greek officials will come together next month to discuss what confidence building measures they can impose to avoid new confrontations in the Aegean Sea, Greeces top diplomat said, while also informing about an agreement for the relaunch of exploratory talks for the resolution of all problems stemming from the Aegean. We should start to be in constant dialogue with small steps without big objectives. An assessment meeting between the officials from the two foreign ministries for the confidence building measures will be held on April 12, Greek Foreign Minister Georgios Katrougalos told a joint press conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on March 21 in Antalya, Hurriyet Daily News writes in the article Turkey, Greece to resume Aegean talks.

The Greek top diplomat also announced his agreement with Cavusoglu for the resumption of exploratory talks between the two countries which have been suspended in the wake of a failed coup in mid-2016 in Turkey.

Ties between Turkey and Greece have always been shaky due to the lack of a border line in the Aegean Sea that causes unending disputes over territorial waters and continental shelfs. Efforts to resolve them diplomatically have not yet yielded results although the two parties are still committed to stick with talks to this end.

For his part, Cavusoglu confirmed that talks will be held between the two ministries on April 12 on confidence building measures so that all these problems can be resolved peacefully. Turkey and Greece had imposed dozens of confidence building measures in the past that included temporary pause to military drills in the Aegean Sea during the tourism season.

One other top issue the two ministers discussed was a recent ongoing hydro-carbon tension in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The two ministers met and reviewed the situation just a day after the prime ministers of Greece and Greek Cyprus held a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Tel Aviv.

Any project [in this region] that does include Turkey is not realistic. Turkey has rights stemming from international law, Cavusoglu stressed, while praising his counterparts earlier remarks on the fact that Turkey should not be excluded.

Apart from Turkeys rights to conduct activities to explore hydro-carbon reserves, the Turkish Cypriots also have their own rights off the island, the Turkish minister said. We had a very simple demand for securing the rights of the Turkish Cypriots [after the beginning of Greek Cypriot explorations]. This guarantee can be provided through the European Union or other formulas can be found. We have shown possible flexibility on that.

Turkey began its own explorations in the region after the Greek Cypriot government denied to secure the rights of the Turkish Cypriots, Cavusoglu stated, We will start drilling operations in the coming period. This issue might have been resolved simply.

The Greek minister sought to assure his counterpart that neither Greece nor Greek Cypriots were aiming to monopolize the hydro-carbon resources in the region, underlining that the problem should be resolved through international law and without escalating tension between parties.

We, as Greece, believe and support that Cyprus has its own rights in its economic exclusive zone. This right concerns both communities [of the island]. We are not cold to assessments that hydro-carbon resources should be used to the benefit of both sides. We have a proposal for the formation of a fund for the fair distribution of the revenues, he stated.

Turkish and Greek ministers also discussed a potential new effort for the resumption of negotiations for the settlement of the decades-old Cypriot conflict. We are not in a position to digest another failure. We should not restart talks just for the sake of a conversation. These talks should be goal-oriented and not open-ended. We should determine the frame beforehand, Cavusoglu said, blaming the Greek Cypriots for the collapse of the latest initiative in Crans Montana.

Katrougalos, for his part, described Crans Montana as a conference in which both sides made important progress for a lasting settlement, but at the same time criticized the Turkish parts insistence on the continuation of the guarantees, one of the main parameters of the talks that pledge important roles for the three guarantor countries, Turkey, Greece and the United Kingdom. The Greek minister described these guarantees as outdated.

Cavusoglu rejected his guests characterization of this parameter. We observe unilateral efforts [by Greek Cyprus]. This makes Turkeys guarantees much more important. He also criticized the Greek Cypriot government for not willing to share authorities with the Turkish community. Therefore, we believe categorizing guarantee and security agreements as outdated is not a realist approach.Tabuk Cement wins clinker export order to Yemen

22 March 2019

Tabuk Cement of Saudi Arabia has won an order to export 500,000t of clinker to Golden Oil Co in Yemen. The contract will conclude by the end of 2019, according to a bourse statement.



The financial impact will be reflected in Tabuk Cement's financial business report in the 2Q19. Tabuk Cement operates an integrated cement plant at Duba port producing 1.2Mta of cement.

Published underFive years ago, on March 21, 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the Agreement on the Accession of the Republic of Crimea in the Russian Federation following the results of a nationwide referendum: 96.77% of the peninsula voters chose to join Russia. The agreement on the accession of Crimea and Sevastopol to the Russian Federation was signed on March 18, 2014 and ratified by the Federal Assembly on March 21.

At the Russian Foreign Ministry's conference, dedicated to the 'Crimean Spring' anniversary, member of the Federation Council Igor Morozov noted that "Crimea always gave passionate spirit to our people - both during the wars with Turkey and during the Great Patriotic War. This passionate spirit of Crimeans, which is transferred to all Russian people, made the so-called 'Crimean spring' possible for us in 2014. Now, it is a stable term, which, if translate it into the Gumilyov language, is the passionate spirit of our Russian people."

According to Igor Morozov, it was time when true colors were shown: "The Americans had nothing else to hide. They considered that we gave them a reason, so a strategy of prompt global strike was announced at the first Welsh NATO summit. What was secret information (Americans prepared their missile defense system, including in outer space) it was made public back then. It gave an understanding that we should move forward as well. Crimeans, you gave us that opportunity, you united the whole society around the leader, around the president! We united all those having patriotic attitudes."

"In the future, it was easy for the President, the Federation Council to decide on the participation of our Armed Forces in the Syrian campaign. The President addressed the UN General Assembly with words: "If you dont unite, then we will be alone in fighting international terrorism." Syria's battle ground gave us the opportunity to test all types of weapons, including new physical principles weapons. We again started to enter the geopolitical orbit as a global player. Putin became the real global leader after Crimea, during the Syrian campaign. We were told that Russia would be blocked, that it was already isolated, that its economy was torn to shreds. But in fact, all the Persian Gulf monarchies were visiting Putin and negotiating with him on the issues that worried them, including economic ones," Morozov said.

Meanwhile, first deputy chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs Vladimir Dzhabarov told about his experience of being an election observer five years ago: "The March 16th was a day of uncertain weather in Yalta: rain, snow, sun, and strong wind. But I saw huge queues at polling stations, they were mostly young people. This voter category usually comes later, but then they queued up in the morning to cast their vote to return to Russia." In addition, Dzhabarov was really impressed with a 96-year-old woman with a walker who explained why she came to the polling station: "I have been waiting for this day since 1954. 60 years. And thank God, I am here and I can cast my vote."

"Now when I hear statements of European leaders, NATO representatives that the referendum in Crimea was undemocratic, was held in violation of the rules, it surprises me. I have documentaries from all polling stations. Those days I did not see armed people in Yalta at all, except for one policeman," Dzhabarov assured. According to him, the fact that Crimea and Sevastopol "returned home" is the greatest achievement of our country in the postwar period, because this is the case when Russia did not lose territory after the end of World War II, but returned its historical part."U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the Middle East for regional security talks as Washington looks to draw new support in its opposition to Iranian aggression. As Voice of America writes in the article In Middle East, Pompeo Seeks Regional Support Against Iran, Pompeo began is trip in Kuwait late Tuesday and headed to Israel Wednesday. His trip will also take him to Lebanon.

Pompeo, in comments to reporters en route to the Middle East, dismissed the suggestion that his meeting with Netanyahu could be seen as the U.S. intruding in the Israeli election in support of Netanyahu. A senior State Department official said last week that Pompeo would not be meeting with Netanyahu's opponents, but Netanyahu alone as the current head of the Israeli government. Netanyahu is visiting Washington next week for the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful Jewish lobbying group in the United States, and also could meet with President Donald Trump.

Pompeo said the recent U.S. shift away from terminology describing the West Bank and Syria's Golan Heights as "Israeli-occupied" to that of "controlled" by the Jewish state was not accidental. He said that the characterization in a recent State Department report on human rights around the world about Israeli control of the disputed territories "was a factual statement about how we observe the situation. And we think its very accurate, and we stand behind it."

Pompeo said that on his third stop, in Beirut, "well spend a lot of time talking with the Lebanese government about how we can help them disconnect from the threat that Iran and Hezbollah present to them." The United States considers Hezbollah, a militant Islamist political group, as a pro-Iranian "terrorist" organization, even though it is represented in the coalition government of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a U.S. ally.The fact that children's movies industry in Russia is in a deep crisis has been repeatedly said for many years. Some say that this happens due to lack of funding, others blame lack of directors and screenwriters specializing in this particular industry, and some people blame ideological crisis. Disney company launched continuation of the social-cultural project "Happiness is ..." in Russia. The goal of this is to help young Russian filmmakers to make movies for the big screen. One of the initiators of this project, director of the famous Soviet children's films "Mustached Nanny", "A Dog Was Walking on the Piano", "Mio, My Mio", Vladimir Grammatiko, dicussed modern family and children's movies in an interview with Vestnik Kavkaza.

- Why is this project so important?

- We help young Russian filmmakers, gather the budget and say: "Here's the money, shoot your movie!" Things like that happen rarely. In addition, young people come together to implement the project - this is very important and very interesting. Open competition was held, in which young people from different cities participated. We also held actor's contest, during which everyone could send their videos, demonstrating why they should be chosen.

- Are there any directors from the Caucasus?

- Of course. There was one man. Six girls and one man won our contest. This is a trend - women are now stronger.

- Writer Sergey Lukyanenko is part of the jury. Are there fantasy stories among "Happiness is ..." short stories' series?

- No. That's not why we called him. Sergey is an amazing person. His great, it's so interesting to talk to him. He is polyphonic, he has so many different projects, different knowledge, he has tremendous experience.

- Which movie did you like the most?

- "Dear". Actors performed beautifully. And it's also such a human story, and it's very well done.

- Could one of the short stories become a huge full-length film?

- It's possible. By the way, "Dear" can easily be turned into full-length movie. This is not a story about abandoned people, it's about those who have found parents.

- What do you think about current situation with children's films?

- This industry is in a deep crisis. Directors can't make serious fiction, powerful tale or historical film that teenagers really want to see. Those who get money don't even think about this.

In addition, there are marketing costs. Children's television can't show commercials. As a result, there is no children's broadcasting on federal channels. However, I sometimes think that maybe it's not necessary to return to it. Imagine children's shows on NTV?! I have a hard time to imagine that. We must understand today's realities.

Of course, we also have to deal with the Internet. We need some kind of regulation there, since its not very good to count on people's conscience and decency.

- Are any of your projects involve countries of the South Caucasus region?

- Maybe in the future. I wouldn't rule out possibility of cooperation. I think that this time will come soon, because it's a reasonable idea.In 1950 there were 12 urban areas in the United States that had one million or more citizens. In 2010, 41 had more than one million in population and this number is projected to grow to 53 by 2030 (Source: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division). And currently more than 85 percent of our population is clustered into cities. Of the ten most populated metropolitan regions touching seven or eight states, all went overwhelmingly for the Democrat in the 2016 presidential election.



Now Senator Elizabeth Warren is hopping around saying almost anything to distinguish her candidacy from the profusion of others running for president. Sandwiched between her promises of trillion dollar giveaways is a clever ruse to abolish the electoral college.



It will always draw rousing cheers from her audiences.

That is because a few know it would mean Democrats would be elected president into the next millennium. People like Rep Steve Cohen say by selecting the president by popular vote it would be more democratic, but what he really means is it would elect more Democrats. Meanwhile the majority of those wanting to eliminate the electoral college dont have a clue why we have it and how it protects the minority from dominance by a few regions. This is who they are counting on to back their crafty scheme.



We have the electoral college because we are a representative republic of fifty separate states that work symbiotically together to form a union. We have the Senate for the same reason. Recently Ive also heard Democrats questioning the makeup of the Senate complaining that California has the same number of senators as Wyoming. Well, wake up and smell the Skinny Latte Californians, a representative republic is what we were given so tyrants would have an almost impossible path to power. Today that includes an equal obstacle for dominance by one political party. But, like the Eloi in the Time Machine, when Warren sounds the siren, her supporters fall in lockstep with whatever silly thing she tosses out.



The Founding Fathers experienced the persecution of tyrants. Their parents and grandparents experienced even more of the evils of absolute power living in Europe. They were subject to forced military service to fight the tyrants never ending wars over territory, excessive taxation and even confiscation of their land and livestock. They knew how nearly impossible it was to stop them. So they gave the new nation the electoral college as a way to elect temporary leaders. And its worked just fine since 1788. We only hear whining when some sore losers campaign failed to take into account the electoral college.



Do we want the big cities deciding who will be our president? Look at the disasters many of those cities are in: violent crime, failed schools, potential bankruptcy. What party has controlled them for the last half century or more? These people make grand promises of prosperity but often deliver poverty just like Venezuela. And doing away with the electoral college would allow those Democrat controlled big cities to dominate the presidential elections.



Dont let anyone tell you the electoral college is unconstitutional-a tool they often employ. What the constitution clearly permits is not unconstitutional. Cohen knows that and thats why he tries to link the electoral college with racism. He hopes to make those defending the electoral college appear to be defending racism. Dont be fooled by that one.



Do we want leaders who trick people into supporting a sinister plan to abandon something that has helped make this nation great? Tell Elizabeth Warren and Steve Cohen we know what they are up to and we dont want any part of it.



Ralph Miller

* * *

I'm afraid I have a different view than my good friend Ralph Miller in regards to the Electoral College. As an independent voter, I have no ax to grind regarding the last presidential election or any previous presidential election for that matter.

I've heard many people explain how the Electoral College was created to prevent large states from controlling elections. However, they are thinking of something commonly referred to as the "Great Compromise". This was the agreement to establish our bicameral legislature where representation in the House of Representatives is based on the population of each state, and representation in the Senate is two senators per state. This was a method to make sure that small states' interests where equally represented and not merely cast aside by the large states' representatives.

The Electoral College was established because the framers of the Constitution simply did not trust the American electorate of the late eighteenth century! There was good reason for them having this attitude. The American public as a whole in the late 1700's were poorly educated and usually unaware of how government worked and the important issues of the day. The electors of that day could vote for any person receiving votes when the Electoral College voted in January following a presidential election. Currently, over 20 states have passed laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate receiving the majority of the popular vote in their state. The Electoral College was a last ditch body that could override the election of, for lack of a better term, an "American Hitler".

In addition, the founding fathers further restricted the ability of the common man to vote. To qualify in most states a voter had to be white, male, at least 25, and own land. An additional restriction was created by establishing the voting day as Tuesday. Most workers in those days couldn't afford to give up wages to go vote. Today, no other western civilized country votes during the week. Voting is conducted usually on Saturday, or Saturday and Sunday because most people don't have to lose a day's work to vote.

The President of the United States is the only office elected nationally. It is also the only indirect election we have where people vote then another group actually decides who wins the election. Additionally, why should our votes here in Tennessee count less than people's votes in other states? Tennessee has 11 electoral votes, two senators and nine representatives, and a population of just over 6,000,000. Each elector represents 600,000 citizens. Wyoming has three electors, two senators and one representative, and a population of 600,000. Each elector represents only 200,000 citizens. Why should our Tennessee votes only count 1/3 as much as someone voting in Wyoming?

The basic question is do we believe in the concept of one person one vote? I always have!

Ken Barker

* * *

I think we should give every county in this country a vote, I think that would make us all equal. There are 3,141 counties including parishes, organized boroughs, census areas, independent cities and the District of Columbia.

If you are wondering about the last election Donald Trump won 3,084 counties and Clinton won 57. This country is over 3.7 million square miles and the 57 counties that voted for Clinton are 319 square miles. Does that really seem like a majority of our country voted for Clinton?

Damon Sledge

* * *

In response to Mr. Sledge, the numbers quoted on counties are entirely incorrect. According to fact-check.org, Clinton won at least 487 counties. In fact, Clinton won 27 counties in Texas and 31 in Georgia, which exceeds the quoted number of 57. The idea that the 57 quoted counties totaled 319 square miles is absurd because that would mean that these counties each averaged only 5.6 square miles. Los Angeles County alone covers 4,751 square miles with a population of over 10 million, which is more than 41 states.

I think the Electoral College serves a purpose because it does decide the presidential election when no one gets a majority of the popular vote, which happens often due to third party candidates. If elections required a majority of the popular vote we would often be in a run-off situation, which would be difficult to implement for many reasons. However, I struggle with the idea that the vote of people in populous states, like Democratic California and Republican Texas count proportionally less than a voter in a less populous state. Also, with the Electoral College, a Democratic voter here in Tennessee must feel like his or her vote doesnt count in a presidential election because the state is overwhelmingly Republican and its winner take all on the electoral votes. The same thing must hold true for a Republican voter in a state like California, which votes heavily Democratic.

Perhaps electoral votes should be voted in same proportions that the state voted. I dont have all of the answers, but it sure seems like a problem that in two of the last three presidential elections with no incumbent, the winner got fewer votes from Americans than the loser. How can someone get the most votes and lose? Im not advocating for a Republican or Democratic position, just thinking about it from a common sense standpoint.

David Groves



Logans Roadhouse is completing its remodel at the Northgate location.

There will be a ribbon-cutting with the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, April 3, at 10:45 a.m. following the official re-opening Saturday, March 30.

Officials said, "The 2019 transformation revamps Logans Roadhouse look and feel throughout the restaurant, paying tribute to its brand heritage for being The Real American Roadhouse. Upgrades include unique art fixtures, freshly painted interior and exterior, larger TVs in the bar, new chairs, booths, wall art and highlight an oversized American Flag made up of over 400 beer cans.

"The Chattanooga location will feature a renovated private dining room perfect for any occasion from business meetings to birthday parties."

We are excited to reveal the new look of Logans Roadhouse in the Chattanooga community, said Tim Kaliher, brand president of Logans Roadhouse. Since 1991, we have had the pleasure of serving our guests an authentic roadhouse atmosphere with a vibrant bar, laid back attitude and quality menu at affordable prices. With this renovation, we are thrilled to welcome loyal and new guests into our doors for decades to come.

Beginning at 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday, April 3, Logans Roadhouse and the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce will welcome the Chattanooga community to the revitalized restaurant with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Following the ceremony, guests are invited to stay for lunch to experience the refreshed space.

The Chattanooga Logans Roadhouse store is located at 504 A Northgate Mall.March 26, East Brainerd Chamber Council Meeting

11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The Chattanooga Event Center: 2193 Park Dr.

Speaker: Steven Wagner, Erlanger Health System Foundation

$12

March 26, LCAA PM Regathering

4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Virgola: 608 Georgia Ave.

Leadership Chattanooga graduates and guests are invited to stop by for networking and to catch up with LC classmates.

No cost.

March 26, Ooltewah/Collegedale Monthly Mixer

5 to 7 p.m.

Springhill Suites: 8876 Old Lee Hwy.

Join the Ooltewah/Collegedale Chamber Council for their monthly mixer, held on the fourth Tuesday of every month. There will be complimentary light appetizers as well as drink specials.

No cost.

March 26, Introduction to Enneagram

6 to 7:30 p.m.

The Chattery at Chattanooga WorkSpace: 302 W. 6th St., Ste. 3L

This short introduction to the Enneagram framework will give you a broad overview of the nine types and how they relate to one another, the patterns that each type exhibits and the opportunities to have more harmonious relationships with all types available with this understanding.

Register at thechattery.org.

$15

March 27, Ribbon Cutting for Southern Hearth & Patio

2 to 2:30 p.m.

Southern Hearth & Patio: 6513 Lee Hwy.

Join the Chattanooga Chamber for a ribbon cutting event for Southern Hearth & Patio.

March 28, Reality Check at East Hamilton High School

7:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.

East Hamilton High School: 2015 Ooltewah-Ringgold Rd.

Reality Check teaches ninth graders budgeting and emphasizes the connection between education and income by allowing students to roleplay as heads of household on a set budget. Community volunteers are needed to assist with this event. To volunteer for this Chattanooga Chamber career readiness program, please contact Cathy Humble at 423.763.4321 or chumble@chattanoogachamber.com .

March 28, Enterprise Gateway Chamber Council Meeting

8:15 to 9:30 a.m.

Hospice of Chattanooga: 4411 Oakwood Dr.

Speaker: District 4 Hamilton County Commissioner Warren Mackey

$12

March 28, Pick the Brain of a CPA

11 a.m. to Noon

INCubator: 100 Cherokee Blvd. (Park across the street in the Republic lot)

In this one-hour Q&A session, you can ask the CPA any and all of your business-related accounting questions. Bring your questions and something to take notes with.

Speaker: Adam Osborne, Henderson Hutcherson & McCullough

Register at tsbdc.org/chscc/.

No cost.

March 28, ChaTech Women Social, Supported by AT&T

4 to 6 p.m.

UTC College of Engineering & Computer Science Building, Maytag Room: 735 Vine St.

Welcome to ChaTech Womens first social of 2019! This is a great networking opportunity for college students and established professionals interested in empowering and supporting women in technology.

Find info at chatechcouncil.org.

No cost.

March 28, Creative Journaling 101

6 to 7:30 p.m.

The Chattery at Chattanooga WorkSpace: 302 W. 6th St., Ste. 3L

In this class, you'll learn how to set up the six most important pages in your bullet journal so you can walk out of class ready to begin a more productive and organized life.

Register at thechattery.org.

$15

March 29, YPC Luncheon

11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

E Spaces: 651 E. 4th St.

Join YPC for their monthly luncheon.

Register at ypchattanooga.org.

Members: $5

Non-Members: $15

March 29, Ribbon Cutting for River City Pottery

3 to 3:30 p.m.

River City Pottery: 6413 Lee Hwy., Ste. 135

Join the Chattanooga Chamber for a ribbon cutting event for River City Pottery.

More on these events and other support for your business at chattanoogachamber.com.Plans for the new neighborhood of West End are underway on the 112 acres that includes the old Alstom plant. Victor Dover of Dover, Kohl and Partners gave a picture-rich presentation Thursday that showed designs for cultivated community spaces, a corporate headquarters, townhouses, a performance space, and commercial spaces including lodging. Manufacturing jobs are also a part of the equation for the south end of the parcel owned by Jimmy White and Hiren Desai of Urban Story Ventures.

Mr. Dover wrote Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns and has invested decades studying how to make livable communities. While underscoring that this is a draft that is open to revision, Mr. Dover enthusiastically delivered a talk about how his team visualizes a complete overhaul of the area.



Cities are never finished, theyre continually works in progress. Theyre like giant works of art where many, many people collaborate. So we approach a site like this with a lot of humility because lots of people have already thought about it, and theyve lived their lives here{this site} was really like an industrial wall between the city of Chattanooga and its river. There was and is a fence around all 112 acres here. You could only enter and approach the riverfront in this area with permission. And thats begun changing. He spoke about the Blue Goose Hollow Trail and how people can walk along the river there, but only a small slice of riverfront property. That is slated to change dramatically.



In their future, the area around Blue Goose Hollow Trail will be expanded into an extensive riverside park that will open onto prestigious addresses and landmark locations. Reconnecting people to the river where there has not been access for so long along an industrial tract of land is a key element of West End.



This should be a place for everybody, not just a playground for the super-rich. It will be a place, we can be pretty certain, where folks with lots of money and choices about where to go will naturally want to be. Its not hard to figure out how to make it attractive to people with lots of choices, theyll be choosing it. What we need to spend time also working on is getting the rest of us to have a way to enjoy this space and participate in it, and thats where the attainable housing components and affordable commerce components come in, said Mr. Dover. He indicated that size of residential units and scope of views would contribute to price differences.



The residential components were categorized in the presentation under Attainable Housing. The elements included intentional inclusivity and workforce housing partners. The real goal is an affordable life, not just an affordable house, he said. Mr. Dover described how bringing more jobs to the population center of the region and reducing transportation costs creates a lower total cost. Mr. Dover said If you have a great restaurant that you want to open in this neighborhood, we want your master chef to have a place to live in this neighborhood, too. Thats the intentionality. He said that creating below market housing could be done with a whole suite of tools such as housing tax credits if those are available, public-private partnerships, and working with employers to consider housing as a method of retention and recruitment.



When we design a neighborhood, what were doing fundamentally is designing human habitat. Were trying to create a place where people like to be, and can live their lives productively, live healthy and happy livesThe umbrella idea here is a livable neighborhood, a community thats part of our city-wide ecosystem of civilization, said Mr. Dover. His understanding of the ecosystem of Chattanooga goes back more than 20 years when he was part of the planning process for development in Southside Chattanooga.



Its clear that Mr. Dover believes in trees and how they shape a community. The plans call for at least 1500 new trees, shade trees, inviting trees. Encouraging people to walk under those trees is underlined by the 10-point plan for a car-optional neighborhood. You can actually move around in such a neighborhood without wearing a car, he said. The plans incorporate bike lanes separated from car lanes by trees, a density plan that brings housing and jobs together in practical ways, and street mapping that results in slower driving and happier pedestrians.



Contributing to green engineering elements are clever wastewater management strategies such as creating a canal and other water features that will be landscaped to attract people while filtering runoff to clean the water before it reaches the Tennessee. Reminders of the history of industrial activity could be kept by transforming some of the buildings into new structures. Mr. Dover imagines the steel skeleton of Bay 46 kept here, partly remains enclosed, partly remains open to the sky facing the riverfront park. And just for fun we made a beach out of the ADM site.



In the picture, Bay 46 has CHATTANOOGA across the top and serves as a performance space; there are yellow beach umbrellas where Archer Daniels Midland now loads barges.



Mr. Dover used What if a lot in his talk. The execution of this big picture plan is expected to take at least ten years and will evolve throughout the planning and zoning processes. Public squares, vistas, streets that connect the neighborhood to the river with signature views are threaded through the design. The new pattern of blocks and streets is designed to fan out to maximize the natural views and architecture that might become intertwined with the name of our city. This design template is intended to provide a toolkit for the development of industrial assets into a neighborhood that draws on our history rather than paves over it.

The WoodSongs Dalton 2019 Concert Series will host Ray Cardwell and Tennessee Moon with Micahlan Boney to open at 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 30 at The Wink Theater in downtown Dalton.

Advance tickets for the March concert are available at the Dalton Freight Depot Gift Shop, The Ice Castle, Bigham Discount Music, online at www.woodsongsdalton.com, and at the door. Advance tickets are $18 and $22 at the door.

The concert series features emerging and established performers of Americana, country, and bluegrass music, whose performances also benefit local non-profits. Many of the performers over the years have been Grammy nominees and recipients and most have received recognition for their talents by the International Bluegrass Music Association and SPGBMA. The concert series will be held at the Wink Theater, 115 Crawford St. in the heart of downtown Dalton. WoodSongs Dalton is sponsored in part by Friends of WoodSongs, area businesses and the Dalton Convention and Visitors Bureau. Proceeds from the concert will benefit the DEO Clinic, a 501 (c)3 nonprofit medical clinic that provides medical care to low income uninsured individuals. Proceeds up to $2,500 will be matched by Modern Woodmen of America to benefit DEO Clinic.



For further information, check out WoodSongs Dalton on Facebook or call 706-581-8025.

About Ray Cardwell:

Ray Cardwell is one of the most diversely talented artists playing bluegrass music today, with a broad array of interests and influences. Born into a musical family, Ray grew up in the Cardwell Family Band, performing on a variety of stages, including the Mountain Folks Music Festival at Silver Dollar City, Fort of the Osage, Dogpatch USA, and various concerts hosted by Ozarks musicologist, Max Hunter. In addition to the bass guitar, Ray is also an accomplished keyboardist, sax player, and vocalist with a five octave range. He was a founding member of the Midwest bluegrass band Slick Nickel and recorded two albums with the critically acclaimed national touring gospel band New Tradition. Ray also performed with National Honor Choirs at both the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall when he was working on his degree in music education.



His CD entitled Tennessee Moon on Pinecastle Records was received with high praise with ten songs charting on Bluegrass, Americana and Folk Charts. Time To Drive is the first single release from Ray's upcoming CD due out in the winter of 2019. The single was released on March 16, 2018. It debuted at number one on the Bluegrass Today Grassicana Chart. It was in the weekly top 15 for over 30 weeks, seven of those weeks it remained at number one.



About Micahlan Boney:

Micahlan Boney has performed in eleven states, solo and as part of various bands. Micahlan began performing on fiddle with her older brother at the age of eight and writing songs. She added the guitar, mandolin and banjo in the following years. In October 2018, Micahlan moved to Nashville, to work with Kent Wells, producer for Dolly Parton, Vince Gill and Emmy Lou Harris, and Dark Horse Studios to record her first EP and work on several music projects.



In 2017, Micahlan won the Savannah Country Music Showdown in a duo with John Brown, and she also won the John Hartford Memorial Songwriting Contest in Bean Blossom, Indiana. She was the youngest person and to date the only female to have ever won the songwriting contest.Two teachers from Hamilton County Schools have advanced to the next round in the selection of the Tennessee Teacher of the Year. Sara Pratt from Apison Elementary and Kristin Robertson from Signal Mountain Middle High are Southeast Region-level finalists in the selection process.

Ms. Pratt and Ms. Robertson earned Hamilton County Schools Teacher of the Year honors in January.



Ms. Pratt has spent all four years of her teaching career working with fourth-graders at Apison Elementary School. "Ms. Pratt encourages achievement by creating a culture of respect and authentic learning in her classroom," officials said. "She celebrates the struggle that can lead to growth by recognizing when her students thinking has evolved from learning. Pratt builds her instruction around the individual student and teaches through unique activities in which her students can actively participate."

Children find that in my class they will struggle with problems, but in that struggle there is growth, said Ms. Pratt. We celebrate this struggle and growth process by recognizing when our thinking has evolved as a result of learning. Video of Ms. Pratt working in the classroom.



Ms. Robertson teaches ninth-grade English at Signal Mountain Middle High School, where she has been since 2013. She previously taught at Soddy Daisy High. Ms. Robertson also taught 8th-grade language arts. Also, Ms. Robertson serves as a personal project instructor to 25 students, working with them to complete their culminating personal project for the International Baccalaureate Middle Years program. "By attending sporting events and interacting with students in the community, Robertson builds positive relationships with her students," officials said. "Robertsons classroom climate of high expectations encourages students to take academic risks and embrace challenges."

Teachers who form relationships see the most authentic growth and learning because their students know that their teacher believes in them and wants to invest in their lives, Ms. Robertson said. I use the information I gain from forming relationships to invent fun activities that hook students interest. Video of Ms. Robertson working in the classroom.



The Tennessee Teacher of the Year program seeks to recognize and honor outstanding teachers who devote themselves to their students and show gains in exceptional academic achievement.

According to the Tennessee Department of Education website, the goals of the program include:

 Promoting effective teaching practices by recognizing and rewarding outstanding teachers

 Engaging regional teachers of the year in education policymaking through the Teacher Advisory Council

 Encouraging participation by every school in the state so that all Tennessee teachers may be recognized and rewarded

 Building a network of local and state corporate sponsors

 Providing a network for teachers to share effective practices

 Encouraging a sense of professionalism in teaching

 Encouraging greater participation in building a strong community-school partnership



The selection timeline for the Tennessee Teacher of the Year begins on the individual school level, with peers selecting a teacher from each of the following grade bands: PreK-fourth, fifth  eighth, and ninth  12th. Local school district select teachers of the year from those bands. A total of 27 teachers were selected finalists at the regional level.



Nine teachers are chosen as Region-level winners and travel to Nashville, where all are recognized. Three grand division winners representing the east, middle, and west are announced, as well as the final winner of the Tennessee Teacher of the Year award. The final winner represents Tennessee in the national competition and serves as an ambassador for education throughout the year.



The Region-level winners are announced between May and June.

The Bates family has come a long way since fans were first introduced to them as friends of the Duggar Family. Boasting 19 kids, the Bates seemed to share a lot of the sane values as the Duggars, and they even seemed to have the same expectation for their kids. Things, however, have shaken out unexpectedly. Not only does the Bates family seem more liberal and wholesome than the Duggars, but fans are excited to see the Bates kids spreading their wings and achieving their dreams. Most recently fans went wild when Michael Bates, 29, suggested that she had her eyes on a career in the healthcare industry.

Do the Bates kids go to college?

While the Bates and Duggar families share a religion, there is one massive difference; the Bates family does allow their children to attend college if they are interested. Both Kelly Jo and Gil, the matriarch and patriarch of the family attended formal universities. In fact, the pair met while they were both enrolled in school.

The Bates Family (Photo by James Ambler / Barcroft USA / Getty Images)

Several of the Bates children have attended Christian universities, according to In Touch. Michael Bates attended online classes through Roane State Community College before she married Brandon Keilen in 2015. It is not known if she finished her degree, but it seems that she has had an interest in nursing for many years. She was enrolled at Roane State as a liberal arts major with a minor in health sciences.

What is Michaels education plan?

Michael let it slip that she is currently in the process of saving money to attend an accredited nursing program. Now living in Chicago, Michael has plenty of excellent educational opportunities. According to Niche, Loyola University in Chicago, The University of St. Francis in Joliet and The University of Illinois at Chicago have top-rated nursing programs.

Michael has not shared what school she is interested in attending. The Tennesse native is still in the planning phase of her educational goals. Brandon Keilen works as a videographer for the Institute for Basic Life Principles, a controversial Christian ministry. He is also working on a childrens book that he is writing and illustrating.

Do Michael and Brandon plan to have children?

Michael and Brandon married in 2015 after two years of dating. While the adorable couple set out on their life together in Chicago shortly after their wedding, things havent been picture-perfect for the pair. Both Michael and Brandon have been vocal about wanting to have a family, but it just doesnt seem to be happening for the couple.

The Keilens chronicled their heartbreaking infertility journey in several episodes of Bringing Up Bates. They are currently working with specialists to pinpoint the problem, but they continue to have difficulty conceiving. According to Knox News, the young couple is open to adopting if they cant have biological children.Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu slammed U.S. President Donald Trump's tweet seeking to legitimize Israel's control of the Golan Heights.

"The territorial integrity of states is the most fundamental principle of international law," Cavusoglu said in a tweet.

"Attempts by the U.S. to legitimize Israel's actions against international law will only lead to more violence and pain in the region. Turkey supports Syria's territorial integrity," he added.

Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin also condemned the preposterous claim, Anadoly Agency reported.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump said in tweet it was time for the U.S. to recognize Israel's control of the Golan Heights.Its hard to remember a time when Mariska Hargitay wasnt playing the role of Olivia Benson on the NBC drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Because shes been starring on the show for so long many viewers feel like they know her, but not everyone is aware of her background and who her famous mother was. Heres more on her familys tragic story as well as the actress age and what her ethnicity is.

Mariska Hargitay | Paul Bruinooge/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

How old is Hargitay and what is her ethnicity?

Mariska Magdolna Hargitay was born in Santa Monica, California, on Jan. 23, 1964, to parents Mickey Hargitay and Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield.

Her father, a bodybuilder and former Mr. Universe, was from Hungary and gave his daughter her first and middle names, which are Hungarian. Her mother was of German and English ancestry. The Law & Order actress parents separated shortly after her birth and a major tragedy struck when she was just 3 years old.

Jayne Mansfield | Hulton Archive/Getty Images | Mariska Hargitay | Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images

In 1967, she was traveling in a car with her two brothers, her mom, her mothers boyfriend, and their driver from Biloxi, Mississippi to New Orleans when their vehicle slammed into the back of a tractor-trailer. Mansfield and the two other adults in the front seat were all killed but the three children, who were asleep in the backseat, suffered just minor injuries.

The way Ive lived with loss is to lean into it. As the saying goes, the only way out is through, Harg itay told People. In my life, certainly, Ive tried to avoid pain, loss, feeling things. But Ive learned instead to really lean into it, because sooner or later you have to pay the piper.  Im not saying its easy, and it certainly hasnt been for me. Theres been a lot of darkness. But on the other side things can be so bright.

She added that Someone once said about [remembering] my mother: All you have to do is look in the mirror. Shes with me still.

Who Hargitay is married to and how many children they have

Hargitay is married to Younger star Peter Hermann. The two actually met on the set of Law & Order: SVU back in 2001.

Peter Hermann and Mariska Hargitay | Paul Bruinooge/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

The actress recalled that she tried telling Hermann a joke to break the ice but he didnt find it funny. A few months later though, when they were having a conversation about religion, he asked if she would like to go to church with him. Hargitay said she knew then that he was the one. In 2004, they tied the knot at the Unitarian Historical Chapel in Santa Barbara, California.

The couple has three children together. They welcomed their first child, August Miklos Friedrich, in 2006 when Hargitay was 42. Then five years later, the couple adopted a baby girl, Amaya Josephine, and a boy named Andrew Nicolas.

What is her net worth?

Mariska Hagitay Bobby Bank/GC Images

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Hargitay makes a whopping $450,000 an episode for her role on SVU and has an estimated net worth of $50 million.

Her husband is worth an estimated $10 million, bringing the couples combined net worth to $60 million.

Read more: How Many Children Does NCIS Star Mark Harmon Have and How Long Has He Been Married?

Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook!Cult film What We Do In the Shadows is back but on the smaller screen in an FX series, premiering March 27. Fans can expect the same cheeky humor and hilarious, dark characters, but with a new spin.

Creators Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi discussed how the FX series will differ but will still have the same vampire-blood flavor. The comedians met with The New York Times to discuss the launch of their series and looked back at their groundbreaking film that created a serious cult following.

AUSTIN, TX  MARCH 08: (Back row L-R) Harvey Guillen, Kayvan Novak, Natasia Demetriou, Jemaine Clement, Paul Simms, Matt Berry, (front row L-R) Stefani Robinson, Taika Waititi, and Mark Proksch of the film What We Do in the Shadows pose for a portrait in the 2019 SXSW Film Festival Portrait Studio on March 8, 2019 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Robby Klein/Getty Images)

So what elements can fans depend on seeing in the new series? But what will change? Clement and Waititi dish about what fans can expect.

This was how the series was hatched

Clement and Waititi didnt look into their rearview after the film came out in 2014. However, their creative fangs were awakened thanks to producer Scott Rudin.  Scott Rudin saw the film and then started harassing us until we did it, Clement told The New York Times. Taika. Weve got to do this show. When is this show happening? Weve got to get it rolling. I know it can go.

Rudin also enthusiastically reached out to Waititi too. I was in Hawaii, about to have my second kid, he said. Itd be like three or four in the morning, the phone would ring, and it would be him.

Shooting a television series was entirely different than the movie

When Clement and Waititi shot the film, they were the ones in charge. However, when it came time to shoot the series, things changed quite a bit. The thing is, in the movie, we were the bosses and we never had to take notes. Now we have to take notes from the network, Clement said. And a lot of the notes are like, In the movie   Oh, man. We know. We did the movie.'

Take notes on something you created and you know everything about, Waititi joked. Plus, Waititi said having to listen to his voice directing and acting can got a little annoying too. Its hard enough listening to your own voice while youre editing. And then also listening to your own voice while youre directing. And acting. Doing a stupid accent and then stopping and giving a note. Youre just talking all day long.

New characters but same idea

Thankfully the same humor and concept will remain intact. However, this new group of vampires are going to be trying to deal with life on Staten Island, according to The New York Times.

The new cast stars Matt Berry as Lazio, known for his charisma, according to FX. Also, Kayvan Novak as Nandor, known as Nandor the Relentless. Plus, Natasia Demetriou as Nadja, a female vampire who is considered to be the matron of the house.

Keeping the vampires fit and fabulous are Harvey Guillen as Guillermo and Mark Proksch who plays Colin Robinson. Colin is known as an energy vampire who can walk in the day and still eats humans but not their blood.

Do fans get to see Viago and Vladislav? They encouraged us to do it, Waititi told The New York Times. Itd be really cool if you guys were in the show, at least one of you. Well, Im not going to do it if hes not going to do it. Neither of us really wanted to do it.

Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook!Kim Kardashian has been interested in politics and the justice system for quite a few years now. Keeping Up With The Kardashians fans can tell you that between the episodes showcasing breakups, makeups, and family drama, Kim finds ways to show off her politics and interest in social change. In one episode, she put on an event for homeless women with the purpose of helping them to find jobs (the event included things like how to put a resume together, basic interview skills, and pampering). In another, she and her sisters took a field trip to Planned Parenthood. The visit focused on how the medical care center is more than an abortion clinic. The PP employees went over how they tend to a wide array of medical needs.



Kim Kardashian | Jared Siskin/amfAR/Getty Images

The Alice Marie Johnson story



In 2017, Kim became interested in the story of Alice Marie Johnson. She devoted much of her time and energy to freeing the woman after spending 22 years in prison for a first-time nonviolent drug offense. She was successful. Since that time, according to Kim, shes immersed [herself] in learning about the criminal justice system.



Kims support for California Gov. Gavin Newsom



For the last year, I have immersed myself in learning about the criminal justice system. I visited prisons, met with formerly incarcerated people, and helped with cases of individual injustice  including two death penalty cases. I have met with and am very supportive of Governor Newsom and his decision to help bring an end to the California Death Penalty. Racial bias and unfairness run deep throughout the justice system but especially when it comes to the death penalty. And we should not be okay with the risk that an innocent person could be executed. I hope we can turn toward better solutions that focus more on healing victims of trauma and prioritizing fairness and justice, she posted on Instagram.



California Gov. Gavin Newsoms moratorium on capital punishment

When two-thirds of those on death row are people of color and one-third have a severe mental illness, the application of justice is not equal. The disparities are profound, and thats why we must end the death penalty. pic.twitter.com/avTHLbAHJb  Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 20, 2019

What exactly is Kim supporting?



California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced a moratorium on capital punishment, which grants a temporary reprieve for 737 inmates on death row.

According to The New York Times, the executive order does three things:



grants reprieves to the inmates currently on death row  they will still be under a death sentence, but not at risk of execution; closes the execution chamber at San Quentin prison; and withdraws the states lethal injection protocol, the formally approved procedure for carrying out executions.

I cannot sign off on executing hundreds and hundreds of human beings, knowing  knowing  that among them will be innocent human beings, said Newsom.



Read more: Khloe Kardashian Defends Tristan Thompson, Calls Him a Good Dad to True



Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook!Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos have seemingly done the impossible in showbiz. The two have created a long-lasting relationship that has withstood the test of time. Together they are known as one of Hollywoods cutest and most powerful couples.

Ripa recently shared how every date feels like a first date with her husband, so how does this power couple make it work?

The couple met at work

Ripa and Consuelos met while filming the daytime soap All My Children. Ripa was a regular on the show when Consuelos came in to read for the soap. But Ripa says she knew that Consuelos was the one before she ever met him.

After an extensive search for Ripas love interest on All My Children, the casting agent showed the actress of a dark-haired Latino actor and said, I found him. Ripa says, I saw my husband in a photograph before I saw him. I knew when I saw his photograph.

They have been married over 20 years

The happy couple married May 1, 1996, and will celebrate their 23rd wedding anniversary this year. The two eloped to Vegas shortly after meeting. Ripa has credited spending quality time together as a key to making their relationship work. She said, Sometimes well put the kids to bed early and watch Jersey Shore on DVR. I think were better parents because we have date night to look forward to.

But she also recognizes that its good for partners to have some time apart, stating, He doesnt need to take me everywhere or do everything with me. Im very much about us having our own separate time. And sometimes, its ok to fight, Its OK to fight about things. Were secure with each other. I dont feel like if we have an argument, it will be the end of our lives.

And they still find excuses to work together

If youre a fan of Live! With Kelly and Ryan, you know that Consuelos has made several appearances on his wifes talk show. Consuelos was a frequent sub in when Ripa was looking for her new co-host after Michael Strahan left the show. And its not just Consuelos stopping by his wifes show, Ripa made a recent appearance on her hubbys show as well.

Consuelos plays Hiram Lodge on the hit CW series Riverdale. Ripa guest starred on the show, playing none other than Hirams mistress. The couple joked about the role on Instagram with Consuelos saying, Bring side piece to work day. Ripa responded, Im usually against mistresses but this time Ill make an exception.

The couple has three kids

The actor and talk show host have three children together, sons Michael and Joaquin, and daughter Lola. Ripa admits that her children are just like any other children. Her three kids are limited to one hour of electronics per day and are not allowed to have their phones at the dinner table.

And just like normal kids, Ripa and Consuelos children sometimes get embarrassed by mom. Ripa is careful not to make the kids feel uncomfortable with what she shares. If the kids dont like something she posts on social media, she promptly takes it down.

Every date is like a first date

It takes something special to make a date with your spouse feels like a first date. But Ripa joked with her friend Rachael Harris that thats exactly what her husband does. She told Harris, Every date with Mark is like a first date in your sophomore year of high school. Every date, she added, Like, every date hes like, Is this OK? Is this OK? Is this OK? Can I touch you here? Can I touch you there?'

But Consuelos isnt acting like a teenage boy trying to make a move on his girl. Instead, hes worried about what has been taped, and tucked, and glued. She said getting undressed after a night out is like breaking open a pinata, Theres false eyelashes, theres hair extensions, theres chicken cutlets, those are on the floor. You name it. Sounds like Consuelos has lots of experience helping Ripa keep everything all together.One of the most popular, and successful leading men in Hollywood, is also one of the most private. Were talking about the ever elusive and always intriguing Keanu Reeves. The Matrix star has found amazing success on screen, but his personal life has not always been so successful.

When it comes to Reeves dating history, its hard to sift through what is real, and what is only rumors. And, there are a lot of rumors for this ageless A-lister. That tends to happen when you refuse to openly share your personal life with the world. A hard feat to do in 2019. We cant blame him for wanting his privacy, though.

Because Keanu Reeves values his privacy, and because he has been through a lot, this article will focus mostly on his confirmed relationships, and less on the rumors.

Who has Keanu Reeves dated?

Generally known for being one of the nicest actors in Hollywood, Keanu Reeves has had several confirmed relationships. Most of his past relationships have been with other celebrities and even co-stars.

Jill Schoelen: Dated From 1986-1989

The John Wick star and Jill Schoelen met on the set of Babes in Toyland and started dating. They were together for about three years before another actor started catching her eye. She broke up with Reeves and started dating Brad Pitt. In fact, Schoelen was Brad Pitts first fiance.

Sophia Coppola: Dated From 1991-1992

In 1991, Reeves reportedly met Sophia Coppola on the set of her father, Francis Ford Coppolas movie, Bram Stokers Dracula. They were often photographed together, and she was regularly seen on the back of his motorcycle. Their relationship lasted about a year.

Sandra Bullock: Dated Briefly in 1993

While filming the movie Speed, Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves dated briefly. Although the relationship was brief, they have remained great friends. After her very public divorce to Jesse James, Reeves reportedly help her through it.

Jennifer Syme: Dated From 1998-1999

Probably one of the most heartbreaking events in Reeves life started after meeting Jennifer Syme. According to him, he fell in love immediately after meeting in 1998. Soon after that Symes became pregnant. When the baby was delivered stillborn at eight months, Reeves was filming The Matrix. The couple was devastated, and within a few weeks, their relationship was over.

To make this story even more tragic, there could be no reunion between Reeves and Syme, as she passed away after a car accident. A year and a half after losing his daughter, Ava Archer Syme-Reeves, he had to say goodbye to Jennifer too.

Claire Forlani: Dated From 2004-2006

Although Reeves and Claire Forlani dated for about two years, there are still a lot of rumors surrounding these two. One rumor is that they broke up after Reeves proposed to the Meet Joe Black actress.

He claims that never happened. Another rumor is that the two started dating again in 2008, while they were both in other relationships. The Daily Mail reported that the pair were spotted sharing a cigarette after a couple of dates in 2008. There is no confirmation that this is true.

Parker Posey: Possibly Dated in 2008

Although neither side has confirmed, either way, an onlooker at Chateau Marmont hotel said, They were sharing a seat and sitting very, very close. They were laughing and joking and looked as though they were having a really good time. But it was probably the oddest couple Ive ever seen! Reported News.com.au. Posey later told the press they were discussing a role.

China Chow: Possibly Dated in 2008

Keanu Reeves and China Chow were caught swimming and playing on the beach in the French Riviera. She was also reportedly topless for at least part of the trip. Later they were photographed at a restaurant in Italy. Sounds a lot like a romantic European vacation.

Jamie Clayton: Rumors

Although Keanu Reeves has been linked to several other people, there is little proof that these rumors are true. Many relationships can be explained by business meetings, friendly get-togethers, or movie roles. Currently, rumors have suggested that Reeves is dating Jaime Clayton of Sense 8. Neither Reeves nor Clayton has confirmed or denied this rumor.

Jaime Clayton is a transgendered activist and actress. If these two are dating, theyre not ready to go public. Furthermore, there would likely be more than just blurry images of them allegedly kissing because they are both very powerful and popular. It is not likely that either Reeves or Clayton could hide any relationship for long.

Right now theres nothing to suggest that Keanu Reeves has had any serious relationships since the death of Jennifer Syme.Since 2007 when she was just 9-years-old Kylie Jenner has appeared on her familys hit reality series, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Over the years, fans have watched Jenner blossom from a little girl into a makeup mogul and mother. Over the past decade and some change, Jenner has drastically changed her look, had two very public romances, and welcomed her infant daughter, Stormi Webster into the world.

Though Jenner is just 21-years-old, she was able to build her billion dollar empire on the back of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and her many sponsorships and social media posts. Will Jenner also allow Stormi to be on KUWTK?

Will Kylie Jenners daughter, Stormi, appear on Keeping Up with the Kardashian?

All of the Kardashian/Jenner siblings except for supermodel Kendell Jenner have children, and they all appear on Keeping Up with the Kardashians sparingly. Though Kylie Jenner has been open about sharing many snaps and videos of her adorable baby, it looks like Stormi wont be appearing on KUWTK at all.

During an interview with Interview magazine, the Lip Kit mogul was asked if she would allow Stormi to appear on the reality series. Jenner said, I am going to wait until she is old enough to make that decision for herself. From where were sitting that means Stormi probably wont ever appear on the show. After all, shell be at least a pre-teen by the time she can decide for herself and let us all hope KUWTK has signed off for good by then.

Kylie Jenner almost gave Stormi a different name

Jenner is always showing us snippets of Stormis life. From her massive 1-year-old birthday party to the lavish gifts that she gets from her daddy, Travis Scott Stormis life is much better than all of ours. Recently while on Instagram live Jenner revealed that Stormi almost had a very different name. The billionaire said, One name I will tell you guys, because I dont think Im ever going to name my daughter this (another daughter), but I wanted to name her Rose. Shout-out to everyone named Rose.

Is Kylie Jenner pregnant with baby number two?

Though the rumors are that Jenner and her rapper beau, Travis Scott are currently having some serious trust issues, fans are convinced Jenner is pregnant with baby number two.

The 21-year-old recently snapped a picture of herself and Stormi enjoying the beautiful California weather, with Stormi clinging to her mom. Jenner captioned the photo saying, my baby is stuck to me like glue lately. She also shared a video of herself telling the adorable baby, Girl! Youve gotta do things without me. Stormi replies, Yeah!

Fans are convinced this means that Jenner and Scott are expecting their second child together. After all, there is an old wives tale that small children tend to cling their mothers when she is pregnant with another child. Though there arent any scientific facts to back it up, some people believe that young children can somehow sense pregnancy, even before their mothers can tell.

Follow The Cheat Sheet on Facebook!Guest Commentary

Homelessness has been cussed and discussed with no solution in sight. With no viable plan, most government officials wring their hands and hope the problem will go away.

The latest suggestion is to pay the homeless a living wage. Thus, the unfortunate street people could afford the requisite training to find jobs.

I guess this is possible. The evening news interviewed an ex-homeless lady who received money from a private charity and was eventually able to open a coffee shop, thus, becoming a local success story.

We sometimes forget that other countries can have experiences similar to ours....Guest Commentary

Across the pond, London-based BP and Netherlands-headquartered Shell are looking to invest in innovative electric technology, which is very good news.

The two international oil giants, both of which have oil refineries in northwest Washington, recognize the growth in battery storage capacity. Their investments should bring down costs for consumers and bring ground-breaking technology to market quicker.

Making electric cars and new batteries for homes and power grids is a major step toward replacing carbon-based energy with electricity from renewables such as wind and solar.

The worldwide f...Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that U.S. President Donald Trumps statement that it was time to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights has brought the region to the edge of a new crisis.

"We cannot allow the legitimisation of the occupation of the Golan Heights," the Turkish leader said at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Reuters reported.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump said in tweet it was time for the U.S. to recognize Israel's control of the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to Israel and regional stability.How Did Moses "Write" God's Law (and the Pentateuch) at and around Mount Sinai? Christian Examiner Contributor | 22 March, 2019 by Ken Lambert

Two current, and interrelated, publications delve into the longstanding and complicated question of whether or not Moses was a historical person and/or the authenticity of the Biblical story surrounding Mount Sinai and the 10 Commandments.

A new movie is airing in select theaters since March 14thtitled "The Moses Controversy." The documentary is well-produced in many aspects, but one of its main experts may have some questionable theoriesaccording to a separate archeologist and historian. Such is often the case when analyzing ancient history and/or Christianity.

Dr. Douglas Petrovich (Ph.D) recently published a book titled, "The World's Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew As the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script." In said book he makes the claim that Moses had access to an alphabet/writing mechanism in order for him to write down God's Law given atop Mount Sinai (according to the record in the Bible). However, there are concerns with the means that Dr. Petrovich arrived at his conclusionaccording to Dr. Ronald Stewart (Ph.D), an archeologist, historian, and imaging expert.

Stewart states that the basis of Petrovich being able to ascertain legible language/script characters is faulty. "Dr. Petrovich's investigative computer program's (Power-Point) 400% magnification tool technique allowed his images to be enlarged/expanded so large that it made it lose resolution. The results (of the noted stele artifact) become blurry and make any detail not only indiscernible but indistinguishable as to what he looked at." Stewart claims this makes the book's translation of all of the artifacts he researched and studied incorrect. This false theory then spills over into the brand-new documentary movie regarding Moses.

To test his own theory on the subject, Stewart notes a rebuttal test conducted by a Dr. Nathaniel Greenewho agrees with Stewart in that this magnification procedure seemed to make the stele picture analysis more difficult and blurry than just the normal 100% viewing. Following Greene's test procedure, Dr. Stewart also performed his own similar testwith results which contradict that of Petrovich.

To fully present his own opinions and analysis as this newer interest in Moses is occurring, Dr. Stewart is releasing his own book on the topic, called, "Beyond The World's Oldest Alphabet; Hebrew Memories At Mount Sinai." In addition to the theories stated above, Stewart also has a different interpretation of what is shown regarding some historical engravings in the noteworthy Sinai 115 stele.

"Dr. Petrovich's translation ofthe stele artifact does not depict persons who were directly related to the biblical patriarchs, like Abraham. Rather, these depictions or petroglyphs are "pre-writing Hebrew depictions" of allegedly the 'Pharaoh of the Moses era.'" Stewart also asserts that right below this potential "Pharaoh" is a detailed scene of the Israelites as they cross through the midst of the Red Sea.

The culmination of Stewart's book gives a couple of examples of "pre-writing-Hebrew-depictions" of (allegedly) Moses in a rock carving holding the set of the "10 Commandments" under one arm and his "staff/rod" under the other.

All told, the quest for answers regarding the life of Moses and the Exodus story is alive and well in 2019even if varying experts have contradictory theories.

Ken Lambert has been writing for both secular and religious publications for several years. He co-authored the book "Top 10 Most Influential Christians Since the Apostles" and holds a Doctorate in Ministry. He resides in southern New Hampshire.Religious 'nones' now as big as evangelicals in the US, new data shows Christian Post Contributor | 21 March, 2019 by Samuel Smith

The number of religious "nones" in the United States are now statistically equal than the number of evangelicals, according to a political scientist who analyzed data from the recently released 2018 General Social Survey.

The GSS, a biennial project run by NORC (National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago, was released this week and showed how America's religious landscape continues to change.

Ryan Burge, a political science researcher at Eastern Illinois University, analyzed data from the survey. He used a Reltrad (religious tradition) classification code to compensate for the oversample of African Americans in earlier waves of data.

According to Burge's data, 23.1 percent of those surveyed were people of "no religion," while those who are evangelical  of any race, not just white  represented about 22.8 percent of the tally.

Despite a tiny resurgence in the 2018 data, white mainline protestants, which were once the largest U.S. religious demographic in the 1970s, were at just 10.8 percent of the tally, a far cry from 1975 when they were over 30 percent.

Catholic respondents fell slightly to 23 percent but continue to be one of the largest two religious demographics in the U.S.

The study comes as there has been a rise over the last decade-plus in the number of religiously unaffiliated individuals in the United States. According to Burge's data, the religious "nones" comprised just 5 percent when the GSS was first conducted in 1972. Today, religious "nones" are just under a quarter of the GSS data.

"The 'nones' are not slowing down," Burge told The Christian Post in an email. "Their share of the population is continuing to climb ~1 percent every two years and has done so for the past 15 years or so. If current trends keep up then they will be the largest group in the United States in the next five years, statistically."

While the share of "nones" continues to rise, the number of Catholics and Protestants have dwindled over the years. The two groups were once the two largest religious groups in the nation. In 1972, the two groups comprised over 25 percent of the GSS tally each.

Read more from "Religious 'nones' now as big as evangelicals in the US, new data shows" on The Christian Post.When God Picks a Side Christian Examiner Contributor | 22 March, 2019 by Mark Klages

California Christians, does anything your state does surprise you anymore?

According to an article by Adam Shaw, one of FOX News' reporters covering US and European politics, California's Pitzer College is retaining study-abroad programs to China, Turkey and Cuba while ending trips to Israel. Shaw articulates that the university's president, Mr. Melvin Oliver, disagrees with the decision to end the program, which garnered 67 votes for, 28 against, and 8 abstentions. President Oliver cites the continued and longstanding exchange with universities in countries with proven human rights abuse records, such as in the case of 19,000 killed in Nepal's bloody civil war and with China's restrictive policies. Still, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) is pushing for the university's College Council to recommend ending the program. (Why is a US Representative from Michigan involved in a private California college's business? That's for another post.)

Pitzer's own student-run Claremont Independent issued a scathing retort of the activism, calling it the "worst form of virtue signaling" for its shortsightedness against academic freedom and ill-considered impact against pro-Palestinian students who find the freedom through Pitzer to experience the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from within Israel itself.

So, why, you ask, is Israel so important to Americans and isn't that statement proof that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was right when she questioned the loyalty of Americans and lobbyists who support the Jewish State?

Well, maybe the answer is as simple as Israel's enemies always find themselves at the hands of an angry God every time, without fail?

"Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope;

even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you.

I will bend Judah as I bend my bow

and fill it with Ephraim.

I will rouse your sons, Zion,

against your sons, Greece,

and make you like a warrior's sword.

The Lord Will Appear

Then the Lord will appear over them;

his arrow will flash like lightning.

The Sovereign Lord will sound the trumpet;

he will march in the storms of the south,

and the Lord Almighty will shield them.

They will destroy

and overcome with slingstones.

They will drink and roar as with wine;

they will be full like a bowl

used for sprinkling the corners of the altar.

The Lord their God will save his people on that day

as a shepherd saves his flock." (Zechariah 9:12-15, NIV)

The Bible is replete with examples of powerful kings and armies who failed against Israel (e.g., Pharaoh: Exodus 14, Goliath and the Philistines: 1 Samuel 17). Yeah, but that was in Biblical times, you say. Israel is nothing without US support, you say. Well, just ask Egypt and Syria what happened in 1973. Call it the October War, the Yom Kippur War, or the Six Day War, that led to the unholy alliance; regardless, two vastly greater armies learned again what it means to defy the living God. Since the end of that conflict, nations have tried to defeat Israel daily, but to no avail.

On the contrary, those in history on Israel's side have fared much better than her enemies. Even in spite of Israel's own disobedience to God at times (and one might include Israel itself today in that statement) God remains true to His promises.

Fast forward to 2019.

Democratic Freshman Representatives Omar and Tlaib are making headlines for their disparaging remarks about Israel. But they are not alone. According to a Foreign Policy article published in December, 2018, anti-Israel sentiment is increasing in the US. Citing a University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll with a representative sampling of 2,352 Americans and a margin of error of 2 percent, Shibley Telhami reported support for a "one-state solution" as high as 35 percent while 36 percent remain supportive of two states. Among the critical node, Americans between 18 and 34 years old, support for the one-state solution rose to 42 percent.

So, Christian, all of these hard facts, all of this recorded history, all of this proof begs one question: On which side of a Holy God do we as Americans want to fall?

It's not a trick question. I'll give you a hint. When God picks a side, it pays to agree with Him.

Mark Klages is an influential contributor, a former US Marine and a lifelong teacher who focuses on applying a Christian worldview to everyday events. Mark blogs at https://maklagesl3.wixsite.com/website under the title "God Provides where Hate Divides," with a heart to heal social, political, relational, and intellectual wounds through God's divine love and grace. Mark can also be found on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-klages-04b42511/.American Catholics are growing more concerned about the fate of the worldand with it, Christian persecution.

More than 9 in 10 now identify persecution as either very or somewhat severe. This is roughly the same percentage as an identical poll last year, both sponsored by the US branch of Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN). But over the last 12 months, the share choosing the very severe category rose from 40 percent to 46 percent.

And their level of concern went with it, rising 9 percentage points. Last year, 49 percent of Catholics described themselves as very concerned. This year, 58 percent.

The poll surveys 1,000 American Catholics across the spectrums of age, politics, and piety, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates.

It showed that intense Catholic concern is growing on several global issues. Those very concerned about human trafficking rose from 72 percent to 82 percent. Poverty climbed from ...

1Google banned Christian YouTube ad on homosexuality after backlash from employees

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A video advertisement informing people on the Bibles teachings on homosexuality was banned by Google-owned YouTube and ruled to be counter to the organizations mission.

The Daily Caller News Foundation has reported that a Google vice president in June 2018 moved to prohibit a video advertisement from Messianic Jewish Radio host Michael Brown from being advertised on YouTube after employees called the video homophobic.

The video in question is titled Can you be gay and be a Christian? and was posted on Browns AskDrBrownAccount. In the video, Brown, an author, host of the "Line of Fire" podcast, and contributor to The Christian Post and other publications, argues that homosexual sex is a sin.

Although he argues it is no worse than other sins, he states that Christians are called to abstain from sinful behavior.

According to internal Google communications obtained by the Daily Caller, the video was flagged in an internal listserv newsletter called Yes at Google. The newsletter is run by Googles human resources and is sent to over 30,000 employees. The listserv is devoted to addressing microaggressions and micro-corrections within the company.

Highlighted in the listserve was a comment from an employee who stated that Browns advertisement was appearing in channels operated by gay and lesbian users.

I cannot see how this can be allowed when the specific idea of LGBT videos is to allow the creators to feel free to share their content and be comfortable that anti-LGBT advertisers would not be attached to their content, the employee reportedly wrote. This seems very counter to our mission, specifically around PRIDE 2018 timeframe.

After backlash to Browns videos advertising continued to grow among employees, Google vice president for product management and ads, Vishal Sharma, declared that the video would no longer be eligible to run as an advertisement.

Although she stated that YouTube is an open platform that supports the free expression of creators with a wide range of views, Sharma reportedly explained in a comment published by the listserv that we dont allow advertising that disparages people based on who they are. This also includes peoples sexual orientation.

[W]e remove ads that violate this basic principle, she stated. After careful and multiple reviews over the course of a few days, our teams decided to remove the ad in question here as it violates our policy. Weve communicated this to the advertiser and have been in touch with creators who have been actively engaged on this issue.

The Christian Post reached out to Google for comment on the Daily Caller article and for confirmation of Sharmas comments. A response is pending.

Brown responded to the Daily Caller article in an op-ed titled Google v. Gods word. Although Sharma accuses his video of disparaging people, Brown asserts that his video showed no hatred toward the LGBT community and just simply shared Gods word.

I did not disparage anyone on the video. Not once, he stressed. I simply stated what Gods Word says, simply and clearly and directly.

While some could argue that Browns assertion that someone cant be a true follower of Christ if they openly practice homosexuality is disparaging, he maintains that he simply repeated what Gods word says and what the Synagogue and Church have believed for millennia.

Not only so, but in the video I made clear that no one is condemned for having feelings or attractions, he detailed. The issue is whether we act on those feelings or attractions. And that, in fact, is our choice.

Brown said he believes that Googles battle right now is with the Bible.

[This means] that, if I simply produced a video reading relevant Bible verses on the subject, that video would not be suitable for advertising either, he warned. It would be one thing if Google said, 'Lets be sure this video is only advertised on conservative Christian channels.' That would have been perfectly fine, and we would have fully respected that. Our goal was to equip believers with truth, not provoke LGBT viewers on their own channels. But that was not to be.

Google software engineer Mike Wacker first spoke out against the Yes at Google listserv in a Twitter thread last week where he stated that HR is involved in describing sincere religious beliefs as homophobic.

[T]his newsletter has also enabled a call-out culture where small incidents or opposing viewpoints are called out with big words: misogynistic, racist, homophobic, etc, Wacker wrote. Employees call out each other and sometimes call out Google's users.

In addition to banning his video from being advertised, Browns YouTube account has also been demonetized based on a decision he can not appeal. This means that the account cant earn money from advertising posted to the accounts videos.

Administrators claimed that Browns account was demonetized due to re-used copywrited content. His account was ruled not to comply with YouTube Partner Program terms.

There are a handful of videos that we received notice about for using a music clip or TV clip that they claimed was not fair usage. But in each case, they made clear this was not a strike against us, that we were not in any trouble with them, and that there was nothing we needed to do, Brown explained. In the end, a few of those videos were demonetized based on these alleged copyright violations.

When Brown asked for clarification on the decision to demonetize the account, he received an email back explaining that administrators could not provide him with specific details as to what led them to this decision.

Of course, we will push back every way we know how, first because these are unfair business practices and second because pushing back against YouTubes double standards is the thing to do, Brown stated. And while I cant say for sure that this happened to us because we are outspoken, conservative, Bible believers, I can say with certainty that Google/YouTube has certainly made clear where it stands on these issues.ECFA suspends Harvest Bible Church amid scandal; former members demand donations be returned

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The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability has suspended Chicago-area megachurch Harvest Bible Church following the firing of its longtime pastor James MacDonald and amid ongoing revelations that the ministry had misappropriated funds.

In a statement from ECFA President Dan Busby Friday, the ministry watchdog group said the board of directors was suspending HBC's membership as of March 14.

"On November 28, 2018, ECFA opened a formal investigation of Harvest Bible Chapel to review their compliance of ECFAs Seven Standards of Responsible Stewardship. During a site visit to the church in December, we thoroughly examined the information made available to us and believed the church was in compliance with our standards," Busby said.

Yet in light of recent investigative reporting that documented several instances of financial malfeasance and unpacked how the church was structured in such a way to shield ministry resources from scrutiny, the organization has changed its tune.

"Given the emergence of new information, we have concerns the church may be in serious violation of ECFA Standards 2, 3, 4, and 6. During the indefinite suspension, the church may not represent that they are an ECFA member or display ECFAs membership seal," Busby said.

"The investigation has been and will remain ongoing during the suspension as we work to determine whether Harvest Bible Chapel should be terminated, advised of the steps necessary to come into full compliance or whether they are in fact in compliance with our standards and should, therefore, be restored to full membership.

The ECFA's standards require that each organization must be governed by no fewer than five people, a majority of whom are independent, and maintain accurate financial records and utilize proper management and controls. The Friday statement about HBC did not elaborate on the specifics of how the church may have violated their standards.

The change in stance comes as former members of the church are demanding that thousands of dollars in donations be returned as questions persist about the misuse of funds.

The local CBS affiliate reported Monday that former parishioners Scott and Marsha Thompson now want back the $72,000 they gave over the course of a few years when they were members because of the allegations of financial misappropriation.

Thompson told the outlet that he began questioning MacDonald's spending habits back in 2006 when he saw his $2 million home on a private lake, which was featured in a local magazine. He left the church in 2013

All this is coming out that millions of dollars potentially has been mishandled, he said regarding why he is now going public with his complaints.

The Christian Post reached out to the church for comment, inquiring specifically about the financial review the ministry says they are doing, but did not receive a response by press time.

An interim leadership team, however, has announced that the church "is opening a new bank account to handle members' tithes, and the money will be used only for ministry expenses, 'banking obligations' and staff salaries," according to the Daily Herald Monday. No funds are being directed to the senior pastor's office or to items in past budgets.

The church has also announced that donations recently have dropped by 40 percent and that they are significantly reducing their operating expenses.

Journalist Julie Roys, whose investigative journalism about the allegations of suspicious financial activity at HBC was published in December in World magazine, said Monday that it was "stunning" that it took as long as it did for the ECFA to act and suspend the Chicago-area church. This is especially the case, she stressed, particularly given her follow-up reporting from last month documenting additional instances of abuse of church funds.

"The fact that ECFA didnt discover these violations itself is bad enough. But the fact that the group failed to act even after I reported these glaring violations is inexcusable. What it took to finally force the groups hand was my report that MacDonald had funded African safaris, Florida vacations, and other luxury purchases with church funds," Roys explained on her blog Monday.

"I cant imagine how anyone could put any trust in the groups ability to hold any church or ministry 'accountable' as it claims," she said.

In a March 12 statement to CP, Busby said that the information Roys reported was "cause of significant concern" and that they would be addressing it in the coming days.Francis Chan defends speaking at events with 'false teachers, will use more caution in future

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After taking heat for speaking at a stadium event with pastors described as prosperity gospel preachers and false teachers, Francis Chan has publicly responded to those concerns and vowed to continue speaking at events that feature people with whom he theologically disagrees.

The 51-year-old popular preacher and author who co-founded Cornerstone Community Church in Simi Valley California issued a lengthy statement over the weekend in an attempt to refute any negative conclusions drawn from his decision to speak at The Send conference in Orlando in late February.

The Send is a stadium conference that has been hosted in cities nationwide since 2011 by The Call, an organization run by charismatic Christian evangelist Lou Engle. At such events, a number of pastors and Christian leaders are invited to come and give a message.

With over 60,000 gathered at Camping World Stadium, the 10-hour Feb. 23 event was hosted by Youth With A Mission, Christ for All Nations, and Engle. The lineup included the likes of Chan, Benny Hinn, Todd White, Daniel Kolenda and music from Hillsong Young & Free, Jesus Culture, Tasha Cobbs-Leonard, and Bethel Music.

Although The Send event was a major production in which Chan was simply invited to speak, pictures emerged online of Chan with Hinn and White. This sparked some critics to question why Chan would choose to speak at an event with charlatans known to promote the prosperity gospel.

From what I hear from friends and critics (I stay away from social media, etc), there have been a lot of conclusions drawn from my decision to speak at The Send conference as well as other venues, Chan, the author of Crazy Love, wrote in the statement.

Some people have questioned my willingness to take pictures with anyone who asks for a picture with me. So I thought it might be helpful to explain some of my theological beliefs which have come under scrutiny as of late, as well as some of my practices/decisions.

Chan first addressed the question of the prosperity gospel, which refers to teachings that imply that followers of Jesus will be healthy and wealthy. Sometimes, prosperity gospel preaching has been used to encourage Christians to make donations to a certain ministry in exchange for supposed divine blessings in their lives.

Chan asserts that the prosperity gospel is a dangerous teaching. In Chans opinion, the prosperity gospel contradicts the teachings and example of Christ and the apostles.

Jesus taught His disciples If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me (Matt 16:24), Chan wrote. It was not a call to come and prosper but rather the opposite  a call to come and suffer. The New Testament is full of passages explaining the suffering that comes with a decision to follow Christ.

Chan said prosperity gospel teachings also provide a false hope that can result in confusion and discouragement.

Prosperity preachers often promise greater wealth if their listeners will give more to their ministries, he added. This is never promised in Scriptures.

Chan explained that he once gave a sermon where he showed how suffering is a theme found in every book of the New Testament.

Chan, who is invited to speak at over 500 events a year, went on to explain why he sometimes accepts speaking engagements at places that tolerate theology that is different from his.

According to Chan, he speaks at events almost every week of the year and said that it is part of his calling in this season of his life.

However, he doesnt normally ask event organizers who else will be speaking at a particular event. He wrote that he normally does his own research on others invited to speak. While other speakers at events can many times be friends of his or close acquaintances, there are others that he knows little about.

This current experience has caused me to consider exercising more caution and to develop a team to help me research, Chan declared. That being said, I speak in many places where I am not in alignment theologically. I actually believe that is where I can be most effective, as long as they give me the freedom to address anything I believe the Lord wants me to address.

Chan plans to work with the elders of his church to come up with more safeguards for future events.

Chan stressed that he now recognizes that sometimes his participation in an event can give an impression that I align with every other speaker at the event.

Im not sure what to do about that other than to tell you that I dont, Chan assured. Unless the elders of my church direct me differently, I will continue to be found preaching in venues with those I disagree. I will preach in just about any kind of setting if Im given freedom to preach from any passage of scripture.

Chan stated that while he strives to call out and denounce false preachers, it is hard to collect accurate data on their teachings and beliefs. He admitted that in the past he has erred in calling out the false teachings of preachers and pastors.

Over the years, many things have been said about me that simply are not true. I cant know the motives, but I am sure it is untrue. In the same way, friends of mine have been misrepresented and their reputations unfairly tarnished, Chan wrote. I want to make sure that I am not guilty of the same thing.Not a preaching series: Joel Osteen details new History channel program 'Jesus: His Life'

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Televangelist Joel Osteen was on ABCs Good Morning America Monday to talk about his upcoming 8-part History channel series detailing the life of Christ through the eyes of those around him.

In the weeks leading up to Easter beginning on Monday, March 25, History will air Jesus: His Life, a series that will be co-produced by Osteen, the pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas and a widely published author.

The series will focus on the perspective of biblical figures that surrounded Christ, such as Joseph, Mary, Caiaphas, Judas Iscariot and Peter.

Osteen, who has experience producing behind the scenes when his father was the pastor at Lakewood, said that the History series was not a project that he could turn down.

I loved seeing the life of Jesus through the eyes of the people that were there, Osteen explained. We have seen the story but it is a little different when you see, [for example], what did Joseph think when he found out his wife was pregnant.

Osteen added that the series will be less about preaching and more about showing what life was like for people during the time of Christ

[The movie] is more about the culture, the setting at that time. I was inspired by that. I learned from that. You know, just putting myself in those peoples shoes. It really took on a different perspective to me, Osteen said. I thought, Would I have responded like Joseph? Would I have that kind of faith? It is an inspiring series and I think people will learn.

The megachurch preacher assured that the project is not a preaching series.

Its for everybody to learn about the most important man that ever lived, Osteen contended. Whether you believe He is the son of God like I do or not, Jesus was somebody that changed the culture.

The series will include comments from experts, scholars, and pastors from a variety of backgrounds.

It will also include perspective from left-leaning Christian leaders such as Father James Martin, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Church and Joshua Debois, the former head of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships under President Barack Obama.

We took it from different perspectives and makes it really well-rounded, Osteen stressed. Its a fantastic series.

I think anybody can be inspired by the life of Christ and what he brought  forgiveness, love, respect, redemption, second chances, he continued. That is what we all need in life.

Osteen was asked which of Jesus relationships stuck out to him the most. To that, he responded with Peter.

I think Peter was the everyday-person. I love the fact that Jesus, when he chose His disciples, he didnt choose the people that you would expect, Osteen reasoned. Peter was a fisherman. He was rough. He made mistakes. Sometimes, he cussed people out. Yet, he was Jesus close disciple and even when he failed when Jesus needed Him the most, Jesus forgave him. It is the story of Christ right through Peter.

Today, Osteen says, people need the message of Christ more than ever before.

Its easy in our lives today to get caught up in our own world and just think about ourselves, Osteen said. But Jesus life was about lifting people up and helping somebody else. It seems like more than ever today, we need to make that a part of our life  being a blessing to somebody else, lift somebody up.

As The Christian Post previously reported, the series premise is similar to the storyline of Sight & Sound Theatres' theatrical production Jesus, which also focused on the people Jesus came in contact with.

History channel previously produced a 10-part series called The Bible. The series was produced by Mark Burnett and drew over 11.7 million viewers in 2013. That series led to the production of the movie "Son of God" and the subsequent TV series "A.D."

The "Jesus: His Life" series will be produced by Nutopia productions, which produced the 2015 program "Finding Jesus. Faith. Fact. Forgery."Apologist breaks down why 'atheism is so attractive' to some

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Apologist Ray Comfort is known for his creative approach to sharing the gospel. Comfort, who founded the Living Waters ministry, regularly creates documentaries and other outreach projects aimed at reaching people with biblical truth.

But the well-known apologist wasnt always the Bible-believing man he is today.

In recent years, Comfort has produced and hosted films like 180, Noah and the Last Days, Audacity and his new project 7 Reasons  movies that lead people to think deeper about faith, the world around them and Gods love.

He recently spoke with PureFlix.coms Pure Talk about what he believes is the biggest barrier that prevents people from embracing God and the Bible.

READ ALSO: Want to Know How to Answer Atheists? Check This Out

Its not understanding the danger. The Bible says men love darkness and hate the light, neither will they come to the light lest their deeds be exposed, Comfort said, noting that this love for darkness clouds human judgment. So, everybody loves their sins.

Watch Comfort break down his views on atheism and share his own journey to faith:

Comfort is set to be a central fixture in the PureFlix.com sponsored Answering Atheist conference (April 17-21) this Easter at the Ark Encounter attraction. Its a conference that promises four days of solid biblical teaching to equip you to stand confidently on Gods word.

The apologist will join Answers in Genesis founder Ken Ham, among many others, in addressing key questions about faith, atheism and how to engage with non-believers. Comfort will also preach at a sunrise service on Easter morning at the Ark Encounter, leading in a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The reason atheism is so attractive to the unsaved is because it gets rid of moral accountability, Comfort told Pure Talk. If theres no God, theres no ultimately right or wrong and theres no punishment for right and wrong.

He also shared details on his own upbringing and spiritual journey, explaining that he grew up in New Zealand in a non-Christian household and didnt find God until he was an adult.

READ ALSO: Inside the Incredible Story Behind Lifesize Replica of Noahs Ark

I wasnt interested in God, he said of his early years. I was just interested in doing my own thing  but when I saw my danger  that caused me to let go of my sin.

At age of 20, Comfort was married, had a home and had already built a successful business, accomplishing most of his goals early on  a scenario that left him with a uniquely early midlife crisis of sorts.

Some deeper thoughts about life and meaning soon shocked him out of spiritual apathy. In fact, everything changed for Comfort one night when he was sitting in bed next to his wife and he came to a terrifying realization.

I began thinking, She could die and everything else would mean nothing, Comfort recalled, noting that this revelation left him in tears, looking up at the heavens and crying out with confusion and concern. Six months later God heard my cry.

Comfort was on a surfing trip and another guy shared the gospel with him. Suddenly, everything became clear and his purpose and understanding were transformed.

I understood that I was a sinner and the thing that convinced me was the 10 Commandments, he said, noting that these moral laws left him deeply impacted and convicted. [I thought], If God has seen my thought life  then Im in big trouble, and thats when I understood the cross.

READ ALSO: Be Bold for the Christian Faith: Your Key to Engaging Atheists

So, Comfort said he decided to become a Christian. Almost immediately, he was sharing his faith with the masses  something he continues to do here in America decades later.

One of Comforts motivators is that he is horrified at the thought of what happens to those who reject Christ. With that in mind, he seeks to bring the gospel to others in an effort to yield understanding and to build bridges to God.

Want to see Comfort share his views on faith and atheism in person? Youre invited to attend the Answering Atheists conference this April. You can learn more here.

This article was originally published on Pure Flix Insider. Visit Pure Flix for access to thousands of faith and family-friendly movies and TV shows. You can get a free, one-month trial here.

Billy Hallowell, author of "The Armageddon Code," has contributed to TheBlaze, the Washington Post, Human Events, the Daily Caller, Mediaite, and the Huffington Post, among other news sites. Through journalism, media, public speaking appearances, and the blogosphere, Hallowell has worked as a journalist and commentator for more than a decade.Russia will begin delivering its natural gas to Hungary via the Turk Stream pipeline in the second half of 2021, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto said in a Rossiya-24 TV channel forecast.

"According to the present-day state of affairs, it turns out that we stand a good chance to start receiving the gas via the new delivery route by approximately second half of 2021," TASS cited him as saying.

Commenting on another Russian-Hungarian project, the construction of the Paks NPP in Hungary, Szijjarto said his country and the European Union have completed the process of approval.

"We are already behind schedule, I wont deny it. But falling behind the schedule does not mean that we reject the project. It only means that the NPP will be put into operation later than planned," he noted.

"The delays are mostly due to protracted formal procedures within the EU, which took longer than they should and definitely longer than we planned. Now they are over, and the EU has given the green light. The preparatory work on the ground is under way, auxiliary infrastructure is being built," the diplomat said.Boy, 5, fatally crushed by granite table top at Texas church

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The Harris County Sheriffs Office is still trying to determine how a 5-year-old boy managed to topple over a granite table top that crushed him to death as he played at a church in Houston, Texas, on Thursday night.

According to news station KPRC the tragedy occurred at about 9:30 p.m. at the Signs and Wonders Apostolic Outreach Ministries led by Apostle Dwayne McCarty and Prophetess Schantel McCarty in north Harris County.

In a statement to The Christian Post Friday, the Harrison County Sheriffs Office said when they arrived on the scene they were told that the 5-year-old boy was inside a room playing by himself when tragedy struck.

A large granite top fell on top of him. The 5-year-old was transported by ground to Memorial Hermann where he was pronounced deceased. Homicide [detectives] are trying to determine how he managed to topple over the table onto his person, the statement said.

It is unclear how many people were at the church when the incident took place.

Senior leaders at Signs and Wonders Apostolic Outreach Ministries did not respond to requests for comment Friday. However, a member of the church told CP that it was a different church that was meeting in the church building on Thursday night.

That was not a part of our church services. That was a totally separate church and organization, she said.

When asked if Signs and Wonders Apostolic Outreach Ministries owned the building, she replied No, and suggested she would try to find out the name of the church that was meeting in the building.

Thats not us, she insisted.

According to ABC 13, the table that killed the boy, whose identity is being withheld by police, was not bolted down. A parishioner told the network that the table, which was reportedly made by a church member, takes a couple people to lift it. They also expressed shock that it toppled over. About six years ago, Apostle McCarty launched an unsuccessful campaign to raise $15,000 on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo to help fund an ambitious plan to create a mix-used income generating church project that would include a 24 hour childrens day care and community center.

It is our mission to be an Apostolic Church, commissioned by God to walk in the prophetic anointing. We are to train, equip, and empower men and women through the inspired word of God, and to build strong ministry teams within the five fold i.e. The apostles, prophets, evangelist, pastors, and teachers. We are snatching the blindfolds of Satan off of the eyes of Gods people, and setting the captives free from bondage through the work of the Holy Spirit, he wrote in introducing his church.

We believe in the word of God where it says to train up a child the way they should go, and that when they get older they will not depart from it. It is our vision to have a 24-hour Christian day care that would eliminate the stress of parents working over night or late hours. This day care would specialize in teaching life skills, education through computer rooms, as well as train them through the word of God, he said.Franklin Graham Talks Jesus Christ's Return, Fulfillment of Prophecy as Jerusalem Embassy Opens

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The Rev. Franklin Graham has made note of prophecy surrounding the return of Jesus Christ as Christians and Jews mark the 70th anniversary of the establishment of Israel and the U.S. embassy's official opening in Jerusalem.

"[Seventy] years ago today, the State of Israel was established. In fulfillment of prophecy, God brought the nation into being, and He is sustaining them for the day when the Lord Jesus Christ Himself will return and establish His throne in Jerusalem as Scripture tells us," Graham wrote on Facebook Monday.

"I believe it is significant that the United States has formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and is moving our embassy there," he added, referring to the U.S. government's major decision that was announced last year, with the ceremony taking place on Monday.

"This has been promised by past U.S. presidents and administrations, but it had never become a reality, until now," wrote the evangelist, who is president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Several big-name evangelical preachers and megachurch pastors have all commented on the link between biblical prophecy and the opening of the U.S. embassy.

John C. Hagee, senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in Texas and founder of Christians United for Israel, delivered the closing benediction at the Jerusalem benediction.

"Jerusalem is the city of God. Jerusalem is the heartbeat of Israel. Jerusalem is where Abraham placed his son on the altar on the Temple Mount and became the father of many nations," he said on Monday.

"Jerusalem is where Jeremiah and Isaiah penned principles of righteousness that became the moral foundations of Western Civilization. Jerusalem is where Messiah will come and establish a kingdom that will never end," Hagee added.

"We thank you, O Lord, for President Donald Trump's courage in acknowledging to the world a truth established 3,000 years ago that Jerusalem is and always shall be the eternal capital of the Jewish people."

The opening of the U.S. embassy, seen as highly controversial in the Muslim world, led to violent protests, with over 60 Palestinians killed and another 2,400 injured during violent protests in the Gaza Strip where an estimated 35,000 protested Israel's 70th anniversary, calling the creation of the Jewish state a "catastrophe." Protesters have been burning tires, setting kites on fire, and throwing Molotov cocktails at IDF forces.

U.S. deputy press secretary Raj Shah said that terrorist group Hamas, not Israeli forces, are to blame for the deaths.

"We believe that Hamas is responsible for these tragic deaths, that their rather cynical exploitation of the situation is what's leading to these deaths, and we want them to stop," Shah said.

Pastors such as Greg Laurie of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Irvine and Riverside, California, also defended Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy to Israel's capital.

"Jerusalem always has been, and always will be, the capital of this great nation (Israel). The Lord gave it to King David, and now it's about time we (the U.S.) moved our embassy there," Laurie said in a short Facebook video on Monday.

The prophetical significance of the move was also hailed by Judge Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News opinion host, who compared Trump to the Bible's King Cyrus.

"Donald Trump recognized history. He, like King Cyrus before him, fulfilled the biblical prophecy of the gods worshiped by Jews, Christians and, yes, Muslims, that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish state and that the Jewish people deserve a righteous, free and sovereign Israel," Pirro wrote in an op-ed in Fox News published on Sunday.Millennials Who Attended Evangelical Protestant Schools More Likely to Marry, Have Children: Study

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Generation X and millennial-aged adults who attended evangelical Protestant schools are more likely to get married and have children than their peers who attended public schools, according to a recent study.

In research conducted by the Canada-based think tank Cardus that was released Tuesday, found that among young adults aged 2439, "EP schoolers are more likely to be married, and less likely to cohabit."

"By guiding graduates toward traditional marriage and family, evangelical Protestant schools may set up structural constraints and opportunities that encourage evangelical religious orientations and practices," explained the report.

"Specifically, we would expect that EP-school graduates are more likely to attend church services regularly, and this tendency is enhanced and reinforced for them when they marry and have children."

The report also found that young adults educated at evangelical Protestant schools are more likely to read the Bible, attend worship, and pray than those who attended public schools.

"Our findings show strong effects of EP schooling on various religious and spiritual outcomes in young adulthood, and these effects hold up after controlling for family-background and demographic variables, including religion of parents," noted the study.

Researchers used the 2011 and 2014 Cardus Education Surveys for the United States and the CES for Canada taken in 2012 and 2016.

From an initial sample space of approximately 2,000 private school attendees, the report focused on 245 U.S. students and 203 Canadian students who went to evangelical Protestant schools.

The report noted that there tended to be slight disparity in the findings between the United States and Canada, with the former reflecting the trends more strongly than the latter.

"Across all models, there appears to be a tendency for marriage, family, and education variables to account for a greater portion of the EP-schooling effect in the U.S. than in Canada," noted the report.

"One reason for this may be that cohabitation has a different relation to EP schooling and religious outcomes in Canada compared with the U.S. Another may be that religious outcomes in Canada are less strongly related to marriage and family, and marriage and family are less strongly driven by EP schooling, than in the U.S."

Cardus' findings come as other entities have noted a decline in marriage and birth rate among younger adults, especially millennials.

In September, the Institute on Family Studies reported that about a quarter of millennial-aged adults have neither married nor had children upon entering their 30s.

"At ages 30 to 34, more than a quarter of millennials (26 percent) have not yet started a family  meaning they have neither been married nor had any children," said Wendy Wang, director of research at IFS.

"Another 18 percent of millennials have children but have never been married. Only a narrow majority  56 percent  have been married before. And most of these ever-married young adults (78 percent) have children."Most Protestant pastors see school as 'negative influence' on spiritual formation

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A majority of Protestant pastors and half of Catholic priests believe school is a negative influence on a childs spiritual development, according to a new report by the Barna Group.

Barna partnered with a religious think tank named Cardus to interview 650 Protestant and Catholic church leaders last year about spiritual development among youth.

Respondents were asked to rank certain entities regarding whether they had a positive or negative influence on a child's spiritual development. The categories were parents/family, church, school, peers/friends, Christian community, and culture/society.

According to their findings released Tuesday, 65 percent of Protestant respondents and 50 percent of Catholic respondents viewed school as a negative influence on a child's spiritual development.

In fact, schools are ranked alongside a childs friends and peers as primarily negative influences  a view held by 61 percent of Protestant leaders and 65 percent of Catholic leaders, said Barna.

In some cases, the perceived negative influence of a childs school or friend group outweighs a perceived positive influence by double.

Barna noted that Catholic priests were more likely than Protestant pastors to view school as having a positive influence on a child's spiritual development.

This denominational gap could be explained by the prevalence of Catholic school education and the possibility that Catholic priests are assessing the influence of a religious school education, explained Barna.

While school ranked high on the negative influence side, culture/society was ranked the worst, with 94 percent of surveyed Protestant pastors and 92 percent of surveyed Catholic priests saying that culture/society had a negative influence on a child's spiritual development.

Ray Pennings, Cardus executive vice president, said in a statement released Tuesday that schools, especially Christian academic institutions, must play an important role in the spiritual development of children.

Church and family life are important in the spiritual formation of young adults, but our research reinforces that schools play an important role too, said Pennings.

Church leaders, parents, and educators must understand the positive influence of Christian schooling on spiritual formation and work together to ensure that these schooling options are genuinely available for as many families as possible.

In research released in January 2018, Cardus found that Generation X and millennial-aged adults who attended evangelical Protestant schools were more likely to read the Bible, attend worship, and pray than their peers who attended public schools.

The 2018 report drew from the 2011 and 2014 Cardus Education Surveys for the United States and the CES for Canada taken in 2012 and 2016.

"Our findings show strong effects of EP schooling on various religious and spiritual outcomes in young adulthood, and these effects hold up after controlling for family-background and demographic variables, including religion of parents," noted the study from last year.Pastor convicted in historic hack-based insider trading gets 5 years in prison, ordered to pay $14.4M

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Vitaly Korchevsky, a former hedge fund manager and pastor was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay more than $14 million in forfeiture for his role in what the FBI billed as the largest known computer hacking and securities fraud scheme.

Todays sentence sends a powerful message that, no matter how sophisticated or novel the scheme, cybercriminals and traders who steal information from U.S. companies and undermine the integrity of our financial markets will be held accountable for their actions, Richard P. Donoghue, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement Thursday.

Korchevsky, 53, who once served as pastor of the Slavic Evangelical Baptist Church in Brookhaven, Pennsylvania, was sentenced in a federal court in Brooklyn Thursday by U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Dearie.

Last summer he was convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and computer intrusion, conspiracy to commit money laundering and two counts of securities fraud. In addition to being ordered to pay $14.4 million in forfeiture, the former pastor was also ordered to pay a $250,000 fine.

His co-defendant in the case, Vladislay Khalupsky, 48, was sentenced to four years imprisonment for the same charges in January.

Korchevsky and Khalupsky will now pay the price for using their experience as traders to generate millions of dollars in unlawful trades based on hacked information, Donoghue said.

Despite his protestations of innocence, Korchevsky, who was also a former Morgan Stanley vice president, was convicted after it was proven by investigators that he profited at least $14 million from 2010 to 2015 by trading securities on information he got from earnings reports and other market-moving announcements stolen by Ukrainian hackers before they were released publicly.

The pastor and his co-conspirators used the information from the stolen earnings reports to make trades generating approximately $30 million in illegal profits.

When he was first arrested he insisted to his congregants that his heart was "clean before the Lord."

Following his conviction after a four-week trial, his lawyer, Steven Brill, told Bloomberg that the verdict left the pastor's family in tears.

"Although we respect the verdict, we disagree with it, and are disappointed. But the fight continues, and we look forward to availing ourselves of all legal options going forward," he said.

None of those options were strong enough to keep him out of prison.

The Secret Service remains committed to aggressively investigating and pursuing those responsible for cyber-enabled financial crimes, said U.S. Secret Service Special Agent-in-Charge of the New York field office, David E. Beach, in the news release from the Department of Justice.

The sentence today is testament to the Secret Services commitment to building strong partnerships between local, state and federal law enforcement and represents a win against those who chose to threaten the financial infrastructure of the United States, he added.Trans group activist drops police complaint against Christian for 'misgendering' adult child

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A transgender rights activist who reported a British Christian journalist to the police for "misgendering" her teenage child has withdrawn her complaint.

Susie Green, who leads the transgender advocacy group Mermaids, decided to drop her complaint against Caroline Farrow, a Catholic commentator and writer for the U.K. Catholic Herald, because the media coverage, she said, was misrepresenting what had happened, the Guardian reported Wednesday.

If I had continued my complaint then [Farrow] would have continued to have a platform to spread misinformation about what actually happened, Green said in an interview on BBC2's Victoria Derbyshire program.

Being involved in an investigation would have meant that I couldnt talk.

Surrey police contacted Farrow earlier this week and asked her to present herself at the station for an interrogation on caution over tweets she wrote about Green and her 20-year-old child, a biological male who identifies as female and goes by the name "Jackie."

The police were investigating whether she had violated the Malicious Communications Act, which makes it a crime "to send messages that are indecent or grossly offensive, threatening, or contain information which is false or believed to be false, if the purpose for sending it is to cause distress or anxiety."

Farrow said Tuesday that she did not remember what her tweets said, but noted that she likely said "son" or used male pronouns. The only thing that the police told her was that she was being interviewed for "misgendering."

The Catholic journalist told The Christian Post in a Tuesday interview that she "may have said something about her taking her son abroad for surgery. Which is true. She did. But I guess she is baulking about him being called a son. But at what point did he become a daughter? Because surely at the point she took him to be castrated he was a boy."

Her tweets, which were from October 2018 and shared on the Mermaids website, said that Green was in violation of the Samaritan policy about how suicide is discussed in the media, and asserted that what she did do her male child  taking him overseas to have his penis inverted and his testicles surgically removed  was illegal, and that she had sterilized and mutilated him.

"Susie Green may feel that giving her son off-label illegal medication aged 11 and drastic surgery was the path of least harm in her circumstances but she shouldn't project and impose it on other vulnerable kids as best practice" another one of Farrow's tweets read.

"I think it's time everyone called out Susie Green and Mermaids' policy out for what it is. Child abuse," yet another read.

Green went on to argue Wednesday that "people misgender my daughter online, that wasnt uncommon. What was uncommon was that this was a journalist who had a public platform, who used that to send very malicious and nasty messages.

"They were allegations of serious misconduct and vile and spiteful personal attacks. The content was not about misgendering and it is unfortunate that so much of the media has fallen for the incorrect claim that they were."

She added: "In essence, the public discussion about this issue has been wrongly directed."

When asked by the BBC if she thought the alleged "hate crime" Farrow committed is an urgent life-or-death topic, Green said she didn't believe any hate should stand and that the harm done by communications online is "absolutely immense."

"Saying that Jackie before surgery is male and should be referred to as a boy is completely wrong and goes against the Equality Act 2010," Green asserted.

Green and Farrow appeared on ITV's "Good Morning Britain" to debate transgender policy as it relates to Girl Guides, the English equivalent of Girl Scouts, in September.

During the interview, Farrow argued the position that single-sex spaces such as changing rooms in children's schools and in other places of public accommodation should be maintained. She added that, among other things, females do not have penises.Trump Admin. Closes Palestinian Liberation Organization's DC Office, Israel 'Our Friend and Ally'

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The Trump administration is shutting down the Washington D.C. headquarters of the Palestinian Liberation Organization due to their refusal to takes steps toward peace with Israel.

In a Monday speech before the conservative legal group The Federalist Society, National Security Advisor John Bolton said they were closing the office as well as placing sanctions on the International Criminal Court.

"The United States will always stand with our friend and ally, Israel," he said, adding that the current administration "will not keep the office open when the Palestinians refuse to take steps to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel."

His remarks come as tensions escalate in the region and as Jews mark their new year, 5779. Rosh Hashanah began Sunday evening and will end Tuesday evening.

The move is being seen as a way to pressure the Palestinians to return to negotiations with the Jewish state.

"We have permitted the PLO office to conduct operations that support the objective of achieving a lasting, comprehensive peace between Israelis and the Palestinians since the expiration of a previous waiver in November 2017," said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, in a statement.

"However, the PLO has not taken steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel," she said, echoing Bolton.

Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian representative to Washington, said relations between the U.S. and the Palestinians are at historic lows, and that the action was all a part of Trump's efforts to pursue the "deal of the century." U.S. policy is effectively "implementing of Israel's grocery list," he said.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat also blasted the move.

"These people have decided to stand on the wrong side of history by protecting war criminals and destroying the two-state solution," he said of the Trump administration.

"I told them if you are worried about courts, you should stop aiding and abetting crimes."

Bolton also threatened to put sanctions against the International Criminal Court if it investigates the U.S. and Israel, saying the judicial body was "dead to us"

"While the Court welcomes the membership of the so-called 'State of Palestine,' it has threatened Israel  a liberal, democratic nation  with investigation into its actions to defend citizens from terrorist attacks in the West Bank and Gaza," Bolton said.

"We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and, we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans," he said.

Ever since the Trump administration's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and the subsequent relocation of the U.S. embassy there, the Palestinians have ceased regarding the U.S. as a partner for peace in the region.

Last month the State Department announced that United States was cutting more than $200 million in economic aid for Palestinians and was redirecting the funds to other projects.

That move happened "at the direction of President Trump," according to a State Department official, in order to ensure the money is spent "in accordance with U.S. national interests and [will] provide value to the U.S. taxpayer."Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin signs bill banning abortion based on sex, race or disability

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Aborting a fetus due to her race, gender or disability is now illegal in Kentucky.

In a move state lawyers have defended as a fight against eugenics, outspoken pro-life advocate and Kentuckys evangelical Christian Gov. Matt Bevin signed a bill, HB 5, into law Tuesday immediately banning abortion based on sex, race or disability.

The move comes just days after a federal judge, David J. Hale of the Western District of Kentucky, temporarily blocked another measure Bevin signed into law on Friday, that prohibits abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected which usually occurs around six weeks. That law was expected to take effect immediately. But late Friday, Hale ruled it was potentially unconstitutional and delayed enforcement for at least 14 days to prevent irreparable harm until he could hold a hearing, The New York Times said.

Less than 24 hours after HB 5 was passed last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit asking a judge to block it, the Courier Journal reported.

The ACLUs lawsuit argues that banning abortion based on sex, race or disability infringes on a woman's right to an abortion by imposing restrictions on her reasons for doing so.

Bevins general counsel M. Stephen Pitt, argued in a filing in U.S. District Court in Louisville on Tuesday that the law bans "eugenics-based abortions."

In Plaintiffs view, somewhere in the Fourteenth Amendments penumbra lies a protection for eugenics, he wrote. This is a perverse distortion of Roe v. Wade  and its progeny.

On Monday the ACLU had asked the court to order Bevin to notify the organization when he signed HB 5, saying that instituting laws that instantly affect critical patient care should not be a cat-and-mouse game. Pitt noted in his filing that the bill was signed into law by Bevin on Tuesday.

In a video message Friday, Bevin scolded his good friends at the ACLU for challenging HB 5, before it had been signed into law and suggested they needed a civics refresher from Schoolhouse Rock on how legislation works.

Yesterday our good friends at the ACLU, and I say good friends in the broadest sense of that word, have chosen to sue the Commonwealth of Kentucky over the passage of House Bill 5. And by passage I mean it moved through the legislature, the House and the Senate in overwhelming fashion, Democrat and Republican alike, and it makes good sense that it did, he said.

House Bill 5, simply says that in Kentucky we think its inappropriate to kill an unborn child simply because of its race, or of the childs gender or of a perceived disability. But too much to ask for the folks at the ACLU. They would pretend to speak for what is appropriate in America from a jurisprudence standpoint, from a civic standpoint. The people that are supposedly defending the civic rights of people in this country, nonetheless think its appropriate that you can kill a child based on its race, or kill a child based on its gender. The people of Kentucky again fortunately dont agree with that and so this law was passed through the legislature, Bevin added.

Bevin, who has made pro-life legislation a priority of his administration, recently decried laws in New York expanding abortion protections as well as a similar proposal in Virginia.

The effectiveness of our pro-life laws and of my administrations legal team was made evident in recent weeks when Planned Parenthood and other hard left, pro-abortion groups announced their intent to pool their ample economic and legal resources to fight against Kentucky babies. Those groups are bringing $90 million into our state, along with additional armies of liberal lawyers to try to tear down Kentucky laws protecting life, Bevin wrote in a Kentucky Today op-ed just over a week ago. As we ponder the heinous nature of the New York law and the bill that was shamelessly proposed in Virginia, Kentuckians must realize that pro-abortion radicals are even suing for the right to dismember a third trimester baby.

As Bevin was threatened with the ACLUs recent lawsuit on Wednesday he responded in a tweet: Bring it! Kentucky will always fight for life... Always!Here are 12 Things Every New Student Should Know as They Begin Seminary.

By Nate Elgin, Dallas Theological Seminary Graduate (ThM, 2018)

In August of 2010, my wife and I left our hometown in Virginia to move to Dallas, Texas, a place we had visited only oncea month prior, to find an apartmentso I could start my studies at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS). We left everything we had ever known to make this move. Now, I find myself on the other side of graduation having learned a great deal, both inside and outside the classroom. The whole experience has led me to reflect on twelve things I want every new student to know as they begin their seminary studies:

1. Souls Over Papers

I never once regretted putting an assignment off to care for my wife, my church, or my soul, for that matter. I had to remember that failing to love my wife disqualifies me from ministry just as much as preaching heresy. Make every effort to minister to family, friends, classmates, and the people in your church. If your heart hardens to the plight of others, as you acquire head knowledge, youre missing the point of a seminary education.

2. Get Involved in the Local Church

Seminary does a great job equipping students for ministry, but the local church prepares you. Theres a difference. For your own good, stay under the authority of a pastor/elder board/etc., as you learn to serve before you lead. The paradox of the kingdom of God is that the most significant leaders are the greatest servants. Serve the best you can. Gain knowledge in the classroom, but develop your spiritual gifts in the church.

3. Get Out of the Echo Chamber

There is tremendous value in hearing the perspectives of those who differ from you. Theres no growth in the echo chamber. If you surround yourself with people who think, believe, or share a similar background with you, you will only learn to love yourself more. You dont need to endorse a different view, but you should listen to it and respect the individual.

4. Ask the Professors to Coffee or Lunch

Take advantage of the facultys knowledge and their experience. Again, preparation for ministry is the goal. When I first started at DTS, I believed I only needed education and then Id be on my way. I was wrong. Seminary students need mentors, seasoned saints to share their life lessons and experiences. The faculty has far more to offer than academia. They will love you because they love Jesus, and they want to help students become effective ministers, not just smart ministers.

5. Remember Seminary is not Monolithic

No two seminary experiences are the same, yet theres always someone who can empathize with you. For as many prominent alumni the seminary has, there are just as many cautionary tales. Do not get discouraged by the struggles of another, nor should you bank on the successes of someone else. Follow the Lords leading and make the experiences your own.

6. Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

In my seventh year at DTS, I found myself contemplating ways out, exhausted from the length of the journey, but my friends got me through it. I had assumed everyone I knew from student orientation, had already graduated and now served in ministry. I felt alone. But, by Gods grace in year seven, new relationships formed and I experienced a resurgence in my heart because of it. Again, souls over papers.

7. Seek Out the Struggling Student

There are people on campus who are struggling. They could be international students who are in the country for the first time or students who are questioning whether or not they belong at seminary. Seek them out, serve them, love them, learn from them, and fight for them. Jesus always took the side of the struggling soul and so should you.

8. Theology with Open Hands

Learn to die on the right hills. Continuationism versus Cessationism. Complementarianism versus Egalitarianism. Reformed versus Arminian. Convenantalism versus Dispensationalism. Plenty of room exists in orthodoxy for all of these. Understand that, accept it, and love your brothers and sisters in Christ.

9. Ask the Dumb Questions

If you do not understand something when it feels like everyone else does, say something. If you have the temptation to stay quiet because you feel like youre the only one who understands, say something. Chances are someone else feels the same way. Staying quiet reinforces shame. Shame has no place among the people of God.

10. Be Known

If you are struggling in any waywith sin, with your course load, with homesickness, whatever it may beconfess to friends, your church community, and your professors. There is a grace in the people of God, and the classroom should be no different.

11. Suffering for Your Good

Suffering isnt necessarily the devil trying to keep you from graduating. It could be God-ordained suffering because he wants to wring something out of you that is not surrendered to him. God uses the brokenness of this world to sanctify his children, to teach us more about himself, and mature us. Without question, suffering prepared me more for ministry than anything I learned in the classroom. It may be the case for you as well.

12. Enjoy!

You have received a generous gift from the Lord. You will get bogged down, you will experience fatigue, you will have hard days and days of small things, but remember: you are studying the written, self-disclosed revelation of God. What a gift! You are there to know God in a more profound way so that you might worship and enjoy him all the more. Enjoy the journey! Consider it all joy.

The last eight years, my wife and I have served as covenant members of The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas, and for the next year, I plan to complete an internship there in the Institute Department. Im grateful that in this transition, I wont have to leave everything behind as I once did, and I wont have to find a new home. Instead Ill get to serve in a place thats already home. I hope to do so in a way that honors our great God and all that he taught me during my time at DTS, both inside and outside the classroom.

To learn more about studying at Dallas Theological Seminary, please fill out the request information form!How the Bible Came to Life Before My Eyes

by Meredith Andrews

Everyone I knew who had taken a trip to Israel told me it would change my life. They said being where Jesus walked and seeing the locations where He performed miracles, delivered sermons, laid down His life then took it up again and later ascended into heaven, would make Scripture come alive for me like I had never before experienced. And they were absolutely right. Because I knew this was a trip of a lifetime, I went into it with so much expectation. I was not disappointed.

Each day in Israel was significant, whether we were walking among the ruins of Capernaum, floating in the Dead Sea, touching a portion of Golgotha, or overlooking the Valley of Megiddo (Armageddon). I am sure I had a consistent look of shock and awe plastered on my face no matter where we went. So much wonder, so much of what Ive believed to be true coming to life before my eyes.

On day 2 of our Holy Land tour, we visited the ancient city of Capernaum. Located on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, this is the town where Jesus carried out the majority of His miracles during His three years of public ministry. From healing the paralytic who was lowered through the roof by his friends to healing the servant of the Roman Centurion who approached Jesus with astounding faith, Capernaum was central to the Gospels. One of my favorite parts about this historic city, however, was seeing the remains of a structure believed to be the house of Peters mother-in-law. Why is that such a big deal, you ask? Because it is said that was the house where Jesus resided during those three earth-shaking years. As I stared at what was left of it, I could imagine Jesus eating there, sleeping, conversing, laughing, praying. It was absolutely overwhelming.

Being on the Sea of Galilee during day 3 of our trip was quite possibly my favorite part of our time in Israel. We were a part of a very large group (around 700 people), and we needed seven boats to accommodate our rather ginormous crew. Once everyone was aboard our small fleet of Jesus vessels, we set off for the middle of the lake where the boats were then all tied together. Im sure it was quite a sight from shore. As one of the last boats was approaching, we were met with a familiar chorus blaring over their speakers and began to sing along, What a beautiful name it is, what a beautiful name it is, the name of Jesus Christ my King. In that moment I cannot even describe the worship that arose from the water, but it was from a group of people lifting one voice in complete adoration, wonder and surrender. I was weeping. I couldnt get away from the fact that we were floating on the very sea that Jesus had walked on, spoken to, and invested in His men, His disciples, time and time again. I was absolutely undone.

I could go on for hours and tell you story after story of how I encountered the presence of God in Israel in ways I never imagined. Each day there was something to discover, and although we were walking through ancient history, it stirred up our faith in new and tangible ways. You dont need to take my word for it. Instead, I encourage you to experience it for yourself. Get some of your favorite people together and embark on a journey to the Holy Land with Inspiration Cruises & Tours. Walk where Jesus walked. See what He saw. Let the Word of God come alive inside your heart like never before. When you go, expect the Lord to reveal Himself to you in new and breathtaking ways, because thats exactly what He wants to do. Go ahead and step out of the boat. You wont be disappointed.

Join Inspiration Cruises & Tours on an Exceptional Israel Tour!U.S. President Donald Trumps statement that Washington should recognize Israels sovereignty over the Golan Heights may destabilize the situation in the Middle East, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, expressing hope that it will remain just a call.

"Such calls may considerably destabilize the already strained situation in the Middle East In any case the idea as such by no means works for the tasks and goals of the Middle East settlement. Its the other way round," TASS cited the spokesman as saying.

Earlier, Trump tweeted that the US should recognize Israels full sovereignty over the Golan Heights.Azusa Pacific removes ban on same-sex romantic relationships a second time

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Correction Appended

Azusa Pacific University, a major California-based Christian school, has once again opted to remove a ban on same-sex romantic relationships.

The University changed their student guidelines on inappropriate sexual behavior last Thursday, removing the ban on homosexual relationships, according to a report by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune published Saturday.

Azusa Pacific University spokesperson Rachel White explained in comments emailed to The Christian Post on Tuesday that the changes were part of an overall update of the undergraduate student handbook.

The old handbook, produced decades ago, underwent a significant revision and redesign after input from student leaders, board, administration, faculty, and staff, explained White.

White said that the ban on same-sex relationships did not reflect our commitment to disciple our students and point them to Christ.

APU is an open enrollment campus and some students who choose to attend do not share our Christian faith perspective. We are committed to sharing the Gospel with all our students and we support all our students in making decisions that will enhance their spiritual formation, stated White.

The new handbook, which includes a section on sexual stewardship, affirms our mission to be Christ-centered, applies uniform standards to all students, states that APU is biblical and orthodox in our evangelical identity, and calls the university to develop disciples and scholars for Christ.

The university still defines marriage as being exclusively between one man and one woman, and also prohibits unmarried heterosexual couples living on campus from cohabitating.

Furthermore, explained White to CP, the Universitys rules regarding on-campus housing will not be effected by the change, as the school expects that all students will respect and adhere to our standards, including those related to sexuality.

APU promotes an evangelical worldview and affirms that sexual relationships are designed by God to be expressed solely within a marriage covenant between one man and one woman and that individuals remain celibate outside of that marriage covenant, added White.

Brave Commons, a pro-LGBT group that engages in advocacy on Christian college campuses, celebrated the Azusa handbook change in a statement released Friday.

While the school upholds their view of marriagebetween a man and womanthe ban removal offers equal treatment of LGBTQ+ students in relationships as their heterosexual peers, stated the group.

Brave Commons Co-Executive Director Erin Green, an integral piece of the conversation and movement at Azusa Pacific, finds hope in the LGBTQ+ students at APU who fueled the change, which offers no stigmatizing of queer people specifically. This is what we asked for all along.

Denny Burk, professor at Boyce College and president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, spoke with concern about the new handbook regulation, writing that Azusas student handbook fails to make a moral distinction between homosexual and heterosexual relationships.

Even when abstinent, they are not morally equivalent. A heterosexual relationship can and may have the covenant of marriage as its aim and goal, wrote Burk in a piece published Sunday.

A homosexual relationship can never have marriage as its aim and goal. That means that a homosexual relationship can never be holy or pleasing to God. By definition, it is sinful.

Azusa had previously attempted to remove its ban on same-sex romantic relationships last September, however they reversed course several days later.

In a statement released last year, the Universitys Board of Trustees explained that officials never got approval to remove the ban, adding that they were standing firm and will never "capitulate to outside pressures, be they legal, political, or social."

"We pledge to boldly uphold biblical values and not waver in our Christ-centered mission," the board added in their 2018 statement. "We will examine how we live up to these high ideals and enact measures that prevent us from swaying from that sure footing."

Correction, March 20, 2019.

A previous version of this article mentioned student housing for married students. APU does not have on-campus housing for married students.Film: Ray Comfort convinces pro-choice advocates to change mind on abortion

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Is abortion moral? Is current U.S. law too permissive? Are there circumstances that make terminating a pregnancy an ethical choice? These are just a few of the loaded questions at the heart of the ever-contentious abortion debate.

Theyre also topics that are creatively grappled within filmmaker Ray Comforts riveting new film 7 Reasons. The movie, which released on March 15 at 7ReasonsMovie.com, will challenge viewers to think deeper about the abortion debate, as Comfort asks a variety of men and women about their beliefs on abortion  and whether it really is truly a womans right to choose.

READ ALSO: 5 Real Life Stories of Abortion Survivors

I feel like its a womans right to choose, one interviewee responds. We have rights over our own body. Others are seen agreeing with this conclusion.

Those featured in 7 Reasons give a variety of justifications for why they believe abortion should be permissible. From the inconvenience of pregnancy to parental incompetence, the circumstances offered up were sweeping.

Some argued that fetuses simply arent babies  or that some women seeking abortions are justified in doing so, as they arent ready for the responsibility of being a parent.

People who dont have money cant pay for themselves, one person says, citing financial barriers.

Watch the 7 Reasons trailer:

But Comfort patiently questions each person and, before long, its easy to see the house of cards come tumbling down, with hearts and minds changing in the process.

Youd sacrifice willingly because Gods given you an instinct to love your offspring, Comfort told one woman, encouraging her to reject abortion as a moral option and turn to God. God can grant everlasting life as a free gift.

READ ALSO: 12 Heartwarming Family Movies About Adoption

As the conversations unfold, something fascinating happens in 7 Reasons: people start to realize the true gravity of their perspectives.

You can watch the film starting on March 15 at 7 Reasons.

This article was originally published on Pure Flix Insider. Visit Pure Flix for access to thousands of faith and family-friendly movies and TV shows. You can get a free, one-month trial here.

Billy Hallowell, author of "The Armageddon Code," has contributed to TheBlaze, the Washington Post, Human Events, the Daily Caller, Mediaite, and the Huffington Post, among other news sites. Through journalism, media, public speaking appearances, and the blogosphere, Hallowell has worked as a journalist and commentator for more than a decade.Religious 'nones' now as big as evangelicals in the US, new data shows

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The number of religious nones in the United States are now statistically equal than the number of evangelicals, according to a political scientist who analyzed data from the recently released 2018 General Social Survey.

The GSS, a biennial project run by NORC (National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago, was released this week and showed how Americas religious landscape continues to change.

Ryan Burge, a political science researcher at Eastern Illinois University, analyzed data from the survey. He used a Reltrad (religious tradition) classification code to compensate for the oversample of African Americans in earlier waves of data.

According to Burges data, 23.1 percent of those surveyed were people of no religion, while those who are evangelical  of any race, not just white  represented about 22.8 percent of the tally.

Despite a tiny resurgence in the 2018 data, white mainline protestants, which were once the largest U.S. religious demographic in the 1970s, were at just 10.8 percent of the tally, a far cry from 1975 when they were over 30 percent.

Catholic respondents fell slightly to 23 percent but continue to be one of the largest two religious demographics in the U.S.

The study comes as there has been a rise over the last decade-plus in the number of religiously unaffiliated individuals in the United States. According to Burges data, the religious nones comprised just 5 percent when the GSS was first conducted in 1972. Today, religious "nones" are just under a quarter of the GSS data.

The nones are not slowing down, Burge told The Christian Post in an email. Their share of the population is continuing to climb ~1 percent every two years and has done so for the past 15 years or so. If current trends keep up then they will be the largest group in the United States in the next five years, statistically.

While the share of nones continues to rise, the number of Catholics and Protestants have dwindled over the years. The two groups were once the two largest religious groups in the nation. In 1972, the two groups comprised over 25 percent of the GSS tally each.

Catholics, specifically, are down three percentage points in the last four years, according to Burges analysis.

As for evangelicals, their peak came in the early 1990s when the number of evangelicals topped 30 percent.

Black Protestants continue to make up less than 10 percent and have not risen above 10 percent since 1972.

In a tweet, Burge said that while he doesnt put much stock in one-year shifts, he stressed that the larger trends are instructive.

Last year, polling from ABC News and The Washington Post found that between 2003 and 2017, the percentage of adult Americans that profess no religion grew from 12 percent to 21 percent.

At the same time, the white evangelical portion of the population has shrunk from 21 percent to 13 percent.

Also, that poll found that 36 percent of Americans identified as members of Protestant faith (including evangelicals).

In 2003, the polling found that 50 percent identified as a member of Protestant faith. Meanwhile, the share of those who self-identify as Catholics (22 percent in 2017) held steady over those years.Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment

A couple of years ago, I had occasion to write about Bella Bond, a two-year-old girl who was discovered inside a trash bag on a Deer Island beach in Boston Harbor. How depraved we have become as a culture, I thought, not imagining it could actually get worse. Well, it turns out my imagination was shortsighted.

By way of quick review, Bellas mom, Rachel, had a criminal background, a long history of drug addiction and child abuse/neglect, and had lost custody of two previous children. The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) had apparently received multiple calls regarding Bella but failed to provide refuge.

Instead, she was left to live in an unsafe home where she was eventually killed, then stuffed inside a trash bag and dumped into the ocean.

Surely, this would lead to serious reform of DCF, right? Not so much. There was some talk, followed by meaningless changes, and here we are today, waiting for the next tragedy. And make no mistake, that tragedy will surely come.

Missing from the discussion, at the time, was the secret suffering that is ongoing, day after day after day. While it may be true that DCF-related deaths are few, the neglect and abuse children endure inside the deeply flawed foster care system is widespread and all but completely ignored by the media. Moreover, the dysfunction is of no real interest to the politicians responsible for the system, who have steadfastly refused to discuss the problems, let alone attempt to seriously to fix them.

So why was I surprised a few weeks back when I saw lawmakers in a nearby state actually clapping and cheering when a bill was signed that allowed the killing of babies right up until the day of birth? Or how about a few weeks later when a different set of politicians could not even agree on a bill that required medical care to be administered to any baby born alive after a failed abortion.

How did our nation fall into such darkness that so many people have such little regard for the well-being of the most innocent among us?

With that as background, I had occasion this week to watch a video in which several people testified before the Kentucky State Senate regarding an abortion bill. The testimony of two women stood out.

First, there was the lady who proudly spoke about her abortion, while advancing Planned Parenthood lies. It didnt have a heartbeat. It didnt have a face. It didnt have feelings. It was a clump of cells and tissue, said Nicole Stipp of Louisville.

Then there was the testimony of former abortion clinic worker Abby Johnson. While she testified forcefully at that hearing, her comments in a prior speech struck me the most. She had worked in a clinic for several years without being fully aware until one day she assisted in an ultrasound-guided abortion and could see directly on a monitor exactly what happens in the womb during a first-trimester abortion.

Can you see the arms and legs? Yes, she said. Can you see the fingers and toes? Yes, absolutely. You see that babys heart beating. You see the whole baby on that screen.

Johnson said there is one question almost all women ask prior to an abortion. Will my baby feel pain? She had answered a thousand times emphatically with a "no," exactly as Planned Parenthood had instructed her. She had no idea it was a lie.

Then came the day when the truth was revealed to Johnson on a TV screen when she witnessed undeniably that the baby most certainly did feel pain before it was literally torn apart and sucked out of the womb by a force much more powerful than a household vacuum.

(The abortion doctor) is going to take that suction probe and blindly poke it around until he thinks he has enough blood and tissue, explained Johnson. The small body parts would eventually be placed inside a bag and stored in a freezer.

Those bags would be picked up by a company that would later place the baby parts in an incinerator, explained Johnson. Thats if the abortion facility decides they dont want to just put them in their industrial size disposal and grind them up and put them into the waste water.

So there you have it. Welcome to the new America where about half of us proudly advocate for the slaughter of babies and tens of thousands of others neglect and abuse their children after they are born; a place where our politicians are complicit in this Holocaust, and people like you and me do not want to be bothered to do anything about it.

Johnsons story has been developed into a movie, Unplanned, scheduled for release March 28th. I saw the preview and it brought me to tears, as I suspect it would for anyone whose heart is not frozen cold as ice.

The movie is rated R because of its subject matter. That means a sixteen-year-old girl will not be allowed to see this movie without a parent present because the film depicts abortion, but that same girl could have an actual abortion without her parents even knowing. Let that sink in for a minute.

While the movie exposes the horror of abortion, I am told that it also offers hope to women who are pregnant, and for women who are grieving after an abortion, along with hope for abortion workers who are haunted by the violence that has taken place in their clinics. There are services and organizations available to help, a few of which are listed below.

And what about the rest of us, especially those who call themselves Christian? What will we do? When a nation that has been blessed by God becomes a society that does not care for its young, we should assume a reckoning is coming, not just for the perpetrators but also for those who stand idle in the midst of such evil.

Darkness cannot be prevalent apart from the absence of light. It is hard to imagine that our culture could have descended into such deep darkness if we who claim to be followers of Jesus were being faithful to our call to be the light of the world.

If there is to be any hope for the future of our nation, if we desire to escape the judgment we clearly deserve, we who call Christ our Lord had better get serious about living in sacrificial obedience to him. A good place for us to start would be Revelation 3:1-3.

Jim Ash is the founder and publisher of the Main Street Journal, a local newspaper in Marlborough. He and his wife have extensive experience with the foster care/adoption in Massachusetts.

Help for pregnant women:

https://optionline.org

www.care-net.org/what-is-a-pregnancy-center:

Support for post abortion trauma:

www.operationrescue.org/about-abortion/post-abortion-help/hopeafterabortion.com

To get involved in right to life issues:

www.nrlc.org/help

www.heartbeatinternational.org

This column originally appeared here:

http://msjnews.com/ash-let-those-with-blinders-see-p12090-102.htmWeekly briefing: Nones, LifeWay stores, Azusa Pacific

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We've compiled the top stories of the week. Here's what you need to know:

Nones on track to be largest faith group in US

The proportion of Americans with no religion has continued to rise and they now account for 23.1 percent of the U.S. population. Evangelicals, meanwhile, represent 22.9 percent, according to a political scientist who analyzed data from the recently released 2018 General Social Survey.

Mainline Protestants now only make up 10.8 percent of the total.

The nones are not slowing down  If current trends keep up then they will be the largest group in the United States in the next five years, statistically.  Ryan Burge, a political science researcher at Eastern Illinois University

Supreme Court wont hear case: Christian B&B owner must serve same-sex couples

Aloha Bed & Breakfast owner Phyllis Young faces a penalty for refusing to rent a room to a lesbian couple in 2007, after the Supreme Court denied to hear the case.

The denial allows a lower court ruling against the small business to stand.

All LifeWay stores closing

After initially announcing that it would be closing a few stores earlier this year, LifeWay Christian Resources has now decided to close all of its brick-and-mortar stores.

LifeWay, which sells Christian literature, gifts and other merchandise, said it is shifting to a digital strategy.

Azusa Pacific University removes ban on same-sex relationships again

Noting that the ban on same-sex relationships did not reflect the Christian schools commitment to disciple their students and point them to Christ, APU decided to lift it a second time.

Azusa had initially lifted the ban last year but reinstated it after its Board of Trustees said they never approved the move.

Two trustees resigned in December, citing a drift toward liberal ideology.

Online churches are helping local church growth

An extensive study by Pastor Jay Kranda, Vanderbloemen and Pushpay revealed that doing church online doesnt actually hurt local churches as some have feared. Online churches have actually helped in growing local churches, 59 percent of surveyed church leaders said.

Online churches have developed to be more than just live streaming. Pastors or volunteers try to engage viewers and get them plugged in to small groups or local churches.

Let the data speak for itself  Weve seen a trend emerge that indicates the online church brings tangible value to the growth of churches.  Jay Kranda, Saddleback Church

Read our feature Grandmother fighting to save 10-y-o grandson from puberty blockers, gender-transition speaks out

Check out our latest podcast: A deeper look at why many millennials think evangelism is wrong

Pray for

Victims of Fulani violence in Nigeria

Christians in the Democratic Republic of Congo who were attacked; 6 were killed

New releases

Albums:

Covered by Mack Brock (March 22)

Deeper Roots: Where the Bluegrass Grows by Steven Curtis Chapman (March 22)

Motions of Mercy by Luke + Anna Hellebronth (March 22)

Books:

The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace by Jared C. Wilson (March 12)

Not Afraid of the Antichrist by Michael Brown, Craig S. Keener (March 19)Christian journalist to be interrogated by police for 'misgendering' activist's transgender child

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A Catholic journalist in England is being told by police that she might have committed a criminal offense because she "misgendered" someone and will soon be interrogated under caution.

The authorities contacted Caroline Farrow, who writes for the U.K.-based Catholic Herald, after a September appearance on Good Morning Britain where she debated Susie Green, who heads the transgender advocacy group Mermaids.

During the interview Farrow argued the position that single-sex spaces in children's schools and in other places of public accommodation should be maintained and noted, among other things, that females do not have penises.

What prompted the police action, however, was that Farrow allegedly referred to Greens child, who is now called "Jackie," a biological male who underwent a surgical procedure in Thailand several years ago to remove his genitals, with incorrect pronouns on Twitter.

"I do not know what I am supposed to have done but the police told me that 'you appeared on 'Good Morning Britain' with Susie Green and made some tweets misgendering her daughter,'" Farrow said in an interview with The Christian Post Tuesday.

"I have to go and be interviewed under caution, a taped interview where I will be shown offending tweets which supposedly constitute the offence of Malicious Communications. If you look up the offence youll see that I am not in breech. I havent threatened or said anything that I know to be untrue or is indecent or grossly offensive."

Farrow could not recall precisely what she said that was supposedly so awful about Green to warrant police action.

"I think I may have said something about her taking her son abroad for surgery. Which is true. She did. But I guess she is baulking about him being called a son. But at what point did he become a daughter? Because surely at the point she took him to be castrated he was a boy?" she said.

Meanwhile, Farrow has been regularly harassed and threatened by transgender activists. One trans activist even doxxed her ex.

At Farrow's request, The Christian Post is not linking to one particular harasser's website, but she relayed to CP that he has written about doing sexually explicit and violent things to her, kicking her teeth in, holding peoples heads under water until they sustain brain damage, and published photos of sex toys he says she needs.

This person has also published photos of her children and their schools and made all kinds of accusations against her husband, a Roman Catholic priest, putting her whole family at risk.

"And the police do nothing," she commented.

"I have pointed out to the police that I am a Catholic journalist and commentator, and it is my religious belief that a person cannot change sex. That we are in the middle of a national conversation about what it means to be male and what it means to be female," she explained on Twitter Monday about what she told police.

If she does not go in for the interview she was informed she will be arrested, she said.

The Catholic journalist is "furious" and did not get much sleep last night.

Her story mirrors that of women's rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Minshull, a mother of four who was also interrogated by police over a year ago for remarking on Twitter about Green's child. The Mermaids leader was reportedly upset that Keen-Minshull used the word "castration" to describe the surgical procedure where Green's testicles were cut off and his penis inverted to construct a fake vagina, and reported her to authorities.

Keen-Minshull, who also goes by the name Posie Parker, commented on her Facebook page Monday that she was recently interviewed by police a second time for two comments she had made about Green.

"Apparently Susie [Green] wields unimaginable power over the police," she mused.

"As far as the transgender ideology stretches I believe it is one of complete submission. Those that even raise questions are silenced with threats and accusations of bigotry," Parker told CP in an interview last year weeks after her initial police interrogation.

"We all have the capacity to be offended and offensive. We have to decide whether we want to criminalize this offense," she added, noting that "in a world of billions I would hope the liberty of free speech is one we would extend to all, not just those we agree with."Muslim prisoner supported by Trump evangelical adviser Johnnie Moore released from prison

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An 82-year-old Muslim prisoner of conscience in Pakistan who was supported by Trump evangelical adviser Johnnie Moore has been freed after three years imprisonment for blasphemy.

Ahmadiyya Muslim Abdul Shakoor was released from prison Monday after a high court in Punjab reduced his eight-year sentence for the alleged crime of selling commentary on his Ahmadiyya religious beliefs.

As adherents to a minority sect of Islam that promotes peace and tolerance, Ahmadis face severe persecution in Pakistan, which is about 97 percent Sunni Muslim. Pakistan's constitution even declares Ahmadis to be non-Muslims and the countrys penal code prevents Ahmadis from claiming that they are Muslims.

Shakoor, the Indian-born manager of a bookshop and optician store in the Punjab province, was arrested on Dec. 5, 2015, after officials from the Punjab police and Pakistans Elite Force raided Shakoors bookshop. He was taken along with the stores assistant, Mazhar Abbas. He was accused of selling Ahmadiyya commentary on the Quran.

At Shakoors trial, officers who raided the bookstore were the only witnesses. Prosecutors alleged that a letter from the Ahmadiyya director of public affairs was sent to Shakoor days earlier telling him that selling Ahmadiyya literature had been banned.

According to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Ahmadiyya leaders have said that the prosecution fabricated the letter to support their argument in Shakoors case. Ahmadiyya leaders even noted that the ban on literature in question in the case didnt even go into effect until Jan. 20, 2016, after the trial had concluded.

Throughout, Shakoor maintained that he didnt distribute Ahmaddiya literature but admitted to possessing the literature. However, possession of Ahmadiyya literature is not a crime in Pakistan.

Last year, USCIRF Commissioner Johnnie Moore, an evangelical communications executive who has long advocated for persecuted believers overseas, adopted Shakoor as part of USCIRFs Religious Prisoners of Conscience Project.

The project was launched in 2017 to fulfill a congressional requirement mandated by the Frank Wolf International Religious Freedom Act of 2016 for USCIRF to list names of prisoners of conscience. Through the project, each USCIRF commissioner adopts a prisoner of conscience that they personally advocate for.

Abdul Shakoors release comes as welcome news to those of us who have been engaging with Pakistans government and civil society on issues related to religious freedom and peaceful coexistence between religious communities, Moore said in a statement. We hope and pray this once again becomes the trend in Pakistani society, and no longer the exception.

As Moore noted, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan declared last month at the World Government Summit in Dubai that he has a desire to reform Pakistan.

"He remembered a more pluralistic Pakistan of his youth, and he professed his desire to have a society that protected humanity, embraced the rule of law, and saw knowledge as a sacred duty, Moore stressed.

Recalling the golden age of Medina, he said that these values are not at enmity with a religious and mainly Islamic society. As I tweeted then, one of the best ways he can prove his reform agenda is real  taking the country back to the era he fondly describes is ... Promote Tolerance, Embrace Religious Freedom, and Guard Minorities.

Shakoors release comes just days after the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed condemned Pakistans treatment of Ahmadis.

Ahmadis have been subject to systematic persecution by means of State-sanctioned discrimination and other repressive measures, including the closing of their businesses, schools and places of worship and the imprisonment of those who violate the restrictive laws imposed on the community, Shaheed wrote in a report submitted earlier this month.

Pakistan is also notorious as being one of the worst nations in the world when it comes to the persecution of Christians.

According to Open Doors USAs 2019 World Watch List, Pakistan ranks as the fifth-worst nation in the world for Christian persecution.

Last month, an enraged Muslim mob reportedly attacked over 200 Christian families after four women were falsely accused of blasphemy.

Earlier this year, the Pakistan Supreme Court upheld its decision to acquit Christian mother Asia Bibi, who spent nearly a decade in prison and was sentenced to death after she was accused of blasphemy by Muslim co-workers.Christians and Muslims stand together to remember victims of New Zealand mosque shootings

Christians stood side by side with Muslims on Friday as New Zealand remembered the victims of the mosque shootings a week ago.

In Christchurch, a two-minute silence was held in honour of the 50 people killed and the dozens more wounded in attacks on two mosques by a lone gunman.

In the UK, the bishops of Chichester, Horsham and Lewes visited mosques in Crawley on Friday in an expression of support following the shootings.

The Bishop of Lewes, Richard Jackson, met with members of Langley Green Mosque while the Bishop of Horsham, Mark Sowerby, spent Friday at Noor Mosque.

The Bishop of Chichester, Dr Martin Warner, said his visit to Broadfield Mosque was an act of solidarity.

"I have come to this mosque in Crawley today to express, on behalf of the Christian Church in Sussex, our solidarity with you who are our Muslim brothers and sisters," he said.

"We shared in the international shock and revulsion at the news of the shootings at the Friday Prayers in Christchurch one week ago. This was a cowardly attack on vulnerable people. It was a crime against humanity."

He added his concerns over reports that five mosques had been vandalised in Birmingham in the wake of the attacks. The windows of the mosques were smashed during the early hours of Thursday morning.

Dr Warner said the incidents in Birmingham were "further evidence of a campaign that is evil in its origins, planning and consequences".

In a statement to the Muslim community, he said: "We, as Christians, believe that the attacks in Christchurch and in Birmingham demonstrate a sacrilegious spirit in the world today.

"Like you, we are also people committed to religious faith. And we recognise that we have much in common, sharing our veneration of Abraham and deep traditions that promote the virtues of truth, of peace and of justice.

"But we are driven to condemn the desecration of your sacred places and the violation of your freedom to live and pray as Muslims in this, or any country that claims to be a civilised, tolerant and just society.

"Hatred of this kind affects all of us, regardless of what our faith might be. As Muslim and Christian, we must find a way to break the destructive cycle of fear and hatred. This land faces many challenges to the flourishing of its people in all the richness of our diversity.

"Let us, as people of faith, be known as those who are the foundation of a society in which kindness and respect shape the quality of our life."Cyclone Idai disaster 'is getting worse', not better, warns CAFOD

Catholic aid agency CAFOD says it has been left shocked as the scale of the destruction caused by Cyclone Idai across southern Africa becomes more apparent.

It has partnered with the Disasters Emergency Committee to assist hundreds of thousands of people affected by the storm, which is believed to have killed at least 1,000 people in Mozambique alone.

Tens of thousands have been left homeless after the cyclone battered Beira city, in Mozambique's Sofala Province, where winds reached up to 140km/h and torrential rains submerged nearly 90 per cent of the city.

Although Mozambique is believed to be the worst affected country, huge devastation has been wrought across Zimbabwe and Malawi, where hundreds more have died.

CAFOD estimates that 2.6 million people across the two countries are in need of humanitarian aid to see them through the coming weeks.

In a Twitter update, the aid agency said things were "getting worse" for the countries affected.

"Despite the cyclone hitting over a week ago, we fear that the disaster is getting worse," it said.

CAFOD's Director, Christine Allen, said: "The more we see and hear of the destruction caused by Cyclone Idai, the more shocking is the devastating impact on the lives of children, women and men. Reports from the ground tell us of entire villages submerged and whole families missing.

"But there are still lives to be saved and communities who need our help. We cannot waste any time reaching those in urgent need.

"We've already seen how the Catholic community has responded, here in England and Wales and through our global church network. CAFOD has made an initial 100,000 pledge for Mozambique and 50,000 for Zimbabwe, but much more will be needed as the disaster unfolds.

"This money will help families who have lost everything to survive the coming days. Knowing they are not alone will give them hope."

Communities are also suffering after Idai wiped out crops and washed away homes, roads and bridges.

In addition to food shortages, the extensive flood waters have given rise to fears of water-borne diseases and sanitation issues.

Gabriel Bertani, CAFOD's Country Representative for Mozambique, said: "Powerful cyclones like Idai damage water supplies and sanitation facilities which increases the risk of water-borne diseases spreading.

"In the low-lying areas, flood waters have caused widespread damage to crops and livestock, leaving people with very limited food for their daily needs."

CAFOD is working with local Caritas emergency response experts to help provide shelter and distribute emergency food, including rice, beans, sugar and cooking oil, as well as hygiene kits.

Bishop Charles Kasonde of Solwezi, who also chairs the Association of Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa, has asked for prayers for all those involved in rescue operations and providing humanitarian assistance.

"I also pray that our partners and people of good will who have always journeyed with us in both good and bad times may rise up to the call," he said.

Christian aid agency Tearfund is also working with local partners to provide food, shelter and cooking utensils to people affected by Idai, and has released 53,000 for relief efforts across the three affected countries.

With the cyclone damaging crops that were ready for harvesting, Tearfund is planning to distribute seeds to mitigate the impact of the expected food shortages.

Tearfund's Country Director in Mozambique, Edgar Jone, explained: "This is a catastrophe. It's a huge setback for the work we are doing to support people to overcome poverty in Mozambique.

"Our priority now is to reach those people who have lost so much and support them to get back on their feet.

"Cyclone Idai has destroyed so much in an instance, and it will take years for people to recover what they have lost."

Earnest Maswera, Tearfund's Country Director in Zimbabwe, said it was the "worst possible time" for the cyclone to strike as crops had been just weeks away from harvesting.

"The loss of crops aggravates existing challenges we have been facing because even before the floods 5.3 million people had been experiencing food shortages and this will increase significantly," he said.

In addition to claiming dozens of lives, he said that the cyclone had caused "immeasurable" destruction to houses, farms and infrastructure in Zimbabwe, with the damage to roads and bridges making many areas inaccessible.

Tearfund is working with its partner, the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe, to bring clean water, sanitation solutions, and trauma counselling to those affected in Buhera district.

At least 300 households will receive food, blankets and utensils from the aid agency.

In Malawi, where at least 56 people have been killed, Tearfund's country director Vincent Moyo said flooding was a major issue.

He estimates that over 22,000 homes have been destroyed, displacing 110,000 people.

"Currently we need plastic tarpaulins for shelter, food and clean treated water that is safe to drink. We are also aiming to prevent water borne diseases that may arise as a result of the floods," he said.

To donate to Tearfund's Disaster Relief Fund, visit https://www.tearfund.org/give/when_disaster_strikes/

To donate to CAFOD's Cyclone Idai Appeal, visit https://cafod.org.uk/donations/Don't look to God for an answer to Brexit impasse, says Tony Blair

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested this week that Christians should make up their own minds about Brexit instead of looking to God for an answer.

Mr Blair, a Catholic, said in an appearance on BBC 2's Newsnight that it was not "sensible" to pray to God for an answer on the row over Britain's exit from the European Union.

"You can be as religious as you like but the thing about praying to God is he doesn't tell you what the level of minimum wage is," he said.

"I don't know what God's view of Brexit is and I don't think it's a sensible enquiry to have."

His comments came as churches were this week told to open their doors as places of prayer and contemplation for members of the public feeling uneasy about Brexit.

Church of England leaders are asking churches to hold informal cafe-style prayer meetings over the weekend of March 30, which should have marked the start of Britain's post-Brexit journey. That was before EU leaders agreed to push back the deadline by a few weeks to give Theresa May more time to get her deal passed in Parliament.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, said it was a "critical time" for the nation.

"As followers of Jesus Christ we are called to demonstrate that love for God and for each other, along with compassion, solidarity and care for the poorest, are our defining values," he said.

"These values have been the bedrock of our national life for many centuries. They are not simply our history: they are also our best hope for the future.

"For this reason, a century from now the Church will be remembered for how it responded at this crucial moment in the life of our nation and country. Will we be those who worked to defuse tension and hostility? Will we be those who called for civility and respect in how we speak about, and treat, each other?

"Will we be those who never stopped praying with urgency and hope for our country, our communities and our political leaders  and for a way forward that allows every person, family and community to flourish?

"This is an opportunity for the Church of England to join together in prayer for God's kingdom to come, and for the good of all in society. I hope that each of us will take hold of these resources to help us pray for our country at this critical time."NATOs actions close to Russias borders violate the principle of the indivisibility of security, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in the Grand and General Council (parliament) of San Marino.

"It is no secret that the situation on our common continent continues to be complicated. We see the ongoing policy aimed at stepping up NATOs military and political activities and bringing the alliances military infrastructure closer to Russias borders," TASS cited the Russian top diplomat as saying.

According to Lavrov, despite the fact that commitments not to bolster ones security at the expense of others were enshrined in OSCE and NATO-Russia Council documents approved by consensus at the top level, violations of the principle of the indivisibility of security are observed.Home Office to review Christian asylum seeker's rejection after outcry over letter quoting Bible

The Home Office has said it will review an Iranian Christian's request for asylum after a rejection letter quoting the Bible caused an uproar.

The Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Paul Butler, was among those to have condemned the Home Office after excerpts of the rejection letter went viral.

The excerpts were shared to Twitter by Nathan Stevens, who said he was working with the claimant on his asylum case.

The letter included Bible passages to challenge the asylum seeker's claim that he had converted because "in Islam there is violence and revenge" while in Christianity, he had found "peace, forgiveness and kindness".

Excerpt from a home office reasons for refusal letter for a convert to Christianity. Ive seen a lot over the years, but even I was genuinely shocked to read this unbelievably offensive diatribe being used to justify a refusal of asylum. pic.twitter.com/R1wA1HMNwH  Nathan Stevens (@nathestevens) March 19, 2019

The Bible verses quoted in the letter included Matthew 10:34 in which Jesus says, "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword."

The letter continued by citing Revelation ch 2: 22-23 and ch 9:3-6: "Similarly, the book of Revelation is filled with imagery of revenge, destruction, death and violence."

It added: "These examples are inconsistent with your claim that you converted to Christianity after discovering it is a 'peaceful' religion, as opposed to Islam which contains violence rage and revenge."

The contents of the rejection letter were so astonishing that many people commenting on the Twitter post initially questioned whether it was genuine.

Bishop Butler said it reflected "such a profound misunderstanding of the texts and practices of faith communities".

"To use extracts from the Book of Revelation to argue that Christianity is a violent religion is like arguing that a Government report on the impact of climate change is advocating drought and flooding," he said.

The Home Office later issued a statement saying it was working closely with faith partners to improve its handling of asylum claims involving religious conversion.

"This letter is not in accordance with our policy approach to claims based on religious persecution, including conversions to a particular faith," the statement read.

"We continue to work closely with key partners, including the APPG [All Party Parliamentary Group] on International Freedom of Religion and a range of faith groups, to improve our policy guidance and training provided to asylum decision-makers so that we approach claims involving religious conversion in the appropriate way."

After the backlash on social media, Mr Stevens said in a new update on Friday that the Home Office has now agreed to reconsider the asylum seeker's application.

"Important news on the Iranian Christian conversion case I have been working on: the Home Office have agreed to withdraw their refusal and to reconsider our client's asylum application, offering us a chance to submit further representations. A good start, but more change is needed," he said.

Important news on the Iranian Christian conversion case I have been working on: the Home Office have agreed to withdraw their refusal and to reconsider our clients asylum application, offering us a chance to submit further representations. A good start, but more change is needed  Nathan Stevens (@nathestevens) March 22, 2019

Bishop Paul Butler said the nature of the letter suggested the issue ran deeper than a lack of religious literacy at the Home Office.

"It is good that the Home Office has recognised that this decision is inconsistent with its policies and that its staff need better training, but the fact that these comments were made at all suggests that the problem goes deeper than a lack of religious literacy among individual civil servants and indicates that the management structures and ethos of the Home Office, when dealing with cases with a religious dimension, need serious overhaul," he said.

Archbishop Angaelos, Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London, raised similar concerns, saying that the letter was "based on, at best a complete and utter misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Christian Scripture, and at worst an intentional manipulation of the text to justify the rejection of this vulnerable individual".

"This particular incident needs thorough investigation because while it has been accepted by a spokesperson from the Home Office as 'not in accordance with our policy', it must be determined whether this is merely out of misunderstanding or a proactive attempt to adversely affect the application of someone whose life may very literally be at risk," he said.

"It must also be ascertained as to whether religious discrimination is at work, as there is no place for partiality within a Government that seeks to promote equality, and abides by Article 18 of the Declaration of Human Rights among other agreements."Royal College of Physicians adopts neutral position on assisted suicide despite widespread opposition among members

The Royal College of Physicians has abandoned its historic opposition to assisted suicide despite over half of its members saying they would refuse to participate in the practice if it was made legal.

The RCP said it had been moved to change its position after a survey of its own members found that there was no majority view on assisted suicide.

The poll triggered a backlash among doctors and academics who said it represented a "deliberate attempt" on the part of a minority in the RCP to drop opposition to assisted dying. Opponents claiming that the 60 per cent threshold to maintain the status quo was evidence of vote rigging mounted a legal challenge but this was rejected by the High Court on Thursday.

According to the findings of the poll, 43.4 per cent of respondents thought that the RCP should oppose any change in the law to legalise assisted dying, slightly down from the last survey in 2014 (44.4 per cent).

Doctors who wanted the RCP to support a change in the law rose from 24.6 per cent to 31.6 per cent. Only a quarter of the 6,885 respondents agreed that the RCP should adopt a neutral stance, down from 31 per cent in 2014.

The online survey, carried out between 5 February and 1 March, also found an increase in the number of doctors personally supporting a change in the law on assisted dying, from 32.3 per cent to 40.5 per cent, while those opposing the practice fell from 57.5 per cent to 49.1 per cent.

Despite this, most doctors said they would not be prepared to participate in helping someone to die. Only a quarter (24.6 per cent) said they would be prepared to participate in assisted dying if the law changed, a slight increase from 21.4 per cent in 2014. The percentage saying they were not prepared to participate in assisted dying stood at over half (55.1 per cent), a small decrease from 58.4 per cent five years ago.

RCP president Professor Andrew Goddard said that being neutral would allow the body to better reflect the diversity of opinions among members.

"It is clear that there is a range of views on assisted dying in medicine, just as there is in society. We have been open from the start of this process that adopting a neutral position will mean that we can reflect the differing opinions among our membership," he said.

"Neutral means the RCP neither supports nor opposes a change in the law and we won't be focusing on assisted dying in our work. Instead, we will continue championing high-quality palliative care services."

However, Christian advocacy group CARE accused the RCP of "spinning" the results of the survey to support a neutral position.

CARE's Communications Manager, James Mildred said: "It's all very well for the College to argue it is only trying to represent the views of members, but I'm afraid this is just sleight of hand.

"What makes the fact that this is nothing more than a sleight of hand embarrassingly explicit for the College, is that the result is pretty much the same as in 2014 and yet the outcome has been made to mean something completely different.

"Despite this spinning on the part of the leadership of the College, however, the truth is that the College is just as opposed to assisted suicide today as it was in 2015 when Parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject it.

"Anyone can see through that and the College has done itself no favours by trying to re-spin an unchanged reality  that doctors continue to oppose assisted suicide  through the introduction of bizarre rules imposed without consulting its members.

"Neutrality will be interpreted by many as a green light for assisted suicide laws, however, it is up to Parliament to make that call.

"We continue to believe that there is no way assisted suicide legislation could be made safe from abuse or negligence."

The Bishop of Carlisle, the Rt Rev James Newcome, welcomed Mr Goddard's assurances that the RCP would focus on high quality palliative care rather than assisted dying, which he said was "an emphasis that the Church of England shares and has always encouraged".

However, he said that the law should remain unchanged on assisted dying.

"We also recognise that fewer than one third of RCP members wanted the College to support a change in the current law prohibiting assisted suicide while fewer than a quarter said they would participate in assisted dying should the law change," he said.

"The Church of England's position remains to affirm the intrinsic value of every human life and express its support for the current law on assisted suicide as a means of contributing to a just and compassionate society in which vulnerable people are protected."There are 'limitations' to free speech, says London Mayor after street preacher's arrest

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has addressed the recent arrest and subsequent de-arrest of a street preacher outside Southgate tube station.

Video footage of Oluwole Ilesanmi being arrested by police for a "breach of the peace" went viral on social media and has now been viewed over 2 million times.

Police arrested Mr Ilesanmi after a member of the public complained that he had made 'Islamophobic' comments. No further action was taken and Mr Ilesanmi was subsequently de-arrested.

However, a complaint was later lodged against Enfield police over their handling of the situation after Mr Ilesanmi said he had been released by police some distance from Southgate and was only able to make his way back with the help of a member of the public who paid for his bus fare.

The incident has given rise to concerns about freedom of speech for Christians.

Addressing Mr Ilesanmi's arrest during Mayor's Question Time at the London Assembly on Thursday, Mr Khan said: "I expect the police to take this matter seriously."

Although Mr Khan said it would be inappropriate for him to comment on the specific case in light of the ongoing review by the borough's Professional Standards Unit, he defended the right of police to investigate allegations of criminal offence.

"It's always been clear that freedom of speech is critical and must be protected but also the police must be able to investigate when allegations are made of a criminal offence," he said.

"Police officers have to strike a difficult balance on this issue on a regular basis and in complex circumstances, such as policing protests and public order incidents."

A Christian preacher this afternoon was arrested at Southgate station London N14 for preaching about Jesus . @CConcern the police told him its because public had said he was being islamophobic . We have the full video and wondered when preaching was now illegal ? @Campaign4T pic.twitter.com/ZxC1DhlZCf  Eye On Antisemitism (@AntisemitismEye) February 23, 2019

He said the London Metropolitan Police appreciated the "sensitivities" involved and took "seriously" the duty to be balanced.

He added: "The Commissioner and I both believe that the law should be applied to all Londoners irrespective of their background and beliefs and without fear or favour. As part of this, our police officers are rightly expected to always uphold the highest standards."

Responding to his comments, assembly member and Christian, David Kurten, said free speech was an "important" right and that there were aspects of Mr Ilesanmi's arrest that he had found "disturbing", including the police taking away his Bible.

He said there was a fear, particularly among Christians, that freedom of speech was being "undermined".

Pressing the mayor on whether Christians could openly read from any part of the Bible without fear of arrest, Mr Khan refused to rule out the possibility of similar incidents happening again in the future.

"There's not an unlimited right to freedom of expression or free speech. There are limitations and there's a balance that needs to be done," said Mr Khan.

"But I'm quite clear in my own views - we should go as far as we can to uphold that really important principle [of free speech] and that includes discourse about religion."The small gestures and silent perfection of Giorgio Morandi

Lorenzo Balbi of the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna shows us around the artists former home in the city, and discusses how his focus on the process rather than the result makes him one of the most important figures in 20th-century art

Giorgio Morandi was born in the Italian city of Bologna in 1890  and rarely ever left. As a young man, he studied at Bolognas Academy of Fine Arts, an institution where later in life hed serve as a professor for 26 years. Morandi is best known today for his beautifully contemplative still-life paintings  works which prompted the art historian, Roberto Longhi, to describe him as arguably the greatest Italian painter of the 20th century.

Experiments with Cubism and Futurism Very early on in his career, Morandi experimented with the days prevailing styles, Cubism and Futurism. Then, for a few years from 1917 onwards, he embraced the Metaphysical Painting movement, led by his compatriots Giorgio di Chirico and Carlo Carra. Broadly speaking, this entailed dreamlike imagery with eerie lighting, unlikely perspective, and strange, symbolic objects. A fine example is Metaphysical Still Life, now part of the State Hermitage Museum collection in St Petersburg. These works of Metaphysical Painting are crucial to Morandis artistic development, says Renato Pennisi, Senior Specialist in Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christies Italy. However, they dont tend to appear on the market, as theyre pretty much all in museum collections.

Morandis signature style: moods of tranquility and privacy By 1920, there were signs of Morandi moving away from di Chirico, towards his own signature style. In that years still-life, Natura morta, he has abandoned dramatic shadows and bold, black outlines in favour of a gentler, diffuse light. The paintings bread, apple and empty glass hint at a frugal meal in keeping with the myth that has built up around Morandi. Hes remembered as a simple, reclusive figure who went by the nickname of Il Monaco (The Monk). A lifelong bachelor, he lived most of his adult life in a modest apartment with his three sisters, his bedroom doubling as a studio. As he himself put it, Im a painter of the kind of... composition that communicates a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all.

Morandis trademark pictures: bottles, vases and jugs on a table From the early 1920s until the early 1960s, Morandis paintings show remarkable consistency. He has by now hit upon his trademark pictures: still-life arrangements of bottles, vases and jugs on a table, painted in largely sombre colours (greys, browns and chalky whites, above all). Superficially, these may all look similar. However, his painting is full of subtle shifts and inflections, dependent on precisely which objects are placed where; in what combination; and under what sort of light. Such was Morandis attention to detail that his slight shift of a bottle has been compared to the chess move of a grand master.

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), Natura morta, painted in 1939. 12 x 22 in (32 x 56.5 cm). Sold for 2,546,500 on 16 October 2015 at Christies in London  DACS 2019

In Natura morta (above), painted in 1939, a rhythm is created from left to right by the undulating heights of the objects in a row, as well as by their rich alternations in colour (vermilion being the most striking). Morandis gift was to transform a group of quotidian vessels into a composition that looked timeless. 'It takes me weeks to make up my mind which group of bottles go well with a particular tablecloth, Morandi once said. And yet still I often go wrong with the spaces. Perhaps I work too fast.

Painstaking preparation and a sense of permanence This sometimes included stretching his own canvases and grinding his own pigment. A rare oval-shaped canvas  one of just two he ever made  actually holds the world auction record for the artist. Natura morta (1940) sold for $4.3 million in May 2018, as part of The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller.

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), Natura morta, painted in 1940. Oval: 14 x 19 in (37.5 x 50 cm). Sold for $4,332,500 on 8 May 2018 at Christies in New York  DACS 2019

In a bid to make his objects look opaque and, thereby, imbued with a sense of permanence, the artist was also fond of coating them in paint and allowing dust to accumulate on them.

The market for Morandis work Buoyant is the word Pennisi uses to describe the market for the artists work. Morandi has always been considered an icon of 20th-century art and always been a star among collectors in Europe and the United States. What has changed in the past few years, however, and what has given his market a boost, is the fact that Asian buyers are now seriously interested in him. Morandis practice of repetition, small gestures and silent perfection is one that has parallels in a number of Asian cultures. One thinks of customs such as calligraphy or tai chi, says the specialist. Hes an artist whose still lifes can be appreciated far beyond the time and place in which they were made  and current prices reflect that. The record price for a Morandi at auction has been broken twice in the past three and a half years, on both occasions at Christies  first by 1939s Natura morta (see above); then again last year (see below).

Landscape paintings Alongside still lifes, the one genre Morandi returned to on a regular basis throughout his career was landscape. These would either be of the view from his studio window in Bologna, or vistas of the mountain town of Grizzana, in the Apennines, where he spent summer months and also a large chunk of the Second World War.

Painted en plein air and emanating a sense of rural tranquillity at a time of international turmoil, Paesaggio (1943) dates from that wartime period. In the manner of one of his heroes, Paul Cezanne, Morandi managed to abstract the scenery slightly yet at the same time ensure it retains a certain monumentality.

Fame, acclaim and increasing abstraction Fame came Morandis way after the War. In 1948 he represented Italy at the Venice Biennale, and in 1957 he won the Grand Prize for painting at the Sao Paulo Biennale (defeating both Marc Chagall and Jackson Pollock in the process). Such success enabled him to give up his teaching job at the Academy and focus exclusively on his art work.

The early 1950s also saw a significant shift in his still lifes, which became increasingly abstract. In 1952s Natura morta, above, his loose grouping of objects seems almost to float in space. Morandi eliminates any hint of the transition between different pictorial planes, to such an extent that the relation between objects, table and what appears to be the wall behind is unclear. The more abstract paintings from the 1950s have become increasingly popular on the market, says Pennisi. Prices for them have caught up with what people used to consider the peak period for Morandi  the 1940s  when he was still making the regular, figurative compositions.

Symbols and the search for meaning in Morandis still-life paintings Morandi died in 1964, aged 73. His imagery would influence numerous artists after him, including the Minimalists, who admired his pared-back aesthetic and emphasis on order, geometry and spacing. In 2008, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

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news to your inbox every week SubscribeGiacomettis monument to a fallen hero of the French Resistance

When Alberto Giacometti was commissioned to create a monument to the executed French Resistance hero Gabriel Peri, it marked a transformative moment in the Swiss sculptors career which resulted in one of his first walking men

On a grey December day in 1941, the journalist Gabriel Peri, a leading figure in the French Resistance, was taken from a disused chapel at Fort Mont-Valerien outside Paris along with some 70 other hostages and shot dead by the German occupying forces. The shock that greeted the news in France was profound. The author Albert Camus (1913-1960) wrote, I recall the day when the waves of revolt within me reached their climax. It was a morning in Lyon, and I had just read in the newspaper of the execution of Gabriel Peri. It was an outrage that prompted the novelist to renounce his pacifism and join the French Resistance. He later used the subject of Peris death in the allegorical work The Stranger.

Peri addressing a rally of working men in 1937. Photo: Tallandier/Bridgeman images

Peri had left a farewell letter in which he declared, I should like my fellow countrymen to know that I am dying so that France may live In a few minutes I am going out to prepare a future that will be des lendemains qui chantent (the tomorrows that sing). The phrase made him a hero of the French Resistance and was used for propaganda purposes to encourage the US to join the war. Peri (1902-1941) was the brilliant foreign affairs correspondent on the Communist national newspaper LHumanite. In the build-up to the Second World War, the strident anti-fascist had written unequivocally about the threat of Hitlers ambitions and exhorted the French government to action. When Stalin announced his pact with Germany in 1939, Peri was horror-struck; he slumped at his desk in the offices of LHumanite unable to write or speak.

Gabriel Peri at his desk at the headquarters of the newspaper L Humanite during the war. Photo: Tallander/Bridgeman images

Inevitably, the French Communist party fell into disarray and was forced underground with the German invasion of 1940. Peri was captured on 18 May 1941, following a wave of arrests ordered by General Otto Edwin von Stulpnagel (1878-1948), a strategy designed to rip the heart out of the Communist resistance. While in captivity, Peri was pressurised to denounce the party but emphatically refused, despite his earlier rejection of Stalin. After his execution Peris great friend, Louis Aragon, the poet and co-founder of the Surrealist group, commemorated the journalist in the poem La Legende de Gabriel Peri. The poem talks very evocatively about where Peri is buried and the pain emerging from his tomb, explains Christies specialist Valerie Didier Hess.

At the end of the war, the provisional government commissioned the sculptor Alberto Giacometti to create a full-scale monument to Peri to be placed in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare (now known as Place Gabriel-Peri). According to Hess, the site was emblematic because it is a symbol of modernity and industrialisation. The station was painted many times by the Impressionists because, she says, It represented modern France. Giacometti proposed a sinewy figure striding towards a grave, an early prototype of his sombre walking man sculptures  like Aragon and Camus, Giacometti was interested in existentialist thought and the crisis of identity wrought by two World Wars.

Peri died a martyr, but Giacometti shows that his soul still lives and remains an example for France to follow  Valerie Didier Hess

For Giacometti, 1946 was a pivotal year, says Hess. It was when he began making these incredibly slender figures which later became his signature. In an interview with the art critic David Sylvester in 1964, Giacometti responded to a question about these emaciated forms saying, I fought against it, I tried to make them broad. The more I wanted to make them broad, the narrower they became. But I dont know what the real explanation is. Today, these post-war sculptures are highly coveted: in 2015, Lhomme au doigt, conceived in 1947, sold at Christies for $141,285,000. Project pour un monument a la memoire de Gabriel Peri (piedestal par Paul Nelson), which measures 45.5 cm in height, has attracted much attention because of its date. So many of Giacomettis plasters were lost or destroyed in the 1940s, explains Hess, so this is one of the earliest known representations of the walking man we have today.

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news to your inbox every week SubscribeI once had a job writing columns from my couch in Colorado.

I rarely had to go to my office in New York - although I sometimes did, to at least say hi in person and expense some flights, hotels and meals.

I never had to sit through meetings. My editors were people I dealt with through emails and occasional phone calls. My job was remote and virtual.

These were the most efficient years of my career.

Today, I get dressed, drive to the newsroom, sit through several meetings and play office - because, well, thats the way weve always done it. But in this edition of Texas Inc., we offer two features that explore another way of doing things.

WordPress co-founder and Houstonian Matt Mullenweg says hell never put his companys name on a building, as thoroughly as that might pamper his ego, because he runs what he calls a distributed company, with more than 850 people around the world.

Why spend millions or even billions on a headquarters that can only draw from one geographic area when you could have the best and the brightest engaged from just about everywhere?

Mullenweg told our technology editor Dwight Silverman that instead of holding and maintaining an enormous amount of real estate, his company spends more of its operating budget on travel.

With modern communications technology, and an increasingly global economy for most businesses, a big corporate headquarters is just plain silly to Mullenweg.

And do you know what else is silly? Going to meetings.

Nothing gets done in meetings that cant get done in a fraction of the time by people online using efficient collaboration tools. But bosses hold meetings to hold court or to lord it over their minions. And the few minions who actually like meetings use them to suck up, or to demonstrate how smart they are.

As for me, I like meetings for cracking jokes. Its their highest value for anyone who is basically comic or a prankster at heart.

Also in todays Texas Inc., our brainy columnist, Chris Tomlinson, points out that meetings are where organizational democracy can take place. I like that idea, but I dont know of any business that could be considered a democracy. Some are more collaborative than others, but for most, its top-down management, baby.

The more people attend meetings, the more they feel fatigued at the end of the day. Goal-oriented people hate meetings the most because they think meetings distract from getting things done, Tomlinson writes.

Tomlinson, by the way, doesnt often go to meetings, and he is highly goal-oriented and productive. But his column doesnt propose eliminating all meetings - just that bad ones. It also offers some insights on how to conduct good ones.

I could ramble on with my own thoughts on how companies could be better reorganized using modern communications technology. I mean, its nearly 2020 already. But Ive got to get up from my cubicle bank and go to another meeting.

Please enjoy Texas Inc. Were glad youre reading.Houston-based Silver Eagle Distributors, the nation's largest independent distributor of Anheuser-Busch beverages, has sold its Houston-area assets to Redwood Capital Investments, the company announced Friday.

Its Houston territory includes Fort Bend County, Montgomery County and a significant portion of Harris County. Silver Eagle Distributors will keep its 13-county territory in the San Antonio area.

More beer trends: Houston breweries looking beyond beer and beards

"Redwood is the ideal group to acquire the Houston-area territory," John L. Nau III, chairman and chief executive of Silver Eagle Distributors, said in a news release. "They are committed to excellence and future growth and as a current member of the Anheuser-Busch wholesaler family have a clear understanding of the business."

TEXAS, INC: Get Texas business news updates delivered to your inbox

Nau will continue as president and chief executive of Silver Eagle Distributors  San Antonio. Bob Boblitt, Silver Eagle's president, and John Johnson, its executive vice president for sales and marketing, will continue in leadership roles with the new company in the Houston region.

According to last year's Chronicle 100 survey of top private companies, Silver Eagle Distributors had 1,534 total employees, 1,080 of which were located in Houston. Its had $1.1 billion in revenue in 2017.

The Redwood Capital acquisition will include the corporate offices and warehouse in Houston as well as warehouse operations in Conroe, Cypress, Rosenberg and Pasadena. The company will continue to operate as Silver Eagle Distributors.

In addition to Anheuser-Busch, Silver Eagle Distributors is responsible for sales, marketing and distribution of a wide variety of beverages that include domestic and import brands, microbrews and craft beers, craft spirits and several non-alcohol beverages and waters.

How Silver Eagle Distributors moved into San Antonio: Houston beer vendor to snap up San Antonio counterpart

Redwood became a member of the Anheuser-Busch wholesaler family in 2017 when it invested in Lakeshore Beverage located in Chicago.

"Redwood Capital Investments is a unique investment firm that acquires privately owned companies and is committed to maintaining and promoting the legacy of the previous business owners," Nau said in the news release. "I think this dynamic new company will take beverage distribution in Texas to a whole new level."

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.Pep rally or gala dinner?

With University of Houston's crimson-clad Spirit of Houston Marching Band drum line firmly in place outside the Astorian on Thursday night, "Celebration: A College of the Arts for the City of the Arts" attendees received a spirited, collegiate welcome to the inaugural fete.

Organizers insisted that the fundraiser was more of a "friendsraiser," albeit one that garnered nearly $200,000 toward student scholarships to offset tuition and fees, program support for the Blaffer Art Museum and UH art supplies.

Though to the University's point, some 286 alumni and art donors rallied behind the first-ever event for one history-making reason: Kathrine G. McGovern.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Spring's style statement is the understated beige

McGovern, a proud Cougar grad, donated a $20 million gift to complete UH's $1 billion "Here We Go" Campaign. As a result, the Kathrine G. McGovern College of Arts was established in her honor. It's a doubly significant milestone as she becomes both the first alum and first woman to receive the distinction.

Light from the evening's awe-inspiring sunset poured through the industrial-style venue's lofty windows as dinner-goers toasted McGovern's feat.

Dean Andrew Davis acknowledged the program's distinguished alumni, Carolyn Houston Boone, Michael Ray Charles and David Ashley White before patrons dug into the menu's salad trio, chicken breast with orzo pilaf and (what else?) red velvet cake.

Chancellor Renu Khator professed her own love of all things red from the podium. "I always said that if I was ever president of a university, their colors would have to be red, or else I'd change it. So I got really lucky."

She spoke at length on the University's growth, future plans and the importance of art education.

"Art is not about making a living, it's about making life richer," Khator said.

UH School of Theatre and Dance student performers Muhammad Khaerisman, Christian Klepac

Andres Roa, Scott Searles and Sarah West illustrated her point. They were accompanied by pianist Stephen Jones, saxophonist Trenton Whitehead and bassist Grace Brown. Leslie Sisk lent vocals to a rendition of Barbra Streisand's "Putting it Together."

Last, though certainly not least, McGovern delivered rare remarks. "I cannot think of a better investment in a greater institution."

LIFESTYLE ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Houston Ballet's 'Premieres' shocks with quiet awe

Afterwards, she was presented with a special memento: a portrait of her beloved parakeet, Mac, hand-painted by art student Elizabeth Bomba-Bloom onto an ostrich egg donated by the Houston Zoo.

Members of the Spirit of Houston Marching Band closed the show while another student passed out hot pink issues of Open Donut, UH's art 'zine.

All-in-all, another win for the home team.

PREVIEW: Get experts picks for concerts, kids stuff, fine arts, movies and more delivered to your inbox weekly.Georgia's National Food Agency has seized more than one tonne of meat from different companies in Tbilisi, as they possessed either expired, harmful or unchecked meat.

The agency says that meat seized from Companies Dadu and Ina was a health hazard, while LTD Nikora possessed more than 240 kg of expired meat.

The companies have been fined and the meat will be destroyed by the employees of the Food Safety Service, Agenda.ge reported.A roughly seven-mile stretch of the Houston Ship Channel has been closed due to contaminants spilling out of the Intercontinental Terminals Co. in Deer Park.

The Ship Channel closure starts at Tucker Bayou, where ITC is located, and goes out toward Galveston Bay. The Lynchburg Ferry is located roughly in the middle of this closed portion, according to the U.S. Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Services.

There is no way around the closed portion, meaning ships at the most inland part of the ship channel, known as the Turning Basin, will remain there until it reopens. Ships destined for the Turning Basin and other more inland destinations will likewise be halted.

The latest on ITC: Wall surrounding tank farm at charred Deer Park plant breaches

There were 54 vessels in transit when the order was given to close the ship channel. Around 2:15 p.m., there were 41 vessels in transit outside the affected area. The 13 vessels not moving would be a fair estimate of ships immediately affected, according to the Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Services.

The Coast Guard did not know how long the Ship Channel would be closed.

According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the dike surrounding the ITC chemical storage tanks damaged by this week's fire had been breached. Booms had been put in place, and there's action being taken to contain runoff from the breach with additional booms.

ITC's contractor, at the direction of TCEQ, and the Coast Guard are skimming and pumping contaminated runoff into storage containers. The Port Houston Fire Department is also assisting with response.Plano's Denbury Resources and Houston shale driller Penn Virginia Corp. said they're mutually agreeing to terminate their merger in which Denbury would acquire the smaller firm in April.

The deal was first announced in early November amid a wave of Texas shale consolidation deals right as oil prices were plunging at the end of 2018.

Denbury had planned to acquire Penn Virginia in a deal worth $1.7 billion, including debt. Denbury would have taken over Penn Virginia's position focused on South Texas' Eagle Ford shale, where it has roughly 84,000 acres.

"After careful consideration, the Penn Virginia board of directors decided that it is in the best interests of the company and our shareholders to mutually agree to terminate our merger agreement with Denbury," said John Brooks, president and chief executive officer of Penn Virginia.

"We remain focused on developing our assets and maximizing value for our shareholders as a standalone company," he added.

Both companies have seen their shares in fall in recent months. Denbury, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, now has a market cap of $860 million, while Penn Virginia, traded on the Nasdaq, sits just below at about $800 million.

RELATED: The shale deals just keep coming

Penn Virginia employed almost 100 people at the beginning of this year.

Last summer, Brooks said the company was seeking "a range of strategic alternatives," including a possible sale. Penn Virginia had filed for bankruptcy in May 2016, about three months after crude prices hit their low of about $26 a barrel during the recent oil bust.

During its bankruptcy, Penn Virginia moved its headquarters from Virginia to Houston.

The company emerged from bankruptcy in September 2016, though it said in its second-quarter 2018 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that as of Aug. 3, there were still claims against the company related to the bankruptcy.



Oil fell the most in three weeks as disappointing economic data sowed new fears of slowing global growth.

West Texas Intermediate futures in New York dropped 1.8 percent Friday, paring the week's gain to less than 1 percent. Weaker than expected manufacturing data from Germany and France cast fresh doubts on Europe's economic outlook, dragging equities down. The U.S. treasury yield curve for 3-month and 10-year yields spent inverted Friday morning for the first time since the financial crisis in 2007, a move widely seen as a reliable harbinger of recession in the U.S.

"The oil markets right now are really trading step-in-step with the global markets as a whole," said Mark Watkins, who helps oversee $151 billion at U.S. Bank Wealth Management.

PREVIOUSLY: Oil slips below $60 as stronger dollar caps supply-driven rally

Oil has gained 30 percent this year, and a two week rally saw prices climb above $60 a barrel in New York on Wednesday for the first time in 2019. Prices have been supported by OPEC and its allies reaffirming their commitment to supply cutbacks and ongoing disruptions in Venezuela and Iran have also squeezed supplies. But the concerns over slowing global growth and the ongoing U.S.-China trade dispute have capped rallies.

FUEL FIX: Get energy, oil, and gas news updates delivered each weekday

"The French and German PMIs were both just abysmal," said Bob Yawger, director of the futures division at Mizuho Securities USA in New York. "We were trading at $60 until the Eurozone data started coming out so it's definitely a perception on demand and has nothing to do with supply-side economics this morning."

WTI for May delivery lost 94 cents to settle at $59.04 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent for May settlement fell 83 cents to settle at $67.03 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange.

The S&P 500 index was down 1.8 percent as of 3:45 p.m. in New York, on pace for its worst single-day since January 3.

AMLO: Mexicos new president takes nationalist tone on energy

The S&P 500 index was down 1.5 percent, on pace for its worst single-day since January 3.

Surprise Drop

Until Friday, oil's prices had been supported by bullish news on the supply side.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration showed crude stockpiles dropped by the most since July last week, defying analysts' forecasts for a 1.75 million-barrel increase. However, they are still near the five-year average for this time of the year, suggesting growing shale output still risks undermining OPEC and its partners' efforts to cap production.

Saudi Arabian Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih said OPEC+ remains committed to curbing output when the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee met on Monday. Still, Russia and Iraq, the coalition's other major suppliers, suggested the group should monitor the market until May or June before making a decision on extending the cuts through the year as developments in Venezuela and Iran may influence supply.

--With assistance from Heesu Lee and Grant Smith.

2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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.Dozens of experienced securities lawyers and prosecutors usually apply for the prestigious and influential job of regional director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissions Fort Worth office when it comes available, which is not that often.

The SEC regional director operates as the regions top corporate cop, policing hundreds of publicly traded businesses - including three of the 10 largest in the U.S. - and more than 1,000 financial brokers, dealers, investment officers and advisors with more than $2 trillion of assets under management.

The mission of the position is heroic: put financial fraudsters out of business, protect everyday investors from scams and shams and hold corporate America accountable.

Needless to say, the job of SEC regional director is considered the single most important federal regulatory position to most Texas businesses and has been one of the most sought after jobs in the federal government. Until now.

The number of people who applied for the Fort Worth-based job since Shamoil Shipchandler departed the office seven weeks ago can be counted on one hand, according to current and former SEC officials.

The reason, they say, is simple: the SECs enforcement budget has been slashed, staffing in te Fort Worth office has been dramatically reduced and the ability to investigate and bring high-profile, complex cases against corporations and financial institutions involved in illegal and fraudulent conduct has been significantly weakened.

And there is a strong belief in the legal community that the Trump administration will do nothing to improve the situation for the next two years.

This is one of the most important positions regarding business in Texas, but who wants the pressure of running an office with so much responsibility that is down 30 percent of its enforcement lawyers? says Toby Galloway, a shareholder at Texas-based law firm Winstead and former chief trial counsel at the SEC.

During the past two and a half years, nearly 20 senior level leaders with significant experience in securities enforcement have left the SECs Fort Worth office for jobs in the private sector. Because of budget cuts, Shipchandler was not allowed to replace any of those officials.

The regional directors job is an extraordinary opportunity, but the next leader definitely faces some pretty significant challenges - the biggest being reduced resources, Shipchandler, now a partner at Jones Day, told The Texas Lawbook in an interview last month.

The resource issue has to be addressed and fixed, he said. There is a lot of money coming into the region and into Texas. Bad people who want to do bad things are going to follow the money and the SEC must have the resources to deal with it.

The SEC regional director oversees a team of about 140 lawyers, paralegals, accountants and examiners that are supposed to regulate and prosecute wrongdoing at the 815 publicly traded businesses - including 65 Fortune 500 companies - operating in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas, including Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, AT&T, American and Southwest airlines and Walmart.

Steve Korotash, a partner at Morgan Lewis and former assistant director of enforcement at the SEC, says that the position has always been viewed as one of the premier legal jobs in the country, but he says experienced attorneys who would normally seek the post are not because this is a difficult time for the Fort Worth office.

The enforcement staff is operating at half of its normal staffing level, Korotash says. All the political pressures are still there, but the resources to do the job are not.

The Texas Lawbook has identified four Texas lawyers - all from Dallas and all white men - reportedly being considered by SEC leaders for the regional directors job, including current associate regional director Marshall Gandy, current assistant director David Reece, HD Vest Financial Services associate general counsel Eric Chartan and Brad Foster, who is a partner at Hunton Andrews Kurth in Dallas who specializes in securities litigation.

Jones Day partner David Woodcock, the SECs regional director before Shipchandler, says he is surprised that so few lawyers are seeking the position and he says there may still be a sleeper candidate that has applied that no one knows about.

Nearly two-dozen lawyers sought the job in 2011, but SEC leaders surprised everyone when it gave the job to Woodcock, who was previously a securities litigator at Vinson & Elkins in Austin.

No one knew I had even applied for the position, Woodcock says.

Amy Osteen, general counsel of Dallas-based Rug Doctor, says the next regional director needs to be someone who isnt afraid to take risks.

That might mean taking on cases that are difficult to win, says Osteen, who was a finalist for the regional directors position in 2015. Or, deciding not to bring a tough case even when public opinion would demand otherwise. Bottom line, any person filling the regional director role needs to have the strength of character to do the right thing even when its hard.

Korotash says it is important that the next regional director in Fort Worth be someone who knows how to prioritize [and knows] how to quickly understand the various strengths of individual staff members.

Most importantly, the office needs a leader, not a manager, someone who will roll up his sleeves and work, someone who will lead by example, someone who will be focused on the welfare of the staff and not on self-promotion, he says. There are current staff members who possess those attributes. Frankly, to go outside the office at this time would likely be a mistake. With all of the headwinds the office is facing, the learning curve is too steep for someone unfamiliar with the agency.

For a longer version of this article, please visit TexasLawbook.net.CAM Integrated Solutions, a provider of engineering, procurement and construction management solutions to onshore oil and gas upstream, midstream and transmission markets, has leased 59,220 square feet at 17000 Katy Freeway for its headquarters. Justin Leighton, Branon Pesnell and Lonna Dorman of Transwestern Commercial Services represented the tenant. Eric Anderson and Parker Burkett, also of Transwestern Commercial Services, represented the landlord, an affiliate of InSite Realty Partners. Built in 2007, the 175,000-square-foot building is in the Park Ten Office Park in the Energy Corridor, is 34 percent leased. The three-story building was previously occupied by Mustang Engineering.

American Landmark has acquired Haven at Lakes of 610 Apartments, a 282-unit apartment complex at 8900 Lakes at 610 Drive south of the Texas Medical Center from a joint venture of Guefen Development and Rainier Cos. American Landmark plans to invest $1.45 million in the property, which will be renamed Aspire at 610. Upcoming improvements include faux-wood plank flooring, USB plugs, smart locks, a dog-washing station, fire pits, package locker system, clubhouse and landscaping. Built in 2018, the four-story complex has a clubhouse, pool with sundeck, and business center. Tampa-based American Landmark owns seven properties in the Houston area.After 100 years of serving the community across the greater Houston area, Houston Methodist is celebrating the entire system of hospitals throughout the course of 2019, beginning with the Willowbrook location.

On March 28, Houston Methodist invites the community to celebrate a century of service at Houston Methodist Willowbrook with the debut of the Houston Methodist Mobile History Wall, an interactive digital display highlighting milestones throughout the history of the organization.

Keith Barber, CEO of the Houston Methodist Willowbrook, and Marc Boom, Houston Methodist president and CEO, will tell the story of the hospital at the event. Barber said the debut of the Mobile History Wall at the Willowbrook event will be a fun experience for attendees. The wall includes 6,000 pages of documents and photos about the history of Houston Methodist.

It is an interactive digital display commemorating the 100-year history of Houston Methodist and the people who shaped it, including facts about Houston Methodist Willowbrook Hospital and campus shots, he said. It's very interactive. You can go and touch it. If you're interested in a certain or event or that type of thing, you can go and touch it and it will take you there and you can actually ... move your body in front of it and interact with it

Barber said some of the events highlighted were milestones not only for the hospital network but for Houston and the nation. He said the first multi-organ transplant in Houston was completed at Houston Methodist as well as the first kidney transplant in Texas.

Our motto is to be unparalleled and to continue to lead medicine, especially as we move into our second century, to be unparalleled with patient safety, quality, service and innovation, he said.

Barber said he is proud of not only the growth of the entire hospital system, but the Willowbrook location as well.

From 2000, we've gone from 68 beds to 350 beds by the time we end 2019, he said. What I continue to see from where I sit, it's about continuing to advance through recruiting the most talented physicians and the most talented employees so that we can continue to grow each of those service lines. We grow first through quality and then what happens is the volume comes after that.

Houston Methodist is also celebrating its centennial with the Rendezvous of the Century Gala on Thursday, Nov. 14 at Minute Maid Park. The family of President George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush will serve as honorary chairs at the event.

One thing that's very, very important to us is our employee engagement and celebrating with our own people and then obviously going out in the community and celebrating with the community as well, Barber said.

chevall.pryce@chron.comResidents of Jersey Village will have a new destination to spend time with friends and family, participate in local government and interact with their community as sections of Village Center, a mixed-use development, begin to come online over the next 36 months.

Were in the process of design right now and finalizing all of the master planning. Were looking to have a groundbreaking some time mid to late summer, said Saul Valentin, founding principal of Collaborate Architects.

On March 18, Jersey Village City Council approved an economic development agreement between the city of Jersey Village and developer Collaborate for the completion of the Village Center, which will sit on 43-acres of land south of U.S. 290 on Jones Road. According to the Chapter 380 Economic Development Agreement document draft in the March 18 meeting packet, Collaborate anticipates the project may be a total capital investment of about $145 million.

Village Center will include a new city hall, open spaces for gathering, retail, an amphitheater, restaurants, multi-family residential housing and a hotel said Austin Bleess, city manager for Jersey Village.

The Village Center project has been in the works since 2010, Bleess said.

NEW STATION: Cypress Creek Fire Dept. asks voters for 1-cent sales tax increase

Before the city could move forward with development, he said a tax increment reinvestment zone needed to be established. A TIRZ finances improvements meant to boost property values within its boundaries. Portions of the incremental increase in future ad valorem property tax revenue are given to the TIRZ to pay for improvement projects.

The city of Jersey Village established TIRZ No. 2 in 2017 and approved the Final Financing Plan and Project Plan for TIRZ No. 2 on in February 2018.

The TIRZ as proposed will allow the City and other taxing entities to partner with each other for public improvements each may have planned for the area, states the TIRZ No. 2 plan document. The City believes that a TIRZ is the best mechanism by which to partner with the private sector developers to plan, fund, and construct the needed improvements over the long-range time horizon such an ambitious undertaking might require.

Bleess anticipates the Village Center development to be completely open by May 2022. He said portions of the project will begin opening over the next 36 months.

About a year ago we started conversations with Collaborate and discussions have been ongoing since then, Bleess said. Its been really fun to work with them. From day one it was obvious that they shared the vision that we had.

Saul Valentin, founding principal of Collaborate, said the focus of the development is community engagement and development for both Jersey Village residents and nearby northwest Houston community members. City hall will be a large portion of the development and will anchor the project, he said.

100 YEARS AND COUNTING: Houston Methodist celebrates a century of service

U.S. 290 does not have a development like that, Valentin said. Its fairly close to the city but far enough that people still need and want the same services. We started working with Jersey Village about a year ago and they really wanted us to partner. They didnt just want somebody to just come and put retail in there.

In addition to social, office and retail spaces, Valentin said the city and Collaborate envisioned Village Center with collaborative educational spaces to encourage community growth.

Tenants will be announced soon, he said.

Were looking to announce the educational partners that we are working within the next two or three months, Valentin said. Theres a lot of momentum that we want to maintain this year alone, never mind next year.

With Jersey Village being close to a major highway and many northwest Houston residents currently traveling into the city for work, Bleess said the office space in the Village Center will be a boon for the community at large.

PREPARING FOR GROWTH: Metro's chairwoman discusses $7.5B public transit plan

Youve got people that live in Jersey Village or further out on (U.S.) 290 and that cuts their commute dramatically, Bleess said. Theres businesses that the developer is working with that are looking for new office space and Jersey Village is at the heart of the population growth of northwest Harris County.

The city council voted in favor of the project unanimously and Mayor Justin Ray praised the board and Collaborate for the decision. Bleess said hes heard positive feedback from citizens of Jersey Village.

Theyre very excited to see another revenue growth for the community, possibility for jobs and that kind of thing to come, Bleess said. Theres been a lot of people on social media that are just very excited about the opportunity that this brings for them from a retail and eating out and events perspective. The flip side is how thats going to benefit the community as a whole.

chevall.pryce@chron.comA traffic stop turned into an animal cruelty investigation March 11 after an officer found two small dogs left behind after a vehicle pulled out of a car wash at 5211 FM 2351.

After stopping the vehicle for expired registration in the 100 block of Melody Lane, the officer released the driver, but not before noting animal hair and the odor of dirty dogs throughout the vehicle, police said.

The officer returned to the car wash and discovered a small white dog with matted hair and a smaller blonde-haired dog, according to the report. Friendswood Animal Control picked up both dogs.

Theft

A domestic worker is suspected of stealing jewelry from her employer in the 2900 block of Red Maple Court, according to a March 4 police report.

Two backpacks containing school books, homework, clothing and AirPods were stolen from the front porch of a residence March 3 in the 2200 block of Stillhouse Hollow Lane, according to a March 4 police report.

Police filed a stolen vehicle report March 5 in the 4300 block of Lucian Lane. The victim reportedly loaned a blue 2006 Chrysler Town & Country van to a contractor Jan. 6. The next day, the owner learned the vehicle had been involved in an accident, but when she attempted to contact the contractor, she was unsuccessful, police said. She also was unable to locate the vehicle in police impound, according to the report. A warrant is pending for the contractor.

A UPS package was stolen from a home March 4 in the 16400 block of Oxnard Lane, according to a March 7 police report.

A cell phone was stolen Nov. 2, 2018, at Friendswood High School, 702 Greenbriar Drive, according to a March 7 police report. Electronics recycler ecoATM contacted the victim Feb. 22 and reported her cell phone had been sold at one of its kiosks in California, police said. EcoATMs security features include a photo and ID scan, according to its website.

A package theft was reported March 8 in the 1900 block of Lavaca Street, police said. The victim had ordered an iPhone on eBay, but the package arrived ripped, damaged and empty, according to the report.

Fraud

A Friendswood woman received an insufficient funds alert from her bank and discovered two unauthorized ATM withdrawals were made March 5, according to a March 6 police report. She believes her credit card was skimmed at a Pasadena gas station, police said.

A Friendswood woman reported 57 fraudulent transactions between Jan. 18 and Feb. 13 on her credit card, according to a March 6 police statement.

A Friendswood man called his bank after receiving a text alert to verify a purchase and discovered several fraudulent attempts to charge his credit card, according to a March 7 police report. The purchases were declined, and the victim believes a family member may have stolen his credit card information, police said.

A Friendswood woman received a call from someone posing as an attorney for her friends granddaughter and seeking $8,000, according to a March 8 police report. The caller allegedly claimed the granddaughter had hit an undercover officer in a car accident and needed the money to get out of jail. A second voice on the line claimed to be the granddaughter, police said. When the woman said she could only afford $4,000, the caller told her to FedEx the cash overnight to an address in Cary, North Carolina, according to the report. The woman complied but called police 10 hours after the package was delivered, police said. The delivery location reportedly was a vacant home.

Criminal mischief

Police filed a criminal mischief report March 8 after a vehicle allegedly drove over a curb and left deep ruts in grass at Friendswood Junior High School, 1000 Manison Parkway. A fire investigator received information about the suspect during an arson investigation in mid-February, police said.

Narcotics

Police charged a Sweeny woman, 27, with possession of a controlled substance after a traffic stop for expired registration March 5 in the 2000 block of West Parkwood Avenue. The officer found marijuana joints and two pens that contained THC oil during a vehicle search, police said.

A Houston man, 31, was charged with possession of a controlled substance after officers found him locked inside a bathroom stall at Whataburger, 214 E. Parkwood Ave., police said. He reportedly was conscious but refused to come out. Once he unlocked the stall, Friendswood EMS evaluated him and police took him into custody for public intoxication, according to the report. He allegedly was found in possession of a vaporizer and THC oil.

Police charged a Webster woman, 26, with possession of a controlled substance after a traffic stop for a license plate violation March 8 in the 500 block of East Parkwood Avenue. The officer found cocaine residue, Ecstasy, a vape cartridge containing THC and marijuana during a vehicle search, police said.

A 50-year-old League City man was charged with possession of a controlled substance after he reportedly passed a Friendswood officer and sped down Grissom Road, police said. The officer followed and checked the vehicles registration, which was expired, before conducting a traffic stop in the 3300 block of Cedar Bluff Drive, according to the report. The driver allegedly told the officer he had taken four Xanax. While Friendswood EMS checked on the driver, the officer searched the vehicle and found cocaine and crack cocaine, police said.

Police charged a 25-year-old League City man with possession of drug paraphernalia after a traffic stop for expired registration March 8 in the 3000 block of West Bay Area Boulevard. His drivers license was suspended and he had outstanding warrants in Angleton and Lake Jackson, according to the report. The officer found a bag of marijuana during a vehicle search, police said.

A League City man, 35, was charged with marijuana possession after a traffic stop for speeding March 9 in the 600 block of South Friendswood Drive, police said. He reportedly told the officer he had a little more than an ounce of marijuana in the vehicle, and the officer found a clear jar containing marijuana during a vehicle search, according to the report. Bond was set at $1,000.

Driving while intoxicated

A Friendswood man, 35, was charged with DWI after he reportedly exited a parking lot March 5 in the 200 block of East Parkwood Avenue at a high rate of speed, police said. He allegedly did not pause to check for oncoming traffic and then straddled two lanes before reaching a speed of 59 mph. An officer stopped the vehicle in the 3700 block of FM 528, according to the report. The driver failed a field sobriety test and refused a breath or blood test, police said.

Police charged a Dayton man, 23, with DWI after a traffic stop for speeding March 9 in the 1500 block of FM 528. He failed a field sobriety test and agreed to a breath test, police said. The officer reportedly observed open containers inside the vehicle. Two of three passengers called an Uber to take them home, while the third, a 29-year-old Bay City man, was taken into custody for public intoxication, according to the report.

Police charged a Houston man, 40, with DWI after a witness reported a reckless driver March 10 in the 100 block of East Edgewood Drive. An officer stopped the vehicle in the 500 block of FM 2351, and the driver refused a field sobriety test and a breath test, police said. He reportedly was combative during execution of the blood search warrant and threatened to burn down one of the officers homes. Bond was set at $500,000.

Public intoxication

A Pasadena man, 41, was charged with public intoxication after a witness reported his behavior March 10 at a car wash in the 5100 block of FM 2351, police said. An officer arrived to find the suspect standing next to his truck; the left front tire was blown, and the rim bent, according to the report.

Tobacco

Five Friendswood High School students will face a judge in municipal court for the charge of possession, purchase, consumption or receipt of cigarettes, e-cigarettes or tobacco products by a minor, police said. School officials reportedly confiscated vaping devices from the students and turned the materials over to school resource officers. Some cases were a result of see something, say something tips; other students were caught vaping in restrooms by an administrator, police said.

Traffic

Police charged a Houston man, 41, with driving while license invalid March 9 in the 3000 block of FM 528.

Harassment

Police took a Seabrook man, 59, into custody on a warrant after a suspicious person was reported March 4 in the 800 block of Buckingham Drive. The victim in a stalking case reportedly observed the man, her alleged stalker, driving past her residence multiple times in his black BMW. She also had received text messages from him, according to the report. An officer conducted a stop after observing the man drive past the victims home, police said, and a vehicle inventory reportedly yielded two unmarked bottles of pills. An emergency protective order was requested and bond set at $10,000.U.S. Congressman Dan Crenshaw shocked many residents when he said the City of Houston has not yet submitted a permit application to the U.S Army Corps of Engineers for the dredging of the notorious Kingwood mouth bar near the San Jacinto River.

If approved, the application would allow the city to receive federal funding to use toward the $40 million dredging project.

Houston officials said they still must prove the mouth bar  a buildup of 500,000 cubic yards of sediment in Kingwood that could exacerbate flooding  was the result of Harvey before submitting.

The mouth bar dredging is in addition to a $70 million dredging project currently underway in the San Jacinto River.

"We talked quite a bit about the data that we had because what you have to do is show that it's actually Harvey related," Houston Chief Resilience Officer Steve Costello said during Houston's Capital Improvement Projects Community Meeting at the Kingwood Community Center on Thursday.

Costello said the City of Houston is taking core samples and basing it on the color of the material to determine what came from Harvey.

"What we're going to do is we're going to submit the field data supporting the Harvey material to FEMA," Costello said. "We anticipate that being done by (Friday) or sometime (before March 29). Then we're going to submit a permit for the disposal site."

A lengthy process

However, Crenshaw said the Houston officials need to submit the application as soon as possible so the project could be completed while the dredging equipment is already in the area.

It would save money and expedite the project, he said.

"We're working closely with the City of Houston on this, and Costello in particular, and they assured us that they will have that application in hopefully this week, but we've heard that last week and the week before that," Crenshaw said.

Houston City Councilman Dave Martin said he has been meeting with Governor Greg Abbott along with the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA since October 2018 about the removal of the mouth bars.

"Our point in going back to the governor on Oct. 11 with a team of folks was to plead to the governor and the Texas Department of Emergency Management that while we have the equipment in the water why can't we use some additional dollars that (Houston) Mayor (Sylvester) Turner helped us with along with the resources that the State of Texas and Governor Abbott and continue this dredging project and take it from the West Lake Houston Bridge into the lake where the mouth bars are," Martin said in a statement in November.

Martin also mentioned in the statement that the dredging of the mouth bar cannot begin until the $70 million emergency dredging of the river is complete. Emergency dredging is scheduled for completion by April.

Saving $17 million

Kaaren Cambio, field representative with Crenshaw's office and San Jacinto River Authority board member, said they invited the corps of engineers to their office in January because they were working with the City of Houston to help expedite the permit application process.

Cambio said the cost rises approximately $17 million to nearly $60 million if the equipment that's already in the San Jacinto River has to demobilize and re-mobilize. Cambio said the City of Houston needs to turn in their permit application before April because it will take four months to get the permit.

"The permit process from the corps of engineers has two hard-stop 30-day wait periods in that process. So a permit can't be done unless in four months because it has to go out for public comment," Cambio said.

Cambio said the City of Houston also has to file for a request for disposal permit application with the Army Corps of Engineers to dispose the sediment from the mouth bar on a private property on the other side of the San Jacinto River.

Houston has made an agreement with area resident Berry Madden for the sediment to be disposed on one of his properties that is near the river.

"Under the Stafford Act, you can only remove the amount of material that came from that specific disaster," Cambio said. "So (Houston) had to do core drillings, they're still doing that, they're almost done, but they didn't have to wait until those core drillings were done to file for this permit."

'Frustrating' delays

Cambio said Crenshaw's office and the Army Corps of Engineers has been trying to get the City of Houston to expedite their permit application since April 2018.

"We met with governor about two Mondays ago. We went to Austin and the first thing he said is 'Kaaren, how can you not get them to file their permit' and that's what's really frustrating because literally they can file a permit before their permit based upon a broad set of terms. The (City of Houston) chose to do it their way and they keep saying 'two weeks, two weeks, two weeks.'"

kaila.contreras@chron.comFox 26 Houston will soon have a new face behind the news desk.

Denise Middleton, a former evening anchor and reporter at KTHV in Little Rock, Arkansas, has joined the local TV station, according to a release on Friday.

abc13's Tom Koch: 20 things you don't know about me

Beginning April 8, Middleton will take over the weekend anchor chair. She will also do reporting for various newscasts, the release said.

Middleton is a Bayou City native and a graduate of the University of Houston, where she earned a Bachelors of Arts degree in broadcast journalism.

"It's always been my dream to work in my hometown, alongside some of the anchors and reporters who inspired me to go into this field," Middleton said in the release.

Chita Craft: 20 things you don't know about me

Middleton's resume also includes stints at KSLA in Shreveport, Louisiana and KHAS in Hastings, Nebraska.

"Denise is a multi-talented journalist and a wonderful storyteller who truly connects to the people she is reporting on," station vice president and news director Susan Schiller said in the release.

"We are thrilled to give Denise the opportunity to come home and serve the community she loves."

Marcy de Luna is a digital reporter specializing in social media, the famous, and food. You can follow her on Twitter @MarcydeLuna and Facebook @MarcydeLuna. Read her stories on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com. | Marcy.deLuna@chron.com | Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text messageIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked U.S. President Donald Trump after he said it was time to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

"President Trump has just made history. I called him. I thanked him on behalf of the people of Israel. He did it again!" Netanyahu told reporters. "The message that President Trump has given the world is that America stands by Israel," the Guardian cited him as saying.

"At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump!" Netanyahu also tweeted.Medicare faces numerous threats in 2019. Its time for lawmakers and healthcare advocates to attack these challenges head-on.

One threat stems from the Trump administration, which has suggested weakening the so-called protected classes provision in Medicare Part D.

Medicares Part D drug benefit has enabled seniors to purchase subsidized prescription coverage from private insurers. Part D regulations require every plan to cover all medications in six protected classes of therapies, including anticonvulsants, antidepressants, antineoplastics, antipsychotics, antiretrovirals, and immunosuppressants. This protection ensures that older adults who battle cancer, HIV/AIDS, depression, and other serious diseases have a full range of treatment options.

The administrations proposal would allow Medicare Part D plans to stop covering some of the most popular and needed medications in these classes. Key medical and patient advocacy groups have indicated that the proposal should be withdrawn.

Another threat lurking for beneficiaries relates to the importation of prescription drugs. Some politicians argue certain drugs can be obtained cheaper if imported from other countries, assuming that price is the only factor that should motivate consumers.

However, consumers should also be concerned with the safety of imported drugs. Is the drug developed in a safe manner? Is it counterfeit? In other words, could it be a threat to the health of a person who uses the imported drug?

It is essential that the most stringent safety requirements be developed before there is any discussion of importation. All drugs that might be imported must pass this rigorous safety test.

In the highly-charged atmosphere around drug prices, importation will be a front and center issue. Different bills permitting everything from unlimited importation to very limited importation will be presented in this session of Congress. Sens. Chuck Grassley and Amy Klobuchar already introduced one importation bill, the Safe and Affordable Drugs from Canada Act of 2019. However, the rallying cry from advocates must be safety first.

Another concern relates to Medicare Part Ds Low-Income Subsidy (LIS) program, which enables enrollees to obtain heavily discounted prescriptions. Some influential government advisors have proposed raising these enrollees co-pays for certain necessary prescriptions. The program is a lifeline for low-income, older adults needing prescription drugs. All efforts to squeeze this vulnerable group of older Americans must be resisted.

Further, we need to do a better job of raising awareness about the LIS program to those older Americans from minority communities who are underutilizing this important benefit.

Medicare has been an unqualified success. Politicians, from the president to representatives in Congress, have pledged to protect Medicare. Advocates should pressure them to fulfill that pledge.

Bob Blancato is executive director of the National Association of Nutrition and Aging Services Programs.courtesy of the Montgomery County Jail

A Conroe man is in custody after he allegedly confessed to his family that he fatally stabbed his girlfriend in the presence of their three-year-old and their newborn.

Lirio Maldonado Jr., 23, is being charged with murdering 20-year-old Cassandra Benitez. A woman identifying herself as Maldonados sister called authorities Wednesday morning and said he killed Benitez. Police found Benitez dead at the Reserve at Forest Ridge apartments at 3030 North Frazier, according to a Conroe Police Department press release.The fact that Waddy Thompson had been a private citizen for two weeks did not keep him from asking Santa Anna for one more favor of on March 23, 1844.

Texans naively presumed their neighbors in New Mexico would jump at the chance to join the Lone Star Republic. So, in the summer of 1841, President Mirabeau Lamar sent more than 300 soldiers, merchants and miscellaneous adventurers to deliver an engraved invitation and to stake Texas claim to the lucrative Santa Fe Trail trade.

But the Mexican army was waiting for the trespassers. Tricked into surrendering by a snake in their own grass, the so-called Pioneers were disarmed, shackled and force-marched hundreds of miles into the interior of Mexico.

The capture of the Santa Fe Expedition caused an outraged uproar not only in Texas but throughout the United States as well. Newspapers, state legislatures and public rallies put maximum pressure on the federal government to take swift and effective action.

Secretary of State Daniel Webster instructed his minister to tell the Mexicans in no uncertain terms that Washington expected the immediate release of every American and humane treatment of the Texans. When the request was ignored, President John Tyler appointed an ex-congressman as a special envoy to intercede on the prisoners behalf.

Waddy Thompson, Jr. of South Carolina was the best man for the job. During his three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Whig had tirelessly championed the Texas cause. He overcame foot-dragging by President Andrew Jackson and the opposition of New England fanatics, led by former White House occupant John Quincy Adams, to obtain diplomatic recognition for the new nation 11 months after the Battle of San Jacinto.

Thompson was hardly surprised by his chilly reception in Mexico City. Relations between the two countries had been strained since Texas independence, and over the years he had said a lot of harsh things about his hosts.

But the unwelcome foreigner warmed Santa Anna and his cabinet right up by speaking to them in Spanish at their first meeting. He had gone to the trouble of learning the language, something unheard of for a U.S. diplomat in those days.

Thompson made such a good impression on Santa Anna that the dictator agreed to face-to-face talks about the Santa Fe prisoners. The two must have hit it off because in a matter of weeks every American was homeward bound. Freedom for those captives with Texas addresses took much longer, but in time they too were released.

In September 1842, Mexican troops struck San Antonio for the second time in six months. They massacred a small force commanded by Nicholas Dawson and seized three dozen civilians as human trophies before scurrying back across the border.

Upward of 500 Texans gave chase, but the raiders beat them to the Rio Grande. Most turned back, but the rest kept going and fought a Christmas Day battle with Mexican regulars in the border town of Mier. Running low on food, water and ammunition, 176 capitulated in the mistaken belief they would be treated as prisoners-of-war.

Their captors went back on their word -- if, in fact, it was ever given -- and orders from on high were issued for their execution as bandits. As soon as Waddy Thompson learned of the imminent mass murder, he hurried to the office of the foreign minister.

The official, running the show in Santa Annas absence, refused to hear him out. They are not American citizens, and you have no right to interpose on their behalf.

They are human beings and prisoners-of-war! Thompson retorted. It is the right and duty of all nations to see that Mexico does not violate the principles and usages of civilized warfare.

But the foreign minister would not budge. Then, sir, shoot them as soon as you choose, said Thompson rising to his feet. But let me tell you that if you do you will at once involve a much more powerful enemy than Texas.

His parting words changed history and saved lives. The death decree was amended to spare nine out of every ten Texans. The condemned were selected by lot with the unlucky drawing infamous black beans.

Thompson spent his last 14 months in Mexico City lobbying for better conditions for the Mier prisoners and negotiating for their eventual release. Two weeks after submitting his resignation, he paid a final call on Santa Anna.

After exchanging pleasantries, Thompson asked The Napoleon of the West what he planned to do with the 36 Texans kidnapped in San Antonio a year and a half earlier. Do you intend to keep them always?

The persuasive southerner gradually wore down Santa Anna, until he finally asked for the names of the prisoners the visitor wanted freed.

All of them, Thompson answered. How can I distinguish between men, all strangers to me personally, whose cases are in all respects the same, and why should you?

A few days later, Waddy Thompson left Mexico with 36 very happy and very grateful Texans.

Texas Entertainers: Lone Stars in Profile, Bartees brand-new book, now ready for immediate shipment! Get your copy by mailing a check for $26.30 to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.Metro continues preparing for the growth of the greater Houston area, which the entity anticipates will increase in population by 50 percent in 20 years.

To meet the growth in Houston expected by 2040, Metro created a large-scale improvement plan called MetroNext. Now, the public transit provider is educating voters about a potential $3.5 billion bond election in the fall that would provide funds for the project. According to Carrin Patman, chair of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the bond would not affect the property tax rate.

Patman delivered an update on the current state of MetroNext and the need for public transit during the Cy-Fair Houston Chamber of Commerce luncheon on March 19.

She said that the passage of a bond election would help fund the project, which includes the expansion of several transit systems and measures to reduce road congestion during peak hours.

Patman explained that the $7.5 billion plan would be financed in part by the $3.5 billion in bonding authority, issued over time, in addition matching federal funds and $500 million funded locally.

$3.5 billion front the federal government in a match, so we leverage those federal dollars for local opportunity, and half a billion in local funds, she said.

Citing a study from Texas A&M Transportation Institute, Patman said Houston is home to 11 of the 25 most congested roadways in Texas. Metros plans to reduce congestion include bus rapid transit, automated transit and bus platooning  all of which would be implemented with the MetroNext plan.

Patman said that bus rapid transit, or BRT, is about half the cost of rail, but yields comparable service.

The buses are nicer, they have platforms like a rail line, they have a dedicated corridor and they are kind of the way of the future, we think, for many corridors, Patman said. They are less expensive than rail and a lot of times theyll have beautiful landscaping.

Community connectors  smaller bus routes for small areas  could be implemented in the Cypress and northwest Houston areas, Patman said. The connectors could bring citizens to and from large gathering points, such as a grocery store or a mall.

We have them now at Acres Home up north and in Missouri City down to the southwest, Patman said. Were going to add some of those to our plan. Or, we have quick line services. For example, in Belaire they take folks to the medical center for jobs on an expedited basis.

Platooning buses would function like a light rail, connecting buses to each other electronically and having them ride in a dedicated lane while moving at the same speed as a light rail, Patman said.

Because of the safety technology and the fact that they will have dedicated lanes, thats part of our new plan too, Patman said. They can just speed, like a commuter rail, down the corridors and almost provide the same service, if not the very same service, for less of a cost.

Houstonians can expect to begin seeing autonomous transit vehicles in the near future, Patman said, beginning with a test run at Texas Southern University.

This autonomous vehicle is going to go up and down the pedestrian corridor at Texas Southern University and transport people, Patman said. If it works well, then were going to then start transporting people to the purple line  In order to use transit, just like with a park and ride and the same is true for the bus service  you have to get to it and you have to get from it to where youre going.

Voters may be deciding on the bond in November and Patman encouraged people in the audience to give their input on, and approval to fund, the next 20 years of Metro projects.

Were going out to the voters, including you all, this fall to ask for bonds in order to further build out our system in light of our regions explosive growth and we really need your ideas, your input, on how we can better serve you with the plans, she said. Well count on you for that.

chevall.pryce@chron.comUpdate at 7:30 p.m.:

During a briefing on Friday afternoon, Francisco Sanchez, Harris County's deputy emergency management coordinator, urged residents to stay informed over the weekend after another fire was contained at the ITC plant in Deer Park and clean-up operations would continue.

"Our hope is this does not happen again, but should it happen we'll be ready to respond," said Sanchez.

Sanchez said their main area of concern were the communities surrounding the plant and noted that Harris County remained at a low risk.

The fires were contained at the ITC plant in Deer Park late Friday afternoon, according to company spokesman Dale Samuelson.

"The fire has been extinguished," said Samuelson.

Samuelson said it was unclear how many tanks caught fire or the chemicals that were inside, but he said they would release that information when it becomes available.

At least two tanks were on fire at the plant, sending up another plume of black smoke, according to the Harris County Office of Emergency Management.

Update at 4:47 p.m.:

ITC confirmed in a news release that the tanks in the west side of the containment area have re-ignited.

A runoff ditch along Tidal Road also appears to be ablaze.

"This is a developing incident," ITC officials said in the statement. "We will provide additional information as soon as it becomes available."

Harris County authorities said the fire is taking place within the original tank farm that was the site of the fire earlier this week.

It's unclear where the blaze began or what caused it. ITC couldn't immediately confirm what chemicals are in the affected tanks.

Deer Park's office of emergency management referred to the smoke as a "flare up." A shelter-in-place isn't in effect at this time.

"The City of Deer Park is not issuing a Shelter-in-Place order at this time but we are monitoring the situation," the office said.

The Sam Houston Tollway Ship Channel bridge was closed due to the fire but was re-opened by Harris County Precinct Eight constables shortly before 5 p.m.

Original story:

A wall surrounding the damaged tank farm at the charred Deer Park chemical storage facility breached shortly after noon Friday, company and Harris County officials said, increasing the risk that airborne and liquid toxins will be released from the site.

HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM INVESTIGATES: Deer Park company battling fire accused of intentionally polluting water during Harvey

"We have learned that a portion of the tank farm containment wall containing the product has partially collapsed. Industrial neighbors and the Texas Battleship and Monument State Park should consider taking shelter-in-place precautions," said Intercontinental Terminals Co. spokesman Dale Samuelson. "We are coordinating with federal, state and local officials to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

County emergency operations spokesman Aaron Ewing said local officials are working under an ongoing air monitoring plan to assess the situation at the facility where holding tanks began exploding on Sunday and burned for days. Officials noted that such a breach could affect the effectiveness of the foam blanket that is coating the tank farm in the hopes of preventing flare-ups and the release of further toxins.

HOUSTON CHRONICLE EXCLUSIVE: Dangerous chemicals create hidden dangers in Houston

It is unclear whether the central risk posed by Friday's breach is airborne or into the Houston Ship Channel or Tucker Bayou.

About the same time of the breach, which occurred on the north side of the wall, Port of Houston officials closed part of the ship channel, due to pollution from the fire. A spokesman said the channel is closed from Tucker Bayou to Light 116.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said workers were trying to contain toxins from flowing downstream by placing additional booms in the water, and said an ITC contractor is collecting and storing contaminated runoff.

"TCEQ is working to fully assess and mitigate any wider impact," the agency's roughly 2 p.m. statement read.

The wall breach came shortly after ITC officials said crews could spend up to 12 hours pumping pyrolysis gasoline out of one of tanks and that during that time, the risk of benzene exposure in the air will increase.

"There's going to be a lot of agitation in the tank when we start the pumping," Brent Weber, ITC incident commander, said. "There is an elevated risk of benzene emission during this time."

WHAT RESIDENTS ARE SAYING: Anxiety washes over Deer Park community after fire

Pyrolysis gasoline, also known as "pygas" is a benzene-rich liquid byproduct that can be blended with other chemicals for use as a gasoline additive. That chemical was the source of a benzene spike on Thursday morning, after it leaked out from foam covering one of the tanks. City leaders issued a shelter in place that lasted for several hours.

ITC officials estimated on Thursday that 14,000 barrels of pygas remained in that tank. However, ITC officials said Friday that about 20,000 barrels remained.

WHAT IS BENZENE? What you need to know about the dangerous chemicals in the Deer Plant fire

Crews attempted to pump pygas from the tank on Thursday, but the effort didn't work, Weber said, in part because of an unideal environment concerning the positioning of the pump. The pump was also losing prime, he said.

Aside from the roughly 20,000 barrels of product in the one tank, about 40,000 more barrels are expected to be removed, Weber said. Not all tanks are compromised, but they contain pygas and naptha, which have some percentage of benzene.

Elevated levels of the highly carcinogenic benzene were detected early Thursday in the area near the plant, prompting a shelter in place that continued throughout the morning.

Around 4:38 a.m. Friday, one air monitor specifically testing for benzene and located about 500 yards from the tank farm picked up an elevated reading, falling within the threshold of taking additional precautionary measures, according to the Harris County Emergency Management Office. The reading, recorded by county officials, was higher than Thursday's. It showed lower readings later in the morning.

An ITC spokesman said that because the Friday reading was "localized," there was no need for a public notice or shelter-in-place order. No other nearby monitors picked up elevated benzene readings, according to a map on the county's emergency management website.

"We've got no indication that there was any [elevated benzene] spread anywhere else," the spokesman said.

Deer Park Mayor Jerry Mouton said he isn't sure whether more shelter-in-place orders will be called but pointed to the possibility of more benzene releases as an indicator.

"There is potential," he said.

Mouton said he didn't like to speak in hypotheticals. Twice, he referred to the presence of benzene in everyday life.

"You're already being exposed to some level of benzene," Mouton said.

So far, fire investigators have not been able to access the facility to investigate the cause of the fire, according to the Harris County Fire Marshal's Office.

Samantha Ketterer and Brooke A. Lewis contributed to this report.

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.Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has described as irresponsible U.S. President Donald Trumps statement Washington should recognize Israels full sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

"Such statements being made today are irresponsible in our opinion. They are capable of causing negative effects [on the process of Middle East settlement]," Zakharova said on the Rossiya-24 round-the-clock television channel. "They may cause still greater destabilization in the region."

Zakharova recalled that the world community should see its main task in stabilizing the Middle East, and not in triggering new wars and exacerbating the already existing conflicts.

Earlier, Trump tweeted that the US should recognize Israels full sovereignty over the Golan Height.Visitors at the Tomball German Heritage Festival will be able to listen to music, dance and eat during the three-day event which will celebrates the areas German roots.

In the mid to late 19th century, German migrants arrived in Texas, and in northwest Harris County, they settled in Tomball, Klein, Spring and Cypress.

In the Klein area, most of your migration started in the 1840s until the 1890s. In most of that time, there was a lot of war that was going on in Germany at the time, said Steven Baird, director of the Klein, TX Museum and Wunderlich Farm.

With European countries at war with each other, many were looking to escape war and settle down in the U.S.

According to letters collected by the museum, the first migrants told their families back in Germany about the mild winters, rich soil and abundant lumber they could cut down to build houses.

Land was expensive. They couldnt really farm enough acreage to feed all their families, so a lot of them starting coming this way, Baird said.

The names of streets and schools in northwest Houston still bear the names of German families who founded the early communities and churches, such as Klein, Schindewolf and Theis.

Other European migrants who also contributed to the founding of early communities in the county also have schools and streets named after them, such as Mahaffey and McDougle, who were originally from Scottish families, Baird said.

Want to go? The Tomball German Heritage Festival will be hosted at the Tomball Depot at 201 South Elm. The cost will be free and shuttles will be available from the Tomball Regional Medical Center to downtown. When: Friday, March 29 starting at 6 p.m. When: Saturday, March 30 starting at 10 a.m. When: Sunday, March 31 starting at 12 p.m. See More Collapse

Grady Martin, the founder of the Tomball German Heritage Festival, said he was inspired to start the festival in 2000 keep remind the community of its historical roots.

Other cities in Texas, such as Fredericksburg, New Braunfelds and Brenham, that were also founded by German migrants had retained their character as Texas German cities, he said.

We wanted to have a German festival because we felt like we were losing our Texan German (roots), he said.

Along with the festival, Tomball also became a sister city to Telgte, a city in northwest Germany, to deepen its ties to the settlers who settled the area.

According to the sister city site, a similar German dialect found in the names of Tomball streets and buildings support a historical link between the two cities, such as Telge Road and Buvinghausen Street.

The program also supports a student exchange program between both cities to promote cultural ties.

While some visitors to the Tomball German Heritage Festival may not be aware of the historical significance of the first founding families, Martin said more people learn about their contributions to the city.

We felt like if we started a really good German festival, we could draw attention to our heritage, he said.

The upcoming festival will be from Friday, March 29 to Sunday, March 31 at the Tomball Depot.

For more information, visit www.tomballgermanfest.org.

mayra.cruz@chron.comFor Kaitlyn Snyder, a junior at Tomball High School, creating art helps her articulate her feelings.

The Tomball Community Art Showcase unveiled on Thursday, March 21, at the Tomball Community Library featured artwork created by Tomball students, including Snyders painting that depicts a girl hugging her knees and hiding her face on a dark background as menacing hands hovered over her head.

I really wanted to show how it feels to have anxiety, like a crushing, overwhelming-ness and it feels like its attacking me, she said.

She used photos of her moms hands as a reference to create the ones in her painting, which took her two weeks to create.

When people see her work, she hopes to teach them something shes experienced through an image instead of words.

I hope that they take a better understanding of anxiety itself because I feel like so many people underestimate the severity of it, Snyder said.

The showcase where her work is displayed is a three-way partnership between the Harris County Public Library, Lone Star College and Tomball ISD that will feature students artwork.

Janna Hoglund, co-director of the Tomball Community Library, said the partnership was a way to highlight students talent.

We partnered to highlight the art creations of our talented Tomball youth. Art is a universal language of love and kindness. Art unites. It challenges and inspires, said Janna Hoglund, co-director of the Tomball Community Library.

While the library will house the students pieces, Tomball ISD will decide which works will be featured and regularly change them.

JD Janda, Tomball ISD fine arts director, said the arts have helped students express themselves.

Art communicates in an entirely different way. Our students learn to connect their emotions, he said.

Natalia Dominguez, a third grader at Creekview Elementary said she was happy to be among the first group of students whose artwork was featured in the library.

Her painting of a butterfly took her two classes to complete.

I like the colors, she said.

Grace Nguyen, an art teacher at Creekview Elementary, said Dominguez was one of five students to be featured from her class.

In her classes, students learn about color theory and creating different works like drawings, paintings and sculptures as ways to express themselves.

I like that we can be able to represent our school district. The kids can share their love of art, she said.

Hoglund said that aside from showcasing students work, the library was also seeking raise funds for a glass display case so that other future pieces could be exhibited and not be damaged.

The case may cost between $25,000 to $45,000 to construct, depending on the size and the materials used to create it, she said.

We would like to ask our community to come together to help us to create and construct this beautiful glass, custom-made display so we can be proud of what we have to offer here in Tomball and display it, Hoglund said.

For more information, the Tomball Community Library can be reached at 832-559-4200.The Lone Star College System recently made three changes to their tuition and fees  all approved by the Board of Trustees. Two of the changes increased tuition while one change decreased tuition.

All changes to tuition and fees will take place at the start of this years fall semester.

2019-20 credit tuition and fees change

The change that will affect the majority of the systems students is the approval of an increase in the 2019-20 credit tuition and fees schedule: credit tuition went up $5 from $44 to $49 per credit hour and out-of-district tuition went from $95 to $105 per credit hour.

Other minor fees, such as distance learning and registration fees, increased by $1.

Jennifer Mott, the systems chief financial officer, explained that the move follows the board policy that was approved last year. It provides guidelines for an automatic tuition and fees increase at no more than 8 percent of the previous years rate for the next few years.

THE WOODLANDS: Residents near proposed new office building uneasy about development

The board policy is meant to convey a 50/50 split between students and local taxpayers in supporting the cost of education, Mott said.

The college currently receives 41 percent of their funding from local property taxes and 27 percent from student tuition and fees. The remaining 32 percent comes from state appropriations, out-of-college fees and grants, but the system is hoping to equalize the taxpayer and student levels within five years.

Workforce non-credit course fee change

A second change approved by the board was a $3 per contact hour tuition increase in workforce, non-credit open enrollment courses.

Contact hours are measured by the hours of scheduled instruction time per course. That change brings the total fee per contact hour from $13 to $16.

The workforce, non-credit open enrollment courses are for students who need professional certifications for various trades and skills, but not an official credit-bearing degree, according to Dwight Smith, the systems vice chancellor of academic success.

SAVE THE DATE: Spring time offers plethora of events in The Woodlands

This is a way for individuals to enter the workforce, but they dont have to do it through credit program, Smith said.

Smith said this fee has not been increased in four years, so the increase helps with the extra costs in both instruction and administration.

Tuition and fee exemption for firefighters

Firefighters, both volunteer and professional, are to benefit from the third tuition and fees change.

The system eliminated the tuition and laboratory fees for firefighters enrolled in the emergency medical services certificates and associate of applied science degree programs.

THE WAIT IS OVER: Snooze wakes up The Woodlands with new restaurant opening today

It was a consideration by the college of ways to extend benefits to firefighters in our programsIm sure theyll see it as a benefit to their careers, Smith said.

In the fall 2018 semester, the system had about 180 students enrolled in either the fire science technology associate of applied science degree or the basic structural firefighter certification.

System officials said that firefighter students in their program would be exempt from more than $3,000 of tuition and fees, but they would still have to pay their other fees.

jane.stueckemann@chron.comFor the next few weekends, almost 200 pieces of art by junior and senior class students from Montgomery County are on public display in The Woodlands. Works shaped out of clay, drawn by hand and adorned with wax fill the special pop-up in Market Street.

The artwork is submitted to the Student Art Scholarship Exhibit run by The Woodlands Arts Council in conjunction with The Woodlands Waterway Arts Festiva, which is scheduled for April 13-14 this year.

Its really to promote arts in our community. At every age group, whether youre a student or senior or middle-aged, everybody has a creative aspect, said Tricia Howard, who works with the education outreach branch of The Woodlands Arts Council and is helping with the student art portion of the festival this year.

The student art exhibit was one of the first components of the festival when it started 14 years ago. Since one of the core pillars of the council is arts education, Howard explained that the program is meant to offer educational financial assistance to students in the area.

First it was only for Conroe ISD, but now its for all of Montgomery County, Howard said. Theres a lot of history, and its important to the students in the community and the teachers whove been involved for a long time.

Students can submit pieces in six categories: painting, drawing, mixed media 2D, mixed media 3D, digital art and photography. Howard said that soon, the council will have to incorporate different mediums, such as 3D printing, because art is evolving.

Young people are really creative and do all kinds of different things, Howard said.

Three winners are selected from each category by judges who either have backgrounds in art or are professional artists. The judging is always done in the blind method, so the students names arent revealed during the judging. Each student is, however, given the opportunity to write a short statement about their piece.

Want to view the artwork? All pieces will be on display at a pop-up exhibit in Market Street, 9695 Six Pines Drive, Suite No. 1060 for the next three weekends from noon to 5 p.m. Here are the dates: March 22 and 23 March 29 and 30 April 5 and 6 See More Collapse

Once selected, the winning students receive a monetary prize that goes directly to help with tuition costs at their educational institution of choice. In total, Howard said the program gives about $20,000 yearly to students. Much of that money is raised through proceeds from the arts festival.

On April 6, the council is hosting a reception for the students who submitted art, their parents, and friends of the arts council. Then, the winners will be announced. All winning pieces will be displayed during the arts festival April 13 and 14.

Student Ryan Rummage, a senior at Magnolia West High School, painted a longhorn bull on an 11-by-14-inch canvas board.

My great-grandmother started teaching me art at age 4. She taught me to oil paintbut I hadnt oil painted in five to eight years because I was so busy with schoolwork, Rummage said. This was my opportunity to reconnect with my past, and Im so grateful for it.

Rummage, who wants to pursue her art career in the future by attending the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, said competitions like this are important for students such as her.

Its motivational. Ive had ups and downs in my art career, and I had to walk away and come back to (this piece). But anyone can do art, you just have to find your passion and specific style, Rummage said.

jane.stueckemann@chron.comIn an effort to secure funds for flood mitigation studies, state Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, has added a rider to the proposed 2020-21 state budget seeking $400,000 to do a feasibility study of a possible Spring Creek detention reservoir.

If the funding rider survives an initial debate at the statehouse, it will be included in the Texas budget that is scheduled to be voted on sometime between next week and the end of the legislative session in late May.

Toth told The Villager he was acting in coordination with state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, to secure funds for the detention reservoir that he claimed that were available in the past year, but which he said were not sought after vigorously enough by officials with the San Jacinto River Authority.

I am trying to get funding for this study. This is the money we should have gotten if (SJRA General Manager) Jace Houston would have done his job at the San Jacinto River Authority, Toth said. I am really angry. (The funds) Should have been in our pockets already. It is really frustrating, we should have had this funding already.

Houston was unavailable for an interview for this article, however Chuck Gilman, the director of water resources and flood management for the SJRA, said Toths allegations were false.

Gilman said Houston and other officials with the SJRA have worked diligently in the time since Hurricane Harvey hit to find ways to mitigate flooding in The Woodlands and along the Spring Creek watershed. Gilman also detailed a timeline of actions by SJRA officials in meeting with a wide variety of officials and governmental entities to find funding for a variety of projects dating to spring of 2018 and earlier.

We have been the only agency that has been proactive in getting funding for the Spring Creek studies, Gilman said. I feel like we have been proactive. I have not heard anything about (Toths) proposal. We are happy to participate in anything that the region believes would benefit the community.

The wording of Toths budget rider would add $400,000 in designated state funds for the 2020-21 budget for the state Water Development Board be devoted to the Feasibility study for the Spring Creek Flood Detention Reservoir as general revenue appropriations for Water Resources Planning.

Detention reservoir

The idea of a detention reservoir or dam-like structure being constructed upstream on Spring Creek has been discussed by regional leaders during the past 18 months in response to the devastating flooding that came in late August and early September of 2017 after Hurricane Harvey inundated the region with more than 50 inches of rainfall in a several day period.

Flooding along the Spring Creek watershed during Harvey caused varying problems in and around The Woodlands, including the flooding of homes in the Village of Creekside Park, the neighborhoods of Timarron and Timarron Lakes and some western portions of The Village of Grogans Mill. Some elected officials and other specialists that deal with water issues and flood mitigation believe possibly building a dam farther up the Spring Creek would allow for more control over water levels and hence decrease the chances of flooding in a heavy rain events.

However, building a dam on Spring Creek is a complicated endeavor, one that would require assistance and approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as well as more than a dozen local entities, including the San Jacinto River Authority.

Gilman said that officials with the SJRA have been exploring ways to secure funding for an early flood warning detection system as well as a potential structure to detain water on Spring Creek since Harvey, and that in May of 2018, the agency was approached by officials from five different municipal utility districts in both The Woodlands in Montgomery County and Harris County  Montgomery County MUDs 1, 7, 46 and 69, as well as Harris-Montgomery County MUD 386, which sits in both counties.

This whole concept (of a Spring Creek detention reservoir feasibility study) was originated with Bob Leilich, a director with (Montgomery County) MUD No. 1, Gilman said. They came to our office on May 14, 2018, with the request for a large study of the feasibility of multiple (reservoir) sites.

Gilman said he and others with SJRA were already working with a consortium of entities, including the City of Houston, the Harris County Flood Control District as well as Montgomery County, on ways to get funding for a variety of studies. However, Gilman claimed, Leilach and other MUD officials wanted an independent study focused solely on a Spring Creek detention reservoir. Those discussions led to an agreement to seek grants from the Texas Water Development Board for $400,000 which would be matched by the five MUDs and the SJRA with their own $400,000 to do a wide ranging study, he added.

The request was for a Spring Creek siting study, totalling $800,000, and the other half of grant was for the early flood warning detection system which was $150,000 from the state and we would match $150,000, Gilman said. We got the grant for the early flood warning detection system, but not the Spring Creek siting study.

That $800,000 study was slated to include a utility conflict analysis for any potential sites, flood modelling for the entire watershed as well as possible structural designs for the detention reservoir, including elements such as a spillway, levees, gates or a weir, Gilman said.

Gilman said after the agency had their grant request rejected, officials with SJRA went back to the five MUDs and discussed options to move forward despite lacking the requested funds. After discussions, Gilman said leaders with the four Montgomery County MUDs agreed to a lesser study costing only $100,000 that would merely seek out possible sites for such a structure.

(The reservoir) Could be anywhere in the watershed, Gilman noted. The study was boiled down to if we can even find any amount of land that would affect flooding in The Woodlands.

Whats next?

Bob Leilich, board president of Montgomery County MUD No. 1, said he and Woodlands Joint Powers Agency General Manager Jim Stinson helped to get the various MUDs along Spring Creek to support the study, even though flood control is not a MUD responsibility.

It is with these committed funds that I am optimistic that we can begin, in April, work on the first four tasks of the SJRA proposal, to nail down whether the potential exists to build one or more significant retention facilities, and to quantify the retention (volume) capabilities, Leilich said in a letter he sent to Toth. If this study produces positive results, we still we need $400,000 to complete the remaining five tasks of the SJRA proposed study. Again, I want to reiterate the enthusiastic and real support we have from the SJRA and their great help in refining and polishing the proposed study. Without their help we would not be starting this work.

Woodlands Township Director Bruce Rieser, who is the chairman of the townships Flood/Storm Drainage Task Force, said while Leilich and Stinson were coordinating with the various MUDs, he had approached Toth about seeking the $400,000 in funding from the state after the original grant request was rejected last year.

I asked Steve (Toth) to add this to the (state) budget. He was very helpful. We really need the full study done, it is not just the siting, it is much more complex, Rieser said. When we found out (last year) we would not be getting the grant funding, (several) MUDs came up with a different plan (to do the $100,000 site study only).

As of Thursday, March 21, Rieser said he and others have received full support from The Woodlands Joint Powers Agency and a commitment from The Woodlands Township to add $100,000 into a pool of funds to supplement the $400,000 state budget rider from Toth. Additionally, four MUDs in The Woodlands  Montgomery County MUDs 1, 7, 46 and 60  have each offered to commit $100,000 to the funding pool, meaning if all goes as plans with Toths budget rider, there could be as much as $900,000 for a larger, multi-faceted study on the feasibility of a proposed detention reservoir.

I just want the funding and to do the study, Rieser said.

jeff.forward@chron.comThe Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is exerting a powerful effect on foreign capital inflows into Vietnam, forcing the local government to issue far-reaching reforms in order to catch up with new-generation foreign direct investment (FDI)., Vice Chairman of Vietnams Association of Foreign-Invested Enterprises, toldthat hi-tech processing and manufacture, smart agriculture, healthcare, education and training, and renewable energy will be the hottest sectors for FDI in the coming months and years.The new-generation FDI strategy aims to create breakthrough growth as well as sustainable economic development based on the achievements and lessons of the countrys 30-year economic restructuring process, along with FDI mobilization and use.In my opinion, it is quite necessary to focus on the selection of FDI capital because in the long term it would be counter-productive to exchange the environment and natural resources for momentary growth, as the price of such deals will be extremely high. This means we need a clear direction for FDI mobilization for every sector and locality, while balancing capital and human resources.In investment promotion, we should reduce unnecessary activities that cause waste and are costly. Recently, many investment promotion forums have been held across the country, announcing a lot of billion-dollar projects. However, the disbursement of these projects has failed to be controlled.To remedy this, we need to add regulations to monitor the implementation of FDI projects to narrow the gap between registered and disbursed capital. For example, specific criteria and requirements on capacity, experience, and financial capacity of investors should be introduced to ensure the transparency and performance of these projects, along with regulations on the time line of capital contribution to ensure progress.In order to improve the efficiency of this capital mobilization channel, we should overcome the current shortcomings in the process of FDI attraction, such as the weak linkages between foreign-invested enterprises and domestic ones, relatively underdeveloped supporting industries, and environmental pollution. Generally, in addition to mobilizing new-generation FDI, we also need to facilitate the development of the private sector.Mobilization of new-generation FDI in the coming time would depend on many factors. In addition to desire and determination, we need to pioneer 4IR-ready human resources who can drive innovation, creativity, and proactivity.Moreover, the implementation of other breakthroughs like institutional reform, infrastructure development, human resource training, and development of the private sector are all progressing at a slower pace than necessary in 4IR.Additionally, there are difficulties in the implementation of policies and directives issued by central agencies at the local level regarding the encouragement of the private sector, while the fluctuations of the world economy already have a great impact on Vietnams economy.In general, Vietnam needs to simplify investment procedures and develop synchronized infrastructure facilities in order to welcome new-generation foreign investment capital flows.Also, the country would need to be more selective in attracting projects through determining which projects are suitable for each sector and region and, at the same time, issue methodical investment promotion programs.The volume of foreign capital attracted will also depend on this activity. Thus, it is necessary to work out investment promotion programs with a focus on interdisciplinary and inter-regional projects and product value chains. Local authorities need to suggest specific investment destinations to multinational groups and provide necessary information to convince investors to invest in the country.In addition, Vietnam needs to hold more training courses to create high-quality human resources for sectors in which it aims to call for investment. Moreover, local enterprises should be encouraged to cooperate with foreign-invested enterprises to learn experience, transfer technology, and receive support in training. Samsungs training courses for local suppliers is an outstanding example of such cooperation.-It was billed as a drill.

But law enforcement officials at an Indiana elementary school reportedly ordered teachers to turn around and crouch and then shot them with plastic pellets, leaving the educators bruised and bloodied during an active-shooter training drill.

Details about the January incident emerged during a Wednesday hearing before state lawmakers on proposed legislation outlining how schools could spend grants from the Indiana safe-schools fund. The measure would require schools to have active-shooter training.

Gail Zeheralis, director of government relations for the Indiana State Teachers Association, testified about a small school district between Indianapolis and Chicago that appeared to take its active-shooter training drill too far.

Sheriff's deputies directed teachers at a Twin Lakes School Corporation elementary school in Monticello, Indiana, into a room four at a time, told them to crouch down and then shot them execution-style with pellets in rapid succession, according to Zeheralis's testimony.

"They were injured to the extent that welts appeared and blood was drawn," according to Zeheralis's prepared testimony, which was shared with The Washington Post. "There was screaming."

Zeheralis said teachers waiting outside the room heard their co-workers screaming, and then were brought into the room and shot with the pellets. She said the teachers were told not to relay what happened to anyone.

The teachers union, which supports the safe-schools grants, called for an amendment prohibiting drills that include shooting at teachers.

"We believe adding a sentence prohibiting the firing of any projectile during these drills is a sufficient and necessary guideline going forward," Zeheralis's testimony read. "No one in education takes these drills lightly. The risk of harming someone far outweighs whatever added realism may be sought."

Twin Lakes School Corporation offered few details but said in a statement the drill was conducted in partnership with the White County Sheriff's Department. The sheriff's department provided the school staff with ALICE training, which stands for "Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate."

Twin Lakes School Corporation said it received questions about the training from the local teachers union and arranged a meeting between educators and law enforcement to discuss the incident.

"Twin Lakes looks forward to continuing its important partnerships with the Twin Lakes Classroom Teachers Organization and the White County Sheriff's Department in pursuing a safe environment for all students and employees," the statement read.

The Sheriff's Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The department told the Indianapolis Star it had conducted similar training before but that after receiving a complaint, it would no longer use air-powered devices to shoot teachers.

Dan Holub, executive director of the Indiana State Teachers Association, said the proposed legislation and the publicity from the training incident has generated productive conversations about how Indiana can prepare and prevent emergency situations that schools might face.

"It's important that we understand what's happening in our schools," Holub said. "This is a case with extraordinarily poor judgment, and the community has a right to know about it."Birthday wishes

Call 281-422-8302 or email david.bloom@baytownsun.com to wish someone a happy birthday. We will print your birthday wish on Page 2 of The Sun.

Happy Birthday WishesAt least two people were injured when a Metro bus crashed into a building Friday in east Houston.

The bus and an SUV collided in the intersection of Clinton Drive and Hirsch Road around 2:30 p.m. Two people inside the SUV were rushed to an area hospital, according to Metro officials.For Rob Hubbard, president of Atlas Survival Shelters in Montebello, California, business is booming.

Demand for protective bunkers/panic rooms and escape tunnels is on the rise as more Americans look to invest in their personal security as well as safety from nuclear threats, wildfires, tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes, according to Business Insider.

PRIME PROPERTY: Get updates about Houston-area real estate deals and developments

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg allegedly keeps a secret escape passageway beneath his conference room for emergencies, Business Insider reported. The publication also reported that the 34-year-old executive also has a panic room in at least one of San Francisco homes.

But you don't have to be a billionaire to afford a panic room.

Hubbard, a Houston native who splits his time between the Bayou City and California, is attempting to take the shelter industry mainstream by offering affordable options.

RELATED: Real estate transactions: Energy Corridor, North Houston, Sugar Land draw office lease deals

Hubbard's company manufactures more than 20 different styles of shelters that cost upwards of $100,000. They also produce basic bunkers that sell for as little as $20,000.

Some of the models double as an extra room in your house.

His "Winenado" bunker model, for example, serves as both a nuclear fallout shelter and a wine cellar under a home. It can be ordered with or without an air filtration system.

Other shelter styles look like a gun room, home movie theater, office or party room.

"It has a 'wow factor' and gives you an extra floor underneath your house that's relatively affordable," Hubbard told Chron.com.

It made sense to Hubbard, then, to work with home builders who can offer clients a secret underground room as an upgrade to their home.

In Texas, Hubbard gets the highest number of orders from Dallas residents.

"In Dallas, guns and bunkers go together like peanut butter and jelly," Hubbard said.

He gets fewer requests from the Houston area due to the city's high water risks, which rules out underground escape tunnels and limits underground shelters since they have to be made water-tight.

"We did a shelter a half-mile from The Galleria recently," he said. "We dug the hole and two days later it was filled to the top with water. But that doesn't mean you can't do them."

Conroe, Huntsville, College Station and surrounding areas located further from the Gulf are better options for Houstonians, Hubbard said.

"My bunker is near Victoria," he said. "It's on a large ranch and has been in the ground since 2012."

The majority of his clients are female, accounting for about 55 percent of his customer base, according to Hubbard.

"Men will buy a shelter to use as a man cave," he said. "With women, there's a mother bear effect. They want a shelter to protect their family."

Hubbard also receives a number of orders from ranchers and oil company owners, he noted.

"I want to start a common shelter industry," he said.

Marcy de Luna is a digital reporter specializing in social media, the famous, and food. You can follow her on Twitter @MarcydeLuna and Facebook @MarcydeLuna. Read her stories on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com. | Marcy.deLuna@chron.com | Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text messageFour men accused in a string of convenience store robberies late last year in the Houston area, including one that turned deadly, now face federal charges.

Melvin Jones, 20, Daivion Gully, 18, Deanjelo Wells, 19, and Artavius Johnson, 29, already face state charges after the attacks, including capital murder after a convenience store clerk was shot to death in November.

BREAKING NEWS UPDATES: Get your Houston breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox

The four were scheduled to appear in a Houston federal courtroom on Friday, after being indicted on federal charges on March 14. The charges accuse the men of aiding and abetting interference with commerce by robbery and aiding and abetting use, brandishing and discharging a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence.

RELATED: Police: 2 robberies in 40 minutes outside Baybrook Mall

The charges involve interstate commerce because two of the businesses have headquarters out of state and the third, based in Houston, ships goods to other states, federal officials said in charging documents.

The attacks began on Sept. 26, when authorities said Gully and Wells robbed at gunpoint the Gulf Gas located on 3300 Yellow Stone. On Oct. 24, Jones and Wells are accused of robbing a Chevron station at 8265 Richmond Avenue and then, two hours later, the Gulf Station again.

A robbery turned deadly on Nov. 3, when 66-year-old Hafeez Qureshi, a clerk at Sunny Food Mart was shot dead. All four are accused in that shooting at 9075 South Dairy Ashford.

They were arrested four days later.

Qureshi was a father of five and grandfather of two who, friends say, always provided for those around him.

"It's heartbreaking because he called his wife and said, 'Today's going to be my last day,'" his son-in-law, Ikram Ullah, said. "He hung up the phone and 15 minutes later, the incident took place."

If convicted of the federal charges, each faces up to 20 years in prison on robbery charges. The firearm offense carries a possible death sentence, federal official said.

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.GALVESTON  The city of Galveston and its police union have reached a tentative agreement on a pension plan, ending months of contentious negotiations, city officials announced Wednesday.

A Tuesday meeting brokered by Republican state Reps. Dan Flynn and Mayes Middleton helped facilitate the final agreement between city officials and the Galveston Police Pension Board, which resolved governance and funding issues.

The terms of the tentative agreement are designed to put the Galveston police pension fund  which has over $32 million in unfunded liabilities  on a path toward solvency. The city will raise its contribution to 18 percent from the current 14.83 percent, an increase of more than 21 percent. The police union contributions will be frozen at 12 percent for the foreseeable future.

The city and pension plan members will equally share future increases or decreases in contribution levels, which will be based solely on actuarial science, city officials said.

This will be the last time that you have this kind of hoopla or issue with the police pension, said Brian Maxwell, the Galveston city manager. This legislation sets it forward where nobody should have to touch this again. Its going to move forward and that was the goal.

State lawmakers now will draft the bill to enshrine the pension agreement into law.

While Galvestons police pension is not as troubled as those of other Texas cities faced with massive deficits  Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin have accumulated more than $22 billion combined in municipal pension shortfalls, according to a 2016 report from Moodys  the city has seen its police pension plunge from 99 percent funded in 2000 to 42 percent funded in 2017.

The increase in contributions will be offset by spending cuts that have not yet been identified, though the city stated that no decrease in police department staffing or services is expected at this time.

A key detail in the agreement is lowering the pension funds projected rate of return from 7.5 percent to 7 percent.

Struggling municipal pension funds face a common problem  unsustainable projected rates of return on investments that fail to account for economic and market volatility. Houston, for example, projected rates as high as 8.5 percent for its three municipal pension funds, when those returns were averaging closer to 3 percent or 4 percent.

Galveston previously had an assumed rate of return on its police pension plan of 8 percent, which had been reduced to 7.5 percent as of 2018, still one of the highest in the state.

In working with the pension review board and Rep. Flynn, it was agreed upon that 7 percent is basically the median of what most other plans are functioning at right now, Maxwell said.

Maxwell added the pension fund should be fully funded in 28 years at the current contribution levels, though possibly sooner if the fund overperforms its return.

Current police officers will continue to collect a normal retirement after 20 years of service at age 50. Newly hired officers will collect a normal retirement after 20 years of service at age 55.

The pension board and the city also agreed to change the structure of the board and its requirements. The previous board structure gave the police four appointees to the citys three. The new board will have three trustees elected by the plan members, one appointed by the Galveston Municipal Police Association president, two appointed by the city manager, and two appointed by the City Council. Major decisions of the board related to benefit changes would require a supermajority of the trustees for approval.

nick.powell@chron.comThe Houston narcotics officer at the center of an internal police investigation  as well as an FBI civil rights probe  into a botched January raid that left two people dead has retired, his lawyer confirmed Friday.

Officer Gerald Goines retired Friday afternoon while under investigation following the Jan. 28 shooting deaths of two residents during a no-knock raid of a Pecan Park residence in south Houston. The Harris County District Attorneys Office is reviewing more than 1,400 criminal cases that Goines worked on over the course of his 34-year career.

Goines was relieved of duty as questions mounted about his actions leading up to the drug raid, in which a team of undercover narcotics officers burst into a residence at 7815 Harding St. after obtaining a no-knock search warrant. A gun battle ensued that left homeowners Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas dead. Goines was shot, as were three other officers, one of whom remains hospitalized.

'CLEAR HER NAME: Mother of woman killed in botched Pecan Park drug raid speaks out

Nicole DeBorde, the attorney representing Goines, confirmed her clients retirement.

He has quite an extensive recovery to deal with, she said. So instead of fighting with that and all the administrative issues, he decided it was time.

Goines retirement came a day after Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo confirmed that he expected more than one officer to be criminally charged for their actions in the ill-fated raid. After court documents related to the investigation were made public in February, Acevedo said he expected the case agent would likely face criminal charges for allegedly lying about using a confidential informant to conduct an undercover buy at the Harding Street residence.

The Pecan Park bust  and the officers actions  have drawn scrutiny because police did not find any heroin, only a small quantity of cocaine and marijuana. Investigators later were unable to find the confidential informant whom police said they relied upon to obtain a search warrant.

Officer Steven Bryant, who participated in the raid and was also relieved of duty as questions mounted, retired earlier this month.

In a search warrant for Bryants phone data, an investigator with HPDs Special Investigations Unit wrote that Bryant told investigators that he had retrieved two bags of heroin from the center console of Goines police car at the instruction of another officer.

That, however, was not consistent with the affidavit used to obtain the warrant for the Jan. 28 raid, in which Goines wrote that Bryant identified heroin brought out of the house.

Though he took the two bags of drugs for testing to determine that they contained heroin, Bryant eventually told investigators that he had never seen the narcotics in question before retrieving them from the car.

Goiness retirement is the latest fallout from the deadly raid, and comes as Acevedo has launched a wide-ranging probe into the narcotics division and its operations following the raid. The FBI has launched a civil rights investigation into the operation and the DAs office has announced that it is reviewing 2,200 of the past criminal cases handled by Goines and Bryant.

FALLOUT: Acevedo reveals new no-knock raid policy

Acevedo has dramatically curtailed no-knock raids and said that he will equip raid teams with body cameras to record the operations. None of the narcotics officers who conducted the raid was wearing a body camera.

Two other narcotics officers, including Goines longtime former partner, have also quietly retired from the department in recent weeks, one under investigation for an unrelated matter, according to police documents and sources. Each officer had more than 20 years experience with the department.

Michael Doyle, the attorney representing the family of Nicholas, who died in the raid, offered a succinct comment on the news.

That doesnt really answer any questions or change anything, he said.

Acevedo was not immediately available for comment Friday evening, and officials with the Houston Police Officers Union declined to comment.

James Pinkerton contributed to this report.

st.john.smith@chron.comThe massive, days-long chemical fire at the chemical storage facility in Deer Park drastically impacted the daily routine for nearby residents.

Multiple shelter-in-place orders were issued as surrounding school districts closed campuses for most of the week. Even after the fire was extinguished Wednesday, exposure to carcinogenic benzene vapors continue to cause concern around the Intercontinental Terminals Co. facility.

While elevated benzene levels have been detected in the air, the possible chemicals in nearby waterways remains a mystery. Federal agencies, including the EPA and Coast Guard, said they tested samples of the water earlier this week, but those results have not been released as of Friday afternoon.

DEER PARK FIRE: What you need to know about benzene

Some residents have been wondering whether the chemicals would impact their drinking water, but according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, they shouldn't worry about that.

"The city of Deer Park reports that run-off of foam and chemicals resulting from the fire response do not pose a threat to the quality of the city's drinking water," according to a news release from the TCEQ.

Federal agencies were expected to test samples of the water in Tucker Bayou and the Houston Ship Channel, which sits adjacent the ITC plant. However, the city doesn't get its drinking water from those waterways.

The city gets its drinking water from the Coastal Water Authority, which draws from the Trinity River, according to the TCEQ.

"Water is stored in a reservoir located northeast of the Lynchburg Ferry," the release said. "From there, it travels through a closed pipe system to Deer Park customers."

RELATED: Wall surrounding tank farm at charred Deer Park plant breaches

The release said water in the municipal water system never touches the water impacted by the fire. The water system is also designed to treat debris, including ash, that may have fallen into the untreated water at the drinking water plant.

The release added that the lab testing of the city's water revealed no evidence of benzene. The TCEQ also advised anyone who uses wells north of State Highway 225 to test their water before using it, as a precaution.

Click here to view the full press release.

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.A Houston restaurant had to temporarily shut down to meet specific inspection requirements from the city from March 11 to March 17.

The city maintains an agreement with the restaurant that anytime it scores high on inspection reports, it must temporarily close to meet those requirements, according to inspection record.What is the minimum salary you need to buy a home in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin?

One company sought to find the answer.

On Mar. 19, smartasset.com released a report that calculated the figures for those five locations, as well as the other top 10 largest cities in the United States.

You can examine the organization's methodology more deeply here.

The company describes itself as "a financial technology company aiming to provide the best personal finance advice on the web."

You can click through the slideshow above to see the minimum salary you need to afford home payments in the 15 largest U.S. cities in 2019, according to smartasset.com.

All of the pictures above are homes in those cities.

RELATED: Several Houston area universities among top nursing schools in Texas

Peter Dawson is a digital reporter in Houston. Read him on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, houstonchronicle.com. | Peter.Dawson@chron.com | NEWS WHEN YOU NEED IT: Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message | Sign up for breaking news alerts delivered to your email here.The fires that began Sunday at a Deer Park chemical plant owned and operated by Intercontinental Terminals Co. prompted the company to open a claims hotline and website on Wednesday.

People seeking compensation for "income loss or other losses/damage caused by the incident," have through through June 25, 2019, to file a claim. Businesses and individuals can use the hotline and website to file claim forms.

There is a clause in both the individual and business forms that says people have to release the company and its affiliates from legal action. It states: "No payment will be made by or on behalf of ITC without the claimant executing a release of all claims against ITC and its underwriters."

A massive fire burned through the chemical storage facility for three days and wafted a miles-long plume of black smoke in the air. The fire was finally extinguished Wednesday.

But the city of Deer Park issued a shelter-in-place order after elevated benzene levels were detected in the chemical storage facility early Thursday morning, officials said.

About 4 a.m., benzene readings peaked at levels that could cause health concerns, according to data supplied by ITC. Benzene levels dropped significantly as the morning continued, ITC officials said.

At 11:40 a.m., county officials received consistent readings of benzene levels "below the actionable limit." Deer Park lifted that order Thursday after air quality readings showed the lower benzene levels.

Around that same time, Galena Park, which is located northwest of Deer Park, also lifted its shelter-in-place order.

The ITC claims call center number is 346-263-9766 and is open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday.

RELATED: Deer Park plant fire: What you need to know about benzene

Peter Dawson is a digital reporter in Houston. Read him on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, houstonchronicle.com. | Peter.Dawson@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.A woman was hospitalized Friday morning with burns and smoke inhalation injuries after a fire at a home near Jersey Village, according to Metro Video.

The Cy-Fair Fire Department said it responded to a structure fire at 3 a.m. near Prairie Wind and Silvanwind. Firefighters saw heavy flames showing through the room of the home, officials said.Police records show officers have twice responded to allegations of domestic violence over the last 13 years involving mayoral candidate Greg Brockhouse.

Now a city councilman, Brockhouse is running to unseat Mayor Ron Nirenberg in the May 4 election.

On Dec. 23, 2009, at around 11:55 p.m., Brockhouses wife, Annalisa, called police and alleged that Brockhouse had grabbed her, thrown her to the ground and tried to hit her, according to a police report obtained by the San Antonio Express-News.

On Express-News.com: Past domestic violence allegations emerge against mayoral candidate Greg Brockhouse

No one was charged in the incident, and Brockhouse said Thursday he doesnt recall it.

Annalisa is Brockhouses third wife.

The earlier allegation of domestic violence involved Brockhouses second wife, Christine Rivera.

In that case, Rivera called 911 around 10:15 p.m. on April 29, 2006, records show.

Brockhouse had moved out of their Northwest Side home and had returned to retrieve some belongings. Rivera and her then-boyfriend, who were out at the time, encountered Brockhouse when they got home.

FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox

Rivera said Brockhouse pushed her, which Brockhouse denies. Brockhouse said he was the victim in that incident because he was assaulted by Riveras boyfriend.

No one was arrested in that case, either.

Read more about what Brockhouse called "one of the worst days of my life" and why his ex-wife says he has "anger management issues" on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com.

Brian Chasnoff is an investigative reporter based in San Antonio. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | bchasnoff@express-news.net | Twitter: @bchasnoffWillamette University is ranked No. 9 in the nation among small schools on the Peace Corps 2019 Top Volunteer-Producing Colleges and Universities list.

Twelve Bearcats are currently volunteering around the world. More than 340 have served in the Peace Corps since the agencys founding in 1961. Willamette has ranked among the Peace Corps top small colleges 15 of the last 17 years.

Nathaniel Balk 16 is currently serving as an education volunteer in Morocco.

Whether it was lectures in the classroom or convocations, Willamette emphasized how important both community and giving are to the world, Balk said. Willamette was influential on my decision to join Peace Corps because I know that my purpose isnt just to live, but to make the world a better place.

Students interested in serving as volunteers should visit Career Development on the third floor of the Putnam University Center. Learn more about Willamettes commitment to civic engagement through the Office of Community Service Learning.

Willamette MBA and the College of Law offer financial assistance to returned Peace Corps volunteers through the Paul D. Coverdell Fellows program, a graduate fellowship program that includes an internship in an underserved community in the United States.

The annual ranking is based on the size of the student body at participating colleges and universities. Willamette is one of two Oregon schools in the top 10 institutions with fewer than 5,000 undergraduates. University of Portland is also ranked No. 9.

The Peace Corps strives for world peace and better understanding between Americans and people of other countries. Volunteers spend more than two years tackling challenges related to health, education, agriculture and economic development.Finding a decent fare to Hawaii is getting increasingly complicated now that there are so many players, and so many fares in the market. If you don't check fares for a living like I do, it can feel overwhelming. And you nearly always walk away thinking, "did I get ripped off?"

Here's a cheat sheet that can help avoid the angst, cover all your bases, and get a good fare.

Some overall advice: To get the best deals you must be flexible and travel midweek- this usually means departing the mainland on a Tuesday or Wednesday and then returning from Hawaii on a Wednesday or Thursday. Summertime and Christmastime flights are the most expensive so bargain hunters should set their sites on flying in spring (before June 10 or so), late summer (after August 18 - September, or fall (October, early November) or in the "dead weeks" of early December and most of January. You'll likely pay twice as much if you can only travel on weekends during peak seasons.

Using Google Flights.

-Use Google Flights, which I think provides the broadest look at available airline fares except Southwest Airlines. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but hang in there, because it's an especially good tool for bargain hunters! Google Flights helps you easily determine what a good "ballpark" fare to Hawaii is, but I'll lend a hand here. During the slower spring or fall seasons, any roundtrip, midweek fare at or around $300 roundtrip between the West Coast and Hawaii is a good deal. During peak summer and winter seasons, if you can get a fare at or around $500 roundtrip you are doing great.

-FROM/TO FIELDS: Enter multiple airports if you live in an area that has more than one. Since I'm in the Bay Area, I always enter San Francisco SFO, Oakland OAK and San Jose SJC in the "from" field. If I don't have a specific island to visit, I'll enter all of them (Honolulu HNL, Maui OGG, Kauai LIH, Hawaii KOA) to see which one comes up with the best fares. Lately, the cheapest fares have been into Maui or Hawaii (The Big Island).

-BAGS TAB: To avoid the airlines' irritating "basic economy" or "saver" fares, look for the "Bags" tab add a one carry-on bag, which will filter them out. Currently, United and Alaska offer these stripped down fares, which don't make much sense for flying to Hawaii because you can't reserve a seat to sit with your companions and or you can't use the overhead bin (on United). Currently Hawaiian Airlines does not offer basic economy fares, but has said it will do so later this year.

-STOPS TAB: Also, look for the "Stops" tab and filter to nonstops only for the most convenient flights. However, if getting a rock bottom fare is important, open it up to one-stop flights. Sometimes airlines will offer the best deals if you are willing to stop first in in Southern California or Phoenix. From the Bay Area, Alaska, Hawaiian, United and Sun Country fly nonstop. (Southwest does, too but you won't find it on Google flights- see below)

-ECONOMY DROP DOWN: Go ahead and check first class, especially during summer peaks. Look for the drop down tab that defaults to "Economy" and move it to "First." If you are paying the big bucks for an economy seat anyway, you may want to consider paying a bit more to fly in first class, where fares generally run in the $800 to $1,000 range. (Find out more about how to fly in first class to Hawaii here.)

-DATES FIELD: If you have broad flexibility, scan monthly calendars. You can do this on Google Flights by clicking on the date or calendar field. When you do, a full month calendar pops up. Then you can toggle between months using the arrows on the side of these calendar popups.

Don't miss a shred of important travel news! Sign up for our FREE bi-weekly travel alert emails!

Chris McGinnis

-COMPARE: Once you've entered your destinations and dates, added a carry on bag, checked for cheaper one-stop flights, click on the "Price Graph" tab to see how the fare you see compares to fares on different dates. You may find something cheaper.

-GET FARE ALERTS: Fares change all the time, so if you don't like what you see, click on the "Track Prices" button to set up a fare alert which will be sent to you via email along with a link to a Google Flights fare search page. Easy!

-BOOK IT: Find a fare you like? Click all the way through to the airlines' booking site to be sure it exists and is not basic economy. Then book it and enjoy your trip!

Searching on Southwest.com

Booking on the Southwest.com site is not as easy as on Google Flights, but it's always worth looking. The most important thing to remember about Southwest flights to Hawaii is that it thankfully does not offer a basic economy or saver fares to Hawaii, so what you see is what you get. Southwest allows you to check two bags for free, and bring a carry-on if it the fits in the overhead bin. But it does not allow you to reserve a seat ahead of time.

-LOW FARE CALENDAR: To get your ballpark fare, go straight to Southwest's "Low Fare Calendar" which you'll see at the bottom of the BOOK field (or just click on the link I've provided). Enter your departure city (if in the Bay Area, that will be OAK for now, SJC later. Southwest does not have plans to fly to Hawaii from SFO.) Then you can get a good idea of fares by month- and zero in on the best deals. (A quick scan shows some remarkable deals to Kona KOA right now-- in late May you can go for just $205 roundtrip!)

-DEPART AND ARRIVE: If you have specific dates for your trip, go to Southwest.com. Right now Southwest is only offering flights from Oakland to Honolulu, Kona and Maui. Eventually it will add San Jose and Kauai. Unlike Google flights, you can only enter one depart and arrive airport. In the Bay Area, enter OAK and then HNL or OGG (Maui) and your estimated dates.

I hope this has helped you find a great deal to the islands! Tell us about the great fare you snagged in the comments.

Read all recent TravelSkills posts here

Get twice-per-week updates from TravelSkills via email! Sign up here

Chris McGinnis is the founder of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis.PEI invites 150 immigration candidates to apply in new draw Express Entry, Labour Impact and entrepreneur candidates invited in March 21 draw

PEI invites 150 immigration candidates to apply in new draw Express Entry, Labour Impact and entrepreneur candidates invited in March 21 draw

PEI invites 150 immigration candidates to apply in new draw Express Entry, Labour Impact and entrepreneur candidates invited in March 21 draw CIC News Aa Accessibility Font Style Serif

Sans Font Size A

A

Prince Edward Island issued new invitations to immigration candidates in a draw held March 21.

Prince Edward Island, or PEI, holds monthly draws for immigration candidates who have submitted an Expression of Interest to its immigrant nominee program, the PEI PNP.

PEI is one of 11 Canadian provinces and territories that take part in Canadas Provincial Nominee Program, which lets them nominate a set number of immigration candidates for Canadian permanent residence each year.

A total of 150 invitations were issued to candidates in PEIs Express Entry, Labour Impact and Business Impact immigration categories in the March 21 draw, raising the total number of invitations issued this year through the PEI PNP to 440.

The 131 Express Entry and Labour Impact candidates who received an invitation in todays draw can now apply to PEIs provincial nominee program, the PEI PNP, for a nomination for Canadian permanent residence. The province did not provide a breakdown of these invitations.

The 19 entrepreneur candidates invited through the Business Impact: Work Permit Stream category can now apply to the PEI PNP for a letter of support for a temporary work permit.

Find out if you are eligible for Canadian immigration

Express Entry, Labour Impact invitations

PEIs Express Entry category is linked to the federal Express Entry system, which manages the pool of candidates for three of Canadas main economic immigration categories  the Federal Skilled Worker Class, Federal Skilled Trades Class and Canadian Experience Class.

Express Entry candidates who would like to be considered for a provincial nomination from PEI must first complete a separate Expression of Interest (EOI) profile with the PEI PNP.

These profiles are given an EOI score out of 100 based on factors such as education, work experience and proficiency in English or French. The highest-ranked candidates are invited to apply for a provincial nomination through monthly draws.

Express Entry candidates who receive a provincial nomination are awarded an additional 600 points toward their Express Entry ranking score.

PEIs Labour Impact Category is not aligned with the Express Entry system and is divided into three EOI-based streams  Skilled Workers (in PEI and outside Canada), International Graduates and Critical Workers.

Candidates for these streams must be working in PEI or have an eligible full-time, long-term job offer from an employer in the province, among other criteria.

Entrepreneur invitations

PEIs Business Impact: Work Permit Stream is for eligible foreign entrepreneurs with business ownership or eligible management experience who would like to invest in and run a business in PEI.

The Work Permit stream also operates on an EOI basis and the lowest-ranked candidate in the March 21 draw had a score of 110.

Find out if you are eligible for Canadian immigration

 2019 CICNews All Rights ReservedMany IT organizations have become partners in the overall corporate effort to digitally transform and improve the customer experience. And IT teams often focus their efforts on being the enabler of these changes. But what if IT went a step further? What if, rather than focus only on enabling changes, IT became more engaged and actually inspired business units by showing the way forward?

Thats the approach taken by Santiago Aldana Sanin, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Avianca Airlines, the Colombian national carrier. One of the keys to Aviancas success is that Aldana Sanin is responsible for the customer digital experience and works with numerous operating teams to enhance it. Avianca starts with a focus on the cultural changes necessary to improve the experience. Then the carrier makes decisions about the technology platforms needed for cultural change. To inspire, IT must adopt new thinking to become more agile and innovative. Further, as Aldana Sanin explains, there must be a commitment to becoming data-driven, with strong data-collection processes.

The framework for improving the customer experience starts with understanding that Avianca is the distance between a customer and his or her goal. That goal may be a vacation, a family visit, or a business trip. The question then becomes how to reduce the effort or friction involved in achieving that goal. The greater the reduction in effort that a change delivers, the more important it is. The customer experience at Avianca is divided into 19 areas with more than 90 touch points, and Aldana Sanins goal is to reduce friction at each touch point. For example, during the booking process, delivering only appropriate and viable offers reduces a travelers frustration and improves the experience.

This thinking drove Aviancas decision to focus the cultural and technology solutions on a few key elements:

Personalize the experience

Deliver appropriate and valuable information

Automate to reduce the amount of customer effort required at each touch point

Gather strong data to evaluate potential changes

Provide an omnichannel-consistent experience

In addition, Avianca views the customer experience holisticallythat is, before, during, and after the tripto ensure all aspects of the experience are improved.

To achieve this goal, Aldana Sanin looked to key technology partners. Teaming with Adobe, Microsoft, Amadeus, Accenture, and SAP enables Avianca to weave together all data cohesively and transform the customer journey. This provides the essential underlying information to personalize experiences, and its transforming Avianca into a data-driven organization.

The carrier leverages Microsoft Dynamics 365 for CRM and Adobe Experience Manager, Adobes experience delivery offering, on Microsoft Azure to deliver personalized content for its homepage and the Avianca app. Experience Manager makes the process of editing content quick and easy. Avianca is also using Adobe Campaign to provide more valued communications with customers. Using Adobe Target, Avianca can now conduct A/B and multivariate testing of offers to determine which option performs better. These tools drive agility as Avianca can now make new or different offers more quickly and change the experience more readily.

Watch Aldana Sanin explain Avianca Airlines customer-centric IT strategy below.

For more information on what customer-centric IT looks like, click here.28272

DocuWare Is Paving the Way for Higher Partner Revenues With the Introduction of U.S. Cloud Partner Program

Following a year of exceptional cloud expansion, DocuWare introduces its U.S. Cloud Partner program with the successful launch of a similar program in Germany. Presently the company is committed to staying well ahead of demand for cloud installations hosting 2,000 cloud customers.

Based on the fast-growing demand for cloud, the provider believes that all business will need to digitize their core processes to drive cost efficiency and align with compliance regulations. For a company of any size, the cloud is an optimal platform as it requires zero investment in hardware, facilitates for fast deployment and requires low maintenance costs. Also, business continuity will not be compromised with the cloud's multiple layers of backup and software updates.

Check out: Top Cloud Companies

DocuWare's new program will allow new partners to focus on preconfigured cloud solutions. Small tech businesses who provide IT services comprise the best candidates for this program as they already sell cloud based software or are seeking to add robust cloud solutions to their portfolio. DocuWare cloud partner will suit as efficient use of personnel, more full profit margins, shorter sales cycle and recurring revenues for small providers with high expertise but limited staff which adds overall sustainability.

DocuWare's program will offer support that includes e-learning via webinars, tutorials and videos, access to professional services, DocuWare lead protection, DocuWare technical support, partner info newsletter, partner portal, marketing and sales material, whitepapers and listing on DocuWare website.

The DocuWare Cloud Partner program tailors on but does not replace the companys already successful Authorized DocuWare Partner program. The company's zero-compromise cloud services are a best-fit for digitizing, automating and transforming processes. It operates in 70 countries with headquarters in Germany and the U.S.

Cloud Solution Providers - 42Q, ActivePlatform, allConnex,

See Also:

prnewswire|CIO Review

Facebook|CIO ReviewThe homelessness industry has pulled off some impressive feats of rebranding over the yearsmost notably, turning street vagrancy into a consequence of unaffordable housing, rather than of addiction and mental illness. But for sheer audacity, nothing tops the alchemy that homelessness advocates and their government sponsors are currently attempting in San Francisco. The sidewalks of the Haight-Ashbury district have been colonized by aggressive, migratory youths who travel up and down the West Coast panhandling for drug and booze money. Homelessness, Inc. is trying to portray these voluntary vagabonds as the latest victims of inadequate government housing programs, hoping to defeat an ordinance against sitting and lying on public sidewalks that the Haight community has generated.

The outcome of the industrys rebranding campaignand of the Haights competing effort to restore orderwill be known this November, when San Franciscans vote on the proposed sit-lie law. That vote will reveal whether San Francisco is ready to join the many other cities that view civilized public space as essential to urban life.

Four filthy targets of Homelessness, Inc.s current relabeling effort sprawl across the sidewalk on Haight Street, accosting pedestrians. Can you spare some change and shit? Will you take me home with you? Cory, a slender, dark-haired young man from Ventura, California, cockily asks passersby. Dude, do you have any food? His two female companions, Zombie and Eeyore, swig from a bottle of pricey Tejava tea and pass a smoke while lying on a blanket surrounded by a fortress of backpacks, bedrolls, and scrawled signs asking for money. Vincent, a fourth traveler, as the Haight Street punks call themselves, stares dully into space. All four sport bandannas around their necksto ward off freight-train exhaust as they pass through tunnels, they explainas well as bikers gloves and a large assortment of tattoos and metal hardware. The girls wear necklaces and bracelets of plastic disks and other hip found objects; their baggy tank tops and stockings are stylishly torn.

A petite Asian woman passes the group and smilingly hands Cory the remains of a submarine sandwich. Suddenly, all four are on their feet, tearing at the sub. As Zombie stuffs the bread into her mouth, partly chewed chunks fall back out onto the ground.

Such juvenile hobos see themselves as on a mission, though theyre hard-pressed to define it. Sometimes they follow rock bands, and other times more mysterious imperatives, between Seattle, Portland, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Venice Beach, and San Diego. Some are runaways; some are college dropouts; others are years older. Eeyore says she got kicked out of her Riverside, California, home at 14 because she was a punk and an asshole.

Of all the destinations on the traveler circuit, the Haight carries a particular attraction to the young panhandlers, thanks to the Summer of Love. Starting in late 1965, waves of teens from across the country began pouring into what was then a ramshackle, blue-collar neighborhood of pastel Victorian houses and low-rent businesses, drawn to the emergent drug culture and its promised liberation from the bourgeois values of self-discipline and hard work. The time has come to be free, a local flyer proclaimed. Be FREE. Do your thing. Be what you are. Do it. Now. This insipid philosophy was eventually co-opted by consumer capitalism, while the hippie ethos gave way to punk, daisy chains to piercing, acid to meth, and mindless utopianism to mindless nihilism. In the Haight itself, national chain stores like American Apparel, McDonalds, and Ben & Jerrys found a place next to the head shops, tie-dye boutiques, and check-cashing outlets. But the kids kept coming.

The defining characteristic of all these travelers seems to be an acute sense of entitlement. If you can afford this shit on Haight Street, then goddamn, you can probably afford to kick down $20 [to a panhandler] and it wont fucking hurt your wallet, a smooth-faced blond boy from Spartanburg, South Carolina, defiantly tells the camera in The Haight Street Kids, a documentary by Stanford Universitys art department. I ask the group on the blanket: Why should people give you money? They got a dollar and I dont, Cory replies. Why dont you work? We do work, retorts Eeyore. I carry around this heavy backpack. We wake up at 7 AM and work all day. Its hard work. Shes referring to begging and drinking. She adds judiciously: Okay, my liver hates me, but I like the idea of street performance. Were trying to get a dollar for beer. More specifically, theyre aiming for two Millers and a Colt 45 at the moment, explains Zombie. Arent you embarrassed to be begging? Im not begging, Im just asking for money, Cory says, seemingly convinced of the difference. How much do you make? In San Francisco, you dont get muchmaybe $30 to $40 a day, says Eeyore. When youre traveling, you can make about $100 on freeway off-ramps.

What more conventional people consider employment is, in the eyes of the street punk, something conferred gratuitously. People see you, theyre like, Get a job. Youre like, Okay, pay me, hire me. You know, do something!  a boy complains on a promotional video made by Larkin Street Youth Services, a local organization that serves homeless youth. Meantime, welfare will do just fine. A strapping young redhead trudging down Haight Street with a bedroll and a large backpack explains the convenience of his electronic food-stamp card, which he can use to pick up his benefits wherever he happens to bewhether in Eugene, Oregon, where he started his freight-train route last Halloween, or in California.

Over the last several years, the Haights vagrant population has grown more territorial and violent, residents and merchants say. Pit bulls are a frequent fashion accessory, threatening and sometimes injuring passersby. In July, two pit bulls bred by the residents of an encampment in nearby Golden Gate Park tore into three pedestrians, biting a 71-year-old woman to the bone and wounding her two companions. In October 2009, one of three punks sitting on a blanket with dogs spat on a 14-month-old baby when its mother rejected their demand for change. The vagrants carry knives and Mace; people who ask them to move risk getting jumped.

Merchants trying to clean up feces and urine left by the alcohol-besotted youth are sometimes harassed and attacked. Kent Uyehara, the proprietor of a skateboard shop in the Haight, has gotten into fistfights with vagrants when he tells them that they cant sell marijuana in front of his store. They start it, but if they say F you, were going to say F you back, he says matter-of-factly. Business owners, already struggling to stay afloat in the weak economy, worry that shoppers will avoid their stores or the entire neighborhood, rather than navigate around packs of drunken youths on the sidewalk.

By late 2009, community frustration with the gutter punks rising aggressiveness had led the Haights police captain, Teri Barrett, to propose a new law that would ban sitting or lying on city sidewalks from 7 AM to 11 PM. Under current policies, an officer can ask someone sprawled across a sidewalk to move only if he observes a pedestrian being substantially obstructed and if that pedestrian will sign a complaint and testify in court against the sidewalk sprawler. Few pedestrians are willing to do so; as for the merchants themselves, they fear retaliation. After the manager of a boutique selling Goth clothing installed outdoor cameras and called the police about the vagrants outside her store, the vagrants threw live birds, their wings flapping wildly, in a cashiers face.

Barretts proposed ordinance against sidewalk colonization would remove the current requirement of a civilian victim and allow a police officer to take action on his own. The officer would first have to warn someone sitting or lying on a sidewalk that he was violating the law; only if that person refused to move could the officer issue a citation against him.

Both Mayor Gavin Newsom and San Franciscos new police chief have endorsed the proposed law, later named Civil Sidewalks. It is similar to ordinances adopted in Seattle, Berkeley, Portland, Santa Cruz, and Palo Alto, all cities with impeccable progressive credentials. The police have issued few citations under those laws; as in San Francisco, their main purpose is to give officers the authority to ask squatters to move along and to prevent the hostile occupation of public space.

The homelessness industry instantly mobilized against the Civil Sidewalks law. Its first tactic was to assimilate the gutter punks into the homelessness paradigm, so that they could be slotted into the industrys road-tested narrative about the casualties of a heartless free-market economy. Homelessness, at its core, is an economic issue, intoned the Coalition on Homelessness, San Franciscos most powerful homelessness advocacy group, in a report criticizing the proposed law. People are homeless because they cannot afford rent. Even applied to the wizened shopping-cart pushers of the traditional homeless population, this simplistic statement is deeply misleading. But applied to the able-bodied Haight vagrants, it is simply ludicrous, entailing a cascading series of misrepresentations regarding the role of choice in youth street culture. The Haight punks may not be able to afford rent, but that is because they choose to do no work and mooch off those who do. Further, they are not looking for housing. They have no intention of settling down in San Francisco or anywhere else. The affordability or unaffordability of rent is thus irrelevant to their condition.

Shoehorning the street kids into the homeless category requires ignoring their own voices, ordinarily a big no-no among progressives when it comes to official victims of capitalism and other oppressions. They are not homeless, the travelers insist, and they look down on those who are. When you stop traveling and stay on the street, you become a home bum, Eeyore says. A stringy, middle-aged alcoholic buzzes around Eeyore and her companions blanket, offering incoherent sallies. Asked if the older guy is an acquaintance, Cory scoffs, Hes just some crazy that wandered up, in between more pitches for food and change.

If the travelers feel no affinity for the white winos of the Haight and Golden Gate Park, they keep themselves even farther from the largely black street population of the Tenderloin, a drug-infested downtown neighborhood of single-room-occupancy buildings that is San Franciscos other major locus of public disorder (see sidebar). I dont hang out in the Tenderloin because I dont feel like smoking crack, Cory says primly. Such scruples suggest a keen sense of self-preservation, notes Kent Uyehara. These kids couldnt handle the Tenderloin, he says. The local drug dealers wont tolerate hippie punks interrupting their operations; theyd get beaten up or shot.

An unintentionally hilarious letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2010 revealed just why the homelessness-industrial complex is so desperate to claim the Haight infestation for itself: government contracts. The majority of the youth on the streets and in the park are in the Haight seeking support to address the issues that have led them there, wrote the executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services in criticizing the sit-lie proposal. Funding to help these youths through outreach, case management, education and employment has been severely cut over the past two years. . . . Rather than rallying in anger, a better use of our time is to focus on helping youths exit the streets so they can find work and housing and become contributing members of the community. Translation: Homelessness, Inc. wants more money.

Larkin Streets analysis of why people hang out in the Haight is as wildly inaccurate as the Coalitions fingering of unaffordable rent. Few, if any, of these vagrants are in the Haight seeking support to address the issues that have led them there, unless support means money for booze and drugs. To the contrary, the youth are there to party, en route to their next way station. As a platinum blonde boozily announces in The Haight Street Kids: I love this city, love your fucking life. A tall youth draped around her adds: Its awesome for traveling kids to stop in when they need a break.

Predictably, the offer of services and housingwhich San Franciscos round-the-clock outreach workers constantly put before the Haight Street vagrantsis usually turned down. As for becoming contributing members of the community, thats definitely not on the agenda, either. Asked what he saw for himself in the future, a traveler in the Stanford documentary rolls his eyes, smiles nervously, and shakes his head for nearly a minute before replying: A hot dog, theres definitely a hot dog in my future.

But a social-services empire has grown up around the street vagrants; its members livelihood depends on a large putative client population, even if the clients arent interested in their services. Enforcing laws designed to ensure safe and accessible public spaces is the most effective means of changing behavior, which is why the sit-lie law is such a threat to Homelessness, Inc. San Francisco has poured billions of dollars into nonprofit groups and subsidized housing over nearly three decades; the street population perceptibly wanes and becomes less aggressive only during those intermittent periods when the city summons the will to enforce common norms of public behavior.

In March, Santa Cruzs mayor testified to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (San Franciscos version of a city council) about Santa Cruzs own sit-lie law. The ordinance had a major impact on making sidewalks passable, Mayor Mike Rotkin said, by sending a message that it was not acceptable to claim turf and live on the sidewalk all day. After years of ineffectual social-services spending, Santa Cruzs vagrant youth population started acting more civilly a mere couple of weeks after the ordinance passed. Such results are why San Franciscos advocates must prevent these instructive experiments in law enforcement from happening in the first place.

The homelessness industrys second tactic was to demonize Civil Sidewalks supporters as motivated by hatred toward the poor. This issue makes me sick to my stomach, the head of the Coalition on Homelessness, Jennifer Friedenbach, told a supervisors meeting in May. It makes me sick because were putting into place another law that promotes hatred and that will codify economic profiling. Giving tickets for being destitute is not what a civilized society engages in. Mary Howe, executive director of the Homeless Youth Alliance, a needle-exchange program in the Haight, testified at the same hearing that it was disgusting that there was not more compassion where there is not enough affordable housing.

Needless to say, the sit-lie law says nothing about economic status; what it profiles is not wealth but behavior. The Haight Street vagrants colonize the sidewalk all day not because they are poor but because doing so is the essence of their traveling lifestyle. And a resident or store owner afflicted by punks threatening passersby in front of his home or business is indifferent to how much money is in their pockets; hes even indifferent to the constant panhandling. He only wants a passageway open and welcoming to all. I dont care if they ask for change, says Arthur Evans, a self-described former hippie from Greenwich Village who has lived in the neighborhood for 35 years. Its okay if they loiter and make a bit of noise. But I dont feel safe walking down the Haight at night any more.

The statement from the Homeless Youth Alliances director about affordable housing is the usual non sequitur: the gutter punks are not looking for housing, whether temporary or permanent. Every night, about 100 beds in the citys shelter system remain vacant, though outreach workers are always trying to get people to use them. As for permanent housing, youre not going to be able to afford rent at any level if you opt out of working or studying. And while some of the street colonists may come from truly impoverished backgroundsthough such a fact is irrelevant to the validity of the proposed lawothers do not. Two blondes in The Haight Street Interviews, a YouTube video, explain that they got to escape the whole private school mentality by starting to follow punk bands in seventh grade.

Finally, the homelessness advocates pulled out their trump card: associating supporters of the Civil Sidewalks law with business interests. San Francisco progressives regard businessmen as aliens within the body politic whose main function is to provide an inexhaustible well of funds to transfer to the citys social-services empire. If it werent for vigilant politicians, however, the interlopers would constantly seek to duck this ever-growing civic obligation. If these corporations pay their fair share, supervisor John Avalos explained in 2009 when introducing a new business tax, we can generate millions that will go towards keeping health clinics, youth and senior services, and jobs safe for San Franciscans. (The contradiction between raising business taxes and keeping jobs safe was lost on Avalos.)

So the sit-lie opponents portrayed the law as the brainchild of the rapacious profit seekers, even though the Haights residents were as instrumental in its genesis as local merchants were. Ive heard we should pander to business, a member of the Coalition on Homelessness told the supervisors in May. To that I say: San Francisco is not a theme park for tourists. If they want a squeaky-clean world, they should go to Six Flags and pay for the privilege. Tourists who cant get by someone on the sidewalk, she continued, need to develop some spine and say excuse me.  (Those on the sidewalk cant be expected to say excuse me for blocking everyone else.)

Such cluelessness about the challenges of creating a business and staying afloat is typical of advocates everywhere, as is the aristocratic assumption that San Franciscans will always enjoy an endless supply of tourist dollars, no matter the street conditions. What makes San Francisco unique is that so many of its elected officials have just as limited an understanding of civil society. And no one embodies this contempt for the private sector more than supervisor Chris Daly, a youthful-looking former activist now representing the Tenderloin.

Dalys signature blend of pomposity and childishness was on full display in the May hearing on the sit-lie law, during which he condescended to an assistant chief of police, the mayors public-safety advisor, a small-business owner, and the Chamber of Commerce. He fulfilled the spirit, if not the letter, of his January pledge to use the f-word at every board meeting, a tradition for which he had already laid ample groundwork during past foulmouthed public tantrums. You can sugarcoat shit, but that doesnt make it ice cream, he said, in reference to the proposed law. But his most distinguishing touch was to see the law as all about himself and his fellow progressives. In Dalys fantasy narrative, the bills real purpose was to unseat the boards progressive bloc by creating a wedge issue that would mobilize moderate and conservative voters in the November election. The desire of residents and proprietors across the city for passable, open public spaces, in Dalys view, was a front orchestrated by the nefarious Chamber of Commerce. Maintaining this story line, for which no shred of evidence exists, required Daly to dismiss the testimony of mothers worried about walking their children to school and of struggling managers who told of losing customers unwilling to navigate the human mess in front of their stores.

The unexpected twists and turns of Dalys monologues, not to mention their length, may put a listener in mind of a certain obsolete Caribbean dictator. In the middle of his opening harangue against the sit-lie law, he interjected, for no apparent reason: My name is Chris Daly. Im a homeless advocate. Having caught everyones attention with this oddly timed piece of information, he went on: I was elected ten years ago talking about affordable housing and Im still talking about it. Were lying if we say that measures like this will get us there. We need radical changes in budget priorities. . . . We need to move money from the sacred cows of fire and police to housing and special needs.

Leaving aside the eternal irrelevance of affordable housing to the Haight gutter punks, the notion that San Francisco has been stiffing welfare spending in favor of fire and police is ludicrous. In the 2009 fiscal year, the city spent $175 million on homelessness, compared with a $442 million police budget. Thats $26,865 in services for each of the citys 6,514 homeless persons, the majority of whom are housed in city-subsidized lodgings, compared with $52 per San Franciscan on police protection. (Including such indirect services for the homeless as paramedic calls and psychiatric services for inmates would bring the per-capita rate much higher.) The rest of San Franciscos massive social-services spending, including health care and welfare, was nearly $3 billion in 2009, compared with a combined police and fire budget of $720 million. (The fire department could, in any case, be considered part of the citys service empire, since most of its runs are for non-fire-related emergency services, often for passed-out vagrants.)

The weirdest argument against the sit-lie law marshaled by Daly and his allies at the May supervisors meeting was that the new measure was not even necessary, since the police already had the legal authority to move people along who were sitting on the sidewalk. Why the police would go to the trouble of seeking a new ordinance when they could just use an existing one was never explainednor was the incongruity of the progressives arguing for the existence and use of a power that they fiercely oppose.

At issue in the supervisors odd claim is the requirement of a civilian complainant under the existing law. Police officials and city attorneys testified that under the current ordinance, judges would not entertain a prosecution unless a civilian victim of sidewalk obstruction had done the unlikely and come forward. (And as Santa Cruzs mayor had testified in the supervisors earlier meeting, quality-of-life laws requiring third-party complainants are completely ineffective.) Daly and fellow supervisors David Campos and Ross Mirkarimi, however, hammered city witnesses on the fact that the current sidewalk obstruction law does not explicitly state that a civilian victim and complainant is needed. True, but the courts have inferred that requirement in interpreting the statuteand judicial practice is just as controlling an authority.

The progressives obsessive statutory nit-picking deflects attention from certain key but unstated facts. First, the boards leftists seem not to understandor else simply rejectthe concept of public order. Campos badgered an assistant police chief about his statement that the sit-lie laws purpose was to protect neighborhood safety and vitality. Such an idea apparently flummoxed Campos: What exactly do you mean by neighborhood vitality? What conduct hurts it? he asked. One trip to the Haight should be enough to answer that question. Campos then took up the hairsplitting strategy: Activities when you are standing up can also hurt neighborhood vitality. So what is the conduct you are trying to stop? The fact that a law does not target all negative behavior does not mean that stopping some negative behavior is illegitimate. San Francisco does not hesitate to ban discrimination against gays just because other groups might independently face discrimination.

Second, the progressives reject Broken Windows theorythe idea that an environment where low-level offenses are pervasive is likely to breed higher-level offensesnotwithstanding the universal experience of law enforcement officials that allowing people to flout public norms and to take over public space all day, often drinking, leads to more serious crimes.

The supervisors voted in June against the sit-lie law eight to three, though the public had backed it by a 71 to 24 percent margin in an earlier 2010 poll. (In the Haight itself, support for the law, though strong, is not unanimous: one merchant has called for a boycott of businesses that endorse the measure, which he sees as the advance wedge of gentrification.) The supervisors vote reflects both a recent change and longer-term trends in San Franciscos politics and culture.

Since 2000, San Francisco has held district elections for supervisors, replacing the traditional citywide franchise. It now takes fewer votes and a far smaller campaign chest to get elected; local nonprofit social-services groups and unions man get-out-the-vote drives that easily push their preferred candidates into city hall. The resulting boards have made even their liberal 1990s predecessors look moderate (though those earlier boards were as much a product of Mayor Willie Browns vacancy appointments as they were of at-large elections). Developers bleed money to non-profits of the supervisors choosing, according to the San Francisco Weekly. During budget negotiations in 2009, the board used a barely legal maneuver to restore cut funds to specific social-services groups in their districts, including one that provided a festive Ladies Night for prostitutes. This action violated the intent of a law that the supervisors fund only government departments, not specific nonprofit grantees, reported the San Francisco Public Press.

The tight alliance between politicians and service providers within Homelessness, Inc. has not gone unnoticed by city residents. At the May hearing on the sit-lie law, a petite young black woman mocked the progressives claim that they were fighting for the [homeless] population. You people in the social-service mafia make money off this population, she retorted, and then go home to neighborhoods where people are not loitering, puking, and pissing outside your door 24 hours a day. We dont need you here; we need accountability for low-income residents who go to work and dont do drugs 24/7.

But the supervisors contempt for the economic engine that makes government social-services spending possible also stems from changes in the citys political culture that long predate district elections. Hard as it is to believe today, San Francisco once understood that entrepreneurial energy was essential to urban vitality. After World War II, San Francisco aspired to rival Manhattan as a world-class center of finance and commerce, positioning itself as the gateway city to the Pacific Rim. A pro-growth coalition of mayors, downtown business leaders, and unions launched transportation and other development projects to create the conditions for economic opportunity, writes San Francisco State University professor Richard DeLeon in Left Coast City. Voters consistently defeated antidevelopment measures. In the late 1970s, refugees from New Yorks blackouts, crime, and budgetary disasters found in Frisco a city that still knew how, in William Howard Tafts phrase.

By the mid-1980s, however, the pro-growth coalition had collapsed. The fatal pressures upon it included the loss of such longtime city fathers as industrialist J. D. Zellerbach and banker Charles Blyth, a backlash against the perceived overbuilding of downtown, and the emergence of a new white-collar population with the affluence to value lifestyle over economic growth, DeLeon observes. The passage in 1986 of the most restrictive antigrowth measure of any big city in the country marked the citys transformation. Henceforth, San Francisco would be characterized by a progressivism concerned with consumption more than production [and] residence more than workplace, writes DeLeonone that has inured itself to threats of private-sector disinvestment. The citys political elites also developed a taste for identity politics and useless symbolic gestures, especially regarding foreign policy. Public order and economic viability took a backseat to the rapid expansion of municipal unions and the government-subsidized social-services sector.

The fate of various sit-lie ordinances over the years limns San Franciscos political evolution. In 1968, at hippie high tide, a unanimous board of supervisors passed a law banning sitting and lying on city streets and sidewalks. The board had no trouble understanding the Haight-Ashbury Merchants and Improvement Associations plea that its time that our sidewalks were free to walk again.

By 1994, however, Mayor Frank Jordan could not get a narrower sit-lie law past the board of supervisors or the voters (the ACLU had long since eviscerated the 1968 ordinance in the courts). Though the city was already spending $50 million on homeless services and $55 million on welfare for able-bodied single adults (many of whom chose to live on the street and spend their generous checks on drugs and booze rather than rent), the supervisors embraced the line that the proposed sit-lie law criminalized poverty. Homelessness, Inc. was already a key player in San Francisco politics. After the supervisors rejected the sit-lie law, Jordan placed it on the ballot. In an election year of resurgent leftism that saw the loss of San Franciscos last Republican supervisor, voters were nevertheless much more narrowly divided on the measure than the board was, rejecting it by barely a 2 percent margin.

Between 1994 and today, little permanent progress has been made in the public discourse regarding civil order. San Francisco seems doomed to repeat a one-step-forward-two-steps-back approach to the maintenance of safe and civil streets. Jordan, a former San Francisco police chief, had been elected in 1991 to clean up the city from the chaos tolerated by Mayor Art Agnos, a social worker and well-connected state assemblyman. Jordan crafted thoughtful initiatives that balanced assistance to vagrants with misdemeanor enforcement, an approach he dubbed Matrix (see San Francisco Gets Tough with the Homeless, Autumn 1994).

The homelessness industry found a ready champion against Jordan in former California assembly speaker Willie Brown, one of the most charismatic and powerful politicians in recent California history. Brown promised that he would end Matrix if elected mayor, and upon taking office in 1996, he proved true to his word. Embracing the advocates mantra that homelessness was a housing and welfare problem, Brown vowed to end it within 100 days. Instead, within less than a year, he had declared the problem unsolvable. When I came into office I assumed that making services available would and could cause a reversal of the situation for most people on the streets, Brown said. I was wrong. . . . There are some people who just dont want to live inside, and theres nothing you can do with them. They are the hobos of the world. They dont want help. As for Homelessness, Inc., Brown said that he would henceforth ignore the advocates. They have their own political agenda, he observed. They dont know whats going on in the streets.

Throughout his eight years as mayor, Brown sporadically revived Jordans quality-of-life law enforcement strategies, usually sub rosa, when the public clamor against needle-infested parkland or refuse-infested plazas grew too loud. The advocates denounced each short-lived initiative as the product of downtown business interests and lambasted Brown as a traitor. A 1996 effort in the Haight to reduce its vagrant youth population collapsed when the youth turned down the offered housing and jobs and the district attorney decided that he couldnt be bothered to prosecute the public-order arrests that the police were bringing in.

From the early 1990s to 2002, spending on vagrancy rose 50 percent, with nothing to show for it. Voters in 2002 rated homelessness as the citys most pressing problem, as they had for years and would continue to do throughout the decade. In another deja-vu moment, then-supervisor Gavin Newsom, a restaurateur and Brown protege, resuscitated one of Jordans most innovative ideas: requiring single, able-bodied welfare recipients to use part of their welfare check for housing. Newsom took his proposed Care Not Cash program directly to the public, which voted it in by 60 percent in 2002. The usual machinations followed: a judge overturned the law, and the board then passed a rival, less demanding, measure sponsored by Chris Daly.

Newsoms revenge was to ride Care Not Cash into the mayors office, winning the election in 2003 on his support for tough love. In 2004, the California Supreme Court reinstated Care Not Cash; since then, the number of homeless adults collecting cash welfare has dropped 86 percent. Newsoms reprise of the Jordan playbook continued with a ballot initiative to counter aggressive panhandling (since emasculated by the pro bono defense bar) and, after goading, support for the sit-lie law. Late last year, a Haight activist fighting for the Civil Sidewalks ordinance observed sarcastically to a local TV reporter that there had been more sightings of the late Jerry Garcia in the Haight than of Newsom, who lives on the tony hilltop a few blocks above the besieged street. Soon thereafter, Newsom publicly acknowledged the Haight disorder and embraced the Civil Sidewalks ordinance.

Perhaps the lock of Homelessness, Inc. on San Franciscos politics will be broken in November, when citizens will vote on the sit-lie law in a referendum. It is auspicious that the current push for civil sidewalks is coming from the Haight, long viewed as the epicenter of San Franciscos progressive movement. In 1987, antidevelopment radicals there burned down a Thrifty drugstore during construction. Mayor Agnos then refused to meet with Thriftys president, a moment that epitomized the citys indifference to private enterprise and even the rule of law when it conflicted with the higher prerogatives of progressive political correctness. Now a majority of Haight residents are clamoring for surcease from the intimidation and lawlessness that Homelessness, Inc. declares is the price that a city must pay until every last tax dollar is turned over to itself.

Of course, a victory for the Civil Sidewalks law at the ballot box will not end the matter. San Franciscans have been voting for sensible order-maintenance policies for decades, only to see the supervisors and the courts thwart their will. But there are other hopeful signs of a possible sea change in the citys most counterproductive tendencies. The public defender, unabashedly left-wing on many matters, has put a wide-ranging public-pension-reform measure on the November ballot; a moderate supervisor has sponsored another ballot initiative to eliminate the most egregious transit-union protections. Both measures gleaned a record-breaking number of qualifying signatures, despite the citys traditional inclination to rubber-stamp the demands of municipal-service unions. However, if Newsoms current bid for California lieutenant governor is successful, which would allow the supervisors to appoint his replacement, all bets regarding the implementation of the sit-lie law are off.

Not relying on their possible king-making power, the progressives are fighting back against the sit-lie law at the ballot box. Supervisor Mirkarimi, who represents the Haight, has authored an initiative requiring the police department to engage in community policingspecifically, foot patrolsin an effort to draw votes from the sit-lie measure. Mirkarimi, who has pushed foot patrols for years as a foil to what he disparagingly calls L.A.-style policing, claims that mandating more cops on the beat will resolve whatever disorder problems the Haight may face, thus obviating the need for an allegedly rights-trampling measure like the sit-lie law. If the intention behind Mirkarimis measure was not clear enough, board of supervisors president David Chiu has added an amendment to it, holding that if the foot-patrol initiative wins with a larger majority than the sit-lie law, out goes the sit-lie law.

The idea that the supervisors have the expertise to dictate police deployment and strategy is laughable, as police chief George Gascon has said. It is also dangerous, since Mirkarimis foot-patrol requirement could interfere with the departments ability to deploy officers to the citys highest-crime areas, even as Gascons data-driven policingL.A.-style policing, in factis just kicking in. But the foot-patrol measure also fails as an alternative to the sit-lie law, since officers walking the beat lack the authority to do anything about the disorder they confront, absent a cooperating victim.

San Franciscos magical topography has allowed it to indulge in antiurban policies for decades. Even as sector after sector of its economic base has peeled off under the pressure of high taxes, ignorant regulations, and government-inflated housing costs, tourists have kept pumping billions into the citys coffers. Homelessness, Inc. could disparage these visitors, as well as the workers and entrepreneurs who tried to meet their needs, confident that the bay, the islands, the light, and the citys unique architecture would keep the tourist tax dollars$21.5 million a day in 2009pouring down.

Such self-indulgence is particularly foolish in a recession. But the sit-lie law is about more than business viability, however important such viability is to a citys lifeblood and energy. It is also about the most basic rules of civilized society, which hold that public spaces should be shared by the public, not monopolized by the disorderly few.

Top Photo: Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesIn November, New York City voters took to the polls and approved three ballot initiatives that changed the city charter. The changes came about as a result of a charter revision commission created by Mayor Bill de Blasio and were ultimately relatively minor.

But that was last year. This year, another charter revision commission created by the New York City Council is well under way and has big plans in store. Council Speaker Corey Johnson said last year that this commission would overhaul the charter. The last time such major changes went through was in 1989, when voters eliminated the Board of Estimates and the position of City Council president, and created the offices of council speaker and public advocate.

If the 2019 Charter Revision Commission is anything like the 1989 one, voters can expect some consequential proposals to decide on come November. So heres what has been going on with the commission so far.

Who who will develop proposed changes to the city charter?

The commission is made up of 15 people, two more than the mayors commission last year. Johnson appointed four of them, de Blasio appointed another four and the city comptroller, the public advocate and each borough president appointed one apiece. This also differs from de Blasios commission, in which he appointed every member.

Does that mean that the commission this year will be more independent?

Technically, all charter revision commissions are independent entities that can review the entire document and have the ability to propose any change they deem necessary to the charter, no matter how small or how sweeping. Historically though, when a mayor has convened a commission, he has done so with a fairly narrow purpose in mind and his commission complies with that mandate. De Blasios commission focused primarily on campaign finance and voter participation. The City Councils commission, created through legislation championed by then-Public Advocate Letitia James, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Johnson, does not have a specific mandate and has been tasked with reviewing the entire charter to make significant changes to city governance. Theoretically, including appointees from multiple offices across city government could minimize the influence any one interest could have on what the commission chooses to look at.

When will I know what these proposals are?

The City Councils commission began its work in September with a series of public hearings across the five boroughs to allow members of the public to make recommendations and proposals about what they think the commission should look out. Those hearings came to a close in January, when the commission issued its list of focus areas based in part on public input. In February, a series of expert forums got underway to gain additional insight about the focus areas. So far, the commission has heard testimony on elections, police accountability, finance, governance/finance and governance. The final two forums will be on land use and governance/land use.

In April, the commission is scheduled to release its preliminary ballot proposals and begin another series of public hearings across the city for input on the specific proposals made. In June, the commission will draft final proposals based on the public feedback, and then submit them to the City Clerk in July. That gives the commission a few months to educate voters on what they will vote on ahead of the November general election.

What are the focus areas that the commission decided on?

The topics can be split into four broad categories: elections, governance, finance and land use. Each topic contains a variety of different areas of examination or potential proposal areas to consider.

On the topic of elections, the commission identified three specific aspects to follow up on: instant runoff or ranked choice voting, the redistricting process and campaign finance  including both public campaign financing and the structure of the city Board of Elections.

Governance has several more areas of interest. Perhaps one of the hottest topics under this category is the office of the public advocate. The commission will examine the office and consider proposals to modify its powers and responsibilities, whether that means scrapping the office or expanding its powers. Police accountability also falls under this category, including an examination of the Civilian Complaint Review Board and how police discipline is handled. Other issues in the governance category include corruption and conflicts of interest, a review of the citys Conflicts of Interest Board, the powers of borough presidents and exploring the creation of a chief diversity officer in the office of the mayor and within every city agency.

The city budget has several subsections within the finance category, including timing, structure and authority of the City Council in terms of appropriations. Other areas of interest within finance include the creation of independent budgets for certain offices, like the public advocate, policy relating to procurement and contracting and decision-making regarding investments in the citys public pension.

Last but certainly not least is land use. The largest aspect of this section relates to the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP, a perennial issue for charter revision commissions. The mayors commission heard testimony on the process last year, but ultimately did create any proposals. Within the ULURP process, the commission will examine the creation of a pre-ULURP procedure to get more stakeholder input, allowing a borough president to submit his or her own application alongside those originating from the city, review the timeline and possibly modify how ULURP applications are changed by the City Council. Other potential proposals include the creation of citywide comprehensive planning for land use projects, reviewing franchising in the city in relation to the Franchise and Concession Review Committee and examining the Landmark Preservation Commission, including possibly paying members.OHCHR Moldova: Apel deschis pentru aplicatii din partea OSC-urilor pentru a beneficia de suport in desfasurarea activitatilor de advocacy la nivel international in contextul celui de-al treilea ciclu de EPU a R. MoldovaIn Ukraine, separatists are holding Stanislav Aseyev, a reporter from the Donbas region, on the eastern border with Russia. In Turkmenistan, Saparmamed Nepeskuliev, a reporter for the same news organization, is under constant surveillance by police. Last year, another of their distant colleagues, Abadullah Hananzai, was killed by a suicide bomb as he raced to film the carnage of a suicide bomb blast in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The three belong to a corps of 700 foreign reporters that the US government pays to chronicle war, corruption, and politics in 22 countries for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Since its reconfiguration after Cold War, RFE/RL, as its known, has attempted to practice the values and standards of good journalism where the press is under threat.

RELATED: Ukrainian reporter held captive by Russia-backed separatists

When RFE/RLs reporters are imprisoned, it campaigns for their release. When reporters are banned from a country altogether, RFE/RL journalists go undercover and underground. When they are killed, the outlet pays to replace them. When they are harassed and threatened, US ambassadors or State Department officials sometime offer public support and criticize the host country, even if it is otherwise a US ally. Some exiled journalists work at its airy Prague headquarters where a daily story conference resembles a United Nations meeting: 26 languages represented around one large, crowded table.

RFE/RL, now a multi-platform online media outlet, is part of a constellation of US-funded programs that include Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti for Cuba, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. While its little known in the US, where, until 2013, its distribution was banned, it reaches a global audience of 34 million a week. Congress has supported the cause: over six years, starting in 2012, its budget has increased by 30 percent to $124 million.

RFE/RLs growth and tenacity is a bit of good news amid a global resurgence in censorship and President Donald Trumps ongoing campaign against journalists as the enemy of the people. It is the top-notch standard for civilized journalism in countries where free media are under pressure or almost non-existent, Jakub Janda, executive director of European Values, a think tank in the Czech Republic, says. It does not have huge audience given its budget, he adds, but its main role is to show people who have not seen good journalism what it looks likeand in that, it succeeds.

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In Jamal Khashoggis last Washington Post piece before his murder, he wrote that the Arab world needed an outlet like RFE/RL.The US funds the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, but his point was the region needs something even stronger. The Arab world is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power, he argued. During the Cold War, Radio Free Europe, which grew over the years into a critical institution, played an important role in fostering and sustaining the hope of freedom. Arabs need something similar.

RFE/RL stations are also Washingtons open, public way to compete with Russian state-controlled media and disinformation. (A marked change from before 1971, when the program was operated in part by the Central Intelligence Agency.)

Current Time, a Russian-language program co-produced with the Voice of America, now operates 24/7 despite a lack of access to government-controlled airwaves and restrictions that block it from state-funded news aggregators. RFE/RLs Moscow bureau is the largest it has ever been with 50 staff and 50 freelancers, and another 50 journalists around the country. And last month, after more than a decade, RFE/RL resumed operations in Bulgaria and Romania.

ICYMI: A journalists resurrection poses threat to public trust

The reporters affiliation with the United States, however, offers them little protection. In 2018 alone, 22 RFE/RL journalists were either killed, injured, assaulted, arrested, imprisoned, or temporarily detained for their work. Three of them died.

Editors and reporters have learned to take special precautions to avoid detection under the most hostile governments. Farruh Yusupov, director of RFE/RLs Turkmen service, directs an undercover network of reporters in Turkmenistan from the outlets headquarters in Prague.

Only I know their names, and one other person knows some of them, Yusupov says. Correspondents rely on him for fact-checking help, communicating through encrypted networks and piecing together bits of information from several constrained journalists. They will get in touch with me, send me the information, and Ill check it with other sources from different localities.

Recently, an undercover correspondent recorded and sent out a video showing hundreds of Turkmen villagers lining up for bread. Authorities were unable to identify the videographer but discovered where the video was taken and raided the village in the middle of the night, arresting 50 people. The villagers were released after questioning, but security around the area remained high for several days as the search continued. The videographer wasnt caught.

In Ukraine, where a flourishing media exists, the government has tried to silence one of RFE/RLs star reporters, Natalia Sedletska. Her award-winning reporting has led to government efforts to recover millions of Ukrainian hryvnia in taxpayer money stolen by corrupt officials. She and her colleagues have produced dozens of stories about alleged corruption in President Petro Poroshenkos administration. Sedletska has been the target of death threats and hostile social media campaigns.

In August, Ukraines prosecutor general attempted to seize 17 months of Sedletskas cell phone records, which he said he needed to pursue a leak investigation against the director of the national anti-corruption bureau. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has provisionally upheld Sedletskas appeal against the move. Although its decision is not binding, Ukraine has so far respected its views.

The prosecutor generals move created a dangerous precedent that was not yet in place in Ukraine, Sedletska tells CJR. It showed that the court can disclose the sources of journalists without giving journalists the right to appeal, without giving the opportunity to express arguments in the court session.

Sedletska complained to the European Court of Human Rights, which quickly ruled, in September, that Ukraine should hold off accessing her records for a month. In October, it decided to maintain the decision until further notice.

Ukraine has abided by the ECHR rulings. But Sedletska believes the damage is done. Sources and whistleblowers saw that having trusted contacts with journalists is now dangerous because journalists will not be able to meet their obligations and protect the source, she says.

Other US allies take an even dimmer view of RFE/RL than Poroshenko does. Pakistans intelligence service closed RFE/RLs Islamabad office in 2018, saying that it was against the interests of Pakistan. Azerbaijan closed the Baku bureau after its pieces alleged corruption by the ruling Aliyev family, and earned worldwide attention. (Reporting on both those countries continues from Prague.)

In Afghanistan, where ISIS and the Taliban have destroyed much of the media infrastructure and killed or driven off a new reporting cadre built up in the country in recent years, RFE/RLs Radio Azadi is still on 12 hours a day. But the dangers of reporting remain. In early February, for instance, RFE/RL covered the story of gunmen shooting two reporters dead in the studios of Radio Hamsada, in the provincial northeast.

RFE/RLs editorial content is protected from US government interference by federal law. Instead, an independent body, the US Agency for Global Media (formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors) oversees its operations. The agency is run by John Lansing. Were confronting state-sponsored lying directly, he said at the unveiling of the agencys new name and logo this fall. Hopefully we can push the tide of authoritarianism back.

Trump has nominated Michael Pack to be the new CEO of USAGM. A former executive at the former US Information Agency, which the BBG absorbed in 1999, he is also the former president of the conservative Claremont Institute. His confirmation sits in Congressional limbo. Pack has made documentaries for PBS and, recently, two films with Steve Bannon, Trumps former strategist and the one-time head of Breitbart. Critics worry about his plans.

Just over a year before his nomination, Pack described a desire to see right-wing politics represented in nonfiction filmmaking in The Federalist, a far-right publication. Documentaries have been the almost exclusive playground of the Left, he wrote. He criticized films decrying global warming, attacking big agriculture, mocking gun ownership, denouncing George W. Bushs wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Pack declined to comment for this story.)

Whatever the politics in Washington, Temeem Akhgar, a reporter at Radio Azadi in Kabul, is no less determined to do his work. We call ourselves soldiers with pen, Akhgar, who was on duty the day his colleague Hananzai was killed, says. We never deny going out on assignment, he adds. But when he and his cohort go to work, We do kiss our kids, say our last goodbye, leave our bank credit cards at home, and share the code with our family members that if we do not return. He continues, We are scared, our hearts do hesitate to go out, but we have no other option. This is the field we choose.

ICYMI: I wrote a story that became a legend. Then I discovered it wasnt true.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Dana Priest, Nicole Kirkner, Rae Wee, and Kerrigan Stern are the authors of this article. Priest is a Washington Post reporter and the John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland. Kirkner, Wee and Stern are her students, as are contributors Jordan Fox and Cody Bradshaw.The mid-tier gold miners' stocks have been rallying on balance in recent months, carving a solid young upleg. They've mostly finished reporting their latest fourth-quarter results, revealing how they are faring fundamentally. Their operating and financial performance is very important for investors, as the mid-tier realm is where most of the gold-stock sector's gains accrue. They fared really well in a challenging quarter.

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 global nature of the gold-mining industry complicates efforts to gather this all-important fundamental data. Many mid-tier gold miners trade in Australia, South Africa, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other countries with quite-different reporting requirements. These include half-year reporting rather than quarterly, long 90-day filing deadlines after year-ends, and dissimilar presentations of operating and financial results.

The definitive list of mid-tier gold miners to analyze comes from the GDXJ VanEck Vectors Junior Gold Miners ETF. Despite its misleading name, GDXJ is largely dominated by mid-tier gold miners and not juniors. GDXJ is the world's second-largest gold-stock ETF, with $4.1b of net assets this week. That is only behind its big-brother GDX VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF that includes the major gold miners.

Major gold miners are those that produce over 1m ounces of gold annually. The mid-tier gold miners are smaller, producing between 300k to 1m ounces each year. Below 300k is the junior realm. Translated into quarterly terms, majors mine 250k+ ounces, mid-tiers 75k to 250k, and juniors less than 75k. GDXJ was originally launched as a real junior-gold-stock ETF as its name implies, but it was forced to change its mission.

Gold stocks soared in price and popularity in the first half of 2016, ignited by a new bull market in gold. The metal itself awoke from deep secular lows and surged 29.9% higher in just 6.7 months. GDXJ and GDX skyrocketed 202.5% and 151.2% higher in roughly that same span, greatly leveraging gold's gains. As capital flooded into GDXJ to own junior gold stocks, this ETF risked running afoul of Canadian securities laws.

Canada is the center of the junior-gold universe, where most juniors trade. Once any investor including an ETF buys up a 20%+ stake in a Canadian stock, it is legally deemed a takeover offer. This may have been relevant to a single corporate buyer amassing 20%+, but GDXJ's legions of investors certainly weren't trying to take over small gold miners. GDXJ diversified away from juniors to comply with that archaic rule.

Smaller juniors by market capitalization were abandoned entirely, cutting them off from the sizable flows of ETF capital. Larger juniors were kept, but with their weightings within GDXJ greatly demoted. Most of its ranks were filled with mid-tier gold miners, as well as a handful of smaller majors. That was frustrating, but ultimately beneficial. Mid-tier gold miners are in the sweet spot for stock-price-appreciation potential!

Major gold miners are increasingly struggling with declining production, they can't find or buy enough new gold to offset their depletion. And the stock-price inertia from their large market capitalizations is hard to overcome. The mid-tiers can and are boosting their gold output, fueling big growth in operating cash flows and profitability. With much-lower market caps, capital inflows drive their stock prices higher much faster.

Every quarter I dive into the latest results from the top 34 GDXJ components. That's simply an arbitrary number that fits neatly into the tables below, but a commanding sample. These companies represented 82.1% of GDXJ's total weighting this week, even though it contained a whopping 71 stocks! 6 of the top 34 were majors mining 250k+ ounces, 17 mid-tiers at 75k to 250k, 8 "juniors" under 75k, and 3 explorers with zero.

These majors accounted for 19.8% of GDXJ's total weighting, and really have no place in a "Junior Gold Miners ETF" when they could instead be exclusively in GDX. These mid-tiers weighed in at 44.3% of GDXJ. The "juniors" among the top 34 represented just 14.8% of GDXJ's total. But only 4 of them at a mere 6.1% of GDXJ are true junior golds, meaning they derive over half their revenues from actually mining gold.

The rest are primary silver miners, gold-royalty companies, and gold streamers. GDXJ is overwhelmingly a mid-tier gold miners ETF, with sizable small-major exposure. Investors and speculators need to realize it is not a junior-gold investment vehicle as advertised. GDXJ also has major overlap with GDX. Fully 28 of these top 34 GDXJ gold miners are included in GDX too, with 23 of them also among GDX's top 34 stocks.

The GDXJ top 34 accounting for 82.1% of its total weighting also represent 36.6% of GDX's own total weighting! The GDXJ top 34 clustered between the 11th- to 40th-highest weightings in GDX. Thus over 4/5thsof GDXJ is made up by almost 3/8ths of GDX. But GDXJ is far superior, excluding the large gold majors struggling with production growth. GDXJ gives much-higher weightings to better mid-tier miners.

The average Q4'18 gold production among GDXJ's top 34 was 164k ounces, just over half as bigas the GDX top 34's 302k average. Despite these two ETFs' extensive common holdings, GDXJ is increasingly outperforming GDX. GDXJ holds many of the world's best mid-tier gold miners with big upside potential as gold's own bull gradually powers higher. Thus it is important to analyze GDXJ miners' latest results.

So after every quarterly earnings season I wade through all available operational and financial results and dump key data into a big spreadsheet for analysis. Some highlights make it into these tables. Any blank fields mean a company hadn't reported that data as of this Wednesday. The first couple columns show each GDXJ component's symbol and weighting within this ETF as of this week. Not all are US symbols.

19 of the GDXJ top 34 primarily trade in the US, 5 in Australia, 8 in Canada, and 2 in the UK. So some symbols are listings from companies' main foreign stock exchanges. That's followed by each gold miner's Q4'18 production in ounces, which is mostly in pure-gold terms excluding byproducts often found in gold ore like silver and base metals. 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. In cases where foreign GDXJ components only released half-year data, I used that and split it in half where appropriate. That offers a decent approximation of Q4'18 results.

Symbols highlighted in light blue newly climbed into the ranks of GDXJ's top 34 over this past year. And symbols highlighted in yellow show the rare GDXJ-top-34 components that aren't also in GDX. If both conditions are true blue-yellow checkerboarding is used. Finally production bold-faced in blue shows the handful of junior gold miners in GDXJ's higher ranks, under 75k ounces quarterly with over half of sales from gold.

This whole dataset together compared with past quarters offers a fantastic high-level read on how mid-tier gold miners as an industry are faring fundamentally. While Q4'18 proved challenging with lower average gold prices, the GDXJ miners generally weathered it well. These elite mid-tier miners did much better last quarter than the major-dominated GDX elites. Their profits and stock prices are ready to soar with higher gold.

GDXJ's managers have continued to fine-tune its ranks over this past year, making some good changes. For some inexplicable reason, one of the world's largest gold miners AngloGold Ashanti was one of this ETF's top holdings as discussed last quarter. AU was finally kicked out and replaced with a smaller major gold miner Kinross Gold and a mid-tier Buenaventura. Together they now account for 11.7% of GDXJ's weighting.

Reshuffling at the top makes year-over-year changes less comparable, particularly given KGC's larger size relative to most of the rest of the GDXJ top 34. Neither it nor BVN were included in GDXJ a year ago, and are new additions since Q3'18 results. Both are sizable GDX components, probably added to GDXJ to keep the weightings down in its smaller Canadian components. 4 other stocks climbed into the top 34.

Torex, Alacer, Hochschild, and Seabridge were already in GDXJ a year ago but weighted below the top 34. GDXJ is largely-but-not-entirely market-cap weighted, so it's normal for components to rise into or fall out of the top 34 as their stock prices move higher or lower. All the following comparisons between Q4'18 and Q4'17 are across the two slightly-different GDXJ-top-34 sets, not the exact companies shown above.

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. The top 34 GDXJ gold miners excelled in that department, growing their aggregate output by a big 12.8% YoY to 5.1m ounces! That's really impressive, trouncing both the major gold miners dominating GDX as well as the entire world's gold-mining industry.

Last week I analyzed the GDX majors' Q4'18 results, which revealed they are still struggling with serious challenges. The GDX top 34's total production fell 3.9% YoY when adjusted for a mega-merger. That was worse than total global output slumping 0.9% YoY according to the World Gold Council. So GDXJ's mostly-mid-tier gold miners really stand out. They are bucking the industry trend with strong production growth.

Again GDXJ's top 34 components start at the 11th-highest weighting within GDX. Most of the production problems occurred above that threshold, in GDX's top 10 components which include the world's largest major gold miners. Their immense average production of 630k ounces in Q4'18 was nearly 4x the 164k average among GDXJ's top 34! Those GDX top 10 also accounted for a dominant 59.1% of its total weighting.

GDXJ excluding these depleting giantsand reallocating their heavy weightings across smaller majors and mid-tier gold miners makes all the difference. The big majors' waning production and large market caps act as an anchor retarding GDX's upside. GDXJ doesn't share that burden, which helped its top 34 show such strong production growth. There's no reason to own the large majors with their serious challenges.

Also interesting on the GDXJ production front last quarter was silver. This "Junior Gold Miners ETF" also includes major silver miners, both primary and byproduct ones. The GDXJ top 34's silver mined rocketed 53.8% higher YoY to 31.2m ounces! For comparison the GDX top 34's total reported output of 28.8m ounces actually slumped 1.5% YoY. The smaller GDXJ mid-tiers are way better than majors at growing their outputs.

The mid-tier gold miners continue to prove all-important production growth is doable off smaller bases. With a handful of mines or less to operate, mid-tiers can focus on expanding them or building a new mine to boost their output beyond depletion. But the majors are increasingly failing to do this with the super-high production bases they operate at. As long as the majors are struggling, it's prudent to avoid them.

GDXJ investors would be better served if this ETF contained no major gold miners producing over 250k ounces a quarter on average. They still command nearly 1/5th of its weighting, which could be far better reallocated in mid-tiers and juniors. If VanEck kept the major gold miners in GDX where they should be, it could give GDXJ much-better upside potential. That would make this ETF more popular and successful.

In gold mining, production and costs are generally inversely related. Gold-mining costs are largely fixed quarter after quarter, with actual mining requiring about the same levels of infrastructure, equipment, and employees. So the higher production, the more ounces to spread mining's big fixed costs across. Thus with sharply-higher YoY production in Q4'18, the GDXJ top 34 should've seen proportionally-lower costs.

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-GDXJ-component gold miners that reported cash costs averaged $698 per ounce. That was up a sharp 10.8% YoY, and considerably worse than the GDX top 34's $655 average.

Those were the highest GDXJ cash costs seen since at least Q2'16, when I started this research thread. But even $698 is far lower than prevailing gold prices, showing the mid-tier gold miners face no existential threat. And GDXJ's high cash costs last quarter aren't righteous anyway, as they were skewed higher by an extreme outlier. One of the new GDXJ companies Buenaventura reported crazy cash costs of $1627 per ounce!

Excluding that wild anomaly, the rest of the GDXJ top 34 averaged cash costs of $662 which was right in line with Q3'18's $663. They'd be even lower without Sibanye-Stillwater, a troubled South-African major gold miner that saw cash costs soar 30.1% YoY to an ugly $1167. If that too is excluded the overall average falls to $642. So for the most part the mid-tier gold miners' cash costs remain really low relative to gold.

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 GDXJ top 34 reporting AISCs averaged $932 per ounce in Q4'18, which was also up a sizable 7.1% YoY. That was also barely the highest seen since at least Q2'16, contradicting the big production growth these miners achieved. But once again this was heavily skewed by extreme outliers, including both BVN and SBGL. Hecla also reported a stunning 52.3% YoY surge in its gold AISCs to a nosebleed $1582 per ounce!

Both BVN and SBGL reported sharply-lower YoY production, helping explain their huge cost surges. HL's is more temporary, as it expects 2019 gold AISCs to average a still-high-but-much-lower $1250. Without these abnormal situations, the rest of the GDXJ top 34 averaged excellent AISCs of just $863 per ounce. That would be down 0.8% YoY, and is close to the GDX majors' $837 average also excluding BVN and HL.

Yet even at that skewed artificially-high $932 per ounce, the elite GDXJ gold miners have great potential to enjoy surging profits and hence stock prices. Gold was relatively weak last quarter, averaging $1228 which was 3.8% lower YoY. That implied the mid-tier gold miners as an industry were earning $296 per ounce. That's still a 24% profit margin, proving Q4'18's major GDXJ lows weren't fundamentally righteous.

Gold is faring much better in this almost-over Q1'19, averaging $1303 which is up a big 6.1% quarter-on-quarter. Assuming GDXJ-top-34 AISCs are flat, these elite mid-tier gold miners are earning around $371 per ounce this quarter. That implies enormous 25.3% QoQ profits growth! We won't know for sure until after Q1's earnings season, near mid-May. But the mid-tiers' fundamentals should've greatly improved.

Bigger profits driven by higher gold prices are sure to attract investors back to the still-beaten-down gold-stock sector in a big way. The gold miners will stand out even more with earnings growth expected to be scarce in the general stock markets this year. If gold continues marching higher on balance as it ought to, and GDXJ average AISCs retreat as BVN and HL get anomalous costs under control, GDXJ profits will soar.

The GDXJ top 34's hard accounting results in Q4'18 were mixed, but way better than GDX on all fronts. These elite mid-tier gold miners reported total sales of $7.4b last quarter, up a strong 12.1% YoY. That is right in line with their 12.8% YoY total gold production growth. That huge 53.8% YoY surge in their silver output helped offset the 3.8% YoY decline in average gold prices. The mid-tier gold miners' revenues are strong.

Compare that to the GDX top 34, which saw sales plunge 10.3% YoY in Q4 due to 3.9%-lower merger-adjusted gold output. Those strong GDXJ-top-34 revenues kept operating-cash-flow generation solid, totaling $2.2b which was down 9.2% YoY. That again crushed the majors in the GDX top 34, which saw OCFs plummet 30.4% YoY. The divergence between how mid-tiers and majors are faring these days is gaping.

The elite GDXJ mid-tier gold miners also invested in growing their production, so their collective total cash on hand slid 14.3% YoY to $5.9b. The GDX majors saw a similar 14.6% YoY decline in their cash, yet they certainly didn't spend enough to offset their depleting mines. The only real blemish on the GDXJ top 34's Q4 results came in hard GAAP profits. Their aggregate bottom line collapsed to a $732m loss last quarter!

That was far worse than Q4'17's $26m loss. Much of this was due to big non-cash impairment charges, writedowns of the carrying value of gold mines and deposits due to lower gold prices and forecasts. If gold miners expect lower gold prices going forward, they have to flush the resulting expected economic losses through current-quarter results when those impairments are perceived. That hammered overall results.

Honestly the Q4'18 impairments seemed pretty unnecessary, with average gold prices merely down 3.8% YoY. 2018's full-year average gold price actually rose 0.8% YoY. Major impairments usually happen in years gold plunges sharply, like 2013's brutal 27.9% plummeting. Something like that really changes the economic assumptions underlying gold mines. But gold only slumped 1.6% last year, which is utterly trivial.

Some of the bigger impairment charges came from First Majestic Silver and Osisko Gold, which wrote off $168m and $166m. This primary silver miner and gold-royalty company aren't even mid-tier gold miners. And the perpetually-troubled South African majors Gold Fields and Sibanye-Stillwater which have long tainted GDXJ reported big half-year losses implying $169m and $98m in Q4. These alone total $601m of losses.

That accounted for nearly 5/6ths of the GDXJ top 34's total GAAP losses last quarter. While many of the elite mid-tier gold miners reported small losses, the great majority of the surge in losses came from a handful of stocks. Overall the GDXJ GAAP profits looked relatively decent compared to the majors. GDX's top 34 reported a staggering $6.0b in accounting losses in Q4'18! The mid-tiers are thrashing the majors.

GDXJ's mostly-mid-tier component list of great gold miners is really faring well, especially compared to the struggling large gold miners. Investors looking to ride this gold-stock bull should avoid the world's biggest gold producers and instead deploy their capital in the mid-tier realm. The best gains will be won in individual smaller gold miners with superior fundamentals, plenty of which are included within GDXJ.

Despite being the world's leading gold-stock ETF, GDX needs to be avoided. The major gold miners that dominate its weightings are struggling too much fundamentally, unable to grow their production. Capital will instead flow into the mid-tiers, juniors, and maybe a few smaller majors still able to boost their output and thus earnings going forward. None of this is new, but the major and mid-tier disconnect continues to worsen.

Again back in essentially the first half of 2016, GDXJ skyrocketed 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.

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 74% this week!

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The bottom line is the mid-tier gold miners are thriving fundamentally. They are still rapidly growing their production while majors suffer sharp output declines. The mid-tiers are holding the line on costs, which portends strong leveraged profits growth as gold continues grinding higher on balance. The performance gap between the smaller mid-tier and junior gold miners and larger major ones is big and still mounting.

Investors and speculators really need to pay attention to this intra-sector disconnect. Gold and its miners' stocks should power far higher in coming years as the lofty general stock markets roll over. But the vast majority of the gains will be concentrated in growing gold miners, not shrinking ones. This means the mid-tier and junior gold miners will far outperform the majors. The smaller miners have superior fundamentals.

###As Russian television cameras rolled, one of the last Ukrainian journalists remaining in the separatist-held Donbas region of the country stumbled over his espionage confession, barely five minutes long.

Stanislav Aseyevs employer and colleagues said the confession, filmed by the network Rossiya 24 and published in August, was forced and false.

RELATED: The US still supports journalism around the world, even if Donald Trump doesnt

This was done to illustratethat no Ukrainian journalist would ever want to go to the Donbas and write the truth about what is happening, Denis Kaplunov, a friend of Aseyev, told Capital News Service. They punished Stanislav to warn everyone else.

Aseyev, 29, became a journalist for the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty four years ago. He has been held in a factory converted to a military base and prison by the Russian-backed separatist Donetsk Peoples Republic, or DPR, since his capture from his hometown of Donetsk in June 2017.

Aseyev is one of 42 journalists from RFE/RL to have been killed, injured or imprisoned since 2018, according to the organization. When Stas talked with our editors last time, he had no clue that he was being followed, Maryana Drach, director of RFE/RLs Ukrainian service told CNS.

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RFE/RL was created during the Cold War to counter Soviet propaganda. It is now an independent news agency that reports in 22 countries, most of them former Soviet territories. Though still funded by Congress, US law prohibits control or interference by the US government.

The DPR, along with the Luhansk Peoples Republic, both in the eastern part of the country, broke away from Ukraine in 2014. It is financially and militarily dependent on Russia, which seeks to pull Ukraine away from the west and towards the influence of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said former ambassadors to Ukraine John Herbst and Steven Pifer.

After the separatist takeover, news channels and publications were replaced by Kremlin-supported media, according to Gulnoza Said, Europe and Central Asia program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Journalists who wrote for Ukrainian publications had to decide whether to write investigative stories that would then be twisted into Russian propaganda, Alisa Sopova, a journalist from Donetsk, says. They also worried about how to report the truth while family and friends were caught in the violence. According to the Council of Europe, six journalists have been imprisoned since 2015 on allegations of treason and espionage. Four remain detained.

ICYMI: A journalists resurrection poses threat to public trust

Aseyev choose to stay in Donetsk, where his family lives. He felt an obligation to report what was happening during the media blackout, Drach says.

He was previously an academic, specializing in artificial intelligence. But his journalism has focused on the realities of city life. He has detailed how easy it was to vote multiple times in different districts around Donetsk during primary elections, and revealed that most of those participating in the elections were older retirees. They are a chronicle of Russian aggression in the Donbas, through the eyes of a simple resident, Kaplunov, his friend, says.

On June 2, 2017 at 6:25pm, Aseyev filed his last report for RFE/RLs Donbas Realities, a radio program. He told his mother he would visit her the next day. She didnt hear from him. When she and his friends visited his apartment, they found indications of illegal entry. His computer was missing. They, and his colleagues, feared the worst.

More than a month later, the DPR confirmed in a written statement sent to his mother that they were holding Aseyev. A year later, he surfaced on Rossiya 24 confessing to espionage.

Aseyev is being kept in the Isolyatsiya Art Centre, a former factory, turned art exhibit, turned military base. The only regular visitor he has been allowed is his elderly mother. (Attempts to reach her for this story were unsuccessful.)

On September 14, ambassador Toni Frisch of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe visited Aseyev. Mr. Aseyevconfirmed to us that he has no major complaints about the place of detention, its medical care and nutrition, Matthias Bosshard, a political advisor to Frisch, said.

A former professor of Aseyevs, Ihor Kozlovsky, was detained in 2016 and held in basement prisons throughout Donetsk, although not in the same place as Aseyev. When Kozlovksy was released in 2017, he told the Ukrainian news organization Hromadske that the cells were so small he could barely move, and a hole in the floor served as a toilet. At times he had a sack over his head as interrogators shouted and pointed guns at him.

The US Department of States annual Human Rights Report on Ukraine described an extensive network of prisons in Donetsk. They are located in basements, sewage wells and garages and arent fit even for short-term detention, with reports of shortages of food, water, heat, sanitation, and proper medical care.

Aseyevs colleagues say that the Trilateral Contact Group, an organization which hosts talks with representatives from the separatists, Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany, and which helped free Kozlovsky, is his best chance for freedom.

But nothing has been reportedno sign of a process moving forwardfor several months. Aseyevs colleagues, his friends and family, can only wait.

ICYMI: I wrote a story that became a legend. Then I discovered it wasnt true.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Jordan Fox is a senior multi-platform journalism and Russian language and literature double degree candidate with a military science minor at the University of Maryland. She has written and taken pictures for The Diamondback, the Daily Caller, theHyattsville Life and Times and the newsletters of both the National Defense University of Delaware and UMD Army ROTC.Bear with me as I go full meta. Here in the offices of Columbia Journalism Review, weve been struggling to figure out how to cover the rumored imminent appearance of the Mueller report. Its a quintessential press story, if only because the Mueller report is occupying the mind of every political reporter in the country. As MSNBCs Ari Melber said, were now in The TMZ phase of this probe. The stakes are incredibly high, not just for the integrity of Donald Trump and the office of the presidency, but also for public trust in the electoral system and in how information travels. Besides Trump campaign staffers, others who may be implicated are executives at Facebookfor allowing Russian disinformation to travel on its platformand members of the pressfor hyping a story that, if it doesnt bring down the president, will be one of the biggest flops in history.

But as long as the Mueller report remains something of a black box, theres nothing to look at, nothing to cover. Theres a bunch of tense reporters sitting around, making bets about when the report is going to appear and what indictments it might contain. As per Joe Pompeos survey of newsroom preparations, in Vanity Fair, journalists are reading the tea leaves (or, more likely, putting their feet on their desks and beard stroking), trying to figure out, from what they do knowthe anticlimactic trial of Paul Manafort, the useless testimony of Michael Cohenwhat the future might hold. Some TV crews reportedly had the glamorous job of staking out the home of William Barr, the attorney general, before they were asked to leave.

ICYMI: The Washington Post publishes problematic op-ed

One thing reporters have thought to do with all their free time: write potential drafts of history. They are writing A versions and B versions and C versions. For example, Muellers report will either be made (A) public, (B) kept private, or (C) released with redactions. When the news drops, theyll take the version theyve written that most closely matches reality, and add in the relevant details. This strategy was on display early this month, when the Times accidentally posted two versions of a paragraph about Brexit, each of which described a different result of a vote in the British parliament. The internet was quick to see this as not a flub, but as a display of the world were now living in, where moments like the election of Trump, and the vote for Brexit, and potentially the Mueller report, all seem like such unlikely developments that there must be a parallel universe somewhere, a place where these events are turning out differently.

Lets say, for the sake of argument, that the report shows no evidence that Trump had knowledge of collusion with Russia, even though some of his staffers were meeting with Russians. The American people will feel led on by the presence of the Mueller report at the top of their news feeds: the story was paid as much attention as Watergate, but will it amount to the equivalent of the inquiry into Benghazi? For those who followed Trumps lead in distrusting Muellers team, and in making repeated calls that the investigation is a witch hunt, the blame will not fall on the government but on the media. Trump has been first in leading the charge for blaming the media for focusing too much on Mueller. Too bad a large portion of the Media refuses to report the lies and corruption having to do with the Rigged Witch Hunt  but that is why we call them FAKE NEWS! he tweeted in August. And, on March 18, he primed his Twitter followers for vindication: Wow! A Suffolk/USA Today Poll, just out, states, 50% of Americans AGREE that Robert Muellers investigation is a Witch Hunt. @MSNBC Very few think it is legit! We will soon find out? (That poll is flawed, according to Factcheck.org, because it asked respondents two questions at once.)

If the public groans that the press has paid the Mueller investigation too much attention, our focus as journalists should be on improving our process.

If, in the other extreme, there is significant evidence of collusion, the media wont get a round of applause. More likely, the Mueller report wont pave such a clean path. (History, the British columnist Iain Martin wrote this week of Brexit, is seen as a sweeping movement of powerful forces. In reality, he argued, its made by a series of interrelated cock-ups made by tired leaders in a hurry.) There will be some evidence that Trump knew about meetings with Russians, with the concession that collusion isnt illegal. There will be some indictments, but mostly for lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Where that will leave trust in the media is unclear. Trust in the press and other public institutions has been declining for 40 years, and CJR recently conducted a poll with Reuters and Ipsos about how the public thinks journalism is done; the results show a significant gap in both trust and understanding.

Trump has focused that trust deficit into hostile energy, in the way a magnifying glass focuses a beam of light. In the two years of his administration, the press has come to represent Trumps warring party, even more so than Democrats. The Mueller report will either indict the presidents manipulation of public interest, or the presss. And while disinformation campaigns on social media arent at the center of this particular report, the reputation of the platforms will be colored by Muellers findings.

If the public groans that the press has paid the Mueller investigation too much attention, our focus as journalists should be on improving our process. Are we treating history too much as a set of forking paths, whose future rides on single momentsthe release of a report, the election of a particular person? Are we treating politics too much as theater? Are we too competitive with each other, such that were drafting full stories before news has even broken? Perhaps we need focus more on recording the present than on anticipating possible futures.

ICYMI: I wrote a story that became a legend. Then I discovered it wasnt true.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Nausicaa Renner is digital editor of CJR.The Mueller report is coming. Maybe. Last night, CNN, NBC, and MSNBC were abuzz with speculation that the special counsel has all but wrapped his findings and is getting ready to deliver them to the Justice Department. Across the networks, the words any time now did a lot of work. On Anderson Coopers show, John Deanthe White House counsel who turned on Nixon during Watergate and has, consequently, seen this all beforesaid that he doesnt think Mueller is done yet; the White House, Dean speculated, could have started the rumor that the report is imminent to make the process look drawn out. In the studio, Shimon Prokupecz, CNNs crime and justice reporter, disagreed. I dont think we would be told a report is coming any day now if there were other indictments, he said. Who was right? Who knows?

Over the past few weeks, weve heard, on several occasions, that the Mueller report was about to drop. In its continued absence, reporters on the Mueller beat have been busy interpreting signs. Andrew Weissmann, a top prosecutor for Mueller, is stepping down. What does that mean? Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who was stepping down, is now staying a bit longer. What does that mean? Staff are carrying boxes out of the special counsels office. Yesterdays speculation felt particularly feverish. But its hard to tell, at least from the outside, whether that reflects a change in reality or the bored angst of journalists.

ICYMI: The Washington Post publishes problematic op-ed

Triangulating clues seems necessary because Muellers investigation is hermetically sealed, as The New York Times put it. His office has been remarkably impervious to leaks; when he communicates, its almost always through court documents. In recent weeks, the most useful journalism has stuck to what we know for sure: The Washington Post and the Times, for instance, produced graphics linking important figures to key events. Last month, Chad Day and Eric Tucker of the Associated Press explained that we already know a great deal about Muellers findings; his collected court filings, they wrote, are a report hiding in plain sight. Yesterday, Jonathan Karl, chief White House correspondent at ABC News, struck a similar note, pointing to a potential road map in the form of a letter that Rosenstein sent to the Senate last year. The bottom line, Karl said, do not expect a harsh condemnation of President Donald Trump or any of his associates if they have not been charged with crimes.

Still, major news outlets are ready to move. According to Vanity Fairs Joe Pompeo, the Times, the Post, and The Wall Street Journal already have stories, B-roll, interactives, and graphics in the oven; news trucks have been camped outside the Justice Department; the home of William Barr, the attorney general; and other places. Yesterday, photographers snapped pictures of Mueller driving to his office.

Whatever happens next, and whenever it happens, the clearest truth we have is that the report will not be the end of the Mueller story. Since 2017when the investigation was authorized, to determine whether Russia interfered in the election of Donald Trump to the presidencyits been talked about in dramatic terms: as an epic mystery leading up to a big final reveal. But thats never been realistic. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote last month for The New Yorker, Watergate was like Shakespearea drama that built to a satisfying climax, but Mueller is more like Becketta mystifying tragicomedy that may drift into irresolution. Its a compelling analogy. Then again, who knows? A Hollywood ending could come today.

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Below, more on Mueller:



Other notable stories:

ICYMI: The White House released a troubling video last week

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

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.This week, journalists from dozens of small startups and non-profits joined funders and journalism academics at a small, art-filled boutique hotel in Denver to talk about how to save local journalism. There were drinks and dinners and tasteful snacks during the various sessions designed to encourage brainstorming among the 140 or so attendees, and heated discussions on the rooftop patio by the giant flames of a never-ending fire pit that was embedded in an abstract sculpture, overlooking a museum dedicated to Colorado history.

The conferencecalled the Accelerate: Local Media Summitwas sponsored by Facebook (along with the Knight Foundation and the Online News Association), but the companys name was almost completely absent. It didnt appear on any of the signs, badges, notepads, or pens. Only the tote bags carried a logo that said facebook journalism project in very small type. There were a number of members of the companys journalism and marketing teams on hand, two of whom took to a small stage in one of the meeting rooms to present some research, but for the most part the company kept a low profile. Demure and self-effacing arent adjectives one normally uses to describe Facebook. So why the disappearing act?

The company, to put it mildly, has a conflicted relationship with journalism. This week, when Facebook announced that its news deserts research was unable to find any local news content on Facebook in dozens of regional markets, several journalists pointed out the obvious irony: the lack of local news was, in many ways, Facebooks fault for taking over the market for both advertising and content. Facebook says effort to revive corpse hindered by ten year effort to kill corpse, as one journalist put it on Twitter.

Facebook says effort to revive corpse hindered by ten year effort to kill corpse https://t.co/wUJ0OKqQLr  Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) March 19, 2019

Almost every journalist I spoke with at the conference shared at least some of this cynicism about Facebooks good intentions. While it has tried to convince media companies to use its platform as much as possible, the company also often changes its mind on what kinds of content it prefers, routinely alters the News Feed algorithm in ways that make it harder for media companies to reach their users, and is the worlds largest distributor of misinformation. This has bred distrust and resentment among working journalists, who are increasingly skeptical of Facebooks overtures. Critics say accepting help from the company is like the fly accepting an invitation from the spider.

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READ: New Zealand massacre: Journalists divided on how to cover hate

Many of the small startups at the conferencewhich included sites like WhereByUs, Blavity, Spaceship Media, City Bureau, Berkeleyside, and Migratory Notesseemed glad to have anyone offering help and financing, including Facebook, but one or two admitted they felt a bit like props in a marketing campaign.

Critics say accepting help from the company is like the fly accepting an invitation from the spider.

Members of Facebooks news partnerships team insist their desire to help struggling local media outlets is genuine, and this is easy to believe, since many of them used to be journalists at outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times. The team maintains they want to help local journalism regardless of whether it appears on Facebook or not. They also point out that committing $300 million for journalism (as the company did in January)which funds an accelerator to help media companies figure out new business models, and programs like the American Journalism Projectshows that this commitment extends to the highest levels of the company. This is something Mark cares about, said a Facebook staffer (the event was held under Chatham House Rules, which means speakers cant be identified).

Conference attendees suspected Marks intentions might be less than pure, however. The companys central motivation, some said, was to counteract all the bad publicity for its role in distributing fake news that may have influenced the 2016 election. They felt the conference, in other words, and even the entire Facebook Journalism Project itself, was a giant public relations exercise intended to make the company look like it cares. Others ascribed Facebooks actions to an even darker theory: the commitment to local journalism, one editor said, is to get as much local news onto the platform as possible, in order to make it more dependent on Facebook.

READ: A mosque massacre is livestreamed

Some have wondered why the company doesnt take the most obvious step to help journalism survive, i.e. hiring journalists and editors directly to work for Facebook and improve the quality of journalism on the platform. When pressed, Facebook staffers say the company doesnt want to intervene directly in the marketanother irony, as it already chooses which journalistic entities to fund, mostly through third parties, and by fiddling with its News Feed algorithm to promote certain kinds of journalism and hide others. At the moment, according to data from NewsWhip, the attention seems to mostly be going to clickbait and low quality partisan news sources, despite the companys repeated commitment to emphasize quality.

Evangelists on Facebooks news partnerships team insist Zuckerberg and the rest of senior management are concerned about democracy and about healthy communities, and believe that high quality journalism helps support both of those things. At the same time, however, Facebook staff also note that local news is something users say they want, implying the decision to get more of it is driven at least in part by the product team. And that undoubtedly helped fuel the air of skepticism that seemed to hover over the event, once all the snacks and drinks had been consumed: a sense that all of the well-meaning discussion was going to wind up mostly benefiting Facebook, as usual.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Mathew Ingram is CJRs chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.The owner of a Revere, Mass.-based contracting company has been indicted in connection with a workers compensation insurance fraud scheme, according to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

Anner Valentin Amaya of Revere, Mass., was indicted by a Suffolk County Grand Jury on five counts of workers compensation fraud, two counts for failure to provide workers compensation insurance, and five counts of larceny of over $250 by false pretenses. He will be arraigned in Suffolk Superior Court on April 17.

The attorney generals office said it began an investigation after this matter was referred to the office by the Insurance Fraud Bureau.

The AGs Office alleges that between May 2012 and August 2016, Amaya, who owns the business Valentin General Contractors, substantially underreported the number of individuals his business employed and the amount he paid these employees when audited by his workers compensation insurance provider. In total, the AGs Office alleges that Amaya evaded more than $73,000 in insurance premiums.

Source: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of the Attorney GeneralSAN JUAN, Puerto Rico  Crews were preparing Wednesday to shut down generators that have powered an island off Puerto Ricos coast  the last customers to be reconnected to the U.S. territorys main power system 18 months after Hurricane Maria destroyed the grid.

The Electric Power Authority said it would connect an underwater cable to Culebra by the afternoon, despite wariness from the more than 1,000 people who live on the island, which is popular with tourists.

One year and six months relying solely on a generator that if the gasoline runs out, we dont have power, said Culebra resident Grace Monel, adding that people were hit with several outages a month that have damaged home appliances. It has taken so long.

She said she now worries that the electrical grid is still fragile, noting that two major outages were reported on the main island of Puerto Rico this week alone. Officials said a cat was responsible for the first outage, which left thousands of people without power in the capital of San Juan on Saturday. Another outage, on Tuesday, was blamed on an iguana that made contact with a 115,000-volt bar, leaving some 100,000 people without power.

Jose Sepulveda, the power companys transmission and distribution director, acknowledged to The Associated Press that the current system, which serves 1.5 million customers, is a patch-up job following the Sept. 20, 2017, hurricane, and that it needs further repairs and updates.

Some codes were ignored because of time and lack of equipment, he said, adding that safety was never compromised. Now that the emergency is over, we will start rebuilding the system.

Sepulveda said he did not know how long that process would take, saying only that it would be months as crews inspect a grid that was destroyed by Maria and rebuilt with help from the U.S. government and millions of dollars in federal funds. He said that in some cases, cables of a substandard caliber were used to help restore power across Puerto Rico, which was fully energized by August 2018, nearly a year after a storm that caused more than an estimated $100 billion in damage.

In addition, officials will be installing three backup generators in Culebra to replace the three that are being retired. They were operated and fully funded by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The Atlantic hurricane season starts June 1 and Sepulveda said the grid is not ready for another major storm. If one hits, We will experience something similar to what happened in 2017, he said.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.AKRON, Ohio -- Akron City Council has scheduled a special meeting Monday afternoon to discuss funding for several items in the councils budget.

Council members are to meet at 3:15 p.m. Monday in council chambers, Clerk of Council Robert Keith said in a Friday memo.

The meeting will set the councils budget priority funding for:

Training for City Council and administration to assist in the development of a comprehensive racial-equity policy for the city.

Councils My Neighborhood, Our Akron neighborhood grant program.

Intervention and support programs to address gun violence.

Renewal and restoration of councils membership with the Ohio Municipal League, which lobbies on behalf of cities legislative bodies on the state level.

An online interactive budgeting tool to assist council in understanding and setting the citys budget, and to help council communicate with residents regarding the citys budget priorities.

The meeting was requested by Ward 2 Councilman Bruce Kilby, Ward 4 Councilman Russel Neal and Ward 10 Councilman Zack Milkovich, Keith said.

Want more Akron news? Sign up for cleveland.coms Rubber City Daily, an email newsletter delivered at 5:30 a.m. Monday through Friday.BEREA, Ohio -- Marijuana possession, West Bagley Road: A Berea woman, 23, and a Brook Park man, 24, were cited at about 12:20 a.m. March 13 after police found a glass jar containing marijuana residue, a marijuana grinder, several burned marijuana cigarettes, a glass pipe, a marijuana rolling plate and a digital scale in their Chevrolet Cruze.

Police had pulled over the car because it had remained stopped for several seconds at a green traffic light on West Bagley at Barrett Road. The car smelled like marijuana.

The woman, who was driving, was given a summons to appear in court.

Damaged property, East Bridge Street: An East Bridge resident called police at about 2 p.m. March 14 and said that a woman had mistakenly driven into and damaged his fence the night before.

The woman said it was dark, raining and difficult to see. She thought she had arrived at an intersection, so she turned her car and hit the fence.

The woman gave the man her name and contact information and promised to pay for the damage. The man said he wanted the incident documented in case she doesnt follow through.

Theft, West Center Street: A South Carolina dealership license plate was stolen between 1 and 9 a.m. March 15 from a car parked outside Giant Eagle, 50 West Center.

Identity theft, Quarrystone Lane: A Quarrystone couple reported March 13 that someone stole $75,000 from their TD Ameritrade account between Feb. 15-20.

The couple said TD Ameritrade promised to reimburse the stolen money. The companys fraud department is investigating.

Runaway, East Bagley Road: A 15-year-old girl ran away from OhioGuidestone, 202 E. Bagley Road, at about 5 p.m. March 13.

Workers at the counseling center-foster home called police and said the girl had run east on East Bagley. Police checked the area, then learned the girl had turned up at Southwest General Health Center in Middleburg Heights, where staff had pinned her down.

Police went to the hospital, handcuffed the girl and started to drive her back to OhioGuidestone. She screamed and threatened to harm herself. Police drove her back to the hospital for an evaluation.

Found property, Berea Commons: A citizen called police at about 10:15 a.m. March 15 after finding a syringe outside Le Crepe Bakery & Cafe, 2 Berea Commons.

Police checked the area and also found a used hypodermic needle, with the cap on, in the bushes. Police gathered the items for destruction.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A judge on Thursday handed down a 27-year prison sentence to a 17-year-old boy who beat an elderly couple with a cane and held up a TV news crew as part of a months-long robbery spree.

Eddie Burns emerged from a turbulent childhood fraught with violence and trauma and, at 15 years old, launched a spree that left in its wake much of the same.

Burns, who was charged as an adult, pleaded guilty on March 14 to multiple counts of attempted murder, aggravated robbery and other charges. He faced a minimum of 12 years and up to 30 years in prison.

Common Pleas Court Judge Joan Synenberg said she believes in giving people second chances, but the Burns already had several chances to get help.

This is about dangerousness, Synenberg said.

Synenberg pointed to a court-ordered evaluation of Burns before his case in which a psychiatrist noted that Burns was cold, callous and unremorseful about his crimes.

That just may be who you are, Synenberg said. You have to be callous to do this kind of thing.

Burns apologized to his victims and said that he was ready to serve his prison sentence.

Burnss spree began in August 2017 and spread until his February 2018 arrest.

Aug. 10, 2017: Burns punched and robbed a 77-year-old man who was taking money out of an ATM at his neighborhood convenience store at East 99th Street and St. Clair Avenue. Store security arrested Burns, he was taken to the countys juvenile detention center and released. He did not show up for any subsequent court hearings and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Nov. 13, 2017: Burns and another assailant kicked in the side door of an 87-year-old mans home on East 99th Street in Cleveland. Burns punched the man in the face and head, strapped the man to a chair with duct tape and stole his credit cards and a leaf blower. The man freed himself and went to a neighbors house for help. The man spent two weeks in the hospital and two weeks in rehab.

Dec. 28, 2017: Burns and two or three other masked assailants approached WOIO Channel 19 news reporter Lacey Crisp and a cameraman who were reporting a story on East 99th Street and robbed the pair at gunpoint. Later that day, Burns tried to sell Crisps cellphone at a wireless store in Cleveland and, when he turned it on at the store, it automatically notified owner of location. Police traced it to the store and got the surveillance video showing Burns at the counter trying to sell the phone.

Jan. 8, 2018: Burns and another male robbed a Spectrum employee at gunpoint. A few minutes after robbery, Burns was in a convenience store right around the corner from the robbery using the mans ATM card.

Jan. 21, 2018: Burns and several other people blocked an Amazon delivery driver in the driveway of a Solon home and carjacked the driver at gunpoint. Later that day, Burns and a group of teens used the drivers credit card at a local Walmart and a GameStop.

Cleveland police caught up with Burns about 9 p.m. Feb. 7, 2018, just minutes after they said he attacked 76-year-old Della Watts and her 81-year-old husband, Willie Watts Jr. in the driveway of their home on East 99th Street in Clevelands Glenville neighborhood.

Burns approached Della Watts as she walked to her house with her cane and told her that he used to shovel snow from her driveway, according to a police report. He then grabbed her purse and shoved her to the ground. He picked up her cane and struck her several times in the head and body, then attacked her husband as he came to her aid.

Willie Watts died on March 29. Medical examiner Dr. Thomas Gilson ruled Watts died of natural causes, including from heart disease, diabetes, dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, an illness that affects the lungs. Gilson said in a statement that his death could not be medically linked to the beating.

Della Watts and Crisp each detailed the fear that Burns inflicted into them during their crimes. Crisp said she believed that Burns was going to shoot her as he demanded that she wipe her cellphone of its security code, and that she still suffers from anxiety attacks.

Both asked Synenberg to impose lengthy sentences.

No one can tell me you are not partly to blame for my husbands death, Della Watts said. My life has been shattered because of you. You should not get out of jail until you are as old as I am.

Burnss lawyer, Morgan Pirc, argued that Burns was forever changed at the age of 13 when his biological father committed suicide. Burns was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and self-medicated with marijuana and alcohol, and started hanging around older kids. Burns had also witnessed three shootings, including one which ended with a friend dying in his arms at a block party, Pirc said.

He picked up theft and robbery cases in juvenile court. Judges ordered him to complete counseling and other services instead of sending him to youth prison. But Burns did not complete any of the programs, before he began the violent robbery streak that landed him in court Thursday.

Pirc argued that the juvenile court failed efforts to get services to Burns in his earlier cases. When he did not complete the social service programs, the court should have either placed him in inpatient facility or sentenced him to a youth prison, Pirc said. Now, there are a string of victims and a boy being sent to prison for crimes that began when he was 15 years old, Pirc said.

Synenberg said she understood that all of the trauma that made Burns into the 17-year-old person he was Thursday.

Unfortunately, who you are today is a person who is really dangerous, Synenberg said.

To comment on this story, please visit Thursdays crime and courts comments page.Get AfricaFocus Bulletin by e-mail! Format for print or mobile Southern Africa/Global: Cyclone Idai and Climate Justice AfricaFocus Bulletin

March 22, 2019 (190322)

(Reposted from sources cited below) Editor's Note A week after Cyclone Idai struck the coast of Mozambique near Beira, there are still people awaiting rescue from treetops and roofs. The death toll, with confirmed deaths numbering in the high hundreds, is still unknown, with the largest number in Mozambique, and still devastating numbers in Zimbabwe and Malawi as well. The full impact has been slow to emerge, but it is finally gaining more attention from world media. This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts and links under three topics: strategic ways to contribute, sources for updates, and the issue of climate change and climate justice. For quick overviews of the situation, check out these short videos. Guardian, March 19, 2019  2-minute video overview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCO9MSRXYWA ENCA, Rescue operations in Buzi, Mozambique, March 20, 2019  3- minute video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIM-MBR6yNk Deutsche Welle, March 20, 2019  5-minute video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S5RlM7KGZI For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on climate change and the environment, visit http://www.africafocus.org/intro-env.php For extensive ongoing updates, see https://clubofmozambique.com/ and https://reliefweb.int/disaster/tc-2019-000021-moz ++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++ Strategic ways to contribute This list is selective and far from complete. If you know an international relief organization that you trust, it is likely that they are there by now. And, if you have contacts with other organizations working on the ground, you may want to use those channels. These are a few strategic suggestions, taking into account the ongoing need to strengthen organizations that dealing not only with the immediate crisis but with recovery and preparation for the next crises. The United Nations has an essential role in response to emergencies. Its coordinating body for this is UNOCHA. To contribute for Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi go to http://tinyurl.com/y4gnjr5j You can also donate through a 5 times match to UNICEF (through May 10) at http://tinyurl.com/y3lrr7za Doctors without Borders, as is often the case, was one of the first international agencies on the ground in Beira. To contribute for Cyclone Idai go to http://tinyurl.com/y2a76wdb Health Alliance International has been working in Mozambique, with the Ministry of Health for over 30 years, and has staff in Beira. Contribute at https://healthallianceinternational.org/cyclone-idai/ The Mozambican organization Alternactiva has launched a crowdfunding campaign, in partnership with Mozambique Peasants Union (UNAC) and Forum Mulher, with a particular focus on supporting recovery by peasants and women in Sofala province. Contribute at http://tinyurl.com/y3angh75 Unidos por Beira

https://www.facebook.com/unidosporbeira/ A group of volunteers in Maputo, who as of yesterday had coordinated collection of goods for Beira and packed them into containers (approximately 700 tons) that will depart for Beira by ship tomorrow. They can be supported by transfers to the following bank account at Standard Bank in Maputo. Unidos por Beira, Account holder: Kwe Trading, Bank: Standard Bank, NIB: 0003 0118 0683483100758, IBAN: MZ59 000301180683483100758, Swift: SBICMZMX International bank account transfers can be difficult and expensive, particularly from the United States. But a new on-line service makes it much more convenient, and can be done with a credit or debit card. In addition to the bank details above, one also requires a mobile phone number for the recipient to be notified. See the instructions for Mozambique, Zimbabws, and Malawi at the following links. In the reason for the transfer check family or friend support. https://www.worldremit.com/en/mozambique/faq/bank-transfer https://www.worldremit.com/en/zimbabwe/faq/bank-transfer https://www.worldremit.com/en/malawi/faq/bank-transfer Zimbabwe Cyclone Relief https://www.gofundme.com/zimbabwe-cyclone-relief

See Facebook post by Alex Magaisa Malawi Red Cross https://www.gofundme.com/emergency-relief-for-flooding-in-southern-malawi

Background on fundraising organization Satellite maps University of Edinburgh researchers Ryan Casey and Sam Bowers have used radar satellite imagery which can see through clouds to map the flooding. Their detailed maps, including the third map below. show a band of flooding 100 km long from south of Buzi to northwest of Dondo and Beira. http://bit.ly/MozCyclone4 and http://bit.ly/MozCyclone2. Their website is https://sambowers.bitbucket.io/ Updates Briefing: The response to Cyclone Idai New Humanitarian (formerly IRIN), March 21, 2019 http://tinyurl.com/y4lxkznr Sumayya Ismail, Africa Editor Vittoria Elliott, Freelance journalist Nearly a week since Cyclone Idai struck three of the most vulnerable countries in Southern Africa, needs are rising and humanitarians still dont have a full picture of the extent of the disaster. Aid access is one of the biggest challenges and cholera is a major concern. More than a million people in Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe have been affected by what the UN called a massive disaster. Its emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, said the situation is likely to deteriorate, and the number of people affected is likely to increase. Mozambique was the first country hit. Some reports estimate 90 percent of Beira, the fourth largest city, with more than 500,000 residents, may be damaged or destroyed. But Medecins Sans Frontieres said its still too early to have a complete overview of the situation as many areas remain cut off and inaccessible by road. Rain and heavy winds continue, so reaching certain areas by air or sea is a challenge. The storm also destroyed most of Beiras telecoms infrastructure, making it difficult to get word out of the affected areas. I am able to say that all health centres and hospitals have been affected, said Caroline Rose, MSFs head of mission in Mozambique, expressing concern about the growing health needs, especially the risk of waterborne diseases, including cholera. Several health centres have lost their roofs and are in very, very bad condition. In neighbouring Zimbabwe, the situation we are seeing now isnt fully clear, agreed Mildred Makore, Mercy Corps director of programmes in the country. Chimanimani, which is the worst-hit district, is still inaccessible. Evaluations are going on and we may be overwhelmed when we have true access. Heres a round-up of what we know about the humanitarian needs and response. What is the scale of the disaster? Late on 14 March, Cyclone Idai made landfall off the coast of Mozambique, before continuing to Zimbabwe and Malawi, causing widespread devastation across parts of the three countries. The scale of damage in Mozambique is massive and horrifying, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said. Tens of thousands lost their homes; roads, bridges, and crops were washed away; and people remain trapped on roofs awaiting rescue as parts of Beira are still under water. More than 100,000 people needed emergency evacuation in Beira and surrounding areas in Buzi District. Although the official death toll is just over 200, Mozambiques president estimated more than 1,000 people may have been killed. So far, 1,500 are injured and 17,000 displaced. These photos from Buzi (above)were taken by Mozambiques National Institute of Disaster Management (INGC) In Zimbabwe, floods destroyed 600 homes, affecting an estimated 15,000 people. So far, more than 100 people have been reported dead, 200 are injured, and another 200 are still missing. Malawi has reported 57 dead and more than 500 injured. More than 94,000 people are estimated to have been displaced and some 840,000 people have been affected, according to the government. Although water levels have subsided a bit in Zimbabwe and Malawi, flooding continues in Mozambique and hundreds of thousands remain at risk. There are also growing concerns about the overflow of the Marowanyati Dam in Zimbabwe, which threatens to increase water levels in Mozambique. Heavy rain and flooding before the cyclone hit had claimed more than 120 lives and affected 1.5 million people in the region, the UN said. Malawi and Mozambique are both prone to extreme weather events, such as the floods that left hundreds dead in both countries in 2015. While parts of Zimbabwe are under water, other parts are in the midst of El Nino-induced drought, which has caused a severe food crisis. How were people impacted? The World Food Programme estimates that 1.7 million people in Mozambique alone were along the path of the cyclone when it hit. MSF described the scene as destruction  and a lot of water, saying that electricity, telecommunication lines, and main roads leading into Beira remain cut off, with houses and buildings submerged, and hospitals severely damaged. Search and rescue operations are continuing, but many people remain unreachable. Those who made it out of affected areas are living informally in schools, churches, or sometimes just out in the open, where they face the risk of respiratory infections and other diseases. With people exposed to the elements all the small problems will become big problems, MSFs Rose said. In Nsanje, one of Malawis worst-hit districts, houses fell down completely or partially, and a lot of toilets and kitchens went down, said Ilse Casteels, MSFs head of mission in the country. Because of the floods people moved to higher areas, regrouping in churches and centres and schools. For the moment there are a lot of families staying there, she said, even though some people have returned home to start rebuilding as the flood waters recede. In Malawi and Zimbabwe, people lost their homes but also their livelihoods when the floods destroyed their crops. Many of those affected in Zimbabwes eastern highlands are small-scale farmers, Mercy Corps Makore said. As a result worsening food security will be a major concern in the months ahead. An estimated 200,000 are in need of urgent food assistance for the next three months in Zimbabwe, the WFP said, with Chimanimani the hardest hit. Who is responding? UN agencies, local and international aid organisations, and foreign countries have intervened or sent funds to assist the humanitarian response. Many others are in the process of raising donations. The WFP aims to provide food assistance to some 600,000 people in Mozambique and 650,000 people in Malawi. MSF is providing emergency medical care in affected regions and, in Mozambique and Malawi, it has prioritised continuity of care for vulnerable HIV and tuberculosis patients who were being treated before the disaster struck. In Zimbabwes Chimanimani district, where severe flooding wiped out roads and bridges and left the area accessible only by helicopter, the International Rescue Committee has set up a mobile clinic and is distributing food and specialised kits for women. Mercy Corps has been focusing on water, hygiene, and sanitation services. In Mozambique, the Indian Navy and the South African Air Force have been assisting the governments search and rescue operation. Meanwhile, aid organisations are estimating a long road to recovery. The World Health Organization is sending three months of supplies for 10,000 people. CARE is working with the government of Mozambique to provide seeds and livestock to replenish farms that have been decimated by flooding. The UNs Central Emergency Response Fund, known as CERF, has allocated $20 million to ramp up the humanitarian response across the three countries. The UK is donating almost $24 million, the EU close to $4 million, and the African Union $350,000. Tanzania said it was sending urgent relief supplies, including tonnes of medicine and food. What are the humanitarian needs/gaps? Access to potable drinking water, shelter, food, and healthcare are the priorities, aid groups say, with water, sanitation, and hygiene needs particularly urgent as the risk of waterborne diseases is the major concern across the board. In Beira, we fear a huge cholera outbreak soon, said MSFs Rose. The main challenges will be [getting treatment] for people who dont understand they have cholera, and that its urgent, or people who are not reachable, or people who cannot reach health centres. Given that areas are still cut off, this is a real concern. To mitigate the challenges, MSF will attempt a decentralised system with small cholera centres in many zones, Rose said. We cannot ask people to go to big centres. We will have to be in the communities where they are. Zimbabwe has been in the midst of a cholera outbreak since last year. Mercy Corps, which has been assisting with the response, is concerned that recent events will worsen the crisis. Our major concern is that the water bodies have been contaminated, because the latrines have been destroyed, Makore said. We are concerned because there can be an ensuing disaster following that, related to the waterborne diseases, including cholera and typhoid, as well as malaria. We have to make sure the affected population has access to clean water, she said, adding that a lot more support is required to help those affected in Zimbabwe - from immediate lifesaving aid to longer-term support for communities who will need to rebuild. In Malawi, MSFs Casteels said the most urgent need is clean, potable water, after many boreholes were affected by the flooding. She also expressed concern about cholera and malaria spreading in the coming weeks. The biggest concern that you hear is about food. Access to food now, but also in the future. People are really afraid crops are affected. And because the country is so dependent on agriculture, thats a big concern. What are the longer-term issues? Mercy Corps Makore said the priority should be resiliencebuilding for affected communities. Contextually, for Zimbabwe right now, we have got two natural disasters at the same time. The El Nino-induced drought and now this [flooding]... Whatever produce was available was washed away, and livestock was also washed away, she said. Right now, we need to speak about food security, which was already an issue, but now we need to think beyond that because of the potential for disease outbreaks, shelter concerns, displacement. So I think we have a huge task ahead of us as organisations. In Malawi, Casteels raised similar concerns. The biggest concern that you hear is about food, she said. Access to food now, but also in the future. People are really afraid crops are affected. And because the country is so dependent on agriculture, thats a big concern. Based on the aftermath of previous disasters that have affected Mozambique, MSFs Rose said: it will take years to rebuild the town [of Beira]. This will have the worst impact on those most vulnerable, she said. Its those who have small, fragile houses that are worst impacted, as they are always the people without the means to build a new house. So its a vicious cycle. Those who have no means to rebuild will be left outside with no house, more at risk of disease and worse off." "The situation is already complicated and it will continue to be, especially for the most vulnerable, she said. In Zimbabwe, already confronted by a host of humanitarian, economic, and political challenges, Cyclone Idai has only made the outlook more bleak. The priority is to help get people back on track and restore some level of dignity and hope, said Makore. Additional update sources Mwiza Munthali of AfricaNow! on WPFW, March 20, in Washington, DC featuring Effects of Cyclone Idai on Southern Africa. Interviews with Estacio Valoi, an investigative journalist based in Mozambique and is part of Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ); and Suzgo Khunga, an Assistant Bureau Chief and News Analyst for Nation Media Group in Malawi. Hour-long radio program. http://tinyurl.com/yxl9ll36 Guardian, Cyclone Idai 'might be southern hemisphere's worst such disaster' , March 19, 2019

http://tinyurl.com/yycmjwut NPR, Plight Of Survivors After Cyclone Idai: No Power, No Homes, No Roads, March 20, 2019

http://tinyurl.com/y6n6nkmd BBC, Cyclone Idai: Mozambique survivors desperate for help, March 20, 2019

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47637166 BBC, Cyclone Idai: How the storm tore into southern Africa, March 21, 2019

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47638696 Climate Change and Climate Justice Two longer articles on the impact of climate change, in addition to the two below, are: Guardian, Climate change making storms like Idai more severe, say experts, March 19, 2019

http://tinyurl.com/y669gnf6 BBC, Cyclone Idai: What's the role of climate change?, March 20, 2019

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47638588 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Cyclone Idai: Time the Rich Countries Compensate Victims of Climate Change Disasters Centre for Natural Resource Governance, Harare, March 18, 2019 http://cnrgzim.org/ - Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/y2f4k94r Cyclone Idai is sweeping across Southern Africa with Mozambique and Zimbabwe being the hardest hit. More than 200 people have died across the region since the storm hit on 4 March. In Zimbabwe Chimanimani district is the hardest hit, with more than 65 people confirmed dead as of Sunday 17 March whilst hundreds are still missing. Hundreds of homes were swept away whilst road infrastructure was destroyed, rendering Chimanimani inaccessible for rescue efforts. Whilst human life is beyond monetary value, the loss in terms of damage to property can reach billions of dollars, and some of the families may never recover from their loss unless they are properly compensated. And yet the big question is who must take responsibility for compensating the affected people? The link between extreme weather events and climate change can no longer be disputed. Climate change, being a culmination of unrelenting emission of greenhouse gases, mainly by the industrialized rich countries, is responsible for the disaster unfolding in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi  countries with among the worlds lowest emissions rates. However, whilst rich countries have enough resources to cushion their populations from some of the extreme effects of climate change, poor countries have limited resources to cope with climate change-related disasters. Had there been enough adaptation resources, a significant number of lives could have been saved. Many were washed away whilst sleeping in their homes in the dead of the night. Whilst the benefits of greenhouse gas emissions are enjoyed by the rich countries, the poor countries are on the receiving end of deleterious effects of climate change. Sadly, given the reluctance of rich countries to take drastic action towards carbon emission reductions, natural disasters are set to increase resulting in more loss of lives and property in the poor countries. Sadly majority of the victims have no idea as to who is chiefly responsible for their calamities. The situation unfolding in our region is of global significance. It is a consequence of human action and those contributing more to climate change ought to compensate the victims. The Centre for Natural Resource Governance is of the view that the rich countries must pay their climate debt to the Zimbabwean people  but the Zanu PF government and Minister Mthuli Ncube cannot be trusted to manage the payments. Instead, we need trusted agencies in civil society to receive aid and direct transfers to the ordinary people affected. This could be done simply by arranging payout systems in the affected parts of Zimbabwe, so that everyone living in those areas would get a reparations payment. There is need to compensate families for loss of lives, destruction of homes and even loss of food, livestock and domestic utensils. The situation is dire in fragile states where governments have misplaced priorities which relegates human security to humanitarian work of Non-Governmental Organisations and well-wishers. [For an additional article on the same theme, with multiple links to related information, see Cyclone Idai lays bare the fundamental injustice of climate change, Grist, March 19, 2019 ( http://tinyurl.com/y2voc543).] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Tropical cyclone Idai: The storm that knew no boundaries The Conversation March 20, 2019 Jennifer Fitchett

Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography, University of the Witwatersrand https://allafrica.com/stories/201903200883.html Tropical cyclone Idai has made headlines across southern Africa throughout the month of March. Lingering in the Mozambique Channel at tropical cyclone intensity for six days, the storm made landfall in Beira, Mozambique in the middle of the month, then tracked in a westerly direction until its dissipation. The greatest impact of the storm was experienced on landfall. It caused flooding, excessive wind-speed and storm surge damage in the central region of Mozambique. Adjacent countries of Malawi and Zimbabwe experienced severe rainfall, flooding and damage from the high wind speed. Madagascar also experienced bouts of high rainfall during the storms pathway to Beira. The flooding has left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and displaced across the region while the death toll has continued to rise in the week following landfall. The effects of the cyclone were felt as far south as South Africa and introduced rolling blackouts due to damaged transmission lines that supply the country with 1100 MW of power from Cahora Bassa in northern Mozambique. Historically, nine storms that had reached tropical cyclone intensity made landfall on Mozambique. A larger number of weaker tropical systems, including tropical storms and depressions affect the region, with a total landfall of all tropical systems of 1.1 per annum. The most severe tropical cyclone to make landfall in Mozambique was tropical cyclone Eline in February 2000. It had a category 4 intensity on landfall and resulted in 150 deaths, 1000 casualties from flooding, 300 000 people displaced and four ships sunk. The storms off Africas east coast are weaker than their northern hemisphere counterparts. Category 4 and 5 tropical cyclones make landfall at a near-annual rate in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Why the wide impact Why have so many countries been affected? Tropical cyclones are large storm systems. Immediately surrounding the eye of the storm  a region of calm weather, no wind and no rain  are spirals of storm clouds that span a minimum radius of ~100km. These cloud bands represent the thunder storm conditions, with the rain and winds typical of a tropical cyclone. A ~100km radius is typical of category 1 tropical cyclones, the lowest intensity ones. As the storms intensify to categories 2, 3, 4 and 5, the size increases significantly. This means that a high intensity storm, such as tropical cyclone Idai, has a range of impact significantly larger than the storm track that it follows. In recent years concerns have been growing about the impact of climate change on cyclones. Research has shown that changes to the worlds temperature, as well as ocean warming, are responsible for an increase in the severity of tropical cyclones. This has recently been researched for the South Indian Ocean. As the ocean is warming, the region which experiences temperatures conducive to tropical cyclone formation is expanding and temperatures in the tropical regions are becoming warm enough for cyclone intensification. Category 5 tropical cyclones, which have been experienced in the North Atlantic for almost a century, started to occur in the South Indian Ocean since 1994, and have occurred increasingly frequently since then. This means that as climate change continues and intensifies, so too do these storms. This will mean a greater frequency of not only severe damage from storms, but damage over a larger region. In addition to the impact of warming on the storm intensity, climate warming has also been found to increase the expanse of the storms within any given intensity. Cyclone Idai So how intense was tropical cyclone Idai? Storm track records, which include the geographic location of the storm at set time intervals, the wind speed and the atmospheric pressure, are documented by a number of regional climatological organisations. This data is synthesised by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association, providing a useful resource for scientists to explore storm behaviour. Tropical cyclones are classified on the basis of their wind speed and central pressure. The weakest storms to be classified as tropical cyclones  category 1  have a minimum sustained wind speed of 119km/hr. At category 3 the storms have a minimum wind speed of 178 km/h. As the category increases, so too does the potential for damage. Category 1 storms are classified as resulting in dangerous winds that cause some damage, whereas category 3 storms are expected to cause devastating damage. The history of tropical cyclone Idai is documented in these records. The cyclone reached category 3 intensity between 03:00-06:00 on the 11th March 2019, while positioned at its most easterly extent of the storm track. By 03:00 on the 12th March the storm had dissipated to category 2 intensity, and it fluctuated between intensities of categories 2 and 3 over the 36 hours that followed. From noon on the 13th March the storm maintained a category 3 intensity which persisted until landfall on the 14th. What needs to be done Storms that affect many countries present particular challenges. They clearly have no regard for political boundaries. The fact that they affect lots of countries presents challenges in both preparing for storm events in a proactive way and responding to prevent loss of life and livelihood. This requires countries to communicate effectively with one another, to provide coherent messages about the forecasting of the storm track and potential damage, and to facilitate effective evacuations. This storm provides a grim prospect of the future of tropical cyclones in a region under continued threat from climate change. Effective adaptation to minimise storm damage is essential in preparing the region for an increase in the severity of these storms. Disaster risk management plans are also very important to minimise the loss of life. AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter. AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please write to this address to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about reposted material, please contact directly the original source mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see http://www.africafocus.orgCLEVELAND, Ohio  A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order late Thursday that partially blocked an Ohio law banning an abortion method called dilation and evacuation  the most common method of second-trimester abortions.

Senior U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett in Cincinnati listed several portions of the law, which then-Gov. John Kasich signed in December, that he barred from being enforced. He did not fully block the implementation of the law, which is set to go into effect Friday.

The law makes it a fourth-degree felony to perform the procedure, commonly known as D&E, and carries a penalty of up to 18 months in prison. It says the procedure can only be done if the doctor first causes fetal demise or if the mothers life is at serious risk.

The judge put the restraining order in effect for 14 days.

(You can read the ruling here or at the bottom of this story.)

Barretts ruling stems from a lawsuit Planned Parenthood filed in February. The organization  which has abortion clinics in Bedford Heights, Columbus and Cincinnati  noted that D&E is the safest and most common method of abortion after about 15 weeks of pregnancy. During the procedure, the womans cervix is dilated and the fetus and other tissue are removed with surgical instruments and suction.

Planned Parenthood said the law was unconstitutional because it imposes an undue burden on women seeking abortions after 15 weeks.

Lawyers for the state said government interests justify the new law because Ohio seeks to promote respect for life, protect the medical community, and eliminate the possibility for pain for the unborn child, according to Thursdays order. The head of Ohio Right to Life, an anti-abortion advocacy group, called the D&E procedure barbaric.

Barrett, appointed by President George W. Bush, did not rule Thursday on whether the law is constitutional. Instead, he said he wants to hear more evidence from both sides before he rules on constitutionality and whether to impose a preliminary injunction.

The judge wrote, though, that other courts have reviewed laws similar to the one Ohio passed and found them to be unconstitutional. However, the state has questioned whether those other courts used the correct legal standard, according to Barrett.

The judges order follows a hearing he held Monday, and does not completely block the states ability to enforce the new law. Specifically, his order blocks the state from enforcing the law against doctors who perform the procedure for a woman who is less than 18 weeks pregnant.

After that, prosecutors can enforce the law, though with a few exceptions:

A doctor may not be prosecuted if they accidentally remove a part of the fetus while trying to comply with the requirement to bring about fetal death.

Prosecutors also may not charge a doctor if they perform the procedure after an attempt to terminate the fetus fails.

A doctor may perform the procedure without first terminating the fetus if they determine that terminating the fetus is not a viable option or is medically impossible for the patient.

Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio CEO Iris Harvey said in a statement Friday that while the organization is pleased with Barretts decision, "we know that there is more work to do to ensure patients right to health care is not further eroded.

This ban is just another example of how Ohio politicians continue to chip away at reproductive rights, putting the health and safety of Ohioans at greater risk, "Harvey said. Planned Parenthood is prepared to relentlessly fight for all Ohioans access the full spectrum of reproductive health care, including safe, legal abortion.

Michael Gonidakis, the head of Ohio Right to Life, said in a statement Friday that his organization was frustrated that the law will not go into effect as planned.

As a society we cannot in good conscious allow a procedure that dismembers a living unborn baby to continue, Gonidakis said. He added that "we trust that pro-life Attorney General Dave Yosts office will defend our pro-life law well.

A spokesman for Yost did not return a voicemail left Thursday.

Barretts decision comes in the wave of recent activity both in the courts and in the Republican-controlled legislature regarding Ohios abortion laws.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that a measure lawmakers passed in 2016 to keep Planned Parenthood from receiving public money to pay for non-abortion-related health care programs was constitutional.

The Ohio Senate also passed a bill last week that would ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. The bill is now in the House.YORK TOWNSHIP, Ohio -- Authorities are searching for a vandal who damaged a military monument at a community park, the Medina County Sheriffs Office said.

Deputies received a call about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday that someone knocked over the military monument in the York Township Municipal Park on Norwalk Road near Columbia Road, according to a Facebook post and a sheriffs report. The vandal damaged the monument and the brick pavers around it.

The monument is located in a portion of the park dedicated to all military Gold Star families.

Investigators are not sure when the vandalism took place.

Authorities are investigating after a military monument was knocked over at a York Township park.Medina County Sheriff's Office

The corners of the monument are cracked and chipped and deputies could not lift the monument up because of its weight, the report says.

There are no surveillance cameras near the memorial, the report says.

Authorities found a light that shines on the monument partially pulled up from the ground. They took the light to inspect it for any fingerprints, the report says.

Deputies recommended that the county install cameras to monitor the memorial site and that deputies patrol the area more often.

Anyone who witnessed the vandalism or has any information is asked to call the sheriffs department at 330-725-6631.

If youd like to comment on this story, visit Thursdays crime and courts comments section.TONGANOXIE, Kansas  A 61-year-old black man moving into his new home during the early-morning hours was held at gunpoint and handcuffed by police in an incident that has the American Civil Liberties Union calling for an investigation, reports say.

Karle Robinson, a Marine veteran, was detained by police as he carried a TV from a moving van into his new home at about 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 19, the Associated Press reports.

Tonganoxie Police Chief Greg Lawson tells the Kansas City Star that after reviewing video of the August 2018 incident, he believes his officers acted appropriately in the incident, saying they had reason to believe a crime was in progress.

But the ACLU of Kansas, in a letter requesting an investigation from state Attorney General Derek Schmidt, says its a case of moving while black, NBC News reports.

Id like to see those cops and that chief lose their jobs because this was uncalled for  this is strictly racial profiling, Robinson tells the Associated Press.

According to NBC News, the attorney generals office says it has forward the ACLUs letter to the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training.

Robinson was detained by police in front of his house in handcuffs for about eight minutes before officers determined he did own the home, reports say. Afterward, the officers helped Robinson carry the TV into his home and one can be heard apologizing, the AP reports.

If you look at the situation, I think, I think you get it," an officer says.

But the ACLU says Chief Lawson stopped Robinson from filing a written complaint to police about the incident, the Star reports. Robinson also claims police routinely followed him, and frequently drove by or parked in front of his home.

Each of these incidents would be concerning had they been alleged independently, the ACLU says in its letter to the attorney generals office. Together, they suggest a pervasive culture of racial bias and systemic process failure within the Tonganoxie Police Department.COLUMBUS, Ohio  Gov. Mike DeWine on Thursday called for additional transparency from JobsOhio, the states private economic development nonprofit.

That included calling on JobsOhio to immediately release information about how much its employees make. JobsOhio, which was created in 2011 to be more secret and functionally replace the state governments economic development department, currently only has to report its employee salary information once a year. The organization increasingly has drawn bipartisan criticism for its lack of transparency, although JobsOhio frequently argues it is more transparent than most private nonprofits.

DeWine, who appoints JobsOhios board members, also called on the organization to work more closely with the state governments tourism bureau to promote Ohio as a travel and relocation destination. He made these comments during JobsOhios board meeting in Columbus. It was the first board meeting hes attended since becoming governor in January.

For more information see the story below.U.S. Attorney General William Barr (L) leaves after a meeting at the West Wing of the White House March 21, 2019 in Washington, DC. Key law-enforcement officials in Washington are preparing for the release of the report by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Attorney General William Barr on Friday notified lawmakers that he intends to provide information about the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller's report "as soon as this weekend."

"The Special Counsel has submitted to me today a 'confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions' he has reached," Barr wrote in a letter sent to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

"I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend," he wrote.

Barr said in the letter that over the course of Mueller's investigation, there were no instances in which Mueller was blocked from pursuing an action. He pledged "as much transparency as possible" and wrote that he would keep lawmakers informed of the status of his review.

Mueller was appointed in May 2017 to oversee an investigation into links between President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and the Russian government. He has since brought charges against nearly three dozen people, including six former Trump advisors and 26 Russian nationals.

Read more: Robert Mueller's report is finally finished. This is what we know about his probe so far

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the next steps are up to Barr.

"The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsel's report," Sanders wrote in a post on Twitter.

Trump has blasted the probe since the outset and has accused Mueller of leading a partisan "witch hunt."

Barr said he will consult with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Mueller about which information, beyond the report's principal conclusions, he will be able to provide to lawmakers and the public.

Sarah Sanders tweet

Democrats immediately pushed the Department of Justice to make Mueller's report available to Congress.

In a joint statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said it was "imperative for Mr. Barr to make the full report public and provide its underlying documentation and findings to Congress."

The two pressed Barr not to provide a "sneak preview" to Trump or his staff and wrote that "the White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public."

House Judiciary Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., wrote on Twitter that he looked forward to "getting the full Mueller report and related materials."

"Transparency and the public interest demand nothing less," Nadler wrote. "The need for public faith in the rule of law must be the priority."

The full text of Barr's letter is below:

Dear Chairman Graham, Chairman Nadler, Ranking Member Feinstein, and Ranking Member Collins: I write to notify you pursuant to 28 C.F.R.  600.9(a)(3) that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters. In addition to this notification, the Special Counsel regulations require that I provide you with "a description and explanation of instances (if any) in which the Attorney General" or acting Attorney General "concluded that a proposed action by a Special Counsel was so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued." 28 C.F.R.  600.9(a)(3). There were no such instances during the Special Counsel's investigation. The Special Counsel has submitted to me today a "confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions" he has reached, as required by 28 C.F.R.  600.8(c). I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend. Separately, I intend to consult with Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Special Counsel Mueller to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Department's long-standing practices and policies. I remain committed to as much transparency as possible and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review. Finally, the Special Counsel regulations provide that "the Attorney General may determine that public release of" this notification would be in the public interest." 28 C.F.R.  600.9(c). I have so determined, and I will disclose this letter to the public after delivering it to you. Sincerely, William P. Barr Attorney General



This is breaking news. Check back for updates.An entirely new cottage industry of RV and vehicle landlords has cropped up to fill the demand, renting out everything from bunk beds to box trucks to people who earn far more than minimum wage.

+31 PALO ALTO: A line of RVs is parked near the entrance to Stanford University along El Camino Real, which has long been a popular spot for people living in mobile homes. California is home to about 12 percent of the US population but a disproportionate number of the nation's homeless at 22 percent

+31 LOS ANGELES: The city's iconic palm trees and distant mountains form the backdrop for a string of camper vans on the streets of the West Rancho Dominguez/Compton area of the City of Angels

+31 LOS ANGELES: One homeless resident, who gave his name as Joe, pushes some of his possessions near a line of RVs on the streets of the Canoga Park area of the City of Angels

+31 It is illegal in many parts of California to sleep in vehicles on the streets, with occupants subject to fines and tickets and action by police, so lines and clusters of RVs tend to be relatively small and move often - fueled by the complaints of locals who consider their presence a nuisance or an eyesore

+31 Getting accurate data in cities like Los Angeles and across the entire state has its complications, says Russ Heimerich, deputy secretary of communications for Californias Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. The figures are usually based on point and time counts, when staff go out in January to look for people who are demonstrably homeless. They go to the shelters, but youre not going to stop and knock on somebodys RV necessarily and say, Are you here because youre camping in a Walmart parking lot because youre cruising the country, or are you here because you got placed out of your home? Those point in time counts probably wouldnt catch those

And a growing wave of resentment is spreading across the state just as quickly as the trend in vehicle living itself. The topic is ubiquitous at town council meetings from San Diego to San Francisco, as residents toss out a variety of complaints  everything from trash and unsanitary conditions to drug dealing and, simply, the fact that they consider parked campers in residential areas to be eyesores that bring down the value of their suburban communities.

The reality, however, cannot be ignored.

In Los Angeles, 2018 data recorded 45,043 homeless people last year, according to the citys Homeless Services Authority. Seventy-five percent of those people were in unsheltered accommodation, with 3,814 people in cars, 3,554 people in vans and 8,380 in RVs and Campers.

But getting accurate data in cities like Los Angeles and across the entire state has its complications, says Russ Heimerich, deputy secretary of communications for Californias Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. The figures are usually based on point and time counts, when staff go out in January to look for people who are demonstrably homeless.

They go to the shelters, but youre not going to stop and knock on somebodys RV necessarily and say, Are you here because youre camping in a Walmart parking lot because youre cruising the country, or are you here because you got placed out of your home? Those point in time counts probably wouldnt catch those.

He tells DailyMail.com: One of the major causes of homelessness is, frankly, the high cost of housing in California, and so we are working on initiatives to get local governments to approve and plan for housing and make it easier to plan for developers who want to build housing to do so.

The state has almost six million households that pay rent as opposed to owning; of those, more than three million households pay more than 30 percent of their income towards rent, which is a very large percent, Heimerich tells DailyMail.com. And more than 1.7million households pay more than 50 percent of their income toward rent.

He adds: Many, many families in California are one pay check away from being homeless. They lose a job or they have a sudden medical emergency where they have to use the money for hospitalization or doctors or whatever, instead of paying the rent  in California, anyway, and I suspect elsewhere, there is a large percentage of the homeless who are those people who have had that one disaster and can no longer afford to pay rent.

Its not that theyre without a job; in some cases, its just that theyre priced out of their homes or somehow economically forced out of their homes. We have a large number of people here that, if you were looking at them on the street, you would never guess that they were homeless, that theyre sleeping in cars, RVs, or there are a lot of people couch surfing with friends, that sort of thing.

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+31 Above, a map that shows where RVs in Palo Alto line up along El Camino Real, near the entrance to Stanford University, which has long been a popular spot for people living in mobile homes

+31 In addition to RVs, many people have resorted to living in vehicles. In Los Angeles, 2018 data recorded 45,043 homeless people last year, according to the citys Homeless Services Authority. Seventy-five percent of those people were in unsheltered accommodation, with 3,814 people in cars, 3,554 people in vans and 8,380 in RVs and campers

+31 One car resident, who gave her name as Mariola, sits near a luxury apartment complex in the Canoga Park area of Los Angeles. According to Russ Heimerich, deputy secretary of communications for Californias Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, in the state there are 'almost six million households that pay rent as opposed to owning; of those, more than three million households pay more than 30 percent of their income towards rent, which is a very large percent. And more than 1.7million households pay more than 50 percent of their income toward rent

+31 RVs and camper vans are parked everywhere from church lots to residential streets to industrial parks - and councils across the state have received complaints from locals who allege trash discarding, lack of sanitary conditions, illicit activity and other problems

+31 The scale of the problem has become so large that grassroots organizations and other efforts have sprung up to get RVs and vehicles off the streets and instead allow them to park in designated, guarded, often secret locations

Footage shows Palo Alto streets lined with people living in RVs Loaded : 0% Progress : 0% 0:00 Previous Play Skip Mute Current Time 0:00 / Duration Time 1:34 Fullscreen

+31 The homeless crisis has sparked something of a cottage industry for opportunistic landlords who buy RVs, vans and box trucks to rent out to desperate tenants

+31 One problem with ascertaining accurate numbers is that it's hard to distinguish between people actually living in camper vans and people on vacation; on top of that, many people might not want to admit that they are homeless, and others con't consider themselves homeless at all, instead calling their transiency a lifestyle choice

+31 Above, a line of RVs parked near the entrance to Stanford University is seen along El Camino Real road in Palo Alto. This has long been a popular spot for mobile homes

+31 Above, a map showing where in Compton that RVs tend to park, which is along S. Broadway from Rosecrans Ave. to 133rd St. California, which is home to 12 percent of the US population, also hosts a disproportionate amount of the nations homeless at 22 percent

The problem has become so widespread that grassroots organizations and other efforts have sprung up to provide safe parking places for such displaced individuals. Its actually illegal in many parts of California to sleep on the street in a parked vehicle, so many of the working homeless face fines, tickets and being moved on by police  contributing to the mobile nature of parking sites and the fact that rarely more than a dozen vehicles are parked together at any one time.

Emily Uyeda Kantrim is a program director for SafeParkingLA, a non-profit which accepts applications daily from people looking for guarded, specifically identified and often secret locations to park and sleep. In a 30-day period, she tells DailyMail.com, her organization gets about 250 applications.

Of those, about 100 are homeless for the first time and not connected to any other services, she says. They dont know about homeless services; maybe to them that means going to a physical shelter and having to stay there for whatever reason. Out of that 100, 60 are under the age of 40 and have a job  so that was a new statistic that no one else has really dialled down into before.

She says: Weve seen  and this is born out in other statistics as well  more young people who are just excluded from the rental market due to the cost, as well as seniors who are on a fixed income and who are being displaced from their historic communities.

She tells DailyMail.com: I can tell you that out of the number of people who contact us who are in RVs, these are people who primarily have felt they have no way back into housing. A family will call and say, What do you have out here, because we have been displaced from our neighbourhood; we cant afford it anymore. So we bought this RV so our kids can go to the same school.

People are trying to make peace with the reality of their situation by trying to do something; they dont realize its not legal to park your RV on a regular city street and sleep in it.

Another issue with figuring out the scale of the problem  and fixing it  is that many people do not want to admit they are homeless or even think of themselves as homeless in the first place, instead considering their transient living a lifestyle choice and a true home.

Uyeda Kantrim emphasises that people need to be more educated about services available to them, while Heimerich points to the fact that the state government is increasingly trying to allocate funds for more services and more affordable housing.

Examples of initiatives, for example, include legislation last year that put $500million in the hands of local jurisdictions specifically to help with homelessness. Another half a billion dollars has been earmarked similarly for homeless initiatives, he tells DailyMail.com.

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+31 Many, many families in California are one pay check away from being homeless. They lose a job or they have a sudden medical emergency where they have to use the money for hospitalization or doctors or whatever, instead of paying the rent  in California, anyway, and I suspect elsewhere, there is a large percentage of the homeless who are those people who have had that one disaster and can no longer afford to pay rent. Its not that theyre without a job; in some cases, its just that theyre priced out of their homes or somehow economically forced out of their homes. We have a large number of people here that, if you were looking at them on the street, you would never guess that they were homeless, that theyre sleeping in cars, RVs, or there are a lot of people couch surfing with friends, that sort of thing

+31 General views show RVs parked near Stanford; across California, community responses to the growing number of camper vans and other vehicles has varied wildly. Some homeowners befriend the homeless and working displaced, even offering facilities such as showers in their homes, while others complain to councils and even fight with neighbors who help the itinerant newcomers, accusing them of facilitating the trend

+31 Official figures - or as close as possible - are usually obtained annually in January, when Heimerich says staff go out to look for people who are demonstrably homeless. He adds: They go to the shelters, but youre not going to stop and knock on somebodys RV necessarily and say, Are you here because youre camping in a Walmart parking lot because youre cruising the country, or are you here because you got placed out of your home? Those point in time counts probably wouldnt catch those

+31 Emily Uyeda Kantrim is a program director for SafeParkingLA, a non-profit which accepts applications daily from people looking for guarded, specifically identified and often secret locations to park and sleep. In a 30-day period, she tells DailyMail.com, her organization gets about 250 applications. Of those, about 100 are homeless for the first time and not connected to any other services, she says. They dont know about homeless services; maybe to them that means going to a physical shelter and having to stay there for whatever reason. Out of that 100, 60 are under the age of 40 and have a job  so that was a new statistic that no one else has really dialled down into before

+31 Uyeda Kantrim tells DailyMail.com: I can tell you that out of the number of people who contact us who are in RVs, these are people who primarily have felt they have no way back into housing. A family will call and say, What do you have out here, because we have been displaced from our neighbourhood; we cant afford it anymore. So we bought this RV so our kids can go to the same school'

+31 At a meeting last year at City Hall, the Los Angeles Times reported how multilple residents of a South LA neighbhorhood pleaded for new restrictions on trucks and RVs parking in the area, with one woman alleging the street across from her church had become an eyesore over the last year, cluttered with trash and sewage dumped by people living there in campers and buses. Others claimed to have seen drug deals taking place openly.

+31 RV communities have been moved on from industrial parks where business people claim theyre losing clientele, and suburban residents  however true or not  have insisted theyve seen needles in public parks and evidence of drug use. Neighborhood tensions have even risen when some homeowners let vehicle dwellers use their home showers or other facilities, with locals opposed arguing that such altruism makes the areas more attractive to itinerant riff-raff

+31 Even walking down the street to pick up my newspaper Im getting complaints, Councilman Bob Blumenfield told the LA Times last year. We dont want our neighborhoods to become campsites

That doesnt mean that the more widespread and home-owning communities are exactly thrilled with the situation. Palo Alto may see swathes of well-maintained, high-end RVs, but theres no denying that decrepit camper vans with non-working residents, often involved in questionable activities, take up residence in neighborhoods where they are not wanted. There have been complaints of trash, filth, drugs and other illicit activities.Angie Thomas, the author behind "The Hate U Give", knows a thing or two about rejection, having suffered many snubs in her career.

Speaking at London's Southbank Centre last week, Thomas gave attendees a piece of advice that could be embraced by anyone with a creative goal.

"Write for yourself, first and foremost  write the stories that you want to read. Write the books that you would like to walk into a store and pick up," the best-selling author said at the "Angie Thomas: On the Come Up" event in London.

"Don't write it because it's a trending topic. Don't write it because it could be turned into a film. Don't write it because you think it's going to win awards," she said before adding, "Write it because you enjoy it, because that's why you will enjoy writing it. If it's something that you enjoy, it'll be something you'll want to read."

Thomas made a name for herself as an author, after publishing her debut novel "The Hate U Give" in early 2017. The book tracks the life of 16-year-old Starr Carter, who has her world turned upside down after she witnesses the fatal shooting of a childhood friend, by a police officer.

Thomas was initially drawn to writing this story, after seeing the reactions that came from the police shooting of Oscar Grant, back in 2009. After that and other cases fueled her own frustration and anger, Thomas told Epic Reads in 2017 that she wanted to find a way for her writing to show the human side of race-based injustice, along with finding a way to find hope in times of hurt.

And her hard work paid off. Commenting on the response people had to her book "The Hate U Give", Thomas told Goodreads in late 2017, that one of the best aspects was seeing how the book had "successfully found its readership and how it has successfully reached the kids I wanted it to reach."

The author has published two successful books, "The Hate U Give" and "On The Come Up", both of which have been picked up for on-screen adaptions.Investors need to change their approach to investing in pharmaceutical companies that are working to develop life-altering treatments, former Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini told CNBC on Friday.

Bertolini, who resigned from his posts at Aetna last year after the insurer's $69 billion merger with CVS Health, said investors currently are trading "on a basis that says, 'does this drug work today? Did this trial pass today?''"

"The investment model in drug development is all wrong," he said in an interview with "Squawk Box." Drugmakers such as Biogen are "doing research, they're doing applied science to try and find a way to commercialization. That's what they should be doing."

Bertolini spoke a day after Biogen's stock posted its worst day in 14 years after the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company terminated the trial of Alzheimer's disease drug aducanumab, which it had been developing in partnership with Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai.

As many as 5.5 million Americans over the age of 65 suffer from Alzheimer's, a progressive disease that often affects memory, thinking and behavior.

Biogen's experimental drug targeted a compound in the brain known as beta amyloid, which was believed by many scientists and drugmakers to play a role in the devastating disease. An independent audit revealed the drug was unlikely to work.

The biotech company joins a long list of companies that have failed to successfully treat the disease. Wall Street viewed Biogen's setback on Thursday as the industry essentially going back to the drawing board when it comes to curing Alzheimer.

Bertolini called Biogen's stock plummet of more than 29 percent on Thursday "crazy" and not "realistic."

Bertolini joined CNBC to discuss health care and his new book, "Mission-Driven Leadership: My Journal as a Radical Capitalist."Brazilian stocks fell sharply on Friday as the arrest of the country's former president, Michel Temer, sparked worries that government debate over key fiscal reforms may be delayed.

The iShares MSCI Brazil ETF (EWZ) dropped 6 percent and posted its worst day since May 18, 2017, when it fell 16.3 percent. The Bovespa index, Brazil's benchmark index, fell about 3.3 percent after hitting an all-time high earlier this week.

Temer was arrested in Sao Paulo on Thursday, with prosecutors alleging he was the head of a "criminal organization" that took more than $470 million in bribes or kickbacks.

Temer already faced ongoing criminal investigations against him before leaving the presidency. However, his arrest comes as current President Jair Bolsonaro tries to push forward major changes to the country's pension system, which investors largely bet will happen.

"The key question is whether or not his arrest affects pension reform. In theory it shouldn't," Dirk Willer, head of emerging market strategy at Citigroup, said in a note. However, "the period between the unveiling of the pension reform and approval by the special house committee will be filled with much noise and headline risk. [Thursday's] news was a good example of the sort of headline risks one should expect over the next months when pension reform makes its way through congress."

Brazilian stocks surged to start the year amid hopes the Bolsonaro administration would pass key changes to the country's social security system. Brazil's generous pension system effectively lets citizens retire in their 50s. This has led to massive government debt, which has stymied consistent economic growth in Brazil.

But while investors are still betting on some sort of reform taking place, they are realizing it could be a bumpy ride. On Wednesday, Bolsonaro unveiled a military pension reform plan that would save just $265 million on average over the next 10 years. These savings are well below those proposed by the country's Economic Ministry.

But it is key for Bolsonaro's broader pension-reform efforts as lawmakers indicated they could not debate the matter until they saw the president's plans for military pensions.

Now, Temer's arrest could delay that process even further depending on how his party  which holds 34 seats in the lower house  reacts, Citi's Willer said.

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.Jasper Juinen | Bloomberg via Getty Images Theresa May, U.K. prime minister, pauses during a news conference at a European Union (EU) leaders summit in Brussels, Belgium, on Friday, March 22, 2019.

European Union leaders have warned Britain that it has one final opportunity to leave the bloc in an orderly fashion, after agreeing to delay the departure date beyond March 29. The U.K. will be offered a delay until May 22, if lawmakers support Prime Minister Theresa May's twice-rejected Withdrawal Agreement next week. But, if Parliament votes against May's embattled template to leave the bloc, the EU will support a shorter delay until April 12. This is designed to allow the U.K. time to get the deal through or indicate another way forward. "This is perhaps the last chance for Britain to say what it wants for the future," Belgium's Prime Minister Charles Michel told reporters on Friday. "More than ever, this is in the hands of the British parliament," Michel said, as he arrived for the second day of an EU summit overshadowed by talks over Britain's departure.

'This is it'

May, who had asked to be able to delay Britain's departure until June 30, said British lawmakers now faced a "clear choice." They could either support her Brexit deal, deliver on the referendum result and exit the EU in an "orderly manner" or face the prospect of having to stand candidates in the European Parliamentary elections three years after a small but clear majority voted for Brexit. On Thursday, EU leaders spent seven hours discussing a host of options regarding Brexit, saying that while they regret the country's decision to leave, they are eager to move on with the process. Eventually, the bloc decided a May 22 departure date would apply if Parliament rallies behind the prime minister next week. Otherwise, Britain must decide whether to offer a new plan or leave the EU without a deal on April 12. "In case of no vote (in Parliament) it will guide everybody to a no-deal for sure," French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters on Thursday. "This is it. We are ready," Macron said.

'How can you prepare for something terrible?'

The French premier reportedly told EU leaders in the room on Thursday that before coming to Brussels he had thought May only had a 10 percent chance of winning a third meaningful vote. But, after listening to the prime minister speak on Thursday, he had cut his estimate to just 5 percent, Reuters reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the discussions.Gov. Gavin Newsom discusses emergency preparedness during a visit to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection CalFire Colfax Station Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2019, in Colfax, Calif.

LOS ANGELES  California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide emergency Friday as result of "a vast tree die-off throughout the state" and deteriorating forest conditions that have increased the risk of wildfires.

The executive order allows the state to suspend environmental review on some fuel-reduction projects, including tree thinning in forests and other high-risk fire areas. It comes as the state is bracing for perhaps another tough wildfire season after devastating 2017 and 2018 blazes that killed more than 120 people.

Newsom made the announcement during a press conference Friday in Northern California's Lake County, a region hard hit by wildfires that has seen more than half of its acreage burn since 2012. The governor also launched a new initiative to promote emergency preparedness for wildfires.

"The increasing wildfire risks we face as a state mean we simply can't wait until a fire starts in order to start deploying emergency resources," Newsom said in a statement. "California needs sustained focus and immediate action in order to better protect our communities."

According to governor's emergency declaration, there are an estimated 2.2 million homes located in so-called wildland urban interface areas that are at "high or very high fire hazard" risk.

The action by the Democratic governor follows President Donald Trump's repeated criticism of California's wildfire prevention efforts, including blaming the state in November for "gross mismanagement of the forests." The president threatened to pull federal funds from the state last October and repeated it in November as firefighters were still battling major blazes across California.

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1061168803218948096

Again, the president in January renewed his attack on California's forest management practices and threatened to cut off federal aid.

The lion's share of forest land in California is controlled by the federal government.

Last year, California experienced more than 7,600 wildfires that charred more than 1.8 million acres, up from 1.3 million acres in 2017. Six of the 10 most destructive fires in the state have occurred in the past two years.

The state's most devastating blaze was the Camp Fire last November that ravaged the Northern California town of Paradise, killing 86 people and destroying more than 10,000 homes.

Newsom has criticized Trump's threats and defended the state's management of forests.

The governor announced earlier this year that the state will spend $1 billion on forestland management over the next five years, with funding coming from proceeds from California's cap-and-trade auctions. Also, Newsom has proposed the state spend more than $300 million to upgrade its planning and response to wildfires and other disasters.

Newsom's state of emergency declaration follows the release of a report by Cal Fire earlier this month that identified 35 priority fuel-reduction projects in more than 200 communities considered high fire-risk zones. Some of the projects involve tree removal or other fuel-reduction steps on privately owned lands.

"Now that the governor has given the green light and signed the proclamation, we're going to take action immediately on projects," said Mike Mohler, a spokesman for Cal Fire. "By next week, we will have boots on the ground and working on all of these projects."

As part of the state's wildfire prevention efforts, Newsom is mobilizing California National Guard troops to assist in clearing hazardous dead trees, vegetation and creating fuel breaks, according to Cal Fire. Some of the National Guard troops set to help in the wildfire prevention efforts previously were focused on assisting in the Trump administration's U.S. border request.

The governor's executive order to exempt environmental review on fuel-reduction projects raised concerns by some groups that have been critical of logging practices.

"We didn't like the fact they're talking about removing oversight and regulations," said Kathryn Phillips, director of Sierra Club California. "There is value to the oversight that comes with timber harvest plans and that comes with some of the other regulations."

For example, she said some environmental reviews on timber are meant to prevent unintended consequences such as mud flows into rivers and streams that could happen as a result of major storms.The object detection and tracking technology developed by SenseTime is displayed on a screen at the Artificial Intelligence Exhibition & Conference in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, April 4, 2018. Bloomberg | Getty Images

If China doesn't step up its efforts on issues such as data privacy and intellectual property protection, the country could lose out on a 37 trillion yuan ($5.5 trillion) growth opportunity in the decade ahead, according to new analysis. Based on research from economics consulting firm AlphaBeta, the report published Thursday by the nonprofit Hinrich Foundation found that China's 2017 flows of digital data contributed 3.2 trillion yuan of value to the domestic economy, and 1.6 trillion overseas. By 2030, the analysts expect growth in such digital trade, especially in the consumer and retail business, to contribute 37 trillion yuan to China's economy. That would be about one-fifth of Beijing's projected gross domestic product, the report noted. "That estimate relies on free cross-border data flows for those opportunities," Konstantin Matthies, engagement manager at AlphaBeta, told CNBC on Thursday. "If you put in place things that will impede that, that number is going to shrink."

GET YOUR ESSENTIAL TECH INSIGHT FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE PODCAST SERIES Subscribe E-NEWSLETTER Sign up

The report laid out "priorities for action" for China, such as adopting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Privacy Framework and guidelines for protecting personal information as put out by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Other changes which could help China realize its growth potential from digital trade include clearer definitions of what content is illegal, and balanced rules protecting intellectual property rights, the report said. It noted that restricting access to some online material can raise costs, or make business impossible, for some Chinese digital companies. China is infamous for an internet firewall that blocks domestic access to websites Beijing considers a threat to its control, such as The New York Times, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Google search is also unusable. Chinese internet censors also scour social media to delete content deemed sensitive. The blocks can lower business productivity, and create an atmosphere of fear for businesses that worry they could be shut down overnight. On intellectual property protection, foreign businesses say Beijing has made some progress, especially with new laws such as the recently announced foreign investment law. But questions remain about enforcement. The report's suggestions are rather general, Zhou Nianli, professor at The University of International Business and Economics' WTO research institute, said Thursday. Zhou was speaking at media event in Beijing hosted by the think tank Center for China and Globalization, which provided CNBC with a Mandarin-language transcript.Lyft, the ridesharing company set to hit public markets Friday, will be a good stock to buy in the short term but it has challenges in the long run, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Friday.

"I think Lyft is exactly the kind of stock that can work in this slower growth environment, but you need to be careful with these fresh-faced IPOs," the "Mad Money" host said. "Short term, I'm betting this turns out to be a good trade, but as a longer-term investment I'm more skeptical."

In evaluating the tech company, Cramer highlighted pros and cons about Lyft as it looks to continue taking market share in the growing transportation-as-a-service business. He predicted the company will be worth $21.5 billion and the stock could sell between 3.8 to 4.8 times next year's sales.

"I think the stock can go to $75 before it starts getting expensive relative to its peers, but for all we know it will go to $75 immediately after it starts trading. After that, I think you need to get more cautious."

Lyft is a great growth story, the host said. After launching in San Francisco in 2012, it has expanded to more than 300 markets across the country and Canada. With 18.6 million active users as of December, 1.1 million drivers, and 39 percent market share, it practically has a duopoly with Uber, he said.

The company has a good balance sheet because it has no problem raising money, but it spent $1 billion in 2018 and plans to top that figure in 2019, Cramer noted. Although its gross margins improved from 18 percent in 2016 to 42.3 percent last year, Lyft has a ways to go before it is profitable because it is spending to expand and take market share, he added.

"The biggest concern here is that Lyft lost nearly a billion dollars last year and we have no idea when it will become profitable," Cramer said. "Yesterday the company held a major investor meeting where they indicated that 2019 will be a peak year for investing in the business ... The problem here is that if anything starts to go off the rails, there's nothing propping up the stock."

Lyft's bookings growth has also slowed from 140 percent in 2017 to 75 percent in 2018, Cramer said. The good news is its revenue as a percentage of bookings has continued increasing 18 to 27 percent in the past two years, meaning the company is making more money per ride. But the company could miss user expectations as bookings ease, similarly to the active users on Snapchat, the picture and video app owned by Snap Inc., Cramer said.

Additionally, the transportation sector is highly regulated, especially at the local and state levels where disruptive tech companies don't get much love from politicians, Cramer said. He also criticized its dual-class ownership structure, which gives nearly half of the voting power to its founders: CEO Logan Green and Vice Chairman John Zimmer.

"When shareholders don't have the ability to remove management, you can end up with some perverse incentives," the host said. "This is something else Lyft has in common with Snap, and it's pretty suboptimal."Taxis in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, are set to use wireless fast-charging technology to keep them running.



In an announcement Thursday, Finnish energy firm Fortum said it would work with the City of Oslo and Momentum Dynamics, a U.S. company, to build the system.



The project will use induction technology, with charging plates installed in areas where taxis, which will carry a receiver for the charging, park.



"We will install the wireless chargers at taxi stands, such as the one at... Oslo Central Station," Annika Hoffner, the head of Fortum Charge and Drive, said in a statement.



"Taxis will be able to drive up to the charger and a wireless charging session will automatically start," Hoffner added, explaining that taxis could charge while waiting for new customers.



The rollout of a wireless charging system in Oslo is part of a wider transition to cleaner types of transport in the country.

In 2018, there were 46,143 new passenger car registrations for battery electric vehicles in Norway, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association.

Sture Portvik, electric mobility manager for the City of Oslo, said that all taxis in Oslo would be zero-emission from 2023.Rajat Gupta, retired head of consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and a former Goldman Sachs board member, was convicted nearly seven years ago of insider trading, and spent 19 months behind bars.

Now, in his first interview since his release from prison in 2016, Gupta maintained his innocence, and said he wants to rebuild his life.

Gupta told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin that he is innocent, despite being found guilty by a jury of three counts of securities fraud and one conspiracy charge, and not guilty on two other charges. He said his biggest regrets are speaking too freely about Goldman's corporate secrets, and not testifying at his trial.

"I was going to testify. And in the very end, they wore me down and convinced me I shouldn't. And to me, it was a personal failure," he told Sorkin.

Gupta was convicted of illegally sharing information about Goldman Sachs to hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, who is serving 11 years in prison for insider trading. The case involving Gupta revolved around the day in 2008 when Warren Buffett agreed to invest in Goldman Sachs. After the board discussed that investment, Gupta was charged with calling Rajaratnam just 16 seconds later and divulging the Buffett news.

At the time of his sentencing, Gupta was one of the most prominent figures to face prison in the government's widespread crackdown on insider trading.

Gupta told Sorkin that he spent time with Rajaratnam in prison, and ultimately forgave him. "We played Scrabble in prison together. We played chess. We had breakfast together."

"I told him, 'Raj, I am here because of you,'" Gupta said. "He's not the apologizing type, so he didn't say, 'I'm sorry.'"Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg told CNBC Friday that the move in bond yield was primarily due to "Brexit scare"and "further softening of export outlook in manufacturing PMIs."

Hitting a low of -0.001 percent, the 10-year bond yield's downturn comes amid rising concern about the direction of the euro zone's largest economy, with a string of weak data in recent months fueling speculation that Germany could be heading for recession.

Germany's 10-year government bond yields slipped into negative territory on Friday for the first time since October 2016.

IHS Markit's PMI survey published Friday revealed that Germany's manufacturing sector contracted for the third consecutive month in March, with output growth nearing a six-year low.

German government 10-year bond, an important benchmark for European fixed income assets, is viewed as a safe-haven for investors. In times of uncertainty and challenging market environment, investors tend to move their investments from riskier assets into safe-havens like gold and German government bonds. The bond yields hitting negative territory shows there is a rising demand for the 10-year paper due to the ongoing uncertainty in the euro zone economy being fueled from a slowdown in Germany, a deadlock among politicians on Brexit among others.

Meanwhile, data from Germany's federal statistics office (Destatis) in February showed that the country narrowly avoided a recession in the fourth-quarter of 2018, with the economy growing 0.0 percent from the previous quarter.

In January, German's gross domestic product (GDP) grew 1.5 percent in 2018, compared with 2.2 percent growth in 2017. Although it was Germany's weakest growth in five years, Destatis noted that the economy had still grown for the ninth year in a row.

Adding to the slowdown in Germany is the uncertainty surrounding Britain's exit from the European Union. In the latest, the European Union agreed to an extension to the date of the U.K.'s withdrawal from the bloc, but said the length of the delay would depend on whether Parliament approves Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal next week.

All of these factors seem to be adding to investors being cautious in the region. Earlier this month, the euro zone's central bank slashed its growth forecast for 2019 to 1.1 percent from an earlier forecast of 1.7 percent made in December.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi warned that there had been a "sizable moderation in economic expansion that will extend into the current year."This picture taken on May 15, 2018 shows a Garuda Indonesia Boeing 737 Max 8 at Jakarta International airport in Jakarta. - Indonesia's national carrier Garuda will call off a multi-billion-dollar order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 jets after two fatal crashes involving the plane, the company said, in what is thought to be the first formal cancellation for the model. (Photo by IHWAN IDAMIN HARAHAP / AFP) (Photo credit should read IHWAN IDAMIN HARAHAP/AFP/Getty Images)

Airline Garuda Indonesia said Friday that it is requesting a cancellation to its current order for 49 Boeing 737 Max jets valued at $6 billion.

Newswires Reuters and AFP both reported the company's plans.

Reuters, citing Garuda's CFO, said the company may change its 737 Max order to another type of Boeing jet. The national carrier of Indonesia did not explain why it no longer wanted the planes.

In response to CNBC's request for comment, Garuda spokesman Ikhsan Rosan said the airline sent a letter to Boeing on March 14 to cancel its order for the 737 Max jets. Garuda has not heard back from Boeing, but the aircraft manufacturer will visit Jakarta on March 28 for "further discussion," said Rosan.

Garuda currently only has one 737 Max 8 in its fleet, according to Reuters.

The Indonesian airline is the first to publicly confirm plans to cancel an order for the Boeing jets after two fatal crashes involving the 737 Max 8. The planes have been grounded by authorities in multiple countries  including in the U.S., Europe, China and Indonesia.Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump during a meeting outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Despite all the back and forth between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping's negotiating teams, the U.S. and China will ultimately come to a trade agreement, according to one investor.

When that happens, markets could soar 15 percent or more for the rest of the year, said Jackson Wong, associate director at Huarong International Securities.

"The rumor is (that by the) end of April, the deal would be 90 percent done. And, by end June, (the) deal would be signed," Wong told CNBC's "Street Signs" on Friday.

Wong's prediction follows the market rally that began at the beginning of this year, roughly coinciding with investors' increasing expectations that a U.S.-China trade deal could be inked.

"Now the investors in China or around the world are expecting a deal to be done. They have been expecting since the end of last year. So I think the market has been rallying from that point on," he said.

The ongoing rally, he said, may continue a bit, but there is also a chance it could "consolidate around the current level for about maybe a few weeks." From there, Wong said, markets will be set for another leg up once Trump and Xi reach an accord.

Such a deal could also have a positive impact on the real economy worldwide, he said.

His analysis comes amid the ongoing trade war between the world's two largest economies that began about one year ago. That escalating fight has seen rounds of tariffs imposed on items ranging from soybeans to steel, attempts at reconciliation, and Trump declaring the benefits of a trade war on Twitter. Tensions have eased since the presidents of both nations agreed in December to pause any further tariffs while negotiations continued.

Donald Trump tweet: Tariffs are the greatest! Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It's as simple as that - and everybody's talking! Remember, we are the "piggy bank" that's being robbed. All will be Great!

The negotiations are focused on both reducing the U.S. trade deficit with China and eliminating some of the systemic impediments to foreign firms succeeding in Asia's largest economy.

Wong acknowledged that there have been differences of opinion on both sides, but he said he remains positive that both parties will be able to reach a consensus.

"Talks are going not bad," Wong told CNBC. "The main differences, in my point of view, (are) solvable. China wants all tariffs lifted, and the U.S. wants a say in the new intellectual property theft and transfer policies."

"If both countries give in a little bit, so maybe, you know, the tariffs will stay a little bit longer, and then China would give (the U.S.) more control over policies, then they can have a final deal," he said.

Nonetheless, Wong said, the U.S.-China relationship is still rather weak.

"Both countries are standing on very fragile grounds and any sudden move on either side would break the trust on each other," he said. "Investors are still cautious and nervous about that until they can decide a date that Donald Trump and Xi Jinping can meet. Otherwise, anything can be a wildcard."A smartphone displays the Bitcoin GBP market value on the stock exchange via the Yahoo Finance app.

"People looked at cryptocurrency and said this market is a mess; that's because they were looking at data that was manipulated," said Matthew Hougan, global head of research at Bitwise. "When you cut away the echo chamber of these nonsense numbers, it should be an efficient, well-arbitraged market."

Bitwise, an asset manager in the process of trying to list the first-ever bitcoin exchange-traded fund, said it met with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday to discuss its application . As a part of the process, it submitted analysis that could help regulators cut through the noise.

An analysis published by Bitwise this week shows that 95 percent of bitcoin spot trading is faked by unregulated exchanges. The survey, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, echoes concerns by regulators that cryptocurrency markets are still ripe for manipulation.

New research is casting even more doubt on the legitimacy of bitcoin trading.

The analysis showed that "substantially all of the volume" reported on 71 out of the 81 exchanges was wash trading, a term that describes a person simultaneously selling and buying the same stock, or bitcoin in this case, to create the appearance of activity in the market. In other words, it's not real.

Those exchanges report an aggregated $6 billion in average daily bitcoin volume. The study finds that only $273 million of that is legitimate.

"The idea that there's fake volume has been rumored for a long time; we were just the first people to systematically look at which exchanges were delivering real volume," Hougan told CNBC.

The San Francisco-based firm compared at Coinbase Pro, which reports about $27 million in average daily volume in bitcoin. Its median "spread," or difference between the price a seller wants and the price a buyer wants, for bitcoin was about 1 cent. That scenario passed Bitwise's test for having real volume.

But in another stark comparison, CoinBene  the biggest reported exchange on CoinMarketCap.com  has a nearly $15 spread. Hougan said they found other extreme examples of exchanges with a spread of more than $300.

"It is surprising that an exchange with almost 18 times the volume of Coinbase Pro would have a spread that is 1,500 times larger," Bitwise said in the report.

Exchanges may have an incentive to report fake volume. Bad actors may look to attract listings for new initial coin offerings, or ICOs, who want their cryptocurrency on an exchange where more trading goes on, Bitwise said. Those fees can run from $1 million to $3 million per listing, according to data from Autonomous Next.

U.S. regulators have taken a cautious approach to making bitcoin mainstream for traders. The SEC highlighted the risk of manipulation as reason for rejecting applications for other cryptocurrency ETFs. The office of New York Attorney General also flagged the issue in a recent report warning that exchanges are vulnerable. Because most cryptocurrency trading platforms don't use the same monitoring tools as stock exchanges, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton has warned that investors may not get a fair assessment of bitcoin's price.

"What investors expect is that trading in the commodity that underlies that ETF makes sense and is free from the risk of manipulation," Clayton said in November at the Consensus Invest Conference in Manhattan. "It's an issue that needs to be addressed before I would be comfortable."

Hougan said this also explains why trading volume for regulated bitcoin futures has seemed weak. Chicago-based CME and Cboe began listing bitcoin derivatives at the end of 2017 but have had much lower volumes than the $6 billion reported by unregulated exchanges.

"When you realize the size of the real bitcoin market, the CME starts to look a lot more significant," Hougan said.Deputy U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Robert Khuzami speaks to the media about the Michael Cohen case outside of federal court August 21, 2018 in New York City.

Robert Khuzami, the high-ranking federal prosecutor who led the criminal case against President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, is leaving his post in Manhattan on April 12, officials said Friday.

Khuzami will be replaced as deputy in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York by Audrey Strauss, the current senior counsel there. The office is continuing to probe issues related to Trump.

Khuzami's departure is for personal reasons relating to his commute each week from Washington, D.C., where he lives with his family, and is not the result of political pressure, according to NBC News.

Multiple people familiar with the situation told NBC that Khuzami was not asked to leave nor is he being forced out, and that his exit is unrelated to his role in the Cohen probe.

It was not disclosed by officials whether Khuzami would remain employed by the Justice Department. CNBC has requested comment from the DOJ.

In addition to Strauss taking over the role held by Khuzami, Arnold & Porter partner Craig Stewart will become chief counsel to U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, the head of the SDNY office, according to a news release.

Berman praised Khuzami in a statement, while confirming that he was leaving the office for family reasons:

Rob Khuzami is an extraordinary and brilliant lawyer who has upheld the ideals of integrity and professionalism that characterize the work of this Office. There can be no higher praise. As an example of his extraordinary commitment to the Office, Rob has been commuting weekly from Washington, D.C., since January 2018. While his desire to continue to serve remains strong, he understandably has decided to return home to his family.

Berman was recused from handling Cohen's case for reasons that have not been revealed after Trump picked him to run the office in January 2018.

Berman's office is continuing to investigate areas related to Trump, including the payments of hush money to two alleged paramours of the president shortly before the 2016 election. Trump has denied having sex with either woman: porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.

Cohen, 52, pleaded guilty last year to multiple charges lodged by the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office, including campaign finance violations stemming from the hush money payouts, and financial crimes. He also admitted to lying to Congress in a separate case lodged by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Cohen is due to surrender May 6 to begin a three-year prison term.WASHINGTON  Russian President Vladimir Putin bragged a year ago that his country had a new nuclear-powered missile with unlimited range. But the Kremlin will only produce a few of them because the weapon has yet to complete a successful test and is too expensive to develop, according to sources with direct knowledge of a U.S. intelligence report on the weapons program.

Russia's cruise missile Burevestnik, referred to as "Skyfall" in American intelligence reports, was tested once earlier this year. Prior to that, the weapon was tested four times between November and February in 2018, each resulting in a crash, according to sources who spoke to CNBC on the condition of anonymity.

The U.S. assessed that the longest test flight lasted just more than two minutes, with the missile flying 22 miles before losing control and crashing. The shortest test lasted four seconds and flew for five miles. The tests showed that the nuclear-powered heart of the cruise missile failed to initiate and, therefore, the weapon was unable to achieve the indefinite flight Putin had boasted about.

The weapon, which has been in development since the early 2000s, is believed to use a gasoline-powered engine for takeoff before switching to a nuclear-powered one for flight, sources explained.

One U.S. intelligence report assesses that the Burevestnik will not be combat-ready for another decade, despite Putin's claim that the "invincible" weapon has a proven capability.Special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday delivered his report to Attorney General William Barr on Russia's election interference and possible collusion with Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

The handoff marks the long-anticipated end of the high-profile and highly guarded Russia probe nearly two years after it began.

No more indictments will be filed from the special counsel's office, nor will any more be recommended, a senior Justice Department official told NBC.

It remains unclear how much of the report will be made public, but Barr suggested Friday that at least portions of it will be released.

"The Special Counsel has submitted to me today a 'confidential report explaining prosecution or declination decisions' he has reached," Barr wrote in a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees.

Barr wrote that he intends to consult with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Mueller "to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law."

"I remain committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review," Barr wrote.

He added: "I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the special counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend."

Scroll down or click here to read Barr's full letter.

Mueller was appointed by Rosenstein days after Trump abruptly fired former FBI Director James Comey, who had been in charge of the government's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The special counsel was authorized to look into Russian meddling and potential "links and/or coordination" with the Trump campaign, as well as "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation." It was later revealed that the special counsel was investigating whether Trump himself obstructed justice.

A spokesman for the special counsel's office did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

In a tweet, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "We look forward to the process taking its course."

TWEET The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course. The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsel's report.

The president's lawyers, Jay Sekulow and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said in a statement: "We're pleased that the Office of Special Counsel has delivered its report to the Attorney General pursuant to the regulations. Attorney General Barr will determine the appropriate next steps."

Mueller's team has lodged indictments against 34 people and three companies. Five people, including Trump's former longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, have been sentenced to prison.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing related to Mueller's investigation. From its inception, he has decried the probe as a politically motivated "witch hunt."

Although the special counsel's probe has formally ended, a handful of federal cases lodged by Mueller remain active. Trump's longtime confidant Roger Stone, for instance, faces a Nov. 5 trial on charges of lying to Congress and witness tampering filed by Mueller's prosecutors.

Others, including Rick Gates, Manafort's former business partner, have yet to be sentenced.

Former federal prosecutor David Weinstein said it was too soon to draw conclusions about who had and had not been targeted by Mueller.

"Until we read the report, it is only speculation as to why certain people were not indicted and what evidence exists as to the interference, or lack of interference, by the Russian government," Weinstein told CNBC in an email.

"This does not mean that other DOJ components are finished working with the leads that were provided to them by the special counsel's office," Weinstein added.Boston brewer Sam Adams is dedicating a new beer to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, named after one of the liberal judge's comments about gender and the court.

When There Are Nine, a Belgian Brut IPA, takes its name from the the 86-year-old's declaration that "there will be enough women on the Supreme Court when there are nine."

The beer brand will unveil the new brew next week during a "special celebration," according to an event page posted online. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Pink Boots Society, an organization that promotes women in the beer industry.

"We wanted to name it Brut Bader Ginsburg but our legal team, uh, dissented," the event page says. A representative for the Boston Beer Company, Sam Adams' parent, did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

The beer is made with a blend of hops created by the Pink Boots Society and Yakima Chief, an international hops supplier, in honor of International Women's Day, which was celebrated earlier this month.

Ginsburg was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton and confirmed in 1993, becoming the second woman on the top court. The nine-member court now has three female justices, including Ginsburg as well as justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, all of whom were appointed by Democratic presidents.

Ginsburg, a Brooklyn native, recently returned to the bench after weeks recovering from a December cancer surgery. It's not clear whether Ginsburg likes beer, but she is known to enjoy a glass of wine.Special Counsel Robert Mueller arrives at his office on March 21, 2019 in Washington DC. It is expected that Mueller will soon complete his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and release his report.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation and will not file any more indictments in connection with his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, NBC News reported on Friday, citing a senior U.S. law enforcement official. There are no sealed indictments.

It is possible that leads uncovered during the special counsel's inquiry and handed off could lead to charges brought by state prosecutors or other parts of the Department of Justice. But Mueller has no more indictments waiting under seal, and he will not recommend any further indictments, multiple outlets reported.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to oversee the investigation into any links between President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and the Russian government in May 2017.

Since then, Mueller's investigation has led to nearly 200 criminal charges and has secured convictions or guilty pleas from top Trump advisors, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Trump, who has waged a fierce, years-long campaign to discredit the special counsel, has denied any wrongdoing.

Dilanian tweet

Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers on Friday that he received a report from Mueller and will share its conclusions possibly as soon as this weekend.

Barr said he will consult with Rosenstein and Mueller "to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law."

The White House has said that the next steps are up to Barr. Democratic leadership has pressed for the report to be made available to Congress and the public.

"I think we should wait for the full report to be issued before jumping to any conclusions," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said at a press conference Friday evening after a reporter asked about reports that there would be no new indictments.As U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May presses on to take Britain out of the European Union, one leading economist raised questions about the viability of the single political and economic bloc.

"You have to wonder about the future of the European Union itself ... this is an imperfect union and the survivability of it is, I think, a serious question," Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University, told CNBC's Sri Jegarajah on Friday.

Even before Brexit came about, the EU faced multiple challenges over the last decade, said Roach, who's a former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. Those challenges include a sovereign debt crisis in Greece and a standoff with Italian leaders over the country's spending plans.

And with the U.K.  one of the largest European economies  planning to leave the bloc, it remains to be seen whether the EU has the ability to withstand more pressure coming from member states while still reeling from the shocks of the global financial crisis, said Roach.

The EU agreed to postpone the U.K.'s exit from the bloc to May 22 if May can convince the British parliament to accept the existing deal. If May fails to convince parliament, Britain would face a disorderly exit from the EU on April 12.Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly met with a top official in China Friday as he tours the country ahead of the China Development Forum and Apple's own event on Monday.

State-run news agency Xinhua reported that Cook met with Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan on Friday. Apple did not immediately return a request for comment on the topic of the meeting or other reasons for Cook's trip to China, but Xinhua said Sun "made positive remarks" about Apple's role in relations between the U.S. and China.

According to local reports, Cook also visited an online education company that is incorporating augmented reality into its product and met with a Chinese musician as he touted Apple's streaming service. Cook has been in the country since Thursday and has posted about the trip on Weibo, 9to5Mac reported.

Tweet

It's unclear if Cook will be in attendance at this weekend's Chinese Economic Forum, though Apple is listed as a participating group on the event's website. Cook attended the forum last year, where he had called for data privacy regulation following Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal that revealed the agency exploited millions of user data without their explicit consent.

Tweet

Cook's trip follows a turbulent year for commerce between the U.S. and China due to ongoing trade tensions between the two countries. Apple's revenue in the region was hit hard in its first quarter 2019, dropping nearly $5 billion from the previous year. Cook had cited economic slowdowns in China as a chief cause for its disappointing revenue in the quarter, but still expressed optimism in an interview with CNBC following the report.

"I'm encouraged by the comments coming out of both countries," Cook told CNBC's Josh Lipton at the time. But the path forward between the two countries still remains unsettled.

Cook is expected back in the U.S. by Monday, when Apple is hosting its own event where analysts anticipate it will unveil a new streaming service.

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.

Watch: CNBC's full interview with Apple CEO Tim CookA top White House trade official will be leaving in the coming weeks, amid the Trump administration's high-stakes talks with China, the White House confirmed on Friday.

Clete Willems, deputy director of the National Economic Council, has served as the lead trade negotiator, known as the "sherpa," for the U.S. at multilateral summits like the G-7 and G-20, among others. He has also served as a right-hand man to NEC Director Larry Kudlow on trade with China, where Willems has participated in negotiations in Washington and taken part in the delegations of deputy officials in Beijing.

"It has been a great honor to serve the president in this White House for the last two years. President Trump's leadership on trade has entirely changed the global conversation and will lead to an international system that is more free, fair, and reciprocal," Willems said in a statement.

His departure takes place as talks with China linger into April. Willems has accepted a top position in the private sector so he can spend more time with his family, according to the administration.

"As my top international deputy, Clete has helped the president change the global conversation on trade and make exceptional progress in negotiations with China, the EU, Korea, and reform of the international trading system," Kudlow said in a statement. "We will miss him and wish him all the best."

He will be succeeded by Kelly Ann Shaw, "who has worked on all areas of international trade and economic development as our deputy," Kudlow added.

Shaw joined the White House in November as an assistant to the president and senior director for international trade, investment and development. Previously, she had served as trade counsel at the House Ways and Means Committee and assistant general counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify Willems' role in U.S.-China trade negotiations.U.S. President Donald Trump talks with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as they walk down the U.S. Capitol steps on March 14, 2019.

President Donald Trump said he wants to work with Democrats to pass legislation to rebuild U.S. infrastructure, a long-held goal of his administration that has yet to materialize.

Trump, in an interview with Fox Business Network that aired Friday, said infrastructure is "the easiest thing" his White House can hope to achieve by working with Democrats.

"They want it, I want it," Trump said, adding that he spoke to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "the other day" about the issue.

A spokesman for Pelosi confirmed to CNBC that the speaker and Trump "briefly spoke about infrastructure" during an annual St. Patrick's Day luncheon on March 14.

"The Speaker has repeatedly said she wants to work with him on this issue," added the spokesman, who declined to comment further on the details of the private conversation.

Trump went further in the interview, which was conducted Thursday, saying "we agree on it" and "we like the type of infrastructure we're talking about."

The president added: "Maybe in a certain way more Democrats, from my standpoint, than the Republican concept, private, public. I like, frankly, owning our own roads, owning our bridges. I don't like selling them to other countries."

The need to repair or rebuild America's roads, bridges, buildings, tunnels and other structures has been pushed by Trump since his presidential campaign, and is broadly supported on both sides of the political aisle. America's overall infrastructure received a dismal "D+" grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers in its latest report card in 2017.

But the parties diverge on how to fund the pricey investment. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a Washington Post op-ed in December that he would not accept an infrastructure bill that did not address climate change.

"Any infrastructure bill would have to include policies and funding that help transition our country to a clean-energy economy and mitigate the risks the United States already faces from climate change," Schumer wrote.

Pelosi mentioned her holiday event conversation with the president in remarks to reporters Wednesday. She suggested she was open to working with Trump on addressing both infrastructure and the opioid crisis.

"Those are two areas that are our priorities that he says he wants to do," said Pelosi, D-Calif. "So we shall see, but we want to try to find our common ground."US President Donald Trump (R) gestures as he meets with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un (L) at the start of their historic US-North Korea summit, at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa island in Singapore on June 12, 2018.

President Donald Trump said Friday that he would scrap action his administration took only a day earlier to crack down on companies accused of helping North Korea evade sanctions.

"It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea," the president tweeted on Friday, though the Treasury announcement he appeared to reference took place Thursday and did not involve "large scale" sanctions. "I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!"

Donald Trump North Korea tweet

In explaining the president's sudden announcement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesn't think these sanctions will be necessary." Trump's tweet and the press secretary's clarification of it sent waves of confusion throughout Washington, from the Pentagon to the White House itself.

On Thursday, Treasury designated two China-based shipping companies that it said has aided Pyongyang in circumventing U.S. and international sanctions. The U.S. and its allies have used those economic measures to push North Korea to dismantle its nuclear and missile programs.While we may associate farming with sunshine, fresh air and pretty patches of land, innovation and technology are beginning to change where food is grown.



In London, for instance, one farm is using LED technology and hydroponic systems to produce greens 33-meters below the surface. The company, aptly named Growing Underground, says its process uses 70 percent less water than a traditional, "open-field farming."



Hydroponics, as the Royal Horticultural Society puts it, relates to "the science of growing plants without using soil, by feeding them on mineral nutrient salts dissolved in water."



With a focus on reducing food miles, Growing Underground says its produce  which includes mustard leaves, pea shoots and coriander  can be delivered within four hours of picking and packaging.



For several years now, Growing Underground has been collaborating with the University of Cambridge's Energy Efficient Cities Initiative to analyze a range of data.



"We automatically log temperature and humidity but also manually record crop growth," Melanie Jans-Singh, a PhD student at Cambridge, told CNBC's Sustainable Energy.



"We try to analyze all these relationships between energy, crop growth and environmental conditions in order to be able to grow plants as best as possible with a minimal amount of energy," Jans-Singh added.



The utilization of underused areas of urban space  Growing Underground's site is located in a former air raid shelter  is set to play an increasingly important role in the way people grow crops.



"The Growing Underground farm is a very good example where a derelict space has been put to good use," Ruchi Choudhary, reader in architectural engineering at Cambridge, told CNBC.



This idea, Choudhary explained, could be pushed further by tapping into environments that were rich in waste heat and carbon dioxide, such as hospitals and school buildings.A Chinese coast guard vessel is followed by a Vietnamese coast guard ship in the disputed waters of the South China Sea on May 14, 2014.

Vietnam has lodged an official protest with China following the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing vessel in the disputed South China Sea, Vietnam said late on Thursday.

Vietnam and China have for years long been embroiled in a dispute over the potentially energy-rich stretch of waters, called the East Sea by Vietnam.

The fishing vessel was moored near Da Loi island in the Paracel archipelago on March 6 when a China Maritime Surveillance Vessel chased it and fired water cannon at it, Vietnam's foreign ministry said in a statement.

The boat sank after hitting rocks while it was being chased. All five fishermen on board were rescued by another Vietnamese fishing boat, the ministry said.

A Vietnamese rescue agency said earlier that the Chinese vessel rammed the fishing boat.

"The Chinese vessel committed an act that violated Vietnam's sovereignty over the Hoang Sa archipelago, threatened the lives and damaged the properties and the legitimate interests of Vietnamese fishermen," the ministry said in the statement, referring to the Paracel islands by their Vietnamese name.

Vietnam had lodged a protest with China's embassy in Hanoi and demanded that China deal strictly with its Maritime Surveillance agency to prevent similar incidents and to compensate fairly the fishermen for their losses.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing was cited by Chinese media as saying earlier that the fishing boat had sunk when the Chinese vessel approached, and that the Chinese crew had rescued the fishermen.

China claims 90 percent of the South China Sea, where it has steadily expanded military and other installations on artificial islands and reefs, unnerving the region and angering Washington.

In addition to Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have claims to parts of the sea.

Bazaar Corporate Radar | Feb 22, 2021, 12:00 AM IST

Bazaar Corporate Radar

Bazaar Corporate Radar is your window into the minds of top CEOs, Boardrooms, global economists, fund managers and sector analysts. If it?s making news, you?ll find it on Bazaar Corporate Radar.Colorado Politics is published both in print and online. Our website features subscriber-only news stories daily, designed for public policy arena professionals. Member subscribers also receive the weekly print edition of our award-winning newspaper, containing outstanding features and news stories, in their mailboxes every Saturday.In this June 29, 2018, file photo, wild horses occupy a watering hole outside Salt Lake City. The U.S. government is seeking new pastures for thousands of wild horses that have overpopulated Western ranges. Landowners interested in hosting large numbers of rounded-up wild horses on their property can now apply with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.Organizers with a Colorado group backing the movement for a national popular vote for president are hopeful that a change in how states Electoral College votes are awarded will be passed by enough states to determine the winner in next years presidential election.Palmer High School seniors Cristian Granados and Gabriel Wright won first prize in C-SPAN's 2019 StudentCam competition for their documentary "What it Means to Be American: Voting." Courtesy C-SPAN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When Chrome changes, people pay attention  not only because Chrome is the world's most popular browser, but also because its underlying technologies, and the decisions that go into making those technologies, power a host of rivals, notably Microsoft's Edge.

Each Chrome upgrade is accompanied by enterprise-centric release notes that highlight some of the additions, deletions, enhancements, and modifications slated for the future. We've collected the most important for this update of Computerworld's latest what's-coming round-up.

Nothing is guaranteed, as Google itself says: "They might change, be delayed, or canceled before launching to the Stable channel." But these ongoing notes are the best forecasting source available.

Chrome 94: Shift to speedier releases

Google's new four-week release cadence for Chrome begins with v. 94, which will launch Sept. 21. From that point on, Google will roll out a Chrome upgrade every four weeks, with an exception for the end-of-year holidays.

Chrome 94 also starts the clock on the Extended Stable release channel, which will be upgraded every eight weeks, giving enterprise IT admins who manage (through group policies) the option of a slower tempo. Commercial customers who adopt Extended Stable will run v. 94 for eight weeks, when it will be replaced by v. 96 on Nov. 16. Meanwhile, security-only updates will be distributed every two weeks to Extended Stable builds.

Chrome 94: Hubba Hubba

A new content-sharing feature that Google calls a sharing hub will debut in Chrome 94 (rather than in Chrome 93, where it was once supposed to appear).

The hub, which is actually a menu, can be called up by clicking on a new icon in the address bar. During Computerworld's test, the icon, a right-facing caret, was at the right of the address bar. The menu will offer users a wide range of sharing-the-current-page functions, including sharing with apps like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others; creating a QR code for the page's URL; and casting the page to any already-set destinations, such as a smart TV or another device.

Chrome users can press fast-forward and begin using the sharing hub immediately by setting an option on the experimental features page reached after entering chrome://flags in the address bar. Find the "Desktop Sharing Hub in Omnibox" item, set the drop-down menu at the right to "Enabled" and restart the browser.

Enterprise IT can control this functionality with the DesktopSharingHubEnabled group policy.

Chrome 94: Settings get themselves organized

Beginning with v. 94, Google will replace the existing single long Settings pane  brought up by clicking the main menu, the three vertical dots at the far right of the Chrome frame, then selecting Settings  with a page that consists of several sections. Google said the change should result in better navigability of the browser's options.

As with most Chrome changes or enhancements, Google will introduce the new Settings pane gradually, starting with a subsection of the user base, then expanding the distribution to more copies. It's likely that no everyone will see the Settings change in Chrome 94.

Chrome 94: Make HTTPS Great Again!

Chrome already defaults to loading pages over HTTPS (rather than the once-standard and less-secure HTTP) protocol, assuming the destination has an HTTPS-secured page. But Chrome 94 will take that lean-into-HTTPS one step further with what Google's calling "HTTPS-First" mode.

If HTTPS-First is enabled  it will be off by default  Chrome will try to upgrade all page loads to HTTPS and if unsuccessful, display a full-screen warning before allowing a click-through to the HTTP destination. HTTPS-First is thus a more aggressive version of what Chrome now delivers: It puts every page through the HTPP-or-HTTPS check and posts an alert for the non-compliant destinations.

Google said that a group policy would be available to enterprise IT to disable the HTTPS-First mode.

Chrome 95: Chrome apps to die, for real this time...seriously

Google has been planning the demise of Chrome apps for years, and with v. 95, the company is literally pulling the plug: Chrome apps "will no longer function."

Chrome 95 is to launch Oct. 19.

(The Chrome 95 cut-off was later than a 2020 adjustment had specified as June 2021. Last year's deadline change likely was prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the original drop-dead was to be in 2018, so Google has been working this for quite some time.)

Enterprises will be allowed to extend support for Chrome apps until June 2022, the previously-announced date, using a group policy.SIA to offer personalised in-flight meals and enhance child meals for travellers

Singapore Airlines (SIA) will be making several enhancements to its in-flight offerings in efforts to deliver a more personalised experience for customers.



It will be the first airline to allow Premium Economy Class customers to pre-order main courses from its in-flight menu from May 1, 2019. This follows the initial launch to Suites, First Class and Business Class customers on all flights across its network last year, SIA said in a press release on Thursday, March 21.



Under this new initiative, customers may pre-select their meal choices via the SIA website or mobile app anytime from three weeks before travel up to 24 hours before flight departure.

Photo: Connected to India





This way, customers get to enjoy a more personalised dining experience, and can be ensured of their preferred meal choice from either the in-flight menu or the Book the Cook service.

In another industry first, Singapore Airlines will be enhancing its Child Meal programme to enable parents to pre-order specific meals for their children from three different cuisine categories. They are: Asian, Western and Vegetarian. This will give parents greater visibility and choices over the child meals in advance of travel. Parents can visit the Airlines website up to 24 hours before the day of travel to view the dishes planned for their flight and select the one that best suits their childs preferences.



The move comes after an intensive focus group and meal tasting session conducted to gather insights from parents and children to better understand their preferences, SIA said. The initiative will be rollde out to all cabin classes from June 2019 for flights departing Singapore. It will then be extended progressively to flights departing from overseas destinations from August 2019.



Focus group sessions and targeted surveys were also conducted for two of the Airlines other popular special meals  the Indian Vegetarian Meal and Muslim Meal . Feedback received from these sessions enabled the Airline to improve on these meals by reviewing the ingredients and service ware used. The frequency of menu rotation will also be increased to provide greater variety for customers.

We see personalisation in in-flight dining offerings as being key to creating an even more memorable travel experience, said SIAs Executive Vice President Commercial, Mr Mak Swee Wah. Apart from focus groups and targeted surveys, we are also leveraging on data analytics to better track meal preferences and customers needs.EU leaders give May three weeks to come up with a plan if her deal isnt passed

Prime Ministers appeal falls flat as EU seizes control of exit date  The Guardian

Pound firms after May is allowed more time  FT

Cracks emerge as Brussels squabbles over inevitable no deal  The Times

EU leaders open door to long delay  The Scotsman

Merkel angry at Macron and Tusk for risking hardest Brexit  Daily Express

Varadkar thinks EU should cut UK some slack  FT

European Union leaders last night handed Theresa May a three-week lifeline to come up with an alternative Brexit plan if her withdrawal deal is not approved by MPs. After nearly seven hours of wrangling the 27 leaders agreed to give Mrs May an unconditional extension until April 12 to indicate a way forward. If her deal is passed, Brussels will give the government until May 22 to pass the legislation that would implement Brexit. If the deal is not agreed by the April deadline, however, Britain will be forced to choose between a no-deal Brexit or agreeing to hold European elections in return for a longer extension to the Article 50 process.  The Times

More:

Truss urges May to embrace no deal instead of delay  The Sun

How May decided she was prepared to accept a no-deal departure  FT

and wrecked her strategy to win over Brexiteers  FT

Ministry of Defences bunker plan  The Times

>Today:

>Yesterday:

as Remain ministers launch fresh bid to block no deal

Remain ministers have warned the Prime Minister that they are prepared to quit unless she gives them a free vote on a new backbench bid to stop no deal. A cross-party group of MPs is on Friday expected to table a new amendment that will force the Prime Minister to accept a longer extension to Article 50 if her deal fails. The amendment, which will be voted on next week, will mean that if Mrs Mays deal is defeated Parliament  rather than the Prime Minister  will decide whether to accept any offer of a longer extension of Article 50 from Brussels. A group of eight Remain ministers met Julian Smith, the Chief Whip, on Thursday to demand a free vote on the amendment to avoid the threat of mass resignations.  Daily Telegraph

Petition to cancel Brexit hits 2.5 million signatures  Daily Mail

TUC and CBI unite to sound alarm over no-deal  The Times

Prime Minister ignores rising calls to rule out cliff-edge exit  The Sun

Rudd takes aim at Mays plan in letter to resident  Daily Telegraph

Labour:

Corbyn wont rule out revoking Article 50  The Times

and he will meet Barnier before summit  The Guardian

Audience mock Labour leaders walkout on Question Time  Daily Express

Backbenchers carry party torch at second referendum march  The Times

>Today: Iain Dales column: Zombie May and her Zombie Cabinet

>Yesterday:

May apologises to MPs

Chastened leader seeks to make amends after cataclysmic 24 hours  FT

Bercow orders Leadsom to sit down in fresh spat  Daily Express

Hague warns that UK is heading for another election  The Sun

Theresa May has conceded MPs are as frustrated by the Brexit process as she is after yesterdays accusatory Number 10 speech sparked fury in the Commons. The Prime Minister was blasted for pitting the public against MPs after she claimed, I am on your side and that the public were fed up of political games. Mrs May referred to her televised speech in Brussels on Thursday night, saying: I expressed my frustrations and I know that MPs are frustrated too  they have difficult jobs to do. Parliamentarians on both sides of the House had slammed the PMs speech, to the extent that Speaker John Bercow was prompted to reassure MPs, None of you is a traitor. Mrs May was warned that her remarks had put them in danger of physical attack by angry members of the public.  Daily Mail

>Today: Video: WATCH: U-turn! May offers an apology to MPs. More or less. (After all, her deal needs their votes.)

>Yesterday: Video: WATCH: Bercow implores MPs to raise the level of debate then orders Leadsom to sit down

as Chief Whip joins parliamentary revolt against Mays speech

Theresa Mays chief whip has joined a full-scale revolt against her effort to turn voters anger on parliament that left her almost without allies. Julian Smith told Conservative MPs he agreed that her effort to deflect Brexit chaos was appalling. Tory whips are furious that Mrs Mays address has wrecked efforts to gain enough support for her Brexit deal to have a chance of it passing after it was defeated by 391 votes to 242 at a second meaningful vote last week. They say that the gap had been at its narrowest before her statement. Mark Francois, a hardline Brexiteer, told Sky News: If youre trying to persuade numbers of MPs to back a proposition, you dont do that by insulting them. Philip Lee, a Conservative MP who supports a second referendum, said that MPs deeply resented being cast as the enemies of the people.  The Times

Has the Prime Minister cracked her whips?  ITV

Comment:

This offensive speech set the country on a dangerous path  Andrea Jenkyns MP, Daily Telegraph

May has trashed our democracy and put MPs in danger  Lisa Nandy MP, The Guardian

Editorial:

Mays furious attack on MPs is justified  The Sun

Strategic failure  The Times

>Yesterday:

and Brady tells her MPs want her to quit

T

Trevelyan and Crouch amongst MPs who approached the whips  The Sun

heresa May has been told by the most senior Tory backbencher that MPs want her to stand down because of her handling of Brexit, The Telegraph can reveal. Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 committee of Tory MPs, visited the Prime Minister in Downing Street on Monday afternoon and made clear that a growing number of Tories believe she has to go. The visit by Sir Graham to Downing Street on Monday came after he was bombarded with text messages by colleagues and urged to confront the Prime Minister with demands that she should quit. Sir Graham imparted their calls in a neutral manner in his role as chairman of the 1922 committee during the meeting in Downing Street.  Daily Telegraph

Comment:

For country and partys sake, she must step down  Stewart Jackson, Daily Telegraph

Philip Collins: MPs share much of the blame for the current impasse

I am bored beyond words at hearing MPs demand, yet again, a solution for which there is not enough support. Rather they should ask themselves the question with which I began. If it were your job to find a viable solution, in this parliament populated by this set of people right now, what is it? If you find that there is a large distance between your answer to this question and the political Ponzi scheme you are selling in public then I am afraid you are part of the problem. It is a fake nobility to carry on proclaiming your principled status as, all around you, consensus crumbles. It might be convenient to ascribe all the blame to Mrs May but it is a fundamental error of attribution. The problem with Brexit has so many more multitudes than are contained in Mrs May.  The Times

Britain now has two choices: no deal, or a long delay  Bernard Jenkin MP, Daily Telegraph

Macrons harsh words make no-deal more likely  Iain Martin, The Times

What the EU should do next about Brexit  FT

Offering to quit might be what it takes to get Mays deal through  Fraser Nelson, Daily Telegraph

The Prime Minister is making a hideous gamble  Martin Wolf, FT

No-deal would trigger huge battle over the future of the economy  Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph

Brexit is not the cause of Britains political breakdown  Gary Younge, The Guardian

Gove, the silent assassin, being tipped to replace May

Johnson digs in for leadership battle with new financial support

He was famously banished to the backbenches and told to learn about loyalty by Theresa May, but now Michael Gove could prove to be the Prime Ministers silent assassin, according to Tory sources. Following a stellar Commons speech in which he eviscerated Jeremy Corbyn, a different kind of momentum is gathering behind the Environment Secretary as a potential unity candidate to succeed Theresa May The latest Conservative Home leadership poll put Johnson well ahead of the pack with 26 per cent of the vote, compared to Raab on 13 per cent and Gove on 10 per cent  up a percentage point on the month before.  Daily Telegraph

Boris Johnson has received another 15,000 donation from JCB, the construction company, as he prepares for a potential Conservative Party leadership contest. The former foreign secretary has received 31,000 of donations since mid-February, according to the register of members interests. In January The Times revealed that Mr Johnson had received 10,000 from JCB three days before giving a speech about Brexit at its headquarters. Lord Bamford, the companys chairman, is a longstanding financial supporter of the Conservative Party and backed Leave in the 2016 referendum. He has said that there is nothing to fear from leaving the European Union without a deal. In addition to the 15,000 Mr Johnson received from JCB, he also accepted 16,000 from Johan Christofferson, an investment banker. Mr Christofferson previously gave Mr Johnson 20,000 in January.  The Times

>Yesterday: Johnny Mercer MP in Comment: Reform the leadership rules. MPs should present members with a final four candidates, not two.

Ex-Labour donor gives big boost to The Independent Group

MPs clueless about technological change, warns adviser

A former minister in Gordon Browns government has made a significant donation to the Independent Group. Lord Myners, who was City minister in the Treasury from 2008 to 2010, said the political centre had lost our voice Lord Myners, 70, a former chairman of Marks and Spencer and the Guardian Media Group, was appointed to the upper chamber as a Labour peer but now sits on the cross-benches. He donated 12,700 to Mr Browns Labour leadership campaign in 2007 and also helped Labour Tomorrow, a group set up in 2016 to oust Jeremy Corbyn. In January he was one of more than 150 business figures who called for a second Brexit referendum in a letter to.  The Times

MPs are clueless about the impact of robots and new technology on workers, the Governments gig economy adviser has warned. In a model of the workforce in 2035 Matthew Taylor says the rapid trend towards automation will trigger more inequality, put the workforce under constant surveillance, push down wages and deepen regional divisions across the UK. These will have a bigger impact on workers than simple job losses, he warns. A survey of MPs by his RSA think tank found that less than half of them feel they have the expertise to make sound judgements about tech policy. Only 15 per cent said MPs were doing enough to prepare workers for new technologies.  The Sun

Riley says some in Labour see Jews as the enemy

Opposition launch local election campaign with focus on cuts  The Guardian

Countdown star Rachel Riley yesterday warned that some Labour members see Jews as the enemy. The maths whizz said Labour has become institutionally anti-Semitic under Jeremy Corbyn. The star is Jewish and has suffered a torrent of vile abuse online for speaking out on the racism. And she was met with a fresh barrage of hate from trolls at the weekend for tweeting her sympathies for the victims of the New Zealand terror attack. Speaking in Parliament yesterday, she said beyond a shadow of a doubt Labour is anti-Semitic Miss Riley said a Labour member told her of a party meeting where other Labour people say that tribalism can drive the Labour party by giving them an enemy, which at the moment is the Jews.  The Sun

>Yesterday: Left Watch: Corbyn wont attend a meeting with Umunna. But heres who he will meet.

Sturgeon to reveal independence plan

Nicola Sturgeon has said she will set out her plans for a second Scottish independence referendum after this phase of the Brexit negotiations. The First Minister said in January she was going to set out her timetable for another vote in a matter of weeks but has since refused to give further details against the backdrop of Brexit chaos at Westminster. Ms Sturgeon told the Scottish Parliament independence is the only solution to the broken government of Westminster after the chaos of Brexit. It came as the pro-independence Greens heaped the pressure on the SNP leader to set out her plans for a second independence referendum in response at First Ministers Questions today.  The Scotsman

Progressive Unionists join attack on Sinn Fein over sectarian banner

ONeill defends McDonald  News Letter

The Progressive Unionist Party has added its voice to those challenging Sinn Fein over a banner calling for England to get out of Ireland. Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald was pictured holding the banner at the St Patricks Day parade in New York on Sunday. PUP chairman Brian Lacey said Ms McDonalds actions  just weeks after she told a gathering of civic unionists in Belfast that those who want to refight old battles are hindering reconciliation  laid bare Sinn Feins strategy to perpetuate division and separation Earlier this week, the Republics Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said the banner was offensive and divisive, while the Green Party NI leader Clare Bailey said the slogan on the banner calls into question her genuine commitment to equality and rights.  News Letter

>Yesterday: Henry Hills Red, White, and Blue column: Tory MPs lead backlash against decision to prosecute Ulster veteran

News in Brief:Henry Newman is Director of Open Europe.

Everyone is so used to knocking Theresa May and the Government that we sometimes forget the Labour party have any agency at all in the ongoing Brexit dramas.

When I mentioned in a recent BBC interview, that Labour MPs, as well as Conservatives, had some responsibility for making decisions on Brexit, the presenter looked at me with disbelief. Yet Labour voted for a referendum in 2015, promised to respect the result in 2016, whipped MPs to trigger Article 50 in March 2017, and then pledged to deliver Brexit in the June 2017 General Election.

At one level, Labours Brexit strategy has been remarkably effective. They have an impossible split within their own party. Their electoral logic requires them both to win Leave-voting seats, and also hold Remain seats, while managing an activist base and parliamentary party which is very Remain.

They have bridged this divide through ambiguity. In 2017s General Election they managed to promise all things to many people, and their vote share went up as a result. Its possible that the emergence of The Independent Group will challenge this over the next few months, particularly if we head towards a new election, but its too soon to tell.

Is this all part of Labours cunning plan? Some observers are sceptical about how deliberate their policy decisions have been. The profound tensions in the Brexit beliefs between, say, Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn, is also a crucial factor. The Shadow Brexit Secretary has been nudging the party towards ever softer positions  first a customs union, then a second referendum, perhaps the single market (or Common Market 2.0) next.

But will the Labour party actually carry through on any of these promises? The Leader of the Oppositions team and Len McCluskey, a key union figure, are extremely critical of the possibility of a second referendum.

Corbyn noticeably forgot to mention a second referendum at all during his Point of Order on Tuesday 12 March, after the second meaningful vote defeat. Its also been left out of other key communications, despite the party suggesting that their policy had switched totally to backing a referendum. Corbyn still prefers calling for a General Election. Sometimes he elides the two calling for a Peoples Vote through an election, insisting of course that all options are on the table.

Overall, its often seemed that the Labour party leadership are just MIA. Some of the biggest moments in Brexit have come from debates or rows within the Conservative Party, exacerbating the impression that this is all just a Tory issue. Equally, it has sometimes been Labour backbenchers, such as Yvette Cooper or Hilary Benn, who have seemed to do more to shape the process than many in the shadow cabinet.

If you apply almost any scrutiny to Labours position on Brexit, it rapidly disintegrates. They seem to have abandoned their absurd test that any Brexit deal had to deliver the exact same benefits as membership. That was rightly described by the Shadow Trade Secretary as bollocks. But their current position is hardly more coherent:

Labour say we are not supporting Theresa Mays deal at all, but admit that they have no issue with any part of the legally-binding deal  the Withdrawal Agreement;

Labour complain of a blindfold Brexit when it was the EU, not the UK, that insisted our future relationship couldnt be negotiated during Article 50;

Labour call for the Prime Minister to relax her red lines, when this would make no difference at all to the divorce deal which MPs are actually voting on;

Labour demand a second referendum but whipped their MPs to abstain on the question just last week;

Labour insist that the question of a second referendum must include credible remain and leave choices, but Jeremy Corbyn refuses to say which way he would vote in one because it depends what the choice is;

Labour call for cross-party talks and reaching out to find a consensus but Jeremy Corbyn stormed out of a meeting on Wednesday because Chuka Umunna of The Independent Group was present;

Labour call for a customs union, market access and protection of rights, but all of those things are provided for in the current deal via the backstop, and possible under the current Political Declaration;

Labour demand a customs union with a say over trade policy, but the EU has ruled this out for now and this would anyway form part of negotiations that cannot begin until after we have left;

Labour dont want harmonisation on state aid or competition rules, but the EU would surely make these a requirement of any customs union;

Labour demand dynamic alignment on employment and environmental rules but then admit that they could match or exceed future EU standards in any event.

Labour call for a general election, but cant say what their Brexit policy would be if one was called.

Its quite clear that Labours plan involves being seen to neither aid nor obstruct Brexit. Other than promising a jobs first Brexit or Labours Brexit deal theres painfully little detail. While Starmer is clearly knowledgeable, Corbyn can seem confused, muddling the Single Market and the Customs Union, as he showed in his interview with Sophy Ridge last Sunday.

The one clear policy shared by virtually all the Labour party is a profound opposition to No Deal. On almost everything else theres a fair bit of confusion. Some Labour MPs desperately want to reverse the 2016 referendum result and are passionate Peoples Vote advocates.

But there are many others who genuinely oppose a second referendum while seeking a softer Brexit. This group ought to find a way to support the current Brexit deal. The divorce deal leaves open for the future all possible relationships with the EU from something as distant as Canadas to a deal closer than Norways. The only proviso is that both sides must find a solution to the Irish border question.

Ultimately a danger for the Conservatives could come if Labour came together around a slightly softer version of Mays deal (say the deal with a customs union amended on top). If that then passes the Commons with Labour support, and resolves the Brexit impasse, the public just might get the impression that Labour  despite all its divisions, inconsistencies and problems  is willing to act in the national interest to avert a crisis.

They might therefore conclude that however much they may distrust Corbyn and however divided Labour might be, the Conservatives offer no better answers. That should cause Tory MPs to reflect very carefully before rejecting the Prime Ministers deal for a third time.Dr Sarah Ingham is a member of Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham Conservative Association.

The Prime Minister was clear in her original request to the European Council for an extension until June 30th that it would not be in the interests of either the UK or the EU to participate in this springs elections to the European Parliament. Yesterdays agreement holds within it the possibility of a further extension beyond the April and May dates that it established. Among the reasons that this possibility it is viewed with dismay across the Commons is the prospect of those elections.

Indeed, many ministers seem to view the UKs possible participation in the poll as so toxic as to be radioactive, shuddering their no thanks in an echo of the anti-nuclear power slogan of yesteryear. Claims are being made, not least by Nadhim Zahawi on Wednesdays Daily Politics that the participation is the European election would be evidence of political meltdown and would unleash forces. But it would be unfair to single out Zahawi; some of his colleagues have been equally hyperbolic in recent days.

Leaving aside whether whipping up fears about civil unrest only serves to normalise it, is this refusal even to consider allowing UK voters their say in the European elections sensible?

In case MPs havent noticed, we are already in the middle of a political meltdown as far as many voters are concerned, . This is in part due to the Prime Ministers repeated delays in putting her unpalatable Withdrawal Agreement to the test, hoping that unconvinced MPs willbuckle at the 59th minute of the 11 hour. Being under intense time pressure is no way to buy a bottle of wine, let alone to decide the future of this country for decades to come.

Quite what these forces are that might be unleashed remains a mystery. The dogs of (civil) war? Or another interview with Brenda of Bristol, who was decidedly unimpressed by the announcement of the 2017 general election?

Over a thousand days on from the referendum, the United Kingdom seems even more split about its future relationship with the EU than it was on June 23rd 2016. Every day, we become a more polarised country, constantly assailed by divisive, shrill discourse  not least because Brexit is used by many as their proxy in the culture war.

It is the Article 50 Extension, not the prospect of British voters taking part in the Euro Election, that represents collective political failure in Westminster. As the Government, MPs and civil servants have become bogged down in the Brexit process, voters have become an abstraction, the people whose will must be respected.

The European elections would offer a chance to put voters back in the Brexit process. If nothing else, it would be a benign way of taking the countrys temperature, and finding out the electorates views on the Euro-issue three years on from the referendum. It would be the ultimate opinion poll.

The poll would be democracy in action  who can argue with that?  but far less divisive and damaging for the country than a Second EU Refernedum, for which ardent Remainers are still agitating and for which exhausted MPs, unable to reach any agreement, might still opt. And with a far-left Corbyn government not absolutely beyond the realms of possibility, fighting the Euros is infinitely preferable than risking a general election.

In addition, the UKs participation could surely act like the safety valve on a pressure cooker  a means of allowing voters emotions, as well as their opinions, to be vented? All that frustration, disillusion and anger with Westminster could be channelled safely into campaigning and voting. It would move the debate on from contested claims about 350 million a week for the NHS: it could be the start of some healing.

The UK sends 73 MEPs to the European Parliament: they have less influence on daily local life than many district councillors. Turn-out in the EU 2014 Election was 35.6 per cent  not quite the level of engagement shown in Ireland (52.4 per cent) or Belgium (89.4 per cent). It reflects the fact that, five years ago, the EU was hardly the major issue for voters that it has been allowed to become, thanks to choices made by the Cameron and May governments. If there is one election where the Conservatives can afford to take a hit, its the election for the European Parliament.

With a 21-month implementation period still on the cards, it might be no bad thing for the UK to continue to have some representation in Strasbourg and Brussels. It might be very much in our interest, if not necessarily the EUs. Of course, should the Prime Ministers unloved Withdrawal Agreement be passed, or should the EU refuse to grant an Extension, or should we leave with No Deal, this is all just speculation.

But as they vote meaningfully or indicatively over the coming few days, MPs should at least be open to the idea of giving voters their say in late May. They could perhaps consider that, back in June 2016, the people landed them in this mess: perhaps its time for the people, through another exercise in democracy, to start helping them get out of it.03/22/2019

Its safe to say that few people if any prepare for the possibility that their car might spontaneously catch fire or anticipate what will happen after the fact.

Still, Stephani and Shaun Klamm say that they would have expected a bit more urgency from Toyota. Instead, the San Diego family tells ConsumerAffairs that Toyota has been surprisingly cavalier about a sudden fire that the family says nearly killed Shaun and the couples two children.

The familys ordeal started early in the morning on March 12. Shaun was on his way to take his two children to school when he thought he had forgotten his cell phone. They headed back to the house to look for it. As it turned out, the device had been in his pocket the whole time.

Now running late, the children got back in the car and Shaun started to drive away. They werent far from the house when his 12-year-old daughter began screaming. She told her father to pull over. It was then that Shaun noticed that smoke was coming out of the steering column, from under the dashboard. The kids grabbed their backpacks and jumped out of the car as he quickly pulled over. Below is a video they took:

Thinking that it was an electrical fire, Shaun grabbed his wrench. He opened the hood to disconnect the battery as fast as he could, but the electric components appeared fine. The fire, it seemed, was originating from the interior. Within thirty seconds, the whole dash and the floorboards of the front of the car was on fire, Shaun tells ConsumerAffairs.

Firefighters with the San Miguel Fire Department said that the interior of the car was completely engulfed by the time they arrived. They extinguished the fire, leaving behind an SUV that was melted from the inside, and said the cause was undetermined.

The passenger compartment was totally involved upon arrival, the fire departments report says.

Second fire in eight months

The Klamms are the second family in eight months to publicly share a story about a new Toyota RAV4 spontaneously catching fire. In both cases, the fire appeared to originate from the interior of the vehicle, rather than from the battery or the engine.

Minneapolis couple Heap and Hayling Han told investigators last year that their Toyota RAV4 was turned off and parked outside their front door when it suddenly caught fire in the middle of the night. They called 911. A first responder was laying out a line when the car suddenly exploded, likely due to the fire coming in contact with the gas tank. The firefighter was hospitalized with minor injuries.

Afterward, the fire department in Minneapolis said that fire was unlike any they had seen in a vehicle before.

Normally, the fires you come across, the engine is running or has been running, a Minneapolis Fire Department spokesman told ConsumerAffairs last year. The fire was not intentionally set, they ruled, but the cause was left undetermined.

The Klamm family, meanwhile, purchased their own Toyota RAV4 brand new in September 2017, they tell ConsumerAffairs. It drove well initially. But lately, in recent months, Shaun suspected that something had gone haywire with the electronics. After a recent oil change, the car began acting funny, Shaun says. The high beams didnt turn on when they were supposed to and the radio would turn on and off by itself.

Shaun brought it back to the local dealership numerous times, he says, and couldn't get the electrician to look under the hood or take his issues seriously.

I understand, with new stuff there's issues that happen, and stuff that goes wrong at times, he says. But when I have somebody who acts like they know more about that car than I do...Ive been driving that car every day for the last year and a half. I know that car better than anybody else.

Customer service runaround

After the fire, the familys insurer had the car towed and Stephani tried to contact Toyota. But the companys customer service workers have been difficult to get ahold of ever since, she says.

Toyota last week put a case manager named John A. in charge of handling the Klamm familys report. But Toyota has not supplied the Klamms with John A.s last name, his direct phone number, or his direct email address.

Instead, Stephani says that John A. will try to call her once, while she is at work, and that when she returns the call, she is put on hold for lengthy periods of time. When she finally gets through to a person, its John A.s receptionist.

We appreciate you taking the time to contact the Toyota Customer Experience Center, says an email that John A. sent her last week, which Stephani forwarded to ConsumerAffairs.

I apologize my recent attempt to reach you by telephone was unsuccessful.

We cannot accept electronic replies to this email, the message says at the bottom.

After Shaun finally got ahold of John A., he says the case manager accused him of trying to somehow benefit from the fire. He said, What are you trying to get out of this? Shaun recalls.

The fact is, your vehicle put my children's lives in danger, and you're going to come at me with that?

Toyotas press team tells ConsumerAffairs that they are currently attempting to look at the vehicle.

The safety and security of our customers are top priorities, Toyotas press team responds in a statement. The owner of the involved 2017 RAV4 contacted the Toyota Customer Experience Center (1-800 line) on March 12. We are currently attempting to inspect the vehicle.

Since we have not inspected the vehicle, we do not have anything else to share at this point, the statement concludes.

No after-market work done

After the Han familys RAV4 spontaneously caught fire in Minnesota, Toyota sent an investigator down and told the family that the fire may have been caused by an improperly installed tow hitch. It was an explanation that the Han family didnt believe.

The Klamm family is adamant that they had no after-martket work done on their vehicle.

There was nothing after-market on that car, Shaun says, adding that they even paid Toyota $900 for a new car alarm and $1,600 for a ten-year extended warranty.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.70%

Website zsnr2-szamotuly.pl uses latest and advanced technologies. It supports HTTPS and GZIP compression. The main html page has a size of 18610 bytes (18.17 kb uncompressed) and 6070 bytes (5.93 kb compressed).

This CoolSocial report was updated on 2019-09-29, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want.Pullmantur Cruises has released its cruise program for the summer of 2020, including new sailings to Iceland and Israel, Egypt and Turkey.

Commented Pullmantur Cruises' President and CEO, Richard J. Vogel: Adding Iceland to our offer is part of our wish to continue evolving in order to give our passengers new alternatives, by visiting incredible places without renouncing our Spanish lifestyle. We want to emphasize the onboard experience and our different programs to suit the needs and tastes of all travellers."

The Zenith will sail eight days and seven nights to Iceland and the Faroe Islands.

According to Pullmatnur, some of the excursions available will allow passengers to discover the villages and traditions of the Faroe Islands in Thorshaven; visit the eastern fjords of Iceland and the Hengifoss waterfall; fly over the Diamond Ring in Akureyri; and enter the Golden Circle (Gullfoss, Geysir and Thingvellir waterfalls) in Reykjavik.

The cruise starts in Trondheim on July 4 and concludes in Reykjavik on July 11, 2020. Pullmantur offers charter flights from Madrid and Barcelona. Passengers can board in Trondheim or in Reykjavik going on the opposite direction.

Another new option will be Israel, Egypt, Greece and Turkey aboard the Horizon sailing 12 days roundtrip from Athens on Nov. 1 and Nov. 12, 2020. Ports of call include Limassol, Haifa, Ashdod, Port Said/Alexandria, Marmaris, Bodrum and Santorini.

Pullmantur is also launching new itineraries in the Mediterranean, calling at Malta, Sicily, Portugal, Spain and Morocco .

The cruise line has also launched the first special edition of its family brochure of cruises, providing details on the variety of services and activities on offer for the whole family.

If there is one thing that defines us, it is that we offer a personalized, flexible experience tailored to the way each of our guests travel, and committed to the Spanish/Latin lifestyle, Vogel added.The Vladivostok Sea Terminal has announced the start of its biggest cruise season ever with the March 20 call of Phoenix Reisens Albatros. She is the first 16 vessels slated to call throughout the year, which will also see Vladivostok serving as an embarkation port.

The 650 mostly German passengers aboard the Albatros were greeted with a traditional welcome ceremony, organized by the cruise terminal operator with the support of Primorsky Territory Government.

Cruise passengers traffic for the year is expected to double from last year to about 30,000 passengers. Combined with ferry passenger traffic, the overall passenger volume will reach 100,000 passengers for 2019.

Among the notable events will be maiden calls by the Spectrum and Quantum of the Seas in September. Their calls have been made possible by dredging, the Sea Terminal stated.

Also calling this year will be the Costa neoRomantica and Serena, the Westerdam and Maasdam and the Diamond Princess.

April 22 will see a double call by the Westerdam and the neoRomantica.

Vladivostok will also be restoring its status as turnaround port. Local residents and tourists will be able to book cruises and sail from Vladivostok. The Costa NeoRomantica will sail from Vladivostok on May 30, calling at Korean and Japanese ports. And the Spectrum of the Seas will sail on Sept. 9 to Shanghai, Maizuru and Fukuoka.

In a prepared statement the Sea Terminal said that Vladivostok has strong sourcing potential with a population of 24.4 million in the Siberian and Far Eastern Federal districts of Russia. There are also some 70 million people in the Northeastern provinces of China (Heilongjiang and Jilin), which do not have sea ports.

The company said that Vladivostok can also support international sourcing with air/sea programs.

To support and further develop homeporting operations the Vladivostok Sea Terminal said it is actively working with the neighboring Pacific Russia regions (Sakhalin and Kamchatka) and nearby ports in South Korea and Japan to develop new itineraries for Asian and international cruise markets.With less than three months until a for-profit aquarium opens in Westfield Trumbull Mall, industry peers remain worried about how it will treat its exhibits.

We are concerned when we read that SeaQuests operations in other locations not only have fallen short of (Association of Zoos and Aquariums) standards, they have triggered criminal charges and regulatory fines in response to their care of animals and their attempted procuring of species from the marine environment, reads a statement from the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, regarding the incoming 17,000 square-foot SeaQuest Interactive Aquarium.

National issues

SeaQuest has had its share of negative publicity through the years. The company has operations in Colorado, Nevada, Texas and Utah, with plans to open in other states, including Connecticut. Animal rights groups have accused the company of animal cruelty at several of its six locations.

SeaQuest founder Vince Covino has been the target of criticism from animal welfare advocates over the companys stewardship of aquariums in San Antonio and Portland, Ore. His brother Ammon Covino was convicted on a charge of illegally shipping sharks and rays. The brothers have defended their record.

Last summer, the state of Colorado issued a cease-and-desist order against a SeaQuest Interactive Aquarium in Littleton after state officials determined the site failed to pass numerous Pet Animal Care and Facilities Act inspections of its bird exhibit.

An investigation was also opened in Colorado after reports of animals biting patrons and staff. National sources reported that at least 30 injuries were reported at the aquarium from June 2018 through January of this year.

Animal advocates have also criticized the aquariums business in Nevada, citing accusations of neglect and mistreatment of wildlife.

SeaQuest has disputed the allegations.

Recent news stories have brought to light inaccurate and misleading information about SeaQuest, and how we care for the animals at our facilities, a SeaQuest spokesman wrote in an email to Hearst Connecticut Media. The SeaQuest family is committed to delivering a safe, educational and fun interactive experience at each of our facilities for the animals, our guests and team members.

Reassurance

Despite ongoing coverage of alleged abuse, mall and town officials have remained tight-lipped about the accusations against the company, not responding to repeated emails and phone calls from Hearst Connecticut Media asking for comment.

SeaQuest told Hearst that it has reassured officials that the Trumbull location would be sensitive to the welfare of its exhibits.

SeaQuest will never make a decision that will hurt an animal or put money before the health of an animal, read a statement from the company to the Town of Trumbull.

In that same statement, the company said that its operations met and exceeded AZA requirements. In the past, SeaQuest has opted out of pursuing AZA accreditation, according to national sources.

To say that their exhibits meet AZA standards for aquariums in particular  our standards are the same as what USDA or NOAA would require, said Rob Vernon, spokesperson for the AZA. They are performance-based standards, not engineering-based standards.

Vernon told Hearst Connecticut Media that none of SeaQuests locations have applied for or received the accreditation.

There is certainly a big distinction between an accredited zoo and aquarium and a non-accredited facility, said Barrett Christie, Director of Animal Husbandry for the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, which has expressed concerns over the incoming SeaQuest venue.

Lacking governing bodies

The Trumbull location touts exhibits featuring sharks and stingrays among more than 300 species. Guests at other SeaQuest facilities are able to purchase snorkeling sessions among rays and fish lasting a half-hour.

Depending on the animals that SeaQuest features in the Trumbull location, the company would need to have a license to display certain species to the public, experts said.

In most states, there arent any governing bodies that can enforce animal safety and welfare of fish and reptiles  Connecticut included.

Its a very difficult case to prove, Bartlett said. There arent rigorous standards set for fish the way they way there are for mammals.

In many cases, Bartlett said, organizations seek accreditation from third-party organizations to show they are operating at a high standard. The AZA, among others, offers a credential to facilities that meet extensive regulations, though its not mandatory to apply for it.

The Norwalk and Mystic aquariums or Connecticuts Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport are AZA accredited.

Contributions from Alexander Soule

Jordan.grice@hearstmediact.comBRIDGEPORT  Social action network Bridgeport Generation Now will host a free, two-day workshop this weekend at University of Bridgeport.

The Civics 101 workshop weekend runs throughout the day Saturday and Sunday.

There will be a kickoff event that begins at 6 p.m. Friday at B:Hive Bridgeport, 930 Main St., with A Seat At The Table, a conversation about the fight for social equity and justice, with a focus on women.

The workshop focuses on building community power through civic knowledge and goes throughout the day Saturday and Sunday at University of Bridgeport, Shintaro Akatsu School of Design, 126 Park Ave. Workshop topics include understanding local and state government, public safety and police accountability.

Saturdays events begin at 10 a.m., with registration and brunch, followed by a welcome address. There are workshops throughout the day from 11:30 a.m. through 4:30 p.m. There is a break for lunch around noon. The days events end with a group discussion that begins at 4:30 p.m.

Sundays events begin at noon with registration and lunch, followed by events throughout the day from 1 p.m. through 3 p.m.

A breakdown of the events can be found at bptgennow.org/civics-101-workshop/.BRIDGEPORT  A city-based nonprofit was recently awarded funding to launch a mobile outreach program  Specializing in Opiate Addiction Recovery.

Recovery Network of Programs announced the award, which is funded through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, earlier this month.

The nonprofit will work in collaboration with local Bridgeport community providers to launch Project SOAR. The program will use outreach strategies to engage and retain people in treatment and recovery for opioid addiction.

At a time when our communities are being devastated by the opioid epidemic, Project SOAR will remove all barriers to care and will expand access to thousands of individuals in the greater Bridgeport area, said a prepared statement from RNP CEO Jennifer Kolakowski.

She said the nonprofit will work with its partners to make sure everyone in need of medical care and additional services are able to get those.

RNP is a behavioral health care provided, serving the Greater Bridgeport Area since 1972.BRIDGEPORT  Eleven of the 19 people cited in an internal investigation might not face Police Commission hearings about their conduct during a 2017 incident, if the cops union has its way.

Rather than face the seven-member volunteer commission, 11 of those cited in an Office of Internal Affairs report for violating police policies would be disciplined at the discretion of Chief Armando Perez.

Some people arent happy with that.

The first point of concern is them asking that almost all of the officers be taken out of any type of hearing, said Callie Heilmann, president of social action network Bridgeport Generation Now.

The report concluded that 19 Bridgeport Police Department members broke various rules after cops were called to a house party on a noise complaint. When the Internal Affairs report was released earlier this month, it said the citys Police Commission would have jurisdiction over disciplining those 19.

But Sgt. Chuck Paris, president of Bridgeports police union, said the groups attorneys reviewed the Internal Affairs report and decided the violations cited for most of the officers did not meet a threshold to necessitate a Police Commission review.

As of Friday, Paris said he had not heard back from the commission about the unions request for a reduction in hearings. He also said he did not have a list available of the 11 people for whom the change was being requested.

Police Commission Chairman Dan Roach limited his comment on the matter, saying, Like any request, it will be reviewed.

Paris said the union would avail itself of all legal recourse.

Were ready to take additional measures, which includes possibly going to federal court to have this reviewed, he said. Were going to support our officers.

Perez said Friday he couldnt comment on the decisions of the union or its attorneys, but he said that what happens next would be up to the Police Commission.

Those Police Commission hearings that are held are to be conducted in private, as with other disciplinary cases in the department. But Heilmann said her organization is working to meet with the commission to talk about transparency.

Theres no reason why the Police Commission cant release a report outlining their findings, she said.

The Office of Internal Affairs investigation was launched on Oct. 24, 2017, following two civilian complaints about officers who intervened as a party on Oct. 21, 2017. Two officers were initially dispatched for a noise complaint that got out of control, Perez said Friday.

As tensions escalated, police put out a call for more response. Forty-six officers ended up at the party, and seven people were arrested.

The Internal Affairs investigation, completed last November but not released until this month, found that two civilian detention officers and 17 cops violated department policies related to supervision, use of excessive force and truthfulness that night.

Three of those named  Officer Thomas Lattanzio, Sgt. Mark Belinkie and Lt. Robert Sapiro  already will not be subject to Police Commission hearings. Lattanzio killed himself on Dec. 4, 2017. Belinkie committed suicide on March 2. Sapiro retired earlier this month.

The Internal Affairs investigation began Oct. 24, 2017. The results were released to the chief and Mayor Joe Ganim on Nov. 13, 2018, by OIA Officer in Charge Lt. Brian Dickerson, who was transferred this month to a position with less stress. The results were obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media on March 6, after a January Freedom of Information request.

Perez said he was worried that with the Internal Affairs report being released before the hearings, the officers might be prejudged by the public.

I think that (the report) went out premature and it hurts everybody, Perez said. It hurts the police department, it hurts the public, it hurts the people that are involved.Jacqueline Valles love for early childhood education began in the basement of Good Shepherd Christian Church on Hancock Avenue in Bridgeport.

Something about working with small children in a Bible study class gave the city teen a warm feeling.

By the time she was 17, Valle was working part time in the infant and toddler classroom at Cambridge Manor in Fairfield, and set aside thoughts of a career in business administration to pursue what she calls a passion.

She didnt realize it was a passion that comes with at a hefty price.

As an early childhood professional and single parent of two boys, I have struggled to make ends meet at times, said Valle. It was a career that expected her to get an early childhood degree in exchange for minimum-wage pay.

Now head teacher at Honey Bear Learning Center in Stratford, Valle makes more, but not what she is worth, according to her boss. And she oversees a staff of 10 teachers, many of whom are in the same boat she was in 23 years ago. Between low salaries and what it costs to stay credentialed, Valle and others say theyd make more working at Costco.

Everyone understands it is an issue that needs to be dealt with, said state Rep. Robert Sanchez, D-New Britain. We want everyone to get a trade or a college degree. We want people to work, but we are not doing that in this state. We need to be more proactive. It is time for Connecticut to wake up and do this.

In 2018, the state Department of Labor said child care workers on average, excluding the public school system, make $12.21 an hour.

At the same time, many parents struggle to pay a preschool tuition in Connecticut that averages $13,880 a year for infant care, according to the Economic Policy Institute. For 4-year-olds, the annual average is $11,502.

As house chairman of the legislatures Education Committee, Sanchez is well aware of the struggle. He is a Head Start alum who has spent his career in early childhood education.

Sanchez has pushed forward a half-dozen bills that have sailed through his committee and on to the Appropriations Committee. Collectively, the proposals would boost pay for child care workers, up the states contribution to child care slots and vouchers, expand eligibility for state subsidies and make it easier for child care workers to afford the college credentials required of them.

They are all good bills, but they cost, Sanchez acknowledged.

How much is yet to be calculated.

Sanchezs hope is that Appropriations and Gov. Ned Lamont can see their way to funneling a couple of million dollars more into helping the states Care4Kids program boost rates and, thus, teacher salaries.

Between his advocacy, and that of Beth Bye, a former state senator and now Commissioner of the states Office of Early Childhood Education, supporters say that even amid state fiscal mess, the time has come to move the needle on a system that has treated trained professionals as babysitters.

I do have hope, said Marie Russell, academic chairwoman for Child Studies at Post University in Waterbury, where there are 1,600 online and in-person students studying in the field. I see it as a growing awareness ... that the early childhood years are very, very critical ... I think there is real incentive to solve this problem.

All over the map

When it comes to its support of early childhood education, Connecticut is all over the map.

The National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers ranks Connecticut fifth in the nation in spending on early childhood education. The same report puts Connecticut at 36th in meeting all of the quality benchmarks set by the federal government.

The state claims the No. 3 spot for early child education enrollment, according to U.S. News and World Reports. Connecticut is second behind Washington, D.C., in the percent of early childhood programs with national accreditation, but unlike most other states, it doesnt have a quality rating system for day care centers.

Connecticut is also one of only three states that dont let parents in post secondary education to use Care4Kids subsidies. That is one of several areas the early child care bills attempt to address.

Each year in Connecticut, about 35,000 babies are born. In two-thirds of those cases, by the time a child is 2, all adults in the household are working outside the home, said Merrill Gay, who directs the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance.

Thats where the state gets involved. Connecticut regulates and supports child care to help families work and promote healthy child development.

Anyone who watches an unrelated child regularly for more than three hours a day needs a state license.

The state also provides funding through several programs. One is Care4Kids, which helps low- to moderate-income parents pay for child care costs by giving them vouchers. About 14,000 preschoolers served this year through that program.

The governors proposed budget would spend $130 million in the 2019-20 fiscal year Care4Kids.

The value of vouchers varies, but on average they cover tuition costs at 4 percent of centers in the state. By comparison, California gives parents access to 72 percent of available programs, and New York, up to 69 percent, according to Gay.

The average Care4Kids per-child subsidy in Southwestern Connecticut is $241 a week for infant and toddlers, $190 a week for center-based preschool slots.

One bill advanced by the Education Committee would require the average Care4Kids voucher to cover 75 percent of the market cost of child care. In Fairfield County, that amounts to $421 a week for infants and toddlers and $363 for preschoolers. The new money would be directed toward teacher salaries  something Sanchez and others say is desperately needed.

I think Rep. Sanchez is really on the mark, Bye said. The wage issue is really the overriding issue in early childhood, in making sure our kids have quality. The issue is, as you raise the rate, you might not be able to serve as many families.

This, and most of the early childhood bills are not supported by the governors budget.

Byes office, instead, plans to use a new $14.3 million federal award  not part of the state budget  to boost vouchers to the 25th percentile for preschool and 50th percentile for infant toddlers. In Southwestern Connecticut, that amounts to $244 and $359 respectively.

The 25th percentile would satisfy one of several federal requirements the office is striving to meet.

Another $127 million in the state budget directly supports early care and education slots for children at public schools and accredited community-based child day care centers in high needs districts. State aid doesnt cover the full cost of operating a day care slot, which Gay puts at about $15,000. The bill that would increase vouchers would also boost slot funding by $1,000 to $9,927.

Whats proposed

Collectively, these bills try to address some of the systematic issues that limit access to early childhood quality in our state, Wendy Simmons, director of education and equity at Connecticut Voices for Children, said in testimony to the Education Committee.

There is also a proposed bill to raise income eligibility for parents using Care4Kids to 75 percent of the state medium income. Another would expand the Care4Kids Program to parents enrolled in higher education. Now, only parents employed or in high school can access the program.

Another proposal would forgive student loans of child care workers.

Thats one that Patricia Farquharson, director West Haven Child Care Center and an associate professor at Post University in Waterbury, hopes will pass.

Loan forgiveness, Farquharson said, could get more people into the field and help keep them there. Over the past four decades, Farquharson said, early childhood education has become much more professional.

It needs the pay scale to match, she said.

SB 932 would delay a requirement that forces child care centers to hire more staff with early childhood certificates and degrees. There simple arent enough of them yet, those in the field say.

And SB 930 creates a pilot program allowing for a group of family day care providers to set up shop together in a non-residential setting. Four incubators would initially be allowed to start, one each in New Britain, New Haven, Bridgeport and Stamford.

I support them all, said Valle, anticipating an effect that would empower families.

At Honey Bear, there are 52 infant, toddlers and preschool children and a staff of 10 teachers who make, on average, $14 to $15 an hour.

We pay what (our) budget can afford, said owner Cathy Vanicky, pledging that any increase in state aid would go straight to the staff.

Sanchez said he realizes many of the proposals are costly.

My position is, if we can get even a couple of million dollars, it would open the system up, he said.

Letters to that effect have been sent from Education to Appropriations.

We are looking for something, Sanchez said. In the past, we got nothing.

lclambeck@ctpost.com; twitter/lclambeckBRIDGEPORT  A Superior Court judge on Friday refused to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the brother of a Greenwich man who was allegedly abused for months while a patient at a state psychiatric hospital.

Albert Shehadi sued both the state and the federal government in March 2018, claiming the abuse violated the U.S. Constitution and the Connecticut Patients Bill of Rights. It seeks money damages and injunctive relief.

Construing the allegations in the light most favorably to the plaintiff, the court must infer that the defendants conduct was indicative of highly unreasonable conduct, involving an extreme departure from ordinary care, in a situation where a high degree of danger, i.e., the plaintiffs abuse, is apparent, Judge Barbara Bellis ruled in a nine-page decision.

Ten employees of the Whiting Forensic Division of Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown were arrested after surveillance video showed them hitting, kicking and pushing William Shehadi Jr. out of bed, according to court documents.

At one point, a male nurse is seen gyrating his groin on Shehadis face, and other workers are shown on the video dousing Shehadi with liquids, throwing food at him and forcing him to wear a diaper on his head.

The relentless abuse inflicted by state employees on a helpless, mentally ill man day after day for weeks and weeks shows a level of cruelty that is sickening in the extreme, said Shehadis lawyer, Antonio Ponvert III.

Shehadi, 58, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1995 for the death of his father and committed to the psychiatric hospital.

The state lawsuit names the State of Connecticut, State Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS), as well as the Commissioner of DMHAS and 11 Whiting administrators and supervisory level employees as defendants.HAMDEN  Owners of The Rough Draft music venue and bar are looking for financial help to save their dream.

High school teachers Chris Scionti and Karen Robinson, co-owners of the Hamden establishment, want to preserve the venue they have worked hard to keep alive, but after a deal to sell The Rough Draft and transfer ownership fell through, the venue is at risk of closing if they cant find an another investor or partner.

I just want this place to succeed, however that happens, Robinson said.

Theyve reached out to the community for interested partners, investors or buyers who would be willing to put some money into the venue so the shows might go on.

Everybody who comes through loves it, Scionti said. The bands love it, the customers love it, but we need consistency and to invest in advertising and its tough not being able to put as much time into it.

Scionti and Robinson opened The Rough Draft last June. When Steve Rodgers closed his venue trifecta  The Space, The Outer Space and The Space Ballroom  Scionti and Robinson opened their concert venue in the building that housed The Space, hoping to keep a bit of Rodgers legacy alive.

When they opened, all but one of The Rough Drafts employees, including Robinson, worked at The Space, The Outer Space and The Ballroom. Scionti and Robinson even bought some of The Outer Spaces sound equipment, its sound booth and its tables, chairs and bar stools.

They put their life savings into the venue along with blood sweat and tears, Scionti said. But even though the business has been doing well, he said they need more capital to keep it going.

I believe in the business and I know if I had deep pockets wed be able to continue, he said. But time and money are obstacles and they need more time to build the business.

Its been on an upward climb, but we need more of a cushion. Its been that way from the start, he said.

Now were left with where we started, with this dream, this place and no money to push it forward, Robinson said. Were near the end.

In the next week or two, Scionti said theyll have to make some tough decisions and be creative to find ways to continue.

Since its opening, The Rough Draft has had somewhat of a rough ride at times.

A flood in late September last year threatened to close The Rough Drafts doors, but with the help of the music community, the business weathered that storm and many area musicians came together to perform benefit shows.

Robinson said at the time, the communitys support is what encouraged them to keep going.

The venue does a lot to attract musicians and audiences to its stage, but the many concert venues in the New Haven area make the business competitive, Scionti said.

We have a show that we think will do good but then a lot of other venues are having shows the same night and the audience gets split up, which is great for the music scene but hard on the venue owners, he said.

But theres something those downtown venues dont have  a parking lot. Robinson said this is really valuable for a venue in the area because its not an asset the downtown New Haven venues offer.

If the only option Scionti and Robinson have is to sell their dream, Scionti said it would hopefully go to someone who loves the music scene and understands it.

Preferably, it would be someone who keeps it somewhat with the vibe, but we dont have much say in that at this point, Robinson said. If somebody made us an offer, wed be at the point where we cant say no.

She said theyre not looking to squander a potential investors money, but rather use it to build the business and create something sustainable.

The person who comes in would have to have a desire and understand the potential thats not tapped into yet, Scionti said. Were doing pretty good considering we havent been spending money on advertising and if we had wed be doing much better.

Scionti said theyve struggled with reaching a sustainable level for their business, but have always been on the cusp.

Were almost there, he said. We probably, in retrospect, would have put this call out when we opened, and then wed be in a much better position.

mdignan@hearstmediact.comEven as cannabis legalization has spread throughout the country, the unexplored territory has been passing laws that allow people to smoke outside their homes.

As things currently stand in states where marijuana is legal, you can only smoke in your home, whether thats stated explicitly or not. Using marijuana is not allowed in buildings, public spaces, cars (when youre driving, obviously, but even when youre not) or in hotels.

Alaska recently took a step to change that. The state is the first to pass a law allowing so-called social consumption of marijuana at specially licensed retail locations. Essentially, it will allow people to both buy and smoke cannabis at cannabis cafes associated with dispensaries that get the proper licensing from the state.

Related: Israeli Study Finds Marijuana Has Promise for Treating Autism Symptoms

First statewide rules.

But cant people already consume marijuana at licensed establishments in Denver and California? Yes, to an extent. The Coffee Joint in Colorado became famous as the first legal and licensed cannabis consumption lounge, although as they say on their site its vaporization and edibles only - no open flame.

Colorado could have become the first state with laws in place governing cannabis cafes and social consumption, but then-Gov. John Hickenlooper vetoed it last year. In California, the cities of West Hollywood, San Francisco and Oakland also allow businesses to get a license that allows consumption on site, but Alaska is the first to pass a social consumption law at the state level. Its a major step toward allowing to consume marijuana in the same way people drink alcohol in bars.

Related: Adult-Use Marijuana Is a 'No-Brainer' for Two Florida Lawmakers but Just a 'No' for Most

What the law does.

Alaska Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer, a Republican, signed the bill into law earlier this month allowing businesses that sell marijuana to also provide a space for people to smoke it. The rules require that the dispensary create a use area that is clearly separated from the retail shop by a wall, a secure door or placed outdoors. Also, the only shops that will be licensed to allow onsite use will have to be a freestanding building (that eliminates smoke drifting into other businesses).

Becoming a cannabis cafe will require a second license. Applications are expected to start soon, with the new lounges possibly open by the summer of 2019.

Alaska officials, knowing they are blazing a new trail for state officials, have taken their time creating these rules. Cary Carrigan, executive director of the Alaska Marijuana Industry Association, told the Associated Press that everyone involved is aware this is not happening anywhere else in the U.S. yet. As we start to develop this, people are really looking at us, so I know that everybody wants to get it right. I dont want to have to get this pulled back and revisited.

In a blog item on the decision in Alaska, NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri said he expects more states to follow suit in the not too distant future.

To stay up to date on the latest marijuana-related news make sure to like dispensaries.com on Facebook

Related:

Alaska Becomes First State to Legalize 'Cannabis Cafes'

Florida Finally Allows Actual Marijuana Flower in Medical Marijuana Dispensaries

This Week in Weed: How To Get High The "Proper" Way



Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reservedLast year, Jarod Ferguson described graduating from Staples High School like climbing Mount Everest.

Its difficult, requires long-term commitment and its not something everyone in his situation could do. But its worth it, if you do manage to make it to the top.

I know that reaching the summit of Everest will be my greatest accomplishment so far, he wrote.

By all rights, Ferguson should not have graduated from Staples. In 8th grade he attended school in his native Philadelphia.

It was only through a grant from A Better Chance of Westport that gave Ferguson the opportunity.

The organization will hold its signature event on March 30, at Rolling Hills Country Club.

Called the Dream Event, its the primary fundraising vehicle through which inner-city students like Ferguson are able to get a Westport education.

Every year, the event features speeches from former students and performances from Westport student musical groups. Theyve been doing it since 2002.

Each year, we continue to be moved by the words and accomplishments of our scholars, and this years Dream Event should be another night of inspiration and celebration, A Better Chance Westport Co-President Michele Mitnick said in a release.

This years Dream Event will feature a performance by the Staples High School Orphenians, speeches by two graduating seniors, a cocktail party, dinner, and silent and live auctions.

Tickets are available at www.abetterchanceofwestport.orgFaced with the prospect of a long and divisive Democratic primary season, liberal groups are kick-starting the general election in targeted swing states with plans for paid advertising campaigns attacking President Donald Trump's economic record.

Using a direct-to-camera style, the efforts will lean heavily on testimony from working-class voters who say Trump has let them down by repeatedly siding with wealthy interests amid slow wage growth and rising health care costs.

One spot by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA that is part of a six-figure digital ad buy launched this week features a retired union steelworker, with a gruff voice and a close-cropped mustache, casually cursing as he describes Indiana workers who lost their jobs after Trump vowed to stop companies from moving jobs overseas.

"People clapped. People cried. They wanted something to believe in," Chuck Jones, the former president of an Indianapolis steelworkers union says in the ad. He then uses an unprintable word to describe what happened next to hundreds of workers at a Carrier plant in Indianapolis. Trump had visited the plant weeks after his election, vowing to save workers' jobs.

"I had to tell the people their jobs were going to Mexico. They were devastated. People lost their health care and their retirement," Jones says. "Working people have got to fight back," he concludes.

The efforts are meant to offset what Democrats see as an uncomfortable imbalance in the 2020 race: They are likely to go more than a year before selecting a nominee, while Trump retains daily use of his megaphone at the White House to attack Democrats as extremists.

Priorities has promised to spend $100 million on broadcast and digital ads in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida before Democrats pick a nominee. A second group, American Bridge, which has historically focused on opposition research, has begun fundraising for a $50 million expansion that will be devoted to a similar paid campaign to persuade voters in the same states that Trump has let them down.

A third group backed by labor unions and billionaire Tom Steyer, For Our Future, will be deploying $80 million this cycle for a voter contact campaign starting in the coming months that will target hard-to-reach voters this year in a broader group of potential swing states. And the political operation for former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has begun planning a fourth voter targeting and advertising effort focused on the nominating phase that could spend more than the $115 million invested in the 2018 elections, according to aides.

"We are facing a long nominating process in our party, leaving a gaping hole that, if not filled, could set Trump up for a second term," reads a fundraising pitch being circulated by American Bridge.

Trump's political advisers, aware of his potential vulnerabilities among blue-collar voters in states that gave him his narrow win in 2016, have been working to blunt the coming onslaught. On Wednesday, Trump flew to Lima, Ohio, to announce 400 new jobs at a military factory, and he plans to travel next week to Michigan for another event.

"Our playbook is pretty open. We are not shy about how we won last time and how we are going to win again," said a person close to the Trump campaign, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

That person dismissed the work of the outside groups as an effort to paper over the damage the party's candidates will do to each other in the primary campaign.

"They have to do this," the person said. "No matter the party, no matter the election year, primaries have bruising consequences for every candidate."

Republican outside groups are also gearing up for a fight, with the conservative group Club for Growth already debuting an ad targeting Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman who entered the race last week. After raising $75 million in the 2018 cycle, the Trump-backing super PAC America First Action is also planning major spending in the election, though the bulk of those funds will likely target the Democratic nominee next year.

"We all know what the battleground states look like. Both sides are going to engage in massive turnout. So it is going to come down to these slices of the electorate," said America First Action president Brian O. Walsh.

Much of the Democratic independent effort, which is allowed by law to raise money in unlimited amounts, will be coordinated through Priorities, which has been the primary outside advertising group supporting the Democratic presidential campaigns since 2012.

The group oversaw Democratic digital spending in the 2018 midterm elections and hosts regular meetings with dozens of liberal groups to coordinate advertising and messaging. This year, Priorities will start a separate meeting to coordinate press operations of outside groups, especially in the key swing states, with the goal of pushing news coverage critical of Trump.

Early polling and data analysis by Priorities has concluded that a significant number of people did not vote for the Democratic nominee in 2016, either because they stayed home or supported Trump, and can be won over in 2020 by highlighting their economic concerns and disillusion with corruption in Washington.

"One of the things we have found is that while the targets for persuasion and mobilization are somewhat different from one another, the messages that mobilize and persuade are pretty similar across those two groups," said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who has helped develop the Priorities messaging.

"The concerns about the costs of health care and wages not keeping up with the cost of living are common to those two groups," he said. "The perception that Trump looks out for the wealthy is common for those two groups."

The American Bridge program, which is still being developed, envisions separate paid advertising and public relations efforts by local messengers focused on working class, exurban and rural voters in the three targeted Midwestern states, and possibly Florida. The plan includes an emphasis on rural radio advertising.

A fundraising pitch by the group said the goal of the campaign would be "softening up Trump's numbers with key sections of his coalition."

"We understand that we may not win these voters back entirely but if we don't make inroads into these areas, we will win the popular vote, lose the electoral college and the senate could be lost for a decade," the pitch reads.

American Bridge claims to have gathered over 176 gigabytes of Trump research that could be used in the general election, and the group is exploring legal structures that will allow it to share that research, including 24,000 video and audio files, with the Democratic nominee.

The group was founded by David Brock, a former conservative journalist who became a liberal activist, and it plans to continue its other work of researching and collecting video for House, Senate and state campaigns. But to aid the new fundraising effort for swing-state messaging, the group is adding former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, who ran for Senate in Florida last year, and former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell to its board of directors, which also includes former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm.

The Bloomberg effort, though still undefined, has hired a roster of talent connected to the last two Democratic presidential efforts, including Brynne Craig, a political director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign; David Plouffe, a former campaign manager to Barack Obama; and Dan Wagner, a data scientist who worked on both Obama campaigns.

The grass-roots outreach will be run again by For Our Future, which focuses on knocking on doors to reach targeted voters who might not otherwise vote, especially in black and Hispanic communities. The group has decided to focus this year on seven states, adding Ohio, Virginia and Nevada to the list used by Priorities.

Initial voter contacts are focused on gathering information on what issues move key voters, which is then shared with other outside groups working on the 2020 race. Later this year, the door-to-door efforts will shift to messaging about Trump.

"We are going to work in a much more highly coordinated fashion," For Our Future CEO Justin Myers said. "We are going to make sure that all the groups are talking to each other."Two months ago, as noted here, it seemed like the federal investigation into the matter of some $35,000 that was generated in the sale of scrap metal that was in the hands of Bridgeports Department of Public Facilities seemed like sort of small potatoes to bring the FBI to town.

But, as also noted then, when you start digging up small potatoes, particularly in the traditionally fertile loam of Bridgeport, and as you turn over the rocks in your way, you just never know what else may turn up.

So, in recent months, its been revealed that a federal grand jury in New Haven is examining not only the potatoes but a number of no-bid contracts awarded to at least two local contractors.

The grand jury presumably is now wading through four years worth of city records related to bidding and contract procedures obtained by subpoena.

Since then, Mayor Joe Ganim has fired Jose Tiago, the deputy director of the Public Facilities Department, and Jose Moura, a department employee and Tiagos cousin; took two weeks pay and two weeks vacation time from John Ricci, a long time Bridgeport political figure and the $134,000-a-year director of the department.

Tiago, taking no chances, has hired a prominent criminal attorney.

Former Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch fired Ricci in 2013 in a flap over construction of a long driveway to the Lordship home of prominent contractor Manuel Moutinho as part of a safety improvement plan at Bridgeports Sikorsky Memorial Airport. Ricci was airport manager at the time.

At the time, Finch said the move was prompted by Riccis failure to disclose outside financial dealings the manager had with Moutinho.

Ganim, to his credit, has also hired a consulting firm to look over the citys purchasing and bidding practices.

Its likely that other topics, as yet unspecified publicly, are popping up as blips on the federal radar.

In the script, at least, for the movie All the Presidents Men, the dramatization of the Nixon Watergate story, the actor Hal Holbrook, as Deep Throat, advised Robert Redfords Bob Woodward, a Washington Post reporter, to Follow the money.

Of course, much more let to the downfall of Richard Nixon, but checks passed between conspirators were helpful pointers along the way.

Cash, though, is a form of money that is difficult to follow. When prosecutorial squeezing begins, Suspect 1 might say he gave Suspect 2 a bunch of money.

Suspect 2 replies, No he didnt and should the case proceed, you now get into the area of credibility and other witness-character issues.

When the story of the scrap metal sales was first reported by Hearst Connecticut Media, Ricci conceded that the department  a practice he said he inherited  had a sort of sunshine fund, a petty cash drawer whose contents were used for morale-boosting things like meals, event tickets, birthday cakes, contributions to food pantries, Toys for Tots donations and other such humane gestures.

Its a new generation of special agents that is looking around today in Bridgeport, agents who were not involved, for instance, in 1981 with a botched attempt to sting the then-Police Chief Joseph A. Walsh by offering him a bribe that Walsh saw coming a week away.

Nor were they involved in the investigation and prosecution of Ganim in 2003.

So theyre viewing developments in Bridgeport with fresh eyes.

They probably have lots of questions.

Among them, one would imagine, is what was the final resting spot for the $35,000 in city money generated by the sale of scrap metal.

Well just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, pass the potatoes.

Michael J. Daly is retired editor of the editorial page of the Connecticut Post. Email: Mike.Daly@hearstmediact.com.WEST HAVEN  Three people were shot after a fight broke out at the Lotus Lounge nightclub on the Boston Post Road early Friday morning, police said.

Sgt. Charles Young said the fight broke out just before 2 a.m. Upon arrival, police found one subject with gunshot wounds. That person was immediately taken to an area hospital for treatment, police said.A former president/CEO of a Kansas credit union will be sentenced in June for embezzling nearly $40,000, according to the U.S. Attorneys office in Topeka.

Connie Marie Kent, 52, Topeka, Kan., pleaded guilty to one count of theft from a credit union in U.S. District Court on Tuesday.

In a plea agreement, Kent admitted that from 2009 to 2017 she stole $39,895 from the former Topeka Post Office Credit Union, which is now the $8.9 million 1st Kansas Credit Union.

Court documents do not reveal how the embezzlement was detected or how Kent may have concealed her theft over nine years.California is the first state to pass a comprehensive consumer privacy law with far-reaching implications. First, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) can affect organizations without a physical location in California. Second, it may push other states to accelerate passage of similar laws, as well as cause Congress to pass a national privacy law.

Your organization needs to know if it is covered under the CCPA in order to begin preparing for its technical effective date of Jan. 1, 2020. Here is your eight-step process for doing that.

Know Your Obligation to the CCPA

Dorsey & Whitney explains that the CCPA goes far beyond current U.S. privacy protections, and in many respects emulates elements contained in the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). And similar to GDPR, many U.S. firms are wondering if they are subject to the CCPA.

Coverage starts with the consumer, which the CCPA defines as a natural person who is a California resident.

Next, the CCPA applies to any for-profit legal entity that meets the following general criteria:

Collects consumers personal information

Determines how and why that information is processed

Conducts business in California, even if only online

Meets one of the following annual criteria: Gross revenue of at least $25 million Collects personal information for at least 50,000 consumers, households or devices Derives half of its annual revenue from the sale of personal information



CCPA-defined consumers have the right to:

Know what personal information is being collected on them

Know if that information is being sold and to whom

Opt out of that information being sold

Obtain a copy of their personal information

Receive equal service and price regardless of whether they exert the above rights

Sue for damages if their personal information is breached

The CCPAs very broad view of personal information includes the following:

Demographic information (i.e., name, address, email)

A unique identifier, such as an IP address

Account or Social Security number

Drivers license or passport

Personal property records

Online activity

Biometric, geolocation, employment and education data

Any inferences that an entity draws from the above information

In addition, Privacy Law Blog points out that the CCPAs definition of personal information includes information that is identifiable to a household, not necessarily a consumer.

The CCPA does grant an exemption for GLBA-regulated firms, but financial institutions need to understand the exact nature of that exemption. It only extends to data that is covered under GLBA. Other CCPA-defined personal information that an entity collects is covered under this law. For example, information collected through webpage trackingsomething not covered under GLBA would be subject to the CCPA.

Importantly, the right to sue for damages in the event of a data breach is not part of the exemption and applies to GLBA-regulated firms and their GLBA-covered data.

Map Consumer Data

If you are covered under CCPA, start by mapping all of the personal information under your control. Chronicle of Data Protection recommends asking the following questions in order to do this:

What personal information do you collect or possess?

How do you collect it?

Where and how do you store it?

Do you share it with other entities?

Is such shared data part of a sale, a provision of service, or used for some other purpose?

As of Jan. 1, 2020, CCPA-defined consumers will have the right to request their information. Even though enforcement of the law will not begin until at least July 1, 2020, covered entities will still need to comply with such consumer requests at the start of next year. Personal information that is held by a third party on your behalf will likely pose the biggest risk. So, in addition to conducting your own data-mapping exercise, make sure all of your third-party vendors do the same and share the results with you.

Update Privacy Disclosures

The CCPA gives consumers the right to know exactly what personal information is being collected about them. In order to comply with that, businesses must provide a disclosure at or before the point of collection. It must inform consumers as to the categories of personal information to be collected and the purposes for which the categories of personal information shall be used.

Covered entities must also disclose where that personal information is gathered from, the categories of third parties with whom it is shared and any specific pieces of personal information collected.

These disclosures will need to be ready by Jan. 1, 2020, and New Jersey Law Journal warns that they will be a large part of compliance. They should be available through a publicly posted privacy notice, and specifically upon request by a consumer. They must also be updated annually.

Create a Homepage Privacy Link

The law also calls for a privacy link on the homepage of any covered entitys business website. It must be clear and conspicuous, titled Do Not Sell My Information, and linked to a page that allows consumers to opt out of having their personal information sold.

As soon as possible, covered entities should begin the IT change management process for adding this link to their homepage because it must be visible as of Jan. 1, 2020.

Develop a Process for Handling Consumer Requests

Starting on Jan. 1, 2020, covered entities must be ready to respond to consumer requests about their personal information that are allowed under the CCPA. These requests must be processed free of charge and within 45 days. Therefore, covered entities need to develop appropriate procedures for processing the following types of consumer inquiries:

Request a copy of their personal information

Request that their personal information be deleted

Find out what categories of their personal information are being sold

Request to opt out of the sale of personal information for those over 16 years old

Request to opt in for the sale of personal information for those between the age of 13 and 16

Obtain consent from a guardian to sell personal information from a consumer under 13 years old

It is important that covered entities pay attention to the above age requirements, as the law indicates that, a business that willfully disregards the consumers age shall be deemed to have had actual knowledge of the consumers age. This could prove to be a risk area in complying with the CCPA.

Identify and Implement System Changes

In order to implement the above procedures, corresponding systems will need to be updated. Go ahead and make your IT team aware that changes are coming, so they can prioritize them within their change management process. Likewise, get started on writing the new procedures in order to give your IT team as much time as possible to incorporate them into your systems by Jan. 1, 2020.

Train Employees

Once systems are updated, begin training employees on the key aspects of the CCPA, your corresponding procedures and system updates. This education should take place prior to Jan. 1, 2020, and the result should be that employees, especially those in customer-facing roles, understand the following:

Their physical location or that of company headquarters does not determine CCPA coverage

For this laws purposes, a consumer is a resident of California

Where to direct or how to process consumer requests regarding their personal information

Whether your organization has decided to apply this law across its entire footprint for consistency sake or only to California consumers

Strengthen Data Security

The CCPA allows consumers to seek damages for breached personal information if it is the result of the business violation of the duty to implement and maintain reasonable security procedures and practices. This has the potential to significantly up the financial and reputational ante of a data breach. Therefore, covered entities should review and update their information security and privacy policies and actively monitor their data security defenses to ensure this risk is mitigated to the greatest extent possible.

A Lot Might Happen in the Coming Year

Debate in California about the CCPA has not stopped. Both its opponents and supporters are still advocating for additional changes, which could mean that the law will be amended again before 2020. In addition, the California Attorney General has until July 2, 2020, to publish the laws corresponding regulations, which will provide further clarification about complying with it.

Beyond California, other states may begin passing their own laws, although how similar is uncertain. If they do, Congress may step in with a national privacy law in order to provide some consistency for companies operating in multiple states.

As of now, those are the unknowns. The current state of the CCPA is the only known, and that is what covered entities must start preparing for as soon as possible. The upside is such preparation, in particular the data mapping, will put you in a better position to comply with any subsequent privacy laws that are enacted.Pine Grill Classic a special start to high school boys basketball

The Pine Grill Roundball Classic is in its 10th edition after a year hiatus because of COVID. A great local tournament opens the HS basketball season.What role does faith play in your life, your public life and your private life?

This was a question Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren was asked recently at a CNN town hall.

In her reply, she focused on Jesus saying: When you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.

I was hungry and you gave me food, she said, I was thirsty and you gave me water, I was in prison and you visited me, I was naked and you clothed me.

That passage is not about you had a good thought and held onto it, she said. Thoughts about good things are not enough. It does not say, you just didnt hurt anybody, and thats good enough. No. It says, you saw something wrong. You saw somebody who was thirsty. You saw somebody who was in prison. You saw their face. You saw somebody who was hungry, and it moved you to act. I believe we are called on to act.

This means, she said, there is God. There is value in every single human being.

Around the same time, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput was speaking at the University of Mary in North Dakota, at the vocations jamboree. (They are old friends of mine there, and I am on their Board of Regents.) Time is precious, he said. Time matters. It matters because we really have so little of it in any life, and if we misuse it, we never get it back. Ill be 75 this year, so Im old. Many of you here tonight are young. In a sense, Im already the past. Youre the present. Time and experience separate us. But when we listen to and learn from each other, we make a future for the Gospel by using our time well together in the world.

We cant be reminded enough of this, can we? Days go by so quickly and how are we using the time?

The archbishop also quoted C.S. Lewis describing Christianity as a fighting religion. Chaput explained: Our weapons are very different from the hatred and violence of a battlefield, but the combat is just as real. Spiritual warfare has a long and Biblically rooted tradition in Christian life because Satan is real, evil is real, and theres no neutral ground in the struggle for the soul of the world. In the end, were either with God and for God, or were against him. We need to choose.

Also around the same time, I got into an Uber in Manhattan and somewhat mysteriously the driver delivered a discourse on angels and hell. People are lying and cheating and stealing and murdering. It is evil and it is everywhere.

My Muslim cab driver named Mohammed continued: The angels are everywhere, too, and only do what God wants. The angels are writing everything down. They are keeping a book. They have the record. God will be the judge. Everything you do matters to you going to heaven or to hell.

People do go to hell. People dont want to talk about this. People dont want to know this. We must talk about this. We must know this.

This has everything to do with the early presidential season and our political lives, because our political lives cant be separated from our lives. Theres no other way to live that makes sense. And thats why, I cant help but be stuck a wee bit on Elizabeth Warren saying: There is value in every single human being.

This is not a Democrat vs. Republican thing. We all have our faults. This is a humanity thing. That there is value in every single human being is a meditation for us all because there is more we all can be doing. And in a particular way, we should be shaken by the ongoing debates about third-term abortion and the survivors of abortion.

Presidential candidates (Beto ORourke, the latest, as I write) look like they are set to run with talking points about women making decisions for themselves and their bodies. We need to start honestly looking at the faces of children on sonograms and the adult survivors of botched abortion attempts who have survived. These are humans with value. Every human being includes them. And until we are honest about this  until politicians are brave enough to challenge the Planned Parenthood establishment that has a stranglehold in a particular way on the Democratic Party  Warrens words will be just words.

Dont get me wrong, Republicans and the pro-life movement has miles to go, too  on adoption and foster care and helping women get on and stay on their feet. But it is the Democratic Party that has, at times, waged war on womens care centers and some of the other frontline helps to women and children. And which is loyal to an ideology that simply doesnt value all human lives. Right now, they are being fairly open about it in the abortion survivors debate.

Elizabeth Warren and I probably agree on very little. But that passage stirs me, too. It makes me think about love and it makes me think about hell and Gods judgment. If this were to be the presidential cycle where we honestly thought about that, what a difference it could make.

(Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review Online and founding director of Catholic Voices USA. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.)Most of us have studied for something at one point in our lives - and will no doubt be well aware of the temptation to procrastinate.

But how likely would you be to click onto Facebook if you knew thousands of people were watching you?

This is the theory behind an unusual new YouTube trend called Gongbang, which sees students film themselves studying and livestreaming it to their followers.

The strange phenomenon originated in South Korea and has spread around the world, with several channels now dedicated to watching students with their nose in a book, including Study Vibes and The Strive Studies.



Scroll down for video

An unusual new YouTuber trend called Gongbang sees students film themselves studying and livestreaming it to their followers

Many YouTubers claim the videos are motivational, due to the pressure of being watched, while others point out it's a way of proving to their parents that they're hard at work, reports Oddity Central.

This year alone, more than 4,000 South Korean Gongbang videos have been uploaded to YouTube. Many of the videos are almost completely silent, bar the odd rustle of a page being turned. Others are set to mellow, instrumental music, and most go on for hours at a time.

One Gongbang streamer from South Korea, who goes by the username Bot-No-Jaem, earned himself 342,000 subscribers and millions of views for broadcasting YouTube videos of himself studying for up to seven hours at a time.

Often the videos show little more than the YouTuber's hands vigorously scribbling away in their workbooks

In South Korean culture, studying is taken incredibly seriously, with many prospective university students hitting the books for up to 18 hours a day ahead of their admission exams.

What is 'Gongbang'? Gongbang sees students film themselves studying and livestreaming it to their followers. Many YouTubers claim the videos are motivational, due to the pressure of being watched, while others point out it's a way of proving to their parents that they're hard at work. Meanwhile Gongbang streams playing in the background serve as constant encouragement to keep working and avoid distractions. Advertisement

Dull as they sound, Gongbang streams playing in the background serve as constant encouragement to keep working and avoid distractions.

One Gongbang streamer who goes by the username Man Sitting Next to Me said the videos also help provide students with a 'sense of belonging'.

He told The Korea Herald: 'Solo test-takers constantly battle against the feeling of loneliness while studying alone.

'By watching Gongbang and engaging in real-time chatting, people can stay motivated and feel a sense of belonging.

'They can also share their study tips and test information through the comments.'

College student Yoon Min-young, 23, told the newspaper she feels a 'sense of rivalry' when she watches streamers pour over books for hours.



'Whenever I feel like giving up on studying, I watch Gongbang and recharge my motivation,' she said.

'At the same time, I feel relieved especially when I see those live videos on quiet, lonely nights.

'They make me feel I'm not the only one who stays up all night for studying. Ive never met the Gongbang streamers in person, but they have already become my good study buddies and pacemakers.'Cindy Crawford has shared the secrets behind her effortlessly youthful beauty looks - while admitting that her husband of nearly 21 years actually 'hates' when she wears makeup.

The 53-year-old supermodel took time out of her day to reveal her everyday beauty regime to Vogue, when she performed a step-by-step tutorial of the typical products she uses on her face.

But while Cindy admitted that she enjoys putting together a natural, everyday look, she said her husband Rande Gerber 'hates makeup', saying of her very simple routine: 'This is already too much makeup for him.'

Fresh-faced! 53-year-old Cindy Crawford has shared her every day skincare and makeup routine in a video for Vogue

Prep! The supermodel first went through her skincare regime, which involved moisturizing, using a serum and an eye cream and using cold water rollers on her eyes (pictured left)

Base: The mother-of-two then went in with foundation, which she applied all over her face before blending it out with a buffing brush

Difference of opinion: Cindy admitted that her husband Rande Gerber 'hates' makeup and would rather she didn't wear it

She added: 'I do explain to him that women wear makeup for other women, not men.'

While the mother-of-two appears that like a skillful pro, she notes in the video that she actually didn't know much about makeup before she started modelling, while confessing that she still likes to get her products on and get out the door as fast as she can.

Gorgeous: The stunning model recently celebrated her 53rd birthday

The clip began with Cindy, who has her own line of anti-aging skincare products called Meaningful Beauty, saying that she begins her regime by washing her face and applying a serum.

'I love our new melon serum from Meaningful Beauty, and this really is like a collagen booster. It's not greasy at all and it goes right into the skin,' she said as she pressed the product onto her face.

Cindy then applied an eye-cream, before using a set of eye rollers, which she described as 'golden balls', to help refresh her eyes.

'I like to put them in a glass of iced water. They're so soothing,' she said as she rolled them across her eye lid and under eye area.

The model then applied a day cream with an SPF 30 from her own skincare like, and concluded that her skin was now 'prepped'.

'When I started modelling I knew zero about makeup,' Cindy said, as she revealed that her mother never wore many beauty products on her face.

Cindy said she thinks it's important for women to learn how to achieve their 'basic out the door' face, which inspired the name for her makeup book - Cindy Crawford's Basic Face - with Sonia Kashuk.

'You want to have your simple routine that you know you're going to feel good, in case you run into someone that you used to go to high school with,' she said.

Conceal: She then used two different concealers on her face - one for her under eye area, and another for blemishes on her face, including areas of hyper pigmentation

Perfecting: She then set the concealer and foundation in place using a powder in a shade similar to that of her natural skin tone

All about the eyes: Cindy brushed through her brows, which she says she is thankful she never 'over tweezed' and filled them in, before adding a light brown eye shadow to her eyelids

Finishing touch: To complete her eye makeup look, Cindy applied a coat of mascara to her top lashes, as she said she rarely applies it to her lowers lashes because they are too long

Glowing: The model applied a swipe of cream blush to the apples of her cheeks and blended the product into the skin using a brush

Cindy began her makeup look by applying a few swipes of the Light Expert Click Brush Liquid Foundation from By Terry ($58), which she then blended out using a foundation brush.

She revealed that she likes using a brush for her foundation because, as a result, she applies less powder.

'As I get older, I'm not a big fan of powder because it tends to settle in those fine lines and wrinkles,' she explained.

Next up is concealer. She first applied one concealer under here eyes and blended it out using her finger.

Then she used a stick-concealer from Nars ($26) on any areas of the face that she wants to conceal, including hyper pigmentation on her cheeks.

'I don't like to use a lot of powder now, but if you do put any kind of foundation or something on you do have to set it a bit,' she explained, as she revealed she uses Chanel's Healthy Glow Sheer Colour powder ($58).

The model used a fluffy brush to pat the product onto the areas she applied the foundation and concealer.

Next, Cindy brushed through her brows, and said: 'Thank God I did not over-tweeze my brows when I was young because I still have pretty good brows.'

Using Anastasia Beverly Hills' Perfect Brow Pencil ($23) she filled in some sparse areas in her eyebrows.

Cindy then said she tells her 17-year-old daughter Kaia Gerber, who is also a model, to never over-tweeze her eyebrows.

Beauty: Finishing up her everyday makeup look, Cindy applied a pink-orange shade of lipstick to her lips and blended it out with her finger

Tips! Cindy revealed that her 17-year-old model daughter Kaia Gerber (right) has taught her some tips over the years

Like mother, like daughter: Kaia, who is following in her mother's modelling footsteps, recently walked for a number of designers at Paris Fashion Week

She said: 'Fortunately that bushier look is in now so she hasn't been tempted yet.'

For Cindy's everyday eye makeup, which she says is 'a little old school', she applies a sweep of brown eye shadow across her eye lid.

'It's not a lot. It's just to give me a little bit of depth there so my lid doesn't look like it's dropping down,' she explained.

Completing her eye-makeup, Cindy applied a coat of Maybelline's Lash Stiletto mascara ($8.50) to her upper lashes.

Explaining her reasoning behind avoiding putting mascara on her lower lashes, Cindy said: 'It drops on me because I have really long lower lashes, so unless I'm on a shoot I just keep it on the top.'

As she neared the end of her tutorial, Cindy said: 'I have found that as I've gotten older I wear way less makeup. I would say that's the biggest evolution for me, which is kind of counter-intuitive.

'But that also means that taking care of your skin is more important because you're not covering it up with makeup.'

Cindy also revealed that she often learns makeup and beauty tips and lessons from Kaia, who she says often learns how to do different makeup looks from videos on YouTube.

She said: 'Sometimes, to be honest with you, I do learn tricks from Kaia.'

Classic: The model said she wasn't very confident doing her makeup when she was growing up and modeling, as her mother never wore many beauty products so she didn't learn from her

Old school: Cindy, pictured in the 1990s, revealed that she and her peers learned most of their makeup and beauty tips from makeup artists they worked with over the years

She added: 'If she wants to learn how to do a cat-eye, she learns. She just YouTubes it and all of a sudden she'll come out and [say] "oh look, I tried this new look today".

'Then I'll be like "wait, how did you do that?", and she will show me,' she said.

Next, she applied a few swipes of Josie Maran's Argan Colour Stick blush ($22), which has a cream consistency, to her cheeks and blended the product out with a brush.

Explaining her reasoning behind using a cream blush rather than a powder, Cindy said: 'That's probably another transition I've made as I've gotten older is that I want creamy more than dry.

Lastly, Cindy applied a pink-orange shade of Charlotte Tilbury's Superstar Lips ($34) to complete the look.

Concluding the seven-minute video, Cindy said: 'There were certain models that were really good at doing their own makeup, and loved it.

Speaking about Canadian model Linda Evangelista, Cindy said: 'She could paint a brow and [do] her lip liner.

'That was just never me. I could do it if I had to, but I didn't have a lot of confidence in doing my own makeup,' she said.

The model added that she and her fellow models learned most of their tips from the makeup artists in the industry.With flu season right around the corner there is a product on the market that is promising to make sick days a 'thing of the past'.

Tecmask is an Australian business that has designed a 'stylish' range of medical grade disposable face masks that have a high efficiency filter to ward off germs.

If you have work to do and can't afford a day away from the office, this could be the answer - and it's only $12.99.

PR maven Roxy Jacenko calls herself a fan as well, saying in an Instagram post that thanks to this product 'sick days are now no longer accepted'.

Tecmask is an Australian business that has designed a 'stylish' range of medical grade disposable face masks

PR maven Roxy Jacenko even calls herself a fan, saying in an Instagram post thanks to this product 'sick days are now no longer accepted' (pictured)

The brand has incorporated colourful designs, such as black cherry and French blue, as their drive is to 'change the perception of a germ mask from a commodity to a fashion accessory'.

The concept of Tecmask was created by a father-daughter duo, David and Maddy Scarf, whilst travelling in Japan.

They were surprised to see how many people were wearing plain white surgical masks even though locals were otherwise fashion conscious.

The product was first launched in Japan and caught the attention of fashionistas who swapped their medical grade masks for these.

If you have work to do and can't afford a day away from the office, this could be the answer - and it's only $12.99

The brand has incorporated colourful designs, such as black cherry and French blue, and they have with a high efficiency filter to ward off germs

Why do people wear a Tecmask? - When worried about cabin flu while travelling on a plane - When they want to clean out dusty cupboards without inhaling filth - If they are susceptible to hay fever - If they have a nasty cold and flu they don't want to pass on to others - Those who catch public transport every day and are worried about catching the common cold Advertisement

Eventually it was featured in Japanese Vogue and the Tecmask were able to open pop-up stores around the country.

The company has now set up their headquarters in Sydney in an aim to introduce it to the Australian market and they have a store in Double Bay.

The masks have been designed to stringent medical standards and provides medical grade protection, having been designed to last longer than standard disposable face masks.A mother-to-be who was worried the maternity bras she bought from H&M wouldn't arrive by the time she gave birth has received a thoughtful letter from a customer service representative.

Kea Whiteman, who lives in the UK but is originally from Perth, Australia, shared a photo of the handwritten letter to a Facebook group.

After feeling as though she might go into labour one morning, Ms Whiteman began to stress that the nursing bras she purchased the night before just wouldn't make it to her in time, Yahoo reported.

Kea Whiteman received a thoughtful letter from a customer service representative from H&M who was unable to fast track her urgent maternity bra order

Worried, she called H&M to see whether they could hasten the delivery process.

While the woman who answered, Adela, was described as 'beautiful and kind', she said there wasn't any way for her order to be fast tracked.

Instead, two days later, Ms Whiteman received a note in the mail along with a generous gift card from H&M. It was signed from Adela.

'Dear Kea, it was nice to talk to you today. I hope everything went well and that both you and the baby are okay,' it said.

'Here's a little something for you to start a new journey. Have an amazing day.'

Ms Whiteman was brought to tears by the gesture and was surprised at how much of a difference such a small move could make.

'I think you can just tell when someone has a kind heart, and that I certainly could when I spoke to her on the phone,' she said.

'As you can imagine I completely burst into tears... it turned my day around.'

Ms Whiteman was brought to tears by the gesture and couldn't be more grateful for finding 'someone with a kind heart,' she told the publication

She will be placing the note in her daughter's baby book for safekeeping.

Meanwhile other members of the group began sharing stories of their own heartwarming retail experiences.

One mother said she bought a dress for her autistic daughter who had recently gone through surgery.

But when it got lost in the post the store gave them a full refund, a replacement dress and a $50 gift card.A woman has revealed why she and her long-term partner have made the collective decision not to have children or get married.

Mila Brazzi, 26, from Brighton, who has been dating Louis Day, 28, for almost two years, came to a decision not to exchange vows or have children after discussing plans for their future.

The senior account manager admitted they have both received pressure and judgement from their family to conform to traditional ideas surrounding relationships, but have yet to tell them the outcome of their decision.

Mila and Louis' decision follows research from online dating service Match.com that revealed a third of single Brits don't want to tie the knot, and no longer believe 'I do' is the ultimate symbol of commitment that it once was.

Mila, who met charity engagement worker Louis at work eight years ago, revealed there were a number of contributing reasons that led to their decision, and explained that she believes marriage doesn't place men and women 'on an equal level'.

She also became aware that there were more 'unhappily married couples than happy ones', and believes that the environmental impact of overpopulation makes having children the 'most selfish thing you can do'.

Louis Day, 28, and Mila Brazzi, 26, from Brighton (pictured) explained why they've made the collective decision not to get married or have children, branding it 'selfish'

Explaining why she is against marriage, she said: 'I have many issues with the overall tradition of marriage as it doesn't place men and women on an equal level and as such I have no interested in supporting or being a part of it.

'It's seen as tradition for many for of the man to ask permission from the woman's father or male head of the household before asking the woman herself if she wants to marry him. Although this is more symbolic now, the father of the bride 'giving his daughter away' is still very common.

'Also at the end of the ceremony, the phrase 'I now pronounce you man and wife' encapsulates the inequality faced by women.

'Why doesn't it say husband and wife or man and woman? As a female in a patriarchal society that believes in genuine equality, that's a very uncomfortable phrase to hear.'

Mila who works as a senior account manager met charity engagement worker Louis while working together eight years ago. The pair, pictured on the beach in Britain, have received pressure to conform to traditional relationship values from their family

Explaining why she decided against having children, she explained: 'The turning point for me was when I listened to a podcast about the ethics of having children which encouraged me to think about the impact of procreation in a new and deeper way.

'Although, even before this I was already of the opinion that there are too many people versus resources in the world and having a child would just add to the huge existing pressure on the planet's resources.

'My decision to not bring new life into the world is for the benefit of the unborn human as much as it is for those already living.

'Ultimately, I believe that having kids is the most selfish thing a person can do when there isn't enough resources for the people already living to have a good life.'

Reflecting on how her views on settling down have changed, she continued: 'I just realised as I grew out of my late teens that marriage was in reality different to the romanticised and idealised notion I grew up with.

'Being unhappily trapped in a marriage seems, to me, such a tragic situation to be in and certainly not something I want for me and Louis.

The couple's decision not to conform comes in the wake of findings from Match.com that revealed a third of single Brits are now against marriage. The couple are seen together on a night out

'My parents were never married, but many other close family members are. I would say that I'm more aware of the unhappily married couples around me than the happy ones.

'Once we knew we both wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, the conversation naturally lead onto marriage and children.

'It was important for us to establish that we both had similar dreams for the future to ensure we'd be happy together in the long term.

'I think there are so many ways to show a person your love and commitment that are far more meaningful and exciting than marriage - and less expensive and stressful too. The most valuable thing Louis and I have is our time.

'Planning long, amazing adventures together is a great way of expressing our love for each other - it shows that we want to experience new things and really live in that moment with each other.

'I can certainly see more people around me beginning to think the same way.'

Mila (pictured with Louis) revealed her parents were never married and the majority of people who she knows that have made legal vows are unhappy

The 26-year-old says marriage goes against her personal beliefs as it doesn't place men and women on an equal level in addition to being stressful and expensive, seen together

Mila, who believes discussing views on marriage and children with Louis often is important for addressing if anything has changed, explained that discussing the subjects has strengthened their relationship.

She continued: 'We discuss these things fairly often, checking in to see if anything has changed. We're very open and honest with each other and I think talking about these big subjects has helped us become even closer while also strengthening our relationship.

'We haven't mentioned our decision not to get married or have children to our families, mainly to save ourselves having to have a potentially awkward and fraught discussion.

Mila revealed many of she and Louis's friends aren't surprised by their decision not to have children as they are also unsure if they want them. Seen at a party together

'As you would expect, friends with kids disagree with our point of view and say that being a parent is the best thing that could happen to anyone.

'Largely friends that don't have kids don't seem surprised in our decision as many are unsure themselves if they want or will ever have kids.'

She added: 'Louis wanted kids when he was in his early twenties. I just liked the idea of having a real life doll to dress up, which is definitely not a good enough reason to have a child.'

The senior account manager says no one can predict the future, therefore it's impossible to promise to love someone forever. The couple are seen at the pub together

Speaking a bout marriage, she added: 'The biggest factor for me not wanting to get married is I don't believe in it. I don't believe you can promise to love someone forever even if you feel 100 per cent sure you really love them.

'Nobody can predict the future which is why no one can know for certain that they will want to be with their partner forever.'

The recent findings also reveal that half of people believe having a joint bank account is just as much of a commitment as exchanging vows, while 29 per cent say owning a pet together is a marker or a truly committed relationship.

Meanwhile over a quarter of singletons claim they can't afford to have children and 30 per cent of millennials would prefer to spend their cash on a lavish lifestyle than on raising a family.

Match's dating expert Hayley Quinn said: 'These findings reflect a shift in how we are viewing relationships - we're entering an era which champions an individualistic approach to dating.

Mila, seen with Louis, believes having children is the most selfish decision anyone can make as there is already so much pressure on the world's resources

'We are redesigning how we exist in our relationships - whether we date one person, or many, whether we marry, or remain unattached by choice and what our life priorities are.

'This is a positive step as for many it means freedom to pursue happiness on their own terms.'

Mila who has not considered preventive surgery to avoid pregnancy added: 'My advice to anyone would be to do some research first and to think carefully about why they want to have kids or get married before they actually do it.

'And then ask themselves if they think that their reasons are good enough to go through with it.

'There are some valid arguments to have a couple of children, but having any more than two is to be beyond selfish in my opinion.

'I'd say we're in the minority but I definitely feel the tides are beginning to shift as more and more people take finical and wider ethical concerns into account when thinking about their life decision.'Ever wonder how stars like Jennifer Lopez have shoulder-length locks one day and a long flowing mane the next? Spoiler: it's not their shampoo and conditioner!

RPZL, New York's first express hair extension and state of the art blowout bar, was the first to recognize the need for on-demand celeb-worthy extensions at an accessible price point.

On Friday, March 22 the brand has expanded their high-quality offerings even further by launching three new collections in collaboration with A-list hair stylists Joseph Maine and Laura Polko, and Instagram star Jackie Oshry.

Magic: Stars like Jennifer Lopez have shoulder length hair one day and long flowing locks the next thanks to hair extensions

'With RPZLs new celebrity stylist and influencer collaborations, we are able to give our customers exclusive new colors, lengths and products based on our new partners expertise and unique aesthetic,' said Lisa Richards, boss babe and Co-Founder of RPZL.

'These collaborations will expand into additional categories, reinforcing our commitment to providing the best hair extensions and products in the marketplace and will introduce both exciting new celebrity stylists and influencer collaborations and product regularly.'

Expert: Joseph Maine is the talent behind many celebrity hair styles, including that of Katie Holmes, Kate McKinnon, Sophia Bush, Ashley Benson, Olivia Culpo and Priyanka Chopra

Recently named Best Hair Protege by Allure Magazine, Joseph Maine is the talent behind many celebrity hair styles, including that of Katie Holmes, Kate McKinnon, Sophia Bush, Ashley Benson, Olivia Culpo and Priyanka Chopra.

The RPZL X Joseph Maine collection consists of elevated essentials like pre-cut blended ends for a natural look and light invisible clips. He also introduced 30 clip-in extensions (hello, Ariana Grande ponytail)!

The New York-based hair pro is represented by The Wall Group Global Agency and can be found at Serge Normant at John Frieda Salon in Chelsea, one of the most prestigious salons in the country.

Premium product: The RPZL X Joseph Maine collection consists of elevated essentials like pre-cut blended ends for a natural look and light invisible clips, all at an accessible price point

Head to toe: Bi-coastal celebrity stylist Laura Polko, who names Chrissy Teigen, Hailee Steinfeld, Poppy Delevingne and many others among her clients, has teamed up with her favorite hair extension brand for her own line of clip-ins

Inspired by the runway and celeb fashions: The RPZL x Laura Polko collection includes the highest quality hair, multi-tonal colors for easy blending, and invisible, weightless clips at an accessible price point

Bi-coastal celebrity stylist Laura Polko, who names Chrissy Teigen, Hailee Steinfeld, Poppy Delevingne and many others among her clients, has teamed up with her favorite hair extension brand for her own line of clip-ins.

Laura worked with the label to develop a collection inspired by her favorite runway and celebrity looks, that best represents her luxe sensibility.

If your natural color is difficult to match, Laura's got you covered!

The RPZL x Laura Polko collection includes the highest quality hair, multi-tonal colors for easy blending, and invisible, weightless clips at an accessible price point.

Variety: If your natural color is difficult to match, Laura's got you covered

High fashion: Laura worked with the label to develop a collection inspired by her favorite runway and celebrity looks

Something for everyone: Jackie Oshry (a.k.a. @jackieoproblems and legendary Instagram ginger) has partnered with RPZL on a redhead-focused extension capsule

Match it: Jackie, co-host of the Morning Toast with her sister Girl with No Job, Claudia Oshry, has worked with RPZL for the past year to find the perfect shade of red for her upcoming wedding

Filling the void: The range of red hair extensions has been slim pickens until now

The range of red hair extensions has been slim pickens until now.

Jackie Oshry (a.k.a. @jackieoproblems and legendary Instagram ginger) has also partnered with RPZL on a redhead-focused extension capsule.

Jackie, co-host of the Morning Toast with her sister Girl with No Job, Claudia Oshry, has worked with RPZL for the past year to find the perfect shade of red for her upcoming wedding.

This collaboration expanded into creating the RPZL x Jackie O collection debuts the most expansive line of reds in history, with a wide-range of blonde and brunette clip-in shades as well.

Having a bad hair day? Before you throw your hands up in air and surrender, RPZL launched Postmates, providing extension delivery anywhere on demand in New York City.The Duchess of Sussex must understand she cannot 'live like an A-list Hollywood star' while enjoying the privilege of the monarchy, a royal expert has warned.

Anna Pasternak is the author of Untitled: The Real Wallace Simpson, The Duchess of Windsor and A Princess in Love, about Princess Diana.

Speaking in the latest episode of Yahoo News' weekly online series, The Royal Box, Anna offered her take on Meghan's role within the royal family and offered a 'cautionary note' to the royal, saying she had to realise she 'can't have it all'.

The Duchess of Sussex must understand she cannot 'live like an A-list Hollywood star' while enjoying the privilege of the monarchy, author Anna Pasternak warned. Pictured, Meghan steps out with friend Abigail Spencer while in New York for her baby shower last month

She added this moment of realisation is essential for the longevity of the monarchy.

'I think what Meghan's got to realise is she cannot live life in the royal family like an A-list Hollywood star,' Anna said. 'Within the monarchy it requires a very different set of behaviour.'

She continued: 'You cannot have it all. You cannot have your freedom and this privilege... It's not a fairytale. Recognise that and live with the consequences.'

Commenting on the Duchess' New York baby shower, Anna said: 'I think [the baby shower] was in very poor taste. When the country is in a state of extreme anxiety and flux and are struggling financially. I think you cannot have it both ways.

'You cannot on the one hand, say to the people: "Save the planet, save plastic," and then be revving up a private jet with a massive carbon footprint for a lavish baby shower in New York. I don't think it looks good and I don't think it's appropriate.'

Anna Pasternak, pictured, is the author of Untitled: The Real Wallace Simpson, The Duchess of Windsor and A Princess in Love, about Princess Diana. She offered her take on Meghan's role within the royal family and said the Duchess must accept that she cannot 'have it all'

Anna said Meghan must learn that it is not her but the Queen and the heir to the throne who must be given the spotlight. Pictured, the Duchess of Sussex made a surprise appearance on stage at the British Fashion Awards at the Royal Albert Hall in December last year

Anna explained Meghan understanding her place in the royal hierarchy is key to its long-term survival.

'I don't think she [Meghan] understands that she can't be this international star on a global stage. That has to be the Queen, then Charles, then William and Kate.

'They have to be the stars. That's how you ensure continuity of the monarchy.

'The house of Windsor has done incredibly well to stay together when so many other European houses have collapsed. And they've done that because they recognise it's the monarch who has to be the main event.'

The author speculated that it is likely to be this difference in attitude at the root of any tension between the Duchess of Sussex and her sister-in-law the Duchess of Cambridge.

Anna noted how the Duchess of Cambridge and the Duchess of Cornwall had been better at adhering to royal protocol. Pictured, Kate on an outing with the Queen in London this week

She said: 'I think William is very responsible and knows what his role is and Kate has come alongside that and executed that extremely well.

'And I think it's quite difficult to then have had Meghan [come in], who seems to want to modernise and set her own agenda.'

Finally, she agreed their were comparisons to be made between the Duchess of Sussex and Wallis Simpson.

'The obvious and more trivial similarities are that they were both 34 when they met their princes, they're both American divorcees, they both share a penchant for couture,' she said.

'They are both also well educated women and bright women. Wallis whip smart - much brighter than the duke - and I think Meghan is similarly smart.'(ANSA) - Brussels, March 22 - The EU's external action service (SEAE) led by Federica Mogherini will on Monday propose to EU ambassadors the definitive closure of the anti-migrant smuggler operation Sophia, sources said Friday.

In a document distributed to the 28, the SEAE also proposes the possible birth of a new non-executive mission exclusively aimed at training the Libyan Coast Guard, they said.

A high school in Texas has granted a father, who is dying with cancer, his final wish to see his adopted daughter graduate.

Lindale High School in Lindale, Texas, threw a mock ceremony for Christan Patterson, a senior at the school, whose father Mark Patterson was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer in January.

Mark previously fought cancer according to CBS 19, however, when it returned this year the disease had spread to the lymph nodes near his kidneys, and he was placed in a hospice when some of his organs began to fail.

Special: Christan Patterson (pictured), a student at Lindale High School in Lindale, Texas, held a mock ceremony for her dying father, Mark, in order to him to be able to see her graduate

Perfect: The ceremony saw Christan, a senior at the school, wearing her formal graduation cap and gown while walking down a path and standing to receive her diploma

Emotional: The ceremony was held on the grounds of The Hospice of East Texas, where Christan's father Mark Patterson is currently staying

Proud: When doctor's recently told Mark, who has stage four esophageal caner, that he only had two weeks to live, he said his final wish was to see his daughter graduate high school

Love: Mark, who used to work as a bus driver for the school, was brought out to the patio of the hospice to attend the ceremony on Wednesday, March 20

Mark was recently given just two weeks to live, according to the publication.

When his wife Darla asked him what his final wish would be, he said it would be to see his adopted daughter Christan graduate high school.

She explained: 'The question was "what is your goal?"

'He broke down and started crying and said, "I just want to see my baby girl graduate", she added.

In an effort to fulfill his wish, the school organized a mock graduation ceremony on the patio of The Hospice of East Texas.

Mark, who used to work as a bus driver for the school, was brought out in his hospice bed to the patio to attend the ceremony on Wednesday, March 20.

The ceremony saw Christan walking down a path in her graduation cap and gown as Pomp and Circumstance classic graduation song played in the background.

And it wasn't just the father and daughter who attended the heartwarming event.

Christan, Mark and Darla were joined by fellow students, teachers, old colleagues and friends, all of whom gathered to watch the special moment.

Christan's graduation is scheduled to take place in May, however, speaking to the publication she said Wednesdays ceremony was even more special to her.

'The graduation in May will be special, but I know I will be laughing more and be more outgoing since I'll be with my classmates.

Achievement: The ceremony was attended by a number of locals in the area including teachers from Christan's school, friends and fellow students

Support: Pictured looking at her husband during the ceremony, Darla said it was one of Mark's former colleagues that suggested they hold the special graduation ceremony

'But I know this one will definitely be something in the books,' Christan said.

Darla explained where the idea to hold the mock graduation came from.

She said that a man who worked with Mark when he was a bus driver came to her and said: 'What if we give Christan a graduation?'

She added: 'The principal, the superintendents, and Lindale let this happen. They let teachers come. They let students come.'

Speaking about the mock graduation, Christan said: 'I'm really glad I got to let him see that and [that] he got to experience that.

'I was thinking about my dad a lot, thinking about him more than my feelings because I want to but him first before me.

Christan, who is adopted, added: 'My mom and dad are my mom and dad.

'It doesn't matter if it's blood or not blood. They love me. They care for me.

'My Christan faith is so strong that if he passes I will live my life to the fullest to God and to my dad's will, and just try to make him happy because my dad is my rock,' she added.

Christan's mother Darla has since revealed that her daughter has been accepted to 11 of the 12 colleges she applied to.

Lindale High School captured a snippet of the ceremony on video, and posted it to Facebook with a heartfelt caption.

The caption read: 'We feel so honored to have been able to present one of our senior students, Christan Patterson, with a mock graduation in honor of her father. Her father, Mark Patterson, is a former bus driver for Lindale ISD.

Devastating: Mark (pictured) was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer in January of this year after battling, and beating, the disease before

Family love: Speaking to CBS 19 at the graduation ceremony, Christan, who is adopted, said of her mother and father: 'They love me. They care for me.'

Heartfelt: Christan said her father is her 'rock' and that when her father passes, she will live her life to the fullest 'to God and to my dad's will'

'He is currently in hospice battling cancer and his wish was to see his daughter graduate. Please keep this wonderful family in your thoughts and prayers,' it read.

The video has been viewed over 35,000 times, and has received dozens of comments as people send their best wishes to the family and community of Lindale.

The hospice where Mark is currently staying, and where the ceremony was held, also had something to say about the event.

Resharing the school's video, the hospice said: 'Hospice of East Texas is honored to have been a part of this special moment.'

Meanwhile, the family have set up a Go Fund Me page in order to raise funds for the growing expenses that Darla, in particular, is faced with as she is currently going through an extremely tough time with her family.

The page details that Darla's son was diagnosed with eye cancer on her birthday on January 15, around the same time Mark was diagnosed.

Her parents were in a near fatal car wreck in September, 2018.

Darla's mother is back at home with her, but is unable to drive, and has difficulty taking care of herself.

Darla's father is still in a nursing home due to dementia and Alzheimers, and to make things even worse, she was recently involved in a car accident in which she was hit by an uninsured driver.

As a result, her car was totaled, and she has had to take a second mortgage to help fund herself.The Queen's former spokesman has confessed that he thought Meghan Markle's New York City baby shower 'was a bit over the top', particularly when it came to the estimated $503,000 cost.

Dickie Arbiter, Queen Elizabeth II's former press spokesman, admitted he was left unimpressed with the extravagant festivities in February to celebrate the arrival of the Duchess of Sussex and Prince's Harry's first child.

'Baby showers, it's very much an American thing,' he told US Weekly when asked about Meghan's, 37, baby shower. 'We don't do it here in the U.K.'

Speaking out: The Queen's former press spokesman Dickie Arbiter admitted he was unimpressed by the Duchess of Sussex's baby shower

Lavish: Dickie described Meghan's baby shower (pictured) as an 'American thing' that 'we don't do here in the U.K' as he expressed how the expenses seemed over the top

He continued: 'It was a bit over the top in terms of expense and the way she got there.'

Dickie was no doubt referring to Meghan's decision to travel via private jet for the occasion; DailyMail.com exclusively revealed that she was flown home on a private plane by George and Amal Clooney, after Amal attended the extravagant event in New York.

It is believed that Meghan also traveled to New York via private jet.

Rumors have circulated that Kate Middleton is set to throw her sister-in-law another baby shower in the U.K. that her mother Doria is believed to be flying in for, however Dickie could not confirm whether the second event will actually happen.

'That's something they have to answer,' Dickie said. He worked for Buckingham Palace as a press secretary for 12 years before moving on to become a royal commenter for TV and publications.

'Meghan is American and she does things the American way,' he said

Her first baby shower was set in New York City, specifically at the The Mark Hotel's incredible Grand Penthouse Suite, which costs a staggering $75,000 per night. The cost of the Grand Penthouse Suite actually makes it the most expensive per-night hotel room in the U.S.

Guests in attendance at the lavish affair included Amal Clooney, Canadian stylist Jessica Mulroney, Serena Williams, Abigail Spencer, Meghan's sorority sister Genevieve Hillis, Gayle King and designer Misha Nonoo  who is credited with introducing Meghan and Prince Harry.

The festivities first began on February 19, when The Mark Hotel was decorated with blush-colored roses while cotton candy machines were brought in for the shower, which happened on February 20.

Nearest and dearest: Many of Meghan's closest friends who attended her wedding were there, including Amal Clooney (left) and Serena Williams (right)

Lavish: The baby shower took place in the Penthouse Suite at The Mark Hotel, which is widely reported to be the most expensive per-night hotel room in the U.S.

Behind-the-scenes: A video that emerged in February on social appeared to give a glimpse at the pink, girly decorations inside the penthouse party

The baby shower fueled speculation Meghan might be having a girl as decorations appeared themed in shades of pink, including the sweets.

Royal fan account harry_meghan_updates shared a video on Instagram Stories, claiming that the short clip was actually captured inside the star-studded baby shower.

The video shows a dessert table that features plenty of sweet treats, including four macaron towers from Laduree, which cost a total of $460.

The cost of Meghan's New York baby shower Private jet from the UK to New York, round trip - $250,000 The Mark Hotel Grand Penthouse Suite for two nights - $150,000 Five nights in a one-bedroom suite at The Mark Hotel - $9,982.05 Dinner for five at The Polo Bar - approx. $420

Lunch at Cafe Bolud - approx. $78 Afternoon tea for two at Laduree - approx. $45 Two Royal Protection officers - $14,213 Harp player Erin Hill - $625 17 Away carry-on suitcases - $3,825 Babyletto Hudson 3-in-1 Convertible Crib - $379 Two 10ft mandarin trees - approx. $280 Lady Fleur roses - approx. $399.95 Trek bicycle - approx. $609.99 Carnival King cotton candy machine - $199.99 Jennifer Meyer 'Mommy' necklace - $850 Repeat Roses - $1,750 JZ Events - $50,000 Lewis Miller - $20,000 TOTAL: $503,656.98 Advertisement

Dessert also featured a two-tiered cake featuring a miniature paper cut out of Harry and Meghan standing next to a pram  believed to be the work of event designer Darcy Miller.

The event designer has been credited with putting together the lavish dessert buffet at the event.

Guests did not walk away from the baby shower empty handed as they reportedly were gifted Cuyana leather totes that were filled to the brim with products, People reports.

The totes, which retail for $175-$195 depending on style, included $67 Jo Malone Green Tomato Leaf scented candles, $65 Tatcha Rice Enzyme Powder, and $81 Susanne Kaufmann Body Butter.

Daniel Martin, Meghan's longtime friend and makeup artist, dished on the festivities in an interview with People after the busy week.

'It was exactly what she needed, and it was a reunion for all of us, too, who hadnt seen each other since the wedding,' he said at the time.'

The evening prior to the baby shower included dinner at The Polo Bar, which cost an estimated $420.

'Snow was falling outside, and it was so cozy  we all sat on couches or on the floor and told stories and caught up,' Daniel revealed about the festivities.

'It was like going to a family reunion.'

Meghan is anticipated to give birth to her first child in the next four to five weeks.

She was last seen earlier this week while making an unannounced appearance with Prince Harry to New Zealand House in London. The pair showed up to the building on Tuesday to pay tribute to the victims of the Christchurch Terror Attack, which left more than 50 people dead.

The duchesses' maternity leave has her scheduled for no other appearances or public events until after the baby is born.A romantic man surprised his pregnant girlfriend by fully furnishing their apartment while she was at work.

Charles Hall IV, who had been living in his car before moving into the property, surprised his girlfriend Rashelle Edwards when she returned home from a day's work to their brand new apartment in Phoenix, Arizona.

Charles, who told Storyful that he lived in his car for six months before the pair got their own place together, captured the special moment in a video which he later shared to his Twitter page.

Shock! Pregnant Rashelle Edwards was left stunned when her boyfriend Charles Hall IV furnished their entire apartment as a surprise while she was at work

Waiting: Charles, who spent six months living in his car before they moved in together in Phoenix, Arizona, filmed his girlfriend's reaction to the adorable surprise

Wow! Charles, who told Storyful that the couple is expecting a baby in October, completely decked out the property with new furniture, leaving Rashelle open-mouthed in surprise

Surprised: Not only were there larger pieces of furniture, there were also accessories like blankets laid out for Rashelle to find

'Prior to this apartment, I lived in my car for a six months,' Charles told Storyful while sharing the video, which begins as Rashelle is unlocking the door to their apartment.

Meanwhile, Charles can be heard saying: 'Alright, open the door.'

Adorable: Charles even bought his girlfriend a bouquet of flowers

Once the door is unlocked, Rashelle, who is from Woodland, California, walks into the dimly lit room.

While looking around the room while the lights are off, Rashelle says: 'What? You got it all set up?'

Charles responds, as he says: 'Don't look at me. Go turn those lights on.'

Rashelle walks over to the opposite side of the room to reach a light switch, and turns on the lights in the living area.

When she realizes that her boyfriend has managed to furnish their apartment without her realizing, she is shocked.

'Oh my god,' she said, while feeling the new couch and its cushions.

Making her way around the new couch, Rashelle says that she 'loves' it.

The adorable moment becomes even more special when Charles hands Rashelle a colorful bunch of flowers.

Rashelle shows her appreciation for the furnished apartment and the flowers, as she says: 'Thank you, baby!'

She then leans in toward Charles to give him a hug.

Lovers: 'First apartment together. She left for work and it was empty. I just....' Charles captioned the video on his Twitter feed

Happy: The couple are now looking forward to the birth of their baby

Delighted: Twitter users were overjoyed by the video and were quick to praise Charles's adorable surprise

Since the video was uploaded to Twitter on Sunday, March 17, it has gone viral.

So far, its views have amassed a whopping 140,000 views.

Similarly, the clip has gathered 23,000 retweets and almost 500 comments from different Twitter users.

One user @KidIncognito_ commented on the video, saying: 'I cant wait for me and my shawty to have our first apartment/house together so we can come together and decorate it.'

'I'm smiling ear to ear bro bro this is fly,' user @davidjosephII said.

User @makenzewarner17 added: 'This is amazing!! Congratulations and I wish you guys the best! I followed because I wanted to see the milestones.'

Another, user @FuknSpicy joked: 'I remember those days so cute. Eight years later your crying cause they wont leave..'

'Keep THIS SAME ENERGY for each other!!' added user @ViciousEgo.Warning: This story contains images and information about infant loss that may be distressing for some

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When Nicole Thomson felt what she thought were signs of pre-term labour at 33 weeks pregnant she was filled with excitement at the prospect of meeting her baby girl early.

But just hours later the Queensland-based mother-of-three and her husband Chase were faced with their worst nightmare when they were told by doctors that their beautiful baby, Esther Mae, had died.

'I had been in and out of hospital for a couple of days being monitored thinking I was in pre-term labour. All test results showed that I wasn't and that bub was healthy. I could feel her kicking and moving around normally, and listening to her heartbeat gave me some reassurance, but I still felt like something wasn't right,' Nicole said.

'I woke up on February 2nd 2017 in hospital after having a few hours sleep from being monitored for most of the night.

Nicole and Chase Thomson faced with their worst nightmare when they were told by doctors that their beautiful baby, Esther Mae, had died at 33 weeks for unknown reasons - just one month before she was due to be born

'I was feeling positive as we were booked to go to Brisbane that afternoon to see a specialist and part of me was excited because I knew she was coming early despite what the tests showed.'

They wrapped Esther in a blanket and placed her in Chase's arms as he sat by my side waiting for me to wake up.

But when the midwife came in shortly afterwards and struggled to find her baby's heartbeat, Nicole's excitement quickly turned to anxiety.

'The midwife asked if I had much movement since I'd been awake and I realised that I hadn't, I also noticed that my belly had gone soft on top which was very unusual as it was always rock hard because of the position Bub was normally in,' Nicole said.

Trying hard to remain positive, Nicole watched as doctors performed an ultrasound before telling her that she needed an emergency caesarean because the baby's heartbeat was 'fading fast'.

When Nicole Thomson felt what she thought were signs of pre-term labour at 33 weeks pregnant she was filled with excitement at the prospect of meeting her baby girl early

Alone at the hospital and beginning to shake uncontrollably, Nicole frantically asked for a phone to call her husband and mother to tell them what was happening.

'As they were racing me through the corridors I tried to call him [Chase] but he didn't pick up because I was calling from a private number. It turned out that he was just about to leave town for work and it was lucky that he was with my mum at the time,' Nicole said.

'I called her and as she answered, I kind of just yelled/cried in the phone "Mum, I'm having an emergency cesarean". I heard her yell my exact words to Chase in a panicked tone and that was it, I was being wheeled through the theatre doors. I remember feeling a little relieved knowing that he was on his way.'

Lying on the operating table faced with bright lights and a room full of strangers, Ms Thomson said that she had never felt more 'out of control'.

While she was under, Chase arrived at the hospital and was raced through the corridors and although he saw Nicole on the table briefly as he passed by, he wasn't allowed to enter the room.

'I remember opening my eyes and to the right I could see a midwife standing next to the bed. She lent over and said in a gentle voice "I'm sorry Nicole, Esther didn't make it",' Nicole said

'I watched from my bed as Chase bathed her petite body, followed by his first and only dance that they ever shared together,' Nicole said

'He was anxiously waiting, hoping for some news, any news. He sat there thinking that he was going to walk out of the hospital without both of us,' Nicole said.

I watched from my bed as Chase bathed her petite body, followed by his first and only dance that they ever shared together.

Eventually a doctor emerged to let Chase know that while Nicole was okay, doctors were performing CPR on their baby.

'He went into the room where our daughter lay on a table and watched as the team continued to work on her, hoping with all of his heart that she was going to pull through,' Nicole said.

'One midwife asked if she had a name, and that's when he named her 'Esther Mae'. She broke into tears when he told her, and said that it was beautiful. He sat and held my hand for a while while I was asleep and then stumbled out of the room nearly falling over.'

Family, friends and their little boy Leo also came to visit Esther to say goodbye; Leo gave his little sister kisses and while he wasn't able to comprehend the situation entirely he remained gentle and sympathetic to everyone (pictured)

'Why did we take photos with Esther?' For some, taking photos may sound like a strange or weird thing to do and that probably would've been my thinking prior to this tragic experience. But when it's one of the only things that you will ever keep of your child, it's not even a question. Advice for parents in a similar situation: Try and collect as many memories of your baby as you can because once they're gone, they're gone. Things like photos, fingerprints, hands/feet moulds, a piece of their hair. Anything that will help you you remember them. Advertisement

After 40 minutes a doctor approached Chase and asked him a question no parent should ever have to answer.

'They asked him if he wanted them to keep trying [to revive Esther], and Chase made the impossible decision and asked them to stop. They wrapped Esther in a blanket and placed her in Chase's arms as he sat by my side waiting for me to wake up,' Nicole said.

'I remember opening my eyes and to the right I could see a midwife standing next to the bed. She lent over and said in a gentle voice "I'm sorry Nicole, Esther didn't make it".

'Chase was sitting next to me with Esther in his arms. I looked into his eyes and with a deep breath, my first words to him were "I'm sorry". Seeing my husband, my best friend holding the beautiful baby that our love had created lifeless in his arms hurt me more than words can ever explain. She was perfect from head to toe and for some unknown reason, her soul was gone.'

Nicole then had Esther placed on her chest where she immediately noticed how warm and perfect she was.

'Chase was sitting next to me with Esther in his arms. I looked into his eyes and with a deep breath, my first words to him were "I'm sorry",' Nicole said

'Her body was still warm and she looked every bit of what a newborn baby should. We were rolled through the hospital down to our room on the maternity ward where my mum was waiting,' she said.

'I saw people looking with excitement towards me as if to congratulate me on my baby. But I kept her covered and tried not to make eye contact with anyone as tears welled in my eyes.'

Nicole, a photographer, asked her mum to bring her camera to the hospital and she and Chase spent the day capturing special moments with Esther.

'With a heavy heart, my mother captured photos of us throughout the day with our darling Esther. I watched from my bed as Chase bathed her petite body, followed by his first and only dance that they ever shared together. It was the saddest and most special sight,' Nicole said.

Family, friends and their little boy Leo also came to visit Esther to say goodbye; Leo gave his little sister kisses and while he wasn't able to comprehend the situation entirely he remained gentle and sympathetic to everyone.

The pair also organised a beautiful farewell service for Esther, with Nicole determined to make it perfect as 'it was the only event I'd ever get to plan for her'

The hardest thing, Esther said, was accepting that little Esther really was gone and that there was no known reason why.

'My natural instinct was to check on her, to cuddle her, to feed her and each time that I laid eyes on Esther, my heart would break a little more,' she said.

Losing Esther will affect me for the rest of my life, but I know that she will always be watching over our family.

'Chase and I decided that we needed to say goodbye to her the next day as we wanted to remember her the way she was, perfect and beautiful. We had organised to have moulds of her hands and feet done as keepsakes the following afternoon, and agreed we would do it after that.

'We kissed her cheeks for the last time and tears rolled down our faces as we embraced each other while they rolled Esther away. She would now be flown to Brisbane for an autopsy.'

Nicole and Chase left the hospital heartbroken without their baby and returned home to a strong support system of people who were there to help with anything they needed.

We await the day where we lay eyes on her beautiful face once again,' Nicole said

What caused Esther's death? Nicole had an ultrasound about 10 days prior to Esther's passing which displayed an abnormality with Esther's bowel. There was never any concern for her well being, and certainly none for her life. Her autopsy result confirmed that she had a an Intestine Atresia (complete blockage or obstruction in the intestine). However, it was not a proven factor for her death. The Cause of Death on her Autopsy Report was 'Unexplained intrauterine death' Advertisement

The pair also organised a beautiful farewell service for Esther, with Nicole determined to make it perfect as 'it was the only event I'd ever get to plan for her'.

'It was an incredibly beautiful but sad service. Often funerals are a celebration of one's life, but this wasn't the case for our Esther. Instead, we dreamt of what could've been and found some peace in knowing that Esther is safe and living in paradise. We await the day where we lay eyes on her beautiful face once again,' she said.

In the weeks and months following, Nicole and Chase were overwhelmed with emotions and were thankful they had their little boy Leo to keep them busy.

'He was the reason I had to get out of bed whether I wanted to or not. He was and continues to be my little ray of sunshine everyday,' Nicole said.

Four months after Esther died, the pair received news that brought them much deserved joy. They were expecting a baby.

'We welcomed our rainbow girl Primrose Ivy safely into the world on February 5th 2018, just three days after Esther's first anniversary,' Nicole said (pictured meeting Primrose for the first time)

'I never wanted to replace Esther, I just knew it would help with the healing process,' Nicole told FEMAIL.

'I believe she chose her beautiful baby sister to be here with us today. We welcomed our rainbow girl Primrose Ivy safely into the world on February 5th 2018, just three days after Esther's first anniversary.

'Being pregnant with Primrose after losing Esther was the most anxious time of my life, I didn't have any peace until I heard her cry for the first time. Meeting her restored a hope in me that I never thought I could get back; she has brought new joy into our lives and we are beyond grateful for our rainbow girl.'

While Nicole and Chase are both overjoyed to be raising their two amazing children, they remember Esther every day and still have their battles.

While Nicole and Chase are both overjoyed to be raising their two amazing children, they remember Esther every day and still have their battles

'It's a vicious cycle where some days I feel on top of the world and others I don't want to see the light of day, and struggle doing even the most simplest of tasks,' Nicole said.

'I love my job but please don't be fooled by all the smiles and pretty photos. These are just tiny snippets of our lives. A piece of me is gone forever, and I will never be the same person again. Some people say the pain will get easier, but I don't think it does. You just learn different methods of how to cope with the agonising pain.

'Losing Esther will affect me for the rest of my life, but I know that she will always be watching over our family.

'I want to help break the silence of miscarriage, stillbirth and child loss by sharing my story. My hope is that it will raise awareness and show families experiencing loss that they are not alone.'

If you or anyone you know is affected by the loss of a baby or child, call the Sands 24/7 National Support Line on 1300 0 72637.

You can read more about Nicole's experience here and follow her family updates on Instagram at Raising.Them.Kind.The nation has reacted to the impending exit from the European Union with a mix of panic, confusion and determination, with some even taking financial safety precautions and others securing their British status.

But elsewhere a different kind of alarm has ensued - the fear of being left without essential beauty products and plastic storage containers.

Society bible Tatler have released their guide to which luxury imported products readers should stock up on, in a glimpse at how the other half live.

Reporting that upmarket brands are stockpiling their goods to avoid potential future import taxes, the magazine admits: 'Its not just the regular Joe who is raising their defences and hoarding goods'.

Recommending that readers stock up on trademark orange Le Creuset pots as 'a casserole wouldn't be a casserole outside of a Le Creuset', the publication also highlights the importance of stocking up on 49.50 Laduree Macarons, 19.50 L'Occitane shower gel and 115 Veuve Clicquot champagne.

Here is a list of the French essentials the other half will be stocking up on before Brexit.

1. Le Creuset pot

Society bible Tatler have released their guide to which luxury imported products readers should stock up on, recommending that readers stock up the trademark French Le Creuset pots. Above: The signature shallow 3.2L casserole pot priced at 235

Revealing that they are sticking to tradition when it comes to kitchenware, the top rungs of society will be slow-cooking their stews in the trademark orange iron vessels.

Confirming their choice, Tatler says: 'Orange is what we'll be seeking to restore normality amid post-Brexit turbulence'.

Their signature shallow casserole pot, priced at 235 for the large 3.2L version, is described as ideal for cooking risottos, meat, vegetables and tarts.

2. Laduree Macarons

Suggesting that Meghan Markle, who previously revealed her taste for the sweet treats, may be stockpiling them 'over at Kensington Palace', the next essential is macarons by luxury French bakery Laduree. Pictured: A box of mixed macarons costing 49.50

Proving that even the wealthier half of society don't always count calories, the next essential is macarons by luxury French bakery Laduree.

Suggesting that Meghan Markle, who previously revealed her taste for the sweet treats, may be stockpiling them 'over at Kensington Palace', they admit they would be 'lost without them'.

A box of mixed macarons by Laduree Paris, founded in 1862, costs 49.50 and contains 24 pieces.

3. Laulhere Traditional French Beret

Tatler recommends getting hold of a traditional beret hat by French luxury brand Laulhere before it's too late. Pictured: Traditional French Beret 2098 Lurex Cap by Laulhere at 116

Ringing the alarm bells for fashionistas across the country, Tatler recommends getting hold of a traditional beret hat by French luxury brand Laulhere.

Urging their readers to invest in the essential fashion item before it's too late, they write: 'The chic will be deprived of their preferred head wear'.

The Traditional French Beret 2098 Lurex Cap by Laulhere, founded in 1840, retails at 116.

4. LOccitane en Provence

The French luxury brand's Almond Shower Oil retails at 19.50 for 250ml, with Tatler admitting: 'These are products that bring the very essence of Provence to the British bathroom and life would be vastly inferior without'

The well-groomed creme de la creme of society wouldn't be complete without butter soft skin, and recommend LOccitane's almond shower gel to achieve it.

The French luxury brand's Almond Shower Oil retails at 19.50 for 250ml, and their Verbena Shea Butter Gentle Soap, made from a 100% vegetable base, costs a reasonable 9.

Tatler says: 'These are products that bring the very essence of Provence to the British bathroom and life would be vastly inferior without'.

5. Veuve Clicquot Champagne

Veuve Clicquot's Bryt NV champagne 1.5L retails at 115 Selfridges, and the publication admits that 'home-grown bubbles just don't compare'.

As would be expected of the high society, the champagne lifestyle comes as part of the package.

Recommending a life of 'one sip water and one sip champagne', the magazine urges readers to stockpile the best yellow-label bubbles.

Veuve Clicquot's Bryt NV champagne 1.5L retails at 115 Selfridges, and the publication admits that 'home-grown bubbles just don't compare'.

6. Evian water

'Dont let Brexit get in the way of a pristine, supple visage', Tatler urges, reminding readers of the importance of keeping the skin hydrated. Pictured: 4 for six bottles of 1.5l of water

Bringing it back to basics, the publication encourages their followers to stock up on 'bottles and bottles of Evian', in the event our clean water supply is cut off.

'Dont let Brexit get in the way of a pristine, supple visage', Tatler urges, reminding readers of the importance of keeping the skin hydrated.

Evian, which originates form the south shore of Lake Geneva, retails at around 4 for six bottles at major supermarkets.

7. Leoube Premium Olive Oil

Pictured: Leoube Premium Olive Oil 29.99 500ml currently out of stock

Bringing it back to the kitchen, dishes just aren't the same without extra special olive oil by French brand Leoube, produced from centuries-old olive trees in the heart of ancestral lands.

And the publication's alarm at not being able to get hold of the very best French stuff may not be unfounded, with Leoube Premium Olive Oil already sold out on some sites.

Leoube Premium Olive Oil retails at 29.99 for 500ml, and is currently out of stock on their own website.A founder of global fashion brand The Kooples - which has a string of celebrity ambassadors including Zayn, Stella Maxwell and Irina Shayk - has come under fire after dressing up as an African tribe member to celebrate the Jewish festival of Purim.

Photos and video footage of Laurent Elicha - one of the three French brothers behind the popular high street clothing brand - and his family dressed up were posted to his wife Noemi's Instagram account.

Laurent, 43, Noemi, 33, and their two young children are seen with their faces painted dark brown, wearing fake dreadlocks and tribal make-up and jewellery.

When Noemi shared the photos to her 26,000 followers, she was quickly accused of wearing 'blackface'.

The images have since been removed from social media. In a statement Noemie Elicha said she 'regret and apologises for any offence that has been caused'.

Scroll down for video

Fashion chain The Kooples co-founder Laurent Elicha, 43, and his wife Noemi, 33, at a party to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim. Noemi told her 26,000 followers that she dressed up as an African because she loves the continent

The mother-of-two posted this caption alongside the images wishing her followers 'Hag Sameah' for Purim, which means happy holidays in Hebrew

Abover: as the couple normally look: Photos and video footage featured on Noemi's Instagram page and have attracted criticism from some of her followers, who say the couple are practising 'blackface' in the party images

An image posted by Noemi showing the couple with darkened skin, fake dreadlocks and tribal make-up; she captioned the photo '#tribalvibe'

Noemi Elicha used bright yellow and red make-up on her darkened skin and black lipstick

Criticism: Comments on the posts were largely positive but some accused the couple of wearing 'blackface', the last comment, in French, reads: 'It looks smart but it is blackface'

The practice of 'blacking up', which has its origins in the early 19th century when white people would mimic African Americans through stereotypes, is considered highly racist by many.

Some of the images explain why the family chose to dress as they did, with a close-up photo of Noemi captioned: 'When I said I fell in love with Africa'.

Another photo of Laurent and Noemi, with white make-up daubed on their darkened skin, in captioned #tribalvibes.

While the reaction to the photos in the comments left was largely positive, some criticised the couple.

Noemi Elicha and her two children dressed up for Purim, which took place on Wednesday 20th to Thursday 21st March. Jewish people wear fancy dress to mark when Jewish people were saved from persecution by Haman

Noemi regularly posts photos of herself and her husband Laurent, who represents womenswear for the brand, to her 26,000 followers on her instagram account

BLACKFACE HISTORY The practice of blackface was condemned as early as 1848 but continues to rear its ugly head in modern society. In the early 1800s, Blackface minstrelsy would feature white men with their faces painted black and exaggerated lips and eyes. The characters these men played were ignorant and uneducated, hyper-sexual, lazy and superstitious. They were also often criminals who stole, scammed and instigated confrontations. Frederick Douglass was one of the first to call out the practice, denouncing it in a review in 1848 in The North Star. Advertisement

One user, juliamia7171, wrote a series of negative emojis including a banned sign and the hashtag #blackface.

Another, acashany, writing in French wrote: 'c'est une chose ma puce mais la c'est du blackface' meaning 'It looks smart but it is blackface'.

The Jewish holiday of Purim, which took place on Wednesday 20th to Thursday 21st March sees Jewish people wearing fancy dress to mark being saved from persecution by Haman.

The fashion brand was founded by the three Elicha brothers - Alexandre, Laurent and Raphael - in Paris in 2008 and targets couples.

Alexandre explained the company's quirky name: 'In French, couples sounds like "kooples". We wanted a place you could shop with your boyfriend.'

The smiling couple pose for photos during a very lively party to celebrate Purim

Laurent represents womenswear for the brand, which has around 350 stores across Europe and the US.

The company regularly teams up with celebrity ambassadors to create new lines with Stella Maxwell, former One Directon star Zayn and Irina Shayk all currently paid to promote the brand's clothes or accessories.

In a statement shared with MailOnline Noemie Elicha said: 'I regret and apologise for any offence that has been caused. This was not my intention in any way and I have removed the image from social media.'

Earlier this year, Gucci was forced to apologise for selling a sweater that many social media users said resembled blackface because of its design.

The $890 black balaclava knit top from the label's Fall/Winter 2018 season features a cut-out at the mouth that is outlined in red.

The controversial top was quickly discontinued after it sparked outrage on Twitter, with many claiming that it was a form of blackface.

Searches on Gucci's website revealed that the item is no longer listed, but archive searches indicate that the clothing item was last on the brand's site in January.

Many speculated that the items were released for Black History Month, but all of the pieces had been showcased months prior in 2018.

Poor choice: Last week, Gucci was heavily criticized for its $890 balaclava knit top from the Fall/Winter 2018 season, which features a cut-out at the mouth that is outlined in red

A Twitter user named Rashida shared a screengrab of another mask-like item that Gucci showed off on the runway last year, writing: 'They have a mask to match so you can have a chic classic black face moment without the mess of paint.'

The practice of blackface continues to cause deep offence.

In the early 1800s, Blackface minstrelsy would feature white men with their faces painted black and exaggerated lips and eyes.

The characters these men played were ignorant and uneducated, hyper-sexual, lazy and superstitious.

They were also often criminals who stole, scammed and instigated confrontations. The practice was condemned as early as 1848 but continues to make headlines.A mother-of-five branded 'disgusting' by cruel internet trolls has vowed to continue posting candid snaps of her 'wrinkly' tummy and stretchmarks.

Brenda Rivers Stearns, 32, of Ohio, struggled to come to terms with the change to her body after a traumatic birth with her first child, which left her with larger breasts, a 'floppier' belly and rockbottom self-confidence.

The content creator and stay at home mom, who weighed 110lbs (7st 12lb) before her pregnancies, admits it took the birth of her fifth child for her to finally accept and love her own postnatal figure.

She now weighs 121lbs (8st 9lb) and is on a mission to help other mothers love their post-baby bodies as they are, without trying to change them.

Brenda Rivers Stearns, 32, of Ohio, has vowed to keep posting candid snaps of her 'wrinkly' tummy and stretchmarks to encourage other moms to fall in love with their post-baby bodies

Brenda, pictured with Benjamin, struggled to come to terms with the change to her body after a traumatic birth of her first child, which left her with larger breasts and a 'floppier' belly

The devoted mom, pictured at almost 40-weeks pregnant with Benjamin, says she sometimes she feels 'ugly' but usually snaps out of it when she reminds herself how far she's come

Brenda told how she met her husband Isaiah, 37, in 2009 through an accidental text. After the pair exchanged messages they soon fell for each other, and went on to have five children  Victoria, seven, Veronica, six, Samuel, five, Vanessa, three, and Benjamin, who is nine-months-old.

She explained: 'I sent a text message to the wrong number while I was living in Georgia and Isaiah got the text half an hour after he had set up a new mobile phone plan. God works in mysterious ways.

'Ever since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to be a mommy. I literally am living the dream life.

'My first birth was a bit traumatic. I ended up with an emergency caesarean which left a huge scar on my lower abdomen. I didn't like my body; my breasts grew three times larger, I had stretch marks on my sides, my belly flopped and I just didn't feel beautiful.

'With each pregnancy and birth came more changes. It wasn't until the birth of my fifth child that I gained confidence to love myself.

Brenda and her husband Isaiah, 37, have five children  Victoria, seven, Veronica, six, Samuel, five, Vanessa, three, and Benjamin, who is nine-months-old

After two caesarean births and three unmedicated VBACs (vaginal birth after caesarean), Brenda says she has come to realise the depth of strength and beauty a woman's body has

'It took me five pregnancies, two caesarean births, three unmedicated VBACs (vaginal birth after caesarean) and five beautiful healthy children to realise the depth of strength and beauty a woman's body has.'

With this newfound confidence, Brenda began posting pictures of her real mom body on Instagram to show other mothers it's OK to not have a perfect, airbrushed figure.

But cruel trolls attacked her pictures, calling her 'ugly' and 'disgusting'.

Thankfully this doesn't faze Brenda, who says this reaction only spurs her on to post more real pictures to normalize expectations.

She said: 'I get it all. Hate messages, trolls, comments saying my body is disgusting or ugly.

'Those comments usually fuel me to post again and again until we normalize the true beauty of a mother's body.

'I feel very positive about my body. I do have physical goals I want to reach; I want to be healthy and strong and stay active throughout my days. I have my moments when I feel 'ugly' and I usually snap out of it when I remind myself how far I've come.'

The mother-of-five admits it took the birth of her fifth child, Benjamin, pictured, for her to finally accept and love her own postnatal figure

Brenda said becoming a mother has helped her realize that, to her children, it doesn't matter what her body looks like because they see her for who she is inside

She added that becoming a mother has helped her realize that, to her children, it doesn't matter what her body looks like because they see her for who she is inside.

'They know my heart and to them that's enough. I want to love myself how they love me,' Brenda explained.

'My breasts are way large, my belly is wrinkled and floppy, I have stretch marks on my sides, my abdomen isn't flat. But it's also changed in other ways.

'My body now is stronger, I have a higher tolerance for physical pain, my body loves deeper, my body can hold five babies.

This body is capable of loving so much more than that pre-pregnancy one.

'I am very proud. My body carried life within me - not everyone has that privilege.'

Brenda shares her raw motherhood posts on Instagram under the handle @she-plusfive.

Despite being labelled 'ugly' and 'disgusting' by cruel online trolls, Brenda has vowed to continue posting snaps of her post-baby body

Brenda says she doesn't want other mothers to wait as long as she did to love themselves for who they are

Pictured with her brood, Brenda says children see behind the stretched-out skin, marks, and lines

'When I stop and think of what my body has done for me, I change the focus and start thanking my body, I take time for myself and slow down. I am able to appreciate myself better,' she added.

'I wish I could have realized how strong and amazing my body was with my first baby.

'I don't want others to wait as long as I did to love themselves for who they are right now.

'So, while society wants to sit behind a screen and label us as flawed, I am here to remind all of you that to our children, we are perfect. They see behind the stretched-out skin, marks, and lines. They see us for who we truly are.

'They know our hearts and love us unconditionally, and that is all that matters.'

For more information about Brenda, visit www.instagram.com/she-plusfive.Mary Doyle, 28, from Newport in south Wales, has bravely waived her right to anonymity to speak out about her stepfather Mark Garnett

A woman who was abused by her stepfather as a child has revealed how he would put sellotape over her mouth to keep her quiet - after a 20 year battle to bring him to justice.

Mary Doyle, 28, from Newport in south Wales, has bravely waived her right to anonymity to speak out about her evil stepfather Mark Garnett, 52, who was eventually jailed for seven years for indecent assault of a child.

The paedophile put tape over her mouth to keep her quiet, and also pushed her under the water before assaulting her, the court heard during his trial.

Mary said she first reported the abuse when she was taken into care aged six, but the case was dropped a number of times.

It wasn't until 2011 the CPS decided to take the case forward - and even then it took years more for Garnett to be jailed.

Stay-at-home mother Mary, from Newport, Wales, said: 'I am relieved he has been sentenced but disappointed that it took so long.

'Mark took my life and smashed it up. I was deeply affected by what happened to me, but don't want it to define me.

Mary as a child is pictured with Mark, who was finally brought to justice after 20 years

'It is sickening to think he was walking the streets for 20 years after what he did to me, but know I can try and start to move on with my own life.

'I feel like I have a second chance at life and want to show other victims that they can speak up, no matter how much time has passed.'

Mark began dating Mary's mother when she was four-years-old and quickly moved into their home in Blackwood, South Wales in around 1994.

Mary said she first reported the abuse when she was taken into care aged six, but the case was dropped a number of times.

She said he turned on her when she broke a lightbulb, and the indecent assault happened after her mum took a job at a local pub - leaving Mary alone with him.

During the trial, Newport Crown Court heard how he had put Sellotape over the child's mouth to keep her quiet, and had pushed her under the water in a bath before assaulting her.

Speaking now, she said: 'I had told Mark I was going for a bath. He followed me in and started touching me in the tub.

'I said I would tell my mum and he dunked my head under the water and threatened me, so I kept quiet.'

It wasn't until Mary was taken into care she decided to confide in her foster family, who reported the ordeal to the police, she said.

Mary said: 'I was put with a foster family and told them I had a secret before revealing what had happened to me.

'They immediately reported it and I was interviewed by police.

'The case was eventually dropped because they thought, at my age, cross-examination could mentally damage me.

'Looking back, it was not going to court that did the most damage.'

During the trial, Newport Crown Court heard Garnett put Sellotape over Mary's mouth to keep her quiet, and had pushed her under the water in a bath before assaulting her

Traumatised Mary tried to move on with her life, but she said she couldn't forget what happened and tried again to get a conviction in 2005.

Mary said: 'When I was around 14, I would call the police station every day and try to get my case heard.

Mary, pictured as a child, was burdened with flashbacks and struggled to move on

'The police interviewed me again but soon the case was dropped.

'I was told there was a lack of evidence and it happened too long ago. I couldn't believe it.'

Mary said she was burdened with flashbacks and struggled to move on.

She added: 'It was affecting every part of my life and I was terrified knowing that Mark was still out there somewhere.

'I was having terrible nightmares and my mental health was struggling.

'I was determined not to give up and fought for six years to have my case heard.

'My case was turned down several times by the CPS before they took the decision in 2011 to follow through with the prosecution.

'The case went on for four years but finally he was convicted in 2015.'

Jailing him in March 2015, Judge Tom Crowther QC said: 'As [the victim] has grown older, she's clearly been haunted by your actions.'

Mr Crowther said the CPS had decided against pursuing a case against Garnett on more than one occasion before taking the 'proper decision' in 2011 to follow through with the prosecution.

He told the defendant he would have to serve an indefinite sexual prevention order which will not allow him to live in the same household as any child under the age of 16, unless with the permission of social services.

Traumatised Mary tried to move on with her life, but she said she couldn't forget what happened and tried again to get a conviction in 2005

Garnett, of Newbridge, was told he would serve half of his seven-year sentence in custody before being released on licence.

He was found guilty of one charge of indecently assaulting a girl under 13.

He was cleared of two counts of rape and three counts of indecent assault.

Garnett had told police the sexual allegations against him were 'all lies', the jury heard.

He told police: 'I have never ever molested a child. I have never ever had intercourse with that kid. I have never ever played with that kid.'It might not be the most glamorous of locations, but Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden rocked construction site chic on a visit to a sweage treatment plant today.

The future queen, 41, donned a high vis vest, an orange hard hat and a pair of dark green wellies for the tour of the Henriksdal plant in central Stockholm to mark World Water Day.

The Crown Princess, who is first in line to the throne after her father Carl XVI Gustaf, is the High Patron of the charitable organisation WaterAid alongside her husband Prince Daniel.

The impressive Henriksdal facility, built within underground rock caverns, serves 800,000 people from Stockholm and surrounding municipalities.

Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden donned a high vis vest, an orange hard hat and a pair of dark green wellies for the tour of the Henriksdal plant in central Stockholm to mark World Water Day

Princess Victoria wore a stylish long wine-coloured wool coat beneath her high-vis ensemble - teamed with matching suede boots before she swapped them for her dark green wellies.

The mother-of-two swept her brunette hair back into her signature sleek low bun and wasted no time in getting down to business at the plant.

Having pulled on a pair of industrial-style black and yellow gloves, she ventured down into the cavernous wasteworks.

Henriksdal, built in the 1930s, is the first wastewater treatment plant in the world to be constructed in rock.

The vivacious royal wasted no time in exploring the site, which is built within underground rock caverns and serves 800,000 people

The mother-of-two swept her brunette hair back into her signature sleek low bun and grinned as she was given a tour of the plant

Crown Princess Victoria was photographd as she looked around the enormous facility in central Stockholm

Having pulled on a pair of industrial-style black and yellow gloves, she ventured down into the cavernous wasteworks

On her arrival, the princess wore a stylish long wine-coloured wool coat - which she later covered up with a high vis vest - teamed with matching suede boots

It was expanded between 1963 and 1970, with the addition of new basins for biological treatment in aeration tanks.

It now comprises two facilities, Henriksdal and Sickla, which are connected by two 1km tunnels.

The plant is being extended to double the treatment capacity to serve 1.6 million people and to comply with new, more stringent treatment requirements.

Victoria, who is first in line to the throne after her father Carl XVI Gustaf, later visited Lake Brunnsviken, located near her home at the Haga Royal palace in north Stockholm

The Crown Princess, pictured collecting fresh water, is the High Patron of the charitable organisation WaterAid alongside her husband Prince Daniel

The mother-of-two poured the water from the picturesque lake into a bright orange WaterAid container

The princess was later pictured filling a can with water from Lake Brunnsviken, located near her home at the Haga Royal palace in north Stockholm.



Victoria traded her stylish purple coat for a more practical knee-length waterproof anorak and walking boots.

World Water Day is an annual UN observance day celebrated worldwide which highlights the importance of fresh water.The Duchess of Sussex will follow royal tradition and give birth to her first child in the Lindo Wing, it has been reported following widespread speculation.

Meghan, 37, who is due in the coming weeks, was said to be considering other options, but a source said today that the Lindo wing, at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, is the 'superior choice' for the royal couple.

The hospital is where the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had all three of their children - Prince George, five, Princess Charlotte, three, and Prince Louis, 10 months.

It was previously speculated that the Duchess of Sussex might consider the US-owned hospital like The Portland, in London, or one closer to their new home in Windsor like the Frimley Park Hospital, in Surrey.

But a source told the Evening Standard today: 'Having weighed up the options, and in acknowledgement of its place in royal tradition, they consider it the superior choice'.

Meghan, 37, who is due in the coming weeks, was said to be considering other options, but a source said today that the Lindo wing, at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, is the 'superior choice' for the royal couple. Pictured, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex earlier this month

The hospital is where the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had all three of their children - Prince George, five, Princess Charlotte, three, and Prince Louis, 10 months, pictured

Kensington Palace declined to comment.

In February it emerged that The Lindo Wing maternity ward had told its staff to avoid taking holiday in April, prompting speculation that Baby Sussex would be born there.

Prince Harry and Prince William were also born at St Mary's.

However conflicting reports have suggested Meghan might select a Home Counties hospital that would be more accessible from the Sussexes' new home at Frogmore Cottage, Windsor.

Frimley Park Hospital, in Surrey, where Harry's aunt, the Countess of Wessex, had her two children, was said to be in the running.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George on the steps of the Lindo Wing in August 2013. The Cambridges followed Diana's lead in choosing the hospital

Duchess of Cambridge and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge with baby daughter Princess Charlotte on the steps of the Lindo Wing, following her birth in May 2015

Meanwhile last month reports emerged claiming the Duchess of Sussex may opt for an American-owned hospital to welcome the royal baby.

Princess Diana's former butler Paul Burrell, 60, predicted that Meghan, 37, will opt against the 7,500-a-night Lindo Wing where sister-in-law Kate Middleton gave birth, in favour of a US hospital in London such as The Portland.

The Portland in Fitzrovia is owned by the Hospital Corporation Of America, and is where royal Sarah Ferguson, as well as Meghan's celebrity pal Victoria Beckham, and Kate Winslet chose to give birth.

There have also been claims suggesting the couple might plump for a more natural route and are even considering a home birth, although this seems unlikely.

Prince Charles and Princess Diana on the steps of the Lindo Wing with newborn Prince William

However other reports have recently hinted that the couple may choose a more natural route, with previous sources claiming that the duchess has been reading up on hypnobirthing techniques with a view to giving birth at their new home in Windsor.

Giving birth at home would be in contrast to the exclusive Lindo Wing, where Amal Clooney gave birth to her twins last year, and which even offers champagne on its menu for thrilled parents to toast new arrivals.

Prices at the plush West London hospital ward start at an eye-watering 5,900 for a one-night stay, with a stay in one of the suites closer to 7,500.(ANSA) - Bologna, March 22 - Bologna prosecutors on Friday asked to investigate former rightist militant Paolo Bellini in connection with the Bologna train station bombing that killed 85 people on August 2, 1980.

Bellini testified as an informant on the alleged talks between the State and the Mafia to stop a bombing campaign in 1992.

Other former rightist militants were convicted in the bombing but investigations have continued.

Members of the NAR neo-fascist terrorist group including Giusva Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro were convicted over what was one of the worst atrocities of Italy's so-called years of lead of political violence in the 1970s and 1980s.

President Sergio Mattarella said recently that it was necessary to uncover the whole truth about the bombing and shed light on the "shadowy areas" that remain in relation to the attack.

Last April a Palermo court found guilty former heads of the ROS security police Mario Mori, Giuseppe De Donno and Antonio Subranni, former Forza Italia Senator and Berlusconi aide Marcello Dell'Utri, and Mafia bosses Leoluca Bagarella and Nino Cina' for holding talks between the Italian State and the Sicilian Mafia aimed at stopping a wave of bombings in the early 1990s.

Also found guilty was go-between Massimo Ciancimino, son of late Mafia-convicted Palermo mayor Vito Ciancimino.

The guilty parties were sentenced to prison terms ranging from eight to 28 years.

Former interior minister Nicola Mancino was cleared of perjury.

When it comes to fashion, we are all inspired by what we see; whether it be a well-dressed celebrity, a blow-your-mind catwalk presentation or even a super stylish every-day passerby.

As fashion editors, we're moved by all of the above, and then some. We're exposed to under-the-radar labels; we get a first-hand look at collections months before they hit stores; we're tapped into brands with chic-yet-cheap offerings and we shop - a lot.

To share our knowledge, FEMAIL brings you Style Swoon, a weekly series of the latest, greatest and on the verge. We hope this Friday series will serve as a buying guide and point of inspiration for the clotheshorses and fashion fanatics alike.

LUPITA'S BAG OF CHOICE

Her bag of choice: Lupita Nyong'o has been spotted carrying Brahmin handbags on three separate occasions this week

Lupita Nyong'o has been spotted carrying Brahmin handbags on three separate occasions this week.

First on March 11 the 'Us' actress attended the 'Little Monsters' premiere carrying the Mini Francine Astaire bag.

On March 18, she made her way to the 'Late Show with Steven Colbert' toting the label's Mini Francine Jackson.

And for her appearance the next day on 'Good Morning America,' she accessorized her Prabal Gurung skirt and blouse with Brahmin's Duxbury Satchel Melbourne and Nine West sandals.

Left: Mini Francine Astaire by Brahim, $315; brahmin.com. Center: Mini Francine Jackson by Brahmin, $395; brahmin. Right: Duxbury Satchel Melbourne by Brahmin, $275; brahmin.com

THE PERFECT BLOWOUT

CHI Lava Dryer, $179.99 can be pre-ordered on chi.com

Friday, April 22 CHI launched the Lava Dryer and it's giving the Dyson a run for it's money!

Volcanic and ceramic minerals are embedded into the innovative honeycomb ceramic lava heater for a healthier heat.

Reducing drying time and producing a stronger more precise air flow, the lava ceramic ions smooth, reduce frizz and lock-in shine.

Plus, its unique comb nozzle straightens and styles hair without a brush needed.

The $179.99 dryer will be available on ULTA Beauty starting April 22, 2019, but can be pre-ordered now on chi.com.

Perfecting: Reducing drying time and producing a stronger more precise air flow, the lava ceramic ions smooth, reduce frizz and lock-in shine. Plus, its unique comb nozzle straightens and styles hair without a brush needed

THE CARRIE NECKLACE

The famous necklace: On Friday, March 22 Patricia Field launched the Carrie 2.0 necklace at Patricia Field ARTFashion Gallery

On Friday, March 22 Sex and the City costumer Patricia Field launched the Carrie 2.0 necklace at Patricia Field ARTFashion Gallery.

The Custom Name Necklace is available in 14K gold, white gold and gold-plated options.

Channeling her inner Carrie Bradshaw, author of Making it in Manhattan, Caroline Vazzana, modeled the retro-inspired bauble for a stylish editorial shot by Ronald Flowers and styled by Barbie Beach.

In the editorial Caroline wears new ARTFashion artists' designs that can be found at the renowned costume designer's NYC gallery. Her hair is perfectly curled by Luiigy Baerga and her makeup flawless by Lucas Dean.

The Custom Name Necklace is available in 14K gold, white gold and gold-plated options. $150; patriciafield.com

INVITE ONLY EVENT

A-list party: On Sunday, March 17th, The Daily Front Row hosted its 5th Annual Fashion Los Angeles Awards, sponsored by Sunglass Hut, at the Beverly Hills Hotel

On Sunday, March 17th, The Daily Front Row hosted its 5th Annual Fashion Los Angeles Awards, sponsored by Sunglass Hut, at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Ilaria Urbinati was honored with the Style Curator Award by Sunglass Hut, which was presented by her client James Marsden.

Kate Hudson, Lady Gaga, Adriana Lima, Slick Woods, Quincy Combs and more were seen trying on the new Spring trends from Sunglass Hut and mingling over wine.

Lady Gaga was overheard raving over the new Miu Miu sunnies on the red carpet.

Fashion forward: James Marsden and Quincy Combs were dressed to the nines at the 5th Annual Fashion Los Angeles Awards, sponsored by Sunglass Hut

AMAZON'S LATEST LAUNCH

Beauty: On Tuesday, March 19 Olivia Culpo attended the launch of Amazons first dedicated skincare line, Belei, in New York City

On Tuesday, March 19 Olivia Culpo attended the launch of Amazons first dedicated skincare line, Belei, in New York City.

Belei is a 12-piece line of high-quality skincare products that offer solutions for various skin types (acne, aging, dull, dehydrated, etc..) and feature ingredients with proven effectiveness.

All Belei products are free of parabens, phthalates, sulfates, and fragrance and are not tested on animals. Bottles are made of post-consumer recycled resin and carton packaging is 100% recyclable.

The entire collection ranges in price from $9-$40 can be purchased on amazon.comInnovative chefs have come up with some truly mindblowing dishes by mixing unexpected ingredients, but some food are just not meant to be mixed  at the very least, for purely aesthetic reasons.

Case in point: A new Asian fusion restaurant in New York City's East Village is serving up pieces of juicy pork belly wrapped in clouds of pink cotton candy.

While the sweet and savory combination is actually getting rave reviews from diners, it's impossible for some Twitter users to get past how absolutely revolting the dish looks once it has been bitten into.

Blech! Twitter users have been left horrified by this image of pork belly wrapped in pink cotton candy from a new Asian fusion restaurant in New York City called Chinese Graffiti

Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB-GYN, joked that it looked like a 'rogue tampon protruding from a vulva'

The restaurant, called Chinese Graffiti, just opened up at 11th Street and Avenue A in Manhattan two weeks ago.

Andrew Steinthal  who knows a thing or two about good food, with positions at both Zagat and Infatuation  was one of the early diners at the establishment, and shared a picture of the most interesting dish he was served.

'At a new restaurant in the East Village where they think it's ok to serve pork belly wrapped in cotton candy and Im going to have nightmares for the rest of my life,' he wrote.

Andrew included a picture, which shows a half-eaten piece of pork belly protruding from the middle of a slowly melting bit of cotton candy.

Unfortunately, at first glance, it looks like something much more vulgar.

'That looks like a rogue tampon protruding from a vulva,' tweeted OB-GYN Dr. Jennifer Gunter.

Ew! People also left GIFs and memes to express their disgust

Banned! One woman joked that the food image looks so vulgar that she was reporting it

Gross: This person thinks it looks more like an exploding blemish from an episode of Dr. Pimple Popper's show

Creep: Others compared the dish to a baby bird and something out of Stranger Things

'Aaaaaand my appetite is gone,' wrote another.

'I'm convinced there are things in the world nobody needs. This would definitely make it to the top 10,' said a third, while yet another tweeted: 'Wtf. I love pork belly. I like cotton candy. Why would someone create this monstrosity?'

At least one commenter joked that she was reporting the tweet for inappropriate content.

Others compared the dish to a baby bird, something out of Stranger Things, and a mess from an episode of Dr. Pimple Popper's show.

Andrew told commenters he wasn't a fan of the taste, either, describing it as 'very very gross.'

However, he seems to be in the minority. Though the restaurant has only been open for a couple of weeks, it already has a five-star average review on Yelp  and several commenters are calling out the pork belly cotton candy as a must-eat.

'Best dish of the night: cotton candy pork belly!' raved one.

They like it! Despite the unappetizing picture, diners who have actually tried the dish and posted about it on Yelp have given it rave reviews

It's back! Chinese Graffiti's chef David DiSalvo also previously offered it at the now-shuttered Brooklyn steakhouse Carnem Prime

'The cotton candy pork belly is delicious!! I know it sounds strange but after you have it you're like "why didn't i think of that?" wrote another.

One called it 'amazing,' while another ended a positive review with, 'Oh and the cotton candy pork belly. It sounds weird, but do yourself a favor and order it!'

Diners also appear to have been pleased with other more traditional dishes, like lobster pasta, soup buns, dumplings, and veggies.

Perhaps the most surprising thing of all, though, is that this isn't even the first New York City restaurant to serve the strange mash-up.

Chinese Graffiti's chef David DiSalvo also previously offered it at the now-shuttered Brooklyn steakhouse Carnem Prime.

'I love pork belly,' DiSalvo told the Village Voice in 2015. 'And this is really good quality pork. We skin it, score it, brine it, and braise it; then we crisp it to order and spin it with cotton candy.

'Its a dish inspired by Jose Andress Foie Gras Cotton Candy. But its a bit more familiar and accessible.'

Both the Village Voice and Bustle gave the dish rave reviews at the time.A 73-year-old man was left covered in a rash after he caught a bacterial infection from his fish tank.

The unnamed man was referred to the University of Iowa's infectious disease unit after he developed a non-itchy, painless rash.

Swellings cropped up on his hands, chest, abdomen and face. Tests showed the bacteria Mycobacterium marinum was to blame.

The man is thought to have caught the infection, carried by many fish species, while cleaning his salt or freshwater tanks.

A 73-year-old man was left covered in a rash (pictured left) after he caught a bacterial infection from his fish tank. The man - who has not been named - also had large swellings on his hands (seen right). Biopsies revealed the bacteria Mycobacterium marinum was to blame

After a series of antibiotics, the man's rash cleared up within a few months. He did not seek help for his symptoms until three months after they first appeared.

The incident was written in a BMJ Case Report by Dr Takaaki Kobayashi, from the department of internal medicine, who treated the patient.

When the man arrived at hospital, he denied having any fever or cough, as well as not recently traveling or coming into contact with an ill person.

Doctors initially thought he was suffering from the bacterial-infection nocardia, which usually affects the lungs, and can cause chest pain, coughing and breathing difficulties.

His rash started to fade after he was given the antibiotics trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole.

Laboratory tests then revealed he actually had M.marinum.

Due to the severity of his rash, the antibiotic rifabutin was added to his treatment regimen.

A month after he was first seen, his lesions had improved, with them disappearing completely a few months later.

Scientists identified the bacteria due to it producing a yellow pigment when exposed to light (pictured). This prompted them to add another antibiotic to the man's treatment regimen

FISH PEDICURE CAUSES A WOMAN'S TOENAILS TO FALL OFF A woman's toenails fell off after she had a controversial fish pedicure. The unnamed woman - who was in her 20s - developed onychomadesis, which caused her to shed her nails at their roots, six months after the spa treatment. Fish pedicures involve people submerging their feet in warm water with the small fish Gurra rufa, which feed on human skin. The beauty craze peaked in popularity around ten years ago due to unsupported claims it leaves feet smoother, while boosting circulation, eliminating bacteria and even treating psoriasis. Yet the treatment became less fashionable amid reports it could spread blood-borne infections - such as HIV and hepatitis C - if sufferers bleed in the water. As a result, fish pedicures have been banned in ten US states but not in the UK. The woman, who is believed to be from New York, is thought to be the first person to develop onychomadesis from such treatments. Advertisement

A report suggests 84 per cent of human M.marinum infections can be linked back to a fish tank, with most occurring due to a fish bite or an open wound coming into contact with contaminated water.

The rash usually occurs on the upper body but it can spread elsewhere via the lymphatic system in between 25 and 50 per cent of cases.

M.marinum is often misdiagnosed as syphilis or TB.

But the bacteria can be easily identified in the laboratory due to it producing a yellow pigment when exposed to light.

The authors of the case report are urging doctors to consider M.marinum if a patient has an unexplained rash, particularly if they mention having a fish tank.

The bacteria has no standard treatment, however, surgery may be required if a patient's deep tissue becomes infected.

M.marinum's symptoms are usually just small red bumps that do not heal.

However, people with a suppressed immune system may develop a fever, enlarged lymph nodes or blood infections.

The man in this case had Crohn's disease and had taken the immune system suppressing-drug prednisone every day for 40 years.

It is unclear whether this caused him to have a more serious reaction to the infection.Instagram will block anti-vaxx hashtags in an ongoing attempt to crack down on medical misinformation being shared on the social-media site.

The Facebook-owned company announced it will minimise 'recommendations of this content and accounts that post it'.

'Short-term measures' will include blocking hashtags associated with 'known health-related misinformation', including #vaccinescauseautism, #vaccinesarepoison and #vaccinescauseharm.

However, a spokesperson from the social-media giant warned it will take several weeks for the move to come into effect, with these hashtags still being active on Instagram today.

Vaccines are one of the greatest advances of modern medicine, rendering life-threatening diseases that could reach epidemic proportions into rarities.

The spread of misinformation online has been blamed for the 'anti-vaxx brigade', considered one of the greatest threats to public health worldwide.

Instagram vows to crack down on medical misinformation by blocking anti-vaxx posts (stock)

Pictured is a post that comes up under the search #vaccinescauseallergies

Vaccination fears soared following a study by the disgraced gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab can lead to autism in 1995.

His controversial views have since been widely discredited and Wakefield has been struck off - but vaccination rates plummeted in the wake of the study.

An Instagram spokesperson said in a statement: 'As part of our work to address health-related misinformation on Instagram, were looking at ways to minimize recommendations of this content and accounts that post it across Instagram.

'[This includes] in "Suggested For You", Explore and hashtags.

'We noted that this process would take place over several weeks.

'But as we take action in the short-term we know that fighting misinformation is a long-term commitment.'

Although searching for anti-vaxx content still brings up a host of results, Instagram bosses insist clicking on a blocked hashtag will soon take users to a blank page without results.

This comes after Facebook announced at the beginning of the month it will be limiting anti-vaxx misinformation from its groups, pages and news feeds.

Adam Schiff - US representative for California's 28th congressional district - pressed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google's chief executive officer Sundar Pichai over the spread of anti-jab fake news on these platforms.

Mr Schiff claimed algorithms demonstrate Facebook and Google - which owns YouTube - are promoting anti-vaxx messages.

In another attempt to crack down on the anti-vaxx brigade, Facebook has banned adverts that include 'misinformation about vaccines', according to a blog post put out by the social-media giant.

A controversial advert was banned on Facebook last November for claiming all jabs have the potential to kill a child.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the paid-for post by Stop Mandatory Vaccination was 'distressing' and 'misleading'.

And YouTube announced it will no longer recommend anti-jab videos to its users.

The Facebook-owned company has come under pressure from lawyers and public-health experts for not doing enough to stop the anti-vaxx brigade. Pictured is a controversial post that questions the safety of jabs that comes up when users search for vaccines

Pictured is another anti-vaxx post that Instagram users can easily find via the search bar

The US is in the midst of a measles outbreak, which has struck 15 states and is believed to be driven by growing anti-vaccine sentiments.

Social media has helped the movement gain momentum, with anti-vaxxers often leaving a slew of comments objecting the scientifically-proven preventative measure.

In order for vaccines to protect a population from diseases, between 90 and 95 per cent of that group needs to have gotten their shots.

But in 2017, just 70 per cent of toddlers in the US aged between 19 and 35 months old had received all of the vaccinations recommended to them by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And while the UK remains a world leader in vaccine coverage, rates have declined in nine of 12 vaccinations given routinely to children in England, figures show.A mother who was told a giant growth in her womb was benign is now fighting for her life after doctors discovered it is in fact an aggressive cancer.

Rachael Thomas' 5lb growth weighed almost as much as a newborn and left her looking six months pregnant.

She thought surgery in November to remove what was believed to be a non-life threatening fibroid tumour would be the end of her health worries.

The 45-year-old had lost two stone within a month but claims doctors reassured her there was little to worry about.

But after the operation, the growth was found to be cancerous, and last week, Mrs Thomas was given the devastating news it had spread.

Doctors say the tumour's location at the base of her spine means further surgery could leave her paralysed.

Mrs Thomas and her husband, Michael, also 45, from Newport, Wales, are angry at doctors for leaving the situation so late.

Rachael Thomas, 45, who was told a giant grwoth in her womb was benign is now fighting for her life after doctors discovered it is in fact an aggressive cancer. Pictured last year

Mrs Thomas, a mother-of-three, lost two stone in a month when her health took a turn for the worst. She had been on the waiting list to have a fibroid in her womb removed. Pictured in hospital after the removal of the growth which weighed 5lb

Mrs Thomas and her husband, Michael, 45, are angry that doctors didn't give Mrs Thomas' fibroid - which is normally non-cancerous - more attention

Mrs Thomas was on a waiting list last year to have her fibroid tumour removed.

According to the NHS website, fibroids are non-cancerous growths made up of muscle and tissue that develop in or around the womb.

They can grow to the size of a melon, but can be as small as a pea.

The mother-of-three explained: 'I had various gynaecological issues so I was already waiting for this routine op.'

But then her health took a turn for the worst.

She said: 'After we got back from our summer holiday in France, I began bleeding so heavily that I couldn't even make it into work. I became a virtual prisoner in my own home.

'I had zero appetite and my weight plunged from eight and a half to six and a half stone. Friends and family were shocked when they saw my frail appearance.'

Mr Thomas grew increasingly concerned for Mrs Thomas' health and repeatedly took his wife to see doctors.

WHAT ARE FIBROIDS? Around one in three women develop fibroids  benign growths in or around the womb - most often between the ages of 30 and 50. They are thought to develop more frequently in women of African- Caribbean origin. It's also thought they occur more often in overweight or obese women because being overweight increases the level of oestrogen in the body. Only very rare that fibroid develops into cancer but there is 0.2 per cent risk of malignant transformation (i.e. becoming cancerous). TELL-TALE SIGNS Heavy or painful periods. In some cases it can lead to anaemia  iron deficiency  causing tiredness, lethargy and shortness of breath. Abdominal pain. Bloating, discomfort in the stomach, and pain in the lower back and legs. Frequent urination and constipation, caused by fibroids pressing on internal organs. Pain or discomfort during sex britishfibroidtrust.org.uk Advertisement

He said: 'In the space of two months, my beautiful wife lost two stone. Everybody around her could see that there was something seriously wrong.'

Doctors monitored her condition, but she said she was always reassured there was nothing to worry about.

'Fibroids are non-life threatening. It meant I was left on the waiting list and wasn't seen as a priority,' she said.

Many women are unaware they have the condition, and treatment is not always necessary as they can shrink and disappear without treatment, especially after menopause.

But Mrs Thomas said hers grew so large friends began questioning if she was expecting a baby.

'My health was deteriorating rapidly and my fibroid tumour was visibly growing,' she said. 'My stomach was rock solid to the touch.

'Friends started asking when I was due. Honestly, I looked six months pregnant.'

Over the following months, Mrs Thomas - who is mother to Lauren, 24, Nikkita, 20 and Nadine, 19 - was admitted to hospital on two separate occasions and treated for sepsis.

Mrs Thomas said: 'The second time I was admitted, I looked like I was on my deathbed. Friends who popped in for a visit left sobbing, believing they'd never see me again and were saying their last goodbyes.'

Mrs Thomas' gynaecologist advised she needed an urgent hysterectomy.

In November last year, doctors at Royal Gwent Hospital, Newport, removed her womb, along with the 14cm tumour.

Mrs Thomas said: 'No wonder I looked pregnant. The thing was the size of a newborn baby.'

Back at home, Mrs Thomas began the long road to recovery.

Mrs Thomas' growth, pictured, made her look 'six months pregnant'

Mrs Thomas' weight plummeted by two stone when she returned from a holiday in France, but doctors reassured her by monitoring her health

She said: 'We all felt an enormous sense of relief that I'd be on my feet again soon and we could get on with our lives.'

But just two weeks before Christmas she was called back in to hospital. She said: 'A biopsy had shown my fibroid was in fact an aggressive cancer.'

On very rare occassions, a fibroid develops into cancer with a 0.2 per cent risk of malignant transformation, according to British Fibroid Trust.

Mrs Thomas said: 'On the bright side, after a CT and MRI scan, doctors were confident that they'd removed all traces of the disease.

'They made an appointment for me to have a further scan in April. I wasn't offered any follow-up treatment. No radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

'I wanted to believe that I was getting better but I'd lost all faith in the medical profession by that point.'

When Mrs Thomas began experiencing back pain and numbness in her legs earlier this month, she returned to hospital, believing she was suffering from sciatica.

Mr and Mrs Thomas, pictured during their wedding, said they have been deluged with messages from other women with similar experiences

Mr Thomas said: 'So much for a non-life threatening condition. I think it's important to raise awareness around the issue'

Mrs Thomas is receiving radiotherapy to try and shrink the tumour on her spine

But an MRI scan showed the aggressive cancer had spread to Mrs Thomas' spine.

Doctors gave her the devastating news that surgery to remove the tumour was too high risk and could leave her paralysed.

Mrs Thomas said: 'We were all stunned. This could have been prevented if doctors had acted sooner.

'I began a course of radiotherapy on March 2nd and, if the tumour shrinks as a result, then there's a chance they may be able to go-ahead and operate.'

Mr Thomas said he has been deluged with messages from other women with similar experience after sharing Mrs Thomas' story on social media.

'I felt really angry that this had happened to us,' he said.

'I posted Rachael's story on Facebook and was inundated with messages from other women whose fibroids were left so long they turned cancerous. I couldn't believe it.'

'So much for a non-life threatening condition. I think it's important to raise awareness around the issue.

'For now, we are trying to stay positive and believe there can be a happy ending for Rachael. She is going to smash this - she is one tough girl.'

A spokesperson for Aneurin Bevan University Health Board said: 'Our thoughts are with Mrs Thomas and her family and we wish her all the very best as she undergoes treatment.

'Due to patient confidentiality we cannot discuss individual cases, although we are in correspondence with the family and would be happy to meet to further discuss their concerns.'A woman went into anaphylactic shock after eating a pancake made from flour riddled with dust mites.

The 43-year-old - who has not been named - had taken just a few bites of the Japanese pancake okonomiyaki when she started wheezing, broke out in a rash and struggled to breathe.

The woman was rushed to a hospital where she told doctors in Japan she had made a pancake from flour that had been kept in an open bag for a year in an 'underfloor storage unit'.

When she provided a sample of the flour, scientists found up to 4,500 dust mites per gram.

A 30x microscope used to examine the flour the woman used to make the pancake revealed it was contaminated with Dermatophagoides farinae dust mites (left). The creepy crawly, which was present in numbers of 4,500 per gram, is pictured right at 100x magnification

An allergy test revealed the woman had a dust-mite allergy but was not allergic to any of the other pancake ingredients, which included egg, yam, pork, prawns and squid.

The patient made a 'rapid recovery' following oral - and IV - steroids, as well as antihistamines.

The incident was written in a BMJ Case Report by Dr Katsunori Masaki, from the department of internal medicine at Saiseikai Utsunomiya Hospital on Japans main Honshu island. Dr Masaki treated the patient.

WHAT IS ANAPHYLACTIC SHOCK? Anaphylaxis, also known as anaphylactic shock, can kill within minutes. It is a severe and potentially life-threatening reaction to a trigger, such as an allergy. The reaction can often be triggered by certain foods, including peanuts and shellfish. However, some medicines, bee stings, and even latex used in condoms can also cause the life-threatening reaction. According to the NHS, it occurs when the immune system overreacts to a trigger. Symptoms include: feeling lightheaded or faint; breathing difficulties  such as fast, shallow breathing; wheezing; a fast heartbeat; clammy skin; confusion and anxiety and collapsing or losing consciousness. It is considered a medical emergency and requires immediate treatment. Insect stings are not dangerous for most victims but a person does not necessarily have to have a pre-existing condition to be in danger. An incremental build-up of stings can cause a person to develop an allergy, with a subsequent sting triggering the anaphylactic reaction. Advertisement

While cooking the pancake - which she made at home for her family - the woman experienced a runny nose and sneezing due to 'aerosol distribution of the mite allergen during food preparation'.

Upon eating it, her discomfort soon escalated into other tell-tale allergy symptoms, as well as abdominal pain and diarrhoea.

Her relatives, who ate the same meal, were fine.

The woman - who suffers from hay fever - went to A&E, where she was successfully treated.

She later provided a sample of the flour to be examined under a microscope.

Scientists found 4,500 Dermatophagoides farinae dust mites per gram.

They also uncovered 11 of the microscopic mite species Chelacaropsis moorei per gram of flour.

A dust-mite allergy is common, with symptoms usually including a runny nose, swollen eyes and tight chest.

In rare cases, eating large amounts of the microscopic mites causes severe symptoms - known as oral mite anaphylaxis - due to the creepy crawlies often being heat resistant.

Oral mite anaphylaxis is considered a 'hidden' cause of severe allergic reactions and is often overlooked by doctors.

It has previously been linked to pizza dough, scones and cakes.

The danger lies in the fact contaminated flour looks normal - white and dry - when it is in the bag.

The authors warn dust mites are more likely to contaminate flour in 'tropical and subtropical areas' due to these regions' high temperatures and humidity.Hundreds of schoolchildren in London are carrying rucksacks that monitor the city's 'shameful' air quality as part of a university study into pollution.

Some 250 youngsters from five primary schools in the capital have been wearing the state-of-the-art backpacks since Monday as part of the Breathe London project.

The rucksacks contain sensors - developed by Dyson engineers and King's College London scientists - that measure particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide levels in the air.

Researchers estimate students in a quarter of schools across London are exposed to nitrogen dioxide that exceed European Union safe limits.

Nitrogen dioxide is released by vehicle emissions and irritates the lining of the lungs, leading to an increased risk of infection, as well as wheezing, colds and flu.

The rucksacks (pictured) contain sensors - developed by Dyson engineers and King's College London scientists - that measure particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide levels in the air

For the past week, hundreds of children in London have been wearing rucksacks that monitor air quality on their daily journeys to and from school. Participants in the project are pictured

The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan (pictured) launched the project and hopes it will serve as a blueprint for other cities around the world to ensure children breathe cleaner, healthier air

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan - who launched the project - said: 'It remains a shameful fact that Londons toxic air is harming the lung growth and health of our young children.

'And we are determined to do everything in our power to protect them.'

Paul Dawson, vice president of health and beauty at Dyson, added: 'Our engineers have been researching clean air technologies for over two decades.

'Our team of experts applied their leading knowledge to develop intelligent sensors, compact enough to fit in children's backpacks.

'They use our unique algorithm to process detailed reports of London's air pollution  from the moment children leave their homes, to the time they arrive at the school gates.'

Mr Dawson said youngsters' developing lungs makes them particularly vulnerable to the effects of air pollution.

'Children can take up to 30,000 breaths a day,' he said.

'City air can contain potentially harmful pollutants  including nitrogen dioxide and soot-based particulate matter.

'That's why this study is so vital. It will help us monitor exactly what our children are exposed to, to inform effective solutions.'

POLLUTION LEVELS ILLEGAL IN MOST UK MONITORING ZONES The UKs air pollution was labelled a 'national embarrassment' in September. Figures for 2017 showed 37 out of 43 air quality zones across the UK had illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution, the same number as the previous year. Annual average levels of the pollutant from exhaust fumes fell in most places, figures from the Government and environmental law charity ClientEarth revealed. But levels are still more than double the legal limit in Greater London and also well over the limit in areas including South Wales, West Midlands, Glasgow and Greater Manchester. Brighton, Worthing and Littlehampton in West Sussex  an area declared as legal in the previous year  crept up to just below the threshold again, the statistics show. The UK has been breaching EU pollution limits for nitrogen dioxide, much of which comes from diesel vehicles, since the rules came into effect in 2010. Air pollution causes an estimated 40,000 premature deaths a year in the UK and is linked to health problems from childhood illnesses to heart disease and even dementia. Advertisement

In the week-long experiment, the rucksacks - which weigh just over 2.2lbs (1kg) - will switch on and off automatically, running from 6am-to-11am and 2pm-to-8pm.

The bags - which do not have a name - can be worn as normal with plenty of room for books and lunch boxes, according to Kate Barnes, headteacher at Haimo Primary School in Greenwich, southeast London.

Haimo Primary is one of the schools that has been taking part in the project.

The data will allow researchers to better understand the most harmful air pollutants, their origins, and when and where they are highest, according to Dr Benjamin Barratt, a lecturer in air quality science at King's.

The study will also support improvements in public health, such as by encouraging parents to walk or cycle with their children instead of travelling by car, he said.

In a statement on the project, Ms Barnes said: 'Air pollution has been found to restrict lung growth in children.'

Poor lung function during childhood can persist into later life and is often associated with serious health issues, such as chronic obstructive lung disease.

'Our children are on the playground at lunchtime, running around, breathing in this air - and it's not okay,' Ms Barnes said.

'We have to do something about it, and we have to change mindsets of the parents and carers.'

Haimo Primary School successfully petitioned two years ago to close off a nearby road at the beginning and end of each day.

That has led to a significant drop in parents driving their children to school, with more taking up air-friendly modes of transport like walking, Ms Barnes said.

Haimo Primary School has even incorporated lessons on the effects of climate change, and how to combat it, into its curriculum.

'[Our students] want to help other schools - not just locally, not just nationally, but globally,' Ms Barnes said.

'They're the future leaders. If they are growing up knowing this is a problem, they're going to do something about it.'

Earlier this month, the UN called for air pollution to be viewed as a human rights issue.

It claims the problem is responsible for seven million premature deaths a year around the world, including 600,000 children.

The mother of Ella Kissi-Debrah - who died at nine years old in 2013 following several seizures - applied for a new inquest at the High Court last month.

This is after fresh evidence linked her daughter's death to illegal levels of air pollution near their London home, the BBC reported.

An individual's death has never before been directly attributed to air pollution.

Mr Khan (pictured) hopes the project will encourage more children to cycle or walk to school

Britains worst pollution hotspots was outside Earls Court tube station in London where the annual average of 129.5 micrograms per cubic metre of air was triple that of the World Health Organization's 40 mcg limit, according to research last month

Last weekend, the British branch of the UN children's agency Unicef UK held rallies in London, Birmingham and Manchester to highlight how local children, families and campaigners feel about toxic air in cities.

A third of children across Britain are breathing in illegal levels of air pollution, with the figure rising to about 75 per cent in the cities where the demonstrations were held, according to Unicef UK's campaign manager Becky Dallison.

More than 2,000 schools and nurseries in England and Wales are located close to roads with illegal levels of pollution, the agency warned.

And by 2035, air pollution-related health costs could exceed 5billion ($6.57billion) in Britain.

The Government has pledged to fight air pollution and introduce new legislation this year on air quality.

Mr Khan said he hoped the backpack initiative would serve as a blueprint for other cities around the world.

The Breathe London project, devised by City Hall and the C40 alliance of cities working to tackle climate change, has also set up more than 100 fixed monitors and air-quality monitoring cars on London streets.

An issue this large and complex requires bold and innovative action to protect future generations, and ensure our children breathe cleaner, healthier air, Mr Khan said.

The Mayor of London's office described the Breathe London initiative as 'the most comprehensive city-wide network of air quality monitors of its kind in the world'.From shaking while drinking a cup of tea to needing a nap in the afternoon, brain-cancer patients have revealed the more subtle 'symptoms' of their disease.

A study of 39 brain cancer sufferers reveals just how slight the signs can be, with many dismissing their poor memory and lack of balance as part of getting older.

Many also worried their doctor would think they were 'silly' if they went to them complaining of feeling 'grumpy' or 'clumsy' with no other symptoms.

And some participants said they hadn't sought help sooner because they were busy working parents with 'other priorities'.

A new study of 39 brain-cancer sufferers reveals just how slight the signs can be, with many dismissing their poor memory and lack of balance as part of getting older (stock)

The research was carried out by Kings College London and led by Dr Suzanne Scott, a senior lecturer in health psychology.

The prognosis for brain cancer is poor, with just 40 per cent of patients living more than a year after diagnosis and only 20 per cent surviving five years, the authors wrote in the journal PLOS One.

Despite its seriousness, brain cancer research has poor levels of investment compared to other forms of the disease.

Recent research suggests 39 per cent of brain cancer patients in the UK see their GP three or more times before being referred to a specialist.

To identify how brain cancer symptoms get missed, the researchers interviewed 39 recently diagnosed adults, and their loved ones, from east and north-west England.

Their results reveal the patients noticed they underwent 'subtle changes', such as poor concentration, headaches and simply feeling out of character.

They also reported being less interested in activities, as well as not caring about their relationships, job and hobbies.

But they did not consider these symptoms and never considered seeking help.

One woman, aged between 61 and 70, said: 'When I was drinking a cup of tea it felt like a little shake on one side but it didnt really enter my head that it would be anything'.

A man of the same age added: I was at the sink doing some washing up and I kept leaning... into the sink, very slowly.

'Its funny, you just dont even think, I should go to the doctors with this, you just dont, it just seems like, Ill get over that.'

Many of the participants failed to seek help sooner due to them 'feeling silly', believing nothing could be done or not wanting to waste their doctors' time.

As people get older, they also increasingly dismiss changes as being part of the ageing process.

A female participant aged 51-to-60 said: 'I started napping in the afternoon, so I thought Oh, Ive hit 50 now".'

And results further suggest we are less likely to take symptoms seriously if they are mild or come and go.

One female participant  aged between 41 and 50  said: 'When I was talking it was like I was slurring slightly, but it would only last for about not even a minute and it would go.'

Symptoms that coincide with periods of stress were often dismissed as being due to the participants' hectic schedules rather than a sign of illness.

I thought [it] was my job because teachers are renowned for being tired,' a female participant, aged 31 to 40, said.

'Also, a lot of other people in my job will say "oh my God Im so tired" so I just thought "everybody is feeling like that".'

The prognosis for brain cancer is poor, with just 40 per cent of patients living more than a year after diagnosis and only 20 per cent surviving five years, the authors wrote (stock)

The patients often failed to mention their symptoms to their GP because they felt they were 'unnecessary'.

'You wouldn't go to the doctors thinking "well, you know, Im grumpy, I keep rubbing my arm",' a female participant, aged 41 to 50, said.

Another woman of the same age added: 'I never, ever would have said to a GP I was more clumsy.

Others also worried about wasting their doctor's time.

'I mean, the doctors are so busy now, you dont want to keep bothering them with every little thing because theres people that need to see the doctors and cant get in,' a 41 to 50 year old woman said.

'It's just a funny thing to explain to a doctor  that you get deja vu and then a smell.'

And some were concerned their GP may think they were being 'silly'.

'I didnt want to go and say to him, I think Ive got Alzheimers, a woman said.

'Hed think I was silly because I was 31 to 40 at the time, so hes probably going to think, Oh gosh, shes a hypochondriac".'

And many, particularly busy parents, thought they had bigger problems to deal with.

A friend of one of the participants said: 'Youre a working mum and you tend to just get on with it.

'As far as youre concerned, you just think, okay, headache, whatever".'

Many of the patients only sought help when they became concerned they may have had a stroke, developed poor eyesight or have dementia.

Others were nagged into going to their GP by their loved ones.

The scientists behind the study encourage those who are worried something may be wrong to take a list of their symptoms or changes to their GP.

They also want those who are concerned to enlist the help of their loved ones, who may better notice changes in how they are acting.

Further research should look for the symptoms most associated with people putting off seeking help, the scientists add.After years of her own harrowing fertility struggles, Aprill Lane and her husband, Brian, have the family they always wanted: two sons and three daughters.

But, 'I felt strongly that my body wasn't done, even though we were resolved with our own family,' Aprill told Daily Mail Online.

She was as clear about this as she had been about wanting a big family for her whole life.

Aprill wanted to help another woman have children, it was just a matter of deciding how.

When she found out about the groundbreaking uterus transplants last year, Aprill had her answer.

So, last year, the 39-year-old mother-of-five boarded a plane from her home in Boston to Dallas - all on her own dime - so that her uterus could be surgically removed and transplanted into another woman she'd never met.

Aprill Lane, 39, donated her uterus so it could be transplanted to a stranger after Aprill endured her own fertility struggle but ended up having five children

Aprill is one of four children, and from the time she was a little girl she knew she wanted to be a mother to the same kind of family she was raised in - a big one.

'On our wedding day, when we were doing vows, the pastor said "be the father of our children" and I responded "be the father of our four children."

That was in December 2007. Despite starting to try as soon as they were married, Aprill and Brian had still not conceived by mid-2008 and sought reproductive counseling.

It didn't make any sense. They were both reproductively healthy, and were given the only diagnosis left, 'unexplained infertility.'

'For some reason, when our sperm and egg met, they didn't match very well,' Aprill says.

'I think if we were diagnosed in 10 years, we would know why.'

Their fertility specialist assured Brian and Aprill that she was confident they would be able to conceive, eventually.

'But when you're getting older, five or 10 years is a long time,' Aprill says.

For three-and-a-half years, Aprill underwent grueling IVF treatments.

When April married her husband, Brian, (right), she made it clear in their vows she wanted a big family - 'four children' - the couple is thrilled to have five:

It was a lonely time. As their friends had children, she and Brian stopped getting invites to birthday parties, and dinners.

Aprill found support groups on line that placed women in chat groups based on what round of IVF they were on.

It was a great comfort, at first, but she became part of small subset of women that just kept getting bumped to the next chat as others got pregnant. At one point, their group was called 'IVF 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.'

'[Infertility] is a draining disease that's often misunderstood, and people don't quite understand it, so instead people shy away from you...it's physically draining and and emotionally draining as well.'

So Aprill and Brian decided they would just have to have a different kind of family - an adopted one.

In 2011, they adopted Miles from birth, and almost immediately the last thing they expected happened: Aprill got pregnant. The couple's second son, Mark, was born 13 months after his older brother.

And then, after another 10 rounds of IVF trying for a third, they had twin girls, Marlee and Josie, now three.

After years struggling to conceive, Aprill and Brian are now the proud parents of five children, Miles, Marlee, Juliet, Josie and Mark (left to right)

They thought they were done, but just before the twins' second birthday, the Lanes found out Aprill was pregnant again - spontaneously and without IVF - with daughter Juliet, now two.

'Once we got to Miles' birth, then it all happened really fast.

The couple agreed that five kids was enough to keep their hands full, but Aprill still felt like she 'would keep going if there was a car big enough.'

She considered surrogacy, but as beautiful as pregnancy was for Aprill, it was also nine months of unrelenting sickness, and she knew it would be hard on the young family.

Last summer, the nonprofit Aprill founded to help families being treated for reproductive issues get funding got an application unlike any she'd seen before.

The applicant had received a uterus transplant. Aprill knew that - if she qualified - this was what she wanted to do.

'It's a way of helping someone carry a pregnancy without me having to do it physically,' she says.

'And giving back in acts of kindness is a big theme in our family'

Before donating her uterus, Aprill had to undergo all manner of tests, including to make sure her veins were strong enough to be transplanted (left) and took selfies as she did a breathing test at the hospital in Dallas (right)

Aprill had fly to Baylor University Medical Screening to undergo extensive screening, and run the idea by her entire family - including all five children, ages two to seven.

When she got the news that she'd been accepted as a donor, Aprill and her husband were both thrilled.

'I actually felt pride in my body,' Aprill says.

'For so many years, you think your body is failing you, and then I was like, "shoot, my body is awesome."'

She and Brian prepared themselves, and their children for Aprill's trip from Boston to Texas, teaching the children how to do new tasks for themselves that their mother wouldn't be able to during her two months of recovery, and explaining to them exactly what her body would be going through.

Within months, Aprill was on a plane to Dallas, ready to bid her uterus farewell.

The surgery went smoothly, but recovery proved harder than expected. She had been worried about sexual dysfunction and incontinence, but had been able to find reassurance from other donors or research.

The entire Lane family was involved in Aprill's decision to donate her uterus, and they were thrilled for her when she was accepted to the program

Miles, seven, was adopted from birth, Juliette, two, was a conceived spontaneously and unexpectedly and Marley, three, Mark, six and Marlee, three, were all conceived via IVF (left to right)

What she couldn't have estimated was the extent of the pain of her recovery. She knew she wouldn't want to take painkillers, but Aprill hadn't known any other donors that had made the same choice.

Nonetheless, she had to get back to work - though thankfully from home, where she could lie down while working from her laptop, just 13 days later.

Aprill wasn't really herself, unable to lift things or go on runs, for about eight weeks.

But she had been through so many years of the physical and emotional pain of infertility for so many more years than that - and she had the hope that her uterus might end that for another woman.

And Aprill says she doesn't miss her uterus, or the periods she stopped having once the organ was gone (though she still has her ovaries).

'It's actually been really healing for me,' she says.

After donating her uterus, Aprill did a boudoir shoot to capture 'the beauty of the scar' seven weeks after surgery, before it faded

'I didn't realize how much of my emotional health was tied to getting my period every month and even when we weren't actively trying it was a monthly reminder of failure and it hit me hard every single month.'

That's not to say that Aprill was unfeeling in the whole process.

'In the beginning, I was very worried about the recipient,' she says.

'I was worried about [the transplant] instilling some hope into her and then it failing and me being a part of a letdown.'

But the two women have since communicated, anonymously, and Aprill has even sent a 'period package' with pads and a 'diamond uterus pin.'

If the recipient agrees - which would most likely happen after she's given birth - Aprill would very much like to get to know her.

I'd love to meet her,' she says.

'I don't have an emotional attachment to my uterus because I've learned to disconnect from it to protect myself.

'So it's not about that, but the science is just amazing.

'[The recipient] has lived her whole life not thinking she could have a child, and I think it would be awesome to connect with her once she has success.'

ACCIDENTAL AGENT by Alan Judd (S&S 14.99, 272 pp)

ACCIDENTAL AGENT

by Alan Judd (S&S 14.99, 272 pp)

As a former soldier and diplomat, Judds insight into the intelligence service is on display in this superbly crafted spy thriller.

Brexit is looming and Charles Thoroughgood, head of MI6, knows he is not supposed to be spying on the European Union, no matter how tempted.

Suddenly, his ambitious deputy uncovers an extraordinary source of information on the EUs thinking. But is it to be trusted? Is his deputy gilding the lily because he wants to take over Thoroughgoods job as MI6s C?

Charles knows his masters in the Foreign Office will be anxious to get their hands on what may represent the EUs bottom line.

At the same moment, he discovers that he may have a family connection to a suspected terrorist on the loose in Britain, whom MI5 are keen to investigate.

A beautifully observed, vivid picture of modern spying.

THE DEVIL ASPECT by Craig Russell (Constable 16.99, 496 pp)

THE DEVIL ASPECT

by Craig Russell (Constable 16.99, 496 pp)

This scalpel-sharp dissection of the nature of evil from the award-winning Russell is set in Czechoslovakia in 1935. An ambitious, if naive, young psychoanalyst, Dr Viktor Kosarek, has a new job at a remote lunatic asylum in a castle that houses the so-called Devils Six, the most dangerous killers in Europe.

Meanwhile, in Prague, a serial murderer known as the Leather Apron is preying on young women in a way that is uncannily reminiscent of Jack the Ripper.

All this is set against the background of the rise of National Socialism, and the Nazi party, in neighbouring Germany.

A splendidly Gothic story, inspired by European folklore, it asks difficult questions about how we judge evil  including whether the Devil can show himself in human form. It is breathtaking.

FREEFALL by Jessica Barry (Harvill Secker 12.99, 368 pp)

FREEFALL

by Jessica Barry (Harvill Secker 12.99, 368 pp)

A compelling debut, this opens with a young woman surviving a two-seater plane crash in the Colorado Rockies, where the pilot dies.

Allison Carpenter is determined to survive, though you are never quite sure why, nor why there appear to be mysterious pursuers anxious to find her. Thousands of miles away, her mother, Maggie, is desperate to discover whether Allison is alive.

So begins a search across the U.S., where nothing is what it seems. Allison appeared to have the perfect life, engaged to a handsome, rich new boyfriend whom her mother knew nothing about. Are there skeletons in his life which may have put Allison in danger? Emotionally true and strikingly well told.(ANSA) - Rome, March 22 - Italian President Sergio Mattarella said Friday that Chinese President Xi Jinping's State visit was strengthening cooperation between the nations. "Cooperation between Italy and China will be confirmed during the much-welcomed visit of President Xi with trade agreements," Mattarella said after meeting Xi at the presidential palace in Rome.

Mattarella hailed the memorandum of understanding that the Italian government is set to sign on Saturday related to Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative - a massive infrastructure plan that seeks to create a sort of modern-day Silk Road to better connect China to Europe and Africa. "The signing of the Italy-China memorandum is a sign of the attention devoted to a framework for an increase in cooperation between Italian businesses and Chinese businesses," he told a joint news conference with Xi.

THE FOURTH SHORE by Virginia Baily (Fleet 16.99, 384 pp)

THE FOURTH SHORE

by Virginia Baily (Fleet 16.99, 384 pp)

Virginia Bailys effortlessly enjoyable third novel shares some similarities with its predecessor Early One Morning, which maps the turbulent family dynamics between a woman and a Jewish boy following the Nazi occupation of Rome.

This time, the lesser-known Italian occupation of Libya between the wars is the setting for a sweeping story about the disastrous consequences of an adolescent sexual awakening, as Liliana Cattaneo, a young naif from Italy, falls for an Italian fascist while staying with her older brother in Tripoli.

Much of the story is told in the form of recalled memories, and Baily is very good at exploiting the poignancy of flashback. Liliana, now a widow who has been living in England for decades and unhappily estranged from her Italian family, returns to Rome on a whim after the assassination of her nephew, ordered by Gaddafi.

Italian brutalities in Libya remain a quiet but insistent presence in an emotionally rewarding novel so succulent with detail that you can almost feel the Tripoli sand storms whipping across your face.

LIAR by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (Pushkin Press 12.99, 256 pp)

LIAR

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (Pushkin Press 12.99, 256 pp)

This latest novel by the acclaimed Israeli writer is initially hard going but by the end it has the momentum of a psychological thriller.

Mousy student Nofar, 17, has been verbally abused at work in an ice-cream parlour and, in the confusion that immediately follows, she allows a policewoman to believe her aggressor sexually assaulted her.

From this small slippage of the truth, a distortion of enormous proportions grows, as Nofar becomes a national celebrity, paraded on TV and praised for her moral courage, while her alleged attacker faces public opprobrium and a probable prison sentence.

There is one problem: a boy saw what really happened, and soon he and Nofar are embroiled in a compromising quasi-sexual relationship.

Gundar-Goshen carefully shades in the grey between the black and white, allowing our sympathies to slide around the more others become implicated in Nofars deceit. The power of testimony lies not just in what is said, but in what people seek to hear, and she explores that minefield with historical perspective and clear-sighted detachment.

SPRING by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton 16.99, 352 pp)

SPRING

by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton 16.99, 352 pp)

Just when things were starting to look really bad, along comes the third instalment in Ali Smiths seasonal quartet to lift us out of the gloom.

Her great project is to novelise the moment in which we live  Spring was finished only weeks ago.

It abounds with fecund narratives about borders and migration, while extending and deepening what, three novels in, is becoming an extraordinary embodiment of the ways in which storytelling connects us.

A lapsed film-maker, mourning the death of his scriptwriter, decides on impulse to take a train to Scotland.

A worker at a detention centre also finds herself hurtling north, alongside a preternaturally clever 12-year-old girl, whom she strongly suspects of somehow helping detained refugees break free.

At the same time, the work of Katherine Mansfield and Rilke, the history of Culloden, Greek myths and the propulsive lyricism of spring itself, thread together in narratives of loss and rejuvenation.EVERYBODY DIED, SO I GOT A DOG

by Emily Dean (Hodder 16.99, xxpp)

When Emily Dean was young, she dreamed of having a dog, but, most of all, of living in a dog family. The sort of families that have dogs, you see, are normal.

They have routines, their houses are tidy, they budget for phone bills, insurance policies and food for the freezer. And with their dog, the whole family would settle down to watch David Attenboroughs Life On Earth before bedtime.

Life at home in the Dean family was totally different: rackety, disorganised, Bohemian, and lived to an accompaniment of drama, unpaid bills and four-letter expletives.

Instead of Rice Krispies for breakfast, Emily and her sister, Rachael, might eat leftover canapes from a party the night before. This was definitely not the kind of home where dad would remember to buy dog biscuits.

Emily Dean (pictured) who is now the only surviving member of an extraordinary family shares her upbringing in a disorganised Bohemian household in a new memoir

Emilys father, Michael, was a hugely famous pioneer of arts television, working with Joan Bakewell on Late Night Line-Up and making documentaries always masking his semi-detached selfishness with pretentious quotations. Her mother, Christine Collins, an actress, seemed to be a rather sad figure whose career (such as it was) had been derailed by the arrival of two children.

One of lifes perpetual understudies, who believed her agent was always about to call, she veered between Night-time Mum (who smoked and drank and screeched in dressing rooms), and cuddly, loving Daytime Mum. Says Emily, The two characters seemed to be stuck in an eternal tussle.

And then there was beautiful Rachael  Emilys adored older sister, the stable one, who would go on to create her very own dog family. An adored wife and mother, her life was cut brutally short by cancer when she had everything to live for.

EVERYBODY DIED, SO I GOT A DOG by Emily Dean (Hodder 16.99, xxpp)

Emily is now the only survivor of this extraordinary family  her parents died three years after her sister. The title of her funny, sparklingly honest and heart-breaking memoir pulls no punches. It is a defiant statement that refuses to tiptoe around grief. It contains misery and happiness in one phrase.

When Emily was 13, she came home from school to find a letter on the doormat from her father. He was on a plane to New Zealand, allegedly for the sake of his career. I am sorry not to have told you in person, he wrote, and hoped that one day she would forgive him.

Shocking to read, this anecdote (told with Emilys trademark breeziness) is a reminder that Michaels favourite poet Larkin was dead right in his summation of what some parents do to their children.

The following year, her mother landed a small acting role in Australia and left the sisters with two different families; their cat Treacle was rehomed. Their fathers many infidelities now out in the open, the girls had to tolerate  on a rare visit  his praise of his new girlfriends children. Emilys judgment on his behaviour is all the more devastating for being lightly expressed. As you read, you admire her more and more.

The sisters take different paths  Emily lurches through relationships and lives a glamorous life as a journalist; Rachael settles down with Adam, has two children and gets Giggle the dog.

Then comes something terrible. The account of her sisters diagnosis, death, funeral and the aftermath is written with moving control, dignity and beauty  yet its clear Emilys grief and rage pushed her close to the edge.

Rachaels dog proves to be important in the healing process . . . but Emily isnt ready for her own canine friend yet. First, she has to endure the death of her mother from motor neurone disease, and then the sudden loss of her (still estranged) father after a stroke. Just one of those bereavements would tax most of us; Emily Dean buries all three of her family members near each other  then is forced to process her complex feelings.

The result? She signs up for a retreat that takes her to the deepest levels of healing and forgiveness. She learns to stop blaming and even love herself. And  hooray!  she finally gets a dog: Raymond the Shih tzu. This is proof that, at last, she can accept her past and move forward, dog-lead in hand, to buy dog biscuits.

The finale of this rather wonderful book  where she smuggles Ray into the cemetery to meet her family  is so endearing it had me in tears.THE MAN WHO WAS SATURDAY

by Patrick Bishop (William Collins 20, 320pp)

Could the disguises and the dissembling really work? The chances seemed pretty slim.

Surely their imitations of German officers uniforms would be rumbled straight away by even the dopiest of sentries, ending ignominiously the bid by Airey Neave and his companion to escape from Colditz, the formidable fortress for troublesome prisoners-of-war in Nazi Germany.

The silver epaulettes on their long greeny-blue overcoats were made from lino, their dyed trousers were the wrong shade, the leggings of their jackboots were cardboard.

In a new biography, Patrick Bishop recounts the life of British Army lieutenant Airey Neave who was assassinated (pictured) by the the Irish National Liberation Army using a home-made bomb in 1979

Yet, on a dark, snowy January night in 1942, Neave, a British Army lieutenant, and Dutch officer Tony Luteyn carefully crept from their hiding place beneath the stage of the camp theatre, down a spiral staircase, past the German officers mess and the guardroom and out onto an open bridge over the castle moat.

They strode forward, bold as brass, passing one sentry, who stared hard but saluted, then another, until they came to a wicket gate and took a path that Neave knew from a previous escape attempt led to the bed of the dry moat and up the other side. Then it was a mad scramble over a high stone wall . . . and theyd made it. They were free.

The two of them swapped their fake uniforms for workers clothes and headed for the nearest train station.

Four days (and many close calls) later, they were ploughing through heavy snow on their hands and knees and across the border into neutral Switzerland.

Neave was the first Briton to make a home run from supposedly escape-proof Colditz  a moment of triumph he would never forget and for which he would always be remembered as a hero.

Pictured: Airey Neave with Margaret Thatcher in March 1979 before he was murdered by a car bomb in the House of Commons car park

He wrote later: We had pitted our wits against the might of Nazism and cheated the Germans in all their self-conscious arrogance and cruelty.

Thirty-seven years later, in 1979, he would be a national hero again, though of a different sort. As a Tory MP and an outspoken Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland who advocated a tough line against terrorists (including the death penalty), he was targeted by INLA, the Irish National Liberation Army, an offshoot of the IRA.

A three-man hit squad from Belfast attached a home-made bomb to the underneath of his car, a modest Vauxhall Cavalier, and it exploded as he was driving up the ramp and out of the underground car park at the Houses of Parliament.

His injuries were so severe that police did not recognise him at first even though he was a prominent public figure. He died in hospital.

It was a heinous and shocking assassin-ation that brought terrorism to the heart of Westminster  and a crime for which no one has ever been brought to justice.

A visibly moved Margaret Thatcher  whose surprise election as Tory leader Neave had masterminded and who just a month later would enter Downing Street as prime minister  hailed him as a staunch, brave man, one of freedoms warriors, a person of tremendous inner strength.

Yet, paradoxically and almost tragically, as this perceptive biography shows, he was a man who, inside, never really thought he was up to the mark. His private diaries  to which author Patrick Bishop has had access  reveal him as a troubled soul whose successes never compensated for what he saw as his failures.

This sense of inadequacy began at school (Eton), where he was perceived as conscientious rather than inspired or inspiring, and continued at Oxford, where he only managed a Third, a so-called gentlemans degree.

After a couple of years as a trainee lawyer, he went to war in 1940 and was quickly captured when the Germans overran Calais.

THE MAN WHO WAS SATURDAY by Patrick Bishop (William Collins 20, 320pp)

His part in the British Armys heroic last stand there was minimal, as he was all too keenly aware.

He was leading a searchlight platoon rather than a combat unit, took a bullet in the side when they came under fire during the last-ditch defence of the town and was lying helpless in a makeshift underground aid post when it was overrun and he was forced to surrender.

His direct engagement with the enemy had amounted to a few futile shots in the air at a German spotter plane.

He felt deep shame, and, though he was being hard on himself, this proved the spur. He refused to accept incarceration and see out his time as best he could but would make every effort to escape.

On the run for three days from one camp, he fell into the hands of the Gestapo, was probably tortured (though, typically, he never talked about it) and threatened with a firing squad. His punishment was to be sent to Colditz.

Escaping from there made his name but also meant, to his dismay, that he could never be sent on front-line military duties again (for security reasons, in case he was captured a second time).

He joined Military Intelligence and, with the codename Saturday, became a pivotal part of MI9, a little-known but dynamic department running escape routes out of occupied Europe for Allied soldiers and airmen caught behind enemy lines.

Thousands of men were brought back, thanks to his efforts  though the self-deprecating Neave would always see them and their Resistance helpers in France (particularly the women) as the heroes rather than himself. Mine did not seem a soldiers life, he lamented.

In search of real action, Major Neave (as he now was) finally got his chance when, after D-Day, he and the SAS set up a secret holding camp in a forest south of Paris as a refuge from German reprisals for those on the run.

All in all, it was a more than creditable war record for one man, rounded off when he was appointed as the lawyer to serve war crime indictments on the Nazi leaders such as Goering and Hess at the Nuremberg trials.

Yet he returned home unfulfilled and about to face even more disappointment. The post-war decades were a let-down for him (as they were for many men returning to civvy street).

He struggled to make a living as a jobbing barrister and struggled too to have any impact as a backbench Conservative MP after his election to Parliament in 1953.

Despite the fame (but not riches) he got from his well-received books on his wartime exploits, most notably They Have Their Exits about his escape from Colditz, political promotion eluded him.

He was no wheeler-dealing Francis Urquhart (as in the House of Cards character), but rather the plaything of party whips. Indeed, after Neave suffered a heart attack in 1959, the then Tory chief whip Ted Heath supposedly dismissed him to his face as finished.

He despaired of everything  not least when the hugely popular TV series on Colditz in the Seventies left him and his pioneering escape out of the script entirely.

He recorded plaintively in his diary: I would like to be somebody but it is, I fear, too late. It wasnt. There was to be one last great escape from the obscurity he feared.

Shortly after, he attached himself to an up-and-coming Tory MP, Margaret Thatcher, whom he admired as brilliant and beautiful. She was also fearless, reminding him of the amazing women guides and couriers he knew who had risked their lives to run the escape lines in Europe during the war.

When Heath was challenged as Conservative leader in 1974, Neave took on her campaign and did so brilliantly.

Reaching back to the tricks of dissembling that had secured his exit from Colditz, he managed to persuade Tory MPs that she couldnt possibly win the leadership on the first ballot.

They could safely vote for her to be sure of ousting Heath, then plump for one of the safer, male candidates, such as Willie Whitelaw.

It worked. Heath  Neaves nemesis  was out. Thatcher  thanks to Neave  was in. He finally had the success he always craved and there would certainly have been more to come with a senior place in government.

But there was a price, and in that terrible explosion four years later, he paid with his life.

This time there was no escape.BOOK OF THE WEEK

I TALK TOO MUCH

by Francis Rossi (Constable 20, 320pp)

The extraordinary thing about the survivors of the great Sixties and Seventies rock boom is, simply, that so many of them have survived.

Keith Richards will obviously outlive us all, but Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon are still around, as indeed are all four of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

And given how many drugs he has taken over the years, and how little of his nose he still has in full working order, Status Quos Francis Rossi looks in remarkably good health these days. Its only their fans, like me, who crumble prematurely into dust.

Francis Rossi (pictured right with Rick Parfitt in 2014) recounts his rise to fame in rock group Status Quo in a fascinating new memoir

Rossi has a good story to tell. From their earliest days in the mid-Sixties as The Spectres, through a stop-start pop career in the late Sixties, the glory denim days of the Seventies, massive wealth and ludicrous expenditure in the Eighties, and easy middle-aged contentment thereafter, Status Quo have just kept going.

Rossi is the only original member left. John Coghlan, the drummer with the moustache and the ridiculously long hair, stomped off in a rage in 1980.

Alan Lancaster, the diminutive hard-man bassist, went after Live Aid in 1985. And Rick Parfitt, Rossis partner in rhythm for nearly half a century, died of a heart attack in 2016, having long since used up his nine lives in a high-octane life of showbiz excess. He lived as though there was no tomorrow, and eventually he was proved right.

So rather a lot has happened, and Rossi is happy to talk about all of it. This is rarer than you would think in a rock memoir, but Status Quos USP, at least in their early days, was always their absolute authenticity.

No one would grow their hair or wear those double denims or play that relentless chug-chug rock n roll of theirs if they didnt want to. In the end, of course, it all turned them into raving lunatics, as we find out.

Rossi was brought up in a large Italian family in South London, and was imbued from birth with a strong work ethic. Working evenings and weekends was just normal to me. I think this must have affected my attitude later when I became involved in trying to make it in a band.

Strange hours, working on those days and nights when so-called normal people were relaxing, never worrying about things like holidays, putting every spare penny back into the business  none of this was a sacrifice to me.

Rock musicians tend to bang on about their need for artistic expression and creative freedom. Rossi, by contrast, always recognised the constant need for another hit single.

As highly strung as the strings on his guitar, hes nowhere near as outgoing and confident as you might think. Im actually always in fear of things becoming out of control. Im in fear of people. Its hidden away in some of my best-known lyrics and its probably one of the reasons why I got lost in drugs for so many years.

Francis (pictured alongside Rick partfitt and Alan Lancaster in 1973) is the only remaining original member of Status Quo

But look at it another way, and you could say that it was Rossis drive and nervous energy that fuelled the bands rise in the early Seventies, just as much as his songs did. The rest of the band were of a different stripe. Alan Lancaster had been a friend of Rossis at school.

He was the tough little kid the more nervous Rossi had hidden behind, and he never really changed at all. Lancaster did write and sing several songs over the years but, against all the evidence, he always saw himself as the leader of the band, and wouldnt compromise over anything.

Rossis portrait of him is hil-arious: a permanently enraged toerag, constantly ready to argue about anything.

Francis who grew up in a large Italian family in south London recalls working strange hours to achieve hits and sacrificing things such as holidays in order to have money to invest

Rick Parfitt was, unlike Rossi, rock star incarnate. He was constantly buying flash cars, having brief and tempestuous affairs with blondes and, perhaps inevitably, running out of money. And if the girls werent blonde to start off with, they soon were.

I TALK TOO MUCH by Francis Rossi (Constable 20, 320pp)

Once on a bus, the band were reminiscing about their schooldays. Rossi said hed love to go back in time and learn more, because he missed so much of it, having been ill as a child.

Rick said: F*** all that. I know all I need to know. Rossi was dumbfounded. How could anyone say anything so arrogant? But Rick was like that. Full steam ahead, no looking back.

The Eighties make for a pretty grim read. The drugs overpower the band, and the records get worse and worse. But Rossi doesnt judge his past self too harshly, which is itself refreshing.

Did it go to our heads? he asks at one point. Of course it did. It is meant to, isnt it?

Happily, Rossi has been drink- and drug-free since 1989, and has therefore had a long time to contemplate the wreck he made of his life in the middle years.

Hes a strange old fish: at times modest and self-deprecating, often very funny about his misadventures, but occasionally you see a glint of pure ego. Thats a rock star for you. All those limousines eventually seep into the blood.

In the main, though, this is a surprisingly amiable memoir from a man who sees no need to lie or obfuscate. He even tells the truth about his hair transplant. As you might imagine, it really hurt. So did a lot else, it seems, in an unusual and highly readable book.More than half of British blue-chip firms are under fire from shareholders over the massive pension deals handed to bosses.

As many as 54 companies in the FTSE 100 have been handing chief executives cash payments worth at least a quarter of their salary every year towards their retirement.

Some chiefs receive a pension top-up worth more than a third of their salary  with Tui chief executive Friedrich Joussen handed 489,000 a year, or 51 per cent of his basic pay.

Tui chief executive Friedrich Joussen handed 489,000 a year in pension contributions, or 51 per cent of his basic pay

This flouts tough new guidelines from the powerful Investment Association that state pension payments should be worth no more than 24 per cent of salaries.

And for new chief executives the figure should be in line with what staff receive  typically below 15 per cent.

The IA  which represents the Citys major investors who manage more than 7trillion of assets  looks set to issue a string of warnings over companies breaching the code.

It sets the scene for major investor rebellions as companies put their pay schemes to shareholders at annual general meetings in the coming weeks.

IA members include Schroders, Legal & General, Invesco, Prudential, Aviva and Aberdeen.

Andrew Ninian, corporate governance director at IA, said: Members have been clear this is an issue of fairness and pension contributions should be aligned with the majority of the workforce.

And the worst offender is... TUI The boss of travel firm Tui enjoys a bumper pension scheme bigger than any other in the FTSE 100. Friedrich Joussen got a contribution of 489,000 to top up his pension pot and cover associated fees last year. That represented 51 per cent of his 953,000 salary and was the highest contribution in percentage terms in the FTSE 100. The boss of travel firm Tui enjoys a bumper pension scheme bigger than any other in the FTSE 100 German-headquartered Tui claims that the costs cover a payment of 394,000 a year which goes into a pension fund the 55-year-old can access in seven years time when he hits retirement age, with the rest covering costs associated with looking after his money. Joussen was given this lucrative pension agreement in 2014 as part of a new contract at Tui. It dwarfs the contributions for junior staff, who get a maximum of 5pc of salaries. Even pilots only get 15 per cent.

Luke Hildyard, of the High Pay centre, said: With vast pay awards, top bosses would rake in much higher pension payments than ordinary workers, even if they were paid on the same terms.

But most chief executives receive a much bigger proportion of their salary. Such blatant double standards leave a sour taste in the mouth of ordinary workers.

Most chief executives get a cash lump sum every year towards their pension, calculated at a specific percentage of their salary.

Unlike regular staff members whose funds are locked away until they retire  they can invest this cash in the market or spend it as they would with normal pay.

Research for the Mail shows that in 2017 a total of 54 FTSE 100 businesses paid their bosses contributions of 25 per cent or more.

Major offenders include Ross McEwan at bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland, who gets 35 per cent or 350,000 of his 1million base pay; Pascal Soriot, of drugmaker Astrazeneca, who picks up 30 per cent or 375,000 of his near 1.3million salary; and Ivan Menezes at drinks firm Diageo, who gets 30 per cent or 351,000 of his 1.2million wage bill.

Others receiving 30 per cent or more include Rakesh Kapoor of Reckitt Benckiser, Marco Gobbetti of Burberry and Mike Coupe of Sainsburys. The IA crackdown has triggered panic in boardrooms, with some already announcing pension payments will be cut.

At Aviva, contributions for chief executive Maurice Tulloch were cut from 28 per cent to 14 per cent when he was promoted to the job this month, in line with other staff.

But other firms have been accused of trying to get around the guidelines.

Lloyds faces backlash after it cut boss Antonio Horta-Osorios pension payments to 33 per cent of his salary or 419,000  still more than the IA limit. It also increased his other fixed pay by 175,000, offsetting the cut. The IA has warned tricks to boost pay will not be well received.Pressure is mounting on the UKs competition watchdog to investigate the leasehold scandal that has left up to 100,000 families facing crippling ground rents.

Furious MPs accused developers, solicitors and investors of deliberately running a racket to rip off customers and called on the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to take action.

It comes just days after the CMA rebuffed calls for it to step in, despite pressure from Housing Secretary James Brokenshire and an influential committee of MPs.

Rent row: MPs have accused developers, solicitors and investors of deliberately running a racket to rip off customers

Officials claim there would be little to learn from a full-blown market study and have refused to countenance a new probe because of preparations for Brexit.

But MPs yesterday insisted there was evidence of a serious cross-market failure that required the CMA to step in.

Speaking in the House of Commons, they said elderly people were among those hoodwinked into buying houses on leases and claimed tens of thousands of families might be victims of mis-selling.

Housing committee chairman Clive Betts said: Developers have denied they deliberately mislead leaseholders but the number of near-identical stories reflects a serious cross-market failure.

We hope our call will act as pressure on the CMA to finally act.Government borrowing has fallen to its lowest level in 17 years due to a surge in tax receipts.

The public sector borrowed 200million in February, lower than expected and significantly down on the 1.2billion borrowed the previous year.

It takes borrowing for this financial year so far to 23.1billion  a fall of 18billion from the same period a year earlier, and its lowest level since 2001-2002.

A a surge in tax receipts has given Chancellor Philip Hammond a war chest of more than 26bn which he can spend without breaking his fiscal targets

The improvement was largely driven by higher payments from income and capital gains taxes, which together brought in a total of 6billion last month.

Tax payments have beaten all predictions since the Brexit vote, triggering a dramatic improvement in the public finances.

It has given Chancellor Philip Hammond a war chest of more than 26billion which he can spend without breaking his fiscal targets  setting the stage for tax cuts or spending rises if a Brexit deal is struck.

Overall public debt stands at nearly 1.8trillion. This is equal to 82.8 per cent of the British economy, down from 84.2 per cent a year earlier.

Experts warned that borrowing could rise sharply if Britain leaves the EU without a deal.

John Hawksworth, chief economist at PwC, said: 'All bets would be off in the case of a disorderly No Deal Brexit, which could push UK growth into negative territory, dampening tax revenue growth and widening the budget deficit significantly over the next few years.'Investors are a sceptical bunch, and the City was clearly not quite convinced by Chemring's attempt to reassure the market yesterday.

The troubled defence contractor, which has equipment on the Curiosity Mars rover programme, said 85 per cent of its profit and 60 per cent of its revenue will be made in the second half of the year because of 'planned and unplanned' disruption at several of its sites.

Many in the City will have read the news as a veiled profit warning, despite Chemring also saying that its full-year expectations have not changed.

Defence contractor Chemring said 85 per cent of its profit and revenue will be made in the second half of the year because of 'planned and unplanned' disruption at several of its sites

It is still suffering disruption to flare manufacturing operations following an explosion in Salisbury last August that killed one employee and injured another.

And it has now said that as well as a planned temporary closure to a plant in Australia, its sites in Tennessee and Norway both 'experienced the failure of manufacturing equipment'.

Investors will find out the full-scale of the disturbances when it releases first-half results on June 5. Yesterday's news sent Chemring shares down by 7.9 per cent, or 12.2p, to 142.8p last night.

A profit warning for engineering group Renishaw sent the FTSE 250-listed group's share price down 11.2 per cent, or 470p, to 3730p.

Stock Watch - Xaar Shares in tech company Xaar fell after revenues slumped 36.5 per cent and pushed the firm into the red. Cambridge-based Xaar makes the printer part that transfers ink on to paper - known as the printhead. Revenue plunged from 100million in 2017 to 63.5million last year, partly driven by poor sales of printheads used to decorate ceramic tiles. It made a 12million loss compared with an 18million profit last year. Xaar shares shed 7 per cent, or 8.7p, to 116.3p last night.

Renishaw, which makes components such as robotic equipment that can be used in brain surgery, said it expects pre-tax profit to be 123million to 141million, down from 146million to 166million estimated in January.

It expects a slowdown in demand in Asia for its products to continue throughout the rest of the financial year.

AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould pointed out Renishaw's previous profit stumbles were during notable global economic upheavals such as the 1997 Asian debt crisis and financial crisis between 2007-2009.

He said the latest could reflect a 'slowdown in the smartphone market and the bloated inventories which have caused so much difficulty for silicon chip makers'.

Elsewhere on the FTSE 250  where a lot of the headline corporate news was concentrated yesterday  shares in energy group Enquest rallied as it said revenue and profit rose, and issued a confident outlook on production at its flagship Kraken field in the North Sea. Shares rose 11.3 per cent, or 2p, to 19.64p.

The FTSE 250 moved into the red yesterday, losing 0.21 per cent, or 41.40 points to 19,347.58, while the FTSE 100, on the other hand, rose 0.88 per cent, or 64.30 points to 7355.31.

Legoland, Alton Towers and London Dungeon operator Merlin shed 5.5 per cent, or 20.2p, to 348.7p after Berenberg cut its rating to 'Sell' from 'Hold'.

Analysts said they struggle to see the company achieving earnings growth in any division this year despite its cost-saving plan and investments in new sites and hotels  though they did say the company was 'priced for perfection'.

And Crest Nicholson shares fell 8.9 per cent, or 34.6p, to 354.2p after JP Morgan cut its target price for the housebuilder in a sector review note  from 440p to 400p. Crest shares also went ex-dividend yesterday, meaning its shares no longer qualify to receive the most recently declared payout.

Kier shares lost significant ground for the second day running after it posted a first-half loss of 36million on Wednesday.

Kier's stock fell 7 per cent, or 30.2p, to 399.2p per share.

And finally, Diaceutics shares rose 15 per cent on its first day of trading on AIM.

Belfast-based Diaceutics, which provides data analytics services to big pharma companies, raised 17million at a placing of 76p  in the first float on AIM so far this year.

Shares rose 15.13 per cent, or 11.5p, to 87.5p.The White House is actively trying to put together an Arab fighting force that could replace American troops in Syria, allowing President Trump to make good on his promise that U.S. soldiers deployed there would be coming home soon.

Not only does President Trump want Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to donate billions of dollars to the war effort, the Wall Street Journal is reporting, he's asking them to commit troops to the war-torn Middle East country, too.

According to WSJ, the president's new national security advisor, John Bolton, asked Egypt's acting intelligence chief officer, Abbas Kamel, if Cairo would be willing to put boots on the ground in Syria.

The White House is actively trying to put together an Arab fighting force that could replace American troops in Syria, like the ones seen here in March of 2017 in Aleppo

Trump has asked Arab nations for billions of dollars for the war effort. Now, he wants them to send in troops, too

A U.S. fighter stands near a military vehicle, north of Raqqa city, Syria in November of 2016. The U.S. has roughly 2,000 troops in Syria at present

A U.S. official also told the publication that 'Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the U.A.E. have all been approached with respect to financial support and more broadly to contribute.'

An Arab fighting force would be chalked full of complications. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are locked in an intense regional dispute. The UAE, Bahrain and Egypt joined Saudi Arabia in cutting ties with Qatar last summer over the Gulf state's alleged support for extremists.

At an end-of-March event, Trump suggested that a plan was nearly in place when he said, 'Were knocking the hell out of ISIS. Well be coming out of Syria, like, very soon.

'Let the other people take care of it now,' he added.

But that was before Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad carried out a deadly chemical weapons attack on the rebel-held town of Douma.

On Friday, in conjunction with the U.K. and France, Trump ordered targeted strikes against Assad's forces.

In a national address Trump argued that the airstrikes were vital to the national security interests of the United States.

'We are prepared to sustain this response until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents,' he pledged.

But Trump also said the United States' friends in the Middle East needed to assist in the long-term effort to stabilize Syria.

'We have asked our partners to take greater responsibility for securing their home region, including contributing large amounts of money for the resources, equipment, and all of the anti-ISIS effort,' he said.

'Increased engagement from our friends, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, and others can ensure that Iran does not profit from the eradication of ISIS.'

President Trump has met with or has plans to meet with heads of state from each of the countries, with the exception of Egypt, in recent weeks as he considers what to do when a deadline to extricate the United States from the Iran nuclear deal arrives next month.

European officials are begging the U.S. not to back out of the 2015 deal that gave Iran sanctions relief so it would halt its nuclear weapons program. However, Iran's illicit ballistic missile development, terror financing and support for Assad in Syria have tempted Trump to follow through on a campaign promise to tear it up.

Next week Trump will host French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House for the first state dinner of his 14-month presidency.

The Iran deal is likely to come up as the two leaders discuss the quagmire in Syria.

Yesterday, Trump's spokeswoman pushed back on a boast from Macron that he had persuaded President Trump to keep U.S. troops in Syria.

Sarah Sanders reaffirmed that the United States' policy has not changed, and it would still like to pull American soldiers deployed in Syria out as soon as feasible.

'We've talked about this for a while, but our policy hasn't changed. We still have troops on the ground,' she said. 'But the President wants to bring those people home, and that hasn't shifted.'

At a National Security Council meeting Trump is said to have requested that the troops come home in the next six months.

Sanders wouldn't confirm that timeline to reporters on Monday.

'We don't have a timeframe on it,' she said. 'It's not based on an arbitrary timeline, but on defeating ISIS and also getting the Gulf partners in the region to step up and do more both militarily and financially.'For many years, Sophie Peel was too embarrassed to explain to friends why she missed so much school or why she always came off the netball court suffering from excruciating pain in her hands and feet.

It's only in recent years that the 21-year-old Canberra university student has been able to open up about the rare disease that has had such a huge effect on her life.

Ms Peel was 12 when she was diagnosed with Fabry disease, a rare genetic condition that can affect many parts of the body.

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Sophie Peel will undergo fortnightly enzyme replacement therapy for the rest of her life

People with the disease don't make enough of an enzyme that's essential for breaking down waste in the body, leading to cell damage that can cause severe pain, headaches, fatigue, skin lesions and gastrointestinal problems.

Sophie is the only person in her family who suffers from it.

'I was referred to various specialists but it took a long time to get a definite diagnosis,' Ms Peel told Daily Mail Australia.

'I remember it being a long and ambiguous period because specialists weren't confident to diagnose the condition as Fabry, which was difficult and frustrating.'

Prior to the diagnosis, Sophie suffered acroparesthesis - a condition characterised by a burning sensation in the hands and feet - for five years when she was a child.

'I played netball every weekend and would come off the court every game because my fingers and toes felt like they were on fire,' Ms Peel recalled.

'It made it for me hard to catch for ball, so it was difficult for people other than my parents to understand what was going on.'

The Canberra university student doesn't let Fabry disease get in the way of her travels now - but the condition left her struggling with schoolwork when she was younger

The most severe of her symptoms was intense abdominal pain, which left Ms Peel frequently exhausted and unable to leave the couch.

'I missed a lot of school because I was in so much pain for hours and hours at a time,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'No medication would help relieve the pain. It was a struggle keeping up with schoolwork and explaining to friends why I was absent so often.'

When she was 16, Sophie became one of the first children in Australia to undergo enzyme replacement therapy, which dramatically reduced the severity of her symptoms, including the frequent abdominal pain.

Once too embarrassed to tell friends, Sophie has opened up about her rare genetic disease

Five years later, Ms Peel has moved away from home to study genetics at the Australian National University.

She still makes the three-and-half-hour drive back to Sydney once a fortnight for enzyme replacement therapy, which she'll undergo for the rest of her life.

She underwent brain surgery last December to have a shunt installed after she was diagnosed with the unrelated condition hydrocephalus, which results in fluid on the brain.

Now in her final year of study, Ms Peel hopes to pursue in a career in the health field which will allow her to travel and explore the world.

Last Thursday, she called for an earlier and more accurate diagnosis of rare diseases like Fabry to help improve and save Australian lives to coincide with Rare Disease Day.

Sophie Peel now leads a far more normal life thanks to enzyme replacement therapy and hopes to pursue a career in healthcare

Sohpie hopes to raise awareness about rare diseases suffered by two million Australians

'It's a way of making people aware of diseases they wouldn't normally heard about in everyday life,' Ms Peel told Daily Mail Australia.

'My case isn't bad compared to others, where it has taken years for them to get an accurate diagnosis.'

She has found friends to be understanding since she started opening up about her condition.

Ms Peel is also hopeful about ongoing medical trials into Fabry disease.

'I hope improvements can be made so less people have to go through the symptoms,' Ms Peel said.

'I was referred to various specialists but it took a long time to get a definite diagnosis,' Fabry disease sufferer Sophie Peel (pictured) told Daily Mail Australia

There are up to 8,000 recognised rare diseases with new diseases identified each week.

Up to 80 per cent of rare diseases are genetic and up to 30 per cent of rare disease patients will die before their fifth birthday, according to Genetics Alliance Australia (GAA) and Gaucher Association Australia & New Zealand.

More genetic services can assist with the testing, diagnosis, management and counselling of those living with a rare disease.

'This significant loss of life is unjustifiable. It is therefore imperative that the medical community act now to offer Australians living with a rare disease the best chance at life.' GAA executive director Jan Mumford said.

'The complexity of rare, genetic diseases can make them extremely difficult to diagnose, leading to a 'diagnostic odyssey' where patients consult with a number of specialists before obtaining a definitive diagnosis.'(ANSA) - Rome, March 22 - Chinese President Xi Jinping said in Rome on Friday that Beijing does not want trade and investment relations with Italy to be a one-way street. "The Chinese side wants trade in both directions and a flow of investment in both directions," Xi said after meeting Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

The Chinese president said the meeting with his Italian counterpart was "fruitful' and featured "broad agreement".

He also argued that the good bilateral relations between the States were positive for the whole international community.

"Looking at the world, we have an epochal change before us," Xi said.

"China and Italy are two important world forces to safeguard peace and promote development.

"China wants to work with Italy to revive the spirit of fairness, mutual respect and justice".

The muscle-bound killer of Melbourne crime lord Carl Williams is providing cruel fitness advice to the ex-wife of the slain gangland boss from behind bars.

Matthew Johnson was sentenced in 2011 to life in jail with a non-parole period of 32 years for the brutal execution of Williams inside Barwon Prison.

But his incarceration has not stopped him from continuing to taunt his victim's family from within the jail's state-of-the-art high security unit: Olearia.

Matthew Johnson as he appeared on the Facebook profile he used to taunt the ex-wife of Carl Williams. Johnson killed Williams in jail after it was revealed he had turned into a police informer

Matthew Johnson took to social media to taunt the ex-wife of Roberta Williams after he watched her attack a reporter on television. Johnson murdered Carl Williams with the stem of an exercise bike

Carl Williams smiles from the prison dock after being sentenced to jail over a series of gangland murders. Matthew Johnson violently wiped the smile off his face and continues to laugh at his family even from behind bars

With the help of an associate outside jail, Johnson took to social media a day after Roberta Williams appeared in a bizarre television interview, in which she attacked a reporter.

'Stop sooking Roberta and go get on a treadmill,' Johnson posted to Facebook - to the amusement of his friends and followers.

A Current Affair reporter Reid Butler was throttled by Williams during the interview after he reminded her ex-husband had been a ruthless killer.

'You're going to die, you dog,' Williams yelled during the attack.

She declined to comment on Johnson's remarks when contacted by Daily Mail Australia.

Corrections Victoria spokesman Michael Gleeson said prisoners do not have access to the internet and cannot upload or publish information themselves.

'Under the Corrections Act 1986, it is an offence for a prisoner to possess a mobile phone or electronic device, or for any person to introduce contraband into a prison. These offences carry a maximum penalty of two years imprisonment,' he said.

Opened in 2016, the $36 million unit is officially a prison within a prison, separated from the rest of Barwon and housing its own visits centre and medical wing.

'He's very closely monitored. He doesn't have access to the Internet or a phone or any of that stuff,' a prison source said.

But authorities believe Johnson had been operating the social media page with help from either a friend or family member on the outside.

Matthew Johnson is one of the most feared men in jail. Known as 'The General' he heads the Prisoners of War prison gang and continues to taunt his victims from Barwon Prison's toughest unit

A haunting image captured on CCTV from within Barwon Prison. It shows Carl Williams reading a copy of the Herald Sun before he is bashed to death

Several family members appeared to be friends with him on Facebook, where he was affectionately referred to as 'The General'.

Corrections Victoria last month warned inmates who phoned friends with instructions to publish posts on social media would have privileges taken away from them.

The warning followed tweets by Russell Street bomber and fellow Barwon inmate Craig Minogue of news drug lord Tony Mokbel had been stabbed in jail.

Russell St bomber and fellow Barwon inmate Craig Minogue. He broke the story from behind bars that Tony Mokbel had been stabbed in jail. His prison rants have become common on Twitter

Drug lord Tony Mokbel is wheeled out of Barwon Prison after he was stabbed. News of his attack broke on Twitter by a fellow inmate. It has caused authorities to review laws to try and keep inmates off social media

The state government is in the process of implementing new offences under the Corrections Regulations 2009, targeting communications by third parties on behalf of prisoners.

The new offences will come into force over the next couple of weeks, with prisoners found in breach subject to disciplinary action, such as withdrawal of privileges and fines.

The state government has also written to the Commonwealth Government to seek a national approach targeting third parties communicating on behalf of prisoners.

Johnson is believed to be among a who's who of inmates still using social media from behind bars.

A quick search linked to Johnson's Facebook profile revealed another profile in the name of cop shooter Sam Liszczak.

Liszczak was jailed last year for a minimum of six years over a 2015 escapade where he shot and firebombed properties thought to belong to Carl Williams' father George and Roberta Williams.

Cop shooter Sam Liszczak was ordered by Matthew Johnson to shoot up the homes of Carl Williams' dad and ex-wife. He also appears on Facebook in a variety of photos captured of him from behind bars

The Facebook profile of cop shooter Sam Liszczak. He was jailed for six years after a rampage that saw him blast a cop in the face. The officer survived

It ended when Constable Ben Ashmole was blasted in the face from near point-blank range with a shotgun.

Johnson was already recognised as one of the state's most feared criminals when he was bizarrely housed with Williams.

He later said he murdered the tubby drug dealer in self-defence.

Johnson is part of the notorious Prisoners of War jailhouse gang which despises snitches and is known for its brutal hazing rituals.

Roberta Williams during a recent visit to court in Melbourne. Matthew Johnson suggested she should get on a treadmill. The former wife of killer Carl Williams refused to comment on the remarks

Barwon Prison houses a who's who of Victoria's most dangerous criminals. Killer Matthew Johnson remains behind bars there where he recently taunted the ex-wife of Carl Williams, whom he murdered

An official autopsy report showed Williams - who was wearing Calvin Klein underwear - was struck once to the right side of the head from behind while he sat reading the newspaper in the high-security unit's common area he shared with two other prisoners.

He then fell to the ground where he was struck up to seven times to the left side of his head.

'He was later dragged, face down by the offender to his cell where he remained for almost 30 minutes before being located by prison guards,' forensic pathologist Melissa Baker wrote in a report soon after the murder.

The brutal attack saw Williams die almost instantly.

Johnson's Facebook profile mysteriously vanished from the site on Wednesday morning.American whiskey producers are suffering a worsening hangover from the Trump administration's trade disputes.

Overall exports of bourbon, Tennessee whiskey and rye whiskey fell 11 percent during the second half of 2018 compared to the prior-year period, as the impact of tariffs started to be felt, the Distilled Spirits Council said in a report Thursday.

Exports to the European Union fell 13.4 percent in the second half of the year, after rising 33 percent during the first six months, owing in part to companies like Jack Daniels maker Brown-Forman Corp, fast-tracking shipments overseas, especially to Europe, before the tariffs kicked in.

The European Union, which imposed a 25 tariff on American whiskey, is the largest market for the liquor, accounting for nearly 60 percent of total exports, according to the Council.

President Donald Trump talks with reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House today

Bottles of spirits at the Prichard's Distillery in Nashville, Tenn. A spirits industry trade group says the tariff-induced hangover for US whiskey producers became more painful in late 2018

'With the full-year data in hand, it is clear that the retaliatory tariffs are having a significant and growing impact on American whiskey exports,' council President and CEO Chris Swonger said in a release.

'The damage to American whiskey exports is now accelerating, and this is collateral damage from ongoing global trade disputes.'

American whiskey makers have been caught in the middle since mid-2018, when the EU targeted American whiskey and other U.S. products in response to President Donald Trump's decision to slap tariffs on European steel and aluminum.

Whiskey makers in the U.S. also face retaliatory tariffs in Canada, Mexico, China and Turkey as part of other trade disputes.

Those duties amount to a tax, which producers can either absorb in reduced profits, or pass along to customers through higher prices - and risk losing market share in highly competitive markets.

In the EU, American whiskey exports declined 13.4 percent in the second half of 2018 when tariffs slammed the brakes on shipments, the council said.

It was a much steeper drop than the 8.7 percent export decline the council had reported for July through November of last year.

The EU still accounted for nearly 60 percent of total American whiskey exports in 2018. The United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and France are among top export destinations for American spirits.

US President Donald J. Trump speaks to the media as he departs the White House for his Mar-a-Lago resort

Catoctin Creek Distillery whiskey is on display in a tasting room in Purcellville, Virginia

And the end-of-the-year holiday season is traditionally the spirits industry's strongest sales season.

Large and small American distillers alike are sharing the pain.

Scott Harris, co-founder and general manager of Catoctin Creek Distillery in Virginia, said Thursday that just 1 percent of its overall 2018 revenues came from Europe, compared with about 11 percent the prior year.

Before the trade disputes erupted, he had hoped the European business would grow to one-fourth of total 2018 revenues.

'Essentially, it just turned off, went off a cliff,' he said of his distillery's business in Europe.

It's created a dilemma for Harris - whether to resupply his rye whiskey stocks in Europe to maintain a presence there in hopes the trade conflict ends soon.

'Are we going to take it on the chin and just eat the cost of the tariffs ourselves by lowering our price into Europe just to stay relevant in the market?' he said. 'Or are we going to not sell over there?'

He hasn't decided yet. His distillery's domestic sales rose 30 percent last year, but as his sales evaporate in Europe, he sees a 'lost opportunity' after working for years to develop markets there.

American whiskey exports to the EU surged by 33 percent in the first half of 2018, partly due to stockpiling of whiskey supplies by some large American distillers ahead of the tariffs.

Smaller distillers, however, didn't have the luxury of stockpiling. And with those supplies disappearing while trade disputes continue, large distillers are being hit, too.

Spirits industry giant Brown-Forman Corp., best known for its Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey brand, said recently that if the tariffs stay in place, the annualized cost to the Louisville, Kentucky-based company would be about $125 million.

The company said it is taking actions to try to mitigate about half of the tariff impact expected in its current fiscal year.

Despite the dramatic slowdown in the second half of 2018, American whiskey exports still managed a 5.1 percent overall gain in exports last year, to a record $1.18 billion.

That was due to a 28 percent surge in total whiskey exports in the first six months of the year, the council said. But last year's increase was down sharply from the annual growth rate of 16 percent in 2017, it said.Advertisement

A copy of London's iconic Tower Bridge in east China has drawn ridicule after it was left unrecognisable from an expensive makeover.

The Tower Bridge replica, which is double the size of the British version with four turrets, was built in the tourist city of Suzhou, Jiangsu province in 2012.

Government officials last September invested 20 million yuan (2.2 million) in renovation works to 'make it more Chinese' and 'more coherent with the surrounding architectural style', Chinese media reported.

After: A copy of London's iconic Tower Bridge in east China's Suzhou city has drawn ridicule after it was left unrecognisable from an expensive makeover. The local government spent about 20 million yuan (2.2 million) in to 'make it more Chinese'

Before: The Tower Bridge replica, which is double the size of the British version with four turrets, was built in 2012

Some users even said it looks like a military Pillbox - a concrete guard post dating back to World War Two

The renovated landmark was recently unveiled following six months of construction, according to Beijing News.

Photos and video footage released on Saturday show the entire structure painted over with grey paint, its distinctive pointed turrets mowed flat and its ornate mullions replaced with rectangular panes - much to the horror of surrounding residents and net users.

The structure, which has been a hit location for 'European-style' wedding photography, now looks like a prison, net users said in protest.

Twin towers: The old version of the replica has been a hit location for 'European-style' wedding photography

Photos released on Saturday show the entire structure painted over with grey paint, its distinctive pointed turrets mowed flat and its ornate mullions replaced with rectangular panes - much to the horror of surrounding residents and net users

'Who ever re-designed this has absolutely no sense of aesthetic,' one user said on Weibo. 'Ugly beyond belief!'

Some users even said it looks like a military Pillbox - a concrete guard post dating back to World War Two.

'Who decided to remove the pointed turrets? It's so ugly I can't look at it,' one user commented on Chinese microblogging site Weibo.

'Who ever re-designed this has absolutely no sense of aesthetic,' another comment read. 'Ugly beyond belief!'

'To be honest, it looked quite magnificent before as it was a pretty good replica, now it just looks ridiculous,' another person said.

Unlike the real span in the UK capital (pictured), which was opened in 1894, Suzhou's model is not cantilevered and cannot open to let tall boats pass

Each of the five-storey towers of the Chinese version is 131 feet tall and are connected by a pair of suspended walkways

The bridge, located above the river Yuanhetang, is 45.9 meters (150 feet) wide and includes fast and slow lanes and a pedestrian pavement.

Each of the five-storey towers is 40 meters (131 feet) tall and are connected by a pair of suspended walkways. There are also elevators taking visitors to the top for a bird's-eye view of the city.

Unlike the real span in the UK capital, which was opened in 1894, Suzhou's model is not cantilevered and cannot open to let tall boats pass.

An official of the Xiangcheng district government said the renovations are necessary to repair wear-and-tear damage

'Who decided to remove the pointed turrets? It's so ugly I can't look at it,' one user said on Chinese microblogging site Weibo

An official of the Xiangcheng district government told Beijing News in late January that the renovations are necessary to repair wear-and-tear damage following years of traffic.

'Considering the area's future urban development, we also re-designed the structure to make it more coherent with the overall surrounding architectural style,' the official added.

Sitting about 200 miles north-west of Shanghai, Suzhou has become well known for cloning other world-famous landmarks.

In 2008, the Suzhou government announced they would build the copies of 56 landmark bridges from around the world on its rivers.

A replica of the Louvre Pyramid in Paris has also been built in a theme park in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province

East meets West: A structure that is half Temple of Heaven in Beijing, half Capitol Building in Washington was build in Hebei

So far, the city has its own Sydney Harbour Bridge, as well as a copy-cat Pont Alexandre III bridge straight out of Paris, the French capital.

On top of that, the area boasts a Dutch town complete with windmill and Dutch-style housing.

The city with 6.6 million residents is often dubbed the 'Venice of the East' and has been an important hub of China's silk industry for around a thousand years.

Elsewhere in China, replicas of world-famous landmarks can be found, including a Thames Town near Shanghai, a replica of Austria's Hallstatt resort in Luoyang, Henan and copycats of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysee square in Hangzhou.

Last June, a full-size replica of the Great Sphinx of Giza has reappeared in a theme park in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province

The life-size replica of the Sphinx belongs to the Hebei Great Wall Film Studios in north China

Last June, a full-size replica of the Great Sphinx of Giza has reappeared in a theme park in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, reigniting fury from the Egypt government.

The Sphinx copy measures almost the same size as the original, with its appearance resembling closely to the world-famous limestone statue currently standing on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile.

The model belongs to Hebei Great Wall Film Studios. Chinese media previously reported that the statue had been built as a film set in the theme park.

But it unlike the original - which was carved from limestone - the Chinese version appears to have been built using reinforced concrete.Deputy Ryan Thompson. Thompson, 42, was shot and killed by a man in the country illegally

The road rage suspect who killed a sheriff's deputy, wounded a police officer and died in a central Washington state shootout this week was living in the United States illegally, the federal government said Thursday.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Juan Manuel Flores Del Toro, 29, was a citizen of Mexico who entered the United States in 2014 at Laredo, Texas, on a temporary agricultural worker visa.

The agency had no record that Flores Del Toro left the U.S. or extended his visa after it expired.

Meanwhile, police said Thursday they were still investigating the suspect's background and why he led the officers on a chase before the gunbattle.

Ellensburg Police Capt. Dan Hansberry said Flores Del Toro lived in Ellensburg, a university city of 20,000 residents east of Seattle, in agriculturally-rich central Washington.

Flores Del Toro died in a hospital a short time after the Tuesday evening gunbattle.

The body of a Kittitas County Sheriff's deputy is draped with a U.S. flag as it is carried out of Kittitas Valley Healthcare Hospital in the early morning hours of Wednesday, March 20, 2019, in Ellensburg, Wash

The body of a Kittitas County Sheriff's deputy is draped with a U.S. flag as it is carried out of Kittitas Valley Healthcare Hospital in the early morning hours

Fire and law enforcement officials join others in saluting as the body of a Kittitas County Sheriff's deputy draped with a U.S. flag

Kittitas County Sheriff's Office officials react outside the Steward & Williams Funeral Home and Crematory in Ellensburg, after the body of Sheriff's Deputy Ryan Thompson was brought there

Investigators do not know why Flores Del Toro fled, and there were no warrants pending for his arrest, Hansberry said.

Police in the past 'had limited contacts with him,' but Hansberry described them as 'nothing of real significance' without providing further details.

Officers had tried to stop Flores Del Toro's vehicle after they received a complaint about the motorist's driving that authorities have described as a 'road-rage type event' without disclosing more details.

, Frank Johnson, center, pastor of the Chestnut Street Baptist Church, leads a prayer outside the Kittitas County Court House in Ellensburg during a vigil for Sheriff Deputy Ryan Thompson

Flowers, a flag, and other items are displayed at a growing memorial to slain Kittitas County Sheriff's Deputy Ryan Thompson on a sign outside the Sheriff's office in Ellensburg

A woman leaves flowers at a growing memorial to slain Sheriff's Deputy Ryan Thompson

A Kittitas County Sheriff's deputy was killed and a police officer was injured after an exchange of gunfire during an attempted traffic stop

A sheriff's deputy was killed and a police officer was injured after an exchange of gunfire during an attempted traffic stop

The body of a Kittitas County Sheriff's deputy is draped with a U.S. flag as it is loaded into an ambulance for a procession away from Kittitas Valley Healthcare Hospital

A law enforcement chaplain walks into Kittitas Valley Healthcare Hospita

A Kittitas Valley Fire & Rescue ambulance carries the body of a Kittitas County Sheriff's deputy away from Kittitas Valley Healthcare Hospital

An EMT reacts while listening to Kittitas County Sheriff Gene Dana, not shown, speak at a news conference

Police chased Flores Del Toro's car, which stopped in a house trailer park near the small town of Kittitas, about 5 miles from Ellensburg. Flores Del Toro got out of the vehicle and used a handgun to exchange gunfire with officers, Hansberry said.

Sheriff's deputy Ryan Thompson, 42, was killed and Kittitas police officer Benito Chavez, 22, was shot in the leg, suffering a shattered femur. He was hospitalized Thursday in satisfactory condition.

Thompson was married with three children.

Chavez was hired for the three-person Kittitas police department last July, officials said.

It was the first fatal shooting of a law enforcement officer in Kittitas County since 1927, officials said.

Kittitas County Sheriff Gene Dana speaks at a news conference on Wednesday

Ellensburg Police Chief Ken Wade, center, talks to reporters as Kittitas County Sheriff Gene Dana, left, and Kittitas Police Chief Chris Taylor, right, look on during a news conferenceSniffer dogs uncovered 450 bricks of cocaine in Philadelphia, the city's largest seizure of the drug in more than two decades.

Local, state and federal law enforcement officials said Thursday the cocaine was found inside 13 duffel bags in a shipping container.

Customs and Border Protection's Area Port Director for Philadelphia Joseph Martella says Tuesday's seizure amounted to more than 1,185 pounds of cocaine worth about $38million.

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A total of 450 bricks of cocaine, weighing 1,185 pounds with a street value of $38 million, was put on display at the U.S. Customs House

This image provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows cocaine seized from a shipping container at the Philadelphia seaport

U.S. customs officials say drug dogs sniffed out Philadelphia's largest seizure of cocaine in more than two decades

Martella says the ship was ported in Guatemala before stopping in the Bahamas and was destined for the Netherlands.

Bricks of the narcotic were stuffed in duffel bags found in a shipping container filled with liquid rubber aboard the MSC Desiree, which was traveling from Colombia to Europe,

Based on their historical data, and the area where it left from and went through being considered a 'high-risk area,' the container was searched by a K-9 unit on Tuesday and the drugs were found.

The container was brought to the Port of Philadelphia on North Delaware Avenue.

Multiple agencies, including Philadelphia Police, Pennsylvania State Police, Delaware State Police, Homeland Security, the DEA, the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection, inspected it around 10.30 am Tuesday.

U.S. Customs & Border Protection Mid-Atlantic Region spokesman Stephen Sapp said following a multi-agency inspection, the alleged contraband was discovered inside a shipping container.

It is Philadelphia's largest seizure since 1998.

The cocaine confiscation is the largest for the CBP Area Port of Philadelphia since May 1998

450 bricks of cocaine were found inside 13 duffel bags in the shipping container

Casey Durst, CBP's Director of Field Operations in Baltimore, hailed the team who conducted the apprehension.

'Taking a half-ton of dangerous drugs out of circulation is a significant success for this collective team of federal, state and local law enforcement officers who work very hard every day to keep people safe,' Durst said.

'Customs and Border Protection remains committed to working with our law enforcement partners and to disrupting narcotics smuggling attempts at the Area Port of Philadelphia.'

Federal and local authorities seen here at the Port of Philadelphia inspected the container after noticing the bolts on the door had been tampered with

Multiple law enforcement agencies are seen at the Port of Philadelphia where they seized at least 450 bricks of cocaine

Federal and local authorities inspected the container after noticing the bolts on the door had been tampered with.

Last month, customs agents seized 3,200 pounds of cocaine worth $77 million at Port New York/Newark.

The cocaine haul at the Port of New Jersey and New York was three times larger than the latest Philadelphia seizure and the street value of the cocaine was worth three times more at $77 million.

Customs agents seized the biggest shipment of cocaine recovered at the ports of New York and New Jersey in 25 years.

It's the biggest cocaine seizure at the ports since 1994. The drugs were hidden behind boxes of dried fruit aboard a cargo ship.

The shipment was intercepted when the vessel stopped over in New York/Newark on its way to Antwerp, Belgium.Two WAGs who use Instagram to claim vaccines are not safe have had their social media accounts restricted over their 'dangerous' views.

Shanelle Cartwright, wife of Titans player Bryce Cartwright, and Taylor Winterstein, wife of Frank Winterstein, who plays for the Penrith Panthers, have both been unable to make permanent posts to Instagram or Facebook, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Both women had regularly made posts against vaccinating children, and Ms Winterstein is running a $200 workshop on 'Making Informed Choices', which alleges vaccines are not safe for humans - a claim widely disputed by western medicine.

Two anti-vaxxer NRL WAGs have had their Instagram accounts restricted for spreading 'misinformation' regarding vaccines. Shanelle Cartwright and Taylor Winterstein were both unable to make permanent posts to their page, and could only use Stories

On Wednesday, Ms Winterstein told Instagram followers: 'I still don't have access to my main IG page and can not post, so I will have to do all future posts on IG stories only, until my page stops being censored'.

She thanked her pro-vaccine friends for standing by her, and said she was simply fighting for the 'freedom to choose'.

Ms Cartwright revealed in an Instagram story video she had also been censored two weeks ago, and had chosen to stop posting about vaccinations to ensure she could still use her account.

'A few of you have asked me to post more vaccine things,' she said.

'I'm actually not going to because my page was censored for about a week a couple of weeks ago so I'm not going to.

'My friend Tay, her account has been censored. She can't post at all on it, only on the stories so it's a bit hard for her to keep posting.'

Ms Cartwright (pictured with her family) responded to the action by saying she would no longer make posts about her views on vaccines

Ms Winterstein, who is running a $200-per-ticket workshop on 'making informed choices' says she will just use stories for now

Earlier this month, Facebook revealed in a blog post how they would combat misinformation about vaccines by reducing the platform the content was given.

The company vowed to reduce the ranking of groups and pages that spread misinformation about vaccinations, reject ads that include misinformation and disable accounts that continue to try and run anti-vaccination ads.

Facebook has also vowed not to 'show or recommend content that contains misinformation about vaccinations on Instagram Explore or hashtag pages'.

'We are exploring ways to share educational information about vaccines when people come across misinformation on this topic,' the post said.A man was left 600 out of pocket after he had to prove to NatWest that he had not stolen his own credit card.

Teddy Eastoe had his credit card stolen after applying for one with NatWest in order to boost his credit rating.

The 24-year-old said there was no proof that the card had been delivered or where it had been stolen from as Natwest didn't send the card as tracked through Royal Mail.

Now Teddy says he has 'lost faith' in the bank despite them offering him 250 in compensation.

Teddy Eastoe (pictured above) had his card stolen from his home near Belsize Park in London

Teddy, who lives in London ordered the card in February but didn't receive it. However when he checked his online banking two weeks later, he realised that 614.91 had been spent on the credit account.

After calling NatWest on February 15 while going through check-in at Stansted Airport with his girlfriend for a trip to Berlin, the bank said it would process a refund.

However, more than three weeks later on March 11, the bank called and informed him that they were contesting his story.

Teddy had been on a shopping trip to Selfridges in London. The thieves used the card six hours after Teddy's transaction, which led NatWest to believe that he had used the card himself.

Speaking to MailOnline Teddy said the bank had tried to use the fact that Teddy had shopped in the department store earlier that day to blame him for the transactions.

'I've completely lost faith in them and I don't think they had a right to accuse me of using the card.'

NatWest is said to have claimed that because the credit card had been used on TFL services in central London, that it was Teddy using the card. As well as this Teddy said that Natwest highlighted that there wasn't much time between the transactions, despite the card having also been used at retailers that Teddy had never shopped at before.

Teddy said: 'They were extremely selective with the process and the information they had access to. I've to been with them for ten years they abused their position of power.

Teddy (above) had been travelling to Berlin with his girlfriend when he realised the money was missing

'I questioned whether or not this would have happened if it was a new customer, would there have been more suspicion then?'

Teddy who lives in an area of Belsize Park which has had over 10,000 stolen from it in recent months, then decided to take matters into his own hands.

He gathered information about where the transactions took place and contacted the stores in question to see if CCTV still remained from the dates. However due to the time it took NatWest to respond to him, some of the CCTV had been deleted.

But another, Size? in Camden, still had the recording, and said a man not fitting Teddy's description was captured buying some trainers.

Teddy said he tried to open a case with Action Fraud, which handles fraud cases, but the details he provided meant it could not be 'classified as a police crime.'

However, Teddy said police closed the case after 24 hours, without taking a statement.

Speaking to the MailOnline, a spokesperson for the Met said: 'On 12 March a report was made relating to a bank card being taken between 6 February and 15 February.

'No transaction details were given on the report. 'Police tried to call the victim the following day. A message was left with a crime number. Due to the lack of investigative opportunities, the case was closed at that point, pending further information or evidence coming to light.

'Additional information was provided by the victim later on 13 March. The case was re-opened the following day and allocated to an investigating officer on 15 March. The officer sent an email to the victim requesting additional information which will be assessed and investigated.

'There has been no arrest at this stage and enquiries continue.'

However Teddy stated that when he initially reported the crime, the police had only taken a few details.

'They left me a voicemail the following morning (13/03) and within just over four hours of receiving that, they sent me the attached email to say they had closed the case before I had the chance to contact them.

The bank has now offered Teddy 250 in compensation and refunded the money

'It was only once I contacted 101 again and explained that I had a store which had confirmed they have CCTV footage of an individual making the transactions that the case was re-opened and assigned to an officer in the borough of Camden.'

NatWest initially offered Teddy 50 in compensation but has since pushed the offer up to 250.

Despite this Teddy says he doesn't know how he can put a value on the time and stress which was caused by the case.

'I'm extremely frustrated and disappointed in all honesty. An element of me that knew it would get resolved  I knew I was innocent  at the beginning I didn't realise the extent I had to go through.

'With most things it's innocent until proven guilty but it seems like with NatWest it's the opposite.

'I've spent a whole working week contacting the police, NatWest, Action Fraud and Royal Mail.'

Speaking to the MailOnline a spokesperson for NatWest said: 'We take our responsibility to prevent fraud very seriously. We are sorry to learn that Mr Eastoe has been a victim of this fraud.

'Having undertaken a further review of this case we have offered Mr Eastoe a full refund as well as a gesture of goodwill for the inconvenience that this has caused. 'The head of a radical Christian church is planning to boycott New Zealand's two minutes of silence on Friday because it will include a Muslim 'call to prayer' which says Allah is the only God.

Apostle Bishop Brian Tamaki, head of Destiny Church, said the country will become a Muslim nation as it remembers the victim's of the Christchurch terrorist attack.

The prayer will be broadcast nationally on TVNZ and Radio NZ.on just before 1:32pm local time followed by two minutes of silence.

'On Friday...at least for a moment NZ will become a Muslim Nation...2min of silence is ok but the Islamic Prayer will sound?,' Bishop Tamaki posted.

'It contains this line '...there is no God but Allah' well I Disagree...'Jesus Christ ' is the only True God...This is Not US!.'

Bishop Brian Tamaki has shared this post slamming the Muslim call to prayer on Friday at 1.30pm

The call to prayers, known as adhan, is part of Islamic tradition and formally tells Muslims it is time to worship.

Words include 'Allahu Akbar' or 'God is great', and 'La ilaha illa Allah' which means 'there is no god except the one God'.

The call to prayers will be followed by two-minutes of silence on Friday to mark a week since 50 people were murdered and 50 others injured in a mass shooting.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said arrangements for a memorial service, likely to be held next week, were still being made.

'While it will be in Christchurch, we are looking at how we can involve the rest of New Zealand,' she told reporters in Christchurch on Wednesday.

Apostle Bishop Brian Tamaki (pictured) claims that the prayers will make New Zealand a Muslim nation

Bishop Tamaki, whose church was launched in a warehouse in 1998 and has hardline views on homosexuality, disagreed with the call to prayers.

'Jacinda Ardern has abused her Prime Ministerial Decree in allowing 'Allah as the Only True God' to be Sounded in Muslim Prayer,' he said.

'This is offensive to all True Christians in Aotearoa..Our National Identity is at stake,' he shared.

Twitter users have claimed that Tamaki does not understand the term Allah and have criticised his posts

Twitter users have questioned whether Tamaki really understands the term Allah and have slammed him for being 'disrespectful.'

One person said: 'I'm pretty sure I read in the bible that there are many names for God. Yahweh is one. Allah is another. There are many more.'

Another said: 'Gosh, well then, it's probably quite a good thing that your opinions really do not matter to the rest of us.'

'Didn't Jesus say I have sheep that are not of this flock? John 10:16,' another posted.Shocking footage has emerged of a boy producing a meat cleaver and swinging it at other youngsters during an after-school fight.

The clip filmed on a mobile phone shows pupils in school uniform brawling at a car park in Oldham, in yet more violence on Britain's blood-soaked streets.

At least four boys can be seen scrapping and throwing punches as a group of teens surround them watching on.

After one of the boys falls into a hedge a youngster in a tracksuit pulls out a huge knife on him.

The youngster can be seen bringing the blade down upon the boy in the hedge (left) and the other boy uses his legs to parry the attack (right)

The blade-wielding thug takes a swipe at the boy as he lies helplessly in the hedge before turning round at aghast onlookers and waving the weapon wildly.

The fight is believed to have taken place on Thursday close to the Toby Carvery in Chadderton, the Manchester Evening News reported.

A spokeswoman for Greater Manchester Police said they were aware of an incident and had launched an investigation.

It is not thought that any serious injuries were sustained in the attack.

The news comes as a knife crime epidemic is sweeping the country, with the number of criminals being caught with knives at a ten-year high.

The knife-wielding thug can then be seen standing on the path as he waves the blade around, while other youngsters back away from him

Before the blade was drawn, around four boys (left and right) could be seen scrapping and throwing punches as others watched or tried to pull them off each other

Earlier this month the country was sickened by the murder of 17-year-old Jodie Chesney, a Girl Scout who was stabbed in the back as she sat on a park bench in Romford, east London.

Yousef Makki, also 17, a Manchester Grammar School boy was slain in Cheshire just one day after Miss Chesney's death.

Last night an 18-year-old man was left seriously injured after being stabbed in the leg and stomach in Essex. While another man of the same age in Balham, London, was rushed to hospital by air ambulance with a stab wound.Scott Morrison's plan to cap migration will slow the construction industry and force thousands of tradesmen out of a job, an economist has warned.

The Prime Minister on Tuesday announced plans to set a limit of 160,000 permanent migrants per year.

A slowdown in population growth would mean fewer houses need to be built, causing a decrease in the number of jobs available to tradesman, according to Housing Industry Association chief economist Tim Reardon.

Scott Morrison's plan to cap migration will slow the construction industry and force thousands of tradesmen out of a job, an economist has warned (stock image)

A slowdown in population growth would mean fewer houses need to be built, causing a decrease in the number of jobs available to tradesman, according to Housing Industry Association chief economist Tim Reardon (stock image)

'If we see a contraction in population growth at this point in the cycle, that would accelerate the downturn in home-building activity and have stronger implications for the wider economy,' he told The Australian.

'One in 10 Australians is employed in building and construction This is not the right time in the cycle to apply the brakes on population growth.'

Meanwhile, other industries face a 'labour-supply crunch' - meaning there are not enough people to fill roles, according to University of Melbourne demography professor Peter McDonald.

Mr Morrison has pledged that 1.25million more jobs will be created but Mr McDonald said there is 'no way in the world' these roles can be filled without immigration.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison (pictured) is preparing to slash Australia's immigration intake

This table shows how Australia's population increased the most in Victoria by 2.2 per cent and decreased in the Norther Territory by -0.2 per cent in the 12 months to September

'Given the labour-supply crunch that Australia faces at the moment, it does not make economic sense to cut the migrant intake,' he said.

Federal Labour remains open-minded about a total migration cap but has pledged to take in more refugees.

Figures showed migration into Australia in the year to September was down from the previous year.

Australia's population growth 1881: 2.3 million 1918: 5 million 1959: 10 million 1981: 15 million 1991: 17.4 million 2004: 20 million 2013: 23 million 2016: 24 million 2018: 25 million Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics; House of Representatives Standing Committee for Long-Term Strategies, December 1994 Advertisement

There were 240,100 immigrants compared with 259,400 the year before, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Announcing his plans on Tuesday, Mr Morrison said debate about the number of migrants moving to Australia each year was not related to the value of immigration to the country.

'Just because Australians are frustrated about traffic jams and population pressures encroaching on their quality of life, especially in this city, does not mean they are anti-migrant or racist,' he said.

A regional settlement policy - which will require people in the general skilled migrant scheme to live in cities other than Sydney and Melbourne for at least five years - has also been approved by cabinet.

Labor frontbencher Mark Butler said the policy appeared to be the status quo.

'If Scott Morrison has some detail he wants to show to us or the Australian community, obviously we'd be willing to look at it,' he told ABC Radio National.

The government has also been hinting at spreading migrants across the states and territories to ease pressure on infrastructure, without outlining any concrete details about how this would work.

Its policies are expected to centre on forcing skilled migrants to live for at least five years in cities other than Sydney or Melbourne, and enticing university students into regional towns.

Greens leader Richard Di Natale questioned the timing of the debate, which has re-emerged shortly after 50 people were murdered in New Zealand mosques last week.

'Three days after a massacre the prime minister decides to land this into the national conversation,' he told ABC News Breakfast.Fuze is a global UCaaS provider  in business since 2006. Their average seat size is greater than 3,000 with 40% of customers with headquarters outside of North America. Most recently, they added video and messaging to their voice offerings.

Our biggest differentiator is enterprise migrations from premise to cloud  with an entire practice in place to make this happen. The fact weve done this gives us a leg up on our competition, says Michael Affronti, SVP of Product & Design in an in-person interview.

Last year we closed a 27,000 user account in the UK and this speaks to the size of the enterprises we deploy, he exclaimed.

He went on to explain they have an industry-leading unified application CX with chat, voice and video. Underneath their Fuze platform is an underlying data platform  analyzing how many are in-meetings, MOS scores and who dialed what number.

The Fuze Data platform has Fuze View  which shows the details of the calls while Fuze Discover is like a advanced level BI tool allowing sophisticated drill-downs and reporting. It allows exporting for reporting and data mashups.

They typically replace Cisco and Avaya and Microsoft Skype or Teams is their typical competitor. Fuze is generally picked for the voice platform which they consider their advantage. They have 38 countries with localized service and arrangements with 80 carriers.

We offer one bill and one throat to choke, he exclaimed.

He said, This tends to get us a leg up over all of our competitors. He continued, Then the app experience, data platform and cloud-enablement tend to drive them over the competition.

They recently announced a strategic partnership with Samsung which represents an umbrella of solutions. They are now inside of 17,000 Waste Management trucks on Samsung tablets. This started the partnership. They think 5G and IIoT can be great homes for Fuze services.

Also they released in January they renamed their voice SKU from voice to calling  with the ability to activate a full WebRTC meeting from a voice call. This works with the browser version on desktop and mobile.

A lot more innovation will come from Samsung relationship and on their data platform  AI and ML on Fuze Data via partners, he explained.

They also now have backoffice tools which allow admins to more efficiently manage Fuze though preemptive network monitoring.

In all, it was a positive meeting  Fuze seems to be executing well, competing against Microsoft and inking significant partnerships with tech giants like Samsung. These developments should bode well for their future.

See also news of the latest patent Fuze received this month relating to network communications route selection.CAIRO - The Italian Trade Agency (ICE) organised a collective that is participating in the 4th edition of the Watrex Expo water trade fair in Cairo.



The international expo is dedicated to water technologies such as desalination, purification, treatment, irrigation, and management of industrial water.



There are 19 countries including Egypt participating in the expo.



The Italian companies participating are: Aqua, Airmec, AT Covers, Etatron, Fiberplast, Innova, Protecno, and Valveit.



The companies are presenting a wide range of engineering technologies and services, including filtering and measuring equipment, valves and pipelines, water and air purification, and desalination plants.



Most of the Italian technologies at Watrex are part of the machines and equipment sector, which had an export value to Egypt in 2018 totaling 908 million euros, the highest sector among Italian exports to Egypt, at 36% overall.



The main components within the sector are pipe fittings, boilers, tanks, basins, and thermostatic valves, with imports from Italy - the top supplier country - totaling 167 million dollars in 2018 (36% of the market); centrifuges, apparatus for filtering or purifying liquids or gases, with imports from Italy in 2018 totaling 25 million dollars (11% of the market); and pumps and liquid elevators, with imports from Italy (the main supplier to Egypt) in 2018 totaling 91 million dollars (27% of the market).



Egypt is developing a series of important project initiatives in the field of water infrastructure to increase potable water and to boost the infrastructure network for wastewater treatment.



The objective is to sufficiently respond to challenges in demographic growth, industrial development, and the demands of agricultural production, which receives 80% of the country's water resources.



In 2017, the Egyptian government launched a national 20-year plan for investments in water technologies and infrastructure, providing for a financial commitment of 20 billion dollars, of which about 1.5 billion is currently the subject of calls for tenders, in particular for desalination and treatment facilities.



In this infrastructural effort, Egypt is largely supported by interventions from multilateral development banks and international organisations such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank, and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group. The expo was inaugurated by the new Egyptian Housing Minister Asem El-Gazzar, and by Water and Irrigation Minister Mohamed Abdel Ati.Jacinda Ardern's boyfriend Clarke Gayford has posted a heartwarming picture of their daughter Neve after she crawled for the first time.

The adorable photo shared on Twitter shows Neve's tiny hand holding tightly onto her father's finger.

'For her 9 month birthday today we received the gift of crawling. While her mum got her the gift of having a safer country to grow up in,' he wrote.

Mr Gayford thanked the PM after military-style semi-automatic assault rifles were banned in New Zealand under new laws following the Christchurch mosque attack.

Jacinda Ardern's boyfriend Clarke Gayford has posted a heartwarming picture of their daughter Neve after she crawls for the first time

Mr Gayford (left) thanked the PM (right) after military-style semi-automatic assault rifles were banned in New Zealand under new laws following the Christchurch mosque attack

The tweet received an outpour of support for the stay-at-home father and for Ms Ardern and her commendable response to the terror attack.

'This is a special tweet that I think needed more than I thought today, thank you for sharing  and thanks to Jacinda too,' one user wrote.

'Her mum is just amazing. Showing the world how to lead a country and earning so much respect in the process. She shines with dignity, integrity, kindness and strength. I am so proud to live here,' another wrote.

Ms Ardern became the second elected leader in the world to give birth while in office after Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who gave birth to daughter Bakhtawar in 1990.

Mr Gayford and Ms Ardern welcomed Neve Te Aroha Ardern in June 2018.

'I can't imagine how hard it's been in your household this week, but you must be incredibly proud,' one person on Twitter wrote.

One mother wrote: 'I hope her mum has had time to just hold her close this week, just as the rest of us have needed to hold our babies (big and little) hard to ease our grief.'

The tweet received an outpour of support for the stay-at-home father and for Ms Ardern and her commendable response to the terror attack

Many across the globe were moved by Ms Ardern's empathetic response to the massacre, which left 50 dead and dozens injured in hospital.

The PM has covered the funeral costs for all victims' families and mourned at a vigil in a full hijab as a sign of respect.

Mr Gayford's post has garnered over 7,000 likes and nearly 1,000 retweets.A 45,000-year-old log discovered during excavations for a new power station could explain a mysterious global event which may have dramatically changed the Earth's climate.

Scientists in New Zealand believe the 60-tonne log could hold the answers to the ancient Laschamp Event - where the earth's north and south poles switched with each other 40,000 years ago.

The 60-tonne Kauri log was found nine metres beneath the surface in Ngawha in New Zealand's north island in February, and was handed over to local Maoris on Wednesday after a major excavation operation.

Top Energy, the company building the power station, began earthworks in 2017 and had excavated 900,000 cubic metres of soil before stumbling across the 16-metre log.

On Wednesday 60-tonne tree had sections cut off either end so it could be moved using two large mobile cranes and transporter vehicles, to then be loaded onto a truck and be taken five kilometres down the road, where it was handed over to the local Maoris

Scientist Alan Hogg, from Waikato University, determined the tree dates back to 40,500 years ago, NZ Herald reported.

The mammoth log's age sparked interest to scientists studying the Laschamp Event - a 'magnetic reversal' where the Earth's north and south magnetic poles switched places.

It was not known exactly when the reversal occurred but it was thought to have been about 41,000 years ago.

Scientists hope that through studying the level of radioactive carbon in the tree's rings would allow them to determine when the reversal occurred and for how long.

Kiwi scientists believe the magnetic reversals  and the accompanying drop in the Earth's magnetic field strength, which allowed more solar radiation to reach the Earth's surface  could have a major effect on climate.

'This tree is critical, we've never found one of this age before,' Mr Hogg says finding the tree was a stroke of luck which will play a huge role in future research.

Scientists in New Zealand believe the 60-tonne log could hold the answers to the ancient Laschamp Event - where the earth's north and south poles switched over 40,000 years ago

Going by its size the tree was likely to have been 1500-2000 years old when it died, Mr Hogg said.

The 16-metre log was transported to nearby Ngawha Marae (sacred place) on Wednesday, where a ceremony was be held to welcome the ancient tree to the hapu's care (a division of Maoris).

Ngawha Trustees committee chairman Richard Woodman said it was a 'fantastic acknowledgement' from Shaw that the tree was being returned to its rightful owners rather than gifted.

Transporting the tree was a major operation, with sections of about 1.5m long needing to be cut off either end so it could be moved, with the stump alone weighing 28 tonnes.

The three sections were lifted by two 130-tonne cranes, then taken by truck five kimoleters down the highway, with the whole operation taking four hours.Tate has become the latest institution to give up funds from the controversial Sackler family - amid allegations it helped fuel the US opioid crisis.

The Sackler family, which runs a trust in its name, has 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.

But now Tate, which has previously accepted millions from the Sackler Trust, has said it is 'not minded' to accept any further funding - soon after the National Portrait Gallery also cancelled a 1 million donation from the Trust.

The Sackler family from left to right: Dr. Theodore Shapiro, Dr. Jack Barchas, DR. Susan Shack Sackler, Dr. Kathe Sackler, Dr. Carla Shatz, Dr. BJ Casey, Dr. Jay Gingrich and Dr. Robert Michels

Tate (Tate Modern is pictured), which has previously accepted millions from the Sackler Trust, has said it is 'not minded' to accept any further funding in the wake of the allegations

Purdue Pharma is the maker of the prescription opioid painkiller OxyContin (pictured)

The Trust is run by the family that owns Purdue Pharma, seller of prescription painkiller OxyContin - a drug for which the family is facing allegations of conspiracy and fraud for allegedly portraying as non-addictive. Something which the family has 'vigorously denied'.

Speaking on BBC's Newsnight this evening, Marie Balshaw, who has been Tate's director since 2017, said the organisation had no plans to accept further money from the trust.

'We have received money from the Sacklers in the past, before anyone was aware of any of the issues that the National Portrait Gallery has been looking at in relation to their donation,' she told Newsnight's Kirsty Wark.

'At the present time, we're not in any discussion with the foundation about receiving a gift, and our trustees at the moment are minded not to accept one.'

She added that where Tate's resources come from, is 'something that is always considered by an ethics committee' and that decisions were made by trustees on a case by case basis.

'Reputational issues are something that's part and parcel of life of running an organisation like this one... you can't not think about these issues,' she said.

This file photo shows the outside of Purdue Pharma at the company's offices in Stamford, US

The National Portrait Gallery in London (pictured) has also given up funds from the Sackler family

Her comments are the latest from the leaders of artistic institutions who have severed ties with the Sackler Trust following controversy over the family's ownership of Purdue Pharma.

The company is facing lawsuits in America alleging that it sold the medicine as a drug with a low chance of causing addictions, despite knowing this was not true.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has said that opioids - a class of drug which includes everything from heroin to legal painkillers - were involved in almost 48,000 deaths in 2017.

News that the National Portrait Gallery had cancelled a 1 million donation from the Sackler family emerged on Wednesday.

Speaking to the Guardian, a spokesperson for the gallery said that it had agreed with the Sackler family that both parties would not proceed with the donation 'at this time'.

The family claimed that the donation to the gallery's 'Inspiring People' project had been dropped in order to avoid creating a 'distraction' from the hard work the institution had put in to the initiative.

Despite the decision being revealed as mutual, it could be seen as a major blow to the family's status following a campaign led against them by American artist Nancy Goldin.

Goldin has previously spoken out about being addicted to OxyContin after being prescribed the drug and last week said she was 'happy' with the decision taken by the NPG.

Protests had previously been held outside the Guggenheim museum (pictured) by artist Nancy Goldin

Protesters targeted the Guggenheim (pictured) over its ties to the Sackler family

Nancy Goldin (pictured centre pointing) took charge of a protest against the family outside the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York

She highlighted the need for other museums and galleries to do the same and reconsider gifts from the Sackler family.

Reflecting on the decision she said: 'They did the right thing. I hope there is a domino effect now; there needs to be.'

She had previously refused a retrospective of her work to be held at the NPG if it accepted the donation and had held protests outside the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York over their links to the Sackler's.

According to a 2016 estimation by Forbes magazine, the Sackler family has an estimated worth of $13billion, making them the richest family in America and each year the family continues to make philanthropic donations.

However in November 2018 court filings suggested that some members of the family had 'actively participated in conspiracy and fraud to portray [OxyContin] as non-addictive, even though they knew it was dangerously addictive'.

The Royal Opera House (pictured) has also previously received financial support from the Sackler family

Shakespeare's Globe in London (pictured) has also previously received money from the Sackler family

Following the revelation some public institutions  including New York's Columbia University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art  have reviewed whether they would continue to accept their donations.

Responding to National Portrait Gallery decision, a spokesman for The Sackler Trust said: '[We have] supported institutions playing crucial roles in health, education, science and the arts for almost half a century and we were pleased to have the opportunity to offer a new gift to support the National Portrait Gallery.

'The giving philosophy of the family has always been to actively support institutions while never getting in the way of their mission.

'Recent reporting of allegations made against Sackler family members may cause this new donation to deflect the National Portrait Gallery from its important work.

'The allegations against family members are vigorously denied, but to avoid being a distraction for the NPG, we have decided not to proceed at this time with the donation. We continue to believe strongly in the gallery and the wonderful work it does.'

Over time the Sackler name has provided financial support for various institutions in the UK such as the Royal Opera House, Shakespeare's Globe and the Royal Ballet School.

In 2017 the V&A opened a Sackler courtyard which was estimated to have cost 2million. This is while the V&A in Dundee, Scotland is said to be under pressure to return a donation from the Sackler family.Bill Cosby was taunted on Twitter after tweeting out a celebratory post for his wife Camille's 75th birthday, with many wondering how he was even able to tweet from behind bars.

Cosby is currently serving three to ten years for sexual assault but that didn't stop him from having someone from his team post for his wife.

'Happy 75th Birthday to my beautiful bride, Camille,' the tweet reads. It has been liked more than 1,100 times.

Scroll down for videos

Bill Cosby, who is currently serving three to ten years for sexual assault, took to Twitter on Wednesday to wish his wife Camille a happy 75th birthday

The 81-year-old said: 'Dear, youre a wonderful mother, loving wife, but most importantly, youre the strength of this family. Please celebrate your day!'

Cosby continued: 'Dear, youre a wonderful mother, loving wife, but most importantly, youre the strength of this family. Please celebrate your day!'

The post included hashtags geared towards his wife but also included #FreeBillCosby and #FarFromFinished - in reference to his last tour.

It also included pictures of the couple throughout their almost 55-year marriage.

In February, spokesman Andrew Wyatt indicated that the comedian didn't want his wife or his children to visit him in prison. He asked that they not be caught up 'in that environment' and wanted them to also avoid the possible media circus

It is believed that spokesman Andrew Wyatt was behind the post as the crisis manager regularly makes statements on behalf of the 81-year-old.

In February, Wyatt indicated that the comedian didn't want his wife or his children to visit him in prison. He asked that they not be caught up 'in that environment' and wanted them to also avoid the possible media circus.

While many wished the Cosby matriarch a happy birthday, there were many people who were stumped by how the convicted felon was able to Tweet from behind bars.

While many wished the Cosby matriarch a happy birthday, there were many people who were stumped by how the convicted felon was able to Tweet from behind bars

Jessica Ackerman said: 'He gave the guards some puddin pops to get some Twitter time.'

'Someone's got a jail guard buddy with an iPhone,' a different user speculated.

'How do you tweet from prison?,' Rhonda Rogers asked. 'That should be a convenience you are stripped of with having a pencil and paper to write letters!!!'

One user wondered if Camille was behind the tweet and said: 'I can't believe she spent her birthday transcribing this tweet for him.'

One user wondered if Camille was behind the tweet and said: 'I can't believe she spent her birthday transcribing this tweet for him'

Several users took the time to blast Cosby for the numerous allegations of abuse against him.

'#billcosby you have cheated on her and still you wish her a happy birthday? Have you no shame,' one user stated. 'On a contraband cellphone you still want to be in the limelight? Do your time there think about your victims not twitter.'

James Cipolla added: 'After 50 plus years of marriage Every Time I was sleeping with another woman, all 200 of them ( awake or asleep) I think I was thinking of you - but I can't remember?'

Other users just asked where the quaaludes were.

It's important to note that the Tweet did not indicate that it was sent from a mobile device.

Cosby was sentenced in September to three to 10 years behind bars for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his gated estate in 2004.

He has been barraged with similar accusations from more than 60 women over the past five decades.

Cosby must serve the minimum of three years before becoming eligible for parole.President Trump appeared to interfere on Friday with sanctions the U.S. put on two Chinese shipping companies as punishment for their illicit trade with North Korea.

The unexpected action seemingly thwarted his Treasury secretary's plans and contradicted a stern statement from his national security adviser on sanctions evasion.

Trump announced the intervention in a tweet that suggested he was referring to the sanctions on the Chinese businesses that Beijing said it would investigate. He said the 'large scale sanctions' were 'announced today' by the U.S. Treasury that would have been 'added to those already existing' on North Korea.

'I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!' he said.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders did not explain which sanctions he meant in a statement linked to the topic that praised the North Korean dictator.

'President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesn't think these sanctions will be necessary,' she said.

President Trump appeared to intervene on Friday to prevent sanctions on two Chinese companies the U.S. planned to punish for illicit business dealings with North Korea from going into effect

The unexpected action thwarted his Treasury secretary's plans and contradicted a stern statement from his national security adviser on sanctions evasion

White House statement cited Kim Jong-un as a reason to relax sanctions. North Korean dictator's government has said it will discontinue nuclear talks without sanctions relief

It was a guessing game on Friday as to what the president meant but he appeared to be referring to Treasury's sanctions on the Chinese businesses

It wasn't until hours later, after multiple requests for clarification from DailyMail.com, that White House officials said the president was referring to other, unspecified sanctions on North Korea.

Officials said there was no reversal of the sanctions on the Chinese shippers. What Trump intended to signal was that the ministration would not be pursuing additional sanctions against North Korea until further notice.

Their correction to the president's tweet claiming he was counteracting a Treasury announcement was a reminder of the chaos that ensues when the social-media savvy president issues edicts on Twitter before administration officials tasked with communicating and defending his policies are looped in.

The White House's explanation for Trump's unilateral decision to put a halt on sanctions gave Democratic lawmakers on key foreign policy committees new ammunition in their argument that president makes 'erratic' decisions that he shares with the world before consulting with his senior advisers.

They said the announcement the U.S. would scale down sanctions is evidence Trump is slowly capitulating to Kim, as well, as he scrambles to save faltering nuclear negotiations.

Kim's government declared after a February nuclear summit that talks would discontinue with the U.S. if Trump refused a demand for sanctions relief. Trump declined, at the time, and the summit ended abruptly.

The White House signaled Friday that the president was willing to prevent new sanctions from going into effect in order to keep the conversation going.

A trade deal with China that's on the verge of being finished may also have something to do with the president's sudden change of heart. China and North Korea as close allies.

'We have a lot of other meetings set up for this weekend on trade. We have a lot of talks with China,' the president told reporters as he left Washington for a weekend at his private estate in Florida.

Trump had hoped to be finished with a Chinese trade deal by the end of the month and envisioned himself meeting with the country's leader, Xi Jinping, at Mar-a-Lago next weekend to wrap up loose ends.

That plan was on ice after Trump left his summit in Hanoi with Kim without striking a nuclear accord China and North Korea are allies, and Xi indicated he's unwilling to cross an ocean to meet with Trump until he's certain he'll come away with a trade deal.

In a blow to both nations on Thursday, the Trump administration sanctioned two Chinese shipping companies suspected of helping North Korea evade sanctions - the first targeted actions taken against Pyongyang since the nuclear negotiations with the U.S. in Hanoi last month ended without agreement.

The president's national security adviser touted the sanctions in remarks thought to represent the position of the White House.

'The maritime industry must do more to stop North Korea's illicit shipping practices,' John Bolton tweeted. 'Everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Korea's sanctions evasion.'

A spokesperson for Bolton could not be reached for comment on Friday afternoon as Democrats pummeled Trump for what appeared to be an about -ace.

'There is no question that Trump is being played by Kim Jong Unone of the worlds most vicious dictators. Sidestepping his own Treasury Dept. and withdrawing sanctions against North Korea the same day they were announced defies logic,' said Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen.

Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it's 'amateur hour' at the Trump White House.

'In exchange for absolutely nothing from North Korea, the President just reversed his own Administration on the world stage,' he argued. 'This erratic, incoherent approach to foreign policy is making the world a more dangerous place.'

BREAKDOWN: It wasn't clear where the breakdown in communication between Trump and John Bolton and Trump and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin came from

Protesters wearing masks of U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stand near the map of Korean Peninsula during a rally demanding the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and peace treaty near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea on Thursday

More than 20 protesters participated at a rally and also demanding the end the Korean War and to stop the sanction on North Korea

The Treasury Department sanctioned Dalian Haibo International Freight Co. Ltd. and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co. Ltd. on Thursday for using what it described as 'deceptive methods' to circumvent both U.S and international sanctions on North Korea.

An advisory said Treasury was working with the State Department and the U.S. Coast Guard to add dozens of other vessels it believes to have engaged in illegal oil transfers with North Korean tankers or prohibited coal exports to a watch list.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that tough action from the international community must continue for Kim to willingly give up his nuclear weapons.

'The United States and our like-minded partners remain committed to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea and believe that the full implementation of North Korea-related UN Security Council resolutions is crucial to a successful outcome,' he said.

'Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk.'Australia's biggest state faces days of political chaos as ideologically-opposed fringe minor parties decide who forms the next government.

The Shooters Fishers and Farmers Party, the anti-coal Greens and an independent gay rights activist could potentially hold the balance of power in the New South Wales Parliament if neither major party commands a majority in tomorrow's election.

Polls show Premier Gladys Berejiklian's Coalition government losing at least six seats, which would force Australia's most populous state into minority government for the first time since the aftermath of the 1991 election.

Australia's biggest state faces days of political chaos as ideologically-opposed fringe minor parties decide who forms the next government (pictured is independent MP Alex Greenwich, left, with Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, second left)

This would see both Labor and the Liberal and National parties forced to negotiate with fringe minor parties in a bid to cobble together a potentially-unstable power-sharing arrangement.

The Shooters party won the seat of Orange in a 2016 by-election and could potentially expand their presence in the state's west by winning the Nationals-held seats of Murray and Barwon.

It wants the government to stop recording ammunition sales and is pushing a controversial plan to allow former police and army officers to grant gun licences and exempt them from paying any fees.

Former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, who was also a state Country and National Party MP for 13 years, said the Shooters party was influenced by the American National Rifle Association and presented a real threat to gun laws in NSW.

The Shooters party (MP Phil Donato pictured right) won the seat of Orange in a 2016 by-election and could potentially expand their presence in the state's west by winning the Nationals-held seats of Murray and Barwon

'It's not helped if the Shooters party were to win an outright balance of power and multiple seats in both houses,' Mr Fischer told Daily Mail Australia on Friday.

'The National Rifle Association in the USA is still a presence on the internet.'

Mr Fischer said 'any wholesale chipping away of the gun laws' was a risk to 'children's safety and community safety' in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand.

Outgoing Shooters MP Robert Brown hit back at Mr Fischer's suggestion his party was influenced by the NRA and downplayed the possibility of them securing changes to gun laws.

'Bulls***. You can quote me on that,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'Tim Fischer is telling lies.'

Mr Greenwich (left), who was previously the director of Australian Marriage Equality, has promised to push for new laws banning religion-based schools from discriminating against gay and transgender teachers and students

Mr Brown said the Shooters would also refuse to be part of any minority government with the Greens.

'I don't think that would ever happen, a power sharing agreement with the Greens,' he said.

'Our constituency would want to hang the party executive and the party members from the yard arms if they did something like that, mate.'

The Shooters party, which is also campaigning for religious freedom, is philosophically at odds with the independent member for Sydney Alex Greenwich and the Greens.

Mr Greenwich, who was previously the director of Australian Marriage Equality, has promised to push for new laws banning religion-based schools from discriminating against gay and transgender teachers and students.

The Greens, who already hold three lower house seats in the NSW Parliament, are even more radical.

The Greens (Newtown MP Jenny Leong pictured), who already hold three lower house seats in the NSW Parliament, are even more radical. They also want the state government to commit $1 billion towards local 'community' renewable energy projects on top of another $1.5 billion a year for 'large-scale, publicly-owned renewable energy projects'

They want NSW to ban coal mining and coal-fired power stations by 2030.

They also want the state government to commit $1 billion towards local 'community' renewable energy projects on top of another $1.5 billion a year for 'large-scale, publicly-owned renewable energy projects'.

The minor party holds the Sydney inner-west seats of Newtown and Balmain, along with Ballina on the state's far north coast, which covers Byron Bay.

It stands of chance of winning the Nationals seat of Lismore, also in the state's north, which includes the hippie town of Nimbin where locals sell marijuana and space cakes on the main street.

The Greens stand of chance of winning the Nationals seat of Lismore (candidate Sue Higginson pictured), in the state's north, which includes the hippie town of Nimbin where locals sell marijuana and space cakes on the main street

Just last week, Labor was leading in the polls, with a UComms /ReachTel poll showing the Opposition leading the government 51 to 49 per cent, after preferences.

If replicated at the election, that would represent a swing of more than five per cent away from the government and see the Coalition lose six seats, which would deprive the Liberal and National parties of a majority.

In that scenario, it could potentially form a minority government with regional independents Greg Piper and Joe McGirr and Mr Greenwich, whose mentor Clover Moore helped former Liberal premier Nick Greiner cling to power in 1991.

If it lost more seats, the Coalition and Labor could be forced to court the Shooters and the Greens for a chance to govern NSW.

As of Friday afternoon, Sportsbet had Labor picking up East Hills and Coogee from the Liberal Party, Upper Hunter, Tweed and Lismore from the Nationals and the Shooters winning Barwon from the Nats.

The betting agency had the the Nationals regaining Ballina from the Greens.

Under that scenario, the net loss of five seats would see a Coalition lose its majority.An alleged thief has been found passed out on a table after he crashed through the roof of JB Hi-Fi during an overnight break-in.

Police were called to the Rouse Hill store in Sydney's north-west just before 3am yesterday morning after two men allegedly broke into the store and were taking mobile phones.

Police found the man unconscious on the table with a head injury and once he woke up, he tried to run away.

The man's alleged accomplice escaped before the police arrived with dozens of phones worth thousands of dollars.

An alleged thief has been found passed out on a table after he crashed through the roof of JB Hi-Fi Rouse Hill during an overnight break-in

The alleged thieves gained access to the store by climbing through the ceiling of the loading dock and lowering themselves down.

They allegedly began taking mobile phones from the store room until an alarm was triggered.

One of the suspected thieves panicked and tried to escape through the roof, but it collapsed and he fell almost eight metres onto a table.

Chief Inspector Jason McSweeney told Seven News that the man was 'somewhat lucky his fall from grace and has landed on the table, which may have assisted in preventing more significant injures.'

Police were called to the store in Sydney's north-west just before 3am yesterday morning after two men allegedly broke into the store and were taking mobile phones

Police believe the man who escaped will try to sell the stolen phones online on sites such as eBay and Gumtree or the black market.

They warned the public to keep an eye out for brand new phones being sold for cheap prices online.The U.S. military is practicing tactics that it last rehearsed more than 70 years ago in preparation for a possibly conflict with China.

It was during World War II that U.S. Marines moved quickly from island to island as they fought bloody battles again Japanese forces who were determined to dominate the Pacific.

The Marine Corps is now re-examining its island-hopping strategy for today's troops, as a possible conflict with China draws ever-closer.

A Marine with Charlie Company, Battalion Landing Team, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, bounds toward a defensive position during a live-fire range as part of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit's simulated Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, Camp Schwab, Okinawa, Japan

US Marines recently led a simulated assault on a small island in the Pacific, honing skills thought to be essential in a fight with China.

Marines pilot a Combat Rubber Raiding Craft during a simulated boat raid

.The exercise, which also involved the Army and the Air Force, was part of the Corps' efforts to refine the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations concept

Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit have so far led a series of simulated small-island assaults in Japan.

The 31st MEU, supported by elements of the 3rd Marine Division, 3rd Marine Logistics Group, and 1st Marine Aircraft Wing; members of the Air Force 353rd Special Operations Group; and Army soldiers with 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, practiced seizing Ie Shima Island - a place where the Marine Corps often train.

After the Marines 'seized' the island's airfield, troops went on to established a Forward Arming and Refueling Point.

Aircraft including the Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters and C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft were also on hand to assist.

Rocket artillery units were brought in on board the C-130Js and there were simulated long-range precision-fire missions, Stealth fighters also conducted expeditionary strikes with precision-guided munitions according to Business Insider.

'This entire mission profile simulated the process of securing advanced footholds for follow-on forces to conduct further military operations, with rapid redeployment,' the service said

Aircraft including the Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters and C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft were also on hand to assist.

The Marine Corps is now re-examining its island-hopping strategy for today's troops, as a possible conflict with China draws ever-closer

U.S. Marine run back to an assault amphibious vehicle after setting a simulated demolition charge during their final exercise rehearsal as part of an exercise

'This entire mission profile simulated the process of securing advanced footholds for follow-on forces to conduct further military operations, with rapid redeployment,' the Corps said in a statement.

'The exercise was part of the Corps' efforts to refine the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations concept, which is the modern version of the World War II-era island-hopping strategy.

'It is critical for us to be able to project power in the context of China, and one of the traditional missions of the Marine Corps is seizing advanced bases,' Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week.

'If you look at the island chains and so forth in the Pacific as platforms from which we can project power, that would be a historical mission for the Marine Corps and one that is very relevant in a China scenario.

Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit have led a series of simulated small-island assaults in Japan

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Congress that the ability to seize advanced bases would be critical in a war with China

The reasons for this latest military exercise comes as the US worried about China's growing military might.

In the Pacific, China is establishing military outposts on occupied islands in the South China Sea while seeking to extend its reach beyond the first island chain.

The US and Chinese military operate in close proximity to one another but often have conflicting objectives and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the two nations could find themselves in a shooting war in the South China Sea.

'We continue to seek areas to cooperate with China where we can, but where we can't we're prepared to certainly protect both US and allied interest in the region,' Kenneth McKenzie, the director of the Joint Staff, said at the Pentagon last May.

'The United States military has had a lot of experience in the Western Pacific taking down small islands,' McKenzie said.

'We had a lot of experience in the Second World War taking down small islands that are isolated, so that's a core competency of the US military that we've done before. It's just a 'historical fact.'General Robert Neller asked for more funding in the leaked memos to the Pentagon

The commandant of the Marine Corps has warned that deployments to the southern border have contributed to budget shortfalls that pose an 'unacceptable risk to Marine Corps combat readiness and solvency.'

In memos addressed to acting Pentagon chief Patrick Shanahan and Navy secretary Richard Spencer, General Robert Neller wrote that he had been forced to cancel or reduce exercises in five countries.

Neller included a long list of factors that have contributed to budget shortfalls in his plea for more money for the Marine Corps, among which he included the border deployments and unscheduled budget transfers under President Donald Trump's border emergency declaration.

The other factors Neller cited in the shortfall included civilian pay raises, adjustments to private housing allowances, and a Congressional mandate to upgrade the firefighting foam used on Marine bases.

Scroll down for full memos

US marines put barbed wire atop fencing along the United States-Mexico border in San Ysidro, California, in November. Currently about 500 Marines are at the border

Due to the budget issues, Marines will miss exercises in Indonesia, Scotland and Mongolia, and their participation in joint exercises in Australia and South Korea will be reduced, Neller said in the documents dated March 18 and 19.

'Marines rely on the hard, realistic training provided by these events to develop the individual and collective skills necessary to prepare for high-end combat,' Neller said in the memo sent to Spencer.

'Although some effects can be mitigated, the experience lost by these units at a critical time in their preparation cannot be recouped,' he continued.

In the memo, which was first reported by the Los Angeles Times, Neller asks Spencer for help getting funding freed up for the Marine priorities.

Neller lists nine unplanned factors that led to the problem, but the Marine Corps said that, by far, the most significant issue forcing the training cuts is the widespread hurricane damage.

Neller said Trump's emergency declaration to secure $6.7 billion from the Pentagon's 2019 budget for his wall meant the corps could not afford to rebuild hurricane-hit bases in North Carolina and Georgia.

About $3.5 billion in damages was done to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and surrounding facilities by Hurricanes Florence and Michael.

Marine Corps said that, by far, the most significant issue forcing the training cuts is the widespread hurricane damage to bases. Seen above is flooding from Hurricane Florence

Neller said that earlier hopes that Congress might approve requests to move larger amounts of money around in the budget now appear unlikely. He called the situation in North Carolina critical, noting that hurricane season begins in June and Marines and sailors are working in 'compromised structures' that must be repaired quickly.

The Defense Department is seeking more than $2 billion in funding for hurricane damage in the 2020 fiscal year budget. But Neller said the Marine Corps needs more than $600 million in this current fiscal year to do those needed repairs and address other shortfalls.

The other shortfalls include the ripple effect of the ongoing debate over Trump's plan to build a wall on the southern border.

Currently there are about 500 Marines deployed to the border mission, where U.S. service members are helping in wall construction, transportation, surveillance and other tasks requested by the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition, the Pentagon is shifting funding from various department budget accounts to pay for the wall construction costs.

Other cost issues, Neller said, include an unbudgeted civilian pay raise, unfunded increase in Marine deployment to Australia and unplanned cuts in funding for the Marine Reserve.

His memo got quick backing from a key Congress member.

'President Trump should stop treating the Pentagon as a piggybank for his misguided domestic policy aims,' said Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. 'President Trump has ignored the facts, ignored the experts, and ignored a big bipartisan vote against his views on border security. I hope he doesn't try to ignore this memo.'While Times Square in New York is a draw for tourists who want to see the bright lights of the big city, people visiting Miami are now being confronted with similar massive displays that are unwelcome along the waterfront.

Ballyhoo Media has dispatched a number of 46-foot-long-by-12-feet-high floating, double-sided digital billboards in South Beach.

And many sunseekers aren't loving the aesthetic of the barges.

People of Miami thought the floating billboards (pictured) might be barred, and brought legal challenges trying to stop the barges, but were largely unsuccessful

Ballyhoo Media has dispatched a number of 46-foot-long-by-12-feet-high floating, double-sided digital billboards in Miami over the last year. A floating Ballyhoo Media billboard is shown in South Florida

The LED displays from the Miami-based company (shown in Florida) have also been spotted cruising up and down the Hudson River, between Manhattan and New Jersey, since October

A Twitter user with the account name '@Elonech' was not shocked by the move, but definitely didn't support it, writing, 'I'm not surprised that filth like this exists in Miami. Way to ruin a good thing you craven moneygrubbers'

A Twitter user with the account name '@Elonech' tweeted: 'I'm not surprised that filth like this exists in Miami. Way to ruin a good thing you craven moneygrubbers.'

While Twitter user Dave Hidding wrote: 'Crass commercialism at the beach. Yes, two story high by six story long billboards cruising slowly up & down the beach on barges- just offshore. Is anywhere off-limits to the marketers/advertisers?'

People of Miami thought it might be, and brought legal challenges trying to stop the barges, but were largely unsuccessful when the floating billboards debuted in the South one year ago.

Ballyhoo Media CEO Adam Shapiro told the Miami Herald that reactions are actually more mixed, with an equal split of those who dislike the additions and those who approve

Twitter user Dave Hidding wrote, 'Crass commercialism at the beach. Yes, two story high by six story long billboards cruising slowly up & down the beach on barges- just offshore. Is anywhere off-limits to the marketers/advertisers?'

Ballyhoo Media CEO Adam Shapiro told the Miami Herald that reactions are mixed, with an equal split of those who dislike the additions and those who approve.

'Initially, people in Miami were skeptical,' Shapiro said.

'Its scary at first, like anything new  "Whoa, what is this electronic thing on the water?"  You cant please everyone and I cant attempt to, but we get just as many calls from people who think its a cool concept.'

People on social media had jokes about the concept. One Twitter user listed as living in California wrote, 'And I thought the MLB took outfield advertising too far'

Another Twitter user with the account handle '@samshul0' also quipped about the less than stellar scenic implications about the new development

Still, people on social media had jokes about the concept. One Twitter user listed as living in California wrote, 'And I thought the MLB took outfield advertising too far.'

Another Twitter user with the account handle '@samshul0' also quipped about the less than stellar scenic implications about the new development.

'Woah that's a cool sunset on the horizon let me take a picture,' he wrote, adding with emphasis, '*billboard blocks the picture*'

People in New York aren't thrilled about the addition to waterfront views, either. A Ballyhoo Media billboard is shown in the Hudson River, with the World Trade Center in the background

Shapiro said that while there aren't currently plans to add more barges to the New York City area, the company does foresee expansion to other cities. A billboard in New York is shown

The LED displays from the Miami-based company have also been spotted cruising up and down the Hudson River, between Manhattan and New Jersey, since October.

The Big Apple versions are larger, measuring 60-by-20 feet.

People in New York aren't thrilled about the addition to waterfront views, either.

'It's disgusting,' Marcy Benstock, director of the Clean Air Campaign and the Open Rivers Project, told the Gothamist.

'People go to the river to contemplate, to do yoga or meditate or just relax. Then this giant billboard comes alongwhat a nightmare!'

An attorney leading an online Ballyhoo opposition, who requested not to be named, told the outlet, 'How can you let one of the few natural spaces we have left be turned into a new Times Square?'

That lawyer is part of a group of people seeking to invalidate the barges in the greater New York City area, based on a local zoning rule that sates, 'no moving or stationary advertising sign shall be displayed on a vessel plying waterways adjacent to Commercial Districts and within view from an arterial highway.'

Shapiro told the Gothamist that Manhattan critics are out of luck on legal grounds similarly to their Miami counterparts.

'The code that's written for New York City basically ends at the end of the pier lines, so we're outside of that specific enforcement,' he said.

Shapiro said that while there aren't currently plans to add more barges to the New York City area, the company does foresee expansion to other cities.

That is exactly what some want to avoid.

'Are you able to Stop this before it becomes an issue at Jax Beach?' downtown Jacksonville, Florida resident David Boette tweeted to Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry.20 searches in al-Nusra terror funding probe In Abruzzo, Turin, Milan and province of Ascoli Piceno

(ANSAmed) - ROME, MARCH 22 - Italian police on Friday searched the homes of more than 20 Tunisian-Italians suspected of funding Islamist terrorist movement al-Nusra, judicial sources said.



The searches were carried out in Abruzzo, Turin, Milan and the province of Ascoli Piceno in what police called "a complex probe" into the funding of international terrorism.(ANSAmed).



The father of a man killed outside a Florida convenience store in 2016 had to be held back in court Thursday after a relative of the murderer's relative was heard making a vulgar comment after his guilty conviction.

Frank Daly III, 30, was shot dead during an altercation with Marquis Valentine outside the Kwik Stop on 6th Avenue in Lake Worth three years ago.

After hearing Valentine's first-degree murder conviction, someone thought to be his family member was reportedly heard saying: 'At least he's still alive.'

Sous chef Frank Daly III, 30, was shot dead during an altercation with Marquis Valentine

Victim's dad, Frank Daly Sr, tried to jump over bench to get to the killer's insensitive supporter

Daly family supporters had to hold the distraught father back as he reacted to a comment

CBS 12 reports it was that comment that triggered the slain man's parent, Frank Daly Sr, to lunge in the direction of the killer's supporters.

Other relatives of the victim were also visibly upset by the reaction from Valentine's side but some opted to restrain Daly Sr as a heavy guard presence kept the situation under control.

Nobody was hurt. All the while, Valentine sat calmly in the Palm Beach County court.

Daly Sr, grandfather to the father-of-two's children, continued to speak when he was brought down from a bench he tried to climb over to access the back row.

Killer: Valentine was caught a month after the murder, at 27 years old. Police found tens of thousands of dollars from drugs sales at his home. He had been released from prison in 2015 after being convicted of grand theft of a motor and cocaine possession

Tears streamed from the eyes of Daly's loved ones. One of them responded the comment from Valentine's side was 'disrespectful'.

CBS 12 reports that before the insensitive comment from Valentine's supporter, a judge had asked a distraught family member of the killer to leave the court room due to her loud crying.

After she was ordered out, the person made the comment about Valentine getting away with his life despite being sentenced to the remainder of his time alive behind bars.

Prosecutor Terri Skiles had to explain what led to the outburst to Judge Weiss as the Daly family asked Skiles to apologize on their behalf.

The judge then revealed what they already knew, Valentine would get life in prison without parole, the mandatory sentence for a first-degree murder conviction in the state.

Valentine heard his fate as he approached the door to be led to a cell.

Daly  who was a sous chef at Cabo Flats - was on his way home to his fiancee and child on July 31, 2016 when he was fatally shot in the chest.

Murderer's family member was reportedly heard saying: 'At least he's still alive' after another person supporting Valentine was told to leave courtroom for loud crying

Valentine was convicted of murder Thursday and sentenced to life in prison without parole

Other relatives of the victim were also visibly upset in the Palm County court as the trial closed

Surveillance footage showed Daly put his hands in the air as a surrender and attempted to get into his blue Carolla after a verbal exchange with Valentine. But he was shot in the chest and died later.

'They were talking all these things. A guy came in behind them and they said something to him. I can't hear them because of the glass. Then I look at the camera and I see he went to get his gun and then I saw the guy come outside and shoot him,' store clerk El Sadig Elgak said at the time.

The day after the incident, Daly's father cried as he said 'words shouldn't be the cause to take someone's life'.

Surveillance footage showed Daly put his hands in the air as a surrender and attempted to get into his blue Carolla after a verbal exchange with Valentine

'I don't know where I'm going to go from here. It is a tough. The gun violence has to stop,' Daly Sr told CBS 12 after flying in with a dozen loved ones from New Jersey. 'This is tragic and they can't find him. He just runs away. This is grossly unfair and unjustified and you will get caught.'

At the time Tracie Daily appealed for money on a GoFundMe page that raised $5,760 of a $10,000 goal, calling the incident a 'random senseless act of violence'.

Valentine was captured a month later.

A 27-year-old at the time, police found tens of thousands of dollars from drugs sales at his home.

He had been released from prison in 2015 after being convicted of grand theft of a motor and cocaine possession

The day after the incident, Daly's father cried as he said 'words shouldn't be the cause to take someone's life'DIY smear tests should be introduced as soon as possible to reduce cases of cervical cancer, a charity has said.

Jos Cervical Cancer Trust made the plea in a bid to diagnose the disease at an earlier stage.

The latest NHS figures show only 71 per cent of women are up to date on screening  the lowest rate since records began  and around five million women are overdue.

Reality TV star Jade Goody died of cervical cancer aged just 27 in 2009 and the charity's campaign comes on the 10th anniversary of her death.

Celebrities including Rebekah Vardy and Tamara Ecclestone have used social media to urge women to get tested, but screening rates have still not risen.

DIY smear tests should be introduced as soon as possible said Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust

Robert Music, chief executive of Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust, said self-testing could not come soon enough.

He said Australia and Denmark, which already use home testing, are seeing fantastic results in prevention and the number of early diagnoses.

He added that it could be a game changer for those with physical or psychological difficulties with the usual test, which is carried out by a medical professional.

The scheme  in which HPV testing kits are sent in the post then returned to the NHS  will be trialled in England with a view to national implementation.

By December 2019, authorities plan to make a postal DIY smear test, that also checks for HPV, available to all women across the country.

Officials hope it will boost screening coverage by reaching women who have ignored invitations for tests because of embarrassment or difficulties getting an appointment.

The pilot scheme was announced as NHS England revealed that cervical screening administration will return in-house from June after it terminates the contract with the scandal-hit company currently doing it, Capita.

Jade Goody, who rose to fame after starring in an early series of reality TV show Big Brother, died of cervical cancer aged just 27 in 2009 (pictured in 2008)

Rebekah Vardy took part in a social media campaign called #SmearForSmear in which women posted photos of themselves with smudged make-up in a bid to draw attention to the importance of smear tests, which test for signs of abnormalities in the cervix

The decision follows a series of screening blunders, including Capitas failure to send invitations or test results to 50,000 patients last year.

HOW JADE GOODY'S DEATH SHONE THE SPOTLIGHT ON CERVICAL CANCER Jade Goody, a reality TV star who shot to fame after appearing on Big Brother, died of cervical cancer aged 27 in 2009. Goody was diagnosed with cervical cancer on television while she was featuring on Bigg Boss, the Indian version of Big Brother, in August 2008. By February 2009, Goody's cancer had spread to her liver, bowel and groin so she had emergency surgery to remove three tumours. The same month, Goody was told she had just months to live so she and her partner, Jack Tweedy married on March 12  she died on March 22. Later in the year, cervical screening rates rose sharply in the UK in what was dubbed the 'Jade Goody effect'. She had brought such a high profile to the disease the number of women screened in 2008/9 was 3.6million, up from 3.2m the previous year, The Guardian reported. Then-Health Secretary Andy Burnham said: 'These figures show the remarkable effect that Jade Goody's tragic case has had in reversing a downward trend in the number of young women attending cervical screening.' Although screening rates have since dropped again, Goody's mother, Jackiey Budden, continues to use her daughter's legacy to encourage women to get tested. Last month she told This Morning people think smear tests are 'embarrassing or theyre scared', adding: 'It takes five minutes and Ive never, ever missed one.' Advertisement

Uptake rates for cervical screening are the lowest in 21 years, with nearly a third of women ignoring their last appointment letters.

Professor Sir Mike Richards, who is leading a review of NHS cancer screening programmes, told MPs the DIY tests will follow a scheme tried in the Netherlands, where postal kits boosted uptake.

We may get to a different segment of the population by offering HPV self-sampling sets through the post, he told the Commons public accounts committee.

Home testing has been made possible by the creation of a more sensitive cervical test which uses a swab to test for the HPV virus.

Health officials said the self-sample pilot schemes are likely to involve women who have missed screening, with a kit sent to them within a month of a failure to respond to an appointment.

Studies have found the tests are nearly as accurate as those done in a clinic.

And women who missed screening appointments were twice as likely to provide a sample for testing as they were to respond to reminders to come to a clinic, Belgian research found.

Around 3,200 British women are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year and 1,000 die with the disease annually.

But these rates are projected to rise by nearly 40 per cent in the next 20 years.

Experts say another 2,000 women would die every year without the screening programme.

Charities said the introduction of self-sampling could benefit thousands of women who are too embarrassed to go for tests as well as those with a disability and survivors of sexual violence.

Robert Music, chief executive of Jos Cervical Cancer Trust, said: We have been calling for this for a long time and believe this could be a game-changer.

Other countries are already seeing very positive results of HPV self-sampling, with those who have delayed attending for many years choosing to take the test.

It is now crucial that this pilot moves forward quickly to ensure we are not left behind in our vision of eliminating cervical cancer.A new grammar school for more than 1,000 pupils could lead to dozens more being created across the country.

The plan involves creating a 'satellite campus' of an existing selective school in Kent.

Establishing new grammars is illegal, but the scheme may be allowed if it is defined as an 'extension' of an existing site and relatively nearby.

If approved, it would be only the second one to be built in 20 years, and could set a precedent for many more across the country.

Parents across the country will be hoping that more grammar schools will be founded as they look to provide their children with an education that can match private schools (stock image)

Grammar schools are in high demand among parents who want a rigorous academic education for their children and cannot afford private school fees.

Kent retains the old 11-Plus system used to decide grammar admissions and has a desperate shortage of places.

But Left-wing campaigners yesterday said the plan was creating grammars 'by the back door'.

Two schools  Barton Court Grammar in Canterbury and Queen Elizabeth's in Faversham  both want to build a new campus on the coast near Whitstable, around 10 miles from both sites and catering for 150 pupils per year.

Both are to submit rival applications to ministers and will bid for a slice of the Government's new 50million Selective School Expansion Fund. Parents in the area have long complained their children have to commute long distances to access grammars.

Sir Roger Gale, the Conservative MP for North Thanet, said: 'It's ridiculous that all of those young people have to travel to three other towns to have the selective education they've qualified for and to which they're entitled.'

Kent County Council has already said a satellite grammar is the 'preferred option' to cope with demand from new housing developments. Kent has 32 grammars, more than most other areas of the country, so the potential for expansion is large.

David Anderson, head teacher at Queen Elizabeth's, said the plan would provide the 'opportunities and choice that students deserve'.

Faversham Tory MP Helen Whately added: 'A satellite school would give more children the opportunity of the education that it offers, along with reducing hours spent in buses and cars to schools further afield.'

It follows a successful bid by the Weald of Kent grammar school in Tonbridge to create a satellite campus in nearby Sevenoaks in 2015. It became the first new selective school to be approved since the creation of new grammars was banned by New Labour in 1998.

Establishing new grammars is illegal, but the scheme may be allowed if it is defined as an 'extension' of an existing site and relatively nearby (stock image)

Yesterday, the latest move was criticised by Comprehensive Future, which is run by Left-wing campaigners including Tony Benn's daughter Melissa.

Nuala Burgess, chairman of the group, said: 'It's a shocking use of education funding to try to bypass the law and build a new grammar school via the back door. If this goes ahead, there's nothing to stop the DfE (Department for Education) from building dozens of dubious 'annexe' grammar schools all around the country, all without parliamentary scrutiny, and all in breach of the law.'

The DfE said selective schools will only receive funding for expansions if they can prove how they will improve access for disadvantaged pupils.Advertisement

New Zealand fell silent on Friday afternoon during a poignant memorial service exactly a week after the Christchurch terror attack.

Hundreds of Muslims and non-Muslims gathered in the city's Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor mosque where worshipers were gunned down.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, wearing a black and gold headscarf in solidarity with the Islamic faith, briefly addressed the emotional gathering.

'New Zealand mourns with you. We are one,' she said.

The call to prayer was heard at 1.30pm local time (11.30am AEDT) and followed by two minutes of silence.

Then Imam Gamal Fouda gave a moving speech in which he said the 50 victims were martyrs and their blood has 'watered the seeds of hope'.

Zaed Moustafa - who was injured and lost his father and brother in the mosque attacks - was among those paying respects as well as Australian boxer and Muslim convert Anthony Mundine.

Scroll down for video

'We are one': Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, wearing a black and gold headscarf in solidarity with the Islamic faith, briefly addressed the emotional gathering

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (in a black headscarf) and her entourage arrive before Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque

Moving: Worshippers pray a week after fifty Muslims were killed when a gunman opened fire on two mosques last Friday

Zaed Moustafa (in the wheelchair), the son of Hussein Mohamed Khalil Moustafa, a victim of the mosque attacks, attends Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch

Zaid Mustafa, left, son and brother of victims from last week's mosque shootings is welcomed to Friday prayers

Members of the public look on during a gathering for congregational Friday prayers and two minutes of silence for victims of the mosque massacre

Hundreds of Muslims prayed together in their weekly Friday prayers in the park to pay tribute to the victims of the terror attack

Ms Ardern arrives before Friday prayers at Hagley Park. She briefly addressed the gathering, saying: 'New Zealand mourns with you, we are one'

Then there was a prayer before the cleric leading the service gave a moving speech in which he said the 50 victims were martyrs and their blood has 'watered the seeds of hope'. Pictured: People at the gathering

Addressing victims' families, the speaker said: 'Your loved ones did not die in vain. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope.'

The speaker said the rise of white supremacism was a 'global threat to mankind' and showed that 'terrorism has no race, no colour, no religion.' He called for an end to Islamophobia and the 'irrational fear of Muslims.' Pictured: A man sobs

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (pictured wearing a black headscarf) closed the ceremony with a speech at 2pm

A woman takes photo with her mobile phone of people attend the Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (in a black and gold headscarf) arrives before Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque

'Thank you New Zealand for teaching the world what it means to love and care,' the speak said. Pictured: An Imam giving prayer

The speaker said: 'Today, from the same place, I look out and I see the love and compassion in the eyes of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and human beings'

The speaker thanked the New Zealand government, the emergency services and neighbours 'who opened their doors to save us from the killer.'

In his speech, Imam Gamal Fouda said: 'Last week I saw hatred and rage in the eyes of the terrorist who killed 50 and wounded 42 and broke the hearts of millions.' Pictured: PM Ms Ardern (centre) leaves the service

The speaker called on governments around the world to end hate speech and the politics of hate. Pictured: PM Ms Ardern (centre) leaves the service

In his speech, Imam Gamal Fouda said: 'Last week I saw hatred and rage in the eyes of the terrorist who killed 50 and wounded 42 and broke the hearts of millions.

'Today, from the same place, I look out and I see the love and compassion in the eyes of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and human beings.

Addressing victims' families, he said: 'Your loved ones did not die in vain. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope.

'Through them, the world will see the beauty of Islam and the beauty of our unity.'

The cleric thanked the New Zealand government, the emergency services and neighbours 'who opened their doors to save us from the killer.'

'Thank you New Zealand for teaching the world what it means to love and care,' he said.

The speaker then called on governments around the world to end hate speech and the politics of hate.

He said the rise of white supremacism was a 'global threat to mankind' and showed that 'terrorism has no race, no colour, no religion.' He called for an end to Islamophobia and the 'irrational fear of Muslims.'

United in grief: Thousands have gathered in a park for a public memorial service one week after the New Zealander terror attack

Muslims and non-Muslims together showed their support in Christchurch's Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor mosque where worshipers were gunned down last Friday

Women wearing headscarves in tribute to the victims of the mosque attacks are seen before Friday prayers at Hagley Park

Muslims pray ahead of Friday prayers at Hagley Park in Christchurch, New Zealand during a memorial service following the terror attack

The call to prayer was heard at 1.30pm local time (11.30am AEDT) and followed by two minutes of silence

Muslims pray during Friday prayers at Hagley Park in Christchurch as people across New Zealand are observing the Muslim call to prayer

A Muslim man prays during Friday prayers at Hagley Park. He closes his eyes and holds out his palms during the prayer

'We appreciate the support that the people of New Zealand have given to us at this time, and the opportunity to do this,' community leader and head of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, Mustafa Farouk, said

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern greets members of the Muslim community as she attends Islamic prayers in Hagley Park

Armed police officers secure the perimeter before Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch

People attend Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand for a moving service

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern leaves after the Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern attends the Friday prayers at Hagley Park alongside several Muslim women

A man prays as people gather for congregational Friday prayers and a two-minute observation of silence at Hagley Park

Australian boxer Anthony Mundine (centre) joins Muslims for the call to pray at Hagley Park, opposite the Al Noor Mosque

Before the ceremony, prominent Muslims thanked the public for their support since the shooting. Pictured: A man at the ceremony

The public memorial comes the morning after more than 10,000 people marched silently through Dunedin to a packed rugby stadium where 15,000 people gathered for a sombre vigil. Pictured: Women at the ceremony on Friday afternoon

Two men embrace during Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand

Female members of the public with head scarfs gather for the call to prayer and the moments silence at Hagley Park

Mundine (right in red T-shirt), a Muslim who has visited surviving victims in hospital, was seen praying and hugging friends in the park

Before the ceremony, prominent Muslims thanked the public for their support since the shooting. Pictured: People leave after the service

Women wearing headscarves as tribute to the victims of the mosque attacks are seen before Friday prayers

A Muslim man cries during Friday prayers at Hagley Park in Christchurch, New Zealand as PM Jacinda Ardern paid tribute

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (centre) walks past the past Al Noor mosque as she arrives for a gathering

Muslims pray during Friday prayers at Hagley Park in Christchurch. People across New Zealand were observing the Muslim call to prayer

Australian boxer Anthony Mundine, a Muslim convert who has visited surviving victims in hospital, was seen praying and hugging friends in the park.

Before the ceremony, prominent Muslims thanked the public for their support since the shooting.

'We appreciate the support that the people of New Zealand have given to us at this time, and the opportunity to do this,' community leader and head of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, Mustafa Farouk, said.

'We are so happy that this prayer will be broadcast to the entire world so that everyone can be a part of it.'

The public memorial comes the morning after more than 10,000 people marched silently through Dunedin to a packed rugby stadium where 15,000 people gathered for a sombre vigil.

Locals look on at the candlelit vigil held on Thursday night at Forsyth Barr Stadium in Dunedin, to show their respects for the 50 people killed in last week's mosque massacre

On Thursday night more than 10,000 people marched silently through Dunedin to a packed rugby stadium where 15,000 people gathered for a sombre vigil

A mass burial of the victims is expected to take place on Friday after the Police Commissioner announced that all 50 victims of the attack had now been formally identified and their bodies could be released to family.

Up to 25 bodies have been washed in preparation for the burial at the city's Memorial Park Cemetery.

More than a dozen victims have so far been buried after funerals on Wednesday and Thursday, including 71-year-old grandfather Haji-Daoud Nabi, whose final words - 'Hello, brother' - greeted the gunman who first attacked the Masjid al Noor mosque.

Three teenagers were also among those laid to rest.

The New Zealand government has moved swiftly to prevent a tragedy like the Christchurch massacre from ever happening again.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Ardern announced semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles would be banned, as well as parts that can be used to convert less-powerful guns into military-style weapons.

Legislation to introduce the ban is expected to be introduced by April 11, but in the meantime the weapons have become illegal under interim measures.

A buyback program - similar to that of Australia's after the Port Arthur massacre - will be launched to take existing weapons out of the public, and gun owners who don't comply will face fines.

'On 15 March, our history changed forever. Now, our laws will, too,' Ardern said.

'We are announcing action today on behalf of all New Zealanders to strengthen our gun laws and make our country a safer place.'Advertisement

Australian boxer Anthony Mundine joined fellow Muslims in grieving and prayer at Hagley Park near Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch as the community continues to mourn last week's devastating shooting.

Heartbreaking photos show a grief-stricken Mundine hugging another man and praying opposite Al Noor Masjid on Friday, a week after 43 people were killed at the same mosque.

A gunman killed 50 worshipers at the Al Noor Masjid and Linwood Masjid and a 28-year-old Australian man, Brenton Tarrant, appeared in court last Saturday morning charged with murder.

Mundine embraced a fellow Muslim man at Hagley Park opposite Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand a week after it was attacked in a mass shooting. Fifty people were killed in the attack - 43 of them were killed at Al Noor

Mundine looks up during Friday prayers at Hagley Park in Christchurch. People across New Zealand are observing the Muslim call to prayer as the nation reflects on the moment one week ago when 50 people were slaughtered at two mosques

Mundine performs a sujud in direction of Mecca to praise Allah with fellow Muslims. The position involves having the forehead, nose, both hands, knees and all toes touching the ground together

Mundine receives a hug from a member of the Tu Tangata Iwi Tapu motorcycle club as 100s Muslims and non-Muslims attended Friday prayers in Hagley Park to reflect on the violent tragedy

Mundine condemned the 'horrific act of terrorism' and expressed his support for victims in the aftermath of the shooting.

'My heart goes out to the innocent victims of todays tragedy. I am deeply saddened and disturbed by todays horrific act of terrorism,' he said in a Facebook post.

'Innocent people carrying out their Jummah prayers peacefully have their lives cut short. Please keep the victims, their loved ones and all of humanity in your prayers!'

Mundine greets community members as he arrives to attend a two-minute observation of silence in honour of those killed in the twin mosque massacre

United in grief: Mundine joined Muslim worshipers in afternoon prayers opposite Al Noor Mosque. Al Noor and Linwood Mosques will not be ready for weekly Friday prayers as forensic workers are still cleaning up rooms where people were killed

'Innocent people carrying out their Jummah prayers peacefully have their lives cut short. Please keep the victims, their loved ones and all of humanity in your prayers!' Mundine said in an emotional Facebook post

Boxer Anthony Mundine attends the Call To Prayer event held at Hagley Park outside the Al Noor Mosque in

Mundine visited shooting survivors in hospital on Thursday before heading to Al Noor Mosque the next afternoon.

'Im honoured to be visiting these beautiful brothers and sisters who survived the horrific atrocities in Christchurch,' he said in a Facebook post.

'May Allah give them the strength to get through this terrible experience and heal their pain. They are all amazing and very brave humans. Please keep them in your prayers.'

Mundine visited shooting survivors in a Christchurch hospital on Thursday before heading to Al Noor Mosque the next afternoon. 'Im honoured to be visiting these beautiful brothers and sisters,' he said on Facebook

'May Allah give them the strength to get through this terrible experience and heal their pain. They are all amazing and very brave humans. Please keep them in your prayers,' Mundine said in a Facebook post about the survivors

Hundreds of Muslims and non-Muslims gathered in the city's Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor mosque where worshipers were gunned down.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, wearing a black and gold headscarf in solidarity with the Islamic faith, briefly addressed the emotional gathering.

'New Zealand mourns with you, we are one,' she said.

The call to prayer was heard at 1.30pm local time (11.30am AEDT) and followed by two minutes of silence.

Then Imam Gamal Fouda gave a moving speech in which he said the 50 victims were martyrs and their blood has 'watered the seeds of hope'.

Zaed Moustafa - who was injured and lost his father and brother in the mosque attacks - was among those paying respects.

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (in a black headscarf) and her entourage arrive before Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque

Zaed Moustafa (in the wheelchair), the son of Hussein Mohamed Khalil Moustafa, a victim of the mosque attacks, attends Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in ChristchurchA Melbourne man who waited in a woman's bedroom to sexually assault her, then stepped on her throat until she passed out, has been jailed.

Clinton James Tuite, now 35, got away with the 2007 attack for years until he was linked to the crime by DNA found on cigarette butts in the next door neighbour's yard.

Then 23, Tuite prepared for the attack by taking cable ties, duct tape and a piece of wood, and donning a balaclava before breaking into the woman's Chirnside Park home.

Tuite struck the victim's face hard and blindfolded her eyes before indecently assaulting and attempting to rape her (stock image)

The 38-year-victim had just finished night shift, watched television and eaten when she heard a noise.

When she went into her bedroom, Tuite was waiting for her. He bound her wrists with a cable and pushed her onto the bed as she started to cry out.

Tuite struck the victim's face hard and blindfolded her eyes before indecently assaulting and attempting to rape her.

The woman tried to escape, but Tuite stood on her throat until she lost consciousness.

Tuite was found guilty by a Supreme Court of Victoria jury in October of aggravated burglary, attempted rape, indecent assault and intentionally causing injury.

He was sentenced to 10 years and two months in jail, and must spend at least seven years behind bars before being eligible for release on parole.The NHS could be forced to pay out hundreds of millions more in negligence claims as a result of increasing waiting times, experts have warned.

About four in ten NHS compensation claims are due to delays in treatment or diagnosis, but this could rise if more people are left on long waiting lists, a report by the National Audit Office said.

In 2017-18, about 3,000 claims were resolved by the NHS, with damages paid in 56 per cent of cases, at a cost of 600 million.

About four in ten NHS compensation claims are due to delays in treatment or diagnosis (stock image)

Waiting times targets for A&E and non-emergency treatment are under review by NHS England, which could scrap the current 18-week target for people to start treatment following a referral.

This covers non-emergency  or elective  operations such as hip and knee replacements or cataract removal. Rising demand has seen the number of people treated increase from 1.2 million to 1.3 million a month since 2013.

But the national target of 92 per cent of patients receiving treatment has not been hit in the past three years.

This has seen the number waiting more than 18 weeks  often in pain and discomfort  grow from 153,000 to 528,000 over the same period.

'There is a risk that longer waiting times may lead to patient harm and negligence claims against the NHS,' the report said.

Sir Amyas Morse said there has been insufficient progress on reducing waiting times for non-urgent care

'For many people, longer waits result in inconvenience and the discomfort associated with living with a medical condition.

'But for others their condition may deteriorate and a longer wait for treatment may cause them harm.'

The focus on critical care  such as A&E and urgent cancer referrals  had meant elective care had been allowed to slide, the report said.

In 2017, NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens accepted that waiting times would lengthen as hospitals focus on other areas such as cancer and mental health.

As part of the NHS long-term plan, the health service will be allocated funds over the next five years to increase the amount of planned surgery year-on-year, to cut long waits, and reduce the waiting list.

Improvements have been seen in areas such as urgent cancer referrals  where GPs suspect cancer and patients are invited to their first hospital appointment within two weeks.

But the rise in demand on services means key cancer waiting times  such as 85 per cent of patients starting treatment within two months  have not been met for five years.

The NAO said it found persistent staff shortages in diagnostic services and a widening gap between demand for these services and the number of staff working in these areas was adding to delays.

Sir Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said: 'There has been insufficient progress on tackling or understanding the reasons behind the increasing number of patients now waiting longer for non-urgent care.

'With rising demand for care as well as constraints in capacity, it is hard to see how the NHS will be able to turn around this position without significant investment in additional staffing and infrastructure.'

Professor Neil Mortensen, of the Royal College of Surgeons, said patients would be concerned by the report.

He added: 'These will be patients waiting in pain or discomfort. The fact that 40 per cent of NHS compensation claims are attributed to delays in treatment and diagnosis is a visible sign that reducing waiting times needs to be an absolute priority.'

Caroline Abrahams, of Age UK, said: 'The NHS needs sufficient Government funding so older people don't have to wait endlessly for important treatments like cataract operations and hip and knee replacements, undermining their ability to live life to the full and causing them pain, anxiety and distress.'The best friend of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence has said he does not believe any more suspects in the racist attack will be brought to justice.

Duwayne Brooks, who was with Stephen when he was stabbed in London in 1993, said there is 'no way' the remaining suspects could be convicted.

Speaking before presenting a BBC documentary on knife crime last night, Mr Brooks, 44, said 'only someone very close' to the group could lead to further convictions and he did not believe that would happen.

In April 1993 Stephen Lawrence (pictured) was stabbed to death in an unprovoked racist attack in Eltham, South-East London

It took reform of the UK's double jeopardy law for Gary Dobson, 41, left, to be convicted of Stephens murder. David Norris, right, was jailed for 14 years for the murder

The Daily Mail accused five men of being the 18-year-old's murderers in its famous 1997 front page.

Two of them, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were jailed for life in 2012 after forensic evidence emerged.

Mr Brooks told the Evening Standard: 'Those I know are involved have not been found guilty while the ones who have are not expressing any remorse, and that makes it worse for us as victims.'Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk have urged MPs not the plunge Britain into a no-deal Brexit abyss and to vote for Theresa May's withdrawal deal.

At a press conference in Brussels last night, Donald Tusk said the EU had agreed an extension to Brexit to May 22 if MPs approve Theresa May's exit plan.

But if MPs vote it down next week, Britain will have until April 12 to say what it will do next.

At the end of the short announcement Donald Tusk was asked by a reporter whether a 'special place in hell' should be reserved for Brexiteers who don't vote for May's deal.

Mr Tusk responded: 'According to the Pope hell is empty. It means there are a lot of spaces.'

The press conference was then ended by an aide, but not before Mr Juncker shouted 'Don't go to hell.' - as the EU leaders urged Brexiteers to back Mrs May.

Speaking at a press conference today, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (left) and Donald Tusk (right)

At the start of the press conference Tusk said that the response to Britain's request for an extension to the Article 50 withdrawal process was agreed 'unanimously' by leaders of the other 27 member-states.

Mr Tusk said: 'Prime Minister May repeated her request to extend the Article 50 period to the end of 30th of June and to approve the so-called Strasbourg Agreement.

'During the discussion between the EU27, the leaders accepted the request in a positive spirit.

'The European Council decided to approve the Strasbourg agreement.'

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said: 'Since the day of the referendum the position of the 27 members of the European Commission has been united and unequivocal.

'We have worked tirelessly to negotiate the Withdrawal Agreement. We have done everything we could to get it over the finishing line.

'We were asked for clarifications in December, we gave it to them. We were asked for assurances in January, we gave it to them.

'I was asked for further reassurances last Monday in Strasbourg, notably with regard to the backstop, I gave it to them.

'So I have to welcome that today, the 27 leaders endorsed the legally bonding clarifications and assurances that Prime Minister May and I agreed in Strasbourg.

'This closes and completes the full package. There is no more that we can have.'

The so-called 'flextension' plan was drawn up in a meeting stretching over eight hours at an EU summit in Brussels, as EU27 leaders wrangled over possible final cut-off dates for Brexit.

Theresa May has created breathing space of a fortnight if Mrs May reaches the end of next week without securing agreement for her package

The format increases pressure on Leave-backing MPs to row in behind Mrs May's deal, for fear that if it falls the UK could find itself electing new MEPs and remaining for month or years within the EU.

But it also creates a breathing space of a fortnight if Mrs May reaches the end of next week without securing agreement for her package, or if Speaker John Bercow prevents her from tabling a motion which he regards as a repeat of those already defeated by 230 votes in January and 149 votes last week.

Parliament could use that time to try to take control of the process and force Mrs May towards a softer Brexit stance or second referendum.

The bulk of the meeting took place behind closed doors in Mrs May's absence, after her plea for a longer extension to June 30 fell on deaf ears.

Mrs May had to leave the room after making her case in a 90-minute presentation to her European counterparts.

The Prime Minister was reportedly pressed on what she will do if MPs reject her deal for a third time but did not commit herself to a Plan B or rule out a no-deal Brexit.The Queen sent a message of support as a massive aid appeal was launched yesterday to save the millions hit by Cyclone Idai.

Whole villages have been swamped by floodwaters in what could become the worst weather disaster ever to hit the southern hemisphere.

Aid agencies, struggling with only four helicopters at one stage, fear the death toll could be in the tens of thousands but they have yet to even reach whole swathes of Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

The Queen sent a message of support as a massive aid appeal was launched to save the millions hit by Cyclone Idai in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe

Yesterday they launched an appeal to send food, fresh water and tents to the region where some 2.6million people are estimated to have lost homes, farms and families.

The British Government is offering to match every pound donated, up to 2million.

The Queen, who made a private donation, sent her sympathies to the presidents of the three Commonwealth countries.

She said: Our thoughts and prayers are with all those who have lost loved ones and those who are in urgent need of food, water, medical care and shelter.

Cyclone Idai smashed into the Mozambique coast a week ago at 105mph and left a trail of destruction as it swept inland.

Villages and farms have been submerged in floodwaters so deep that buildings and trees are invisible from the air in some places. Houses, roads and bridges have been ripped apart.

Some 835 square miles are flooded. So far about 300 people are confirmed dead but the toll has been estimated at more than 1,000 and it is feared tens of thousands may have died.

Aid agencies yesterday launched an appeal to send food, fresh water and tents to the region where some 2.6million people are estimated to have lost homes, farms and families. The British Government is offering to match every pound donated, up to 2million. So far about 300 people are confirmed dead but the toll has been estimated at more than 1,000 and it is feared tens of thousands may have died

The full scale of the disaster is still unfolding as search and rescue operations ramp up. But more torrential rain is forecast and the UN has predicted it may become one of the worst weather disasters on record in the southern hemisphere.

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella group of 14 charities, is co-ordinating the appeal.

Save the Children has so far delivered 51 tons of aid to Mozambique. A cargo plane carrying 8,400 tarpaulins, 3,500 jerry cans, 2,500 buckets and 20 tents arrived on Tuesday night.Machiel Pouw, of Save The Children, said: A family saw their brick house swept away from them. When they went to another house for safety, the roof collapsed.

The Queen, who made a private donation, sent her sympathies to the presidents of the three Commonwealth countries. She said: Our thoughts and prayers are with all those who have lost loved ones and those who are in urgent need of food, water, medical care and shelter'

Another family fled for safety in a tree. There are tens of thousands of heart-breaking stories like this, lives shattered over the past days.

Some 15,000 people still need to be rescued from the devastation, Mozambique officials said, as they continued to help 1,000 more a day.

Cyclone victims are clinging to roofs or stuck in trees. In the port city of Beira, home to 600,000 people, aid workers say there are only two to three days of clean water left.

Roads out of Beira have been destroyed and the city itself has been 90 per cent damaged or destroyed.

The DEC said: Every pound donated by the UK public will be matched by the UK Government through its Aid Match scheme up to the value of 2million.(ANSAmed) - TUNIS - Fadhel Mahfoudh, Tunisian minister for relations with constitutional instances, civil society and human rights, announced that the Medenine migrant centre will be closed due to overcrowding and deplorable conditions for those being hosted there. "The conditions in this centre are inhumane, and it will therefore be closed immediately," Mahfoudh said during a working visit to Medenine. "We have to find solutions to allow migrants and refugees to live with dignity," he said. He said the centre's location, situated in a residential neighbourhood between a high school and a foyer for female students, is inappropriate. He said the location creates problems with the neighbourhood's residents, who have already asked local authorities to find another place to host the migrants.



Resident numbers continue to increase The centre is managed by the Tunisian Red Crescent with the support of international organisations, IOM, UNHCR, and the collaboration of the International Red Cross. Local sources said the centre currently hosts 20 migrants and 180 asylum seekers, but numbers continue to grow daily due to the increase in migrant flows from Libya. The Tunisian Red Crescent and some local NGOs have long denounced the critical conditions at the Medenine centre.



IOM supports decision Lorena Lando, the Tunisian director of the International Organization for Migration, said the organisation supports the decision to close the centre, which she said has surpassed its maximum capacity. She said IOM will do everything it can to provide the necessary support and assistance to the centre's guests and to respond to the authorities' demands in terms of migrant assistance. "IOM remains available to every migrant who wishes to return to his or her country of origin," Lando said.



She said IOM ensured the return from Tunisia of 605 migrants to their countries of origin in 2018. UNHCR Tunisia representative Mazen Abu Shanab said the increase in the number of Libyan migrants in Tunisia (about 300 per month) is calling for a doubling of efforts in terms of assistance. Most of the migrants who are staying at the Medenine centre are Eritreans who wish to reach Europe, Shanab said.

A child's tragic handwritten note buried among thousands of flowers outside of a Christchurch mosque has captured New Zealand's heartache.

'I wish that egg didn't do that,' the crumpled note read.

'Love from Blake.'

The simple but devastating message, shared by New Zealand police, showed how the callous killing of 50 Muslim people had broken the hearts of the entire nation.

An 'egg' in New Zealand slang is a clown, or an idiot, and one of the more polite names that have been used for self-confessed Brenton Tarrant since the shooting.

'I wish he didn't do that': A note from a young child named Blake left for those mourning loved ones after the Christchurch mosque massacre shows the heartbreaking impact the terror attack has had on people from all walks of life

Last Friday, Tarrant allegedly live-streamed himself driving to the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, armed with multiple high-powered guns.

The stream continued as he entered the place of worship during Friday prayers, and shot defenceless men, women and children dead as they cowered in fear.

Self-confessed terrorist Brenton Tarrant (pictured) allegedly stormed the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, shooting defenceless worshippers and killing 50

Ahead of the horror attack, Australian-born Tarrant released a bizarre 73-page manifesto, which was a combination of hatred and internet memes.

The attack killed 50 and left dozens more fighting for life. Since, New Zealanders have flocked to their local mosque to lay flowers and show support.

Residents left flowers, teddy bears, cards and notes with sorrowful apologies and messages of support.

On one, a New Zealander said they were 'sorry we let this happen'.

'This doesn't change us,' the note continued. 'We won't be forced into a fear that reshapes us.

'Some among us took the wrong path, and we share the pain of the consequences. I am still proudly and gratefully Kiwi.'

Tarrant, who grew up in Grafton NSW, briefly fronted Christchurch District Court on Saturday following a mass shooting at Al Noor and Linwood Majid mosques on Friday afternoon.

Mourners have descended on mosques all over the country to show their support and share their sympathies

A moving note left outside a mosque in Dunedin sends a similar message of solidarity

Tarrant was charged with one count of murder but police say many more charges are expected to be laid - he has been remanded in custody and his duty lawyer did not apply for bail. He will reappear in the High Court on April 5.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke at a press conference in the New Zealand city this week, following visits around Christchurch to pay respect to the victims, where she said the gunman had every intention to 'continue' the attack.

'There were two other firearms in the vehicle that the offender was in and it absolutely was his intention to continue with his attack,' Ms Ardern said at the press conference.

Brenton Harrison Tarrant - a 28-year-old Australian man from Grafton NSW - briefly fronted Christchurch District Court on Saturday charged with one count of murder. More charges are expected to be filed

Police allege that Tarrant began his shooting rampage at the Al Noor Masjidal Mosque in the city's east, before driving across town to the Linwood Masjid Mosque and again opening fireA Muslim leader has delivered a powerful message during a public memorial service for the victims of the Christchurch terror attack.

Muslims and non-Muslims came together in the city's Hagley Park on Friday - a week after a gunman stormed two mosques, killing 50 people and injuring dozens more - to take part in prayer.

Imam Gamal Fouda, of Al Noor mosque, told the thousands who had gathered that from the tragedy there was hope.

Gamal Fouda, the imam of tragedy-stricken Al Noor mosque, delivers a sermon ahead of a two-minute observation of silence for victims of the twin mosque massacre, during congregational Friday prayers and memorial gathering at Hagley Park in Christchurch

Gamal Fouda, the imam of Al Noor mosque, told the thousands who attended the memorial that the tragedy brought hope

Muslims and non-Muslims have come together in the city's Hagley Park on Friday -a week after a gunman stormed two mosques, killing 50 people and injuring dozens more - to take part in prayer

'Your loved ones did not die in vain. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope.

'Through them, the world will see the beauty of Islam and the beauty of our unity.'

'Last week I saw hatred and rage in the eyes of the terrorist who killed 50 and wounded 42 and broke the hearts of millions.

'Today, from the same place, I look out and I see the love and compassion in the eyes of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and human beings.'

New Zealanders have responded to the horrific killings with a show of unity.

Many women in attendance wore headscarves in solidarity with New Zealand's Muslim community.

Muslims answer the call to pray at Hagley Park, opposite the Al Noor Mosque, in Christchurch, New Zealand

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern leaves after the Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who was present at the service, also covered her head with a scarf.

The imam thanked Ms Ardern for 'honouring us with a simple scarf'.

He thanked the New Zealand government, the emergency services and neighbours 'who opened their doors to save us from the killer.'

'Thank you New Zealand for teaching the world what it means to love and care,' he said.

He then called on governments around the world to end hate speech and the politics of hate.

Muslims prostrate towards Mecca during congregational Friday prayers led by Gamal Fouda, imam of tragedy-stricken Al Noor mosque, during a gathering for prayers

People leave after the Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand

He said the rise of white supremacism was a 'global threat to mankind' and showed that 'terrorism has no race, no colour, no religion.' He called for an end to Islamophobia and the 'irrational fear of Muslims.'

Imam's speech came after a call to prayer at 1.30pm NZT (11.30am AEDT) and was followed by a moment of silence.

As the call was broadcast around the country, thousands of people stood silently in a park opposite the mosque where the killing began, as the country of 4.5 million came to a standstill.

The massacre by alleged shooter Brenton Tarrant has shocked a nation known for its tolerance.

Armed police officers secure the perimeter before Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch

Imam thanked Ms Ardern (pictured) for 'honouring us with a simple scarf'. He thanked the New Zealand government, the emergency services and neighbours 'who opened their doors to save us from the killer'

It has prompted horrified Kiwis to respond with vigils and performances of the traditional Maori haka dance, and to form lines behind Muslims to symbolically protect them while they pray.

A mass burial of the victims is expected to take place on Friday after the Police Commissioner announced that all 50 victims of the attack had now been formally identified and their bodies could be released to family.

Up to 25 bodies have been washed in preparation for the burial at the city's Memorial Park Cemetery.

More than a dozen victims have so far been buried after funerals on Wednesday and Thursday, including 71-year-old grandfather Haji-Daoud Nabi, whose final words - 'Hello, brother' - greeted the gunman who first attacked the Masjid al Noor mosque.

Three teenagers were also among those laid to rest.Theresa May has conceded MPs are as frustrated by the Brexit process as she is after yesterday's accusatory Number 10 speech sparked fury in the Commons.

The Prime Minister was blasted for pitting the public against MPs after she claimed, 'I am on your side' and that the public were fed up of 'political games.'

Mrs May referred to her televised speech in Brussels on Thursday night, saying: 'I expressed my frustrations and I know that MPs are frustrated too - they have difficult jobs to do.'

Parliamentarians on both sides of the House had slammed the PM's speech, to the extent that Speaker John Bercow was prompted to reassure MPs, 'None of you is a traitor.'

Prime Minister Theresa May attempted to strike a conciliatory note in Brussels tonight as she climbed down to offer MPs something short of an apology by conceding 'I know that MPs are frustrated too'

John Bercow was prompted to reassure MPs, 'None of you is a traitor,' after they voiced concerns over her rhetoric

Last night the PM was left looking isolated after she told the public she was on their side, distancing herself from her fellow ministers

The PM added tonight: 'There are passionately held views on all sides.

'I am very grateful to those MPs who have supported the deal, to those who have come around to support the deal and to all those MPs I have been meeting across the House.'

Mrs May was warned that her remarks had put them in danger of physical attack by angry members of the public.

Anna Soubry, the pro-Remain MP who now sits as an independent, said she was unable to travel home this weekend after receiving 'very, very serious' death threats.

Senior backbenchers said the PM's broadcast meant it would be even more difficult for her to get her Brexit deal through the Commons when it returns next week.

Downing Street defended the remarks saying they had been intended as a 'message to the public' to explain why she was now seeking a delay to Britain's withdrawal date.

Asked about claims that they had jeopardised MPs' personal safety, a No 10 spokeswoman said: 'I flatly reject that.'

However, Ms Soubry, who has previously been a target for pro-Brexit protesters, said: 'I'm not able to go home this weekend, I am not safe.

'When a senior police officer tells your partner that if it was his wife in the situation that I am in, he would say 'I am frightened for her safety', I think that tells you everything.'

Her comments came after the Commons Deputy Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle emailed MPs on Wednesday - before Mrs May's address - advising them to travel by taxi or with colleagues amid heightened tensions in the run-up to next week's votes.

Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle said three men had to intervene on Thursday when an assailant tried to attack him, grabbing at his glasses after shouting that politicians were 'traitors'.

Mr Russell-Moyle blamed the Prime Minister for having 'whipped up fear and division with her speech last night', while Labour frontbencher Angela Rayner said the incident in Brighton was 'terribly worrying'.

May smiles as she gives a news briefing after meeting with EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday night

In the Commons, Labour MP Paula Sheriff said she had contacted the Prime Minister last week urging her to 'dial down the hate' after being told her head 'should be chopped off'.

Fellow Labour backbencher Diana Johnson said she had received messages calling her a traitor and saying that she and two other Hull MPs 'should be shot and hanged'.

It prompted speaker John Bercow to intervene, saying: 'None of you is a traitor. All of you are doing your best.'

Former Cabinet minister Nicky Morgan said Mrs May's attack on MPs was 'terribly misjudged' at a time she was seeking to build support in the Commons for her deal.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met with just 17 of her constituents at a New York Library, explaining that her lack of accessibility and business hours came from her taking 'baby steps'.

The 29-year-old politician stressed for her supporters to follow her on Twitter for updates after the brief meeting at Westchester Square Library in the Bronx on Thursday.

'Right now we're just taking these baby steps and adapting according to community feedback,' she explained to the New York Post.

The freshman politician has a staggering 3.26million followers on Twitter.

AOC met with 17 constituents at the Westchester Square Library in the Bronx to discuss rising housing cost

'We don't want to be too concrete, we adapt to the feedback of the community, so if we hear that folks want more evening hours we're happy to do that.'

Four months after her inauguration and Ocasio-Cortez has only opened an office in Queens. She has yet to open one in the Bronx.

But she stressed that her constituents could call, email or add her on social media. She is also having pop-up officer hours across the city.

Ocasio-Cortez also stressed that she 'constantly' attends community events, adding that she was headed to the Bronx Community Board 9 on Thursday.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stressed that her constituents could call, email or follow her on social media

Ocasio-Cortez also stressed that she 'constantly' attends community events, adding that she was headed to the Bronx Community Board 9 on Thursday

But the politician did note that she wasn't 'allowed' to supply a schedule of her future events.

'Due to safety reasons I'm not allowed to, so Capitol Police, uh, yeah, it's intense, so, Capitol Police recommend that we don't give specific details about where we will be and when too far in advance,' she said.

At the Bronx meeting, AOC stressed that people should call their local politicians to pressure them about rising housing cost.

'There are two bills in the Assembly and the state Senate that could fix a lot of the runaway rent crisis going on,' she asserted, according to News 12. 'We need people to call their state members. '

In a recent Time profile, it was revealed that AOC gets so many death threats that her aides are trained to evaluate her visitors.A nine-year-old US citizen who crosses from Mexico into California every weekday for school has told how she was terrified when she was detained for more than 30 hours as border agents probed her identity.

Julia Isabel Amparo Medina was stopped Monday by US Customs and Border Patrol while attempting to cross from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Ysidro, California, to attend school, as she does each weekday, at Nicoloff Elementary School.

The school is only six miles away from the city where she lives. Thousands of Mexican children are believed to do the same thing. They are able to because they were born in the US then moved back to Mexico with their families carrying US passports.

On Monday, Julia and her brother were being driven by their mother's friend and her two children.

They had left Tijuana at 4am to leave enough time but traffic was at a standstill so the friend told the kids to get out of the car and walk.

She said she would then order them an Uber to take them the remainder of the way to their respective schools but the kids were stopped before they could make it.

Border agents who inspected Julia's passport card said she no longer looked like the picture. They detained her and accused her and her brother of lying, insisting Julia was in fact her cousin.

After more than 30 hours and following the interference of the Mexican consulate, the child was released on Tuesday and had an emotional reunion with her parents.

'I was scared. I was sad because I didn't have my mom or my brother. I was completely by myself,' she told them.

Scroll down for video

Reunited: Julia's mother got the Mexican consulate involved, and nearly two days later she was reunited with her daughter, in a tearful embrace with her son at the San Ysidro port of entry. She was detained for more than 30 hours

Julia crosses the border from Mexico into California every weekday for school

Julia (pictured) didn't make it to class on Monday, or Tuesday, She said she was told if she admitted she was her cousin, Melanie, she could go home and see her mother

The child's school is only six miles across the border where she lives in Tijuana with her family. She goes every day and is driven by her mother's friend

Her 14-year-old brother, Oscar Amparo Medina, was also questioned, and allegedly made to sign a document stating that his sister was actually his cousin, Melanie, while the family said he was threatened with sex trafficking charges.

Oscar was not detained and it wasn't until 6pm the following day that her mother, Thelma Galaxia, received the call that her daughter would be released at the San Ysidro port of entry.

Julia and her family shared their version of what happened, painting a picture that would be frightening for anyone, let alone minors without the guidance of a trusted adult at their side.

The family said Julia and Oscar were in a vehicle in line on the Mexico side at the San Ysidro border crossing with family friend Michelle Cardenas and her two children at around 4am on Monday.

The line was long, Cardenas said, so she told the children to get out and walk across the border, with a plan to call them a rideshare to take them to their respective schools so they wouldn't be late.

Oscar attends ninth grade at San Ysidro High School and Julia is in the fourth grade at Nicoloff Elementary School, but neither of them made it to their classes that day.

The family said Oscar (pictured left) was threatened with sex trafficking charges if he didn't sign the document saying his sister was his cousin. The children had been driven to school by their mother's friend Michelle Cardenas (right) but she told them to get out the vehicle and walk when the traffic was not moving

The line was long, Cardenas said, so she told the children to get out and walk across the border, with a plan to call them a rideshare to take them to their respective schools so they wouldn't be late

Agents allegedly told Julia that she didn't look like her passport photo, which was taken when she was younger. In the US, passports for children under the age of 16 are valid for five years, per the US Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs.

'My daughter told her brother that the officer told her that if she admitted that she was her cousin, she would be released soon so she could see her mom,' Galaxia said.

CBP said Julia 'provided inconsistent information during her inspection' so she was detained in order to allow authorities 'to perform due diligence in confirming her identity and citizenship.'

In a statement to DailyMail.com, a CBP spokesman said: 'The younger child provided inconsistent information during her inspection, and CBP officers took the 9-year-old into custody to perform due diligence in confirming her identity and citizenship.

'CBP officers confirmed that the teenager was a U.S. citizen and he was permitted to enter the U.S. At about 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, after confirming her identity and that she was a U.S. citizen, the girl was admitted to the United States and released to her mother.

'CBP prioritizes the safety of the minors we encounter. Its important that CBP officials positively confirm the identity of a child travelling without a parent or legal guardian.'

Her 14-year-old brother, Oscar Amparo Medina (second from right), was also questioned, and allegedly made to sign a document stating that his sister was actually his cousin, Melanie. They are shown above showing their passport cards

The family are seen above reunited at the border as they speak with a reporter

They would not say what the inconsistent information was that she gave, adding only: 'Some specifics of our techniques for determining the true identity of a person crossing the border are law enforcement sensitive information.

'In addition, some details of this case are restricted from release due to privacy concerns.

Oscar said agents forced him to sign a letter stating Julia was their cousin, Melanie, after accusing him of crimes he didn't understand.

'She [Juila] is my daughter,' Galaxia said. 'He [Oscar] was told that he would be taken to jail and they were going to charge him for human trafficking and sex trafficking.'

Galaxia got the Mexican consulate involved, and nearly two days later she was reunited with her daughter, in a tearful embrace with her son at the San Ysidro port of entry.

Thousands of children are believed to live in Mexico and attend schools in Arizona, California, Texas and New Mexico.

To enroll, they often use an address of a relative or friend who lives near a public school.

They are US citizens and obtained passports by being born in the States.

Their presence divides opinion. Some believe the children are entitled to the same education as any other kid living in the US.

Others think it is unfair that they should be able to take advantage of free schooling when their families do not pay US tax dollars.Sir Graham Brady (pictured) is reported to have told the Prime Minister that her own MPs want her to quit

The most senior Tory backbencher has told Theresa May that MPs want her to stand down because of her handling of Brexit, it was reported last night.

Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs, is said to have visited the Prime Minister on Monday to tell her that a growing number believe she has to quit.

Sir Graham had been bombarded with text messages by Conservative MPs and urged to confront the Prime Minister with demands that she should go, the Daily Telegraph said.

Sir Graham imparted their calls in a neutral manner in his role as chairman of the 1922 Committee during the meeting in Downing Street, the paper reported.

Downing Street suffered yet another blow yesterday when Eurosceptic MPs who had backed Mrs Mays deal threatened to abandon it last night after she had left open the prospect of No Deal.

The Prime Minister came under pressure from switchers who voted for her plan last week fearing if it fell there would be a lengthy delay to Brexit.

Now such a delay seems to be off the table, some Eurosceptics may seek to achieve No Deal.

The MPs had been convinced by Mrs May to back her proposals after she warned they faced a choice between that and a long extension to Article 50.

But in a reversal, she has ruled out asking for a long delay and  despite last nights developments in Brussels  the door to leaving without a deal remains open.

Several of the MPs told Mrs May personally that she would need to promise to quit to have any hope of getting her deal through the Commons next week.

She was given the blunt advice at a robust meeting with 20 Tories in her Commons study on Wednesday. One MP said: The point was made by several people that if she wanted to get her deal through, she would have to say, Im leaving on such and such a date.

Another said: There were some people reiterating the view that her still being there was a problem. It was clear its not something shes contemplating. She took it on the chin but didnt respond.

Mrs May is said to have been told that her own MPs do not want her to stay in the job amid Brexit negotiations

Several Tory MPs contacted Chief Whip Julian Smith yesterday calling for Mrs May to go, among them former culture minister Tracey Crouch and ex-ministerial aide Anne-Marie Trevelyan.

Amid a backlash against the PMs address to the nation on Wednesday, one Cabinet minister refused to back her approach. While on a visit to Basildon, Home Secretary Sajid Javid was asked by the BBC if she was wise to blame MPs for the Brexit delay.

He said: I have just come from Westminster to get away from Brexit, so I dont think its appropriate to answer that question.

Some previously supportive MPs went public to say they could now vote against the deal when it comes back to the Commons.

Mansfield Tory MP Ben Bradley said: She has made it more difficult. In terms of getting enough support, that speech last night was not helpful.

One MP said Mrs Mays No Deal reversal left them feeling they had the rug pulled out from underneath them.

Another said: A week ago we were all told that No Deal was dead and she has brought it back to life.

In another blow to Mrs Mays hopes of getting the deal through, a senior DUP figure described the Irish backstop as toxic.

The meeting with Eurosceptic MPs took place at 7pm on Wednesday. In what was described as a no holds barred discussion, MPs sought reassurance that No 10 knows what they are doing, one attendee said.

Several MPs argued that it was harder for them to back Mrs Mays deal now because they had done so thinking Britain could leave on time on March 29.Former FBI Director James Comey has penned an op-ed in the New York Times. He is pictured above talking backstage before a panel discussion about his book 'A Higher Loyalty' on June 19, 2018, in Berlin, Germany

Former FBI director James Comey said in a New York Times op-ed published Thursday that he neither knows nor cares what the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation will be - so long as the probe was conducted properly.

US President Donald Trump abruptly fired Comey in 2017, triggering a series of events that led to Mueller being named to investigate allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and that the Trump campaign colluded in that effort.

'I have no idea whether the special counsel will conclude that Mr. Trump knowingly conspired with the Russians in connection with the 2016 election or that he obstructed justice with the required corrupt intent,' Comey wrote in the New York Times.

'I have no idea whether the special counsel will conclude that Mr. Trump knowingly conspired with the Russians in connection with the 2016 election or that he obstructed justice with the required corrupt intent,' Comey wrote in the piece above

'I also don't care. I care only that the work be done, well and completely.'

The highly-anticipated Mueller report has been said to be imminent for several weeks. One element of the investigation is whether Trump's firing of Comey amounted to obstruction of justice.

Since his dismissal, Comey has emerged as an outspoken critic of Trump -- including publishing a book last year that detailed his soured relationship with the president.

President Donald Trump speaks Thursday March 21, in the East Room of the White House in Washington

But in the op-ed, he stopped short of joining many Trump critics in calling for his impeachment -- arguing that would deepen political divisions even further in an already fractured US society.

'Even though I believe Mr. Trump is morally unfit to be president of the United States, I'm not rooting for Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that he is a criminal,' he wrote, an argument he has also made previously.

'I'm also not rooting for Mr. Mueller to 'clear' the president,' he added.

'I am rooting for a demonstration to the world - and maybe most of all to our president and his enablers - that the United States has a justice system that works.'Advertisement

A notorious motorcycle gang performed a stirring haka outside a mosque in New Zealand on Friday in a moving display of solidarity after the Christchurch terror attack.

Members of the Mongrel Mob, one of the country's largest gangs with more than 1,000 associates, vowed to protect their 'Muslim brothers and sisters' praying at the Jamia Masjid mosque in Hamilton on the North Island.

Wearing their trademark black and red leather waistcoats which feature the words Mongrel Mob alongside the gang's British Bulldog insignia, members performed their haka before standing guard outside the mosque.

Their performance was met with a round of applause and cheering from members of the Muslim community who watched before heading inside to pray.

Poignant pictures from the scene showed local Muslim Association president Dr Asad Mohsi touching noses with gang members in a traditional Maori greeting called the Hongi after he welcomed their support.

The display came after New Zealand fell silent during a poignant memorial service in Christchurch's Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor mosque where worshipers were gunned down.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, wearing a black and gold headscarf in solidarity with the Islamic faith, briefly addressed the emotional gathering. 'New Zealand mourns with you. We are one,' she said.

The call to prayer was heard at 1.30pm local time (11.30am AEDT) and followed by two minutes of silence.

Then Imam Gamal Fouda gave a moving speech in which he said the 50 victims were martyrs and their blood has 'watered the seeds of hope'.

On guard: A notorious motorcycle gang (pictured performing a haka at the Jamia Masjid mosque in Hamilton on the North Island) stood guard outside the mosque on Friday in a moving display of solidarity after the Christchurch terror attack

Passion: Members of the Mongrel Mob, one of the country's largest gangs with more than 1,000 associates, also performed a haka outside the Jamia Masjid mosque in Hamilton on the North Island. Pictured: A gang member preforming a haka

Solidarity: Waikato Muslim Association president Dr Asad Mohsi (right) touches noses in a traditional 'Hongi' greeting with a gang member (left). The gang's performance was met with a round of applause and cheering from members of the Muslim community who watched before heading inside to pray

Members of a New Zealand gang called the Mongrel Mob stand guard outside Jamia Masjid mosque in Hamilton on the North Island on Friday. The display came after the local Mongrel Mob president, Sonny Fatu, vowed on Wednesday to help make Muslims feel safe while they prayed

The Mongrel Mob is an organised street gang based in New Zealand that has a network of more than thirty chapters throughout the country. Pictured: Members perform a haka on Friday

The gang's main rival is the Black Power gang and there have been several very public and violent clashes between the two gangs over the years. Pictured: Gang members in Hamilton on Friday

The gang began with a group of mainly European youths from Wellington and Hawke's Bay in the 1960s. Pictured: Gang members perform a haka

Legend within the gang holds that the name originated from the comments of a judge in the Hastings District Court, who referred to a group of men before him as 'mongrels'. Pictured: Gang members on Friday

Many wore their trademark black and red leather waistcoats which feature the words Mongrel Mob alongside the gang's insignia, a British Bulldog. Pictured: A gang member poses for photos

By the late 1960s loose groups of rebellious young men in Wellington and Hawke's Bay were calling themselves Mongrels. By 1966 they were wearing patches bearing the name 'Mongrel Mob'. Pictured: A gang member on Friday

New Zealand's most notorious gang: A brief history of the Mongrel Mob The Mongrel Mob is an organised street gang based in New Zealand that has a network of more than thirty chapters throughout the country. The gang's main rival is the Black Power gang and there have been several very public and violent clashes between the two gangs over the years. The gang began with a group of mainly European youths from Wellington and Hawke's Bay in the 1960s. Legend within the gang holds that the name originated from the comments of a judge in the Hastings District Court, who referred to a group of men before him as 'mongrels'. By the late 1960s loose groups of rebellious young men in Wellington and Hawke's Bay were calling themselves Mongrels. By 1966 they were wearing patches bearing the name 'Mongrel Mob'. By about 1970 the gang had expanded to include numerous Maori. Members consider Hastings in Hawke's Bay to be the gang's 'Fatherland' or birthplace, and the gang first became known for its violence in Hawke's Bay. Later, similarly named groups sprang up around the country, forming their own independent chapters. In the 2000s and 2010s, the Mongrel Mob began expanding into parts of Australia. In 2018 they also expanded into Canada. The gang claims it offers a surrogate 'family' for young men, most of whom are often alienated from their family via joining. The membership is mixed but predominantly Maori and Polynesian. Advertisement

On Wednesday local Mongrel Mob president Sonny Fatu vowed to help make Muslims feel safe while they prayed.

'We will support and assist our Muslim brothers and sisters for however long they need us,' he told Stuff.

'We were contacted by a representative who said some of our Muslim brothers and sisters have fears for Friday during their prayer, and the question was posed whether we could be apart of the safety net for them to allow them to pray in peace without fear.'

Waikato Muslim Association president Dr Asad Mohsin said he appreciated the support the Muslim community has received from 'different sections of society, different interests and dispositions.'

He said he did not view the mob as 'gang members.'

'We value them as humans and we appreciate that they value us too,' he said.

Mohsin urged that it is important for the community to show they will not bow down to terror and invited the gang to pray inside the mosque as opposed to standing guard outside.

'There are no fears, and we are not scared. They don't have to stand outside the mosque, they can come inside, right behind where the sermon is given,' he told the New Zealand Herald.

Fatu promised the Mongrels' gesture will be a 'peaceful' one and the gang would not be armed.

'We are peacefully securing the inner gated perimeter, with other community members, to allow them to feel at ease,' he added.

Solidarity: Waikato Mongrel Mob president Sonny Fatu (pictured left) offered to protect Jamia Masjid Mosque in Hamilton, in New Zealand's North Island

Biker gangs across New Zealand have come out to show their support in the wake of the Christchurch massacre. Members of the Mongrel Mob (pictured on Saturday) descended at Hagley College, in Christchurch the day after the attack

The Mongrel Mob is an organised street gang in New Zealand based across the country. Members (pictured on Saturday) offered to protect Muslim mosques during Friday prayer

This week members of the Black Power, Mongrel Mob (pictured on Saturday), Hells Angels, and King Cobras have taken part in tributes to honour the 50 victims of New Zealand's first ever terror attack

'Our differences are the glue that hold us so tightly together. We must now focus not on where we have been, but where we are going. Let us repair the holes in our waka and restrategise the rest of our journey,' said Mongrel president Fatu.

Throughout this week members of the Black Power, Mongrel Mob, Hells Angels, and King Cobras took part in tributes to honour the 50 victims of New Zealand's first ever terror attack.

On Sunday, ten members of Black Power, which was first formed in 1970, gathered near the police cordon at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch to perform a moving haka.

On Sunday, the country's largest Maori gangs performed a haka near the police cordon at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch. The poignant moment saw around 10 members of Black Power perform (pictured)

New Zealand falls silent in tribute to the 50 people killed in the Christchurch massacre  as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gathers with thousands outside Al Noor mosque to join Muslim prayers

By Charlie Moore for Daily Mail Australia

New Zealand fell silent on Friday afternoon during a poignant memorial service exactly a week after the Christchurch terror attack.

Hundreds of Muslims and non-Muslims gathered in the city's Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor mosque where worshipers were gunned down.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, wearing a black and gold headscarf in solidarity with the Islamic faith, briefly addressed the emotional gathering.

'New Zealand mourns with you. We are one,' she said.

The call to prayer was heard at 1.30pm local time (11.30am AEDT) and followed by two minutes of silence.

Then Imam Gamal Fouda gave a moving speech in which he said the 50 victims were martyrs and their blood has 'watered the seeds of hope'.

Zaed Moustafa - who was injured and lost his father and brother in the mosque attacks - was among those paying respects as well as Australian boxer and Muslim convert Anthony Mundine.

'We are one': Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, wearing a black and gold headscarf in solidarity with the Islamic faith, briefly addressed the emotional gathering

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (in a black headscarf) and her entourage arrive before Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque

Zaed Moustafa (in the wheelchair), the son of Hussein Mohamed Khalil Moustafa, a victim of the mosque attacks, attends Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch

Zaid Mustafa, left, son and brother of victims from last week's mosque shootings is welcomed to Friday prayers

The speaker said: 'Today, from the same place, I look out and I see the love and compassion in the eyes of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and human beings'

A Muslim man cries during Friday prayers at Hagley Park in Christchurch, New Zealand as PM Jacinda Ardern paid tribute

'We appreciate the support that the people of New Zealand have given to us at this time, and the opportunity to do this,' community leader and head of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, Mustafa Farouk, said

A Muslim man prays during Friday prayers at Hagley Park. He closes his eyes and holds out his palms during the prayer

In his speech, Imam Gamal Fouda said: 'Last week I saw hatred and rage in the eyes of the terrorist who killed 50 and wounded 42 and broke the hearts of millions.

'Today, from the same place, I look out and I see the love and compassion in the eyes of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and human beings.

Addressing victims' families, he said: 'Your loved ones did not die in vain. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope.

'Through them, the world will see the beauty of Islam and the beauty of our unity.'

The cleric thanked the New Zealand government, the emergency services and neighbours 'who opened their doors to save us from the killer.'

'Thank you New Zealand for teaching the world what it means to love and care,' he said.

The speaker then called on governments around the world to end hate speech and the politics of hate.

He said the rise of white supremacism was a 'global threat to mankind' and showed that 'terrorism has no race, no colour, no religion.' He called for an end to Islamophobia and the 'irrational fear of Muslims.'

Members of the public look on during a gathering for congregational Friday prayers and two minutes of silence for victims of the mosque massacre

Hundreds of Muslims prayed together in their weekly Friday prayers in the park to pay tribute to the victims of the terror attack

Ms Ardern arrives before Friday prayers at Hagley Park. She briefly addressed the gathering, saying: 'New Zealand mourns with you, we are one'

Then there was a prayer before the cleric leading the service gave a moving speech in which he said the 50 victims were martyrs and their blood has 'watered the seeds of hope'. Pictured: People at the gathering

Addressing victims' families, the speaker said: 'Your loved ones did not die in vain. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope.'

The speaker said the rise of white supremacism was a 'global threat to mankind' and showed that 'terrorism has no race, no colour, no religion.' He called for an end to Islamophobia and the 'irrational fear of Muslims.' Pictured: A man sobs

In his speech, Imam Gamal Fouda said: 'Last week I saw hatred and rage in the eyes of the terrorist who killed 50 and wounded 42 and broke the hearts of millions.' Pictured: PM Ms Ardern (centre) leaves the service

Armed police officers secure the perimeter before Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch

People attend Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand for a moving service

Women wearing headscarves in tribute to the victims of the mosque attacks are seen before Friday prayers at Hagley ParkA mother has been bitten on the ear by another woman after an argument broke out on a western Sydney bus.

The assault occurred after a 32-year-old mother and her young child in a pram exited a bus on Sherwood Road at Merrylands.

A woman had earlier verbally abused the mother after she boarded the bus on Argyle Street at Parramatta.

Police have released an image of a woman they would like to talk to in relation to the assault and are appealing for public assistance

Both the women exited the bus and the unknown woman physically assaulted the mother, tore off a chain she was wearing and bit her ear.

The woman fled the scene and emergency services were contacted where the mother was taken to Westmead Hospital and treated for minor injuries.

Police have released an image of a woman they want to talk to in relation to the assault.

She is described as white , aged in her mid-30s, thin build and was wearing a green shirt.

Anyone with information about this woman is urged to contact police.Rugby legend Sonny Bill Williams has shared his struggles and heartache following the mosque shootings last week.

The typically shy Williams fronted media on Friday ahead of the Call to Prayer in Christchurch's Hagley Park in a show of solidarity for the Muslim community.

Williams said he wanted to show that he is a proud Muslim and a proud New Zealander.

The typically shy Sonny Bill Williams fronted media on Friday ahead of the Call to Prayer in Christchurch's Hagley Park in a show of solidarity for the Muslim community

'I knew that, although being a naturally shy person I knew that I had to step up and be honorable and lead in this space,' Williams told reporters

'I knew that, although being a naturally shy person I knew that I had to step up and be honorable and lead in this space,' he told reporters.

Thousands of Muslims and non-Muslims came together for the memorial service on Friday - a week after a gunman stormed two mosques, killing 50 people and injuring dozens more

Many women in attendance wore headscarves in solidarity with New Zealand's Muslim community.

Williams, who is a prominent Muslim, praised New Zealanders for uniting with the Muslim community following the tragedy.

All Blacks rugby player Sonny Bill Williams greets members of the public after attending islamic prayers in Hagley Park near Al Noor mosque on March 22

A Call to Prayer was held at Christchurch's Hagley Park on Friday - a week after a gunman stormed two mosques, killing 50 people and injuring dozens more

He said the volume of people offering help and support to those in need was humbling.

The All Blacks star, who converted to Islam in 2009, was left shaken following news of the shooting on Friday last week.

In a tearful video posted to social media, Williams pleaded with fans to show their support for the families who had been affected by the horrific incident.

'I'm just deeply, deeply saddened that this would happen in New Zealand,' he wrote.

Williams would regularly pray at the Al Noor Mosque, the scene of the worst of last week's atrocity, when he played for Canterbury and the Crusaders.

Many women, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (pictured) wore headscarves in solidarity with New Zealand's Muslim community during the memorial

Gamal Fouda, the imam of tragedy-stricken Al Noor mosque, delivers a sermon ahead of a two-minute observation of silence for victims of the twin mosque massacre, during congregational Friday prayers and memorial gathering at Hagley Park in Christchurch

The sportsman remained in touch with several families who went to the mosque  the biggest in the Christchurch  when he left the South Island to continue his career with the Auckland Blues.

His close connection to the Al Noor Mosque helps to explain why the New Zealand sporting hero pulled out of a crucial match to help and show his support to Christchurch's Muslim community.

Earlier this week the Auckland Blues captain announced will not lead his team against the Highlanders in their crucial Super Rugby clash on Friday night.TEL AVIV - A spokesperson for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said the legitimacy of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights are "determined by the Palestinian and Syrian people", in response to US President Trump's declaration that the US should recognize Israel's authority over the disputed territory. The spokesperson, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said that any decision taken by the US "is against the law and international legitimacy".



"It has no value, it won't give legitimacy to the Israeli occupation, and it will remain a dead letter," Rudeina said, adding that it will only serve to increase tension in the region.



Egyptian news agency Mena, citing a statement from the Egyptian foreign ministry, said Egypt has "confirmed its position, which considers Syrian Golan an occupied Arab territory".



It said Cairo's position is based on "international legitimacy" created by various UN resolutions, particularly UN Security Council Resolution 497 from 1981 against Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights.



Egypt's statement "puts the accent on the need for the international community to respect the resolutions" and "the Charter of the United Nations" which views "possession of territories with force" as illegal, Mena said.



Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov, cited by Tass news agency, said Trump's statements on the Golan Heights can "destabilise the region" and it is therefore opportune that the statements "remain only a proposal".



Syria also forcefully denounced Trump's declarations, according to Syrian state news agency Sana, citing a statement from the Syrian foreign ministry.



"Trump's declarations don't change the truth, because Golan is, and will remain, Syrian," the statement said.



Syria called Trump's remarks "a violation of international resolutions" regarding the illegitimacy of the Israeli presence.Selfless Sikh taxi drivers have been offering free rides to Muslims and anyone else in need after the Christchurch mosque attack.

Blue Star Taxi driver Manjinder Singh is one of many who have helped transport people around the city, following the chaos that cost 50 lives and injured dozens.

With taxi drivers in high demand, Sikhs like Mr Singh have put aside their differences with Muslims - who have had a long history of conflict in their homelands.

'We decided we will offer them free rides. Whoever is in stress. Whoever needs,' Mr Singh told TVNZ.

Blue Star Taxi drivers like Manjinder Singh (pictured) is one of many who have helped transport people around the city, following the chaos that cost 50 lives and injured dozens

When TVNZ asked Mr Singh if he saw the act as an obligation, the humble taxi driver simply replied: 'I would say, it's a privilege because I never felt it was an obligation.'

'It was just a human and natural reaction.'

A spokesman from Christchurch Blue Star Taxis told Daily Mail Australia the company has generously donated a number of vouchers for free taxi rides, following the attack.

'We have also transported relatives of victims for funeral services for free yesterday and today,' the spokesman said.

'Overall, the response has been great and people are really happy.'

'It was collective selfless service effort by the Sikh community in difficult time when everyone was constributing more than us,' Mr Singh told Daily Mail Australia.

With taxi drivers in high demand, Sikhs like Mr Singh have put aside their differences with Muslims

Mr Singh took to Facebook and said the Sikh community were simply just putting their religious teachings into practice

Mr Singh noticed how hard hospital workers and police worked throughout the week.

'We we are in the transport servicing industry. We thought why can we not contribute?' he said.

The selfless driver told RadioNZ 'terrorism doesn't have a religion'.

'The victims are humans, they aren't Muslims, Sikh or anyone [else],' he said.

Mr Singh took to Facebook and said the Sikh community were simply just putting their religious teachings into practice.

'Recognise all human race as one. Serving God is serving humanity and serving humanity is serving God,' he wrote online.

The Sikh community have also provided food but have gone further and are now raising money for plane tickets to help bring the family members of victims to New Zealand

The Sikh community have also provided food but have gone further and are now raising money for plane tickets to help bring the family members of victims to New Zealand.

Bloody conflicts between Sikhs and Muslims occurred during the Partition of India in 1947.

The conflict led to two independent dominions - a Hindu and Sikh majority in India and a Muslim majority in Pakistan.Omir Bekali, an ethnic Kazakh who spent several weeks in a camp in Karamay before fleeing to Turkey, says the camp was meant to strip detainees of their religious belief

A former detainee has told of the horror at China's re-education camps for Muslims.

Indoctrination starts with early morning patriotic songs and sessions of self-criticism, and often ends with a meal of only pork, according to Omir Bekali, an ethnic Kazakh who said he spent several weeks in a camp in Karamay in Xinjiang before fleeing to Turkey a year ago.

UN experts say China holds one million Muslims in camps in the heavily policed far-west region where most of the country's ethnic Uyghur, the largest Muslim minority, live.

But Beijing has denied the accusations, saying people are attending 'vocational education centres' to rid them of any extremist thoughts in a region that was hit by deadly riots and attacks in recent years.

The sites are a kind of 'campus', according to China's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Yucheng speaking last week.

Bekali said he was able to leave after nearly two months in the Xinjiang camp, he believes, because of an intervention by Kazakhstan authorities

A gate of what is officially known as a vocational skills education centre under construction in Dabancheng, in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region

'Our education and training centres have been set up according to our needs. The students that come in to learn, it's a dynamic number that changes,' Shohrat Zakir, the chairman of Xinjiang's government, told journalists on the sidelines of China's annual parliamentary meeting last week.

'As a whole, the number of people in the education centres should be less and less, and if one day society no longer needs it, these education centres can gradually disappear,' he said, without providing the number of people at the facilities.

For Bekali, the exiled former detainee, the camp was more about trauma than education.

Omir Bekali, a Kazakh who was imprisoned and sent to a re-education camp in China, shows how he was chained during his detention during an interview in his apartment in Istanbul

The institutions had only one objective, he said, to strip detainees of their religious belief

Bekali seen in chains while speaking at a news conference of the Society for Threatened Peoples and the World Congress of the Uyghur people about re-education camps, in Berlin

The institutions had only one objective, he said, to strip detainees of their religious belief.

'Every morning, at 0700 to 0730, we had to sing the Chinese national anthem. We sang together, 40 or 50 people, facing the wall,' Belaki told AFP, recalling the scene in his modest Istanbul apartment.

'I never really wanted to sing, but because of the daily repetition, it sinks in. Even a year later, the music is still resonating in my head,' he said, adjusting the traditional patterned cap worn by Kazakh men.

Born in Xinjiang to ethnic Uyghur and Kazakh parents, Bekali, like many minorities from China, left for Kazakhstan in 2006 to look for work. There, he got Kazakh nationality.

His troubles began in March 2017 when he was arrested in Xinjiang after he returned on a business trip for his Kazakh travel agency.

Chinese paramilitary soldiers patrol the streets of Urumqi in Xinjiang region

A UN report said up to one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities have been detained

A guard tower and barbed wire fences surround an internment facility in the Kunshan Industrial Park in Artux in western China's Xinjiang region

After spending seven months in prison on charges of aiding 'terrorism', he was sent to a re-education camp.

Among the obligations for detainees of all ages he says was to eat pork on Fridays, which is a holy day for Muslims. Consumption of pork is prohibited by Islam's religious restrictions.

He said the 'students' - as officials called them - were also forbidden to speak a language other than Mandarin and to pray or grow a beard, which authorities interpreted as a sign of religious radicalisation.

Bekali said he was able to leave after nearly two months in the camp, he believes, because of an intervention by Kazakhstan authorities.

A vocational education centre in Hotan. Bekali said the 'students' - as officials called them - were also forbidden to speak a language other than Mandarin and to pray or grow a beard

A damaged shop in Tianchi Street in Urumqi, Xinjiang during a riot in 2009

The former detainee has been visiting overseas conferences to tell his story as one of the few survivors able to speak out. Most prefer to keep quiet, for fear of endangering their loved ones in China.

Bekali has no news of his parents and his three brothers and sister, who remain in China.

After being released, he left Kazakhstan to settle in Turkey with his wife and children. He said he wanted to 'put more distance' between himself and China.

Xinjiang, which shares a border with several countries including Pakistan and Afghanistan, has long suffered from violent unrest, which China claims is orchestrated by an organised 'terrorist' movement seeking the region's independence.

Omir Bekalic, center, prepares to pray at a mosque in Almaty. Since 2016, Chinese authorities have ensnared about one million Muslim Chinese, in internment camps, a UN panel said

It has implemented a massive, high-tech security crackdown, which it says has prevented any violent incidents in over two years.

But many Uighurs and Xinjiang experts say the violent episodes stem largely from spontaneous outbursts of anger at Chinese cultural and religious repression, and that Beijing plays up terrorism to justify tight control of the resource-rich region.

While it previously denied the existence of the camps, Beijing has moved towards acknowledging their existence - but insists they are for 'vocational education' and are vital in the fight against separatist sentiments and religious extremism.

It has also gone on a public relations blitz since last October in a bid to counter a global outcry against the camps by inviting diplomats and journalists to tour the centres.Ibises have invaded a Brisbane park spreading an 'unbearable smell' that has angered local residents and a nearby school.

The wading birds have stunk out Einbunpin Lagoon Park in Sandgate, northern Brisbane making parts of it unusable..

The urban flamingos have also left record amounts of poo in the water feed a blue-green algae bloom.

Brisbane City Council's has been blamed for missing the hatching season when they could have prevented more ibises from being born.

Einbunpin Lagoon Park in northern Brisbane is infested with ibises and an angry Councillor says the City Council was too late to stop even more from hatching (park lagoon pictured)

Cr Jared Cassidy of the Deagon Ward said the lagoon's ibis population was larger than ever and half the park has been 'unusable for months'.

'It (the ibis population) should have been front of mind,' he said to The Courier-Mail.

A contractor was hired to check the lagoon and remove eggs but the eggs had already been hatched.

No wade! The wading birds take up every branch of a tree in the park's lagoon. They have made an 'unbearable smell' and their poo fed a blue-green algae bloom last year

One egg and two nests were removed from 48 roosting ibis by the contractors in January.

Ibis are protected under the Queensland Nature Conservation Act, meaning it is prohibited to remove nests that contain hatchlings and fledglings.

The park's ibis population started being monitored in the 2017/18 breeding season.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Brisbane City Council for comment.Brent Bozell has said the 'tech industry liberal bias is the greatest threat to liberty in history'

A group of media leaders have been gathering to discuss ways to combat so-called 'liberal bias' in the tech industry.

Leaders from conservative websites including the Washington Times, The Federalist, The Daily Signal, LifeSite News, Breitbart, Regnery Publishing, Prager U, Sinclair Broadcasting, The Heritage Foundation and came together to discuss what they say is the a left-wing bias among billionaire tech titans who use their power to 'push a political agenda.'

'Conservatives are coming together, across a broad spectrum, of enterprises and joining forces to fight what some of us believe to be, potentially, the greatest threat to liberty in history,' Media Research Centerfounder Brent Bozell said in an interview with Fox News. 'I think we're heading for an all-out war. As much as they like Kumbaya, this isn't gonna be Kumbaya.'

Leaders from conservative websites including the Washington Times, The Federalist, The Daily Signal, LifeSite News, Breitbart, Regnery Publishing, Prager U, Sinclair Broadcasting, The Heritage Foundation and came together to discuss what they say is the a left-wing bias among billionaire tech titans who use their power to 'push a political agenda.'

'Google is potentially the most dangerous because of the power it has with its search engine,' Bozell said. 'You've also got service companies that are getting into the act, whether it's PayPal or Microsoft or numerous others, they're now starting to either flat-out censor or demonize conservative online publications.'

Leaders from prominent conservative websites have been meeting to combat what they see as 'left-wing bias' among popular sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon

'Google is potentially the most dangerous because of the power it has with its search engine,' Bozell said. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google is pictured here

When it comes to Twitter, Bozell had similarly veiled warnings saying the social media platform was 'a global group of influencers who are able to spout their messages, while people with beliefs that don't coincide with the company's agenda are often muted.'

He said Twitter users are forced to abide by 'speech control,' which gets to be 'Orwellian after a while' because a ruler is essentially telling you what rhetoric is acceptable.

'That starts getting very eerie,' Bozell added. 'Especially when you're looking at this being worldwide, not just this country, it's worldwide.'

The meeting was the second gathering of the group, and more are being planned.

The group are now looking to meet with politicians on Capitol Hill to try and pull together some sort of strategy.

Twitter has consistently denied it 'shadow bans' users, specifically writing a blog post in July 2018 that it does not shadow ban, a practice which 'deliberately makes someone's content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.' Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Twitter is pictured here

'Some of us have been cognizant of this emerging threat from the beginning,' Bozell said. 'Only recently has everyone started realizing how big this problem is and how existentially necessary it is to fight them. Everyone is in agreement that it's an all-hands on deck situation for freedom.'

President Trump on Tuesday attacked Twitter, Facebook and Google, stating the companies are 'on the side of the Radical Left Democrats.'

Twitter has consistently denied it 'shadow bans' users, specifically writing a blog post in July 2018 that it does not shadow ban, a practice which 'deliberately makes someone's content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.'

Facebook recently apologized to Trump's social media director, Dan Scavino Jr., for temporarily restricting his account for a couple of hours due to automated bots on the platform  prompting the president to tweet '#StopTheBias.'

Leaders from conservative websites including the Washington Times, The Federalist, The Daily Signal, LifeSite News, Breitbart, Regnery Publishing, Prager U, Sinclair Broadcasting, The Heritage Foundation and came together to discuss what they say is the a left-wing bias among billionaire tech titans who use their power to 'push a political agenda.'

'It's a concerted effort led by billionaires who have this extremist vision for remaking America their communications vehicle is not The New York Times, it's Facebook, Twitter, it's these social media sites,' Bozell said. 'Can anyone deny the dramatic change that's occurred in this country in the past 10 years? Can anyone deny that has happened? This is not a coincidence and they are very, very successful the world has suddenly gone upside down.'.

'There are some many tentacles all over the place it's not an easy proposition to study why this is happening and what the end goal of the radical left is and how they're trying to implement it,' Bozell said.

'The question becomes, if we do nothing, if we've gone this far, this radically far in 10 years, if we do nothing, come 10 years from now where will we be? If that doesn't scare somebody then nothing will.'A man with HIV has infected an underage girl more than half his age when he had sex with her, after plying her and her friend with ice.

Noor Panjshiri picked up the 16-year-old girl near Dandenong in Melbourne in June 2017 and drove her to his home, where he gave her and a 14-year-old girl methamphetamine, the County Court heard on Friday.

Noor Panjshiri, who was aware he was infected with HIV at the time, then had unprotected sex with the teenager and didnt tell her he had the virus.

The girl said during a recorded interview that she vomited and felt unwell after having sex with Panjshiri, and almost a month later was diagnosed with HIV.

Noor Panjshiri, who was aware he was infected with HIV at the time, then had unprotected sex with the 16-year-old without telling her he had the virus

A doctor said it was 'highly plausible' the girl became infected towards the end of June, around the same date they had sex.

He was found guilty in the County Court in Melbourne on Friday of several charges, including negligently causing serious injury, and two counts of supplying a drug of dependence to a child.

Panjshiri, who is also known as 'Chris' did not take his antiviral medication regularly and had a viral load that was at a 'risky level', the court heard.

The offender denied having sex with the girl, and argued she had contracted HIV from someone else.

Panjshiri was remanded and will be sentenced at a later date.Robert Mueller was pictured arriving at his Washington DC office Thursday, as sources close to the Russia investigation say they believe there will be no more indictments, ABC News reports.

The Mueller-led probe has already seen six former President Donald Trump advisers accused, but a letter from last June indicated that without confirmed charges on the way, it's unlikely the public will hear more about anyone involved.

'Punishing wrongdoers through judicial proceedings is only one part of the Department's mission,' Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley. 'We also have a duty to prevent the disclosure of information that would unfairly tarnish people who are not charged with crimes.'

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Sources close to the Russia investigation believe there will be no more indictments in the Robert Mueller-led probe. Mueller is pictured arriving at his Washington DC office Thursday

Mueller was named to investigate allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and that the Donald Trump campaign colluded in that effort

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley last June that there's a duty not to tarnish the reputations of those not charged

'Punishing wrongdoers through judicial proceedings is only one part of the Department's mission,' Rosenstein wrote in the 12-page letter

The man who appointed Mueller penned a 12-page letter in response to Grassley requesting more information on the special counsel investigation.

Rosenstein said the ethic applies to 'an ordinary citizen, a local or state politician, a campaign official, a foreign agent, an officer of the federal legislative, executive, or judicial branch'.

'In fact, disclosing uncharged allegations against American citizens without a law-enforcement need is considered to be a violation of a prosecutor's trust.'

Rosenstein criticized James Comey's handling of Hillary Clinton in 2016. The then-FBI Director didn't charge the Democrat with a crime but tried to justify his behavior by calling it unusual circumstances.

Rosenstein wrote that 'disclosing uncharged allegations against American citizens without a law-enforcement need is considered to be a violation of a prosecutor's trust'

Rosenstein's (left) letter in response to Grassley (right) requesting more information on the special counsel investigation

Comey said in a New York Times op-ed published Thursday that he neither knows nor cares what the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation will be - so long as the probe was conducted properly.

US President Donald Trump abruptly fired Comey in 2017, triggering a series of events that led to Mueller being named to investigate allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and that the Trump campaign colluded in that effort.

The highly-anticipated Mueller report has been said to be imminent for several weeks. One element of the investigation is whether Trump's firing of Comey amounted to obstruction of justice.

Last summer, Rosenstein said in the letter that the Department of Justice must 'follow established procedures, especially when the stakes are high'.

The Mueller report has been said to be imminent for several weeks. Part of probe looks at whether Trump firing James Comey was an obstruction of justice

On page 11, Rosenstein referenced Attorney General under President George W. Bush, William Barr. Barr  who is soon to take the position again under Trump - appointed three special counsels in 14 months to investigate the Bush Administration's handling of a bank fraud case involving loans to Iraq, on October 17, 1992.

Explaining the conflicts that can arise in such probes he wrote: 'Tension between Congress's oversight interests and the Department's solemn responsibility to protect law enforcement information is unavoidable.

'In 1989, then-Assistant Attorney General William Barr wrote that misunderstandings often arise because congressional investigations, by their nature, are usually adversarial and unbounded by the rules of evidence.

'In another 1989 opinion, the Department's Office of Legal Counsel explained that 'the executive branch has ... consistently refused to provide confidential information' to 'congressional committees with respect to open cases'.'A stray dog called has saved an Australian couple from a savage monkey attack while on holiday in Thailand.

Matty Miles and Aprille Hughes from Melbourne drove to The Great Buddha of Phuket on a moped in January.

A group of about seven aggressive monkeys began hissing at the couple and followed them around the hills.

A Thai Ridgeback named Burt came to the rescue and faithfully stayed by the couple's side throughout their journey.

The grateful couple is now aiming to raise funds to bring Burt to Australia.

Engaged Melbourne couple Matty Miles (left) and Aprille Hughes (right) drove to The Great Buddha of Phuket on a moped in January

Thai Ridgeback Burt (pictured) came to the rescue and faithfully stayed by the couple's side throughout their journey

Ms Hughes was incredibly fearful the monkeys would bite and she would get rabies while on the trip.

'Burt protected us, she got between us and the monkeys,' she told Yahoo7.

'She kind of guided us, walked in front of us and made sure we were OK,' Mr Miles said.

The couple wants to raise $15,000 to cover Burt's flight as well as more vaccinations, food and permits.

About $800 has so far been spent to take Burt to an animal hospital for vaccinations, microchipping and tests.

The dog had a scab on her left butt cheek from the monkey attack as well as parasites and large ticks.

Close to $800 Australian dollars had been spent after Burt was taken to an animal hospital for vaccinations, microchipping and tests

'How could we not help a street dog find peace finally after who KNOWS how long she was living rough!' the couple wrote on their Facebook fundraising page.

The couple returned the favour and made an 11km road trip to feed and check up on Burt every day at 5.30am during their holiday.

The intuitive dog noticed a pattern and would diligently turn up at the same time and location.Michael Navage, a 40-year-old homeless man, was charged with drug possession, bestiality and animal cruelty

A man in Arizona has been arrested for allegedly having sex in the shower with his pet cat.

The Mesa Police Department responded to a call of a cat in distress at a residence located close to Val Vista Drive and University Drive on Wednesday.

There, a witness told authorities that 40-year-old Michael Navage, who is homeless, had taken his pet cat into the bathroom.

The caller heard the cat screaming and could hear Navage shouting that 'the cat was stuck on his penis'.

The caller told police that they also repeatedly heard the man call the cat a 'w***e,' according to police reports obtained by DailyMail.com.

Navage is also said to have told the cat to stop 's******g.'

A responding officer found the father in the bathroom naked with the cat partially wrapped in a towel near his genitals. Meth was also found inside the bathroom.

A witness called the Mesa Police on Wednesday and said Navage had taken his pet cat into the bathroom and that the critter had been screaming

Navage was indicated as being a methamphetamine dealer who uses his drugs sales to secure lodging and showers at various places.

He is said to have had fake money and forged IDs and checks in his possession, according to police reports.

The cat was taken to a local veterinarian, who determined that the cat had suffered wounds on its backside. The abused critter was also found to have previous rib fractures and pelvic injuries that had healed over time.

A responding officer found the father in the bathroom naked with the cat partially wrapped in a towel near his genitals. Meth was also found inside the bathroom

Navage was indicated as being a methamphetamine dealer who uses his drugs sales to secure lodging and showers at various places. On Facebook he refers to himself as a 'Drug lord'

Navage told police that he had not had sex with the cat, adding that he had loved the pet since he got it as a kitten.

He repeatedly boasted to authorities that the 'girth' of his genitalia was too big to fit into the cat's anus, which meant that it was 'impossible' for him to have sex with the cat.

The man - who lists himself as being a Drug Lord on his second Facebook profile - has been charged with drug possession, bestiality and animal cruelty.

Navage is due in court on March 28.Petit had been criticized by PETA and others who suggested that he recklessly pushed the dogs, leaving them too exhausted to continue to the finish in Nome

Contributing to the dogs' trepidation was the fact that they were along the Bering Sea coast, where they got lost in a blizzard in 2018 and lost their lead

Rather, Petit explained, they became startled when he yelled at the aggressive dog that was bullying its teammate: 'They heard an upset daddy'

Petit insists the dogs 'did not slow down like a tired team would'

The team stopped after Petit yelled at a dog that was bullying another

French musher Nicolas Petit held a commanding lead in the Iditarod earlier this month when his team of dogs opted to quit along the coast of the Bering Sea

The Iditarod musher who was hours ahead in the Alaska wilderness race when his dogs refused to keep running dismissed critics who say he ran them too hard and chalked it up to a bad memory that spooked them.

The team stopped last week after Frenchman Nicolas Petit yelled at a dog that was bullying another, but they 'did not slow down like a tired team would,' he said.

It came a year after they got lost in a blizzard near the same spot along the Bering Sea coast - close to the finish line of the 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race that takes global competitors across mountain ranges and wind-swept ice.

'I wouldn't say it's a curse for me, I just had a bad time last year and lingering effects of the bad time this year,' Petit said.

It was pure coincidence that it happened at the same point in the race, he said.

'They remember that we didn't have a fun run,' going through the snow the wrong way, Petit said Wednesday, sprawling out on a friend's sofa in Anchorage.

Iditarod musher Nicolas Petit poses with two of his dogs in Anchorage, Alaska. The Frenchman Petit was in the lead of this year's race but his dog team quit running after he yelled at Joey, right, to stop picking on Danny, left. Petit says that isn't the reason the dogs quit running

Petit yelled at Joey, left, to stop picking on Danny, right, shortly before the dogs quit along the Bering Sea coast. He blew a similar lead in 2018 when the team got lost in a blizzard

Petit getting kisses from two of his dogs. The Frenchman refers to them as his 'children'

Dogs from his team piled on top of him and licked his face. Also nosing their way in for attention were Joey, who was the bully on the trail, and Danny, the younger male dog who was bullied.

When Petit withdrew from the race this year, he said it was a 'head thing' for the dogs.

Then the blowback began - in press releases, on blogs and on social media. The most vocal critic of the race, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said it wasn't the dogs that needed their heads examined, it was anyone who supports 'the merciless race.'

Others speculated that Petit overexerted the dogs, they were mistreated or were mentally unfit to run. Petit denies it all.

'This isn't any type of a reason to get rid of what I consider my children - the dogs I raised,' Petit said. 'No, I won't get rid of them. They are the most important thing in my life.'

He also said he's 'stopping plenty' along the grueling route, preferring to rest outside checkpoints and along the trail when possible, where he says it's quieter and the dogs get more sleep.

In this March 10, 2019 photo, Nicolas Petit comes down Kouwegok Slough to reach Unalakleet, Alaska, on Sunday morning in the lead of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. The Iditarod musher, Petit, was hours ahead in the Alaska race when his dogs refused to keep running

In this March 10, 2019 file photo, Nicolas Petit arrives in Unalakleet, Alaska

When Petit withdrew from the race this year, he said it was a 'head thing' for the dogs. Then the blowback began - in press releases, on blogs and on social media. The most vocal critic of the race, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said it wasn't the dogs that needed their heads examined, it was anyone who supports 'the merciless race'

Libby Riddles, the first woman to win the Iditarod in 1985, said the sport requires a fine balance between being competitive and keeping the dogs happy - something she said Petit excels at.

In 2018, Petit rested his dogs at a cabin between checkpoints before the disastrous run in the blizzard. He planned to stay at the cabin again this year. Video shows an energetic and eager dog team entering and leaving the first checkpoint. Within a mile of the cabin, the dog dustup happened that Petit claims cost his team the lead

'People have this idea that you can force these dogs' to the finish line, Riddles said last week. 'It's not like that at all.'

In 2018, Petit rested his dogs at a cabin between checkpoints before the disastrous run in the blizzard. He planned to stay at the cabin again this year but leave it with a well-rested team.

Video shows an energetic and eager dog team entering and leaving the first checkpoint.

Within a mile of the cabin, the dog dustup happened. Joey, a 2-year-old and the only non-neutered male on the team, was behind Danny, a 16-month-old pup. Every time Danny slowed down, Joey would pick on him.

Finally, Petit yelled, 'Joey, that's enough!'

'I raise my voice a little bit and they are all like, 'Oh, boy, that's not normal,'' Petit said. 'I try to be as calming and collected with my dogs as possible all the time, so they heard an upset daddy.'

The team refused to keep going. He tried walking ahead of them to see if they would follow and putting different dogs in the lead. Other mushers came by, but even that didn't rouse the dogs.

They finally got the mile to the cabin. Fourteen hours after the dogs stopped, they took off but didn't make it far. Petit took them back and pushed the panic button on his GPS unit, effectively withdrawing from the race.

A snowmobile brought food and then carted the dogs off the trail.

Petit still expects to compete in next year's Iditarod. He's said he's planning to take his dogs next week to the problem area - the Bering Sea coast - to show them the fun they can have on that stretch of the trail.

'And that it's not always blowing, and we don't always get lost, and it can be a very positive experience as opposed to the last two years,' he said.Thousands of people have linked arms to form a human chain outside a mosque in New Zealand following the Christchurch terror attack.

Joined shoulder to shoulder, residents stood tall and united as they symbolically shielded Muslims during Friday afternoon prayers at the Kilbirnie Mosque in Wellington on the country's North Island.

The display of solidarity marked exactly one week since the mass shootings at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques that claimed the lives of 50 people.

'We want to reassure our Muslim brothers and sisters that we are here for them and with them,' co-organiser Daniel Kleinsman said in the lead-up to the event.

'We want to create the bonds and relationships that prevent such an act of terrorism from occurring ever again.'

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Thousands of Muslims and non-Muslims linked arms to form a human chain outside a mosque in New Zealand following the Christchurch terror attack (pictured, a human chain formed outside the Kilbirnie Mosque)

Linked shoulder to shoulder, residents stood tall and united as they symbolically shielded Muslims during Friday afternoon prayers at the Kilbirnie Mosque in Wellington on the country's North Island (pictured, residents link arms to form a human chain)

The display of solidarity marked exactly one week since the mass shooting at the Al Noor and Linwood Masjid mosques, which claimed the lives of 50 people (pictured, mourners gather for the service outside Kilbirnie Mosque)

'We want to reassure our Muslim brothers and sisters that we are here for them and with them,' co-organiser Daniel Kleinsman said in the lead-up to the event (pictured, a stirring service outside Kilbirnie Mosque)

Police commissioner Mike Bush, mayor Justin Lester and leaders from the religious community were among those spotted in the thousand-strong crowd as well as members from Wellington gang The Full Blooded Islanders.

'Its a powerful symbol of support and love, but its also practical,' Mr Kleinsman said on the human chain.

'It seeks to create a physical barrier of protection for those persecuted at this time.'

The chain observed two minutes of silence to remember the victims of one of the worst attacks in New Zealand's modern history.

Flowers and signs of support were also laid in front of the mosque as an added show of support.

International Muslim Association New Zealand president Tahir Nawaz said he was moved at the sight.

'It clearly shows the New Zealand community and public is with us and the main purpose is to show the solidarity to us, to pay condolences, and to assure us that whatever happened we are going to stay strong, and the community will be with us all the way.'

Member of parliament Paul Eagle took to Twitter to post videos of the moving display of support.

'We are one,' Mr Eagle tweeted.

Students from Te Kura Kaupapa o Nga Mokopuna delivered a moving song to pay respect to the 50 lives lost, before they performed a haka.

The stirring display came as New Zealanders held tributes across the nation, with a poignant memorial service held at Christchurch's Hagley Park opposite Al Noor Mosque - one of the sites of the mass shooting.

'New Zealand mourns with you. We are one,' New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern said as she wore a black and gold headscarf.

Imam Gamal Fouda gave a moving speech in which he said the 50 victims were martyrs and their blood has 'watered the seeds of hope'.

'Last week I saw hatred and rage in the eyes of the terrorist who killed 50 and wounded 42 and broke the hearts of millions.

The chain observed two minutes of silence to remember the victims of one of the worst attacks in New Zealand's modern history (pictured, thousands gathered outside Kilbirnie Mosque to pay tribute to the victims of the mass shooting at Al Noor and Linwood Masjid mosques)

International Muslim Association New Zealand president Tahir Nawaz said he was moved at the sight (pictured, two women dressed in headscarves observe two minutes of silence)

Member of parliament Paul Eagle took to Twitter to post videos of the moving display of support (pictured, residents console each other outside Kilbirnie mosque)

Police commissioner Mike Bush, mayor Justin Lester and leaders from the religious community were among those spotted in the thousand-strong crowd as well as members from Wellington gang The Full Blooded Islanders (pictured)

Te Kura Kaupapa o Nga Mokopuna delivered a moving to pay respect to the 50 lives lost, before they performed a haka (pictured, a volunteer hands out refreshments at the Wellington mosque)

'Today, from the same place, I look out and I see the love and compassion in the eyes of thousands of fellow New Zealanders and human beings.

Addressing victims' families, he said: 'Your loved ones did not die in vain. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope.

'Through them, the world will see the beauty of Islam and the beauty of our unity.'

The cleric thanked the New Zealand government, the emergency services and neighbours 'who opened their doors to save us from the killer.'

'Thank you New Zealand for teaching the world what it means to love and care,' he said.

The speaker then called on governments around the world to end hate speech and the politics of hate.

He said the rise of white supremacism was a 'global threat to mankind' and showed that 'terrorism has no race, no colour, no religion.' He called for an end to Islamophobia and the 'irrational fear of Muslims.'

The stirring display came as New Zealanders held tributes across the nation, with a poignant memorial service held at Christchurch's Hagley Park opposite Al Noor Mosque - one of the sites of the mass shooting (pictured, an overview of the crowd at Kilbirnie Mosque on Friday afternoon)

'New Zealand mourns with you. We are one,' New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern said as she wore a black and gold headscarf (pictured, a woman mourns outside Kilbirnie Mosque)

Imam Gamal Fouda gave a moving speech in which he said the 50 victims were martyrs and their blood has 'watered the seeds of hope' (pictured, the public gathered outside Kilbirnie Mosque on Friday afternoon)UNHRC says Israel used 'excessive force' in Gaza Israeli ambassador says resolution manipulation by Hamas

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, MARCH 22 - The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on Friday condemned Israel for "excessive use of force in Gaza" during weekly demonstrations along the border.



Israel called the resolution hypocritical and said it intends to cooperate with UNHCR.



The Council approved (with 23 votes in favour, nine against, and 14 abstentions) a report that said Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity when they opened fire against Palestinian protesters.



It also called for those responsible to face justice.



Israel said it doesn't feel bound by "an absurd, pro-Hamas and pro-terrorism report" that it said was voted on by "dictatorships and hypocrites".



"The moral majority, on the other hand, didn't support it," it said.



Israeli Ambassador to Italy Ofer Sachs said the resolution was the "umpteenth occasion in which the UN Council of Human Rights has betrayed its mandate, giving in to the manipulation of Hamas".



In a statement, Sachs expressed "bitterness with respect to Italy's abstention" alongside that of other member states in the Council vote.(ANSAmed).



A pet owner has discovered dog treats laced with fish hooks on one of Sydney's most popular beach walks.

The treats were spotted on a section of the city's iconic Bondi to Coogee coastal walk on Friday morning.

A community Facebook group has condemned the find, describing the culprit's actions as 'reckless and reprehensible.'

Dog treats threaded through with fish hooks (pictured) were found on a stretch of the popular Bondi to Coogee coastal walk on Friday

The dog treats (left) were found by local residents who alerted Randwick Council before disposing of them

Randwick Council posted a warning on its Facebook page (pictured) about 'nails' in dog baits, but it was pointed out that the objects were actually fish hooks

Another person wrote: 'This is disgusting and seems to happen all around the eastern suburbs.'

The treats threaded through with fish hooks were found by local residents who alerted Randwick City Council, before disposing of them, a council spokesperson told Yahoo7.

Randwick City Council have also have issued a warning to other pet owners who use the track to keep their eyes open.

'Please look out for your pooches and share this information,' the council posted on its Facebook page.

Users also took to the council's page to register their disgust.

'Geez who does that??? Some people are really damaged,' wrote one user.

The fish hook filled dog treats were found on a stretch of the popular Bondi to Coogee coastal walk (pictured)

'Jail them and make them swallow nails,' said another.

The council said that rangers had searched the area around Alexandria Parade and were investigating the rest of the coastal walk for any further contaminated treats.

The matter has also been reported to NSW Police, who are investigating.Two US service members were killed in Afghanistan Friday, NATO said, withholding further details until the soldiers' next of kin are informed.

The deaths are the latest casualties to hit the international coalition amid ongoing peace talks between Washington and the Taliban.

NATO's Resolute Support mission would not immediately release any details about the soldiers but said they had been killed during an unspecified 'operation' in the country.

A Marine walks towards a U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter at FOB Lagman Security transfer to Afghans begins, Qalat, Zabul, Afghanistan, 2011

The number of US troop casualties has fallen dramatically since the end of 2014 when Afghan forces took over from US-led NATO combat troops to secure the country

'In accordance with U.S. Department of Defense policy, the name of the service members killed in action are being withheld until 24 hours after notification of next of kin is complete,' said NATO.

The deaths come a day after at least six people were killed by blasts in an Islamic State-claimed attack during Persian New Year celebrations in a Shiite area of Kabul.

The number of American casualties has fallen dramatically since the end of 2014 when Afghan forces took over from US-led NATO combat troops to secure the country.

U.S. troops patrol at an Afghan National Army (ANA) base in Logar province, Afghanistan

U.S. Army's Alpha Company 4th Battalion 5th Stryker Brigade on a mission from Forward Operating Base (FOB) Wolverine on December 11, 2009 near Qalat, Afghanistan

Fighting continues to flare across Afghanistan more than a week after the latest round of talks between the US and the Taliban ended in Doha, as Washington continues to seek an end to the nearly 18-year war.

The Afghan government has complained it is being left out of the negotiations, as many Afghans fear a premature US withdrawal could see the Taliban return to some semblance of power.

The country remains on edge as winter comes to end, with warmer weather sparking the potential onset of a new fighting season as analysts warn the Taliban may increase attacks to gain leverage at the negotiating table.

US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is spearheading efforts to strike a peace deal with the Taliban before Afghanistan's presidential election, which was pushed back to late September earlier this week.

A U.S. Marine (C) walks as Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers attend a training exercise in Helmand province

Afghan National Army soldiers carry out an exercise during a live firing at the Afghan Military Academy in Kabul

Staff Sgt. Bryan McQueen is presented with the helmet that protected him from a machine gun shot to the head whilst serving in AfghanistanSyria and its allies have condemned Donald Trump's declaration that America should recognise Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

The Foreign Ministry in Damascus vowed it would use 'every possible means' to 'liberate' the region and described the US President's statement as a threat to international peace and stability.

It said his comments on Twitter confirm 'the blind bias of the United States to the Zionist entity,' referring to Israel, and added that the statement won't change 'the fact that the Golan was and will remain Arab and Syrian.'

It comes as Russia branded the move 'irresponsible' and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the declaration has brought the region 'to the brink of a new crisis and new tensions.'

Trump's statement was immediately welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who thanked the President for his 'bold' move

The strategic plateau (pictured in file image) was seized from Syria by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and has been disputed ever since. Israel unilaterally annexed the area in 1981 , but the subsequent U.N. Security Council resolution 497 refers to Israel as 'the occupying power'

The 690 square mile Golan Heights region lies is claimed by both Israel and Syria. It borders Lebanon to the north and Jordan to the south

Russia warned that such a policy U-turn could fan the flames of new conflict in the region.

'Certainly, such appeals can considerably destabilise an already tense situation in the Middle East,' Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

'In any case, this idea in itself does not in any way contribute to the goals and objectives of a Middle East settlement, but rather the opposite,' he said.

'It's just a call for now, hopefully it will remain a call.'

Russia's Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also described the move as 'irresponsible', according to state-owned news agency RIA.

This sentiment was echoed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said Trump's 'unfortunate' declaration has brought the region 'to the brink of a new crisis and new tensions.'

What is the origin of the dispute over Golan Heights? Golan Heights is 690 square mile region of rocky highland in the Levant. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel seized the Heights from Syria, and most Syrian Arab residents of Golan Heights fled during the conflict. After the armistice, Israel began to settle the area and unilaterally annexed it in 1981. There are now estimated to be some 20,000 Israelis and 20,000 Syrians living in the area. But the international community considers the Heights to be a part of Syria that is occupied by Israel. An Israeli soldier stands next to signs pointing out distances to different cities, on Mount Bental, an observation post in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that overlooks the Syrian side of the Quneitra crossing. Golan Heights is an invaluable vantage point of Israel to monitor Syrian movements Though relatively small, the area is of significant political and strategic importance - bordering Israel, Lebanon and Jordan. It provides Israel an ideal look-out point, as much of southern Syria including the capital Damascus can be viewed from the top of the heights. The area is also a key source of water in the dry Levant and provides one third of Israel's water supply. Decades of talks have unraveled over the issue of the border - Syria wants a return to the pre-1967 boundaries but Israel has refused. This is because those boundaries would again give Syria control of the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, which is currently Israel's main source of fresh water. Instead, Israel wants the border to be laid just a few hundred metres to the east of the shore. Talks have also been hampered by the election in 2009 of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who takes a hard-line approach as well as the onset of civil war in Syria in 2011. Advertisement

'We will never allow the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights,' Erdogan added.

Trump's announcement on Thursday signifies a major shift in American policy and gives Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a political boost a month before what is expected to be a close election.

Israel captured the strategic highlands from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967 and unilaterally annexed the 690 square mile region in 1981.

The Trump administration has been considering recognizing Israel's sovereignty there for some time, and Netanyahu pressed the matter with visiting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier this week.

The U.N. Security Council resolution 497, issued after the annexation, refers to Israel as 'the occupying power' and says Israel's attempt to 'impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect.'

Syria's foreign ministry and its allies have slammed Trump's call for Israeli control of Golan Heights (pictured) to be recognised, with many warning of the 'irresponsible' threat to peace in the region

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (left) shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during their visit to Netanyahu's official residence in Jerusalem on Thursday. Netanyahu has praised President Donald Trump's recognition of its control over the Golan Heights as a holiday 'miracle'

What was the international reaction to Trump's comments? SYRIA: The foreign ministry reacted with anger - promising to escalate its presence and use 'every possible means' to 'liberate' the region and slamming Trump's 'bias'. ISRAEL: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the 'bold' move and thanked Trump. RUSSIA: The Kremlin condemned the 'irresponsible' move, which it said would 'considerably destabilise an already tense situation in the Middle East'. IRAN: Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote on Twitter that he was shocked by Trump 'continuing to try to give what is not his to racist Israel: first Al-Quds & now Golan'. GERMANY: A government spokeswoman said Germany rejected 'unilateral steps' and said borders could only be changed through peaceful negotiations between all those involved. TURKEY: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Trump had risked plunging the region into a 'new crisis' and added he would 'never allow the occupation of Golan Heights to be made legitimate' THE EU: A spokeswoman said that the EU still 'does not recognise Israel's sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967, including the Golan Heights'. THE ARAB LEAGUE: Organisation head Ahmed Aboul Gheithad said Trump had paved 'the way for official American recognition' of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan and called this 'completely beyond international law'. EGYPT: The Foreign Ministry cited U.N. Security Council resolution 497 of 1981 which rejected Israel's annexation of the territory, and said it considers the Golan Heights as occupied Syrian land. Advertisement

Damascus said Trump's statement 'clearly shows the U.S. disdain to the international legitimacy and violates its resolutions, especially Security Council resolution 497' while also threatening 'international peace and stability.'

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also expressed his shock at the American stance.

'All shocked by @realDonaldTrump continuing to try to give what is not his to racist Israel: first Al-Quds & now Golan' Zarif tweeted from Istanbul where he was attending an emergency meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Meanwhile, Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit reminded critics that Trump's notion 'comes outside the international legitimacy and no country, no matter how important it is, can make such a decision.'

This was backed up by the European Union, which emphasized that it does not recognise Israel's sovereignty in Golan Heights.

'The position of the EU has not changed,' an EU spokeswoman said.

'The European Union, in line with international law, does not recognise Israel's sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967, including the Golan Heights and does not consider them to be part of Israel's territory.'

The U.S. will be the first country to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, whose status the rest of the international community believe should be determined by negotiations between Israel and Syria.

Attempts to bring Israel and Syria to the table have failed.

A German government spokeswoman said that the area was Syrian territory occupied by Israel.

'If national borders should be changed it must be done through peaceful means between all those involved,' Ulrike Demmer said. 'The government rejects unilateral steps.'

It was not immediately clear how a U.N. peacekeeping force that is in place in the Golan might be affected by the U.S. move. That force's mandate expires at the end of June.

There had been signals that a U.S. decision was coming. Last week, in its annual human rights report, the State Department dropped the phrase 'Israeli-occupied' from the Golan Heights section, instead calling it 'Israeli-controlled.'Alisa Tepikina, 22, pictured during her pregnancy, died after 'excruciating pain' shortly after giving birth in Russia

A young woman suffered 'excruciating pain' and died in a coma shortly after giving birth when an inexperienced obstetrician allegedly ripped out her placenta in Russia.

Alisa Tepikina, 22, smiled at seeing her first child, a girl, but was left screaming in pain as the recently-qualified medic apparently pulled roughly on the umbilical cord.

The placenta did not separate from her inverted uterus in the normal way and she fell into a coma, suffered a cardiac arrest and died.

A criminal probe into possible medical negligence has been launched in the case in Nizhneserginskaya, in Russia's Sverdlovsk region.

Alisa's father Dmitry Malyukov, 47, said: 'We have been told that the 'birth' of the placenta did not occur.

'The midwife called in a doctor. The obstetrician, aged 27 and recently qualified, began to pull the umbilical cord roughly.

'My daughter was suffering, she was screaming in pain. But the doctor paid no attention.'

The family have friends working on the medical staff in the hospital, who witnessed what happened and gave evidence to police, he said.

'She tugged the umbilical cord with real force - the uterus was inverted,' he said.

'Alisa screamed so loud that she could be heard throughout the hospital. This is like something from the Middle Ages.

'This caused a pain shock, severe bleeding, and she fell into a coma.'

Alisa Tepikina, pictured left and right, was left screaming in pain as the recently-qualified medic pulled roughly on the umbilical cord

Alisa and husband Nikolay Tepikin on their wedding day. He was told she had fallen into a coma, suffered a cardiac arrest and died

He was told that Alisa suffered a cardiac arrest and never regained consciousness.

A helicopter was put on standby to rush the mother to a major surgical hospital - but she was deemed too weak to fly.

The official cause of her death was registered as severe shock caused by pain, said her mother Svetlana Cheshko, 42.

Soon after the birth her husband Nikolay Tepikin, 22, had accompanied the baby to another hospital because the girl had a minor neck injury.

The woman's mother, Svetlana Cheshko (second left), holds her newborn granddaughter Anna

When he returned several hours later he was told his wife was seriously ill and allowed to sit with her.

It emerged that Alisa was already dead.

'Her eyes were covered in blindfolds, her jaw was tied up,' he said.

'There were tubes everywhere for a lung ventilator but no machine nearby. I reached out to hold her hand - and it was cold.'

The obstetrician in the case was suspended and the Russian Investigative Committee confirmed a criminal case has been launched.

Elena Barannikova, head physician at Nizhneserginskaya hospital, claimed her doctors were not to blame and the 'uterus spontaneously inverted'.

She said: 'It is rare, but it happens.'

Alisa's grandmother Lyudmila said: 'I called the hospital and asked if Alisa saw her daughter before she died.

'It was important for me to know.

'They told me what she had seen her child, and smiled.'

Svetlana Cheshko (left), Alisa's mother, and her husband Nikolay Tepikin (right) were told she had died of severe shock caused by painHundreds of pregnant Russian women travel to the United States each year to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship.

They pay anywhere from $20,000 to sometimes more than $50,000 to brokers who arrange their travel documents, accommodations and hospital stays, often in Florida.

While the cost is high, their children will be rewarded with opportunities and travel advantages not available to their Russian countrymen. The parents themselves may benefit someday as well.

And the decidedly un-Russian climate in South Florida and the posh treatment they receive in the maternity wards - unlike dismal clinics back home - can ease the financial sting and make the practice seem more like an extended vacation.

The Russians are part of a wave of 'birth tourists' that includes sizable numbers of women from China and Nigeria.

President Donald Trump has spoken out against the provision in the U.S. Constitution that allows 'birthright citizenship' and has vowed to end it, although legal experts are divided on whether he can actually do that.

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In this photo taken on Jan. 24, 2019, Denis Wolok, the father of 1-month-old Eva's father, shows the child's U.S. passport during an interview with The Associated Press in Hollywood, Fla. Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women, like Wolok's wife, Olga Zemlyanaya, travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship

Although there have been scattered cases of authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies for visa fraud or tax evasion, coming to the U.S. to give birth is fundamentally legal. Russians interviewed by The Associated Press said they were honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even showed signed contracts with doctors and hospitals.

There are no figures on how many foreign women travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter immigration laws, estimated that in 2012, about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the U.S., then left the country.

The Russian contingent is clearly large. Anton Yachmenev of the Miami Care company that arranges such trips, told the AP that about 150 Russian families a year use his service, and that there are about 30 such companies just in the area.

South Florida is popular among Russians not only for its tropical weather but also because of the large Russian-speaking population. Sunny Isles Beach, a city just north of Miami, is even nicknamed 'Little Moscow.'

In this photo taken on Jan. 24, 2019, Olga Zemlyanaya, an interior design blogger, holds her 1-month-old daughter Eva in Hollywood, Fla. Zemlyanaya, who gave birth to a daughter in December, was remaining in Miami until her child is issued a passport. 'With $30,000 we would not be able to buy an apartment for our child or do anything, really. But we could give her freedom. That's actually really cool.' (AP Photo/Iuliia Stashevska)

In this photo taken on Jan 19, 2019, a doctor performs an ultrasound examination for Svetlana Mokerova in Miami Beach, Fla. Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women, like Mokerova, travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire the privileges of American citizenship. (AP Photo/Iuliia Stashevska)

'With $30,000, we would not be able to buy an apartment for our child or do anything, really. But we could give her freedom. That's actually really cool,' said Olga Zemlyanaya, who gave birth to a daughter in December and was staying in South Florida until her child got a U.S. passport.

An American passport confers many advantages. Once the child turns 21, he or she can apply for 'green card' immigration status for the parents.

A U.S. passport also gives the holder more travel opportunities than a Russian one; Americans can make short-term trips to more than 180 countries without a visa, while Russians can go visa-free only to about 80.

Traveling to the U.S. on a Russian passport often requires a laborious interview process for a visa. Just getting an appointment for the interview can take months.

Some Russians fear that travel opportunities could diminish as tensions grow between Moscow and the West, or that Russia might even revert to stricter Soviet-era rules for leaving the country.

'Seeing the conflict growing makes people want to take precautions because the country might well close its borders. And if that happens, one would at least have a passport of a different country and be able to leave,' said Ilya Zhegulev, a journalist for the Latvia-based Russian website Meduza that is sharply critical of the Kremlin.

Last year, Zhegulev sold two cars to finance a trip to California for him and his wife so she could give birth to their son.

Trump denounced birthright citizenship before the U.S. midterm election, amid ramped up rhetoric on his hard-line immigration policies. The president generally focuses his ire on the U.S.-Mexico border. But last fall he mentioned he was considering executive action to revoke citizenship for babies born to non-U.S. citizens on American soil. No executive action has been taken.

In this photo taken on Jan. 19, 2019, Svetlana Mokerova, 25, fitness instructor takes a selfie in Miami Beach, Fla. Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship. Mokerova and her husband went all out, renting an apartment with a sweeping view. She relished the tropical vibe, filling her Instagram account with selfies backed by palm trees and ocean vistas. (AP Photo/Iuliia Stashevska)

In this photo taken Jan 19, 2019, Svetlana Mokerova, a fitness instructor, speaks to a doctor in Miami Beach, Fla. 'We did not have a very clear understanding about all the benefits' of an American passport, she said. 'We just knew that it was something awesome.' (AP Photo/Iuliia Stashevska)

The American Civil Liberties Union, other legal groups and even former House Speaker Paul Ryan, typically a supporter of Trump's proposals, said the practice couldn't be ended with an order.

But others, like the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, said the practice is harmful.

'We should definitely do everything we can to end it, because it makes a mockery of citizenship,' said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an outspoken Russian lawmaker, said the country can't forbid women from giving birth abroad, and many of them also travel to Germany and Israel.

'Trump is doing everything right, because this law is used as a ploy. People who have nothing to do with the U.S. use it to become citizens,' Zhirinovsky said.

Floridians have shown no problem with the influx of expectant mothers from Russia.

Yachmenev, the agency manager, says he believes it's good for the state because it brings in sizable revenue.

In this photo taken Jan. 24, 2019, Olga Zemlyanaya, an interior design blogger holds her 1-month-old daughter Eva in Hollywood, Fla. Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women, like Zemlyanaya, travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship. (AP Photo/Iuliia Stashevska)

In this photo taken on Saturday, Feb. 16, 2019, Ilya Zhegulev, a journalist for the Latvia-based Russian website Meduza, his son Ivan and his wife Katya pose for a photo during a walk to the playground in snowy Moscow. Last year, Zhegulev sold two cars to finance a trip to California for him and his wife so she could give birth to their son and acquire a U.S. passport for their son. (AP Photo/Iuliia Stashevska)

Svetlana Mokerova and her husband went all out, renting an apartment with a sweeping view. She relished the tropical vibe, filling her Instagram account with selfies backed by palm trees and ocean vistas.

'We did not have a very clear understanding about all the benefits' of a U.S. passport, she said.

'We just knew that it was something awesome,' added Mokerova, who gave birth to a daughter after she was interviewed.

Zemlyanaya said that even her two nights in the hospital were a treat, like 'a stay in a good hotel.'

In contrast to the few amenities of a Russian clinic, she said she was impressed when an American nurse gave her choices from a menu for her meals.

'And then when she said they had chocolate cake for dessert, I realized I was in paradise,' Zemlyanaya added.

She even enjoyed how nurses referred to patients as 'mommies,' as opposed to 'rozhenitsa,' or 'birth-giver' - the 'unpleasant words they use in Russian birth clinics.'

Zemlyanaya said she was able to work remotely during her stay via the internet, as were the husbands of other women, keeping their income flowing. Yachmenev said his agency doesn't allow any of the costs to be paid by insurance.

Most of the families his agency serves have monthly incomes of about 300,000 rubles ($4,500) - middling by U.S. standards but nearly 10 times the average Russian salary.

Yachmenev said he expects that birth tourism among Russians will only grow.

Business declined in 2015 when the ruble lost about half its value, but 'now we are coming back to the good numbers of 2013-14,' he said.

In this photo taken on Jan. 21, 2019, people walk past a lifeguard booth painted in the colors of an American flag on a beach in Miami Beach, Fla. The Miami area is popular among Russians not only for its tropical weather but also because of the large Russian-speaking population. Sunny Isles Beach, a city just north of Miami, is even nicknamed 'Little Moscow'. (AP Photo/Iuliia Stashevska)Sydney pubs and bars stopped serving alcohol on Friday night during an 'unhappy hour' to protest the city's lockout laws.

The 'unhappy hour' will took place at 6pm and lasted 10 minutes, with the aim to protest NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and the government's support of the restrictions.

Pub managers jumped onto their bars to discuss the licence conditions that have reportedly seen rock and roll music banned in some pubs in the city.

Pubs and bars in Sydney will stop serving alcohol at 6pm on Friday night as part of an 'unhappy hour' - a protest against the lockout laws and other regulations

The 'unhappy hour' protest follows others such as this one held in Sydney's Hyde Park in February (pictured) against the NSW government's live music regulations

Plastic glasses have been mandated, ballet almost removed from a festival, and coloured lights frowned upon, in other licencing restrictions.

'This is our chance to do something positive with this election and start reviving Sydney's night-life,' Michael Rodrigues, chair of the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA), told the Daily Telegraph.

The NTIA represents a number of festivals, venues, and bars, and is organising the protest.

Mr Rodriques says the protest is about more than just festival restrictions and lock out laws.

'This is our chance to do something positive with this election and start reviving Sydney's night-life,' said Mr Rodrigues.

'It's more than that; we're looking at a $16 billion dollar opportunity and potential bigger vision for the night time of this city,' said Mr Rodrigues.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian (pictured) says her government is doing away with over-regulation

A scorecard from the NTIA, the organisation which represents bars and festivals, on where the parties stand on liquor law changes

The $16billion amount is in reference to a report by Deloitte Access Economics that found Sydney's night time economy was underdeveloped by that amount.

The protest organisers had originally said over 100 bars would cease service on Friday night, but late on Thursday night this was revised down to just 34 venues.

Many members of the NTIA have apparently refused to take part in the co-ordinated action.

Protesters (pictured) at a protest in Belmore Park, Sydney in 2016 against the CBD lockout laws

The organisation has also produced a scorecard ranking political parties on their commitments to the night-time economy, and has asked voters to think about what they want for Sydney.

'We see a city with a thriving, creative and innovative night-time economy which everyone can be a part of,' he said.

The red tape and regulation, which include pub lock-out laws and other liquor laws, is projected to be an important topic at this weekend's state election.

While Premier Gladys Berejiklian has insisted the Coalition government is doing away with over-regulation, Labor has claimed the government has declared war on live music.

'It's mad. Everyone accepts it's a problem. There are 669 venues where there are bans and restrictions,' Labor's spokesman for the night time economy, John Graham told news.com.au.North Korea has suddenly withdrawn its staff from a liaison office with the South, near the demilitarised zone which divides the two countries.

Pyongyang officials said they were acting on 'higher-level' instructions as they informed their South Korean counterparts of the move today.

The office in Kaesong on the northern side, which opened last September, was seen as a symbol of the two nations' reconciliation efforts.

But the latest move is likely to dampen those efforts, in another sign of slow progress on nuclear diplomacy after a summit between Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump last month ended with no agreement.

North Korea has abruptly withdrawn staff from the two Koreas' first liaison office in Kaesong, pictured in an opening ceremony last year

Seoul said a number of North Korean officials left the liaison office carrying documents, but most of the equipment was left behind. It was unclear if the withdrawal was temporary or not.

The North's Unification Ministry said Pyongyang 'will not mind the South remaining' in the liaison office.

A South Korean government minister said his country plans to continue staffing the office, insisting that staff be allowed to commute there as normal.

While the liaison office was one of the main agreements reached in three summits between Moon and Kim last year, South Korean minister Chun said it was too early to say whether North Korea is renegading on the deals.

'We don't think this could be called a violation of an agreement,' Chun said.

'We want to monitor the situation for a bit longer and respond to the developments, instead of making predictions or premature judgments.'

The withdrawal is a setback for South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has sought improved relations with North Korea alongside the nuclear negotiations between the North and the United States.

The office opened last September as part of a flurry of reconciliation steps that also included North Korea's participation in last year's South Korean Winter Olympics.

South Korean Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung, pictured today, said it was too early to say whether North Korea is renegading on the deals

They also included mutual dismantling of front-line guard posts and the halting of military exercises along their border.

The liaison office is the first since the peninsula was split into the U.S.-backed South and Soviet-supported socialist North in 1945.

The Koreas previously used telephone and fax-like communication channels that were often shut down in times of high tension.

Kaesong is also the location of a now-shuttered factory complex that was jointly run by the two Koreas. It combined South Korean capital and technology with cheap North Korean labor.

Both Koreas want the U.S. to allow exemptions from sanctions to permit the reopening of the factory park, which provided North Korea with much-needed foreign currency.

North Korean state media have recently demanded that South Korea distance itself from the U.S. and resume joint economic projects that have been held back by the U.S.-led sanctions against the North.

There have also been reports of renewed activity at a North Korean nuclear test site, which have been condemned by Donald Trump.Jordan Peterson, the right-wing academic who has called himself the 'professor against political correctness' has called Cambridge academics 'cowards and mountebanks' after they withdrew an offer of a visiting fellowship.

Dr Peterson, 56, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, had initially been set to teach with Cambridge's Faculty of Divinity for two months in autumn.

But on Wednesday the university took the invite back 'after a review'.

In a strongly worded response, Dr Peterson said: 'I think the Faculty of Divinity made a serious error of judgement in rescinding their offer to me.

'I think they handled publicizing the rescindment in a manner that could hardly have been more narcissistic, self-congratulatory and devious.

Dr Jordan Peterson, 56, said the decision to rescind his invitation, and to do so publicly (below), was made by 'cowards and mountebanks'

The school tweeted the decision to rescind the offer, but had not publicised the initial agreement

'I believe that the parties in question don't give a damn about the perilous decline of Christianity, and I presume in any case that they regard that faith, in their propaganda-addled souls, as the ultimate manifestation of the oppressive Western patriarchy, despite their hypothetical allegiance to their own discipline.

I' think that it is no bloody wonder that the faith is declining (and with it, the values of the West, as it fragments) with cowards and mountebanks of the sort who manifested themselves today at the helm.'

Colleagues and fellow-travellers came to his defence.

The historian Niall Ferguson tweeted: 'Having taught at Cambridge for three happy years I am dismayed at the shabby treatment of @jordanbpeterson. All concerned should  hang their heads in shame.'

Toby Young, the journalist and educationalist, said he was 'ashamed to be a Cambridge alumnus'.

Professor Peterson wrote that had planned to write lectures on the Bible stories contained in Exodus while at Cambridge, after a lecture he gave while there last year, on the first sentence of Genesis, garnered 3.7 million views making it the most well-received talk he has ever posted online.

A lecture by Dr Peterson (pictured above in Sydney this year) at Cambridge last year, focused on the first line of the Bible, has been viewed more than 3 million times

Cambridge University (from front to back: the Grand Courtyard of St John's College, Trinity College, Senate House and the Old Schools, Gonville & Caius College and Kings College Chapel). The School of Divinity first invited, then uninvited, Dr Peterson to lecture there

He said: 'I thought that I could extend my knowledge of the relevant stories  and that doing so would be useful for me, for faculty members who might be interested in speaking with me, and to the students.

Dr Peterson, holdd controversial views on race, gender and political correctness.

He has argued that marginalised groups are infantilised by a culture of victimhood and offence, that political correctness threatens freedom of thought and speech and that 'the West has lost faith in masculinity'

In 2016 he opposed an anti-discrimination law which would require him to use the preferred pronouns of his students and colleagues.

He claimed it infringed on free speech, although he added he would use whatever pronouns a person wanted out of courtesy.

A university spokeswoman said this week: '[Cambridge] is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles. There is no place here for anyone who cannot.'

The students' union said: 'We are relieved to hear that Jordan Petersons request for a visiting fellowship to Cambridges faculty of divinity has been rescinded following further review.

'It is a political act to associate the University with an academics work through offers which legitimise figures such as Peterson. His work and views are not representative of the student body and as such we do not see his visit as a valuable contribution to the University, but one that works in opposition to the principles of the University.'

Dr Peterson said the CUSU statement 'borders on the unintelligible.'Advertisement

Theresa May was today accused of 'declaring open war' on her own Eurosceptic MPs by promising a free vote on a second referendum or revoking Article 50 if her Brexit deal is killed off next week.

Downing Street will ask MPs from all parties to help find her a Plan B as Tory rebels said their 'isolated' leader should 'name a date' for her resignation after failing to deliver Brexit for March 29.

Mrs May is expected to hold a vote to gauge support among MPs for the seven main paths for Brexit: The PM's deal, No Deal, a second referendum, Labour's preferred customs union deal, a Norway-plus EEA deal, a Canada-plus free trade deal or revoking Article 50 and staying in the EU.

Brexiteers are furious because it would give control to Parliament, where the majority of MPs are remainers who want the softest possible Brexit or no Brexit at all.

Tory MP Steve Baker, the ERG's deputy chairman, said today: 'National humiliation is imminent through these indicative votes. The wrong Conservatives have the levers of power'. Michael Fabricant tweeted: 'If this is true, has Theresa May now decided to declare open war on ALL her backbenchers'. Yeovil MP Marcus Fysh said: 'This is the most ludicrous, childish and unrealistic idea I have ever seen. Utterly unfit'.

Treasury minister Liz Truss also said she would oppose the move as Brexiteers Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were seen outside Downing Street today.

Confirming the PM's Plan B Business Secretary Greg Clark, one of the 'gang of four' senior remainers in the cabinet, said: 'If doesn't get passed then the Government will facilitate the ability for Parliament to express a majority of what it would approve. I think that is the right step'.

The row came as the DUP appeared to shred any hopes Mrs May had of getting her deal through as Westminster leader Nigel Dodds blasted the PM's 'inexcusable' TV address on Wednesday and said she was 'far too willing to capitulate' during negotiations with the EU.

He said: 'The Prime Minister missed an opportunity at the EU Council to put forward proposals which could have improved the prospects of an acceptable withdrawal agreement and help unite the country. She has now agreed with the EU to kick the can down the road for another two weeks and humiliatingly revoke her oft-stated pledge that the UK would leave the EU on March 29'.

On her decision to point the finger at MPs for the Brexit stalemate he added: 'Lectures by the Prime Minister putting the blame on others cannot disguise the responsibility her government bears for the current debacle'.

Earlier the Prime Minister summoned cabinet ministers including Liam Fox, Philip Hammond and Stephen Barclay to No 10 for crisis talks. Tonight she will head to Chequers and is expected to focus on wooing Tory remainers and Labour rebels after Conservative Brexiteers and the DUP appeared to desert her.

Theresa May is back in Downing Street today (pictured) after the EU gave her three weeks to get her deal through Parliament and it emerged she would offer MPs a free vote on where Brexit goes next if she fails

Brexiteer Tory leadership candidates Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were outside the Cabinet Office today as Mrs May announced her Plan B

Earlier Mrs May summoned ministers Liam Fox, Stephen Barclay and Philip Hammond to Downing Street today as she fights to save her deal

Relaxed EU leaders including Emmanuel Macron (front left) and Donald Tusk (front right) posed for a 'family photo' at the European Council summit in Brussels this morning - but Mrs May left early

European Council President Donald Tusk holds the hand of Emmanuel Macron as the EU hailed a 'successful' for the bloc and the French President suggested that he is losing patience with Britain and will accept No Deal

On another dramatic day in Westminster, it emerged:

Has the DUP finally killed off Mrs May's deal: Westminster leader delivers excoriating verdict on PM's 'EU capitulation' DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds has said Theresa May failed to secure changes to her Brexit deal - including the Northern Ireland backstop - at the summit in Brussels. 'The Prime Minister missed an opportunity at the EU Council to put forward proposals which could have improved the prospects of an acceptable Withdrawal Agreement and help unite the country,' he said. 'That failure is all the more disappointing and inexcusable given the clear divisions and arguments which became evident amongst EU member states when faced with outcomes they don't like.' He added: 'Nothing has changed as far as the Withdrawal Agreement is concerned. We will not accept any deal which poses a long-term risk to the constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom.' Advertisement

Brexiteers are furious and remainers are celebrating after Theresa May offers a free vote on the seven Brexit destinations if her deal is voted down;

Choices will be: The PM's deal, No Deal, a second referendum, Labour's preferred customs union deal, a Norway-plus EEA deal, a Canada-plus free trade deal or revoking Article 50 and staying in the EU;

Jeremy Corbyn said he would meet with PM to stop No deal and refused to rule out Labour supporting a bid to revoke Article 50  effectively cancelling Brexit;

The DUP appeared to kill off support for Mrs May's deal by blasting her over EU negotiations and her decision to attack MPs;

Former Tory minister Sir Oliver Letwin confirmed a cross-party group of MPs will try to seize control of the parliamentary agenda next week to force through a soft Brexit.

Mrs May is holed-up in Downing Street today plotting how to save her Brexit deal as it was revealed she will only call a third vote if it has a 'realistic prospect of success' after EU leaders humiliated her in Brussels last night.

But her official spokesman said the EU Council was clear that the extension to May 22 was contingent on winning a vote 'next week', likely to be on Tuesday.

This morning the Prime Minister dodged the second day of an EU summit in Brussels and flew back 'to work on getting the withdrawal deal passed' after European leaders ignored her plea for three-month Brexit delay and gave her a two-week 'flextension' until April 12 if MPs reject her deal.

Privy Council given secret briefing on No Deal Senior politicians on all sides were offered a secret briefing on No Deal planning. The privy council - all MPs and peers with Right Honourable in their in their title - was invited to the Cabinet Office to be told the latest on Operation Yellowhammer, MailOnline understands. Boris Johnson was pictured arriving at the Cabinet Office on Whitehall around the time of the meeting. Yellowhammer is the civil contingencies wing of No Deal and involves putting 3,500 troops on standby, booking space on emergency ferries for NHS drugs and preparing for miles of lorry queues out of Dover. It emerged last night the Army has opened a No Deal command post inside the secret Pindar nuclear bunker under Whitehall. Advertisement

Mrs May was ejected from the Brussels summit dinner and forced to eat alone as the talks continued to overcome the split and EU leaders then rejected her June 30 extension after calling her make-or-break summit display 'evasive' and 'confused'.

One senior EU official said after the PM left the room French President Emmanuel Macron said loudly that he believed Mrs May's deal had a 10 per cent chance of getting through the Commons but added: 'After listening to her, I now think five per cent' before Donald Tusk grimaced and chipped in that this 'sounded too optimistic'.

Belgian PM Charles Michel is equally sceptical and said: 'If there is a miracle I believe in miracles, but they are not frequent.'

Britain will not leave the EU until at least next month after a late-night deal in Brussels where European leaders rejected Mrs May's appeal for an extension until June 30 after her plea for a three-month delay fell flat.

Instead they offered to extend Article 50 until May 22  only if the Prime Minister gets her deal through Parliament next week. If her deal fail she must make a decision by April 12  just three weeks' time - to either plump for No Deal, ask for a longer extension or revoke Article 50.

Senior Brexiteer calls for May to QUIT over plans to hand control of Brexit to Parliament as TWO ministers openly criticise the PM Theresa May faced mounting calls to quit today as a senior Brexiteers warned the 'wrong Conservatives' were in charge of the party. Steve Baker accused the Prime Minister of volunteering Britain for a 'national humiliation' amid claims she is poised to hand control of Brexit to MPs. The idea of 'indicative votes' caused fury among Tory MPs who accused the Prime Minister of 'going to war' with her own party. Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss publicly endorsed criticism of leaked plans for 'indicative votes' that most expect would lead to Parliament softening Brexit. And Business Secretary Greg Clark slammed the PM's angry Wednesday night speech blaming MPs for blocking her deal. The new rows come after Sir Graham Brady, the shop steward of Tory MPs, warned Mrs May her party wants her to go over Brexit. The embattled Mrs May returned to Downing Street today after a humiliating European Council ended in Brussels agreeing to delay Brexit but only on the bloc's terms - without the PM in the talks. Steve Baker accused the Prime Minister of volunteering Britain for a 'national humiliation' amid claims she is poised to hand control of Brexit to MPs Mr Baker said: 'National humiliation is imminent through these ''indicative votes''. 'The wrong Conservatives have the levers of power.' Amid reports Downing Street were denying the scheme, Ms Truss said: 'Good'. Separately, Mr Clark criticised the PM's handling of the Brexit stalemate this week and particularly her late night speech on Wednesday. He told the BBC: 'It's understandable, given the sense of frustration she had that people weren't coming together but it clearly wasn't a great success. 'I don't think it was helpful in resolving the matter. But, listen, none of us is infallible and even prime ministers sometimes don't get the tone quite right.' Business Secretary Greg Clark and Chief Secretary Liz Truss both criticised the Government's handling of Brexit today Conservative backbencher Steve Double has said Theresa May is now 'isolated' within the party and called on her to consider her position. Mr Double said Mrs May was unable to maintain collective responsibility after two-thirds of 'her own parliamentary party voted against a motion (on extending Article 50) that she put to the House''I think it is quite clear that she is not leading her party. She is isolated, sadly, from a majority of the parliamentary party now. We need to find a way forward and I think that requires new leadership. Advertisement

As support for her appeared to drain away backbencher Michael Fabricant compared his party leader to Neville Chamberlain, who signed a disastrous appeasement deal with Hitler, and said: 'At this difficult time we need a Churchill, not a Chamberlain'.

Dozens of MPs are now said to be demanding she 'names a date' for her resignation after failing to deliver Brexit for March 29.

Conservative backbencher Steve Double has said Theresa May is now 'isolated' within the party and called on her to consider her position.

Mr Double said Mrs May was unable to maintain collective responsibility after two-thirds of 'her own parliamentary party voted against a motion (on extending Article 50) that she put to the House'.

'I think it is quite clear that she is not leading her party. She is isolated, sadly, from a majority of the parliamentary party now. We need to find a way forward and I think that requires new leadership.

'I know that many people feel that next week is a defining moment and I would very much hope that she would reflect on her position.

'We have got to, as a party, reunite and I don't think we can do that around her leadership. I think I will be among many in the parliamentary party giving her a very clear message.'

Insiders said EU leaders were visibly bemused during last night's Brexit debate described as '90 minutes of nothing' where Mrs May appeared 'evasive, had no plan and even seemed confused' when asked what she will do if her deal is voted down again.

One prime minister told aides afterwards: 'The only thing that came through with clarity was her lack of a plan' and one EU aide said afterwards: 'She didn't have a plan, so they needed to come up with one for her'.

Mrs May will head back to Britain this morning to make a final attempt to convince the DUP, Tory Brexiteers and Labour rebels to back her deal.

But today it emerged that her most senior backbencher, Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, has told her personally that dozens of her MPs say she must quit after he was 'bombarded with texts'.

Last night the EU grabbed control of Brexit and piled pressure on MPs to back her deal.

If she loses Mrs May will have to decide whether to leave with No Deal or seek a longer delay, probably until at least the end of the year, which will require the UK to take part in the European Parliament elections on May 23.

It came after ministers said she was prepared to take Britain out of the EU without a deal if her agreement is not passed in the Commons next week.

The PM last night appeared to express regret for her controversial remarks earlier this week which blamed MPs for failing to agree on a deal. In a late-night press conference in Brussels, she said Britain was now at a 'moment of decision', but added: 'I know MPs on all sides of the debate have passionate views and I respect those different positions.

'[On Wednesday night] I expressed my frustrations and I know that MPs are frustrated too  they have difficult jobs to do. I hope we can all agree that we are now at the moment of decision and I will make every effort to make sure we can leave with a deal and move our country forward.'

French president Emmanuel Macron rounded on MPs for plunging Britain into crisis by refusing to pass the deal agreed with 27 EU countries.

He acknowledged that, with the threat of a disruptive No Deal still hanging in the air, 'the EU today doesn't have all the cards in our hands'. He added: 'Everything depends on the British vote. The EU in a very clear manner has today responded to a British political crisis. The British politicians are incapable of putting in place what their people have demanded.

'Their people voted for Brexit. Today we have a situation where the Parliament has voted against the agreement negotiated over two years and has voted against No Deal. It's a true crisis, democratic and political, but it's a British crisis.'

Last night's announcement removed the prospect of a No Deal Brexit a week today.

It came after three senior ministers said they believe that if Mrs May's deal is rejected by MPs again, she would rather sanction a No Deal Brexit than plunge the country into the limbo of a lengthy delay.

One said: 'If the deal is not going to be deliverable because Labour won't support it  and that is where we are right now  then the new reality is going to be making No Deal work.'

Theresa May has landed back in London after leaving Brussels early 'to work on getting the withdrawal deal passed' - but EU leaders believe she has a 5% chance of success

Prime Minister Theresa May leaves the British Residence in Brussels to return to the UK after the EU tore up her proposed new Brexit date and gave a her two weeks to solve the crisis

Theresa May was humiliated last night after EU leaders took control of Brexit and gave her a fortnight to get MPs to vote for her deal or come up with a Plan B

In a press conference held after midnight in Brussels, Mrs May said she would return to Britain in the morning to resume work on building support for the deal. Most in Westminster believe she is doomed to fail a third time

EU Council President Donald Tusk (left leaving the talks last night) confirmed plans for a two-stage delay plan. If Mrs May passes her deal at a third attempt next week, Britain will be allowed to stay in the EU until May 22

So... what now? As the EU agrees to put off Brexit until at least April 12 MPs MUST choose whether to accept the deal, crash out or hold European elections to buy time for a new plan What was agreed at the summit last night? EU leaders have approved a two-part delay to Brexit following late night talks. Brexit is set to be delayed until April 12 whatever happens next week, giving the UK an extra two weeks. If MPs pass the Brexit deal before then, the extension will run until May 22. What does it mean? The immediate risk of the UK leaving without a deal next Friday, on March 29, is effectively over - subject to a change in UK law but this should be a formality. Brexiteers will still believe they can secure a No Deal exit on April 12 while Remainers will see it as an opportunity to lock in a much longer delay. What is the first step now? Mrs May is returning to Downing Street this morning and vowed last night to keep working to build support for her deal. She is likely to continue talks with her DUP allies in the hope getting them on board will bring back some more Tory rebels. There will also be efforts to win over Labour MPs in Leave seats. Commons votes on Brexit will resume next week. When will MPs next have a say? Monday night. There is currently due to be another debate on Brexit 'next steps' on Monday that will mean a series of votes from 10pm. The debate has to be held by law because of the second defeat of the deal last week. This is not the third vote on the deal but a repeat of the debates held on January 29, February 14 and February 28 after the deal was crushed the first time. There will likely be votes on several proposals including a second referendum, revoking Article 50 and a soft Brexit. There will be another attempt by some MPs to seize control of the Commons agenda to try and change the law to shape Brexit. Will there be a third vote on the deal and when will it be? Mrs May says yes and says it will be next week. Most currently expect it to be held on Tuesday night but this is not fixed. Can she win? It looks unlikely. The prospect of No Deal on April 12 will encourage Brexiteers they should vote down the deal a second time. There is currently little sign the DUP are being won over by a political offensive behind the scenes. Mrs May also alienated Labour MPs with her angry speech on Wednesday night. It seems possible she could end up losing the third vote by a bigger margin than the 149 votes she lost the second one. What if she does win? If the PM manages a great escape, then Britain will be on track to leave on May 22. The Government will move quickly to get the necessary laws in place. What if she loses? The EU has made clear that if the deal goes down a third time, Britain must come back with a plan in time for the new deadline of April 12. Most urgently, a decision will have to be made on whether the UK takes part in European Parliament elections on May 23. If it does not, there will be No Deal - and Mrs May says electing MEPs would be the wrong thing to do. However, there is still a majority of MPs in Parliament against No Deal so the choice could be taken away from the PM. If elections are agreed in the UK there will probably be a new EU summit around April 10 to approve a much longer extension - perhaps to the end of 2019 or even longer. The UK will have to have a new plan for what to do with the time as Brussels has made clear it cannot keep going over the same deal. Will MPs vote on other options? Probably. Monday night's vote could setup a full-blown 'indicative vote' that would set all the options against each other. A defeated Government could stage the same procedure. The idea would be to find what kind of Brexit might be supported by Parliament or if there is none, see if there is support for a new public vote. Will May resign? Nobody knows. No Prime Minister has ever soaked up so much humiliation and carried on and yet Mrs May is still in Downing Street. She suggested this week she would not accept a long delay beyond June 30, seen by many as a hint she would resign if it had to happen. A third defeat for the deal next week would also provoke huge calls for her to resign. A move to No Deal could also see some Tory MPs join with Labour to force the Government out with a vote of no confidence. What happens to Brexit if May goes or the Government collapses? It is hard to know. Even with a tweak to the law to change the date, Brexit will still happen with No Deal on April 12 if other choices keep being rejected. But we also know there is a majority of MPs against a No Deal Brexit. It is possible there are enough Tory MPs prepared to remove the Government to stop No Deal by installing a Corbyn government ahead of a snap election. Only the Government can bring forward the necessary change in the law to change the Brexit date. What is Labour's position? Labour says no deal must be stopped - but also says it will not vote for Mrs May's deal. It wanted a three month delay to renegotiate the political declaration on the final UK-EU relationship but this would require it form a Government more or less immediately. Were it to do so, it would try pass the divorce deal attached to a new political declaration that said the final relationship would be based on a permanent customs union. It has passed no comment on the actual proposed delay. Will there have to be a new election or a referendum? This falls into the anything is possible category. Parliament is deadlocked and has been for months - which suggests an election is necessary. And yet the governing Tory party clearly has little idea what it would put to the country or who would lead it into an election. An election can be forced without the consent of the Tories but it is very difficult. Similarly, it is far from clear there are the votes for a referendum in the Commons. The idea was crushed last week because Labour did not vote for it. Will Brexit ever happen? Almost three years after the referendum, this depends entirely on your view of events. The law says it will but there are enough MPs to at least change the date if given the chance to do so. It could now happen on April 12 or May 22. Or it could be delayed much further. Advertisement

Another senior minister said Mrs May had been driven to a No Deal position in part by the actions of Cabinet Remainers like Amber Rudd, Greg Clark and David Gauke who provoked uproar in the party when they tried to force her to take the option off the table.

Minister admits he doesn't know if or when Theresa May will bring her deal back to Parliament - but reveals MPs will get a free vote if the PM fails again A Brexit minister has failed to detail the Government's plans for a third meaningful vote following talks in Brussels to extend the process. Labour used an urgent question to challenge Kwasi Kwarteng to confirm that MPs will have another vote on Theresa May's deal next week, what day it will take place and how the motion will be 'substantially different'. Mr Kwarteng replied: 'In respect to his question about the meaningful vote, it is the Government's full intention, I think, to bring this meaningful vote to the House. 'We have to have a decision and the House has to decide whether it will vote for a deal and commit to an orderly exit out of the EU, or whether it seeks to maintain a stance of indecision and continue the uncertainty.' Conservative former minister Sir Edward Leigh pushed Mr Kwarteng to answer the question on how the motion will be substantially different, before saying: 'Will he make absolutely clear today on behalf of the whole Government, not just the Prime Minister, but three years after the referendum it'd be utterly intolerable if we were still in the EU during the European elections. 'I want him to give an absolute commitment today that the Government would rather resign than be privy to such an appalling betrayal of the people's trust.' Mr Kwarteng replied: 'I cannot make a comment at this despatch box as to what the Government will or will not do in the event of a European parliamentary election.' Tory Mark Francois, whip of the European Research Group, said: 'Can I remind the minister of Denis Healey's first rule of politics: When you are in a hole, stop digging. 'Whenever the meaningful vote is tabled, if you, Mr Speaker, allow it, I believe this house will vote it down, not least because of the rather hubristic speech the Prime Minister made when she effectively attacked members of this house for having the temerity to vote with their consciences. So, I think it won't go through.' Mr Kwarteng said: 'The Government's focus at the moment is to make sure we can potentially get a meaningful vote and actually secure the deal on the table, that is what I have always maintained. 'If the meaningful vote doesn't get through, we will have to look at alternatives.' Mr Kwarteng said he expects a statutory instrument (SI) linked to changing the Brexit date to be introduced to the Commons 'in the early part' of next week. Mr Francois later shouted 'this is a shambles' as Mr Kwarteng failed to provide further details on when exactly the SI will be tabled. Tory MP Philip Davies (Shipley) said: 'There are millions of people outside this House who are absolutely seething and they're largely seething with people who stood on a promise to deliver the result of the referendum and then see, once elected, that they try and frustrate, or in some cases even overturn, the result that they promised to honour when they stood for election at the general election. 'If those people don't think there's going to be a backlash they are in cloud cuckoo land. 'The Government could and should leave on March 29, as it promised all the way along'. Advertisement

'If the meaningful vote is defeated again then it will be No Deal,' the minister said. One Remainer minister told the Mail: 'I am concerned that the PM has boxed herself in, and worried that we are running towards No Deal.'

It was also claimed 18 Remainer ministers are threatening to quit in a plot to snatch control of Brexit and avoid No Deal. They want votes on alternatives to Mrs May's deal, including a longer delay, or even reversing the exit process.

Meanwhile, extraordinary details also began to emerge of the Government's plan to ramp up No Deal preparations. The military yesterday installed a team in a nuclear bunker under the Ministry of Defence to co-ordinate the Army's response if the UK leaves the EU without a deal.

Mrs May insisted that despite the delay  and the prospect of more down the track  Brexit would be delivered, saying: 'Yes, we will be leaving the EU.' But she added that last night's plan outlined the 'importance of the House of Commons passing the Brexit deal next week so we can put an end to the uncertainty'.

European Council president Donald Tusk said the response to Britain's request for an extension to the Article 50 withdrawal process was agreed 'unanimously' by EU leaders. He said that 'all options remain open' now until April 12.

Setting out the terms of the Brexit extension, Mr Tusk said: 'April 12 is a key date in terms of the UK wondering whether to hold European Parliament elections.

'If it is not decided do so by then, the option of a long extension will immediately become impossible.'

And he added: 'What this means in practice is that until that date all options remain open.'

Asked how long the 'long extension' eventually on offer to the UK could be, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker replied: 'Until the very end.'

Chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier told reporters: 'It is not a deal, it is a step in the process. We are constructive and patient.'

Mrs May ruled out cancelling Brexit by revoking Article 50. She also said it would be 'wrong' to hold elections to a European Parliament the public had voted to leave in 2016  but did not explicitly rule it out.

Labour MP Hilary Benn, Commons Brexit committee chairman, told the Today programme the Prime Minister must open her mind to alternatives to her Brexit deal.

Setting out his plans to bring forward an amendment for indicative votes on alternatives on Wednesday, Mr Benn (Leeds Central) said: 'This won't work if the Prime Minister is not prepared to move an inch.

'I'm afraid that's the story of the last 2 and 3/4 years because about a month ago she said 'my door is open, come and talk to me' but it was very evident that her mind was closed.

'We need to open up this process because we have rejected her deal, we've rejected no-deal, the EU has decided to give us a little more time and we've really got to get on with it.'

United States Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland said he hoped the UK and the EU would not do anything to 'preclude a free trade agreement' with the US during Brexit negotiations.

Speaking to the BBC Today programme, he said: 'This is a very, very challenging process for both sides.

'It's our desire to see both sides come to an amicable conclusion so that the US can enter into free trade agreements and that neither do anything that would preclude a robust free trade agreement with the US.

'In terms of the minutiae of the scheduling negotiations and the question of a crash out versus no crash out, it's a very, very delicate situation that needs to proceed on its own and I don't think I would be helpful in contributing anything at this point.'

Theresa May (pictured at the EU summit yesterday) made a 104-minute plea for more time from EU leaders today as draft conclusions from the EU summit suggest she will only get a Brexit delay until May 22

Donald Tusk outlined the EU's plan for avoiding No Deal next week on Twitter following hours of talks on what to do about Brexit

A smiling Theresa May says hello to Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Belgium's Prime Minister Charles Michel as she asks the EU to delay Brexit until June

Mrs May was kissed by President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, who demanded the May 22 Brexit rather than a June 30

Mr Sondland stressed he wanted the UK to be left without its 'hands tied' by any Brexit agreement and suggested EU standards would have to come closer to US standards to prevent this.

He said: 'I don't have a concern per se, I'm saying that when the UK departs under whatever circumstances we don't want the UK in any free trade negotiation with the US to have to say 'we want to do X, Y, Z, with you but our agreement with the EU precludes that'.

'We want them to have free hands to do a complete and robust free trade agreement with the US...

'A great example would be if they entered into an arrangement with the EU where the standards of that arrangement were completely in contravention with US standards and there was no prospect of any arrangement, and that would tie their hands.'

French President Emmanuel Macron struck the toughest note yet as EU leaders prepare to receive Britain's request for a three month delay to Brexit today saying if she loses in the Commons 'it's No Deal for sure'

European Union leaders attend the round table meeting at an EU summit in Brussels. British Prime Minister Theresa May is trying to persuade European Union leaders to delay Brexit by up to three months, just eight days before Britain is scheduled to leave

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, right, and Keir Starmer, Labour Shadow Brexit secretary, leave EU headquarters prior to an EU summit in Brussels

Theresa May last night ruled out cancelling the Brexit countdown despite a public petition soaring past two million signatures.

The Prime Minister said she did not believe in halting the deadline after the EU offered a delay plan, adding: 'I do not believe that we should be revoking Article 50.'

With the highest sign-up rate on record, more 2,000,000 people had pledged their support by the time she fielded questions from reporters in Brussels on Thursday.

Asked by the Press Association whether she thought the public's view had shifted towards revoking Article 50, Mrs May said: 'If you look back to what happened in the referendum, we saw the biggest democratic exercise in our history.

'And there was a clear result that we should leave the European Union.

'We said here's the vote, what is your decision, and we will deliver on it.

'And I believe it's our duty as a Government and as a Parliament to deliver on that vote.'

The petition on the Parliament website quickly gained support in the wake of the Prime Minister's speech on Wednesday night and Revoke Article 50 started to trend on Twitter.

As of 6am on Friday, nearly 2.3 million people had pledged their support to the cause.

Data from the petitions website shows support for the petition concentrated in London and constituencies around Cambridge, Brighton, Bristol, Oxford and Edinburgh.

In the 2016 referendum, these six cities were also in favour of Remain.

'Europe must not remain hostage to Brexit': Macron suggests that the EU could let the UK crash out if May doesn't strike a deal within two weeks

Emmanuel Macron has today issued a blunt warning to warring UK politicians that Europe will 'not remain hostage to Brexit' as he signaled that the EU will let the UK crash out without a deal.

The French president maintained his hardline stance at the end of an EU summit which saw Theresa May humiliated over her attempt to delay Brexit until June.

Mr Macron, who led efforts to cut short any extension to Article 50 agreed by the EU, said a no-deal scenario was in no one's interests, but the EU was 'prepared' for such a route.

Speaking to reporters in Brussels at the end of the summit he said: 'It is a political lesson to us all: a proposed rejection of the EU with no plan can only ever lead to a stalemate and that is what we are seeing currently with the situation in the UK.

'This is something we should all realise especially now. But if we are to ignore the fears and anger of European citizens it will only lead to a disaster.'

He also took a swipe at Leave supporters, saying: 'Brexiteer leaders told people leaving would be easy. Bravo.'

But as the EU took the driving seat over the length and manner of Brexit, European Council president Donald Tusk took a more conciliatory tone, saying: 'Until April 12, anything is possible - a deal, a long extension, if the UK decided to rethink its strategy or revoking Article 50, which is a prerogative of the UK government.'

He added: 'The fate of Brexit is in the hands of our British friends. We are prepared for the worst but hope for the best and, as you know, hope dies last.'

Smiling European leaders had earlier pointed to an empty podium place after dealing Mrs May a humiliating political blow over Brexit.

As the exhausted Prime Minister slunk back to London they patted themselves on the back in Brussels this morning after dictating to Britain a timetable for the next few months.

Mrs May decided to forego the second and final day of the European Council meeting after EU leaders gave her a fortnight 'flextension' to get MPs to vote for her deal after calling her make-or-break summit display 'evasive' and 'confused'.

Friday was also the 25th anniversary of the European Economic Area, whose members Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein participate in the EU's single market without being members.

Emmanuel Macron set out a stark position when he spoke to the media at the end of the two-day European Council summit in Brussels

Donald Tusk (left) and Jean-Claude Juncker also spoke to reporters but struck very different tones over Britain and the coming weeks

Mr Juncker said it had been easier for EU leader to discuss relations with China than with the UK, but Tusk said 'anything is possible' in the next three weeks

Speaking alongside Mr Tusk in an end-of-summit press conference, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker again blasted the Prime Minister after her Brussels humiliation, saying it had been easier for an EU summit to discuss its relationship with China than its ties with the UK.

The European Commission president said talks about the Communist powerhouse today had been easier those with Britain last night, despite calling EU/Beijing relations 'good  not excellent'.

Mr Juncker told a press conference: 'My dear friends, we didn't just talk about the United Kingdom, we talked about China as well.

'It was much more easy to talk about China than it was to talk about the United Kingdom I have to say, not that China is asking to join the European Union - because it is not leaving the European Union.'

The Prime Minister had gone to Brussels looking to get a Brexit delay until June 30 but they blew that out of the water after a catastrophic grilling of the PM that lasted more than 90 minutes.

German chancellor Angela Merkel said that leaders had 'an intensive, but successful evening' as they reduced Mrs May's request for a Brexit delay until June 30 to one of as little as two weeks.

They warned that it was up to Mrs May and Westminster politicians to get their act together over Brexit.

Corbyn to meet May on Monday in bid to force her to agree to softer Brexit - as he says if May's plan is defeated next week MPs will block No Deal

Jeremy Corbyn will meet Theresa May next week and try to convince her to pursue a softer Brexit as he left the door open to cancelling leaving the EU altogether.

36 hours after he stormed out of crunch talks because Chuka Umunna was invited the Labour leader said he is now willing to sit down with the PM.

Mr Corbyn says he will meet Mrs May on Monday - before she is due to put her ailing deal before MPs for a third time - and his main aim is to force her to abandon No Deal.

And he said that Labour would get behind her if she agreed to pursue a softer Brexit that includes Britain staying in a customs union with the EU.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, right, and Keir Starmer, Labour Shadow Brexit secretary, leave EU headquarters prior to an EU summit in Brussels where he said he would now sit down with the PM

He told The Mirror: 'We're the responsible party here. We're not running down the clock, we're looking for solutions.

'If she could say she's prepared to understand what we're saying, the points we're making about the future - customs union, dynamic relationship with Europe - then we will be able to talk to her about that. She's got to move forward on how things can change'.

Earlier the Labour leader was twice asked if he might formally ask the Government to halt the process of leaving the EU if Britain was heading for No Deal.

He refused to rule it out both times, adding that a second referendum was also possible.

Mr Corbyn was in Brussels to meet the bloc's chief negotiator Michel Barnier and Martin Selmayr, the EU's top civil servant, hours before yesterday's EU summit began.

During 'very constructive discussions', he laid out his plan for a 'softer' Brexit which would lock us into a permanent customs union with the EU.

Before last night's Brussels talks delivered two new possible dates for Brexit  April 12 or May 22  Mr Corbyn was asked if Labour would 'contemplate' a longer Brexit delay if Mrs May's deal is rejected again next week, or if it would support revoking Article 50.

He replied: 'These are hypotheticals. So far as we're concerned, we think there's an urgency in constructing a majority for an agreeable solution and that's what we're concentrating on at the moment.'

Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Stammer (left) and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn arrive in Brussels ahead of a meeting with Michel Barnier

Jeremy Corbyn (pictured leaving Downing Street last night) walked out on a crucial Brexit briefing with party leaders because former Labour MP Chuka Umunna (right) was invited

She wrote on Twitter: 'Corbyn on Hamas (the terrorists): I wanted Hamas to be part of the debate. Corbyn on Chuka Umunna (the anti-racism ex-Labour MP): Tell him I'm not talking to him'

The Labour leader again dodged the question when asked directly if he would 'rule out' cancelling Brexit.

He said: 'We think what we're proposing can be achieved in Parliament, we do believe we can construct a majority that will prevent all the chaos that will come from crashing out.'

Mr Corbyn also hinted that he could back a bid for a second referendum.

He added: 'Our determination is to prevent a No Deal exit from the EU.'

It comes following reports that cross-party talks for a softer Brexit with Remainer MPs are gaining ground.

Talks between Labour and Conservative MP Nick Boles for a Norway-style 'Common Market 2.0' - possibly with single market involvement or a permanent customs union  are nearing a deal, the BBC said.

Mr Corbyn also defended his behaviour after walking out of a crucial Brexit meeting with Mrs May on Wednesday because Labour defector Chuka Umunna was present.

A slew of critics accused of him 'extraordinary, juvenile' behaviour and pointed out that in the past he has been willing to sit with members of the terror group Hamas, as well as inviting IRA members to the Commons just days after the 1984 Brighton bombing.

But yesterday the Labour leader claimed there had been 'confusion' over the meeting.

He said: 'I had a separate and very extensive discussion with the Prime Minister later on and also arranged to meet the Prime Minister again on a one-to-one basis.

'We have done a great deal to listen carefully and try to construct a majority that can bring about a resolution.'

TWO MILLION sign petition to cancel Brexit: Celeb Remainers Hugh Grant, Annie Lennox and Professor Brian Cox back campaign to avoid No Deal (but other names look like they've been added from North Korea and Afghanistan)

Celebrity Remainers including Hugh Grant and Annie Lennox are among more than two million people who have signed a petition today to cancel Brexit to avoid No Deal.

Grant claimed every 'sane' person in the country was signing the plea, which was also backed by Professor Brian Cox and Jennifer Saunders.

Rising rapidly every minute it passed the seven-figure milestone shortly before 3pm after Theresa May made a speech blaming Parliament for a delay to Brexit last night.

The petition passed 10,000 names on Monday soon after it was created. Parliament's petition site crashed repeatedly today as the number of signatures rose.

Despite verification checks including a signatory's post code and email addresses, the data from the petition appeared to suggest some names may have been added from overseas. The rule of Parliament's petition site say only UK citizens can sign.

As people flocked to the campaign today, Mrs May was back in front of the cameras on arrival at the EU summit in Brussel - refusing to rule out No Deal and insisting Brexit had to be delivered.

The petition crashed past 1,000,000 signatures shortly before 3pm today after backing from a host of celebrities

A map showing where people have signed shows concentrations of support in cities such as London, Oxford and Edinburgh

The petition states: 'The government repeatedly claims exiting the EU is ''the will of the people''.

'We need to put a stop to this claim by proving the strength of public support now, for remaining in the EU. A People's Vote may not happen - so vote now.'

The Government is obliged to offer a written response and it will be considered for a debate in Parliament - but it will not be staged before exit day on March 29.

A map showing where people have signed shows concentrations of support in cities such as London, Oxford and Edinburgh.

A raft of public figures have promoted the petition since Mrs May's controversial speech in Downing Street last night.

Celebrities including Hugh Grant, Annie Lennox and Brian Cox all backed the petition

Hugh Grant said: 'I've signed. And it looks like every sane person in the country is signing too.

'National emergency. Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU.'

Anne Lennox said the petition was 'currently gaining 100,000 signatures an hour'.

Actor Eddie Marsan urged his followers to sign, tweeting: 'In years to come, when future generations look back on Brexit and how this country was taken over by fanatical ideologues, to the left andto the right, they'll ask ''where were you? What did you do?''.'

TV physicist Brian Cox said: 'I've signed this petition to revoke A50 and deal with the consequences afterwards - referendum, election, whatever.

'I have no idea whether these things do any good but after May's astonishingly irresponsible speech this evening I'll give anything a go.'

Margaret Anne Georgiadou, who started the petition, told the BBC: 'I became like every other Remainer - very frustrated that we've been silenced and ignored for so long.

'So I think now it's almost like a dam bursting, because we've been held back in a sense - it's almost like last chance saloon now.'

She said the petition 'didn't do very well for a week'.

The Petitions Committee said: 'As many of you have guessed, the number of people using the site has caused problems this morning.

'It's a mix of people reloading the front page to watch the signature count go up and people trying to sign petitions.'

Theresa May's deputy official spokesman said the Government had said '12,000 times' it would not revoke Article 50, adding: 'It is not something that she is prepared to do.'

Emergency 'Cobra' committee takes over No Deal preparations amid moves to activate 'Operation Yellowhammer' on Monday - putting 3,500 troops on standby, booking ferries for NHS drugs and getting ready for huge lorry jams

The Government's emergency Cobra committee has taken over No Deal preparations today amid plans to activate 'Operation Yellowhammer' on Monday.

Yellowhammer is the civil contingencies wing of No Deal and involves putting 3,500 troops on standby, booking space on emergency ferries for NHS drugs and preparing for miles of lorry queues out of Dover.

The plans - dubbed a No Deal 'doomsday' scenario - also include Foreign Office teams preparing to help Britons who get stranded in Europe from a dedicated 'nerve centre'.

Officials have been planning for No Deal for months and activated 320 other contingency plans before Christmas with 101 days to March 29. It included a public information campaign telling citizens to prepare their own families.

The new escalation comes with just eight days until exit is due to happen and with no deal agreed amid deadlock in Parliament.

Cabinet Ministers were told on Tuesday Operation Yellowhammer would be stood up, the Daily Telegraph revealed.

Brexit secretary, Stephen Barclay, told them in a letter: 'Operation Yellowhammer command and control structures will be enacted fully on 25 March unless a new exit date has been agreed between the UK and the EU.'

He told departments to be ready to make 'necessary changes' to their contingency planning to account for an extension, and be ready to 're-programme' certain measures so that they could instead be activated before the new exit date.

Yellowhammer is the civil contingencies wing of No Deal and involves putting 3,500 troops on standby, booking space on emergency ferries for NHS drugs and preparing for miles of lorry queues out of Dover

Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay told Cabinet on Tuesday that Operation Yellowhammer would be stood up on March 25

What does yellowhammer mean and how did civil servants come up with the name? Yellowhammer is the code name for the work for planning a no deal Brexit carried out by the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS). It takes its name from a small yellow bird which lives across the UK. They forage for seeds to eat, breed in May and enjoy singing. Male yellowhammers learn their songs from their fathers, and over the course of time regional dialects have developed. In ancient legend the birds were linked to the devil - the intricate patterns on their eggs were said to conceal an evil message. The Yellowhammer operation works across all Whitehall departments to ensure the UK is able to weather the shock of crashing out of the Brussels bloc. The word itself is randomly generated by a computer. The CCS was established in 2011 and works on projects to ensure the UK can handle potentially disruptive change. Projects similar to Yellowhammer have been carried out to prepare for the 2012 Olympics and the Champions League final. Advertisement

A Department for Transport source told The Times: 'Clearly if we are facing a no-deal Brexit on Friday there are going to be issues that require a substantial response and we need to ensure that the department is working in a way that allows us to do that ahead of time.

'The unknowns are going to be the reaction of other European countries to issues like customs and driving licences. We need to be in a position to respond to issues quickly.'

A government spokesman said: 'As a responsible government we have been planning and continue to prepare for all eventualities and that includes managing the impacts of a no deal Brexit as they arise.'

European Research Group deputy chairman Mark Francois said in the Commons yesterday Operation Yellowhammer shoudl be stood up immediately.

He said: 'If that is so and there is no extension, why do we not just vote down the rancid withdrawal agreement and sprint for the line?'

Chris Heaton-Harris, a Brexit minister, told MPs: 'We do have Operation Yellowhammer, which is working to deliver the biggest peacetime project in the history of the civil service.

'Leaving the European Union with a deal remains the government's top priority, but a responsible government must plan for every eventuality including a no-deal scenario, and these preparations are taking place alongside work to deliver on the government's policy priorities.'

An official report published last month admitted 200,000 firms that trade with the EU are not ready for a no deal Brexit.

The study from the Brexit department also found citizens are ignoring no deal warnings and failing to make sure they are ready for a no deal.

It said no deal would cause delays at the border - potentially meaning shortages and prices rises for some food, particularly fresh produce not in season in Britain.

The report warns panic buying could fuel shortages in foods that are shipped across the Channel.

Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan revealed the No Deal 'nerve centre' that is ready to help stranded UK citizens this week

Labour MP and Best for Britain supporter Rosie Duffield said: 'The only reason this money is being spent on disaster planning rather than our crumbling public services is because the Prime Minister is obsessed with keeping no deal on the table to force through her bad Brexit deal.

'Stopping the coming crisis should be the government's sole agenda, not facilitating it.

'Messes like this explain why the mood in the country has shifted over the last three years.

'No deal is not an acceptable outcome. People want a final say on Brexit, but also expect MPs to think about revoking A50 to stop this government walking us over a cliff-edge if we reach a point of national crisis next week.'

3,500 troops are on standby for no deal Brexit

Extra personnel could be needed at British ports, at the border or even to help police civil disobedience if a no deal Brexit leads to food shortages or other problems

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson told MPs last year that 3,500 troops will be 'held at readiness' to help with a no-deal Brexit.

The troops are a mix of regulars and reserves and will be held on bases to be deployed as needed as Britain leaves the EU.

Extra personnel could be needed at British ports, at the border or even to help police civil disobedience if a no deal Brexit leads to food shortages or other problems.

Downing Street insisted the use of soldiers is common - pointing to how troops helped out successfully in the running of the Olympics.

Speaking in the Commons when he made the announcement, Mr Williamson said: 'We've as yet not had any formal request from any Government department but what we are doing is putting contingency plans in place, and what we will do is have 3,500 service personnel held at readiness - including regulars and reserves - in order to support any Government department on any contingencies they may need.'

Up to 10,000 lorries could be parked in Kent if no deal causes delays at the ports

Dover has room for 1,720, Manston Airport near Margate, which has been purchased by the Department for Transport, could fit 4,000 and 4,500 could be parked on the M20 - as happened when 'Operation Stack' was triggered in 2015

More than 10,000 lorries could be parked in Kent to cater for queues of trucks heading for France in event of a no-deal Brexit.

First lorries would be parked at Dover, then on Manston Airport and finally the M20.

Dover has room for 1,720 while Manston Airport near Margate, could fit 6,500 following a series of tests. If they run out of room, more lorries could be parked on the M20 - as happened when 'Operation Stack' was triggered in 2015.

Further contingency plans that emerged in November suggested the 10-mile long M26 could also be pressed into service for overflowing lorries.

Specialist drugs first in line for emergency ferry space

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling had mooted the Government leasing entire roll-on, roll-off lorry ferries

Reserving space on ferries for critical supplies is among the contingency plans triggered by the Cabinet today.

Specialist drugs used by the NHS are first in line for space on the No Deal ferries, which were mired in controversy when Transport Secretary Chris Grayling handed one of the contracts to an untested firm with no ships. The deal was later cancelled.

The Department of Health is understood to have contacted pharmaceutical companies urging them to route their supplies using the new ferry services.Eighteen ministers  including members of the Cabinet  are ready to join a plot to snatch control of Brexit from the Prime Minister to avoid No Deal, it was claimed last night.

The frontbench rebels are threatening a mass walk-out unless Theresa May allows votes on alternatives to her deal, such as a soft Brexit, a longer delay, or even reversing the process of leaving the EU.

They want Parliament to be given other options if her deal is rejected again by MPs so they can prevent a No Deal Brexit.

The group is planning to support an amendment on Monday, put forward by Labours Yvette Cooper, Tory Sir Oliver Letwin and others, that would seize control of the parliamentary timetable.

Cabinet ministers Greg Clark, David Gauke, David Mundell, Amber Rudd (pictured) and Claire Perry, seven junior ministers, and three ministerial aides were all allowed to keep their jobs despite breaking a Government three-line whip

Frontbench rebels are threatening a mass walk-out unless Theresa May allows votes on alternatives to her deal

Corbyn will not rule out cancelling Brexit Jeremy Corbyn yesterday left the door open to cancelling Brexit. The Labour leader was twice asked if he might formally ask the Government to halt the process of leaving the EU if Britain was heading for No Deal. He refused to rule it out both times, adding that a second referendum was also possible. Mr Corbyn was in Brussels to meet the blocs chief negotiator Michel Barnier and Martin Selmayr, the EUs top civil servant, hours before yesterdays EU summit began. During very constructive discussions, he laid out his plan for a softer Brexit which would lock us into a permanent customs union with the EU. Before last nights Brussels talks delivered two new possible dates for Brexit  April 12 or May 22  Mr Corbyn was asked if Labour would contemplate a longer Brexit delay if Mrs Mays deal is rejected again next week, or if it would support revoking Article 50. He replied: These are hypotheticals. So far as were concerned, we think theres an urgency in constructing a majority for an agreeable solution and thats what were concentrating on at the moment. The Labour leader again dodged the question when asked directly if he would rule out cancelling Brexit. He said: We think what were proposing can be achieved in Parliament, we do believe we can construct a majority that will prevent all the chaos that will come from crashing out. Mr Corbyn also hinted that he could back a bid for a second referendum. He added: Our determination is to prevent a No Deal exit from the EU. It comes following reports that cross-party talks for a softer Brexit with Remainer MPs are gaining ground. Talks between Labour and Conservative MP Nick Boles for a Norway-style Common Market 2.0 - possibly with single market involvement or a permanent customs union  are nearing a deal, the BBC said. Advertisement

If passed, it would force Mrs May to stage indicative votes on Wednesday that would be likely to give MPs the choice of a Norway-style Brexit, Labours customs union plan, a second referendum, No Deal, or revoking Article 50, the formal process for leaving the EU.

In addition the rebel ministers are considering a second backbench amendment, also due to be debated on Monday, that would demand that Mrs May seek a long extension to the Article 50 process of months or even years if her deal has not been passed. Last night, it was unclear how the new potential dates for Brexit thrashed out in Brussels might affect this.

One minister had said they and 17 of their ministerial colleagues, including several members of the Cabinet, were prepared to resign to ensure that indicative votes take place next week.

Asked about the identities of the potential rebels, they pointed to the list of 15 ministers and aides who last week defied Mrs May by abstaining on a motion that took No Deal off the table.

Cabinet ministers Greg Clark, David Gauke, David Mundell, Amber Rudd and Claire Perry, seven junior ministers, and three ministerial aides were all allowed to keep their jobs despite breaking a Government three-line whip to vote against the motion.

One of the rebels last night said the mood was grim in the group after the Prime Minister announced she would not allow a long delay to Brexit as they realised there might be little time left for them to stop No Deal.

The minister said they were determined to stop a situation where Mrs Mays deal is defeated and the only remaining option is No Deal. They believe the amendment on Monday could be their final opportunity to do this.

They added: If the Prime Minister decides to go for my deal or No Deal then, oh dear.

A Cabinet source said: The strategy the Prime Minister is pursuing is guaranteed to see the defeat of her own Brexit plans.

A previous amendment proposing indicative votes last week was defeated by 314 votes to 312, meaning just two MPs need to switch sides on Monday for it to pass. One of the MPs behind the plan last night said they were very confident they now have the numbers.

David Lidington, Mrs Mays de facto deputy, previously suggested the Government would stage indicative votes.

A previous amendment proposing indicative votes last week was defeated by 314 votes to 312, meaning just two MPs need to switch sides on Monday for it to pass (pictured left: David Mundell. Right: David Gauke)

But when Miss Cooper asked the Prime Minister to commit to this in the Commons on Wednesday, she appeared resistant. Mrs May said: The House has had many opportunities actually. The House has rejected alternatives to the Governments deal.

The Cabinet is bitterly divided between the group of ministers opposed to No Deal, and a rival faction of Brexiteers who believe leaving the EU without an agreement would be preferable to a long delay. Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss yesterday said she now believes No Deal is more likely than any other scenario.

Asked if she would rather have No Deal than an extension to Article 50, she replied: God, yes. No extension. I do think its very unlikely now that were going into a long extension.

And questioned whether Britain is ready for No Deal, she said: Yes. I dont believe the plague of locusts stuff.

The Cabinet is bitterly divided between the group of ministers opposed to No Deal, and a rival faction of Brexiteers who believe leaving the EU without an agreement would be preferable to a long delay (pictured left: Claire Perry. Right: Greg Clark)(ANSAmed) - NAPLES, MARCH 22 - The Mediterranean Tourism Exchange (BMT) is taking place in Naples on Friday through Sunday, where the main topics of discussion will include projects to relaunch tourism in southern Italy and the Universiade World University Games to take place in Naples and the region of Campania in July.



In addition, the expo will focus on programmes by tour operators for the 2019 tourist season, strategies by industry associations to bring tour agencies and tour operators in line with new European directives, and new technologies in the tourism sector.



The BMT is being held at Naples' Mostra d'Oltremare conference centre, and organisers said it is the "main spring tourism expo dedicated to sector operators".



They said it is organised by Progecta with the support of the Region of Campania and the Chamber of Commerce, and that this year also has the support of UniCredit bank, "which testifies to the attention the bank places on development in the sector and in the territory".



The inaugural seminar in the Sala Mediterraneo in pavilion 4 includes the "Grand Tour del Sud", a project by Progecta to relaunch incoming tourism in southern Italy by networking offers in the region with interregional itineraries to be promoted abroad, with the support of the Italian Tourism Board (ENIT) and regional tourism boards.



Those scheduled to attend the inauguration include: Campania tourism councillor Corrado Matera, Naples Chamber of Commerce president Ciro Fiola, Universiade commissioner Gianluca Basile, Mostra d'Oltremare president Alessandro Nardi, and Progecta srl CEO Angelo de Negri.



Valentina della Corte, professor of economics and business management at University of Naples Federico II, will moderate the seminar.(ANSAmed).

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared Trump to a parasite on Late Night with Seth Meyers last night.

The democratic socialist joked that President Trump was a 'nematode' near the end of the interview while revealing her love for biology.

Ocasio-Cortez said: 'Science was my first passion. I studied microbiology and the impacts of antioxidants on a model organism known as the C. elegan, which is of the nematode family.'

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compares Trump to a nematode on 'Late Night with Seth Meyers'

She took a swipe at the president near the end of the interview while discussing her love for science

Meyers then joked that she shared that passion with President Trump. 'I think he did that too,' he said.

But before Meyers could finish, Ocasio-Cortez interrupted, 'Because he's a nematode?' she joked, as the crowd burst out laughing.

Nematodes are microscopic worms that act as parasites in animals and plants. They eject bacteria inside the animal's body, which then multiplies and causes blood poisoning, leading to death.

Ocasio-Cortez has consistently swiped at the president well before becoming a House Representative in January.

AOC pictured in 2007, at the high school science competition she discussed on the late night show

The democratic socialist said there was 'no question' Trump was a racist earlier this year

She said earlier this year there was 'no question' Trump is a racist. In an interview with CBS News, she based her claim on 'words that he uses, which are historic dog whistles of white supremacy'.

Last week, the Democratic Rep. was awarded 'three Pinocchios' from a fact-checker for her claim that he transferred no money to fight opioid addiction after he declared a national health emergency.

Ocasio-Cortez retweeted a C-SPAN clip of her questioning the White House's director of drug policy James Carroll with her claim: 'Amount President Trump has transferred from other agencies to fund his 'Build the Wall' Emergency: $10s of millions, & has identified billions more. Amount he's transferred to address the Opioid National Emergency: $0.'

But The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog found the freshman lawmaker from New York was making a 'highly misleading comparison' and took issue with her attempt to connect the president's actions in the opioid crisis with his actions in trying to build his border wall.A woman known as 'The Beast' died after having five consecutive hours of drug-fuelled sex in Colombia.

The unnamed woman, 32, was having sex with a man at a hotel in Cali, in the country's south, when she began to feel unwell.

She told him that she felt dizzy but wanted to carry on, reports La Republica.

But moments later she began convulsing and suffered a cardiac arrest.

A woman known as 'The Beast' reportedly died after having five consecutive hours of drug-fuelled sex (file photo)

He called for an ambulance but when they took too long to arrive, he wrapped the woman up in the bed sheets and took her to University Hospital of Valle in a taxi.

By the time they arrived at the hospital, the woman was already dead.

Police believe the pair had taken drugs to prolong the amount of time they could have sex for.

It is not known if the drugs are to blame for her death.Galina Kobzeva, 69 was sentenced to eight years in prison for the attempted murder of five-year-old Nadya Shustova

A woman has been jailed for nine years for trying to kill her neighbour's five year old daughter after she mistook the child for Gollum from The Lord of the Rings.

Galina Kobzeva, 69, was convicted of the attempted murder of Nadya Shustova with a knife and hammer before throwing her off a third floor balcony in the Samara region of Russia.

The child was close to death and survived by a 'miracle'.

Pensioner Kobzeva has been ordered to pay 8,350 in 'moral damages' to her victim.

Nadya was in hospital for four months after suffering multiple head and body injuries and fractures.

The girl later told how she had screamed for help as she was beaten and stabbed - but no-one came.

The neighbour had been babysitting the child in her flat when she staged the horrific attack.

A woman passerby saw Kobzeva throwing the child from the balcony - then rescued her from the pavement and called an ambulance.

Nadya (left) suffered a concussion, fractured spine and hip and a collapsed lung after being thrown from the balcony of an apartment in the Samara region of Russia (right)

She said the wild-eyed pensioner had screamed: 'Don't touch her! She must die! There is a demon inside her, a devil!'

In court Kobzeva told the judge that she had been drinking beer at the same time as taking medication when she attacked the child.

She had gone to check on Nadya who was watching TV and 'suddenly saw Gollum from The Lord of the Rings' who 'stared' at her 'loudly laughing'.

Oksana Baleyko with her daughter Nadya, who was thrown from a balcony by her babysitter in Russia

She left the room fearing a delusion, drank more beer, then returned and 'once again saw a laughing monster from the saga of the British writer'.

The girl's mother Oksana Baleyko, 25, said: 'She decided to fight this "monster".

'She beat and kicked Nadya and finally grabbed a hammer from the balcony.'

Kobzeva hit the girl repeatedly over the head.

'The woman said she remembers nothing until she woke up only next day when she was already in jail.'

Nadya told her mother that the neighbour tried to strangle her.

'Then Galina beat Nadya's head against the floor, and grabbed a hammer and struck her on the head,' said Oksana.

'Doctors told us that she used a knife too because Nadya's head was covered with stabs and cuts.

'Then she tried to push Nadya out of the window but my daughter actively resisted and shouted.

'Galina then beat her against a window sill and finally pushed her down from the balcony'

Nadya's parents Mikhail Shustov and Oksana Baleyko, who trusted their 'friendly' neighbour to look after their daughter on the night she tried to murder her

Oksana Baleyko with her daughter Nadya. A witness said Kobzeva screamed: 'Don't touch her! She must die! There is a demon inside her, a devil!' after she threw the child from her third-floor balcony

Medical documents highlighted in court show Nadya was in a 'grave' condition when she came to hospital.

She suffered concussion and head injuries including multiple cuts and bruises.

She had a fractured spine and hip.

Her lung had collapsed and her limbs were covered in cuts and bruises.

She still requires regular hospital treatment.

Kobzeva, who was babysitting Nadya (pictured), had been drinking beer while on medication. She claimed she 'suddenly saw Gollum from The Lord of the Rings' who 'stared' at her 'loudly laughing'

Her mother said the moral damages should have been higher but she was satisfied with the nine year sentence which is followed by a year when the pensioner is forbidden from leaving her home city.

Her mother and father, Mikhail Shustov, had earlier appealed direct to President Vladimir Putin alleging repeated delays in the case.

Oksana said she 'trusted' the neighbour before the attack and the woman was always 'friendly' with Nadya.

Kobzeva was deemed mentally fit to stand trial.A 27-year-old make-up artist who had her hair extensions pulled out in night out gone wrong has admitted to biting a woman's face and leaving her with a severe laceration.

Chelsea Hall pleaded guilty to assaulting the woman at Northies Cronulla Hotel, in Sydney's south, at Sutherland Local Court on Friday.

The victim required hospital treatment after suffering a three-centimetre bite mark to her left cheek when the dance floor fight kicked off on September 29, 2018, the St George Shire Standard reported.

Chelsea Hall (pictured) has admitted to biting a woman's face and leaving her with a severe laceration after night out in Sydney's south

Hall (pictured on the night of the assault) pleaded guilty to assaulting the woman at Northies Cronulla Hotel, in Sydney's south, at Sutherland Local Court on Friday

The fight kicked off after Hall (pictured), from Woonona in north Wollongong, intentionally bumped into the victim's friend

Hair pulling turned to a vicious brawl when the victim and her friends began to dance in the same vicinity as Hall.

The victim and her group purchased alcoholic beverages and moved to the front of the DJ booth on the dance floor, according to agreed police facts.

Hall, from Woonona in north Wollongong, then began to move backwards and intentionally bumped into the victim's friend.

The facts state the pushing continued and the victim decided to intervene, telling Hall there was room to dance elsewhere.

'The accused has pushed the victim with both hands with enough force to cause the victim to stumble back,' police facts stated.

'The accused grabbed the victim by the by her hair and the victim grabbed the accused's hair and pulled out her hair extensions.'

'The accused grabbed the victim by the by her hair and the victim grabbed the accused's hair and pulled out her hair extensions,' police facts state. Pictured: Hall on night of assault

Hall, a makeup artist, eyelash technician and childcare worker, claimed she acted in self-defence

The two women came face-to-face and Hall began to bite the victim on the left side of her face.

Two security guards were needed to separate Hall and the victim, police facts said.

Hall, a makeup artist, eyelash technician and childcare worker, claimed she acted in self-defence after an alleged physical alteration with the victim's friend.

'Her friend grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go, the only thing I could think was I can't breathe, and her face was right there and I literally just panicked and bit her,' Hall told police.

Hall told police she felt like she was going to die and said she shouldn't have assaulted the victim.

Hall will appear at Sutherland Local Court on May 9 for sentencing.A New Zealand man who is accused of carjacking a heavily-pregnant woman's Mercedes while her two children were in the back seat could be jailed for 48 years.

LJ Savea Wright appeared at Campbelltown Local Court in Sydney's west on Friday, after being charged with three offences, including aggravated assault and detaining a person, the Daily Telegraph reported.

The 20-year-old and another man are accused of going for a test drive with the 34-year-old victim on Saturday after she advertised her 2014 black Mercedes A45 AMGA for sale online.

LJ Savea Wright appeared at Campbelltown Local Court in Sydney's west, on Friday, after being charged with three offences, including aggravated assault and detaining a person

The 20-year-old is accused of allegedly carjacking a woman's (pictured) Mercedes and driving off with her two kids in the car

Wright got into the car and then violently pushed the nine-month pregnant woman onto the ground and sped off with her son, 10, and daughter, eight, still inside.

'I screamed on the side of the road my scarf was off and everything,' the woman told police in a video posted online after the incident.

Her children were let out a few moments later.

'The kids I found them here on the side of the road,' the distraught mother can be heard telling police.

Wright was arrested on Thursday and charged with three offences, including aggravated assault and detaining a person.

The court heard that Wright had the alleged attack planned in advance.

'Planned, premediated attack,' police prosecutor Mr McGee said.

Wright (pictured) was arrested on Thursday and charged with three offences, including aggravated assault and detaining a person

Magistrate Ian Guy denied Write bail despite he offering to surrender his New Zealand passport, and conditions of not leaving his home except for work or with parental supervision, the publication reported.

Mr Guy said Wright will face 'a very significant time on imprisonment'.

The case was adjourned to May 22.

Police are still searching for the Mercedes and the second man described as being of Pacific Islander/Maori in appearance, and 20-25 years old with a solid build and purple dyed hair in a bun, who was wearing a grey jumper and dark pants.Kim Jong-un has reportedly purged his personal photographer for damaging his 'supreme dignity' by blocking the crowd's view of him for just three seconds.

The man, identified only by his surname Ri, was fired after he scrambled for better snaps of the dictator during so-called elections.

According to Pyongyang sources, he was guilty of 'adjusting the angle so that the camera's flash covered the Dear and Respected Supreme Leader Comrade's neck'.

He was also blamed for violating two further rules  one banning photography within two metres of the tyrant, and another prohibiting pictures or video from being taken directly in front of him.

Kim Jong-un's personal photographer, known only by his surname Ri, has been purged after he stood in front of the dictator to get a better snap during North Korea's so-called elections

As a result, the 47-year-old photographer was fired from his job and booted out of the Workers' Party of Korea  effectively rendering him a second-class citizen.

It's a hefty fall from grace for a man who, only a month ago, was trusted to document the summit with Donald Trump in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The incident occurred when Kim Jong-un made a public appearance during North Korea's so-called elections on March 10.

The dictator had arrived to cast his vote and, when he stopped to wave at the crowd, Ri stepped in front of him to take a photo.

Another camera behind the crowd captured the exact moment Ri's fate was sealed and the footage was later broadcast on state television.

It's a hefty fall from grace for a man who, only a month ago, was trusted to document the summit with Donald Trump in Hanoi, Vietnam (pictured)

A source familiar with the situation spoke to South Korea-based online newspaper, Daily NK, and said the faux-pas was considered an 'anti-Party act of damaging the Supreme Dignity of our Party'.

Another source told the paper that Ri had been fired almost instantly.

They said: 'The head photographer, who had been at the scene, told Ri that the video he took right in front of Kim Jong-un was a "video that damages the Supreme Dignity", and fired him.'

Elections in North Korea are generally considered to be a sham, with the ruling Workers' Party recently winning an improbable 607 of the 687 available seats in the Supreme People's Assembly.

The other two main parties are both allied to the Workers' Party and only one candidate appears on each ballot  and though their name can be crossed out, doing so is thought to be treasonous.This is the terrifying moment a bear mauls a forest officer and chases him into a reservoir during a rescue operation that went wrong.

Forest protection officer, Kumar, had been trying to drive the bear away from Velugodu Reservoir in Andhra Pradesh, India, and take it to the forest.

Kumar and other officers had cornered the bear and were trying to tie it up with ropes when it broke free and began its attack.

Forest protection officer, Kumar, was mauled by a bear while he was trying to rescue it today at Velugodu Reservoir in Andhra Pradesh, India

The bear had run into the reservoir to try and get away from the forest workers that were trying to rescue it.

He then starts charging towards Kumar, who dashes into the reservoir to try and escape.

He makes it into the water just before the bear catches up to him and mauls him.

Other forest workers managed to stop the attack by throwing stones at the bear to distract it.

Kumar was rushed to Kurnool General hospital and he is still there recovering from his injuries.

Forest officials and local villagers continued the rescue mission and managed to get the bear back to the forest.Ms Balls daughter MRhaiyah Mitchell shared the special moment and has received hundreds of good wishes

Given all-clear from breast cancer after final round of radiation treatment

This is the beautiful moment an American mother celebrated being cancer free by ringing her hospital's bell.

Lakesha Ball was given the all-clear from breast cancer almost two years after her diagnosis.

In an iconic tradition, she took her opportunity to ring the 'Hope Bell' at Maryland Proton Treatment Center.

Inspiring footage shows her putting all her might in ringing the large silver bell as loudly as she can.

Ms Balls daughter MRhaiyah Mitchell posted the video on Instagram, saying: 'Today my Mom Is CANCER FREE. Today my mother rung that damn bell.

'My baby is done... Ma we did it. We finish baby!!! It's over ma. No more breast cancer.

'I love you soo much. 40 treatments Radiation everyday, 3 appointments in 1 day... Skin burning from your Radiation. Nails turning from your chemo... Thank you lord.'

Lakesha Ball filmed ringing the 'Hope Bell' at Maryland Treatment Center

After two years of treatment, she can be seen taking her time to enthusiastically ring the bell

Ms Ball was first diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2017

Well wishers have left hundreds of kind comments, and have like the video more than 21,000 times.

Ms Ball was first diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2017.

Likely many hospitals across the United Kingdom and the US, when someone is clinically given the all-clear from cancer they celebrate by ringing the hospital bell.

Ms Ball finally got to take her turn on March 11, 2019.

Well wishers have left hundreds of kind comments on the video, and have liked it more than 21,000 times

Many hospitals have the tradition that when someone is clinically given the all-clear from cancer they celebrate by ringing the hospital bellJeremy Corbyn will meet Theresa May next week and try to convince her to pursue a softer Brexit as he left the door open to cancelling leaving the EU altogether.

36 hours after he stormed out of crunch talks because Chuka Umunna was invited the Labour leader said he is now willing to sit down with the PM.

Mr Corbyn says he will meet Mrs May on Monday - before she is due to put her ailing deal before MPs for a third time - and his main aim is to force her to abandon No Deal.

And he said that Labour would get behind her if she agreed to pursue a softer Brexit that includes Britain staying in a customs union with the EU.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, right, and Keir Starmer, Labour Shadow Brexit secretary, leave EU headquarters prior to an EU summit in Brussels where he said he would now sit down with the PM

He told The Mirror: 'Were the responsible party here. Were not running down the clock, were looking for solutions.

'If she could say shes prepared to understand what were saying, the points were making about the future - customs union, dynamic relationship with Europe - then we will be able to talk to her about that. Shes got to move forward on how things can change'.

Earlier the Labour leader was twice asked if he might formally ask the Government to halt the process of leaving the EU if Britain was heading for No Deal.

He refused to rule it out both times, adding that a second referendum was also possible.

Mr Corbyn was in Brussels to meet the blocs chief negotiator Michel Barnier and Martin Selmayr, the EUs top civil servant, hours before yesterdays EU summit began.

During very constructive discussions, he laid out his plan for a softer Brexit which would lock us into a permanent customs union with the EU.

Before last nights Brussels talks delivered two new possible dates for Brexit  April 12 or May 22  Mr Corbyn was asked if Labour would contemplate a longer Brexit delay if Mrs Mays deal is rejected again next week, or if it would support revoking Article 50.

He replied: These are hypotheticals. So far as were concerned, we think theres an urgency in constructing a majority for an agreeable solution and thats what were concentrating on at the moment.

Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Stammer (left) and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn arrive in Brussels ahead of a meeting with Michel Barnier

Jeremy Corbyn (pictured leaving Downing Street last night) walked out on a crucial Brexit briefing with party leaders because former Labour MP Chuka Umunna (right) was invited

She wrote on Twitter: 'Corbyn on Hamas (the terrorists): I wanted Hamas to be part of the debate. Corbyn on Chuka Umunna (the anti-racism ex-Labour MP): Tell him I'm not talking to him'

The Labour leader again dodged the question when asked directly if he would rule out cancelling Brexit.

He said: We think what were proposing can be achieved in Parliament, we do believe we can construct a majority that will prevent all the chaos that will come from crashing out.

Mr Corbyn also hinted that he could back a bid for a second referendum.

He added: Our determination is to prevent a No Deal exit from the EU.

It comes following reports that cross-party talks for a softer Brexit with Remainer MPs are gaining ground.

Talks between Labour and Conservative MP Nick Boles for a Norway-style Common Market 2.0 - possibly with single market involvement or a permanent customs union  are nearing a deal, the BBC said.

Mr Corbyn also defended his behaviour after walking out of a crucial Brexit meeting with Mrs May on Wednesday because Labour defector Chuka Umunna was present.

A slew of critics accused of him extraordinary, juvenile behaviour and pointed out that in the past he has been willing to sit with members of the terror group Hamas, as well as inviting IRA members to the Commons just days after the 1984 Brighton bombing.

But yesterday the Labour leader claimed there had been confusion over the meeting.

He said: I had a separate and very extensive discussion with the Prime Minister later on and also arranged to meet the Prime Minister again on a one-to-one basis.

We have done a great deal to listen carefully and try to construct a majority that can bring about a resolution.Indonesia's national carrier has cancelled an order for 49 of the Boeing jets which have crashed twice in five months.

Garuda said its passengers have 'lost trust and no longer have confidence' in the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet after a combined 346 passengers died in air disasters in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

The end of the $4.9bn (3.7bn) order, believed to be the first such cancellation for the jet, deals a fresh blow to the Boeing plane after governments across the globe blocked it from their airspace.

Garuda, which ordered 50 aircraft is also talking to Boeing about whether or not to return the one plane it has already received.

In a bid to stem the crisis, Boeing will change its rules to make an optional cockpit warning light compulsory as investigators focus on the plane's 'angle of attack' sensor.

Indonesian carrier Garuda said passengers had 'lost trust and no longer have the confidence' in the Boeing plane following the crashes. Pictured: the one 737 Max 8 it has already received

WHAT IS AN ANGLE OF ATTACK INDICATOR AND DISAGREE LIGHT? As investigators look into the cause of the crashes, attention has turned to a new software in the jets that takes readings from devices called angle of attack sensors. The software can essentially push a plane's nose down in some circumstances, for example when the sensors suggest the plane may be stalling. Angle of attack indicator: The angle of attack indicator displays the two sensors, which shows how much the aircraft's nose it tilted up or down. It is the angle between a plane's wing and the oncoming air, according to the FAA. If the angle of attack becomes too great, the wing can stall and lose lift. If a pilot fails to recognize and correct the situation, a stall could lead to loss of control of the aircraft and an abrupt loss of altitude. The indicator can alert pilots of low airspeed conditions before a aerodynamic stall occurs, especially during takeoff and landing. Such stalls can send the plane downwards in an uncontrolled way. Angle of attack disagree light: The disagree light activates if the two sensors in the software do not agree. Boeing will now make the disagree light free of charge as part of a forthcoming software update to the 737 MAX fleet in the wake of the two fatal crashes, officials briefed on the matter said on Thursday. Advertisement

Garuda had so far paid Boeing about $26 million, while the company's head told Indonesian media that it would consider switching to a new version of the single-aisle jet.

'In principle, it's not that we want to replace Boeing, but maybe we will replace [them] with another model,' a director said.

Boeing officials will visit Indonesia next week to discuss Garuda's plans to call off the order.

'We have sent a letter to Boeing requesting that the order be cancelled,' Garuda spokesman Ikhsan Rosan announced.

'The reason is that Garuda passengers in Indonesia have lost trust and no longer have the confidence' in the plane, he said.

Aviation expert Shukor Yusof said Garuda's announcement were the first formal plans by a carrier to cancel an order for the 737 MAX 8.

'It will probably not be the last. There is a risk that Garuda's rival Lion Air, which also has many 737 MAX 8 orders, might make the same decision,' he said.

Lion Air has said it was postponing delivery of four of the jets after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board.

Lion Air operates 10 Max 8 jets, part of a then-record $22 billion order from Boeing made in 2011.

The airlines are the only two that use the Max 8 in Indonesia.

The Ethiopian tragedy came after a Lion Air jet of the same model crashed in Indonesia in October, killing all 189 people on board.

Boeing will change its rules to make an optional cockpit warning light compulsory, in the wake of the deadly Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes. Pictured: the very Boeing 737 Max 8 jet which crashed in Ethiopia on March 10, killing 157 people

The cockpit of a Boeing Co. 737 MAX 9 jetliner is seen during production at the company's manufacturing facility in Renton, Washingto

Both planes reportedly experienced erratic steep climbs and descents as well as fluctuating airspeeds before crashing shortly after takeoff.

Boeing will now require the jet to have an 'AoA Disagree' alert, which was previously optional and came at an extra cost, meaning some budget airlines such as Lion Air chose not to install them.

The alert warns pilots when the plane's critical 'angle of attack' readings may be wrong.

Faulty angle of attack sensors were blamed in part for the Indonesia disaster last October and have been at the centre of investigations into the Ethiopia crash.

In both cases, the pilots lost control soon after take-off and fought a losing battle to stop their jets plunging down.

Ethiopian emergency services work at the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa on March 10. The crash has set off one of the widest inquiries in aviation history and cast a shadow over the Boeing 737 MAX model intended to be a standard for decades

An Indonesian officer holds the Lion Air JT610 flight data recorder shortly after it was found underwater last November

In Indonesia, the sensor was said to have triggered the automated Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) to force the plane's nose down.

MCAS was introduced by Boeing on the 737 Max 8.

Angle of attack sensors would tell MCAS to point the nose of a plane down if it was in danger of stalling.

According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the automated MCAS system repeatedly pushed the plane's nose down following take-off.

The pilots of the Ethiopian Airlines plane reported similar difficulty before the aircraft plunged into the ground near Addis Ababa on March 10.As San Francisco prepares to celebrate Lawrence Ferlinghettis 100th birthday on Sunday, City Lights Books will be the focus of much attention. The little paperback bookshop he launched in 1953 is now so large that it occupies an entire block of storefronts and doubles as a North Beach tourist attraction.

The City Lights bookstore in 2019.

This is what the storefront looked like when I clerked at City Lights in the 1960s.

City Lights Books in the 1950s and 60s.

Shig Murao

Heres an excerpt adapted from My Adventures in Fugitive Literature, later included in The Z Collection:

It was June of 1966 when I looked up a college friend living in North Beach. He was working at City Lights and mentioned me to Shig Murao, who managed the store. Shig was impressed that I had a graduate degree, but he was more impressed that I had dropped out to clerk at the 8th Street Bookshop in New Yorks Greenwich Village. 8th Street was not just any bookstore. It had a literary reputation as a sort of East Coast sister to City Lights. The 8th Street owners, Ted and Eli Wilentz, were involved in the small press movement as publishers of Corinth Books. Like City Lights, Corinth was associated with the Beats. Also like City Lights, 8th Street stocked tons of poetry books and mimeo zines of the 60s, which you wouldnt have found in the usual mainstream bookstores. Shig hired me on the spot.

Clerking at City Lights, 1966



To be a clerk at City Lights was an intimate privilege. Far more bohemian than 8th Street, City Lights had the atmosphere of a funky Left Bank cave with flimsy cellar bookshelves partly made of orange crates, some rickety chairs and cafe tables for reading, and a lone clerk sitting at the top of the stairs by the front door ringing up sales on an old-fashioned cash register. Lawrence still took an occasional turn at the register. And if Shig had confidence in you, he left you alone to do your thing.

I AM THE DOOR is still there.

Photo by David Tom, 2017

At some point he gave me a key to the store and asked me to open up on Sunday mornings. The streets of North Beach would be deserted. Across from the store, at Columbus and Broadway, the topless clubs would be closed. The morning sunlight would be sharp and bright, and I recall the pleasure of sitting at the cash register reading undisturbed for as much as an hour or two until the first customers began drifting in.

The stairway to the basement is the same as it was.

Photo by David Tom, 2017

One of the great things about clerking there was that you met everybody who came through the door. You were like a gatekeeper. The people who walked in could be anybody. You met all kinds. Bill Graham, the rock promoter, showed up once a week with his Fillmore concert posters to put in the window. Honest-to-god poetry lovers stopped by to check the mimeo magazines. A guy in a three-piece suit came up from the basement one time with $80 worth of mimeos under his arm. He turned out to be D.J.R. Bruckner, Chicago bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, later on Nixons enemies list. Bob Kaufman, the poet of Solitudes, would appear suddenly just inside the door and rock back and forth, his eyes fluttering. He was like a ghost. Never said a word. Neal Cassady blew in once. He wanted to cash what was more than likely a bad check. Lawrence had called ahead, Dont give him any money. I didnt. Cassady was offended, but jaunty about it. Some millionaires dont even put salt on their table, he said, and blew back out.

The basement bookshelves are improved these days.

Photos by David and Sharon Tom, 2017





After Id been a clerk for about a year, Shig told me Lawrence was looking for an editorial assistant. Why didnt I ask him for the job? By then the City Lights shipping department had grown too large to remain hidden behind the cellar bookshelves. Lawrence moved the operation to a corner storefront on upper Grant Avenue and put his editorial office in a small apartment above it.

With Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1968

He told me he needed someone to handle permissions requests, publishing correspondence, some of his own mail, and editorial chores like proof reading. Was I willing? It was a step up from the cash register. Of course I was willing. For the next two years we shared a room overlooking Filbert Street. Lawrences desk, an old-fashioned rolltop, was in one corner. My desk was in another corner. A second room had a futon on the floor and little else. A third closet-size room held the editorial files.

Ive been asked what it was like working for Lawrence at such close quarters. I found him an easy boss to work for. He was clear in his expectations. He didnt look over my shoulder or try to micromanage whatever I was doing. He was also very self-contained. Never gossiped. Rarely made small talk. His reputation for being tight with money was true, but contrary to Cassadys insult, he was generous with his possessions. There were times he lent me his cabin in Big Sur, and when I didnt have a car he gave me his VW bus to get there.

In the City Lights editorial office holding the third issue of Earthquake, 1968

Had I stayed in New York I might never have done a little magazine. But the intimacy of the Bay Area literary scene, which teemed with poets, combined with the advantage of my position at City Lights, which was a nexus for San Franciscos small-press publishers, spurred me to it. My co-editor at first was Gail Dusenbery (nee Chiarello), a veteran of the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference. She had been part of two circles of budding poets, one led by Robert Duncan and the other by Gary Snyder. Oyez Press had recently published her first book of poems, The Mark. It was Gail who came up with a name for the magazine: The San Francisco EARTHQUAKE. Naturally I asked Lawrence for a contribution to the first issue, which appeared in the fall of 1967. He gave me a diaristic account of his trip to Berlin earlier that year for the Literarisches Colloquium in Wannsee. His really significant contribution, however, was a generous offer to put the magazine in the City Lights catalog. This meant nationwide distribution, which it would not have had otherwise. By the second issue my closest collaborators were Carl Weissner, Mary Beach, Claude Pelieu, and Norman O. Mustill. It was a crazy crew, and we had a great time while it lasted.

Becky Kerr, 22, hit back at a vengeful Tinder match after he sent her hurtful messages

A 'spiteful' Tinder match branded a girl a 'hungry hippo' with 'more rolls than Greggs' and wished for her to be run over in a fat-shaming rant all because she turned him down.

Singleton Becky Kerr, 22, was swiping through the dating app last weekend when she matched with a man called Tom.

The supermarket baker from Warrington, Cheshire was stunned when Tom bluntly asked if she 'fancied a s**g' despite Becky expressly stating on her Tinder bio that she was not looking for a casual fling.

But after politely responding 'no, ta', Miss Kerr was met with a barrage of abuse as she was called a 'disgusting fat b***h' who looks like a 'sack of potatoes'.

Tom also expressed a wish to see Becky 'run over' by a taxi or lorry and said: 'Shut up you fat ugly horrible dirty obese todge.'

Tom's opening rant said: 'Alright ya fat b***h. You're such a huge woman it's actually disgusting I really hope you choke on a hungry hippo.... Oh wait... That's you.

'Stupid fat b***h thinking your mad cos you look like the mad controller.

'I really wanna bell a delta [taxi] to yours and give me a fiver for him to run you over but to be fair you will probably eat the car thinking it's a burger or a pizza ye fat giraffe neck.

The supermarket baker from Warrington, Cheshire, was branded a 'hungry hippo' with 'more rolls than Greggs'

Miss Kerr's Tinder bio explicitly states she is not interested in casual hook-ups and calls herself a 'fat girl'

'So next time you're in the street I hope you get run over by a lorry yet fat wet wipe.

'You're the size of the Wetherspoons on south road. No wonder I couldn't get a breakie this morning cos you probably ate it all ye fat hairy b***h.

'I'm off to go s**g a bird who doesn't look like a sack of potatoes from Iceland.

'P.S. you're so fat you look like a Fiat 500, oh wait you couldn't porbs fit in the car cos you would break the tyres.

'Just an extra P.S. you're fat.'

But Miss Kerr refused to let the hateful comments get to her and she replied with her own retorts as her 'coping mechanism'.

She said: 'He messaged me saying "fancy a s**g?". To me if someone sends that in a first message it's a straight "no".

'I said "no" to him in what I think was a polite way. I could have gone on a massive rant about how you shouldn't speak to women like that but it wasn't worth the argument.

But Miss Kerr refused to get upset by the fat-shaming messages or block Tom on the dating app

Tom started the exchange with a blunt message asking for a s**g but when Miss Kerr refused he launched into a vitriolic attack on her appearance

'Then I got all that abuse back. At first I was shocked. I've been called boring or frigid before by people on Tinder but this is the first time someone has really tried to hurt me.

'But then I started picking up on all of his mistakes and it was making me laugh, like he called me the mad controller instead of the fat controller.

'I also found it funny that he compared me to a Fiat 500 because I own a Fiat 500.

'I tried to find the funny side. That's my coping mechanism.. And I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of just blocking him and acting like he'd hurt me.

'So I sent him a funny reply and it's not the response he wanted. I got loads more abuse back.'

After reading his angry rant, Miss Kerr replied to Tom awarding him 10/10 for effort and highlighting how funny she found it that she owns a Fiat 500.

Tom appeared to continue trying his luck, asking Miss Kerr to perform a sex act on his 'average size c**k' in exchange for the party drug ketamine which is also used as a horse tranquilizer.

When Miss Kerr pointed out that she had no need for the drug as Tom had called her a hippo not a horse, he replied: 'Shut up you fat ugly horrible dirty obese t***e.

After being branded a 'hippo' Miss Kerr laughed off Tom's offer of ketamine, a party drug which is also used as a drug tranquiliser

Miss Kerr poked fun at Tom who continued to mock her appearance, saying she looked like Bruce the Shark from the Disney film Finding Nemo

'You look like a mix between Bruce the shark and Shrek you fat ugly b***h. You have more rolls than f***ing Greggs.'

She responded by telling Tom he 'can't handle rejection' and questioning his taste in women.

But the baker, who compares dating a fat girl to opening a bag of crisps in church on her own Tinder profile, thinks taking Tom's cruelty on the chin only angered him more as he quickly unmatched her.

She said: 'It didn't upset me because he had asked me to sleep with him before so I can't be that bad.

'It's purely because I said 'no' to him that he was then being so spiteful.

'He wasn't giving me abuse out of nowhere. He messaged me asking for a shag but I knew I was better than what he was offering and he just couldn't handle the rejection.

'He wanted me to argue back and get upset so he could think he was the big man upsetting a girl but I wasn't going to let him win.

'And he was really unimaginative. He just picked up on one thing, the fact that I'm a big girl. But my whole bio is a jokey metaphor about dating a big girl.

'He thought he was being funny so I thought it would be entertaining to give him a funny response back and he just couldn't handle it. He ended up unmatching me.

'I think he was really offended that I was seeing the funny side.'

While she was able to laugh off Tom's 'shocking' behaviour, Miss Kerr feels this kind of abuse from the Tinder reject could seriously impact women struggling with their body image.

She said: 'He obviously has no respect for women whatsoever and will go around hurting people's feelings and not caring about the consequences'

She said: 'It's lucky it was me he was giving abuse to and not someone who's more insecure.

'It could have a really serious impact on some people.

'If someone was already feeling quite down and depressed or struggling with their body image that abuse could be their breaking point.

'A few of my friends who saw the messages told me they would have been raging or in tears.

'He obviously has no respect for women whatsoever and will go around hurting people's feelings and not caring about the consequences.

'It's just not right. He's probably a keyboard warrior and wouldn't dare say any of those things to someone's face.

'If other women have had that kind of abuse they should just ignore it, there's no use taking any notice of it.'All of the territory in Syria previously controlled by ISIS has been eliminated, the White House said Friday, and President Donald Trump showed reporters and a crowd of his supporters an upside-down pair of before-and-after maps to prove it.

'So here is ISIS on Election Day, here's ISIS right now.' he said on the tarmac in West Palm Beach, Florida as he pointed to the two different versions of the same territory. 'If you look  so there's ISIS. And that's what we have right now, as of last night. That's what we have right now.'

After posing for photos, he gave the map to a journalist, saying, 'You guys can have the map. Congratulations. Youll spread it around?'

Trump then shook hands with a few dozen fans who had shown up to see him arrive from Washington, and signed a red 'Make America Great Again' hat.

President Trump held up his ISIS before-and-after maps upside-down on Friday as he showed them off to reporters

Trump handed his map to a reporter and asked him to pass it around, not knowing that he had just posed for pictures with the paper inverted

TOPSHOT - Heavy smoke rises above ISIS's last remaining position in the village of Baghouz during battles with the Syrian Democratic Forces on March 18

Aboard Air Force One before Trump deplaned, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders gave journalists a peek at the maps, holding them correctly.

The president showed off a similar map on Wednesday at the White House as he left for a brief trip to Ohio, and noted the tiny speck of red where ISIS fighters remained holed up.

The speck was gone on Friday but the whole sheet of paper was inverted.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan briefed Trump about developments on the ground, according to White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.

The president has been hinting at the victory for days.

Trump was quick to warn minutes later that the once-strong terror army is still a danger online.

Despite a total geographic victory over ISIS, he tweeted Friday that the group still 'uses the internet better than almost anyone,' and warned people susceptible to their propaganda campaigns that 'they will always try to show a glimmer of vicious hope, but they are losers and barely breathing. Think about that before you destroy your lives and the lives of your family!'

That's right: White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders showed reporters the map aboard Air Force One and got it rightside-up

The president got it correct on Wednesday when he showed off his Defense Department maps at the White House

Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have liberated all of Baghouz from ISIS

Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces, tweeted 'Baghouz is free and the military victory against Daesh has been achieved,' referring to the group by its Arabic acronym.

Bali says the so-called caliphate, which once sprawled across much of Syria and neighboring Iraq, is gone, and pledged to continue the fight against remnants of the extremist group until they are completely eradicated.

Earlier it was was reported that ISIS fanatics were hiding in caves in their final holdout in Syria.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) battled militants holed up in Baghouz overnight, supported by coalition airstrikes.

The Kurdish-led SDF have been predicting imminent victory for days but while thousands of the terrorists have fled a few are still hiding in the Syrian village.

The jihadists were holed up in what appeared to be caves in a rocky shelf overlooking Baghouz, their final sliver of land along the Euphrates river.

A vehicle carrying fighters of the US-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) drives through the village of Sousa

They were also hiding in trenches as war planes carried out two raids against ISIS movements on Thursday night.

'Our forces are trying to force them to surrender, but so far the clashes are continuing,' the SDF's Mustafa Bali said.

The SDF has been battling for weeks to defeat Islamic State at the Baghouz enclave in southeastern Syria at the Iraqi border.

Backed by U.S. air power, they swept on Tuesday into a camp where hundreds of fighters had been making their last stand, prompting early 'victory' celebrations.

They said they would declare the group defeated once a search for hidden mines and jihadist holdouts was complete.

The terror group's final defeat at Baghouz will end its territorial rule that once spanned a third of Iraq and Syria.

A cat walking past a destroyed building in the village of Sousa, near the village of Baghouz in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzo

After sweeping across swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, the ISIS jihadists' cross-border caliphate has been whittled down by multiple offensives to the tiny embattled enclave in Baghouz, Syria (pictured)

But the U.S. military has warned that Islamic State may still count tens of thousands of fighters, dispersed throughout Iraq and Syria, with enough leaders and resources to present a menacing insurgency.

A propaganda video carrying the mark of an Islamic State news outlet was distributed among online followers of the group on Thursday.

It showed footage from inside Baghouz and a fighter calling for Muslims in Western countries to stage attacks.

The United States believes Iraq is the location of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who stood at the pulpit of the great medieval mosque in Mosul in 2014 to declare himself caliph, sovereign over all Muslims.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on a visit to Jerusalem, told reporters victory was 'close'.

Fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) celebrate as they come back from the frontline in the battle against ISIS on Tuesday

Fighters from the SDF stand together in the village of Baghouz today as the final push to sweep ISIS from the area continues

He was proud of 'the work that the United States did, the Department of Defense did, that the folks fighting down in the Euphrates river valley did', he said.

'The threat from radical Islamic terrorism remains. We need to finish out the last few square metres there, in Syria. Still work to do.'

Thousands of people including women, children and fleeing jihadists have poured out of Baghouz into the al-Hol camp in north-eastern Syria.

The camp is now holding more than 72,000 people, including more than 40,000 children, rescue workers said.

The total number of deaths on the way to it or shortly after arriving now stood at 138, the overwhelming number of them babies and infants.Advertisement

The boss of Greggs, Microsoft's UK chief executive and the great-granddaughter of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst all received honours at a Windsor Castle investiture ceremony today.

Roger Whiteside, chief of the Greggs bakery chain, was given an OBE for services to women and equality. In 2016 he joined the Women's Business Council, which aims to tackle barriers to women's career progression.

Mr Whiteside, who has been in his current position for six years, was also on the founding team of Ocado - and began his career at Marks & Spencer where he spent 20 years, eventually becoming head of its food business.

Today, he said it was 'really important' that Greggs takes a modern approach to environmental issues, adding that the company's launch of a vegan sausage roll had been a 'revelation'.

Roger Whiteside, chief of the Greggs bakery chain, receives an OBE from the Queen for services to women and equality

In 2016, Mr Whiteside joined the Women's Business Council, which aims to tackle barriers to women's career progression

Microsoft UK's chief executive Cindy Rose was given an OBE at the investiture ceremony today for services to UK technology

Prior to joining the US electronics giant, Ms Rose led the consumer division at telecommunications firm Vodafone

He said: 'Because we have been around for so long, we are in the psyche of the British public. Of course our heritage is in bakery and we have seemed to have been probably a bit old fashioned and all of those sorts of thing in the past.

'So for us to be in the forefront of things like vegan and gluten free, that tends to attract the headlines.'

He said that the introduction of the vegan sausage roll was part of a 'long-term' strategy to adjust to the public's changing eating habits and was not a publicity stunt. He said: 'We wouldn't do it if we thought it was a fad.

'It is clear to us that dietary choice is something that is broadening in appeal and in the way we live.'

Dr. Helen Pankhurst is made a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) by the Queen at Windsor Castle today

Dr Pankhurst is a leading feminist and senior adviser to charity Care International - and regularly speaks out on gender issues

Activist Dr Pankhurst, also a writer and academic, was installed as the University of Suffolk's first chancellor in December

Professor Jane Cummings, ex-chief nursing officer for England, is made a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire)

Professor Cummings, who retired last year, receives the award from Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle today

Mr Whiteside added that while there were 'very few' people who follow a completely vegan diet, there has been a trend among the public wanting to eat less meat.

He added: 'I now eat more vegetable meals than I used to because I feel like it is probably better to have a diet that is more balanced in that way.'

Profits at Greggs have been boosted by the launch of the vegan sausage roll and there has been a move to add more vegan food to their menus, according to Mr Whiteside.

Microsoft UK's chief executive Cindy Rose also got an OBE at the event for services to UK technology. Prior to joining the US electronics giant, she led the consumer division at telecommunications firm Vodafone.

The Queen also gave a CBE to women's rights campaigner Dr Helen Pankhurst for services to gender equality. Dr Pankhurst is a senior adviser to charity Care International and regularly speaks out on gender issues.

The Queen presents an OBE to Paul Lindley, who founded organic baby food firm Ella's Kitchen, at Windsor Castle today

Mr Lindley was given his award from the Queen for services to food and drink exports and children's welfare

Skateboarder James Threlfall was presented with an MBE by the Queen for his work with young people in Wiltshire

Mr Threlfall is an ambassador for mental health charity Calm (Campaign Against Living Miserably)

Frank Mullane, chief executive of AAFDA (Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse), is awarded an MBE at Windsor Castle today

Mr Mullane is presented with the MBE by the Queen today for his services to families affected by domestic homicide

The activist, also a writer and academic who recently compared the battle for women's right to vote a century ago to the #MeToo movement today, was installed as the University of Suffolk's first chancellor in December.

Dr Pankhurst said her famous ancestor would be 'delighted' and 'amused' that she had been honoured with a CBE for campaigning on gender equality.

Dr Helen Pankhurst, who is descended from the famous suffragette, was handed the honour by the Queen at Windsor Castle on Friday.

She said: 'I think the fact that I am being given an honour on gender equality issues and people are still talking about the need to continue to address gender equality... I think she would be amused, but obviously delighted.'

The activist said that while it is important to 'celebrate success' on the progress of gender issues, there is still 'so much that needs to be done'.

Dr Helen Pankhurst with her CBE medal (left) and Microsoft UK CEO Cindy Rose with her OBE (right) at Windsor Castle today

Roger Whiteside with his OBE medal (left) and Frank Mullane with his MBE medal (right) pose for pictures at Windsor Castle

Professor Jane Cummings with her CBE medal (left) and Paul Lindley with his OBE medal (right) after the ceremony today

James Threlfall poses with his MBE medal today after it was awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth II at an investiture ceremony

She said: 'In every single area we are not there yet, but the direction of travel and the fact that we all know we are on a journey is really positive.'

Honoured campaigner wants greater awareness of domestic abuse The public needs to be 'more aware' of domestic violence so victims can get better support, according to a campaigner on the issue. Frank Mullane, CEO of charity Advocacy After Domestic Abuse, made the comments after he was presented with an MBE by the Queen at Windsor Castle on Friday for services to families affected by domestic homicide. Mr Mullane, from Swindon, said he lost his sister and nephew to domestic abuse in 2003. He said: 'It is quite a poignant moment because obviously we reflect back on the murder and none of this would have been in our lives but for murders, that's a strange feeling.' However, he said it is a 'nice feeling' to receive the honour, adding: 'It is wonderful to see the recognition for the work that we do.' The public needs to be 'more aware' of domestic abuse so they know how to give 'safe interventions', Mr Mullane said. 'A person suffering domestic abuse, for example my sister, first of all comes to her brother. We give loving responses, whereas I think we need informed responses.' Advertisement

Dr Pankhurst said that companies need to engage better with gender issues, calling it 'disgraceful' that two-thirds of companies are yet to publish their pay gaps with around a fortnight to go until the deadline.

She said: 'I think it really is disgraceful. I think we need to continue to push so it is not just companies that have 250 people and above that have to report. Smaller companies don't need to report, and I think a lot of the inequality can be at the smaller companies as well.'

She added that there was also some 'hiding of the data' in cases such as partners of law firms not having to declare all their income.

Dr Pankhurst, who is also a writer and academic, said that a key area of progress on gender issues is that 'there are so many men who are happy to call themselves feminists that are more involved in bringing up their children and caring for their parents'.

The campaigner, who was joined at the ceremony by her children and a friend, added: 'All of us, we are just absolutely delighted.'

Skateboarder James Threlfall, who is an ambassador for mental health charity Calm (Campaign Against Living Miserably), was presented with an MBE for his work with young people in Wiltshire.

He said that it is 'really important' young people have access to activities, adding: 'When I was younger I found that some of my friends went off and were getting into trouble.'

However, focusing on skateboarding 'completely kept me out of trouble', he said, and helping young people access the sport is 'really, really important'.

An OBE was given to Paul Lindley, who founded organic baby food firm Ella's Kitchen, for services to food and drink exports and children's welfare.

Jane Cummings, ex-chief nursing officer for England, received a CBE.A five-year-old boy died in a house blaze after he used a lighter to set fire to the corner of a book in his bedroom just moments after telling his mother 'I love you', an inquest heard.

Alex Clarke suffered fatal injuries in the fire which started in his bedroom after book fell on the floor.

His brother William, eight, and sister Jessica, 10, ran downstairs and alerted their mother Emma, who raised the alarm.

She asked neighbours for help but they were unable to get past thick smoke and intense heat to reach Alex.

Firefighters eventually pulled him from the room at the property in Leeds and he was taken to hospital, but died from his injuries the following day.

Alex Clarke, five, pictured, died after starting a fire in his bedroom when he used a lighter to set fire to a book or paper, an inquest heard

In a statement read to Wakefield Coroner's Court, Ms Clarke said the family had been playing board games and watching television on the night of the incident.

She added: 'Alex ran down, gave me a kiss and a cuddle and said 'I love you'.

'Around 8.20pm William and Jessica ran down saying the bedroom was on fire.'

After being taken from the house, Alex was rushed to Leeds General Infirmary then transferred to the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, the court heard.

Fire investigator Jamie Lister of West Yorkshire Fire Service, said the cause was 'most likely a cigarette lighter to something in the room, probably a book or papers.'

He added it was more than likely a 'deliberate' act.

Reading a statement from neighbour Simon Horner, who tried to rescue Alex, coroner Ms Watson said: 'He ran upstairs and into a wall of black smoke and could feel intense heat coming through the walls.'

Neighbours in Leeds rushed to try to save Alex but were beaten back by thick smoke and intense heat. Pictured are police and tributes at the scene following the fire

Another neighbour, Krzysztof Olejnik, briefly searched the blazing bedroom before going to the kitchen and filling pans with water, the inquest heard.

Detective sergeant Paul Kravtschuk of West Yorkshire Police, who investigated the fire, said there were no suspicious circumstances or concrete evidence indicating who had started the fire.

Forensic pathologist Dr Michael Parsons conducted the post mortem and concluded Alex died as a result of complications after suffering severe burns and smoke inhalation in a house fire.

Recording a verdict of misadventure, Assistant Coroner Sarah Watson said: 'I find that a naked flame was deliberately produced from a gas lighter.

'It was applied to paper.'A new slew of classified emails from Hillary Clinton's private email server show that she discussed setting up a 'private, 100% off-the-record' back channel to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu

A new slew of classified emails from Hillary Clinton's private email server show that she discussed setting up a 'private, 100% off-the-record' back channel to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The heavily redacted batch of documents reveal that a senior aide to Clinton warned her that she was in 'danger' of being 'savaged by Jewish organizations, in the Jewish press and among the phalanx of neoconservative media' due to political machinations by 'Bibi and the Jewish leadership', Fox News reported.

One of the emails reveals a classified conversation between the former Secretary of State and family confidant Lanny Davis, who is now representing President Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

It shows that Davis offered to serve as a private line of communication between Clinton and Netanyahu.

The latest email dump, comprising 756 pages, was revealed by Judicial Watch - a conservative government transparency group whose standard practice is to sue government agencies that slow-walk the disclosure of public records.

Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for the 2016 nomination, exclusively used a private email account and a home server during her time in government.

One of the emails reveals a classified conversation between the former Secretary of State and family confidant Lanny Davis, who is now representing President Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen. It shows that Davis offered to serve as a private line of communication between Clinton and Netanyahu (pictured together in 2010)

In September 2, 2010, in an email exchange marked classified, Lanny Davis (above) tells Secretary Clinton he could serve as a private channel for her to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he had a 'private and highly trusted communication line, unofficial and personal, to PM N[etanyahu].'

In September 2, 2010, in an email exchange marked classified, Lanny Davis tells Secretary Clinton he could serve as a private channel for her to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he had a 'private and highly trusted communication line, unofficial and personal, to PM N[etanyahu].'

Davis adds: '[N]o one on the planet (other than your wonderful husband) can get this done as well as you.'

Secretary Clinton responds with classified information, saying 'I will reach out to you directly and hope you will continue to do the same w me. The most important issue now is [Redacted B1].'

In a September 18, 2010, email, Davis contacts Clinton to tell her that, 'As soon as I wrote last email, I reverted to my old role as your crisis manager and worrier about you, read the word 'optics' I suddenly felt  oops. I am registered under FARA for one or more foreign governments or businesses.

'I don't think it would look right. I want to avoid any even slight chance of misperception.'

Clinton responds: 'Thx for looking out for me, my friend. I'll tell Cheryl to stand down.' Davis replied, '100% off-the-record.'

And on January 29, 2009, Clinton adviser Sid Blumenthal emailed Clinton a memo titled 'Good Cop, Bad Cop', where he informs her that his sources tell him that an 'attack' on the appointment by Obama of former Sen. George Mitchell as Special Envoy to the Middle East was 'coordinated by Jewish institutional leaders and carefully scripted'.

The documents also show classified correspondence between Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in April 2011 regarding Palestinian issues. Above, Clinton with Blair in September 2010

Also cited is Mitchells 'Arab descent' as making him 'politically vulnerable'.

Blumenthal told Clinton that any conversations she had with Netanyahu 'flows directly and instantly back to top (U.S.) Jewish leadership'.

The documents also show classified correspondence between Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in April 2011 regarding Palestinian issues.

One classified email exchange took place between Blair and Clinton between January 16 and 24, 2009, with the subject line 'Re: Gaza', according to Judicial Watch.

On Jan 16, Blair passed on information he learned from Middle East leaders, writing that he wanted to get something 'resolved before Tuesday' [when Obama would be sworn in as president].

Clinton responded to Blair on January 19, 2009, writing 'Tony  We are finally moving and I am looking forward to talking w you as soon as I'm confirmed, tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest. Your emails are very helpful so pls continue to use this address...'

Blair replied: 'It would be great if we could talk before any announcements are made,' Judicial Watch reported.

The emails came from a tranche of 72,000 documents the FBI recovered and turned over to the State Department in 2017.Health authorities have released an urgent measles alert after an infected person visited a number of public events in Melbourne including the Australian Grand Prix.

The infected woman, who is in her 40s, contracted the illness in the Northern Territory where there is currently an outbreak of measles.

Victorian authorities said the woman may have been infectious when she attended public areas across metropolitan Melbourne between March 16 and March 18.

The infected woman, who is in her 40s, contracted the illness in the Northern Territory where there is currently an outbreak of measles (stock image)

Thousands of Formula 1 fans streamed through the gates of Albert Park last weekend for the Grand Prix and could have come into contact with the highly infectious illness.

The woman visited the Jones Stand, gate two entrance and food areas at gate one on the Saturday.

She returned to the event the following day and attended the Fangio Stand and the same gates.

There are further concerns for members of the public who were at Woolworths in Braybrook, Melbourne's western suburbs, on Saturday between 12 and 1pm and Monday between 1 and 2pm.

The infected woman is isolated in hospital where she is being treated.

'Anyone who presents with signs and symptoms compatible with measles should be tested and notified to the department,' the Victoria health alert said.

Thousands of Formula 1 fans streamed through the gates of Albert Park last weekend for the Grand Prix (pictured) and could have come into contact with the highly infectious illness

'There should be an especially high index of suspicion if they have attended any of the areas stated above and are unvaccinated or partially vaccinated for measles.'

Those most at risk of contracting measles are children and adults born during or since 1966 who do not have documented evidence of receiving two doses of a measles-containing vaccine or evidence of immunity.

Measles can persist in the environment for up to two hours and the infectious period of patients with illness is roughly five days before, to four days after, the appearance of the rash.

Symptoms include a fever, severe cough, conjunctivitis and coryza, followed by a rash which starts on the face.Advertisement

A large crowd of people attended Australia's largest mosque to pay respect to those killed in the Christchurch shootings.

About 6000 people were at Lakemba Mosque, in Sydney's west on Friday to pray for the 50 people who died in the horrific Christchurch terrorist attack.

The crowd flooded into the streets as they prayed and listened to the Imam's sermon regarding last week's massacre.

A large crowd of people attended Australia's largest mosque to pay respect to those killed in the Christchurch shootings

The crowd flooded into the streets as they prayed and listened to the Imam's sermon over last week's devastating event

The mosque was decorated with the Aboriginal flag, flowers, and hand-written notes to the fallen victims on the terrorist attack

'I am sorry this world could not keep you safe. May your journey home be a soft and peaceful one. You are us xx,' one of the notes read

'To All out Muslim Brothers and Sisters. You are important and loved,' a hand-written note read outside Lakemba Mosque

An Aboriginal flag covered with hand-written notes was hanging outside the mosque, surrounded with flowers dedicated to the men, women and children who lost their lives.

'I am sorry this world could not keep you safe. May your journey home be a soft and peaceful one. You are us xx,' one of the notes read.

'New Zealand should have been their home. My heart breaks for your community,' read another.

The memorial service began with a Quran recitation, followed by the Athan - call to prayer - where Muslims performed their prayer.

A Friday sermon was then delivered by the Imam, who dedicated his talk to the victims of the horrific terrorist attack, and urged the brothers and sisters to unite.

An absentee funeral prayer was then performed for the victims, followed by a two minute silence by everyone in attendance.

A large group of Muslims gathered at Lakemba mosque to pray for the fallen victims of the Christchurch terrorist attack

Muslim brothers prayed at Lakemba Mosque on Friday in memory of the 50 lives lost in Christchurch last week

Men flooded the streets outside Lakemba Mosque and prayed during the memorial service to the Christchurch victims

Muslims gathered at Lakemba Mosque to pray for the 50 innocent people who were gunned down by a terrorist

A Muslim man is greeted by a Belmore Boys High School student at Lakemba Mosque on Friday during the memorial service

Students from Belmore Boys High School are seen congregated outside the mosque on Friday afternoon

Students from local high schools also performed the haka and a heartfelt hymn.

The Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA) Facebook page thanked the community for their support in helping the day run smoothly.

'The Memorial Service | Christchurch Terrorist Attacks saw 5000 - 6000 people visit Lakemba Mosque today,' they wrote.

'We had students from Punchbowl Boys' High School share a heartfelt speech and Hymn, followed by a haka.

Maori schoolboys (pictured) perform a Haka after Friday prayers at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney

Punchbowl Boys High School perform a Haka for the 50 innocent men, women and children who lost their lives in the Christchurch Mosque terrorist attack

'More students from Belmore Boys High School also performed a powerful haka.

'Thank you NSW SES Canterbury Unit for providing volunteers and supporting us manage people and traffic flow.

'We pray for the lives lost and the families and communities who are feeling the weight of last weeks terrorist attacks.'

Belmore Boys High School wrote on Facebook: 'Our boys represented their school, their families and their cultural background in showing solidarity with the people of NZ today at Lakemba Mosque.'

The Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA) Facebook page thanked the community for their support in helping the day run smoothly

Students from the local high schools came together to perform and honour those killed in last Friday's terrorist attack

Punchbowl Boys High School students comfort each other prior to performing the Haka on the steps of the mosque

'A deeply moving experience and a proud moment for BBHS, for public education and for Australia.'

The students from Punchbowl Boys High School sung 'Noqu Masu' to honour the victims before performing the Haka.

They were welcomed by a Maori Muslim elder who led the traditional Maori welcome, the caranga.

'The boys greeted the custodians of Lakemba Mosque with the traditional Maori greeting, the hangi before performing a heartfelt hymn to acknowledge the lives lost in Christchurch and stand in solidarity with their Muslim brothers and sisters,' LMA wrote on Facebook.

Lakemba Mosque, which completed construction in 1972, has become a defining establishment of the Australian Muslim community

Located in the heart of a Muslim community, the mosque hosts thousands of people each week

Lakemba Mosque, which completed construction in 1972, has become a defining establishment of the Australian Muslim community.

Located in the heart of a Muslim community, the mosque hosts thousands of people each week.

Last Friday more than 1000 people visited the mosque to pray for the victims of the Christchurch terror attack. The mood was sombre yet resilient.

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Leader of the Opposition Michael Daley were among multiple politicians in attendance to pay their respect.

Punchbowl Boys High School sing on the steps of the mosque in solidarity with the victims of the Christchurch terror attack

Muslim men pray at Lakemba Mosque one week after 50 people were killed in the Christchurch terror attackCraig Thomas, 38, branded the 'worst domestic abuser' a judge had ever seen, has been sent back to prison

The 'worst domestic abuser' a judge had ever seen has been sent back to prison just six months after his release.

Craig Thomas, 38, was jailed in 2013 for a relentless campaign of abuse he committed against his then partner Charlotte Rooks while keeping her prisoner in his Cardiff flat.

He was given a 10 year prison sentence for beating her with hammers, making her sleep naked standing up and forcing her to eat pictures of deceased loved ones.

He was released last summer after serving five years of his sentence.

The Ministry of Justice have now confirmed that Thomas was recalled to prison in January for breaching his licence.

A prison service spokesman said: 'Craig Thomas was recalled to prison on 26 January 2019 for breach of his licence conditions.'

It is has not been confirmed what Thomas did to merit being locked up again.

In 2013, Miss Rooks discovered she was pregnant with Thomas's child which seemed to trigger an escalation in his violent behaviour.

She said: 'Things started to happen. He would stay over and say to me that I had to sleep standing up - then if I was falling asleep he would throw stuff at me.

'When my foster mum died he made me eat her pictures. I was given a ring that was something sentimental that been left to me and he made me eat that as well.

Charlotte Rooks was the victim of Thomas's abuse and said she still suffers from PTSD and health problems

'Numerous times when I was living in my house he would hit me in the stomach with the metal part of the Hoover while I was pregnant.

'There was glass from a picture frame where he cut the back of my head.

'Sometimes we would be in the car and he would just repeatedly punch me in the side of the face.'

Miss Rooks said it was fear for her loved ones that kept her from leaving initially.

She said: 'This was weeks into the relationship but he kept on threatening to do stuff to my family and my son.

'He used to make me spend all night standing up naked.'

Miss Rooks still suffers from a string of health problems and PTSD following Thomas' abuse and has called for the reasons behind his recall to be made public.

She said: 'I have been aware since January this year that Craig Thomas had been recalled to Prison.

She was made to sleep standing up naked, eat photographs of her family and was repeatedly punched and beaten

Miss Rooks has called for the reason behind Thomas's re-offending to be made public to protect others

'Knowing his prolific history of violent offending I am not surprised that this has happened, only that it has taken this long for him to be caught.

'The law dictates that I am not allowed to know what Thomas has or has not done which, has resulted in his recall.

'I believe it is in the public interest that myself, other victims, potential victims and the general public are kept fully informed of the whereabouts of such a dangerous and remorseless criminal.'

A spokeswoman for the Parole Board has said they are reviewing Thomas' case.

She said: 'We can confirm the parole review of Craig Thomas has been referred to the Parole Board and is following standard processes.

'The job of the Parole Board is to determine if someone would represent a significant risk to the public after release.

'The panel will carefully look at a whole range of evidence, including details of the original evidence and any evidence of behaviour change.

'We do that with great care and public safety is our number one priority.'Advertisement

Rescue workers in Mozambique fear an outbreak of cholera, dysentery or malaria could take the death toll from Cyclone Idai even higher after the country's President said as many as 1,000 people could have died.

Up to 500,000 people are still believed to be at risk after the cyclone hit Mozambique's port city of Beira on March 14 before moving inland.

At least 360 people have died in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, and 2.6 million people have been affected, the United Nations said, as Idai's winds ripped apart homes, schools and medical centres.

Accompanying heavy rains have triggered floods, inundating swathes of farmland, while health services and clinics have broken down and water supplies have been damaged.

People from the town of Buzi unload at Beira Port, Mozambique, after being rescued from the flood waters. Thousands of people are still stranded after after Cyclone Idai hit the country last week

People walk on the flooded street of Buzi, central Mozambique, after the devastation cyclone which the country's President fears may have killed as many as 1,000 people - amid fears that diseases could push the death toll even higher

People collect metal sheets from a damaged supermarket to re-build their destroyed houses following the devastation caused by Cyclone Idai in Beira

The British public donated 6 million to the aid appeal launched yesterday by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), and the Government pledged to match the first 2 million - taking the first day total to 8 million.

However, charities warned that far more money is urgently required if a humanitarian crisis is to be avoided, with alarming reports of only two or three days of clean water left in the devastated city of Beira.

A team of ex-military volunteers, trained and experienced in disaster response, will today travel to Mozambique in the wake of the disaster.

Team Rubicon UKs advance team anticipate they will be working to get aid and water into the most remote, cut-off communities. Although supplies have begun to arrive, many communities remain inaccessible.

The volunteers, predominantly military veterans, will focus on delivering where the need is most acute, with expertise in water purification, needs assessment, drones for damage assessment support and last-mile logistics.

Medecins Sans Frontieres aid workers said people would resort to drinking water contaminated with waste and sewage as well as dead bodies which will be discovered as water levels recede.

One aid worker said: 'With latrines having been washed away and sanitary systems disrupted, open defecation and the pollution of water sources is a major concern. These can lead to waterborne illnesses, such as cholera and typhoid.'

About 90 percent of the infrastructure in Beira city alone has been destroyed, said rescue workers, and rescue teams are battling to reach communities cut off due roads and bridges being washed away.

In Zimbabwe's eastern mountainous province of Manicaland, aid workers from the charity Mercy Corps said they had begun distributing purified drinking water packets, hygiene and sanitation supplies.

Mildred Makore of Mercey Corps said populated areas such as Chimanimani town, were still cut off by road. With no power, hospitals had run out of fuel to operate back-up generators.

A woman from the Inhamudima area of Berea killing birds in order to feed her familyas a result of lack of food after cyclone Idai made landfall in Sofala Province

People walk is the standing water in a street on Friday in downtown Beira, Mozambique. Thousands of people are still stranded after after Cyclone Idai hit the country last week

A woman from the Inhamudima area of Berea washing her family's clothes as flood waters recede after cyclone Idai made landfall in Sofala Province, central Mozambique

'Both Chimanimani and Chipinge are malaria zones and with people sleeping outside, not having access to clean water sources and, once temperatures increase again, the potential for case numbers to rise is great,' she said.

In Malawi, where almost 1 million people have been affected by floods, aid workers said they were worried about the spread of disease in some 170 makeshift camps where more than 125,000 people have sought refuge without sufficient toilets.

'This may be the most devastating such disaster in the region's history, and its damage can escalate quickly if we do not act immediately,' said Concern Worldwide's U.S. chief executive Colleen Kelly.

'We must prevent a second wave of destruction from additional flooding, crop loss, hunger, and potential disease.'

Survivors of Cyclone Idai, listen to a volunteer from Mozambique Red Cross, after arriving to an evacuation centre in Beira, Mozambique, on Thursday

People from the town of Buzi unload from a boat at Beira Port after being rescued. The devastation in the city has sparked fears of diseases such as cholera

People from the isolated district of Buzi take shelter in the Samora M. Machel secondary school used as an evacuation center in Beira

People from the town of Buzi get off a boat in pouring weather at Beira Port as they escape the devastated coastal city

A woman carries salvaged metal sheeting amid the shattered city of Beira, Mozambique

Men play checkers beside a fallen tree leaning on a wall after the strong cyclone a week ago in Beira

The situation in Beira 'boiling' as residents suffered shortages of food, water and other essentials one week after a devastating cyclone, the head of a South African rescue operation said on Friday.

Connor Hartnady, rescue operations task force leader for Rescue South Africa, said residents of Beira - a low-lying port city of 500,000 people - were becoming fed up with shortages.

He also said a group of 60 people had been discovered trapped by flood water in an area north of Beira during a reconnaissance flight.

The storm's torrential rains caused the Buzi and Pungwe rivers, whose mouths are in the Beira area, to burst their banks.

Roads into Beira were cut off by the storm, and most of the city remains without power.

Donate to Team Rubicon here.

Pedestrians walk on the edge of a collapsed bridge in Nhamatanda, about 60 miles west of the port city of Beira

People use makeshift boats to navigate the flooded areas after the passage of the cyclone Idai in Matarara, Sussudenga district, in MozambiqueAdvertisement

A giant Playboy Bunny carved into a hillside of 'Scotland's most expensive estate' by an aristocrat has gone up in flames - two years after he moved out.

The 300ft iconic rabbit silhouette logo of Hugh Hefner's magazine was cut into the landscape of Tillypronie Estate by its then owner aristocrat Philip Astor.

The 12,000 acre estate and house was originally built 150 years ago in 1867 by Sir John Clark, the diplomat son of Queen Victoria's physician.

The giant playboy bunny, pictured, was mowed onto a steep hill on the Tillypronie Estate in Aberdeenshire in 2014 on the orders of its aristocratic owner Philip Astor in 2014. However, the unusual decoration has been removed by the new owner

The bunny, pictured, has virtually disappeared after a controlled heather burning to remove the iconic design

The Tillypronie estate, pictured, was placed up for sale in 2016 and purchased for something in the region of 10.5 million

Mr Astor said he was proud of his 'light hearted adornment' which ad lasted a few years on the bleak hillside

Queen Victoria continued to be a regular visitor to Tillypronie often accompanied by her servant and confidant John Brown - made famous in the film 'Mrs Brown'.

Mr Astor, who inherited the estate in 1984, commissioned estate workers to mar the bunny image into the land - with pilots and walkers often catching a glimpse.

The 10.5million estate was put on the market in 2016 and it was snapped up - with locals claiming the buyer was a major hedge fund manager.

But now pictures show the charred Playboy Bunny disappearing after a blaze - although it is unclear if it was controlled burning or a wild fire.

And the bunny which has amused and baffled those who saw it has rapidly begun to disappear at the estate near Tarland, Aberdeenshire.

Mr Astor said: 'He was an amusing feature. It was a skilled job creating him. My head keeper at the time, Sandy McConnachie, had mapped it out, getting the perspective right. 'He drove a tractor with a swipe behind it, while being directed by another keeper from below via a walkie talkie'

The scorched remains can still be seen on the hillside with the image much less clear than it once was.

Barrister Mr Astor previously spoke about his involvement in having the bunny put onto the hillside.

He said he was 'proud' of the light-hearted adornment on 'a blank bit of hill that looked as though it needed a feature'.

Paying tribute to the bunny, Mr Astor said today: 'It's a matter for the new owner, of course.

'But the Bunny had had a pretty good innings, and I'm pleased to see that at least he still survives on Google Maps.'

Mr Astor said he thought the bunny had a 'pretty good innings' but said the decision to remove him was up to the new owner

He explained how the iconic symbol was etched onto the landscape.

Mr Astor said: 'He was an amusing feature. It was a skilled job creating him.

'My head keeper at the time, Sandy McConnachie, had mapped it out, getting the perspective right.

'He drove a tractor with a swipe behind it, while being directed by another keeper from below via a walkie talkie.

'It's a steep slope, so Sandy had to be pretty careful.'

The lifespan of the Playboy Bunny has been significantly shorter than other notable British landscape figures.

The Cerne Abbas Giant, in Cerne Abbas, Dorset, dates back to the 17th Century and is protected by the National Trust.

And the Westbury White Horse on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, was first documented in 1742, although historians have speculated it commemorates King Alfred's victory at the Battle of Ethandun in 878.

The Playboy Bunny logo was designed by Art Paul and appeared on the second edition of the magazine.

The 12,000 acre estate and house was originally built 150 years ago in 1867 by Sir John Clark, the diplomat son of Queen Victoria's physician

The estate has its own salmon fishing, a pheasant shoot and even it's own church

Queen Victoria was a regular visitor to the country estate which has family ties to Samantha Cameron, wife of the former PM

Mr Astor said his former hillside decoration looked especially magnificent when it was covered in snow

Mr Astor added: 'Incidentally, it used to look particularly good with a bit of snow.'

Along with its own salmon fishing, pheasant shoot and even a church, Migvie Kirk, the estate also has family ties to Samantha Cameron, wife of the former Prime Minister.

Philip Astor, a member of the Anglo-American Astor family, is a first cousin once removed to the 4th Viscount, Lord William Astor, who is married to Mrs Cameron's mother, Lady Annabel.

For a while, it was 'the most expensive estate on the Scottish market' at offers over 10.5 million.Distressing footage has emerged showing the moment a ferry with a 'technical problem' capsized in the Tigris River near the northern city of Mosul, killing 94 people.

The ferry capsized on Thursday with scores of people on board, including dozens of families with children.

The short clip shows water flooding over the barriers of the packed vessel, which eventually overturns as the passengers scramble to get across to the other side.

Iraq's president Barham Saleh has rushed to Mosul to meet with security officials there over the accident, while search teams continue their efforts to find more bodies.

The ferry was overcrowded with revellers celebrating both Mother's Day, as well as Nowruz, the Persian New Year on Thursday, March 21

The ferry was full of holidaymakers celebrating Mother's Day, as well as Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which also fell on March 21 this year.

Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi has ordered an investigation into the sinking and also briefly visited Mosul, where he declared three days of national mourning.

Meanwhile the country's judicial authorities have ordered the arrest of nine workers operating the ferry.

The men were detained and an arrest warrant is out for the owner of the tourist island where it was headed.

Col. Hussam Khalil, head of civil defence in the northern Nineveh province, said the ferry sank because of a technical problem and that there were not many boats in the area to rescue drowning passengers.

The ferry reportedly sank due to a technical problem but the situation was made worse by the high water level in the Tigris River after a particularly wet rainy season

Col. Hussam Khalil, head of civil defence in the northern Nineveh province, also said there were not many boats in the area to rescue drowning passengers

The Tigris river's level was also higher than usual after a rainy season that brought more downpours than previous years.

Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Saad Maan placed the death toll from the accident at 94, adding that 55 have been rescued, including 19 children.

Earlier, a health ministry official said the dead included at least 33 women, 12 children and 10 men.

The sinking appeared to have happened against a backdrop of fairground rides including a ferris wheel and small roller-coaster as revellers celebrated the ancient Persian festival of Nowruz.

Scene of the accident: The Tigris river in Mosul where a ferry carrying around 100 people sank during Kurdish new year celebrations

Two people swam across the river in a bid to rescue people from the ferry while a group of women watch on from the shore

Also known as the Persian new year, Nowruz marks the arrival of spring.

The holiday dates back to at least 1700 BC and incorporates ancient Zoroastrian traditions.

It is the most important event in the Iranian calendar and is widely celebrated across the territories of the old Persian empire, from the Mideast to Central Asia.Advertisement

Theresa May last night secured a deal that would delay Brexit until May 22 if she passes her plan in parliament - or see the UK crash out on April 12 if she fails to.

She faces an uphill struggle to win support for the third vote on her deal and will this weekend attempt to persuade reluctant MPs to vote for it.

Rebel MPs are plotting to seize control of the process, which could see Brexit cancelled, an extension given or a second referendum.

And today it has been revealed that if May fails to get her deal through, she will offer a similar raft of votes to MPs.

The seven options are expected to be Mrs May's Deal, No Deal, Revoking Article 50, a Second Referendum, a Customs Union soft Brexit deal, an even softer Customs Union and Single Market deal and a Canada-style Free Trade Agreement deal.

However, any new agreement struck in parliament would have to be ratified by the EU - which could simply choose to force the UK out with no deal.

This is your guide to what happens next:

What was agreed at the summit last night?

EU leaders have approved a two-part delay to Brexit following late night talks.

Brexit is set to be delayed until April 12 whatever happens next week, giving the UK an extra two weeks.

If MPs pass the Brexit deal before then, the extension will run until May 22.

What does it mean?

The immediate risk of the UK leaving without a deal next Friday, on March 29, is effectively over - subject to a change in UK law but this should be a formality.

Brexiteers will still believe they can secure a No Deal exit on April 12 while Remainers will see it as an opportunity to lock in a much longer delay.

What is the first step now?

Mrs May is returning to Downing Street this morning and vowed last night to keep working to build support for her deal.

She is likely to continue talks with her DUP allies in the hope getting them on board will bring back some more Tory rebels. There will also be efforts to win over Labour MPs in Leave seats.

Commons votes on Brexit will resume next week.

When will MPs next have a say?

Monday night. There is currently due to be another debate on Brexit 'next steps' on Monday that will mean a series of votes from 10pm. The debate has to be held by law because of the second defeat of the deal last week.

This is not the third vote on the deal but a repeat of the debates held on January 29, February 14 and February 28 after the deal was crushed the first time.

There will likely be votes on several proposals including a second referendum, revoking Article 50 and a soft Brexit. There will be another attempt by some MPs to seize control of the Commons agenda to try and change the law to shape Brexit.

Will there be a third vote on the deal and when will it be?

Mrs May says yes and says it will be next week. Most currently expect it to be held on Tuesday night but this is not fixed.

Can she win?

It looks unlikely. The prospect of No Deal on April 12 will encourage Brexiteers they should vote down the deal a third time.

There is currently little sign the DUP are being won over by a political offensive behind the scenes.

Mrs May also alienated Labour MPs with her angry speech on Wednesday night.

It seems possible she could end up losing the third vote by a bigger margin than the 149 votes she lost the second one.

What if she does win?

If the PM manages a great escape, then Britain will be on track to leave on May 22. The Government will move quickly to get the necessary laws in place.

What if she loses?

The EU has made clear that if the deal goes down a third time, Britain must come back with a plan in time for the new deadline of April 12.

Most urgently, a decision will have to be made on whether the UK takes part in European Parliament elections on May 23. If it does not, there will be No Deal - and Mrs May says electing MEPs would be the wrong thing to do.

However, there is still a majority of MPs in Parliament against No Deal so the choice could be taken away from the PM.

If elections are agreed in the UK there will probably be a new EU summit around April 10 to approve a much longer extension - perhaps to the end of 2019 or even longer.

The UK will have to have a new plan for what to do with the time as Brussels has made clear it cannot keep going over the same deal.

Will MPs vote on other options?

Probably. Monday night's vote could setup a full-blown 'indicative vote' that would set all the options against each other. A defeated Government could stage the same procedure.

There are claims today the Government would put up seven options: Mrs May's Deal, No Deal, Revoking Article 50, a Second Referendum, a Customs Union soft Brexit deal, an even softer Customs Union and Single Market deal, and a Canada-style Free Trade Agreement deal.

The idea would be to find what kind of Brexit might be supported by Parliament or if there is none, see if there is support for a new public vote.

Will May resign?

Nobody knows. No Prime Minister has ever soaked up so much humiliation and carried on and yet Mrs May is still in Downing Street.

She suggested this week she would not accept a long delay beyond June 30, seen by many as a hint she would resign if it had to happen.

A third defeat for the deal next week would also provoke huge calls for her to resign.

A move to No Deal could also see some Tory MPs join with Labour to force the Government out with a vote of no confidence.

What happens to Brexit if May goes or the Government collapses?

It is hard to know. Even with a tweak to the law to change the date, Brexit will still happen with No Deal on April 12 if other choices keep being rejected.

But we also know there is a majority of MPs against a No Deal Brexit. It is possible there are enough Tory MPs prepared to remove the Government to stop No Deal by installing a Corbyn government ahead of a snap election.

Only the Government can bring forward the necessary change in the law to change the Brexit date.

What is Labour's position?

Labour says no deal must be stopped - but also says it will not vote for Mrs May's deal.

It wanted a three month delay to renegotiate the political declaration on the final UK-EU relationship but this would require it form a Government more or less immediately.

Were it to do so, it would try pass the divorce deal attached to a new political declaration that said the final relationship would be based on a permanent customs union.

It has passed no comment on the actual proposed delay.

Will there have to be a new election or a referendum?

This falls into the anything is possible category. Parliament is deadlocked and has been for months - which suggests an election is necessary.

And yet the governing Tory party clearly has little idea what it would put to the country or who would lead it into an election. An election can be forced without the consent of the Tories but it is very difficult.

Similarly, it is far from clear there are the votes for a referendum in the Commons. The idea was crushed last week because Labour did not vote for it.

Will Brexit ever happen?

Almost three years after the referendum, this depends entirely on your view of events. The law says it will but there are enough MPs to at least change the date if given the chance to do so.

It could now happen on April 12 or May 22. Or it could be delayed much further.This is the tense moment a student stared down a Trump supporter who wore a MAGA cap to a student vigil for the victims of the Christchurch mosque attacks last Friday.

The vigil was taking place at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was organized by the Muslim Student Association.

Cellphone footage, taken by a bystander, showed a man in shorts and wearing a backpack staring intensely at the Trump fan, as an announcer says over a PA system that 'white supremacy is tearing the world apart'.

The two men face off at the vigil at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Standing with his hands joined, the man in the hat stared right back as dozens of people paid their respects to the 51 terror victims.

The video was posted by Twitter-user Jasmine Wablob and has been shared multiple times since.

Wablob shared the video with the message: 'Forgot to give a shout out to this incredible man who stared at the guy in the MAGA hat for the entire vigil :,) (volume up too).'

In a string of tweets she also made reference to the man in the cap, saying: 'I hope you rot'.

Around 250 people, including community members, professors, vice chancellors, and university Chancellor Henry Yang, attended the gathering.

The event was to honor the victims of the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a white supremacist - who name checked Trump in his manifesto - murdered almost 50 people at mosques.

The two men barely flinched at the vigil in which 250 people were in attendance

People gather for prayers and to observe a two minutes of silence for victims of the twin mosques massacres at Hagley Park in Christchurch, New Zealand, today

A man reacts near his children in front of floral tributes across the road at the Masjid Al Noor mosque on Tuesday

The announcer, African history and history of Islam Professor Butch Ware, can be heard saying: 'We will not stand idly by as racism and white supremacy tears this country and tears this world apart.'

MAGA (Make America Great Again) was the slogan of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign but the hats have become the subject of controversy in recent months.

The video echoes a similar incident at York University in Toronto on Monday where a man appeared at a vigil for the victims of the two shootings in New Zealand, again, wearing the red MAGA hat.

Video shows the young man in the red and white cap emblazoned with US President Donald Trump's campaign slogan being confronted by fellow students after the vigil

Students accused the man, who has not been named, of intentionally provoking his classmates by wearing the cap to the event for the 49 victims of the Islamaphobic hate crime.

Several onlookers then begin chanting 'get out' at the man. As he turns around to leave, a woman can be seen knocking the hat off his head.

In January, the hat was in the media glare again as an intense debate was sparked when students from a Catholic school in Kentucky showed up to a rally in Washington and appeared to mock Native Americans outside the Lincoln Memorial.London's theatre503 has been mocked for a bizarre open-call on social media.

A Twitter post made by the group, on Thursday, received plenty of attention seeking out playwrights who are 'female-identifying mothers'.

Their post read: 'Are you a playwright who identifies as female? Are you are Mum? We want your Scripts for the Motherhood Plays.'

'We're keen to programme a week of play(s) by the most brilliant mother playwrights from 2  6 July.'

London's theatre503 (pictured) has been mocked for a bizarre open-call on social media

A Twitter post made by the group, on Thursday, received plenty of attention seeking out playwrights who are 'female-identifying mothers'

While there were a few replies of interest, many were quick to react to the theatre's overtly-specific advertisement. One tweeted wrote: 'The theme is motherhood but you can't simply say women? Wow.'

While there were a few replies of interest, many were quick to react to the theatre's overtly-specific advertisement.

HeirHelen tweeted: 'The theme is motherhood but you can't simply say women? Wow.'

Catgirl67 wrote: 'I identify as Mum to our adorable cats and can string some edgy banter together. Do I qualify?'

'Word salad,' QuartofNoreply mocked.

Alissia jokingly asked: 'Please can you clarify whether males are allowed to submit? Thank you x'

The theatre replied back to her saying they we're 'specifically looking for female identifying mothers', noting that male playwright call outs open elsewhere within the theatre - leaving Eric Bugenhagen to clarify Alissia's question: 'so mums then.'

Twitter users mocked the tweet including one who wrote: 'My cat is a female and is a mother. You didn't say if it had to be human? She has written a great play about chasing a laser pointer'

Basil Helmet said: 'How long is this opportunity open for? I'd think I'll be able to identify as a mum and a playwright in about 2 weeks as it's half term and I've got a bit of time.'

'My cat is a female and is a mother. You didn't say if it had to be human? She has written a great play about chasing a laser pointer,' StanisStan mocked.

Meanwhile, Chris Wright shared: 'I sincerely hope you're ashamed of using the phrase "identifies as female", which makes women (adult human females) feel they have to justify themselves.'

MailOnline have contacted theatre503 for comment.The first picture has emerged of a suspect package found at an Irish sorting office this morning, which appears 'identical' to four letter bombs sent to London transport hubs two weeks ago, police have said.

The Irish Gardai uploaded two photographs on Facebook of the parcel, which was found at the Limerick An Post sorting office shortly after 6am this morning.

'This parcel appears to be identical to parcels (pending closer forensic and ballistic examination) discovered earlier this month in London and Glasgow,' the post reads.

The army's explosive ordnance disposal team are currently at the scene, as the police said they were liaising with UK Authorities as part of their investigations.

Irish police are currently investigating a parcel of interest (pictured) which was found at the Limerick An Post sorting office shortly after 6am this morning

Police said at first inspection the parcel appears to be 'identical' to four parcels found in London and Glasgow sent by the 'New IRA'

Ireland's justice minister Charlie Flanagan said a stamp on the parcel discovered in Limerick this morning was similar to the 'Love Ireland' stamps on the explosives sent to the UK.

Security officials are now probing whether the package is the 'missing' fifth device which the alleged New IRA perpetrators claimed they had sent to an army recruitment officer.

Staff at the depot near Limerick discovered the suspect item at around 6am on Friday, more than two weeks after the other packages arrived at Waterloo station, Heathrow and City airports and the University of Glasgow.

Gardai police officers and a bomb disposal squad from Ireland's Defence Forces were both called in to examine the package today.

A suspect package discovered at an Irish sorting office in Limerick (pictured, a police officer outside) this morning may be linked to the letter bombs sent to London transport hubs

Gardai police officers (pictured, a Garda vehicle) and a bomb disposal squad from Ireland's Defence Forces were both called in to examine the package in Limerick this morning

'This is a despicable act,' Mr Flanagan told RTE.

'The sending of incendiary devices like this is totally unacceptable. I hope the people responsible are brought to justice.'

An Irish Defence Forces spokesman said the package was a 'viable improvised explosive device contained in a plastic envelope'.

A group calling itself the IRA claimed responsibility for the parcel bombs sent to Waterloo station, Heathrow and City airports and the University of Glasgow earlier this month.

The organisation, known to police as the New IRA, claimed one parcel, addressed to a British army recruitment officer, may not have been discovered yet.

The group claimed it posted five devices to addresses in Britain, but only four had been discovered at the time the claim of responsibility was sent to a Belfast newsroom.

Mr Flanagan said the item found in Limerick could be the fifth. 'We have reason to believe this could be the case,' he said.

A Garda spokesman said: 'An Garda Siochana are currently investigating a parcel of interest identified at the Limerick An Post sorting office shortly after 6am.

'This parcel appears to be identical to parcels (pending closer forensic and ballistic examination) discovered earlier this month in London and Glasgow. The Army EOD team are currently at the scene.

Police said the Limerick package could be linked to explosive devices (pictured) sent to Heathrow, London City Airport and Waterloo railway station with Irish stamps

The letters delivered to London transport terminals were sent with this stamp issued by the Republic of Ireland in 2018

Where were the other 'New IRA' packages sent? Tuesday March 5, 9.55am: Suspicious package at The Compass Centre near London Heathrow Airport. The package is opened by staff, causing the device to ignite, which results in a small fire. No one is injured. Tuesday, 11.40am: British Transport Police called to reports of a suspicious package in the post room at London Waterloo station, the busiest rail hub in the UK. The package is not opened and officers make it safe. Tuesday, 12.10pm: Police are called to a report of a suspicious package at offices at City Aviation House at London City Airport. Staff are evacuated, and the package is not opened. Officers make it safe. Wednesday March 6: Suspicious package is received at the University of Glasgow. The package is not opened and no one is injured. Several buildings within are evacuated, with specialist officers carrying out a controlled explosion. Advertisement

'An Garda Siochana continue to liaise with the UK authorities in relation to these investigations.'

Scotland Yard said today it was aware of the suspicious package in Limerick.

'We are in liaison with our counterparts in the Republic of Ireland as to whether this may have any connection,' a spokesman said.

The group which calls itself the IRA (Irish Republican Army) is made up of militants opposed to Northern Ireland's 1998 peace deal.

It is separate and far smaller than the Provisional IRA, which was responsible for almost half of the 3,600 deaths during the 30 years of violence and which disbanded after the peace deal.

Dissident groups are smaller in number and capability though they have claimed lives in recent years including of two prison officers.

The New IRA, who were behind the Londonderry car bomb in January, also admitted responsibility for a spate of letter bombs sent to British Army recruitment centres in 2014.

The three suspect packages in London were sent to Waterloo station and Heathrow and City airports on March 5.

Irish police were helping the Metropolitan Police with their inquiries after it emerged the packages had been sent with Irish stamps.

They appeared to be issued by An Post for Valentine's Day 2018, featuring a heart motif and the words 'Love' and 'Eire'.

All the packages were A4-sized white postal bags containing yellow Jiffy bags and appeared capable of igniting a small fire when opened.

Where and when the three devices were received at the London transport hubs two weeks ago

Security personnel stand guard at the Cab Road entrance to Waterloo station this afternoon, where police said a cordon was in place but railway services were continuing to operate

Who are the New IRA? The New IRA are the latest dissident republican terror group to claim the mantra of the Irish Republican Army. It was formed in 2012 by a merger of the Real IRA - responsible for the 1998 Omagh atrocity - hardline splinter groups and individual republicans opposed to the peace process. The New IRA is different to the Provisional IRA, which has been on ceasefire since 1997 after a 30-year campaign of violence. In January this year, New IRA terrorists carried out a car bomb attack outside a courthouse in Londonderry city. In February 2014, its members were blamed for seven letter bombs sent to army recruiting offices in the UK. The faction is regarded by police in Northern Ireland and the Republic as the most dangerous terrorist group since the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire more than two decades ago. New IRA activists are thought to number about 50, with a further 200 'supporters', and some have acquired counter-surveillance skills by attending courses in countries such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Two weeks ago, Irish police discovered an arms dump in a wooded area in County Louth. The hide included two rifles and Semtex plastic explosives, enough to act as a booster for three car bombs, although this find was linked to a separate dissident faction. MI5 is believed to have bolstered its Ulster operations and now has more than 700 officers stationed in Belfast as part of a huge operation to combat the threat of dissident terrorism. The spy agency's main target is the New IRA, which is set on exploiting any return of a hard border in Ireland to create 'renewed conflict'. Counterterrorism sources say the group is intent on further attacks and will be reckless in its approach. Advertisement

The first package went off at the offices of Heathrow Airport bosses in a building called The Compass Centre, to the north of the runway and on the perimeter of the site.

Nobody was hurt in the small fire which ensued but the building was evacuated and anti-terror experts took over and made the device safe.

Shortly after 11.30am, a similar device was found in the post room at Waterloo Station.

This package was not opened and police experts made it safe.

The third incident happened at 12.10pm the same day when police were called to a report of a suspicious package at offices at City Aviation House at London City Airport.

Staff were evacuated from the building, and the package was not opened - with no impact on flights. Specialist officers again attended and made the device safe.

The senders' addresses were given as Dublin, with two having added the name of coach operator Bus Eireann.

Another suspect package forced an evacuation at the University of Glasgow a day later, which the perpetrators claimed was meant for a recruitment officer.

Police Scotland said a controlled explosion was carried out as a precaution on the package found in the mailroom, after several campus buildings had been evacuated.

It sparked fears that the bombs would provoke anti-Irish sentiment in the UK at a highly sensitive time during the Brexit negotiations on the border.

Detectives from Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Command were leading the investigation into the three packages received in London.

Police Scotland, under direction from the Crown, were leading the investigation into the package received at the University of Glasgow.

Police and bomb disposal units at the University of Glasgow after the incident there

Armed police on the scene at London City Airport last Tuesday after the package was found

Waterloo is the most-used railway station in Britain, according to the latest Office of Rail and Road figures, with more than 94million passengers using it last year.

It is the London terminus for the South Western Railway franchise - which runs busy commuter services as well as longer-distance trains - and is on the London Underground's Jubilee, Bakerloo, Northern and Waterloo & City lines.

Heathrow is by far the UK's busiest airport, carrying 80million passengers in 2018, while London City is the 14th-most used in the country.

Security expert Will Geddes claimed the incidents at Heathrow, London City and London Waterloo were to be expected given the current threat level.

He said: 'We've not had a significant incident for quite some time. To be honest, we were anticipating something happening. Transportation hubs have always been on the agenda for any kind of terrorist group.'

He said it was 'really tricky' to keep train stations and airports safe, saying: 'The biggest threat you're always going to have is someone leaving an IED in an unattended bag.'French soldiers will be permitted to 'open fire' if lives are threatened by Yellow Vest rioters this weekend, the military governor of Paris said today.

General Bruno Leray's ominous words highlight the growing law and order crisis faced by President Emmanuel Macron as he faces up to the increasingly violent social movement.

It has now been confirmed that the French Army will support some 5,000 police trying to keep order during the 19th Yellow Vest Saturday demonstration in a row in Paris at the weekend.

General Leray told Franceinfo Radio on Friday: 'If their life or that of the people they defend is threatened, they can go up to opening fire.'

There was widespread rioting across the French capital last Saturday, with banks, high-end shops, and restaurants looted and burnt out.

French police will be allowed to open fire if lives are threatened by Yellow Vest rioters this weekend, the military governor of Paris said today. Pictured: protesters setting up a barricade on the Champs-Elysees last Saturday

The French Army will support some 5,000 police trying to keep order during the 19th Yellow Vest Saturday demonstration in a row in Paris at the weekend. Pictured: a protester stood next to a flaming newsstand on the Champs-Elysees

Police took part in running battles with the Yellow Vests, who are named after their high visibility motoring jackets, using teargas, baton charges and water canon to try and restrain them.

But despite 250 plus arrests and numerous serious injuries, scenes of anarchy were broadcast all over the world.

General Leray said an unspecified number of soldiers mainly used for anti-terrorism duties would be defending public buildings this Saturday.

'They are subject to the same legal framework as the internal security forces,' he added, while conceding that soldiers have 'different ways of coping' with trouble.

Despite 250 plus arrests and numerous serious injuries, scenes of anarchy were broadcast all over the world. Pictured: Le Fouquet's restaurant in flames

Opponents of Mr Macron's increasingly reactionary policies have pointed to the dangers of allowing battle-trained soldiers to deal with civilian protests. Pictured: a man cleans up a burnt newsagents after last weekend's protest

'They are perfectly capable of appreciating the nature of the threat and answering it in a proportionate manner,' said General Leray.

Paris police said today that no Yellow Vest protests would be allowed on the Champs-Elysees tomorrow, a week after hundreds of anti-government demonstrators rioted and looted on the iconic Paris avenue.

Protesters will also be prevented from streets surrounding the Arc de Triomphe, at the top of the avenue, as well as several nearby areas including the presidential Elysee Palace and the National Assembly, the Paris prefect's office said.

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe also announced plans on Monday to increase fines for taking part in the banned demos.

Opponents of Mr Macron's increasingly reactionary policies have pointed to the dangers of allowing battle-trained soldiers to deal with civilian protests.

The Yellow Vests began weekly protests across France four months ago, initially because of fuel tax rises, but the group are now calling for president Emmanuel Macron to resign

Philippe Capon, of the UNSA police union, said: 'I'm worried about how they will respond in case of attack.'

The Yellow Vests began weekly protests across France four months ago, initially because of fuel tax rises.

The movement escalated into a broader revolt against the Paris establishment, calling for Mr Macron to resign.

French security forces used a 'last resort' chemical weapon against them for the first time on Saturday.

Gendarmes confirmed that a 'small amount' of the gas was released close to the Arc de Triomphe.

Video posted online by the independent Taranis news outlet showed the debilitating substance coming out of armoured cars.

Police have used a range of controversial weapons so far, from rounds of tear gas to so-called 'flash ball' rubber bullets that have caused scores of injuries, especially to eyes.Advertisement

Emmanuel Macron has today issued a blunt warning to warring UK politicians that Europe will 'not remain hostage to Brexit' as he signaled that the EU will let the UK crash out without a deal.

The French president maintained his hardline stance at the end of an EU summit which saw Theresa May humiliated over her attempt to delay Brexit until June.

Mr Macron, who led efforts to cut short any extension to Article 50 agreed by the EU, said a no-deal scenario was in no one's interests, but the EU was 'prepared' for such a route.

Speaking to reporters in Brussels at the end of the summit he said: 'It is a political lesson to us all: a proposed rejection of the EU with no plan can only ever lead to a stalemate and that is what we are seeing currently with the situation in the UK.

'This is something we should all realise especially now. But if we are to ignore the fears and anger of European citizens it will only lead to a disaster.'

He also took a swipe at Leave supporters, saying: 'Brexiteer leaders told people leaving would be easy. Bravo.'

But as the EU took the driving seat over the length and manner of Brexit, European Council president Donald Tusk took a more conciliatory tone, saying: 'Until April 12, anything is possible - a deal, a long extension, if the UK decided to rethink its strategy or revoking Article 50, which is a prerogative of the UK government.'

He added: 'The fate of Brexit is in the hands of our British friends. We are prepared for the worst but hope for the best and, as you know, hope dies last.'

Smiling European leaders had earlier pointed to an empty podium place after dealing Mrs May a humiliating political blow over Brexit.

As the exhausted Prime Minister slunk back to London they patted themselves on the back in Brussels this morning after dictating to Britain a timetable for the next few months.

Mrs May decided to forego the second and final day of the European Council meeting after EU leaders gave her a fortnight 'flextension' to get MPs to vote for her deal after calling her make-or-break summit display 'evasive' and 'confused'.

Friday also marked the 25th anniversary of the European Economic Area, whose members Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein participate in the EU's single market without being members.

Emmanuel Macron set out a stark position when he spoke to the media at the end of the two-day European Council summit in Brussels

Donald Tusk (left) and Jean-Claude Juncker also spoke to reporters but struck very different tones over Britain and the coming weeks

Mr Juncker said it had been easier for EU leader to discuss relations with China than with the UK, but Tusk said 'anything is possible' in the next three weeks

Speaking alongside Mr Tusk in an end-of-summit press conference, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker again blasted the Prime Minister after her Brussels humiliation, saying it had been easier for an EU summit to discuss its relationship with China than its ties with the UK.

The European Commission president said talks about the Communist powerhouse today had been easier those with Britain last night, despite calling EU/Beijing relations 'good  not excellent'.

Mr Juncker told the press conference: 'My dear friends, we didn't just talk about the United Kingdom, we talked about China as well.

'It was much more easy to talk about China than it was to talk about the United Kingdom I have to say, not that China is asking to join the European Union - because it is not leaving the European Union.'

The Prime Minister had gone to Brussels looking to get a Brexit delay until June 30 but they blew that out of the water after a catastrophic grilling of the PM that lasted more than 90 minutes.

German chancellor Angela Merkel said that leaders had 'an intensive, but successful evening' as they reduced Mrs May's request for a Brexit delay until June 30 to one of as little as two weeks.

They warned that it was up to Mrs May and Westminster politicians to get their act together over Brexit.

Relaxed EU leaders including Emmanuel Macron (front left) and Donald Tusk (front right) posed for a 'family photo' at the European Council summit in Brussels this morning

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker was in a jovial mood this morning as he greeted EU leaders in Brussels

A Union Jack was among flags laid out to mark the spots where European leaders stood for the family photo, despite Theresa May having already left Brussels

An animated Mr Tusk greets German chancellor Angela Merkel as she arrives for th egroup photograph, as Mr Macron and Mr Juncker look on

Mr Macron warmly greeted Mr Juncker in Brussels this morning. The French president had warned his country was ready for a no-deal Brexit

The politicians put on a touchy-feely display in the council chamber ahead of the second day of discussions in Brussels

Mr Juncker leads EU leaders towards the spot where they posed for their joint photo this morning - with Theresa May noticeably absent having returned to London already

An upbeat Irish premier Leo Varadkar joked with Norway's Prime Minister Erna Solberg, right, and Estonian Prime Minister Juri Ratas following Theresa May's embarrassing evening

A smiling Mr Juncker patted Mrs Merkel on the back as they chatted with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez

French president Emmanuel Macron had earlier taken to Twitter to warn that his nation was prepared for the fallout from a no-deal Brexit.

Mr Macron said: 'We responded with a clear deadline to Prime Minister Theresa May.

'It is up to the British to remove the ambiguities.

'If the British went out without agreement, we have already made every effort to protect ourselves.'

Instead of June 30 EU leaders offered to extend Article 50 until May 22  only if the Prime Minister gets her deal through Parliament next week.

One senior EU official told Politico last night that after the PM left the room Mr Macron said loudly that he believed Mrs May's deal had a 10 per cent chance of getting through the Commons but added: 'After listening to her, I now think five per cent' before Donald Tusk grimaced and chipped in that this 'sounded too optimistic'.

A glum-looking Theresa May arrived back at Downing Street this morning after cutting short her trip to the EU summit to give her more time to woo rebel MPs and try to get a Brexit deal through Parliament

Tory chief whip Julian Smith, who has the difficult task of winning over Tory backbenchers to back Theresa May's Brexit deal, is seen entering Downing Street this morning after Mrs May arrived back from Brussels

Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay, who has spoken out against a long Brexit delay, followed Mr Smith into Number 10 to see the Prime Minister

International Trade Secretary Liam Fox also arrived at Downing Street a short time later as the Prime Minister debriefed senior ministers

But they warned her that if the deal was not passed she must make a decision by April 12  just three weeks' time  on what to do next.

Austria's Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Friday he hoped the withdrawal agreement negotiated between Britain and the remaining European Union states would now pass the British parliament after EU leaders granted Britain extra time.

Arriving for the second day of a summit dominated by the race to agree a delay to Brexit, Kurz said a disorderly Brexit would become more likely if the British House of Commons rejected the withdrawal agreement for a third time.

'If there isn't a majority then a hard Brexit will once again move a step closer,' he told reporters.

Emmanuel Macron has a clear message for Theresa May and MPs this morning as he took to Twitter

He suggested that the UK would be allowed to crash out of the EU without a deal if a deal could not be agreed

Leaders agreed that a longer delay would be possible if Britain participated in May's European Parliament elections, but Mr Kurz expressed doubts over this.

'If a country is leaving the EU, then it would be more than just strange if they still took part in the European elections,' he said.

Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel put the chances of Parliament passing the withdrawal deal at 50-50.

'The best possible outcome would be a new referendum and to stay,' Bettel told reporters on Friday.

Belgium's prime minister said he hoped for a rational decision to back the withdrawal treaty.

Charles Michel said preparations for no-deal were still underway, however.

He added: 'This is perhaps the last chance for Britain to say what it wants for the future.

'More than ever, this is in the hands of the British parliament.'A 17-year-old boy has been arrested by police investigating the murder of Jodie Chesney.

The teenager was detained on suspicion of murder and is currently in custody at a police station in east London.

It follows the fatal stabbing of Jodie on March 1 when she was attacked while listening to music with friends.

The arrest comes after three males have already been charged with murder over the stabbing.

Manuel Petrovic, 20, Svenson Ong-a-kwie, 18, and a 16-year-old boy have all been remanded in custody ahead of trials later this year.

Jodie (pictured), 17, was stabbed in the back as she listened to music with six friends on March 1. Three men have been charged over her death so far

Manuel Petrovic (left; and right, in a court sketch on March 11), 20, has been charged with the murder of Jodie

Svenson Ong-a-kwie, 18, (pictured) has also been charged with murder and will face trial alongside Petrovic and a 16-year-old boy at the Old Bailey on 2 September

Friends tried to save Jodie, pictured, but she was pronounced dead at the scene an hour after the attack having sustained an 18cm stab wound

They are due to be tried for the murder of the Explorer Scout together at the Old Bailey on September 2.

Friends battled to save Jodie but she collapsed in the park with an 18cm stab wound to her shoulder blade and was pronounced dead at the scene around an hour later.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: 'A 17-year-old male was arrested on Friday, 22 March on suspicion of murder. He was taken to an east London police station where he remains in custody.

'Police were called by the London Ambulance Service at 21:25hrs on Friday, 1 March, to reports of a stabbing in a park close to St Neot's Road in Harold Hill.

'Officers attended and found Jodie suffering from a stab injury. She was pronounced dead at 22:26hrs.'

Jodie's father Peter, left, stepmother Joanne, centre, and sister Lucy, right, have all paid tribute to the Explorer Scout and appealed for help from the community to find those responsible

Police pictured at the scene in Harold Hill, East London, on March 3, two days after Jodie was fatally stabbed

Another three people - a 50-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman, both from Dagenham, London and a 17-year-old boy who were arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender and have all been released on bail.

Jodie's death on March intensified the outrage over knife crime in London and locals have paid tribute to her across Romford, laying dozens of bouquets and purple ribbons.

Jodie, described by her father Peter as a 'proud geek' and a 'great girl', was pronounced dead at the scene just over an hour after police were alerted to what they called a 'savage, evil' attack at about 9.25pm.

A post-mortem examination gave the cause of the death as trauma and haemorrhage.When members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team investigating Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election arrived for work each day, they placed their mobile phones in a locker outside of their office suite before entering.

Operating in secrecy in a nondescript glass-and-concrete office, the team of prosecutors and investigators since May 2017 has unearthed secrets that have led to bombshell charges against several of President Donald Trump's aides, including his former national security adviser, campaign chairman and personal lawyer, who have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.

To protect those secrets from prying ears, the whole of the office suite in southwest Washington was designated a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), U.S. spy speak for an area that has restrictions to ensure secret information stays secure.

One common restriction in SCIFs is to keep out smartphones and other electronic devices, which can be turned into covert listening devices or spy cameras. Visitors were also required to turn these over before entering.

Caught: Robert Mueller was photographed arriving for work at his Washington D.C. office on Thursday. He put down a sun visor to make it more difficult for photographers to capture his picture

Ground zero: This is one of the buildings which house the offices used by the Robert Mueller team. The building is in Washington D.C. just southwest of the White House. Witnesses interviewed by Mueller said they were picked up at their lawyers' offices and whisked into a parking garage before being taken for questioning

The restrictions, while not surprising given the team was investigating whether a hostile foreign power tried to help Trump win the 2016 election and whether his campaign conspired in the effort, have not been previously reported.

Accounts of witnesses interviewed by the special counsel's team, their lawyers and others familiar with the investigation reveal the lengths to which Mueller, a former FBI director, went to ensure his high-profile probe safeguarded its secrets.

In a city known for its leaks, Mueller pulled off a rare feat. He kept a tight lid on both his office and the evidence he was amassing in his highly sensitive investigation that has cast a cloud over Trump's presidency. And he did it even as Trump relentlessly criticized him, calling the probe a 'witch hunt' and the special counsel's team 'thugs.'

When former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo agreed to an interview with Mueller in May 2018, he was told he would be picked up at the hotel where he was staying in Washington.

On the lookout for a black government SUV, Caputo and his lawyer were surprised when an FBI agent drove up in his personal car, a white Dodge Charger.

'Then he drove us 15 blocks to their location and we went in through the garage so that nobody would see,' Caputo said in an interview.

Caputo was questioned about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Manafort's aide Rick Gates and long-time Trump adviser Roger Stone. When the interview was over, Mueller's team told him they would take him back to his hotel. Caputo said Mueller's team was not happy with what he said next.

'I said I'm meeting a TV crew downstairs so I won't need a ride,' Caputo said. 'They weren't upset that I was talking to the media, they were disturbed that I was doing it in (front of) the office.'

'They were concerned ... that would put their agents and attorneys at risk,' Caputo said, adding that he agreed to meet the news crew at a different location nearby.

Former Trump campaign advisor Sam Nunberg said an FBI agent picked him up at the train station to take him to the office.

'You put your phone and any electronic devices and leave them in a compartment out front,' Nunberg added. 'It was a very plain office.'

Nunberg said he went into a conference room with three tables, and prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, a member of Mueller's team, came in with three FBI agents, one female and two males.

The office's location was not publicly revealed but was discovered by journalists. Still, it has not been widely publicized. Mueller's team has asked media outlets not to publish the exact location for security purposes.

'We are working in a secure location in Southwest DC,' Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, has said.

'In a town where everybody and their mother is trying to get on the front page, Bob Mueller was always trying to stay out of the news,' said Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department spokesman. 'He wanted to be judged on actions, not press conferences.'

Caught on camera: Andrew Goldstein, Mueller's lead prosecutor, was pictured outside the office used by the special counsel during a rainstorm on Thursday

Corallo, who was briefly a spokesman for Trump's legal team, was interviewed by Mueller's team in February 2018.

Corallo and other witnesses summoned for interviews by Mueller's team said they were picked up from their lawyers' offices and taken to a secure parking garage in the building in southwest Washington.

The team's office suite was anonymous with no plaque on the door to identify its occupants, said Washington lawyer A. Joseph Jay, who represented a witness he declined to identify.

More than once, Jay recalled, members of Mueller's team expressed their commitment to confidentiality. 'They made it clear on a number of occasions, 'We don't leak. You don't have to worry about that with us.''

'By keeping to their code of silence, they were professionals,' Jay said. 'They weren't reacting to the spin. They were doing their jobs. They spoke through a number of indictments. They spoke through a number of sentencing memos.'

Mueller has remained silent throughout the investigation and his office has issued only one statement.

In that statement, issued this past January, spokesman Carr labeled as 'not accurate' a BuzzFeed News account describing evidence collected by the special counsel that allegedly showed that Trump had directed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. BuzzFeed has stood by its story.

Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, himself a former federal prosecutor, also remarked on Mueller staying out of sight.

'Whenever we talk to them, they say, "We'll take it to Bob." He's like the Wizard of Oz,' Giuliani said.

Giuliani said although he was suspicious of leaks to the news media, he acknowledged he knew of none for sure from the special counsel's team and that nothing he told Mueller's office was leaked.

'Mueller doesn't talk to us. I don't know why he'd talk to the press,' the former New York mayor added.

Joseph Campbell, a former assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division who worked at the agency when Mueller headed it, said the special counsel knows how to handle sensitive investigations and ignores the attacks on him.

'He went through 12 years starting with 9/11 of extremely critical and sensitive investigations around the world,' said Campbell, referring to the 2001 attacks on the United States. 'This is right in his wheelhouse.'

'He is not affected by external criticism or speculation,' Campbell added.

Robert Litt, former general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said any leaks about the investigation appeared to have come from witnesses or their lawyers.

'There's nothing he can do about that,' Litt said, referring to Mueller.

Litt said Mueller, the 74-year-old former U.S. Marine Corps officer and architect of the modern FBI, probably 'cares little about the public perception of him.'

'He cares,' Litt said, 'about doing the job right.'A seven-year-old boy killed in an arson attack on his home told his mother 'I love you' and 'we're going to make it together' moments before he died.

Joel Urhie was trapped in a bedroom at his family home in Deptford, south east London, when a fire ripped through it last August.

Murder detectives have now issued an image of a man seen buying a jerry can of petrol just one hour before the attack and are urging anyone with information to come forward.

Joel's mother Efe is also calling for any witnesses to 'examine their consciences' and provide any information that would help bring her son's killer to justice.

Ms Urhie and her older daughter Sarah were able to escape by jumping from a first-floor window, injuring themselves in the process, and the mother revealed she wanted Joel to follow so she could 'cushion his fall'.

This man was seen buying a jerrycan of petrol shortly before an arson attack which killed a boy

Joel's mother Efe said his last words to her were 'I love you' and 'we're going to make it together' as she urged anyone with information on his death to come forward

Little Joel Urhie was killed in the fire following the arson attack in August last year

Scotland Yard released footage of the man at a Shell garage in Blackheath less than two hours before the fire

Speaking on BBC Crimewatch Roadshow, she said: 'He told me "I love you Mummy", and "we're going to make it together"'

Today, nine months on, police released images of the man at a Shell garage at 2.20am on the day Joel died in Shooters Hill Road, Blackheath.

He paid with a 20 note and then left the scene on a bicycle.

Just over an hour later, the blaze started at the house just a few miles away in Adolphus Street, Deptford.

Joel's body was found by emergency services in the upstairs bedroom he shared with his mother. A post-mortem found he had died of burns caused by the fire and smoke inhalation.

Police believe a burning item may have been pushed through the letterbox to start the blaze.

Joel's older brother Sam had been released from prison three months before the arson attack and had been stabbed outside the family home less than two months before the arson. He wasn't living at the house at the time of the fire.

Sam had been jailed for four years for drug dealing in 2016.

In CCTV images released this morning, the man is seen arriving on a bicycle with a petrol can that he filled with fuel. He paid with a 20 note.

He is described as white, in his 30s or 40s, 5ft10' and tall with a medium build.

The man wore blue jeans, blue deck shoes and a blue t-shirt with a two word motif. One of the words can be made out as 'removals'.

It is thought lighted accelerant was pushed through the letterbox of the family home

Police later released shocking photos of the devastation caused to the inside of the building

Joel's older brother Sam, previously jailed for drug dealing, had been stabbed outside the house less than two months before the fire

A special reconstruction was aired today on Crimewatch Roadshow alongside the images.

Mrs Urhie also paid tribute to her son and made an emotional plea for anyone with information to come forward.

She said: 'Joel was the sweetest most caring little boy you could ever meet.. He was so intelligent and always curious to learn new things.

'He never complained about anything. He loved going to church, and led the Praise and Worship at the weekly bible study group.

'Joel always wanted people around him - that was why we used to go to the park a lot so that he could make new friends. His smile and laugh would light up a room and he was so full of life and energy.'

She said the last words she exchanged with her beloved son, Joel, was that he had told her 'I love you Mummy', and 'we're going to make it together'.

Trapped in a bedroom, she said she had planned to jump out ahead of him to cushion his fall.

Detective Inspector Alison Cole said: 'The petrol station where these images were taken from is just a few miles from the Urhie family home in Adolphus Street, the location of the devastating attack which led to Joel losing his life.

'We are asking for help to identify this individual as we would like to speak to him as part of our ongoing work - if only to eliminate him from our enquiries. If you are this man, or you know him, please contact us as soon as possible.

'We are hoping that it will help jog the public's memories of that night in August last year.

'This terrible arson - one of the most horrific crimes I have seen in over 25 years of policing - claimed the life of an innocent child, a tragic loss his family will never get over, and we desperately need the help of the public to bring justice for Joel's family.'A seven-year-old boy was allegedly knifed to death by a 75-year-old woman on his way home from school in a case that has shocked Switzerland.

The schoolboy was stabbed in the neck at around 12.45pm yesterday on St Galler-Ring in the northwestern Swiss city of Basel.

His teacher found the child lying on the ground with serious injuries and called emergency services, but the boy later died at the University Children's Hospital.

A seven-year-old boy was allegedly knifed to death by a 75-year-old woman on his way home from school in Switzerland (file photo)

Authorities said the elderly woman presented herself to prosecutors 'and informed them that she had attacked the child'.

Police said they are still investigating the circumstances and motive for the attack, and are appealing for witnesses.

Police spokesperson Peter Gill told Basler Zeitung: 'There was information that an elderly person was at the scene, and soon afterwards, a 75-year-old Swiss woman turned herself in to the prosecution authority.

'She said she had stabbed the seven-year-old to death. So far, we have no idea what the motive might have been.'

The woman is now being psychiatrically evaluated after the crime which has shocked the country.

Further investigations have also revealed that the woman did not know the boy, or anyone from his family, who originated from Kosovo.A solar storm on its way to Earth could mean the Northern Lights will be seen from the UK on Saturday night, forecasters have said.

The Met Office said the phenomenon, known as the aurora borealis, may be visible in Scotland.

Skies in Glasgow and Edinburgh are forecast to be cloudy on Saturday night, but there could be breaks long enough to reveal the lights.

The Met Office said the phenomenon, known as the aurora borealis, may be visible in Scotland

Further north, in the Scottish Highlands, or east, in Dundee and Aberdeen, the sky is likely to be clearer.

The Northern Lights are created by disturbances in Earth's magnetosphere caused by a flow of particles from the Sun, and are usually concentrated around the Earth's magnetic poles.

NOAA, an American agency that monitors the atmosphere, said the Northern Lights could be visible as far south as Michigan and Wisconsin in the United States

The southward shift of the lights on Saturday is caused by an ejection of plasma, known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) from the Sun, which followed a solar flare on Wednesday.

Bonnie Diamond, meteorologist at the Met Office, said: 'A Coronal Mass Ejection has happened and the effects of that are expected to arrive later tomorrow evening.

'This type of active geomagnetic storm means that there is the possibility of the aurora borealis, commonly known as the Northern Lights.

CME forecast to arrive late 23rd March following C5 flare from sunspot AR2736. Active-minor geomagnetic storm periods possible with low risk of moderate storms. As a result, aurora may be visible in Scotland where cloud breaks. Latest forecast available https://t.co/JL4kEFnjRa pic.twitter.com/kxTtoqolDc  Met Office Space (@MetOfficeSpace) March 21, 2019

'Whether or not you will see the Northern Lights depends on where you are and what the weather is like. Scotland is where you're most likely to see it.

'There's a couple of showers on the west coast of Scotland on Saturday evening, and with those showers there will be a bit of cloud.

'However, the clearest skies are further east in Aberdeenshire, where there are plenty of clear skies. Further north, you're pretty likely to see something.'

The Northern Lights over Derwent Water, near Keswick, in the Lake District, in March 2015

The Met Office's Space account tweeted: 'CME forecast to arrive late 23rd March following C5 flare from sunspot AR2736. Active-minor geomagnetic storm periods possible with low risk of moderate storms.

'As a result, aurora may be visible in Scotland where cloud breaks. Latest forecast available'

NOAA, an American agency that monitors the atmosphere, said the Northern Lights could be visible as far south as Michigan and Wisconsin in the United States.Police have arrested a 17-year-old boy accused of making racist threats online, warning of a 'an ethnic cleansing' that led authorities to close all nine of the citys schools for two days.

Charlottesville, Virginia, police said in a statement the unidentified teen of Portugese descent faces a felony charge of threatening to commit seriously bodily harm on school property.

The teen, who lives in Albemarle, is also charged with a misdemeanor count of harassment by computer.

Charlottesville High School and all other schools in the Virginia city were closed Thursday and Friday in the wake of a racially charged threat invoking an 'ethnic cleansing'

At a press conference on Friday afternoon, Charlottesville Police Chief Rashall Brackney declined to name the alleged perpetrator citing state laws protecting juvenile suspects, but said he was acting alone and was not a student at the local high school.

Rashall revealed that internet providers helped investigators track down the juvenile on the Dark Web, resulting in his arrest just after 6am.

All public schools in Charlottesville remained closed for a second day as authorities investigated the online racist threat.

The system's nine schools, which have a combined student body of more than 4,300 students, were closed Thursday and Friday out of precaution after authorities told school officials of the threat on Wednesday.

Superintendent Rosa Atkins told families that the threat was 'racially charged' and the school system does not tolerate hate or racism.

The threat was said to have originated on the anonymous online message board 4chan

Charlottesville police said the original threat targeted Charlottesville High School.

The Daily Progress reported that the city's police department launched an investigation on Wednesday after learning of a post circulating on Reddit that include a screenshot of another post that was said to have originated from 'the Chans,' meaning the anonymous online message boards 4chan and 8chan, which are known to be frequented by white supremacists.

The post threatened to unleash an 'ethnic cleansing' on Charlottesville High School's black and Latino students, and warned white students to stay home on Thursday.

Charlottesville was the site of the deadly 'Unite the Right' white nationalist rally in August 2017

The school district released a statement on Thursday addressing the closings, which said, in part: 'the entire staff and School Board stand in solidarity with our students of color - and with people who have been singled out for reasons such as religion or ethnicity or sexual identity in other vile threats made across the country or around the world.

'We are in this together, and a threat against one is a threat against all.'

Charlottesville was the site of the deadly 'Unite the Right' white nationalist rally in August 2017, which claimed the life of 32-year-old paralegal Heather Heyer.

The threat comes just days after a self-described Australian white nationalist attacked two mosques in New Zealand, slaughtering 50 people and wounding dozens more.

In the wake of the attack, New Zealand's major Internet service providers banned 4chan and 8chan for live streaming the mosque massacres.Disgraced NRL star Luke O'Donnell has admitted to hiding cocaine in his underpants.

The 38-year-old former NRL enforcer pleaded guilty to drug possession at Waverely Local Court in Sydney on Friday.

O'Donnell was fined $2200 after he was caught by police in possession of 3.83 grams of cocaine during a Saturday night out in Bondi Junction last August.

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Luke O'Donnell pleaded guilty to drug possession at Waverly Local Court on Friday. It comes following his conviction in January for four offences after an incident last June. O'Donnell is seen in custody after that incident (pictured)

Luke O'Donnell (pictured left) is seen here after being charged for the incidents last June. In his latest run in with police, O'Donnell was found with 3.83 grams of cocaine hidden in his underpants

O'Donnell was seen getting into a woman's car on Grafton Street about 7pm on August 10 before being pulled over by police.

Police became suspicious O'Donnell was hoarding drugs and took him to a nearby disabled toilet to be strip searched.

Inside the bathroom, the former Sydney Roosters and North Queensland Cowboys star reached down inside his pants and 'produced some rolled up paper from his underwear containing several bags of white powder,' court documents stated.

In January, O'Donnell was convicted of four offences including assaulting a female senior constable, and was fined $1600, after a violent incident at his Clovelly unit last June.

O'Donnell (pictured playing for the Sydney Roosters) had hidden the cocaine in his underpants

Police were called by O'Donnell's parents after he started rambling and hung out a three story window.

Footage from a police boy camera shows six officers, his girlfriend, and his parents trying to calm him down.

After O'Donnell refused to let the officers in to talk with him he started to threaten police.

O'Donnell (pictured centre) seen here during his arrest during a violent altercation last June, was found with 3.83 grams of coke during a Saturday night out in Bondi Junction last August.

'Listen here you c**t, you're not putting handcuffs on me I'll f**king smash the f**k out of you. Get off me,' he said, reported the Daily Telegraph.

He continued: 'C*** get off me, go back to Goulburn police school you p****.'

He also tried to drunkenly attack a female officer before police eventually tasered him.New Zealand's deputy prime minister says the man accused of killing 50 people in two mosques will spend the rest of his life in isolation in prison and called for solidarity to eradicate 'hate-filled ideologies'.

Winston Peters was speaking at an emergency session of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Co-operation's executive committee called by Turkey to combat prejudice against Muslims after the attack.

Mr Peters' attendance comes amid controversy sparked by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who, at election campaign rallies, has been screening video clips of the attack, despite efforts by New Zealand to prevent the video's spread.

Mr Erdogan also drew Australia's anger for comments suggesting Australians and New Zealanders with anti-Muslim sentiments would be sent back in coffins like their ancestors who fought against Turks in the First World War Battle of Gallipoli.

Mr Peters took a conciliatory tone on Friday, welcoming comments by Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who said at a news conference at the end of the OIC meeting that Australians and New Zealanders visiting Turkey would be greeted at Gallipoli remembrance ceremonies next month with the same welcoming hospitality 'as they always were'.

Mr Peters said: 'We are returning home to New Zealand with a grateful assurance that our people will come here to commemorate Anzac and will be as welcome as they always were.'

He said he did not discuss Mr Erdogan's use of the footage with Turkey's foreign minister or president.

NZ's Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Winston Peters holds the press conference

Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the emergency session called in the wake of the attacks

'I did not see any sound, peaceful purposes in raising it,' Mr Peters said, adding that they had received 'very assuring information' from the Turkish presidency.

Mr Peters told representatives of Muslim nations: 'No punishment can match the depravity of (the gunman's) crime but the families of the fallen will have justice.'

He also screened moving photographs of New Zealanders mourning the victims.

Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, was arrested and charged with murder. The gunman livestreamed the attack and released a manifesto describing his white supremacist views and how he planned the shootings.

The OIC urged all countries to refrain from statements and policies that associate Islam with terror and extremism. It also demanded that March 15  the day of the Christchurch attack  be marked as the International Day of Solidarity Against Islamophobia.

Members of the Muslim community pray Friday prayers in Hagley Park in Christchurch

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at a gathering for Friday prayers and two minutes of silence for victims of the twin mosque massacre, at Hagley Park in Christchurch

Family Photo of the #OIC open-ended emergency meeting of the Executive Committee at the level of Foreign Ministers in #Istanbul, #Turkey, to discuss the terrorist attack on two mosques in #Christchurch, #NewZealand. #OICNewZealandTerrorism #ChristchurchMosqueAttack pic.twitter.com/Nv3GyeijuE  OIC (@OIC_OCI) March 22, 2019

Addressing the OIC meeting on Friday, Mr Erdogan praised New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, saying her 'reaction, the empathy displayed, and her solidarity with Muslims' should serve as an example to all leaders.

He condemned populist politicians who he said encouraged attacks on Muslims and refugees.

'Politicians who pave themselves the road to power by alienating Muslims and creating enemies out of refugees must pull themselves together.'

He also called for neo-Nazi groups to be considered terrorists.

He said: 'If we don't show our reaction in a strong manner, the neo-Nazi virus will engulf the body even more. If we don't raise our voices, Western governments will not disrupt their comfort.'A man was arrested after being found stuck inside an air conditioning vent in a Long Island dental office on Tuesday morning.

Sean Maranzino, 32, was found by employees of Calderon Dental Care in Bay Shore more than three hours after he became trapped, ABC New York reported.

'Hanging out from the ceiling, stuck, he was stuck,' said Heather Hernandez, an office employee. ' He couldn't get out.'

Dr. Mike Calderon, the dentist, laughed when he recalled that the accused burglar claimed he was doing when he was found.

'He was looking for his cat, and the cat's name was Sparkles,' Calderon said.

Maranzino also reportedly claimed to be from the fire department and requested a ladder.

Sean Maranzino, 32, of Patchogue, Long Island, told Calderon Dental employees who found him stuck in the ceiling that he was looking for his cat named Sparkles

Maranzino was accused of five burglaries in the Suffolk County area in total

Employees of Calderon Dental Care in Bay Shore, Long Island (left), found the accused burglar trapped in the air duct (right) when they opened the office on Tuesday morning, more than three hours after Maranzino allegedly got stuck

Police arrested Maranzino, a resident of Patchogue, Long Island, after removing him from the ceiling.

The unemployed HVAC specialist was also charged with four additional burglaries in the past week, allegedly entering those businesses through vents as well.

On March 14th, Maranzino allegedly fell through the ceiling of a Jackson Hewitt tax preparation business in East Patchogue at 3.45am, where an employee, Amir Hassan, was sleeping due to the hectic tax season.

'I have a shotgun, so I came out with my shotgun and I told him, "You leave now,"' Hassan told the suspect when he tried to claim he was there to deliver vitamins and work on the HVAC system.

The suspect, who police believe had actually been trying to rob the pharmacy next door, fled the armed accountant through the back door.

Maranzino also allegedly fell through the ceiling of this Jackson Hewitt Tax Service

When he fell into the tax preparation office, an employee named Amir Hassan, who was sleeping at the office over night, confronted Maranzino

Sean Maranzino (center), an unemployed HVAC repairman, is being held on $25,000 cash bail

Maranzino is also accused of robbing a Vitamin Shoppe on March 15, High Times Vape on March 17, and Vitamin World on on March 18.

He is suspected of stealing cash, smoking gear and lockboxes from the various businesses, and is charged with five counts of third-degree burglary.

'He's a small, wiry-type individual,' said Chief Stuart Cameron of the Suffolk County Police. 'I don't think many of us would be able to crawl through the HVAC ducts in buildings.'

The width of the dental office duct in which he was found was only 14 inches, according to ABC.

Maranzino is being held on $25,000 cash bail.A former Apprentice contestant who accused Donald Trump of unwanted kissing and groping has kicked off her defamation suit by demanding her own phone records, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Summer Zervos believes the data could prove crucial in her bid to prove the President defamed her by calling her a liar and dismissing her claims of sexual misconduct as 'another hoax.'

Attorneys for the 46-year-old have drawn up subpoenas demanding that AT&T hand over all 'paper and/or other forms of saved, older records dating back to 2007', raising questions that there may have been compromising conversations between her and Trump.

Zervos claims Trump first forced himself on her at a job interview in Manhattan's Trump Tower in 2007 then weeks later thrust his genitals against her and groped her breasts during a meeting in LA.

The President's legal team have opted not to contest the application filed on Wednesday at New York Supreme Court.

Summer Zervos, a former Apprentice contestant who accused Donald Trump of unwanted kissing and groping, has kicked off her defamation suit by demanding her own phone records

Attorneys for the 46-year-old have drawn up subpoenas demanding that AT&T hand over all 'paper and/or other forms of saved, older records dating back to 2007', perhaps to show compromising conversations she had with Trump

But the move is merely the opening move in what will likely be a bitterly contested legal bid to see a sitting US President called into court for sworn questioning.

Zervos got the green light to sue Trump in the summer of 2018 after a state court judge denied a motion to dismiss her suit but the President's attorney appealed the decision.

The Appellate Division, First Department ruled in the California-based businesswoman's favor last week when Justice Dianne Renwick noted that 'the President is still a person, and he is not above the law'.

The ruling means Zervos' lawyers can proceed  and may get the chance to grill Trump under oath about whether he defamed her by calling her a liar.

'We look forward to proving to a jury that Ms. Zervos told the truth about defendant's unwanted sexual groping and holding him accountable for his malicious lies,' her lawyer, Mariann Wang, told reporters.

Zervos, a Republican who appeared on The Apprentice in 2006, accused Trump of kissing her against her will at a 2007 meeting in New York, and later groping her at a Beverly Hills hotel.

She was among the more than dozen women who came forward to accuse Trump of sexual misconduct after the infamous 'grab them by the p***y' Access Hollywood clip that emerged during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump responded by calling the women 'liars' and dismissing their accusations as '100 percent fabricated'.

Zervos, a Republican who appeared on The Apprentice in 2006 (pictured), accused Trump of kissing her against her will at a 2007 meeting in New York and then of groping her breasts at the Beverly Hills Hotel a few weeks later

He also re-tweeted a picture of Zervos with the caption 'This is all yet another hoax.'

She responded by suing for defamation on the basis the allegations were truthful and his denial had damaged her reputation.

Trumps lawyers attempted to get her suit thrown out by invoking the Constitution's supremacy clause, which prohibits states from interfering with the federal government in the exercise of its powers.

A five-judge panel in Manhattan however ruled the clause was never intended to deprive a state court of its authority to decide cases and controversies.

Trump's lawyer Marc Kasowitz said afterwards that the president would appeal to the Court of Appeals, defending his remarks as opinions he had a right to express in the course of a heated campaign.

Zervos' lawyers countered that Trump's words were factual falsehoods that subjected her to threats and cost her business at her Southern California restaurant.

The decision, which affirmed a lower court ruling from last March, comes after the appeals court called Zervos' case 'materially indistinguishable' from former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones' lawsuit accusing then-President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment.

In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court let Jones' case go forward. That paved the way for Clinton's impeachment the following year.

All five justices found Zervos' defamation claim legally sufficient, without ruling on its merits.

Trump also faced a defamation claim by adult film actress Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit over a hush money agreement. That lawsuit was dismissed on March 7

Trump also faced a defamation claim by adult film actress Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit over a hush money agreement. That lawsuit was dismissed on March 7.

The judges said in an opinion written by Justice Renwick: 'The current sitting President attempts to shield himself from consequences for his alleged unofficial misconduct by relying upon the constitutional protection of the Presidency.

'We reject defendant President Trump's argument that the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution prevents a New York State court - and every other state court in the country - from exercising its authority under its state constitution.

'Instead, we find that the Supremacy Clause was never intended to deprive a state court of its authority to decide cases and controversies under the state's constitution.'

Zervos was the first contestant to be booted off the 2006 season of The Apprentice after her team accused her of not pulling her weight.

While her contribution left Trump unimpressed, it was her habit of constantly interrupting him that finally prompted The Donald to fire her.

She is seeking a retraction, an apology, and compensatory and punitive damages.President Donald Trump on Friday intensified his attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation in his latest effort to undermine the findings in Mueller's highly anticipated report, saying 'people will not stand for it.'

The probe is widely expected to end in the coming weeks, but Trump was focused on its beginnings rather than its conclusion, complaining about Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein's appointment of Mueller in May 2017.

Rosenstein appointed the special counsel after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

'I have a deputy, appoints a man to write a report on me, to make a determination on my presidency,' Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network. 'People will not stand for it.'

Trump bemoaned that the special counsel was 'best friend' to Comey, who succeeded Mueller as FBI director. There's no evidence the two are close friends.

No let up: Trump repeated his anti-Mueller mantra on the White House lawn saying: 'There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. Everybody knows it. It's all a big hoax. It's all a witch hunt.'

In the dark: Trump - like the rest of the political world - is waiting to see if speculation that the Mueller report is imminent

Attack in the morning: Trump used an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network to claim that Mueller was the 'best friend' of James Comey, the FBI director the president fired

Mueller was appointed following the recusal two months earlier of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

That action entangled Rosenstein, whose memo castigating Comey was cited by the White House as justification for his firing. In addition, Rosenstein didn't appoint Mueller to write a report - that's simply the ordinary course of action laid out in the special counsel regulations.

The president, speaking to reporters on the White House lawn before leaving for meetings at his Florida estate, again repeated his claim that 'There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. Everybody knows it. It's all a big hoax. It's all a witch hunt.'

Guessing when Mueller's report will be turned over to the Department of Justice has become a popular Washington parlor game, though the special counsel has not officially indicated that his probe is in its final stages.

Justice Department regulations require only that Mueller give the attorney general a confidential report that explains the decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions. That could be as simple as a bullet point list or as fulsome as a report running hundreds of pages.

Attorney General William Barr is required only to say the investigation has concluded and describe or explain any times when he or Rosenstein decided an action Mueller proposed 'was so inappropriate or unwarranted' that it should not be pursued.

After Mueller turns in his report, Barr has said he will draft a second one for congressional and public consumption.

Trump's camp are waiting as eagerly as anyone else - and just as much in the dark.

What next? Robert Mueller, who was seen arriving at his offices in Washington D.C. on Thursday, is at the center of intense speculation that he is on the verge of handing his report to the Department of Justice, run by Attorney General William Barr, who left his home Friday for work

All eyes focused: This was the scene outside one of the office buildings used

Rudy Giuliani, Trump's attorney, told the Washington Post that it was like waiting for a baby to come and that if there was 'good news' he would 'give out cigars.'

Trump and his allies have spent nearly two years trying to discredit Mueller. But the president has grown increasingly confident the report will produce what he has insisted all along: no clear evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and his 2016 campaign.

And Trump and his advisers are considering how to weaponize those possible findings for the 2020 race, painting the probe as a failed coup while railing against investigations launched by House Democrats.

Even if Mueller's final report does not implicate the president in criminal conduct, the investigation was far from fruitless.

His team brought charges against 34 people, including six Trump associates, and three companies.

His prosecutors revealed a sweeping criminal effort by Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and showed that people connected to the Trump campaign were eager to exploit emails stolen from Democrats.

Hand in your phones! How Robert Mueller leak-proofed his investigation by turning his entire D.C. office into a secret fortress and even kept its address away from prying eyes

When members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team investigating Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election arrived for work each day, they placed their mobile phones in a locker outside of their office suite before entering.

Operating in secrecy in a nondescript glass-and-concrete office, the team of prosecutors and investigators since May 2017 has unearthed secrets that have led to bombshell charges against several of President Donald Trump's aides, including his former national security adviser, campaign chairman and personal lawyer, who have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.

To protect those secrets from prying ears, the whole of the office suite in southwest Washington was designated a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), U.S. spy speak for an area that has restrictions to ensure secret information stays secure.

One common restriction in SCIFs is to keep out smartphones and other electronic devices, which can be turned into covert listening devices or spy cameras. Visitors were also required to turn these over before entering.

Ground zero: This is one of the buildings which house the offices used by the Robert Mueller team. The building is in Washington D.C. just southwest of the White House. Witnesses interviewed by Mueller said they were picked up at their lawyers' offices and whisked into a parking garage before being taken for questioning

The restrictions, while not surprising given the team was investigating whether a hostile foreign power tried to help Trump win the 2016 election and whether his campaign conspired in the effort, have not been previously reported.

Accounts of witnesses interviewed by the special counsel's team, their lawyers and others familiar with the investigation reveal the lengths to which Mueller, a former FBI director, went to ensure his high-profile probe safeguarded its secrets.

In a city known for its leaks, Mueller pulled off a rare feat. He kept a tight lid on both his office and the evidence he was amassing in his highly sensitive investigation that has cast a cloud over Trump's presidency. And he did it even as Trump relentlessly criticized him, calling the probe a 'witch hunt' and the special counsel's team 'thugs.'

When former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo agreed to an interview with Mueller in May 2018, he was told he would be picked up at the hotel where he was staying in Washington.

On the lookout for a black government SUV, Caputo and his lawyer were surprised when an FBI agent drove up in his personal car, a white Dodge Charger.

'Then he drove us 15 blocks to their location and we went in through the garage so that nobody would see,' Caputo said in an interview.

Caputo was questioned about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Manafort's aide Rick Gates and long-time Trump adviser Roger Stone. When the interview was over, Mueller's team told him they would take him back to his hotel. Caputo said Mueller's team was not happy with what he said next.

'I said I'm meeting a TV crew downstairs so I won't need a ride,' Caputo said. 'They weren't upset that I was talking to the media, they were disturbed that I was doing it in (front of) the office.'

'They were concerned ... that would put their agents and attorneys at risk,' Caputo said, adding that he agreed to meet the news crew at a different location nearby.

Former Trump campaign advisor Sam Nunberg said an FBI agent picked him up at the train station to take him to the office.

'You put your phone and any electronic devices and leave them in a compartment out front,' Nunberg added. 'It was a very plain office.'

Nunberg said he went into a conference room with three tables, and prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, a member of Mueller's team, came in with three FBI agents, one female and two males.

The office's location was not publicly revealed but was discovered by journalists. Still, it has not been widely publicized. Mueller's team has asked media outlets not to publish the exact location for security purposes.

'We are working in a secure location in Southwest DC,' Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, has said.

'In a town where everybody and their mother is trying to get on the front page, Bob Mueller was always trying to stay out of the news,' said Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department spokesman. 'He wanted to be judged on actions, not press conferences.'

Caught on camera: Andrew Goldstein, Mueller's lead prosecutor, was pictured outside the office used by the special counsel during a rainstorm on Thursday

Corallo, who was briefly a spokesman for Trump's legal team, was interviewed by Mueller's team in February 2018.

Corallo and other witnesses summoned for interviews by Mueller's team said they were picked up from their lawyers' offices and taken to a secure parking garage in the building in southwest Washington.

The team's office suite was anonymous with no plaque on the door to identify its occupants, said Washington lawyer A. Joseph Jay, who represented a witness he declined to identify.

More than once, Jay recalled, members of Mueller's team expressed their commitment to confidentiality. 'They made it clear on a number of occasions, 'We don't leak. You don't have to worry about that with us.''

'By keeping to their code of silence, they were professionals,' Jay said. 'They weren't reacting to the spin. They were doing their jobs. They spoke through a number of indictments. They spoke through a number of sentencing memos.'

Mueller has remained silent throughout the investigation and his office has issued only one statement.

In that statement, issued this past January, spokesman Carr labeled as 'not accurate' a BuzzFeed News account describing evidence collected by the special counsel that allegedly showed that Trump had directed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. BuzzFeed has stood by its story.

Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, himself a former federal prosecutor, also remarked on Mueller staying out of sight.

'Whenever we talk to them, they say, "We'll take it to Bob." He's like the Wizard of Oz,' Giuliani said.

Giuliani said although he was suspicious of leaks to the news media, he acknowledged he knew of none for sure from the special counsel's team and that nothing he told Mueller's office was leaked.

'Mueller doesn't talk to us. I don't know why he'd talk to the press,' the former New York mayor added.

Joseph Campbell, a former assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division who worked at the agency when Mueller headed it, said the special counsel knows how to handle sensitive investigations and ignores the attacks on him.

'He went through 12 years starting with 9/11 of extremely critical and sensitive investigations around the world,' said Campbell, referring to the 2001 attacks on the United States. 'This is right in his wheelhouse.'

'He is not affected by external criticism or speculation,' Campbell added.

Robert Litt, former general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said any leaks about the investigation appeared to have come from witnesses or their lawyers.

'There's nothing he can do about that,' Litt said, referring to Mueller.

Litt said Mueller, the 74-year-old former U.S. Marine Corps officer and architect of the modern FBI, probably 'cares little about the public perception of him.'

'He cares,' Litt said, 'about doing the job right.'Four men were today named in court as the IRA terrorists behind the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.

Inquests are currently being held into the deaths of twenty-one people who were killed in two explosions at the city's Mulberry Bush and Tavern in the Town pubs in November 1974.

An ex-IRA member today gave evidence in which he named four of those behind the attacks and gave the nicknames of two others, apparently with the blessing of IRA leaders.

Following the revelations, family members of some of those killed in the attacks demanded police take action.

Julie Hambleton, whose sister Maxine was killed in the Tavern in the Town, said: '[We expect] information as a matter of urgency now as to what is going to happen, what, where and when.'

The witness, himself a convicted bomber who was named in court only as 'Witness O', said Seamus McLoughlan was the commander of the Birmingham IRA at the time and selected the targets, while Mick Murray and Michael Hayes were part of the bombing team and another man, James Gavin, was involved.

Murray, McLoughlan and Gavin have all since died and Witness O claims that Hayes has protection from prosecution following the peace process.

West Midlands police said today that 'where new facts come to light, they are scrutinised to see if people can be brought to justice'.

In 1975, six men - the Birmingham Six - were convicted over the blasts but acquitted 16 years later. The attacks remain Britain's largest unsolved terror crime.

Michael Hayes has been named as one of four IRA terrorists behind the 1974 Birmingham bombing at the inquests today. He is the only one of the four still alive. He apologised for his role in the attack on TV in 2017, but is reportedly protected by the Good Friday Agreement

A convicted IRA bomber, who was not identified, told the inquests into the victims' deaths that Mick Murray (left) and James Gavin (right) were also involved

The men allegedly behind the bombings were named at inquests into the deaths today. Pictured: A body is carried from the Mulberry Bush

As the names of the alleged bombers were given in court, many of the bereaved family members broke down in tears.

West Midlands Police statement: 'The pub bombing investigation has never closed. 'Our approach is, where new facts come to light, they are scrutinised to see if people can be brought to justice. 'The force will never lose sight of the tragic fact that 21 people lost their lives in the atrocities that took place in Birmingham in 1974. 'It's not appropriate to make further comment at this stage while we're in the middle of the coroner's inquests.' Advertisement

Outside court, victim's sister Ms Hambleton reacted to the news, and said: 'Witness O has today named the bombers involved in the Birmingham pub bombings.

'I have a letter from David Thompson chief constable of West Midlands Police that says this is an on-going live investigation... as such we expect action.'

A West Midlands Police spokesman said: 'The pub bombing investigation has never closed.

'Our approach is, where new facts come to light, they are scrutinised to see if people can be brought to justice.

'The force will never lose sight of the tragic fact that 21 people lost their lives in the atrocities that took place in Birmingham in 1974.

'It's not appropriate to make further comment at this stage while we're in the middle of the coroner's inquests.'

Two years ago, Hayes issued a public apology for the bombings, telling the BBC he was part of the group responsible, but refusing to say if he planted the bombs.

He told the broadcaster that two people had planted bombs in the pubs and he had later defused another on Hagley Road.

Is there still an IRA command structure? In light of Witness Os revelation that he had received the blessing of IRA leaders, Kenny Donaldson, Director of the South East Fermanagh Foundation, told MailOnline: 'The question that has to be asked of Sinn Fein is does the IRAs command structure still exist? 'Sinn Fein have told us repeatedly that there is no command structure. They say that the IRA has gone.' In 2015, senior Sinn Fein activist and former paramilitary Bobby Storey claimed that the IRA had become like a butterfly and flown away. Advertisement

Asked if he was one of the two who planted devices, Hayes replied: 'I'm not telling you.'

He added: 'We were horrified when we heard (innocent people had died) because it was not intended.

'I personally defused the third bomb. I specialised in explosives. I knew what I was doing.'

Mr Hayes said the IRA unit in Birmingham had been shocked by the scale of the death toll.

He said: 'It was not the intention of the IRA to kill innocent people. That wasn't meant. It wouldn't have been done if that was the case.

'We believed that we gave adequate warnings. It was only later on that we realised there was eight valuable minutes missed. We were going to give them a half-hour warning.

He remains a free man living in Ireland despite having been questioned over the pub attacks.

Speaking after today's hearing, Julie Hambleton, whose sister Maxine was killed in the bombings, called for action from the police following the disclosures

Maxine Hambleton was one of 11 people killed in the Tavern in the Town pub

L-R: Pamela Palmer, Desmond Reilly, James Craig, and Maralyn Nash were killed that night

More than half of the victims were under 30. L-R: Stephen Whalley, 21, Jane Davies, 17, Maureen Roberts, 20, and Eugene Thomas Reilly, 23, lost their lives in the atrocity

Witness O's testimony today suggests he was promised he would not be pursued following the Good Friday Agreement, signed by the Irish and UK governments in 1998.

In his evidence today, Witness O said of Hayes: 'He can't be arrested. There is nobody going to be charged with this atrocity. The British Government have signed an agreement with the IRA.'

The witness said he had never heard of another suspect, Michael Patrick Reilly (pictured), who a barrister for the victims referred to as 'the young planter'

Murray died in 1999, Gavin in 2002 and McLoughlin in 2014. McLoughlin was given full paramilitary-style 'honours' at his funeral, with masked men firing shots over his coffin.

Witness O - who is himself a convicted bomber - said that he had been given permission to name the men by the current head of the IRA in Dublin.

Asked by the victims' families' QC, Lesley Thomas, who that man was, Witness O replied: 'Well, I'm not telling you his name.'

Asked why not, the former IRA man said: 'Because he's the head of the IRA. He could be shot dead.'

Witness O was accused of protecting another man previously linked to the bombings, Michael Patrick Reilly, who is also still alive.

When asked about him by barrister Mr Thomas, Witness O replied: 'No, I don't remember him at all. Reilly? I would remember that.'

The barrister then told him Mr Reilly was known as 'The Young Planter'.

Mr Thomas said: 'You know who he is, don't you? He's the one you're protecting, isn't he?'

The blasts at the Mulberry Bush (shown) in the base of the city's iconic Rotunda and the basement Tavern in the Town killed 21 people and injured 220 more

The Memorial Stone remembers the 21 victims outside the city's St Phillips Cathedral

Unionists demand answers over 'current IRA' claims Witness O today said he had been given permission to speak to the inquests, including giving the bombers' names. When coroner Sir Peter Thornton QC asked him who had given that authorisation, he replied 'The head of the IRA', adding that he had approached the organisation's chief in Dublin six months ago. Following his evidence DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson demanded answers from Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald. He said: 'Mary Lou McDonald needs to explain how the head of the IRA in Dublin can give 'permission' for an individual to be named, when she tells us the IRA doesn't exist.' Ulster Unionist Assembly member Doug Beattie said: 'Given that numerous Sinn Fein politicians have claimed that there is no IRA, you wonder just who is sitting in Dublin, claiming to be the head of it? 'The PSNI and the Garda need to give an assessment of this claim as a matter of urgency.' Advertisement

The witness replied: 'Who? Protecting who? No.'

Witness O also claimed he had given McLoughlan's name to two police detectives while in HMP Winson Green just days after the bombings, but heard nothing more.

He said to the four men he named: 'The police already know who they are, and they haven't done anything.'

He added that two other men, who he identified as 'Dublin Dave' and 'Socks' had also been involved, but that he did not know either man's name.

Witness O, who was in jail at the time of the bomb attacks, described the bombings as 'an atrocity'.

He added that the Birmingham IRA active service unit responsible was 'stood down' by the organisation's Army Council following the blasts.

All the men have been named before in connection with the bombings, but never in a formal setting.

Six men, known as the Birmingham Six, were jailed in 1975 for the double bomb attacks, but their convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal in 1991.

Their case remains one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in English legal history.

Witness O, who also told the coroner he was no longer an IRA member, voluntarily agreed to give evidence to the inquests on condition of anonymity.

Firemen at work following the bomb attacks in Birmingham city centre that targeted the Mulberry Bush pub and the Tavern in the Town

Why are IRA suspects protected from prosecution? Scores of IRA fugitives were granted an amnesty in a secret deal between Tony Blair's Labour government and Sinn Fein around the time of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. So-called 'comfort letters' assured 187 Republican terror suspects they were no longer being hunted by the police. At least 95 recipients were linked to almost 300 murders. Tony Blair's administration claimed there was no secret to the 'comfort letters,' but politicians in N. Ireland other than Seinn Fein members said they were never aware of them. The letters  sent to the so-called 'on the runs' after pressure from Sinn Fein  only came to light during the trial of John Downey, the man accused of the Hyde Park bombing in 1982. The trial collapsed in February last year when it emerged the 63-year-old had been told he would not face prosecution for the blast that killed four soldiers and seven horses in London. In addition, Northern Irish law provides a Royal Prerogative of Mercy and is exercised by the Justice Minister to reduce sentences but is shrouded in secrecy in relation to terrorism. It has previously been revealed that the royal prerogative was used in 16 terrorism-related cases in the immediate years after the Good Friday Agreement. Advertisement

The disclosure of the alleged bombers' names was an unexpected twist, as the issue of who carried out the bombers was not within the scope of the inquests.

Today's testimony comes after the former IRA intelligence boss Kieran Conway yesterday asserted that the attacks were the work of an autonomous cell of volunteers, done without the authority of leaders in Ireland.

Conway insisted that the pubs were not legitimate targets because they were not frequented by soldiers. And warnings designed to give police a chance to clear the buildings failed because phone boxes had been vandalised.

Astonishingly, Conway also claimed that the deaths were not murders, arguing that the victims were killed 'accidentally' during a war against the British state.

He said that in the aftermath of the blasts, an 'OC' - officer commanding - and his second-in-com-mand were hauled before a so-called IRA court which cleared them after hearing of the problems with the phones. They could have been expelled or even executed, he said.

Conway said yesterday: 'The bombings had been careless, if not downright incompetent.'

Asked if the victims had been murdered, he declared: 'It was an IRA operation that went tragically wrong. It should not have happened.

It was outside the range of permissible targets but in my opinion it was not murder.'

The families of the victims have waited 44 years for new inquests, which finally began last month.

Who are the men named as Birmingham bombers today?

Mick Murray Mick Murray has previously been said to be second-in-command of the Birmingham IRA unit. After the attacks he was questioned alongside the Birmingham Six but was never charged with murder. He was convicted of possessing explosives and later sentenced to 12 years for separate terrorist offences. Throughout his trial he refused to say a single word because he refused to acknowledge the court. On his release, he was welcomed back into the IRA and remained a member until his death in 1999. Advertisement

James Gavin James Gavin, also known as Jimmy Kelly, was found guilty of possessing explosives after the original Birmingham bombings trials. He was given one year in jail, but because of time on remand he walked free. Gavin was said to be from County Armagh in 1963 and joined the British Army. He deserted in 1964 in West Germany. After the Birmingham bombings he was jailed for the murder of another Republican in 1975. He died in 2002, a free man. Advertisement

Michael Hayes Michael Hayes is a a married father of two in his 70s still living free in Dublin. In 2017, he told a BBC interview that he accepted 'collective responsibility' for the Birmingham bombing but did not know who planted the devices. He was questioned by police following the interview but has not faced action. Today's evidence in the inquests suggests he may have been granted immunity during the peace process. Advertisement

Seamus McLoughlin Seamus McLoughlin was known as 'Belfast Jimmy' in 1970s. On the day of the Birmingham blasts he was on an Aer Lingus flight from Birmingham to Dublin with the remains of James McDade, the IRA man who had blown himself up with a bomb in Coventry. When he died in Ireland in 2014 masked men fired shot over his coffin, which was covered in the Irish flag outside a relative's home in the Ardoyne district of North Belfast. Advertisement



Theresa May faced mounting calls to quit today as senior Brexiteers warned the 'wrong Conservatives' were in charge of the party.

Steve Baker accused the Prime Minister of volunteering Britain for a 'national humiliation' amid claims she is poised to hand control of Brexit to MPs.

The idea of 'indicative votes' caused fury among Tory MPs who accused the Prime Minister of 'going to war' with her own party.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss publicly endorsed criticism of leaked plans for 'indicative votes' that most expect would lead to Parliament softening Brexit.

And Business Secretary Greg Clark slammed the PM's angry Wednesday night speech blaming MPs for blocking her deal.

The new rows come after Sir Graham Brady, the shop steward of Tory MPs, warned Mrs May her party wants her to go over Brexit.

The embattled Mrs May returned to Downing Street today after a humiliating European Council ended in Brussels agreeing to delay Brexit but only on the bloc's terms - without the PM in the talks.

Steve Baker accused the Prime Minister of volunteering Britain for a 'national humiliation' amid claims she is poised to hand control of Brexit to MPs

Business Secretary Greg Clark and Chief Secretary Liz Truss both criticised the Government's handling of Brexit today

Steve Baker warned the 'wrong Conservatives have the levers of power' amid Tory fury at plans for indicative votes

Ms Truss backed reports the indicative votes were being denied by No 10. They have since been confirmed by the Business Secretary

Mr Baker said: 'National humiliation is imminent through these ''indicative votes''.

'The wrong Conservatives have the levers of power.'

Amid reports Downing Street were denying the scheme, Ms Truss said: 'Good'.

Separately, Mr Clark criticised the PM's handling of the Brexit stalemate this week and particularly her late night speech on Wednesday.

He told the BBC: 'It's understandable, given the sense of frustration she had that people weren't coming together but it clearly wasn't a great success.

'I don't think it was helpful in resolving the matter. But, listen, none of us is infallible and even prime ministers sometimes don't get the tone quite right.'

Conservative backbencher Steve Double has said Theresa May is now 'isolated' within the party and called on her to consider her position.

Mr Double said Mrs May was unable to maintain collective responsibility after two-thirds of 'her own parliamentary party voted against a motion (on extending Article 50) that she put to the House'.

'I think it is quite clear that she is not leading her party. She is isolated, sadly, from a majority of the parliamentary party now. We need to find a way forward and I think that requires new leadership.

Michael Fabricant launched the stinging attack on Theresa May after she moved to delay Brexit because MPs refused to pass her deal

The Lichfield MP seized on an announcement from the Bank of England that enough changes to the law were in place to make Britain ready for No Deal.

Earlier, Mr Fabricant added to mounting criticism of the PM. He said: 'The Bank of England say with the range of legislation now enacted both in the EU and the UK, we are ready for a No Deal Brexit.

'Now is the time for a Churchill. Not a Chamberlain.'

He added: 'I have every reason to believe that the Government Chief Whip has been spelling out the realities to the Prime Minister as has been the Chairman of the 1922 Committee.'

Mr Fabricant voted against Mrs May's at both 'meaningful votes'.

Earlier, it emerged Sir Graham, the chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs, visited the Prime Minister on Monday to tell her that a growing number believe she has to quit.

Sir Graham had been 'bombarded with text messages' by Conservative MPs and urged to confront the Prime Minister with demands that she should go, the Daily Telegraph said.

Sir Graham imparted their calls in a 'neutral' manner in his role as chairman of the 1922 Committee during the meeting in Downing Street, the paper reported.

Sir Graham Brady (pictured) is reported to have told the Prime Minister that her own MPs want her to quit

Downing Street suffered yet another blow yesterday when Eurosceptic MPs who had backed Mrs May's deal threatened to abandon it last night after she had left open the prospect of No Deal.

The Prime Minister came under pressure from 'switchers' who voted for her plan last week fearing if it fell there would be a lengthy delay to Brexit.

Now such a delay seems to be off the table, some Eurosceptics may seek to achieve No Deal.

The MPs had been convinced by Mrs May to back her proposals after she warned they faced a choice between that and a long extension to Article 50.

But in a reversal, she has ruled out asking for a long delay and  despite last night's developments in Brussels  the door to leaving without a deal remains open.

Several of the MPs told Mrs May personally that she would need to promise to quit to have any hope of getting her deal through the Commons next week.

She was given the blunt advice at a 'robust' meeting with 20 Tories in her Commons study on Wednesday. One MP said: 'The point was made by several people that if she wanted to get her deal through, she would have to say, 'I'm leaving on such and such a date'.'

Another said: 'There were some people reiterating the view that her still being there was a problem. It was clear it's not something she's contemplating. She took it on the chin but didn't respond.'

Mrs May is said to have been told that her own MPs do not want her to stay in the job amid Brexit negotiations

Several Tory MPs contacted Chief Whip Julian Smith yesterday calling for Mrs May to go, among them former culture minister Tracey Crouch and ex-ministerial aide Anne-Marie Trevelyan.

Amid a backlash against the PM's address to the nation on Wednesday, one Cabinet minister refused to back her approach. While on a visit to Basildon, Home Secretary Sajid Javid was asked by the BBC if she was wise to blame MPs for the Brexit delay.

He said: 'I have just come from Westminster to get away from Brexit, so I don't think it's appropriate to answer that question.'

Some previously supportive MPs went public to say they could now vote against the deal when it comes back to the Commons.

Mansfield Tory MP Ben Bradley said: 'She has made it more difficult. In terms of getting enough support, that speech last night was not helpful.'

One MP said Mrs May's No Deal reversal left them feeling they had the 'rug pulled out from underneath them'.

Another said: 'A week ago we were all told that No Deal was dead and she has brought it back to life.'

In another blow to Mrs May's hopes of getting the deal through, a senior DUP figure described the Irish backstop as 'toxic'.

The meeting with Eurosceptic MPs took place at 7pm on Wednesday. In what was described as a 'no holds barred' discussion, MPs sought reassurance that No 10 'knows what they are doing', one attendee said.

Several MPs argued that it was harder for them to back Mrs May's deal now because they had done so thinking Britain could leave on time on March 29.

But other Conservative MPs said now was not the time for the PM to resign as it would only increase instability.

One senior Tory backbencher said: I have no particular desire to see Theresa May step down, partly because I am by no means convinced that her stepping down is going to have any positive impact at all, because we need to find a replacement.

It wouldnt be a replacement from six leisurely weeks of a Conservative Party leadership election, it would have to be one the following morning  where is that going to come from?A photo of a cable technician, who soothed a customer's disabled toddler while fixing an internet problem in her home, has gone viral.

Jessica Nash Donnahoo, of Greenville, South Carolina, posted a photo on Facebook of Spectrum employee Rob Kinney holding and comforting her three-year-old son, Sailor.

Sailor, who was adopted at birth, was born with rare brain defects and a seizure disorder. One is optic nerve hypoplasia which caused him to be blind since birth and the other is known as a Chiari malformation of the brain.

Jessica Nash Donnahoo, of South Carolina, posted a photo on Facebook of Spectrum employee Rob Kinney holding and comforting her disabled son, Sailor, 3. The post has gone viral

Donnahoo told GMA that Sailor, who has heightened senses and sensory issues, was feeling particularly overwhelmed the day the cable technician came to carry out work.

Sailor seemed to immediately take to Kinney, who has worked for Spectrum for nine years, and walked over to him, reaching his arms in the air.

Kinney, a single dad to a four-year-old girl, didn't ignore the toddler or tell him to go away, but instead lifted him up, held and comforted him.

Donnahoo, who also has a two-year-old daughter, took to Facebook to praise Kinney for going above and beyond, tagging Kinney and Spectrum in the post.

Single dad, Kinney, (pictured above) managed to soothe the toddler while upgrading the Donnahoo's internet at the same time

Jessica Nash Donnahoo, (pictured above) with husband Drew and the couple's children

'Dear Spectrum Internet,

'Today your technician Robert came to our home to upgrade our internet and help us start up TV streaming. He walked into a mess. My son, Sailor, is three years old. He was born with two rare brain defects and he is blind.

'He is unable to communicate his needs, and today has been rough for him. He has been crying all morning. Ive been trying to soothe him while also meeting the needs of my two year old daughter, cleaning, washing dishes, and doing laundry while my husband works. Its just been a tough day.

'When Robert walked in and started talking, Sailor ran to him and reached up. Robert didnt seem bothered at all and, instead, held my son off and on for the whole 45 minutes he was in our home. He snuggled him close while I folded laundry. It was a huge relief to this tired momma. Robert could have walked in, rushed, and left but instead he saw a need greater than internet and met it.

'Thats beyond customer service- its humanity at its best. Robert deserves a raise... a promotion... something! Hes an asset to your company and I will never forget his kindness. Sincerely, Jessica.'

Sailor (pictured above right) is blind and was adopted by the Donahoo's after years of unsuccessful fertility treatment. Later Donnahoo unexpectedly fell pregnant with her daughter

The post has been shared 145,000 times to date.

Kinney managed to keep on working while comforting Sailor.

Donnahoo said he held Sailor off and on for the entire 45 minutes he was in her home, only putting him down to plug in equipment or go out to his truck.

Humble Kinney praised the Donnahoo family for having a 'kind and gentle spirit,' for adopting Sailor and taking care of him every day.

He told GMA he only stepped in for a short period of time.

'I picked him up and held him while I was doing a few things inside. He was super comfortable with it to the point he started getting sleepy,' Kinney told GMA.

Sailor was adopted by the Donnahoo's after years of unsuccessful fertility treatment.

Later Jessica Nash Donnahoo fell unexpectedly pregnant with the couple's daughter.New South Wales residents voting in Saturday's state election can get a taste of democracy at polling booths hosting electoral sausage sizzles.

The 'democracy sausage' has become a familiar sight during Australian elections as schools and church halls welcome voters.

A special website allows voters to find their nearest democracy sausage, and Daily Mail Australia has compiled a last minute voting guide for the 2019 state election.

New South Wales residents voting in Saturday's state election can get a taste of democracy at polling booths hosting the iconic electoral sausage sizzle

Using the hashtag #DemocracySausage the website maps crowdsource data of polling booths hosting sausage and cake availability

Using the hashtag #DemocracySausage the website maps crowdsource data of polling booths hosting sausage and cake availability.

Stalls can notify the website if they will be serving food at the polling event.

The website also list what drink options are available and whether there are vegetarian and halal options.

Other than wondering where to get a democracy sausage, voters might be left scratching their heads about where and how to vote.

HOW DO I VOTE?

Voters will be handed two ballot papers on Saturday: A large one for the Legislative Council and a small one for the Legislative Assembly.

Legislative Assembly

There are 93 members in the NSW Legislative Assembly who each represent one electoral district for a four-year term.

You can only vote for candidates running in your electoral district.

To vote, you must put a number one in the square next to the candidate you want to elect.

There is optional preferential voting so you can show more choices by putting a number two next to the second choice and three next to the third choice and so on.

Voters will be handed two ballot papers on Saturday: A large one for the Legislative Council and a small one for the Legislative Assembly (stock image)

Legislative Council

There are 42 members in the NSW Legislative Council and each member represents the whole state in Parliament for an eight-year term.

The elections are held every four years and voters elect half of the council at one election, and the other half at the next.

The names of the candidate and their political party, if applicable, are shown.

The ballot paper has a thick line running across it, with group voting squares above the line and columns of candidate voting squares below it.

You must choose between voting 'above the line' or 'below the line' as you cannot vote both above and below the line.

Voting above the line you must put a number one in a voting square for one of the groups. If you wish to make more choices you can preferentially vote above the line.

If you vote below the line you must vote for candidates from number one until number 15.

If you are an Australian citizen over the age of 18 who has lived in NSW for more than a month you are required to vote

DO I HAVE TO VOTE?

If you are an Australian citizen over the age of 18 who has lived in NSW for more than a month you are required to vote.

WHAT HAPPENS IF I DON'T VOTE?

If you don't have a valid reason for not voting you will be fined $55.

WHEN DO POLLING BOOTHS OPEN AND CLOSE?

Polling booths will open at 8am on Saturday and will shut at 6pm.

WHERE DO I VOTE?

The Legislative Assembly has 93 electorates across the state and each of them has between 17 and 50 polling booths.

Schools, church halls and community centres are usually transformed into voting centres for the day.

You can see a full list of voting centres here or you can call the NSW Electoral Commission on 1300 135 736.

DO I NEED ID?

Most voters will be fine to leave their ID at home.

A driver's licence or photo card is required to check eligibilty when casting a 'declaration vote'.

This may happen in instances where your name doesn't appear on the roll, it appears you've already voted or you're voting outside your electorate.Hannegret Donnelly, 54, has been jailed for life after killing her husband

A German midwife who has been jailed for murdering her husband said in police interviews how she would chase him around the house with a rolling pin.

Hannegret Donnelly, 54, killed her husband Christopher, 55, in their Buckinghamshire home as he struggled with bronchial pneumonia.

Investigators found 78 injuries on Christopher's body after his death including a cauliflower ear, wounds all over his head, internal injuries including fractures to his shoulder bone, spine, and neck, fractures to the cartilage in his voice box and other traumatic injuries.

These were all caused by being hit with a blunt object or a fist according to police and his blood was found all over the house.

In police interviews, Donnelly, a mother-of-four, admitted beating her husband with a rolling pin and a hairbrush, punching him in the face and pushing him down the stairs.

She said: 'We had a chase around the table in a more lighthearted sort of way.

'I tried to sort things out with him in sort of a bantering sort of way.

'If I hit you with a rolling pin, maybe you come out of your trance... but then it did get... yeah, I did hit him a bit harder sometimes.

A rolling pin from Donnelly's house was retrieved by police after the German midwife confirmed beating her husband with the utensil

The midwife said in police interviews she chased her husband around the kitchen table with a rolling pin but she thought it was 'lighthearted' and 'bantering'

'But as I saw, he never... it was not as if he fell over and lost consciousness, it wasn't anything like that.

In another clip, Donnelly said: 'I punched him on his nose severely, I was so angry with him, but he didn't have such a big cut, just a small cut.'

She also spoke about an incident when she shoved her husband down the stairs.

'I pushed him in the back and he walks a bit faster, then he tripped and fell against a crate.

'The crate got broken and then he cut himself on the head quite badly.'

Donnelly said he was never violent towards her but she would use violence to rouse him from a trance-like state and 'reset something in him'.

The jury unanimously convicted Donnelly after a 13-day trial.

Senior investigating officer Detective Chief Inspector Felicity Parker of Thames Valley Police said: 'He was coercively controlled by his wife on a daily basis.

'She told him what was acceptable and punished him when he did something that disagreed with her view; he suffered extreme injuries as a result of this systematic abuse.

'This case highlights the fact that domestic abuse affects men and women and the consequences can be catastrophic.

Judge Amanda Yip, QC, sentencing her today, said: 'What is clear is the violence you inflicted was one-sided.

'The blood found in your home all matched his. No one but you knows what caused you to repeatedly assault you husband.

'It does not appear that your relationship was always a troubled one. You had been married for 23 years at the time of his death.

'You have deprived your four children of their father and sadly your separation because of your arrest can only add to their trauma.

Donnelly said her husband was never violent with her and she beat him to 'reset something in him'

'It is clear Christopher experienced physical violence before death- it is inconceivable that he did not suffer mentally.'

Just days before he died, the killer wrote in her diary: 'I did not allow him to go to the toilet.'

She also did not allow her children to use mobile phones and the landline had been disconnected.

The pair met in 1992 when Mr Donnelly used to play the clarinet and saxophone having studied at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

A qualified biochemist, he fell into ill health and his wife began to beat him with household objects.

In the two years leading to his death, their children aged between 12-21 became isolated and were home schooled by their mother.

Eloise Marshall, QC, prosecuting, told Kingston Crown Court: 'In this case the victim was particularly vulnerable due to his disability.

'We know that the defendant from her own admissions she continued to assault him.

'She has said that these repeated injuries were committed with a rolling-pin. It is unclear and the Crown are unable to say whether that was the only instrument.

'There would have been mental and physical suffering inflicted on the victim until death.

A jury unanimously convicted Donnelly after a 13-day trial and Judge Amanda Yip QC sentenced her to life with a minimum of 16 years

'Their household was a complex and strange one and even though they seemed a conventional family over the years they withdrew from life outside.'

Tim Malone, QC, defending, said: 'There were attempts to help him. There is then the indication when the police arrive that they have carried out CPR for about 30 minutes.

'There was also the immediate comment made by Mrs Donnelly that the death was unexpected, that they had hoped he would have come out and that they spent the evening grieving before going round to the neighbours to make the phone call.'

Donnelly of Berryfields, Buckinghamshire, denied murder and grievous bodily harm between 30 March 2016 to March 30, 2018.

She was convicted of murder and jailed for a minimum period of 16 years.

The brother of Mr Donnelly, Peter, cited his beliefs as a Roman Catholic, and said he forgive his younger brother's killer.

He said after the verdict: 'As far as Hannegret Donnelly's actions have harmed me I must be in a position to forgive.'President Donald Trump claimed in an interview broadcast Friday that Twitter is working to artificially lower the number of people who see his daily blasts of topics that range from the U.S. economy to Iranian saber-rattling.

'Its not right the way they do it. I know exactly what theyre doing. They take people off my account. They make it very hard for people to join,' he told the Fox Business Network.

A Twitter spokesperson did not respond to emailed questions on Friday morning about the allegation, nor did Trump's social media guru Daniel Scavino.

But the president's claim, if true, would suggest an ideologically driven effort to tamp down his successful habit of sidestepping traditional news media with a megaphone large enough to reach more people that the number who watch cable news.

Still, he said, he doesn't look favorably on the concept of treating social media titans like public utilities and breaking them up to dilute their monopoly power.

'I dont like the concept of it,' the president said.' I really would like everybody to be free, but they dont treat us the same way as they treat liberal Democrats and others.'

President Donald Trump said in an interview broadcast Friday that Twitter has been artificially squeezing his account, removing followers and making it harder for him to add more

Trump has more than 59 million Twitter followers; the idea that the social platform would limit the number of people who can see his daily posts incensed him on Monday, according to a White House official

'Im able to get the word out through my social media,' he said, 'because I have great social media, but Ill tell you, its much tougher than it should be.'

Trump said that until recently he 'was picking up hundreds of thousands of people in a very short period of time,' before changing the subject without describing what may have changed.

He said Tuesday that Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms are discriminating against conservatives and other Republicans, and accused them of colluding with each other to limit online speech.

'We use the word "collusion" very loosely all the time,' Trump said during a joint press conference with Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro, 'and I will tell you there is collusion with respect to that because something has to be going on.'

Scavino complained Monday that Facebook was preventing him from interacting with people who leave comments on his personal page.

And the president's son Donald Trump Jr. wrote in an op-ed that 'Big Techs censorship of conservatives' has become 'ever more flagrant and overt.'

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he believes social media companies are 'colluding' to limit conservatives' public exposure

Trump made his commnts during a joint press conference with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, specifically naming Twitter and Facebook

The president also mentioned Google earlier in the day, naming the search giant as a company that's 'on the side of the Radical Left Democrats'

The president appeared to agree. 'It seems to be if they're conservative, if they're Republicans, if they're in a certain group, there's discrimination, and big discrimination, and I see it absolutely on Twitter and Facebook ... and others,' he said Tuesday. 'We have to do something.'

'Things are happening, names are taken off, people aren't getting through. You've heard the same complaints,' he added, referring to what conservatives have called 'shadow-banning.

Trump claimed that executives at social media companies harbor 'hatred' in many cases, toward 'a certain group of people that happen to be in power, that happen to have won the election.'

'I do think we have to get to the bottom of it,' the president urder, without suggesting any actions he might take.

He also renewed his attacks on traditional media, including TV networks and their newscasts.

Scavino's experience with Facebook enraged Trump, according to a White House official.

President Trump's longtime social media manager, Dan Scavino, is also his director of Oval Office operations; Scavino found himself on Monday locked out of commenting on his own Facebook posts

Scavino complained top Facebook and the company says it has apologized, but insisted his temporary loss of access was not driven by ideology or by who he works for

'Facebook, Google and Twitter, not to mention the Corrupt Media, are sooo on the side of the Radical Left Democrats. But fear not, we will win anyway, just like we did before! #MAGA,' the president tweeted Tuesday morning.

Scavino, a longtime Trump aide, posted a screen shot Monday night of a message from Facebook saying he was temporarily blocked from making public comments because some of his comments had been reported as spam.

'AMAZING. WHY ARE YOU STOPPING ME from replying to comments followers have left me - on my own Facebook Page!!??' an incensed Scavino wrote.

'People have the right to know. Why are you silencing me???'

Facebook said the issue was an 'unintended consequence' of its spam policy, and claimed in a statement that it had apologized for what it called an 'inconvenience.'

'I will be looking into this!' the president boomed in a tweet.

Trump Jr., meanwhile, blasted social platforms more explicitly in an essay for The Hill, an inside-the-beltway political newspaper.

'Left unchecked, Big Tech and liberal activists could construct a private 'social credit' system  not unlike what the communists have nightmarishly implemented in China  that excludes outspoken conservatives from wide swaths of American life simply because their political views differ from those of tech executives,' he wrote.

On Twitter, Trump Jr. reacted to Scavino's Facebook hassle: 'As Ive been saying. This is a disgusting abuse of power, and of course it only goes one way.'

Donald Trump Jr. slammed tech companies like Twitter in an op-ed on Monday, complaining that they 'shadowban' conservatives

Don Jr. reacted to Scavino's Facebook beef by saying it's a problem only conservatives seem to have

California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Twitter and some of its users for defamation and 'shadow-banning'

Separately, a prominent Republican congressman sued Twitter for 'shadow-banning conservatives' on Monday, bringing the issue into sharper relief.

Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican, seeks $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages against Twitter and some of its users.

Nunes alleged in his lawsuit that Twitter is guilty of 'knowingly hosting and monetizing content that is clearly abusive, hateful and defamatory  providing both a voice and financial incentive to the defamers  thereby facilitating defamation on its platform.'

Nunes named specific Twitter accounts in his legal complaint, including an accusation that a GOP consultant had 'implied' in tweets 'that Nunes colluded with prostitutes and cocaine addicts, that Nunes does cocaine, and that Nunes was involved in a 'Russian money laundering front".'

The lawsuit also names the accounts @DevinNunesMom and 'Devin Nunes' Cow,' or @DevinCow as harrassing troublemakers.A beauty queen has been stripped of her title - amid claims she went awol and damaged her gold and silver crown.

Miss Moscow 2018, Alesia Semerenko, is accused of refusing to take part in key events 'due to illness' - but then being seen on her social media sunbathing in the Maldives.

The economics student, 24, kept her crown at home against the rules and when it was returned 'the encrusted diamonds were falling off it', claimed the organisers.

The catwalk star denies the accusations against her and claims she is the victim of a vendetta and campaign of 'lies' because she caused an upset in winning the prestigious Russian beauty pageant title three months ago.

Scroll down for video

Miss Moscow 2018, Alesia Semerenko, is accused of refusing to take part in key events 'due to illness' - but then being seen on her social media sunbathing in the Maldives

The beauty queen had taken several holidays and when she was expected to attend an event with Russian military paratroopers she was seen on a beach in the Maldives (pictured)

The Miss Moscow title is seen as prestigious and a previous winner last year wed the then king of Malaysia, Semerenko is pictured at the 2018 final

A source from the contest Alesia 'must be distressed at having to give away her crown to her nearest competitor - runner-up Ksenia Palenova - but this is what is happening now.'

The source claimed it was impossible to contact Alesia to undertake engagements to which she was committed after winning the title.

Pageant producer Svetlana Yagovitskaya complained that the beauty queen was repeatedly ill 'but in her Instagram she is having an intense social life'.

She said: 'She fell ill once then again and again. It was going on for several months.

'When managers went to see her at home, they found that the crown was broken and bent in several places.

'It was not clear what exactly Alesia was doing with it - but the crown looked shabby.'

She had taken several holidays and when she was expected to attend an event with Russian military paratroopers she was seen on a beach in the Maldives.

'What is the sense in having a queen who we can't bring anywhere?'

The catwalk star denies the accusations against her and claims she is the victim of a vendetta and campaign of 'lies' because she caused an upset in winning the prestigious Russian beauty pageant title three months ago

The economics student, 24, kept her crown at home against the rules and when it was returned 'the encrusted diamonds were falling off it', claimed the organisers

The title is seen as prestigious and a previous winner last year wed the then king of Malaysia. Alesia Semerenko is pictured in a holiday snap

She was told her 'fairytale is over' after failing to acknowledge a final warning, according to a report in Moskovsky Komsomolets.

The title is seen as prestigious and a previous winner last year wed the then king of Malaysia.

Director of the contest Tatiana Andreeva-Falk, the director of Miss Moscow contest, told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper: 'It is very unpleasant that nothing matters for her except her beauty.

'We hardly managed to get the crown back from her. It is broken. It has to be repaired. It is an expensive crown, made from gold-plated silver and semi-precious stones.'

She said: 'The winner of the contest Is expected to take part in numerous events for one year, mostly for charity. Alesia has not attended a single one. It is impossible torch her on the phone.'

She had also skipped most of the rehearsals ahead of the contest.

'We thought hard whether to expel her before the contest but she is such a beautiful girl. We didn't throw her out. The the jury made her the winner.'

Alesia Semerenko was told her 'fairytale is over' after failing to acknowledge a final warning, according to a report in Moskovsky Komsomolets

Director of the contest Tatiana Andreeva-Falk, the director of Miss Moscow contest, told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper: 'It is very unpleasant that nothing matters for her except her beauty'

Her critics say when she won the title she vowed to 'fight the common view that beauty and intellect are incompatible'

Semerenko denied refusing any roles and insisted she was always at the end of a phone or contactable on social media

Her critics say when she won the title she vowed to 'fight the common view that beauty and intellect are incompatible'.

She said: 'The stereotype is that we are stupid dolls incapable of anything but walking down the catwalk. I want to breakdown this stereotype.'?

Semerenko denied refusing any roles and insisted she was always at the end of a phone or contactable on social media.

She insisted she had not broken or damaged her crown. She claimed she was the victim of 'lies'.

Stripping her of the crown was a 'disgrace' and 'stupid'.

The reason she had been fired 'is totally different and I don't want to talk about it', she said.

'I can only say that there is somebody who was very unhappy about my crown.'

She added: 'Let Polenova carry my crown after me. Probably, she won't break it.'

She stated: 'I deserved this victory and this moment cannot be crossed out of the history, whatever they say and write.'Waleed Aly and Jacinda Ardern have shared an emotional embrace ahead of a candid interview about the Christchurch mosque shootings.

The Australian television presenter sat down with Ms Ardern in New Zealand to discuss the horrific terrorist attack that claimed the lives of 50 Muslim worshippers.

In stark contrast to his fiery interview with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison earlier on Thursday night, Aly's first encounter with the New Zealand leader was warm and welcoming as they shared a hug.

Waleed Aly and Jacinda Ardern have shared an emotional embrace ahead of an candid interview about the Christchurch mosque shootings

The Australian television presenter (pictured) sat down with Ms Ardern in New Zealand to discuss the horrific terrorist attack that left 50 people dead on Friday

In a teaser for the interview, which is due to air on Network Ten's The Project on Monday, Ms Ardern greeted Aly with a surprising: 'Do you mind if I give you a hug?'

Aly happily embraced Ms Ardern saying: 'No, not at all!' Ardern replied: 'I know that might sound strange!'

Aly wasted no time delving straight into the tough questions, saying: 'I know you don't want to answer this question.'

Aly asked Ms Ardern to explain how becoming a mother had affected how she related to the terror attack.

Ms Ardern said parenthood had 'almost certainly' affected her reaction, but she admitted she has 'always been a person inclined to feel things quite deeply'.

She told the presenter she became emotional while visiting with families who lost loved ones in the tragedy.

Aly then asked Ms Ardern to talk him through her decision process to wear a black hijab, which he said has since become a 'very iconic image'.

'I gave it very little thought, it was so obvious to me that would be the appropriate thing to do,' Ms Ardern replied.

'So if in wearing the hijab as I did gave them a sense of security to continue to practice their faith then I'm very pleased I did it.'

When Aly next asked the New Zealand PM about the issue of far-right extremism in Christchurch, she described how social media played a part in perpetuating certain views.

Aly and Ms Ardern shared a hug before their interview

'Social media is both a tool for good, and a tool - in some cases - for evil,' she said.

The presenter then asked Ms Ardern how she felt about the perpetrator being an Australian, to which she replied it was less about origin and more about the fact New Zealand had been a deliberate choice, which was the most confronting.

'I think that's what's we've really rallied against,' she said.

Aly concluded the interview by praising New Zealanders for how well they supported each other in the wake of the attack.

He asked Ms Ardern if there was something in particular that allowed the nation to be able to be able to respond in such a loving and supportive way.

She said while New Zealanders see themselves as being peaceful and inclusive, the act has been counter to that.

'But the response [to the terror attack] - the flood of flowers outside of mosques, the spontaneous song, where people have gathered - that's New Zealand,' she said.

Aly's interview with Ms Ardern was in stark contrast to his earlier discussion with the Australian Prime Minister.

Tensions reached boiling point onscreen on Thursday when Mr Morrison and Aly spoke about comments the politician allegedly made about using anti-Muslim sentiment to win points with voters during a shadow cabinet meeting in 2010.

Aly's interview with Ms Ardern was a stark contrast to his earlier discussion with the Australian Prime Minister on Thursday (pictured)

Mr Morrison has vehemently denied the claim and said it had damaged his reputation with the Islamic community.

'You implied Muslims couldn't feel safe because they had a PM who had somehow been prejudiced against them and I don't believe that's true,' he said.

'Can't you see that what you're suggesting is at complete odds with the experience that I have been involved in over the last ten years of my public life?' Mr Morrison told Aly on Thursday night.

Mr Morrison said that as shadow immigration minister, he raised concerns about anti-Muslim sentiment and wanted them addressed.

'I was acknowledging there were fears, and we had to address them. Not exploit them.'Zaharie Ahmad Shah (pictured) was the pilot of the doomed flight

DID THE PILOT HIJACK HIS OWN PLANE?

Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah planned mass murder because of personal problems, locking his co-pilot out of the cockpit, closing down all communications, depressurising the main cabin and then disabling the aircraft so that it continued flying on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel.

That was the popular theory in the weeks after the plane's disappearance.

His personal problems, rumours in Kuala Lumpur said, included a split with his wife Fizah Khan, and his fury that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been given a five-year jail sentence for sodomy shortly before he boarded the plane for the flight to Beijing.

But the pilot's wife angrily denied any personal problems and other family members and his friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.

This theory was also the conclusion of the first independent study into the disaster by the New Zealand-based air accident investigator, Ewan Wilson.

Wilson, the founder of Kiwi Airlines and a commercial pilot himself, arrived at the shocking conclusion after considering 'every conceivable alternative scenario'.

However, he has not been able to provide any conclusive evidence to support his theory.

The claims are made in the book 'Goodnight Malaysian 370', which Wilson co-wrote with the New Zealand broadsheet journalist, Geoff Taylor.

It's also been rumoured that Zaharie used a flight simulator at his home to plot a path to a remote island.

However, officials in Kuala Lumpur declared that Malaysian police and the FBI's technical experts had found nothing to suggest he was planning to hijack the flight after closely examining his flight simulator.

And there are also theories that t he tragic disappearance may have been a heroic act of sacrifice by the pilot.

Australian aviation enthusiast Michael Gilbert believes the doomed plane caught fire mid-flight, forcing the pilot to plot a course away from heavily populated areas.

IF NOT THE PILOT, WAS THE CO-PILOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MYSTERY?

Co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, again for personal problems, was suspected by rumour-spreaders to have overpowered the pilot and disabled the aircraft, flying it to its doom with crew and passengers unable to get through the locked cockpit door.

Theorists have put forward the suggestion that he was having relationship problems and this was his dramatic way of taking his own life.

But he was engaged to be married to Captain Nadira Ramli, 26, a fellow pilot from another airline, and loved his job. There are no known reasons for him to have taken any fatal action.

There have been a series of outlandish theories about the disappearance of the plane

Others have suggested that because he was known to have occasionally invited young women into the cockpit during a flight, he had done so this time and something had gone wrong.

Young Jonti Roos said in March that she spent an entire flight in 2011 in the cockpit being entertained by Hamid, who was smoking.

Interest in the co-pilot was renewed when it was revealed he was the last person to communicate from the cockpit after the communication system was cut off.

DID THE RUSSIANS STEAL MH370 AND FLY THE JET TO KAZAKHSTAN

An expert has claimed the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 was hijacked on the orders of Vladimir Putin and secretly landed in Kazakhstan.

Jeff Wise, a U.S. science writer who spearheaded CNN's coverage of the Boeing 777-200E, has based his outlandish theory on pings that the plane gave off for seven hours after it went missing, that were recorded by British telecommunications company Inmarsat.

Wise believes that hijackers 'spoofed' the plane's navigation data to make it seem like it went in another direction, but flew it to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia.

However, Wise admits in New York Magazine that he does not know why Vladimir Putin would want to steal a plane full of people and that his idea is somewhat 'crazy'.

Wise also noted there were three Russian men onboard the flight, two of them Ukrainian passport holders.

Aviation disaster experts analysed satellite data and discovered - like the data recorded by Inmarsat - that the plane flew on for hours after losing contact.

Careful examination of the evidence has revealed that MH370 made three turns after the last radio call, first a turn to the left, then two more, taking the plane west, then south towards Antarctica.

MH370 WAS USED BY TERRORISTS FOR A SUICIDE ATTACK ON THE CHINESE NAVY

This extraordinary claim came from 41-year-old British yachtsman Katherine Tee, from Liverpool, whose initial account of seeing what she thought was a burning plane in the night sky made headlines around the world.

On arrival in Thailand's Phuket after sailing across the Indian Ocean from Cochin, southern India with her husband, she said: 'I could see the outline of the plane - it looked longer than planes usually do.There was what appeared to be black smoke streaming from behind.'

Ms Tee's general description of the time and place was vague and she lost all credibility when she later stated on her blog that she believed MH370 was a kamikaze plane that was aimed at a flotilla of Chinese ships and it was shot down before it could smash into the vessels.

Without solid proof of the satellite data, she wrote on her blog, Saucy Sailoress, the plane she saw was flying at low altitude towards the military convoy she and her husband had seen on recent nights. She added that internet research showed a Chinese flotilla was in the area at the time.

While the debris proved the plane went down in the Indian Ocean, the location of the main underwater wreckage  and its crucial black box data recorders  remains stubbornly elusive.

THE JET LANDED ON THE WATER AND WAS SEEN FLOATING ON THE ANDAMAN SEA

On a flight from Jeddah to Kuala Lumpur that crossed over the Andaman Sea on March 8, Malaysian woman Raja Dalelah, 53, saw what she believed was a plane sitting on the water's surface.

She didn't know about the search that had been started for MH370. She alerted a stewardess who told her to go back to sleep.

'I was shocked to see what looked like the tail and wing of an aircraft on the water,' she said.

It was only when she told her friends on landing in Kuala Lumpur what she had seen that she learned of the missing jet. She had seen the object at about 2.30pm Malaysian time.

She said she had been able to identify several ships and islands before noticing the silver object that she said was a plane.

But her story was laughed off by pilots who said it would have been impossible to have seen part of an aircraft in the water from 35,000ft or seven miles.

Ms Raja filed an official report with police the same day and has kept to her story.

'I know what I saw,' she said.

THE AIRCRAFT SUFFERED A CATASTROPHIC SYSTEMS FAILURE AND CRASH-LANDED ON THE OCEAN

A catastrophic event such as a fire disabling much of the equipment resulted in the pilots turning the plane back towards the Malaysian peninsula in the hope of landing at the nearest airport.

Satellite data, believable or not, suggests the aircraft did make a turn and theorists say there would be no reason for the pilots to change course unless confronted with an emergency.

A fire in a similar Boeing 777 jet parked at Cairo airport in 2011 was found to have been caused by a problem with the first officer's oxygen mask supply tubing.

Stewarts Law, which has litigated in a series of recent air disasters, believes the plane crashed after a fire - similar to the blaze on the Cairo airport runway - broke out in the cockpit.

After an investigation into the Cairo blaze, Egypt's Aircraft Accident Investigation Central Directorate (EAAICD) released their final report which revealed that the fire originated near the first officer's oxygen mask supply tubing.

The cause of the fire could not be conclusively determined, but investigators pinpointed a problem with the cockpit hose used to provide oxygen for the crew in the event of decompression.

Following the 2011 fire, US aircraft owners were instructed to replace the system - it was estimated to cost $2,596 (1,573) per aircraft. It was not known whether Malaysia Airlines had carried out the change.

If either pilot wanted to crash the plane, why turn it around? So the turn-around suggests they were trying to land as soon as possible because of an emergency.

THE US SHOT DOWN THE AIRCRAFT FEARING A TERROR ATTACK ON DIEGO GARCIA

The Boeing 777 was shot down by the Americans who feared the aircraft had been hijacked and was about to be used to attack the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia atoll in the Indian Ocean. So conspiracy theorists claim.

And former French airline director Marc Dugain said he had been warned by British intelligence that he was taking risks by investigating this angle.

There is no way of checking whether Dugain received such a warning or why he believes the Americans shot down the plane.

But adding to the theory that the aircraft was flown to Diego Garcia, either by the pilot Zaharie or a hijacker, was the claim that on the pilot's home flight simulator was a 'practice' flight to the island.

Professor Glees said: 'The Americans would have no interest in doing anything of the kind and not telling the world.

'In theory, they might wish to shoot down a plane they thought was attacking them but they wouldn't just fire missiles, they'd investigate it first with fighters and would quickly realise that even if it had to be shot down, the world would need to know.'This is the shocking moment cartel gangsters led a parade down a street in Mexico.

A viral video shows how members of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel [JNGC] drove a convoy down an avenue in Tlalixcoyan, a city in the state of Veracruz, on the evening of March 14.

Cops noticed 28 SUVs and pickup trucks with an army of armed men carrying military assault rifles while residents were out enjoying the festive scene at 9pm local time.

Police officers responded by assuring the safety of the carnival attendees.

'Taking into account that they outnumbered us by a lot in personnel and weaponry, we gave ourselves the task of protecting and monitoring the people that were enjoying the outing,' law enforcement officials said in a statement.

SUVs and trucks carrying cartel men paraded through a street in Tlalixcoyan. A couple of hours later, the cartel unleashed a wave of attacks against police forces in the region

Still image from a video recorded the evening of March 14 show the moment cartel members drive their SUV and trucks down an avenue in the Mexican state of Veracruz

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel was on its way to unleash a series of attacks against police forces in the Mexican state off the Gulf of Mexico.

At approximately 10:30pm, the JNGC led a massive assault against a police highway command unit on a road connecting the cities of La Tinaja-Cosamaloapan.

The gun battle left one police officer dead, and several vehicles, including one patrol car, were set one fire.

Shortly before midnight, the cartel engaged a police station house in the town of Tierra Blanca.

A nearly 20-minute gun fight was a retaliatory response to cops who had recently killed three members of the dangerous organization and seized a cache of weapons.

The cartel members fled the scene but left behind six Molotov cocktail bombs inside a vehicle.

The JNGC set two tractor trailers on fire in the middle of same road where they had battled the cops earlier.

Cops in Veracruz return fire after they were attacked at a station house in Tierra Blanca

At about 5am on March 15, Mexican police forces killed four suspected members of the New Jalisco Generation Cartel during a gun battle in Joachin. Pictured are two of the men that were declared dead at the scene

After a gun fight the early morning of March 15, police in Veracruz seized military assault weapons and a couple of vehicles belonging to the New Jalisco Generation Cartel

However, law enforcement officials did manage to keep track on some of them, killing four suspected cartel members during a 5am attack in the town of Joachin.

Hours later, the criminal faction left banners hanging from highway overpasses warning the head of the state police in Veracruz that he would be responsible for whatever happened going forward because another police chief known as 'Pescador' ['Fisherman'] had aligned himself with the rival cartel, Los Zetas.

Mexican authorities have been unsuccessful in capturing the leader of the New Jalisco Generation Cartel, Nemesio 'El Mencho' Oseguera Cervantes.

The 52-year-old man is the most-wanted in Mexico and one of the most-wanted criminals in the United States.

The U.S. government is offering a $10million award for information leading to his capture.

Mexican authorities have been unsuccessful in capturing the leader of the New Jalisco Generation Cartel, Nemesio 'El Mencho' Oseguera Cervantes. The United States government is offering a $10million reward for his arrestJordan Bradley, pictured enjoying cocktails on a sunshine holiday before returning to Manchester to burgle homes

A burglar who claimed he joined a string of raids because he was depressed after his girlfriend dumped him has been jailed for one year.

Jordan Bradley, 26, helped Kailem Barlow, 21, break into homes across north Manchester by smashing windows and stealing thousands of pounds worth of valuables - including cash, laptops, jewellery and bank cards.

When the pair were caught Barlow confessed to raiding almost 100 homes over a three-month period, including sheltered accommodation for the elderly.

Bradley claimed he helped Barlow on three of the raids because he had split up with his girlfriend and was feeling 'anxious and depressed.'

He was pictured enjoying cocktails and swimming pools on sunshine holidays before he returned to Manchester to carry out the burglaries.

One victim lost money he had been saving for a holiday.

At Manchester Crown Court Bradley, who is from Moston and has previous convictions for burglary, was jailed for 12 months after he pleaded guilty to three counts of burglary, handling stolen goods and assisting an offender.

Barlow, from Failsworth, admitted 17 charges of burglary and asked for 80 others to be taken into consideration.

He was jailed up for three years and four months.

Bradley (right) helped Kailem Barlow (left), 21, break into homes across north Manchester by smashing windows and stealing thousands of pounds worth of valuables - including cash, laptops, jewellery and bank cards

The court heard the raids occurred between April and November lat year across Moston, Harpurhey, Failsworth and Chadderton.

Prosecutor Rachel Widdicombe said in one burglary the victim was asleep when at 2.20am he woke to the sound of 'tapping and banging' and could hear Barlow saying 'unplug it' to another unnamed accomplice.

The victim went downstairs and saw both men in the living room having entered through a window which was smashed.

The pair fled empty handed but in a further raid a phone, a child's laptop, games and cash was stolen from a house while the victim was at church with her two children.

One resident who was targeted in one of the raids had to be referred to a psychiatrist for anxiety.

Barlow was arrested after his blood and fingerprints were found in several homes in Moston and Failsworth. He then voluntarily took police around the locality where he pointed out various other homes he had burgled.

In mitigation Bradley's lawyer Lee Hughes said: 'These burglaries were described as amateurish and he has expressed shame and embarrassment for the offending'

Bradley was arrested after collectable coins snatched during a raid were found at his home along with a set of car keys taken during another raid in which a mobile phone, a tablet, cash and jewellery worth 4,000 was stolen whilst the occupants were away in Germany. He gave no comment in police interview.

In mitigation Bradley's lawyer Lee Hughes said: 'His descent into offending was caused by loss of stability due to increased anxiety and depression by his brother having a serious condition.

'He was also dumped by his partner and he lost his accommodation shortly thereafter. He was led by others. These burglaries were described as amateurish and he has expressed shame and embarrassment for the offending. These proceedings have been a real eye opener to him and he has been assessed as a low risk of reoffending and harm.'

Sentencing judge Martin Rudland told Bradley: 'These burglaries are grave crimes as they involve innocent members of the public having to suffer the indignity of of having their homes searched. Whilst there was greater harm due to Barlow your offending was much more inept. However you should have have shown the maturity to take a step back and say: "I am not going to do this." '

Sentencing judge Martin Rudland told Bradley: 'Whilst there was greater harm due to Barlow your offending was much more inept'

For Barlow defence lawyer Stuart Duke said: 'He has been remorseful throughout his time in custody and wants the chance to start his life again. He said he knew what he was doing was wrong but his remorse is genuine, and he blames nobody but himself.'

In a statement to police one of the victims of the burglary spree said: 'This has left me feeling afraid in my own home, I'm frightened to go out and I am worried about them waiting for me when I get home.

'I am angry that someone felt they had the right to do this. I was saving this money for a holiday and this has left me without this. It's left me frightened that they could have hurt my dogs. I feel disgusted by the people who have done this.'

Another said: 'I don't feel safe in this house anymore, I don't know who the person is that's responsible for breaking in and forcing entry, but it's a horrible feeling that somebody has been in my own home going through my personal belongings. I don't have home insurance, so the cost has fallen on my shoulders.'

A third victim said: 'The burglary scared me, and I'm frightened in my own house, I am constantly checking on my children, I'm waking up in the night and my son is scared. I don't know how they have any right to come into my house and steal from me. I no longer feel safe in my own house and I am paranoid they are going to come back'.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an interview that it is 'possible' that President Donald Trump has been 'raised' by God to save the Jewish people from Iran.

Pompeo made the comments to the Christian Broadcast Network in an interview from Jerusalem during his visit, which precedes Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu's trip to Washington next week.

'I am confident that the Lord is at work here,' Pompeo told his the network.

During a lengthy discussion at the David Citadel Hotel overlooking Jerusalem's Old City, Pompeo was asked about the Jewish holiday of Purim, which falls on the day his comments were taped.

'I am confident that the Lord is at work here,' Pompeo said after being asked about any parallels between Trump's role combating Iran  the 'new Haman'  and Queen Esther's biblical role saving the Jews

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with Lebanon's President Michel Aoun at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon, Friday, March 22, 2019

Grand setting: Mike Pompeo spoke about his belief in the president doing 'the Lord's work' on an interview filmed the day before he met Lebanon's President Michel Aoun in the Baabda Palace in Beirut

Other meeting: Mike Pompeo met Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri at the government palace in Lebanon

Classical reminder: Mike Pompeo met Saad Hariri, Lebanon's prime minister, in the classically-styled government palace in Beirut

Biblical land: Mike Pompeo had prayed at the Western Wall of the Old City of Jerusalem on Thursday as part of his five-day Middle Eastern tour

The biblical story tells of how Queen Esther through cunning saved the Jewish people from being wiped out.

Interviewer Chris Mitchell asked Pompeo, the nation's top diplomat, asked whether Trump was here to 'save the Jewish people,' and made brought up the story as a parallel.

'And you also mentioned a Bible story last night when you had your statements with the prime minister,' Mitchell said.

'Jews worldwide and here in Jerusalem are talking about the fact that Esther 2,500 years ago saved the Jewish people with God's help from Haman. And now 2,500 years later there's a new Haman here in the Middle East that wants to eradicate the Jewish people like just like Haman did: the state of Iran,' he said.

Coronation of Esther, 5th century BC, as Jewish Queen of Persia, by King Ahasuerus (Xerxes) (Vincenzo Morani) Art (Paintings) - various Artist: MORANI, Vincenzo (1813-70, Italian)

Pompeo made his comments in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network from Jerusalem

'Could it be that President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?'

Pompeo responded: 'As a Christian I certainly believe that's possible.' He then spoke of his trip touring the archeological sites dating back 3,000 years.

'To see the remarkable history of the faith in this place and the work that our administration's done to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state remains. I am confident that the Lord is at work here,' Pompeo said, in a video clip put out by CBN.

'It was special for me as a Christian. It was special I think to show the commitment the United States has to this democracy, this Jewish nation of Israel,' Pompeo.

U.S Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, center, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and the Rabbi of the Western Wall Shmuel Rabinovitch, left, visits the Western Wall tunnels synagogue in Jerusalem's Old City on Thursday, March 21, 2019

TRAVELING COMPANION: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (L) with his wife Susan upon their arrival at Beirut International airport in Beirut, Lebanon. Pompeo arrived in Beirut on the last leg of his five-day Mideast tour that also took him to Kuwait and Israel

SMILE!U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil in Beirut, Lebanon

He spoke on a day President Trump said the U.S. should recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel, a move that if carried out would be a plum for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who must stand for reelection in weeks. The rest of the world recognizes the territory, seized from Syria in 1967 Six Day war, as occupied territory that should be a subject of talks.

In a Fox Business Network interview, Trump was asked if he took the action to help the embattled Netanyahu politically. ''No. I wouldn't even know about that,' the president said. 'I wouldn't even know about that I have no idea. I hear he is doing okay,' Trump said.

President Trump on Friday once again attacked the opposition Democratic Party as 'anti-Jewish,' a day after denying that his statement on the Golan Heights was meant to bolster Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu

Trump also pleased evangelical voters in the U.S. as well as the Netanyahu government last year by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, breaking with longstanding U.S. policy.

Pompeo also spoke about his own religious path in the interview.

'So I grew up going to church on Sundays, but frankly it wasn't a priority in my life growing up. I went off to West Point, and as a young cadet, during my freshman year there were two young men who were juniors who were true men of faith. And they held these little Bible study/cookie klatches on Sunday afternoons,' Pompeo said.

'And they invited all the cadets to see  it was purely voluntary. And I started showing up, and  truly remarkable. I started going to church every weekend on my own, because I wanted to be there to learn and to grow, and at some point during that first year I really did come to have an understanding of Jesus that was different than the one that I had before,' he said. 'It fundamentally changed my life.'

Pompeo noted that he 'swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States' when he assumed his post.

'But in each of those missions, the task that I have is informed by my understanding of my faith, my belief in Jesus Christ as the savior. It doesn't drive answers and outcomes every day,' he said. 'But it does inform how I try to treat every human being with dignity and respect in ways that Christians ought to.'In an in-person interview, Ricardo Belmar, Sr. Dr. Global Enterprise Marketing, Infovista explained the companys Ipanema SD-WAN has enhanced application intelligence as well as cloud-native orchestration.

He said, Our new solution allows QoE control via deep application visibility. He continued, It has been enhanced and can now recognize thousands of applications, not just hundreds.

He further explained, this includes cloud apps and the updates also are delivered via the cloud.

Moreover, these updates used to be delivered during software maintenance upgrades. Now, its always up to date, he exclaimed.

The network devices have end -to-end QoS based on dynamic queuing, allowing for the measuring of network conditions in real-time. This allows the enterprise to build performance profiles relating to the user experience for each application. They can then use this profile with different techniques on the network.

Infovistas Ipanema SD-WAN with new cloud-native management and control of applications tightly combines session-based routing and dynamic path selection of the underlay network with an overlay of deep application visibility and dynamic control of the quality of experience for business-critical applications.

Ricardo exclaimed, If the top priority application is payment processing, it will always gets fast response-time across the site, at all times. He continued, They can slow low priority traffic to allow this to happen.

He went on to say in one case, a customer who did exactly this saw 70% less errors as a result of doing just this.

He further explained, their solution works session-by-session, which is better than other solutions. They dont just move to another link, he explained.

We can also do this per call, he said. We can separate voice, video and data on different networks and sync on other end.

He said, this is called the Application Intelligence+.

The company has also moved the management platform from server-based, into the cloud  cloud-based orchestration. There is also zero-touch installs on edge-devices, allowing them to function once they get a DHCP address. The boxes simply phone home to the orchestrator, Ricardo explained.

The routing has also been enhanced and the solution can be the only CPE device  a router, WAN optimization device, Application Intelligence+ solution, routing and path selection all in one cohesive whole. This can also be provided via a VNF allowing carriers to provide these services.

Ricardo explained their solution does well in bake-offs, especially when competing with solutions using FEC which can be good over unreliable links but the trade-off is excessive use of bandwidth.

They also use dynamic queues which can grow or shrink as needed, taking from low-priority apps as needed to perhaps keep call quality high.

In short, Application Intelligence+ goes one step beyond vanilla SD-WAN and allows companies to better optimize their application performance which has been found to be directly linked to business performance, profitability and success.Two suspected gang members were burned alive by vigilantes moments after they reportedly shot a cab driver outside a church.

Cell phone images registered the disturbing moment Roger Ronald Gomez Carrillo, 23, and Edwin Herrera, 19, were set on fire by an angry mob Thursday morning in Mixco, Guatemala.

Gomez Carrillo and Herrera, alleged members of the Mara 18 criminal organization, reportedly drove up on a motorbike to Fardy Mayen Perez Miranda, a 23-year-old cab driver.

The gunmen were reportedly were part of a group extorting local tax drivers. They tried to hand Perez Miranda a cell phone while he was on a meal break inside his vehicle, according to Guatemalan news station TN 23.

He refused it and tried to drive away, but was fired upon by the assailants in front of a Mormon church.

WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGES

Taxi driver Fardy Mayen Perez Miranda, 23, (pictured) died from wounds to the chest and abdomen after he was shot by two alleged gang members in Guatemala on Thursday

Edwin Herrera, who was suspected member of the Mara 18, was burned alive by a mob in Guatemala after he and another man allegedly open fired and killed a cab driver

Shocking moment one of the two suspected gang members, who allegedly shot a cab driver in Guatemala, is tossed into a pile of debris that had been set on fire on Thursday.

A group of taxi drivers in the vicinity rushed to their colleague's aid and stopped the men from fleeing the scene.

Gomez Carrillo and Herrera were kicked, punched, and pelted with rocks before the angry mob lit them on fire as police officers could just watch.

One of the shooters is spotted in the video struggling to stay on his feet as his left leg is engulfed in flames while traffic comes to a standstill.

Eventually a police officer manages to throw dirt over him to put the flames out.

An alleged shooter (left) seeks help from a resident (right) in Mixco, Guatemala, shortly after vigilantes beat and set him on fire

On Thursday, an angry mob reacted to the shooting of a cab driver, who would later die at a hospital, by setting on fire Roger Ronald Gomez Carrillo and Edwin Herrera, who are suspected of being members of the Mara 18 gang in Guatemala. One of the shooting suspects (picture) runs for help as his left leg is in flames

Edy Guillermo Sanchez (left) attacks one of the two men who allegedly shot dead a 23-year-old cab driver they reportedly tried to extort Thursday in Guatemala. The suspect in this picture was later tossed into debris (pictured to the right) that had been set on fire

Another cab driver, reportedly identified as Edy Guillermo Sanchez, is seen delivering a kick to the other shooter as he tries to escape the flames. The man then makes a gesture with his hands to encourage people to join in on the beating.

Seconds later, the man and another person toss the suspected gunmen into a pile of burning debris.

Sanchez, 26, was arrested hours later, with police saying he incited the violence.

The shot cab driver and the suspected shooters were all taken to a local hospital where they died hours later.

Perez Miranda suffered gun shots to the chest and abdomen and lost a huge amount of blood that led to his death.

Gomez Carrillo and Herrera were alive when they were taken to hospital but were declared dead hours later after suffering burns to more than 80 percent of their bodies.

Police officers investigate the perimeter where two Guatemalan men with alleged ties to a gang reportedly shot a cab driver. The used a motorcycle (pictured) during the attack

The cab driver's vehicle and the alleged shooters' motorcycle remained at the site of the crimeAdvertisement

RVs are everywhere and anywhere around Los Angeles  clusters of them on residential streets, in industrial parks, near high schools and church parking lots.

There are thousands of them, dotted around the city and the county, in a trend thats impossible to miss  and one that extends across the Golden State. From Palo Alto to Sacramento and San Francisco, the proliferation of RV and vehicle living has become more and more obvious in recent years against a backdrop of complex socioeconomic issues.

Many of these are not holidaymakers or pleasure seekers; in fact, thousands of RV dwellers are homeless. And their numbers are actually difficult to quantify.

California, which is home to 12 percent of the US population, also hosts a disproportionate amount of the nations homeless at 22 percent. But many do not fit the stereotype of homelessness; they dont have drug or alcohol or psychiatric problems. They are employed, just not making enough to afford the states still-rising rental prices. Some dont consider themselves homeless at all, simply viewing the unorthodox housing choice as just that  a choice, and a cheaper one.

An entirely new cottage industry of RV and vehicle landlords has cropped up to fill the demand, renting out everything from bunk beds to box trucks to people who earn far more than minimum wage.

Scroll down for video

PALO ALTO: A line of RVs is parked near the entrance to Stanford University along El Camino Real, which has long been a popular spot for people living in mobile homes. California is home to about 12 percent of the US population but a disproportionate number of the nation's homeless at 22 percent

LOS ANGELES: The city's iconic palm trees and distant mountains form the backdrop for a string of camper vans on the streets of the West Rancho Dominguez/Compton area of the City of Angels

LOS ANGELES: One homeless resident, who gave his name as Joe, pushes some of his possessions near a line of RVs on the streets of the Canoga Park area of the City of Angels

It is illegal in many parts of California to sleep in vehicles on the streets, with occupants subject to fines and tickets and action by police, so lines and clusters of RVs tend to be relatively small and move often - fueled by the complaints of locals who consider their presence a nuisance or an eyesore

Getting accurate data in cities like Los Angeles and across the entire state has its complications, says Russ Heimerich, deputy secretary of communications for Californias Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. The figures are usually based on point and time counts, when staff go out in January to look for people who are demonstrably homeless. They go to the shelters, but youre not going to stop and knock on somebodys RV necessarily and say, Are you here because youre camping in a Walmart parking lot because youre cruising the country, or are you here because you got placed out of your home? Those point in time counts probably wouldnt catch those

And a growing wave of resentment is spreading across the state just as quickly as the trend in vehicle living itself. The topic is ubiquitous at town council meetings from San Diego to San Francisco, as residents toss out a variety of complaints  everything from trash and unsanitary conditions to drug dealing and, simply, the fact that they consider parked campers in residential areas to be eyesores that bring down the value of their suburban communities.

The reality, however, cannot be ignored.

In Los Angeles, 2018 data recorded 45,043 homeless people last year, according to the citys Homeless Services Authority. Seventy-five percent of those people were in unsheltered accommodation, with 3,814 people in cars, 3,554 people in vans and 8,380 in RVs and Campers.

But getting accurate data in cities like Los Angeles and across the entire state has its complications, says Russ Heimerich, deputy secretary of communications for Californias Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. The figures are usually based on point and time counts, when staff go out in January to look for people who are demonstrably homeless.

They go to the shelters, but youre not going to stop and knock on somebodys RV necessarily and say, Are you here because youre camping in a Walmart parking lot because youre cruising the country, or are you here because you got placed out of your home? Those point in time counts probably wouldnt catch those.

He tells DailyMail.com: One of the major causes of homelessness is, frankly, the high cost of housing in California, and so we are working on initiatives to get local governments to approve and plan for housing and make it easier to plan for developers who want to build housing to do so.

The state has almost six million households that pay rent as opposed to owning; of those, more than three million households pay more than 30 percent of their income towards rent, which is a very large percent, Heimerich tells DailyMail.com. And more than 1.7million households pay more than 50 percent of their income toward rent.

He adds: Many, many families in California are one pay check away from being homeless. They lose a job or they have a sudden medical emergency where they have to use the money for hospitalization or doctors or whatever, instead of paying the rent  in California, anyway, and I suspect elsewhere, there is a large percentage of the homeless who are those people who have had that one disaster and can no longer afford to pay rent.

Its not that theyre without a job; in some cases, its just that theyre priced out of their homes or somehow economically forced out of their homes. We have a large number of people here that, if you were looking at them on the street, you would never guess that they were homeless, that theyre sleeping in cars, RVs, or there are a lot of people couch surfing with friends, that sort of thing.

Above, a map that shows where RVs in Palo Alto line up along El Camino Real, near the entrance to Stanford University, which has long been a popular spot for people living in mobile homes

In addition to RVs, many people have resorted to living in vehicles. In Los Angeles, 2018 data recorded 45,043 homeless people last year, according to the citys Homeless Services Authority. Seventy-five percent of those people were in unsheltered accommodation, with 3,814 people in cars, 3,554 people in vans and 8,380 in RVs and campers

One car resident, who gave her name as Mariola, sits near a luxury apartment complex in the Canoga Park area of Los Angeles. According to Russ Heimerich, deputy secretary of communications for Californias Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, in the state there are 'almost six million households that pay rent as opposed to owning; of those, more than three million households pay more than 30 percent of their income towards rent, which is a very large percent. And more than 1.7million households pay more than 50 percent of their income toward rent

RVs and camper vans are parked everywhere from church lots to residential streets to industrial parks - and councils across the state have received complaints from locals who allege trash discarding, lack of sanitary conditions, illicit activity and other problems

The scale of the problem has become so large that grassroots organizations and other efforts have sprung up to get RVs and vehicles off the streets and instead allow them to park in designated, guarded, often secret locations

The homeless crisis has sparked something of a cottage industry for opportunistic landlords who buy RVs, vans and box trucks to rent out to desperate tenants

One problem with ascertaining accurate numbers is that it's hard to distinguish between people actually living in camper vans and people on vacation; on top of that, many people might not want to admit that they are homeless, and others con't consider themselves homeless at all, instead calling their transiency a lifestyle choice

Above, a line of RVs parked near the entrance to Stanford University is seen along El Camino Real road in Palo Alto. This has long been a popular spot for mobile homes

Above, a map showing where in Compton that RVs tend to park, which is along S. Broadway from Rosecrans Ave. to 133rd St. California, which is home to 12 percent of the US population, also hosts a disproportionate amount of the nations homeless at 22 percent

The problem has become so widespread that grassroots organizations and other efforts have sprung up to provide safe parking places for such displaced individuals. Its actually illegal in many parts of California to sleep on the street in a parked vehicle, so many of the working homeless face fines, tickets and being moved on by police  contributing to the mobile nature of parking sites and the fact that rarely more than a dozen vehicles are parked together at any one time.

Emily Uyeda Kantrim is a program director for SafeParkingLA, a non-profit which accepts applications daily from people looking for guarded, specifically identified and often secret locations to park and sleep. In a 30-day period, she tells DailyMail.com, her organization gets about 250 applications.

Of those, about 100 are homeless for the first time and not connected to any other services, she says. They dont know about homeless services; maybe to them that means going to a physical shelter and having to stay there for whatever reason. Out of that 100, 60 are under the age of 40 and have a job  so that was a new statistic that no one else has really dialled down into before.

She says: Weve seen  and this is born out in other statistics as well  more young people who are just excluded from the rental market due to the cost, as well as seniors who are on a fixed income and who are being displaced from their historic communities.

She tells DailyMail.com: I can tell you that out of the number of people who contact us who are in RVs, these are people who primarily have felt they have no way back into housing. A family will call and say, What do you have out here, because we have been displaced from our neighbourhood; we cant afford it anymore. So we bought this RV so our kids can go to the same school.

People are trying to make peace with the reality of their situation by trying to do something; they dont realize its not legal to park your RV on a regular city street and sleep in it.

Another issue with figuring out the scale of the problem  and fixing it  is that many people do not want to admit they are homeless or even think of themselves as homeless in the first place, instead considering their transient living a lifestyle choice and a true home.

Uyeda Kantrim emphasises that people need to be more educated about services available to them, while Heimerich points to the fact that the state government is increasingly trying to allocate funds for more services and more affordable housing.

Examples of initiatives, for example, include legislation last year that put $500million in the hands of local jurisdictions specifically to help with homelessness. Another half a billion dollars has been earmarked similarly for homeless initiatives, he tells DailyMail.com.

Above, a map that shows where mobile homes line up in Canoga Park, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, on Erwin St., and in the area of Canoga Ave. and Osborne St.

Many, many families in California are one pay check away from being homeless. They lose a job or they have a sudden medical emergency where they have to use the money for hospitalization or doctors or whatever, instead of paying the rent  in California, anyway, and I suspect elsewhere, there is a large percentage of the homeless who are those people who have had that one disaster and can no longer afford to pay rent. Its not that theyre without a job; in some cases, its just that theyre priced out of their homes or somehow economically forced out of their homes. We have a large number of people here that, if you were looking at them on the street, you would never guess that they were homeless, that theyre sleeping in cars, RVs, or there are a lot of people couch surfing with friends, that sort of thing

General views show RVs parked near Stanford; across California, community responses to the growing number of camper vans and other vehicles has varied wildly. Some homeowners befriend the homeless and working displaced, even offering facilities such as showers in their homes, while others complain to councils and even fight with neighbors who help the itinerant newcomers, accusing them of facilitating the trend

Official figures - or as close as possible - are usually obtained annually in January, when Heimerich says staff go out to look for people who are demonstrably homeless. He adds: They go to the shelters, but youre not going to stop and knock on somebodys RV necessarily and say, Are you here because youre camping in a Walmart parking lot because youre cruising the country, or are you here because you got placed out of your home? Those point in time counts probably wouldnt catch those

Emily Uyeda Kantrim is a program director for SafeParkingLA, a non-profit which accepts applications daily from people looking for guarded, specifically identified and often secret locations to park and sleep. In a 30-day period, she tells DailyMail.com, her organization gets about 250 applications. Of those, about 100 are homeless for the first time and not connected to any other services, she says. They dont know about homeless services; maybe to them that means going to a physical shelter and having to stay there for whatever reason. Out of that 100, 60 are under the age of 40 and have a job  so that was a new statistic that no one else has really dialled down into before

Uyeda Kantrim tells DailyMail.com: I can tell you that out of the number of people who contact us who are in RVs, these are people who primarily have felt they have no way back into housing. A family will call and say, What do you have out here, because we have been displaced from our neighbourhood; we cant afford it anymore. So we bought this RV so our kids can go to the same school'

At a meeting last year at City Hall, the Los Angeles Times reported how multilple residents of a South LA neighbhorhood pleaded for new restrictions on trucks and RVs parking in the area, with one woman alleging the street across from her church had become an eyesore over the last year, cluttered with trash and sewage dumped by people living there in campers and buses. Others claimed to have seen drug deals taking place openly.

RV communities have been moved on from industrial parks where business people claim theyre losing clientele, and suburban residents  however true or not  have insisted theyve seen needles in public parks and evidence of drug use. Neighborhood tensions have even risen when some homeowners let vehicle dwellers use their home showers or other facilities, with locals opposed arguing that such altruism makes the areas more attractive to itinerant riff-raff

Even walking down the street to pick up my newspaper Im getting complaints, Councilman Bob Blumenfield told the LA Times last year. We dont want our neighborhoods to become campsites

That doesnt mean that the more widespread and home-owning communities are exactly thrilled with the situation. Palo Alto may see swathes of well-maintained, high-end RVs, but theres no denying that decrepit camper vans with non-working residents, often involved in questionable activities, take up residence in neighborhoods where they are not wanted. There have been complaints of trash, filth, drugs and other illicit activities.

At a meeting last year at City Hall, the Los Angeles Times reported how multiple residents of a South LA neighborhood pleaded for new restrictions on trucks and RVs parking in the area, with one woman alleging the street across from her church had become an eyesore over the last year, cluttered with trash and sewage dumped by people living there in campers and buses. Others claimed to have seen drug deals taking place openly.

Even walking down the street to pick up my newspaper Im getting complaints, Councilman Bob Blumenfield told the LA Times. We dont want our neighborhoods to become campsites.

RV communities have been moved on from industrial parks where business people claim theyre losing clientele, and suburban residents  however true or not  have insisted theyve seen needles in public parks and evidence of drug use. Neighborhood tensions have even risen when some homeowners let vehicle dwellers use their home showers or other facilities, with locals opposed arguing that such altruism makes the areas more attractive to itinerant riff-raff.

Cities such as Berkeley have moved larger encampments from public areas such as the local marina, only to worsen the reactions of residents when the RVs and vans re-appear in different regional spots.

The Chamber said it has received a range of complaints from local businesses due to deteriorating conditions in the neighborhood, local publication Berkeleyside reported last autumn. Such negative impacts include making parking spots rare for employees and residents, waste containers getting poured down storm drains, evidence of campers urinating and defecating on public sidewalks and/or private property, and feeling unsafe around campers who are exhibiting mentally ill or otherwise aggressive behaviors.

Some proposed solutions in similar cities have been to issue permits for varying periods of time, as well as designated sanitary and other humanitarian facilities.

The California government is attempting to funnel more funds towards homelessness and services, but many people remain unaware of options available to them or unwilling to engage with services. While new trends show growing numbers of families and working professionals simply priced out of the housing market, traditional issues with some homeless involving addiction and other illnesses also still remain

There is an upcoming safe parking conference in May, and Uyeda Kantrim describes a sense of urgency  telling DailyMail.com that a way must be figured out to specifically serve RVs and make sure people are not just looking for this to the be lowest level of housing  that it actually becomes temporary in nature

The caliber of RVs and camper vans varies wildly, with some expensive models such as these pictured in Canoga Park in Los Angeles and others decrepit and badly in need of repair

Cities such as Berkeley have moved larger encampments from public areas such as the local marina, only to worsen the reactions of residents when the RVs and vans re-appear in different regional spots

Heimerich tells DailyMail.com: 'One of the major causes of homelessness is, frankly, the high cost of housing in California, and so we are working on initiatives to get local governments to approve and plan for housing and make it easier to plan for developers who want to build housing to do so

Heimerich tells DailyMail.com that, when it comes to many people living in RVs or vehicles: Its not that theyre without a job; in some cases, its just that theyre priced out of their homes or somehow economically forced out of their homes. We have a large number of people here that, if you were looking at them on the street, you would never guess that they were homeless, that theyre sleeping in cars, RVs, or there are a lot of people couch surfing with friends, that sort of thing

The Chamber said it has received a range of complaints from local businesses due to deteriorating conditions in the neighborhood, local publication Berkeleyside reported last autumn. Such negative impacts include making parking spots rare for employees and residents, waste containers getting poured down storm drains, evidence of campers urinating and defecating on public sidewalks and/or private property, and feeling unsafe around campers who are exhibiting mentally ill or otherwise aggressive behaviors

Uyeda Kantrim says there is an upcoming convention in May with all the Southern California State parking vendors from places like San Diego and Santa Barbara  really trying to understand how to do this at scale. Theres a lot of statewide movement on this, and we feel very privileged to be able to have figured out a very nimble way of trying to build programs at a neighborhood level  and have people picking up this model and do it wherever they live. Because its definitely doable, she tells DailyMail.com

Above, a look at motor homes lining the road in Palo Alto. California is grappling with an uptick of those living in RVs, and Uyeda Kantrim, who is working on the front lines and seeing everyone from families and students to senior citizens, describes a sense of urgency  telling DailyMail.com that a way must be figured out to specifically serve RVs and make sure people are not just looking for this to the be lowest level of housing  that it actually becomes temporary in nature'

But the needs and the situations of the occupants of vehicle dwellers across the state genuinely vary wildly. One newfound landlord included Russell Savala, who shared his story in 2017 with Marketplace.org  which described his growing fleet of box trucks and RVs for rent in the [Silver Lake] neighbourhood that he and his business partner, an electrician, have bought for cheap and cleaned up.

One of his tenants at the time was Melody Groundflyer, who rented a box truck from him  despite bringing home $45,000 a year as a cable technician.

I dont have a minimum wage job, but its a struggle to find a place you can afford, she told Marketplace.org.

Savala described one of his other properties, an RV which he was renting out bunk by bunk.

Two beds, shared living section, he told Marketplace.org, which added that the bunk  two years ago  was going for $200 per a week, the whole RV for $1,000 a month and box trucks for $500 per month.

Which is insane, honestly, Savala told Marketplace.org. But you dont have a contract, you dont have a deposit or anything. So it works for some people.

But Uyeda Kantrim, working on the front lines and seeing everyone from families and students to senior citizens, describes a sense of urgency  telling DailyMail.com that a way must be figured out to specifically serve RVs and make sure people are not just looking for this to the be lowest level of housing  that it actually becomes temporary in nature.'

She mentions an upcoming convention in May with all the Southern California State parking vendors from places like San Diego and Santa Barbara  really trying to understand how to do this at scale.

Theres a lot of statewide movement on this, and we feel very privileged to be able to have figured out a very nimble way of trying to build programs at a neighborhood level  and have people picking up this model and do it wherever they live.

Because its definitely doable, she says.Eight more migrants have been detained by Border Force agents after trying to cross the Channel today.

Immigration officials were alerted to a small inflatable boat near St Margaret's Bay in Dover, Kent, at around 6am this morning.

Border Force and Kent Police attended the scene and detained one person.

Then at 7.30am, another small vessel was spotted heading towards Dungeness, Kent, with seven people discovered and seized.

Border Force officials detained eight more migrants crossing the Channel this morning, including a group of seven stopped near Dungeness. Pictured are some of the seven being ferried ashore from a Border Force cutter

It comes after 16 Iraqi nationals - including women and children - were stopped in the Channel on Tuesday, while 18 Eritreans - 11 men, six women and a child - were found in the back of a German lorry during a random stop on the M26 last week.

The group of seven stopped today, whose nationalities have not yet been confirmed, have been brought to Dover where they will be medically assessed. The ages of those involved have not yet been revealed.

Retired coastguard officer Andy Roberts said he believed the numbers of people attempting to make the dangerous crossing would only increase.

He said: 'The people traffickers will be rubbing their hands together with glee now the weather and the conditions have improved.

'They've been waiting a few weeks for conditions like this so they can bring more over.

'As summer approaches there will be a bigger increase.'

The nationalities and ages of the group of seven, pictured, have not been revealed and they have undergone medical checks this morning

Hundreds of migrants have made the perilous trip across the Dover Strait - the busiest shipping lane in the world - since last November.

It sparked Home Secretary Sajid Javid to haul in extra Border Force cutters in the Channel to tackle the problem.

Speaking earlier this week, a Home Office spokesperson said: 'Anyone crossing the Channel - one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world - is taking a huge risk with their life.

'Since the Home Secretary declared a major incident in December we have tripled the number of cutters operating in the Channel, agreed a joint action plan with France and increased activity out of the Joint Coordination and Information Centre in Calais.The Coalition holds a narrow one per cent lead over Labor in the last poll before the country's largest state election.

Residents in New South Wales will head to polling booths between 8am and 6pm on Saturday to elect representatives in the upper and lower houses.

On the eve of the election, a NSW Newspoll for The Weekend Australian showed the Coalition were ahead of Labor 51 to 49 per cent in a two-party-preferred poll.

The lead is the Coalition's best Newspoll result in two years, representing a 3.3 per cent swing away from the government compared with its 2015 election result.

Gladys Berejiklian's (pictured) Liberal party holds a narrow one per cent lead over Labor in the last poll before the country's largest state election

A similar result at the election would see Premier Gladys Berejiklian lose six seats, meaning she would need the support of at least one independent from the crossbench to form a government.

If the Coalition win on Saturday, it would be the first time since 1971 that a Liberal Party-led government in NSW had won a third consecutive term and Ms Berejiklian would become the first popularly elected female premier in NSW history.

The Newspoll showed the Coalition has lost support outside Sydney, with a six per cent slump in primary-vote support to 39 per cent, deadlocking it with Labor at 50-50 on a two-party-preferred basis.

Ms Berejiklian leads Labor leader Michael Daley 43 to 35 as preferred premier, but 22 per cent of voters remained uncommitted.

Mr Daley's disapproval rating rose nine points from 38 per cent to 47 and his satisfaction rating dropped five points from 37 to 32.

Ms Berejiklian leads Labor leader Michael Daley (pictured) 43-35 in premier stakes but 22 per cent of voters remained uncommitted

Ms Berejiklian emerged victorious at the People's Forum on Wednesday where she debated key policies with Mr Daley.

From an audience of 100 undecided voters, Ms Berejiklian managed to draw 50 in favour of the Coalition while the opposition leader only managed to draw 25 votes. The final 25 were undecided.

A series of blunders from Mr Daley helped lift Ms Berejiklian to the top as the Labor leader drew blanks on a number of his party's policies.

The debate came after a September 2018 video of Mr Daley surfaced where he claimed young people were being forced to 'flee' Sydney because educated Asian migrants were stealing their jobs.

A bad week for Mr Daley also hurt Labor's primary vote, which is now at 35 per cent.

The Coalition's statewide primary vote is up one to 41 per cent, with the Greens steady at ten per cent and 'others', which includes independents, One Nation and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party, also steady at 14 per cent.

Residents in NSW will head to polling booths between 8am and 6pm on Saturday to determine which major party will form government

Ms Berejiklian and the Coalition government have been slammed by Labor for their controversial plan to knock down Allianz Stadium in Sydney's eastern suburbs.

Major demolition works have already begun on the stadium, which will be bulldozed and replaced with a new one at a cost of $729 million.

Mr Daley has been pushing to stop the works until at least after the election, on the basis that if he is elected he will refurbish the stadium at a lower cost.

'It will be close,' Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney.

'We need to finish the projects we've started, we need to begin the new ones.'

Ms Berejiklian has also come under fire for her hard-line stance against drug testing following a spate of drug-related deaths at music festivals.

A number of music festivals have since been cancelled due to high costs of new rules governing the events, including increased security.Good Samaritans have helped raise over $11,000 for an 80-year-old Chicago empanada vendor who sells his treats for just $1 each and was robbed twice in the last two weeks.

Modesto Fuentes, 80, is a hardworking Chicago man who walks six miles around Gage Park three times a week selling his cheap empanadas.

He's trying raising $15,000 to retire in Mexico and to place a new cross over his wife Juana's grave as she passed away several years ago.

Despite his hard efforts, he's been robbed twice over the last two weeks, once terrifyingly at gunpoint where he lost his meager $38 dollar profit made that day.

Widower Modesto Fuentes, 80, is an empanadas vendor in Chicago who was robbed twice over the past two weeks as he sold his treats, including once at gunpoint

The modest man is trying to save up $15,000 to retire in Mexico and to visit his wife Juana's grave

The Chicago man walks six miles around Gage Park three times a week to sell his $1 treats

'They took $40 and four empanadas. I just want to earn an honest living,' Fuentes said through a translator to CBS.

When his customer Tania Rangel heard of the robbery she was outraged and shared his harrowing story on Facebook.

'I just wanted to have people support him. People were commenting, "hey, start a GoFundMe for him,"' Rangel said.

Rangel set up the GoFundMe page to win back Fuentes' losses, starting out with a of $1,000. But she was left completely shocked by the overwhelming support that flooded her way.

She reset the goal to $10,000 and the page has already surpassed that, hitting more than $11,300 by Friday afternoon.

'I started with a goal of $1,000, just trying to help him. And then it started raising and raising. People were like, "add more, add more,"' she said.

'They took $40 and four empanadas. I just want to earn an honest living,' Fuentes said, recalling how he was robbed twice in the past two weeks

Customer Tania Rangel (left) heard of the robbery, shared his story online, and started the GoFundMe page for him

Fuentes says his life has been difficult after his wife Juana died several years ago

The GoFundMe page raised a whopping $10,726 by Friday morning. It has since climbed to more than $11,300

More than 550 kind-hearted people have donated to Fuentes' cause.

'I see my dad in him and I wanted to do whatever I could for him,' Rangel said.

She details Fuente's dire situation on the GoFundMe page, explaining that life has been difficult for him following his wife's death.

'His name is Modesto and he sells delicious empanadas and I have been buying from him the last few years. I ran into him today and he told me about how hard it has been lately. His wife died a couple years ago and his only job is to sell these empanadas,' she wrote in the page.

'He has been robbed a couple of times and as recent as two days ago he was robbed at gun point and they took the only $38 dollars he had made the whole day! This hurt my soul to know people are stealing and terrorizing an older man that is out in the hot and cold making a few dollars a day!' she added, urging people to donate.

The initial goal of the page was to recover his losses and the cost of future groceries but it looks like it may soon reach $15,000, giving Fuente the Mexico retirement he's always dreamed of.A son of missionaries who later married into the family of an African dictator has admitted to his role in an international counterfeiting operation.

Ryan Gustafson, 28, an American married to the granddaughter of the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and counterfeiting counts on Thursday in Pittsburgh.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that prosecutors said Gustafson's operation was uncovered after one of his confederates bought coffee in Pittsburgh with a fake $100 bill.

Ryan Gustafson, 28, (pictured), an American married to the granddaughter of the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and counterfeiting charges

The U.S. Secret Service said Gustafson had originally been arrested in Uganda in 2014 when police there raided his residence and found fake money and other evidence linking him to a counterfeiting ring.

Gustafson, who is the son of missionaries and is originally from Montana, was extradited from Africa to Pittsburgh in December 2015 to face trial here.

Asked by U.S. District Judge Mark Hornak how he pleaded, he answered 'guilty' to three counts and acknowledged responsibility for others which can be considered at sentencing.

He faces charges including conspiracy to manufacture and sell counterfeit currency, conspiracy to launder money and committing counterfeiting acts outside the U.S.

Gustafson is married to Sherry Amin Gustafson, granddaughter of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and his father-in-law is Taban Amin, is a high-ranking Ugandan official, according to TribLive.com.

Gustafson is accused of leading an international counterfeit U.S. currency operation headquartered in Uganda, which flooded the country and the U.S. with more than $2 million in counterfeit Federal Reserve Notes.

Although counterfeit notes were manufactured in Uganda, by December 2013, the bills were being passed in Pittsburgh-area retail stores and businesses.

His plea deal calls for a sentence of 74 months, which takes into account time he already served in a Ugandan prison for counterfeiting.

When he was arrested, police raided his residence and found fake money, computers, printers and life-like rubber gloves called 'Anon Hands' designed to conceal fingerprints.

Gustafson is married to Sherry Amin Gustafson, granddaughter of the late former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, (pictured)

Assistant U.S. Attorney Shardul Desai claimed that in 2013 he set up a site on the dark web called Community-X, which was dedicated to buying and selling counterfeit bills.

He used the pseudonym 'Willy Clock' or 'Jack Farrel' for his operation, the Department of Justice said in a statement.

He later split the site into two sites, using one to sell and ship counterfeit money to U.S. customers who would wire him real money as payment.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, one customer was Joe Graziano, a former Bank of New York Mellon employee in Pittsburgh who used a fake bill to buy a latte at Peets Coffee Shop in Oakland in 2013.

That transaction launched the investigation that led to Gustafson.

General Idi Amin Dada seized power after a coup in January 1971. Ex-Officer in the Ugandan Army and alleged 'guerrilla' Tom Masaba is stripped of his clothes and tied to a tree before his execution at Mbale, (pictured)

A Tanzanian soldier looks at the bodies of men who were massacred by Amin's secret police during the fall of Kampala

Graziano was sentenced to to 7 and a half years in federal prison and ordered to pay more than $4 million in restitution to various corporate victims he defrauded through various financial scams.

Gustafson is due to be sentenced on July 23 although that date could change. If convicted of the charges, he faces for a prison sentence of 45 years, a fine of $1,000,000, or both.

Sherdal Desai said Gustafson is a flight risk as his wife and child are in Uganda and he has insisted that he wants to be with them there.

'He fought aggressively to prevent his deportation back to the United States, including refusing a medical examination,' Desai said in court papers.

He also claimed that Gustafsons passport is missing and he can make a fake one with his computer skills.

His missionary parents are living in Rwanda, and hes spent most of his life in Africa despite his ties to the U.S., Desai said.

Idi Amin ruled the East African country of Uganda from 1971 until he was deposed by a combined Ugandan rebel and Tanzanian force in 1979.

It is estimated that more than 200,000 Ugandans were tortured and murdered during Amins regime, while human rights groups put the figure closer to 500,000 people. He died from kidney failure in 2003 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.The Ohio vice squad that arrested porn star Stormy Daniels on charges that were later tossed out has been disbanded in the wake of misconduct allegations.

Columbus Police Department interim chief Tom Quinlan announced on Tuesday that he was disbanding the 10-officer unit behind Daniel's arrest in July on suspicion of inappropriately touching an undercover officer.

'Today I removed three officers from their vice assignments, and notified the remaining seven vice officers that I am abolishing their assignments,' Quinlan said in a video posted to the department's Twitter account.

'The vice unit is currently undergoing an internal review by the investigative deputy chief,' the chief continued.

Stormy Daniels is seen at the 2019 Adult Video News Awards in January. She was arrested by the Columbus vice squad in July but the charges were dropped hours later

It comes just weeks after one of the squad's officer, 55-year-old Andrew K. Mitchell, was accused of kidnapping two women under the guise of an arrest and forcing them to exchange sex for their freedom.

Vice squad officer Andrew K. Mitchell was accused of coercing women into sex

Mitchell, a veteran officer of 30 years, was charged with witness tampering, obstruction of justice and making a false statement to federal investigators as well as with two other lesser charges.

The indictment also alleged that he had engaged in paid sex with numerous prostitutes. Mitchell has pleaded not guilty and denies all of the allegations.

The charges were the latest black eye for the Columbus vice squad, which drew national scrutiny of the arrest of Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Cliffords.

Daniels was performing at Sirens strip club when officers conducting an undercover sting accused her of 'fondling' patrons and cops in violation of Ohio's strip club laws.

Prosecutors dropped charges hours later, saying the law cited in Daniels' arrest applied only to those who regularly performed at the club.

Daniels was performing at Sirens strip club in July when she was arrested in a sting

An internal department review released earlier this month found that the arrest was improper but not planned ahead of time or politically motivated.

Officers who went to Sirens strip club that night were targeting the club and not Daniels as part of an ongoing investigation into alleged illegal activity, according to the review.

Those alleged activities including human trafficking, underage drinking and drug dealing, the report said.

But the investigation that night shifted to a narrower investigation of alleged illegal touching of customers by dancers, according to the report.

Daniels is taken into custody in this image from a police bodycam. Undercover officers said that she was 'fondling' patrons and undercover officers in violation of Ohio strip club law

Daniels was taken into custody but prosecutors dropped the charges hours laterw

Officers chose to obtain evidence for such touching 'by placing themselves, unnecessarily, at risk and potential for physical contact with Ms. Clifford,' the report concluded.

Earlier this year, Daniels sued several Columbus police officers for $2 million over that arrest.

Daniels' federal defamation lawsuit alleges that officers conspired to retaliate against her because of her claims she had sex with Donald Trump before he became president.

The officers 'believed that Ms. Clifford was damaging President Trump and they thereafter entered into a conspiracy to arrest her during her performance in Columbus in retaliation for the public statements she had made regarding President Trump,' according to the lawsuit.Syracuse resident Ron Rockwell Hansen, 59, is charged with espionage after prosecutors allege he was paid thousands by Chinese agents for information

A former case officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency faces 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to spying on the United States on behalf of China.

Syracuse resident Ron Rockwell Hansen, 59, is charged with espionage after prosecutors allege he was paid thousands by Chinese agents for information.

The ex-warrant officer, who retired from the U.S. Army in 2006 and took up a post at the Defense Intelligence Agency, learned to speak Russian and Mandarin-Chinese fluently, and was later hired to his brother's cyber-security firm H-11 Digital Forensics.

It is alleged that by 2014, Hansen was on the Chinese payroll and had earned many thousands from his work as a double-agent.

As part of his espionage directive Hansen tried to solicit information from a DIA intelligence officer between May 2016 and June 2018.

He taught the agent how to clandestinely record and transmit information at the Chinese agents' behest, which he then planned to sell for $200,000.

However, that agent reported Hansen to the FBI who began investigating him. Court documents show he had already been on their radar after he previously tried to access classified information.

The ex warrant officer, who retired from the U.S. Army in 2006 and took up a post at the Defense Intelligence Agency, learned to speak Russian and Mandarin-Chinese fluently, and was later hired to his brother's cyber-security firm H-11 Digital Forensics (DIA HQ is pictured)

FBI agents took Hansen into custody in June, when he was traveling to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to take a connecting flight to China.

Chinese agents had demanded the 'China ops plan' - the U.S. military's operational strategy for potential military intervention with China, court documents show.

On June 2, 2018, Hansen met with the officer, who was now a secret source for the FBI, and was handed the classified documents before his scheduled flight to China.

Hansen was initially charged with 15 counts related to espionage, however he only pleaded guilty to the first charge - attempt to gather or deliver defense information.

Prosecutors are expected to ask the court to dismiss the remaining 14, which include bulk cash smuggling and acting as an agent of a foreign government.

Hansens plea agreement included a stipulated sentence of 15 years, although the court must approve the prison time.

He is scheduled to be formally sentenced September 24.The treasurer of a New York police charity, who is accused of stealing more than $400,000 so she could pay for Barbra Streisand tickets and her grandchild's private school tuition, was seen trying to hide under her umbrella as she left court.

Lorraine Shanley, 68, was charged on Thursday with bank fraud and aggravated identity theft for allegedly stealing funds from the Survivors of the Shield charity.

The charity provides funds to the families of officers who are killed in the line of duty.

As she exited the New York federal court yesterday, she attempted to hide her face completely by partially collapsing the umbrella over her head, while being escorted by an unidentified man.

Shanley, who was the non-profit's volunteer treasurer for seven years, is accused of using $410,000 worth of donations to fund her lifestyle.

Lorraine Shanley, the treasurer of a New York police charity, is accused of stealing more than $400,000 so she could pay for Barbra Streisand tickets and her grandchild's private school tuition. She is pictured on Thursday, leaving a federal court in New York

The 68-year-old attempted to hide under her umbrella as she left court with an unidentified man. She was charged yesterday with bank fraud and aggravated identity theft for allegedly stealing funds from the Survivors of the Shield charity

Shanley, who was the non-profit's volunteer treasurer for seven years, is accused of using the charity's money to buy $8,000 in event tickets, including $1,400 to see Barbra Streisand

It is also alleged that Lorraine Shanley (pictured) wrote at least $45,000 in checks that she could deposit into her own accounts, paid about $29,000 for her grandchild's private school tuition and spent $63,000 on her son's criminal legal expenses

The amount that Shanley is accused of stealing totaled about 20 percent of the charity's donations, according to court documents. She is pictured above with her NYPD cop brother

Prosecutors said Shanley (above) was an authorized signatory on the charity's bank account and credit card but she used those funds to benefit herself and her family

She is accused of using the charity's money to buy $8,000 in event tickets, including $1,400 to see Barbra Streisand.

Shanley also allegedly wrote at least $45,000 in checks that she could deposit into her own accounts, paid about $29,000 for her grandchild's private school tuition and spent $63,000 on her son's criminal legal expenses.

In addition, she is accused of spending approximately $32,000 on dental expenses and $25,000 on landscaping at her Staten Island home.

The amount that Shanley is accused of stealing totaled about 20 percent of the charity's donations, according to court documents.

About 99 percent of the donations the charity receive comes from NYPD employees.

Prosecutors said Shanley was an authorized signatory on the charity's bank account and credit card but she used those funds to benefit herself and her family.

She was caught when a new volunteer reviewed the charity's tax returns and records in an effort to modernize the non-profit's operations.

Shanley's social media accounts are filled with photos of her with NYPD officials. She is pictured left with Borough Commander Of Staten Island Chief Kenneth Core

'Lorraine Shanley allegedly capitalized on tragedy and monetized people's generosity,' U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said

Shanley's social media accounts are filled with photos of her with NYPD officials.

Shanley surrendered on Thursday morning and was due to face Manhattan Federal Court later in the afternoon.

She is charged with one count of bank fraud, which carries a 30 year maximum sentence, and one count of aggravated identity theft, which carries a two year sentence.

'Lorraine Shanley allegedly capitalized on tragedy and monetized people's generosity,' U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said.

'As alleged, Shanley stole over 20 percent of the donations to a charity whose sole mission is to help the families of NYPD officers killed in the line of duty.

'Thanks to the investigative work of the IRS and special agents from our Office, Shanley will be prosecuted for her actions.'Police in Michigan searching for a missing mother-of-eight say they have found the body of the woman's six-day-old daughter in her car.

Lansing police said Ashley Shades silver 2002 Toyota Camry was discovered parked Tuesday in the 100 block of East Kilborn Street and that Shade has not been located. The 35-year-old mother and the infant were reported missing Monday night.

Police department spokesman Robert Merritt said it is too early to say how the newborn died and that an autopsy will be conducted.

Police in Michigan are looking for Ashley Shade (left), who six-day-old baby daughter (right) was found dead in her parked car on Tuesday

He added that the 'focus right now is finding Ashley,' reported Lansing State Journal.

An investigation indicated Shade delivered her eighth child last week and she and the baby needed medical attention.

Family say Shade hid her most recent pregnancy and delivered the baby at home

Following Tuesday's tragic discovery, Shade's family spoke out about her disappearance, revealing to ClickOnDetroit that the woman has been battling drug addiction and mental health problems, and that five of her seven surviving children were in protective custody.

According to the woman's relatives, Shade hid her most recent pregnancy from them and delivered the baby in secret at home.

Family members said the mother was spotted holding her dead daughter in her arms at several locations in Lansing. She was last seen at South Washington Avenue and Holmes Road.

Shade's uncle appealed to her, pleading to turn herself in and saying that he was told by a detective that police seek to help, not harm her.

Shade is described as 5-foot-8 and weighing 142lbs, with blue eyes and light-brown curly hair. She has a tattoo on the back of her neck.

Anyone with information on her whereabouts is being asked to call police.

Relatives say five of Shade's seven surviving children were in protective custodyPrince Charles has been a rock to son Prince Harry and daughter-in-law Meghan Markle during a tough first year of marriage together, according to a filmmaker who got to know the British royal intimately.

And pragmatic Charles has advised his youngest son to ignore the critics and the swirling controversies and 'soldier on'.

That is the insight of filmmaker John Bridcut, who conducted in-depth interviews with the Prince, his wife, The Duchess of Cornwall, and his sons, Prince William and Prince Harry for a special program Prince Charles at 70, which premieres on PBS Sunday.

And despite Charles' public persona of being a cold, business-like royal, he is in fact a 'caring, kind and sensitive' soul - who has a close friendship with his two sons Wills and Harry - Bridcut exclusively told DailyMailTV.

Prince Charles has been a rock to son Prince Harry and daughter-in-law Meghan Markle during a tough first year of marriage together, according to filmmaker John Bridcut who got to know the British royal intimately

The heir to the throne has been able to use his experience of his own public dramas with late wife Princess Diana, alongside his caring nature, to pass on solid advice to the Duke And Duchess Of Sussex

'There is a close relationship between father and son and I'm aware that he gets along very well with both the daughters-in-law,' explained Bridcut in an exclusive interview.

'He is naturally a warm person, but as the film made clear, he is also like his mother  very conscious of the work he has to do.

'The Queen is reading her red boxes and all this and Charles has got a lot of office work that he's doing into the evening and so on, so there's a conflict there in your work life balance, which a lot of people will identify with.'

'Charles at 70' explores how away from the limelight, the royal has not just been a huge advocate for his country and the Commonwealth - the organization made up of the UK and countries which were almost all former British colonies, but a solid support to his children, especially Harry and Meghan.

John Bridcut conducted in-depth interviews with the Prince for Prince Charles at 70which premieres on PBS Sunday

The heir to the throne has been able to use his experience of his own public dramas with late wife Princess Diana, alongside his caring nature, to pass on solid advice to the Duke and Duchess Of Sussex.

Asked about what kind of advice he might have offered, Bridcut said: 'I would have thought that his approach would be that you just carry on doing the job. He wouldn't have added to that. His attitude would be that some of the attacks, he would feel were unfair.

'He would apply himself and just carry on doing the job and soldier on and that's what he's done and it's borne fruit.'

Charles keeps his support of the younger royals and his true nature hidden from the public.

Bridcut said: 'He has got a natural aversion to being seen or described in anyway that he would see as saccharin.

'He does not want to be seen as a sentimental or touchy feelie, because I think that's part of what he sees as his private life and his private existence.'

'So he doesn't push that side of things. So I think that's why it's taken a while for people to notice it, because it's not in their face all the time. '

Charles demonstrated just how close he is to Harry, when he stepped in at the last minute to walk Meghan down the aisle at their Windsor wedding on May 19, last year.

Bridcut said Charles has 'a close relationship between father and son and I'm aware that he gets along very well with both the daughters-in-law,' explained Bridcut in an exclusive interview

Bridcut says that Meghan's obvious delight at having Charles replace her absent father Thomas Markle - with whom she has had a major and very public rift - gave the world an insight into their close bond.

'Charles is being completely supportive - and could be seen in the very touching way in which he was involved in the wedding ceremony itself, which was sort of all quite understated.

'It was all very last minute of course the way things turned out. But what Camilla says in the film, that I felt very strongly when I watched it myself, with the way he held out his hand for Meghan's mother and that moment was completely unscripted and spontaneous, but totally typical of the man actually.

'He doesn't advertise this but he is a very sensitive man and I've seen that myself a lot.

'And again, it is something that is not true of all royals. He goes to the opera and he will weep at the opera, because he gets moved by that.'

He doesn't advertise this but he is a very sensitive man and I've seen that myself a lot.

In the film the Princes speak openly about their love for their father, and Bridcut admits that the closeness is clear.

While publicly the world saw the two men as Princess Diana's children, now it's becoming clear that the boys are very much Charles' sons and he played a huge part in making them the men they are today.

Bridcut said: 'There was sense in which for a long time, people saw them as their mother's sons and I think there's been a growing awareness that actually they have a good relationship with their father and it's actually quite touching and it's sort of built in the last few years.

'And the thing is Princess Diana inevitably has faded from public consciousness, because it's now 20 more than years since she was alive and so there is a whole new generation that didn't know her at all.

'I think people were surprised that they actually had a really good relationship with their father, without in anyway decreasing their devotion to their mother.'

Despite Charles' public persona of being a cold, business-like royal, he is in fact a 'caring, kind and sensitive' soul - who has a close friendship with his two sons Wills and Harry - according to Bridcut

While publicly the world saw the two men as Princess Diana's children, now it's becoming clear that the boys are very much Charles' sons and he played a huge part in making them the men they are today

He continued: 'I think that has helped, yes. I think people have seen the respect they have for him. I feel myself it's really interesting to see particularly Prince Harry has become a real champion of his father and in a way, they look more alike as the years go by.

'They're different people obviously, but there is a real sympathy there and he in some ways physically reminds me of his father and I find that quite surprising, whereas William looks more like his mother.'

Bridcut added: 'He is a patriarchal figure within his own family, within the wider royal family. He has the respect of being the number two and so I think there's a lot of members of the royal family that will defer to him, but I think it's not in a way that is in any sense challenging.'

Charles remains very wary about addressing his future as King - given that it would mean the passing of his beloved mother The Queen.

'The head of the family is the Queen and I think the Duke of Edinburgh used to play a considerable role in that way, probably much less now, but I think Charles will be very weary about stepping into that role, because there is no vacancy,' Bridcut says.

'He would not presume to be the head of the family, because his parents were too old or something.

'I don't think he would like that idea. I think it's pretty much still the Queen as the matriarch.'

Bridcut also said he believed the Royals have no plans to push Charles aside and crown William King ahead of his father.

Bridcut said: 'He is a patriarchal figure within his own family, within the wider royal family. He has the respect of being the number two and so I think there's a lot of members of the royal family that will defer to him, but I think it's not in a way that is in any sense challenging'

He continued: 'There is nobody in the Royal family who would descend from the idea that when you become monarch, you become monarch for life and I just don't think it crosses their mind that there will be any alternative.

'The Duke of Windsor was the example of somebody who didn't do that and they're determined not to repeat that example.

'And I think certainly it's one people talk loosely about, not so much now, but they certainly used to five years ago talk about skipping a generation and William will become king, because they like the idea of a young king and the person who would be the least like that would be William himself, because he's trying to bring up his family and so on.

'The last thing you want is to become king at the same time as trying to bring up three small children.'

In the PBS film, Charles admits about the future: 'You have to make of it what you feel is right. 'There's nothing laid down, that's what makes it so interesting, challenging and of course, complicated.'

For close to 50 years, Prince Charles has been an outspoken champion for environmental issues, advocating solutions to climate change, pollution, and other issues long before these issues became mainstream.

He has also worked tirelessly to provide opportunities for Britain's young people with his youth charity, the Prince's Trust.

Despite occasionally ruffling feathers, the Prince remains committed to his fight for the environment and social causes and shows no signs of slowing down.

Charles demonstrated just how close he is to Harry, when he stepped in at the last minute to walk Meghan down the aisle at their Windsor wedding on May 19, last year

Bridcut added: 'What Camilla says in the film, that I felt very strongly when I watched it myself, with the way he held out his hand for Meghan's mother and that moment was completely unscripted and spontaneous, but totally typical of the man actually'. Pictured: Prince Charles leading his wife Camilla and Meghan's mother Doria Ragland out from the chapel on Prince Harry and Meghan's wedding day

Bridcut feels he has been at the forefront of revolutionizing the British Royals - even though in the late 1990s, following Diana's death, he was viewed with mixed emotions by many worldwide.

'That difficult period after Diana's death sort of colored things for a quite a while,' he said.

'I think what has changed is the perception that he (Charles) works incredibly hard at causes that a lot of people have come around to.

'People often saw his causes as a bit cranky when he started out and a lot of them have become much more widely accepted.

'Clearly he didn't create the campaign for climate change, but he was involved early on in pushing that as a really important issue.

'And I think other things like corporate social responsibility, urban design, that's a bit more controversial I suspect, but his involvement particularly with the Prince's Trust and young people have I think really won him a great deal of respect.

'I found it interesting, because this is a film where we were filming in Durham although its not made clear where it is in the film and he was up doing a walkabout in the streets and there were a lot of students out in the streets.

'I was really surprised by this, because I thought when we were going up, there will be middle aged and elderly people and perhaps some young families with young children out to see him.

'I was really surprised by the number of university students who were waiting to talk to them.'

Charles remains very wary about addressing his future as King - given that it would mean the passing of his beloved mother The Queen

Bridcut said: 'The head of the family is the Queen and I think the Duke of Edinburgh used to play a considerable role in that way, probably much less now, but I think Charles will be very weary about stepping into that role, because there is no vacancy,' Bridcut says

He continued: 'He found it very easy to engage with them. I think that's one of his strengths, which is gradually percolating through that he is much more at ease talking to people he doesn't know than a lot of the royals are.

'He always aims to find a connection with people that he meets, whether it's where they live or visited, or where they've been on holiday, where they've been educated, all that sort of thing.

'He will try and find the connection. People have begun to realize and accept that the Queen isn't going to be around much longer, and she might go on for another 10 years, but it is sort of imminent.'

Bridcut even recalls hearing some of the people they saw on the streets in Durham, a town in the north of England, saying: 'I've come to see the next king.'

He said: 'I've never heard that before and it was really interesting that people saw him not as Prince Charles, but as the next king and I suspect that it may be happening internationally as well. I think his sons have also helped him in that way.'

The documentary charts the Prince's working life at a time when he is taking on an increasing amount of duties in support of the Queen and preparing for his future role as king.

The film features scenes of him in his home office in London and on working trips to Scotland and Wales, as well as abroad during visits to the Pacific island republic of Vanuatu and Caribbean countries struggling to recover from the recent deadly hurricanes.

Prince Charles at 70 premieres Sunday, March 24, 8:00-9:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS.A Bronx man being held for ransom at gunpoint was rescued from his 18-hour ordeal by an undercover police officer posing as his brother on Wednesday.

Juiliano Marcelino, 31, allegedly lured Jonathan Demitro, 28, into his car with an offer of a test drive to discuss a sale of the Honda Accord, the New York Post reported.

After beginning the drive in the Belmont section of the Bronx around 9pm on Tuesday night, Demitro said that Marcelino pointed a gun on him during the return trip home.

Demitro was then held hostage by the armed kidnapper for the next 18 hours driving around the borough while Marcelino called Demitro's brother demanding $2,500 for the man's release, according to NBC New York.

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Jonathan Demitro, 28, was taken for a harrowing ride after meeting Juiliano Marcelino, 31, claiming to be selling his car on this street in the Belmont section of the Bronx

After Demitro took the Honda Accord for a test drive, Marcelino allegedly brandished a gun and kept him hostage for the next 18 hours

'My brother told me he was doing crazy drugs in the car,' Demitro's brother told NBC. 'They got into two accidents.'

The brother also said that on top of two firearms, Marcelino apparently had a knife and pepper spray in the vehicle as well.

Detectives were able to arrest Marcelino on Wednesday afternoon with one of the detectives posing as Demitro's brother there to pay off the ransom in the Foxhurst neighborhood.

Police say that when the kidnapper was confronted, he made a motion as if he was drawing a gun before running.

The kidnapping ordeal ended when a detective posing as Demitro's brother confronted Marcelino on Southern Boulevard, seen here, on Wednesday afternoon in the Foxhurst neighborhood of the Bronx

After chasing him down and arresting him, they allegedly found a gun tucked in his waistband.

Demitro was struck in the head with Marcelino's gun during the kidnapping, but he wasnt taken to a hospital. His kidnapper was under the influence when arrested, so he was initially hospitalized.

The Honda Accord Marcelino had been driving was also stolen, according to authorities.

The 31-year-old faces numerous charges including robbery, grand larceny auto, resisting arrest, obstructing government administration, assault, criminal mischief, criminal possession of a weapon and kidnapping.Police are hunting a New York City sex attacker who broke into a woman's home in the middle of the night and tried to rape her in front of her horrified 11-year-old son.

The home invader stormed the apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood in Manhattan at around 5.15am Wednesday.

He grabbed the 43-year-old victim by her throat and threw her on a bed before trying to pull her pants off while choking her.

The son tried to help his mother but was also assaulted by the attacker, who shoved the boy to the ground.

Police revealed the attacker gained entry to the home as the door was left open by the woman's husband, who had returned from work, dropped off his bag and nipped back out to move his double-parked car.

This is the home invader who tried to rape a mother in front of her horrified 11-year-old son early Wednesday morning

The attacker - described as black and between 5ft 8 and 6ft tall - stormed the apartment and pounced on her, before assaulting the child as he tried to protect her

The woman was woken up by her dog, which started barking at the attackers presence.

When she went downstairs to check on the dog, the invader pounced on her and attempted to rape her.

Her adult daughter was also home at the time of the attack. The attacker got spooked by the woman's screams and ran off as the husband returned.

Police released video of the suspect Thursday, and described him as a black man between 5ft 8 and 6ft tall, wearing a black jacket, dark pants and a grey hooded sweatshirt.A teacher who was let go from her job at a New Jersey school last year has filed a lawsuit claiming to have been sexually harassed by fifth graders before her termination.

In the motion filed on Monday, Denise Kruse, 36, alleges that students from the Community Charter School of Paterson made 'thrusting motions' behind her, asked if she ever performed oral sex, and even reached down their pants and touched their genitals in front of her.

Kruse also claims students would put their hands up to tell her they were sexually aroused in her class, and secretly uploaded videos of her buttocks to Snapchat.

Her lawyer, Heidi Weintraub, believes the school and its senior officials failed to adequately protect Kruse from the harassment.

Denise Kruse (pictured) filed a motion on Monday claiming students from the Community Charter School of Paterson sexually harassed her in 2018

Kruse alleges that students from the Community Charter School of Paterson made 'thrusting motions' behind her, asked if she ever performed oral sex, and even reached down their pants and touched their genitals in-front of her

The suit also raises allegations of discrimination and unfair dismissal against the school's African-American CEO, Curtis Palmore.

Kruse claims Palmore decided not to renew her contract as part of a plan to replace white staff members with black educators he'd previously worked with in The Bronx, New York.

In response to the former teacher's complaint, Community Charter issued a statement on Thursday insisting harassment and discrimination are not tolerated at the school.

'The Community Charter School of Paterson is deeply committed to creating a workplace and learning community that is free of harassment or discrimination of any kind, where students and staff alike feel safe, supported and cared for,' the statement read.

'While the school cannot comment on a complaint that has not been served, or publicly discuss an employees job performance, one can be assured that the schools protocols for investigating and addressing sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation are consistent, fair and thorough,' it continued.

However, in the lawsuit, Kruse accuses Charter Community of creating a hostile work environment and for violating her rights by ignoring her sexual harassment complaints, which she believes were a factor in her termination.

Kruse said she raised the issues to senior officials at the school but believes they failed to take any effective measures to stem the behavior

The suit also raises allegations of discrimination and unfair dismissal against the school's CEO, Curtis Palmore (above). Kruse claims Palmore favored black educators over white ones

The mother-of-two specializes in special education. She was re-assigned from her post to teach remedial math to fifth-graders in February 2018, where the harassment started soon after

According to her lawyer, Kruse started working at Community Charter in February 2016 as a special education teacher. Two-years later, she was reassigned to teach remedial math to fifth-graders.

The lawsuit details that Kruse had trouble controlling the class who were 'disrespectful' and continuously misbehaved.

Kruse said she raised the issues to Palmore but believes he failed to take any effective measures to stem the behavior.

On May 15, 2018, the mother-of-two was told her contract wouldn't be renewed any further and she says she was offered no explanation as to why.

'The circumstances surrounding [the administrations] failure to renew [Kruses] contract for the 2018-19 school year and then replace her with African-American teachers, is sufficiently suspicious to warrant the conclusion that she was discriminated against,' Weintraub wrote in the lawsuit.

According to NorthJersey.com, Kruse's allegations come as one of several against charter schools in Paterson over the last few years.

Last year, Community Charter were forced to pay $90,000 in damages to a substitute teacher after she claims one of the school's administrators, Manny Martinez, sexually harassed her.

Principal of the College Achieve Charter school, Henry McNair, has also been accused of sexual misconduct at two different schools in the state.Gokmen Tanis (pictured) is suspected of shooting three people dead on a tram in Utrecht on Monday

The suspected gunman in the deadly Utrecht tram shooting has confessed and said that he acted alone, Dutch prosecutors have announced.

Gokmen Tanis, 37, faces murder and terrorism charges after apparently opening fire on Monday in a shooting which killed three people.

The Turkish-born suspect is due to appear before a judge today.

Tanis also faces charges of attempted murder or manslaughter and making threats with a terrorist intent.

The nature of Monday's attack and a note found in a suspected getaway car suggest a possible terror motive, prosecutors have said.

'The 37-year-old suspect confessed this morning to the examining magistrate the criminal offences against him. He also stated that he acted alone,' the Dutch prosecution service said in a statement.

'Because of the investigation nothing else can be said.'

Investigations continue into whether the suspect's actions 'flowed from personal problems combined with a radicalised ideology'.

Prosecutors have said there was no evidence of a link between Tanis and the three people who were killed.

The three victims were a 19-year-old woman from Vianen, south of Utrecht, and two men aged 28 and 49 from Utrecht itself, the statement said.

Three others were seriously wounded and four suffered light injuries, according to prosecutors.

Tanis remains in custody after his detention was extended today by two weeks, the maximum allowed.

Emergency: Dutch special police forces inspect the tram in Utrecht after a gunman opened fire in the public transport carriage and killed three people

Authorities earlier said they had found a suspicious letter in a getaway car used by the Turkish-born suspect.

The letter made them 'seriously' consider terrorism might have been involved in Monday's rampage.

A 40-year old man, who was held on Tuesday because Tanis was arrested in his house, was released on Friday after authorities found no evidence to link him to the shooting.

Two other men who were arrested Monday in connection with the shooting have also released.

Armed police captured Tanis after an eight-hour manhunt that virtually shut down the Netherlands' fourth largest city and saw security stepped up at airports and key sites across the country.

Police said they found a red Renault Clio that the suspect had carjacked before the attack and used as a getaway car afterwards. They had also found a firearm after his arrest.

A stream of mourners laid flowers on Tuesday at the site of the attack near the 24 Oktoberplein square.

Tributes: Students lay flowers near the site of the shooting as Dutch police and prosecutors pursue 'every lead there is'

It has also emerged that the suspect had only been freed from jail in a rape case two weeks ago.

Tanis was originally arrested in 2017 then released from pre-trial detention, before being taken back into custody when he breached his bail conditions, the central Netherlands district court said.

He was freed again at the start of March.

In 2014, he was also convicted of 'illegal possession of weapons' and attempted theft but acquitted of attempted manslaughter. He was also convicted in recent months for shoplifting and burglary.

Broadcaster NOS meanwhile said some of his relatives had links to fundamentalist Islamic groups, but also that he was known for unstable behaviour after divorcing his wife two years ago.

A woman involved in the rape case told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper: 'He is completely mad and uses drugs. I have previously warned the police against him. He's not a terrorist but a psychopath.'

Support for the Netherlands poured in from around the world, including the United States, the EU and Russia.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: 'America stands with you. We will continue to do all we can to help you in this terrible time of tragedy.'

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country's intelligence agency was 'looking into' the attack.A school in south-east China has sparked controversy for forcing its students to kowtow before their teacher, a practice that is now largely viewed as submissive and obsequious.

Around 30 students at a school in Xiamen, Fujian province were filmed kneeling and putting their head to the ground in full prostration before being allowed to stand up.

Kowtow, which translates to 'knock head', dates back to the Qin dynasty, when subjects would kneel and touch the ground with their forehead in a sign of deep respect and worship.

Around 30 students at a school in Xiamen, Fujian province were filmed kneeling and putting their head to the ground in full prostration before being allowed to stand up

The video filmed at the Xiamen Commerce And Industry Tourism School went viral on social media on Thursday, sparking outrage from net users who accused the school of promoting hierarchies and a 'red tape culture'.

Students wouldn't be able to graduate unless they pass the kneeling test, one student told Chinese news outlet BTime.

'Does the teacher or principal think they're emperors?' one user questioned on Chinese microblogging site Weibo.

'The feudal practice of prostration has been thrown out after the Xinhai Revolution. What's the point of bringing it back?' one user commented, referring to the 1911 revolution that overthrew China's last imperial dynasty and established the Republic of China.

The video filmed at the Xiamen Commerce And Industry Tourism School went viral on social media on Thursday, sparking outrage from net users who accused the school of promoting hierarchies and a 'red tape culture'

Students wouldn't be able to graduate unless they pass the kneeling test, one student said

'Society is going backwards. This is so outdated and unnecessary,' another person said.

Nowadays, the practice of kowtow could still be seen in contemporary ceremonies such as weddings, funerals and Chinese New Year events in rural villages.

The school responded in a statement on Friday saying that teachers were only giving students 'traditional etiquette lessons'.

'A dedicated department in our school is exploring an arrangement for traditional etiquette exercises,' the Xiamen Commerce And Industry Tourism School said on its official Weibo account.

'Our original intention is to have students learn ceremonial Chinese etiquette and promote the excellent traditional culture of our country. There are seven sessions in the entire arrangement,' the school added.

The statement also said the relevant staff would make 'appropriate adjustments and improvements' to the exercise.Bo Dukes (pictured), 34, was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Wilcox County judge on Friday

A Georgia man was sentenced to at least 25 years in prison on Friday, after he admitted to helping burn the body of a teacher whose grim end in a rural pecan orchard remained a mystery for more than a decade.

Bo Dukes, 34, was issued the maximum sentence by a Wilcox County judge on Friday, after a jury found him guilty of concealing the death of Tara Grinstead in 2005.

Before the judge's verdict was issued, the decorated veteran offered a tearful apology to Grinstead's family.

'I'm truly sorry. Your long suffering has been unimaginable,' Dukes said in court, turning from the judge to address the dead woman's family. 'My actions were cowardly, callous, and cruel. I was more interested in self-pity and self-preservation than doing the right thing for Tara and for you.'

A high school teacher and former beauty queen, Grinstead was 30 when she vanished from her home in Ocilla, in October 2005.

In a tearful apology to the victims family, Dukes spoke of how he 'failed Tara' and was 'cowardly, callous and cruel' for what he did to hide her death

A high school teacher and former beauty queen, Grinstead was 30 when she vanished from her home in Ocilla, in October 2005

A billboard with her photo and the phone number of a tip line loomed in the area for years as Grinstead's family held on to the hope that she might be found alive.

No answers came until February 2017 when authorities arrested Dukes and a friend accused of being Grinstead's killer.

'For over 11 years, he watched all of us who loved her suffer unimaginable pain and heartache as we frantically searched for her,' Connie Grinstead, the slain woman's stepmother, told the judge Friday.

She asked for Dukes to receive the maximum penalty, saying: 'He did nothing. He just went on living his life.'

Dukes' defense attorney, John Fox, asked for his client to be given a 12-year sentence, as had he never have cooperated in 2017, Grinstead's parents may have never found out what happened to their daughter.

In a statement to the courtroom, Dukes' mother, Dixie Hudson, told the judge of her son's military service, pointing out that he was a decorated soldier.

She acknowledged her son has 'issues' and asked the court to rehabilitate him.

Her death remained a complete mystery until Dukes came forward to police in 2017 and told of how his friend Ryan Duke - of no relation - killed her

In a recorded interview with police, Dukes (right) told of how Ryan Duke (left) broke into Grinstead's home using a credit card and strangled her to death. The pair went to high school together

Using Dukes' (right) truck, Ryan Duke moved the body of Grinstead to Dukes' family's pecan orchard, and elicited his friend's help to move her body into the forest and burn it

A billboard with her photo and the phone number of a tip line loomed in the area for years as Grinstead's family held on to the hopes that she might be found alive

Superior Court Judge Robert Chasteen Jr. sided with Grinstead's step-mother and sentenced Dukes to 25 years imprisonment for concealing a death, hindering the apprehension of a criminal, and two counts of lying to police.

The charges all stemmed from a June 2016 interview with a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent in which Dukes denied telling an Army buddy a decade earlier that he helped dispose of Grinstead's body.

However, Dukes confessed to his role in covering up the murder a few months later, in February 2017.

He told the GBI his best friend, Alexander Duke, had broken into Grinstead's home using a credit card and strangled her to death in bed.

Using Dukes' truck, he then drove her body to a pecan orchard owned by Dukes' uncle.

Dukes said he helped his friend move Grinstead's body deeper into the woods, where they spent two days burning her remains to ash.

Ryan Duke, of no relation, is scheduled to stand trial April 1 for Grinstead's murder in nearby Irwin County, where she lived.

Authorities say Duke also confessed, saying he broke into Grinstead's home to steal money for drugs, and they found DNA from both Duke and the slain woman on a latex glove found in her yard.

Duke's defense attorneys have said he gave a false confession under the influence of drugs. The say in court filings that Duke was home asleep when Grinstead was killed.

Though Dukes has been sentenced as an accomplice, he still faces charges in Ben Hill County, where Grinstead's body was burned.

Earlier this year, police also charged the 34-year-old for sexually assaulting two women at gunpoint on New Year's Day while he was on bail.Advertisement

Jewish families in London and around the world celebrated the festival of Purim this week, marking it by dressing in an array of dazzling outfits.

The annual festival commemorates the foiling of a plot to massacre the Jewish people 2,500 years ago in ancient Persia.

It usually falls in March and is celebrated on the 14th and 15th days of Adar in the Jewish calendar.

The holiday is marked with carnival-like parades where people dress up in masks and fancy dress outfits and eat traditional food, such as Hamantash pastries.

Children are encouraged to dress up to celebrate Purim and everyone congregates at the synagogue to hear a retelling of the ancient story.

Recorded in the book of Esther in the Torah, it tells how Hamanm, a royal adviser to King Ahasuerus - presumed to be Xerxes I of Persia - planned to kill all the Jews in the empire before his plans were foiled by Mordecai and his adopted daughter Queen Esther.

On the evening before, Jewish people do not eat or drink, but then enjoy feasts and parties during the festival.

Dressed in costumes as well as orthadox clothing, members of the Jewish Community celebrate the festival of Purim in Stamford Hill north London on March 21

A Jewish father in Stamford Hill, London, dressed in Orthodox Jewish clothing, walks down the road with his children who are decked out in a brilliant and patchwork display of colour and flowers

Children are encouraged to dress up to celebrate Purim and everyone congregates at the synagogue to hear a retelling of the ancient story at its origins

A smiling Jewish man dressed in a flamboyant array of colours rides his scooter down the road in Stamford Hill, north London to mark the festival of Purim

Three adorable Jewish schoolgirls dressed in elegant, matching outfits walk along the road with an older woman, presumably their mother, as they celebrate Purim in London

Photos of the Purim celebration in Stamford Hill yesterday show off an array of colourful and celebratory dresses, including two girls dressed in matching pink Princess costumes

This young boy is dressed in a spectacular outfit to mark Purim in north London. His outfit is completed with a toy camel and drawn on facial hair

These Jewish children in London look delighted to be celebrating Purim. Three are dressed in colourful clown costumes while the older girl is dressed a bit more conservatively - though she also has a splash of colour

This Jewish family are all smiles as they pose happily during Purim. The older child is dressed in a Princess-like white dress while the two younger boys are dressed as adorable teddy bears

Dressed as one of the Queen's Beefeaters, this Jewish boy smiles nervously at the camera during Purim, as an older man smiles at him

Stamford Hill in north London has the largest concentration of ultra-orthodox Charedi Hasidic Jews in Europe and they looked very excited to mark Purim

It was a family affair as delighted revellers of all ages dressed up and took to the street to mark the ancient festival this year

The annual festival commemorates the foiling of a plot to massacre the Jewish people 2,500 years ago in ancient Persia

It seems like mostly children who dress up to celebrate the event, but a lot of adults also joined in, including this group who danced merrily

This father pushed his child down the road while she was dressed in a stunning, green dress, decorated with flowers. A girl behind her, presumably her sister, wore a matching outfit

These children look to be having the time of their lives as they celebrate Purim, with one of them dressed in a giant teddy bear costume

The holiday is marked with carnival-like parades where people dress up in masks and fancy dress outfits and eat traditional food, such as Hamantash pastries

Children are encouraged to dress up to celebrate Purim and everyone congregates at the synagogue to hear a retelling of the ancient story

This family decided to go for a Navy theme with the elder brother dressed as the captain and his smiling younger sisters dressed as sailors

Young, male members of the Jewish Community celebrate the festival of Purim in Stamford Hill, dancing together merrily

These two regally dressed sisters looked very happy as they strolled down the road to mark the annual Jewish festival

Four friends dress up in fancy dress costumes for the Jewish festival in New York. One dresses is dressed as Spiderman, while the other wears an animal onesie. The third teen is dressed as a mustard bottle while the fourth is dressed in a suit and hat

Three little children also dress up for the festivities, the two younger children don lion costumes while the child in the centre wears an intricately patterned robe with a furry hat, often called a ushanka

A young boy holds out his plastic sword and his thumb up while showing off his pirate costume, complete with a hat and boots

This young boy dressed up for Purim in a fun cowboy ensemble with cowboy hat, vest with badges, and brown and white chaps

One girl is dressed up as a pineapple with fake green lashes, while her friend dressed up as a slice of watermelon. In between them a younger boy shows off his clown costume with matching make-up

Three friends dress up in matching shark outfits for the Jewish festival

One man flaunts his unique outfit which he matched with pair of reflective sunglasses

Two sons have dressed for the event in a fancy dress ensemble for the Jewish festival. Their father co-ordinated costumes with them by wearing the same blue velvet hat

Another father pushes a stroller with a young child who is dressed in a hat while carrying a colourful box. Walking alongside him is his older brother dressed in a popcorn costume

One father is surrounded by his five children, all in costume for Purim. His daughters wear olive green dresses with red bonnets, while his sons wear knights costumes

A father and son in New York, both dressed in uniforms for the Jewish festival, hold the salute pose

Meanwhile in Israel, five young children dressed in colourful costumes for Purim walk across the road at Mea Shearim neighborhood in Jerusalem

A father walks on the street with his children dressed in colourful clown costumes for the Jewish festival

Men stand on a table as they take part in 'Se`udat Purim' feast to celebrate the Purim holiday

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men show off their home as they celebrate Purim as they celebrate the festivity

Four friends dress in red satin military inspired costumes for the festivities

Three ultra-orthodox Jewish men, dressed in fancy outfits, embrace as they celebrate the special holiday

Another group of friends show off their sailors outfits, complete with matching caps and blue neckerchiefs around their necks

This group celebrates the holiday with loud cheers as they parade down the street in Jerusalem

Three teen boys, two dressed in suits with hats and another in a coat with gold trimming and tall gold hat. Two of the friends pull funny faces, while the other carries what appear to be a box of giftsDeputy U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami, who oversaw the criminal case against Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen, is stepping down from his role next month.

Khuzami led the charge against Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, lying to Congress and other federal crimes, when U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman was recused from the case for undisclosed reasons in April 2018.

Cohen, who also acted as Trump's personal fixer, is due to start a three-year prison sentence in May.

Khuzami, who will leave on April 12, has reportedly told colleagues that his departure is for personal reasons and unrelated to any political pressure.

His resignation comes as special counsel Robert Mueller is said to be close to wrapping up his two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Veteran prosecutor Robert Khuzami, who oversaw the criminal case against Donald Trump's former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, will step down next month citing personal reasons

'Rob Khuzami is an extraordinary and brilliant lawyer who has upheld the ideals of integrity and professionalism that characterize the work of this Office. There can be no higher praise,' Berman said in a statement, following the announcement.

'While his desire to continue to serve remains strong, he understandably has decided to return home to his family,' Berman added.

The 62-year-old played a key role in the criminal case against Cohen, but managed to avoid the ire that Trump directed towards Mueller.

Khuzami has also been in charge of the ensuing probes into campaign-finance violations and related conduct at the Trump Organization.

The decision has been in the works for weeks,' according to NBC News, who say multiple people familiar with the decision stressed that Khuzami was not pushed out.

Speculation has increased in recent weeks that Mueller is close to wrapping up his investigation into electoral interference. The probe has already seen six former Trump advisers accused

The 62-year-old played a key role in the criminal case against Cohen, but managed to avoid the ire that Trump directed towards Mueller. Khuzami has also been in charge of the ensuing probes into campaign-finance violations and related conduct at the Trump Organization

Khuzami assumed responsibility of the Cohen investigation when Berman was recused in April 2018.

Cohen will begin a three-year prison sentence after admitting to arranging hush-money payments during the 2016 election to silence two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.

Khuzami's replacement Audrey Strauss previously worked on the Iran Contra case and was the chief legal officer for Alcoa. The investigation into Trump's office will continue on multiple fronts, despite the resignation.

Speculation has increased in recent weeks that Mueller is close to wrapping up his investigation into electoral interference.

The probe has already seen six former Trump advisers accused, but a letter from last June indicated that without confirmed charges on the way, it's unlikely the public will hear more about anyone involved.

The highly-anticipated Mueller report has been said to be imminent for several weeks. One element of the investigation is whether Trump's firing of FBI Director Jame Comey amounted to obstruction of justice.Details of how the mistress of Patrick Frazee disposed of crucial evidence in the case has been revealed in court documents.

Krystal Jean Kenney was tasked not only with cleaning up the gruesome murder scene where she claims Frazee bludgeoned Kelsey Berreth, but also finding a way to get rid of the young mothers personal effects.

Legal filings submitted earlier this month state that Kenney did this by hurling Berreths keys into a gorge, burning both Berreths cell phone and the burner phone she used to communicate with Frazee and giving the victims gun to a relative.

Kenney told authorities this after first denying she even knew who Berreth was, before eventually confessing to just how the 29-year-old pilot was brutally murdered on Thanksgiving as her daughter played in the next room.

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Mistress to murder: Krystal Jean Kenney (above in court back in February) disposed of crucial evidence in the Kelsey Berreth murder case, including a gun, keys and the missing mother's phone

Gone girl: Kenney will be sentenced after Frazee's trial for her own involvement after pleading guilty to one felony count of tampering with evidence (mugshots above)

Filings submitted in the case show that Kenney eventually told authorities that, after watching Frazee burn his former fiances body in a giant fire on his mothers ranch, she was sent home to Idaho with strict instructions to make sure a cell phone, gun and keys belonging to Berreth were either hidden or destroyed.

The keys were the first piece of evidence Berreth disposed of, throwing them into one of the deep gorges at Malad Gorge State Park.

The deep and steep cliff walls make most of the park inaccessible, while the raging rapids make a water search near impossible.

Berreths phones were then burned by Kenney according to documents, but not before they provided investigators with a trail that lead from Frazees farm in Colorado to the home of Kenneys friend in Idaho.

Berreths phone last pinged in Idaho on November 25 at Malad Gorge, around the same time a woman with unknown ties to Kenney called Frazee's cell.

That woman lives less than 10 miles from Maad Gorge.

The woman, 39, has been employed in the medical field, so there is a chance she may have been a friend of Kenney's from work.

Tossed: She then disposed of Berreth's keys at Makad Gorge State Park, right over the border from Colorado in Idaho

Without a trace: There has still been no sign of Berreth's body or remains

Then, when Kenney returned home, she burned Berreth's phone and the burner she used to speak with Frazee.

The charred remains of those two devices were then disposed of at the hospital where she worked before she was charged in the case.

The final remaining piece of evidence - Berreths gun - was given by Kenney to a male friend.

Kenney said that it belonged to a family member.

In addition to this, Kenney also texted Berreth's mother, Frazee and Berreth's place of employment during her drive home to Idaho 'with the intent of distracting law enforcement at the direction of Frazee.'

These actions and her delay in sharing this information, which has dealt a devastating blow to prosecutors has now led some to question if Kenney should have been offered a plea deal by the state of Colorado.

At the same time, because she is the only witness in the case, the verdict in the case now hinges entirely on her testimony.

There is also still no trace of Berreth's remains.

Kenney broke down in tears as she confessed to destroying Berreth's cell phone in court back in February.

She also agreed to testify against Frazee at his murder trial.

Kenney will be sentenced after Frazee's trial for her own involvement after pleading guilty to one felony count of tampering with evidence.The French Constitutional Council has given authorities the green light to use bone age tests when evaluating young refugees and migrants.

The court, which is France's highest constitutional authority, ruled on Thursday that such tests can be employed to help determine whether the new arrivals should qualify for child protection services.

The practice has been heavily criticised by rights groups, who argue that radiation from the X-rays could harm the body.

The French Constitutional Council ruled on Thursday that controversial bone age testing X-Rays could be used to help determine the age of refugee and migrant minors. Pictured: Children in the Calais Jungle camp

Others question the reliability of such tests, which were originally developed to determine a child's skeletal maturity.

They are widely considered to be less accurate with older children, and have a margin of error of up to three years; a refugee who claims to be 17 for example could be anywhere between 14 and 20 years old.

The Council, which decides on the validity of laws, said it recognised that such testing was not completely accurate, and decreed that results could not be the sole factor in determining a minor's age.

'The person being tested gets the benefit of any doubt,' the court ruled.

Unaccompanied minors Walid Khan (right) and his brother Manzor (left) from Afghanistan, who lived in the Calais Jungle while trying to get to the UK. They are pictured with friend Ahmad in 2016

The case brought before the Council involved a Guinean migrant, identified only as Adama S., who arrived in France in 2016 claiming to be 15, which entitled him to the care of child social services.

Adama refused to submit to the X-ray tests, which are used to help determine an unaccompanied minor's age and require consent under French law.

The next year, a juvenile court in Ain, southwest France, ruled that Adama was an adult and removed him from the welfare services.

The number of self-professed unaccompanied minors arriving in France rose to some 17,000 in 2018 from 6,000 in 2015, according to the Interior Ministry.

In the absence of legal documents, there are few alternatives to the bone tests for accurately assessing a person's age.

Child migrants are loaded in to a minivan in Saint Omer, France ahead of their journey to Britain. The court sanctioned the bone age tests but said minors would get the 'benefit of any doubt'

But critics say the practice can be used to deny entry to some children who should benefit from France's protection under international law.

'We're extremely disappointed,' said Clementine Bret of the Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) aid group, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

'We would have liked to see France honour itself by following the examples of Spanish and English courts,' which have outlawed such testing, Bret said.

Other EU countries, however, already have mandatory X-ray checks in place, including Belgium, Sweden and Italy.Ten suspected terror plotters have been arrested in Germany on suspicion of planning a jihadist attack with a car and guns.

German prosecutors said the 10 suspects were under investigation for plotting to 'kill as many people as possible'.

The suspects, ranging in age from 20 to 42, were detained in raids conducted by police in the region around Frankfurt earlier on Friday.

Ten suspected terror plotters have been arrested in Germany on suspicion of planning a jihadist attack with a car and guns (file photo)

No details were provided on the nationalities of the suspects.

The main suspects were a 21-year old man from Offenbach, a city near Frankfurt, and two 31-year brothers from Wiesbaden, who were associated with the Islamist Salafist community in the area, prosecutors said.

According to FNP, the terror suspects had already been in contact with weapons dealers and hired a 'larger vehicle'.

Evidence seized during the police raid is said to have included 20,000 (17,000) in cash as well as numerous knives.

The last major terror strike in Germany was the Berlin Christmas market attack in 2016. Pictured: mourners lay flowers and light candles at the scene

There were also documents and electronic data stores seized during the raid, it is reported.

Some 200 police officers are said to have taken part in today's operations in south-west Germany.

The last major terror strike in Germany was the Berlin Christmas market attack in 2016 when Anis Amri drove into a crowd and killed 12 people.

The attack was later claimed by the Islamic State group.

Using fake documents, he fled to Italy and died in a shootout with police near Milan four days later.Thailand's exiled former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, hosted a wedding reception for his youngest daughter in Hong Kong on Friday two days ahead of a general election in his homeland - the first one in eight years.

Although ostensibly a family affair with a raft of VIP guests, the ceremony's timing seemed to carry an implicit message to Thaksin's countrymen back in Thailand: Don't forget me and my political allies when you go out to vote.

Thaksin was ousted by a 2006 military coup. However, the Pheu Thai party of his loyalists is still expected to capture the most seats in Sunday's polls.

Parties for and against Thailand's junta are rallying across Bangkok as election fever grips the country ahead of the first poll in eight years.

Thailand's exiled former PM, Thaksin Shinawatra, hosted a wedding reception for his youngest daughter in Hong Kong on Friday - two days ahead of a general election in his homeland. He is seen arriving at the reception with Thai Princess Ubolratana Mahidol, who made an abortive attempt last month to be a prime ministerial candidate for a political party allied to Thaksin

Although ostensibly a family affair with a raft of VIP guests, the ceremony's timing seemed to carry an implicit message to Thaksin's countrymen back in Thailand: Don't forget me and my political allies when you go out to vote. (Above, Thaksin welcomes guests to the reception)

Also absent at the nuptials in Bangkok but present in Hong Kong was Thaksin's sister, Yingluck Shinawatra (pictured at the reception), who like her brother was ousted from the prime minister's job in 2014 and also fled into exile to avoid a prison sentence

A farmer points at an image of Thaksin Shinawatra on a calendar in Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand. Although Thaksin is banned from interfering in Thailand's politics, his name is a powerful political attraction. In tribute, and to win votes, some candidates have changed their names to Thaksin so his supporters can register their loyalty at the ballot box

The generals who seized power in 2014 are hoping to hold on through the ballot box with the help of military-appointed senators who can vote for prime minister, and coup leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha made his first appearance at a rally for his Phalang Pracharat party.

But he faces several parties linked to the influential Shinawatra family, which has won every election since 2001.

Thai Princess Ubolratana Mahidol made an abortive attempt last month to be a prime ministerial candidate for a political party allied to Thaksin. And she was a special guest at the wedding reception on Friday.

Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha greets supporters during a pro-junta Palang Pracharath Party's general election rally campaign in Bangkok on Friday

The generals who seized power in 2014 are hoping to hold on through the ballot box with the help of military-appointed senators who can vote for prime minister, and coup leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha made his first appearance at a rally for his Phalang Pracharat party (pictured, his supporters).

Thaksin has not been back to Thailand since 2008, when he fled the country to escape serving a prison term for a conflict of interest conviction he insists was politically motivated.

Thailand is broadly divided between pro-Shinawatra factions and an elite aligned with the military, which has portrayed itself as a stabilising force and defender of the country's monarchy.

But loyalties are more complex now with more than 7million first-time voters aged 18-25 and new parties in the mix.

The most prominent is Future Forward, led by charismatic frontman Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, a 40-year-old billionaire popular with millennials.

Thousands of young Future Forward supporters decked out in the country's trademark orange colours waved flags and glow sticks at a stadium in Bangkok Friday night ahead of Thanathorn's appearance, as their hero prepped backstage.

'You win the ideas first and then you win the war and then you can change,' Thanathorn told reporters before his speech.

A Thai woman passes posters of Pheu Chart party's Veerawit Chuajunud (left), who changed his name to Thaksin Chuajunud, and Pracha Pracharat Party's candidate and Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha (left on right poster), during an election campaign in Nakhon Ratchasima

Political buzz galvanised multiple rallies across the Thai capital as the sun went down.

Even the famously gruff Prayut, the army man who led the 2014 putsch, took to the stage in Bangkok.

General election contested by 70 parties More than 70 parties are contesting Sunday's general election in Thailand, the first since a military coup nearly five years ago. Up for grabs are 500 seats in the House of Representatives, where parties will need to win at least 25 seats to be able to nominate their preferred candidate for prime minister. The prime minister will be chosen in a joint vote of members of the elected house and the unelected senate, whose 250 members will all be appointed by the junta after the general election. Advertisement

Wearing a white shirt and slacks and holding roses, he ascended the stage and spoke for about five minutes, jabbing his finger to punctuate points.

'Thank you for all the support given me, I will give back with my life and my heart,' he said.

But it remains to be seen whether his Phalang Pracharat can make a dent in the electoral machine of Pheu Thai, the Thaksin-affiliated party that still taps loyalty from the poor but populous rural north and northeast.

'They are strong with all people,' said Sharpay Janperng, 26, manager at an education company, at a packed rally for the party.

Pheu Thai's top candidate for prime minister, Sudarat Keyuraphan, told the crowd that 'happiness and a good economy depend on your pen.'

Future Forward and Pheu Thai, whose rallies were held 100 metres apart, both oppose the junta. But pro-democracy forces need to overcome the built-in advantage of the 250 appointed senators.

That means Phalang Pracharat and other military-aligned parties need only 126 votes in the 500-seat Lower House to elect a prime minister.

Thaksin's youngest daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, got married to Pidok Sooksawas, a pilot at a commercial airline (pictured)

In a thinly veiled jibe at the stacked deck, Thai hip-hop sensation Rap Against Dictatorship, whose last anti-junta song racked up nearly 60million views on YouTube, named their next release '250 sycophants'.

By contrast, Pheu Thai would need to cobble together 376 votes to gain the upper hand.

That raises the prospect of a long road ahead of political horsetrading after preliminary results are announced Sunday night.

Analysts believe the loyalties of Bhumjaithai, which finished third in 2011 and is run by the fantastically wealthy Anutin Charnvirakul, will be in high demand.

Anutin said Friday his party would support a 'stability' government but is leaving his options open.

Thaksin, a billionaire telecoms mogul, has been in self-exile since 2008 to avoid a jail term on corruption charges. But he still sits at the heart of Thailand's politics.

Earlier this month the dissolution of one of his parties - Thai Raksa Chart - hampered an election strategy to cobble together votes under a party list system.

Thai Raksa Chart had proposed Princess Ubolratana as its candidate for premier, but King Maha Vajiralongkorn struck down the move calling it 'highly inappropriate'.

Thaksin the populist beams in to wedding through a video link

Thailand's conservative establishment hates Thaksin because of the electoral strength he drew from the country's poor and rural majority with his populist programs.

This meant he was not able to attend the actual marriage ceremony in Thailand last Sunday of his youngest daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, and Pidok Sooksawas, a pilot at a commercial airline.

Thaksin was however able to beam in through a video link - a method he frequently used to talk to his followers in the early years of his exile.

Also absent at the nuptials in Bangkok but present in Hong Kong was Thaksin's sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, who like her brother was ousted from the prime minister's job in 2014 and also fled into exile to avoid a prison sentence.

Although Thaksin could not attend his daughter's actual ceremony, he was able to beam in through a video link - a method he frequently used to talk to his followers in the early years of his exile

Thaksin's daughter Pintongtha 'Aim' and her husband Nattapong 'Pong' Kunakornwong welcome guests at the wedding of Thaksin's youngest daughter Paetongtarn 'Ing' Shinawatra at a hotel in Hong Kong on Friday

A video posted on Instagram by a guest at Friday's reception showed the bride, evidently referring to her father, telling guests that: 'You know the reason why I, we, have this wedding this far away from our hometown. It's because home is where your heart is, and my heart is right here.'

Reporters hovering outside the entrance to Hong Kong's Rosewood Hotel were able to shout a few questions to Thaksin as he escorted guests inside, but received only brief answers. He said he was 'very happy' in English, and when asked in Thai how he felt about the elections, replied 'I don't know yet.'

Thaksin beamed as he walked Princess Ubolratana into the luxury hotel, which overlooks Victoria Harbor.

Ubolratana caused an uproar when the pro-Thaksin Thai Raksa Chart Party registered her as its nominee for prime minister in an unprecedented move for a member of the royal family, which by tradition stays above politics.

Reporters hovering outside the entrance to Hong Kong's Rosewood Hotel were able to shout a few questions to Thaksin as he escorted guests inside, but received only brief answers. He said he was 'very happy' in English, and when asked in Thai how he felt about the elections, replied 'I don't know yet'

The move was seen as a clever ploy by Thaksin's political machine to immunize itself against charges that it opposed the monarchy, an allegation that conservative Thais had hurled at the ambitious businessman-politician.

However, it turned into a disaster for Thai Raksa Chart when only hours later, Ubolratana's younger brother, King Maha Vajiralongkorn, declared that the nomination was extremely inappropriate and unconstitutional.

In short order, the state Election Commission rejected the nomination, and a court dissolved the party and imposed a 10-year ban on political activity by its executive board.

Disbanding Thai Raksa Chart was a bow to Thaksin's political allies because it was hoped the party would add parliamentary seats to the total accrued by the flagship Pheu Thai party.

Members of the disbanded party, along with other allies of Thaksin, attended Friday's wedding reception.

Thaksin made a fortune in the telecommunications sector before going into politics, and even though Thai authorities seized a big chunk of his wealth, he remains a globetrotting businessman based in Dubai, though the extent and details of his holdings are unclear.Advertisement

New York City Jewish families across all boroughs gathered at their local synagogues to celebrate Purim in a stunning spectacle where children took to the streets dressed up in adorable costumes while holding onto bags of sweets to share with friends.

The ancient holiday is celebrated every year on the 14th of the Hebrew month Adar and celebrates the bravery of Queen Esther who saved the Jewish people from being murdered and persecuted in ancient Persia.

The holiday started on Wednesday and continued into Thursday evening.

Excited parents and children were spotted in Brooklyn dressed up for the special holiday as cowboys, princesses, and mad scientists as they headed to synagogue for parties and prayer services.

Jews across New York City celebrated the traditional festival of Purim this week, which started on Wednesday and ended Thursday evening

The evening before Purim the Jewish people fast. Then on Purim there is a grand feast, children dress in costumes and exchange sweets, and all gather at synagogues for to hear the ancient story of Queen Esther

Children braved the rain on Thursday to dress up in fun costumes like this boy dressed as a mad scientist

This vibrant trio was spotted in Brooklyn on Thursday dressed as a pineapple, strawberry and a cheerful clown

All smiles here! These two little boys couldn't contain their excitement and went all out with their costumes as a frightening pirate and a gleeful cowboy from the Wild West

With them, many kids clutched bags of chocolates and sweets like Humentaschen, a traditional cookie shaped like a triangle and stuffed with different kids of fillings.

Some lucky kids were seen holding money in their hands as they headed out.

Adults joined the fun, dressed in Wild West inspired costumes, sailors, and superheros characters like Deadpool.

The celebration commemorates the first time a government sought to kill the Jewish people in ancient Persia, a cruel agenda led by Haman, the evil adviser to the Persian King.

Queen Esther intervened and saved her people from genocide.

Services and celebrations for the holiday typically include congregating at local synagogues for retellings of the ancient story.

Strike a pose: Adults joined in the costume fun as well to mark Purim, a jolly festival for the Jewish people

Mini me! A proud father dressed as an officer and his son dressed as a cop saluted cameras as they walked through Brooklyn on Thursday

Families were seen walking to synagogue with presents and in fun costumes for the special holiday

Lion, tigers and bears - oh my! These sweet kids were dressed up in furry tiger and lion costumes on Thursday

A little bride struggled to keep up with her family in her extravagant wedding costume, complete with a veil

The evening before Purim, Jewish people do not typically eat or drink, but during the festival they enjoy a lavish feast and wine.

Last year in Brooklyn many political costumes took over the streets, most poking fun at President Donald Trump.

This year was more calm and playful, with kids dressing up in stuffed animal costumes, as robots, and pilgrims.

A more startling scene spotted in Borough Park, Brooklyn was a stuffed man hanging from a rope suspended over a busy street, dressed with a long beard and mustache.

Though shocking, the man is supposed to represent evil adviser Haman, who was killed by hanging for his plot to commit a mass massacre against the Jews.

According to the tale, Haman's ears were cut off as a part of his punishment. The cookies eaten on Purim, called Humentaschen, translate to 'ears of Haman'.

In Borough Park, Brooklyn a stuffed man was seen suspended from a rope. He represents the evil adviser Haman, who advised the king to commit genocide against the Jewish people in ancient Persia. Queen Esther stepped in and stopped the plot, saving the Jewish people, which they commemorate each year with the festival of Purim

Residents of the Jewish neighborhood were unphased by the stark stuffed hanging man. Evil adviser Haman was killed by hanging after his plot to kill the Jewish people was foiled

Thumbs up! These boys gave a cheeky thumbs up to photographers amid the craziness of Purim on Thusday

These little boys dressed up as Navy SEAL officers and pirates for the festival on Thursday in New York

A princess and her prince! This family couldn't wait to get to synagogue for the special celebration Thursday

Costume and comfort! These guys dressed as sharks while keeping comfy and dry in their plush onsiesA Michigan woman accused of turning a blind eye as her husband raped and molested two female relatives in the couple's care has accepted a plea deal.

In November, Dhiannah Fawcett, 40, from Oakley in Saginaw County pleaded guilty to one count of fourth-degree child abuse - a misdemeanor carrying a maximum penalty of one year in jail.

Prosecutors have now agreed to dismiss a second felony count of second-degree child abuse, that carries a 10-year jail sentence, as part of the plea.

Dhiannah Fawcett, 40, is accused of turning a blind eye as her husband raped and molested two female relatives in the couple's care

Fawcett's husband Brian, 58, is accused of raping and molesting the girls, aged 15 and 16, over a four-year period as they stayed with the couple.

The abuse allegedly started when the girls were as young as 12.

The younger victim said she told Dhiannah Fawcett about the abuse, but nothing was done.

Fawcett's husband Brian (pictured), 58, is accused of raping and molesting the girls, now aged 15 and 16, over a four-year period

Brian Fawcett is charged with six counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct with a relation, two counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct, and one count of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct.

First-degree criminal sexual conduct involves penetration and is punishable by up to life imprisonment, while second-degree criminal sexual conduct is limited to touching and is a 15-year felony.

The Brian Fawcetts cases are scheduled for trial before Judge Trice on July 16.The death of student Libby Squire is being treated as a 'potential homicide', police said today.

Humberside Police found the 21-year-old's body in the Humber Estuary earlier this week following a six-week search after her disappearance during a night out with friends in February.

The force confirmed today it is now 'solely investigating' her death as a possible murder and have stopped probing other causes.

A post mortem took place last night but police are not releasing the results due to 'operational reasons'.

The University of Hull student, from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, had not been seen since the early hours of February 1. She had been on a night out in Hull but is believed to have been refused entry to a nightclub and put in a taxi by her friends.

Humberside Police believe she may have 'come to harm' and a 24-year-old man suspecting of abducting her has been charged with a number of unrelated offences.

Officers confirmed that Polish butcher Pawel Relowicz, from Hull, was still under investigation, although he has never been charged in relation to her disappearance.

Mourners have left floral tributes in her memory today at a bench in Beverley Road, Hull, where she was last seen in February.

University of Hull student Libby Squire, 21, who is originally from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, was last seen in the early hours of February 1 this year. Police have confirmed they are treating her death as a 'potential homicide'

Mourners have been coming to the bench in Beverley Road, Hull, throughout the morning to pay their respects to the student

Floral tributes have been left in her memory on a bench where she was last seen in Hull

Messages of love and support for Libby and her family have been left alongside flowers

Her body was pulled out of the Humber Estuary on Wednesday and tests last night confirmed it was Libby. Pictured are police at the scene on Wednesday

Libby Squire has not been seen since the early hours of February 1. A timeline shows how the police investigation has progressed since her disappearance. On Wednesday a body was recovered from the Humber Estuary near Grimsby docks

In a statement, Detective Superintendent Martin Smalley said: 'Our thoughts remain today with Libby's family and friends at this incredibly sad and devastating time for them.

'The loss of a loved one is always an upsetting and traumatic experience to go through, but the circumstances surrounding Libby's death will only intensify the heartache for her family.

'Specially trained officers continue in supporting Libby's family and we will do all we can to provide further support and assistance to them in any way we are able to.

'The University of Hull have also created a space for tributes to Libby, which is open to both students and the community to attend and remember Libby and offer any messages of condolence.

'In regards to our investigation, while we have considered throughout the missing person inquiry that Libby may have come to some harm, Libby's death and the recovery of her body now leads us to solely investigate as a potential homicide.

'The post-mortem examination concluded late last night and at this stage, we will not be releasing any results for investigative and operational reasons.

'We have to protect the integrity of the investigation, which is live and very much active and ongoing, with one man who remains under investigation.

'An inquest into Libby's death will be opened on Monday afternoon (25 March) at Hull Coroner's Court at 1pm.

'Libby captured the hearts of not just the people in Hull, but across the country, and as I have said before, the support shown has been overwhelming and my sincerest thanks to absolutely everyone who has been involved.'

Tributes have poured in for Libby today from staff and students at the University of Hull, with the students' union saying everyone is 'devastated' by her death.

The vice chancellor and union president said extra measures have been put in place to support students trying to cope with the news and more safety measures have been put in place, including organising students who want to walk in groups or with security staff, if requested.

Union president Osaro Otobo said: 'The student community are absolutely devastated by this news but now we want to pull together and support each other to make sure we're all during this time.'

The bench in Beverley Road, Hull, pictured, is now covered in bouquets and has become something of a shrine in her memory

Last week, Libby's mother Lisa (pictured right with her daughter) said the family were 'really struggling' without their daughter and 'miss her beyond belief'. The student's body was yesterday found in waters near Grimsby Docks

Ms Otobo was speaking with vice-chancellor Susan Lea in front of floral tributes which have been laid in memory of Ms Squire around a tree on the campus.

She said: 'The student body would like to pay their respects to Libby and her family. So, as a students' union, we have a Remembrance Tree on our ground floor where students can write a note for Libby and her family which will be passed on to them.

'They just want to show their respects. You can see from the tree, all of the flowers and the tributes.

'That's what want to do just show how much we care.'

Asked whether students were worried about their own security, Ms Otobo said: 'There'll be some concerns about safety but I want to highlight that this is such a rare occurrence, so now, as a students' union, we highlight all the measures that you can take to be safe on a night out, including how to prepare your journey, make sure you book a taxi on a night out.'

Professor Lea said: 'It has been a difficult time. Students and staff are devastated by the situation and way it has unfolded. But I think we've pulled together as a community.

'This a really close-knit community and we've been really heartened and moved by the way in which staff and students, the local community and the police have come together at a difficult time both in the search for Libby but, also, to support one another.'

She said safety was an 'absolute priority' for staff and students.

'We are absolutely committed to providing all the support we can to our staff and our students,' the professor said.

'We are doing that in a variety of ways and I have an extremely strong team leading that.

'So we have extra assistance available to our students through advisers.

Russell and Lisa Squire, the parents of missing student Libby Squire, made an emotional appeal for information in helping to find her soon after she went missing

'But we also have schemes available so security will walk with them if they would like somebody to walk with them. And students have got together to form groups so they can walk in pairs.

'So there's a variety of initiatives to provide that support.'

Prof Lea also said mental health support for students had been 'augmented'.

Revealing the tragic news yesterday evening, Detective Superintendent Martin Smalley said: 'A post-mortem examination commenced this afternoon and is continuing to be carried out this evening.

'However formal identification has now taken place and we can confirm the body recovered is that of missing woman Libby Squire. Libby's family have been informed and are receiving support from specially trained officers.'

Speaking last night, Professor Susan Lea, vice-chancellor at the University of Hull, where Libby was a student, said: 'As a close-knit University community of staff and students, we are all absolutely devastated by the loss of our student, Libby Squire.

'Our hearts go out to Libby's family and friends at this incredibly difficult time and we will continue to give them our full support.'

She added: 'We will keep doing everything we can to support our staff and students as they adjust to this shocking and tragic news and we will continue to support the police fully with their investigation.'

Police were on Tuesday seen combing Oak Road playing fields in Hull as part of an 'ongoing investigation'. Oak Road playing fields have been at the centre of the search for missing Libby in recent weeks

Hull Community Church also last night changed its profile picture on Facebook to one paying tribute to Miss Squire.

With a post on the page reading: 'We are devastated at the news of Libby Squire. Our prayers and thoughts are with the family at this horrendous time.

'We have taken Libby to our hearts, and she will never be forgotten by us here in Hull.

'We have laid white tulips for Libby on the bench where she was last seen - only to find that others have come too to pour out their grief and send messages of love.'

Miss Squire was dropped off near her house at 11.29pm on February 1 and was last seen walking in a nearby road at 12.05am wearing a black skirt, black leather jacket and distinctive trainers.

CCTV captured her walking towards the nightclub earlier in the evening, with cameras also capturing her on a bench near her home.

On Wednesday, Humberside Police revealed that a body had been recovered from the Humber Estuary, in close proximity to Grimsby Docks.

The RNLI launched from Cleethorpes at about 2.30pm and brought the body to the quayside, where there was a large police presence.

A spokesman for the RNLI said at the time: 'Lifeboat crews from the RNLI's Humber and Cleethorpes stations launched at 2.30pm this afternoon to a report of a casualty in the water.'

Officers were seen raking long grass in a wooded area in Oak Road Playing Fields in Hull soon after her disappearance, 500 yards from where the university student was last seen on CCTV

In the days after her disappearance, officers from the police regional marine unit searched a pond at Oak Road Playing Fields, near to Miss Squire's home

Officers cordoned off an area of the dock and a blue tarpaulin could be seen alongside the boat, covering something on the ground.

A number of uniformed officers could be seen and what appeared to be detectives.

Police have been engaged in a desperate search for the 21-year-old ever since she went missing earlier this year.

Also still missing are two men who tragically jumped from the Humber Bridge within minutes of each other in the early hours of December 29.

Sam Conlin, 24, from Hull, is believed to have taken his own life after an eight year battle with his mental health. The second man, believed to be in his 40s from Grimsby, was not named by police at the time.

Moments prior to Miss Squire's disappearance she was spotted on a security camera near a bench on Beverley Road, where a motorist stopped to offer her help.

And a woman living in a street close to Miss Squire's home later said she heard a scream which she said 'sounded like someone being attacked'.

The woman said the 'nature' of the noise - heard in the early hours - had shocked her as 'they don't normally get women screaming like that' on her street.

A video released by the Squire family shows Libby dancing and singing in the passenger seat of a car

One of the people featured in Humberside Police's CCTV footage of four witnesses, who they believe 'may have seen or heard something that could be vital'

The four people who feature in the CCTV footage from February 1 in Hull are circled above

The woman said the area was filled with mainly students who were often loud at night.

Police also revealed at the time that they had found Miss Squire's mobile phone at her home but that it had not helped to provide any information about where she went the night she went missing.

Police were on Tuesday seen combing Oak Road playing fields in Hull as part of an 'ongoing investigation'.

Timeline of Libby Squire disappearance January 31: Ms Squire is dropped off in a taxi near her home on Wellesley Avenue at 11.29pm and is seen 10 minutes later on CCTV near a bench on Beverley Road, where a motorist stopped to offer her help. February 1: She is believed to have remained in the area until about 12.09am. She is reported missing and officers begin an intensive search for the student. February 5: Around 200 students and staff gather in the rain at the University of Hull to show solidarity and support for Ms Squire, her family and friends. February 6: Pawel Relowicz, 24, is arrested at an address in Raglan Street in Hull on suspicion of abducting Ms Squire. Earlier in the day, her parents Lisa and Russ issue a statement thanking the public for their help and say they have been 'overwhelmed with people's kindness and support'. February 7: Officers take to the streets around where Ms Squire was last seen a week earlier to hand out leaflets and drive around a large screen displaying images of the student, as the search continues. February 11: Relowicz, of Raglan Street, Hull, appears at Hull Magistrates' Court accused of voyeurism, outraging public decency and burglary - charges unrelated to the disappearance of Miss Squire. He remains under investigation following his earlier arrest on suspicion of abduction. February 28: Police admit it is increasingly likely Ms Squire 'has come to harm'. Detective Superintendent Martin Smalley, leading the investigation, says his team has followed up hundreds of leads and carried out intensive searches yet her disappearance remains 'unexplained', adding: 'We must increasingly consider she has come to harm.' March 7: Relowicz appears in court charged with seven further unrelated offences, including two counts of burglary, two counts of voyeurism, two counts of outraging public decency and one of receiving stolen goods in connection with seven alleged incidents committed between 2017 and 2019 in Hull. March 20: Humberside Police say a body has been recovered from the water in the Humber Estuary but add that it is too early for any identification or confirmation of gender to be made. March 21: Humberside Police say a post-mortem examination has confirmed that the body recovered is that of Ms Squire, and her family has been informed. Advertisement

Oak Road playing fields have been at the centre of the search for missing Libby in recent weeks.

And police divers have searched the lake in Oak Road , which is near to the home of the missing 21-year-old student.

Last week Libby's family released a new video of her singing in the car with her family as they struggle to cope without her six weeks on.

Her mother Lisa said the family are 'really struggling' without their daughter and 'miss her beyond belief'.

She said: 'As a family, we are really struggling. The whole family miss Libby beyond belief.

'Libby's disappearance is having a big effect on all of us. Please if you have any information let the police know.'

The video shows Libby singing with her brother and two sisters who are out of view of the camera.

Senior Investigating Officer Detective Superintendent Martin Smalley added at the time: 'For the past six weeks the amount of support from the people of Hull, the region and around the UK has been staggering.

'I want to thank everyone for their assistance and to everyone who has come forward with information to help us with our investigation so far.

'We continue to search for Libby. Hundreds of officers have been involved both on land and in the water and we have followed up hundreds of leads and lines of enquiry.

'Libby's disappearance remains unexplained and while we remain hopeful, we must consider she has come to harm.

'Last month we released CCTV footage showing four people on Oak Road in Hull close to the junction with Clough Road around the time that Libby was last seen.

'We want to speak with them as they may be possible witnesses and might hold important information'.

Libby's family had previously said that the student's disappearance was 'very out-of-character' and that she is a 'very thoughtful and caring young woman who puts others before herself'.

Soon after she went missing around 200 students from across Hull gathered at an event held in her honour, which was also attended by Libby's parents, Lisa and Russell Squire, who joined students and members of the local community.

University staff and students braved the wet weather and walked more than 100m from the library to the Canham Turner building as part of a solidarity march.

At the time, Vice chancellor professor Susan Lea told those in attendance: 'We come together this evening to express our deep concern about Libby.

'Libby is a Philosphy student here at the university of Hull and one of our community.

'I have to say we have been deeply moved by the way in which both our students and local community have come together in support of one another and to help to try and find Libby.

'This event this evening is part of that support and solidarity to show support and solidarity for Libby, for Libby's parents, for Libby's friends, for Libby's family and indeed for one another.'

Photographs released by Miss Squire's family show her at home on Christmas Day last year (left) and in Paris in May 2017 (right) when she visited with friends during a gap year

A map traces Libby's last known movements before she disappeared six weeks ago

Relowicz was arrested on suspicion of abduction after Libby Squire vanished more than a month ago, and remains under investigation.

But the 24-year-old Polish national has never been charged with anything in relation to the University of Hull student's disappearance.

Appearing at Hull Crown Court on Monday, he denied five counts of burglary, three of voyeurism, three of outraging public decency and one of receiving stolen goods.

He spoke only through an interpreter to confirm his name and enter his not guilty pleas during the 15-minute plea and trial preparation hearing.A Indian woman used a kitchen knife to cut off her husband's genitals during a 'petty' row after he came home drunk.

Santhoshi Singh, 24, and her husband Sher, 26, live in the southern city of Hyderabad with their two children, who are both below the age of four.

The couple, who were originally from Rajasthan in the north, had moved to the city just ten days go in search of a better livelihood, the Deccan Chronicle reports.

Santhoshi Singh, 24, cut off the genitals of her husband Sher, 26, after he came back drunk to their home in Hyderabad, India (pictured)

The incident began when Sher, who worked in a local marble factory, returned home on Saturday evening slightly intoxicated, having been out drinking.

Santhoshi, angered by her husband's behaviour, lost control after Sher then picked a 'petty' quarrel with his wife.

According to the Chronicle, she then seized a kitchen knife and used it to slice off the victim's genitals.

Neighbours of the couple contacted the police, who rushed Sher to Osmania General Hospital.

Sher Singh, 26, is currently recovering at Osmania General Hospital (pictured), where his wife is attending his bedside

He is currently undergoing treatment but is said to be in a stable condition.

Police inspector V. Ashok Reddy told the Chronicle: 'The couple fought over a petty issue and Sher Singh was in a drunk condition and their children were sleeping.

'His wife got angry and chopped off his genitals with a knife. He is currently undergoing treatment and is stated to be stable.'

Sher has filed a complaint and criminal case has been opened, the inspector said.

But Santhoshi is currently attending her husband's bedside at the hospital and has not been arrested yet, he added.Economic consultant Hilary Mackay, pictured outside Uxbridge Magistrates' Court was arrested after she arrived at Heathrow Airport on board a British Airways flight from Johannesburg

An economic consultant downed rum and wine before flooring three cabin crew with a series of judo sweeps while on a flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow, a court heard.

Hilary Mackay 54, repeatedly called one cabin crew member a 'b****' on the night flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow.

It was said Mackay, whose Kensington home is worth 1.5 million, became 'aggressive and agitated' after being asked to leave an extra leg room seat she hadn't paid for.

It is said she started swearing at crew and fumed 'do you expect me to look at these empty seats?'

The court heard that during the 10-hour flight she downed a quarter of a litre bottle of rum and two small bottles of wine and deliberately stuck her leg out when when she saw workers coming down the aisle, leaving them 'shocked and bruised'.

Prosecutor Jasbir Kaur told Uxbridge Magistrates' Court: 'The allegations relate to incidents on December 12 last year on an inbound flight travelling from Johannesburg in South Africa to Heathrow in London - during that flight Ms Mackay drinking from her own alcohol she had in her hand luggage.

'She was originally seated in 49G but moved to 49H, an extra leg room seat which attracted an additional cost of 50.

'She was asked by a member of cabin crew if she wanted to continue accessing that seat she would have to pay or else she would have to return to her original seat.

'However it is alleged that throughout the flight Ms Mackay was verbally abusive to staff, swearing at them several times - she was disruptive and on several occasions placed her foot out into the aisle as staff walked past, thus assaulting them.

'Ms Mackay was reported and she was met by police when the flight landed in Heathrow.'

At an earlier hearing in January Mrs Mackay described her actions, saying: 'I was practising judo sweeps, so it wasn't to target those three people.'

The prosecution at that hearing added: 'She did a judo sweep on an aeroplane which constitutes an assault because people were tripped up.'

Lucey Downey, the cabin service supervisor and one of the alleged victims, described being sworn after asking Mackay to move back to her seat.

She said: 'I approached her in a calm manner - I came down to her eye level, spoke softly to her and explained the situation about the seating.

Mackay, pictured, is accused of using a judo sweep to hit three members of cabin crew on the flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow

'I gave her the option of staying in the seat and paying the extra money or moving back to her seat - she was agitated and aggressive in her tone, she didn't like the idea of moving because it was an empty row of three and more comfortable.

'She said she didn't "f****** see why" she would have to move seats - I asked her not to swear at me.

'She said to me that if I was going to be "pissing" her around she was going to make the night very difficult for us.'

Ms Downey left told her manager about Mackay's refusal to move, who told her she would speak to the defendant after takeoff.

Ms Downey said it wasn't until later in the flight as she was walking down the aisle that she was assaulted by Mackay.

She said: 'As I walked down the aisle Ms Mackay put her leg out with some force and aggression and it tripped me up.

'I felt a sharp kick to my shin which made me trip and grabbed onto the seats either side of the aisle to stop myself from falling.

The captain of the flight alerted authorities in Heathrow about a disruptive passenger and police arrested Mackay when the jet arrived at the terminal gate

'I took a deep breath and put myself upright - I didn't engage with Ms Mackay - I was very shocked, something like that had never happened to me before - I felt very shaken up actually.'

Manager Alex Scott, who went down to speak to the defendant after the flight took off, said Mackay called her a 'b****' three times.

She said: 'When she came back from the toilet she took her passport and boarding pass and thrust it in my face - I had to pull back.

'I was trying to be calm and knelt down beside her but she was already agitated.

'We has a conversation that lasted about 15 minutes - I explained she could pay for the extra leg room or he could return to her original seat.

'She said "if I go back to my seat, do you expect me to look at these empty seats?" - I said yes because other customers have paid for those seats and it's not fair for you to sit there when you haven't paid but we just kept going round and round.

'She said "you're a b****" - she moved her body forward and said it three times and then she said "I will move back to my seat but I'm not happy".'

The court heard later in the flight as Ms Scott was serving meals, Mackay shoved her cart into the opposite seats.

Ms Scott said: 'During the meal service I asked her if she wanted a hot drink and she said yes politely.

'Then she pushed my cart into the other seats on the other side of the aisle - I said please don't do that it's dangerous.'

Defending herself in court today, Mackay said the cabin crew should 'know better' than to aggravate a smoker and accused the BA staff of 'talking nonsense' in their evidence

Addressing the court, cabin crew member Leanne Palmer described being kicked in the ankle by Mackay and nearly hitting the ground.

She said: 'As I was walking I felt a kick to my ankle and I tripped, a big trip, and just saved myself by grabbing onto the lower part of the chair - I was really shocked.

Another crew member, Philip Sumner, told the court that Mackay tried to trip him up twice.

He said: 'The lady put her right leg out as she saw me walking down - she held eye contact with me as she did it.

'I saw it and was able to climb over the leg and continued on to do the toilet checks.

'The passenger was looking at me as I was doing this - her eyes were on me all the time - and as I came back she puts her leg out when I was very close to her.

'I climbed over it again and said you're going to seriously hurt someone - she just shrugged her shoulders at me.'

Police in Heathrow were called just after 6am after being alerted about a 'disruptive passenger' - PC Carl Brackley arrived at the airport with two other officers and took Mackay off the plane.

In a statement read out in court he said: 'I could smell intoxicating liquor on her breath and her eyes were glazed, she was slurring her words.

'I could see what appeared to be a tear in her eye, it appeared she had been crying.'

He explained to her there were reports of her being 'antagonistic' to crew members on the flight about a seat.

Mackay said she wanted to lie down and sleep on the three empty seats in the row.

She said: 'I'm short, extra leg room means nothing to me, I was interested in the two empty seats beside me - it was a 10 hour non smoking flight, I was interested in getting through the flight.'

PC Brackley asked her whether she had been drinking to which she said 'yes'.

He said: 'She pulled out a bottle from her bag, I asked her what it was and she said it was rum - a quarter of it was gone and she said at the start of the flight it was full.

'She said she had also had two bottles of wine, the single glass bottles given on flights.'

He added: 'I believe she was drunk.'

Mackay was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and being drunk on an aircraft, both of which were later dropped - during her police interview that day she was further arrested for the assaults on cabin crew.

She gave a no comment interview and was later charged with three counts of assault by beating - one of which was reduced to common assault at today's trial.

Giving evidence today Mackay said they crew should 'know better' than to aggravate a smoker on a flight and accused the victims of 'talking nonsense' and 'not being honest' in their statements.

She said: 'The crew should know better than to rile the passengers - they should be there to make the flight as smooth and quiet and beautiful as they can.

'There are people who do smoke and can't smoke on an aircraft and they shouldn't aggravate those passengers.'

Defending herself today, Mackay said after she sat in the extra leg room seat, a man had sat in hers and she was unable to go back.

She said: 'I explained that to them but they refused to listen - they didn't want to listen - they just wanted money for the seat.'

But this was refuted by the witnesses, who said they told her they would move the man - which they did.

The verdict will be given later.A student who survived the Parkland shooting has taken her own life.

Sydney Aiello, 19, a recent graduate from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, committed suicide over the weekend, according to her mother Cara Aiello.

Cara Aiello told CBS Miami that her daughter had struggled with 'survivor's guilt and was recently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.'

Sydney Aiello, pictured above, was a recent MSD graduate who was close friends with Meadow Pollack, one of the victims of the Parkland shooting

Sydney was close friends with Meadow Pollack, one of the 17 students and staff killed in the mass shooting on February 14, 2018. The youngest of her family, Pollack was one of four seniors gunned down at the high school on Valentine's Day.

Meadow Pollack had been ready to go to Lynn University in Boca Raton.

Cara Aiello said her daughter Sydney was on campus when the shooter opened fire but was not in the Freshman Building.

She added that Sydney, who was studying at Florida Atlantic University, struggled to attend college classes because she was afraid of being in a classroom and was often sad but hadn't asked for help before she killed herself.

She took her own life on March 17.

Her funeral took place Friday.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy the Broward school district opened several counseling centers. Grief counselors and comfort animals were also on site as students returned to school in the weeks following the shooting.

Nikolas Cruz, suspected of killing 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, appeared in court, Friday.

Cruz, 20, did not speak at the pre-trial status hearing in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where his public defender asked for prosecutors to hand over all body cam evidence.

But things became heated between defense lawyer Melissa McNeill and Judge Elizabeth Scherer as McNeill sought an order to force the prosecution to hand over the footage within 10 days.

Sydney (right) was close friends with Meadow Pollack (pictured left), one of the victims of the Parkland shooting

Aiello took her own life at the weekend, according to her mother, who said her daughter had struggled with 'survivor's guilt' following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

'This court has put us under a schedule, and we are not able to comply with that schedule because we are not receiving the information that we need to prepare this case for trial,' McNeil said, according to WPLG-TV.

'You're being disrespectful and I'm not going to be talked to in this way,' Scherer told the lawyer.

After the hearing resumed, the judged eventually agreed to order prosecutors to turn over all of the body cam evidence within 10 days.

Cruz's trial is scheduled for early next year, no specific date has been set, as yet.

Cruz's attorneys have said he will plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence.

The prosecution is seeking the death penalty.

On Wednesday it was reported that the Principal of Stoneman Douglas High, Ty Thompson was reassigned amid an ongoing investigation into whether teachers could have prevented the killings.

In January, a commission report found that he was 'disengaged' with the school's threat assessment process and was unaware that shooter Nikolas Cruz's behavior was of concern.

Three other school employees who were in the school on the day of the shooting have also been reassigned.

Suspect Nikolas Cruz appeared in court Friday suspected of killing 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

A GoFundMe page has been created 'In Loving Memory of Sydney Aiello', which has already raised more than $24,000.

'Sydney spent 19 years writing her story as a beloved daughter, sister and friend to many,' it reads.

Tributes poured in on the page.

'I knew Sydney when she was a little girl, she was so beautiful, funny & very sweet. She was my granddaughters friend. My heart breaks for Sydney & her family,' one contributor wrote.

'Please accept this small token of my heart felt love for you. I will pray hard for you every day,' Grace Agostino wrote.

'So sorry for your loss - she was our childrens babysitter,' the Shear Family wrote.

Sydney is survived by her parents Cara and Joe, and her brother Nick.

Sydney Aiello loved yoga. According to her mother, she wanted to dedicate her life towards helping others.

Meadow Pollack's father, Andrew Pollack, told the Miami Herald that his heart goes out to Sydney Aiello's parents.

Pollack has become an outspoken advocate of increasing school security.

'It's terrible what happened. Meadow and Sydney were friends for a long, long time,' Pollack said. 'Killing yourself is not the answer,' he added.

If you or someone you know is struggling you can call the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255.

To speak to someone outside the U.S. visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention.

Cara Aiello said Sydney (pictured above) was on campus the day of the shooting but not in the Freshman Building



A former News Corp. senior vice president says he resigned over what he calls Fox News's 'extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric' after immigrating to the U.S. as a refugee from Afghanistan.

Joseph Azam, 37, told NPR coverage on Rupert Murdoch's network 'fundamentally bothered' him, saying 'it worries me that, you know, what's being put out into the universe could actually create a lot of risk for [my children].'

He left his post as the group chief compliance officer for News Corp.'s corporate headquarters in late 2017 after joining the company in 2015.

Azam said: 'Scaring people. Demonizing immigrants. Creating, like, a fervor  or an anxiety about what was happening in our country.

'It fundamentally bothered me on a lot of days and I think I probably wasn't the only one.'

As part of his argument Azam referenced a tweet by Murdoch which said: 'Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.'

Former News Corp. senior vice president Joseph Azam, left, says he resigned over what he calls Fox News's 'extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric'. Azam said coverage on the network 'fundamentally bothered' him and he pointed to tweets he sent host Tucker Carlson, right

During the opening monologue of her show (pictured) on March 9, Pirro claimed that Omar's hijab was a sign that she was committed to the religious law which originates from the Quran, adding that it was 'antithetical' to the constitution

News Corp. and Fox News are technically separate entities but are still both controlled by the Murdoch family.

News Corp. is the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post among others.

Fox News' parent company is Fox Corporation.

The channel has faced growing pressures in recent weeks following host Judge Jeanine Pirro remarks suggesting that US Representative Ilhan Omar's hijab meant that she subscribes to Sharia law.

Her show was kept off air for a second week in a row following the opening monologue of her show on March 9, in which Pirro claimed that Omar's hijab was a sign that she was committed to the religious law which originates from the Quran, adding that it was 'antithetical' to the constitution.

Fox News 'strongly' condemned the views expressed by Pirro, saying: 'They do not reflect those of the network and we have addressed the matter with her directly.'

Media Matters also released 40 transcripts in which another Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, made a number of racist, sexist and misogynistic while appearing as a guest on the shock jock radio program 'Bubba the Love Sponge' between 2006 and 2011.

And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lashed out at Laura Ingraham and her Fox News guest for mocking the way she pronounces her name, saying she's doing 'the Latina thing'.

Azam replied to a tweet from Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson in 2017

Azam left his post as the group chief compliance officer for News Corp.'s corporate headquarters in late 2017 after joining the company in 2015

News Corp. and Fox News are technically separate entities but are still both controlled by the Murdoch family. Rupert Murdoch is pictured

Azam, who came to the United States as a toddler from Kabul, even tweeted Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson in 2017.

Carlson tweeted: '#Tucker: Why does America benefit from having tons of people from failing countries come here?'

Azam replied: 'If you come upstairs to where all the executives who run your company sit and find me I can tell you, Tucker. #Afghanistan.'

He claims he was then told he should not attack others working in the Murdoch empire and took the tweet down.

Azam added: 'My issue with this isn't as an American Muslim. It's not as a refugee. It's not as an immigrant. It's as an American.

'I live here. I have kids here. And it worries me that, you know, what's being put out into the universe could actually create a lot of risk for them.'

He even took a shot The Wall Street Journal, calling it The New York Post 'dressed up in a tuxedo'.

Ingraham was speaking to conservative lawyer Joe diGenova when they started mocking freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for saying her name with an accent

Azam said: 'It was very eloquent, mostly. It was policy-backed, at a certain level.

'In a very subtle and eloquent way, it was kind of like the stuff that would happen in the [New York Post], dressed up in a tuxedo.'

Former Sky News Australia producer, Rashna Farrukh, this week tweeted that she had quit the News Corp. owned channel following the New Zealand terror attack.

Fox News declined to comment on Azam's claims. DailyMail.com has contacted News Corp. for comment.The defense has rested its case in the homicide trial of a white police officer charged with shooting and killing an unarmed black teenager near Pittsburgh, signaling the jury will soon get the case.

Former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld is charged with criminal homicide in the shooting of 17-year-old Antwon Rose II last summer.

Video showed Rosfeld shooting Rose in the back, arm and side of the face as he fled from a traffic stop of a car used in a drive-by shooting. The former officer told a jury he thought Rose or another suspect had pointed a gun at him.

The jury will hear closing arguments Friday afternoon and then begin deliberating.

A defense expert, retired Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Clifford W. Jobe Jr., testified Rosfeld followed proper procedure when he shot and killed Rose.

'I can't fault Officer Rosfeld,' Jobe, a use-of-force expert, told jurors on Thursday. He called the officer's actions 'textbook.'

Officer Michael Rosfeld is charged with criminal homicide in a police shooting near Pittsburgh. This week he testified in his own defense and called an expert witness to support him

Rosfeld shot Antwon Rose II (above) three times as the teen fled a traffic stop last summer. Rose had been sitting in the front seat of an unlicensed taxicab when the back-seat passenger rolled down a window and shot at two men in North Braddock. The drive-by shooting led Rosfeld to pull over the unlicensed cab a short time after

Retired Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Clifford W. Jobe Jr (above) testified that Rosfeld followed proper procedure, calling the shooting 'textbook'

As Jobe returned to the stand Friday for cross-examination, the judge lifted a gag order he imposed on parties in the case at the request of the defense.

Defense attorney Patrick Thomassey said while he and prosecutors have abided by the judge's order, the attorney for Rose's family has not.

On Wednesday, S. Lee Merritt released a letter to the media that Rose's mother wrote to prosecutors urging them to show what a 'kind, loving and funny' person her son was.

Rosfeld, 30, fired three bullets into Rose after pulling over an unlicensed taxi that had been used in a drive-by shooting.

Rose, a passenger in the car, was shot in the back, arm and side of his face as he was running away.

Michelle Kenney, second from left, the mother of Antwon Rose II, leaves the courthouse on Wednesday. The judge lifted a gag order on the case after she released a letter to the press

Footage of the moment Michael Rosfeld shot dead unarmed black 17-year-old Antwon Rose II as he fled a traffic stop last June was shown to the jury at the former East Pittsburgh police officer's trial on Tuesday. Rosfeld is circled left and Rose is circled right

Rosfeld testified Thursday he thought Rose or another passenger in the car had pointed a weapon at him, and he fired in self-defense. But it turned out that neither teen had a gun at the time.

'It happened very quickly,' said Rosfeld, who took the stand in his own defense.

'My intent was to end the threat that was made against me. I just wanted to end the threat to me. I followed the threat and fired.'

Rosfeld got choked up and dabbed away tears as he recounted finding the mortally wounded Rose on the ground.

'I was upset, shocked,' he said. 'He was moaning, trying to breathe.'

The former officer testified after the prosecution rested its case Thursday.

Video from the drive-by shooting that preceded the fatal traffic stop shows 18-year-old Zaijuan Hester extending his gun out of the window of the gold Chevrolet Cruze and firing. Rose's silhouette can be made out in the front seat

A prosecution witness has said that after the shooting, he heard Rosfeld say repeatedly, 'I don't know why I shot him. I don't know why I fired.'

But another prosecution witness said he heard the officer ask, 'Why did he do that? Why did he take that out of his pocket?'

Prosecutors charged Rosfeld with an open count of homicide, meaning the jury can convict Rosfeld of murder or manslaughter.

Rose had been riding in the front seat of the cab when another occupant, Zaijuan Hester, in the backseat, rolled down a window and shot at two men on the street, hitting one in the abdomen.

A few minutes later, Rosfeld spotted their car, which had its rear windshield shot out, and pulled it over.

Hester, 18, pleaded guilty last week to aggravated assault and firearms violations. Hester told a judge that he, not Rose, did the shooting.A bloody car seat covered with human teeth that was found in a parking lot in Noblesville, Indiana earlier this week was involved in a suicide earlier this year, according to investigators.

Police received a call Tuesday night about the gruesome scene found outside a Lowe's store in the midwestern town located about 22 miles north of Indianapolis.

They tracked down the vehicles owner on Thursday.

The owner told detectives he or she had discarded the seat after purchasing the vehicle it came from through a third-party seller.

Police in Noblesville, Indiana were called Tuesday night to investigate a suspicious seat found with blood and several adult teeth around it

The original owner from Pennsylvania initially didn't mention someone had committed suicide inside the vehicle back in January.

After discovering the carnage, the vehicle's current owner just discarded the bloody seat, authorities said.

Noblesville police told WTHR on Thursday that no crimes had been committed by the vehicle's current owner and the investigation of the bloody seat is now closed.Two men who were killed when they touched overhead powerlines while on top of a London freight train may have been 'train surfing'.

The bodies of a 25-year-old man from Aberystwyth, Wales, and a 27-year-old from Clerkenwell, London, were found on tracks between Hackney and Stratford in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Police have found 'nothing to indicate' that the deaths are linked to graffiti.

One was discovered at 1am on the tracks near Wallis Road, Hackney Wick, while the other was discovered at 2.30am on the line near Carpenters Road, Stratford.

Police were called to the line just after 1am to find a man in his 20s dead on the tracks. The second man was also found dead at 2.31am. Pictured: Flames and smoke near the tracks last night

They have been identified as a 25-year-old from Aberystwyth, Wales, and a 27-year-old from Clerkenwell, London

A spokesman for British Transport Police said they died after 'sustaining serious electrical burns'.

'Their families have each been informed and are now being supported by specially trained family liaison officers.'

Detective Sergeant David Taylor, also from the BTP, said: 'Our thoughts are with both families as they come to terms with this devastating news, we will of course provide them with as much support as possible.

'The initial evidence that weve been able to gather suggests that both men were on top of a moving freight train wagon, when they came into contact with the over-head power lines.

'Our investigation will continue to examine how and why they came to be on top of this train although there is nothing to indicate that graffiti was involved.'

Police have found nothing to indicate that the deaths are linked to graffiti. Their bodies were found on the rail line between Hackney Wick and Stratford

An undated photo of Hackney Wick station, near where the two victims were found dead last night

Yesterday police said: 'We are looking into the possibility that the victims were train surfers or graffiti artists - we are not ruling out either at this stage of the investigation.'

Police were also previously investigating whether the pair were graffiti artists.

A spokesman would 'not speculate' on train surfers being more likely because of the overhead power lines, but said that both deaths were being linked.

Novelist Joseph Allchin, 35, has a flat looking over the track.

He told The Standard: 'I heard a loud explosion and went to the window and saw a fire on the tracks next to a stationary freight train. I thought it was fireworks at first.

A BTP spokeswoman said: 'At approximately 1am in the morning on March 21, BTP were called to the line between Hackney Wick and Stratford.' Pictured: Stratford Station

It is not known why the two Stratford victims were on the tracks. Last year, three graffiti artists were hit by a train near Loughborough Station in south London. They were, left to right: Jack Gilbert, 23, Alberto Fresneda Carrasco, 19 and Harrison Scott-Hood, 23

'I was concerned because of the freight train. It had a large white canister, so I was worried it would blow up.

'The fire was igniting underneath the train. I thought someone had thrown something burning onto the tracks.'

The highway that runs underneath the bridge that links the shopping centre to the park was littered with orange traffic cones and barriers and appeared to be under construction.

It appears the new road is linked to a new housing development being built between Westfields and West Ham's London Stadium.

The railway lines were on the side nearest to Westfield Shopping Centre.

There was no longer a police presence at Carpenters Road by 1pm today and workmen at the construction site nearby appeared unaffected.

Pedestrians also walked across the bridge unconcerned and did not seem to be aware anything had taken place overnight.

Police are examining if the two victims could have been graffiti artists. Pictured is graffiti in Statford near to where the incident happened

Graffiti outside The London Olympic Park when it was under construction for the 2012 Olympic Games

No sign of a forensic tent or officers were visible from the bridge.

A spokeman for British Transport Police (BTP) said: 'One of the victims is a male in his 20s, we cannot confirm which one at this time.

'The train tracks between Stratford and Hackney Wick are served by an overhead power line which is electrified.

'We are looking into the possibility that the victims were train surfers or graffiti artists - we are not ruling out either at this stage of the investigation.

'At the moment we are looking for any witnesses who could help us with our enquiries.'

The incident initially caused closures and disruption on the London Overground and Greater Anglia services but this has now been cleared.

Last year, three graffiti artists were killed by a train when they walked down tracks near Loughborough Station in south London.

The families of Alberto Fresneda Carrasco, 19, and 23-year-olds Jack Gilbert and Harrison Scott-Hood gave a joint statement saying 'a love of painting' was the only thing they were guilty of.

Detective Chief Inspector Tim Tubbs said: 'An investigation is now underway to discover what happened and how these two people came to lose their lives on the railway.

'At this time we are treating their deaths as unexplained as we make a number of urgent enquiries.

'I would ask anyone who was near Stratford or Hackney Wick last night, and saw something which they think might be relevant to contact us as soon as possible.'

Information can be passed to BTP by sending a text to 61016 or by calling 0800 40 50 40 quoting reference 23 of 21/03/19.A former head of the MI5 has expressed concern that abuse and intimidation levelled at public figures 'is a problem that isn't going away'.

Lord Evans, the director general of MI5 between 2007 and 2013 said death threats and daubing of homes of politicians has increased in the last 18 months.

It comes amid rising tensions caused by Brexit but Lord Evans says Britain leaving the European Union is not the only reason for the rise.

Lord Evans, the director general of MI5 between 2007 and 2013 said death threats and daubing of homes has increased in the last 18 months

The cross-bench peer told the BBC: 'We are very concerned about the situation in regard to intimidation and abuse in public life.

'This is a problem that isn't going away.

'When you get to the point of death threats, when you get to the point of daubing of properties - that is absolutely clearly beyond any acceptable level in a democracy.'

Prime Minister Theresa May leaves the British Residence in Brussels. Responding to questions about the PM's speech this week Lord Evans said language used in public debate should be courteous

The current chairman of the committee on standards in public life warned a new 'political activity' is 'infecting' the country.

He said: 'This is not just a Brexit-related issue, this is a form of, kind of, political activity which is infecting the political life in this country and has been doing so for a period.

'But it is particularly acute at the moment because of the political conflict that is going on over our future in or out of Europe.'

Lord Evans suggested it was having a damaging impact on public debate.

He said: 'I have had three conversations with people that I regard as reliable and sensible commentators who have said that they are aware of cases where individuals are so concerned that they are both limiting what they are willing to say on public matters, and there is a risk that they will actually feel that they have to change the way in which they are voting.

'And I think that's a very serious matter.'

Asked about the controversy surrounding Theresa May's televised addressed in which the Prime Minister was accused of blaming Parliament for delays on Brexit, Lord Evans said language used in public debate should be courteous.

'I think the overall question of intimidation is the critical point here.

'I think we need to ensure that the sort of language that is being used in public discourse is courteous and does not get used in a way that stokes up strong feelings.

'Although there are strong political feelings on this it should not and cannot be allowed to spill over into abuse and intimidation.'

Lord Evans said he agreed with some other national security experts that a no-deal Brexit could make the UK less safe.

He added: 'I am concerned that in the event of a hard Brexit that there will not be the preparations that we need to have in order to ensure that legal instruments, such as the European arrest warrant, access to European and Europol databases etc are properly assured.

'I am not so immediately worried about intelligence cooperation because that is not an issue on which the European Union is the, kind of, competent authority.'Nikolas Cruz's lawyer was branded 'disrespectful' during a heated exchange with a judge as the accused Parkland shooter appeared in court on Friday - the day his 18th victim was laid to rest.

Cruz, 20, did not speak at the pre-trial status hearing in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where his public defender asked for prosecutors to hand over all body cam evidence.

Things became heated between defense lawyer Melissa McNeill and Judge Elizabeth Scherer as McNeill sought an order to force the prosecution to hand over the footage within 10 days.

'This court has put us under a schedule, and we are not able to comply with that schedule because we are not receiving the information that we need to prepare this case for trial,' McNeil said, according to WPLG-TV.

Accused Parkland High School shooter Nikolas Cruz enters the courtroom for a hearing at the Broward Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on Friday

Cruz listens to attorney Diane Cuddihy in the courtroom during Friday's hearing. Co-counsel Melissa McNeill got in a heated dispute with the judge at the hearing

Cruz listens to his public defender, Diane Cuddihy during a hearing on police body-camera footage at the Broward Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale on Friday

Judge Scherer responded that she had already asked McNeil if she needed to re-depose a witness to get the footage, and that McNeil had said no.

'No, I did not say that,' McNeil shot back. 'I said, judge, let's finish with the other arguments and then we can address whether or not I want to re-depose. There are several issues'

'Ms. McNeil, let me talk, please,' Scherer interrupted.

'Well, you're misquoting me, judge,' McNeil told her.

'Ms. McNeil, I said, 'Are you asking this court to re-depose the witness?' And then you said, 'Not at this time,' Scherer said. 'But then I said, 'Is there anything else on defense (motion No.) 49?' And both sides said no. And I said, 'Let's move on.''

'Then we need to readdress 49,' McNeill blasted back.

'OK, you need to take it down a notch,' Scherer warned.

'Judge, you are putting words into my mouth,' McNeill remonstrated.

'You are being disrespectful,' Scherer told her.

Judge Elizabeth Scherer blasted one of Cruz's attorney's as 'disrespectful' in a heated exchange over production of the footage

Cruz sitting at the defense table looks over at the gallery during the hearing

Cruz rubs his eyes during the hearing about police body-cam footage on Friday

McNeill clapped back: 'Judge, I have to repeat myself for you so you can understand what I'm saying.'

The judge then interrupted and called for a five-minute recess so McNeill could compose herself.

'You're being disrespectful and I'm not going to be talked to in this way,' Scherer told the lawyer.

After the hearing resumed, the judged eventually agreed to order prosecutors to turn over all of the body cam evidence within 10 days.

Cruz is charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder in the February 14, 2018 shooting massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. His attorneys say that he will be willing to plea guilty in exchange for life in prison, but no deal has been accepted yet.

No trial date has yet been set, though proceedings are tentatively expected to begin sometime early next year.

Cruz walks out of court after the hearing, at which the judge eventually agreed to order prosecutors to turn over all of the body cam evidence within 10 days

Cruz stared down cameras in the courtroom, as on the same day it emerged that a student who survived the Parkland shooting has taken her own life.

Sydney Aiello, 19, a recent graduate from Stoneman Douglas, committed suicide over the weekend, according to her mother Cara Aiello.

Cara Aiello told CBS Miami that her daughter had struggled with 'survivor's guilt and was recently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.'

Cara Aiello said her daughter was on campus when Nikolas Cruz opened fire but thankfully, was not in the Freshman Building.

She added that Sydney struggled to attend college classes because she was afraid of being in a classroom and was often sad but hadn't asked for help before she killed herself.

She took her own life on March 17.

Her funeral took place Friday.A Texas sheriff's deputy is in critical condition after being shot in the head during a routine traffic stop in the early hours of Friday morning.

The El Paso County Sheriff's Office confirmed the shooting happened at 1:50 am on March 22, after officer Peter Herrera pulled over a vehicle for headlight and registration violations in San Elizario.

As Herrera approached the car, one of the suspects allegedly got out of the vehicle and fired several shots at the deputy.

Unable to return fire, Herrera was struck several times in the attack, sustaining gunshot wounds to the body and the back of his head.

The El Paso County Sheriff's Office confirmed the shooting happened at 1:50 am on March 22, during a traffic stop conducted by officer Peter Herrera

A spokesperson for the police force said the bullet narrowly missed Herrera's brain.

The two men in the car then threw their weapons and fled the scene on foot. They were later found hiding in a shed two blocks away.

Both men have been arrested but their identities have not yet been revealed by the sheriff's office.

Investigators say the gun allegedly used to shoot Herrera was also recovered near the crime scene.

Herrera is said to be in a critical but stable condition. He was undergoing surgery as of Friday morning, police said. He is expected to survive.

Herrera pulled the vehicle over in San Elizario for registration and headlight violations, when one of the passengers got out and fired several shots at the deputy

Unable to return fire, Herrera was struck several times in the attack - including once in the back of the head. The bullet narrowly missed his brain, police say

The shooting is currently under investigation by multiple authorities, including the sheriff's office and the Texas Rangers.

No further information is being released by police at this time.

On Friday afternoon, a blood drive is being held for Deputy Herrera between 12:30 and 4:30 pm, at the El Paso County Sheriff's Office headquarters.

'We ask for your help and prayers for Deputy Herrera, his family and loved ones, and his brothers and sisters who serve our communities with pride,' a spokesperson said in a statement.Jurors heard Alice Cutter (pictured), 22, and her partner Mark Jones, 24, were photographed posing in the knitwear in April last year

A couple suspected of being neo-Nazi terrorists wore 'his-and-hers' Swastika jumpers, a court has heard.

Jurors heard Alice Cutter, 22, and her partner Mark Jones, 24, were photographed posing in the knitwear in April last year.

The engaged couple, from Halifax, West Yorkshire, have gone on trial at Birmingham Crown Court accused of being members of the banned far-right organisation National Action.

The far right-wing group was banned by the Government on December 16, 2016, following the murder of MP Jo Cox.

The jumpers were found by police during searches of the couple's home.

The court heard officers also found Swastika earrings, Nazi memorabilia and an image of Cutter holding a gun.

In court today, prosecutor Barnaby Jameson QC outlined a series of photographs believed to have been taken on Cutter's mobile, including knives bearing a Nazi symbol.

He went on to describe an alleged image of Cutter and Jones in 'his-and-hers Swastika knitwear', and an image 'showing Jones holding what looks like a bazooka'.

He told the court: 'On the same mobile, is a shot of Jones standing by a sign saying 'warning, you area now entering Nazi Germany, beware of fanatics'.'

The third day of the trial was told Cutter, who is alleged to have been an entrant in a 'Miss Hitler' contest in 2016, refused to answer questions after the Nazi-themed items.

Alice Cutter, 22, leaving Birmingham Crown Court where she is on trial with three others, accused of being members of the banned Neo-Nazi group National Action

The couple deny the charges alongside co-defendants Garry Jack, 23, and Connor Scothern, 18.

The court heard National Action members also discussed killing MPs and mixed-race children on mobile phone chat groups.

Mr Jameson said: 'Inside the groups you will hear language of shocking racism and racial slurs, discussions about killing mixed race children, napalming blacks, MPs being 'Tommy Maired' and praise for the Neo-Nazi Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Brevik.

'The views expressed by Cutter are some of the most extreme of all - and entirely in keeping with the mindset of an unapologetic Nazi'.

Describing a search of the Cutter-Jones address on September 27, 2017, Mr Jameson said: 'They found National Action photographs and stickers, a Nazi flag, a body scanner, a copy of Mein Kampf, a scarf favoured by National Action members and a folding knife.'

And upon researching the address on September 5, 2018, after the arrest of Jones and Cutter, Mr Jameson told the court police found 'an image of Cutter with a gun and a picture of Hitler', among other things.

The couple (Cutter is right) deny the charges alongside co-defendants Garry Jack, 23, and Connor Scothern (pictured left outside the court)

The court heard Jones and Cutter (pictured) become an item after she appeared in Miss Hitler 2016

The court also heard how Jones allegedly sent an anti-Islamic drawing to other far right extremists showing the Prophet Muhammed being raped by a pig.

It heard Jones sent the image along with other offensive material via the Telegram online messaging service nine months after the group was banned.

And Jones started deleting a number of files that were 'plainly incriminating' shortly before the first search of their home, Mr Jameson told the told.

He said: 'What was Jones worried about, or is the answer obvious?'

The court also heard today how Garry Jack and Connor Scothern, also on trial, were sent an email urging them to 'throw away or burn any memorabilia' following counter-terror raids.

The jury heard the 'wholly disingenuous' email was written by a man who has since been convicted of National Action membership.

Described in court as a 'masterpiece of back-covering' the message was headed 'Recent News' and read: 'I am sure you have all heard the news that 4 men have been arrested on the grounds that they are members of the terrorist organisation NA.

'I can understand any concern this will raise since some of our members are ex-NA but I don't think anyone should be worried since we are not associated with NA in any way.

'NA is a dead movement and due to the vile tweets posted by a few select members it was proscribed.'

All of the defendants deny the charges. Cutter and Scothern are pictured outside of Birmingham Crown Court

Advising several recipients to distance themselves from the banned terror group, the message added: 'Delete any affiliations you have to the group.

'Throw away or burn any memorabilia you are holding on to. If anyone is caught breaking the NA proscription or advocating for NA or even holding any NA memorabilia they will be kicked from the group.

'Stay safe and be smart. They are watching the far right's every step now and if even one of us slips up it will cost all of us. This is an all for one and one for all situation.'

Jack and Scothern are on trial alongside Cutter and her partner Jones.

Cutter, 22, and Jones, 24, deny being members of National Action between December 2016 and September 2017.

The Crown also alleges that Jack, 23, from Shard End, Birmingham, and Scothern, 18, from Nottingham, belonged to the organisation between the same dates.

The trial continues next week.A pregnant first-grade teacher is fighting for her life after she was stabbed ten times in a carjacking outside of her home in Los Angeles.

Tanya Maga, 33, was parked in her car in Sunland, California on Wednesday when she was attacked by the vicious knifemen.

She remains in a critical but stable condition, while the condition of her unborn baby remains unknown.

Tanya Maga, a first-grade teacher, was parked in her car in Sunland, LA, on Wednesday when she was attacked by three knifemen. Tanya is pictured here with husband Greg

One attacker stabbed the 12-weeks-pregnant driver in the chest, before another suspect took her car and crashed it into other vehicles, police said. One of the knife wounds punctured her lung.

Two suspects were taken into custody and booked on suspicion of carjacking and attempted murder, police said. Their names were not immediately released.

The crash following the carjacking was caught on CCTV. Footage shows the high speed collision followed by the men fleeing from the wrecked vehicle on foot.

'She's got 10 punctures from stabbing, one of which went all the way through the nose,' the woman's husband, Greg Maga, told KTLA.

'Because she's pregnant, she tried to protect herself from the stabbing  she used her hand, so she has a lot of stabs on her hand. We don't know yet about the baby.'

Three people came 'absolutely out of nowhere' and asked for his wife's phone before attacking her,' he said.

'She's alive. She's badly injured. She's going through surgery as we speak,' Greg added Thursday morning.

'She's got 10 punctures from stabbing, one of which went all the way through the nose,' the woman's husband, Greg Maga (pictured, left) said. 'She's alive. She's badly injured. She's going through surgery as we speak' he said

Tanya was rushed to a nearby hospital in critical but stable condition, Los Angeles Police Department Officer Greg Kraft said. The injuries were not considered to be life threatening, Kraft said.

Another law enforcement officer described the attack as 'animalistic.'

'I get choked up even talking now about it,' Lt. Frank Kryshak said during a news conference today.

The condition of her unborn baby remains unknown. An ultrasound will be conducted after surgery.

10800 block of Eldora Avenue, as the woman was coming home for the day, LAPD report

The victim's stolen car was later found abandoned after it had crashed into several vehicles in another neighborhood.

The chief is making this a priority,' LAPD Lt. Frank Kryshak said Thursday.

'We are making this a priority here at Foothill (Station). We've been working on this case non-stop since last night, and we will continue to do that.

'Sometimes we use the term 'imminent.' In this case it is imminent  we are going to make arrests with the other outstanding individuals.'A pet owner in south-west China has sparked outrage after he was filmed making his pet dog pose with a cigarette in its mouth.

The owner in Guiyang, Guizhou province also said his daughter spent 150 yuan (17) to tattoo a pair of eyebrows on the chihuahua.

The small pooch, named Laifu, or 'blessing' in Chinese, has become a sensation in its neighbourhood due to its 'cute' appearance, the owner told local media.

A pet owner in Guiyang, south-west China's Guizhou province has sparked outrage after he was filmed making his pet dog pose with a cigarette in its mouth while standing on its hind legs

The small pooch, named Laifu, or 'blessing' in Chinese, has become a sensation in its neighbourhood due to its 'cute' appearance, the owner told local media

Footage released by video news site Pear shows the brown pooch attracting a large crowd as it stands very still on its hind legs for photographs

Footage released by video news site Pear shows the brown pooch attracting a large crowd as it stands very still on its hind legs for photographs.

'Stand still, don't move or look around,' the owner, surnamed Hu, was heard instructing the pet.

He then made the dog perform a trick by holding an unlit cigarette in its mouth for more photos, which it obediently obliged.

'Come on, hold this for us to take a photo of you,' he told the pooch.

He told reporters that he had been training the dog for more than eight years and it has always been 'very well-behaved'.

'I train it every day at home, it's rather famous now in our neighbourhood,' he added.

The owner is seen making the dog perform a trick by holding an unlit cigarette in its mouth for more photos, which it obediently obliged. Net users have accused the man of animal abuse

The man has owned the dog for more than eight years and it has always been 'well-behaved'

'Come on, hold this for us to take a photo of you,' the owner was heard telling the pooch

However, the man was widely criticised by net users who see it as abuse.

'Such a poor dog. What was the owner thinking?' one comment read on Chinese microblogging site Weibo.

'What a sick man,' another person said.

'Can't you see? This is totally animal abuse,' one user said.

'This is not funny at all. The poor dog is suffering!' another comment read.

Last month, a pet owner in Wuhan, Hubei province also sparked controversy for painting a pair of eyebrows on her Golden Retriever with black hair dye.

Human hair dye contains toxic chemicals and should never be used on dogs or other pets, according to Live Science quoting a Florida-based animal shelter.

The pet owner in Wuhan, Hubei province said her mother was colouring her father's hair when she decided to use the leftover dye to draw a pair of eyebrows on the pooch

The dog has become a sensation in its neighbourhood due to its 'hilarious' and 'cute' appearance, the owner told reporters

The bleach in the dye will irritate any sores or spots on the dog's fur and may even cause the dog to shed. If the substances get into an animal's eyes, it might severely damage its vision and cause blindness.

While China has legislation safeguarding land-based and aquatic wildlife, it currently lacks legislation protecting animal welfare or preventing cruelty to animals.

In September 2009, animal rights activists and legal experts began circulating a draft Law on the Protection of Animals and in 2010, a draft Law on the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for the State Council's consideration, according to Human Rights in China, a Chinese non-governmental organisation based in New York.

The draft proposes a fine of up to 6,000 yuan (693) and two weeks' detention for those found guilty of animal cruelty, according to China Daily. However till this day, no progress has been made.

While the country's first ever legislation protecting animal welfare has yet to be adopted, the increasing cases of animal abandonment and serious cruelty towards animals such as killing of dogs and burning of cats have led to serious resentment within society.Two men have been arrested after five mosques had their windows smashed in Birmingham on Thursday, West Midlands Police said.

A 34-year-old man from Perry Barr handed himself into a Birmingham police station and was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage.

And a 38-year-old Yardley man was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage this afternoon after being detained by members of the community.

Both are in custody this evening.

West Midlands Police and Counter Terrorism Unit are continuing to investigate the incidents and patrols have been stepped up in key locations in the city.

Security advice is also being given to places of worship across the West Midlands.

Assistant Chief Constable Matt Ward said: 'This is a significant step forward in our enquiries however the investigation continues into the motive for the incidents.

'We are working extremely closely with mosques and local communities around the West Midlands and this will continue.

'It remains incredibly important that we unite together against those who seek to create discord, uncertainty and fear.'

It came after one of the shocking moments was caught on CCTV as a yob smashes up the windows of a mosque in Birmingham in a late-night rampage.

The mosque targeted was the Masjid Faizul Islam in Broadway, Perry Barr, and it was one of five in the city to be vandalised.

Muslim worshippers in the city say they are afraid to take their children to prayers following the attacks, which took place less than a week after the Christchurch massacre.

The video footage shows a man wearing a hat with his face covered as he walks towards the mosque in the early hours.

He is carrying an object in his hand, thought to be a hammer, and uses it to smash a window of the mosque.

A mosque in Birmingham had its windows smashed up by a yob who kept his face covered

The police forensic team at work at the mosque and community centre on Albert Road had its windows smashed

Five mosques in the city were attacked in total. They are on Albert Road, Birchfield Road, Slade Road, the Broadway and Witton Road in the city.

A concerned parent told Sky News that he no longer 'felt safe taking his five year old to prayers'.

The attack at the Witton Road Islamic Centre in Witton saw seven windows and two doors smashed up.

The mosque's imam says that the attack took place between 1.30am and 2am with West Midlands Police saying they were alerted to the other attacks throughout the night.

Police were called to the mosque on Birchfield Road at 2.32am before realising that the attack had happened earlier.

Volunteers work on fixing the damaged windows at the Witton Road Islamic centre in Birmingham after it was attacked on Thursday

A mosque on the corner of Fentham Road and Birchfield Road in Birmingham that had its windows smashed with a sledgehammer

Anxious worshippers look at the mosque in Perry Barr, Birmingham after its damaged windows were boarded up

At 3.14am, they were alerted to a similar attack at the mosque on Slade Road, Erdington.

They then began patrols in areas with mosques and came across the other damaged buildings.

Forensic officers are working to identify evidence, and CCTV is being examined.

Footage of the damaged Witton mosque was posted online by Labour party Councillor for the Bromford and Hodge Hill ward, Majid Mahmood.

Worshippers inspect the damage done to the Witton mosque during Thursday's rampage

He tweeted: 'Unfortunately the Witton Road Islamic Centre was attacked overnight by an individual who used a sledgehammer to break the windows.

'I said last week that Muslims were afraid after the terrorist attacks in Christchurch.

'We need support in Brum.'

His words were echoed by the Imam of Witton Islamic Centre.

Sharafat Ali, 66, told Birmingham Live: 'Its terrible, the community is shocked because of what's happened in New Zealand.

The mosque's imam Sharafat Ali, 66 is now calling for more police protection ahead of Friday prayers

Four attacks were confirmed by police this morning, before a fifth one was discovered later in the day

'We've been here for 30 years. In the morning you get 40 worshippers for morning prayer, on Friday you get about two to three hundred.

'This doesn't happen in Aston.

'Tomorrow is Friday prayers and I don't know what's going up happen.

'We are asking the police to give us more security.'

Home Secretary Sajid Javid tweeted: 'Deeply concerning and distressing to see number of mosques have been vandalised in Birmingham overnight. @WMPolice are investigating motive but let me be clear - hateful behaviour has absolutely no place in our society & will never be accepted.'

Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson tweeted: 'I'm deeply saddened and disturbed by the attacks that have taken place on mosques across Birmingham in the early hours of this morning.

Footage showed the moment the Masjid Faizul Islam mosque (pictured) had its windows smashed

The motive for the vandalism is unclear, with anti-terror police now investigating the overnight attacks

'Mosques are places of worship where people should feel safe and I'm appalled that they've been targeted in this way.

'I stand in complete solidarity with the British Muslim community against the growing tide of Islamophobia we are facing in this country.

'We have recently seen the tragic consequences of right wing extremism in New Zealand. I hope the government takes the necessary steps to reassure the British Muslim community and that the perpetrators of these hate-fuelled attacks are swiftly brought to justice.'

Shabana Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood, tweeted: 'The reports of attacks on mosques across Birmingham are truly terrible.

'I have spoken with the Chief Constable & will be in constant contact with community leaders throughout the day.

'I would urge all residents to remain calm & call Crime Stoppers with any info you may have.'

The Al-Habib Masjid Mosque on the corner of Birchfield Road and Fentham Road in Perry Barr, Birmingham was attacked

West Midlands Police Chief Constable Dave Thompson said: 'Since the tragic events in Christchurch, New Zealand, officers and staff from West Midlands Police have been working closely with our faith partners across the region to offer reassurance and support at mosques, churches and places of prayer.

'At the moment we don't know the motive for last night's attacks.

'What I can say is that the force and the Counter Terrorism Unit are working side-by-side to find whoever is responsible.

'At difficult times like this, it is incredibly important that everyone unites against those who seek to create discord, uncertainty and fear in our communities.'

The Jame Masjid on Birchfield Road in Birmingham also had its windows smashed with a sledgehammer

The mosque's windows were boarded up after volunteers had cleared up all the glass outside the building

A mosque in Birmingham was attacked last night with sledgehammers, windows smashed, no casualty reported

UK pic.twitter.com/2lgxkgDJvq  Khalid (Halit Ertugrul) (@khalid_pk) March 21, 2019

John Cotton, Labour councillor for Glebe Farm and Tile Cross areas in the city, tweeted: 'Appalled to see that Birmingham mosques have been the target of vandalism and violence overnight.

'I'm working with @WMPolice & @BhamCityCouncil to ensure we find those responsible & support our Muslim communities.

'These thugs do not speak for Birmingham & will not divide us.'

The Birmingham Council of Mosques said it a statement: 'As far as we can tell the Masajids were based around Handsworth/Aston and Witton.

'We ask the masajids to be vigilant and do not hesitate in reporting any unusual/suspicious behaviour to the police immediately.

'It is vital you report it so it can be logged.'

West Midlands Police Chief Constable Dave Thompson confirmed they are working alongside counter-terrorism officers

Representatives of the Birmingham Council of Mosques slammed the attack and called on police to do more

Javid Iqbal, a spokesman for Witton Islamic Centre said: 'We've had a white intruder strike in the middle of the night. He has arrived with a sledgehammer and smashed one window. The force of the swing has actually meant he had lost his grip and the sledgehammer ended up in the middle of the mosque.

'Incredibly, he has then gone away for half and hour and come back with another hammer to damage several more windows. There's about five or six windows that have been put through.

'In that half and hour, other mosques in a two mile radius or so have been attacked as well. So I don't know if he was working in a team and there were several of them.

'Whatever the case, it is just a minority of idiots that do not reflect the values of this city or this community.

'We have boarded up the mosque but it remains open today for worshippers. I'm yet to speak to insurers about the cost of the damage.

Seven windows and two doors were smashed in the attack that took place between 1.30am and 2am

Mosque volunteers could be seen sweeping up the broken glass in the aftermath of the vandalism

Police officers were spotted helping mosque officials clean up the glass that littered the pavement outside one of the damaged mosques

'We have asked for extra resources from police, not just for Friday prayers but also for early in the morning and late at night.'

Worshipper Rashid Mohammed, 33, a father-of-three, said: 'I was afraid something like this might happen after New Zealand. It was only a matter of time.

'I won't lie, I've been looking over my shoulder since Christchuch, even to the point where I make sure I'm by an emergency exit when I pray in case anything happens.

'All it takes is one small-minded racist and it is very sad to see this happening in this day and age. We are proud to live in such a diverse city and we are devastated that these incidents still happen.'

Anyone with information has been asked to contact police via Live Chat between 8am and midnight, via 101 any time, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555.Herb Gildin was 10 years old and traveling on a stateless passport, scared and confused, hurtling by train to a mysterious place called Sweden with his two older sisters, Cele and Margaret. It was 1939, and the children knew virtually nothing about the Scandinavian country or the larger world  only that their German hometown had become increasingly dangerous for Jews. So their parents sent them to live with complete strangers, Christian families, in Sweden, all with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), dedicated to relocating Jewish children in any safe place they could as World War II raged.

The Gildin children lived for two years in Sweden, where Herb became particularly close with his foster family, who had taken him in with the implication that the arrangement could very well be for good. After that time, however, Herb and his sisters made the arduous journey by land and sea to New York to reunite with their parents  and Herb went on to realize the American Dream, building a successful business and four generations of Gildins in the States.

For many of those years, however, Herb failed to fill in the details of his backstory when talking to his own family. It was only for the curiosity and determination of Herbs children and grandchildren that they came upon a whole new family connection for them to celebrate  in Sweden, where the Christians whod taken in Herb as a boy were only too excited to reunite with him after more than 50 years.

A new documentary, The Starfish  made by Herbs grandson, 29-year-old filmmaker Tyler Gildin  now tells the extraordinary story of resilience, determination and family; it premiered in January at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, one month after the birth of Tylers son, Brody, Herbs first great-grandchild.

Now Herb  just four weeks shy of his 90th birthday  is sitting in his pristine Florida home, reflecting on his own life and legacy as he cradles Brody; he only met the newborn in person for the first time yesterday, when Tyler and his wife came to visit from New York.

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Herb Gildin, 89, cradles his first great-grandson, Brody, who is just three years old; Brody's father, Tyler, has made a documentary about Herb's extraordinary life and journey from Germany during World War II to Sweden and, finally, America

Herb, second from left, with his parents and two older sister, Cele and Margaret; the Jewish children were sent off with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in 1939 when it became clear that it was not safe for them stay in Germany

Herb Gildin pictured with his New York native wife, Gloria, their grandson Tyler and his wife, Zara, and their first great-grandchild, Brody

This is something Ive been wanting for a long time, Herb tells DailyMail.com, beaming proudly. Hes almost three months old, and I finally got to hold him a little bit  and its just exciting to have this little baby boy. Hes a beautiful little boy.

Hes the first and only member of the fourth generation. There arent too many Gildins  now we have another grandson who can continue the Gildin name and all that the Gildins stand for. Im very proud to be a Gildin; I think were very special and weve tried to live our lives beautifully  and I hope that goes on to the next generation. And I hope Im here long enough to enjoy and watch him growing up.

He adds: Im pleased that, somewhere, my great-grandson will look at this thing and get to know me a little bit.

His older descendants have certainly gotten to know him better through the documentary project, which emerged after the 2017 funeral of Herbs older sister, Cele; Herb gave the eulogy.

I heard a story [that] I had never heard from his mouth; I had never heard any of these stories, Tyler tells DailyMail.com. And it just kind of hit me, of how have I not filmed this before? I work in film, hes telling this story.

Within months, he says, the process of filming began, and grandfather and grandson sat down on camera to explore the family history.

Herb was born in 1929 in Landsberg, Germany, the youngest of three children to a father who owned a shoe store and his younger wife. There was nothing out of the ordinary about his upbringing, he says; he liked to play, ride his bicycle and spend time with his friends. Nothing really changed until the infamous night of Kristallnacht in November 1938, when Nazis rounded up Jews, torched synagogues, vandalized homes and businesses and even killed some members of the Jewish community while imprisoning others.

The night of Kristallnacht is really when Hitler decided that Jews were no longer welcome in Germany  so they gathered all the Jews throughout Germany, but I could only talk about happened to us in Landsberg, Herb tells DailyMail.com. The polizei came and took us all to a gymnasium  there may have been approximately 20, 25 families. And they had us all gather in this place; they didnt tell us why we were there, but we heard the breaking of glass during this time  and we knew that something terrible was happening and was going to be happening to us.

Herbs father was temporarily imprisoned, and when the rest of the family returned to their home and store, the windows had all been broken and the premises had been looted.

It was the beginning of a terrible change; it was no longer a normal family, Herb tells DailyMail.com. We were ostracized because of our religion  and it was the beginning of a very difficult time.

He adds: After Kristallnacht, we were no longer able to go to school and things were different. The people I thought were my friends all of a sudden werent as friendly, because they now all had joined Hitler Youth. Before that, it made no difference to me or to them that I was Jewish. After Kristellnacht, it made a big difference.

Herb and Gloria have been married for 64 years after he spotted her playing ping pong while on vacation; he still refers to her as his 'little lady' and 'rock'

Gloria tells DailyMail.com: He didnt tell me what he did for a living; he didnt tell me what he came from, I was just very attracted. He was adorable ... After I met his sister, who had an accent, and I said to him: How come your sister has an accent and you dont? Thats when he told me where hed come from. Other than that, he was very secretive

Herb, playing in Sweden with his bicycle, moved to the Scandinavian country with his older sisters at the age of 10; he was first placed with an elderly couple but was later moved to a different Christian family, the Silows in Falun, Sweden, who had teenage children and who Herb came to consider his second parents and siblings

After moving to America and working to help his family, Herb was drafted during the Korean War - before he was a citizen - and served within the continental US; he was integrated with the Mississippi National Guard and tells DailyMail.com: I was probably the first Jewish person they had ever met. But over a period of time, they got to know, they got to like me, I got to like them

Herb is pictured reuniting with his Swedish 'relatives' in 2001; he rarely spoke of his youth and Swedish time to his wife. children and grandchildren, but their curiosity and research led him back to the Scandinavian family who had taken him in as a stranger

But youre talking about eight, nine-year-old children. When somebody says, Theres a bad man, a bad boy, then Im a bad boy. Thats all  you cant go to school, you dont have friends.

As the situation worsened, his father was tipped off by friendly Germans that it was time to get his children out of the country  and the proactive HIAS helped secure them a place in Sweden.

I knew absolutely nothing about Sweden; Im not even sure that I ever heard of Sweden, Herb tells DailyMail.com, adding that, in the rush and panic during that period, there was no one to take the time to give more information to the three Gildin children about their destination.

Who was going to tell us? Absolutely not. My parents were interested in getting us safe  that was their main interest  It could have been anywhere  it didnt make any difference at all.

He and his older sisters, then aged 12 and 14, were placed with families in the same town, Falun, Sweden, but Herbs initial situation  with an elderly couple who werent used to children and spoke no German  didnt work out. HIAS helped move him to another family, this one with teenage children not much older than Herb  and he flourished, particularly bonding with the youngest daughter, Agneta.

I had a good life living in Sweden; it was comfortable, he tells DailyMail.com. I did miss my parents, absolutely did, I missed being with my sisters  but when youre young enough, you adjust. And I adjusted, I think, reasonably well. They became my family, this was my second mother, second father, second sister and brothers. I did not ever think that I was going to leave. This was a lifetime commitment.

He tells DailyMail.com: You must understand that, when this family took us in, it was a lifetime commitment. You must understand, the probability of my parents ever leaving Germany and us being able to join them again was probably zero. So when these families took us in, it wasnt: Im going to take you in for a year or two or three; this was a probability of being a lifetime commitment. They took in and adopted a young boy, and they were going to be part of that family for the rest of my life and their lives.'

Herb's incredible story is told in new documentary The Starfish, filmed by his 29-year-old grandson, Tyler Gildin - who only began hearing some of the family's stories when his grandfather gave a eulogy in 2017 for Tyler's great-aunt, Cele

Herb and Gloria Gildin are pictured with their grandsons at the premiere of The Starfish in January at the Miami Jewish Film Festival; Gloria tells DailyMail.com that her filmmaker grandson, Tyler - second from left - 'really portrayed what we intended to show, adding: One of the important things, to me, was to realize that there are people in this world who will take people in and take care of them  and, at a time like the Kinder transports, people who opened their homes and their hearts to little people, never knowing that theyd ever go back. Its just rewarding to see that there are people like this in the world'

The new film will also show at a Maryland film festival later this month, and the Gildins hope it resonates with people beyond their family and social circle. Herb tells DailyMail.com: I think that my story, and our story, is such a wider story, because it is so different than most people my age that tell their children and grandchildren about their life  its all about concentration camps, gas chambers, death. Ours was a difficult time, but it was wonderful people doing wonderful things. Good things happened during this period of time, and thats so rare  you dont hear stories like that'

We beat the odds, and ultimately we were able to come to the US  but that didnt happen too often.

The Gildin children were lucky; at a time when few nationalities were being allowed into the US, they got in under the Russian quota, because their father had actually been born in that country. The young trio traveled across Eastern Europe, Russia and Siberia to Japan, then boarded a cargo ship bound for Americas West Coast  earlier in 1941, before Pearl Harbor and Japans entrance into the war.

Sometimes, when I looked back at the possibility of, in 1941, being interred in Japan during the war, under a stateless passport  who would look out for us? Who would take care of us? he tells DailyMail.com.

After an arduous journey, the children made it to Seattle  where their arrival made the newspapers because so few refugees were arriving in the States at the time, especially from Germany  but were disappointed because they thought their parents would be waiting to greet them. Instead, the three still had to travel alone from coast to coast to meet their mother and father in New York.

Their family situation in New York was far less comfortable than what the children had been used to in Germany and Sweden; they lived in a poor neighborhood, their parents worked in a shoe factory and sewing, and they were faced with yet another language: English. Some of the other children made fun of Herb, he says, and it wasnt easy  but we survived.

He tried to keep in touch with his second family in Sweden, but slow and laborious communication through letters  coupled with his responsibilities towards helping the family in New York  eventually made the effort more sporadic.

The sad thing is, after a couple of years, I wrote less, spoke less, he tells DailyMail.com. One of my only regrets is that I didnt keep better contact with that family for more than 50 years  the mother, the Swedish mother, loved me  They had lost a child, and I was the replacement for the child that they had lost. So she  her commitment to me was as a true mother. I think that when she discovered that I had an opportunity to leave, that I was going to leave, I think she was terribly, terribly upset.

Herb and Tyler pose at the grandparents' home in Delray Beach, Florida. Herb says of the film: 'I think the young people today should understand. Holocaust, to them, is history  but the story I tell  its really a story of grandfather talking to Tyler, my grandson. He asked the questions, l try to tell him. I think its a wonderful story just to get on record, because theyre so rare'

Herb, third from right, poses in Sweden during Christmas with his foster Christian family; he tells DailyMail.com: 'I did miss my parents, absolutely did, I missed being with my sisters  but when youre young enough, you adjust. And I adjusted, I think, reasonably well. They became my family, this was my second mother, second father, second sister and brothers. I did not ever think that I was going to leave. This was a lifetime commitment

Although Herb was born in Germany, he traveled on a stateless passport to Sweden - a country he knew nothing about - with his juvenile two sisters

Herb and his older sisters were eventually able to travel to the US to meet their parents, when so few refugees were allowed in that their arrival made headlines in Seattle; the Gildins were able to move to the States because Herb's father was born in Russia, and the family entered under the Russian quota, he says

Tyler, wearing an Islanders hat - who grew up close to his grandfather on Long Island - tells DailyMail.com that, when his grandfather gave his great-aunt's eulogy, 'I had never heard any of these stories. And it just kind of hit me, of how have I not filmed this before? I work in film, hes telling this story. Within months, he says, the process of filming began, and grandfather and grandson sat down on camera to explore the family history

And I dont know how she was after we left, obviously not happy, but sad. A few years later, she decided she wanted to come visit me again  [it] must have been five or six years later. She came to New York, and I dont know why or how  and I guess it still bothers me to this day  my mother did not want to meet the woman that really had been my second mother and saved our lives. Where would we be without this family?

I cannot, will never understand why she could not. Guilt, somewhere, I dont know. I ended up meeting them in New York  I shouldve done better, and Im sad that my mother never had the opportunity to say thank you. But it is what it is, and she must have had her reasons.

As time went on, however, Herb continued to build a life of his own. He was drafted during the Korean War but luckily stationed within the US  and integrated with the Mississippi National Guard.

I was probably the first Jewish person they had ever met, he laughs. But over a period of time, they got to know, they got to like me, I got to like them.

He joined his brother-in-laws dairy business after the war, and he also met his future wife: A New Yorker named Gloria who he spotted on vacation while she was playing ping pong.

He didnt tell me what he did for a living; he didnt tell me what he came from, she tells DailyMail.com. I was just very attracted. He was adorable.

The couple tease each other in their Delray Beach home, a bright and airy house filled with carefully curated art and an inground pool outside. Herb, at 89, still calls her his little girl, little lady, and his rock.

After I met his sister, who had an accent, and I said to him: How come your sister has an accent and you dont? Thats when he told me where hed come from, Gloria says. Other than that, he was very secretive.

Herb remained that way as the two married and built a life together; they worked day and night to make a lighting business succeed and now have an international workforce. They raised a son and a daughter  and it was their daughter, truly, who spearheaded efforts to find out more about Herbs past. She studied abroad in Germany and kept digging from there.

It was at the insistence, help of my daughter that we finally, after 50 years, had a reunion in Sweden, when I got to meet no longer the parents but now the children and grandchildren of the parents, Herb tells DailyMail.com, adding: The parents that were the original people that took us in were no longer alive.

Herb and Gloria arrived in Sweden with their two children and several grandchildren, and Gloria lights up when she describes seeing her husband meet his Swedish sister.

It was very touching, she tells Daily Mail.com. I had to hold myself back from crying. It was just a very touching experience to see these old people who were remembering themselves as children  and seeing each other 60 years later, and yet having this warmth. It was beautiful.

Herb and Tyler review family photo albums at the Gildin home in Delray Beach, Florida. Tyler's documentary about his grandfather, The Starfish, features old family pictures as well as footage from the 2001 reunion of Herb and his Swedish hosts, as well as scenes from when yet another Swedish descendant came to visit America

Filmmaker Tyler holds his three-month-old son, Brody, in his grandparents' home in Florida; his grandfather Herb says the baby is 'the first and only member of the fourth generation. There arent too many Gildins  now we have another grandson who can continue the Gildin name and all that the Gildins stand for. Im very proud to be a Gildin; I think were very special and weve tried to live our lives beautifully  and I hope that goes on to the next generation. And I hope Im here long enough to enjoy and watch him growing up. He adds: Im pleased that, somewhere, my great-grandson will look at this thing and get to know me a little bit

Gloria Gildin looks on while Herb smiles at his first great-grandchild; Herb tells DailyMail.com: Theres nothing left on my bucket list; Ive accomplished everything that I would want to do, and I hope that, throughout these years, that Ive touched many lives by just being on this earth ... And Im so appreciative of all the people who have touched my life  thats the story I want to leave for my great-grandson

Herb and Gloria, front and center, have a son and daughter as well as five grandchildren - and, now, a great-grandson; they are pictured with the family before the arrival of Brody

Herb and Gloria display an endearing and affectionate rapport both in the documentary and while they talk to DailyMail.com, clearly proud of each other and their family

Herb tells DailyMail.com: Immigration today is important; its news every day. And I think that we should tell the story of an immigrant who really did well, difficult as it was. I feel we learned that the impossible is not impossible. It is possible if you work hard enough, believe in what you try to do

Footage from that reunion is included in Tylers documentary, as well as scenes from when yet another Swedish descendant came to visit America.

Herb says: When I left Sweden  the youngest daughter of the family was Agneta, and she was, at the time, 17, 16. When I came back, I saw who I presumed was Agneta, but that was an old lady sitting there! And I remembered her as a 17-year-old playmate. It was 50-somewhat years later since we had seen each other, and yet she called me little brother, hugged, kissed and talked about the things that we remembered.

It was quite an exciting reunion, and I got to meet her family  they said they knew in the stories their parents told about a young boy that lived with them in Sweden, but they didnt know too much about Little Herbie.

The reunion of the families was a heart-warming conclusion to one of the few uplifting stories to take place during World War II  one of different countries and cultures banding together for the overall good of humankind.

I think that my story, and our story, is such a wider story, because it is so different than most people my age that tell their children and grandchildren about their life  its all about concentration camps, gas chambers, death, he tells DailyMail.com. Ours was a difficult time, but it was wonderful people doing wonderful things. Good things happened during this period of time, and thats so rare  you dont hear stories like that.

And I think the young people today should understand. Holocaust, to them, is history  but the story I tell  its really a story of grandfather talking to Tyler, my grandson. He asked the questions, l try to tell him. I think its a wonderful story just to get on record, because theyre so rare.

He adds: Immigration today is important; its news every day. And I think that we should tell the story of an immigrant who really did well, difficult as it was. I feel we learned that the impossible is not impossible. It is possible if you work hard enough, believe in what you try to do.

Herb and Gloria burst with grandparent pride because its their grandson whos brought their story to life; they also hope the documentarys messages resonate with people outside of their family and social circle as it screens at festivals and, ideally, beyond.

He really portrayed what we intended to show, Gloria says of Tyler, adding: One of the important things, to me, was to realize that there are people in this world who will take people in and take care of them  and, at a time like the Kinder transports, people who opened their homes and their hearts to little people, never knowing that theyd ever go back. Its just rewarding to see that there are people like this in the world.

Anything can happen in America, she says. The American Dream.

And as they give their interviews and pose, little baby Brody alternately cries and gurgles in the background, the fourth generation Gildin free to enjoy that dream  because of strangers, in Sweden, who opened their homes and hearts in an act of compassion during one of the most shameful episodes in world history.

Theres nothing left on my bucket list; Ive accomplished everything that I would want to do, and I hope that, throughout these years, that Ive touched many lives by just being on this earth, Herb tells DailyMail.com. And Im so appreciative of all the people who have touched my life  thats the story I want to leave for my great-grandson.Jeremy Corbyn was left red-faced today after getting himself into yet another tangle, this time with an Alsatian named Acer.

The Labour leader was out meeting members of the public in Wales after attending the funeral of veteran MP Paul Flynn.

The photos show Corbyn attempting to pose for a picture with a young mother and her baby in a stroller, after taking some much needed time out from a chaotic week in Parliament.

However, it wasn't long before the boisterous pup was giving Corbyn the run around after spotting something ahead of him.

Jeremy Corbyn ended up in a bit of a tangle earlier today when he was out meeting locals in Newport, South Wales

Corbyn had to detangle himself after Acer the Alsatian was distracted by something

Corbyn managed to get the perfect picture before the Alsatian spotted something interesting

The cute dog surged forward, leaving Corbyn to untangle the dog's lead from the pushchair and the mother to duck under Corbyn as he tried to control the dog.

Corbyn had attended the funeral of MP Paul Flynn and had addressed the congregation at the St Woolos Cathedral earlier today.

He paid tribute to his friend and described him as somebody who was 'very special in every conceivable way in his life'.

He said: 'I loved the character of him and the way in which he spoke up for Newport, spoke up for causes that weren't necessarily terribly popular and the zany sense of interest that he had.

Corbyn had been in Wales attending the funeral of Paul Flynn (pictured above) the Labour MP for Newport West

'He was a wonderful guy in so many ways.

'He was also very proud of coming from Newport, coming from Wales, and I see him in the tradition of Aneurin Bevan.

According to Wales Online, Mr Corbyn said that Paul had never been besotted by power.

He added: 'He was only there to serve the people that had put him there and to serve the principals he had adopted in childhood and stuck to all his life.'

Corbyn's trip to Wales comes after the Labour leader said that he wouldn't rule out revoking Article 50, before admitting that it wasn't his 'focus'.

Speaking in Brussels on Thursday he failed to rule out cancelling Brexit unilaterally to stop No Deal.A defrocked Catholic priest from New Jersey who was convicted 15 years ago of molesting two boys is now teaching children English in Dominican Republic.

NBC News first broke the story on Friday after tracking down the former clergyman, 47-year-old Hadmels DeFrias, to Colegio del Caribe, a private school in the popular resort city of Punta Cana.

The educator told a reporter that he no longer poses a threat to minors, saying: 'I don't see the children with those eyes anymore. For me they are children and they need to be treated like children because that is what they are.'

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Defrocked New Jersey Catholic priest Hadmels DeFrias, 47, is pictured outside a Dominican Republic school where he now teaches English

DeFrias, who says he has a clean record in his native Dominican Republic, was hired a year ago as a teacher at Colegio del Caribe in Punta Cana, where his classroom has no doors

But he admitted that the feelings may not be gone forever.

'I am not telling you that maybe someday it wont be there, because I can't predict the future.'

DeFrias' identity became public knowledge last month when the Newark Roman Catholic Archdiocese released the names of 63 former priests who were credibly accused of sexual abuse against children.

DeFrias, a graduate of Seton Hall University with a Masters in Divinity degree, was ordained in 1999 and had two brothers younger than 14 accuse him of molestation in the early 2000s while he was assigned to St Mary of the Assumption Church in Elizabeth.

DeFrias, who says he was diagnosed with a disorder whose sufferers are attracted to adolescent, is a member of an interfaith monastic order

DeFrias pleaded guilty in 2004 to a charge of criminal sexual contact to avoid jail time and was sentenced to three years of probation.

Under the conditions of his sentence, the disgraced cleric was barred from ever having contact with minors in New Jersey.

In his NBC interview, the former priest expressed remorse for his actions and explained that he was diagnosed with ephebophilia, which is a primary sexual interest in adolescents.

DeFrias was removed from ministry shortly after sentencing. According to his Linkedin profile, he operated a body shop for seven years, then briefly worked in telemarketing, before moving to Florida in 2013 to become a wedding officiant.

In the past two years, DeFrias moved back to his native Dominican Republic, where he joined a monastic interfaith group called the Order of Eremitic Servants, and then became an 'independent Catholic non-Roman priest' with the 'Progressive Celtic Church,' which bills itself as an offshoot of the Anglican Church, although officials with the Anglican Church of North America beg to differ.

At the time of the sexual abuse nearly 20 years ago, DeFrias was assigned to St Mary of the Assumption Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey

DeFrias' profile reveals that he was hired at Colegio Carbie in February 2018.

During his interview with NBC, DeFrias said he has no criminal record in the Dominican Republic, which allows him to work with children, but he nevertheless claimed that told his employers about his history in the US.

DeFrias also pointed out that he is never left alone with his students because he has a teacher's aide present at all times in his classroom, which has no doors.A Pennsylvania woman admitted to having sex with a 14-year-old boy - but claimed it was to help cope with her depression while her boyfriend was in jail, according to police.

Leanora Propes is now facing statutory sexual assault charges after her alleged victim told law enforcement the assault happened last summer.

Propes, of Scranton, is said to have confessed to having sex with the teen while boyfriend Glenn James Marr was in prison.

But she is said to have claimed she did it because she was lonely and missing 34-year-old Marr.

Leanora Propes admitted to having sex with a 14-year-old boy but said it was to help cope with her depression while her boyfriend Glenn James Marr was in jail, police say

Propes, of Scranton, is said to have confessed to having sex with the teen while boyfriend Glenn James Marr was in prison. The couple are pictured together

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports Marr, of Binghamton, New York is also facing a charge of obstruction for giving investigators false information.

He is said to have told police about the alleged incident before saying he made it up to 'get revenge' on her.

The 14-year-old boy told police he had four sexual encounters with Propes while Marr was behind bars.

He had initially denied anything had happened, police said, after his mom called police to report the crime.

Marr, of Binghamton, New York is also facing a charge of obstruction after saying he made up the alleged incident to 'get revenge' on Propes

Propes is said to have claimed she did it because she was lonely and missing 34-year-old Marr

The 14-year-old boy told police he had four sexual encounters with Propes while Marr was behind bars. Propes and Marr pictured together

Propes had said the boy's mother made the allegations up over an issue of stolen money.

Both Propes and Marr posted bail. They are expected back in court on Wednesday.

She is charged with statutory sexual assault and corruption of minors, among other charges. Marr is charged with with obstruction.William Sullivan, 21, (pictured) was arrested for harassing a Jewish colleague at work

A New York man was arrested for harassing a Jewish colleague and telling her she was 'in the gas chamber now' while she was in a cooler where they worked.

William Sullivan, 21, from Saugerties, was charged with one misdemeanor count of aggravated harassment over the March 11 incident.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the case was the latest in a rising number of anti-Semitic episodes reported in New York.

The Democrat joined state police Superintendent Keith Corlett at a special conference announcing the arrest of Sullivan.

Police said the incident occurred at Mother Earth's Storehouse in Ulster, outside Kingston, 50 miles south of Albany.

Troopers say a female Jewish employee was in the produce cooler with another co-worker when Sullivan appeared in the doorway, shut off the lights and told her: 'You're in the gas chamber now'. He then allegedly insulted her faith with an expletive.

Corlett said the woman told her managers about the encounter and later reported it to police.

After the incident, the woman, Sarah Shabanowitz, said in a statement that Sullivan turned to her and said: 'you f*****g Jew', ABC7 reported.

The incident occurred March 11 at Mother's Earth's Storehouse, (pictured), in Ulster, just outside of Kingston, NY

The store's owner, Kevin Schneider, told the Daily Freeman of Kingston that Sullivan was fired and that the woman has quit.

Schneider, who also owns stores in nearby Saugerties and Poughkeepsie, did not return a call seeking details.

The 40-year-old company posted a statement on Facebook apologizing for the 'immense upset' to the community.

'The situation has been handled and the employee is no longer employed by us,' the statement said. 'We have never, nor will we ever tolerate hate.'

He later posted another statement apologizing again and said the store has taken action to ensure a similar situation does not happen again.

Troopers said Sullivan was issued an appearance ticket and released. He is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday. It was unclear whether Sullivan has a lawyer who could comment.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, (center), said the case was the latest in a rising number of anti-Semitic episodes reported in New York at a conference on Friday

In a statement to the news network, Shabanowitz said she was 'horrified' by the incident and the store's response.

'The way Mother Earth treated me was wrong. Not just Will, but management and the ownership. No one did anything to make me safe,' she wrote.

'No one took this seriously. Instead, management ordered me to keep quiet.

'I will not be quiet. No one should be subjected to anti-Semitism or racism or sexism at work.'

State police said Sullivan had no prior criminal history. Sullivan and Shabanowitz worked together for about a year, they said.

Kevin Schneider, the owner of Mother Earth's Storehouse, apologized for the incident

While it's unusual for the governor to participate in news conferences announcing a misdemeanor arrest, Cuomo's office said he made the trip to Kingston to bring attention to the rise in anti-Semitic episodes in the state this year.

Cuomo called the latest case sad, disturbing and frightening. 'What makes it worse, frankly, is that this is not an isolated situation,' he said. 'We have been seeing a growing number of anti-Semitic activity.'

Cuomo said there have been about ten such instances since early January, including separate attacks on three Orthodox Jewish men in Brooklyn and the defacement of public spaces in New York City and on Long Island with swastikas.

The governor also mentioned the mass shooting at a mosque in Pittsburgh in October that left 11 Jewish worshippers dead.

He also mentioned last week's massacre of 50 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand as examples of 'a virus of hate' that is spreading across the globe.

'This is something that everyone must be concerned about,' said Cuomo, a Roman Catholic who noted that his two brothers-in-law are Jewish.Former President Barack Obama will meet Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the rebellious Democratic freshman class that has already caused headaches for leaders of the newly empowered House majority.

Obama, who came in with a large House majority of his own after his historic 2008 win only to watch it get wiped out in successive elections, will speak to the 67-strong class that has already been challenging leaders on impeachment while pushing forward on taxes and environmental policy.

The president, himself a former community organizer, will get to interact for the first time with Ocasio-Cortez, who landed on the cover of Time Magazine this week and has become better known than many of her party's presidential candidates.

President Barack Obama will speak to members of the House freshman class on Monday

Among her classmates is Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who set off a firestorm with her critics about Jewish support for Israel with her 'all about the Benjamins' comment and other remarks that drew a rare rebuke on the House floor.

Another member of the class who has already stood out is Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who while speaking the day she was sworn in was caught on camera saying 'Let's impeach the mother******' in a comment referencing President Trump.

Obama had to contend with a House GOP caucus where members questioned his citizenship, tried to impeach his attorney general, repeatedly voted to repeal Obamacare, and clashed with his White House over government funding.

Rep.-elect Angie Craig, D-Minn., Rep.-elect Kim Schrier, D-WA., Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY., Rep.-elect Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, D-Fla., Rep.-elect Abby Finkenauer, D-Iowa, and Rep.-elect Sharice Davids, D-KS., line up as they join other members of the freshman class of Congress for a group photo on Capitol Hill in Washington

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has attracted millions of Twitter followers, rolled out a Green New Deal, and called for taxes of as high as 70 per cent on multi-millionaire earners

Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., left, and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., have each drawn scrutiny for their remarks in the new Congress

Omar's comments about support for Israel are certain to get comments at the annual AIPAC summit next week

Obama is coming at the invitation of Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Committee member Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., listens to testimony by Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former lawyer, before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019. She denounced President Trump in her first speech from the House floor

The new class is contending with leaders keen to both enact a legislative agenda and investigate the Trump administration  without taking actions that might interfere with their effort to defeat him at the ballot box in 2020.

As Politico, which reported the event, noted, several new members worked for the Obama administration, including Andy Kim (D-N.J.), who served on the National Security Council.

Obama, who prides himself on being able to maintain a cool head, also will interact with members of a caucus where the ability to grab headlines with provocative tweets and viral moments is a new coin of the realm.A flight attendant who traveled to Mexico for work through a program for immigrants brought to the U.S. as children has been detained.

Attorney Belinda Arroyo said Friday that 28-year-old Selene Saavedra Roman raised concerns about whether she could work an international flight due to her immigration status.

Arroyo says Mesa Airlines mistakenly reassured the enrollee in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, that she could.

Selene Saavedra Roman (pictured above) had raised concerns about whether she could work an international flight due to her immigration status

However, US authorities stopped Saavedra Roman on her return to Houston.

She is originally from Peru and came to the US aged three.

Roman graduated college at Texas A&M and was granted legal status under DACA.

According to Roman's attorney she has now been held for more than a month at an immigration detention center in Conroe, Texas.

Roman is married to an American citizen, David Watkins, and is in the process of applying for legal residency status.

Watkins told NBC that his wife had put Mexico and Canada on her 'no fly' list 'very intentionally' when she was hired by Mesa Airlines.

Hillary Clinton mentioned Roman's plight on Twitter and asked people to sign a petition calling for her to be released from a detention center where she is being held by ICE

Roman (pictured above) who is enrolled in DACA was reassured by Mesa Airlines that she could travel to Mexico and be admitted back into the U.S.

Watkins said he did not know his wife had been sent to Mexico. He learnt by text upon her return that she had landed in Houston but was being detained.

'It has been absolutely terrible,' Watkins said. 'Sometimes you have a nightmare and when you wake up you say, 'Okay the nightmare is over.' When I go to sleep, I have nightmares. When I wake up, I'm still stuck in the nightmare.'

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lent her voice to Roman's plight, Friday.

'This is an awful story: A DACA recipient in good standing was told by her airline she could work on a route to Mexico. Now she's in detention and ICE is threatening to revoke her status,' Clinton tweeted.

She went on to ask people to sign a petition calling for Roman's release.

Mesa Airlines apologized and joined the Association of Flight Attendants in also asking for her release.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement says Saavedra Roman didn't have a valid document to enter the country.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says on its website that those who travel outside the country without permission are no longer covered by the program.Nick Memmo, 35, of East Freetown, Massachusetts, was arrested Monday night for keeping an 86-inch flat screen television

A man who mistakenly received a larger television along with one he had ordered was placed in handcuffs after deciding to keep it.

Nick Memmo, 35, of East Freetown, Massachusetts, was at his home Monday evening when police executed a search warrant and found the 86-inch 4K HDR Smart LED TV mounted to his wall, according to Boston 25 News.

'They surrounded the house and knocked on the door with flash lights coming through all the windows,' Memmo said of the night of his arrest. 'They told me to come outside then handcuffed me.'

At issue was a television so large that the Freetown Police say they needed a pickup truck to deliver it to their station. Memmo ordered a 74-inch television through Amazon, but received the bigger TV as well from the third-party shipper.

Memmo freely admits that the 86-inch flat screen was sent to his home in error and that police attempted to question him several days prior to his arrest.

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The 86-inch flat screen smart TV that was delivered to Memmo by mistake was seized by police and apparently required a pickup trick to deliver it to their station

'I said 'Do I need to hire an attorney?' and they said I wasn't under investigation at that point,' Memmo told the news station. 'They were just asking questions. I answered a lot of questions with 'I don't know' just so I didn't jeopardize myself.'

The police had a slightly different version of events, according to a press release.

After they were told by a delivery service that it had delivered one of the televisions by mistake and made several unsuccessful attempts to recover it, police visited Memmo who they claimed refused to cooperate.

'Amazon said I had nothing to worry about,' Memmo said in his defense. 'I made no wrong no decisions at that point.'

Memmo says that had he known he would be arrested, he would have paid the difference for the extra delivery or just returned it to the shipping company

Memmo's Amazon order had only been for one 74-inch flat screen, seen here. When the second 86-inch TV arrived, Memmo admits he kept it, and upon looking up relevant laws and contacting Amazon, believed he was within his rights to keep it

The third party shipping company who delivered the television claims that Memmo misrepresented himself and signed for the TV when it arrived, a charge that the 35-year-old Massachusetts man disputes

The third party shipping company claims he signed for the delivery, and that he misrepresented himself as someone he was not, all of which Memmo disputes.

Memmo was arraigned at Fall River District Court and charged with larceny over $1,200 by false pretense and misleading a police officer.

The 35-year-old small businessman is now facing possible jail time. He says if he believed he was going to have been arrested, he would have just paid for the second TV or returned it.A man convicted of killing a woman in 1983 has been cleared by DNA evidence, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors in Broward County, Florida on Friday submitted a motion to vacate the conviction of Ronald Stewart, a serial rapist who died behind bars in 2008 after pleading no contest to killing Regina Harrison.

Serial killer Jack Harold Jones confessed to Harrison's murder in a sealed letter that he left with instructions to be opened one year after his execution in 2017, leading investigators to reexamine the physical evidence in the case.

'The Broward State Attorney's Office and Hollywood Police Department regret the roles our agencies played in Stewart's conviction,' the agencies said in a statement. 'Although Stewart is now deceased, it is appropriate that the record be corrected.'

Prosecutors say that DNA clears Ronald Stewart (left) in a 1983 murder, though he is still guilty of rape. Serial killer Jack Jones (right) confessed to the slay in a letter before his execution

Harrison had turned 20 just two days before she disappeared on May 2, 1983, while taking evening bike ride from her parents' house to Hollywood's North Beach. A witness reported seeing her with a skinny, long-haired man on a black bike.

The following day, her nude body was found strangled in West Lake Park, with evidence that she had been sexually assaulted.

No arrest was made for five months, until a Fort Lauderdale detective saw a television story about the killing.

He had been part of a task force that had earlier arrested Stewart for a series of rapes - and when captured, the skinny, long-haired man had been riding a black bike.

The woman who had seen Harrison at the beach picked Stewart out of a photo lineup. A jailhouse snitch said Stewart had confessed to killing a woman in a park.

Even though fingerprints at the scene didn't match Stewart, he pleaded no contest to avoid the death penalty. A 50 year sentence was added to the 50 years he was serving for multiple rapes.

Stewart was sent to Mississippi to serve his sentence for rapes committed there, where he stayed until he was sent to Florida a year before his death.

He died of cancer while incarcerated on September 11, 2008.

Regina Harrison was riding her bike in a Florida park when she was raped and strangled. Killer Jack Jones said her ghost haunted him for three years, compelling him to confess

Jones was arrested in 1995 in Arkansas for the rape and strangulation of a 34-year-old accountant, Mary Phillips, in her office and the beating of her 11-year-old daughter.

He was convicted and sentenced to death. In 2003, DNA connected him to the 1991 rape and strangulation at a Fort Lauderdale hotel of Lorraine Barrett, a 32-year-old Pennsylvania tourist. He cooperated, pleaded guilty and was sent back to Arkansas to await execution.

He gave the letter to his sister to hold in about 2007, saying that she should keep it until a year after his execution.

In it, Jones told her to give the letter to the detective who investigated a 1991 Fort Lauderdale murder he confessed to in 2003 - he had told the detective he'd killed a third woman and would eventually tell him who.

The sister forwarded the letter last year and DNA testing confirmed Jones, not Stewart, killed Harrison at the park.

In the letter, Jones says he was haunted by Regina's ghost for three years.

'She forgave me. I never forgave myself,' he wrote. He said he wanted the Harrison family to know 'I am deeply sorry, that I couldn't rest easy until they knew.'

By his execution, Jones had lost a leg to diabetes and said he was ready to die.

Jack Harold Jones is seen in 2007, around the time that he penned the letter confessing to the murder, which he left with his sister to hand over a year after his execution

But why he confessed to two murders but not Harrison's until his own death is knowledge he took to the grave.

Richard Harrison, the victim's brother, said Thursday that he and their parents, who are now elderly, were stunned to learn the man they thought killed Regina was innocent of her death.

He said Stewart came up for parole in Mississippi but never denied guilt. Harrison, a Tampa attorney who represents municipal governments, said he understands why prosecutors now must correct the record.

'If this did not involve my family personally, this would be a fascinating episode of 'CSI,'' he said. 'But it doesn't make Stewart any less evil and it certainly doesn't make him any less dead. And Jones has already been executed ... and we can only execute people once.'

He said his sister was a kind, deeply religious young woman who was attending Palm Beach Atlantic College, a Christian school in West Palm Beach. He said she hadn't figured out her career but would have taken a job helping others.

'She was a really sweet kid,' he said.Police have charged a man with attempted murder after a 19-year-old was stabbed in a terror attack last weekend at a Tesco car park.

Vince Fuller, 50, was arrested in Surrey on suspicion of terror offences after an alleged attack with a knife last Saturday at around 10.30pm.

Witnesses said they heard a man yelling racist obscenities during the incident in the village of Stanwell. Police said the episode was 'inspired by the far-right'.

Fuller, of Viola Avenue, Stanwell, is further charged with possessing a bladed article, affray, having an offensive weapon and racially aggravated fear or provocation of violence.

Vince Fuller, 50, was arrested after the incident in a Tesco car park on Saturday night

Surrey Police (pictured at the scene on Sunday) were called to reports on Saturday at around 10.30pm of a man acting aggressively

Vincent Fuller was arrested in Stanwell, a village in Surrey close to Heathrow Airport

Detective Superintendent Nigel Doak, a counter terrorism officer, said at the time the incident 'has continued to show the hallmarks of a terrorist event.'

'We believe the victim, a 19-year-old Southern European man, may have been targeted due to his ethnic appearance,' he added.

The suspect was originally arrested by Surrey Police last Saturday night and was further arrested at 7pm the following day by Counter Terrorism Policing South East detectives, under Section 41 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

The victim sustained serious injuries to his hands.

Detectives believe he entered McDonalds to seek help after being attacked and was then taken to hospital by ambulance to Ashford Hospital.

He was transferred to St George's Hospital in south London where he underwent surgery and was released shortly afterwards.

It comes after at least 50 people were killed in a horrific far-right attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, by Australian-born Brenton Tarrant.

Prime Minister Theresa May condemned the Surrey attack on Sunday evening and thanked the emergency services for their 'handling of the terrorist incident'.

She tweeted: 'My thanks to the emergency services for their handling of the terrorist incident in Stanwell.

'My thoughts are with the injured man, and his family and friends. Vile, hateful far-right extremism has no place in our society.'

Police promised that Mosques in the Surrey area would see a higher police presence following the attack.

Fuller was arrested after a 19-year-old was stabbed in the Tesco supermarket carpark last weekend

Home Secretary Sajid Javid reacted to the incident in a statement, and said: 'We must stand together as a society and reject the terrorists and extremists who seek to divide us.

'Now's the moment for us all to challenge the hatred, ignorance and violence they peddle and stand up for the kind of country we are and want to be.'

He added: 'To any communities who are feeling vulnerable and under threat I say we are with you. You benefit our country, you are part of our country, part of us.'

Detective Superintendent for Surrey Police, Karen Mizzi, said: 'I want to reassure residents that we are doing all we can to ensure a thorough investigation takes place and we are supporting those affected by last night's events.

'Patrols will be stepped up across Stanwell in order to provide assurances to those in the area specifically around mosques and increasing engagement with communities of all faiths, giving advice on how people and places can protect themselves.

'We stand together with all communities in Surrey and we will take action against any criminal behaviour which seeks to undermine society, especially where crimes are motivated by hate. There can never be any excuse for this type of incident in any shape or form and this criminality will not be tolerated.'A dead man was found on a New York City subway during Friday morning's rush hour.

The 31-year-old man was found by an MTA worker on a northbound F train at the 169th Street station in Queens Friday morning, according to the New York Post.

Authorities said they responded to a 911 call that came in at about 7.15am.

A NYC MTA worker found a dead man on a Train at the 169th Street station in Queens (stock)

The man, 31, was found dead on the F train, with no obvious signs of trauma on his body (stock)

When police arrived, they found him unconscious and unresponsive. EMS then declared him dead at the scene. Initial reports indicated that his body showed no obvious signs of trauma.

An autopsy will be conducted to determine how he died.

Police said that the man's name will be released once his family has been notified of his death.

Authorities are investigating the incident.An extremely rare albino penguin has made its debut at a Polish zoo but faces being rejected by other birds because it is the odd one out.

The albino penguin hatched in mid-December at Gdansk zoo, and has been under veterinary care since then.

In footage of its release, the timid little bird is shown being prodded into its new enclosure with its companions.

An extremely rare albino penguin has made its debut at a Polish zoo but faces being rejected by other penguins because it is the odd one out. The bird hatched in mid-December at Gdansk zoo and has been under veterinary care since then

In the wild, such an unusual-looking penguin would be rejected by other penguins and would have little chance of survival.

At its new home, it has its parents and two other birds for company.

The bird's sex has not yet been determined. It weighs 1.1 pounds and stands 11 inches tall.

In the wild, such an unusual-looking penguin would be rejected by other penguins and would have little chance of survival. It is also prone to diseases because it lacks a protective black pigment, zoo director Michal Targowski said

The zoo's director Michal Targowski said the albino penguin 'would have become the very first to be attacked by predators.'

He said it requires special care, being prone to diseases since it lacks a protective black pigment.

He added that his team was astonished after its birth but are 'incredibly happy' to have a baby albino penguin.The fired New York cop accused of shooting his love rival in the face has been indicted for planting a knife on his victim, according to sources.

Sgt. Ritchard Blake, 40, was fired after disturbing video showed the moment 21-year-old Thavone Santana was shot in the mouth in an alleged dispute over a woman.

Blake - who was off-duty at the time of the shooting - now faces charges of attempting to cover up a crime scene after turning himself in to the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office on Friday, ABC News reports.

He has been indicted for tampering with evidence after allegedly planting a knife at the scene of a shooting before retrieving, according to surveillance video.

District Attorney Gonzalez said: 'The entirety of the evidence in this case was presented to a grand jury, which considered all of the defendant's actions and returned an indictment charging him with tampering with evidence.

'This is a shocking offense, especially given the defendant's obligations as a police officer, and we intend to hold him accountable for his alleged conduct.'

Commissioner O'Neill said: 'By swiftly moving to terminate former Sergeant Ritchard Blake in August of 2018, the department sends a clear and unambiguous message that criminal conduct will not be tolerated within the ranks of the NYPD.'

The video surveillance shows Santana  who had his left hand in his pocket throughout  walking towards the defendant who fires one shot, striking Santana in the mouth

The incident was caught on surveillance cameras outside the home of Blake's girlfriend Debbie Lima, 33, where the cop, left, is seen arguing with Santana, right, and pulls out a gun

The defendant was then captured on video surveillance searching Santanas left shorts pocket, according to the District Attorney's office

No weapon was found in Santanas pocket, but police later recovered a razor blade on the ground next to him, according to the investigation

The August 2 shooting was filmed on surveillance cameras outside the home of Blake's girlfriend 33-year-old Debbie Lima, with whom he has a 10-year-old son with.

Blake is not charged in the shooting itself but instead is accused of planting a knife on the victim, whose jaw has been wired shut since the incident.

'All the evidence was presented to the grand jury and they found that the shooting was justified', a law enforcement source said.

NYPD fired Blake after protesters, including Santana's mother Arrie Spencer, marched in New York to demand justice and that the sergeant be dismissed.

In the shooting video a man identified as Blake is seen arguing with Santana, from Brooklyn, just under the Livonia Avenue station in East New York around 5am.

Blake appears to pull an object from his side and moments later Santana is on the ground.

The Attorney General's office said in a statement: 'The defendant is captured on video surveillance removing a knife from his own back pants pocket and dropping it on the ground next to Santana.

'Within seconds, after looking up at a surveillance camera, the defendant picked the knife back up and put it back into the same back pants pocket.'

Santana suffered a bullet to the jaw and sources said that the two men knew each other and may have both been romantically involved with Lima.

Neighbors said that just before shots fired Blake, Santana, and Lima were fighting and screaming. Santana at one point allegedly told Blake: 'Control your b****!'

Blake at first claimed that Santana tried to rob him, but police later clarified that it was not a robbery case.

Santana, pictured, was shot in the jaw but survived the blow. Santana's family and friends marched to protest the violence and to demand Blake be fired from the NYPD and jailed

After the incident Blake, who served in the 109th precinct in Queens, was stripped of his gun and badge and placed on administrative duty.

Blake also had a sealed arrest in 2016 relating to an assault on a woman.

A lawsuit filed against him said: 'Sgt. Blake has a prominent and long history of violence, assaults and was the subject of Internal Affairs investigations of his actions in 2010, 2011 and 2016 and was disciplined for his violations of NYPD Policies.'

The defendant was released without bail and ordered to return to court on April 17, 2019. He faces up to four years in prison if convicted.

His attorney Abe George said Blake shot Santana 'in self-defense'.Immigration and Customs Officials are expected to release as many as 1,800 migrants from custody in Texas over the next three days, according to shelter officials who work with the agency to house migrants seeking asylum.

Ruben Garcia, executive director of Annunciation House, told KVIA-News in El Paso, Texas, that local shelters are overwhelmed and may not be able to handle the influx of newly released migrants.

ICE officials told DailyMail.com that they couldn't confirm estimates or provide a number for how many would be released from the El Paso region, as it will be dependent on the number turned over by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Central American immigrants walk between a newly built Bollard-style border fence, left, and the older "legacy" fence after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico on February 1, 2019 in El Paso, Texas. The migrants later turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents, seeking political asylum in the United States

'The current volume of family units crossing the border  combined with limited transportation resources, time restrictions on families in government custody, and finite space at family residential centers  have all contributed to the current state of events,' ICE officials said in a statement.

'ICE is releasing families to (non-governmental organizations) that provide assistance with immediate basic needs such as temporary shelter, food, water, clothing and transportation services; however, many of these organizations are overwhelmed due to the ongoing influx of families at the border,' officials added.

The development follows news earlier this week that the Trump administration will stop detaining immigrant families who cross the border illegally in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas because the volume has surpassed officials' ability to safely keep them in jails.

Instead, starting this week, families in that region have been released on their own recognizance with a Notice to Appear in immigration court for deportation or asylum proceedings  a policy known as 'catch-and-release,' which Trump has vowed to end.

Department of Homeland Security officers patrol along the border fence separating US and Mexico in the town of El Paso, Texas in this February 2016 file photo

The goal is 'to mitigate risks to both officer safety and vulnerable populations under these circumstances,' a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official told DailyMail.com.

ICE released roughly 107,000 family members into the U.S. from December 21, 2018  March 20. After they are released, adult immigrants are typically required to wear ankle monitors to track their location  a policy that doesn't apply to children.

Immigration authorities said the agency arrested 34,546 people living in the country illegally in October through December of last year - the first quarter of the 2019 fiscal year, according to Reuters. The number represents a 12 percent drop from the 39,328 people arrested during the same period a year earlier.

'Our interior arrests have been affected because I have had to redirect' resources to address the 'alarming rate' of arrivals at the border, said Nathalie Asher, executive associate director of ICE's enforcement and removal operations, during a conference call with reporters.

ICE has three family detention centers - including two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania - which can hold thousands of people at any given time.

Under a federal agreement, ICE can detain families with children for up to 20 days.

A majority of the families are fleeing gang violence, poverty and corruption in the Northern Triangle region of Central America  Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Most have sought asylum in the U.S., saying they would face threats of violence and death if they returned to their home countries.

Salvadoran migrants wait for a transport to arrive after turning themselves into US Border Patrol by border fence under construction in El Paso, Texas on March 19, 2019

The process for seeking asylum often last years and many are ultimately unsuccessful. Some immigrants are allowed to live in the U.S. while awaiting their fate in court while others spend the time in detention centers.

Last year Trump sought to stem the tide of families coming across the border by implementing a controversial zero-tolerance policy that led to thousands of immigrant children being separated from their parents while both were detained for the misdemeanor of crossing the border illegally.

The actions sparked massive public outrage and multiple federal lawsuits, leading to Trump ending the policy through an executive order on June 20, 2018.

A federal judge also ordered the administration to reunite families  a slow process that is ongoing and hampered by many parents having been deported without their children.

More recently, the administration has begun to return some Central American migrants back to Mexico until a judge decides their case.Illusionist Uri Geller has vowed to 'telepathically stop Brexit' in an open letter penned to Theresa May this evening.

The Israeli-British TV personality said he felt 'psychically and very strongly' that most Britons were anti-Brexit and said he will 'not allow' the Prime Minister to lead Britain out of the European Union.

Mr Geller, who is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions, claimed his powers had been validated by the CIA and MI5 and warned Mrs May to heed his warning.

Uri Geller attached to the letter an image of himself with Prime Minister Theresa May, which he posted on Facebook this evening. He claimed he had known the now-PM for 21 years and that she had visited his home

Mr Geller, who is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions, claimed his powers had been validated by the CIA and MI5 and warned Mrs May to heed his warning

The Israeli-British TV personality said he felt 'psychically and very strongly' that most Britons were anti-Brexit and said he will 'not allow' the Prime Minister to lead Britain out of the European Union

He wrote: 'I feel psychically and very strongly that most British people do not want Brexit. I love you very much but I will not allow you to lead Britain into Brexit.

'As much as I admire you, I will stop you telepathically from doing this  and believe me I am capable of executing it.

'Before I take this drastic course of action, I appeal to you to stop the process immediately while you still have a chance.'

Geller, who is currently in Israel, used to live in Sonning, which lies in Mrs May's Maidenhead constituency.

In his letter, he said he had known the now-PM for 21 years and that she had visited his home.

He added: 'Three years before you became Prime Minister, I predicted your victory when I showed you Winston Churchill's spoon on my Cadillac, which I asked you to touch.'

Theresa May is back in Downing Street today (pictured) after the EU gave her three weeks to get her deal through Parliament and it emerged she would offer MPs a free vote on where Brexit goes next if she fails

EU Council President Donald Tusk (left leaving the talks last night) confirmed plans for a two-stage delay plan. If Mrs May passes her deal at a third attempt next week, Britain will be allowed to stay in the EU until May 22

EU Remain protesters outside Downing Street as Theresa May addresses the nation from Downing Street last week

He also claimed he is using the power of his mind to ensure that 'Jeremy Corbyn never gets the keys to Number 10 Downing Street'.

'I will ensure that they bend out of all proportion to ensure that he never takes up residence there,' he wrote.

Geller rose to prominence in the 1970s with an act based around his apparent psychic powers and telepathy skills, which were even tested by the CIA.

He is perhaps best known for his trademark spoon-bending trick.

After an extension was agreed by EU leaders on Thursday, the UK is due to leave the union on May 22 if Mrs May can get MPs to back her withdrawal deal.Amber Rudd tweeted she had been 'trolled' by her own daughter, after she wrote a satirical article about the 'advantages' of a no-deal Brexit for milennials.

Her daughter Flora Gill's piece lists 'Instagrammable blue passports', 'the perfect protest photos' and 'affordable housing' as benefits to millennials if Britain leaves the EU without a deal.

Ms Rudd, the Work and Pensions Secretary, defied the Prime Minister last week in a key Brexit vote, refusing to vote against a motion that ruled out no-deal.

Flora Gill said Brexit would give millenials 'affordable housing' and the 'perfect protest photos' in an article for The Spectator

Home Secretary Amber Rudd (pictured) tweeted that she had been 'trolled' by her daughter's article

The Oxford University graduate wrote what appears to be a tongue in cheek piece for The Spectator, claiming Brexit is a useful 'scape goat' for millennials in awkward social situations.

'No longer do you need to rely on permanently delayed tubes, or numerous dying aunts - Brexit is here for you,' it says.

'Parents question why you don't have a job? - Brexit. Why were you late for the party? Brexit. Need an excuse to break up with Mr wrong? 'I'm so sorry, it's not you, it's Brexit'.

The article, by the former Philosophy and Theology student who now works for shopping company Value Retail, claims to be putting a 'positive spin on a no-deal Brexit for Remain-voting millennials'.

Her mother, Amber Rudd, is Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and was Home Secretary from July 2016 to April 2018, resigning shortly after the Windrush Scandal.

Her late husband, A. A. Gill, was a restaurant critic for The Sunday Times and published author. He died in 2016, aged 62, after developing cancer.

In 1995 her parents divorced after her father began an affair with Tatler's editor-at-large Nicola Formby. The pair stayed together afterwards and married shortly before his death.

Ms Gill also said millenials could use Brexit as an excuse for not having a job or being late

Gill (left) is the daughter of Amber Rudd, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and the late Sunday Times restaurant critic A. A. Gill (pictured)

Rudd campaigning with her ex-husband, the writer and restaurant critic A. A. Gill, in 2005, who tragically passed away in 2016

Ms Gill is a freelance writer and writes for the Sunday Times and Tatler, among others

Amber Rudd was Home Secretary from 2016 to 2018 before resigning shortly after the Windrush scandal

Gill with former partner Nicola Formby at a film premiere in 2001. The pair had two children together and remained a couple until his death from cancer aged 62 in 2016

Social media users have reacted with amusement and shock to the story.

Tom Smith, who supports the EU, tweeted: 'I might wholeheartedly disagree with the sentiment, but it's nice to read a Gill again.'

Catherine Kearney tweeted: 'She's her father's daughter for sure!'

Paul Wietzel tweeted back to Amber Rudd: 'Nice article by your daughter. Seems a lot of people are losing their sense of humour.'

Shelley tweeted: 'I'm loving how everyone is missing the beautiful sarcasm of her piece. Brilliant.'

Other's, however, were less than amused.

Keith Dickerson said on Twitter: 'This is insulting and patronising - there isn't a single reason to accept a no-deal Brexit here.'

Betise Head said: 'It's sort of witty but, frankly, I cannot laugh about it any longer. Too dangerous, too messy and too irresponsible.'

In July last year, Flora moved into her mother's parents home in Kensington, complete with a garden square and wine cellar.

In her piece for Tatler, she described it as a 'budget set of a Downton Abbey remake'.

'Imagine if the family had lost the estate but crammed all the fancy fixtures into an apartment in London,' she wrote.

'Today, when millennials must choose between rent and avocados, surely the positives of a free, large apartment in a prime Kensington location outweigh the negatives?'This is the hilarious moment a die-hard Miley Cyrus fan delivers a performance of the star's famous Wrecking Ball video on a garage tire swing.

Matty Graham, 28, from Bristol, executed a passionate yet unsexy dance as he swung half naked from a tyre attached to a garages ceiling.

Choosing to stay true to the original video Matt stripped down to his underpants for the video, taken on February 17.

Matt even took the performance one step further than Miley by hanging upside down in mid-air while holding onto the tyre with his feet.

After the exhausting performance Matty is seen looking rather queasy outside as he recovers from the spinning of the tyre.

He takes a moment to drink some water and regain his breath while his friend laughs hysterically.

The footage was taken by Lew Guy who runs a limo rental service from the garage.

Daredevil performs a hair-raising move dangling himself upside down while holding the tyre between his legs

He came in like a wrecking ball: Matty seems to have nailed the composition of the shoot but opts for bare feet rather than the work boots worn by Miley

Miley Cyrus, 26, passionately performing her iconic Wrecking Ball video in the nudeGeorge Conway insisted on Friday morning, as he needled his wife's boss again on Twitter, that President Trump has 'narcissistic personality disorder' and 'needs to be re-elected so he can't be indicted' for alleged criminal behavior.

He pinned a tweet to the top of his account that said: 'THINK about the fact that we dont just have a mentally unstable presidentbut a president who thinks he needs to be re-elected to avoid being indicted. (At least in that one respect his thinking is clear.)'

The attorney's high-profile dispute with the president led Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway to break her silence this week on her marriage.

George Conway insisted on Friday morning, as he needled his wife's boss again on Twitter, that President Trump has 'narcissistic personality disorder' and 'needs to be re-elected so he can't be indicted' for alleged criminal behavior

The attorney's high-profile dispute with the president led Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway to break her silence this week on her marriage

The intervention had little impact on her husband, who before she spoke had suggested that Trump is in 'cognitive decline' and claimed Friday that he's 'mentally unstable'

She spoke at length Thursday about her husband's ugly public feud with the president after Trump called him a 'whack job' - saying on Fox News that she was 'not being asked to choose between my job and my marriage.'

The White House counselor gave a pained interview as her husband continued his assault on Trump. She said it's 'unlike' him to tweet at all and it's a 'new' development that he's no longer 'supporting the agenda of the president and my work there.'

She scolded her husband on television for using her position to bring attention to his comments. Conway said the president had a right to defend himself because her husband had criticized him first.

'I appreciate the president defending what he thinks is unfairness,' she told Maria Bartiromo on her Fox Business show. 'I'll leave that up to him.'

She added in a message intended for her husband: 'I was raised, though, in a household of strong Italian Catholic women who taught me that you air grievances like that in private, so it is very surprising to see it be so public.'

She said on 'Mornings with Maria' that she had conversations with her husband 'certainly' about keeping his views to himself.

'I've talked about it in passing,' she said of her talks with Trump about the matter.

But she said: 'I am not being asked to choose between my marriage and my job.'

The intervention had little impact on her husband, who before she spoke had suggested that Trump is in 'cognitive decline' and claimed Friday that he's 'mentally unstable.'

She said on 'Mornings with Maria' that she had conversations with her husband 'certainly' about keeping his views to himself

Unaffected: George Conway continued tweeting criticism of the president after his wife spoke on Fox Business Network

After the interview, George Conway said that Trump is ''#notstable #notagenius,' in a reference to the president's declaration that he's a stable genius, and retweeting messages calling him 'a pathological narcissist.'

Trump had raised the temperature Wednesday in his feud with George Conway, calling him 'a husband from hell' in a tweet and telling reporters that he's 'a whack job.' The back-and-forth prompted the lawyer's wife, Kellyanne, to publicly side with her boss in the month's long spat.

The next morning, George Conway was back on the attack, promoting a decades-old Tom Brokaw interview with a 33-year-old Trump as evidence for his argument that Trump is nuts. He also claimed the president is a 'compulsive liar,' and that's why Trump's lawyers didn't want him talking to Robert Mueller.

After calling Trump 'dumb' in one assessment, Conway said, in response to a follower's claim that Trump could be in 'cognitive decline,' that it's 'possible' the 72-year-old president is losing his mental faculties.

'Also possible. There's a clip of Trump online talking to Tom Brokaw thirty years ago and Trump is speaking in complete, coherent sentences. It's quite a remarkable contrast to today, when all you get are these often incomprehensible word salads,' he said.

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George Conway suggested Thursday that Donald Trump is in 'cognitive decline,' in spite of a public warning from his wife - a senior adviser to the president - that he's not qualified to offer such a diagnosis

Trump had raised the temperature Wednesday in his feud with Conway, calling him 'a husband from hell' in a tweet and telling reporters that he's 'a whack job'

The next morning, George Conway was back on the attack, promoting a decades-old Tom Brokaw interview with a 33-year-old Trump as evidence for his argument that Trump is nuts

He also claimed that Trump is a compulsive liar who would put himself in legal jeopardy if he had to sit for questioning

Kellyanne Conway had avoided comment on her marriage and her husband's derogatory remarks about her boss until this week. She addressed the clash for the first time this week.

She noted Thursday, on Bartiromo's program, 'I don't talk much about this publicly.'

Conway said her first priority is the 'protection' of the four children she has with George.

She said her husband encouraged her to work for the president and was 'enthusiastic' about the family's move from New York to Washington at the beginning of the Trump administration.

'We have four school-aged children. So you don't just -- I -- I'm their mother. I could never have just come here and been here for two and a half years without them. So we made a decision as a family to move here,' she said. 'George decided he would like to do something different with his career. I totally supported that. He wanted the solicitor general's job. That didn't work out. Then he was nominated or offered the job at the Justice Department.'

Conway argued that her husband's tweets are meaningless, as he does not have the power to act on his assessments in the way Mueller, the deputy attorney general or a talk show host does.

'I don't know when the feminists are going to write this story about the unusual situation of a man getting power through his wife,' she predicted. 'But that's what we have here.'

Trump wrote that Mr. Conway is angry that he didn't get a plus administration position, and mocked him as 'Mr. Kellyanne Conway'

She told Politico Trump had sat on the sidelines of her household's political mudfight long enough.

'You think he shouldn't respond when somebody, a non-medical professional, accuses him of having a mental disorder? You think he should just take that sitting down?' she said. 'Don't play psychiatrist any more than George should be. You're not a psychiatrist and he's not, respectfully.'

George Conway said in an interview on Tuesday that he takes his anti-Trump frustrations out online so he can avoid disrupting his marriage by complaining directly to his powerful wife about the president he considers insane.

'The mendacity, the incompetence, it's just maddening to watch,' he told The Washington Post on Tuesday. 'The tweeting is just the way to get it out of the way, so I can get it off my chest and move on with my life that day. That's basically it. Frankly, it's so I don't end up screaming at her about it.'

Speaking of the public war of words that led him to tweet a definition of 'narcissistic personality disorder,' he said the armchair diagnosis 'stuck ... because of the utter bizarreness this weekend, his own conduct. It was so illustrative.'Ross Dawson, 32, was jailed for 35 years for three robberies and an aggravated burglary

A violent robber who tricked an 84-year-old woman into giving him a lift before shoving her out and taking her car has been jailed for 35 years.

Ross Dawson, 32, of no fixed address, carried out a string of violent robberies including holding cab drivers at knifepoint in two incidents, robbing a woman with the help of a female accomplice as well as aggravated burglary.

In the chilling attack on the 84-year-old woman, Dawson approached the car at her house in Romford, east London, and asked for a lift to hospital.

He claimed his pregnant wife was not feeling well on July 22, 2017, and the pensioner let them in.

But on the way Dawson forced her to stop on a secluded road, pushed her out of the car and sped away from the scene.

The incident was recorded on a passerby's dash-camera.

Dawson also dumped his 15-year-old female accomplice, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and she was arrested and found with a black handled, eight-inch kitchen knife in her handbag.

In one attack on July 22, 2017, he asked an 84-year-old woman to take him and who he said was his pregnant wife to hospital in Romford, east London

Dawson told the elderly woman to pull over on a secluded road and he pushed her out of the car and drove away

The scene was caught on the dash-cam of a car behind (pictured) and Dawson left his female accomplice on the side of the road. She was arrested and found to have an eight-inch knife on her

Detective Sergeant Billy Baxter said: 'This is a despicable individual and whose violent crimes is some of the worst I have ever investigated.

'His sentence clearly reflects the threat he was to the public and the fact he will not be even be eligible for parole until 20 years means his victims are afforded some peace of mind which will help them move on from such a harrowing experience.'

In a similar attack, Dawson and a woman got into a taxi in Romford in the early hours of July 4, 2017.

He told the driver to pull over because his pregnant wife was feeling sick in the back seat.

After the car stopped, Dawson pulled out a knife, punched the driver in the face and demanded money from him.

The cab driver said he could take the money as he started to get out of the vehicle but Dawson dragged him to the floor and held the knife to his throat.

He ordered the driver to give him the car key but it snapped in the struggle meaning Dawson could not start the vehicle.

Dawson and the woman fled on foot.

A fortnight later, on July 15, 2017, a woman asked for a taxi to Kingsbridge Circus, Romford, and a 61-year-old driver took the call.

The male driver arrived and two men approached the taxi - with Dawson getting in.

He asked to be taken to Crow Lane in Romford but the driver asked for payment first.

In a similar attack he asked a taxi driver to pull over due to his female accomplice - who he said was pregnant - feeling sick

Dawson offered his phone as a surety but the driver declined.

The robber again pulled out a knife and demanded money.

The victim - who said he was scared for his life - handed over his wallet and Dawson asked for the chain around the driver's neck - which was his taxi ID.

The incident was recorded on the driver's dash-cam which Dawson had failed to notice.

The last incident happened on August 3, 2017, at around 7pm in Ilford.

A 30-year-old woman answered the door to a young girl she knew and let her in the house.

But a short while later the girl opened the door for two men, which included Dawson and a white man known only as John.

John put a knife to her throat and demanded she tell them where her valuables were hidden.

Dawson then went behind the victim and put his right arm over her right shoulder and put her in a headlock.

Dawson pulled out a knife, punched the driver in the face and said he wanted money

The taxi driver agreed and said he could take the money, but Dawson dragged him to the floor and held a knife to his throat. He demanded the man's car key which had snapped, so Dawson and the young girl fled on foot. The incident was caught on the driver's security camera

He started to squeeze her neck and the victim told police she thought she was going to die.

She lost consciousness, blacked out and fell to the floor.

When she woke up her whole body was shaking but she realised the robbers had gone. She rang police and screamed for help down the street.

Dawson was identified in all the incidents and charged on August 3, 2017.

He pleaded guilty to three robberies and one aggravated burglary at previous hearings at Snaresbrook Crown Court - where he was sentenced today.

The court heard how Dawson would use a knife and target young women in his attacks, despite being wanted on recall to prison.

A 32-year-old man was arrested on September 17 in connection with the incident on August 3, but was released.

The 15-year-old girl pleaded guilty at youth court in October 2017 to possession of a pointed and bladed article.

Dawson's 35-year sentence includes two charges brought against him by West Mercia Police for blackmailing other inmates while he was in custody.A Louisiana man has been freed from prison after spending 36 years behind bars for a rape he did not commit.

Archie Williams, 58, was convicted of raping and stabbing a woman in her home in Baton Rouge in 1982.

He was 22 at the time and was convicted after the white victim identified him in a line-up of other people.

It was the third time she had seen his face after being shown photographs of him by police on two occasions beforehand.

Archie Williams, 58, is pictured leaving court on Friday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after spending 36 years in prison for a crime he did not commit

Williams holds up a t-shirt with the word Justice on it outside Baton Rouge court on Thursday

Williams hugs his family outside the court on Thursday. He said he was happy to be free but dismayed over the number of people still unfairly locked up

Williams, who was in fact at home sleeping at the time of the murders, was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole but has been fighting to have his conviction overturned.

On Thursday, it was vacated after police matched fingerprints found at the scene to those of serial rapist Stephen Forbes.

They achieved the match by running the prints found at the rape scene through the FBI's national fingerprint database.

Prosecutors for years refused to run the search, claiming he had no statutory right to it.

It was not until Commissioner Kinasiyumki Kimble of the 19th Judicial District Court ordered that it be carried out this month that the truth was finally revealed.

If they had done it sooner, they would have found that the fingerprints belonged to Forbes and could have potentially stopped him from going on to attack other women.

It now remains uncertain if he will file legal action against the state for compensation.

On Thursday, a prosecutor apologized to Williams in court for the decades he has spent wrongfully incarcerated.

'This is the right, honest, ethical and now factual thing to do.

'You are factually innocent, wrongfully convicted, and on behalf of the state, we apologize that you have suffered this,' East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillary Moore III said.

The man was joyful as he celebrated outside the courthouse with his family but said he was pains over the thought of others still being in jail when they should not be.

'I'm not free until they're free,' he said.

Williams was 22 when he was caught up the investigation. It is not clear why police suspected him initially.

Williams was jubilant but also saddened, he said, by the number of men who remain wrongfully convicted

The 58-year-old and his lawyers from The Innocence Project walk out of court on Thursday. He was exonerated by fingerprints found at the scene which belonged to another man but which prosecutors refused to test for years

The attack happened at night and involved Forbes breaking in to the woman's house and raping her in her bedroom.

When a neighbor entered the home, he stabbed them then fled.

Both the neighbor and the victim gave descriptions to the police of the attacker which made him taller than Williams.

They were also both shown photo line-ups that included Williams in them but did not pick him on more than one occasion.

It was not until they had been shown his face several times already that they fingered him as the attacker.

He was convicted by a jury, despite his family testifying that he was at home asleep on the night of the attack, and was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

Williams is shown with his sisters in prison. He first contacted The Innocence Project in 1995

In 1995, 13 years into his sentence, Williams contacted The Innocence Project and asked its lawyers to take his case.

Since then, they have been fighting to have all the DNA evidence from the scene and the fingerprints tested.

In addition to the victim labeling Williams as her attacker, prosecutors convinced the jury of his guilt by saying that his DNA matched a sample of semen found at the scene.

It could have in fact belonged to dozens of different men and was not an individual match.

For years, the Innocence Project's lawyers have pleaded with state authorities to let them run fingerprints found at the scene through the FBI's national database which was modernized in 2014 to become more reliable.

Prosecutors, however, refused on the grounds that Williams had no statutory right to it.

His lawyers fought their case through the courts and, earlier this month, a judge ordered that they run the prints.

They were a hit for Forbes who died in prison in 1996.

He was arrested in 1986 while trying to rape someone else, two miles away from the home where he attacked the woman Williams was accused of raping.

Forbes confessed then to four other rapes which happened after Williams was jailed.

The Innocence Project celebrated Williams' release on Thursday but is calling for it to be mandated that prisoners get access to any and all DNA and finger print tests which could exonerate them.

'Mr. Williams first wrote to the Innocence Project for help in 1995. He was 35 years old.

'Today, he walked out of prison at age 58. There is no way to quantify the loss and pain he has endured.

The Innocence Project fought alongside Mr. Williams for close to two and a half decades to be able to utilize advancements in forensic testing to prove his innocence.

'Once a person is convicted, the criminal laws are rife with vast, insurmountable procedural hurdles intended to favor finality over truth. While we have come a long way in allowing convicted people access to evidence for DNA testing, we have a long way to go when non-DNA evidence of innocence is at issue.

'Given what we now know about wrongful convictions, that they occur at alarming rates, we must create pathways for truth to prevail,' said Vanessa Potkin, director of post-conviction litigation.House lawmakers in Texas have voted to protect the right of kids to run lemonade stands without fear of being shut down by police.

Fort Worth Republican Rep. Matt Krause's bill passed 144-2 on Wednesday. It still needs to move through the Senate before heading to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk.

'Yesterday was one small step for lemonade, today is one giant leap for young entrepreneurs,' Krause said after its passage in the chamber, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Homemade beverages are currently banned under the Texas Food Establishment Rules due to health concerns.

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George P. Bush shows his support for HB 234a bill put before the Texas House of Representatives that would legalize lemonade stands run by children on Tuesday

Bush tweeted his support for the bill along with the video of him purchasing lemonade

Today, a very enthusiastic group of entrepreneurs set up shop to sell lemonade to @txglo employees. I stopped by for a glass (or 2). Thanks to @repmattkrause for taking a stand for #LemonadeFreedom #HB234 pic.twitter.com/EjVKhvLeLL  George P. Bush (@georgepbush) March 19, 2019

House Bill 234 had received support from land commissioner George P. Bush, son of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on Tuesday.

'Can't think of anything more basic, more entrepreneurial, more creative for a child to begin the idea of learning the value of a dollar,' Bush says in the video after he purchases a $1 lemonade from some kids the day before passage of the bill.

'I'm encouraging my fellow Texans to support this piece of legislation that goes far to build imagination and creativity in our great state.'

The measure comes after police shut down a lemonade stand run by two little girls, Zoey and Andria Green, in Overton, Texas, in 2015 because they did not have the proper permits.

Steve Maxwell, left, of Shreveport, La., drops a donation in the jar for Andria Green on Saturday after the girls were told they were not allowed to sell lemonade but that they could ask for donations on June 13, 2015

Austinite Branson Burton, 8, testifies in favor of Lemonade Bill at House State Affairs Committee hearing on February 27, 2019

Branson Burton, 8, of Austin, Texas, pleaded the case of young entrepreneurs to the House State Affairs committee in support the bill last month, according to NBCDFW.

'This bill will support me and thousands of other kids to have the chance to start their own lemonade business without having to go figure out and pay for city permits or being worried about getting in trouble with the health department,' he said in his testimony.

The new Texas law would legalize temporary lemonade stands or other stands selling nonalcoholic beverages operated by minors on private property or public parks.

A similar bill was filed in Minnesota after a Minneapolis 13-year-old nearly had his hot dog stand shut down.Robert Durst is being sued for the wrongful death of his wife Kathleen 'Kathie' Durst, 27 years after she vanished without a trace.

In the complaint, which was filed by Carol Bamonte if her role as administrator of her late sister's estate, Durst is accused of not only killing his first wife but then working with his family to cover up the murder.

Durst's later father Seymour is frequently mentioned in the filing, which at one point states: 'Further investigation is ongoing to determine what involvement, if any, Seymour had in Kathies disappearance and murder. There is no question that he actively participated in the cover-up of Kathies disappearance and murder.'

It is also alleged that Seymour told his son to 'take care of the problem' just prior to Kathie's death when she she threatened to expose what she had alleged were illegal practices being carried out by the multibillion-dollar Durst Organization.

The filing also cites multiple times that Durst has allegedly admitted to the murder, though he has never been convicted or even charged with her death.

One of those times caught on audio, when at the culmination of filming for the HBO documentary The Jinx, a still-microphoned Durst retired to a bathroom where he stated: 'What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.'

That is due in large part to the fact that Kathie's body has never been discovered, and she was only declared dead in March 2017, which was 25 years after she went missing.

A lawyer for Durst said in a statement: 'Bob Durst did not have anything to do with Kathy Durst's disappearance and he did not kill Susan Berman and he doesn't know who did.'

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The jinx: Robert Durst (above in 2016) has been hit with a wrongful death lawsuit by the sister of his first wife Kathleen, who vanished without a trace on January 31, 1982

Don't blink: Kathie's body has never been found and Durst has never been charged or convicted of his first wife's murder (couple above in their wedding photo)

In the complaint, there are multiple theories presented as to why Durst may have murdered his wife, in addition to her possibly exposing the family company.

'For example, just weeks before he killed Kathie, an unprovoked Durst physically assaulted Kathies friend, Peter Schwartz, causing substantial facial and back injuries,' states the court filing.

'On the day Kathie disappeared and was killed, she had confronted Durst because she was angry he paid Schwartz off to avoid civil and, possibly, criminal prosecution.'

It is also alleged that Durst was anything but a loving husband in the lawsuit.

'That there is overwhelming evidence that Durst repeatedly physically, emotionally and financially abused Kathie over a significant period of time and, further, that such abuse escalated within the months prior to her disappearance,' reads the court filing.'

Durst is currently being held in a Los Angeles prison as he prepares to stand trial for the murder of his former friend and confidante Susan Berman.

Berman was murdered execution style in her home, just months after then-district attorney for Westchester County Jeanine Pirro announced that the case was being reopened 18 years after Kathleen's death.

It has been theorized by some that Durst not only confided in Berman, but also had her wear a wig and stop by the couple's New York City apartment after she went missing to help give him an alibi.

Berman had contacted Durst to let him know that police wished to speak with her regarding the disappearance of Kathie just a few days before her death.

He would not have been charged with Berman's murder had he not appeared on 'The Jinx,' with the show finding a letter he had written with the words 'Beverly Hills' and a forensic expert later matching that to a note sent by Berman's killer.

In between those events, Durst also moved to Texas and began to dress like a woman.

He also killed his neighbor Morris Black and then dismembered the body, which was found floating in the water off Gavelston with the exception of the head.

Durst went on the run after posting $300,000 bail following his arrest on suspicion he had committed the crime, and was later picked up while shoplifting a chicken salad sandwich and some Band-Aids from a Pennsylvania supermarket.

This theft, which got him extradited back to Texas, occurred despite the fact that Durst had $500 in his pocket at the time.

He was eventually declared not guilty in his first murder trial, with the jury citing the lack of forensic evidence as the biggest weakness in the case.

It is believed that Durst was once again trying to go on the run after he was charged with Berman's murder.

He was picked up at the Canal Street Marriott in New Orleans on March 14, 2015 after a warrant was issued for his arrest, and found with a loaded rrevolver, five ounces of marijuana, his passport and birth certificate, a flesh-toned latex mask, and $42,631 in cash.

Durst also had a fake Texas ID with the name 'Everette Ward,' which he used to check into the hotel.

He was held in New Orleans on the gun and drug charges before being extradited to California.

In addition to the 'The Jinx,' Durst's first marriage was the subject of the 2009 film 'All Good Things' starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst.

Michael Struk, the now-retired NYPD detective who was the first to speak with Durst after he reported his wife missing, later described Durst as acting nonchalant and casual about the entire incident, much to his shock and surprise.

Though he and his fellow detectives found that Durst made a number of contradictory and alarming statements over the course of the investigation, there was never enough conclusive evidence to even charge him in the disappearance of his 29-year-old bride.

He was featured on the Emmy-winning HBO documentary 'The Jinx,' and seemed to suggest that he was not under a great deal of pressure to dig deep into the disappearance of Kathie due to the lack of a body.

That program also suggested that the enormous wealth and power Durst's father Seymour had at the time was used to shut down any attempts to try and tie his son to the murder of the young nurse.

It is unclear why Durst wanted to have Struk testify in the case however, as the man has made no secret of his disdain for the billionaire.

And while he would not state that Durst had killed his wife and Berman, he did say back in 2015 that the alleged killer was 'capable of anything.'Police have arrested a substitute teacher in Alabama after his gun went off in a first-grade classroom on Friday.

Authorities have said that 74-year-old Henry Rex Weaver is in custody at this time.

He has been booked on charges of possession of a deadly weapon on school grounds, aggravated assault in the third degree, and reckless endangerment.

No one was seriously injured in the incident which occurred around 12.30pm.

'There was one juvenile who had received very minor injuries but was treated on the scene and released,' the sheriff's department said in a statement shared on Facebook.

Substitute teacher Henry Rex Weaver, 74 (pictured), is in custody after a gun he had in his pocket went off on Friday in a room full of first graders at at Blountsville Elementary School in Blountsville, Alabama.

Blount County Sheriff Mark Moon says students were in the classroom with Weaver at Blountsville Elementary School when a gun that was in his pocket discharged.

Administrators were alerted, and the man was detained until authorities arrived.

The weapon involved is a small caliber firearm.

Blount County Sheriff Mark Moon says students were in the classroom with Weaver at Blountsville Elementary School (pictured) when a gun that was in his pocket discharged

Waver has been booked on charges of possession of a deadly weapon on school grounds, aggravated assault in the third degree, and reckless endangerment

Moon says he is concerned that a substitute teacher brought a firearm to school.

He says the minimum charge in the case is reckless endangerment, which is a misdemeanor under state law.

Records aren't yet available to show whether Weaver has a lawyer who could speak on his behalf.Two young girls watched on in horror as their little sister was crushed to death by a ute in a busy service station car park.

Hayley Pattenden, three, was killed when she was struck by the vehicle at Burpengary BP, north of Brisbane on Thursday.

Her family had been travelling home to Rockhampton when they stopped for a toilet break.

Hayley Pattenden, three, was killed when she was struck by a ute at Burpengary BP, north of Brisbane on Thursday

Hayley's (left) older sisters Olivia, five, (centre) and Sophie, seven, (right) witnessed the tragedy

It is understood the young girl had jumped out of the vehicle and ran into the path of the ute without looking.

Her older sisters Olivia, five, and Sophie, seven, witnessed the tragedy.

Paramedics rushed to the scene but the small girl could not be saved.

Her mother Tegan Kurtz told the Courier Mail their lives had been turned upside down since Hayley's death.

Hayley has been remembered as a shy girl with a 'cheeky smile' who was always trying to keep up with her big sisters.

Tegan Kurtz (pictured right) has been left heartbroken after her daughter Hayley Pattenden (pictured left) was killed

Paramedics rushed to the scene but the small girl could not be saved. A GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family cover funeral costs

'She loved rodeos and helping her dad with the cattle, but she was a real mummy's girl and often would sneak into her mum's bed at night. We all greatly miss her,' Ms Kutz said.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family cover funeral costs.

The driver of the ute was taken to hospital after suffering shock from the incident.

Investigations into Hayley's death are ongoing.Special Counsel Robert Mueller has not recommended any new criminal indictments as he wraps up his Russia probe, deflating what some Democrats hoped would be a bad-news day for the White House.

Mueller delivered a long-awaited report Friday to Attorney General Bill Barr, opening up the possibility that key members of Congress could know its bottom line by the end of the weekend.

But a senior Justice Department official said Friday that there will be no more indictments filed with federal courts, meaning the president, his inner circle of present and former confidants and his family members are out of immediate legal jeopardy.

And the biggest pelts on Mueller's wall will remain former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates, along with former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen and former National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn.

President Donald Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said he and the president's other lawyers 'are confident that there is no finding of collusion by the president.'

The news of Mueller's final official actions swept through Washington in the flash of thousands of tweets just before 5:00 p.m. Friday, launching a political battle over what's in the report and how much will be made public.

The Justice Department notified leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees before announcing the end of a 22-month-long saga focused on still-unproven allegations that Trump's 2016 campaign colluded with agents of Russia to improve his chances in the election.

Trump, according to White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, has not seen any results from Mueller's investigation. White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Emmet Flood were with the president at his Mar-a-Lago resort club in Palm Beach, Florida when news wires lit up.

How the news broke: This is the letter Bill Barr, the attorney general, sent to the chairs and ranking members of the Judiciary Committees, revealing the Mueller probe is over

In his hands: Attorney General Bill Barr now has the results of the almost two-year long Mueller probe into the 2016 election and whether Russia helped elect Donald Trump

What the White House says: Sarah Sanders said the president knows nothing of the contents of Mueller's probe

'The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr,' Sanders wrote in a tweet, 'and we look forward to the process taking its course.'

'The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsels report,' she added.

Despite the reports Mueller would bring no additional indictments, there remained the possibility of indictments already sealed, or that another body such as the Southern District of New York wold bring indictments.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, told MSNBC there was a 'high probability' that could happen.

'I think there is a strong possibility of additional indictments, including president Trump's family,' Blumenthal said Friday evening.

'Maybe not by the Department of Justice, main Justice. But by other offices. I know that you want to stick to the Mueller report. But the Mueller report cannot be viewed in isolation,' the former prosecutor and Trump nemesis continued. 'Any more than an investigation, even though it may end, cannot lead to additional investigative leads and actions. And so I think there's a high probability of additional indictments.'

The president himself said Friday morning as he left Washington for Florida that he had no information about when Mueller might finish his work.

'I have no idea about the Mueller report,' he said, adding his standard assurance that 'there was no collusion,' between Trumpworld and the Kremlin, and that 'there was no obstruction' of justice in the White House.

'Everybody knows it. It's all a big hoax. ... I call it the witch hunt,' he said.

The 'highly respected' Barr, he added, 'ultimately will make a decision.'

Trump has said for more than two years that the Mueller probe was a politically motivated operation inspired by an unverified opposition-research dossier funded by the Democratic National Committee and his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton's campaign.

The special counsel's office has filed nearly 200 charges against 34 individuals  including six former Trump advisers and 26 Russians.

Seven of them have pleaded guilty to federal crimes. Judges have sentenced five of them.

The Mueller report promises to be the year's biggest partisan football in a city known for for tribal mudfights.

Senate Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia pointed a finger at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and warned that '[a]ny attempt by the Trump Administration to cover up the results of this investigation into Russia's attack on our democracy would be unacceptable.'

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Trump ally who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee until two months ago, said Friday that the Mueller report should end speculation about whether or not the president's campaign partnered with the Kremlin to deny Clinton the presidency.

'[T]hroughout this prolonged investigation, which cost tens of millions in taxpayer dollars and included aggressive surveillance tools, we still havent seen any evidence of collusion,' Grassley said.

He also called on Barr to 'provide Congress and the American people with the findings to finally put an end to the speculation and innuendo that has loomed over this administration since its earliest days.'

No let up: Trump repeated his anti-Mueller mantra on the White House lawn saying: 'There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. Everybody knows it. It's all a big hoax. It's all a witch hunt.'

Attack in the morning: Trump used an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network to claim that Mueller was the 'best friend' of James Comey, the FBI director the president fired

On Wednesday Trump told reporters that he would have no objection to the public release of Mueller's findings.

'I don't mind,' he said.

'Let it come out,' Trump declared. 'Let people see it.'

In his letter to Judiciary Committee chairs and ranking minority members, Barr said he is 'committed to as much transparency as possible.'

'I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend,' he wrote.

Barr added that he plans to consult with Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein to decide what information 'can be released to Congress and the public.'

The president's lawyers said they were happy to see Mueller bring the Trump administration's longest nettling saga to an end.

'We're pleased that the Office of Special Counsel has delivered its report to the Attorney General pursuant to the regulations. Attorney General Barr will determine the appropriate next steps,' Giuliani and Jay Sekulow said.

Mueller's report followed a series of signals that his expansive probe, which accumulated costs of $25 million through the end of 2018, was entering its final stages.

As Trump ramped up his rhetorical war on his own Justice Department, Mueller's prosecutors had begun to hand off critical cases to other jurisdictions, including the Southern District of New York and the District of Columbia  both of which can continue their work long after Mueller's office is shuttered.

Andrew Weissmann, one of Mueller's top prosecutors, took a job at New York University. The special counsel's office confirmed that Assistant U.S. Attorney Zainab Ahmad, another key Mueller deputy, had concluded his detail. And the senior FBI agent that was part of the team, David Archey, took a job overseeing the FBI field office in Richmond.

BILL BARR'S LETTER REVEALING MUELLER PROBE IS OVER Attorney General William Barr delivered a letter to Congress on Friday notifying the leaders of the Judiciary committees that special counsel Robert Mueller had submitted his report on the Russia investigation. The letter was addressed to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, and Republican Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia. Here is the text of the letter: Dear Chairman Graham, Chairman Nadler, Ranking Member Feinstein, and Ranking Member Collins: I write to notify you pursuant to 28 C.F.R. 600.9(a)(3) that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters. In addition to this notification, the Special Counsel regulations require that I provide you with 'a description and explanation of instances (if any) in which the Attorney General' or acting Attorney General 'concluded that a proposed action by a Special Counsel was so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.' 28 C.F.R. 600.9(a)(3). There were no such instances during the Special Counsel's investigation. The Special Counsel has submitted to me today a 'confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions' he has reached, as required by 28 C.F.R. 600.8(c). I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend. Separately, I intend to consult with Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Special Counsel Mueller to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Department's long-standing practices and policies. I remain committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review. Finally, the Special Counsel regulations provide that 'the Attorney General may determine that public release of' this notification 'would be in the public interest.' 28 C.F.R. 600.9(c) I have so determined, and I will disclose this letter to the public after delivering it to you. Sincerely, William P. Barr Attorney General Advertisement

Rosenstein, who had planned to leave his post in mid-March, decided to remain a 'little longer.'

Mueller, a former FBI director, has been a quiet force in Washington since accepting the mission from Rosenstein in May 2017.

Rosenstein was the top DOJ official empowered to appoint him: Jeff Sessions, who was then the attorney general, unexpectedly recused himself from the Russia matter shortly after taking office because he had been a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.

Trump shoved Sessions out the door in November.

Barr, who was previously the attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, took the reins of the Justice Department barely five weeks ago.

He now has the momentous responsibility of deciding which portions of Mueller's output can be released in a way that's consistent with federal law.

Mueller, a DOJ employee, is obligated only to submit his report to Barr. Congressional Democrats have consistently said they want to see his work in its entirety, however.

It's possible Barr could delicately thread a political needle by sending an executive summary to Capitol Hill and keeping the rest private.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell framed the Mueller probe as a broad look at Russia's documented attempts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, and sidestepped possible implications for the White House on Friday.

'Many Republicans have long believed that Russia poses a significant threat to American interests. I hope the Special Counsels report will help inform and improve our efforts to protect our democracy,' he said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats, were more aggressive.

'It is imperative for Mr. Barr to make the full report public and provide its underlying documentation and findings to Congress,' they said in a joint statement.

'Attorney General Barr must not give President Trump, his lawyers or his staff any "sneak preview" of Special Counsel Mueller's findings or evidence, and the White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public.'

'The American people have a right to the truth. The watchword is transparency,' they said.

Schumer told reporters that since 'the president himself has called without qualification for the report to be made public, there is no reason on Gods green earth why Attorney General Barr should do any less.'

Asked if Democrats will owe the president an apology if Mueller hasn't found any evidence of improper election-year behavior, Schumer hedged.

'I think we should wait for the full report to be made public before jumping to any conclusions,' he said.

Mueller's final tally: Trump's inner circle of convicts and turncoats - and 25 wanted Russian trolls 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. Advertisement

Hand in your phones! How Robert Mueller leak-proofed his investigation by turning his entire D.C. office into a secret fortress and even kept its address away from prying eyes

By: Reuters

When members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team investigating Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election arrived for work each day, they placed their mobile phones in a locker outside of their office suite before entering.

Operating in secrecy in a nondescript glass-and-concrete office, the team of prosecutors and investigators since May 2017 has unearthed secrets that have led to bombshell charges against several of President Donald Trump's aides, including his former national security adviser, campaign chairman and personal lawyer, who have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury.

To protect those secrets from prying ears, the whole of the office suite in southwest Washington was designated a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), U.S. spy speak for an area that has restrictions to ensure secret information stays secure.

One common restriction in SCIFs is to keep out smartphones and other electronic devices, which can be turned into covert listening devices or spy cameras. Visitors were also required to turn these over before entering.

Ground zero: This is one of the buildings which house the offices used by the Robert Mueller team. The building is in Washington D.C. just southwest of the White House. Witnesses interviewed by Mueller said they were picked up at their lawyers' offices and whisked into a parking garage before being taken for questioning

The restrictions, while not surprising given the team was investigating whether a hostile foreign power tried to help Trump win the 2016 election and whether his campaign conspired in the effort, have not been previously reported.

Accounts of witnesses interviewed by the special counsel's team, their lawyers and others familiar with the investigation reveal the lengths to which Mueller, a former FBI director, went to ensure his high-profile probe safeguarded its secrets.

In a city known for its leaks, Mueller pulled off a rare feat. He kept a tight lid on both his office and the evidence he was amassing in his highly sensitive investigation that has cast a cloud over Trump's presidency. And he did it even as Trump relentlessly criticized him, calling the probe a 'witch hunt' and the special counsel's team 'thugs.'

When former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo agreed to an interview with Mueller in May 2018, he was told he would be picked up at the hotel where he was staying in Washington.

On the lookout for a black government SUV, Caputo and his lawyer were surprised when an FBI agent drove up in his personal car, a white Dodge Charger.

'Then he drove us 15 blocks to their location and we went in through the garage so that nobody would see,' Caputo said in an interview.

Caputo was questioned about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Manafort's aide Rick Gates and long-time Trump adviser Roger Stone. When the interview was over, Mueller's team told him they would take him back to his hotel. Caputo said Mueller's team was not happy with what he said next.

'I said I'm meeting a TV crew downstairs so I won't need a ride,' Caputo said. 'They weren't upset that I was talking to the media, they were disturbed that I was doing it in (front of) the office.'

'They were concerned ... that would put their agents and attorneys at risk,' Caputo said, adding that he agreed to meet the news crew at a different location nearby.

Former Trump campaign advisor Sam Nunberg said an FBI agent picked him up at the train station to take him to the office.

'You put your phone and any electronic devices and leave them in a compartment out front,' Nunberg added. 'It was a very plain office.'

Caught on camera: Andrew Goldstein, Mueller's lead prosecutor, was pictured outside the office used by the special counsel during a rainstorm on Thursday

Nunberg said he went into a conference room with three tables, and prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, a member of Mueller's team, came in with three FBI agents, one female and two males.

The office's location was not publicly revealed but was discovered by journalists. Still, it has not been widely publicized. Mueller's team has asked media outlets not to publish the exact location for security purposes.

'We are working in a secure location in Southwest DC,' Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, has said.

'In a town where everybody and their mother is trying to get on the front page, Bob Mueller was always trying to stay out of the news,' said Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department spokesman. 'He wanted to be judged on actions, not press conferences.'

Corallo, who was briefly a spokesman for Trump's legal team, was interviewed by Mueller's team in February 2018.

Corallo and other witnesses summoned for interviews by Mueller's team said they were picked up from their lawyers' offices and taken to a secure parking garage in the building in southwest Washington.

The team's office suite was anonymous with no plaque on the door to identify its occupants, said Washington lawyer A. Joseph Jay, who represented a witness he declined to identify.

More than once, Jay recalled, members of Mueller's team expressed their commitment to confidentiality. 'They made it clear on a number of occasions, 'We don't leak. You don't have to worry about that with us.''

'By keeping to their code of silence, they were professionals,' Jay said. 'They weren't reacting to the spin. They were doing their jobs. They spoke through a number of indictments. They spoke through a number of sentencing memos.'

Mueller has remained silent throughout the investigation and his office has issued only one statement.

In that statement, issued this past January, spokesman Carr labeled as 'not accurate' a BuzzFeed News account describing evidence collected by the special counsel that allegedly showed that Trump had directed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. BuzzFeed has stood by its story.

Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, himself a former federal prosecutor, also remarked on Mueller staying out of sight.

'Whenever we talk to them, they say, 'We'll take it to Bob.' He's like the Wizard of Oz,' Giuliani said.

Giuliani said although he was suspicious of leaks to the news media, he acknowledged he knew of none for sure from the special counsel's team and that nothing he told Mueller's office was leaked.

'Mueller doesn't talk to us. I don't know why he'd talk to the press,' the former New York mayor added.

Joseph Campbell, a former assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division who worked at the agency when Mueller headed it, said the special counsel knows how to handle sensitive investigations and ignores the attacks on him.

'He went through 12 years starting with 9/11 of extremely critical and sensitive investigations around the world,' said Campbell, referring to the 2001 attacks on the United States. 'This is right in his wheelhouse.'

'He is not affected by external criticism or speculation,' Campbell added.

Robert Litt, former general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said any leaks about the investigation appeared to have come from witnesses or their lawyers.

'There's nothing he can do about that,' Litt said, referring to Mueller.

Litt said Mueller, the 74-year-old former U.S. Marine Corps officer and architect of the modern FBI, probably 'cares little about the public perception of him.'

'He cares,' Litt said, 'about doing the job right.'For many newsreaders, a last minute spruce up before going live is to be expected.

But MSNBC's Matt Bradley took things to bizarre lengths when he was caught spitting into his hands and slicking back his hair unaware cameras were already rolling.

Broadcasting live from Syria, almost 6,000 miles from MSNBC's New York HQ, the journalist who was preparing to do a piece to camera was unaware he was already live on air when he carried out his unorthodox beauty regime.

Bradley, who was reporting on the collapse of the caliphate in the region, spat into his hands twice and then ran his hands through his hair to perfect his dirty blond quiff, as anchors in the NY studio watched on sheepishly.

For many newsreaders, a last minute spruce up before going live is to be expected. But MSNBC's Matt Bradley took things to bizarre lengths when he was caught spitting into his hands and slicking back his hair unaware cameras were already rolling

Broadcasting live from Syria, almost 6,000 miles from MSNBC's New York HQ, the journalist who was preparing to do a piece to camera was unaware he was already live on air when he carried out his unorthodox beauty regime

The clip shared on Twitter shows MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi begin his reporting with Bradley not receiving any audio.

'This just in, three U.S. military officials are in direct contradiction that the Islamic state territory in Syria has been 100% eliminated.

'They say the fighting is still going. Matt Bradley is in eastern Syria where the last remnants where the so called caliphate were, what's the situation for you,' Velshi said.

The clip shared on Twitter shows MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi begin his reporting with Bradley not receiving any audio

The cameras then cut to an unsuspecting Bradley who was caught in the middle of his last-minute grooming session.

Despite the slightly embarrassing slip-up, Bradley has earned acclaim for his journalism - having filed from some of the most dangerous regions around the world.

His report comes just days after US-backed forces were celebrating 'victory' after they captured a key ISIS encampment and reduced the terror group's 'caliphate' to a few hundred square yards of bombed-out scrapyard in Syria.

The cameras then cut to an unsuspecting Bradley who was caught in the middle of his last-minute grooming session

Officials from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were seen singing and dancing and giving 'V for victory' signs as they returned from the frontline in Baghouz in the country's east.

The extremists had retreated in to a tiny parcel of land with some reportedly having used their own children as human shields.

The taking of the ISIS camp was a major advance but not the final defeat of the group in Baghouz, the last village held by the extremists where they have been holding out for weeks under siege, according to Bali. Still, fighters from the force were starting to celebrate anyway.

Despite the slightly embarrassing slip-up, Bradley has earned acclaim for his journalism - having filed from some of the most dangerous regions around the world

'I'm happy it's over. Now I know my people are safe,' said a fighter who identified himself as Walid Raqqawi who fought in the camp Monday night.

He said he is returning to his hometown of Raqqa to rest. Comrades from his unit sang and danced in celebration at an outpost in Baghouz, all saying they were looking forward to going home.

Hardened militant fighters holed up in the encampment have been mounting a last-stand defence of the enclave, all that is left of ISIS's self-proclaimed 'caliphate' that once spanned a third of both Syria and Iraq.Salmon reared in giant indoor fish tanks  rather than the sea  has gone on sale in Britain for the first time.

Thousands of fish spend their lives in concrete containers instead of the open water pens used in conventional salmon farming.

The Norwegian company behind it, Atlantic Sapphire, insists its system is better for the environment and the fish.

Salmon that have been raised in large indoor fish tanks instead of the sea have gone on sale in Britain

Norwegian company Atlantic Sapphire are behind the new plans but insist its system is better for the environment and the salmon

The rows of concrete containers to hold the salmon are pictured while under construction

It has signed a deal with Whole Foods Market to supply its UK stores, with other supermarkets set to follow suit.

But campaign groups have warned that it has echoes of factory farming which can cause animals stress.

The first land-reared fish went on sale in Britain this week, labelled as Responsibly Farmed Salmon Fillet.

The first land-reared fish were labelled as Responsibly Farmed Salmon Fillet when they went on sale in Britain this week

Chief executive of Atlantic Sapphire, Johan Andreassen, told the industry website IntraFish: We sent the first truck this week, it will be sold in all [Whole Foods] UK shops.

Whole Foods has seven British stores. It is owned by Amazon, but it is not known if the salmon will be sold by the web giants online grocery service.

Atlantic Sapphire farms the salmon at its Bluehouse in Denmark  which it describes as the equivalent of a greenhouse  and this is the first time it has been sold in Europe outside that country.

Its website boasts: When choosing Atlantic Sapphire salmon, you are not only caring for your health and wellbeing, but also for the health of our planet.

Atlantic Sapphire farms the fish tank salmon at what it calls a Bluehouse in Denmark and this is the first time it has been sold in Europe outside that country

Conventional fish farms around the coast of Scotland have also come under scrutiny as their waste can pollute local waters and they become a magnet for parasitic lice, requiring harsh chemicals to deal with these infestations.

An Atlantic Sapphire spokesman said: Fish are given ideal conditions to thrive.

Inside the Bluehouse the water is continuously purified to remain crystal clear.

Salmon will never have contact with sea lice or be exposed to wild fish diseases.

The waste generated in our Bluehouse is used as fertiliser and creation of renewable energy in the form of biogas.

But Phil Brooke from campaign group Compassion In World Farming said: This is factory farming.

These intensive systems are likely to be very crowded, so I would be surprised if they met high welfare standards.

This will create stress for salmon, which in the natural environment would migrate huge distances. At least in the sea pens, they get natural light and conditions.Now what?

Special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his Trump-Russia investigation and on Friday delivered his final report to the attorney general.

Rod Rosenstein, the No. 2 U.S. Justice Department official, in May 2017 appointed Mueller to look into Russian interference, whether members of Trump's campaign coordinated with Moscow officials and whether the Republican president has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe.

Mueller has so far charged 34 people and three companies. Trump denies collusion and obstruction.

We may not get all the juicy details uncovered over the past 22 months - at least not right away - but this story is far from over.

Here's what to expect next:

Special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his Trump-Russia investigation and on Friday delivered his final report to the attorney general

WHAT HAPPENS NOW THAT THE INVESTIGATION IS OVER?

Justice Department regulations required only that Mueller give the attorney general a confidential report that explains the decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions. That could be as simple as a bullet point list or as fulsome as a report running hundreds of pages.

WHAT WILL THE ATTORNEY GENERAL DO?

Attorney General William Barr said he envisions two reports, and only one for congressional and public consumption, which he will write.

Barr has said he takes seriously the 'shall be confidential' part of the regulations governing Mueller's report. He has noted that department protocol says internal memos explaining charging decisions should not be released.

Barr has said he will draft his report for the chairman and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees. But here again, the regulations provide little guidance for what such a report would say.

The attorney general is required only to say the investigation has concluded and describe or explain any times when he or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided an action Mueller proposed 'was so inappropriate or unwarranted' that it should not be pursued.

In a letter Barr sent Friday to the four lawmakers he said there were 'no such instances.'

He also said he may be in a position to advise them of Mueller's 'principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.'

Barr said he would determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public after speaking with Mueller and Rosenstein.

The White House is reflected in a puddle, Friday March 22, 2019, in Washington, as news breaks that the special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation into Russian election interference

WILL TRUMP BE ABLE TO SEE THE REPORT?

It is unclear whether Trump will ask to see the report and under what circumstances he or his attorneys might be able to view it, especially because the document is meant to be confidential for Justice Department leadership.

Mueller reports to the Justice Department, not the White House.

Barr said at his confirmation hearing that he would not permit White House interference in the investigation. But he also has voiced an expansive view of executive power in which the president functions as the country's chief law enforcement officer and has wide latitude in giving directives to the FBI and Justice Department.

Democrats could seize on any disclosure to the president to argue that the report really isn't confidential and should be immediately provided to them as well.

Copies of a letter from Attorney General William Barr advising Congress that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation, are shown Friday, March 22, 2019 in Washington

CAN DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS SUBPOENA MUELLER AND HIS REPORT?

Sure. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., has said as much.

'We could subpoena the final report. We could subpoena Mueller and ask him in front of the committee what was in your final report. Those are things we could do,' Nadler told ABC's 'This Week' in October.

But Trump, as the leader of the executive branch, could direct the Justice Department to defy the subpoena, setting the stage for a court fight that would almost certainly go to the Supreme Court.A teenage mother from Melbourne filmed herself performing sexual acts with her infant daughter and sent the footage to someone in the United Kingdom, a court has heard.

The man in the UK is accused of blackmailing young women into filming pornography by threatening to send intimate pictures to family and friends.

The 18-year-old Melbourne woman was released on bail on Friday and ordered not to go near her child after a children's court hearing, in which details of the case were revealed.

A 18-year-old Melbourne woman filmed herself performing sexual acts on her infant daughter before sending the footage to a man in UK (file image)

Her parents were in court and became emotional when explicit details of the allegations were read out by an Australian Federal Police agent.

The teenager is facing four charges, including sexual penetration of a child, and producing and transmitting child pornography.

The agent said the young woman, who was 17 at the time, was communicating with a man in the UK via the messaging application WhatsApp.

Police had a "strong case" against the teenager, the agent said.

The teenager was tracked down and arrested on Wednesday after an analysis of a WhatsApp profile linked to the UK man, who was recently arrested by British authorities.

"(She) sent pictures of herself to him," the agent said.

"(He) became aware that (she) was the mother ... requests that she carry out sexual acts with the child."

The young woman has never been in trouble with police before and her lawyer said it had been a "shock" to spend two nights in custody.

"She is somewhat overwhelmed," the defence lawyer said.

In the dock, the teenager shed tears as she was bailed on strict conditions, including a ban on internet use.

The man is accused of blackmailing the woman into filming pornography by threatening to send intimate photos to her family (file image)

"You can't go on Facebook. You can't go on Snapchat. You can't Google things," the magistrate said.

The magistrate also made an intervention order to keep the young woman away from her daughter, warning her of serious consequences if it was breached.

"It is a really serious order, and it must be taken seriously," the magistrate said.

Prosecutors had opposed bail, citing risks she could potentially destroy evidence linked to her phone, which has not yet been forensically examined.

But the magistrate believed the risks of the teenager's release were manageable.

The teenager is due to return to court on April 2.Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election has ensnared dozens of people, including several advisers to President Donald Trump and a series of Russian nationals and companies.

Rod Rosenstein, the No. 2 U.S. Justice Department official, in May 2017 appointed Mueller to look into Russian interference, whether members of Trump's campaign coordinated with Moscow officials and whether the Republican president has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe.

Mueller has charged 34 people and three companies. Trump denies collusion and obstruction.

Russia denies election interference. Mueller has handed in a report on his investigation, the Department of Justice said on Friday.

The following are those who have pleaded guilty or have been indicted in Mueller's inquiry.

GUILTY: MICHAEL FLYNN

Trump (L) jokes with retired Gen. Michael Flynn as they speak at a rally at Grand Junction Regional Airport on October 18, 2016 in Grand Junction Colorado

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: MICHAEL COHEN

Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen stands behind Trump as a group of supporters lay hands on Trump in prayer during a campaign stop at the New Spirit Revival Center church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, September 21, 2016

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 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

Trump with campaign chairman Paul Manafort at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2016

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: RICK GATES

Rick Gates, former deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump, walks out of the U.S. Courthouse after a bond hearing in Washington, D.C., on Monday, November 6, 2017

Pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and making false statements in February 2018. Awaiting sentence.

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

Papadopoulos was a member of Trump's campaign foreign policy advisory committee

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.

He has agreed to cooperate with the special counsel investigation.

Pinedo is a 28-year-old computer specialist from Santa Paula, California

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.

He has agreed to cooperate with the special counsel investigation.

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.

Van der Zwaan (left) was a Dutch attorney for Skadden Arps who worked on a Ukrainian political analysis report for Paul Manafort in 2012

GUILTY: W. SAMUEL PATTEN

Pleaded guilty in August 2018 to failing to register as a lobbyist while doing work for a Ukrainian political party. Awaiting sentence

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.

Patten (left), 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

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.

Kilimnik is a former employee of Manafort's political consulting firm and helped him with lobbying work in Ukraine

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

Bijan Kian, number two in now disgraced former national security adviser Mike Flynn's lobbying company, and the two's business partner Ekim Alptekin were indicted for conspiracy to lobby illegally. Kian is awaiting trial, Alptekin is still to appear in court

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.

INDICTED: 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

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. Awaiting trial.

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, but as recently as January 4 told Dailymail.com that he doesn't expect to be indicted.

'They got nothing,' he said of the special counsel's investigation.

According to the federal indictment, 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.'Congressional Democrats issued immediate demands that they have the ability to see the entire Mueller report  including its underlying evidence  after Special Counsel Robert Mueller handed his work product to the new attorney general.

With Attorney General William Barr vowing to rush out information on the report's 'principal conclusions' as soon as this weekend, Democrats were insisting they see both the complete document and the evidence in its entirety.

'It is imperative for Mr. Barr to make the full report public and provide its underlying documentation and findings to Congress,' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said in a joint statement.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are demanding to see the full Mueller report immediately

'Attorney General Barr must not give President Trump, his lawyers or his staff any 'sneak preview' of Special Counsel Mueller's findings or evidence, and the White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public,' the leaders said.

'The American people have a right to the truth. The watchword is transparency,' they said.

Speaking to reporters Friday, Schumer said: 'The American people have a right to the truth. The watchword is transparency.'

'There is no reason on Gods green earth why Attorney General Barr' shouldn't release the full report, said Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer

He added: 'The president himself has called without qualification or the report to be made public. There is no reason on Gods green earth why Attorney General Barr should do any less.'

Schumer predicted the effort ultimately would prevail due to public sentiment.

'The demand of the public is overwhelming to see the report when its on such a serious matter and it will be made public. Public pressure will force it to be,' he said.

Barr himself pledged transparency during his Senate confirmation hearing. But the strong defender of presidential power also left open the possibility he would share his own summary, rather than the report itself, to Congress  a move that would provoke a fight with the Democratic House.

Although there were reports Mueller would bring no additional indictments, there remained the possibility of indictments already sealed, or that another body such as the Southern District of New York wold bring indictments.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, told MSNBC there was a 'high probability' that could happen.

'I think there is a strong possibility of additional indictments, including president Trump's family,' Blumenthal said Friday evening.

'Maybe not by the Department of Justice, main Justice. But by other offices. I know that you want to stick to the Mueller report. But the Mueller report cannot be viewed in isolation,' the former prosecutor and Trump nemesis continued. 'Any more than an investigation, even though it may end, cannot lead to additional investigative leads and actions. And so I think there's a high probability of additional indictments.'

With the White House already resisting document requests from the Democratic Congress, lawmakers want to get hold of Mueller's work product and use it as the basis for additional investigation.

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, a member of the Intelligence and Judiciary panels, bluntly told CNN Friday afternoon: 'We want the full report. We want it now. We want it before the president is able to get it or make any edits.'

How the news broke: This is the letter Bill Barr, the attorney general, sent to the chairs and ranking members of the Judiciary Committees, revealing the Mueller probe is over

President Trump said that he would have no objection to the public release of Mueller's findings  although he was not specific as to what he would see released

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks with House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who is ramping up his own investigations

The president is a subject. He's a subject of the investigation. He has an inherent conflict of interest,' Swalwell continued. 'It's really inappropriate that he would even touch this. IF he didn't do anything wrong, he would keep his hands off it.'

Sand Senate Intelligence Committee Co-chair Democrat Mark Warner: 'Congress and the American people deserve to judge the facts of the Mueller report for themselves. It must be provided to Congress immediately, and the AG should swiftly prepare a declassified version for the public. Nothing short of that will suffice.'

Warner added on Twitter: 'Any attempt by the Trump Administration to cover up the results of this investigation into Russia's attack on our democracy would be unacceptable.'

House Judiciary ranking member Rep. Doug Collins, a Republican of Georgia, joined the call for the release of the Mueller report.

'After nearly two years, the special counsel has concluded his investigation, and I look forward to reviewing Attorney General Barr's report carefully, when it becomes available. I fully expect the Justice Department to release the special counsel's report to this committee and to the public without delay and to the maximum extent permitted by law,' Collins said.

'We want the full report. We want it now,' said Rep. Eric Swalwell of California

Special Counsel Robert Muller arrives at his office building, Thursday, March 21, 2019, in Washington

Barr told key lawmakers: 'I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend,' he wrote.

That raised the possibility that he would provide a mere summary of Mueller's findings, which could leave information that didn't result in charges out of the matter.

Trump said that he would have no objection to the public release of Mueller's findings  although he was not specific as to what he would see released.

'I don't mind,' he said.

'Let it come out,' Trump declared. 'Let people see it.'

And White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told the public via Twitter Friday afternoon: 'The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsel's report.'Thousands of newly discovered fossils of showing stunning detail of sea organisms have been unearthed in China.

They represent a range of species that lived as far back as 518 million years ago, during a time where there was a surge in lifeforms on Earth.

These new finds could reveal new details early life during that period which is known as the Cambrian Explosion, say scientists.

Paleontologists found the fossils on the bank of the Danshui river in the Hubei province of southern China, including a detailed imprint of a jellyfish (pictured) trapped in a mud slide

Paleontologists found the fossils in rocks on the bank of the Danshui river in the Hubei province of southern China.

Amongst the fossils, primitive forms of jellyfish, sponges, anemones, worms, algae, tiny invertebrates called kinorhynchs or mud dragons and arthropods were found.

Scientists believe the rocks show what was in a mudslide that took place more than 500 million years ago when life on Earth experienced a massive burst of diversity in life forms known as the Cambrian explosion.

The 4,351 separate fossils excavated so far include 101 species, with 53 of them previously unknown to scientists.

Unlike other Cambrian fossil troves, the Qingjiang site is unique in that it not only includes well-preserved fossils but soft-bodied organisms as well, said the study from Xi'an University

More than 50 per cent of the discoveries are thought to be previously unknown species, the study published in the journal Science on Thursday.

More than 50 per cent of the discoveries are thought to be previously unknown species, the study published in the journal Science

Unlike other Cambrian fossil troves, the Qingjiang site is unique in that it not only includes well-preserved fossils but soft-bodied organisms as well, the study states.

According to the authors, the unique aspects of Qingjiang have the potential to greatly inform the understanding of early animal evolution.

Dr Allison Daley, a paleontologist with an interest in the Cambrian Explosion at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, was not part of the study but wrote a perspective that accompanied the study.

She wrote: 'The treasure trove of the Qinjiang biota provides an exciting opportunity to explore how paleoenvironmental conditions influenced ecological structuring and evolutionary drivers during the Cambrian Explosion.'

Comb jellies (left) and a tiny form of invertebrates called a kinorhynch, or mud dragon (right), were also discovered

Researchers say the discovery in China may rival previous fossil hauls, such as the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rocky Mountains in 1909, Chengjiang in China and Emu Bay Shale in Australia.

The site in Burgess dates back to 508 million years ago and includes well-preserved fossils that show evidence of animal's skin, eyes, gut and brains.

Scientists will be studying the recent Chinese discoveries to try and work out what they can reveal about early life on earth.

The full report was published in the journal Science.Humans see things in a very similar way to computers, according to a study which quizzed people on images and asked them to 'think like a machine'.

Participants were shown blurry images and asked to choose between A or B of what they assumed the AI may have picked up.

They found that 75 per cent of the time humans and machines picked the same answer, showing that both can be equally tricked.

The findings demonstrate how advances in artificial intelligence continue to narrow the gap between the visual abilities of people and machines.

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Computers, like those that power self-driving cars, can be tricked into mistaking random scribbles for trains, fences and even school busses. People aren't supposed to be able to see how those images trip up computers but in a new study, Johns Hopkins University

Artificial intelligence systems have long been better than people at remembering large quantities of information.

It was thought that humans have had the edge at recognising everyday objects such as dogs, cats, tables or chairs.

The study makes the suggestion that when humans saw what computers that power self-driving cars saw, they were equally tricked into mistaking scribbles for trains, fences and school buses.

Recently, 'neural networks' that mimic the brain have approached the human ability to identify objects according to the study, by John Hopkins University.

This has led to technological advances supporting self-driving cars, facial recognition programs and helping doctors spot abnormalities in radiological scans.

The findings suggest modern computers may not be as different from humans as we think, and demonstrate how advances in artificial intelligence continue to narrow the gap between the visual abilities of people and machines

'Most of the time, research in our field is about getting computers to think like people,' said senior author Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor in Johns Hopkins' Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

'Our project does the opposite - we're asking whether people can think like computers,' he said.

Even with these technological advances, there's a critical blind spot: it's possible to purposely make images that neural networks cannot correctly see.

And these images, called 'adversarial' or 'fooling' images, are a big problem because they could be exploited by hackers and causes security risks, but they suggest that humans and machines are actually seeing images very differently.

In some cases, all it takes for a computer to call an apple a car, is reconfiguring a pixel or two.

In other cases, machines see armadillos and bagels in what looks like meaningless television static.

'These machines seem to be misidentifying objects in ways humans never would,' Professor Firestone said.

Artificial intelligence systems have long been better than people at doing math or remembering large quantities of information; but humans have had the edge at recognising everyday objects such as dogs, cats, tables or chairs

Humans see things in a very similar way to computers, according to a study which quizzed people on what they thought a machine would see. Participants were shown blurry images and asked to choose between A or B of what they assumed the AI may have picked up

'But surprisingly, nobody has really tested this. How do we know people can't see what the computers did?'

To test this, Professor Firestone and lead author Zhenglong Zhou, a Johns Hopkins senior majoring in cognitive science, asked people to 'think like a machine'.

Machines have only a relatively small vocabulary for naming images. So, Professor Firestone and Zhou showed people dozens of fooling images that had already tricked computers, and gave people the same kinds of labelling options that the machine had.

In particular, they asked people which of two options the computer decided the object was - one being the computer's real conclusion and the other a random answer.

'Was the blob pictured a bagel or a pinwheel?' It turns out, people strongly agreed with the conclusions of the computers.

These images, called 'adversarial' or 'fooling' images, are a big problem because they could be exploited by hackers and causes security risks, but they suggest that humans and machines are actually seeing images very differently

Recently, 'neural networks' that mimic the brain have approached the human ability to identify objects according to the study, by John Hopkins University. This has led to technological advances supporting self-driving cars and facial recognition programs

People chose the same answer as computers 75 per cent of the time.

Next, researchers upped the ante by giving people a choice between the computer's favorite answer and its next-best guess.

In the question, 'was the blob pictured a bagel or a pretzel?' People again validated the computer's choices, with 91 per cent of those tested agreeing with the machine's first choice.

Even when the researchers had people guess between 48 choices for what the object was, and even when the pictures resembled television static, an overwhelming proportion of the subjects chose what the machine chose well above the rates for random chance.

A total of 1,800 subjects were tested throughout the various experiments.

'We found if you put a person in the same circumstance as a computer, suddenly the humans tend to agree with the machines,' Professor Firestone says.

'This is still a problem for artificial intelligence, but it's not like the computer is saying something completely unlike what a human would say.'

The research appears today in the journal Nature Communications.Two American astronauts took a spacewalk Friday to replace aging batteries on the International Space Station.

NASA's Anne McClain and Nick Hague are scheduled to work in space for several hours to swap out three old nickel-hydrogen batteries with more powerful lithium-ion batteries.

The duo overcame minor struggles in their first task, which involved attaching a tool bag on one of the station's trusses for possible future use.

Above, astronauts Anne McClain and Nick Hague taking a spacewalk to replace aging batteries on the International Space Station on Friday. Friday's spacewalk is the first of three planned excursions to replace batteries and perform other maintenance

The station's robotic arm did much of the heavy work already, but the astronauts still have to lug 300-pound adaptors the size of a large coffee table and reconnect attachments.

Even when the chore is complete, there will still be more of the 20-year-old station's original batteries to replace.

NASA is about halfway through replacing 48 batteries with ones that are expected to last the remainder of the station's life.

The space station uses solar panels to generate power but the batteries are used when it's in the dark and not getting power from the sun.

Friday's spacewalk is the first of three planned excursions to replace batteries and perform other maintenance.

Next week's spacewalk will include the first all-female crew, including McClain.An army of 'killer robots' that will assist infantry on the battlefield has been unveiled in propaganda footage released by Russia

The video, released by the Kremlin, appears to showcase the state's latest drone technology.

That includes and AI-controlled driverless tank that follow the aim of a soldier's rifle to obliterate targets with its own weaponry.

Russia's Advanced Research Foundation (ARF) said the ultimate goal is to have an army of robots entirely controlled by Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

Currently the drones are deployed alongside infantry who remotely control the vehicles, but in the future the tech will be fully autonomous.

That means the military hardware will be able to target and kill enemies without any human intervention.

'The evolution of combat robots is on the path of increasing the ability to perform tasks in autonomous mode with a gradual reduction in the role of the operator,' a spokesperson for the ARF told C41SRNET.

The video was uploaded to YouTube by the ARF and shows off the capabilities of the killer tech.

Russia has released frightening footage which showcases their latest robot technology which includes killer robots, autonomous drones and driverless tanks

The propaganda clip released by the Kremlin shows AI-controlled mini-tanks and swarms of autonomous cat-sized drones obliterate targets

The robots are controlled remotely and are designed to assist Russian infantry. But in the future the tech will be fully autonomous, which means it can target and kill enemies on its own

The video was uploaded to YouTube by the ARF and shows off the capabilities of the killer tech

'The evolution of combat robots is on the path of increasing the ability to perform tasks in autonomous mode with a gradual reduction in the role of the operator,' a spokesperson told C41SRNET

WHAT IS THE AUGUST UN CONVENTION ON KILLER ROBOTS? Experts from scores of countries are meeting to discuss ways to define and deal with 'killer robots' - futuristic weapons systems that could conduct war without human intervention. The weeklong gathering is the second this year at UN offices in Geneva to focus on such lethal autonomous weapons systems and explore ways of possibly regulating them, among other issues. Some top advocacy groups say governments and militaries should be prevented from developing such systems, which have sparked fears and led some critics to envisage harrowing scenarios about their use. As the meeting opened Monday, Amnesty International urged countries to work toward a ban. Amnesty researcher on Artificial Intelligence Rasha Abdul Rahim said killer robots are 'no longer the stuff of science fiction,' warning that technological advances are outpacing international law. Advertisement

Superpowers around the world are working on a range of autonomous and remote controlled vehicles to change the face of modern warfare.

Earlier this month, the British Army announced plans that will see 200 miniature drones 'smaller than a human hand' deployed on the battlefield to provide soldiers with an eye in the sky.

These mini-drones, dubbed Black Hornet, could take over the life-threatening surveillance and reconnaissance duties currently undertaken by soldiers.

The Ministry of Defence is investing 66million ($87m) in robotic systems, which will also include automated supply delivery drones.

Experts have issued warning over these developments, with the world's largest gathering of scientists - held in February - claiming killer robots are a 'grave threat to humanity' and should be banned.

Scientists and human rights campaigners told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington DC lethal droids able to select targets without human help represent the 'third revolution' in warfare after gun powder and nuclear weapons.

Just as international agreements greatly restricted the use of landmines, similar international agreements should be used to prevent robotic killers becoming established.New details have emerged around what and how much Facebook knew about the massive Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal.

Court documents filed late Thursday in the U.S. reveal that Facebook employees had flagged Cambridge Analytica's concerning 'data-scraping practices' as early as September 2015.

That's a full three months before an article was published in The Guardian, describing how the now-defunct campaign research firm planned to use improperly collected user data to build profiles of U.S. voters and serve them targeted messages.

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Court documents filed late Thursday in the U.S. reveal that Facebook employees had flagged Cambridge Analytica's concerning 'data-scraping practices' as early as September 2015

The revelation in December 2015 detailed how the data was being used to help boost Texas senator Ted Cruz's presidential campaign.

Later on, Cambridge Analytica was discovered to be working with Donald Trump's presidential campaign as well.

Facebook has told lawmakers that it first became aware of the sharing of user data with Cambridge Analytica in December 2015.

However, the court document, filed by the attorney general for Washington DC in its consumer protection enforcement case, states otherwise.

'The jurisdictional facts in the Document show that as early as September 2015, a D.C.-based Facebook employee warned the company' about Cambridge Analytica, the filing states.

Details of the filing were first spotted by The Guardian.

Facebook has said it first became aware of Cambridge Analytica's data-sharing in December 2015. But a court document, filed by the Washington DC attorney general, says otherwise

Further details about the employee's conversations with Facebook are unclear, as the document has been partially redacted.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to the Guardian that employees knew about Cambridge Analytica's data-scraping practices in September 2015, but added that it was separate from the widely reported incident wherein 87 million users had their information harvested and shared with Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge.

In that incident, Cambridge Analytica purchased the data from Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan, who developed the 'This Is Your Digital Life' quiz app used by many users.

Kogan is now suing Facebook for defamation.

'In September 2015 employees heard speculation that Cambridge Analytica was scraping data, something that is unfortunately common for any internet service,' the spokesperson told the Guardian.

'In December 2015, we first learned through media reports that Kogan sold data to Cambridge Analytica, and we took action. Those were two different things.'

Mark Zuckerberg confirmed under oath to Congress last April that he learned Kogan had sold the data to Cambridge Analytica when reporters contacted Facebook about it, i.e. December 2015.

Zuckerberg repeated those claims to the UK's DCMS committee during hearings - a fact that, coupled with the claims made in the lawsuit, caught the eye of DCMS committee chair Damian Collins.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies in front of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee after it was reported that some 87 million users had their info harvested by Cambridge Analytica

In response to a tweet questioning if Facebook executives committed perjury or if the firm is 'catastrophically mismanaged,' Collins said: 'This important new information could suggest that Facebook has consistently mislead the @CommonsCMS about what it knew and when about Cambridge Analytica.'

Facebook has been fighting to have the DC attorney general's lawsuit dismissed and sought to have the employee exchanges cited by the attorney general sealed.

The DC attorney general has pushed back on this, saying the document shouldn't be sealed.

They added that it's 'an email exchange between Facebook employees discussing how Cambridge Analytica (and others) violated Facebook's policies,' the filing states.

'Facebook's concerns about the document are purely reputational,' the filing explained.

'Document contains candid employee assessments that multiple third-party applications accessed and sold consumer data in violation of Facebook's policies during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.

'It also indicates Facebook knew of Cambridge Analyticas improper data-gathering practices months before news outlets reported on the issue,' the filing continues.

Facebook and the District of Columbia are scheduled to appear in court on Friday.A new report has revealed that popular crowd-funding platform GoFundMe is working to remove campaigns promoting anti-vaccination rhetoric, saying it violates the platform's terms of service.

'Campaigns raising money to promote misinformation about vaccines violate GoFundMes terms of service and will be removed from the platform,' a spokesperson for the site told The Daily Beast.

In the report, the company also said it is in the midst of reviewing current campaigns on its site to ensure they comply with its standards on anti-vaccination advocates. Violators, a spokesperson said, will be removed immediately.

A new report has revealed that popular crowd-funding platform GoFundMe is working to remove campaigns promoting anti-vaccination rhetoric Despite its efforts to stem anti-vaccination campaigns, some remain live and continue to rake in money. Stock image

WHAT IS FACEBOOK'S PLAN TO CURB ANTI-VAX PROPAGANDA? In a recent post, Facebooks VP of Global Policy Management outlined a series of steps the firm is now taking to cut down on vaccine misinformation: Reducing the ranking of groups and pages that spread vaccine misinformation Rejecting ads including misinformation about vaccines Removing related targeting options, such as 'vaccine controversies' Removing this content from recommended pages in Instagram Explore or hashtags Providing 'authoritative information' on the topic of vaccines Advertisement

A brief search of anti-vaccination campaigns on GoFundMe's website, however, revealed that several campaigns relating to anti-vaccination are still live and some have already taken in well over $100,000.

In some instances, ongoing campaigns are accepting donations for children or other persons that fundraisers claim have been 'injured' by vaccines.

Others, notably one supporting controversial doctor, John Piesse, are funneling money toward legals fees for doctors that have allegedly been prosecuted for their support anti-vaccination believers.

A campaign for Piesse has raised more than $144,000 to date.

Some of the current campaigns found by DailyMail.com are even more direct in their support of the anti-vaccination movement, asking for money that would fund anti-vaccination websites and literature.

A representative for GoFundMe did not respond to a request for comment before the time of publication.

As the movement towards vaccine skepticism has grown, public health experts and other concerned parties have put increased pressure on platforms like YouTube and Facebook to help stem the spread of misinformation.

Factually baseless claims made by anti-vax groups have been amplified by social media and the internet, say critics, and have contributed to the resurgence of ailments such as measles, which was officially eradicated in the U.S. in 2000 only to return to affect hundreds of people in recent years.

Anti vaccination movements have contributed to the resurgence of formerly eradicated diseases like the measles. Stock image

In February, video-streaming giants, YouTube, took the unprecedented step of demonetizing anti-vaccination videos after a report that showed false claims made by the groups were promoted equally with videos founded in real science.

Facebook also announced its own plans to combat medical misinformation made popular through anti-vax groups.

Fervor surrounding the belief that vaccines can cause autism and other adverse effects on the health of humans -- particularly infants -- has endured despite the fact that the original paper, published in British journal, The Lancet, in 1998, has been widely debunked

In 2010, The Lancet formerly retracted the paper admitting that the findings of its author, Andrew Wakefield, were incorrect.Seventeen of 58 species evaluated were classified as facing extinction, the Shark Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation (IUCN) said late Thursday in an update of the Red List of threatened animals and plants.

'Our results are alarming,' said Nicholas Dulvy, who chairs the grouping of 174 experts from 55 countries.

'The sharks that are especially slow-growing, sought-after and unprotected from overfishing tend to be the most threatened.'

That category includes the shortfin mako, whose cruising speed of 40 km/h (25 mph)punctuated by bursts of more than 70 km/hmakes it the fastest of all sharks.

Seventeen of 58 species evaluated were classified as facing extinction, the Shark Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation (IUCN) said late Thursday in an update of the Red List of threatened animals and plants. The shortfin mako is pictured

Along with its longfin cousin, the two makos are highly prized for their flesh and fins, considered a delicacy in Chinese and other Asian culinary traditions.

'Today, one of the biggest shark fisheries on the high seas is the mako,' Dulvy told AFP. 'It is also one of the least protected.'

In May, nations will vote on a proposal by Mexico to list the shortfin mako on Appendix II of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

An Appendix II status would not ban fishing or trade, but would regulate it.

Six of the species reviewed were listed as 'critically endangered,' three for the first time: the whitefin swellshark, the Argentine angel shark, and the smoothback angel shark.

Eleven others were classified as either 'endangered' or 'vulnerable' to extinction.

The IUCN's shark group is conducting a two-year review of more than 400 species of sharks.

For land animals, conservation biologists focus on population size and geographic range in assessing extinction threat.

For sharks and other marine animals they use another approach, looking instead at how quickly populations decline.

In light of its new findings, the Shark Specialist Group is calling for 'immediate national and international fishing limits, including complete bans on landing those species assessed as 'endangered' or 'critically endangered'

But that requires a benchmark, especially for pelagicor open oceanspecies, Dulvy explained.

Only within the last 10 years have scientists been able to establish one, partly with the help of tuna fisheries that began to keep tallies of sharks by-catch.

'A decade on, we now know that the situation is way worse than we ever thought,' Dulvy said.

Ironically, fisheries management organisations doing a better job policing tuna catches has increased the incentive for fishermen to target sharks for extra income.

'In the Indian Ocean'along coastlines in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal'the tuna fishery is really a shark fishery with tuna by-catch,' Dulvy said.

In light of its new findings, the Shark Specialist Group is calling for 'immediate national and international fishing limits, including complete bans on landing those species assessed as 'endangered' or 'critically endangered',' said Sonja Fordham, deputy chair of the group and an officer at The Ocean Foundation.

That category includes the shortfin mako, whose cruising speed of 40 km/h (25 mph)punctuated by bursts of more than 70 km/hmakes it the fastest of all sharks

WHAT IS THE STATE OF THE EARTH'S SPECIES? - Two species of vertebrate, animals with a backbone, have gone extinct every year, on average, for the past century. - Currently around 41 per cent of amphibian species and more than a quarter of mammals are threatened with extinction. - There are an estimated 8.7 million plant and animal species on our planet and about 86 percent of land species and 91 percent of sea species remain undiscovered. - Of the ones we do know, 1,204 mammal, 1,469 bird, 1,215 reptile, 2,100 amphibian, and 2,386 fish species are considered threatened. - Also threatened are 1,414 insect, 2,187 mollusc, 732 crustacean, 237 coral, 12,505 plant, 33 mushroom, and six brown algae species. - The global populations of 3,706 monitored vertebrate species - fish, birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles - declined by nearly 60 per cent from 1970 to 2012. - More than 25,000 species of 91,523 assessed for the 2017 'Red List' update were classified as 'threatened'. - Of these, 5,583 were 'critically' endangered, 8,455 'endangered', and 11,783 'vulnerable'. Advertisement

Sharks have lorded over the world's oceans for some 400 million years, playing a critical role in global food chains.

But the top-level predators have proven especially vulnerable to human predation: they grow slowly, become sexually mature relatively late in life, and produce few offspring.

The greeneye spurdognewly classified as endangeredhas a gestation period of nearly three years, the longest in the animal kingdom.

A 2013 peer-review study estimated that upward of 100 million sharks are fished every year to satisfy a market for their fins, meat, and liver oil.

More than half of shark species and their relatives are categorised as threatened or near-threatened with extinction.Advertisement

SpaceX is gearing up to conduct the first test hops of Elon Musk's Starship prototype rocket at its Boca Chica, Texas facility.

In recent days, the test site has been swarming with activity as engineers moved the gleaming spacecraft to the launch pad and installed its sole Raptor engine that packs twice the firing power of SpaceX's older Merlin engines.

A new set of aerial images show off SpaceX's progress in preparation for the suborbital hop tests, which were slated to take place earlier this week, but were later postponed following several days of bad weather.

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A new set of aerial images show off SpaceX's progress in preparation for the suborbital hop tests, which were slated to take place earlier this week, but were later postponed following several days of bad weather. Pictured is the Starship prototype

WHAT IS A 'HOP' TEST? SpaceX's Starship prototype, called the Starhopper, will undergo several tests to make sure its systems work properly. The first of these tests, called a 'hop' test, is simply a short static fire test. During a hop test, the Starhopper's single Raptor engine will be fired up. However, spectators won't be able to see much, if any, of the action. The hop involves a 'really short' low-altitude hovering demonstration, wherein the craft lifts just a few feet off the ground. Elon Musk's rocket firm will also conduct ground systems testing and load it with propellants. Advertisement

The rocket firm had eyed Wednesday, Thursday or Friday as possible dates to carry out the 'hop' tests.

Now, the Federal Aviation Administration has alerted to flight restrictions in the area between 10:00a.m. (ET) and 7:00p.m. (ET) on March 25th, 26th and 27th.

This indicates that the hop tests could take place as soon as early next week, though neither SpaceX nor Musk have posted any word on the matter.

In preparation for the potential test fire, SpaceX had moved the Starhopper suborbital vehicle to a launch pad at its Boca Chica test site near Brownsville, Texas.

SpaceX was expected to conduct hop tests on Thursday, with a six-hour launch window opening at 10a.m. (CST) and lasting through 4p.m. (CST).

If the hop tests go according to plan, it will serve as an important baby step toward Musk's wider plan to send humans on a mission to the moon.

However, spectators both on the ground and from afar won't be able to see much, if any, of the action during the hop test.

The Starship prototype, called Starhopper, was moved from its build site to a launch pad (pictured) at SpaceX's Boca Chica, Texas testing site. That, in addition to the FAA establishing flight restrictions in the area, indicates tests will take place soon

If the hop tests go according to plan, it will serve as an important baby step toward Musk's wider plan to send humans on a mission to the moon. However, spectators both on the ground and from afar won't be able to see much of the action

SpaceX spokesman James Gleeson confirmed to the Brownsville Herald that Starhopper had been moved to the launch pad in preparation for tests.

'SpaceX will conduct checkouts of the newly installed ground systems and perform a short static fire test in the days ahead,' Gleeson told the Brownsville Herald.

'Although the prototype is designed to perform suborbital flights, or hops, powered by the SpaceX Raptor engine, the vehicle will be tethered during initial testing and hops will not be visible from offsite.'

During tests, Starhopper will be pumped with liquid methane and oxygen propellant and will use one of SpaceX's powerful Raptor engines.

The prototype is expected to only lift a few feet off the ground, meaning it won't be a true liftoff, but rather a brief hover.

A livestream has been set up by SPadre.com showing a view of the Starhopper prototype at the Boca Chica site.

The Brownsville Herald also reported that State Highway 4, which leads to Boca Chica Beach, is currently closed to the public in anticipation of the planned tests later today.

News of the hopper tests come after Musk tweeted earlier this week that Starhopper tests would 'hopefully' be held in the coming days.

Pictured is a separate component from the Starhopper prototype and what appears to be sections of a nosecone that could be installed on the Starship. Musk said the firm won't install a new nosecone on the hopper following an earlier incident

Pictured is another view of the Starhopper prototype situated on the launch pad at SpaceX's Boca Chica test site. During tests, it will be pumped with liquid methane and oxygen propellant and will use one of SpaceX's powerful Raptor engines

Plans for the tests were first spotted in a SpaceX flyer posted on Reddit.

When asked whether the tests would begin this week, Musk replied in a tweet: 'Hopefully. Always many issues integrating engine & stage. First hops will lift off, but only barely.'

Musk's tweet seemed to suggest that the firm is currently working to integrate the Starhopper and its redesigned Raptor engine, which SpaceX unveiled for the first time in February.

The Starhopper test vehicle will feature one Raptor engine vs. the final Starship version, which is set to be packed with three powerful Raptor engines.

As part of its first test 'hops,' SpaceX will ensure that the Starship prototype and its Raptor engine can takeoff and land without any issues.

SpaceX was expected to conduct hop tests on Thursday, with a six-hour launch window opening at 10a.m. (CST) and lasting through 4p.m. (CST) but it was pushed back. Pictured above the Boca Chica test site near Brownsville, Texas, on Thursday

Starhopper will be pumped with liquid methane and oxygen propellant and will use one of SpaceX's powerful Raptor engines. The site is seen above on Thursday

Musk added in a later tweet that the firm won't build a new nosecone for Starhopper, after the device was damaged by a series of strong wind gusts at its Texas test site in January.

'Don't need it,' Musk wrote. 'What you see being built is the orbital Starship vehicle.'

Meanwhile, residents near SpaceX's test site in Brownsville, Texas have been seeing flyers posted by the company alerting them to upcoming tests.

The flyer states that Starhopper tests could begin as soon as this week.

'During those tests, SpaceX will establish a safety zone perimeter in coordination with local law enforcement,' the flyer notes.

'Signage will be in place prior to testing to alert the community of any temporary closures of Highway 4 and Boca Chica Beach.'

Elon Musk said SpaceX chose to omit a nosecone from the Starhopper prototype (pictured Wednesday) after it was toppled off of the spacecraft as a result of strong wind gusts earlier this year

Additionally, Musk showed off what will be a crucial element of the Starship rocket.

The SpaceX CEO posted a video demonstrating tests of the rocket's heat shield, which will prevent it from burning up upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

In doing so, the rocket is better equipped for immediate re-use.

'Starship needs to be ready to fly again immediately after landing,' Musk said in a tweet. 'Zero refurbishment.'

The heat shield is made up of hexagonal-shaped tiles that are designed to keep out hot gas as the rocket returns to Earth's surface.

Musk said the 'white-hot' sections reached a maximum temperature of 1650 Kelvin or 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

The tiles will be installed on the rocket's 'windward side' and there's 'no shield needed on the leeward side,' Musk added.

Plans for the tests were first spotted in a SpaceX flyer posted on Reddit (pictured). The flyer says the firm could begin tests of its Starhopper prototype rocket as soon as this week

SpaceX could soon begin tests of its Starship spacecraft (pictured). Elon Musk said the firm will 'hopefully' conduct the first test hops of SpaceX's Starship prototype, called Starhopper

In January, the company revealed images of its fully-assembled Starship hopper test rocket.

'This is for suborbital VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) tests,' Musk said in a tweet last month.

'Orbital version is taller, has thicker skins (won't wrinkle) & a smoothly curving nose section.'

The model he shared is expected to be used for testing short launches and landings.

Musk hopes to conduct a manned mission with tourists to the moon by 2024.

Completing a successful mission to the moon would mark an incremental step in Musk's other vision of traveling to Mars.Boeing has been forced to delay the first uncrewed test flight of its Starliner capsule.

Industry sources say the firm is pushing back its planned flight to the International Space Station for NASA's human spaceflight program by three months, with launch now slated for August.

It was initially scheduled to lift off in April to prepare for a crewed mission in August.

But, the latter will now be pushed back, too. Boeing is now eyeing November for its crewed Starliner flight.

Reuters reported last month that NASA has warned Boeing and rival contractor SpaceX of design and safety concerns the companies need to address before flying humans to space.

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Boeing has been forced to delay the first uncrewed test flight of its Starliner capsule. Industry sources say the firm is pushing back its planned flight to the International Space Station for NASA's human spaceflight program by three months, with launch now slated for August

Boeing's first test flight was slated for April but it has been pushed to August, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

The new schedule means that Boeing's crewed mission, initially scheduled for August, will be delayed until November.

A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.

A NASA spokesman declined to comment but said a new update to the launch schedule would be posted next week.

NASA is paying Boeing and SpaceX about $6.8 billion to build rocket and capsule launch systems to return astronauts to the International Space Station from U.S. soil for the first time since America's Space Shuttle program went dark in 2011.

Earlier this month an unmanned capsule from Elon Musk's SpaceX completed a six-day round-trip mission to the International Space Station.

Its astronaut flight is planned for July. For years, the United States has relied on Russia for rides to the space station.

The clock is ticking because there are no seats available for U.S. crew on the Russia spacecraft after 2019 given production schedules and other factors.

NASA said it was considering paying for two more seats to the space station for autumn of 2019 and spring of 2020 to ensure U.S. access.

NASA is paying Boeing and SpaceX about $6.8 billion to build rocket and capsule launch systems to return astronauts to the International Space Station from U.S. soil for the first time since America's Space Shuttle program went dark in 2011

The initial April launch was ahead of a United Launch Alliance mission for the Department of Defense in June from the Cape Canaveral launch pad in Florida, so Boeing would have needed to clear the launch pad by the first week in May, one of the sources said, describing the pressure not just on technical issues but also launch schedules at Cape Canaveral.

Separately, Boeing's commercial airplane division is under scrutiny in the wake of two 737 MAX passenger jet crashes in five months.Advertisement

Its the Ritz of the UK motorway service station world.

Cobham services between junctions nine and 10 on the M25 has been ranked as the No1 service station in Britain, thanks to its impressive array of facilities, which includes a Nandos and a launderette.

Coming bottom of the ranking are two Todhills at the far north end of the M6.

The best and worst motorway service stations in the UK revealed. This graphic shows the top 10

The table was drawn up by Northgate Vehicle Hire, which said that it looked at the number of amenities of each facility and the quality of service across on-site restaurants and hotels.

Twenty per cent of the score came from ratings found on the Motorway Services Online website, which is essentially the TripAdvisor for service stations.

The list gives each service station a mark out of 100, with Cobham scoring an impressive 97.28, three points ahead of second-place Cherwell Valley on the M40.

Cobham services between junctions nine and 10 on the M25 has been ranked as the No1 service station in Britain, thanks to its impressive array of facilities, which includes a Nandos and a launderette

Cobham services even features an array of eye-catching fountains, as this image shows

It boasts the most food outlets of any service station, with 13 unique offerings. As well as a Nandos it has a KFC, McDonalds, a Harry Ramsden's, a Carvery Express, a Greggs, an El Mexicana and a Pizza Express.

The station also includes a WH Smith and an M&S Simply Food, along with a whopping 4,620 parking spaces.

The UKs most dangerous motorway  the M6  has a number of excellent service stations, suggesting a lack of places to take a break isnt the main reason for the roads 7,000 reported accidents over the past ten years.

Junction 3s Corley services hits 5th place on the list with a rating of 88.53. Meanwhile Norton Canes (on the toll road) also scores highly, with an overall rating of 87.30.

Heading further north, your best place to rest if youre heading towards Tyneside or the Scottish border, according to the research, is Motos Wetherby services on the A1 (M) at junction 46.

This stop includes eight food outlets and has the best hotel rating on the entire list, claiming a score of 87.38.

Two Todhills on the M6 in Cumbria have come bottom of the ranking. Pictured is Todhills (south), which came last out of 112

If youre travelling on the M11 then youre in luck  with an average score of 85 points, this motorway ranks the best for available service stations. This is thanks to a solid score from Birchanger Green services, which boasts eight different food outlets.

Londons M25 places eleventh on the list, and the M1 comes in ninth. Motorists hitting the M23 in Surrey, however, arent in for a good stop, with an average score of 63.

Welcome Break, meanwhile, comes out on top as the most consistently high-quality service station provider, with an average rank of 82.35 across all of its sites. The average rank of all service stations is 78.10.

The two Todhills in Cumbria between junctions 44 and 45 occupying the bottom two places in the table of 112 stops score badly mainly because of a lack of facilities.

The bottom-ranked Todhills (south) only has two options for food - a Wild Bean Cafe inside the BP petrol station and a Costa.

While the Todhills (north) only has a Deli by Shell and a Costa.

However, some customer comments are quite positive.

One driver, in 2013, said: Stopped here as busting for toilet on way to Scotland. Wow, nice staff and welcoming atmosphere. I actually bought a coffee and sandwich which I hadn't planned on and a tempting muffin.

Moto Hospitality Ltd, which runs Todhills, said: 'Todhills, on the M6 near Carlisle, is not a motorway service area and therefore cannot reasonably be compared to other service areas. The site is a rest area on both sides of the motorway, each consisting of a Costa Coffee shop and car park, operated by Moto Hospitality Ltd, and a forecourt, which is independently owned. We are currently planning a development programme for the site, which was previously two Little Chef restaurants.'She's expecting her second son with fiance Hermann Nicoli.

And Candice Swanepoel showed off her rapidly blooming baby bump in a sundress patterned, appropriately, with flowers when she was spotted out in Vitoria, EspIrito Santo in Brazil on Monday.

The 29-year-old Victoria's Secret Angel teamed her pretty frock with flip-flops and wound her blonde tresses into an updo as she left her car.

Enjoying time away: Candice Swanepoel showed off her rapidly blooming baby bump when she was spotted out in Vitoria, EspIrito Santo, Brazil on Monday

The radiant supermodel, who appeared to be make-up free, clutched her cellphone in one hand as she strolled.

Candice hails from South Africa but Herman, 35, is Brazilian and the pair spend a lot of time there, where they have a home.

Later she was spotted out in a baggy, white jump suit with the sleeves and legs rolled up.

Getting bigger: The 29-year-old Victoria's Secret Angel wore a sundress patterned with flowers that draped beautifully over her burgeoning belly

Changing it up: Later the supermodel was seen out in a white, short-sleeved jumpsuit

Having fun with her son: The smiling mom bent over a small tricycle that likely belonged to her 19-month-old lad Anaca

The smiling mom bent over a small tricycle that likely belonged to her 19-month-old son Anaca.

She, Nicoli and their little boy were spotted out enjoying the beach and playing in the ocean on Easter Sunday.

Candice and Nicoli have been together since meeting in Paris when she was just 17. The longtime couple announced their engagement in 2015.

Water babies: She, fiance Hermann Nicoli and their Anaca were spotted out having fun in the ocean on April 1, Easter Sunday

So cute: The blue-eyed beauty shared this throwback snap of herself and Anaca on Monday

Meanwhile, Candice opened the annual Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in November, which was held in Beijing, China.

She sat out the 2016 show because she was expecting Anaca.

The question is, will she have to miss the 2018 show because of his little brother.

Doting mom: Candice added this adorable snap to her Instagram storiesA Hunter Valley real estate agency has gone viral after putting up a sign saying their homes sell 'quicker than a Married At First Sight divorce'.

A photo of the sign, which was placed outside a house in Maitland and features a photo of ill-fated season four couple Nick Furphy and Sharon Marsh, has been widely shared on social media over the past 24 hours.

The sign, which is not endorsed by Channel Nine or production company Endemol Shine Australia, reads: 'SOLD - quicker than a #MAFS Divorce'.

Hilarious! A Hunter Valley real estate agency has gone viral after putting up a sign saying their homes sell 'quicker than a Married At First Sight divorce'

Clare Verrall was one of several former MAFS stars to share the picture to Instagram on Thursday night.

'OK. Even I found this funny! I think they owe Sharon and Nick some of their commission though,' she wrote.

PRDnationwide Hunter Valley estate agent Matthew Clarke, who sold the home with his brother Ryan, told Daily Mail Australia the sign was a 'spur of the moment' decision.

Going viral: A photo of the sign, which was placed outside a house in Maitland and features a photo of ill-fated season four couple Nick Furphy and Sharon Marsh (pictured on MAFS in 2017), has been widely shared on social media over the past 24 hours

'My brother doesn't watch the show but I do,' said Matthew, 24.

'We just came up with the idea when we sold the house and sent it over to our signs people who did it up for us,' he added.

It's no secret that Married At First Sight has a poor track record for making long-lasting relationships.

'We just came up with the idea': PRDnationwide Hunter Valley estate agent Matthew Clarke (left), who sold the home with his brother Ryan (right), told Daily Mail Australia the sign was a 'spur of the moment' decision

Even MAFS' resident expert, John Aiken, has acknowledged the matchmakers haven't been very successful in the past.

'We're not happy we've only had one successful match over five seasons [Bryce Mohr and Erin Bateman]. We'd like a higher strike rate,' he told The New Daily in January.

'But what we find is the transition from the experiment to the real world can be a real challenge, and distance is an issue. Each year we go in trying as hard as we can to get more over the line.'She rose to national fame in 2009 after becoming the runner-up of the very first MasterChef Australia series.

And now celebrity chef Poh Ling Yeow has returned to where her successful career all began.

Taking to Instagram on Thursday, the 46-year-old shared a video of herself filming scenes for an upcoming episode of MasterChef.

Guess who's back! Celebrity chef Poh Ling Yeow returned to Channel Ten's cooking series MasterChef Australia (pictured: L-R Gary Mehigan, Mat Preston, Poh Ling Yeow and George Calombaris)

'Filming on the old stomping grounds today,' her video caption read.

Filming the clip was MasterChef judge Gary Mehigan, 52, who gave fans a behind-the-scenes tour.

'Here we are on set. The native habitat of the original food nerds. The look out food nerd,' he joked, while pointing the camera at Poh, who was in hair and makeup.

Sneak-peek: She shared a behind-the-scenes video to fans on Instagram featuring MasterChef judge Gary Mehigan

He then panned the camera on to a table where judges George Calombaris, 40, and Matt Preston, 57, sat glued to their phones and said: 'And the nesting food nerds.

'I am the scouting food nerd, off the find food,' Gary quipped.

Returning for its 11th season in 2019, MasterChef Australia promises viewers a season full of surprises.

Smile for the camera: Gary took over the video and panned the camera on to a table where judges George Calombaris, 40, and Matt Preston, 57, (pictured) sat glued to their phones

Contestants will be tested by the biggest international and local chefs and challenged to create delicious culinary meals.

Channel 10 has renewed MasterChef Australia for season 11 and applications for the show are open.

Last week, Heston Blumenthal credited the reality cooking show for igniting a 'food explosion' in Australia.

'There's nowhere to hide!' Blumenthal has admitted the Channel 10 reality cooking show is 'brutal' on aspiring chefs. Pictured Masterchef stars (left to right) Gary Mehigan, Matt Preston and George Calombaris

'I've seen a food explosion happen (in Australia) so quickly and so impressively, than any country in the world,' the British chef told The Herald Sun.

He added: 'And I think MasterChef had a big role to play with that.'

Heston, 52, also claimed the foodie trend in this country is down to Australia's 'have a go' attitude.

'I think one of the areas that should be celebrated, and held on to, in Australian culture, is the fact people are prepared to have a go. More than any other country I've seen, they want to have a go, and that should be cherished.'Katie Price is set to pay back a staggering 12,000 a month to clear her debts, Companies House documents have revealed.

Legal documents show the star will pay back the staggering figure to total 856,358 over the course of five years, clearing almost half of her original 2.1 million debt.

This comes despite recently Katie vowing to splash the cash on a new car after being banned from driving for three months, as the mother-of-five soaked up the sun on a luxury break to Thailand with beau Kris Boyson.

Big money: Katie Price is set to pay back a staggering 12,000 a month to clear her debts, Companies House documents have revealed

Payback: Legal documents show the star will pay back the staggering figure to total 856,358 over the course of five years, clearing almost half of her original 2.1 million debt

In the documents, it explains that Katie will pay back 12,302.25 a month in the first year; 12,332.81 a month in the second year; 14,363.37 in the third; 15,296.44 in the fourth; and 16,068.36 in the fifth.

It was also previously alleged that prior agreements with creditors state that should Katie not keep up the payments for four years, her house will be put up for auction to cover the figure.

The agreement is said to have been set up after her company, Jordan Trading, went into liquidation.

The agreement is said to enable the star to avoid bankruptcy - with the same files showing from February 2018 to last month, she paid 27.96 to creditors.

Lavish: This comes despite recently Katie splashing the cash on a luxury break to Thailand with beau Kris Boyson

A source also told The Sun: 'These figures show just how much financial trouble Katie is in and what a challenge she faces to turn things around.

'Having said that, most people will wonder how she has managed to avoid bankruptcy with an agreement which lets her get away without paying 59 per cent of what she owes.'

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Katie Price for comment.

Tough time: The star also recently vowed to spend more money on a new car after being banned from driving for three months

This comes just weeks after Katie vowed she wouldn't hold back in spending money on a new car, after being banned from driving for three months.

Speaking outside Bexley Magistrates' Court, she said at the time: 'I chose to be disqualified for three months because it adds on to my disqualification that I'm already on, which means I get my driving licence back on the 24th of May which means I can go car shopping - let's ban the pink car.'

Despite her recent money woes, Katie is also allegedly to have spent around 25,000 on six holidays in the last eight months by The Sun, and only a few days ago returned from a sun-soaked break to Thailand with beau Kris.

Tough times: Katie vowed to buy a new car as she exited Bexley Magistrates Court last month, saying: 'I can go car shopping - let's ban the pink car'

On Wednesday Katie plead 'definitely not guilty' to using abusive language after allegedly telling her ex-partner Kris Boyson's new girlfriend: 'Are you enjoying f***ing my husband?'

The star had failed to appear in court in the previous days due to her Thailand break, and will now face trial on June 3rd.

Katie narrowly avoided bankruptcy last December after reaching a deal with creditors, and has recently been attempting to sell off her animals in a bid to raise funds.In the last few days, both Wendy Williams and Lala Kent have revealed to the world their struggles with addiction.

And Lena Dunham commended the two 'strong sober queens' for coming forward about overcoming substance abuse on Wednesday.

'First Lala Kent now Wendy Williams- so proud of all these strong sober queens,' the former Girls actress, 32, tweeted. 'It's a bumpy path for us all, but admitting you need help is the beginning of true freedom. Sometimes it's stronger to be weak for a moment.'

'So proud of these strong sober queens': Lena Dunham, pictured May 2018, commended Lala Kent and Wendy Williams for coming forward about their struggles with substance abuse

Praise: Dunham shared her thoughts on Twitter on Wednesday

Lena's supportive tweet comes after DailyMailTV learned Wendy had been secretly living at a sober living residential facility in order to treat an addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs.

After DailyMailTV contacted Wendy for comment regarding the story, she confessed on her show Tuesday morning she was living at a sober home and had been attending meetings around New York City.

On Monday, Lala revealed to her social media followers she is an alcoholic, and had been attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for the last five months.

'Five months ago, I came to the realization that I am an alcoholic, and I am now a friend of Bill W.,' Kent said. 'You will never know how much this program means to me. It has given me new life.'

Coming forward: Lala Kent (L, February 2019) and Wendy Williams (R, September 2018) have shared with their world their struggles surrounding addiction these last few days

Bill Wilson is the co-founder of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-Step program.

'I always say, if you don't have to be sober, I wouldn't recommend it. But ... as someone who does need to be sober, being in my right frame of mind every single day is truly incredible,' she added.

Lena has been open and honest with fans about grappling with substance abuse as well.

Sharing her truth: After DailyMailTV contacted Wendy for comment regarding the story, she confessed on her show Tuesday morning she was living at a sober home and had been attending meetings around New York City

Last year she revealed on Dax Shepard's podcast, Armchair Expert, they she was six months sober after misusing the anti-anxiety drug Klonopin for three years.

'I've been sober for six months,' she said. 'My particular passion was Klonopin.'

The HBO star said she started taking Klonopin when her anxiety got so bad it got in the way of her work and daily activities and when she 'started feeling like I was a living panic attack'.Sam Ball claimed during a radio appearance on Friday that he never slept with Ines Basic during their so-called 'affair' on Married At First Sight.

But Ines is determined to set the record straight, telling her Instagram followers they were in fact intimate and that producers did not 'fake' their relationship.

Sharing a screenshot of a Daily Mail Australia article about Sam's interview, she wrote: 'Yeah, producers made you [perform a sex act] for four hours, hun. Yeah OK.'

Scroll down for video

It's getting messy! Married At First Sight's Ines Basic (left) is determined to set the record straight after Sam Ball (right) claimed their affair was 'staged' and they never had sex

Despite Ines' rebuke, Sam has repeatedly insisted they never had sex - even though the couple were shown passionately kissing on MAFS before waking up in bed together the next morning.

The radio interview that so provoked Ines' anger took place shortly after 7am on Nova 96.9's Fitzy & Wippa breakfast show.

During his chat with Ryan 'Fitzy' Fitzgerald and Michael 'Wippa' Wipfli, Sam claimed he was told what to say during the pair's secret rendezvous.

Grim: Ines shared this screenshot of a Daily Mail Australia article to Instagram on Friday alongside the caption, 'Yeah, the producers made you [perform a sex act] for four hours, hun'

Sam alleged that MAFS producers would pull him aside during filming and tell him, 'It would sound great if you say this...'

He further claimed that, after repeating the producers' suggested lines, situations would naturally 'progress' towards a storyline.

This extraordinary admission suggests that Ines and Sam's 'affair' would not have happened without behind-the-scenes intervention.

He should've stayed quiet! Sam claimed during a radio appearance on Friday that he never slept with Ines during their so-called 'affair' on Married At First Sight

'It was definitely pushed and manipulated. Like the whole show, we all know it's not completely real,' Sam said, adding that he and Ines never even had sex.

Sam, who has previously starred in Home and Away and Secret City, also took the opportunity to address rumours Channel Nine hired him as a professional actor.

He admitted that he was sometimes 'acting' on camera (for example, when he body-shamed Elizabeth Sobinoff at their wedding) but wasn't on the show as an actor.

Breaking his silence: During an appearance on Fitzy & Wippa, Sam (centre) said that elements of his 'affair' with Ines were staged by the show's producers. Pictured with Ryan 'Fitzy' Fitzgerald (left) and Michael 'Wippa' Wipfli (right) in the Nova 96.9 studio on Friday

When asked about the audition process, Sam confirmed that he signed up himself because he 'genuinely wanted to meet someone' and wasn't put forward by a talent agent.

Later on, Sam spoke about the devastating personal toll of being portrayed as a 'villain' on Married At First Sight.

He said his parents had been 'great' and 'supportive' amid the backlash, but acknowledged that his mother was 'upset' by what had happened.The director of the controversial documentary Leaving Neverland has fired back at Michael Jackson 'truthers' who refuse to believe the pop star was a paedophile.

The two-part HBO series featured disturbing allegations by Wade Robson and James Safechuck that Jackson sexually abused them when they were children.

In the weeks since Leaving Neverland aired, devoted fans of the 'King of Pop' have leapt to his defence by staging protests and launching a campaign against the film.

'Facts don't lie, but paedophiles do': Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed (pictured) has hit back at Michael Jackson 'truthers' who refuse to believe the pop star was a child abuser

But speaking on Channel Seven's The Morning Show, filmmaker Dan Reed refuted claims Michael Jackson was being falsely accused, and even mocked his supporters' campaign slogan, 'Facts don't lie. People do'.

'I interviewed police investigators and none of them had any doubt at all about [Jackson's] guilt,' Reed said.

'I did a massive amount of research - there's no doubt at all Jackson was lying for a long time. Facts don't lie, but paedophiles do.'

Claims: Finding Neverland featured disturbing allegations by Wade Robson (pictured as a child with Jackson) and James Safechuck that Jackson sexually abused them as children

Reed, who is better known for his investigations into war and crime, also told of how his unlikely partnership with Jackson's accusers came about.

'It was completely accidental, he said. 'I approached them [Robson and Safechuck] through their lawyers and they decided to meet me.'

Elsewhere in the interview, Reed said he disagreed with radio stations that have decided to stop playing Jackson's songs following the accusations.

Accuser: Wade Robson, who claims he was groomed and sexually abused by Michael Jackson as a child, is pictured in the documentary Leaving Neverland

'The aim was never to topple Jackson from his pedestal,' Reed said. 'I wasn't trying to get Michael Jackson or his music banned.

'People need to face up to the fact he was a paedophile, but continue to separate the art from the man.'

The Morning Show airs weekdays from 9am on Channel SevenIt was years pre-Beyonce, but Tamera Mowry is still incurring the wrath of the Beyhive after admitting she was star-struck when she met Jay-Z.

The Sister Sister star, 40, revealed on Wednesday's The Real, that she was excited to see him on the red-carpet of a Nutty Professor premiere - when she was just 23 years old.

She told her fellow hosts that when she met him, she got 'hit by the charm' of the rapper.

Could have been so different! Tamera Mowry admitted on Wednesday's The Real that she was charmed by Jay-Z when they met

'I actually met Jay-Z in person. And he wasn't with Beyonce at the time and I wasn't dating anybody.

'When I met him, you do get hit with the charm. I found myself, strangely, asking for gum.

'I met him, it's so weird. My sister and I were at a premiere of Nutty Professor and he walked by and I was like, "Oh my god, that's Jay-Z". And I was like, "Can I have some gum". And he gave me some gum.

Got any gum? Jay-Z was at the premiere of Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, in 2000, which is where she said she met him

Having fun: Tamera was with her twin sister Tia at the same premiere and she asked Jay-Z for gum

The encounter is likely to have happened at the Nutty Professor II: The Klumps premiere in Los Angeles in 2000, when both were present.

Co-host Loni Love handed out some serious side-eye shade to Tamera as she recalled the meeting, as well as demanding to know where her now-husband was at the time.

'It couldve been Jay-Z and Tamera?! Wow,' the 47-year-old asked, while sipping tea.

Spilling tea: Co-host Loni Love (second from right) handed out some serious side-eye shade to Tamera as she recalled the meeting, as well as demanding to know where her now-husband was at the time

She explained: 'I actually met Jay-Z in person. And he wasn't with Beyonce at the time and I wasn't dating anybody'

'When I met him, you do get hit with the charm,' she added, of the rapper

Tamera, who is now happily married to Fox News correspondent Adam Housley, was trolled on Instagram for the admission.

'Oh hells no dont mess with Queen B!' wrote one, on the show's video.

Another chastised co-host Loni Love for stirring the pot: 'Now antie @comiclonilove lets not start rumors!! Before you know, the beehive will be saying @tameramowrytwo is Becky with the good hair!!'

Tamera shares son Aden, six, and daughter Ariah, three, with Housley.

She lost her niece Alaina Housley, 18, to gun violence on November 7 in a mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, California.Emily Ratajkowski is a giant in new ad photos for the canned wine BABE.

The 27-year-old supermodel showed off her figure in a white one-piece swimsuit for all three photos, which saw her edited into a colossus towering over various locales.

In one snapshot, she could be seen sipping a can of BABE while leaning against the Empire State Building, which was only slightly taller than she.

Class: Emily Ratajkowski is a giant in a string of new ad photos for the canned wine BABE

Another photo saw her looming over a Los Angeles freeway, and in a third image she lay across a San Diego beach as tiny regular people soaked in the sun around her.

She joked on Instagram that this was the 'ATTACK OF THE 50 FT EMRATA,' dishing: 'Watch out for powerful billboards like this one to take over your hometown!'

BABE was co-launched by Emily's pal Josh Ostroksy, a.k.a. The Fat Jew, an Internet personality infamous for a 2015 joke-stealing scandal.

Emily and Josh, whom she has described on social media as her 'twin brother from another mother,' have been seen socializing often.

Sizzling: The 27-year-old supermodel showed off her figure in a white one-piece swimsuit for all three photos, which saw her edited into a colossus towering over various locales

Tanner Cohen and David Oliver Cohen, who started the popular Twitter page White Girl Problems, worked with Josh to start off the wine brand.

The trio began their drinks venture a couple of years ago by launching White Girl Rose, which they then released in canned form as Babe.

Meanwhile, Emily recently revealed via her Instagram that her swimwear line Inamorata is expanding to include a new collection called BODY.

Emily, who while showing Vogue around her vast apartment in 2015 said she was for a platform to 'redistribute wealth in this country,' married last February.

Massive: In one snapshot, she could be seen sipping a can of BABE while leaning against the Empire State Building, which was only slightly taller than she

She made a splash with her surprise courthouse marriage to producer Sebastian Bear-McClard in New York, wearing a $200 Zara trouser suit.

Though they only became a couple weeks before the wedding, a source told Us Weekly that 'Emily has known Sebastian for years.'

The London-born model and actress recalled to Marie Claire last year: "People came after my marriage, like: "Wow. I give it three weeks." Im like: "What?"'

She groused: 'No one can take women seriously on any choices that they make, especially if theyre unique to them and they dont play into the way we think women should get married. It's a constant writing-off.'

Trio: BABE was co-launched by Emily's pal Josh Ostroksy, a.k.a. The Fat Jew (left), pictured with her and her husband Sebastian Bear-McClard (middle)

Emily, who has a penchant for showing off her figure on red carpets and social media, also told Marie Claire that her breasts are 'a key to my sexuality.'

The Gone Girl supporting player told the magazine: 'Boobs are funny. They hurt sometimes, and sometimes theyre the thing that makes me feel the most powerful.'

'I remember there was some article like: "Emily Ratajkowski Is the Mozart of Breasts." What was so bad is someone sent it to my dad, who sent it to me,' she recalled.After completion of deal GVK Group's shareholding in MIAL will increase to 74 pc from existing 50.5 pc, the company said.

New Delhi: GVK Power & Infrastructure on Friday said its step-down subsidiary GVK Airport Holdings will acquire 12 crore shares of Mumbai International Airport (MIAL) for Rs 924 crore from ACSA Global.

After completion of this 10 per cent stake buy from ACSA along with the earlier purchase of 13.5 per cent from Bidvest, GVK Group's shareholding in MIAL will increase to 74 per cent from the existing 50.5 per cent, a company statement said. "GVK Airport Holdings Ltd...has exercised it right, under Right of First Refusal in terms of the Shareholders Agreement dated April 4, 2006....to acquire 12 crore equity shares of MIAL, constituting 10 per cent of the total paid-up share capital of MIAL, from ACSA at the rate of Rs 77 per share," it added.She is firmly back on with Stephen Bear after he called her 'the girl for me'.

But was without her man as she arrived in style to the Financial Markets Online Event in Soho, London on Thursday night.

The Love Island star looked absolutely incredible as she showed of her toned legs in a blazer inspired black dress



Suits her! Georgia Harrison arrived in style to the Financial Markets Online Event in Soho, London on Thursday night

The double breasted number plunged down the middle to show off her ample assets before going in to cinch in her tiny waist.

Georgia boosted her height in a pair of towering black pointed ankle boots as she posed up a storm at the event.

She enhanced her pretty features with a glamorous slick of make-up, complete with lashings of mascara and pink gloss.

Style queen: The double breasted number plunged down the middle to show off her ample assets before going in to cinch in her tiny waist

Gorgeous: She enhanced her pretty features with a glamorous slick of make-up, complete with lashings of mascara and pink gloss

Trendsetter: Joining Georgia at the bash was Nicole Bass who looked casually cool in a pair of nude-coloured dungarees

Adding to the stylish look, Georgia's luscious blonde locks were styled in flirty braids.

Joining Georgia at the bash was Nicole Bass who looked casually cool in a pair of nude-coloured dungarees.

Nicole teamed the number with a simple black top and added a pair of sexy strappy studded heels.

Toting her essentials in a chic black handbag, Nicole looked sensational as she sported an immaculate blowdry.

Looking good: Nicole teamed the number with a simple black top and added a pair of sexy strappy studded heels

Strike a pose: Toting her essentials in a chic black handbag, Nicole looked sensational as she sported an immaculate blowdry

Georgie Clarke was also present at the bash and looked incredible in a striped monochrome ensemble.

The beauty's tiny white crop top showed off a peek of her flat stomach as she partied the night away.

Model Victoria Clay flaunted her sensational cleavage in a perilously plunging clingy black dress with a dangling gold bodychain.

Jodie Weston amped up the sex appeal in a skintight black PVC dress embellished heels.

Fab: Georgie Clarke was also present at the bash and looked incredible in a striped monochrome ensemble

Glimpse: The beauty's tiny white crop top showed off a peek of her flat stomach as she partied the night away

Saucy: Model Victoria Clay flaunted her sensational cleavage in a perilously plunging clingy black dress with a dangling gold bodychainAnna Gunn leapt up with lightning speed and sliced her arm through the air, in one fluid motion, as if parrying an opponent.

It was not some kind of martial arts move  the actress was, in fact, demonstrating how to split open a coconut, a skill she will be needing when she opens in Tennessee Williamss The Night Of The Iguana at the Noel Coward Theatre this summer.

Gunn, who won acclaim and major awards for her seminal television roles  Skyler White in Breaking Bad, and Martha Bullock in Deadwood  laughed and said: I really have to get on with my machete training...Anna Gunn with a machete could be dangerous.

It was clear from that little display of physical dexterity, in the middle of the lounge at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, that Gunn has a flair for the theatrical. In fact, shes a top-flight thespian who has acted on and off Broadway and in Los Angeles, where she has often trodden the boards.

Anna Gunn leapt up with lightning speed and sliced her arm through the air. The actress was demonstrating how to split open a coconut, a skill she will be needing when she opens in Tennessee Williamss The Night Of The Iguana at the Noel Coward Theatre this summer

She once played Isabella in a production of Measure For Measure there, back in 1999, for the late Peter Hall. The director told his cast not to be intimidated by Shakespeare, Gunn recalled, telling them (Bard purists might want to look away now) that their accents were much more naturally the way Shakespeare intended the verse to be spoken.

The cutlass action at the Chateau had to do with Annas upcoming role: shes playing Maxine Faulk, the affable and rapaciously lusty proprietor of the Costa Verde hotel, set atop a jungle-covered hill in a remote part of Mexico, in Williamss 1961 drama, which many regard as his last great play.

Maxine makes rum-cocas for her guests; and needs a big blade to slice open coconuts.

The production, which starts previews at the Noel Coward on July 6, will be directed by James Macdonald.

In addition to Anna, it stars Clive Owen as Reverend Shannon, a defrocked Episcopal minister, and Lia Williams as Hannah, a spinster of no particular parish, who pushes her wheelchair-imprisoned 97-year-old grandfather (Julian Glover) here, there and everywhere.

Gunn won acclaim and major awards for her seminal television roles  Skyler White in Breaking Bad (pictured), and Martha Bullock in Deadwood

It is Gunns professional London debut. Professional, because when she was 19, she did a summer drama course over here. After watching a season of plays in London and Stratford featuring the likes of Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Gambon, Imelda Staunton and Greta Scacchi, she was hooked.

Maria Aitken, the acting teacher and director, wrote her a letter of introduction that landed her a key role in The Beggars Opera in Chicago. Gunn still has the letter, and knows its contents off by heart.

Although celebrated for her screen work, theatre is her first love. And Maxine in The Night Of The Iguana is a juicy role.

I confess, I didnt automatically see her in the part which Bette Davis originated on Broadway  and Gunn agreed that normally, people would think of me as Hannah.

But shes hooked on Maxine now, and is in the process of creating a playlist for her (shes thinking Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday)  something she likes to do for all her characters.

Gunn sees the play as a beautiful story of redemption, forgiveness and grace.

Youve got this triangle of Shannon, Hannah and Maxine, she explained. The women offer different paths to Shannon, a man struggling with a weakness for booze and under-age girls.

On this particular night, at this particular hotel, there are German guests and a bus load of schoolgirls. To be a woman on her own in the 1940s, running a place like that, Gunn mused. Ive been to Mismaloya [where the film version is set]. You can still only get there by boat. Its still remote. And Maxine runs everything on her own. She has helpers, but shes running it.

The discussion prompts me to mention the powerful personal essay she wrote in 2013 for the New York Times, about the indecent level of abuse she suffered on social media, and in print and on TV, after the illogical hatred of Skyler in Breaking Bad spilled over into a loathing for her as a person.

Its the double standard thing, she told me. Youve got this guy Walter White, whos doing horrible things. No matter what Walt did, people kept on going Yay!

But that wife is such a nag, because she keeps telling him not to do these terrible things. Hes allowed. Shes not. I was being told: You be quiet!

We chatted about how Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar was recently savaged by the New York Times (unfairly, we felt) because she was tough on her staff.

Although celebrated for her screen work, theatre is Gunn's (pictured with her on stage co-stars) first love. And Maxine in The Night Of The Iguana is a juicy role

Nobody would write a piece like this about a man, Gunn said. If shes got exacting standards and a certain way of expressing it, its still not acceptable somehow, and seems to be a mark on her character in some way. If a man was doing it, theyd say: Hes a leader! He has a right to do that.

Looking at The Night Of The Iguana through a 21st-century prism, its interesting to see how the Rev. Shannon perceives Maxine as a woman.

He makes digs at her, Gunn said, and its the same as what weve been talking about.

She acknowledged that tremendous progress has been made, in terms of the treatment of women, in the past couple of years. Awareness is the first step, she said.

She gave me an example. When someones coming to put a mic on her, on set, she told me, she tries to make them comfortable. You might have a bit of joking. Like: Its fine  just get on in there! Meaning: put the mic in my shirt  Im giving you permission.

But the person will suddenly look up at you and go Argh! And I find everybody going: Is this OK? Are we all right?

This isnt a bad thing, because what were saying is: What is OK, in the way I talk to you?

It will calm down, eventually, she predicted.

One discussion prompts me to mention the powerful personal essay she wrote in 2013 for the New York Times, about the indecent level of abuse she suffered after the illogical hatred of Skyler in Breaking Bad spilled over into a loathing for her as a person

The actress, who admitted its in my nature to be pretty direct, said her parents had invested her with a feeling that there was nothing I couldnt do.

I dont know that they were that thrilled when I first said I wanted to be an actor. But to their great credit they said OK. There was always a strong work ethic: if you wanted something you had to work hard at it.

Once she was out of college they told her: You have chosen this, and now youre on your own. Theres no bailing you out.

But the most important thing her mother and father taught her was that I had a voice as important as any male...my opinions were just as important.

Her two daughters  Emma, 18, and EILA, 12  will be on summer break during some of her time at the Noel Coward, and will pop over to visit her.

Meanwhile, 11 years after the last episode of Deadwood, a reunion movie version of the western drama has been shot and will go out on HBO in the States on May 31.

As Gunn and I made our way out of the Chateau Marmont, we were back to coconuts, and tackling them on stage.

Maybe dont sit in the front row, she advised.

The musical Company, a masterpiece by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth thats been re-gendered by director Marianne Elliott, goes into its final week on Mondayat Londons Gielgud Theatre. The cast led by Rosalie Craig, Patti LuPone, Mel Giedroyc and Jonathan Bailey, were on top form Wednesday night. So was the splendid orchestra. I hope theres further life for this gem.

Watch Out For

Janie Dee (pictured), Phil Daniels, David Burt and Ronald Samm are also in the company

Sam Archer and Sophia Hurdley, who have both danced for Matthew Bournes New Adventures company, and who will play the main characters in a musical adaptation of Oscar Wildes bittersweet fairy tale The Happy Prince.

Archer will play the bejewelled gold statue prince, who stops a swallow (Hurdley) on its way to Egypt and asks it to help him alleviate the misery and poverty in the city.

Hal Cazalet composed the music and penned the lyrics, and will also direct.

The show has a book by Michael Barry and will have three showcase performances at the Place Theatre, London on May 3 and 4. Janie Dee, Phil Daniels, David Burt and Ronald Samm are also in the company.

Visit www.theplace.org.uk for ticket details.

Jake Gyllenhaal, who has begun long-term discussions about performing in the West End for the first time in nearly two decades.

Gyllenhaal, celebrated for roles in films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and Nightcrawler, appeared in Nick Paynes play A Life, part of a double bill with Tom Sturridge (in Simon Stephens Sea Wall) this year at New Yorks Public Theater.

And hes had informal talks about possibly transferring the productions, directed by Carrie Cracknell, to London next year.

Gyllenhaal, celebrated for roles in films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and Nightcrawler, appeared in Nick Paynes play A Life, part of a double bill with Tom Sturridge (in Simon Stephens Sea Wall) this year at New Yorks Public Theater

First, though, Sea Wall/ A Life are eyeing a move to Broadway this year; before potentially heading to London in 2020.

It is the third time Gyllenhaal has appeared in a play by Payne (he did Constellations on Broadway, and If There Is I Havent Found It Yet).

There has also been talk of him bringing a production he did at the Hudson Theatre, NY, of Sunday In The Park With George. But thats a much more complicated and expensive proposition.

Gyllenhaal was last on stage here in Kenneth Lonergans You Can Count On Me.Gretchen Rossi has shared more photos of her baby bump.

In a Thursday Instagram post, the 40-year-old Real Housewives of Orange County star showed a bunch of photos of herself in a green dress, cradling her burgeoning belly.

She captioned the photos with a passionate call to her followers to help improve access to IVF services in the United States.

Bumping along nicely: In a Thursday Instagram post, 40-year-old Real Housewives of Orange County star Gretchen Rossi showed a bunch of photos of herself in a green dress, cradling her burgeoning belly

The reality TV star, who is expecting her first child with Slade Smiley in July, began the lengthy post: 'Today I am 6 months pregnant!'

'I cannot believe how quickly time has flown by.'

'I am truly loving every minute of being pregnant (even the hard stuff) because I dont know if I will ever feel a little life growing inside me again.'

'I wake up everyday with massive gratitude for this miracle that God has blessed us with!'

Political: She captioned the photos with a passionate call to her followers to help improve access to IVF services in the United States

Green with envy: The reality TV star, who is expecting her first child with Slade Smiley in July, began the lengthy post: 'Today I am 6 months pregnant!'

'However all these amazing emotions I get to feel everyday, I realize so many women and couples might never feel because of not having the financial means to fight infertility and do things like IVF.'

'This little girl growing inside me has given me the passion, & motivation to stand up, use my platform and my voice to make some noise and try to change this!'

'Infertility was diagnosed as a disease and we need to demand that our insurance companies start to cover the prohibitive costs of infertility treatments!'

'Start reaching out to your local senators and asking them to pass the Access to Infertility Treatment and Care Act that Senator @corybooker from New Jersey initiated!'

'(Sidenote: This is not about politics or a political post this is about basic human rights that we all should have when it comes to insurance companies covering a disease [THUMBS UP EMOJI])'

Proud parents: The blonde beauty threw a gender reveal party with her 45-year-old fiance Slade Smiley last month. Seen here in February last year

The Michigan-born beauty continued the post, 'I went and meet with the Senator today to thank him for creating this monumental Bill and to find out how I / we can help pass this Bill!'

'It is amazing to see a man fighting for these types of rights!'

'We have some big ideas & campaigns coming up so please be on the lookout so you can do your small part to help (the close to 7million couples) struggling with infertility!'

'We can do this!! We can enact change if we all come together! [FLEX EMOJI]'

Call to arms: 'Start reaching out to your local senators and asking them to pass the Access to Infertility Treatment and Care Act that Senator @corybooker from New Jersey initiated!' wrote the TV personality. Booker seen here this month

Shout: At her gender reveal, the RHOC star could be seen screaming after pink confetti was released in front of her guests. 'Its a GIRL!!!' she captioned the clip

Gretchen revealed the gender of her first child last month. The blonde beauty threw a gender reveal party with her 45-year-old fiance Slade Smiley and she was overjoyed with the news.

In an Instagram Story, the RHOC star could be seen screaming after pink confetti was released in front of her guests. 'Its a GIRL!!!' she captioned the clip.

Gretchen added, 'Thank you Lord for this amazing miracle. We wanted a little girl so much! We couldnt be happier! Best day of my life!'

Plan B: Gretchen and Slade spent four years trying to get around their fertility issues, and eventually the successful strategy for them was embryo implantation

Gretchen and Slade spent four years trying to get around their fertility issues, and eventually the successful strategy for them was embryo implantation.

'Its been such an emotional journey for us. Because of that, its brought us so much closer together,' Gretchen revealed on the syndicated TV series.

She later told People magazine, 'It's pretty exciting that we have our little Christmas miracle.'Fraud: How They Steal Your Bank Account

Rating:

This is soft-touch Britain. Fraud: How They Steal Your Bank Account (ITV) detailed the scams that crooks use to siphon off millions of pounds from our credit and debit cards.

The documentary tried studiously not to labour the point, as if it was just a coincidence, but one factor stood out: all the gangs came from overseas. Organised criminals target Britain because sentencing is so lenient.

A mob from Ghana was seizing cashcards in the post and swaggering through London on blatant spending sprees.

In one warehouse they bought seven smartscreen TVs and tried to stuff them into the back of their Mercedes; the car park CCTV caught them ramming the boxes in with their boots.

A mob from Ghana was seizing cashcards in the post and swaggering through London on blatant spending sprees

Their behaviour wasn't just suspicious, it reeked of crime. But they knew they were immune: even if, by some improbable chance, police were called, the gang would be long gone before officers arrived.

And if they were caught, so what? The fraud squad did track them down, in the end. All but one of the crooks got a suspended sentence, with a bit of community service thrown in.

Yet this is organised theft on a humungous scale, and it's costing you a fortune: even if you've been lucky and your bank account hasn't been burgled, you're still paying for it through inflated insurance premiums.

The documentary didn't attempt to unravel any of this. It just showed us the brazen gangsters and the exasperated police.

The documentary tried studiously not to labour the point, as if it was just a coincidence, but one factor stood out: all the gangs came from overseas

Two men, with the faces of thugs from central casting, flew in to Heathrow from Moldova. One of them drove straight to Stratford-upon-Avon, where an accomplice had installed card-skimmers in two of the cash machines.

Provincial towns are a prime target, because police numbers are even more stretched than in the capital.

This time, the over-confident crooks were arrested, in the airport car park. One coolly responded 'No comment' to every question.

'You've been in the country two minutes,' said a despairing detective, 'and already you know how to say, 'No comment' '

The coppers were in no doubt of the impact of the crimes. Like the phone fake tax scams uncovered so clinically this week by the Mail's Investigations Unit, these ruthless schemes leave lives in tatters.

Yet this is organised theft on a humungous scale, and it's costing you a fortune: even if you've been lucky and your bank account hasn't been burgled, you're still paying for it through inflated insurance premiums

'The impact can be really devastating,' said Detective Superintendent Perry Stokes, 'but these gangs stick two fingers up to the victims.' What he didn't add was: 'And the courts just give them a slap on the wrist.'

Stabbed: Britain's Knife Crime Crisis

Rating:

Feeble sentencing was one of the themes of Duwayne Brooks's emotional investigation into murders on the street, in Stabbed: Britain's Knife Crime Crisis (BBC1). Duwayne saw his friend Stephen Lawrence killed in a senseless attack 26 years ago, a story he helped to tell last year in BBC1's superb trilogy Stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation.

His instinct was that knife killers ought to face life imprisonment without parole, but this sensitive and thoughtful man, who is clearly still suffering the effects of trauma, recognised that every solution has to be considered.

Last year, there were 285 fatal stabbings in just England and Wales. 'There doesn't seem to be the will to tackle it,' he said.

Serious documentaries usually demand a professional presenter. Duwayne, an amateur, was earnest, and so emotional that he wept as he interviewed a couple whose son had been murdered coming home from the pub in a quiet village.

This deeply personal approach wouldn't work for most reports, but it was exactly what we needed here.The Bay At Nice (Menier Chocolate Factory, London)

Rating:

Verdict: Penelope Wilton brings art history alive

Should you ever find yourself in a tight spot, needing to interest an audience in a discussion about art, freedom and responsibility, heres how you do it.

One: Cast Penelope Wilton as your leading lady.

Two: Toy with your audience about whether or not youll show them the painting under discussion.

Three: Do not exceed 75 minutes.

Charisma: Penelope Wilton and Ophelia Lovibond (left) in The Bay At Nice

This is the cunning plan which underpins Sir Richard Eyres revival of Sir David Hares 1986 play about a sixtysomething woman (Downton Abbeys Wilton) invited to the Hermitage Museum in 1950s Leningrad to authenticate a painting by the French artist Henri Matisse.

The artist himself has been dead for two years and the museums curators have exhausted their own bureaucratic checks.

Wiltons character, Valentina, is a former pupil of Matisse who, in addition to pointers about painting may have had carnal knowledge of the great man. Her visit to the Hermitage, 40 years on, is therefore a chance to revisit her past.

Its also a chance to deal with her daughter, who has followed Valentina to the museum in the hope of borrowing some cash to help her through a divorce. It is, you may guess, a rather contrived scenario, but thanks to her enormous stage magnetism, Wilton pulls it off.

She is not one of those performers who flaps and raves. She may have a wry, slightly headmistressy quality, but she has warmth and focus, too.

Hares plot doesnt challenge Wilton too much; and restricts her to reminiscences about her bohemian past in Paris. Yet the actress never seems less than completely immersed in her memories.

This one-act play may be a cerebral hour-and-a-quarter, but its meditations on living with the decisions that we make in life are freighted with wit and sophistication

She also stings deliciously when scolding her 37-year-old daughter Sophia for leaving her husband; or when curtly dispensing advice to Sophias 63-year-old admirer.

Wiltons strength as a performer makes for a great bulwark against the hectoring attentions of Ophelia Lovibond as her child.

Lovibond is brilliant in her own way: vexed, confused and infuriated with her mothers diffidence. But she is also anxious that wanting to leave her husband (an upright Communist Party member) may be part of a decadent fantasy.

There are shades of Tolstoys tragic heroine Anna Karenina about Sophia, but as her model aircraft enthusiast lover, David Rintoul is no Count Vronsky.

Hes more of a Chekhov desperado, agonising about being unhappy but insisting on soldiering on just the same.

Much more suitable for Sophia would be the museums dapper and intelligent, but nervously deferential, young curator (Martin Hutson). Fotini Dimous set design is suitably artistic: elegantly conjuring up the grandeur of Peter the Greats Hermitage in the boutique Menier with an expanse of parquet, some dusty old canvases, pale turquoise panelled walls, and a gorgeous medieval tapestry, glimpsed off.

This one-act play may be a cerebral hour-and-a-quarter, but its meditations on living with the decisions that we make in life are freighted with wit and sophistication.

And it holds your attention, by making you wonder if youre ever going to see the Matisse in question, which sits under a dust sheet like a fifth character.

Im not sure the evening would have worked without that tease  but it definitely wouldnt work without Wiltons quiet charisma, bathing Hares play in sunlight.

The Taming Of The Shrew (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford)

Rating:

Verdict: From patriarchy to matriarchy

How to deal with Shakespeares embarrassing misogyny? For the virtuous modern theatregoer, The Taming Of The Shrew is a particularly awkward example.

It is, after all, the comedy about a feisty young woman being beaten and humiliated by her loutish husband Petruchio.

If the play were written today, it would see Shakespeare roasted on Twitter and run out of town.

And although Claire Prices Petruchia does seem fond of Katherine, there is no cloak of charm to make her any more palatable. Claire Price is pictured as Petruchia above

Director Justin Audiberts solution is to ditch the plays big bad patriarchy and swap the sexes over, to create a good hearty matriarchy.

Claire Price, therefore, storms in as a flame-haired Petruchia to subdue the recalcitrant Katherine (Joseph Arkley) in order to get her paws on a very considerable dowry.

Subplots abound, including a host of suitors vying to win the hand of Katherines simpering brother (James Cooney).

Purists may be alarmed at interference with Shakespeares hallowed verse, but is it worth the effort? Its disorientating at first; but I cant say it made me see the play differently.

Once I got my bearings, the plot quickly reverted to the tasteless blood sport it always is. But at least its good for equality quotas  the number of women in the cast is more than tripled.

Katherine is confirmed as the most interesting role  something audiences knew already  and we identify more with her suffering than we do with her husbands bullying.

And although Prices Petruchia does seem fond of Katherine, there is no cloak of charm to make her any more palatable.

Arkley, by contrast, brings dignity to Kate, who also has Shakespeares best lines.

In any event, there is good slapstick fun throughout Audiberts well-drilled and otherwise conventional production.She splits her time between Los Angeles and London.

And Petra Ecclestone was ensuring she spent some time with her British pals as she enjoyed a night out at Scott's in the capital on Thursday.

The F1 heiress, 30, looked sensational on the outing, ensuring she would turn heads at the elusive private member's club.

Catching up: Petra Ecclestone was ensuring she spent some time with her pals as she enjoyed a night out at Scott's in London on Thursday

Dressed to impress, Petra showcased her lean figure in a leather mini skirt teamed with thigh high stiletto boots.

Wrapping up in the chill, the mother-of-three sheathed herself in an oversized fur coat with colourful splashes.

Petra's signature blonde locks were worn in loose waves for the night, whilst she clutched a small black bag in her perfectly manicured hands.

Dressed to impress: The F1 heiress, 30, looked sensational on the outing, ensuring she would turn heads at the elusive private member's club

These boots were made for partying! Dressed to impress, Petra showcased her lean figure in a leather mini skirt teamed with thigh high stiletto boots

Petra no doubt had plenty to chat about with her pals as she's currently planning her wedding to fiance Sam Palmer.

The Maddox art gallery manager recently posted a sweet tribute to the socialite after exclusively announcing the couple's engagement to MailOnline.

He told his followers Petra accepting his proposal was one of his personal highlights of 2018.

Furry nice! Wrapping up in the chill, the mother-of-three sheathed herself in an oversized fur coat with colourful splashes

As the former electrician delighted over the news, Petra's Formula 1 tycoon father, Bernie Ecclestone, 88, seemed less impressed, saying he 'doesn't know what the hurry is' - just 14 months on from his daughter's explosive divorce.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, he said: 'I told her I dont know what the hurry is I dont understand the reason.'

The businessman's reaction stood in stark contrast to Sam's words.

Blonde bombshell! Petra's signature blonde locks were worn in loose waves for the night, whilst she clutched a small black bag in her perfectly manicured hands

The vintage car dealer wrote: 'A personal thank you to everyone that made opening Maddox Gallery Los Angeles possible.

'I hope everyone had as an amazing year as us and that 2019 brings lots of love,health and happiness to all.

'My personal highlights have been opening the gallery in LA with the woman I love and her agreeing to marry me. Here is to a fantastic 2019.'

Petra and Sam announced their engagement on New Year's Eve after one year of dating, and just 14 months on from her acrimonious divorce from James Stunt, with whom she shares three children.Line Of Duty creator Jed Mercurio has hinted that he plans to scrap the show before viewers get bored, as the programme approaches its fifth series.

The television writer, 53, suggested that he has already started plotting ideas for how the show will end because he is aware that the series has a 'lifespan'.

Although the show has already been commissioned for a sixth series next year, Jed told The Mirror that he doesn't know how long it can go on for.

Shock decision: Line Of Duty creator Jed Mercurio has hinted that he plans to scrap the show before viewers get bored, as the programme approaches its fifth series

Discussing how he thinks the show will end, he said: 'I have had some thoughts. I don't know how long it can go on for. I think a lot depends on how people respond to it.

'I think we recognise that it has got a lifespan. We have to calibrate that against what the audiene response is.'

Martin Compston confirmed the sixth instalment of the BBC drama as he drove fans wild with huge season five spoilers during a recent appearance on This Morning

Drawing to a close: The television writer, 53, suggested that he has already started plotting ideas for how the show will end because he is aware that the series has a 'lifespan'

During Tuesday's This Morning, the actor hinted he may not be returning to his lead role Anti-Corruption Unit Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott for the next season.

The Scottish star, 34, said it had been a 'great' seven or eight years in the role as he thanked TV bosses for a 'job of a lifetime'.

He said: 'I don't know whether I'd be in it. You never know. We've filmed five. We've got six commissioned.'

'I don't know if I'm in it': Martin Compston recently CONFIRMED season six as he shocked fans with major spoilers

Phil really grilled the star as he pointed out Martin would know whether his character was killed off or if he would reprise his role for the sixth season.

Determined not to spoil Line Of Duty for fans, Martin remained tight lipped on whether he will appear in season six but he did say it had been 'a job of a lifetime'.

He replied: The audience don't know [if I'll be killed off]. It's a job of a lifetime I've never laughed so much on any set.

Spoiler: During Tuesday's This Morning, the actor hinted he may not be returning to his lead role Anti-Corruption Unit Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott for the next season

What's going on? Phil really grilled the star as he pointed out Martin would know whether his character was killed off or if he would reprise his role for the sixth season

'It's been a great seven or eight years, you just have to say thanks for memories. Any one can go. Some big shocks coming this year.'

Season four saw Balaclava Man, who was snatching and murdering women as well as even attacking Martin's Steve, shot dead by Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar).

Line Of Duty season five opens will a new wave of crime plaguing the community as it's revealed the Balaclava Man was part of a wider organised crime gang.

Best time: Determined not to spoil Line Of Duty for fans, Martin remained tight lipped on whether he will appear in season six but he did say it had been 'a job of a lifetime'

Pictured: Season four saw Balaclava Man, who was snatching and murdering women as well as even attacking Martin's Steve, shot dead by Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar)

Martin divulged the 'rewarding' moment 300 fans gasped simultaneously at the BFI screening as he insisted season five was the best yet.

He confessed: 'We've got so good at keeping secrets from the twists. Great to see it with an audience [at the BFI screening], there was this collective gasp from 300 people. Those moments are really rewarding.

'It's terrifying. You're job as an actor is not messing up these scripts. Series after series, this is the strongest one. This one really is phenomenal.'Sofia Richie was spotted this Thursday enjoying a Beverly Hills outing with her dramatically older boyfriend Scott Disick.

The 20-year-old daughter of Lionel Richie wore faded jeans and slipped into a flowing black top that matched her jacket and leather handbag.

Meanwhile, her 35-year-old hunk complemented a blue top with olive green trousers and rounded off the ensemble with a pair of white sneakers.

Legging it: Sofia Richie was spotted this Thursday enjoying a Beverly Hills outing with her dramatically older boyfriend Scott Disick

Sofia returned to her hometown of Los Angeles on Wednesday after flouncing off on a glamorous work trip to the Arabian peninsula.

As she documented on her social media, she was in Kuwait City for the launch of her capsule purse collection with local brand Marzook.

Marzook have also released collaborations with such names as the high-end Swiss jeweler De Grisogono and Lebanese designer Nicolas Jebran.

Sofia has a fondness for holidaying in Middle Eastern countries, having jetted out for lavish vacations in the past to Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Bombshell: Her 35-year-old hunk complemented a blue top with olive green trousers and rounded off the ensemble with a pair of white sneakers

'I think a lot of people think they have to prove their relationships through social media and I'm just happy being private about my relationship,' she said recently.

Covering the April issue of Tatler, she explained: 'It's not like I won't post pictures about it, but I like having my little private life.'

Scott shares three children with Kourtney Kardashian - nine-year-old son Mason, six-year-old daughter Penelope and four-year-old son Reign.

Tres elegant: The 20-year-old daughter of Lionel Richie wore faded jeans and slipped into a flowing black top that matched her jacket and leather handbag

Last year, Kourtney's half-sister Kendall Jenner commented on a photo of Scott with Sofia, Mason, Penelope, and Reign: 'Awww Scott and his kids'.

Kourtney and Scott, who were introduced by Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis in 2006, went on and off before finally breaking off the romance in 2015.

Like Scott, Kourtney, 39, has a penchant for picking drastically younger people to date - she recently ran around with 25-year-old Algerian model Younes Bendjima.

Kourtney and Younes broke up last year, and since then she was linked 21-year-old model Luka Sabbat - but he told The Cut last month: 'We're definitely not dating.'The Duchess of York looked in great spirits as she enjoyed a night at the theatre.

Sarah Ferguson, 59, was all-smiles as she hit the red carpet for the opening night of Ain't Too Proud - The Life and Times of The Temptations' Broadway Play in New York on Thursday.

Posing up a storm for the cameras, Fergie seemed to be in her element.

Loving life: Sarah Ferguson, 59, attended the opening night of Ain't Too Proud - The Life and Times of The Temptations' Broadway Play in New York on Thursday.

Not afraid to stand out from the crowds, the mother-of-two donned a vibrant emerald green shell top that she teamed with a black peplum hem skirt.

Fergie put an edgy spin on the look by layering up with a leather jacket and swapping her typical heels for suede trainers.

She completed the look by styling her trademark auburn locks in a half up style.

Chirpy: The Duchess of York looked in great spirits as she enjoyed a night at the theatre. Posing up a storm for the cameras, Fergie seemed to be in her element

Fergie's trip to New York comes after she flew out to Sierra Leone last month for charity work.

The royal visited a village where she was greeted by school children as she joined them in the classroom.

Posting pictures of her visit to her Instagram account, which boasts 169,000 followers, Fergie wrote: 'Such a privilege to be welcomed so warmly by children at this school in Port Loko, Sierra Leone, which has been helped by my charity.

'It breaks my heart that 121 million children dont have a chance to go to school which is why I am here to launch Street Childs campaign to build or renovate 1,000 schools and give an education to 100,000 children.'

Turning heads: Not afraid to stand out from the crowds, the mother-of-two donned a vibrant emerald green shell top that she teamed with a black peplum hem skirt

Sarah is the proud mother of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie of York and split from Andrew in 1996.

She and the Duke of York still share a home at the Royal Lodge in Windsor and have remained close, with Fergie previously remarking that 'we're divorced to each other, not from each other'.

She told the Daily Mail in November that while they have no intention to remarry, they are 'the happiest divorced couple in the world'.

Radiant redhead: Fergie completed the look by styling her trademark auburn locks in a half up style and donning small gold hooped earrings

Sarah added: 'We are completely compatible. Our bywords are communication, compromise and compassion.

'July 23, 1986 was the happiest day of my life. Andrew is the best man I know. What he does for Britain is incredible; no one knows how hard he works for his country.

'My duty is to him. I am so proud of him. I stand by him and always will. The way we are is our fairy tale.'Avid surfer Liam Hemsworth was spotted with a towel around his waist as he enjoyed a beach day in Malibu, where he lives.

The 29-year-old bombshell, who married Miley Cyrus three months ago, draped his chiseled torso in a thin white tee for his outing.

Liam had a smile on his face and could be glimpsed holding onto his wet-suit as he strolled along the area where beachgoers parked their cars.

Hunk: Avid surfer Liam Hemsworth was spotted with a towel around his waist as he enjoyed a beach day in Malibu, where he lives

He and Miley married two days before Christmas in her native Tennessee after an on-off relationship that began when they co-starred in the 2010 film The Last Song.

The pair kept their wedding out of the public eye, announcing it only after it had occurred, but Liam told Sunday TODAY last month: 'It was a really special day.'

He shared: 'It was pretty much just immediate family. I feel really happy and really fortunate to be with such a great person.'

A place in the sun: The 29-year-old bombshell, who married Miley Cyrus three months ago, draped his chiseled torso in a thin white tee for his outing

Liam, whose shared Malibu house with Miley burned down in the California wildfires late last year, added on the chat show that 'weve been through so much together over the last 10 years, so it felt like it was time.'

The brother of Chris Hemsworth explained of his and Miley's private life that 'we just try to keep as much of it private as we can.'

Allowed he: 'A lot of things we cant control, obviously, but I think not buying into the things that are maybe said about us.'

On the go: Liam had a smile on his face and could be glimpsed holding onto his wet-suit as he strolled along the area where beachgoers parked their cars

Liam, who featured in The Hunger Games movies, quipped: 'I think Ive been fake married about 9,000 times before my actual real marriage.'

The hunk recently starred opposite his fellow Australian Rebel Wilson in the romantic comedy spoof Isn't It Romantic, also featuring Priyanka Chopra and Adam DeVine.

His upcoming movies include a brace of crime dramas entitled Killerman and Arkansas, the last of which also stars Vince Vaughn and John Malkovich.Efforts to unionize teachers in charter schools are picking up in a handful of states and counter efforts by school administrators to tamp them down often backfire, according to a study by the University of Washingtons Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Those trends are among several issues the study explores on unionizing efforts in charter schools, a topic that has generated national headlines recently but one we still dont know a lot about.

Charter unionization drives and strikes by charter school teacherssuch as those recently seen in Chicago and Los Angeles capture media attention, but they are nowhere near the norm. Only 11.3 percent of charter schools have unionized staff . Thats down by 1 percent from 10 years ago.

The vast majority of charter schools are not unionized because state laws exempt charters from a lot of rules, including, in most states, collective bargaining contracts. But while charter schools are not required to be unionized, theyre not prohibited, either.

National figures, though, can gloss over the realities in different states. Charter unions have expanded in states that already have a strong union presence, such as Illinois, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

They have declined in states such as Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and Oregon.

While the majority of unionized charters54 percentare so because they are required to be under state law, most new unionization efforts are because schools have voluntarily chosen to organize.

EdWeek Explains: What Are Charter Schools?

Why Teachers in Charter Schools Join Unions

When charter school teachers choose to organize, it is usually because teachers have lost trust in administrators and want more say in how schools are run, CRPE found from a small sample of interviews with teachers and administrators at charters that recently unionized or were undergoing the process.

More specifically, teachers cited high turnover rates, pay, organizational instability, and school growth as contributing factors.

Additional bureaucracy from growth, such as a single-site charter school expanding with new campuses, left teachers in some cases feeling as though they had lost their voice and contributed to the decision to organize. Teachers concerns were only exacerbated when administrators launched campaigns, often with the help of outside groups, to convince teachers to abandon their unionization efforts. These campaigns usually had the reverse affect.

Several teachers CRPE spoke with said they opposed tenure protections and did not try to include it in their contracts, which in some cases put them at odds with local union officials helping them to organize.

While unionizing does increase the say teachers have in their schools operations, it did not, however, resolve the trust issues, the report found.

What Types of Charter Schools Unionize?

Eighty percent of unionized charter schools are independent from a larger network. However, unions have been growing within nonprofit and for-profit charter operators. The number of unionized charters affiliated with management groups has doubled since 2009mostly through teachers choosing to organize.

Charter schools with unionized teachers in general serve fewer low-income students and have lower teacher-to-student ratios compared to non-unionized charters, according to federal data analyzed by CRPE for the report.

However, charters where the staff voluntarily organizedversus the school launching with a collective bargaining agreement or state law requiring itserved more disadvantaged students and had larger teaching staffs.

Collective bargaining agreements for charter schools and those for traditional public schools also have some key differences, the study found. Charter contracts tended to allow for more flexibility in how teachers are evaluated, disciplined, and dismissed.

Achievement in Unionized Charter Schools

Do students perform better academically in charters operating under a collective bargaining agreement? The researchers at CRPE took a stab at answering this question, although the studys authors say their analysis is limited. But when looking at how students fared on state English language arts assessments, students at unionized charter schools did slightly better overall than their peers at non-unionized charters. Academic growth was slightly higher among non-unionized charters. However, in both cases the differences were not statistically significant.

Students in charters where teachers chose to organize did better than their counterparts in nonunionized charters overall.

The full study can be found here: An Unlikely Bargain: Why Charter Schools Choose to Organize and What Happens When They Do .

Related stories:Reliance, an Indian conglomerate controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has significant exposure to the financial system of the US.

New Delhi/Mexico City: Reliance Industries is selling fuels to Venezuela from India and Europe to sidestep sanctions that bar US-based companies from dealing with state-run PDVSA, according to trading sources and Refinitiv Eikon data.

Reliance had been supplying alkylate, diluent naphtha and other fuel to Venezuela through its US-based subsidiary before Washington in late January imposed sanctions aimed at curbing the OPEC members oil exports and ousting Socialist President Nicolas Maduro.

At least three vessels chartered by the Indian conglomerate supplied refined products to Venezuela in recent weeks, and another vessel carrying gasoil is expected to set sail to the South American nation as well, according to the sources and data.

A Reliance spokesman wrote to Reuters in an email and said: Reliance is and will remain in compliance with the sanctions and shall work with the concerned authorities.

He also said the volume of products supplied to and crude oil imported from Venezuela have not increased.

Reliance, an Indian conglomerate controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has significant exposure to the financial system of the US, where it operates subsidiaries linked to its oil and telecom businesses, among others.

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.

Additional sanctions against Venezuela are possible in the future, as US President Donald Trumps administration has not yet tried to prevent companies based outside the United States from buying Venezuelan oil, a strategy known as secondary sanctions.

Refinitiv Eikon trade data shows that Reliance shipped alkylate, a component for motor gasoline, to Venezuela on vessels Torm Mary and Torm Anabel in recent weeks.

Those originated in India and passed through the Suez Canal.

It also shipped a gasoline cargo using tanker Torm Troilus to Venezuela and is preparing to send 35,000 tonnes of gasoil in a vessel called Vukovar to the South American nation.

Reliance is also supplying some products from its Rotterdam storage, a source familiar with Reliances operation said.

PDVSA did not reply to a request for comment.

In a statement last week, Reliance said its US unit has completely stopped all business with PDVSA. Reliance also halted all supply of diluents including heavy naphtha to Venezuela and does not plan to resume such sales until sanctions are lifted, according to the release.

Venezuela has overall imported some 160,000 barrels per day of fuel and diluents for its extra heavy oil output since the US measures were imposed, according to PDVSA and Refinitiv data.Matt Damon and his wife Luciano Barroso have been welcomed with open arms by the tight-knit community of Byron Bay, NSW.

And the Hollywood couple were seen enjoying a leisurely day out in the idyllic coastal town on Tuesday, stopping by a local cafe for lunch.

Matt, 48, and Luciano, 43, shared a few laughs with the other customers before heading off for an afternoon stroll.

Just another day in Byron Bay! Matt Damon (second from left) and his wife Luciana Barroso (far right) mingled with the locals during a visit to a cafe in Byron Bay, NSW on Tuesday

Matt dressed casually for the occasion, blending in with the locals in a white T-shirt, boardshorts, flip flops and a baseball cap.

At one stage, the Good Will Hunting star shared a lively conversation with two surfer types, who were seen bursting into laughter.

His wife Luciana, who looked bohemian chic in a pastel blue skirt and midriff-baring top, was also seen chatting away nearby.

What's so funny? At one stage, the Good Will Hunting star shared a lively conversation with two surfer types, who were seen bursting into laughter

The couple, who married in 2005 and share four children, Alexia, Isabella, Gia and Stella, are frequent visitors to Byron Bay.

During their trips to the Australian coast, they are often joined by their friends, Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky, who live in the area.

In the past, Matt has been forced to deny rumours he and Luciana are relocating Down Under on a full-time basis.

Hey, neighbours! Matt and Luciana are frequent visitors to Byron Bay, an idyllic town on Australia's east coast

In March last year, Page Six reported that The Bourne Identity star wanted to move his family to Australia because he opposed Donald Trump's presidency.

A source told the gossip column: 'Matts telling friends and colleagues in Hollywood that hes moving the family to Australia for a year.'

However, the actor's representative Jennifer Allen later denied this, telling the Associated Press: 'Hes not moving out of the U.S.'

Keeping it simple: Matt dressed casually for the occasion, wearing a white T-shirt, boardshorts, flip flops and a baseball capShe played a downtrodden girl who was uncomfortable in her own skin in Muriel's Wedding.

But Toni Collette looked worlds away from her breakout role at the 25th anniversary screening of the much-loved Australian movie, dazzling in a low-cut maxi dress and leather jacket as she took to the red carpet.

The Little Miss Sunshine actress, 46, was radiant as she arrived for the special screening of the iconic film at the Walter Reade Theater in New York.

Not terrible! Toni Collette, 46, looked fabulous in a low-cut maxi dress and leather jacket as she took to the red carpet for the 25th anniversary screening of Muriel's Wedding in New York

Clearly happy to be celebrating the film that launched her career, the now Golden Globe winning actress teamed a boho floral dress with cowboy boots and edgy leather accessories.

Released in 1994, the classic film follows Collette's character Muriel Heslop from the fictional coastal town of Porpoise Spit, who is obsessed with ABBA and sees marriage as a way of validating her self-worth.

But the Wanderlust star looked a long way from Porpoise Spit and was every inch the Dancing Queen on the red carpet with long wavy locks, sparkly accessories and a megawatt smile.

A long way from Porpoise Spit! The Wanderlust star looked radiant on the red carpet with long wavy locks, sparkly accessories and a megawatt smile

The actress, who has been married to musician Dave Galafassi since 2003, with whom she has daughter Sage, 11, and son Arlo, seven, has previously said what a significant impact the iconic film had on her career.

In an interview with Stellar in May 2018, Toni said she was thankful for her hilarious lead role as the socially awkward singleton and what it continues to give her career.

'Those doors would never be opening now were it not for Muriel's Wedding,' she told the magazine.

Veteran actress: The Golden Globe winner has come a long way since starring as socially awkward singleton Muriel in the much-loved 1994 Aussie movie

The Blacktown-born actress also revealed she still gets stopped in the street by fans of the film who say 'you're terrible Muriel', more than two decades after it first hit the big screen.

She said that playing the repressed, underdog character who becomes an unlikely heroine changed her life.

'It's pretty incredible that a film has stayed with people on such a deep level,' she added.

Doors opening: The Aussie superstar has revealed what a significant impact the iconic film had on her career  and continues to have 25 years later

From Muriel's Wedding, Toni had a succession of roles that catapulted her into international superstardom.

These include films like The Sixth Sense, for which she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1999 and her United States Of Tara series, which earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in 2010.

The classic film, which famously features the music of ABBA, was turned into a musical by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2016 and Muriel's Wedding The Musical returns to Melbourne this month and Sydney in June this year.Arnold Schwarzenegger looked to be in good spirits in Los Angeles on Thursday after he was heavily critical of President Donald Trump amid his recent attacks on his friend, the late Sen. John McCain.

The Hollywood action hero, 71, headed for a touch-up at a nail salon donning an all-black outfit of a t-shirt, sweatpants and sneakers, sporting freshly-dyed dark brown hair set against a graying beard he's growing.

The Terminator star toted a silver tablet at the establishment, where it seemed he received a pedicure, as he was seen pulling his socks back on.

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He'll be back! Arnold Schwarzenegger, 71, looked to be a satisfied customer in LA Thursday after a touch-up at a nail salon. He was heavily critical of President Donald Trump amid his recent attacks on his friend, the late Sen. John McCain on Wednesday

The ex-California governor on Wednesday was critical of Trump amid his recent litany of remarks against the late Arizona senator, who died last August 25 after battling brain cancer.

Trump in the past week has inexplicably ranted about the late senator repeatedly on topics ranging from the senator's forwarding the Steele dossier to the FBI, to his historic vote against repealing Obamacare in July 2017.

On Thursday Trump told Fox Business, 'Im not a fan of John McCain ... he was horrible what he did with repeal and replace. What he did to the Republican Party, and to the nation, and to sick people that could have had great health care, was not good.'

Schwarzenegger on Wednesday told The Atlantic he could not let Trump's ongoing remarks pass without responding, telling the publication they were a disgrace.

Strapping: Schwarzenegger wore an all-black outfit of a t-shirt, sweatpants and sneakers, sporting freshly-dyed dark brown hair, set against a graying beard he's growing

Happy: The Terminator star toted a silver tablet as he smiled leaving the establishment

Kind words: Schwarzenegger said Americans 'will be lucky if everyone in Washington followed McCain's example, because he represented courage'

'An attack on him is absolutely unacceptable if he's alive or dead - but even twice as unacceptable since he passed away a few months ago,' Schwarzenegger said. 'I just think it's a shame that the president lets himself down to that kind of level.'

Calling McCain 'just an unbelievable person,' Schwarzenegger said Americans 'will be lucky if everyone in Washington followed McCain's example, because he represented courage.'

The bodybuilding icon - sarcastically - suggested that Trump, during his morning workouts, should focus his energies on issues like immigration reform and infrastructure instead of bashing McCain.

'I know he must be working out every day, because he's so unbelievably in shape.'

Yukking it up: Arnold sarcastically suggested that Trump - during his morning workouts - should focus his energies on issues like immigration reform and infrastructure instead of bashing McCain

Everyman: The A-list actor is often seen taking care of chores around the Santa Monica area

Sock it to ya: It seemed he received a pedicure, as he was seen pulling his socks back onThey're one of the hottest Hollywood couples, and even recently launched their very own fitness app.

And Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky showcased their impressive physiques while setting up a makeshift shower during a camping trip in Western Australia earlier this month.

Spanish beauty Elsa, 42, put on a busty display in a white bikini before a shirtless Chris showed off his rippling abs in a video that Elsa posted online on Thursday.

White hot! Elsa Pataky showcased her impressive physique during a camping trip in Western Australia earlier this month

'Happy days,' Elsa said in the clip as she soaked up the ocean view from their tent.

She then shared a video of Chris, 35, refilling a shower bag, again while shirtless.

The Thor star could then be seen cuddling up to a wallaby in an adorable video.

Not a bad view! She then shared a video of Chris, 35, refilling a shower bag while shirtless

Thor blimey: Chris showcased his washboard abs

Making furry friends: The Thor star could then be seen cuddling up to a wallaby in an adorable video

Elsa also shared footage of the couple trying a 'warm-water sea urchin' for the first time, which left the Hollywood actor 'disgusted' by the taste.

The pair - who are based in Byron Bay in Northern NSW - certainly lived up to their down-to-earth reputation this month as they roughed it in tents with little water and no wifi or phone signal during a mini break with friends and family.

Too funny! Elsa also shared footage of the couple trying a 'warm-water sea urchin' for the first time, which left the Hollywood actor 'disgusted' by the taste

Elsa gushed about their trip online, writing earlier: 'We feel so lucky to have been able to go on an incredible trip to WA (Western Australia), a beautiful place with amazing people.'

'We were able to connect with our kids, partners and friends in deeper, different ways. Without the stress of routine, without agendas, plans or luxuries.'

'Just beaches, shells, surf and games around the camp fire. I feel very fortunate.'Priyanka Chopra revealed that Nick Jonas cried the most when they got married in December during a chat show appearance.

The 36-year-old actress during an episode of Watch What Happens Live on Thursday was grilled in a segment dubbed Wedding Tells! by host Andy Cohen, 50, about their nuptials.

'Who cried the most during the vow exchanges?,' Andy asked Priyanka who rocked a black dress with silver polka dots and a sheer top.

Wedding tales: Priyanka Chopra shared details about her wedding in December to Nick Jonas during an appearance Thursday on Watch What Happens Live

'Nick,' Priyanka replied.

Andy also asked which of Nick's brothers, Kevin and Joe, gave the better wedding gift.

'Well, the good thing is that Kevin gave us like 100s of bottles of wine and Joe got us an amazing fridge which looks like a car to put it all in. It kind of worked out,' Priyanka said.

Andy also asked how Nick, 26, reacted when he saw Priyanka in her Ralph Lauren wedding gown for the first time.

Newlywed star: The 36-year-old actress wore a black dress with sheer top for her visit to the Bravo clubhouse in New York City

The host: Andy Cohen, 50, grilled Priyanka about her wedding to 26-year-old Nick

'He cried,' Priyanka said.

She admitted that she also cried when seeing him after having a 'freakout moment' right before walking down the aisle.

Priyanka said she was 40 minutes late and dealing with a 75-foot train.

The guests: Willie Geist joined Priyanka in the Bravo clubhouse

'I'm doing like a full freakout moment but then that door opened and I saw his face,' Priyanka said as she made a crying motion.

A caller named Michael from Philadelphia also asked Priyanka if the rumors were true that she was upset that Meghan Markle, 37, skipped her wedding to Nick.

'No, it's not true,' said Priyanka, who was promoting her new YouTube series If I Could Tell You Just One Thing that will premiere March 27.

Freakout moment: Priyanka revealed that she had a 'full freakout moment' right before walking down the aisle

She also was asked about her involvement in the development of the Wild Wild Country documentary into a feature film and if she had met former Rajneesh movement spokeswoman Ma Anand Sheela yet.

Priyanka said she hadn't met Sheela, 69, yet, but wanted to play her in the movie that she was developing with Barry Levinson, 76.

'It's far away right now, but hopefully it will happen,' Priyanka said.

Film project: The actress said she wants to portray Ma Anand Sheela in a film project under works with Barry Levinson to make a movie out of the Wild, Wild Country documentary

Documentary subject: Ma Anand Sheela, shown in a 1985 mugshot, was a key figure in the Wild Wild Country documentary and Priyanka said she wants to play her in a film being developedHe was recently denied entry to a swanky Sydney bar due to his extensive neck and arm tattoos.

But Rhyce Power proved he was undeterred by the backlash on Thursday, as he proudly showed off his latest inking - a giant floral-patterned tattoo on his scalp.

The 27-year-old - who is the brother of Married At First Sight's Jessika Power - gave his followers a 360-degree view of the body art in an Instagram clip.

Tatt's a bold look! Married At First Sight's 'hot brother' Rhyce Power showed off his HUGE scalp inking during a workout... after being refused entry to a bar due to his extensive body art

He captioned the clip: 'First session done and wow I've never pushed like this before, can't wait to see what these eight weeks bring.'

The part-time model first unveiled his new scalp tattoo in a video shared to Instagram on Wednesday.

The confronting footage showed Rhyce getting an extensive inking above his ear on the right side of his head.

Flower power? The part-time model, who is the brother of Married At First Sight star Jessika Power, took to Instagram on Wednesday to unveil his new scalp tattoo

In the video, Rhyce is shown getting the tattoo at a parlour in Thailand, where he is currently enjoying an extended vacation.

He captioned the footage: 'Nah can't feel it hey.'

The former carpenter later shared a photo of the finished design: a multi-layered flower which blends into an angular 3D pattern on the back of his head.

'Can't feel it': In the video, Rhyce is shown getting the tattoo at a parlour in Thailand, where he is currently enjoying an extended vacation

The latest addition joins the large lotus flower already tattooed on Rhyce's neck.

His extensive collection of body art also includes a fierce-looking demon head on his throat and a tribal design on his left arm.

Rhyce's new inking is unlikely to improve his reputation among security staff at Sydney's more upmarket nightclubs, however.

The finished product: Rhyce later shared a photo of the completed design: a multi-layered flower which blends into an angular 3D pattern on the back of his head

Earlier this month, he was refused entry to the swanky Double Bay bar Pelicano after bouncers disapproved of his tattoos.

'Security didn't like the look of his neck and arm tattoos and he didn't have anything to cover them up - so he got denied by security,' a source told The Daily Telegraph.

Rhyce had been on a night out with Bachelor in Paradise star Eden Schwencke when he was blocked from entering the venue.

Inked: Rhyce's extensive collection of body art includes a fierce-looking demon head on his throat and a tribal design on his left arm







Alessandra Ambrosio looked as stylish as ever when she was glimpsed this Thursday fueling up her Range Rover at a Malibu gas station.

The 37-year-old former Victoria's Secret Angel slipped into a gleaming cream sleeveless top with flared-hem high-waisted MOTHER jeans.

Letting her wavy hair down, she accessorized with a colorful striped wrap and a pair of sunglasses, lending herself a bit of extra stature on sky-high stilettos.

Fab: Alessandra Ambrosio looked as stylish as ever when she was glimpsed this Thursday fueling up her Range Rover at a Malibu gas station

That same day, the Brazilian bombshell swung by a Malibu brunch thrown by local jeweler Jacquie Aichie to launch a new line.

She had swept off her jacket and gathered her hair into a bun when she was seen smiling and mingling with her fellow partygoers.

Alessandra herself has collaborated with her sister Aline Ambrosio and pal Gisele Coria to launch a new swimwear line called GAL Floripa.

The look: The 37-year-old former Victoria's Secret Angel slipped into a gleaming cream sleeveless top with flared-hem high-waisted MOTHER jeans

The new clothing brand takes its title from a nickname for Florianopolis, the Brazilian city where Alessandra gave birth to both of her children.

Ale, as her fans affectionately call her, is currently in a relationship with Italian hunk Nicolo Oddi, who founded the fashion brand Alanui with his sister Carlotta.

Last year, Alessandra broke her decade-long engagement to RE/DONE founder Jaime Mazur, with whom she shares two children - Anja, 10, and Noah, six.

In demand: That same day, the Brazilian bombshell swung by a Malibu brunch thrown by local jeweler Jacquie Aichie to launch a new line

Neither Jamie nor Alessandra, who got engaged in 2008, publicly confirmed the breakup reports when they surfaced last March.

A source had gossiped to Us Weekly that the pair were 'trying to keep their split on the down low, but Alessandra has been out and about ready to mingle and hasnt been taking Jamie to anything.'

Alessandra, who walked a Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in Miami Beach roughly three months after delivering Anja, has been with Nicolo for months now.Courteney Cox warmly reunited with her former Cougar Town co-star Busy Philipps on Thursday's episode of her E! late night talk show Busy Tonight.

The duo played divorcee Jules Cobb and her employee Laurie Keller in the Florida-set sitcom, which ran for six seasons across two networks (ABC and TBS) between 2009-2015.

However, the 54-year-old Golden Globe nominee humorously had no recollection of meeting the 39-year-old host at her first audition.

Hey girl! Courteney Cox warmly reunited with her former Cougar Town co-star Busy Philipps on Thursday's episode of her E! late night talk show Busy Tonight

Castmates: The duo played divorcee Jules Cobb and her employee Laurie Keller in the Florida-set sitcom, which ran for six seasons across two networks (ABC and TBS) between 2009-2015

'I do not Busy because I have a terrible memory,' Courteney apologized.

'So on Cougar Town, you have the memory. And on Friends, Jennifer [Aniston] does, so I have to rely on you two.'

The pink-haired presenter got emotional recalling that time, gushing: 'It was a really special job and part of the reason was you're such a special person and you really made it that way for everyone.'

Cox then revealed she met her on/off fiance - Snow Patrol guitarist-keyboard player Johnny McDaid - when he attended one of her weekly Sunday Suppers in 2013.

Ouch! However, the 54-year-old Golden Globe nominee humorously had no recollection of meeting the 39-year-old host at her first audition

Courteney apologized: 'I do not Busy because I have a terrible memory. So on Cougar Town, you have the memory. And on Friends, Jennifer [Aniston] does, so I have to rely on you two'

The pink-haired presenter got emotional recalling that time, gushing: 'It was a really special job and part of the reason was you're such a special person and you really made it that way for everyone'

'I met my boyfriend, my partner because Ed Sheeran came over on a Sunday,' the Alabama-born brunette confirmed.

On top of the 42-year-old Irish musician in her 8,000-square-foot Malibu home, Courteney revealed she forces her 14-year-old daughter Coco to take piano lessons.

'I make Coco take piano because she does have such a beautiful voice that I think she should have an instrument to go along with it,' the ex-wife of David Arquette explained.

'And it's torture for her, but she has to do it. It's the one thing I make her do...I play piano too a little. I mean, yeah, I get nervous when people are watching, but yes!'

Still going strong! Cox then revealed she met her on/off fiance - Snow Patrol guitarist-keyboard player Johnny McDaid - when he attended one of her weekly Sunday Suppers in 2013

The Alabama-born brunette confirmed: 'I met my boyfriend, my partner because Ed Sheeran (R) came over on a Sunday' (pictured February 17)

'She does have such a beautiful voice!' On top of the 42-year-old Irish musician in her 8,000-square-foot Malibu home, Courteney revealed she forces her 14-year-old daughter Coco to take piano lessons (pictured March 11)

The ex-wife of David Arquette explained: 'I think she should have an instrument to go along with it. And it's torture for her, but she has to do it. It's the one thing I make her do'

Casually clad: Cox opted to wear a black blazer over a matching scoopneck top and faded black skinny jeans selected by stylist Maryam Malakpour

Face-plumping fillers 'dissolved'? The former Bruce Springsteen video vixen's suspiciously smooth complexion came courtesy of microneedling and laser treatments like Clear + Brilliant

Cox opted to wear a black blazer over a matching scoopneck top and faded black skinny jeans selected by stylist Maryam Malakpour.

The former Bruce Springsteen video vixen's suspiciously smooth complexion came courtesy of microneedling and laser treatments like Clear + Brilliant.

In 2017, the SAG Award winner claimed to New Beauty she had all her face-plumping fillers 'dissolved,' but she still receives weekly facials from aesthetician Mila Moursi.

The Two Sides director narrates and produces the 20-part fertility docuseries 9 Months with Courteney Cox, which streams Tuesdays and Wednesdays on Facebook Watch.The pair were involved in a fracas late last year, when Danielle Bregoli pegged a drink at rival rapper Iggy Azalea at a Fashion Nova event.

And it appears the feud between the 28-year-old Australian and the 15-year-old American performers has continued.

Fans took to Twitter this week to claim that a character in Iggy's new music video, Sally Walker, is based on the teenager.

'Did she just run Bhad Bhabie over?' Fans took to Twitter this week to claim Iggy Azalea (pictured) has hit out at 'Cash Me Outside' girl Danielle Bregoli in new single Sally Walker

An actress wearing a similar high ponytail and clothing style to the rapper, who goes by the moniker Bhad Bhabie, is killed at the start of the video.

Hit by a car, the girl bleeds on the floor while another character states, 'Red is her colour' - believed by some fans to be a reference to Danielle's dyed ginger hair.

One fan Tweeted: 'Hold up... I think Iggy Azalea is throwing shade with her #SallyWalker video at @BhadBhabie. If you guys recall, Bhad Bhabie threw a drink at Iggy back in November'.

At war: The pair were involved in a fracas late last year, when Danielle Bregoli (pictured) aka Bhad Bhabie, pegged a drink at rival rapper Iggy a at a Fashion Nova event

Who's that girl? Fans took to Twitter this week to claim that a character in Iggy's new music video, Sally Walker, is based on the teenage Danielle

Even Danielle got involved, re-Tweeting a music review that called Iggy: 'a low rent Bhad Bhabie' and added her own comment, saying the article has: 'the right idea'

Another weighed in: 'So we're just going to act like @IGGYAZALEA didn't run Bhad Bhabie over in the beginning of the #SallyWalker music video...Alright cool'.

Yet one more wrote: 'Rumour has it that #SallyWalker is Bhad Bhabie. I mean "at least red is her colour". #IggyAzalea'.

Even Danielle got involved, re-Tweeting a music review that called Iggy, 'a low rent Bhad Bhabie' and added her own comment, saying the article has: 'the right idea.'

The feud between the pair began when Danielle threw a drink in her face during an ugly nightclub showdown.

Lookalike? An actress wearing a similar high ponytail and clothing style to the rapper, who goes by the moniker Bhad Bhabie, is killed at the start of Iggy's Sally Walker video (pictured)

Is that her? Hit by a car, the girl bleeds on the floor while another character states, 'Red is her colour'

Lookalike: The fashion style of the Sally Walker character and the reference to red being her colour is believed by some fans to be a reference to Danielle's dyed ginger hair. Danielle is pictured in 2019

In November, Cardi B's Fashion Nova event descended into chaos, when Iggy was drenched by a drink thrown at her by Danielle.

In footage taken at the Los Angeles event, the teen threw a full glass of water at the Fancy hitmaker.

Both rappers' entourages then appeared to clash during the ugly scene at the fashion event.

Danielle went on to make negative remarks about her blonde rival while on stage at a concert.Pete Davidson was the man in black Thursday while taking a stroll in the Venice area of Los Angeles.

The 25-year-old comedian wore a black hoodie along with black sweatpants while walking on trendy Abbot Kinney Boulevard.

The Saturday Night Live star added a pop of color with pink socks and finished his casual outfit with fresh white sneakers.

Solo stroll: Pete Davidson was spotted Thursday going for a solo stroll in the Venice area of Los Angeles

Pete accessorized with black sunglasses and talked on his cell phone while out and about.

The comic and Kate Beckinsale, 45, earlier this month went public with their romance.

The couple made things official when they were spotted together March 3 at a New York Rangers game in New York City.

Pete was engaged last year to pop star Ariana Grande, 25, but they called it off and split last October.

Black outfit: The 25-year-old comedian wore a black hoodie and matching sweatpants

The New York City native attended the Hollywood premiere of The Dirt on Monday at ArcLight Hollywood.

The biographical musical comedy-drama tells the story of notorious rockers Motley Crue.

Pete portrays Geffen Records executive Tom Zutaut in the movie released Friday on Netflix.

Busy star: Pete walked and talked on his cell phone while spending time on trendy Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice

The Dirt features Douglas Booth as Nikki Sixx, Iwan Rheon as Mick Mars; Machine Gun Kelly as Tommy Lee and Daniel Webber as Vince Neil.

Pete also has a role in the upcoming crime comedy movie Going Places written, directed and starring John Turturro, 62.

Going Places is both a remake of the 1974 French film of the same name and a spin-off to the 1998 cult film The Big Lebowsky by the Coen Brothers.

The Coen Brothers granted John the right to use his Jesus Quintana character in the spin-off, but they are not involved in the production.

New couple: Kate Beckinsale and Pete are shown earlier this month in New York City as they went public with their romance at a New York Rangers game



Hitesh Patel was apprehended by law enforcement officials of Albania in Tirana on March 20, say officials.

"Patel is an accused in the case and is the brother-in-law of the main accused in the case, the Sandesara brothers (Nitin and Chetan Sandesara). He is expected to be extradited to India soon," officials said.

New Delhi: Hitesh Patel, an accused in a case related to Rs 8,100 crore alleged bank loan fraud by Sterling Biotech group, has been detained in Albania on the basis of an Interpol notice issued by the Enforcement Directorate, officials said on Friday.

They said Hitesh Narendra Patel was apprehended by law enforcement officials of Albania in Tirana on March 20.

"Patel is an accused in the case and is the brother-in-law of the main accused in the case, the Sandesara brothers (Nitin and Chetan Sandesara). He is expected to be extradited to India soon," officials said.

The Enforcement Directorate had ensued an Interpol red corner notice against him on March 11.

They said Patel was instrumental in getting dummy directors for shell companies used by Sandesaras.Rumors have been swirling about their relationship being on the rocks.

But Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott were spotted out with one-year-old daughter Stormi Webster for the first time on Thursday since the cheating scandal, in video obtained by TMZ.

The trio went to Sweet Chick in Los Angeles for a family dinner.

Frosty: Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott were spotted out with one-year-old daughter Stormi Webster for the first time on Thursday since the cheating scandal, in video obtained by TMZ. The couple seen here in February 2019

The family outing comes amid suspected cheating on the part of the Astroworld artist.

Kylie was still dealing with 'serious trust issues' after finding suspect text messages from her rapper beau last month.

The cosmetics capitalist found incriminating texts from her beau to another woman after becoming suspicious following ex best friend Jordyn Woods' betrayal.

Curve model/Kylie BFF Woods turned Jenner's world on its head in February when it was revealed she made out with Kylie's sister-in-law Khloe Kardashian's baby daddy Tristan Thompson.

However the family meal indicated that tensions may be thawing between the pair, who have been dating since April 2017.

'Trust issues': Kylie was still dealing with 'serious trust issues' after finding suspect text messages from her rapper beau last month

She juggles life as a mother to daughter Stormi with her billion-dollar make-up empire.

And Kylie Jenner opened up about parenthood and her prosperous career as she graced the cover of Interview Germany's Spring/Summer 2019 issue with a racy spread, shot by acclaimed photographers Luca and Alessandro Morelli.

In the candid discussion, the TV personality, 21, detailed whether she'll let her 13-month-old appear on her reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians in the future, and slammed critics who lament her 'self-made' billionaire status.

Candid: Jenner opened up about parenthood and her prosperous career as she graced the cover of Interview Germany 's Spring/Summer 2019 issue, shot by acclaimed photographers Luca and Alessandro Morelli

The make-up mogul rose to prominence on the E! hit series alongside the Kardashian/Jenner clan; Kourtney, 39, Kim, 38, Khloe, 34, Rob, 32, and Kendall, 23.

And while her early beginnings were documented on TV, Kylie has revealed her daughter Stormi will be the one to decide whether she'll want to appear on the small screen in the future.

The brunette, who shares her only child with rapper beau Travis Scott, shared: 'I am going to wait until she is old enough to make that decision for herself.'

Reality star Kylie also detailed her thoughts on growing her family: 'I do want more kids but I do not have any plans in the near future to have children right now.'

Doting mother: The TV personality, 21, detailed whether she'll let her 13-month-old appear on her reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians in the future, and slammed critics who lament her 'self-made' billionaire status

Different route: While her early beginnings were documented on TV, Kylie has revealed her daughter Stormi will be the one to decide whether she'll want to appear on the small screen in the future

Earlier this month, the brunette bombshell faced criticism when she was announced as Forbes' youngest self-made billionaire of all time through her make-up range Kylie Cosmetics.

The title was previously held by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who became a billionaire aged 23.

Defending her new status, Kylie defiantly said: 'Theres really no other word to use other than self-made because that is the truth. That is the category that I fall under.'

Famous faces: The make-up mogul rose to prominence on the E! hit series alongside the Kardashian/Jenner clan; Kourtney, 39, Kim, 38, Khloe, 34, Rob (not pictured), 32, and Kendall, 23 (together with mother Kris Jenner in 2014)

Family first: The brunette, who shares her only child with rapper beau Travis Scott, shared: 'I am going to wait until she is old enough to make that decision for herself.'

Feeling broody? Reality star Kylie also detailed her thoughts on growing her family: 'I do want more kids but I do not have any plans in the near future to have children right now'

She's a boss: Earlier this month, the brunette bombshell faced criticism when she was announced as Forbes' youngest self-made billionaire of all time through her make-up range Kylie Cosmetics

The Los Angeles native went on to admit she had an advantage with her platform following the success of KUWTK.

She expressed: 'Although, I am a special case because before I started Kylie Cosmetics, I had a huge platform and lots of fans.

'I did not get money from my parents past the age of 15. I used 100% of my own money to start the company, not a dime in my bank account is inherited and I am very proud of that.'

Alongside the discussion, Kylie displayed her modelling prowess as she dazzled in a series of sizzling ensembles, styled by Brett Alan Nelson.

Defiant: Defending her new status, Kylie said: 'Theres really no other word to use other than self-made because that is the truth. That is the category that I fall under.'

'I am a special case': The Los Angeles native went on to admit she had an advantage with her platform following the success of KUWTK

Alongside the discussion, Kylie displayed her modelling prowess as she dazzled in a series of sizzling ensembles, styled by Brett Alan Nelson

Commanding attention: The daughter of Kris and Caitlyn Jenner maintained her vampy vixen look as she slipped into a red latex boydsuit and a matching wide brim hat, which she tilted to one side

The daughter of Kris and Caitlyn Jenner maintained her vampy vixen look as she slipped into a red latex boydsuit and a matching wide brim hat, which she tilted to one side.

Proving to be every inch the style chameleon, the Life of Kylie star enhanced her killer curves in a clingy black corset, before switching into a feline print number.

She exuded Old Hollywood Glamour in the hair department as her glossy tresses were styled into glamorous waves by Cesar Deleon Ramirez at The Wildform.

Opting for her trusted make-up artist Ariel Tejada, Kylie accentuated her striking features with lashings of mascara, matte red lipstick and heavily-applied blush.

Kylie's spread with Interview Germany's Spring/Summer 2019 issue is available here.Trial By Kyle was the breakout show of Channel Ten's Pilot Week last year.

And now the show's production has given some financial incentives for fans to audition for a role in the show's upcoming debut season.

An advertisement listed on Star Now reveals it's 'seeking people with real disputes' and states 'contributors will receive $500 for appearing on the show'.

A valuable argument! A Trial By Kyle application call-out published on Friday offers a $500 appearance fee, interstate travel and payouts of up to $1500 to appear on the show. Pictured: Host Kyle Sandilands

Other incentives include paid travel, with the ad stating: 'Interstate travel will be organised.'

Payouts appear to be handled by the show also, with the ad reading: 'Any financial disagreements can be paid out, up to $1500.'

It's the second call-out for the Judge Judy style courtroom program.

An advertisement listed on Star Now reveals it's: 'seeking people with real disputes' and states 'contributors will receive $500 for appearing on the show.' Pictured: Kyle, co-host Anna Heinrich and the show's security guard

Host Kyle Sandilands took to his radio show earlier this year to put a call out to his listeners, letting them know applications were open.

'What we're looking for, if you've got an issue or an argument with a relative, partner or anyone, and you need me to judge on it,' he explained.

'It doesn't matter what the situation is or who the person is that you want to take to court, bring them on the show!' he added.

Worth a shot! Other incentives include paid travel, and payouts up to $1500. Kyle is pictured on the show with girlfriend Imogen Anthony

In the show, Kyle will preside over disputes between two conflicting parties and make a determination based on the evidence presented.

He will be assisted by criminal lawyer and former Bachelor contestant Anna Heinrich who will analyse evidence and advise him on the legal issue of each case.

The pilot episode of Trial By Kyle was a success watched by 385,000 across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.

The show is expected to return mid 2019.He has a net worth of $30 million after establishing himself in Hollywood movies and huge television series.

Yet Colin Farrell was content with his 5 box of Ferrero Rochers when he left the afterparty of his latest movie Dumbo at Soho House, in London on Thursday.

The actor, 42, looked impossibly sharp in a grey suit as he went out onto the streets to greet his admiring fans and letting them snap selfies of him.

Chocolate addict: Colin Farrell left Dumbo bash triumphantly with his 5 Ferrero Rocher to hand on Thursday after 22.8m star shocked TV viewers by SWEARING

In the single box of Ferrero Rocher, Colin will be get 16 chocolate pieces made of whole hazelnut immersed in layers of crispy wafer and smooth chocolate.

Dumbo star Colin styled his spiky hair using gel and he pulled off a stubble look with his smouldering gaze.

The Hollywood star undid two of his buttons to tease a glimpse of his chest and he added a splash of colour with his red belt.

Delicious! In the single box of Ferrero Rocher, Colin will be get 16 chocolate pieces made of whole hazelnut immersed in layers of crispy wafer and smooth chocolate

Colin had a busy day in the British capital after he appeared on daytime television chat show Lorraine earlier in the day.

TV host Lorraine Kelly issued an apology on behalf of Colin after he shocked viewers by swearing live on air at 9am.

The TV presenter, 59, scolded the actor for saying a 'wee naughty word' moments after he accidentally made a foul-mouthed blunder.

Snapping pictures: The actor, 42, looked impossibly sharp in a grey suit as he went out onto the streets to greet his admiring fans and letting them snap selfies of him

Colin could be heard uttering 'horse s**t' candidly in an interview about his new movie, Dumbo, on Thursday morning's show.

Lorraine said: 'I just have to apologise about when Colin said a wee naughty word, some of you werent happy about that.'

She jokingly added: 'But what can we do, its live TV?!

Looking good: Dumbo star Colin styled his spiky hair using gel and he pulled off a stubble look with his smouldering gaze

The host's apology came after Colin was chatting about the new live action version of Disney classic Dumbo, with the star joking about working with kids and animals.

He said: 'They say don't work with kids and animals, but the days are more limited when you do. It's a story about family, forgiveness and sickness.

'I play a widower, my children have lost their motherbut it does it in such a gentle way that is accessible to a wide variety of audience. My character has to clean up horse s**t.'

He's a busy man! Colin had a jam-packed day in the British capital after he appeared on daytime television chat show Lorraine earlier in the day

Revealed: He has a net worth of $30 million which is the equivalent of 22,833,450 after establishing himself in Hollywood movies and huge television series

In July 2015, Colin's True Detective co-star Rachel McAdams revealed the actor had got her hooked on 'chocolate coconut chips' while filming season two of the show.

She told The Independent: 'Working with Colin was a delight. He would come to my trailer for a chat and a cup of tea every day. We got really into chocolate coconut chips.'

Colin also revealed his love of chocolate as well as pizza and cheeseburgers when he discussed the struggles of staying healthy and the desire to 'live as long as possible'.

Hands on: The actor signed away a number of autographs when he was bombarded with fans outside of the afterparty

Home time! The TV star was content with his 5 box of Ferrero Rochers when he left the afterparty of his latest movie Dumbo at Soho House

He told The LA Times in 2015: 'Part of it is fear-based and wanting to live forever. I would like to live as long as possible because I'm really enjoying being alive.

'And I want to watch my two boys grow up and observe them figuring out what kind of men they want to be. I do really enjoy yoga and practice as much as I can.

'And I love getting up and hiking the trails in Griffith Park or wherever. But I also love cheeseburgers and pizza and Philly cheesesteaks and chocolate and Mexican Coca-Cola, so green juice is about offsetting that, more than anything, and trying to create some balance. Really, I love everything trashy.'She celebrated her son Alfie's fourth birthday earlier this month.

And Catherine Tyldesley, 35, has revealed why she 'never takes chances' with her health now she's a mother.

The former Coronation Street star admitted she 'needs to ensure she's on the planet for as long as possible' to be there for her little boy, who she shares with personal trainer husband Tom Pitfield, 32.

Health: Catherine Tyldesley, 35, has revealed why she 'never takes chances' with her health now she's a mother to son Alfie, four

Speaking in an interview with MailOnline, she said: 'It's no longer just about me. I need to ensure that I am on this planet for as long as possible.

'I've always been quite in tune with my body but certainly since Alfie arrived I have got so much to live for.

'And I want to make sure I am in the best health I can be and have loads of energy because he's just an absolute fountain of energy. It's a lot of coffee!'

The actress, who is supporting the charity Ovacome during Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, said being in 'the best health' often means learning to trust your own instincts when it comes to your body.

Motherhood: The former Coronation Street star, four, admitted she 'needs to ensure she's on the planet for as long as possible' to be there for her little boy (pictured in March 2017)

She said: 'We had a family friend. She had ovarian cancer in her family and the doctors kept saying to her "Oh you're fine it's probably just IBS."

'By the time they actually listened to her it was too late'

After the death of her friend, Catherine says she's never taken any chances with her own health checks.

And when she faced a health scare of her own a couple of years ago over a troublesome smear test, she didn't hesitate to seek a second medical opinion.

'Basically I knew something wasn't right. My doctor was like, "Oh you're fine you're not due for another smear test" but it was really niggling me. And I thought "Do you know what? For the sake of 120 I am going to go private."

She said: 'It's no longer just about me. I need to ensure that I am on this planet for as long as possible' (pictured with Alfie as a baby and husband Tom Pitfield)

'I was fortunate enough to be able to afford to do that. I've said to my girlfriends if you've got a spare 120 lying around try to go once a year as opposed to once every three years. That new pair of shoes can wait.

'Its very hard to diagnose ovarian cancer so its even more important to be aware of the signs. I'm adamant with things like that. We know our bodies better than anybody.'

And the actress, who is the star of new Channel 5 drama 15 Days, also revealed she is 'very active' with Alfie, and tries her best to eat healthily at home.

She said: 'I love to bake and I find it really therapeutic. We try to do healthy versions of different cake which is really cool.

Smile: The actress said being in 'the best health' often means learning to trust your own instincts when it comes to your body

Family affair: And the actress, who is the star of new Channel 5 drama 15 Days, also revealed she is 'very active' with Alfie, and tries her best to eat healthily at home

'The boys love it and obviously I'm getting extra veg into Alfie. There's no refined sugars in there. It's still a treat. There's still natural sugar in there but they love it.

'I do a lot of my own recipes. I like to switch off by just experimenting in the kitchen. Sometimes it goes really wrong and sometimes we hit gold.'

She added: 'We love to do a lot of walking and we're very active with Alfie. We love the Lake District but if we want somewhere a bit closer we head up to Rivington in Lancashire. It's our go-to.'

Catherine, who has created a charity dress for Ovacome, said she hopes to get rid of the 'ridiculous stigma' and embarrassment around women getting their ovaries checked.

Taking time off: Catherine has been focusing on herself and her family - including toddler son Alife - since she decided to leave Coronation Street last year

She said: 'I think women are often very embarrassed to even talk things like having your ovaries checked. I really want to get rid of that ridiculous stigma.

'I think its really important to listen to your body and not to be embarrassed. We've all got these bits and pieces. All women have the same thing. The doctor has seen things a million times.

'It's about totally getting rid of that embarrassment for people.'

Catherine has been focusing on herself and her family - including toddler son Alfie - since she decided to leave Coronation Street last year.

Travel plans: The star recently laid out her plans to travel as a family with her husband and her young son

While she admitted she may make a return to the cobbles, the star recently laid out her plans to travel as a family with her husband and her young son.

She told Manchester Evening News: 'The timing seemed right. My son Alfie doesnt start at school for another two years so as a family we wanted the chance to travel.

'I have relatives in Australia, but we didnt want to go for just a couple of weeks, wed like to go over there and spend six weeks or more over there and then visit as many countries as possible.

'Tom and I had always talked about travelling and we are keen for Alfie to visit different cultures.'

She added: 'In between there will hopefully be some exciting projects for me as well.'

If you are concerned about ovarian cancer, contact Ovacomes Freephone support line on 0800 008 7054, or contact www.ovacome.org.ukBen Shephard was forced to apologise on Friday's Good Morning Britain after Susannah Constantine dropped the F-bomb at just 8am in the morning.

The presenter, 44, was left stunned after the What Not to Wear star, 56, had a slip of the tongue on live television.

Susannah was discussing how she sleeps in a separate bed because her husband, Sten Bertelsen, snores badly, when she muttered the F-word under her breath.

Scroll down for video

Whoops!: Ben Shephard was forced to apologise on Friday's Good Morning Britain after Susannah Constantine dropped the F-bomb at just 8am in the morning

She said: 'A good night's sleep is the bedrock for everything, Im a better wife, Im a better mother so sleep is the most important thing.

'I think the way we do it, and I totally get you with the anxiety thing, I find the anxiety is worse in the morning, I wake up in fear.

'I will go in our bedroom and we will have a cuddle, when we go on holiday we always sleep together, but also it's work. If Im writing, Im up til two in the morning so I dont want to wake my husband up.'

F-bomb!: The presenter, 44, was left stunned after the What Not to Wear star, 56, had a slip of the tongue on live television

Hilarious!: Susannah was discussing how she sleeps in a separate bed because her husband, Sten Bertelsen, snores badly, when she muttered the F-word under her breath

She added: 'There's something about processing the day which we'll have that time together, we'll go to bed together and have a conversation and then Ill go off.

'We've been married for nearly 24 years so it was important for us, for our children to see that we were going to bed and now they're older they will understand that for f**k's sake...'

However, Ben was quick to address the slip of tongue, as he quickly added: 'Apologies to anyone who heard Susannah express herself like that too early in the morning.

'Apologies again if anyone was offended by Susannah's slip of the tongue!'

Important sleep: She said: 'A good night's sleep is the bedrock for everything, Im a better wife, Im a better mother so sleep is the most important thing.'

Snoring!: 'We've been married for nearly 24 years so it was important for us, for our children to see that we were going to bed and now they're older they will understand that for f**k's sake...'

Susannah and her husband Sten have been married for almost 25 years after tying the knot in 1995.

The couple have three children together - daughters Cece, 15, and Esme, 18, as well as son Joe, 20.

Only recently, Susannah appeared on Strictly Come Dancing, she was partnered up with Anton du Beke but they were the first duo to be eliminated from the hit BBC One show.

Funny!: However, Ben was quick to address the slip of tongue, as he quickly added: 'Apologies to anyone who heard Susannah express herself like that too early in the morning.'Their love story shaped history, and is well-known around the globe.

Yet Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's relationship might have some troubling times ahead in season three of ITV's hit show, Victoria.

Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes, 32, gave Lorraine a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what's to come in the show on Friday.

Drama: Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes teased rising tensions between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in ITV's hit show on Friday's edition of Lorraine

The actress, 32, began: 'As we come into series three there is a revolution in France and the King is overthrown and comes to England, spreading through Europe.

'Rife through England and the British Isles is this feeling of insecurity and I think the big question for Victoria is identity, because its all shes ever really known and if you take away her throne and her palace I think the big question is who is she?'

She went on: 'Victoria and Albert I think having very different minds, temperaments, personalities, Albert being very logical and Victoria being very temperamental and emotionally led, we see them kind of more separate than they were before theres definitely things that they cant seem to work out which causes a big marital rift, I suppose.'

Tension: Tom described Prince Albert as being 'older' and 'more confident', as he explained that 'both of them are culprits, and both of them are to blame for this tempestuous nature'

Tom described Prince Albert as being 'older' and 'more confident', as he explained that 'both of them are culprits, and both of them are to blame for this tempestuous nature' between them.

He added: 'Theres an obsession with one another for all the good things and the bad things, and theres something pure about that, even if it does have its negative sides. They kind of lent towards that at times in series two but this time theres barely any love really.'

While the tension between the royal couple might cause some distress for viewers, Jenna seemed to enjoy them as she said they were 'really fun to play'.

Oh dear: Jenna went on, 'We see them kind of more separate than they were before theres definitely things that they cant seem to work out which causes a big marital rift, I suppose'

Working through it: While Tom went on, 'This wasnt a marriage for position it was really something else, but I think that it's really being tested'

The Doctor Who star explained: 'Throughout her diaries, shes the one who would lose her head and lose her temper and say the worse thing in the world like a child in many, many ways and immediately regret it and is the one who is shamed and has to say sorry.'

While Tom went on: 'Theyre kind of distant, theyre clinging to the structure and fabric of their life for their duty, for their kids. It's not only for their children, but all their public duties, and [they have] a distant memory of the purity of their love. This wasnt a marriage for position it was really something else, but I think that it's really being tested.'

Challenges ahead: Tom went on, 'They have a distant memory of the purity of their love, this wasnt a marriage for position it was really something else'

Victoria is set to make its long-awaited return to UK screens on Sunday, after the last series concluded in October 2017.

The upcoming third outing will see the iconic Queen once again at odds with her husband Albert, as they face political upheaval thanks to the rise of the Chartists movement.

As the series will document Victoria's life, Jenna recently revealed that she will be recast as the series progresses to accurate portrays Victoria at a later age.

Speaking at a press event for the show's imminent third season, the actress also offered some insight into who she thinks should replace her.

Time for change: As the series will document Victoria's life, Jenna recently revealed that she will be recast as the series progresses to accurate portrays Victoria at a later age

'Theres going to come a point where I have to [to be recast]. The idea Ill be playing Victoria meeting Abdul is not really possible,' she admitted. 'But its going to be a hard thing to give over, especially as she gets older.

'[Victoria] is becoming much more like everything that shes kind of known for  her impatience and straightness and inability to hide how she feels.

'[Recasting] brings a lot of challenges and its hard as an actor  when youve taken it so far its hard to give it up.'

Asked who she would like to see take the reins, The Cry star Coleman answered: 'Theres lots of people. Helena Bonham Carter would be good, but shes busy right now. Olivia Colman was so good in The Favourite but shes busy too.'

Victoria returns on Sunday 24th March at 9pm on ITV.On Wednesday, James Packer cut a relaxed figure as he arrived in Miami.

The 51-year-old dressed casually as he arrived in the Floridian city on a flight, before boarding what appeared to be a yacht.

After his flight, he first disembarked from a black car before crossing the car park to reach what looked like a dock.

Relaxed: James Packer (pictured) cut a relaxed figure as he arrived in Miami on Wednesday

With an entourage in tow, James dressed down in a navy blue polo shirt and dark loose-fit jeans.

The casino magnate covered his face with sunglasses and had his dark hair cropped quite short.

James was flanked by a group of male friends or minders who trailed behind him as he boarded the boat.

Neat: The casino magnate covered his face with sunglasses and had his dark hair cropped quite short as he left a nearby car before heading for a dock where a boat waited

Company: With an entourage in tow, James dressed down in a navy blue polo shirt and jeans

Mates: The entire group wore matching black sunglasses as they strutted along

The men wore sunglasses and one of them carried a bag and a phone or walkie-talkie strapped to his belt.

With blue-green ocean in the background, James carefully held onto a bar as he steadied himself to board.

The appearance comes after the mining magnate was loosely linked to a Hollywood sex scandal recently.

Friends on deck: One of the men carried a phone or walkie-talkie strapped to his belt as they walked along the dock

All aboard: Ocean in the background, James carefully held onto a bar as he got on board what appeared to be a yacht

Married Warner Brothers chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara was accused of having an affair with British actress Charlotte Kirk, who he allegedly tried to land roles for in exchange for sex.

James, who is Charlotte Kirk's former partner, was thrown into the media storm when it was revealed he introduced the pair at the Hotel Bel Air in 2013 and unwittingly helped orchestrate the alleged rendezvous.

James Packer is not accused of any sexual impropriety.She was previously named Model Of The Year by the British Fashion Council.

And Georgia May Jagger proved she was worthy of the title as she rocked a stunning ensemble while enjoying a night out at Good Luck Bar in Los Angeles on Thursday.

The British beauty, 27, turned heads as she slipped her slender frame into a form-fitting mint and pink silk dress.

Style: Georgia May Jagger proved she was worthy of her Model Of The Year title as she rocked a stunning ensemble while enjoying a night out at Good Luck Bar in Los Angeles on Thursday

She showed off her edgy side by adding a black leather jacket and chunky Dr. Martens boots to her ensemble.

The blonde bombshell wore her hair in a side parting while showing off her natural radiance under a thin layer of makeup.

Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall's daughter finished off her look with a handful of rings while toting her belongings in a black handbag.

Beauty: The British beauty, 27, turned heads as she slipped her slender frame into a form-fitting mint and pink silk dress

Catwalk queen: Despite coming from famous parents Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, Georgia has gone on to forge a successful modelling career (pictured February 2019)

Despite making a name for herself in modelling, Georgia stressed the importance of taking 'wisdom' from her parents in an interview with The Evening Standard.

She told the publication in June 2016: 'I really look up to older people, and I like to take wisdom from my uncles, aunts, parents and grandparents.

'My grandma fell in love and married again later in life, so I always thought that was really inspirational; that it didn't always need to be that you settle down with one person and that's it.'

Family girl: She previously told Evening Standard about the importance of 'wisdom' from her parents and relatives

She recently confirmed he romance with with dashing restaurateur Louis Levy by sharing her first snap of them together on social media last month.

Besotted Georgia threw her arms around her new love's neck as she sat comfortably in his lap while Louis planted a kiss on her cheek for the snap.

A very smitten Georgia captioned the post: 'The best birthday present I got this year.'

Parisian-born Louis, 29, paid a visit to the blonde beauty for her birthday in London after travelling from his home in New York City.

The restaurateur part-owns the popular Mimi eatery in Greenwich Village.It is exactly ten years to the day since Jade Goody passed away from cervical cancer.

And the late Big Brother star's mother, Jackiey Budden, and former husband, Jack Tweed, appeared on Friday's Good Morning Britain to remember her.

However, it wasn't long until the grieving mother, 60, awkwardly clashed with Dr Hilary Jones as they discussed cervical screenings and the HPV vaccination.

Anniversary: Jade Goody's mother, Jackiey Budden, and former husband, Jack Tweed, appeared on Friday's Good Morning Britain to remember her ten years on from her death

While Jackiey went on to ask Good Morning Britain host Charlotte Hawkins 'who are you?' leaving her co-hosts Kate Garraway and Ben Shephard to jump in.

At the end of the interview, the 60-year-old guest pointed at Charlotte and remarked: 'Who are you?'

To which Kate quickly interjected with: 'This is Charlotte. The only reason she said that is because we knew Jackiey from back in the day.'

She added: 'You must have seen Charlotte from watching the show? That's very rude of us, sorry.'

Awkward: However, it wasn't long until the grieving mother, 60, asked Good Morning Britain host Charlotte Hawkins 'who are you?' leaving her co-host Kate Garraway to jump in

Feisty: While Jackiey went on to awkwardly clash with Dr Hilary Jones as they discussed cervical screenings and the HPV vaccination

Heartbreaking: It is exactly ten years to the day since Jade Goody passed away from cervical cancer (pictured in January 2009, two months before her tragic death)

With Jackiey replying: 'I feel so rude, sorry, we haven't been introduced. I see you, but no one introduced me to her.'

While earlier on during the interview Jackiey and Dr Hilary clashed over cervical screenings and the HPV vaccination.

Dr Hilary was expressing how important it was to get a screening and discussed how a home testing kit could be a way to get more women checked, as it avoids the embarrassment of seeing a doctor or nurse, with cervical cancer checks hitting a 20 year low.

To which Jackiey interrupted as she spoke about the HPV vaccination and said that boys can have the injection now as well to prevent the disease.

Who's that girl?: At the end of the interview, the 60-year-old guest pointed at Charlotte and remarked: 'Who are you?'

Quick!: To which Kate quickly interjected with: 'This is Charlotte. You must have seen Charlotte from watching the show? That's very rude of us, sorry.'

However, Dr Hilary quickly interjected as he said: 'You still need screening!' while Jackiey continued to speak about the vaccination.

With the television doctor adding: 'It protects against some of the viruses but women still need the screening!'

Jackiey went on to say: 'Its like a kick in the teeth. We are trying to fight it with Jades legacy... we cant have a smear test until we are 25 now, which is a liberty... there is not such thing as embarrassed. You cant be scared for five minutes. Its your life... dont be selfish!'

The 60-year-old went on to talk about the ten-year anniversary of Jade's death, she said: 'Its grand [to remember her]. Its amazing. Fans send me cards and letters, this morning I [got] five.

Clash: While earlier on during the interview Jackiey and Dr Hilary clashed over cervical screenings and the HPV vaccination

'When people say to me: "Ten years has gone so quick", I dont understand that because its every day for me. But what did get me was the 22nd of February. We were filming and I was like: "Oh my god, its their wedding day." I text [Jack]... I broke thinking that Jack and Jade, they got married but they never had a wedding life, they had one day.

'If she was here, life would be so different, I would have the kids, [Jack] would be at home with her, we would all be here together if she was alive now.'

While Jade's former husband Jack said: 'Its been difficult. I had a whole family, I had Bobby and Freddie, I know they wasnt my kids but I still see them as they was, I had Jackiey, Jade and then all of a sudden everything just got taken away. Jade got taken, the boys got taken and Jackiey yeah.... It was hard to deal with.'

On seeing Jade's sons, Bobby, 15, and Freddy, 14, who she had with ex Jeff Brazier, he added: 'Yeah, I mean, I have seen them in the last year...once. I dont blame Jeff... at the start I was getting myself into trouble... I was on a downward spiral. So I dont blame him at the start for doing what he done. He has let me see them now and do I speak to them on Instagram but they are quite far away from where I live.'

Upsetting: The 60-year-old went on to talk about the ten-year anniversary of Jade's death, she said: 'Its grand [to remember her]. Its amazing. Fans send me cards and letters, this morning I [got] five.'

Jack tied the knot with Jade in 2009 following a three year romance, just one month before her tragic death.

She had split from the father of her sons Jeff while she was pregnant with their youngest child in 2004, after two years together.

TV presenter Jeff has sole custody of the teenagers, who he raises with wife Kate Dwyer, and banned Jack from visitations when he ended up in prison.

Just one month after Jade lost her battle with cancer, Jack was sentenced to a 12-week jail term in April 2009 after being convicted of assaulting a taxi driver.

Heartbroken: While Jade's former husband Jack said: 'Its been difficult. Jade got taken, the boys got taken and Jackiey yeah.... It was hard to deal with.'

Hard to move on: Jack went on to admit he has found it difficult to move on and find love once again, he said: 'I did try and move on but I think I rushed into it... trying to find a replacement.'

Close: On seeing Jade's sons, Bobby, 15, and Freddy, 14, who she had with ex Jeff Brazier, he added: 'Yeah, I mean, I have seen them in the last year...once. I dont blame Jeff... at the start I was getting myself into trouble.' (pictured all together in 2008)

Jack went on to admit he has found it difficult to move on and find love once again, he said: 'I did try and move on but I think I rushed into it... trying to find a replacement. It didnt seem to work, it wasnt the right thing to do. That same feeling I had for Jade, I cant really feel that for anyone else. I dont think its the right thing to do, its not fair on the other person.'

To which Jackiey insisted: 'She would want you to [Jack], she would want you to. She would love Jack to be happy and have someone... she would like you to have children and be with someone. He could have been with [another] woman the day she died, she didnt care, she would like him to be happy and have a life.'

Smear tests help to prevent cervical cancer by checking the health of the entrance of the womb and detecting any abnormal cells, yet the screening rates are currently the lowest they have been for two decades as women are not attending the check ups.

Family: TV presenter Jeff has sole custody of the teenagers, who he raises with wife Kate Dwyer, and banned Jack from visitations when he ended up in prison (pictured together recently)She's just returned from her fourth sponsored trip of the year so far.

And Millie Mackintosh reunited with husband Hugo Taylor for a date night at London's Soho House on Thursday after jetting home from her luxurious break in Rovaniemi, Finland.

The former Made In Chelsea star, 29, slipped into faux leather trousers and a T-shirt with a colourful image of a snake as she emerged from the private members' club holding hands with the sunglasses entrepreneur, 32.

Date night: Millie Mackintosh reunited with husband Hugo Taylor for a date night at London's Soho House on Thursday after jetting home from her luxurious break in Rovaniemi, Finland

The reality TV personality completed her chic ensemble with a classic black blazer and delicate strappy stiletto heels.

Millie, who tied the knot with Hugo in June 2018, wore her brunette locks loose around her shoulders and finished off her look with a pair of statement silver earrings.

Hugo cut a more casual figure in jeans, a green checked shirt and a suede jacket as he made his way through Soho on their date night.

Millie had spent the week holidaying at the Arctic TreeHouse Hotel in Rovaniemi which costs a minimum of around 600 per night to stay.

Lovebirds: The former Made In Chelsea star, 29, slipped into faux leather trousers and a T-shirt with a colourful image of a snake as the couple emerged from the private members' club

She regularly treats fans to a glimpse of her lavish getaways, and Millie was keen to flaunt her jaunt to Finland with her followers by posing in the cabin against a snowy background on Monday.

The confident social media 'influencer' slipped her slender frame into a light blue, two-piece bikini on Instagram.

Millie accessorised her look with a pair of stylish heart-shaped shades and a baker boy style cap, along with a pair of grey snow boots.

In another snap she had shared to the page, Millie looked tanned, toned and glowing as she posed in front of a scenic hot tub.

She's no wallflower! The reality TV personality ensured to document her most recent trip to Finland with a sensational bikini snap on her Instagram page on Monday morning

Impressive: Millie had spent the week holidaying at the Arctic TreeHouse Hotel in Rovaniemi, Finland which costs a minimum of around 600 per night

Commanding attention, Millie's costume accentuated her physique and gave her 1.3million Instagram followers a glimpse of her perky derriere.

In another shot, the reality star posed in the same bikini while lying on a bed, with the caption: 'Missing my love @hugotaylorlondon (her husband Hugo Taylor)'.

In now expired Instagram stories, the blogger revealed she was at the stunning destination as part of a press trip.

But previous exotic getaways of Millie's have been thanks to companies gifting her the glamorous holidays.

Wow! In one Instagram story, the former Made In Chelsea star looked tanned, toned and glowing as she posed for an idyllic snap in front of a hot tub

Home sick: In another shot, the reality star posed in the same bikini while lying on a bed, with the caption: 'Missing my love @hugotaylorlondon (her husband Hugo Taylor)'

In January, Millie jetted on the second leg of her honeymoon with husband Hugo during which she thanked The Westin Maldives Miriandhoo Resort for 'hosting her'.

At the start of this year Millie was among 16 stars and influencers who had breached Advertising Standards Authority rules surrounding paid posts on Instagram.

The reality star is far from alone in having flouted advertising guidelines in this way as Instagram is often flooded with famous faces who promote products, arguably without making it clear they are being paid for the sponsorship.

That is why the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) conducted an investigation 'into concerns that social media stars are not properly declaring when they have been paid, or otherwise rewarded, to endorse goods or services'.

All the stars identified in the investigation, which began last August, agreed to change their ways.

Flexible: Millie often treats fans to a glimpse of her lavish getaways on social media

Under consumer protection law, influencers are required to clearly state if they have received payment for products they endorse - either in gifts, money, or by loan of the products.

Millie and Hugo tied the knot at his uncle's country estate and opted for a religious blessing as they had married formally at Chelsea's Old Town Hall in London three days prior to the celebration.

The couple originally dated in 2011 while on Made In Chelsea, but split up when it emerged he had cheated on Millie with her friend Rosie Fortescue, who attended their wedding alongside a bevy of other co-stars.

Millie and Hugo confirmed their reunion in May 2016 - the same week Millie's previous divorce was finalised - and he proposed during a holiday in Mykonos, Greece, in July 2017.

The reality star was previously married to rapper Professor Green, 35, real name Stephen Manderson, from September 2013 until they announced their separation in February 2016.Domestic traders' body CAIT on Wednesday criticised Congress chief Rahul Gandhi for his repeated statements on GST.

Traders are not annoyed with GST and instead are willing to adopt it in a cohesive manner, said CAIT in a letter to Rahul Gandhi. (Photo: File | ANI)

New Delhi: Domestic traders body CAIT Wednesday criticised Congress President Rahul Gandhi on his statement on GST, saying traders are not annoyed with the new indirect tax regime and instead willing to adopt it in a cohesive manner.

We have come across one of your statements made yesterday (Tuesday) at a rally that traders are suffering from GST and if you come to power, you will abolish Gabbar Singh Tax as called by you for GST.

As a representative body of business community of the country, we highly object your statement which is highly deplorable and far from facts and is being seen as an attempt by you to score points on shoulders of traders, Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) National Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said in a letter to Gandhi.

He said though in initial months of the GST implementation, traders faced several problems because of it being a new taxation system but with passing of time and subsequent steps taken by the government, it is being simplified to a greater extent.

The biggest relief from the goods and services tax (GST) is that it has relived traders from continuous Inspector Rule and lot of burden of complying the taxation system and paperwork, he added.

He also said Gandhis statement is highly deplorable and far from facts and is being seen as an attempt by you to score points on shoulders of traders.

We highly object that taking the shoulders of traders, you have called GST as Gabbar Singh Tax. It gives an impression that perhaps relaxations, amendments, simplification and lowering of tax rates are certainly not in your knowledge thats why you are saying that traders are suffering from GST which is certainly not the case, he said.It's been a dramatic week on the cobbles, with Rana Habeeb passing away after being crushed to death in the Underworld roof collapse.

And Coronation Street's Alison King headed to film scenes for the ITV soap in Manchester on Friday which will see her character Carla Connor go on the run following her factory's disaster.

Wrapped up in an ITV red padded coat, the actress, 46, looked downcast as she clutched an array of items including what appears to be a script.

Work: Coronation Street's Alison King headed to film scenes for the ITV soap in Manchester on Friday which will see her character Carla Connor face the music over her factory's disaster

The soap star was dressed in a casual ensemble which included dishevelled Converse trainers and a grey hoodie as she made her way to shoot scenes with Robert Preston, played by Tristan Gemmill, 51.

The characters will come face-to-face after Robert spots a guilt-ridden Carla n the floor as he makes his way into a hotel.

Robert and Carla will no doubt have a frosty exchange after Robert accused Carla of poisoning his now ex-fiancee Michelle against him.

The chef recently began a vendetta against the factory boss, firstly warning her last week to 'watch out' and then lurking nearby as Carla discovered her car window had been smashed.

Glum: Wrapped up in a red padded coat, the actress, 46, looked downcast as she clutched an array of items including what appears to be a script

Enemies: Alison was making her way on set to shoot scenes with Robert Preston, played by Tristan Gemmill, 51

Heart-wrenching: Rana Habeeb passed away this week, after she was crushed to death following the Underworld factory roof collapse

However, Robert is the least of Carla's troubles as she is set to get the blame for the factory roof collapse, after she cut corners in getting the roof repaired.

With her sister Kate Connor's fiancee Rana having died in the catastrophe, Carla is set to be overwhelmed with guilt in the coming weeks.

Opening up about Carla's impending breakdown after becoming Weatherfield's Public Enemy Number One, Alison recently explained: 'Its just too much, she sees what has happened and goes into meltdown.

'It is the final thing for her, the straw that finally breaks the camels back after everything she has gone through.

Trouble: Robert is the least of Carla's troubles as she is set to get the blame for the factory roof collapse, after she cut corners in getting the roof repaired

Down and out: The characters will come face-to-face after Robert spots a guilt-ridden Carla as he makes his way into a hotel

Guilty: Robert is the least of Carla's troubles as she is set to get the blame for the factory roof collapse, after she cut corners in getting the roof repaired

'More people are going to suffer and she believes it is because of her actions, everything has come tumbling down again and the worst thing ever has happened.

'She totally believes she is responsible for the accident because she didnt get the roof fixed.'

Adding of her character's downward spiral, she said: 'It is the breaking point, and she has a complete breakdown, it is cumulative of all the life trauma that has happened to her.

'She is that strong person who has carried on for too long and not asked for help or dealt with anything properly; her upbringing, finding her father, the rape, losing the baby, the disastrous relationships, the death of Aidan. She is at snapping point.'

Heartbroken: With her sister Kate Connor's fiancee Rana having died in the catastrophe, Carla is set to be overwhelmed with guilt in the coming weeks

Fans will know that Carla isn't entirely to blame for the accident, with a mystery culprit previously seen tampering with the roof - rendering it even more unstable.

As well as Carla herself, suspects include Robert, Carla's ex Peter Barlow and builder Gary Windass.

Teen Seb Franklin is also in the running, after vowing to get revenge on Gary after being sacked.

While Carla's other ex Nick Tilsley previously stated that he wouldn't mind if the factory burned down so that he could claim on the insurance.

But viewers will have to wait and see just who the culprit is.

Coronation Street continues on Sunday March 24 at 8pm on ITV.Diane Kruger has revealed she fell into 'such a dark place' after her separation from Joshua Jackson coincided with two family deaths.

The actress, 42, spoke candidly about her year of 'darkness and personal loss' in an interview with iNews, released on Friday.

The screen star admitted her victory at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 - where she won the accolade of Best Actress for her role in Fatih Akin's In the Fade - was bittersweet.

'There was a lot of darkness': Diane Kruger has revealed she fell into 'a dark place' after her split from Joshua Jackson coincided with two family deaths (pictured in September 2015)

She said: 'I was in such a dark place. I had two really close family deaths that year, I was separating from my partner of 10 years. There was just a lot of darkness and personal loss. Then the role was very dark.'

The mother-of-one, who had separated from Dawson's Creek star Joshua Jackson a year earlier, confessed winning the award for her German-language debut felt 'superficial' in light of what was going on in her personal life.

She said: 'There is something about grief and loss that lets you see how uncompassionate we are as a society, including myself. You watch TV and you become so numb to somebody else's misery.'

But the actress, who welcomed a daughter with the Walking Dead star Norman Reedus, 50, in November 2018, said her recent experience making new movie The Operative was much more positive - because she was pregnant at the time.

Loss: The actress, 42, spoke candidly about her year of 'darkness and personal loss' following the premiere of her latest work, The Operative, at the Berlin Film Festival last month (pictured)

She said: 'It was definitely a special experience being pregnant when filming. It will always be a special movie because of that; she is in every scene.'

And Diane went on to reveal her greatest role yet - motherhood - joking 'Let's not f*** that one up.'

The actress was married from 2001 to 2006 to French film star Guillaume Canet, who is now with Marion Cotillard, but the two never had children.

Diane was then in a decade-long romance with Joshua Jackson, 40, from 2006 to 2016.

'Let's not f**k that one up': Diane and The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus, 50, welcomed their daughter, whose name is not known, in November last year

Amicable: Diane and Joshua dated for 10 years before parting ways in 2016 (pictured together in September 2015)

The pair had been plagued by rumours of relationship problems in the months before their split, with Diane admitting she was 'unsure' of marrying again.

Diane and Norman were first seen together as a couple in July 2016 after first meeting when they starred together in the drama Sky in 2015.

In the movie, Diane played a character leaves her husband before hooking up with a cowboy stranger, played by the actor.

They welcomed their daughter, whose name is not known, in November last year.

Norman is also father to son Mingus, 19, with ex, model Helena Christensen, who he dated from 1998 until 2003.His ex Katie Price was in court this week, accused of yelling profanities at his new girlfriend Michelle Penticost.

But Kieran Hayler sided with the school teacher on his birthday on Friday, as they spent the night at a luxury spa in Sussex.

The couple shared a kiss outside the hotel after carrying their Louis Vuitton luggage bags to a car.

Kisses: Keiran Hayler was pictured kissing his girlfriend Michelle Penticost outside a luxury spa hotel in Sussex on his birthday this week

He'd spent his 32-year-old birthday luxuriating with new partner Michelle, who teaches at the same school that his children Jett, 5, and Bunny, 4, attend.

It's been a stressful week for Kieran, whose estranged wife pleaded 'definitely not' guilty to claims she confronted Michelle in the school playground last September.

Katie attended the Crawley Magistrates Court on Wednesday, her third court appearance this year, and will face trial at Horsham Magistrates on June 3.

Spa day: The duo were seen leaving the hotel after a weekend away to celebrate

Turmoil: Meanwhile, Kieran's ex Katie Price this week appeared in court accused of shouting at Michelle

The head teacher at a primary school in the West Sussex village of Shipley overheard an altercation between Katie and Michelle late last year.

Katie is accused of shouting 'Are you f***ing my husband?' at Michelle outside the school in front of shocked parents.

The model was criticised for failing to attend a hearing last week while she was on holiday with current boyfriend Kris Boyson.

Smooch: Katie was clearly siding with Michelle, who is a teacher at his children's school

Romantic: Michelle appeared to have treated her boyfriend to a special birthday outing

Going strong: It's been a stressful week for Kieran, after Katie denied the shocking showdown

On Friday, just as Kieran was celebrating his birthday, Katie cryptically condemned the betrayal that happened during her third marriage to Kieran.

In multiple now-deleted images, the mum-of-five suggested that she was trying to 'forgive and trust' someone who 'betrayed' her.

Many fans speculated that the individual in question was Katie's former best friend Jane Pountney, who had an affair with Kieran behind Katie's back.

Katie acknowledged that a relationship 'can never "go back" to the way it was', but offered hope to her former friend with the hope that it 'can go forward.'

Stand by your woman: Several teachers at the school reported overhearing the argument

Casual: The couple left the luxury hotel in matching casual attire on Friday

Kieran was accused of being unfaithful on more than one occasion during his marriage to Katie.

He had an affair with Jane as well as Katie's pal Chrissy Thomas back in 2014, just one year after his wedding to the model.

Katie also recently accused the former stripper of straying with the family nanny and a 19-year-old girl in their local Co-op.

Katie confirmed her split from Kieran, 32, in May, after months of attempting to save their marriage following his affair with the family nanny Nikki Brown.

Warring: Katie is accused of shouting 'Are you f***ing my husband?' at MichelleNeil Patrick Harris, 45, is fun loving both on the screen and off.

And when joined by his husband, David Burtka, 43, the pair make a dynamic party planning duo - which is what the couple dished about in their interview with Parade, published on Friday.

The lovebirds, who've been married since 2014, told the magazine that they're always finding new ways to entertain their friends and be social.

So icy: Neil Patrick Harris, 45, and husband David Burtka, 43, opened up about their love for throwing parties in an interview with Parade published on Friday, pictured here, the lovebirds jetted off to Iceland for a weekend trip

According to the pair, they strive to see life as a party, which is also ironically the name of Burtka's first cookbook, which comes out in April.

Burtka said, 'I think it's so important for us to be social and get together with friends. Life is a party when you have other people to celebrate with.'

For the two, who are the adoptive parents of 8-year-old twins, Harper and Gideon, seeing life as a party means throwing unique and detailed gatherings for their friends to enjoy.

Happy family: Neil and David captured a beautiful memory with their twins, Harper and Gideon, 8

In fact, the How I Met Your Mother principal once transformed their basement into a haunted maze for Halloween.

The thrilling night was pulled off so well, that Jane Krakowski, 50, called it, 'the scariest thing I've ever experienced in my life.'

And most recently, Neil also got the toe-headed twins in on the fun and threw their house into a disarray for St. Patrick's Day, blaming the mess on leprechauns, a prank the kids soaked up.

These crazy antics are stunts Harris' professional chef of a husband is always on board for, especially thanks to his upbringing in a large family in Dearborn, Michigan.



Uh oh! Neil Patrick Harris's kids Gideon and Harper were not pleased when they woke up to a mess filled home instead of catching a St. Patrick's Day leprechaun Saturday

What a mess: Neil recorded a video showing off the dismantled living room, which he claims leprechauns caused, for an exciting St. Patrick's day prank with the kids

'It was normal to go to a party for any reasona christening, a birthday,' Burtka explained.

'It was always a good timea celebration around food and drink. Everyone would chip in, and wed have fun, and thered be dancing and games. It was just a really great way to grow up.'

Since entertaining is such an important part of their lives, the two some have figured out exactly what each of their roles are in terms of planning.

Neil joked, 'David tells us what to do, and we follow suit. I say, Yes, chef, when Im in the kitchen, like were on some reality show. And I do all the dishes.'

DIY: David got crafty with his two little ones, putting his party planning skills to use in an Instagram Neil shared

The Dance Off actor is also a detailed list maker, which David admits is both part of the fun and part of what helps them execute successful nights.

'I think people are nervous that they cant do it. Theyre nervous they wont get it done in time,' the A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas star said.

To help out with that, David created 16 seasonal party plans with everything anyone needs to pull them off, included in his Life Is A Party cookbook.

From planning a timeline to menus and decorations to playlists, activities and party favors, David's book will cover it all ... even how to enjoy the process.

'Why throw a party if youre not going to have fun, right?' he chimed.

Burtka started his culinary career by attending Le Cordon Bleu in Los Angeles 10 years ago, which at the time, he thought would be just a quick break from acting.

However, one thing lead to another and he eventually created his own catering company and threw parties for Hollywood big wigs like Katy Perry, 34, and Christina Hendricks, 43.

All smiles: The family of four grinned widely into the cameras during a sunset family photo

The picture perfect pair have been together since 2004.

In 2010, they welcomed the twins via a surrogate and then married four years later in 2014.

The family currently resides in New York, after living in Los Angeles while Harris filmed HIMYM.Love Island star Wes Nelson was spotted for the first time with Lissy Roddy amid dating rumours two months after his split from Megan Barton Hanson.

The Dancing On Ice star, 21, and the Instagram model enjoyed a low-key date, in Manchester on Friday after claims they've been hanging out a lot in recent weeks.

They appeared to be close as the rumoured new couple were spied crossing the road together during their shopping trip.

Is it Love (Island)? Wes Nelson was seen for the first time with Instagram model Lissy Roddy amid dating rumours... two months after Megan Barton Hanson split

Love Island finalist Wes stayed true to his style in a biker jacket, black plain top and a pair of ripped jeans.

The reality star appeared to be mending his heartache after his devastating split from his ex-girlfriend Megan as he spent time with the stunning model.

Lissy stood out from the bustling Manchester streets in a bright red hoodie and she accessorised with a plaid handbag.

Is he moving on now? The reality star appeared to be mending his heartache after his devastating split from his ex-girlfriend Megan as he spent time with the stunning model

Cosy: They appeared to be close as the rumoured new couple were spied crossing the road together during their shopping trip

Dress sense: Love Island finalist Wes stayed true to his style in a biker jacket, black plain top and a pair of ripped jeans

Sources shared with MailOnline that the duo have been enjoying hanging out together in the early stages of dating.

Of the new couple, a source told MailOnline: 'They are just enjoying spending time together at present and isn't as serious yet as boyfriend and girlfriend.'

Rumours were circulating that the couple have started dating, just two months after his split from Megan Barton Hanson.

Pictured: Lissy stood out from the bustling Manchester streets in a bright red hoodie and she had a suitcase in tow

Big news: Rumours were circulating that the couple have started dating, just two months after his split from Megan Barton Hanson

A source told The Sun that the pair have grown 'inseparable' after first meeting at a fashion party in Dublin, and until not have kept their relationship under wraps.

It comes amid claims that Wes 'kissed' a mystery brunette while on a night out in Manchester last week, despite ex Megan claiming he vowed to give her his 'undivided attention.'

The source claimed that Wes met Lissy  real name Alicia  at the party thrown by Nasty Gal, with his co-star Josh Denzel acting as wing man for the encounter.

Could it last? Sources shared with MailOnline that the duo have been enjoying hanging out together in the early stages of dating

They added: 'Wes is having a really good time getting to know Lissy, they've been on some nice dates and they've been hanging out, going on shopping trips together and chilling at home.

'Lissy's the reason Wes was so adamant he wouldn't be getting back with Megan. She is absolutely stunning and he's one very happy man.'

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Wes Nelson and Alicia Roddy for comment.

A Banksy romance: The pair were both on their phones while they were on the move

Lissy is no stranger to flaunting her figure in scantily clad social media posts, and also boasts a staggering 600,000 followers on Instagram.

The model also posts videos on her Youtube channel, with makeup tips, must-have outfits and her favourite hairstyles.

These claims come after it was reported that Wes had been spotted cosying up to a mystery brunette last week while on a night out in Manchester.

The pair were reportedly seen 'kissing passionately' after the mystery girl approached Wes' table to say hello to the Dancing On Ice finalist, the Sun claimed.

The onlooker then claimed the brunette left with Wes and a group of his friends at the end of the night.

Not single anymore? Love Island star Wes has reportedly found love again, two months after his split from Megan Barton Hanson (pictured in London, January 2019)

Stunning: The hunk is reportedly dating Instagram model Lissy Roddy, after the pair met a party in Dublin, according to The Sun

Ab-tastic: Lissy - real name Alicia - also posts videos on her Youtube channel, with makeup tips, must-have outfits and her favourite hairstyles

But just days later, ex Megan claimed that Wes vowed to give her his 'undivided attention' in a birthday card, which she shared in pictures allegedly obtained by The Sun.

Inside the card, the Dancing On Ice finalist poured his heart out in a bid to win the blonde bombshell back and announced he was whisking her away to remote villa in Morocco for some 'alone time'.

Being honest about his feelings, he expressed how difficult their break-up had been on him.

He wrote: "...For the first birthday gift I have booked a remote villa trip for us in Morocco. It's completely out of the way so we have alone time.

'However the biggest thing I want to give you is my undivided attention from this day forth. Words really can't describe how much I love you. There's not been a minute of the day that I have not spent think about you.

Concluding: 'It's been so difficult doing the "normal" things we always do together. Once again we have "gravitated" back to each other. Love Wesley' (sic).

Controversial: It was also recently reported that Wes 'begged' ex Megan to take him back after he sent her a grovelling birthday card

Done: It was also claimed that Megan has 'grown sick of Wes's immaturity,' as he continues 'to act like a single man despite trying to win her back'

Previously, it was said that Megan was reportedly 'confused' by the situation - which stemmed from Wes' appearance on Loose Women at the time, where he shut down any hopes of the pair getting back together.

And now The Sun reports that Megan has 'grown sick of Wes's immaturity,' with the source adding that there was 'no way' Megan would take him up on his breakaway offer as he continues 'to act like a single man despite trying to win her back'.

Wes had previously vowed that he and Megan would never get back together last month.

Asked if there was a chance they could reconcile, he sighed: 'I don't think so, it's sad it is very sad.'

Done: Megan and Wes split in January six months after first meeting in the Love Island villa

Discussing their break-up, he reasoned: 'It's very difficult. Any person in the public eye knows, when your relationship is your career essentially. It was a lot of pressure, there was a lot of opinions.'

'We havent spoken in a good amount of time. Sometimes it's civil, sometimes it's not. I'm not a malicious person, I'm not bitter.'

Megan and Wes split in January six months after first meeting in the Love Island villa, which itself sparked a furore as their coupling left his former partner Laura Anderson heartbroken.

Their split came after Megan was embroiled in a so-called 'feud' with his Dancing On Ice professional partner Vanessa Bauer, claiming on social media she tactically split from her own partner as a publicity stunt.Piers Morgan has 'reported' Jameela Jamil's to the police on Twitter for 'mis-gendering' him amid their furious row about gender fluidity.

The row between the duo, which has been going on for over 24 hours, started earlier in the week with a disagreement about Sam Smith saying he doesn't identify as either a man or a woman.

Piers, 53, took to Twitter on Friday morning to after Jameela, 33, 'mis-gendered' him: '"This thing". Wow. On every level that is a shameful mis-gendering. Cc @metpoliceuk'.

Clash: Piers Morgan and Jameela Jamil's furious debate has escalated and seen the TV personality 'report' the actress to the police on Twitter

The tweet he was responding to came from the actress earlier on Friday: 'LOL. He thinks "honey" can only be used about females. How do we send this thing back in a time machine to the era in which it belongs...?'

MailOnline has contacted a representative for Piers and the Metropolitan Police.

The pair's Twitter row occurred after the Good Morning Britain host scoffed at Sam's recent revelation that he shifts between identifying as the male or female gender.

Furious: The row between the duo which has been going on for over 24 hours, started earlier in the week with a disagreement about Sam Smith's gender fluidity

Hitting back: Piers, 53, took to Twitter on Friday morning to after Jameela, 33, 'mis-gendered' him: '"This thing". Wow. On every level that is a shameful mis-gendering. Cc @metpoliceuk'

Bitter spat: The tweet he was responding to came from the actress earlier on Friday

Sharing a link to an article about the TV host's on air comments, Jameela made her thoughts on the matter very clear.

Sam had made the admission during Jameela's new I Weigh Interview series, while discussing what a 'non-binary' and 'genderqueer' identity meant to him.

The Good Place actress tweeted: 'LOL. Of course Englands biggest s**t stain has something mean to say about it.

'He thinks men who carry babies in a comfortable papoose where they can feel your body heat and pulse, arent manly. This clown spews constant toxic ideas of masculinity".'

Piers fired back: 'Appalling that you just assume I am identifying as male tonight.'

'Youre right, it is extraordinary I identify you as any kind of human being at all you giant pile of w**k', Jameela hit back.

Piers retorted, 'Id rather be w**k than woke, luv', prompting Jameela to reply with, 'Mission accomplished hun'.

The presenter then told her: 'Dont call me hun.

'I identify as male, but hun normally applies to a female (honey) which means you are mockingly mis-gendering me & thats now apparently a criminal offence in Britain.

Row: Sharing a link to an article about the 53-year-old TV host's on air comments, Jameela made her thoughts on the matter clear, but Piers had plenty to say back

Debate: Last week, Sam bravely admitted, 'You are just you. You are your own special creation. That is how I take it. I am not male or female. I think I float somewhere in between - somewhat on the spectrum'

'Unless you meant hun as a derogatory term for Germans in which case youre a racist.'

Jameela appears to have left the feud lie there, but Piers couldn't resist another retort.

Replying to a tweet supporting Jameela, he wrote, 'The only vile thing around here is your horrible click-baiting & Ms Jamils disgusting foul-mouthed abuse,' he wrote.

Outspoken: Jameela has been embroiled in various rows with celebrities over her views

The origin of the feud stems from Piers' comments on Tuesday's edition of GMB.

He told viewers: 'Sam Smith has announced hes gender fluid  he cant work out if hes male or female.

'Im now identifying as Sam Smith so I can get his royalties. It works both ways.'

Piers' co-host Susanna Reid asked him: 'Why do you care?'

Branding it a 'generational thing', Piers elaborated: 'He has millions of fans. What are they supposed to think?

Controversy: The origin of the feud stems from Piers' comments on Tuesday's edition of GMB, when he joked, 'Sam Smith has announced hes gender fluid.. Im now identifying as Sam Smith (pictured) so I can get his royalties. It works both ways'

'I think there are so many ramifications around self-identity which actually are a real concern and they havent really thought it through.'

Sam had spoken about his own experience of gender fluidity in a chat with Jameela last week.

The four-time Grammy winner explained: 'You do not identify in a gender. You are just you. You are your own special creation.

'That is how I take it. I am not male or female. I think I float somewhere in between - somewhat on the spectrum.'

Giving further context, Sam said: 'Ive always had a bit of a war in my body and my mind I do think like a woman in my head at times.

'Ive sometimes sat there and questioned, do I want a sex change? Its something I still think about, but I dont think it is,' he explained.

Sam also revealed he has always been 'very free' when it comes to thinking about his sexuality.

'Ive tried to change that into my thoughts on gender when I move, when I have sex with men, its very feminine. Im feminine in many ways - and Ive resented that,' he stated.She has been filling her Instagram feed with sensational bikini snaps.

And Ashley James, 31, rejoiced about being single after ditching toxic men in her life in a stream of her latest swimwear snaps, in Maldives on Instagram on Friday.

As she reflected on her life, the star gorged on mushroom pizza and downed a glass of rose wine while she soaked up the sunshine in a strapless black and red bikini.

Model behaviour: Ashley James posed in a strapless bikini and an orange cutaway swimsuit in Maldives as she celebrated ditching toxic men to enjoy single life and pizza on Friday

With her copy of Catherine Gray's The Unexpected Joy Of Being Single to hand, Ashley admitted finally feels content being a singleton as she is happy in herself.

The single star confessed she had spent a lot of time 'chasing' love because she thought it was the only 'source of happiness'.

'Life is just as happy when you're single. It takes time, and I used to think people were lying, but you can be.' She wrote in a lengthy caption.

'Whatever your age, if you feel undesirable, like you're constantly chasing a relationship, see being single as a weakness, or are made to feel like a freak for enjoying being single, then you need to read this book.

She made the cut! In the snap, the presenter was the picture of confidence as she put on a busty display in a plunging orange cutaway costume while she toasted with prosecco

'I still love romance, but I used to chase love like it was the only source of happiness. I wish they taught it in schools! '

The former Made In Chelsea star reminisced on the hurtful time when she was cheated on by an ex boyfriend, in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

In dark humour, Ashley joked she planned to return to South Africa to drink False Bay rose after her ex's bad behaviour had left a 'bitter taste' in her mouth.

She jested: 'I need to go to South Africa because the False Bay rose is exquisite. My ex cheated on me in Stellenbosch which put a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth, but this wine has rekindled my desire to go there. (I'm joking, the scenery and culture of cape Town too!).'

Banter: Ashley, 31, poked fun at women who get their husbands taking their Instagram photos as she joked her non-existent 'Insta-husband' was trying to quit

Although she has been posting a number of bikini snaps displaying her incredible curves, the jet-setter insisted she 'loves' pizza and the snack should be 'enjoyed'.

The London-based DJ clarified she didn't mean people should be unhealthy as she said people should enjoy a balanced lifestyle.

She added: 'I love pizza. Food should be enjoyed and celebrated, not seen as a treat or indulgence. I'm not saying be unhealthy, I'm saying you can have a relatively active lifestyle and still enjoy life's greatest pleasure!'

Ashley thanked her 200,000 followers on Instagram when she shared another swimsuit-clad photograph from her Maldives holiday.

Down-to-earth: The former Made In Chelsea star poked fun at her single status as she joked about herself chasing 'f**k' boys while 'marriage material men' were unobtainable

In the snap, the presenter was the picture of confidence as she put on a busty display in a plunging orange cutaway costume while she toasted with prosecco.

Besides the picture, Ashley candidly revealed she's had a string of 'toxic' relationships with men and social media.

She said deleting social media off her phone changed her life when she went travelling for a couple of years.

Ashley said: 'I was in a toxic relationship with social media and men (I'll talk more about that if you're interested).'

Idyllic: Another stunning snap from her holiday sees the presenter sporting a tiny pink bikini

The former Made In Chelsea star poked fun at her single status as she joked about chasing 'f**k' boys and claimed 'marriage material men' were unobtainable.

Via Instagram stories, Ashley shared a snap where she was watching a bird which she labelled as a 'f**k' boy while the sky-high para glider was 'marriage material'.



Away from the cooler climes of the UK, the ex Made In Chelsea star is currently travelling with her best friend and DJ buddy Charlotte de Carle.

Ashley kept her followers updated about her antics via her Instagram Stories, revealing she and Charlotte were moving on to the next destination.

Breakfast goals: The former Made In Chelsea star looked sensational in one picture as she showcased her curves in a tiny pink bikini

It comes after she revealed that she had spent a lot of cash on a 'floating breakfast' as a special experience on her Maldives getaway.

The former reality star made sure she got her money's worth as she shared several pictures and video updates of her lavish brunch.

In one clip, Ashley walked up and down the pool holding onto the 'floating breakfast' while she drank a flute of champagne, joined by her pal who carried a bottle of bubbly.

While a different video saw the blonde beauty pose by herself in the infinity pool as she guided the wooden tray of food and raised her glass in the air.

Lavish!: Ashley revealed that she had spent a lot of cash on a 'floating breakfast' as a special experience on her Maldives getaway

Making the most of it: And the reality star turned DJ made sure she got her money's worth as she shared several pictures and video updates of her lavish brunch

Ashley appeared to make the most of her Tuesday as she went on to reveal on her Instagram stories that she and her friend enjoyed a picnic on their own private island for the day.

The star's idyllic day comes after she hit back at an internet troll who criticised her for showcasing her 'cellulite' in a bikini-clad Instagram snap from her trip on Monday.

Branding the cruel social media user a 'c**t', the CBB star vowed to embrace her 'sexy, God given dimples' before penning a passionate message about self-confidence.

She's confident! The star's idyllic day comes after she hit back at an internet troll who criticised her for showcasing her 'cellulite' in a bikini-clad Instagram snap on Monday

The star was angry when a troll slammed her for displaying her stunning figure in a blue bikini, commenting: 'Whattttt... What happened your a*s... you have cellulite.'

Responding to the cruel remark, Ashley said: 'What begins with C and ends with **t? In case you don't know, Nearly every single woman has cellulite. It's totally normal. It's sexy.

'And tbh when I'm on my death bed I won't think "s**t, I wish I spent more time depriving myself of food and drink and stressing about my God given dimples... If you don't like it you can kiss it', the blonde cheekily added.

Bold: Branding the cruel social media user a 'c***', the CBB star, 31, vowed to embrace her 'sexy, God given dimples' before penning a passionate message about self-confidenceKelly Brook seemed to have that 'Friday feeling' as she was seen beaming on her way to her radio show at Heart FM, this week.

The 39-year-old wore mossy-coloured trousers and a dusty pink tie top for her drivetime slot with JK King at Global Radio in London.

The model was seen confidently striding through Leicester Square in sassy leopard print heels, walking with one hand in her pocket and her work pass swinging at her side.

Friday feeling: Kelly Brook was glowing as she was pictured heading to work at Global radio on Friday

Kelly was typically glamorous with her hair left long and loose around her shoulders and some muted pink make-up.

She was heading into her penultimate show of the week after landing the highly sought-after drivetime radio slot at the start of this year.

The brunette celebrated getting a 'proper job' again in January after years of waiting for the right hosting role.

Style star: The brunette made a confident stride in leopard print heels

Done for the day: The model left her hair long and glossy for a day at work

Kelly reportedly 'proved seriously popular' when she made her debut on the airwaves at the end of 2018.

The model recently said that life is more settled now that she has a permanent job and steady boyfriend Jeremy Parisi.

'It definitely feels like a whole chapter of my life is over,' Kelly told The Sun On Sunday's Fabulous last month.

Outing: Kelly was accompanied by fellow DJ, JK King as she left the studios

'Like, that person is dead. The girl who didnt have a lot of control over what was going on doesnt exist any more. Those times have gone.'

Kelly says she goes through transitions 'every three to four years' and likes to change things up.

She joked: 'I knew I didnt want to get rid of Jeremy, so I felt like a new job would be good. I was ready. Id got a bit lazy and I didnt like where it was going.'

High street edit: Kelly wore an ensemble completely comprised of high street wares

Glam: Kelly was typically glamorous with her hair left long and loose around her shoulders and some muted pink make-up as she headed home later on

Casual: Kelly was joined by a male pal as she left the studio following her radio stint

Pals: Despite her long day Kelly flashed a beaming smile for the cameras

Goody bag: Kelly left toting a bag of goodies in a branded Hear bagWith the April 2 runoff election to decide the next mayor of Chicago, one of the Windy City's most famous natives is throwing his hat into the political ring.

Chance the Rapper (born Chancelor Jonathan Bennett), 25, held a press conference on Thursday at City Hall in Chicago, to announce his endorsement for Democratic mayoral candidate Toni Preckwinkle.

He also voiced some concerns he had about Preckwinkle's opponent, Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor and staunch advocate for police.

Chance's endorsement: Chance the Rapper endorses Democratic mayoral candidate Tori Preckwinkle to be the new mayor of Chicago

'The resounding voice has been that they don't necessarily feel comfortable or safe going into a city where Lori Lightfoot sits on the fifth floor,' Chance said at the press conference, as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

'Her past record as a prosecutor has not been in the best interests of young black people in Chicago, hasn't been entirely truthful, and even the campaign and the image she has created since the February election has been, like I just said, very untrue,' the rapper continued.

Conversely, Chance praised Preckwinkle for fighting for her community, and, 'redistributing that wealth and that funding to things that actually equip young black folks to accomplish what they need to and survive in this city.'

Mayoral candidate: Conversely, Chance praised Preckwinkle for fighting for her community, and, 'redistributing that wealth and that funding to things that actually equip young black folks to accomplish what they need to and survive in this city'

Chance the Rapper's endorsement could go a long way to securing the youth vote in the election, and it comes at a time when her opponent stopped airing TV ads.

Preckwinkle is trailing her opponent, at least in terms of fundraising, with Preckwinkle raising $1.6million to Lightfoot's $1.9million.

Chance's father, Ken Bennett, a former Obama administration official, is now the head of Preckwinkle's campaign.

Smiling chance: Chance the Rapper's endorsement could go a long way to securing the youth vote in the election, and it comes at a time when her opponent stopped airing TV ads

Chance previously backed former candidate Amara Enyia's campaign, along with another Chicago native musician, Kanye West.

Chance donated $400,000 to her campaign in January, but he made it clear that his endorsement to Preckwinkle will not come with a financial donation.

'I don't have any more money for Chicago politics,' the rapper said.

No money: Chance donated $400,000 to her campaign in January, but he made it clear that his endorsement to Preckwinkle will not come with a financial donation

Preckwinkle was presiding over a County Board meeting at City Hall while Chance was holding his press conference, but she held a separate press conference to thank him for his support.

'He's been a champion of education reform, criminal justice reform, and those are surely things that have been hallmarks of my campaign,' Preckwinkle said.

'So I think it's really important to get validation from a young activist like him,' she continued.

Chance the Champion: 'He's been a champion of education reform, criminal justice reform, and those are surely things that have been hallmarks of my campaign,' Preckwinkle saidDemi Moore joined in the celebration as her ex-husband Bruce Willis renewed his wedding vows with his second wife this week.

Demi, 56, was one of a handful of guests that gathered to watch Bruce, 64, and Emma, 40, re-do their big day after 10 years of marriage, in Turks and Caicos on Thursday.

Bruce and Demi's eldest daughter Rumer, 30, posted a snap of the blended family together and wrote: 'Papa and Stepmama got married again 10 years later!!! So happy I was able to be here and celebrate with the crew. I love you both so much.'

Sharing the love: Demi Moore was one of a handful of guests at her ex-husband Bruce Willis' vow renewal ceremony in Turks and Caicos on Thursday

Demi could be seen in the photo beaming away wearing a gold dress with white embroidery.

In a second group shot the guests looked more candid as they pulled surprised faces for the camera.

Emma, who wore a one-shoulder floral dress, also documented the special day, sharing a photo of her kissing the Pulp Fiction star.

'We said, we do, again, 10 years later #happyanniversarymylove' the model captioned the photo.

Amicable exes: Demi was seen in a gold dress with white embroidery as she helped celebrate Bruce and Emma's big day alongside other family members

10 years on: Emma, 40, shared her own snaps from the day including this romantic kissing snap

Bruce, who celebrated his birthday just two days ago, wore a white linen shirt and pants - the same he wore the first time round in 2009.

It comes as no surprise that Demi was invited as the actress was also a guest at Bruce and Emma's wedding in Parrot Cay, Turks and Caicos in 2009.

Bruce owns a stunning five-bedroom oceanfront home there with two guests villas.

The action star was married to Demi from 1987 to 2000 and as well as Rumer they share daughters Scout, 27 and Tallulah, 25.

Tallulah appeared to be missing from the family trip.

Doing it again: Emma showed off some pretty baskets that her daughters carried

So pretty: Flower girls Mabel, six, and Evelyn, four wore dresses just like moms

Daddy daughter time: Emma snapped a sweet shot of Bruce in the pool at their stunning oceanfront home

Talented duo: Demi and Bruce's daughters Rumer, 30, and Scout, 25, entertained the guests with some singing. Their other daughter Tallulah, 27, didn't appear to have made the trip

Bruce and Emma have two daughters; Mabel, six, and Evelyn, four.

Bruce previously said he once thought he would never find love again after his marriage to Demi ended.

Talking to W magazine in 2009 he said: 'I went from 'f*** love' to 'love is truly the answer,

'I spent  10 years single and, for the most part, unhappy. In a dark place. I never thought that being with someone else was the answer. I would say, "Im alone, but Im not lonely." But I was just kidding myself. Then I started hanging around Emma, and on a day-to-day basis my life became much happier.'

Demi meanwhile is rumored to be in a relationship with Serbian fashion stylist Masha Mandzuka, however, they haven't been pictured together since December.

Mini-mes: The three girls looked gorgeous as they posed on the sane with their flowers

The Striptease beauty recently talked about how she's putting her relationships first over her career.

Speaking to Gwyneth Paltrow and Arianna Huffington at the 2019 In Goop Health summit earlier this month, Demi said: 'My relationships are more important, and what I do comes second,'

The actress said that shes shifted her priorities to refocus on her health and the people around her in the 'last seven years.' and no longer looks outwards for validation.

'What does it matter what anyone thinks? Nothing is that bad,' she told them.

Emma is pictured with her two daughters with Bruce; Mabel, six, and Evelyn, fourRadhika has lent her support to an initiative called Oh My Hrithik which talks about the guilt and shame associated with female sexual fantasy.

Fireband actress Radhika Apte never shies away from speaking her mind. Radhika who has lent her support to a self- love initiative called Oh My Hrithik talks about the guilt, shame, and taboo associated with female sexual fantasy.

Started by six 19-year-old girls from Mumbai, the initiative aims to remove the stigma associated with the issue and a part of the campaign is to encourage women to talk openly about it. When I was an eight-year-old, I used to watch a lot of films on television with my house help. I would watch heroines stranded in the rain or wind with their sarees pallu falling off just when the hero would arrive in the scene, she posted on her social media handle and remembers her earliest fantasy. There was this boy in my school I liked and I used to fantasise about getting caught in the rain, wearing a saree. And just like those films, my pallu would fall off when this boy would arrive. Of course, he never kissed me, but I used to dream of kissing him. I would go to bed early to fantasise about him. I think we should be able to talk about our fantasies openly and there is nothing to be ashamed of, she adds.Jennifer Garner has no shame when it comes to wishing her best pal the happiest of birthdays.

The 46-year-old star took to Instagram to bust out a little tune on the saxophone for her friend Reese Witherspoon on her 43rd birthday.

Garner was dressed in a full marching band uniform, hat and all, as she showed off her musical talent.

Happy birthday! Jennifer Garner dressed in a full marching band costume and busted out A Groovy Kind of Love on her old saxophone as a birthday treat to friend Reese Witherspoon on Friday

'Many moons ago, my high school marching band played this song for homecoming,' Garner penned in an Instagram caption.

'Today I play it for my boo, @reesewitherspoon. We have a groovy kind of love. Happy birthday, Lady. #bandgeeksarethebestgeeks #havethebestday'

The Alias actress then proceeded to play a slightly off-key rendition of the 1988 Phil Collins hit, A Groovy Kind of Love.

The song was first released in 1965 by The Mindbenders.

Committed! Garner even wore the classic marking band hat, complete with a giant plume of feathers

'Many moons ago, my high school marching band played this song for homecoming,' Garner penned in an Instagram caption. 'Today I play it for my boo, @reesewitherspoon. We have a groovy kind of love. Happy birthday, Lady.

Performer! Jennifer got totally in character as a 'band geek' as she performed the song, albeit slightly off key

Jennifer performed the tune as best she could whilst wearing a giant hat with a big feather plume.

She even held a note extra long so she had time to turn the page of music notes.

Jennifer Garner and Reese Witherspoon are two of Hollywood's closest A-list best friends.

The long time pals often showcase their close bond on social media.

Pals! Reese and Jennifer have been the best of friends for a long time (pictured together here in 2015 and 2006)

Recently, Reese laughed off a fake headline that suggested that she and Jennifer shared some baby news.

The Legally Blonde star took to social media to show of a magazine cover that claimed the duo were both pregnant, and asked her fellow actress pal an important question.

'Hey @jennifer.garner! Can we raise our imaginary babies together?' she said.

The magazine cover featured a side-by-side of the two, with the title; 'Jen & Reese Baby Bombshells. Shock & Joy for the Hollywood BFFS.'

Too funny! Reese and Jennifer recently laughed off a fake headline together that suggested that the BFFs shared some baby news

During the holidays, Santa has paid an early visit to Reese - in the form of Garner.

The 13 Going on 30 star sent her buddy a statue replica of her French bulldog, Pepper, with a seasonal Santa hat on its head and presents at its side.

Witherspoon is ringing in her 43rd year while on vacation in the Bahamas, sharing snaps of the trip on social media.

'For my birthday I just want all the cake, all the flowers and all the candy... is that too much to ask?! Thank you for the sweet wishes, feeling like one very lucky lady,' she wrote in a caption.

Birthday girl! Reese is celebrating her birthday on an exotic trip with family, which she is sharing on social media

Before her birthday, Reese shared a long note about her last year.

'How many amazing people I met, the great fun I have had at work, friends I truly cherish, the people I have lost, the joys that definitely outweigh the sadnesses, and my loving family always at the center of everything.

'I always remember that saying, Dont look back, youre not going that way, but I want to look back a minute before I go forward again and say thank you to everyone who follows me here, everyone who came to see me speak this year, everyone who took time to say hi or say something positive, everyone who showed me their heart and their kindness.

I am so lucky to walk through this world with you all.'

'For my birthday I just want all the cake, all the flowers and all the candy... is that too much to ask?! Thank you for the sweet wishes, feeling like one very lucky lady,' she wrote in a caption.

The love fest did not stop there as many of Reese's Big Little Lies co-stars took to social media to send their birthday greetings.

Nicole Kidman shared a sweet snap of the two embracing after the 2017 Emmy Awards with the caption: 'You deserve all the love and hugs in the world Wishing you a happy happy happy birthday beautiful woman. Love being on this journey of life with you. xx Nic.'

Laura Dern also sent her well wishes as she shared a snap of them together and wrote: 'Today is one of my favorite holidays. Its Celebrate Magic Day, otherwise known as Reeses birthday. Deep, powerful, true and bada** beyond measure.'

Other Big Little Lies co-stars who paid tribute to Witherspoon included Zoe Kravitz, Kathryn Newton, and Darby Camp.

'Love being on this journey of life with you': Nicole Kidman shared a sweet snap of the two embracing after the 2017 Emmy Awards

'It is one of my favorite holidays': Laura Dern also sent her well wishes as she shared a snap of them together

'This day should be a national holiday': known as Reeses birthday. Deep, powerful, true and bada** beyond measure.' Other Big Little Lies co-stars who paid tribute to Witherspoon included Zoe Kravitz, Kathryn Newton, and Darby CampPorsha Williams is now a mom.

The Real Housewives Of Atlanta diva, 37, has welcomed her first child - a daughter - with fiance Dennis McKinley, according to social media shared by her family Friday.

Her husband-to-be was the first to post about the happy news, sharing a video of Porsha patiently lying down in a hospital bed right before her labor.

Oh baby! Porsha Williams welcomed a daughter with fiance Dennis McKinley on Friday

'#MILFSeason' he wrote on top of the clip, which showed a glowing Williams holding her belly while clad in a polka dot nightgown.

Her reps later confirmed the happy news with People, who also learned that the baby was born at 1:36pm Friday, via C-section. The newborn weighs 6lbs 15oz and is 20 inches long.

'What a time to be alive! Porsha and I are so happy and blessed to announce the arrival of our daughter, Baby PJ,' Dennis told the magazine.

'We couldnt have imagined a more magical moment! Cant thank everyone enough for joining us on this journey-its been a fantastic journey.'

It's going down! Sharing a photo of him and his love sitting on a hospital bed, he wrote: 'Its going down! BASEMENT #MEETtheMcKinleys #BabyPJ #MILFSeason #Grateful'

She's here! Lauren Williams announced the baby girl was here while sharing a screenshot of a text conversation with Dennis

The Atlanta star's sister Lauren Williams was also in a celebratory mood.

She announced the baby girl was here while sharing a screenshot of a text conversation with Dennis.

Dennis also posted about the exciting news ahead of the birth.

Sharing a photo of him and his love sitting on a hospital bed, he wrote: 'Its going down! BASEMENT #MEETtheMcKinleys #BabyPJ #MILFSeason #Grateful.'

He made it clear that Porsha was in good company as he posted a shot of 'The Mommas,' that appeared to feature Williams' mom, her mother-in-law, and her sisters.

Welcome to the club! Dennis made it clear that Porsha was in good company as he posted a shot of 'The Mommas'

They've got potential! The couple didn't have a name picked out, but Dennis did reveal a few of the potential options while posting a plate of celebratory cookies for his followers

Though the couple didn't have a name picked out, Dennis did reveal a few of the potential options as he posted a plate of celebratory cookies for his followers.

Each treat was inscribed with a potential name. It looked like the couple were keeping to a theme, as each option began with a 'p'.

The new parents looked like they would be choosing between Penelope, Po, Paris, Paige, Pilar and Pia.

Sister support! Portia's sister Lauren was at her side during the delivery

Hospital duds: Dennis shared a first-person look at his scrubs

Portia announced her pregnancy back in September.

Having a baby has been a long-time goal for the star, who revealed that she had suffered a miscarriage in 2013 around the same time as her happy baby news.

'I've waited a really really long time for this moment,' she told People magazine. 'I am cherishing each minute and enjoy every day being pregnant. It's a blessing for us.'She regularly turns heads with her sensational sense of style.

And Uma Thurman cut a glamorous figure as she attended the Cradle of Champions premiere at the Prince of Charles cinema in Leicester Square on Friday.

The actress, 48, donned a black blazer with a matching jumper and a crisp, white shirt.

Style: Uma Thurman cut a glamorous figure as she attended the Cradle of Champions premiere at the Prince of Charles cinema in Leicester Square on Friday

Uma paired it with black leather trousers and leopard print flats.

Letting her brown locks hang loose down her shoulders, she also carried a camel scarf as she made her way into the venue.

Uma was previously married to French financier Arpad Busson, and the pair welcomed daughter Luna in 2012 before their split in April 2014.

The Kill Bill star was also married to Gary Oldman for two years back in 1990, and actor Ethan Hawke in 1998. She and Ethan share two children - daughter Maya, 19, and son Levon, 15.

Ensemble: The actress, 48, donned a black blazer with a matching jumper and a crisp, white shirt

Glamour: Letting her brown locks hang loose down her shoulders, she also carried a camel scarf as she made her way into the venue

Family: Uma was previously married to French financier Arpad Busson, and the pair welcomed daughter Luna in 2012 before their split in April 2014

Happy: Uma seemed to be in great spirits as she donned a chic ensemble for the outing

Low-key: She happily posed for snaps in her chic outfit as she stepped out in the capital

Uma was one of many actresses who spoke out against film producer Harvey Winestein in the wake of numerous sexual assault allegations.

During an appearance on The Late Show With Seth Meyers, show host Seth congratulated Uma on her essay in The New York Times in which she detailed her claims against the disgraced film producer.

She said: 'Well, you've got to be a citizen and you can't leave people alone holding the bag of truth by themselves. Theres no one I wish to get due process more than him.'

Simple: Uma's look was simple and classic as she arrived for the premiere event, joined by a member of her team

Warm: Uma was also happily posed for snaps outside the cinema as she arrived for the launch

Speaking out: Uma was one of many actresses who spoke out against film producer Harvey Winestein in the wake of numerous sexual assault allegations

The 47-year-old alleged in her article that the producer first made sexual advances towards her in a Parisian hotel room, before later attacking her again in London.

She wrote: 'It was such a bat to the head. He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things.

'But he didn't actually put his back into it and force me. You're like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard. I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track. Not his track.'Coronation Street star Lucy Fallon has finally confronted her 'foot fetish fanatics.'

Writing in the comments of an Instagram post, the soap star, 23, vowed that no fan - fetishist or otherwise - would get the chance to lick her feet, but joked she could consider the offer if they were willing to pay.

This comes after it was reported in August last year that Lucy was 'living in fear' of a foot fetishist begging to lick her toes, as source told The Daily Star she had been bombarded with messages relating to the odd request.

Savage: Coronation Street star Lucy Fallon has finally confronted her 'foot fetish fanatics,' after she took to Instagram to share a throwback post

In her throwback snap, Lucy looked effortlessly chic as she posed on a bridge, telling fans that she was pining for Paris after recently returning from a trip to the country.

But after several followers commented asking to see her feet, the Bethany Platt actress responded in cutthroat fashion.

She wrote: 'FAO foot fetish fanatics; no I will not show you my feet. Or let you tickle my feet. Or let you lick my feet. Unless youre paying... then maybe x.'

Weird: After sharing a chic throwback post, Lucy was bombarded with comments asking to see her feet

Outraged: The Bethany Platt actress then posted a scathing response, saying she would never let someone 'lick her feet'... unless they paid her

This comes after it was reported last year that Lucy had spent months being plagued with messages begging for the chance to lick her feet, with some even asking to be sent clippings from her toenails.

A source told The Daily Star: 'It's vile. The cast were pretty weirded out by the whole thing at first, but now they are just trying to laugh it off.

'They all find it disgusting that anyone would want their toenails. And he was willing to pay good money too. It's utterly barmy.'

Representatives of Coronation Street declined to comment when contacted by MailOnline at the time.

Toe-curling: This comes after it was reported last year that Lucy had spent months being plagued with messages begging for the chance to lick her feet

Lucy has previously taken to social media to share snaps of her feet, lamenting an infection she had caught after dancing the night away at the British Soap Awards in May.

Posting a close-up snap of her foot, she simply captioned the post 'infected foot.'

The beauty also took to Instagram Stories to share a video of her hobbling along after the party, writing in the caption: 'the day after the night before.'She recently returned from her envy-inducing getaway to Bali.

But Lousie Thompson couldn't resist reflecting on her sun-kissed getaway to the Indonesian island as she took to her Instagram platform with a sizzling swimwear snap on Friday.

The Made in Chelsea star, 28, looked incredible as she showed off her toned and bronzed physique in a barely-there red and pink halter-neck cut-out one-piece.

'Cloud nine': Lousie Thompson, 28, couldn't resist reflecting on her sun-kissed getaway to Bali as she took to her Instagram platform with a sizzling swimwear snap on Friday

With her long tresses pinned back on both sides, Louise completed her sultry look with a swipe of pink eyeshadow, a splash of mascara, peach lipstick and blusher to showcase her cheekbones.

The stunning shot, titled 'cloud nine', is one of a series of pictures taken by the star during her travels in Bali.

In another picture the reality star was seen embracing the sunny weather as she enjoyed an ice cream while clad in an elegant white skirt and sleeveless blue patterned top.

Last week, Louise shared yet another snap showcasing her toned stomach as she posed in a tiny white bikini next to a gorgeous bamboo fence on the Indonesian island.

Hanging low: The Made In Chelsea star has been sharing an array of pictures during her travels on the island of Bali

Perfectly poised: In another picture the reality star was seen embracing the sunny weather as she enjoyed an ice cream while clad in an elegant white skirt and sleeveless blue top

Louise let her wavy brunette locks fall down past her shoulders as she smiled in the stylish tie-front bikini top and briefs.

She completed her look with a single circular gold ring on her left hand. Louise captioned the shot: 'Proper wavy in Bali' followed by a wave emoji.

The chic snap came after Louise was heard poking fun of her fellow tourists as she holidayed with her boyfriend Ryan Libbey last Thursday - and shared several videos of beach club guests attempting to take the perfect pool selfie.

Her social media antics came as the brunette beauty shared a whopping 27 bikini pictures (and counting) on her exotic holiday.

In one video, Louise said: 'Ryan and I are spending our afternoon in the most un-us way ever. This is called Omnia and it's basically Ibiza, but in Bali!

Idyllic: Last week, Louise shared yet another snap showcasing her toned stomach as she posed in a tiny white bikini next to a gorgeous bamboo fence on the Indonesian island

'There's also another bit of the pool over there, with people hanging out, swimming around, got their butt cheeks out.'

Showing off her delicious platter of fresh sushi, she continued: 'In our defence, the reason that we are here is because I've heard the food is really good in that Japanese restaurant, which is a box over there. The cocktail is actually pretty delicious too.'

Louise then panned the camera over people bobbing about in the shallow end, joking that every single person had a phone in their hand.

She focused heavily on a glamorous girl who was perched on the edge of the pool, working her angles so her boyfriend could take a picture of her in a bikini.

Living it up: Louise was heard poking fun of her fellow tourists as she holidayed with boyfriend Ryan Libbey lastThursday

'What's going on? Where's the normal people?': Louise filmed fellow holidaymakers in the pool, joking that everyone had phones in their hands

Tasty: Showing off her delicious platter of fresh sushi, she continued, 'In our defence, the reason that we are here is because I've heard the food is really good'

Snap happy: The Made In Chelsea star's social media antics come as the brunette beauty has shared countless bikini pictures on her exotic holiday

Self-aware: Louise scoffed, 'I thought I was bad! Every single person in this pool has a phone'

She scoffed: 'I thought I was bad! Every single person in this pool has a phone and seems to be taking pictures... Phones, phones, broken phones...

'What's going on? Where's the normal people?'

'I bet he's like, for f**k's sake!', Ryan said of the poor bloke trying to take a selfie of his girlfriend - something poor Ryan is only too familiar with.

Louise laughed: 'No one's even having a good time, they're all miserable!'

The reality starlet has been soaking up the sun in the holiday hotspot with her hunky fiance, 28.

Louise laughed: 'No one's even having a good time, they're all miserable!'

Looking good: The stunning star has been delighting her followers all week with sizzling snaps from her tropical holiday

Louise, who was engulfed in an intense love triangle with Spencer Matthews and Jamie Laing on the popular E4 series, has now rebranded herself as a health and fitness guru which is evident on her social media platforms.

It appears as though she has found her calling, as the petite star regularly flaunts her chiselled physique on Instagram.

Offering advice to her followers on how to achieve a body like her, the London native has also brought on board the assistance of her beau Ryan as they share exercise tips.

Her brother Sam, 26, revealed he quit the series, six years after first appearing on the show.

Previous romance: Louise was engulfed in an intense love triangle with Spencer Matthews (L) and Jamie Laing (R) on the popular E4 show

In an interview with Heart, the Celebs Go Dating star admitted he's made the departure after struggling to deal with his recent break-up from co-star Sophie 'Habbs' Habboo.

Sam, who dated the 25-year-old from last May till November, admitted to breakfast hosts Lucy Horobin and Jamie Theakston: 'Getting dumped all the time was chipping away at my confidence'.

Detailing the break-up, he elaborated: 'You don't want to be around your ex. Everyone on there is now more her friend and a lot of my friends have upped and left.

'[MIC] takes your soul, you are so invested in it as it is is your real life', the reality star added.Turning the sidewalk into their own personal catwalk, Adriana Lima and Josephine Skriver got to work on Friday.

The models were spotted as they filmed a Maybelline advert on location in New York on Friday.

Former Victoria's Secret model Adriana, 37, looked fierce as the newer angel, Josephine, 25, waltzed beside her.

Runway walk: Adriana Lima, 37, looked flawless with Josephine Skriver, 25, as they modeled for Maybelline in New York on Friday

Lima donned a plain outfit, with an army green colored dress cinched at the waist with a tan buckle belt.

The Brazilian supermodel's brunette hair was straight and shiny as she walked down the sidewalk in tan heels that revealed her tribal tattoo.

Keeping up with the iconic model, Skriver swung her arms while walking next to Adriana, in a tan shirt and button up skirt.

Stunning: Lima tucked her hair behind her ear while the cameras flashed during the Maybelline shoot

Toting a tiny tan purse, Lima worked all her angles, giving the company her very best.

The dark haired beauty has been a spokesperson for Maybelline cosmetics since 2003.

After 18 Victoria's Secret fashion shows, she left the franchise this past December.

During her last VS show, she got emotional as she walked the runway. Backstage, she spoke with ET about what was running through her mind, admitting that her nerves haven't calmed down much since she first became an angel in 1999.

The best of friends: Adriana and Josephine shared a sweet moment as they glanced at each other while crossing the street

Now, the jaw dropper will be trying her hand at new projects.

'For my future, I plan to be involved and supporting women in different projects. So let's see what else is out there. I have a few tricks and other talents that you haven't seen yet,' she said.

Adriana was also granted the Fashion Icon of the Year Award at the Daily Front Row Fashion LA Awards earlier in March.

Flashing the pearly whites: Lima sported a wide smile as Josephine sauntered next to her for the makeup brand

Skriver grinned next to Lima, as she showed off her long, spider like legs during their two day shoot in the Soho district.

And, she was sure to boast about the achievement all over social media while on set.

In one Instagram story, the blonde stuck her tongue out at the camera while getting ready for another full day ahead.

Tongues out: Josephine played with the camera as she revealed another day on set via her social media accounts on Friday

Acting skills: The 25-year-old model showed off her long legs in a simple tan skirt

Then in another, she re-posted someone's story showing her looking both ways as she crossed the street.

As the New York weather continues to be in the chilly 50s, Josephine worked to make herself appear warm in the short outfit.

Soaking up the sun, the Danish model threw her head back in one shot, spreading her arms wide out.

Born in Copenhagen, Josephine made her modeling debut in 2011, when she opened for Alberta Ferretti and closed for Prada.

She's also walked for many other prominent designers, like Calvin Klein, Gucci, Givenchy and more.

And, she got her angel wings in 2013 and has been walking in VS fashion shows since then.

Getting some rays: The Danish model paused to take in the sunlight as she walked in her grey healed bootsShe typically litters her social media pages with glamorous selfies from her idyllic trips abroad and glitzy events, offering an idealistic view of her life.

However after reviewing her Instagram habits, Vicky Pattison revealed that she was disappointed with the 'unrealistic' construction of her life on her page.

The TV personality, 31, vowed to her followers that she would change her ways and claimed she would post a more realistic view of her life in future on Friday.

Candid: Vicky shared an 'honest' make-up free selfie lying in bed with her dark locks scraped back off her face

Proving she is a woman of her word, alongside the lengthy post, Vicky shared an 'honest' make-up free selfie lying in bed with her dark locks scraped back off her face.

Her caption read: 'I was scrolling through my Instagram earlier (vapid I know) and I was disappointed with what I saw. It was awash with glossy images, campaign pictures and ads. Just my made up face and perfectly styled hair staring back at me.

'Dont get me wrong- I like to post pictures like that, every now and then its lovely to see how nice you can look when youve made a real effort (or in my case a whole team of people have made an effort) with your appearance. And makeup, hair extensions, tan and nails are a big part of who I am- but they arent my reality- not most of the time anyway.

Glam: Vicky typically litters her social media pages with glamorous selfies from her idyllic trips abroad and glitzy events, offering an idealistic view of her life

'Unless Im filming, shooting or at an event I wear gym gear, I will not wear a scrap of make up, my hair will be up in a little bun and I am more often than not a bit spotty and pale and usually pulling a silly face.

'This is me.. it seems as though I havent been honest with Instagram and you all recently and for that I apologise- its easy to get bogged down trying to compete with the unrealistic images of perfection that saturate social media- but its not real... this however is...

'I hope you accept this offering of my big moon face by way of an apology- I always strive to be honest on here and it seems I have let it slip. But I promise it wont happen again.

Fun in the sun: The TV personality, 31, vowed to her followers that she would change her ways and claimed she would post a more realistic view of her life in future on Friday

'Ive missed my moon face- I like it just as much as the one with all the makeup on- maybe a bit more actually as I can rub my eyes on this one. Have a wonderful weekend everyone... And be kind and honest to each other and yourselves, on social media and in real life.'

Some of Vicky's most recent glamorous shots were taken during a sun-drenched trip to Dubai, having enjoyed a romantic city break with her new boyfriend Ercan Ramadan weeks earlier.

The couple, who have only been dating for a few weeks, retreated away to Budapest, Hungary, for their first mini-break since going public as an item last month.

Vicky recently admitted she got together with one-time TOWIE star Ercan after he 'slid into her DMs' following her split from ex fiance John Noble.

She told new! magazine: 'We've followed each other for a long while on Instagram. It was one of those ones where you just follow good looking fellas.'

Vicky said nothing ever came to fruition between the pair because Ercan got a girlfriend and she met John, but both of them split from their respective partners in the space of a month.

She added: 'He [Ercan] slid into me DMs over Christmas and it's gone from there. He's lovely and fun.'

Vicky went public with her new man in February during a trip to Dubai - three months after calling off her engagement to John.The federal government says it will update health guidelines and educate stonemasons about the risks of inhaling dust in response to an unfolding silicosis crisis.

Calls for a national reaction to diagnoses of the occupational lung disease were followed by the death of Gold Coast stonecutter Anthony White on Saturday.

Doctors discovered Mr White had the disease in November 2017 after he'd breathed in crystalline silica dust found in engineered stone.

He is believed to be the first tradie to die of silicosis in Australia, and his brother, Shane Parata, has also been diagnosed.

Safe Work Australia is prioritising work to address health risks linked to dust exposure in the workplace, federal Industrial Relations Minister Kelly O'Dwyer said.

"The standard for crystalline silica dust occupational exposure is currently under review by Safe Work Australia, and proposed exposure levels are currently out for public consultation," she said.

Safe Work Australia is working on ways to raise awareness about ways to cut risks from silica dust, developing an educational campaign for workers and will update health monitoring guides.Sydney Roosters veteran Brett Morris has taken aim at Dylan Napa's trolls, saying it has got to the point that NRL players will reconsider going out.

Canterbury and Queensland prop Napa has become an easy target in the wake of his infamous sex tapes for which he has been fined 10 per cent of his 2019 salary by the NRL.

News Corp reported that Napa was last week involved in a volatile incident at a pub during which during which a group of men attempted to provoke him by filming him on their phones and verbally taunt him.

Morris described it as a sad indictment of society and said that NRL players were questioning whether they can still socialise like regular citizens.

"It's probably something that's going to happen to him quite a fair bit now," Morris said.

"He's going to get to a point where is it even worth going out for a meal with his mates now or stay home and have a BBQ?

"Because that's the way people are these days and that's a shame."

Morris, a father of three, said at 32 years of age he rarely goes out these days - and if he does he's usually in bed before midnight.

However, he said experiencing harassment was a common occurrence for NRL players and they were often the target of people looking to get a reaction out of them and capture it on film.

"With camera phones these days, anyone can film whatever you're doing - you might not be doing anything wrong," Morris said.

"You take that video out of context and flip it on its head, it can look like you're doing something wrong.

"There are people out there looking to get you. It's the reality, we've seen it with all these videos that are coming out. It's sad, it's a problem with society.

"They think they can make a quick buck out of filming someone on their phone.

"As players, you have to be more aware of your surroundings and the situation that you put yourself in."Stakeholders have two weeks to tell the federal government how the terms of reference for a royal commission into the mistreatment of disabled Australians should look.

The consultation period on the government's draft terms of reference will close on March 28.

A public survey will be open until then, allowing Australians to provide feedback on the scope of the inquiry.

The government is proposing to investigate the violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of Australians with disabilities, wherever it has taken place.

But Greens senator Jordon Steele-John, who was the driving force behind the royal commission, said redress should have been explicitly mentioned in the terms.

"A clear pathway forward for survivors of violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect must be included in any royal commission including prosecution, investigation and most importantly, redress," he said in a statement.

The commission would examine mistreatment in institutional settings, workplaces, schools, homes and in the community.

It would be applicable to all disabled people.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says the federal government will fully fund the inquiry and he now has "letters patent" from all the states and territories to allow it to go ahead with the proper legal authority

Disability advocates are pushing for the royal commission to be called before an election, when the government enters caretaker mode and such an inquiry can no longer be established.It takes many iconic scenes, items, quirks, accessories and settings from those films and then chides them.

The song Nakhrewali plays during a fight scene, and the fight at the end is inspired by The Karate Kid.

Rating:

Cast: Abhimanyu Dassani, Radhika Madan, Gulshan Devaiah, Mahesh Manjrekar, Jimit Trivedi, Shweta Basu Prasad

Director: Vasan Bala

Writer-director Vasan Balas Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota (The Man Who Feels No Pain) is a joyous, fun, hugely entertaining and sharp film born out of deep love and heartache for a genre that disappeared from our lives all to soon  the kung fu-karate, martial arts films.

MKDNH scavenges from past glories  Wuxia (films set in ancient China) and kung fu films starring Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, John G. Avildsens The Karate Kid, Kill Bill  but also, generously, from the tacky, kitschy, gaudy 1980s Bollywood movies.

Flitting between dreams and reality, between whats filmy and real in its context, it picks several iconic moments, items and cliches and uses them all, getting to show and enjoy doing the filmy while laughing at itself for doing so. In essence, having a jolly good time all along.

Balas film has the feel and texture of sweaty, B-grade, kung fu films that many of us of a certain vintage  with access to a bulky video player and a monthly account with a video parlour bhaiyya  grew up watching. But its more than that.

Cool according to most of those action movies was defined as silent, male and macho. MKDNH redefines cool as middle-class goofy, and its both  male and female. MKDNH doesnt just usurp the genre and all its tropes, making the film not just comic book fabulous in a Deadpool way, but also oh-so-political.

It takes many iconic scenes, items, quirks, accessories and settings from those films and then chides them.

Even the films title turns the very chauvinistic boast on its head, suggesting that dard nahin hona is a bimari, not a superpower. The film spares nothing  from bindi to the poet Rumi and his pretentious aficionados, from boy-talk about Kamal Haasan versus Rajini fans to random splashes of political commentary.

MKDNH is an ode to the days of VHS tapes, a film for those crazies who love the trashy, who as teenagers sat down in living rooms, often on the floor, wide-eyed, waiting for magic to begin.



Har mind-blowing kahani ke peeche theres a very bad decision, announces Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota, and begins

Like all superheroes with their thinking blurbs, we hear Surya (Abhimanyu Dassani) think as he faces a gang of uniformed security men charging at him.

The opening shot itself  with Surya in a maroon track suit, action slo-mo, funny talk  sets the tone and then the film goes into flashback to explain how, who, why, and what the superheros power and weakness is.

Telling you would be a spoiler, so suffice to say, paani peete rehna chahiye.

The flashback involves a pregnant Aai (Shweta Basu Prasad), a perennially harried Baba (Jimit Trivedi), Ajoba (grandfather played by Mahesh Manjrekar) and a tragedy at the hands of chain snatchers.

Soon theres a diagnosis from the doctor that we are told to look up on Google. Baba cant deal with Suryas peculiar problem, and wants to keep him safe and locked up. But Ajoba, who believes control nahin karna, care karna hai, trains him in secret  how to protect himself, how to fight, how to survive.

And when attacked from all sides in school, little but toofani Supri lunges to little Suryas defence.

Supri has her own sad story, and doesnt believe Surya when he says Aankhon ke laser se maar de as her drunk dad is dragging her away.

As Surya grows up, wearing swimming goggles, a backpack and repeatedly saying Ouch, he devotes himself to watching every manner of martial arts film  Drunken Master, My Lucky Master, Game of Death  in secret, on VHS tapes. From these he learns karate and kung fu, but then comes upon a real-life fight  100-man fight by the one-legged Karate Mani (Gulshan Devaiah) and bows respectfully. He has found his sensei  master.



MKDNH is split in two equal parts  while the first half is about the hero, the second is devoted to the villain, Jimmy, and his humshakal brother, Karate Mani. Or, as the film tells us, a cliched drunk karate master and the cliched psychotic villain.

En route to meeting his hero, Surya stops in his tracks to watch in awe a girl (Radhika Madan) kick ass in a badass way

Like Supri, she too has a bad man tugging at her. And while she saves others, she needs saving, too.

And then theres the one who felt spurned by his appa and is after Karate Manis locket Finally, a chain chor Surya is determined to destroy...



Movies become dear to us for reasons big and small. But there are some, with their naughty asides, tiny baubles, bits of dialogue loaded with in-jokes that we get and feel a unique personal connect with. With such films we form a relationship, a personal one.

MKDNH is that kind of film.

I loved it. I have watched it twice already  at the Toronto International Film Festival last year where it won the Peoples Choice Award, and now.

And this week I plan to watch it again.

MKDNHs strength lies in its clever, political screenplay, funny, crisp dialogue and the films goofy disposition to have fun. Theres freshness to how all its characters act and speak, and then theres the injection of the real in the filmy for comic effect, especially at Jimmys Security Services, but the films magic lies in how it uses cliches and classic scenes.

Geraftar makes repeated appearances, Langra Mani eats an orange during a confrontation, and Jimmy eats banana chips while watching a fight he has organised, taking us back to that fight in Big Boss when Bruce Lee ate a packet of potato chips.

The song Nakhrewali plays during a fight scene, and the fight at the end is inspired by The Karate Kid.

Even Terminator makes an appearance, for no reason. Chumma. For fun.

Apart from the writing, the films real coup is its cast. Each and everyone is just fabulous. Mahesh Manjrekar, is the films soul  warm, wise and brilliant as well.

Gulshan Devaiya is in a cocky league of his own, perhaps sharing that space with other character acts as, Randeep Hooda, Irrfan Khan and Pankaj Tripathi. He is always fabulous. Here he brings the film alive with both, his chamkeela performance as Jimmy, and one-legged fighting as Karate Mani. I bow to him.

What a joy it is to discover, on your own and not through the PR machine in overdrive that the star of a film is the son of a much loved actress.

Abhimanyu Dassani, son of Bhagyashree (Maine Pyaar Kiya), has that boy-next-door charm, but also acting and fighting chops that are quite impressive. How Bollywood welcomes him will be interesting to watch.

What can I say about Radhika Madan? She bowled me over in last years Pataakha, and she made me fall in love with her all over again in MKDNH. Petite and very pretty, she is a naturally talented actress and a force to be reckoned with.Unsustainable pay increases could cost jobs, employer groups have warned as the political leaders try to sway the small business vote.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten will both visit businesses in Melbourne on Thursday as the pair trade blows on the political debate of wages.

The opposition has hinted at tweaking industrial laws to drive wages up for low-paid workers, while unions are pushing for a $43-a-week rise in the minimum wage.

But Mr Morrison says Labor is forcing businesses to sack people in order to give others pay rises.

Business Council of Australia CEO Jennifer Westacott warns that small businesses will feel the ramifications of any political decisions.

"I want people to have higher wages but I don't want them to have higher wages that are then seen in lost jobs," she told Sky News on Wednesday.

"If their businesses aren't successful or they can't increase their success and they're paying higher wages to people then they've got three choices - they sack people, they put their prices up for consumers or they pay themselves less."

Labor is weighing up ways to encourage the Fair Work Commission to take more factors into account to ensure low-paid workers get a living wage, which is 60 per cent of the national median wage.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions in its annual review wants the commission to lift the minimum wage by six per cent to $762.20 a week, up from $719.20.

But Ms Westacott's concerns were echoed by employer groups.

"A minimum wage increase of six per cent would be a sure-fire way of destroying jobs, harming businesses, and threatening Australia's long period of economic growth," Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox said.Visibly affected by his first two weeks behind bars, George Pell has returned to prison knowing he could be there for the rest of his life.

Jailed for a maximum six years by County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd on Wednesday, the disgraced cardinal will be 80 when his minimum non-parole period expires in three years and eight months.

Any chance of freedom before then will be pinned to his appeal application, to be heard in Victoria's Court of Appeal in June.

A bail application was foreshadowed when his conviction for sexually abusing two choirboys at St Patrick's Cathedral in East Melbourne in 1996 became public.

Pell sat emotionless and looking visibly thinner through more than an hour-long sentence hearing where the judge noted he would spend a "substantial portion" of his remaining life expectancy behind bars.

"I am conscious that a term of imprisonment ... carries with it a real, as distinct from theoretical, possibility that you may not live to be released from prison," he said.

He pointed to the brazenness of Pell's offending from a position of power and authority as the newly-installed Archbishop of Melbourne.

"Your obvious status as Archbishop cast a powerful shadow over this offending," he said.

Pell hadn't delivered threats to secure the boys' silence, clearly feeling he didn't need to, the judge said.

"In my view, your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance."

Pell, who was until late-February the Vatican's treasurer, is the most senior member of the Catholic Church to be jailed for child sexual abuse.

Former prime minister John Howard was one of 10 people who provided character references that spoke of Pell's life dedicated to service.

"Self-evidently you have experienced an exceptional career with the Catholic Church. You are clearly an intelligent and hard-working man," Judge Kidd said.

His life behind bars will be more difficult with concerns over his safety given his notoriety and high profile, the judge noted.

A Corrections Victoria assistant commissioner provided a statement on Pell's first days in custody, noting he had been assessed as an "immediate risk of serious threat".

That risk may be reduced by time in protection and in time, Pell may be able to mix with a limited number of heavily vetted prisoners, the commissioner noted.Craig Laundy is expected to announce "imminently" his retirement as the federal Liberal MP for the marginal Sydney seat of Reid.

Mr Laundy - a former minister and ally of Malcolm Turnbull - has reportedly told Prime Minister Scott Morrison of his decision to quit and kept it secret while a new candidate was found.

However, attempts to recruit a high-profile replacement have had a major setback, after former NSW Police deputy commissioner Nick Kaldas rejected an offer to run as the Liberal candidate, The Australian reported on Thursday.Scott Morrison has declared he will not put any Australians at risk by helping home-grown extremists who want to come home from the Middle East.

The prime minister has pushed back against an impassioned plea for assistance from an Australian woman who joined Islamic State.

"I'm not going to put any Australian at risk to try and extract people from those situations," Mr Morrison told reporters in Melbourne on Thursday.

"They have made their decisions, and if they are Australian citizens, there is a process for us to deal with them under Australian law.

"They will face the full force of Australian law should they be in a position to seek to come back to Australia."The High Court has waved through compensation for cultural and economic losses to Aboriginal native title holders from a remote Northern Territory town, in a decision that could have multi-million dollar ramifications for other states.

However, the court did cut the amount the NT government must pay to the Ngaliwurru and Nungali people of Timber Creek after it built infrastructure and tried to sell land for commercial development without consultation.

The original payout ordered by the Federal Court for cultural loss, economic loss and related interest was $3.3 million.

The final amount is now $2.53 million, following the High Court ruling on Wednesday that followed an earlier Federal Court appeal decision which reduced it to $2.9 million.

The total includes $1.3 million for cultural losses and recognises spiritual attachment to the land, which measures around 1.26 square kilometres. The remainder compensates for economic loss and interest.

"This important finding means that the spiritual connection of Aboriginal people to their country is paramount in Australian law - as it should be," Northern Land Council interim CEO Jak Ah Kit said.

The High Court reduced the economic value of the compensation to 50 per cent of the freehold value of the land, despite the Timber Creek native title holders saying it should be 100 per cent.

This followed a NT government and Commonwealth appeal to the court arguing the method used to determine the rate of compensation by the Federal Court was incorrect.

Timber Creek, in the Victoria River district, is a tiny town of about 250 people, 600km from Darwin near the West Australian border.

Now, this landmark case may have implications for much larger native title compensation claims around Australia and the level of compensation likely to be paid to Aboriginal traditional owners.

"In some cases, especially where sacred sites have been damaged in the past, the amount of compensation could be quite substantial," Mr Ah Kit said in a statement.

"But the first step will always be to try and agree to compensation without litigation, and the High Court's judgment shows the way forward for collaborative outcomes."

International law firm Ashurst said more case law work will need to be done to understand how the High Court ruling impacts on native title compensation for mining projects, agricultural developments and pastoral leases.

"It is likely that nationally, the liability for native title compensation will run into the billions of dollars," Ashurst partner Tony Denholder said in a statement.A defence psychiatrist has told an Israeli court that former Melbourne school principal Malka Leifer is unfit to face trial in Australia on charges of child sex abuse and rape.

But the integrity of psychiatrist Dr Brian Trappler to give evidence in court has been questioned, based on public statements he made in 2017.

As reported by The Australian Jewish News, Dr Trappler previously proclaimed

Leifer's innocence, writing on Facebook; "she never committed the crimes she was accused of."

As petitions were being delivered to force the Israeli government to follow up on

Leifer's alleged crimes and have her extradited to Australia, Dr Trappler declared the women calling for her to face trial were not 'frum,' or devout Jews.

He called the women, particularly those allegedly abused by the former principal at the ultra-orthodox Adass Israel School in Melbourne, a 'lynch mob.'

He further stated the Jewish women were committing a crime by reporting to

secular authorities.

After Wednesday's hearing, Manny Waks, CEO of Kol V'oz, an organisation preventing sexual abuse in the Jewish community, said Dr Trappler had no credibility as a witness.

"Today's hearing should have lasted no more than a few minutes.

"The prosecution should have presented the judge with Dr Trappler's previous absurd public statements regarding this case and the judge should have dismissed Dr Trappler as a witness," Waks told AAP.

Melbourne sisters Dassi Erlich and Nicole Meyer who were allegedly abused by

Leifer, travelled to Israel specifically to attend the closed court, now in it's 48th

hearing.

A public protest was held outside court to show support for the sisters.

The large crowd of supporters held signs reading "you're not alone," referring to

Leifer's victims, and chanted "we want justice."

Dassi Erlich thanked everyone for showing up and supporting them.

"Thank you for letting us know we are not alone, we feel your support, it is because of your support that we can continuing doing this ... continue fighting for justice and ensure this abuser is not on the streets anymore," Erlich told the crowd.

The sisters from Melbourne have been fighting for Leifer's extradition since she fled Australia in 2008.Two people have been shot and another has been attacked by an axe at a home in western Sydney.

One man suffered a gunshot wound to his thigh and another to his wrist during the incident at Blacktown about 4.45am on Thursday, a NSW Ambulance spokesman told AAP.

Another man was hit in the head with the blunt side of an axe and suffered a closed head injury.

The trio was taken to Westmead Hospital in serious but stable conditions.

A police operation is underway.Prime Minister Scott Morrison has defended allowing mortgage brokers to continue charging ongoing fees against the recommendation of the banking royal commission.

The coalition backflipped on abolishing trailing commissions, instead opting to get the competition watchdog and financial regulators to review the issue in three years.

Mr Morrison said the decision was about "basic fairness" and followed consultation with mortgage brokers.

"We're backing the mortgage brokers, Labor's backing the big banks," he told reporters in Melbourne on Thursday.

Abolishing trailing commissions paid to mortgage broker during the term of a property loan was a recommendation of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry.

Lobby groups for the sector claimed this would have seriously damaged 20,000 small business mortgage brokers across the country.

Labor has chastised the government for reversing its position, accusing it of lacking the mettle to deal with the issue.

The opposition has committed to abolishing trail commissions and will cap mortgage broker fees at 1.1 per cent of a property loan if it wins the federal election due in May.

Mr Morrison said brokers helped customers to get the best deal and ensured they weren't left "naked" to the banks.

"We want to see the mortgage broking industry continue to thrive," he said.

"The best thing for us to do was not to leave customers exposed by ensuring mortgage brokers were weaker."

He said under the coalition's plan, brokers will have the status quo on commissions so they could continue to run their businesses.An 85-year-old former Anglican priest has been charged with the alleged historical sexual abuse of a teenage boy on NSW's far north coast.

The 13-year-old was befriended by the priest during high school scripture class and piano lessons in 1978 and was later assaulted on the far north cost, NSW Police said in a statement on Thursday.

The former Anglican clergyman was arrested on Wednesday at his home near Newcastle and charged with buggery.

The man is expected to face Newcastle Local Court on May 2.Police have intercepted three Irish men as they tried to leave Australia and charged them over an alleged fraud scam targeting elderly homeowners.

A 20-year-old Irish national, on his way to the United Kingdom, was arrested by Australian Federal Police at Sydney Airport on March 7.

Large amounts of cash and jewellery were discovered in the man's luggage.

He was charged with aggravated break and enter and denied bail.

A second Irish man, aged 22, was arrested at Sydney Airport as he tried to board a flight to Qatar about 8.20pm on Saturday.

Police say large amounts of cash and jewellery were also found in his luggage.

He was charged with fraud and dealing in the proceeds of crime and refused bail.

On Monday, officers arrested a third man, a 20-year-old Irish national, at Melbourne's Tullamarine airport as he tried to board a flight to China.

He was extradited to NSW and charged with dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception.

The man was refused bail and is due to appear before Sutherland Local Court on Thursday.

Police are hunting for a fourth alleged offender.The CRPF has ordered a commission of inquiry into the incident, the sources in the force said.

All the three injured men succumbed in the hospital. Subsequently, the CRPF jawan Kumar shot himself also but survived the apparent suicide attempt, the officials said.

Srinagar: Three Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) jawans were killed in a reported act of fratricide in Jammu and Kashmirs Udhampur district late on Wednesday night.

Officials said that a CRPF jawan Ajit Kumar shot and critically wounded his three colleagues after an altercation inside its 187 battalion headquarters at Battal Ballian area of Udhampur at 10.15 pm on Wednesday.

All the three injured men succumbed in the hospital. Subsequently, the CRPF jawan Kumar shot himself also but survived the apparent suicide attempt, the officials said.

Dr Vijay Bansotra, medical superintendent of the district hospital Udhampur, said that four CRPF jawans were brought to the hospital. Three of them succumbed. The fourth one was critical and has been evacuated to the military command hospital, he added.

Jammus inspector general of police Manish Kumar Sinha said that the police has taken up the investigation and further details of the incident are being ascertained. Station House Officer Udhampur Vijay Singh Choudhary said that as per an initial report Kumar opened fire on his colleagues in a fit of anger. He shot himself also and was rushed to the hospital, he said. The CRPF has ordered a commission of inquiry into the incident.

An earlier report had said that the CRPF personnel fired at each other after an altercation took place among them over some issue.

The CRPF has ordered a commission of inquiry into the incident, the sources in the force said.

A team of senior officers is probing the incident to ascertain what exactly led to the fatalities, the sources said.

Such incidents are not uncommon in J&K ravaged by a three decade old militancy and violence.

As per official statistics, hundreds of incidents of fratricide and suicide have taken places within the security forces during this period.

Stress is mainly believed to be the root cause of the incidence although the Army as well as paramilitary forces have initiated concrete steps in the light of "in-depth" analysis of past incidents and identification of windows of prevention which have helped in addressing the issue greatly.

While the Army has set up help lines and yoga classes to help the soldiers deal with stress, the CRPF and Border Security Force hold regular shows to entertain their men. However, main reasons of members of the security forces' resorting to extreme steps continue to be denial of leave and their being forced to perform duties for long periods in tough conditions including counter-insurgency operations, a recent survey had said.The head of the Australian Taxation Office has declared "integrity is everything" after the organisation was cleared of allegations it had executed a widespread cash grab on small businesses.

ATO Commissioner Chris Jordan has expressed the sentiment in an address to the Tax Institute's national convention in Hobart, after noting media commentary that 2019 may well be the "year of the watchdog".

"A healthy tax system which people have confidence in contributes to the stability and prosperity of our country," he said on Thursday.

"With a federal integrity and corruption commission on the cards - integrity is everything."'

Mr Jordan's speech comes after Inspector General of Taxation Andrew McLoughlin on Wednesday released the findings of his review into allegations the ATO inappropriately used garnishee notices in 2016/17.

The notices are used to recover tax debts through third parties, such as banks or customers who owe the business money.

ABC's Four Corners alleged in April 2018 the ATO had told staff to issue standard garnishee notices in every small business case as a "cash grab" towards the end of the year.

The ATO was also accused of assessing the performance of staff based on how much debt they collected.

After an extensive probe, Mr McLoughlin cleared the ATO of widespread issues.

"The allegations that there was an ATO direction for a 'cash grab' on small business or that debt staff personal performance were set on amounts collected - are not sustained," he said.

But he said problems did arise in some local areas for limited periods, particularly at the Adelaide office, by way of the inappropriate use of "enduring" garnishee notices.

Such notices require recurring payments for a certain period of time, generally three months.

"Those problems were anticipated and addressed by management once they became aware," Mr McLoughlin said.

Mr Jordan has welcomed the report and lamented that much of the media commentary about his organisation in 2018 was "disappointing".

"While we have done much to build trust and confidence in the system and in us ... some media was doing the opposite," he said.

He's feeling more optimistic about the future and the ATO's work with small businesses.

Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman Kate Carnell says the high number of garnishee notices issued in 2016/17 is still concerning.

The review found there were 23,712 notices issued in the year, about 40 per cent less than the 40,289 notices the ATO had expected to send.

"Given the draconian nature of the notices and the lack of judicial or other external oversight of notices before release, they should be used only as a last resort ... if at all," Ms Carnell said.A study into a spate of shark attacks, one of them fatal, in the Whitsundays has found a "very low" number of sharks in the area.

Victorian doctor Daniel Christidis was mauled to death last November and a woman and a girl were seriously injured in separate attacks in September in Cid Harbour.

An interim report on a study prompted by the attacks found there was a "notable absence of bull sharks" in the area.

The study included 465 hours of catch and release fishing in December last year.

Following the attacks the Queensland government outlined a five-point plan to improve safety. which included $250,000 in scientific research and a no swim zone in the harbour frequented by tourists.There has been a sudden spike in the number of West Australians seeking legal help because they can't pay their mortgage, with 112 people asking Legal Aid WA (LAWA) for assistance in January and February alone.

That compares to 301 people last year, and only 46 people in 2013.

Director of civil law Justin Stevenson predicted defaults would continue to surge in WA this year amid ongoing property price softness, unemployment and an end to interest-only loans.

Mr Stevenson said he was concerned not just for home owners.

"Another area of concern is elderly people who are the guarantors of the loan, who find themselves subject to possession applications," he said.

"Without assistance from LAWA, homelessness is a real consequence for these West Australians."

LAWA has launched outreach facilities of the state-wide Mortgage Hardship Service in Perth's worst affected suburbs - Midland, Merriwa and Baldivis.Students striking for climate action want the prime minister to know they love learning, but they feel let down by his inaction on the environment.

Tens of thousands of students will again strike from school on Friday demanding political action on climate change.

The students have three demands: stop the Adani coal mine, no new coal or gas, and 100 per cent renewables by 2030.

Victorian high school student Milou Albrecht was central to organising the strikes and says she will be taking to the streets out of fear of not having a safe future.

"We don't want to strike," the 14-year-old told AAP.

"We love learning, that's important for them to know."

Friday's country-wide mass protest comes months after students first turned their back on the classroom in the name of climate action, a move condemned by the prime minister.

"What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools," Scott Morrison said at the time.

But this time the students have found support from universities, unions, students groups and even NSW Opposition Leader Michael Daley.

Federal Labor leader Bill Shorten says the government has been on strike from climate policy since it has been in power.

"In an ideal world, they (students) would protest after school hours or on weekends but it's a bit rich of the government to lecture school kids for going on strike on climate," he told reporters in Melbourne on Thursday

Milou and her friend Harriet O'Shea Carre were inspired by Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, who has been striking for climate action since last August.

Harriet hopes the prime minister calls a climate emergency and says she will feel terrible if he again condemns their actions.

"It's totally unfair considering they have been representing (voters) with the expectations they will do what's in the best interests of the country," she said.

"They are letting us down every single day they don't do that.

"In the end, I think we will make these changes with or without our politicians."

Harriet says Australia's political leaders are forgetting the students will be able to vote in a few years, but she says they still have power now.

"Just because we're kids and we don't have political power doesn't mean we don't have any power," she said.

"As individuals we may be weak but together our collective voice is very strong and we can make change even without that vote."A shampoo spill left a Melbourne waterway covered with foam and the environmental watchdog has fined the company responsible thousands of dollars.

The foam spread across part of Blackburn Lake in January after a 100-litre drum of shampoo spilled into a drain from the Nunawading factory of STN International Pty Ltd.

"The foam pile at Blackburn Lake troubled community members and had the potential to harm aquatic life in the lake," Environmental Protection Authority metro regional manager Dan Hunt said in a statement issued on Thursday.

Shampoo and soap can deprive fish and other aquatic life of oxygen in the water and interfere with their metabolic processes, he added.

The company was fined $8,060.

A waste contractor removed the shampoo from the drain and Blackburn Lake and the company has put in controls to prevent any additional spills.Police want help to find a missing Queensland woman, believed to be in Victoria.

Farzana Ahad, 42, was last seen in Richmond in December 2017 and has not been in contact with friends or family since.

Police are concerned for her welfare, due to the length of time she's been missing and a medical condition.

Farzana is about 160cm tall, of medium build and of olive complexion, with short brown hair.

She has a distinctive tattoo of a Hindu symbol on her upper left arm and a coloured butterfly, rose and zodiac symbol tattoo on her back.

Queensland Police have been investigating since 2017 and now believe she may be in Victoria.

She is known to frequent the Richmond and Melbourne areas.

Anyone with information should contact Richmond Police Station on 8420 3600A manslaughter confession from a Melbourne wife killer has averted the need for a high-profile murder trial and despite previously gunning for the more serious charge, police are satisfied with the outcome.

Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton on Thursday said the plea from Borce Ristevski on Wednesday would allow "justice to move through the courts more quickly".

"Certainly for people required to give evidence and other members of the family ... it speeds up the process, and it's all part of that bargaining, that plea situation that is dealt with as a matter of course," he told ABC radio.

"(I'm) not disappointed. Everyone worked very hard on that case. The police ... will be sort of relieved in a way too they will be able to move through with that plea."

Ristevski, 55, pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of his dress shop-owner wife Karen almost three years after she went missing in June 2016.

The admission was made on the eve of a scheduled five-week murder trial.

Supreme Court Justice Christopher Beale ruled that Ristevski's actions after the killing - when he played the role of grieving husband - could not be used to prove "murderous intent".

Prosecutors subsequently filed a new indictment with the lesser charge of manslaughter, which Ristevski admitted, scuttling the murder trial.

In previous hearings, prosecutors pushed hard for a murder trial, saying Ristevski's deceitful behaviours after the killing gave rise to the required intent.

Mr Ashton said cases built on circumstantial evidence were always challenging rather than drawing on direct evidence.

"When you build those circumstantial cases, it can be a laborious and painstaking and often can in some cases come down to a jury accepting the circumstantial matters, proving beyond reasonable doubt that a certain set of facts has occurred," he said.

Ristevski was charged in December 2017 after a lengthy investigation that involved listening devices and CCTV footage analysis.

He allegedly killed his 47-year-old wife at their Avondale Heights home on June 29, 2016 and took her Mercedes-Benz roadster to dispose of the body in bushland.

Eight months later, her skeletal remains were found between logs in Macedon Regional Park.

Ristevski will face a pre-sentence hearing on March 27.More than a million extra social housing and affordable homes will be needed in Australia by 2036 to meet growing demand, research shows.

Sydney is most in need, with projections showing more than 210,000 additional homes are required. Melbourne comes in second place, needing 176,800 more places.

Of the necessary dwellings, 728,600 should be for social housing, with the remainder to be tailored as affordable homes, the University of NSW's City Futures Research Centre found.

Lead researcher Laurence Troy said on Thursday if the forecast need is to be met by 2036, at least 12 per cent of all residential development should be low- to middle-income housing.

"To cover the backlog of unmet need and future need in Australia, two in 10 new homes will need to be for social housing over the next 20 years, and a further one in 10 for below market affordable rental housing," Mr Troy said.

Everybody's Home campaign spokesperson Kate Colvin said the report highlighted the nation's housing crisis.

"It shows the housing system is far more broken than we first thought - but it also shows that delivering the scale of new homes for people who need them is entirely doable with political will and commitment," Ms Colvin said.

The report presents findings of a research project commissioned by Community Housing Industry Association NSW and Homelessness NSW.

EXTRA SOCIAL AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING NEEDS BY 2036

* Sydney 217,000

* Melbourne 176,800

* Brisbane 117,600

* Perth 95,700

* Adelaide 50,500

* Hobart 8,500

* Darwin 4,800

* ACT 11,700

SOURCE: City Futures Research CentreAustralian farmers effectively have access to an agriculture visa after the government extended a raft of migration programs, Prime Minister Scott Morrison says.

The agriculture sector, led by horticulturalists and the National Farmers' Federation, has been pushing for a specific farm worker visa to address crippling labour shortages.

"We've already effectively got it. If it's quibbling about a name, well I think that's just politics," Mr Morrison told ABC radio on Thursday.

At the NFF conference in October, Mr Morrison said he remained committed to the idea but urged caution.

"We will work to establish an agriculture visa - that is the long-term solution, even the medium-term solution," he said at the time.

Now he's confident the government has extended enough existing programs to do the same job as a dedicated visa.

"We already have one. It already works that way. This is just a semantic discussion about titles," he said.

Earlier this week, the government added a host of farm jobs to the Regional Occupations List to allow migrants to be sponsored for up to four years.

The move followed recent changes to the working holiday maker and seasonal worker visa programs, also designed to address labour shortages in agriculture.

Mr Morrison said he would continue to expand migration schemes as workforce demands presented.

"You continue to try and work with the sector but at the same time you want Australians doing Australian jobs so you've got to get the balance right," he said.Police are investigating the disappearance of a woman and her seven-month-old daughter in Western Australia 20 years ago.

Veronica Philomena Lockyer and her daughter Adell Sherylee Partridge were last seen in the Merredin/Burracoppin area in late 1998.

The indigenous mother-of-six, who led a transient lifestyle, visited women's hostels in Perth and communities in northern WA.

Unconfirmed information indicates that in November or December 1998 Ms.Lockyer had her baby with her and may have caught a taxi from the Centre Point Shopping Centre in Midland.

One of Ms Lockyer's other daughters reported the pair missing in July.

Detective Senior Sergeant Adrian Richards said police had serious concerns about their welfare because there were no records or documentation since late 1998.

"We're approaching this investigation with an open mind," he told reporters on Thursday.

Ms Lockyer would now be aged 54 and her daughter would be 20.Congress leader Sam Pitroda has said the country needs more proof of Balakot deaths.

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called the Congress scepticism about the Balakot attacks shameful.

In a wide ranging interview to news agency ANI, Rahul Gandhi confidant and Chairman of the Overseas Indian National Congress Sam Pitroda has questioned the death toll in the Balakot airstrike conducted by the Indian Air Force in Pakistan in retaliation of the Pulwama terror attack.

If they (IAF) killed 300, its ok. All I am saying is can you give me more facts and prove it, said Pitroda told ANI.

Modi retaliated: The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning Indias armed forces. Shame.

He said: Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew. Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India. We will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest.

Modi said the Opposition insults our forces time and again. I appeal to my fellow Indians -- question Opposition leaders on their statements. Tell them -- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics. India stands firmly with our forces, he said.

In the ANI interview, Pitroda had said international news outlets had an alternate view of the impact of the air strike and that the people of India deserved to know the facts of the Air Force operation.

I would like to know a little more because I read reports in the New York Timesand other newspapers. Did we really attack? We really killed 300 people? I dont know that. As a citizen, I am entitled to know and if I ask it is my duty to ask, that doesnt mean Im not a nationalist, That doesnt mean I am on this side or that side. We need to know the facts. If you say 300 people were killed, I need to know that. We all need to know that, people of India need to know that and then comes global media which says nobody was killed. I look bad as an Indian citizen, said Pitroda.

Pitroda, who is part of the Congress manifesto committee for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and is considered a senior ideologue of the party, sought a dialogue with Pakistan. I am a Gandhian, I believe in more compassion and respect. I believe in more dialogues personally. I think we should have a dialogue with everybody. Why just Pakistan? We are having dialogue with the whole world, added Pitroda.

Pressed further to clarify if talks with Pakistan was an option post the Pulwama terror attack which killed 40 CRPF jawans, Pitroda said that it would be naive to assume that if some people came here and attacked, every citizen of that nation is to be blamed. I dont know much about (Pulwama) attack, it happens all the time, attack happen in Mumbai Taj hotel and Oberoi hotel. We could have reacted then and sent our planes but that is not the right approach according to me thats not how you deal with the World. Eight people come (referring to Mumbai 26/11 attacks) and do something, you dont jump on the entire nation, said Sam Pitroda in an interview to ANI.

When asked if he questioned the Indian Air Forces version of the Balakot air strikes, Pitroda clarified that an attack is different from making a claim of 300 dead. We cannot be emotional. Data has to be neutral. So you come in today and say I killed 300 people and I say wait a minute, the World is saying we didnt kill anybody or kill less or kill more.. I dont know, added Pitroda.

Sam Pitroda added a caveat to his remarks on the Pulwama terror attack and Balakot air strikes by saying that the views expressed by him were his personal views and not those of the Congress party. I am talking as an individual. I am talking as a scientist. I believe in reason. I believe in logic. I believe in data. I dont believe in emotions, he added.

When asked if Dr Manmohan Singh when Prime Minister was as decisive in his actions as PM Narendra Modi, Pitroda said that PM Manmohan Singh was one of the best Prime Ministers the country ever had. A lot of people ridiculed, a lot of people have written articles, they have done movies. It is all bogus, he added. Pitroda also said that he disagreed with the way PM Modi acted post-Pulwama attack.

Pitroda went on to say in the interview that since 2014, a populist government had risen in both India and the United States. The formula is to create fear by saying that there is enemy at the border. In India, it is Pakistan. In US, it is Mexican immigrants. Then say everything is bad because nobody is competent, he added.An outbreak of a mosquito-borne virus in Tasmania has prompted health authorities to re-issue a warning for residents and travellers on the state's east coast.

Two more cases of the Barmah Forest virus have been confirmed, after three were confirmed earlier in March.

"Although a small number of cases have been notified in Tasmania in the past - these are the first cases where we are confident they have been acquired in Tasmania, rather than interstate," Public Health Services Clinical Director Dr Faline Howes said on Thursday.

"The fact that we are seeing a number of cases of this virus is significant and we'd obviously like to understand more."

Two more potential cases are being investigated by health authorities.

The Barmah Forest virus is similar but less severe than Ross River virus and symptoms including joint pain, tiredness, headaches and muscle pain can last for months.

Many people, however, show no symptoms.

Health authorities have reminded people on Tasmania's east coast to protect themselves against mosquito bites, after issuing the same warning a few weeks ago.

Mosquito traps will be set up this weekend on the state's east coast to try and confirm the presence of the mosquito species known to carry the virusSydneysiders are being warned to prepare for a severe thunderstorm which is set to bring "possibly giant hailstones" and damaging winds.

Very dangerous thunderstorms have been detected near Blacktown and Riverstone, the Bureau of Meteorology said on Thursday evening.

The storms are moving towards the east with severe thunderstorms expected to hit the city and eastern suburbs by 6.30pm.

The State Emergency Service is warning residents to move cars under cover or away from trees, secure loose items around homes and keep at least eight metres away from fallen power lines.

"Heavy rainfall that may lead to flash flooding, large, possibly giant hailstones and damaging winds are likely," the bureau said in a statement.

The conditions are a result of fairly warm and humid air interacting with a low-pressure trough lingering near the state's coast, a Bureau spokesman told AAP.

The big wet could last until early or mid next week.

Friday is forecast to bring showers and thunderstorms to the state's east possibly extending to the northwestern slopes.

Showers are forecast on Saturday extending to northern inland areas while on Sunday showers will likely reach the far northern inland with a chance of thunderstorms in the north.AAP FactCheck Investigation: Does the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party have policies to give guns to 10-year-olds and relax the national firearms agreement?

The Statement

"I think the Shooters Party is absolutely dangerous. Their policies of giving guns to 10-year-olds and relaxing John Howard's gun laws are recent policies. We will not stand for 10-year-olds being given guns in NSW."

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian warns that the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers (SFF) party wants to give guns to 10-year-olds and wind back the National Firearm Agreement. March 14, 2019.

The Analysis

The NSW government has attacked the SFF's gun policies saying "they are pretending that they're not party positions - they are." [1]

AAP FactCheck examined the premier's claims the SFF has policies to give guns to 10-year-olds and relax John Howard's 1996 National Firearm Agreement.

The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party was formed in 1992 by shooters and hunters who believed the 1992 NSW Firearms Amendment Act "was designed to make them the scapegoats for criminal misuse of firearms by others". In 2016 the party changed its name to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party (SFF). [2]

The SFF holds two NSW Upper House seats and the party has increased its vote at every election since 2003. [3]

In a November 2016 NSW by-election the SFF won its first lower house seat in Orange by 56 votes after seven recounts. [4]

An SFF spokesperson told AAP FactCheck the party was fielding 25 candidates for NSW Lower House seats at the March 23 election.

Back in 2011, the SFF introduced a bill to NSW parliament to remove restrictions on the age of shooters for air rifles, with a caveat that minors be supervised by parents. The bill lapsed. [5]

SFF party leader Robert Borsak said in August 2017 the party "would be happy to see minor's permits for firearms use to be reduced from 12 years of age to 10 years." [6]

On October 11, 2017 NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro recounted to NSW parliament a Sydney radio interview in which Mr Borsak "confirmed that he wants to see guns in the hands of 10-year-olds". Mr Barilaro told parliament "the policy of the Shooters Party is to have 10-year-olds with guns on properties". [7]

Mr Borsak told AAP FactCheck the party dumped the policy regarding 10-year-olds in October 2017 because of "community attitudes". "We changed our policy in October 2017 and now support the existing age restrictions", which allow 12-year-olds to use and possess guns, but not buy firearms. [8]

The SFF policy shift followed the party's defeat in two NSW by-elections on October 14, 2017, supposedly following "scare-mongering" over the policy by the Nationals. [9]

In February 2019, the SFF's only NSW lower house member, Orange MP Phil Donato, reiterated the policy shift and refuted a claim by the premier that his party wanted 10-year-olds to have guns. "It's pure scare-mongering, it's purely trying to place fear in the community by the premier, totally false," Mr Donato said. [10]

The premier and her Treasurer Dominic Perrottet have however maintained the SFF has a policy to give guns to 10-year-olds.

On December 17, 2018, the premier called on Labor to rule out a deal with the SFF over its policy to lower the age limit for a minor's gun permit. "People want to know what you stand for and I don't stand for 10-year-olds having guns, I don't stand for those laws that John Howard put in 1996 to be watered down," Ms Berejiklian said. [11]

On February 2, 2019, Mr Perrottet likened the SFF to American gun lobby the National Rifle Association (NRA). "The opposition leader is jumping into bed with an organisation like the NRA of NSW who want to arm 10 year olds with guns," Mr Perrottet said. [12]

AAP concludes the premier's claim the SFF has a policy to give 10-year-olds a gun is false.

Twelve days after the April 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, where 35 people were killed, prime minister John Howard announced a sweeping package of gun reforms. [13]

Cabinet papers released by the National Archives of Australia reveal a May 10, 1996 meeting with commonwealth attorney-general, Daryl Williams, and state and territory police ministers broadly adopted Mr Howard's gun control package which became the National Firearms Agreement (NFA). [14]

The SFF's top two policies for the 2016 federal election were to repeal the 1996 NFA and "vehemently oppose" the establishment of a Commonwealth Firearms Registry. [15]

Mr Borsak however told AAP FactCheck the premier's claim, that SFF has a policy to "relax" Mr Howard's gun laws, was a "complete lie", as the party had also dropped that policy in October 2017 to "reflect community sentiment".

"There is no short-term, medium-term or long-term aim by the party to repeal the National Firearms Agreement," he told AAP FactCheck. "We're not looking for a relaxation of the National Firearm Agreement at all, what we are looking for is a review of the administration of the Firearms Act in New South Wales."

Mr Borsak's claim is supported by a February 2018 story in The Australian. "After being hit with Nationals claims they wanted semi-automatic weapons introduced, the Shooters have also watered down their previous policy of having the National Firearms Agreement abolished and reworked." [16]

However the current policies page on the SFF website lists "review the National Firearms Agreement of COAG" as its first item under firearms. Also included are plans to oppose a Commonwealth Firearms Registry or any other federal interference state firearm laws, and expand self-defence rights and non-lethal means of protection. [17]

AAP FactCheck concludes that premier's claim regarding the currency of the SFF's National Firearms Agreement policy is inconclusive.

The Verdict

Ambiguous - It is not possible to determine the veracity of the statement, or it has an equal weighting of true and false elements.

The References

1: 'NSW government launches attack on dangerous Shooters Party'. By Anna Caldwell. The Daily Telegraph. March 14, 2019:

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/nsw-government-launches-attack-on-dangerous-shooters-party/news-story/1e54d9e5fdab78abe607c680fc468aba

2: Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party website: https://www.shootersfishersandfarmers.org.au/our_party

3: 'NSW election ballot draw favours Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party and Greens'. By Nour Haydar. The ABC. March 7, 2019: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-07/nsw-ballot-draw-favours-minor-parties-at-state-election/10879618

4: 'Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party takes aim at the NSW Lower House in upcoming election'. By Kelly Fuller. ABC Illawarra. January 29, 2019: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-29/shooters-fishers-farmers-party-target-nsw-election/10756052

5: 'Firearms Legislation Amendment Bill 2011'. NSW Parliament: https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/bills/Pages/Profiles/firearms-legislation-amendment-bill-2011_1.aspx

6: 'Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party calls for firearms permits for 10-year-olds'. By Andrew Taylor. Sydney Morning Herald. August 6, 2017: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/shooters-fishers-and-farmers-party-calls-for-firearms-permits-for-10yearolds-20170801-gxmyzy.html

7: NSW Legislative Assembly Hansard. October 12, 2017: https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/Hansard/Pages/HansardResult.aspx#/docid/HANSARD-1323879322-99289

8: 'Push for guns in schools'. By Heath Aston and Eamonn Duff. The Sun-Herald. July 17, 2011: https://www.smh.com.au/education/push-for-guns-in-schools-20110716-1hj5q.html

9: 'Donato says there is no policy to give guns to 10-year-olds'. Central Western Daily. February 7, 2019: https://www.centralwesterndaily.com.au/story/5890248/its-pure-scare-mongering-donato-says-theres-no-policy-to-give-10-year-olds-guns/

'Shooters abandon changes to firearm permits policy'. By Andrew Clennell. The Australian. February 19, 2018: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/shooters-abandon-changes-to-firearm-permits-policy/news-story/e91dadc7e77c182c761fd739c9dd7f8e

10: 'Donato says there is no policy to give guns to 10-year-olds'. Central Western Daily. February 7, 2019: https://www.centralwesterndaily.com.au/story/5890248/its-pure-scare-mongering-donato-says-theres-no-policy-to-give-10-year-olds-guns/

11: 'NSW Labor won't rule out Shooters deal'. AAP/SBS. December 17, 2008:

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/nsw-labor-won-t-rule-out-shooters-deal

12: 'Shooters Party strikes deal with Mark Latham's One Nation', by Linda Simalis. The Sunday Telegraph. February 2, 2019: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/shooters-party-strikes-deal-with-mark-lathams-one-nation/news-story/e6d3f61d622c82f9c63dd49a2d32c332

13: 'It took one massacre: how Australia embraced gun control after Port Arthur'. By Calla Wahlquist. The Guardian. March 15, 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/15/it-took-one-massacre-how-australia-made-gun-control-happen-after-port-arthur

14: 'John Howard's decisive action on gun control revealed in 1996 cabinet papers'. By Anne Davies. The Guardian. January 1, 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jan/01/john-howard-port-arthur-gun-control-1996-cabinet-papers

15: 'Shooters, Fishers And Farmers Party Election Statement'. Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia. May 31, 2016: https://ssaa.org.au/news-resources/politics/shooters-fishers-and-farmers-party-election-statement/

16: 'Shooters abandon changes to firearm permits policy'. By Andrew Clennell. The Australian. February 19, 2018: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/shooters-abandon-changes-to-firearm-permits-policy/news-story/e91dadc7e77c182c761fd739c9dd7f8e

17: 'Firearms Policy'. Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party: https://www.shootersfishersandfarmers.org.au/federal_policies-newZoom will go fast, Zorro will be strong and Zoe is likely to be the most popular.

Or at least that's what the kids at Sydney Children's Hospital think of the newest recruits to join NSW Police's dog unit.

The five playful German shepherd puppies - Zoom, Zorro, Zoe, Zara and Zala - got to meet the patients who named them at the hospital on Thursday.

Jett Waldron, 7, who is undergoing chemotherapy for rhabdomyosarcoma - a form of children's cancer - told AAP he picked Zoom because he thinks the pup will be fast.

"It's awesome - it definitely brightens their spirits. I think big kids and little kids like the puppies," Jett's mother, Melanie Waldron, said.

Bella Duggan, 12, who has the heart condition cardiomyopathy said Zara was her favourite name.

She told AAP she loved playing with the dogs because they were "really cute and fun".

Her mum, Ev Schneider, said voting on the final names and then getting to meet the puppies was one of Bella's favourite days in hospital.

"It's just special, it just nice to be involved in it," she said.

Sydney Children's Hospitals spokeswoman Gilly Paxton said: "Every child here will remember their stay in hospital for the puppies and not because they were in hospital."

The puppies, born on Christmas Eve, have started tracking training and will one day be used in foot pursuits and missing person searches.A young driver "selfishly prioritised" texting his girlfriend over road safety when he crashed into two police officers in western Sydney, a NSW judge said before jailing him for at least two years.

Judge John Hatzistergos jailed Jakob Thornton for three years and eight months with a non-parole period of two years at Downing Centre District Court on Friday over the February 2018 crash.

Thornton pleaded guilty in August to two counts of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm.

The 23-year-old was looking at his phone for up to 20 seconds when he ploughed into senior constables Jonathan Wright and Matthew Foley, who were setting up a random breath test site at Leumeah.

Thornton had sent 29 text messages during his drive home, including 18 to his girlfriend and at least three on a highway while travelling at 110 km/h.

The judge said an officer yelled "stop" at Thornton before he collided with the back of their car at about 60 km/h, "squashing both victims between the two vehicles".

The officers were left with serious injuries.

Surgeons had to amputate Sen Const Wright's leg below the knee, which he said has left him with "constant chronic phantom and actual limb pain".

"I am never pain-free," he said in his victim impact statement.

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."

Thornton's provisional license had been suspended three times prior to the crash and he was fined for using a mobile phone while driving three years earlier.

But 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 reads.

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.While New Zealand families mourned their dead and surgeons worked overnight to save dozens more injured in the Christchurch mass shooting, the alleged terrorist's manifesto provides a troubling insight into one of the blackest days in the nation's history.

Australian Brenton Tarrant, allegedly behind Friday's attack which killed at least 49 people, did not originally plan to carry out the massacre in New Zealand, his rambling writings reveal.

What's not yet clear is whether Australia was the first choice for the attack.

Tarrant, 28, allegedly prepared his manifesto titled "The Great Replacement" and posted it on a message board website hours before driving to the Christchurch mosque.

In the post, the self-declared fascist said he planned to carry out an attack for two years and decided to target Christchurch three months ago.

"I only arrived to New Zealand to live temporarily whilst 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," the post states.

As his hateful writings spread through the internet, the digital communities which Tarrant appeared to reference throughout the text grappled with their own "moral culpability".

"(Are we) morally responsible for the radicalisation of white men on the internet?," one forum user asked.

"The world is responsible for radicalising white men, this is just where we go to vent," another shot back.

Originally from Grafton, Tarrant worked as a personal trainer at the Big River Squash and Fitness Centre.

The 28-year-old said he had a regular childhood but had little interest in education and has recently worked as a "kebab removalist".

That was a reference to a Bosnian Serb propaganda folk song from the 1990s called Serbia Strong, which became a meme popular on white nationalist forums.

Under a heading "Why did you carry out the attack?", he said it was to avenge "thousands of deaths caused by foreign invaders".

Under another heading entitled "What are your wishes?", he quoted a white nationalist slogan known as "the 14 words".

He was arrested on Friday afternoon along with three others.

One of them, believed to be Tarrant, has been charged with murder and will appear in court on Saturday.About 150,000 students, parents and activists have taken to the streets to protest over the federal government's inaction on climate change.

Strikes were held across the country on Friday at 60 locations, as part of a global effort to shine a light on climate change.

The protests were estimated to be 10 times the size of those held in November.

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.

More strikes will be planned if the students don't see the action they want from the government.

"If the politicians are just going to throw our futures away there's nothing we can do but be out here and say: we're not going to let you do that," 15-year-old Olivia Boddington told AAP at a climate strike in Canberra.

"We're not going to just go away."

Huge crowds gathered across the country on Friday, including at Sydney's Town Hall Square, outside Melbourne's Old Treasury Building and in Brisbane's CBD.

The movement was inspired by Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, who has been striking for climate action since last August.

The 16-year-old's activism has earned her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Senior cabinet minister Christopher Pyne criticised the students for striking, saying the move will damage their education.

However, Labor national president Wayne Swan defended student activism.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.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison was briefed by agency chiefs on Friday, 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."

Mr 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.

Australia's terrorism alert level has not been lifted, but NZ's was lifted from low to high.

Mr Morrison said he had heard nothing to suggest any Australians were killed or injured in the shooting.

NZ 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.A blueprint for Formula 1's proposed 2021 overhaul will be presented to all teams on March 26 in London.

But Formula 1 CEO Chase Carey claimed prospective new teams have already expressed interest in joining the category in 2021 with speculation growing that the field may be boosted from 10 to 12.

Formula 1 owners Liberty Media have worked on a revamp of the sport since taking over the category in early 2017 in a bid to cut competition costs for teams and provide a more balanced distribution of revenue.

Carey and motorsport governing body FIA's president Jean Todt confirmed they would unveil the sport's future direction by revealing prospective 2021 rules at a strategy group and commission meeting in London later this month, just days ahead of the Bahrain Grand Prix.

"We should be ready with the global package and the commercial side, financial side, which is the responsibility of Formula 1," Todt said in Melbourne ahead of the Australian Grand Prix.

"We have the cost control, which is a new initiative which is quite well advanced.

"We have engine regulations which have been sent to the teams a few days ago, and we have chassis regulations, and we have the governance.

"Those are all the different chapters on which we are working, and we should be in a position to have a finalised package to discuss with the teams on March 26."

While they are yet to attract a new engine manufacturer, Carey said there was already "real interest" from prospective new teams.

"We have had, more on the teams side than the engine side, a number of potential new entrants that expressed interest and enthusiasm if we provide a structure that they think enables it to be something they could enter more constructively," he said.

Todt said he would "love" to have a 12-team Formula 1 field in the future.

F1 has not boasted a 12-team grid since 2012.

"F1 should have 12 teams but of course it would pose a problem, because if you have 12 teams with certain revenues to distribute, those would have to get less income," said Todt.

"They would not be happy. But that is what F1 should be."

But Red Bull team boss Christian Horner baulked at expanding the field.

"I always go for quality over quantity. I think we've got 10 teams that are in pretty decent health at the moment, compared to previous years," he said.

"I think we have a good balance at the moment and I prefer that we look after what we've got than inviting more entries for the sake of filling the grid."Latrell Mitchell has played against Will Chambers, so he should know better.

Instead, the Sydney Roosters star allowed himself to get baited in his side's 26-16 round-one loss to South Sydney on Friday.

Mitchell was sporting a decent cut following a head clash with Dane Gagai, who was in the face of the representative star for most of the night.

But the Kangaroos and NSW Origin representative insisted it wasn't the increased physicality that opposition teams are throwing at him as his star grows.

"I think they want to bait me. They sort of got me a little bit tonight, but I'll let them have that," Mitchell said after the match.

"I definitely feel as though I can be more of a threat with the ball. I was a bit quiet tonight and I'll take that upon myself and work hard on that."

It is not the first time Mitchell has been targeted by rival players.

There was plenty of chippiness in his battles with Queensland and Melbourne centre Will Chambers last year.

"He was pretty good at it, the best. (But) I think I went away from that. I've got to get back to playing my footy," Mitchell said.

Much of the build-up to the match was also about Mitchell's individual match-up with Greg Inglis, who has been switched from left to right flank by Wayne Bennett.

Mitchell suggested he showed the Kangaroos veteran, whose fitness and form was questioned leading into the contest, too much respect.

"I tried not to show him as much respect as I should have. It's good to see him out there and playing some footy," Mitchell said.

"I know he's had a bit of backlash. I feel as though it's a step in the right direction for him. I want to praise him because he's GI.

"But he's obviously a great opponent to go up again. I just didn't want to focus too much on it, it's obviously Greg Inglis but it's just another opponent."The government declared the outfit as 'an unlawful association under Section 3(1) of the Unlawful Prevention Act 1967.'

The outfit had given up the use of gun in 1994 but continued its separatist activities. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: The central government on Friday banned the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), saying the outfit led by former militant leader Yasin Malik is actively engaged in inciting secessionism and illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.

The government declared the outfit as an unlawful association under Section 3(1) of the Unlawful Prevention Act 1967, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba told reporters here.

The outfit, which had initiated a militant movement in Kashmir in 1988 and was involved in numerous acts of terror, had given up the use of gun in 1994 but continued its separatist activities.

Gauba noted that JKLF was involved in the killing of Kashmiri Pandits, which resulted in their exodus from the valley in 1990.

The outfit also was involved in kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in December 1989, as well as the killing of four IAF personnel besides several other acts of terror, he said.

At least 37 FIRs have been registered by the Jammu and Kashmir Police against JKLF, two cases, including the case of murder of IAF personnel, were registered by CBI. The NIA has also registered a case, which is under investigation, the Home Secretary said.

"Government is committed to relentlessly pursuing the policy of curbing the activities of secessionist organisations which are a threat to the unity and integrity of the country. The NIA and ED are taking strong steps against these organisations," he said.

"The JKLF has many serious cases registered against it, he said, adding the action has been taken in accordance with the policy of zero tolerance against terrorism followed by the central government."

Gauba said the JKLF had spearheaded the separatist ideology in the Valley and has been at the forefront of separatist activities and violence since 1988.

He said that the murders of Kashmiri Pandits by the JKLF in 1989 had triggered their exodus from the Valley.

"Yasin Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley and is responsible for their genocide," he said while reading out the statement.

"This organisation, alongside, is also responsible for illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism. JKLF is actively involved in raising of funds and its distribution to Hurriyat cadres and stone-pelters to fuel unrest in the Kashmir Valley as well as for subversive activities," he added.

Gauba stated that the JKLF has been "actively and continuously encouraging, feelings of enmity and hatred against the lawfully established government as well as armed rebellion."

"It is evident from these that JKLF continues to be actively engaged in supporting and inciting secessionism and terrorism including terror financing," Gauba said.

He further stated that the government will continue reviewing the process of withdrawing security of separatist leaders.

Malik, who was detained on February 22, was lodged at Kothibagh police station. He was booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA).

In the aftermath of the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district, which claimed lives of 40 CRPF soldiers on February 14, the Jammu and Kashmir government withdrew the security cover of several separatists including Malik, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Shabir Shah and Saleem Geelani.An Australian man will appear in a New Zealand court on Saturday charged with murder over the Christchurch mosques massacre.

Former NSW personal trainer Brenton Tarrant, 28, has been charged with murder after at least 49 people were killed in separate attacks on two mosques in Christchurch on Saturday, horrifying New Zealanders.

NZ Police have announced the Christchurch court where Tarrant is due to appear will be closed to public over security concerns, but media will still be able to attend.

Two other people arrested are yet to be charged.

"This individual has travelled around the world with sporadic periods of time spent in New Zealand," NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Saturday."

"They were not a resident of Christchurch. In fact they were currently based in Dunedin,"

She said inquires were ongoing to establish whether the other two were directly involved.

A fourth person arrested on Friday was a member of the public who was in possession of a firearm, but with the intention of assisting police, she said. They have since been released.

Tarrant, who is yet to be named by police, identified himself online as behind the shooting that began as hundreds of worshippers gathered for prayers in the South Island city on Friday.

Police have said none of those arrested had appeared on the watchlist of New Zealand or Australian security agencies

Tarrant, 28, grew up in Grafton in NSW and stated in a rambling 74-page "manifesto" posted online before the attack he had spent years planning in vengeance for deaths in Europe, before deciding on Christchurch three months ago.The family of a man who is accused of murdering dozens of people in Christchurch approached NSW Police after viewing footage of the terror attack, it has been confirmed.

Police Commissioner Mick Fuller on Saturday said there were "no active threats" in NSW linked to the massacre in New Zealand, however the national terrorism threat level remains at "probable".

A total of 49 people died in the attack on two mosques on New Zealand's South Island on Friday and more than 40 people are in hospital.

Three people have been arrested including a 28-year-old Australian citizen, charged with murder.

"After the crime, my understanding is the family (of this man) did approach NSW Police after the incident was on TV," Mr Fuller said in Sydney on Saturday morning.

The commissioner will be joined by other senior police at a meeting with religious leaders at the Australian National Imams Council in the city's west.Labor frontbencher Tony Burke has condemned comments from Queensland senator Fraser Anning blaming the Islamic community for the New Zealand mosque shooting as "hate speech" and "horrific and sick".

Mr Burke told the ABC "the normalisation of bigotry is something that is not only confined to him".

"We need to call it out, we need to make sure that no way any member of parliament fosters it. He wants the conflict and he wants the notoriety," he said on Saturday.

"He was put there as the result of being on the One Nation ticket. One Nation is the reason he is there."

Prime Minister Scott Morrison also hit out at the independent senator's comments in a tweet on Friday.

"The remarks by Senator Fraser Anning blaming the murderous attacks by a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist in New Zealand on immigration are disgusting. These views have no place in Australia, let alone in the Australian Parliament."

Opposition leader Bill Shorten also voiced his anger at the comments.

"While families in Christchurch mourn for loved ones they've lost, an obscure Australian senator saw this act of terrorism and tragedy as an opportunity to blame the murder victims," he tweeted

Mehreen Faruqi, the first Muslim woman elected to federal parliament, named Senator Anning and Pauline Hanson as politicians who target Muslims.

"There is blood on the hands of politicians who incite hate. To me, there is a clear link between their politics of hate and this sickening, senseless violence in Christchurch," she tweeted.

A vigil was held at Lakemba mosque in Western Sydney on Friday night for the Christchurch victims and was attended by Premier Gladys Berejiklian, NSW Opposition Leader Michael Daley, Immigration Minister David Coleman and Mr Burke.

Speaking at the vigil Mr Coleman said the attack was an "act of indescribable evil".

National President of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Australia and Grand Imam Mr. I. H. Kauser said unity against bigotry was critical at this sad time.

"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."Christians and Muslims in Perth will gather on Saturday in a show of solidarity following the mosque attacks in New Zealand.

The gathering, with representatives from the Perth Muslim community along with Uniting, Anglican and Catholic community members, plan to meet at the Uniting Church in the City "to pray, light a candle, or sit in the silence of the church".

"We have received a lot of love and support from our neighbours and friends, and it's important that we stay united and quell any voices promoting division and hate speech," Imam Mohammed Shakeeb from the Perth Mosque said in a statement.As the enormity of the Port Arthur massacre unfolded, John Howard thought to himself: "Heavens above, what's the point of having a huge majority if you can't do something with it."

The result was the National Firearms Agreement, hammered out over the strong opposition of some states and gun owners, banning semi-automatic rifles and shotguns and imposing strict national licensing requirements.

Thirty-five people died and 23 were wounded when lone gunman Martin Bryant opened fire on visitors at Port Arthur, Tasmania on the afternoon of April 28, 1996.

At that time the coalition had been in power for just under two months.

Cabinet documents for 1996 and 1997, released by the National Archives of Australia on January 1, reveal some of the mechanics of implementing the NFA and buying back more than half-a-million banned guns from their owners.

Cabinet historian Paul Strangio said the actual cabinet documents were not as illuminating on the gun law changes as he had hoped.

"A lot of it was done out of Mr Howard's private office and the big arguments were in the party room rather than the cabinet. The tensions were particularly around the National Party," he said.

Guns laws then and now remain the responsibility of states and territories.

Pre-1996, firearms laws varied widely, though following a series of gun attacks, Victoria and NSW had tightened up their laws and there was a growing movement for standardised national laws.

Among the holdouts was Tasmania whose lax laws allowed Bryant to acquire the two military rifles he used at Port Arthur.

The cabinet documents show Tasmania was quick to agree to tighten its laws.

A cabinet minute of April 29 - the day after the massacre - cites an oral report from Tasmanian senator and cabinet minister Jocelyn Newman who said the Tasmanian state government, opposition and Greens had agreed to ban all military style semi-automatic rifles and to introduce registration of all guns.

Mr Howard was at Kirribilli House in Sydney when he was informed of the tragedy.

"Tony Rundle, the then premier of Tasmania, rang me. I went down to Canberra that night and we had a meeting at The Lodge. It was then I started about the idea of national gun laws," he said.

"It was one of these things where there was overwhelming support for what we did in the cities and in most of regional Australia.

"But in certain areas of the bush, people felt aggrieved. They felt they had been deprived and handicapped through the behaviour of a madman."

Mr Howard said he could understand how some of them felt.

"But I just believed overwhelmingly that if you couldn't do this and you weren't prepared to chance your arm on something like this, well what's the point of being in government," he said.

Mr Howard said this was a very difficult time for his colleagues, deputy prime minister and Nationals leader Tim Fischer and his deputy John Anderson.

He believed a referendum to transfer gun law powers to the Commonwealth would have been carried but it became an unnecessary option.

Mr Howard met some of those impacted by the shooting, such as Walter Mikac who lost his wife and two young daughters.

"It was a very early reminder to me that one of the jobs of the prime minister is to comfort and console and embrace and hug people who have had immense tragedy," he said.

Mr Fischer said Australia was a safe place because of those laws, but it wasn't easy.

He recalls an effigy of himself set alight outside a public hall in Queensland as he and the cabinet took their policy around the country.

"If you count 10 or more victims as a gun massacre, we had several before 1996, we've had zero since," he told AAP.

"The US has several every month of every year of the 21st century."

He warned that Australians shouldn't become complacent, and must guard against any attempts to wind back the gun laws.

It's an issue New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will now have to grapple with after promising changes following the Christchurch massacre, which has left at least 49 people dead.New Zealand police have defended the 36 minutes it took to arrest the man now charged with murder over the Christchurch mosque massacre.

There has been some criticism that police were too slow too react to the attacks at two mosques that have left at least 49 people dead.

NZ Police Commissioner Mike Bush said police were at the Deans Ave mosque within minutes of the incident being reported at 1.42pm on Friday.

District Commander John Price, who was in charge of Friday's operation, told reporters on Saturday he was happy with the response.

"That is an incredibly fast response time. You had a mobile offender across large metropolitan city," Commander Price said.

Mr Bush praised police and other emergency service workers for their actions - and members of the public who tried to help.

He said the arrest of Australian man Brenton Tarrant - who on Saturday faced court on one count of murder - was dangerous.

"That person was not willing to be arrested," Mr Bush said.

"We also believe that not only were there IEDs in that vehicle, so it was a very dangerous manoeuvre.

"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 from further harm."At least a dozen people - including a four-year-old girl - are still fighting for their lives after the Christchurch massacre that left 49 people dead.

The girl has been flown to Auckland's Starship children's hospital for treatment, while two other children - a two-year-old boy and a 13-year-old boy - are in a stable condition in Christchurch Hospital.

Head of surgery, Dr Greg Robertson, told reporters on Saturday that 36 of the 48 injured people remain in hospital. At least seven have been discharged.

"Of the 36 patients that remain in hospital, 11 of them are in the intensive care unit, including one female aged in her mid-20s," he said,.

"All of those in ICU are what we would consider critically ill."

He said most of the wounded who were shot while at Friday prayers at two Christchurch mosques were men aged between 30 and 40.

Christchurch hospital, which has experience with major trauma following the two earthquakes, was put to the test with 12 operating theatres in use throughout the night to treat the wounded, many who have suffered "quite significant" injuries.

"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," Dr Robertson said.

"Many of the people will require multiple trips to theatre to deal with the complex series of injuries that they have."

Four patients died on their way into the hospital.

Australian man Brenton Tarrant, 28, appeared in court on Saturday charged with one count of murder and is likely to face more before he reappears on April 5.

Two other people are in custody but have yet to charged.New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has met with leaders of Christchurch mosques targeted in the mass shooting as she tries to assure the country's Muslim community they'll be protected.

Ardern landed in the South Island city on Saturday following the killings of 49 worshippers gathering for prayers at two mosques.

Going straight from her plane to a Christchurch's refugee centre, Ardern heard from senior members of the Muslim community, who thanked her and the nation for an outpouring of support.

"We were not expecting that, but we are very, very grateful, we are blessed," mosque committee member Habib Ullah told the room, describing how neighbours had left flowers at his door.

But concerns were nonetheless raised about what the shootings would mean for some in the community, with many of those killed the sole breadwinners for families, while prayer centres could be closed through the busy season.

"Is there any long-term plan for those who survived?" Ullah asked.

Ardern said in the days and weeks to come, questions would inevitably turn from immediate protection to long-term safety.

"We need to keep having that conversation about how we ensure your ongoing safety," she said.

"There will be questions about how we ensure people's livelihoods. How we ensure they meet day-to-day needs."

At Hagley College, just minutes from where 41 people were fatally shot at the Al Noor mosque, families of the victims greeted the prime minister.

"We need to support each other, we need to spread unity and love and happiness between all people," Linwood mosque Imam Ibrahim Abdelhalim told reporters outside.

"If this evil thinks we will stop going to our mosque here or stop doing our worship to our god, Allah, we never ever cannot stop. Because we still believe this country accepts all religions... We are part of the New Zealand community."

Ardern - accompanied by a contingent including the deputy prime minister and leader of the opposition - travelled under intense security on Saturday, heavily armed police on streets around the city.Some of Lewis Hamilton's social media posts are enough to make even stoic Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff raise his eyebrows.

Sky diving in Qatar. Surfing lessons with Kelly Slater. And perhaps the biggest shock - designing clothes for Tommy Hilfiger?

Yet while Wolff admitted he was "always worried" about Hamilton's off-track antics, he said nothing would distract the 34-year-old Formula 1 star from his quest for a sixth world title.

"We had a laugh last year because I couldn't get hold of him and couldn't get hold of my chief strategist and one of the race engineers," Wolff said.

"I found out they were racing motorbikes in Jerez and nobody would pick up the phone - they were a bit apologetic.

"But Lewis is not an 18 or 19-year-old young man any more. He's a five-time world champion. He knows exactly what works for him and what doesn't."

It takes a lot to stir the stony-faced Wolff, with cynics claiming he almost smiled as Hamilton stormed to his fifth world title last year.

But he would have almost gasped when Hamilton posted footage of himself skydiving in Qatar ahead of this weekend's Australian Grand Prix.

Then there was the post of him surfing with 11-time world champion Slater, and he still somehow found time to launch a new clothing line with Hilfiger.

But Wolff said Hamilton would be as focused as ever behind the wheel at the Formula 1 season opener in Melbourne.

"All these activities are not a negative distraction ... every time he's able to decompress from motor racing, he comes back stronger," Wolff said.

"We mustn't be judgemental. Some people go on a meditation seminar to India, others do sky-diving, others are out for the ladies.

"Let's accept how everybody is."Controversial far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has been banned from entering Australia on tour after his remarks about the New Zealand terror attack.

Immigration Minister David Coleman released a statement on Saturday after backflipping on a decision to grant Mr Yiannopoulos a visa into the country.

"Milo Yiannopoulos will not be allowed to enter Australia for his proposed tour this year," Mr Coleman said, after having granted him a visa a week ago.

"Mr Yiannopoulos' comments on social media regarding the Christchurch terror attack are appalling and foment hatred and division.

"The terrorist attack in Christchurch was carried out on Muslims peacefully practising their religion. It was an act of pure evil."

The government had agreed to the visa after conservative MPs had put pressure on Mr Coleman to override the Department of Home Affairs' advice to ban Mr Yiannopoulos.

"I'm banned from Australia, again, after a statement in which I said I abhor political violence," Mr Yiannopoulos said on social media after the announcement on Saturday.

Mr Yiannopoulos had described Islam as a "barbaric, alien" religious culture on social media overnight after the terror incident, prompting the government's change of heart.

Labor MP Tony Burke took to Twitter to praise the decision to ban the speaker.

"Milo banned. Good. His overnight comments weren't that different from how he has always behaved. There was already enough evidence to ban him which is why the department had already recommended he be banned. The Australian tours for the world's hate speakers must stop," he urged.

The speaking tour had previously been given the green light despite Mr Yiannopoulos owing Victoria Police $50,000 to cover policing at a Melbourne event in December, 2017, during which up to 500 left-wing protesters clashed with about 50 right-wing activists.Kumaraswamy said even now he wanted to tell those leaders that there were no permanent enemies or friends in politics.

Bengaluru: Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy said Thursday he will not plead for support with those Congress leaders who are against his son Nikhil Kumaraswamys candidature as coalition candidate from Mandya in the Lok Sabha polls.

Taking a dig at those opposing Nikhil, the Karnataka CM said those who are originally from the Congress have already extended their support and JD(S) workers are efficient to ensure his victory. He also said his father and former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda was yet to decide on contesting the Lok Sabha polls. Some leaders in Mandya have gone ahead from the back door. It is not necessary for me to talk to them now.

My workers are efficient, instead of trusting those backstabbing, trust those who work honestly. Im not blaming everyone, Kumaraswamy said in response to a question about him personally seeking support from Mandya Congress leaders.

Kumaraswamy said even now he wanted to tell those leaders that there were no permanent enemies or friends in politics and the Congress had decided to give the seat to the JD(S) in the coalition set up. With their own adamant behaviour, if they still want to go away with an intention to take revenge, good, they can work anywhere they want, he added.

The Chief Ministers sharp reaction came a day after several Congress leaders in Mandya extended their support to independent candidate Sumalatha Ambareesh despite their party denying her a ticket.

The Congress and JD(S), who have been traditional rivals in Mandya, have decided to fight the election together in an alliance this time, and according to the coalition arrangement the seat had gone to the regional party as it had a sitting MP there.

The Congress move to cede the seat to JD(S) is being vehemently opposed by leaders in Mandya, with a few even expressing openly their support to Sumalatha, widow of actor-politician Ambareesh. Ambareesh had early won on Congress ticket from the constituency.

Both hiselder brother Revanna and nephew Prajwal wanted Gowda to contest from Hassan as this will be his last election, he said. Gowda wished to contest his last election from Hassan, but as he had promised the seat to Prajwal three years ago, he doesnt want to go back on the decision now, he said.

Prajwal Revanna, the other grandson of Deve Gowda has been announced as JD(S) candidate from Hassan, the family turf of the party patriarch and the seat he has been representing. The Congress and JD(S) have decided to launch a joint election campaign in the presence of Congress president RahulGandhi on March 31, either near the old airport road or nearNelamangala, by gathering about 5 lakh people, Kumaraswamy said.It took seven years and $16 billion to build Hudson Yards, a project erected over a New York train depot

With an arts center, posh stores, uber expensive apartments and lots of controversy, the largest privately funded real estate development in US history opens Friday in Manhattan.

It's in a place called Hudson Yards, and it took seven years and a cool $16 billion to build.

The project was erected on a giant slab of concrete covering a rail depot and makes New York a new center of urban planning innovation in a city with a red hot real estate market.

In this new neighborhood, some apartments will fetch as much as $30 million.

The area between 10th and 12th avenues and 30th and 40th streets was long a no-man's land. Now it is ready to welcome New Yorkers and tourists in a new tribute to the US financial capital's legendary skyscrapers.

The six towers in this development, conceived by prestigious architects in the 2000s when Michael Bloomberg was mayor, did not set a record for height.

But they are brimming with technological innovation. The complex has its own waste treatment, a blackout-proof electrical generating system and automatic underground doors to protect sensitive equipment from rising waters as a result of climate change.

- A new New York icon? -

Apartments are expected to sell for as much as $30 million, and rent for a single room apartment goes for $5,000 a month

The project's goal is not just to use idle space in a city that is fabulously dense and crowded. Rather, the idea is for the neighborhood to be fully integrated into the Big Apple, said Douglas Woodward, a professor of architecture at Columbia University who took part in the design master plan.

Aside from the residential towers and offices -- which already host corporate offices of companies like L'Oreal USA and software company SAP -- the complex has about 100 high-end stores like Dior and Fendi, and 25 restaurants from big-name chefs like Jose Andres and Thomas Keller.

It also has an artistic center named The Shed that will open in April, and an outdoors area with trees to create a campus atmosphere, Woodward said.

Unlike London's Canary Wharf neighborhood, which is far from the city center, or La Defense, located west of Paris, Hudson Yards is just a few minutes from Times Square thanks to a subway station that opened in 2015.

The neighborhood can also be reached by foot via the High Line, a raised walkway built on a former rail line that in just a few years has become a major city attraction.

Stephen Ross, the real estate developer behind the project, wants Hudson Yards -- said to be the city's most ambitious since Rockefeller Center was built in the 1930s -- to become "the biggest tourism attraction and icon in New York."

Despite the inherent risk of such a massive investment, and the fact that many of the apartments are still available for rent -- with a single room apartment going for $5,000 a month -- the 78-year-old real estate magnate is brimming with confidence and said he will soon move to a Hudson Yards penthouse.

"What we are doing here is so unique" that residents "will want to be here," Ross said during a recent visit to the work site. "People want to live in a place where everything is, that's what people live in a city for.

"It's a live-work-play environment, and you are in the city! This does not exist anymore," he said.

- Chorus of critics -

Is "The Vessel" original outdoor interactive public art or the "stairway to nowhere?"

Not everyone is as enthusiastic.

"I can't help feeling like an alien here, as though I've crossed from real New York with all its jangling mess into a movie studio's backlot version," New York magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson wrote in February.

"Everything is too clean, too flat, too art-directed."

Davidson slammed Hudson Yards as "para-Manhattan," a site that has "no history, no holdover greasy spoons, no pockets of blight or resident eccentrics."

At a time of growing outrage over tax breaks given to big companies such as Amazon, some are angered by the subsidies and tax breaks granted to the project, estimated at around $6 billion.

Critics have especially focused on "The Vessel," a giant open air spiral staircase that climbs 15-stories high located in the plaza between the building towers.

The Hudson Yards observation deck "floats" more than 1,000 feet (300 meters) above ground, but will not open until 2020

Visitors can climb the structure via 154 different staircases after making a free online reservation.

When the project was presented in 2017, The New York Times dubbed it the "stairway to nowhere."

But as is the case of many great building projects, the final verdict will be given by its use.

One of Hudson Yards's coming attractions is an observation deck that seems to float more than 1,000 feet (300 meters) above ground.

The observation deck, attached to a 1,296-foot tower (the Empire State Building's needle is 1,250 feet tall), will not open until 2020.

The project's second phase is just about to begin. A more residential-type neighborhood will be built on the west side of the rail depot, complete with a school and green areas.

One thing is certain: fueled by the city's dynamic economy, building projects are booming in New York, east and west of Manhattan, on "billionaires row" that borders Central Park and in Queens, where plans are underway for a project at Sunnyside Yard, an old rail depot even bigger than Hudson Yards.Kurdish-led forces backed by a US-led coalition have unleashed a deluge of fire on the Islamic State group's last enclave in eastern Syria

Islamic State group fighters launched suicide attacks Wednesday at US-backed Syrian forces in a desperate bid to defend their last scrap of territory after 3,000 of their fellow jihadists surrendered.

Despite the attempted counterpunch the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said in an evening statement that its fighters had advanced as they conducted "a large-scale attack on terrorist positions".

Four SDF members were killed in clashes on Wednesday, it said.

AFP correspondents heard air strikes and artillery fire near the frontline after night fall Wednesday, on a fourth night of bombardment.

IS once ruled over millions in a swathe of Syria and Iraq, but it has since lost all that territory except for a riverside slither in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border.

Thousands of men and women have poured out of the pocket in recent weeks, hampering an advance by the SDF, which has paused its offensive multiple times to allow evacuations.

Supported by air strikes by the US-led coalition, the SDF resumed shelling on Sunday.

They unleashed a deluge of fire on jihadist outposts for three nights in a row, engulfing their makeshift encampment in a ravaging blaze.

"IS's final moments have started," SDF official Jiaker Amed told AFP Wednesday.

The last pocket of IS territory in eastern Syria

Clashes flared as the SDF worked to thwart any IS fightback.

Jihadists "launched two counterattacks today -- one in the morning and another in the afternoon", an SDF official told AFP.

"The second one was much stronger" and was launched under the cover of smoke caused by bombing, he said.

The official said jihadists were using suicide bombers but his force intercepted them before they reached their target.

The jihadists "made no progress and they were stopped," he said.

- 'Final hour' -

Inside Baghouz, the crackle and thud of gunfire and shelling rang out from the encampment as plumes of thick black smoke rose over the bombed-out IS bastion.

Amid the rubble, three SDF fighters lobbed a salvo of mortar shells towards the IS pocket, hours after the first attempted counterattack at daybreak under the cover of a dust storm.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces are waging a ground offensive against the jihadists

On a rooftop near the front line, an AFP correspondent saw a warplane fire two missiles at IS positions.

Delil, an SDF fighter, said: "Today, the sandstorm is to their benefit but all coming days are ours."

Outside the village, dozens of evacuees sat in clusters on a field dotted with yellow flowers, a day after thousands of the last survivors of the "caliphate" handed themselves over to US-backed forces.

After a night of heavy bombardment on Tuesday, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said about 3,000 jihadists had handed themselves over to the SDF in the past 24 hours.

"The battle is ongoing and the final hour is now closer than ever," he said on Twitter.

But an SDF official said on Wednesday that "it appears as though many fighters remain inside" the last pocket.

Near the front line on Tuesday night, AFP correspondents saw bright, long streaks of light in the night sky as US-backed forces bombed jihadist outposts.

Explosions shook the IS pocket as large fires tore through a cluster of tents and buildings.

- 'No freedom of movement' -

Coalition spokesman Sean Ryan on Wednesday said IS has no room to manoeuvre.

"There is no freedom of movement at night for the enemy," he told AFP.

"Combined with the SDF ground movement against the final enclave, progress is being made and their capabilities are being severely destroyed."

Since December, about 60,000 people have left the last IS redoubt, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, around a tenth of them suspected jihadists.

The exodus has sparked a humanitarian crisis in Kurdish-run camps for the displaced further north, which are struggling to accomodate the mass influx of women and children.

Tens of thousands of people have left the crumbling "caliphate" since December

The UN's food agency on Tuesday appealed for urgent funding for the Al-Hol camp, which is receiving the bulk of evacuees.

At the height of its brutal rule, IS controlled a stretch of land in Syria and Iraq the size of the United Kingdom.

The total capture of the Baghouz camp by the SDF would mark the end of the cross-border "caliphate" it proclaimed more than four years ago.

But beyond Baghouz, IS retains a presence in eastern Syria's vast Badia desert and sleeper cells in the northeast.

The jihadists have continued to claim deadly attacks in SDF-held territory in recent months, and the US military has warned of the need to maintain a "vigilant offensive".

Baghouz is the latest major battlefront in Syria's complex civil war, which has killed more than 360,000 people since 2011.UN envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths briefed the Security Council behind closed doors on a stalled truce deal seen as crucial to diplomatic efforts to end the war

The United Nations Security Council met behind closed doors on Wednesday to try to salvage a stalled truce deal in Yemen seen as crucial to diplomatic efforts to end the devastating war.

Yemen's government and its Saudi and Emirati allies agreed in talks with Huthi rebels nearly a month ago to redeploy their forces from the flashpoint city of Hodeida, but nothing has happened on the ground.

UN envoy Martin Griffiths told the council that he was "still working with the parties to make the redeployment in Hodeida a reality," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.

The pullback was agreed in December under a ceasefire deal reached in Sweden that offered the best hope in years of moving toward an end to the conflict that has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine.

Details of a two-stage pullback from Hodeida city and its ports were finalized during a meeting between the government and the Huthis on February 17, marking the first concrete step toward de-escalation.

UN diplomats said the Huthis were refusing to pull away from the ports of Saleef and Ras Issa as part of the first stage, citing fears that forces linked to the Saudi-led coalition will move in to take over those facilities.

"It's clear that one party has more problems than the other at the moment, but this tends to swing around," British Ambassador Karen Pierce told reporters after the meeting.

General Michael Lollesgaard, who also briefed the council as head of a newly-created UN mission to monitor the redeployment from Hodeida, will hold meetings in the coming days to push for action on the ground, diplomats said.

- A very big step -

The Security Council will meet again on Tuesday to take stock and consider a tougher stance if no progress is made.

"If there isn't progress and if Stockholm does collapse, the Security Council will need to think about further measures and that is a very big step," Pierce said in an interview to Al-Arabiya television.

On Tuesday, the ambassadors in Yemen of the permanent council members -- Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States -- said they were "extremely concerned" that agreements had not been implemented.

The pullback should begin "without further delay and without seeking to exploit the redeployments by the other side," they said in a joint statement.

With Hodeida peace efforts stalled, fighting in northern Hajjah province escalated this week, with 12 children and 10 women killed during two days of strikes, the UN humanitarian coordinator said.

The Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen will enter its fifth year later this month, with millions of civilians facing famine.

The conflict has unleashed the world's worst humanitarian conflict.Activist Aziza al-Yousef, pictured here during an interview in Riyadh on September 27, 2016, is one of 10 Saudi women who has gone on trial after being detained for a year without charge

Ten Saudi women appeared in court Wednesday for the first time since being detained last year in a sweeping crackdown on activists, ratcheting up scrutiny of the kingdom's human rights record.

The trial of the women, who have been held for nearly a year without charge, comes as Saudi Arabia seeks to placate international criticism over last year's brutal murder of insider-turned-critic Jamal Khashoggi.

Prominent activists Loujain al-Hathloul, Hatoon al-Fassi, Aziza al-Yousef and Eman al-Nafjan were among those who attended Riyadh's criminal court, where they heard the charges against them, court president Ibrahim al-Sayari said.

Family members of the women -- some of whom allegedly faced torture and sexual harassment during interrogation -- were permitted to attend the court session, but a group of around two dozen foreign journalists and Western diplomats were barred from entering.

Visibly distressed relatives huddled together outside the courtroom, clutching handwritten appeals for the judge as they waited their turn to see the detainees inside.

The charges against the women were not disclosed to the public.

But London-based rights group ALQST said they were held under the kingdom's sweeping cyber crime law, which carries prison sentences of up to 10 years, based on their contact with "hostile entities" including human rights organisations.

- 'Escalating repression' -

Sayari 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.

"It now seems that the authorities will charge the women's rights activists, after keeping them in detention for nearly one year without any access to lawyers, and where they faced torture, ill treatment and sexual harassment," said Amnesty International's Middle East campaigns director Samah Hadid.

Women hold signs reading "honk for women's rights" and "freedom for Loujain, Aziza and Iman" during a protest organised by Amnesty International outside the Saudi Arabia embassy in Paris, on March 8, 2019 to mark International Women's Day

"The authorities are now treating defending women's rights as a crime, which is a dangerous escalation in the country and their crackdown on human rights activism," Hadid told AFP.

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 longstanding 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".

Human Rights Watch researcher Adam Coogle said the trial and alleged mistreatment of the women "is yet another sign of escalating repression in Saudi Arabia".

"Authorities should immediately halt these unfair proceedings and release any activist charged solely based on their peaceful activism," he told AFP.

- Paving way for release? -

Amnesty and the family of Hathloul, who was among the detainees allegedly tortured and sexually harassed, had feared the women would be charged with terrorism, as they had been expected to appear at a court set up to handle terror-related cases.

But relatives received a last-minute call informing them the case had been shifted to the criminal court, without being told why.

The move has triggered speculation the trial -- shrouded in secrecy -- could pave the way for the release of the women, after the crackdown prompted scathing criticism against Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's much-trumpeted drive to modernise the conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been dented by the jailing of fremale activists who had long campaigned for the right to drive

Some detainees, including Hathloul, were recently made to sign letters in prison requesting a royal pardon from King Salman, family members said.

"Terrorism charges are very hard politically for the Saudi government to go soft on, but criminal charges may open the door for an acquittal," Bessma Momani, a professor at Canada's University of Waterloo, said.

"The Saudis need to change the page on this file badly -- its economy and success of its reform drive hinges on removing the negative perceptions that the arrests of these women has caused," she told AFP.

Prince Mohammed's much-trumpeted drive to modernise the conservative kingdom has been dented by the detentions, part of a wider crackdown by Saudi authorities on activists, clerics and critics in recent years seen as stamping out political dissent.

The arrests have resulted in further pressure on Saudi Arabia, which has faced global outrage over journalist Khashoggi's murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last October.

Last week, 36 nations condemned Saudi Arabia over the murder, in a rare censure of the wealthy oil-rich kingdom at the UN Human Rights Council.officials said dozens of children were trapped inside the building

Rescuers on Wednesday recovered eight bodies and rescued 37 people alive from the wreckage of a collapsed four-storey building in the Nigeria's economic capital Lagos

Children had been attending an "illegal school" inside the residential building when the structure collapsed, officials said.

"Thirty-seven people were rescued alive and eight were recovered dead," Ibrahim Farinloye of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said in a statement.

Earlier officials said dozens of children were trapped inside the building which collapsed mid-morning in an area near Itafaji market on Lagos Island.

Building collapse in Lagos

In chaotic scenes, panicked parents, local residents and shocked onlookers rushed to the area as police, firemen and medics staged a massive rescue operation.

- Blood and dust -

A young man helping rescue efforts who gave his name only as Derin said "at least 10 children" were trapped inside but "thought to be alive".

An AFP reporter at the scene saw at least eight people pulled from the wreckage, including a small boy with blood on his face.

Covered in dust, he was alive but unconscious and appeared to be badly hurt.

One local resident who witnessed the moment of collapse said there was no warning.

"We were smoking outside when the building just collapsed," Olamide Nuzbah told AFP in pidgin English.

- Distraught parents -

As rescuers worked furiously to reach those inside, distraught parents begged them to find their children.

Emergency and rescue personnel have been trying to find survivors

"Please, save my child, save my child!" wept one traumatised mother whose seven-year-old daughter was trapped inside, as people tried to console her.

School bags, toys and clothes could be seen among the piles of rubble as a bulldozer tried to clear a path through some of the wreckage to help the rescue efforts.

Hundreds of local residents tried to help, passing water and helmets through to dust-covered rescuers working tirelessly to sift through the rubble, some of whom appeared to be distressed.

Many locals told AFP that the building, which was in an advanced state of disrepair, had been "earmarked" for demolition by the authorities in Lagos state.

"It is a residential building that was actually accommodating an illegal school," said Ambode, the state governor, confirming that most buildings in the area had been marked for demolition but saying some landlords had defied the move.

"We get resistance from landlords but we must continue to save lives," he said, pledging to step up measures against all structures that failed to meet the correct standards, saying they would be "quickly evacuated" and demolished.

Lagos, which has a population of 20 million people, is made up of a collection of islands.

The incident took place near Itafaji market on Lagos Island, a densely-populated area which is one of the city's oldest neighbourhoods

One of them is Lagos Island, a densely-populated area which is one of the city's oldest neighbourhoods.

It is characterised by its Afro-Brazilian architecture, a style brought over by thousands of freed slaves who headed back home after decades working the plantations in Brazil.

- Tragically common -

Despite efforts to renovate the area, a large number of abandoned buildings have been taken over by families or businesses, despite being dilapidated and unsafe.

Building collapses are tragically common in Nigeria, where building regulations are routinely flouted.

In September 2014, 116 people died -- 84 of them South Africans -- when a six-storey building collapsed in Lagos where a celebrity televangelist was preaching.

An inquiry found it had structural flaws and had been built illegally.

And two years later, at least 60 people were killed when the roof collapsed at a church in Uyo, the capital of Akwa Ibom state, in the east of the country.The founder of Guinea-Bissau's PAIGC party, Amilcar Cabral, looks down as spokesman Joao Bernardo Vieira speaks to the press

Guinea-Bissau's historic ruling party appeared well placed to form a coalition government Wednesday after winning weekend elections in a result likely to perpetuate its long-running standoff with President Mario Vaz.

In announcing provisional results, the National Election Commission said the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) had secured 47 of parliament's 102 seats after winning 46.1 percent of the vote.

But the result was just short of an outright majority, leaving the party dependent on smaller factions to build a coalition.

And the result could well plunge this poor, volatile West African state into a new round of confrontation between PAIGC and Vaz, analysts warned.

Another 48 seats were taken by two opposition parties, with the final seven seats won by factions who on Tuesday agreed to back a PAIGC-led government.

The announcement sparked jubilant celebrations at PAIGC's headquarters where chanting supporters banged drums and saucepans, and cars honked their horns.

"So far there has been no challenge," said election chief Pedro Sambu, who said turnout in Sunday's legislative ballot stood at more than 84 percent.

The one-time Marxist party has run this tiny state of two million people for most of the 45 years since independence from Portugal.

- Long crisis -

The elections sought to end a nearly four-year-old crisis

Sunday's vote aimed to draw a line under a crisis that erupted in August 2015 when Vaz sacked his prime minister Domingos Simoes Pereira, who heads PAIGC.

Vaz, who also came from the same party, then appointed a string of prime ministers but none garnered sufficient support to achieve a majority in parliament.

Parliamentary work was snarled for two years -- sparking frequent strikes by civil servants who went unpaid because of delays in approving the budget.

In April 2018, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) brokered a deal which led to the installation of consensus premier Aristide Gomes, allowing parliament to resume its work.

Gomes was given the caretaker role of preparing for fresh legislative polls, which eventually took place on March 10 after a string of largely technical delays.

The new coalition lineup will play a key role in choosing the next prime minister.

That is likely to hand the role of kingmaker to Nuno Gomes Nabiam, who heads the five-seat APU-PDGB which has agreed to back a PAIGC-led government.

Nabiam ran against Vaz in the 2014 presidential elections but was beaten in the second round.

Vaz's five-year term ends on June 23.

- Powerful opposition -

That leaves two parties in opposition -- the Madem-G15, led by PAIGC rebels, which picked up 27 seats, and the Party for Social Renovation (PRS), which won 21 seats and is reputedly close to part of the military hierarchy.

Ahead of the vote, the two parties concluded their own pact, meaning they could constitute a powerful opposition of 48 MPs.

The outcome of the election may confirm fears that gridlock may flare again, say commentators.

"Nothing suggests that these elections will make it possible to resolve the problems undermining the country," UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had warned ahead of the vote.

He pointed to the option of a future revision of the constitution to clarify the roles of president and prime minister, both of whom wield executive power.

- Coups and cocaine -

Guinea-Bissau

Wedged between Senegal and Guinea on Africa's west coast, Guinea-Bissau has a notorious reputation for volatility.

It has seen 16 coup attempts since independence, four of which have been successful.

International sanctions remain in place since 2012 after the last violent seizure of power.

The country's porous coastline and chronic instability have made it a target for Latin American drug lords trafficking cocaine to Europe, implicating members of the elite.

During Sunday's vote, police in the capital Bissau said they had found nearly 800 kilogrammes (1,700 pounds) of cocaine in a Senegal-registered truck, the biggest drugs haul in a decade.Mariam al-Mahdi, deputy leader of Sudan's Umma party, speaks at a press conference in this file picture from September 9, 2014

A Sudanese appeals court on Wednesday ordered the release of a senior opposition politician after she was jailed for taking part in protests against President Omar al-Bashir's rule, her family said.

Mariam al-Mahdi, deputy chief of the country's main opposition Umma Party, had been sentenced to jail for a week on Sunday by an emergency court after security agents arrested her while she was taking part in a march against Bashir's rule.

She was arrested outside her party office in Omdurman, the twin city of the capital, as police broke up the march called by protest organisers to challenge a nationwide state of emergency imposed by Bashir on February 22.

"The appeals court freed Mariam and she is now at home," her sister Rabah told AFP.

Mariam's lawyer Ubada Abdelrahman also confirmed the release of the opposition figure.

Mariam and Rabah, the two daughters of Umma Party chief and former premier Sadiq al-Mahdi, have participated in protests after their father threw his weight behind the movement.

Bashir swept to power in an Islamist-backed coup in 1989 after toppling Mahdi's government.

Bashir's three-decade rule has been rocked by nationwide protests since December, and the veteran leader has ordered a slew of tough measures to quell the demonstrations.

He has imposed a state of emergency across the country, banned all unauthorised rallies and set up the emergency courts to probe violations.

Protests initially broke out on December 19 after a government decision to triple the price of bread amid a broader economic crisis in the country.

They soon escalated to nationwide rallies against Bashir's administration.

But since the state of emergency came into effect the scale and intensity of the rallies have shrunk.

Officials say 31 people have died in protest-related violence so far, while Human Rights Watch says the death toll is at least 51 and includes medics and children.An American Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 arrives in Miami, Florida from Washington Ronald Reagan National Airport on March 12, 2019 in Miami, Florida

The US decision on Wednesday to ground the Boeing 737 MAX came after authorities noted similarities between two recent crashes, eerily echoing reports from American pilots who complained of problems with the plane late last year.

At least four US pilots filed reports following the October crash of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia shortly after takeoff and all complained the aircraft suddenly pitched downward, according to documents reviewed by AFP on a flight safety database.

The Lion Air crash that killed 189 people was attributed to the flight stabilization system designed to prevent the aircraft from stalling, the "MCAS."

The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday that new evidence and satellite data indicated similarities with Sunday's crash of an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 minutes after takeoff, killing 157.

That link "warrants further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents," the FAA said in the emergency order grounding the 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft.

Dozens of airlines and governments around the world had already taken that step.

The cause of the tragedy in Ethiopia has not been determined, although the black boxes with critical data and recordings of the pilots were retrieved Monday and are due to be shipped to France for analysis.

Boeing already announced it was working on an update to its flight software and training on the aircraft.

- 'DONT SINK DONT SINK' -

One pilot on a US carrier reported an incident in November 2018, just weeks after the Lion Air crash, saying the plane "pitched nose down" two to three seconds after engaging the autopilot following takeoff, according to the report on the Aviation Safety Reporting System, maintained by NASA.

"The captain immediately disconnected the autopilot and pitched into a climb," the report said. "The rest of the flight was uneventful."

The flight crew reviewed the incident "at length... but can't think of any reason the aircraft would pitch nose-down so aggressively."

Another pilot on a flight in November said the crew discussed the concerns about the aircraft following the Lion Air crash, and "I mentioned I would engage the autopilot sooner than usual."

But again once engaged, there was a quick automated warning of "DONT SINK DONT SINK!"

"I immediately disconnected the AP (autopilot) ... and resumed climb," the officer said. But after review, "frankly neither of us could find an inappropriate setup error."

"With the concerns with the MAX 8 nose-down stuff, we both thought it appropriate to bring it to your attention."

The ASRS is a voluntary system of reports that allows research to "lessen the likelihood of aviation accidents."

The Lion Air accident had focused attention on Angle of Attack (AOA) sensors connected to the aircraft stabilization system.

A malfunction of these systems may erroneously correct the path by pitching the aircraft down due to a mistaken assessment that the aircraft is in a stall.

Andrew Hunter, a defense industry expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said while Boeing and the FAA have good track records on addressing safety concerns, sometimes the combination of automated systems and humans do 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."

"I'm not sure the fix here was quite so easy," Hunter said.President Donald Trump's former campaign chief Paul Manafort, pictured in 2018, is the highest-profile yet stemming from the Russia collusion probe

President Donald Trump's former campaign chief Paul Manafort, already facing 47 months in prison for tax and bank fraud, was sentenced to an additional 43 months in prison Wednesday on conspiracy charges.

"The defendant is not public enemy number one," US District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in delivering the sentence in a hushed Washington courtroom.

"But he is not a victim either," Jackson added, stressing that the veteran Republican lobbyist and political consultant had shown little remorse and had lied repeatedly.

Manafort's case is the highest-profile yet stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Jackson stressed to the court that the case had nothing to do with the 2016 vote but was connected to political consulting and lobbying activities he performed for pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians.

She said the question of whether any members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia was "not presented in the case. Period."

"Therefore it was not resolved in this case either," Jackson said.

She ridiculed defense arguments that Manafort's prosecution only came about because of the Mueller probe.

"That argument falls flat," Jackson said. "The Department of Justice was already looking into this matter."

Before his sentencing, Manafort, who was brought into court in a wheelchair, pleaded to the judge not to sentence him to more time other than the 47 months he was given last week in a separate case.

"I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have got me here today," Manafort told the court.

"Let me be very clear I accept responsibility for the acts that have got me here today," he went on. "For those mistakes, I am remorseful."

But Jackson dismissed his plea for no more prison time on the charges of conspiring to launder money and tamper with witnesses.

She added 43 months to the 47 months he already received, making the total 90 months. She gave him credit for the nine months he has already spent in prison, reducing the term facing him to 81 months -- a little under seven years.

Manafort is one of a half-dozen former Trump associates and senior aides charged by Mueller, although none of them have been accused so far of direct collusion with Moscow to get Trump elected to the White House.Bahrain opposition figure Ibrahim Sharif, seen here in a June 2015 picture, has been sentenced to six months in jail by a Bahrain criminal court for criticising the president of Sudan who has faced protests against his three-decade rule since December

Bahrain on Wednesday sentenced a liberal opposition figure to six months in jail for tweeting criticsm of Sudan's president who has been facing protests against his rule, rights groups said.

Ibrahim Sharif, a founding member of the secular National Democratic Action Society (Waed) party which was dissolved in May last year, was also given a 500-dinar fine ($1,300) by Bahrain's lower criminal court.

Amnesty International and the Britain-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) denounced the sentence against Sharif.

"Bahrainis are being made to pay a hefty price for simply expressing their views," said Amnesty's Middle East research director Lynn Maalouf.

"It is flabbergasting that someone can be made to appear before a court and stand trial, let alone serve a sentence, for simply having expressed their opinion on Twitter."

Amnesty said the prosecution was based on a December tweet by Sharif in which he said "get out of here, man" and "the time has come for freedom for the Sudanese and the departure of the dictatorial president".

The tweet, accompanied by a picture of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir said that during his rule "civil wars have piled up, the South seceded, and he has impoverished, starved and degraded the kind and noble Sudanese people".

Bashir's three-decade rule has been rocked by nationwide protests since December.

Amnesty said Sharif will appeal the verdict and pay bail in order to stay out of prison until a decision by the appeals court.

Article 215 of Bahrain's penal code stipulates that anyone who "publicly insults" a foreign country or its leader can be imprisoned for up to two years in jail.

"Today's judgement is a slap in the face to freedom of expression and demonstrates the paranoia of the ruling family about the exposure of the human rights abuses of their fellow Arab dictators," BIRDS's advocacy chief, Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, said.

Sharif, a Sunni who supported Shiite-led protests in a failed 2011 uprising in the Sunni-ruled kingdom, was released from jail in July 2016 after having served a year, on a charge of inciting hatred against the regime.

He had served a four-year jail term after the protests were crushed before being released under a royal amnesty in June 2015.

His party was dissolved in May 2017 as part of Bahrain's crackdown on dissent.Indian govt decided not to send any representative to event because Pak had invited representative of Hurriyat Conference to the event.

The Pakistan National Day is observed every year on March 23, though the Pakistan High Commission had decided to organise the event this year on March 22. (Representational Image)

New Delhi: The Indian government will not send any official representative to the Pakistan National Day event at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi on Friday.

The Indian government decided not to send any representative to the event because Pakistan had invited the representative of the Hurriyat Conference to the event.

The Pakistan National Day is observed every year on March 23, though the Pakistan High Commission had decided to organise the event this year on March 22.

An Indian minister usually represents the government at the event.

Amid decline in bilateral ties after the Pulwama attack in February, India had formally complained to the Pakistan government about instances of its diplomats and officials in Islamabad being harassed by security personnel.As America waits for special counsel Robert Mueller's report on alleged collusion between Donald Trump and Russia, the president is already fighting back

No one even knows when it will come out, but Robert Mueller's top secret probe into possible collusion between Donald Trump and Russia has Washington on edge -- and the president mounting preemptive attacks against impeachment.

"How do you impeach a man who is considered by many to be the President with the most successful first two years in history, especially when he has done nothing wrong," Trump asked Wednesday in a stream of tweets laying out the case for his innocence.

Urgent predictions that Mueller's report is just about to drop have come out all year, only to be proven wrong, leaving the country grasping for clues.

Every passing week with no news raises the tension. Will the special counsel's nearly two-year investigation exonerate Trump?

Or will it link him to a Kremlin influence operation in what would be one of the biggest political scandals in US history?

Trump is far from the only one biting his nails.

National Public Radio made waves last week with a report about elderly people near death's door fighting to hang on so that they too can see what Mueller uncovers.

- Impeachment skirmishes begin -

President Donald Trump (right) doesn't know what special prosecutor Robert Mueller will say yet, but he's already fighting back against possible impeachment

Almost everyone agrees that whatever Mueller finds, he will abide by justice department policy that he does not have authority to indict a sitting president.

That job, if this worst case scenario occurred, would fall to Congress and a possible impeachment trial.

But impeachment is a political, rather than purely judicial battle, and Trump -- Mueller report or no Mueller report -- is already fighting back.

He got an unexpected assist from the de facto Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi on Monday when she effectively took impeachment off the table for now -- much to the annoyance of more gung-ho members of her party.

"Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country," Pelosi, who is speaker of the House of Representatives, told The Washington Post.

Trump leapt on that Wednesday, tweeting "I greatly appreciate Nancy Pelosi's statement."

"Everyone must remember the minor fact that I never did anything wrong, the Economy and Unemployment are the best ever, Military and Vets are great -- and many other successes!" he continued.

- Judgment day or bust? -

Once Mueller finally hands in his findings, today's skirmishes will turn into battles on an rarely seen scale.

The fight over whether President Donald Trump should face impeachment is only just heating up. A Trump baby blimp is seen as a motorcade passes supporters and protesters, as Trump travels to US Border Patrol McAllen Station for a roundtable event on January 10, 2019, in McAllen,Texas.

The first clash will be simply over how much of the report is even made public.

Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr gets to make that decision.

However, if Democrats don't get what they want, they will force Mueller to testify before Congress -- a hearing that would turn into a political spectacle for the ages.

And only then would the final showdown -- the fight over Trump's future -- begin.

Incredibly for a city submerged in leaks to the media, Mueller's most stunning known achievement so far has been to keep everyone guessing.

Republicans predict the Mueller report will be a bust, giving Trump, who has repeatedly called the whole thing a "witch hunt," an open route to reelection in 2020.

But Democrats see judgment day approaching.

"Here's my rule on this one," Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of an array of Democrats seeking nomination as Trump's 2020 opponent, told MSNBC news Wednesday.

"Let's wait until we get the Mueller report. Combine it with everything else we've seen. Then we'll know what to do."Cyclone Idai heads for Mozambique

At least 115 people were killed in Mozambique, Malawi and South Africa after heavy rains affected 843,000 people across southeast Africa, officials and the UN said, prompting calls for emergency aid.

At least 66 people have been killed in Mozambique, 45 in Malawi and four in South Africa following torrential rains that have triggered flash floods.

Mozambique cabinet spokeswoman Ana Comoana said the "government has decreed a red alert due to the continuing rains and the approach of the tropical cyclone Idai, expected to reach the country between Thursday to Friday".

She spoke to reporters late Tuesday after a cabinet meeting in Maputo to discuss the emergency.

The floods in Mozambique, one of Africa's poorest countries, have already destroyed 5,756 homes, affecting 15,467 households and 141,325 people.

In neighbouring Malawi, floods have left over 230,000 people without shelter and affected around 739,000 people, according to the UN.

Malawi's Meteorological Department has warned of more rains and flooding in the country's south between Thursday and Sunday.

In Mozambique, 111 people have been injured, 18 hospitals destroyed, 938 classrooms destroyed and 9,763 students affected.

More than 168,000 hectares (415,000 acres) of crops were destroyed, the government spokeswoman added.

Authorities there have ordered the compulsory evacuation of people living in flood-prone areas.

"Sixteen accommodation centres have been opened in the provinces of Zambezia and Tete to accommodate the displaced," Comoana said.

"The government needs 1.1 billion meticais ($16 million) to assist 80,000 families affected by the rains".

Mozambique is prone to extreme weather events. Floods in 2000 claimed at least 800 lives while more than 100 were killed in 2015.

"Tropical Cyclone Idai, which formed over the Northern Mozambique Channel on March 9, is expected to make landfall near Beira (eastern Mozambique) on March 14 or 15," said the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

"The cyclone was located over the Mozambique Channel on March 12 and is expected to strengthen into intense tropical cyclone status (Category 4 equivalent) again prior to making landfall."President Donald Trump's former campaign chief Paul Manafort, pictured in 2018, was sentenced to an additional 43 months in prison

New York prosecutors filed mortgage fraud and other charges on Wednesday against Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's former campaign chief, just minutes after he was sentenced to an additional 43 months in prison in another case.

Manafort, 69, who appeared in court in a wheelchair, is now facing a total of 7.5 years in jail after going before two federal judges for tax crimes, bank fraud and conspiracy charges.

Trump has previously dangled the possibility of a pardon for Manafort, who headed his White House bid for two months in 2016, but the president said on Wednesday that he has "not even given it a thought."

"I do feel badly for him," Trump added. "I think it's a very sad situation."

Trump could pardon Manafort for the array of federal crimes he has been convicted of, but he would be unable to do anything about a potential conviction in New York state, where the latest charges were brought.

"No one is beyond the law in New York," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said in announcing the 16-count indictment of Manafort.

This combination of file pictures shows (top L-R) Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort and (bottom L-R) George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates and Roger Stone

Manafort's prosecution is one of the most high-profile cases stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether any members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.

Trump seized upon Manafort's sentencing by Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington to claim it had been "proven again today" that "there was no collusion" between anyone on his election campaign and Moscow.

But Jackson, in sentencing Manafort for conspiracy charges, did not say the case had proven there was no collusion -- she merely said the question of collusion was "not presented in this case."

"Therefore it was not resolved in this case either," Jackson said.

"The 'no collusion' refrain," she said, "is unrelated to the matter at hand."

- 'That argument falls flat' -

Manafort was sentenced to 47 months in prison by another judge last week for five counts of filing false income tax returns, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failing to report a foreign bank account.

Kevin Downing, lawyer for Paul Manafort, speaks to reporters after Donald Trump's former campaign chairman was sentenced to an additional 43 months in prison

The charges were related to more than $55 million he earned doing lobbying and consulting for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine and his use of offshore bank accounts to hide the payments from US tax authorities.

The Ukrainian money was used to support a lifestyle which included purchases of luxury homes and cars, antique rugs, and expensive clothes, including an $18,500 python jacket.

Manafort appeared before Jackson for sentencing on two counts of conspiracy he pleaded guilty to -- one involving money laundering and failure to register as a foreign agent and the other involving witness tampering.

Jackson could have sentenced Manafort to five years in prison on each count, but she opted to tack on a total of 43 months to his previous sentence and give him nine months off as credit for time served.

"The defendant is not public enemy number one," Jackson said. "But he is not a victim either."

Jackson said Manafort had shown little remorse and it was "hard to overstate the number of lies" he has told.

The judge ridiculed defense arguments that Manafort's prosecution only came about because of the Mueller probe.

"That argument falls flat," Jackson said. "The Department of Justice was already looking into this matter."

Kevin Downing, an attorney for Manafort, had told the judge earlier that "but for a short stint as a campaign manager in a presidential election, I don't think we'd be here today."

- 'I am sorry' -

Manafort, who was in a wheelchair because of gout, pleaded to the judge not to sentence him to more time in prison.

Lawyers for Paul Manafort arrive in court for his sentencing

"I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have got me here today," Manafort said. "Let me be very clear I accept responsibility.

"For those mistakes, I am remorseful."

Manafort, who worked on the White House bids of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, asked the judge to let him be with his wife. "She needs me and I need her," he said.

Speaking to reporters after the sentencing, Downing, Manafort's attorney, called it a "callous, harsh sentence that is totally unnecessary."

His remarks were interrupted by protestors shouting "Liar!"

Manafort is one of a half-dozen former Trump associates charged by Mueller.

Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney, is to begin serving a three-year prison sentence on May 6 for fraud, tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and lying to Congress.

Manafort's former deputy Rick Gates reached a plea deal with the special counsel's office and is awaiting sentencing.

Former national security advisor Michael Flynn admitted lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials and is also awaiting sentencing.

George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and spent 12 days in prison.

Another Trump advisor, Roger Stone, awaits trial.President Donald Trump's judicial nominee Neomi Rao, 45, earned US Senate confirmation to be a judge on the US Court of Appeals in Washington

The US Senate on Wednesday confirmed another of Donald Trump's controversial picks for a powerful federal judgeship, as the president leaves an increasingly prominent mark on the nation's courts.

Neomi Rao was confirmed on a party-line vote of 53-46 in the Senate, where Trump's Republicans hold the majority, despite her past writings that some critics have interpreted as blaming survivors of sexual assaults for being attacked.

At 45, Rao now becomes a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most powerful benches in the country, replacing Brett Kavanaugh who endured a bitter confirmation battle last year after Trump named him to the US Supreme Court.

During that hearing Kavanaugh faced allegations of sexual abuse dating back to his time high school.

In Rao's own hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she distanced herself from some of her early writings, saying she penned them during "a time of exploration."

"If a woman drinks so much that she cannot choose, well, getting there is part of her choice," Rao wrote in a review while studying at Yale University in the early 1990s.

Democrats were united against her. They accuse Rao, a lawyer who until now headed the administration's office of regulatory affairs, of weakening protections for consumers and the environment.

The US Constitution stipulates that the president nominates federal and Supreme Court judges for life.

The Senate has to date confirmed 90 of Trump's judicial nominees, as the president seeks to reshape the federal judiciary to make it more conservative.

"Will soon be 145 Judges!" Trump tweeted at the weekend, referring to the dozens of his nominees awaiting confirmation for federal district courts and circuit appellate courts.

Several of the vacancies in the 860 permanent judicial positions have been filled with jurists that earned stamps of approval from the conservative Federalist Society.

Many of the new judges are young. Last week the Senate green-lighted Trump's pick Allison Jones Rushing to a US appeals court despite concerns about her experience. Born in 1982, she could spend several decades on the bench.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did not spare China and Iran in the State Department's annual report on human rights around the world

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed China's mass detention of Muslims but took a lighter hand on North Korea as the State Department released its annual human rights report Wednesday.

Iran also came in for harsh criticism while rival Saudi Arabia, cited for many identical domestic rights abuses as well as the murder of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was given easier treatment.

And in a small semantic change, the report appeared to shift the US view of Israel's hold on the Golan Heights seized from Syria in 1967, calling it "Israeli-controlled" instead of "Israeli-occupied" as before.

Introducing the annual report, a fact-based country-by-country review, Pompeo excoriated Beijing for its allegedly deteriorating rights situation.

China is "in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations," Pompeo said.

He said Beijing intensified its campaign of repression against Muslims in the far western province of Xinjiang "to record levels" during 2018.

"Today, more than one million Uighurs, 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 government -- or advocates change in government."

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said China has put more than a million people -- including Uighur Muslims -- in "reeducation camps"

The State Department also singled out Iran, the United States's main adversary in the Middle East, for a human rights record that "remained extremely poor and worsened in several key areas," noting 20 deaths and thousands of arrests in protests during 2018.

Tehran was also cited for contributing to rights abuses in Syria through its support for President Bashar al-Assad, and in Yemen for backing the Huthi rebels battling for control of the country.

In the Western Hemisphere, Venezuela and Nicaragua came in for strong criticism for extrajudicial murders, disappearances, torture by security forces and denial of basic freedoms.

Pompeo assailed Nicaragua for the government's use of snipers and live ammunition to repress protests that the report says left "at least 325 persons dead and more than 2,000 injured" last year.

"In Nicaragua, when citizens peacefully protested social security benefits, they were met with sniper fire. Critics of the government have faced a policy of exile, jail, or death," Pompeo said.

- North Korea criticism moderated -

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (L) and US President Donald Trump (R) walking together at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi

Pompeo acknowledged that despite extreme abuses in many countries, Washington would work with them if needed.

"The policy of this administration is to engage with other governments, regardless of their record, if doing so will further US interests," Pompeo writes in the report's preface.

That appeared to extend to North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong Un is being wooed by President Donald Trump, who is aiming to persuade the regime to give up its nuclear weapons.

While human rights experts consider Pyongyang one of the worst offenders in the world, Trump barely mentions rights violations when he talks about the country.

Last year's report said: "The people of North Korea faced egregious human rights violations by the government in nearly all reporting categories."

This year, it abbreviates that line to "Human rights issues included" and then details a familiar list of abuses including unlawful or arbitrary killings by the government, torture, and "substantial interference with" the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association.

- Semantic signals on Israel? -

Avigdor Lieberman, Yisrael Beiteinu party leader and Israel's former defence minister, looks through binoculars during a visit to a looking point in Mount Bental in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, as part of his campaign for the upcoming Israeli election

While the report is generally based on factual reporting, the US can use it to signal changes in its views of other governments.

The 2017 report changed its designation for the former "Israel and the Occupied Territories" to "Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza," and stuck with that again this year.

But the State Department insisted Wednesday that calling Golan "Israeli-controlled" instead of "Israeli-occupied" was not a policy shift in Israel's favor.

"There's no change in our outlook or our policy vis-a-vis these territories and the need for a negotiated settlement there," said Michael Kozak of the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

"What we try to do is to report on the human rights situation in those territories."

"And 'occupied territory' has a legal meaning to it; I think what they tried to do is to shift more to just a geographic description."The village of Majdal Shams (L)in the Golan Heights, an area that US refers to as "Israeli-controlled" rather than "Israeli-occupied" in its latest annual human rights report

The US no longer refers to the Golan Heights as an "Israeli-occupied" territory in its latest annual human rights report, published Wednesday, though the State Department insists the wording change doesn't mean a policy change.

The report now calls the area the "Israeli-controlled Golan Heights."

When asked about the change on such a sensitive Middle East subject, a senior US official told reporters in Washington "there's no change in our outlook or our policy vis-a-vis these territories and the need for a negotiated settlement there."

"This, by the way, is not a human rights issue, it's a legal status issue," said Michael Kozak of the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

"What we try to do is to report on the human rights situation in those territories, and so you're just trying to find the way of describing the place that you're reporting on," he said. "And 'occupied territory' has a legal meaning to it; I think what they tried to do is to shift more to just a geographic description."

And another semantic change that appeared in last year's report showed up again this year, with a section titled "Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza," instead of its previous "Israel and the Occupied Territories" heading.

President Donald Trump, who has shown robust support for close US ally Israel, recognized Jerusalem as the country's capital in 2017, defying international consensus much to the chagrin of Palestinian leaders, who view Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

Israel seized much of the Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War and then effectively annexed it in 1981, a move that was never recognized by the international community.

Israel and Syria remain technically at war after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, though a demilitarized border zone established through an armistice had long been relatively calm until the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

Influential Trump ally US Senator Lindsey Graham said Monday during a visit to the Golan Heights with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would push for US recognition of Israel's sovereignty over the strategic region "now and forever."In this photo obtained from NASA, technicians at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, move the largest piece of structural test hardware for the new deep space rocket, the Space Launch System

NASA's administrator said Wednesday its next heavy-lift rocket, the SLS, is running into additional development delays, and the space agency now wants to use private launchers for its next Moon mission.

Boeing has spent years developing the SLS, or Space Launch System, which would be the most powerful rocket ever built, with the goal of resuming manned space missions to the Moon. A capsule for astronauts, Orion, is being built by Lockheed-Martin and Europe for the missions.

After a three year delay, a first unmanned mission around the Moon and back, dubbed EM-1, has been scheduled for June 2020.

But NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told a Senate hearing that the "SLS is struggling to meet its schedule" and won't be ready in time for the EM-1 mission.

"Last week it came to our attention that we're not going to be able to maintain the schedule," he told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

It is the first time that NASA has clearly acknowledged the extent of the problems with the SLS, which according to an inspector general's report last August has so far cost the space agency more than $12 billion to develop.

Bridenstine then made the shocking announcement that he wants to entrust the EM-1 mission in June 2020 to existing private launch systems, instead of waiting for SLS to be ready.

He did not say which private company he had in mind, but SpaceX would be a natural candidate with its Falcon Heavy rocket. United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy also would be a capable alternative.

United Launch Alliance is a joint venture of Lockheed and Boeing. SpaceX was founded by billionaire Elon Musk.

"We have amazing capability that exists right now that we can use off the shelf in order to accomplish this objective," Bridenstine said.

The new plan would consist of first launching the Orion capsule, and then follow it with the launch of an upper stage for propulsion. The two elements will then dock in orbit for the voyage around the Moon.

No rocket in existence today is capable of lifting both elements together, because of their weight, which is why NASA needed the more powerful SLS.

"I want to be clear, we do not have right now an ability to dock the Orion crew capsule with anything in orbit. So between now and June of 2020, we would have to make that a reality," Bridenstine said.

"NASA has a history of not meeting launch dates, and I'm trying to change that," he said.California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a news conference at which he announced a moratorium on California's death penalty

Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty in California on Wednesday, granting a reprieve to 737 condemned inmates -- the largest death row population in the United States.

"The death penalty has been an abject failure. It discriminates based on the color of your skin or how much money you make," he told a news conference. "It's ineffective, irreversible, and immoral.

"It goes against the very values that we stand for -- which is why California is putting a stop to this failed system."

Newsom, a Democrat who took office in January, has been a staunch opponent of the death penalty, last carried out in California in 2006.

In a tweet, President Donald Trump denounced the decision as a slap in the face for victims and their families.

"Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers," he said. "Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!"

An inmate stands in his cell on June 8, 2017 in San Quentin State Prison in California.

Newsom said that as he spoke, the execution chamber at California's San Quentin State Prison was being dismantled and stressed that his order -- which stands as long as he is governor -- does not mean that any inmates already on death row would be released.

"Those people are not going to be let out by this act, they will be held to account," he said. "We don't want to join Saudi Arabia... North Korea. We don't want to be part of what is happening in Iran, in Iraq, China, Somalia, Pakistan and Egypt.

"Those are the countries -- those last five -- that join the US in executing more of their citizens than any other nations on Planet Earth."

- 'Time for California' -

He said he hoped California and the United States as a whole would ultimately end the death penalty for good.

Lonnie David Franklin Jr., also known as the "Grime Sleeper," was sentenced to death for 10 murder he committed between 1985 and 2007

"Three out of four nations in the world do better, they have abolished the death penalty," he said. "It's time for California to join those ranks."

Newsom, who appeared emotional during the news conference, said he had met relatives of victims in recent days and acknowledged they were divided on the issue.

"I met someone yesterday who said this is about eradicating evil, and you have a responsibility to eradicate evil by executing those on death row," he said.

"I met a mother who said... 'you have no right to take another life in the name of my daughter who was murdered.'"

A quarter of all those on death row in the United States are in California, according to the governor's office. Twenty-five people on California's death row have exhausted all of their appeals.

Among the most notorious inmates is Lonnie David Franklin Jr, also known as the "Grim Sleeper," who was sentenced to death for 10 murders between 1985 and 2007.

Also on death row is Scott Peterson, who murdered his pregnant wife Laci Peterson and their unborn child in 2002. He was sentenced to death by lethal injection in 2005.

Human Rights Watch said that with the governor's decision, California continues a trend in the United States away from putting people to death.

The state joins Colorado, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, which have similar bans, and 20 states that have abolished the death penalty, it said.

Executions in the United States

"Governor Newsom has demonstrated great courage and leadership in ending the cruel, costly, and unfair practice of executing prisoners," said Alison Parker, US managing director at Human Rights Watch.

"Californians should be proud their state has taken a stand to end state-sanctioned killing and uphold the human rights of all people."

The American Civil Liberties Union also welcomed the decision saying it was "a watershed moment in the fight for racial equity and equal justice for all."

Although studies show that an increasing number of Californians favor a sentence of life without parole to the death penalty in most cases, voters in 2012 and 2016 rejected measures to repeal the death penalty.A Boeing 737 Max 8 flown by Southwest Airlines taxis to the gate at Baltimore Washington International Airport near Baltimore, Maryland, on March 13, 2019

The ban on the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft became worldwide on Wednesday after US President Donald Trump joined Canada and other countries in grounding the aircraft amid mounting global fears for the jets' airworthiness.

US authorities said new evidence showed similarities between Sunday's deadly crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 and a fatal accident in Indonesia in October.

The Federal Aviation 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 aircraft until further notice.

Trump told reporters at the White House the "safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern."

Mexico late Wednesday suspended MAX 8 and 9 operations, after Canada and Chile also joined the long list of countries to ban the plane from flying in their airspaces. Many airlines have voluntarily taken it out of service. Brazil, Costa Rica and Panama followed suit.

Ethiopia said it would send the black boxes from Flight ET 302 to France for analysis, which could provide crucial information about what happened.

"Hopefully they will come up with an answer but until they do the planes are grounded," Trump said.

FAA acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency has been "working tirelessly" to find the cause of the accident but faced delays because the black box flight data recorders had been damaged.

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 chief Dennis Muilenburg said he supported the US decision "out of an abundance of caution" but continued to have "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," Muilenburg said in a statement.

The accounts of the recent crashes were echoed in concerns registered by US pilots on how the MAX 8 behaves.

- Pilots concerns -

Boeing 737 MAX prohibited from flying

At least four American pilots made reports following the Lion Air crash, all complaining the aircraft suddenly pitched 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 crash, 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 transportation 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 nose of the plane downward 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 plane's nose down following takeoff.

The Ethiopian Airlines pilots reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged into the ground as they tried to return to the airport.

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 on Sunday said the captain on the flight, Yared Mulugeta Getachew, 29, was an experienced aviator with more than 8,000 flight hours.

Andrew Hunter, a defense industry expert at the Center 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."

- Banned from the skies -

In Ethiopia, distraught families wept and lit candles as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field, killing 157 passengers and crew, an AFP correspondent said.

The Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 was less than four months old when it went down six minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on Sunday, disintegrating on impact.

Families of the victims from Kenya, China, the United States and Canada, as well as diplomatic staff from embassies, were visiting the crash site.

A dozen airlines have grounded the plane, while Nigeria, Lebanon, Egypt, Serbia, Vietnam, New Zealand and Hong Kong on Wednesday also joined the list of countries to ban it from their airspace.

The European Union and major hubs such as the United Arab Emirates and Australia had already done so.

American Airlines said it had 24 aircraft affected by the US ban, while Southwest Airlines said it was still confirming the move.

The MAX series is Boeing's fastest-selling model.

There are 74 of the planes registered in the United States, and 387 in use worldwide with 59 carriers, according to the FAA.

Low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle has said it would demand financial compensation from Boeing as the implications of the mass grounding for the airline industry remained unclear.

Shares in the company rose Wednesday on Wall Street despite the US order but were still down 10.6 percent since before Sunday's crash.

burs-hs/wd/it/dwChinese telecom giant Huawei has strenuously denied allegations its equipment could be used for espionage

The US upped pressure on Europe Wednesday to avoid turning to Huawei for 5G telecom infrastructure, with a top commander saying NATO forces would cease communicating with their German colleagues if Berlin teams up with the Chinese firm.

The US and several other Western nations, fearful of the security risks posed by a company closely tied to the Chinese government, have shut Huawei out of tenders for the development of super-fast fifth-generation, or 5G, networks.

"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," US General Curtis Scaparrotti, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told US lawmakers.

"If it also is inside of their defense communications, then we're not going to communicate with them" across those systems, the general said before the House Armed Services Committee.

"And for the military, that would be a problem."

Scaparrotti's comments came during questioning about trade talks in Europe, and Germany in particular, with Chinese telecom groups such as Huawei.

The company has been charged by the US justice department of stealing trade secrets, obstructing a criminal investigation and evading economic sanctions on Iran.

Its 5G equipment is reputed to be much further advanced than those of rivals Ericsson and Nokia, which has made it attractive for mobile operators looking to quickly roll out new networks.

The next-generation systems will bring near-instantaneous connectivity that can enable futuristic technologies such as self-driving cars.

Chinese law obliges companies headquartered in the country to provide technical assistance to intelligence services, but Huawei has strenuously denied allegations its equipment could be used for espionage.

Kathryn Wheelbarger, acting US assistant secretary of defense for international affairs, told the committee Huawei represents a "threat" to Europe.

- Private and military concerns -

"I can assure you that in all our conversations with all our European partners, we make very clear the threat of Chinese investment or development of the telecommunications infrastructure in Europe," Wheelbarger said.

These concerns relate to the "security of our communications, both private... as well as military," she said.

The two Pentagon officials refused to give further details in public about their concerns, telling elected officials they would discuss the subject in depth during a later closed session.

Germany is due to launch auctions in mid-March for future mobile telecommunications infrastructure.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported the US had warned Berlin about future "information sharing" if it uses "untrusted vendors" in its 5G infrastructure.

The newspaper said the US Ambassador to Berlin, Richard Grenell, had sent a letter to German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier warning that in such a case, the US could scale down intelligence and other information exchanges.

On Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Berlin would consult Washington over using technology made by Huawei, although "we will define our standards for ourselves."

Asked about the security standards that Europe could adopt to protect against Chinese espionage, Wheelbarger said there were none.

"Having looked into Huawei quite a bit a few years ago, I realized the challenges of even having a mitigation plan or strategy for the 4G infrastructure," she said.

"Given this sort of generational shift that is between 4G and 5G, I am not aware of something that would give us the kind of security we would need to mitigate the challenges it would impose on us."The massive rescue operation here had been going on for the past nearly 48 hours after the child fell into the borewell Wednesday evening.

As the rescuers on Friday reached close to the spot where the child was trapped, digging by machines was stopped and was carried out manually to ensure that soil did not fall over the infant, officials said. (Image: ANI)

Hisar: After a 48-hour-long struggle, an 18-month-old child who fell into a borewell here was rescued safely on Friday. Nadim fell into the 60-foot deep borewell while playing near his house in Balsamand village in Hisar district of Haryana. As soon as Army and NDRF personnel pulled out Nadim from the borewell, the elated villagers started raising slogans like 'Bharat Mata ki Jai'. "The child has been brought out after a difficult rescue operation. He is totally safe. We have sent him to the medical college at Agroha in Hisar, where doctors will examine him thoroughly and keep him under observation," Hisar's Deputy Commissioner Ashok Kumar Meena told PTI.

The massive rescue operation here had been going on for the past nearly 48 hours after the child fell into the borewell Wednesday evening. Even the Holi celebrations in the village on Thursday remained subdued as everyone was praying for the child's safety. As the rescuers on Friday reached close to the spot where the child was trapped, digging by machines was stopped and was carried out manually to ensure that soil did not fall over the infant, officials said. Local villagers formed a human chain to help authorities in digging the soil. Earlier, the authorities had started digging a parallel well about 20 feet away from the borewell and subsequently, they created a tunnel to bring out the child safely. The child's movements were monitored using a night-vision camera which was dropped inside the borewell. Nadim was playing with some friends who were plucking fruits from a tree when he suddenly fell into the borewell. Afterwards, his family members and the villagers informed police.

The child's father is a labourer. Earthmovers, drilling machines and other equipment had been pressed into service to rescue the child, even as oxygen tubes were dropped to help him breathe. Biscuits and juices were supplied to the child. A medical team had also been deployed at the incident site. The deputy commissioner had earlier said that legal action would be taken against the person who dug the borewell without taking any permission from the department concerned. He said a survey would also be carried out in the district to find out how many borewells had been left open and could pose danger. The incident has again brought to the fore the dangers posed by uncovered borewells, which have turned into death traps for children.The war in Yemen is the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with an estimated 14 million people at risk of famine

The US Senate on Wednesday dealt a stinging bipartisan rebuke to Donald Trump's 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 a historic curtailment of presidential war powers that directs Trump "to remove United States 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 text now heads to the Democrat-led House of Representatives, which approved a similar measure that stalled earlier this year, and which is likely to pass the latest effort.

The White House has threatened a veto, but the measure nonetheless sets a historic marker.

Should the House approve the measure, it would be the first ever passed by Congress to invoke the 1973 War Powers Resolution to directly curtail a president's use of military powers.

"Today, we begin the process of reclaiming our constitutional power by ending US involvement in a war that has not been authorized by Congress and is clearly unconstitutional," Senator Bernie Sanders, who is running for president in 2020 and is a sponsor of the measure, said on the Senate floor.

Republican Senator Mike Lee concurred, saying Saudi Arabia "is not an ally that deserves our support or our military intervention."

The Saudis, he said, "are likely using our own weapons... to commit these atrocities of war. That's not OK."

The war in Yemen is the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with an estimated 14 million people at risk of famine.

The World Health Organization says about 10,000 people have been killed in the war between forces loyal to the Yemeni government, backed by the Saudi-led coalition, and the Iran-aligned Huthi rebels, but rights groups say the death toll is far higher.

The vote may well be the first of two congressional rebukes of Trump in as many days.

On Thursday, the Senate is expected to vote on a resolution to reverse Trump's emergency declaration on border security, after the president went around Congress in a bid to secure more funding for his wall between the United States and Mexico.Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks during the "March for Truth" against President Donald Trump, in El Paso, Texas, on February 11, 2019

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.The oil fields are Myanmar's equivalent of the American Wild West, where entrepreneurs scramble to strike it lucky

As clouds of acrid, black smoke belched above the flames engulfing an artisanal oil field in central Myanmar, prospectors from nearby hillsides arrived in droves, hoping for riches from a fresh line of black gold.

"The fire's a really good sign -- it means there's lots of oil here," Khin Maung Htay tells AFP as he scouted around the site just hours after the blaze was extinguished.

"There were 600 barrels of oil a day coming out."

Workers set up a machine to build a new oil rig

The fields near Minhla, north of Yangon, are Myanmar's equivalent of the American Wild West, where informal oil entrepreneurs scramble from site to site in the hope of striking lucky.

It is a hard way to make a living.

A forest of temporary "derricks", three legged pyramids made from metal or bamboo stretching 30 feet or more into the air, covers the hillsides.

A pulley at the top of each well supports a drill that can plunge more than a kilometre into the ground.

Setting up a drilling operation can cost $60,000, one worker told AFP

Each is manned by a team working round-the-clock, often caked in black, viscous grime as they wait for a potentially lucrative spurt of oil.

"It's like the lottery," shouts Than Moe over the deafening noise of generators powering the field's hundreds of drills.

As he cooks up some rice for his crew of seven, he explains that setting up a drilling operation can set you back more than $60,000.

Those at the site try to salvage all the oil they can

"But if we strike oil, we can get that back in one day."

The teams live right next to the wells in bamboo huts and tarpaulin tents offering some protection from the searing heat.

Many even bring their families along for their nomadic life.

Children run around the hillsides dodging motorbikes and trucks transporting barrels of oil, while a handful of restaurants and tea shops serve the transient population of several thousand.

People at the site try to clean themselves as best they can in the dirt and heat

The weekend's blaze extinguished, some trudge knee-deep through a river of oozing filth, overspill from the wells mixing with water left behind by fire trucks, scraping up any oil they can salvage.

People here dismiss the risks involved.

"The fires aren't dangerous. They happen all the time," one man says without giving his name.

"We're just worried about losing money."

-- This story accompanies a photo essay by Ye Aung Thu --Vietnamese national, Doan Thi Huong (2nd R), has been trial for a year and a half over the 2017 assassination of Kim Jong Nam at Kuala Lumpur airport that shocked the world

A Vietnamese woman charged with assassinating the North Korean leader's half-brother lost her bid for immediate release Thursday as Malaysian authorities refused to drop a murder charge, days after her Indonesian co-accused was freed.

"In reference to the representation submitted on March 11 to the honourable attorney-general, we got an order to proceed with the case," lead prosecutor Muhammad Iskandar Ahmad told the High Court in Shah Alam, outside Kuala Lumpur.

Doan Thi Huong, 30, has been on trial for a year and a half over the 2017 assassination of Kim Jong Nam at Kuala Lumpur airport that shocked the world.

She sobbed in the dock as the news was announced, and tearfully told reporters: "I am not angry that Siti has been freed. Only God knows that we did not commit the murder.

"I want my family to pray for me."

The Indonesian woman accused alongside her -- Siti Aisyah -- was unexpectedly released Monday after prosecutors withdrew the murder charge against her. They did not offer any explanation but it followed intense lobbying from the Indonesian government.

Judge Azmi Ariffin said Huong was not "physically and mentally" well enough to continue with the trial on Thursday, and adjourned proceedings until April 1.

Vietnamese ambassador to Malaysia, Le Quy Quynh, told AFP at the court: "I'm very disappointed that the court did not free Doan.

"We will request Malaysia to be fair and to release her as soon as possible."In the world's coldest capital, many burn coal and plastic just to survive temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees -- but warmth comes at a price: deadly pollution makes Ulaanbataar air too toxic for children to breathe

In the world's coldest capital, many burn coal and plastic just to survive temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees -- but warmth comes at a price: deadly pollution makes Ulaanbataar's air too toxic for children to breathe, leaving parents little choice but to evacuate them to the countryside.

This exodus is a stark warning of the future for urban areas in much of Asia, where scenes of citizens in anti-pollution masks against a backdrop of brown skies are becoming routine, rather than apocalyptic.

Ulaanbaatar is one of the most polluted cities on the planet, alongside New Delhi, Dhaka, Kabul, and Beijing. It regularly exceeds World Health Organisation recommendations for air quality even as experts warn of disastrous consequences, particularly for children, including stunted development, chronic illness, and in some cases death.

Erdene-Bat Naranchimeg watched helplessly as her daughter Amina battled illness virtually from birth, her immune system handicapped by the smog-choked air in Mongolia's capital.

Pollution in Ulaanbataar is so bad that parents have little choice but to evacuate their children to the countryside

"We would constantly be in and out of the hospital," Naranchimeg told AFP, adding that Amina contracted pneumonia twice at the age of two, requiring several rounds of antibiotics.

This is not a unique case in a city where winter temperatures plunge towards uninhabitable, particularly in the districts that rural workers moved to in search of a better life.

Here row upon row of the traditional tents -- known as gers -- are warmed by coal, or any other flammable material available. The resulting thick black smoke shoots out in plumes, blanketing surrounding areas in a film of smog that makes visibility so poor it can be hard to see even a few metres ahead.

Hospitals are packed and young children are vulnerable, common colds can quickly escalate into life-threatening illness.

- Birth defects -

The situation was so bad that doctors told Naranchimeg the only solution was to send her little girl to the clean air of the countryside.

Now aged five, Amina is thriving. She lives with her grandparents in Bornuur Sum, a village 135 kilometres away from the capital.

"She hasn't been sick since she started living here," said Naranchimeg, who makes the three-hour round trip to see Amina every week.

"It was very difficult in the first few months," she said. "We used to cry when we talked on the phone."

Five-year-old Amina was sent to the countryside to live with her grandparents, after doctors warned the toxic air in the Mongolian capital was making her sick

But like many parents in Ulaanbaatar, she felt the move was the only way to protect her child.

The levels of PM2.5 -- tiny and harmful particles -- in Ulaanbaatar reached 3,320 in January, 133 times what the World Health Organisation (WHO) considers safe.

The effects are terrible for adults but children are even more at risk, in part because they breathe faster, taking in more air and pollutants.

As they are smaller, children are also closer to the ground, where some pollutants concentrate, and their still-developing lungs, brains, and other key organs are more vulnerable to damage.

Effects to prolonged exposure range from persistent infections and asthma to slowed lung and brain development.

The risks apply in utero, too, because gases and fine particles can enter a mother's bloodstream and placenta, causing miscarriage, birth defects and low birth weights, which can also affect a child for the rest of their lives.

Researchers are now investigating whether pollution, like exposure to tobacco smoke, has health effects that could even be passed down to the next generation.

- 'Terribly afraid' -

Buyan-Ulzii Badamkhand and her husband need to stay in capital for work, but they have decided to send their two-year-old son Temuulen more than 1,000 kilometres away.

The 35-year-old mother-of-three struggled with the decision, even moving from one ger district to another in the hope her son's health would improve.

But successive bouts of illness, including bronchitis that lasted a whole year, finally convinced her to send Temuulen to his grandparents.

Hours after he arrived, she called her mother-in-law to discuss her son's medicines.

"But my mother-in-law asked me 'does he still need medicine? He isn't coughing anymore," she said.

"I tell myself that it doesn't matter that I miss him and who raises him, as long as he is healthy, I am content."

Respiratory problems are the most obvious effect of air pollution, but research suggests dirty air can also put children at greater risk for diabetes and cardiovascular disease later in life.

And the WHO links it to leukaemia and behavioural disorders.

When air pollution peaks in winter, Ulaanbaatar's playgrounds empty and those who are able to are increasingly travelling abroad to wait out the smog.

In desperation, Luvsangombo Chinchuluun, a civil society activist, borrowed money to take her granddaughter to Thailand for all of January.

"We can't let her play outside (in Ulaanbaatar) because of the air pollution, so we decided to leave," she said.

The persistent smog has caused tensions in the city, with those living in wealthier areas blaming the ger residents for the pollution and even calling for the tent districts to be cleared.

But the ger residents say coal is all they can afford.

Ulaanbataar air pollution

"People come to the capital because they need sustainable income," said Dorjdagva Adiyasuren, a 54-year-old mother of six.

"It's not their fault," she added.

In a bid to tackle the problem, the local government banned domestic migration in 2017, and a ban on burning coal comes into force from May.

But it is unclear whether the moves will be enough to make a difference.

For Naranchimeg, the problems are serious enough to make her consider whether she wants more children.

She explained: "Now, I am terribly afraid of to give birth again. It is risky to carry a child and what will happen to the child after it is born in this amount of pollution?"Greens leader James Shaw (L), who is Climate Change Minister and whose party is part of the ruling centre-left coalition, was not seriously injured

A senior New Zealand government minister was assaulted in an early-morning street attack Thursday that left him with a black eye and shook up Wellington's normally laid-back political atmosphere.

Green Party co-leader James Shaw was walking to the parliament building known as the Beehive when a man punched him in the face in what his office described as an unprovoked attack.

While Shaw's office played down any political aspect to the assault, Trade Minister David Parker told reporters the attacker "was said to be shouting things out about the United Nations".

Shaw, who is Climate Change Minister and whose party is part of the ruling centre-left coalition, was not seriously injured.

His office said two members of the public helped him and he continued to parliament, attending a meeting before going to hospital for a precautionary check-up.

He suffered a black eye, telling stuff.co.nz "it looks worse than it is".

Police said a 47-year-old man was arrested and would appear in court Friday charged with injuring with intent.

Political violence is practically unheard of in New Zealand, a nation of about 4.5 million where most government ministers do not have a regular security detail.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that "in New Zealand, you just don't expect these things to happen".

"We have an environment in New Zealand where politicians are accessible, and that's something we should feel proud of," she told reporters.

"We are after all, here to serve people. But today's events really show we cannot take that for granted."

Wellington mayor Justin Lester said it was "a sad day for democracy".

"This is outrageous behaviour and if undertaken by a Wellingtonian, shameful," he tweeted.

"Elected representatives of all hues show courage to represent New Zealanders and we are lucky to have unparalleled access to them."

There was condemnation from across the political spectrum, with the leader of the conservative National Party Simon Bridges tweeting: "Violence is never OK."

Ardern said Shaw had told her he was doing fine" and she had told him to take whatever time off he needed to recover.India said it was disappointed China had delayed a bid to blacklist a Kashmir militant leader

India said Thursday it was "disappointed" by China again delaying a bid to blacklist the leader of a Pakistan-based militant group that claimed a massive suicide bombing in Kashmir last month.

The blast on February 14 killed 40 Indian troops and triggered tit-for-tat air strikes and an aerial dogfight in the most serious bust-up in years between New Delhi and Islamabad.

Although the suicide bomber was native to the part of Kashmir that Indian controls, the attack was claimed by Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), one of several militant groups based in Pakistan.

China on Wednesday put on hold a request by Britain, France and the United States to add the leader of JeM, Masood Azhar, on a UN sanctions blacklist which would subject him to a global travel ban, an assets freeze and an arms embargo.

China -- an all-weather ally of Pakistan which has blocked three similar moves -- said it needed more time to examine the sanctions request targeting Azhar, and asked for a technical hold which could last up to nine months.

In a statement, the Indian foreign ministry said it "was disappointed by the outcome", adding it would continue to pursue all avenues to make sure "terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice".

China has blocked three previous attempts at the committee on sanctions against Al-Qaeda and IS-linked groups to blacklist the JeM leader. The group itself was added to the UN terror list in 2001.

China's decision was the top news across Indian media on Thursday, with the Indian Express headlining its report: "Jaish chief gets Great Wall of China".

India's main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi used the opportunity to mock Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is seeking re-election in a national ballot starting next month.

"Weak Modi is scared of Xi. Not a word comes out of his mouth when China acts against India," Gandhi tweeted, referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Regional rivals China and India have longstanding territorial disputes but Modi and Xi have tried to patch up ties, banking on their personal chemistry to smoothen differences.

China's move on Azhar also triggered a storm of anti-Chinese sentiment on Twitter with #BoycottChinaProduct attracting hundreds of tweets.

China is India's biggest trading partner, but the trade imbalance is skewed heavily in favour of Beijing.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 system -- implicated in the crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX 8 in Indonesia in October -- within 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.

Oromo women perform a traditional chant at the crash site at Hama Quntushele village, in Oromia region

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.

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 pilots -- many of whom come from the military -- would have been able to react quickly to the MCAS flaw, if that occured in the accident last weekend.

And Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger -- noted 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.

"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.

A man holds an Ethiopian flag as children from neighbouring Hama elementary school arrive to pay condolences at the crash site

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.

Boeing shares

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.

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 crash -- wiping out about $25 billion in value -- after 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.

Boeing 737 MAX prohibited from flying

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.

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.

burs-ft/hsIrish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar is seen with President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump last March at the White House

The White House will turn a tad green Thursday as President Donald Trump receives Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and a pot of shamrocks to mark St. Patrick's Day.

The tradition, in which US presidents have been known to don green neckties, goes back to the 1950s and offers the small country special access to the US presidency at least for a day.

Around this time of year in 1952, then Irish ambassador John Hearne showed up at the White House to offer President Harry Truman some shamrocks, the symbol of Ireland.

It turned out Truman was on vacation, in Florida.

The next year Hearne did get to see President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who met with him for 15 minutes -- and accepted the bright, green leafy gift -- to talk about relations between the two countries.

Then president Ronald Reagan in 1988 has lunch at a bar near Washington on St Patrick's Day

The tradition has continued pretty much non-stop, helped by the fact that many US presidents have had some degree of Irish blood in them.

Ronald Reagan was particularly fond of the ritual.

"He was really big about St. Patrick's Day celebrations at the White House," said Matthew Costello, senior historian at the White House Historical Association.

"Reagan liked to tell Irish jokes about his family, his grandfather. He was really big about St. Patrick's Day celebrations at the White House," said Costello.

"There's one year he snuck off and went down to Alexandria on St. Patrick's Day to have lunch and a pint with people. And they didn't tell anybody. They told the owners of the bar, like, an hour before that the president would show up," he added. The town is just across the Potomac River in Virginia.

- Reagan and his sweet tooth -

The visit by the Irish prime minister -- when Barack Obama was president, the water in a fountain on the White House lawn was dyed green -- is a chance to celebrate ties between two countries joined by waves of immigration from Irish people fleeing famine in the 19th century.

Water in a fountain at the White House is dyed green in 2016 to mark St Patrick's Day

But it also provides a special diplomatic platform for a country of just five million people, an entree that small nations do not normally enjoy with the world superpower.

In the 1990s Irish leaders took this opportunity to press then president Bill Clinton to help nudge along the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Varadkar is expected to use his time with Trump to address diplomatic issues that include Britain's messy departure from the European Union and its impact on Ireland. The latter is part of the EU while Northern Ireland is in the United Kingdom. Their border is one of the main sticking points in the process.

Then prime minister Bertie Ahern gives a pot of shamrocks to then president Bill Clinton in 1998

On a personal level, the two men are very different. Trump is 72 and widely accused of being a white nationalist and anti-immigrant. Varadkar is 40, of partly Indian heritage and openly gay.

Last year at this time they spoke about the situation of the many Irish living in America.

That came during the shamrock delivery session.

The plant is destroyed, for security reasons, said Costello.

But the president can keep the thing it came in.

Reagan used one such glass pot to hold the jelly beans he was so fond of, said Costello.Israel seized 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles) of the Golan during the Six-Day War of 1967, then annexed it in 1981 in a move never recognised internationally

A spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has criticised a US move to no longer refer to the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights as occupied territories in its annual human rights report.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh called it "a continuation of the hostile approach of the American administration toward our Palestinian people and... contrary to all UN resolutions."

In a statement carried by official Palestinian news agency WAFA late Wednesday, he said the change was part of US President Donald Trump's plan to "liquidate" the Palestinian cause.

Trump is expected to unveil his long-awaited plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace in the coming months, even though the Palestinian leadership has frozen contact with Washington over Trump's 2017 declaration of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Palestinians believe the upcoming plan will be blatantly biased in favour of Israel.

In its latest human rights report published Wednesday, the United States referred to the Golan Heights as "Israeli-controlled" as opposed to "Israeli-occupied".

Another semantic change that appeared in last year's report showed up again this year, with a section titled "Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza," instead of its previous "Israel and the Occupied Territories" heading.

The US State Department insisted the different wording did not mean a change in policy.

Israel occupied the Golan Heights, West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War.

It later annexed the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem in moves never recognised by the international community.

It has withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, but has fought three wars with Palestinian militants there and maintains a blockade of the territory.

Israel's occupation of the West Bank continues.Kovind will hold restricted and delegation-level talks with Bolivian President Evo Morales during the visit.

New Delhi: President Ram Nath Kovind will next week visit Croatia, Bolivia and Chile and hold talks with the leadership of these countries to strengthen ties in keys sectors such as trade, investment and renewable energy.

Kovind will first visit Croatia from March 25-28 in what would be the first visit by an Indian president to the European country, Vijay Thakur Singh, Secretary East in the Ministry of External Affairs, said at a media briefing. During the visit, Kovind will participate in the India-Croatia Business Forum. He will also deliver an address at the University of Zagreb. He will hold talks with his Croatian counterpart Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, Singh said.

From Croatia, Kovind will head to Bolivia on March 28 for a three-day visit, the first high-level visit to the Latin American country since the establishment of diplomatic ties, the secretary east said. Kovind will hold restricted and delegation-level talks with Bolivian President Evo Morales during the visit. He will also participate in a India-Bolivia business meet, address university students, and interact with Indian community members during his stay in Bolivia. On March 30, he will head to Chile where he will hold talks with the restricted and delegation-level format with Sebastian Pinera.

During the visit, Kovind will participate in a business meet, address University of Chile and interact with members of the Indian community, Singh said. Renewable energy and defence cooperation will be on the agenda during Kovind's talks in Chile, she said. "The president's visit to the three countries will have a full agenda...We are hopeful that the president's visit will reinvigorate our bilateral ties and provide new direction to our relationship with these three countries," she said. Kovind will head back on April 2 and will make a transit halt in Cape Town in South Africa during which he will pay tribute to the late former South African president Nelson Mandela and interact with the Indian community.Residents of Manila, queue to recieve water distributed as the Philippine capital endures a prolonged drought

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."

Bucket-bearing families wait hours to fill up from tanker trucks and some hospitals to turn away less urgent cases in Manila

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.

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

"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 government has admitted that the problem of growing demand for water has long been forecasted but they failed to address it due to delays in projects that would expand capacity

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.

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

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.Montreal drew among the largest crowds, estimated by organizers at nearly 150,000

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.

Thousands demonstrated in front of La Moneda presidencial palace in Santiago, Chile during the global protests

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)

A man in Medellin, Colombia, performs during a protest as part of the global demonstrations calling for action to stem climate change

"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.

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 are living through an existential crisis that has been ignored for decades," says 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, wearing yellow, who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize

"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 -

In France, tens of thousands joined the youth strike, with up to 40,000 in Paris alone, police said

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.

In London, thousands of youngsters skipped classes to march on Downing Street

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."

Crowds filled the streets of Montreal, in temperatures barely above freezing

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.

The global demonstrations were started by a 16-year-old Swedish student who began skipping school to protest last year

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan strongly condemned the New Zealand attack, saying it illustrated growing hostility to Islam

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.

After Friday prayers, dozens of people gathered in Istanbul chanting condemnation of the attack and waving signs saying "Stop global terrorism"

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, news 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."

Meanwhile, Ankara opened an inquiry after it emerged that the man alleged to be the gunman made several visits to Turkey, an official said.

A visitor -- believed to be the 28-year-old Australian arrested and charged with murder in New Zealand -- "visited Turkey several times and stayed for a long period on the country," the Turkish official said without giving dates.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 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.

IS group's last holdout in eastern Syria

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 -

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

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.

Many of those leaving the jihadist bastion are in poor health

"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.

Tens of thousands of people have streamed out of territory held by the Islamic State group since December

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.Huge crowds marched through the Algerian capital for a fourth consecutive Friday calling for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down

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.

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

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."

Algerian protesters want President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down

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.Ebba Akerlund was the youngest of five victims killed in an April 2017 Stockholm truck attack

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.Survivor: Emergency workers pluck a child from the collapsed building. The disaster left 20 dead, according to a new toll

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.

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".

- Demolition starts -

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.

"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.

The disaster revived a fierce debate in Nigeria about illegally or poorly-construction buildings. Regulations are routinely flouted

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.

LASBCA's Fakolujo told reporters most of the buildings had been the subject of long-running court cases, which meant they could not demolished.

- No warning -

One shop owner said she had only just paid a year's rent of 72,000 naira ($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.

Building collapse in Lagos

"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.

"They didn't allow us to take nothing, they just started."Police on patrol outside the Id Kah Mosque in China's restive Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Beijing strongly on Friday again strongly rejected criticism of mass Muslim detention camps

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."Manufacturing only accounts for about 12% of the US economy, but it is slowing as global demand, especially in China, declines, according to new government data

US manufacturing dropped sharply for the second consecutive month in February with across-the-board declines in nearly every category of product, the Federal Reserve reported Friday.

The decline kept overall industrial production from rebounding as analysts had forecast, despite a surge in the volatile utilities component.

The weakness, which many economists say will continue this year, is a blow to President Donald Trump's aggressive trade policies which have been focused on boosting American manufacturing, even as it makes up a dwindling share of the US economy.

And economists attribute some of the weakness to the slowdown underway in China, in part the result of Trump's trade war with the world's second largest economy.

Total industrial output eked out a gain of 0.1 percent, after falling 0.4 percent in January -- slightly better than originally reported -- helped by the 3.7 percent surge in utilities, according to the monthly report.

But manufacturing fell 0.4 percent after a 0.5 percent decline in the prior month, even though January's decline was an improvement on the 0.9 percent drop originally reported.

Within the manufacturing sector, the negatives were widespread, including losses of about 2 percent for nonmetallic mineral products and machinery.

"Manufacturing is succumbing to Chinas gravitational pull," said Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics.

He said "a broad-based softening is underway, and were sticking to our view that the sector will be in recession through mid-year."

- 'Into the mire' -

However, manufacturing accounts for only 12 percent of GDP, "so a short and relatively mild downturn in the sector is not going to pull the rest of the economy into the mire, but it will be a constraint on overall growth in both GDP and employment," Shepherdson said in a research note.

Output of motor vehicles and parts saw just a small dip, which was good news after the 7.6 percent drop in January, while computers and electronic products gained more than 1 percent.

The drop in motor vehicle production was essentially cancelled out by the gain in parts output. But excluding those two, total output was down 0.2 percent, according to the report.

Mining output, which includes oil and natural gas, rose 0.3 percent for the second month in a row, marking the 13th consecutive monthly increase.

Total industrial production remains 3.5 percent above February 2018, while manufacturing is up 1 percent.

With the tepid output, total industrial capacity in use dipped for the third consecutive month to 78.2 percent.

Mickey Levy of Berenberg Capital Markets notes that US output continues to perform better than other advanced economies.

But as global demand softens, he cautioned, "How long will US resilience last as the industrial slump spreads through other advanced economies and key trading partners?"Tanzanian President John Magufuli, pictured here during his inauguration ceremony in 2015, has been accused by rights defenders of being authoritarian

The head of Tanzania's main opposition party on Friday condemned what he described as a climate of fear installed by a "police state" after he was held in prison for more than three months.

Freeman Mbowe, head of the Chadema party, and fellow lawmaker Esther Matiko who was also jailed, described appalling prison conditions.

"This country has become a real police state," Mbowe told a press conference.

"Fear has gripped the country... people don't dare speak out, freedom of the press no longer exists," he said.

Mbowe and Matiko were arrested in November after they failed to appear in court twice to face charges over a protest march in February 2018 during which a 22-year-old student was killed by a police stray bullet.

In an appeal by the pair, judge Sam Rumanyika ruled last Thursday that their rights had been violated and ordered their immediate release on bail.

Critics say President John Magufuli has unleashed a wave of oppression since his election in 2015, cracking down on opposition figures, the media, and gay people.

"The death of the opposition would be a disaster for the country. You cannot build a democracy by beating or silencing your adversary," said Mbowe.

Mbowe said that in prison, some inmates spent up to two weeks without washing, which led to infectious diseases such as scabies, with prisoners scratching themselves "until blood flows".

He said prisoners are so tightly packed into cells that when sleeping, a "group leader" takes charge, clapping his hands so everyone can roll over in unison.

Meanwhile in the women's prison, Matiko said the mentally ill were locked up with criminal offenders. He vowed to take up the issue in parliament.Union home secretary Rajiv Gauba said the action was taken while following the zero tolerance policy of the Central government against terrorism.

New Delhi: The Centre on Friday banned Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) for its alleged role in promoting secessionist activities in Jammu and Kashmir and a series of violent acts, asserting its policy of zero tolerance against terrorism.

The front was banned under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act after a meeting on security was chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Union home secretary Rajiv Gauba said the action was taken while following the zero tolerance policy of the Central government against terrorism.

Murders of Kashmiri Pandits by the JKLF in 1989 triggered their exodus from the Valley. Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pandits and is responsible for their genocide, said Mr Gauba. The JKLF has many serious cases registered against it. This organisation is responsible for murder of four Indian Air Force personnel and kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of the then Union home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in the VP Singh government, he said.

Malik is at present lodged in Kot Balwal jail in Jammu and is likely to face trial in the three-decade-old case of kidnapping of Rubaya Sayeed and the killing of IAF personnel.

A home ministry official said that the Centre has evidence to show that the JKLF is in close touch with militant outfits and is supporting militancy in J&K and elsewhere.

The outfit claims secession of a part of the Indian territory from the Union and supports terrorist and separatist groups fighting for this purpose, he said.

The ban on JKLF coincided with a coordinated crackdown by various Central investigative agencies on Friday to pave the way for confiscating 25 assets linked to LeT chief Hafiz Sayed, four to Shabir Shah, and other immovable facilities in the name of over a dozen people linked to militant outfits.

The JKLF was founded by Pakistani national Amanullah Khan in the mid-1970s at Birmingham in the United Kingdom and came into prominence in 1971 when its member hijacked an Indian Airlines plane flying from Srinagar to Jammu.

As many as 37 FIRs have been registered against the JKLF by the Jammu and Kashmir Police, Mr Gauba said.

The organisation was also involved in the kidnapping and killing of Ravindra Mhatre, an Indian diplomat posted the UK, in 1984. A week later, India executed Maqbool Bhat, a JKLF activist, who had been sentenced to death.

The JKLF is the second organisation in Jammu and Kashmir which has been banned this month. Earlier, the Centre had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI).

Earlier, the government withdrew security of several separatist leaders in the state following the Pulwama terror attack on February 14 in which over 40 CRPF personnel were killed.The Australian attacker in New Zealand cited Norwegian far-right extremist killer Anders Behring Breivik, picture here at his trial, as an influence

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 said he killed his victims because they embraced multiculturalism

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.

"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.

New Zealand authorities described the mosque attacker as a "right-wing extremist" and a "terrorist"

"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.

The Masjid al Noor mosque was one of two targeted in the Christchurch attacks

"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."Filmmakers are looking to cash in on India's seven-week national election with around 900 million eligible voters

A Bollywood biopic on Narendra Modi's rise from humble beginnings to Indian prime minister is to hit cinemas next month, its director said Friday, just in time for elections.

It is the latest in a series of political movies released over the last few weeks, with filmmakers seeking to cash in on a seven week national election with around 900 million eligible voters.

"Proud to announce the release date of my film #PMNarendraModi 12th April 2019," Omung Kumar B said on Twitter.

The Hindi film industry has a long tradition of producing politically tinged flicks -- but industry watchers say 2019's offerings are more partisan than ever before.

"The film will traverse the journey of Narendra Damodardas Modi from his humble beginnings to his years as Gujarat Chief Minister," Kumar told Press Trust of India.

"(And) onto his landmark win at the 2014 election and finally being nominated as the prime minister of India," he added.

Kumar has also directed other biographical movies including one on Mary Kom, India's leading Olympic boxer.

The silver screen and politics have often intertwined in India.

Many actors have become politicians while Bollywood has not shied away from tackling political issues in its plotlines.

The nationalistic, all-guns-blazing "Uri: The Surgical Strike" which celebrates the Indian army's strikes on militants in 2016 in response to a raid that had killed 19 Indian soldiers, is one of the most successful movies this year.

Modi was widely lauded for the operation and the film sees Vicky Kaushal play an army major in charge of avenging the attack -- which India blamed on its arch enemy Pakistan -- on the Uri base.

Besides Uri, other politically-themed movies released this year include "The Accidental Prime Minister", which was based on a book about India's previous prime minister.

Another filmmaker also released "Thackeray", a biopic about divisive Mumbai politician Bal Thackeray, who died in 2012.

The film, according to the critics, was designed to boost support for the Shiv Sena -- a Hindu chauvinist party he led and founded.

Earlier this January, another biopic on a late actor-turned politician in southeastern Andhra Pradesh state was released.Cutting jobs "in the most socially responsible way possible"

Ford on Friday said it planned to cut "more than 5,000" jobs in Germany as part of a major restructuring to boost profitability at the US car giant's European operations.

The group aims to carry out the jobs cull through voluntary redundancies and early retirement, a spokeswoman told AFP.

"This announcement is part of the Ford restructuring announced in January in Europe with the goal of returning to profitable business in Europe as soon as possible," she said.

"The aim is to cut more than 5,000 jobs in the most socially responsible way possible," the spokeswoman added, without detailing how the cuts would be divided among Ford's operations in Cologne, Aachen and Saarlouis.

The announcement, which was shared with Ford Germany employees earlier on Friday, comes after the carmaker warned in January that "thousands" of jobs would be cut as part of a revamp of its loss-making European division.

Ford employs some 53,000 people across Europe, around 24,000 of them in Germany.

The overhaul comes at a time of widespread upheaval for global automakers as the industry pivots to the greener, smarter cars of the future and polluting diesel cars fall out of favour.

The industry is also grappling with the knock-on effects of US-lade trade tensions, Brexit uncertainty, and economic slowdowns in the key European and Chinese markets.

Ford, the second-biggest US automaker, plans to respond to the challenges with a global reorganisation, including a huge cost-cutting drive and partnership deals with rival carmakers.

The group, which booked a 2018 net profit of $3.7 billion, already announced last year that it would halt production of almost all sedans and small cars in the United States to save $11 billion.

In the United Kingdom, Ford plans to axe 1,150 jobs, according to Britain's Unite union.

In France, the group plans to close a plant making gear boxes near Bordeaux, costing 800 jobs and drawing the ire of the French government.

In Russia, Ford said it would launch a strategic review of its joint venture Ford Sollers.

Like other carmakers who have teamed up to reduce costs in an increasingly competitive industry, Ford earlier this year announced an alliance with German giant Volkswagen to jointly develop commercial vans and pickups from 2022.

The two companies are also in talks about potentially cooperating on electric and self-driving cars, the latest example of rivals joining forces to save on the massive research and development costs needed for the switch to future technologies.American Airlines had been sending two flights a week to Caracas and one to the western city of Maracaibo, all from Miami

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.The world reacted with horror to the New Zealand mosque attacks

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."

- 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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pictured opening a cabinet meeting on March 10, 2019, faces corruption allegations and an uncertain battle to hold on to power in elections

US diplomatic chief Mike Pompeo travels next week to Israel, where he will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close ally of Donald Trump's administration in the midst of a heated re-election campaign.

The US secretary of state travels to the Middle East February 19-23, stopping first in Kuwait for talks before heading to Jerusalem and Beirut, his spokesman Robert Palladino said.

"The common thing in each of those places is helping those countries bolster their efforts to push back against the Islamic Republic of Iran," Pompeo told Fox News.

The Trump administration has repeatedly clashed with Tehran, also an arch foe of the Jewish state.

In Jerusalem, Pompeo "will reaffirm both privately and publicly during that visit our unwavering commitment to Israel's security and its right to self-defense," a senior State Department official said.

Earlier, Pompeo backed Israel's "right to protect its citizens," after the Jewish state said it struck dozens of Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip in response to rockets from the Palestinian enclave.

"Once again, Israeli citizens are under attack from terrorists in Gaza, armed and financed by their puppet masters in Tehran," he tweeted.

"We stand by our ally. Israel has the right to protect its citizens."

Pompeo's visit to Jerusalem, which the United States now recognizes as the Jewish state's capital -- to the great dismay of the Palestinians and the international community -- is especially an opportunity to meet with Netanyahu just before Israel's April 9 legislative vote.

The visit is a welcome one for Netanyahu, facing corruption allegations and an uncertain battle to hold on to power.

Pompeo has no plans to meet Netanyahu's rivals, who include former military chief of staff Benny Gantz and ex-finance minister Yair Lapid.

The diplomatic chief "meets with him as the head of government in Israel," explained the senior official.

"We have major US interests with Israel. Those interests don't go away. They don't go into suspension because of the electoral cycle," the official added.

In Lebanon, where Pompeo travels after Israel, one of the principal topics will be the Shiite movement Hezbollah, which the United States considers a terrorist group that works at Iran's behest.

Hezbollah is nonetheless a member of Prime Minister Saad Hariri's government, a Washington ally.A Canadian born to Indian parents, Singh gained fame for her YouTube channel "Superwoman," launched in 2010, which today boasts 14.5 million subscribers and nearly 3 billion total views

Major television channel NBC has tapped YouTube star Lilly Singh to helm a late-night talk show, making the Canadian the first woman to host on a US broadcast network in more than three decades.

The evening talk shows have been a mainstay of American television for more than half-a-century -- but their hosts are generally white men.

The late comedian Joan Rivers did host her own show from 1986 to 1988 on Fox, but that channel -- unlike competitors ABC, CBS and NBC -- is not known for its late-night talk programming and no longer uses the format.

Comedian Samantha Bee also hosts her own evening satire news show entitled "Full Frontal," but it airs on the cable channel TBS and has a much smaller audience than the four national broadcast networks.

Singh, 30, will take over the last of NBC's three slots that is currently hosted by Carson Daly and begins at 1:35 am EST.

A Canadian born to Indian parents, Singh gained fame for her YouTube channel "Superwoman," launched in 2010, which today boasts 14.5 million subscribers and nearly three billion total views.

She announced her new gig as host of "A Little Late with Lilly Singh" as a guest on NBC's "The Tonight Show, the network's most-watched late-night program that's hosted by Jimmy Fallon.

It will be "kind of like my YouTube channel," she said, adding that "I think it's a little awesome for an Indian Canadian woman to be on a late-night show."US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, seen here on March 14, 2019, cut his head on a glass shower door and received seven stitches, but was given a clean bill of health and maintained his campaign schedule

US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders cut his head on a shower door Friday and received seven stitches, but he proceeded with his scheduled campaign events, a spokesperson said.

The 77-year-old senator, the oldest candidate in the Democratic race to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020, went to a walk-in clinic to be checked and was given a "clean bill of health," Sanders spokeswoman Arianna Jones said in a statement.

"The senator has proceeded with all of his scheduled events" including a breakfast with local clergy and then a health care roundtable in South Carolina, she said.

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 -- including two who are less than half his age.

In the last presidential election in 2016, Republican Donald Trump attacked Democrat rival Hillary Clinton, who was 68 at the time, as suffering from "low energy" when she came down with pneumonia during the campaign, claiming she lacked the stamina to be president.Semi-automatic AR-15s on sale at a Utah gun range

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.

US Senator Dianne Feinstein speaks at an event to appeal for the renewal of a ban on assault weapons

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.

"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.Iraqi Yazidis attended a ceremony to mark the first opening of mass grave containing victims of the Islamic State group in Sinjar region

Iraqi authorities on Friday opened a first mass grave containing victims of the Islamic State group in the Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar, where jihadists brutally targeted the minority.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, a Yazidi who escaped IS and became an outspoken advocate for her community, attended the ceremony in her home village of Kojo to mark the start of exhumations.

The United Nations, which is assisting with the forensic work, says the first opening of a mass grave in the region will help to shed light on the fate those inhabitants killed by IS.

Hundreds of men and women from the village are believed to have been executed by the jihadists when they took over the area in 2014.

IS fighters slaughtered thousands of Yazidi men and boys, then abducted women and girls to be abused as sex slaves

The Yazidi people were targeted by the IS jihadists who swept across northern Iraq in 2014 and seized their bastion of Sinjar near the border with Syria.

IS fighters slaughtered thousands of Yazidi men and boys, then abducted women and girls to be abused as sex slaves.

The Kurdish-speaking Yazidis follow an ancient religion rooted in Zoroastrianism, but IS considers them to be "apostates".

The United Nations has said IS's actions could amount to genocide, and is investigating the jihadist group's atrocities across Iraq.

Murad called at Friday's event for Iraq's central authorities and those in the Kurdistan region to "protect the mass graves" so that proof could be found of the "genocide of the Yazidis".

"There will not be reconciliation with the Arab tribes of our region if their dignitaries don't give the names of those who carried out the crimes so they can be judged," she said.

Nadia Murad, a Yazidi who escaped IS captivitym, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy

The head of the UN investigative team Karim Khan said the exhumation marked an "important moment" for the probe, with 73 mass graves discovered so far in Sinjar alone.

"The road towards accountability is a long one, and many challenges lay ahead," he said in a statement.

"Notwithstanding this, the spirit of cooperation between the survivor community and the government of Iraq is to be applauded."

IS is currently battling to defend the last shred of its crumbling "caliphate" across the border Syria in the face of Kurdish-led forces backed by an international coalition.RLSP gets 5, HAM 3, VIP 3; Sharad to fight under RJD symbol.

Senior leaders of the Congress were in talks with Grand Alliance or Mahagathbandhan comprising Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP), Hindustani Awam Morcha-Secular, Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) and Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) to iron out last-minute differences. (Photo: PTI)

Patna: After days of discussions, the six-party Opposition grand alliance or Mahagathbandhan in Bihar on Friday announced its seat-sharing formula for the 40 Lok Sabha seats, half of which will be fought by Lalu Prasad Yadavs RJD and nine by the Congress.

According to the agreement, the Upendra Kushwaha-led Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) will put up candidates in five seats, the Jitan Ram Manjhi-led Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) and the Mukesh Sahani-led Vikassheel Insan Party (VIP) in three each and the RJD will give one seat out of its quota to the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (CPI-ML).

No seats were given to the CPI and CPI-M, making it clear that former JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who is contesting from Begusarai, will not be supported by the grand alliance.

RJD state president Ram Chandra Purve told reporters that former JD(U) president and NDA convener Sharad Yadav will contest on the RJD symbol and merge his party Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) with it after the Lok Sabha polls.

After the announcement, RJD spokesperson Manoj Jha said, This alliance has been formed to serve people and save the Constitution.

Sources said to pacify the Congress, which got nine seats despite a demand for 11 seats, it was decided that a party candidate will be nominated for a Rajya Sabha from Bihar. In 2014, the Congress had won just one seat while the RJD had won four.

The BJP-led NDA has already announced its seat sharing arrangement, according to which Janata Dal-United (JD-U) and the BJP will contest 17 seats each and the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), led by Ram Vilas Paswan, six seats. The current NDA constituents had won 30 out of the 40 seats in 2014.

Names of grand alliance candidates for the first phase of polling on April 11 were also announced. Of the four seats in the first phase, the HAM has been given two seats  Gaya and Aurangabad. Mr Manjhi himself will be contesting from Gaya.

RLSP candidate Bhudeo Chaudhary has been fielded from Jamui which is currently held by LJPs Chirag Paswan.

The other prominent candidates in the list are HAMs Upendra Prasad from Aurangabad and RJDs Vibha Devi, whose husband Raj Vallabh Yadav was recently disqualified from the Assembly following conviction in a rape case, from Nawada.

Earlier in the day, reports suggest that RLSP chief Kushwaha, who had walked out of the NDA following an offer of only two seats, was upset with five seats offered to his party in the grand alliance.

Sources said he wanted around six seats but his demand was turned down during the meeting because other parties were also demanding a respectable seat share. The RLSP had won three seats in 2014.

The biggest gainer was, surprisingly, the fledgling VIP, which was floated by former Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni less than six months ago. It got three seats to contest.South Sudan's rebel leader Riek Machar is to be reinstated as vice president under the terms of the peace deal

Russia took a swipe at the United States and its allies on Friday for their reluctance to embrace a peace deal for South Sudan, the latest in a string of agreements that have so far failed to end the war.

Moscow abstained in a vote at the UN Security Council to adopt a US-drafted resolution that called on South Sudan's leaders to show further political will to advance peace.

The five-year war has killed tens of thousands, uprooted more than one third of South Sudan's 12 million people and has seen horrific levels of sexual violence along with brutal attacks on civilians.

The resolution, which also renewed the mandate of the UN peacekeeping force in South Sudan for a year, was supported by 14 of the 15 council members.

Russia complained that the measure failed to welcome the peace deal brokered by Sudan and signed in September, saying this sent "the incorrect signal" to Juba's warring sides.

"We are disappointed by the stubborn reluctance of colleagues to welcome the Khartoum agreement," said Russian Deputy Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy.

China also voiced disappointment at the council's failure to strongly support the peace pact, but nevertheless voted in favor of the resolution.

- US sees lack of commitment -

The resolution described the peace agreement as "an important step forward" and a "window of opportunity" but called on leaders to "demonstrate the political will to peacefully resolve the conflict".

The measure stressed that key provisions -- which are still under negotiation -- on power-sharing and security arrangements for the return to Juba of opposition leaders were "essential" to advance the peace process.

"The US remains deeply concerned by the lack of political commitment from the parties at the national level to fully implement all tenets of the agreement," US Acting Ambassador Jonathan Cohen told the council after the vote.

The deal provides for a power-sharing government that will prepare elections, but it has been greeted with skepticism after many previous agreements failed to take hold.

South Sudan descended into war in December 2013 when President Salva Kiir accused Riek Machar, his former deputy, of plotting a coup.

A previous peace agreement fell apart when heavy fighting broke out in Juba in July 2016 following the return of Machar, who was forced to flee on foot, chased by tanks and helicopter gunships.

Under the latest deal, Machar is scheduled to return to Juba in May to once again take part in a transitional government as vice president.Qualcomm said it won a $31 million jury award in its lawsuit accusing Apple of infringing on its mobile phone chip patents

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.Floods have also hit southern Malawi, affecting almost a million people

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 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.Ambulances rush towards one of the two mosques in Christchurch where a right-wing extremist armed with semi-automatic weapons rampaged during afternoon prayers

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.White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the "alt-right" march in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017

The massacre of Muslims at New Zealand mosques on Friday demonstrated the global reach of a white nationalist movement that preaches an imagined "European" ideal, rejects immigration and shares often vicious threats over the internet.

It's leaderless, fragmented, and relies for attention on lone-wolf type attackers like the 28-year-old Australian loner who allegedly killed 49 people Friday in Christchurch, explaining in a manifesto that he wants to "crush immigration" and revenge terror attacks on Europe.

But experts say it is a cohesive movement bound together online that stretches across Europe into Russia, has a deep following in the US and Canada, and as Friday's attack showed, is present in Australia and New Zealand.

They say it poses as much of an international threat as Islamic extremism, and even more so in the United States where white nationalist attacks have outpaced those by jihadists for years.

"White nationalism and far-right extremism is the most prominent extremist threat facing the United States today, and indeed it is a worldwide phenomenon," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

"These folks fear demographic change. They use the term white genocide," he said.

- Roots in 1930s, 1940s -

The white nationalist movement has roots in concepts espoused decades ago by European and American fascists and neo-Nazis.

This image grab from a self-shot video streamed on Facebook Live on March 15, 2019 shows the Christchurch suspect in his car before the attack

French historian Nicolas Lebourg noted that the Christchurch suspect's manifesto cited British 1930s fascist Oswald Mosley, who developed the idea of a planet organized by race.

His use of the word "Europeans" for whites was first promoted in the late 1940s by American neo-Nazi Francis Parker Yockey.

"White genocide" is an idea that appeared around 1972 in the United States, Lebourg noted, and was then popularized in Europe by French writer Renaud Camus.

Indeed, the suspect's manifesto was titled "The Great Replacement," the title of a 2011 book by Camus, popular in white nationalist circles, that argued that non-white immigrants are supplanting white Europeans.

But their ideas are not uniform -- some white nationalists are anti-Muslim, some anti-Jewish, some capitalist, others socialist.

What unites them today, analysts say, is their fundamental opposition to immigration.

Vanderbilt University professor Sophie Bjork-James said a common fear was that white Christians could become minorities in societies they have dominated for centuries.

This has given rise to movements like the France-rooted "Identitarians," and Identity Evropa in the United States.

White nationalists have been further emboldened by the rise of politicians espousing traditionalist views and a tough line on immigration -- from Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orban in Hungary to Russian President Vladimir Putin; and the UKIP party in Britain.

A 2017 march in Berlin by the right-wing "Identitarian" movement which supports white nationalist ideals

The same holds true in the United States where President Donald Trump campaigned for the White House on an anti-immigration platform, backed by an overwhelmingly white voter base.

Trump notoriously appeared to sanction the march by white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, and has avoided condemning violence from the far-right.

Bjork-James said, "They see him as an incredible opportunity to broaden their influence."

The Christchurch suspect called Trump "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose."

While he was swift to condemn the massacre, Trump courted controversy once again on Friday by saying he did not think it showed white nationalism to be a growing problem worldwide.

"I don't really. I think it's a small group of people," he told reporters in the Oval Office.

- 'Lone wolf strategy' -

Bjork-James said the internet, especially sites like GAB and Stormfront, have helped build a global community for the otherwise disparate white nationalists.

"Stormfront is a global clearinghouse for white nationalism," she said.

It was filled with comments early Friday on the Christchurch attack, with some questioning the murder of women and children.

One commenter rejected the debate, she noted, by saying chillingly: "Invaders are not innocent people."

She said overall the movement operates consciously as a "leaderless resistance," whose members aimed to inspire each other into action.

"The lone-wolf attack is actually a part of a global strategy," said Bjork-James.

The New Zealand killer said he was inspired by Norway's Anders Breivik, who is serving a 21-year sentence for killing 77 people July 2011

The Christchurch suspect wrote that he took inspiration from other white nationalists who undertook mass killings.

He cited Anders Breivik, who slaughtered 77 people in Norway in 2011; Dylann Roof, who killed nine African-Americans in a US church in 2015; Alexandre Bissonnette, who murdered six in a 2017 attack on a Canadian mosque; and others like them.

But Lebourg said that attacks more recently appear to have become part of a cycle of revenge, especially since the jihadist bombings that targeted France in 2015.

The suspect's manifesto supports that: he cites revenge for historical events and recent Islamic extremist attacks multiple times.

The 2015 attacks were "a tipping point for all the supremacists," Lebourg said. "Now revenge is in people's heads."China's Deputy UN Ambassador Wu Haitao accused the United States of "prejudice" after it criticized Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative

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.US intelligence has been struggling 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

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.Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was included in US sanctions 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

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.

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.Bernie Sanders, the liberal senator who made campaign finance reform a central pillar of his rebellious 2016 presidential campaign, entered the 2020 race in February with a bang, raising $5.9 million in the first 24 hours

The 2020 presidential election is still 20 months away, but one campaign battle is already raging: the fight for America's small-dollar contributions.

With all 12 major Democratic White House candidates shunning donations from corporations and political action committees, or PACs, they have turned their collective eye toward individual voters, who are showing increasing willingness to open their pocketbooks and play a larger role in the political process.

All signs point to an avalanche of personal contributions in the 2020 election cycle as individuals invest more of their own cash in candidates, as polls show voters are overwhelmingly fed up with dark money and corporate influence in politics.

Candidates are required to report their first-quarter donations to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) within the coming weeks, and the results are likely to show that while big money will still be at play in the election process, it just might be coming more from everyday voters.

- 'Eager to give' -

"The money in politics is corrupting. It controls everything," Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told voters in Des Moines, Iowa, last month after announcing her presidential bid

"There was a lot of energy on the Democratic side (in the 2018 midterm elections) and I see no reason why Democratic giving would slow down in a cycle when President Trump is actually on the ballot," Patrick Burgwinkle, communications director for campaign finance reform group End Citizens United, told AFP.

Individual Democratic donors are "eager to give," he added, "provided that these candidates are walking the walk on reforming our broken campaign finance system."

Many of them seek to claim the moral high ground and prove they will be accountable to the American people and not to corporate donors or special interests.

"The money in politics is corrupting. It controls everything," Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told voters in Des Moines, Iowa, last month after announcing her presidential bid.

"You have to get money out of politics. And that's why, as a very small first step, I'm not taking corporate PAC money."

Instead she and others, armed with massive voter databases culled from social media and other contacts thanks to improving technology, are sending out millions of fundraising emails seeking contributions to fund their exhausting ground operations -- "even just a dollar," pleaded one such message from Democrat Cory Booker.

Bernie Sanders, the liberal senator who made campaign finance reform a central pillar of his rebellious 2016 presidential campaign, entered the 2020 race in February with a bang, raising $5.9 million in the first 24 hours from more than 220,000 individuals across all 50 states. The average donation was $27.

"Powerful special interests may have the money," he tweeted, "but we have the people."

Donald Trump of course is not sitting idle. The president filed his candidacy for 2020 the day after his inauguration, and his campaign has been fundraising ever since, reportedly raising some $106 million by last October.

- Unlimited political spending -

Armed with massive voter databases culled from social media and other contacts thanks to improving technology, Democrats like Cory Booker are sending out millions of fundraising emails seeking contributions to fund their exhausting ground operations

Many Democrats have raised the reform alarm since 2010, when the controversial Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs FEC lifted restrictions on campaign spending by corporations and unions.

It also paved the way for unlimited political spending by independent groups known as super PACs, political entities that can accept unlimited contributions -- sometimes millions of dollars by a single entity or individual -- and then spend that money advocating for a candidate.

Burgwinkle, of End Citizens United, said some Democrats have benefited from super PACS, but that the lion's share of post-Citizens United PAC money went towards helping elect Republicans.

But today, Trump's challengers are receiving major financial boosts from energized grassroots supporters.

"The race for money in the Democratic Party is really going to be a race for small dollars," said Colby College's Anthony Corrado, a government professor and leading expert on political finance.

"What Bernie Sanders proved in 2016 was that you can finance a campaign largely depending on small-dollar contributions -- if you can generate the excitement amongst the grass roots faithful."

When Beto O'Rourke announced his presidential campaign Thursday, he went up with a website that led supporters to a user-friendly donation page powered by ActBlue, a non-profit group whose platform has become a small-dollar juggernaut

But just because candidates swear off corporate or PAC money and focus on grassroots voters, nothing is preventing a mega-donor like billionaire Democratic activist Tom Steyer from contributing millions of dollars to PACs and outside money groups that will independently help candidates.

Meanwhile the online donation process is becoming increasingly efficient for small-dollar donors.

When Beto O'Rourke announced his presidential campaign Thursday, he went up with a website that led supporters to a user-friendly donation page powered by ActBlue, a non-profit group whose platform has become a small-dollar juggernaut.

ActBlue says millions of Americans contributed a staggering $1.6 billion through the platform, at an average $39 per donation, during the 2018 election cycle.

"They're not looking for political access, they're supporting a cause or a political platform," Corrado said of the donors.

"And if you've got 100,000 people giving you $10 a month, you've suddenly got real money."Brenton Tarrant was not on any terrorist watch-list and appeared to have no criminal history

A one-time gym trainer from rural Australia who became steeped in neo-fascist ideology during travels in Europe, Brenton Tarrant described himself as an "ordinary white man" -- until he became anything but ordinary.

The gunman behind the massacre of 49 people in two New Zealand mosques flashed a white power sign during a brief court appearance Saturday, but he was not on any terrorist watch-list and appeared to have no criminal history.

Tarrant, 28, grew up in the small town of Grafton in northern New South Wales, where he graduated high school before earning some fitness qualifications and going on to find work at a local gym in 2009.

The gym's owner, Tracey Gray, described him as a hard-working trainer but said he appeared to have been changed by his travels in Europe and Asia -- which social media posts suggested included trips as far afield as Pakistan and North Korea.

"I think something must have changed in him during the years he spent travelling overseas," Gray told national broadcaster ABC.

"Somewhere along the lines, experiences or a group have got a hold of him," she said.

Gray's speculation was backed up by a rambling, hate-filled, manifesto Tarrant posted to social media ahead of the Christchurch killings.

In the 74-page screed, he says he first began considering an attack in April and May of 2017 while travelling in France and elsewhere in Western Europe.

He mentions being shocked at the "invasion" of French cities by immigrants and his "despair" at the French presidential vote that year which saw pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron defeat his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen.

In a brief biographical sketch included in his manifesto, Tarrant describes himself as "just a ordinary white man... born in Australia to a working class, low income family".

His childhood was "regular" and, he insisted, issue-free. He "barely" achieved a passing grade in school and had no interest in pursuing higher education.

According to media reports, his father died of cancer in 2010 and gym owner Gray said she believed he had a mother and sister still living in Grafton.

Tarrant left the gym in 2011 and his travels, he says, were funded by money he made investing in Bitconnect -- an open source cryptocurrency that collapsed in early 2018 amid charges it was a glorified Ponzi scheme.

Two modified semi-automatic weapons -- reportedly AR-15s -- two shotguns and a lever-action gun were used in Friday's deadly rampage, and photos of the weaponry with distinctive writing on them were posted on social media days before.

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.

Ankara on Friday said it was investigating Tarrant's multiple visits to Turkey, and who he might have met while he was there.

The Bulgarian government has also said it was looking into Tarrant, who apparently visited the country late last year, as well as having earlier travelled to other parts of the Balkans -- including Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Tarrant's manifesto said he took "inspiration" from other right-wing extremists including racist Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011 motivated by his hatred of multiculturalism.

Tarrant described Oswald Mosley, a notorious British fascist leader and anti-Semite from the 1930s, as "the person from history closest to my own beliefs".During the course of the investigation, it came to light that the videos were also allegedly exported to the United Kingdom by Sathak.

New Delhi: Enforcement Directorate on Friday arrested Zakir Naiks trusted aide Abdul Kadir Najmudin Sathak for allegedly actively assisting him in money laundering.

According to ED, the money laundering was done through "dubious" origins from UAE to facilitate production and broadcasting incriminating videos for spreading communal hatred and radicalisation of a particular community.

Sathak, who is a jeweller by profession, was director of M/s. Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC which owned the Peace TV channel that used to broadcast communal and inflammatory speeches by Naik from UAE for the Middle East and Africa.

"PMLA investigation revealed that the company of which Sathak was the director was controlled by Naik through him as he was his trusted aide," said the ED statement.

The ED said that the content of the Peace TV channel was allegedly made in India by M/s Harmony Media Pvt Ltd, Mumbai, which was also controlled by Zakir Naik by placing his sister, Nallah Noorani and his close associate Aamir Gazdar as directors.

Moreover, "the funds required to record the content for Peace TV was routed through M/s. Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC, Dubai. An amount of Rs 79 crore (approximately) was received from M/s. Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC to M/s Harmony Media Pvt Ltd," read the ED statement.

But for these monies, it would not have been possible to produce these controversial speeches of Zakir Naik and reach wider audiences through Peace TV. The source of fund remitted by M/s. Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC to Harmony Media is suspicious as there were no advertisements run on this channel and Sathak has not submitted any details of the same. The arrangement was made to project the transfer of money from M/s. Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC to M/s Harmony Media Pvt Ltd, as a business transaction, said the statement.

Both the entities, M/s Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC and M/s Harmony Media Pvt Ltd, were directly controlled by Naik through his trusted aides, according to ED.

During the course of the investigation, it came to light that the videos were also allegedly exported to the United Kingdom by Sathak.

There was no monetary transaction in respect of videos exported to the UK, which further raises suspicion. Further investigation in the matter is under progress, the ED statement read.

Earlier, a total amount of Rs. 50.49 crore worth of properties belonging to Zakir Naik, Islamic Research Foundation which he founded and properties acquired by him in the names of his relatives were attached provisionally by the Enforcement Directorate. Aamir Gazdar, a close associate of Zakir Naik was also arrested for aiding him to deal with the proceeds of crime.The death toll from the worst attack directed at Muslims in the West in modern times stood Saturday at 49

A pair of rural New Zealand police officers dramatically arrested the suspected Christchurch gunman 36 minutes after authorities were alerted, it emerged Saturday, as the prime minister hailed their bravery.

Jacinda Ardern said the alleged attacker, 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant, would surely have killed even more people than the 49 worshippers he massacred in two mosques were it not for the policemen.

"The offender was mobile, there were two other firearms in the vehicle that the offender was in, and it absolutely was his intention to continue with his attack," Ardern told reporters in Christchurch.

Grainy video apparently shot from a passing car shows the gunman's light-coloured vehicle at the side of a busy road, rammed against the kerb by a police car and with one of its front wheels suspended in the air.

Two police officers -- one of whom appears to be armed only with a handgun -- can be seen pointing their weapons at the open passenger-side door.

"They were rural community cops I understand from Lincoln (a nearby town) who were present here. Anyone who has seen the footage... they put New Zealand first," Ardern said.

"The individual charged was in custody 36 minutes from receiving the first call," she said.

The officers can be seen dragging a black-clad figure away from the vehicle, as motorists slowly drove by on the other side of the city carriageway.

Police Commissioner Mike Bush also praised the officers who brought the massacre to a halt.

"I would also like to commend -- and some of you would have seen, the brave actions on social media of police staff who responded to this incident," he said.

"I'm extremely proud of what they've done today."

Ardern said 39 people remained in hospital, of whom 11 were in intensive care.

Tarrant, 28, flashed a white power gesture as he appeared in court Saturday charged with one count of murder. Further charges are expected to follow.US President Donald Trump displays his veto, which overrides congressional opposition to his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border

Donald Trump signed the first veto of his presidency Friday, overriding congressional opposition to secure emergency funds to build more walls on the US-Mexico border.

Trump declared in the Oval Office that he was "proud" to sign the veto.

It came after he suffered an embarrassing defeat on Thursday when senators, including fellow Republicans, voted to terminate his declaration of an emergency on the Mexican border.

Surrounded by law enforcement officials, senior aides and people who have lost loved ones to cross-border crime, Trump said the veto reaffirming his power to get the funds without Congress was to "defend the safety of all Americans."

"The mass incursion of illegal aliens... has to end," he said. "People hate the word 'invasion' but that's what it is... Our immigration system is stretched beyond the breaking point."

Trump's emergency declaration allows him to secure funding for construction of border walls after he failed to get authorization from Congress.

Opponents, who accuse Trump of executive overreach and overhyping the problem on the border, could now use court challenges to halt the emergency measure.

- 'Power grab' -

Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives and a leader in the fight to prevent Trump's wall plans, called Trump's action a "lawless power grab."

"The president has chosen to continue to defy the Constitution, the Congress and the will of the American people," she said in a statement.

An attempt to override the veto will be held on March 26, she announced. However, this is very unlikely to pass as a two-thirds majority is required.

Trump has made border security an over-arching domestic issue in his presidency and says it will remain at the center of the agenda in his 2020 reelection bid.

Although there has been a surge in arrival of families and children at the border, overall apprehensions at the frontier are down substantially from a decade or more ago.

Most Republicans support Trump's position that the border is out of control. However, there were defections in Thursday's Senate vote by Republican senators angered at what they see as the president's improper seizing of power over the government purse strings -- a role reserved for the legislature.

- Legal challenge -

The declaration of emergency has been challenged by 16 states which sued the administration last month, contending the order was contrary to the constitution's presentment and appropriations clauses, which outline legislative procedures and define Congress as the final arbiter of public funds respectively.

The lawsuit also questioned Trump's categorization of illegal border crossings as a national emergency, saying data issued by the administration itself refuted the notion.

The White House says the emergency order empowers it to pull around $6.6 billion from other sources, mostly already-allocated funds in the Defense Department budget.

But the complaint countered that tapping military funds would result in huge losses for the states' national guard units which would otherwise use the money to combat drugs.

Should the states prevail, the case could work its way up to the Supreme Court, setting up a precedent-setting showdown on the separation of powers.People from all walks of life arrived at the police barriers near the mosques on Saturday to pay their respects and to show support for New Zealand's 50,000 Muslims

The word repeated over and over across New Zealand is "Why?"

Why was the country, thought of as among the most peaceful in the world, singled out for a horrifying terrorist attack?

This South Pacific nation, hailed by Muslim immigrants as a "heaven on earth", ranks second only to Iceland on the Global Peace Index.

But in just 36 minutes on Friday afternoon, 49 Muslims were shot dead at two Christchurch mosques, leaving more dead than there were murders in all of last year.

In a country where police routinely patrol unarmed, parents strained to explain to their kids what happened, even as they struggled to understand it themselves.

Residents are struggling to come to terms with the horrific act of violence in a country thought of as one of the most peaceful in the world

A sole gunman "made the point that there is nowhere that's far enough away", said Chris, who took his children aged 12, nine and four, to the scene of the Linwood mosque where seven were gunned down.

"It's a fine line between telling the children this is the reality of it," he said, "and not exposing them to the true nature of humanity that can lead to this sort of thing."

Nearby, a heavily armed policewoman tried to explain to two young girls she was holding a rifle to keep them safe, to which one of the girls responded by saying the gunman had used a rifle to kill people.

- Paradise lost? -

New Zealand is not a Utopia, there are occasional reports of racism and anti-immigrant attitudes, but they attract headlines because they are not the norm.

"I live in New Zealand because the first time I came here in 2011, I found a place that was heaven on earth and I decided to bring my family to live here in peace, away from all the troubles," a Palestinian man told AFP.

Mourners fear New Zealand's geographical isolation increasingly counts for little in a connected world

People from all walks of life arrived at the police barriers near the mosques on Saturday to pay their respects and to show support for New Zealand's 50,000 Muslims, who make up about one percent of the population.

"This is not something you'd expect on our soil," said Luke Smith, who was also in Christchurch eight years ago when devastating earthquakes killed 185 people.

"It's a different sort of feeling to the earthquakes. That being a natural disaster and this being an outright act of terrorism. It leaves you feeling totally different.

"Shock would be the biggest way to describe it. You don't think it's going to happen on our soil."

Chris said it showed New Zealand's geographical isolation counted for little in a connected world.

"It shows you can immerse yourself in a nice, gentle society and in the social media part, he can immerse himself in another community that reinforces his ideas and rage."

On the sombre streets of Christchurch, Jeremy Mitchell said it was "surreal" such a massacre could happen in New Zealand.

"I think everyone in the community is 100 percent in support of the Muslim community and the Muslim families who have lost their loved ones.

"We want to say we have no part of that (massacre) and we don't believe what (the gunman) believes."The Muslim community in Christchurch is struggling to come to terms with this week's violence

A few months ago, Christchurch's Linwood Mosque proudly laid down new carpets in its halls.

On Friday, the light brown carpets were stained red after an gunman stormed the building, spraying bullets at worshippers.

"There was blood everywhere. Everything was out of control," Ibrahim AbdelHalim, imam of Linwood Mosque, told AFP.

Like the wider Muslim community in Christchurch, Egypt-born AbdelHalim is struggling to come to terms with the violence wrought upon worshippers this week as he waits to bury the dead.

Working together with the local Islamic community, AbdelHalim had sought to refresh the mosque after a trust bought it over in early 2018.

Some of the seven worshippers who died at Linwood were among the most enthusiastic contributors, donating their personal time to help in fundraising efforts.

One woman, a local Kiwi, fell down beside his wife when she was shot dead, AbdelHalim said. His wife, Falwa El-Shazly, was shot in the arm but survived the attack.

Another man, a Fijian-Indian New Zealander who would regularly bring boxes of food from his restaurant during mosque donation drives, was also killed.

"They are dear to me, these are people who offer to us work for free," AbdelHalim said.

"It was a very bad day, not just all of us, all of New Zealand."

At Hedley College, the main meeting centre for the survivors and victims' families, local Muslims from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds shared wordless hugs and fought back tears as they exchanged news about their loved ones.

With Muslims making up just one percent of New Zealand's population, some members of the close-knit community raced to the mosques when they heard about the shootings.

"I did not go to the prayer yesterday due to work... but received a call from my friends and rushed to the spot," Mohammad Kamruzzaman, originally from Bangladesh, told AFP.

"Five of (our Bangladeshi friends) are still missing, only Allah knows where they are. We have lost... a guardian lady for our community, who taught children the Koran for free. It feels like we have lost a parent."

- 'We are not immune' -

Fiji-born Azan Ali, 43, who was in the Linwood Mosque with his Auckland-based father when the attack occurred, trembled when he thought back to crack of the gun shots on Friday.

"Will I see my parents, my kids, my loved ones again or not? All the people you pray with, you see beside you..." he added, his voice trailing off.

"My kids are scared, you know. You just have to work through it as a community."

His father, Sheik Aeshad, who saw a worshipper shot in the neck, said he could not understand how such violence could take part in New Zealand, a small nation better known for its rolling, green hills and snow-capped mountains.

"We never thought in New Zealand, this could happen. New Zealand's so friendly a place, you can leave your door open and go. But not now," he added.

"I'm thinking what's going to happen the next time... it could be more people targeting somewhere else."

It was a sentiment shared by Sahra Ahmed, a New Zealander of Somali origin and a nurse active in her local community.

Sahra said the attacks showed the South Pacific island nation could not escape the global wave of right-wing extremism.

"This is a global movement, for better or worst, it's happened in all parts of the world. And some people like to import ideas from everyone else. So we're not immune from what's happening," she told AFP.

"It doesn't matter where you go, the world is very small."Im Sokrithy who guided Moon on the trip said the president was curious about the complex's history

South Korean President Moon Jae-in sloughed off the trappings of high office Saturday and mingled with thousands of other tourists at Cambodia's famed Angkor Wat.

The Angkor Archeological Park, a world heritage site, contains the remains of the different capitals of the Khmer Empire, dating from the 9th to the 15th centuries.

Moon is the first South Korean president to make a state visit to Cambodia in 10 years

Millions visit each year, making the ruins in Siem Reap province Cambodia's most popular tourist destination.

But it also serves as a frequent stopping off point on major state visits.

Moon lingered for two hours at the site, where he climbed on wooden staircases for better views, examined intricate ancient walls, posed for photos with officials, and paused to enjoy a coconut juice.

South Korea's President Moon Jae-in (front 3rd R) during his visit to the Angkor Wat temple in Siem Reap

He is the first South Korean president to make a state visit to Cambodia in 10 years, according to Yonhap.

Im Sokrithy, from the state agency which manages Angkor, guided Moon along with an entourage and said the leader was curious about the complex's history.

South Korea is one of the country's biggest investors and source of tourists

"He asked where the stones were taken from and the process of building the temples," he told reporters.

South Korea is one of the country's biggest investors and source of tourists, and Moon's presence also delighted South Korean travellers, who clapped and shook his hand.

The appearance caps a three-day trip during which Moon met with Cambodian leader Hun Sen in the capital Phnom Penh on Friday.Smoke plumes billow from the remains of the Islamic State group's camp near the Baghouz village in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor

US-backed forces battled Islamic State group fighters overnight as the jihadists Saturday clung onto their crumbling bastion in eastern Syria.

"Clashes broke out again last night and have continued since," said Adnane Afrine, spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

"There have so far been no surrenders (today) and there's no sign they are giving up," he told AFP.

AFP journalists at an SDF post inside Baghouz village, the last IS redoubt, heard sporadic rounds of mortar fire and US-led coalition planes overhead.

IS launched three suicide attacks Friday outside Baghouz, killing six people among those fleeing the crumbling jihadist bastion near the Iraqi border.

They were the latest casualties in Syria's devastating civil war as it entered its ninth year 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 Baghouz.

The SDF and coalition warplanes have rained fire on the enclave since last Sunday, blitzing more than 4,000 IS fighter and family members into surrender.

Their on-off assault has been mostly fought at night, suspending major operations dayside to allow more surrenders, especially of civilians.

In total, over 61,000 people have streamed out of IS-held territory since December, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says.The family of late conservationist Steve Irwin praised the town's positive attitude towards the crocodile

With Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" playing in the background and a tribute from Steve Irwin's family, a small seaside town in north Queensland bade farewell to a beloved community member Saturday, a saltwater crocodile.

Affectionately known as Bismarck, Fluffy or Gary, depending on who you speak to, Cardwell residents held a ceremony to say goodbye to the town's 4.5 metre (15 feet) croc.

More than 50 people attended the service, held at the Cardwell Jetty and organised by local Thea Ormonde.

Bismarck made international headlines earlier this month, when fisherman Ryan Moody posted a video to social media about finding the crocodile -- rumoured to be as old as 80 -- dead in a creek with what's believed to be a gunshot wound.

The family of late bushman Steve Irwin sent a representative and recorded a thank you to the small town that played at the service, praising their positive attitude towards the reptiles.

They said their late husband and father -- a zookeeper and conservationist -- would have been the proudest of Cardwell residents for accepting the croc as a part of their town.

"He was so, so passionate about protecting crocodiles and making sure we had these modern-day dinosaurs for the future generations," Irwin's daughter Bindi and son Rob said.

Ormonde told AFP she couldn't believe the interest the crocodile's death attracted from across the world.

"Bismarck delighted locals and tourists as he was always happy to show himself at a safe distance," she said.

"I believe he lived by the belief, 'you leave me alone and I'll leave you alone.'"

Not everyone had the same feeling about honouring Bismarck though.

Local Member of Parliament Nick Dametto said "there's no proof the animal has been shot, it's still very much under investigation."

"I grew up hunting and I was always taught if you're going to hunt something, you should do it for two reasons -- pest management or to use or eat parts of the animal" he said.

A spokesperson from Cardwell Police confirmed they are currently investigating the death of the crocodile to see if it's been killed illegally.

In Queensland, the illegal taking of a crocodile has a maximum fine of Aus$28,383 (US$20,000).An image grab taken from a video handed out by Yemen's Huthi rebels on March 27, 2018 shows what appears to be Huthi military forces launching a ballistic missile reportedly from the capital Sanaa two days earlier

Yemen's Huthi rebels warned on Saturday they could launch attacks against the capitals of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who lead a military coalition against them.

The threat came as the United Nations was trying to salvage a truce deal in Yemen, seen as crucial to diplomatic efforts to end the country's four-year war.

"We have aerial photographs and coordinates of dozens of headquarters, facilities and military bases of the enemy," rebel military spokesman Yahya Saree said in comments carried by the rebels' Al-Masirah channel.

"The legitimate targets of our forces extend to the capital of Saudi Arabia and to the emirate of Abu Dhabi," capital of the UAE, he said.

"We have manufactured advanced generations of attack aircraft, and new systems will soon be functional."

The Iran-linked Huthi rebels have targeted Saudi border towns and Riyadh with ballistic missiles and also claimed drone attacks on the airports of Abu Dhabi and Dubai during the course of the conflict

Saudi Arabia has said the missiles were all intercepted by its air force, with one civilian reported killed by falling shrapnel, while the UAE has denied the alleged drone attacks.

Saudi Arabia and its military allies joined the Yemeni government's war against the Iran-linked Huthis in March 2015, triggering what the UN calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Some 10 million Yemenis face mass starvation, according to the UN.

Both sides to the conflict stand accused of acts that could amount to war crimes.

The World Health Organization estimates nearly 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen since March 2015, when Saudi Arabia and its allies joined the government's war against the Huthis.

Other rights groups estimate the toll could be much higher.

On Wednesday the UN Security Council met to discuss the stalled truce deal that had been agreed in Sweden in December between the Saudi-backed Yemeni government and the Huthis.

The deal -- which called for a ceasefire, rebel pullback and mutual redeployment from Hodeida, Yemen's lifeline Red Sea port controlled by the Huthis -- offered the best hope in years of moving toward an end to the conflict.

While the fighting in Hodeida has eased, redeployment efforts have stalled in recent weeks.

UN envoy Martin Griffiths told the Security Council on Wednesday he was still working to make the redeployment a "reality".

bur-nyA fighter of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces loads an ammunition belt at a position in the village of Baghouz, near Syria's border with Iraq

US-backed forces battled Islamic State group fighters Saturday as the holdout jihadists clung to the last dregs of their crumbling "caliphate" in eastern Syria.

For weeks, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have been battling to crush IS fighters cornered in a riverside encampment in the village of Baghouz.

The makeshift camp of tents and tunnels is all that remains of a once-sprawling "caliphate" declared in 2014 over swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq.

The SDF and coalition warplanes have rained fire on the enclave since last Sunday, blitzing more than 4,000 IS fighters and family members into surrender.

US-backed forces have reduced daytime airstrikes and shelling to allow for more exits from the last jihadist bastion.

But AFP journalists at an SDF post inside Baghouz heard sporadic rounds of mortar fire Saturday, and an SDF spokesman said fighting was ongoing.

"Clashes broke out again last night and have continued since," SDF spokesman Adnan Afrin said.

"There have so far been no surrenders (today) and there's no sign they are giving up," he told AFP.

An SDF statement said the latest fighting broke out after the Kurd-led force attacked IS positions inside Baghouz.

Around 32 jihadists, including at least four senior IS figures, were killed in the battle, it said.

- Suicide attacks -

On Friday, IS launched three suicide attacks outside Baghouz, killing six people as they fled the village near the Iraqi border.

They were the latest casualties in Syria's devastating civil war as it entered its ninth year with 370,000 dead.

The US-led coalition said the bombers were dressed in women's clothing and had mixed with others who were surrendering.

"Daesh has proven to demonstrate a reckless disregard for human life and continues to be a global threat," it said late Friday, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

Smoke plumes billow from the remains of an Islamic State group camp near the village of Baghouz in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor

"We stand by our SDF partners as they fight to liberate that last Daesh-held territory," it said on Twitter.

Analyst Mutlu Civiroglu said the attacks were designed to keep "moral high" among jihadists.

"From their perspective they are resisting, they are not giving up quickly," he said.

Die-hard IS fighters have unleased a wave of suicide bombings over the past week to impede the SDF advance.

It remains unclear how many fighters and civilians remain inside Baghouz.

More than 61,000 people have streamed out of IS-held territory since December, a tenth of them suspected jihadists, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The exodus has sparked a humanitarian crisis in Kurdish-run camps for the displaced further north, where civilians have been transported.

They include the wives and children of alleged foreign jihadists, hundreds of whom are being held by Kurdish forces.

- Distress, fatigue, malnutrition -

Around 3,000 people arrived at Al-Hol camp from Baghouz over the past two days, pushing the camp's population to over 69,000, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said Saturday.

According to the United Nations children's fund, UNICEF, the camp was designed with capacity for just 20,000 people.

The UN said most of the new arrivals "show clear signs of distress, fatigue, malnutrition and require some form of medical care or attention".

Suspected wives and children of Islamic State group fighters exit the village of Baghouz in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor

According to the IRC and UN, since December around 122 people have died en route to the camp or shortly after arriving, mostly small children, two of them on Thursday.

"There is an urgent requirement for funding to continue health and nutrition interventions in the camp," the UN said.

At the height of its brutal rule, IS controlled territory in Syria and Iraq the size of the United Kingdom, with a population of millions.

The total capture of the Baghouz camp by the SDF would mark the end of the cross-border "caliphate" it proclaimed more than four years ago.

But beyond Baghouz, IS retains a presence in eastern Syria's vast Badia desert and sleeper cells in the northeast.

The jihadists have continued to claim deadly attacks in SDF-held territory in recent months.Devotees at a sacred tattoo festival in Thailand work themselves into possessed trances to resemble wild animals

With inky designs covering his chest and arms, one man crawls on the ground like a tiger while another twists his fingers to resemble claws and growls.

The possessed devotees appear to be on the verge of attack but are quickly restrained and coaxed back to normal.

It's all part of a sacred tattoo festival at the Wat Bang Phra temple in Nakhon Pathom province 80 kilometres (50 miles) west of Bangkok.

Thailand is a deeply superstitious country where animism, folk beliefs and Hinduism seep into the majority faith Buddhism.

Tattoo wearers believe the intricate ink brings them good luck and protection from harm

Every year, thousands of devotees gather at Wat Bang Phra for the annual festival, which celebrates the traditional Sak Yant tattoos.

Wearers believe the intricate ink brings them good luck and protection from harm.

They flock to the festival so monks can bless and "recharge" their tattoos, while some receive new ones via long metal needles with countless small jabs.

"Whatever sins we committed this past year, we can wash it away when we pay respects to the elder monks who bless our tattoos," said Chalachai Pichuea 44, a motorcycle taxi driver from Bangkok.

Family business owner Wichai Kripjumwan said he comes every year for the renewal process and to thank the monks "who give us these powers".

The possessed devotees appear to be on the verge of attack but are quickly restrained and coaxed back to normal

The symbols favoured by devotees vary from astrological signs, wild animals or inscriptions in Pali and Sanskrit.

Participants work themselves into possessed trances to resemble wild animals and charge towards a stage with a Buddha statue.

Throngs of volunteers block them, then pinch their ears in an act meant to release the spirit.BSP chief Mayawati on Wednesday announced she will not contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

The statement announcing Mayawati's decision pointedly mentioned that a minister or a prime minister has six months to become a member of the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha. (Photo: File)

Lucknow: The BSP Friday announced its first list of 11 candidates for the Lok Sabha elections, fielding JD(S) turncoat Kunwar Danish Ali from Amroha.

Ali, who was general secretary of the Janata Dal-Secular, quit the party and joined the Bahujan Samaj Party only last week.

The BSP also declared Haji Fazulrahman its nominee from Saharanpur, Malook Nagar from Bijnore and Girish Chandra from Nagina, a party release said here.

Hazi Mohammad Yakoob has been fielded from Meerut, Satbeer Nagar from Gautam Buddh Nagar, Yogesh Verma from Bulandshahr, Ajit Baliyan from Aligarh, Manoj Kumar Soni from Agra, Rajveer Singh from Fatehpur Sikri and Ruchi Veera from Aonla.

Mayawati's BSP is contesting 38 of the 80 Lok Sabha constituencies in Uttar Pradesh under the seat-sharing arrangement with Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal.

BSP chief Mayawati on Wednesday had announced she will not contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, but stressed it was not necessary to be an MP to become a minister or a prime minister.

The statement announcing her decision pointedly mentioned that a minister or a prime minister has six months to become a member of the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha.

The BSP, Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal have entered into an alliance in Uttar Pradesh for the April-May Lok Sabha polls.

The Congress is not part of this pact, but the alliance has said it will not field candidates in Amethi and Raebareli, the two seats that are now with Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi.

The Congress, in turn, said it will leave seven UP seats for the SP-BSP-RLD alliance, an offer that was spurned by Mayawati.Nur Bekri has been accused of abusing his position and was expelled from the Communist party

China has expelled one of its most senior ethnic Uighur officials from the Communist Party, the country's anti-corruption watchdog said Saturday, accusing the former energy chief of abusing his position to live a "lavish life".

Nur Bekri, who was placed under investigation last September and removed from his post a month later, engaged in "family-style corruption", illegally accepting property directly or through his relatives, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said in a statement.

China's anti-graft agency said investigations revealed Bekri -- described as "greedy and corrupt" by the watchdog -- had demanded luxury cars for his relatives, participated in opulent banquets, accepted expensive gifts from those seeking favours and lived a "lavish life" in violation of Communist party principles.

He was also accused of trading power for sex.

He has been expelled from the party and his case will be transferred to prosecutors for further investigation, the statement added.

Bekri worked his way up in his native Xinjiang, eventually rising to deputy party secretary and government chairman in the far western region, before being appointed the head of China's energy administration in 2014.

He was also deputy head of China's state planner prior to his fall from grace, making him one of the highest-ranking Uighur officials in the country.

The mostly Muslim Uighur minority populates the restive Xinjiang region, where it faces a draconian crackdown in the name of combating terrorism and separatism.

Up to a million minorities are believed to be held in extrajudicial re-education camps in Xinjiang, rights groups say.

President Xi Jinping has presided over a much-publicised anti-corruption campaign since coming to power in 2012, which some have compared to a political purge.

The energy industry has been a particular target, with several top officials at China's state-owned oil companies coming under investigation in recent years.WASHINGTON (AP) - In a story March 12 about Senate confirmation of Paul Matey as an appeals court judge, The Associated Press reported erroneously that Matey is senior vice president and general counsel at University Hospital in New Jersey. He left the hospital in August 2018 and became a partner at Lowenstein Sandler law firm.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Senate backs Trump court nominee over home-state objections

The Senate has confirmed President Donald Trump's nominee for a Philadelphia-based appeals court, despite opposition from the nominee's two home-state senators

By MATTHEW DALY

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump's nominee for a Philadelphia-based appeals court won Senate confirmation Tuesday, despite opposition from the two senators representing his home state of New Jersey.

The Senate voted 54-45 to approve Paul Matey to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, giving the court a majority of Republican appointees.

Matey, a former aide to Republican ex-Gov. Chris Christie, was opposed by New Jersey's two Democratic senators, who accused Trump and the Senate's Republican majority of shredding a longtime custom for partisan gain. Home-state senators traditionally are allowed to weigh in on judicial nominees before they move forward.

The vote marked just the second time that a judicial nominee was approved despite opposition from both home-state senators. The first came two weeks ago, when the Senate confirmed Seattle attorney Eric Miller to an appeals court seat despite opposition from the two Democratic senators representing Washington state.

The Senate last week confirmed former Justice Department official Chad Readler and former Ohio Solicitor General Eric Murphy as appeals court judges despite objections from Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. The other home-state senator, Rob Portman, R-Ohio, backed the two nominees.

Until last year, it had been nearly three decades since the Senate confirmed a judge without consent from both home-state senators.

"Republicans claim to be the party of conservatism. Yet there's nothing conservative about sweeping aside century-old norms for political gain," said Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J.

Fellow New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a Senate speech that Republicans "seem to be intent on dismantling the century-old process for vetting of judicial nominees ... taking it apart piece by piece, whatever it takes to push through these nominees."

Booker, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, said, "The wound that is being created right now goes right to the ability of any senator in this body to truly represent their state."

He warned Republicans that "the pendulum is going to swing. There's going to be a Democratic president eventually."

Booker and Menendez said the White House did not consult with them before nominating Matey, nor did they get an offer of a meeting before his confirmation hearing.

"If it wasn't for my presence on the Judiciary Committee, where I got five minutes to question him, this person would have sailed through without any consultation from two home-state senators," Booker said. "I ask my colleagues: How would they feel if this happened to them?"

Menendez said he was concerned about Matey's record, saying, "The people of New Jersey have no appetite for a judge who served in Gov. Chris Christie's administration" and was once seen as a Christie protege.

Matey was a top lawyer for Christie during the "Bridgegate" scandal that centered on a plot to create traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge to punish a Democratic mayor who didn't endorse Christie. Christie wasn't charged, but several of his aides were convicted.

Calling the 2013 bridge episode "one of the most egregious abuses of political power against everyday New Jersey families in our history," Menendez said Matey "could not detail the steps he took to ensure ethics rules were followed" to monitor or prevent the scandal.

The partisan battle over judges is likely to continue. California's two Democratic senators on Monday asked the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee to postpone a hearing on a Los Angeles lawyer nominated as a federal appeals court judge, saying the nominee hadn't turned over his controversial writings for review.

Sens. Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein asked Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., not to move forward with a hearing Wednesday on Kenneth Lee's nomination to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

A spokeswoman for the committee said the hearing will proceed as scheduled.

Matey is a partner at Lowenstein Sandler law firm. He previously was senior vice president and general counsel at University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, and before that was Christie's deputy chief counsel and an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.

The 3rd Circuit hears cases from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands.MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) - The most senior Catholic convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison for molesting two choirboys in an Australian cathedral in a crime the judge said showed "staggering arrogance."

Cardinal George Pell must serve a minimum of 3 years and 8 months before he is eligible for parole, according to the judge's order. The five convictions against Pell carried a maximum possible sentence of 10 years each.

"In my view, your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance," Victoria state County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd said in handing down the sentence.

Pope Francis' former finance minister was convicted by a unanimous jury verdict in December of orally raping a 13-year-old choirboy and indecently dealing with the boy and the boy's 13-year-old friend in the late 1990s, months after Pell became archbishop of Melbourne. A court order had suppressed media reporting the news until last month.

The 77-year-old denies the allegations and will appeal his convictions in the Victoria Court of Appeal on June 5. It was not immediately clear if he will also appeal the sentence.

For the first time in Pell's many court appearances since he returned to Australia from the Vatican to face abuse charges, Pell wore an open-necked shirt without a cleric's collar. He was also not wearing a cardinal's gold ring, which might reflect strict rules on jewelry in the state penal system.

In this Dec 10, 2018, photo, Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Catholic cleric to face sex charges, departs an Australian court. Pell was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Asanka Brendon Ratnayake)

In explaining his sentencing decision, the judge said Pell had led an "otherwise blameless life." Kidd said he believed given Pell's age and lack of any other criminal record, the cardinal posed no risk of re-offending.

The judge also took pains to note that he was sentencing Pell for the offenses on which the cardinal had been convicted - and not for the sins of the Catholic Church.

"As I directed the jury who convicted you in this trial, you are not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church," Kidd said.

But the judge also said that Pell had abused his position of power and had shown no remorse for his crimes. Kidd described the assaults as egregious, degrading and humiliating to the victims.

Pell showed no emotion during the hourlong hearing and barely moved throughout. He stood silently with his hands behind his back as the judge read his sentence. Pell signed documents that registered him for life as a serious sexual offender before he was led from the dock by four prison officers.

In a statement, one of Pell's victims called the judge's sentence "meticulous and considered."

"It is hard for me to allow myself to feel the gravity of this moment, the moment when the sentence is handed down, the moment when justice is done," the man said in a statement read outside court by one of his lawyers, Vivian Waller. "It is hard for me, for the time being, to take comfort in this outcome. I appreciate that the court has acknowledged what was inflicted upon me as a child. However, there is no rest for me. Everything is overshadowed by the forthcoming appeal."

The father of one of Pell's victims who died of a heroin overdose in 2014 at the age of 31 paid tribute to his son's childhood friend for speaking out.

"I commend the young fellow who has come forward," the father said. "He kept it in for a long time and that would've been hell for him. Absolute hell."

The father said he was "really appreciative and thankful that he did come forward."

"I want to give him a hug. He was a fabulous little kid. He's a fabulous man now," the father said.

The father also described the sentence as "a disappointment."

The father is considering suing Pell and the church over the abuse.

Australian law prohibits the publication of sex crime victims' identities, so the father also cannot be identified.

Abuse victims' groups also expressed disappointment that the punishment was not harsher.

The sentence "makes a mockery of the concept of true accountability and is not a sentence commensurate with the crimes committed and the harm reaped," Blue Knot Foundation president Cathy Kezelman said in a statement.

SNAP, a U.S. support group for victim of clergy abuse, described the sentences as "comparatively light."

"We hope that the sentence imposed on Cardinal George Pell will provide some measure of healing to the living survivor of his abuse and comfort and closure for the family of Pell's non-surviving victim," SNAP said in a statement.

The judge said Pell's age was a significant factor in determining his sentence.

Pell suffers from hypertension that is exacerbated by stress and has a dual-chamber pacemaker, the judge said.

Pell used a cane to leave the court, after having both knees surgically replaced in December.

Pell's sentencing comes on the sixth anniversary of Francis' election as pope. Pell was in the conclave that elected him and remains eligible for any potential future conclave until age 80 or unless he is removed.

Asked by a reporter outside court after the sentencing whether the case against Pell amounted to a witch hunt, his lawyer Robert Richter gave a rueful smile.

"No comment - you be the judge," Richter replied.

After centuries of impunity, cardinals from Australia to Chile and points in between are facing justice in both the Vatican and government courts for their own sexual misdeeds or for having shielded abusers under their watch.

Last week, France's senior Catholic cleric, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, was convicted of failing to report a known pedophile priest to police. Barbarin was given a six-month suspended sentence.

Pope Francis last month defrocked the onetime leader of the American church after an internal investigation determined Cardinal Theodore McCarrick sexually molested children and adult men. It was the first time a cardinal had been defrocked over the child abuse scandal.

The surviving victim made a statement against Pell in 2015 - a year after the other victim's death - to a police task force set up to investigate allegations that arose from a state parliamentary inquiry into handling of child abuse by religious and other nongovernment organizations. The task force also investigates allegations made to a similar national inquiry, called the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Pell gave evidence by video link from Rome to the royal commission, the nations' highest level of inquiry, in 2016 about his time as a church leader in Melbourne and in his hometown of Ballarat.

The four-year royal commission found in its 2017 report that the Melbourne Archdiocese had ignored or covered up allegations of child abuse by seven priests in a bid to protect the church's reputation and avoid scandal.

The royal commission was critical of Pell's predecessor in Melbourne, Archbishop Frank Little, who died in 2008. It made no findings against Pell, saying in a redacted report that it would not publish information that could "prejudice current or future criminal or civil proceedings."

Australian police interviewed Pell about the survivor's allegations in a Rome hotel in 2016. Pell described the allegations at the time as "vile and disgusting conduct" that went against everything he believed in.

Pell voluntarily returned to Australia in 2017 to face an array of child abuse charges, most of which have since been dropped. The full details of those allegations were suppressed by court orders.

Pell was once the highest-ranking Catholic in Australia's second-largest city, where he is now a prisoner held in protective security. Pedophiles such as Pell are typically separated from the main prison populations in Australia.

Pell was 55 years old and had recently established a compensation plan for Melbourne's victims of clergy abuse when he abused the two boys at St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1996. The survivor testified that Pell had walked in on the boys swigging altar wine in a back room after a Sunday Mass.

The judge rejected Richter's submission that no person thinking rationally would molest two 13-year-old boys in a cathedral sacristy after a Mass with the doors open.

"To offend in such a risky and brazen manner, I infer that, for whatever reason, you were in fact prepared to take on such risks. I conclude that your decision to offend was a reasoned, albeit perverted one," Kidd said.

More than a month later, Pell abused the survivor again, squeezing the boy's genitals as they passed in a cathedral corridor after a Mass.

The judge said the assault was committed with "a degree of physical aggression and venom."

___

Associated Press writer Kristen Gelineau in Sydney contributed to this report.

In this Dec 7, 2018, photo, Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Catholic cleric to face sex charges, steps out of a car using walking crutches as he arrives at an Australian court. Pell was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Asanka Brendon Ratnayake)

FILE - In this Feb. 27, 2019, file photo, Cardinal George Pell arrives at the County Court in Melbourne, Australia. Pell was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill, File)

Protesters gather outside the County Court during the sentencing of Cardinal George Pell in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, March.13, 2019. The most senior Catholic to be convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill)

A woman reacts outside the County Court after the sentencing of Cardinal George Pell in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The most senior Catholic to be convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill)

Robert Richter, lawyer of Cardinal George Pell, leaves the County Court after the sentencing of Pell in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The most senior Catholic to be convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill)

Robert Richter, center, lawyer of Cardinal George Pell, leaves the County Court after the sentencing of Pell in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The most senior Catholic to be convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill)

A man reacts outside the County Court during the sentencing of Cardinal George Pell in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The most senior Catholic to be convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill)

A man reacts outside the County Court during the sentencing of Cardinal George Pell in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The most senior Catholic to be convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill)

Protesters gather outside the County Court during the sentencing of Cardinal George Pell in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The most senior Catholic to be convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill)SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - California Gov. Gavin Newsom has placed a moratorium on executions in the state . Here are some notable inmates out of more than 700 people on the nation's largest death row:

SCOTT PETERSON

After he reported his pregnant wife missing on Christmas Eve 2002, police pursued nearly 10,000 tips, and looked at parolees and convicted sex offenders as possible suspects. Ultimately, Peterson was arrested and convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Laci Peterson and second-degree murder for their unborn son in Modesto, California. Now 46, he's housed at San Quentin State Prison.

RICHARD ALLEN DAVIS

Davis, 64, has been on death row at San Quentin since his 1996 conviction in the kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma, California. The case helped gain support for California's "three-strikes law" for repeat offenders. A third conviction for a serious felony leads to an automatic life sentence.

LONNIE FRANKLIN

FILE - In this March 17, 2005 file photo Scott Peterson is escorted by two San Mateo County Sheriff deputies to a waiting van in Redwood City, Calif. Peterson was taken to death row at San Quentin State Prison after being sentenced to die for murdering his pregnant wife, Laci. Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to sign a moratorium on the death penalty in California, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Justin Sullivan, Pool, File)

A serial killer nicknamed the "Grim Sleeper," Franklin was convicted in 2016 for the killings of nine women and a teenage girl in Los Angeles dating to the 1980s. He was linked at trial to 14 slayings, including four women he wasn't charged with killing. Police have said Franklin, now 66, may have had as many as 25 victims.

CHARLES NG

He was convicted along with an accomplice, Leonard Lake, of killing 11 people at a cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills during the 1980s. Lake killed himself in 1985. Ng's prosecution cost California approximately $20 million, the most expensive trial in state history at the time. Now 58, Ng is housed at San Quentin.

RODNEY JAMES ALCALA

Prosecutors said Alcala, now 75, stalked women like prey and took earrings as trophies from some of his victims. He was sentenced to death in 2010 for five slayings in California between 1977 and 1979. In 2013, he received an additional 25 years to life after pleading guilty to two homicides in New York. Investigators say his true victim count may never be known.

VINCENT BROTHERS

A former high school vice principal, Brothers was convicted of killing his wife, their three young children and his mother-in-law. Prosecutors said he tried to create an alibi by flying to Columbus, Ohio, with the pretext of visiting his brother. He then drove his rental car to Bakersfield, California, to kill his family and returned to Ohio. Now 57, he's been on San Quentin's death row since 2007.

ANGELINA RODRIGUEZ

Her husband's death was initially ruled undetermined, which meant Rodriguez was ineligible for a payout on his life insurance. After she pushed for more testing, it was determined that Frank Rodriguez died of antifreeze poisoning. She was arrested for his death and convicted in 2004. She also was accused - but never convicted - of killing her infant daughter in 1993.

FILE - This Dec. 7, 1993 file photo shows Richard Allen Davis appearing with his public defender, Bruce Kinnison, in a Sonoma County Municipal Court in Santa Rosa, Calif. Now 64, Davis has been on death row at San Quentin State Prison since his 1996 conviction in the kidnap-murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to sign a moratorium on the death penalty in California, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump can't get enough of Rep. Ilhan Omar.

As Democrats try to turn the page after the freshman lawmaker's remarks, criticized by some as anti-Semitic, ignited an embarrassing intra-party fight, the Republican president is trying to prolong and weaponize the issue for his 2020 campaign, asserting during a private weekend fundraiser that Democrats "hate" Jews.

While Trump publicly muses about winning over Jewish voters for his re-election, his motivations are more complicated and expansive. The Republican president's rhetorical escalation also is designed to unsettle the Democratic primary debate, exploit an issue that can energize his supporters and move past his own history of toying in anti-Semitic motifs.

Trump was slow to condemn white supremacists who marched violently in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. In 2016, he circulated an image of a six-pointed star alongside a photo of Hillary Clinton, a pile of money and the words "most corrupt candidate ever." And he told a group of Republican Jewish donors he didn't expect to earn their support because he wouldn't take their money.

"You want to control your politicians, that's fine," he told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015.

Ultimately, the group and many of its donors backed Trump.

In this March 12, 2019, photo, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., listens as Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Russ Vought testifies before the House Budget Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington. Debate in Congress over Israel and anti-Semitism is providing President Donald Trump an opening to appeal to Jewish American voters (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Trump on Tuesday promoted comments by former model and 2016 campaign staffer Elizabeth Pipko, who said on Fox News' "Fox & Friends" that "Jewish people are leaving the Democratic Party."

Pipko, who serves as spokeswoman for the group Jexodus, which bills itself as speaking for "Jewish Millennials tired of living in bondage to leftist politics," saw her comments amplified by Trump on Twitter. "There is anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party," she continued. "They don't care about Israel or the Jewish people."

Her comments mirrored Trump's charge on Friday that Democrats had become an "anti-Israel" and "anti-Jewish" party, responding to the House vote a day before to disapprove of all prejudice in response to Omar's invocation of "dual-loyalty" charges against American supporters of Israel earlier this month.

Speaking later that evening, Trump went even further in an appearance before Republican National Committee donors, charging that Democrats "hate" Jewish people, according to a person who heard the remarks but spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the president's comments at a private event.

Omar, D-Minn., had sparked a political firestorm with comments suggesting supporters of Israel have dual allegiances. It derailed the Democrats' focus on investigations of the Trump administration, including a public back-and-forth over how, or even if, her party should condemn her comments. The ultimate resolution, which passed the House overwhelmingly, didn't call out Omar by name.

As a small percentage of the nation, American Jews are not a particularly significant voting bloc, nor is Israel their decisive issue of concern. And both major political parties acknowledge the controversy is unlikely to alter dramatically the electoral votes of the American Jewish community, which has skewed decisively toward Democrats for more than a generation.

Even a small shift, though, can be significant.

"We're slicing the salami very thin, and an incremental shift in traditional Democratic blocs to the other side can have a profound impact," said Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

He said his group plans to make "the largest investment that we've ever had in the 2020 race in terms of outreach, advocacy and independent expenditures on behalf of the president."

Stoking the fight also gives Trump an opportunity to deflect criticism of his own rhetoric, invigorate evangelical Christians for whom the Israel issue is a powerful motivator and paint Democrats into a radical corner.

It also plays into Trump's attempt to cast Democrats as radicals ahead of the 2020 campaign, said conservative commentator Seth Mandel, executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine. He noted that Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders pushed back against efforts to condemn Omar's comments.

"It makes it very easy to say they're just adopting whatever the socialist says," Mandel said.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders kept the controversy alive on Monday by criticizing Democrats for failing to explicitly repudiate Omar.

"It's something that should be called by name," she said. "It shouldn't be put in a watered-down resolution."

Sanders pointed to Republican condemnation of Rep. Steve King earlier this year, including stripping the Iowa Republican of his committee memberships, after he made remarks defending white supremacy. But King had long espoused racially charged ideas, and the GOP only took action after it lost its majority in the chamber.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, warned that Trump's politicization of the issue "threatens the bipartisan support for Israel."

"The problem is that the president sees it somehow as a way to make some kind of political hay and a wedge," she said. "And he keeps addressing it that way. And I just think it's a mistake, as someone that's a strong supporter of Israel, that he keeps doing it."

Halie Soifer, the executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said her group welcomes Trump's focus on the issue of anti-Semitism.

"He himself has emboldened anti-Semites in our country by both repeating anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories," she said. "He has no credibility with Jewish voters."

Trump has been among the loudest critics of Omar, including last month when he called on her to resign from the House or at least resign her post on the Foreign Affairs Committee over her suggestion that Jewish money drove support for Israel.

With respect to Trump's own comments to Republican Jewish donors, Brooks, the Republican Jewish Coalition official, said they were meant obviously in jest and any suggestion otherwise is "unfair and ridiculous."

Jexodus is hardly the first time Trump has tried to peel away minority voters from the Democratic coalition. He has pushed the WalkAway and Blexit movements to win over black voters to the GOP, but those efforts proved to have limited, if any, impact.

According to AP Votecast, a survey of more than 115,000 midterm voters and 3,500 Jewish voters nationwide, voters who identified as Jewish broke for Democrats over Republicans by a wide margin, 72 percent to 26 percent, in 2016.

Over the last decade, Jewish voters have shown stability in their partisanship, according to data from Pew Research Center. Jewish voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party over the Republican Party by a roughly 2-1 ratio.

___

Associated Press writers Hannah Fingerhut, Elana Schor and Laurie Kellman contributed to this report.

___

This story has been corrected to show the name is Halie, not Hallie.WOODSTOCK, Ill. (AP) - Hundreds of mourners packed a high school gymnasium Wednesday morning to remember a northern Illinois sheriff's deputy who was shot and killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a hotel.

The main gym at Woodstock North High School was filled during the funeral for McHenry County Sheriff's Deputy Jacob Keltner. More people were in an overflow area. Law enforcement representatives attended from across the region.

The Rev. Kendall Koenig, senior pastor of Light of Christ Lutheran Church in Algonquin, spoke about the 35-year-old Crystal Lake deputy's family. Koenig said Keltner recently built zip lines for his son's toys in their basement.

"Friends, we are not heroes because of how we die," Koenig said. "We are heroes for how we live and you have lived it," Koenig said of Keltner.

Mourners also left notes and flowers on a sheriff's squad car parked in Woodstock and dedicated to Keltner, a 12 -year veteran of the sheriff's office.

Keltner's wife wrote an open letter to her husband Monday, saying she would give anything for one more hug, joke or "I love you" from her husband.

A McHenry County Sheriff's vehicle serving as a memorial car is parked outside before funeral services for slain McHenry County Sheriff's Deputy Jacob Keltner on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, at Woodstock North High School in Woodstock Ill. Keltner was shot and killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a hotel on March 7, 2019. (Scott P. Yates/Rockford Register Star via AP)

"It's unfair," she wrote. "I have screamed. I have cried. Nothing can make this better."

Keltner was part of a U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force that was trying to serve a warrant on Floyd E. Brown, 39, for burglary and parole violation charges last Thursday. Police say Brown shot Keltner, fled the Rockford hotel in a vehicle and was arrested hours later after a standoff.

Brown is charged with first-degree murder in federal court. He didn't enter a plea during his first court appearance Monday. The case is next scheduled to be in court March 20.

This photo provided by McHenry County Sheriff's Office shows Deputy Jacob Keltner. Floyd E. Brown is accused of fatally shooting Keltner, Thursday, March 7, 2019 at a hotel as a U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force tried to serve Brown with an arrest warrant for burglary and parole violation charges. (McHenry County Sheriff's Office via AP)

Law enforcement departments from all over the area arrive before funeral services for slain McHenry County Sheriff's Deputy Jacob Keltner on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, at Woodstock North High School in Woodstock, Ill. Keltner was shot and killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a hotel on March 7, 2019. (Scott P. Yates/Rockford Register Star via AP)

Law enforcement departments from all over the area arrive before funeral services for slain McHenry County Sheriff's Deputy Jacob Keltner on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, at Woodstock North High School in Woodstock, Ill. Keltner was shot and killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a hotel on March 7, 2019. (Scott P. Yates/Rockford Register Star via AP)

A color guard with members from New York, Elgin and North Aurora, Illinois, exit the building during a shift change before funeral services for slain McHenry County Sheriff's Deputy Jacob Keltner on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, at Woodstock North High School in Woodstock, Ill. Keltner was shot and killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a hotel on March 7, 2019. (Scott P. Yates/Rockford Register Star via AP)

A McHenry County Sheriff's vehicle serving as a memorial car is parked outside before funeral services for slain McHenry County Sheriff's Deputy Jacob Keltner on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, at Woodstock North High School in Woodstock, Ill. Keltner was shot and killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a hotel on March 7, 2019. (Scott P. Yates/Rockford Register Star via AP)

Taps is performed as people arrive before funeral services for slain McHenry County Sheriff's Deputy Jacob Keltner on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, at Woodstock North High School in Woodstock, Ill. Keltner was shot and killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a hotel on March 7, 2019. (Scott P. Yates/Rockford Register Star via AP)

A column of men holding flags greet people as they arrive before funeral services for slain McHenry County Sheriff's Deputy Jacob Keltner on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, at Woodstock North High School in Woodstock Ill. Keltner was shot and killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a hotel on March 7, 2019. (Scott P. Yates/Rockford Register Star via AP)

Law enforcement officers pause while a color guard passes by the front door before funeral services for slain McHenry County Sheriff's Deputy Jacob Keltner on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, at Woodstock North High School in Woodstock Ill. Keltner was shot and killed while trying to serve an arrest warrant at a hotel on March 7, 2019. (Scott P. Yates/Rockford Register Star via AP)SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Michelle Aldana gave birth to her first child chained to a hospital bed.

Then serving time at the Utah state prison on a drug charge, she says she labored through the difficult 2001 birth for nearly 30 hours, her ankles bleeding as the shackles on both her legs and one arm dug in. "I felt like a farm animal," she says.

The practice of keeping inmates shackled during childbirth was once common around the United States, but that's gradually been changing after women began speaking out, with 22 states passing laws against it over the past two decades.

Utah and at least three other states are considering joining them this year, after the federal government recently banned the practice with a sweeping criminal justice reform law. Many other states have policies against shackling, but advocates say that without a law it's harder to stop a practice they condemn as dangerous and inhumane.

Women are America's fast-growing segment of prisoners. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates about 12,000 pregnant women are incarcerated in U.S. jails or prisons each year.

"For me, it's just a fundamental issue of dignity," said Democratic state Rep. Stephanie Pitcher, who is sponsoring the Utah measure. "A woman deserves dignity in childbirth."

In this Feb. 27, 2019, photo, Michelle Aldana is shown at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Utah is one of at least four states considering bans this year on the shackling of incarcerated women during childbirth. The Utah measure has passed the state House and is being considered by the Senate. The measure is a relief for mothers like Aldana, who was shackled when she gave birth while incarcerated on a drug charge in 2001. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Though the state prison changed its official policy to prohibit shackling in 2015, Pitcher has heard from a number of Utah doctors who have treated incarcerated women having babies in shackles, some as recently as this year. Her bill, which would apply to both the prison and local jails, passed the state House and is being considered by the Senate.

The practice is an outgrowth of policies requiring all prisoners to be restrained during medical treatment for safety, said Amy Fettig, deputy director of the National Prison Project at the ACLU.

But childbirth is different, she said. Preventing a woman from moving during labor increases the risk of potentially life-threatening health risks inherent in childbirth, like blood clots. It also makes it harder to move her if there is an emergency, or feed the baby after it's born.

Meanwhile, the physical conditions of labor make escape attempts unlikely, and there are no documented cases of a woman getting away while having a child, Fettig said.

Still, some have raised safety concerns. In Utah, Republican Rep. Eric Hutchins has pointed out that violent incidents happen often in state prisons, and hospitals have far less built-in security.

He ultimately voted in favor of the bill, which does allow some shackling during transportation and the use of soft restraints if an inmate is documented to be dangerous. Prison officials are also in support, and say their policy change means women like Aldana are treated differently today.

Most other states without laws against shackling do have policies in place, but without strict controls, the practice is hard to stamp out, said Lauryn King, a public-policy Ph.D. student at The George Washington University who completed a state-by-state analysis of laws on the topic.

"What are the odds that without specific training, your average corrections officer knows every policy?" she said. In New York, for example, a report found the practice continued even after a law was passed.

In Wisconsin, a woman said in a lawsuit she was shackled with a chain so short that she couldn't reach the stirrups during labor in February 2014. Tennessee and Arkansas have faced similar lawsuits and are weighing bans on the practice this year, along with South Carolina.

In Utah, Aldana was bloody and sore after her tough labor, which also left her with a broken pelvis from the pressure of the baby. She was released a month after her son was born, and in the years since she's recovered and become a substance abuse counselor. Now pregnant with her third child, she still suffers with anxiety about childbirth but said a law against shackling would be a relief.

"I just don't think any woman, when they're that vulnerable, should ever be treated that way," she said. "It's just wrong."

In this Feb. 27, 2019, photo, Michelle Aldana is shown at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Utah is one of at least four states considering bans this year on the shackling of incarcerated women during childbirth. The Utah measure has passed the state House and is being considered by the Senate. The measure is a relief for mothers like Aldana, who was shackled when she gave birth while incarcerated on a drug charge in 2001. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

In this Feb. 27, 2019, photo, Michelle Aldana is shown at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Utah is one of at least four states considering bans this year on the shackling of incarcerated women during childbirth. The Utah measure has passed the state House and is being considered by the Senate. The measure is a relief for mothers like Aldana, who was shackled when she gave birth while incarcerated on a drug charge in 2001. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

In this Feb. 27, 2019, photo, Michelle Aldana is shown at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Utah is one of at least four states considering bans this year on the shackling of incarcerated women during childbirth. Then serving time at the Utah state prison on a drug charge, Aldana says she labored through a difficult 2001 birth for nearly 30 hours, her ankles bleeding as the shackles on both her legs and one arm dug in. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

In this Feb. 22, 2019, photo, State Democratic Rep. Stephanie Pitcher speaks on the house floor at the Utah State Capitol, in Salt Lake City. Utah is one of at least four states considering bans this year on the shackling of incarcerated women during childbirth. The Utah measure has passed the state House and is being considered by the Senate. Pitcher argues the chains are both unnecessary during labor and exacerbate health risks. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A U.S. appeals court appeared inclined Wednesday to reject a request by the Trump administration to block a California law limiting police cooperation with immigration officials.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals raised concerns about another state law extending protections to people in the country illegally. The Trump administration has sued California over three such laws, saying they obstruct federal immigration efforts and urging the 9th Circuit to block them.

Judge Milan Smith said at a hearing that U.S. officials might find it frustrating that local authorities can't help them take custody of people in the country illegally.

But "because it's an obstacle doesn't mean it's illegal, right?" he asked an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice.

The law prevents law enforcement agencies in the state from providing release dates and personal information of jail inmates - information administration officials say they need to safely remove dangerous people who are in the country illegally.

Judge Andrew Hurwitz said it doesn't allow local officials to interfere with federal efforts to take immigrants into custody, it just forbids them from "affirmatively helping."

FILE - In this Feb. 9, 2017, file photo, a man walks up the steps of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals building in San Francisco. The Trump administration will try to convince a federal appeals court to block California laws aimed at protecting immigrants in one of the many ongoing lawsuits between the White House and the Democrat-dominated state. At issue in the Wednesday, March 13, 2019, hearing before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a March 2018 lawsuit by the administration over three California laws that extended protections to people in the country illegally. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

"They're not required to be helpful, are they?" he asked.

Smith and Hurwitz, however, expressed concerns about another state law requiring inspections of facilities where immigrants are detained. The panel did not immediately issue a ruling.

The inspection law also calls on the state attorney general to review the legal rights immigrants are afforded and how they are being apprehended. Hurwitz said he had trouble understanding how the conditions under which immigrants were apprehended were any of California's business. He also raised concerns that the authority to evaluate the due process immigrants receive may be too broad.

Smith questioned whether the state could require more of federal detention facilities than it does of state facilities.

More than 50 immigrant advocates protested outside the federal courthouse before the hearing, some holding signs saying "ICE out of California," referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Trump administration's 2018 lawsuit was part of its broader efforts to crack down on so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that it says allow criminals to stay on the streets. It is among numerous legal fights between the White House and Democrat-dominated California. California has sued the Trump administration dozens of times, mostly over immigration, the environment and health.

California officials say their policies limiting cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities promote trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement and encourage witnesses and victims to report crime.

An attorney for the state, Aimee Feinberg, said Congress did not require in an immigration law that states assist with immigration enforcement. "It's purely voluntary," she said.

The three laws were aimed at preserving "state resources for state priorities and to safeguard the health and welfare of state residents," the California attorney general's office said in a brief to the 9th Circuit. "Nothing in the Constitution or federal immigration law divests the state of the authority to make those choices."

Daniel Tenny, an attorney with the Justice Department, said all three laws interfere with federal immigration enforcement.

The Justice Department argued in court documents that the Constitution gives the federal government pre-eminent power to regulate immigration.

"The bills, individually and collectively, mark an extraordinary and intentional assault on the federal government's enforcement of the immigration laws," Justice Department attorneys said in a filing.

U.S. Judge John Mendez in Sacramento ruled in July that California could limit police cooperation with immigration officials and require inspections of detention facilities where immigrants are held, but the state could not bar private employers from allowing immigration officials on their premises without a warrant. The 9th Circuit judges spent little time on Wednesday discussing the third law.NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A 1978 law giving preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings involving American Indian children is an unconstitutional race-based intrusion on state powers that has caused families to be "literally torn apart," an attorney told a federal appeals court Wednesday.

But supporters of the decades-old law say it's needed to protect and preserve Native American culture and families. In court, lawyers for Indian tribes argued that the law's definition of an Indian child is based not on race, but on tribal political affiliations.

"A child whose 'Indian-ness' is based solely on race ... does not qualify," said Department of Justice attorney Eric Grant, defending the law.

A federal district judge in Texas last year struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act .

Backers of the law, including numerous tribes and the federal government, say that if the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds that decision, many Native American children will be lost to their families and tribes.

"Tribal nations are still reeling from generations of our families being separated," Tyson Johnston, vice president of the Quinault Indian Nation said after the hearing. "So, even though we've had good policy like the Indian Child Welfare Act, it's going to take us many more generations to rectify those past wrongs."

FILE - In this Aug. 6, 2013, file photo, Veronica, 3, a child at the center of an international adoption dispute at the time, smiles in a bathroom of the Cherokee Nation Jack Brown Center in Tahlequah, Okla. A federal law that gives preference to Native American families in child welfare proceedings involving Native children is facing a significant legal challenge. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law didn't apply in a South Carolina case involving Veronica because her Cherokee father was absent from part of her life. (Mike Simons/Tulsa World via AP, File)

In briefs filed ahead of Wednesday's hearing, the tribes accused the law's opponents of "paternalistically contending that they know better than Indian families and tribes what is best for their children."

The case was heard by three of the 5th Circuit judges: Jacques L. Wiener Jr., James L. Dennis and Priscilla Owen. There was no indication when they would rule.

The law has led to some emotional, high-profile cases, including one in 2016 in which a court ordered that a young Choctaw girl named Lexi be removed from a California foster family and placed with her father's extended family in Utah. Images of the girl being carried away from her foster home drew widespread attention. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law didn't apply in a South Carolina case involving a young girl named Veronica because her Cherokee father was absent from part of her life.

Adoptive parents in the current case include Chad and Jennifer Brackeen, a Texas couple who fostered a baby eligible for membership in both the Navajo and Cherokee tribes. The boy's parents voluntarily terminated their parental rights and the Brackeens petitioned to adopt him. The state denied their request after the Navajo Nation identified a potential home with a Navajo family in New Mexico.

In briefs, they say the Navajo Nation sought to have the child "removed from the home in which he had spent most of his life and given to an unrelated Navajo couple - simply because he was an Indian."

The Brackeens got an emergency stay and went to court. They were able to adopt the boy in January 2018 after the placement fell through. The boy is now 3, and the couple is seeking to adopt his younger half-sister, according to the brief, "but it is unclear whether that adoption will be permitted under ICWA."

Attorney Matthew McGill represents the Brackeens and a Minnesota couple, the Cliffords, who were unable to adopt a child who lived with them after having been shuttled among foster homes. "The Cliffords' family was literally torn apart," he told the appeals court judges.

Another couple says in briefs that a child who had been living in their home suffered "serious emotional harm" after being removed and given to a grandmother. Still another couple says they were able to adopt a Native American child with severe medical conditions as a result of the Brackeen lawsuit. They and others said they fear the adoption could be legally attacked if the district court ruling is overturned.

The states of Texas, Louisiana and Indiana also joined the lawsuit opposing the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 because many Native American children were being removed from their homes by public and private agencies. In such adoptions, the law requires states to notify tribes and seek placement with the child's extended family, members of the child's tribe or other Native American families. Tribes, whose status as sovereign nations is derived from treaties with the U.S. government and acts of Congress, also have a say in foster care placements.

___

Associated Press reporters Felicia Fonseca in Flagstaff, Arizona, and Stacey Plaisance in New Orleans contributed to this report.

___

This story has been corrected to correct the spelling of Johnston's name from Johnson.

Tehassi Hill, tribal chairman of the Oneida Nation, stands outside a federal appeals court Wednesday, March 13, 2019 in New Orleans, following arguments on the constitutionality of a law giving Native American families preference in adoption of Native American children. A Texas-based federal judge ruled the 1978 law unconstitutional last year. Hill is among leaders of various Native American tribes hoping the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will reverse the ruling and uphold the law. (AP Photo/Kevin McGill)

FILE - This March 31, 2016, file photo shows Rusty and Summer Page, foster parents of Lexi, a then-6-year-old girl with Native American ancestry, who was removed from their home, outside the California Court of Appeal in downtown Los Angeles. Lexi ultimately was placed with her father's extended family in Utah. A federal law that gives preference to Native American families in child welfare proceedings involving Native children is facing a significant legal challenge. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)

In this Feb. 13, 2019, photo provided by the National Congress of American Indians, Sarah Kastelic, executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, speaks at an annual gathering of the National Congress of American Indians in Washington. A federal law that gives preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings involving Native children is facing a significant legal challenge. (National Congress of American Indians via AP)The search is ongoing for answers in the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane shortly after takeoff for Nairobi on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board.

Ethiopian authorities said Wednesday that they will send the flight recorders recovered from the plane to an as-yet-unspecified European country for analysis.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said "new information" indicated some similarities with a Lion Air crash in the Java Sea that killed 189 people in October. The agency grounded the jets while investigators determine whether there was a shared cause of the two crashes. The FAA had been criticized for allowing the planes to fly while dozens of countries suspended their use.

U.S.-based Boeing said it has "full confidence" in the 737 Max but supports the decision to temporarily ground all 371 of the planes.

Here are some questions and answers about the crash, the plane and the investigation:

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Workers walk down stairs from a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for American Airlines at Boeing Co.'s Renton assembly plant, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Renton, Wash. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

WHAT PROMPTED THE FAA TO ACT?

The Federal Aviation Administration initially declined to ground the 737 Max, cautioning against comparing the Ethiopian Airlines crash with the October crash of a Lion Air 737 Max off of Indonesia or assuming that they are related.

Pressure on the FAA grew as more than 40 countries including the entire European Union and Canada suspended flights by the plane or barred it from their airspace.

On Wednesday, the agency ordered the grounding, saying that new information from the wreckage in Ethiopia, along with satellite-based tracking of the flight path, "indicates some similarities" between the Ethiopia and Indonesia crashes.

The agency said it was ordering the jets' grounding while investigators determine whether there was a shared cause of the two crashes.

Indonesian investigators have not stated a cause for the Lion Air crash, but are examining whether faulty readings from a sensor might have triggered an automatic nose-down command to the plane, which the Lion Air pilots fought unsuccessfully to overcome. The automated system kicks in if sensors indicate that a plane is about to lose lift, or go into an aerodynamic stall. Gaining speed by diving can prevent a stall.

The Lion Air plane's flight data recorder showed problems with an airspeed indicator on four flights, although the airline initially said the problem was fixed.

___

WHAT ARE FLIGHT RECORDERS AND WHY ARE THEY SO IMPORTANT?

The FAA requires every large commercial aircraft to have a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder, known as "black boxes." The recorders, which can withstand temperatures of 1,100 degrees Celsius and water depths of 20,000 feet, collect information about a flight.

Voice recordings pick up the flight crew's voices, as well as other sounds inside the cockpit. Information from the data recorder can generate a computer animated video reconstruction of the flight. Investigators can then visualize the airplane's altitude, instrument readings, power settings and other details of the flight to help with the investigation, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Some experts have said the search for answers about what caused the crash could take months.

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WHAT IS BOEING DOING IN RESPONSE TO THE CRASHES?

Boeing says it supports the temporary grounding of the entire fleet of Max planes, while reiterating it believes the planes are safe.

Prior to the grounding, Boeing had promised to upgrade some flight-control software "in the coming weeks."

Boeing began working on the changes shortly after the Lion Air crash. It is tweaking the system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the plane's nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow.

A Boeing spokesman said once updated software is installed, the system will rely on data from more than one sensor to trigger a nose-down command. Also, the system won't repeatedly push the nose down, and it will reduce the magnitude of the change, he said. There will also be more training for pilots.

___

HAVE THERE BEEN COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE PLANES?

Airline pilots on at least two U.S. flights reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing 737 Max planes to tilt down suddenly. The pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, the nose tilted down sharply. In both cases, they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot.

As described by the pilots, the problem did not appear related to a new automated anti-stall system that is suspected of contributing to the Lion Air crash in Indonesia.

The pilot reports were filed last year in a data base compiled by NASA. They are voluntary safety reports and do not publicly reveal the names of pilots, the airlines or the location of the incidents. It was unclear whether the accounts led to any actions by the FAA or the pilots' airlines.

___

WERE AIRLINE EMPLOYEES AND PASSENGERS WORRIED?

Patrick Smith, a Boeing 767 pilot who writes a column called "Ask the Pilot," says he's been telling passengers who ask that the 737 Max is safe. He also says he hasn't heard of any pilots who worry about flying the plane.

Others didn't want to take any chances. The Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents more than 26,000 flight attendants at American Airlines, called on CEO Doug Parker to "strongly consider grounding these planes until an investigation can be performed."

___

This story has been updated to correct the death toll in the Lion Air crash. It was 189, not 187.

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)The BJP is likely to repeat almost all its sitting MPs barring a few seats including Patna Sahib and Madhubani.

The BJP which is in alliance with JD(U) and LJP in the state is contesting on 17 seats, its ally JD(U) also has equal number of seats, while the remaining are with the LJP. (PTI | Representational Image)

New Delhi: The BJP has finalised the candidates for the 17 Lok Sabha seats it will be contesting in Bihar and the names will be announced jointly with the allies, senior party leader J P Nadda said Thursday.

The BJP is likely to repeat almost all its sitting MPs barring a few seats including Patna Sahib and Madhubani.

Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad is expected to be the partys candidate from Patna Sahib in place of sitting MP and film star Shatrughan Sinha and from Madhubani it may field sitting MP Hukmdev Narayan Yadavs son, as he has expressed his unwillingness to contest the election.

Releasing the first list of the partys 184 candidates for the Lok Sabha polls, Nadda said, The party has also finalised names of all 17 party candidates from Bihar and sent the list to the state unit which will announce it jointly with allies -- JD(U) and Lok Janshakti Party.

The BJP which is in alliance with JD(U) and LJP in the state is contesting on 17 seats, its ally JD(U) also has equal number of seats, while the remaining are with the LJP.

The BJP in its first released on Thursday announced Prime Minister Narendra Modi again its candidate from Varanasi, party chief Amit Shah from Gandhinagar and Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh from Lucknow.

The Lok Sabha elections 2019 will be conducted in seven phases starting from April 11 and will continue till May 19. The counting of votes will take place on May 23.SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Gov. Gavin Newsom not only put a moratorium on executions in California on Wednesday, he said he also may commute death sentences and is pushing to repeal capital punishment.

Newsom signed an executive order granting reprieves to all 737 condemned inmates on the nation's largest death row. That means no executions while he's governor.

He was backed by fellow Democratic lawmakers who introduced a ballot measure that would repeal the death penalty next year by putting the politically perilous issue before voters for the third time in eight years. Voters supported capital punishment in 2012 and 2016, when they voted to speed up executions by shortening appeals.

"I cannot sign off on executing hundreds and hundreds of human beings, knowing - knowing - that among them will be innocent human beings," Newsom said, citing examples of condemned inmates who were ultimately exonerated. California would have to execute one inmate each day for more than two years to empty death row, he noted.

Critics accused Newsom of usurping voters' will. One Republican lawmaker said Newsom broke the trust of those who elected him in November, and a prominent victims' rights law firm suggested a court challenge and possible competing ballot measure that would restrict governors' rights to grant reprieves.

"Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!" tweeted President Donald Trump.

Flanked by lawmakers, Gov. Gavin Newsom discusses his decision to place a moratorium on the death penalty during a news conference at the Capitol, March 13, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Although California has executed no one since 2006, Newsom said he acted as executions potentially neared for 25 inmates who have exhausted their appeals and as court challenges to the state's new lethal injection process potentially neared their end.

He rescinded those execution regulations and shuttered the state's never-used $853,000 execution chamber. Prison officials symbolically removed execution equipment from the chamber on Wednesday, releasing photos and video as proof it was dismantled.

Newsom defended his decision in intensely personal terms.

"It's a very emotional place that I stand," he said. "This is about who I am as a human being, this is about what I can or cannot do. To me this is the right thing to do."

He said he's considering commuting death sentences as "a next step" once state Supreme Court justices explain why they blocked 10 non-death commutations sought by former Gov. Jerry Brown last year.

A California governor needs Supreme Court approval to pardon or commute the sentence of anyone twice convicted of a felony, a restriction that applies to more than half of condemned inmates.

Democratic Assemblyman Marc Levine is counting on Newsom to transform voters' long-running support for the death penalty.

Levine said he drove by San Quentin State Prison's death row on his way to Sacramento Wednesday, thinking "This is a new day for California, a new day for justice."

But while six senators and 17 assembly members are supporting Levine's proposed constitutional ban on executions, that's a long way from the 27 Senate and 54 Assembly votes required to put the measure on the 2020 ballot.

Democrats control the necessary votes in both chambers, but are not monolithic on the topic. Democratic Assemblyman Thomas Umberg of Santa Ana, a former federal prosecutor, said Newsom's decision ignores victims in favor of "some criminals who are so depraved, who have committed such heinous crimes ... that they deserve the ultimate punishment."

Lawmakers have until June 2020 to put the measure on the fall ballot and will take that time to build support among voters and lawmakers, said Levine spokesman Terry Schanz.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association supported Newsom's election last year, but is among law enforcement organizations and victims' rights groups that oppose repeal. The death penalty is the final deterrent keeping murderers serving life sentences from killing again behind bars, said union president Kurt Stoetzl.

Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager, president of the California District Attorneys Association, said the association will also fight the proposed constitutional amendment banning a punishment she said is used "only against the very worst murderers."

Newsom has the constitutional power to unilaterally grant reprieves, as he did Wednesday, said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which has been fighting in court to force the state to resume executions.

But he said opponents could propose a constitutional amendment adding the Supreme Court oversight of reprieves.

Opponents could also mount a legal challenge to Newsom's rescinding of the lethal injection regulations and closing the death chamber, which he said violates a state law requiring corrections officials to be ready to carry out executions.

Republican Assemblyman Tom Lackey, a former highway patrolman, accused Newsom of going back on his word to voters not to interfere with executions.

But Newsom said his opposition has long been well known.

He said he's had tough meetings with dozens of victims' families, including a dozen or so in the last week.

"To the victims all I can say is we owe you, and we need to do more and do better," he said. "But we cannot advance the death penalty in effort to try to soften the blow of what happened."

In this March 13, 2019, handout provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation a death penalty chamber chair is carried to a truck at San Quentin State Prison, in San Quentin, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order, Wednesday, placing a moratorium on the death penalty. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)

In this March 13, 2019, handout provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation a pair of death penalty chamber chairs sit on a truck after their removal at San Quentin State Prison, in San Quentin, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order, Wednesday, placing a moratorium on the death penalty. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)

In this March 13, 2019, handout provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation a closed sign is placed on the door leading to the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison, in San Quentin, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order, Wednesday, placing a moratorium on the death penalty. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)

Assemblyman Tom Lackey, R-Palmdale, meets with reporters to discuss his opposition to Gov. Gavin Newsom's executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty at the Capitol, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom pauses as he responds to a reporter's question about his decision to place a moratorium on the death penalty during a news conference at the Capitol, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Gov. Gavin Newsom signs the executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty at his Capitol office Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Gov. Gavin Newsom signs the executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty at his Capitol office Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

FILE - In this Aug. 16, 2016, file photo a condemned inmate is led out of his east block cell on death row at San Quentin State Prison, in San Quentin, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to sign a moratorium on the death penalty in California Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

In this Dec. 3, 2014 aerial photo released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, CDCR, shows the San Quentin State Prison, in San Quentin, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, placing a moratorium on the death penalty. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)HEJERE, Ethiopia (AP) - The Latest on The Latest on Ethiopian Airlines crash (all times local):

11:45 p.m.

Boeing's stock has halted a two-day skid after turning higher in the final minutes of trading on Wall Street.

The about-face came shortly after President Donald Trump issued an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. The Federal Aviation Administration followed with a statement saying it was ordering the planes grounded based on new evidence from the crash site.

While the U.S. grounding is not good news for the company, it did serve to eliminate a major element of uncertainty, which can often weigh on a stock more than bad news itself.

Many nations had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from their airspace this week following Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash. A similar Lion Air plane crashed in October, killing 189 people.

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)

Shares in Chicago-based Boeing ended up $1.73 or about 0.5 percent, at $377.14 Wednesday after they lost more than 11 percent in the first two days this week. The stock is still up 17 percent for the year.

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11:10 p.m.

The Federal Aviation Administration says new evidence from the Ethiopian Airlines crash site coupled with its own data gathering led it to order the grounding of Boeing 737 Max planes.

The agency's order Wednesday said new information had been uncovered from the wreckage of the Ethiopian Airlines jet. That, taken together with data from satellite-based tracking of the plane's flight path, pointed to similarities with an October crash of a Lion Air 737 Max in the Java Sea.

The FAA said it was ordering the jets' grounding while investigators determine whether there was a shared cause of the two crashes.

The agency's move Wednesday came after it had faced mounting criticism for backing the airworthiness of the 737 Max jets as countries around the world were grounding them.

For its part, Boeing said it supported the FAA's move out of an abundance of caution and to reassure the flying public of the aircrafts' safety. But it said it continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 Max planes.

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9:45 p.m.

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 that killed 157 people.

Many nations in the world had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from its airspace, but until now, the Federal Aviation Administration had been saying that it didn't have any data to show the jets are unsafe.

Trump said Wednesday that the FAA would be making the announcement soon to ground the planes.

He says any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and then be grounded.

Trump says pilots and airlines have been notified.

He says the safety of the American people is of "paramount concern."

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8:20 p.m.

A spokesman for Germany's Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation is telling The Associated Press that the agency was asked by Ethiopian authorities to analyze the black boxes from Sunday's plane crash but declined because it lacked the necessary software.

Spokesman Germout Freitag said Wednesday that he doesn't know where the black boxes will be sent next.

An Ethiopian Airlines spokesman said flight recorders from the jet will be sent to a European country for analysis because Ethiopia lacks the technology to examine them.

The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. The disaster is the second with a Max 8 plane in just five months and has set off a wave of groundings of the planes around the world.

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7:45 p.m.

A Nigerian official says the country has closed its airspace to the Boeing 737 Max 8.

President Muhammadu Buhari's personal assistant in a Twitter post cites Nigeria's aviation minister as saying the model involved in Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash is barred until the cause of the disaster is determined.

And in Mauritania, civil aviation authorities say Mauritania Airlines has halted its use of the model.

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12:05 p.m.

Canada's transport minister says the country is closing airspace to the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner that killed 157 people.

Canada becomes the latest country to bar the Boeing 737 Max as the investigation into the latest crash, the second in just over five months, is underway.

Transport Minister Marc Garneau said new information they received Wednesday morning in the form of satellite data shows a possible but unproven similarity to a previous Max 8 crash.

Boeing has said it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies and does not intend to issue new recommendations about the aircraft to customers.

Given the proximity to the U.S Canada's decision to ground the planes may cause problems for U.S. airlines.

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3:05 p.m.

An Ethiopian Airlines spokesman confirms that the black box from Sunday's crashed plane will be sent to Europe.

Asrat Begashaw has declined to tell The Associated Press which country will be analyzing the voice and data recorders of the flight.

The plane crashed six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa en route to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board.

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12:45 p.m.

Lion Air has confirmed reports it has put on hold the scheduled delivery of four Boeing 737 Max 8 jets while it waits for the outcome of the Indonesian investigation into its October crash that killed 189 people.

Speaking at a transport ministry news conference in Jakarta about the grounding of Max 8 planes, Lion Air executive Daniel Putut said the airline needs to know the "root cause" of the accident.

Lion Air ordered 222 Boeing Max planes, including 218 of the Max 8 model and four Max 9 planes. It currently has 10 Max 8 planes in its fleet.

Many countries worldwide have grounded Max 8 jets after one operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed on Sunday, killing 157 people.

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12:40 p.m.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand says it has ordered the budget airline Thai Lion Air to suspend flying its Boeing 737 Max planes for seven days while it conducts risk assessments and special training for pilots.

The agency says it will consult with the plane's maker and designer about safety measures. The suspension begins Thursday. It comes after Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash.

Thai Lion Air is the only Thai airline flying B737 Max models.

The airline is an associate company of Indonesia's Lion Air, which lost a B737 Max 8 in October shortly after takeoff from Jakarta in a crash that killed 189 people.

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12:30 p.m.

Egyptian aviation authorities have banned the operation of all Boeing 737 Max aircrafts, citing safety concerns.

The Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority says in a statement it has barred "flying over, landing and takeoff" of Boeing 737 Max aircrafts.

It also says Egypt doesn't have these aircraft and that they are not part of its future plans.

The announcement cites the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday that killed 157 people on board.

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12:05 p.m.

Lebanon's state news agency says the country's civil aviation authority has barred flights by Boeing 737 Max aircraft from landing or flying in Lebanese skies following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner that killed 157 people.

Lebanon becomes the latest country to bar the Boeing 737 Max as investigation into the latest crash, the second in just over five months, is underway.

The decision by Lebanon's head of civil aviation doesn't elaborate on the reason for the banning or the duration. The national air carrier mostly operates Airbus.

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11:50 a.m.

Kosovo has barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 738 Max 9 airplanes from its airspace following the crash of a similar jetliner in Ethiopia on Sunday in which all 157 on board were killed.

Kosovo's Civil Aviation Authority said in a Wednesday statement the decision was taken because of "the investigation of the equipment" of the planes, adding that it is effective immediately.

Many airlines around the world have grounded the Boeing jetliner and many countries, including the entire European Union have barred the plane from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few areas where the plane can fly. Two Max 8 jets have had deadly crashes in just five months.

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11:40 a.m.

Norwegian Air Shuttles says it will seek compensation from aircraft maker Boeing after the low-cost carrier grounded its fleet of 737 MAX 8 aircraft.

Carrier spokeswoman Tonje Naess told The Associated Press Wednesday that the Oslo-based airline "should not have any financial burden for a brand new aircraft that will not to be used."

On Tuesday, Norwegian Air Shuttles grounded its 18 Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft on recommendation from European aviation authorities after Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash in which 157 people were killed.

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11:20 a.m.

An Ethiopian Airlines spokesman says the "black box" from the crashed Boeing jet will be sent overseas for analysis but no country has been chosen.

In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Asrat Begashaw says the airline has not decided where to send the data and voice records of the flight's last moments.

He says that "we have a range of options. What we can say is we don't have the capability to probe it here in Ethiopia."

The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. The disaster is the second with a Max 8 plane in just five months and has set off a wave of groundings of the planes around the world.

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10:55 a.m.

Hong Kong will ban the operation of all Boeing 737 Max aircraft "into, out of and over" the key Asian aviation hub beginning at 6 p.m. (1000 GMT) Wednesday.

The announcement from the Civil Aviation Department cited the crash of two of the planes within less than five months and said the ban would continue "until further notice."

The statement said: "The CAD has been closely monitoring the developments, the investigation progress and the information from relevant aviation authorities."

It said the CAD had noted that the U.S. Federation Aviation Administration has affirmed the planes' airworthiness and that investigations were ongoing.

It said the department has been in close contact with the FAA and other the relevant organizations, including the two airlines, SpiceJet of India and Russia's Globus Airlines, that use the aircraft to operate flights into and out of Hong Kong International Airport.

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10:45 a.m.

Much of the world, including the entire European Union, 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 five months.

The European Aviation Safety Agency took steps to keep the Boeing 737 Max 8 out of the air, joining Asian and Middle Eastern governments and carriers that also had safety concerns in the aftermath of Sunday's crash, which killed all 157 people on board.

Referring to the Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people last year, European regulators said Tuesday that "similar causes may have contributed to both events."

British regulators indicated possible trouble with a reportedly damaged flight data recorder.

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This story has been corrected to fix a headline that should have referred to the 737, non the 747.LONDON (AP) - In a tentative first step toward ending months of political deadlock, British lawmakers voted Wednesday to block the country from leaving the European Union without a divorce agreement, triggering an attempt to delay that departure, currently due to take place on March 29.

Parliament is scheduled to decide Thursday whether to put the brakes on Brexit, a vote set up after lawmakers dealt yet another defeat to Prime Minister Theresa May amid a crisis over Britain's departure from the EU.

The lawmakers' 321-278 vote has political but not legal force, and does not entirely rule out a chaotic no-deal departure for Britain. But it might ease jitters spreading across the EU after lawmakers resoundingly rejected May's divorce deal on Tuesday. Exiting the EU without a deal could mean major disruptions for businesses and people in the U.K. and the 27 remaining EU countries.

In chaotic scenes that revealed how May's authority has been eroded by Brexit battles, more than a dozen pro-EU government ministers abstained rather than vote with her against ruling out no-deal.

Speaking with a raspy voice after weeks of relentless pressure, May hinted that she plans to make a third attempt to get lawmakers to support her Brexit deal, which they have already rejected twice.

She said Parliament faced a "fundamental choice" - a "short, technical extension" if lawmakers approve a divorce deal with the EU in the next week, or a much longer delay to Brexit if they don't.

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to lawmakers in the House of Commons, London, Wednesday March 13, 2019. In a tentative first step toward ending months of political deadlock, British lawmakers voted Wednesday to block the country from leaving the European Union without a divorce agreement, triggering an attempt to delay that departure, currently due to take place on March 29. (Mark Duffy/UK Parliament via AP)

The EU warned that voting against no-deal Brexit wasn't enough to stop it. By law, Britain will leave the EU on March 29, with or without a deal, unless it cancels Brexit or secures a delay.

"There are only two ways to leave the EU: with or without a deal," a European Commission official said. "The EU is prepared for both. To take no deal off the table, it is not enough to vote against no deal - you have to agree to a deal."

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the unresolved situation.

Earlier, chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier warned that "the risk of a no-deal has never been higher."

As Britain teeters ever closer to the edge of the Brexit cliff, lawmakers are trying to seize control from the divided and squabbling government, although it's far from clear if they can agree on a way forward. There are competing factions that support May's deal, a "softer" deal that would keep close ties with the EU, a no-deal Brexit, or even a new referendum on Britain's EU membership.

Parliament likely will agree to delay Brexit, but it would need EU approval. The bloc - openly exasperated by Britain's continuing Brexit crisis - warned that the U.K. would need to present a strong reason for any extension.

"I am against every extension - whether an extension of one day, one week, even 24 hours - if it's not based on a clear opinion of the House of Commons for something," said the European Parliament's chief Brexit official, Guy Verhofstadt. "Please make up your minds in London, because this uncertainty cannot continue."

The bloc is also reluctant to consider a delay that goes beyond elections to the European Parliament in late May, because it would mean Britain would have to participate in the polls even as it prepares to leave.

Both Britain and the EU have ramped up planning for a no-deal Brexit, which would rip up decades of rules for travel and trade between Britain and the bloc. Economists say it could cause huge upheaval, with customs checks causing gridlock at U.K. ports, new tariffs triggering sudden price increases and red tape for everyone from truckers to tourists.

The U.K. government announced its plans for the Irish border in the event of a no-deal Brexit, saying it wouldn't impose new checks, duties or controls on goods coming from EU member Ireland into Northern Ireland. It also said it wouldn't slap tariffs on 87 percent of goods coming into Britain from the EU - though there would be new levies on imports of some items including meat and cars.

The tariffs, intended to be temporary, wouldn't apply to goods crossing from Ireland to Northern Ireland, raising fears the plan would spark a rise in smuggling.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said under the proposals, "Northern Ireland will become a backdoor to the European single market and I think that in a matter of months that will lead to the need for checks at Northern Ireland's ports."

"I don't think the U.K.'s proposals will be workable for very long," he said during a visit to Washington.

In Irish border communities and U.K. ports, no-deal anxiety was mounting.

"Potentially it is going to be a nightmare," said Michael Eddy, a district councilor who lives in the aptly named town of Deal, a few miles from the major Channel port of Dover on England's south coast.

He says local authorities have modeled potential disruptions and believe that even "a two-minute delay for every truck going through the port of Dover" would lead to a 50-mile (80-kilometer) traffic jam.

"What then happens with local people wanting to go about their business, wanting to get to hospitals, wanting to get their kids to school, all of that kind of stuff?" he said.

The European Parliament approved measures Wednesday to ameliorate the immediate hardships of a no-deal Brexit. It backed emergency plans to provide continuity for everything from air, port and road traffic to foreign students to the fishing industry.

The U.K. Parliament has twice rejected the withdrawal agreement that May spent two years negotiating with the EU, and the bloc insists there will be no more talks.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned British lawmakers that "whoever rejects the (Brexit) agreement plays with the welfare of their citizens and the economy in a reckless way."

Yet May has not given up on a third attempt to get her deal through Parliament again.

U.K. Treasury chief Philip Hammond said he was "confident that we will do a deal" in the next few weeks.

Many Britons wish they could share his optimism.

"I think that a bit of unity would be helpful now," said Katharine Beaugie, an artist in Dover. "It would be much better if we could have found some sort of decision."

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Casert reported from Strasbourg, France. Renee Graham in Deal, England, Gregory Katz and Danica Kirka in London, Frank Jordans in Berlin and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.

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Follow AP's full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during Prime Minister's Questions inside the House of Commons in London, Wednesday March 13, 2019. Britain and the European Union seem braced Wednesday for a chaotic, cliff-edge Brexit, as Britain's Parliament is set to hold further votes over the split with European Union. (House of Commons/PA via AP)

Former U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) leader and member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage attends a session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Jean Francois Badias)

An anti-Brexit remain in the European Union supporter, takes part in a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

European Union's Frans Timmermans, first vice president of the Commission, left, and European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier attend a session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Jean Francois Badias)

European Union's Frans Timmermans, first vice president of the Commission, center left, and European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, right, attend a session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Jean Francois Badias)

Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters take part in a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland)

An anti-Brexit, left, and pro-Brexit supporter debate outside the House of Parliament in London, Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Prime Minister Theresa May's mission to secure Britain's orderly exit from the European Union appeared headed for defeat Tuesday, as lawmakers ignored her entreaties to support her divorce deal and end the political chaos and economic uncertainty that Brexit has unleashed.(AP Photo/Tim Ireland)

European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier delivers his speech during a plenary session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Jean Francois Badias)

Geoffrey Cox, Britain's Attorney General looks down as he leaves 10 Downing Street following a cabinet meeting in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. In the background is Stephen Barclay, Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May sits on front bench right, orange jacket, facing a packed parliament Tuesday March 12, 2019. May keeps going, declining to resign, despite two successive parliamentary defeats of historic proportion and she is still pushing for her Brexit agreement, despite ample evidence that Parliament won't support it. (Mark Duffy/UK Parliament via AP)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves from Downing Street 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/Matt Dunham)

A pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporter takes part in a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The European Parliament's chief Brexit official says he wants to limit any Brexit deadline extension to a few months at best, fearing it will take over the whole European election campaign. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

FILE - In this Tuesday March 12, 2019 file photo, lorries queue at the entrance to the Port of Dover ferry terminal during delays to the cross Channel ferry, in Dover, England. Britain unveiled a temporary tariff regime on Wednesday, March 13 that could boost the price of imports ranging from cars to butter if the U.K. leaves the European Union without an agreement on future trade, triggering fury among business leaders who weren't consulted on the proposals. The tariffs, which would last for up to 12 months, were published hours before lawmakers are scheduled to vote on whether to prevent the country from leaving the EU without a deal. (Gareth Fuller/PA via AP, file)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May sits on front bench right, orange jacket, facing a packed parliament Tuesday March 12, 2019. May keeps going, declining to resign, despite two successive parliamentary defeats of historic proportion and she is still pushing for her Brexit agreement, despite ample evidence that Parliament won't support it. (Mark Duffy/UK Parliament via AP)

General view of the European Parliament during a plenary session in Strasbourg, eastern France, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Jean Francois Badias)

A dog owner holds her dog in parliament square where pro and anti Brexit protesters hold a rally in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

MP Jeremy Wright leaves the Houses of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Britain's Parliament has voted to reject having the country leave the European Union without a divorce agreement, a decision that lessens but does not remove the chance of a chaotic "no-deal" Brexit. The vote Wednesday night also increases the chances that Britain's exit from the bloc will be delayed. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland)STRASBOURG, France (AP) - The Latest on Brexit (all times local):

9:10 p.m.

The European Commission is warning Britain's Parliament that voting against Brexit happening without a withdrawal deal in place isn't enough and lawmakers must approve the deal, too.

An official from the EU's executive branch noted Wednesday that the bloc already reached a divorce deal with Prime Minister Theresa May and the House of Commons rejected it - twice.

The official asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the unresolved situation.

Parliament voted Wednesday night to reject leaving the EU as scheduled on March 29 if it hasn't approved an agreement.

A pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporter takes part in a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The European Parliament's chief Brexit official says he wants to limit any Brexit deadline extension to a few months at best, fearing it will take over the whole European election campaign. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

The EU official said: "There are only two ways to leave the EU: with or without a deal. The EU is prepared for both. To take no deal off the table, it is not enough to vote against no deal - you have to agree to a deal."

-By Raf Casert.

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9 p.m.

British Prime Minister Theresa May says Parliament will vote Thursday on whether to seek a delay to Britain's March 29 departure from the European Union.

May said lawmakers are at the point where they must approve a withdrawal agreement in coming days and request a short postponement to Brexit day or request a "much longer" extension from the EU to negotiate a new arrangement.

The prime minister warned that a long extension would mean Britain would have to take part in European Parliament elections in late May.

She says this is not her preferred outcome and urged Parliament to "face up" to the consequences of the decisions it has made.

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8:20 p.m.

Britain's Parliament has voted to reject having the country leave the European Union without a divorce agreement, a decision that lessens but does not remove the chance of a chaotic "no-deal" Brexit.

The vote Wednesday night also increases the chances that Britain's exit from the bloc will be delayed.

British lawmakers voted 312 to 308 for a motion that "rejects the United Kingdom leaving the European Union without a Withdrawal Agreement and a Framework for the Future relationship."

The vote has political but not legal force. A no-deal Brexit could still happen unless Britain and the EU ratify a divorce agreement or Britain decides to cancel its departure.

British lawmakers now plan to vote Thursday on whether to ask the EU to delay the country's March 29 departure day.

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6:20 p.m.

Dutch authorities have demonstrated a digital system for completing customs forms that ferry terminals in the Netherlands are mandating to try to minimize disruptions following Brexit.

The system, called Portbase, was designed so freight haulers could fill out the forms online before they get to ferry terminals for trips to the U.K.

Managing Director Iwan van der Wolf said the system already is being used for destinations outside the European Union and now will be applied to the short trip between the Netherlands and the U.K.

He said Wednesday the online system "is already proven. It's in use, works very well and everybody's happy with it."

Dutch Overseas Trade Minister Sigrid Kaag says the Netherlands is well prepared for Brexit, but urged foreign transport companies to be ready for changes at Dutch ports.

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6:00 p.m.

French President Emmanuel Macron says the British Parliament's second rejection of Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit agreement with the European Union is "regrettable."

Macron, who was in Kenya's capital on Wednesday, said during a news conference that the EU spent months negotiating the deal and now only Britain can steer a course for leaving the bloc since "the solution to the current impasse is in London."

The French leader said EU negotiators would look at any request from the U.K. to postpone Brexit, which is set for March 29.

But Macron warned that the 27 remaining member countries wouldn't automatically agree to an extension.

He said the British government has "to explain to us what the point of it is, and in particular whether it adds anything."

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4:05 p.m.

The European Union has adopted contingency measures in case Britain leaves the bloc as scheduled on March 29 without a withdrawal deal in place, and the procedures would bring changes overnight to both sides of the English Channel.

The EU parliament approved the last of 11 such measures on Wednesday. They cover everything from air, port and road traffic to the status of foreign students. Some would require reciprocal measures in Britain.

Catherine Bearder, who represents southeast England in the European Parliament, used airline passengers as an example of the confusion a no-deal Brexit could create.

Bearder said: "If we're going to leave at midnight, they need to know: 'Can the planes take off the next day?' Whether their pilot's recognition is valid....That all of these things that actually make an airplane fly have to be recognized."

Belgian EU legislator Tom Vandenkendelaere described the alternate procedures as "the typical measures you would take in a state of emergency, and that are also only taken for a temporary, for a strict period in time with strict conditions as well."

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3:25 p.m.

British expats on Spain's Costa del Sol are fretting about what Brexit might entail for them, now that the U.K. Parliament has rejected the deal negotiated on their country's departure from the European Union.

Sitting in the sun outside a cafe in the town of La Cala de Mijas on Wednesday, 66-year-old retiree Kevin Fox said he was worried about his future public health care entitlements in the EU and how much his U.K. old-age pension would be worth.

When he moved to Spain 12 years ago, one pound sterling was worth 1.47 euros, he said. Now, he gets around 1.12 euros for each pound.

"I can't afford to stay here if they're not paying for my health care," Fox says, referring to a possible end of the current reciprocal care system between the U.K. and other EU countries.

Mick Robinson, an apartment owner in Spain for the past 13 years, says the current situation is "very worrying."

He says after the deal's defeat Tuesday, "It's even worse. We don't know what's going to happen."

The Spanish government says some 300,000 Britons are legally resident in Spain.

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3 p.m.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz says any delay to Britain's departure from the European Union should be as short as possible, though he isn't specifying any date.

The Austria Press Agency reported that Kurz said he doesn't expect British lawmakers to vote Wednesday to leave without a deal March 29. He added that "if they do that, then there's no way to help them," but the damage to Britain would be much bigger than to Europe.

If a no-deal Brexit is voted down, British lawmakers will decide Thursday whether to request a delay to Brexit. Kurz wouldn't specify the length of any extension but said that "the shorter the phase by which we extend, the better." He said that, ideally, it would be a question of weeks and not months.

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2 p.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel isn't saying how long she thinks a possible delay to Brexit should be, arguing that it's up to the British Parliament first to provide direction on what happens next.

U.K. lawmakers are to vote Wednesday on whether Britain should leave the European Union March 29 with no deal. If it rejects that idea, it will vote Thursday on whether to delay its departure.

Merkel stressed Wednesday that "it is in our mutual interest that we achieve an orderly departure," though "the options have of course become fewer" after British lawmakers rejected the painstakingly negotiated EU divorce deal.

But she wouldn't be drawn on details of the next move. She said: "I will only say be able to say exactly what will happen next when I have seen the next two days with the British votes, which will perhaps give us a bit of direction on what direction we can think in."

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11:25 a.m.

The European Parliament's chief Brexit official says he wants to limit any Brexit deadline extension to a few months at best, fearing it will take over the whole European election campaign.

Guy Verhofstadt warned that the May 23-26 polls across the 27 remaining EU nations "will be hijacked by the Brexiteers and the whole Brexit issue" if the extension spills over past those days.

"We will talk only about that," he said.

The EU Commission has warned that if Britain were still a member at the time of the elections, it would be forced to organize polls to fill its seats in the European legislature.

Verhofstadt said that "the only thing we will do is give a new mandate to Mr. (Nigel) Farage," the UK lawmaker who has long campaigned in the European Parliament for Britain to leave.

Farage said that "I don't want me coming back here" and called for the EU to reject an extension and make sure the U.K. leaves on time.

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10:20 a.m.

The British prime minister who set the Brexit process in motion is warning that leaving the European Union without a deal would be disastrous for the U.K.

David Cameron told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he fully supports Prime Minister Theresa May's attempts to maintain a "close partnership" with Europe after Britain leaves the EU.

He says Parliament should vote to "rule out no-deal" and seek an extension to the March 29 deadline for Britain's departure.

Cameron resigned after failing to convince British voters to stay in the EU in the 2016 referendum. He called the referendum to settle an internal Conservative Party dispute but ended up losing his office.

He advises the prime minister to seek "partnership deals" within Parliament that might lead to a solution of the Brexit impasse.

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10:10 a.m.

Germany's economy minister says a decisive rejection of a no-deal Brexit by British lawmakers could be a "turning point" and create hope for millions.

The British Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the European Union without a deal March 29 after lawmakers on Tuesday voted down Prime Minister Theresa May's EU divorce agreement.

German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier tweeted: "After divisive debates & votes, today can become a turning point: Rejecting No-deal-Brexit by a large cross-party majority will unite millions in the U.K. & in Europe. Will create hope & solidarity."

He added: "Whatever you finally decide. Good luck dear friends!"

If a no-deal Brexit is rejected, lawmakers are due to vote Thursday on whether to delay Brexit.

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9 a.m.

Britain's government says it won't impose new checks and controls on goods at the Northern Ireland-Republic of Ireland border if the U.K. leaves the European Union without an agreement on future relations.

The policy is part of temporary tariff regime unveiled Wednesday to inform lawmakers who will vote later on whether to eliminate the possibility of a no-deal exit from the EU. The regime will last for up to 12 months.

As part of the plan, the government says there would be no tariffs on 87 percent of imports by value, a "modest liberalization" compared with current trade rules.

A mixture of tariffs and quotas will apply to beef, lamb, pork, poultry and some dairy "to support farmers and producers who have historically been protected through high EU tariffs."

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8:55 a.m.

The European Parliament's chief Brexit official has questioned whether a short extension of the March 29 Brexit deadline can be given if Britain doesn't emerge from its political chaos on the issue.

Guy Verhofstadt said that in the wake of the U.K. parliament's rejection of the Brexit deal, the European legislature had no reason to act on pushing back the deadline to avoid a chaotic British exit from the bloc.

Verhofstadt said that "I don't see reason to give any extension if first of all we don't know what the majority position is of the House of Commons."

He said that "we are waiting now for a proposal coming from London. It is now in London that they have to find a way out of this and break the deadlock."

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8:45 a.m.

The European Union's economic commissioner says the British parliament has squandered its last chance to secure a deal smoothing the way for Brexit.

Pierre Moscovici has told France-2 television that the EU has "done everything we could do" to reassure British lawmakers, who rejected British Prime Minister Theresa May's EU divorce deal for a second time Tuesday.

Moscovici said "the train has passed two times" and the EU will not renegotiate the deal before the scheduled Brexit date of March 29.

He left the door open to an eventual delay if the British request it, but only if there's a clear justification. He said the British have already said what they don't want, and now "it's up to the British to say what they want."

Moscovici said Tuesday's vote increases chances of a British departure that is "disorderly, brutal, like a cliff," including sudden new customs rules and trade chaos.

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8:20 a.m.

Germany's foreign minister says the U.K. Parliament's rejection of the Brexit deal negotiated on Britain's departure from the European Union was "reckless."

Heiko Maas says the EU made "far-reaching additional offers and assurances" at Britain's request this week.

In remarks released late Tuesday, Maas said the U.K. Parliament's decision to reject the deal "brings a no-deal scenario ever closer."

He added that "whoever rejects the agreement plays with the welfare of their citizens and the economy in a reckless way."

Maas said Germany is prepared "as best as possible for this worst possible case," though Germany hopes a disorderly Brexit can still be avoided in the coming 17 days.

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8:10 a.m.

The European Union's chief Brexit negotiator says Britain must finally get its act together as a chaotic no-deal departure from the bloc is little more than two weeks away.

Michel Barnier said Wednesday it was time for Westminster to change tack, after the U.K. parliament handed Prime Minister Theresa May another huge defeat on her freshly renegotiated Brexit deal.

Barnier said that "again the House of Commons says what it does not want. Now this impasse can only be solved in the U.K."

The EU parliament's Brexit group was meeting to assess the situation in Strasbourg, France before a plenary debate on the impasse.

British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal.

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Follow AP's full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit

An anti-Brexit remain in the European Union supporter, takes part in a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Anti-Brexit remain in the European Union supporters, take part in a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Prime Minister Theresa May's mission to secure Britain's orderly exit from the European Union appeared headed for defeat Tuesday, as lawmakers ignored her entreaties to support her divorce deal and end the political chaos and economic uncertainty that Brexit has unleashed.(AP Photo/Tim Ireland)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to lawmakers in parliament, London, Tuesday March 12, 2019. Prime Minister Theresa May's mission to secure Britain's orderly exit from the European Union appeared headed for defeat Tuesday, as lawmakers ignored her entreaties to support her divorce deal and end the political chaos and economic uncertainty that Brexit has unleashed. (Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament via AP)

European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier arrives at a plenary session in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Jean Francois Badias)

Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters take part in a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland)

Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporters take part in a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Artist Kaya Mar, anti-Brexit remain in the European Union supporter, holds a placard 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)

An anti-Brexit remain in the European Union supporter, holds a placard during a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Britain and the European Union braced Wednesday for a chaotic, cliff-edge Brexit after U.K. lawmakers rejected the divorce deal that the two sides had agreed upon. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday pledged greater partnerships with Kenya in economic development and efforts to improve the environment and to battle regional extremist violence.

At the start of his two-day visit to Kenya, Macron met with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and launched a new car model assembled at a Peugeot factory in this East African country.

"What we want to do is to be part of your new growth agenda," he said.

Following discussions with Kenyatta, Macron unveiled a new Peugeot 3008 SUV which will be locally assembled by the French car manufacturer. Kenyatta drove his guest for a short test drive of the vehicle.

"This is a good day for Kenya and for our development," Kenyatta said adding that he expects Macron's visit to have a positive impact on tourism and business.

Macron and Kenyatta signed new agreements to development public and private partnerships. Macron was accompanied by a group of French business leaders.

France's President Emmanuel Macron, left, shakes hands with Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta as they speak to the media during a visit to the Central Railway Station in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

Macron's visit is the first by a French leader since Kenya became independent from Britain in 1963. He was received at State House, President Uhuru Kenyatta's official residence, and given a guard of honor with a 21-gun salute.

Macron came to Kenya after visiting Djibouti and Ethiopia on a trip that is focusing on investment and security in East Africa, a region of increasing strategic importance.

In Ethiopia, a country mourning the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash on Sunday that killed 157 people, Macron expressed condolences and made a gesture of confidence in the state-owned company.

Ethiopia's new ambassador to France posted on social media a photo of Macron with the Ethiopian Airlines CEO, Tewolde Gebremariam, saying the French leader had "reaffirmed his support for the launch of Ethiopian flights to Marseille, which will be the second destination in France."

In Kenya the French president also will attend a U.N. environmental meeting and One Planet Summit in Nairobi.

Macron said top among the issues they had discussed was security and counter-terrorism.

"We want to improve the cooperation in the region from the security and defense point of view," he said.

Kenya is among the African Union countries contributing troops to reinforce Somalia's weak army against an insurgency the Islamic extremist rebels of al-Shabab, which is affilitated to by al-Qaida. Kenya has suffered the most of al-Shabab attacks outside Somalia.

Macron said France will work closely with Kenya on green energy. He said Kenya delivered "tremendous results in the fight against climate change."

Macron's office said that Kenya is the only African nation to reach the goal of making renewable energy 75 percent of its energy mix.

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Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa

France's President Emmanuel Macron, center left, walks with Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta as they arrive to visit the Central Railway Station in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

France's President Emmanuel Macron, left, shakes hands with Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta as they speak to the media during a visit to the Central Railway Station in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

France's President Emmanuel Macron, standing in front of a Kenyan military officer, speaks to the media during a visit with Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta to the Central Railway Station in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

France's President Emmanuel Macron, left, speaks to the media accompanied by Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta during a visit to the Central Railway Station in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

France's President Emmanuel Macron, right, meets with Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta on his arrival at State House in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi)

France's President Emmanuel Macron, left, meets with Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta on his arrival at State House in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi)

France's President Emmanuel Macron, left, meets with Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta on his arrival at State House in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi)

France's President Emmanuel Macron inspects the guard of honour at State House in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi)

France's President Emmanuel Macron and Uhuru Kenyatta stand together in readiness to inspect the guard of honour at State House in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi)

France's President Emmanuel Macron shakes hands with Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta after their press conference at State House in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi)

France's President Emmanuel Macron speaks during a press conference with Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta at State House in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Macron is visiting Kenya Wednesday, after stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday, as part of his latest Africa visit aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi)WASHINGTON (AP) - As country after country grounded Boeing's 737 Max jets after a deadly crash Sunday in Ethiopia, U.S. air safety regulators remained resolute in their refusal to do so - until Wednesday.

That's when the Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order keeping the planes on the tarmac. The agency said what made the difference was new, enhanced satellite tracking data and physical evidence on the ground that linked the Ethiopian jet's movements to those of an Indonesian Lion Air flight that plunged into the Java Sea in October and killed 189 people.

"That evidence aligns the Ethiopian flight closer to Lion Air, what we know happened to Lion Air," said Daniel Elwell, acting FAA administrator.

Officials at Lion Air have said sensors on their plane produced erroneous information on its last four flights, triggering an automatic nose-down command that the pilots were unable to overcome on its final voyage.

The FAA was under intense pressure to ground the planes and resisted even after Canada on Wednesday joined more than 40 countries, including the European Union and China, in barring the Max from the air, leaving the U.S. almost alone.

The agency, which prides itself on making data-driven decisions, had maintained there was nothing to show the Boeing jets were unsafe, and flights continued.

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)

But President Donald Trump, who announced the grounding, was briefed Wednesday on new developments by Elwell and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, and they determined the planes should be grounded, the White House said. Trump spoke afterward with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg and Boeing signed on.

"At the end of the day, it is a decision that has the full support of the secretary, the president and the FAA as an agency," Elwell said.

While early satellite tracking data showed similarities between the Ethiopian jet's flight path and Lion Air, Elwell said the FAA was skeptical of the low-resolution images. The data showed movements that weren't consistent with how airplanes fly, Elwell said.

On Wednesday, global air traffic surveillance company Aireon, Boeing and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board were able to enhance the initial data and make it more precise "to create a description of the flight that made it similar enough to Lion Air," Elwell said.

He wouldn't detail the evidence found on the ground, saying the FAA is a party to the ongoing investigation.

The U.S. also grounded a larger version of the plane, the Max 9.

The Ethiopian plane's flight data and voice recorders were to be sent to France Wednesday night for analysis, Elwell said. Some aviation experts have warned that finding answers in that crash, which killed 157 people, could take months.

Airlines, mainly Southwest, American and United, should be able to swap out planes pretty quickly, and passengers shouldn't be terribly inconvenienced, said Paul Hudson, president of flyersrights.org, which represents passengers. The Max, he said, makes up only a small percentage of the U.S. passenger jet fleet, he said.

"I think any disruptions will be very minor," he said.

Sharon Barnes, a passenger at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, said she agreed with grounding the planes. "I think it was the right decision given that the rest of the world is doing the same thing, and it's a prudent thing to be doing until we know more about what's going on," she said.

Michael Fortman, picking up wife at the Seattle airport, wondered why the planes could pass all tests to be flying, yet they now have been grounded.

"Did it really go through all the testing or not, or just stuff afterward that they're finding out about the plane?"Fortman asked.

Boeing issued a statement saying it supported the FAA's decision even though it "continues to have full confidence" in the planes' safety.

The company also said it had recommended the suspension of the Max fleet after consultations with the government.

The groundings will have a far-reaching financial impact on Boeing, at least in the short term, said John Cox, a veteran pilot and CEO of Safety Operating Systems.

In addition to those that have already been grounded, there are more than 4,600 Boeing 737 Max 8 planes on backlog that are not yet delivered to airlines.

"There are delivery dates that aren't being met, there's usage of the aircraft that's not being met, and all the supply chain things that Boeing so carefully crafted," Cox said.

Even so, Boeing will recover, because planes typically fly for up to 40 years, and any needed fix will be made quickly, he said.

Shares in Chicago-based Boeing ended up $1.73 or about 0.5 percent, at $377.14 Wednesday after they lost more than 11 percent in the first two days this week. The stock is still up 17 percent for the year.

In making the decision to ground the Max 8s in Canada, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said a comparison of vertical fluctuations found a "similar profile" between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and the Lion Air crash. Garneau, a former astronaut who flew in the space shuttle, emphasized that the data is not conclusive but crossed a threshold that prompted Canada to bar the Max 8.

"This is not the proof that it is the same root problem," he added. "It could be something else."

The growing number of countries joining the ban put the FAA in a difficult position, said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the NTSB who is now an aviation consultant. He said the FAA, which certified the 737 Max as airworthy and has been the lead regulatory body for the airplane.

Goelz said Trump likely was feeling pressure from Congress and the public to step in. "There's probably nobody in the administration who's got more of a sensitive ear to cable television," he said.

After Trump's announcement, American Airlines said its "teams will make every effort to rebook customers as quickly as possible."

United Airlines, which grounded its 14 Max planes, said the aircraft account for roughly 40 flights per day. Through a combination of spare aircraft and rebooking customers, the airline did not anticipate a significant operational impact.

Southwest Airlines said it immediately complied with the order and removed its 34 Max 8 from scheduled service. The airline said the Max 8 planes account for less than 5 percent of the airline's daily flights, adding that it remains confident in the airliner after completing more than 88,000 flight hours over 41,000 flights, but that it supports the FAA's decision.

Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said its pilots had received special training on how to deal with the Max's anti-stall software that could point the nose down.

"In addition to the basic trainings given for 737 aircraft types, an additional training was given for the Max version," Tewolde told state news reporters. "After the Lion Air crash, questions were raised, so Boeing sent further instructions that it said pilots should know."

Tewolde said he is confident the "investigation will reveal that the crash is not related to Ethiopian Airlines' safety record."

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Krisher reported from Detroit, while Gillies reported from Toronto. AP video journalist Manuel Valdes and AP writers Elias Meseret and Yidnek Kirubel in Hejere, Ethiopia, and Cathy Bussewitz and Alexandra Olson in New York contributed to this story.

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)SINGAPORE (AP) - A growing number of airlines and countries around the world have grounded Boeing 737 Max jets or banned them from their airspace following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people on Sunday, five months after a similar Indonesian Lion Air jet plunged into the ocean, killing 189. A look at those countries and airlines:

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AUSTRALIA

Australia has announced a temporary ban on flights by 737 Max aircraft, although none of its airlines currently operate them. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority said Tuesday that the ban will affect two foreign airlines - SilkAir and Fiji Airways - that use them for flights to Australia.

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BRAZIL

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)

Brazil's Gol Airlines has suspended the use of seven Max 8 jets. The airline said it hopes to return the aircraft to use as soon as possible. Gol said it has made nearly 3,000 flights with the Max 8.

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CANADA

Canadian on Wednesday closed its airspace to the Max 8. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said a comparison of vertical fluctuations found a "similar profile" to the Lion Air crash that killed 189 people in October. Canada lost 18 of its citizens in Sunday's crash, the second highest number after Kenya.

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CAYMAN ISLANDS

Cayman Airways, a Caribbean carrier, has stopped using its two Max 8 jets. President and CEO Fabian Whorms said the move starting Monday will cause changes to flight schedules. Cayman is the flag carrier of Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory.

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CHINA

China has 96 Max 8 jets in service, belonging to carriers such as Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines. The civil aviation authority directed the planes to be grounded indefinitely on Monday. There were eight Chinese citizens on the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed shortly after taking off on Sunday.

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ETHIOPIA

A spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines said it grounded its remaining four Max 8 jets as an "extra safety precaution" while it investigates Sunday's deadly crash. The airline is awaiting the delivery of 25 more Max 8 jets.

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EUROPE

The European Aviation Safety Agency has issued a directive grounding all 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft. EASA said in its emergency airworthiness directive Tuesday that "at this early stage" of the most recent investigation, "it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events." The grounding applies to all European Union airspace.

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FIJI

Fiji has suspended all Max 8 flights in and out of the country. The decision only affects one operator, Fiji Airways.

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HONG KONG

Hong Kong has banned the operation of all 737 Max aircraft "into, out of and over" the key Asian aviation hub beginning Wednesday evening. The announcement from the Civil Aviation Department said the ban would continue "until further notice." It said the department has been in close contact with the two airlines, SpiceJet of India and Russia's Globus Airlines, that use the aircraft to operate flights into and out of Hong Kong International Airport.

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ICELAND

Icelandair Group has temporarily suspended operations of its three 737 Max aircraft until further notice. President and CEO Bogi Nels Bogason said Tuesday that the temporary suspension won't impact the company's operations, as it only affects three aircraft out of a fleet of 33.

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INDIA

India has grounded all 737 Max 8 planes. A statement late Tuesday said the planes "will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations." The statement did not say how many planes were affected.

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INDONESIA

Indonesia has temporarily grounded Max 8 jets to inspect their airworthiness. Director General of Air Transportation Polana B. Pramesti said the move was made to ensure flight safety. A Lion Air model of the same plane crashed in Indonesia in October. Indonesian airlines operate 11 Max 8 jets. Lion Air, which owns 10 of them, said it will try to minimize the impact of the decision on operations. The other Max 8 jet belongs to national carrier Garuda.

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NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand has suspended Max 8 flights in and out of the country. The decision only affects one operator, Fiji Airways. No New Zealand airlines use the Max 8 planes.

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MALAYSIA

The Civil Aviation Authority said no Malaysian carriers operate the Max 8, but that foreign airlines are banned from flying the plane in Malaysia, and from transiting in the country, until further notice.

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MEXICO

Mexico's civil aviation agency announced Wednesday night that it is suspending immediately all flights by Max 8 and 9 jets in its airspace.

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OMAN

Oman and the United Arab Emirates have barred flights by Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft. Oman's Public Authority for Civil Aviation made the sultanate's announcement, without elaborating on its reasoning. State-owned Oman Air operates five Max 8 aircraft and said it was rescheduling other planes for its flights.

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PANAMA

Copa Airlines has temporarily suspend operations of its six MAX 9 planes until the cause of the Ethiopian crash is known.

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SINGAPORE

Singapore has temporarily banned Max 8 jets - and other models in the Max range - from entering and leaving the country. SilkAir, a regional carrier owned by Singapore Airlines, has six Max 8 jets. It said the ban "will have an impact on some of the airline's flight schedules."

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SOUTH AFRICA

Comair, the operator of British Airways and Kulula flights in South Africa, has grounded its Max 8 while it consults with Boeing, other operators and technical experts. Its statement did not say how many planes were affected. It said the decision was made without intervention from regulatory authorities.

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SOUTH KOREA

South Korean airline Eastar Jet has suspended operations of its two Max 8 planes and replaced them with Boeing 737-800 planes starting Wednesday on routes to Japan and Thailand. The airline said it hasn't found any problems, but is voluntarily grounding the planes in response to customer concerns.

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TURKEY

Turkish Airlines has suspended all Max flights. In a statement Tuesday on Twitter, CEO Bilal Eksi said the suspension would continue until the "uncertainty affecting safety is cleared."

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UAE

The UAE's General Civil Aviation Authority has banned the aircraft from its airspace in what is said was "a precautionary measure." The Max is the workhorse of the Dubai government-owned budget carrier FlyDubai. It operates 11 Max 8 and 2 Max 9 jets. Its total fleet is around 60 aircraft, including other models of the 737.

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UNITED STATES

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration grounded the MAX Wednesday, saying "new information" indicated some similarities with a Lion Air crash in the Java Sea that killed 189 people in October. The agency suspended the jets while investigators determine whether there was a shared cause of the two crashes. The FAA had been criticized for allowing the planes to fly while dozens of countries suspended their use.

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VIETNAM

Vietnam has banned Max planes from flying into its airspace. The ban lasts until further notice. None of Vietnam's four airlines uses the Max model planes in their fleets, but Korea's Eastar Jet, Thai Lion Air and Malaysia's Malindor Air fly those planes to Vietnamese destinations.

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This story has been corrected to fix references to the death toll in the Lion Air crash. It was 189, not 187

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)

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 photo taken Monday, March 11, 2019, three Shanghai Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 passenger planes are parked at the Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai, China. U.S. Aviation experts on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 joined the investigation into the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner that killed 157 people, as a growing number of airlines grounded the new Boeing plane involved in the crash. (Chinatopix via AP)NEW YORK (AP) - A case featuring sensational claims that followers of a 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 minor 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."

Nancy Salzman, center, arrives at Brooklyn federal court, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in New York. Salzman, a co-founder of NXIVM, an embattled upstate New York self-help organization, is expected to plead guilty in a case featuring sensational claims that some followers became branded sex slaves. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

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.

Nancy Salzman, center, arrives at Brooklyn federal court, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in New York. Salzman, a co-founder of NXIVM, an embattled upstate New York self-help organization, is expected to plead guilty in a case featuring sensational claims that some followers became branded sex slaves. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Nancy Salzman arrives at Brooklyn federal court, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in New York. Salzman, a co-founder of NXIVM, an embattled upstate New York self-help organization, is expected to plead guilty in a case featuring sensational claims that some followers became branded sex slaves. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Nancy Salzman, center, arrives at Brooklyn federal court, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in New York. Salzman, a co-founder of NXIVM, an embattled upstate New York self-help organization, is expected to plead guilty in a case featuring sensational claims that some followers became branded sex slaves. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Nancy Salzman, center, is surrounded by reporters as she arrives at Brooklyn federal court, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in New York. Salzman, a co-founder of NXIVM, an embattled upstate New York self-help organization, is expected to plead guilty in a case featuring sensational claims that some followers became branded sex slaves. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Nancy Salzman, center, leaves Brooklyn Federal court, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in New York. Salzman, co-founder of NXIVM, the embattled upstate New York self-help organization has pleaded guilty in a case featuring sensational claims that some followers became branded sex slaves. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)MIAMI (AP) - Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz on Wednesday offered his vision for what an independent presidency could look like, even though he still hasn't decided whether to enter the White House race himself.

In a speech at Miami Dade College, Schultz laid out his plans for protecting democracy and free enterprise and sought to show how a president elected outside the two-party system could repair the current dysfunction in Washington.

Schultz also vowed to sign only legislation that has bipartisan support and to not put forward any Supreme Court nominee who cannot be confirmed by two-thirds of the Senate.

"The courts have become yet another battlefield in the ongoing war between Democratic and Republican leaders," Schultz said. "These battles have undermined our faith in the rule of law and the impartiality of the entire judicial system. All of this has to change."

Schultz also said that he would assemble a Cabinet that includes members from across the political spectrum and consists of a larger share of women than that of any previous president. In an explicit contrast to President Donald Trump, Schultz argued that he'll nominate "the most qualified people, period" and that he won't "humiliate them on Twitter or make decisions so outrageous that they feel compelled to resign in protest." Trump's Cabinet has been plagued by regular turnover and scandal.

The 65-year-old billionaire also highlighted his difficult upbringing in a New York City public housing project.

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz gives a speech at Miami Dade College in Miami, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The 65-year-old billionaire gave details on what an independent presidency could look like despite not yet deciding whether to enter the White House race himself. (AP Photo/Ellis Rua)

Rothschild Toussaint, an economic major who attended Schultz's speech, said the former CEO's centrist message is one that could unify the country during a time of extreme divide. Although he is a registered Democrat, Toussaint, who immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti, said he is "open to all possibilities" for the upcoming presidential election.

"It seems like a lot of self-interest is starting to pull apart politics, especially along Democrat and Republican lines," he said

Schultz has been exploring a potential independent candidacy for months, to the dismay of some Democrats who say that an outside independent candidacy could have a spoiler effect, handing Trump a second term.

Schultz, a lifelong Democrat who recently registered as an independent, has said he would do nothing to help re-elect Trump. He has said that Democrats and Republicans are equally to blame for repelling voters at the center of the political spectrum, and he has argued that an independent candidacy like his could re-engage them.

___

Summers reported from Washington

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz gives a speech at Miami Dade College in Miami, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The 65-year-old billionaire gave details on what an independent presidency could look like despite not yet deciding whether to enter the White House race himself. (AP Photo/Ellis Rua)ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) - Algerian opposition leaders called for continued mass protests Wednesday against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika as key figures in his new government attempted to appeal for calm.

The opposition accuses the 82-year-old president of flouting the constitution to cling to power. This week he abandoned plans to seek a fifth term, but he also canceled next month's presidential election without setting a new date and replaced key ministerial posts, including that of prime minister, with loyalists.

Teachers took to the streets to keep up pressure on the longtime president, as political uncertainty grips this gas-rich North African country.

A broad swath of opposition figures met Wednesday at the headquarters of the Islamist party El Adala and issued a statement saying: "At this historic, decisive moment, the Algerian opposition is at the side of the people."

They called the election delay unconstitutional, and appealed for the unprecedented revolt against the ailing Bouteflika to continue. Nationwide, potentially decisive protests are expected Friday, after millions have come to the streets in recent weeks.

Algeria's new deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Ramtane Lamamra, tried to appeal for calm on Public Radio Wednesday, saying the new government is "fully fledged" and "will ensure political and economic institutions function normally."

Teachers hold placards reading, on the left, "You have millions. We are millions of teachers" and in the center "I dream of a democratic Algeria", during a protest in Algiers, Algeria, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Algerian teachers gathered outside the central post office in the capital Algiers to protest President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to delay next month's presidential election. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul)

"We want the transition (to new elections) to be as short as possible," he added.

Former foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, who is close to Bouteflika, said, "we want to organize successful elections in a climate of serenity to preserve the stability of Algeria."

Brahimi denied reports that he would chair a conference planning Algeria's future, adding: "I say to the young Algerians who protest, do not destroy Algeria, like Iraq and Syria."

Algerians have barely seen their president since he suffered a stroke in 2013, and question his fitness for office. Protesters are also angry about corruption and secrecy in Algeria's power structure.

Wednesday's opposition gathering included prominent Islamists and rival secular parties, two former prime ministers and others who have served in Bouteflika's governments but have since turned against the country's leadership.

However it didn't include all opposition forces, and overall the opposition has failed to come together around a single figure seen as a viable alternative to Bouteflika.

Meanwhile, teachers protested Wednesday outside the central post office in Algiers, and Algerian media reported teachers' protests in other cities too.

The demonstrators demanded that Bouteflika step down now, or at the latest when his current term ends next month.

Bouteflika returned Sunday from two weeks in a Geneva hospital. A fighter in Algeria's war for independence from France, he is notably appreciated for reconciling his deeply damaged nation after a decade-long Islamic insurgency in the 1990s left some 200,000 dead.

___

Thomas Adamson and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.

A teacher holds a placard during a protest in Algiers, Algeria, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Algerian teachers gathered outside the central post office in the capital Algiers to protest President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to delay next month's presidential election. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul)

A teacher holds a placard during a protest in Algiers, Algeria, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Algerian teachers gathered outside the central post office in the capital Algiers to protest President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to delay next month's presidential election. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul)

A teacher holds a placard during a protest in Algiers, Algeria, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Algerian teachers gathered outside the central post office in the capital Algiers to protest President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to delay next month's presidential election. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul)

Teachers hold placards during a protest in Algiers, Algeria, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Algerian teachers gathered outside the central post office in the capital Algiers to protest President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to delay next month's presidential election. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul)

A teacher holds a placard during a protest in Algiers, Algeria, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Algerian teachers gathered outside the central post office in the capital Algiers to protest President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to delay next month's presidential election. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul)Venkanna said he was offered prayers with his family members.

Venkanna, said he conducted a pooja and offered prayers to the Goddess Kali for a win of the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu. (Photo: ANI)

Amaravati: Telugu Desam party Member of Legislative Council (MLC) Buddha Venkanna on Thursday performed a 'havan' to ensure his party's successful performance in the upcoming Assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh.

Venkanna, said he conducted a pooja and offered prayers to the Goddess Kali for a win of the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu. Venkanna said he was offered prayers with his family members.

Venkanna said: "Chandrababu Naidu is a visionary leader. I wish he serves for the state for a longer time. I performed the pooja as some evil forces are coming together against Naidu as they are incapable of fighting and winning simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly polls. In order to prevent such evil forces, we performed this pooja today."

Telugu Desam Party (TDP) on Tuesday released its final list of 25 candidates for Andhra Pradesh for the ensuing Lok Sabha elections and the third list of 36 candidates for the state Assembly polls. Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu-led party has finalised its candidates for both state and national polls.

There are 25 Lok Sabha and175 Assembly seats in Andhra Pradesh.

Andhra Pradesh will go to polls in a single phase on April 11. The Lok Sabha and legislative assembly polls will be held in the state simultaneously on this day. The results will be announced on May 23.TIRANA, Albania (AP) - The leaders of both Albania and North Macedonia say they believe that the European Union will decide in June to open membership talks with them.

North Macedonia's Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who on Wednesday was in Tirana to meet with his counterpart Edi Rama, said they expect "the EU to take a positive stand on our two countries ... so that we fulfil this strategic goal."

Brussels decided last June that membership talks with Albania and Macedonia - recently renamed North Macedonia - may open if the two nations continue with the progress of reform.

The two prime ministers said their Cabinets have complied with all requests, including reforms in their judiciaries and public administration.

.

North Macedonia's Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, left, and his Albanian counterpart shake hands during their meeting in Tirana, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The two leaders say they believe that the European Union will decide in June to open membership talks with them. (AP Photo)

North Macedonia's Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, left, and his Albanian counterpart smile during their meeting in Tirana, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The two leaders say they believe that the European Union will decide in June to open membership talks with them. (AP Photo)

North Macedonia's Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, left, and his Albanian counterpart Edi Rama shake hands during their meeting in Tirana, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The two leaders say they believe that the European Union will decide in June to open membership talks with them. (AP Photo)LONDON (AP) - Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are once again being cast as monopolies that have become too powerful for society's good, a recurring theme that's increasing the pressure to rein them in.

A 150-page report commissioned by the British government depicts big digital companies in search, social media, advertising and e-commerce as threats to competition, innovation and personal privacy. Meanwhile, the music streaming service Spotify filed an antitrust complaint in Europe against Apple, accusing it of stifling competition through its control over the iPhone's operating system and app store.

Wednesday's dual attacks provide more fodder in a worldwide debate about whether stricter rules need to be drawn up to handcuff or even break up leading tech companies as they try to extend their tentacles into new markets.

"What you're seeing is a broad recognition that there is a problem," said Matt Stoller, a fellow at Open Markets, an institution that studies corporate monopolies and advocates for more competitive markets.

In the U.S., Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren last week proposed breaking up the biggest U.S. tech companies, saying they have too much market and political power.

That high-profile missive further emboldened long-time critics such as former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

FILE - This photo combo of images shows the Amazon, Google and Facebook logos. A review into competition in the U.K.'s digital market says the country needs tough new rules to help counter the dominance of big tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon. The independent review published Wednesday, March 13, 2019 says global tech giants don't face enough competition and that existing rules are outdated and need to be beefed up. (AP Photo, file)

In a recent opinion piece for The Guardian newspaper in Britain, Reich compared Facebook, Google and Amazon to "robber barons" who built business empires on innovations in the late 19th century and were eventually broken up to foster more competition.

"I think we are seeing a turn of the pendulum," Reich said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press. "I think Silicon Valley executives really need to take a hard look in the mirror."

The British government's new report was led by Harvard University professor Jason Furman, who was a chief economic adviser to former President Barack Obama. The report found that global tech giants don't face enough competition and says that existing rules are outdated and need to be strengthened.

"The digital sector has created substantial benefits but these have come at the cost of increasing dominance of a few companies, which is limiting competition and consumer choice and innovation," Furman said. "Some say this is inevitable or even desirable. I think the U.K. can do better."

As for Spotify, the streaming service's beef with Apple centers on a 30 percent tax that digital services have to pay to use Apple's "in-app" payment system, making Spotify subscriptions more expensive than Apple Music. That same commission system recently prompted Netflix to stop accepting new subscription sign-ups through its iPhone app, as Apple prepares to unveil its own rival service.

"There is now a shared aspiration, which is the power of the tech platforms being reduced," said Blair Levin, a policy adviser to New Street Research and a former chief of staff to a Federal Communications Commission chairman.

Apple didn't respond to requests for comments on Spotify. Google and Amazon also didn't respond to request for comment on the British report, while Facebook declined to comment.

But in the past, all four companies have fiercely defended their business practices and attempted to make cases that there is still ample competition in their respective markets.

And the companies' supporters, including legions of lobbyists hired to influence lawmakers, note there is little evidence that their actions have hurt consumers by driving up prices or degrading the quality of their services - many of which are free.

Nevertheless, Britain's House of Lords recently called for a new digital regulatory authority to provide overall oversight.

European Union authorities also have faced down big tech companies. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager has slapped whopping fines on Google and ordered Apple to pay back billions in back taxes. EU, German and Austrian authorities are looking separately into Amazon's marketplace platform over complaints of unfair practices.

Although the U.S. government has yet to take similar action, the Federal Trade Commission recently created a task force focused on anti-competitive behavior in the industry.

Britain's financial secretary, Philip Hammond, said the country's government would respond later this year to the report's recommendations, which must be approved by Britain's Parliament to take effect.

Recommendations include setting up a new "digital markets unit" tasked with giving people more control over their data by using open standards. That would let people move or share their personal information if they switch to a new digital service.

The report's authors said making it easier to switch would result in new digital services while creating new business opportunities to manage the data.

The report also recommended:

- Getting big companies to share key data with startups, while safeguarding personal information. The report said data sharing can help foster innovation and new business ideas. The panel cited as an example Uber's release of data to help improve infrastructure and planning decisions.

- Drawing up a code of conduct to lay out acceptable behavior for tech companies in their relationships with users. The report said clarifying unfair conduct would allow disputes to be resolved more easily.

- Rewriting rules so authorities can better stop digital mergers likely to "damage future competition, innovation and consumer choice." Critics have contended one way tech companies protect their turf is by using their cash and stock collectively worth trillions of dollars to buy promising startups before they can evolve into competitive threats.

___

Liedtke reported from San Francisco. AP Technology Writer Rachel Lerman contributed from San Francisco.

___

This story has been corrected to fix the spelling the Harvard professor's last name. It's Furman, not Fuhrman.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.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP, during a rally in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Erdogan has laid in to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him a "thief" and a "tyrant" in the latest spat between the two leaders.(Presidential Press Service via AP, Pool)

"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.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP, during a rally in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Erdogan has laid in to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him a "thief" and a "tyrant" in the latest spat between the two leaders.(Presidential Press Service via AP, Pool)

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP, during a rally in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Erdogan has laid in to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him a "thief" and a "tyrant" in the latest spat between the two leaders.(Presidential Press Service via AP, Pool)

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP, during a rally in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Erdogan has laid in to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him a "thief" and a "tyrant" in the latest spat between the two leaders.(Presidential Press Service via AP, Pool)ROME (AP) - Italy's Justice Ministry has ordered a preliminary inquiry into an appeals court ruling that overturned a rape verdict in part by arguing that the woman who was attacked was too ugly to be a credible rape victim.

The ruling has sparked outrage in Italy, prompting a flash mob Monday outside the Ancona court, where protesters shouted "Shame!" and held up signs saying "indignation."

The appeals sentence was handed down in 2017 - by an all-female panel - but the reasons behind it only emerged publicly when Italy's high court annulled it on March 5 and ordered a retrial. The Court of Cassation said Wednesday its own reasons for ordering the retrial will be issued next month.

Two Peruvian men were initially convicted of the 2015 rape of a Peruvian woman in Ancona, but the Italian appeals court overturned the verdict and absolved them, finding that she was not a credible witness. In part of the ruling, the court noted that the suspects had found her unattractive and too "masculine" to be a credible rape victim.

Cinzia Molinaro, a lawyer for the victim, said her appeal to the Cassation contested a host of procedural problems with the acquittal verdict but said she had also cited the "absolute unacceptability" of the Italian court's reference to the victim's physical appearance.

The appeals sentence quoted one of the suspects as saying he found the woman unattractive and had her listed as "Viking" on his cellphone.

Molinaro noted that the woman, who has since returned to Peru, had suffered such genital trauma in the rape that she required stitches.

The Justice Ministry said it was conducting the "necessary preliminary investigations" into the appeals verdict. Molinaro said the ministry can send investigators to a court to check if there were any problems or omissions in the sentence, even when the case is still under appeal.

The case is the second to spark criticism in recent weeks in Italy, where cases of sexual violence and the murders of women regularly top the news.

Protests broke out earlier this month after an appeals court in Bologna nearly cut in half the sentence for a man who admitted to killing his partner. The court cited as one of its reasons for the reduction the "emotional storm" of jealousy that the killer experienced. Critics said the reduced sentence basically sanctioned the practice of "honor killings."LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) - Emergency crews sifted through debris as night fell on frantic efforts to rescue scores of school children and others feared trapped inside a three-story building that collapsed Wednesday in Nigeria's densely populated commercial capital, Lagos. At least eight people were confirmed dead and 37 others were rescued alive.

Anguished families crowded around the flattened remains of the building, which housed an elementary school, holding out hope that more children would still be found alive in the wreckage.

Scenes of jubilation erupted earlier in the day when a man was brought out alive. But the mood shifted dramatically an hour later when another man was brought out dead. The rescue of a woman carried to an ambulance on a stretcher was greeted with cries of, "She's not dead!" in the local Yoruba language.

The evening call to prayer could be heard as hundreds anxiously waited in the city's Ita Faji neighborhood trying to help in rescue efforts. Using flashlights, some people pulled what looked like clothing from the ruins. In the crowd, a baby cried.

As many as 100 children had been in the primary school on the building's top floors, witnesses said.

"It touches one to lose precious lives in any kind of mishap, particularly those so young and tender," Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said.

A child is rescued 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Earlier, Associated Press video showed rescuers in yellow vests carrying dust-covered, stunned-looking children from the rubble, to cheers from hundreds who had rushed to the scene. But the crowd quieted as others were pulled out slung over rescuers' shoulders, unmoving.

The children were hurried to ambulances. One man pressed his hands to a passing survivor's head in blessing.

More equipment was brought in as nightfall approached. National Emergency Management Agency spokesman Ibrahim Farinloye said 37 people had been pulled out alive, while eight bodies were recovered from the ruins. An unknown number remained missing.

It was not immediately clear why the building collapsed, but such disasters are all too common in Nigeria, where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight and floors are added to already unstable buildings.

Lagos state Gov. Akinwunmi Ambode said the building, which had been marked for demolition, was classified as residential and the school was operating illegally on the top two floors.

He promised a full investigation once rescue operations were concluded and vowed that those responsible would be prosecuted.

"I want to commiserate with the families of those that lost their lives in this collapsed building," the governor said in a post on his Facebook page that also urged onlookers to "give the rescue workers the chance to save more lives."

The children's rights group Plan International Nigeria called on the Lagos state government to "launch an inquiry into the incident, and ensure that all persons found culpable for dereliction of duties are punished."

"This incident has further highlighted the urgent need ... to take urgent action on issues of safety in schools across the country," country director Hussaini Abdu said.

Ambode, the state governor, said his deputy was visiting hospitals and that the government would cover the hospital bills of survivors. "All we are interested in now is to save more lives and also see how those that have been rescued are put in proper place and proper care," he said.

Earlier in the day, anxious onlookers stood in narrow streets and on rooftops of rusted, corrugated metal, watching the rescue efforts. With emotions high, a number of shirtless men jumped in to offer assistance, hacksaws and mallets in hand. Some were barefoot. Some were bare-handed. One held a water bottle in his teeth.

The collapse came as Buhari, newly elected to a second term as president, tries to improve groaning, inefficient infrastructure in Africa's most populous nation.

In a recent report, the International Monetary Fund noted the state of the country's crumbling infrastructure.

"Nigeria's infrastructure is generally less than half the size than in the average sub-Saharan Africa country and only a fraction of that in emerging market economies," the report said. "The perceived quality of the infrastructure is low."

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Petesch reported from Dakar, Senegal.

___

Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa

People gather at the scene 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

A woman cries as a body of 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Emergency services attend the scene after a school building collapsed 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

A woman cries as a body of 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Emergency services attend the scene after a building collapsed 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

A woman cries as a body of 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

In this image taken from video rescue workers and emergency teams work at the scene of a building collapse in Lagos, Nigeria, Wednesday March 13, 2019. There was no immediate official word on numbers of casualties. (AP Photo)

A child is rescued 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

A child is rescued 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

A child is rescued 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

A child is rescued 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Emergency services attend the scene after a building collapsed 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Emergency services attend the scene after a building collapsed 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

A child is rescued 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

In this image taken from video rescue workers and emergency teams work at the scene of a building collapse in Lagos, Nigeria, Wednesday March 13, 2019. A three-story building has collapsed in Lagos, and rescuers rush to pull out scores of children thought to be inside. There was no immediate official word on numbers of casualties. (AP Photo)

Emergency services attend the scene after a school building collapsed 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.(AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

In this image taken from video, people help a child after he was rescued from the scene of a building collapse in Lagos, Nigeria, Wednesday March 13, 2019. A three-story building has collapsed in Lagos, and rescuers rush to pull out scores of children thought to be inside. There was no immediate official word on numbers of casualties. (AP Photo)

Emergency services and local people dig at the scene after a school building collapsed in a densely populated neighborhood of 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.(AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

In this image taken from video, people help a child after he was rescued from the scene of a building collapse in Lagos, Nigeria, Wednesday March 13, 2019. A three-story building has collapsed in Lagos, and rescuers rush to pull out scores of children thought to be inside. There was no immediate official word on numbers of casualties. (AP Photo)LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) - The Latest on Nigeria building collapse (all times local):

8:45 p.m.

A Nigerian emergency official says eight people are dead in a collapsed school building and 37 people have been rescued alive.

The statement by National Emergency Management Agency spokesman Ibrahim Farinloye does not say how many of the dead or rescued are children.

Witnesses have said up to 100 children could have been in the primary school when the three-story building in Lagos collapsed.

Rescue efforts are expected to continue into the night as hundreds of anxious people watch an excavator work under floodlights.

A child is rescued 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

___

7:50 p.m.

An emergency official confirms deaths in the collapse of a three-story school building in Nigeria but refuses to give a toll as search and rescue efforts continue.

Witnesses have said as many as 100 children could have been inside the building.

Official Shina Tiamiyu says the emphasis is on finding survivors. Workers have pulled more than 40 people, dead and alive, from the ruins.

Signs of life remain as night falls hours after the collapse in Lagos. Rescue efforts are expected to continue throughout the night.

The watching crowd was jubilant when searchers found a man alive. An hour later, the crowd stilled when a body was carried by.

___

7:15 p.m.

Night is falling at the site of a collapsed school building in Nigeria as search and rescue workers make frantic efforts to find what could be scores of children in the ruins.

The evening call to prayer has been heard as hundreds of anxious people watch in the heart of the country's commercial capital, Lagos.

An emergency official has said more than 40 people have been found but it is not known how many are dead.

Workers have carried several dust-covered children, some moving and some still, to waiting ambulances.

Nigeria's president says that "it touches one to lose precious lives in any kind of mishap, particularly those so young and tender."

___

5:45 p.m.

The general manager of the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency says more than 40 people have been rescued from a Nigeria school building collapse.

Shina Tiamiyu tells the Associated Press that a death toll cannot yet be determined as rescue efforts continue.

Some witnesses estimated that as many as 100 children were in the primary school on the top floor of the building that collapsed in Lagos.

Rescue efforts are expected to go into the night as sunset nears.

___

5 p.m.

Lagos governor Akinwunmi Ambode says at least 25 children have been rescued after a three-story school building collapsed in Nigeria.

It is not known how many students were in the primary school on the top floor, or how many have died.

The collapse occurred in the heart of Nigeria's commercial capital, setting off frantic rescue efforts.

___

4 p.m.

Witnesses say nearly two dozen children have been pulled from a collapsed building in Lagos, Nigeria.

It is not known how many students may have been at a primary school that was located on the top floor of the three-story building.

The school could have had as many as 100 children there at the time of the collapse.

It is not immediately known what caused the structure to collapse, leaving piles of dusty concrete slabs and exposed metal.

___

2:25 p.m.

There are cheers as a small child is pulled from the ruins of a collapsed three-story building in Lagos, Nigeria. But the crowd quiets as another child is freed but does not move.

It is not yet clear how many children have been pulled from the rubble, and how many have survived. Scores were thought to be inside when the three-story building containing a school went down.

___

1:35 p.m.

Rescue efforts are underway in Nigeria after a three-story building school building collapsed while classes were in session. Scores of children are thought to be inside.

Associated Press video from the scene on Wednesday shows at least one dust-covered child being carried out of the rubble. Onlookers crowd around in the densely populated neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital.

They cheered as the child was lifted out.

Building collapses are all too common in Nigeria, where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight.

Emergency services attend the scene after a building collapsed 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

A child is rescued 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. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

In this image taken from video rescue workers and emergency teams work at the scene of a building collapse in Lagos, Nigeria, Wednesday March 13, 2019. A three-story building has collapsed in Lagos, and rescuers rush to pull out scores of children thought to be inside. There was no immediate official word on numbers of casualties. (AP Photo)SUZANO, Brazil (AP) - Two masked men armed with a gun, knives, axes and crossbows descended on a school in southern Brazil on Wednesday, killing five students and two adults before one killed the other and then himself, authorities said.

The men, identified as former students at the school in a suburb of Sao Paulo, also shot and killed the owner of a used car business nearby before launching the attack on the school, authorities said.

Besides the five students, the dead included a teacher and a school administrator, said Joao Camilo Pires de Campos, the state's public secretary. Nine others were wounded in the school attack and hospitalized, he said.

"This is the saddest day of my life," de Campos said, speaking to reporters outside the school in the Sao Paulo suburb of Suzano.

Authorities identified the attackers as 17-year-old Guilherme Taucci Monteiro and 25-year-old Henrique de Castro.

"The big question is: What was the motivation of these former students?" de Campos said.

A student cries outside the Raul Brasil State School in Suzano, the greater Sao Paulo area, Brazil, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The state government of Sao Paulo said two teenagers, armed with guns and wearing hoods, entered the school and began shooting at students. They then killed themselves, according to the statement. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Monteiro's mother, Tatiana Taucci, offered a possible answer, telling Band News while hiding her face from the camera that her son had been bullied at the school.

"Bullying, they call it. ... He stopped going to school ... because of this," she said.

She said she was surprised by his involvement and found out about the attack from the television like everyone else.

Minutes before the attack, Monteiro had posted 26 photos on his Facebook page, included several posing 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.

By Wednesday afternoon, Facebook had taken down Monteiro's page.

During the attack, Monteiro opened fire with a .38 caliber handgun and de Castro used a crossbow, de Campos said, adding that forensics would determine how each of the victims died.

The attackers were also carrying Molotov cocktails, knives and small axes, authorities said

"In 34 years as a policeman, it's the first time I see someone use a crossbow like that," police Col. Marcelo Salles said. "It is horrendous."

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 police, they took their own lives. Monteiro shot de Castro in the head and then shot himself, police said.

Students gathered outside the school recounted harrowing attacks and seeing several bodies lying in pools of blood.

Kelly Milene Guerra Cardoso, 16, said she and other students took refuge in the school's cafeteria, locked the door and lay on the floor.

"We stayed there until the door was opened. We thought it was the shooters coming to get us, but it was the police," she said. "They told us to start running."

Horacio Pereira Nunes, a retiree whose house is next to the school, said he heard shots around 10 a.m.

"Then a lot of kids started running out, all screaming," he said. "It didn't take long until police arrived."

The Raul Brasil Professor public school has more than 1,600 students from elementary to high school grades, teachers gathered outside said.

Latin America's most populous nation has the largest number of annual homicides in the world, but school shootings are rare.

In 2011, 12 students were killed by a gunman who roamed the halls of a school in Rio de Janeiro, shooting at them.

President Jair Bolsonaro ran on a platform that included promises to crack down on criminals, in part by expanding public access to guns. Soon after his Jan. 1 inauguration, Bolsonaro issued a decree making it easier to buy a gun.

"A monstrosity and cowardness without equal," Bolsonaro wrote in a tweet expressing his sympathies for the families of the victims of Wednesday's attacks.

Similar to arguments made by proponents of less gun regulation in the United States, Bolsonaro and his supporters argue that expanded access to guns will combat crime.

Sen. Major Olimpio, a member of Bolsonaro's party and a proponent of loosening gun legislation, again made that argument hours after Wednesday's rampage.

"We can't let those who take advantage of this tragedy speak about how disarmament is the solution," he tweeted, adding: "Weak and shameful 'disarmament farce,' which gave guns to criminals and prevented self-defense."

___

Associated Press writer Mauricio Savarese reported this story in Suzano and AP writer Anna Jean Kaiser reporter from Rio de Janeiro.

A teenager who was injured during a shooting inside the Raul Brasil State School, is carried on a gurney into a hospital, in Suzano, Brazil, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The state government of Sao Paulo said two teenagers, armed with guns and wearing hoods, entered the school and began shooting at students. They then killed themselves, according to the statement. (Johnny Morais/Futura Press via AP)

A man comforts a woman at the Raul Brasil State School in Suzano, Brazil, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The state government of Sao Paulo said two teenagers, armed with guns and wearing hoods, entered the school and began shooting at students. They then killed themselves, according to the statement. (Mauricio Sumiya/Futura Press via AP)

A former student is comforted by a friend outside the Raul Brasil State School in Suzano, the greater Sao Paulo area, Brazil, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The state government of Sao Paulo said two teenagers, armed with guns and wearing hoods, entered the school and began shooting at students. They then killed themselves, according to the statement. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Forensic vehicles transport the bodies of the people who were killed in a school shooting at the Raul Brasil State School in Suzano, in the greater Sao Paulo area, Brazil, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Two masked former students armed with guns, knives, axes and crossbows descended on the school Wednesday, killing five students and two adults before taking their own lives, authorities said. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Police officers guard the entrance of the Raul Brasil State School in Suzano, Brazil, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The state government of Sao Paulo said two teenagers, armed with guns and wearing hoods, entered the school and began shooting at students. They then killed themselves, according to the statement. (Mauricio Sumiya/Futura Press via AP)

A woman uses her cell phone as she waits for news outside the Raul Brasil State School in Suzano, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The state government of Sao Paulo said two teenagers, armed with guns and wearing hoods, entered the school and began shooting at students. They then killed themselves, according to the statement. (Mauricio Sumiya/Futura Press via AP)

Police officers stand guard outside the Raul Brasil State School in Suzano, the greater Sao Paulo area, Brazil, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The state government of Sao Paulo said two teenagers, armed with guns and wearing hoods, entered the school and began shooting at students. They then killed themselves, according to the statement. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on the emergency declaration by President Donald Trump (all times local):

3:16 p.m.

President Donald Trump says he is telling Republican senators to vote how they "feel good" on a resolution opposing his national emergency declaration for border wall funding.

But Trump adds that "anybody going against border security, drug trafficking, human trafficking, that's a bad vote."

Trump declared a national emergency to steer millions of dollars to his long-promised border wall without congressional approval. The Democratic-led house has passed the resolution opposing the move and the Republican-majority Senate will vote Thursday.

Trump would not commit to supporting a separate measure curbing presidents' powers to declare future emergencies. Republicans thought that legislation would make it easier for GOP senators to support the border emergency. Trump said he'd have to take a look.

A section of a border wall used for training is visible behind Vice President Mike Pence, center, as he poses for a photograph with Border Patrol agents following a border wall training demonstration at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Advanced Training Facility in Harpers Ferry, W.Va. Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

If the resolution passes the Senate, Trump is expected to veto it.

__

2:55 p.m.

An 11th-hour Republican rescue mission to keep President Donald Trump from a Senate defeat on his signature issue of building barriers along the southwest border seems near collapse.

GOP senators emerging from a private lunch tell reporters that they believe the Senate will vote Thursday to annul Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the border. He took that step to steer billions of extra dollars to barrier construction.

Republicans hoped Trump would support a separate measure curbing a president's power to declare future emergencies - making it easier for GOP senators to support the current emergency.

But GOP officials say Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee announced to colleagues that Trump was opposing his legislation.

Trump will veto the resolution blocking the border emergency. It will be his first of his presidency.

___

1:20 p.m.

President Donald Trump is lobbying Republican senators to vote against legislation that would block his declaration of an emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The president says GOP senators "are overthinking" the expected Thursday vote and he tweets that it should be thought of as "very simply Border Security/No Crime."

If Trump's border emergency stands, he could divert $3.6 billion from military construction projects to build border barriers, even though Congress had voted to limit him to less than $1.4 billion for such construction.

Trump tweets: "We have a MAJOR NATIONAL EMERGENCY at our Border and the People of our Country know it very well!"

It's long looked like the Republican-run Senate would join the Democratic-led House in voting to block Trump's declaration. That would set up the first veto of Trump's presidency.

___

10:20 a.m.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the House won't consider Republican legislation intended to curb the power of future presidents to unilaterally declare national emergencies.

Her announcement might make it harder for Republicans to prevent a high-profile rebuff of President Donald Trump's effort to divert more money to building barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The White House and Republican senators are in talks about a bill that would give Congress more power to block emergency declarations from a president in the future.

The hope is that Trump would endorse that plan, and then more GOP senators would oppose a separate resolution blocking Trump's current emergency declaration.

The Senate is scheduled to vote Thursday on that resolution. Its fate is unclear.

Pelosi says in a statement that the House "will not take up this legislation to give President Trump a pass."

___

12:05 a.m.

Opposition by a few Republican senators to President Donald Trump's emergency declaration at the U.S.-Mexico border appears to be softening.

The White House and GOP senators are working on a compromise that would limit the power of presidents to declare national emergencies on their own.

A Senate vote is expected Thursday on a measure to reject Trump's emergency declaration, which he's using to get access to billions of dollars for building border barriers.

So far, four Republican senators have said they'll vote with Democrats to oppose Trump's emergency order. If Trump would commit to signing a bill that would handcuff future emergency declarations, some of those senators might support his border declaration.

Even if the Senate joins the House in rejecting Trump's order, he could veto the measure.COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - A judge has ordered a vice squad officer in Ohio held without bail on charges of forcing women to have sex with him under threat of an arrest.

A federal indictment also accuses Columbus police officer Andrew Mitchell of witness tampering and lying to federal agents when he said he'd never had sex with prostitutes.

Magistrate Judge Kimberly Jolson issued the continuing hold on Mitchell Wednesday in federal court in Columbus. The 55-year-old officer is set for formal arraignment next week. Defense attorney Mark Collins says Mitchell will plead not guilty.

Mitchell has also been investigated by state authorities but not yet charged after police said he fatally shot a prostitute who stabbed him in the hand while sitting in his unmarked police car.

FILE - This undated file photo provided by Michelle Dalton shows her daughter, Donna Castleberry. Columbus vice squad Officer Andrew Mitchell forced women to have sex with him under threat of an arrest, pressured others to help cover up crimes, and lied to federal investigators when he said he'd never had sex with prostitutes, according to charges unveiled Monday, March 11, 2019. Mitchell has also been investigated by state authorities after police said he fatally shot Castleberry, who stabbed him in the hand while sitting in his unmarked police car. (Michelle Dalton via AP, File)CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - 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.

"This is a very epic cyclone," said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Weather Prediction Center. "We're looking at something that will go down in the history books."

In Colorado, a state patrol officer was hit and killed by a car as he was helping another driver who slid off Interstate 76 near Denver.

Corporal Daniel Groves, 52, was outside his patrol car when he was struck. He died at a hospital.

Hundreds of drivers were stranded on Colorado highways, including 500 in the Colorado Springs area alone. Gov. Jared Polis activated the National Guard to help find and rescue snowbound drivers.

Scores of motorists took refuge at truck stops in eastern Wyoming while blowing snow forced portions of major highways to close in Colorado, Nebraska and South Dakota.

Joe Miller's beard freezes over as he walks through downtown Casper, Wyo., during a winter storm Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The storm brought blizzard conditions to parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. (Josh Galemore/The Casper Star-Tribune via AP)

Bria McKenzie, 22, said she and her mother, brother and sister were stuck in their car for more than two hours on a hilly road in Colorado Springs.

The snow was blinding and numbing, and the wind was whipping so hard she didn't feel safe walking to a hospital just down the road, she said.

"We thought about it, well maybe we'll run over to the hospital - at least we'll be warm," she said. "But we were soaking wet already just from trying to keep the windshield clear and from trying to push our car and help other people push their cars. It was just like every second you were out there, it felt like parts of you were just freezing."

McKenzie said they were eventually rescued by her father in his pickup truck.

Hundreds of flights were canceled at Denver International Airport, and nearly 40 were grounded in Colorado Springs.

"It caught me completely off guard," said Sarah Brin of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who was stranded at the Denver airport.

It was supposed to be a brief layover on her flight home from the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, but it turned into an overnight stay.

She booked a room in a downtown hotel and reserved a spot on a shuttle van, but some shuttle trips were canceled because of the weather.

"We'll see if they actually show up," she said.

Many schools and government offices closed for the day. Xcel Energy said high winds caused about 184,000 homes and businesses to lose electricity, mostly in the Denver area. Xcel spokesman Mark Stutz said zero visibility made conditions difficult for repair workers, and it could take days to restore power to everyone.

In North Texas, severe thunderstorms damaged buildings and flipped over small planes parked at an airport.

Flooding forced evacuations in northeast Nebraska and western Iowa, including a retirement home in Pierce, Nebraska. Residents of Avoca, Iowa, were filling sandbags to keep floodwaters from spreading, and the American Red Cross set up a shelter for anyone who was displaced.

Parts of seven states were under blizzard warnings, and 20 states were under some level of high wind alert, Carbin said.

A tornado in New Mexico ripped roofs from buildings in the small town of Dexter, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of Albuquerque. Authorities said five people were hurt, but none of the injuries were life-threatening. A dairy euthanized about 150 cows injured by the tornado.

Chaves County Sheriff Mike Herrington said the tornado "took out" about 10 homes on one street.

High winds knocked 25 railroad freight cars off a bridge into a mostly dry riverbed near Logan in northeast New Mexico. No one was injured, New Mexico State Police said.

A wind gust of 92 mph (148 kph) was recorded in the mountains northwest of Denver.

The storm was expected to drop up to 22 inches (56 centimeters) of snow in Wyoming, 14 inches (36 centimeters) in South Dakota and a foot (31 centimeters) in Colorado.

Forecasters said the winds would pile snow into deep drifts.

The culprit was a sudden and severe drop in ground-level air pressure in Colorado, the most pronounced dive since 1950, Carbin said. 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.

"It's like a vacuum cleaner, really," Carbin said. When that much air rushes higher into the atmosphere, it causes severe weather.

Meteorologists call the rapid change in pressure a "bomb cyclone" or "bombogenesis."

Forecasters had warned about the storm for days, said meteorologist Ryan Maue of weathermodels.com.

"Everybody saw it coming. Some people underestimated it so they're stranded and that's unfortunate," he said.

___

Elliott reported from Longmont, Colorado. Also contributing were James Anderson in Denver, Jeff Baenen in Minneapolis, Margery Beck and Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, Seth Borenstein in Washington, Paul Davenport in Phoenix and Matt Volz in Helena, Montana.

A man crosses Crow Creek during a blizzard on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Cheyenne, Wyo. Heavy snow hit Cheyenne about mid-morning Wednesday and was spreading into Colorado and Nebraska. (Jacob Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP)

Shoppers struggle to head to their vehicles outside a grocery store 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)

A motorist clears the windows of her vehicle 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)

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)

Shoppers struggle to make their ways back to the vehicles outside a grocery store 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)

Kelly Walsh High School student Riley Dennis, 15, shovels snow from the sidewalk Wednesday, March 13, 2019 during a winter storm in Casper, Wyo. The storm brought blizzard conditions to parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. (Josh Galemore/The Casper Star-Tribune via AP)

A person works on clearing snow during a winter storm Wednesday morning, March 13, 2019 in Casper, Wyo. The storm brought blizzard conditions to parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. (Josh Galemore/The Casper Star-Tribune via AP)

Maintenance supervisor Dan Leach frees storm drains of ice and snow at Episcopal Church Homes in St. Paul, Minn. on Tuesday, March 12, 2019. The rain that began falling Tuesday in the Twin Cities was expected to continue through Thursday, making for soggy, foggy -- and possibly icy -- conditions. A flood watch is in effect for the area Wednesday and Thursday, with temperatures forecast to reach into the 40's, triggering considerable snow melt, according to the National Weather Service. (Scott Takushi/Pioneer Press via AP)

A snow plow rumbles north on Capitol Avenue during a blizzard on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Cheyenne, Wyo. 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)

Tom Skaar of Cheyenne laughs while walking his dogs on House Avenue during a blizzard on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Cheyenne, Wyo. 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 road starts to flood near Canton, S.D. and the Iowa boarder, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (Loren Townsley/The Argus Leader via AP)

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire student Kaylee Stuttgen of Fall Creek, WIis. steadies herself through ice and puddles as she walks along Garfield Ave. to school in Eau Claire, on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (Dan Reiland/The Eau Claire Leader-Telegram via AP)

James Little closes his eyes against blowing snow during a blizzard on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Cheyenne, Wyo. Heavy snow hit Cheyenne about mid-morning Wednesday and was spreading into Colorado and Nebraska. (Jacob Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP)

A sign tells shoppers that a craft store is closed 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)

Neil Alderson, executive director of the Schlessman YMCA, moves snow for patrons 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)

Shoppers struggle to head to their vehicles outside a grocery store 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)

Cars splash through flood water on Ames Avenue west of 66th Street Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Omaha, Neb. A vast and powerful storm is bringing blizzards, floods and a tornado to more than 25 states, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. Flooding forced evacuations in northeast Nebraska and western Iowa. (Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald via AP)

A truck drives southbound through flood water on 60th Street Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Omaha, Neb. A vast and powerful storm is bringing blizzards, floods and a tornado to more than 25 states, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. Flooding forced evacuations in northeast Nebraska and western Iowa. (Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald via AP)In 2014 too, Mr Modi, while campaigning as a prime ministerial candidate, had started his campaign from Wardha.

Mumbai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has again chosen Wardha to kickstart his campaign for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. He will address a public rally at Wardha on March 28.

In 2014 too, Mr Modi, while campaigning as a prime ministerial candidate, had started his campaign from Wardha. It proved to be a lucky launch, as the BJP romped home with a thumping majority five years ago.

This time too, he has chosen the Vidarbha city for his opening rally, which will be held at Swavalambi Maidan at 11 am on March 28. Following this, he is expected to visit Akola and Nandurbar. However, it is not known yet whether Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray will accompany him at the Wardha rally.

According to party sources, the BJP has decided to re-nominate sitting MP Ramdas Tadas from the Wardha constituency, whereas Congress has announced the name of state womens chief Charulata Tokas, who is the daughter of senior party leader, late Prabha Rao.

Vidarbha is considered as the stronghold of the BJP. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP-Shiv Sena combine had swept Vidarbha by winning all 10 seats in the region. The BJP won six seats, while Sena emerged victorious in four constituencies.

However, the upcoming polls are expected to be an acid test for the BJP-Sena alliance as the Vidarbha region has been affected by major factors like drought and farmers suicides. The failure of the BJP to create the separate state of Vidarbha is also likely to be a major factor in the polls.

The first joint rally of the BJP-Sena in the state will be held at Kolhapur on Sunday, March 24, which will be attended by chief minister Devendra Fadnavis as well as Mr Thackeray.KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Toxic waste illegally dumped into a river in southern Johor state sickened scores of students and teachers, prompting Malaysia's government to order 111 schools to close Wednesday.

Education Minister Maszlee Malek earlier Wednesday told 34 schools to shut down and later said that number was up to 111 schools. He didn't give details.

More than 500 people were treated for breathing difficulties, dizziness, nausea and vomiting after inhaling toxic fumes from the waste. Officials said 166 people were hospitalized, and several were under intensive care.

Environment Minister Yeo Bee Yin was quoted by the country's Bernama news agency as saying that rain could have caused the contamination to spread despite efforts to contain it.

Two factory owners and a worker have been detained for investigation. News outlets said the waste, believed to contain chemicals used to dissolve metal at a scrapyard and a chemical factory, was discharged a week ago, leaving a thick black sludge in the river. Cleanup efforts are ongoing.

Emergency personnel unload a student from an ambulance after toxic chemical spill in Pasir Gudang, Johor state, on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Malaysia's education ministry has ordered 34 schools to be closed in southern Johor state after toxic waste believed dumped in a river sickened dozens of students and teachers. (AP Photo/Thomas Yong)LORDSTOWN, Ohio (AP) - Gov. Mike DeWine isn't optimistic that General Motors will bring a line of new vehicles to the sprawling Ohio assembly plant the automaker shut down last week, possibly for good.

GM indicated it has been in talks with one or more other companies about taking over the site for another use, said DeWine, a Republican.

DeWine told The Vindicator in Youngstown that "it's clear to me that they're looking not at putting a new line" of vehicles in the plant.

The assembly plant in Lordstown, which employed more than 4,000 workers just two years ago, built its last car a week ago, eliminating the final 1,700 positions left at the factory.

GM has not said whether it will be closed permanently, instead saying that the plant will be kept in a "state of readiness" and that its fate will be decided during contract negotiations later this year.

The automaker intends to shut down five plants in North America by early next year as part of a companywide restructuring . But the plant closing in the U.S. still must be negotiated with the United Auto Workers later this summer.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine speaks during the Ohio State of the State address at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, Tuesday, March 5, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul Vernon)

Political leaders in the state along with union officials and workers are leading a campaign to save the Lordstown plant, lobbying the company's top executives. President Donald Trump also has voiced support for bringing new work to the plant.

DeWine said GM has not told Ohio officials that it has plans to use the factory in the future or revealed what other companies it has talked with about the site.

"My focus is to do everything to get jobs back in that plant, understanding that our hands are really tied until there is some movement from General Motors," he said Tuesday.

DeWine said GM might let the state know more in four to six weeks.

"At some point, if we're going to help, we have to be involved. The sooner we can be involved, the earlier we can start helping," he said.

___

Information from: The Vindicator, http://www.vindy.comGENEVA (AP) - Israeli authorities have opened criminal investigations of the deaths of 11 Palestinians who were killed by Israeli fire during protests along the Gaza border in the past year, a senior Israeli official said Wednesday.

Israeli officials briefed journalists in Geneva to rebut allegations contained in a U.N. human rights report issued last week. The report alleges Israeli soldiers intentionally fired on civilians and could have committed crimes against humanity at the border, where live ammunition killed 189 people dead and injured more than 6,000 in violence that began last March.

The senior official said full-fledged criminal investigations in such cases are opened if "reasonable grounds" of suspicion of criminal misconduct are found. Critics say such investigations rarely result in prosecution of soldiers.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Gaza's Hamas rulers have sought to use the demonstrations as a way to press Israel to ease a crippling blockade, imposed after the Islamic militant group seized control of the territory in 2007.

Israel has defended its tactics during the protests, saying it is protecting its sovereign border. It accuses Hamas militants of using the crowds for cover, and notes that demonstrators have launched firebombs, flaming tires and incendiary kites across the border.

Mourners carry the body of Saif Abu Zaied, 15, during his funeral though the streets of Gaza City, Thursday, March 7, 2019. Gaza's Health Ministry said Abu Zaied died from Israeli gunfire during nighttime skirmishes along the Gaza-Israel frontier last night. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

But it has come under heavy criticism for the large number of unarmed people who have been shot, often far from the border. The U.N. report said 35 children were among those killed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized the report, which was mandated by the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council, after its release and accused the 47-member body of "an obsessive hatred of Israel."

Diplomatic efforts could lead to another of the Human Rights Council's many resolutions critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. The council's current session ends March 22.

Israeli officials are also concerned the one-year anniversary of the upsurge of border protests on March 30 could spark new demonstrations.

Mourners carry the body of Tamer Arafat, 23, during his funeral in front of his family house in Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, Saturday, March 9, 2019. Arafat was shot in the head by Israeli troops during Friday protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel the Palestinian health ministry said. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Medics and relatives move a wounded teenager, who was shot by Israeli troops during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, into the treatment room of Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Friday, March 8, 2019. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)JERUSALEM (AP) - An Israeli organization has minted a coin emblazoned with the face of Nikki Haley, President Donald Trump's former ambassador to the United Nations, to commemorate her defense of Israel in the world body.

The Sanhedrin, a Jewish organization that dreams of restoring the Jewish Temple, where ancient temples once stood in Jerusalem's Old City, is one of three religious groups behind the Haley coin.

"She supported Israel and she told the truth ... that all the United Nations, all its agenda, is to destroy Israel," Hillel Weiss, spokesman for the group, said Wednesday. "She acted in a manner that represented biblical tenets," he added.

Weiss said that Haley's decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Human Rights Council and her criticism of what Israel and the U.S. say is an anti-Israel bias at the U.N. earned her the recognition.

His group's coin features Haley's face set against the United Nations building with a Jewish menorah on the front, and a stylized rendition of the Jewish Temple on the back. The collector's item costs $65 for silver and $90 for gold, plus shipping, according to its website .

Haley, a devout Christian who helped strengthen ties between Israel and the American evangelical community, has attracted the adoration of Israel's religious and nationalist right wing.

This Wednesday, March 13, 2019. photo shows a coin emblazoned with the face of Nikki Haley, President Donald Trump's former ambassador to the United Nations, to commemorate her defense of Israel in the United Nations, in Jerusalem. The Sanhedrin, a Jewish group that says it aims to restore the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, is one of three groups behind the coin. (AP Photo/Dusan Vranic)

Haley became known at the U.N. for her hard line against Iran and her derision of the Human Rights Council. She often chided the council for focusing singularly on Israeli abuses and neglecting poor records of other states - a stance lauded and echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In her last pro-Israel gesture after announcing her surprise resignation last fall, she proposed a resolution condemning the Hamas militant group for violence against Israel.

Haley also championed President Trump's decision to cut all U.S. funding to Palestinian refugees and recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Trump, a hero to the Sanhedrin group for that very reason, is the face of the group's other coin, first minted last year. The token depicts Trump alongside the Persian King Cyrus. Weiss said he has sold 20,000 of the Trump coins so far.

The Trump administration's decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, celebrated by Israel, prompted the Palestinians to sever ties with Washington. The Palestinians seek east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war, as the capital of their future state.

Proceeds from the biblical coins, the website says, will go toward preparations for establishing the third Jewish Temple - an aspiration with explosive political implications.

The hilltop spot that housed the biblical Temples is revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, the holiest spot in Judaism. Today it is considered the third-holiest site in Islam, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The competing claims to the compound serve as a frequent flashpoint of violence.WASHINGTON (AP) - The Trump administration used an annual human rights report to call out Saudi Arabia on Wednesday over the October killing of U.S.-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 U.S. 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 Saudi Arabia's Public Prosecutor's Office indicted 11 suspects and said 10 people were under investigation but has not released more information.

"At year's 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 added that 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 a range of other human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, including the arrest of at least 20 prominent women's rights activists, executions for nonviolent offenses, forced disappearances and torture of prisoners.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during the release of the 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices at the Department of State in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The report noted some gains in the monarchy, including that women were allowed to vote and run as candidates in municipal elections for the first time.

Khashoggi had been living in Virginia in self-imposed exile as he wrote columns critical of the Saudi government under the crown prince, the de factor leader.

His killing caused tensions to soar between the U.S. and the kingdom, with members of Congress saying they believed the crown prince was behind the operation, an allegation the Saudi government has denied. President Donald Trump has been reluctant to place blame on a country that is central to his Middle East policy.

In presenting the report, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. "will expose violations of human rights wherever they occur." He did not mention Saudi Arabia, but made clear the Trump administration will deal with foreign countries no matter how poor their rights record to advance national interests.

"The policy of this administration is to engage with other governments, regardless of their record, if doing so will further U.S. interests," Pompeo said.

In addition to Saudi Arabia, the report pointed out abuses committed by NATO ally Turkey.

Turkey arbitrarily arrested tens of thousands of lawmakers, lawyers and journalists for alleged terrorism ties or legitimate speech and did not look thoroughly into abuse allegations. "The government continued to take limited steps to investigate, prosecute, and punish members of the security forces and other officials accused of human rights abuses; impunity for such abuses remained a problem," the report said.

Human rights groups lambasted the report as inadequate even with Pompeo's qualification that the administration must work to promote U.S. national interests.

"From its shielding of Saudi leaders from accountability over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, to its cozy relationship with NATO allies trending towards authoritarianism, the Trump administration seems disinterested in its own advice," said Human Rights First. "With respect to the Khashoggi killing, the administration's continued insistence that it is waiting on a Saudi-led investigation is laughable, given the complete absence of rule of law in that country."

The report noted abuses in a number of familiar U.S. adversaries like China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Myanmar and Russia, all of which were cited for major violations, including forced disappearances, torture, arbitrary killings and arrests and political prosecutions.

Pompeo said China "is in a league of its own when it comes to human rights abuses," citing mass detentions of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and ethnic Kazakhs as well as repression of Tibetans, Christians and other religious minorities.

In Burma, the report said evidence had surfaced to support allegations that the military carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in 2017 and it accused the government of preventing humanitarian assistance from reaching those displaced.

In Iran, the report said "the government's human rights record remained extremely poor and worsened in several key areas." Those included executions for crimes without fair trials and forced disappearances.

Russia was cited for abuses in Ukraine, as well as authoritarian moves against opposition figures.

Closer to home, the report identified widespread abuses in Cuba and Venezuela.

In Venezuela, where the administration no longer recognizes President Nicolas Maduro as the country's legitimate leader, the report said abuses included extrajudicial killings by security forces, torture, harsh and life-threatening prison conditions, restrictions on free expression and the press, sham elections and pervasive corruption.SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Officials in the Northern California city of San Jose on Wednesday criticized so-called sanctuary policies they say prevented federal authorities from detaining a gang member in the country illegally before he allegedly killed a woman.

San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia said Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza, 24, stalked Bambi Larson's neighborhood before beating and stabbing her to death in her home. 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.

Arevalo Carranza, who was homeless and had several convictions for felony offenses, was arrested Monday night in the Feb. 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.

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 told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

In this photo released March 12, 2019, by the San Jose Police Department, is Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza. Authorities in Northern California are criticizing so-called sanctuary policies they say prevented federal authorities from detaining Carranza who is in the country illegally before he allegedly killed a woman inside her home. San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia says Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza stalked Bambi Larson's neighborhood before allegedly beating and stabbing her to death. Garcia says Immigration and Customs Enforcement had previously asked to take custody of him six times, four times in Santa Clara County and two times in Los Angeles County. (San Jose Police Department via AP)

"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, the police chief, also criticized Santa Clara County's policy during a Tuesday 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.

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.

His spokeswoman, Janice Rombeck, said Cortese was traveling Wednesday and was not available to comment.WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate voted Wednesday to end U.S. support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition's war in Yemen, bringing Congress one step closer to a unprecedented rebuke of President Donald Trump's foreign policy.

Lawmakers have never before invoked the decades-old War Powers Resolution to stop a foreign conflict, but they are poised to do just that in the bid to cut off U.S. support for a war that has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe.

The vote puts Congress on a collision course with Trump, who has already threatened to veto the resolution, which the White House says raises "serious constitutional concerns."

The measure was co-sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R- Utah. Next, it will move to the Democratic-controlled House, where it is expected to pass.

The resolution passed by a vote of 54 to 46, with seven Republicans breaking with Trump to back the resolution: Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Steve Daines of Montana, Mike Lee of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Todd Young of Indiana.

"The bottom line is that the United States should not be supporting a catastrophic war led by a despotic regime with an irresponsible foreign policy," Sanders said on Wednesday from the Senate floor. He said a vote in favor of the measure would "begin the process of reclaiming our constitutional authority by ending United States involvement in a war that has not been authorized by Congress and is unconstitutional."

From left, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, meet before holding a news conference on the Senate vote on ending U.S. support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition fighting in Yemen, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

In its statement threatening a veto, the White House argued the premise of the resolution is flawed and that it would undermine the fight against extremism. U.S. support for the Saudis does not constitute engaging in "hostilities," the statement said, and the Yemen resolution "seeks to override the president's determination as commander in chief."

"By defining 'hostilities' to include defense cooperation such as aerial refueling," the White House statement said, the Yemen resolution could also "establish bad precedent for future legislation."

Trump's support for Saudi Arabia has been a point of tension with Congress since the killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year. Lawmakers from both parties have criticized Trump for not condemning Saudi Arabia strongly enough for the killing.

Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., addressed those tensions when he urged his colleagues to oppose the measure.

"We should not use this specific vote on a specific policy decision as some proxy for all the Senate's broad feelings about foreign affairs. Concerns about Saudi human rights issues should be directly addressed with the administration and with Saudi officials," McConnell said from the Senate floor.

McConnell argued the Yemen resolution "will not enhance America's diplomatic leverage" and will make it more difficult for the U.S. to help end the conflict in Yemen and minimize civilian casualties.

Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, argued that U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition helps facilitate peace talks and withdrawing from the conflict would delay an eventual political settlement.

"We need to stay engaged (in Yemen) with the limited engagement we've had," Risch said.

A similar resolution to end support for the Yemen war passed the Senate in December, but it was not taken up by the then Republican-controlled House.

Approaching its fifth year, the war in Yemen has killed thousands and left millions on the brink of starvation, creating what the United Nations called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said before the vote that the resolution "will be seen as a message to the Saudis that they need to clean up their act."

"We are made weaker in the eyes of the world when we willingly participate in war crimes, when we allow our partners to engage in the slaughter of innocents," Murphy said.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.

FILE - In this March 8, 2019 file photo, President Donald Trump waits for his son Barron Trump, and first lady Melania Trump after speaking with reporters outside the White House in Washington before traveling to Alabama to visit areas affected by the deadly tornadoes. Trump has had it with the #fakeMelania conspiracy theories circulating on social media. Trump is claiming that photos of his wife were altered to make it appear that a look-alike accompanied him to Alabama last week. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

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.

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

In this March 8, 2019 photo, President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump visit a line of crosses at Providence Baptist Church in Smiths Station, Ala., as they tour areas where tornados killed 23 people in Lee County, Ala. Trump has had it with the #fakeMelania conspiracy theories circulating on social media. Trump is claiming that photos of his wife were altered to make it appear that a look-alike accompanied him to Alabama last week. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)LONDON (AP) - It was a routine winter training mission in northeastern Scotland until the Maritime and Coastguard Agency crew spotted a stranded dog on the snowy Cairngorms mountains below.

They couldn't fly away and leave the dog in trouble, so winchman Mark Stevens on Wednesday was lowered to the ground, scooped up the cold and frightened animal, and both were raised back to the helicopter.

The dog, named Ben, was cuddled and warmed on board before being rushed to a veterinarian.

It turns out Ben had been missing for two days in dangerous weather caused by Storm Gareth.

Officials say Ben has recovered from exposure and has been reunited with his owner.SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The Latest on a Trump administration lawsuit against California over state sanctuary laws (all times local):

12:50 p.m.

A U.S. appeals court appears inclined to allow enforcement of a California law that limits police cooperation with immigration officials.

The Trump administration has sued the state over that law and two other state laws that it says obstruct federal immigration efforts. The administration wants all three laws blocked.

Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Milan Smith said during a hearing on Wednesday that federal officials might find it frustrating that local authorities can't help them take custody of people in the country illegally. But Smith says he doesn't see how that lack of cooperation is illegal.

Smith and another judge on the three-judge panel expressed concerns about another state law requiring inspections of facilities where immigrants are detained. The panel did not immediately issue a ruling.

8:55 a.m.

Dozens of immigrant advocates are outside a federal courthouse in San Francisco in advance of a hearing where the Trump administration will try to persuade an appeals court to block state laws that protect immigrants.

Some are holding signs that read "ICE out of California," referring to the agency that enforces immigration laws. There are more than 50 people.

At issue before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a 2018 lawsuit by the administration over three California laws that extended protections to people in the country illegally.

A U.S. judge in Sacramento kept two of the laws in place in July but blocked part of a third.

___

12:05 a.m.

The Trump administration will try to persuade an appeals court to block California laws aimed at protecting immigrants.

At issue in Wednesday's hearing before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a 2018 lawsuit by the administration over three California laws that extended protections to people in the country illegally.

The White House says the laws obstruct federal immigration enforcement efforts.

It's one of several lawsuits between the White House and the Democratic-dominated state.

A U.S. judge in Sacramento kept two of the laws in place in July but blocked part of a third.

The Trump administration is asking a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit to entirely block all three laws. The panel will hear arguments but won't rule immediately.Agencys counsel claimed Sathak helped preacher to launder money.

Mumbai: A special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court on Friday remanded Abdul Kadir Najmuddin Sathak, a jeweller by profession and an alleged aide of controversial televangelist Dr Zakir Naik, in the custody of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) until March 27.

Seeking Sathak's custody, ED counsel Hiten Venegaonkar had contended before special PMLA judge M.S. Azmi that the accused runs a broadcasting company in the United Arab Emirates and helped broadcast controversial speeches of Dr Naik and also helped him carry out money laundering.

The ED had first apprehended him at Delhi International Airport in December 2018, when he was trying to go to the UAE, but he was arrested only on Friday. As per the ED, after registration of FIR against Dr Naik, it also registered a case and, during the probe into the matter, the statement of Dr Naik's sister Nailah Noorani and other persons who were directors of companies owned by Dr Naik were recorded.

These statements sho-wed that M/s Harmony Media Pvt Ltd (HMPL) is involved in producing TV talks, which is exported to M/s Global Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), Dubai for telecasting the same as per the rate fixed by Dr Naik. According to the ED in 2006, M/s GBC was established for launching the channel Peace TV where Sathak and S.M. Khalil were partners in the ratio of 50 per cent each and invested 1.25 million dirhams each.

Mr Venegaonkar sought Sathak's custody, saying he has not come clean about the nature of his personal interactions and with whom he was dealing with in order to carry out the agreements between HMPL and GBC. His replies to the agency were evasive, he stated.

According to the ED, Sathak claimed that the revenue of GBC was generated out of donations received from corporations owned by the crown prince of the UAE or his family or from the family directly or other donors and not from advertisements, which is ordinarily the norm in the media industry. It, therefore, appears that the UAE and the other Emirates funded the Peace TV and the content production for Peace TV channel for reasons beyond pious religious activities and Sathak is direct player in the matter, being one of the directors of GBC, Mr Venegaonkar claimed.LAS VEGAS (AP) - An attorney for Las Vegas Sands Corp. says a Hong Kong businessman deserves a fraction of the $347 million he's seeking for breach-of-contract because he abandoned Sands to find other advice to open a Macau casino.

Richard Suen's attorney, John O'Malley opened a third trial in the long legal battle telling jurors Wednesday that Suen and his company Round Square Co., should get almost $347 million for introducing billionaire Sands chief Sheldon Adelson and Sands executives to key Chinese officials with influence to grant a coveted Macau gambling license.

Sands attorney Richard Sauber countered that Suen and Round Square earned no more than $3.76 million before abandoning Adelson and Sands in 2001 to find other advice - long before the Sands Macau casino opened in 2004.

"What did they actually do? What was the quality of what they did? What's the value of those services?" Sauber said jurors will be asked to decide. "The Round Square group did not deliver what they came to the table and told Mr. Adelson they could do - deliver a license."

Jurors later began hearing videotaped testimony from Adelson, who testified in two previous trials but isn't expected to testify in person now for health reasons. His video testimony was scheduled to continue Thursday.

The company disclosed recently the 85-year-old billionaire board chairman, CEO and Republican national party donor is being treated for cancer and has not been at the company's Las Vegas offices for more than two months.

FILE - This June 17, 2014 file photo shows the Sands Expo and Convention Center and The Palazzo in Las Vegas. A jury is set to decide how much Las Vegas Sands Corp. has to pay to a Hong Kong businessman for helping the company open its first Macau resort. Attorneys for Richard Suen and Sands are to provide trial overviews Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Sands chief Sheldon Adelson isn't expected to testify. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

Suen could testify Friday. He maintains he was promised a $5 million "success fee" if Sands got a Macau license, plus 2 percent of Sands' Macau profits over the 18-year life of the company casino license.

Las Vegas Sands now owns five properties in Macau, where O'Malley put profits at a combined $17.1 billion through June 2022. The attorney said the promised fee and slice of profits mean Suen and Round Square should receive $346.9 million.

"There's no contract in this case," Sauber countered during his turn before the 15 men and women picked to hear the civil breach-of-contract damages trial in Clark County District Court. "What we're here to figure out is equitable reimbursement."

Jurors have been told the case could last until mid-April.

Sands appealed previous jury judgments of $44 million against it in 2008 and $70 million against it in 2013, and this jury's decision could be appealed yet again to the Nevada Supreme Court.

The state high court twice upheld trial findings that Suen and his company provided services to Sands and that the company is liable for damages.

But justices looked at a range of damage claims from $1 million to $348 million and decided in 2016 that a new jury should hear more evidence before deciding an amount.

"Value. Worth. Benefit. You keep those three ideas in your mind," Suen lawyer O'Malley told the jury. "How much is deserved?"

Suen and his business partners used their Chinese network of trusted social and business relationships, or "guanxi" (gwan-CHE'), to benefit Sands at a time when worldwide competition for three casino licenses was intense, O'Malley said.

"Mr. Suen ... and other colleagues had Chinese government connections. They arranged and attended a lot of meetings. They had local contacts. Their knowledge of Chinese culture would turn out to be important," the attorney said.

Publicly traded Sands also owns its flagship Venetian and Palazzo resorts and Sands Expo Center on the Las Vegas Strip, a resort in Singapore and one property in Pennsylvania.We don't find out our protagonist's name for quite some time in "The Mustang ," the feature debut of French writer-director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre.

All we know at first is what we see and what Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts projects. A psychologist played by Connie Britton, in a brief but impactful role, tries to get a sense of his mental state having been in and out of solitary confinement in a rural Nevada penitentiary a number of times, but he's not interested in playing along, or even trying.

"I'm not good with people," growls Schoenaerts as he hits her panic button to end the session.

Schoenaerts is a commanding presence, and usually a quite empathetic one in films like "Rust and Bone" and "A Bigger Splash," but here with a shaved head and a rage simmering beneath his nearly dead eyes, he's downright terrifying. His identity, you realize, is that of a prisoner. He doesn't think about his past, his future or his needs. He merely exists. He even rebuffs the young pregnant woman (Gideon Adlon) who comes to visit. (It's his daughter, you discover, but even that is left ambiguous for a moment).

It's not until he's assigned to manure duty as part of the correctional center's wild horse training program that a light even starts to come back on, partly because the head of the program, Myles (Bruce Dern) treats the inmates like human employees, not criminals. He even asks our protagonist his name: Roman Coleman. The significance of naming will come back in this brief, gorgeous film about untamed and forgotten outcasts. It's probably worth mentioning here that the themes aren't exactly subtle, but that doesn't make them any less effective.

This is a real program in which inmates, many with no equine experience, tame wild horses for eventual adoption and sale to the public.

This image released by Focus Features shows Matthias Schoenaerts in a scene from "The Mustang." (Tara Violet Niami/Focus Features via AP)

Roman, of course, takes to the craziest horse. Perhaps it's the first time he's actually felt smaller or less powerful than a living creature. And with the encouragement of a fellow inmate, Henry (the always compelling Jason Mitchell), he starts the long process of "gentling" the horse. He'll eventually even give it a name - Marquis, which he sees in a contraband equestrian magazine he traded for in the prison, but which he pronounces "Marcus."

There's a sin in his past that's never even alluded to, of course. It's why he's in there after all. Does no one know, you wonder? Or perhaps it's too horrific for words. It's revealed eventually, late in the film and not unlike that pivotal revelation in "Paris, Texas."

Even with its unusually restrained running time, "The Mustang" is a powerful and emotional journey framed by gorgeous sun-soaked shots of the stark Nevada landscape. I just wish there was a little more character development for the supporting players, like Myles and Henry, and the prison's rotten apple Dan (Josh Stewart), who feels more like a lazy screenwriting construct than an actual part of the world we've gotten to know.

But Clermont-Tonnerre has established herself as a filmmaker to watch with "The Mustang," and has also made the most compelling case yet that Schoenaerts can not only handle an American accent, but excel with it too.

"The Mustang," a Focus Features release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "language, some violence and drug content." Running time: 96 minutes. Three stars out of four.

___

MPAA Definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

___

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr

This image released by Focus Features shows Matthias Schoenaerts in a scene from "The Mustang." (Focus Features via AP)

This image released by Focus Features shows Matthias Schoenaerts in a scene from "The Mustang." (Focus Features via AP)

This image released by Focus Features shows Matthias Schoenaerts, left, and Gideon Adlon in a scene from "The Mustang." (Focus Features via AP)

This image released by Focus Features shows Connie Britton in a scene from "The Mustang." (Tara Violet Niami/Focus Features via AP)ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - A tornado that ripped roofs from buildings and injured five people in a tiny New Mexico town has left a trail of debris that authorities said Wednesday they would wait to clear because of high winds still sweeping through the region.

The tornado touched down outside of Dexter on Tuesday evening before quickly barreling into the town about 18 miles (or 29 kilometers) south of Roswell, where the injured were taken to a hospital. They had suffered non-life threatening injuries, authorities said.

Chaves County Sheriff Mike Herrington said the tornado "took out" about 10 homes on one street in the town of about 5,000 people. A dairy was forced to put down about 150 cows that were injured, he added.

Schools are expected to be closed for the remainder of the week, and all entries into the town have been closed as 60 to 70 mph winds continue to stir scrap and other tornado wreckage.

"It's flying around like shrapnel," Herrington said in a phone interview. "It's blowing in a circle ... It's just not a good, safe environment."

The strength of the tornado has not yet been determined by a team the National Weather Service sent to the area, meteorologist Chuck Jones said.

In the Wednesday, March 13, 2019, photo released by the New Mexico State Police shows shipping containers strewn across the river bed, with a jumbled pile of containers on the slope above one bank of the Canadian River near Logan, N.M., about 184 miles (296 kilometers) east of Albuquerque. Union Pacific spokeswoman Raquel Espinoza said the derailed cars were the tail end of a mixed-freight train consisting of two locomotives and 73 rail cars. Authorities blamed high winds for a train derailment in eastern New Mexico where approximately 25 freight cars went off a trestle over a mostly dry river bed. (New Mexico State Police via AP)

The tornado came amid a strong storm system that was not expected to relent as it moved toward the northeast, Jones said. "It's deepening and strengthening very quickly," he said.

About 200 miles (or 322 kilometers) northeast of Dexter, authorities said high winds had derailed a train on the high desert plains near Logan, a town of about 1,000 residents. New Mexico State Police photos of the derailment showed shattered train cars scattered across a mostly dry riverbed.

There were no reported injuries in the derailment, state police said.

In total, about 40,000 Xcel Energy customers in the region that spans much of eastern New Mexico and the Texas panhandle were without electricity, the company said.

In Dexter, Herrington said he believed there would have been more tornado injuries had more people been home when it touched down. But luckily, it occurred at a time when many people were at work or returning home from work, he said.

A severe weather warning was issued earlier in the afternoon for hail, lightning, high winds and multiple tornadoes, with authorities urging residents to stay off roads and shelter animals.

Another tornado also touched down in nearby Hagerman on Tuesday, destroying the city's water system, the Roswell Daily Record reported .MEXICO CITY (AP) - A new human rights report says Mexican marines improperly used a helicopter-mounted minigun that fires 3,000 rounds per minute in a 2018 border city shooting that killed three civilians.

The rotating-barrel machine gun is a powerful weapon that according to Mexican guidelines should be used "proportionately," that is, to counter an equivalent threat.

But the National Human Rights Commission said in a report Wednesday that drug cartel gunmen didn't present a threat to the helicopter when the gunship opened fire.

A woman and two children were killed when they drove through a running gun battle between marines and cartel gunmen in the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo.

One marine was also killed in the gun battles and 12 were wounded. Four gunmen also died.ST. LOUIS (AP) - The St. Louis prosecutor's ongoing feud with others in the city's legal establishment escalated Wednesday when she accused a judge, the police and a special prosecutor of trying to intimidate and embarrass her.

The latest dust-up between Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department is over a warrant to search her office's electronic records related to a perjury investigation of William Tisaby. Gardner hired the former FBI agent last year to investigate then-Gov. Eric Greitens.

Circuit Judge Michael Mullen on Tuesday ordered Gardner to comply with the search warrant. She immediately appealed, but before a state appeals court could rule, police and an attorney for the special prosecutor appointed to oversee the Tisaby case went to her office and removed an email server.

The appeals court later Tuesday issued a preliminary order halting execution of the search warrant. The email server was returned about an hour after it was taken.

Gardner told The Associated Press by phone that the whole process was a personal attack on her.

"It's to embarrass, it's to harass," Gardner said. "That's all this is about. Nothing else. It's not about the law."

FILE - In this May 5, 2017, file photo, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner poses for a photo in St. Louis. An attorney for St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner is accusing police, a special prosecutor and a judge of trying to "intimidate and humiliate" her through a search warrant of electronic records in her office. The search warrant is part of an investigation into whether a man Gardner hired last year to investigate former Gov. Eric Greitens lied under oath during a deposition. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

But, she added: "I will not be bullied. I will not be intimidated. I'm not scared to do what's right."

Email and phone messages on Wednesday seeking comment from Special Prosecutor Gerard Carmody and police were not immediately returned. Mullen, through a court spokesman, declined comment.

Gardner, who was elected in 2016, has long had a testy relationship with the police department.

In January 2018, she took the unusual step of hiring Tisaby to investigate allegations that Greitens took an unauthorized partially nude photo of a woman with whom he had an affair in 2015, a year before he was elected. She said at the time that police refused to investigate the governor; police said they were never asked.

Greitens was indicted in February 2018 on felony invasion of privacy. The charge was dropped in May but Greitens, who was also under investigation over other concerns, resigned in June .

Gardner's handling of the Greitens case drew strong criticism from his attorneys, who asked police to investigate whether Tisaby lied under oath as part of a deposition of the woman involved in the affair. In June, Mullen appointed Carmody as special prosecutor to oversee that investigation.

Gardner and police butted heads again last year when she developed an "exclusion list" of 28 officers who won't be permitted as primary witnesses in criminal cases. She cited credibility concerns but didn't say specifically what prompted the list.

In January, Gardner's criticism of how police investigated a male officer's alleged Russian roulette-style fatal shooting of a female colleague drew an angry rebuke from Police Chief John Hayden .

Gardner had questioned whether police tried to block drug and alcohol testing of officer Nathaniel Hendren and his partner after the shooting of Katlyn Alix, an allegation Hayden called "unwarranted" and "irresponsible."

Hendren was charged with involuntary manslaughter and armed criminal action.ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - Minnesota's legislative auditor said Wednesday that an investigation found no proof that money defrauded from a state child care program found its way to terrorist organizations overseas.

Lawmakers asked Legislative Auditor James Nobles to look into the issue after KMSP-TV reported last year that the Minnesota Child Care Assistance Program was defrauded out of as much as $100 million per year. The station, partly citing unnamed sources, also reported that state and federal agents had determined that some of the ill-gotten money had gone overseas and that they believed at least some of it likely ended up with terrorists.

The station's reports, which also cited Scott Stillman, a former computer forensics expert for the state Department of Human Services, which administers the program, suggested that fraudulently obtained money had gone to the Somali-based terrorist group al-Shabab.

In his report, Nobles said investigators couldn't substantiate that any of the money ended up with terrorists. He also said that while fraud in the child care program is a problem, investigators couldn't establish a reliable estimate of how much money has been defrauded from it, though they believe it's more than the $5 million to $6 million that prosecutors have been able to prove was stolen.

A separate review into whether the department's oversight of the program is adequate to safeguard its financial resources is due early next month.

The Minneapolis area is home to the country's largest Somali-American community, and Nobles noted in his report that it's common for Somali-Americans to send money back to the East African country to help family and friends. He said it's possible that some money defrauded from the program made its way overseas, but that there is no proof.

"It is possible that the individuals who sent the money sent it intending to provide support to a terrorist organization," the report states. "It is also possible that individuals in Minnesota sent money to Somalia and other countries to help their families and friends pay for food, medicine, or shelter, but terrorists obtained the money through theft or extortion. All of these are possibilities, but for none of them did we find evidence to substantiate a connection between CCAP fraud money and support for a terrorist organization."

The Child Care Assistance Program provides federal money to help low-income families afford child care while parents work or attend school. Some daycare center operators allegedly overbilled for children who weren't really there. Prosecutors have charged at least a dozen Minnesota residents, including several with Somali connections, and child care centers with defrauding the program.

Following the allegations of a terrorist connection, local Somali leaders objected to what they considered a rush to judgment against their community. On Wednesday, Minnesota House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler, a Democrat, said any misuse of public funds is serious, "but using unsubstantiated allegations as an excuse for Islamophobic attacks on an entire community is reprehensible."

Republican leaders focused Wednesday on the need for stronger actions to root out fraud. Sen. Mark Koran, who is vice chairman of the Legislative Audit Commission, and several colleagues called for the resignation of the Department of Human Services' inspector general.

Nobles said his office interviewed department officials, program investigators, law enforcement officials and prosecutors. His office subpoenaed Stillman and interviewed him under oath. Investigators also reviewed court records from about two dozen terrorism-related cases in Minnesota. To obtain some information from prosecutors, investigators and law enforcement, they agreed not to disclose certain details and to protect identities of individuals who provided information, his report states.

"We are confident that given the history and expertise of investigating and prosecuting terror-related cases in Minnesota, if there were any allegations of CCAP fraud money going to terrorist organizations, investigators would certainly follow up and prosecutors would prosecute them for providing material support to terrorist organizations," the report states.

Human Services Commissioner Tony Lourey said his department is committed to fixing the problem of fraud in the child care program, and that it has asked the Legislature for money to beef up oversight efforts.

___

Follow Steve Karnowski on Twitter: https://twitter.com/skarnowski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.

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)

"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.

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.

_____

For more small business news, insights and inspiration, sign up for our free weekly newsletter here: http://discover.ap.org/ssb

_____

Follow Joyce Rosenberg at www.twitter.com/JoyceMRosenberg . Her work can be found here: https://apnews.com

Josh Lamont, right, laughs with his father Bob at their residence 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)

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) - A handful of Verizon customers could soon have faster wireless service - but they'll have to pay $10 a month more.

Verizon says it'll flip the switch next month on a much-hyped, next-generation "5G" phone network . Service will start in parts of Chicago and Minneapolis. Verizon expects to have 5G in 30 cities this year.

For now, few people will sign on. The offer is available only on unlimited plans, which currently start at $75 for one person or $160 for a family of four without 5G. On family plans, each 5G line would cost $10 extra.

And network access will initially work with just one phone, Motorola's Moto Z3, with a special 5G attachment. Verizon will offer some promotions at first, including discounts on the phone and attachment and the first three months of 5G service free.

Other 5G-enabled phones, including one from Samsung, will come this year. Verizon would not say how 5G pricing will work with those phones.

T-Mobile has said its 5G plans won't be more expensive if its proposed takeover of Sprint goes through. Sprint hasn't announced 5G prices. Both expect to launch a 5G network this year.

FILE- In this Sept. 26, 2018, file photo visitors stand near a 5G logo at a display the PT Expo in Beijing. A handful of Verizon customers will soon have faster wireless service, but they'll have to pay $10 a month more. Verizon says it'll flip the switch next month on a much-hyped, next-generation "5G" phone network. Service will start in parts of Chicago and Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

AT&T hasn't announced 5G prices. It will start selling its first 5G phone this summer.RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - Search warrants unsealed Wednesday show that a North Carolina political operative suspected of illegally handling election ballots in 2016 was under surveillance by FBI and state investigative agents days before last year's primary.

The three search warrants issued in December and January were part of a state investigation that's yielded felony election-law charges against Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr., 63. The warrants were unsealed at the request of a media coalition including The Associated Press.

Dowless and four people he allegedly hired to collect ballots were charged in state court last month on charges including possessing absentee ballots related to their work in the 2016 primary and general elections and last year's GOP primary. The district attorney prosecuting the case said she also is investigating potential crimes leading up to the 2018 general election.

Dowless last year worked to increase mail-in ballot results for the incumbent Bladen County sheriff, who won, and for Republican 9th Congressional District candidate Mark Harris, who at first appeared to narrowly beat Democrat Dan McCready in November's election. That result was never certified.

A state investigation found the contest "was corrupted by fraud, improprieties, and irregularities so pervasive that its results are tainted as the fruit of an operation manifestly unfair to the voters and corrosive to our system of representative government," the state elections board said in a summary of its hearings last month released Wednesday.

The elections board ordered new elections in the congressional race and two local contests caught in the uncertainty caused by the absentee ballot operation funded mainly by Harris' campaign.

FILE - In this Dec. 5, 2018 file photo, Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. poses for a portrait outside of his home in Bladenboro, N.C. The North Carolina political operative at the center of a ballot fraud scandal is facing criminal charges for his activities in the 2016 elections and the Republican primary in 2018. Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019, that Dowless was arrested after grand jury indictments alleging illegal possession of absentee ballots and obstruction of justice. (Travis Long/The News & Observer via AP, File)

"Tampering, obstruction and disguise have obscured the precise number of votes either unlawfully counted or excluded, but substantial evidence supports our conclusion that the absentee ballot scheme and other irregularities cast doubt on the outcome of each contest subject," the elections board said.

The summary provides no evidence that the number of completed mail-in ballots handled and potentially corrupted by Dowless and his team exceeded Harris' 905 vote lead after November's election.

"It is neither required nor possible for the State Board to determine the precise number of ballots affected in circumstances such as this," the summary said.

Harris is not running in the new election, which has party primaries scheduled in May. McCready filed as a candidate on Tuesday.

The search warrants show that Dowless and his 2016 activities were being investigated as last year's elections were unfolding. The state elections board had uncovered Dowless' 2016 suspected ballot-collection efforts and advised federal prosecutors in January 2017 that they should investigate. No federal charges resulted, but the search warrants show the FBI was apparently reacting to the warnings.

One search warrant says an FBI agent was watching an automated teller machine outside a Bladenboro gas station early on May 3. Dowless was seen meeting with several people, who soon used the ATM. About two hours later, two State Bureau of Investigation agents were watching as Dowless used a different ATM, the warrant said.

Authorities demanded video, account holder information and other data, and the owner of the ATMs produced it, the warrant said.

Dowless often visits the identified ATM to tap Social Security disability payments he's received since suffering a heart attack seven years ago, his attorney, Cynthia Singletary wrote in an email.

Investigators also sought bank records related to a political action committee.

Harris testified last month that in 2017 he wrote two checks totaling $3,340 as a retainer for Dowless' ballot work ahead of the May 2018 Republican primary. The money was sent to a political action committee, or PAC, at Dowless' request, Harris testified. The PAC's campaign finance reports show it had made payments to Dowless in 2014 and 2015, the warrant said.

The PAC was shut down by the state elections board in September 2017 for failing to comply with state campaign finance laws.

___

Follow Emery P. Dalesio on Twitter at http://twitter.com/emerydalesio . His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/emery%20dalesio.

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)LONDON (AP) - Police in Scotland say the three people who died in an avalanche on Britain's highest peak were two Frenchman and a Swiss national.

The three perished Tuesday in an avalanche on Ben Nevis. Two died immediately while the third victim died before rescuers could get him to the hospital.

Police said Wednesday that a fourth person who was injured was also a Swiss national. He is in stable condition at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. The men ranged in age from 30 to 43.

Ben Nevis, located in the Scottish highlands, stands nearly 1,344 meters (4,409 feet) above sea level.

Hill walkers make their way along the Ben Nevis mountain path in Scotland, Wednesday March 13, 2019. A young climber is being treated for serious injuries after an avalanche on the UK's highest mountain "wiped out" a climbing party on Tuesday, killing some of them and triggering a search and recovery operation in "brutal conditions", a rescuer said. (Andrew Milligan/PA via AP)If a person has single nationality through naturalisation, the Home Office can revoke their citizenship

When the bill proposing to revoke the citizenship of naturalised citizens was read, Lord Houghton objected on the grounds that the bill confide[s] to the Secretary of State a very transcendental power  more than ought to be entrusted to any man. Lord Houghton presented his sensible argument during the debate on the Naturalisation Bill in the House of Lords on March 10, 1870.

A century and a half later, British Home Secretary Sajid Javid has used his transcendental power to revoke Shamima Begums British citizenship. Shamima was born in Britain. At 15, she decided to go to Syria to support the militant Islamic State group, with two other friends. Four years later, Shamima, who just lost her newborn child, waits in the Syrian refugee camp. She intends to return to Britain. Major news and print outlets have debated whether she deserves another chance  but civil rights need not be the prerogative of a single individual, whether Shamima Begum or Sajid Javid. Rather, it is the concern of society at large.

We should not just ask what moral grounds allow this individual her citizenship, but on what legal grounds does the state deny citizens their citizenship status? Specifically, we should look at how the state has come to acquire this transcendental power that frightened members of the House of Lords in the 19th century.

Oxford Universitys Professor Matthew Gibney, an expert on forced migration, shows that the British state has tinkered with immigration laws several times before, starting with the Germans. The First World War saw a rise in anti-German sentiment in Britain. The government concocted laws as a threat to evacuate German residents. Geopolitical changes after the Second World War brought changes in immigration and citizenship laws in 1948, in 1964 and in 1984. Yet, these laws played a minute role in politics and policies. But, events in 2001 changed the purpose, power and politics of these laws.

Two events, the Oldham riots in 2001, and 9/11, increased the intensity and scope of the denaturalisation law. In 2002, the Labour government presented the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill. Gibney notes: The bill proposed three major changes to the deprivation law. First, the standard for denaturalisation changed from disloyalty, trading with the enemy, etc. to a single standard: that the Secretary State thinks that an individuals holding citizenship is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom.

Second, the law now applied to all types of British citizen: those who had gained it through birth, registration, or naturalisation. Third, the government now would not deprive if it would make an individual stateless. The third point was in the context of Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that affirms everyone has a right to belong to a nationality.

Amendments in 2004, 2005, and 2006 further enhanced the scope and power of the law. Now, in order to deny citizenship, the home secretary had to just argue that ones citizenship was not conducive to the public good. Also, a notification letter from the Home Office would automatically revoke ones nationality.

Though Labour, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, enacted these laws, the Conservative government employed them as a political tool. Gibney shows that in just one year, 2010-2011, David Cameron and Theresa May, then home secretary, denaturalised six people. This was more than Blair and Brown ever did in nine years. Just in 2011-2014, 23 people were denaturalised on the grounds of being not conducive to the public good. In fact, the whole immigration policy under the Conservatives acted to alienate immigrants.

In 2014, the government proposed amendments in the law that ignored Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After much parliamentary discussion, objection and deliberation, the power of the Home Office was extended but in a complicated way. Until now, British nationals, by birth and naturalisation, with dual citizenship could be denaturalised. After this amendment, those with single nationality could also be denaturalised on the grounds of not being conducive to public good but only if they had received their citizenship through naturalisation, not by birth.

If a person has dual nationality, the Home Office can revoke their citizenship. If a person has single nationality through naturalisation, the Home Office can revoke their citizenship. If a person has single nationality, through birth, the Home Office can revoke their citizenship by showing the person can get nationality elsewhere. Christopher Bertram, professor of social and political philosophy, argues that in theory government can denaturalise anyone but in practice this law specifically targets citizens from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups. Thus, under this law, all nationals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

By arrangement with DawnBRUSSELS (AP) - Top officials are warning that the crisis in Syria is not over and are calling for large-scale support for people in need on the eve of a major donors' conference.

U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock said Wednesday that "without an immediate and substantial injection of funds, lifesaving provisions of food, water, health care, shelter and protection services will likely be interrupted."

The U.N. says $3.3 billion is required to help meet Syria's aid needs, plus $5.5 billion to support Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, where most Syrians take refuge.

Around 55 countries and 80 delegations are expected to attend Thursday's donor conference in Brussels.

As the conflict enters its ninth year, about 11.7 million Syrians still depend on aid. Almost as many have fled or been displaced inside the country.ATLANTA (AP) - A civil liberties group is demanding that police on the Georgia Capitol grounds allow demonstrators to wear Planned Parenthood buttons that include profanity.

In a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union says two women who oppose legislation that would ban some abortions wore pink buttons that included the profanity as part of a slogan.

Capitol police ordered both women to remove the buttons March 7 and that officers told others that items with "curse words" weren't allowed because children were present, the lawsuit states.

Georgia Department of Public Safety Capt. Mark Perry said the agency will abide by whatever the federal courts decide.

The plaintiffs in the case are both opposed to legislation now being considered in Georgia that would ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. A hearing on the bill is set for Thursday, and one of the women wants to wear her button at the hearing, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit seeks an order that would allow people to wear the buttons on Capitol grounds.

The ACLU cites a Vietnam-era U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a man had the right to wear a jacket using profanity to refer to the draft while in a courthouse.WASHINGTON (AP) - No dental insurance? You're not alone. Roughly 1 in 4 Americans don't have dental coverage, according to industry figures.

Employers are by far the biggest provider of dental benefits in the U.S., accounting for nearly half of all enrollees, followed by the government's Medicaid plan for low-income people.

Researchers have shown that costs are a bigger obstacle to dental care in the U.S. than all other forms of health care.

Dental discount plans are a lesser-known option, used by just 5 percent of patients with private dental benefits, according to the latest survey figures from the National Association of Dental Plans.

Here's a look at how discount plans work and when they can make sense:

WHAT ARE DISCOUNT PLANS?

FILE- In this April 3, 2018, file photo, a dentist works on polishing and contouring the teeth of a patient at his dental office in Virginia Beach. Va. Roughly 1 in 4 Americans don't have dental coverage, according to industry figures. Employers are by far the biggest provider of dental coverage in the U.S., accounting for nearly half of all enrollees, followed by the government's Medicaid plan for low-income people. (Kristen Zeis/The Virginian-Pilot via AP, File)

The plans aren't insurance. Instead they function like warehouse clubs, giving members access to discounted prices on various dental procedures, ranging from 20 to 60 percent. Discount plans are offered by a number of large health coverage providers, including Aetna, Humana and CVS Health.

The networks of dentists who participate can be smaller than insurance networks, limiting patient choice. And they won't cover the complete cost of preventive cleanings and X-rays like most insurance plans.

Still, discount plans can be a good option for patients who might otherwise skip check-ups altogether, says Dr. Dave Preble, senior vice president of the American Dental Association's Practice Institute.

If you get patients to a dentist "and keep them coming back on a regular basis, it's been proven to keep them healthier," Preble says.

LIKELY CUSTOMERS?

Older Americans make up a large share of the market for discount dental plans. About 40 percent of enrollees in the plans are between ages 56 and 75, according to the Consumer Health Alliance, an industry group.

In part, that's because Medicare, the federal health plan for seniors, does not cover dental health. Seniors can purchase supplemental dental coverage or access care through privately run Medicare Advantage plans, but many don't due to the extra expense.

Roughly half of all U.S. seniors had no dental coverage in 2017, according to survey results from the dental plan association.

Finally, discount plans can provide a cheaper option for those who can't afford monthly premiums of employer-based insurance.

WHAT'S THE COST?

Most discount plans range from $200 to $400 in fees for a family, offering potential savings for those on a tight budget.

In comparison, annual fees for a typical family dental insurance plan in 2017 were nearly $600, according to industry statistics, not including copays and coinsurance.

But it's important to remember discount plans merely give access to savings on exams, fillings and other procedures. Enrollees can wind up paying more out-of-pocket than they'd save on insurance premiums.

NOT ENOUGH COVERAGE

Discount plans can also make sense for patients who have maxed out their insurance benefits.

Many employer-sponsored plans cap annual care at $1,500 per person. High-cost procedures like root canals, crowns or dental implants can sometimes exceed that limit. Enrolling in a discount plan could be a way to save on those uncovered expenses.

Plus, there's no limit on the number of procedures you can get in a year. Some insurance plans impose waiting periods after enrollment or annual limits on how often patients can get expensive procedures.

"If you need something done right away and it's a major procedure you're going to get that discount immediately," says Evelyn Ireland, executive director of the National Association of Dental Plans.

Most insurance doesn't cover cosmetic dentistry, such as teeth whitening or bonding to improve the appearance of damaged teeth. In many cases, discount plans can be applied to those.

"That can be appealing to a younger population that doesn't feel like they need a lot of dental services but may want cosmetic procedures," Ireland says.SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP) - Election authorities in North Macedonia have confirmed three candidates for the April 21 presidential elections, including a law professor running as the first female candidate in the newly renamed country.

Center-left candidate Stevo Pendarovski is facing conservative professor Gordana Siljanovska Davkova for the largely ceremonial post. Blerim Reka, representing two small ethnic Albanian parties, is also running.

Incumbent conservative President Gjorge Ivanov will serve out his second five-year term through May 12. He fiercely opposed a deal between his country's social democrat government and neighbor Greece to change the country's name from Macedonia to North Macedonia, ending a decades-old dispute.

On Wednesday, State Election Commission spokeswoman Ljupka Gugucevska told the AP that all three candidates had gathered the required 10,000 signatures to be eligible in the election.SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - The Latest on California Gov. Gavin Newsom's moratorium on executions (all times local):

1:30 p.m.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is not only putting a moratorium on executions in California, he also may commute death sentences and is pushing to repeal capital punishment whether through the ballot box or the courts.

Newsom signed an executive order Wednesday granting reprieves to all 737 condemned inmates on the nation's largest death row. That means no executions while he's governor.

He said he's considering commuting death sentences as "a next step" once state Supreme Court justices explain why they blocked several non-death commutations sought by former Gov. Jerry Brown last year.

He also supports repealing the death penalty. Democratic lawmakers introduced a ballot measure to do so next year.

FILE - In this Monday Feb. 11, 2019 file photo Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom answers questions at a Capitol news conference, in Sacramento, Calif. Newsom is expected to sign a moratorium on the death penalty in California Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

The state prison guards' union says the death penalty is the only deterrent to keep murderers from killing again behind bars.

___

10:15 a.m.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed an executive order putting a moratorium on executions in the most populous state.

Newsom signed the order Wednesday granting a reprieve to the state's 737 death row inmates for as long as the Democrat is governor. It doesn't change any convictions or sentences and won't allow anyone to be released from prison.

Newsom says his views on the death penalty were shaped 40 years ago through his grandfather's and father's advocacy on behalf of a wrongfully convicted man.

His order also repeals California's lethal injection protocols and closes the state's never-before-used death chamber at a state prison. California hasn't executed anyone since 2006.

President Donald Trump says Newsom is "defying voters." California voters narrowly approved a ballot measure to speed up executions in 2016.

___

12:01 a.m.

The 737 inmates on California's largest-in-the-nation death row are getting a reprieve from Gov. Gavin Newsom.

He plans to sign an executive order Wednesday placing a moratorium on executions.

Newsom also is withdrawing the state's lethal injection regulations and shuttering the new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison that has never been used.

California hasn't executed anyone since 2006, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. And though voters in 2016 narrowly approved a ballot measure to speed up the punishment, no condemned inmate faced imminent execution.

The Democrat calls the death penalty "a failure" that has discriminated against people based on race and class.

California's death houses one of every four condemned inmates in the United States.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signs the executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty at his Capitol office Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate on Wednesday confirmed President Donald Trump's nominee to replace Brett Kavanaugh on a high-profile appeals court, despite concerns about her past writings on sexual assault.

White House official Neomi Rao won confirmation to a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on a straight party-line vote, 53-46. No Republican opposed Rao, and no Democrat supported her.

Rao, 45, heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, where she plays a key role in Trump's efforts to roll back federal rules and regulations. She also worked in the George W. Bush White House but has never tried a case in state or federal court.

Trump nominated Rao for the seat left vacant when Kavanaugh joined the Supreme Court last fall.

Lawmakers from both parties expressed concerns about her past writings, particularly on date rape and other sexual assault. As a Yale undergraduate Rao suggested that intoxicated women were partly responsible for date rape. She also criticized affirmative action and questioned equal rights for women and gay people.

Rao has distanced herself from language she used as a college student, saying at her confirmation hearing that she cringes at some of the language she used in opinion articles she said were intended to be provocative.

FILE - In this Feb. 5, 2017 file photo, Neomi Rao, President Donald Trump's nominee for a seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee for her confirmation hearing, on Capitol Hill in Washington. The Senate on March 13, 2019, confirmed Rao, President Donald Trump's nominee to replace Brett Kavanaugh on a high-profile appeals court, despite concerns about her past writings on sexual assault. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who recently revealed she was raped in college, called Rao's 1990's opinion pieces "absolutely abhorrent and reprehensible at best," but said she was reassured after Rao wrote a letter to senators repudiating her past views.

Ernst and other Republicans said Rao was qualified despite her lack of courtroom experience. Rao's work on federal regulations qualifies her for the District of Columbia circuit, which handles many administrative appeals of executive branch actions, Ernst said. But she and other Republicans said they might view Rao differently if she is nominated to the Supreme Court.

Rao, widely seen as a future candidate for the high court, is a member of the conservative Federalist Society. The legal policy group has played a key role in Trump's judicial nominations, including Kavanaugh's elevation to the high court.

Democrats staunchly opposed Rao, citing her lack of trial experience and publicly stated pride at rolling back federal rules on Trump's behalf. Rao said at her confirmation hearing that she and Trump have successfully pushed deregulation that "gets government out of the way" and helps small businesses and other companies create jobs.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called Rao "an outstanding choice" to serve on the District of Columbia Circuit, widely considered the nation's second-most important federal court, below only the Supreme Court.

"She is an expert on administrative law and has a sound, conservative judicial philosophy that one would expect from a Republican nominee for such an important position," Graham said.

But California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the panel's top Democrat, said Rao has a "troubling and aggressive record" on deregulation, particularly on rules that protect health and the environment.

As head of the regulatory office, Rao "has taken a buzz saw to protections for women's health and for sexual assault victims on college campuses," added Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat, said Rao has "minimal practical experience in the law" and legal views that are "beyond extreme."

Addressing Trump from the Senate floor, Durbin asked: "Isn't there a good Republican conservative somewhere who's actually been in a courtroom, actually made an appearance in a case, maybe even tried a case or filed a motion and would know a courthouse if they saw it and on not on TV? Is that too much to ask for a lifetime appointment to the second-highest court in the land?"WARSAW, Poland (AP) - An opposition lawmaker in Poland is demanding explanations from the parliament speaker about why a right-wing weekly with an anti-Semitic headline was available at the parliament's hotel.

Michal Kaminski said Wednesday he spotted the "Tylko Polska" paper with a front-page headline reading "How to Recognize a Jew" in the kiosk at the hotel, where lawmakers from outside Warsaw stay during parliamentary sessions, and where many of them dine.

He said it was an "absolute scandal" that such "filthy texts, as if taken from Nazi newspapers" are sold in the Polish parliament.

Kaminski appealed for explanations from Parliament Speaker Marek Kuchcinski, a member of the right-wing ruling Law and Justice party.

A spokesman for the parliament office, Andrzej Grzegrzolka, said the distributor was responsible for the choice of newspapers, while the newsagents were not employed by the parliament.

He said a court should look into the message propagated by the weekly and decide whether the title should be suspended. Polish law bans hate speech motivated by race or religion.BEIRUT (AP) - The Latest on developments in and related to Syria (all times local):

9:25 p.m.

Activists say Russian airstrikes have hit the central prison in rebel-held Idlib in northwest Syria, leading to the escape of dozens of prisoners.

Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes Wednesday were among the heaviest in recent weeks and hit the city's central prison, which is controlled by a militant group linked to al-Qaida.

The Observatory says nearly 80 prisoners escaped and the militants declared an emergency and deployed to search for the escapees. Other strikes killed four people, the Observatory said.

The activist-operated Sham News Network said the strikes targeted the central bank, killing some prisoners while others escaped.

A U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighter watches illumination rounds light up Baghouz, Syria, as the last pocket of Islamic State militants is attacked on Tuesday, March 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

The Russian Defense Ministry said earlier Wednesday it had hit a weapons depot belonging to al-Qaida-linked group.

___

7:20 p.m.

The Russian military says its warplanes have destroyed a weapons depot in Idlib in northwestern Syria.

Russia's Defense Ministry said Wednesday's airstrike targeted a depot belonging to the al-Qaida branch in Idlib. It said the attack was coordinated with Turkey.

The ministry said the raid was launched after Russia had received a tip about the delivery of a big shipment of drones to the depot, which were to be used for an attack on the Russian base.

Russia and Turkey brokered a cease-fire in September for Idlib, the last major stronghold of Syria's rebels. The agreement averted a Syrian government offensive, but it has come under strain as al-Qaida-linked militants have seized territory from rival insurgents. The two countries have pledged to coordinate their operations in Idlib.

___

11:35 a.m.

U.S.-backed Syrian forces say Islamic State militants are putting up a desperate fight against their advances and have staged a counterattack from the tiny speck of land the extremists still hold in eastern Syria.

A commander with the U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces says the IS counterattack began overnight, from the west of a riverside pocket in the Syrian village of Baghouz where the Islamic State group has been making its last stand.

The commander says clashes were underway on Wednesday and that the Kurdish-led forces are repelling the IS counterattack. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

A spokesman for the U.S.-backed forces, Adnan Afrin, says IS militants are putting up a "fierce resistance," firing mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades.WASHINGTON (AP) - The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee suggested on Wednesday that former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker may have had conversations with President Donald Trump about Michael Cohen's legal troubles, saying that Whitaker "did not deny" the conversations during a private meeting on Capitol Hill.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., did not get into the specifics of what Whitaker said when he met with Nadler and the top Republican on the panel, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins. Collins said he heard Whitaker's comments differently and maintained that Whitaker said he "had not talked with the president about Mr. Cohen at all." Two Republican staff members in the room backed up Collins' version. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential meeting.

There was no transcript taken at the meeting, according to the Republican aides, so it wasn't clear exactly what Whitaker said, and it may never be clear. But the dispute could have high stakes, as Democrats have voiced concerns that Whitaker was a Trump loyalist whose appointment, they suspect, was aimed at suppressing investigations of the Republican president.

Whitaker returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday after Democrats said they wanted him to clarify his open testimony before the Judiciary panel in February. One thing that Nadler said he had questions about was whether Trump had "lashed out" at Whitaker after Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and lying to Congress.

News reports said Trump did lash out at Whitaker, but Whitaker said in the hearing that he did not. In a letter to Whitaker asking for him to return and clarify his comments, Nadler said that the committee "has identified several individuals with direct knowledge of the phone calls you denied receiving" from the White House.

After Wednesday's meeting, Nadler said that "unlike in the hearing room, Mr. Whitaker did not deny that the president called him to discuss the Michael Cohen case."

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., comes out to talks with reporters following his meeting with former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Nadler also said after the meeting that Whitaker was "directly involved" in conversations about whether to fire "one or more" U.S. attorneys - he did not say which ones - and that he was "involved in conversations" about the Southern District of New York's case against Cohen and whether it might have gone too far. Nadler did not give details on those conversations.

Collins said that Whitaker suggested the conversations about district attorneys were normal personnel issues, and to characterize those comments otherwise were "an overreach and a stretch." Collins added that Whitaker said he hadn't had any conversations with officials in the Southern District of New York.

According to the Republican aides, Whitaker said that those conversations were among other Justice Department staff and that Whitaker said he thought some of the claims in the campaign finance case were "specious" from a legal standpoint.

Nadler said he wasn't sure what the next steps would be after hearing from Whitaker. He said the committee would "analyze the revelations and see where they lead."

At the February hearing, which was held while Whitaker was still acting attorney general, Democrats confronted him on his past criticism of special counsel Robert Mueller's work and his refusal to recuse himself from overseeing it, attacked him over his prior business dealings and challenged his credentials as the country's chief law enforcement officer.

Nadler said after the public testimony that his answers were "unsatisfactory, incomplete or contradicted by other evidence." In the letter sent to the Justice Department, Nadler said Whitaker didn't offer clear responses about his communications with the White House and was inconsistent about what questions he refused to answer.

Whitaker left the Justice Department after Attorney General William Barr was confirmed Feb. 14.

Former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker arrives for a meeting with the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., comes out to talks with reporters following his meeting with former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., comes out to talks with reporters following his meeting with former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - People who have long been critical of a plan to put more cell towers in Grand Teton National Park are getting the opportunity to officially weigh in on the project.

Grand Teton National Park in western Wyoming seeks thoughts from the public on plans for a new network of cell towers amid questions about how the National Park Service balances public safety with the experience of wilderness.

The park currently has two cell towers as part of a system built piecemeal-fashion, with some fiber-optic lines buried without conduit and poorly mapped. The lines are vulnerable to damage, according to a Park Service analysis and proposal for nine additional towers and related equipment.

"The current equipment and services that we've got are outdated, they're inadequate and they don't serve us well, nor do they serve park visitors or our partners well," Grand Teton spokeswoman Denise Germann said Wednesday.

Outages lasting several days have been known, Germann said.

The new towers would be built in already developed areas not far from the park's main roads. Benefits would include boosting the range where people could call for help, directing visitors to park services and helping retain seasonal workers by keeping them in touch with friends and family, according to the Park Service.

FILE - In this Aug. 28, 2016 file photo visitors watch the morning sun illuminate the Grand Tetons from within the Great Room at the Jackson Lake Lodge, in Grand Teton National Park, north of Jackson Hole, Wyo. Grand Teton National Park in western Wyoming seeks thoughts from the public on plans for a new network of cell towers amid questions about how the National Park Service balances public safety with the experience of wilderness. The park currently has two cell towers as part of a system built piecemeal-fashion, with some fiber-optic lines buried without conduit and poorly mapped. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley,File)

Grand Teton plans two public meetings and will take comments from the public on its proposal by April 10. With approval, construction of the new system could begin as soon as this fall, according to Germann.

One group questions whether the Park Service gives sufficient consideration to the implications of cell service in the backcountry.

"Part of the point of wilderness is the ability to be disconnected and feel alone, but if somebody on the same trail can order a pizza, or sell stock, or chase Pokemon, that takes away from the visitor experience," said Jeff Ruch with the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

This isn't the first time PEER has questioned cell towers in Grand Teton. In 2018, the group obtained Park Service documents outlining the proposal and raised concern the park might put up the towers with little public involvement.

The Park Service lacks a comprehensive policy for cell facilities, Ruch said.

"Do they want to wire the wilderness?" Ruch said. "They say, 'No, no, we don't intend to do that, but we're not taking any steps to prevent it.'"

Cell coverage still wouldn't reach much of the park, Germann said.

Unlike some other national parks, Grand Teton does not have any designated wilderness, where machinery such as cars, trucks and even chain saws are prohibited by law. However, Grand Teton has over 190 square miles (500 square kilometers) of recommended wilderness that includes the main summits of the Teton Range in the western half of the park.

Cell phones are already common in those areas and signs encouraging people to practice courtesy would help address any unintentional increase in cell-phone use, according to the Park Service proposal.

Park officials could require companies installing cell towers to direct coverage from backcountry areas, Ruch suggested.

The Park Service encourages people with ideas to improve the cell tower proposal to submit comments, said Germann.

___

Follow Mead Gruver at https://twitter.com/meadgruverShe speculated that a possible motive may have been to try to discredit investigations into the murder of Valdez

The other two attempted hacks took place the day after Valdez's killing on May 15, 2017, and it remains unclear who carried them out or for what purpose.

The widow of a renowned Mexican journalist murdered two years ago was the target of an attempted spyware attack 10 days after his death, an internet watchdog group reported Wednesday.

The Toronto-based Citizen Lab said the attempt to place Pegasus spy software targeted Griselda Triana, the widow of Javier Valdez, bringing to 25 the number of known cases involving the spyware in Mexico  including two of Valdez's colleagues at the Riodoce weekly in the northern state of Sinaloa.

The other two attempted hacks took place the day after Valdez's killing on May 15, 2017, and it remains unclear who carried them out or for what purpose.

Pegasus allows for monitoring of devices and their content, including the remote activation of cameras and microphones without users' knowledge.

Israeli company NSO, which licenses Pegasus, said Wednesday in a statement attributed to a spokesperson that it provides its technologies only "to highly vetted intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the sole purpose of fighting terrorism and crime."

NSO declined to discuss whether any specific country has used its products, but said usage outside those purposes "is considered a misuse and will be investigated."

But in 2017, Citizen Lab made public the results of an investigation that found that some of Mexico's most prominent journalists had been targeted by the spyware.

The watchdog has also reported Pegasus being used to target human rights activists, politicians, investigators and in one case a minor.

"We can add Griselda's name to the growing list of family members of cartel-linked killings, and their advocates, who demanded justice and got targeted with Pegasus instead," said John Scott-Railton, one of the report's authors.

"I am not a criminal or a terrorist but I have been a target of spying because I was Javier's partner," Triana said. "What reasons were there to spy on me? Neither I nor my family or criminals, and I am sure that I do not represent any danger to national security."

She speculated that a possible motive may have been to try to discredit investigations into the murder of Valdez, said she would file a complaint and called on the new government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to clear up the case.

The government of then-President Enrique Pena Nieto denied any illegal use of the spyware, and though it began an investigation, it remains unknown who targeted the people in Mexico

Citizen Lab's first report on Pegasus in Mexico was released in early 2017 and documented cases from the previous two years. The attempts to hack Triana and the Riodoce journalists shows that the strategy continued to be employed after it became public.

Now investigators say it apparently continued to be active through September 2018, just a few months before Pena Nieto's government concluded on Dec. 1 and more than a year after federal prosecutors announced the investigation.

In Triana's case, she reportedly received a text message that mentioned a possible theory about her husband's murder: that he was purportedly killed in a bid to steal his phone.

Triana, a journalist who works for the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, did not open the message because it seemed absurd  she had been in close contact with investigators at the time. Nor did she open a second message seemingly alluding to her being the target of harassment.

Most of the 25 in Mexico said to be targeted with Pegasus were critics of the government or people in crucial moments of investigations: journalists denouncing corruption cases, activists proposing restrictions on sugary drinks, even foreign experts with diplomatic status looking into the disappearance of 43 teachers' college students in 2014 at the hands of police allegedly in league with organized crime.

The malicious messages purported to have news related to the targets' work or referenced their personal lives, such as alluding to the death of a loved one or a romantic relationship.

Citizen Lab has documented the use of Pegasus in other countries with dubious human rights records, such as Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

NSO said its products have a proven record of helping governments combat things like suicide bombings, drug and sex trafficking and kidnapping.

"Citizen Lab's latest non-scientific, non-data driven report builds upon their ongoing guesswork regarding NSO technology," the company said. "This group has accused NSO of every possible wrongdoing, when the truth of the matter is that our technology helps save lives."DENVER (AP) - The Latest on a winter storm hitting the West and Midwest (all times local):

6:40 p.m.

Winds gusting to more than 60 mph (96 kph) howled through the Rapid City area as a late winter storm slammed western South Dakota.

The National Weather Service reports a gust of 63 mph (101 kilometers per hour) was recorded Wednesday at Rapid City Regional Airport.

The airport was closed because of the approaching storm.

The high winds came as people in southeastern South Dakota are dealing with rain and flooded roads.

Greg Giannini needed to get gas for his generator, because the lights were flickering at his home and he was afraid he was going to lose power. Even though he has four wheel drive, his car got stuck at the pumps and he was trying to dig out to get home as the blizzard swirled around him. He was stuck near North Gate Blvd. in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette via AP)

The sanitary sewer system in Sioux Falls is experiencing above-normal flows. Officials are asking residents to limit water usage through Friday evening to allow the system to catch up.

___

5:35 p.m.

The hundreds of motorists stranded on Colorado roadways by a blizzard included a Colorado Springs woman who became stuck in her car for two hours with her mother, brother and sister as they were trying to return home from a doctor's appointment.

Bria McKenzie says the snow was so blinding and numbing, and the wind was whipping so hard, that she didn't feel safe to walk to a hospital a short distance from where they were stranded Wednesday afternoon.

The 22-year-old McKenzie says other cars also became stuck on the hilly road, until the line of vehicles disappeared from view into the blizzard.

McKenzie says they were eventually rescued by her father in his pickup truck, and it took him another 20 minutes to drive to their home less than a mile away.

___

4:45 p.m.

A Colorado state patrol officer who was hit by a car during a winter storm while responding to an accident has died.

The Colorado State Patrol says Corporal Daniel Groves was outside his patrol car along Interstate 76 northeast of Denver on Wednesday when a driver lost control and hit him.

Officials say Groves was helping another driver who had slid off the highway.

The State Patrol said Groves was taken to a hospital but died there of his injuries.

Groves was 52 and had worked for the agency for nearly 12 years.

The crash is being investigated. The statement said high speed in poor driving conditions may be a factor.

Colorado's governor has declared a state of emergency in response to the storm.

___

4:30 p.m.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has declared a state of emergency and activated the Colorado National Guard to help in search and rescue operations.

Polis spokeswoman Shelby Weiman said Wednesday the state Emergency Operations Center and the Department of Transportation are working with local counties "to prioritize the most immediate needs for those resources."

Amy Ford, a spokeswoman for the state transportation department, says dozens of drivers were stranded on Colorado highways, and numerous accidents were reported on roads that included interstates 25 and 70.

Colorado Springs officials say hundreds of vehicles were stranded in the city and surrounding El Paso County, and it would take several hours for responders to reach them all.

___

3:35 p.m.

Meteorologists say the storm raging across the West and Midwest was caused by a sudden and severe drop in air pressure called a "bomb cyclone" or "bombogenesis."

Low air pressure is how meteorologists measure the strength of a storm, and this is the strongest in Colorado since at least 1950.

Pressure readings are similar to what's seen in Category 2 hurricanes.

Meteorologist Ryan Maue of weathermodels.com said it's very rare.

Maue says forecasters have been warning about the storm for days, but some people underestimated it and wound up stranded.

___

3:10 p.m.

Truck stops in eastern Wyoming have turned into refuges for motorists because of a blizzard that has shut down two key highways.

In Cheyenne, about 60 trucks were stranded at the Sapp Brothers Travel Center along Interstate 80 and an estimated 120 were at the Love's Travel Stop off Interstate 25.

A 280-mile (451-kilometer) stretch of I-80 was closed from the small city Rock Springs to the Nebraska state line. And a 300-mile (483-kilometer) section of I-25 was closed from the small city of Buffalo to the Colorado border.

The blizzard began Wednesday morning and was expected to continue through Wednesday night. It prompted the closures of schools, government offices, a university and the Cheyenne Veteran Affairs Medical Center and its clinics.

___

2:35 p.m.

Authorities blamed high winds for a train derailment in eastern New Mexico where approximately 25 freight cars went off a trestle over a mostly dry river bed.

The New Mexico State Police said no injuries resulted from the wreck Wednesday near Logan, about 184 miles (296 kilometers) east of Albuquerque.

State Police photos posted on Twitter showed shipping containers strewn across the river bed, with a jumbled pile of containers on the slope above one bank of the Canadian River.

Union Pacific spokeswoman Raquel Espinoza said the derailed cars were the tail end of a mixed-freight train consisting of two locomotives and 73 rail cars.

A high wind warning issued earlier by the National Weather Service said the storm moving through the area would produce "one of the strongest wind events in years for West Texas and southeast New Mexico."

___

1:30 p.m.

The Nebraska State Patrol has closed Interstate 80 from the Wyoming border east to North Platte as well as all state highways in the Nebraska Panhandle as a late-winter blizzard swept into the state.

The patrol advised motorists on Wednesday not to travel.

The closures came as officials also warned of flooding in the eastern part of the state.

The National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning for parts of Wyoming and western to central Nebraska north into South Dakota.

The service says blizzard conditions will continue through Thursday afternoon.

Snow accumulation of 10 to 22 inches (25 to 56 centimeters) is expected, with higher amounts further north. Winds gusting as high as 65 mph (105 kph) also were forecast.

___

11:40 a.m.

Some of Colorado's busiest highways are closed as a raging storm brings heavy snow to a wide swath of the West and Midwest.

Many schools and state offices were shut down Wednesday amid a blizzard expected to engulf parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota.

In Colorado, 22 miles (35 kilometers) of Interstate 25 near the Wyoming border was closed, and 66 miles (105 kilometers) of Interstate 70 was closed to westbound traffic.

The two highways are the state's busiest north-south and east-west routes, crossing in Denver.

Vehicles were required to have chains to cross several mountain passes in Colorado.

Three major entrances to Rocky Mountain National Park were also closed.

___

9:55 a.m.

Hundreds of miles of interstate highway in Wyoming have closed because of a raging late winter storm bringing heavy snow to the eastern and southern parts of the state.

A 250-mile (402-kilometer) stretch of Interstate 80 from Cheyenne to Rock Springs is closed, along with a 110-mile (177-kilometer) section of I-25 from Casper to Buffalo.

Heavy snow hit Cheyenne about midmorning Wednesday and was spreading into Colorado and Nebraska.

About 1,000 flights into Denver have been canceled as a winter storm hits the western U.S., with blizzard conditions expected to engulf parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota.

School was canceled Wednesday in many places where up to more than a foot (30 centimeters) of snow and winds as high as 80 mph (129 kph) was possible.

___

8:34 a.m.

About 1,000 flights into Denver have been canceled as a winter storm hits the western U.S., with blizzard conditions expected to engulf parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota.

School was canceled Wednesday in many places where up to more than a foot (30 centimeters) of snow and winds as high as 80 mph (129 kph) was possible.

State and local government workers in Denver and Wyoming were told to stay home and many colleges also closed for the day.

Parts of Interstates 80 and 25 were closed in Wyoming because of heavy snow and whiteout conditions.

Heavy snow was falling in northern Arizona and forecasters say dangerous winds in New Mexico are expected to make travel hazardous across much of the state.

A truck drives north on I-25 during the snowstorm in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Some of Colorado's busiest highways are closed as a raging storm brings heavy snow to a wide swath of the West and Midwest. Many schools and state offices were shut down Wednesday amid a blizzard expected to engulf parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. (Kelsey Brunner/The Gazette via AP)

Clutching a bag of groceries a man sprints to his car as he leaves the Sprouts grocery store on North Gate Blvd. in Colorado Springs, Colo. At that time, the store was still open while a massive blizzard was moving through on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Some of Colorado's busiest highways are closed as a raging storm brings heavy snow to a wide swath of the West and Midwest. Many schools and state offices were shut down Wednesday amid a blizzard expected to engulf parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. (Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette via AP)

A man helps push a car off the side of Union Blvd. in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Some of Colorado's busiest highways are closed as a raging storm brings heavy snow to a wide swath of the West and Midwest. Many schools and state offices were shut down Wednesday amid a blizzard expected to engulf parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. (Kelsey Brunner/The Gazette via AP)

A road starts to flood near Canton, S.D. and the Iowa boarder, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (Loren Townsley/The Argus Leader via AP)

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire student Kaylee Stuttgen of Fall Creek, WIis. steadies herself through ice and puddles as she walks along Garfield Ave. to school in Eau Claire, on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (Dan Reiland/The Eau Claire Leader-Telegram via AP)

James Little crosses the street during a blizzard on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Cheyenne, Wyo. Heavy snow hit Cheyenne about mid-morning Wednesday and was spreading into Colorado and Nebraska. (Jacob Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP)

A man crosses Crow Creek during a blizzard on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Cheyenne, Wyo. Heavy snow hit Cheyenne about mid-morning Wednesday and was spreading into Colorado and Nebraska. (Jacob Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP)

James Little closes his eyes against blowing snow during a blizzard on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Cheyenne, Wyo. Heavy snow hit Cheyenne about mid-morning Wednesday and was spreading into Colorado and Nebraska. (Jacob Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP)WASHINGTON (AP) - The Pentagon plans to begin flight tests this year of two types of missiles that have been banned for more than 30 years by a treaty from which both the United States and Russia are expected to withdraw in August, defense officials said Wednesday.

By moving forward with these missile projects, the Pentagon is not excluding the possibility that the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty could still survive, although it likely will be terminated in August. At that point, Washington and Moscow would no longer face legal constraints on deploying land-based cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (310 to 3,410 miles). The INF treaty has been in effect since 1987.

The INF treaty was an arms control landmark in the final years of the Cold War, but it began unraveling several years ago when Washington accused Russia of developing, testing and, more recently, deploying a cruise missile that U.S. officials say violates the treaty. Russia denies the violation and contends the U.S. accusation is a ploy to destroy the treaty.

Intermediate-range weapons are regarded as particularly destabilizing because of the short time they take to reach a target.

When he announced on Feb. 1 that the U.S. would pull the plug on the INF treaty, President Donald Trump said his administration would "move forward" with developing a military response to Russia's alleged violations. He was not specific, but defense officials on Wednesday spelled out a plan for developing two non-INF compliant, non-nuclear missiles.

The officials, who spoke to a small group of reporters under Pentagon ground rules that did not permit use of their names or titles, said one project is a low-flying cruise missile with a potential range of about 1,000 kilometers; the other would be a ballistic missile with a range of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers. Neither would be nuclear armed, the officials said.

President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on drug trafficking at the souther border in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Washington. Trump said during the event the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft "effective immediately," in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

The U.S. cruise missile is likely to be flight-tested in August, one official said, adding that it might be ready for deployment within 18 months. The longer-range ballistic missile is expected to be tested in November, with deployment not likely for five years or more, the official said. If Russia and the U.S. were to reach a deal to rescue the INF treaty before August, these projects would not go forward.

The cruise missile recalls a nuclear-armed U.S. weapon that was deployed in Britain and several other European NATO countries in the 1980s, along with Pershing 2 ground-based ballistic missiles, in response to a buildup of Soviet SS-20 missiles targeting Western Europe. With the signing of the INF treaty, those missiles were withdrawn and destroyed.

The defense officials said U.S. allies in Europe and Asia have not yet been consulted about deploying either new missile on their territory. NATO is currently studying the implications of the demise of the INF treaty and possible military responses.

One defense official said it was possible that the intermediate-range ballistic missile could be deployed on Guam, a U.S. territory, which would be close enough to Asia to pose a potential threat to China and Russia.

Arms control advocates and Democrats in Congress have questioned the wisdom of leaving the INF treaty, while accepting U.S. allegations that Russia is violating it by deploying a cruise missile that can target American allies in Europe.

"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," Rep. 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."

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said Wednesday the Pentagon has not yet established a military requirement for a ground-launched cruise or ballistic missile of intermediate range.

"It is unwise for the U.S. and NATO to match an unhelpful action by Russia with another unhelpful action," Kimball said. The alliance also needs to develop a post-INF arms control strategy because "if the United States tries to bully NATO into accepting deployment of such missiles, it is going to provoke a destabilizing action-reaction cycle and missile race."NEW YORK (AP) - An international group of scientists and ethicists on Wednesday called for a temporary global ban on making babies with edited genes.

It's the latest reaction to last November's announcement that gene-edited twins had been born in China, which was widely criticized.

Mainstream scientists generally oppose making babies with altered DNA now, citing safety and ethical issues that must be addressed first. Such genetic changes may be passed to future generations, unlike gene editing done in parts of the body not involved in reproduction.

So news last year that Chinese scientist He Jiankui claimed to have edited DNA of embryos provoked widespread condemnation.

Some scientists had called for a moratorium before the latest proposal, which carries no legal authority. It came from 18 researchers from seven countries who published a commentary in the journal Nature. They included prominent gene-editing experts Feng Zhang and David Liu of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They receive money from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also supports The Associated Press Health & Science Department.

The researchers want a temporary ban on research designed to produce a baby from sperm, eggs or embryos that bear altered DNA. Roughly 30 nations already prohibit making babies from such "germline" gene editing, the authors said. It's essentially banned in the U.S.

This "will place major speed bumps in front of the most adventurous plans to re-engineer the human species," they wrote. "But the risks of the alternative ... are much worse."

The moratorium would allow time for discussion of technical, scientific, societal and ethical issues that must be considered, they said.

Among the proposals: Individual nations should pledge to block such research for a specific period, perhaps five years. After that, each country could decide on its own about what to allow, but only after taking steps like providing public notice, joining international discussions about the pros and cons, and determining whether its citizens support proceeding with such gene editing. The proposal does not cover gene-editing experiments that don't involve trying to establish a pregnancy.

In a letter to the journal, Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, said he supported the moratorium idea.AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) - Maine lawmakers are considering a bill that would require horse-drawn buggies to have reflectors or lights at night.

The Portland Press Herald reports the push comes after several crashes involving motor vehicles in northern and central Maine, home to a growing number of Amish communities. In a January crash, several children were injured.

State Rep. Chloe Maxmin says it's impossible for drivers to see buggies at a distance, and there's no margin for error for stopping on rural roads.

Rep. David McCrea's bill would require reflective white tape on the buggies and an oil lantern that shines red when viewed from the rear and white when viewed from the front.

Whitefield resident Ben Zook says he and other Amish community members are willing to work with lawmakers on safety concerns.WASHINGTON (AP) - When John Hickenlooper announced his Democratic presidential campaign, he vowed to sit down with the Senate's top Republican if he wins in 2020 - the kind of milquetoast pitch for bipartisanship that White House hopefuls have made for generations.

But for some Democrats, Hickenlooper's pledge landed with a thud.

Still stung by President Barack Obama's fierce battles with Republicans and at odds with nearly every policy the GOP has pursued during the Trump administration, some Democrats say they have little interest in talk of cross-party cooperation. They increasingly view Republicans as immovable obstacles on everything from health care to the economy and are challenging presidential candidates to blow past their GOP opponents instead of bringing them into the fold.

"Happy talk about coming together with the Republicans is not going to fly," said Brian Fallon, who advised Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Fallon is pushing White House hopefuls to support overhauling Senate rules that typically require some level of bipartisan support for big-ticket legislation.

The take-no-prisoners approach represents a new test for Democratic presidential candidates eager to harness the energy of the party's liberal base without alienating moderates who may be more open to compromising with the GOP. It also marks a significant shift in strategy and tone for a party whose last two nominees, Obama and Clinton, each made explicit appeals to moderate Republicans and vowed to work across the aisle.

"There are some very angry people who have watched the events of the last 10 years and watched Donald Trump and their attitude is 'hell no,'" said David Axelrod, one of Obama's closest political advisers. "And their voices are very loud."

FILE - In this March 6, 2019, file photo, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper speaks in lower downtown Denver. Generations of presidential candidates have made promises to work across the aisle. But as the 2020 campaign kicks into high gear, some Democrats say they have little interest in talk of cross-party cooperation. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

That new reality poses a dilemma for White House hopefuls like Joe Biden, who is expected to launch a 2020 campaign in the next few weeks. The former vice president has worked closely with scores of Republicans during more than four decades in politics, was Obama's point man in numerous negotiations with congressional Republicans and will likely make that experience a cornerstone of a 2020 campaign.

Last week, Biden found himself at the center of a liberal firestorm after he called Vice President Mike Pence a "decent man" - the kind of offhand remark Biden has made about countless Republicans over the years. Liberal activists said Pence's support of anti-gay measures made even that mild praise unacceptable, and Biden apologized.

But on Tuesday, Biden bemoaned a political climate in which speaking kindly about the other party is considered offensive.

"If you notice, I get criticized for saying anything nice about a Republican," Biden said during a speech Tuesday to a firefighters union. "Folks, that's not who we are."

While partisan infighting is nothing new in Washington, Obama and Biden's eight years in the White House left some Democrats particularly pessimistic about the party's ability to work with Republicans. Party leaders still seethe over Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's now-infamous pledge to make Obama a one-term president and contend GOP lawmakers repeatedly moved the goalposts on health care, budget battles and Supreme Court nominations.

Democratic strategist Maria Cardona said it's not that Democrats wouldn't prefer working with Republicans, "it's that Democrats tried it and got screwed."

Although Obama remains broadly popular among Democrats, some in the party now suggest he spent too much time trying to forge compromises with Republicans who had little interest in helping him achieve his agenda. Even as he campaigned for re-election in 2012, Obama said his victory would break the GOP "fever" - a prediction he and his advisers later conceded was overly optimistic.

Cardona said she hopes a future Democratic president is "a little bit more eyes wide open" about the likelihood of forging compromise with the GOP.

Polling shows just how far apart the two parties' priorities are heading into the 2020 race. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted last month, Democrats list health care costs, education, the environment, Medicare and assistance for poor and needy people as their top policy priorities. None of those issues landed among the top priorities for Republicans, who cited terrorism, immigration and the military among their most pressing priorities.

Democrats like Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, say they're well-aware that simply sitting down and talking with Republicans will not suddenly break Washington's logjam. But they say it's equally naive to suggest Democrats can simply go it alone.

"Saying that we shouldn't even try is exactly why we have constant gridlock in Congress," Hickenlooper spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said. "What do we expect will happen in 2020 - the Republican Party is going to dissolve?"

Even if Democrats were to take back the White House, maintain control of the House and retake the Senate, their majority in the upper chamber would almost certainly be narrow.

That's prompted a groundswell of support among Democratic activists for abolishing the filibuster, the Senate procedure that requires 60 votes to pass big-ticket legislation instead of a simple majority. Rarely do presidents have Senate majorities so large that they can clear 60 votes with only the support of their own party.

Jay Inslee, the Washington state governor running on an ambitious agenda to combat climate change, was the first Democrat to call for abandoning the filibuster. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a favorite of many progressive Democrats, has also said she's open to making the change.

"It's all on the table, baby," Warren said when asked about the filibuster during a campaign event in New York.

Warren said Democrats have sometimes been too timid in power and declared, "I won't be one of those."

___

Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDCATLANTA (AP) - Just months after a contentious race for Georgia governor, and amid several election-related lawsuits and a probe by U.S. House Democrats, the state Senate on Wednesday approved a House plan calling for the statewide purchase of new electronic touchscreen voting machines that print a paper ballot.

It's a big step toward replacing Georgia's current outdated voting system, which offers no auditable paper trail. But some say it's a big step in the wrong direction.

On one side, Republican lawmakers and county election officials say the proposed touchscreen machines, called electronic ballot marking devices, are the easiest to administer and can accommodate all Georgians, including those with disabilities. On the other side, Democrats, voting integrity activists and cybersecurity experts say the machines are hackable and that a system using hand-marked paper ballots would be cheaper and more secure.

Debate has been passionate, bordering on raucous in committee hearings, the two legislative chambers and, perhaps most vociferously, on Twitter.

The proposal comes months after Republican Brian Kemp, then the secretary of state, defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams in the governor's race. The election drew national attention and shook voter confidence after it was marred by issues including long voter lines, reports of malfunctioning voting machines and high rates of rejected absentee ballots.

The bill's Senate sponsor, Republican Sen. William Ligon of Brunswick, said the proposed machines are superior to hand-marked ballots because they "leave absolutely no room for doubt of voter intent, since voters make a clear choice with the touch of a button." He said "stray or accidental marks" on hand-marked ballots could cause a ballot to be invalidated.

FILE- This May 22, 2018 file photo, shows a voter access card inserted in a voting reader during voting in the Georgia primary in Kennesaw, Ga. Just months after a highly contentious race for Georgia governor, the state Senate has approved a House plan to purchase new electronic touchscreen voting machines that print a paper ballot statewide. It's a big step toward replacing Georgia's current outdated voting system, which offers no auditable paper trail. But some say it's a big step in the wrong direction. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)

But Democratic Sen. Elena Parent of Atlanta pushed back on that assertion, saying scanning technology had improved to where that's no longer an issue.

"When you're dealing with a ballot marking device, it puts the onus on the voter to understand how it works and ensure that it correctly recorded their intent, which is just not the case with a hand-marked paper ballot," Parent said. She said a hand-marked ballot is the best record of voter intent.

While many states use these types of machines in places, often to assist disabled voters, Georgia would be the first to make them the primary voting method statewide.

Democrats tried several times to stop or delay the vote, but were overruled by Republican leadership and the Senate GOP majority.

The proposal passed the state House last month, largely along partisan lines, with Republicans in support. That's similar to the Senate's 35-to-21 vote Wednesday. It now goes back to the House to consider some slight changes made by the Senate.

Systems using electronic ballot markers include touchscreen computers, where voters make their selections and then print a paper ballot. Under the legislation, voters will have a chance to review a summary of selections on their ballot printout before putting it through a scanner, where votes are tallied. Setups from different vendors vary, but many offer ballot printouts that include text summaries as well as barcodes where voter selections are encoded for tabulation.

Hand-marked paper ballots are simply ballots filled out with pen on paper.

One of the biggest points of contention is the lack of financial information offered in support of the bill. Bond funding, or borrowing, totaling $150 million has been included in the 2020 budget proposal, but the bill does not include a fiscal note - a report on the bill's estimated financial impact.

"We are totally disregarding state law and Senate rules as far as the need for a fiscal note, there is no doubt," said Senate Minority Leader Steve Henson, a Democrat from Stone Mountain. Henson moved to have the bill ruled "out of order" because it lacked a fiscal note, but was overruled by Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan.

Last week, a U.S. House committee requested a trove of information from Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as it investigates "recent reports of serious problems with voter registration, voter access and other matters affecting the ability of people in Georgia to exercise their right to vote."

Those alleged problems surfaced when Kemp was Georgia's chief election official, supervising the election in which he was running for governor.

Kemp said the panel, led by Democrats, should "quit playing politics up there."

A federal lawsuit that challenges Georgia's use of the current paperless electronic voting machines, filed by election security advocates and individual voters, is still pending. Bruce Brown, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, wrote to lawyers for the state in late February, saying the electronic ballot-marking machines authorized by the bill "will not provide secure or auditable elections or resolve the issues raised in the litigation."

The wide-ranging legislation would also tweak Georgia's strict standard for verifying voter registrations and clarify when polling places can be closed or moved, measures proposed earlier by Democrats.

Lawmakers hope to have some new machines in place in time for testing during municipal elections in November 2019, before having them installed statewide for use in the November 2020 presidential election, which also includes a U.S. Senate race and all of Georgia's U.S. House seats.NEW YORK (AP) - This week's controversy over statements made by Fox News Channel's Tucker Carlson is as much about a high-stakes battle over the network's financial future as it is over what he said on a radio show a decade ago.

The liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America this week released two batches of recordings Carlson made as a guest on radio's "Bubba the Love Sponge Show" between 2006 and 2011, before he worked at Fox. The release was timed to coincide with Fox's meeting with advertisers on Wednesday, the first time it has ever made a sales pitch that for most television networks is a rite of spring.

In the tapes, Carlson made remarks minimizing statutory rape, used sexist slurs to refer to specific women and referred to Iraq as "a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys."

Fox's prime-time host has responded by attacking Media Matters and vowing that "we will never bow to the mob." In the only specific reference to his quoted remarks, Carlson said that "it's pointless to try to explain how the words were spoken in jest, or taken out of context, or in any case bear no resemblance to what you actually think."

What's behind the words is a bare-knuckles brawl over advertising revenue, the lifeblood for any network. Media Matters' goal has been to publicize controversial or offensive things said by Fox's prime-time hosts Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to attract the attention of advertisers, who are usually loathe to see their products associated with controversy.

A show becomes less viable if advertising dollars are choked off - a strategy that worked before for liberal activists when Fox News parted ways with Glenn Beck.

FILE - In this March 2, 2017 file photo, Tucker Carlson, host of "Tucker Carlson Tonight," poses for photos in a Fox News Channel studio, in New York. The liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America this week released two batches of recordings Carlson made as a guest on a radio show where he made denigrating remarks about race and gender. It was timed to coincide with Fox's first-ever sales meeting with advertisers on Wednesday, March 12, 2019. Media Matters says it wants to pressure Fox into better behavior by making advertisers aware of what is being said on the air. Carlson says critics want to shut Fox down. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Under normal circumstances, Fox's prime-time lineup would be a coveted spot for advertisers since it routinely has the biggest audience of any cable television network. But Fox's controversies have tarnished the brand, said Mark Hughes, CEO of C3, a firm that consults companies on effective advertising strategies. The troubles date to sexual misconduct allegations against Carlson's predecessor Bill O'Reilly and the late Fox chief Roger Ailes, which turned off women who make a large percentage of ad-buying decisions, he said.

With continued controversy, Fox News is going to see less ad revenue from top brands, Hughes said.

Carlson's show on Tuesday, for example, contained no advertisements from car companies, soft drink makers or any of the brands that are traditionally big spenders on TV commercials. The commercials on Carlson's show featured four for Fox programming, two each for a pillow manufacturer and a storage company, and plugs for a walker, hearing aid, blood pressure-lowering device and testosterone booster. Another commercial was for a computer-cleaning service that dubbed itself "the people's militia."

Advertising has been shifted to different parts of the day so no revenue was lost and Fox is on track for a record year in ad sales, said Marianne Gambelli, the network's advertising sales president. Kantar Media estimated Fox News had $1.022 billion in advertising revenue in 2018, up from $1.019 billion in 2017.

Carlson said on his show Tuesday that critics like Media Matters "would like Fox News shut down tomorrow. The other news channels agree with that."

But Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, denied that.

"My intention ultimately is to enforce a change of behavior, not to eradicate Fox," he said.

He said he doesn't mind a network with opposing political views, but objects to one that uses offensive language and promotes division.

"Do you think it's OK to make money off of everything and anything?" he said. "I think most people would say the answer is no. So now we're just talking about where the line is. I think it's OK to go after someone's livelihoods, when their livelihood is something uniquely bad and destructive or in bad faith."

Carusone said he was encouraged last fall when Fox cut back on airing President Donald Trump's campaign rallies in their entirety. But he also said he's concerned that progress can't be made if Fox and its supporters feel backed into a corner.

Fox and its defenders are particularly angered by efforts to go after advertisers, worrying that it can cost someone their job.

"Even if Tucker apologized for what he said, it wouldn't make a difference to those who are pushing for this narrative," wrote political comedian Tim Young in USA Today. "They don't actually care about what he said on shock jock radio; they care about what he says on his show every night and the influence he has on American politics as an entertainer. And they won't settle for anything less than his silencing - which will never happen."

During its presentation to advertisers, Fox touted news shows and personalities like Bret Baier, Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith. It offered statistics to show its popularity in parts of the country that aren't necessarily dominated by conservatives.

Fox declined to allow a reporter from The Associated Press to attend the sales pitch.

A recent New Yorker magazine article detailing the network's ties to President Trump, and the Democratic National Committee's decision not to allow Fox News to host one of its debates of 2020 presidential contenders have recently hurt Fox's efforts to distinguish between its news and opinion sides.IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) - Two Iowa county treasurers recently vacationed with a businessman they have supported for a lucrative tax website contract, staying at his Florida beach property for free in an apparent violation of state ethics law.

Dubuque County Treasurer Eric Stierman and Winneshiek County Treasurer Wayne Walter confirmed the trip to The Associated Press, highlighting a long, cozy and ethically questionable relationship between county officials and an important vendor.

The longtime elected officials flew to Florida last November. There they met Marc Carr, founder and CEO of GovTech Services, which hosts the website used by most Iowa counties to collect property and motor vehicle taxes. For three nights, the trio stayed at a Florida home with Stierman's brother-in-law. For two nights, they stayed at Carr's condominium in St. Pete Beach, a resort town on a barrier island near St. Petersburg.

Stierman and Walter denied any wrongdoing, describing Carr as a friend with whom they had previously vacationed in Florida.

"Just three buddies going on a trip," said Stierman, who acknowledged sending Christmas cards featuring a photo of the men to other county officials.

But the treasurers have long wielded their influence to benefit Carr's company, which has collected millions since 2011 under a contract with the Iowa County Treasurers eGovernment Alliance.

This screenshot shows video links to testimonials on the website for GovTech Services, which most Iowa counties have partnered with to collect property and motor vehicle taxes. Two Iowa county treasurers, including Dubuque County Treasurer Eric Stierman, upper left, recently vacationed with the businessman who runs the website at his Florida beach property for free in an apparent violation of state ethics law. (GovTech Services Website via AP)

Stierman was a board member for the alliance when the contract - now worth $460,000 annually - was awarded. Both have served as alliance president and have known Carr since he was Adams County treasurer in the 1990s.

Since 2014, Stierman has appeared in an online testimonial praising GovTech's work as "wonderful" and Carr's customer service.

"Would I hesitate to ever go with them again? No, I would not. I'm extremely happy with the service that we get from them," he says. "Marc calls you back or he answers the phone directly and your problems are taken care of."

Building on his exclusive contract with 88 of Iowa's 99 counties, Carr, 48, has expanded his business into other states.

He said that he believed the use of his condo by county treasurers was legal but that he'd ask a state panel for an opinion.

State Auditor Rob Sand said Wednesday that his office recently opened an investigation into the matter.

The Iowa ethics law bans public employees from accepting gifts and favors worth $3 or more from "restricted donors," who include vendors, lobbyists and others affected by their official actions. Vendors are barred from offering gifts, and the law doesn't contain an exception for friends.

"Even where there is a genuine personal friendship, the acceptance of personal benefits from those who could gain advantage by influencing official actions raises suspicions that tend to undermine the public trust," it warns.

St. Pete Beach condos rent anywhere from $100 to $200 a night in November. Carr and his wife, who live in Glenwood, Iowa, purchased the condo in 2015. Stierman said he had stayed there once previously. Walter said the stay last November was his only but that the trio previously vacationed together in Daytona Beach.

Stierman and Walter suggested that the free lodging did not amount to a gift because they accepted it in exchange for the free stay that Carr received from Stierman's brother-in-law. Walter later claimed that he bought drinks and "other stuff" for Carr during the vacation to offset the free lodging, adding that he paid cash and couldn't remember details.

"I'm convinced, appropriately so to my personal satisfaction as an honest person, that I did not take anything free from Marc," he said.

Gov. Kim Reynolds recently appointed Walter to a second six-year term on the investment board for the Iowa Public Employees' Retirement System. Walter, who has held office since 1984, faces an upcoming Senate confirmation.

Stierman, who has held office since 1994, said he wasn't "that familiar with" ethics law.

The Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board previously ruled that another perk funded by GovTech Services' for county treasurers is illegal. The board issued an opinion in 2015 concluding it was a gift law violation for the company and another vendor to sponsor a college scholarship program that is only open to the children and grandchildren of treasurers and their staffs. Despite the advisory, the program has continued.

Floyd County Treasurer Frank Rottinghaus, who has called the scholarships unethical, said that vacationing with the vendor was also problematic.

"I certainly have a problem with the appearance," he said. "The law tells us that we should avoid the appearance of any type of relationship that would affect decisions that we would make on behalf of our citizens."

Anyone who knowingly violates the law is guilty of a serious misdemeanor and can be removed from office, but enforcement action is rare. Complaints against local officials are handled by prosecutors where they reside. County attorneys in Dubuque and Winneshiek had no immediate comment.

The governor has known Walter, Stierman and Carr since she was the Clarke County treasurer in the 1990s. She and her now-disgraced ally, Dave Jamison , were involved in forming the alliance, which initially contracted with ABC Virtual to host the website. Reynolds was hired by ABC Virtual immediately after leaving the treasurer's office in 2008. Carr also worked for ABC Virtual, which lost the contract in 2011 amid financial difficulties. He then founded GovTech, which was awarded the deal and has kept it since.WASHINGTON (AP) - A government watchdog says former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke didn't engage in illegal political activity when he went to Pennsylvania about a year ago to announce federal grants shortly before a special House election.

The Office of Special Counsel released its finding this week clearing Zinke, saying the coal dump site where he announced the nationwide grants, including $55 million for Pennsylvania, to clean up mines was an appropriate choice.

A federal law known as the Hatch Act bars executive branch officials from engaging in some kinds of political activities.

Federal officials were asked to examine whether Zinke made the trip to boost the GOP candidate, Rick Saccone, who ended up losing the congressional election to Democrat Conor Lamb.

President Donald Trump announced Zinke's resignation in December amid a series of ethics investigations involving the interior secretary. Other investigations stemming from Zinke's tenure are continuing are continuing.WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. is issuing an emergency order Wednesday grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft "effective immediately," in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people, President Donald Trump said.

Many nations had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from its airspace, but until Trump's announcement, the Federal Aviation Administration had said that it didn't have any data to show the jets are unsafe. Trump cited "new information" that had come to light in the ongoing investigation into the incident. He did not elaborate.

"All of those planes are grounded, effective immediately," Trump said during a scheduled briefing on border security.

Trump said any airplane currently in the air will go to its destination and then be grounded. He added all airlines and affected pilots had been notified.

Trump said the safety of the American people is of "paramount concern," and added that the FAA would soon put out a statement on the action.

Trump said the decision to ground the aircraft "didn't have to be made, but we thought it was the right decision."

President Donald Trump speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Washington. Trump said the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft "effective immediately," in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

The president insisted the announcement was coordinated with aviation officials in Canada, U.S. carriers and aircraft manufacturer Boeing.

"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."

In a statement, Boeing said it "continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX." The company added that it had decided "out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft's safety - to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft."

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said the company was "supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution."

__

Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann and Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

Mike McDaniel, director of Houston High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, left, and Carla Provost, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, right, listen as President Donald Trump speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Washington. Trump said the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft "effective immediately," in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)Google was accused in the lawsuit of violating a 1986 law governing the privacy of stored electronic communications.

Google agreed in the settlement to disclose on its website how users search terms are shared but was not required to change its behavior. The three main plaintiffs received $5,000 each for representing the class. Their attorneys received about $2.1 million.

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday put in jeopardy an $8.5 million settlement Google made with users to resolve a class action lawsuit accusing it of violating their privacy by sharing users search queries with other websites.

The justices, in an unsigned opinion, threw out a ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals that had upheld the settlement, directing it to take a fresh look at whether the plaintiffs had the legal standing necessary to sue and whether they were even harmed by the search engine operator.

Google, part of Alphabet Inc., was accused in the lawsuit of violating a 1986 law governing the privacy of stored electronic communications.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, saying the increasingly common type of settlement at the heart of the case was unfair and unreasonable and should not have been approved by the 9th Circuit.

These so-called cy pres (pronounced see pray) settlements are used in class action cases when it might be impractical to carve up low-value individual damages among a large number of plaintiffs. In endorsing the Google settlement in 2017, the 9th Circuit said each of the 129 million US Google users who theoretically could have claimed part of it would have received a paltry 4 cents in recovery.

Proponents have said these settlements can put otherwise negligible awards per person to good use by benefiting groups that work for the public good or support underfunded entities. Critics have said they encourage frivolous lawsuits and excessive fees going to plaintiffs lawyers.

Google agreed in the settlement to disclose on its website how users search terms are shared but was not required to change its behavior. The three main plaintiffs received $5,000 each for representing the class. Their attorneys received about $2.1 million.

Under the settlement, much of the rest of the money would go to organizations or projects that promote internet privacy, including at Stanford University and AARP, a lobbying group for older Americans, but nothing to the millions of Google users who the plaintiffs were to have represented in the class action.

A Google representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

The settlement was challenged by attorneys including Ted Frank of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which advocates against what it considers abusive class action procedures.

Following the ruling, Frank said he expects the lower courts to again find that the plaintiffs may sue and that the issue will soon be back before the high court. The decision simply delays the day of reckoning for this unfair practice, Frank said.

The case began when a California resident named Paloma Gaos filed a proposed class action lawsuit in 2010 in San Jose federal court.

The plaintiffs said that their privacy was violated when their search terms were disseminated by Google to other sites. One searched for her own name, another for financial and health data, and a third for information related to his divorce proceedings.

The Supreme Court may soon get another opportunity to clarify what is needed for plaintiffs to achieve the legal standing necessary to sue. The justices are considering whether to hear a pending appeal by online shoe retailer Zappos, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc, over whether customers are entitled to sue over a 2012 data breach.NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The Latest on the appeal of a federal judge's ruling that the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act is unconstitutional (all times local):

1:30 p.m.

Opponents of a 1978 law governing Native American adoptions have told a federal appeals court in New Orleans that the law is an unconstitutional threat to the well-being of children and families.

The Indian Child Welfare Act gives preference to Native American families in adoptions involving Native American Children. Opponents told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday the law is a race-based intrusion on individual states' adoption procedures. They also fear that a decision upholding the law could endanger adoptions already completed.

Indian tribes say the law is needed to preserve Native American families and culture.

A federal district judge in Texas struck down the law last year. The tribes want a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit to overrule that judge. It's unclear when the panel will rule.

___

9 a.m.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans is set to hear arguments on a 1978 law giving preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings involving Native American children.

A federal district judge in Texas last year struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act. That was a victory for opponents who say it is racially motivated and unconstitutionally discriminatory. Backers of the law, including numerous tribes and the federal government, say that if the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds that decision, many Native American children will be lost to their families and tribes.

Backers of the law say its definition of "Indian child" is based on tribal affiliations that are political, not racial.

A three judge 5th Circuit panel was to hear arguments Wednesday morning.WATERLOO, Ill. (AP) - Authorities say a 4-year-old boy and his grandparents were rescued after their small plane crashed in southern Illinois.

The fixed-wing, single-engine Piper PA-32 was traveling from Mobile, Alabama, when it went down Tuesday in rural Monroe County on its way to St. Louis Downtown Airport in Cahokia, Illinois.

The plane, piloted by 62-year-old Michael Stodard of Fairhope, Alabama, crashed into the yard of Waterloo police officer Trin Daws. The officer says he and another man broke the plane's windows with a fire extinguisher and pulled the boy out.

Sheriff's Maj. Jim Lansing says the boy, his grandmother and his grandfather were talking when they were taken to hospitals. He says they suffered injuries that weren't life-threatening.

Lansing says the grandmother, 61-year-old Angel Stodard, told authorities a warning light went on, oil was spewing onto the windshield and they couldn't see.

Workers prepare the wrecked plane for transport Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Waterloo, Ill. The family who survived the Tuesday plane crash near Waterloo are from Alabama and were taken to area hospitals with minimal injuries. (Derik Holtmann/Belleville News-Democrat via AP)RENO, Nev. (AP) - Two rural Nevada counties have paid $250,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a former Las Vegas entertainer who was wrongfully jailed for 18 days for a burglary he didn't commit in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, his lawyer said Wednesday.

Sean Laughlin, 56, filed a lawsuit in U.S. 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.

Laughlin's ordeal began in December 2016 when a state trooper stopped him for a minor traffic offense in Carson City. A routine warrant check showed a Sean Laughlin was wanted for failing to appear in court for a residential burglary in Pahrump, 385 miles (620 kilometers) away.

Laughlin 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 $675,000 before he was set free 18 days later with no explanation without ever seeing a lawyer.

The longtime comedian and juggler lost his job on an Australian cruise ship as a result of his incarceration.

Court records show U.S. Magistrate Robert McQuaid Jr. approved the settlement on Feb. 7.

This undated photo provided by Sean Laughlin's attorney shows Las Vegas entertainer Sean Laughlin. Two rural Nevada counties have paid $250,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a former Las Vegas entertainer who was wrongfully jailed for 18 days for a burglary he didn't commit in an apparent case of mistaken identity, his lawyer said Wednesday, March13, 2019. Sean Laughlin, 56, filed a lawsuit in U.S. 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. (Sean Laughlin via AP)

His Reno lawyer, Terri Keyser-Cooper, said Wednesday they have received two separate checks for $125,000 and are "elated" with the outcome.

"Sean certainly deserves it," she told The Associated Press. "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."

Lawyers representing the two counties did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

The crime involved stealing jewelry, used women's clothing, DVDs, camper and an electric screwdriver with a total value of less than $4,000. Throughout his incarceration, Laughlin protested almost daily to deputies, inmates - "anyone who might listen," the lawsuit said. He eventually became severely depressed and borderline suicidal.

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.LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Lawmakers in Arkansas and Utah sent their governors legislation Wednesday banning most abortions 18 weeks into a woman's pregnancy, moving the states closer to enacting bans that could be among the strictest in the country.

The Arkansas House gave final approval by an 86-1 vote to the bill there, which Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson has said he supports. Arkansas already bans abortion 20 weeks into a woman's pregnancy. Hutchinson told reporters he believed the restriction would likely survive a court challenge.

"It's within the second trimester that states are allowed to pass restrictions on, and this, with the science we have today it seems like a very appropriate restriction," Hutchinson said shortly before the measure passed the House.

The House had approved an earlier version of the bill and on Wednesday backed an amendment adding exceptions for rape and incest. The measure already included an exception for medical emergencies.

The 18-week bans would be the strictest in the country if enacted, though proposals to ban abortion earlier in a woman's pregnancy are advancing in several other state legislatures.

Utah also passed an 18-week ban with exceptions for rape, incest, life of the mother and fatal fetal defects on Wednesday, sending it to Republican Gov. Gary Herbert. He hasn't said whether he'll sign it, though he has said he's generally against abortion.

FILE - In this Feb. 25, 2018 file photo, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson speaks at the National Governor Association 2018 winter meeting in Washington. Arkansas lawmakers have sent the governor legislation banning most abortions 18 weeks into a woman's pregnancy, a prohibition that could be the strictest in the country. The House on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, gave final approval by an 86-1 vote to the bill, which Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson has said he supports. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah responded to the vote by saying it would sue over the measure if Herbert signs it. Opponents have warned the measure could embroil the state in a costly lawsuit if signed into law, though supporters in the GOP-dominated Legislature argue it's worth it to reduce the number of second-trimester abortions.

Another abortion measure banning the procedure if the only reason is a diagnosis of Down syndrome has also been passed by Utah lawmakers and is on the governor's desk, though it would only go into effect if a similar measure is upheld elsewhere.

In Arkansas, the 18-week proposal is among several abortion restrictions that have moved quickly through the majority-Republican Legislature. Hutchinson last month signed into law a measure banning abortion in the state if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing the procedure nationwide.

Abortion rights groups called the ban an unconstitutional attempt to challenge the Roe v. Wade decision.

"Arkansas already has some of the most extreme anti-abortion restrictions in the country, as well as some of the nation's highest rates of teen pregnancy and maternal mortality," Gloria Pedro, Arkansas lobbyist for Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, said in a statement. "Instead of continuing to attack access to safe, legal abortion, lawmakers should focus on improving Arkansans' health."

Other abortion measures advancing in Arkansas also include a proposal to prohibit doctors from performing abortions solely due to a Down syndrome diagnosis. That measure was endorsed by a Senate panel Wednesday afternoon.

___

Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.

___

Follow Andrew DeMillo on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ademilloWASHINGTON (AP) - The chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee says he does "not see the need for further action" against Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen after he clarified his testimony under oath about never seeking a pardon from Trump.

In a letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings, lawyer Michael Monico clarified that Cohen had asked one of his lawyers to explore the possibility of a pardon before he left a joint-defense agreement with Trump last June.

Cohen's Feb. 27 declaration before Cummings' committee that "I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from President Trump" set off a firestorm. Congressional investigators promised to look into the claim, and Trump called him a liar on Twitter.

The statement Cohen made "could have been clearer regarding the time frames," Monico wrote in the letter obtained by The Associated Press. Still, Monico said Cohen's testimony was true and he stands by his statement.

Cummings said in a statement Wednesday that "I do not see the need for further action - at least at this time." He said he understands that Cohen may have answered more detailed questions on the topic in separate, closed-door testimony before the House intelligence committee the next day.

"We will review that transcript when it becomes available and determine whether any additional steps are required," Cummings said.

FILE - In this March 6, 2019 file photo, Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former lawyer, speaks as he departs after testifying before a closed-door session of the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, in Washington. Cohen sues the Trump Organization, on Thursday, March 7, saying he is owed $1.9 million.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Another Cohen lawyer, Lanny Davis, and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani went back and forth in dueling interviews and tweets last week over the pardon issue. Trump weighed in on Friday, tweeting that Cohen had personally asked him for a pardon. Cohen denied that minutes later in a tweet of his own.

Monico reiterated that denial in his letter to Cummings, saying Cohen never asked Trump for a pardon and that Trump never offered one. He said Cohen had asked a prior lawyer to inquire about a possible pardon because Trump had "publicly dangled the possibility of pardons when commenting about ongoing investigations."

"With that in mind, as a past member of the joint defense team, Mr. Cohen asked his then attorney to discuss with another Trump attorney possible pardon options consistent with the President's prior public declarations," Monico said. Nothing ever came of that effort, he said.

Cohen is slated to begin a three-year prison sentence in May.

___

Associated Press writer Michael Sisak contributed to this report from New York.Congressional Democrats and tribal leaders renewed criticism Wednesday of President Donald Trump for scaling back two national monuments in Utah following a wider review of lands protected around the country by past presidents.

The 2017 national monument review had a predetermined outcome and didn't take into account tribal interests despite some of the lands being sacred to them, lawmakers and tribal leaders said during a House Natural Resources Committee hearing in Washington.

The hearing brought the contentious review carried out by ex-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke back into the spotlight and rehashed many of the arguments that surrounded that assessment. The review led Trump to downsize two Utah monuments that protected wide expanses of lands home to tribal artifacts, dinosaur fossils and wildlife habitat.

Republicans on the committee and a few local representatives from Utah defended the review of 27 national monuments created since 1996 as a necessary re-evaluation of misuse by past presidents of a law that is supposed to be used to create small monuments around areas with particular historical or archaeological value. They said Trump's decision to follow Zinke's suggestion to downsize in December 2017 the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments was necessary to correct abuses by Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva, the committee chairman, called the monument reductions "the largest public lands rollback in modern American history" and said questions persist about whether the process was illegal and improperly influenced. The Interior Department's office of inspector general report cleared Zinke of wrongdoing following a complaint that he redrew the boundaries of a national monument in Utah to benefit a state lawmaker and political ally.

Zinke was asked to appear but declined, Grijalva said. He also said there had been multiple requests sent to Interior on how the decision was made, but many of those inquiries have gone unanswered.

FILE - In this Dec. 11, 2018 file photo, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke speaks after an order withdrawing federal protections for countless waterways and wetland was signed, at EPA headquarters in Washington. As Democrats in Congress prepare to scrutinize President Donald Trump's review of 27 national monuments, most recommendations made by ex-Interior Ryan Zinke remain unfinished. They are seemingly stuck as other matters consume the White House. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)

Several tribal leaders testified that the downsizing of Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah by about 85 percent peeled back protections, exposing lands that are sacred to several Native American tribes.

"In Hopi, we never just leave an area. . . . Yes, maybe there is nobody there today, but we know spiritually they are still there," said Clark Tenakhongva, vice chairman of the Hopi Tribe. "It would hurt all the nations that have ties to Bears Ears if oil, mining and other activities were to occur there. How would you feel if I took an ATV and rode around in your church area?"

A coalition of tribal, conservation, outdoor recreation and paleontology groups have sued to block the downsizing of the monument. Those lawsuits are pending.

Zinke and Trump have openly advocated for a return to American energy dominance. But so far, no mining has occurred on lands stripped from the Utah monuments despite exploratory interest from companies, according to state and federal officials who approve permits.

U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, a Republican from Utah, scoffed at the notion that monument cuts were about opening the lands for oil, gas and other mineral extraction. He urged the Democrats to support his proposal that would create new rules to limit the unilateral power afforded presidents under the Antiquities Act that is used to create national monuments, and require approvals from local entities.

"The problem is there are no rules. There is no process in the law," Bishop said. "It is a worthy topic to discuss, even if the Democrats have put blinders on to try to narrow the focus."

Bishop and others who defended the review and pointed to a sweeping public lands bill signed into law on Tuesday by Trump that creates five new monuments - two of which Zinke suggested - as the right way to establish monuments rather than unilateral decisions made by presidents.

"That's the way monuments should be made," Bishop said.

In the 15 months since Trump downsized the Utah monuments, the president has done nothing with Zinke's proposal to shrink two more monuments, in Oregon and Nevada, and change rules at six others, including allowing commercial fishing inside three marine monuments in waters off New England, Hawaii and American Samoa.

Zinke resigned in December amid multiple ethics investigations and has joined a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm. Trump has nominated as his replacement Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for the oil and gas industry and other corporate interests.

FILE - In this May 26, 2017, file photo, Susie Gelbart walks near petroglyphs at the Gold Butte National Monument near Bunkerville, Nev. As Democrats in Congress prepare to scrutinize President Donald Trump's review of 27 national monuments, most of the recommendations made by ex-Interior Ryan Zinke remain unfinished, seemingly stuck on the backburner as other matters consume the White House. Zinke recommended cuts to the boundaries of Gold Butte National Monument to free up a water district that he thought shouldn't have been included in the boundaries. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

FILE - In this July 6, 2000, file photo, Pilot Rock rises into the clouds in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument near Lincoln, Ore. As Democrats in Congress prepare to scrutinize President Donald Trump's review of 27 national monuments, most of the recommendations made by ex-Interior Ryan Zinke remain unfinished, seemingly stuck on the backburner as other matters consume the White House. Zinke recommended reductions to Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which protects a heavily forested area where three mountain ranges converge and had been doubled in size by former President Barack Obama. (AP Photo/Jeff Barnard, File)

FILE - In this Aug. 2, 2016, file photo, cyclists race along the scenic Byway 12 above Calf Creek and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument beyond during the second stage of the Tour Of Utah bike race. As Democrats in Congress prepare to scrutinize President Donald Trump's review of 27 national monuments, most of the recommendations made by ex-Interior Ryan Zinke remain unfinished, seemingly stuck on the backburner as other matters consume the White House. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP, File)TULSA, Okla. (AP) - An Oklahoma teenager charged with murder, rape and other felonies during a 2017 string of crimes has pleaded guilty less than a month before his trial was to start.

Seventeen-year-old Deonte James Green pleaded guilty in Tulsa County court Wednesday to first-degree murder and 19 other counts in a blind plea, meaning it was entered without a sentencing agreement with prosecutors. His trial was scheduled to begin April 1.

In July, a hearing will be held for Green, who faces up to life in prison without parole, that will consider his age and likelihood of rehabilitation before Green is sentenced.

Green was 16 when he's accused of shooting Broken Arrow middle school teacher Shane Anderson to death and raping an 81-year-old woman in a separate incident.ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Greece's Justice Ministry has angered opposition parties and officials in the governing Syriza party by proposing criminal law changes that would reduce sentences for some serious offenses.

The main opposition New Democracy party deplored the lower penalty for making and throwing gasoline bombs, which anarchist and far-left demonstrators often use against police officers.

The party said Wednesday the proposed changes would encourage use of Molotov cocktails and also criticized the ministry's proposed softening of the sentence for heading a criminal organization.

Leaders of Greece's Nazi-inspired Golden Dawn party are on trial on that charge, in connection with the 2013 slaying of a left-wing musician.

Syriza's youth branch opposed the proposed penalty for leading a criminal organization, as well as a separate proposal that would make rape convictions more difficult.ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - A young Pete Kaiser had the drive to learn about racing sled dogs and the family and community to support his passion. Years later, he won the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Growing up, Kaiser had plenty of sled dogs to choose from at his parents' kennel in Bethel, a rural community in southwest Alaska. He got his first taste of success as a senior in high school when he won a 65-mile (105-kilometer) race. From there, the competitions and prizes kept getting bigger.

On Wednesday, the 31-year-old captured the crowning glory in the sport, the Iditarod, a grueling test against the wildest terrain Alaska has to offer. Kaiser crossed the finish line in the Gold Rush town of Nome after beating back a challenge from the defending champion, Joar Ulsom of Norway.

Ulsom finished the race just 12 minutes after Kaiser, who took 9 days, 12 hours, 39 minutes and 6 seconds to complete the 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) journey over two mountain ranges, along the frozen Yukon River and across the treacherous, wind-swept Bering Sea coast.

It's Kaiser's first Iditarod victory in his 10th try. He said he wasn't sure what made everything come together for him this year.

"Just years of knowledge gained and trying to put it all together to have a better race, better dog team this year - every little detail coming into play," he said in a post-victory interview televised from the finish line.

Peter Kaiser (9) poses with his lead dogs, Morrow, left, and Lucy., Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Nome, Alaska, after winning the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. It's the first Iditarod victory for Kaiser in his 10th attempt. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News via AP)

Kaiser became the fifth Alaska Native and first Yupik musher to win the world's most famous sled dog race.

Veteran Iditarod musher Mike Williams Sr. has been friends with the Kaiser family and watched Pete's career progress. His victory lifts up not only the Yupik people but all southwest Alaska, Williams said.

"It's going to make 35,000 people proud," Williams said. "I think he's going to be a great representative for us."

A large group of residents from Bethel, Kaiser's hometown, flew in to see his victory. Alaska Native dancers and drummers performed near the finish line as they waited for Kaiser to arrive, even though it was past 3 a.m.

Kaiser called the support "extremely humbling, and it motivates me every day to perform to my best, and I just want to thank them for coming out here tonight."

When he was young, Kaiser went to races like the Kuskokwim 300, an annual mid-distance race in Bethel, to learn everything he could from the mushers.

That includes Ed Iten, a veteran musher whose best Iditarod finish was second place in 2005.

"He was a young boy then and came over and helped me feed the dogs," Iten said. "Then he went from helping out when I was in Bethel feeding my dogs to eventually whipping my butt in the Kusko 300, so he's a quick study."

Kaiser, who counts Iten as his mentor, went on to win four Kuskokwim 300 races.

"It just couldn't be better," Iten said of Kaiser's Iditarod victory. "We've been waiting for this. There's been no doubt in my mind that he was going to get it sooner or later."

Dogs are in the Kaiser family's blood. Pete's father, Ron, raced dogs for a few years and then kept an active kennel. His mother, Janet, managed the Kuskokwim 300.

Kaiser, who is married with two children, mushes in the winter and gets seasonal summer jobs on top of managing the kennel.

Sled dog races don't have lucrative jackpots - Kaiser picked up about $50,000 and a new truck for winning the world's premier competition. The prize money is down about $20,000 from what the 2017 winner received.

This year's race was marked by the stunning collapse of Frenchman Nicolas Petit, who was seemingly headed for victory as late as Monday. He had a five-hour lead until his dog team stopped running.

Petit said one dog was picking on another during a rest break, and he yelled at the dog to knock it off. At that point, the entire team refused to run. He had to withdraw.

Fifty-two mushers began this year's race. Petit was among 11 who withdrew.

The 2019 race came during a bruising two-year stretch for the Iditarod that included a dog doping scandal and the loss of national sponsors amid protests by animal rights activists.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is the biggest critic.

"Hundreds of dogs (including six from Pete Kaiser's team) were so sick, exhausted, or injured that they were pulled from the race, forcing the ones remaining to work even harder, struggling on in what is a grueling test - not of human endurance but of a dog's ability to survive extreme cruelty," PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said in a statement after Kaiser's victory.

Joar Leifseth Ulsom, right, congratulates Peter Kaiser on his win in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Nome, Alaska. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News via AP)

Peter Kaiser is mobbed by friends early Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Nome, Alaska, after winning the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. It's the first Iditarod victory for Kaiser in his 10th attempt. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News via AP)

Jessie Royer passes icebergs in open water on Norton Sound as she approaches Nome, Alaska, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in the Iditarod trail sled dog race. Royer, of Fairbanks, took third place. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News via AP)

Peter Kaiser (9) checks in at the finish line, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Nome, Alaska, after winning the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. It's the first Iditarod victory for Kaiser in his 10th attempt. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News via AP)BALTIMORE (AP) - Crews in Baltimore started demolishing a blighted block of vacant homes Wednesday as the city ramps up efforts to reduce its thousands of boarded-up eyesores.

Mayor Catherine Pugh said her administration is committed to build from areas of strength to eliminate abandoned houses and "pave the way for new investment and long-awaited revitalization." The city has had at least 16,000 uninhabitable homes for many years, and the mayor said she wants to shrink that number to 15,000.

Pugh got in a bright yellow excavator to start the demolition on a street in West Baltimore - just one of many long-abandoned blocks of the overwhelmingly African-American area where generational poverty and extreme inequity will take years, if not decades, of sustained attention to address.

"We owe it to residents to provide them neighborhoods and public spaces that support their quality of life, allowing them to raise families and enjoy the same opportunities of other areas of the city," said Pugh, who took office in late 2016.

As a gaggle of city officials departed the area after demolition began, neighborhood resident Erick Dailey stood and watched heavy machinery claw away at a few abandoned row homes.

Dailey was partly glad to see the block's eyesores - typically referred to as "vacants" in Baltimore - knocked down because they are havens for drug gangs and arsonists. But he had concerns about what would happen after the bulldozers leave. He wondered aloud why more abandoned structures weren't being rehabilitated when locals like him could try making them livable again with some help.

Work crews demolish a derelict block as Baltimore tries to reduce its sea of boarded-up properties, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Mayor Catherine Pugh says her administration is committed to eliminating abandoned houses to "pave the way for new investment and long-awaited revitalization." She got in an excavator Wednesday to start the demolition in a blighted swath of West Baltimore. (AP Photo/David McFadden)

"I've been trying to get my credit right so I can buy a couple of vacants. I would love to fix a couple up, rent them to veterans like myself. There's more destitute people in this neighborhood than there are kids, so the last thing we need is more parks," he said.

Other onlookers said they hoped Baltimore City Hall finally has a clear vision and firm plan for creating revitalization opportunities. The city has long struggled to boost its many depressed areas and has been knocking down abandoned properties for many years.

Maryland's biggest city is hardly alone in dealing with issues of urban decay. But Baltimore's numerous vacant lots and roughly 16,000 uninhabitable row homes with weeds growing out of boarded-up windows have proved especially intractable in poor and racially segregated areas. Baltimore's population today is roughly 612,000 - about the same as 100 years ago and significantly less than its 950,000 figure in 1950.

Housing researchers say about 20,000 other city properties are currently unoccupied and pose a risk of becoming shells.

Under a plan announced by city and state officials in early 2016, thousands of vacant buildings are slated for demolition. The hope is for open space and state-subsidized financing to stimulate private investment in new homes, retail stores and other businesses to revive impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods. The yearslong Project CORE includes $75 million in state funding and much more in financing opportunities for private-sector development.

Other large-scale demolition efforts, including those in Detroit, Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio, have had mixed results.

Pugh said the future plan for the West Baltimore block where demolition started Wednesday is a multiphase homeownership project called Bakers View Townhomes that will include 87 "affordable" homes.

A city statement said the townhouse project has received $1.1 million in bond funds from the Baltimore City Department of Housing & Community Development, among other funds. A local community development organization also received funds from Project CORE to stabilize vacant properties.

___

Follow David McFadden on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dmcfaddThe decision to rename Astana was made by the interim president Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev. An online petition has exceeded 42 thousand signatures. The city has changed its name three times in less than 60 years.

Astana (AsiaNews / Agencies) - In a rare public display of dissent, about 20 people demonstrated yesterday in front of the mayor's office in Astana against the decision to rename the capital in honor of Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan for almost 30 years who resigned on March 19th. The police arrested everyone.

Nazarbayev has ruled the Central Asian republic since 1989, when it was still part of the territory of the Soviet Union. His resignation took everyone by surprise. However, the experts believe that he will continue to maneuver politics from behind the scenes, thanks to administrators loyal to him and to the figure of his daughter Dariga, who has been appointed Speaker of Parliament.

The decision to change the name of the capital Astana is the first official motion of the interim president Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, former Senate Speaker. According to activists, the decision should have gone through parliamentary voting instead. Meanwhile, an online petition launched on the GoPetition platform against the city's fourth name change in less than 60 years has exceeded 42 thousand signatures.

Known as Akmolinsk, in 1961 Astana was renamed Tselinograd ("city of virgin lands" in Russian); in 1991, when the country gained its independence, it assumed that of Aqmola ("White sepulcher" in Kazakh). Finally in 1997, when the capital was moved from Almaty to Aqmola, the city took the name of Astana ("capital" in Kazakh).CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - A New Hampshire auto shop owner facing deportation to Lebanon is seeking a pardon for crimes he committed as a teenager 14 years ago.

Alain Ata came to the U.S. at age 10, and spent several years in prison for burglary, conspiracy and receiving stolen property incidents when he was 18. Now 34, he seeking a pardon that will allow him to remain in the country.

In a letter to state officials, Ata says he made mistakes as a youth, but has matured and worked hard to find purpose in life. He owns an auto repair shop in Manchester and takes care of his elderly, disabled parents.

"This was a non-violent crime which stemmed from hanging around the wrong crowd and my own bad decisions. I have taken full responsibility for it and have paid dearly," he wrote. "I love this country and what it stands for. I want to live here close to my family and begin one of my own. This pardon is the only way to lift this burden off my shoulders and allow me to make decisions going forward without the fear of being torn away from all that I love and cherish in this world."

Prosecutors and the chief justice of the state Superior Court oppose his request. In a letter, Assistant Rockingham County Attorney William Pate said Ata and others broke into a home by force, and Ata later was convicted of threatening and drunken driving.

The Executive Council on Wednesday delayed action on whether Ata deserves a pardon hearing, though two of the five members said they support holding a hearing.

"I think we need broad immigration reform, and this is one instance that epitomizes the shortcomings of our immigration system," said Councilor Andru Volinsky.

Councilor Russell Prescott called Ata a "genuinely considerate person."

"He made a bad mistake and served time for that," he said. "I think his case is very compelling and should be heard."WASHINGTON (AP) - In a story March 7 about (topic), The Associated Press reported erroneously that the IT services provider TEKsystems is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Its headquarters are actually in Hanover, Maryland.

A corrected version of the story is below:

A hot US job market is coaxing people in from the sidelines

Defying expectations, a hot US job market is pulling in workers from the sidelines

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER

AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - A surprisingly strong burst of job growth over the past year has led many economists to wonder: Where are all the workers coming from?

As recently as last spring, analysts had worried that hiring would slow as the pool of unemployed shrank. Many employers have complained for years that they could no longer find enough people to fill their open jobs.

Turns out they were both wrong.

The pace of hiring in 2018 was the most robust in three years, and for a surprising reason: Many more people have decided to look for work than experts had expected. The influx of those job seekers, if sustained, could help extend an economic expansion that is already the second-longest on record.

The growth in America's workforce - made up of people either working or looking for work - has helped reverse an alarming consequence of the recession: The exit of millions of Americans from the job market.

For five years after the Great Recession ended in 2009, many Americans gave up on their job hunts. Some suffered from disabilities. Others enrolled in school or stayed home to raise children. Still others were stymied by criminal pasts or failed drug tests. Some just felt discouraged by their job prospects. Because they weren't actively seeking work, they weren't even counted as unemployed.

Economists had speculated that millions of these people lacked necessary qualifications or were otherwise deemed undesirable by employers and might not work again. That meant stronger hiring wouldn't necessarily help them.

Yet for the past few years it has. The proportion of Americans ages 25 to 54 who have a job has reached nearly 80 percent - the same as before the recession. Economists refer to this age group as "prime-age" workers. It excludes older Americans who have retired and younger workers who may be in school.

"The U.S. is a very diverse and dynamic economy and can often surprise us," said Julia Coronado, chief economist at MacroPolicy Perspectives. "This is a positive surprise. We're due for one."

Other factors that have held some people back from seeking work have included the high cost of child care and a lack of paid leave. Research suggests that such costs have held back the workforce participation rate of prime-age U.S. women, a rate that trails those in most other industrialized countries.

Child care costs delayed the return of Valarie Regas of Atlanta to the job market after she gave birth to her second child in 2012. Regas wanted to go back, but most of the jobs she found didn't pay enough to cover child care. So she remained mostly out of the job market for five more years.

After completing a coding boot camp at Georgia Tech, Regas was hired last year by a division of the European aerospace giant Airbus. The company initially wanted someone with more experience, she said. But after she pitched them on her enthusiasm and willingness to learn, she was hired as a software programmer.

"Even with the exorbitant cost of child care, I am now bringing home real money," said Regas, 36.

Many companies are relaxing their education or experience requirements, according to economists and staffing agencies. They are considering more applicants with disabilities. Businesses are expanding their training programs. Some, analysts say, are also looking with a more open mind at people with criminal backgrounds.

The rebound has confounded many experts' projections. In 2014, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that the proportion of people ages 16 and up either working or looking for work - often called the participation rate - would be just 62.5 percent by the end of 2017 and would decline thereafter. Instead, the figure reached 63.2 percent in January, a five-year high.

"We have learned this year that there's more slack in the labor market because people are coming back in," Fed Chairman Jerome Powell told Congress last week.

The influx of people, Powell acknowledged last year, had come as a "surprise."

Women, it turns out, have returned to the workforce in greater numbers than men. The proportion of prime-age women in the labor force is now higher than before the recession. And for women ages 25 through 34, participation is at an 18-year peak. The participation rate for prime-age African-American women also exceeds its pre-recession level.

As they assess a broader pool of job applicants, some companies are doing more to develop skills. A survey by Manpower found that 54 percent of employers invested in training programs in 2018, up from just 20 percent four years earlier. One-third said they're adjusting their education and experience requirements, with some no longer requiring a college degree.

Ricardo Madan of TEKsystems, an IT services provider, says his company is willing to train more of its new hires, rather than just finding already-qualified workers. Last year, the Hanover, Md.-based company paid for a three-month boot camp for 25 potential employees run by Trilogy Education, a training company, and Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

It ended up hiring 19 of them.

"We weren't thinking this way five years ago," he said. "It's never been this hard to find people."SHEFFIELD, Mass. (AP) - Authorities say five people have been found dead after a fire in a home in western Massachusetts.

Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington says the fire in Sheffield was reported just before 8 a.m. Wednesday, and the home was fully engulfed when fire crews arrived.

The fire was just over an hour later, and the bodies were found when firefighters entered the home.

Harrington did not take questions at a Wednesday afternoon news conference. She called the investigation "complicated."

No additional details about the victims have been disclosed.

The cause remains under investigation.

Berkshire County Sheriff Department officers close off the road Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Sheffield, Mass., to a home where investigators work at the scene of a house fire that killed five people. (Ben Garver/The Berkshire Eagle via AP)

___

This story has been corrected to change he to she in paragraph 4.WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump on Wednesday dangled the prospect of walking away from a new trade deal with China if it's not to his liking, just as he cut short his summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Un when the two sides failed to reach an agreement.

Trump spoke on the state of negotiations with China shortly before meeting with Republican senators on trade issues. He spoke optimistically of the U.S. and China being able to reach an agreement, declaring that "China has not been doing well. We've been doing unbelievably well."

But Trump also seemed to hark back to last month's summit when asked whether he preferred that the two parties work out a trade deal before he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping or whether he'd prefer to work out the final details with Xi. Trump said he preferred the latter option.

He cautioned that "President Xi saw that I'm somebody who believes in walking when a deal is not done."

Last month, Trump had said "sometimes you have to walk" in explaining why his summit with Kim was abruptly cut short without a commitment from North Korea to eliminate its nuclear arsenal.

"We're making great deals, or we're not going to make them at all. We're going to go (with) tariffs," Trump said Wednesday.

President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on drug trafficking at the southern border in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

So far, the U.S. has imposed tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese imports. China retaliated by slapping duties on about $110 billion of U.S. goods. Many of the tariffs imposed by China target U.S. farm products such as soybeans and pork, contributing to a projected 12 percent drop in net farm income last year.

Farmers are anxious for the president to work out an agreement with China as well as for Congress to ratify a new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"It's an exciting time in terms of trade," Trump said.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said after the White House meeting with Trump that he urged the president and lawmakers "to solve this tariff issue on steel and aluminum."

Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel and aluminum in the name of national security, but those tariffs have led to a series of retaliatory tariffs from Canada and Mexico targeting farm country. Grassley said no agreements or conclusions were reached in the meeting.

While Trump portrayed China as anxious for a trade deal, his former economic adviser, Gary Cohn, said he believes it's the U.S. that is "desperate" for an agreement.

"The president needs a win," Cohn said in a Freakonomics Radio podcast that aired Wednesday night. "The only big open issue right now that he could claim as a big win that he'd hope would have a big impact on the stock market would be a Chinese resolution."

Cohn helped lead the push for the tax cuts that Trump and Republican lawmakers got into law in December 2017. But he disagrees with Trump on the merits of tariffs. He said he often tried during his time at the White House to convince Trump that tariffs made products that Americans buy more expensive and hurt the economy.

"I was losing the war on tariffs every day with the president. I knew I wasn't convincing him I was right," Cohn said.SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) - Park fountains are gushing with green-dyed water. Beer trucks are making deliveries on a constant loop. And thousands of tourists in gaudy green outfits will soon arrive for Savannah's biggest celebration of the year.

Georgia's oldest city is gearing up for the South's largest St. Patrick's Day parade this weekend. It's a 195-year-old tradition started by Irish immigrants to Savannah that has ballooned into one of the region's most popular street parties after Mardi Gras.

Streamers of cardboard shamrocks and green T-shirts with bawdy slogans were on display Wednesday outside bars and storefronts along Savannah's historic downtown riverfront. Street musician Marion May wore a large leprechaun hat as he played his flute for visitors strolling past a fountain filled with water stained a verdant shade of green.

"People from across the county, all crevices and cracks, are going to be coming here," said May, 71, who on St. Patrick's Day often sets up with his bucket for collecting tips in nearby Johnson Square. "If they're not Irish, they're going to be Irish for one day. Like me."

Like New York and Chicago, Savannah will hold its parade Saturday, the day before the traditional March 17 holiday.

Nobody performs any official crowd estimate in Savannah, but parade organizers in the past have figured some of the largest crowds exceeded 500,000. Most of the area's 16,000 hotel rooms are booked, said Joe Marinelli, president of Visit Savannah, the city's tourism bureau.

Marion May wears a leprechaun hat while playing his flute next to a fountain of green-dyed water on the downtown riverfront of Savannah, Georgia, on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Savannah is gearing up for its 195-year-old St. Patrick's Day parade, the city's largest tourism event of the year. (AP Photo/Russ Bynum)

"You partner terrific weather with a Saturday parade and we are expecting large crowds," Marinelli said. "And this is more than just a two- or three-day weekend. It potentially could grow into a four- or five-day weekend for some of our visitors coming to town."

Spring-like temperatures in the 60s are forecast for St. Patrick's Day weekend. There's also a small chance for rain on Saturday, though parade organizers don't seem concerned.

"It's going to be a beautiful day," Bubba Edgerly, chairman of the Savannah St. Patrick's Day Parade Committee, assured reporters at a Wednesday news conference. "We've been praying at church."

For many business owners in downtown Savannah, St. Patrick's Day is typically the most profitable time of the year. That's especially true when the parade falls on a weekend, which won't happen again until 2024.

Melissa Swanson, owner of The Rail Pub in downtown Savannah, said customers are typically lined up down the block when she opens at 8 a.m. on parade days to serve breakfast with green grits and bloody marys.

This St. Patrick's Day weekend, Swanson figures her customers will drain 350 cases of Miller Lite and 26 kegs of Guinness. She adds: "We serve 80 other kinds of beer."

"There is no other weekend that compares to St. Patrick's Day," Swanson said. "The closest I think you'll get is Halloween when it's on a weekend. But it's not even half of what St. Patrick's is."MEXICO CITY (AP) - The Mexican government said Wednesday it is launching a formal search for 19 migrants who were pulled from a bus last week by armed men in the northern border state of Tamaulipas.

Tamaulipas state police, the army, federal police and prosecutors will participate in the search, according to the National Search Commission for Missing Persons.

Mexico's top security official said Tuesday that in addition to the 19 seized last week, 25 others were kidnapped last month from a different bus, for a total of 44.

The search effort, dubbed "Operation to Find them Alive," refers specifically to the 19 men snatched in the more recent incident. It wasn't clear if a separate effort was underway for the 25, though some Mexican officials have suggested the victims might already be in the United States.

The government hasn't specified the nationalities of the victims, but they are believed to be from Central America.

The kidnappings recall the horrors of 2011, when dozens of passengers were hauled off buses by drug gangs in Tamaulipas, killed and their bodies dumped in mass graves. In 2010, dozens of migrants were also abducted and massacred by the same gang.

For that very reason, most of the migrant caravans that have crossed Mexico in recent months have carefully avoided crossing through Tamaulipas, even though it often represents the shortest route to the U.S. border.

On Tuesday, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said "we are investigating to be sure, because there is a theory that this is a method that is used to get into U.S. territory. It's not that they disappear, but rather that they cross the border that way. We have already had two cases like that."

Officials said there were indications the missing men had hired a smuggler to get them over the border. But it was unclear why the smugglers would have used such an elaborate and violent plan to meet the migrants.

Lopez Obrador is desperate to avoid any repetition of the massacres of 2010 and 2011, saying "that is what we are most worried about."

In the past, drug gangs have often kidnapped migrants to demand ransom payments from their relatives in the United States. But officials said no reports of ransom demands have been received in the most recent cases.SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Alcohol limits for beer at Utah grocery stores inched closer to the rest of the country Wednesday under a legislative compromise in the state where the predominant faith teaches abstinence from alcohol.

The agreement would raise alcohol limits to 4 percent starting in November, a level that's still lower than almost all other states but would allow beers like Bud Light and Corona to be sold, Republican Sen. Jerry Stevenson said.

The agreement breaks a stalemate over a proposed larger increase that was supported by big retailers like Wal-Mart but opposed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which counts most lawmakers as members.

The 4-percent-by-weight limit would allow most, but not all, regular-strength beers in private stores and on tap, said Kate Bradshaw, a lobbyist with the Responsible Beer Choice Coalition, a group of manufacturers, distributers and sellers.

"It's the biggest change in Utah alcohol history in 86 years, since prohibition ended," she said. A task force would also be assigned to study whether to raise the limits again. Higher-strength beer, wine and spirits are only available at state-owned liquor stores in Utah.

The compromise is palatable for the church as well. Marty Stephens, director of government relations, said the faith still had concerns but considers the compromise an improvement and won't oppose it.

FILE - In this Jan. 28, 2019, file photo, Republican Sen. Jerry Stevenson, looks on during a news conference, in Salt Lake City. Utah lawmakers have reached a compromise deal to increase the amount of alcohol available in beer. Jerry Stevenson said Wednesday, March 13, 2019, the agreement would raise alcohol limits to 4 percent, which is still relatively low but would allow for most production-line beers to be sold in grocery and convenience stores. It must still be approved by the state Legislature. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

The deal cleared its biggest hurdle, the state House of Representatives, Wednesday night, and it is expected to fare well in the state Senate.

Utah now limits beer to 3.2 percent alcohol at grocery and convenience stores, which stock weaker versions of popular beers. Large breweries have been discontinuing those products, though, because the market is shrinking as other states like Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas abandon similar limits.

The emptier shelves are difficult for stores that depend on revenue from beer sales, Stevenson has said. He originally wanted to raise alcohol limits to 4.8 percent, but The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opposed the idea. The state Senate passed it anyway, but it stalled in the House amid concern about the potential side effects.

If passed, the deal would also avoid the possibility of a ballot initiative seeking the approval of higher alcohol limits from voters who have bucked state lawmakers on other hot-button issues like medical marijuana and Medicaid expansion.

Utah also hosts an active microbrewery community, and many brewers had opposed the incremental 4.8 increase that they said would benefit big companies over locals.

The Utah Brewers Guild did not take a position on the compromise deal.ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - Paul Manafort's indictment on state-level charges in New York could offer a blueprint for keeping President Donald Trump's associates behind bars if he pardons them on federal charges stemming from the Russia probe.

But those backstop efforts could be upended if state lawmakers can't close what some call the "double jeopardy loophole" - a New York law that state prosecutors see as a major hurdle to taking up cases that have already been resolved at the federal level.

"If we do not close this loophole, and close it soon, New Yorkers may never realize the justice they deserve," said Sen. Todd Kaminsky, a Long Island Democrat and sponsor of legislation to tweak the law.

That push gained new momentum Wednesday after a Manhattan judge unsealed state charges accusing the 69-year-old Manafort of conducting a yearlong mortgage fraud scheme that raked in millions of dollars.

The state charges were announced just minutes after Manafort was sentenced in the second of two federal cases stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe of Russian influence on the 2016 election. They included allegations Manafort misled the U.S. government about foreign lobbying work and encouraged witnesses to lie on his behalf.

Some of the conduct described in the New York indictment appeared to echo the charges and testimony in Manafort's federal case in Virginia, but Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. appeared to strategically build his case around charges of mortgage fraud and falsifying business records - which aren't federal crimes.

FILE - In this file photo taken on Monday, Nov. 6, 2017, Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, leaves the federal courthouse in Washington. Russian state television stations have jumped at what they perceive as a relatively mild sentence handed to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, saying it is proof that U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller's investigations have failed to prove Trump's collusion with Russia. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

New York's double jeopardy law doesn't explicitly give state prosecutors a green light to bring charges when a defendant has received a federal pardon. Legal experts say the omission was inadvertent, but that could have big implications for New York's ability to investigate and prosecute the president's associates.

It's quirky, too, because a presidential pardon can't waive state crimes.

"If the president were to issue a pardon, it would seem like justice would be served by (Manafort) being prosecuted for state crimes. The state law, as it is currently written, doesn't allow for that," said former Manhattan prosecutor Rebecca Roiphe, now a professor at New York Law School.

New York state Attorney General Letitia James said Tuesday that she's reached agreements with legislative leaders on a bill revising the double jeopardy law. She said she expects a vote within the coming weeks.

Vance said in a statement that his office started investigating Manafort in March 2017 and that the probe "yielded serious criminal charges for which the defendant has not been held accountable."

"No one is beyond the law in New York," Vance said.

Manafort is due to serve more than seven years in prison for his federal convictions, but Trump has raised the prospect of offering him a "get out of jail free" card. The president has repeatedly defended Manafort and floated the idea of granting him a pardon.

New York's 16-count indictment alleges Manafort gave false and misleading information in applying for residential mortgage loans. It says that the fraud started in December 2015 and continued until three days before Trump's inauguration in 2017.

Manafort is also charged with falsifying business records and conspiracy.

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, said Vance's case still has a good chance of succeeding under the current law because the mortgage charges are state crimes distinct from the federal allegations.

"Vance has left himself a fair amount of breathing space to argue that his prosecution does not violate the statute because the crimes he's prosecuting are sufficiently different from the crimes the United States prosecuted," Gillers said.

Former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, first raised the alarm about the double jeopardy loophole last year. Despite support from Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, lawmakers failed to revise the law. Schneiderman resigned just weeks later after being accused of assaulting former girlfriends.

___ Michael Sisak reported from New York.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.

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)

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.

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ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - A legal fight between Buzz Aldrin and his adult children over whether the former astronaut was competent to manage his affairs ended Wednesday, averting a messy, intrafamily squabble that would have loomed over this summer's 50th anniversary celebrations of the Apollo 11 moon-walking.

Two of Aldrin's children have withdrawn their petition seeking guardianship of Aldrin's affairs, and the former astronaut has dropped his lawsuit against his children and former manager, said Buzz Aldrin's attorney, Keith Durkin, who wouldn't offer any further details.

Aldrin, 89, said in a statement that the end of the legal fighting will help restore family harmony.

"This was the most charitable way to manage a difficult situation, as this year, which marks 50 years since we first stepped foot on the moon, is too important to my family, the nation and me," said Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon after Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969.

In a statement, his children, Andy and Jan Aldrin, asked for privacy in allowing the family to work through their issues.

"We truly appreciate the support we have received from so many and ask, again, for your understanding and respect as we continue to work through this as a family, in a private manner," the Aldrin children said.

FILE - In this Feb. 5, 2019, file photo, astronaut Buzz Aldrin arrives for President Donald Trump's State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington. A legal fight between Aldrin and his adult children over whether the former astronaut was competent to manage his affairs ended Wednesday, March 13, averting a messy, intrafamily squabble from hanging over celebrations this summer of the 50th anniversary of his Apollo 11 moon-walking. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

Buzz Aldrin sued two of his three children in Florida court after they filed a petition saying their father was suffering from memory loss, delusions, paranoia and confusion. The children said Aldrin was associating with new friends who were trying to alienate him from his family, and that he had been spending his assets as "an alarming rate."

In his lawsuit, Buzz Aldrin sought to remove Andy Aldrin from control of his financial affairs, social media accounts and several nonprofit and business enterprises. Andy Aldrin had been a trustee of his father's trust. Buzz Aldrin accused his daughter of not acting in his financial interests and conspiracy, and he accused his former manager, Christina Korp, of fraud, exploitation of the elderly and unjust enrichment. Also named in the lawsuit were several businesses and foundations run by the family.

Aldrin's oldest son, James, wasn't involved in the legal fight.

A lawyer for Korp didn't respond Wednesday to an email and phone message seeking comment.

___

Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAPby Wang Zhicheng

The explosion was similar to a magnitude 2.2 earthquake. Fire brought under control during the night. Many people have responded to an appeal to donate blood. Factories, houses, schools in the area have been destroyed. Three thousand people evacuated. In the past the exploded factory had received fines for pollution and mismanagement. Xi Jinping's message.

Beijing (AsiaNews) - At least 47 dead and 90 wounded, including 58 in very serious conditions. This is the provisional toll from the explosion of a chemical fertilizer factory in Yancheng (Jiangsu).

The explosion took place at 2.50 pm yesterday at the Tianjiayi chemical industry. Its strength was recorded as similar to a magnitude 2.2 earthquake.

More than 640 people were taken to the hospital and dozens were recovered from under the rubble of the factory even during the last night. Many people came to hospitals at night to donate blood.

This morning, the Yancheng government issued a statement stating that the fire had been brought under control, that 3,000 workers from the surrounding factories were removed and that today schools and kindergartens remain closed, while air pollution is controlled .

Yesterdays fire created damaged workshops and in the surrounding buildings, with collapsed walls, disintegrated window panes, doors brunt down.

The cause of the explosion is still unknown. A woman, interviewed by the AFP, said that the concern about the pollution levels of the factory and the low safety conditions was well known.

In the past, Tianjiayi, founded in 2007, had received several fines for air pollution and mismanagement. Accidents in the workplace are very common in China, with factory fires, explosions and mine collapses. The causes are often due to the lack of security protocols.

Thus far, the managers of the factory in question are in police custody.

In the last few years, the biggest incident of this kind happened in 2015, with the explosion of a dangerous chemical material depot in Tianjin, where 160 people died and nearly 1,000 were injured.

President Xi Jinping, who is visiting Italy, said that no effort should be spared to recover the people trapped under the rubble and treat the wounded. He also asked local governments to increase safety inspections.

In the photo: Fire at Yancheng factory tamed. A sign highlights the importance of safety at work.WASHINGTON (AP) - Cyberattacks from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are increasingly sophisticated and, until recently, were done with little concern for the consequences, the top Pentagon cyber leaders told a congressional committee on Wednesday.

Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, head of U.S. Cyber Command, laid out the escalating threats, following a Navy review released this week that described significant breaches of naval systems and concluded that the service is losing the cyber war.

Speaking during a subcommittee hearing, Nakasone said the U.S. is now prepared to use cyber operations more aggressively to strike back, as the nation faces growing cyberattacks and threats of interference in the 2020 presidential elections.

He said the military learned a lot working with other government agencies to thwart Russian interference in the 2018 midterm elections, and the focus now has turned to the next election cycle.

The Navy report underscored long-known cyber threats from Russia and China that have plagued the U.S. government and its contractors for more than a decade. It said there were "several significant" breaches of classified Navy systems and that "massive amounts" of national security data have been stolen. The report laid out a number of recommendations to reduce cyber vulnerabilities across the Navy and make cybersecurity a higher priority.

Data has been stolen from key defense contractors and their suppliers, the report said, adding that "critical supply chains have been compromised in ways and to an extent yet to be fully understood." The report, ordered by Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, concluded that while the Navy is prepared to win at conventional warfare, that's not the case for the current cyber war.

FILE - In this Jan. 29, 2019, file photo, National Security Agency director and head of U.S. Cyber Command Gen. Paul Nakasone testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington. Nakasone says the military learned a lot as it worked with other government agencies to thwart Russian interference in the 2018 midterm elections. He says the focus has turned to the next election cycle. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

The U.S. government has complained for years about data breaches by China to steal high-tech information and other trade secrets. The federal government, for example, charged two alleged Chinese hackers in December with breaching computer networks as far back as 2006 and suggested they could be linked to the theft of personal information from more than 100,000 Navy personnel.

China has denied the widespread hacking accusations, but the issue is one of several that tied up ongoing negotiations on a U.S.-China trade agreement.

In addition, the U.S. was caught off guard by widespread Russian interference in the 2016 election, including the use of social media to influence voters and sow dissent among the electorate.

Members of Congress peppered Nakasone and Kenneth Rapuano, the assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, with questions about what the military is doing to respond to cyber breaches and deter countries like Russia and China.

Rapuano acknowledged that for years the U.S. did not sufficiently respond to cyberattacks by other nations, particularly as the breaches did not rise to the level of a conventional military response. He said deterrence is about imposing consequences and, "historically we have not done that."

He said that strategy is changing but officials also have a deliberate approval process for offensive cyber operations, including some that require presidential approval.

He also said that the Pentagon will soon issue a memo outlining how National Guard will be able use department networks and systems in the states to help foil cyberattacks on the homeland.

The proposed budget released on Tuesday calls for a 10 percent increase in Pentagon spending on cyber operations, for a total of $9.6 billion.WASHINGTON (AP) - El Salvador's president-elect said Wednesday that he has not decided whether to keep relations with China, but criticized the Asian nation as not being respectful to his country.

In his first public remarks since winning election last month, the 37-year-old Nayib Bukele said China does not respect the rules of commerce, manipulates its currency and meddles into other countries' democracies. He did not provide specific details on his criticism.

"We want to be friends with China, but China has to be friends with us," Bukele said during the first day of this three-day visit to Washington. "I don't mean money or investment, but respect."

Last year, current President Salvador Sanchez Ceren switched El Salvador's diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing, a move that prompted Washington to recall its ambassador.

In El Salvador's capital, the country's Supreme Court on Wednesday provisionally suspended the cancellation of a trade agreement with Taiwan and agreed to hear a challenge to its legality. The ending of the deal had been scheduled to take place March 15.

Ceren's administration, which ends when Bukele takes office June 1, said in a statement that its actions on the trade agreement complied with termination rules spelled out in the deal as well as with international conventions. It said exiting the deal was part of the accords struck with China after El Salvador switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing.

El Salvador's President-elect Nayib Bukele speaks to the press at Mexico's National Palace after meeting with the President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico City, Tuesday, March 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

On other matters, Bukele said he has discussed with both the United Nations and the Organization of American States his goal of creating an international commission to investigate corruption in El Salvador, similar to a U.N.-backed effort in Guatemala.

The businessman-turned-politician also reiterated his desire to improve his country's relations with the United States, where about 2.5 million Salvadorans live.

He promised to curb by the end of his five-year term end the surge of Salvadoran migrants toward the United States, which has been a major irritant in relations with President Donald Trump's administration.

Bukele plans to meet with U.S. national security adviser John Bolton and financial organizations before returning home Friday evening.

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Luis Alonso Lugo on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/luisalonsolugo

El Salvador's President-elect Nayib Bukele speaks to the press at Mexico's National Palace after meeting with the President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico City, Tuesday, March 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

El Salvador's President-elect Nayib Bukele walks past the Diego Rivera murals at Mexico's National Palace after meeting with the President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico City. Tuesday, March 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)CHICAGO (AP) - Records show Cook County's top prosecutor asked Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson to let the FBI investigate the alleged attack on Jussie Smollett before the actor was charged with lying to authorities.

Email and text messages given to the Chicago Sun-Times by State's Attorney Kim Foxx show she made the effort after former first lady Michelle Obama's chief of staff Tina Tchen contacted Foxx to set up a telephone conversation with a Smollett relative.

The ensuing conversations were cited by Foxx in recusing herself from Smollett's prosecution.

Foxx tells the Sun-Times the relative expressed concerns over leaked information that media outlets attributed to "police sources."

Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says the FBI was involved from the start but there was never talk of turning the case over.

Smollett is accused of lying to the police about the Jan. 29 attack.

"Empire" actor Jussie Smollett, center, arrives at Leighton Criminal Court Building for a hearing to discuss whether cameras will be allowed in the courtroom during his disorderly conduct case on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, in Chicago. A grand jury indicted Smollett last week on 16 felony counts accusing him of lying to the police about being the victim of a racist and homophobic attack by two masked men in downtown Chicago.(AP Photo/Matt Marton)

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Information from: Chicago Sun-Times, http://chicago.suntimes.com/FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - Kentucky's Republican-led legislature on Wednesday passed its latest measure to put more restrictions on abortion, setting up another legal fight with abortion-rights defenders.

The legislation would ban abortion for women seeking to end their pregnancies because of the gender, race or disability of the fetus. The GOP-dominated Senate voted 32-4 to send the bill to the state's anti-abortion governor, Republican Matt Bevin.

Soon after the vote, the American Civil Liberties of Kentucky tweeted: "We will see the state of Kentucky in court (again)." The threat will intensify a bitter legal feud - the ACLU already is embroiled in federal court fights challenging three abortion-related laws in the state.

Bevin responded to the ACLU's latest challenge, tweeting: "Bring it! Kentucky will always fight for life." Bevin's running mate in his re-election bid this year, Sen. Ralph Alvarado, gave the opening remarks in support of the measure during the Senate debate Wednesday.

Kentucky's Republican leaders have aggressively pushed to restrict abortion since the GOP took total control of the state's legislature in 2017. The latest Kentucky bill is part of a larger agenda by GOP-dominated legislatures in some states to restrict abortion. Lawmakers in Kentucky and several states are pushing legislation to ban most abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected. Conservatives want to push an abortion case to the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge the court's 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

The bill would ban abortions based on the fetus's sex, race, color, national origin - or diagnosis or potential diagnosis of Down syndrome or any disability.

FILE - In this Feb 28, 2019, file photo, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin speaks in the Capitol building in Frankfort, Ky. Kentucky's Republican-led legislature on Wednesday, March 13, passed its latest measure to put more restrictions on abortion, setting up another legal fight with abortion-rights defenders. (AP Photo/Bryan Woolston, File)

"House Bill 5 recognizes and affirms that all human life has intrinsic value," Alvarado said. "House Bill 5 would hold the abortionists accountable for performing an abortion for a specific reason - because the baby is a boy or girl, because the baby is a particular race or because they might be born with a known or suspected disability."

The ACLU said it will challenge the bill on behalf of the last abortion provider in Kentucky.

The measure would go into effect immediately upon the governor's signature. Anticipating that step, the ACLU said it will ask a judge to block the measure from taking effect while its lawsuit is considered.

"We see this legislation for exactly what it is - part of a campaign to prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion if she needs one - and we won't stand for it," Brigitte Amiri, deputy director with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement.

The Kentucky bill would require doctors performing abortions to certify in writing that, to their knowledge, their patient did not want to end her pregnancy because of concern over her unborn child's sex, race, color, national origin or disability.

Doctors violating the measure would face felony prosecution and the loss of their medical license. Any clinic where a violation occurred would lose its license. Pregnant women would not face penalties. Kentucky's last abortion clinic is in Louisville.

Several other abortion-related bills are winding their way through Kentucky's legislature.

The highest-profile measure would ban most abortions in Kentucky once a fetal heartbeat is detected. Another would ban most abortions in the state if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized the procedure nationwide. The Kentucky House on Wednesday passed a bill to require that women undergoing drug-induced abortions be informed that the procedure can be reversed. The bill now returns to the Senate.NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - The Tennessee Supreme Court on Wednesday expanded protections for reporters by ruling they can only be held liable for defamation if their reporting is not fair and accurate, regardless of their personal feelings toward a subject.

Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk sued investigative reporter Phil Williams for defamation in 2016, arguing there is an exception to a law that protects journalists when the reporter acts out of malice.

The $200-million suit against Williams and WTVF-TV station owner Scripps Media cites news reports aired in 2016 based on sealed court documents. Funk has interpreted the reports as accusing him of soliciting a bribe, extortion and blackmail. Williams' attorneys, in their pleadings, have said the stories simply reported on allegations made by others.

The case stalled over questions of what information Williams is required to hand over to Funk in the discovery phase. Funk wanted Williams to give him all the information he gathered and produced in reporting his stories so Funk could try to prove that Williams acted out of malice.

Tennessee's fair report privilege protects reporters from defamation suits when they report fairly and accurately on an official action or proceeding. But there is precedent for considering whether a reporter harbors malice toward a subject.

Williams' attorneys argued against that interpretation. They were joined by The Associated Press and a dozen other news organizations with operations in Tennessee along with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.

In this Jan. 13, 2017, photo, NewsChannel 5 investigative reporter Phil Williams listens to Glenn Funk's attorney during a hearing as part of his defamation trial in Nashville, Tenn. The Tennessee Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Williams, who was sued for defamation by the local district attorney. (George Walker IV/The Tennessean via AP)

That brief argued that Tennessee precedent regarding malice was outdated and ran afoul of both U.S. Supreme Court precedent and the First Amendment.

In its Wednesday ruling, the high court presented a hypothetical in which two reporters cover defamatory statements made during a judicial proceeding. One of the reporters dislikes the person about whom the statements were made and the other doesn't.

Under Funk's desired interpretation, one reporter would be covered by the fair report privilege and the other would not.

"This result would neither advance the purposes of the fair report privilege nor protect the individuals about whom defamatory statements were made," the court concluded. "The privilege can only be defeated by showing that a report about an official action or proceeding was unfair or inaccurate."

But the case is not over. It now goes back to the lower court to determine whether the news reports were both fair and accurate and based on an official action or proceeding.OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - The Latest on a request to delay a civil trial in Oklahoma accusing opioid manufacturers of fueling a deadly epidemic (all times local):

5:10 p.m.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court has rejected a request by drugmakers to immediately postpone the May start of a trial in a lawsuit that accuses the companies of fueling the state's opioid epidemic.

On Wednesday, the court instead set a March 20 hearing on whether to grant a 100-day postponement of the trial.

The trial is scheduled to start May 28 in Cleveland County, where a judge has already denied the request.

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter sued 13 opioid manufacturers in 2017, alleging they fraudulently engaged in marketing campaigns that led to thousands of overdose addictions and deaths.

Several states have filed similar lawsuits, but Oklahoma's is expected to be the first to go to trial.

Drugmakers say they need more time to analyze documents provided by the attorney general.

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11:30 a.m.

Drugmakers accused of fueling an opioid epidemic in Oklahoma are asking the state's highest court to delay a civil trial.

A Supreme Court referee is set to hear drugmakers' request Wednesday after a Cleveland County judge denied a request to postpone the May 28 start. The referee will make a recommendation to the court.

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter sued 13 opioid manufacturers in 2017, alleging they fraudulently engaged in marketing campaigns that led to thousands of overdose addictions and deaths.

Several states filed similar lawsuits, but Oklahoma's is expected to be the first to go to trial.

The drugmakers say they need more time to analyze more than a million documents they received from the attorney general last month. State attorneys say the companies' allegations are "false and misleading."NEW YORK (AP) - The Latest on the New York sex slave case (all times local):

6:10 p.m.

The leader of an embattled upstate New York self-help organization has been hit with child pornography charges.

Federal prosecutors announced the new charges against Keith Raniere on Wednesday.

Raniere was arrested last year in a sex-trafficking investigation of his Albany-based NXIVM group. Prosecutors say a secret society within the organization branded women with his initials and forced them to have sex with him.

Earlier Wednesday, group co-founder Nancy Salzman pleaded guilty to conspiracy during a hearing in federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday.

FILE - In this Jan. 28, 2019 file photo, Nancy Salzman arrives to Brooklyn federal court in New York. Salzman, a co-founder of an embattled upstate New York self-help organization is expected to plead guilty in a case featuring sensational claims that some followers became branded sex slaves. Salzman is due in federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday, March 13 for a plea hearing. There was no response to a request for comment from one of her lawyers. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

Raniere is set to go on trial next month. Also charged in the case are Salzman's daughter as well as Seagram liquor fortune heiress Clare Bronfman and TV actress Allison Mack.

There was no immediate response from Raniere's lawyer on Wednesday.

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4 p.m.

A co-founder of an embattled upstate New York self-help organization has pleaded guilty in a case featuring sensational claims that some followers became branded sex slaves.

Nancy Salzman pleaded guilty to conspiracy during a hearing in federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday. She's to be sentenced on July 10. There was no immediate response from her lawyer.

Salzman was a co-founder of NXIVM, a cult-like group based near Albany. Prosecutors say a secret society within the organization branded women with a spiritual leader's initials and forced them to have sex with him.

The leader, Keith Raniere, is set to go on trial next month. Also charged in the case are Salzman's daughter as well as Seagram liquor fortune heiress Clare Bronfman and TV actress Allison Mack.LONDON (AP) - British lawmakers have gone on record saying they don't want the U.K. to leave the European Union without a divorce agreement in place, increasing the odds that Brexit won't take place as planned at the end of the month.

With the approaching deadline intensifying fears that economic and personal turmoil might follow a "no-deal" withdrawal by Britain, Parliament voted 321-278 Wednesday to rule out the possibility.

However, Prime Minister Theresa May and the European Union noted the decision wasn't legally binding. She offered the House of Commons another chance to try to stop the countdown by voting Thursday on whether to ask the EU for a delay.

A look at what might happen:

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DELAY, DELAY, DELAY

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)

Now that the House of Commons gave leaving the EU without an agreement a thumbs down, they are scheduled to vote again on the EU to delay Brexit by up to three months.

This option is likely to prove popular, since politicians on both sides of the Brexit debate fear time is running out to secure an orderly withdrawal by March 29.

Extending the timeframe for Brexit 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 late May elections 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 elections.

French President Emmanuel Macron, one of the EU's strongest supporters, said Wednesday that a request for a postponement would be considered, but not granted automatically.

Macron said the British government has "to explain to us what the point of it is, and in particular whether it adds anything."

___

CONTINUING CRISIS

Whatever Parliament decides this week, it 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 also is unwilling to abandon the hard-won deal with the EU on Britain's withdrawal and future relationship with the bloc. Parliament voted it down twice, and May might try to put it to a third.

She told lawmakers after their Wednesday vote they are down to two choices: approving a withdrawal agreement in coming days and requesting a short delay to Brexit, or requesting a "much longer" extension from the EU in hopes of negotiating a new arrangement.

The prime minister warned that a long extension would mean Britain would have to take part in the European elections. May said the House of Commons had to "face up" to the consequences of the decisions it made.

Some think the only way forward is a snap election that could rearrange the forces in 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 efforts to secure a new referendum on whether to remain in the EU. The government opposes the idea, which at the moment also lacks majority support in Parliament.

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.

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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)CHICAGO (AP) - The attorney for two brothers accused of helping stage an attack on "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett in downtown Chicago says the men regret their involvement.

Gloria Schmidt represents Abimbola "Abel" and Olabinjo "Ola" Osundairo. She told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the brothers agreed to help Smollett because of their friendship with him and the sense that he was helping them in their careers.

Schmidt says the brothers have come to realize how much the incident has negatively affected minorities and particularly victims of actual hate crimes.

Smollett is charged with lying to the police about being the victim of a racist and homophobic attack by two masked men. He allegedly paid the Osundairo brothers $3,500 to help him stage the attack.

Smollett is expected to enter a plea on Thursday.

___

"Empire" actor Jussie Smollett, center, arrives at Leighton Criminal Court Building for a hearing to discuss whether cameras will be allowed in the courtroom during his disorderly conduct case on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, in Chicago. A grand jury indicted Smollett last week on 16 felony counts accusing him of lying to the police about being the victim of a racist and homophobic attack by two masked men in downtown Chicago.(AP Photo/Matt Marton)

Check out the AP's complete coverage of the Jussie Smollett case.

Attorney Gloria Schmidt poses for a portrait after a video interview with The Associated Press Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Chicago. Schmidt is the attorney for Abimbola "Abel" Osundairo and Olabinjo "Ola" Osundairo, two Nigerian brothers who told police that "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett paid them $3,500 to help stage an attack on himself in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - California's Democratic governor announced Wednesday he was temporarily shutting down the nation's most populous death row. Since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978, it has executed 13 inmates, the last one in 2006.

Here are things to know about California's death row.

WHAT HAPPENS TO CONDEMNED INMATES' SENTENCES AND APPEALS?

They will remain on death row, sentenced to death and their appeals will continue. County prosecutors can still demand the death penalty, and trial court judges can still sentence convicted murderers to death after a jury recommends execution. But no executions will be scheduled while the governor's moratorium remains in effect.

"Everything keeps going as before," said Santa Clara University law professor Ellen Kreitzberg. "Just no executions."

WHERE ARE CONDEMNED INMATES KEPT?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom discusses his decision to place a moratorium on the death penalty during a news conference at the Capitol, March 13, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

They are confined to individual cells in one of three special sections of San Quentin State Prison. There are 520 cells stacked five stories high in the prison's east block, where the vast majority of condemned inmates live. There are three dozen cells on the sixth floor for condemned inmates deemed to cause the least trouble. The so-called "adjustment center," the solitary confinement wing of death row for disruptive prisoners, has 81 cells.

The 22 women sentenced to death are housed in the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. No woman has been executed since California reintroduced capital punishment in 1978.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE SO-CALLED DEATH CHAMBER?

Newsom ordered the dismantling of the never-used death chamber at San Quentin. Prison officials built it in 2008 in an attempt to comply with a federal court order to improve death chamber conditions and training of execution staff. The sterile chamber was built on the site of the prison's old gas chamber. Death by gas was stopped in 1996 after a court ruling questioned its constitutionality.

WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON EXECUTED IN CALIFORNIA?

Clarence Ray Allen, 76, was executed by lethal injection at 12:20 a.m. Jan. 17, 2006, after spending 22 years on death row. He was the oldest inmate executed since the reinstatement of capital punishment. Allen was convicted of ordering the 1980 murders of three people he believed had helped prosecutors convict him of a 1974 murder. He was serving a life term for the 1974 murder of a burglary accomplice when he ordered the three additional murders. Billie Ray Hamilton, who Allen met in prison, was convicted of the triple slaying and sentenced to death, but died at age 57 of natural causes in 2007.

WHICH INMATE WAS TO BE EXECUTED NEXT?

Authorities called off the lethal injection of Michael Morales two hours before his scheduled Feb. 21, 2006, execution for the murder and rape of a 17-year-old girl. Prison officials said they could not comply with a recent court order requiring licensed medical professionals to administer lethal injections. California then indefinitely suspended capital punishment to rework its lethal injection policies and procedures. Since then, 25 condemned inmates including Morales have exhausted all of their appeals and were considered "next in line."

WHO HAS LIVED ON DEATH ROW THE LONGEST?

One of the two "Tool Box Killers," Lawrence Bittaker, 78, entered death row on March 30, 1981, after he was convicted of raping, torturing and killing five teenage girls in 1979. His accomplice, Roy Lee Norris, accepted a plea bargain of life in prison without parole in exchange for testifying against Bittaker. They were called the Tool Box Killers because of the everyday tools they used in their crimes.

WHO WAS THE NEWEST DEATH ROW INMATE?

Eric Jimenez, 34, arrived on death row on Nov. 29, 2018. A Tulare County jury found him guilty in 2018 of two gang-related murders, six years after Porterville police arrested him in California's Central Valley. His first appeal - an automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court - has not been filed.Prime Minister Mahdi visited the wounded in the hospital and paid tribute to the victims. The ferry was packed with tourists celebrating the Kurdish New Year. Over 200 people on board, well beyond the vessel capacity. At least 19 children and 61 women died. Local sources denounce an attempt by security forces to block journalists' reports.

Mosul (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The Iraqi Prime Minister has decreed three days of national mourning, after visiting the place where a ferry across the Tigris sunk yesterday afternoon, near Mosul, killing nearly 100 people. According to state television, Adel Abdel Mahdi visited the injured in a hospital in the former "Caliphate" stronghold and the morgue where the bodies of the victims are held.

The ship, used for transporting people, was packed with families and tourists who celebrated the Nowruz (Kurdish New Year).. First reports say there were around 200 people on board, more than the boat could contain.

The ship was heading towards the island of Umm Rabaen, a tourist resort about 4 km north of the center of the city of Mosul, one of the many stops planned for the trip organized in conjunction with the new year. According to some videos, the ferry suddenly tilted to the right, taking on water, to then capsize and be dragged downstream of the river.

The Civil Protection adds that the vast majority of tourists were unable to swim and the ship was devoid of any means of rescue . Among the victims - 94 those ascertained so far - there are at least 19 children and 61 women. The rescue men saved 55 others, snatching them from the rushing waters of the river.

Some images broadcast on social media show the boat upside down and people being dragged by the current. "There were too many people on board," says one of the surviving passengers. "The water started to come on board, the ferry weighed down and overturned. I saw with my own eyes children who died in water ".

A few hours after the tragedy there is a trading of accusations and responsibilities. Local authorities report having warned people of the danger, due to the increasing level of water from the opening of the doors of the Mosul dam. Others point the finger at tour operators who purposely ignored the danger.

The Ministry of Justice has ordered the arrest of nine employees of the ferry company and have imposed a ban on expatriation of the owners of the boat and the tourist site. Local sources speaking to Mosul Eye, a blog that denounced jihadist violence during the rule of the Islamic State (IS, formerly Isis), also denounce an attempt by security forces to hide the tragedy by trying to arrest journalists and prevent them from interviewing the families of the victims.PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - Short-term rental sites Airbnb and HomeAway lost a legal challenge Wednesday against an ordinance enacted by a popular California tourist city.

The ordinance imposed several obligations involving rental sites in seaside Santa Monica, including refraining from booking properties that are not licensed and listed on a city registry.

A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that a lower court properly dismissed the legal challenge over its failure to state a claim against the city.

The panel also rejected an assertion that the ordinance violates a 1996 federal law protecting internet companies from liability for posting third-party content, and that it violates speech protections of the First Amendment.

Santa Monica City Attorney Lane Dilg said the ordinance prevents residences from being converted into de facto hotels, protects affordable housing and helps residents stay in their homes.

"We look forward to collaborating and cooperating with technology companies to advance the community's best interests, but the platforms' broad assertions of immunity in this case simply go too far," he said in a statement.

In a statement that didn't specifically address the ruling, Airbnb said it had tried to work with Santa Monica for two years "on a solution that ensures working and middle-class families who want to visit the coast can find an affordable place to stay."

"Despite our efforts, the city insisted on an approach that was out of step with progress across the country," Airbnb said.

The claims were previously dismissed in June by a U.S. District Court judge. The appeal was argued in October before a three-judge panel in Pasadena.

The companies asserted that Santa Monica's ordinance violated the Communications Decency Act because it forced them to monitor and remove third-party content.

The judges found that the ordinance does not require the companies to review the content that property hosts post on websites, and said the only monitoring needed is to comply with the ordinance's prohibition on processing transactions for unregistered properties.

Incoming booking requests are the result of third-party listings, but the information is internal and not public, the ruling found.

The judges said they agreed with the district court's conclusion that the ordinance "regulates conduct, not speech, and that the conduct banned . . . does not have such a 'significant expressive element' as to draw First Amendment protection."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.

President Donald Trump listens during a briefing on drug trafficking at the southern border in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Washington. Trump said during the event the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft "effective immediately," in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

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.

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.

___

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

___

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheckWASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on U.S. involvement in the Yemen war (all times local):

5:30 p.m.

The Senate has voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition's war in Yemen.

The bipartisan vote Wednesday is another strong rebuke of President Donald Trump's support for Saudi Arabia, which has been a point of tension with Congress since the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year.

If the legislation passes the House, it would be the first time lawmakers have invoked the decades-old War Powers Resolution to halt American military involvement in a foreign conflict.

The White House has already threatened to veto the legislation, which it says is flawed and could undermine the fight against extremism.

FILE - In this Oct. 1, 2018 file photo, children sit in front of moldy bread in their shelter, in Aslam, Hajjah, Yemen. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHAU.N. warned in a report Tuesday, March 12, 2019, that thousands of Yemeni civilians caught in fierce clashes between warring factions are trapped in the embattled northern district of Hajjah. The number of displaced in the district has doubled over the past six months, the humanitarian agency said. (AP Photos Hani Mohammed, File)

The measure in the Senate was co-sponsored by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.

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The Senate is poised to vote Wednesday on ending U.S. support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition fighting in Yemen, legislation the White House has threatened to veto.

The measure is co-sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R- Utah. If it were to pass Congress, it would be the first time lawmakers have invoked the decades-old War Powers Resolution to halt American military involvement in a foreign conflict.

It would also be another strong rebuke of President Donald Trump's support for Saudi Arabia, which has been a point of tension with Congress since the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year.

In its statement threatening a veto, the White House argued the premise of the resolution is flawed and that it would undermine the fight against extremism.WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker returning to Capitol Hill (all times local):

7 p.m.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is suggesting that former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker may have had conversations with President Donald Trump about Michael Cohen's legal troubles, saying that Whitaker "did not deny" the conversations during a private meeting on Capitol Hill.

Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler did not get into specifics of what Whitaker said when he met with Nadler and the top Republican on the panel, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins. Collins said he heard Whitaker's comments differently and maintained that Whitaker said he "had not talked with the president about Mr. Cohen at all." Two Republican staff members in the room backed up Collins' version. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential meeting.

The dispute could have high stakes, as Democrats have voiced concerns that Whitaker was a Trump loyalist whose appointment they suspect was aimed at suppressing investigations of the president.

- By Mary Clare Jalonick

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., comes out to talks with reporters following his meeting with former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

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1:20 p.m.

Former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker is returning to Capitol Hill to clarify his testimony about several matters, including his communications with President Donald Trump.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said after Whitaker's public testimony in February that his answers were "unsatisfactory, incomplete or contradicted by other evidence." Nadler said Whitaker didn't offer clear responses about his communications with the White House and was inconsistent about which questions he refused to answer.

Nadler asked Whitaker to return to the committee to clarify his answers. Whitaker, who has since left the Justice Department, will meet Wednesday afternoon with Nadler and the committee's top Republican, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins.

Former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker arrives for a meeting with the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., comes out to talks with reporters following his meeting with former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)KINSHASA, Congo (AP) - Congo's new President Felix Tshisekedi on Wednesday pardoned about 700 political prisoners who were jailed under his predecessor.

Tshisekedi signed the decree, fulfilling a promise he made earlier this month to do so during his first 100 days in office.

Among those set for release is Firmin Yangambi, who was sentenced in 2009 to 20 years in prison on charges of being a threat to national security. Also being freed is Franck Diongo, an opposition figure who was sentenced to five years during the previous administration.

Tshisekedi was declared winner of the Dec. 30 election, leading Congo to its first peaceful transfer of power since independence from Belgium nearly 60 years ago. He succeeded Joseph Kabila, who governed the largely impoverished but mineral-rich central African country for 18 years.

Tshisekedi, who was an opposition leader, has also promised to reinvigorate justice and fight corruption in Congo. He made the declaration at the beginning of March in the presence of members of the government, military, civil and judicial authorities as well as members of the diplomatic corps.

The president has also said he would work actively to ensure the conditions for a rapid return of those who are outside the country for political reasons. While on his first international trip to neighboring Republic of Congo in February, he urged tens of thousands of political exiles to return home, saying everyone would be needed to move Congo forward.SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - California Gov. Gavin Newsom was about 10 years old when he met a man wrongfully convicted of murder, an encounter that educated him about injustice and laid the groundwork for his decision to place a moratorium on executions this week.

"This has been a 40-year journey for me," Newsom said Wednesday, minutes after signing the executive order to grant reprieve to 737 death row inmates. "This is a journey that began with an introduction of an elderly man named Pete Pianezzi."

Pianezzi was convicted and given two life sentences in the 1937 double murder of a gambler and bystander in Los Angeles. He was spared the death sentence by a single juror and would, more than 40 years later, be declared innocent after a government informant admitted Pianezzi had been set up by the mob.

It was a case that touched Newsom's father and grandfather as well as former Govs. Pat and Jerry Brown, the father-son duo who were close friends of the Newsoms. It was Jerry Brown who, during his first two terms in office, declared Pianezzi's innocence with a pardon in 1981.

Newsom, 51, first met Pianezzi when he was 10 or 11 years old, he said Wednesday. Pianezzi was 90 years old when he died in 1992.

"I was a young man learning that life story and I also got to know Pete up until his dying days," Newsom said. "I also had the opportunity, in that spirit, to start thinking and to reflect on the death penalty, its purpose and on the passion that arises when we debate the issue."

Gov. Gavin Newsom signs the executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty at his Capitol office Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Newsom's grandfather, William Newsom II, had hired Pianezzi's wife to work for him in the 1940s and watched her take weekly visits to her husband at Folsom State Prison.

"My father was rather intrigued," William Newsom III, Gavin Newsom's father, told the Los Angeles Times in 1981, adding that his father was convinced of Pianezzi's innocence.

Pianezzi was paroled in 1953 and later pardoned by Pat Brown in 1966, though the pardon was based on the notion that he had been rehabilitated, not that he was innocent. Gavin Newsom said his grandfather helped convince Brown, who he had known for decades through San Francisco political circles, to pardon Pianezzi.

Newsom's father later took up the cause and convinced Jerry Brown to pardon Pianezzi again, this time declaring him innocent, after several people involved admitted he had been set up. William Newsom III, a Brown appointee to the state court of appeals, knew Pianezzi socially and had long been intrigued by his case, he recalled in a 2009 oral history project available through the University of California-Berkeley.

"I became convinced by reading about it that he had been framed. Suffice to say, I was right. He had been framed," he said. "Pete was out of jail for years and years, and had a job, was doing fine, but he couldn't live with the idea. He was no angel, but he had never committed a murder, and that's a big difference."

Pianezzi had been previously convicted of robbery.

It was one of several cases the governor referenced Wednesday as he explained his reasoning in deeply personal terms for ending the death penalty in California. He cited cases like Pianezzi's to show that the death penalty is applied unevenly and that innocent people can find themselves behind bars and even on death row.

"This is about who I am as a human being. This is about what I can or cannot do - to me this was the right thing do," he said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom pauses as he responds to a reporter's question about his decision to place a moratorium on the death penalty during a news conference at the Capitol, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Gov. Gavin Newsom signs the executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty at his Capitol office Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

In this Aug. 3, 2010 photo released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, CDCR, shows the San Quentin lethal injection room, or the death penalty chamber at San Quentin State Prison, in San Quentin, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, placing a moratorium on the death penalty. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)

In this photo provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation a gurney is removed from the death penalty chamber at San Quentin State Prison, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in San Quentin, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order, Wednesday, placing a moratorium on the death penalty. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via APNEW YORK (AP) - A wayward lamb running around a New York City bridge briefly held up traffic before its rescue.

The animal was first seen trotting eastbound along the shoulder of Gowanus Expressway around 9:30 a.m. Wednesday. New York City Police Officer Dominick Gatto says he was on-duty when a motorist informed him about the lamb on the lam.

Gatto and other police officers chased down and caught the animal, taking it to the Animal Care Center in Staten Island.

Animal Care Center employee Jessica Vaccaro says the lamb is young, probably less than a year old.

Officials say the lamb will be transported to Skylands Animal Sanctuary and Rescue in New Jersey - the same sanctuary that took in a cow that escaped a New York City slaughterhouse last year.NEW YORK (AP) - Federal prosecutors have requested copies of communications Michael Cohen had with a New York attorney who broached the possibility of a pardon from President Donald Trump, the attorney said Wednesday.

The attorney, Robert J. Costello, released a statement disputing Cohen's claim that Trump "dangled" a presidential pardon in front of Cohen before he began cooperating with federal prosecutors and special counsel Robert Mueller.

"We have documents to back our position up, and are preparing to provide these to the U.S. Attorney's office, who has asked for them," Costello said in the statement. The statement referred to Cohen's account of the pardon discussions as "utter nonsense."

Federal prosecutors requested emails and documents from Costello last week amid an investigation into "possible violations of federal criminal law," The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing a copy of the request.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan declined to comment.

Attorneys for Trump and Cohen have offered dueling versions of events about the pardon talks and whether Cohen misled a congressional committee during testimony last month. Trump last week called Cohen, his former personal attorney, a liar and alleged in a tweet that Cohen "directly asked" for a pardon.

FILE - In this March 6, 2019, file photo, Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former lawyer, returns to Capitol Hill in Washington, to appear before the House Intelligence Committee. An attorney who says he sought a presidential pardon for Cohen has agreed to provide documents to federal prosecutors. Attorney Robert Costello said in a statement Wednesday that the records would support his claim that Cohen asked him to broach the possibility of a pardon. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Costello, in an interview with CNN Wednesday, said it was Cohen who raised the specter of a pardon, and said he brought the matter up with Trump's legal team even though he thought it was premature at the time. Costello was not retained by Cohen but had several conversations with him after the FBI raided Cohen's home and office last April.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani confirmed that Costello, a former federal prosecutor, reached out to him after the raid.

"My answer was the president is not going to consider or give any pardons now," Giuliani told The Associated Press. "As I have said in the past, the president has the right to, and that doesn't mean he won't consider it when the investigation is over."

Costello did not respond to repeated messages from The Associated Press.

Lanny Davis, an attorney for Cohen, declined to comment.

Costello's remarks came a day after Cohen's lawyers sent a letter to the House Oversight Committee seeking to clarify Cohen's testimony last month that he never sought a pardon from the president.

Cohen declared under oath Feb. 27, "I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from President Trump."

But his attorney Michael Monico told the committee in a letter Tuesday that Cohen asked his lawyer to explore the possibility of a pardon before Cohen left a joint-defense agreement and turned against Trump last June.

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Associated Press writers Jonathan Lemire and Michael R. Sisak contributed to this report.AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Democrat Beto O'Rourke has told a Texas TV station that he's running for president in 2020.

The former Texas congressman sent a text message to KTSM Wednesday afternoon confirming the news that he will seek the Democratic presidential nomination.

He wrote: "I'm really proud of what El Paso did and what El Paso represents. It's a big part of why I'm running. This city is the best example of this country at its best."

O'Rourke was little-known outside his hometown of El Paso until he challenged Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last year. He got within 3 percentage points of upsetting Cruz in the nation's largest red state and shattered national fundraising records while using grassroots organizing and social media savvy to mobilize young voters and minorities.HAVANA (AP) - In the midst of a regional crisis over Venezuela and tough economic straits, the Cuban government is about to launch a sweeping makeover of its centrally planned, single-party system with dozens of new laws that could reshape everything from criminal justice to the market economy.

Nearly a year of debate and discussion ended last month with the approval of Cuba's first constitutional reform since 1976. Some observers see the new constitution as a merely cosmetic update aimed at assuring one of the world's last communist systems won't get another revamp until long after the passing of its founding fathers, now in their late 80s and early 90s. Others see the potential for a slow-moving but deep set of changes that will speed the modernization of Cuba's economically stagnant authoritarian bureaucracy.

Cuban legal experts told The Associated Press that they expect the government to send the National Assembly between 60 and 80 new laws over the next two years to replace ones rendered obsolete by the new constitution. The assembly is virtually certain to unanimously approve all government proposals, as it has for decades.

"I expect to see big changes in Cuba with the new constitution," said Julio Antonio Fernandez, a constitutional law professor at the University of Havana. "A new state structure, a transformed political system, led by the Communist Party, of course, but different and confronting big challenges."

One of the first changes will be in Cuba's political system. Within five months, the government is required to pass a new electoral law that splits the roles of head of state and government between the current president and the new post of prime minister. A new set of governors will replace the Communist Party first secretaries as the highest official in Cuba's 15 provinces.

While the Communist Party remains the only permitted political group, the wording of the new constitution could allow voters to choose between various candidates rather than simply voting yes or no for a candidate pre-selected by a government commission, experts said.

FILE - In this July 21, 2018 photo, a member of the National Assembly studies the proposed constitutional update in Havana, Cuba. Some observers see the new constitution as a merely cosmetic update aimed at assuring one of the world's last communist systems won't get another revamp until long after the passing of its founding fathers, while others see the potential for a slow-moving but deep set of changes that will speed the modernization of Cuba's economically stagnant authoritarian bureaucracy. (Abel Padron, Agencia Cubana de Noticias via AP, File)

A new business law could create a formal role for small- and medium-sized businesses. Until now, all private workers and employers are legally classified as "self-employed," leading to situations in which hundreds of thousands of "self-employed" waiters, cooks, maids, construction workers and janitors go to work each day for the "self-employed" owners of restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts and construction contractors.

Business owners hope legal recognition will bring them privileges like the right to import and export, now held only by state monopolies.

"There's a full-on effort to give life to the new constitution, to accompany it with laws so it doesn't become a dead letter," Homero Acosta, the secretary of the Cuba's Council of State and one of the key figures in the reform, said on state television this month.

A new family code is expected to address the issue of gay marriage, which was struck from the new constitution after popular resistance.

A new criminal code will for the first time create the right of habeas corpus, requiring the state to justify a citizens' detention, and give Cubans the right to know what information the government holds about them.

The revamped criminal law could also, experts said, contain stronger provisions against domestic violence, greater environmental protections and animal rights and create tougher punishments for government mismanagement and corruption.

Cuba's powerful military and intelligence ministries employ tens of thousands of agents and informants, control much of the economy and are often exempted from the rules governing civilian sectors of the government. Whether the Interior Ministry and Revolutionary Armed Forces will be subject to the new limits in the legal reform remains an open question.

Cuba is in its fourth year of expected zero to minimal growth, and the government feels increasingly threatened by the Trump administration's effort to overthrow Venezuela's Cuban-allied government as the first step in an offensive against socialist states throughout Latin America.

Only 78 percent of registered voters, some 6.8 million out of 8.7 million, said "yes" to the new constitution in a Feb. 24 referendum. That's a massive approval rate in any other country but relatively low for Cuba, where voters usually approve government proposals by margins well over 90 percent.

In this case, some 700,000 voted "no," while others abstained or filed marred or blank ballots.

That could put unusual pressure on the government to come up with new laws that win widespread public approval, rather than simply imposing new regulations after closed meetings of Communist Party and government leaders.

"The referendum showed that Cuba is a more politically diverse society than it often seems on the surface," constitutional lawyer Raudiel Pena said. "Now let's hope that lawmakers really take that into consideration."

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Associated Press writer Michael Weissenstein contributed to this report.

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Andrea Rodriguez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ARodriguezAP

FILE - In this Dec. 21, 2018 file photo, members of the National Assembly debate the draft of a new constitution at Convention Palace in Havana, Cuba. Cuban legal experts told The Associated Press that they expect the Cuban government to send the National Assembly between 60 and 80 new laws over the next two years to replace ones rendered obsolete by the new constitution. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File)

FILE - In this Feb. 24, 2019 file photo, Cuba's President Miguel Diaz-Canel talks to the press after voting in a referendum to approve or reject the new constitution in Havana, Cuba. Only 78 percent of registered voters said "yes" to the new constitution in a Feb. 24 referendum, a massive approval rate in any other country but relatively low for Cuba, where voters usually approve government proposals by margins well over 90 percent. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File)South Koreas Unification Ministry was given no explanations for the move. Twenty-five South Korean officials will remain at the office for the coming days. The regular inter-Korean meeting was not held following the failure of the Trump-Kim summit.

Seoul (AsiaNews/Agencies)  North Korean officials withdrew on Friday from an inter-Korean liaison office (pictured) located in Kaesong, on the intra-Korean border, South Koreas Unification Ministry announced. The office opened last year as a permanent venue for contacts between the two Koreas.

This comes as the peace and denuclearisation process remain deadlocked following last month's no-deal summit in Vietnam between North Korea and the United States.

The first consequence of the failure came yesterday when the US imposed sanctions on two Chinese shipping companies that helped Pyongyang evade US and UN sanctions against its nuclear programme.

North Korean officials notified their southern counterparts at the liaison officers' meeting earlier in the day that the North would pull out of the office in accordance with a directive from their government. All North Korean officials then left the building, the Unification Ministry said in its statement.

South Koreas Deputy Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung said that the 25 South Korean officials at the office would remain for the coming days, adding that the North gave no reason for the decision.

"The government considers this withdrawal decision regrettable and hopes the North will return at an early date so that the office will be operated normally," Chun said at a press briefing.

He went on to say that all other inter-Korean communication channels are operating normally and that the government will comprehensively review the situation and consider follow-up measures.

Chun also noted that no unusual signs have been detected over the past week, but the weekly liaison meeting between himself and his North Korean counterpart, Jon Jong-su, was not held.LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - The Latest on legislation banning most abortions 18 weeks into a woman's pregnancy (all times local):

11:10 p.m.

Lawmakers in Arkansas and Utah have sent their governors legislation banning most abortions 18 weeks into a woman's pregnancy, moving the states closer to enacting bans that could be among the strictest in the country.

In Arkansas, the House on Wednesday gave final approval by an 86-1 vote to the bill, which Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson has said he supports.

Utah also passed an 18-week ban on Wednesday, sending it to Republican Gov. Gary Herbert. He hasn't said whether he'll sign it, though he has said he's generally against abortion.

The 18-week bans would be the strictest in the country if enacted, though proposals to ban abortion earlier in a woman's pregnancy are advancing in several other state legislatures.

Arkansas already bans abortion 20 weeks into a woman's pregnancy.

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2 p.m.

Arkansas lawmakers have sent the governor legislation banning most abortions 18 weeks into a woman's pregnancy, a prohibition that could be the strictest in the country.

The House on Wednesday gave final approval by an 86-1 vote to the bill, which Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson has said he supports. Arkansas already bans abortion 20 weeks into a woman's pregnancy.

The House had approved an earlier version of the bill and on Wednesday backed an amendment adding exceptions for rape and incest. The ban would be the strictest in the country if enacted, though proposals to ban abortion earlier in a woman's pregnancy are advancing in several other state legislatures. Another 18-week ban is pending in Utah's legislature.SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The New York Times reports that federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into Facebook's data deals with major electronics manufacturers.

The newspaper says a grand jury in New York has subpoenaed information from at least two companies known for making smartphones and other devices, citing two unnamed people familiar with the request. It reports that both companies had data partnerships with Facebook that gave them access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of users.

Facebook describes those data deals as innocuous efforts to help smartphone makers provide Facebook features to users before the social network had its own app.

The Times reports that it is not clear when the inquiry began or exactly what it is focusing on. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - Australia's prime minister said on Thursday he won't put officials in danger by retrieving extremists from the Middle East after an Australian Islamic State group widow asked to bring her children home from a Syrian refugee camp.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison's response came after the Australian Broadcasting Corp. interviewed the woman in one of the refugee camps in northern Syria where she has lived with her toddler son and malnourished 6-month-old daughter since they fled the Syrian village of Baghouz where the Islamic State group has been making its last stand.

ABC said the 24-year-old woman refused to confirm her identity and wore a veil during the interview, but it identified her Thursday as Zehra Duman.

The woman said her daughter needs hospital treatment and she wanted to bring her back to Australia.

"Nobody really cares about us here, and I understand the anger that they have toward a lot of us here," the woman told ABC, referring to the Kurdish authorities' treatment of tens of thousands of her fellow Islamic State supporters in the camps.

"But the kids don't need to suffer," she added.

Morrison said Australians who take their families to war zones to fight with the Islamic State movement had to take responsibility for their actions.

"The great tragedy of those who went and joined up with terrorists - to support terrorist causes through Daesh and have taken their families into warzones where they're basically fighting against Australia - is they have placed their children in this horrendous position." Morrison told reporters.

"I'm not going to put any Australian at risk to try to extract people from those situations," he added.

Deakin University security expert Greg Barton said the government could no longer use the excuse of risk for failing to repatriate Australian extremists as Australia rightly did when the extremists were in territory controlled by Islamic State fighters.

"Care would need to be taken bringing her back, but it's entirely do-able," Barton said. "We more than most countries can deal with this."

Western countries were reluctant to bring their nationals home from the Middle East since the Islamic State caliphate collapsed because most countries struggled to gather evidence to prove them guilty of an offense, Barton said.

But Australia got around that burden of evidence in 2014 when a new law made simply being inside Islamic State-held territory in Syria and Iraq a crime punishable by 10 years in prison. The onus is on Australians who visit designated Islamic State-held areas to prove they had reasonable excuses.

No one has yet been prosecuted under the law.

Barton said Morrison wouldn't bring the family home before elections due in May because the prime minister thought that would be politically unpopular.

Morrison said any Australian citizen who returned from supporting Islamic State fighters would "face the full force of Australian law."

Opposition leader Bill Shorten, whom opinion polls suggest will likely be prime minister after the May elections, said his party would work constructively with the government on repatriating Australian children from Syria without "political point-scoring."

"We'll work it through. Do you separate kids from their parents? Who's going to look after them?" Shorten said to reporters.

Duman said on social media she gave up her middle-class life in the Australian city of Melbourne where she was part of a Turkish-Australian family for the battlefields of Syria in late 2014.

She had followed Islamic State soldier Mahmoud Abdullatif who had left Melbourne months earlier for the Raqqa, the Islamic State movement's center in Syria.

The couple announced their wedding online in December 2014, with a photograph of her dowry that included an assault rifle.

Duman, who began calling herself Zehra Abdullatif or Umm Abdullatif, said her 23-year-old husband died five weeks after their wedding.

The former private school student became an avid online recruiter for the movement and urged other women to join her.

When asked on Twitter in early 2015 what she missed about Australia, her reply was simple and numeric: "0"BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) - 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 administration's 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.

FILE - In this April 20, 2013, file photo, male Greater Sage Grouse perform their mating ritual on a lake near Walden, Colo. The Trump administration is finalizing plans to ease restrictions on oil and natural gas drilling and other industry activities that are meant to protect an imperiled bird species that ranges across the American West. U.S. Bureau of Land Management Acting Director Brian Steed told The Associated Press the changes still protect greater sage grouse while addressing concerns that policies under former President Barack Obama were too restrictive. A formal announcement is expected Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

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.

"It's 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 administration's 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. "We're doing that in a very careful way to ensure that the bird's 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 bird's range, which covers some 270,000 square miles (700,000 square kilometers).

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 kilometers) 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 BLM's new approach "will really complement what we're already doing. That's 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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.

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.

CORRECTS YEAR - North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, center, speaks at a gathering for diplomats in Pyongyang, North Korea on Friday, March 15, 2019. 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 ministry's North America desk. (AP Photo/Eric Talmadge)

"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."

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.

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Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann in Washington contributed to this report.

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Talmadge is the AP's Pyongyang bureau chief. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram: @EricTalmadgeWASHINGTON (AP) - 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.

President Donald Trump signs the first veto of his presidency in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Washington. Trump issued the first veto, overruling Congress to protect his emergency declaration for border wall funding. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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.

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AP writers Alan Fram, Lisa Mascaro, Catherine Lucey and Colleen Long contributed.

President Donald Trump speaks about border security in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Washington. Trump issued the first veto of his presidency, overruling Congress to protect his emergency declaration for border wall funding. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump hands out a pen after signing the first veto of his presidency in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Washington. Trump issued the first veto, overruling Congress to protect his emergency declaration for border wall funding. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - 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."

Tom Witke, left, his son Chad, center, and Nick Kenny, launch a boat into the swollen waters of the North Fork of the Elkhorn River, to check on Witke's flooded property, in Norfolk, Neb., Friday, March 15, 2019. Heavy rain falling atop deeply frozen ground has prompted evacuations along swollen rivers in Wisconsin, Nebraska and other Midwestern states. Thousands of people have been urged to evacuate along eastern Nebraska rivers as a massive late-winter storm has pushed streams and rivers out of their banks throughout the Midwest. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

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 kilometers) 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.

Wisconsin's governor declared a state of emergency Friday as flooding worsened, and Iowa's 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 kilometers) south of Omaha, Nebraska, downstream to St. Joseph, Missouri on Friday, a stretch of about 70 miles (112.7 kilometers).

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 it's 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 kilometers) 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 neighboring 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 percent last week to 90 percent.

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.

Thick ice slabs litter yards and roads in Fremont, Neb., Thursday, March 14, 2019, after the ice-covered Platte River flooded it's banks. Evacuations forced by flooding have occurred in several eastern Nebraska communities. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

The eastbound lanes of Interstate 94 were closed at Exit 161 on Wednesday evening and remained closed Thursday, March 14, 2019 until snowplows could clear the east-west interstate highway of drifted snow near Bismarck. North Dakota transportation officials closed sections of major interstates after blowing snow reduced visibility to nearly zero (Tom Stromme/The Bismarck Tribune via AP)

A fence encrusted with ice and corn stalks, stands in flood waters of the Elkhorn River, in Norfolk, Neb., Friday, March 15, 2019. Thousands of people have been urged to evacuate along eastern Nebraska rivers as a massive late-winter storm has pushed streams and rivers out of their banks throughout the Midwest. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Farmers work on land isolated by the swollen waters of the North Fork of the Elkhorn River, in Norfolk, Neb., Friday, March 15, 2019. Heavy rain falling atop deeply frozen ground has prompted evacuations along swollen rivers in Wisconsin, Nebraska and other Midwestern states. Thousands of people have been urged to evacuate along eastern Nebraska rivers as a massive late-winter storm has pushed streams and rivers out of their banks throughout the Midwest. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Cows ready for calving stand in a pen on land isolated by the swollen waters of the North Fork of the Elkhorn River, in Norfolk, Neb., Friday, March 15, 2019. Heavy rain falling atop deeply frozen ground has prompted evacuations along swollen rivers in Wisconsin, Nebraska and other Midwestern states. Thousands of people have been urged to evacuate along eastern Nebraska rivers as a massive late-winter storm has pushed streams and rivers out of their banks throughout the Midwest. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Tom Witke, center, his son Chad, right, and Nick Kenny, load a boat out of the swollen waters of the North Fork of the Elkhorn River after checking on the Witke's flooded property, in Norfolk, Neb., Friday, March 15, 2019. Heavy rain falling atop deeply frozen ground has prompted evacuations along swollen rivers in Wisconsin, Nebraska and other Midwestern states. Thousands of people have been urged to evacuate along eastern Nebraska rivers as a massive late-winter storm has pushed streams and rivers out of their banks throughout the Midwest. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Waterfowl swims past a fence encrusted with ice and corn stalks, as it stands in flood waters of the Elkhorn River, in Norfolk, Neb., Friday, March 15, 2019. Thousands of people have been urged to evacuate along eastern Nebraska rivers as a massive late-winter storm has pushed streams and rivers out of their banks throughout the Midwest. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

A pickup truck sits in a ditch after being swept by flood waters in Norfolk, Neb., Friday, March 15, 2019. Heavy rain falling atop deeply frozen ground has prompted evacuations along swollen rivers in Wisconsin, Nebraska and other Midwestern states. Thousands of people have been urged to evacuate along eastern Nebraska rivers as a massive late-winter storm has pushed streams and rivers out of their banks throughout the Midwest. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)JERUSALEM (AP) - Cross-border fighting between Israel and Gaza's 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 Israel's military by surprise. Overnight, Israeli warplanes hit some 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 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.

On Friday, Israeli media quoted defense officials as saying a preliminary investigation indicated the rockets were fired from Gaza 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.

A Palestinian inspects the damage of destroyed building belongs to Hamas ministry of prisoners hit by Israeli airstrikes in 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)

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. 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. Israel's military said earlier Friday that it holds Hamas responsible for all attacks coming from Gaza.

The late-night attack Thursday on Tel Aviv, Israel's 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 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.

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Akram reported from Gaza City, Gaza Strip.

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)

A wreckage of Hamas military site is seen empty after it 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)Houses of worship around the world, a place of reflection and peace, have been targeted for attack by extremists. Here are some of the deadly assaults over the last decade:

July 16, 2010: Jundallah group kills 27 and injures 270 after it carries out a double suicide bombing against another Shiite mosque in southeastern Iran.

Oct. 31, 2010: Al-Qaida in Iraq militants attack Our Lady of Salvation Catholic Church in Baghdad during Sunday night mass, killing 58 people in the deadliest assault targeting Christians since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion there. Al-Qaida in Iraq later became the Islamic State group.

Dec. 15, 2010: Two suicide bombers from the Sunni extremist group Jundallah blow themselves up near a mosque in southeastern Iran, including six Revolutionary Guard commanders.

Aug. 5, 2012: Six members of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, in Oak Creek, are fatally shot by a white supremacist, Wade Michael Page. Page was shot by a responding officer and later killed himself.

Nov. 18, 2014: Two Palestinians using axes, knives and a gun kill four Jewish worshippers and an Israeli police officer in an attack on a Jerusalem synagogue.

FILE - In this Sept. 24, 2015, file photo, police inspect inside the al-Balili mosque after suicide bombings at the mosque during Eid al-Adha prayers in Sanaa, Yemen. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed, File)

Jan. 30, 2015: Suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in the Pakistani town of Shikarpur kills 71. Jundullah claims responsibility.

March 20, 2015: Islamic State suicide bombers attack a pair of mosques in Yemen's capital, unleashing monstrous blasts that ripped through worshippers and killed 137 people.

June 17, 2015: Nine black worshippers including a pastor are killed by Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, after he prayed with them in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof was convicted of federal hate-crime and obstruction-of-religion charges and sentenced to death.

Sept. 24, 2015: A suicide bomber strikes a mosque in Yemen's rebel-held capital, killing 25 worshippers during prayers for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

Nov. 12, 2016: Suicide bomber from Islamic State group kills over 50 at the shrine of Shah Noorani, in Pakistan's Baluchistan province.

Dec. 11, 2016: Suicide bomber strikes inside a Cairo chapel adjacent to St. Mark's Cathedral, seat of Egypt's ancient Coptic Orthodox Church. The Islamic State group claimed the attack, which killed at least 25 people.

Jan. 29, 2017: A gunman killed six men during evening prayers at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City. Alexandre Bissonnette pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and attempted murder charges and was sentenced to serve 40 years in prison before being eligible for parole.

Feb. 16, 2017: Suicide bomber detonates his explosives vest among the devotees at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Pakistan's Sindh province, killing 98.

April 9, 2017: Twin suicide bombings rock churches in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria and Tanta, killing at least 45 people. The attack was claimed by the Islamic State group.

June 15, 2017: A suicide bomber kills four people at a Shiite mosque in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul. Among the dead is a leader of Afghanistan's ethnic Hazaras, who are mostly Shiite Muslims.

Aug. 1, 2017: A suicide bomber storms into the largest Shiite mosque in Afghanistan's western Herat province, opening fire on worshippers before blowing himself up, killing at least 90 people. Hundreds more were wounded in the attack, which happened during evening prayers.

Aug. 25, 2017: Militants storm a packed Shiite mosque in Kabul during Friday prayers. The attack ends with at least 28 worshippers killed and 50 wounded, many of them children. Two of the assailants blow themselves up and another two are shot dead by Afghan security forces.

Sept. 29, 2017: A suicide bomber blows himself up outside a Shiite mosque in Kabul, killing five. The attack took place as worshippers were leaving the mosque after Friday prayers.

Oct. 20, 2017: The Islamic State group claims a suicide bomber attack, killing 31 and wounding 29 people, at a Shiite mosque in Kabul.

Nov. 5, 2017: Dressed in black tactical-style gear and armed with an assault weapon, 26-year-old Devin Kelley opened fire at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, killing 26 people and wounding about 20 others.

Nov. 24, 2017: Militants kill 311 worshippers in a mosque attack in north Sinai, the deadliest such terrorist attack in Egypt's modern history.

Dec. 17, 2017: Islamic State attack on a church in Pakistani city of Quetta kills 16 people.

Aug. 3, 2018: Suicide bombers disguised in burqa robes attack a Shiite mosque in eastern Afghanistan, killing 27 people.

Oct. 27, 2018: A gunman believed to have spewed anti-Semitic slurs and rhetoric on social media entered Tree of Life Congregation synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire, killing 11 and wounding six, including four police officers.

Jan. 27, 2019: Two suicide attackers detonate two bombs during a Mass in a Roman Catholic cathedral on the largely Muslim island of Jolo in the southern Philippines, killing 23 and wounding about 100 others. Three days later, an attacker hurls a grenade in a mosque in nearby Zamboanga city, killing two religious teachers.

March 15, 2019: At least 40 people are killed in an attack at mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.

FILE - In this June 25, 2015, file photo, people line up to attend the wake of Sen. Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine killed in a shooting, at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

FILE - In this Jan. 30, 2017, file photo, people hold candles for victims of Sunday's deadly shooting at a Quebec City mosque, during a vigil in Montreal. A gunman killed six men during evening prayers at the Islamic Cultural Centre. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

Police escort people away 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 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)

Police stand outside a mosque in Linwood, Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed during shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

Police block the road near the shooting at a mosque in Linwood, Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed during shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) - With Algerian flags on their backs, hundreds of thousands of people of all ages marched for a fourth consecutive Friday through Algeria's capital and other cities to press for an end to the 20-year-rule of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Four days after April elections were canceled and the president withdrew his bid to seek a fifth term, in a clear response to last week's nationwide marches, protesters demanded he leave at the end of his mandate - something that was not part of the official plan.

Compact crowds packing leafy boulevards throughout central Algiers appeared bigger than a week ago, and the question on all minds what, if anything, authorities might do next.

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 country's shadowy leadership. Their numbers surged after midday Muslim prayers. By evening, they were still trying to disperse.

"God willing, he will leave soon," Karim Mohamed, one of the protesters, said of Bouteflika, "because this is the demand of the entire people. And God willing, the demand of all the people will be met."

Algerians have barely seen Bouteflika, 82, 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 country's gas wealth.

Algeria's new prime minister Noureddine Bedoui gives a press conference, in Algiers, Algeria, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Algeria's new prime minister is promising to create a government within days as the country faces mass protests calling on President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul)

The spring sun seemed to encourage the protesters, so numerous that it was difficult to move on some streets in Algiers. Algerian media reported protests in several other cities around Africa's biggest country. Students, teachers, judges and unions were among those joining Friday's marches.

Riot police vans lined side streets of Algiers and surveillance helicopters circled overhead. There were no reports of violence.

Protesters have shown pride in their giant, peaceful get-togethers - noted by officialdom in speeches in recent days. The peaceful nature of the marches, bringing together the diversity of the Algerian population, may be all the more remarkable because they were charged with high emotion.

"Enough hypocrisy. Leave, leave, leave, leave!" said a woman protester. "If you have an ounce of dignity, why haven't you left?"

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 crowd included women with and without headscarves, youth, and fathers carrying children on their shoulders.

The protesters wanted to send a mass message of rejection of Bouteflika's attempt this week to defuse Algeria's political crisis. While he abandoned plans for a fifth term, and promising reforms that address concerns of frustrated, struggling youth, his decision to cancel the election left critics fearing he could cling to power.

Police surrounding the Algiers' central post office at the start of the protest 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 provoke public anger.

Among protesters' chants were "gang of thieves" and "you ruined Algeria, we don't want you." Others chanted "peaceful demonstration" in an effort to ensure that things don't get out of hand.

The crowd seemed determined to prevent any politicians from taking advantage of the protests for personal gain, shouting down outspoken left-wing figure Karim Tabou when he tried to give a speech.

Some protesters held signs reading "Army, People, Same Fight," in an apparent appeal to the powerful army not to crack down on demonstrations.

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.

Bouteflika is credited with helping reconcile the nation after that, but is accused of becoming increasingly out of touch as his presidency dragged on.

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Lotfi Bouchouchi in Algiers and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.

Algeria's Vice Prime Minister Ramtane Lamamra gives a press conference, in Algiers, Algeria, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Algeria's new prime minister is promising to create a government within days as the country faces mass protests calling on President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul)

A teacher holds a placard during a protest in Algiers, Algeria, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Algerian teachers gathered outside the central post office in the capital Algiers to protest President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to delay next month's presidential election. (AP Photo/Anis Belghoul)The US Treasury yesterday announced punitive measures against two Chinese companies. Updated report on illegal trade practices in North Korea. In 2018, North Korean ports received at least 263 deliveries of refined oil. The limit imposed by the UN was exceeded by 7.5 times.

Washington (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Washington has fined two Chinese shipping companies that helped North Korea to evade US and international sanctions on its nuclear program: it is the first US measure since the failure of the Hanoi summit between President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

The US Treasury Department yesterday announced punitive measures against Dalian Haibo International Freight Co. Ltd. and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co. Ltd .. Washington also stated that it is updating its report on Pyongyang's illicit trade practices, appointing another 71 boats - in addition to the 24 already identified - suspected of having exported coal from North Korea or made ship-ship transfers of refined oil.

After the second Trump-Kim summit, Ri Yong-ho - Pyongyang's Foreign Minister - declared that his country had presented to the US "realistic" proposals, in exchange for "a partial lifting of the sanctions, which hinder the civil economy and the sustenance of our people .

The Treasury says that last year the North Korean ports received at least 263 deliveries of tankers containing refined oil. If these tankers had been full, Pyongyang would have imported 3.78 million barrels or more than 7.5 times the amount allowed by the limit imposed by the United Nations (500 thousand a year).

US officials report that Dalian Haibo provided goods and services in support of the Paeksol Trading Corp., a North Korean company previously sanctioned, as involved in the metal or coal trade and providing alternative revenue to the Pyongyang regime.ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - Defense lawyers for a one-time business partner of former national security adviser Michael Flynn say Flynn has lied so often that the government can't possibly have fulfilled its legal obligation to disclose all of his misstatements.

At a hearing Friday in federal court in Alexandria, though, prosecutors said they've more than met their disclosure obligations.

Flynn's former partner, Bijan Kian, is facing trial for illegal lobbying on behalf of Turkey. Kian and Flynn were pushing the U.S. to expel a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gulen, who is a nemesis of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Kian's lawyers say they expect Flynn will be the key witness at Kian's trial, and they'll need to impeach Flynn's credibility as a witness. Flynn has already pleaded guilty as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation to making false statements, and Kian's lawyers say they know more about Flynn's lies from the public record than they do from what the government has disclosed from its files.

Prosecutors have said they have fulfilled their responsibility to provide information from their Flynn files that could be helpful to the defense. Indeed, Assistant U.S. Attorney James P. Gillis said prosecutors have provided even more information that they're required to from notes that FBI agents have taken in their interviews of Flynn since he began cooperating with authorities.

But Gillis said Kian's lawyers should not be given carte blanche to "frolic through everything the Office of Special Counsel has produced" regarding Flynn. He said Flynn's statements on some topics are sensitive and are part of ongoing investigations, including investigations being done outside the special counsel's office.

Kian's lawyers, though, said that they deserve to know about lies Flynn has told even if they do not tie directly to the Kian case, because they can be used to impeach his credibility as a witness.

"A lie is a lie. A bad act is a bad act," defense lawyer Mark MacDougall said.

The judge at Friday's hearing said he's confident prosecutors will make the necessary disclosures. But he did order defense lawyers to make a list of specific categories where they feel they are entitled to more information, and ordered prosecutors to review it to see if additional disclosures are warranted.COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) - The 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 Defense College says the shooter is against mass immigration and "has to some extent 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 Breivik's 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 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."

FILE - In this Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2017 file photo, Anders Behring Breivik raises his right hand at the start of his appeal case in Borgarting Court of Appeal at Telemark prison in Skien, Norway, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2017. The manifesto that the presumed New Zealand shooter who killed at least 49 people in two mosques in Christchurch on Friday, March 15, 2019 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. (Lise Aaserud/NTB Scanpix via AP, File)

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.ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Greece on Friday backed calls by Bolivia's left-wing President Evo Morales for a negotiated settlement to the severe political and financial crisis in Venezuela, in what marks a different approach to that pursued by key European allies.

Many European Union countries are among 50 nations, including the United States, which are backing Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido against embattled President Nicolas Maduro. Those EU countries want a presidential election to resolve Venezuela's problems.

But Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' Syriza party has friendly ties with left-wing parties in South America and has expressed support for Maduro.

Morales met with Tsipras in Athens on a rare trip to Europe, and called on the Greek prime minister to press the EU to push for talks between the Venezuelan government and opposition as a way out of the crisis.

"I have expressed by serious concern at the situation in Venezuela, with the deepening financial and humanitarian crisis," Tsipras said. "The only option in the coming days is a dialogue involving all sides - from the government and the opposition - to sit at the same negotiating table and avoid an the escalation of the crisis and possibility a bloody civil conflict."

A senior government official in Athens told The Associated Press that Greece did not have a "front seat" in international negotiations involving Venezuela but was pressing other EU countries to insist in trying to reach a negotiated settlement. The official, who spoke ahead of Morales' visit, asked not to be named pending official statements.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, center, and Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, right, take part in a conference in Athens, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Morales is in Greece on a two-day official visit. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Late Thursday, Morales accused Guaido of acting like a colonial-era "viceroy," and criticized the support he has received from the U.S.

"We do not agree with this outside interference ... solutions must be found inside the country," he said Friday.

Referring to Tsipras as "brother Alexis," Morales said he was seeking Greek support in often-troubled trade negotiations between the EU and South American countries and said his government would receive advice from experts in Athens to try and emulate Greece's "tourism miracle."

Last year, more than 30 million tourists visited Greece, a country with a population of 10.7 million.

Both Tsipras and Morales are seeking re-election this year and promised to work to broaden international cooperation between left-wing parties.

___

Iliana Mier in Athens and Costas Kantouris in Thessaloniki contributed. Follow Gatopoulos at http://www.twitter.com/dgatopoulos

Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, right, shakes hands with Bolivia's President Evo Morales after their press conference at Maximos Mansion in Athens, Friday, March 15, 2019. Bolivia's left-wing president on Thursday compared Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to an erstwhile colonial viceroy and spoke out against any military intervention in the troubled country. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

Bolivia's President Evo Morales speaks during a press conference with Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras at Maximos Mansion in Athens, Friday, March 15, 2019. Bolivia's left-wing president on Thursday compared Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to an erstwhile colonial viceroy and spoke out against any military intervention in the troubled country. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, right, welcomes Bolivia's President Evo Morales at Maximos Mansion in Athens, Friday, March 15, 2019. Bolivia's left-wing president on Thursday compared Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to an erstwhile colonial viceroy and spoke out against any military intervention in the troubled country. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

Bolivian President Evo Morales, right, listens Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, during a conference in Athens, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Morales is in Greece on a two-day official visit. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)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.

Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi talks with journalists during a press conference at the 2019-22 ENI strategy presentation in San Donato Milanese, Milan, Italy, Friday, March 15, 2019. Italian energy giant ENI says 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. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

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.

A technician holds up a bottle with green diesel fuel at the Eni's laboratory research during the 2019-22 ENI strategy presentation in San Donato Milanese, Milan, Italy, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi delivers his speech during the 2019-22 ENI strategy presentation in San Donato Milanese, Milan, Italy, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi delivers his speech during the 2019-22 ENI strategy presentation in San Donato Milanese, Milan, Italy, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)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.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban attends a ceremony during the 171th anniversary of the outbreak of the 1848 revolution and war of independence against the Habsburg rule in Budapest, Hungary, Friday, March 15, 2019. (Zsolt Szigetvary/MTI via AP)

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.

Hussars attend a ceremony during the 171th anniversary celebrations of the outbreak of the 1848 revolution and war of independence against the Habsburg rule in Budapest, Hungary, Friday, March 15, 2019. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP)BRUSSELS (AP) - Across Brussels, British residents are waking up. The first thing midwife Jo Everatt does is to check websites for Brexit updates. Lobbyist Brian O'Riordan scans two newspapers. European Union official Chris Kendall checks Twitter.

For Brits living and working in the heart of the European Union, the Brexit debate and the uncertainty surrounding it is a constant background noise that occasionally fades away - then comes roaring back louder than ever.

While British lawmakers bicker over the terms of their country's divorce from the EU, British citizens in Brussels - where the bloc's headquarters is located - worry about Brexit's impact on their ability to work and travel, on their savings and on their plans for their future.

Many, after holding out for years, are applying for a second citizenship in their adopted country.

"It can become obsessive if you let it," O'Riordan said in the dining room of his home just outside Brussels. "So yeah, it's trying to get the balance right between living your life normally and not being obsessed with Brexit."

That's tough when their very futures are so tightly interwoven with the fate of Britain's faltering plan to leave the EU.

In this photo taken on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, British lobbyist Brian O'Riordan poses with his dogs in his house in Rixensart, outside Brussels. Britons in Brussels are fretting about how their country's looming departure will affect their daily lives. Growing numbers are taking Belgian nationality as a way of ensuring they can still live, work and travel freely in Europe after Brexit. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

The Brexit noise has been at full volume this week as lawmakers in the British Parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject a deal worked out between their government and the European Union, then voted also against leaving the bloc without a deal. On Thursday, British politicians voted to postpone it altogether.

Nowhere are the moves being followed so closely as here in Brussels, which lives and breathes European politics. These days, as the clock runs down toward Britain's promise to leave on March 29, politics means Brexit.

In the shadow of the X-shaped Berlaymont building that houses the European Commission, office workers drink coffee and leaf through newspapers in a cacophony of languages - all with front pages dominated by the latest Brexit machinations in London. Across the street, a row of the EU's blue flags with 12 gold stars snap in a stiff early spring breeze.

The proposed deal would protect the rights of Britons in Europe - and vice-versa - but with its survival in question Britons on the continent are in limbo.

"It's a kind of bizarre feeling, this sense of disempowerment, helplessness watching it all happen, not really understanding why," O'Riordan said.

That uncertainty finally pushed him over the edge. He has lived in Belgium for two decades and speaks French to his two border collie dogs - all the while being happy to be British. But with Brexit looming, he shifted his pension savings out of Britain and took Belgian citizenship.

He is far from alone.

The Belgian government's statistics service, StatBel, released figures this week showing a spike in Brits becoming Belgians after the 2016 Brexit referendum.

In 2015, 127 Britons took Belgian citizenship. The following year the number soared to 506. In 2017, 1,375 of the 23,000 Brits living in Belgium - a whopping 6 percent - adopted Belgian nationality.

Everatt, the midwife, hasn't made the switch, but she contemplates it as she frets about her future: How will Brexit affect her regular trips to England? What will it mean for her thriving Belgian business running classes for young expat mothers in a first-floor room overlooking the gravel paths and manicured lawns of Ambiorix Square?

She has seen young mothers moving back to the U.K. and others worried at the prospect of having to relocate.

"The thought of them leaving and going home is sad because you leave a chapter of your life behind and it's enforced," she said. "It's not a voluntary move. It's 'turn the lights out and leave everything behind.'"

Some Brits find the only way to escape the Brexit blues is with humor.

Chris Kendall, a British-German EU official who works in the bloc's foreign service, tweets and podcasts his thoughts to thousands of followers.

"It's a golden age for gallows humor," he said at a cafe next to the European Commission's office block. "And there's so much to laugh at, so it is definitely a coping mechanism."

Kendall works in Brussels during the week and heads back to England over the weekends to be with his partner and their four children.

As he holds both British and German passports, his freedom of movement is guaranteed even after Brexit. But he fears his regular trips to and from home will be affected by holdups at the border regardless.

"When I'm heading home, I want to get home as soon as I possibly can," he said. "You know a big part of the EU and having this ability to work across borders and travel freely is wonderful. So any disruption to that is going to materially affect my quality of life."

___

Follow AP's full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit

In this photo taken on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, British midwife Jo Everatt, center right, talks to a young mother at her work space in Brussels. Britons in Brussels are fretting about how their country's looming departure will affect their daily lives. Growing numbers are taking Belgian nationality as a way of ensuring they can still live, work and travel freely in Europe after Brexit. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

People walk past European Union flags placed outside the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Britons in Brussels are fretting about how their country's looming departure will affect their daily lives. Growing numbers are taking Belgian nationality as a way of ensuring they can still live, work and travel freely in Europe after Brexit. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

In this photo taken on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, a note in British lobbyist Brian O'Riordan's home calendar shows a planned trip to London, in Rixensart, outside Brussels. Britons in Brussels are fretting about how their country's looming departure will affect their daily lives. Growing numbers are taking Belgian nationality as a way of ensuring they can still live, work and travel freely in Europe after Brexit. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

People and an European Union flags are reflected on the ground on a rainy day outside the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Britons in Brussels are fretting about how their country's looming departure will affect their daily lives. Growing numbers are taking Belgian nationality as a way of ensuring they can still live, work and travel freely in Europe after Brexit. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)OUTSIDE BAGHOUZ, Syria (AP) - The three Islamic State fighters emerged from the group's 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 neighboring 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.

Friday's 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.

Women, children, and an injured man who left the besieged Islamic State-held village of Baghouz, Syria, scramble over a rocky hillside to be checked by U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

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 don't 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 group's hold on territory in Syria and Iraq - a self-declared caliphate that at the height of the group's 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.

People who left the besieged Islamic State-held village of Baghouz, Syria, scramble up a rocky hillside to be checked by U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

People who left the besieged Islamic State-held village of Baghouz, Syria, scramble up a rocky hillside to be checked by U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

A woman and her children, who left the besieged Islamic State-held village of Baghouz, Syria, scramble over a rocky hillside, assisted by a U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces fighter Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) wait outside Baghouz, Syria, to go to the front line where Islamic State militants are staging counter attacks, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) gather outside Baghouz, Syria, to go to the front line where Islamic State militants are staging counter attacks, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) gather outside Baghouz, Syria, to go to the front line where Islamic State militants are staging counter attacks, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) wait outside Baghouz, Syria, to go to the front line where Islamic State militants are staging counter attacks, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) wait outside Baghouz, Syria, to go to the front line where Islamic State militants are staging counter attacks, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)LONDON (AP) - Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from a dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum.

The vote would be to determine whether Britons wanted to stay in the European Union, or sever ties.

The actual referendum was held in June 2016, and Cameron - a youthful prime minister enjoying his second term in office - became its first casualty after he failed to convince voters that the benefits of EU membership outweighed the liabilities.

The vote was 52 percent to 48 in favor of leaving. A chagrined Cameron, with his wife by his side, walked out of 10 Downing Street the morning after and resigned.

Big winners, it seemed, were Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, luminaries of the "Leave" campaign whose "take back control" arguments carried the day, bolstered by unsubstantiated claims that leaving the EU would allow Britain to add 350 million pounds ($455 million) a week to the National Health Service budget.

But it was Theresa May, Cameron's home secretary, who emerged as the Conservative Party choice as his successor and was charged with the task of leading Britain out of the EU - a task that has turned out to be more difficult than most anticipated.

FILE - In this Friday, June 24, 2016 file photo file photo a statue of Winston Churchill is silhouetted against the Houses of Parliament and the early morning sky in London, Friday, June 24, 2016. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

She formally triggered Britain's departure plan in 2017 by sending the EU a letter invoking Article 50. A March 29, 2019, departure date was set.

So far, so good. But negotiations between Britain and the EU have been slow and at times acrimonious, and the 585-page withdrawal agreement produced after two years of talks has been rejected twice by Britain's divided Parliament.

That has led to Britain's decision to seek a delay in the deadline as May prepares, once again, to seek parliamentary backing. It is not clear what path she will take if she fails a third time.

FILE - In this Friday, June 24, 2016 file photo Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party speaks to the media on College Green with the Houses of Parliament in the background in London after Britain voted to leave the EU. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. Britain voted to leave, but negotiations between Britain and the EU have been slow and at times acrimonious, and the 585-page withdrawal agreement produced after two years of talks has been rejected twice by Britain's divided Parliament. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

FILE - In this Friday, June 24, 2016 file photo Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party, celebrates and poses for photographers as he leaves a "Leave.EU" organisation party for the British European Union membership referendum in London. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, July 13, 2016 file photo Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, speaks to the media as his wife Samantha and their children Nancy, Florence and Elwen, from left, look on as they leave 10 Downing Street, in London after he resigned. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, July 13, 2016 file photo Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, his wife Samantha and their children Nancy, Elwen and Florence, hug on the steps of 10 Downing Street in London. Cameron stepped down after six years as prime minister. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, July 13, 2016 file photo, new British Prime Minister Theresa May and her husband Philip May stand on the steps of 10 Downing Street in London. David Cameron stepped down Wednesday after six years as prime minister. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)

FILE - In this Tuesday March 28, 2017 file photo, Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May, sitting below a painting of Britain's first Prime Minister Robert Walpole, signs the official letter to European Council President Donald Tusk, in 10 Downing Street, London, invoking Article 50 of the bloc's key treaty, the formal start of exit negotiations. Britons voted in June to leave the bloc after four decades of membership. (Christopher Furlong/Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE- In this Wednesday, March 29, 2017 file photo, EU Council President Donald Tusk holds British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit letter in notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty at a press conference in Brussels. (AP Photo/Olivier Matthys, File)

FILE - In this Friday, Oct. 20, 2017 file photo, British Prime Minister Theresa May waits for the arrival of European Council President Donald Tusk prior to a bilateral meeting with European Council President Donald Tusk during an EU summit in Brussels. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert, Pool)

FILE - In this Monday, March 19, 2018 file photo European Union chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, right, gestures as he meets with British Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union David Davis at EU headquarters in Brussels. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, File)

FILE - In this Friday, Aug. 31, 2018 file photo Britain's Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union Dominic Raab, left, and EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier prepare to shake hands after a media conference at EU headquarters in Brussels. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, File)

FILE - In this file photo taken on Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018, a sign in a parking lot of a cemetery reads: "No EU border in Ireland" near Carrickcarnan, Ireland, just next to the Jonesborough Parish church in Northern Ireland. (AP Photo/Lorne Cook, file)

FILE - In this Monday, Dec. 3, 2018 file photo protestors are reflected in a puddle as they wave European flags to demonstrate against Brexit in front of the Parliament in London. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. Britain voted to leave, but negotiations between Britain and the EU have been slow and at times acrimonious, and the 585-page withdrawal agreement produced after two years of talks has been rejected twice by Britain's divided Parliament. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

FILE - In this Thursday, Nov. 15, 2018 file photo EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, left, delivers the draft withdrawal agreement to European Council President Donald Tusk during a media conference at the Europa building in Brussels. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. Britain voted to leave, but negotiations between Britain and the EU have been slow and at times acrimonious, and the 585-page withdrawal agreement produced after two years of talks has been rejected twice by Britain's divided Parliament. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File)

FILE - In this Thursday, Dec. 13, 2018 file photo Britain's Ambassador to the EU Sir Tim Barrow, right, gestures to British Prime Minister Theresa May after she spoke with the media at an EU summit in Brussels. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)

FILE - In this Thursday, Feb. 7, 2019 file photo European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker prepares to shake hands with British Prime Minister Theresa May before their meeting at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019 file photo the flag of the European Union and the British national flag are flown on poles during a demonstration by remain in the EU outside spporters the Palace of Westminster in London. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. Britain voted to leave, but negotiations between Britain and the EU have been slow and at times acrimonious, and the 585-page withdrawal agreement produced after two years of talks has been rejected twice by Britain's divided Parliament. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019 file photo a leave the European Union (EU) supporter, at right, holds a placard up in front of remain in the EU supporters protesting outside Downing Street in London. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

FILE - In this Sunday, Feb. 24, 2019 file photo British Prime Minister Theresa May, center, listens as Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, second left, speaks with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, second right, during a meeting of leaders at an EU-Arab summit at the Sharm El Sheikh convention center in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File)

FILE - In this Monday, March 4, 2019 file photo a carnival float depicts British Prime Minister Theresa May and the Brexit during the traditional carnival parade in Duesseldorf, Germany. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. Britain voted to leave, but negotiations between Britain and the EU have been slow and at times acrimonious, and the 585-page withdrawal agreement produced after two years of talks has been rejected twice by Britain's divided Parliament. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File)

FILE - In this Thursday, Feb. 14, 2019 file photo Remain in the European Union supporters wear blindfolds as they take part in a protest event organised by the People's Vote Campaign, which calls for a second referendum on Britain's EU membership, in Parliament Square, London. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

FILE - In this Tuesday, March 12, 2019 file photo a Pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporter takes part in a protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. Britain voted to leave, but negotiations between Britain and the EU have been slow and at times acrimonious, and the 585-page withdrawal agreement produced after two years of talks has been rejected twice by Britain's divided Parliament. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

FILE - In this Tuesday March 12, 2019 file photo Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to lawmakers in parliament, London. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. Britain voted to leave, but negotiations between Britain and the EU have been slow and at times acrimonious, and the 585-page withdrawal agreement produced after two years of talks has been rejected twice by Britain's divided Parliament. (Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament via AP, File)ELSMERE, Del. (AP) - A Delaware man who police say set off a pipe bomb outside the home of his estranged wife's family has pleaded guilty to weapons charges.

News outlets report 49-year-old Mark Consiglio pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday and faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine when sentenced in July.

No one was injured in the March 2018 explosion, but the estranged wife's family believed Consiglio was trying to intimidate them. He had already been charged with threatening the woman at the time of the bombing.

Police later found more pipe bombs at Consiglio's own home, along with a samurai sword, arrows, a homemade gun and other weapons. A previous felony plea had banned Consiglio from owning deadly weapons.

Reports didn't include comment from Consiglio.KILIS, Turkey (AP) - 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.

A woman walks to the court in Kilis, southeastern Turkey, Friday, March 15, 2019. The court convicted Neil Prakash, a former rapper from Melbourne of belonging to a terror group and sentenced him to more than seven years in prison. Prakash 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. He had featured in IS videos, been linked to several attack plans in Australia and has urged lone wolf attacks against the United States. (AP Photo/Mehmet Guzel)

He insisted that he was forced to feature in IS videos and photographs and that they were filmed against his will.

Prakash's lawyer argued that his client had traveled 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 offenses.SYDNEY (AP) - 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 angry about 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 - who authorities identified as Brenton Harrison Tarrant - left behind a 74-page document posted on social media under his name 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 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. Tarrant appeared briefly in court on Saturday morning amid tight security and showed no emotion as the judge read the charge against him.

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.

This frame from video that was livestreamed Friday, March 15, 2019, shows a gunman, who used the name Brenton Tarrant on social media, in a car before the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand. (Shooter's Video via AP)

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 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. Tarrant's relatives in the Australian town of Grafton 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 woman who said she was a colleague of his when he worked as a personal trainer in 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.

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 1 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 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 toward 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 organization. However, he admitted contacts with an anti-immigration group called the reborn Knights Templar and said he got the approval of Anders Breivik for the attack, a claim that has not been verified.

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 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 polarize and destabilize 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 gunman used various hate symbols associated with the Nazis and white supremacy. For instance, the number 14 is seen on his rifle, a possible 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 as he sprays terrified worshippers with bullets again and again, sometimes firing at people he has already cut down.

The gunman - a licensed gun owner who bought the five guns used in the shootings legally - left a scene of carnage that shocked the nation, and the world. It was, in the words of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

This frame from video that was livestreamed Friday, March 15, 2019, shows guns in the car of a gunman who used the name Brenton Tarrant on social media before the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand. (Shooter's Video via AP)

In this frame from video that was livestreamed Friday, March 15, 2019, a gunman who used the name Brenton Tarrant on social media reaches for a gun in the back of his car before the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand. (Shooter's Video via AP)ALTON, N.H. (AP) - Authorities investigating a shooting at a home in Alton, New Hampshire, have someone in custody.

Details of the shooting were not released, but Belknap County Attorney Andrew Livernois told The Laconia Daily Sun the case was a homicide. Police said a suspect was in custody Friday morning.

State police tweeted that "the critical incident in Alton, NH, has come to a conclusion" and referred further questions to the attorney general's office, which said only that officials were "responding to an incident" and that it appears there is no threat to the public.

Schools in the area were under a soft lockdown that has since been lifted.

Further information wasn't immediately available.NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - A parent and a teacher say six schoolgirls in Burundi have been detained for scribbling on an image of the country's president in schoolbooks.

The case echoes one in 2016, when several students were condemned to up to 20 years behind bars. They were freed after a public outcry. At the time, the government said the students had been influenced by "enemies of the country."

The parent and teacher in this case in Kirundo spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety.

Burundi has been in political turmoil since President Pierre Nkurunziza in 2015 announced he would run for another term. The government kicked out the United Nations human rights office this month.

A national federation of children's associations says detaining the schoolgirls is not a solution.TIRANA, Albania (AP) - The United States has warned Albania's opposition against using or inciting violence at a rally this weekend.

The center-right Democratic Party-led opposition is holding a rally on Saturday to demand the government's resignation and is accusing the Cabinet of corruption.

Opposition lawmakers, who have relinquished their seats in parliament, have rejected calls for dialogue from Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama and from the U.S. and European Union.

In a statement Friday, the U.S. embassy said the opposition has "relinquished their obligations."

Recent rallies have turned violent, with police deploying tear gas.

Protesters burn tyres outside the parliament building during an anti-government rally , in Tirana , Albania, Tuesday, March 5, 2019. Albania's opposition holds a rally calling for a new parliamentary election and accusing the government of corruption and links to organized crime. (AP Photo/ Hektor Pustina)MADISON, Wis. (AP) - Beto O'Rourke is returning to Wisconsin this weekend for early campaign stops that speak to the importance of the state in the 2020 presidential race.

O'Rourke is slated to appear Sunday at a coffee shop in Madison, the state's liberal capital city, before heading to Milwaukee - site of the 2020 Democratic National Convention - for other events. It will be O'Rourke's second visit to Madison in a month. He met with more than 200 University of Wisconsin students and faculty in February before he officially entered the race on Thursday in neighboring Iowa.

Wisconsin is expected to be one of the most hard-fought states in 2020 because it is one of the few seen as being truly in play. Democrats view it as part of a "blue wall" that they hope to build in the Upper Midwest to deny President Donald Trump a second term.

Trump carried Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016, becoming the first Republican to carry the state since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Democrat Hillary Clinton was roundly criticized for not returning to the state before Election Day after she lost the Wisconsin primary to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

But Democrats have been buoyed by recent electoral successes - namely Tony Evers' defeat of two-term Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2018 as part of a Democratic sweep of every statewide race.

Adding to the momentum, Democrats on Monday announced that they would hold their national convention in Milwaukee in 2020, choosing it over the much larger cities of Houston and Miami.

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)

O'Rourke, a former Texas congressman, made a point during his first visit in February to emphasize that Wisconsin was "too often overlooked, the conversation does not begin until too late." He said this feeling was motivating his visits to Wisconsin and several other states, including New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, another candidate in the large Democratic presidential field, also made an early campaign stop in western Wisconsin last month.

Milwaukee and Madison are Wisconsin's two largest cities and are the center of Democratic power in the state. In 2016, Clinton carried Milwaukee County with 65 percent of the vote and Dane County, which includes Madison, with 70 percent.

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Associated Press writer Will Weissert in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

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Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sbauerAP

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 talks with J.D. Gillispie, of Burlington, Iowa, at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 13 hall, 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 at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 13 hall, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

In this March 14, 2019, photo, former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to reporters after a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery in Burlington, Iowa. The contours of the Democratic presidential primary came into clearer focus this week with O'Rourke's entry into the race. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) - The Latest on the Trump administration's changes to protections for the ground-dwelling sage grouse in the U.S. West (all times local):

10:30 a.m.

The chairman of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee says the Trump administration's decision to ease restrictions on energy development in the West will "hand over" more public land to fossil fuel companies.

Rep. Raul Grijalva is an Arizona Democrat and said Friday's decision will most directly benefit former clients of Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. Bernhardt was an oil and gas industry lobbyist.

Drilling rules and other land use restrictions are being eased through changes to plans meant to guide conservation efforts for greater sage grouse, a ground-dwelling bird that's been in decline.

U.S. Bureau of Land Management Acting Director Brian Steed told The Associated Press the changes better align federal and state management of grouse habitat.

FILE - In this May 9, 2008 file photo, male sage grouses fight for the attention of female southwest of Rawlins, Wyo. The Trump administration is finalizing plans to ease restrictions on oil and gas drilling and other industries that were meant to protect an imperiled bird species that ranges across the American West, federal officials said Thursday, March 14, 2019. (Jerret Raffety/Rawlins Daily Times via AP, File)

The chicken-sized birds range across portions of 11 Western states.

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8:20 a.m.

The Trump administration has finalized changes to sweeping land use plans for Western states to ease energy industry restrictions in a way officials say will protect a struggling ground dwelling bird.

The plans released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management will guide efforts to protect greater sage grouse.

Environmentalists say the widely-anticipated changes undermine protections for the chicken-sized bird.

But the administration secured backing from Democratic and Republican governors in affected states.

The birds range across 11 Western states.

Their known for their elaborate mating rituals and their numbers have plummeted due to energy development, disease and other factors.

U.S. Bureau of Land Management Acting Director Brian Steed told The Associated Press the changes better align federal and state management of grouse habitat.

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8 a.m.

The Trump administration is changing sweeping land use plans for Western states to ease energy industry restrictions in a way officials say will protect a struggling bird species.

The plans to be released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management will guide efforts to protect greater sage grouse.

Environmentalists warn the widely-anticipated changes could undermine efforts to protect the chicken-sized bird.

But the administration secured backing from Democratic and Republican governors in affected states.

The ground-dwelling birds range across 11 Western states.

They're known for their elaborate mating rituals and their numbers have plummeted due to energy development, disease and other factors.

U.S. Bureau of Land Management Acting Director Brian Steed told The Associated Press the changes better align federal and state management of grouse habitat.

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12 a.m.

The Trump administration is finalizing plans to ease restrictions on oil and natural gas drilling and other industrial activities that were imposed to protect an imperiled bird species that ranges across the American West.

U.S. Bureau of Land Management Acting Director Brian Steed told The Associated Press the changes still protect greater sage grouse while addressing concerns that policies adopted by former President Barack Obama were too restrictive.

A formal announcement is expected Friday.

Critics say the changes will mean more disturbances to the bird's habitat, which includes portions of 11 states. Brian Rutledge with the Audubon Society says that will undermine efforts to shore up grouse populations.

The ground-dwelling birds, known for an elaborate mating ritual, have seen steep declines due to energy development, disease and other factors.BRUSSELS (AP) - Dutch prosecutors say police have detained two men in Amsterdam on suspicion of involvement in providing weapons used in the deadly November 2015 terror attacks in Paris.

Prosecutors said Friday that the men, aged 29 and 31, were detained Tuesday following an investigation by French, Belgian and Dutch detectives. Computers, data carriers, documents and cell phones were seized from their homes.

Prosecutors say in a statement, "the suspicion against them is that they were involved in some way in delivering the weapons" used by Islamic extremists who killed 130 concertgoers at the Bataclan venue and other Paris sites on Nov. 13, 2015.

The 29-year-old suspect appeared before an investigating judge Friday who ordered him detained for two weeks. Prosecutors say the other suspect has been released for health reasons. Their identities were not released.PRAGUE (AP) - Czech police say they have broken up an international ring smuggling migrants from southeast Asia to western Europe.

They say 12 members of the group, nationals of unspecified former Soviet republics, were arrested during raids in the Czech Republic. Other raids in the case were conducted in Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine this week.

Police say the group was organizing transports of migrants who originated in Vietnam, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka mostly to Germany, France and Britain. The migrants had to pay up to $22,000 for the whole trip.

Police said Friday they have documented at least 16 cases of attempts to transport 100 migrants to Europe.

The smugglers face up to 10 years in prison.LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - Abortion-rights defenders opened a new legal fight against Kentucky on Friday to try to block one of the country's most restrictive abortion measures, which would mostly ban the procedure once a fetal heartbeat is detected.

Hours after Kentucky's Republican-dominated legislature passed the so-called fetal heartbeat bill, the American Civil Liberties Union was back in federal court in Louisville to challenge the measure. The legislation won final passage late Thursday and was sent to the state's anti-abortion governor, Republican Matt Bevin, who signed it Friday.

Late Friday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order to block enforcement of the fetal heartbeat bill.

It was the second straight day the ACLU took aim at new abortion restrictions passed by Kentucky lawmakers.

ACLU attorney Brigitte Amiri said Kentucky is part of a broader agenda to push an abortion case to the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge the court's 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

GOP-led legislatures in several other states are also considering fetal heartbeat bills amid surging optimism among conservatives that sweeping abortion bans might have a chance of prevailing in the reconfigured U.S. Supreme Court that includes President Donald Trump's appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

FILE - In this July 17, 2017 file photo, escort volunteers line up outside the EMW Women's Surgical Center in Louisville, Ky. Abortion-rights defenders have expanded their legal fight against Kentucky to try to block the state's most restrictive abortion measure, which would mostly ban the procedure once a fetal heartbeat is detected. The American Civil Liberties amended a federal lawsuit on Friday, March 15, 2019, to take aim at the so-called fetal heartbeat bill. (AP Photo/Dylan Lovan, File)

"This onslaught of bans on abortion that fly in the face of Roe v. Wade are designed specifically for the purposes of trying to get the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe," Amiri said in a phone interview Friday.

The organization has filed four separate lawsuits challenging a series of abortion laws in Kentucky that mostly passed after the GOP took total control of the state legislature in 2017.

It's the most lawsuits the ACLU has pending against any state over abortion policy, Amiri said.

The most restrictive Kentucky measure would require anyone seeking an abortion to first determine if a fetal heartbeat is detectable. If it is, the abortion would be banned, with narrow exceptions such as when the mother's life is endangered. A fetal heartbeat can be detected as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they're pregnant.

Bevin's office did not immediately comment Friday on the ACLU's latest legal action.

"I think we sent a strong message to the world that Kentucky is one of the most conservative, pro-life states in the country," state Senate Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer said Thursday night.

ACLU attorneys said the heartbeat bill would prohibit 90 percent of abortions in Kentucky. The only abortion clinic in Kentucky, EMW Women's Surgical Center in Louisville, would have to turn away most patients, Amiri said.

"If the six-week ban takes effect, the consequences will be devastating," she said.

The ACLU added its legal challenge against the heartbeat bill to a lawsuit it filed Thursday against another Kentucky abortion measure sent to Bevin on Wednesday. That bill would ban abortion for women seeking to end their pregnancies because of the gender, race or disability of the fetus. When the ACLU said it would take the state to court again over that measure, Bevin defiantly tweeted: "Bring it! Kentucky will always fight for life."

It and the heartbeat bill would take effect immediately upon the governor's signature.

The ACLU, which brought the lawsuit on behalf of EMW, also asked a federal judge to block the measure passed Wednesday while its lawsuit challenging the bill is considered.

Federal judges struck down two Kentucky abortion laws in recent years, and the state has appealed both rulings.

One of those laws required abortion clinics to have signed agreements with a hospital and ambulance service in case of a medical emergency. Attorneys for the ACLU and others argued Bevin's administration was using the law to try to force the last abortion clinic to close. The other state law that was struck down required doctors to perform an ultrasound and attempt to describe it and show it to the patient prior to an abortion.

A trial was held late last year in a third lawsuit challenging a Kentucky law aimed at a common second-trimester procedure to end pregnancies. A federal judge has not yet ruled in the case.

Attorneys for the ACLU and other groups challenging the hospital and ambulance transfer agreement law are seeking $1.5 million from the state to cover attorneys' fees and other costs.

___

Associated Press Writer Adam Beam in Frankfort, Ky., contributed to this report.DOYLESTOWN, Pa. (AP) - The Latest on the fate of a Pennsylvania man who authorities say raped, murdered and dismembered his girlfriend's daughter (all times local):

10:45 a.m.

A hearing is underway to determine whether a Pennsylvania man who pleaded guilty in the 2016 rape, murder and dismemberment of his girlfriend's teenage daughter will get life or death.

The penalty phase of Jacob Sullivan's trial opened Friday outside Philadelphia. The 46-year-old pleaded guilty to all charges in the 2016 death of 14-year-old Grace Packer. A jury will hear testimony about Sullivan's crimes before deciding on a sentence of either life in prison or death.

Prosecutors have said Grace's adoptive mother, Sara Packer, watched Sullivan act out a rape-murder fantasy they shared. Sara Packer has agreed to plead guilty in the case in exchange for a life sentence.

Sullivan was Sara Packer's boyfriend. His attorneys plan to argue she masterminded the plot.

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1:05 a.m.

A Pennsylvania jury will decide on life or death for a Pennsylvania man who pleaded guilty in the 2016 rape, murder and dismemberment of his girlfriend's teenage daughter.

Forty-six-year-old Jacob Sullivan pleaded guilty to all charges in the 2016 death of Grace Packer. The penalty phase of his trial opens Friday outside Philadelphia. A jury will hear testimony about Sullivan's crimes before deciding on a sentence of either life in prison or death.

Prosecutors have said that Grace's adoptive mother, Sara Packer, watched Sullivan act out a rape-murder fantasy they shared. Sara Packer has agreed to plead guilty in the case in exchange for a life sentence.

Sullivan was Sara Packer's boyfriend. His attorneys plan to argue that she masterminded the plot.SAO PAULO (AP) - Brazil's Supreme Court has ruled that some corruption cases will be tried by electoral courts, a decision that prosecutors say will have dire consequences for a sprawling graft probe roiling Latin America's largest nation.

In a 6-5 ruling, the top court decided Thursday night that electoral courts should handle cases that involve "Caixa 2," the term used to describe campaign financing via bribes.

Launched in March 2014, the so-called Car Wash probe has uncovered schemes in which companies received bloated contracts and then kicked back billions in bribes to officials. Investigations have led to the jailing of top political figures, such as former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, former Chamber of Deputies Speaker Eduardo Cunha and former Rio de Janeiro Gov. Sergio Cabral. They have also caused political impact in Peru, Panama and El Salvador.

But many legal analysts, business leaders and politicians accuse Car Wash prosecutors of judicial overreach in favor of a political agenda, which prosecutors deny.

The court ruling Thursday said that some cases should be tried by electoral courts because they involve politicians who received kickbacks from companies to finance their campaigns.

The hashtag "The Supreme Court will not shut us up" was quickly the No. 1 trending topic on Brazilian Twitter on Friday, with users calling for the justices to be impeached.

"It's disgraceful," said Adriana Balthazar, a leader of an anti-corruption movement called Come to the Streets. "This is a huge setback for Brazil and is going against an investigation that is saving this country from impunity and corruption."

"Happy corruption day," wrote columnist Helio Gurovitz on the G1 news portal.

Lead Car Wash prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol tweeted that "the fight against political corruption that began five years ago is coming to a close," suggesting that sending complex white-collar cases to electoral courts is essentially a way to ensure that nothing happens.

Dallagnol has been seen to be taking on an even larger role in the probe since former federal Judge Sergio Moro became justice minister for far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro at the beginning of this year.

Justice Gilmar Mendes, who voted in the majority, said efforts to sway the Supreme Court not to send cases to the electoral justice system amounted to methods used by "gangsters."

"This is a fight for power," said Mendes, a longtime critic of the Car Wash probe.

Several justices said Brazil's electoral court system lacks the infrastructure and expertise to handle big corruption cases.

Justice Luis Roberto Barroso disagreed with the majority but said the country would find ways to revamp its justice system and put Car Wash cases on trial.

Justices also noted that electoral court judges could still revoke their right to prosecute such cases and send them to Brazil's criminal justice system.

Thiago de Aragao, a political analyst in Brasilia, said the electoral court is "highly influenced by politics," which could make it easier to get away with accepting illicit money.

The decision isn't an "automatic game-changer for fighting corruption, but it does open a window," he said.Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar is going all-in on Iowa as she tries to become the Democratic nominee for president, returning to the nation's leadoff caucus state this weekend for a flurry of stops - her third visit since launching her campaign just over a month ago.

Klobuchar pitches herself as the next-door neighbor who understands issues facing middle America, scoffs at a snowstorm and "can see Iowa from my front porch." At house parties, bars and spaghetti dinners she's referred to Iowans as "my friends" and reminded them she knows how to win in both big cities and rural areas, a key to defeating President Donald Trump in 2020.

It's a strategy that could make Klobuchar competitive in a state that prizes Midwestern familiarity and values. But Klobuchar will have mounting competition for Iowa voters - and plenty of company - as she works to stand out among better-known Democrats with a lot more money.

"I am a candidate from the heartland," Klobuchar told reporters in Des Moines recently, calling Iowa and the rest of the Midwest "an important part" of her path to success. She said she's hoping for a top-three finish in the Iowa caucus.

Her trip will coincide with the maiden Iowa voyage for Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman who shot to stardom with his failed 2018 bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz.

O'Rourke has been polling higher in Iowa than Klobuchar, a three-term senator and regular visitor to the state. He's scheduled to attend the same Waterloo event a few hours after Klobuchar and also to visit Cedar Rapids, where Klobuchar will march in a St. Patrick's Day parade, inviting inevitable comparisons of crowd sizes and enthusiasm.

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., takes part in a "Conversations About America's Future" program at ACL Live during the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Saturday, March 9, 2019, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP)

The crossover is to be expected with more than a dozen Democrats battling for the chance to unseat Republican President Donald Trump and several others, including former Vice President Joe Biden, potentially getting in the race soon.

Few face the same expectations to perform well in Iowa, however, as Klobuchar, who projects herself as a leading voice of the pivotal upper Midwest.

She has argued that her profile - granddaughter of an iron ore miner who's won in both rural and urban parts of Minnesota - would distinguish her in key general election states 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, such as Wisconsin and Michigan.

But Klobuchar has seen no real movement in her standings among a long list of declared and potential Democratic candidates, according to Des Moines Register/CNN polls. In a poll this month, 3 percent name her as their first choice, unchanged from December before she announced her candidacy. Six percent say she is their first or second choice, also unchanged from December.

Biden topped the March poll with 27 percent saying he's their first choice. He was followed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was the first choice of 25 percent of people polled.

Klobuchar is still an unknown in Iowa, testing the theory that a neighboring state might be more friendly territory for her. There has been a slight decline from December in the share who say they don't know enough about her to have an opinion - 41 percent now versus 54 percent then. That change is about evenly distributed between favorable and unfavorable ratings of her, though Iowa Democrats are more positive (43 percent favorable) than negative (15 percent unfavorable) toward her overall.

Klobuchar's campaign says her grasp of rural issues and ability to win in non-urban areas will appeal to Iowa Democrats, who are looking for a nominee with the coattails to help candidates further down on the ballot return the GOP-controlled state Legislature to split government.

They also say Klobuchar will earn support from a wide range of caucus goers, including women and those looking for a "realist" and someone who can work with Republicans to get things done.

Former Iowa Democratic Party chairwoman Andy McGuire has signed on to be Klobuchar's Iowa campaign chairwoman, and the campaign is expected to announce several new Iowa staff hires soon, spokeswoman Carlie Waibel said.

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Associated Press reporters Tom Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington contributed to this report.

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Follow Sara Burnett on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Sara_Burnett.JOHANNESBURG (AP) - 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 centers, 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.

Neighboring Zimbabwe is bracing for the cyclone's effects even as its power is expected to dim while it continues inland.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.SHEFFIELD, Mass. (AP) - 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 .

Investigators works at the scene of a fatal fire in Sheffield, Mass., on Thursday, March 14, 2019. Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington says the fire was reported just before 8 a.m. Wednesday, and the home was fully engulfed when fire crews arrived. She called the investigation "complicated." (Heather Bellow/The Berkshire Eagle via AP)

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 (190 kilometers) west of Boston in less than a week. Samya Stumo, 24, who died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash Sunday, grew up in Sheffield.

Berkshire County District Attorney Andrea Harrington speaks during a news conference, Thursday, March 14, 2019 in Pittsfield, Mass. Five individuals, including three young children, died Wednesday morning in a home that burned on Home Road in Sheffield, Mass. One of the five victims of a house fire in western Massachusetts has been identified by her employer as a patent attorney with an Albany, New York firm. (Ben Garver/The Berkshire Eagle via AP)TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) - Juan Carlos Perla says he spent his first night in the U.S. in a cold immigration cell with 21 others at the nation's busiest border crossing. Fluorescent lights were always on in the basement holding area. Space was so tight that he laid his sleeping mat next to a toilet.

The 36-year-old from El Salvador soon reunited with his wife and three sons, ages 6, 4 and 10 months, who were in another cell, and the family returned to Tijuana, Mexico, to await asylum hearings in San Diego. They were one of the first families to contend with a radical U.S. policy shift that makes asylum seekers stay in Mexico while their cases wind through immigration courts. Looking rattled hours later, Perla said he would skip his court date and instead settle in Mexico.

"Our fear is that we lose our case and get deported" back to El Salvador, Perla said. "That's suicide for me, my wife and my children."

Perla told a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer that he and his family abandoned their small bakery in the Salvadoran capital after he missed a monthly extortion payment to the 18th Street gang. They beat him and threatened to kill him and his family if he failed to pay the next installment, according to an interview transcript.

If his family's experience is a sign, the policy may be having its intended effect of discouraging asylum claims, which have helped fuel a court backlog of more than 800,000 cases and forced people to wait years for a ruling. Trump administration officials say they want to deter weak claims, freeing up judges to consider more deserving cases.

A federal judge in San Francisco has scheduled a March 22 hearing to consider a request by advocacy groups to halt the practice.

In this March 5, 2019, image, Ruth Aracely Monroy, center, looks out of the family's tent alongside her 10-month-old son, Joshua, as her husband, Juan Carlos Perla, left, passes inside a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico. After fleeing violence in El Salvador and requesting asylum in the United States, the family was returned to Tijuana to await their hearing in San Diego. They were one of the first families to contend with a new policy that makes asylum seekers stay in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Change is being introduced slowly - 240 people were returned to Tijuana from San Diego in the first six weeks. The administration expanded its "Migrant Protection Protocols" strategy on Monday to a second border crossing, in Calexico, California, and officials say the practice will grow along the entire border.

The shift comes as more asylum-seeking families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador arrive at the U.S. border with Mexico.

Border Patrol agents in San Diego have been told to target people who speak Spanish and come from Latin America, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press. The memo says pregnant women and LGBT migrants are to be spared. The administration has said all along that Mexicans are exempt, as are children traveling alone.

Waiting in Tijuana is an unanticipated setback for asylum seekers who had hoped to be released in the U.S. while awaiting a judge's ruling. In Mexico, they lack the family connections they have in the U.S, and some say they feel unsafe.

Selvin Alvarado, his partner and their children from previous relationships stayed at a Tijuana shelter for about six weeks while waiting to be called on an informal list of asylum seekers seeking to enter the U.S. at the San Diego crossing. To earn money, Alvarado unloaded ceramic tiles from delivery trucks in Tijuana while his partner watched their boys, ages 10 and 7.

After claiming asylum, Alvarado was separated from his family and put in an all-male cell with fluorescent lights that were always on and made him lose track of night and day. He told a CBP officer the next day that that he was "afraid of paramilitary groups in Honduras" and that he fled with his family after he discovered the head of his farming collective was stealing money and someone threatened to kill one of his children, according to an interview transcript.

Alvarado, 29, who came with a police report and other documents explaining work-related threats, was sent back to Tijuana with his 10-year-old, while his wife and her son were released in the U.S. and settled with Alvarado's cousin in Houston. He says he cannot work in Tijuana because he has no one to care for his son.

Many immigrants' struggles are compounded by the scarcity of legal advice. Customs officials offer a list of potential legal aid providers, but Alvarado said his calls to those groups elicited no response. Al Otro Lado, a Los Angeles-based legal group working out of a building in downtown Tijuana, gave him an overview of U.S. asylum procedures but no individual advice.

For immigration attorneys, it can be difficult to extend help to people who are on the other side of the border.

The American Bar Association's Immigration Justice Project of San Diego cannot afford to go to Tijuana and will not pursue grants without insurance and license to practice in Mexico, said Adela Mason, the group's director.

Catholic Charities of the San Diego Diocese had to overcome worries about safety and not having license.

"It's a fine line between going down there and providing assistance in a way that is legal but not practicing law in Mexico," said Nadine Toppozada, the group's director of refugee and immigrant services.

Initial asylum hearings in downtown San Diego are scheduled within 45 days, and administration officials hope to put them on a fast track. When their day arrives, asylum seekers are told to report to the border crossing for temporary admission to the U.S. for a bus ride to court.

Dr. Juan Ramon Molina, a primary care physician in Honduras' Nacaome Valley, told a CBP officer that government forces twice tried to kidnap him for his role in an opposition political party and that he did not seek asylum in Guatemala or Mexico because he has family in the U.S. They are in Los Angeles. Houston, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Miami and West Virginia.

Molina, 35, has been looking online for legal help at a Tijuana migrant shelter ahead of his April 8 court date and says he fears that his political adversaries will track him down. Still, he says it is better than being detained in the U.S., where he spent two days in a basement cell at the San Diego crossing that he said was overcrowded and cold.

"The treatment was inhumane," he said.

Before he gave up and returned to Mexico, Perla had arranged for a pastor in Berkeley, California, to give him a room, find legal advice and arrange schooling for his children. In Tijuana, his family is living in a tent inside a migrant shelter.

"My case is a lost cause," he said.

In this March 5, 2019, image, Juan Carlos Perla kisses his 10-month-old son, Joshua, inside a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico. After fleeing violence in El Salvador and requesting asylum in the United States, the family was returned to Tijuana to await their hearing in San Diego. They are one of the first families to contend with a new policy that makes asylum seekers stay in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In this March 5, 2019, image, Juan Carlos Perla reacts as he and his wife, Ruth Aracely Monroy, left, searches for medicine in their tent for their 10-month-old son with a cold inside a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico. Many asylum seekers are now forced to wait in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In this March 5, 2019, image, Ruth Aracely Monroy walks with her sons as they pass two women in the red-light district of Tijuana, Mexico. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In this March 5, 2019, image, Ruth Aracely Monroy helps her son, Carlos, with his jacket among tents set up inside a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico. After fleeing violence in El Salvador and requesting asylum in the United States, the family was returned to Tijuana to wait for their hearing in San Diego. They became one of the first families to contend with a new policy that makes asylum seekers stay in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In this March 5, 2019, image, Juan Carlos Perla holds his 10-month-old son, Joshua, reflected in a mirror inside a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico. "Our fear is that we lose our case and get deported" to El Salvador, Perla said. "That's suicide for me, my wife and my children." (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In this March 5, 2019, image, Ruth Aracely Monroy walks with her sons in Tijuana, Mexico. After fleeing violence in El Salvador and requesting asylum in the United States, the family was returned to Tijuana to wait for their hearing in San Diego. They were one of the first families to contend with a radical policy shift that makes asylum seekers stay in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In this March 5, 2019, image, Juan Carlos Perla looks out from the family's tent - a two-person tent where all five members of the family sleep - inside a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico. "Our fear is that we lose our case and get deported" to El Salvador, he said. "That's suicide for me, my wife and my children." (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In this March 5, 2019, image, Juan Carlos Perla and Ruth Aracely Monroy leave a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico with their sons. After fleeing El Salvador and requesting asylum in the United States, the family was returned to Tijuana to wait for their hearing in San Diego. They were one of the first families to contend with a new policy that makes asylum seekers stay in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In this March 12, 2019, image, 10-month-old Joshua Perla looks out from the family's tent in a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico. Asylum seekers are now forced to wait in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration courts. They often struggle to find legal advice and say they feel unsafe. The Trump administration introduced the new policy in January amid a surge of asylum-seeking families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador arriving at the Mexican border. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In this March 5, 2019, image, Juan Carlos Perla pushes his youngest son, Joshua, in a stroller along a street in Tijuana, Mexico. Perla's experience suggests that a new policy forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico may be having its intended effect of discouraging asylum claims. Trump administration officials say they want to deter weak claims, freeing up judges to consider more deserving cases. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - The Council of Europe's constitutional experts say Hungary's budding system of administrative courts gives too much power to leading officials, with "no effective checks and balances."

The Venice Commission, after a meeting Friday attended by Hungary's justice minister, called on the Hungarian government to amend the laws regulating the courts taking into account its recommendations.

The new courts, to be launched Jan. 1, 2020, will hear cases involving the state on matters including public procurement and taxation.

The commission said there was "a particularly problematic provision" regarding the justice minister's power to make the final decision about the appointment of judges.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a civic group, said that amendments proposed this week by lawmakers from the ruling Fidesz party still did not guarantee the new courts' independence.MISSOULA, Mont. (AP) - A Montana Highway Patrol trooper who was investigating a shooting that killed one person and injured two others was himself shot and critically injured Friday after finding the suspect's vehicle, officials said. Authorities later arrested a 29-year-old suspect.

Trooper Wade Palmer, 35, was among the officers searching for the driver of a Cadillac Escalade who flashed his lights at a pickup truck ahead of him and then opened fire on the truck's occupants when it stopped Thursday night in Missoula, according to charging documents.

The bullets struck Casey Blanchard and Shelley Hayes, along with Blanchard's mother, Julie, who had driven to a Missoula bar to pick the friends up, Julie Blanchard told investigators. Authorities found Hayes dead in the truck's backseat. Casey Blanchard had been shot multiple times but was conscious and Julie Blanchard also had been shot and was conscious, according to the court documents.

Julie Blanchard said the Cadillac followed them from the bar and she pulled over thinking the driver may need help, according to the charging documents filed by Missoula County Chief Deputy Attorney Jason Marks. Investigators said it appeared two handguns and "an AR-15 style rifle" had been used in the shooting.

A little over an hour after that shooting, Palmer found the Escalade on U.S. Highway 93 near a bar in the small town of Evaro about 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. Palmer reported to dispatchers that he was under fire, and then didn't answer his radio, Marks wrote.

Another trooper arrived and found Palmer wounded and still buckled into his patrol car, a statement from Montana Highway Patrol officials said. The shooter had fled.

Law enforcement cover Montana State Trooper Wade Palmer's car at the scene of the shooting near the Evaro Bar on Friday, March 15, 2019, in Missoula, Mont. Palmer, who was investigating an earlier shooting, was himself shot and critically injured early Friday after finding the suspect's vehicle, leading authorities to launch an overnight manhunt that ended in the arrest of a 29-year-old man, officials said. (Tommy Martino/The Missoulian via AP)

Police shut down that stretch of U.S. Highway 93, warned residents to lock their doors and then spent hours searching before they arrested Johnathan Bertsch at about 6:15 a.m. He has been charged with deliberate homicide and three counts of attempted deliberate homicide.

He was being held in the Missoula County Detention Center, and it was unclear whether he had a lawyer. He is scheduled to appear in court on Monday, Marks said.

Palmer initially was taken to a Missoula hospital, where he was listed in critical condition. Dozens of patrol cars crowded the hospital's parking lot as officers from various law enforcement agencies gathered to pay their respects, and they later joined a motorcade that accompanied Palmer to the airport to be transferred to a Salt Lake City hospital for treatment.

Authorities found Bertsch with the help of his father, Burton Bertsch, who said his son had called him and told him, "I had a road rage incident. ... I think I might have shot a cop," according to the charging documents.

Authorities spoke to Johnathan Bertsch using Burton's phone, but he refused to tell officers where he was. They found him after someone called 911 to report the Cadillac parked at the bottom of the driveway along a road near the bar, documents said.

Palmer has been a trooper since 2012. He has a wife and two children, and he won the law enforcement agency's highest honor, the Medal of Valor, in 2015.

A law enforcement officer drives down Highway 93 during the manhunt for a suspect in a Montana Highway Patrol officer's shooting on Friday, March 15, 2019, in Missoula, Mont. Palmer, who was investigating an earlier shooting, was himself shot and critically injured early Friday after finding the suspect's vehicle, leading authorities to launch an overnight manhunt that ended in the arrest of a 29-year-old man, officials said. (Tommy Martino/The Missoulian via AP)WASHINGTON (AP) - 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 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 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.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan goes before the Senate Armed Services Committee to discuss the Department of Defense budget, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

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.

Afghanistan's 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.

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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.CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (AP) - A Tennessee judge has been rebuked for denying the request of a woman on house arrest to travel to Atlanta for an abortion.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press reports the 23-year-old woman was at least 10 weeks pregnant with twins when accepted into General Sessions Court Judge Lila Statom's Mental Health Court in February. The woman, who had pleaded guilty to theft and domestic assault, asked for permission to get the abortion last week, while on house arrest.

Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Tom Greenholtz said Monday that Statom injected her personal beliefs in denying that request and violated the woman's constitutional rights.

Attorney David Barrow said Statom still wouldn't resolve the case, so he left the woman's probation officer a message and drove her to Atlanta himself Wednesday.

Chattanooga hasn't had an abortion clinic since 1993.

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Information from: Chattanooga Times Free Press, http://www.timesfreepress.comSAO PAULO (AP) - A judge has ordered the arrest of a suspect linked to a school shooting that left seven people dead in Brazil.

Sao Paulo's Court of Justice said Friday that an arrest warrant had been issued for a teenager in the city of Suzano, on the outskirts of Brazil's largest city. Police said earlier that another person was believed to be involved in planning Wednesday's attack, but have not revealed his name.

Five students, a teacher and a school administrator were killed at Raul Brasil school. 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.

A student places her handprints on a wall at the Raul Brasil State School one day after a mass shooting, in Suzano, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. 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. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

A relative mourns 15-year-old Caio Oliveira, a victim of a mass shooting at the Raul Brasil State School, in Suzano, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. 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. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

A relative grieves at the burial service of 15-year-old Kaio Lucas da Costa Limeira, a victim of the the mass shooting at the Raul Brasil State School, in Suzano, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. 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. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)MIAMI (AP) - A Florida police officer accused of shooting and wounding a severely autistic man's caretaker, was acquitted on one misdemeanor negligence count Friday and a jury deadlocked on three other charges, including two felonies. A mistrial was declared on those three charges.

The six-person jury found North Miami police officer Jonathan Aledda not guilty Friday of culpable negligence, The Miami Herald reported. A second negligence charge and two counts of attempted manslaughter, a felony, resulted in a hung jury.

The jury foreperson said the vote was 5-1 to acquit Aledda of the other charges. The judge scheduled a March 27 hearing to discuss whether the state will retry Aledda on those counts.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle released a statement saying she would discuss the case with her prosecutors.

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 wasn't a gun.

The incident gained national attention after it was partially captured on a bystander's video.

FILE - In this Wednesday, July 20, 2016, frame from video, Charles Kinsey explains in an interview from his hospital bed in Miami what happened when he was shot by police. North Miami police officer Jonathan Aledda, who is accused of attempted manslaughter, testified, Thursday, March 14, 2019 that he thought Arnaldo Rios Soto had a gun and was holding his caretaker, Charles Kinsey, hostage in the middle of a road in July 2016. It turned out Soto was holding a toy truck, but Aledda insisted he never heard another message on police radio that it wasn't a gun.(WSVN via AP)

Authorities said Kinsey was lying in the street with his arms upraised, begging police not to shoot.

"With a lot of power and authority also comes a lot of responsibility," Miami-Dade Chief Assistant State Attorney Don Horn told jurors during closing arguments Thursday. "The shots that Jonathan Aledda fired were not a misfire. Each shot was intentional while he was trying to kill Arnoldo Rios Soto. Each shot was unnecessary and unreasonable."

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.

Aledda, a trained SWAT member, fired, striking Kinsey in the leg.

Aledda's defense lawyer, Douglas Hartman, blamed faulty radios and poor supervision by the North Miami Police Department for the miscommunications that led to the shooting.

"He had a life-and-death situation. He thought without question that Mr. Kinsey was going to die, be shot and murdered," Hartman told the jury of five men and one woman.

Aledda is the first police officer charged with an on-duty shooting by Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who took office in 1994.SAO PAULO (AP) - 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 Paulo's 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 prosecutor's 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 Brazil's 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.

A student places her handprints on a wall at the Raul Brasil State School one day after a mass shooting, in Suzano, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. 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. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

A relative mourns 15-year-old Caio Oliveira, a victim of a mass shooting at the Raul Brasil State School, in Suzano, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. 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. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

A relative grieves at the burial service of 15-year-old Kaio Lucas da Costa Limeira, a victim of the the mass shooting at the Raul Brasil State School, in Suzano, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. 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. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)GENEVA (AP) - 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.

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 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.COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) - The Latest on a lawsuit that led to a federal judge blocking a Maryland resident's deportation (all times local):

11:45 a.m.

A federal judge who blocked a Maryland man's deportation is now weighing whether the man is entitled to remain in the U.S. while he seeks to legalize his immigration status.

U.S. District Judge George Hazel heard arguments Friday on Wanrong Lin's request for a preliminary injunction that would allow him to stay in the country with his wife and their three children. The judge said he will issue a written ruling "relatively soon."

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Lin in August after he showed up for an interview as part of his application for a "stateside waiver," which allows noncitizens facing deportation to remain in the U.S. while seeking legal status.

In November, ICE agents put Lin on a flight to his native China that hadn't landed before Hazel ordered him to be returned to the U.S.

In this undated photo released by Amber Taylor, Wanrong Lin, left, and his wife, Hui Fang Dong, pose for a photo. Wanrong Lin, a Maryland resident whose deportation was blocked by a federal judge while he was on a flight in November to his native China is seeking a court order allowing him to remain in the U.S. with his family. U.S. District Judge George Hazel is scheduled to hear arguments Friday, March 15, 2019, from attorneys for Wanrong Lin and the federal government. (Amber Taylor via AP)

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12:21 a.m.

A Maryland resident whose deportation was blocked by a federal judge while he was on a flight to his native China is seeking a court order allowing him to remain in the U.S. with his family.

U.S. District Judge George Hazel is scheduled to hear arguments Friday from attorneys for Wanrong Lin and the federal government.

In November, Hazel ordered Lin to be returned to the U.S. just before his flight landed in China. The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland had sued on Lin's behalf only minutes before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents put him on the plane to Shanghai.

Lin is asking for more time to stay here with his family while he seeks permanent residence in the U.S. His wife and three children are U.S. citizens.SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - In a story March 15 about a floating island of solar panels in Chile, The Associated Press reported erroneously that the array is 1,200 square feet. The array is 1,200 square meters.

A corrected version of the story is below:

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - 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-meter (12,917-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.

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)

"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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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)ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - 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.

Netanyahu's 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 center 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, it's 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.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP, during a rally in Ankara, Turkey, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Continuing an exchange of words with the Israeli prime minister, Erdogan says Benjamin Netanyahu is "walking around with this stain" of corruption, in an interview with Haberturk television late on Thursday. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

Interviewed on Turkey's 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 Erdogan's spokesman called Netanyahu a racist for saying Israel was the nation-state only of the Jewish people.WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on President Donald Trump's declaration of an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border (all times local):

9:30 p.m.

President Donald Trump has issued the first veto of his presidency, rejecting an effort by Congress to block the emergency declaration he had used to try 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 and Republicans' increasing independence from the White House.

Trump said Friday, "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 Thursday. It is unlikely that Congress will have the two-thirds majority required to override Trump's veto.

President Donald Trump looks at notes as he speaks about border security in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Washington. Trump issued the first veto of his presidency, overruling Congress to protect his emergency declaration for border wall funding. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

__

5:05 p.m.

Republican senators are exhibiting more willingness to stray from President Donald Trump. But those facing re-election next year are showing far more deference than the rest of their colleagues - and that suggests a worry that crossing him could be career-threatening.

When the Senate voted Thursday to block Trump's declared southwest border emergency, 12 of the 53 GOP senators joined Democrats in voting against him. That's a lot of defections for a president who normally has the backing of GOP lawmakers, a tribute to his overwhelming support among Republican voters.

A closer look shows that of the 20 Republican senators facing re-election in 2020, just one voted against Trump's emergency declaration: Maine Sen. Susan Collins.

Of the 33 incumbents not running next year, 11 defied him, or 1 in 3.

___

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.

President Donald Trump speaks about border security in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)WASHINGTON (AP) - Inter-American Development Bank governors approved Friday a resolution recognizing a new Venezuela representative designated by opposition leader Juan Guaido.

The IDB said in a press release that the designation of Ricardo Hausmann as Venezuela's representative to the lender is effective immediately.

The electronic voting on the resolution will be open until Friday evening, but by mid-morning there were already a sufficient number of votes to enable Hausmann, the IDB's first chief economist, to replace treasury vice minister Oswaldo Perez, an official loyal to President Nicolas Maduro.

The IDB did not say what would happen to Armando Leon, another government loyalist who currently serves as one of the bank's 14 executive directors.

A message requesting comment from Leon's office was not immediately returned.

The IDB was the first international financial organization to recognize Guaido as the legitimate president of the South American country, a stand taken by the U.S. and about 50 other countries that contend Maduro's re-election last year was rigged.

National Assembly President Juan Guaido, who declared himself interim president of Venezuela, visits different points of anti-government protest in Caracas, Venezuela, Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Guaido has declared himself interim president and demands new elections, arguing that President Nicolas Maduro's re-election last year was invalid. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Bank governors are usually based in their home countries and meet once a year. Their next general assembly will be held from March 28-31 in Chengdu, China.

Guaido has not designated representatives to the International Monetary Fund nor the World Bank, and neither body has recognized him as Venezuela's leader.

___

Luis Alonso Lugo on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/luisalonsolugo

National Assembly President Juan Guaido, delivers a speech during a meeting with residents in the Hatillo municipality of Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Guaido has declared himself interim president and demands new elections, arguing that President Nicolas Maduro's re-election last year was invalid. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)PHOENIX (AP) - Greyhound Lines Inc. is no longer allowing U.S. authorities to drop off immigrant families inside bus stations, forcing those who have been released from custody to wait outside until they have a ticket.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to The Associated Press on Friday that it had been asked to drop off migrants outside facilities instead of busing them in.

ICE for years has dropped off migrants at Greyhound stations, largely in Phoenix, after releasing them pending court hearings to decide whether they can stay in the country. From the stations, they travel to their intended destination in the United States.

Greyhound spokeswoman Crystal Booker said the Dallas-based company is experiencing an "unprecedented increase of individuals" at certain bus terminals and that travelers need tickets to get in. She said the policy applies to anyone who lacks a ticket.

"Our priority is to safely and efficiently get customers to their destinations," Booker said in a statement.

Immigrants who are released by ICE don't usually have prior notice and can't make travel arrangements until they arrive at the station. Most of them don't have money and have to wait on a relative or advocacy group to buy their ticket.

A Greyhound bus terminal is shown Friday, March 15, 2019, in Phoenix. Greyhound Lines Inc. is no longer allowing U.S. authorities to drop off immigrant families inside bus stations, forcing those who have been released from custody to wait outside until they have a ticket. (AP Photo/Matt York)

A huge number of Central American families have traveled to U.S. in the past few months, many who say they are fleeing violence and plan to seek asylum. Others say they are escaping extreme poverty.

In Arizona alone between Dec. 21, 2018, and March 5, ICE said it had processed for release about 14,500 people who came as families.

Outside the station in Phoenix, about 15 adults and five children waited in a shaded area near a parking lot Thursday. Some said they had been there for about seven hours.

The federal agency relies on volunteer organizations, many of them faith-based groups, to help families with travel and meals.

Connie Phillips, president and CEO of Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest, said she doesn't blame Greyhound for its policy but rather immigration officials for not having a long-term, sustainable way to deal with releasing migrants.

"Just dropping people off in a place that's not meant to be able to welcome and assist them is not a solution, and we have to work together to create a viable response to this increased need and stop this chaos," Phillips said.

Immigration authorities say they release families at bus stations only when volunteer groups run out of space.

"ICE wants to mitigate strains placed on resources in the local community as we continue to see high volumes of families crossing the border," spokeswoman Yasmeen Pitts O'Keefe said.

Phillips said dozens of volunteers have created a network to respond to the bus station in Phoenix when immigrants are dropped off. They bring food and water, allow migrants to use volunteers' cellphones and help coordinate travel.

Phillips said the groups that help out are able to temporarily house about 700 people in churches and congregants' homes in the Phoenix area, but that doesn't suffice.

The practice of dropping migrants at Greyhound stations isn't limited to Phoenix, but it's where it happens most often.

In San Diego, ICE takes families directly from a Customs and Border Protection station to a shelter run by non-governmental organizations. Authorities have dropped off migrants at the bus station only in some cases.

In McAllen, Texas, migrants are dropped off at a Catholic Charities shelter.

FILE - In this May 28, 2014 file photo, migrants are released from ICE custody at a Greyhound Bus station in Phoenix. Greyhound is no longer allowing immigration authorities to drop off families inside bus stations, forcing them to wait outside until they have a ticket. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency confirmed Friday, March 15, 2019, that it had been asked to drop migrants off outside the facility. (Michael Chow/The Arizona Republic via AP, File)

A Greyhound bus terminal is shown Friday, March 15, 2019, in Phoenix. Greyhound Lines Inc. is no longer allowing U.S. authorities to drop off immigrant families inside bus stations, forcing those who have been released from custody to wait outside until they have a ticket. (AP Photo/Matt York)CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP) - Several of those killed or wounded in the shooting rampage at two New Zealand mosques on Friday were from the Middle East or South Asia, according to initial reports from several governments.

The live-streamed attack by an immigrant-hating white nationalist killed at least 49 people as they gathered for weekly prayers in Christchurch. Another 48 people suffered gunshot wounds in the attacks.

Bangladesh's honorary consul in Auckland, Shafiqur Rahman Bhuiyan, told The Associated Press 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.

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.

Christchurch Hospital chief Greg Robertson said Saturday that seven of the 48 gunshot victims admitted after the shootings in had been discharged.

Workers dig graves at a Muslim cemetery in Christchurch, New Zealand, Saturday, March 16, 2019, for victims of a mass shooing at two area mosques. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

Robertson said a 4-year-old girl who had been transferred to an Auckland hospital was in critical condition and 11 patients who remained in Christchurch were also critically wounded.

"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 said.

Many patients will require multiple operations to deal with their complex series of injuries, Robertson said.

He said a 2-year-old boy was in stable condition, as was a 13-year-old boy.

Mohammed Elyan, a Jordanian in his 60s who co-founded one of the mosques in 1993, was among those wounded, as was his son, Atta, who is in his 30s. That's according to Muath Elyan, Mohammed's brother, who said he spoke to Mohammed's wife after the shooting.

Muath said his brother helped establish the mosque a year after arriving in New Zealand, where he teaches engineering at a university and runs a consultancy. He said his brother last visited Jordan two years ago.

"He used to tell us life was good in New Zealand and its people are good and welcoming. He enjoyed freedom there and never complained about anything," Muath told The Associated Press. "I'm sure this bloody crime doesn't represent the New Zealanders."

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 hospitalized, and the Saudi Embassy in Wellington said two Saudis were wounded.

India's high commissioner to New Zealand, Sanjiv Kohli, tweeted Saturday that nine Indians 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.

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.

Afghanistan's ambassador to Australia and New Zealand said two Afghans are missing and a third person of Afghan origin was treated and released from the hospital.

Two Indonesians, a father and son, were also among those shot and wounded, Foreign Ministry spokesman Arrmanatha Nasir said.

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.

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. She said she was with her son, who is "traumatized" after being shot in his back and leg.WASHINGTON (AP) - Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign says the Vermont senator has been treated at a walk-in clinic for a minor injury while campaigning in South Carolina.

Campaign spokesman Arianna Jones told reporters that Sanders cut his head on the edge of a glass shower door Friday and went to a walk-in clinic. She says the 77-year-old Sanders received a half-dozen stitches and was given a "clean bill of health."

Jones says Sanders is continuing with all scheduled events, including a breakfast with local clergy and a roundtable on health care while in South Carolina. Sanders will travel to Nevada ahead of his first rally in the early-voting state since launching his presidential bid. The rally will be held Saturday.

This image from video provided by WCIV-TV, shows Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks at at healthcare roundtable at the at the International Longshoremen's Association Hall on Friday, March 15 , 2019, in Charleston, S.C. Sanders was wearing a large gauze bandage on his forehead after cutting his head on a glass shower door earlier in the morning. (WCIV via AP)

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks at at healthcare roundtable at the at the International Longshoremen's Association Hall on Friday, March 15 , 2019 in Charleston, S.C. Sanders was wearing a large gauze bandage on his forehead after cutting his head on a glass shower door earlier in the morning. (Andrew J. Whitaker/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)BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - 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."

FILE - In this Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011, file photo, Morris Dees with the Southern Poverty Law Center, right, listens during a news conference, at the Hinds County Courthouse in Jackson, Miss. The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, a nationally known nonprofit that monitors hate organizations, said Thursday, March 14, 2019, it had fired co-founder Morris Dees, who once won a lawsuit that bankrupted a leading Ku Klux Klan group. (Joe Ellis/The Clarion-Ledger via AP, File)

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 we've had to face," he said.PHOENIX (AP) - More than 30 years after it was brazenly stolen from an Arizona museum, a painting by Willem de Kooning reportedly worth $100 million is going on display back where it all began.

The University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson is throwing a fundraiser and homecoming party of sorts for "Woman-Ochre" on Sunday before it gets whisked away for months of restoration work. For some who worked at the museum when the painting was stolen in 1985, the celebration still seems surreal.

Lee Karpiscak, who was the curator of collections at the time, recalls the entire staff feeling devastated. "We tried to be realistic about it," she said. "All these scenarios go through your head and make you crazy. We certainly hoped it would be returned."

It was the morning after Thanksgiving when authorities said a man and a woman showed up at the museum. A security guard and students working the front desk were the only ones there, according to Karpiscak. Police said the woman distracted the guard with small-talk while the man cut the painting right out of the frame, leaving edges of the canvas still attached. The entire heist lasted around 15 minutes.

"How do you eat your Thanksgiving dinner knowing you're going to steal a painting the next day?" Karpiscak said.

There was no security camera system set up then. The next few days were a flurry of activity as FBI agents interviewed the entire staff. But no significant leads developed. Occasionally the museum would get calls from people claiming to know where the painting was.

This August 2017 photo shows "Woman-Ochre," a painting by Willem de Kooning, being readied for examination by University of Arizona Museum of Art staff Nathan Saxton, left, and Kristen Schmidt in Tucson, Ariz. More than 30 years after it was stolen from the museum, the recovered painting will be on display back where it all began. (Robert Demers/University of Arizona Communications via AP)

But Karpiscak said they were callers looking to get back at someone they didn't like. On the theft's 30th anniversary, the museum displayed the empty frame at a news conference in hopes of generating tips.

Then in 2017, a furniture and antiques dealer in Silver City, New Mexico, bought the painting at an estate sale. When researching the piece, he discovered an article about the theft. He notified the museum. A conservator with the university found it to be a perfect match.

The furniture dealer had gotten the painting from the estate of Jerry and Rita Alter. The art work had been hanging in their Cliff, New Mexico, home. Relatives also discovered a photo of the couple taken Thanksgiving Day 1985 in Tucson. Jerry Alter died in 2012 and his wife in 2017. Authorities have never publicly called them suspects.

Jill McCabe, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Phoenix, said an investigation remains ongoing so the agency could not comment.

Because of the investigation, it was not until last November that the FBI fully released the painting back to the museum, curator Olivia Miller said.

"We had it here but we weren't allowed to move it or display it or do anything like that," Miller said.

She said museum staffers have been overwhelmed "in a good way" with the anticipation of the painting being on view again - even if just for a day. And of course, there will be plenty of safeguards around the painting.

"Our security is much different than it was 1985," Miller said. "Certainly at this event, we will definitely have extra eyes."

The oil painting, which was donated to the museum in 1958, is one in an iconic series by the Dutch-American artist that explores the figure of a woman. The piece features the abstract expressionist's signature broad paint strokes, depicting various colors across the female body.

De Kooning died in East Hampton, New York, in 1997 at the age of 92. He was part of the influential New York School of artists that also included Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

After Sunday, the painting will go to the Getty Center in Los Angeles where experts in art conservation and scientific analysis can work on fully restoring it. One of the main issues is if it's possible to reattach the canvas to the fragments left behind when the perpetrator sliced the painting with a blade, Miller said.

"Because the cut is so clean, from my understanding, it makes it more difficult to reattach it," she said.

Miller said once everything is completed, the Getty plans to exhibit the painting next year. The plan is for the canvas to return to Arizona in the fall of 2020.

"I think the emotions will really hit when it comes back from the Getty and it's hanging here for a long time," Miller said.

She wishes the museum director at the time of the theft, Peter Bermingham, were still alive to witness its return. Bermingham died in 2000.

"In the initial interviews...he said he was hopeful," Miller said. "He thought we would eventually recover it and he was absolutely right."

____

Follow Terry Tang on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ttangAPNEW ORLEANS (AP) - The absence of a $3 part may have let tires roll off of a tractor trailer, killing a Tulane University student from Minnesota, a Mississippi transportation official said. An attorney for the trucking company said, "I think they may be mistaken."

One of two 3-inch (7.6-centimeter) locking washers designed to keep truck wheels tightly secured was missing from the trailer, Willie Huff, director of the department's Office of Enforcement, told The New Orleans Advocate.

Two wheels joined together rolled into a rest stop, killing Margaret Maurer of Forest Lake, Minnesota, on March 5. Maurer, 21, and classmates were heading from the Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans to a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina.

The conclusion blaming the missing metal ring is still preliminary, Huff said.

Gene Patten, vice president of safety and compliance for the truck's owner, Dana Transport Inc. of Avenel, New Jersey, told The Associated Press he couldn't comment on the newspaper's report, adding, "They based it on information they have available to them. There's always more to the story."

Company attorney J. Burruss "Buzzy" Riis, of Mobile, Alabama, said, "The Advocate has made some rather bold statements that ... we're still investigating. I don't believe they will necessarily end up being accurate."

Maurer's family has "our extreme sadness and condolences and they are in our prayers," he said.

Huff said that when inspectors unpacked the outer hub of the wheel assembly after Maurer's death, they found only one of the two washers that are used to lock the large nuts holding the wheels in place. The missing ring wouldn't have broken off, he said.

In addition to Dana Transport, the truck is listed under a related company, Suttles Truck Leasing of Demopolis, Alabama.

Both companies are in good standing with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, with "satisfactory" ratings and a better-than-average record on crashes and vehicle safety.

Huff said the missing ring would not have been detected in the kind of unannounced roadside inspections that are logged into the federal database.

"To inspect that truck for that deficiency, you'd have to take all the wheels off the truck," he said.

"It's also something that probably would not be noticed with a pre-trip inspection or roadside inspection unless the wheel is wobbling," he said. "More than likely, this wheel wasn't wobbling. It just slipped off."

___

Information from: The New Orleans Advocate, http://www.neworleansadvocate.comDOVER, Del. (AP) - Delaware prosecutors dismissed all but three remaining cases Friday against inmate defendants charged in a deadly riot at the state's maximum-security prison.

The decision came after earlier trials of seven inmates resulted in only one - who admitted planning the uprising knowing it could become violent - convicted of murder in guard Steven Floyd's death at James T. Vaughn Correctional Center.

Prosecutors have opted to dismiss cases against six of the 18 inmates originally charged in the riot and will move forward only against defendants Roman Shankaras, Lawrence Michaels and Alejandro Rodgriguez-Ortiz. Prosecutors have previously described Shankaras as the "mastermind" behind the February 2017 riot, while other inmates have testified that Michaels, nicknamed "Smoke," participated in attacking Floyd.

"Prosecutors have an obligation only to prosecute criminal cases where they believe there is a reasonable likelihood of a conviction at trial based on the evidence," the attorney general's office said in a statement Friday. "Prosecutors in the Vaughn trials - who are among the Department's most experienced and who have done a remarkable job in an exceedingly difficult case - have evaluated the evidence against the remaining defendants in light of the testimony in the first two trials and the results of those trials."

The prosecution of the inmates has already cost Delaware taxpayers more than $1.1 million in defense attorney costs.

With little physical evidence, and no surveillance camera footage, prosecutors have relied heavily on testimony from other inmates who were in the prison building during the riot but were not among the 18 charged. Defense attorneys have consistently pointed out that the prosecution witnesses have contradicted one another, and that their testimony has conflicted with statements they gave investigators.

FILE - In a Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2017 file photo, Vaughn Correctional Center near Smyrna, Del., remains on lockdown following a disturbance. Delaware prosecutors dismissed all but three remaining cases Friday, March 15, 2019 against inmate defendants charged in a deadly riot at the state's maximum-security prison. The decision came after earlier trials of seven inmates resulted in only one _ who admitted planning the uprising knowing it could become violent _ convicted of murder in guard Steven Floyd's death. (Suchat Pederson//The News Journal via AP, File)

The first trial of three inmates resulted in Dwayne Staats being convicted of felony first-degree murder, first-degree murder of a law enforcement officer, two counts of assault, four counts of kidnapping and second-degree conspiracy. He was already serving a life sentence for murder.

Co-defendant Jarreau Ayers was acquitted of murder but convicted on the same additional charges Staats faced. The jury acquitted a third co-defendant, Deric Forney, on all charges.

The second trial ended last month with no convictions for any of the four inmate defendants.

Floyd was killed during the 20-hour uprising. Two other officers were beaten and tormented by inmates before being released. Response teams eventually used a backhoe to breach a wall and rescue a female counselor. She was not injured.

One of the initial defendants, Royal Downs, a former Baltimore gang leader serving a life sentence for murder, pleaded guilty to a single count of riot and agreed to testify for the prosecution against his fellow inmates. Another defendant, Kelly Gibbs, killed himself in November, just days after pleading guilty to rioting, kidnapping and conspiracy.

Shankaras, meanwhile, recently completed a 7-year sentence for unrelated riot and robbery charges but is being detained on $2.8 million cash bail on the prison riot charges.

Michaels is serving 19 years for kidnapping, attempted robbery and other crimes, with a projected release date of May 2024.

Rodriguez-Ortiz is serving 40 years for manslaughter and other charges and is scheduled to be released in November 2044.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.RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - 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 theaters 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 percent 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 theaters, 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," ''valor," ''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 theaters through Aug. 1.KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Police say a local TV journalist was shot and killed in eastern Afghanistan, less than a week after a journalist in the southern Helmand province was wounded by a sticky bomb attached to his car.

Abdul Rahman, a police officer in the eastern Khost province, says Sultan Mahmoud Khirkhowa, a journalist with the local Zhman TV and radio, was killed Friday by two men on a motorcycle who opened fire on his vehicle.

No one immediately claimed responsibility. Both the Taliban and the Islamic State group are active in the area. IS has targeted journalists in the past and publicly threatened to kill them.

Last year 17 journalists and media workers were killed in Afghanistan.NEW YORK (AP) - The FBI says a New York City man planned to travel to Michigan and buy an ax to kill a professor he once assisted with research.

Frank Segui (seh-GEE') appeared in federal court this week on charges of stalking and sending threatening communications.

He was arrested last month before boarding a bus from New York City to Detroit. The FBI says Segui planned to kill a professor he blamed for his inability to find a job.

Court records say Segui worked as a research assistant for the professor before a falling-out.

Segui is accused of sending a threatening email to the professor saying he does "not deserve life."

Neither the professor nor the university was named in court papers.

An email was sent to Segui's attorney seeking comment.FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - Kentucky's education commissioner on Friday would not rule out disciplining teachers who used their sick days to close multiple school districts so they could protest at the state Capitol.

The Republican-dominated state legislature has been meeting since February, with lawmakers considering proposals that would change who manages the teachers' pension fund and indirectly support private schools with tax credits.

Teachers responded by using their sick days to force school districts to close. Since Feb. 28, at least 10 school districts have had to close because of too many teacher absences. Jefferson County Public Schools, one of the largest districts in the country with more than 98,000 students, shut down six times in two weeks.

So far, lawmakers have not passed those bills. The legislature has only one day left to pass bills, which will be March 28 when they return from a recess to consider any potential vetoes from the governor.

On Thursday, Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis sent a letter to those 10 districts, asking for the names of all teachers who requested a sick day on the days the districts were forced to close.

Attorney Mark Wohlander sent the department a letter Friday asking them to preserve documents as he prepares a possible federal civil rights lawsuit for the department's "unprecedented interference with (teachers') first amendment rights."

Karen Schwartz, a teacher at Phoenix School of Discovery in Louisville, stands with other teaches and their supporters to protest perceived attacks on public education, in Frankfort, Ky, Tuesday, March 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Bryan Woolston)

Lewis acknowledged receiving Wohlander's letter, but he called it "frivolous." He said teachers have the right to protest at the state Capitol. But they don't have the right, he said, to close schools by using sick days when they aren't sick.

In a news conference at the Department of Education, Lewis told reporters it was not his goal to use the information to discipline teachers. But he would not rule it out.

"I could never definitively say that," Lewis said. "When you start to collect information, you don't know what you're going to find."

This is the second year teachers have used "sick outs" to protest Republican-backed legislation, after a wave of teacher activism that began with a strike in West Virginia before spreading to other states.

Last year, teachers opposed Republican Gov. Matt Bevin's proposal to overhaul their pension system, which is at least $14 billion short of the money it needs to pay benefits over the next few decades.

When teachers closed schools in several districts last spring, Bevin told reporters he "guaranteed" a child had been sexually assaulted somewhere in Kentucky that day because the child was left home alone while the schools were closed. Bevin later apologized, but his relationship with some in the education community has never recovered.

The Kentucky Education Association, which represents more than 43,000 teachers, said superintendents could discipline teachers for using sick days when they were not sick. But the association said Lewis' request for teachers' names is meant to intimidate them, "using the power of his office to compile an 'enemies list' of educators for the Bevin Administration."

Lewis reports to the state Board of Education, which is appointed by the governor. But Lewis said Friday that he did not speak with the governor or anyone in his administration about asking for the names of teachers who called in sick.

"That's probably the cry for anything that I do. If I sharpen a pencil, people say Gov. Bevin told me to do it," Lewis said. "I have not talked to the governor in probably about two months."FAIRFIELD, Iowa (AP) - Democratic presidential contender Beto O'Rourke on Friday acknowledged making mistakes as a teen and as a candidate, responding to criticism of his campaign rhetoric toward his wife as well as writings he produced online when he was young.

During a taping of the "Political Party Live" podcast in Cedar Rapids, he addressed criticism of his campaign-trail joke that his wife, Amy, has raised their three kids "sometimes with my help." O'Rourke made the comment at multiple campaign stops during his first swing through Iowa, including earlier Friday, eliciting laughs each time, but he also drew criticism as being insensitive to the challenges faced by single parents raising children.

O'Rourke said the criticism of his "ham-handed" attempt to highlight his wife's work in their marriage was "right on."

"Not only will I not say that again, but I will be much more thoughtful in the ways that I talk about my marriage," he said.

O'Rourke, 46, also said he was "mortified" when he reread the violent fiction he wrote as a teen, which received fresh attention Friday after a Reuters report outlined his involvement in a hacker group as a teen. O'Rourke wrote a handful of posts on the group's message board under the name "Psychedelic Warlord," including a fictional piece he penned when he was 15 about children getting run over by a car.

"I'm mortified to read it now, incredibly embarrassed, but I have to take ownership of my words," he said. "Whatever my intention was as a teenager doesn't matter, I have to look long and hard at my actions, at the language I have used, and I have to constantly try to do better."

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks during an interview following a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

O'Rourke had said after an earlier campaign stop that it was "stuff I was part of as a teenager."

"It's not anything I'm proud of today, and I mean, that's - that's the long and short of it," he said. "All I can do is my best, which is what I'm trying to do. I can't control anything I've done in the past. I can only control what I do going forward and what I plan to do is give this my best."

The comments came on the second day of a presidential campaign in which O'Rourke is seeking to establish himself as a unique voice in the race. He avoided what has become something of a tradition among the 2020 contenders by refusing to announce how much money he raised in the 24 hours after announcing his candidacy. He said it would be soon.

"I don't have a definite plan," he added. "We're not ready to release them now."

The former Texas congressman entered the 2020 presidential race Thursday after months of speculation. He raised an eye-popping $80 million in grassroots donations last year in his failed U.S. Senate race in Texas against Republican Ted Cruz, all while largely avoiding money from political action committees. His early fundraising numbers will be an initial signal of whether his popularity during the Senate campaign will carry over to his White House bid.

So far, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has set the pace for grassroots donations in 2020, pulling in $6 million during his first day as a candidate.

Asked if he thought he would top Sanders, O'Rourke said only, "We'll see."

O'Rourke's reception during his first Iowa swing was overwhelmingly positive, even as he launched his campaign by hitting a handful of counties that had shifted from supporting Democrat Barack Obama to backing Republican Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Most of the towns O'Rourke visited during his first two days in the state were small and rural, manufacturing or farming towns. He kicked off his bid in Keokuk, population 10,300, dropped by a private home in Fairfield, a town about the same size, and jumped atop a coffee shop counter to address the crowd in Mount Pleasant, population 8,500.

The strategy set O'Rourke apart from the rest of the field, many of whom have focused their early swings on the state's population centers or on the traditionally blue counties that make up the bulk of the Democratic primary electorate.

Norm Sterzenbach, who's advising O'Rourke in Iowa, said the strategy came out of the Texan's desire to do more intimate events in his first swing through Iowa.

"He didn't want to do big rallies or big events. He wanted to get into communities and really talk to Iowans, and he wanted to go to smaller towns, smaller communities, and . places that had been neglected" by politicians, he said.

It was an approach reminiscent of his Texas Senate bid, where O'Rourke hit every one of the state's 254 counties, even the most rural areas, some of which hadn't been visited by Democratic candidates in years. O'Rourke didn't commit to visiting all of Iowa's 99 counties - what's locally known as the "Full Grassley," after Iowa's senior Republican senator, Chuck Grassley, who's famous for doing the full swing - but he said he planned to visit as much of Iowa as possible.

That go-everywhere, speak-to-everyone strategy brought him within 3 points of defeating Cruz in Texas, the nation's largest red state.

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to local residents during a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, 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 stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Buttons for former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke sit on display during a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, 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 stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, 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 an audience member during a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, 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 an audience member during a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Darkness has yet to lift for 72-year-old Elizabeth Guzman and thousands of her poor neighbors in a forgotten corner of Venezuela's 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."

"I've never seen a crisis like this. It's the first time," said Guzman, who is malnourished and frail. "It makes me so sad."

Venezuela's power grid crashed on March 7, throwing almost all of the oil-rich nation's 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 Venezuela's 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 they'll ever have lights again.

72-year-old Elizabeth Guzman Espitia navigates a narrow passages up to her windowless room she calls her "little cave" during a blackout in the Santa Cruz of the East neighborhood, in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 14, 2019. I've never see a crisis like this. It's the first time," Espitia said. "It makes me so sad." Venezuela's power grid crashed March 7, throwing almost all of the oil-rich nation's 30 million residents into chaos for nearly a week. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

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 smoldered 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 neighborhood 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.

"I'll sincerely tell you that I have no hope this will ever get fixed," she said, managing to smile. "Never."

Guzman's meager 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 can't 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 he's able to survive better than most of his neighbors 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 don't have water. We don't have lights," she said. "How am I supposed to see in this cave where I live? I'm desperate."

___

Follow Scott Smith on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ScottSmithAP

72-year-old Elizabeth Guzman Espitia sits in her windowless room during a blackout in the Santa Cruz of the East neighborhood, in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Power has surged back to life across most of Venezuela ending the worst blackout in the crisis-wracked nation's modern history. But Santa Cruz of the East residents don't know when they'll have lights again. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

72-year-old Elizabeth Guzman Espitia holds a candle in herwindowless room she calls her "little cave" during a blackout in the Santa Cruz of the East neighborhood, in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 14, 2019. I've never see a crisis like this. It's the first time," Espitia said. "It makes me so sad." Venezuela's power grid crashed March 7, throwing almost all of the oil-rich nation's 30 million residents into chaos for nearly a week. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Members of the House of Mercy evangelical church sing and clap as the light fades and the last rays of the setting sun stream into through the windows, in the Santa Cruz of the East neighborhood, in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 14, 2019. The power has surged back to life across most of Venezuela ending the worst blackout in the crisis-wracked nation's modern history. But residents in the hillside Caracas slum of Santa Cruz of the East don't know when they'll be so lucky. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)MADISON, Wis. (AP) - 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.

"It's 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," Embassy's 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 neighborhood a safer, more peaceful place."

Becket said in a statement that Butler's church can't 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" doesn't 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.

___

Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sbauerAPSANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) - The San Francisco 49ers have re-signed linebacker Mark Nzeocha to a three-year contract and released defensive end Cassius Marsh.

The Niners also agreed to a deal with restricted free agent running back Raheem Mostert on Friday. Mostert's agent Brett Tessler says his client will sign a three-year deal.

Marsh was one of the team's top edge rushers last year with 5 sacks but became expendable after the team traded for Dee Ford this week and gave him a new five-year contract.

Nzeocha has played in 26 games the past two seasons and has been a standout on special teams. He started three games last year at linebacker and provides depth at the position.

Mostert is one of San Francisco's top special teams players and also ran for 261 yards on 34 carries last season.

Safety Antone Exum also signed a one-year deal he had agreed to earlier this week.

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More AP NFL: https://apnews.com/NFL and https://twitter.com/AP_NFLDOVER, Del. (AP) - A Delaware judge has refused to dismiss a shareholder lawsuit over poultry company Pilgrim's Pride's $1.3 billion acquisition of U.K. poultry producer Moy Park, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Pilgrim's Pride's parent company.

Friday's ruling means Pilgrim's Pride stockholders can pursue their claims against Brazil-based JBS SA, one of the largest meat processors in the world.

The lawsuit claims that because JBS controlled both Colorado-based Pilgrim's Pride and Northern Ireland-based Moy Park, it must prove that the deal was entirely fair.

The plaintiffs say JBS orchestrated a deal to sell Moy Park to Pilgrim's Pride in 2017 because JBS needed to raise cash quickly after agreeing to pay a $3.2 billion fine to the Brazilian government after company executives admitted to bribing politicians.NEW YORK (AP) - New York's attorney general says President Donald Trump should pay a fine of as much as $5.6 million over allegations in a state lawsuit that he used his charity to further his presidential campaign.

Democrat Letitia James argued in a court filing Thursday that state law allows a fine equal to double the $2.8 million in free media attention she says Trump received for an event that blurred charity and politics.

The Republican Trump skipped a 2016 Iowa debate and held a competing rally at which he solicited donations that his foundation passed on to veterans' charities.

The foundation has agreed to dissolve.

The lawsuit seeks $2.8 million in restitution. James says there is ample evidence for an immediate ruling in the state's favor.

Foundation lawyers say that any infractions were minor and that the lawsuit is politically motivated.MIAMI (AP) - The Latest on a police officer accused of shooting and wounding a severely man's 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 man's caretaker. The officer was acquitted on one misdemeanor count.

The Miami Herald reports that the six-person jury found North Miami police officer Jonathan Aledda not guilty Friday on a misdemeanor 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 wasn't a gun.

FILE - In this Wednesday, July 20, 2016, frame from video, Charles Kinsey explains in an interview from his hospital bed in Miami what happened when he was shot by police. North Miami police officer Jonathan Aledda, who is accused of attempted manslaughter, testified, Thursday, March 14, 2019 that he thought Arnaldo Rios Soto had a gun and was holding his caretaker, Charles Kinsey, hostage in the middle of a road in July 2016. It turned out Soto was holding a toy truck, but Aledda insisted he never heard another message on police radio that it wasn't a gun.(WSVN via AP)

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 man's 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 wasn't 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 Aledda's gunshots were not a misfire but intentional, as he tried to kill Rios but wounded Kinsey.

Defense attorney Douglas Hartman blamed faulty radios and poor supervision.NEW YORK (AP) - 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 honor a poet could ask for - more, it turned out, than he desired.

FILE - In this Aug. 2, 2011 file photo, poet W.S. Merwin speaks to the Hawaii Conservation Conference in Honolulu. Merwin, a prolific and versatile master of modern poetry who evolved through a wide range of styles as he celebrated nature, condemned war and industrialism and reached for the elusive past, died on Friday, March 15, 2019 at his home in Hawaii. A Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, Merwin completed more than 20 books and ranked high in the pantheon for decades, from early works inspired by myths and legends to late meditations on age and time. (AP Photo/Audrey McAvoy, File)

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 honors as the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize and a gold medal from the arts academy. He was chosen the country's 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 "traveling 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 told 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. Merwin's 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 didn't 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.

Merwin's 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 dishonor, 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.

Merwin's work became sparer, rooted in the Hawaiian landscape and his personal past - how it's often forgotten, how it's never understood at the moment it's lived, how words themselves were imperfect bridges to lost time. In "Secrets," he noted that "wherever our parents came from is another century/an age which they themselves could barely remember."

A poem from 2010, "By the Front Door," is a three-line tribute to simple wonder: "Rain through the morning/and in the long pool an old toad singing/happiness old as water." His poem "Thanks" is another ode to the natural world:

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

FILE - In this Sept. 29, 1994 file photo, poet W.S. Merwin is recognized by the Academy of American Poets after winning the Tanning Prize in Washington. Merwin, a prolific and versatile master of modern poetry who evolved through a wide range of styles as he celebrated nature, condemned war and industrialism and reached for the elusive past, died on Friday, March 15, 2019 at his home in Hawaii. A Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, Merwin completed more than 20 books and ranked high in the pantheon for decades, from early works inspired by myths and legends to late meditations on age and time. (AP Photo, File)COURTLAND, Miss. (AP) - Someone fatally shot the former boyfriend of a Mississippi woman who was burned to death, and investigators are questioning a suspect, authorities said Friday.

Travis Sanford, 33, was killed Friday morning at a home in Courtland, Panola County Sheriff Dennis Darby told news outlets. District Attorney John Champion confirmed that he was Jessica Chambers' boyfriend when she was burned to death in Courtland in 2014. Sanford was incarcerated at the time and was cleared in her death, Darby said.

The suspect in Sanford's death fired a shotgun while running from Sanford's house about 7:30 a.m. Friday, the Clarion Ledger of Jackson quoted Darby as saying. Sanford's girlfriend and two small children were in the home, he said.

Chambers died in a hospital Dec. 7, 2014, a day after being set on fire in the town of 500 in north Mississippi, about 65 miles (100 km) south of Memphis, Tennessee. Two juries have deadlocked on whether to convict a different man, Quinton Tellis, in her death. Prosecutors had said cellphone evidence showed Tellis and Chambers at similar locations, and they played videotaped interrogations in which Tellis repeatedly changed his story when confronted with new evidence. Tellis initially denied seeing Chambers late in the day, but later admitted he had been with her up until about an hour before her death.

Defense lawyers said the prosecution timeline was implausible, and presented testimony from 10 firefighters and emergency medical workers who said they heard Chambers say "Eric" set her on fire. Mississippi authorities have not decided whether to try Tellis a third time.

He is currently jailed in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, where the prosecutor says a grand jury will consider charges in the death of Ming-Chen Hsiao, a Taiwanese woman fatally stabbed in Monroe in 2015. Tellis pleaded guilty in 2016 to unauthorized use of her credit card. After finishing his sentence for that crime, he was arrested on a charge of murder in her death.RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - 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 who'll represent the GOP in a new North Carolina congressional election mandated after a ballot-rigging scandal blocked the former Republican candidate's narrow November win.

Ten Republicans filed by Friday's 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 year's GOP candidate.

Also filing was a Raleigh attorney who was a registered Democrat until shortly before he entered last year's race for a state Supreme Court seat as a Republican.

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)

If none of the Republicans win more than 30 percent of the votes in May, a GOP runoff primary would be Sept. 10.

___

7:15 a.m.

A conservative soldier in the nation's 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 Carolina's 9th congressional district ahead of Friday's 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 isn't 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.

FILE - In this May 8, 2018 file photo, 9th Congressional district Democratic candidate Dan McCready smiles as he speaks with U.S. Rep. Alma Adams outside Eastover Elementary School in Charlotte, N.C. North Carolina's elections board is expected to decide Monday, March 4, 2019, 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. McCready is running again in the new election. Republican candidate Mark Harris will not. Jeff Siner/The Charlotte Observer via AP, File)UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The Security Council extended the mandate of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan by a vote of 14-0 on Friday with Russia abstaining to protest the resolution's failure to welcome September's peace agreement.

Russia's deputy U.N. ambassador Dmitry Polyansky's complaint was clearly aimed at the United States, among others.

U.S. deputy ambassador Jonathan Cohen told reporters after the vote that the Trump administration "remains deeply concerned by the lack of political commitment from parties at the national level to fully implement all tenets of the agreement."

"Having seen previous peace agreements in South Sudan fail to hold and the country fall back into conflict and instability," Cohen said, "the United States and the South Sudanese people expect South Sudan's leaders to demonstrate a clear commitment to the implementation of the agreement through rhetoric and action."

Polyansky countered that there has been "progress" since the peace agreement was signed in Sudan's capital Khartoum. He cited "a substantial drop in the level of violence recorded" and in the number of human rights violations.

"We are disappointed by the stubborn reluctance of colleagues to welcome the Khartoum agreements, which have already proved their viability," Polyansky said. "We believe this is the incorrect signal to be sent both to the parties in South Sudan and also the leading regional powers that made colossal efforts to achieve this."

There were high hopes that South Sudan would have peace and stability after gaining its independence from neighboring Sudan in 2011. But it plunged into ethnic violence in December 2013 when forces loyal to President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, started battling those loyal to Riek Machar, his former vice president who belongs to the Nuer people.

Fighting has killed almost 400,000 people, displaced over four million and left more than 7 million - two-thirds of the population - "severely food insecure" and in need of humanitarian aid.

Many peace agreements have failed, but since the September deal was signed, the previously warring parties have been trying to rebuild trust though U.N. envoy David Shearer told the council last week that "progress has been slow."

He said there are just two months left before a transitional government is scheduled to take over on May 13, and the vice presidents - including first vice president Machar - should have taken up their roles.

Shearer said there are "fundamental issues still to be resolved" including determining the number and borders of states, forming an armed force to be deployed in the capital Juba and major towns to provide security for returning opposition leaders, and drafting a new constitution.

He urged all parties to the peace agreement to maintain momentum to end the five-year conflict, saying there is "no Plan B" and warning that if peace efforts falter the African nation could again be engulfed in serious violence.

The resolution adopted Friday extends the U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan known as UNMISS until March 15, 2020 at its current force levels - a ceiling of 17,000 troops including a regional protection force of up to 4,000 troops, and 2,101 international police personnel.

The council asked U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to take steps to "expedite" deployments.

The main mandate of UNMISS remains the protection of civilians threatened by violence, creating conditions to deliver humanitarian aid, and supporting implementation of the peace agreement.

America's Cohen called on South Sudan's leaders to fully adhere to cease-fire agreements and stop obstructing cease-fire monitors, negotiate security arrangements and power sharing agreements - and "take action against gender-based violence."

Russia's Polyansky said Moscow is also concerned that the resolution which is supposed to outline the mandate of peacekeepers "is overburdened with formulations and wording on gender issues and human rights."NEW YORK (AP) - Netflix will remove footage of a real fiery train disaster from its hit post-apocalyptic survival film "Bird Box" months after the streaming giant was criticized for exploiting a tragedy.

The stock footage was taken from a 2013 crash in the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic when a train carrying crude oil came off the tracks and exploded into a massive ball of fire, killing 47 people.

Netflix licensed the footage from the stock image vendor Pond 5 and used it in "Bird Box" in an early TV news montage. The Sandra Bullock-led thriller is about monstrous entities that compel any human who sees them to quickly try to kill themselves.

Pond 5 in January said the footage "was taken out of context" and apologized. But Netflix said at the time it wasn't planning to cut the clip, although said it was looking at ways to do things differently moving forward.

Nexflix changed its mind and said Friday it will replace the footage with an outtake from a former TV series in the U.S. The company said it is "sorry for any pain caused to the Lac-Megantic community."

The mayor of Lac-Megantic, Julie Morin, had criticized the use of the footage, calling it "a lack of respect." She and Quebec's culture and communications minister, Nathalie Roy, applauded Netflix's latest move. "This result shows that by being united and pooling our efforts, everything is possible," Roy tweeted.

This image released by Netflix shows Sandra Bullock in a scene from the film, "Bird Box." Netflix will remove footage of a real fiery train disaster from its hit post-apocalyptic survival film "Bird Box" months after the streaming giant was criticized for exploiting a tragedy. The stock footage was taken from a 2013 crash in the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic when a train carrying crude oil came off the tracks and exploded into a massive ball of fire, killing 47 people. (Saeed Adyani/Netflix via AP)

___

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwitsCARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - In the week since a massive blackout left millions in Venezuela without power, both the government and opposition have put forward disputing theories on what caused the outage without providing any evidence.

Now two Venezuelans with expertise in engineering and geospatial technologies say they've analyzed NASA satellite imagery indicating there were three fires within close proximity to transmission lines that could have crippled the country's electric grid.

The sleuths took data from a weather satellite that can detect thermal activity and superimposed it on Google Earth images to put together what may be the most concrete analysis yet of what transpired on March 7.

"There is still a possibility that something else happened," said Jose Aguilar, an expert on Venezuela's electrical grid who coordinated the study. "But this is very incriminating."

The power outage plunged a nation already reeling from political and economic tumult into even deeper disarray as hospitals struggled to care for their neediest patients and desperate Venezuelans grappled to find food and water.

Within hours of the attack, the government of embattled President Nicolas Maduro began accusing the U.S. of a cyberattack. Maduro has stuck to that narrative, saying hackers in the U.S. first shut down the Guri Dam and then delivered several "electromagnetic" blows.

72-year-old Elizabeth Guzman Espitia holds a candle in herwindowless room she calls her "little cave" during a blackout in the Santa Cruz of the East neighborhood, in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, March 14, 2019. I've never see a crisis like this. It's the first time," Espitia said. "It makes me so sad." Venezuela's power grid crashed March 7, throwing almost all of the oil-rich nation's 30 million residents into chaos for nearly a week. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Engineers have questioned that assertion, contending that the Guri Dam's operating system is on a closed network with no internet connection. Several consulted by The Associated Press speculated that a more likely cause was a fire along one of the electrical grid's powerful 765-kilovolt lines that connect the dam to much of Venezuela.

The transmission lines traverse through some of Venezuela's most remote and difficult to access regions on their way toward Caracas, making it difficult to obtain any first-hand information that could back up or pinpoint the location of a fire.

Working with an expert at Texas Tech University's Geospatial Technologies Laboratory, Aguilar said satellite data indicates that on the day of the blackout there were three fires in close proximity to the 765-kilovolt lines transmitting power generated from the Guri Dam, which provides about 80 percent of Venezuela's electricity.

He said that a fire on even one of the three lines near the blazes could have been catastrophic.

"A fire of that nature has enough power to cripple the whole system," he said.

Their analysis also shows that fires broke out one day before the blackout near several lesser-voltage lines that could have also weakened the system.

Engineers have warned for years that Venezuela's state-run electricity corporation was failing to properly maintain power lines, letting brush that can catch fire during Venezuela's hot, dry months to grow near and up the towering structures.

Aguilar said that despite the data to support a fire, he still couldn't entirely discredit the possibility that something else crippled Venezuela's power supply, saying he'd need to review dispatch center files to conclude definitively.WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump's re-election campaign has announced he's holding a rally in Michigan at the end of the month.

The announcement came shortly after Trump vetoed a congressional measure blocking his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border.

The campaign says the rally is set for the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 28.

Trump narrowly won the Midwest state's 16 electoral votes in the 2016 presidential election.

The president recently declared a national emergency at the border in order to claim federal funding to build a wall there and fulfill a signature promise of his original campaign.

Both the House and Senate voted to block the declaration, but Trump vetoed that measure Friday. It was the first veto of his presidency.Workers on Bernie Sanders' 2020 Democratic campaign have unionized, becoming the first presidential campaign staffers in history to do so.

Sanders, campaigning in South Carolina on Friday, said he was proud of the distinction.

"We cannot just support unions with words, we must back it up with actions," he tweeted. "On this campaign and when we are in the White House, we are going make it easier for people to join unions, not harder."

The United Food & Commercial Workers Local 400 confirmed that Sanders' campaign workers were the first to win union representation.

"We expect this will mean pay parity and transparency on the campaign, with no gender bias or harassment, and equal treatment for every worker, whether they're in Washington, D.C., Iowa, New Hampshire or anywhere else," UFCW Local 400 President Mark P. Federici said in a news release.

Working on political campaigns at any level often involves grueling hours and low pay. And recently, workers on some campaigns have been pushing to unionize.

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)

Earlier this year, Sanders apologized to female staffers on his 2016 presidential campaign who said they had experienced sexual harassment from male staffers. The New York Times had reported allegations of unwanted sexual advances, as well as pay inequity.

At that time, Sanders said his 2018 re-election campaign to the Senate representing Vermont established "some of the strongest sexual harassment policies in the country," including requiring training for all employees and providing staffers with a way to report harassment to an independent firm.

UFCW said Sanders' campaign had agreed to use "card check" to determine whether most workers wanted a union. In card check, union organizers ask workers to sign cards affirming that they support a union. If a majority of workers sign them, the union presents those cards to the employer so that the employer will recognize the union.

The union said that by Friday, a majority of the campaign's 44 bargaining-unit-eligible employees had signed union cards. Sanders' aides said on a recent conference call that the campaign has roughly 70 paid staffers. The union says that all campaign employees below the level of deputy director will be represented by the union and that negotiations for a collective bargaining agreement will begin "as soon as possible."

Federici called the unionization a breakthrough that he hoped would serve as a model for other campaigns.

"While political campaigns aren't the easiest work environment, every worker has the right to respect and dignity," he said. "And when candidates who claim to support the labor movement practice what they preach, that sends a powerful message that, if elected, they will deliver on their promises to strengthen union rights and level the playing field between workers and employers."MERRIMACK, N.H. (AP) - Democratic presidential hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand is trying to connect with voters' important issues on the ground - or, in some cases, underground.

The U.S. senator from New York held two roundtable discussions Friday in New Hampshire communities struggling with contaminated water. The second was in Merrimack, where hundreds of private wells in the town near a plastics factory have been contaminated with suspected carcinogens, and the state has closed two of the town's public wells.

The same company has caused contamination woes in New York, and Gillibrand highlighted her efforts to help affected residents there. But she also broadened the conversation, arguing that similar incidents across the country point to larger problems of racial injustice and income inequality because it often hurts residents who can't afford water testing, health monitoring or new homes when their wells are polluted.

"This goes to the much bigger problem. There's a growing divide in this country where the wealthy have access to every politician, access to every decisionmaker, and get to set the stage for America. The rest of the country gets no say," she said. "If you are in a low-income community or a community of color, a lot of this environmental degradation follows you. It's where polluters pollute. It's where you have less power because you don't have the money."

Gillibrand was joined by several local activists and freshman state lawmakers who were spurred by the contamination issue to run for office and dubbed themselves "Water Warriors."

Democratic Rep. Kathy Stack of Merrimack said she learned her well was contaminated about two years ago, and she is frightened every day remembering how her children drank the water as they were growing up. Now that they've grown and left home, she's stuck in a house that is too large because no one will buy it.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., left, shakes hands as she arrives at a campaign meet-and-greet at To Share Brewing, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Manchester, N.H. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

"A purchaser can't get a mortgage on a contaminated well," she said. "I wait, and I struggle."

Gillibrand's first discussion Friday was in Portsmouth, where decades of use of a toxic firefighting foam at a former military base contaminated wells later used by businesses and a day care facility. She said she will continue to elevate the issue.

"I think that's what running for president is all about. I'd like to serve this country, and to serve this country well, I need to hear directly from the people I will represent," she told reporters. "For any family, there is no more crippling issue than to know that their water is polluted, to know their child might be at risk or their own health might be at risk because of legacy pollution."

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., high-fives a foosball opponent as partner Casey Leach of Manchester, N.H., laughs at a campaign meet-and-greet, Friday, March 15, 2019, at To Share Brewing in Manchester, N.H. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) - Three University of Kansas fraternity brothers on a spring break trip to Florida are credited with rescuing a young boy from a riptide.

The Kansas City Star reports that Sigma Phi Epsilon brothers Jared Cox, of Overland Park; Connor Churchill, of Olathe; and Cole Firmature, of Omaha, Nebraska, went to a beach on March 11 in Destin, Florida. They were at a beach bar when they heard a woman cry out for a lifeguard and point to the water.

There was no lifeguard patrolling the beach at the time and the three men sprinted to the water.

They spotted a young boy drifting on a boogie board 40 yards out into the ocean. The three men swam out and brought the child to shore by pushing him on the board.

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Information from: The Kansas City Star, http://www.kcstar.comWASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. business groups said Friday they are encouraged by China's approval of a new law that loosens restrictions on foreign investment and said it could help smooth the way to a substantive trade agreement between the two countries.

China's ceremonial legislature passed a measure Thursday seeking to prevent Chinese officials from forcing U.S. and other foreign companies to turn over proprietary technology, a key sticking point in the trade fight between the two countries.

The U.S. has imposed tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods in an effort to force changes to a range of China's economic policies. China has retaliated by slapping duties on most U.S. imports.

"It's one of those confidence building measures," Erin Ennis, senior vice president of the U.S.-China Business Council, said of the move by Chinese legislators. It suggests "the two sides are talking the same language."

U.S. companies have long complained that Chinese officials informally push them to turn over trade secrets in order to access China's market. In some cases U.S. businesses are required to form a joint venture with a Chinese partner, and share technology with them. In other cases U.S. companies are forced to provide trade secrets to win regulatory approval from local officials, who then turn over those secrets to Chinese firms.

The Trump administration also wants China to reign in subsidies for state-owned firms and for companies that are focused on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and self-driving cars.

Surveillance cameras are mounted on a lamp post near the large portrait of Chinese leader Mao Zedong at the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, Friday, March 15, 2019. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Friday denied Beijing tells its companies to spy abroad, refuting U.S. warnings that Chinese technology suppliers might be a security risk. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

The new law would bar Chinese officials from leaking technology to Chinese firms, and would also make it easier for more U.S. companies to do business in China without a partner.

Still, it's not clear how close the two sides are to an agreement. Earlier this week, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told a Senate committee that "there still are major, major issues that have to be resolved."

And Ennis said China needs to publish regulations that would implement the new law, a step they have delayed taking in the past.

Lighthizer has emphasized that the agreement must include enforcement provisions that would allow the U.S. to impose tariffs or other sanctions if China doesn't follow through on its promises. That remains a key sticking point between the two sides, business lobbyists have said.

Lighthizer sketched out how the United States wants to enforce the deal in his testimony Tuesday. U.S. companies that are forced to turn over technology, for example, could bring that concern to U.S. officials, who would raise them in monthly meetings with their Chinese counterparts. Lighthizer and his Chinese counterpart would meet every six months and seek to resolve the toughest cases.

If they were unable to do so, Lighthizer said, the U.S. could "unilaterally act to enforce change," which would likely mean tariffs. The Trump administration wants China to agree to not retaliate, but that is a major sticking point.

Still, both presidents want a deal, business lobbyists say.

"We are cautiously optimistic that the two sides are going to get there," said Jeremie Waterman, president of the U.S. Chamber China Center. "They're clearly whittling the number of outstanding issues down."

Some business groups think an agreement, if it is reached, won't happen until the end of April.

President Donald Trump said on Thursday at the White House, "We'll have news on China probably one way or the other over the next three or four weeks."

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AP Writer Kevin Freking contributed to this report.SILVER CLIFF, Wis. (AP) - Wisconsin authorities have arrested an 82-year-old man suspected of fatally shooting a young couple 43 years ago.

The Marinette County Sheriff's Office on Friday said DNA evidence links Raymond L. Vannieuwenhoven to the shootings of 25-year-old David Schuldes and 24-year-old Ellen Matheys. They were killed in the town of Silver Cliff in 1976.

Authorities arrested Vannieuwenhoven in the town of Lakewood in northern Wisconsin.

WLUK-TV reports the sheriff's office released new sketches of the suspect last summer using DNA from Matheys' clothing.

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Information from: WLUK-TV, http://www.fox11online.comUNITED NATIONS (AP) - The United States and China clashed Friday over Beijing's $1 trillion "belt and road" global infrastructure program after the Security Council unanimously approved a bare bones resolution extending the mandate of the U.N. political mission in Afghanistan for six months.

Last year's resolution extending the mission's mandate for a year welcomed and urged further efforts to strengthen regional economic cooperation involving Afghanistan, including through the massive "belt and road" initiative to link China to Europe, Africa and other parts of Asia. The 2016 and 2017 council resolutions had similar language.

Council diplomats said China wanted the "belt and road" language included in this year's resolution - but the United States objected.

U.S. deputy ambassador Jonathan Cohen told the council after the vote that "China held the resolution hostage and insisted on making it about Chinese national political priorities rather than the people of Afghanistan."

He said the Trump administration opposed China's demand "that the resolution highlight its belt and road initiative, despite its tenuous ties to Afghanistan and known problems with corruption, debt distress, environmental damage, and lack of transparency."

China's deputy ambassador Wu Haitao countered that Cohen's remarks were "at variance with the facts and are fraught with prejudice." He also said one council member - almost certainly referring to the U.S. - "poisoned the atmosphere" which led to the council's failure to adopt a substantive resolution.

Wu noted that since the "belt and road" initiative was launched six years ago, 123 countries and 29 international organizations have signed agreements of cooperation with China on joint development programs.

"The 'belt and road' initiative is conducive to Afghanistan's reconstruction and economic development," Wu said. "Under this framework, China and Afghanistan will continue to strengthen cooperation in various fields, promote economic and social development in the country and the integration of Afghanistan into regional development."

He stressed that the program "has nothing to do with geopolitics."

Germany's U.N. Ambassador Christoph Heusgen, who drafted the resolution with Indonesia's U.N. Ambassador Dian Djani, expressed regret that "issues that have nothing to do" with the work of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan made it impossible to adopt a substantive resolution.

"We very much regret that such topics as the upcoming elections (in Afghanistan), the participation of women in the Afghan peace process, the situation of children in armed conflict, the nexus between climate change and security, are no longer reflected in this resolution," Heusgen said.

The resolution does extend UNAMA's mission until Sept. 17, 2019 and stresses "the central importance of a comprehensive and inclusive Afghan-led and Afghan-owned political process towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict and a comprehensive political settlement." And it welcomes "progress in this regard."

But Heusgen said the text isn't satisfactory to any of the 15 council members.

He expressed hope that in the next six months the U.N.'s most powerful body would be able to overcome its differences and adopt a resolution that also reflects on the peace process and the upcoming elections.DOYLESTOWN, Pa. (AP) - 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 declared Friday as he described how the victim fought for her life.

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 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, 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. It's expected to last several days.

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.

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 rape and murder plot.

"Sara Packer was the driving factor in the intent, the planning and the execution of what happened to her daughter," he said.

FILE - This combination of file photos provided on Sunday, Jan. 8, 2017, by the Bucks County District Attorney shows Sara Packer, left, and Jacob Sullivan. Sullivan pleaded guilty Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019, to first-degree murder in the 2016 death of 14-year-old Grace Packer. Sullivan pleaded guilty to all charges in the 2016 death of Grace Packer. The penalty phase of his trial opens Friday, March 15, 2019 outside Philadelphia. A jury will hear testimony about Sullivan's crimes before deciding on a sentence of either life in prison or death. (Bucks County District Attorney via AP, File)

The defense plans to call Packer as a witness.

The jury that will decide Sullivan's sentence must be unanimous 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 in 2015. Pennsylvania last carried out an execution in 1999.

Sara 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 sent to prison for sexually assaulting Grace and a 15-year-old foster daughter at their Allentown home, about an hour outside 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.

Grace eventually managed to escape some of her bindings and spit the gag out, but was unable to make it out of the house before Sullivan and Packer returned the next day - some 12 hours later - and 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, prosecutors said.

Abington Township Detective Cindy Pettinato, who investigated Grace Packer's disappearance, testified Friday that Sara Packer seemed unconcerned her daughter was gone, quickly ridding the house of her daughter's belongings.

Amy Adam, Grace's guidance counselor, said the teen got excellent grades but required emotional support. She said that a few months before Grace's death, Sara Packer had threatened to send her to foster care or to a residential center. That prompted Grace to write a "good-bye letter" to her family, Adam said.

The letter was displayed for the jury.

"I know that you guys are at your breaking point and I understand," Grace wrote. "I love you guys I always have and I always will."AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - 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 they're 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 year's 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 he's 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.

FILE - In this Feb. 25, 2019 file photo Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the Santa Fe High School student accused of killing 10 people in a May 18 shooting at the high school, is escorted by Galveston County Sheriff's Office deputies into the jury assembly room for a change of venue hearing at the Galveston County Courthouse in Galveston, Texas. A state lawmaker is proposing changes to a bill that would leave certain underage offenders eligible for parole after 20 years after hearing opposition from families of victims involved in a Texas high school shooting last May. (Jennifer Reynolds/The Galveston County Daily News via AP, Pool)

"This bill certainly deals with eligibility, it doesn't require the parole board to parole anyone," Moody said. "I certainly don't 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 nonprofit.

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 Moody's bill strikes a balance between justice and mercy and would build on other recent changes lawmakers have made within the state's 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NEWARK, N.J. (AP) - A $13 billion project to build a new rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey received another blow from federal authorities Friday in the form of a rating that continues to make it ineligible for critical grant funding.

The Federal Transit Administration released its ratings for infrastructure projects around the country and rated the Hudson River tunnel project medium-low, the same rating it gave several months ago. Under FTA guidelines, projects with that rating are ineligible for Capital Investment Grants.

Those grants are being sought by the tunnel project partners, which include New Jersey Transit, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Amtrak.

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez called Friday's rating "ludicrous" and said the rating "is as tied to reality as President Trump is tied to the truth."

The Democratic congressional delegations from both states have accused the Trump administration of holding up funding for the tunnel for political payback.

The federal Department of Transportation, meanwhile, has said the project needs more financial commitment from the states.

New Jersey and New York plan to use long-term federal loans to pay for 50 percent of the project, between $6 billion and $7 billion, with the federal government paying for the other half with grants.

The Department of Transportation has said that's asking for too much and said Friday that the most recent financial plan submitted by project organizers "did not address the key concerns identified by FTA in last's year rating."

The tunnel is more than a century old and operates at peak capacity, accommodating roughly 200,000 passengers each day. An already aging electrical system and crumbling concrete walls were damaged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, leading Amtrak, the tunnel's operator, to estimate one of the tunnel's two tubes could fail within the next decade or so.

That would reduce peak service by 75 percent and cause a ripple effect up and down the rail corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C.

"The U.S. DOT is further delaying this critical infrastructure project and putting the region and the entire national economy in jeopardy," Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a statement. "Only a dysfunctional Washington could reject $6 billion in state funding to rebuild federally-owned tunnels, which are in dire condition."KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - A Missouri lawmaker who's introduced measures that would force adults to own handguns and young adults to own AR-15 semi-automatic rifles said he's trying to make the point that mandates are bad and doesn't actually want to require gun ownership.

"The other side of the aisle loves mandates, so I'm 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, "Let's get back at them."

He said no outside group is helping him with the legislation. The National Rifle Association didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

No hearings on either of the bills are scheduled, and McDaniel said that "of course" the legislation wouldn't 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.NEWARK, N.J. (AP) - A convicted appointee of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has joined his co-defendant's 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 wouldn't endorse Christie's re-election.

Christie wasn't charged.

An appeals court threw out some of Baroni's and Kelly's 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.

Baroni's 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 (AP) - The Federal Election Commission is fining Texas Sen. Ted Cruz $35,000 for failing to disclose that he received loans to help finance his 2012 Senate run.

Cruz said at the time that his family liquidated their net worth to loan $1.43 million to his campaign. But the FEC later found that $1.06 million of that was from loans granted by Citibank and Goldman Sachs, where his wife worked.

Cruz's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

The federal agency has not announced the fine publicly. But the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which filed a complaint in 2016 that led to the fine, released documents revealing it.

The loans' existence was first reported in 2016 by The New York Times.SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The suspected New Zealand shooter carefully modeled his attack for an internet age. He live-streamed the massacre, shouted out a popular meme slogan and published a long, rambling manifesto replete with inside jokes geared for those steeped in underground internet culture.

All that makes Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the man charged with murder for the attack Friday on mosques in Christchurch, the latest person to allegedly commit mass slaughter alongside a targeted appeal to online communities that breed extremism.

Prior to killing six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014, Elliott Rodger posted an online video and circulated a lengthy document full of grievances. He was later found to have ties to a misogynistic online group known as "incels," or "involuntary celibates," who sometimes call for violence against women. Last year, Robert Bowers, the man charged with killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, posted threats on Gab, a social media site popular with white supremacists.

Recruitment with and proliferation of extremist ideals is nothing new - in person or online. People who want to discuss such ideas are bound to find each other, said Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. But whereas small groups might have once met up in real life, now people can go online and find large groups to reinforce and encourage their ideas almost instantly.

People do things online that they might be hesitant to do in real life, Byman said. That can range from harmless acts, such as emailing someone you would be too intimidated to approach at a party, to sharing, building on and encouraging extremist views and violence.

"It enables you to be bolder," Byman said.

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 Photo/Mark Baker)

Online sleuths quickly connected the livestreamed video to posts made by the same user on 8chan, a dark corner of the web where those disaffected by mainstream social media sites often post extremist, racist and violent views.

Tarrant's manifesto spread quickly on 8chan Friday. The 74-page screed espouses white supremacist views even as it contradicts itself. Some saw similarities to the 1,500-page manifesto written by Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian right-wing extremist who killed 77 people in 2011.

The Tarrant document seemed intended to feed the online communities he took part in, in part by "trolling" common internet themes and outlooks with ironic mockery.

"Were you taught violence and extremism by video games, music, literature, cinema?" Tarrant asks himself in the essay.

"Yes, Spyro the dragon 3 taught me ethno-nationalism," he writes, seemingly sarcastically. That passage references a video game for Sony's PlayStation console intended for children 10 and up.

"Fortnite trained me to be a killer and to floss on the corpses of my enemies," he continued, only to abruptly contradict himself in a classic trolling move: "No." Fortnite is a popular online battle game.

Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative called for greater oversight of social platforms after Tarrant's manifesto and attack.

"It's pretty clear the person involved here was radicalized online," she said. "The conversations in these chat rooms and message boards, with in-jokes and memes, are part of a cultivation of a certain kind of radical person in these spaces."

Still, it can be hard to pin his actions on his behavior online, said Hannah Bloch-Webha, a law professor at Drexel University. "I don't think society understands enough about the role of propaganda and violent speech in provoking actual violence," she said.

In a live-streamed video of his attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the shooter says "Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie." That's a reference to Felix Kjellberg, a popular YouTuber who has faced considerable controversy of his own over videos that included anti-Semitic jokes and Nazi imagery .

But again, Tarrant's meaning wasn't straightforward, since he was repeating a popular internet meme crafted to help PewDiePie claim the largest number of followers on YouTube. Kjellberg condemned the attack in a tweet Friday and said he was "sickened" by the use of his name.

The act of livestreaming the attack was in itself a sign of how far internet culture has permeated the physical world. People regularly stream daily events now, said Byman of the Brookings Institute, including their confrontations with law enforcement.

The shooter did his research, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. "He found information online, he found validation, he found an ideology and a purpose in life that led directly to what he did," Cooper said.

Social media is at the center of this increasing challenge, he said. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other sites that allow people to upload their own content have faced fierce backlash for letting violent and hate-filled posts and videos spread.

The companies eventually halted the spread of the New Zealand shooting livestream Friday. But many say they were too slow, and argue the video shouldn't have gone online in the first place.

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AP technology reporter Mae Anderson contributed to this article from New York.

Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019, following a mass shooting. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

This frame from video that was livestreamed Friday, March 15, 2019, shows a gunman, who used the name Brenton Tarrant on social media, in a car before the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand. (Shooter's Video via AP)

This frame from video that was livestreamed Friday, March 15, 2019, shows guns in the car of a gunman who used the name Brenton Tarrant on social media before the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand. (Shooter's Video via AP)SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Hundreds of Puerto Ricans filled a coliseum on Friday to speak at a first of its kind public hearing organized by a group of U.S. legislators visiting the U.S. territory amid complaints about austerity measures and the pace of federal hurricane recovery funds nearly two years after Hurricane Maria.

The crowd came from cities and towns across the island and included students, retirees, people in construction boots and others in high heels. Some even brought gamecocks to protest a recent federal ban on the island's cockfighting industry.

Legislators heard dozens of brief speeches that ranged from unfair treatment by the federal government to homes without proper roofs to shrinking pension funds, with some speeches loudly interrupted by those who support statehood. Behind some speakers, the crowd held signs including "Prosecute bankers," ''Cancel the Debt" and "No more PROMESA," referring to the law that created the federal control board that oversees the island's finances and has imposed various austerity measures amid a 12-year recession.

"It's not fair to cut pensions to the elderly because it goes against the law. It's not fair that cockfighting businesses lose their industry because it goes against the law," said Eliezer Molina, a resident from the western town of San Sebastian as he addressed legislators. "The PROMESA law is pure colonialism and the people have to be respected."

Among those attending the hearing was 54-year-old Jose Nieves, who traveled from the eastern mountain town of Las Piedras and is worried about the effects of restructuring a portion of the island's more than $70 billion public debt.

"The situation in Puerto Rico was disastrous even before the hurricane," he said. "We Puerto Ricans have a lot of things to say."

The majority of people at the hearing support statehood for Puerto Rico, and many of them booed one of the first people to speak: Carmen Yulin Cruz, mayor of the capital of San Juan who opposes statehood and longtime critic of U.S. President Donald Trump.

"It's clear that the response of President Trump and his administration was inefficient, inadequate and bureaucratic," she said. "Only a few still dare to defend it. That inability unleashed a humanitarian crisis that cost the life of nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans."

The hearing was led by Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona and chairman of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees affairs in U.S. territories. Grijalva is in Puerto Rico as part of a four-day trip along with representatives Rob Bishop, a Republican from Utah, Nydia Velazquez, a Democrat from New York and Darren Soto, a Democrat from Florida. Also present was Jenniffer Gonzalez, Puerto Rico's representative to Congress and a statehood supporter.

The legislators also wanted to hear about the effects of decisions taken by a federal control board overseeing the island's finances, including austerity measures.

"If they don't help pave the way for the board to improve the conditions of police officers, criminality is going to increase and officers are going to keep leaving," said Gregorio Matias, vice president of Puerto Rico's police association.

Grijalva said the committee will soon revise the law that created the board and said it was important to hear directly from people most affected by the economic crisis and the aftermath of the hurricane.

"We want to create a law that is more humane, more equal and less oppressive," he said at the end of the hearing, adding that the law might be amended by April or May. "We have to prioritize the interests, the future of the people of Puerto Rico...There is some urgency, no question."

The hearing comes a day after the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report stating in part that some Puerto Rico municipalities are struggling financially because they have not been fully reimbursed for work already completed after the hurricane.

The GAO said Puerto Rico has estimated it needs $132 billion to rebuild from Maria, and that the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency has obligated almost $4 billion in public assistance grant funding.

The group of federal legislators met earlier behind closed doors with FEMA officials, and they are scheduled to meet on Monday with Puerto Rico's governor and the federal control board.ARCADIA, Calif. (AP) - 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 attorney's office said Friday.

The investigators will work with the California Horse Racing Board as it probes the deaths, district attorney spokesman Greg Risling said.

He declined to say what sparked his office's 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 attorney's office to investigate since March 1 and protested outside the prosecutors' office following Thursday's 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.

FILE - This March 7, 2019, file photo, shows the empty home stretch at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Calif. A filly broke both front legs at the end of a workout on the main dirt track at Santa Anita and has been euthanized, becoming the 22nd horse to suffer catastrophic injuries since Dec. 26. Trainer and owner David Bernstein says the 3-year-old filly named Princess Lili B broke down just past the finish line on Thursday morning, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

"Eleven years of broken bones and thousands upon thousands of thoroughbred deaths have finally resulted in a criminal investigation into trainers," Kathy Guillermo, PETA's senior vice president, said in a statement. "The DA's office is doing the right thing."

Santa Anita spokesman Mike Willman said in a statement that the track welcomes the district attorney's "sincere interest in solving these very serious issues that we've experienced over the past two months."

He also pointed to an announcement Thursday by the track's 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 industry's 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 Anita's 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.

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More AP sports: https://apnews.com/apf-sports and https://twitter.com/AP_SportsATLANTA (AP) - Former Vice President Al Gore believes the U.S. is nearing a political tipping point, with the 2020 Democratic presidential field offering voters the chance to replace President Donald Trump with someone "committed heart and soul" to combating climate change.

Gore, who emerged as a leading climate activist after losing the 2000 presidential election, told The Associated Press in a Friday interview that he won't take sides in his party's wide-open nominating fight.

But he said he's talked to several candidates privately and is "encouraged" by what he's hearing publicly, noting that "at least 10" have declared climate action a top priority, while Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has put the issue at the center of his bid.

"We need a new president, and we need a president committed heart and soul to the climate crises," Gore said during an activist training conference in Atlanta hosted by his nonprofit, nonpartisan Climate Reality Project. "I'm very happy that so many of the Democratic candidates have made it clear that's the way they would intend to govern if they won."

Trump's presidency "is unfortunate in so many ways," Gore said, but he also credited Trump's open contempt of the scientific consensus that human activity affects the Earth's atmosphere with pushing many moderates and even some conservatives toward the more traditional liberal activists on the issue.

Gore, 70, added that public opinion is moving so quickly that a new president could find the political muscle for sweeping action. "Even people who used to want to deny it in the past are saying, 'Hey, hold on ... I've had enough of this,'" he said, citing rising sea levels, droughts and an uptick in "once-in-1000-year" storms.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, founder of the Climate Reality Project, speaks with youth climate activists durung a panel discussion on global climate, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

"Every night on the news it's like a nature walk through the Book of Revelation," he said, referring to the last book of the Christian New Testament that forecasts the end of the Earth.

He praises as "an aspirational goal" the Green New Deal pushed by some congressional Democrats but agreed the proposed outline for reducing the nation's net carbon emission to zero in a single decade isn't something that will clear Capitol Hill in one sweeping act.

Gore, who as a young congressman in the early 1980s stood out for holding hearings on global warming effects, is clear that he doesn't oppose the larger legislative effort.

"It creates the political space for working out the details of the best way to do it, but the main goals are decarbonize the economy, stop using the sky as an open sewer and create millions of new jobs as we do it," he said.

That could mean, for example, a tax bill with incentives for business and individuals who invest in solar panels; another tax bill ending fossil fuel subsidies; an infrastructure bill prioritizing high-speed rail; a state-aid program for retrofitting existing public buildings; specific requirements for reducing industrial carbon emissions; and increasing automobile fuel efficiency. The heaviest lift likely would be taxes on carbon emissions.

Gore dismissed Republican efforts to make climate activists out to be "socialists" because they support such ideas.

Costs for combating climate change are not insurmountable, Gore insisted. He argued that the first steps are ending tax advantages for existing fossil fuel industries and redirecting that public investment to expanding solar energy. At the state level, he said, lawmakers must grapple with the consequences of letting regulated monopoly utilities continue to expand their carbon footprints while squelching clean-energy markets.

Since ending his political career, Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his activism and an Oscar for his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

In recent years, he has added an emphasis on environmental justice, the argument that existing environmental and economic policy is hardest on poor and often minority communities. He said he's not sure that angle will translate into votes, but he said history suggests Americans respond when "examples of injustice and unfairness are exposed and revealed."

Gore's optimism is striking for a former politician who lost some of his biggest battles on climate. Most notably, as vice president he helped craft the Kyoto Treaty - a forerunner of the Paris Agreement of 2016 - but watched the U.S. Senate refuse ratification, just as Trump has scoffed at the Paris deal.

But Gore noted that his conference overlapped with Friday's worldwide protests that saw angry students in more than 100 countries walk out of classes to protest what they see as the failures by their governments to combat climate change.

"Almost all of the morally based reform movements in human history have had young people in the forefront. The climate movement is the premier example now," he said. "These kids are calling to the nation's conscience, and they're asking us, 'Think about us. Think about our future.' We need to listen to them."

___

Follow Barrow on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, founder of the Climate Reality Project, speaks with youth climate activists durung a panel discussion on global climate, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, founder of the Climate Reality Project, speaks with youth climate activists durung a panel discussion on global climate, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, founder of the Climate Reality Project, speaks to the Associated Press in an interview, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Atlanta. Gore says the United States is nearing a political tipping point that will force elected officials to adopt more aggressive policies to combat climate change. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)HAVANA (AP) - The U.S. State Department said Friday that it is eliminating a coveted five-year tourist visa for Cubans, dealing a heavy blow to entrepreneurs and Cuban members of divided families, who used the visas to see relatives in the United States and buy precious supplies for their businesses on the island.

The elimination of the visa cuts a vital link between the U.S. and Cuba by forcing Cubans to make a costly and complicated trip to a third country like Mexico or Panama every single time they want to visit the U.S. That's because the U.S. withdrew most of its non-essential diplomatic staff from Havana in September 2017 and stopped issuing visas of almost any type in Cuba.

"This affects every Cuban but especially entrepreneurs who have to travel to get products that don't exist here," said Niuris Higueras, who brings salt, hand towels, candles and other products from the U.S. for her restaurant Atelier, one of Havana's most successful private eateries.

Until now, Cubans who saved the money and mastered the complexities of successfully applying for a visa in a third country would receive a visa eliminating the need to apply again for another five years. That possibility will disappear on March 18 when the B2 visa will only allow a single entry for a three-month stay, Mara Tekach, the U.S. Embassy's charge d'affaires, said in a video posted on Facebook Friday.

Tekach said the change was due to the need to achieve reciprocity between the visa rules of the U.S. and Cuba, which issues Americans single-entry tourist visas allowing a stay of up to three months.

However, the Cuban visa application process is a formality, with airlines and travel agencies authorized to hand out visas to anyone who requests one and pays $50 as part of the purchase of an airline ticket or travel package. Cubans must pay $160, plus airfare and hotel costs in a third country, often to see their visa application swiftly rejected.

FILE - In this Jan. 21, 2015 file photo, people wait their turn to enter the U.S. Interests Section to apply for U.S. travel visas, in Havana, Cuba. The U.S. State Department said Friday, March, 15, 2019, that it is eliminating a coveted five-year tourist visa for Cubans, dealing a heavy blow to entrepreneurs and Cuban members of divided families, who used the visas to see relatives in the United States and buy precious supplies for their businesses on the island. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File)

"Invoking reciprocity here is beyond insulting," said Michael Bustamante, an assistant professor of Latin American History at Florida International University and an expert on contemporary Cuba who advocates for closer bilateral relations. "The announcement today will come as a real blow to many Cubans, only the latest of the Trump policy years."

The seemingly obscure change in visa rules in fact is one of the harshest measures against Cuba taken by the Trump administration because of the effect it will have on the informal supply chain for the communist-run island's small but vibrant private sector. Virtually all of the supplies used by Cuban entrepreneurs from barbers to restaurant owners are either stolen from state enterprises or brought in suitcases from capitalist countries by business owners or "mules," couriers with visas who are paid to haul in the hundreds of varieties of products unavailable in Cuba's stagnant, centrally planned economy.

The U.S. five-year visa not only allowed frequent trips to Miami, Latin American countries such as Mexico would allow Cubans with the U.S. visa to enter automatically.

"This is going to limit me a lot," said Vanesa Pino, owner of the Sweet Details bakery in Havana. She uses her five-year visa to travel once a month to the United States to buy ingredients such as food coloring, decorating tools and sugar for icing. "It doesn't make sense to go to a third country to get a single-entry visa. You can make that effort if the investment then lets you make a lot of trips.

"In my case, in addition to bringing supplies, I would go several times a year to pastry-making fairs, see new products and techniques, and now that's not going to be so easy."

Her visa expires next year.

----

Associated Press Writer Andrea Rodriguez in Havana contributed to this report.WASHINGTON (AP) - Wearing workout gear and carrying water bottles, fans of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg celebrated her 86th birthday Friday by exercising in front of the high court.

The court's oldest justice has become known for her workouts, which include push-ups and planks. The justice has worked out on camera with "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert, and footage of her workout routine was also part of the 2018 documentary "RBG." A book about her workout by her longtime trainer came out in 2017.

On Friday evening, fans dropped to the ground on the sidewalk outside the court and sang "Happy Birthday" while doing the plank. Ginsburg's trainer, Bryant Johnson, led the exercise. He said Ginsburg had worked out Thursday night, and she told him to tell the crowd that for the first time since she underwent surgery for lung cancer in December, she has "been able to do the planks the correct way and the push-ups."

Ginsburg's son James joined the crowd. He said the justice's plans for the evening included dinner out with family. Earlier, the justice was treated to "lots of desserts," made from recipes by her late husband, Martin Ginsburg, he said.

Ginsburg's workouts have helped her regain her strength after two previous bouts with cancer - colorectal cancer in 1999 and pancreatic cancer in 2009. She was absent from the court in January as she recovered from her most recent surgery. Doctors have said there is no evidence of any remaining disease.

There were Ginsburg-linked celebrations elsewhere, too. In Brooklyn, where the justice was born, Democratic Borough President Eric Adams marked Ginsburg's birthday with a cake and a rally as part of his campaign to get the city to rename the Brooklyn Municipal Building for the justice. And in Missouri, a rehabilitated bald eagle named RBG was released back into the wild .

Alice Wisbiski, dressed as Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is joined by others as a group do exercises on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington, Friday, March 15, 2019, to celebrate Ginsburg's upcoming birthday 86th birthday. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Ginsburg was at the high court Friday for a regular private conference of the justices and was likely serenaded by her colleagues. Chief Justice Warren Burger, who led the court in the 1970s and '80s, began a tradition of having wine, a toast and the singing of "Happy Birthday" on justices' birthdays.

"Truth be told, most of them can't carry a tune," Ginsburg has said of the singing.

___

Follow Jessica Gresko on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jessicagreskoPENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) - A Florida woman has been sentenced to life in prison for killing her 9-year-old cousin sitting on her as a form of punishment.

The Pensacola News Journal reports that 66-year-old Veronica Green Posey was sentenced Friday after jurors convicted her of first-degree felony murder.

Prosecutors say Dericka Lindsay had suffered horrific beatings from Posey, and Lindsay's adoptive parents, James and Grace Smith. Officials say Posey sat on Dericka for more than five minutes in October 2017, causing the girl to die from lack of oxygen.

Posey's attorney said the 320-pound (145-kilogram) woman was trying to help the Smiths and didn't intend to hurt Dericka.

James Smith was previously sentenced to 10 years for his role in Dericka's death. Grace Smith still faces charges but is currently mentally and physically unfit to stand trial.

___

Information from: Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal, http://www.pensacolanewsjournal.comBANGOR, Maine (AP) - Sen. Angus King said after a meeting with the acting interior secretary in Bangor that the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument's existence is settled.

King, who met Friday with Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, said there's a line for the monument in the president's budget submitted last week.

The Bangor Daily News reports that Bernhardt spent Thursday touring parts of Acadia National Park. The Katahdin Woods and Watters discussion on Friday included some business owners from the Katahdin region.

The Trump administration previously reviewed the monument created on land donated by the family of Burt's Bees co-founder Roxanne Quimby.

The land includes a 17-mile loop road with views of Mount Katahdin; trails for hiking, mountain biking and snowmobiling; and paddling on the Penobscot River's East Branch.

___

Information from: Bangor Daily News, http://www.bangordailynews.comFONTANA, Calif. (AP) - If Kyle Busch earns his landmark 200th victory across NASCAR's three major series this weekend in Southern California, don't expect him to do much to celebrate the achievement.

"Maybe a hat or something in Victory Lane," Busch said Friday, his indifference obvious in his voice. "Other than that, we go on to the next one."

Although he has opinions about his place in NASCAR history, Busch will allow others to debate it after his victory odometer rolls over to zeros and he ties Richard Petty's career wins mark.

The 33-year-old Busch arrived at Fontana in no mood to do much reflection on a racing career still in its prime, even while others debate the significance of the list he is likely to top soon.

"It doesn't change anything," Busch said. "We're entered in both races (at Fontana). We come out here and try to do the best we can to win. If we win on Saturday and that's win 200, then so be it. I am certainly not going to sandbag a race or throw a race away to try to win 200 in a Cup race. That's not my way of going about things."

After he moved to the brink of the record by sweeping two races in Phoenix last weekend, Busch could tie Petty's mark as soon as Saturday in his dominant Xfinity Series car. With an additional win in the Cup race in his Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota on Sunday, he would be the winningest driver in NASCAR history.

Kyle Busch smiles as he answers questions after winning the NASCAR Cup Series auto race at ISM Raceway, Sunday, March 10, 2019, in Avondale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ralph Freso)

Or not, depending on how you measure it, of course.

Petty's 200 victories all came at the Cup level, while Busch has 52 Cup wins.

Busch has spoken on it all before. He previously said he doesn't consider his wins to be equal to Petty's achievements solely on the top level, but he also realizes Petty didn't face the same level of competition in many of his Cup races as Busch faces every week.

What's clear is that Busch has cemented a place as one of the greatest drivers of his era, in any car and any series. Other experts believe he's one of the best of all time.

"I read what Richard said the other day, which was cool," Busch said. "He talked about how if I was thrown back in their era, with (David) Pearson and Petty, I could compete with those guys. That's very respectful, and I appreciate that. I am honored he said that. I feel I'd like to think the same way that I could do it. It doesn't matter. It's a different time and place."

Busch's success in the other two series will always be a part of his story, but he doesn't shy away from it.

Many drivers share the view of Denny Hamlin, who believes Busch couldn't reach his lofty marks in any racing circuit without a combination of outstanding cars and incredible talent.

"People can argue about the competition going down in different series, and especially in this day and age, equipment is a large factor," Hamlin said. "JGR right now has probably some of the best Xfinity equipment, and when you put one of the best Cup drivers in the best Xfinity equipment, you're going to have a lot of success. In the truck series, we know (Kyle Busch Motorsports) has got tremendous trucks. They outqualify everyone pretty much every week, and then when you put a top Cup guy in a truck that's super-fast, you're going to have the success that you're going to have.

"But I think he's extraordinary on the Cup level. I gauge myself (against) his accomplishments by what he does in the Cup series, and to me, he's the best out there. There's just no one better."

Busch is almost always good on the weathered asphalt east of Los Angeles, winning three Cup Series races - including the first of his career in 2005 - and six Xfinity races. He also has two Truck Series wins here, although the trucks aren't racing this weekend in Fontana.

If Busch wins on Sunday, he would join Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Matt Kenseth as the only three-time winners at Fontana. Joe Gibbs Racing has only won two Cup races at the former California Speedway, both by Busch - in 2013 and 2014.

"I watched him when I was growing up, and he was dominating races then, and still is," 25-year-old Ryan Blaney said. "I feel like he is just getting better as years go on. I hear a lot of people giving grief of how he has just mainly won in Xfinity and Trucks. But yeah, he is deserving of it. It almost makes me mad how good he is. As a competitor, I don't like seeing him win. It frustrates me how he is able to find a way to be better than everybody else a lot of weekends."

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More AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/tag/apf-AutoRacing and https://twitter.com/AP_SportsJACKSON, Miss. (AP) - A federal appeals court told Mississippi lawmakers to redraw a state Senate district where a judge found that black residents' voting power had been diluted.

A panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the order Friday, denying a request by state officials to delay the impact of a ruling that U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves issued last month.

Reeves said Senate District 22 should be redrawn because it fails to give African-American voters an "equal opportunity" to elect a candidate of their choice. The appeals court wrote that a majority of members on its three-judge panel found "there is not a strong likelihood" that state officials ultimately would persuade them to overturn Reeves' ruling.

Three black residents sued the state in July, saying the composition of the district violates the Voting Rights Act. It stretches through parts of six counties, including poor and mostly black parts of the Delta into the affluent and mostly white Jackson suburbs of Madison County. It has a 51 percent black voting-age population and a white senator, Republican Buck Clarke of Hollandale, who was first elected in 2003 under a somewhat different configuration of the district. Clarke is not seeking re-election this year because he's running for state treasurer.

"The Court of Appeals quite properly confirmed Judge Reeves' ruling that lines of District 22 should be changed for this year's election. That configuration added wealthy majority-white suburbs in Madison County to an otherwise largely African-American rural district in the Delta to dilute African-American voting strength in violation of the Voting Rights Act," Rob McDuff, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys, said in a statement Friday.

McDuff, Mississippi Center for Justice and the Washington-based Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law were among those representing African-Americans who brought the lawsuit, including a former state lawmaker who lost to Clarke in 2015.

An attorney for the state could not immediately be reached after business hours Friday.

Mississippi has 52 state Senate districts, and all of the state's legislative seats are up for election this year. The current district lines were set in 2012 and have been used since the 2015 legislative elections.

Both Reeves and the appeals court judges acknowledged that redrawing District 22 will require at least one nearby Senate district to be redrawn, as well.

The appeals court set an April 3 deadline for lawmakers to draw the new districts. Candidates' qualifying deadline for all legislative races was March 1, but the appeals court said the qualifying deadline in the newly drawn districts will be April 12.

____

Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus .FAIRFIELD, Iowa (AP) - The Latest on Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke (all times local):

8:35 p.m.

Democratic presidential contender Beto O'Rourke is acknowledging mistakes he made as a teen and as a candidate as he responds to criticism of his campaign rhetoric toward his wife as well as writings he produced online as a teenager.

While taping the "Political Party Live" podcast in Iowa on Friday, he said his joke that his wife had raised their three kids "sometimes with my help" was a "ham-handed" attempt to highlight her work. He said that criticism of his comment was "right on" and that he won't make the remark again.

He also said he was "mortified" by the violent fiction he wrote as at 15. O'Rourke wrote a handful of posts on a hacker group's message board, including a fictional piece about children getting run over by a car.

___

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to local residents during a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

3:20 p.m.

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke says he's not ready to release his fundraising numbers since entering the 2020 race.

When asked Friday outside a campaign stop in Fairfield, Iowa, when he'd share his numbers, he said, "Soon."

He says: "I don't have a definite plan. We're not ready to release them now."

The former Texas congressman entered the 2020 presidential race Thursday. He raised an eye-popping $80 million in grassroots donations in his failed U.S. Senate race in Texas against Republican Ted Cruz last year, all while largely avoiding money from political action committees.

So far, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has set the pace for grassroots donations in 2020, pulling in $6 million during his first day as a candidate.

Asked if he thought he would top Sanders, O'Rourke said only, "We'll see."

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to local residents during a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Buttons for former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke sit on display during a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, 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 stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, 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 during an interview following a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, 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 an audience member during a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, 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 an audience member during a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - A German freelance journalist jailed in Venezuela since November on espionage charges was released Friday within weeks of two other reporters being expelled from the tumultuous South American nation, his parents and a human rights attorney confirmed.

A court in the capital of Caracas ordered journalist Billy Six to be let go under the conditions that he report back every 15 days and not speak to media, attorney Carlos Correa of Public Space told The Associated Press.

Six, 31, won't be deported from Venezuela, but Correa also said that the journalist isn't prevented from leaving if he chooses.

"We are overjoyed!" his parents Ute and Edward Six posted on a Facebook, also railing against Germany's foreign ministry for not doing enough to help their son who spent 119 days in solitary confinement.

"Viva Venezuela!" they wrote. "Free Billy Six!"

Resident of a Berlin suburb, Six has travelled the globe as an independent journalist for 12 years, publishing his reports in right-wing outlets. His arrest has generated little interest in mainstream German media, which relatives blame on his conservative affiliation.

In Venezuela, he documented the economic collapse and mass migration from the socialist country, landing in jail on espionage charges that his family rejected as false.

This wasn't Six's first arrest amid turmoil. In 2013, he was jailed by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for three months after illegally entering that country to report on its bloody civil war. He was eventually handed over unharmed to Russian diplomats in Damascus who had helped secure his release.

A photo posted on Six's Facebook page in May 2011 shows him holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder, with a caption indicating it was taken on the front line of fighting in Syria.

Six turned his attention to Venezuela over a year ago. His father previously told The AP that his son entered the country legally but was unable to secure journalist credentials required by Venezuela to work as a reporter.

While reporting on Venezuela, Six posted two crudely edited German-language videos online showing him walking the streets, interviewing people and at times narrating his conclusions, critical of Maduro's socialist government.

"Hola amigos, I'm still in Venezuela, South American socialism of the 21st century," Six says, opening one video. "Here on the street there's dust, dirt, garbage, street dogs."

While the government of socialist President Nicolas Maduro has little tolerance for critical coverage by local press, foreign journalists who cross officials are usually spared the same harsh treatment. In the past, foreign reporters, like Six, who weren't accredited would stay in custody for just a few days before being ejected from the country.

The release of Six follows the recent deportation of other two journalists.

Venezuelan security forces seized U.S. freelance journalist Cody Weddle earlier this month at his apartment in Caracas where he had worked for over five years. Most recently, Weddle sent dispatches to a Miami TV station.

Univision's Jorge Ramos and his team were also deported in late February when Maduro cut short an interview during which he was shown video on an iPad shot a day earlier of young Venezuelans eating food scraps out of the back of a garbage truck.

___

Associated Press Fabiola Sanchez contributed to this report.JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - The Congressional Black Caucus chairwoman said Mississippi's governor is "clearly despicable" for not acknowledging work by the state's only black congressman to get the home of a slain civil rights leader named a national monument.

Democratic Rep. Karen Bass of California told reporters during a conference call Friday that Republican Gov. Phil Bryant was petty to ignore Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson.

"I don't know much about the governor of Mississippi, but he is clearly despicable," Bass said. "There is no way in the world he shouldn't acknowledge Bennie Thompson. ... For him to specifically ignore him is an example of his pettiness. The entire Congressional Black Caucus was highly offended that he would be so disrespectful of one of our most important members. I hope the governor knows the slight will not go unnoticed."

An effort to reach Bryant's spokesman late Friday was not immediately successful.

President Donald Trump signed a bill Wednesday creating five new national monuments, including the Medgar and Myrlie Evers home in Jackson. Medgar Evers was the Mississippi NAACP leader when he was assassinated outside the home in June 1963 while his wife, Myrlie, and their three children were inside.

On Twitter, Bryant praised Trump and Mississippi's two Republican U.S. senators for the monument designation.

FILE - In this Jan. 20, 2019 file photograph, Gov. Phil Bryant explains to reporters the advantages of passing and signing the Mississippi Broadband Enabling Act, at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss. Mississippi's white Republican governor Bryant and U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state's only black Democratic congressman are feuding over who should get credit for the home of a slain civil rights leader becoming a national monument. Thompson says he has worked on the issue for 16 years. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

Thompson tweeted back: "Give adequate credit. I've worked on this for 16 years."

Bryant, who is white, responded in a statement to Jackson television station WJTV that Thompson was seeking personal acclaim and was shattering what should be a time of celebration over the national monument designation.

"His anger and hatred are the very characteristics that separated our people in the civil rights era," Bryant said. "He has become a tragic figure who has squandered this opportunity to help bring our state together."

Medgar Evers was a World War II veteran who fought in Europe and returned to his native Mississippi, where he again faced harsh segregation. As the first field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP beginning in 1954, he led voter registration drives and boycotts to push for racial equality. He also investigated lynchings, beatings and other violence that black residents suffered at the hands of white segregationists.

Myrlie Evers was national chairwoman of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998. After living in Mississippi in recent years, she has moved back to California, where she raised her three children after their father's death.

The federal government will take over the ranch-style home from Tougaloo College, which supports the change, bringing money for preservation. The Evers family donated the home to historically black Tougaloo in 1993, and it is open by appointment for tours. The three-bedroom home stood vacant for years after the family moved away in the 1960s, and it was restored in the mid-1990s. It is now filled with midcentury furniture, and one of the bedrooms has a display about the family's history. A bullet hole is visible in a kitchen wall.

The National Park Service named the home a national historic landmark in 2016.

___

Associated Press reporter Errin Haines Whack contributed to this report. Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus .

FILE - In this Oct. 18, 2018 file photograph, U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi's Second Congressional District, speaks in Tougaloo, Miss. Mississippi's white Republican governor and the state's only black Democratic congressman are feuding over who should get credit for the home of a slain civil rights leader becoming a national monument. Thompson says he has worked on the issue for 16 years. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)EVERETT, Wash. (AP) - The trial has been delayed for a Washington state trucker accused of killing a young Canadian couple in 1987.

The Daily Herald reports a judge Thursday rescheduled the trial of 55-year-old William Earl Talbott II for June 3. It was previously scheduled to begin next month.

The SeaTac man has pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder charges in the killings of 18-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg and 20-year-old Jay Cook.

Defense attorneys requested more time, saying they haven't yet received lab notes and they plan to travel to Canada to talk to witnesses.

The young couple was killed on a road trip from their hometown of Saanich, British Columbia, to Seattle.

Authorities say information from public genealogy websites led to identifying Talbott as a suspect.

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Information from: The Daily Herald, http://www.heraldnet.comWASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump's first veto was more than a milestone. It signals a new era of ever perilous relations between the executive and legislative branches of government.

Trump's agenda was stymied even before his party lost unified control of Washington at the start of the year and he has grown increasingly frustrated by his dealings with Congress, believing little of substance will get done by the end of his first term and feeling just as pessimistic about the second, according to White House aides, campaign staffers and outside allies.

Republicans in Congress are demonstrating new willingness to part ways with the president. On the Senate vote Thursday rejecting the president's national emergency declaration to get border wall funding, 12 Republicans joined Democrats in voting against Trump.

The 59-41 vote against Trump's declaration was just the latest blow as tensions flare on multiple fronts.

Trump tweeted one word after the vote: "VETO!" And he eagerly flexed that muscle on Friday for the first time, hoping to demonstrate resolve on fulfilling his 2016 campaign pledge.

GOP senators had repeatedly agitated for compromise deals that would give them political cover to support Trump despite their concerns that he was improperly circumventing Congress. But the president was never convinced that any of the proposals ensured the resolution would be defeated, said a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking.

In this March 15, 2019, photo, President Donald Trump speaks about border security in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Washington. Trump's veto of a bipartisan congressional resolution rejecting his border emergency declaration is more than a milestone. It signals a new era of tenser relations between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

A last-ditch trip to the White House by a group of senators Wednesday night only irritated Trump, who felt they were offering little in the way of new solutions.

As the vote neared, Trump repeatedly made clear that it was about party fealty and border security and suggested that voting against him could be perilous.

"It's going to be a great election issue," he predicted.

Looking past the veto, Trump's plans for future collaboration with Congress appear limited. With the exception of pushing for approval of his trade deal with Mexico and Canada, the president and his allies see little benefit for investing more political capital on Capitol Hill. Trump ran against Washington in 2016, and he is fully expected to do so again.

Trump once declared that "I alone can fix it." But that was before getting hamstrung in Washington, and he is now exploring opportunities to pursue executive action to work around lawmakers, as he did with his emergency declaration on the border wall. He is directing aides to find other areas where he can act - or at least be perceived as acting - without Congress, including infrastructure and drug prices.

Trump made his intentions clear recently as he assessed that Democrats would rather investigate him than cooperate on policy: "Basically, they've started the campaign. So the campaign begins."

His dealings with Congress were inconsistent even when Republicans controlled both chambers, and he has made few overtures to Democrats since they won control of the House.

Trump initially predicted he could work across the aisle, but that sentiment cooled after the bitter government shutdown fight and in the face of mounting investigations. His frustrations are evidence of the difficulty that the Washington neophyte and former business executive has had with the process of lawmaking, and the challenges yet to come.

The White House argues there are still opportunities for collaboration, listing ratification of the Canada-Mexico trade pact as a priority. But passage is anything but assured.

Trump's ire has been directed at both parties for some time, aides said. He was upset with the Republicans' performance during the recent congressional hearing featuring his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, telling allies that he was not impressed with their questioning.

Trump's budget proposal this past week was viewed as a shot at Democrats, with its proposals to increase money for the border wall and cut to social safety net programs. The plan, which had little in the way of new or bipartisan ideas, was declared dead on arrival by Democratic House leaders.

Further stoking tensions, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., invited NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to address an upcoming joint meeting of Congress, in what was widely seen as a rebuke of Trump's criticism of the trans-Atlantic alliance. The invitation was backed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and followed votes earlier this year in which Republicans voiced opposition to Trump's plans to draw down U.S. troops in Syria and Afghanistan.

Presidential complaints about Congress - and efforts to find a workaround - are nothing new.

President Barack Obama in 2014 resorted to what became known as his "pen and phone" strategy.

"I've got a pen to take executive actions where Congress won't, and I've got a telephone to rally folks around the country on this mission," he said.

Obama's strategy yielded years of executive orders and regulatory action, but many proved ephemeral when Trump took office and started unwinding them.

President Donald Trump looks at notes as he speaks about border security in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Washington. Trump issued the first veto of his presidency, overruling Congress to protect his emergency declaration for border wall funding. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)WASHINGTON (AP) - Chinese bombers. Chinese hypersonic missiles. Chinese cyberattacks. Chinese anti-satellite weapons.

To a remarkable degree, the 2020 Pentagon budget proposal is shaped by national security threats that acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has summarized in three words: "China, China, China."

The U.S. is still fighting small wars against Islamic extremists, and Russia remains a serious concern, but Shanahan seeks to shift the military's main focus to what he considers the more pressing security problem of a rapidly growing Chinese military.

This theme, which Shanahan outlined Thursday in presenting the administration's proposed 2020 defense budget to the Senate Armed Services Committee, is competing for attention with narrower, more immediate problems such as President Donald Trump's effort to use the military to build a border wall.

The hearing, for example, spent more time on the wall and prospects for using military funds to build parts of it than on any aspect of foreign policy, including the conflict in Syria or military competition with China, Russia or North Korea.

Shanahan is hardly the first defense chief to worry about China. Several predecessors pursued what the Obama administration called a "pivot" to the Pacific, with China in mind. But Shanahan sees it as an increasingly urgent problem that exceeds traditional measures of military strength and transcends partisan priorities.

In this March 14, 2019, photo, acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan goes before the Senate Armed Services Committee to discuss the Department of Defense budget, on Capitol Hill in Washington. To a remarkable degree, the Pentagon's new budget proposal is shaped by national security threats that Shanahan has summarized in three words: "China, China, China." (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

"We've been ignoring the problem for too long," Shanahan told a senator.

"China is aggressively modernizing its military, systematically stealing science and technology, and seeking military advantage through a strategy of military-civil fusion," he wrote in prepared testimony to the committee, which is considering a $718 billion Pentagon budget designed in part to counter China's momentum.

The $25 billion the Pentagon is proposing to spend on nuclear weapons in 2020, for example, is meant in part to stay ahead of China's nuclear arsenal, which is much smaller than America's but growing. Shanahan said China is developing a nuclear-capable long-range bomber that, if successful, would enable China to join the United States and Russia as the only nations with air-, sea- and land-based nuclear weapons.

Shanahan ticked off a list of other Chinese advancements - hypersonic missiles against which the U.S. has limited defenses; space launches and other space efforts that could enable it to fight wars in space; "systematically stealing" of U.S. and allied technology, and militarizing land features in the South China Sea.

Bonnie S. Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the U.S. has been lacking effective strategies for competing with China on a broad scale.

"It is overdue," she said of the Shanahan focus. "We have been somewhat slow in catching up" in such areas as denying China its regional ambitions, including efforts to fully control the South China Sea, which is contested by several other countries.

Some defense analysts think Shanahan and the Pentagon have inflated the China threat.

"I do think it's worth asking what exactly is threatening about China's behavior," said Christopher Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He doesn't discount China as a security issue, including in the South China Sea, but doubts the U.S. military is the institution best suited to deal with such non-military problems as cyber intrusions into American commercial networks.

In Preble's view, competition with the Chinese is not mainly military. "I still don't believe the nature of the threat is quite as grave as we're led to believe" by the Pentagon, he said. "They tend to exaggerate the nature of the threat today."

In his previous role as deputy defense secretary, Shanahan and President Donald Trump's first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, crafted a national defense strategy that put China at the top of the list of problems.

"As China continues its economic and military ascendance, asserting power through an all-of-nation long-term strategy, it will continue to pursue a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future," that strategy document says.

That explains in part why the U.S. is spending billions more on space, including means of defending satellites against potential Chinese attack, and on building hypersonic missiles to stay ahead of Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons development.

It also explains some of the thinking behind preparing for an early retirement of the USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier, a strategy that views carriers as a less relevant asset in a future armed conflict involving China.

This concern about countering China has permeated the entire U.S. military. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, head of U.S. Africa Command, said last month that dozens of African heads of state were invited to Beijing last fall to consider billions in Chinese loans and grants, and that China is building thousands of miles of railroads in Africa, mostly linked to Chinese mineral extraction operations.

"They're heavily invested and heavily involved" in Africa, he said.

The top U.S. commander in Europe told Congress this week that China also is making inroads in Europe.

"China is looking to secure access to strategic geographic locations and economic sectors through financial stakes in ports, airlines, hotels, and utility providers, while providing a source of capital for struggling European economies," Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti said.NEW YORK (AP) - President Donald Trump played down any threat posed by racist white nationalism 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, When asked whether he thought it was a rising threat around the world, he responded, "I don't really."

"I think it's 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 that's the case. I don't know enough about it yet. But it's 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 gunman's reference to him, Trump professed ignorance.

"I didn't see it. I didn't see it," he said. "But I think it's a horrible event ... a horrible, disgraceful thing and a horrible act."

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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 Trump's 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 O'Rourke, 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.

"It's 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 House's 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."

Trump's 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BAGHOUZ, Syria (AP) - War is personal. And in Syria, after eight years of a grinding conflict, there are as many stories of loss, dispossession and desperate hope as there are people.

What started as peaceful protests in 2011 asking for government change turned into one of the cruelest modern wars and left a trail of broken lives among the country's pre-war population of 23 million. Now half are displaced, nearly half a million dead and many live with permanent scars or have joined militias.

The years of war have left their mark on Dia Hassakeh's 45-year old face. The Arab fighter in the Kurdish-led U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces has seen his family suffer on the conflict's many fronts.

In the early days of the conflict, two of his brothers were wounded fighting in the government military against the armed opposition. In November, another brother was killed by the Islamic State group. Now Dia is battling the militants at IS' last holdout, a speck of territory along the Euphrates River near the Iraqi border called Baghouz.

"As Syrians, every citizen has paid the price," he said, speaking just outside Baghouz. He took the name of his hometown Hassakeh as a nom de guerre when he joined the SDF.

While the Islamic State group's territorial defeat will close one bloody chapter, Syria is still wracked by conflict on the eighth anniversary of its long-running civil war.

In this Feb. 18, 2019 photo, Dia Hassakeh, 45, a fighter in the Kurdish-led U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, looks out of a building in Baghouz, Syria. Eight years of war have left their mark on Dia. In the early days of the conflict, two of his brothers were wounded fighting in the government military against the armed opposition. In November, another brother was killed by the Islamic State group. Now Dia is battling the militants at IS' last holdout, a speck of territory along the Euphrates River near the Iraqi border called Baghouz. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

Syrian President Bashar Assad's government appears to have won the war against the insurgency trying to topple him. But much of the country is out of Assad's hands. The northeast and east, wrested from IS, is largely held by the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces. But their fate as well is uncertain. Though President Donald Trump announced he would withdraw American troops, the U.S. is apparently keeping a small force, hoping to encourage the Europeans to strengthen their presence to protect its Kurdish allies from their nemesis Turkey, and counter Iran's expansion in the region.

Militants are still a potent force. The Islamic State group has planted the seeds to wage an insurgency. The northwestern province of Idlib - an opposition stronghold throughout the war - is home to other jihadists as radical as IS. Nearly 3 million Syrians live in the province, most displaced from other parts of Syria that fell under government control. A Turkish-Russian truce that averted a government assault on Idlib and took pressure off Assad is fraying, threatening new bloodshed.

Assad remains hostage to his massive need for cash to rebuild and his reliance on his allies, Russia and Iran, which are pursuing their own interests. Moscow wants to keep access to the Mediterranean and a position to challenge the West; Tehran is keeping an array of militias in Syria to preserve its domain of influence stretching from Iraq to Lebanon.

And public opposition is not extinguished.

Like Groundhog Day, protesters in southern Syria took to the streets of Daraa, the city where the 2011 anti-government rallies first erupted and where the government only finally managed to re-establish control last year. Men and children this month held day and night protests chanting against Assad after authorities planned to erect a statute for his late father.

"The people want a new president," protesters chanted, a 2019 version of "the people want to bring down the regime."

Within this maze of conflicts, players and interests, Syrians try to find their way.

Dia never liked the anti-government protests. When they erupted in 2011, he left Hassakeh - in the northeast of Syria - to live in northern Iraq. There, while two of his brothers fought in the military against the rebels, he ran a home appliances business and sat out the war - until the war caught up with him unexpectedly. The Islamic State group, feeding off Syria's chaos, swept over much of Syria and northern Iraq. Dia returned to Hassakeh and found the militants closing in on his home province.

He volunteered to fight against them to "protect our family, land and country," he said.

He blames outsiders- militants and superpowers - for breaking up his country. Having fought in the SDF and served in his own government's army before the revolts, he still believes the country will be put back together and heal.

"Any country that goes through this needs time."

The irony is he is fighting in a force backed by a foreign power - the U.S. - and led by Kurds determined to stay as separate as possible.

Sefqan, a 29-year old Kurd who commands an SDF unit of more than 200 special forces fighters, has no issues with his country breaking up and the central government losing authority.

"The Baath regime is no good for us Kurds," he said, referring to Assad's ruling party. "Our rights were lost in Syria ... Our war is to get out from under of this injustice." Sefqan fought against IS and prior to that other jihadist groups who threatened his hometown, Amuda, in Hassakeh province.

Kurds, who made of 10 percent of Syria's pre-war population, have long complained of discrimination and oppression by Damascus. Sefqan belongs to an even more disenfranchised community - he's one of thousands of Kurds who are stateless, because in the past they either failed to convince authorities they were Syrian residents or didn't take part in censuses in the 1960s and 1970s. Referred to as the "foreigners of Hassakeh," ''the muted" or "the concealed," they were long deprived of basic rights like education and health services and were barred even from moving from province to province.

"Any group has a state. Why do we the Kurds not have one? To go to schools. To speak our language. To have an airport and travel. I can't even go to Damascus," said Sefqan, who spoke on condition he be identified only by his first name in accordance with SDF rules for its commanders.

Now Sefqan and many of his people enjoy new found confidence and clout, with the Kurdish-led administration controlling northeastern Syria and bolstered by natural resources and good relations with the U.S-led coalition.

Sefqan and other Kurds dream of emulating the extensive autonomy enjoyed by Iraq's northern Kurdistan. He said the Kurdish-led administration has made strides in giving real representation to the community and praised its efforts to introduce democracy.

"If they continue this, it will be good," he said - though with a note of wariness. Rights groups blame the SDF and the administration for arbitrarily detaining critics, forcing military conscription and controlling what are meant to be representative political bodies.

The SDF has emerged as the most organized non-state actor from the war. It and its political arm have successfully established facts on the ground that will likely be hard to reverse - such as teaching the Kurdish language in schools and setting up parallel governing institutions and their own economic infrastructure.

Ali Ahmed al-Hassan, a 29-year-old Arab, works trucking crude oil from one of the richest oil fields controlled by the SDF. It is a profitable, but highly risky business, because remnants of IS have threatened those helping the "Kurdish economy."

Al-Hassan lived for four years under IS rule after the militants took over his home province of Deir el-Zour. Two of his brothers died, one as a bystander when airstrikes hit an IS position and another when he was caught in a cross fire.

"No one has been spared. My two brothers. My two nephews. And about six cousins. All were killed in the war," he said.

Deir el-Zour has been freed of IS, but it's still insecure. He has to be home before dark because of IS sleeper cells lurking in the countryside.

"We need more than a year" to regain security, he said.

IS has left its mark. The locals "have become foreigners. Many of the (foreign militants) married locals. Our children have become Chinese," he said - his term for the many Central Asian fighters who joined IS in Syria.

Dia believes the militants' presence is a pretext for foreign powers to meddle in Syria.

"Everyone is responsible for the creation of Daesh," he said using the Arabic acronym for IS. "It was created and put on a pedestal to ruin this country, like the Arab spring. "

"All my family has taken part in this war. Five of us. Two were injured - one lost a leg, and another carries a cane - and one was killed. There is only me and another left," he said. "So long as we have life and our hearts are beating, we will fight to liberate this country."

FILE -- In this Oct. 8, 2017 file photo provided by the Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets, Civil Defense workers and Syrian citizens gather after an airstrike hit a market in Maaret al-Numan in southern Idlib, Syria. As Syria is marking the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, the violence has left a trail of broken lives. What started as peaceful protests in 2011 asking for government change turned into one of the cruelest modern wars. (Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets via AP, File)

This Tuesday, March 12, 2019 photo, Syrian displaced children play outside their family tents at a Syrian refugee camp in the town of Bar Elias, in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. As Syria is marks the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, the violence has left a trail of broken lives. What started as peaceful protests in 2011 asking for government change turned into one of the cruelest modern wars. Among the country's pre-war 23 million population, now half are displaced, nearly half a million dead. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

FILE -- In this Jan. 28, 2018 file photo, Turkish troops take control of Bursayah hill, which separates the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin from the Turkey-controlled town of Azaz, Syria. As Syria is marks the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, militants are still a potent force. The northwestern province of Idlib -- an opposition stronghold throughout the war -- is home to other jihadists as radical as Islamic State. A Turkish-Russian truce that averted a government assault on Idlib and took pressure off Assad is fraying, threatening new bloodshed. (DHA-Depo Photos via AP, File)

FILE -- In this July 26, 2017 file photo, Syrians watch a U.S. armored convoy pass on a road to Raqqa, in northeast Syria. As Syria marks the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, the violence has left a trail of broken lives. What started as peaceful protests in 2011 asking for government change turned into one of the cruelest modern wars. Among the country's pre-war 23 million population, now half are displaced, nearly half a million dead. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)

FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2012 file photo, people burn portraits of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad during a demonstration on the outskirts of Idlib, northern Syria. As Syria marks the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, the violence has left a trail of broken lives. What started as peaceful protests in 2011 asking for government change turned into one of the cruelest modern wars. Among the country's pre-war 23 million population, now half are displaced, nearly half a million dead. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)

FILE - In this Nov. 14, 2012 file photo, fighters of "The Beloved of Allah," militia head towards fighting with government forces on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria. As Syria marks the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, the violence has left a trail of broken lives. What started as peaceful protests in 2011 asking for government change turned into one of the cruelest modern wars. Militants are still a potent force. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, File)

ADVANCE FOR PUBLICATION ON FRIDAY, MAR. 15, AND THEREAFTER - FILE - In this Dec 12, 2012 file photo, Kurdish opposition fighters man a tank stolen from the Syrian Army, in Fafeen village, north of Aleppo province, Syria. As Syria marks the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, the violence has left a trail of broken lives. Syrian President Bashar Assad's government appears to have won the war against the insurgency trying to topple him. But much of the north and east, wrested from Islamic State militants, is held by the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces. (AP Photo/Manu Brabo, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 5, 2016 file photo, a Syrian army soldier places a Syrian national flag during a battle with rebel fighters at the Ramouseh front line, east of Aleppo, Syria. As Syria marks the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, the violence has left a trail of broken lives. Syrian President Bashar Assad's government appears to have won the war against the insurgency trying to topple him. While the Islamic State group's territorial defeat will close one of its bloody conflicts, others are still burning. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

FILE - In this July 16, 2018 file photo, a man rides his bicycle through rubble in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, in Damascus, Syria. As Syria marks the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, the violence has left a trail of broken lives. What started as peaceful protests in 2011 asking for government change turned into one of the cruelest modern wars. Among the country's pre-war 23 million population, now half are displaced, nearly half a million dead. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File)

FILE - In this Feb. 22, 2019 file photo, men walk to be screened after being evacuated out of the last territory held by Islamic State militants, near Baghouz, eastern Syria. As Syria marks the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, the violence has left a trail of broken lives. Syrian President Bashar Assad's government appears to have won the war against the insurgency trying to topple him. While the Islamic State group's territorial defeat will close one of its bloody conflicts, others are still burning. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)

FILE - In this Nov. 20, 2013 file photo, Syrian civilians look for their belongings after clashes between opposition fighters and Syrian soldiers loyal to Syria's President Bashar Assad, in Hejeira, near Damascus, Syria. As Syria is marking the eighth anniversary of its grinding war, the violence has left a trail of broken lives. What started as peaceful protests in 2011 asking for government change turned into one of the cruelest modern wars. Among the country's pre-war 23 million population, now half are displaced, nearly half a million dead. (AP Photo/Jaber al-Helo, File)

FILE - In this Feb. 17, 2019 file photo, Dia Hassakeh, 45, a fighter in the Kurdish-led U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, looks out of a building in Baghouz, Syria. Eight years of war have left their mark on him. In the early days of the conflict, two of his brothers were wounded fighting in the government military against the armed opposition. In November, another brother was killed by the Islamic State group. Now Dia is battling the militants at IS' last holdout, a speck of territory along the Euphrates River near the Iraqi border called Baghouz. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)DEHRADUN, India (AP) - Three half-centuries by top-order batsmen earned Afghanistan a vital 142-run first innings lead and control of the one-off test against Ireland on Saturday.

Ireland lost captain William Porterfield for zero during a tricky last hour of play on the second day before reaching 22-1 at stumps. It still trails by 120 runs and needs to bat much better than its first-innings 172 against Afghanistan's spin attack.

Earlier, Rahmat Shah was agonizingly close to hitting a first test century for his country, finishing with a 98 off 214 balls, while captain Asghar Afghan (67) and Hashmatullah Shahidi (61) also contributed before Afghanistan was bowled out for 314.

Afghanistan was eyeing a much bigger lead before Ireland hit back and claimed the last five wickets for 87 runs in the last session.

Earlier, Shah and Shahidi featured in a century stand and denied Ireland success in the first session after it resumed the second day on 90-2.

Both batsmen played solidly against both spin and seam despite Ireland conceding only 20 runs in the first hour.

Shah completed his maiden fifty off 121 balls by pulling the first ball of left-arm James Cameron-Dow (2-94) for his ninth four as Afghanistan scored 47 runs in the second hour and moved to 157-2 by lunch.

Ireland had to wait nearly an hour after lunch before it finally broke the 130-run partnership when off-spinner Andy McBrine (2-77) had Shahidi lbw off a full-pitched delivery.

Tim Murtagh (1-33), who scored a half century in first innings while batting at No. 11, then struck immediately with the second new ball when Shah played on to the fast bowler.

Shah couldn't believe he missed making history for Afghanistan and stood at the crease with his head down before walking back to the dressing room in disappointment.

Ireland seamer Stuart Thompson (3-28) then dealt another blow in the next over when all-rounder Mohammad Nabi was dismissed without scoring while attempting a loose drive.

But Afghanistan managed to bat around the tailenders by smashing four sixes and six boundaries in his 92-ball knock and took the team's total beyond the 300-run mark. Thompson returned and wrapped up the innings by claiming two wickets in successive overs as Afghanistan was caught behind and Wafadar Momand was caught in the slip.

Both teams are competing in only their second test match since gaining test status in 2017. Last year, Afghanistan lost its debut test against India, and Ireland was beaten by Pakistan in its inaugural test.

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More AP sports: https://apnews.com/apf-sports and https://twitter.com/AP_SportsNEW YORK (AP) - A new, troublesome topic hovered over the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York this year: Britain's failed Brexit deal with the European Union that could squeeze Ireland's economy.

But nothing could put a damper on the largest American celebration of Irish heritage on Saturday, with tens of thousands of marchers following a painted green line up Fifth Avenue for the six-hour procession.

Kevin Coughlan, a 27-year-old spectator wearing pants with four-leaf clovers, captured both the New York celebration and the political near-catastrophe overseas, where he still has plenty of family - in Ireland.

"I've always been so proud to be an Irish-American, and that's what today is about; it's more than just one big party, it's about celebrating our freedom," said the Hoboken, New Jersey, resident.

His mood darkened when he turned to Brexit, which "is definitely something we're all worried about, especially my family," he said. "I mean, we're all sort of just waiting for the shoe to drop to see what this means for the Irish economy."

But, he added, "We can get through anything; we survived a potato famine."

Sharon Keely, left, of Dublin, watches as participants march up Fifth Avenue during the St. Patrick's Day Parade, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

This year's official parade theme was immigration, with Brian O'Dwyer, an immigration attorney and activist as the grand marshal. He's a co-founder of the Emerald Isle Immigration Center in Queens that helps clients including a group of Latino immigrants that joined O'Dwyer on Saturday.

Through its history, dating back more than 250 years, the New York parade has often had a political element. In the 1970s and 1980s, as sectarian violence flared in Northern Ireland, there were controversies over the inclusion of groups supporting the militant wing of the Irish Republican Army. A banner reading "England get out of Ireland" has flown in the parade since the 1940s.

And for more than two decades, LGBTQ groups were officially banned from marching, until 2015, when marchers under a banner linked to NBC were first allowed in, opening the doors to other LGBTQ participants since then.

This year's march is taking place amid a new set of questions about relations between the United Kingdom and Ireland.

"When the Irish take to the streets this Saturday for the 258th St. Patrick's Day Parade, our thoughts will take us far beyond the festivities on Fifth Ave. to Washington, D.C., and to the British Parliament in London," O'Dwyer wrote in an editorial in the Daily News.

British lawmakers are struggling to find a way to exit the European Union without disrupting the two-decade old peace accords that created an open border between the Republic of Ireland, which is in the E.U., and Northern Ireland, which is in the U.K.

This week, with a March 29 deadline looming, British lawmakers voted to seek to delay Brexit for at least three months. But the possibility exists that the line between the two parts of Ireland, which has been unguarded for 20 years, will once again become hardened with vehicle checkpoints, with trade rules and tariffs in force.

"It is pretty ironic that we're celebrating Irish freedom and unity over here, while they're debating the Irish border over there," said paradegoer Chris Mahan, 56. "All of my cousins are still back in the old country, as we call it. They still don't know what Brexit will mean for them, for their economy and yea, even their unity as a nation."

But for most at Saturday's parade, the political debate over the future in Ireland took a back seat to the pageantry.

"For me, today is so important because after all the suffering and all the tragedy, we came through. We're here and we're healthy," Carol McNiff said, a third generation Irish-American.

"St. Patrick's Day is about memories, for me. A proud heritage," said Cathy Dwyer, 61. The Queens resident has been coming to the parade since she was a young girl. "I'd say my fondest memory was watching my husband march in this parade. And then watching my kids march. One of the proudest moments of my life."

Popular marching groups include the pipes and drums corps for the Emerald Societies at the New York police and fire departments and the 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry Regiment, of the New York Army National Guard, which has led off the parade since 1851.

Elsewhere in the U.S., the largest St. Patrick's Day parade in the South was held in Savannah, Georgia. Started by Irish immigrants to Georgia's oldest city 195 years ago, the March parade has ballooned into a sprawling street party that's the No. 1 tourist draw for Savannah.

"Savannah's like a bad drug," said Bruce Souers, a Savannah native who's been attending parades for five decades, as he sipped Jameson Irish whiskey from a plastic cup. "Once it's in your blood, you can't get rid of it."

Over in Chicago, the river there was dyed green, a tradition that dates back decades. Thousands line up to watch members of Chicago Plumbers Local 130 dump and spray the dye into the river from boats.

Jennifer McCaffrey, bottom left, and daughter Anastasia, 2, watch the participants march up Fifth Avenue during the St. Patrick's Day Parade, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

A marching band marches up Fifth Avenue during the St. Patrick's Day Parade, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

An Irish dance group rehearses ahead of participating in the St. Patrick's Day Parade, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Participants march up Fifth Avenue past Trump tower during the St. Patrick's Day Parade, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)SUNDERLAND, England (AP) - With Britain's departure from the European Union likely to be put on hold, some Brexit supporters fear their dream is dying.

But they aren't giving up without a fight - or at least, a long walk.

Hard-core Brexiteers led by former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage set out Saturday on a two-week "Leave Means Leave" march between northeast England and London, accusing politicians of "betraying the will of the people."

They plan to finish at Parliament in London on March 29, the day the U.K. was supposed to leave. That deadline now looks unlikely. With British politicians deadlocked over departure terms, lawmakers voted Thursday to seek to delay Brexit until at least June 30.

"If you have seen what's happening in Parliament this week, we may well not be leaving the EU," said Brexit figurehead Farage, who joined the protest dressed for a country walk in tweed cap and Barbour jacket. "If politicians think they can walk all over us, we're going to march back and tell them they can't."

For the 100-200 Brexit believers who showed up to march on a wet, cold day, the gridlock in Parliament is confirmation that Britain's politicians have no intention on cutting the country's ties with the 28-nation EU.

Protestors walk along the coastline at the start of the first leg of March to Leave the European Union, in Sunderland, England, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Hard-core Brexiteers led by former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage set out on a two-week "Leave Means Leave" march between northern England and London, accusing politicians of "betraying the will of the people." (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

"People now are just fed up with the whole situation and want to get out," said John Harrington, who traveled from Southend on England's south coast. "Now with it being prolonged, it could just go on forever."

Like many things connected to Britain's departure from the EU, the Brexit march didn't go completely to plan. Chaos reigned as protesters set off in a cold rain down a muddy North Sea coast path in Sunderland, a former shipbuilding city 270 miles (435 kilometers) north of London.

The starting point was changed at the last minute for what organizers said were security reasons. Even so, a small band of pro-EU protesters caught up with the Brexiteers, singing a ditty telling them where they could shove Brexit. The marchers responded with bad-tempered shouts of "traitors" and "losers."

"I don't think we're marching," Farage said as he was propelled along by a phalanx of security guards. "We're sort of shuffling."

Farage doesn't plan to walk the entire route. Those who do will not cover the whole distance on foot - some legs will be covered by vehicle.

The marchers plan to travel through pro-Brexit heartlands starting in Sunderland, which voted by 61 percent to 39 percent in June 2016 to leave the EU.

Many here stand by that decision, despite warnings that Brexit could damage rather than help the local economy.

Japanese automaker Nissan employs 6,700 people at its plant in the city, and supports thousands more jobs through its supply chain. In February, Nissan canceled plans to build a new SUV in Sunderland. That reversed a decision announced two years ago after Prime Minister Theresa May's government offered some 60 million pounds in incentives. Last week, Nissan's Infiniti division announced it would move production of two models from Sunderland, in another blow to jobs there.

The company says the decisions are not directly related to Brexit, but the auto industry has warned that a no-deal departure would destroy the complex international supply chains that carmakers rely on.

Jim Kerr, 60, does not believe the economic warnings. He said Sunderland has long been ignored by policymakers, whether in London or Brussels.

"In the northeast, many of our industries have been closed," he said. "We lost our coal industry, our shipbuilding industry, our glassmaking industry. All these things are gone.

"No one (elsewhere) worried about it - people in London didn't worry about it, people in other parts of the country didn't worry about it."

Almost three years after Britain voted to leave the EU, uncertainty reigns about when the country will leave, and on what terms.

A withdrawal agreement struck between May's government and the bloc has twice been rejected by Parliament, which has also said it doesn't want to leave the EU without a deal. Amid the deadlock, Parliament voted this week to request an extension. Meanwhile, May plans a third-time-lucky vote on her Brexit deal next week.

Delaying Brexit would require approval from all 27 remaining EU nations, who are fed up with the political bickering in London. They say they will only grant an extension if Britain has a solid plan for what to do with the extra time.

Pro-Brexit British politicians including Farage, meanwhile, have urged populist European governments such as Italy's to veto an extension, leaving Britain to crash out of the bloc without a deal.

U.K. businesses warn that a no-deal Brexit could cause huge upheaval, with customs checks causing gridlock at ports, new tariffs triggering sudden price increases and red tape for everyone from truckers to tourists.

But many Brexiteers here shrug off such worries. For them, Brexit can't come soon enough, and the split from Europe can't be too complete, and compromise with the EU is anathema.

"We voted to leave," said 50-year-old marcher James Murphy. "Not leave with a deal - just leave."

Not everyone in Sunderland agrees.

Social care worker Mary Ann McDonald said that during the 2016 referendum, "we weren't voting for a plan. It was just the idea, and that hasn't worked out."

She would prefer to remain. But she too is exasperated by the political paralysis in London.

"I think it's become a circus," she said. The prospect of delay "is a relief for me personally, but I just think, What now?"

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Follow AP's full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit

A pro European Union demonstrator releases flares to protest the start of the first leg of March to Leave the European Union, in Sunderland, England, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Hard-core Brexiteers led by former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage are setting out on a two-week "Leave Means Leave" march between northern England and London, accusing politicians of "betraying the will of the people." (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Protestors walk along the coastline at the start of the first leg of March to Leave the European Union, in Sunderland, England, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Hard-core Brexiteers led by former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage set out on a two-week "Leave Means Leave" march between northern England and London, accusing politicians of "betraying the will of the people." (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Former UKIP party leader Nigel Farage joins the start of the first leg of March to Leave the European Union, in Sunderland, England, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Hard-core Brexiteers led by former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage set out on a two-week "Leave Means Leave" march between northern England and London, accusing politicians of "betraying the will of the people." (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Former UKIP party leader Nigel Farage, centre, joins the start of the first leg of March to Leave the European Union, in Sunderland, England, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Hard-core Brexiteers led by former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage set out on a two-week "Leave Means Leave" march between northern England and London, accusing politicians of "betraying the will of the people." (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Former UKIP party leader Nigel Farage joins the start of the first leg of March to Leave the European Union, in Sunderland, England, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Hard-core Brexiteers led by former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage set out on a two-week "Leave Means Leave" march between northern England and London, accusing politicians of "betraying the will of the people." (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Former UKIP party leader Nigel Farage joins the start of the first leg of March to Leave the European Union, in Sunderland, England, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Hard-core Brexiteers led by former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage set out on a two-week "Leave Means Leave" march between northern England and London, accusing politicians of "betraying the will of the people." (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)BERLIN (AP) - A senior European Union official is floating the possibility of a two-step delay to Britain's departure from the bloc, currently scheduled for March 29.

Britain is expected to seek a short delay if lawmakers finally pass a twice-rejected EU withdrawal deal, or a longer one if they don't.

European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans told Germany's Funke newspaper group in comments published Saturday that Britain must know why it needs a delay. He added that "as long as this isn't clear, Brexit can only be delayed for a few weeks, solely to avoid a chaotic withdrawal March 29."

Timmermans said: "During this time, the British must tell us what they want: new elections? A new referendum? Only after that can we talk about a several-month extension."

European Union's Frans Timmermans, first vice president of the Commission, center, delivers his speech with European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, at right, and Former U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) leader and member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage, far left, during a session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. British lawmakers rejected May's Brexit deal in a 391-242 vote on Tuesday night. Parliament will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU without a deal. (AP Photo/Jean Francois Badias)

FILE - In this Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019 file photo the flag of the European Union and the British national flag are flown on poles during a demonstration by remain in the EU outside spporters the Palace of Westminster in London. Britain's love-hate relationship with the rest of Europe goes back decades, but the Brexit crisis gripping it today stems from dramatic January 2013 speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he promised an "in or out" referendum. Britain voted to leave, but negotiations between Britain and the EU have been slow and at times acrimonious, and the 585-page withdrawal agreement produced after two years of talks has been rejected twice by Britain's divided Parliament. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)GITHUNGURI, Kenya (AP) - The Rev. George Kageche Mukua was coming home. The Catholic priest had last seen his Kenyan family a year ago, when he boarded a plane for Europe.

His return ended in a thunderous impact in a rural field as Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 faltered shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa and crashed. It struck so hard that the plane appeared to slip right into the ground.

Mukua was one of 32 Kenyans killed, a numbingly high toll on a flight carrying people from 35 countries. No nation lost more.

Like many families now grieving, Mukua's relatives find themselves at a loss in more ways than one. They say they have heard almost nothing from authorities.

They and others around the world are in a state of suspended grief.

Funeral arrangements for the 40-year-old priest are on hold, Mukua's sister, Goreti Kimani, told The Associated Press.

In this photo taken Thursday, March 14, 2019, Father Michael Wa Mugi lights a candle and signs the book of condolence next to a photo of Catholic priest Rev. George Mukua Kageche, 40, who died in the recent plane crash in Ethiopia, at a prayers ceremony held at his home in Githunguri, near Nairobi, in Kenya. The Rev. George Kageche Mukua was one of 32 Kenyans killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 faltered shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa and crashed, a numbingly high toll on a flight carrying people from 35 countries. (AP Photo/Sayyid Abdul Azim)

"There has been no family outreach by any agency involved in counselling," she said, making it even harder for the family to cope.

Unlike neighboring Ethiopia, Kenya's government has not ordered any flags to fly at half-staff or declared a national day of mourning. Apart from President Uhuru Kenyatta's message of condolences to relatives, there has been no government initiative to pay tribute to the dead.

Public shock and sadness soon faded away. With unnatural deaths frequently making headlines in Kenya, from extremist attacks to ghastly road crashes to natural disasters, some people seem to have become immune to mass deaths and are not moved.

While waiting for closure, Mukua's family fills the time talking longingly of a man who was the peacemaker amid the often-fractious relationships that plague polygamous homes like theirs.

"Father did not know boundaries," Kimani said. "We are losing a friend, you know, a person who is not bothered about barriers. He will be reaching out to you, and he was our symbol of unity."

His loss is especially painful as two other brothers were killed in road crashes in the last three years.

"Personally, I am not planning to heal," Kimani said with a deep sigh, resigned. "I am just planning to move on."

But she couldn't help but ask: "There are so many other flights ... Why that one?"

Mukua had been returning home for his annual leave. He was posted to Rome for missionary work last year, much to his family's delight. Like many Kenyans with a loved one abroad, they had hoped the foreign posting would bring opportunities for siblings and other relatives.

Even before Europe, Mukua had been one for journeys.

While the family remained in their village of tea farms not far outside Kenya's capital, Nairobi, he left for South Africa and spent 10 years training to become a priest. He returned home and was ordained.

He was hardly a year and few months into the priesthood, said the Rev. Father Michael Wa Mugi, who worked with Mukua in his hometown of Githunguri.

"We really loved his kind words during the homilies," Wa Mugi said of his friend. "Father was good, down-to-earth humble, a priest who welcomed all."

George Mukua, a cousin, said he was having problems accepting his death. When a relative called this week asking if he had the latest news about the priest, his hopes quickly rose that he had been found alive.

"I kept on expecting he would tell me he had been found in a hotel or something," George Mukua said.

Instead, the wait continues for the family, and for others who have made the journey to the crash site in Ethiopia or stayed home in mourning.

No one seems to know how long it will take to identify whatever is found of the victims' remains.

On Friday, families and others said the work had finally begun. Some swiped their mouths and handed over DNA for the forensic work that many hope will be the key to end their wait.

___

Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa

In this photo taken Thursday, March 14, 2019, sister Goreti Kimani consoles brother Chira Kageche at a prayers ceremony for their brother Catholic priest Rev. George Mukua Kageche, 40, who died in the plane crash in Ethiopia, held at his home in Githunguri, near Nairobi, in Kenya. The Rev. George Kageche Mukua was one of 32 Kenyans killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 faltered shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa and crashed, a numbingly high toll on a flight carrying people from 35 countries. (AP Photo/Sayyid Abdul Azim)

In this photo taken Thursday, March 14, 2019, women from the area participate in a prayers ceremony for Catholic priest Rev. George Mukua Kageche, 40, who died in the plane crash in Ethiopia, held at his home in Githunguri, near Nairobi, in Kenya. The Rev. George Kageche Mukua was one of 32 Kenyans killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 faltered shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa and crashed, a numbingly high toll on a flight carrying people from 35 countries. (AP Photo/Sayyid Abdul Azim)

In this photo taken Thursday, March 14, 2019, George Mukua, the cousin of Catholic priest Rev. George Mukua Kageche, 40, who died in the plane crash in Ethiopia, points to a photograph of the priest taken in 2006 at his first graduation ceremony, after a prayers ceremony held at his home in Githunguri, near Nairobi, in Kenya. The Rev. George Kageche Mukua was one of 32 Kenyans killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 faltered shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa and crashed, a numbingly high toll on a flight carrying people from 35 countries. (AP Photo/Sayyid Abdul Azim)

In this photo taken Thursday, March 14, 2019, mourners gather for a prayers ceremony for Catholic priest Rev. George Mukua Kageche, 40, who died in the plane crash in Ethiopia, held at his home in Githunguri, near Nairobi, in Kenya. The Rev. George Kageche Mukua was one of 32 Kenyans killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 faltered shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa and crashed, a numbingly high toll on a flight carrying people from 35 countries. (AP Photo/Sayyid Abdul Azim)

In this photo taken Thursday, March 14, 2019, Father Michael Wa Mugi speaks to The Associated Press at a prayers ceremony for Catholic priest Rev. George Mukua Kageche, 40, who died in the recent plane crash in Ethiopia, at his home in Githunguri, near Nairobi, in Kenya. The Rev. George Kageche Mukua was one of 32 Kenyans killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 faltered shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa and crashed, a numbingly high toll on a flight carrying people from 35 countries. (AP Photo/Sayyid Abdul Azim)

In this photo taken Thursday, March 14, 2019, sister Goreti Kimani consoles brother Chira Kageche at a memorial service for their brother, Catholic priest Rev. George Mukua Kageche, 40, who died in the recent plane crash in Ethiopia, in his home town of Githunguri, near Nairobi, in Kenya. The Rev. George Kageche Mukua was one of 32 Kenyans killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 faltered shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa and crashed, a numbingly high toll on a flight carrying people from 35 countries. (AP Photo/Sayyid Abdul Azim)CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP) - When the gunman advanced toward the mosque, killing those in his path, Abdul Aziz didn't hide. Instead, he picked up the first thing he could find, a credit card machine, and ran outside screaming "Come here!"

Aziz, 48, is being hailed as a hero for preventing more deaths during Friday prayers at the Linwood mosque in Christchurch after leading the gunman in a cat-and-mouse chase before scaring him into speeding away in his car.

But Aziz, whose four sons and dozens of others remained in the mosque while he faced off with the gunman, said he thinks it's what anyone would have done.

The gunman killed 49 people after attacking two mosques in the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand's modern history.

The gunman is believed to have killed 41 people at the Al Noor mosque before driving about 5 kilometers (3 miles) across town and attacking the Linwood mosque, where he killed seven more people. One person died later in a hospital.

White supremacist Brenton Tarrant, 28, has been charged with one count of murder in the slayings and a judge said Saturday that it was reasonable to assume more charges would follow.

Abdul Aziz, survivor of mosque shooting speaks to Associated Press during an interview in Christchurch, New Zealand, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Aziz, 48, is being hailed as a hero for preventing more deaths during Friday prayers at the Linwood mosque in Christchurch. The gunman killed 49 people after attacking two mosques in the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand's modern history. Seven were killed at the Linwood mosque. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

Latef Alabi, the Linwood mosque's acting imam, said the death toll would have been far higher at the Linwood mosque if it wasn't for Aziz.

Alabi said he heard a voice outside the mosque at about 1:55 p.m. and stopped the prayer he was leading and peeked out the window. He saw a guy in black military-style gear and a helmet holding a large gun, and assumed it was a police officer. Then he saw two bodies and heard the gunman yelling obscenities.

"I realized this is something else. This is a killer," he said.

He yelled at the congregation of more than 80 to get down. They hesitated. A shot rang out, a window shattered and a body fell, and people began to realize it was for real.

"Then this brother came over. He went after him, and he managed to overpower him, and that's how we were saved," Alabi said, referring to Aziz. "Otherwise, if he managed to come into the mosque, then we would all probably be gone."

Aziz said as he ran outside screaming, he was hoping to distract the attacker. He said the gunman ran back to his car to get another gun, and Aziz hurled the credit card machine at him.

He said he could hear his two youngest sons, aged 11 and 5, urging him to come back inside.

The gunman returned, firing. Aziz said he ran, weaving through cars parked in the driveway, which prevented the gunman from getting a clean shot. Then Aziz spotted a gun the gunman had abandoned and picked it up, pointed it and squeezed the trigger. It was empty.

He said the gunman ran back to the car for a second time, likely to grab yet another weapon.

"He gets into his car and I just got the gun and threw it on his window like an arrow and blasted his window," he said.

The windshield shattered: "That's why he got scared."

He said the gunman was cursing at him, yelling that he was going to kill them all. But he drove away and Aziz said he chased the car down the street to a red light, before it made a U-turn and sped away. Online videos indicate police officers managed to force the car from the road and drag out the suspect soon after.

Originally from Kabul, Afghanistan, Aziz said he left as a refugee when he was a boy and lived for more than 25 years in Australia before moving to New Zealand a couple of years ago.

"I've been to a lot of countries and this is one of the beautiful ones," he said. And, he always thought, a peaceful one as well.

Aziz said he didn't feel fear or much of anything when facing the gunman. It was like he was on autopilot. And he believes that God, that Allah, didn't think it was his time to die.BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP) - The two leading contenders in Slovakia's presidential election will meet in a runoff vote that could give the central European country its first woman president.

Zuzana Caputova was leading with 40.5 percent of the votes with 99 percent of some 6,000 polling stations counted early Sunday, according to Slovakia's Statistics Office.

Running a distant second was Maros Sefcovic, an establishment figure who is the European Commission Vice President, with 18.7 percent support. Because no single candidate won an outright majority, a runoff will be held on March 30.

"I consider it a big call for a change," said Caputova, a 45-year-old environmental and anti-corruption activist who is in favor of gay rights and opposes a ban on abortion in the conservative Roman Catholic nation of 5.4 million people.

A pro-Russian populist candidate, Stefan Harabin, finished third in Saturday's first round of voting with 14.4 percent, while Marian Kotleba, chairman of a neo-Nazi parliamentary party, was fourth with 10.4 percent.

In all, 13 candidates vied to become the country's fifth head of state since Slovakia gained independence in 1993 after Czechoslovakia split in two.

Presidential candidate Zuzana Caputova answers questions to media as she arrives at her election headquarters to watch the results of the first round of the presidential election in Bratislava, Slovakia, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

In Slovakia, 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

Andrej Kiska, a successful businessman-turned-philanthropist, was not standing for a second five-year term in the largely ceremonial post. Kiska backed Caputova in the vote.

Caputova has little experience in politics while attracting voters who are appalled by corruption and mainstream politics. She only recently became vice chairman of the non-governmental Progressive Slovakia, a liberal political party. She said she was planning to travel around the country ahead of the runoff to persuade those who voted for unsuccessful candidates to vote for her.

Caputova, as well Kiska, supported the huge street protests that led to the fall of former Prime Minister Robert Fico's coalition government amid a political crisis triggered by the slayings last year of an investigative reporter and his fiancee. The reporter was investigating possible widespread government corruption.

A career diplomat, Sefcovic, 52, 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. Sefcovic joined the commission in 2009 and became a vice president in 2010.

CAPTION CORRECTS THE LOCATION - Presidential candidate Zuzana Caputova with her daughter Emma prepares to cast her vote at a polling station during the first round of the presidential election in Pezinok, Slovakia, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Presidential candidate Zuzana Caputova answers questions to media as she arrives at her election headquarters to watch the results of the first round of the presidential election in Bratislava, Slovakia, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

A man walks past a campaign poster for Zuzana Caputova in Bratislava, Slovakia, Friday, March 15, 2019. Caputova is one of the favorite candidates to succeed Slovakia's President Andrej Kiska in the upcoming election. Slovakia holds the presidential election on Saturday, March 16, 2019. The poster reads: "Let's stand against evil, together we can make it." (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Presidential candidate and European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic answers questions to media after casting his vote at a polling station during the first round of the presidential election in Bratislava, Slovakia, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Presidential candidate and European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic accompanied with his wife Helena arrives to cast his vote at a polling station during the first round of the presidential election in Bratislava, Slovakia, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Father with his son cast a vote at a polling station during the first round of the presidential election in Bratislava, Slovakia, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

A child casts a vote for her mother at a polling station during the first round of the presidential election in Bratislava, Slovakia, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)BERLIN (AP) - Chancellor Angela Merkel says Germany and France hope to win over other European Union countries to their ideas for a "European industry strategy" at a summit this week.

Leaders of the 28 EU countries hold a regular summit Thursday and Friday. Merkel said in her weekly video message Saturday that she and French President Emmanuel Macron have proposed discussing the issue as they try to "secure jobs for the future in strategic business areas in Europe."

She pointed to "strategic research and innovation projects" such as a German-French push to create a car battery cell consortium aimed at catching up with Asian rivals.

Berlin and Paris last month launched a drive for a "European industrial policy," including a push to overhaul EU competition rules to facilitate creation of world-leading companies.MOSCOW (AP) - A Russian doping-test company denies accusations its staff gave athletes advance warning of tests.

The Russian anti-doping agency has alleged that Anti-Doping Initiative's staff tipped off athletes in the sport of powerlifting about what should be no-notice tests and asked them for money.

The company's CEO, Alexei Kozlov, writes in an email that his employees "do not inform athletes about upcoming tests."

He adds that any samples collected from the athletes were sent to a registered laboratory and that "if violations are found, the athletes will be suspended by the International Powerlifting Federation."

The Russian agency, known as RUSADA, was reinstated by the World Anti-Doping Agency last year after nearly three years on suspension over allegations it covered up for doped athletes.

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More AP sports: https://apnews.com/apf-sports and https://twitter.com/AP_SportsPARIS (AP) - French yellow vest protesters set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores in Paris and clashed with police Saturday in the 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. Large plumes of smoke rose above the rioting on Paris' landmark Champs-Elysees avenue, and a mother and her child were just barely saved from a building blaze.

Cobblestones flew in the air and smoke from fires set by protesters mingled with clouds of tear gas sprayed by police, as tensions continued for hours along the Champs-Elysees. By dusk, as the demonstrators had dispersed, the famed avenue was a blackened expanse.

The resurgent violence comes at a watershed moment for a movement, which had been fizzling in recent weeks, and at the end of a two-month-long national debate called by Macron that protesters say failed to answer their demands for economic justice.

Police appeared to be caught off guard by the speed and severity of Saturday's unrest. French riot police tried to contain the demonstrators with repeated volleys of tear gas and water cannon, with limited success.

One arson fire targeted a bank near the Champs-Elysees on the ground floor of a seven-story residential building. A mother and her child had to be rescued just as the fire threatened to engulf their floor, Paris' fire service told The Associated Press. Eleven people in the building, including two firefighters, sustained light injuries.

A 43-year-old German factory worker who identified himself only as Peter had traveled to Paris to show solidarity with yellow vest protesters. Standing Saturday outside the burned-out bank, he said he agreed with the destruction, calling banks "the biggest problem in the world."

Yellow vests protesters set a burricade afire on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protest organizers had hoped to make a splash Saturday, which marks the 4-month anniversary of the yellow vest movement, which started Nov. 17, and the end of the "Great Debate" that the French president organized to respond to protesters' concerns about sinking living standards, stagnant wages and high unemployment.

They claimed Macron failed in that aim.

"It was hot air. It was useless and it didn't achieve anything. We're here to show Macron that empty words are not enough," said yellow vest demonstrator Frank Leblanc, 62, from Nantes.

"We're marking the end of the great debate ... Macron has given us no great solutions," said protester Francine Sevigny from Lyon.

Others praised the violence that tore through Paris.

"I'm glad there are the thugs, because without them our movement wouldn't get any attention. We need the violence so we can be heard," said Marie, a mother of two from Seine-et-Marne who wouldn't give her surname.

The violence started minutes after the protesters gathered Saturday, when they threw smoke bombs and other objects at officers along the Champs-Elysees - the scene of repeated past rioting - and started pounding on the windows of a police van.

Simultaneous fires were also put out from two burning newspaper kiosks, which sent black smoke high into the sky. Several protesters posed for a photo in front of one charred kiosk.

Demonstrators also targeted symbols of the luxury industry, smashing and pillaging shops including brands Hugo Boss and Lacoste, and tossing mannequins out of broken windows. A posh eatery called Fouquet's, which is associated with politicians and celebrities, was vandalized and set on fire. A vehicle burned outside the luxury boutique Kenzo, one of many blazes on and around the Champs-Elysees.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner, who inspected the damage Saturday evening on the Champs-Elysees, said an estimated 10,000 yellow vest protesters were in Paris and another 4,500 had demonstrated around France. He also said the Paris crowd included 1,500 "ultraviolent ones who are there to smash things up."

Still, the numbers paled beside the 30,000 people who took part in a separate peaceful climate march in Paris at the same time, according to Castaner.

And the number of yellow vest protesters remains smaller than early in the movement, when it drew masses to the streets nationwide and polled showed a majority of French people supporting their cause. Since then, repeated rioting by the protesters and economic concessions by Macron have diminished public support for the yellow vests.

Paris police told the AP that 192 people were arrested in Paris on Saturday and 60 others were injured, 18 of them police and firefighters.

The yellow vest groups represented teachers, unemployed people and labor unions. While the rioters drew most attention Saturday, most of the protesters in Paris remain peaceful.

___

Chris den Hond, Milos Krivokapic, Catherine Gaschka and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed.

A news stand burns during a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A yellow vest protester walks past a fire on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A riot police officer aims at a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A black flag flies during a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A riot police officer throws a tera gas canister onto protesters during a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A barricade burns on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A news stand burns during a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters set up barricades through tear gas during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters walk through tear gas during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A barricade burns on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A barricade burns on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests protesters gather on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters throw items to police forces during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters remove a protective wall from a luxury shop during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Riot police officers wait during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A protester throws a device on the Louis Vuitton luxury shop on the Champs Elysees avenue, during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A protester watches the famed restaurant Fouquet's, damaged after riots, on the Champs Elysees avenue, during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters enter the famed restaurant Fouquet's, damaged after clashes, on the Champs Elysees avenue, during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters hide behind street barriers as they clash with police forces during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters hide behind street barriers as they clash with police forces during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Youth clash with police forces during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Youths walk through tear gas during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A riot police officer aims at protesters during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Firefighters try to pull out a fire on a car during a demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests protesters wipe their eyes after tear gas canisters were sent during a demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests protesters take a break to wipe their eyes after tear gas canisters were used during a demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests protesters take a break after tear gas canisters were sent during a demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests protesters stand by a damages shop during a demonstration, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Youths throw a cobblestone on police officers, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests demonstrators damage urban road signs, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A yellow vests demonstrator throws an item to police officers, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A demonstrator faces police water cannons, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - An Australian senator had a raw egg cracked over his head and faces censure from his fellow lawmakers after sparking outrage by blaming Muslim immigration for the New Zealand mosque shootings.

Sen. Fraser Anning came under blistering criticism over tweets on Friday including one that said, "Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?"

"The real cause of the 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 in a statement.

Television cameras caught a 17-year-old boy breaking an egg on Anning's head and briefly scuffling with the independent senator while he was holding a news conference Saturday in Melbourne.

Police said the boy was arrested but was released without charge pending a further investigation. No motive was offered for the egging.

The government and opposition party agreed to pass a censure motion against Anning over his stance on the Christchurch shootings when Parliament resumes in April.

In this image made from video, a teenager breaks an egg on the head of Senator Fraser Anning while he holds a press conference, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in Melbourne, New Zealand. Following the mass shootings on Friday, Anning came under sharp criticism over tweets including one that said: "Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?" (AP Photo)

While such a reprimand is a symbolic gesture, the major parties expect to demonstrate how isolated Anning's views are among Australia's 226 federal lawmakers. The major parties' support ensures the censure motion will be passed by both chambers.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he denounced Anning's comments.

"In his conflation of this horrendous terrorist attack with issues of immigration, in his attack on Islamic faith specifically - these comments are appalling and they're ugly and they have no place in Australia, in the Australian Parliament," Morrison said. "He should be, frankly, ashamed of himself."

Bilal Rauf, spokesman for the Australian National Imams Council, the nation's top Muslim group, likened the senator's views to the rambling manifesto published online by suspect Brenton Tarrant before the slayings.

"When one looks at his statement, it may as well have been an extract from the manifesto of the person that perpetrated these heinous crimes, this act of terrorism in Christchurch," Rauf said.

Rauf said Anning was unfit for the Senate.

Opposition lawmaker Penny Wong accused Anning of attempting to use the tragedy to grab attention ahead of elections in May.

Anning only received 19 votes in the last election in 2016. But because of a quirk in the Australian electoral system, he was elevated to the Senate by the anti-immigration, anti-Muslim One Nation party after a court ruled that its senator, Malcolm Roberts, had not been eligible to run for election due to his dual citizenship.

Anning later defected from One Nation to another anti-immigration party, then became an independent. Analysts say Anning is unlikely to be re-elected as an independent candidate in May.

Anning was widely condemned for his first speech to the Senate in August advocating reviving a white-only immigration policy and using the term "final solution" in calling for a vote on which migrants to admit into the country. Critics accused him of making a veiled reference to the Nazi extermination of Jews.

The government also announced on Saturday it had banned right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos from touring the country over his social media response to the Christchurch shootings.

Immigration Minister David Coleman said Yiannopoulos' social media comments are "appalling and foment hatred and division."

Coleman didn't specify which comments he was referring to.

Yiannopoulos said on Facebook that attacks like Christchurch happen because "the establishment panders to and mollycoddles extremist leftism and barbaric, alien religious cultures."

Lawmakers within Australia's conservative government had been quarreling in recent weeks over whether the firebrand commentator should be allowed to tour Australia this year.

In this image made from video, a teenager breaks an egg on the head of Senator Fraser Anning while he holds a press conference, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in Melbourne, New Zealand. Following the mass shootings on Friday, Anning came under sharp criticism over tweets including one that said: "Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?" (AP Photo)ROME (AP) - Italy prosecutors have opened an investigation into the possible poisoning death of a Moroccan model who was a key witness in the trial against ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi over his infamous "bunga bunga" parties.

Imane Fadil, 34, died March 1 at a Milan-area hospital, where she had been treated since Jan. 29 for exhibiting "symptoms of poisoning," Milan prosecutor Francesco Greco said, according to the Italian news agency ANSA.

In 2012, Fadil had told reporters that she feared for her safety after telling prosecutors investigating possible witness tampering in the case that she was offered money in exchange for her silence about what went on at Berlusconi's parties.

Berlusconi was initially convicted of charges that he paid for sex with an underage woman at the sex-fueled "bunga bunga" parties, and used his influence to cover it up. He was ultimately acquitted by Italy's highest court in 2015.

Asked Saturday to comment, Berlusconi said he was always sorry when a young person dies.

But he added: "I've never known this person and never spoke to her. What I read were her declarations that made me always think these were always invented and absurd things."

FILE - In this Monday, Oct. 3, 2011 file photo, Imane Fadil smiles as she leaves the court in Milan, Italy. Italy prosecutors have opened an investigation into the death of a Moroccan model who testified in one of the inquiries linked to ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi's "bunga bunga" parties. Citing Milan prosecutor Francesco Greco, Italian news agency ANSA reported that Imane Fadil died March 1 at a Milan hospital, where she had been treated since Jan. 29 exhibiting "symptoms of poisoning." (AP Photo/Luca Bruno, File)

Fadil had testified against Berlusconi during the initial trial, and then with two other women had sought civil damages in a spinoff investigation over allegations that Berlusconi paid witnesses for their silence. That trial is ongoing.

Fadil, who had reportedly wanted to be a television sportscaster, argued that she had suffered from lost opportunities because of her involvement in the cases.

Late last year, lawyers for one of Berlusconi's co-defendants in the witness tampering trial began negotiations to settle the women's claims, ANSA reported at the time. But by January, the Milan court had thrown out their claims altogether. Two weeks later, Fadil was hospitalized.

News reports said before Fadil slipped out of consciousness she told her lawyer and family that she feared she had been poisoned.

ANSA quoted Greco as lamenting that the Humanitas hospital in Rozzano didn't report Fadil's complaints or symptoms, which he said were consistent with poisoning while she was being treated. He said prosecutors were only informed of the death when Fadil's lawyer reported it.

In a statement reported by ANSA, Humanitas disputed that, saying that Fadil's medical charts were seized by law enforcement as soon as she died. It said it provided the results of her toxicological exams to prosecutors when they were completed on March 6.

The Pavia lab that conducted the toxicology tests said in a statement Saturday it had been asked by the hospital to analyze metals in Fadil's blood, but stressed that it doesn't measure radioactivity.

Emails and calls to Humanitas and Greco weren't immediately returned Saturday.TIRANA, Albania (AP) - Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday to protest the government, which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime.

Thousands of supporters of the center-right Democratic Party-led opposition gathered on the capital's main boulevard in front of Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama's office to demand his resignation. Rama later called the protest "immature" and said it does not help Albania's progress toward European Union membership.

Protesters, led by Democratic leader Lulzim Basha, then walked to the parliament building and tried to break through police lines while throwing smoke bombs and other objects. Police dispersed them with tear gas and water cannons.

Police said three officers and some demonstrators were injured.

The opposition, whose lawmakers have relinquished their seats in parliament, declines to speak with Rama. It has asked for a transitory Cabinet without him to prepare for an early election. The governing Socialists now have 74 seats in the 140-seat parliament.

"We have no alternative but to protest until we bring back democracy and rule of law," Basha told The Associated Press before the rally.

A protester pushes a gate amid smoke from teargas during an anti-government rally in Tirana, Albania, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime. (AP Photo/Hektor Pustina)

President Ilir Meta urged the opposition to protest peacefully. The U.S. and the EU have warned the opposition not to incite violence and urged them to sit down for talks with the government.

Speaking on a tour ahead of local elections in June, the prime minister said his governing majority "has got the trust of the majority of the population."

"Such kind of convulsions, blockings, obstacles and signs of immaturity ... do not make easy our road toward our European partners," Rama said of the protests, speaking from the city of Berat, 120 kilometers (75 miles) south of Tirana, the capital.

Albania hopes to get the EU's approval in June to launch membership negotiations.

___

Follow Llazar Semini on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lsemini

Protesters gather outside the Prime Minister's office during an anti-government rally in Tirana, Albania, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Thousands of supporters of the center-right Democratic Party-led opposition have gathered on Saturday in front of Socialist Party's Prime Minister Edi Rama to demand his resignation, a transitory Cabinet without him that will prepare fresh elections. (AP Photo/ Hektor Pustina)

A protester raises a banner in front of a police formation during an anti-government rally in Tirana, Albania, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime. (AP Photo/Hektor Pustina)

Policemen line up outside the Prime Minister's office ahead of an anti-government rally in Tirana, Albania on Saturday, March 16, 2019. The center-right opposition Democratic party demands the government's resignation, accusing the Cabinet of corruption and opposition lawmakers have relinquished their seats in parliament and they have rejected calls for dialogue from Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama and from the U.S. and European Union. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Protesters throw stones at policemen during an anti-government rally in Tirana, Albania, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime. (AP Photo/Hektor Pustina)

Protesters hold an Albanian flag during an anti-government rally in Tirana, Albania, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Thousands of supporters of the center-right Democratic Party-led opposition have gathered on Saturday in front of Socialist Party's Prime Minister Edi Rama to demand his resignation, a transitory Cabinet without him that will prepare fresh elections. (AP Photo/Hektor Pustina)

Protesters take part in an anti-government rally in Tirana, Albania, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Thousands of supporters of the center-right Democratic Party-led opposition have gathered on Saturday in front of Socialist Party's Prime Minister Edi Rama to demand his resignation, a transitory Cabinet without him that will prepare fresh elections. The banner reads : "End of the government of thieves and oligarchs" . (AP Photo/ Hektor Pustina)

Protesters hold an Albanian flag during an anti-government rally in Tirana, Albania, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Thousands of supporters of the center-right Democratic Party-led opposition have gathered on Saturday in front of Socialist Party's Prime Minister Edi Rama to demand his resignation, a transitory Cabinet without him that will prepare fresh elections. (AP Photo/ Hektor Pustina)

Protesters take part in an anti-government rally in Tirana, Albania, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Thousands of supporters of the center-right Democratic Party-led opposition have gathered on Saturday in front of Socialist Party's Prime Minister Edi Rama to demand his resignation, a transitory Cabinet without him that will prepare fresh elections. (AP Photo/Hektor Pustina)

A protester crosses the fence of the parliament as thousands of opposition supporters protest in Tirana, Albania on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime.(AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Protesters carry a wounded person as riot police throw shock bombs and tear gas at stone throwing protesters in Tirana, Albania on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime.(AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

A protester throws a smoke bomb at police guarding the government building as thousands of opposition supporters protest in Tirana, Albania on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime.(AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

A protester wearing a mask walks near police guarding the parliament building, as thousands of opposition supporters protest in Tirana, Albania on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime.(AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Protesters throw stones at riot police as thousands of opposition supporters protest in Tirana, Albania on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime.(AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Protesters throw stones at riot police as thousands of opposition supporters protest in Tirana, Albania on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime.(AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Protesters hit back tear gas canisters thrown by police, as thousands of opposition supporters protest in Tirana, Albania on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime.(AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Protesters scuffle with police guarding the parliament building as thousands of opposition supporter try to storm in during a protest in Tirana, Albania on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime.(AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Protesters waving an Albanian flag shout slogans near the government building during a protest in Tirana, Albania on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Albanian opposition supporters clashed with police while trying to storm the parliament building Saturday in a protest against the government which they accuse of being corrupt and linked to organized crime.(AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)KINSHASA, Congo (AP) - Witnesses say at least one person is dead after protests over local elections turned violent in Congo.

Members of President Felix Tshisekedi's Union for Democracy and Social Progress took to the streets in the capital Kinshasa and in other parts of the country after the party failed to win any senate seats from Kinshasa in the regional assembly. Police fired tear gas to put down demonstrations Friday night.

The governor of Kasai-Oriental province confirmed one death there.

The party has been Congo's longtime opposition under former President Joseph Kabila. The party got a boost when its candidate Felix Tshisekedi won the December presidential election.

Militants of Tshisekedi's party also attacked the headquarters of Kabila's party in the capital.

While voters elect regional deputies, senators are then chosen by the deputies. Militant members of the party are now accused of attacking homes and vehicles belonging to some of the regional deputies who chose the senators.COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - Pvt. Walter Beagles arrived at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, in 1918, an African American draftee in a segregated Army that relegated black soldiers to labor battalions out of a prejudiced notion that they couldn't fight.

More than 100 years later, his great-grandson now serves as the base's 51st commanding general.

Brig. Gen. Milford Beagle, Jr., a combat veteran who took command last June, admits that it gets to him, knowing he's serving where his ancestor served but under vastly different circumstances.

"It does become pretty surreal to know that the gates my great-grandfather came through are the same gates I come through," Beagle said. "You always reflect back to you're standing on somebody's shoulders. Somebody put that stair in place so you can move one more rung up."

Beagle hails from the same town where his great-grandfather came from: Enoree, South Carolina. The family dropped the "s'' from the end of its name during his grandfather's lifetime.

He says he felt compelled to enter the infantry as a young man at least partly because African Americans once were largely shunted aside - considered inferior and unsuited to combat.

In this Feb. 9, 2019 photo, Brig. Gen. Milford H. Beagle, Jr. commanding general of Fort Jackson, speaks to the president of the Sgt. Isaac Woodard Historical Marker Association following the dedication ceremony in Batesburg-Leesville, S.C. Beagle, Jr. who now leads the Army's Fort Jackson in South Carolina is descended from a soldier who served there in a segregated military more than a century ago. (AP Photo/Christina Myers)

"That was one thing I did reflect on. Somebody at some point in time said your particular race can't do that," Beagle said. "At some point our ancestors fought so we could be in those front-line units and those combat units."

Beagle has served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, among his many postings.

His great-grandfather, who died in 1985 at the age of 94, didn't talk much about his Army service, Beagle said. But the general enlisted the help of Fort Jackson Basic Combat Training Museum director and curator Henry Howe who found more details about Pvt. Beagles' military service during the Great War.

"Gen. Beagle gave me a copy of his draft card. He did give me a roster of Fort Jackson, but we were able to find out a little bit more information, specifically the days he came in and the units he was with and that he deployed to ... France in late 1918," Howe said.

At Camp Jackson, Beagles would have learned fundamental drills and how to behave as a soldier with the 156th Depot Brigade, but he didn't get much training in combat arms. He moved into the 346th Labor Battalion where his jobs included loading and unloading ships, building roads and digging ditches - labor intensive work.

"The majority of the African Americans were pushed off into the support units," Howe said. "Oftentimes, we in the military look at the combat arms as the glory, but it's overwhelmingly the support people that give the opportunity for victories."

The Army that Pvt. Beagles served in was highly segregated, as was the wider society, said American studies professor Andrew Myers at University of South Carolina Upstate.

"As Jim Crow became more instituted in the civilian society, you saw the same thing kind of take over the military," he said.

Racial tensions were high in some towns surrounding U.S. military camps, leading sometimes to violence.

In Houston, Texas, 1917 a clash between police officers and soldiers led to court martials and the execution of 19 African American soldiers.

"The execution ... of the colored soldiers implicated in the Houston riot was one of the dark spots on the escutcheon of the Army, but it did not dampen the ardor of the colored men who went to the front for the Stars and Stripes," Emmett J. Scott noted in his book, "The American Negro in the World War." Scott was Booker T. Washington's secretary before becoming a special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of War, serving as a liaison between black soldiers and the War Department.

In October 1918, Beagles was deployed to France. The Armistice ending the fighting was signed the following month.

Following the war, Beagles was honorably discharged in January 1919 and returned to his farm. While many cities and towns, including Columbia, South Carolina, hosted parades welcoming back their soldiers, black veterans did not typically get a hero's welcome.

"Especially in the South as they were discharged and went back to their homes, they encountered a lot of conflict with various people," Myers said. Some fell victim to whites who objected to seeing black men in U.S. military uniforms. In 1920, the NAACP noted that nine African American retired soldiers had been lynched in 1919.

However, the mistreatment of African American soldiers during World War I was not a story Gen. Beagle heard from his great-grandfather. Instead, he spoke of hard work, courage, strength and integrity - values that his great-grandson says are woven into his family's history.

"I remember flexing for Great-Grandpa," Beagle said with a smile on his face. "He was just a great person, down to earth, hard working." You could tell that by his hands, Beagle said.

Beagle said his great-grandfather and others contributed significantly to this country, without knowing what their contributions would mean to the future of the military - now a place where people of different races work side by side with the same mission, to protect their nation.

If given one more day with his great-grandfather, Beagle said he would show him today's diverse soldiers in formation during a graduation ceremony.

"I would turn to him and say hey, was it worth it," Beagle said. "And I'm pretty sure I'd get a big smile back and he'd say it was absolutely worth it."

In this Feb. 25, 2019 photo, In the office of the 51st Commanding General for Fort Jackson and the U.S. Army Training Center Brig. Gen. Milford H. Beagle, Jr., speaks about his military memorabilia, awards and unit coins for leadership and excellence in military service. Beagle, who now leads the Army's Fort Jackson in South Carolina is descended from a soldier who served there in a segregated military more than a century ago. (AP Photo/Christina Myers)RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - The outcome of a lawsuit alleging that Donald Trump is violating the U.S. Constitution by profiting off the presidency could depend largely on competing definitions of an antiquated word: emoluments.

At the center of the lawsuit is the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which bans federal officials from accepting benefits from foreign or state governments without congressional approval.

The attorneys general of Maryland and Washington say government spending at Trump's Washington hotel falls under a broad definition of emoluments: any profit, gain, or advantage.

Trump's attorney's, however, argue that the definition does not include payments for hotel stays. They argue that the emoluments clause only bars payments to the president if they're made in connection with services he provides in his official capacity.

The debate over the narrow vs. broad definition is expected to be on display when the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals hears arguments in the case Tuesday.

Trump's legal team is challenging a decision by a federal judge in Maryland to allow the lawsuit to go forward.

FILE- This Jan. 30, 2018, file photo shows the Trump International Hotel in Washington. A federal appeals court is set to hear arguments in a lawsuit that alleges President Donald Trump is violating the constitution by profiting off the presidency. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Judge Peter Messitte ruled in July that the attorneys general had made convincing arguments that the constitutional meaning of emoluments encompasses any profit, gain, or advantage. It was the first time a federal judge had interpreted the emoluments clause.

The 4th Circuit agreed to hear the unusual mid-case appeal. Trump's lawyers are asking the court to overturn Messitte's ruling that the attorney generals have standing to sue Trump.

Trump argues that as president, he has absolute immunity from the lawsuit. But Maryland and the District say that Trump's alleged misconduct is unrelated to the functions of his office, so absolute immunity does not apply.

Before Trump was sued, the emoluments clause was a constitutional provision familiar mainly to constitutional scholars and law professors.

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh and District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine argue that Trump's failure to divest himself of his business holdings - including the Trump International Hotel in Washington - put him in clear violation of the emoluments clause.

Frosh and Racine, both Democrats, say hotels in Maryland and Washington have been harmed because foreign and state government officials are more likely to stay at Trump's hotel in an attempt to curry favor with the Republican president.

"It's not just making something up - it's in the U.S. Constitution - he's prohibited from taking payments from foreign governments or from states ... and he does each one on a daily basis," Frosh said.

Trump won rights to lease the U.S. government's Old Post Office site in 2012 and opened it as a luxury hotel in October 2016, just weeks before he won the presidential election.

The hotel, located just blocks from the White House, quickly became a hot spot for lobbyists and foreign officials. A public relations firm working for Saudi Arabia spent nearly $270,000 on food and rooms. The Philippine and Kuwaiti embassies also have thrown parties there.

Lawyers for Trump argue that the emoluments clause only prohibits compensation made in connection with services provided in his official capacity or in "an employment-type relationship" with a foreign or domestic government. The clause does not prohibit officials from engaging in private business transactions with government customers, Trump's lawyers argue in a legal brief filed in the 4th Circuit.

They say the 4th Circuit "should not endorse such a sweeping and ahistorical interpretation" of the clause.

The broad definition is supported by research conducted by Georgetown University Law School professor John Mikhail, who searched dictionaries that were available to the framers of the Constitution.

Mikhail's research, which was cited by Judge Messitte in his ruling, found that every English dictionary definition of "emolument" from 1604 to 1806 relies on one or more of elements of the broad definition, including "profit," ''advantage," ''gain" or "benefit."

Mikhail's study found that more than 92 percent of the dictionaries made no reference to the "office-and-employment-specific" interpretation put forth by Trump's legal team.

But Trump's more narrow definition of emoluments has its supporters, too.

Andy Grewal, a law professor at the University of Iowa, argues the "proper definition" of emoluments is "office-related compensation" received for the personal performance of services.

Grewal said that under that definition, dignitaries renting rooms at Trump's hotel at market rates does not violate the emoluments clause.

"If a Saudi prince stayed at his hotel and left behind a $100,000 gift for Trump, that would be different than reserving a room at the same rate and terms as applied to everyone else," he said.

Trump's company said it has donated nearly $350,000 to the U.S. Treasury during Trump's two years in office. The Trump Organization said the money represents profits from embassy parties, hotel stays and other foreign government spending at its Washington hotel and other properties.

Two other lawsuits accusing the president of violating the emoluments clause are also winding their way through other federal courts.OUTSIDE BAGHOUZ, Syria (AP) - An international aid group says nearly 3,000 people have arrived at a tent settlement in northeastern Syria over the past two days after leaving the last area held by the Islamic State group.

The International Rescue Committee said in a statement Saturday the new arrivals consisted of almost all women and children, bringing al-Hol camp's population in Hassakeh province to over 69,000 people.

It added that 122 people, mostly children and infants, had died making their way to the camp since December, mainly as a result of severe acute malnutrition, pneumonia, dehydration and diarrhea.

Thousands of people, including IS fighters and their families, have left the last sliver of land held by IS over the past weeks as U.S.-backed fighters slowly advance on the area near the Iraqi border.

Women, children, and an injured man who left the besieged Islamic State-held village of Baghouz, Syria, scramble over a rocky hillside to be checked by U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

People who left the besieged Islamic State-held village of Baghouz, Syria, scramble up a rocky hillside to be checked by U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)WASHINGTON (AP) - As President Donald Trump struggled with mounting Republican defections over his emergency declaration to pay for a border wall, his acting White House chief of staff wasn't on Capitol Hill cajoling former colleagues or in the West Wing making calls.

Instead, Mick Mulvaney was in Las Vegas for an annual getaway with friends and family.

It was a telling example of Mulvaney's laissez-faire approach as he settles into a role that has bedeviled those who came before him.

His predecessor, retired four-star Gen. John Kelly, tried to micromanage Trump but ended up grating on the president and antagonizing outside allies. Mulvaney has made clear he believes his job is to manage the staff and not the president, according to current and former officials and people close to him. And he's OK with that.

Mulvaney doesn't try to limit whom the president speaks with or curb access to the Oval Office. He just asks that those who talk to Trump fill him in on what was discussed to avoid surprises. While former staffers compare the current atmosphere in the West Wing to the early, chaotic days of the administration, when the Oval Office had the feel of Grand Central Station, Mulvaney understands that's how Trump likes it.

The former South Carolina congressman has focused on and succeeded in improving staff morale in a building known for infighting and damaging leaks. Shortly after his arrival, Mulvaney organized a staff retreat at Camp David. He also has worked to build relationship on Capitol Hill, where he served for years. He schmoozed with lawmakers on the sidelines of the State of the Union speech and invited them to a Camp David retreat as well.

FILE - In this Feb. 25, 2019, file photo, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, left, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, center, and Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards talks before President Donald Trump arrives to speak at the 2019 White House Business Session with Our Nation's Governors in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington. As the White House grappled with growing Republican defection against President Donald Trump's use of an emergency declaration to try to build his promised border wall, his acting White House chief of staff wasn't on the Hill working former colleagues or at the White House making calls. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

It's an approach that some outside the building question.

"The chief of staff has to be able to manage down as well as up," said Chris Whipple, author of "The Gatekeepers: How the White House chiefs of staff define every presidency." ''I don't think he's been empowered and I think that's a mistake."

Mulvaney's tenure has coincided with an especially tumultuous time in Washington, beginning with the fight over border wall money that caused the longest government shutdown in the nation's history.

He was at the table in Vietnam for Trump's abruptly terminated summit with North Korea's leader and has watched as newly empowered House Democrats have launched investigations into Trump's dealings.

Trump has been known to make remarks undercutting Mulvaney in front of him, giving some the impression that Trump already may be souring on his third chief of staff in as many years.

But by all accounts, Mulvaney is a happy warrior who generally gets along well with the equally blunt president, is well liked by staff and brushes off slights. Though Trump gave Mulvaney the job on an "acting" basis last December, Trump doesn't appear likely to replace him anytime soon.

Mulvaney has the added benefit of getting along well with Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, both senior advisers with enormous internal power. Mulvaney, who has personal experience working in a family business, understands their unique positions. He built relationships with both as Trump's budget director and has had dinner with their family.

"He's trying to do the best he can with what he has to work with," said Leon Panetta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton who also served as budget director, defense secretary and CIA director.

Like others interviewed, Panetta said it would be impossible to serve as a typical chief in Trump's White House. "All you can do is be there, respond to the president when you can, try to maintain some semblance of order and try to keep things at least halfway on track and not collapsing into total chaos," Panetta said.

Mulvaney, who technically also retains the title of budget director , remains engaged in policy and budget issues, which made his absence in recent days especially notable. He left on Wednesday afternoon as the White House was mounting a final effort to try to stop GOP senators from backing a resolution to block Trump's emergency order. Mulvaney was absent for Thursday's vote, when a dozen Republican senators joined Democrats in rebuking the president. And he was still gone Friday when Trump issued the first veto of his presidency, overruling the vote to terminate his declaration.

The White House defended Mulvaney's decision to take the trip, which senior strategy adviser John Czwartacki said was part of a 25-year tradition.

Mulvaney was to return to Washington on Saturday, in time to appear on the Sunday talk shows, and worked throughout his trip, talking to senators and at least a half-dozen staffers and receiving briefings on the shooting in New Zealand, Czwartacki said.

Czwartacki also said the president was fine with Mulvaney's absence and that the chief of staff had a team in place empowered to operate without him.

Indeed, in a quiet sign of his influence, Mulvaney has brought on a half-dozen new staffers, including communications aides.

Panetta, however, said it was "very unusual" that Mulvaney hadn't played a more prominent role in this year's budget talks, saying he should have been "the primary person trying to guide negotiations."

David B. Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron who is also writing a book on the chief of staff role, echoed that perception, saying previous chiefs, especially those with experience like Mulvaney's, "were essentially handed the keys and told, 'Get this done.'"

Mulvaney is "good at television, he's good at communication. But I think at this point, he's little more than an administrative assistant for Trump," Cohen said.

The White House pushed back on the idea that Mulvaney should have been charged with steering the border wall talks, saying it made sense for Vice President Mike Pence and the White House legislative affairs director to take the lead.

Mulvaney appears happy to be promoting Trump's agenda, even when the president's policies stand in conflict with ideas that Mulvaney has long championed.

In the months before he signed the emergency declaration, Trump argued to his staff that the situation at the border was a national security crisis and demanded to know why he, as president, couldn't stop what he deemed an "invasion."

Other aides told Trump there was nothing he could do. But Mulvaney, a longtime fiscal hawk who had blasted former President Barack Obama for using executive action to dictate immigration policy, went back to his colleagues at the Office of Management and Budget and asked them to start identifying various sources of money the White House might be able to access without Congress' approval to start building the wall.

___

Associated Press writer Catherine Lucey contributed to this report.

FILE - In this Jan. 2, 2019, file photo acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington. As the White House grappled with growing Republican defection against President Donald Trump's use of an emergency declaration to try to build his promised border wall, his acting White House chief of staff wasn't on the Hill working former colleagues or at the White House making calls.(AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)VATICAN CITY (AP) - The Vatican is pushing back against whistleblower reports about problematic work conditions at its U.N. mission in New York under its former ambassador, in the latest scandal implicating the Holy See's diplomatic corps.

The Vatican's U.N. mission said the visa status of its diplomatic, technical and service staff were in full compliance with U.S. regulations from 2010-2014, and that its service staff were paid more than New York's minimum wage.

The carefully worded statement was responding to a March 11 report in the Crux online Catholic site about complaints from former staff about poor and possibly noncompliant work conditions during the 2010-2014 tenure of Archbishop Francis Chullikatt. On Saturday, Catholic News Agency also reported allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior by Chullikatt, currently the Vatican's ambassador in Central Asia.

Asked Saturday for comment, the Vatican press office referred reporters to the mission statement, dated March 11.

Both stories cited unnamed former staff as well as Terrence McKeegan, a legal advisor to the mission, who said he flagged issues of "serious moral and financial corruption" to the Vatican in 2013.

In an email Saturday to The Associated Press, McKeegan stood by his original complaint and said he and eight other staffers at the mission had their salaries unilaterally cut or underpaid by Chullikatt.

Pope Francis arrives for a audience with members of the confederation of the Italian cooperatives in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, )

He provided the Jan. 1, 2014, email where the former ambassador told him to find someone else to pay his salary for the remainder of his one-year contract, apparently in retaliation for having contacted the Holy See several months earlier about the alleged wrongdoing.

McKeegan noted the Vatican had not contested his core complaints about underpayment of staff.

"No matter how you slice it, once you factor in all of the overtime that the domestic or household staff had to work ... they were not being paid justly, whether you want to measure that by state minimum wage or a just or fair wage," he said.

The March 11 mission statement addressed only the Crux report. The mission said Saturday it didn't have an immediate comment on the subsequent CNA report alleging inappropriate behavior.

McKeegan said he had heard nothing for two years after his initial 2013 report, and then was only interviewed by a Vatican embassy official in Washington in December 2015. He said he had heard nothing since.

"The fact is that the serious allegations I made against Chullikatt were never properly investigated by the Vatican, which follows a pattern in so many other cases involving high-ranking officials in the Catholic Church," he said in the email.

The reports are the latest to implicate members of the Vatican's diplomatic corps, who like all diplomats enjoy immunity while serving overseas. In 2017, Francis moved to shore up oversight over the corps by creating a new diplomatic section in the secretariat of state to increase the Vatican's role in selecting and training its envoys.

Recently, French prosecutors placed the Vatican's French ambassador under investigation for alleged sexual misconduct. Prior to that, an adviser to the Vatican's embassy in Washington D.C. was convicted by a Vatican court of possession and distribution of child pornography.

That same tribunal planned to prosecute the Holy See's ambassador to the Dominican Republic for sexually abusing minors, but he died before the trial got underway.

Independent of those investigations, the Holy See's former ambassador to the U.S. sparked a crisis in Pope Francis' papacy last year by accusing him and a long list of Vatican officials before him of covering up for ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. The American cleric was recently defrocked by Francis for sexually abusing minors and adults.PARIS (AP) - A day after worldwide student climate protests, families and activists are marching in France to force faster government action against global warming.

One group gathered Saturday near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, hoping for peaceful actions that contrast with violence at yellow vest protests nearby.

Another march is expected from the famed Opera Garnier to the Republic Plaza, among dozens of climate actions planned around France.

President Emmanuel Macron made a passionate call this week to speed up the global fight against climate change, and has stood up firmly to skepticism from U.S. President Donald Trump.

But activists say Macron's government isn't ambitious enough in cutting emissions or France's dependence on fossil fuels.

Saturday's march comes the day after students in more than 100 countries demanded tougher climate action.FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - The suspect in last year's Florida high school massacre told officers moments after his capture he was hearing demons, a statement that could be used if his attorneys mount an insanity defense.

Body-camera video released by prosecutors begins with Nikolas Cruz handcuffed and face down on the ground on Feb. 14, 2018, with an officer kneeling beside him, helicopters roaring overhead.

The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 had ended an hour earlier, and Cruz had been captured in a Coral Springs neighborhood two miles from the school by Coconut Creek officer Michael Leonard.

Leonard had recognized Cruz by the burgundy Stoneman Douglas Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps shirt and black jeans the shooter had been wearing. Cruz has pleaded not guilty, but his attorneys have said he would plead guilty for a life sentence. They have not said whether they will attempt an insanity defense. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

In the body camera video released Friday, the unidentified Coral Springs officer wearing it asks the then 19-year-old suspect casually, "What's going on today, bro?"

Cruz replies, "Demons, man."

FILE - In this Aug. 15, 2018 file photo, Florida school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz listens during a status check on his case at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Cruz told officers moments after his capture he was hearing demons, a statement that could be used if his attorneys mount an insanity defense. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP, Pool, File)

"Demons?" the officer asks, playing with a piece of string in his hands.

"Voices," Cruz replies.

Cruz then says "Where are the noises?" and cranes his neck to look up at the circling helicopters. He begins cursing and asks where he is.

"What happened?" Cruz yells.

The officer kneeling by Cruz tells him firmly, "Shut up," while the officer wearing the body camera says, "Just be quiet, man."

Inserting a profanity, Cruz says to himself, "What the...did you do?" Now out of view of the camera, Cruz sounds like he is sobbing and hyperventilating.

The officer wearing the camera trots to his nearby SUV to retrieve his cellphone and sends a text message. As he returns, Cruz can be heard weeping in the background, cursing at himself.

The two-minute video soon ends.

Hours later, Cruz would tell detectives during an interrogation that he has long heard demons, according to redacted transcripts released in August.

Cruz told detectives the voice appeared after his father died about 15 years ago but got worse after his mother died of pneumonia in November 2017, three months before the shooting.

Cruz described the voice as a male, about his age, and said the only person he ever told about it was his brother.

Detective John Curcio asked what the voice told him.

"Burn. Kill. Destroy," Cruz responded.

"Burn, kill, destroy what?" the detective asked.

"Anything," Cruz responded.

He told Curcio he had to fight the voice from taking over, that it was always bad. Curcio questioned that, asking how it could always be bad if Cruz had held down a job at a discount store for two years.

"The voice is in here," he said, apparently pointing to his head. "And then it's me. It's just regular me trying to be a good person." Curcio said everyone has a good and bad side.

"Do they really?" Cruz said.

Cruz's trial is tentatively scheduled for early next year, but no date has been set.ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - The New York National Guard will partner with Brazil to conduct joint training missions and military exchanges.

National Guard officials say the state program agreement was signed Thursday in Manhattan by Maj. Gen. Raymond Shields, the adjutant general of New York, and Rear Admiral Guilherme da Silva Costa, representing the Brazilian Armed Forces.

The agreement is the latest program that pairs the state National Guard with the militaries of foreign countries.

U.S. military officials say the nation now has partnerships with 83 countries.

New York has sizable Brazilian-American communities in Westchester, Queens and Manhattan.

The state's defense forces include the Army National Guard, the Air National Guard, the New York Guard and the New York Naval Militia.ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) - Grieving family members of victims of the Ethiopian air disaster are being given sacks of earth to bury in place of the remains of their loved ones.

Officials have begun delivering bags of earth to family members of the 157 victims of the crash instead of the remains of their loved ones because the identification process is going to take such a long time.

Families are being given a 1-kilogram (2.2-pound) sack of scorched earth taken from the crash sites, members of two different families told The Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid any possible government reprisal. An Ethiopian government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters also confirmed the deliveries of soil.

"The soil came as it became impossible to identify bodies and hand over remains to family members," one family member said. "We will not rest until we are given the real body or body parts of our loved ones."

Forensic DNA work has begun on identifying the remains but it may take six months to identify the victims, because the body parts are in small pieces. However, authorities say they will issue death certificates within two weeks. The victims of the crash came from 35 countries.

A mass memorial service for the dead is planned in Addis Ababa to take place Sunday, one week after the crash. Muslim families have already held prayers for the dead and are anxious to have something to bury as soon as possible.

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)

Interpol and Blake Emergency Services, hired by Ethiopian Airlines, will work with Ethiopian police and health officials to identify the bodies, Dagmawit Moges, Ethiopia's Minister of Transport said on Saturday.

"Preparation for the identification process has already started and we will make sure that the post mortem investigation will start as soon as possible," she said.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has sent about 16 members to assist the investigation, she said.

In Paris, investigators started studying the cockpit voice recorder of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet Saturday, grieving family members were given sacks of dirt to bury in place of the remains of their loved ones.

The French air accident investigation agency BEA tweeted Saturday that technical work on the recorder began. The BEA also said work resumed on the flight's data recorders.

The recorders, also known as black boxes, were sent to France because the BEA has extensive expertise in analyzing such devices. Experts from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and the plane's manufacturer Boeing are among those involved in the investigation.

The Ethiopian disaster and a crash last year in Indonesia were both of the Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. The United States and many other countries have grounded the Max 8s as the U.S.-based company faces the challenge of proving the jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty sensors and software contributed to the 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. Shortly after their takeoffs, both crews tried to return to the airports but crashed.

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.

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Charlton reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Dave Koenig in Houston and Tom Krisher in Detroit contributed.

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Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa

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)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims grieve at the site 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, on Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

In this photo taken Thursday, March 14, 2019, sister Goreti Kimani consoles brother Chira Kageche at a memorial service for their brother, Catholic priest Rev. George Mukua Kageche, 40, who died in the recent plane crash in Ethiopia, in his home town of Githunguri, near Nairobi, in Kenya. The Rev. George Kageche Mukua was one of 32 Kenyans killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 faltered shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa and crashed, a numbingly high toll on a flight carrying people from 35 countries. (AP Photo/Sayyid Abdul Azim)

In this photo taken Thursday, March 14, 2019, Father Michael Wa Mugi lights a candle and signs the book of condolence next to a photo of Catholic priest Rev. George Mukua Kageche, 40, who died in the recent plane crash in Ethiopia, at a prayers ceremony held at his home in Githunguri, near Nairobi, in Kenya. The Rev. George Kageche Mukua was one of 32 Kenyans killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 faltered shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa and crashed, a numbingly high toll on a flight carrying people from 35 countries. (AP Photo/Sayyid Abdul Azim)

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)

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)

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)CINCINNATI (AP) - A Cincinnati Public Schools teacher who acknowledged putting duct tape over students' mouths to discipline them has resigned.

District spokeswoman Lauren Worley says Charles Igwekala-Nweke resigned in January.

Igwekala-Nweke taught math at Clark Montessori High School and Hughes STEM High School and had worked for the district since 2015.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reported Friday that school records show a student told another teacher Igwekala-Nweke put tape over his mouth in December.

Igwekala-Nweke wrote in an email to Hughes Principal Kathy Wright that he taped students' mouths shut instead of reprimanding them for talking during an exam.

At least three students told officials their mouths were taped shut.

Igwekala-Nweke later apologized, saying he allowed "gross rationale to justify gross behavior."

___

Information from: The Cincinnati Enquirer, http://www.enquirer.comDUBUQUE, Iowa (AP) - As she waited to meet former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper at a recent house party in Dubuque, attorney Connie O'Connor was anxious about the liberal direction of the Democratic presidential primary.

"I know a lot of people who don't want to vote for Donald Trump but don't necessarily want to vote for the presidential version of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez," she said, referring to the recently elected progressive congresswoman from New York. "I think we forget those people are out there."

But about 80 miles away, union organizer Eli Shepherd pointed to the thousands of people flocking to a Bernie Sanders rally at the University of Iowa as proof that the self-described democratic socialist is best positioned to beat the Republican now in the White House.

"People get brought in (to the campaign) because it's something they deeply care about," Shepherd said. "When there's a campaign that's actually focused on that, that's what's exciting, that's what's transformative, that's how you win."

Democrats have a long fight ahead over this question of who's right.

The early days of the Democratic contest are dominated by a debate over whether candidates such as Sanders are moving the party too far left or whether the embrace of liberal priorities will fire up the base and help defeat Trump.

FILE - In this Feb. 13, 2019, file photo, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, left, applauds at a campaign house party in Manchester, N.H. While the Democratic primary field has shifted left, polls show registered Democratic voters just want someone who can beat Donald Trump. That's led to a potential contradiction being worked over by primary voters. Is the best route to victory to build a liberal movement to win converts or choose a more moderate candidate who can appeal to swing voters? (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)

That debate is sure to deepen if former Vice President Joe Biden enters the race and tries to establish himself as a prominent centrist counterweight to Sanders, a Vermont senator. In the opening days of his 2020 campaign, former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke has also sought to appeal to both parties.

"There's a tension, and that's what presidential campaigns are about," said Simon Rosenberg of the New Democratic Network.

So far, the candidates are racing to prove their progressive bona fides on issues such as "Medicare for All" and the Green New Deal.

Yet surveys suggest Democratic voters are less eager to tack left. A Monmouth Poll last month found 56 percent of registered Democrats said their top priority was a candidate who could beat Trump even if they disagreed with that person on most issues. A Pew Research Center poll in January found that 53 percent of Democrats wanted the party to become more moderate, while 40 percent wanted it to become more liberal.

Though a few insurgents won Democratic congressional primaries last year, most notably Ocasio-Cortez, most of those contests were captured by candidates backed by the party establishment.

Recent campaign swings through Iowa, the nation's leadoff caucus state, by Sanders and by Hickenlooper, a self-described "extreme moderate," illustrated the contradiction in the Democratic field.

For the Sanders appearance in Iowa City, the soundtrack at the University of Iowa student union featured Tracy Chapman's "Talking About A Revolution" and Muse's "Uprising." Well over 1,000 people wore Sanders T-shirts, hats and buttons, some with 2016-era gear and others sporting the newer 2020 models on sale outside the hall.

Cheri Pichone, a disability representative, brought a Sanders action figure to the rally. Pichone voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in 2016 because she said she believed the Democrats "cheated" to deny Sanders the nomination and she's worried it could happen again.

"I don't honestly see how anybody could beat him fairly," Pichone said.

The crowd broke into a deafening roar as Sanders walked to the podium. "This," he said, "is where the political revolution began."

Sanders was referring to the 2016 caucuses, when he came within a few votes of defeating front-runner Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Now Sanders is an early leader, raising at least $10 million, almost all in small-dollar donations, since launching his campaign Feb. 19.

The initial sound of Hickenlooper's first Iowa swing as a presidential candidate was a beer glass shattering.

Someone inside the packed meeting room at Confluence Brewery in Des Moines dropped a mug just as Hickenlooper walked in. Hickenlooper began scooping up shards of glass. "There's nobody in this room who's cleaned up more broken beer glasses than me," Hickenlooper said.

Hickenlooper started a brewpub in a then-desolate stretch of downtown Denver after being laid off from his job as a geologist in the 1980s. The business took off, made Hickenlooper wealthy and helped propel him into the Denver mayor's office.

In Des Moines, he stood in front of a wall of beer cans strategically arranged to create the number "2020," and talked about persuading Republican mayors of suburbs to join Denver in pushing a tax increase to pay for light rail. He recounted, after being elected governor in 2010, how he was able to get the energy industry and environmentalists to agree on limits on methane gas emissions. He bemoaned "a national crisis of division."

"People in Washington, they spend their lives talking about stuff and debating and pointing fingers and blaming the other side," Hickenlooper said, in an apparent dig at the various senators running. "It's about time to bring people together and get stuff done."

In contrast to Sanders, Hickenlooper starts with no base outside of Colorado and little name recognition. He acknowledged he's "a dark horse." One of the most common questions Hickenlooper was asked in Iowa was whether he was related to an Iowa governor and senator with the same last name who served from the 1930s to the 1960s. (The Iowa politician was indeed a distant relative.)

The day after his Des Moines appearance, Hickenlooper stopped at five separate locations across the state.

Joel Greenwald, 64, a retired banker, shook Hickenlooper's hand at an event in Cedar Falls. "They're pushing 'free, free, free,'" Greenwald said about supporters of Sanders and other liberals. "You're going to turn off a lot of Republicans and independents if you say 'free free free.'"

But Greenwald isn't a Hickenlooper supporter. He's waiting for Biden, who is teasing Democrats with the possibility of a third White House run.

Hickenlooper received enthusiastic cheers when he spoke and wound up his trip in another crowded brewpub in Cedar Rapids. After Hickenlooper gave his speech, the crowd gathered around him. Karla Goettel, 69, made a beeline for the candidate and complained about his refusal on the television show "Morning Joe" to call himself a capitalist.

"There are a bunch of Democrats who are pissed off at capitalism," Hickenlooper told her.

Goettel said Hickenlooper knew he messed up the question. "They're all trying to be careful not to be too far right or too far left," she said. "I just want to find someone electable."HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi have been hit by a vicious cyclone that has killed nearly 150 people, left hundreds more missing and stranded tens of thousands who are cut off from roads and telephones in mainly poor, rural areas.

Cyclone Idai has affected more than 1.5 million people in the three southern African countries, according to the U.N. and government officials.

Hardest hit is Mozambique's central port city of Beira where the airport is closed, electricity is out and many homes have been destroyed. The storm hit Beira late Thursday and moved westward into Zimbabwe and Malawi, affecting thousands more, particularly in eastern areas bordering Mozambique.

Homes, schools, businesses, hospitals and police stations have been destroyed by the cyclone. Thousands were marooned by the heavy flooding and, only caring for their lives, abandoned their possessions to seek safety on higher ground.

U.N. agencies and the Red Cross are helping with rescue efforts that include delivering food supplies and medicines by helicopter in the impoverished southern African countries.

Mozambique's President Filipe Nyusi said the damage is "very worrisome" and said that the flooding made it difficult for aircraft to land and carry out rescue operations, according to Mozambique's state radio.

In Zimbabwe, 31 people have died from the floods so far, according to the government. The deaths are mainly in Zimbabwe's Chimanimani, a mountainous area along the eastern border with Mozambique that is popular with tourists. No tourist deaths were recorded, said government spokesman Nick Mangwana.

Roads and bridges were swept away, slowing rescue efforts by the military, government agencies and non-governmental organizations, he said.

The dead included two school students who were among dozens of children trapped in a dormitory after rocks fell from a nearby mountain, said Mangwana. Zimbabwe's military is trying to rescue the 197 students at the school, although unsafe conditions are forcing the soldiers to use ground efforts rather than attempt an air rescue, the government's ministry of information said later.

Zimbabwe state television station, ZBC, reported that 150 people are missing.

"We are receiving tragic reports of some people being swept away. We urge patience as rescue is on its way," Zimbabwe's information ministry said in a tweet, although power cuts and communications breakdown in affected areas means the warning might reach just a few.

In Malawi, people "are now facing a second threat of flash floods" following the cyclone, said the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on Twitter.

South Africa's military has sent in aircraft and 10 medical personnel to help in Mozambique and Malawi, it said in a statement Saturday.PARIS (AP) - The Latest on yellow vest protests in France (all times local):

7:10 p.m.

Yellow vest protesters say they have turned out in increased numbers in Paris on Saturday to show President Emmanuel Macron their disappointment after a two-month national debate ended Friday.

Frank Leblanc, 62, from Nantes, said: "It was hot wind. It was useless and it didn't achieve anything. We're here to show Macron that empty words are not enough."

Francine Sevigny, from Lyon, said: "It's bigger today because we're marking the end of the big debate. All of the yellow vests in France were called to Paris today... Macron has given us no big solutions in the big debate."

Marie, a mother of two from Seine-et-Marne who wouldn't give her surname, said: "I'm glad there are the thugs, because without them our movement wouldn't get any attention. We need the violence so we can be heard."

Paris famed restaurant Fouquet's burns on the Champs Elysees avenue during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Saturday's protests saw more than 100 people arrested amid rioting in the capital.

Macron had led the national debate to respond to protesters' concerns about sinking living standards, stagnant wages and high unemployment.

___

6:15 p.m.

French firefighters are working to extinguish a blaze in a Paris restaurant seen as a powerful symbol of France's elite that was set amid yellow vest protest violence.

The flames pouring out of the posh eatery Fouquet's on the Champs-Elysees marked one of the most powerful images on a day of unusual unrest in the French capital. The restaurant was vandalized Saturday morning and later set ablaze. Several luxury boutiques along the elegant avenue were also ransacked, and kiosks set on fire.

Fouquet's is popular among celebrities and powerbrokers. Critics see the place as an offensive example of bourgeois decadence that is inaccessible to most French people, who are struggling to pay their bills.

It's also associated with former conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, who celebrated his 2007 election victory in Fouquet's - drawing criticism for his choice of such a flashy locale.

___

5:45 p.m.

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe is vowing to "severely punish" the radicals responsible for rioting and setting fires around one of France's richest neighborhoods.

Philippe visited the Champs-Elysees on Saturday to show his support for riot police and firefighters struggling to get the unrest under control after it broke out amid yellow vest protests.

He estimated up to a few thousand troublemakers were responsible for Saturday's "unacceptable" violence. Speaking to reporters, he praised firefighters who saved people trapped in a building set fire by protesters.

The situation remains tense Saturday along the Champs-Elysees after hours of violence and clashes with police firing tear gas and water cannon.

Armored vehicles and about 15 police vans are lined up at one spot, facing down a mixture of yellow-vested protesters and black-clad people who seemed to be seeking opportunities to target police.

___

5 p.m.

Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters.

The violence started minutes after yellow vest protesters started gathering Saturday morning around the Arc de Triomphe. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said on French television that an estimated 10,000 protesters were taking in protests in Paris and another 4,500 were demonstrating around France.

That was up from about 3,000 protesters in Paris last weekend.

But the yellow vest numbers paled beside the 30,000 people taking part in a climate march weaving through Paris at the same time, according to Castaner.

___

2:40 p.m.

A bank has been set ablaze as French yellow vest protesters clash with police in Paris and firefighters had to rescue a mother and her child as the fire threatened to engulf their floor.

Florian Lointier, spokesman for Paris' firefighters, told The Associated Press that 11 people sustained light injuries Saturday in the blaze, including two firefighters.

The fire in the bank, which was on the ground floor of a seven-story residential building near the Champs-Elysees Avenue, was later extinguished. Lointier said a mother and her child were saved from the flames on the second floor and other residents were safely evacuated.

French yellow vest protesters are rioting in a 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron.

___

12:15 p.m.

Large plumes of smoke are rising above Paris' landmark Champs-Elysees avenue as French yellow vest protesters set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police in a 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron.

Police tried to contain the demonstrators Saturday with tear gas and water cannons. Fire trucks rushed and extinguished two burning newspaper kiosks that had been set ablaze. Several protesters posed for a photo in front of a kiosk's charred remains.

The violence started when protesters threw smoke bombs and other objects at officers along the famed avenue in the French capital.

The violence comes after a two-month national debate that Macron organized to respond to protesters' concerns about sinking living standards, high unemployment, stagnant wages and general income inequality.

A yellow vest protester walks past a fire on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A news stand burns during a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests protesters set a burricade afire on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A riot police officer aims at a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A black flag flies during a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A riot police officer throws a tera gas canister onto protesters during a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A riot police officer hides behind a fence during a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A barricade burns on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A news stand burns during a yellow vests demonstration on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters set up barricades through tear gas during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters walk through tear gas during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A barricade burns on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A barricade burns on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests protesters gather on the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters throw items to police forces during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters remove a protective wall from a luxury shop during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Riot police officers wait during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A protester throws a device on the Louis Vuitton luxury shop on the Champs Elysees avenue, during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A protester watches the famed restaurant Fouquet's, damaged after riots, on the Champs Elysees avenue, during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters enter the famed restaurant Fouquet's, damaged after clashes, on the Champs Elysees avenue, during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters hide behind street barriers as they clash with police forces during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Protesters hide behind street barriers as they clash with police forces during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Youth clash with police forces during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Firefighters try to pull out a fire on a car during a demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests protesters take a break to wipe their eyes after tear gas canisters were used during a demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A yellow vests protester takes a photograph of the the renamed Champs Elysees avenue as "Yellow Vest avenue" during a demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Youths walk through tear gas during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A riot police officer aims at protesters during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests demonstrators damage urban road signs, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Youths throw a cobblestone on police officers, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Youths vandalized a shop, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A yellow vests demonstrator rescues another one as police forces use water cannons, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A demonstrator faces police water cannons, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

A yellow vests demonstrator throws an item to police officers, Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Yellow vests demonstrators invade the Champs Elysees avenue Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. French yellow vest protesters clashed Saturday with riot police near the Arc de Triomphe as they kicked off their 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Paris famed restaurant Fouquet's burns on the Champs Elysees avenue during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Firefighters try to pull off a fire on the famed restaurant Fouquet's, on the Champs Elysees avenue, during a yellow vests demonstration Saturday, March 16, 2019 in Paris. Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters and clashes with police. They set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannon (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)HAMMOND, Ind. (AP) - Prosecutors have said they are still determining which confidential items they can share with attorneys defending an Indiana woman who is accused of providing tactical gear and funds to two Islamic State fighters.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Abizer Zanzi said at a status hearing in federal court Thursday that the government has shared discovery that is not confidential with the attorneys for Samantha Elhassani, the Post-Tribune reported.

Items that could be subject to the Classified Information Procedures Act will only be shared if the information is "relevant and helpful" to the defense, Zanzi said, citing "national security interests."

Elhassani, 32, pleaded not guilty last year to conspiracy to provide material support to IS, and aiding and abetting individuals in providing material support to the group. The woman, of Elkhart, Indiana, is accused of aiding the two IS fighters between the fall of 2014 and the summer of 2015, despite knowing the group is an active terrorist organization.

Elhassani's attorneys, Thomas Durkin and Joshua Herman, have security clearances, but that doesn't mean they automatically have access to confidential information, Zanzi said. Judge Philip Simon will determine which confidential information Elhassani's attorneys can see.

Attorneys on both sides said they're on track for the January 2020 trial.

Elhassani told reporters for the BBC and PBS that during a 2015 vacation in Turkey, her Moroccan husband, Moussa Elhassani, tricked her into traveling with their children to Syria, where he became an IS militant.

Moussa Elhassani has since died, according to attorneys. Samantha Elhassani told CNN her husband was killed in a drone strike last year.

She and her children ended up in a Kurdish detention camp and were transferred to U.S. custody in July 2018 by U.S-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

The defense has argued that Elhassani was a victim of "domestic violence and patriarchal abuse," who was forced to follow the "crazy man" she married. Prosecutors say Elhassani knowingly followed her husband to Syria and put her children in danger.BOSTON (AP) - Firefighters in Boston are continuing to pour water on hot spots after battling a nine-alarm fire at a building where caskets are built.

The massive blaze injured five first responders and forced nearby residents to leave their homes.

The fire at the New England Casket Company broke out around 3 p.m. Friday and raged for hours in the East Boston neighborhood.

Fire Commissioner Joseph Finn says two Boston police officers, two Boston firefighters and a firefighter from nearby Chelsea were hurt. All were expected to recover.

Residents evacuated at the height of the blaze were allowed to return home late Friday night, but subway service was still suspended.

Finn says some chemicals stored in the building were released into the air during the fire but don't appear dangerous.

A blown-out window frames the gutted interior of the New England Casket Company a day after a 9-alarm fire destroyed the business in the East Boston neighborhood of Boston, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

Firefighters continue work on site a day after a 9-alarm fire destroyed the New England Casket Company in the East Boston neighborhood of Boston, Saturday, March 16, 2019. The massive blaze injured five first responders and forced nearby residents to leave their homes. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

A rainbow forms as firefighters continue to pour water on the ruins of the New England Casket Company a day after 9-alarm fire destroyed the business in the East Boston neighborhood of Boston, Saturday, March 16, 2019. The massive blaze injured five first responders and forced nearby residents to leave their homes. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)NAOUSSA, Greece (AP) - Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar.

In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and what many consider to be the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations.

Masks.

Naoussa, a city 500 kilometers (310 miles) north of Athens once famous for its textile industry, is home to the annual "soldiers and brides" parade. Local men wear white-and-red plaster masks, each designed slightly differently and uniquely decorated with jewelry and headscarves. Their outfits also include white pleated kilts and vests embroidered with coins.

The ceremonies are held during and just after Carnival season and lead up to Lent on the Orthodox Christian calendar.

"There's a whole ceremonial aspect in how a dress is put on," says Aristidis Tosios, head of the "Soldiers and brides" folk club.

In this Monday March 11, 2019 photo combination, men wearing masks that include a meter- tall, ribbon-covered formation topped with a foxtail pose for photos in the village of Sochos, northern Greece, as they participate in a Clean Monday festival. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

"The gathering is accompanied by traditional instruments, a zournas (wind instrument) and a drum. They go from house to house and the dancer comes out on the balcony and greets them three times, raising his hands. Then he gets out of the house, crosses himself and, jumping three times, greets the representative of the troop."

Two hours' drive to the east, revelers in the village of Sochos wear goat and lamb hides with bells around their waists and masks that include a meter- tall, ribbon-covered formation topped with a foxtail, and hold a procession through the town to the sound of traditional music before dancing.

The costumes can be worn by anyone - men and women, grown-ups and children.

Up to a point.

Men wear the heaviest of the bells, five of them strapped around the waist, weighing 18-20 kilograms (40-45 pounds).

___

Derek Gatopoulos and Demetris Nellas in Athens contributed to this report.

___

Follow Petros Giannakouris at https://www.instagram.com/petrosgiannakouris/

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo combination, dancers wearing masks and traditional attire pose for photos during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Monday March 11, 2019 photo a man wearing a mask that includes a meter- tall, ribbon-covered formation topped with a foxtail poses for a photo, in the village of Sochos, northern Greece, as they participate in a Clean Monday festival. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Monday March 11, 2019 photo a man wearing a mask that includes a meter- tall, ribbon-covered formation topped with a foxtail poses for a photo, in the village of Sochos, northern Greece, as they participate in a Clean Monday festival. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Monday March 11, 2019 photo a man wearing a mask that includes a meter- tall, ribbon-covered formation topped with a foxtail poses for a photo, in the village of Sochos, northern Greece, as they participate in a Clean Monday festival. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Monday March 11, 2019 photo a man wearing a mask that includes a meter- tall, ribbon-covered formation topped with a foxtail poses for a photo, in the village of Sochos, northern Greece, as they participate in a Clean Monday festival. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Sunday March 10, 2019 photo a dancer wearing a mask and traditional attire poses for a photo, during the Boules and Genitsaroi carnival parade in the town of Naoussa, northern Greece. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Monday March 11, 2019 photo a man wearing a mask that includes a meter- tall, ribbon-covered formation topped with a foxtail poses for a photo, in the village of Sochos, northern Greece, as they participate in a Clean Monday festival. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Monday March 11, 2019 photo a man wearing a mask that includes a meter- tall, ribbon-covered formation topped with a foxtail poses for a photo, in the village of Sochos, northern Greece, as they participate in a Clean Monday festival. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Monday March 11, 2019 photo a man wearing a mask that includes a meter- tall, ribbon-covered formation topped with a foxtail poses for a photo, in the village of Sochos, northern Greece, as they participate in a Clean Monday festival. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In this Monday March 11, 2019 photo a man wearing a mask that includes a meter- tall, ribbon-covered formation topped with a foxtail poses for a photo, in the village of Sochos, northern Greece, as they participate in a Clean Monday festival. Springtime in northern Greece is ushered with loud and colorful festivals, many hailing from centuries-old traditions, later tied to the religious calendar. In villages across the region, there are drums, ear-piercing pipe music, customs passed on from grandparents, and the centerpiece of many of the region's celebrations: Masks. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)The Latest on the Democratic contenders for president (all times Eastern):

9:05 p.m.

A slip of the tongue by former Vice President Joe Biden might suggest he's leaning toward running for the White House again.

In a keynote speech at a Saturday dinner for the Delaware Democratic Party, Biden boasted that he has "the most progressive record of anybody running."

But Biden hasn't announced whether he is running again for president. He quickly corrected himself, saying "anybody who would run - I didn't mean it. Anybody who would run."

Cheers nearly drowned out his correction. Although Biden has been known to go off script, his remark is likely to be viewed as a Washington-style gaffe - a case of accidentally telling the truth.

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)

Biden sounded like a candidate-in-waiting, pushing Democratic policies and accusing President Donald Trump of dividing the country.

___

9 p.m.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio championed his progressive values during a trip to New Hampshire as he flirts with running for president.

The Democrat is in New Hampshire this weekend for a two-day visit. He met with New Hampshire Democratic Chairman Ray Buckley as several presidential contenders spent the last two days campaigning across the state.

In a speech Saturday night, de Blasio said the U.S. has to be "a country that rewards working people."

The mayor didn't receive a warm welcome from everyone. A vehicle sporting a large sign saying "Mayor Bill de Blasio is no friend of labor" was parked outside the bar where he spoke.

De Blasio said a decision on whether to run for president would come "sooner rather than later."

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7:05 p.m.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is sporting stitches and a black eye after cutting his head on the edge of a glass shower door.

The Vermont senator says "a little black eye" isn't going to stop him.

Sanders told a crowd of at least 1,000 people attending a rally Saturday at a Las Vegas suburb his policies that were once seen as too radical, including a $15-an-hour minimum wage, have now become mainstream.

He pitched his campaign as a crusade for justice in all forms - social, economic, racial and environmental - that will defeat President Donald Trump with the help of what he called an "unprecedented grassroots effort."

The rally was Sanders' first appearance this year in Nevada, where he gave Hillary Clinton a surprisingly strong challenge in the 2016 caucuses before she edged out a win.

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5:45 p.m.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker is criticizing President Donald Trump's "bigoted, sexist rhetoric" as "dangerous," but declined to fault him Saturday in the New Zealand mosque massacre.

Booker said Trump's rhetoric and the fact that he "can't even condemn Nazis" is dangerous, but said he's "not connecting it to any incidents." He made the comments to reporters after a campaign stop in Ottumwa, Iowa,

Booker said "there are white supremacist groups and right-wing groups that use his rhetoric as license for what they do. They talk about him being on their side. And that's unacceptable."

He said if elected president, he would instruct his Justice Department to investigate hate groups and "unequivocally denounce" hatred.

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4:15 p.m.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar says as president she would put forward a major infrastructure program that would help address flooding that is hitting parts of the Midwest.

The Democratic presidential candidate is campaigning in Iowa on Saturday in two riverfront communities, Waterloo and Dubuque, where flooding is expected soon.

She met with officials Friday in Minnesota to discuss preparations for what could be record flooding due to this year's heavy snowfall. That will also affect parts of Iowa.

President Donald Trump has pledged a "significant" infrastructure plan but has so far not advanced one. A big obstacle has been how to fund such a proposal.

Klobuchar told a crowd in Dubuque that the U.S. hasn't been investing like it should in infrastructure. She says one option to fund a plan would be raising the corporate tax rate, which was cut in Trump's 2017 tax bill.

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4 p.m.

Presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke says being a white male in a 2020 Democratic field that's so deeply diverse won't be a hindrance because his gender and race mean he's had advantages over the course of his life.

The former Texas congressman told reporters Saturday in Waterloo, Iowa, of being white and male: "I would never begin by saying that it's a disadvantage at all."

O'Rourke said he'd had "privileges that others could not depend on or take for granted" and called fixing that "a big part" of his campaign.

In his third day of presidential campaigning, O'Rourke also called the field of Democratic hopefuls "the best we've ever seen" while noting that he's the only candidate from the U.S.-Mexico border, which he said "dominates so much of our national conversation."

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1:10 p.m.

Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar is criticizing President Donald Trump for his response to the deadly attack in a New Zealand mosque, telling voters in Iowa "it's our job to stand up against" white supremacism.

Trump played down the threat posed by white nationalism on Friday after the mosque massacre that left 49 people dead. The man accused of the shootings has described himself as a white nationalist who hates immigrants.

Klobuchar spoke about the shooting during a campaign stop in Waterloo, Iowa, on Saturday. The Minnesota senator referenced Trump's comments after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 when he said "both sides" were to blame for violence.

She said, "that other side was white supremacism."

Another Democratic hopeful, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, also is criticizing Trump, who he says "uses exactly the same language of this monster who shot Muslims and talked about the invaders." He says the president "continually looks for dog whistles to spread hate rather than for looking for ways to search for the better angels of our nature."

___

11:25 a.m.

Presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke is going the distance in Iowa - taking it on the run Saturday in a 5K road race.

The Texas Democrat finished the run in North Liberty in about 25 minutes. He said he was on pace for a slower, 40-minute time in the roughly 3-mile race but began chatting about health care with a fellow runner, kept pace with him and finished faster.

Before the race, many runners posed for pictures or asked if O'Rourke was a regular runner - he frequently jogs - but there was little talk of politics.

The former congressman entered the 2020 presidential race Thursday after months of speculation. He has four Iowa events scheduled Saturday.

___

10:20 a.m.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has championed public service opportunities during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, saying the work could help treat some of the woes facing the country today.

The Democratic presidential hopeful says public service "changes your life." Gillibrand says, "That's why I want national service. That's why I want to make it the cornerstone of my presidency."

The New York senator held a civic service round table in Manchester on Saturday as she finishes a two-day swing through the first-in-the-nation primary state.

She said she "would like to tell anyone in America, if you're willing to do two years of public service, you can get your college degree paid for. So if you're willing to do a year and only a year, you can get two years paid for."

___

1:05 a.m.

Joe Biden is the scheduled headliner at a Democratic Party dinner in Delaware, his home state, as the former vice president considers whether to make another White House run.

Others already in the 2020 race - including Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman who's just joined the crowded field - are visiting early voting states.

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is ending a two-day tour in New Hampshire. That's where Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is set to make some stops in his first visit to the state since announcing his presidential run.

In Iowa, O'Rourke is scheduled to appear at three events, starting with a St. Patrick's Day road race. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will give a speech in Nevada.

2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker talks with an audience member during a meeting with local residents, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in Ottumwa, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, right, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., talk before a briefing from state and federal emergency managers who are gearing up for a flood threat caused by some of the heaviest snow in years, Friday, March 15, 2019 in St. Paul, Minn. The leaders heard that flood problems at the moment are relatively isolated, but chances are high for major flooding on the state's biggest rivers, including the Red, Minnesota, Mississippi and St. Croix. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to local residents during a stop at the Central Park Coffee Company, Friday, March 15, 2019, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

James Porter, of Manchester, N.H., smiles as Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., chats with his 8-year-old daughter, Alice during a campaign meet-and-greet, Friday, March 15, 2019, at To Share Brewing in Manchester, N.H. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., speaks during a campaign meet-and-greet, Friday, March 15, 2019, at To Share Brewing in Manchester, N.H. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., plays with 7-month-old Bodie Nichols of Bedford, N.H. as his sister Emmie, 2, watches at left during a campaign meet-and-greet, Friday, March 15, 2019, at To Share Brewing in Manchester, N.H. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)MILWAUKEE (AP) - A child's body found wrapped in a blanket along a Minnesota highway is believed to be that of a missing 2-year-old girl whose mom police have said was fatally shot by her former pimp, authorities announced Saturday.

The discovery of the child's body came hours after officials had put out a plea asking "the entire nation" to help find Noelani Robinson, whose father, Dariaz Higgins, is charged with killing her mom in Milwaukee on Monday. Police had said the child could be anywhere because her parents had traveled through numerous states.

An off-duty public works employee found the body that's believed to be Noelani's while driving home Friday night, Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales told reporters. The body was inside a blanket off the shoulder of Minnesota Highway 218 north of Austin, about 300 miles (483 kilometers) west of Milwaukee, Morales said.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said in a statement Saturday night that Higgins had stayed at a hotel in Austin at some point in the past week.

How and when the child died is not yet known. An autopsy has not been conducted yet, but authorities believe the death did not occur in the last 24 hours and that the girl "had been there for quite some time," Morales said.

He would not comment on the condition of the body, but the BCA said the child died from blunt force trauma to the head.

In this Friday, March 15, 2019, photo, Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales holds a photo of 2-year-old Noelani Robinson as he speaks at a news conference at the Police Administration Building in Milwaukee. A child's body found wrapped in a blanket along a Minnesota highway is believed to be that of Noelani, a missing 2-year-old girl whose mom police have said was fatally shot by her former pimp, authorities announced Saturday. (Michael Sears/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP)

Asked whether authorities believe Higgins was responsible for the child's death, Morales told reporters, "That's where the criminal investigation is shooting for. It's just too early to tell."

Authorities have not disclosed a motive in the death of the girl's mom, 24-year-old Sierra Robinson. Police said Higgins was Robinson's pimp and they had been romantically involved but were no longer together. Robinson had left Noelani with Higgins when she moved to Las Vegas last month but wanted her back, authorities said.

Higgins, 34, is accused of fatally shooting Robinson and wounding one of her friends. Police arrested him Wednesday and prosecutors have charged him with first-degree intentional homicide. Online court records do not list an attorney who could comment on his behalf.

The friend told police that Higgins had been living in Miami when he agreed to meet Robinson in Milwaukee to return Noelani to her. However, charging documents list a Milwaukee address for Higgins.

According to those documents, Higgins, Robinson, and her friend spent time driving around together in Milwaukee doing drugs Monday, before Higgins took them to an apartment building where he told them Noelani was. Authorities have not said whether they believe Noelani was there at the time. Prosecutors said Higgins shot Robinson and her friend when they got out of the car.

An Amber Alert had been issued for Noelani but was canceled Saturday.

Morales had suggested Friday that Noelani could be in the hands of human traffickers, but declined to provide details for why investigators believed that, other than to say, "That's the world that these two individuals lived in, the victim and the suspect."

The chief said Saturday that his department has sent two detectives to Minnesota.

"This is our job, and the closure is not the closure we like to find. But ... it's something that we have to come out and do," Morales said.KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Police in the Ukrainian city of Poltava have arrested 10 people as nationalist demonstrators attempted to interrupt a campaign appearance by President Petro Poroshenko.

Police said the demonstrators aggressively tried to provoke a conflict with officers at the event Saturday in the city 350 kilometers (210 miles) east of Kiev, the capital.

In the capital, about 3,000 nationalists demonstrated outside the presidential administration building, demanding arrests in an alleged embezzlement scheme in Ukraine's defense industries that allegedly involves figures close to Poroshenko and a factory controlled by him. Some of the demonstrators threw toy pigs, symbolizing corruption.

The embezzlement scheme, reported in a journalistic investigation in February, has become a top issue in the heated campaign ahead of Ukraine's March 31 presidential election.

Far-right demonstrators throw toy pigs and shout "Poroshenko's pigs to jail" during a rally against corruption in front of the Presidential administration's building in Kiev, Ukraine, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Far-right demonstrators throw toy pigs and shout "Poroshenko's pigs to jail" during a rally against corruption in front of the Presidential administration's building in Kiev, Ukraine, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Far-right demonstrators carry a large banner reading "Poroshenko's pigs to jail" during a rally against corruption in Kiev, Ukraine, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Far-right demonstrators brandish flares as they display a large banner reading "Poroshenko's pigs to jail" during a rally against corruption in Kiev, Ukraine, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Far-right demonstrators brandish flares as they display a large banner reading "Poroshenko's pigs to jail" during a rally against corruption in Kiev, Ukraine, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)VALENCIA, Venezuela (AP) - Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido embarked on a new stage of his campaign to oust President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday as the rivals held competing rallies in the capital of Caracas, a pattern which has unfolded repeatedly as both sides attempt to convey strength.

Addressing large crowds in the northern city of Valencia, Guaido pledged to deliver a better life for struggling Venezuelans as he began a planned tour of the country gripped by an economic and political crisis.

"We're stronger than ever," said U.S.-backed Guaido from a podium draped with a large Venezuelan flag.

The leader of the opposition-controlled National Assembly also drew cheers with his denunciations of Maduro, although he warned that difficult challenges still lie ahead.

Earlier in the day, he visited a cathedral and a market in Valencia, where people flocked to take his picture and shake his hand.

Since returning to Venezuela from a Latin American tour on March 4, Guaido has led anti-government activities in the capital of Caracas and announced plans to take his message to other regions. But he has been unable to force Maduro to step down and hold elections.

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who has declared himself interim president, greets supporters at a rally in Valencia, Venezuela, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Large crowds gathered in the northern Venezuelan city to greet Guaido, who plans to tour the country as part of his campaign to oust President Nicolas Maduro. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

On Saturday, the government organized its own flag-waving demonstration in Caracas, attracting large numbers of people to the street. Many were clad in red, the color associated with the movement led by the late President Hugo Chavez, the former military officer who declared a socialist "revolution" after coming to power in 1999. He was succeeded after his 2013 death by his protege, Maduro.

Diosdado Cabello, a leading pro-government politician, evoked the defiant rhetoric of Chavez, denouncing the U.S. and declaring: "We won't surrender."

In Washington, other demonstrators rallied in front of the White House to protest what they call U.S. interference. "Hands off Venezuela!" they chanted.

Maduro has remained in power despite heavy pressure from the United States and other countries arrayed against him, managing to retain the loyalty of most of Venezuela's military leaders.

The latest demonstrations come as the South American country recovers power in many areas after widespread blackouts inflicted misery on millions of people, cutting off running water and communications.

Guaido and the U.S. said corruption and mismanagement by the government caused the outages, while Maduro claimed that the U.S. had launched a "cyberattack" on the national grid in an ongoing attempt to oust him. Maduro has routinely described Guaido as a collaborator in a U.S. coup plot.

Coinciding with the demonstration in Valencia, opposition lawmakers organized smaller anti-government gatherings in the northwest city of Maracaibo, where many areas were devastated by looting during the blackouts.

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine traveled to the Colombian side of the border with Venezuela, which was the scene of a Feb. 23 attempt by Guaido to deliver U.S.-provided aid.

Maduro said the aid mission was actually an attempt to undermine his government's authority and security forces blocked it from entering Venezuela, escalating tensions with the U.S. and dozens of other countries that support Guaido.

During his visit, Kaine visited a soup kitchen and tweeted that the U.S. will continue to try to provide humanitarian assistance.

Guaido declared himself interim president in January, saying Maduro's re-election last year was illegitimate because major opposition figures were not allowed to run.

Venezuela's opposition leader and self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido, sings the national anthem at the end of a rally in Valencia, Venezuela, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Supporters hold their hands up promising to help Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who has declared himself interim president, at a rally in Valencia, Venezuela, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

A supporter of Venezuela's opposition leader and self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido holds a flyer depicting him, as she waits for his arrival during a rally in Valencia, Venezuela, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Supporters cheer for Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who has declared himself interim president, amid a sculpture depicting the Statue of Liberty, at a rally in Valencia, Venezuela, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Large crowds gathered in the northern Venezuelan city to greet Guaido, who plans to tour the country as part of his campaign to oust President Nicolas Maduro. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Supporters of Venezuela's self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido wave to him as he leaves after attending a rally in Valencia, Venezuela, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Supporters of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who has declared himself interim president, arrive to attend a rally in Valencia, Venezuela, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Activists gather to oppose the "Hands Off Venezuela!" rally protesting the Trump administration's efforts to overthrow the government of Nicolas Maduro and replace him with Juan Guaido, in front of the White House, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Activists yell to oppose the, "Hands Off Venezuela!", rally protesting the Trump administration's efforts to overthrow the government of Nicolas Maduro and replace him with Juan Guaido, in front of the White House, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Supporters of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro holds a national flag as they take part in an anti-imperialist march in Caracas, Venezuela, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Many were clad in red, the color associated with the movement led by Chavez, the former military officer who declared a socialist "revolution" after coming to power in 1999. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Supporters of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro cheer an anti-imperialist march in Caracas, Venezuela, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Many were clad in red, the color associated with the movement led by Chavez, the former military officer who declared a socialist "revolution" after coming to power in 1999. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Supporters of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro take part in an anti-imperialist march in Caracas, Venezuela, Saturday, March 16, 2019. Many were clad in red, the color associated with the movement led by Chavez, the former military officer who declared a socialist "revolution" after coming to power in 1999. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) - The white supremacist suspected in the mosque shootings that left at least 50 people dead in New Zealand had traveled to the Balkans in the past three years, where he toured historic sites and apparently studied battles between Christians and the Ottoman empire.

Authorities in Bulgaria, Turkey and Croatia have confirmed that Brenton Tarrant, 28, had been to their countries in 2016-2018. Hungarian counterterrorism authorities also suggested that Tarrant had visited but revealed no other information, and local media in Bosnia reported a 2017 trip there.

While the details of Tarrant's travels are sketchy, authorities in those countries said they are investigating his movements and any contacts he might have had with local people.

During his unprecedented, live-streamed shooting spree Friday in Christchurch, Tarrant exposed his apparent fascination with the religious conflicts in Europe and the Balkans - a volatile region that has been the site of some of Europe's most violent clashes.

Tarrant's soundtrack as he drove to the Christchurch mosque included a nationalist Serb song from the 1992-95 Bosnian war that tore apart Yugoslavia. The song glorifies Serbian fighters and former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic - the man jailed at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague for genocide and other war crimes against Bosnian Muslims.

Tarrant's rifles contained the names of legendary Serbs and Montenegrins who fought against the 500-year-rule of the Muslim Ottomans in the Balkans, written in the Cyrillic alphabet used by the two Orthodox Christian nations.

Backdropped by the Byzantine-era Hagia Sophia, demonstrators chant slogans against the mosque attacks in New Zealand during a protest in Istanbul, Saturday, March 16, 2019. World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation 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.(AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

In a 74-page manifesto that he posted on social media, Tarrant said he was a white supremacist who was out to avenge attacks in Europe perpetrated by Muslims.

While Serbia and Bosnia have not confirmed that Tarrant had visited, police in neighboring Croatia issued a brief statement Saturday saying he was in the country in December 2016 and January 2017. It was not known if his stay was continuous.

Croatia's 24 sata (24 hours) news site said Tarrant left Croatia by plane from the capital Zagreb on Jan. 18, 2017, after visiting the Adriatic coastal cities of Porec, Zadar, Sibenik and Dubrovnik, where he mostly stayed in hostels.

"Until that moment yesterday (in New Zealand), that person was not in the focus of our institutions," Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic told reporters Saturday, according to the official HINA news agency.

In Bosnia, the local Klix.ba news portal reported that Tarrant arrived in that country from Montenegro in early January 2017.

Bulgaria's chief prosecutor, Sotir Tsatsarov, said Friday that Tarrant last year rented a car and toured more than a dozen cities, visiting historic sites from Nov. 9 to Nov. 15. He was mainly interested in the battles between Christians and the Ottoman army, the prosecutor said.

The Interior Ministry said Bulgaria is coordinating with counterterrorism teams from various countries, including the United States, over Tarrant. An investigation has been launched into whether he had contacts with local citizens, authorities said.

"So far, we do not have any evidence that Tarrant had been involved in terror activities during his stay in Bulgaria," the Interior Ministry's chief secretary, Ivaylo Ivanov, said.

He said police are checking all places and all people he possibly contacted during his weeklong stay in the country last November.

Turkey is also investigating Tarrant's movements during his two reported visits to the country that straddles Europe and Asia and who had three citizens injured in Friday's slaughter.

State broadcaster TRT says Tarrant visited Turkey twice in 2016 - on March 17-20 and from Sept. 13 to Oct. 25. The station released a security camera image of him arriving at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport.

Hungary's Counter-Terrorism Center suggested in an email to The Associated Press that he also visited there, saying they are cooperating with other countries to "fully examine the circumstances of (Tarrant's) Hungarian trip and stay."

"The details and phases of this process - for understandable reasons - are not public," the center said.

In Bosnia, many residents said the massacre in New Zealand and Tarrant's mention of Karadzic, who has been convicted of genocide, have brought back their own horrific memories of the Bosnian war, which killed more than 100,000 people.

"This (attack) is more proof that Karadzic's ideology is a motive for killings and terrorism," said Adel Sabanovic, a Muslim from the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo and a survivor of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which Bosnian Serb troops killed some 8,000 Muslim boys and men. "It must be condemned in strongest possible terms."

A YouTube video for the song that Tarrant played in his car on the way to gunning people down at the mosque in Christchurch shows emaciated Muslim prisoners in Serb-run detention camps during the war. "Beware Ustashas and Turks," says the song, using wartime, derogatory terms for Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims used by Serb nationalists.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said the New Zealand shooting is "a terrible crime conducted by a psychopath." He criticized foreign and domestic media for somehow implying that Serbs should be blamed for the crime because of the gunman's "taste for music."

_____

Pablo Gorondi contributed from Hungary and Veselin Toshkov from Bulgaria.

___

For more reporting by The Associated Press on the New Zealand mosque massacre, go to https://apnews.com/NewZealand

Demonstrators chant slogans against the mosque attacks in New Zealand during a protest in Istanbul, Saturday, March 16, 2019. World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation 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. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Demonstrators protest against the mosque attacks in New Zealand during a protest in Istanbul, Saturday, March 16, 2019. World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation 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. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Demonstrators protest against the mosque attacks in New Zealand during a protest in Istanbul, Saturday, March 16, 2019. World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation 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. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Backdropped by the Byzantine-era Hagia Sophia, Turkish police officers provide security during a protest against the mosque attacks in New Zealand in Istanbul, Saturday, March 16, 2019. World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation 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. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)China has blocked the rivers flowing through the chemical industrial park ripped by a deadly explosion to prevent polluted wastewater from entering the sea, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment said Friday.

An explosion rocked a chemical plant Thursday afternoon in east China's Jiangsu Province, killing 47 people and leaving 90 others with severe injuries.

Photo taken on March 22, 2019 shows the accident site of an explosion at a factory located in a chemical industrial park in Xiangshui County of Yancheng, Jiangsu Province. [File Photo: VCG]

The ministry sent a working group to the site immediately after the accident. After on-site inspections, the team decided to block three rivers in the park to prevent the wastewaters from entering the Guanhe river, which flows into the Yellow Sea.

By Friday morning, most of the blocking had been completed, the ministry said.

The working group has ordered that both sewage outlets and rainwater outlets be blocked so polluted water will not seep into the river through rainwater pipes.

Local environmental authorities have launched environmental monitoring to assess air and water quality.BERLIN (AP) - Raed Saleh was 5 years old when his family left their Palestinian village in the West Bank for a better life in Germany. Now 41, the Muslim has become one of Berlin's top politicians and is spearheading efforts to rebuild a synagogue in the German capital that was destroyed by the Nazis 80 years ago.

What may sound utopian in parts of the world where hostilities between Muslims and Jews run high has become a reality in Berlin: Jews, Muslims and Christians have joined forces to rebuild what used to be one of the city's biggest synagogues.

In recent years a surviving section of the Fraenkelufer Synagogue, which stands on the banks of a canal in the city's Kreuzberg neighborhood, has become home to a vibrant and diverse community for Jews from across the world, but as the community grows the space isn't enough.

Co-existence isn't always easy in Berlin, either, but with the blessing of people like Saleh, who heads Berlin's Social Democrats and is a lawmaker in the city's government, the interfaith effort may come to fruition in a few years.

"In the past, Berlin tore down the wall between west and east," Saleh said during a recent visit to the synagogue. "Today, we must tear down the walls of hatred."

"The growing anti-Semitism and hostility toward Muslims, the growing intolerance toward each other - this cannot go on," Saleh said.

In this Wednesday, March 20, 2019, Palestinian-German politician Raed Saleh poses for a photo near a remembrance plague with information and a photo of the former Fraenkelufer synagogue, in Berlin. The Fraenkelufer synagogue which could house about 2000 prayers before it was destroyed by the Nazis. Efforts to rebuild the synagogue are on the way in the German capital. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

The Fraenkelufer synagogue was opened as an Orthodox house of prayer in 1916 and held 2,000 worshippers. Before the Third Reich, Germany's flourishing Jewish community counted about 560,000 people and was known for its cultural and intellectual prominence. In 1938, however, five years after the Nazis had come to power in Germany, mobs destroyed parts of the building during the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, in which synagogues, Jewish stores and homes were vandalized across the country. In the Holocaust that followed, the Nazis and their henchmen murdered 6 million Jews across Europe.

Today, only a side wing of the building, known as the youth synagogue, remains in the middle of what has become a mostly Arab and Turkish immigrant district dotted with mosques, tea houses and kebab stands.

Nonetheless, the small synagogue has attracted a growing number of young Jewish families who have moved to the German capital in recent years from Israel, the United States, the former Soviet Union, South America and Australia.

Saleh said he met up with some of the temple's members over hummus and falafel a while back and asked them how he could help support the growing community.

The answer was clear: they asked for more space.

"When we have bigger events and celebrations, this space is bursting at the seams, it's very quickly getting very tight," said Jonathan Marcus, 38, who is a fifth-generation German member of the Fraenkelufer synagogue. He said there's also a need for additional prayer space, study rooms and a kindergarten.

Saleh promised to turn his words into action last year and now chairs a diverse board of trustees including Jews, Christians and Muslims who seek to raise the estimated 24 million euros ($27.3 million) needed to rebuild the temple's main building, which before the war was a white neo-classical structure fronted by columns.

There are no architectural blueprints yet, but many enthusiastic supporters who hope to collect enough donations to break the ground five years from now.

One of them, Nirit Bialer, a 40-year-old Israeli business development manager who moved to Germany 13 years ago, said she can't wait for her dreams of a cultural center within the synagogue to become real.

"I think it's great that Berlin enables us to work together - people of different faiths, of different backgrounds," Bialer said before attending a prayer service on the eve of the Purim holiday inside the synagogue's somewhat cramped prayer room. "The fact that Raed Saleh is Palestinian by roots is a non-issue ... for me he is a Berliner."

So far, Saleh says reactions to the project have been overwhelmingly positive. Even some Muslim communities vowed to collect money for the synagogue in their mosques after Friday prayers.

"In the end this synagogue is more than just a synagogue: It's a sign for togetherness of religions, cultures and traditions," Saleh said.

___

More information online: www.aufbruch-am-ufer.berlin

In this Wednesday, March 20, 2019 photo, the windows of the so-called youth-synagogue, the remaining building of the 'Fraenkelufer' synagogue, are illuminated in Berlin. The synagogue was able to receive about 2000 prayers before it was destroyed by the Nazis. In the German capital, efforts are underway to rebuild the synagogue. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

This Wednesday, March 20, 2019 photo shows a view inside the prayer room of the so-called youth-synagogue, the remaining building of the 'Fraenkelufer' synagogue, in Berlin. The synagogue was able to receive about 2000 prayers before it was destroyed by the Nazis. In the German capital, efforts are underway to rebuild the synagogue. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

In this Wednesday, March 20, 2019 photo, a fence protects the so-called youth-synagogue, the remaining building of the 'Fraenkelufer' synagogue, in Berlin. The synagogue was able to receive about 2000 prayers before it was destroyed by the Nazis. In the German capital, efforts are underway to rebuild the synagogue. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

This Wednesday, March 20, 2019 photo Jonathan Marcus a German member of 'Fraenkelufer' synagogue poses for a photo inside the prayer room of the so-called youth-synagogue, the remaining building of the 'Fraenkelufer' synagogue, in Berlin. The synagogue was able to receive about 2000 prayers before it was destroyed by the Nazis. In the German capital, efforts are underway to rebuild the synagogue. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)MILAN (AP) - Italy's head of state told visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday that China's new "Silk Road" linking Europe and Asia must be a "two-way street," addressing concerns among Western allies that the colossal infrastructure project is meant merely to amplify Beijing's global influence.

During Xi's two-day official state visit, Italy is expected to become the first major democracy to sign an agreement to join China's "Belt and Road" initiative. The program aims to invest in ports, roads, airports and railways in Asia, Africa and Europe to create a conduit for trade and China's construction industry. Both the United States and Italy's European partners, however, see it as a threat as China seeks to project its power.

While Xi was getting the red-carpet honors in Rome, the European Union's leaders were in Brussels preparing a strategy to counter the growing influence of a China, described as a "systemic rival."

The EU is, among other things, worried about unfair competition from Chinese companies, which are controlled by the Chinese government and benefit from the state's financial backing.

The U.S., meanwhile, is in a trade war with China, imposing tariffs on billions of euros on each other's goods, and wants to limit China's ambitions to dominate future technologies, in particular the next-generation, superfast 5G networks. Critics say Chinese domination in 5G networks could allow it to snoop on global data. Both the U.S. and Europe also complain that China forces foreign companies to provide technological know-how in exchange for a presence in the country.

Xi's visit to Italy is expected to produce dozens of deals worth billions of euros alongside the infrastructure framework covering cultural exchanges, sports cooperation and business deals. Officials have said China's participation in Italy's 5G networks is not on the table.

Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Italian President Sergio Mattarella during a business forum inside the Quirinale Presidential, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Mattarella told visiting President Jinping on Friday that China's new "Silk Road" linking Europe and Asia must be a "two-way street," addressing concerns among Western allies that the colossal infrastructure project is meant merely to amplify Beijing's influence in the region. (Tiziana Fabi/Pool Photo via AP)

Mattarella told a joint press conference with Xi that the infrastructure initiative is "the ideal framework for increasing joint collaboration," to stimulate Chinese investments in Italy and open the Chinese market to Italian exports. But he also addressed concerns that China's state apparatus would be the real winner.

"The old Silk Road was an instrument of knowledge among peoples, of sharing, and of mutual discoveries. So, too, the new one must be a two-way street, along which travel not only merchandise but also ideas, talents, knowledge, long-term solutions to common problems and future projects," Mattarella said.

He said both countries could reap the benefits of economic cooperation "founded on fair competition, respecting industrial and intellectual property and in the common fight against counterfeiting."

Xi told reporters that the importance of China's relationship with Italy went beyond bilateral ties.

"China appreciates Italy's willingness to play a positive role in developing a healthy and stable China-Europe relationship," Xi said.

Xi and his wife, Peng Liuan, were greeted with full honors in the courtyard of the presidential palace, overseen by the regal guard while a band played the Chinese and Italian anthems.

Xi later attended a wreath-laying ceremony at Italy's monument for the unknown soldier, and visited parliament and was scheduled to attend a state dinner where Andrea Bocelli will perform. The state visit, reciprocating one by Mattarella two years ago, was being held under maximum security, with large swaths of Rome closed.

But the centerpiece of the visit will be Saturday's signing of a memorandum of understanding to make Italy the first Group of Seven and core EU nation to join China's "Belt and Road" project, which has so far seen investments totaling more than a trillion dollars.

Since Xi announced the ambitious project in 2013, it has been hit by complaints that it saddles participating countries with debt while doing little to boost local economies. Projects in Nepal, Hungary and Myanmar have been cancelled or stalled as a result of either financing difficulties or violations of local regulations.

In Brussels, French leader Emmanuel Macron called for a concerted EU approach to China, criticizing Italy's singular move in agreeing to sign the deal with China.

"I believe that holding bilateral talks on the New Silk Road initiative is not a good method," Macron said. "We won't proceed like that."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed it would "be better if we act uniformly."

She said it was important that Europe make it clear in discussions with China of the need for reciprocal market access. She noted there have been some signs of progress, with some German companies now allowed to own more than 49 percent of joint ventures in China.

China expert Francesco Sisci said Mattarella's comments indicate "that he fears there hasn't been enough transparency so far in relations between China and Italy. Allies may also have expressed to him their worries about how Italy is managing the new relationship with China."

"The accent is that Italy risks becoming a Trojan horse for the Chinese invasion," he said.

Sisci noted Italy's contrasting interests, between its ties to Western allies, and its ambition to become a bridge linking to Asia and Africa, while expanding its footprint in the huge Chinese market.

Chinese investments in Italy have totaled 22 billion euros ($25 billion), officials say, well below that of other European nations. Britain, for example, has received investments worth 80 billion euros.

Italian exports into China lag other nations by a decade or more, running at 13 billion euros compared with 20 billion euros for France and 87 billion euros for Germany.

___

Sam Petrequin in Brussels and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Italian President Sergio Mattarella review the honor guard at the Quirinale Presidential Palace, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Jinping is launching a two-day official visit aimed at deepening economic and cultural ties with Italy through an ambitious infrastructure building program called "Belt and Road" that has raised suspicions among Italy's U.S. and European allies. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses a business forum inside the Quirinale Presidential palace where he met with Italian President Sergio Mattarella, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Mattarella told visiting President Jinping on Friday that China's new "Silk Road" linking Europe and Asia must be a "two-way street," addressing concerns among Western allies that the colossal infrastructure project is meant merely to amplify Beijing's influence in the region. (Tiziana Fabi/Pool Photo via AP)

Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, delivers his speech during his meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella at the Quirinale Presidential Palace, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Jinping is launching a two-day official visit aimed at deepening economic and cultural ties with Italy through an ambitious infrastructure building program called "Belt and Road" that has raised suspicions among Italy's U.S. and European allies. (Alessandro Di Meo/Pool Photo via AP)

Italian Defense Minister Elisabetta Trenta and Chinese President Xi Jinping review the honor guard during his visit the Monument of the Unknown Soldier, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Jinping is launching a two-day official visit aimed at deepening economic and cultural ties with Italy through an ambitious infrastructure building program called "Belt and Road" that has raised suspicions among Italy's U.S. and European allies. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, shakes hands with Italian President Sergio Mattarella at the Quirinale Presidential Palace, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Jinping is launching a two-day official visit aimed at deepening economic and cultural ties with Italy through an ambitious infrastructure building program called "Belt and Road" that has raised suspicions among Italy's U.S. and European allies. (Alessandro Di Meo/Pool Photo via AP)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, center left, speaks with French President Emmanuel Macron, center right, prior to a group photo at an EU summit in Brussels, Friday, March 22, 2019. European Union leaders gathered again Friday after deciding that the political crisis in Britain over Brexit poses too great a threat and that action is needed to protect the smooth running of the world's biggest trading bloc. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

European Council President Donald Tusk, center, speaks with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, left, and Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel during a round table meeting at an EU summit in Brussels, Thursday, March 21, 2019. British Prime Minister Theresa May is trying to persuade European Union leaders to delay Brexit by up to three months, just eight days before Britain is scheduled to leave the bloc. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

European Council President Donald Tusk, center, speaks with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, left, during a round table meeting at an EU summit in Brussels, Thursday, March 21, 2019. British Prime Minister Theresa May is trying to persuade European Union leaders to delay Brexit by up to three months, just eight days before Britain is scheduled to leave the bloc. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Italian President Sergio Mattarella review the honor guard at the Quirinale Presidential Palace, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Jinping is launching a two-day official visit aimed at deepening economic and cultural ties with Italy through an ambitious infrastructure building program called "Belt and Road" that has raised suspicions among Italy's U.S. and European allies. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Chinese President Xi Jinping, second from left, his wife Peng Liyuan, left, pose for a group photo with Italian President Sergio Mattarella and his daughter Laura Mattarella, right, at the Quirinale Presidential Palace, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Jinping is launching a two-day official visit aimed at deepening economic and cultural ties with Italy through an ambitious infrastructure building program called "Belt and Road" that has raised suspicions among Italy's U.S. and European allies. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, Pool)

The car carrying Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan is escorted by Corazzieri Presidential Guards as it enters the Quirinale Presidential Palace on the occasion of Xi Jinping's meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Xi Jinping was received with full red-carpet honors by his Italian counterpart Friday, launching a two-day official visit aimed at deepening economic and cultural ties through an ambitious infrastructure building program that has raised suspicions among Italy's U.S. and European allies. (Giuseppe Lami/ANSA via AP)

Chinese President Xi Jinping, second from left, his wife Peng Liyuan, left, pose for a group photo with Italian President Sergio Mattarella and his daughter Laura Mattarella, right, at the Quirinale Presidential Palace, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Jinping is launching a two-day official visit aimed at deepening economic and cultural ties with Italy through an ambitious infrastructure building program called "Belt and Road" that has raised suspicions among Italy's U.S. and European allies. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, Pool)

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan arrive at Rome's Leonardo Da Vinci airport in Fiumicino, Italy, Thursday, March 21, 2019. Jinping is in Italy to sign a memorandum of understanding to make Italy the first Group of Seven leading democracies to join China's ambitious Belt and Road infrastructure project. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

The Italian and Chinese flag wave from the car carrying Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan as it enters the Quirinale Presidential Palace on the occasion of Xi Jinping's meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella, in Rome, Friday, March 22, 2019. Xi Jinping was received with full red-carpet honors by his Italian counterpart Friday, launching a two-day official visit aimed at deepening economic and cultural ties through an ambitious infrastructure building program that has raised suspicions among Italy's U.S. and European allies. (Giuseppe Lami/ANSA via AP)The European Union has called for a clear answer from the UK about its next step in the Brexit process after MPs rejected Theresa Mays deal.

The Commons is now set to vote on whether to accept a no-deal Brexit after Mrs May suffered a humiliating defeat as her EU Withdrawal Agreement was rejected for a second time.

With a majority of MPs expected to reject leaving without a deal on March 29, the prospect of a delay to Brexit is increasing  but the EU wants to know what the purpose of any extension would be given Parliaments inability to agree on a way forward.

The EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier again insisted there will be no further offer from Brussels apart from the deal already on the table, and it is now the responsibility of the UK to suggest a way forward.

He told the European Parliament: What will their choice be, what will be the line they will take? That is the question we need a clear answer to now. That is the question that has to be answered before a decision on a possible further extension.

Why would we extend these discussions? The discussion on Article 50 is done and dusted. We have the Withdrawal Agreement. It is there.

That is the question asked and we are waiting for an answer to that.

Mr Barnier added: The risk of no-deal has never been higher. That is the risk of an exit  even by accident  by the UK from the EU in a disorderly fashion.

The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the #UK. Our no-deal preparations are now more important than ever before.  Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier) March 12, 2019

In order to avoid a walkout by Cabinet ministers who oppose a no-deal Brexit, Mrs May has given Tories a free vote on Wednesday evenings no-deal motion.

They will vote on a motion stating: This House declines to approve leaving the European Union without a Withdrawal Agreement and a framework on the future relationship on March 29.

If MPs reject no-deal  as most Westminster observers expect  a third vote will follow on Thursday on whether to authorise Mrs May to request an extension of the two-year Article 50 negotiation process.

Members of the Malthouse Compromise group of Tories from both Leave and Remain wings immediately tabled an amendment proposing a standstill agreement lasting as late as the end of 2021, during which the UK would observe EU rules and pay into Brussels budgets while a full trade deal is negotiated.

Mr Barnier has already insisted there could not be a transition period without a full Withdrawal Agreement.

(PA Graphics)

Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said he would prefer a no-deal scenario  even though it risks economic harm and threatens to break up the United Kingdom  to the prospect of not leaving the European Union.

He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: Between those very unpleasant choices, I think no Brexit is the bigger risk.

But Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, one of the ministers who may have quit if asked to back a no-deal Brexit, told Sky News: Leaving without a deal would be very bad for our economy, very bad for our security.

In preparation for a no-deal outcome, the UK has set out its new tariff schedule which would force up prices on EU imports including cars and many food products but could reduce costs on goods from elsewhere.

A no deal Brexit is a "sledgehammer hanging over business" and needs to be ruled out today, says @cbicarolyn from @CBItweets which represents thousands of businesses #r4today https://t.co/hdWGx2jHU8 pic.twitter.com/ZFwE3teQbW  BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) March 13, 2019

The CBI warned the new tariffs would act as a sledgehammer to the economy.

The UK Government will also not introduce any new checks or controls on goods moving across the land border into Northern Ireland, raising fears it would potentially create a loophole which could be exploited by smugglers.

MPs in the Commons before the Brexit vote result was announced on Tuesday night (UK Parliament/Mark Duffy)

The Brexit deal was defeated by 149 votes on Tuesday night, with 75 Conservatives rebelling.

Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said he still expects Brussels to come up with a new deal, telling LBC Radio: The horses always change places in the final furlong, its always at five minutes to midnight that the real deal is done.

He said it is absurd for Mrs May to grant a free vote on no-deal, because it is a fundamental part of the Brexit negotiating strategy.Security forces veterans convicted of Troubles-related crimes in Northern Ireland are eligible to apply for early release, the Northern Ireland Secretary has indicated.

Karen Bradley said anyone convicted of such an offence and serving their sentence in Northern Ireland would be covered by the terms of the controversial element of the 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement, which enabled hundreds of convicted terrorists to walk free on licence after serving just two years behind bars.

Her answer to a parliamentary question comes days ahead of an announcement by prosecutors on whether the soldiers involved in the Bloody Sunday killings in Londonderry will face court action.

The scheme, which saw around 500 loyalist and republican paramilitaries walk free from prison, currently would not include Bloody Sunday, as it only covers offences committed between 1973 and 1998.

However, legislation proposed by the Government to give effect to a range of new legacy mechanisms  set out in the 2014 Stormont House Agreement  includes a provision to extend the early release scheme to cover offences committed before 1973, changing the start date to January 1968.

So, if that becomes law, anyone convicted of an offence related to Bloody Sunday (January 1972) would be covered by the early release scheme.

Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Those proposals, which have been subject to a recent public consultation, would also extend the provision to those serving sentences in Great Britain.

In the past there has been debate on whether the early release scheme was meant to include convicted security force members.

On Thursday, prosecutors are to announce whether 17 ex-soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will face charges for their involvement in Bloody Sunday  a day that saw 13 civil rights protesters shot dead on the streets of Derry.

Conservative MP Julian Lewis asked for clarification of the terms of the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998 in a written question to Mrs Bradley earlier this month, specifically asking whether the two-year cap applied to members of the armed forces, police and security services.

Mrs Bradley replied on Monday.

Under the early release scheme that formed part of the 1998 Belfast Agreement and was given legislative effect by the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998, qualifying prisoners may apply for early release (subject to certain conditions) after they have served two years in prison, she wrote.

Currently anyone convicted of Troubles-related scheduled offences and serving their sentence in Northern Ireland would be eligible to apply to the scheme.

Release is on licence, such licence being subject to revocation for non-compliance with certain conditions  as has happened in a number of cases. When a licence is revoked an individual is liable to be returned to prison to serve out their original sentence.

The provisions set out in the draft Northern Ireland (Stormont House Agreement) Bill, on which we recently consulted, would amend the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998 to extend this two-year accelerated release scheme for Troubles-related offences to those serving sentences in Great Britain.

The Sentences Act does not cover offences committed before August 1973, so the draft Bill proposes to extend the early release scheme to cover the start of the Troubles (January 1968-August 1973).

The Government has no intention to extend early release to offences committed after the date of the Belfast Agreement in April 1998. There is no proposal in the consultation to do this and the Government is not contemplating it.

The legacy consultation concluded in October and we expect to finish our analysis of the 17,000 plus responses shortly. It is right we take the time to consider each response fully and I will set out the next steps in this process as soon as I can.Police will get a 100 million cash injection to tackle the knife crime crisis, the Chancellor has announced.

The extra funding for forces in England has been earmarked for overtime costs and specialist units dedicated to combating serious violence.

While the measure was welcomed by police chiefs, one rank-and-file leader warned it was only a short-term fix.

Ministers have come under pressure to provide a financial boost for police following a spate of fatal stabbings.

We will make available immediately to police forces in England an additional 100m over the course of the next year, ring-fenced to pay for additional overtime targeted on knife crime." #SpringStatement pic.twitter.com/xxazJE5e1a  HM Treasury (@hmtreasury) March 13, 2019

Total funding for forces in England and Wales reduced by 19% in real terms from 2010/11 to 2018/19, according to the National Audit Office.

Officer numbers have fallen by nearly 20,000 since 2010.

Police are to get 100 million to tackle knife crime (Katie Collins/PA)

In December, Home Secretary Sajid Javid unveiled a provisional settlement that could see police funding rise by nearly 1 billion from April, including money raised through council tax.

Chancellor Philip Hammond said many police and crime commissioners have already committed to using this extra funding to recruit and train additional officers.

But that takes time, he said. And action is needed now.

He said the additional 100 million over the course of the next year will be ring-fenced to pay for additional overtime targeted specifically on knife crime, and to fund new violent crime reduction units to deliver a wider cross-agency response to this epidemic.

Its vital police have the resources they need to crack-down on the rising levels of knife crime. Ive listened & we will be giving 100 million extra to forces, targeting the hardest hit areas. Ill continue to give police the support they need  Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) March 13, 2019

Mr Javid said the money, including 80 million of new funding from the Treasury, will allow police to swiftly crack down on knife crime in areas where it is most rife.

He added: I am deeply concerned by the rising level of knife crime that is devastating communities and robbing young people of their lives and futures.

Law enforcement plays a key role  and it is clear from speaking to police leaders in recent weeks that they need an immediate increase in resources.

National Police Chiefs Council chairwoman Sara Thornton welcomed the announcement.

She said: It will help police forces strengthen our immediate response to knife crime and serious violence.

Bringing violence down is a police priority. We know what works to bring down violence and this additional funding will help us to increase the number of officers available to carry out targeted patrols in crime hotspots, increase our use of stop and search and disrupt gangs and crime groups.

John Apter, chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said: Whilst the funding is welcome it is, however, just a short-term fix as knife crime and violent crime continues to plague our towns and cities. We still urgently need additional resources to solve this issue in the long run.

The Government must make a significant investment in the spending review to give police the long-term boost they need.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan welcomed the limited action but said it was a drop in the ocean compared with huge cuts to police and preventative services.

The Metropolitan Police welcomed the additional funding, saying: Bearing down on violence is our top operational priority and we will continue to work with the Government, the Mayor of London and partners across London so that we can keep London safe.

West Midlands police and crime commissioner David Jamieson said the money does not make up for cuts of 175 million his force has faced, but acknowledged it will partially cover the extra funding needed in the short term.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell said he was furious about the money allocated for policing.

A string of recent deaths has prompted fresh debate over police resources.

Amid mounting calls for action, Theresa May sparked a backlash when she insisted there was no direct correlation between certain crimes and police numbers.

Mr Hammond was also criticised earlier this month after suggesting forces should use existing budgets to tackle knife crime.

Earlier this year it was disclosed that the number of fatal stabbings in England and Wales had risen to its highest level since records started more than 70 years ago.

Official statistics showed there were 285 homicides where the method of killing was by a knife or sharp instrument in the year to March 2018.

This was the highest number since the Home Offices Homicide Index began in 1946.A federal judge has sentenced former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to an additional three-and-a-half years of prison as she questioned his remorse and criticised him for his crimes and years of lies.

The sentence is on top of the roughly four-year prison sentence Manafort received last week in a separate criminal case in Virginia.

It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved, US district judge Amy Berman Jackson told Manafort before sentencing him on conspiracy charges related to his foreign lobbying work and witness tampering.

Manafort had asked for mercy, saying the criminal charges against him had taken everything from me already.

He pleaded with the judge not to impose any additional prison time.

I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have gotten us here today, Manafort said in a calm and steady voice as he read from a written statement.

Paul Manafort was President Donald Trumps former campaign chairman (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

While I cannot undo the past, I will ensure that the future will be very different.

The 69-year-old, who arrived in court in a wheelchair, said he was the primary caregiver for his wife and wanted the chance for them to resume their life together.

She needs me and I need her. I ask you to think of this and our need for each other as you deliberate, Manafort said.

This case has taken everything from me already  my properties, my cash, my life insurance, my trust accounts for my children and my grandchildren, and more.

Adding to his legal woes, Manafort was also charged on Wednesday with mortgage fraud, conspiracy and other counts in a new indictment in New York City.

The state charges appear at least partly designed to guard against the possibility that he could be pardoned by US President Donald Trump and freed early on his federal convictions.

The presidential power does not extend to state charges.

The hearing was a milestone moment in special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into possible co-ordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election campaign.

Manafort was among the first people charged in the investigation, and though the allegations did not relate to his work for Mr Trump, his foreign entanglements and business relationship with a man the US says has ties to Russian intelligence have made him a pivotal figure in the probe.

Defence lawyer Kevin Downing suggested Manafort was being unduly punished because of the media frenzy generated by the appointment of a special counsel.

That results in a very harsh process for the defendant, Mr Downing said.

Mr Trump says he feels very badly for his former campaign chairman.

The president said: On a human basis, its a very sad thing.

Mr Trump also insisted he is not currently considering a Manafort pardon, saying: I have not even given it a thought as of this moment.Chancellor Philip Hammond has insisted that Scotland gets it share of UK spending  but complained he gets precious little thanks from the SNP for it.

The Tory hit back after being challenged by SNP economy spokeswoman Kirsty Blackman, who insisted Scotland had been badly served by consecutive Westminster governments.

She demanded Mr Hammond ensure that Scotland gets an appropriate share of new funding announced in the Chancellors Spring Statement.

But he told her: Scotland gets its share of the increased spending on both capital and resource, but precious little thanks we ever hear from those benches in exchange for it.

From 2010/11 to 2019/20 Scotlands resource block grant has been cut by nearly 2 billion in real terms. https://t.co/uJTItkcyH2  Kirsty Blackman (@KirstySNP) March 13, 2019

Mr Hammond used his statement to the House of Commons to announce 260 million of UK Government funding for the Borderlands Growth Deal.

The cash, which comes on top of 85 million of Scottish Government cash for the project, will be split between areas in the north of England and the south of Scotland.

Scottish Secretary David Mundell described that as absolutely fantastic news for the region.

He said: This exciting deal will boost economic growth by helping existing business, encouraging new ventures and bringing a wealth of improvements to people who live and work in the area and to visitors.

It is an ambitious approach to cross-border working between Governments, local authorities and partners and Im confident that together we can create jobs and opportunity and bring investment.

Great news: Chancellor confirms UK Govt 260 million contribution to #Borderlands Growth Deal. With @scotgov that delivers 345million investment. Wont get much attention today, but transformational long term for our communities across the #Borderlands  David Mundell MP (@DavidMundellDCT) March 13, 2019

In addition to the Borderlands funding, Mr Hammond announced the UK will provide 79 million for a new national supercomputer at Edinburgh University.

He said: Im told that it is up to five times faster than the current generation of supercomputers, capable of a staggering ten thousand trillion calculations per second.

And he quipped: Im told with the right algorithms it might even be able to come up with a solution to the backstop.

While the Chancellor said he was confident of a Brexit deal, he warned MPs of the possible impact of leaving the European Union with no deal in place.

He stated: Leaving with no deal would mean significant disruption in the short and medium term, and a smaller, less prosperous economy in the long term than if we leave with a deal.

This he added would result in higher unemployment, lower wages and higher prices in the shops.

SNP Westminster economy spokeswoman Kirsty Blackman. (Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA)

But with the UKs EU departure looming, Ms Blackman said: The Chancellor should have delivered an emergency budget today to end austerity, reverse the cuts to Scotlands budget, and deliver real investment  to mitigate against the damage the Tories are doing by pushing the UK off the Brexit cliff edge.

She insisted that those in Scotland need to take our lifeboat and get off this sinking Brexit ship.

Meanwhile, Scottish public finance minister Kate Fornes said: While it is welcome that the Chancellor recognises the strategic importance of Edinburgh University and the need to invest in the Borderlands deal, there is much more that could have been delivered today.

It is disappointing that the Chancellor failed to guarantee that all future EU funding to Scotland  worth over 5 billion in this current EU budget round  will be replaced in full.

The best decision the UK Government could take for Scotlands economy and our public finances would be to rule out no deal, to extend Article 50 and to let the people vote against this deeply damaging EU exit.The Prince of Wales and actor Danny Dyer had an unlikely family reunion when the pair met at the Princes Trust Awards in London.

Meeting Charles before the awards at the London Palladium on Wednesday, Dyer told him: Im in EastEnders. Just wanted to let you know were related as well. King Edward III is my grandfather  but I wont go into it. No he is, on my life.

The prince replied: A very long way away.

Yeah, I know, I know, said Dyer.

The EastEnders star discovered in 2016 that he is related to Thomas Cromwell, Edward III, William the Conqueror and Henry III during filming for Who Do You Think You Are?

In January this year he charted his regal lineage in a two-part BBC One series called Danny Dyers Right Royal Family.

Charles shakes hands with Dyer (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

On stage later, the actor joked the two were having a family reunion at the event, where he had come to present the Princes Trust Mentor of the Year award.

When your cousin Charlie makes the call, youve got to help your family out, you know what I mean? he said.

Speaking on stage with Charles, Dyer joked that his reference to their relationship went over the princes head, saying it went straight up his nut.

Host Kate Garraway told Dyer: Im not sure youll be coming over.

Charles met award winners and the charitys supporters at the annual event (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

Later, Charles admitted he had discovered a long-lost relation with Danny Dyer during the event, telling the audience: He told me he was descended from Edward III, which is interesting.

I must do some research when I get back.

Charles also compared notes on fatherhood with Tinie Tempah at the event, as the pair discussed the recent birth of the rappers first child.

Does she keep you up at night? Charles asked Tempah.

No, shes very good, he replied.

Charles compares notes on fatherhood with Tinie Tempah (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

Speaking after the conversation, Tempah told reporters: He was very happy to hear that I have a daughter.

He didnt offer any advice but he was happy to hear she had been born.

Tempah, whose real name is Patrick Okogwu, has been private about the birth of his daughter late last year and his relationship with her mother.

He has said he prefers to keep the identity of his partner and child a secret.The Irish Government has reiterated its call for a public inquiry to be held into the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.

He was shot dead in front of his family in February 1989 by loyalists in an attack found to have involved collusion with the state.

Mr Finucanes widow Geraldine claimed the UK Government had unlawfully reneged on a promise to hold a public inquiry into the killing  one of the most notorious of the Troubles  when former prime minister David Cameron instead ordered an independent review.

Geraldine Finucane, the widow of murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

The Supreme Court in London ruled last month there has been no effective investigation into Mr Finucanes murder and previous inquiries did not comply with the Finucane familys human rights.

Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney announced on Wednesday that the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers in Strasbourg will examine a number of cases related to dealing with the legacy of the Troubles, including the murder of Mr Finucane.

Addressing a meeting of the committee on Wednesday, Irish Ambassador Keith McBean urged the United Kingdom to open a public inquiry into the case.

Ireland would reiterate to the Committee of Ministers that it remains our firm view that a satisfactory outcome to the Finucane case can only be achieved through a public inquiry and we call again on the UK Government to fulfil the commitment it made in this respect under the Weston Park Agreement of 2001, the ambassador said.

Tanaiste Simon Coveney has announced a number of cases related to the legacy of the Troubles will be examined (Niall Carson/PA)

Mr McBean also referred to Bloody Sunday, the day before Northern Irelands Public Prosecution Service (PPS) will announce whether it will prosecute 17 ex-soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA.

Some 13 civilians were shot dead when soldiers opened fire following a civil rights march in Londonderry on January 30 1972.

The Bloody Sunday families, and the families of other victims, have campaigned for truth and justice for decades and are not served by the unclear signals from the UK Government about their intentions, the ambassador said.

A mural in Derry depicting Dr Edward Daly during Bloody Sunday in January 1972 (Liam McBurney/PA)

Where crimes are committed, they must be investigated and prosecuted as necessary in accordance with the law and regardless of the perpetrator.

Ireland has also expressed deep concern generally at the lack of progress in Northern Ireland on tackling its troubled past.

It has been without devolved government for more than two years following a break down in relations between the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein.

Northern Ireland has been without devolved government for over two years (Niall Carson/PA)

A number of mechanisms aimed at addressing legacy issues that were negotiated in the Stormont House Agreement in 2014 have not yet been delivered amid the political vacuum.

These include the Historical Investigations Unit, an independent body in Northern Ireland tasked with investigating outstanding deaths connected to the Troubles.

The Irish ambassador urged the UK to take action, adding: A move ahead to legislation is now urgently required by the UK Government.The European Union has called for clear answers on the UKs Brexit plan as MPs consider rejecting the prospect of crashing out without an agreement in 16 days.

With a majority of MPs expected to oppose leaving without a deal on March 29, the prospect of a delay to Brexit is increasing  but Brussels wants to know what the purpose of any extension would be given Parliaments inability to agree on a way forward.

Chancellor Philip Hammond led calls for a compromise solution after the Commons overwhelmingly rejected Theresa Mays deal on Tuesday night, amid warnings a no-deal Brexit would lead to job losses and price rises.

But Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said a no-deal scenario was better than the prospect of not leaving the European Union at all  even though it would increase tensions between the members of the UK.

The EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier again insisted there will be no further offer from Brussels apart from the deal already on the table and it is now the responsibility of the UK to suggest a way forward.

He asked the European Parliament: What will their choice be, what will be the line they will take?

Frans Timmermans and Michel Barnier at the European Parliament in Strasbourg (Jean Francois Badias/AP)

That is the question we need a clear answer to now. That is the question that has to be answered before a decision on a possible further extension.

Why would we extend these discussions? The discussion on Article 50 is done and dusted. We have the Withdrawal Agreement. It is there.

That is the question asked and we are waiting for an answer to that.

Mr Barnier added: The risk of no-deal has never been higher. That is the risk of an exit  even by accident  by the UK from the EU in a disorderly fashion.

We spared no effort to try and reconcile UK red lines and demands with our duty to protect the EU, the integrity of Internal Market, and the interests of EU citizens.

The Withdrawal Agreement is the best and only possible solution.

FVP Timmermans on #Brexit pic.twitter.com/efUqzGXMjy  European Commission  (@EU_Commission) March 13, 2019

To avoid a walkout by Cabinet ministers who oppose a no-deal Brexit, Mrs May has given Tories a free vote on the Commons motion.

The wording of the motion declares the Commons declines to approve leaving without a deal on March 29  but notes that remains the default position unless an agreement is reached.

Members of the Malthouse Compromise group of Tories from both Leave and Remain wings have tabled an amendment calling for Brexit to be delayed until May 22, followed by a standstill agreement lasting as late as the end of 2021, during which the UK would observe EU rules and pay into Brussels budgets while a full trade deal is negotiated.

The EU has already rejected the idea, which it views as amounting to a transition period without a formal Withdrawal Agreement.

Former Brexit minister Steve Baker, one of the amendments backers, said negotiability is a dynamic concept.

Im in favour of leaving with a #BetterDeal. Heres how:https://t.co/ZZo4aV7SUY



Ill be supporting the #MalthouseCompromise amendment this evening but I cannot support the crass negotiating error of ruling out exit without a Withdrawal Agreement pic.twitter.com/m21nAnJtXi  Steve Baker MP FRSA (@SteveBakerHW) March 13, 2019

A separate cross-party amendment tabled by Tory Dame Caroline Spelman would reject leaving without a deal in any circumstance.

If MPs reject no-deal  as most Westminster observers expect  more votes will follow on Thursday on whether to authorise Mrs May to request an extension of the two-year Article 50 negotiation process.

Divisions between the different wings of the Cabinet were on show as MPs considered rejecting a no-deal Brexit.

The Chancellor used his Spring Statement to call on MPs to put aside our differences and seek a compromise, warning the UK would face significant disruption from a no-deal Brexit.

But Brexit Secretary Mr Barclay said he would prefer a no-deal scenario  even though it risks economic harm and threatens to break up the United Kingdom  to the prospect of not leaving the European Union.

He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: Between those very unpleasant choices, I think no Brexit is the bigger risk.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove, standing in for Mrs May in the Commons after she lost her voice, told MPs: If we do choose to leave without a deal on March 29 therell be economic, political and constitutional challenges that this country will face.

Now we are a great country, we would get through it, we would in due course ensure that this country was more prosperous, freer and successful and, of course, Government has been working hard in order to ensure that we can be prepared for any eventuality and we can mitigate the risks of leaving without a deal.

Meanwhile, Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said that people who advocated for Brexit has been chasing unicorns for a very long time.

Speaking to the press at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington he said: As we head into the next few weeks it should be blatantly obvious that unicorns only exist in fairy tales.

I would say to people who advocated Brexit  is this really what they wanted, protectionism, borders, tariffs, restrictions on trade.

Is this really what Brexit was all about. And for those who voted against the Withdrawal Agreement on the basis that they feared that Northern Ireland would be treated differently as a result of the backstop, it must be evident to them now that its the UK Governments intention to treat Northern Ireland differently.

Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said he still expects Brussels to come up with a new deal, telling LBC Radio: The horses always change places in the final furlong, its always at five minutes to midnight that the real deal is done.

He said it is absurd for Mrs May to grant a free vote on no-deal because it is a fundamental part of the Brexit negotiating strategy.

In preparation for a no-deal outcome, the UK has set out its new tariff schedule, which would force up prices on EU imports including cars and many food products but could reduce costs on goods from elsewhere.

A no deal Brexit is a "sledgehammer hanging over business" and needs to be ruled out today, says @cbicarolyn from @CBItweets which represents thousands of businesses #r4today https://t.co/hdWGx2jHU8 pic.twitter.com/ZFwE3teQbW  BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) March 13, 2019

The CBI warned the new tariffs would act as a sledgehammer to the economy.

The UK Government will also not introduce any new checks or controls on goods moving across the land border into Northern Ireland, raising fears it would potentially create a loophole which could be exploited by smugglers.Business, unions and farmers have responded with dismay to Government plans for changes to tariffs on imported goods if the UK leaves the EU without a Brexit deal.

The CBI said the new rates would hit the UK economy like a sledgehammer, while unions warned that zero tariffs on steel would destroy jobs.

Large reductions in levies on food from outside the EU were worrying to UK producers and could lead to a greater reliance on food produced overseas, said the National Farmers Union.

There was widespread anger that details of the proposed unilateral regime were released just 16 days before the scheduled date of Brexit on March 29, with some business groups complaining they had not been consulted.

Under the Governments plans, tariffs will be slapped for the first time on a range of EU imports, including cars and food products like beef, chicken, lamb, pork, butter and Cheddar-like cheese.

A 10.6% levy on finished vehicles could add 1,500 to the cost of a typical family hatchback. But car parts are zero-rated to avoid disruption to supply chains.

Tariffs will be slashed or eliminated on a wide range of imports from outside the EU, potentially lowering prices on goods from countries like the US and China.

Ministers said that overall the changes would represent a modest liberalisation of the UKs tariff regime, and would remain in place for up to 12 months after a no-deal Brexit.

Some 87% of imports to the UK by value would be eligible for zero-tariff access  up from 80% at present  while many other goods will be subject to a lower rate than under EU rules.

International Trade Secretary Liam Fox said: The temporary tariff would take a balanced approach to support the UK economy as a whole.

It would maintain open trade on the majority of UK imports, to support consumers and business supply chains, but retain necessary tariff protection for particular sectors of the UK economy.

But the EU said it would impose the same levies on UK goods as on imports from other countries with which it has no trade deal, making British producers less competitive on European markets.

CBI director-general Carolyn Fairbairn told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: What we are hearing is the biggest change in terms of trade this country has faced since the mid-19th century being imposed on this country with no consultation with business, no time to prepare.

This is no way to run a country.

What we potentially are going to see is this imposition of new terms of trade at the same time as business is blocked out of its closest trading partner.

This is a sledgehammer for our economy.

Carolyn Fairbairn (Victoria Jones/PA)

The Federation of Small Businesses national chairman Mike Cherry accused ministers of leaving businesses in the lurch.

The sudden reduction or elimination of import tariffs would mean UK producers being undercut in a heartbeat by artificially cheap foreign imports at a time when exporters will face new obstacles to selling into European markets, he said.

TUC general secretary Frances OGrady said the Government was showing reckless disregard for peoples jobs, warning the new regime would deal a hammer blow to our manufacturing industries and the communities they support.

The general secretary of steelworkers union Community, Roy Rickhuss, said zero tariffs on imports would be a fresh betrayal of British steelworkers, putting further pressure on their jobs at a difficult time for the industry.

(PA Graphics)

In special arrangements for Northern Ireland, no tariffs will be payable on EU goods crossing the land border from the Republic unless they are exported on to the British mainland.

But ministers said there would be no border checks down the Irish Sea, with customs officers using compliance and intelligence methods to spot abuses.

The decision  designed to avoid the need for checkpoints which might revive sectarian tensions  was branded a smugglers charter by the chairman of the Commons International Trade Committee, Angus MacNeil.

NFU president Minette Batters described the timing of the announcement a fortnight before the new rates may come into effect as appalling.

The Governments approach would not necessarily lead to cheaper food, but would mean the UK loses control of animal welfare standards, she warned.

Shadow international trade secretary Barry Gardiner said: UK companies will now face competition from a flood of cheap imports that undercut them, putting thousands of jobs here at risk.

Mr MacNeil said the changes were likely to lead to significant increases in prices for UK shoppers and challenging conditions for business, while reducing UK leverage in future trade talks.

The Government says the planned arrangements are only intended to last for up to 12 months in the first instance, said the SNP MP.

But a year is plenty of time for irreversible damage to be done to individual businesses and even whole sectors. And the Governments complete lack of clarity about what happens after 12 months just adds to the already crippling uncertainty which British businesses face.The families of those killed on Bloody Sunday are hopeful they will not have to pass their fight for justice onto the next generation, a campaigner has said.

John Kelly, whose brother Michael was gunned down aged just 17, said he and other relatives of those injured and shot dead are nervous and anxious on the eve of the decision as to whether the British soldiers involved will be prosecuted.

On Thursday morning the families will gather outside The Museum of Free Derry, just yards from where the killings took place 47 years ago, and march together to a city centre hotel to hear whether charges will be brought.

Mr Kelly, 70, said: At the minute were nervous, anxious, trying to anticipate or even think about what the outcome is going to be.

Its been a day that weve been waiting for, for many, many years and hopefully tomorrow we will see justice delivered.

The museum, where many relatives of the dead work to bring the story of what happened at a civil rights march on January 30, 1972 to the world, was a hive of activity on Wednesday with more than 140 visitors.

School groups and holidaymakers alike from countries including the United States and France toured the building in Glenfada Park, which sits in the shadow of a mural of Northern Irelands civil rights movement.

Hege Aglen Elden, a teacher from Norway, said she found the tour very emotional, adding that it was good to be there at such a historic time.

Mickey McKinney looks at a photo on the wall of the Museum of Free Derry (Liam McBurney/PA)

Mr Kelly said he hopes the decades-long journey to justice can finally come to an end with a decision by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) to charge those involved.

He said: Its closure to the families, closure in every aspect of it because the thing that we dont want to do is see this being passed on to the next generation.

I think after this length of time, the time is right now to bring it to an end and hopefully by the delivery by the PPS tomorrow we can look to a better future. I dont want to pass it on to my children, or my grandchildren and all the families feel exactly the same way.

Hopefully, depending on what the PPS delivers tomorrow, we will be in a position where we can bring it to an end.

Mickey McKinney, whose brother William was also killed aged 27, said while he is hopeful of a murder charge, even if that news does not come he will know he and the others have done their utmost for their loved ones.

The 67-year-old said: If we didnt get good news, I can still live with the fact that weve ruffled them (the soldiers and the establishment) a bit.

If it (a prosecution) doesnt happen, well take legal advice to see if there can be a challenge. If theres no challenge, if our solicitors tell us we cant do anything here, I can live with me. Weve given this our all.

Seventeen former members of support company of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment are facing possible charges by the Public Prosecution Service on Thursday.

All 13 of those killed were declared innocent in 2010 following a lengthy public inquiry conducted by Lord Saville, after a years-long campaign by the families to right the wrongs of false claims that their loved ones had been armed.

Recalling his sibling, who was known as Willie, Mr McKinney said: Willie was my brother and he never took part in a riot, he never threw a stone.

Of the soldiers, he said: How dare they take his life? They had no right to do that. They had no right to do what they did on Bloody Sunday.

David Cameron, prime minister in 2010, issued a public apology to the families on behalf of the state for what happened.

However, Alan Barry, from the Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans campaign group, said he feared the paratroopers would face charges, accusing the justice system in Northern Ireland of being one-sided.

I think the whole thing is appalling, that these soldiers could be prosecuted, he said.

This is a new line being drawn in the sand here. If they are prosecuted, what will be next?

A decision is also due to be taken on Thursday by the PPS as to whether to charge two Official IRA suspects.A man has been charged with the murder of a grandmother in Belfast.

Alice Morrow, 53, was found dead in her flat in the Whincroft Way area of east Belfast on Sunday.

She was a mother of three and grandmother to three grandchildren.

Detectives investigating the murder of Alice Morrow in East Belfast have charged a 42-year-old man with her murder. He is due to appear at Belfast Magistrates Court on Thursday 14th March.  Police Service NI (@PoliceServiceNI) March 13, 2019

On Wednesday evening, a 42-year-old man was charged with her murder.

He is due to appear to Belfast Magistrates Court on Thursday.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) launched a murder inquiry following Ms Morrows death.

Detective Chief Inspector Pete Montgomery issued an appeal for information (Niall Carson/PA)

Detective Chief Inspector Pete Montgomery earlier on Thursday issued an appeal for information.

My investigations are ongoing at this time and I am following a number of lines of enquiry, however I know that at 8.45pm on Saturday March 9 Alice travelled from the direction of the Belvoir area to Ballyduff, where she visited friends. She drove her car in both directions, a Silver Peugeot 106, registration FCZ 1913, he said.

She was last seen on CCTV at 2.52am at Brackenvale Eurospar on Saintfield Road where she purchased a number of items and then headed in the direction of Belfast.

Mr Montgomery also asked whether Ms Morrow was seen on Sunday, walking her two Jack Russell dogs, entering or leaving her home at 14 E Whincroft Way or if anyone saw an altercation in her home on Sunday.

I would appeal to anyone who has any information, no matter how insignificant they think it is, to contact us, he said.

Please call detectives on the non-emergency number 101 quoting reference 1345 10/03/19.Ancient Britons travelled for hundreds of miles for rave-like mass gatherings around Stonehenge, a study suggests.

They brought home-reared pigs to the feasts, whose discarded bones have been analysed by scientists.

The results show that people travelled from as far away as Scotland to attend the ritual parties in Wiltshire more than 4,000 years ago.

Researchers examined the bones of 131 pigs from four Late Neolithic sites serving the famous stone circle monuments at Stonehenge and Avebury.

Chemical signals in the bones from the food and water the animals consumed identified the geographical areas where they were raised.

The scientists were surprised to find that the pigs had come from as far away as Scotland, north-east England, and west Wales.

People travelled hundreds of miles to attend rave-like feasts around Stonehenge more than 4,000 years ago, scientists have discovered (PA).

Lead researcher Dr Richard Madgwick, from the University of Cardiff, said: This study demonstrates a scale of movement and level of social complexity not previously appreciated.

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.

Pigs were the prime source of meat for Neolithic feasting, said the scientists.

The team focused on the henge complexes of Durrington Walls, Marden, Mount Pleasant and West Kennet Palisade Enclosures.

Dr Madgwick added: 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.

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.

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.

The research is reported in the journal Science Advances.Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said people who advocated for Brexit have been chasing unicorns for a very long time.

The Taoiseach made the comments to media in the US on Wednesday while MPs at Westminster prepared to vote on whether they are prepared for the UK to leave the European Union without a deal.

As part of his annual St Patricks Day visit, Mr Varadkar attended a lunch at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC.

Leo Varadkar arrives at the US Chamber of Commerce (Brian Lawless/PA)

As we head into the next few weeks it should be blatantly obvious that unicorns only exist in fairytales, he told media at the event.

I would say to people who advocated Brexit  is this really what they wanted? Protectionism, borders, tariffs, restrictions on trade.

Is this really what Brexit was all about? And for those who voted against the Withdrawal Agreement on the basis that they feared that Northern Ireland would be treated differently as a result of the backstop, it must be evident to them now that its the UK Governments intention to treat Northern Ireland differently.

Leo Varadkar speaks to delegates (Brian Lawless/PA)

Addressing the UKs tariff proposals in the event of a no-deal Brexit, Mr Varadkar said Northern Ireland will become a back door to the European single market.

I dont think the UKs proposals will be workable for very long. They propose to treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK, he said.

Northern Ireland will become a back door to the European single market and I think that in a matter of months that will lead to the need for checks at Northern Irelands ports.

So those that opposed the agreement may find that something very akin to the backstop is applied by the UK Government in a few weeks time.

(PA Graphics)

Mr Varadkar also said that in the event of a no-deal Brexit the European customs code will apply to goods exported from the UK to the EU.

That will obviously have a severe impact on the UK economy and the Northern Ireland economy in particular.

Westminster can take the no deal off the table this evening, and if they do so then there is the potential to look at alternatives, for example the UK staying in the customs union.

Mr Varadkar added that Ireland has been preparing for a no-deal Brexit scenario for a long time.

Here in Washington DC and starting a busy week by meeting some friends from home: the Dublin and Belfast Chambers of Commerce pic.twitter.com/49gva5OFEl  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019

We are well placed to deal with any shock that may arise from a no-deal (Brexit), he added.

The fact that we have a budget surplus means that we can borrow if we have to to support our economy.

The Taoiseach started his programme of engagements on Wednesday at the US Chamber of Commerce with Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland.

Irish businesses employ 100000 people in the US and Ireland is the ninth largest source of foreign direct investment here. Im meeting some of these Irish companies who are bringing jobs and investment here in Washington today with @Entirl pic.twitter.com/1TxYhZFhiY  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019

He also attended a round table meeting with Enterprise Ireland chief executive Julie Sinnamon and senior Irish executives, some of whom will be announcing new investments in the US.

There are more than 520 Irish companies operating at 954 locations across all 50 US states, employing more than 100,000 American workers.

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis calculated the value of Irish direct investment in the US at 146.6 billion dollars (110 billion/129 billion euro) in 2017, ranking Ireland as the ninth largest source of foreign direct investment.The US is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft effective immediately in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people, President Donald Trump has said.

Many nations had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from its airspace but, until Mr Trumps announcement, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had said it did not have any data to show the jets are unsafe.

Mr Trump cited new information that had come to light in the ongoing investigation into incident. He did not elaborate.

All of those planes are grounded, effective immediately, the president said during a scheduled briefing on border security.

Mr Trump said any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and then be grounded. He added all airlines and affected pilots had been notified.

He said the safety of the American people is of paramount concern and added that the FAA would soon put out a statement on the action.

Donald Trump said the safety of the US people is `paramount (Evan Vucci/AP)

The decision to ground the aircraft didnt have to be made but we thought it was the right decision, Mr Trump

The president insisted the announcement was co-ordinated with aviation officials in Canada, US carriers and aircraft manufacturer Boeing.

Boeing is an incredible company, Trump said. They are working very, very hard right now and hopefully theyll quickly come up with an answer.Irish Premier Leo Varadkar has confirmed his partner Matt Barrett will join him for a meeting with the US vice-president.

The pair will attend a breakfast with Mike Pence on Thursday morning.

It comes after Mr Pence, who describes himself as a Christian and a conservative, extended an invitation to the couple during a meeting with Mr Varadkar last year.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar met US vice-president Mike Pence and his wife Karen at the White House last year (Niall Carson/PA)

The Taoiseach confirmed on Wednesday evening his partner will be able to attend.

He (Matt) was able to get time off work and make the journey so hell be taking up the invitation from Mike and Karen Pence to attend tomorrow, Mr Varadkar said.

Karen cant be there because shes in Abu Dhabi at the Special Olympics.

Mr Varadkar is Irelands first openly gay leader and one of very few openly gay national leaders in the world.

He is taking part in a series of engagements in Washington DC as part of his annual St Patricks visit to the US.Theresa May has been described as a rabbit in the headlights, too frightened of Brexiteers in her party to really say how bad no-deal would be for country, according to a Labour MP.

Jess Phillips, making her first Commons speech in the debates on the Brexit process, said the single thing that has been missing from the very beginning of this horrid and torrid affair in British politics was any semblance of leadership and courage to take the country somewhere with them.

She said she was not frightened of the people in her Birmingham Yardley constituency who voted to leave, saying if they do not like her views they can vote her out.

Ms Phillips added: I wish the Prime Minister had not been made to be frightened of the people who sat behind her.

Shes certainly terrified of the people in the country.

Tory Nicholas Soames intervened to suggest Mrs May was respectful of those people, not frightened.

Labour MP Jess Phillips (PA)

Ms Phillips said: To me she looks like a rabbit in the headlights, she looks like someone who isnt actually willing to say the real facts and say this is really bad for the country.

Instead we hear it in briefings in Brussels in bars, she said, in reference to an overheard conversation involving her chief Brexit negotiator Olly Robbins about no deal.

The Labour MP said the PM should feel the courage to say Im terrified of no deal and say that even it means being kicked out of Number 10  because that is what courage and leadership is.

Ms Phillips said she was making a speech because she was really sick of the way the Government has gone about this, telling the Commons: Its my way or the highway.

She said she did not know how Michael Gove, who opened the debate, could explain how in the event of a no-deal that food prices would go up and then not move every fibre of his being to end that.MPs have dramatically rejected crashing out of the European Union without a deal at any time and under any circumstances.

In a surprise move, the Commons voted 312 to 308  a majority of four  in favour of an amendment tabled by Tory former cabinet minister Dame Caroline Spelman.

And the vote was later confirmed by a more emphatic 321 votes to 278 when the Governments motion was put forward as amended.

Despite vote to reject a no-deal Brexit, Prime Minister Theresa May told the House of Commons that it remains the default option if no deal was reached.

Dame Caroline had attempted to withdraw her amendment, but it was moved by fellow signatory Yvette Cooper and won the support of a majority of MPs during a string of crunch Brexit votes on Wednesday evening.

The amendment, which is not legally binding, was added to a Government motion tabled by Mrs May which would have rejected no-deal on the scheduled Brexit date of March 29 but left it on the table for other times.

(PA Graphics)

After the voting, Mrs May said that MPs will vote on Thursday on an extension to Article 50, which could involve a short delay to implement a deal agreed in the next few days or a longer delay if no agreement is reached.

To avoid a walkout by Cabinet ministers who oppose a no-deal Brexit, Mrs May initially gave Tories a free vote on the Government motion.

But this was transformed into a three-line whip to oppose the amended motion.

Opposition MPs blamed strong-arm tactics by Tory whips as Dame Caroline tried to pull her amendment before it came to a vote.

Conservative MP Caroline Spelman attempted to pull the cross-party amendment (PA Wire/PA Images)

The former Tory chairman told the Commons that Mrs Mays motion offered a greater opportunity than hers for obtaining a really large majority against a no-deal Brexit.

But Speaker John Bercow told her it was not possible for her to withdraw the amendment, as one of its other signatories could move it to a vote.

Independent Group MP Anna Soubry told the Commons: Its a shameful carry-on when a former chairman of the Conservative Party is whipped against to the extent she will not push that amendment to the vote.

MPs rejected by 374 votes to 164 an amendment from members of the Malthouse Compromise group of Tories from both Leave and Remain wings of the party.

This called for a standstill agreement lasting as late as the end of 2021, during which the UK would observe EU rules and pay into Brussels budgets while a full trade deal is negotiated.

The EU has already rejected the idea, which it views as amounting to a transition period without a formal Withdrawal Agreement.

Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to MPs after the vote (House of Commons/PA)

An extension to Article 50 can only be granted by unanimity among the 27 remaining EU member states, and Brussels has made clear they will do so only if the UK presents a credible justification for being given more time.

The EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier told the European Parliament it was the responsibility of London to suggest a way forward.

What will their choice be, what will be the line they will take? he asked.

That is the question we need a clear answer to now. That is the question that has to be answered before a decision on a possible further extension.

Why would we extend these discussions? The discussion on Article 50 is done and dusted. We have the Withdrawal Agreement. It is there.

We spared no effort to try and reconcile UK red lines and demands with our duty to protect the EU, the integrity of Internal Market, and the interests of EU citizens.

The Withdrawal Agreement is the best and only possible solution.

FVP Timmermans on #Brexit pic.twitter.com/efUqzGXMjy  European Commission  (@EU_Commission) March 13, 2019

Divisions between the different wings of the Cabinet were on show as MPs considered rejecting a no-deal Brexit.

Chancellor Philip Hammond used his Spring Statement to call on MPs to put aside our differences and seek a compromise, warning the UK would face significant disruption from a no-deal Brexit.

But Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said he would prefer a no-deal scenario  even though it risks economic harm and threatens to break up the United Kingdom  to the prospect of not leaving the European Union.

Labours Sir Keir Starmer said that after the 149-vote defeat of her Withdrawal Agreement on Tuesday, Mrs Mays mantra of my deal or no deal should be dead and buried.

But Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss indicated that she believes the deal could still be brought back a third time to the Commons and secure a majority.

I think it is still alive, I do, Ms Truss told BBC Radio 4s PM.

Ultimately, when you look at the alternatives  which are a customs union, no Brexit or no-deal  Theresa Mays deal is more attractive than those other three options.

I think thats the conclusion MPs will ultimately come to.Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said that Irish investment in the United States is at an all-time high.

The Taoiseach made the comment in Washington DC as part of his St Patricks Day visit to the US.

Mr Varadkar kicked off his first number of engagements at the US Chamber of Commerce with Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland.

Ireland has a dynamic and innovation-based enterprise sector, backed by State investment, which is expanding its presence and impact in the US, he said.

Here in Washington DC and starting a busy week by meeting some friends from home: the Dublin and Belfast Chambers of Commerce pic.twitter.com/49gva5OFEl  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019

I look forward to meeting with some of these companies in the coming days and hearing of their plans for the future.

His comments come after a number of Irish companies announced the creation of some 280 new jobs in the US.

Leo Varadkar (centre) with President of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce Niall Gibbons (left) and John Healey, President of the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce, at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC (Brian Lawless/PA)

Netwatch Group, a provider of live remote monitoring for critical infrastructure security, and healthcare technology company RelateCare are creating 100 and 180 new jobs respectively.

Irish businesses employ 100000 people in the US and Ireland is the ninth largest source of foreign direct investment here. Im meeting some of these Irish companies who are bringing jobs and investment here in Washington today with @Entirl pic.twitter.com/1TxYhZFhiY  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019

Ireland is now the ninth largest source of foreign direct investment into the United States at 146.2 billion US dollars (110.6 billion).

Mr Varadkar added: The scale and diversity of this investment is indicative of the strength of the partnership between our two countries.

There are more than 520 Irish companies operating at 954 locations across all 50 US states, employing more than 100,000 American workers.Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said that if the United Kingdom wants to change its mind over Brexit, it would be welcomed back like the Prodigal Son.

The Taoiseach said the United Kingdom would be welcomed back to the European Union with open arms.

Mr Varadkar made the comments to the US Chamber of Commerce chief executive Tom Donohue in Washington DC during his St Patricks visit to the United States.

He was speaking on Wednesday evening, UK time, as MP started voting at Westminster over whether they are prepared for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union on March 29 without a deal.

On Tuesday the House of Commons voted down Prime Minister Theresa Mays proposed Withdrawal Deal.

To the broader public: the Common Travel Area and all that comes with it  free movement between Britain & Ireland, North South  will continue. Thats already been agreed.  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019

Mr Varadkar said: Its always important to remind ourselves that Brexit is not our policy, this is the decision that the UK has made, a decision that we deeply regret in Ireland and across Europe.

If they were ever to change their mind, they would be like the Prodigal Son returning, and we would welcome them with open arms.

But we have to respect the decision they have made which is to leave.

Whatever happens we (Ireland) made our decision a long time ago, that were going to stay at the heart of the EU.

Leo Varadkar arrives at the US Chamber of Commerce (Brian Lawless/PA)

Mr Varadkar told an audience, which included members of the Chamber of Commerce and senior Irish executives, that Ireland and the EU wants a Brexit deal.

We dont believe in tariffs or quotas, or differences in regulations, thats what the Customs Union and Single Market was all about getting rid of those things, he added.

We regret that people are now suggesting we go back to that.

I wonder whether those who advocated Brexit two or three years ago, did they really think it would be about imposing tariffs on each other and paper work and quotas, as thats where we heading if we dont have a deal.

Mr Donohue asked Mr Varadkar how his party have maintained common commitments in relation to Brexit with Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein.

We have a consensus across the Dail on a couple of issues and Brexit is one of those, Mr Varadkar said.

Paramount there is protecting the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement, which has to override any economic or trade related considerations.

We have made so much progress in the last 20 years, with the help of America, in eliminating differences between people in Northern Ireland and north and south (and) sweeping away the hard border that used to exist and we cant allow that to fall backwards.

Even a party like Sinn Fein which used to contribute to the violence and defended some of the violence that happened 20 or 30 years ago, used to be a very anti-European party and wanted us to leave the EU until a few years ago, (but) has now abandoned their policies in those areas.

Here in Washington DC and starting a busy week by meeting some friends from home: the Dublin and Belfast Chambers of Commerce pic.twitter.com/49gva5OFEl  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019

Earlier the Taoiseach said those who advocated for Brexit have been chasing unicorns for a very long time.

As we head into the next few weeks it should be blatantly obvious that unicorns only exist in fairytales, he said.

I would say to people who advocated Brexit  is this really what they wanted? Protectionism, borders, tariffs, restrictions on trade.

Is this really what Brexit was all about? And for those who voted against the Withdrawal Agreement on the basis that they feared that Northern Ireland would be treated differently as a result of the backstop, it must be evident to them now that its the UK Governments intention to treat Northern Ireland differently.

Addressing the UKs tariff proposals in the event of a no-deal Brexit, Mr Varadkar said Northern Ireland will become a back door to the European single market.

(PA Graphics)

I dont think the UKs proposals will be workable for very long. They propose to treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK, he said.

Northern Ireland will become a back door to the European single market and I think that in a matter of months that will lead to the need for checks at Northern Irelands ports.

So those that opposed the agreement may find that something very akin to the backstop is applied by the UK Government in a few weeks time.

Mr Varadkar also said that in the event of a no-deal Brexit the European customs code will apply to goods exported from the UK to the EU.

That will obviously have a severe impact on the UK economy and the Northern Ireland economy in particular.

Leo Varadkar speaks to delegates (Brian Lawless/PA)

Westminster can take the no-deal off the table this evening, and if they do so then there is the potential to look at alternatives, for example the UK staying in the customs union.

Mr Varadkar added that Ireland has been preparing for a no-deal Brexit scenario for a long time.

We are well placed to deal with any shock that may arise from a no-deal (Brexit), he added.

The fact that we have a budget surplus means that we can borrow if we have to support our economy.At least eight people have died after a three-storey school building collapsed in Nigeria, with rescue crews saying that 37 others were rescued from the rubble alive.

Anguished families crowded around the flattened remains of the building in Lagos which housed an elementary school, holding out hope more children would still be found alive.

Scenes of jubilation erupted earlier in the day when a man was brought out alive. But the mood shifted dramatically an hour later when another man was brought out dead.

A woman cries as a body of child is recovered from the rubble (Sunday Alamba/AP)

The evening call to prayer could be heard as hundreds anxiously waited in the citys Ita Faji area, trying to help in rescue efforts.

As many as 100 children had been in the primary school on the buildings top floors, witnesses said.

It touches one to lose precious lives in any kind of mishap, particularly those so young and tender, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said.

Earlier, Associated Press video showed rescuers in yellow vests carrying dust-covered, stunned-looking children from the rubble, to cheers from hundreds who had rushed to the scene. But the crowd went silent as others were pulled out slung over rescuers shoulders, unmoving.

The children were hurried to ambulances. One man pressed his hands to a passing survivors head in blessing.

Emergency services attend the scene (Sunday Alamba/AP)

National Emergency Management Agency spokesman Ibrahim Farinloye said 37 people had been pulled out alive while eight bodies were recovered from the ruins. An unknown number remained missing.

It was not immediately clear why the building collapsed but such disasters are all too common in Nigeria, where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight and floors are added to already unstable buildings.

Lagos state governor Akinwunmi Ambode said the building, which had been marked for demolition, was classified as residential and the school was operating illegally on the top two floors.

He promised a full investigation once rescue operations were concluded and vowed that those responsible would be prosecuted.

I want to commiserate with the families of those that lost their lives in this collapsed building, the governor said in a post on his Facebook page that also urged onlookers to give the rescue workers the chance to save more lives.

Mr Ambode said: All we are interested in now is to save more lives and also see how those that have been rescued are put in proper place and proper care.

The childrens rights group Plan International Nigeria called on the Lagos state government to launch an inquiry into the incident and ensure that all persons found culpable for dereliction of duties are punished.MPs have rejected crashing out of the European Union without a deal, just 16 days ahead of the scheduled break from Brussels.

Events over the next 24 hours will have a major impact on how, when  and if  the UK leaves the EU.

What is happening in Westminster?

MPs will vote on whether Parliament wants to seek an extension to Article 50  delaying the UKs departure beyond the current March 29 deadline  on Thursday.

Mrs May has stressed that would not resolve the divisions in the Commons and could instead hand Brussels the power to set conditions on the kind of Brexit on offer or even moving to a second referendum.

The motion will be amendable, meaning MPs may try to gain a majority for the length of the delay or type of Brexit as part of the extension.

Meanwhile, the Commons Brexit Committee called on Wednesday for Article 50 to be extended, with indicative votes for MPs to signal their preferred way forward.

In our latest report, the Committee and Chair @hilarybennmp calls for a series of indicative votes to be held as soon as possible. Read the report: https://t.co/9KUblmanJG pic.twitter.com/oDEhVv9JvU  Future Relationship with the EU Committee (@CommonsFREU) March 13, 2019

What does the Governments motion say?

The Government motion tabled for debate on Thursday states that if MPs back a Withdrawal Agreement by March 20, the Prime Minister will seek a one-off extension to June 30 to pass necessary legislation.

It says that if the Commons has not passed a resolution approving the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement by March 20, then it is highly likely the European Council would require a clear purpose for any extension and to determine its length.

The motion adds that any extension beyond June 30 would require the United Kingdom to hold European Parliament elections in May 2019.

Govt motion for tomorrow: pic.twitter.com/neeTxcjvTo  Labour Whips (@labourwhips) March 13, 2019

How could Brexit be delayed and for how long?

To secure an extension to Article 50, Mrs May would need the support of the 27 other EU states. They are likely to agree to an extension as long as there was a prospect of a deal being reached  or a referendum or general election which could change the political landscape at Westminster.

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.

If a longer extension was sought, that would mean taking part in the elections, something likely to fuel Eurosceptic anger  and potentially see Nigel Farage standing for the new Brexit Party.

What have the EU 27 leaders said?

Ahead of the no-deal vote, German Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to say how long she thinks a possible delay to Brexit should be, but said it was in our mutual interest that we achieve an orderly departure.

French president Emmanuel Macron said Britain needed a clear reason for requesting an extension and extra time could not be used to renegotiate the withdrawal.

The EUs chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said London must decide what it wants from Brexit before Brussels will consider a delay.

Jean-Claude Juncker said there was no more room for movement (EPTV)

Will the Prime Minister seek further changes in Brussels?

Mr Juncker was clear during his meeting with the Prime Minister in Strasbourg that there was no more room for movement.

In politics, sometimes you get a second chance. It is what we do with this second chance that counts. Because there will be no third chance, he said.

There will be no further interpretations of the interpretations; and no further assurances of the re-assurances.

But a European Council summit on March 21 could give Mrs May one last chance to persuade her fellow leaders face-to-face that she needs extra help to get a deal over the line.

Countdown to leaving the EU (PA Graphics)

So what happens on March 29?

It is still impossible to say. If a deal is somehow reached and legislated for then, although the UK will formally leave the EU at 11pm, very little will change as a transition period will smooth progress to the UKs new future.

If there is a delay, the UK will still be in the European Union until the extension period expires.

But if there is a no-deal Brexit, things are a lot more uncertain  the Government has been ramping up preparations to try to prevent shortages of food and medicine amid fears that increased bureaucracy will clog up key ports where goods arrive from the Continent.Theresa May has held out the prospect of a third meaningful vote on her EU Withdrawal Agreement within the next week after MPs dramatically voted to rule out a no-deal Brexit.

A Government motion for debate in the House of Commons on Thursday offers to seek a one-off extension delaying Brexit to June 30 if MPs approve the deal negotiated with the EU by next Wednesday.

But the Prime Minister warned if the deal  which has already been twice rejected by massive majorities  is not approved, a longer extension will be needed, requiring Britain to take part in the European Parliament elections in May.

I do not think that would be the right outcome, the Prime Minister said.

But the House needs to face up to the consequences of the decisions it has taken.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told MPs Mrs May had repeatedly offered a choice between her deal and no deal, adding: In the last 24 hours, Parliament has decisively rejected both.

Mr Corbyn said: Parliament must now take control of the situation.

Myself, the shadow Brexit secretary and others will have meetings with members across the House to find a compromise solution that can command support in the House.

After the 149-vote rejection of her Withdrawal Agreement on Tuesday, Mrs May suffered a second defeat in as many days when MPs backed a cross-party amendment rejecting a no-deal Brexit under any circumstances.

In a surprise move, the Commons voted 312 to 308  a majority of four  in favour of the proposal tabled by former Conservative chairman Dame Caroline Spelman.

(PA Graphics)

The vote was later confirmed by a more emphatic 321 votes to 278, overriding a Government motion from Theresa May that would have rejected no-deal on the scheduled date of March 29 but left it on the table for other times.

Work and Pensions Minister Sarah Newton quit after defying the whips to vote for the cross-party proposal.

(PA Graphics)

Four Cabinet ministers  David Mundell, Amber Rudd, David Gauke and Greg Clark  and Claire Perry, who attends Cabinet, did not vote on the motion.

Scottish Secretary Mr Mundell said: 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.

Also not voting on the amended motion were ministers Robert Buckland, Alistair Burt, Tobias Ellwood, Stephen Hammond, Richard Harrington, Margot James and Anne Milton, as well as Government whip Mike Freer.

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

Health minister Mr Hammond said the Government whips asked me to vote against the motion, as amended, to reject no-deal but I could not do this as I regard no-deal as a disaster.

Therefore I abstained, despite being a Government minister, he added.

A Cabinet source told PA that, with a significant number of ministers indicating that they were not prepared to vote against the Spelman plan, it was made clear that they would not be required to.

Speaking moments after the vote, Mrs May accepted there was a clear majority against no-deal in the Commons.

But she was greeted by angry barracking by opposition MPs as she insisted no-deal remains the default option in UK and EU law, however, unless a Withdrawal Agreement is reached.

The Government motion tabled for debate on Thursday states that if MPs back the negotiated Agreement within the next seven days, the Prime Minister will seek a one-off extension to June 30 to pass necessary legislation.

BUSINESS UPDATE: Following the result on the #NoDealBrexit debate motion, @CommonsLeader has announced that tomorrow MPs will debate and vote on a motion relating to extending #Article50.  UK House of Commons (@HouseofCommons) March 13, 2019

It adds if no agreement has been approved by the time of the European Council on March 21, it is highly likely the European Council  would require a clear purpose for any extension, not least to determine its length, and any extension beyond June 30 2019 would require the United Kingdom to hold European Parliament elections in May 2019.

The motion sparked fury among MPs, who accused the Government of seeking to ignore the views of the Commons.Three climbers who died after an avalanche on the UKs highest mountain were French and Swiss, Police Scotland have said.

Two of the men caught on Ben Nevis were French, aged 41 and 32, and the third was a Swiss 43-year-old.

A fourth man, 30-year-old Swiss national Mathieu Biselx, remains in a stable condition at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow after Tuesdays avalanche.

Swiss media reported the group were members of the Club Alpin Suisse de Sion (Swiss Alpine Club, Sion).

They were caught by the river of snow and ice in Number 5 gully as Storm Gareth blew in with strong winds, triggering a huge search and recovery operation in brutal conditions, a rescuer said.

One of the climbers died pretty instantaneously, according to Donald Paterson, deputy team leader of Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team (MRT).

Another could not be saved despite receiving CPR for half an hour.

A view of the North Face of Ben Nevis (Andrew Milligan/PA)

Speaking from hospital where he is being treated for serious injuries to both legs, Mr Biselx said his companions were experienced climbers who took advice from local guides and were staying with one.

He said they had been given two routes to take on the mountain and went on one in the morning with no problems.

As they still had time, they suggested doing the second one in the afternoon  assuming they had taken the necessary precautions.

Upon reaching the second route they saw there had already been an avalanche there but had barely reached the area when they were swept away.

Mr Biselx, president of the alpine club and father of a little girl, said he was amazingly lucky.

He told 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, adding: Its terrible theyre not here anymore. They wont see their families again.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the fatalities were absolutely tragic, while Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch MSP Kate Forbes said it was heartbreaking.

Brian Tregaskis, Lochaber MRT secretary, also paid tribute to the climbers and his team.

They were joined by Glencoe MRT and around 30 volunteer mountain rescuers who happened to be training in the area.

Brian Tregaskis, Lochaber MRT secretary, paid tribute to his team (Andrew Milligan/PA)

He said: The members of the Lochaber and Glencoe Mountain Rescue teams did an incredible job in very difficult conditions.

Wed like to extend our deepest sympathies to the loved ones of those who lost their lives and we hope the surviving casualty makes a full and speedy recovery.

Tuesdays incident follows two recent fatal accidents on the mountain, which at 1,345m is the UKs highest.

On New Years 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.Leo Varadkar has defended Irelands corporate tax rate, saying that it gives investors certainty.

The Irish premier was speaking at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC as part of his four-day St Patricks tour of the US.

The Fine Gael leader said that Irelands corporate tax has been at 12.5% for decades and that isnt going to change.

There are actually countries in the European Union that have a lower tax rate than us so we are not even the lowest, he added.

Mr Varadkar with president of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce Niall Gibbons (left) and John Healey, president of the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce (Brian Lawless/PA)

I think what we offer is certainty that even though there may be changes in Government, even though we may go through different economic cycles of recession or growth, that is a certainty and I think that gives investors or potential investors that certainty you need if youre making the 20 or 30-year multibillion-euro investment in an economy. You want to know the fundamentals of those of policies are going to stay the same.

Following meetings with businesses leaders, community leaders and members of the Irish diaspora, Mr Varadkar addressed an audience on Wednesday as part of his engagements in the US capital.

Speaking on stage, US Chamber of Commerce chief executive Tom Donohue said that Ireland was able to improve its economy and employment because it stuck to its tax rates.

Now we are beginning to see in the EU there are a lot of discussions on digital taxes on big companies, which is the next discussion in how do we tax people more than they would like, he added.

Irish businesses employ 100000 people in the US and Ireland is the ninth largest source of foreign direct investment here. Im meeting some of these Irish companies who are bringing jobs and investment here in Washington today with @Entirl pic.twitter.com/1TxYhZFhiY  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019

He asked the Fine Gael leader how Ireland was keeping to its tax commitments.

On (EU) proposals around digital tax, we didnt support them and they have largely been parked, Mr Varadkar added.

Some countries like France have gone ahead and done that unilaterally which is entirely their right to do that. But that has been parked as an EU proposal and we are now looking for a global solution from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and I think that is the right approach.

People across the EU and probably America see that they pay a lot of income tax and they wonder why some big companies dont and why some big companies dont pay their fair share of taxes, and thats not sustainable nor is it right.

I think there will be changes in global taxation and I want Ireland to be on the right side of history when it comes to those but we shouldnt do anything that creates a disadvantage for ourselves or hands an advantage to our competitors and thats why if we are going to change the way tax is structured, the best way to do it is on an international level and I think that is best done through the OECD.Business leaders welcomed MPs vote to reject a no-deal Brexit under any circumstances but urged the Government to turn it into action.

The pound appeared to rise significantly after the vote on Wednesday as fluctuations in Sterling were driven by politics instead of economics, according to one expert.

MPs have voted in the interests of businesses and households by voting to rule out leaving the European Union without a deal, according to the City of London Corporations policy chairwoman Catherine McGuinness.

The move is a victory for common sense, she said.

Ms McGuinness added: Crashing out of the European Union without a deal would be an unprecedented act of self-sabotage.

But in order to stave off this costly economic own goal, Parliament now needs to act swiftly to make todays rejection of no-deal a reality by voting to extend Article 50 and give breathing room for a solution to be found.

Prime Minister Theresa May in the House of Commons on Wednesday (UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/PA)

She also urged the EU to be pragmatic in its response and agree to an extension, adding: Business needs certainty to thrive.

Parliaments decision to reject a hugely damaging no-deal Brexit is a victory for common sense. MPs have rightly voted in the interests of businesses and households by taking a step away from the brink. Article 50 now needs to be extended to give time for a solution to be found.  Catherine McGuinness (@City_McGuinness) March 13, 2019

Dr Adam Marshall, director-general of the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC), warned a messy and disorderly exit from the EU is still a clear and present danger.

He added: The reality is that without action, businesses still face an uncontrolled exit that they neither want nor are ready for.

Its all well and good that Parliament has said it doesnt want a no-deal exit but without concrete action its gestures are meaningless for business.

Extending Article 50 is now a necessity but its no silver bullet for businesses, many of whom fear endless uncertainty.

A deadline that is continuously pushed back isnt a deadline, its an invitation to cancel investment, stop hiring or move UK operations somewhere else.

It's all well and good that Parliament has said it doesnt want a no-deal exit, but without concrete action, its gestures are meaningless for business. A messy and disorderly exit on March 29th is still a clear and present danger. #Brexit @britishchambershttps://t.co/E1Fr2ilIr5  Adam Marshall CBE (@AJBMarshall) March 13, 2019

Leaving the EU without a deal would be an unforgivable act of economic and social self-harm, according to Hugh Savill, director of regulation at the Association of British Insurers (ABI).

He added: It is now essential that this is put on a firm, legislative footing.

Given how much time is left, an extension to Article 50 seems inevitable and is certainly preferable to no-deal by accident.

Stephen Phipson, chief executive of manufacturing organisation Make UK, welcomed the vote result wholeheartedly.

He said: We hope the Government listens and finds a way to make this opinion legally binding.

It is then imperative that Government and Parliament work together to quickly identify a sensible and pragmatic pathway for the future that ends the damaging uncertainty causing havoc to business.

Dean Turner, UK economist at UBS Wealth Management, said the pound had built on gains made earlier on Wednesday.

He added: But be in no doubt that the Brexit process remains extremely fluid, with many twists and turns ahead.A third person has been charged with the murder of Jodie Chesney, the Metropolitan Police have said.

Svenson Ong-a-kwie, 18, of Hillfoot Road in Romford, will appear at Barkingside Magistrates Court on Thursday.

Third person charged with murder of Jodie Chesney in Romford https://t.co/hg0204SAFd pic.twitter.com/EDtTUBVIyZ  Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) March 13, 2019

Jodie, a 17-year-old girl scout, was fatally stabbed in a park in Harold Hill, east London, on March 1 as she listened to music with a group of friends.

A man and a boy have been charged with her murder  Manuel Petrovic, 20, of Highfield Road, Romford, and a 16-year-old, who cannot be named, are both due to face trial at the Old Bailey in September.

Another three people  a 50-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman, both from Dagenham, and a 17-year-old boy who were arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender have all been released under investigation.The US Senate has voted to end US support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalitions war in Yemen, bringing Congress one step closer to a unprecedented rebuke of President Donald Trumps foreign policy.

Politicians have never before invoked the decades-old War Powers Resolution to stop a foreign conflict, but they are poised to do just that in the bid to cut off US support for a war that has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe.

The vote puts Congress on a collision course with Mr Trump, who has already threatened to veto the resolution, which the White House says raises serious constitutional concerns.

The measure was co-sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Mike Lee.

Next, it will move to the Democratic-controlled House, where it is expected to pass.

Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy and Mike Lee meet before holding a news conference on the Senate vote (J Scott Applewhite/AP)

The resolution passed by a vote of 54 to 46, with seven Republicans breaking with Mr Trump to back the resolution: Sensators Susan Collins of Maine, Steve Daines of Montana, Mike Lee of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Todd Young of Indiana.

The bottom line is that the United States should not be supporting a catastrophic war led by a despotic regime with an irresponsible foreign policy, Mr Sanders said on Wednesday from the Senate floor.

He said a vote in favour of the measure would begin the process of reclaiming our constitutional authority by ending United States involvement in a war that has not been authorised by Congress and is unconstitutional.

In its statement threatening a veto, the White House argued the premise of the resolution is flawed and that it would undermine the fight against extremism.

US support for the Saudis does not constitute engaging in hostilities, the statement said, and the Yemen resolution seeks to override the presidents determination as commander in chief.

By defining hostilities to include defence cooperation such as aerial refuelling, the White House statement said, the Yemen resolution could also establish bad precedent for future legislation.

Today the Senate took back its constitutional responsibility to authorize waran authority that belongs to Congress alone, not the presidentby moving to end the catastrophic war in Yemen. This is an historic day. https://t.co/omfrciqIBY  Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 13, 2019

Mr Trumps support for Saudi Arabia has been a point of tension with Congress since the killing of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year.

Politicians from both parties have criticised Mr Trump for not condemning Saudi Arabia strongly enough for the killing.

Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell addressed those tensions when he urged his colleagues to oppose the measure.

We should not use this specific vote on a specific policy decision as some proxy for all the Senates broad feelings about foreign affairs.

Concerns about Saudi human rights issues should be directly addressed with the administration and with Saudi officials, Mr McConnell said from the Senate floor.

Mr McConnell argued the Yemen resolution will not enhance Americas diplomatic leverage and will make it more difficult for the US to help end the conflict in Yemen and minimise civilian casualties.

Senator James Risch, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, argued that US support for the Saudi-led coalition helps facilitate peace talks and withdrawing from the conflict would delay an eventual political settlement.

We need to stay engaged (in Yemen) with the limited engagement weve had, Mr Risch said.

A similar resolution to end support for the Yemen war passed the Senate in December, but it was not taken up by the then Republican-controlled House.

Approaching its fifth year, the war in Yemen has killed thousands and left millions on the brink of starvation, creating what the United Nations called the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

Senator Chris Murphy said before the vote that the resolution will be seen as a message to the Saudis that they need to clean up their act.

We are made weaker in the eyes of the world when we willingly participate in war crimes, when we allow our partners to engage in the slaughter of innocents, Mr Murphy said.Seventeen former British soldiers will hear later today if they are to be prosecuted for opening fire on Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland.

The deaths of 13 innocent civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry almost half a century ago helped galvanise support for the Provisional IRA early in the Troubles.

An image of a Catholic priest waving a blood-stained handkerchief as he tried to help a victim to safety on January 30 1972 went around the world.

Former members of the support company of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment are facing possible charges from the Public Prosecution Service.

The Saville inquiry concluded that the troops killed peaceful protesters (Niall Carson/PA)

They could include counts of murder, attempted murder and causing grievous injury with intent.

Soldiers had been sent into the Bogside nationalist housing estate to deal with riots which followed a Derry march defying a ban on public processions.

As well as the 13 who died, a total of 15 others were shot and injured. One of the injured died months later from an inoperable tumour and some consider him the 14th fatality.

A public inquiry conducted by a senior judge shortly after the deaths was branded a whitewash by the dead victims families and thus began a campaign for a new public inquiry.

Families of the dead sought to right the wrongs of false claims that their loved ones had been armed.

A fresh probe was eventually ordered by former prime minister Tony Blair in 1998.

A decade-long investigation by Lord Saville of Newdigate concluded that the troops killed peaceful protesters and seriously criticised the decision to send them into the Bogside estate in vehicles.

The Saville report used the soldiers ciphers to identify some its authors were sure fired lethal shots. In other cases they recorded those who had probably done so.

Following the inquirys conclusion in 2010, then prime minister David Cameron said the killings were unjustified and unjustifiable.

The Bloody Sunday Memorial in Derrys Bogside (Liam McBurney/PA)

An 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 former soldier has since died.

Four other soldiers included in the Saville Report died before police had completed their investigation.

A decision is also due to be taken on Thursday by the PPS as to whether to charge two Official IRA suspects present on the day.

Papers before prosecutors included 668 witness statements and numerous photos, video and audio evidence.

On Thursday morning the families will gather outside The Museum of Free Derry, just yards from where the killings took place 47 years ago, and march together to a city centre hotel to hear whether charges will be brought.

Alan Barry, from the Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans campaign group, said he feared the paratroopers would face charges, accusing the justice system in Northern Ireland of being one-sided.Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said Ireland needs its friends in the United States more so than ever during these uncertain times.

During a speech in Washington DC, the Taoiseach told the audience that Ireland is fully committed to its membership of the European Union.

While others may make a different decision, we see ourselves at the heart of the common European home which we help to build, he said.

We want to maintain and enhance the transatlantic relationship and we are determined to protect the Good Friday Agreement and everything that flows from it.

So, whatever happens in the coming months, we are sure about our place in the world, we know where we are going and, as a country, we are confident about the future.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (right) in conversation with DUP leader Arlene Foster at the Ireland Funds gala dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington DC (Brian Lawless/PA)

Nr Varadkar was speaking at the Ireland Funds dinner in the National Building Museum during his annual St Patricks Day visit to the US.

His comments came as MPs are set to vote on whether to keep the UK in the EU longer than planned after Prime Minister Theresa Mays authority over Brexit suffered another major blow.

The vote on extending Article 50 comes after MPs defied the Government and dramatically decided to rule out a no-deal withdrawal from the EU amid what some Tory Brexiteers described as chaotic scenes in Westminster.Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said that Ireland and the US have further to go in building countries that reflect all men and women in society.

The Taoiseach was speaking at the Ireland Funds dinner in the National Building Museum, Washington DC, in a night to celebrate visionary women.

Mr Varadkar is in the US capital as part of his St Patricks tour.

In recent years we have smashed stereotypes in both our countries, the old image frozen in time of what a leader is supposed to look like in politics, in business, in professions and in sport has been slowly chipped (away) and at long last confined to the dustbin of history, he said.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (right) with Congressman Richard Neal (Brian Lawless/PA)

In its place we hold up a mirror that more closely reflects women and men in our societies.

People who look like you and me.

We still have further to go.

Sometimes it requires defiance and sometimes acts of imagination.

I believe we must first imagine the kind of society that we want to live in and then work to achieve it.

At this years American Ireland Fund evening were celebrating great Irish American women. An honour to be speaking again this this years event pic.twitter.com/UocPfhUTJT  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 14, 2019

We cant rely on others to change the status quo, we have to do that for ourselves.

At Wednesday nights dinner, Congressman Richard Neal said that women in the US and Ireland have prominent roles in business, arts and government.

The event recognised four women including United States senator Jeanne Shaheen, Tyrone native Sarah Friar, the chief executive of social networking service Nextdoor, Norah ODonnell, the co-host of CBSs This Morning, and Gail Slater, who is special adviser to Donald Trump.

Mr Neal said: Thankfully women now occupy prominent roles in business, arts and in government in both the United States and in Ireland, north and south.

Ireland is very fortunate to have two extraordinary women serve as presidents, which were Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar during his visit to the US (Brian Lawless/PA)

All our incredible honourees this evening are women who are outstanding visionary leaders.

Women have come a long way in both the US and Ireland, but there is still a long way to go.

The Ireland Funds executive director Caitriona Fottrell paid tribute to those who support the philanthropic organisation.

She said: Whats really exciting on a night that celebrates visionary women is how many of the organisations, going right back to very beginning when we were funding tiny communities groups in Northern Ireland right up to some of the largest and creative organisations we support today, how many of those organisations have been led by visionary women, so this is a theme.

We are excited and energised by the transformation those organisations are bringing about and yet every year even better ones come forward.The leader of Sinn Fein and Northern Irelands police chief are to meet on Thursday for a frank conversation.

Mary Lou McDonald and George Hamilton, who are in Washington DC this week, will 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.

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.

Mrs McDonald and Mr Hamilton both attended the Ireland Funds dinner in Washington on Wednesday evening.

The Sinn Fein presidents remarks about the next chief constable triggered a furore last month.

PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton at the Ireland Funds dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington DC (Brian Lawless/PA)

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 historical killings to Northern Irelands Police 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 including political representatives, including Sinn Fein.The Governor of California has not only put a moratorium on executions in the US state but has said he also may commute death sentences and is pushing to repeal capital punishment.

Gavin Newsom signed an executive order granting reprieves to all 737 condemned inmates on the USs largest death row.

That means there will be no executions while he is governor.

Today, we took historic action to stop the death penalty in California. pic.twitter.com/4FmGmPbvAN  Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 14, 2019

He was backed by fellow Democratic politicians who introduced a ballot measure that would repeal the death penalty next year by putting the politically perilous issue before voters for the third time in eight years.

Voters supported capital punishment in 2012 and 2016, when they voted to speed up executions by shortening appeals.

The death penalty has been an abject failure. It discriminates based on the color of your skin or how much money you make. Its ineffective, irreversible, and immoral. It goes against the very values that we stand for  which is why CA is putting a stop to this failed system.  Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 13, 2019

I cannot sign off on executing hundreds and hundreds of human beings, knowing, knowing, that among them will be innocent human beings, Mr Newsom said, citing examples of condemned inmates who were ultimately exonerated.

California would have to execute one inmate each day for more than two years to empty death row, he noted.

Critics accused Mr Newsom of usurping voters will.

One Republican politician said Mr Newsom broke the trust of those who elected him in November, and a prominent victims rights law firm suggested a court challenge and possible competing ballot measure that would restrict governors rights to grant reprieves.

Friends and families of the always forgotten victims are not thrilled, and neither am I!, tweeted President Donald Trump.

Although California has executed no one since 2006, Mr Newsom said he acted as executions potentially neared for 25 inmates who have exhausted their appeals and as court challenges to the states new lethal injection process potentially neared their end.

He rescinded those execution regulations and shut down the states never-used 853,000 US dollar execution chamber.

Death penalty chamber chairs are seen before their removal at San Quentin State Prison (California Department of Corrections/AP)

Prison officials symbolically removed execution equipment from the chamber, releasing photos and video as proof it was dismantled.

Mr Newsom defended his decision in intensely personal terms.

Its a very emotional place that I stand, he said.

This is about who I am as a human being, this is about what I can or cannot do.

To me this is the right thing to do.

He said he is considering commuting death sentences as a next step once state Supreme Court justices explain why they blocked 10 non-death commutations sought by former governor Jerry Brown last year.

A closed sign is placed on the door leading to the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison (California Department of Corrections/AP)

A California governor needs Supreme Court approval to pardon or commute the sentence of anyone twice convicted of a felony, a restriction that applies to more than half of condemned inmates.

Democratic Assemblyman Marc Levine is counting on Mr Newsom to transform voters long-running support for the death penalty.

Mr Levine said he drove by San Quentin State Prisons death row on his way to Sacramento, thinking: This is a new day for California, a new day for justice.

But while six senators and 17 assembly members are supporting Mr Levines proposed constitutional ban on executions, thats a long way from the 27 Senate and 54 Assembly votes required to put the measure on the 2020 ballot.

The death penalty chamber is seen after a pair of chairs were removed at San Quentin State Prison (California Department of Corrections/AP)

Republican Assemblyman Tom Lackey, a former highway patrolman, accused Mr Newsom of going back on his word to voters not to interfere with executions.

But Mr Newsom said his opposition has long been well known.

He said he has had tough meetings with dozens of victims families, including a dozen or so in the last week.

To the victims all I can say is we owe you, and we need to do more and do better, he said.

But we cannot advance the death penalty in effort to try to soften the blow of what happened.Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been sentenced to a total of seven and a half years in prison, then hit almost immediately with fresh state charges in New York.

The state charges would put him outside the presidents power to pardon him.

In Washington, US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson brushed aside Manaforts pleas for leniency and rebuked him for misleading the US government about his lucrative foreign lobbying work and for encouraging witnesses to lie on his behalf.

Mr Jackson added three and a half years on top of the nearly four-year sentence Manafort received last week in a separate case in Virginia, though he will get credit for nine months already served.

Donald Trump expressed sympathy for his former aide (Evan Vucci/AP)

The sentencing hearing was a milestone in special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election campaign.

President Donald Trump said he felt very badly for his former campaign chairman, saying: On a human basis, its a very sad thing.

He said he was not currently considering a Manafort pardon, saying: I have not even given it a thought as of this moment.

After Manafort was sentenced on Wednesday, an indictment was unsealed in New York charging him with state crimes, including a residential mortgage fraud scheme.A suspect in the New Zealand mosque shootings appears to have described himself as an ordinary white man who decided to take a stand.

Brenton Tarrant, 28, from Australia, was named in media reports in his home country as the gunman who appeared to have live-streamed the attack in Christchurch on Facebook as he shot victims in a mosque.

In a 74-page manifesto, believed to have been written by Tarrant, he 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).

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed that one of the people taken into custody by New Zealand authorities is an Australian.

The manifesto, posted online, features 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.

Police and ambulance staff help a wounded man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch (Mark Baker/AP)

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 wasnt a damn thing to do with the economy.

That it was the British people firing back at mass immigration, cultural displacement and globalism, and thats a great and wonderful thing.

The manifesto, which quotes from three British poets, also calls for London Mayor Sadiq Khan, whom he calls a Pakistani muslim invader, to be killed.

And he writes that he supports many of those that take a stand against ethnic and cultural genocide, including Finsbury Park mosque attacker Darren Osborne.

It also cites the rape of British women by European women invaders and includes links to the Rotherham sex abuse scandal.

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.

Sir Oswald Mosley is the person from history that he says he would most associate himself with.

An archive of a Facebook page thought to belong to Tarrant contained dozens of posts in the last week about multiculturalism in Europe, with several referring directly to the UK.

Among them were YouTube recordings of speeches by Sir Oswald.

The attackers rifles were covered in white-supremacist graffiti and he listened to a song glorifying a Bosnian Serb war criminal.

The number 14 is also seen on the rifles, possibly referring to 14 Words, which according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre is a white supremacist slogan linked to Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf.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.

Police attempt to clear people from outside a mosque in central Christchurch (Mark Baker/AP)

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.US regulators have charged Volkswagen and its former chief executive Martin Winterkorn with defrauding investors during its massive diesel emissions scandal.

The charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission come two years after the German motor giant settled with the US over criminal and civil charges, as the company tried to distance itself from one if its darkest eras.

The SEC said Volkswagen issued more than 13 billion dollars (10 billion) in bonds and asset-backed securities in US markets between April 2014 and May 2015, when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 vehicles in the country grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits.

SEC charges Volkswagen, former CEO with defrauding bond investors during clean diesel emissions fraud https://t.co/Hy8anYnYrJ  SEC (@SECGov) March 15, 2019

Volkswagen made false and misleading statements to investors and underwriters about vehicle quality, environmental compliance and the companys financial standing, which gave VW 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 VW 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.

Martin Winterkorn (Michael Sohn/AP)

In 2016 the Justice Department sued VW over the emissions-cheating software and the Federal Trade Commission also sued the company, saying it made false claims in commercials promoting its Clean Diesel vehicles as environmentally friendly.

Martin Winterkorn resigned as CEO, saying he took responsibility for the fraud, but insisted he personally did nothing wrong.

The SEC said he did in the new complaint.

VW told the German dpa news agency that the SEC is repeating unsubstantiated claims against Winterkorn, who was not involved in any sales of bonds.

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, a statement said.

The company has paid 20 billion dollars (15 billion) in fines and civil settlements. It has also pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the US and several managers, including Winterkorn, were charged there.

The surprise charges arrive as VW attempts to distance itself from the scandal. On Tuesday the firm said 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%.

VWs move 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 US District Court for the Northern District of California, charges Volkswagen AG, its subsidiaries Volkswagen Group of America Finance and VW Credit, and Winterkorn with violating the anti-fraud provisions of 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.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.

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.

A police officer patrols at a cordon near a mosque in central Christchurch following the attack (AP)

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.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.

DUP Westminster leader Nigel Dodds (Victoria Jones/PA)

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.

Countdown to leaving the EU (PA Graphics)

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.Interserve has failed to secure investor backing for a rescue plan and is set to fall into administration, with lenders seizing control of the outsourcer.

Investors in Interserve  which holds crucial Government contracts for a range of services in prisons, schools and hospitals  voted against its proposal at a meeting on Friday.

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 companys business and assets (i.e. the entire group) to a newly-incorporated company, to be owned by the existing lenders.

Interserve looks set to avoid a Carillion-style collapse (Steve Parsons/PA)

The firm added that the administration and sale to its lenders is expected to be completed on Friday evening and the business will continue to operate as normal for customers and suppliers.

Shares will be suspended from trading on the London Stock Exchange immediately.

Interserve, which employs 45,000 in the UK, has lined up EY to carry out a pre-pack administration, after which the firm will fall into the hands of its creditors.

Lenders such as RBS, HSBC and BNP Paribas  together with Emerald Asset Management and Davidson Kempner Capital  are expected to seize control once the process is complete.

The pre-pack process will allow it to avoid a Carillion-style collapse, to the relief of Government.

Under the rejected plan, aimed at slashing a near-650 million debt mountain, the group had been proposing a debt-for-equity swap with its lenders that would have resulted in existing investors seeing their holding slashed to just 5%.

However, New York hedge fund Coltrane, Interserves largest shareholder with more than 27%, dismissed the plan, which was eventually rejected by over 59% of shareholders.

It had required the support of over 50% of shareholders to gain approval.

Interserve has been hampered by high debts, construction delays and a failed foray into the energy-from-waste market.A former biology teacher has been convicted of murdering her three-year-old daughter by drowning her in the bath following the breakdown of her marriage.

Claire Colebourn, 36, did not react as the jury foreman read out the unanimous 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 on Friday after an eight-day trial.

She will be sentenced on Monday morning.

Bethan Colebourn, aged three (Hampshire Police/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 at their home in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, 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.

Kerry Maylin, prosecuting, said: Bethan was three-years old, she was a much loved daughter of Claire and Michael Colebourn, but she was found dead at her home.

Claire Colebourn, when Bethan was found, was also in the house and she was at the time suffering a diabetic episode.

Bethan died because she had been put in the bath at home and held under the water, the act was completed by her mother.

The prosecutor said that just over a month before Bethans death, Colebourn and her husband separated and Mr Colebourn had moved out.

Police at the scene outside a property in Whitsbury Road, Fordingbridge, after a 35-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of murdering a three-year-old girl (PA)

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.

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.

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.

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.The Scottish Government spent more than 100,000 on legal costs in a civil court case brought by former First Minister Alex Salmond.

The ex-SNP leader won a procedural case in January over the process of its investigation into harassment allegations against him.

In response to queries under Freedom of Information, the Government said the net legal costs of defending the case were 118,523.

This will be met from budgets managed by the Director General for Organisational Development and Operations.

In the statement, the Government confirmed that no employee would be made redundant due to the costs.

Scottish Conservative MSP Maurice Golden said taxpayers will be furious that this saga is costing them money.

The Scottish Government spent more than 100,000 on defence costs for a civil action brought by former First Minister Alex Salmond (Andrew Milligan/PA)

He added: This is an enormous sum and that is before you take into account any additional costs  which could be substantial.

Scottish Labour MSP Pauline McNeill described the costs as a waste of taxpayer money and said answers were needed on the Governments decisions.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: It was necessary and appropriate for the Scottish Government to instruct counsel who have rights of audience in the Court of Session where Mr Salmond served his petition for judicial review.

Specialist external legal assistance was also required to advise on the specific requirements of the petition.

Salmond,  who resigned his membership of the party in August 2018  appeared at Edinburgh Sheriff Court in January charged with 14 offences, including two of attempted rape.

He refutes absolutely these allegations of criminality.Former subpostmasters have hailed a High Court victory in their ongoing legal battle against the Post Office over its computer system.

More than 550 claimants are involved in a group legal action against the Post Office over the Horizon IT system, which it introduced between 1999 and 2000.

Represented by a group of six lead claimants, they allege the system contained a large number of software defects  which they say caused shortfalls in their accounts.

The Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) said subpostmasters had scored an emphatic win after a judge made a series of findings on the first of at least three trials in the case.

In a ruling on Friday, 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.

Alan Bates, one of the lead claimants in the case and a JFSA representative, said: This is a major step forward to achieving justice and getting to the truth of the matter.

The Post Office faces a legal action from hundreds of subpostmasters (PA/Tim Ireland)

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 weve been fighting for  postmasters have won and Post Office will never again be able to behave as they have in the past with impunity.

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 that the burden is on the claimants to prove that any of their shortfalls were generated by flaws with Horizon.

The judge said: The Post Office describes itself on its own website as the nations 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.

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 judges 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.

Mr Parker said the Post Office is considering an appeal on certain aspects of the ruling.The leader of the Brexit Party has said the way leaving the EU has been handled is worse than anything since the Suez Crisis.

Catherine Blaiklock was speaking on the River Tyne in Newcastle, where she joined the Fishing For Leave flotilla protest over Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit plans.

It comes the day before former Ukip leader Nigel Farage starts out on his March To Leave, from Sunderland to London.

Ms Blaiklock said: It is 1,000 days on Tuesday since the referendum.

They have had plenty of time to prepare everything, there has been an absolute wanton failure to prepare.

The pro-Brexit protest was held at Newcastle Quayside (Owen Humphreys/PA)

People think it is laughable, pathetic, even people who voted Remain, who are weak Remainers, think it has been disastrous handling.

Its the worst handling of any event since Suez.

Three years (since the referendum)  zero progress.

Fishermen sailed along the Tyne in a pro-Brexit protest (Owen Humphreys/PA)

She compared the situation to an Olympic Games where the athletes turn up with days to go and no stadia have been built.

She added: We had three years to prepare, its a catastrophic failure of the Government, of MPs  you couldnt script it.

Fishing vessels display pro-Brexit flags during a protest at Newcastle Quayside (Owen Humphreys/PA)

The flotilla of 12 trawlers made its way up the choppy waters of the Tyne, while a battered boat was driven on the back of a lorry by road, before they met at Newcastles Quayside.

A Fishing For Leave spokesman said: The terms of the Withdrawal Agreement are an existential threat to fishing and a total betrayal of Brexit and Britain.

It means a second surrender of our industry and coastal communities and places a constitutional bomb under democracy.

Pro-EU supporters wave flags from the Gateshead Millennium Bridge (Owen Humphreys/PA)

The last trawler to leave let off a volley of fireworks into the blue sky as it cast off from the Quayside and headed back down river.

The noisy display lasted more than two minutes and echoed around the office blocks beside the Millennium Bridge.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 Ireland, students also took to the streets in cities including Dublin.

Students in Edinburgh are taking part in the global school strike for climate action (Jane Barlow/PA)

Young people gathered in Parliament Square, London, with placards that read: 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!

Joe Crabtree, 15, from south-west London, who is missing GCSE mocks for the protest, said: Im here today to send a clear message to Government that Im fed up with inaction on climate change.

I think theyre 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 its not being dealt with.

Students take part in the climate change protest in Cambridge (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

He called for a green new deal to create low carbon jobs being proposed by Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US, and for politicians to declare a climate emergency, stop investing in fossil fuels and back 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.

Thousands of Dublin Students take to the capitals streets this lunchtime to take part in #schoolstrike4climate . #FridaysForFuture #SchoolStrike @pa pic.twitter.com/AhbgvwB6fX  Niall Carson (@niallcarsonpa) March 15, 2019

On the global day of action, she said: Young people feel empowered by other young people, this is very much a student-led movement.

Its something we all feel very passionate about, because its personal to us, its about our future.

This is a broad movement and we are all striking in solidarity.

The A-level student said her teachers were very supportive of what she was doing and, though they were a bit concerned about her missing lessons, they recognised the importance of the issue to her generation.

Police warned people taking part in the protests not to climb statues (Kirsty OConnor/PA)

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.

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.

The strikes come in the wake of a UN report last year which warned limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which climate impacts become increasingly severe, requires unprecedented action.

Today, hundreds of thousands of young people around the world are making their voices heard.  Their message is clear: climate change is real, its happening now, and we must act. #FridaysForFuture  #Cities4Climate #ClimateStrike pic.twitter.com/6V6PO2iVZs  C40 Cities (@c40cities) March 15, 2019

That includes cutting global carbon dioxide emissions by almost half within 12 years, and to zero by mid-century.

Politicians including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Environment Secretary Michael Gove have spoken of their support for the young climate strikers.

And 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.The Queen and other senior royals have sent heartfelt messages of condolence to the people of New Zealand following the Christchurch mosque shootings.

The words of support were led by the Queen, who said she and the Duke and Edinburgh had been saddened by the appalling events which left 49 people dead in the New Zealand city.

The Prince of Wales showed solidarity with New Zealanders, saying: This appalling atrocity is an assault on all of us who cherish religious freedom, tolerance, compassion and community.

And in a joint message, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said: 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.

The Prince of Wales has sent a message to the people of New Zealand:



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 peoples lives... (1/4)  The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall (@ClarenceHouse) March 15, 2019

No person should ever have to fear attending a sacred place of worship.

Right-wing extremist Brenton Tarrant, 28, from Australia, appeared to have live-streamed the terror attack in Christchurch and outlined his anti-immigrant motives in a manifesto posted online.

New Zealands police commissioner, Mike Bush, said 49 people were confirmed dead and that a man in his late 20s had been charged with murder.

In her message to the Governor-General of New Zealand, Dame Patsy Reddy, 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.

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.  The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (@KensingtonRoyal) March 15, 2019

At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders.

The countrys prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, described the killings as one of New Zealands darkest days, adding: What has happened here is an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.

Charles, who visited New Zealand in 2015 with the Duchess of Cornwall, said in his message: 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 peoples 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.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex wear traditional Maori cloaks called a Korowai during their visit to New Zealand last autumn (Tim Rooke/PA)

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.

William and Kate, and Harry and Meghan said in their joint message that their hearts went out to the families and friends of the people killed in the devastating attack.

They went on to say: 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.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.

Protests were planned in 100 towns and cities across the UK (Jane Barlow/PA)

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.

The rain did not put off any of the protestors in Glasgow (Douglas Barrie/PA)

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.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.

Mourners at the scene (Mulugeta Ayene/AP)

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.

An engine recovered from the crashed Lion Air jet (Achmad Ibrahim/AP)

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.

Boeing 737 Max jets are grounded at Sky Harbour International Airport in Phoenix (Matt York/AP)

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.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.

(PA Graphics)

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.

Police at the mosque in Linwood (Mark Baker/AP)

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 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.

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.It was the week the countdown clock stuttered to a stop and Britain said goodbye to one of the few certainties of Brexit  the March 29 date for EU withdrawal. Heres what happened, and what will happen next.

Days to go

Anybodys guess. Conceivably 14, if the European Union refuses to grant an extension and forces the UK to leave on March 29. Or 107, if Theresa May secures a short, technical delay to June 30. Or 657, if there is a long extension to the end of the proposed transition period on December 31 2020. Or some other number that the politicians manage somehow to settle on.

What happened this week?

After a weekend of stalemate, the Prime Minister seemed to have made a breakthrough on Monday, flying to Strasbourg to agree with Jean-Claude Juncker three new documents designed to reassure her critics.

That respite lasted little more than 12 hours, as Attorney General Geoffrey Cox released advice that legally, the new papers hadnt changed very much. Mrs Mays Withdrawal Agreement went down to defeat by 149 votes on Tuesday  the fourth-worst in parliamentary history, compared to the number one slot held by the 230-vote drubbing of the same Agreement in January.

Theresa May watches the tellers deliver the result of a crucial Brexit vote (Mark Duffy/UK Parliament/PA Images)

Wednesday saw the PM beaten again, as MPs voted to rule out a no-deal Brexit in any circumstances. And on Thursday, a seismic week saw the totemic departure date of March 29  exactly two years since the UK formally told Brussels it wanted to leave  scrubbed from the timetable, as the Commons voted to delay withdrawal.

What happens next?

Dogged as ever, Mrs May is planning a third attempt to get her Agreement through the Commons in what Westminster is calling Meaningful Vote 3  or MV3  probably on Tuesday or Wednesday.

The package will not be much different from the offer decisively rejected twice before by MPs, though the Attorney General is understood to be looking for ways to sweeten the pill of his legal advice. Mrs May is pinning her hopes on Brexit-backing Tories, the DUP and Labour MPs from Leave seats swallowing their objections to her plan to fend off the alternative of possibly seeing their cherished goal receding months or years into the future.

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.  Charles Michel (@eucopresident) March 14, 2019

If she wins her vote, Mrs May will go to the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday to ask for an extension of up to three months, to allow time to tie up all the legislative loose ends needed for a smooth Brexit. If she loses, she has said a longer delay will be needed. And EU leaders have indicated that they will only grant that if the UK can explain what it wants to do with the extra time. An extension can only be agreed by all 27 leaders unanimously. If they refuse, Mrs May could return on Friday with no-deal Brexit looming seven days later.

Good week

Philip Hammond

Amid the chaos enveloping Westminster, the Chancellor delivered a low-key Spring Statement and pulled off the trick of appearing loyal to his leader  or at least more loyal than virtually any of his colleagues  while at the same time placing himself at the head of calls for consensus on Brexit.

Philip Hammond leaves 11 Downing Street ahead of the debate on extending Article 50 (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Bad week

Julian Smith

Theresa Mays Chief Whip oversaw a breakdown in Government discipline, with four Remain-backing Cabinet ministers defying a three-line whip on Wednesday without consequences. Publicly, confusion was blamed, but privately some claimed to have been given a nod and a wink that there would be no repercussions if they abstained. Angry Leavers vented their fury at a testy meeting the following day, in exchanges which Downing Street described as honest, but some insiders claimed had seen the PM going batshit.

Chief Whip Julian Smith fought to maintain Cabinet discipline (Victoria Jones/PA)

Mrs May was forced on Thursday to offer a free vote on delaying Brexit in order to avoid the threat of resignations. The move resulted in more than half of her partys MPs, including seven Cabinet ministers, trooping into the opposite voting lobby to their leader.

Quote of the week

These are unenviable choices, but thanks to the decision that the House has made this evening, they are choices that must now be faced.  Theresa May, setting out the options open to the UK after the rejection of her deal on Tuesday.

Tweet of the week

Tonight I voted against delaying Brexit, but the Parliament agreed to an extension. It must be a swift one, with purpose. We must deliver the result of the referendum, and hurry up about it!  International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt, after Thursdays vote.

Tonight I voted against a delaying Brexit, but the Parliament agreed to an extension. It must be a swift one, with purpose. We must deliver the result of the referendum, and hurry up about it!  Penny Mordaunt (@PennyMordaunt) March 14, 2019

Word of the week

Extension

After years of insisting that March 29 was set in stone as Brexit day, come what may, the Prime Minister buckled under the pressure of approaching deadlines, a divided Cabinet and a disobedient Commons and accepted she must ask for more time.

The length of any extension, and the purposes to which it will be put, will dominate Brexit debate over the coming days.Bernie Sanders has been treated at a walk-in clinic for a minor injury while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the US presidency.

Campaign spokesman Arianna Jones told reporters that Mr Sanders cut his head on the edge of a glass shower door in South Carolina on Friday and went to a walk-in clinic.

She said the 77-year-old senator received a half-dozen stitches and was given a clean bill of health.

Health care is a right, not a privilege. We need Medicare for All. https://t.co/Vkc4v78ngQ  Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 15, 2019

Ms Jones said Mr Sanders is continuing with all scheduled events, including a breakfast with local clergy and a roundtable on health care while in South Carolina.

Mr Sanders will travel to Nevada ahead of his first rally in the early-voting state since launching his presidential bid.

The rally will be held on Saturday.The online messaging forum where Christchurch terrorist suspect Brenton Tarrant announced his intentions has been labelled a hotbed for far-right radicalisation, as users continue to praise the massacre of 49 people at two mosques on Friday.

Tarrant posted links to a manifesto on the messaging site 8chan early on Friday morning, promising to carry out an attack which he subsequently livestreamed on Facebook.

Its been a long ride you are all top blokes, he added.

Home Secretary Sajid Javid told mainstream social media companies enough is enough after footage of the terrorist attack in Christchurch spread rapidly across the networks. But, more than 12 hours after the shooting, 8chan users were still praising Tarrant for his murder spree.

A Home Office spokesman said: It is illegal to publish terrorist propaganda online and we condemn in the strongest of terms the role that these kinds of forums have played in promoting violent extremism and allowing this sickening content to be shared.

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

He was very active not just in the mainstream social media platforms but especially also on some of the fringe platforms that serve as hotbeds for far-right radicalisation, said Julia Ebner, a research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank focused on finding solutions to extremism and polarisation.

Flower rest at a road block, as a Police officer stands guard near the Linwood mosque, site of one of the mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Saturday, March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

Unfortunately, I have to say we almost expected something like this to happen after monitoring these groups and these online spaces the hate speech dynamic has really accelerated and weve seen calls for violence on a lot of these alternative tech platforms.

8chan was created as a forum for free speech by an American programmer in 2013, making all users anonymous by default and allowing them to create new message boards on different topics.

But the focus on free speech and believing the establishment is too politically correct means sites like 8chan, 4chan and other fringe platforms have become safe-havens and self-reinforcing radicalisation bubbles, said Ms Ebner.

As such, they have been the subject of continued controversy in recent years as extremists flocked to the platforms for their lack of regulations, leading to praise for US school shootings and terrorist attacks, as well as discussion of conspiracy theories, racist memes, harassment campaigns, co-ordinated hacking and images of child sexual abuse.

More than 12 hours after the shooting in Christchurch, hundreds of 8chan users had commented in a mega thread about the massacre, started by someone who posted Tarrants video, a list of highlights, a swastika and picture of alt-right icon Pepe the Frog.

Both Tarrants manifesto and video were littered with in-jokes and references to 8chan discussions, according to far-right extremism expert Robert Evans, writing on investigative journalism website Bellingcat.

They are meant to distract attention from his more honest points, and to draw the attention of his real intended audience, wrote Evans, describing Tarrants attack as inspirational terrorism.

The Christchurch shooter put a Sonnenrad on his body armor, a well known neo Nazi symbol. https://t.co/23kTTqy46U  Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) March 15, 2019

And among the racist, Islamophobic, homophobic and anti-semitic comments in the celebratory megathread on 8chan, some users described Tarrant as an accelerationist for a race war.

The only way he could have done this better is if hed claimed he was doing it to get revenge for a gay lover killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting, wrote one user, referring to the 2016 Florida massacre perpetrated by an American who swore allegiance to Islamic State.

Muslims are going to shoot up churches across the west in the coming weeks, they added.

Damian Collins, the Tory chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, said: These platforms are being used to disseminate the vilest content and make people aware of its existence.

We should look at companies like that and say for them to allow their platforms to be used in that way is damaging to society. Its hugely harmful.

He called for a regulator to have the power to sanction companies allowing the spread of harmful content, adding that the ultimate sanction would be to bar them from the internet.

The Government has been clear that tech companies need to act more quickly to remove terrorist content online and that should include blocking access to the platforms that promote it, the Home Office spokesman added.

The Government is expected to publish its Online Harms White Paper in the coming months as a precursor to legislation.

The #Christchurch attacker studied the dynamics of polarisation, his main aim outlined in his manifesto was to exacerbate divisions to provoke radical change, demonstrating a #FinalRaceWar mentality often associated with #GreatReplacement ideologies #NewZealandShooting  Julia Ebner (@julie_renbe) March 15, 2019

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter all condemned the attack, and said they were working to remove any affiliated content  but the owners of 8chan did not respond to requests for comment.

Ms Ebner said digital policy legislation could help in the long term, but mainstream platforms needed to make more effort to identify and remove violence-inciting images, as well as messages.

More broader societal efforts are also needed to encourage a process of de-radicalisation, she added.

In terms of the aims of the perpetrator, hes driving communities apart and thats very similar to what jihadists have been doing and really goes back to the heart of the strategy behind any terrorist attack, she said.

He made it so explicit in his manifesto, he said he wants to provoke radical change through creating or worsening the existing divisions. So I think theres a big challenge for us in civil society to avoid that he reaches his goals.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.

People taking part in a vigil at the New Zealand War Memorial (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

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.

People lay flowers at the New Zealand War Memorial on Hyde Park Corner (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

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.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, Mr Trump maintained that he is not finished fighting for his signature campaign promise, which stands largely unfulfilled 18 months before voters decide whether to grant him another term.

Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution, Mr Trump said, 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.

President Donald Trump looks at notes (Evan Vucci/AP)

It is unlikely that Congress will have the two-thirds majority required to override Mr Trumps 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 toward the southern border wall.

Congress was overruled by the veto (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

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.

A boy rides his bike along a razor-wire-covered border wall that separates Nogales, Arizona, from Nogales, Mexico (Charlie Riedel/AP)

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.

Mr Trump maintained that the situation on the southern border is a tremendous national emergency, adding, our immigration system is stretched beyond the breaking point.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.

Flowers are placed on the tomb of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco (Andrea Comas/AP)

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.President Donald Trump played down any threat posed by racist white nationalism after the gunman accused of the New Zealand mosque massacre called the president a symbol of renewed white identity.

Mr Trump, whose own previous responses to the movement have drawn scrutiny, expressed sympathy for the victims who died as places of worship turned into scenes of evil killing.

But he declined to join expressions of mounting concern about white nationalism, saying that I dont, really when asked whether it was a rising threat around the world.

I think its a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess, Mr 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.

Mr 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.

A police officer patrols at a cordon near a mosque in central Christchurch (Mark Baker/AP)

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, Mr 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 US 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.

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office (Evan Vucci/AP)

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.

Mr 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, Mr 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.

Mr Trump himself telephoned New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, offering condolences, prayers and any help the US might be able to provide.

New Zealands prime minister Jacinda Ardern (AP)

She told reporters she answered: My message was: to offer sympathy and love to all Muslim communities.

Mr 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 posting explosives last autumn to Democratic Party officials and media members, many of whom had been criticised 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 US into a white ethno-state.

It took more than a week for Mr 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 US and abroad.

In January, for example, the New York-based Anti-Defamation League said that domestic extremists killed at least 50 people in the US, 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 US 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.Home Secretary Sajid Javid said he has been left sick to the stomach by a terror attack in New Zealand which claimed the lives of 49 people.

Right-wing extremist Brenton Tarrant, 28, from Australia, went on the shooting spree at two mosques in Christchurch.

Writing in the Express, Mr Javid called the attack heart-breaking.

He added: Sick to the stomach by the massacre of 49 innocent worshippers as they attended Friday prayers.

They were simply targeted for being Muslims, as they paid respects to God.

My own late father never missed Friday prayers. I often joined him, and I fondly look back on the peaceful moments we shared.

Christians hand out flowers outside a Birmingham mosque in the wake of the attack (Ben Birchall/PA)

Footage of the attack, which had been filmed by the gunman, was circulated online after the massacre.

Mr Javid urged people to stop viewing and sharing the sick material online, adding: It is wrong and it is illegal.

Online platforms have a responsibility not to do the terrorists work for them.

This terrorist filmed his shooting with the intention of spreading his ideology.

He said tech companies must do more to stop his message being broadcast.

Mr Javid added that the Government is trying to address what he called illegal behaviour and companies who dont clean up their platforms should be prepared to face the force of the law.

The flag flies at haft mast on the New Zealand High Commission in Londons Haymarket, after the mosque attacks in Christchurch (Jonathan Brady/PA)

The Home Secretary acknowledged that British Muslims will be feeling worried in the wake of the attack.

He added: I say to them what I told my own concerned friends and family members who contacted me in the aftermath.

You have my unwavering support at this terrible time.

I condemn this atrocity with every fibre of my being.

The UK was recently rocked by a wave of terror attacks, he said, adding: We know just how it feels.

The prayers of our whole country are with the victims of this atrocity.Pep Guardiola accepts his Manchester City tenure is likely to be judged on whether he succeeds in the Champions League or not.

The City boss has set extraordinarily high standards for himself having previously guided Barcelona to victory in the competition twice.

In comparison to that his spell in charge of Bayern Munich, where he was a three-time losing semi-finalist, is generally regarded as a disappointment.

That is despite almost cleaning up on the domestic front with three Bundesliga titles and two German Cups.

Already at City, Guardiola has won the Premier League by a record margin and the League Cup twice, but he expects Europe to be the barometer of whether his reign is a success or failure.

He said: I was judged in Munich in that way so I will be judged here as well. My period in Munich was not good for most people because we didnt get one final. We got semi-finals but we didnt get a final and we were judged.

Guardiolas time at Bayern Munich was considered disappointing due to lack of Champions League success (Martin Rickett/PA)

So, Im a lucky guy. My standards are high. I have to reach it.

Guardiola was speaking after learning his side will face Premier League rivals Tottenham in the quarter-finals of this seasons competition next month.

He recognises such judgements are the price he has had to pay for his success but he still believes they are unfair.

Huge game in the @ChampionsLeague for both clubs! Will be good to go back and see some old faces. Looking forward to it!! pic.twitter.com/v5OJsBssTl  Kyle Walker (@kylewalker2) March 15, 2019

The 48-year-old said: When you are in the position that we are right now, Ive not many complaints. Im pretty sure our fans know it.

When I spoke with my chairman, CEO, sporting director, the people here know and they give credit for what we have done in the last two seasons. At the end, that is the most important thing.

After that, everyone can judge if its a disaster. If we do not win the Champions League, our work for three seasons, every three days, is a failure or a disaster. I completely do not agree but what can I say? Accept it and move on.

Guardiola has already enjoyed plenty of domestic success with City (Nick Potts/PA)

Whats important is that the players, the club, the fans and the people give credit if we are consistent and humble and, in every single game, do what we have to do.

But I have to accept it. We won a lot in the past and thats why people believe that is normal  but that is not normal.Puerto Vallarta Jewish Community Passover Seder

Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico - On Friday, April 19, 2019 at 6:30 pm, the Puerto Vallarta Jewish Community will celebrate our traditional Passover Seder at the beautiful River Cafe on the Isla River Cuale in El Centro.

Gather up your family friends and come out and enjoy a traditional Seder with a dinner consisting of: gefilte fish, matzo ball soup, brisket, roast chicken, roasted herb potatoes, steamed mixed vegetables, dessert, coffee, tea, grape juice and kosher wine for 975 Pesos ($50 USD) per person, or 500 Pesos ($25 USD) for children ages 5 to 10, including tip. Children age 4 and under free.

The assistance of volunteers is necessary in order to make the Seder a success. Think of us as a large, caring family that works well together. Volunteers are needed as greeters, to hand out and collect the Haggadahs, kippas and song sheets, and to read Hebrew parts, perform the candle lighting ceremony, and help the children with the Four Questions.

We are ALL looking forward to sharing this holiday together. Reservation are necessary to ensure that you will be included, especially if you have a group that wants to be seated together. If you plan to attend, please make your reservations with the Puerto Vallarta Jewish Community via a Paypal payment to helth1(at)sbcglobal.net.

For more information or to volunteer, please contact me at helth1(at)sbcglobal.net.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.

Police officers search the area near the Masjid Al Noor mosque (Mark Baker/AP)

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.Examining the bacterial makeup of a childs nose could help doctors improve the diagnosis and treatment of serious lung infections, scientists say.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh found that bacteria and viruses at the back of the nose and throat of children with respiratory infections is different to that of healthy youngsters.

These differences indicate the severity of the condition and could help doctors predict how long the affected child needs to spend in hospital.

In less serious cases they could be helped to recover naturally, reducing the need for antibiotics.

Lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs), including pneumonia and bronchiolitis, are a leading cause of death in under-fives around the world.

Symptoms include shortness of breath, weakness and fever.

The findings could aid doctors when assessing the risk of lung infection (Andrew Matthews/PA)

Professor Debby Bogaert of Edinburgh Universitys Medical Research Council Centre for Inflammation Research, who led the study, said: Lung infections can be extremely serious in children and babies and are very distressing for parents.

Our findings show for the first time that the total microbial community in the respiratory tract  rather than a single virus or a bacteria  is a vital indicator of respiratory health.

This could really impact on how doctors diagnose LRTIs and use precious antibiotics to fight infections.

Researchers worked with teams in The Netherlands to take samples from more than 150 children under the age of six hospitalised with an LRTI and compared them with samples from healthy children.

They found the microbiome  the population of bacteria and viruses  at the back of the nose and throat was related to that seen in the lungs, making it easier to understand and diagnose infections.

The microbiome profiles allowed them to identify 92% of children as being healthy or ill when combined with factors such as the childs age.

It also provided a marker of the infections severity.

The study, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, is published in the journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.Almost a fifth of the Syrian refugees who have come to the UK as part of a special programme have settled in Scotland, according to figures revealed by the SNP.

In 2015, the UK Government committed to taking in 20,000 Syrians driven from the war-torn country by 2020 through the Syrian vulnerable person resettlement programme.

Data obtained by the party from the Scottish Parliaments Information Centre (SPICe) shows that since 2015, 13,818 refugees have arrived in the UK.

Of those, 2,562, or 18.5%, have settled in Scotland.

The SNP said the UK Government can and should be doing more to help vulnerable refugees and unaccompanied children.

SNP MSP Ruth Maguire said: Im extremely proud that Scotland has risen to its global responsibilities by offering a secure home to refugee families fleeing persecution and conflict.

Syrian refugees taking take part in an earlier English language project in Edinburgh (Andrew Milligan/PA)

They have been welcomed by communities across our country, bringing with them diverse skills and interests and enriching our society.

The UK Government meanwhile has sadly neglected its moral obligations, turning a blind eye to a humanitarian crisis.

Doing as little as they possibly can to help those in need, the Tories are forcing many of those fleeing war, persecution and terror to take dangerous and illegal routes in the search for safety.

There is no doubt that the UK can and should do more.

A spokesman for the Home Office said: As a country we can be proud that we have resettled over 14,500 people through our vulnerable persons resettlement scheme, which provides sanctuary to the most vulnerable refugees who have fled Syria and who cannot be effectively supported in the region.

We are grateful for the ongoing support of more than 290 local authorities across the UK and we continue to work closely together to convert pledges of accommodation into arrivals.Theresa May will continue efforts to salvage her Brexit deal amid further signs of pressure on her position.

Further talks are expected over the coming days with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in the hope that persuading the 10 Northern Irish MPs to back the deal will help sway scores of Tory Eurosceptics to fall into line.

DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds said lengthy talks on Friday with senior ministers including Chancellor Philip Hammond were constructive and there was a renewed focus from the Government on addressing their concerns.

Mr Dodds said: We have had a constructive dialogue. Those discussions will continue over the coming period of time.

The Prime Minister is expected to bring her Withdrawal Agreement back for a third vote early next week despite its overwhelming 149-vote defeat on Tuesday.

It has been a bruising week for the Prime Minister, with her Cabinet in open revolt as the focus on her leadership intensified.

The Daily Telegraph reported two senior Downing Street figures believe she should fall on her sword by setting out the timetable for her departure.

Prime Minister Theresa Mays leadership has been questioned (PA)

Earlier this week, Tory MP George Freeman, a former head of Mrs Mays policy board, said we need to choose a new leader with a vision to make sense of Brexit and Conservative veteran Sir Christopher Chope said he would seriously consider voting against her in a Commons confidence motion.

Brussels has begun preparations for a possible delay to Brexit beyond the current March 29 deadline after MPs backed an extension to the Article 50 process.

Latvian foreign minister Edgars Rinkevics suggested a delay of up to two years could be required if MPs continue to reject the Brexit deal.

Number one priority would be the deal that is reached is passed, he told BBC Radio 4s Today. If it is not the case what we need is clear vision from the UK Government how much time UK needs to come up with new proposals, new ideas how we proceed. In that case its not a couple of months, I believe then we are talking about maybe one or two years.

European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans suggested that any extension to Article 50 could be a two-stage process, initially limited to a few weeks unless Mrs May could set out what she wanted to achieve with the extra time.

He told Germanys Funke newspaper as long as this isnt clear, Brexit can only be delayed for a few weeks, solely to avoid a chaotic withdrawal on March 29.

During this time, the British must tell us what they want: new elections? A new referendum? Only after that can we talk about a several-month extension, he added.

Documents circulating among EU ambassadors make clear the bloc would terminate the UKs membership on July 1 if it has not taken part in European Parliament elections.

The draft paper obtained by the Financial Times said Britain has to take part in the May 23-26 votes if it wants an extension of more than three months.

The EU guidance echoes the briefing provided to MPs at Westminster before Thursdays vote, which said if the UK were to seek an extension beyond July 1, and hence remain a member state beyond that point, it would need to participate in the EP elections.

Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay explains why he voted against the government on #Brexit last night, minutes after arguing for the plan in the Commons



[tap to expand] https://t.co/H6ujN2cyEk pic.twitter.com/V5kAweomZb  BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) March 15, 2019

Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay, who voted against the Government motion requesting an Article 50 extension, indicated he would prefer a no-deal departure from the bloc to a long delay.

He told the BBC: 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.

Former Cabinet minister Esther McVey suggested fellow Brexiteers could back Mrs Mays rubbish deal next week to make sure the UK leaves the EU.

Quick training session before the March To Leave tomorrow morning! pic.twitter.com/MAm6ABmpSq  Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) March 15, 2019

She told BBC Radio 4s Political Thinking With Nick Robinson podcast: The element now is that people will have to take a bad deal rather than no deal.

Any Brexit delay will require the agreement of the other 27 European Union members, with the issue likely to be on the table at a summit in Brussels on Thursday.

Meanwhile, former Ukip leader Nigel Farage was setting out on his March to Leave, starting in Sunderland and due to arrive in Westminster on March 29.A four-year-old girl is among those fighting for their lives after the New Zealand mosque massacre.

At least 49 people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques during midday prayers on Friday and dozens more were wounded, some critically.

New Zealands prime minister Jacinda Arden has vowed to change the countrys gun laws in the wake of the shooting spree that stunned the world.

Brenton Tarrant, 28, from Australia, appeared in court on Saturday charged with one count of murder and was remanded until April 5. Police said further charges were expected to follow.

He appeared to have live-streamed the terror attack in Christchurch and outlined his anti-immigrant motives in a manifesto posted online.

A search was under way at his residence in Dunedin on Saturday.

The critically wounded four-year-old child was named as Elin by her uncle Sabri Daraghmeh, who told reporters in a phone call from Jordan on Saturday that she remains in the danger phase.

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

Her father Waseem, 33, the brother of Mr Daraghmeh, is said to be in a stable condition.

The Jordanian citizen of Palestinian origin is reported to have moved to New Zealand five years ago and described it as the safest place one could ever live in.

On Saturday, Christchurch Hospital said 39 people remained in hospital, 11 of them in intensive care.

Four people died en route to hospital.

The majority of the patients are male aged 30 to 40, while two of them are boys aged two and 13, said Greg Robertson, chief of surgery at the hospital.

The two-year-old boy was reported to be in stable condition, as was the 13-year-old.

Twelve operating theatres worked through the night, said Mr Robertson.

Many of those injured will need multiple returns to surgery.

Of those killed in the massacre, 41 died at the Masjid Al Noor mosque on Deans Avenue in central Christchurch, seven were killed at the suburban Linwood Masjid Mosque, and one person died at Christchurch Hospital.

A total of four people were arrested following the massacre  one of whom was in possession of a firearm but with the intention of assisting police, and was released a short time later.

New Zealand police commissioner Mike Bush said two of those in custody were arrested at a cordon, and that officers were working to establish whether they had had any involvement in the incident.

Ms Arden said the primary perpetrator in the shootings had five guns and held a gun licence, adding: I can tell you one thing right now  our gun laws will change.

(PA Graphics)

In the video live-streamed by Tarrant, a man inside a mosque appears to say: Welcome brother, as a gunman approaches.

A number of improvised explosive devices found on a vehicle after the shootings were defused by police.

Mr Bush, who had earlier called the attack a very well-planned event, said the suspect was not known to police either in New Zealand or Australia.

An injured man is taken to hospital (AP)

Police urged all mosques across New Zealand to stay closed over the weekend for security reasons.

British security sources said there were no apparent UK links to the attack.

A 24-year-old man from Oldham, Greater Manchester, was arrested on Saturday after posting comments online supporting the slaughter, Greater Manchester Police said.The tragic deaths of 49 people in shootings at two mosques in New Zealand top the agenda on Saturday.

The Guardian calls it carnage and reports that the suspected perpetrator displayed white supremacist symbols during the deadly assault.

Guardian front page, Saturday 16 March 2019: Carnage in New Zealand as gunman kills 49 in mosques pic.twitter.com/SFmUI5JIID  The Guardian (@guardian) March 15, 2019

Technology giants were criticised after the massacre was live-streamed in the first terror attack designed for social media, the Daily Telegraph says.

Saturday's Daily Telegraph front page: 'The first social media terror attack' #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/HOFKjU3oNn  The Telegraph (@Telegraph) March 15, 2019

The Daily Mail reports that the film was deleted only after it had been running for 17 minutes  enough time for it to be reposted across the web.

The Times reports that shortly before the killings, Brenton Tarrant published a manifesto in which he said that he had been inspired by Islamophobic attacks in Britain.

And the Daily Mirror carries a photo it claims is Tarrant as a child.

What the papers say - March 16

Tomorrow's front page: Angelic boy who grew into an evil far-right mass killer#tomorrowspaperstodayhttps://t.co/VcCGfLyXUn pic.twitter.com/7uN0YULl8F  The Mirror (@DailyMirror) March 15, 2019

Meanwhile, the Daily Express says Home Secretary Sajid Javid condemned the shootings as an attack on the freedom and values that unite us all, while the i runs with the headline: Innocence lost.

Tomorrow's @Daily_Express front page:



- #NewZealandMosqueShootings: A fuelled attack on values that unite us all



- Love that keeps Theresa May rock steady



- Unseen photos of the Royal Family at play#tomorrowspapertoday pic.twitter.com/ORjyVef7JB  Daily Express (@Daily_Express) March 15, 2019

The Sun says the tragedy shocked and appalled the world.

Tomorrow's front page: A terrorist massacred 49 Muslims - live-streaming the horror on Facebook in scenes that shocked and appalled the world. https://t.co/xJQ8uuWSim pic.twitter.com/dtNQ7F3Bi2  The Sun (@TheSun) March 15, 2019

In other news, the Financial Times reports that Philip Green is launching a restructuring of his Arcadia group, whose brands include Topshop.Nigel Farage will lead a march from Sunderland to London in protest against attempts to betray the will of the people over Brexit.

The March to Leave, which has been organised by the Leave Means Leave campaign, will begin on Saturday in the north-east city, the first to return a vote in favour of exiting the European Union on the night of the 2016 referendum.

It will then stop off in towns including Hartlepool, Pontefract, Doncaster and Wellingborough before arriving in London on March 29, when a mass rally will take place in Parliament Square.

.@Nigel_Farage: March 29th should be our independence day, but politicians are trying to stop Brexit.



Parliament Square, 29th March will be a historic rally of Brexiteers to tell those in power not to betray Brexit. Be there.https://t.co/uH6QIKFSIg pic.twitter.com/4upKy5cUZy  Britain Means Business (@BritMnsBusn) March 9, 2019

It is expected the march will be followed all the way by two advertising vans made by Led By Donkeys, a grass roots anti-Brexit campaign founded in January.

The group says the vehicles will ensure marchers, onlookers and the rest of the nation are reminded of the contradictions, lies and hypocrisies that Nigel Farage has peddled throughout his campaign to ensure the United Kingdom leaves the European Union in the most disruptive and dangerous way possible.

Outlining the reasons for the peaceful protest, the marchs website states: It is now clear the Westminster elite are preparing to betray the will of the people over Brexit.

Nigel Farage speaking at a Leave Means Leave rally at Central Hall in London (PA)

To counter this, Leave Means Leave are undertaking a peaceful protest to demonstrate the depth and breadth of popular discontent with the way Brexit has been handled.

It adds: Failing to deliver a true Brexit will permanently damage the British peoples faith in democracy.

Quick training session before the March To Leave tomorrow morning! pic.twitter.com/MAm6ABmpSq  Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) March 15, 2019

On Saturday, the march is expected to proceed from Sunderland to Hartlepool, a distance of more than 20 miles, before heading to Middlesbrough on Sunday.

The campaigns website says tickets to be core marchers, who pay 50 to get fully-paid accommodation, breakfast and dinner for the duration of the 14-day event, have sold out.

In announcing the march, Mr Farage said: All of us who want Britain to be a great country once again accept that we must be prepared to stand up for what we believe in and fight for our independence.

Leave Means Leave chairman John Longworth said in February: The Westminster elite has had over two years to implement Brexit and instead has done everything in its power to prevent it.

An extension of Article 50, thereby kicking the can further down the road, is completely unacceptable.New Zealand has been trying to come to terms with the deaths of 49 people shot to death at two mosques during midday prayers on Friday.

One man was arrested and charged with murder.

Brenton Harrison Tarrant appeared in court on 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 attack that stunned New Zealand.

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 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.

The gunman also live-streamed in graphic detail 17 minutes of his rampage at Al Noor Mosque.

At least 48 people were wounded, some critically. Police also defused explosive devices in a car.

Christchurch Hospital chief Greg Robertson said on Saturday that seven of the 48 gunshot victims admitted after the shootings in had been discharged.

A four-year-old girl who had been transferred to an Auckland hospital was in critical condition and 11 patients who remained in Christchurch were also critically wounded.

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 said.

A two-year-old boy was in stable condition, as was a 13-year-old boy.

Police stand by makeshift memorial near the Linwood Mosque in Christchurch (Mark Baker/AP)

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 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.

He has spent little time in Australia in the past four years and only had minor traffic infractions on his record.

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 US president Donald Trump tweeting, We stand in solidarity with New Zealand.

New Zealand, with a population of five 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.

A man places flowers at a makeshift memorial near the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, (Mark Baker/AP)

On Saturday, the prime minister said the primary perpetrator in the shootings was a licensed gun owner and legally acquired the five guns used.

Ms Ardern said the countrys gun laws will change as a result of the carnage, but she did not specify how.

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, Ms Ardern said. They are us.

At the White House, Mr 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.

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.

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.

Mr 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 attack.A group of protesters has gathered in Sunderland ahead of a 14-day march to London in a bid to avert perceived attempts to betray the public over Brexit.

The March to Leave, which has been organised by the Leave Means Leave campaign, is being led by former Ukip leader Nigel Farage.

Around 100 people assembled in Sunderland, the first city to vote in favour of exiting the European Union on the night of the 2016 referendum, in order to start the event.

Some supporters were carrying flags bearing messages including leave means leave and storm Brexit.

On our way to #MarchforLeave in Sunderland. Let's march onwards for Britain. pic.twitter.com/bv0qGx9Y3Z  Andrea Jenkyns MP (@andreajenkyns) March 16, 2019

Mr Farage is expected the join the march including Kate Hoey and Andrea Jenkyns, the MPs for Vauxhall and Morley and Outwood respectively.

They were joined by a group of counter-protesters, including from the anti-Brexit grassroots campaign Led By Donkeys.

Former Ukip party leader Nigel Farage joins the start of the first leg of March to Leave the European Union (Frank Augstein/AP)

The march will make its way to Hartlepool on Saturday, a trip of around 20 miles, before proceeding on to Middlesbrough on Sunday.

It will then stop off in towns including Pontefract, Doncaster and Wellingborough before arriving in London on March 29  the intended date of Brexit  when a mass rally will take place in Parliament Square.

A big Sunderland welcome to @Nigel_Farage

(Billboard location: Pallion Rd, Sunderland) pic.twitter.com/zhmG0pwsvp  Led By Donkeys (@ByDonkeys) March 16, 2019

Outlining the reasons for the peaceful protest, the marchs website states: It is now clear the Westminster elite are preparing to betray the will of the people over Brexit.

To counter this, Leave Means Leave are undertaking a peaceful protest to demonstrate the depth and breadth of popular discontent with the way Brexit has been handled.

It adds: Failing to deliver a true Brexit will permanently damage the British peoples faith in democracy.

In announcing the march, Mr Farage said: All of us who want Britain to be a great country once again accept that we must be prepared to stand up for what we believe in and fight for our independence.There were chaotic scenes as a march led by Nigel Farage left Sunderland in order to protest against a perceived Brexit betrayal.

The March to Leave set off from the North East city on Saturday morning, and will make its way over to London over a 14-day period, arriving in the capital on March 29, where a mass rally will take place on Parliament Square.

Leading hundreds of people in the protest, Nigel Farage said: The will of the people is very clear.

If you see what has been happening in Parliament this week, we may well not be leaving the EU.

If politicians think they can walk all over us, then were going to march back and tell them they cant. Simple as that.

The event has been arranged by the Leave Means Leave campaign, and will proceed towards Hartlepool on Saturday, a trip of around 20 miles, before proceeding on to Middlesbrough on Sunday.

On our way to #MarchforLeave in Sunderland. Let's march onwards for Britain. pic.twitter.com/bv0qGx9Y3Z  Andrea Jenkyns MP (@andreajenkyns) March 16, 2019

The campaigns website says tickets to be core marchers, who pay 50 to get fully-paid accommodation, breakfast and dinner for the duration of the 14-day event, have sold out.

Angry rows broke out as the march started, with several counter-protesters assembling in order to get their views across.

They were carrying love hearts bearing messages like we love workers rights and we love to have a say, but some marchers responded by calling them EU money grabbers.

The counter-protesters were also told to respect the 2016 referendum result, with one man waving a fake blue passport in their direction.

As Mr Farage arrived, a flare was set off with the EU colours, with shouts of exit Brexit emanating form the counter-protesters.

It is understood that two two advertising vans, made by the anti-Brexit grassroots campaign Led By Donkeys, will also be following the march.

A pro European Union demonstrator releases flares as the march kicks off (Frank Augstein/AP)

Barry Lockey, who arrived in Sunderland carrying a flag with the message Get Britain out: Time to leave the EU, said that the event is about supporting democracy.

He said: The democracy in the Parliament building has been spot on. Theyve got their no-deal taken off the table by four votes.

Mr Lockey pointed out that this margin was much smaller than the 4% margin of victory during the EU referendum, which he said is now being discredited.

He added: Im sorry, but that really riles me. And theyre not going to get away with it.

We had a busy night at @ByDonkeys, covering Sunderland in our billboards. Farage's fake grassroots elite-funded circus has not gone unchallenged  pic.twitter.com/CBgLx3qf9y  Led By Donkeys (@ByDonkeys) March 16, 2019

Theyre going to get kicked out, them people, and theyre an absolute damned disgrace.

In contrast, one counter-protester told the Press Association its going to be a disaster if we leave.

Frank Hindle, 66, said: Were here to point out that not everybody agrees with this crowd, who think its going to be wonderful if we leave.

Discussing the no-deal Brexit that many of the marchers are calling for, he said: The impact that will have on businesses and on prices, and on the availability of things like medicines and so forth, it doesnt bear thinking about.Xem them

...

Tin bai cuoi cung

Khong con du lieu e loadItalian prosecutors have opened an investigation into the death of a Moroccan model who testified in one of the inquiries linked to former premier Silvio Berlusconis bunga bunga parties.

Citing Milan prosecutor Francesco Greco, Italian news agency ANSA reported that Imane Fadil died on March 1 at a Milan hospital, where she had been treated since January 29 exhibiting symptoms of poisoning.

In 2012, Ms Fadil had told reporters that she feared for her safety after telling prosecutors investigating possible witness tampering in the case that she was offered money in exchange for her silence about what went on at the parties.

Mr Berlusconi was acquitted by Italys highest court in 2015 of charges that he paid for sex with an underage prostitute during the parties.Parts of the UK have woken up to snow after an area of low pressure swept across the country.

Snow covered daffodils in Stanley, County Durham, the UK is to be battered by strong winds, rain and snow as an area of developing low pressure sweeps across the country.

A Met Office yellow warning for snow is in place until Saturday night for much of Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north east of England.

Snowy condition on the A1 near Alnwick, Northumberland, the UK is to be battered by strong winds, rain and snow as an area of developing low pressure sweeps across the country.

As much as 10cm of snow could fall on higher ground, according to forecasters.

Snow covered daffodils in Stanley, County Durham, the UK is to be battered by strong winds, rain and snow as an area of developing low pressure sweeps across the country.

Good morning UK! Strong winds & outbreaks of rain across much of the UK. Some heavy rain in the N&W, snow in parts of Scotland. Mainly dry but cloudy across the SE. Mild in the south, colder elsewhere. Weather warnings in place, pls check for your area: https://t.co/cQSfu1VDbo pic.twitter.com/2gFaT0HBlb  Met Office (@metoffice) March 16, 2019

(Owen Humphreys/PA)

Heavy snow fell in parts of Northumberland overnight covering part of the A1 at Alnwick.

(Owen Humphreys/PA)

(Owen Humphreys/PA)

(Owen Humphreys/PA)

(Owen Humphreys/PA)

The worst of the wintry weather is expected to be over by Saturday evening with a more settled picture for Sunday.

Snow covered flowers in Stanley, County Durham, the UK is to be battered by strong winds, rain and snow as an area of developing low pressure sweeps across the country.Politicians will move heaven and earth to prevent the UK from leaving the European Union without a deal, Labours shadow chancellor said.

John McDonnell said quite a number of MPs would be prepared to support a compromise deal with the guarantee it goes back to the people for a final say on Brexit.

However no-deal was not a feasible option on the ballot paper, he said.

Ahead of a speech in Gravesend, Kent, he told the Press Association Theresa Mays underlining of the legal default of the UK leaving without a deal on March 29 had led to this weeks rejection.

He said: I think thats irritated MPs so much, thats why no-deal was voted out, and I know that was only an advisory motion but I think MPs would move heaven and earth to prevent a no-deal if she tried that again.

He went on: People have looked over the edge, theyve taken the advice of Theresa Mays own Treasury department, theyve taken the advice of the Bank of England, every independent assessment of the consequence of no-deal, which is pretty catastrophic for our economy.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Mr McDonnell was speaking ahead of one of a series of weekend meetings where he has been sharing Labours message on austerity.

He said he had not noticed a dramatic change in peoples views since the 2016 referendum, but that the party was looking to back backbench proposals to give the public a say over a compromise deal agreed by Parliament.

He said: We are working with Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson, they have their amendment, which was about going back to the people with whatever was agreed in parliament, so weve said we would support that if it comes back, and it may well be this week but it will be down to the tactics they want to pursue, because they will only push that when they think theyve got a realistic prospect of winning.

But, he said, any final say must be on a credible deal.

He went on: Theres no point putting Theresa Mays deal or something like that in my view because its not credible, its dangerous, it has to be a credible deal that we think would protect jobs and the economy, and I think thats what a majority of MPs would vote for, I dont think a majority would vote for something that would damage their constituents livelihoods.

Mr McDonnell said he felt a referendum could be achieved in a relatively curtailed period of time, but that Brussels will not agree to a delay without a realistic plan.

The electoral commission has said it could take months to organise a further referendum campaign and vote.

Asked if he was concerned a significant delay could draw attention from the partys internal issues, such as the anti-Semitism allegations, said: No, the anti-Semitism thing is completely separate and we are keeping our focus on that.

He added: Thats a separate issue that well deal with and nothing will distract us from it either.

When he later addressed the room, Mr McDonnell ripped into the Conservatives austerity programme, which he said has left local government absolutely savaged.

He said: After nine years of austerity, I dont believe there isnt a community around the country that hasnt been hit pretty hard.

We just need to start transforming peoples lives very rapidly.

He also slammed the arrogance of the Tories concerning their spring budget, which saw money pledged committed to combating the knife crime problem.

He said: Its just become commonplace unfortunately, and then Philip Hammond in the spring statement offered 100 million to try and support local police  hes cut 2.4 billion.An Australian senator had a raw egg cracked over his head and faces censure from fellow politicians after sparking outrage by blaming Muslim immigration for the New Zealand mosque shootings.

Sen Fraser Anning came under blistering criticism over tweets on Friday, including one that said: Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?

The real cause of the 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 in a statement.

Television cameras caught a 17-year-old boy breaking an egg on Mr Annings head and briefly scuffling with the independent senator while he was holding a news conference on Saturday in Melbourne.

Police said the boy was arrested, but was released without charge pending a further investigation. No motive was offered for the egg attack.

The government and opposition party agreed to pass a censure motion against Mr Anning over his stance on the Christchurch shootings when Parliament resumes in April.

A teenager breaks an egg on the head of Senator Fraser Anning (AP)

While such a reprimand is a symbolic gesture, the major parties expect to demonstrate how isolated Mr Annings views are among Australias 226 federal politicians.

The major parties support ensures the censure motion will be passed by both chambers.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he denounced Mr Annings comments.

In his conflation of this horrendous terrorist attack with issues of immigration, in his attack on Islamic faith specifically  these comments are appalling and theyre ugly and they have no place in Australia, in the Australian Parliament, Mr Morrison said. He should be, frankly, ashamed of himself.

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.  Scott Morrison (@ScottMorrisonMP) March 15, 2019

Bilal Rauf, spokesman for the Australian National Imams Council, the nations top Muslim group, likened the senators views to the rambling manifesto published online by suspect Brenton Tarrant before the slayings.

When one looks at his statement, it may as well have been an extract from the manifesto of the person that perpetrated these heinous crimes, this act of terrorism in Christchurch, Mr Rauf said.

Mr Rauf said Mr Anning was unfit for the Senate.

Opposition politician Penny Wong accused Mr Anning of attempting to use the tragedy to grab attention ahead of elections in May.

Mr Anning only received 19 votes in the last election in 2016. But because of a quirk in the Australian electoral system, he was elevated to the Senate by the anti-immigration, anti-Muslim One Nation party after a court ruled that its senator, Malcolm Roberts, had not been eligible to run for election due to his dual citizenship.

Mr Anning later defected from One Nation to another anti-immigration party, then became an independent. Analysts say he is unlikely to be re-elected as an independent candidate in May.Hundreds of people have taken part in an anti-racism march and rally in Glasgow.

The Stand up to Racism (SUTR) event saw crowds gather in the citys George Square before a march through the streets.

A minutes silence was also held at 11am to remember those killed in the New Zealand terror attacks.

A statement from Unite the Union Scotland said: All of us who campaign and work for a world free from fear, hatred and bigotry must redouble our efforts.

The current political climate has created an environment where racism has once again reared its ugly head.

Solidarity to all those marching in the anti-racism demo in George Square, Glasgow today. Come join us 11am! An injury to one is an injury to all. TSSA will always oppose racism and fascism in any form and we are proud to be there today. pic.twitter.com/DjbLD9iI7i  TSSA Scotland (@TSSAScotland) March 16, 2019

It continued: There has been a rise in far-right, racist and xenophobic attitudes which has been given oxygen by some of the current debates surrounding the decision by the British public to leave the European Union.

There is an urgent need for all decent-thinking people to come together under a banner of democracy and equality to stand against those that try to divide us.

The message is clear; lets stand together to promote tolerance, acceptance and equality. Unite pledges to play our full part.

Anti-racism campaigners march through the streets of Glasgow (Victoria Mitchell/PA)

Some of the crowd chanted we stand with Christchurch as they entered the square.

A number of SUTR rallies were held around the UK.

There was a heavy police presence as the Glasgow event got under way.

A petition, backed by Glasgow Fight Racism Fight Imperialism (FRFI) and Glasgow Palestine Human Rights Campaign, had been launched online ahead of the rally to try and prevent the Confederation of Friends of Israel in Scotland (COFIS) and Glasgow Friends of Israel (GFI) attending.

A number of counter-protesters were kept at the other side of George Square, away from the main rally.A refugee who ran towards the Christchurch terror attacker is being hailed a hero for preventing more deaths.

When the attacker, alleged to be white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, entered the Linwood mosque in Christchurch, Abdul Aziz, 48, picked up the first thing he could find  a credit card machine  and ran outside, screaming: Come here!

His actions led the gunman on a cat-and-mouse chase before scaring him into speeding away in his car.

But Mr Aziz, whose four sons and dozens of others remained in the mosque while he faced off with the gunman, said he thinks its what anyone would have done.

The terrorist killed 49 people after attacking two mosques in the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealands modern history.

He is believed to have killed 41 people at the Al Noor mosque before driving about three miles across town and attacking the Linwood mosque, where he killed seven more people. One person died later in a hospital.

Mourners place flowers as they pay their respects at a makeshift memorial near the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch (Vincent Yu/AP)

Tarrant, 28, has been charged with one count of murder and a judge said on Saturday that it was reasonable to assume more charges would follow.

Latef Alabi, the Linwood mosques acting imam, said the death toll would have been far higher if it wasnt for Mr Aziz.

Mr Alabi said he heard a voice outside the mosque at about 1:55 pm and stopped the prayer he was leading and peeked out the window. He saw a man in black military-style gear and a helmet holding a large gun, and assumed it was a police officer. Then he saw two bodies and heard the gunman yelling obscenities.

I realised this is something else. This is a killer, he said.

He yelled at the congregation of more than 80 to get down. They hesitated. A shot rang out, a window shattered and a body fell, and people began to realise it was for real.

Then this brother came over. He went after him, and he managed to overpower him, and thats how we were saved, Mr Alabi said, referring to Mr Aziz.

Otherwise, if he managed to come into the mosque, then we would all probably be gone.

Mr Aziz said as he ran outside screaming, he was hoping to distract the attacker. He said the gunman ran back to his car to get another gun, and Mr Aziz hurled the credit card machine at him.

He said he could hear his two youngest sons, aged 11 and five, urging him to come back inside.

The gunman returned, firing. Mr Aziz said he ran, weaving through cars parked in the driveway, which prevented the gunman from getting a clean shot. Then Mr Aziz spotted a gun the gunman had abandoned and picked it up, pointed it and squeezed the trigger. It was empty.

He said the gunman ran back to the car for a second time, likely to grab yet another weapon.

He gets into his car and I just got the gun and threw it on his window like an arrow and blasted his window, he said.

The window shattered: Thats why he got scared.

He said the gunman was cursing at him, yelling that he was going to kill them all. But he drove away and Mr Aziz said he chased the car down the street to a red light, before it made a U-turn and sped away.

Online videos indicate police officers managed to force the car from the road and drag out the suspect soon after.

Originally from Kabul, Afghanistan, Mr Aziz said he left as a refugee when he was a boy and lived for more than 25 years in Australia before moving to New Zealand a couple of years ago.

Ive been to a lot of countries and this is one of the beautiful ones, he said. And, he always thought, a peaceful one as well.

Mr Aziz said he did not feel fear or much of anything when facing the gunman. It was like he was on autopilot.

And he believes that God, that Allah, did not think it was his time to die.A man is in a serious condition in hospital after being stabbed several times in what police say was an attempted murder.

The 20-year-old was found by a member of the public on around 9.35pm on Friday night in Keir Hardie Road, Larkhall, South Lanakrshire.

He was taken to Wishaw General Hospital where medical staff describe his condition as serious but stable.

Police said the attack was being treated as attempted murder.

Detective Sergeant Ronnie Douglas, of Cambuslang CID, said: From our inquiries so far, we understand that there had been a party in a house near to where the man was found, however, there was nothing ongoing on police arrival.

We have still to establish whether he had been at the party or not so would ask that anyone who was there or who maybe saw a disturbance in the street, contact police.

The stabbing of a man in Larkhall is being treated as attempted murder (Joe Giddens/PA)

If you have any information that will assist officers with their investigation, then please contact Cambuslang CID via 101. Please quote incident number 4427 of the 15 March 2019 when calling.A huge study suggests the Apple Watch can sometimes detect a worrisome irregular heartbeat  but experts say more work is needed to tell if using wearable technology to screen for heart problems really helps.

More than 419,000 Apple Watch users signed up for the study, making it the largest ever to explore screening seemingly healthy people for atrial fibrillation, a condition that if left untreated can trigger strokes.

Stanford University researchers in the US reported that the watch did not panic flocks of people, warning just half a per cent of participants -about 2,100  that they might have a problem.

Dr. Mintu Turakhia (@leftbundle) maps the overarching goals of the Apple Heart Study. #ACC19 pic.twitter.com/XVcEqqeAeD  American College of Cardiology (@ACCinTouch) March 16, 2019

However, even among those cases flagged, its not perfect, according to Dr Richard Kovacs of the American College of Cardiology, who was not involved with the study.

People who received an alert were supposed to consult a study doctor and then wear an EKG patch measuring cardiac activity for the next week, to determine the watchs accuracy.

Some skipped the virtual check-up to consult their own doctors. Overall, about 57% sought medical attention.

An Apple Watch (Lynne Cameron/PA)

Among those who participated in EKG monitoring through the study, a third had atrial fibrillation, or a-fib, according to preliminary results being presented at an American College of Cardiology conference in New Orleans.

Great presentation of the Apple Heart Study by Dr. Mintu Turakhia & Dr. Marco Perez at #ACC19 this morning. pic.twitter.com/awSBlPCb1K  StopAfib.org (@stopafib) March 16, 2019

Stanford lead researcher Dr Mintu Turakhia said a-fib tends to come and go, and a week of monitoring might have missed some cases. But he said if the watch detected another irregular heartbeat while someone was wearing the EKG patch, then 84% of the time it really was a-fib.

Dr Lloyd Minor, Stanfords dean of medicine, said: This study we believe provides very encouraging evidence that a device, the Apple Watch, can be used to detect a-fib and to point out to people when additional monitoring or testing may be needed.

Other cardiac experts said the study, which was funded by Apple, suggests screening with wearable technology might be technically feasible eventually, but more research is required.

I would not advise this to the overall general population, said Dr Valentin Fuster, director of Mount Sinai Heart in New York and a former American Heart Association president, who was not involved with the study.

He said that he would like to see it senior citizens with risk factors like high blood pressure.Like thousands of Welsh rugby fans before him, the Duke of Cambridge prepared for a big Wales rugby match by sipping a pint of the famous Brains SA.

William pulled a pint of the iconic ale himself as he opened the new Brains Brewery in Cardiff.

After pouring the drink and taking a sip, the duke joked: I shant neck the whole lot.

William was given a tour of the new Dragon Brewery, where he met staff working on the production line.

William enjoys his pint (Richard Stonehouse/PA)

Head brewer Bill Dobson explained the production process to the royal as he showed him around the new multi-million pound facility.

During his visit, the duke filled a nine-gallon cask of Brains SA beer.

While watching the casks being filled, one started spraying ale and the duke, who was laughing, had to quickly get out of the way.

John Rhys, chairman of Brains, joked: You did well to step back then.

William also met apprentices from a scheme that aims to help people out of long-term unemployment by training them as chefs in Brains pubs.

The Duke of Cambridge narrowly misses being sprayed in beer (Richard Stonehouse/PA)

After being assisted in pulling the pint by Dave Lewis, the long-standing manager of the Brains-owned Lamb & Flag in Abergavenny, the duke unveiled a plaque to mark his visit.

He said: Im sorry you are all in on a Saturday, on a rugby day. I hope you all get to the TV later or the stadium.

Following the visit, the duke was attending the Wales vs Ireland Six Nations match at the Principality Stadium as patron of the Welsh Rugby Union.

Brains, which was established in 1882, is Waless biggest brewer and moved to the new premises earlier this year.

The duke unveils a plaque while officially opening the new Brains brewery (Richard Stonehouse/PA)

The Dragon Brewery, which is due to be fully operational in a few weeks, will produce more than 20 million pints of Brains beer a year.

The current Cardiff Brewery site next to the station is due to be transformed into the exciting Central Quay development, with work commencing later this year.

Mr Rhys, who is the great great-grandson of company founder Samuel Arthur Brain, said: We were honoured to welcome the duke to officially open the Dragon Brewery.

This marks an important step in our exciting plans to set up our proud, family-owned Welsh company to prosper in the long term.

We look forward to launching new beers and building on the success of our thriving pub estate in the coming years.The first round of elections is barely three weeks away. As things stand, Narendra Modis BJP and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) appear better prepared and more organised than the Opposition. They have their alliances in place, the leadership question is settled  and they are dominating the narrative.

The Opposition appears disorganised and disparate, struggling to sew up its alliances. Leave alone ensuring a one-to-one fight against the BJP and optimising unity among the parties opposed to the BJP, Modis opponents appear intent on maximising their strengths.

Will another round of lotuses bloom? The NDA has its alliances in place  and it's dominating the narrative. (Source: Reuters)

Modi and Shah have displayed greater clarity of purpose and a clearer objective  their primary objective is to ensure that Narendra Modi wins a second term in office, and if that means conceding more seats to allies, so be it. A case in point is Bihar, where the BJP is contesting four seats less than 2014. In UP, the BJP swallowed its pride and managed to mollify Anupriya Patel and Om Prakash Rajbhar, despite all the bad blood of the past couple of months. In Maharashtra, till a couple of weeks back, the BJP and Shiv Sena were at war with each other  but keeping their primary objective in mind, the BJP walked the distance to ensure a seat-sharing alliance with the Sena.

The contrast in the Oppositions approach couldnt be starker.

Far from ensuring a nation-wide grand alliance, they have not even been able to come up with their seat-sharing arrangement at the state level. True, the Congress has an alliance in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka  but in states like UP (80 seats), Bihar (40), West Bengal (42) and Delhi (7)  that together account for 167 Lok Sabha seats  the Opposition is a divided house.

In Bihar, the Rashtriya Janata Dal-Congress announced their intention to enter an alliance six months ago. Last week, the RJD agreed to give 11 seats to the Congress  but then changed its mind. Predictably, the Congress protested, and at one stage, it appeared the alliance would fall apart.

Finally, the Congress agreed to give up three seats to the alliance on course.

Divided, they stand? The Opposition has failed to present itself as a strongly well-knit force against the BJP-led NDA. (Source: PTI)

In neighbouring West Bengal, the situation is worse. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) has decided against having any pre-poll alliance and will contest all the seats.

What is worse is that the Left and the Congress too have failed to work out a seat-sharing arrangement, thereby making it a four-cornered contest in the state. In Uttar Pradesh, the BSP shut the door even on a tactical alliance between the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party-RLD alliance and the Congress, thereby making it a three-cornered contest.

The inability, or the refusal, of the Opposition to reach an agreement defies not just logic but common sense as well.

According to some number crunchers in UP, the SP-BSP-RLD alliance is expected to bring the BJP tally down from 71 to 33. In the event of an alliance with the Congress, the BJPs tally would have been reduced to 19. Apparently upset with the Congress for not allying with it in Madhya Pradesh, the BSP hit back by blocking all attempts to work out even a tactical alliance in UP.

It reportedly spurned last-minute attempts even by Sonia Gandhi to find a way out.

The situation in Delhi is no better.

Initially, the Congress was unable to make up its mind on whether or not to ally with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal mooted the idea  but then, the Congress played hardball with Sheila Dikshit putting her foot down. Eventually, following the intervention of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) patriarch Sharad Pawar, the Congress leadership changed its mind and began exploring the possibility of a tie-up.

However, this time round, the AAP upped the ante, demanding seats in Haryana and Punjab in lieu of an alliance in the capital.

Watching with interest: PM Modi could well return to power simply because of the confusion in the Opposition camp. (Source: Reuters)

For now, the NDA appears to be sitting pretty. The Opposition, on the other hand, is a house divided.

It lacks leaders with vision and foresight who are willing to subsume their personal ambitions for a larger goal. If the current trend continues, the Narendra Modi-led government will be the first non-Congress government to win a second consecutive term in office, and the Opposition will have no one to blame  but itself.

Also read: Decoded: Why 'experts' are not happy with the Modi government American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved.

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Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Crown: Adularia Inversiones 2010 S.L., Angleboard Sweden AB, Bates Cargo-Pak ApS, Butimove, CMB Machinery and Technology (Shanghai) Co Ltd, CROWN AP (Thailand) Company Limited, CROWN Aerosols & Promotional Nederland, CROWN Aerosols Italia Srl, CROWN Aerosols Nederland BV, CROWN Aerosols UK Limited, CROWN Americas LLC, CROWN Arabia Can Company Ltd, CROWN Asia Pacific Holdings Pte. Ltd., CROWN Asia Pacific Investments (T) Limited, CROWN Bevcan Espana S.L., CROWN Bevcan France SAS, CROWN Bevcan Slovakia s.r.o., CROWN Bevcan Turkiye Ambalaj Sanayi Ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, CROWN Bevcan and Closures (Thailand) Company Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans (Cambodia) Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans (Dong Nai) Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Beijing Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Changchun Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Danang Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Hangzhou Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Hanoi Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Heshan Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Hong Kong Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Huizhou Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Malaysia Sdn Bhd, CROWN Beverage Cans Nanning Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Putian Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Saigon Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Shanghai Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Sihanoukville Limited, CROWN Beverage Cans Singapore Pte. Ltd., CROWN Beverage Cans Ziyang Limited, CROWN Beverage Packaging LLC, CROWN Beverage Packaging Puerto Rico Inc., CROWN Cans Ghana Limited, CROWN China Holdings (Hong Kong) Limited, CROWN Commercial Belgium BVBA, CROWN Commercial France SAS, CROWN Commercial Germany GmbH & Co. KG, CROWN Commercial Hungary Kft, CROWN Commercial Netherlands B.V., CROWN Commercial Vermogensverwaltung GmbH, CROWN Cork & Seal USA Inc., CROWN Embalagens Metalicas da Amazonia S.A., CROWN Emballage France SAS, CROWN Emirates Company Limited, CROWN Envases Mexico S.A. de C.V., CROWN Famosa S.A. de C.V., CROWN Food Packaging (Thailand) Public Company Limited, CROWN Foodcan (Hat Yai) Company Limited, CROWN Foodcan (Nakhon Pathom) Company Limited, CROWN Foodcan Germany GmbH, CROWN Foodcan GmbH, CROWN Imballaggi Italia Srl, CROWN Imgallaggi Italia Srl, CROWN Italy Finance srl, CROWN Khmer Beverage Cans Limited, CROWN Maghreb Can, CROWN Magyarorszag Csomagoloipari KFT, CROWN Metal Packaging Canada Inc., CROWN Metal Packaging Canada LP, CROWN Middle East Can Co. Ltd., CROWN Packaging (Barbados) Limited, CROWN Packaging Holdings LLC, CROWN Packaging Investment (H.K.) Limited, CROWN Packaging Ireland Ltd, CROWN Packaging Jamaica Limited, CROWN Packaging Polska Sp.z.o.o., CROWN Packaging Technology Inc., CROWN Packaging Trinidad Limited, CROWN Packaging UK Limited, CROWN Promotional Packaging UK Ltd, CROWN SIEM, CROWN Senegal, CROWN Societe Malgache d'Emballages Metalliques, CROWN Speciality Packaging BV, CROWN Speciality Packaging Investment Pte. Ltd., CROWN Specialty Packaging UK Ltd, CROWN TCP Beverage Cans Company Limited, CROWN Verpakking Belgie NV, CROWN Verpakking Nederland B.V., Caretex Asia Ltd., CarnaudMetalbox Engineering Ltd, CarnaudMetalbox Food South Africa (Pty) Limited, CarnaudMetalbox Group UK Limited, CarnaudMetalbox Overeseas Limited, CarnaudMetalbox Overseas Limited, Cierres Hermeticos S.A. DE C.V., Constar International, Crown Americas Capital Corp., Crown Americas Capital Corp. II, Crown Americas Capital Corp. III, Crown Americas Capital Corp. IV, Crown Americas Capital Corp. V, Crown Americas Capital Corp. VI, Crown Brasil Holdings Ltda., Crown Canadian Holdings ULC, Crown Closures Spain S.L., Crown Colombiana S.A., Crown Comercial de Envases S.L., Crown Commercial Italy Srl, Crown Commercial Polska Sp. z.o.o., Crown Consultants Inc., Crown Cork & Seal Company (DE) LLC, Crown Cork & Seal Company Inc., Crown Cork & Seal Deutschland Holdings GmbH, Crown Cork & Seal Receivables (DE) Corporation, Crown Cork & Seal de Portugal Embalagens S.A., Crown Cork Kuban, Crown Cork and Seal Receivables II LLC, Crown Developpement SAS, Crown European Holdings, Crown Food Espana S.A.U., Crown Foodcan Turkey Ambalaj Sanayi Ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Crown Hellas Can Packaging SA, Crown Heshan Trading Company Limited, Crown Holdings Italia Srl, Crown Holdings Spain S.L., Crown International Holdings B.V., Crown International Holdings Inc., Crown Luxembourg Holdings, Crown Mexican Holdings S. de R.L. de C.V., Crown Overseas Investments B.V., Crown Packaging Commercial UK Limited, Crown Packaging Distribution UK Limited, Crown Packaging European Division GmbH, Crown Packaging European Division Services SAS, Crown Packaging European Holdings GmbH, Crown Packaging Lux I S.a.r.l., Crown Packaging Lux II S.a.r.l., Crown Packaging Lux III S.a.r.l., Crown Packaging Manufacturing UK Limited, Crown Packaging Maroc, Crown Receivables III, Crown Services Iberia, Crown UK Holdings Limited, Crownway Insurance Company, Dacro B.V., EMPAQUE, Fabricas Monterrey S.A. de C.V., Form Koruyucu Ambalaj Sanayi Ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Foshan Continental Can Co. Limited, Foshan Crown Easy-Opening End Co. Limited, Glass & Silice S.A. DE C.V., Globoplastt s.r.o., Gunther S.A.S., Haloila Bulgaria EOOD, Interstrap B.V., Josef Kihlberg AB, Kiwiplan GmbH, Kiwiplan Inc, Lachenmeier ApS, Liljendals Bruk AB, Litec France S.A.S., Mezger Heftsysteme GmbH, Mima Films S.a.r.l., Mima Films Sprl, Mima Packaging Systems S.A.S., Mivisa, Nordic S.A.S., Norsk Signode AS, Oy M. Haloila AB, PT CROWN Beverage Cans Indonesia, Package Design and Manufacturing, Prolatamex S.A. DE C.V., Quandel Verpackungs- und Foerdertechnik GmbH, SMB Schwede Maschinenbau GmbH, SMP Schwede Maschinenbau Weischlitz GmbH, SPG Denmark, SPG France Holdings SAS, SPG Germany Service Management GmbH, SPG Industrial Packaging S.a.r.l, SPG Netherlands B.V., SPG Packaging Ireland Limited, SPG Packaging Systems GmbH, SPG Packaging UK Ltd, Scybele S.A.S., Shippers Europe S.p.r.l., Signode BVBA, Signode Brasileira Ltda, Signode Hong Kong Limited, Signode Industrial Group, Signode Industrial Group AB, Signode Industrial Group Colombia S.A.S., Signode Industrial Group GmbH, Signode Industrial Group Holdings Lux S.a.r.l., Signode Industrial Group Holdings US Inc, Signode Industrial Group Lux S.A., Signode Industrial Group Mexico, Signode Industrial Group Sweden AB, Signode International Holdings LLC, Signode International IP Holdings LLC, Signode International Investment LLC, Signode Kabushiki Kaisha, Signode Korea Inc, Signode NZ Limited, Signode Netherlands B.V., Signode Packaging (Qingdao) Co., Signode Packaging (Shanghai) Co., Signode Packaging Espana S.L., Signode Packaging Group (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Signode Packaging Group Australia Pty Ltd, Signode Packaging Group Canada ULC, Signode Packaging Group NZ, Signode Packaging Systems Limited, Signode Pickling Holding LLC, Signode Polska sp. Z.o.o., Signode Singapore Pte. Ltd., Signode Sweden Holdings AB, Signode System GmbH, Signode System Packaging GmbH & Co. KG, Signode Systems (Thailand) Ltd., Signode US IP Holdings LLC, Silice De Veracruz S.A. DE C. V., Silice Del Istmo S.A. DE C.V., Silices De Veracruz, Societe Civile Immobiliere Rousseau-Ivry, Societe Civile Immobiliere des Baquets, Societe de Participations CarnaudMetalbox, Stopak India Pvt. Ltd, Strapex Austria GmbH, Strapex Embalagem L.d.a., Strapex Holdings Limited, Strapex S.A.S., Strapex Srl, Superior Investments Holdings Pte. Ltd., Superior Multi-Packaging Limited, TopFrame LLC, V.A.C. B.V., Vichisa S.A. de C.V., and Warehouse Automation Iberia S.L..11 hours ago

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Dow Jones Stocks Can Offer Dependable Long-Term Returns Adding components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average to your investing strategy certainly comes with its fair share of positives. Since the companies that make up this widely-recognized stock market index are some of the worlds best businesses, investors know they are getting quality by focusing on the Dow.

Read ArticleSPDR S&P Bank ETF's stock was trading at $30.71 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, KBE stock has increased by 77.7% and is now trading at $54.58.

View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19.Lloyds Banking Group plc, together with its subsidiaries, provides a range of banking and financial services in the United Kingdom and internationally. It operates through three segments: Retail; Commercial Banking; and Insurance and Wealth. The Retail segment offers a range of financial service products, including current accounts, savings accounts, mortgages, motor finance, unsecured loans, leasing solutions, credit cards, and other financial services to personal and small business customers. The Commercial Banking segment provides lending, transactional banking, working capital management, risk management, and debt capital market services to small and medium-sized entities, corporates, and financial institutions. The Insurance and Wealth segment offers life, home, and car insurance products; and pension, investment, and wealth management products and services. It also provides digital and mobile banking, and telephone services, as well as advisory services for savings, investments, and planning for retirement. The company offers its products and services under the Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Scottish Widows, MBNA, Schroders Personal Wealth, Black Horse, Lex Autolease, Birmingham Midshires, LDC, IWeb, and Agricultural Mortgage Corporation brands. Lloyds Banking Group plc was founded in 1695 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreGot a question or tip? Contact us at bizmojoidaho@gmail.com.SunTrust Banks, Inc. operates as the holding company for SunTrust Bank that provides various financial services for consumers, businesses, corporations, institutions, and not-for-profit entities in the United States. It operates in two segments, Consumer and Wholesale. The Consumer segment provides deposits and payments; home equity and personal credit lines; auto, student, and other lending products; credit cards; discount/online and full-service brokerage products; professional investment advisory products and services; and trust services, as well as family office solutions. This segment also offers residential mortgage products in the secondary market. The Wholesale segment provides capital markets solutions, including advisory, capital raising, and financial risk management; asset-based financing solutions, such as securitizations, asset-based lending, equipment financing, and structured real estate arrangements; cash management services and auto dealer financing solutions; investment banking solutions; and credit and deposit, fee-based product offering, multi-family agency lending, advisory, commercial mortgage brokerage, and tailored financing and equity investment solutions. This segment also offers treasury and payment solutions, such as operating various electronic and paper payment types, which comprise card, wire transfer, automated clearing house, check, and cash; and provides services clients to manage their accounts online. The company offers its products and services through a network of traditional and in-store branches, automated teller machines, Internet, mobile, and telephone banking channels. As of December 31, 2018, it operated 1,218 full-service banking offices located in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. SunTrust Banks, Inc. was founded in 1891 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

Read MoreFirst Trust North American Energy Infrastructure Fund's stock was trading at $20.3259 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 (Coronavirus) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, EMLP stock has increased by 20.5% and is now trading at $24.49.

View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19.Reports from the United Nations and African governments say Cyclone Idai's death toll has risen to over 550 people.

Personnel carry a body from a military helicopter in Chimanimani, about 600 km south east of Harare, Zimbabwe, Wednesday, March, 20, 2019. Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa visited a part of Chimanimnani affected by cyclone Idai and promised assistance in the form of food and rebuilding of homes. Hundreds are dead, many more missing and thousands at risk from massive flooding in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe caused by Cyclone Idai.[Photo via AP/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi]

A U.N. official says Cyclone Idai has killed 242 people in Mozambique and 56 people in Malawi, according to government reports. Another 259 deaths have been cited in Zimbabwe from the country's defense minister.

Gemma Connell, head of the U.N. humanitarian office for southern and eastern Africa, said Thursday from Mozambique's capital of Maputo that those figures are expected to rise, especially in Mozambique, where many areas remain inundated.

Connell visited the Mozambique city of Beira on Wednesday and flew over affected areas including the town of Buzi, which was under water for several days after the cyclone hit March 14. She says there is still the threat of secondary floods.

She said Cyclone Idai has created "a hugely complex situation" that requires "an even more complex response." She urged nations to donate as much as possible to help those left hungry and homeless.Varian Medical Systems, Inc. designs, manufactures, sells, and services medical devices and software products for treating cancer and other medical conditions worldwide. It operates through Oncology Systems and Proton Solutions segments. The Oncology Systems segment offers hardware and software products for treating cancer with radiotherapy, fixed field intensity-modulated radiation therapy, image-guided radiation therapy, volumetric modulated arc therapy, stereotactic radiosurgery, stereotactic body radiotherapy, artificial intelligence based adaptive radiotherapy, and brachytherapy, as well as quality assurance equipment. Its products include linear accelerators, brachytherapy afterloaders, treatment accessories, and quality assurance software; and information management, treatment planning, image processing, clinical knowledge exchange, patient care management, decision-making support, and practice management software. This segment serves university research and community hospitals, private and governmental institutions, healthcare agencies, physicians' offices, medical oncology practices, radiotherapy centers, and cancer care clinics. The Proton Solutions segment designs, develops, manufactures, sells, and services products and systems for delivering proton therapy for the treatment of cancer. The company has a strategic agreement with McKesson Corp. to supply treatment delivery systems and planning, services, and radiotherapy information system solutions to its U.S. Oncology Network and Vantage Oncology affiliated sites of care; and a strategic partnership with Siemens AG to represent Siemens diagnostic imaging products to radiation oncology clinics in the United States and other select markets. Varian Medical Systems, Inc. was formerly known as Varian Associates, Inc. and changed its name to Varian Medical Systems, Inc. in April 1999. The company was founded in 1948 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Read MoreJohn Hancock Premium Dividend Fund is a closed ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by John Hancock Investment Management LLC. It is co-managed by John Hancock Asset Management. The fund invests in the public equity markets of the United States. It seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors, with an emphasis on the utilities sector. The fund primarily invests in dividend paying preferred stocks and common stocks of companies. It benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against a composite benchmark comprised of 70% Bank of America Merrill Lynch Preferred Stock DRD Eligible Index and 30% S&P 500 Utilities Index. The fund was formerly known as John Hancock Patriot Premium Dividend Fund II. John Hancock Premium Dividend Fund was formed on December 21, 1989 and is domiciled in the United States.

Read MoreOshkosh Corp. engages in the designing, manufacturing, and marketing of specialty vehicles and vehicle bodies. It operates through the following segments: Access Equipment, Defense, Fire & Emergency, and Commercial. The Access Equipment segment consists of JerrDan and JLG, which manufactures aerial work platforms; and telehandlers that are used in construction, industrial, institutional, and general maintenance applications to position workers and materials at elevated heights. The Defense segment produces tactical wheeled vehicles; and supply parts and services for the United States military and other militaries around the world. The Fire and Emergency segment sells commercial and custom fire vehicles; simulators and emergency vehicles primarily for fire departments, airports and other governmental units; and broadcast vehicles for broadcasters and television stations. The Commercial segment includes McNeilus, CON-E-CO, London, Iowa Mold Tooling Co., Inc (IMT), and Oshkosh Commercial. The company was founded in 1917 and is headquartered in Oshkosh, WI.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Quaker Chemical: AC Products Inc., Applied Surface Concepts Holdings Ltd. , Binol AB, Binol Biosafe OY, Commonwealth Oil Corporation, DA Stuart India Private Limited, DA Stuart Shanghai Co, ECLI Products LLC, EFHCO LLC, Engineered Custom Lubricants, Engineered Custom Lubricants GmbH, Epmar Corporation, G.W. Smith and Sons, GH Holdings Inc., GHG Lubricants Holdings Limited, GHGL London Ltd., GHI Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Global Houghton Ltd., Houghton (Shanghai) Specialty Industrial Fluids Co. Ltd, Houghton Argentina S.A., Houghton Asia Pacific Co. Limited, Houghton Australia Pty. Ltd., Houghton Benelux BV, Houghton CZ s.r.o, Houghton Canada Inc., Houghton Denmark AS, Houghton Deutschland GmbH, Houghton Europe BV, Houghton Holdings Limited, Houghton Iberica S.A. , Houghton International, Houghton International Inc., Houghton Italia S.p.A., Houghton Japan Co. Ltd., Houghton Kimya Sanayi AS, Houghton Magyarorszag Kft, Houghton Mexico S.A. de C.V., Houghton Oil (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd., Houghton Polska Sp. Zo.o., Houghton Romania S.R.L., Houghton S.A.S., Houghton Sverige AB, Houghton Taiwan Co. Limited, Houghton Technical Corp., Houghton Ukraine ToV, Houghton do Brazil Ltda., Houghton plc, Internationale Metall Impragnier GmbH, Lubricor Inc, Lubricor Inc., Lubricor Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Lubricor USA Inc., MIH Acquisition Company LLC, MX Systems International Ltd, Maldaner GmbH, NP Coil Dexter Industries, New Houghton Brazil Inc., Norman Hay Engineering Ltd., QH Chemical Limited, QH Europe BV, QH Holdings Limited, QH International Limited, Quaker (Thailand) Ltd., Quaker Australia Holdings Pty. Limited, Quaker Chemical (Australasia) Pty. Limited, Quaker Chemical (China) Co. Ltd., Quaker Chemical B.V., Quaker Chemical CV, Quaker Chemical Canada Holdings Inc., Quaker Chemical Canada Limited, Quaker Chemical Europe B.V., Quaker Chemical Holdings South Africa (Pty) Limited, Quaker Chemical India Private Limited, Quaker Chemical Industria e Comercio Ltda., Quaker Chemical Investment Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Quaker Chemical Limited, Quaker Chemical MEA FZE, Quaker Chemical Operacoes Ltda., Quaker Chemical Participacoes Ltda., Quaker Chemical S.A., Quaker Chemical S.r.l., Quaker Chemical Services EURL, Quaker Chemical South Africa (Pty.) Limited, Quaker China Holdings B.V., Quaker Denmark ApS, Quaker Houghton (Finco) Ltd., Quaker Houghton Holdings Limited, Quaker Houghton Holdings Ltd., Quaker Houghton International LP, Quaker Houghton Ltd., Quaker International Holdings LLC, Quaker Italia S.r.l., Quaker Russia B.V., Quaker Sales Europe BV, Quaker Shanghai Trading Company Limited, Quaker Spain Holding SLU, Quaker Specialty Chemicals (UK) Limited, SB Decking Inc., SIFCO Applied Surface Concepts (UK) Ltd, SIFCO Applied Surface Concepts LLC, SIFCO Concepts Sarl, SIFCO Concepts Sweden, Sterr & Eder Industrieservice GmbH, Summit Lubricants Inc, Summit Lubricants Inc., Surface Technology (Coventry) Ltd, Surface Technology (Dalian) Co Ltd, Surface Technology (East Kilbride) Ltd., Surface Technology (Leeds) Ltd, Surface Technology Aberdeen Ltd, Surface Technology Australia, Surface Technology Holdings Ltd., TecniQuimia Mexicana, Tecniquimia Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Thai Houghton 1993 Co. Ltd., Ultraseal Asia Limited, Ultraseal Chongqing Limited, Ultraseal Germany GmbH, Ultraseal International Group Ltd, Ultraseal Machinery Dongguan Ltd, Ultraseal Shanghai Limited, Ultraseal USA Inc., Unitek Servicios De Asesoria Especializad S.A de C.V., Verkol S.A.U., Verkol SAU, Wallover Enterprises Inc., Wallover Oil Company Incorporated, Wallover Oil Hamilton Inc., and Wuhan Quaker Technology Co. Ltd.The following companies are subsidiares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise: 3Com International Inc., 3PAR Inc., Apogee, Aruba Networks Inc., Aruba Networks International Cayman, Aruba Networks International Limited, BlueData Software, Cloud Cruiser, Cloud Technology Partners, Cloud Technology Partners Inc., Compaq Computer (Mauritius), Compaq Trademark B.V., Cray, Cray Inc., EDS World Corporation (Far East) LLC, EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc., H3C Holdings Limited, HP Enterprise Services Australia Pty Ltd, HP Financial Services (Australia) Pty Limited, HP Financial Services (Chile) Limitada, HP Financial Services (Japan) K.K., HP Financial Services Arrendamento Mercantil S.A., HP Financial Services Company (Korea), HP Financial Services International Holdings Company, HPE Government LLC, HPFS Global Holdings I LLC, HPFS Global Holdings II LLC, HPFS Rental S.R.L., Hangzhou H3C Technologies Co. Ltd, Hewlett Packard Caribe BV LLC, Hewlett Packard Colombia Ltda., Hewlett Packard Enterprise (China) Co. Ltd., Hewlett Packard Enterprise B.V., Hewlett Packard Enterprise B.V. Amstelveen Meyrin Branch, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Co., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Co. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Cie, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Costa Rica Limitada, Hewlett Packard Enterprise GlobalSoft Private Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise India Private Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Ireland Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Luxembourg SCA, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Polska sp. z o.o., Hewlett Packard Pathfinder LLC, Hewlett Packard Taiwan Ltd., Hewlett-Packard (Israel) Ltd., Hewlett-Packard (M) Sdn. Bhd., Hewlett-Packard (Nigeria) Limited, Hewlett-Packard (Schweiz) GmbH, Hewlett-Packard (Tanzania) Limited, Hewlett-Packard (Thailand) Limited, Hewlett-Packard ApS, Hewlett-Packard Argentina S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Australia Pty Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Belgium SPRL/BVBA, Hewlett-Packard Bermuda Enterprises LLC, Hewlett-Packard Brasil Ltda., Hewlett-Packard Bulgaria EOOD, Hewlett-Packard Caribe B.V., Hewlett-Packard Caribe Y Andina B.V. LLC, Hewlett-Packard Chile Comercial Limitada, Hewlett-Packard Cyprus Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Hewlett-Packard Egypt Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Financial Services (India) Private Limited, Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Canada Company, Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Company, Hewlett-Packard France SAS, Hewlett-Packard G1 SPV (Cayman) Company, Hewlett-Packard Gesellschaft mbH, Hewlett-Packard Ghana Limited, Hewlett-Packard GmbH, Hewlett-Packard Guatemala Limitada, Hewlett-Packard HK SAR Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Hellas EPE, Hewlett-Packard Holdings Ltd., Hewlett-Packard International Bank Designated Activity Company, Hewlett-Packard International Bank Public Limited Company, Hewlett-Packard International Sarl, Hewlett-Packard Italiana S.r.l., Hewlett-Packard Japan Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Korea Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Leasing Limited, Hewlett-Packard Limited, Hewlett-Packard Luxembourg Enterprises LLC, Hewlett-Packard Macau Limited, Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Marigalante Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Hewlett-Packard Middle East FZ-LLC, Hewlett-Packard Mocambique Limitada - Sociedada em Liquidacao, Hewlett-Packard Nederland B.V., Hewlett-Packard New Zealand, Hewlett-Packard Norge AS, Hewlett-Packard OY, Hewlett-Packard Operations Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Hewlett-Packard Peru S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Philippines Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Portugal Lda., Hewlett-Packard SARL, Hewlett-Packard SIA, Hewlett-Packard Servicios Espana S.L., Hewlett-Packard Singapore (Sales) Pte. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard South Africa (Proprietary) Limited, Hewlett-Packard Sverige AB, Hewlett-Packard Technology Center Inc., Hewlett-Packard Teknoloji Cozumleri Limited Sirketi, Hewlett-Packard The Hague B.V., Hewlett-Packard Venezuela S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Vision Limited, Hewlett-Packard d.o.o., Hewlett-Packard s.r.o., Limited Liability Company Hewlett Packard Enterprise, MapR Technologies, New H3C Technologies Co. Ltd., Niara Inc., Nimble Storage, Nimble Storage Inc., Nimble Storage Israel Ltd, Nimble Storage Japan GK, Nimble Storage UK Limited, Plexxi, RedPixie, SGI (Silicon Graphics), Sapphire Holding Co, Scytale, Shanghai Hewlett-Packard Co. Ltd., Silver Peak, SimpliVity, Sinope Holding B.V., Trilead, UAB ES Hague Lietuva, and Unis Huashan Technologies Co. Limited.Serengeti Resources Inc. acquires and explores for mineral properties in Canada. It company explores for gold, copper, and silver deposits. The company's flagship property is the Kwanika project that covers an area of 25,928 hectares located in the northern Quesnel Trough, British Columbia. It also has an option to acquire 100% interest in Top Cat project covering an area of approximately 21,600 hectares situated in central British Columbia. The company was formerly known as Serengeti Minerals Ltd. and changed its name to Serengeti Resources Inc. in 2001. Serengeti Resources Inc. was incorporated in 1973 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.

Read MoreThe Most Extensive and Reliable Source of Information Related to the Mexican Drugs Cartels.



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We often think of student life as a social experience  students from across the country and around the world coming together to build community on campus. But take a deep look at the universitys 400+ active student societies and youll see that student life at Dal is about a whole lot more than just that  and more than academics, too. Sometimes, its about pushing for social change. Typically, its students leading by example. And more often than not, its driven by a desire to build a better world, in our own backyard or halfway around the planet. At this weeks Dalhousie IMPACT awards, dozens of different awards will be presented by the university and the Dal Student Union to recognize the many ways individual students and student groups improve our communities, each and every day. And the most prestigious of these awards is the Board of Governors Award. The universitys top award for student life, the Board of Governors Award is presented annually to recognize exceptional contributions or leadership in the extracurricular realm  building community on campus, service in the broader community, improving diversity and inclusion and much more. The recipients are nominated by their peers in the Dal community, and chosen by a committee consisting of the president, three Board members and the vice-provost student affairs. Meet the 2019 Board of Governors Award recipients:

Aisha Abawajy, Applied Computer Science Harnessing the power of student advocacy and community-building Aisha Abawajy may be a Computer Science student, but its her experience in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences that inspired one of her defining contributions to student life at Dal.



Aisha, who is minoring in Political Science, was elected president of the Dalhousie Arts and Social Sciences Student Society after her second year, and took note of how few People of Colour were involved in the group. So she created a sub-committee of the society dubbed BIPOCUS  the Black, Indigenous and People of Colour Caucus  to create a supportive environment for racialized students to get involved and take on leadership roles.



We just got so much love and support from folks who want to join in other faculties, and on other campuses, says Aisha. People were really excited about a group of BIPOC folks who were able to come together and talk about our experiences as racialized students at Dalhousie. Theyre not always conversations people are comfortable having.



BIPOCUS is now a university-wide group, one that exists both as a social and community space, and as an avenue for advocacy and activism.



Racial justice and racial inequalities on campus affect all of us, says Aisha of the unity between Black, Indigenous and People of Colour voices in the group. And we also have a lot to learn from each other  taking into account the intersectionalities of race, gender, sex, socioeconomic situation.



Aisha, who grew up in Halifax as a first-generation Canadian, with Oromo parents originally from Ethiopia, has spent her time at Dal driven by the same values that inspired BIPOCUS. A devoted O-Week volunteer, she organized the Dreaming in Colour event to put BIPOC perspectives at the forefront. In October 2018, she organized the first Maritime Racialized and Indigenous Students Experience Summit. And alongside all this, she has remained heavily involved in the Faculty of Computer Science  working as a TA, making the Deans List and winning the Facultys Leadership Award last year.



Now, Aishas support for her fellow students is about to enter an exciting new chapter as incoming Dalhousie Student Union president for 2019-20.



My own experience has been that students, when organizing together over a common goal, are able to accomplish so much. (Ryan McNutt)

Meredith Baldwin, Planning and Sustainability Connecting students and others with the natural world

Given her academic and extracurricular interests, its amazing to think that Meredith Baldwin hated the outdoors for much of her upbringing.



As a kid, I was exposed to hiking, camping, canoeing, and all types of outdoor adventures, she says. There were elements that I enjoyed, but by about age 10 I refused to do any of the activities.



It wasnt until she moved away from her family and community in Burlington, ON that she re-discovered her passion for nature  a passion that not only flows through her studies in Urban Planning and Sustainability, but her quest to get more people experiencing and enjoying the wilderness.



As president of Your Environmental Sustainability Society (YESS), Meredith partnered with a fellow society member to create Trips by Transit (TBT)  a non-profit initiative that takes people out to wilderness areas and cultural spaces found along local transit routes.



For me, TBT extends beyond a chance to adventure, says Meredith. It works to remove systemic and unjust barriers that stop individuals from accessing nature and community. We help them navigate public transit and we advocate for more effective and affordable public transit. They can also learn about local community issues  both environmental and social.



One such issue close to Merediths heart relates to the Backlands, a large unprotected wilderness area just outside peninsular Halifax thats accessible by transit. By taking hundreds of local residents to the area on TBT outings, Meredith inspired an outpouring of support that convinced Halifax City Council to vote to protect the at-risk portion and create the citys first wilderness park.



Meredith would like to see TBT eventually expand beyond Halifax and its second location in Kingston, Ont., but she has stepped away from the day-to-day operations and passed the responsibilities to two other Dalhousie students. For her own future, she says Halifax now feels like home and she wants to stay put, perhaps working to help municipalities collaborate with non-profits to plan for climate change.



Historically, urban planning has taken top-down approaches, she says. But to address sustainability this needs to be flipped on its head to a citizen-led approach with planners taking the role of supporters. (Graeme Gunn)



Chloe Blackman, Community Health & Epidemiology (masters) Making mental health a priority Adjusting to university life can be overwhelming and stressful, especially when it involves relocating to a new city, leaving behind family and friends. No one knows this feeling better than Chloe Blackman, a second-year masters student studying Community Health and Epidemiology.



As an undergraduate student at Dalhousie, Chloe had a difficult time adjusting to university life. She felt isolated, and her mental health depreciated.



It was about the same time that she became a founding member of the Dalhousie Medical Campus Response Team (DMCRT). The team, a subsidiary of St. Johns ambulance, is a student-run volunteer organization that focuses on providing first aid to the university community, offering services at major events and activities on campus.



DMCRT gave me something to be accountable to at a time that I was really struggling with my mental health, says Chloe. It also sparked my interest in engaging other students to help them cope with their mental challenges. She helped the award-winning DMCRT develop a Mental Health Division  the first campus response team in Canada to do so  offering services including an anonymous email service, 'Let's Talk,' to help students access care for their mental health concerns.



Chloes commitment to serving others stretches beyond campus. She has over 500 hours of community service at the Ronald McDonald House. She also volunteers with the Child Intensive Services at the IWK where she tutors youth on a variety of academic subjects. In the winter months, she also volunteers with the Out of the Cold Emergency Shelter.



And her experience working in mental health informs her masters research on prostate cancer and mental health for men.



Through my academics and volunteer experience, I have found that there is a lot of stigma associated with mental health for men. This is what motivated me to combine the medical aspect of prostate cancer and how it contributes to poor mental health in men and boys.



Now serving as president as DMCRT, her continued passion for others makes her a most deserving Governors Award winner.



It gives me a platform to engage people and challenge stereotypes on mental health, she says. (Cecilia Khamete)

Justine Dol, Health (PhD) Mobile innovation in postnatal health care  at home and abroad Newborn babies dont come with instruction manuals. But what if they came with text messages full of evidence-based health information about the best ways to care for them?



Justine Dol, a third-year PhD in Health candidate, wants to know if postnatal, text message-based infant care information delivered to new moms could increase their sense of confidence and knowledge of caring for their new babies, while also decreasing the feelings of isolation or anxiety that can affect some new moms.



In Canada, there has been a shift away from in-person postnatal care, she says. So, were looking at innovative ways we can still reach moms to provide critical information, and most have access to cell phones.



Her research bridges local and global perspectives, working with new mothers in both Halifax and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) during the first six weeks of parenthood. What seems like a simple technology can reach more people, both here in Canada and in Tanzania. And we wanted to use an innovative approach that wouldnt add an additional burden to the health system.



Justines early love of research was sparked while pursuing her undergraduate and masters degrees in Ontario. But it was her community development work in Tanzania, Jamaica and Uganda that gave her research its focus.



I learned the importance of having women become empowered through different means, where they can gain confidence and community which increases their personal empowerment, as well as at the family or society level by having an extra source of income, she says.



On the heels of research positions at the IWKs Centre for Pediatric Pain Research, Dals PhD in Health program (launched in 2015) was a natural fit to combine her interests in health international development. Her volunteer experiences  including as founding member and three-year president of the PhD in Health Student Society and with the Consortium of Universities for Global Health  strengthen connections between her peers and global opportunities.



Its rewarding for me knowing its making a positive difference in someones life  whether its finding a little tidbit of information that they didnt know before, or providing evidence based text messages so new moms dont have to turn to Google or be unsure. (Sarah Dawson)

Free Event

Easter Sunrise Service at the Deeds Carillon

Since 1942, the Easter Sunrise Service has been a powerful display of faith, unbrokena ceaseless tradition in an ever-changing city.

As dawn broke on Sunday morning, April 5, the first Easter Service was held at the Deeds Carillon. An estimated crowd of 10,000 made the pilgrimage by automobile, bus and on foot read page 14 of the April 1942 edition of the NCR Factory News.

Dayton History invites the entire community to attend this free celebration. Attendees may wish to bring chairs or blankets for seating. This engaging and powerful event continues this annual tradition and was the very first event at Carillon Historical Park.

The largest carillon in Ohio was built at the request of Edith Walton Deeds. Completed in 1942, the 151-foot tower houses 57 bells. Upon its completion, the first concert was played by Mrs. Deeds during the first Sunrise Service on Easter Sunday of that same year. The Easter Sunrise Service has since continued, unbrokena ceaseless tradition in an ever-changing city. In fair weather and foul, during triumphant and trying times, people from all walks of life have gathered at Deeds Carillon, in Daytons early morning Easter light, for this powerful display of faith.Mumbai: The arrest of fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi on fraud and money laundering charges amounting to USD 2 billion, represents a turning point in Indias efforts to deal with those attempting to trick its banking system, say experts. The Rs 14,000 crore, fraud which moreover included a few bank staff, nearly brought Indias second biggest state-run bank on its knees. Punjab National Bank (PNB) had detailed a net loss of over Rs 12,200 crore in FY18 after the scam came to light in January 2018.

Investigation by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the government and an expert panel driven by Y H Malegam named by the banking regulator brought these weaknesses to sharp focus. These incorporate blunders made by state-run banks in administration and checking of risk as well as its audits, the central bank informed a parliamentary board headed by Congress leader Veerappa Moily that tabled its report in Parliament in August 2018. The central bank moreover recognised certain gaps in its powers to regulate public sector banks (PSBs).

Without alleged lapses from board members of the bank, auditors, we might not see the scam happening, as seen in the case of the distressed Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS).

As per the RBI, none of the banks audit reports brought out the gaps within the processes at PNBs Brady House Branch in Mumbai since 2011. Consequently, directors on the board of the bank had no means to be aware of these inconsistencies as they banked completely on the data given by the administration.

Vijay Aggarwal lawyer of Nirav Modi declined to comment.

The board of directors of banks and their risk management committee should be held responsible for the fraud of such magnitude," said Ved Jain, former president of Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI).

PNB maintains the scam was not the result of a systemic issue. It was one of the peoples issues and it was happening in one of the branches. The moment this surfaced, we took corrective action. We started filing with the regulatory authority and we started filing with the investigation agencies," the bank informed parliamentarians.

The increasing number of bank frauds has driven to investors getting to be very cautious in making lending decisions, said specialists.

According to RBI information, over 5,900 bank frauds including over Rs 32,300 crore were detailed in 2017-18. Pavan Kumar Vijay, founder of advisory firm Corporate Professionals, said that lenders have ended up cautious after the scam. All banks should come together and work out a standardised process of giving loans," Vijay said.

Punjab National Banks financial health is improving. It reported a net profit of Rs 246.5 crore within the December quarter of FY19.

The development is positive and we are happy about it," a senior PNB official said after news emerged about Nirav Modis arrest in the UK.

The PNB fraud too brought to light serious contrasts between the finance ministry and RBIs powers. The RBI holds that not all arrangements of the Banking Regulation Act, 1937, applies to state-run banks, particularly those relating to hiring and terminating of chairmen and managing directors of public sector banks.

The finance ministry, says that the central bank has adequate supervisory powers, counting inspection of banks books and examining directors and other officers.

Also, withdrawal of all loan restructuring schemes and a revised framework for resolution announced by the RBI in February 2018 had expanded the transparency within the banking sector.

Thirteen state-run banks detailed a combined net loss of over Rs 21,000 crore within the first half of FY19, compared to 11 reporting a combined net loss of over Rs 6,800 crore within the same period a year back, according official information.

(With agency inputs)The contract will be executed by Tata Power SED as the prime contractor with foreign OEM.

New Delhi: Tata Power Strategic Engineering Division (SED) has bagged a Rs 1,200 crore contract from the defence ministry for supply of ship-borne 3D Air Surveillance Radars.

Tata Power SED has signed a deal with the Ministry of Defence to supply 23 ship-borne 3D Air Surveillance Radars to the Indian Navy over the next 10 years, a Tata Power statement said on Friday.

The contract was signed under the Buy & Make (India) category of the Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) 2013 that will be offering the Indian Navy a proven solution, with a production arrangement in India under Transfer of Technology (ToT).

The contract will be executed by Tata Power SED as the prime contractor with foreign OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) partner Indra Sistemas, Spain.

Tata Advanced Systems Ltd (TASL) has entered into a share purchase agreement with Tata Power to buy Tata Power SED, subject to regulatory and other approvals.

In November 2017, Tata Power SED had signed a contract with the defence ministry for supply of Portable Diver Detection Sonar (PDDS) for Indian Naval applications.

Tata Power is an integrated power company and together with its subsidiaries and jointly controlled entities, has an installed capacity of 10757 MW.Washington and Beijing are battling over the final shape of an agreement that both sides have said they would like to reach.

Washington: The United States will continue to impose additional import tariff on Chinese products till the time a trade deal is reached with the country, President Donald Trump has said.

"We're not talking about removing them. We're talking about leaving them for a substantial period of time, because we have to make sure that if we do the deal with China that China lives by the deal," Trump told reporters on the south lawns of the White House on Wednesday.

Washington and Beijing are battling over the final shape of an agreement that both sides have said they would like to reach, with American officials demanding profound changes to the Chinese industrial policy.

Asked about the progress in the trade talks, the US president said, "We're getting along with China very well. President Xi is a friend of mine. The deal is coming along nicely. We have our top representatives going there this weekend to further the deal."

The world's two largest economies are locked in a trade war since Trump imposed heavy tariffs on imported steel and aluminium items from China in March last year, a move that sparked fears of a global trade war.

Trump imposed tariff hikes of up to 25 per cent on USD 250 billion of Chinese goods. In response, China, the world's second largest economy after the US, imposed tit-for-tat tariffs on USD 110 billion of American goods.

"No president has ever done what I've done with China. China had free reign over our country, taking out USD 500 billion a year for many years. We actually rebuilt China, in the truest sense of the word. We rebuilt China," he added.Mumbai: Shraddha Kapoor is undoubtedly one of the busiest actresses in B-Town right now, but she took out some time from her busy schedule to celebrate Holi. The actress joined her Street Dancer 3D team to celebrate the festival of colours.

The actress who never misses a chance to celebrate each festival with great pomp, rejoiced the festival of colours with her Street Dancer team balancing her personal and professional life with utmost perfection yet again.

Giving glimpses into the rendezvous of Holi at the sets of the film, Shraddha Kapoor shared pictures and videos of her joyous celebration with co-stars Varun Dhawan, Nora Fatehi and director Remo D'Souza.

Earlier this month, the actress had a working birthday as she ringed in her day in a flight from London to Mumbai, post which she headed directly to the sets of Chhichhore. The actress is simultaneously juggling the shoot of Saaho and will soon begin her prep for Baaghi 3 which marks her return to the franchise.

After impressing the audience with her exemplary dancing skills, Shraddha Kapoor is making a comeback to the dance franchise with Street Dancer. The elegant and graceful actress adds charm to her moves with her vibrant personality.

On the work front, the actress has Saaho, Chhichhore, Street Dancer, as well as Baaghi 3 in the pipeline and is seen hopping from one set to another succumbing to her work commitments.The story of Kesari comes from recorded history thanks to the messages relayed from Saragarhi Forts tower to the other two forts

Rating:

Cast: Akshay Kumar, Parineeti Chopra

Director: Anurag Singh

At times, stereotypes are born out of fables and legends, and sometimes out of an act so brazen, so insanely brave that a communitys reputation, regard and prestige is forever sealed.

Though a blip in the Great Game that was being fought between Britishers and Russians in Central Asia for territory, the 1897 Battle of Saragarhi, in which 21 Sikh soldiers of the 36th Sikh Regiment stood their ground against an estimated 10,000 Afghani tribesmen, guarding what has been described as a modest post, or a picquet, is one such act of collective bravery, and is considered one of the greatest last stands in history.

Defending what was essentially a stone and mud fort with a communication tower used to send heliographic messages  flashing mirrors  in Morse code to the two main forts, British forts, Lockhart and Gulistan, set about four-five miles apart on the Khyber Pass, all 21 Sikh soldiers died.

The Afghans attacked Saragarhi to cut off communication between the two forts, isolate and then attack them.

They began the attack on Saragarhi at 9 am on September 12, 1897, and the 21 Sikh soldiers, with their single-shot rifles and bayonets, held out for more than six hours, leaving, by some estimates, 600 Afghan tribesmen dead.

The fight to hold the fort for as long as they could was a suicide mission to give time for reinforcements to reach the other two forts. And they succeeded in their mission, but paid for it with their lives.

Each one of the 21 soldiers was awarded an Indian Order of Merit, the highest British gallantry award given to Indian troops then.

The story of Kesari comes from recorded history thanks to the messages relayed from Saragarhi Forts tower to the other two forts. But the enthusiasm to tell this story now is pivoted on the desire to align with the messaging of the current dispensation that markets war and military action as an opportunity for national glory, and as the cornerstone of Indias identity.

Having suffered sermons delivered around potty holes and sanitary napkins, I approached Kesari with much trepidation.

Writer-director Anurag Singhs Kesari is a commercial enterprise that tells a stunning story in a compelling way. But simultaneously, Kesari seeks to serve an ulterior motive, a larger cause.

In retelling the story 122 years after the battle, it mildly distorts, mythologises, exaggerates and embellishes it to goad jingoistic fervour of a saffron hue, almost in unison with the shrill dont-question-the-forces spiel we are hearing these days.

Theres an enemy  Muslims, and the soldiers are fighting for the gora bosses, and yet the film invokes religion, Sikhs honour and pagri, and creates bloody but iconic imagery that sells and seals military valour as the ultimate gift to desh ki mitti.

Kesari is a technically savvy, well-made film, and it has measured performances by its entire cast. Akshay Kumar is especially good. But, the film operates almost entirely in three modes  it is cute when its with the 21 Sikhs, angry when it comes face-to-face with foreigners, and lethal in its response when threatened.

In choosing to tell a story, and how it is told, there often lies a political agenda.

Akshay Kumar tells all his stories these days with a one-man, one-party audience in mind. And therein lies his fraud. His patriotic fervour seems calculated not just to boost box-office collections, but also to reduce the distance between him and the powers that be. That makes me cringe.

Kesari is split in two neat parts, with the first half of the film setting out the context, the politics, introducing the hero, and the second half is dedicated mostly to the battle.

The film stays true to facts to a large extent, but insinuated in the first part is a needless digression where an honourable Indian  Havildar Ishar Singh (Akshay Kumar)  defies orders to save the life of a Muslim woman from barbaric Mullahs.

A small skirmish with a gora boss is also injected, to again create grounds for heroism and bravado. While the gora sahib insults, demands servility and says mean things about the mitti of Hindustan, we know that he will eventually beget at least one tight slap, if not literally, at least figuratively.

Feeling like a gulam and not a fauji, Ishar Singh is sent off to take charge of Fort Saragarhi. As he walks through the gorgeous landscape, he has imagined conversations with his wife, Jeevani (Parineeti Chopra), calling her Malko in cute Punjabi style.

What awaits him at the fort is a Lagaan-type of bonding with the team he is to lead.

This bit, which involves a rooster fight, a punishment, lots of loyalty and pride, is quite adorable and humanises the 21 men with jokes about kachchas, newly married men missing their brides, daddies missing daughters they havent seen, gay jokes and some talk about why low-caste Bhola Singh never smiles.

Theres also a glimpse of some patronising secularism as the soldiers help rebuild a mosque before the 21 Sikhs face hordes of charging Afghans. Ishar Singhs call to arms is a clarion call to fight for the Sikh pride  i.e. their community and religion. Kesari is bahaduri ka rang, he says, giving the battle meaning by making it personal. Which was not the case. And is often not.

With the heightened drama of depleting ammunition, of the enemy rising on its dead to breach the wall of the fort, and some melodrama, the film keeps upping the emotional quotient.

The battle itself has stunning action, aided by CGI of course, and the stuntmen doing gatka usually seen only during Hola Mohalla.

The best action, of course, is kept for Ishar Singh at the end when there is hand-to-hand combat in which he literally skewers Afghans on his sword, turning the enemy into human kebabs, wrenching from an impossible situation a moral victory so glorious and honourable that even the enemy bows, respectfully.

The films last scene is epic. Theres lots of slashing, sharp blades and red blood, most of it quite unbelievable but spectacular.

The films last kill is cathartic, but, again, not recorded in history. Exactly as havildar Ishar Singh has said to the Mullah when threatened that by the end of the day his pagri will be under his foot, I felt like saying the same to Akshay Kumar  Chal jhoote.

British historian Maj. Gen. James Lunt wrote, Ishar Singh was a somewhat turbulent character whose independent nature had brought him more than once into conflict with his military superiors. Thus, Ishar Singh  in camp, a nuisance, in the field, magnificent.

Captain Amarinder Singh said of him, While he will always be remembered for his gallant conduct at Saragarhi, within the regiment they will also rue the loss of their best illicit liquor producer, and a man who borrowed meat on hoof for his men, when short of rations, from a neighbouring unit without asking them.

Akshay Kumar as the brave, deft, agile, skilled, passionate Sikh soldier is excellent. But all this is powered by his pride in his pagri. He uses his cuteness to endear himself to us, and his romance with Parineeti is quite sweet. He carries the film with his charming confidence, but also on the zeitgeist of our times.

The film awards ceremonies that are to come will be falling over themselves to open envelops and scream out his name. At least this time it will be well deserved.

Though Kesari does say a few right things  Jung, sarhad sab karobar hai  its portrayal is uncompromisingly biased. While on the Indian side, a gay joke is cracked, the Afghanis get a sharp-shooting eunuch.

It is true that the tower was set on fire, that the Mullah of Hadda, an influential preacher, had declared jihad, that there was hand-to-hand combat in Saragarhi, the scenes as created  the young signaller sepoy Gurmukh Singh is turned into a walking mashaal, a soldier is impaled, rather beautifully, by swords and daggers  are dramatic, but phoney.

The Battle of Saragarhi is a deeply tragic and inspiring piece of history that needed no embellishments. The more real and honest things had been kept, the less used and abused I would have felt.

That apart, Anurag Singhs Kesari in many parts, especially in the dhol scene, Kesari reminded me of Cy Enfields Zulu (1964) about how 150 dog-tired British infantry men at Rorkes Drift in 1879 and stopped 4,000 Zulu tribesmen.

Singh, who made the huge hits, Punjab 1984 and the Jatt and Juliet series  the top three highest grossers of Punjabi cinema  and his cinematographer, Anshul Chobey, use the stark majesty of the landscape to frame iconic action images that will remain seared in my memory.SCOTUS Urged to Take Counseling Case

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Liberty Counsel

March 21, 2019



WASHINGTON, March 21, 2019 /Christian Newswire/ -- Liberty Counsel filed a petition today urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review Pickup v. Newsom, a case that upheld a ban by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals which prohibits licensed counselors from providing talk therapy to minors seeking to reduce or eliminate their unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors, or identity.

Last year in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA) v. Becerra, the Supreme Court gutted the Pickup v. Newsom (then Pickup v. Brown) case and a similar case from the Third Circuit, King v. Christie. As Liberty Counsel argued to the Court of Appeals, the High Court ruled that it had never created a "professional speech" category. With the Supreme Court's rejection of King and Pickup, the therapy bans in California, New Jersey, and other jurisdictions are subject to constitutional challenge.

Liberty Counsel asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to recall its mandate and reconsider its ruling in light of NIFLA. The court denied the request and now Liberty Counsel is requesting that the Supreme Court review that denial.

"The fundamental rights of counselors and clients to exercise their right to speak in private counseling sessions must be protected," said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. "The law is a gross intrusion into the fundamental rights of counselors and clients. All people should have access to the counselor of their choice. No government has the authority to prohibit a form of counseling simply because it does not like the religious or moral beliefs of a particular counselor or client," 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.



SOURCE Liberty Counsel



CONTACT: Mat Staver, 407-875-1776, Liberty@LC.org



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Sex toys, shoes, lighters, pens and tin cans are amongst the waste found in areas used by animals, including some in danger of extinction. (Photo: AFP)

Galapagos: Armed only with gloves and large sacks, park rangers and volunteers are battling the scourge of plastic waste blighting the idyllic Galapagos Islands and their unique creatures.

Tons of plastic wastes wash up on the shores of the Galapagos islands where microparticles end up in the stomachs of species found only in the Pacific archipelago 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) west of mainland Ecuador.

Those microparticles, often from waste discarded in big cities from other countries and even continents, are perhaps one of the greatest threats to the iguanas, tortoises, birds and fish of the Galapagos.

The tiny plastic pieces become part of the food chain "that we may later feed on," biologist Jennifer Suarez, a marine ecosystems expert with the Galapagos National Parks (PNG).

Sun rays and the ocean's saltwater break down bottles, bags, lids, containers and fishing nets. Yet while those objects may appear solid to the naked eye, when battered against rocks or by the force of waves, microparticles splinter off, which are subsequently ingested by animals.

Every year, and despite the punishing heat and sun, expeditionary groups arrive at Galapagos beaches to survey the damage caused by man. Sex toys, shoes, lighters, pens and tin cans are amongst the waste found in areas used by animals, including some in danger of extinction.

In uninhabited zones such as Punta Albemarle, in the far north of Isabela Island, where AFP joined a team of cleaners, waste from far and wide was discovered. "More than 90 percent of the waste gathered doesn't come from Galapagos activities, but rather from South America, Central America and even a great deal of waste with Asian branding," said PNG director Jorge Carrion.

With a population of around 25,000, the archipelago, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has tightened its rules regarding plastics use in recent years. Most of the plastic waste ashing up on the Galapagos shores are bottles of Peruvian, Colombian or Panamanian products, and containers with Chinese branding.

That waste "probably comes from the fishing fleets from Asia just outside the Galapagos' exclusive economic area," said Carrion, speaking from the PNG dock in Puerto Ayora, the capital of Santa Cruz Island.

Since 1996, local fishermen have been cleaning the remotest islands and for the last three years, they've been keeping a register.German whiskey which is mostly sold in the domestic market is gaining global recognition. (Photo: Representational/Pixabay)

Germany: Bastian Heuser swirls the snifter of deep amber whiskey before taking a sip, noting its sweet caramel flavour that soon opens up with hints of spices, nuts and dried fruits.

Its not single malt from a verdant Scottish glen, nor a sour mash from the hills of Tennessee. This is an award-winning German rye whiskey produced by the tiny Spreewood Distillery, nestled in a small town among the fields and forests of Brandenburg about an hours drive from Berlin.

German whiskey is little known outside the country, and the industry is still tiny compared with others, but isnt unaffected by major international issues, with distillers seeing both opportunities and dangers with Britains decision to leave the European Union and Europes trade spat with the U.S. over new tariffs.

Both issues may seem far away from the Spreewood Distillery, established in refurbished farm buildings in the town of Schlepzig, home to about 600 people, where the emphasis is on a small, craft product created from locally sourced ingredients.

From grain to glass, we do it all here, Heuser says at the distillery he has run with his two partners since 2016. The only thing we dont have is our own field of rye, but maybe that will come.

More and more micro operations like Spreewood have been opening up in recent years, focusing on small batches of quality whiskey. Nobody quite knows when it happened, but today distilleries producing whiskey in Germany outnumber those in Scotland, about 180 to 130.

Its crazy how many German whiskey distilleries there are these days, German Whisky Distillers Association president Michaela Habbel says. Of course the fact still is that German whiskey only accounts for 0.4 percent of the world market.

In 2017, the entire German whiskey production was worth 11.6 million euros ($13.1 million)  negligible when compared with Scotch whisky exports alone that year, worth some 4.4 billion pounds ($5.8 billion).

With such a small overall production of about 6 million litres (about 1.6 million gallons) in 2017, German whiskey is mostly sold on the domestic market. But that doesnt mean that distillers like Heuser and Habbel arent watching international politics, with whiskey featuring prominently in two major current issues  Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trumps protectionist tariffs.

With 90 percent of Scotch whisky exported, accounting for 20 percent of all British food and beverage exports, the Scotch Whisky Association is increasingly concerned about Britains looming Brexit exit from the European Union, especially if there is no deal on future trade relations.

Brexit represents a seismic shift for our industry and one which our members are working hard to plan and adjust for, the association says, noting that the EU is the single most valuable market for Scotch.

Across the Atlantic, when Trump imposed tariffs on European steel and aluminium, the EU retaliated last year targeting typically American products, including Harley-Davidson motorcycles and bourbon whiskey.New Delhi: Enforcement Directorate on Friday arrested Zakir Naiks trusted aide Abdul Kadir Najmudin Sathak for allegedly actively assisting him in money laundering.

According to ED, the money laundering was done through "dubious" origins from UAE to facilitate production and broadcasting incriminating videos for spreading communal hatred and radicalisation of a particular community.

Sathak, who is a jeweller by profession, was director of M/s. Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC which owned the Peace TV channel that used to broadcast communal and inflammatory speeches by Naik from UAE for the Middle East and Africa.

"PMLA investigation revealed that the company of which Sathak was the director was controlled by Naik through him as he was his trusted aide," said the ED statement.

The ED said that the content of the Peace TV channel was allegedly made in India by M/s Harmony Media Pvt Ltd, Mumbai, which was also controlled by Zakir Naik by placing his sister, Nallah Noorani and his close associate Aamir Gazdar as directors.

Moreover, "the funds required to record the content for Peace TV was routed through M/s. Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC, Dubai. An amount of Rs 79 crore (approximately) was received from M/s. Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC to M/s Harmony Media Pvt Ltd," read the ED statement.

But for these monies, it would not have been possible to produce these controversial speeches of Zakir Naik and reach wider audiences through Peace TV. The source of fund remitted by M/s. Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC to Harmony Media is suspicious as there were no advertisements run on this channel and Sathak has not submitted any details of the same. The arrangement was made to project the transfer of money from M/s. Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC to M/s Harmony Media Pvt Ltd, as a business transaction, said the statement.

Both the entities, M/s Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC and M/s Harmony Media Pvt Ltd, were directly controlled by Naik through his trusted aides, according to ED.

During the course of the investigation, it came to light that the videos were also allegedly exported to the United Kingdom by Sathak.

There was no monetary transaction in respect of videos exported to the UK, which further raises suspicion. Further investigation in the matter is under progress, the ED statement read.

Earlier, a total amount of Rs. 50.49 crore worth of properties belonging to Zakir Naik, Islamic Research Foundation which he founded and properties acquired by him in the names of his relatives were attached provisionally by the Enforcement Directorate. Aamir Gazdar, a close associate of Zakir Naik was also arrested for aiding him to deal with the proceeds of crime.Guwahati: A journalist of a news TV channel was attacked with knives and seriously injured in an attack in a restaurant Ganeshguri locality here, police said Friday. Chakrapani Parashar, a journalist of satellite news channel News18/AssamNE, was stabbed by some workers of a restaurant adjacent to his office when he was on duty on Thursday night, police said. Police have detained four accused in connection with the attack. Parashar sustained serious injuries in various parts of his body and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he is stated to be out of danger, the police said.

Trouble began on Thursday afternoon when Parashar went with his unit to cover a fight between the main accused, who runs a restaurant in the same building as the news channel and some youths while playing Holi, News18 Assam/NE Deputy Manager (Operations) Aparup Barua said. "Though the news was not telecast, the restaurant owner started an argument with Parashar for covering the incident. In the evening when about five to six of our journalists, including Parashar, went to the restaurant to settle the matter amicably, the accused took out a dagger and stabbed him repeatedly," Barua said. The accused has a criminal record and was arrested earlier too, he said. Various political parties - national and regional and journalists organisations have condemned the attack on Parashar.

The Electronic Media Forum Assam (EMFA) has expressed concern over the attack and demanded stringent actions against the culprits. It also urged the state government to ensure security to media persons by enacting a special protection law at the earliest. In a statement here on Friday, EMFA claimed that increasing instances of physical assaults are being reported from various parts of the country and the Centre should take the matter seriously. It also appealed to all media persons across the country to be united over the issue.He was replying to a question on Nirav Modi during an exclusive interview to ANI. (Photo: ANI)

New Delhi: Sam Pitroda, a close confidant of Congress president Rahul Gandhi, on Friday described the arrest of fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi in London as an event and said the courts will the decide such cases.

He was replying to a question on Nirav Modi during an exclusive interview to ANI.

Asked about the BJP charge that most of the economic offenders got freebies and easy loans due to political pressure during the UPA government and that the current BJP-led dispensation made stricter laws, he said, Look, I dont buy all this crap. All I say is event-based politics does not make sense. This is an event. Nirav Modi is an event.

Pitroda, also the chairman of Overseas Indian National Congress, said, I am talking more about the holistic approach which is inclusion, which is embedded in what kind of nation you want to build. Whether one fellow went abroad with Rs five thousand-crore loan or seven thousand-crore loan....Fine, it is important. But this is not embedded in nation-building. Today, crisis is really embedded in two things -- inclusion and do I really want a nation where everybody is divided.

Replying to questions on economic offenders, he said, Let the courts decide. The court will decide it. What is the issue?

When pointed out that criminality lay because people took Indian money away to foreign shores, Pitroda said, Let the courts decide....there is enough power in courts here. They are wise enough to decide. Let them handle it.

Nirav Modi was arrested by the Scotland Yard in connection with a loan default case in India on Tuesday afternoon (local time). He was produced before a London court which sent him to the jail after rejecting his plea for bail. He will be in the judicial custody till March 29.The outfit had given up the use of gun in 1994 but continued its separatist activities. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: The central government on Friday banned the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), saying the outfit led by former militant leader Yasin Malik is actively engaged in inciting secessionism and illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.

The government declared the outfit as an unlawful association under Section 3(1) of the Unlawful Prevention Act 1967, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba told reporters here.

The outfit, which had initiated a militant movement in Kashmir in 1988 and was involved in numerous acts of terror, had given up the use of gun in 1994 but continued its separatist activities.

Gauba noted that JKLF was involved in the killing of Kashmiri Pandits, which resulted in their exodus from the valley in 1990.

The outfit also was involved in kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in December 1989, as well as the killing of four IAF personnel besides several other acts of terror, he said.

At least 37 FIRs have been registered by the Jammu and Kashmir Police against JKLF, two cases, including the case of murder of IAF personnel, were registered by CBI. The NIA has also registered a case, which is under investigation, the Home Secretary said.

"Government is committed to relentlessly pursuing the policy of curbing the activities of secessionist organisations which are a threat to the unity and integrity of the country. The NIA and ED are taking strong steps against these organisations," he said.

"The JKLF has many serious cases registered against it, he said, adding the action has been taken in accordance with the policy of zero tolerance against terrorism followed by the central government."

Gauba said the JKLF had spearheaded the separatist ideology in the Valley and has been at the forefront of separatist activities and violence since 1988.

He said that the murders of Kashmiri Pandits by the JKLF in 1989 had triggered their exodus from the Valley.

"Yasin Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley and is responsible for their genocide," he said while reading out the statement.

"This organisation, alongside, is also responsible for illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism. JKLF is actively involved in raising of funds and its distribution to Hurriyat cadres and stone-pelters to fuel unrest in the Kashmir Valley as well as for subversive activities," he added.

Gauba stated that the JKLF has been "actively and continuously encouraging, feelings of enmity and hatred against the lawfully established government as well as armed rebellion."

"It is evident from these that JKLF continues to be actively engaged in supporting and inciting secessionism and terrorism including terror financing," Gauba said.

He further stated that the government will continue reviewing the process of withdrawing security of separatist leaders.

Malik, who was detained on February 22, was lodged at Kothibagh police station. He was booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA).

In the aftermath of the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district, which claimed lives of 40 CRPF soldiers on February 14, the Jammu and Kashmir government withdrew the security cover of several separatists including Malik, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Shabir Shah and Saleem Geelani.The Pakistan National Day is observed every year on March 23, though the Pakistan High Commission had decided to organise the event this year on March 22. (Representational Image)

New Delhi: The Indian government will not send any official representative to the Pakistan National Day event at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi on Friday.

The Indian government decided not to send any representative to the event because Pakistan had invited the representative of the Hurriyat Conference to the event.

The Pakistan National Day is observed every year on March 23, though the Pakistan High Commission had decided to organise the event this year on March 22.

An Indian minister usually represents the government at the event.

Amid decline in bilateral ties after the Pulwama attack in February, India had formally complained to the Pakistan government about instances of its diplomats and officials in Islamabad being harassed by security personnel.The security forces launched a cordon and search operation in Imam sahib area of Shopian in south Kashmir following information about the presence of militants there, an army official said. (Representational Image)

Srinagar: Three militants were killed in separate encounters with security forces on Friday in Shopian and Bandipora districts of Jammu and Kashmir, taking the number of ultras killed over the past 24 hours to five, officials said.

Two militants were killed in an overnight gunbattle in Hajin area of Bandipora district, an army official said. The operation against the militants was started on Thursday but the security forces had to proceed with caution as two civilians had been taken hostage by the ultras, police said.

While one civilian was rescued Thursday evening, the other hostage  reportedly a minor  might have been killed during the operation, a police official said on condition of anonymity.

A police spokesman said a detailed statement on the operation will be issued very soon but did not elaborate about the fate of the civilian hostage. A militant was killed on Friday in an encounter with security forces in Shopian district.

The security forces launched a cordon and search operation in Imam Sahib area of Shopian in south Kashmir following information about the presence of militants there, the army official said.

He said the militants opened fired on the security forces, who retaliated, triggering a gun battle. One militant has been killed so far in the ongoing operation, the official said, adding that the identity and group affiliation of the slain ultra was being ascertained.

Another gun battle broke out between militants and security forces in Sopore area of north Kashmir's Baramulla district, a police official said. He said no casualties have been reported so far in the operation that is going on in Warpora area of Sopore.

Two Jaish-e-Mohammad militants were killed in an encounter with security forces at Kalantara in Baramulla district on Thursday while three security force personnel, including an officer, suffered injuries during the operation.

A police spokesman said one of the slain militants was Amir Rasool, a local from Sopore, while the other was a Pakistani national.SRINAGAR: Former lawmaker and firebrand leader of regional Awami Itehad Party (AIP) Engineer Rashid on Friday announced that he will fight the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from home constituency Baramulla.

The party, he said, will contest also on the Anantnag, Udhampur and Jammu seats and decide soon on the remaining two seats of the State-Srinagar and Ladakh. Mr Rasheed claimed that he was approached by several political parties to seek AIPs support in the elections but no understanding could be reached with any one of these. The main reason for that is that none of these parties was ready to support the AIPs stand on various crucial issues, he told reporters here. Without naming them, he said that the AIP could not support any of these parties as they are responsible for most of the miseries of the people of the State.

He said that keeping all circumstances in view the party has decided to field Abdul Rayees Rather from Udhampur, Shahzad Shabnum Deewan from Jammu and Zubair Masoodi from Anantnag where he himself will contest on Baramulla seat. The party will take the decision on the remaining two seats  Srinagar and Ladakh- soon, he said.

Meanwhile, NC president and former chief minister Farooq Abdullah on Friday started campaigning for the Congress candidates Vikramaditya Singh and Raman Bhalla for the Udhampur and Jammu Lok Sabha seats.Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah during the BJP Central Election Committee meeting at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi. (PTI)

Ahmedabad: With the announcement that BJP president Amit Shah is contesting from Gandhinagar, replacing party veteran L.K. Advani, all eyes are on Gujarat.

While the BJP state unit is ready to take advantage of Mr Shahs nomination, the Congress is re-working its strategy to counter the move. The Congress has announced four candidates for Gujarat and is expected to announce names for the remaining 22 seats any time now.

According to a senior party leader, the Congress is planning to create the kind of momentum it did for the 2017 elections, to counter the BJPs nationalism narrative. The state party leadership is planning the campaign in the same way. The party is hopeful that Priyanka Gandhis visit will attract women voters.

The induction of Patidar leader Hardik Patel was a step in that direction. The Hardik factor had helped us in the assembly elections. Now he is with the party so we are hoping to get full support from his team, the PAAS. We will raise the same issues of farmers distress and unemployment. The temple visits will also be a part of the campaign, said a party leader.

It is learnt that the party has identified 11 seats where its chances are good, based on the 2017 results. Banaskantha, Patan, Mehsana, Sabar-kantha, Surendranagar, Junagadh, Amreli and Anand are the seats where the party was leading in in Assembly segments. Jamnagar, Bharuch and Porbandar are three seats where it trailed the BJP by less than 20,000 votes.

If Hardik Patel contests from Jamnagar, the Congress can hope to get the Patidar vote in the entire Saurashtra region. In Amreli constituency, the party has five MLAs in the seven Assembly segments. The Anand seat has remained with the party, except in 2014, and this time, with the nomination of former state president Bharat Solanki, it is hoping to get the fortress back.

We are fighting for all 26 seats, including Gandhinagar, from where Amit Shah is contesting. We will get maximum seats from Gujarat, state party spokesperson Dr Manish Doshi said.Ahmedabad: Spelling trouble for the Congress party in Gujarat, leader of the Bhartiya Tribal Party (BTP) and MLA from Jhagadia constituency, Chhotu Vasava, has announced that his party will fight seven Lok Sabha seats in the state, including Bharuch, which is the home pitch of Congress stalwart Ahmed Patel.

Mr Vasavas announcement is being seen as a move to build pressure on the Congress when the party is in the process of selecting candidates.

Seven-term MLA and popular dabang leader, Mr Vasava formed the BTP just a month ahead of the assembly elections in the state in 2017 and contested two seats in alliance with Congress.

The BTP had also won two assembly seats in Rajasthan. He was with Janata Dal (U) till 2017, but parted ways after Nitish Kumar formed an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Mr Vasavas son Mahesh Vasava is also an MLA from Dediapada in Bharuch district. Both father and son are believed to have a strong hold over tribal votes in south Gujarat, especially in the Bharuch Lok Sabha constituency.

Congress party leaders admit that their party will have to form an alliance with the BTP if it wants to win Bharuch. Once a bastion of Rajya Sabha MP Ahmed Patel, who won from here in 1977, 1980 and 1984, this constituency has been with the BJP since 1998.

In 2014, the BJPs Mansukha Vasava won with a lead of 1.53 lakh votes. But in the 2017 assembly election, the Congress was just behind withby 1,964 votes. Chhotu Vasava led with more than 30,000 votes in this assembly segment. In the 2009 Lok Sabha election, he fought on a JD(U) ticket from here and secured 63,660 votes in a triangular battle.

In this scenario, if the Congress and the BTP form an alliance, they can give a tough fight to the BJP.New Delhi/Bengaluru: The magazine reports: Local media had, at the time, widely reported a turf war between Yeddyurappa and senior BJP leaders in the state, such as Ananth Kumar and KS Eshwarappa. (Kumar died in 2018.) Journalists reported at the time that the personal assistants of these politicians were scrambling to secure their opponents papersYeddyurappas personal assistant allegedly attempted to kidnap his counterpart in Eswharappas office. During this time, Yeddyurappas personal staff procured his diary, which then reached the hands of other leaders likes Ananth Kumar, according to the senior officials note.

One of the copies of it was also given to DK Shivakumar and other leaders to raise the issue at the appropriate forum, the senior IT officials note said. Kumar had not gone to press with the pages as his relationship with Yeddyurappa was good, the official wrote, the magazine reports

Courtesy: Caravan website

The diary as seen in the magazine reportedly contains Yeddyurappas signature in Kannada. Sources privy to the conspiracy told DC that some leaders, including the Central leaders in the BJP, Yeddyurappa and his sons were allegedly cautioned that the diary was being handed over to the Congress and these leaders did nothing to stop the political avalanche that may cost Yeddyurappa his career in politics.

Vinay, according to top sources allegedly handed over the diary by Yeddyurappas former personal secretary N.R. Santosh - his one time close friend turned abductor, who rejoined Mr Yeddyurappas office on Friday. Vinay and Santosh were thick friends and Santosh had given him the original diary, which reportedly had personal notings of his alleged financial transactions for safe keeping, said the source.New Delhi: The ruling Bharatiya Janata Partys website is up and running almost a fortnight after it was allegedly hacked. Interes-tingly, the website, bjp.o-rg, came back online sans the data it displayed before it went down.

The BJP, which boasts itself on being digitally ahead of others, made its website online with a new design after it displayed the message We will be back soon almost for 15 days albeit with limited functionality.

However, the only data that could be accessed on the website is the list of the candidates declared by the party on March 20. The photographs of the Prime Minister and party chief also adorn the sites homepage. The tagline  Abki Baar Fir Modi Sarkar  also appears on the top of the page prominently.

Data like organisational details, old press releases, older communications and other links that are interlinked with BJP website are yet to be uploaded. Sources stated that data stored on the website had taken a hit, forcing the party to come up with a new design.

Despite repeated attempts, BJPs IT head Amit Malviya was unavailable for comment. The social media cell in charge for the Lok Sabha elections, Shyam Jaju, however, maintained that the hacking appears to be the work of the Opposi-tion. Sources in the party said that the new website has been uploaded on the server after various vulnerability tests.

Even the Congress had recently taken a dig at the BJP for not being able to reload its website. morning @bjp4india we realise youve been down for a long time now. If you need help getting back up, were happy to help (sic), it had tweeted.New Delhi/Bengaluru: Has the old rivalry between Karnatakas BJP stalwarts, former chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa and former minister K.S Eshwarappas two assistants come back to haunt the Lingayat strongman, weeks before crucial Lok Sabha polls which he was banking on to catapult him back to a position of strength in the saffron party?

The controversial diary which has created a huge embarrassment to the BJP may have been reportedly given to the Congress party by Vinay Bidre  the former personal secretary to former Opposition Leader in the Legislative Council K.S. Eshwarappa.

On Friday, hours after the Congress party launched a blistering attack on Mr. Yeddyurappa when its president Rahul Gandhi accused all BJP leaders of being corrupt, citing a media report that claimed the BJPs Lingayat vote-catcher on whom the saffron party is pinning all its hopes to win the state, had allegedly paid bribes to the tune of Rs 1,800 crore to the top party leadership, a clearly rattled BSY rubbished the claims of massive pay offs.Patna: After days of discussions, the six-party Opposition grand alliance or Mahagathbandhan in Bihar on Friday announced its seat-sharing formula for the 40 Lok Sabha seats, half of which will be fought by Lalu Prasad Yadavs RJD and nine by the Congress.

According to the agreement, the Upendra Kushwaha-led Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) will put up candidates in five seats, the Jitan Ram Manjhi-led Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) and the Mukesh Sahani-led Vikassheel Insan Party (VIP) in three each and the RJD will give one seat out of its quota to the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (CPI-ML).

No seats were given to the CPI and CPI-M, making it clear that former JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who is contesting from Begusarai, will not be supported by the grand alliance.

RJD state president Ram Chandra Purve told reporters that former JD(U) president and NDA convener Sharad Yadav will contest on the RJD symbol and merge his party Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) with it after the Lok Sabha polls.

After the announcement, RJD spokesperson Manoj Jha said, This alliance has been formed to serve people and save the constitution.

Sources said to pacify the Congress, which got nine seats despite a demand for 11 seats, it was decided that a party candidate will be nominated for a Rajya Sabha from Bihar. In 2014, the Congress had won just one seat while the RJD had won four.

The BJP-led NDA has already announced its seat sharing arrangement, according to which Janata Dal-United (JD-U) and the BJP will contest 17 seats each and the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), led by Ram Vilas Paswan, six seats. The current NDA constituents had won 30 out of the 40 seats in 2014.

Names of grand alliance candidates for the first phase of polling on April 11 were also announced. Of the four seats in the first phase, the HAM has been given two seats  Gaya and Aurangabad. Mr Manjhi himself will be contesting from Gaya.

RLSP candidate Bhudeo Chaudhary has been fielded from Jamui which is currently held by LJPs Chirag Paswan.

The other prominent candidates in the list are HAMs Upendra Prasad from Aurangabad and RJDs Vibha Devi, whose husband Raj Vallabh Yadav was recently disqualified from the Assembly following conviction in a rape case, from Nawada.

Earlier reports suggested that RLSP chief Kushwaha, who had walked out of the NDA following an offer of two seats, was upset with five seats offered to his party in the grand alliance.

Sources said he wanted around six seats but his demand was turned down during the meeting because other parties were also demanding a respectable seat share. The RLSP had won three seats in 2014.

The biggest gainer was, surprisingly, the fledgling VIP, which was floated by former Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni less than six months ago. It got three seats to contest.The house was razed to ground during a gunfight between militants and security forces in Hajin area of Bandipora District in Kashmir. (H.U. Naqash)

SRINAGAR: Six militants and a minor boy were killed and three Army jawans injured in a series of gun battles that took place across Kashmir Valley late Thursday night and on Friday.

Twelve-year-old boy Aatif Ahmed Mir killed during one of these gunfights had been held hostage by two militants holed up inside a private house in Hajin area of northern Bandipore district, the officials said. They alleged that Mir was brutally killed by two Pakistani terrorists who were also killed in the final assault of the security forces.

A police spokesman here said that the Pakistani militants belonging to Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) had initially taken two civilians hostages after the security forces laid siege to the area on Thursday evening.

However, the police and security forces with the assistance of community members safely rescued one of them identified as 60-year-old Abdul Hameed, the spokesman said.

Another civilian, a 12-year-old boy Aatif Mir was kept hostage by the terrorists till the end and despite repeated requests by community members and police for his release, he was brutally killed by them, the spokesman said.

According to the police, both the militants were killed by the security forces and that from the incriminating material recovered at the site of the encounter it is understood that the two killed terrorists were Pakistani nationals identified as Ali and Hubaib.

Four more militants were killed in similar clashes with security forces at Kalantara Payeen in Baramulla district and Gadapora in southern Shopian district, the officials said.

They said that one of the two militants killed at Kalantara Payeen has been identified as Aamir Rasool, a resident of north-western town Sopore, whereas the other is believed to be a Pakistani national.

The duo, they added, was associated with proscribed Jaish-e-Muhammad, the outfit responsible for the February 14 terror attack in southern Pulwama in which 49 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed. The identifies of the militants killed in Shopian encounter are being ascertained, the officials said.

At least, one dozen people including a policeman Tariq Ahmed were injured in clashes near the encounter site in Shopian, a report said. The witnesses and hospital sources said that while the policeman was hit by a stone during the clashes, nine persons sustained pellet injuries and one person was hit by a bullet in the neck as the security forces used force to quell the stone pelting mobs in the area.

During the encounter, nine residential houses and a few cowsheds and granaries caught fire, the reports received here said.

Meanwhile, a J&K policeman Irshad Ahmed was shot and critically wounded by unidentified gunman in Court Road New Townhall area of southern Anantnag town on Friday evening.Hyderabad: The BJP-led government only supported "people" and states where the Amit Shah-led party was in alliance, and the NDA rule was "too much of publicity and very less on delivery", a key TRS leader alleged Friday. Nizamabad Lok Sabha member K Kavitha, also daughter of Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) President and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, also sought to ridicule the BJP's new slogan "Modi Hai to Mumkin Hai" (Modi makes it possible). "It is possible if (Narendra) Modiji is there but then what is possible is the question", she said, alleging that the BJP had not delivered on its earlier promise of "Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas". "Because Telangana has not seen any support from BJP (led NDA government)", Kavitha told PTI.

"We have seen them supporting only people and States where they were in political alliance. Being Prime Minister if one is not neutral to each and every State, then people will also be not neutral in the upcoming elections," she said. "And today people are becoming more and more local. Local parties having a global vision are what people are looking for. And that can be provided by only regional parties, not national parties," according to her. She does not believe Narendra Modi being in a national party can empathise with each and every issue of various states and their requirements. "Because we have seen him (Modi) for five years. He did not make an attempt to get to know all the States in a neutral manner," Kavitha alleged. On her assessment of the performance of BJP-led government during its five-year tenure, she said everybody now feels it's too much of publicity and very less on delivery if one looked at any scheme initiated by it.

She said Telangana already has schemes like "Ayushman Bharat" and "Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi" under the names "Aarogyasri" and "Rythu Bandu" which reaches more people and are better designed than the central programmes. "When states are doing a much better job, the Central government trying to emulate states does not make any sense to me," Kavitha said. "Instead, they (the Centre) should be focusing on larger issues like solving Kashmir problem, making sure the monetary situation in the country is good, GDP grows well; they should be looking at larger issues, instead of giving away populist schemes, just before elections," she added.Bengaluru: Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee President Dinesh Gundurao on Friday said his party wants JDS Supremo H D Deve Gowda to contest elections from Bengaluru North constituency.

"I spoke to Deve Gowda ji and requested him to contest from Bengaluru North constituency... Congress has five and JDS two MLAs, who can ensure his victory," he told PTI. Gundurao said the former prime minister's representation from Bengaluru North will have a huge impact in the region, given his stature in public life. The 85-year-old JDS patriarch is yet to decide on contesting the Lok Sabha polls and has been thinking about his "usefulness" in the national capital. Gowda has said he lacked the strength that he had in 1996, when he became the Prime Minister, but there is "enthusiasm". Under a pact between ruling coalition partners for Lok Sabha elections in Karnataka, Congress has been allotted 20 seats while eight sets will be contested by Janata Dal-Secular (JDS). Asked if actor-turned-politician Sumalatha Ambareesh, wife of late actor and Congress leader Ambareesh, can pose a challenge to the coalition partners due to a possible sympathy wave, Gundurao said winning as an independent is difficult with JDS having a strong presence in state assembly, zilla panchayats and municipalities of Mandya district. Sumalatha is contesting as an Independent after she was denied ticket by the Congress from Mandya seat which had been allotted to the JD(S).

Gundurao also said that the Congress would make extra effort to see that Nikhil Gowda, grandson of Deve Gowda, registers a win from Mandya constituency. Asked about the BJP's plan to make "instability" an electoral issue in Karnataka, Gundurao dismissed it as ridiculous saying Modi himself is leading a coalition government at the centre. Also, the BJP is in alliance with NDA partners in several states including Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Punjab, he said. If Modi and BJP are against coalition, they should do away with it, he added. Gundurao said there have been some hiccups in the coalition setup, but the government has been stable. "Congress-JDS alliance has given a stable government but unfortunately BJP has been making efforts to destabilise it by horse-trading," he alleged. Taking a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the state Congress chief alleged that Modi "is diverting people's attention from real issues like failure of GST, demonetisation and joblessness, to emotional issues like Ram Mandir and nationalism". The dialogue of nationalism is very divisive and dangerous as it has already cut India into pieces on grounds of religion, ideologies and nationalism, he said. "We are seeing people taking law onto their hands and killing people including rationalists M M Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh," he said.

The Congress' efforts will be to expose Modi in all these fronts, he added. Asked if the BJP was in an advantageous position due to declaration of Modi as the prime ministerial candidate, Gundurao said "the appropriate question is who should not be the prime minister as there are a huge number of people who do not want Modi to continue". "It will not be easy for the BJP to sell the fake success stories perpetrated in media and social platforms to the people because the truth is that almost all the schemes including Ujwala has not done anything good to them," he claimed. On the other hand, the Congress had helped people by implementing MREGA and bringing in legislations on food security and tribals right, besides Aadhaar, Gundurao added. Rejecting suggestions that his offer to Congress president Rahul Gandhi to contest from Karnataka is due to any fear of loss in Amethi seat, Gundurao said it was aimed at strengthening the party in the south. "There is no design in this. I wrote a letter to Rahul Gandhi suggesting he contest from Karnataka as it would strengthen the party in southern states and retrieve the lost charm from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Let us see what decision the party takes," he said. Gundurao said Rahul Gandhi would address two rallies each in the two phases of Lok Sabha elections in Karnataka.Palaniswami, also the joint co-ordinator of ruling AIADMK, took a dig at the DMK-led opposition, saying it was seeking votes in the absence of a Prime Ministerial candidate whereas the NDA was projecting Modi. (Image: File)

Salem: Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami Friday made a strong pitch for a second term for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lauding him for the air strikes on terror camps in Pakistan and saying he was the "only qualified" leader to ensure the nation's security.

Modi was an "efficient and strong leader", he said launching his campaign for the April 18 Lok Sabha elections in the state from here, his native district in west Tamil Nadu.

Palaniswami, also the joint co-ordinator of ruling AIADMK, took a dig at the DMK-led opposition, saying it was seeking votes in the absence of a Prime Ministerial candidate whereas the NDA was projecting Modi.

He also accused the DMK of doing nothing for the welfare of the people of the state despite having been a partner in the ruling coalitions for 11 years at the Centre.

For a large democratic nation like India, security was very important and to ensure this, it was imperative that the country had an "efficient and strong leader," Palaniswami, whose party is leading the NDA in Tamil Nadu, said.

"Mr Narendra Modi is the only capable leader to protect the country. Only if he is the Prime Minister (for a successive term), can the country achieve great growth in many spheres," he said.

Referring to the killing of the 40 CRPF jawans in the February 14 terror attack in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir last month, Palaniswami said the country responded to it by carrying out air strikes on terror camps in Balakot in Pakistan and credited Modi for the retaliatory action. By this, Modi had brought "pride for India in the international arena," he added. Without naming Indian Air Force fighter pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman from Chennai, who was captured by Pakistan following a dogfight, Palaniswami lauded Modi for ensuring his safe return, saying he came back home 'unscathed.' Modi proved India's 'might' following the pilot's safe return, Palaniswami said. "This (NDA) alliance has to secure a grand victory to ensure the country's safety and security," he added.

The AIADMK is heading the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry with the other partners being the BJP, DMDK, PMK, Puthiya Tamizhagamn and Puthiya Neethi Katchi in the state. All India NR Congress is the NDA pick for the lone Puducherry segment. The 40 seats up for grab in Tamil Nadu (39) and the union territory are considered key for both the NDA as well as the DMK-led United Progressive Alliance for government formation at the Centre. The DMK-led coalition, which includes Congress among others, has been named Secular Progressive Alliance in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. Taking a swipe at the DMK-led alliance, Palaniswami said its PM candidate was yet undecided. "We are seeking votes by projecting Mr Modi as PM candidate. But they are doing so unaware who is their PM pick," he said.

Palaniswami said while DMK chief M K Stalin had earlier proposed Congress President Rahul Gandhi as the coalition's prime ministerial candidate, "he had later said that the PM will be decided after the polls."

Billing the AIADMK government as pro-people, he listed out its various welfare measures and questioned what the DMK had done for the people of the state.

"The DMK was part of the Central government for 11 years... Did it ever lend its voice for the rights of the people of Tamil Nadu. Did it solve issues by taking them up with the Centre. It did not," he charged.

People will reject them, Palaniswami said adding "for national security, and continuance of various welfare schemes, people should vote" for the party-led NDA."

Earlier, he began the electioneering after offering prayers at a Lord Vinayaka temple.

He was canvassing for AIADMK candidate from Salem, K R S Saravanan and ally DMDK's L K Sutheesh, who is contesting from the Kallakurichi Lok Sabha segment.The TRS (Telangana Rashtra Samiti), led by Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, dropped sitting MP A P Jithender Reddy, who was the party's floor leader in the Lok Sabha, in Mahbubnagar seat. (Photo: File)

Hyderabad: The TRS and the BJP ignored key contenders, but a beleaguered Congress fielded senior leaders to send a message it's still in the reckoning, as the Lok Sabha poll scene in Telangana hotted up.

The TRS (Telangana Rashtra Samiti), led by Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, dropped sitting MP A P Jithender Reddy, who was the party's floor leader in the Lok Sabha, in Mahbubnagar seat.

The BJP denied ticket to its sitting MP and former union minister Bandaru Dattatreya from Secunderabad seat.

And in an interesting development, BJP has fielded Bangaru Shruthi, daughter of former BJP President Bangaru Laxman, from Nagarkurnool constituency.

K Kavitha, daughter of the Chief Minister, is seeking reelection from Nizamabad, while in Khammam, the TRS has named former MP Nama Nageswara Rao, who quit the TDP earlier this week, as its candidate in Khammam.

In 2014, the TRS had won 11 seats, the Congress two, while the BJP, the TDP, YSRCP and AIMIM one seat each in Telangana, which has a total of 17 Lok Sabha constituencies.

Polls would be held in single phase on April 11 in the state.

This time, the TRS, brimming with confidence after sweeping the assembly elections last December, has said it aims to win nothing short of 16 seats, leaving one for the AIMIM, with which it has teamed up.

The Congress, which won in 19 of the 119 assembly constituencies, is reeling under a string of desertions of its MLAs.

As many as nine MLAs have announced their decision to join the TRS, dealing the Congress a huge setback ahead of the Lok Sabha poll.

However, the party is putting up a brave front.

It has fielded key leaders  Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee President N Uttam Kumar Reddy, Working President A Revanth Reddy and Komatireddy Venkat Reddy  to send a message to the party cadre that it means business in the Lok Sabha polls.

"All important leaders are contesting in the elections so that the defeat of the Congress in the assembly poll should not demoralise the cadre that we are on a weak footing", AICC in-charge of Telangana, Rama Chandra Khuntia said.Guwahati: In an obvious attempt to put all speculations to rest, BJP president Amit Shah on Friday said that senior party leader and Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma will not be given a ticket to contest the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Despite the state unit recommending his name for the Lok Sabha elections, Mr Sarma has been asked to concentrate on developing the state and strengthening the partys base in the Northeast.

Mr Sarma responded to the tweets, saying that he has accepted the decision humbly and the region will not disappoint Mr Shah in making Narendra Modi the Prime Minister again.

I hope the Assam BJP and the workers of the entire Northeast will ac-cept this decision. I fully believe it will take Assa-m and the Northeast to-wards the path of development, Mr Shah said.

Mr Shah tweeted, The central BJP wants Mr Sarma to continue as a minister in Assam and discharge his duties as the chairman of the Nor-th East Democratic Alli-ance (NEDA), the regional platform of the NDA.

The BJP president said, Mr Sarma is needed for coordination between the region and the central party, and the government in New Delhi.

The Assam election committee and the party workers had sent Mr Sarmas name unanimously for the Lok Sabha polls. The central BJP has wished that he should strengthen the party in Assam and Northeast while remaining as a minister in Assam, and convener of the NEDA, Mr Shah said.

Expressing gratefulness for the faith bestowed upon him by the BJP national president, Mr Sarma responded in another tweet, I humbly accept your decision.

It is significant that Mr Sarma on numerous occasions stated that he would not contest the Assembly elections in 2021, indicating that he was looking for a national role.Bhimavaram: Jana Sena chief K. Pawan Kalyan on Friday lashed out at YSR Congress president Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy stating that the latter was not bothered when his own uncle Y.S. Vivekananda Reddy was brutally murdered in Pulivendula.

Mr Kalyan warned TRS president and TS Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao against interfering in AP affairs. He asked that how Mr Rao could play proxy politics that when the state was divided and people of both states living happily.

While advising Mr Rao to set up his party in AP, Mr Kalyan dared him to field a candidate against him in Bhimavaram. He was addressing a public meeting after filing his nomination papers from the Bhimavaram constituency, his second after Gajuwaka.

Mr Kalyan asked that when Mr Jagan Mohan Reddy had failed to take care of his own uncle, how would he would take care for the people.

Stating that the murder had taken place in Vivekananda Reddys house and there were no blood strains and fingerprints, he questioned Mr Jagan Mohan Reddy for not talking about the murder that took place in his house.

Alleging that the YSRC boss was colluding with the TRS leaders who had hatred for the people of Andhra Pradesh, Mr Kalyan said he was surprised how Mr Jagan Mohan Reddy could join hands with the TRS leaders who had masterminded violence and hurled stones at him in Warangal during the statehood agitation.

Maintaining that he had entered politics not to make money, the Jana Sena boss said his party would form government in AP after the elections and would make efforts to change the political system in the state as desired by the youth.

While criticising AP Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and Mr Jagan Mohan Reddy for ignoring the people for their selfish political ends, he advised Mr Naidu to take voluntary retirement from politics in a dignified way in view of his age.

He promised the people of Bhimavaram that a water pipeline from Vijjeswaram to the city to supply drinking water from Godavari river would be laid within six months after he elected as MLA.

Urging the people of Bhimavaram to give him a chance so that he would develop the town to international standards, he promised unveiling a 100-foot statue of freedom fighter Alluri Sitharama Raju. Maintaining that the sitting MLA of TD G. Srinivas  Mr Srinivas is the former MLA and YSRC candidate and the sitting MLA is P. Anjaneyulu  did nothing for Bhimavaram, he assured that he would resolve the drinking water problem in the segment.TIRUPATI: TD president and AP Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu on Friday disclosed that he owned Rs 47.38 lakh worth of movable assets, self-acquired immovable assets valued at Rs 19.55 crore and Rs 41.94 lakh as inherited assets, totalling about Rs 20.5 crore, in his election affidavit.

Mr Naidu mentioned that he had a case pending against him, at the Dharmabad police station in Maharashtra, regarding his protest against the Babli dam during the days of undivided AP.

The affidavit and his nomination papers were filed on his behalf by Mr P.S. Muni Ratnam, said to his chief assistant, for the Kuppam Assembly segment in Chittoor district. Two sets of papers were filed a the revenue divisional office at Kuppam at 2.40 pm and 2.45 pm, which is believed to be an auspicious time.

For 2017-18 Mr Naidu showed his income as `64,73,208 and that of his wife at Rs 13,45,30,513.

Mr Naidu stated he owned at house plot on Road No.65, Jubilee Hills, whose market value he put at Rs 19,55,01,474, a residential building at Sheshapuram in Naravaripalli hamlet of Chittoor district, worth Rs 41,94,000. Ms Bhuvaneswari had 5 acres of agriculture land at Madeenaguda with a market value of Rs 45 crore, a commercial building at Sannerkuppam in Kanchipuram district of Tamil Nadu, worth Rs 29.29 crore.

Mr Naidu listed loans of Rs 5,24,96,605 and Rs 36,606 pending dues to the government in the form of property tax.

He listed a housing loan jointly held with son Nara Lokesh with an outstanding of Rs 5,16,07,517 and Mr Lokesh personally had Rs 8,89,088 loans. Ms Bhuvaneswari an overdraft of Rs 3,48,71,222 at Bank of Baroda, rental advances of Rs 38,01,600, Rs 14,40,000 from Exide industries and LCC, respectively. Mr Lokesh had rental advances of Rs 5,70,05,87 from Redhills Logistics and Rs 22,22,063 of hand loans.

Mr Naidu showed Rs 18,400 as cash in hand, Rs 44,96,167 as balance in a savings bank account and an Ambassador car worth Rs 2,22.500. Ms Bhuvaneswari had Rs 92,700 cash in hand, Rs 15,18,668 in savings, Rs 30,000 in fixed deposit, Rs 545,76,99,659 worth shares in Heritage Foods Limited, Rs 4,610 worth shares in Vijaya Bank, Rs 22,49,400 and Rs 3,28,80,00 investments in Megabid Finance and Investment, and Nirvana Holdings Pvt Ltd, respectively. Her receivables were shown at Rs 19,43,93,213 and PF Rs 2,76,23,948 and 3,518 grams of gold worth Rs 1,12,36,167 and 445 carats of precious stones and pearls.

Ms C. Bhavani, a BC woman and former MPTC of Gudupalli, and former Ramakuppam sarpanch Ubedulla proposed the nomination. Before filing the papers, Mr Ratnam along with the party cadre reached office in a procession. Prior to this, special puja was performed to the papers at Varadaraja Swamy temple in Lakshmipuram and Tirupati Gangamma temple in Kuppam.

He said his highest educational qualification was MA which he completed at the SVU College in Tirupati in 1974.The chowkidar is, quite unfortunately, not the most loved or respected entity in Indian society. Examples of this are everywhere. Before the 1980s, the Railway Protection Force (RPF) worked like chowkidars and were regarded as the watch and ward staff with weak discipline and uncertain judicial grounding. If an IPS officer was appointed to the RPF, it was considered a demotion  the officer had to make it a point to tell his visitors that he was, indeed, a senior police officer. All this changed when the RPF was turned into an armed force of the Union and at par with the other Central police forces.The watchman, less than desirable as a role, let alone a career, finally acquired the status of a policeman.

In common understanding, the chowkidar conjures up the idea of a night watchman, the one who is supposed to stand guard through the still of the night  less as an armed sentry and more as a signal to the passing thief to go elsewhere because someone is watching this gate. The sound he creates is supposed to act like a pre-emptive strike. Traditionally, the only equipment he carries is a lathi with which to beat the ground, the emanating sound is also offered as proof that he is awake and on duty through the night. Most chowkidars though tend not to stay awake at night.

This is because the modern-day chowkidars working across housing societies and in many other establishments are actually a sorry lot. They do an assortment of duties  from checking the building's water supply to ferrying household goods to washing cars and watching the main gate - and routinely work 12-hour shifts without any break. Usually, the system forbids them from leaving the workstation until the next person on the duty roster takes charge, and if that does not happen, then the duty extends to 24 hours and more.

This then is not the candidate who can keep up the guard. The watchman naturally and regularly sleeps on duty, a concession many employers seem to allow because, well, what is the way out? They are paid a pittance, work multiple shifts and sleep has become an allowance that now seems to come with the job. As the newly-posted New Delhi correspondent of the Washington Post once wrote in his newspaper about the person who guarded his house: But like most Indian chowkidars, I discovered not long after my arrival in India, he is incorrigibly somnolent.

All of which acquires a very different connotation when the role of the Prime Minister of the country is compared to that of the chowkidar. This is more so because should something go wrong, the question has to be and will be asked of the chowkidar, and he usually would not have the liberty to say that the responsibility lies with the previous chowkidar. But since one highlight of the current chowkidar is to point to the previous ones on duty, way back to the time the nation won independence from the British, one wonders how the election campaign of the incumbent will square up with how people treat chowkidars when a theft actually takes place.

The campaign is well under way but is fraught. Given the BJP's well-oiled machinery, its better preparedness for the polls and a more organised management of its media presence, the chowkidar campaign may well go through. There surely will be the coming of the second and the third and further rounds of the campaign, which will build on the initial push. Yet, there are already some indications that the approach is producing some unexpected fallouts  from the laughable when every BJP minister appears to have added the salutary chowkidar as a prefix to their Twitter handles, to the Congress' reaction which had to do nothing more than call out Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya as fellow chowkidars of the Prime Minister.

The campaign has been chosen by the BJP at a time when the allegations surrounding the Rafale fighter jet deal are still in court, and can spring a nasty surprise. Further, the head of the group involved in the follow-on contracts in the case is Anil Ambani, who also is in the news for having managed to avert a jail sentence in another case with Ericsson, with the help of bailout from brother Mukesh Ambani. More noise has come in from Nirav Modi, the scamster who did what no one else has done in the history of Indian banking by literally walking away with more than one billion dollars. He has been caught on camera by an ordinary journalist of London's Telegraph newspaper while the government here is still struggling to respond to his escape from Indian soil. On March 20, he was arrested and produced in a UK court where he was denied bail. Vijay Mallya sits pretty meanwhile in rural England.

In 2014, Narendra Modi related well to the ordinary chaiwallah, and was ably supported by the Congress Partys rather erudite and overrated Mani Shanker Aiyar, who did him the favour of mocking that humble role. Mr Modi had only to say one simple line  chai hi to becche hai, desh to nahi beccha (I sold tea, not the nation). He of course romped home. This time won't be simply that easy.International Womens Day (March 8, 2019) turned out to be a black letter day for the Indian womens movement when the Meghalaya high court, in suo motu proceedings, punished a woman journalist on charges of committing contempt of court.

International Womens Day (March 8, 2019) turned out to be a black letter day for the Indian womens movement when the Meghalaya high court, in suo motu proceedings, punished a woman journalist on charges of committing contempt of court.

Sit in the corner of the courtroom till the rising of the court and pay a fine of `2 lakhs, ordered the high court while holding a woman journalist and a woman publisher, Patricia Mukhim and Shoba Chaudhuri, who edit and publish the Shillong Times respectively, guilty of committing contempt of court. The Shillong Times is a popular daily in the Northeast region published since 1945.

It was ironic that the order throttling the press was passed on a day celebrated as Womens Day globally. If the payment of the fine is not done within a period of two weeks, the court added, the journalists will have to undergo six months simple imprisonment and the paper, the so-called Shillong Times, will automatically come to an end (read: will be banned).

The bench, comprising Chief Justice Mohammad Yaqoob Mir and Justice Sudip Ranjan Sen of the Meghalaya high court, was enraged by an article published in the Shillong Times titled: When judges judge for themselves. The article was critical of a series of orders passed by Mr Sen, also in suo motu proceedings, enhancing the retirement benefits of judges. By directing the state government to consider enhancing the retirement benefits of judges when his own retirement was due shortly, Mr Sen had been judging his own case, the article implied.

The article implied that Mr Sen had ordered for several facilities to be provided not only to retired judges, but also to their spouses and children. In addition to medical facilities, the controversial order stressed the need for providing guesthouses, domestic help, mobile/Internet charges at the rate of Rs 10,000 and a mobile phone for Rs 80,000 to judges. The article compared Mr Sens orders to an earlier order passed by a division bench of the Meghalaya HC asking for Z-plus security to be given to judges, which was later set aside by the Supreme Court.

The bench held that the newspaper report was in bad taste and reflected the high court in a poor light. They held that it was not based on facts and was intended to scandalise the court. The caption was also found to be malicious and contemptuous. The amicus curiae appointed for the case drew the attention of the bench to the fact that Ms Mukhim had also made some derogatory comments against judges on the social media and had even gone to the extent of mocking the judicial system of this country.

A visibly-perturbed Mr Sen wrote in his order: We would like to ask whether the contemnor, Smt Patricia Mukhim, wants to control the judiciary as per her desire and will. If it is so, she is very much wrong. The court refused to accept the apology tendered by the journalists on the ground that it was not genuine and was given only to avert the conviction.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court stayed the judgment passed by the high court on March 15, 2019, a week later, after hearing a special leave petition filed by the two journalists. The CJI-led bench also issued a notice to the registrar-general of the high court and had commented that the duty of the court was to protect the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression and not to subvert the same.

In the petition in the Supreme Court, Ms Mukhim and Ms Chaudhuri have stated that the report was a fair and accurate reporting of the court proceedings. They also contended that the order suffered from manifest perversity and that the sentence passed was manifestly arbitrary, as the fine of Rs 2 lakhs exceeded the maximum sentence of fine of Rs 2,000 imposable under Section 12 of the Contempt of Courts Act. They further alleged that proper procedure was not followed while passing the order. The notice served on them was for civil contempt, but action for criminal contempt was taken against them, they pleaded.

The Editors Guild has criticised the high court order and termed it intimidatory, stating that it undermines press freedom. The Editors Guild further said that it is ironical that the judiciary, which should uphold press freedom, has instead issued an order that militates against freedom of expression and urged the judiciary to exercise its constitutional powers with utmost caution so that the role of a free media in a democracy is duly respected.

It must be noted that the contempt provision is not to be invoked to discipline journalists and lawyers. It cannot be used to restrict the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under the Constitution. It is an exception to the freedom of speech.

Also, contempt proceedings are a relic of a bygone age and not generally invoked in modern democracies. However, in recent times there has been a surge in the use of the contempt power in India.

Justice Markandey Katju, a former judge of the Supreme Court, was issued a notice for contempt of court and asked to explain his criticism of the judiciary. More recently, contempt proceedings were initiated against a senior lawyer of the Supreme Court, Prashant Bhushan, over his comments in social media regarding the appointment of the CBIs acting director.

Ideally, judges should never be oversensitive to public criticism. Bona fide criticism should be welcomed and appreciated because it opens the door to introspection. In 2006, the Contempt of Courts Act (1971) was amended and it now provides truth as a defence, provided it is bona fide and in the public interest. A fair comment on the merits of a judgment is not contempt.

The contempt law is problematic as the judge himself acts as prosecutor and victim and starts with the presumption of guilt rather than innocence, and in his discretion decides punishment.

The renowned British judge, Lord Denning, in Metropolitan Police Commissioner (1969), had observed that the contempt jurisdiction undoubtedly belongs to us, but which we will most sparingly exercise: more particularly as we ourselves have an interest in the matter. Let me say at once that we will never use this jurisdiction as a means to uphold our dignity. That must rest on surer foundations. Nor will we use it to suppress those who speak against us.

It is important that courts in India follow this sound principle while issuing contempt orders against lawyers and journalists when they write articles based on facts and there is no intended malice against an individual judge.Washington: President Donald Trump said the United States should acknowledge Israeli sovereignty over the hotly-contested Golan Heights, in what amounted to a major pre-election gift for his ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognise Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Trump said in a tweet.

Trump called the Golan  a strategic area seized from Syria and annexed in a move never recognised by the international community  of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability! About 20,000 Israeli settlers live in the Golan, which overlooks Syrian territory. Trumps abrupt announcement was immediately cheered by Netanyahu, who faces a tough reelection battle and visits Washington next week.

At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognises Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the PM wrote on Twitter. Thank you President Trump!Police detained the driver, a man in his 40s, and described him as a 'vengeful repeat offender' who had daggers in his car and intended to 'cause serious damage'. (Representational Image)

Beijing: A car rammed into a crowd in central China Friday, killing six people and injuring seven others, and the driver was fatally shot by police, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The injured were taken to hospital following the early morning incident in Zaoyang City in Hubei Province, CCTV said.

China has suffered a spate of similar incidents in recent months.

Last September, 11 people died and dozens were injured when a car struck a crowd in a public square in the central Hunan province city of Hengdong.

Police detained the driver, a man in his 40s, and described him as a "vengeful repeat offender" who had daggers in his car and intended to "cause serious damage".

In late November, a car ploughed into a group of children crossing a street in front of an elementary school in the northeastern Liaoning province, killing five people and injuring at least 19.

The driver said he "chose his victims at random" and had reportedly been contemplating suicide due to domestic troubles before the tragedy occurred.Khan said that all the political parties have agreed to the National Action Plan and by now the militant groups have been proscribed. Further action was being taken against them as his government could not allow any such activity on the soil of Pakistan. (Photo: File)

Islamabad: There was no room for "jihadi outfits and jihadi culture" in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan has said amidst intense global pressure on his government to rein in the terrorist outfits operating from its soil after the Pulwama attack. Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district in February 14.

India launched a counter-terror operation in Balakot. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured its pilot, who was handed over to India on March 1.

Talking to editors and senior journalists here, Khan said that India's NDA government wants to win the general election based on its politics of hatred against Pakistan, The Express Tribune reported.

He warned that the security risk at the Line of Control (LoC) persists until elections are held in India and asked the nation to be prepared at all times. The armed forces of the country are ever ready and would give a befitting response in case of any military aggression, the prime minister said. Khan said that all the political parties have agreed to the National Action Plan and by now the militant groups have been proscribed. Further action was being taken against them as his government could not allow any such activity on the soil of Pakistan.

Tracing the history of jihadi outfits and "jihadi culture", he said "these groups have existed since the days of the US-led Afghan war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and have operated from here for decades", Dawn news reported.

He said that there was no room now for any such group in the country, as Pakistan would like the world to believe that it was not only a peace-loving country but it was sincere in eradicating this culture of "jihadism" and terrorism through short-term and long-term policies. Khan said that India was trying to push Pakistan in the blacklist of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and if that happened, the country would be facing a lot of economic problems.

The international terror financing watchdog FATF last month decided to continue the 'Grey' listing of Pakistan for its failure to stop funding of terrorist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamat-ud-Dawa. In June 2018, Pakistan was placed in the 'Grey' list and given a 27-point action plan by the FATF. This Plan was reviewed as the last Plenary in October 2018 and for the second time in this week-long meeting.

Speaking about the law and order situation in the country, Khan said that banned organisations should have been eliminated a long time ago, but it was his government which was taking action against them. He said that the government was spending huge amount of money to bring them into the mainstream. The US has warned Pakistan that another terror attack on India will prove to be "extremely problematic" as it asked Islamabad to take more "concrete and sustained" actions to rein in terror groups including the JeM and the LeT.As the consortium of banks led by State Bank of India chalked out a Rs 1,500 crore bailout plan to save the ailing Jet Airways, the bank employees registered their opposition against the move.

It is in the larger interest of the country, public and the lenders that Jet Airways continues to fly. We have not lost all hope and all efforts will be on to keep it flying, said SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar on Wednesday.

Opposing the lenders' plan, the All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA) said the banks should not become the owner of Jet Airways and the airlines should repay the loans. In a press release, C H Venkatachalam, the General Secretary of the AIBEA, said: "We totally disagree with such proposals and attempts of Banks to purchase the shares of this ailing airline with a view to save the company at the cost of public money."

"When Jet Airways was making profits, the profits went to the pocket of the owners. When it in loss, why public money and Banks' money should be spent to save them," he said adding banks should do banking business, not run airlines.

The group also stated that private airlines proved to be a failure despite the weakening of public airlines. "All these private airlines were allowed and brought into operation only on the premises that private airlines would be much more efficient than public sector airlines. Because of this open encouragement, India Airlines was virtually weakened. There are attempts to sell airlines (Air India) to some private buyers. But we observe the 'performance' of private airlines," said the statement.

They have asked the government to review the policy of 'weakening public sector.'Cast: Akshay Kumar, Govind Namdev, Mir Sarwar, Rajpal Yadav, Vansh Bhardwaj, Parineeti Chopra

Director: Anurag Singh

Category: UA

Rating - 3/5

Akshay Kumar's Kesari hit the screen this week, which is set in the British Era of 1897. The film begins with Havaldar Ishar Singh (Akshay Kumar) explaining to his friend, the politics of the British, Afghans, Pathans and the Indians. He describes the quagmire in the sub-continent to be a result of a feud between the husband (British), wife (Afghans), and an affair of the latter with Pathans and Russians. As for Indians, Singh calls them 'baraatis' (wedding guests) stuck in the confusion.

Well explained for the uninitiated in Indian history! And as we see in the movie, the venue of the 'marriage-from-hell' is India and well, the 'baraatis' seem to be from the husband's side and like him a little more than they like the wife, little!

Though the film repeatedly highlights the spirit of Seva and courage that the Sikh Community is known for, it is based on the battle of Saragarhi, where 21 Sikhs of the 36th Sikh regiment fought 10,000 Afghans.



It is Havaldar Ishar Singh, who leads the regiment to the unwinnable and gruesome war with the 'lawless and unethical' Afghans. Though they serve the British, it is before this war, that Ishar Singh inspires his regiment to fight as free men for their community and against the long subjugation, "first under the Mughals and now the British."

Thus begin some well-shot battle sequences and one-to-one sword fights.

Like the one where the Pathans reach the battlefield with reverberating drums. The sequence will remind of the Orcs entering the scene in the Oscar-winning 'The Lord Of The Rings'. And it is equally powerful in the way it is shot.

But there are some over-dramatised parts here, that doesn't suit the mood of the film- which seems to be more of a tribute and less of a jingoism act. According to Kesari, wars begin with drum face-offs because platoons carry their own background music to the battlefield (now you know where the epic battle music came from!). There are a lot of 'Allahu-Akbars' and in-your-face evil Maulvis and look-how-barbaric-we-are Afghan soldiers (again similar to the orcs and bests in the LOTR). There are predictable sequences like a rebellious regiment of subordinates and a token scene of the British flaunting their supremacy! Kesari may not be your cup-of-tea if you are not in a mood for an over-dramatic flick. That's what makes most of the second half of Kesari after a rather slow first half.

Released when the Lok Sabha Elections are around the corner, Kesari was also put in the box of a propaganda film by some. It does sail on the theme of Nationalism when it is also the point of campaigning for some political parties. With religion as the dividing force between the good and evil, the film does make 'community' as the major reason why the regiment fights. While the other side has waged 'Jihad' on them. It is a theme that the already volatile atmosphere did not need at this time. (An aftermath of the Pulwama Terror Attack, New Zealand Shooting and instances of communal discord in India).

All said and done, the film is an excellent tribute to the courage of the 36th Sikh Regiment. Their humane side (they build a mosque for the Pathans, offer water to the enemies) will make you question, "Why were such souls wasted for a British war!"

Right then a wise man from the film answers- "Jung, sarhadein, sab karobaar hai (Wars and border, it is all business)." Just like the religion and politics that they are respectively built and fought for!

Akshay Kumar has time and again proved himself to be the new-age Manoj Kumar, with added action sequences and cute romantic angles. Go watch Kesari for the tribute it pays to the spirit of Sikh Community and some well-shot action scenes. For, it is just the right shade of saffron!In this Q&A we caught up with LLM Graduate Anamaria Santos Fonseca Sousa, currently working as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of The Gambia, in partnership with the Law Schools Human Rights Implementation Centre. She talked to us about her journey to pursue her goal of becoming an international human rights lawyer and academic, her Law School experience and how it has shaped her career aspirations, and her advice for South American students looking to study at University of Bristol.

Why did you choose to study at Bristol?

Studying abroad was, I felt, a necessary step towards accomplishing my goal to work as an international human rights lawyer.

I grew up in a city in Northeast Brazil where opportunities were limited for this goal; I earned my undergraduate degree in my hometown, but as there were few courses available, I began traveling 8 hours a week to the state capital of Bahia to earn a specialisation in Public Law in pursuit of my professional goals. This led me to the University of Bristol, where I enrolled in the Human Rights LLM, a programme that provides specific expertise not easily accessible in my home country.

When I decided to study abroad I analysed higher education rankings throughout the world, the areas of expertise of each University and the focus of each programme. I ended up narrowing my choices down to ten universities around the world, and fortunately I was accepted to nine of them. I chose the University of Bristol because of its incomparable academic recognition, and because it demonstrated it could provide me with access to channels through which I can achieve meaningful change.

Additionally, as soon as I was accepted to the programme, one of my lecturers, Dr Diego Acosta Arcarazo, contacted me through email to introduce himself and explain the importance for him and for Bristol of empowering the latino community at the University, which made me feel really welcome and encouraged; his approach was definitely one of the deciding reasons for me to choose Bristol.

What did you find most inspiring during your time at the University of Bristol?

Studying in Bristol was life-changing, a watershed in my life and career. During my time there I was constantly inspired by my lecturers and my peers - seeing such diversity in an academic environment was exactly what I needed to have my horizons broadened. They not only helped me shape my career but also taught me so much about love, life, purpose, the world, culture and beauty.

Moreover, the extracurricular activities were of crucial importance to my experience. For instance, it was through the Human Rights Implementation Centre that I had the opportunity to work with Professor Rachel Murray. I already knew and admired her work, but to be a part of the Clinic brought me a whole new and even better perspective of the impact a Human Rights Law professional can have in the world.

My experience of legal research and practical engagement in the Human Rights Law Clinic was one of the decisive elements that reinforced my desire to pursue a career in academia and human rights law with international organizations.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced at Bristol?

I can cite several challenges I faced in Bristol, but none of them were big enough to make me second-guess my decision; though the experience would have been much smoother without these challenges, I also know that its impossible for some of them not to exist; for instance, the fact that it was my first time living and studying in an English-speaking country.

What have you been working on since completing your LLM, and where do you see yourself in 5 years?

In five years, I hope to have finished my PhD and be working as a lecturer and as a human rights lawyer.

After completing the LLM in Human Rights Law in July 2018, I was offered a position in the University of Bristols PhD in Law programme. Due to my working commitments as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of The Gambia, I deferred the offer for one year. I want to continue my academic career as a PhD researcher specialising in the rights of refugee women. My motivation to undertake this PhD is shaped by my passion for womens rights and migration law, my enthusiasm for research and analysis as well as my desire to pursue an academic career in human rights law.

It was thanks to a partnership between the University of The Gambia (UTG) and the University of Bristol, that I was given the unique opportunity to teach at UTG. In The Gambia I am responsible for teaching the International Human Rights Law unit to Law undergraduates. I am also the editor-in-chief of the annual Gambia Law Review.

Alongside my job in The Gambia, I work as a researcher for Bristol Womens Voice, a charitable organisation developed to tackle abuse and violence against women, for which I have published online reports, and have joined the Action4Justice team to develop a research paper on Arrest/Detention in The Gambia. In addition, I became a member of my alma maters Human Rights Implementation Centre in Brazil as an international collaborator, for which I will be responsible for conducting online seminars on International Human Rights Law and for closely supervising students on their individual research tasks.

What advice would you give to South American students considering Bristol?

I would tell them to study and practise academic English as much as possible prior to their enrolment at university and to develop study methods to cope with a large number of independent study hours.

I would also tell them that studying in Bristol changed my whole life, career and perspective of the world, so I would advise them to accept the offer to study there, to be open-minded to the new academic environment, to enjoy the beautiful city and the opportunity of living in a such a diverse, vibrant and cultural place.

Lastly, I would tell them not to waste a single second of their time here so as to strategize their following steps  so study hard, make wise extracurricular choices and commit to them, take care of your mental health, make friends, enjoy the experience, take in every opportunity to learn inside and outside academia and study hard again.India and Pakistan should resolve their issues bilaterally, the SCO's new Secretary-General has said, asserting that their participation in the security grouping could become "impossible" without a commitment for an "unconditional" fight against terrorism and separatism.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) was established in Shanghai in 2001 with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as founding members. It was expanded in 2017 with the inclusion of India and Pakistan.

Addressing his first press conference here on Wednesday after assuming charge, Vladimir Norov said that the Pulwama terror attack was a "direct provocation" by the opponents of peace between India and Pakistan.

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.

"The recent situation between India and Pakistan, which has resulted in human casualties, I would like to note that there has been a direct provocation by the opponents of the Indo-Pakistani accord and peace," Norov, who was the former Foreign Minister of Uzbekistan, said in response to questions.

Asked how the SCO mechanism could be used to resolve the recent tensions between India and Pakistan, he said: "before joining the SCO as full members, India and Pakistan committed themselves to strictly implement all the provisions of the legal framework that has been developed by the Member States of the Organisation".

"One of such fundamental obligation is not to bring bilateral contradictions and disagreements to the SCO family, as the SCO is not engaged in the settlement of disputable bilateral issues, whether border, water or other topics in relations between the individual Member States," he said.

These issues must be resolved and are being resolved through bilateral consultations and dialogue, goodwill and mutual reasonable compromises, he said.

"The most important condition for participation in a multi-disciplinary cooperation within the SCO is the commitment to unconditional and consistent struggle against terrorism, separatism and extremism. Otherwise, it would be impossible for the two states to participate in the SCO," Norov said.

The whole world has heard clear signals from the parties not to escalate relations and their readiness to fully understand and follow the principles established within the organisation, he said.

"In addition, to offer mediation of the member states of the organization as there is an intention to resolve the differences in a bilateral format," Norov said.

After joining the SCO, India and Pakistan have common ground and are ready to work in the SCO format to ensure regional security, joint counteraction to complex challenges and threats, sustainable socio-economic development, he said.

This was stated by the leaders of India and Pakistan at last year's SCO summit in Qingdao, in particular, their intention to play an active and constructive role in the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group as peace and stability in Afghanistan is a matter of common concern for all the SCO countries, he said.

Both India and Pakistan participated in the activities of the SCO as observers for 12 years and their accession to the SCO was preceded by a fairly long preparatory stage, he said.

At present, representatives of India and Pakistan are actively working in two permanent bodies of the organisation which included the SCO Secretariat and the Executive Committee of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), Norov said, adding that the Indian and Pakistani sides also take part in the activities of all 29 SCO working mechanisms of the SCO.

Also over 300 military personnel of India and Pakistan took part in the international anti-terrorist exercises "Peace Mission-2018", which took place at the at Chelyabinsk region of Russia last year.

This "testifies to the joint and effective work of these two countries within the SCO," Norov said.

The counter-terrorism exercises are due to be held this year again.

The SCO will hold its summit in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, in June this year.

Norov said the admission into the SCO of the "two large and influential states of South Asia" is of particular importance for the organisation and for the Eurasian region, as well to India and Pakistan themselves.

"Being at the same negotiating table, and on a regular basis and in different formats, India and Pakistan are now in the process of a permanent dialogue on all issues which are currently in the agenda of the SCO," he said.

He said that with the admission of India and Pakistan, the SCO has acquired a trans-regional character and in terms of its aggregate potential, the total population, territory, reserves of natural resources, GDP, it has become the largest organisation not only in the region but also in the world.Regional National Conference (NC) President and MP Farooq Abdullah on Friday claimed that his party joined hands with the Congress to save the nation from those who are trying to divide it on the basis of religion.

"We have given this sacrifice (to enter into an alliance with the Congress) for one aim - to keep India a secular country and also keep India strong. There is no other goal in it, Abdullah said while speaking at a joint election rally of the NC and the Congress for the Lok Sabha election in Jammu.

We have to live in this country and strengthen it and its secular ethos which was preached by Mahatma Gandhi. To bring the country out of this quagmire, we have come together. We ensure you (Congress) our full support," he said.

Earlier on Wednesday, after the two parties reached to a pre-poll alliance, Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad had said, It (alliance) was done in the national interest, to strengthen secular forces in Jammu and Kashmir as the state faces threat from Pakistan.

The NC has not fielded any candidate from Jammu and Udhampur parliamentary constituencies in order to support the Congress, while the latter has decided not to field its candidate from Srinagar Lok Sabha seat, from where Abdullah is contesting. There will be a friendly contest on Anantnag, Baramulla and Ladakh seats.

The NC and Congress had contested three seats each in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and both the parties had drawn a blank with the BJP and PDP winning three each. NC had contested all three seats in the Kashmir Valley and Congress two seats of Jammu region and one from Ladakh.A Delhi court on Friday sent alleged Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Sajjad Khan, a close aide of Pulwama attack mastermind Muddasir, to NIA custody till March 29.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had sought his custody for 10 days from Additional Sessions Judge Rakesh Syal.

Advocate M S Khan, appearing for Sajjad Khan, opposed the agency's demand.

Sajjad Khan (27), a resident of Pulwama was arrested near the Lajpat Rai market late Thursday night.

Mudassir had tasked him with establishing a sleeper cell in Delhi, police said.

Forty Central Reserve Police Force personnel were killed in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14 after a JeM suicide bomber rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into their bus.The government on Friday decided to boycott the Pakistan National Day event to be held at its high commission here as Kashmiri separatist leaders were also invited, an official said.

Over the past few years, India's representation at the annual event has been at the level of a union minister.

This year, Indian government officials will stay away from the reception scheduled on the eve of Pakistan National Day, which is celebrated on March 23, the official said.

"The government of India has decided not to send any official representative to the Pakistan National Day event at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi," the official said.

The decision has been taken because Pakistan has decided to invite separatist Hurriyat leaders from Jammu and Kashmir to the event, the official added.

The decision comes in the wake of heightened tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours after the Pulwama terror attack and subsequent air strike by India on a training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26.

Pakistan retaliated the next day by unsuccessfully attempting to target Indian military installations. The JeM claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack.

India has been mounting diplomatic offensive on Pakistan since the Pulwama attack to corner the country internationally on the issue of terrorism.The University of Bristol has received a landmark 1 million donation to further its research activity and impact in Africa.

The generous gift from The Perivoli Trust will create new roles and opportunities for Bristol researchers to tackle key challenges and pioneer innovative solutions for the most pressing concerns on the continent.

A new Perivoli Chair in Africa Research and Partnerships will develop and expand the University's portfolio of interdisciplinary research in partnership with universities, international agencies, charities, governments and organisations across Africa.

The gift will additionally fund opportunities for Vice-Chancellor Fellowships, PhD scholarships and ultimately lead to the creation of a new Centre for Africa Research and Partnerships to achieve real and impactful change in the Trust's priority areas of research: education, health and wellbeing, sustainable agriculture, resilience and governance, and migration and mobility.

The University has over 50 active research projects working with African partners, co-created with regional communities to bring real and local impact.

Working with its partners in the Worldwide Universities Network and international agencies, Bristol leads projects on sustainable ruminant farming; migration data, policy and development; health outcomes of migration events, and resilient peacebuilding in Africa.

The University also leads education projects exploring how students from rural areas negotiate the transition to higher education and the factors that shape the educational achievement of disadvantaged learners in Africa.

The University also is a founding member of TransformU, the UNFPA's (UN Population Fund) new university network and will work to help achieve UNFPA's vision to end unmet need for family planning, maternal death and gender-based violence and harmful practices by 2030.

Professor Nishan Canagarajah, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Bristol, said: "This generous gift from The Perivoli Trust will enable us to further our work in Africa, achieving impactful change through new innovations and initiatives.

"We have over 50 active research projects working with African partners and through the new Perivoli Chair in Africa Research and Partnerships, we will be able to increase the visibility of our work in Africa and maximise the potential of our networks.

"Our vision for a Centre for Africa Research and Partnerships is unique and, ultimately, we hope it will reimagine how UK universities work in Africa to create transformative change to benefit our partners in Africa."

The new Perivoli Chair in Africa Research and Partnerships is now being recruited. They will champion, lead, and coordinate existing activity, while at the same time cultivating new partnerships and identifying opportunities for further growth, strengthening the breadth and depth of partnerships on a global scale.

The Perivoli Trust has a philanthropic focus mostly on the Emerging World and especially Africa. Through the Perivoli Schools Trust, it has transformed nursery education in Namibia, Malawi and Zambia. So far, through this initiative they have trained 5,500 nursery school teachers in reaching an estimated 150,000 children.

The Perivoli Trust has also enjoyed a successful relationship with the University of Bristol over the past ten years, funding a number of key projects which have had a direct impact in Africa. This latest gift represents the Trusts and the University's shared ambition to strive for innovative approaches to achieve impactful change that will benefit generations for years to come in Africa.SHARON HILL  Two Academy Park students steered a challenge from PennDOT into the winners circle at a recent competition.

Senior Samhir Blackwell and junior Cheyenne Phillips were the PennDOT District 6 winners in the departments second Innovations Challenge, a competition that asks high school students to solve real-world transportation challenges.

Their winning collaborative project called Incentivizing the Road takes a psychological approach to how people can drive more carefully through active work zones. They will now compete at the state competition in Harrisburg on April 10 for a $1,500 prize.

I was excited, relieved that I didnt have to stress about them announcing the winners, said Blackwell, when he found out about the victory.

It was amazing, added Phillips. I was really stressed going into the presentation so it was like, whoa, we did it!'

Phillips and Blackwell were presented with this challenge by their gifted support teacher Colleen DiMaggio. The task set up by PennDOT was to to look at innovative methods, aside from laws and educational campaigns that can be developed in the next five to 10 years to get drivers to slow down in work zones.

With Incentivizing the Road, the duo created a way to change a motorists poor driving habits with a rewards-based system through a smart phone app.

Most of our research came from the psychological part of driving, said Phillips. We researched the different parts of the brain that are used when you start driving. Most of the other ideas we were hearing, even in our school, were about physically altering the road, and we didnt think that would be a cost-effective idea. It was better to reach more people through the mind.

They wanted to change peoples driving behavior and to make safe driving a habit.

The team focused on two of the three domains of the brain for their plan: psychomotor and affective.

By training their psychomotor skills we could make it an effective change  that controls feelings and emotions  which would allow drivers to realize the actual importance of driving safely, said Phillips.

Good driving would be recorded on the app that can allow points to accumulate for drivers which could be redeemed for shopping.

They presented this plan to a five-member judging panel at PennDOTs District 6 office in King of Prussia in early March.

Unfortunately, technical difficulties crept up when Phillips and Blackwell were presenting.

I think that boosted my confidence, said Blackwell. But we had it memorized. Even without the presentation we were able to give them all of the knowledge they needed to sell it to the judges.

He just started telling them everything without the slides, that even happened to me, Phillips added. The judges said afterward, the fact that you guys knew your presentation without having to look at it really amazed us. We thought that went in our favor.

Even though they know the presentation front and back, Blackwell said for the state competition they will be presenting bigger and better.

The gifted program has a strong focus on STEAM events with participation in an underwater robotics competition, the Boeing-Philadelphia High School Business Proposal Competition, Poetry slams and even attending the opera. Its a way to make well-rounded students who can think critically and creatively on high concepts, problem solve, and hone their soft skills before they get to college.

I dont want their first time experiencing these things to be in college, said DiMaggio. These opportunities are transferable and theyll need to work cooperatively, thing creatively. We look for these types of things to enrich the kids and it works.The U.S. Armys decision to delay upgrading its fleet of CH-47F Chinook helicopters was not exactly welcome news at the Boeing Companys Ridley plant that employs about 4,600 people locally.

The move comes less than two years after the announcement of the major upgrade program that was expected to secure jobs at the Delco facility for decades. Now a dark cloud is hovering over the plant, and job losses are once again feared at the defense giant.

Delaying CH-47F Block II production funding would have significant detrimental impacts for fleet readiness, the defense industrial base, and taxpayers, and hamper soldiers abilities to carry critical payloads, said Boeing spokesperson Andrew Africk in an emailed statement.

Africk was unable to speak further on the topic until more information comes to light, but others familiar with the program said the impact could be far reaching.

Its sent shockwaves throughout the plant, said United Aerospace Workers Local 1069 President Mike Tolassi. Its something were working on. Were trying to persuade the Army how detrimental it would be, laid the groundwork out telling them if they did it now, how much money they would save rather than doing it five years from now.

Tolassi said delaying those upgrades would require workers to become recertified and retrained when production kicks back in, not to mention expected higher material costs in the future.

In the meantime, he said, businesses in the tri-state area that rely on Boeing employees to spend their money would be hurt, along with vendors who supply parts to the company and taxpayers who will eventually have to pony up more for the same program in the future.

Were not just looking at jobs potentially lost at the Boeing plant, were looking at the whole supply chain, said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute, who recently examined the ramifications of the Armys announcement in a piece for Forbes.

There are about 2,000 workers at the plant who are engaged on the Chinook program, said Thompson. The Army made this decision without thinking about the jobs, without thinking about how it would ripple across other programs, and without thinking about how it would impact Boeings ability to sell Chinooks to other countries. Thats a lot of stuff to leave out.

Army Under Secretary Ryan D. McCarthy announced the move during a talk at the Brookings Institution earlier this month, indicating the Army intends to invest more in modernization to keep abreast with Russia and China in areas like air defense and electronic warfare.

Forthright and ruthless realism underscored these decisions, McCarthy said. We will continue to press ahead with organizational reforms and efficiencies, with a savings target of $10 billion over the (fiscal year 2021 through 2025 Future Years Defense Program).

Everybody in the Chester/Ridley Park area knows that industry has moved away, but those were private decisions, said Thompson. You kind of expect to get a better deal from the federal government. You expect that theyll give some thought to what the human costs are of cutting a big program.

The Chinook, a twin-engine, tandem rotor, heavy-lift cargo helicopter, has been a staple workhorse of the U.S. military and its allies for decades. It previously underwent a Block I upgrade that McCarthy indicated makes it the youngest fleet in the Army and noted the Army already has 10 percent more Chinooks than it needs.

We are reaching the limit of what can be added to and improved on platforms that have been the mainstay of the Army for decades, he said.

The Chinook, which has been built in Ridley Park since the 1960s, has become heavier and bulkier over the years as additional armor was added. The tradeoff came in lowered range and lift ability, which the Block II upgrades were meant to address with advanced rotor blades, redesigned fuel tanks, a sturdier fuselage, and an improved drivetrain.

Expected upgrades to the fleet of 542 aircraft would provide more than 2,000 additional lift-pounds of transport and allow the Chinook to stay in service for decades to come, according to a Boeing fact sheet. Boeing is still under contract to build eight MH-47G Chinooks for special operators, according to military watchdog publication Defense News.

Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, of Zionsville, sent a letter to Army Secretary Dr. Mark Esper earlier this month commending the modernizing endeavors, but noted the Chinook enjoys an outsized role in supporting warfighters as the only heavy-lift rotator-craft capable of moving troops and heavy equipment.

Without the upgrades, Toomey worried that Chinooks will not be able to move the Armys Humvee replacement, the Joint Light Transport Vehicle, and will struggle to lift heavy ordnance like the M777 Howitzer.

Thompson said he looked at the statistics and also has concerns that the Chinook, in its current configuration, probably cant safely lift the heavier JLTV, especially in areas like Southeast Asia or the Middle East, where heat becomes a factor for helicopter operability.

Toomey noted that disrupted production lines and recapitalization requirements could also drive up overall program costs by billions of dollars. Thompson agreed, adding that a wind-down on Chinook production would almost certainly drive up costs for the ones that are still manufactured.

Tolassi said UAW has been working with political allies at the local and federal level to urge the Army to reconsider. State Rep. Dave Delloso, D-162 of Ridley, is among them.

Cuts and delays to the Chinook Block II funding will hurt the fleet readiness of our country and deal a tremendous blow to the region, costing many thousands of jobs for mechanics and plant staff, local retailers and the vendors and contractors throughout the local supply chain who are all dependent on continued production levels at the Boeing plant, said Delloso in a statement. The Chinook is a tried and true heavy-lifting helicopter-the only Army aircraft capable of moving large, heavy equipment in the event of a major conflict-and it is worth saving.

Spokesperson Marlene Richmond said Delloso has reached out to U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-5 of Swarthmore, as well as fellow legislators at the state level. A spokesperson for Scanlon did not return calls for comment Thursday.

We know that in the past, this has happened before and theres been a lot of lobbying to save programs like the V-22 Osprey, said Richmond. Were hoping that if we put the pressure on and talk about this, that they will again reverse course.

The Osprey was at one point all but doomed due to cost overruns, fatal accidents and scandal, but Curt Weldon, the former longtime U.S. Representative for the now defunct 7th Congressional District, is largely credited with saving the program through intense lobbying.

The V-22 later went on to prove itself an essential tool in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Boeing received a $4 billion contract just last year to produce another 58 Ospreys for the U.S. military and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces with its partner, Bell.

Despite rumors swirling last year that the Chinook could be on the budgetary chopping block, the military appeared to be moving forward with upgrades for at least some of the fleet just a few months ago, based on a pre-solicitation notice posted Jan. 10 by Army Contracting Command.

Tolassi said Thursday that he hopes the delay for the Chinook  which he deems the best aircraft in the world made by the best people in the world  is not set in stone and that minds can still be changed.

Were trying to persuade the military, Lets not be hasty in this decision,' he said. Were staying positive and lets see where the chips fall.EDDYSTONE  A 19-year-old borough man is behind bars, charged with attempted first-degree murder and related offenses after he allegedly stabbed his grandmother in the neck with a kitchen knife.

Nathan Anthony Falato, of the 1200 block of Lawrence Avenue, told authorities that before the March 18 assault on his grandmother, he had been having thoughts of harming himself and others, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest, authored by Lt. Joseph Pretti of the Eddystone Police Department and Detective Michael Jay of the Delaware County Criminal Investigation Division.

According to the affidavit, Falato noticed his grandmother kneeling on the floor when he went into the kitchen, grabbed a steak knife, went up to her and stabbed her in the back of the neck. He told authorities the handle broke off of the knife, and he subsequently threw the blade and the handle in a trash can in the kitchen.

He takes full responsibility for stabbing the victim and has no remorse for what had taken place, the affidavit states.

When police responded to a call for an assault at the Lawrence Avenue address shortly after 2 p.m., the grandmother was standing outside, bleeding from the back of her neck. She told the officer that Falato had stabbed her, and that he had possible fled.

The officers entered the house and took Falato into custody.

I wanted to kill her, Falato blurted.

The victim, who was kneeling down and vacuuming in the living room when the assault occurred, told the officers that she had been in fear of her life.

The blade and knife handle were recovered from trash can in the kitchen, where Falato had indicated he tossed them.

The grandmother was treated at Crozer-Chester Medical Center for a puncture wound to the back of her neck, which required stitches.

Additional charges against Falato include aggravated assault, recklessly endangering another person and possession of an instrument of crime. His bail was set at 10 percent of $250,000, which he failed to post. A preliminary hearing is listed for April 15 before Magisterial District Judge Philip S. Turner.

It was not immediately known if Falato had retained an attorney.

Eddystone Officers William Elliott and Shane Laird, CID Lt. William Gordon and CID Detectives Vincent Ficchi, Tim Deery, Dan McFarland assisted in the investigation.

 Rose QuinnIt has not been a good week for Boeing.

Nationally, the aerospace giant is facing a criminal probe after a second deadly crash of its new 737 Max airline. Investigators from the Justice Department want to examine the way the company was regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Now, much closer to home, there is more turbulence for Boeing.

In Delaware County, Boeing means helicopters.

The Boeing plant in Ridley remains the countys biggest single employer. More than 4,600 people enter the facility every day. The plant does crucial work on the Chinook as well as the V-22 Osprey helicopters.

Just two years ago, there was joy at the facility when the Army announced a huge program to upgrade the Chinook fleet. It meant steady work for decades at the Ridley plant.

Or at least that is the way it appeared.

But now all that work  and lots of jobs  are in jeopardy. The Armys latest budget request scraps the Chinook upgrade.

Its not just the Chinook. The Army also is targeting production of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, slashes purchases of other Join Strike Force Vehicles, and a variety of other items.

It has always been one of the hallmarks of what used to be the 7th Congressional District that those Boeing jobs  and its helicopter business  were sacred.

It was always Job 1 for Curt Weldon, who held the seat for two decades and often did battle with Republican administrations  including President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney  who often had Boeing in their crosshairs.

It was a tradition upheld by Democrat Joe Sestak and then Republican Pat Meehan.

The 7th District is no more.

Now it will be the job of Democrat Mary Gay Scanlon, in the newly minted 5th Congressional District, to make sure all those jobs do not disappear as well.

Earlier this week Scanlon joined a group of regional politicians and union chiefs at the Philadelphia Navy Yard to boost the profile of the sagging facility. They were lobbying for more maritime vessels for Philly, with appropriations in Washington expected to be hammered out in the next few months.

Were here today because this shipyard and its skilled workforce has been hit hard by recent declines in ship orders, Scanlon said.

She will get no argument here.

Now, we suggest she focus a few miles south on I-95.

Boeing remains a bellwether of Delaware Countys once formidable industrial might. Familiar, iconic names have disappeared from the countys economic landscape. Names such as Westinghouse, Scott Paper, Sunoco and Sun Ship.

Today Boeing remains.

But this weeks news from Washington is a serious gut-punch to what generations of Delaware County workers reached for every day as they entered those gates off Route 291: a ticket to a solid, middle-class life.

At one time the Ridley plant was home to 14,000 skilled workers working three shifts and cranking out one aircraft a day. Today that number has dwindled to 4,600.

And those now are in danger with this latest news from the Pentagon.

It was a sharp contrast to news just last summer when company officials announced a $4 billion multi-year contract to build 58 more V-22s for several branches of the military as well as the Japanese government. There also was a $100 million deal for a new factory under construction at the Ridley plant for a V-22 production facility to produce new V-22s.

All of this came a year after news of the massive Chinook upgrade program, one that company and union officials said had the potential to insure jobs at the plant for decades.

But this weeks news puts all of that in jeopardy.

Boeing has been in this position before here in the county. It is not the first time the Delco facility has found itself in the crosshairs.

Our congressional delegation has always been able to fend off the worst.

Its time for Scanlon, Sens. Pat Toomey and Bob Casey and the rest of the delegation to roll up their sleeves and fight for these Boeing jobs.

Its been done before. We hope it can be done again.BRISTOL BOROUGH >> The Bristol Riverside Theatre (120 Radcliffe Street) brings back a holiday favorite and welcomes audiences home this holiday season. "An American Christmas Songbook," the theatres first concert in the theatre since 2019, gathers audiences December 9-19 for a heartwarming evening of favorite carols and songs performed by a cast of BRT favorites. Former BRT Artistic Director Keith...SALT LAKE CITY  The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources will host two free mountain goat viewing events in April.

On Saturday, April 6, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., biologists will be available to answer questions and provide information about mountain goats in an area called Rock Creek near Mountain Home, Duchesne County. Spotting scopes will be provided, but participants should bring their own binoculars if they have them. Attendees should also come prepared with warm clothing, snacks and water because the area is remote and services are not available.

The mountain goats move around, so biologists will have to wait until the day of the event to determine the exact viewing sites. To find the viewing sites, drive past the U.S. Forest Service boundary sign on Rock Creek Road. Once past the sign, drive slowly until you see biologists parked along the road.

There is still snow in the area, but Rock Creek Road is plowed and the Stillwater Dam is accessible. However, if it appears the weather will be too severe, the event will be canceled. Call the Vernal DWR office at 435-781-9453 the day before the event to get updates.

To get to the event from U.S. 40, take one of the roads to Altamont/Mountain Home:

 If approaching from the west, turn north onto state Route 87 (North Center Street) in Duchesne. Follow S.R. 87 north for roughly 15.5 miles, and turn left onto the road to Mountain Home (21000 West). Rock Creek Road is about 4 miles before you reach Altamont.

 If coming from the east, drive through Roosevelt on U.S. 40 roughly 5 miles, and turn north onto Ioka Lane (3000 South) and continue to Altamont. Drive through Altamont to reach Mountain Home Road, and turn north. Rock Creek Road is roughly 4 miles past Altamont.

The second event will take place on Saturday, April 13, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., at 4385 Little Cottonwood Canyon Road (at the park-and-ride lot on the north side of the mouth of the canyon).

Biologists will also be at this event to provide information and to offer spotting scopes and binoculars. Registration is also requested, but not required. To register for either event, log on wildlife.utah.gov.SALT LAKE CITY  Anna, Elsa, Ralphie, Evan Hansen and Tevye are among the characters coming to Salt Lake City for the 2019-2020 Zions Bank Broadway at the Eccles season.

Announced on Friday, the upcoming season coming to the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Theater includes "Frozen," "Dear Evan Hansen," "A Christmas Story: A Musical," "Anastasia," "Miss Saigon" and "Fiddler on the Roof."

We are delighted to announce our 2019-2020 season on the heels of a record-breaking engagement of 'Wicked,' which brought more than 100,000 people downtown to the Eccles Theater, Bruce Granath, Broadway Across America VP, said in a press release.

The Tony Award-winning musical "Miss Saigon" will kick off the 2019-20 season Oct. 15-20. A tragic love story (borrowed from the Giacomo Puccini opera "Madame Butterfly") set in Saigon during the Vietnam War, "Miss Saigon" was written by the creative team who gave the musical world "Les Miserables," Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil.

Dec. 3-8 will bring everyone's favorite "deranged Easter bunny" and Red Ryder BB Gun enthusiast to the Eccles stage. Adapted from the 1983 classic holiday movie, "A Christmas Story: The Musical" features tunes by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul  i.e., Pasek and Paul  the award-winning team who wrote the music for "Dear Evan Hansen" and songs for "The Greatest Showman" and "La La Land." Fans of the orignal film can expect to see their favorite moments from the movie, including a terrifying department store Santa, a triple-dog dare and, of course, that Major Award, the leg lamp.

In the new year, another beloved classic will make its way to Salt Lake when "Fiddler on the Roof" comes to the Eccles Theater Jan. 21-26, 2020. One of Broadway's true legends, "Fiddler on the Roof" tells the story of the Jewish father Tevye, his wife, Golde, their three unmarried daughters and life in their small Russian shtetl. The 10-time Tony Award-winner opened on Broadway in 1964 and has been a mainstay in the musical theater world  with hits "Tradition," "If I Were a Rich Man" and "Sunrise, Sunset"  for 55 years.

It's almost (sort of) here! The massively popular Tony Award-winner "Dear Evan Hansen" comes to the Eccles stage from March 4-14, 2020. Telling the story of teenager Evan Hansen, "Dear Evan Hansen" won over critics and fans when it debuted on Broadway in 2016. Winner of six Tony Awards, including best musical, the Washington Post wrote that "Dear Evan Hansen" is "one of the most remarkable shows in musical theatre."

From high school to the mountains of Arendelle, "Frozen" will follow "Dear Evan Hansen," coming to Salt Lake March 15-April 22, 2020. "Frozen," based on the hit 2013 animated film, includes songs from the film as well as additional new songs written by Oscar Award-winning husband and wife songwriting team Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, with a book by Oscar-winner Jennifer Lee.

Closing out the 2019-20 season is the tale of Anastasia, a young woman trying to uncover her mysterious past. The musical "Anastasia"  based on the animated film from 1997  runs from June 9-14, 2020, with songs by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, the Tony Award-winning composers of the musical version of "Ragtime." Deseret News reviewer Leigh Gibson wrote that, "With a maturity beyond its cartoon beginnings, Broadways 'Anastasia' stands on its own."

In addition to these six touring Broadway productions, the 2019-20 season will also include "The Illusionists," (Feb. 1416, 2020) a touring magic show, which season ticket holders can add to their regular season package as a special add-on engagement.

Season ticket holders can renew their six-show package starting on Friday, March 22, at 9 a.m. online at Broadway-at-the-Eccles.com, by phone at 801-355-5502 or in person at 610 E. South Temple.SALT LAKE CITY  Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and Google assistant are all set to female voices by default. Apple users can switch Siri to a male voice and can even pick among American, Australian, British, Irish or South African accents.

But a group of linguists and sound designers in Denmark think there should be another choice: a voice without gender.

Q is an artificial voice that doesn't sound distinctly male or female. It was developed and revealed earlier this month by the creative studio Virtue Nordic and gay rights festival Copenhagen Pride. The project's goal is to combat gender bias and provide greater inclusivity and representation for people who don't conform to gender norms, according to advertisements.

It's a sign that today's tech companies will be scrutinized for how their products include or exclude customers with non-traditional gender identities. As the rights and concerns of gender-nonconforming individuals are playing a bigger role in public debates about bathrooms and driver's licenses, they are also having a greater influence on the world of technology and could affect the products people use every day.

A recent survey by AppDynamics found that 84 percent of millennials regularly use voice-activated assistants, and Digital Journal reported the market for voice assistants is projected to grow by 35 percent a year until at least 2023.

Commentators, including Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of the Atlantic, and Charlotte Webb, founder of Feminist Internet, have questioned whether the widespread use of female-sounding artificial intelligence designed to politely obey orders might be reinforcing damaging gender stereotypes.

"The fact that the technology industry has chosen a woman to, by default, be our always-on-demand, personal assistant of choice, speaks volumes about our assumptions as a society," Mark Wilson wrote for Fast Company. "Women are expected to carry the psychic burden of schedules, birthdays, and phone numbers; they are the more caregiving sex, they should nurture and serve."

Today, eight states, including Utah and Washington, D.C., offer a gender-neutral option 'X' on driver's licenses and identification cards for non-binary people who don't identify with either gender. Tech companies, such as Capital One, are building apps that are sensitive to the issue of gender as well. Last year, the U.S. bank released Eno, an SMS chatbot that is neither male nor female.

Companies turn to different types of research that tells them people expect a female voice. Sometimes we go back to these stereotypes and what happens is we're reinforcing them. We're not changing them.  Julie Carpenter, a research fellow with the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group

Audra Koklys Plummer, head of AI design, told Forbes, Making Eno gender-neutral freed us in a sense because we didnt have to worry about evoking any biases. We could just focus on solving customer problems.

The creators of Q presented the androgynous voice at the South by Southwest creative festival in Texas earlier this month, according to Economic Times. Their hope is to embed the virtual assistant in everything from personal tech to public transit, CNBC reported. But at the moment, the project has no client.

"For me to become a third option for voice assistance, I need your help. Share my voice with Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft and together we can ensure that technology recognizes us all," Q says in a YouTube advertisement.

Julie Carpenter, a research fellow with the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group who helped develop Q, said in another YouTube video, "Companies turn to different types of research that tells them people expect a female voice. Sometimes we go back to these stereotypes and what happens is we're reinforcing them. We're not changing them."

We worked on the pitch, we worked on the format filter, and we worked on the tone of the voice.  Nis Nrgaard, sound designer for Q

Research, including a study conducted by Karl MacDorman, a professor at Indiana University, has shown that men and women both think female voices are more "welcoming" and "understanding" than male voices.

Another study by researchers at Stanford University found people prefer male voices when the voice is used to teach them about computers.

Sound designers created Q by first recording the voices of multiple people who identify as male, female, transgender and non-binary, according to Wired.

"Audio researchers defined a frequency range which is neutral. ... We worked on the pitch, we worked on the format filter, and we worked on the tone of the voice," Nis Nrgaard, sound designer for Q, said in a YouTube video.

Male voices are usually pitched between 85 to 180 hertz and women's are typically between 140 to 255 hertz, Economic Times reported. In addition, men tend to have a "flatter" speech style that varies less in pitch and they pronounce the letters "s" and "t" more abruptly, Nrgaard told Economic Times.

Researchers used the overlap of different voices to identify a neutral sound. Then Nrgaard's team created a set of sample voices, which they tested on 4,500 people across Europe to identify the best one.OGDEN  Marek Matyjasik, a professor in Weber State Universitys Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, has been named a Fulbright Scholar.

He will spend February through June 2020 in Poland, where he will conduct research and teach two geosciences courses at Warsaw University, where he received his bachelors and masters degrees.

Matyjasik, who has been with the university for 21 years, is the 11th Fulbright recipient from WSU in the last 20 years. His field of study focuses on chemical reactions with water and mineral surfaces. He teaches geosciences and leads study-abroad courses in Iceland and Hawaii.

Matyjasik hopes that his experience teaching in Poland next year will help advance Weber States international recognition.

Over the last several years, Weber State has been trying to improve its international presence, Matyjasik said in a statement. I hope my time in Poland will be helpful because having more collaboration with international institutions gives us experience that will help us make more progress in that direction.

In addition to his academic work, Matyjasik has been instrumental in securing funding for WSU to assist students with a desire to study the physical sciences. Last year, the College of Science was awarded a National Science Foundation grant that will provide scholarships to 30 low-income, high-achieving students. Matyjasik was a part of the team of faculty from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences responsible for acquiring the grant.WOMAN AT WAR  3 stars  Halldora Geirharosdottir, Johann Siguroarson, Jorundur Ragnarsson, Margaryta Hilska; not rated; running time: 100 minutes; Broadway

SALT LAKE CITY  Halla is more motivated than your run-of-the-mill environmental activist.

When we meet her in the film Woman at War, she's hiking through rural Iceland, taking out remote power lines. Convinced that her governments industrial negotiations with China will ruin Iceland and contribute to worldwide climate issues, Halla (Halldora Geirharosdottir) is waging a one-woman war against the advances of heavy industry.

That's the basic premise of Benedikt Erlingsson's quirky, amusing and at times thoughtful film about an Icelandic woman forced to choose between two passions.

Hallas efforts have made her paranoid  shes constantly putting her smartphone in the refrigerator and worrying about surveillance  but they arent 100 percent anonymous. While on the run from her fifth sabotage attack, she gets help from a farmer named Sveinbjorn (Johann Siguroarson), who deduces that they are likely cousins. Halla also gets periodic advice from Baldvin (Jorundur Ragnarsson), a member of her local choir who works in the government and keeps her one step ahead of her pursuers.

As publicity for Hallas efforts increases  she eventually becomes known as the Mountain Woman  Baldvin argues that its time for her to shut down operations, issue a manifesto and let the cause grow organically. While Halla would normally never consider backing down, a new development makes Baldvins argument feel timely: Four years ago, Halla submitted an adoption application. Now, she's received word that a Ukrainian girl has suddenly become available.

Young Nika (Margaryta Hilska) lost both of her parents to war and seems like a perfect match for the strong-willed Halla. But as Halla moves forward on both of her major fronts, the two passions become difficult to reconcile. Halla had planned on referencing her twin sister Asa (also played by Geirharosdottir) as an auxiliary caretaker for the adoption, but Asa, who is unaware of the eco-terrorism, is planning to join a convent in India. And when Halla decides to follow through with Baldvins idea and issue her manifesto, the government takes control of the issue with a media spin job that inspires Halla to ramp up the intensity of her campaign.

Woman at Wars story is interesting enough on its own, but Erlingssons quirky execution further elevates the unique material. Throughout the film, a pair of musical groups  in one case, a three-piece tuba band, and elsewhere, a female vocal trio  perform the soundtracks cues on screen. At times, the characters even acknowledge they are there, as if the musicians are part of their subconscious. Theres also a funny subplot about a bike-riding tourist who keeps getting arrested for Hallas attacks by constantly being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The light tone has a way of diffusing what could be a much more confrontational message  making it easier to relate  and a clever ending caps off what should be an interesting option for local foreign film fans. Overall, Woman at War manages to use a broad scale to examine a very intimate subject.

Bergsteinn Bjorgulfssons notable cinematography is subtle and expansive, capturing the beauty of the Icelandic landscape while muting it in a color palette that seems to keep everything in a state of eternal overcast.

The resulting product says a lot more about the passions we connect to our values rather than evaluating the values themselves, and explores our willingness to sacrifice for what we believe in.

Rating explained: Woman at War is not rated and would generally be acceptable for all audiences were it not for an odd locker room scene at Halla and Asas local pool, which contains quite a bit of female nudity in the background.SALT LAKE CITY  The Utah Partners for Health Mobile Medical Clinic has served more than 25,000 patients since it started roaming the valley in 2007.

A new and improved, 38-foot version of the clinic hit the streets this week, with the capacity to see even more patients.

"My community will appreciate it forever," said Gilberto "Juan" Rejon Magana, a longtime community advocate and founder of the Hartland Community 4 Youth and Families.

"Hartland needs it," he said, adding that the former mobile clinic  a 31-foot trailer manufactured in 1997  had gotten too small for the growing needs of the surrounding communities.

"It was cramped and it was difficult to do what we needed to do," said Kurt Micka, Utah Partners for Health executive director. The new trailer will travel to 41 locations throughout Salt Lake and Tooele counties, providing a variety of health care services three days a week.

The mobile medical clinic serves the counties' uninsured population, people with Medicare or Medicaid coverage, or those who earn less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level ($51,500 for a family of four).

"We don't want anybody that lacks access to care to not get a health care visit," Micka said. "Our mission is to fill the gaps in the health care system."

The effort to reach Utah's underserved populations, including refugees, immigrants and the homeless, is "just what the doctor ordered," said Rep. Ben McAdams, D-Utah, who helped cut the ribbon on the clinic at the Hartland Partnership Center on Thursday.

State Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, teaches in the Granite School District and said the mobile clinic will serve an important need, particularly when it is parked outside various schools.

"As a teacher, I know it is so important for our kids to be able to concentrate, listen and learn and they can't do that when they are hurting," she said, adding that kids should also be taught how important health care is throughout their lives, "not just when they're injured, or when they're sick or when they need to do wellness checkups."

The old clinic could get to 10 or 11 patients each day it was in operation, but, with the new one, it is possible to reach 15 to 25 every day, said Maria Zavala, the mobile clinic coordinator with Utah Partners for Health. She said two exam rooms offer more space to see more people.

"There is a lot of people who need it," she said.

Micka said the mobile clinic has two full-time medical providers who can treat acute conditions, sore throats and coughs, influenza, ingrown toenails, but also identify and treat high blood pressure and diabetes, screen for mental health conditions and do wellness exams, including pap smears and breast exams for women.

Most of the care provided by the mobile clinic is free to the patient.

"It makes a huge difference for kids and families to have access to health care in their neighborhoods," said United Way CEO Bill Crim, who also attended the clinic opening on Thursday.

The mobile medical clinic is often accompanied by Charity Vision, a separate mobile eye care clinic, which also provides a service that the surrounding communities need in the form of eye exams and glasses. Eye care is also offered at low or no cost to qualifying patients.

The schedule of locations for the mobile clinic is posted online, at upfh.org, and potential patients can call 385-204-6257 for an appointment.SALT LAKE CITY  Salt Lake police say a fight has turned into a homicide investigation.

Officers were called to 797 E. Northcliffe Drive about 1:15 a.m. Thursday. Cory Haney, 40, was found deceased inside, according to police,

Another person, who is being called a "suspect," was taken to a local hospital to be treated for undisclosed injuries, police stated in their daily watch log report.

Police did not disclose if the suspect was a man or woman. The two parties involved were acquainted with each other, said Salt Lake police officer Michael Ruff, the department's spokesman.

Police were alerted to the situation when someone called 911 to report a fight in progress, he said.

No other information was immediately available.SALT LAKE CITY  A number of Utah civic leaders are reiterating their pledge to support immigration policies that bolster the state's economic future and consider the humanity of those caught in the confusion of the nation's unsettled immigration laws.

Business leaders, along with members of the state's law enforcement community, faith, legal and community advocacy declared their ongoing commitment Thursday to the Utah Compact on immigration  a set of principles originally released in 2010 that outline the need for well-conceived immigration strategies that will help drive the state economy forward and urge federal solutions and policies that do not separate families.

The document, signed by over 120 Utah leaders, "supports policies that strengthen Utahs economy and attract the talent and business the state needs to be competitive," according to the website.

The reaffirmation of the compact was a show of solidarity by various segments of the community that are engaged in the effort to find solutions to the issues surrounding immigration in Utah, said Derek Miller, president and CEO of the Salt Lake Chamber. He said part of the commitment by local leaders should be to "do no harm" by diffusing the vitriol that has continually derailed any progress within the immigration debate.

"(That kind of rhetoric) tries to pull people into political corners, and it's just not helpful to our economy, not helpful to families, not helpful to our society and it's certainly not helpful to driving toward a comprehensive immigration solution," he said.

Miller was among a small group of local leaders speaking during a news conference at the Salt Lake Chamber offices in downtown Salt Lake City.

The five principles to guide Utah's immigration discussion include federal solutions, law enforcement, families, economy and a free society. He noted that reaffirming those important principles laid out in the compact provides a positive signal to the community that Utah is being sensitive to family concerns, economic concerns and law enforcement concerns.

"All of these principles provide a lens through which this policy debate should occur," Miller said, adding that immigration policy and border security are national issues that Congress has failed to adequately address and the country needs lawmakers to act.

"Unfortunately, there are forces in politics today that are trying to drive people apart, trying to divide people," he said. "Our (state congressional) delegation is doing a good job of bringing people together. We need more members to do the same."

The Utah leaders hope to use their collective voice to call for federal immigration reform that produces practical policy solutions for Utah immigrants making significant contributions to the state economy, reaffirms Utahs global reputation as a welcoming and business-friendly state and "secures the nations border while enforcing the countrys immigration laws," a news release states.

The Utah Compact symbolizes another move toward a statewide agreement for reform, the release states. Business and community leaders in Florida, Iowa and Texas have recently launched compacts on immigration in their respective states, demonstrating bipartisan support to advance rational immigration strategy.

Data from the New American Economys Map the Impact reveals the contributions immigrants make to the Beehive States economy. In 2017, immigrants in Utah paid $534.6 million in state and local taxes and held $5.3 billion in spending power, the analysis showed.

Our states economy faces global challenges we must meet with effective immigration policy that balances security with the flow of people and goods across borders, said Miles Hansen, president and CEO of the World Trade Center Utah. Smart immigration policy not only recognizes that Utah is best served by a free-market philosophy that maximizes individual opportunity, but it also helps us compete in the global marketplace by attracting the best talent and most industrious workers to our state."

Meanwhile, Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown said his department is doing all it can to show immigrants that local police are committed to protecting everyone, no matter what their immigration status might be.

Respect for the rule of law is fundamental for a society, but as law enforcement officers, our limited resources should be focused on criminal activities, not civil violations of federal code," Brown said. "We serve the public, regardless of status. We need immigration reform that recognizes that many immigrants in Utah are law-abiding, valuable contributors to our community.

He said the department wants to make sure all immigrants feel "safe and welcome" in Salt Lake City.

"We will never ask you about your status  ever," he said.

Luis Garza, executive director of Comunidades Unidas  a Utah-based community advocacy organization  said the reaffirmation of the Utah Compact sends a good message that the state, business, law enforcement and religious leaders are backing the state's immigrant community.

"It's a good starting point in terms of the conversation," he said. "I'm encouraged by what (the compact) could bring in terms of potential policies and benefits to immigrant communities and to the state as a whole."ROOSEVELT Equipped with plasma arc cutters, Union High School seniors Christopher Nolden and Lyciera Williams got the honor of cutting a sheet metal ribbon marking the opening of the Uintah Basin Technical College's new welding technology building on Thursday.

Unitah Basin Tech President Aaron Weight said it was fitting that students officially open the 13,570-square foot, $4.5 million state-of-the-industry facility because it was built to serve them.

"This building's for you. This building is for the future of the generations that are going to come for the future of welding, not only in the Uintah Basin but throughout the state and globally as well," Weight said.

Nolden said he was on a traditional college track, earning a 29 on the ACT test and admission to a number of universities including Princeton.

"I had all the opportunities to go wherever I like. But as I got older I just decided college wasn't right for me and wanted to educate myself however I could," he said.

After taking a night welding class last summer, he became increasingly interested in welding because of "the confidence that came with it, mainly. After that, all the knowledge and how to use the processes and apply them to my own life."

Williams said she is about halfway through her welding certificate programs, so she will be among the first students to train in the new facility.

"It's so beautiful. I walked in and I was like 'Oh, it's so nice. I'm so excited to use it and see the new welders.' The new kids who are going to come in and use it and see how good the school's going to be to them. I'm so excited to use all the materials and the new torches, like the new torch I just used. That worked very well," she said.

Weight said there is growing demand in the Uintah Basin, as well as the state and nation, for welders.

Demand for more capacity in the welding program at the Roosevelt campus of UBTech is also driven by the success of the program. The technical college has produced some of the top welders in the world.

Chandler Vincent was ranked among the top five in the world at the WorldSkills competition. UBTech students have won top honors in state competitions and its students have also earned top five National SkillsUSA placement four consecutive years.

Welding instructor Kevin Mitchell said there is high demand for welders in the area, particularly in oil and gas industries. Depending on a student's training and experience and the job, welders can earn $15 to $120 an hour.

Sen. Ron Winterton, R-Roosevelt, said the new facility will "put a lot more trained personnel in the field. No longer are we going to have to import that kind of worker, we will have that here on site. Economically, these are good paying jobs."

Once students complete certificate programs, they can roll over their hours into college degrees at Utah State University's campus in Roosevelt, which is another boon, he said.

Former Sen. Kevin Van Tassell, R-Vernal, who secured the legislative appropriation to design and construct the facility, was also in attendance.

The welding technology programs are also supported by partnerships between the college and Miller Electric Manufacturing, Inc., a prominent welding equipment manufacturing company, and Norco Inc., a nationally recognized welding equipment supplier.

Thursday's events also included the unveiling of a sculpture of a welder created by Utah sculptor Scot Olson.

Olson said he was inspired by the idea of students "gaining skills and confidence" as they learn the latest welding technologies in a new setting.

"They gain something that's going to bless their communities, something that is going to bless their families. Welding is an amazing career. I couldn't do what I do without the welders who help me do it," Olson said.

Olson said it is his hope that graduates of the welding technology certificate programs pose with the sculpture on graduation day.

Jim Evans, chairman of the Utah System of Technical Colleges board of trustees, said the board held its meeting in Roosevelt to be part of the opening ceremonies of UBTechs new welding technology building because this is a big deal. As I look at some of the numbers, just under 300 adults and students out took welding classes last year and 90 percent of those, I was told, actually got a certificate of completion. I think 93-plus percent got employment in the welding field related to their trade.

Troy North, construction manager for Gramoll Construction, said the company hired more than a dozen local subcontractors to work on the project, which took just over a year to complete. About $1.5 million in contracts were awarded to area companies, he said.

It was a plus for us. Its great friendships weve now developed we look forward using in the future, North said.SALT LAKE CITY  A former secretary of the interior in President Barack Obama's administration visited the University of Utah to praise the state's lands and share her ideas for recreating in and maintaining the nation's wildernesses.

"We are unique in this country, that we've taken the places that are the most special and we've set them aside for everyone. That was the thought behind the creation of the National Park Service," former Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said Thursday during a panel discussion at the S.J. Quinney College of Law.

The event was part of the school's 24th Annual Stegner Center Symposium, which focused on challenges of recreation on public lands.

In the discussion moderated by Robert Keiter, director of the college's Wallace Stegner Center of Land, Resources, and the Environment, topics of focus included land preservation, getting more people to enjoy nature, Bears Ears National Monument and the recent government shutdown.

Jewell also discussed what she learned during her time as secretary and, before that, as CEO of REI sporting goods company.

Her love for the outdoors started young, she said, when one of her school principals taught her to ski and take up mountaineering, and another teacher encouraged her love for science. That time in the outdoors gave her a committment to nature and the wish to instill that commitment in her children, Jewell said.

But many children today, according to Jewell, aren't developing the same love for the outdoors.

"That is something I think we all need to pay attention to, because some children are growing up with no connection to nature," she said.

According to Jewell, national parks and recreation at them is "extraordinarily important" because the parks serve as a type of cultural journal, sharing with the public and the world "the natural beauty" and the history of the nation.

But she said a way to take a burden off more popular parks and maintain positive visitor experiences might be to promote less-visited wildernesses.

There are under-visited assets in national parks and public lands, and opportunities to highlight "hidden gems" in places that are less visible, Jewell explained.

For example, she said, Zion National Park's strenuous Angel's Landing hike sees a large number of yearly visitors. "I was pretty horrified when I visited Zion in '17  at the number of people that were woefully unqualified" traversing the hike, Jewell recalled.

If land managers focused on sharing places other than "those iconic spots," it would more evenly distribute visitation as well as "open their eyes to so many more treasures," Jewell said.

When Keiter asked how land managers can improve the diversity of who visits public lands, Jewell said she sought to address that question during her work at REI and as secretary.

She said while much of the REI demographic and outdoor enthusiasts tend to be older and white, she learned that many communities recreate in different ways. Land managers can appeal to them by bridging understanding.

For example, she said, she learned that, for the Latino community, outdoor recreation doesn't always look like "the isolated hiker or hunter going into the back woods."

For many in the Latino community, she said, "It's about recreating together."

Isolated campsites with trees between them don't serve the needs of a good part of the community that loves the outdoors and nature, so "let's listen and put in more group areas, more group campsites," Jewell said.

When asked how she feels about the Bears Ears National Monument designation and President Donald Trump's reduction of the monument, she said, "Bears Ears is under threat  it has been looted significantly in recent years."

It is also important to five tribes in the area that "aren't always happy with each other," Jewell said.

As for whether a national monument designation draws more visitors  and with them, damage  to landscapes, Jewell said Bears Ears faced a lot of attention even before it was placed in the spotlight by the designation.

Social media brought it to focus, Jewell said, including for those who didn't all have an understanding of "appropriate uses."

"When people go to visit responsibly and they take their cell phone, and they find a pot hiding under a rock  and they leave it where it should be  they take a picture and they post it on Instagram and they have just given an irresponsible actor directions to go exactly to that site," she explained.

Jewell said she believes supporters of Bears Ears National Monument "will win in court." That declaration was met with applause from those in attendance.

Federal public lands belong to all Americans, she said, "But (locals) are a voice among many that needs to be listened to."SALT LAKE CITY  A popular Utah sandwich restaurant chain has declared chapter 11 bankruptcy after an executive said it "expanded too quickly."

Even Stevens, which had a combined 15 stores in Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Texas and Washington, has already shuttered five of its locations "in order to right-size the company and put it on track to achieve enterprise-level profits," Brooks Pickering, chief restructuring officer for the company, said in a news release Thursday.

According to bankruptcy documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Arizona, Even Stevens owes between $1 million and $10 million combined to dozens of creditors. The restaurant currently has between zero and $50,000 in assets, the document states.

Among Utah businesses to which the chain is most in debt, Even Stevens owes West Jordan-based Sysco Intermountain $380,000, Salt Lake City-based Standard Restaurant Supply more than $100,000 and Orem-based Strategic Technology $44,000, according to the document. It also owes more than $4.5 million in inter-company loans.

As part of its restructuring, the company is closing its Provo location, as well as locations in Arizona, Texas and Colorado. All employees at the Provo location have been offered jobs at other Utah locations, the release states.

The decision to file bankruptcy came after "seven months of business restructuring," according to the company. The chapter 11 bankruptcy filing "allows the company to conduct business during the restructuring process."

"Todays action is an important step on our path to financial stability," Pickering said. "As a start-up, Even Stevens came out of the gate with positive momentum but expanded too quickly, saddling the company with significant financial and operational challenges.

"While the restructuring to date has significantly improved operations, the remaining challenges require the tools afforded through the bankruptcy process to properly protect the interests of our investors, financiers, employees and customers. With the proper business organization and financial discipline, we look forward to achieving long-term success."

The sandwich company that started in 2014 claims it donates a sandwich to a local non-profit for every sandwich sold.

Pickering said decisions made by former management "have put us in a difficult position" but that current leadership is focused on improving food security in communities where the restaurant operates.

In May 2018, co-founder Steve Downs agreed to pay a $150,000 fine to resolve allegations that he misrepresented the financial success of event centers he owns in Utah and four other states. The move came after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against him in federal court.

The SEC alleged Down, of Draper, misled potential investors about the profitability of eight events centers, which can be rented for weddings and parties, in five states, including two in Utah  one at Trolley Square in Salt Lake City and the other in St. George. The companys own financial records show the company never made money, according to the complaint.

Even Stevens then distanced itself from Down in a statement, saying he is a founder and one of many investors but has no role in the day-to-day management or operations of the company.SALT LAKE CITY  Heres a look at the news for March 22.

Should Siri, Alexa or Cortana have a gender? A new artificial voice called Q is a mix.

A former secretary of the interior talked Bears Ears, recreation and maintaining the nations wildernesses at the University of Utah. Heres what she said.

This Utah gun enthusiast is the only person who will be able to legally own a bump stock after a temporary stay was granted.

Utah State Aggies are ready to take on the hungry Washington Huskies in NCAA Tournament.

Hallmark Channels When Calls the Heart cast spoke out on the Lori Loughlin scandal.

These Utah leaders just reaffirmed their support for the Utah Compact on immigration.

A look ahead to the weekend:

Your Weekend: Dancing queens (and dancing men) are back in Utah

Prostate cancer, but funny: After a 10-year hiatus, a Utahns unusual play heads to Denmark

Movie review: R-rated 'Us' is dark, terrifying and just funny enough to keep you from running scared

Is it acceptable to wear jeans to a symphony concert? Here's what the Utah Symphony thinks

She's not world famous yet, but this jazz vocalist coming to Utah soon will be

A look at our most read stories:

The college admissions scandalrevealed what can happen when a moral compass breaks. How can people fix this?

Donny and Marie Osmond announced the end of Las Vegas run on Good Morning America

Mitt Romney, Utah governor and others react to release of Latter-day Saint volunteers from Russia detention

News from the U.S. and world:

The inside story of how John Roberts negotiated to save Obamacare | CNN

Should black Americans get slavery reparations? | BBC News

A Secret Database of Child Abuse | The Atlantic

Instagram Is the Internets New Home for Hate | The Atlantic

Stadia is about the future of YouTube, not gaming | The VergeThe journey to reclaiming womens history isnt over yet, but progress is underway.

March is Womens History Month. Traditionally, womens stories have been left out of the narrative, and women havent typically been seen as being worthy of making history. History without the voices and perspectives of women is best compared to a tapestry with half the threads pulled out: You can still get an idea of the image, but much of the story and nuance is gone.

Utah hasnt traditionally been a place to look for examples of womens history or notable steps toward womens rights. The focus on uncovering womens history has shown, however, that Utah has always been a frontrunner for female progress. Its become apparent that the state has always been full of smart, innovative women who contributed to several landmark events in the state and the nation.

Women were heavily involved and vital to settling Utah right from its beginning. They worked hard right alongside the men to cultivate land, build homes and turn the area into a home. When their family or husbands got sick, women took care of it. For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, women ran the home and provided for their families when their husbands were called away on church missions.

Utah became the second territory or state to allow women to vote, second only to Wyoming. After those rights were taken away 17 years later, they wanted them back. Womens suffrage took root in Utah culture, with many of the church's Relief Society leaders also acting as leading suffragettes. As surprising as it might seem to those who associate Utah women with housework, Utah became a hotspot and leader for womens suffrage.

National suffrage leaders, like Susan B. Anthony, visited Utah to speak to women here. Likewise, Utah suffragettes traveled east, even to the United Kingdom, to speak about womens rights. Influential names like Emmeline B. Wells, Seraph Young Ford, Sarah M. Kimball, Martha Hughes Cannon and Mary Isabella Horne are once again becoming just as well-known as they were during the time they lived.

History hasnt been especially kind to Utah women. Most of their stories are absent from state history books and school curriculum. Scholarly efforts to reclaim their stories and integral place throughout the states history are bringing them back, though. Resurrecting these stories have revealed a few things about Utah women and give clues about what other historical insights could be waiting to be rediscovered around the globe.

Thanks to a great tradition of record keeping and the preservation of the entire run of the Womans Exponent, a Utah newspaper for women that regularly advertised for suffragette meetings and ran pieces about womens rights, a window has opened to show historical contributions that have been overlooked for too long. Its shown that everyday women were actively involved in politics and making changes, with preserved journals and letters shedding light on how those beliefs affected home life.

The work to reclaim Utah womens history is an excellent example of how preconceived notions or stigmas can change when womens voices are included. Womens History Month is a reminder that there is still much more work to be done. Utah is just one place, and the suffrage movement is just one small moment in history. What could we learn about every era and every place if we listened to those womens voices?

The oft quoted Laurel Thatcher Ulrich line, Well-behaved women seldom make history, is sometimes interpreted to mean that a woman has to stand out and do extraordinary things in order to be remembered. In reality, the quote is taken out of context. The point was that women shouldnt have to fight to make history; that everyday women and their lives are worth remembering. We know a lot about the everyday lives of men from all walks of life, but the women who were there next to them are often disregarded, often resulting in a skewed, less nuanced and half-formed version of events.

Utah womens history is emerging as proof that powerful, involved women dont need to be found or created  theyve always been there. We just need to remember them.SALT LAKE CITY  Six days after a gunman killed 50 people outside two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a ban on military-style semi-automatic guns and assault rifles.

Twelve days after the 1996 mass shooting at Port Arthur in Australia, then-Prime Minister John Howard implemented gun laws similar to those outlined by Ardern.

More than six years after the Sandy Hook mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, the United States has not passed federal legislation that would require universal background checks for those interested in buying a gun.

The rapidity at which New Zealand and other countries have arrived at a consensus on gun policy after tragic mass shootings stands in stark contrast to the U.S., which has reached seemingly little consensus on how to prevent future mass shootings. This isnt to say that measures havent been taken. In December, the federal government banned bump stocks, which can be attached to semi-automatic weapons to make them fire at faster speeds, and in February the House Judiciary Committee passed two bills that would require universal background checks on every gun purchase. However, pundits have expressed doubt the bills will pass the Republican-controlled Senate.

The U.S. has some of the loosest gun laws of any developed nation, despite an ever-increasing death toll caused by firearms, according to the Atlantic. Since Sandy Hook, there have been 1,988 mass shootings, averaging about one per day since 2015. (A mass shooting is defined as an event in which four or more people, excluding the shooter, were shot but not necessarily killed, at the same general time and location.) So far in 2019, the U.S. has seen 63 mass shootings. In 2016, 38,658 people died as a result of firearms (70 percent of which were suicides), up from 33,599 in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Over the past week, multiple members of Congress, increasingly frustrated with the governments apparent inability to act, took to Twitter to ask in various ways, Why cant the United States take action on gun policy as quickly as New Zealand did?

This question is perhaps best answered by asking another question: What would need to happen for the United States to stand united behind a gun policy, like New Zealand did? And should the United States strive to follow New Zealands example, or not?

Pillars of gun safety

In order for the U.S. to reach a consensus on gun policy, Americans will need to let go of the "conviction that guns have something to do with freedom," and see gun violence as a public health problem that has a cure, said Philip Alpers, a native New Zealander who is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Sydneys School of Public Health in Australia and founder of GunPolicy.org, an international gun violence database.

He added that doesn't mean getting rid of guns, but rather accepting what he calls the three pillars of gun control, to which around 150 countries adhere.

The first pillar of gun control is to license the operator of a firearm just as you license the driver of a car, Alpers said. The second is to register the object  the gun  just as you would register a car. The third pillar is the presumption in law that firearm ownership is a conditional privilege, just as it is with a car. If you do something silly with a car, you lose your license.

The only country which doesnt do any of those three things is the U.S., Alpers continued. Theres no licensing in most states, no registration in almost all of the states, and the Second Amendment is the precise opposite of the assumption that firearm ownership is a conditional privilege.

For most of U.S. history, the Second Amendment has been interpreted to protect the right of state and local governments, not individuals, to bear arms. That changed with the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Supreme Court ruled that individuals have a fundamental right to keep a firearm in their home for self-defense. However, the court also ruled that the amendment did not protect an individuals right to carry a firearm wherever they wanted, nor an individuals right to possess any type of gun.

It's inevitable that the U.S. administration will eventually follow the exact same best practices with guns as it did with all the other admirable initiatives that it has already led. But it's going to take time.  Philip Alpers, founder of GunPolicy.org, an international gun violence database

Two years later, in the 2010 case McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to not only the federal government, but also state and local governments, meaning that states or cities cannot ban an individual from owning a firearm for the purpose of self-defense.

John Lott, an economist and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and author of the 1998 book "More Guns, Less Crime," said that the best way to ensure the safety of the American people is not necessarily to institute more regulations on guns, but rather to "get rid of gun-free zones."

"Most mass shootings have occurred in places where people aren't allowed to defend themselves," Lott said. "It's not by accident. These terrorists try to go to places where they can kill as many people as possible. The advantage of having someone there with a permitted concealed handgun who isn't readily identifiable is, it completely takes away the strategic advantage of these killers."

"The most effective way of reducing casualties is to allow civilians to be able to carry concealed handguns," Lott added.

Not all policymakers agree with either Alpers or Lott, and gun policy laws vary widely across the country, with states taking matters into their own hands to the extent that they are able.

According to a 2018 Washington Post analysis that examined which states had implemented some of the stricter gun control measures  including mandatory background checks, red flag laws, relinquishment laws, assault weapons bans, high-capacity magazine bans, gun possession prohibitions for high-risk individuals, and gun possession prohibitions for individuals with domestic violence convictions  California and Connecticut had the strictest gun control laws in the nation, with all seven types of laws implemented. Close behind were New York and Massachusetts, which had implemented six of the above laws. Idaho and Montana didnt have any of the above laws, although they did, for example, have laws that prohibit carrying guns on elementary school campuses.

Utah has implemented two of the measures  gun possession prohibitions for high-risk individuals and individuals with domestic violence convictions. As of 2018, it had 13 total gun laws, including several laws requiring a permit for concealed and open carry of a firearm. Nevertheless, it remains a state friendly to guns.

The analysis revealed that 19 states and the District of Columbia have instituted mandatory universal background checks. Six states and the District of Columbia have banned the sale of assault weapons, while seven states and the District of Columbia have banned the sale of assault pistol ammunition and other high-capacity magazines. Seven states have instituted relinquishment laws, which state that if any person becomes disqualified from possessing a firearm, they must turn in those firearms.

Public health research

Recent polls show that around 90 percent of Americans favor the idea of instituting mandatory background checks, and experts are generally in agreement that background checks are the most effective way of preventing guns from getting into the wrong hands.

What is clear is that states with stricter laws do much better than states with weak laws in terms of gun-related deaths, said David Hemenway, a professor of heath policy and director of the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.

Hemenway added that there is not significant evidence in the U.S. that points to the effectiveness of registration or licensing laws in preventing gun-related deaths, but thats because of a lack of data due to a lack of federal grant money for public health research into gun violence.

Some states, such as Hawaii, do have gun licensing laws, but Lott said they have been largely ineffective in tracing crimes back to criminals.

In 1996, Congress passed an amendment sponsored by the National Rifle Association to a spending bill that prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using funds to advocate or promote gun control after a series of public health reports found that having a gun in the house increased the probability of one committing suicide or homicide. As a result, research on gun violence was brought to a complete halt for around 15 years and has been minimal ever since.

A spending bill signed by President Donald Trump in 2018 removed that language, allowing the center to resume research into gun violence.

Mark Rosenberg, who oversees gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NPR that the new bill will allow researchers to develop things for legislators. We can give them the evidence and what is safe and what is effective, just like we do for medications.

They're under a tremendous amount of pressure right now to vote for or against some of these gun legislative proposals, Rosenberg continued. We owe it to them to give them information about what works. We don't know for even the simple basic measures of gun registration and licensing of gun owners  we don't know that that would work  or preventing the sale of semi-automatic rifles. Will that prevent mass shootings or school shootings? We owe it to them to get the research done so we can give them the data.

Alpers thinks this data could make a difference, but added that he believes "the U.S. already knows how to solve this problem," pointing out that the U.S. has been a pioneer in many areas of public health, including car safety, HIV/AIDS research, Ebola research, and smallpox and measles cures.

"American public safety experts and practitioners persuaded America, and then the world, to use standard public health procedures" in all of these areas, he said.

"It's inevitable that the U.S. administration will eventually follow the exact same best practices with guns as it did with all the other admirable initiatives that it has already led," Alpers added. "But it's going to take time."

Evidence-based decisions

Of course, "It's going to take time" is precisely what many Americans are tired of hearing.

But there's a difference between "taking time to get things right and not wanting to change anything at all," said Samara McPhedran, director of the Homicide Research Unit and deputy director of the Violence Research and Prevention Program at Griffiths University in Australia.

"Firearms policy is a very complex and technical area and effective policy comes from making calm, measured, well-informed decisions," McPhedran said.

She added that, in general, it concerns her when "reacting is turned into a virtue and thinking is turned into a vice."

McPhedran said while many governments have applauded Australia's quick action to implement tougher gun policies after the 1996 mass shooting, the laws have also had some unintended consequences, including the creation of a black market of firearms.

In addition, recent studies have shown that the effects of Australia's gun laws are not as straightforward as they may seem. For example, the rate of firearm-related homicides in Australia declined after the mass shooting, but those rates had also been declining before the mass shooting. Although gun-related suicide rates have gone down, so too have rates of suicide by other means, which makes it difficult to say that banning guns alone was responsible for reducing suicide rates. And while there haven't been any public mass shootings in Australia since the stricter gun laws were implemented, it's still unclear why the country didn't have any mass shootings before 1987, when gun laws were lax and semi-automatics were widely owned, McPhedran said.

"The reality and the evidence and a careful evaluation of the situation before 1987 in Australia strongly suggest that theres a lot more going on and the situation is far more complex than people realize," McPhedran said. "It takes time to get these policies right, work out exactly what needs to change, and identify any potential unintended consequences of any action."

Nevertheless, other research, including a study co-written by Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis, has indicated that Australia's gun laws have had an overall positive effect on reducing rates of homicide and suicide, as well as mass shootings.

"From the perspective of 1996, it would have been difficult to imagine more compelling future evidence of a beneficial effect of the law. Whether or not one wants to attribute the effects as being due to the law, everyone should be pleased with what happened in Australia after the NFA (National Firearms Agreement)  the elimination of firearm massacres (at least up to the present) and an immediate, and continuing, reduction in firearm suicide and firearm homicide," the study concluded.

Knowing when to take action

While making measured decisions is important, at a certain point it also becomes necessary to take action, Alpers said.

He pointed out that gun lobbies such as the National Rifle Association often "make very reasonable requests" to legislative bodies after events like a mass shooting to "not have a knee-jerk reaction with ill-considered legislation." However, Alpers said, those requests often result in the government making an official inquiry into the matter, which can often take several years and delay the solution-making process considerably.

The public is a force to be reckoned with. If you tried to go against the public there would be total uproar.  Philip Alpers, founder of GunPolicy.org, an international gun violence database

Alpers said that before the 1996 Australia mass shooting, there had been 11 official inquiries into gun control policies in 10 years because of prior mass shootings. Each inquiry had arrived at a similar set of recommendations, which ultimately weren't implemented. Before the New Zealand mass shooting, Alpers said, there had been four such inquiries in 22 years, each of which had also been defeated by the gun lobby.

When the most recent mass shootings happened in Australia and New Zealand, Alpers said, "it was the last straw."

Both countries were able to quickly identify the gun control policies they wanted to implement because they had those prior sets of recommendations at their fingertips. And although the gun lobby in Australia has pushed back against some of the country's gun regulations, and Alpers expects there to be debate on New Zealand's amendment to the Arms Act when it comes before Parliament in April, an overwhelming majority of people in both countries  and across party lines  support the gun laws, rendering the lobbies "almost impotent."

"The public is a force to be reckoned with," he said. "If you tried to go against the public there would be total uproar."

A symbol of freedom?

Do Americans, as a society, want to follow in the path of New Zealand, Australia, and the 150 or so other countries that adhere to the three pillars of gun control?

Alpers said the debate about gun control is less about guns than it is about freedom and what it means to be American.

"Behind the gun is a symbol of freedom, and the American admiration for freedom is intense," Alpers said.

Returning to the car-gun analogy, he said, "The car is also a symbol of freedom. But we've curbed the abuse and misuse of cars without changing any of that. Guns could be the same. They could still have the same role in society as they do now, but without being so hugely available and so easy to use in the heat of the moment. Laws to reduce the fatality of cars did not reduce the accessibility or appeal of cars."

Hemenway said that if there was strong bipartisan support to take action on gun policy in the U.S., President Trump could do what New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did and go out in front of the country and say, "We're going to do this."

"We could do that very quickly if we wanted to as a society," Hemenway said. "But it just hasn't happened yet."SALT LAKE CITY  Facebook stopped an overseas ad farm targeting Utahs midterm election last fall, Bloomberg News reported Friday.

An alert went off in Facebooks election war room at 11:24 a.m. in mid-October indicating political news in a Utah congressional district wasnt coming from inside the U.S.  a mismatch Facebook had tuned its software algorithms to detect.

A data scientist in the election monitoring center at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, inspected the activity manually and discovered, at 11:47 a.m., that the source spreading the content was an ad farm in Bangladesh. Ten minutes later, an operations specialist removed all the suspect activity, according to the Bloomberg story.

Facebook executives shared the story in a recent slideshow presentation in Paris to show the companys cyber detection tools are effective when working correctly.

Bloomberg News viewed the slides and reported that they show in detail how Facebook has improved its process for rooting out bad actors using tactics similar to those Russian operatives used in 2016.

"The message: Facebook will be more prepared to take on misinformation and meddling in this years elections  in India, the Philippines, Ukraine, Thailand and other countries  as well as the U.S. presidential race in 2020," according to the story.

Justin Lee, Utah elections director, said he didn't have any more details about the apparent attempt to interfere in the election. But he said Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies do a good job of reaching out to the states when something comes up.

"This isn't a particular one that rings a bell, but I know we've seen other threats and been in communication about them," he said. "They picked one as an example, although there's certainly been other threats that have come in that our team and their teams have worked through."

Lee said he's scheduled to talk with Facebook next week about how communication with the compnaylooks going forward. The state can also report suspicious activity to social made companies, he said."This is kind of part of the new world that we live in, that we all watch this stuff," he said.

In the run-up to Utah's primary election last summer, state digital security experts monitored traffic that rose as high as 1 billion attempts at suspicious activities, though not all of it was actual hacking.

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's entry into the U.S. Senate race last year coupled with his negative views of Russia made the Utah ballot more of a target, Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox said at the time.

Cox, who oversees state elections, told Utah voters that even amid unprecedented levels of hacking attempts, they could have confidence that their ballots would be accurately tabulated.

The state allocated millions of dollars along with federal assistance to beef up security measures, including the new voting machine technology, upgrades to the voter registration database protections and partnerships to bolster digital resistance to infiltration and disruption of the election process.Nokia has stated that it will not sign any new business agreements in Iran after the US pulled out of an international pact to ease sanctions on the Middle Eastern country last year.

While Nokia will meet all ongoing contractual obligations in the market, the vendor said it would be quite challenging to reconcile the opposing foreign policy regimes of the US and the EU. Nokia is headquartered in Finland, and the European Union will uphold the agreement to relax sanctions on Iran.

In a statement, Nokia said: The changed US foreign and economic sanctions policy necessitates a reassessment of our operations in Iran which may require us to significantly reduce our business and maintain pre-existing contractual commitments in full alignment with applicable economic sanctions.

Nokias clients in Iran include fixed-line operator HiWeb, mobile operator MTN Irancell, and the Mobile Communications Company of Iran. Last year, Nokia provided network equipment to these companies and delivered certain fixed services to regional operators, both directly and via local partners.

The companys net sales in Iran for 2018 were in the region of 55 million. Nokia stated that none of its business conducted in the market involved any US staff members or affiliates.Tanaiste and Minister Cannon announce more than 1 million in funding in response to Cyclone Idai

Press release

Tanaiste and Minister Cannon announce more than 1 million in funding in response to Cyclone Idai

The Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Simon Coveney T.D., and Minister of State for the Diaspora and International Development, Ciaran Cannon, T.D., today announced over 1 million in Irish funding in support of those affected by Cyclone Idai.

The Tanaiste said:

The devastation caused by Cyclone Idai is truly shocking. Our deepest sympathies go to all those impacted by this disaster.

Rapid assessments, including through EU satellite imagery, have highlighted the vast scale of humanitarian need, which is only likely to grow in the coming days and weeks. It is vital therefore that we step up our international response.

That is why, in addition to our contributions to the UN relief efforts, I am pleased that Ireland will contribute at least 1,050,000 to help those most gravely affected.

Minister of State Cannon added:

Cyclone Idai is among the worst weather-related disasters ever experienced in Africa. Our collective response to what the UN has called an unprecedented disaster, will be crucial over the coming days in order to minimize the loss of life.

I welcome the rapid allocation of $20 million from the UNs Central Emergency Response Fund, which will help those affected meet their immediate basic needs.

Irish Embassies in Mozambique and Malawi are working with partners on the ground in response to this crisis, while the Embassy of Ireland in Pretoria is monitoring the effects of the crisis in Zimbabwe, through its office in Harare.

This initial Irish Government response comprises 400,000 released by the Embassy of Ireland in Mozambique to the World Food Programme; 500,000 to the IFRC Red Cross response in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe; and 150,000 in Irish Aid funding allocated to Concern Worldwide for activities in Malawi.

Ends

Press Office

22 March 2019

Notes to Editor An estimated 1.7 million people have been affected by Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. In the aftermath of the cyclone, flooding is now the major crisis. More than half a million people are estimated to have lost their homes in Mozambique. Beira, Mozambiques fourth-largest city, has suffered extensive damage and remains inaccessible by road. Ireland has been one of the strongest supporters of the UN's Central Emergency Response Fund since its inception in 2005, and is one of the top ten donors to the fund over its lifetime. Ireland also contributes to the EU humanitarian response mechanisms, through which an initial emergency aid package of 3.5 million has been announced (2 million will be provided in Mozambique, 1 million in Malawi, and 0.5 million in Zimbabwe). This is in addition to 250 000 in initial humanitarian assistance. The Governments new policy for international development, A Better World, commits Ireland to redoubling efforts to address and mitigate the effects of climate change in development contexts, as well as helping vulnerable communities recover from the impacts of humanitarian disasters.

 Previous Item | Next Item Facebooks AI for India Summit will be held in Bangalore and is aimed at discussing the possible application of AI to drive advancements across healthcare, education, agriculture, and crisis/disaster mitigation.

Highlights

Facebook announces inaugural AI for India Summit

The event will be held on March 26 in Bangalore

AI for India Summit aims to discuss the possible applications of AI to drive advancements across healthcare, education, agriculture, and crisis/disaster mitigation

Facebook has announced that it will be hosting the inaugural AI for India Summit this month. The event will be held on March 26 in Bangalore and focuses on discussing inclusive growth and solutions to the most enduring social challenges.

The AI for India Summit aims to bring together key representatives from the AI community in India. It will also be attended by the platforms global AI teams who plan to get a better understanding about the future of AI tech in India, especially those that aid with social change.

Facebook is committed to the growth of India, and wants to be an ally to India for developing an expertise in AI. The Summit has been conceptualized to serve as a platform for thought-leaders from across domains to discourse on the possible applications of AI to drive advancements across healthcare, education, agriculture, and crisis/disaster mitigation, in line with the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence that was outlined by NITI Aayog last year, the company noted in its press statement.

Facebook also noted that it is already working on AI projects for social good. The company mentions the Blood Donations Center in Facebook that helps hospitals and blood banks connect with blood donors quickly.

AI has been a particular point of focus for Facebook. Last month, the company announced that its AI scientists were working on a chip aimed at powering a digital assistant like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant. Further, it is also designed to help Facebooks human content moderators sift through and regulate videos and posts on the social media platform.A Nokia 7 user reportedly found his phone sending his personal data to a Chinese server owned by China Telecom.

Highlights:

A Nokia 7 user recently reported that the phone was sending personal information to a Chinese server.

Finland data protection ombudsman promised to investigate the claims.

Nokia said a batch of Nokia 7 phones had an 'error' that led to the data being shared. The fix was issued in a January 2019 update.

Finlands data protection authority has said it will investigate after claims that HMD Globals Nokia smartphones have been secretly sending data to Chinese servers. The probe follows a report by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that claims Nokia phones have been sending sensitive personal data to China after a Nokia user tipped the publication off. The report claims that Henrik Austad found that his Nokia 7 has been sending unencrypted data to a Chinese server when the phone was switched on. The data reportedly included the users location, SIM card number and the phones serial number.

The report claims the server was under the domain vnet.cn, and is reportedly managed by state-owned telecom company China Telecom. HMD Global admitted that a batch of Nokia 7 devices had an error that led them to send data to China. The company claimed the error was fixed in the January software update pushed out to the phone. HMD Global also said its phones dont send personal info that could identify the users to any server.

The Nokia 7 was released exclusively in China in October 2017. Finland data protection ombudsman Rejio Aarnio told Reuters that he would look into the matter to see if there were any breaches involving personal information and if there has been a legal justification for this.

Europe has strict data privacy laws that got even Google entangled. The EU hit Google with a 50 million euros fine for violating Europes GDPR standards. Aarnio told NRK that he would investigate HMD Global for GDPR violation.

Related Read:

Nokia 7 with Bothie camera, Snapdragon 630 chipset and glass design launchedSamsung confirmed on its official website that the Infinity display on the Galaxy A90 will not have a notch, which resonates with previous reports claiming that the phone could have a pop-up camera.

Highlights:

Samsung website confirms Galaxy A90 to come with notchless infinity screen

The reveal hints pop-up selfie camera



The Samsung Galaxy A90 is said to be the high-end phone in the A-Series of phones and it could well be companys first phone with a notch-less display (only if you consider the punch-hole design as a notch). The South Korean giant has confirmed on its website saying that the Notchless Infinity screen only available on Galaxy A90. Reportedly, Samsung accidentally made a microsite live on its Indonesia website showing the Galaxy A90 phone.

When we tried to access the microsite, we couldnt get in, which possibly means that the page has been taken down. All screen and no bezel. The maxed out Notchless Infinity screen gives you the sharpest details, depth, and true-to-life colours for a super immersive experience. Whether you're into games, sharing photos, or just kicking back watching some flicks, the ultra-vibrant Super AMOLED screen makes all your media come to life, the description reportedly read on the website.

There is a mention of the pop-up selfie camera in the website but previous reports have suggested that the Samsung Galaxy A90 could come with sliding and rotating camera. Popular tipster @OnLeaks had said that camera on the Samsung Galaxy A90 will be a kinda mix between Oppo Find X and Oppo N1 systems, which means the camera module could slide out of the smartphones body and rotate to face either the user or the subject behind.

If Samsung does decide to go in for a sliding and rotating camera system, it would need to add that crucial (and usually expensive) moving mechanical part. While Samsung may achieve the much-craved near-edge-to-edge design, the longevity of the mechanism will always remain a question. Recently, the Samsung Galaxy A90, along with two other phones, was seen listed on an official Samsung UK website.

Moreover, if Samsung chooses to include the moving module, it could cut the cost of including up to two (front) cameras. Due to the rotating mechanism, the same cameras setup can be used to click selfies as well as regular photos.

Related Read:

Samsung Galaxy A10, Galaxy A30, Galaxy A50 launched in IndiaNeither party will admit it, but Frances Yellow Vest protesters and the exclusive brands whose stores they recently torched need each other to survive. At least, thats how one French author explains his countrys love-hate relationship with fashion. But well get to that. First: some context.

The thanks for the cashmere and luxury for everyone graffiti left in the Champs Elysees high street in the aftermath of last weeks riots are a visceral reminder of the Yellow Vestsa widely condemned populist movementand their obsession with fashion.

The police appeared overrun as protesters swarmed the Champs-Elysees, vandalising and later setting fire to Fouquets brasserie, a favourite hangout of the rich and famous for the past centuryas well as luxury handbag store Longchamp, a bank, another restaurant and several news stands, (France 24).

But while international news outlets pit the two sides against each other, this conflict is more than capitalists vs. socialists; its the internal struggle of a country proud both of its historic resistance movements and its designer label identity.

Thats not to say the different groups dont oppose each other, but that their opposition is in some sense inevitable. As Marc Abeles, author of An Ethnologist in the Land of Luxury points out, Luxury has always retained a fragrance of the forbidden.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Womenstyle (@_womens_styles) on Mar 20, 2019 at 8:19am PDT

Hence its appeal: by buying something high-end you are doing something rebellious anddare I say itirrational. But theres a certain defiant beauty to it which both Yellow Vest protesters and wealthy consumers seem to recognise.

However, while protesters argue you should resist this temptation, designer labels rely on their disdain to sell to people who revel in (and can afford) this devil may care look.

Which explains why luxury goods are locked into a cycle of becoming ever more expensiveand profitableeven as they are protested against. As reported by The Business Of Fashion, Business is thriving for the behemoths of French luxury.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Paris Fashion Week (@parisfashionweek) on Feb 10, 2019 at 2:19am PST

LVMH, LOreal, Kering and Hermes alone account for one quarter of sales recorded by the 100 largest luxury firms worldwide in a sector that is set to reach 320 billion to 365 billion in sales by 2025, and has captured the imagination of Chinas newly minted millionaires and a new generation of millennials.

At the same time, the director of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris is allegedly finding it hard to convince sponsors to fund his planned exhibition on luxury in Dubai in 2020, as Luxury in France is under attack, (Business Of Fashion).

Read NextGovt sells its stake in Dredging Corporation to 4 major ports

The government has sold its entire stake in Dredging Corporation of India Ltd to a consortium of four state-owned ports, as it rushes to meet its divestment target for the financial year.

The government sold its 73.44 per cent holding in the company at Rs510 apiece - a premium of 17 per cent over Fridays close  to a consortium of Vishakhapatnam Port Trust, Paradeep Port Trust, Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust and Deendayal Port Trust (erstwhile Kandla Port Trust).

The share sale which is expected to rake in Rs1,050 crore for the government, according to analysts, taking it closer to its Rs80,000-crore divestment target for the current fiscal.

Among the consortium of ports that bought governments stake in Dredging Corp, Vishakapatnam Port Trust bought 19.47 per cent, Paradeep Port Trust bought 18 per cent, Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust bought 18 per cent and Deendayal Port Trust bought 18 per cent.

The government also got exemption from the open offer mandated by Sebi.

Shares of Dredging Corporation of India settled over 17 per cent higher at Rs445.75 at Wednesday's close. Earlier, Dredging Corporation of India (DCIL) shares hit 20 per cent upper circuit at Rs456.70 on Wednesday, touching the day's high.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs had, in November, given in-principle approval to sell its entire stake in the company to the four ports.

Stake sale in Dredging Corp is the second strategic sale in a public sector company in the current financial year started April. The government had earlier sold 100 per cent stake in HSCC (India) to NBCC (India) for Rs285 crore.

The government had said the stake sale in Dredging Corp will facilitate linkage of dredging activities with ports and diversification of ports into third-party dredging.Over 2 million sign no-Brexit petition

The number of Britons backing a petition against the country leaving the European Union rose to more than two million even as Prime Minister Theresa Mays moves proved beyond doubt that she has completely lost the gambit.

Reports citing parliamentarians said the number of people signing the Article 50 petition crossed 2,138,983 by Thursday and could rise significantly further, thereby unseating the PM and saving Britain from Brexit.

In fact, the government website for petitions crashed under the signatories calling for Article 50 to be revoked.

For Britain, however, there is no other option than accepting the current deal or crashing out of EU without a Brexit or any safety net.

As things stand cancelling Article 50 is the best option for Britain as any extension or changes to the deal would require consent of the other EU members.

The alternative for Britain is to simply revoke the notice calling for an exit from the EU, although other members may be outraged. Britain, however, cannot be expelled from the EU for the farce.

Many Britons now say that Article 50 was activated before Britain was prepared for Brexit - there was no plan, no agreed strategy, no contingency ideas  there were only deadlines.

And the ruling party was in no mood to abandon Brexit. It simply wanted to cling to power, while the opposition Labour tried to wrest control of the process from the uncertain grip of the prime minster.

Businesses and economists say a no-deal Brexit would cause huge disruptions and billions in costs to the economies of both Britain and the EU.EU sets 12 April Brexit date if May's deal fails in parliament

Britain will get time until 22 May to formally withdraw from the European Union if Prime Minister Theresa May wins parliament approval for her Brexit deal by the 29 March deadline. But if she fails to get parliament approval by then, Britain will be out of the Union by 12 April.

Leaders of 27 European Union member countries arrived at the modified deadline of 12 April for Britains exit from the EU after a crisis summit in Brussels on Thursday.

EU leaders proposed to give Britain an extra two months, until 22 May, to leave the Union if Theresa Mays Brexit deal gets parliament approval at the 29 March vote to avoid the risk of legal wrangling. May, however, failed to convince EU leaders that the deal would succeed.

With the elections to new EU parliament due on 23 May, Britains remaining in the EU beyond the 22 May deadline will be a stumbling block and hence the 22 May deadline. However, if Mays deal fails and Britain asks for a much longer Brexit delay, Britain would have to take part in EU elections. That, however, clashes with British law that mandates that elections would have to be announced six weeks beforehand, ie, by April 12.

"The European Council agrees to an extension until 22 May 2019, provided the Withdrawal Agreement is approved by the House of Commons next week," the EU statement read.

"If the Withdrawal Agreement is not approved by the House of Commons next week, the European Council agrees to an extension until 12 April 2019 and expects the United Kingdom to indicate a way forward before this date for consideration by the European Council."

EU leaders warned ahead of Thursdays summit that there is a possibility of Britain exiting the Union without a deal.

French President Emmanuel Macron said it was the responsibility of UK lawmakers to approve a Brexit deal and make sure Britain does not crash out of the bloc without an agreement.

In case of a no vote ... it will guide everybody to a no-deal for sure, Macron cautioned. This is it.

It is utter chaos in the British parliament. The House of Commons is split, both among and within its political parties, over whether and how to leave the EU. It has twice rejected the deal Prime Minister Theresa May brokered with the blocs leaders late last year.The Muckish Drama Circle is busy preparing for their latest production that will take place over three nights at the end of March.

Their latest production is Sweeneys American Wake and it is sure to delight audiences with a mix of uniquely Irish storytelling, culture,comedy and music, that will resonate with people of all ages and make for a highly-entertaining night out.

Sweeneys American Wake is set against the backdrop of 1920s Ireland when many were forced to emigrate from the locality in search of a better life.

With so many people leaving the Creeslough, Dunfanaghyand surrounding areas during that time, many of them leaving to make new lives for themselves in America, the farewell parties held to mark their departures were termed American wakes as in many cases those about to depart were unlikely to ever return home once they emigrated from Donegal shores.

Hilarious

Of course, while the theme of this new play may seem to mark a sad chapter in local history, the cast, and characters involved make it into an often hilarious mix of laughter and song - particularly when the central family in the play are hoping that after their daughter announces her intention to leave Creeslough for America, their efforts at the eleventh hour to have her married quickly on home turf will stop her setting sail for a new life across the Atlantic Ocean.

But will it work? All will be revealed in this new production directed by Nora Kavanagh, which features a host of top local acting talent, and will take place in Massinass Hall, Creeslough over three nights from March 28 to 30.



Local groups

This years production is being hosted by local community film archive and history group, Glass Mountain Media, in association with the Muckish Drama Circle.

The two groups are working to support each other in their aims to highlight the great community work done in promoting local arts and culture in the area.

Gerald Duffy, a committee member of Glass Mountain Media, said this years show is sure to be a wonderful mix of laughs, history, and music that will have everybody joining in, as well as looking at an important chapter in local history in an entertaining way.

The three-night run, which starts on Thursday, March 28 and runs through to Saturday, March 30, will be ticket only for each night



Tickets

Tickets cost 10 and can be bought in advance through local outlets including Creeslough Supermarket, Creeslough Post Office, Boyces Centra in Dunfanaghy and Sweeneys Service Station in Termon.

Tickets are also available by contacting the Creeslough View and Glass Mountain Media Facebook pages. directly.For a third year, Clean Coasts in partnership with Irish Water are running 'Think Before You Flush,' a campaign aiming to tackle the problem of sewage related litter on Ireland's beaches. It is a public awareness campaign about the problem sanitary products and other items can cause in our marine environment and our waste water systems if they are flushed down the toilet.

Bundoran

Not only does this campaign aim to raise awareness at a national level, there is also a strong emphasis on empowering communities directly to tackle the issues caused by sewage related litter. Bundoran became Donegals first Think Before You Flush community towards the end of 2018 joining 14 other communities around the country.

Workshops

Since then a strong partnership between local Clean Coasts Officer, Bundoran Tidy Towns, Discover Bundoran and Donegal County Council has led the campaign from strength to strength with a large number of businesses adopting the campaign. The work continues with workshops for local schools including Magh Ene College and Four Masters NS, Kinlough as well as several projects and events with local community groups and individuals.

This fantastic effort by the Bundoran community, has brought together some of the local stakeholders to celebrate World Water Day on, March 22 and the achievements of the campaign so far.

"Bundoran has become a true ambassador for the Think Before You Flush campaign in Donegal. It is a wonderful example of the power of community action to create change. A special thanks should be given to our Clean Coasts Groups Bundoran Tidy Towns and Discover Bundoran for being true leaders in the community for this campaign, says Beckey-Finn Britton, Clean Coasts Officer for Donegal and Leitrim.

Micheal McMahon, Chairperson of Bundoran Tidy Towns, said:"We were delighted to become one of the ambassador communities for the Think Before You Flush campaign. We are also thankful to the number of local businesses who have engaged with us by committing to display the promotional materials on their premises. Being a seaside town its of utmost importance that both locals and visitors alike are aware of what they can and cannot flush down the toilet, ultimately affecting the quality of the water that rely on so much for our tourism product here in the town.

The coastal officer for Donegal County Council, David Friel, said: "Its very appropriate that we are gathered here in Bundoran on World Water Day and encouraging locals, businesses and visitors to think before they flush. Its heartening to see the amount of businesses who have embraced this campaign and who want to see their waters remain clean and safe for bathers, surfers and recreational users for this and many more seasons to come. For Bundoran to be chosen as the first Think Before You Flush community in the county is a testament to the trust that is placed in the community to ensure the natural amenity of the Atlantic Ocean is kept as clean and litter free as possible. We look forward to many more communities in the county joining Bundoran to think before they flush.

Irish Water, Siobhan Sheil, said: "Were urging all residents and visitors to Bundoran to Think Before You Flush, and to be mindful of the significant negative impact flushing inappropriate items can have on homes, businesses, the wastewater network, and the marine environment. Last year, there were more than 6,000 sewer blockages across the country. The size and scale of the impact of flushing the wrong items down the toilet is incredible. Irish Water has invested in wastewater infrastructure here in Bundoran and as a result has put a stop to the discharge of the equivalent of 9,600 wheelie bins of raw sewage per day into the sea. However, it is still really important that people recognise the impact of what they flush so the network can function efficiently and effectively. Placing a bin in the bathroom and disposing of sanitary items safely and appropriately has a hugely positive impact on the network and the environment.By some distance I was one of the younger heads in the audience on Thursday night at the assembly hall in St Vincent's school on Seatown Place. And such a pity that more young(er) people were not there that evening.

We were all present to take in a talk by the acclaimed UCD professor Diarmuid Ferriter on the history of the border and the politics surrounding it since partition was drawn up and enforced in 1921.

It was a fascinating evening. Ferriter, speaking for well over an hour, barely stopped to catch a breath and never once slurred a word or lost his razor sharp train of thought.

For those of us lucky enough to be in the audience it was an eye-opening insight into just how much partition and the border has shaped this island for nearly a century now.

And, in case it wasn't self-evident, it is still having a profound impact on the very shape and future of both the UK and the EU, given the current Brexit debacle.

Northern Ireland, and its creation as an entity of the UK, was never supposed to be a long-term proposition to solving the head-scratching "Irish Question". Neither Westminster nor Dublin, nor probably Belfast, saw it as lasting solution. It was supposed to be a start towards a more unified state of Ireland. Which has not come to pass over the past 100 years since.

From listening to Ferriter, it is clear that Michael Collins, upon agreeing to partition, saw it as an initial way of halting hostilities, before diplomacy and dialogue would, almost inevitably, rub away the border and bring the country back together by peaceful means.

If only it were that simple.

On the night, Ferriter said that Irish unity became a more distinct possibility in his eyes on the evening the UK voted to leave the EU back in 2016. Why?

Because it would at long last throw attention back to the forgotten parcel of land known as Ulster. A land which London viewed with chilly detachment and a land which it felt was neither here nor there - "not us, nor them".

Dublin, over the years, has not exactly been accommodating to Northern Ireland and the chance of unification either. Ferriter recounted the humourous story of former Taoiseach Jack Lynch being asked what he would do if he were offered Northern Ireland in the morning - his response? "I'd faint". Such is the remove felt towards Ulster. Such is the awkwardness of finding a solution which could satisfy all sides.

Brexit has thrown the Irish Question and the border into sharp relief once again.

The irony that this small province has now become the defining stalling point over such a huge geo-political crisis as Brexit, will not be lost on anyone interested in Irish history, and also its future.

The UK's long-standing indifference to Ulster has come back to bite them in the posterior. Whatever the outcome of Brexit, which will occur in some way shape or form, the massive levels of post-Troubles EU funding (estimated to be in or around 2.4bn) will cease. And then it will be on London to inject further, substantive funding, into the province.

One wonders if Westminster actually thought of that when they proposed a referendum on leaving the EU. If history has taught us one thing about Northern Ireland and the UK's feelings on it, the answer to that would probably be a shrug of the shoulders and a rare squinted glance across the Irish Sea at a land they feel indifferent to.The grief-stricken fiance of Ruth Maguire has paid tribute to his soulmate and thanked the people of Carlingford for their support following the tragic events in the village over St Patricks weekend.



James Griffin, who was due to get married to Ruth on August 8 of this year, took to Facebook last week to post a heartfelt tribute to his partner.



Ruth, aged 30, who was from Belfast, but lived in Co Down, triggered a massive search after she went missing from a hen party in Carlingford village last Saturday night (March 16).

Tragically Ruths body was recovered from Carlingford Lough on Monday afternoon. Her funeral will take place tomorrow (Saturday, March 23).

Ruth and her partner James have three children; Tyler, 10, Lydia, 7, and Oliver age 5. In a heartbreaking post on Facebook James paid tribute to his late partner: "She will be missed more than she will know from me and our three kids.

She was my soulmate and on the 8th of August 2019 she would have been Mrs Griffin.

I would like to say a big thank you to Kilkeel coastguards, the emergency services, Garda and the local people from Carlingford for everything they have done to find Ruth.

I would also like to say thank you for all the kind messages I'm getting regarding Ruths passing.

Ruth's devastated older sister Rachel Wilkinson also took to social media to pay tribute to her sister, describing her as a beautiful person who had everything to live for.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help raise money for Ruth's family: www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/

ruth-maguire

Employee benefits, when implemented properly, are among the most effective ways to motivate staff and bring out the best in your people. Staff will eventually leave if theyre not valued or treated fairly. Companies that want to invest in their workers can use perks, such as flexible working arrangements and salary packaging, to show recognition and appreciation and ultimately retain staff.

Businesses that arent taking advantage of such perks are missing out. When staff are happy, their work ethics heighten, productivity increases and they contribute to building a better, thriving culture.

To drive the behaviour you want to see in your staff, here are the best employee benefits to help reward and retain your workforce.

Paid time off

Paid time off, such as loyalty, anniversary or birthday leave, is a top incentive to motivate staff. Paid time off or unlimited leave can be beneficial for both parties if its not abused. More leave increases productivity and promotes a healthier work-life balance.

Salary Packaging

Salary packaging, also referred to as salary sacrificing, is a smart way to save money and maximise tax benefits.

It works by changing the income structure of your employee to pay for approved benefits from pre-tax dollars. Some of these include rent/mortgage payments, superannuation, everyday expenses or holiday and travel. Staff will get more and its a tax-friendly way to boost their salary.

Tip: As the employer, its your responsibility to ensure any proposed salary packaging arrangements are aligned with ATO requirements and guidelines.

Flexible Working Arrangements

Traditional workdays are declining as flexible hours are the new normal. Whether it be working from home, reduced hours or changes in start/finish times, such arrangements have become increasingly important. Breaking away from 9-5 workdays is a benefit employees can push for if theyve been with the company for more than 12 months.

According to Hays, 89% of employers say flexible working options are crucial when it comes to staff attraction and retention. The integration of work-life for the two to coexist positively influences all areas of work, including loyalty, revenue growth, productivity, employee engagement and being accountable. Companies can use technology to make flexible working hours more accessible and transparent.

End of Year Bonuses

Employees can also be rewarded with annual bonuses. When managed strategically, bonuses give staff a reason to stay, offering recognition for hard work. Its a good way to reward employees for their contributions and bonuses can keep them motivated for the upcoming year.

Companies still using performance reviews should consider replacing these with career development plans. Theyre more likely to encourage development and can be used with training programs to improve staff performances and productivity.

Tip: There can be a lot of complications around bonuses. To avoid unfair distributions, bonuses should be structured properly.

Sick Pay

Extra paid sick leave is another paid time-off incentive. By law, all employers are to provide sick leave to staff. However, a contractual sick pay agreed on by employers can be more generous to support the overall running of the business. Staff without paid sick leave are more likely to work through their illness. But sick leave is vital for faster recovery and less mistakes.

Health and Wellbeing Programs

Mental health and wellbeing is a growing concern in the workforce. To help keep staff happy and healthy, consider offering health and wellbeing programs, including financial health, which is one of the leading causes of stress.

Australian employees lose an average of 6.9 hours of productive work per week due to stress-related illnesses, which can be minimised with a stronger management-led support network.

Other employee benefits to consider offering include:

Company car

Additional parental leave

Extra superannuation

Childcare payment contributions

Annual travel credit

Referral bonuses

When deciding what benefits matter most to your business, provide choice to your employees. People value the opportunity to choose; offering multiple benefits is always a more positive approach for employee retention.

Which staff incentives will you be implementing? Leave your comments below!

Author BioIn August of 2015, the year before he was elected president, Donald Trump had a clear and concise message for auto workers: You make too much money.

He said U.S. automakers could shift production away from Michigan to communities where autoworkers would make less. You can go to different parts of the United States and then ultimately youd do full-circle  youll come back to Michigan because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less, Trump said. We can do the rotation in the United States  it doesnt have to be in Mexico. He said that after Michigan loses a couple of plants  all of sudden youll make good deals in your own area.

It doesnt matter that unionized autoworkers in other states make the same as unionized autoworkers in Michigan. Trump was making the big pitch for corporations America: take a pay cut or else.

Leading into the 2020 election, Trump told union workers in Lima, Ohio this week that they should cut their own throats by kneecapping the unions that negotiate their wages, benefits, retirement packages, and working conditions and, in the process, blamed the cost of union dues for General Motors decision to close a plant in Lordstown:

I sort of dont want to meet these guys. I want to deal with the people in the union, not the heads of the union. Because the heads of the union are not honest people. Theyre not honest, and they ought to lower your dues, by the way. They ought to stop with the dues. They  youre paying too much dues. As an example, they couldve kept General Motors. They couldve kept it in that gorgeous plant at Lordstown. They couldve kept it. Lower your dues. Lower your dues.

But before Trump told workers at this plant they dont need to support their union, he planted a seed by telling them a direct and provable lie (in chart form):

You see the red line here? These are Wages are Rising for the Workers. These are Wages are Rising. 3.4 percent  its one of the largest increases in 20 years. And for the most part, they were going down. They werent even rising. I used to campaign  Id be in Ohio, Id be in Pennsylvania, Id be all over, and Id talk about wages where people would have to work three jobs and they were making less than they did 20 years ago. You remember that, Rob? Jim? I used to do it all the time. Id be  it was just a part of my speech. Id say, Youre working three jobs. You make less money than you did 20 years ago. And it was literally 21 years. And now wages are going up.

Heres what the trend on wages has actually been:

Looking at growth, 3.4% isnt even close to what its been for the past decade:

Since President Obama got the economy back on the rails, wage growth has been pretty steady. Not as large as wed like of course, but Trump wants workers to think the economy is finally booming so that they dont give Obama any credit for beginning a period of growth thats been strong and steady for ten years.

He also looked at these workers at the Lima Tank Plant and told them that the GDP hasnt been this high in over a decade:

And we just came out  another chart  we just came out with numbers  the Economic Report of the President: 3.1 percent GDP. The first time in 14 years that we cracked 3, right? Thats pretty good  3.1.

Again, lets go to the actual figures:

GDP growth has been over 3.1% many times in the past decade and, like wages, the GDP itself has been on an upward climb since Obama got things set straight:

Its not hard to figure what Trump is doing here. He wants union members to think that, thanks to him, the economy is robust and wages are rising. And that, because of this, they dont need their unions and shouldnt have to pay to support them. Hes already signed Executive Orders to harm federal government union employees and is ready to sign national right to work into law if a bill ever hits his desk.

A significant share of union members voted for Donald Trump. The reasons are many but a significant one was that Trumps campaigning targeted them specifically, making them fearful that foreigners will take their jobs and promising to be their advocate. Democrats, a longtime ally of labor, simply didnt make this a central part of their campaign. Union members who voted for Trump werent stupid. They were duped by a man who has made a career out of duping people by the shear force of his personality and, sadly, they are among a long list of people he has swindled.

Whats important now is for union members to do something about the fact that Trump lied to them then, has lied to them since, and is lying to them now about his support and advocacy on their behalf. His goal is a country with high employment, low wages, and weak unions. This is the Holy Grail for Americas corporations and there are few people who are powerful enough to deliver it like Trump is now.

Conservatives and liberals may disagree on many things but I think something we can all agree on is that you cannot trust Donald Trump to deliver on his promises unless it directly benefits him or his powerful allies in corporate America. I can understand why conservative workers voted for him in 2016 and it is my sincere belief that these men and women are savvy enough and wise enough to see Trump for the con man that he is and not be fooled again.

Oh, one more thing. The union IS going to reduce dues. Just as soon as they build up their strike fund so that they can increase the daily pay union members will get if they are forced to go on strike:

The union responded by saying it has already put in place a plan for members dues to be lowered to their pre-2011 level as soon as the strike fund reaches $850 million. Weve already done it, said UAW spokesman Brian Rothenberg. [] Rothenberg said that at the UAWs convention last year, the union decided that once the strike fund hit the required amount, dues would return to a level they had been at since the 1960s until the change in 2011. The union this month at its bargaining convention in Detroit said it would raise its strike pay from $200 a week to $250 as it heads into contract talks this summer with GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.

So theres that.

[CC Trump image by Gage Skidmore | Wikimedia Commons]ExxonMobil could be the second company after Monsanto to lose lobbying access to members of European Parliament after it failed to turn up to a hearing Thursday concerning whether or not the oil giant knowingly spread false information about climate change.

The call to ban the company was submitted by Green Member of European Parliament (MEP) Molly Scott Cato and should be decided in a vote in late April, The Guardian reported.

"This is the company that denied the science, despite knowing the damage their oil exploitation was causing; which funded campaigns to block action on climate and now refuses to face up to its environmental crimes by attending today's hearing," Cato said in a statement released Thursday. "We cannot allow the lobbyists from such corporations free access to the corridors of the European parliament. We must remove their badges immediately."

The only other company to be denied lobby access to MEPs is Monsanto, which was banned for similar reasons in 2017 after it failed to turn up to a hearing on whether it had improperly influenced studies on the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in its Roundup weedkiller. ExxonMobil contended it could not attend the hearing because of ongoing climate litigation in the U.S. It was concerned that any comments made at the hearing "could prejudice those pending proceedings," according to a letter obtained by AFP. Evidence presented at the hearing Thursday suggested that ExxonMobil had known since 1959 that global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels "was sufficient to melt the ice cap and submerge New York," Harvard University researcher Geoffrey Supran told AFP. Supran presented the findings of a peer-reviewed study he had co-authored looking at almost 200 company documents over a period of decades. Four-fifths of internal documents acknowledged the science behind climate change, while a similar percentage of paid newspaper editorials in the U.S. cast doubt on that same science.

"It is the overwhelming consensus of experts studying the history of fossil fuel funding that companies, including ExxonMobil, have orchestrated, funded and perpetuated climate misinformation to mislead the public and politicians, and stifle action," Supran said, as reported in The Guardian. "Unfortunately, they largely succeeded." ExxonMobil continues to deny charges that it spread climate denial. "We reject the false allegation that ExxonMobil suppressed scientific research on climate change. News reports that claim we reached definitive conclusions about the science of climate change decades before the world's experts are simply not accurate and have long since been debunked," the company wrote in a statement provided to The Guardian. However, another study released Friday suggests that ExxonMobil's climate denialism isn't just a matter of history. The InfluenceMap report found that the five largest publicly traded oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, had invested more than $1 billion of shareholder funds on misleading climate-related lobbying and branding in the three years since the Paris agreement.

During that three year period, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP and Total invested $110 billion in new fossil fuel production while they are projected to spend only $3.6 billion on climate friendly alternatives such as renewable energy. Meanwhile, they spent $195 million a year to market themselves as green leaders and $200 million a year to lobby on climate policy, the Huffington Post reported. Those lobbying efforts included the spending blitz by BP and Chevron that helped defeat a carbon tax in Washington State during the 2018 midterm elections, The Guardian reported. "Oil majors' climate branding sounds increasingly hollow and their credibility is on the line," report author Edward Collins told The Guardian. "They publicly support climate action while lobbying against binding policy. They advocate low-carbon solutions but such investments are dwarfed by spending on expanding their fossil fuel business."By Daisy Brickhill

Each morning, men living in fishing communities along Ghana's coastline push off in search of the day's catch. But when the boats come back to shore, it's the women who take over.

In Ghana's fishing industry, women process and sell the fish caught by men. A "queen" fishmonger  known as the "Konkohemaa"  holds court as the most powerful woman in a fishing community. Elected by family heads, she draws on centuries of tradition and years of experience. When the boats land, she is the one who bargains with the fishermen, mediates conflicts over pricing and processing, and serves as the mouthpiece for local women involved in the industry.

This tradition is now under threat. A growing number of industrial trawlers and illegal fishing operations are rapidly depleting fish stocks, making life harder for local fishers and fishmongers. Oil exploration is also disrupting the local fishing industry.

Fishmongers in Elmina, a fishing port in the Central Region of Ghana. Environmental Justice Foundation

Traditionally, most women in fishing communities in the Central Region of Ghana  their Konkohemaas among them  own boats and finance fishing trips, guaranteeing them a portion of each catch. But as fish grow fewer in number, women are struggling to turn a profit.

Fishmongers in Gomoa Fetteh, a fishing port in the Central Region of Ghana. On the left is Afua, who has seen a drastic fall in Ghana's fish stocks within her lifetime. Environmental Justice Foundation

Fisheries in Ghana are built on an intricate set of traditions, running through generations. Fishmongering, the traditional role for women, is passed down from mother to daughter. Afua, a fishmonger in Gomoa Fetteh, on the central coast of Ghana, recalled learning how to process fish from her mother when she was 15. In those days, she said, the fishermen didn't have to travel far  they could sometimes be seen from the shore making a big catch. Now, the men have to go long distances, and they often return empty-handed.

Afua, smoking fish. The scarcity of fish is diminishing her business. "And it means the little savings I have, I have to use to support my family," she said. Environmental Justice Foundation

Despite the significant role of women in Ghanaian fisheries, their contributions to the sector are often overlooked by policymakers. An analysis of the industry by the Environmental Justice Foundation and local NGO Hen Mpoano found that women are often excluded from decisions about how to manage fisheries. They also have no say in how to prevent illegal fishing, despite the fact that they could be instrumental in its eradication. Women, for example, could organize to refuse to purchase illegally caught fish  those collected by using chemicals such as DDT, petrol or dynamite.

Afua's sister, Rose. She has been a fishmonger for 20 years. Environmental Justice Foundation

Ekua, a fishmonger from Ankaful, in the Central Region of Ghana, processes and sells fish her husband catches  a typical partnership in the industry. But as her husband's catches have diminished, Ekua is increasingly forced to buy fish from other fishermen. Despite the drop in yields, she feels they have no choice but to continue to fish. "If my husband stops fishing we will starve," she said. "If he stops fishing, what work will we do? We have only one job, which is the sea."



Ekua, a fishmonger from Ankaful, in the Central Region of Ghana. Environmental Justice Foundation

Ekua has five children and has been processing fish since her first child was born in 1983. "This morning, after house chores I will bathe the children, so they can go to school," she said. "After I will go to shore to get the fish that my husband will catch for smoking and then cook, so that I can feed the children when they return from school. I buy fish when they get nothing at sea."

One of the major obstacles facing women is limited access to the financial services that are available to men. Men who catch fish can take advantage of subsidies for fuel, nets and boat motors, but women who sell fish enjoy no such assistance. The National Fish Processors and Traders Association was created in 2015 in part to to help women get loans, but thus far none of its members have received any government funding.

Ekua (second from right) with three other fishmongers who are helping her process fish, in Ankaful, near the central coast of Ghana. Environmental Justice Foundation

Communities surveyed by the Environmental Justice Foundation and Hen Mpoano say that gender equality is still far off. Disparities are likely to endure as long as women are left out of policymaking, meaning women will struggle to cope with the decline of the industry.

"Fishing processing was good in the beginning, but now it is worse," Ekua said. "We are worried. We are really worried that fishermen get no fish in the sea nowadays."

Daisy Brickhill, PhD, is a science writer with the Environmental Justice Foundation. She produced this story for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.



Reposted with permission from our media associate Nexus Media.In a world's first, the Irish Parliament voted 90 to 53 on Thursday in favor of a groundbreaking bill that would fully divest public money from coal, oil and gas.

Fossil Free Europe has hailed it as a "first-of-its-kind fossil fuel divestment legislation."

The Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill, which was supported by almost all of Ireland's political parties except the Fine Gael, will now go to the committee stage. According to The Independent, the bill is likely to pass into law in the next few months after it is reviewed.

Once enacted, the initiative would force the Ireland Strategic Investment Funda sovereign wealth fund worth more than 8 billionto sell its investments in fossil fuel industries over the next five years and would also prohibit future investments in the sector.

Independent TD Thomas Pringle, who introduced the bill, said the legislation makes a powerful statement to the world.



"This principle of ethical financing is a symbol to these global corporations that their continual manipulation of climate science, denial of the existence of climate change and their controversial lobbying practices of politicians around the world is no longer tolerated," Pringle said.

"We cannot accept their actions while millions of poor people in underdeveloped nations bear the brunt of climate change forces as they experience famine, mass emigration and civil unrest as a result."

The Republic of Ireland has recently voted on a slew of green measures in order to fight climate change. In October, the Dail Eireann (the country's House of Representatives, so to speak) voted to ban fracking.

Trocaire, an Catholic charity that fights worldwide poverty, backed the divestment campaign.



"With a climate-sceptic recently inaugurated into the White House, this move by elected representatives in Ireland will send out a powerful message," said Trocaire executive director Eamonn Meehan.

"The Irish political system is now finally acknowledging what the overwhelming majority of people already know: That to have a fighting chance to combat catastrophic climate change we must phase out fossil fuels and stop the growth of the industry that is driving this crisis," he added.

In the powerful video below, Green Party leader Eamon Ryan celebrates the bill as a clear message to the White House, which has embraced fossil fuels.



"Donald Trumpwhat an answer to him. What an answer to his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson," Ryan said. "We are going to be selling your ExxonMobil shares, sir, because we don't believe in the future that you stand for."A study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry Thursday found that mothers exposed to the banned pesticide DDT were nearly one-third more likely to have children who developed autism, Environmental Health News reported.

The study, led by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health with the participation of researchers at the University of Turku and the National Institute of Health and Welfare in Finland, was the first to use biomarkers of maternal pesticide exposure to link pesticide exposure to increased autism risk, according to materials provided to ScienceDaily by Columbia University.

"This adds another piece to the puzzle in terms of the possible risk factors for autism," lead author and Columbia University Medical Center professor Dr. Alan Brown told ABC News. "Although we can't prove that it is a cause, we are working towards learning more about how such environmental risks may be altering brain development and possibly increasing autism risk."

Autism is a disorder that impacts communication ability and is associated with repetitive movements and behaviors. Incidence in the U.S. has increased from one in 150 children in 2000 to around one in 59 today, according to Environment Health News.

In Thursday's study, Researchers looked at 778 cases of autism in Finland between 1987 and 2005 and matched the mothers in these cases to a control group whose children did not develop autism. They then analyzed maternal blood samples for DDE, a metabolite of DDT, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), another dangerous pollutant, according to ScienceDaily.

They found that mothers with high levels of DDE in their bloodstream were 32 percent more likely to have a child with autism and more than two times more likely to have a child with autism and an intellectual disability, ABC News reported. They found no effect linked to high PCB levels in the mothers' blood.

DDT was widely banned more than 30 years ago, but it takes such a long time to break down that people can still be exposed to it.

"We think of these chemicals in the past tense, relegated to a long-gone era of dangerous 20th Century toxins," Brown said, according to ScienceDaily. "Unfortunately, they are still present in the environment and are in our blood and tissues. In pregnant women, they are passed along to the developing fetus."

Professor Kristen Lyall of the Drexel Autism Institute at Drexel University, who was not involved in the study, told Environmental Health News that people are most often exposed to DDT by eating contaminated food, especially fish.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told ABC News they were aware of the results.

"We are aware of the study and will carefully consider its findings," they wrote in a statement. "The Federal Drug Administration has action levels for DDT, and this pesticide is included in our monitoring program. The most recent report summarizes the results of FDA's pesticide monitoring program and shows that the levels of pesticide chemical residues measured by FDA in the U.S. food supply are generally in compliance with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's pesticide tolerances."

Researchers don't yet know why DDT exposure would cause autism, but they have two hypotheses, Environmental Health News reported.

First, DDT exposure is linked to premature birth and smaller babies, both risk factors for autism.

Second, DDT exposure impacts the ability of androgens, male sex organs, to bind to receptors. This is an important step in neurodevelopment, according to ScienceDaily.

However, the study needs to be repeated to be confirmed and does not prove that DDT exposure causes autism.

A 2017 study by Lyall also assessing the impact of DDT and PCB exposure on autism risk found opposite results: PCB exposure increased risk and DDT exposure did not, Environmental Health News reported.

Lyall's study was based in California and drew from a smaller population.

"It tells us about the importance about studying different populations, and then to home in on what might be different about this population to tell us even more about autism," Brown told Environmental Health News.Environmental exposure to pesticides, both before birth and during the first year of life, has been linked to an increased risk of developing autism spectrum disorder, according to the largest epidemiological study to date on the connection.

The study, published Wednesday in BMJ, found that pregnant women who lived within 2,000 meters (approximately 1.2 miles) of a highly-sprayed agricultural area in California had children who were 10 to 16 percent more likely to develop autism and 30 percent more likely to develop severe autism that impacted their intellectual ability. If the children were exposed to pesticides during their first year of life, the risk they would develop autism went up to 50 percent.

While the results do not prove that pesticide exposure caused the children to develop autism, they do raise concerns about the consequences of pesticide exposure, something it is difficult for pregnant women or new mothers and their partners to control. "I would hope that these findings would make some policy makers think about effective public health policy measures to protect populations who may be vulnerable and living in areas that could put them at higher risk," lead study author and Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles associate professor Ondine von Ehrenstein told Time Magazine. "Raising awareness in the public may be the way to eventually change practices and agricultural policies." The study looked at nearly 3,000 children diagnosed with autism who were born between 1998 and 2010 and compared them with more than 35,000 other children who were not diagnosed, Health Day reported. Von Ehrenstein told Time that she looked at exposure to 11 pesticides specifically that had been linked to intellectual impairment in animals and smaller human populations. The pesticides studied included diazinon, permethrin and chlorpyrifos. Chlorpyrifos has been the center of controversy recently as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the direction of Andrew Wheeler has demanded a new trial after a court ordered the agency to ban the pesticide that was found unsafe by its own scientistsIOM donates 100,000 to Cyclone Appeal

The Manx Government has made a donation to the African Cyclone appeal.

Chief Minister Howard Quayle tweeted that 100,000 is to be made available to the Disaster Emergencies Committee.

Itll go to help people affected by the cyclone which has caused widespread devastation in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

Up to 2.6m people have been affected.New Zealand broadcast Muslim call to pray on TV, radio

Nationwide silence observed to show respect for victims of Christchurch terror attacks.

New Zealand broadcast the Muslim call for prayer on national television and radio Friday as a sign of solidarity with that community after recent terror attacks in the country.

TWO MINUTES OF SILENCE

Friday marked exactly one week since the attacks in which at least 50 Muslims were killed when a terrorist opened fire on worshipers during weekly Friday prayers at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in Christchurch.

Memorial services were held in all provinces of New Zealand and two minutes of silence were observed as a mark of respect for the victims.

ENCOURAGED WOMEN TO WEAR HEADSCARVES

New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Wednesday encouraged women to wear headscarves when attending the two minutes of silence. Ardern joined thousands gathered in Christchurch for prayers outside Hagley mosque.

"New Zealand mourns with you, we are one," she said, according to TRT World. A New Zealander spearheaded an event Thursday to show solidarity with the victims. Raewyn Rasch started the Scarves in Solidarity campaign, encouraging women to wear a scarf around their heads to support Muslim women in Christchurch.

International attention has been drawn to New Zealand since last weeks terror attacks, bringing the rising Islamophobia in Western countries to focus.The terrorist streamed the massacre for 17 minutes on his social media platform. Brenton Harrison Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, is charged with the massacre.

New Zealand broadcast Muslim call to pray on TV, radio WATCHPentagon spokesman denies Trumps statements over Daesh defeat

Trump has previously announced the defeat of the terror organization, but sleeper cells of fighters remain in Syria.

The Pentagon's chief spokesman is refusing to say whether the last ISIS stronghold in Syria has fallen a day after Donald Trump announced the caliphate's demise for the fourth time in as many months.

"WE CONTINUE TO FIGHT AGAINST ISIS"

"Wherever ISIS exists, we will continue to pursue them with our partners and allies in the region," Charles Summers told reporters on Thursday at a Pentagon media event.

When asked if the fight to clear ISIS from Syria's Middle Euphrates River Valley has ended, Summers replied, "We continue to fight against ISIS wherever they may be."UK academics discuss what comes next for Brexit

With just a week to go before scheduled divorce date, event at Essex University discusses contingencies.

With just a week left before the scheduled date of Brexit, talks are underway for an extension requested by British Prime Minister Theresa May for the UKs divorce from the EU.

"PEOPLE'S VOTE"

Campaigns are growing louder for a second referendum and even revoking Article 50 to remain in the bloc. Some 1 million people are planning to attend a massive rally for a Peoples Vote on Saturday in central London. An event Thursday, one of many being held in the British capital at the moment, looked into various possibilities. Steve Peers from Essex University, an expert on the European Union, thinks there might be a longer extension to negotiate a softer version of Brexit. One way or another the parliament would find a majority to ask her to renegotiate the future relationship and that could be done perhaps in a shorter period, he told Anadolu Agency at an event organized at Kings College.

"THE LABOUR PARTY SUPPORTS IT BUT IN AN AMBIGUOUS AND INDIRECT WAY"

The event, Brexit: What Now?, also featured Anand Menon and Sara Hobolt from the London School of Economics. Peers argued it does not look like there is a majority in parliament for a Peoples Vote. The Labour Party supports it but in an ambiguous and indirect way, he said. Even if the party supports a second referendum, there still might not be a parliamentary majority as there is a backlash within the party as some MPs are on the Leave side, he said. Peers suggested that local elections in May might stop Labour MPs from weighing in on a second referendum.

Hobolt said there is growing support for a second referendum in the UK but it is not so overwhelming. The second referendum is mainly supported by people who voted to remain, Hobolt told Anadolu Agency. Most Leave voters are still very much against it. Hobolt said the outcome of a second referendum might be to remain as it looks like there is a majority for it but it is a small remain majority. And we know a lot of things can happen in referendum campaigns. But that's the way the public opinion is moving, said Hobolt.

She said the main messages in a campaign for a second referendum and who would mobilize more voters would play important parts in how people would vote. Events over the next few days are expected to loom large in the fate of Brexit.UN council opposes Israeli occupation of Golan Heights

UN Human Rights Council calls on Israel to comply with UN resolutions.

The UN Human Rights Council on Friday passed a resolution opposing the Israeli occupation of Golan Heights and urging Israel to comply with the UN resolutions.

26 VOTES ACCEPTED

The resolution was accepted by 26 votes in favor, 16 against and 5 abstentions. This came a day after Trump said it was time for the US to fully recognize Israels sovereignty over the Golan Heights

Israel has long pushed Washington to recognize its claim over the territory it seized from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel occupies roughly two-thirds of the wider Golan Heights as a de facto result of the conflict. It moved to formally annex the territory in 1981 an action unanimously rejected at the time by the UN Security Council.

Todays resolution called on Israel to allow Syrians in the occupied Golan Heights to visit their families, access of international institutions to the region and release all Syrian detainees, including those who have been held in Israeli jails for 30 years. Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Slovakia, Spain, Togo, Ukraine and the UK voted against the resolution.

Notably, the US State Department last week officially referred to the Golan Heights as an Israeli-controlled territory. Previously, it had consistently referred to the region as Israeli-occupied. Last November, the US for the first time voted against an annual UN resolution condemning Israel's continued occupation of the Golan. In all, 151 nations voted in support, with just Israel and the US voting against.Researchers have discovered an early Cambrian fossil assemblage located along the bank of the Danshui River in China. It contains more than 50 previously undescribed animal species, they say. According to the results, this new fossil assemblage has the potential to rival important, previously described Cambrian sites, such as the Burgess Shale. A little more than 500 million years ago, early animal life on Earth exploded in diversity and form in an evolutionary event that would graft the initial branches of most major animal phyla onto the tree of animal life - the Cambrian Explosion. Much of what is known about the Cambrian Explosion has been learned from the fossil record at sites where the geological echoes of this early life have been preserved. Perhaps no other assemblages to date have been more important to our understanding of the Cambrian Explosion than the Burgess Shale and Chengjiang localities - both of which contain large and diverse collections of well-preserved fossils, including soft-bodied organisms, which rarely make it into the fossil record. Here, Dongjing Fu and colleagues present a new early Cambrian fossil assemblage - the Qingjiang biota - which, not only rivals the quality and taxonomic diversity of Burgess Shale and Chengjiang but was also found to contain an unexpectedly large number of previously unknown species. According to Fu et al., of the 101 animal species identified from the site thus far, over half (53%) are previously undescribed. What's more, the notable differences between this and the contemporaneous Chengjiang biota suggests that both developed in different paleoenvironmental contexts. According to the authors, the unique aspects of Qingjiang have the potential to greatly inform the understanding of early animal evolution. "The treasure trove of the Qinjiang biota provides an exciting opportunity to explore how paleoenvironmental conditions influenced ecological structuring and evolutionary drivers during the Cambrian Explosion," writes Allison Daley in a related Perspective.

###There is a wide variety of animals living on the Arctic seabed. Attached to rocks, they feed by removing nutrients from the water using filters or tentacles. But it can take decades for these colonies to become established, and they probably don't achieve their natural diversity until much later. These are the findings of a unique 18-year study by researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), which has now been published in the scientific journal Limnology and Oceanography.

Some sponge species stand on rocks like Roman vases, while the tentacles of feather stars (comatulida) and sea lilies sway elegantly in the currents. When remotely operated underwater vehicles travel around the bed of the Arctic deep sea, their cameras regularly capture images of these sedentary creatures. One of the most important habitats for these organisms is the so-called "dropstones" - rocks and boulders that are incorporated into glaciers on land and then transported out to sea. Once the ice melts, the rocks sink to the seabed, where they provide precisely the hard substrate that many of these species require.

But how long does it take before the first settlers in the Arctic deep sea take advantage of this? And how does the community develop further? "Until now we knew next to nothing about this," explains Michael Klages from the AWI. A few studies have investigated these questions in the Antarctic, but they focused on the shallow sea areas, where the conditions are different.

Now, there are new findings from the deep-sea observatory HAUSGARTEN, located in the Fram Strait between Svalbard and Greenland, where the AWI conducts various long-term ecological studies. In July 1999, Michael Klages and his colleagues from the AWI's deep-sea research group placed a heavy metal frame on the seabed at a depth of 2,500 metres. So-called settlement panels made of clinker bricks, Plexiglas and wood were attached to the frame to offer possible substrates for sedentary deep-sea inhabitants. Then it was a case of waiting to see what happened.

In 2003 and 2011, the team sent a remotely operated underwater vehicle to the construction, and in late August 2017 the frame was finally brought back to the surface. The first author of the recent publication, Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser, who now works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US state of Massachusetts, had the task of carefully examining the settlement panels. This involved counting, collecting and taxonomically classifying the individual organisms.

"In this investigation we saw that colonisation of such habitats in the Arctic deep sea occurs extremely slowly," summarises Michael Klages. After four years, only single-celled organisms belonging to the foraminifera were found on the panels, and after twelve years the polyp Halisiphonia arctica was the only multicellular animal present. Even after 18 years, there were only 13 species of multicellular invertebrates.

However, despite the low diversity, the researchers haven't concluded that natural solid substrates are not an important habitat - on the contrary: "Without them, a number of sedentary animals wouldn't exist in the Arctic deep sea," stresses Michael Klages. But the waste products of civilisation that are now ubiquitous in the oceans don't appear to be a good substitute - despite the fact that the AWI team have seen a sea lily growing on a plastic bottle in one of the pictures taken by the remotely operated underwater vehicle. "That's what gave us the idea of using Plexiglas in our experiment," the researcher explains. "We wanted to see whether it could be colonised just as well as a near-natural substrate." Apparently that's not the case. At least, after 18 years significantly fewer animals were found on the plastic than on the clinker bricks. But the latter couldn't compete with a nearby rocky reef, where 65 different invertebrates were identified. It is possible that even almost two decades isn't long enough for the panels to achieve their theoretical species diversity. The rocky reef mentioned is considerably older in comparison, and so has had more time to attract a wider range of inhabitants.

The findings provide important insights into the sensitivity of deep-sea ecosystems. "If disturbances there destroy the sedentary inhabitants of the seabed, it can take decades for the colonies to recover," says Michael Klages. In the Arctic, such disturbances could occur as a result of fishing, or drilling for oil and gas. However, much more far-reaching consequences are to be expected, e.g. in the depths of the Pacific, where large-scale manganese nodule mining is planned.

###

Original Study: Kirstin Meyer, Melanie Bergmann, Thomas Soltwedel, Michael Klages: Recruitment of Arctic deep-sea invertebrates: results from a long-term hard-substrate colonization experiment at the LTER observatory HAUSGARTEN. Limnology and Oceanography (2019). DOI: 10.1002/lno.11160And teens are less likely to carry a weapon at any location

Adopting stricter state gun laws is linked to a safer school experience for students, finds research published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.

Strengthening gun laws at state level was associated with teens being less likely to report being threatened or injured with a weapon at school, miss at least one day of school due to feeling unsafe, or to carry a weapon at any location.

Among 1.3 million discipline incidents reported in US public schools during the 2013-2014 school year, 1 in 20 were related to weapon possession, write the authors. And a particularly dangerous part of school crime is gun violence, they add.

Previous studies have explored the effect of youth-orientated gun laws on non-fatal injuries, suicide rates, deaths from unintentional shootings and firearm homicides among teens.

But no conclusive evidence was found and little is known on the link between state-level gun laws and school safety.

So to shed some light on this, researchers looked at the associations of stricter gun laws with students' weapon carrying and their perception of school safety.

They used data from the Youth Risk Behaviors Surveys (YRBS) conducted between 1999-2015, which included information on 926,639 teens across 45 states, who were all in 9th to 12th grade.

Students reported on weapon carrying at school, the number of times they experienced weapon threats or injuries at school, the number of school days missed due to feeling unsafe, and weapon carrying at any location.

For each state and year, 133 gun laws were combined into an index of gun control strength, with higher scores corresponding to a stricter gun law environment.

The researchers controlled for individual and state characteristics, as well as year and state fixed events. This included age, sex and race, as well as sociodemographic characteristics such as the unemployment rate, crime rates and state anti-bullying policy.

During the study period, many states strengthened their prohibitions of high-risk guns, and introduced laws preventing individuals with a history of domestic violence from owning or buying guns.

But 20 states allowed the use of a gun for self-defense without duty to retreat.

Stronger gun control (i.e. a 15-point increase in the score) was associated with a 0.8-percentage point decrease in the probability of being threatened or injured with a weapon at school (overall prevalence 7%), a 1.9-percentage point decrease in the probability of carrying a weapon at any location (overall prevalence 16%), and a 1.1-percentage point decrease in the probability of missing school due to feeling unsafe (overall prevalence 6.1%).

Overall, weapon carrying was more common among white students, compared with black and Hispanic students, while perceived threats were less common among white students compared with all other racial groups.

And stricter gun laws were more strongly associated with lower rates of weapon carrying among male students compared with female students.

Black students were more likely to carry weapons at school specifically in response to a strengthening in gun laws, but this may indicate a replacement for a firearm, say the authors.

This is an observational study, and may not be representative of all states. What's more, the information from students was volunteered, and the authors write that teens "might misreport certain behaviors due to social desirability."

But the research highlights that over the last two decades, 17 states experienced a weakening of gun control laws, which may facilitate teens' access to guns and increase levels of violence in schools, write the authors.

"With the prevalence of weapon threats and fights at school decreasing only slightly, and the percentage of students who miss school on the rise, school safety represents a policy priority across the fields of health and education," they conclude.

###Updating the 2013 edition, the new release describes important changes that have since been implemented in the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) safeguards system and documents the IAEA's verification role in Iran

UPTON, NY--The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory published the second edition of Deterring Nuclear Proliferation: The Importance of IAEA Safeguards. The textbook provides a history of the origins of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and an introduction to the ways in which IAEA verifies nation states' nuclear nonproliferation commitments.

"This book will benefit students studying or professionals working in the field of nuclear nonproliferation, and it will give anyone entering the field a running start," said primary author and Brookhaven Lab contractor Michael Rosenthal, who formerly served as head of Brookhaven's Division of Nonproliferation and Safeguards and as a member of the Senior Executive Service within the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Rosenthal and the other co-authors--Leslie Fishbone, Linda Gallini, the late Allan Krass, Myron Kratzer, Jonathan Sanborn, Warren Stern, Barclay Ward, and Norman Wulf--are all experts in nuclear nonproliferation and international security. They have played key nonproliferation roles at the IAEA, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Brookhaven, and universities.

The new edition describes important changes to the implementation of IAEA safeguards since the first edition was published in 2013. Safeguards are technical measures for verifying that states are honoring their international legal commitments to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Traditionally, the safeguards approach focused primarily on the monitoring of nuclear facilities. Today, the IAEA has adopted a state-level approach, which takes into account a state's nuclear, and nuclear-related, activities and capabilities as a whole.

The second edition also chronicles the IAEA's role in implementing safeguards in Iran. The section includes a historical look at the sequence of events that culminated in the negotiation of a multilateral agreement that places strict bounds on Iran's nuclear program. The IAEA continues to verify that Iran is complying with its international and multilateral commitments to limit its nuclear program to peaceful purposes.

The book has been praised by several leaders engaged in efforts to ensure the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.

"Today, policymakers and practitioners who lack basic understanding of the history, rationale, and technical details of the complex architecture of the international nuclear nonproliferation regime and the role of the IAEA safeguards system are grappling with urgent proliferation challenges with one arm tied behind their back," said Ambassador Susan Burk, former Special Representative of the President of the United States for Nuclear Nonproliferation. "Fortunately, Deterring Nuclear Proliferation: The Importance of IAEA Safeguards, fills that knowledge gap. It is a unique resource for understanding the IAEA and is a must-read for security professionals developing and implementing U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy, and for anyone interested in understanding how the nonproliferation regime that we take for granted works to reduce nuclear dangers."

According to Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association and publisher of the journal Arms Control Today, "The latest edition of Deterring Nuclear Proliferation: The Importance of IAEA Safeguards is an invaluable, comprehensive guide to the evolving nuclear safeguards system that undergirds the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. Whether you are a scholar or researcher, a diplomat, a regulator, a student, or an expert practitioner, you will find this book to be a valuable and authoritative resource."

And Christian Kessler, who was a senior U.S. State Department official and nuclear expert, adjunct professor at the University of Washington and Stony Brook University, and member of the U.N. Security Council's Panel of Experts on Iran, wrote, "Deterring Nuclear Proliferation: The Importance of IAEA Safeguards examines the legal, political, and technical factors that shaped evolution of the international system to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, written by a team of experts who helped shape that evolution. Both detailed and comprehensive, it is a unique and uniquely authoritative resource for scholars, educators, and students seeking to learn how we got from Hiroshima to today."

###

A pre-release version of the book is available for download as a free e-book by individuals with .gov and .edu email addresses. If you do not have a .gov or .edu email address but intend to use the book for governmental or educational purposes, please request a copy from wstern@bnl.gov.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

Follow @BrookhavenLab on Twitter or find us on Facebook.Understanding how chemical reactions happen on tiny crystals in liquid solutions is central to a variety of fields, including materials synthesis and heterogeneous catalysis, but obtaining such an understanding requires that scientists observe reactions as they occur.

By using coherent X-ray diffraction techniques, scientists can measure the exterior shape of and strain in nanocrystalline materials with a high degree of precision. However, carrying out such measurements requires precise control of the position and angles of the tiny crystal with respect to the incoming X-ray beam. Traditionally, this has meant adhering or gluing the crystal to a surface, which in turn strains the crystal, thus altering its structure and potentially affecting reactivity.

With optical tweezers, you can capture a single particle in its native state in solution and watch its structural evolution.  Linda Young, Argonne distinguished fellow

Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energys (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago have developed a new technique that combines the power of nanoscale tractor beams with high-powered X-rays, enabling them to position and manipulate crystals in solution that are not in contact with substrates.

The tractor beam technique is known as optical tweezers, which was also coincidentally awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics, because it allows samples to be manipulated using only light.

While ordinary optical tweezers involve a single focused laser beam, the holographic optical tweezers used in the study involve lasers precisely modified with a spatial light modulator. These lasers are reflected off a mirror to create an interference pattern of hotspots that are both more localized than a simply focused laser beam and have rapidly reconfigurable locations. The electric field gradient of these focused hotspots attracts the polarizable crystal and holds it in place.

With a pair of tweezers engaged  each at one end of the crystal  the Argonne scientists could manipulate the semiconductor microcrystal in three dimensions with high precision in the presence of a liquid solution and without exposing it to other surfaces.

Usually, when people look at microcrystals using X-ray diffraction, theyre glued onto a sample holder, which causes a distortion, said Argonne distinguished fellow Linda Young, a corresponding author on the study. But now, with optical tweezers, you can capture a single particle in its native state in solution and watch its structural evolution. In principle, you can add reactants, capture dissolution or reaction and monitor changes at an atomic level.

By gaining the ability to manipulate the sample using only light, Young and her colleagues were able to take advantage of the coherent X-rays produced by Argonnes Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Using a technique called Bragg coherent diffraction imaging (CDI), the researchers were able to examine the crystals structure under real conditions and from a number of different angles.

By pairing optical tweezers with Bragg CDI, scientists now have a new way to explore materials in liquid media, explained Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) scientist Yuan Gao, the first author of the study. Our discovery comes from a combination of different techniques  including pairing lasers with the coherent beam from the APS, he said. To make the experiment work, we needed the nanofabrication technique at the Center for Nanoscale Materials to make the sample cell as well. The Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) is also a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

According to Young, the technique might be useful for a wide range of future studies, including nucleation and crystal growth. Typically, people look at isolated nanocrystalline samples in air or in vacuum. We wanted to be able control such objects in the liquid phase. For example, we wanted to be able to watch catalysis or crystallization unfold in real time with the precision that is afforded by X-ray crystallography, she said.

Gao pointed to the stability afforded by the optical tweezers as a primary advantage for future coherent X-ray experiments. Coherent diffraction is very sensitive to position and orientation of the sample, and this experiment demonstrated the possibilities of this new technique, he said. Because of the stability of the technique, investigators were able to obtain coherent diffraction data, which allowed them to reconstruct the sample with sub-nanometer accuracy, revealing sub-nanometer scale defects and grain boundaries within the ostensibly crystalline ZnO microcrystal.

As we look toward the upgrade of the APS, which will increase the brightness of the X-ray beams by orders of magnitude, these measurements will be much faster and provide even more exciting insight into how samples change in time, added Ross Harder, an Argonne physicist at the APS who is an author on the paper.

Eventually, the researchers would like to extend the technique to capture the ultrafast evolution of the crystal when it is excited by a laser pulse, said University of Chicago chemistry professor Norbert Scherer, another author of the paper. This is the first step in achieving our larger ambition, which is to visualize the time-dependent structural dynamics of how the lattice changes, he said.

To carry out the experiment, the researchers relied on the creation of microfluidic components at CNM. Electrodynamics simulations were also carried out at CNMs Carbon high-performance computing cluster. University of Chicago researchers contributed their expertise on the holographic optical tweezer technique.

###

A paper based on the study, Three-dimensional optical trapping and orientation of microparticles for coherent X-ray diffraction imaging, appeared in the February 11 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Other authors included Argonne scientists Ross Harder, Stephen Southworth, Jeffrey Guest and Leo Ocola. Researchers from Clarkson University and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County also contributed.

The research was partially supported by DOEs Office of Science. Data analysis was performed in part by the National Synchrotron Lightsource-II, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at BNL.

About Argonnes Center for Nanoscale Materials

The Center for Nanoscale Materials is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOEs Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit https://science.energy.gov/bes/suf/user-facilities/nanoscale-science-research-centers/.

About the Advanced Photon Source

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nations first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance Americas scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energys Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energys Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit the Office of Science website.(Jena, Germany) The Italian Crested Newt - Triturus carnifex - eats anything and everything it can overpower. Earthworms, mosquito larvae and water fleas are on its menu, but also snails, small fish and even its own offspring. A research team led by Dr Egon Heiss of Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (Germany) has studied the newt's chewing behaviour and has made an astounding discovery.

Triturus carnifex is an amphibian of the order Caudata and is a true salamander. "According to the textbooks, amphibians swallow their prey whole, but we have been able to refute this," says Heiss. Together with doctoral student Daniel Schwarz and Dr Nicolai Konow of the University of Massachusetts, Heiss has succeeded in proving that the crested newts do actually chew their prey, but in a way that is different from that of most other land-based vertebrates. The researchers have now presented their findings in the specialist publication Journal of Experimental Biology (doi:10.1242/jeb.189886).

Palatal teeth kill prey

"This newt uses what are called its palatal teeth to kill its prey and also to break it up," explains Heiss. This means that the jaw teeth are mainly used to catch or hold the prey. With the help of the tongue, the prey is then rubbed rhythmically against the palate. The palate is equipped with very sharp teeth, around 0.5 to one millimetre long, which are constantly replaced by new teeth. These teeth can, for example, tear open the extremely tough cuticula of fly maggots. "This kills the prey and, at the same time, helps the digestive secretions to take effect," says Heiss. For the newt, this is also a form of life insurance: some insect larvae have such a strong bite that they would be able to bore through the predator's body. The first impetus for the surprising research result came on a research visit to Antwerp (Belgium), when Nicolai Konow and Egon Heiss observed a newt feeding. The biologists were intrigued by the amphibian's head, jaw and tongue movements after it had seized its prey. "The newt actually appeared to be chewing," says Heiss. The researchers were able to obtain a clear idea of what was happening with the help of the X-ray video unit at the Institute of Zoology and Evolutionary Research of the University of Jena.

Salamanders chew like primeval land-based vertebrates

The newt's chewing behaviour prompts the question of how it can be explained in the context of evolution. "We can assume that real palatal teeth were present in early land vertebrates, and we suspect that the 'tongue against palate' chewing mechanism, as seen in newts, is something that goes back to the early days of land-based vertebrates," says Heiss. Very similar chewing mechanisms can indeed be found in ancient mammals such as the echidna and the duckbilled platypus, but also in the manatee. Although in these animals the palatal teeth have been replaced by rough keratin structures, the creatures still rub their food against the palate.

The tongue originated when vertebrates came onto land

From the point of view of evolution, the move from water to land brought about change in animals' chewing apparatus. A key role is played by the tongue, which only developed after vertebrates left the water. It is crucial for enabling chewing, as it moves food to the right place in the mouth. "With fish, the water current helps to do this," explains Heiss. A similar change occurs in amphibian larvae; during metamorphosis, the gills of amphibians transform into a tongue when the larvae leave the water.

The findings now presented are the first results from the research project 'Form, Function and Evolution of Food Manipulation in Urodela', which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and was launched at the beginning of 2017. The project runs until the end of 2019 and maybe during that time, Triturus carnifex will be persuaded to reveal more secrets.

###Boulder, Colo., USA: Glaciers that drain ice sheets such as Antarctica or Greenland often flow into the ocean, ending in near-vertical cliffs. As the glacier flows into the sea, chunks of the ice break off in calving events. Although much calving occurs when the ocean melts the front of the ice, and ice cliff above falls down, a new study presents another method of calving: slumping. And this process could break off much larger chunks of ice at a quicker rate.

The ice-cliff research was spurred by a helicopter ride over Jakobshavn and Helheim glaciers on Greenland's eastern coast. Helheim ends abruptly in the ocean, in near-vertical ice-cliffs reaching 30-stories high (100 meters). On the flight, scientists viewed large cracks (called crevasses) on top of the ice that marched towards the end of the glacier.

"Geologists have spent decades -- centuries -- worrying about slumps," says Richard Alley, co-author of the new paper in Geology. A slump occurs when mass of rock or sediment loses some of its strength, breaks away from its neighboring land, and slides down a slope. Typically, slumps are marked by a steep scarp where the material broke away, followed by a block of material moved downslope.

Alley says the research team noted that features on Helheim glacier are typical of what you might see in a slump-prone terrestrial landscape and they wondered if ice might suffer the same fate. "You've got a crevasse that serves as a head scarp and then you've got the stresses [within the ice] maximized down at the water level," he says.

To test if slumping occurs on ice cliffs, the team monitored Helheim glacier during a calving event, using real-aperture terrestrial radar interferometery. They measured speed, position, and motion of the calving ice. The researchers observed an ice-flow acceleration just before an initial slump, followed by a rotating, full ice-thickness calving of the glacier -- including the entire remaining ice-cliff, reaching both above and below the water line.

Removing the weight of the upper ice by slumping encourages the underlying ice to pop upward. "Because it's still attached at the back, it's going to rotate a little bit," says Alley. The rotation causes a crack to form at the bottom of the glacier as the ice flexes. In turn, the crack can weaken the ice, creating a large calving event -- all triggered by the initial slump on top of the ice cliff.

After observing the slump-triggered calving event, the team modeled when slumping events were most likely to occur on an ice cliff. The modeling looked at tensile, shear, and compressive failure for ice cliffs, and included characteristics of the ice. The scientists found that cliffs reaching more than 100 meters of ice above water were likely to have slumping occur.

Alley says regular calving events happen relatively slowly, such as when the ice front melts over time, undercutting the ice and weakening the cliff. "But that's not going to go really, really, really fast because you have to wait for the melting to undercut it," he says.

With slumping, the calving occurs without waiting for the melt. "We'll go slump... basal crevasse... boom," he says, noting that when the calving happens it will take the 100 meters of ice above the water -- and the 900 meters below the water -- very quickly.

And 1000 meters of ice calving at once isn't the limit. Alley says that in some places in Antarctica, the glacial ice bed can be 1500 to 2000 meters below sea level, creating a much taller cliff above water. He says the worry is that taller cliffs are even more susceptible to slumping. "The scary thing is that if pieces of west Antarctica start doing what Helheim is doing then over the next hundred years models indicate that we get rapid sea level rise at rates that surpass those predicted," says Alley.

Understanding the slump-break process has been a collaborative effort, Alley says, and more investigations are planned for the near future. "We want to understand what are the rules for [ice] breakage by this process and others," says Alley, adding that they hope to collect more observational data as well as refine their models to better understand the slump-break process. "There's still work to be done."

###

The research was supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the New York University Abu Dhabi Research Institute.

FEATURED ARTICLE

Ice-cliff failure via retrogressive slumping

Byron Parizek (parizek@psu.edu), Knut Christianson, Richard B. Alley, Denis Voytenko, Irena Va?kova, Timothy H. Dixon, Ryan T. Walker, David M. Holland. URL: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/569567/ice-cliff-failure-via-retrogressive-slumping.

GEOLOGY articles are online at http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/content/early/recent. Representatives of the media may obtain complimentary articles by contacting Kea Giles at the e-mail address above. Please discuss articles of interest with the authors before publishing stories on their work, and please make reference to GEOLOGY in articles published. Non-media requests for articles may be directed to GSA Sales and Service, gsaservice@geosociety.org.

http://www.geosociety.orgThe e-aq species is difficult to observe directly because it is short-lived and cannot be separated or concentrated. This rules out using direct structural approaches, diffraction or NMR spectroscopy to explore its structure. Though some properties including spectra in UV and IR-regions and the binding energy have been directly observed, the general lack of direct experimental measurements of the structure of the hydrated electron calls for theory.

Reliable modelling of the hydrated electron is at least as challenging as the experimental approach though and the limitations of the computational approaches applied so far have led to considerable theoretical uncertainty. Researchers have not, for example, been able to agree on whether or not the hydrated electron occupies a cavity. Though most theoretical studies suggest that it does, non-cavity models have also proven accurate. Another point of discussion is linked to the distinguishable surface and bulk structures of the hydrated electron.

In the paper, researchers Vladimir Rybkin and Jan Wilhelm at the University of Zurich and Joost VadeVondele at ETH Zurich and CSCS used the first molecular dynamics simulation of the bulk hydrated electron based on correlated wavefunction theory to provide conclusive evidence in favor of a persistent tetrahedral cavity made up of four water molecules. They also showed that there are no stable noncavity structures in the bulk hydrated electron.

The scientists arrived at their model through careful consideration of what features the most accurate approach must have. They wanted it to be based on molecular dynamics to capture the formation and dynamic transformations of the cavity. They needed a many-body correlated electronic structure level to avoid delocalization error and to allow for the correlation effects that have been found crucial in predicting the solvation of the electron accurately without empirical parameters. They wanted the simulation to be performed in the bulk under periodic boundary conditions to avoid formation of the surface structure and, finally, the method should provide an accurate description of liquid water.

The MD simulation they devised--the very first dynamic simulation of a complex chemical species in the condensed phase at the correlated wave function level of theory--fulfills all of these requirements. This was the first critical step. The second was actually managing to carry it out. Such calculations have been technically impossible until recent advances--including those made in their own groups--have allowed for massively parallel manybody theory calculations in the condensed phase on stateart supercomputers such as those as CSCS. It nonetheless took them about 1 million node hours on the Piz Daint supercomputer, Europe's fastest.

The model showed that a cavity is formed within 250 femtoseconds after the excess electron is added to the unperturbed liquid water. Critically, the simulation failed to find any evidence of noncavity structures of the bulk hydrated electron in either stable or metastable states: this provides much stronger theoretical evidence for the cavity model.

###

The paper was funded in part by NCCR MARVEL.Visible imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite showed Tropical Cyclone Trevor filling up Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria.

The Gulf of Carpentaria is a large, shallow sea. It is surrounded on three sides by northern Australia and bounded by the Arafura Sea to the north.

Trevor had crossed the Cape York Peninsula on March 21 and moved into the Gulf. On On March 22 the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite provided a visible image of Trevor. Satellite imagery revealed that Trevor's clouds had filled up the Gulf. It showed that bands of thunderstorms circled more tightly around the center of circulation than the previous day.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology or ABM updated warnings and watches on March 22, 2019. The Warning Zone includes Alyangula in the Northern Territory to Burketown in Queensland, and inland parts of the eastern Carpentaria District and the northwest Gulf Country, including Groote Eylandt, Mornington Island, Borroloola, Robinson River, Wollogorang, McArthur River, Cape Crawford, Creswell Downs, Brunette Downs and Doomadgee. The Watch Zone includes inland parts of the northwest Gulf Country in Queensland and the western Carpentaria and central Barkly Districts in the Northern Territory.

At 8 a.m. EDT (9:30 p.m. Australian Central Standard Time or ACST) on March 22, 2019, maximum sustained winds near Trevor's center were near 90 miles (150 kilometers) per hour. Trevor was centered near 15.0 degrees south latitude and 138.9 degrees east longitude. That's about 110 miles (185 kilometers) north or Mornington Island.

ABM noted "Dangerous conditions are expected tonight along the southern Gulf of Carpentaria coast as Severe Tropical Cyclone Trevor approaches. The cyclone is expected to cross the coast during Saturday morning, March 23, between Port McArthur and the Northern Territory/Queensland border."

Destructive winds, very heavy rainfall and storm surge are expected with this storm. ABM said "Coastal residents between Port Roper and the NT/Queensland Border are specifically warned of a very dangerous storm tide as the cyclone center approaches the coast. Tides will rise significantly above the normal high tide, with damaging waves and very dangerous flooding during Friday night and Saturday. As the cyclone approaches the coast, a storm tide is also expected between the Northern Territory/Queensland border and Burketown. Large waves may produce minor flooding along the foreshore."

For updated forecasts from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, visit: http://www.bom.gov.au

###CORVALLIS, Ore. - The string of volcanoes in the Cascades Arc, ranging from California's Mt. Lassen in the south to Washington's Mt. Baker in the north, have been studied by geologists and volcanologists for over a century. Spurred on by spectacular events such as the eruption of Mount Lassen in 1915 and Mount St. Helens in 1980, scientists have studied most of the Cascade volcanoes in detail, seeking to work out where the magma that erupts comes from and what future eruptions might look like.

However, mysteries still remain about why nearby volcanoes often have radically different histories of eruption or erupt different types of magma. Now scientists would like to find out why - both for the Cascades and for other volcanic ranges.

In a perspective essay published today (March 22) in Nature Communications, scientists argue for more "synthesis" research looking at the big picture of volcanology to complement myriad research efforts looking at single volcanoes.

"The study of volcanoes is fascinating in detail, and it has largely been focused on research into individual volcanoes rather than the bigger picture," said Adam Kent, a volcano expert at Oregon State University and a co-author on the essay. "We now have the insight and data to go beyond looking at just Mount St. Helens and other well-known volcanoes. We can take a step back and ask why is St. Helens different from Mount Adams, why is that different from Mount Hood?"

The study takes a novel approach to this topic. "One way to do this is to consider the heat it took to create each of the volcanoes in the Cascades Arc, for example, and also compare this to the local seismic wave speeds and heat flow within the crust, Kent said. "Linking these diverse data sources together this way gives us a better glimpse into the past, but offer some guidance on what we might expect in the future."

The need for studying volcanoes more thoroughly is simple, noted Christy Till of Arizona State University, lead author of the Nature Communications essay.

Worldwide almost a billion people live in areas at risk from volcanic eruptions, 90 percent of which live in the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire.

The subduction of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate beneath the North American plate is the ultimate driver for the formation of the Cascade Range, as well as many of the earthquakes the Northwest has experienced. Subduction results in deep melting of the Earth's mantle, and the magma then heads upward towards the crust and surface, eventually reaching the surface to produce volcanoes.

But there are differences among the volcanoes, the researchers note, including in the north and south of the Cascade Range.

"The volcanoes in the north stand out because they stand alone," Kent said. "In the south, you also have recognizable peaks like the Three Sisters and Mount Jefferson, but you also many thousands of smaller volcanoes like Lava Butte and those in the McKenzie Pass area in between. Our work suggests that, together with the larger volcanoes, these small centers require almost twice the amount of magma being input into the crust in the southern part of the Cascade Range."

Why is that important?

"If you live around a volcano, you have to be prepared for hazards and the hazards are different with each different type of volcano," Kent said. "The northern Cascades are likely to have eruptions in the future, but we know where they'll probably be - at the larger stratovolcanoes like Mount Rainier, Mount Baker and Glacier Peak. In the south the larger volcanoes might also have eruptions, but then we have these large fields of smaller - so called 'monogenetic' volcanoes. For these it is harder to pinpoint where future eruptions will occur."

The field of volcanology has progressed quite a bit, the researchers acknowledge, and the need now exists to integrate some of the methodology of individual detailed studies to give a more comprehensive look at the entire volcanic system. The past is the best informer of the future.

"If you look at the geology of a volcano, you can tell what kind of eruption is most likely to happen," Kent said. "Mount Hood, for example, is known to have had quite small eruptions in the past, and the impact of these is mostly quite local. Crater Lake, on the other hand, spread ash across much of the contiguous United States.

"What we would like to know is why one volcano turns out to be a Mount Hood while another develops into a Crater Lake, with a very different history of eruptions. This requires us to think about the data that we have in new ways."

The 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens was a wake-up call to the threat of volcanoes in the continental United States, and though noteworthy, its eruption was relatively minor. The amount of magma involved in the eruption was estimated to be 1 kilometer cubed (enough to fill about 400,000 Olympic swimming pools), whereas the eruption of Mt. Mazama 6,000 years ago that created Crater Lake was 50 km cubed, or 50 times as great.

The researchers say the process of building and tearing down volcanoes continues today, though it is difficult to observe on a day-to-day basis.

"If you could watch a time-lapse camera over millions of years, you would see volcanoes building up slowly, and then eroding fairly quickly," said Kent, who is in OSU's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. "Sometimes, both are happening at once."

Which of the Cascades is most likely to erupt? The smart money is on Mount St. Helens, because of its recent activity, but many of the volcanoes are still considered active.

"I can tell you unequivocally that Mount Hood will erupt in the future," Kent said. "I just can't tell you when."

For the record, Kent said the odds of Mt. Hood erupting in the next 30 to 50 years are less than 5 percent.

###Portland experiences both extreme heat in the summer months and frequent nuisance flooding in the winter and spring, and that's only expected to worsen with climate change. A new Portland State University study found the potential for flooding and extreme heat is most acute in East Portland's low-income neighborhoods that have fewer green spaces and larger concentrations of less-educated residents.

The PSU research team -- geography graduate students Benjamin Fahy and Emma Brenneman, geography professor Heejun Chang and urban studies and planning professor Vivek Shandas -- mapped winter flood and summer heat hazard potential, then tested it against sociodemographic and physical variables at a neighborhood scale, including income, level of education, population density, green space and the amount of impervious surface area. This study focused on nuisance flooding, the kind of flooding that shuts down roads, overwhelms storm drains and seeps into basements.

Their findings were published in the journal International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

"Not surprisingly, those poorer, low-lying areas on the eastside along Highway 205 are disproportionately exposed to floods and urban heat islands," said Heejun Chang, a geography professor in PSU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the WISE research group or Water as an Integrated System and Environment. "Those are the potential target areas where the city needs to pay attention to."

Among the findings:

High-flood potential areas are located consistently in East Portland along Highway 205, while most low-flood potential areas are found in NW and SW Portland and near the NE-SE Portland transition along I-84.

Most areas with high-heat hazards are clustered in East Portland, as well as North Portland and along major roadways, while low-heat hazard clustering is found in the western hills, central NE and SE Portland.

The areas with the greatest combined hazard potential (both extreme heat and flooding) were clustered in East Portland, SE Portland and North Portland. Conversely, the city's western hills and central NE and SW neighborhoods - wealthier neighborhoods - showed the lowest risk.

The methods used by the team are meant to be replicated by any researcher, practitioner or policy maker interested in identifying which regions of their cities are most at risk and what demographic factors characterize the most vulnerable citizens.

Chang said planting trees is an easy and effective action to ease both urban heat and flooding.

"If you can better manage land, you can better manage water in the urban areas," he said. "During the summer, trees can provide shading and reduce the heat island effect. But during winter, they can intercept the rainwater, hold water in the soils longer, and release water gradually."

Chang said that in some areas where impervious surface areas are too high, green roofs might be a better alternative. He and his students are continuing to look at ways to expand green infrastructure to reduce heat and nuisance flooding potentials. Shandas has worked with Portland city officials to develop an online mapping tool to identify specific locations where expanding tree canopy can improve social and environmental conditions.

Chang said cities also need to better educate the public, as the places likely to experience the most severe impacts of nuisance flooding and extreme heat often lack access to information and the ability to prepare for hazards.

###

The PSU study is part of the larger National Science Foundation-funded Urban Resilience to the Extremes Sustainability Research Network, a project working to analyze the impacts of climate change on 10 cities in North and South America; identify risks and vulnerabilities associated with extreme weather events; and produce scenarios, transitions and plans for resilient urban infrastructure and systems. The other cities are Baltimore, Maryland; Hermosillo, Mexico; Mexico City, Mexico; Miami, Florida; New York, New York; Phoenix, Arizona; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Syracuse, New York; and Valdivia, Chile.

The study was also supported by PSU's Institute for Sustainable Solutions. Shandas is research director of ISS, and Chang is a faculty fellow.HOUSTON - (March 22, 2019) - The light scattered by plasmonic nanoparticles is useful, but some of it gets lost at the surface and scientists are now starting to figure out why.

In novel experiments at Rice University and the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, along with theoretical work at Princeton University, researchers found that molecules placed on the surface of a single gold nanorod affect its plasmonic response by altering the electronic structure of the particle itself.

The finding could enhance applications like catalysis that involve plasmon-driven chemistry.

Plasmons are ripples of electrons that resonate across the surface of a metal nanoparticle when triggered by light. The light they receive at one wavelength, or color, is radiated at the same wavelength, and that can inform researchers about the particle and its environment.

Surface plasmons help sense the presence of chemicals, enable photochemistry and selectively catalyze chemical reactions. But light lost between the particle's surface and the researcher's eye can contain additional information previously not considered.

It had been thought signal loss via plasmon damping was due to chemicals adsorbed to the nanoparticle surface, perhaps through charge transfer from the metal to the chemical substances. But Stephan Link, a professor of chemistry and of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, had doubts that just one explanation would fit all studies.

They led Link, lead author Benjamin Forster and their colleagues to the discovery of an entirely different mechanism, reported this week in Science Advances.

Their strategy was to put two types of identically sized molecules with different atomic arrangements onto single gold nanorods for analysis. These molecules, cage-like carborane thiols, induced surface dipoles in the metal that in turn scattered enough of the plasmons' energy to damp their signal.

That let the researchers see and measure damping directly with no interference from other molecules or other nanorods. The proximity of the thiols, identical except for the placement of one carbon atom, to the nanorod induced unique dipole moments -- the molecules' positive and negative poles that change strength and move like the needle of a compass -- on the metal surface.

Emily Carter, a theoretical-computational scientist and dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton, performed detailed quantum mechanical calculations to test mechanisms that could explain the experiments.

"Plasmonic resonances have a spectral width that, together with resonance wavelengths, gives specific colors," Link said. "A narrow line gives you a truer color. So we looked at how the width of this resonance changes when we put molecules on the particle."

Not just any molecules would do. The carborane thiols, molecules of the exact same size, stick to gold nanoparticles in equal measure but are chemically different enough to change the plasmons' spectral width. That let the researchers measure plasmon damping by each type of molecule without interference from other damping mechanisms.

The plasmons that flow across a surface depend so heavily on the particle's size and shape that little attention had been paid to the effect of chemicals adsorbed to the surface, Forster said.

"If you change the surface of the nanorod, the energy gets lost in different ways," he said. "We didn't understand this at all. But if something loses energy, it's not functioning as you want it to function."

The refractive properties of the surrounding medium and averaging of signals from multiple particles of various size and shape can also affect the signal. That had also made it difficult to analyze the impact of adsorbed chemicals.

"Several contributions determine the plasmon resonance width," Link said. "But there's a fudge factor everybody invokes that nobody had really tackled in a quantitative way. A lot of people blamed charge transfer, meaning excited hot electrons moved from the metal to the molecule.

"We are saying that's not the case here," he said. "It may not be the same every time you put a molecule on a metal particle, but this gives us, for the first time, a complete quantitative study that also doesn't turn a blind eye to the chemistry at the interface. It lets us understand that the chemistry is important.

"The work is fundamental and I think it's pretty because it's so simple," Link said. "We combined the right sample, the experiment and single-particle spectroscopy with advanced theory, and we put it all together."

###

Forster is a former graduate student at the University of Mainz and now a research scientist at BASF who came to Rice via the Toulouse-Mainz Scholar Exchange Program for applied physics students. The Link lab's collaboration with Forster and his mentor, co-author Carsten Sonnichsen, a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Mainz, has produced three published papers.

Vincent Spata, a former postdoctoral research associate of Carter's at Princeton, is a co-author of the paper. The research was supported by the European Research Council, the Excellence Initiative by the Graduate School of Materials Science in Mainz, the Robert A. Welch Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research via the Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.

Read the abstract at http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/3/eaav0704.

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav0704

This news release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Link Research Group: https://slink.rice.edu

The Carter Group: https://carter.princeton.edu

The Sonnichsen Group: https://www.nanobiotech.uni-mainz.de/prof-dr-carsten-soennichsen/

Rice Department of Chemistry: https://chemistry.rice.edu

Wiess School of Natural Sciences: https://naturalsciences.rice.edu

Illustration for download:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2019/03/0325_PLASMON-1b-WEB-1q1v18w.jpg (Credit: Alese Pickering/Rice University)

David Ruth, 713-348-6327, david@rice.edu

Mike Williams, 713-348-6728, mikewilliams@rice.edu

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,962 undergraduates and 3,027 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance.What happens in our brain when we listen to the rhythmic pace of a song or when, at the traffic light, the light is red and we are trembling awaiting the green? How do we perceive such an abstract feature of the world? For the first time in humans, an imaging study shows that in a specific area of the brain, the so-called "supplementary motor area (SMA)", a time map exists. The study, conducted by the team led by SISSA Professor Domenica Bueti and published in PLOS Biology, shows that distinct portions of the SMA, a region of the cerebral cortex important for both motor preparation and time perception--respond preferentially to different durations. The portions of the SMA responding to similar durations are in close spatial proximity on the cortical surface according to an anterior-to-posterior spatial gradient. The most anterior portions of SMA are greatly active for the shortest duration (200 ms), while the most posterior bits are active for the longest duration (3 sec), the intermediate durations led to the activation of the cortex between those extremes. These novel findings, which are the result of a collaborative effort between SISSA and research institutions in Japan, Switzerland and the Netherlands, are important to gain insights on the computational architecture underlying time perception and they also open up new perspectives to the study of temporal cognition.

The representation of time

"Topography i.e., the fact that neurons processing similar stimulus properties occupy neighbouring positions on the nervous system, is an encoding mechanism widely used in the brain to represent sensory and motor information. For example, there is a body map in our primary somatosensory cortex. In this map, the portions of the cortex receiving tactile information from the hand and the wrist are neighbours compared to those receiving information from the toe" says Domenica Bueti, coordinator of the research whose leading author is the Greek researcher Foteini Protopapa: "our findings show that a topographic representation exists also for something immaterial like time". Previous studies conducted in humans and other animals have shown the involvement of SMA in time perception. However none of those previous works clarified how temporal information is represented in this area.

"With our work we show that in SMA time is represented via topography and duration tuning. The first, as we said earlier, refers to the fact that the portions of SMA responding to similar durations are in close spatial proximity on the cortical surface". The second is duration tuning: "our results show that different portions of SMA respond preferentially to certain durations in a way that the response is greater for the preferred duration and become progressively weaker for durations far from the preferred one. Moreover, we show that temporal maps are linked to perception: i.e., the better the map in SMA, the more accurate and precise is duration perception. This is how SMA represents time".

A cutting-edge study

The research was conducted with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at ultra-high field i.e., 7 Tesla, available at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale of Lausanne. During the study, two groups of healthy volunteers carried out a temporal discrimination task of visual stimuli i.e., two images displayed in sequence on a computer screen for durations ranging from 200 milliseconds up to 3 seconds. Each volunteer had to decide which of the two images was presented for longer time. While the volunteers carried out the task, their cerebral activity was recorded through fMRI.

"It was an extremely complex study, which took a long time to carry out and, besides SISSA, it involved researchers from Osaka University, Sussex University, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale of Lausanne, the Royal Academy for Arts and Sciences of Amsterdam, Lausanne University and Araya Inc. of Tokyo" explains Domenica Bueti.

Perceiving time: innate or acquired phenomenon?

Many interesting and fascinating questions arise from these original findings. Domenica Bueti explains: "We have now to understand what is the time that has been mapped in SMA: is it the physical or the perceived time? Does the map change as the perceived duration changes? Does the map change if an observer perceives a stimulus, which was physically displayed on the screen for one second, as either longer (for example a second and a half) or shorter (for example, 800 milliseconds)? And, are there maps at birth? Or are they the by-product of experience and education? These are important and fascinating questions we would like to investigate with our future research".

###Professor Andreas Schutze and his team of experts in measurement and sensor technology at Saarland University are making available a free data processing tool that represents the very essence of a large number of their research projects. The software package - called simply 'Dave' - is a MATLAB toolbox that allows rapid evaluation of signals, pattern recognition and data visualization when processing huge datasets. The free software enables very large volumes of data, such as those produced by modern sensor systems, to be processed, analysed and visually displayed very rapidly, so that researchers can optimize their measurement systems interactively.

Members of the research team will be at Hannover Messe from the 1st to the 5th of April (Hall 2, Stand B46) where they will be explaining their open source software.

The source code of the MATLAB toolbox 'Dave - Data Analysis and Verification/Visualization/Validation Environment' has been published at http://www.lmt.uni-saarland.de/dave.

When engineers in research departments or research institutes conduct experiments with sensor systems they collect huge quantities of data and have countless signals to analyse - as a result, things tend to get very complicated very quickly. Juggling all of the numbers that come flooding in from the sensors can be extremely challenging. One of the key tasks when configuring a sensor system is to optimize the numerous parameters and variables so that the results provide meaningful information. Which settings are actually the optimal ones is something that the researchers typically have to determine heuristically - and that can take time. If the chosen relationships turn out to be unsuitable, the whole number puzzle simply collapses. Suddenly, those long series of measurements and all the subsequent effort were in vain.

New software that has been developed in Saarbrucken and has been made freely available is helping researchers and companies navigate through the data jungle. Instead of relying on a conventional and time-consuming trial and error approach, the new software effectively asks the question 'What happens when...'.

'Whenever we use our gas sensors to measure air pollutants, we are faced with the same old problem of analysing vast volumes of data and of recognizing signal patterns. If we want to continue to make our sensors more sensitive and more selective, we need to know whether very fine modifications to the sensors themselves and to the analysis actually bring about the desired improvements in sensitivity and selectivity. But there are countless ways in which sensors can be modified. We want to be able to identify the best paths as a rapidly as possible, or, equally, to quickly detect and reject the unproductive paths,' explains Professor Andreas Schutze. 'Over a period of many years and over numerous research projects, we have been developing software that helps us achieve this goal. The software makes use of machine learning methodologies and enables us to identify patterns rapidly, to evaluate data cleanly and to visualize our results,' says Schutze.

The researchers are now publishing their software tool under a copyleft licence. (Under copyleft rules, any adaptations of the original work, such as changes or enhancements are also bound by the same licence that covers the original work.) 'Anyone may use the open source software, provided that when results are published, the authors make reference to Dave,' says Schutze.

Any amount of sensor data can be processed with the Saarbrucken software tool. The software helps to rapidly locate the best paths to take. 'Dave is the opposite of a black box. The software makes the calculations completely transparent. It shows the user that when they alter a particular parameter, it has a specific identifiable consequence. The visualization modules in Dave also make it easier to optimize a measurement system. The user can run through, test out and visualize different variants, and that helps the user find the most promising variants quickly and efficiently,' explains Manuel Bastuck, a research assistant in the Measurement Technology Lab and the developer of the Dave software.

'Using Dave as a tool, we were able to rapidly achieve some widely acclaimed results in the field of condition monitoring in "Industry 4.0" applications. The results not only helped to solve the measurement problem itself, but also to configure the measuring system more simply and more cost-effectively,' says Andreas Schutze.

###

Press photographs are available at http://www.uni-saarland.de/pressefotos and can be used free of charge.

This press release is available in German at: https://www.uni-saarland.de/nc/universitaet/aktuell/artikel/nr/20638.html

Contact: Prof. Dr. Andreas Schutze, Tel.: +49 (0)681 302-4663, Email: schuetze@lmt.uni-saarland.de

Measurement Technology Lab, Saarland University, Saarbrucken, Germany and

Center for Mechatronics and Automation Technology (ZeMA)

http://www.lmt.uni-saarland.deResearchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) and The University of Tokyo find a connection between estrogen and bone health that may offer a new way to treat osteoporosis in women experiencing menopause

Tokyo-Osteoporosis is a condition in which bones become weak and prone to fractures. Fractures typically occur in the wrist, spine, or hip, and can often lead to permanently impaired mobility. Women over 50 are at a high risk of developing osteoporosis, which may be due to the loss of estrogen that occurs after menopause. While studies have linked estrogen levels to bone health, the exact details of this connection are not entirely clear. Researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) describe a new molecular link between estrogen and bone aging, which may eventually lead to new strategies to treat postmenopausal osteoporosis.

Bone is a complex tissue, consisting of a matrix of proteins and minerals that give it the flexibility and strength to support body movement. Bone also contains several types of specialized cells, including osteocytes, that help to maintain this matrix. Over a person's lifetime, many factors can affect how healthy bone structure is maintained. One of these factors is the female sex hormone, estrogen.

"Over the last few decades, we've learned that estrogen plays an important role in maintaining a functional bone matrix," corresponding authors Tomoki Nakashima and Hiroshi Takayanagi explain. "Exactly how estrogen does this, though, is not fully understood. Our laboratory recently discovered that bone matrix is maintained by a protein called Sema3A, which is secreted by osteocytes. This led us to suspect that there might be a mechanistic relationship between estrogen and Sema3A."

Sema3A does indeed appear to be linked to estrogen: the researchers found that blood serum levels of the protein decrease in premenopausal women as they get older--and drop even further once women reach menopause. But how, at the biological level, are estrogen and Sema3A related? And what is Sema3A doing in bone tissue?

To answer these questions, the researchers turned to mice. When mice are given an ovariectomy (that is, when their ovaries are removed), the loss of estrogen causes their bone mass to decrease. This can be prevented, however, by giving the mice an extra supply of the hormone. The team took advantage of this to explore the function of Sema3A.

"When we genetically removed Sema3A from the osteoblast lineage cells (including osteocytes) of mice, we found that intravenous estrogen no longer prevented bones from deteriorating after an ovariectomy," lead author Mikihito Hayashi describes. "In addition, we found that Sema3A sets off a chain of signaling events that promote the survival of osteocytes in these mice. This suggests that Sema3A serves as a key mechanistic link between estrogen and bone maintenance .

We believe that, as women lose estrogen with age and Sema3A levels drop off, osteocytes begin to die and bone loses the ability to maintain its supportive structure."

The researchers hope that the discovery of Sema3A as a major player in bone health and the signaling molecules it controls in bone may offer new therapeutic approaches to treating osteoporosis.

###

The article, "Autoregulation of osteocyte Sema3A orchestrates estrogen action and counteracts bone aging" was published in Cell Metabolism at DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2018.12.021.The big Chinese fine chemical company Zhejiang NHU invest 5.5 million in the biotech start-up CysBio to develop new and affordable biochemicals

CysBio is making cost-effective and novel biochemicals via sustainable fermentation processes. Through advanced synthetic biology and metabolic engineering approaches microorganisms are engineered to convert simple sugars into desired biochemical products. This makes it possible to produce expensive chemicals at very attractive cost levels and furthermore enables the production of novel or rare biochemicals.

The products will have applications in a variety of areas such as the food, feed, nutrition, pharma, cosmetics, and polymer industries.

"Our technologies enable CysBio to create some of the cheapest biochemicals available, as well as some very exciting new products with novel applications as functional chemical building blocks," says Alex Toftgaard Nielsen, CSO and Co-founder of CysBio and Professor at DTU Biosustain.

Based on scientific research from DTU

CysBio's technologies are patented and based on scientific research conducted at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark. This research has made it possible to modify and engineer the bacteria's metabolism, thus, making them able to produce specific amino acids and sulfated biochemicals.

"The investment from NHU demonstrates how DTU's innovation eco-system has successfully assisted in translating academic research into a privately funded spin-out company with a strong technology platform," says Marianne Thellersen, Senior Vice President for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at DTU.

Big unexploited potential

The technology platform paves the way for producing compounds used for e.g. new polymer materials with new functionalities such as conductivity and adhesiveness. Products that are highly demanded by the chemical industry. One of the other biochemicals that CysBio works with is well-known from nature as an alternative to chemically produced pesticides to prevent the growth of bacteria and fungus on surfaces of various kinds. Thus, CysBio expects to produce greener alternatives that can replace the use of harsh chemicals in many different market segments.

"We aim at becoming a leading provider of functional biochemical monomers and the partnership with a leading company like Zhejiang NHU will allow a fast market introduction of parts of this technology. Our strategy will clearly be to enables our technologies to be exploited quickly and effectively through R&D and commercial partnerships," says Henrik Meyer, CEO and Co-founder of CysBio.

The Danish biotech company plans to get their first products on the market already at the beginning of 2020.

Future perspectives for pharma

Some of the key targets for the proprietary sulfation technology will be methods for improving the solubility and bioavailability of some existing drugs and nutraceuticals, thereby increasing the efficacy of the drugs.

"This will help in solving the problem of developing new pharmaceuticals, so we also see great potential in collaborating closely with partners in the pharma industry, "says Alex Toftgaard Nielsen.

Expands portfolio of products

For the stock listed Chinese chemical company, Zhejiang NHU, with global operations and subsidiaries in Europe, the seed investment in CysBio also opens up for exploring new opportunities in the market.

"We strongly believe the future of biotechnology. We have great strategic interests in expanding our biotechnology-based product portfolio by partnering with biotechnology companies. We look forward to assisting CysBio in their growth and further product development." says Mr. Bai Fan Hu, Chairman of Zhejiang NHU.

###Pain relief and end of life care is not being provided equally to people with advanced progressive diseases who were at home during their last three months of life, according to a study of 43,000 people who died across England.

The data for the study was drawn from responses to the National Bereavement Survey (VOICES) in England between 2011 and 2015, which asks families or close relatives to reflect on the quality of care provided to a person who has died.

Just 10% of patients who died of a non-cancerous disease received palliative care at home, compared to 66% of cancer patients.

Led by the University of Leeds, the findings revealed that people who did access palliative care at home were 2.7 times more likely to have experienced good pain relief compared to those who did not receive palliative care.

The association between good pain relief and palliative care at home occurred regardless of the type of disease that patients had, but access to palliative care was not provided equally.

Lead author Dr Yousuf Elmokhallalati, from the University of Leeds, said: "This research shows that palliative care is associated with significant benefits to people with every kind of progressive disease, but this is not reflected in the spread of people that are being offered palliative care.

"We need to ensure that all people, whether they have cancer, heart or lung diseases, or any other life-limiting condition, are being offered appropriate support towards the end of their lives."

Published in the journal BMC Medicine, the study is the first to suggest there are significant reductions in pain for those receiving palliative care at home. It was conducted by researchers from the St Gemma's Academic Unit of Palliative Care led by Mike Bennett, Professor of Palliative Medicine at the University of Leeds, which works in partnership with St Gemma's Hospice in Leeds.

A British Medical Association report in 2016 showed that pain is the most important concern of both the public and of doctors when considering a patient who is facing a terminal illness.

The new study also suggests that patients who had planned where they wanted to die are nearly twice as likely to experience good pain relief compared to those who had not, showing the value of planning ahead and co-ordinating the support of healthcare professionals.

Only a quarter of patients were found to have recorded a preferred place of death, and cancer patients were nearly three times more likely to have a preference recorded compared to non-cancer patients (36.6% of cancer patients vs. 13.1% of non-cancer patients).

Funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), it also found that the pain relief experienced by patients accessing palliative care in the home was approaching the levels experienced by those receiving care in a hospice.

Within the full VOICES survey, 87% of patients who died in a hospice experienced good pain relief, compared with 66% of those who received palliative care support in their home, and 37.5% of those who did not receive support in their home.

Previous research by the same group in 2018 revealed inequalities in the duration of palliative care being provided to patients across England, with cancer patients referred for care around 53 days prior to death, compared with around 27 days prior for non-cancer patients.

Professor Bennett said: "It's already been established that the home is the place where pain is least well controlled, so our findings clearly illustrate the importance of access to end of life care.

"These results, combined with our previous research, suggest that pain relief and access to palliative care is particularly poor for older patients, those with non-cancer diseases and those who live in the North of England. These inequalities must be challenged."

The study was observational and found an association between access to palliative care and pain relief, so it was unable to determine cause and effect.

###

Notes to editors

For interview requests please contact Simon Moore, Press Officer at the University of Leeds, on 0113 34 38059 or s.i.moore@leeds.ac.uk.

You can access an embargoed copy of the paper on Google Drive here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1oKcCUEqvVYsNGlmpFoE7Y2-Qr0BdbRNl

The paper is titled 'Specialist palliative care support is associated with improved pain relief at home during the last 3 months of life in patients with advanced disease: analysis of 5-year data from the national survey of bereaved people (VOICES)' and will be available online here: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-019-1287-8

University of Leeds

The University of Leeds is one of the largest higher education institutions in the UK, with more than 38,000 students from more than 150 different countries, and a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities. The University plays a significant role in the Turing, Rosalind Franklin and Royce Institutes.

We are a top ten university for research and impact power in the UK, according to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, and are in the top 100 of the QS World University Rankings 2019.

The University was awarded a Gold rating by the Government's Teaching Excellence Framework in 2017, recognising its 'consistently outstanding' teaching and learning provision. Twenty-six of our academics have been awarded National Teaching Fellowships - more than any other institution in England, Northern Ireland and Wales - reflecting the excellence of our teaching. http://www.leeds.ac.uk

Follow University of Leeds or tag us in to coverage: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Instagram

National Institute for Health Research

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is the nation's largest funder of health and care research. The NIHR:

Funds, supports and delivers high quality research that benefits the NHS, public health and social care

Engages and involves patients, carers and the public in order to improve the reach, quality and impact of research

Attracts, trains and supports the best researchers to tackle the complex health and care challenges of the future

Invests in world-class infrastructure and a skilled delivery workforce to translate discoveries into improved treatments and services

Partners with other public funders, charities and industry to maximise the value of research to patients and the economy

The NIHR was established in 2006 to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research, and is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. In addition to its national role, the NIHR commissions applied health research to benefit the poorest people in low- and middle-income countries, using Official Development Assistance funding.

This work uses data provided by patients and collected by the NHS as part of their care and support and would not have been possible without access to this data. The NIHR recognises and values the role of patient data, securely accessed and stored, both in underpinning and leading to improvements in research and care. http://www.nihr.ac.uk/patientdataA University of Oklahoma-led project is showing how citizen science programs provide valuable data on rivers in southwestern United States. The datasets of ecological and hydrological data obtained from intermittent rivers (rivers that dry at some point in space or time) in Arizona are input into a nationwide network. Trained citizen scientists are mapping three rivers in Arizona: the San Pedro River, Cienega Creek and Agua Fria River. The wet and dry data collected yearly from these programs map information on how to best manage water resources under a changing climate.

"It is difficult to get good quality data about how much water is in intermittent rivers. Most of our existing infrastructure for measuring river flows in the United States is geared towards monitoring water levels of perennial rivers, which are those that always flow. Citizen science groups provide valuable contributions to the field of river science, as the data they produce would not be available otherwise. Without that data we wouldn't be able to answer basic research questions like how the length of wet river reaches in these rivers has changed over time, and what these changes might mean for fish that live in these rivers," said Daniel Allen, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, OU College of Arts and Sciences.

In this study, these three groups of citizen scientists divide up and measure the river using a simple method that includes measuring the river from where it begins to where it ends in places where there is at least 30 feet of water. The three long-term wet and dry datasets produced by citizen science river monitoring programs describe landscape drying patterns, examine how they vary over time and use models to quantify landscape drying patterns and temperature, precipitation, stream flow and drought metrics.

While trained citizen scientists conducted the wet and dry surveys on each of these rivers, Friends of the Agua Fria National Monument organize the Agua Fria River surveying effort. The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management organize the upper Cienega Creek surveys, and the Pima County Association of Governments organize surveys of the lowest reaches of Cienega Creek. The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management organize surveys on the San Pedro River.

The data from these surveys is used to generate maps on long-term trends in the three rivers. Two of the rivers measured in this study, the Cienega Creek and the Agua Fria River, showed significant decline. The San Pedro is the only one of three rivers did not decline, which may be due to a groundwater management resource plan in effect. It may be that the declining rivers have no protection and groundwater use has increased during the recent droughts in the area, leading to surface water declines.

Changes in landscape drying patterns in intermittent rivers have strong implications for fish connectivity and bird migration. Drying patterns are likely to decrease connectivity for native fish who need long stretches of unbroken river to reproduce. Rivers in this region are important for the millions of birds that migrate from South America and stop in the region on their way north. The cottonwood and willow trees where they roost during resting periods are typically only found next to rivers where there is water year round. The southwestern United States has experienced large droughts over the past several decades, and the extent of river drying will likely continue as a result of climate change.

Citizen science programs focused on mapping wet and dry sections of rivers and streams are valuable and could be expanded unmonitored intermittent rivers. New technologies, such as smartphone applications, are being developed to improve efforts and aid in integrating data collected by different programs. This type of program could be expanded across the United States to study the variables impacting intermittent rivers in different climates and by different intensities of human water use.

###

This study is part of a larger effort to create an intermittent river research coordination network funded with a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. A paper is available in the journal Freshwater Science at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/701483. For more information, contact Professor Allen at dcallen@ou.edu.A UTA mechanical engineer has partnered with a long-time friend from his home nation of South Korea to help find a more effective way for steelmaking companies to inspect and maintain their facilities.

Daejong Kim, a University of Texas at Arlington associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, was awarded an $80,000 grant in January from South Korea-based POSCO--one of the world's largest steelmakers--to help fund a one-year feasibility study of intelligent robot systems for inspection and maintenance of steelmaking facilities.

Kim, who has worked at UTA since 2008, is collaborating closely with POSCO senior principal researcher Kihwan Kim on the project. The two have been friends for almost 25 years after meeting in graduate school at Seoul National University.

Kihwan Kim, who has worked at POSCO for 10 years, has come to UTA and will be on campus for the entire year to help with the feasibility study as a business scholar.

"Steelmaking companies like POSCO have such large and complex production facilities, similar to petrochemical plants," Kihwan Kim said. "The companies always seek to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of inspection and maintenance of those facilities. Recent developments of intelligent robot technologies have drawn our attention greatly. Through this project, I hope to find some great ideas of robot applications for steelmaking facilities. Particularly, we will focus on robotics for harsh and hazardous environments such as high temperature, strong radiation and severe dust."

Daejong Kim said robots could certainly be valuable to help at steelmaking facilities.

"Underneath these plants is a huge maze of electrical wires," Daejong Kim said. "When there is too much of an overload in electrical wires a fire can start, and once that happens it's difficult to control because of the toxic gas underground--it's highly combustible. Even firefighters have difficulty going in. We want to develop some kind of robotic system that can go in and monitor the temperature, and if the wires get too hot the robot can detect and monitor the location of the high-temperature spot and avoid a fire hazard. The robot should be able to avoid obstacles in front of it, carry infrared cameras, and have arms and legs and multiple sensors to detect the problems.

"We're not developing an actual robot now," he continued. "Once the feasibility study is done, the next step is to develop the robot. The study is identifying what kind of functionality is needed with the robot."

Daejong Kim moved from South Korea to the United States in 2000 and received his doctorate degree from the University of Texas at Austin.

Kihwan Kim believes Dr. Kim is the right person to lead this feasibility study.

"I would like to achieve practice results rather than just theoretical ideas, and Professor Kim has lots of experience in industrial application, which has been very successful," Kihwan Kim said. "So, I found that his strength could fit nicely to our goal. I also found out that UTA has strong traditions of engineering, including great people and facilities. It has been a great pleasure to work together with UTA researchers so far."

###

-- written by Brandon GeorgeA new lightweight, low-profile and inexpensive ankle exoskeleton could be widely used among elderly people, those with impaired lower-leg muscle strength and workers whose jobs require substantial walking or running.

Developed by Vanderbilt mechanical engineers, the device is believed to be the first ankle exoskeleton that could be worn under clothes without restricting motion. It does not require additional components such as batteries or actuators carried on the back or waist.

The study, published online by IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems & Rehabilitation Engineering, builds on a successful and widely cited ankle exoskeleton concept from other researchers in 2015.

"We've shown how an unpowered ankle exoskeleton could be redesigned to fit under clothing and inside/under shoes so it more seamlessly integrates into daily life," said Matt Yandell, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. student and lead author of the study.

In a significant design advancement, the team invented an unpowered friction clutch mechanism that fits under the foot or shoe and is no thicker than a typical shoe insole. The complete device, which includes a soft shank sleeve and assistive spring, weighs just over one pound.

The unpowered ankle exoskeleton costs less than $100 to fabricate, without factoring in optimized design for manufacturing and economies of scale.

"Our design is lightweight, low profile, quiet, uses no motor or batteries, it is low cost to manufacture, and naturally adapts to different walking speeds to assist the ankle muscles," said Karl Zelik, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and senior author on the study.

Zelik will be presenting this work next week at the Wearable Robotics Association Conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

The potential applications are broad, from helping aging people stay active to assisting recreational walkers, hikers or runners, he said.

"It could also help reduce fatigue in occupations that involve lots of walking, such as postal and warehouse workers, and soldiers in the field," Zelik said.

Joshua Tacca, BE'18, also is a co-author. He is now a graduate student in the Integrative Physiology Department at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Several other Vanderbilt undergraduate engineering students also contributed to the device design and pilot testing.

###Hi All,



Firstly, I have done a forum search and not found anything that specifically helps me. I apologise if this has been answered already; please let me know and I'll delete the post if it's redundant.



I've been doing some research and believe both myself and my partner are eligible for British citizenship by descent (and as such can apply for British passports) based on the following factors:



- Both born after 31st December 1982

- Both born in a commonwealth country (Australia)

- Both born to mothers who were British citizens (both were "permanent residents" of Australia at the time and as such neither renounced their British citizenship)



My question is whether or not a British passport is sufficient for us to relocate to the UK (semi)permanently and find work etc, or if we'd still need to apply for some kind of Visa in order to immigrate/settle etc.



The UK.gov website is full of information but I'm having trouble sifting through it to find anything specific to our situation.



I'm sure many of you have been down this road in the past, and I'd be grateful if anyone would kind enough to share their experiences, any helpful resources, or any pitfalls we would need to look out for.



Cheers!



MattFrom: American Evaluation Association (AEA) For Immediate Release: Dateline: Washington , DC Friday, March 22, 2019



My name is Dr. Garima Bansal, and I am a teacher educator in the University of Delhi, India. My research agenda is in the areas of educational assessment and evaluation, science education and mathematics education. Currently, I am developing a non-government organization, Bevize Foundation, that aims to develop specialized approaches for inclusion of linguistically diverse student population. We are developing bilingual dictionaries and creative word walls for students speaking Hindi as their first language to encourage meaning-making in science classrooms. It would be of use to students, teachers, teacher educators.

Lessons Learned: Establishing a non-governmental organization is a challenging endeavor. It requires developing a core team sharing the common vision of the organization, gathering of funds to carry-on the activities, building community ties so that people welcome your efforts and become an active participant in the process of social transformation.

My name is Dr. Shetay Ashford-Hanserd and I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Occupational, Workforce, and Leadership Studies at Texas State University. I am also the Founder and Principal Investigator of the

My name is Rosio Pedroso, MPP, and I am Principal at

We are utilizing a collective impact framework to develop a sustainable, research-driven STEM intervention model to increase the number of historically underrepresented and underserved minority youth who attain undergraduate STEM degrees, in collaboration with other community and faith-based organizations.

Lessons Learned: The collective impact approach can be a powerful instrument of change but it requires a significant amount of time to establish trust within the community. We have learned that establishing that trust can make the hard work of establishing a shared vision, common goals and metrics, and ultimately implementing effective out of school STEM programs easier. We have also learned that the collective impact enables community members to contribute to the shared vision in a manner that best suits their skills and/or resources.

Rad Resources: We have provided the following resources to help you in your pursuit of evaluating out-of-school time and informal STEM learning programs.

Framework for Evaluating Impacts of Informal Science Education Projects Learning in Action: Evaluating Collective Impact Afterschool and STEM Learning A Culturally Responsive Evaluation Framework for Out-of-School Time Programs The American Evaluation Association is celebrating STEM Education and Training TIG Week with our colleagues in the STEM Education and Training Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our STEM TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the

About AEA The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association and the largest in its field. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products and organizations to improve their effectiveness. AEAs mission is to improve evaluation practices and methods worldwide, to increase evaluation use, promote evaluation as a profession and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action. For more information about AEA, visit www.eval.org. During AEAs annual conference, Evaluation 2018, we facilitated a 45-minute think tank session entitled Catalysts of Change: Out-of-School Time STEM Programs for Underrepresented Youth, which was featured in the STEM Topical Interest Group (TIG) track. We aimed to share our experiences with out-of-school time STEM programs for underrepresented youth during the formation, implementation, and evaluation stages. As a team of researchers, practitioners, and evaluators in global contexts, we bring a unique perspective to this discussion.My name is, and I am a teacher educator in the University of Delhi, India. My research agenda is in the areas of educational assessment and evaluation, science education and mathematics education. Currently, I am developing a non-government organization, Bevize Foundation, that aims to develop specialized approaches for inclusion of linguistically diverse student population. We are developing bilingual dictionaries and creative word walls for students speaking Hindi as their first language to encourage meaning-making in science classrooms. It would be of use to students, teachers, teacher educators.Establishing a non-governmental organization is a challenging endeavor. It requires developing a core team sharing the common vision of the organization, gathering of funds to carry-on the activities, building community ties so that people welcome your efforts and become an active participant in the process of social transformation.My name isand I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Occupational, Workforce, and Leadership Studies at Texas State University. I am also the Founder and Principal Investigator of the ACCEYSS : Association of Collaborative Communities Equipping Youth for STEM Success (NSF INCLUDES DDLP, Award No. 1764404). Our external evaluator, Rosio Pedroso, MPP, served as the facilitator of our session.My name is, and I am Principal at Pedroso Consulting . As lead external evaluator of ACCEYSS, I am working to ensure the effectiveness of the collective impact framework and assess progress towards the grant goals and objectives.We are utilizing a collective impact framework to develop a sustainable, research-driven STEM intervention model to increase the number of historically underrepresented and underserved minority youth who attain undergraduate STEM degrees, in collaboration with other community and faith-based organizations.The collective impact approach can be a powerful instrument of change but it requires a significant amount of time to establish trust within the community. We have learned that establishing that trust can make the hard work of establishing a shared vision, common goals and metrics, and ultimately implementing effective out of school STEM programs easier. We have also learned that the collective impact enables community members to contribute to the shared vision in a manner that best suits their skills and/or resources.We have provided the following resources to help you in your pursuit of evaluating out-of-school time and informal STEM learning programs.The American Evaluation Association is celebrating STEM Education and Training TIG Week with our colleagues in the STEM Education and Training Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our STEM TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Signify Health of Dallas, a home health care provider, has acquired San Antonio health care technology company TAVHealth.

TAVHealths software helps health care providers keep track of patients social needs  such as food insecurity or lack of transportation  the community services they use and the outcomes of their doctor visits.

Health care providers, insurers and social workers can access and the share the information.

Social needs have been neglected and underserved for too long, and we are excited to combine our social needs platform with Signifys clinical excellence and nationwide network to serve members holistically and keep them healthy at home, TAVHealth CEO Jamo Rubin said in a statement.

Related: Shopping for health care in San Antonio? New price lists might not help.

Signify Health said it provides in-home care and complex care management services to more than 1 million Medicare Advantage recipients annually.

The companies did not disclose terms of the acquisition.

Rubin, a cardiac transplant anesthesiologist, founded the company in 2011. Inc. magazine included TAVHealth on its 2017 list of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies in the United States.

Spencer Magloff, TAVHealths marketing director, said the company plans to stay in San Antonio. It also has an office in Austin.

We have roughly 50 employees and are looking to scale quickly, Magloff said.

Laura Garcia covers the healthcare industry in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her stories and more local coverage on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | laura.garcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @Reporter_LauraA student trying to get into nursing school turned to Easy Expunctions, a San Antonio startup, after she learned a hard lesson  a run-in with the law, even if its minor, can have huge consequences.

Easy Expunctions helps people clear their criminal records for a price, and she was willing to pay it.

According to the company, when she applied to nursing school, the college ran a background check and discovered an obstruction of highway charge, a misdemeanor, on her record. She needed to have it sealed to take classes, the college told her.

After contacting the startup, she created an account online, paid to see whether her charge was eligible for removal, and selected a services package. The company generated the legal documents she needed to petition to have her record sealed, and soon after she was cleared to continue with school, according to Easy Expunctions.

Millions of adults have criminal histories, and the digitization of data means more information is available online than ever. Employers have Google at their fingertips.

This is something that either affects you or somebody that you know, said co-founder and CEO Yousef Kassim, whos also a licensed attorney.

E-Legal Inc., which does business as Easy Expunctions, provides services in Texas and several other states and is growing quickly. The company more than doubled its revenue last year, said Kassim, who declined to disclose sales figures. The startup has raised about $2.4 million since January 2017, including about $1.5 million since September.

The business has 27 full-time employees and plans to hire as many as 33 more over the next two years. Kassim recently moved the company from the Vogue Building on Houston Street into bigger offices at the Court Building, also downtown.

Nearly 100,000 people have created accounts with Easy Expunctions, Kassim said.

The website performs a background check, and customers pay $19.99 to see whether their charges qualify for expungement or nondisclosure.

In Texas, an expunction means someones records are obliterated, as though their arrest had never happened, Kassim said. A nondisclosure means the records are sealed and can only be accessed by certain government agencies for specific purposes  for example, if the person is seeking a specialty license.

People who havent been convicted tend to be good candidates for expunctions, Kassim said. Someone may qualify for a nondisclosure if he or she successfully completed deferred adjudication for certain misdemeanors.

Depending on the services they want, people can pay $499 for the standard package or $599 for premium package. Easy Expunctions generates the legal documents they need to file, along with instructions. For an expunction, the documents include a petition with a clients personal information, details about the offense, why that person is entitled to an expunction and what government agencies might have records about the arrest.

Customers also have to pay filing fees, which can run several hundred dollars. All in all, it usually costs less than $1,000.

If someones petition is denied, Easy Expunctions refunds the clients money. The startups refund rate is less than 1 percent, said Rommy Kassim, the companys co-founder and chief marketing officer.

The company relies on automation and big data to generate the documents that customers need, allowing them to represent themselves in court. The Kassim brothers claim their service is cheaper than hiring a lawyer.

But a professional can help guide someone through a complex and confusing legal system, said Christopher Cavazos, an attorney at the Barrera, Cavazos & Powers law firm. Clients also might not be able to take time off from work.

Theres something to be said about having an experienced attorney, he said. It helps the process go smoothly and correctly.

Cavazos firm typically charges less than $1,500 for expunction services and takes peoples information over the phone.

People who have been arrested but had their case dismissed often dont realize it will show up in a background check.

You forget that theres this next step, Cavazos said. Being able to go out there and not worry about your background check years later is really valuable to people.

Yousef Kassims own brush with the law inspired him to start Easy Expunctions. A misdemeanor the Trinity University alumnus picked up in college was dismissed but stayed on his record. He declined to specify the offense.

It was affecting his job prospects and he couldnt afford an attorney, Kassim said, so he did his own research to get it cleared.

It was a really empowering experience, he said. I got some final closure on an issue that had been holding me back.

The wheels started turning, and after graduating from St. Marys University School of Law in 2013, he started working on a patent for Easy Expunctions method and process of document automation. The patent is pending. He began building the business in Austin with his brother Rommy and officially launched it in 2015.

The brothers were lured to San Antonio in 2016 by city and county incentives.

The package included a grant of up to $100,000, provided that the company conduct business in San Antonio for at least six years and create up to 42 full-time jobs locally, according to the agreement. It also included a $50,000 county grant requiring the business to create at least 20 full-time positions, remain in Bexar County for at least three years and meet wage stipulations.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonios venture-capital investments lag, but climate here is changing

Kassim also started fundraising and found an investor in his backyard. The Geekdom Fund, a San Antonio-based group focusing on early-stage companies, invested in Easy Expunctions.

When determining where to invest, the group looks at what a company has accomplished in its infancy and its market potential, said Cole Wollak, a Geekdom Fund associate.

The market opportunity has to be there, which is something we saw with Easy Expunctions, he said.

Yousef Kassims background was also appealing, he added, and the company had traction.

He studied law and intimately understood the industry he was going into, Wollak said. Hed thought about the idea long before starting (the business).

In the coming years, the brothers are looking to work with more nonprofits after creating portals for several Goodwill organizations, including Goodwill of Central Texas in Austin.

The services help clients identify elements of their criminal history they may not have known about and determine whether they qualify for expunction, said Rachel Hampton, Goodwills director of workforce advancement.

Someones criminal history can have a dramatic impact on their career prospects, she added. Depending on the industry, it could be difficult to land a position.

People are more than their worst moments, Yousef Kassim said. Were a lot more than that.

madison.iszler@express-news.netRating: Once was enough

Heres how long Griffs Hamburgers has been around: I went there as a kid in Fort Worth 50 years ago. The little clown on the logo with a lopsided smile and blue stars for eyes always looked like a cartoon drunk to me, right down to his disheveled chefs hat.

In San Antonio, the Griffs at Pleasanton Road and Military Drive was up and running in 1963. Once a chain with dozens of nationwide locations, Griffs website now shows 13 burger bars in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico.

If you want cheap burgers, go to Griffs. Its a fast-food operation: crowded, cluttered and built for speed and the bottom line. If you want burgers a step above fast food, dont go to Griffs. Its that simple. In a San Antonio market with so many solid burger options, Griffs just doesnt cut it.

On ExpressNews.com: 52 Weeks of Burgers: Sams Burger Joint

Griffs Hamburgers Location: 2418 Pleasanton Road, 210-923-1671, griffshamburgers.com Hours: 9:30 a.m.-11 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 9:30 a.m.-midnight Friday-Saturday; 9:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday See More Collapse

Best burger: The best thing I can say about the best burger at Griffs is that for $7.29, the Double Giant Cheeseburger combo with fries and a drink is a lot of food for not a lot of money. Double meat, double American cheese, fully loaded.

But if you value quality over quantity, youll still walk away unsatisfied. It was sloppy, overcooked, built on a bun not structurally suited for the load and weighed down with a slog of lettuce, pickles, tomatoes and onions that all tasted like the same thing.

Other burgers: An upgrade to cheddar cheese couldnt redeem a Giant Cheeseburger with jalapenos and warmed-up bacon, which even at $4.49 started to lose its low-cost curb appeal. The Griffburger with cheese ($1.69) was a throwback to the tiny fast food burgers of the 1960s, a featherweight patty dressed with mustard, ketchup, onions and pickles that made me wish Id gone to McDonalds instead.

On ExpressNews.com: 52 Weeks of Burgers: The Lords Kitchen

Fried sides: Freezer to fryer. Not a pretty thought in the farm to table age. But dumping your sides from a freezer bag leaves less room for error.

When the oils reasonably clean, Griffs shoestring fries ($1.49 small) fill a greasy paper bag with a moment of relief. The crispiness lasted just a few bites, so work fast.

Onion rings carried about half as many broken rings as full circles, but the breading was consistent and hot ($2.29). For something with a name as long as Cheddar Jalapeno Potato Munchers ($2.29), the little pucks of fried dough didnt taste much like any of those things.

Mavericks: With a basket of fried steak fingers and gravy ($6.99 with fries and a drink), Griffs wont threaten the market for DQs superior version. I liked the strawberry shake ($2.59 small) with bits of pureed fruit, but Griffs best maverick moment came from something simple and old-fashioned: a root beer float ($1.99) with soft-serve and foamy bubbles that took me back to when Griffs seemed like a treat instead of a chore.

Mike Sutter is a food and drink reporter and restaurant critic in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | msutter@express-news.net | Twitter: @fedmanwalkingThe superintendent of San Antonios largest school district and an education policy adviser clashed over measuring student performance at a town hall meeting on the states public school finance system, while an area lawmaker tried to combine their points to find common ground.

The Thursday night town hall featuring Northside Independent School District Superintendent Brian Woods, Texas Public Policy Foundation senior education policy adviser Kara Belew and state Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, comes while state legislators are considering bills that would overhaul the states outdated school finance system.

Experts of the system agree it overly taxes property owners and businesses. When the system was created years ago, public schools were funded half by the state and half by local property taxes. Over time, the burden on homeowners grew to where it is now, with local property taxes paying about 66 percent of the share.

The state share has gone from something close to 50-50 to 45 percent down to 36 percent with locals picking up the rest, which is why your property tax payments are going up so much, Bernal said.

The real trouble started in 2011, during the recession, when legislators slashed $5.3 billion from public education. Around that time, lawmakers started wagging their fingers at schools that werent producing satisfactory student outcomes, Bernal said.

So the state is sort of playing the role of the arsonist and the fire marshal at the same time, Bernal said.

To begin to fix the system, House Bill 3 would add $9 billion to state public education funding with $2.7 billion of that replacing existing property taxes. Belew and Woods agree the bill is a step in the right direction.

The clash between Woods and Belew began over a discussion on whether schools are effectively using money they already have and whether standardized tests fairly measure student achievement.

On ExpressNews.com: Texas school finance plan would refashion funding for low-income students

The state currently spends about $62 billion, according to Belew, yet more than 50 percent of children read below grade level, she said. She pointed to the controversial STARR exam and the ACT and SAT, national college entrance exams.

We need to talk less about spending and more about how we can use that money to effectively improve results, Belew said.

Woods said the primary point of tests is to sort kids. ACT and SAT exams are used for colleges to sort through applicants. But results are now being used to determine how much funding school districts receive and how much teachers are paid.

These tests, even nationally, were never created to do the kinds of things were asking them to decide, Woods said.

He mocked the STARR, saying This is the fundamental measure by which were going to determine success, that garnered laughter from the majority of the audience of about 50 people.

Belew also took a shot at some of Northsides ratings by the Texas Education Agency, specifically honing in on Martin Elementary School that serves 719 students. According to the TEA, 25 percent of students met their grade level standard or above in reading on the STARR exam last year.

Their dreams are literally dying as they are sitting in classrooms not learning, Belew said.

She used this illustration to advocate for school choice and for families who choose to enroll their children in charter schools. She also pointed to Putegnat Elementary School in Brownsville, that serves 458 students, as an example of an exemplar school because more of their children are considered by the TEA to be socially economically disadvantaged and English language learners than Martins, yet 69 percent of Putegnats students met grade level or above in reading on the STARR last year.

Bernal said lawmakers spent a year looking for best practices across the state, and tried to roll their findings into House Bill 3.

Right now, I think we have to stop the hemorrhaging and its not that the kids arent performing. Its that were giving them sub-par resources, Bernal said.

Krista Torralva covers several school districts and public universities in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | Krista.Torralva@express-news.net | Twitter: @KMTorralvaUpdate at 7:30 p.m.:

During a briefing on Friday afternoon, Francisco Sanchez, Harris County's deputy emergency management coordinator, urged residents to stay informed over the weekend after another fire was contained at the ITC plant in Deer Park and clean-up operations would continue.

"Our hope is this does not happen again, but should it happen we'll be ready to respond," said Sanchez.

Sanchez said their main area of concern were the communities surrounding the plant and noted that Harris County remained at a low risk.

The fires were contained at the ITC plant in Deer Park late Friday afternoon, according to company spokesman Dale Samuelson.

"The fire has been extinguished," said Samuelson.

Samuelson said it was unclear how many tanks caught fire or the chemicals that were inside, but he said they would release that information when it becomes available.

At least two tanks were on fire at the plant, sending up another plume of black smoke, according to the Harris County Office of Emergency Management.

Update at 4:47 p.m.:

ITC confirmed in a news release that the tanks in the west side of the containment area have re-ignited.

A runoff ditch along Tidal Road also appears to be ablaze.

"This is a developing incident," ITC officials said in the statement. "We will provide additional information as soon as it becomes available."

Harris County authorities said the fire is taking place within the original tank farm that was the site of the fire earlier this week.

It's unclear where the blaze began or what caused it. ITC couldn't immediately confirm what chemicals are in the affected tanks.

Deer Park's office of emergency management referred to the smoke as a "flare up." A shelter-in-place isn't in effect at this time.

"The City of Deer Park is not issuing a Shelter-in-Place order at this time but we are monitoring the situation," the office said.

The Sam Houston Tollway Ship Channel bridge was closed due to the fire but was re-opened by Harris County Precinct Eight constables shortly before 5 p.m.

Now Playing: A plume of black smoke shot up from the site of the ITC tank farm fire on Friday afternoon. Video: Godofredo Vasquez

Original story:

A wall surrounding the damaged tank farm at the charred Deer Park chemical storage facility breached shortly after noon Friday, company and Harris County officials said, increasing the risk that airborne and liquid toxins will be released from the site.

HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM INVESTIGATES: Deer Park company battling fire accused of intentionally polluting water during Harvey

"We have learned that a portion of the tank farm containment wall containing the product has partially collapsed. Industrial neighbors and the Texas Battleship and Monument State Park should consider taking shelter-in-place precautions," said Intercontinental Terminals Co. spokesman Dale Samuelson. "We are coordinating with federal, state and local officials to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

County emergency operations spokesman Aaron Ewing said local officials are working under an ongoing air monitoring plan to assess the situation at the facility where holding tanks began exploding on Sunday and burned for days. Officials noted that such a breach could affect the effectiveness of the foam blanket that is coating the tank farm in the hopes of preventing flare-ups and the release of further toxins.

HOUSTON CHRONICLE EXCLUSIVE: Dangerous chemicals create hidden dangers in Houston

It is unclear whether the central risk posed by Friday's breach is airborne or into the Houston Ship Channel or Tucker Bayou.

About the same time of the breach, which occurred on the north side of the wall, Port of Houston officials closed part of the ship channel, due to pollution from the fire. A spokesman said the channel is closed from Tucker Bayou to Light 116.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said workers were trying to contain toxins from flowing downstream by placing additional booms in the water, and said an ITC contractor is collecting and storing contaminated runoff.

"TCEQ is working to fully assess and mitigate any wider impact," the agency's roughly 2 p.m. statement read.

The wall breach came shortly after ITC officials said crews could spend up to 12 hours pumping pyrolysis gasoline out of one of tanks and that during that time, the risk of benzene exposure in the air will increase.

"There's going to be a lot of agitation in the tank when we start the pumping," Brent Weber, ITC incident commander, said. "There is an elevated risk of benzene emission during this time."

WHAT RESIDENTS ARE SAYING: Anxiety washes over Deer Park community after fire

Pyrolysis gasoline, also known as "pygas" is a benzene-rich liquid byproduct that can be blended with other chemicals for use as a gasoline additive. That chemical was the source of a benzene spike on Thursday morning, after it leaked out from foam covering one of the tanks. City leaders issued a shelter in place that lasted for several hours.

ITC officials estimated on Thursday that 14,000 barrels of pygas remained in that tank. However, ITC officials said Friday that about 20,000 barrels remained.

WHAT IS BENZENE? What you need to know about the dangerous chemicals in the Deer Plant fire

Crews attempted to pump pygas from the tank on Thursday, but the effort didn't work, Weber said, in part because of an unideal environment concerning the positioning of the pump. The pump was also losing prime, he said.

Aside from the roughly 20,000 barrels of product in the one tank, about 40,000 more barrels are expected to be removed, Weber said. Not all tanks are compromised, but they contain pygas and naptha, which have some percentage of benzene.

Elevated levels of the highly carcinogenic benzene were detected early Thursday in the area near the plant, prompting a shelter in place that continued throughout the morning.

Around 4:38 a.m. Friday, one air monitor specifically testing for benzene and located about 500 yards from the tank farm picked up an elevated reading, falling within the threshold of taking additional precautionary measures, according to the Harris County Emergency Management Office. The reading, recorded by county officials, was higher than Thursday's. It showed lower readings later in the morning.

An ITC spokesman said that because the Friday reading was "localized," there was no need for a public notice or shelter-in-place order. No other nearby monitors picked up elevated benzene readings, according to a map on the county's emergency management website.

"We've got no indication that there was any [elevated benzene] spread anywhere else," the spokesman said.

Deer Park Mayor Jerry Mouton said he isn't sure whether more shelter-in-place orders will be called but pointed to the possibility of more benzene releases as an indicator.

"There is potential," he said.

Mouton said he didn't like to speak in hypotheticals. Twice, he referred to the presence of benzene in everyday life.

"You're already being exposed to some level of benzene," Mouton said.

So far, fire investigators have not been able to access the facility to investigate the cause of the fire, according to the Harris County Fire Marshal's Office.

Samantha Ketterer and Brooke A. Lewis contributed to this report.

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.Smoke Shack, Local Coffee and a Spurs shop are among the new vendors heading to the San Antonio International Airport under a plan approved Thursday by the City Council. But the city rejected Chick-fil-A.

Councilman Roberto Trevino said he couldnt support Chick-fil-As inclusion because of its anti-LGBT reputation, a concern echoed by Councilman Manny Pelaez. Trevino suggested the council approve the deal while directing city staff and its new vendor, Paradies Lagardere, to find a replacement for Chick-fil-A.

The heart of the LGBTQ community is in District 1, and that community has come together to voice its disapproval of this proposal because it includes a company with a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior, Trevino said.

On ExpressNews.com: Chicago alderman protests Chick-fil-A restuarant

The council ultimately adopted Trevinos proposal 6-4-1 after hours of discussion about the Chick-fil-A issue and the process city staff used to pick the winner of the contract.

Councilmen Greg Brockhouse, John Courage and Clayton Perry were among those opposed to Trevinos motion, saying that replacing Chick-fil-A would materially change the citys contract policy. Every company would then have to express its views on LGBT issues, Brockhouse said.

Courage had similar misgivings.

Im just concerned that if we start picking and choosing based on social issues, then does that mean we dont want to let a certain medical group into the Medical Center? I think that is going down a very wrong path for this city to take, Courage said.

Councilman Art Hall was the fourth no vote; Councilwoman Rebecca Viagran abstained. Both had concerns over the RFP process.

Under the approved plan, Atlanta-based Paradies Lagardere will bring eight vendors to the airports Terminal A as a master concessionaire. They are: Sip Brew Bar and Market, Smoke Shack, Local Coffee, the Spurs store, Adinas Market, The Luxury, Boss Bagels and SIP. Chef Andrew Weissman is leading at least one of those ventures.

Those locations are expected to open around a year from now. The vendors they will replace include: InMotion/Stars of San Antonio, Brookstone, Natalies, Raising Canes, Simply Books/Starbucks, Gervins and Blimpies.

There was some contention regarding the process that city staff used to select the contract winner. Paradies Lagardere won over Host International. Both companies had representatives at the session, testifying for more than an hour.

Host Internationals group included Spurs great George Iceman Gervin and chef Johnny Hernandez. Hernandezs two airport restaurants were unaffected by the change.

Assistant City Manager Carlos Contreras said both deals were stellar and that it was a tough decision. In the end, he said, Paradies was guaranteeing more money  nearly $2.17 million per year  and incorporated live music into its concept, among other factors.

Several council members, led by Viagran, said they would have liked to have a briefing session before bringing the deal to a vote.

Brockhouse, who supported Viagrans request, pointed out that Host International won the first round of scoring before losing in the final round after interviews.

Contreras, who helped oversee the process, said changes in scoring are common. He said a briefing session presentation would mirror the one council members received Thursday. Viagrans motion failed 7-4.

Soon after, Trevinos measure to exclude Chick-fil-A passed. The chain has gained notoriety for its CEOs opposition to same-sex marriage. The company has also donated millions of dollars to groups opposed to LGBT people.

Some folks are going to look at this and say Oh my gosh, youre fighting the culture wars, and here you are trying to shove your values down other peoples throats, Pelaez said. Im not. Im just trying to take the culture wars out of our airport.

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In politics, an upset makes for a natural target.

So when John Courage sealed a surprise City Council victory two years ago on the North Side, there was an impression among many that he might become a sitting duck.

Courage, who had previously run for a slew of offices on the Democratic ticket, was now in the District 9 seat that has been a rare conservative stronghold at City Hall, one that counts Joe Krier, Elisa Chan and Kevin Wolff as alumni.

Most expected a moderate, business-backed conservative to try to turn Courage into a one-term council member.

That didnt happen.

Instead, Courage will seek to fend off challenges from Patrick Von Dohlen, a social conservative and financial adviser who narrowly missed a runoff for the seat two years ago; Nicholas Balderas, a 24-year-old software developer; and Richard Reza Versace, a personal trainer.

I find that very surprising, said Wolff, now the lone Republican on the Bexar County Commissioners Court. John Courage is a great guy, but from a philosophical perspective, he doesnt really match District 9.

District 9 candidates John Courage, incumbent Age: 67 Occupation: Retired teacher Family: Married, four children Education: Bachelor's, UTSA; master's, Walden University In his own words: "I want to continue to be your neighbor on the City Council and advocate for your concerns." Nicholas Balderas Age: 24 Occupation: Software developer, H-E-B Family: Not married Education: Smithson Valley High School In his own words: "I decided to run because I feel like we've hit a wall. We've kind of been operating in the status quo." Richard Reza Versace Age: 62 Occupation: Personal trainer Family: Not married; two children Education: Bachelor's, San Antonio College; master's, UTSA In his own words: "I feel more. A lot of politicians don't feel, they just say it because they're reading from a script." Patrick Von Dohlen Age: 49 Occupation: Financial adviser Family: Married; nine children Education: Bachelor's, Texas A&M University In his own words: "We need somebody to represent District 9 who knows what's it like to employ people, to cut a check." See More Collapse

But Wolff said Courage has been able to embed himself in the community and deliver on key services.

Hes a very responsive councilman. He listens to them and he acts on things, Wolff said. I think thats indicative of what council governments are supposed to be. Theyre not supposed to be partisan.

Marco Barros, Courages business-backed opponent in the past runoff, has endorsed him in this contest.

Ive watched him, and he has kept his promises, Barros said. Im very pleased with him.

To vote in the May 4 elections, San Antonio residents must register by April 4.

Here are the District 9 candidates, in the order they will appear on the ballot:

Nicholas Balderas, 24, is a software developer for H-E-B making his first run for office. He said he would focus on easing traffic congestion in the North Side district, fostering smart development and giving neighborhoods a bigger voice in zoning decisions.

Balderas said one of the first things he would do if elected is create a new layer of advisory committees for the citys zoning commission. He said hed like voters to elect neighborhood representatives to smaller councils that can then advise the commission, which advises the City Council.

I think its important that as the city continues to grow, people are involved in their own communities and have a say in what happens in their communities, Balderas said. They absolutely have to be able to vocalize their opinions on these issues.

Balderas said his reason for running isnt that hes dissatisfied with Courages job performance.

I just feel Im unique from John Courage and bring something different to the council, he said.

John Courage, 67, a retired teacher, is the incumbent seeking a second term. Courage said hes proud of his first two years on the council and wants to continue that service into a new term.

Courage pointed to his work in participatory budgeting, an effort in which his office seeks input from constituents about where to best allocate District 9 dollars, and then the community votes on certain projects. In the past, thats led to Courage allocating funds for a left-turn lane near Huebner and Loop 1604 and purchasing six new bicycles for police.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio council eyes homestead exemption on city property taxes

Of late, hes also pushing for a homestead exemption for property taxpayers. The city currently doesnt offer one, and its the only major city in Texas that doesnt. Courage said hes a fiscal conservative.

If re-elected, Courage said, he wants to continue overseeing some bond projects in District 9, including a new park, a senior center and increased connectivity on busy roads such as Huebner.

(Traffic) is a big issue, every day, with everyone I talk to, he said.

Richard Reza Versace, 62, is a personal trainer making his first run for office. Reza Versace said one of his biggest priorities would be combatting obesity and improving nutrition in schools.

I see a lot of things that I can do for my community, and I dont see it being done, he said. Nutrition at schools is horrible, and I can help with that.

If elected, Reza Versace said he would try to target high school nutrition programs and implement a meatless Monday option. He said he would also try to develop free web seminars to teach San Antonians how to cook and practice tai chi.

You are what you eat, and you are what you think, he said.

Reza Versace would also seek to take action on homelessness, increase the minimum wage and try to strengthen gun control measures.

Patrick Von Dohlen, 49, is making his second consecutive bid for the District 9 seat. He finished third two years ago, narrowly missing the runoff.

Von Dohlen said hes running on a simple platform: smaller government, less taxes and more freedom.

We have a city council thats becoming progressively more agenda-driven, Von Dohlen said, adding that the city should return to its core duties, which is to provide basic city services and be great at it.

Unlike Barros, he doesnt think Courage is cutting it in that regard. Von Dohlen said he would use his business acumen  he is a financial adviser  to seek out areas where the city is taking on unnecessary expenses.

Von Dohlen has garnered attention in the past for his stances on social issues, including his opposition to the citys nondiscrimination ordinance and his support for the states so-called bathroom bill that would have required people using public restrooms to use the one that corresponds with their sex at birth.

He was a founding board member and former chair of the San Antonio Family Association, which encourages gay people to seek assistance on its website.

He said Thursday that he does not share all the organizations views. He declined to endorse that view in particular, though he said people should have the option to seek conversion therapy if they want to.

The healthiest thing for people, from a marriage perspective, is to go with natural law, he said, referring to heterosexual marriage.

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Everyone knows the first rule of Fight Club: You dont talk about Fight Club.

But theres a former Bexar County Jail inmate whos breaking that rule  legally.

The one-time inmate who is now serving time in state prison has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, alleging that several detention officers at the Bexar County Jail organized brawls between inmates and bet on the outcome, leaving some inmates bloodied in the aftermath.

OnExpressNews.com: Child and bestiality porn defendant gets 14 years in prison at San Antonio sentencing

Rodolfo Carrazco alleges he was subjected to the underground blood sport while he served a stint at the jail in April 2017 and was beaten seriously enough that he had to be hospitalized with injuries that included a broken jaw. He also lost the gold grille in his teeth.

They would let guys loose to fight each other, said Carrazcos lawyer, Gregory W. Canfield. What our investigation shows is that they were betting on who was going to win.

Carrazco, also identified as Rodolfo Carrasco in court and police records, is serving a 14-year sentence in the Texas prison system for charges that include burglary of a habitation. He was transferred there in November 2017 after being sentenced in Bexar County, records show. While awaiting trial and sentencing, Carrazco was held at the Bexar County Jail.

The lawsuit said deputies unlocked the cells of the housing unit where Carrazco was held and allowed other inmates to challenge him to a fight. The suit, filed Monday with Bexar County as the defendant, seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for pain, mental anguish and the loss of Carrazcos gold grille.

Mr. Carrazco was messed up pretty bad, Canfield said. It was like a fight club. Several inmates and several guards were involved in it.

OnExpressNews.com: After years of pleading, local and federal officials break ground for a new U.S. courthouse in San Antonio

According to Canfield, the fights occurred while supervisors were not around or in areas of the jail where surveillance cameras might not have recorded the incidents. Reluctant inmates were coerced to defend themselves, and talking about the fights was a no-no, according to Canfield.

I believe they were egged on, Canfield said. Inmates had to fight back if you have someone attack you.

The lawsuit does not identify any of the deputies involved, the number of fights, or how long the alleged fight club lasted. It was unclear whether the Bexar County Sheriffs Office has investigated the matter, although then-jail Deputy Raul Gonzales was fired in December 2017 after he was accused of organizing fights between inmates.

Gonzales came under investigation after KENS-TV received complaints from inmates families beginning in April 2017. The KENS report, however, did not mention a fight club or allegations that deputies bet on fights.

At a news conference Wednesday, Sheriff Javier Salazar addressed a number of unrelated incidents of alleged wrongdoing by deputies that came to a head this week  from drunken driving offenses to assault of inmates. Some deputies were terminated, while others were informed they were being shown the door, Salazar said. He explained the internal disciplinary process, typically two separate administrative and criminal investigations, and steps he has implemented to help curb misdeeds by deputies.

He told reporters that he does not tolerate misconduct by any of the 1,500 employees he oversees.

Several months ago, I stood in this very spot and indicated and have made no bones about it, that if you are caught dishonoring this badge, I will make it a point to hunt you down and cut you off like a cancer, Salazar said.

He said he had not heard of recent allegations of a fight club within his offices ranks.

The last case that I heard that term fight club associated with was a case from several years ago, before I took office, and my understanding is that person is no longer employed here, said Salazar, who was sworn into office Jan. 1, 2017.Tom Reel, Staff / Staff photographer

The daughter of a retired San Antonio police officer who appealed her murder conviction and was granted a new trial learned her fate this week after a second jury found her guilty in the 2010 killing of her childs father in a scheme to collect insurance money.

In this episode of The Docket, we look at the second conviction and sentencing of Vanessa CameronIt has been three weeks since Andreen McDonald, a local businesswoman remembered for her love of family and fitness, was reported missing and presumed dead by authorities.

Since her disappearance, McDonalds husband Andre, an Air Force major assigned to a cyber-warfare unity at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland has been jailed on one count of tampering with evidence and several large-scale searches headed by the Bexar County Sheriffs Office have turned up empty.

As updates in the case have slowed, Sheriff Javier Salazar gave what little new info he could during a Wednesday press conference, saying that evidence they have collected has been processed and is being returned to investigators this week.

Some of the technology that we have is just now starting to come in, some of the forensic evidence, he said.

A reward of up to $5,000 is also being offered for information that leads to the arrest of the suspect responsible for McDonalds disappearance.

Salazar said searching without evidence directing them to a specific area is not the best use of their resources.

Until we have direct evidence taking us to a certain area, we wont have a big organized search where were asking people to come out, he said.

But, he said, that doesnt mean people who are out searching should stop.

I would never want to stand in anybodys way of doing that, Salazar said.

He advised that anyone going out into undeveloped areas should take proper precautions to encounter wildlife and other natural hazards.

Realize that with spring weather approaching the snakes are out; it could be dangerous, the sheriff said.

Bobby Green, who retired from the U.S. Army after also serving in the Air Force, encountered an 8-foot rattlesnake during his first independent search last week. That encounter has not discouraged him as he and other members of the community have conducted several searches since then.

On Thursday, Green and his colleagues spent four hours searching the Joint Base San Antonio-Camp Bullis area. Authorities had focused on the area based on information that Andre McDonald may have gone there shortly after his wife disappeared, even though he had no official business there.

I know that if something were to happen to me I would want someone out there looking for me to give my kids and family closure and to give them peace of mind, Green said.

Andreen McDonald, 29, was last seen arguing with her husband on Feb. 28, according to court records. She was reported missing the next day by two friends who went to her Timberwood Park area home to check on her.

The pair told deputies they found blood and hair on a light switch in the master bathroom, and a zipper in a fire outside, according to court documents.

The tampering charge that Andre McDonald, 40, is facing stems from two receipts investigators say he tried to destroy. The receipts list items that could have been used to dispose of Andreen McDonalds body, Salazar said. They include a shovel, an ax, a hatchet, large trash bags, and two 5-gallon gas cans.

Andre McDonald was arrested March 3  with bail set at $2 million  after he was detained for a mental health evaluation.

John Convery, his attorney, is fighting to lower that bail amount, arguing in a motion filed last week that the cost for posting the bond is too expensive.

Very few people could produce the outlandish amount of money to secure pretrial release on $2,000,000.00 bond; MAJ McDonald, is no exception, the motion states.

Convery argued that the bond amount is being used to punish McDonald, who has not been convicted of any wrongdoing.

Judge Frank J. Castro has yet to acknowledge the motion as of Thursday.

Anyone with information on Andreen McDonalds whereabouts is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 210-224-7867.Eva Schloss was 13 when she disappeared.

She and her family had left Vienna after Germany annexed Austria, moving first to Belgium and then to Amsterdam in 1938  and it was then that she first befriended another Jewish girl her own age: Anne Frank.

Her family and the Franks went into hiding on the same day in June 1942, when it really looked like Hitler was going to win the war, Schloss told a rapt crowd of more than 2,000 at Trinity Universitys Laurie Auditorium on Tuesday. The Chabad Center sponsored the event.

Schloss, 89, a Holocaust survivor who became the stepsister of Anne Frank, is now a speaker and author.

Her father told her that he and her 16-year-old brother, Heinz, would stay with one member of the Dutch resistance. Schloss and her mother would stay with another.

My father explained, if we are in two different hiding places, the chance that two of us will survive is bigger, Schloss said. Survive. At 13, I think that was the first time I realized it might be a matter of life and death, which, of course, it was.

We didnt know about the Frank family, nor did they know about us. We just disappeared one day.

Anne Frank did not survive the Holocaust but became its most enduring human example with the publication of her diary after the war.

In their new neighborhood after arriving in Amsterdam, she was among the children who gathered to play together outside their apartments and who introduced herself to Schloss.

We became friends. We were not best friends, Schloss said  because while she was shy and afraid of speaking up, Anne had no inhibitions.

At school, she was jokingly called Mrs. Quack Quack because she never could stop talking, Schloss said. Anne often had to stay after school to write lines as punishment.

I admired her, because she was quite a leader and always telling stories, Schloss said.

As an 11-year-old, she was very interested in boys already, including Schloss older brother.

Schloss spent nearly two years in hiding, living in fear of knocks on the door at night that signaled Nazi searches.

They were captured on her 15th birthday and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The doors were slid open, and it was a lovely May day. And we looked around, and we realized we were at Auschwitz.

We thought, thats it, our last hours have come on Earth, she said.

In the concentration camp, the family was again separated. Schloss and her mother lived in womens barracks, where they slept eight people across in lice-infested bunks and very often, you woke up and the person who slept next to you had not made it.

Schloss said she lived in fear of selections, when they were paraded naked and were scrutinized before some were sent to the gas chambers.

That fall, her mother became very, very sick, Schloss said, and she was sent to the wrong side.

Through a miracle, she said, her mother survived.

Her last encounters with her father were another miracle, Schloss said. When Nazis began to evacuate the camp, leaving them with less supervision, he was able to come see her three times, telling her, Have the courage to carry on.

After those visits, Schloss never saw him again. She learned later that he and Heinz died in another camp several days before it was liberated. She and her mother were taken first to Russia before returning to Amsterdam.

Schloss began speaking about her experiences in 1980, when she felt it became necessary to educate people and help them remember.

She said she was inspired in part by seeing how Otto Frank, who was widowed and later married Schloss mother, worked to publish Annes diary and how that made her friend immortal.

She hopes to do the same for brother Heinz by donating paintings he completed while he was in hiding to the Dutch Resistance Museum and by talking and writing about his life.

Among the crowd Tuesday were more than 700 students from San Antonio universities, along with younger students and families, whom Schloss directly addressed, calling it very very important that they learn about and remember the Holocaust.

Its a pleasure, especially to see so many young people, she said. You are our future.

Marilyn Luna, a sophomore at the Anne Frank Inspire Academy, a local charter school, said she was inspired by Schloss experience and perseverance at such a young age.

She and her classmates have a lot of respect for what happened, Luna said, and take seriously the responsibility to help keep history from repeating itself.

One of them, Sabrina Urena, 14, said hearing Schloss directly describe the emotions she experienced was different from learning about the Holocaust in school or books.

The Chabad Centers executive director, Rabbi Chaim Block, said events such as this help combat rising anti-Semitism, discrimination and violence.

Somehow theres this sense that its becoming OK to engage in this public dialogue of hatred and discrimination, he said. The more that we get people like Eva Schloss out there, to hear their story, the more balance we bring to the public arena.

Schloss description of the progression of the Nazi regimes early restrictions on Jews before they were forced into hiding was particularly important, Block said.

And Nazi Germany, it didnt start where it ended, with gas chambers. It started with the slow delegitimization of an entire people, the slow dehumanization of an entire people. Slowly but surely, it became OK in the German public arena to think about Jews being less than, he said. Thats why these kinds of gatherings are so critical.

LTeitz@express-news.netThe vote in the U.S. House was unanimous that the special counsels report on his investigation of the president and his campaign be made public. And the president has said he backs that intent.

This is what Attorney General William Barr should keep in mind when he decides how much of this report  a confidential version submitted to him Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller  should be disclosed. He has told Congress that he could be in a position to advise you of the special counsels principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.

That, however, doesnt mean those conclusions  contained in a summary  will be accompanied by as much of the reports details as possible. We urge Barr to be as transparent as he can be.

The first thing to keep in mind for why complete transparency wont happen is that the House resolution  passed bipartisanly 420-0, with a handful of abstentions  isnt binding. The rules under which the special counsel operates make clear that Barr is in the drivers seat. Muellers report to Barr is confidential. The attorney general will send a report to Congress explaining its conclusions, but it can be as complete or as incomplete as the he decides is warranted.

The House, assuming they will get bare bones (incorrectly, we hope), is already taking steps to force disclosure.

The rationale for secrecy is that the Justice Department should not release any information that compromises national security and should not publicly comment on evidence in cases where charges are not levied, impugning people not indicted. The Justice Departments stated preference, however, is not to indict a sitting president. So, if Mueller lays out actions that might be deemed sufficient to warrant indictment by reasonable legal minds, that information might not be forthcoming because the president wont be indicted under any circumstance. But causes of action necessary for impeachment  a political act  are not necessarily about indictable crimes.

In other words, there might not be any criminal charges against the president exacted but that doesnt mean his actions wont rise to the level of impeachable offenses. This is why congressional investigations independent of the Mueller probe will still likely be necessary.

What we dont know: Was the president a party to agreeing to that Trump Tower meeting with folks with Kremlin connections  people who promised to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton? Is there a paper or some other kind of trail that definitively points to obstruction of justice in the presidents firing of FBI Director James Comey, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his attempts to fire Mueller and other actions? How much were former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, adviser Roger Stone and others lone wolves in their discussions and dealings with foreign powers and/or WikiLeaks?

Even before Mueller submitted his report  signaling the end of the investigation  the list of potential offenses was long just from what we knew from existing indictments and other revelations. Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, during congressional hearings, pretty much drew a road map on campaign finance violations involving hush money paid to women with whom the president had sex.

Our fervent hope is that the nation awakens Saturday or Sunday morning and finds that Barr has been as forthcoming as the nation needs.

Unfortunately, the GOP-controlled Senate did not offer guidance in this regard as did the House. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham objected that the Senate should also urge Barr to appoint another special counsel to investigate the investigation  a transparent obstruction from a source who has gone from ardent Trump critic during the campaign to abject apologist for the president now that his own re-election campaign looms.

This transparency should occur as a matter of trust and because Americans need this knowledge. With all the revelations about possible presidential wrongdoing and with each Trump attack on the investigation as a witch hunt, there is a cloud hanging over the presidency  and the Justice Department. Americans have been left wondering what precisely has happened. So, let the investigation speak for itself  in its entirety as much as is possible. Was it an investigation whose conclusions are worthy of trust, regardless of whether those conclusions damage or clear the president and his campaign? What Barr releases to Congress could go a long way to answer this question.

The nation needs steps toward closure, though we recognize this report now released might be the beginning of the end, not the end itself. Release as much of the Mueller investigative report as possible. Texas congressional delegation should lead the way in making this happen even if that means going to court.HARTFORD  The suburbs of central Connecticut are now the hot spot for car thefts, while authorities in nearly every major city are seeing fewer vehicles stolen, according to a preliminary report released Thursday to the Juvenile Justice Policy and Oversight Committee.

Committee members including Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, called for an examination of car thefts and juvenile car theft arrests a few weeks ago after a lengthy public hearing on HB 7332, which would allow courts to automatically transfer juveniles charged with committing a car theft to adult court based on their criminal history.

The issue has pitted juvenile justice advocates against police, who say their towns are being whacked with an increasing wave of car thefts that they believe have escalated since the state raised the age for youth to be classified as juveniles to 17 in 2012.

Since then, suburbs have been increasingly plagued with car thefts, especially unlocked vehicles with key fobs left inside the car. There have been several highly publicized deaths connected to teens in stolen cars during the same period, including that of 15-year-old Jayson Negron, who was shot by Bridgeport officer in 2017 as he tried to flee. A Hartford woman also died after being run over by a Hartford teen in a stolen car.

The findings of the report were released less than 36 hours after a 17-year-old from Hartford died after the stolen Mercedes he was in crashed in Durham early Wednesday. The car was chased minutes before by officers in Madison where the vehicle was stolen, state police said. It is unclear who was driving the car.

Car theft decreased in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Britain, and New Haven by more than 38 percent from 2008 to 2017, according to the report drafted by Ken Barone, project manager at the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at Central Connecticut State University.

At the same time, car thefts are up by close to 21 percent in the states suburbs with populations up to 25,000. The highest concentration of car thefts has moved from the New Haven area to the Interstate 91 and 84 corridors in the central Connecticut suburbs, Barone said.

Weve literally seen the problem traveling north over the past seven or eight years, Barone said.

The only outlier was the city of Waterbury, which saw a 91 percent increase in car thefts from 2008 to 2017. Waterbury had the fewest number of car thefts out of any large city in Connecticut 10 years ago, Barone said.

This is one of the few times you dont want to come in last to first in this particular race, said Rep. Geraldo Reyes, D-Waterbury, who attended the meeting at Walkers invitation.

Walker suggested that Waterburys car theft rate was connected to cuts in after school and evening programming designed to keep kids engaged.

Overall car thefts in the state of Connecticut are down from more than 12,000 in the 1990s to 7,310 in 2017, Barone said. But the state has seen an uptick since 2014, when the number bottomed out at 6,100.

Barone cautioned that more data would be needed before any conclusions could be drawn. Car theft in general has about a 14-percent solvability rate, so the age of who committed the crimes is hard to nail down.

He contends that the age range of those charged with car theft hasnt fluctuated much since 2008, when 46 percent of those arrested were under 19, compared to 49 percent in 2017.

About 55 percent of the people arrested for car theft in Glastonbury are under the age of 18, said Glastonbury Police Chief Marshall Porter, who is on the committee. We have a small group of juveniles committing 90 percent of the crimes.

Criminal activity connected to car thefts is also escalating, he said. Theyve gone from joy riding to using the cars to commit more serious crimes, Porter said.

But advocates of juvenile justice reform contend that more data needs to be gathered before any conclusions can be drawn.

I think fear never makes good legislation, Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, said. I know the context of people being run over by cars, but when the public hears those things they say you better do something.

Barone wants to cull information on where the cars are ending up after the vehicles are stolen. But several committee members wanted to collect data on what was happening in a kids life when he opts to steal the vehicle.

Locking them up is not the answer, said Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven. Lets find out why they are choosing to do bad things.STAMFORD  School officials had better have their homework in hand when they go before the Board of Finance with their 2019-20 budget Monday night.

They are scheduled for a quizzing.

Education officials have been earning low grades for their presentations of funding requests.

Last month they asked the finance board to reimburse $702,600 theyd spent on mold cleanup. The board refused, saying it wasnt clear where the money went.

Last week school officials returned, explaining that a review of mold expenses revealed a lower amount: $667,400. But finance board members, still dissatisfied with the detail provided, approved only $600,000, leaving school officials to find the rest in their strapped budget.

At the same March 14 meeting, school officials asked the finance board to release $202,000 from the districts Energy Reserve Fund to help pay an unexpectedly big electric bill. Once again the finance board rejected the request and told school officials to come back with analysis showing why the bill escalated so significantly.

Now, at a 7 p.m. meeting at City Hall Monday, the finance board will begin deliberating Superintendent Earl Kims budget request for $286.5 million, a hefty 5 percent increase over this years spending plan.

The finance board will want answers, Chairman Richard Freedman said.

We want to discern: Whats really going on, and how much do you really need? Freedman said. If we have enough questions that we need them to come back for a second night, we have an open date in our schedule for that.

There is a long-standing push and pull between the Board of Education and the two bodies with power to cut its budget: the Board of Finance and the Board of Representatives, Freedman said. It is because the school budget has built-in contingency funds, he said.

The two boards are always trying to find out  whats in the education budget that we dont know about? he said.

Generally, though, school officials present thorough spending plans, Freedman said.

When we ask for information during budget deliberations, they always provide it, he said. Their budget books are very good. I think they provide a lot of information that the city doesnt provide.

The finance boards recent refusals are about this years budget. And this year has come to be defined by Stamfords own four-letter word.

Mold.

It bloomed in school buildings last summer, when rain fell in record amounts and water seeped through roofs, walls, windows and foundations that have not been adequately maintained for decades. To date, $6 million has been spent on mold-related work district wide.

The continuing costs of cleanup and structural repairs are so significant that the school district cannot cover them, so in October the city created a Mold Task Force to share the financial burden.

It drives Mayor David Martins $603 million 2019-20 budget request for the city and schools, which, if approved, will mean a 4.4 percent tax increase for residents.

It has the school district scrambling to keep within this years budget. Kim has said that, if the spending rate continues until the fiscal year ends on June 30, the district will be $3.15 million over budget, a violation of state law.

Kim, who has imposed a freeze on hiring, overtime, and discretionary spending, was counting on finance board approval of the $702,600 and release of the $202,000 to reduce his overage.

Now hes $67,400 short on the first request and the second is up in the air.

When they asked for money for mold remediation work theyd already paid for, we felt that if we were to be put in that position, we wanted to be satisfied that they had verified the bills properly. We were not, Freedman said. With the electric bill, they didnt give us really any information at all  just a one-page document, one or two sentences long, saying our bills went up 2 percent.

School officials asked for $202,000 because thats all thats left in their reserve fund, he said, but the electric bill was up by a lot more than that. I think it was $400,000 or $500,000. The fact that we didnt even get that number is part of the problem.

School officials have other financial stresses, including escalated costs for custodians whove been cleaning up mold on overtime, and unanticipated special-education costs, Freedman said.

They hit their limit, and they cant overrun their budget, so they have to come to us, Freedman said. They dont usually have to. So they may not know how to do it. We may require more information than they are used to providing.

Finance board member Kieran Ryan said school officials at times appeared to be unprepared and documentation was wanting.

Several times Ive been left increasingly confused or unpersuaded after their presentations, which, to me, anyway, lacked a certain confidence, or lacked a certain clarity, Ryan said.

Clarence Zachery, chief fiscal and operations support officer for the school district, said the Board of Education has rarely had to ask the Board of Finance for supplemental appropriations.

While that is not an excuse for the perceived lack of information, we believed we were following, or even going beyond, the precedent set for the type and amount of information supplied to the (finance board,) based on earlier mold remediation requests, Zachery said.

His staff was set to meet with the citys Office of Policy & Management and the Engineering Departments energy unit to obtain the required data to support our increased electricity cost claim, Zachery said. While we continue to address our expected shortfall with the steps shared at the last board meeting, we remain hopeful that once the additional documentation is provided, we can come to an agreement.

acarella@stamfordadvocate.com; 203-964-2296.GREENWICH  The town is taking a closer look at traffic congestion along the main corridor of Glenville, a problem that many say could get even worse if the state reinstates tolls on the Merritt Parkway and I-95.

Using a $2 million federal grant and operating under an Aug. 1 deadline, Greenwich will develop a preliminary plan to improve traffic flow in the small commercial area, which is known for its backups and slowdowns.

As part of that work, town officials and consultants from Milone and MacBroom met with about 20 residents and property owners Wednesday night at the Bendheim Western Greenwich Civic Center to hear ideas about how to make the area safer for drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists.

We think over the next month we should get to a point where we would have preliminary concepts and then we can ultimately come up with a full concept for the corridor, said Kwesi Brown, the lead project engineer from Milone and MacBroom.

He led the event with Gabriella Circosta Cohee, senior civil engineer for the towns Department of Public Works. After the preliminary plan is completed, the town will be able to estimate how much the improvements could cost, they said.

As Connecticut considers the possible return of tolls, the improvements cant come soon enough, said some residents, who are concerned that drivers seeking to avoid tolls may take short-cuts through Glenville.

Its going to be a nightmare, resident Siegrun Pottgen said at the meeting. It will bring a lot more traffic to the area. They will skip the tolls and come through here. Its human nature.

Before the meeting, business owners and property owners took a walking tour of the area. They were split into three groups to look at specific areas and give feedback to address the issues they found.

Section one focused on the stretch from Glenville Street to the Byram River. Section two concentrated on the Byram River to Pemberwick Road. The third section covered the stretch from Pemberwick Road to Weaver Street.

In section one, participants called for improved coordination of traffic signals to reduce bottlenecks as well as improvements for pedestrians at the driveway for the Stop & Shop complex. Drivers often line up in the parking spaces along Glenville as they wait to turn into the parking lot, they said.

People want to make the whole area pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly so that theres safe access to the shopping center, Cohee said. Maybe that would include improving the sidewalks and adding a grass strip so that feels safer with a buffer between the sidewalk and the roadway. Maybe some trees could be added in as well.

For section two, many pointed to safety issues for drivers and pedestrians in the busy area near the popular Glenville Pizza. They called for traffic signal improvements, a roundabout and/or improvements to the road geometry from Pemberwick.

We heard loud and clear that something had to be done at Pemberwick in the Glenville Pizza area, said Jason Williams, lead landscape architect for Milone and MacBroom.

Many residents also want improvements for pedestrians, after the Planning and Zoning Commission recently approved plans to convert unused office space at The Mill into 69 new apartment units.

Project developer Steven Schacter, who attended the meeting, assured residents that traffic would decrease due to the apartment conversion. Fewer people will be coming and going to homes than they were to offices, he said. But some residents remain skeptical about the projects impact, especially if many of the apartments residents go to and from work using the nearby Merritt Parkway.

For section three, Milone and MacBrooms manager of traffic engineering Dave Sullivan said the discussions centered on backups on Pemberwick, sending traffic all the way back to Weaver Street. Suggestions included new left turn lanes onto Weaver and onto Pemberwick as well as new traffic signals, he said.

Some people felt it might be too many signals, Sullivan said. But some people felt it would be good to have another signal as long as there was proper coordination through the corridor.

There was also a discussion about roundabouts, he said. I heard about a roundabout near Greenwich Hospital (and) we dont want to design one like that. I heard that loud and clear, Sullivan said.

But we also heard that roundabouts may be a good alternative to keep traffic flowing through these areas and give some more opportunities for more green space and more opportunities for parking and pedestrians, he said.

Town resident Frank Futie also urged the consultants and the town to expand the area for examination.

Looking at just this corridor is kind of short-sighted, Futie said. It may have to be broadened because when you get to Stop & Shop, the traffic doesnt mysteriously dissipate. It goes all the way up Glenville to King Street. I think everyone in this room knows Glenville has become a pass-through to get to the Merritt Parkway, and people are looking to circumvent all the issues on 95.

More information will be posted online at www.greenwichct.gov on the page for the Department of Public Works.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.comBRIDGEPORT - An Ansonia man chased out of a home here by a man wielding a machete after he was caught sexually assaulting the mans 14-year-old daughter was sentenced Friday to 30 months in prison.

I was unaware of the actual age of the victim, but I take full responsibility for my actions, 24-year-old Andre Joseph said, pleading with Superior Court Judge Robert Devlin for leniency.

You and another gentleman go into a house to have sex with a 14-year-old girl at three in the morning and her father wakes up and slashes you with a machete, the judge retorted.

On the charges of second-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a child, the judge sentenced Joseph to eight years, suspended after he serves 30 months in prison and followed by 10 years of probation. The judge also ordered Joseph to register as a sex offender.

Senior Assistant States Attorney David Applegate told the judge that on May 22, 2015, a local man had woken up to hear noises coming from his daughters bedroom.

He opened the door and saw his daughter being sexually assaulted by two men, the prosecutor said.

Applegate said that the father grabbed a machete and chased the two men through the house, cutting Joseph in the hand before the men jumped out a window.

The girl told her father she didnt know the names of the two men and had contacted them through Facebook.

Applegate said sometime later Joseph, of Beaver Street, Ansonia, who matched the description of one of the men, arrived at the emergency room at Griffin Hospital with a gash on his hand. He said Joseph claimed he had gotten the cut in a fight with a robber.

Josephs lawyer, Frank Riccio II, said his client has a steady work history and hopes to become a truck driver when he gets out of prison.

A second defendant, Rashad Smith, 23, of Laurel Court, surrendered to police after learning there was a warrant for his arrest and is awaiting sentencing.GREENWICH  The St. Patricks Day Parade in Greenwich will step off this Sunday afternoon under sunny skies and with temperatures in a spring-like mid-50s.

The parade will begin at 2 p.m. from Town Halls southern parking lot.

The parade route heads out onto West Putnam Avenue and then turns onto Greenwich Avenue, heading straight through the center of town to the end at Steamboat Road.

Parking restrictions will be in place for the west side of Greenwich Avenue from Bruce Place, which is at the Greenwich Commons Park, to Steamboat Road.

On the east side of Greenwich Avenue, no parking will be allowed from West Putnam Avenue to Steamboat Road.

Dayton Avenue will be closed for traffic at noon from Field Point Road to the entrance of the supermarkets to allow trucks, floats, cars and other parade elements to proceed.

Additionally, road closures will occur throughout the downtown area beginning at about 1:30 p.m. to prepare for the parade.

Detour signs will be posted and police officers will be on the scene to direct traffic.

West Putnam Avenue will be closed for the parade from Dearfield Drive to Lafayette Place from 1:45 to about 3 p.m. Roads will be reopened as the parade passes through and police determine it is safe.

The parade is organized by the Greenwich Hibernian Association. Monsignor J. Peter Cullen, from St. Michael the Archangel Parish in Greenwich, will serve as the grand marshal.

Monsignor Cullen has been a long time leader in the Diocese of Bridgeport and the Catholic School in Greenwich, said James Dougherty, publicity chairman for the association. He served as pastor of St. Michael Church in Greenwich through a very difficult time and helped rebuild the parish community. Monsignor continues to be involved in the community as both local and state chaplain for the Knights of Columbus.

Cullen was ordained as a priest in 1967 and initially was assigned to work in Puerto Rico before being moved to Bridgeport, where he worked in the Hispanic Apostolate and served on the Affirmative Action Agency of Bridgeport and the City Board of Fire Commissioners. He was then moved to St. Aloysius in New Canaan, where he was a pastor for 17 years. In 2007, he was sent to Greenwich and served as pastor at St. Michaels until his retirement.

During his time in Greenwich, Cullen was also the chair of Greenwich Catholic School. He was the vicar general and moderator of the curia for the Bridgeport Diocese. That gave him the responsibility of assisting then-Bishop William Lori in governing the diocese and in coordinating the dioceses staff.

Monsignor has very strong Irish roots, the Hibernian Association said in a statement. His Irish ancestors include the Cullen, Collins, Nawn and Curley families. His Cullen ancestors came from Ireland to Boston in the 1850s. His ancestors came from counties Roscommon and Cork.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.comby Brendan Tuma | Buccaneers Correspondent | Mon, Mar 18th 4:55pm EDT

Darren Fells has agreed to a one-year contract with the Houston Texans. (Aaron Wilson on Twitter)

Fantasy Impact:

Fells spent 2018 with the Browns and managed to catch 11-of-12 targets throughout his 16 games played. He's considered a great blocking tight end, which makes for a nice fit in the Houston offense.SALEM, Ohio  A federal district court has granted a temporary injunction on the City of Toledos recent action that gives Lake Erie its own legal rights.

Known as the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, or LEBOR, the measure was approved by Toledo voters March 13, amendning the city charter in a way that gave the lake and its waters the right to exist, flourish and naturally evolve.

Supporters saw the bill of rights as a way of protecting the lake from farm nutrient runoff and harmful algal blooms, that result from too much phosphorus entering the lake and its tributaries. But farmers, and the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, have warned that the definitions are too loose, and that giving a lake its own legal standing through one citys laws, is likely unconstitutional.

Constitutional question

Wood County farmer Mark Drewes is challenging the constitutionality of the act, in a case before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Western Division.

District Judge Jack Zouhary granted the injunction in a March 18 decision, effectively putting any enforcement of LEBOR on pause, until further review.

The injunction does not preclude or prevent Toledo from administratively incorporating the new rights into its city charter, according to the decision issued by Zouhary.

Adam Sharp, the Farm Bureaus executive vice president, said his organization appreciates the judges decision.

Farm Bureau stands strong with Mark and his family and we appreciate that this injunction will prevent the law from taking effect while the case filed by the Drewes family is litigated, Sharp said, in a released statement. We are happy to see the court order a preliminary injunction delaying the enforcement of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

The Farm Bureau supports the Drewes case against the constitutionality of LEBOR, and Sharp said hes hopeful that farmers can plant their 2019 crop without fear of being sued.

We will be watching all developments in Toledo as it pertains to this case and will keep you updated as new information becomes available, Sharp said.

More concern

Along with farmers, several members of Toledo City Council have also expressed their concern, in public, that LEBOR may not be constitutional. Farmers have said they want to improve the Lake Erie water quality issue through voluntary measures, and through new state and federal programs being implemented in the western basin.

Earlier this month, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced a new H2Ohio water quality initiative intended to direct up to $900 million to water quality improvement across the state, in addition to projects announced by Ohio Director of Agriculture Dorothy Pelanda, Feb. 26.

According to the judges decision, the purpose of a preliminary injunction is merely to preserve the relative positions of the parties until a trial on the merits can be held.A West Yorkshire farmer has admitted he may quit farming after a large barn fire caused by a suspected arson attack nearly killed 150 sheep.

Fire crews were called at around 4pm on Wednesday (20 March) to a farm blaze in Old Lane, Ovenden.

The barn, which contained 150 pregnant ewes, was set on fire by 'mindless' arsonists, according to the farmer, Keith Midgley, who spoke to Halifax Courier.

However, no sheep were killed in the fire, but Mr Midgley and his family are left with costs running into the thousands.

Due to the severity of the incident, he is now considering walking away from a lifetime of farming.

He told the paper: We've had incidents over the years, with dogs attack sheep, thefts and vandalism, but never anything as bad as this.

It makes me want to say 'enough is enough, let's not bother any more'. I don't make a great living out of farming, I've always done it, I love it, but this feels like the last straw.

The incident follows news of an arson attack on a farm in Derbyshire in November 2018, which destroyed more than 3,000 bales.

Owners of the farm, E H Kinston and Son, posted a viral post on Facebook explaining how three thousand bales had been destroyed in an act of evil duty.

Meanwhile, a huge blaze thought to be an arson attack ripped through a farm building owned by James Dyson in December 2018.

The Head of Farming at Beeswax Dyson Farming, James Dyson's agricultural business, said on social media that 'mindless vandalism' caused the incident.An abattoir in London has been fined nearly 24,000 for meat hygiene failings which have been described as a 'unacceptable disregard of procedures'.

Romford Halal Meats Ltd has been fined a total of 23,952.35 after being prosecuted by the Food Standards Agency.

The abattoir was found guilty of failing to prevent carcases from coming into contact with others before a post-mortem inspection is completed.

The bunching of carcases at the abattoir occurred on 23 July 2017 and followed a series of warnings provided to the site operators to resolve the issue.

The EU provision helps to ensure that carcasses are not bunched together prior to inspection which reduces the likelihood of cross-contamination.

Once a post-mortem inspection has taken place, a carcass can have a health mark applied and be placed on the market.

District Judge Gary Lucie handed down his judgement on 15 March 2019 at Barkingside Magistrates Court and the food business received a fine of 8,000 and ordered to pay costs of 15,782.38 and a victim surcharge of 170.

Dr Colin Sullivan, Chief Operating Officer said: We welcome this fine for the unacceptable disregard of procedures that are put in place to protect consumers.

It helps to send a clear message to other abattoirs that fail to uphold the required standards of food safety.Farmers in the Scottish Borders are fearing a rise in rural crime following a string of thefts across five different farms.

The incidents happened on Monday (18 March) in Makerstoun, Smailholm, Gordon, Jedburgh and Blainslie.

In Makerstoun, three Husqavarna chain saws were stolen. A Honda 420 and a Honda 500 quad bike were stolen from a farm near Gordon.

Thieves attempted to break into a shed on a farm near Smailholm.

Meanwhile, an Ifor Williams caged trailer and Genset diesel generator were stolen from Mossburnford, near Jedburgh.

And a red Honda TRX 420 quad bike, with identifier of 1HTE35P1D4601329 was stolen from a farm near Blainslie between 6.30pm and 7.45am on Tuesday morning.

Kate Maitland, NFU Scotland East Central Regional Manager, said this spike in rural crime is 'extremely worrying'.

Prevention is the best tool we have. The installation of even a basic security system, such as a motion-activated camera directed towards the fuel tank, can be enough to send the opportunistic criminal along the track, she said.

Social media also plays a huge part. The ability to share images and details of potentially suspicious activity has been utilised by many countryside dwellers.

Police Scotland constable Nick Walker added: We would urge farmers and those living in rural areas to be vigilant and report any suspicious activities to police immediately.

Police Scotland are appealing to anyone with more information to contact them on 101 or anonymously to Crimestoppers charity on 0800 555 111.The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you, we are excited to offer 4 weeks FREE Digital & Print access to all subscribers new and returning alike.

We are dedicated to continuing providing reliable, high quality journalism. This is possible with the trust and support of our subscribers in the community we are proud to serve.Turkey drinks more tea per head than any other country and regular visitors to Turkey will have experienced the culture of cay (Turkish tea). Tea in Turkey is so much more than just normal cay and Turkeys herbal teas are some of the best in the world.

If you prefer caffeine free, youll find freshly-brewed herbal tea in most cafes. Here are a few herbal teas you can make for yourself.

Sage (Adacay)

Sage (Adacay) Photograph by Nichola Chapman

A member of the mint family, sage originated from the northern Mediterranean coast, where it was traditionally used for cooking.

Sage has many medicinal properties. It is a stimulant, a diuretic and an expectorant, it has anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and antimicrobial properties, and also serves as an appetite enhancer. Because of these characteristics of sage, sage tea provides many health benefits.

Making sage tea:

Bring one cup (8 oz.) water to a low simmer; remove from heat. Add two teaspoons of fresh sage leaves or one teaspoon of dried sage leaves to the hot water. Steep the tea for at least five minutes; strain. The longer you steep the tea, the stronger the flavor and potential health benefits. Pour the tea into a cup and enjoy.

Sage tea  Adacay. Photo Credit: Gunes Gazetesi

Chamomile (Papatya)

Chamomile (Papatya). Photograph by Nichola Chapman

Brew a cup of fragrant chamomile tea to enjoy so many chamomile tea benefits. This herbal tea eases insomnia, boosts your immune system, banishes menstrual cramps, and much, much more!

Chamomile tea. Photo Credit: Lipton Tea

To make chamomile tea pour 8 oz of boiling water over 1 tbsp dried chamomile flowers, cover and leave for 5 minutes to steep.

St Johns Wort (Kantaron Otu)

St Johns Wort  Kantaron Otu. Photograph by Nichola Chapman.

St. Johns Wort tea has many amazing and powerful health benefits including, relieving stress and anxiety, treating insomnia, soothing respiratory ailments and skin care.

Making St. Johns Wort tea at home is simple, provided you have access to the dried or fresh herb.

St Johns Wort tea. Photo Credit: Organic Facts

Bring 2 cups of water to boil in a saucepan.

Add 3 teaspoons of fresh or dried flowers to the water.

Allow the mixture to steep for 4 minutes.

Strain out the flowers and serve hot.

Add honey for flavor, if desired.

French Lavender (Karakbasotu)

French Lavender  Lavandula Stoechas  Karabasotu. Photograph by Nichola Chapman

Turkey might not be the first country that springs to mind when we talk about French Lavendar (lavandula stoechas) but it has its own beautiful lavender fields in the village of Kuyucak in the province Isparta.

Lavenders lovely scent makes it very popular and there are many uses for dried lavender.

Lavendar Tea

Lavendar tea. Photo credit: Healthline

Lavender tea has an aromatic fragrance and delicate flavor and offers many health benefits.

Heres how to make your own lavender tea:

Boil 8 oz. of water. Place 4 tsp. of fresh lavender buds into a tea ball or sachet. Place the tea ball and water into a teacup. Let steep for 10 minutes. Enjoy!

Mountain Tea (Dag Cay)

Mountain Tea  Sideritis  Dag Cay  Ironwort  Yellow Highland Tea  Sar Yayla Cay . Photograph by Nichola Chapman

Moutain Tea (Sideritis) is a genus of flowering plants widely known for their use in herbal medicine as well as a herbal tea. The tea (dag cay) is made from the dried flowers, leaves and stems of the plant which is found on rocky slopes at very high elevations (over 1000 meters).

Mountain tea  Dag cay. Photo credit: yemek.com

To brew, simply pour some freshly boiled water in a cup with a couple of mountain tea twigs inside. Excellent with a spoonful of honey, it is also lovely with cinnamon or lemon. Since its naturally caffeine-free, it can be enjoyed any time of the day. Fresh, aromatic and flavourful  can be enjoyed either hot or cold.

Speedwell (Yavsanotu)

Speedwell  Veronica  Yavsanotu. Photograph by Nichola Chapman

Recent studies have shown Speedwell (Veronica) tea may be an effective preventative treatment for ulcers. It is most often used been used for coughs and congestion. In modern herbal medicine, speedwell tea, brewed from the dried flowering plant, sometimes serves as a cough remedy or as a lotion for irritated or infected skin.

To make this wonderful tea, use 1-2 tsp. of dried herb per cup of hot water. The recommended dosage of tea (as an expectorant) is one cup taken two to three times daily.

Yarrow (Civan Percemi)

Yarrow  Civan Percemi. Phptgraph by Nichola Chapman

This plant is a do-it-all for flu and fever! Yarrow is both an anti-inflammatory as well as being antimicrobial. It reduces pain, is an anti-catarrhal, relaxes circulation, and is a mild sedative, too.  The Herbal Academy

How To Make Yarrow Tea

Yarrow Tea. Photo credit: mommypotamus

Add 1 teaspoon of dried yarrow flower to one cup of boiling water. Cover and steep for 30 minutes, then strain and serve.

Sources: Healthline/Oliveology/Learn About Herbs/mommypotamus/lovetoknow

Photographs of dried herbs by Nichola Chapman PhotographyCategory Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release

SubCategory Select Sub-CategoryMeet The New Jodi

According to a report in Mumbai Mirror, while Varun Dhawan will step into Govinda's shoes, Sara Ali Khan will reprise Karisma Kapoor's role in this new film.

This Person Confirmed The News

Writer-director Farhad Samji told the daily that he is penning the dialogues for the film and Varun has reportedly begun to prep for dialogues months ahead of the film.

There Is Still Some Time For The Film To Go On Floors

Farhad told Mirror, "It is a boon for any writer to work with a dedicated actor like Varun. I narrated the dialogue draft to him recently and he immediately asked me for a copy, so he could rehearse his lines even though there is still time for the film to go on the floors.

I am looking forward to teaming up with Sara for the second time."

Varun-Sara's Film Is Not A Sequel Or Remake Of Coolie No 1

The writer-director clarified to the daily that this film isn't a remake or a sequel but "an adaptation in a new format." Without revealing much about the film's plot, he said this Varun-Sara starrer will have "plenty of humour and colour, larger-than-life songs" and will be helmed on a "lavish scale".Regarding The Proposal

One of the fans asked a question regarding the best way to propose a girl to which Samantha gave the answer by saying that you just have to be honest. Naga Chaitanya too added that you have to just showcase your true personality.

Everything Is In Your Mind

Another question that popped up was whether a relationship would work if the girl is 7 or 8 years elder to you, to which Naga Chaitanya replied saying that age is never a problem and everything is in your mind.

Naga Chaitanya's Interesting Reply

A lady came up with an interesting question saying that her husband is madly in love with Samantha and she asked them how to make him forget her. On a lighter note, Naga Chaitanya just told to ask her husband to meet him.

How To Handle This Situation!

When a person asked about how to handle a situation where the boy and girl are vegans and non-vegans respectively, Samantha came up with an advice asking to accept a person the way who are they are and nothing else should matter if everything else works in a relationship.A Health Scare

Yesterday (March 21, 2019), Vijay Deverakonda took to social media and revealed that he had to be taken to a hospital after he felt weak during a shoot. He went on to add that it was nothing to worry about as he is going to be fine in no time.

His Exact Words

"What a way to celebrate Holi. I was shooting till 6 am on Wednesday morning, when I noticed that I was down with fever. I was beginning to feel very weak, but I wanted to recover quickly, which is why I checked into the hospital for treatment."

An Inspiring Update

Revealing more about the incident, a source said that it was just a case of 'exhaustion' and nothing else. The source added that the star went in for some treatment as he did not want to take a break from work.

"It's nothing to worry about. It's just exhaustion. And ideally, one should just rest it out. But Vijay can't afford a break right now. So he has checked into the hospital for quick relief in order to be able to resume shooting as soon as possible," he added.

A Good 2018

2018 was an eventful year for Vijay Deverakonda. He received rave reviews for his 'madam madam' act in Geetha Govindam and left the fans asking for more. Unfortunately, his next release NOTA failed big time and turned out to a big embarrassment for all concerned. Luckily, he bounced back in style with Taxiwala which emerged as a surprise hit.

On The Work Front

Vijay Deverakonda will next be seen in Dear Comrade which has created a good amount of buzz amongst fans. Touted to be a political-thriller, the film directed by Bharath Kamma features his Geetha Govindam co-star Rashmika Mandanna as the female lead.Novartis International AG / Novartis plans for Alcon spin-off on April 9, 2019 . Processed and transmitted by West Corporation. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

Alcon obtained approval for listing on SIX Swiss Exchange and New York Stock Exchange

Alcon will seek effectiveness of Form 20-F registration statement from the US Securities and Exchange Commission

Alcon will enter key Swiss SMI and SPI indices on first trading day

Alcon's credit rating confirmed as investment grade (Baa2 by Moody's Investor Service and BBB by S&P Global Ratings) in line with medtech peer group

Alcon has secured debt financing of USD 3.5 billion

Basel, March 22, 2019 - Novartis today confirmed that certain important conditions precedent for the 100% spin-off of the Alcon eye care business have been met, including receipt of certain necessary authorizations and rulings. Completion of the transaction, by way of a distribution of a dividend in kind to Novartis shareholders and ADR (American Depositary Receipt) holders, is expected to be on April 9, 2019. In the distribution, each Novartis shareholder will receive 1 Alcon share for every 5 Novartis shares/ADRs they hold on April 8, 2019, close of business.

Approval has been given, subject to customary conditions, by the SIX Exchange Regulation for the listing of the shares of Alcon Inc. on the SIX Swiss Exchange (SIX) pursuant to the International Reporting Standard. Authorization has also been received for the listing of shares in Alcon Inc. on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

Alcon will seek effectiveness of the Alcon Inc. Form 20-F registration statement from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Alcon Inc. 20-F registration statement is available at www.sec.gov (http://www.sec.gov) and can also be accessed at the following link after its publication with the SEC: https://www.novartis.com/sites/www.novartis.com/files/alcon-20f-filing-2019.pdf (https://www.novartis.com/sites/www.novartis.com/files/alcon-20f-filing-2019.pdf).

Shares in Alcon Inc. are expected to be listed and traded from April 9, 2019 on the SIX and the NYSE under the ticker symbol "ALC". Alcon will also be included in both the Swiss Market Index (SMI) and Swiss Performance Index (SPI) from the first day of trading, as recently announced by the SIX.

Alcon has secured debt financing of USD 3.5 billion through a group of banks. The Alcon credit rating will be investment grade following the spin-off. Moody's Investor Service and S&P Global Ratings have rated Alcon at Baa2 and BBB, respectively, with a stable outlook.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch and UBS AG are advising Novartis on the transaction.

Important information about the Alcon spin-off

Shares of Novartis will continue to trade on the SIX under the symbol "NOVN". Any holders of Novartis shares who sell them prior to the close of trading on April 8, 2019 will also be forfeiting their right to receive Alcon shares in the distribution. Novartis ADRs will continue to trade "regular-way" on NYSE under the symbol "NVS". Any holders of Novartis ADRs who sell them "regular-way" prior to the close of trading on April 8, 2019 will also be forfeiting their right to receive Alcon shares in the distribution.

Between the ADR record date of April 1, 2019 and through April 10, 2019, Novartis ADR holders cannot convert their Novartis ADRs into Novartis ordinary shares and vice versa.

As opposed to a typical US domestic spin-off, and in order to align trading between the Swiss and US markets, there will be no "ex-distribution" trading of Novartis ADRs, nor "when-issued" trading of Alcon shares, prior to the spin-off. Shareholders will not have the ability to trade Novartis ADRs ex-dividend on the NYSE during the period between the day before the ADR record date and the spin-off completion date and will not have the ability to trade Alcon on a "when-issued basis" on either the SIX or the NYSE prior to the spin-off. Beginning on April 9, 2019, shareholders will be able to trade Alcon shares in the regular-way market on both the SIX and NYSE under the symbol "ALC".

Timeline for planned April 9, 2019 spin-off[1]

Date Event February 28, 2019 Approval of the planned 100% spin-off of Alcon eye care business at the Annual General Meeting of shareholders of Novartis AG March 29, 2019 Last day for conversion of ADRs into Novartis shares (and vice versa) April 1, 2019 ADR record date April 8, 2019 Cum-dividend date (last day of trading Novartis shares and ADRs including right to receive Alcon shares) April 8, 2019, close of business Distribution of Alcon shares to Novartis ADR holders (payment date for ADR holders)[2] April 9, 2019 Ex-dividend date (first day of trading Novartis shares and ADRs excluding the right to receive Alcon shares)

Listing and first day of trading of Alcon shares on the SIX (9.00am CET) and the NYSE (9:30am EST)

Inclusion of Alcon in the SMI and SPI Indices April 9, 2019 or shortly after[3] Credit of Alcon shares to Novartis shareholders by their bank or broker April 11, 2019 First day ADR holders may again convert their Novartis ADRs into Novartis ordinary shares (and vice-versa) On or around April 23, 2019 Distribution of net cash proceeds for fractions of shares[4]

[1] Summary description only; for more detail on the expected timeline for the spin-off, please refer to the Alcon Inc. Form 20-F and the Swiss listing prospectus, once available

[2] ADR holders should consult with their intermediary or broker concerning the mechanics of owning Alcon Shares held in street accounts and the date as of which they can expect to begin trading Alcon Shares through their intermediary or broker

[3] Shareholders should contact their bank, broker or other nominee for further information about their account and when they will be able to begin trading their Alcon shares

[4] For details regarding the aggregation and sale of fractional shares, please refer to the Alcon Inc. Form 20-F and the Swiss listing prospectus, once available

Disclaimer

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, that can generally be identified by words such as "plans," "will," "secured," "expected," "outlook," "planned," or similar expressions, or by express or implied discussions regarding the potential completion of the announced spin-off of Alcon; regarding whether the spin-off is in the best interests of shareholders, regarding the future commercial performance of Novartis or of a separate Alcon business, or regarding any potential strategic benefits, synergies or opportunities as a result of the spin-off; or by discussions of strategy, plans, expectations or intentions. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward looking statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations regarding future events, and are subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward looking statements. There can be no guarantee that the proposed spin-off will be completed in the expected form or within the expected time frame or at all. Neither can there be any guarantee that Novartis or a separate Alcon business will be able to realize any of the potential strategic benefits, synergies or opportunities as a result of the spin-off, within any particular time frame, or at all. Nor can there be any guarantee that shareholders of Novartis or Alcon will achieve any particular level of shareholder returns. Neither can there be any guarantee that the spin-off of Alcon will in fact be in the best interests of shareholders, or that the Novartis Group or any of its divisions, or a separate Alcon business, will be commercially successful in the future, or achieve any particular credit rating or financial results. In particular, our expectations could be affected by, among other things: an unexpected failure to satisfy the required closing conditions, or unexpected delays in meeting these requirements; the potential that the strategic benefits, synergies or opportunities expected from the proposed spin-off may not be realized or may take longer to realize than expected; global trends toward health care cost containment, including government, payor and general public pricing and reimbursement pressures and requirements for increased pricing transparency; regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; the inherent uncertainties involved in predicting shareholder returns; a failure to successfully separate Alcon from the Novartis Group subsequent to the completion of the spin-off, or within the expected time frame; potential adverse reactions to the proposed spin-off by customers, suppliers, strategic partners or key Alcon personnel and potential difficulties in maintaining relationships with such persons; the uncertainties inherent in the research and development of new healthcare products, including clinical trial results and additional analysis of existing clinical data; the ability of Alcon as a standalone company to obtain or maintain proprietary intellectual property protection; safety, quality or manufacturing issues, including withdrawal of products from the market; uncertainties regarding actual or potential legal proceedings, including, among others, actual or potential product liability litigation, litigation and investigations regarding sales and marketing practices, intellectual property disputes and government investigations generally; uncertainties involved in the development or adoption of potentially transformational technologies and business models; general political and economic conditions, including uncertainties regarding the effects of ongoing instability in various parts of the world; uncertainties regarding future global exchange rates; uncertainties regarding future demand for our products or those of Alcon as a standalone company; and uncertainties regarding potential significant breaches of data security or data privacy, or disruptions of our information technology systems or those of Alcon as a standalone company; and other risks and factors referred to in Novartis AG's current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission or in the Form 20-F filed by Alcon with the SEC, as amended from time to time, and the corresponding Swiss listing prospectus once available. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

This press release is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, any securities of Novartis or, following the proposed spin-off, of Alcon, and may not be relied upon in connection with the purchase or sale of any such security. Should you wish to invest in Alcon, you should do so solely on the basis of information Alcon will file with the SEC or in the corresponding Swiss listing prospectus at or around the time of the spin-off, including the section "Risk Factors" included in the Alcon Inc. Form 20-F registration statement and the Swiss listing prospectus, respectively. The information filed with the SEC will be available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov (http://www.sec.gov).

About Novartis

Novartis is reimagining medicine to improve and extend people's lives. As a leading global medicines company, we use innovative science and digital technologies to create transformative treatments in areas of great medical need. In our quest to find new medicines, we consistently rank among the world's top companies investing in research and development. Novartis products reach more than 800 million people globally and we are finding innovative ways to expand access to our latest treatments. About 130 000 people of nearly 150 nationalities work at Novartis around the world. Find out more at www.novartis.com (http://www.novartis.com).

About Alcon

Alcon is the global leader in eye care. As a division of Novartis, we offer the broadest portfolio of products to enhance sight and improve people's lives. Our products touch the lives of more than 260 million people each year living with conditions like cataracts, glaucoma, retinal diseases and refractive errors, and there are millions more who are waiting for solutions to meet their eye care needs. Our purpose is reimagining eye care, and we do this through innovative products, partnerships with eye care professionals and programs that enhance access to quality eye care. Learn more at www.alcon.com (http://www.alcon.com/).

Novartis is on Twitter. Sign up to follow @Novartis at http://twitter.com/novartis (http://twitter.com/novartis)

For Novartis multimedia content, please visit www.novartis.com/news/media-library (http://www.novartis.com/news/media-library)

For questions about the site or required registration, please contact media.relations@novartis.com (mailto:media.relations@novartis.com)

# # #

Novartis Media Relations

Central media line: +41 61 324 2200

E-mail: media.relations@novartis.com (mailto:media.relations@novartis.com)

Paul Barrett

Novartis Global External Communications

+41 61 324 5224 (direct)

+41 79 797 8137 (mobile)

paul.barett@novartis.com (mailto:paul.barett@novartis.com) Wes Warnock

Alcon Global External Communications

+1 817 615 2501 (direct)

+1 210 240 4998 (mobile)

wes.warnock@alcon.com (mailto:wes.warnock@alcon.com)





Eric Althoff

Novartis Global External Communications

+41 61 324 7999 (office)

+41 79 593 4202 (mobile)

eric.althoff@novartis.com (mailto:eric.althoff@novartis.com)

Novartis Investor Relations

Central investor relations line: +41 61 324 7944

E-mail: investor.relations@novartis.com (mailto:investor.relations@novartis.com)

Central North America Samir Shah +41 61 324 7944 Richard Pulik +1 212 830 2448 Pierre-Michel Bringer +41 61 324 1065 Cory Twining +1 212 830 2417 Thomas Hungerbuehler +41 61 324 8425 Isabella Zinck +41 61 324 7188

Alcon Investor Relations

Central investor relations line: +1 817 615 2789

E-mail: investor.relations@alcon.com (mailto:investor.relations@alcon.com)





Media release (PDF) (http://hugin.info/134323/R/2239328/882635.pdf)

Air Liquide and PAO Severstal, a steel and mining company, have signed a new long-term contract for the supply of oxygen, nitrogen and argon in Cherepovets (Russia). Air Liquide will invest around 50 million euros in the construction of a state-of-the-art Air Separation Unit (ASU) which will improve the energy efficiency and the overall environmental footprint of the Severstal production process.

Regulatory News:

Air Liquide (Paris:AI) will design, construct and own a new ASU on the Severstal CherMK site in Cherepovets producing 2,000 tons of oxygen per day. This will bring the total production capacity of Air Liquide above 7,000 tons of oxygen per day on this site, making the Cherepovets one of the largest industrial gas production unit across the steel industry worldwide. The project will be operated by Air Liquide Severstal, a joint-venture established in 2005 between Air Liquide and Severstal.

The Air Liquide Engineering and Construction teams will bring their state-of-the-art technologies to build this large-scale ASU,which is planned to be operational by the end of 2020. The new ASU will enable improving significantly the energy efficiency and reducing CO 2 emissions by 20.000 tons/year which corresponds to the yearly emissions of 7.500 cars. This performance will contribute to reach the Climate ambitions of the Air Liquide Group of reducing its carbon intensity by 30% between 2015 and 2025.

This new signature illustrates our strategy of development in key industrial basins. This is the third ASU installed and operated by Air Liquide in Cherepovets since 2007. With the recent renewal of our initial contract, it reflects the long-term partnership and mutual trust between Air Liquide and Severstal.

Guy Salzgeber, Executive Vice-President and member of the Air Liquide group's Executive Committee supervising industrial activities in Europe, said: "We are pleased to strengthen our long-term partnership with Severstal. The signature of this major contract and renewal of the initial one demonstrate trust and confidence in the ability to create value for our customers and deliver long-term performance which is key to ensure profitable growth. We are also committed to accompany our customers in the energy transition journey by promoting low carbon solutions for a sustainable industry."

Alexander Shevelev, General Director of Severstal Management, said: "This contract is further demonstration of Severstal's commitment to sustainable development, as we continue to reduce carbon emissions and improve energy efficiency at our production sites. We are pleased to work with Air Liquide, who shares our focus on environmental protection and takes a highly responsible attitude to ecological conservation. Throughout our long partnership, Air Liquide has demonstrated its ability to deliver high-quality products and innovative services to its customers, and I hope that our positive collaboration will develop further as we continue contributing to the environment protection along with achieving operational excellence together"

The Large Industries business line of Air Liquide Offers gas and energy solutions that improve process efficiency and help achieve greater respect for the environment, mainly in the refining and natural gas, chemicals, metals and energy markets. In 2018, revenues were 5,685 million. Air Liquide in Russia Air Liquide was established in Russia in 1989 and was primarily involved in the sale of industrial gas production equipment. In 2005, OOO Air Liquide, the Russian subsidiary for production and sale of industrial gases was founded. Today, the company operates 15 industrial sites in key regions. More than 500 employees supply products and services to over 1,500 customers.

A world leader in gases, technologies and services for Industry and Health, Air Liquide is present in 80 countries with approximately 66,000 employees and serves more than 3.6 million customers and patients. Oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen are essential small molecules for life, matter and energy. They embody Air Liquide's scientific territory and have been at the core of the company's activities since its creation in 1902.

Air Liquide's ambition is to be a leader in its industry, deliver long term performance and contribute to sustainability. The company's customer-centric transformation strategy aims at profitable growth over the long term. It relies on operational excellence, selective investments, open innovation and a network organization implemented by the Group worldwide. Through the commitment and inventiveness of its people, Air Liquide leverages energy and environment transition, changes in healthcare and digitization, and delivers greater value to all its stakeholders.

Air Liquide's revenue amounted to 21 billion euros in 2018 and its solutions that protect life and the environment represented more than 40% of sales. Air Liquide is listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange (compartment A) and belongs to the CAC 40, EURO STOXX 50 and FTSE4Good indexes.

www.airliquide.com

Follow us on Twitter @airliquidegroup

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005056/en/

Contacts:

Group Corporate Communications

media@airliquide.com

+33 (0)1 40 62 50 59

+33 (0)1 40 62 58 49

Group Investor Relations

Paris France

+33 (0)1 40 62 50 87

Philadelphia USA

+1 610 263 8277

Air Liquide Eastern Europe Russia Communications

Dmitry Kuznetsov/Ksenia Amaryan

+7 495 641 28 98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.The goal of the partnership is to create investable ETx's that track the performance of the sentiment Indexes that Daneel will be rolling out

MONTPELLIER, France, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Blackmoon Financial Group, a blockchain Financial Service and Fintech firm, and Daneel.io (Daneel), a Information Technology and Services firm whose goal is to develop an AI capable of detecting fake news in the Blockchain market, today announced that they have formed a strategic partnership to create a branded Exchange Traded Index (ETx).

The new relationship between Blackmoon and Daneel will enable the two firms to work very closely together to create a showcase of ETx's that track the performance of Daneel's phenomenal sentiment indexes.

Solving the problem of liquidity

Knowing that one can liquidate his or her investment without an impact on price, is a key risk-metric to any and all investment decisions. An STO that supports a thriving and liquid market, immediately increases its perceived value, even if its product, bottom-line or management is not as high a quality as its competitors. The liquidity of the marketplace defines the risk for an investor and the success of the issuer. Without the ease of execution and liquidity, any STO will have limited success, if any at all.

Introducing Blackmoon's Exchange Traded Indexes (ETx)

Blockchain technology may be a better alternative to raise capital from investors. However, price discovery and trading liquidity also require the inclusion of speculators. The ETx that Blackmoon issues on behalf of its partners' brands incentivise traders and speculators to take the risk in the market, by offering them a fungible financial product to arbitrage for profit - further adding bids and offers to an STO that would otherwise not exist - effectively creating a balanced and stable price.

"As soon as we met in Malta Blockchain Summit, we were directly aligned with market expectations and the collaboration was the logical next step, we are eager to see how investors will react to this new kind of indices made possible by the AI." said Harold Kinet, Head of Communication at Daneel.

"Blackmoon and Daneel share a vision and it's because of this that we are pleased to have discovered such an incredible organization to associate with. We are eager to release the Daneel ETx products as soon as possible to offer this amazing investment opportunity to eligible investors globally," said Moshe Joshua, Chief Product Officer at Blackmoon

The strategic partnership with Daneel is one of many that Blackmoon intends to form over the coming months. heir ultimate goal will be to have an entire suite of innovative ETx's to offer their own clients as well as those of their partners.

About Blackmoon

Blackmoon (http://blackmoon.net/) is a financial services company which is part of the Blackmoon Financial Group, a group of financial services and technology companies founded in 2014. The Blackmoon team has extensive experience in investment management, as well as developing automated investment interfaces and asset management tools.

Blackmoon aims to create and maintain the world's best framework for tokenized investment vehicles to deliver investment opportunities in both the real world and the blockchain universe. Blackmoon Platform brings blockchain flexibility to fiat instruments and the benefits of accumulated financial wisdom to the crypto investments.

Blackmoon world firsts include being the first operational blockchain investment platform, the first company to issue a token related to an initial public offering (IPO of Xiaomi) and the first company to launch the first ETx which is linked to the performance of the most-traded coins on Binance.

http://blackmoon.net/

About Daneel

Daneel's (https://daneel.io) is a French "crypto-startup" from Montpellier. The story begins in early 2018 with a crypto money fundraiser (ICO) that raised more than 2 million euros in just 2 days to develop an AI capable of detecting fake news in the Blockchain market.

Daneel, the AI developed by the startup, was released in December 2018 as a mobile application, just 9 months after the fundraising. In the form of an intelligent assistant, the application provides at a glance a clear overview of the current state of the Blockchain and cryptocurrency market. This is a major asset in a market where investors are often misled by information manipulation. In addition, Daneel helps educate these users to better understand the Blockchain and its challenges. Daneel makes it possible to obtain a score of the market sentiment, globally or per asset. As the market reacts very strongly to current events, prices are therefore strongly correlated with investor sentiment.

In addition to the obvious utility for private crypto-investors, Daneel is also a powerful assistant for companies. Traders pro, venture capital companies, banks, media are obviously all concerned and interested to receive relevant and reliable information on the cryptocurrency market and Blockchain technologies. And Daneel's objective is precisely to make this information more easily accessible, by democratizing access to Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Since then, the startup has continued to grow, with a notable presence at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, where it made its first step towards the United States, a key market in the Blockchain world.

Daneel has earned the trust of IBM, Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, WeSprint, Chain Accelerator, Station F and French banks.

https://daneel.io/

Disclaimer: Investment in virtual financial assets carries a high degree of risk and volatility and is not suitable for every investor; therefore, you should not risk the capital you cannot afford to lose. Please consult an independent professional financial or legal adviser to ensure the product meets your objectives before you decide to invest. Regional restrictions and suitability checks apply.

Image: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/839251/Blackmoon_Daneel.jpgINVESCO MARKETS III PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY

("Invesco" or the "Company")

Results of Annual General Meeting held on 22 March 2019

Invesco announces that at its Annual General Meeting ('AGM'), held at 32 Molesworth Street, Dublin 2 on Friday, 22 March 2019 at 9:30 a.m., resolutions 1 to 8, as detailed below, have been passed. Resolution 9 was not passed. The results are as follows:

RESOLUTIONS FOR AGAINST ABSTAIN Ordinary Resolutions 1. Receive and adopt the Directors' Report and Financial Statements for the period ended 30 September 2018 146,104 0 0 2. Reappoint PricewaterhouseCoopers as Auditors of the Company 146,104 0 0 3. Authorise the Directors to fix the Remuneration of the Auditors 146,104 0 0 4. Re-elect Mr Gary Buxton

as a Director 104,304 41,800 0 5. Re-elect Mr Feargal Dempsey

as a Director 146,104 0 0 6. Re-elect Ms Anne-Marie King

as a Director 104,304 41,800 0 7. Re-elect Mr Barry McGrath

as a Director 146,104 0 0 Special Resolutions 8. Remove certain sub-funds of the Company from the premium segment of the official list of the UK Listing Authority maintained by the Financial Conduct Authority, namely: 146,104 0 0 Amend the Constitution to reflect the amendments as detailed in the Appendix attached to the Circular 104,304 41,800 0

Number of shares of the Company in respect of which proxy appointments had been validly made: 146,104 Number of shares of the Company in which the vote was directed to be withheld: 0

The Board acknowledges that while resolutions no. 4 and 6 passed by way of simple majority, the re-election of Mr Gary Buxton and Ms Anne-Marie King as Directors resulted in 28.61% of the votes cast against each of the resolutions. The Board confirms that they seek to understand any concerns around Mr Gary Buxton and Ms Anne-Marie King each holding a position as a director, with a view to resolving these concerns.

The Board also acknowledges that resolution no. 9 with respect to proposed changes to the Constitution was not passed as 28.61% of the votes cast were against the resolution and the special resolution threshold was not met. The Board confirms that they will seek to understand the concerns around the proposed changes to the Constitution and the reasons as to the way votes were cast for this resolution.

For additional information, please contact:

Invesco EMEA ETF Legal

Legaletf@invesco.com

+44 20 8538 4900JINGZHOU, China, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --The Standard Profil Group, operating in China for eight years, has now extended its operations with an investment of EUR 6 million in a new plant located in the city of Jingzhou. The plant will manufacture 2 million sealing profiles for automotive giants every year.

The Standard Profil Group manufactures sealing profiles for global automotive brands in seven countries on 12 production plants. The company, operating in China since 2011, recently invested in the city of Jingzhou for its new plant with an investment of EUR 6 million. TheStandard Profil Jingzhou Plant was commissioned with a ceremony attended by Guangzhong He, Secretary of Municipal Party Committee,Zhiqing Zhong, Municipal Executive Deputy Mayor, Sabri Tunc Angili, Consul General of Turkey, Sezgin Taskin, Beijing Commercial Counsellor of Turkey and Turhan Semizer, the Standard Profil Group CEO. The plant will function as the lead plant for operations in China.

The plant, occupying 66,000 square meters in a strategic area will manufacture 2 million sealing systems annually for Geely, Volvo, Audi, SGM, Renault, Saleen and other automotive giants. The Group will be employing 300 employees till the end of 2019.

At the opening ceremony of The Standard Profil Jingzhou Plant, CEO Turhan Semizer said: "We are proud of our new investment in a strategic region of China. Starting off as a local provider 42 years ago, we are now a global brand; number three in Europe and number six in the world. China is a key market for us and with this EUR 6 million investment in Jingzhou we will be closer to our customers. Considering our booked business with the customers, we expect to reach 600 colleagues in the following two years. By focusing on continuous improvement and high quality, we will have a stronger position in the Chinese market and Asia-Pacific region thanks to the new Jingzhou Plant."

About Standard Profil:

Standard Profil operates under Standard Profil Otomotiv San. ve Tic. A.S. established in 1977. The company manufactures sealing components for the global automotive markets. Headquartered in Istanbul, the company has three plants in Duzce and Manisa. The company operates also in Spain, Morocco, China, South Africa, Bulgaria and Mexico.Dassault Aviation

at LIMA 2019

Saint-Cloud, France, 22 March 2019 - The Dassault Aviation group is particularly pleased to showcase its dual civil/military know-how at the 2019 edition of LIMA (Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition) being held in Langkawi (Malaysia) on March 26-30.

Highlights of the Dassault Aviation participation in LIMA 2019 include:

presence of a Falcon 8X in the static display;

presentation of different configurations of the multi-role Rafale combat aircraft using new immersive virtual reality applications;

presentation of the capabilities of the Falcon 2000 MRA.

With a range of 11,945 km and the quietest and most comfortable cabin in the industry, the Falcon 8X is the flagship of the Falcon family. It is very well suited to the requirements of Malaysian companies. The Falcon after-sales support network in Southeast Asia has been reinforced with Dassault Aviation's acquisition of the maintenance activities of ExecuJet, including infrastructure at Subang Airport, the largest business aviation maintenance facilities in Malaysia.

Operational from land or from an aircraft carrier and capable of carrying 1.5 times its weight in weapons and fuel, the Rafale has been designed to perform the full spectrum of air combat missions. It is combat proven in out-of-area action in multiple theaters of operation. In addition to France, a total of 96 Rafales have been ordered by Egypt, Qatar and India. We are offering the Rafale to the Royal Malaysian Air Force, in cooperation with several Malaysian industrial and institutional partners.

The Falcon 2000 MRA, a multi-role version of the Falcon 2000 business jet, offers a high-performance response to the demands of maritime surveillance/reconnaissance missions: fighting pollution and trafficking, surveillance of borders and exclusion zones, search and rescue at sea, etc.

Dassault Aviation CEO Eric Trappier declared: "We are offering a series of products and partnerships adapted to the geopolitical and economic environment of Malaysia. A dual civil/military company like Dassault Aviation enjoys the advantage of being able to take account of such a broad range of requirements with maximum synergy and efficiency."

* * *

About Dassault Aviation:

With over 10,000 military and civil aircraft (including 2,500 Falcons) delivered in more than 90 countries over the last century, Dassault Aviation has built up expertise recognized worldwide in the design, development, sale and support of all types of aircraft, ranging from the Rafale fighter, to the high-end Falcon family of business jets and military drones. In 2018, Dassault Aviation reported revenues of 5.1 billion. The company has 11,500 employees.

www.dassault-aviation.com

Twitter: @Dassault_OnAir

* * *

Press contacts:

Corporate Communications

Stephane Fort

Mathieu Durand

Tel: +33

mathieu.durand@dassault-aviation.com

For high-definition photos:

http://mediaprophoto.dassault-aviation.com/

For high-definition videos:

http://mediaprovideo.dassault-aviation.com/

AttachmentThe European Investment Trust Plc - Transaction in Own Shares

The European Investment Trust plc ("the Company")

The Company announces that on 21 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: 21 March 2019 Number of ordinary shares purchased: 20,000 Lowest price per share 812.5p Highest price per share 812.5p

The Company intends to cancel the purchased shares.

Following the above transaction, the Company has 40,441,769 ordinary shares in issue. Each of the Company's shares carries one vote. Accordingly, the total number of voting rights of the Company is 40,441,769.

22 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With the permission of Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Lithuania, obtained by AB Klaipedos Nafta (hereinafter - the "Company") on 21 st March 2019, came into force Company's board decision to increase the authorised capital of Company's subsidiary UAB "SGD logistika" in the amount of EUR 800 000.

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 22, 2019 - Stolt-Nielsen Limited (Oslo Brs: SNI) today distributed materials for the Company's Annual General Meeting, as attached, to shareholders of record at the close of business on March 12, 2019, who will be entitled to vote at the meeting.



The Company's Annual General Meeting of Shareholders will be held at the registered office of the Company at Clarendon House, 2 Church Street, Hamilton HM 11, Bermuda, on Tuesday, April 16, 2019 at 11:00 a.m. Proxy votes must be received by DNB Bank ASA, Registrars Dept., P.O. Box 1600 Sentrum, 0021 Oslo, Norway, not later than April 11, 2019 12:00 hours Central European Time.

For additional information please contact:

Investor Relations

Jens F. Gruner-Hegge

Chief Financial Officer

+44 (0) 20 7611 8985

j.gruner-hegge@stolt.com (mailto:j.gruner-hegge@stolt.com)

Media Enquiries

Ellie Davison

Head of Corporate Communications

+44 (0) 20 7611 8926

e.davison@stolt.com (mailto:e.davison@stolt.com)





About Stolt-Nielsen Limited

Stolt-Nielsen Limited (SNL or the "Company") is a leading global provider of integrated transportation solutions for bulk liquid chemicals, edible oils, acids, and other specialty liquids through its three largest business divisions, Stolt Tankers, Stolthaven Terminals and Stolt Tank Containers. Stolt Sea Farm produces and markets high quality turbot, sole, sturgeon, and caviar. Stolt-Nielsen Gas invests in LPG and LNG shipping and distribution. Stolt-Nielsen Limited is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange.

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to Section 5-12 the Norwegian Securities Trading Act

AttachmentsToronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2019) - U3O8 Corp. (TSX: UWE) (OTCQB: UWEFF) ("U3O8 Corp." or the "Company") is pleased to report positive results of additional test work aimed at simplifying the process of extracting uranium and vanadium from a large sample of gravel from its wholly-owned Laguna Salada deposit in Argentina.

After a thorough review of the preliminary economic assessment ("PEA") undertaken on the Laguna Salada Deposit, Mr. Marsh concluded that there is significant room for improvement and simplification of the flowsheet and processing plant design incorporated in the PEA. Mr. Marsh planned a test work program to evaluate the effectiveness of these concepts on a bulk sample of gravel from Laguna Salada. The test work was conducted to evaluate alternative ways of removing sulphate from the gravel proved positive. Mr. David Marsh, director of U3O8 Corp. was formerly General Manager - Technical Project Development at Paladin Energy, and was intimately involved in the design, construction and operation of two uranium production plants in Africa.

David Marsh commented, "Recent test work shows that our simplified process removes as much sulphate from the Laguna Salada gravel as the very much more complex process modelled in the PEA. These results suggest that the flowsheet for processing the Laguna Salada gravel can be significantly simplified, likely resulting in reductions in capital cost since expensive dewatering circuits would be eliminated or reduced in size".

Laguna Salada gravels contain a sulphate-bearing mineral called gypsum, that competes for the reagents that are used to extract the uranium and vanadium. The more efficiently the gypsum can be removed from the gravel, the lower the estimated cost of production of uranium and vanadium. Approximately 40% of the operating cost estimated in the PEA relates to removing sulphate from the gravel. Therefore, simplification of the process, or improved efficiency, of the removal of sulphate has a potentially large impact on estimated uranium and vanadium production costs.

Results of Test Work

The test work reported on here involved the following three steps:

The sample on which the test work was conducted was dug from within a few metres of surface on the gravel plain at Laguna Salada. The soft gravel was excavated with an excavator and was shipped to a the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization ("ANSTO") laboratory, a statutory body of the Australian government, where it was washed with water in a rotating barrel for 5 minutes, which proved sufficient to remove the uranium-vanadium - bearing fine material from the barren pebbles; The fine material was then sieved through successively finer screens. Material that passed through a screen with 0.85mm apertures removed 57% of the gypsum originally contained in the gravel. Only 25% of the gravel passed through the 0.85mm mesh, along with 89% of the gravel's uranium and 46% of its vanadium; and Additional sulphate was removed from the uranium-vanadium - bearing material by mixing it with simulated site water - water made to have a similar composition to that available from the lake at Laguna Salada. This water dissolved 45% of the remaining gypsum. The screening described in step 2, followed by washing the fine component of the gravel with water, removed 78% of the gypsum originally contained in the gravel.

The rejection of 78% of the gypsum achieved in these tests was from the component of the gravel that passed through a screen with 0.85mm apertures. This compares with 75% gypsum rejection through a very much finer screen that had apertures of only 0.075mm - the result that was used to develop part of the process flow sheet for the PEA. These new results show that a similar proportion of the gypsum can be removed from the gravel by a process that is very much simpler than the one modelled in the PEA, which should lead to reductions in both operating and capital cost estimates for the Project.

Further test work is now focused on identifying a simpler and cheaper process (compared to those in the PEA) for the production of separate uranium and vanadium products. Recent processes developed and proven elsewhere offer the potential for, not only a simpler separation process, but also a means to recover and recycle significant volumes of expensive leach reagents.

Technical Information & Cautionary Note

The technical report referred to in this press release is entitled:

September 18, 2014 technical report: "Preliminary Economic Assessment of the Laguna Salada Uranium Vanadium Deposit, Chubut Province, Argentina."The report is available on www.sedar.com and www.u3o8corp.com.

Dr. Richard Spencer, P.Geo., CGeol., President and CEO of U3O8 Corp. and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, has approved the technical information in this news release relating to the Laguna Salada Deposit and the related PEA.

About U3O8 Corp.

U3O8 Corp. is focused on exploration and development of deposits of uranium and battery commodities in South America. Battery commodities that occur with uranium resources include vanadium, nickel, zinc and phosphate. The Company's mineral resources estimates were made in accordance with National Instrument 43-101, and are contained in the following deposits:

Laguna Salada Deposit, Argentina - a PEA shows that this near surface, free-digging uranium-vanadium deposit has low production-cost potential; and

- a PEA shows that this near surface, free-digging uranium-vanadium deposit has low production-cost potential; and Berlin Deposit, Colombia - a PEA shows that Berlin also has low-cost uranium production potential due to revenue that would be generated from by-products of phosphate, vanadium, nickel, rare earths (yttrium and neodymium) and other metals that occur within the deposit.

Additional Information

Information on U3O8 Corp., its resources and technical reports are available at www.u3o8corp.com and on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Follow U3O8 Corp. on Facebook: www.facebook.com/u3o8corp, Twitter: www.twitter.com/u3o8corp and YouTube: www.youtube.com/u3o8corp.

For further information, please contact:

Carolina Diaz at carolina@u3o8corp.com or phone (416) 868-1491 or Richard Spencer, President & CEO, U3O8 Corp., Tel: (647) 292-0225 richard@u3o8corp.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes certain "forward looking statements" related with the development plans, economic potential and growth targets of U3O8 Corp's projects. Forward-looking statements consist of statements that are not purely historical, including statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intensions for the future, and include, but not limited to, statements with respect to: (a) the low-cost and near-term development of Laguna Salada, (b) the Laguna Salada and Berlin PEAs, (c) the potential of the Kurupung district in Guyana and (d) the price and market for uranium. These statements are based on assumptions, including that: (i) actual results of our exploration, resource goals, metallurgical testing, economic studies and development activities will continue to be positive and proceed as planned, and assumptions in the Laguna Salada and Berlin PEAs prove to be accurate, (ii) requisite regulatory and governmental approvals will be received on a timely basis on terms acceptable to U3O8 Corp., (iii) economic, political and industry market conditions will be favourable, and (iv) financial markets and the market for uranium will improve for junior resource companies in the short-term. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in such statements, including, but not limited to: (1) changes in general economic and financial market conditions, (2) changes in demand and prices for minerals, (3) the Company's ability to establish appropriate joint venture partnerships, (4) litigation, regulatory, and legislative developments, dependence on regulatory approvals, and changes in environmental compliance requirements, community support and the political and economic climate, (5) the inherent uncertainties and speculative nature associated with exploration results, resource estimates, potential resource growth, future metallurgical test results, changes in project parameters as plans evolve, (6) competitive developments, (7) availability of future financing, (8) exploration risks, and other factors beyond the control of U3O8 Corp. including those factors set out in the "Risk Factors" in our Annual Information Form available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. U3O8 Corp. assumes no obligation to update such information, except as may be required by law. For more information on the above-noted PEAs, refer to the September 18, 2014 technical report titled "Preliminary Economic Assessment of the Laguna Salada Uranium-Vanadium Deposit, Chubut Province, Argentina" and the January 18, 2013 technical report titled "U3O8 Corp. Preliminary Economic Assessment on the Berlin Deposit, Colombia."

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43588Timed Against World Water Day, Bacardi and Lonely Whale Announce Next Phase of TheFutureDoesntSuck Campaign by Enlisting Comedian and Activist Daniel Franzese to Deliver Sydney's Message

HAMILTON, Bermuda, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Family-owned Bacardi Limited, the largest privately held spirits company in the world, and Lonely Whale, an award-winning incubator for courageous ideas that drive impactful change on behalf of our ocean, announced today a splashy partnership with one brave sea turtle Sydney to put an end to all plastic straw emoji usage. Giving a platform and voice to Sydney, Bacardi and Lonely Whale have issued a "cease and de-sip" letter to the Unicode Consortium, the organization that manages the emoji catalog, requesting the removal of plastic straws from the soda cup and cocktail emojis. The initiative is just one of many ways Bacardi and Lonely Whale are working together to ensure TheFutureDoesntSuck, with the goal to eliminate one billion single-use plastic straws by 2020.

"Marine life is heavily affected by plastic waste and refusing the single-use plastic straw is one way each of us can take action," said Jacob Briars, global advocacy director for Bacardi. "With billions of emojis being used globally each day, we want to help drive a cultural change where our online world promotes a plastic-free, marine-friendly straw, or strawless options for drinks, just as we at Bacardi continue to do so IRL."

Bacardi and Lonely Whale were eager to help Sydney shed light on the threat of plastic straw pollution, showing how one man's straw is another turtle's backyard trash. To ensure all of her friends on land could understand her turtle talk, Sydney worked with Bacardi and Lonely Whale to enlist comedian and activist Daniel Franzese to deliver her message.

"I was honored when Sydney first floated her anti-emoji straw campaign by me, mainly because I shared the same salty feelings about single-use plastic straws," said Daniel Franzese. "I challenge not only Unicode, but everyone to join and pledge so we can ensure a bright future for Sydney and all her marine life friends."

To give avid supporters an alternative emoji solution, Bacardi and Lonely Whale have released a collection of Giphy stickers inspired by the campaign. Bacardi and Lonely Whale hope that by removing plastic straws from digital usage, they too can shift cultural norms around drinking with single-use plastic straws altogether.

"Many have made a commitment to eliminate single-use plastic straws yet the emojis we use in social media haven't kept up with our commitment to an ocean free from plastic. What better way to delete the notion of using single-use plastic straws than by taking it out of the icons more than 90 percent of the world's online population uses every day to communicate?" said Dune Ives, executive director of Lonely Whale. "We hope that as we urge Unicode against including digital straws, consumers will sign TheFutureDoesntSuck pledge to help us remove real plastic straws."

Since joining forces in 2018, Bacardi Limited and Lonely Whale have collaborated to spread the message of reducing the use of single-use plastic straws through brand activations, influencer events, social media and more. Together, they've recruited customers to join the pledge through campaigns in the United States, UK, China and New Zealand. Bacardi also committed to a full review of its supply chain to eliminate the use of plastic where possible while developing recyclable and biodegradable alternatives. Both Bacardi and Lonely Whale are supportive of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, comprised of goals and targets set to stimulate action in areas of critical importance for both humanity and the planet.

To join this global campaign, visit www.thefuturedoesntsuck.org. There, individuals can declare their pledge to ensuring TheFutureDoesntSuck by committing to go plastic-straw free and recruit restaurants, hotels, bars and other venues to do the same. Establishments can register their commitment and challenge others to take the pledge so that together we can all ensure TheFutureDoesntSuck.

About Bacardi Limited

Bacardi Limited, the largest privately held spirits company in the world, produces and markets internationally recognized spirits and wines. The Bacardi brand portfolio comprises more than 200 brands and labels, including BACARDI rum, GREY GOOSE vodka, PATRON tequila, DEWAR'S Blended Scotch whisky, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE gin, MARTINI vermouth and sparkling wines, CAZADORES 100% blue agave tequila, and other leading and emerging brands including WILLIAM LAWSON'S Scotch whisky, ST-GERMAIN elderflower liqueur, and ERISTOFF vodka.

Founded more than 157 years ago, in Santiago de Cuba on February 4, 1862, family-owned Bacardi currently employs nearly 7,000, operates more than 20 production facilities, including bottling, distilling and manufacturing sites in 11 countries, and sells its brands in more than 170 countries. Bacardi Limited refers to the Bacardi group of companies, including Bacardi International Limited. Visit www.bacardilimited.com or follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

About Lonely Whale

Lonely Whale is an award-winning incubator for courageous ideas that drive impactful market-based change on behalf of our ocean. Founded in December 2015 by Adrian Grenier and Lucy Sumner, Lonely Whale is inspired by the power of community to create the change needed to ensure a healthy planet. Lonely Whale is working towards a new era of radical collaboration, together facilitating the creation of innovative ideas that push the boundary on current trends in technology, media and advocacy that positively impact the health of our ocean. The organization spearheaded the global Strawless Ocean movement, which permanently removes single-use plastic straws from establishments and markets, and NextWave Plastics, the first global network of ocean-bound plastics supply chains. Lonely Whale's work has been recognized by Fast Company's World Changing Ideas and Most Innovative Companies, the Shorty Awards, the ADDY Awards, the SEAL Awards, the P4G 2018 Circular Economy Award sponsored by the Danish Government, the HALO Awards, and more. Lonely Whale is a proud supporter of the UN Environment's CleanSeas campaign. To learn more and support, visit www.lonelywhale.org or follow @LonelyWhale.

Enjoy Responsibly.

2018 BACARDI

BACARDI, THE BAT DEVICE & OTHER MARKS RELATED TO PRODUCTS IN THIS NEWS RELEASE ARE TRADEMARKS OF BACARDI & COMPANY LIMITED OR OF OTHER SUBSIDIARIES OF BACARDI LIMITEDNEW YORK, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- FinancialBuzz.com, a respected source in the financial news media space located on Wall Street, today announces an exclusive video interview with Chief Operating Officer, Camilo Villalba of Blueberries Medical Corp. (CSE: BBM) (OTC: BBRRF) (FRA: 10A) live on Wall Street.

Mr. Villalba shares with us his background, information on the benefits that Latin America provides for companies in the cannabis industry, and details on various company goals.

Additionally, Mr. Villalba offers his perspective on the position of building growth and company expansion across Latin America and other regions.

Camilio Villalba is a Bilingual professional in Finance and Foreign Trade with a Master's degree in Business Administration (MBA), specializing in Oil and Gas Industry Management. His knowledge and experience in Oil & Gas project evaluations, financial planning, budgeting and reporting have prepared him to transition into the cannabis industry and become Blueberries Medical Corp.'s Chief Operating Officer.

According to data compiled by Prohibition Partners, the Latin America cannabis legal sales were estimated at USD 125 Million in 2018 and are expected to reach USD 12.7 Billion by 2028. Medical cannabis is expected to account for more than two-thirds of the legal cannabis industry in the region, delivering an estimated USD 8.5 Billion throughout the forecast period. Countries such as Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia have all passed favorable medical cannabis laws. Meanwhile, Uruguay has legalized cannabis for both recreational and medical use. Now, Mexico's newly elected President is considering nationwide legalization of cannabis as well.

Watch the full HD Video Interview now to learn more about the buzz surrounding Blueberries Medical Corp. (CSE: BBM) (OTC: BBRRF) (FRA: 10A)

Click Here for full HD video interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUGpLFOCtAc

About Blueberries Medical Corp. (www.blueberriesmed.com)

Blueberries is a Colombia-based licensed producer of naturally grown premium quality cannabis with its primary operations ideally located in the Bogota Savannah of central Colombia. Led by a specialized team with proprietary expertise in agriculture, genetics, extraction, medicine, pharmacology and marketing, Blueberries is fully licensed for the cultivation, production, domestic distribution, and international export of CBD and THC-based medical cannabis. Blueberries' combination of leading scientific expertise, agricultural advantages and distribution arrangements has positioned the Company to become a leading international supplier of naturally grown, processed, and standardized medicinal-grade cannabis oil extracts and related products.

About Financial Buzz Media

Located on Wall Street in the heart of New York City's financial district, FinancialBuzz.com, a leading financial news informational web portal designed to provide the latest trends in Market News, Investing News, Personal Finance, Politics, in-depth broadcasts on Stock News, Market Analysis and Company Interviews. A pioneer in the financially driven digital space, video production and integration of social media, FinancialBuzz.com creates 100% unique original content. FinancialBuzz.com also provides financial news wire services, dissemination, branding, marketing and advertising for companies directly or third parties for corporate news and original content creation through our unique media platform that includes Newswire Delivery, Digital Advertising, Social Media Relations, Video Production, Broadcasting, and Financial Publications.

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Please Note: FinancialBuzz.com is not a financial advisory or advisor, investment advisor or broker-dealer and do not undertake any activities that would require such registration. The information provided on http://www.FinancialBuzz.com (the 'Site') is either original financial news or paid advertisements provided [exclusively] by our affiliates (sponsored content), FinancialBuzz.com, a financial news media and marketing firm enters into media buys or service agreements with the companies which are the subject to the articles posted on the Site or other editorials for advertising such companies. We are not an independent news media provider and therefore do not represent or warrant that the information posted on the Site is accurate, unbiased or complete. FinancialBuzz.com receives fees for producing and presenting high quality and sophisticated content on FinancialBuzz.com along with other financial news PR media services. FinancialBuzz.com does not offer any personal opinions, recommendations or bias commentary as we purely incorporate public market information along with financial and corporate news straight from the company. FinancialBuzz.com only aggregates or regurgitates financial or corporate news through our unique financial newswire and media platform. For Blueberries Medical Corp., financial and corporate news dissemination, filming, editing and video production, FinancialBuzz.com has been compensated ten thousand dollars by the company. Our fees may be either a flat cash sum or negotiated number of securities of the companies featured on this editorial or site, or a combination thereof. The securities are commonly paid in segments, of which a portion is received upon engagement and the balance is paid on or near the conclusion of the engagement. FinancialBuzz.com will always disclose any compensation in securities or cash payments for financial news dissemination and PR advertising. FinancialBuzz.com does not undertake to update any of the information on the editorial or Site or continue to post information about any companies the information contained herein is not intended to be used as the basis for investment decisions and should not be considered as investment advice or a recommendation. The information contained herein is not an offer or solicitation to buy, hold or sell any security. FinancialBuzz.com, members and affiliates are not responsible for any gains or losses that result from the opinions expressed on this editorial or Site, company profiles, quotations or in other materials or presentations that it publishes electronically or in print. Investors accept full responsibility for any and all of their investment decisions based on their own independent research and evaluation of their own investment goals, risk tolerance, and financial condition. FinancialBuzz.com. By accessing this editorial and website and any pages thereof, you agree to be bound by the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, as may be amended from time to time. None of the content issued by FinancialBuzz.com constitutes a recommendation for any investor to purchase, hold or sell any particular security, pursue a particular investment strategy or that any security is suitable for any investor. This publication is provided by FinancialBuzz.com. Each investor is solely responsible for determining whether a particular security or investment strategy is suitable based on their objectives, other securities holdings, financial situation needs, and tax status. You agree to consult with your investment advisor, tax and legal consultant before making any investment decisions. We make no representations as to the completeness, accuracy or timeless of the material provided. All materials are subject to change without notice. Information is obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed. For our full disclaimer, disclosure and Terms of Use, please visit: http://www.financialbuzz.com.

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Related Links: http://www.FinancialBuzz.comBRUSSELS, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- EU Today, a leading platform for European news, has today called for three actions to be taken to protect construction workers and homeowners from the health risks posed by mineral wool, also known as Man-made Vitreous Fibres (MMVF).

This call for action from policymakers follows a 2018 report published by EU Today that detailed the risks to health caused by the material, which is seen as the successor to asbestos, which was banned in 1999. That report explained that after initially being classified in the past by the WHO and International Agency on the Research on Cancer as carcinogenic and hazardous to humans, mineral wool was declassified as a carcinogenic in 2002. However, the report found that mineral wool may "pose similar risks to asbestos." There was particular concern that past tests on mineral wool gave misleading results because a component was missing from the test samples and the product was not tested as it is actually sold and used. Health concerns relate not only to carcinogenicity. Mineral wool is known to cause skin and lung abnormalities.

Speaking in Brussels, Gary Cartwright, the Editor of EU Today and author of the 2018 report said: "There are three very obvious steps that must be taken. The first action is the re-testing of the product. There is evidence of the carcinogenic hazards of mineral wool, as attested by the WHO and IARC classification in 1988. The subsequent declassification in 2002 was based on tests carried out on products that did not accurately represent mineral wool as they are used commercially and by consumers. There is therefore a clear and urgent need for retesting these products as they are used in practice."

Mr Cartwright went on to explain that the second action required is health and safety legislation: "Unlike on building sites, for example, there is currently no legal requirement for employers to enforce rules on the use of protective clothing by employees. There is also anecdotal evidence that workers in the construction industry are not adequately informed about the potential health hazards of mineral wool. There is a clear and urgent need for these shortcomings to be addressed, possibly in the form of EU legislation."

Mr Cartwright detailed the third action to be taken as product labelling, explaining: "Consumer goods such as alcohol and tobacco are currently subject to strict requirements to inform about potential health risks on product labels. There is a strong argument for mineral wool, whether sold through the trade, or to consumers, to carry similar warnings, displayed prominently on all packaging."

He concluded by saying that policymakers have a duty to act now and protect people from the health risks that mineral wool poses, explaining: "With asbestos, essentially mineral wool's older cousin, we waited 99 years from discovering it was dangerous to actually banning it. Think of all the lives lost in that time. We must learn from that and act more swiftly and firmly around the threat of mineral wool."

About EU Today

Launched on May 1st 2014, EU Today is an independent and politically neutral media platform.

We are based in London, but our journalists and contributors are active across the EU and beyond.

https://eutoday.net/BOSTON, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Boston-based upscale restaurant chain Legal Sea Foods (LSF) has selected Charoen Pokphand Foods (CP Foods) to co-pack premium shrimp products for distribution in North America.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/839842/Charoen_Pokphand_Foods_PLC.jpg

Sharing the same view, Mr. Roger Berkowitz, CEO of Legal Sea Foods, and Dr. Sujint Thammasart, COO (Aquaculture Business Unit) of CP Foods, said it is a proud moment for both companies to jointly introduce premium quality seafood, under the Legal Sea Foods brand, to North American consumers. Within the partnership, CP Foods will produce numerous fresh frozen and high quality items with shrimp sourced from its biosecure aquaculture farms. The products were distributed under the Legal Sea Foods brand, and launched at the Seafood Expo North America and Seafood Processing North America or Boston Seafood Show 2019, the largest Seafood exposition in North America, during March 17 - 19, 2019. It is the main venue where thousands of buyers and suppliers from around the world attend the three-day exposition to meet, network and do business. Attending buyers represent importers, exporters, wholesalers, restaurants, supermarkets, hotels, and other retail and foodservice companies.

Both companies share similar values in delivering the freshest and highest quality seafoods from responsible supply chains. "Legal Sea Foods has a long history of serving premium seafood to its more than 7 million restaurant customers annually, a success which is rooted in our fundamental belief in food safety and quality," said Mr. Berkowitz.

"All of our shrimp are raised in closed system, environment-friendly farms and are fed with feed utilizing fishmeal certified by the Global Standard for Responsible Supply (IFFO RS). Our shrimp feed, seeds, farms and processing plants are recognized as best-in-class within the aquaculture industry, while Legal Sea Foods is the number one seafood brand in America. This makes for a very synergistic partnership," said Mr.Thammasart.

About Legal Sea Foods

Established in 1950, Legal Sea Foods is an upscale American restaurant chain. The current company headquarters is located in Boston. The group operates 37 restaurants, serving over 7 million customers annually. In addition to running a retail products division, Legal Sea Foods also operates an online fish market and ships fresh fish across the United States.

The company implements the highest standards for quality, sanitation and safety at every step -- from purchase, to processing, to shipping and finally, to preparation in the restaurants.

About CP Foods

Charoen Pokphand Foods PCL (CP Foods) is a global and integrated agro-industrial and food company, delivering high-quality products from operations situated in 17 countries, with 4 billion consumers combined.

The company operates its business on the principle of "Corporate Social Responsibility Towards Sustainability" under 3 pillars - Food Security, Self-Sufficient Society and Balance of Nature," which supports the UN Global Compact principles and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

CP Foods is a leading shrimp farmer, processor and exporter, utilizing modern technologies throughout its operations. It offers fresh seafood products from a responsible supply chain, certified by international organizations.



The company is also a proud member of global organizations, such as the UN Global Compact, SEABOS, GSSI, and Seafood Task Force, driving sustainable and positive changes across the world.

As a result of its sustainability initiatives, the company is currently listed in a number of notable indices, such as the DJSI Emerging Markets, the FTSE4Good Emerging Index, and the Stock Exchange of Thailand's SET 50.

For more information, please contact:

Charoen Pokphand Foods PCL (CP Foods)

Tel. +66-2766-7343-5, +662-631-0641, +662-638-2713

Email: pr@cpf.co.thToronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2019) - Gunpowder Capital Corp. (CSE: GPC) (CSE: GPC.PR.A) (OTCQB: GNPWF) (FSE: YS6N) ("Gunpowder" or the "Corporation") is pleased to announce that on March the 22nd, 2019 the Corporation had signed and that it had entered into a Letter of Intent ("LOI") with Grange Conservation LLC., ("GCL") of Wyoming.

The LOI proposes that should the Corporation and GCL both agree to enter into a definitive agreement, the two parties will commence a joint venture Industrial Hemp grow operation (the "operation") which will be based in the State of North Carolina. The operation will be owned by a yet to be formed, and yet to be named, subsidiary ("Newco") where upon formation of Newco, both the Corporation and GCL will each own an equal 50% ownership stake in Newco. This transaction, if completed, would be deemed as an arm's length transaction as both the Corporation and GCL act independently and do not have any relationship to each other.

The terms of the LOI state that in order for the two parties to enter into a definitive agreement, the Corporation shall undertake an equity raise where a minimum of Five Million Dollars ("$5,000,000") USD shall be raised. Once the $5,000,000 USD is raised, and upon completion of due diligence, the two parties will enter into a definitive agreement. The Corporation will issue to GCL 5,000,000 Common Shares as a finder's fee, and an additional 15,000,000 Common Shares upon the completion of the of the due diligence and upon completion of the $5,000,000 equity raise.

Upon entering the definitive agreement, GCL will immediately contribute 45 acres of farm land that is fully licensed to grow industrial Hemp, and which is located in North Carolina to Newco. The Corporation will fund Newco with the proceeds raised, and GCL shall both manage, and have oversight of the growing operations. GCL will not receive any additional consideration other than their equity interest for managing and overseeing the growth operations. The Corporation shall have the right, but not the obligation to acquire the share of Newco owned by GCL for three years from the date of formation of Newco. Should the Corporation elect to acquire GCL's stake in Newco, it may do so by issuing 120,000,000 Common Shares and 65,000,000 Warrants to GCL entitling GCL the ability to purchase an additional 65,000,000 Common Shares of the Corporation at a price of $0.075 CDN per Common Share for 36 months after the date of the issuance.

Should both GCL and the Corporation successfully enter into a definitive agreement, the Corporation will remain as a Merchant Bank, and the Corporation has no intention of changing its current Merchant Banking business model, and will still pursue other business opportunities and investments both inside, and outside of the Industrial Hemp space.

The Corporation is in the process of engaging an investment banking firm to assist with the required capital raise and expects to make an announcement in that regard shortly. There is no guarantee that the Corporation will be able to raise the required funds and move forward with the LOI.

Mr. Paul Haber stated: "We are very pleased to have this joint venture opportunity brought to us and see huge potential in this deal if we enter into a definitive agreement. The 2018 Farm Bill changed federal policy regarding industry hemp, including the removal of hemp from the Controlled Substances Act and the consideration of hemp as an agricultural product. Because of this, we feel that there will be huge demand in the United States for Hemp based products and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to be entering into this industry space at a time where demand is expected to rapidly grow."

About Gunpowder Capital Corp.

Gunpowder Capital Corp. is a merchant bank and advisory services firm based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Gunpowder invests in both publicly traded and private businesses that have successful management teams and attractive economic models. Gunpowder partners with these businesses to support their growth initiatives with its proven methodology of appropriate financing and structured exits. Gunpowder offers debt financing, including mezzanine and bridge loans, equity financing and advisory services. Gunpowder is also building a portfolio of companies in which it takes a long term position and view. For more information please visit www.gunpowdercapitalcorp.com

For further information please contact:

Mr. Frank Kordy

CEO & Director

Gunpowder Capital Corp.

T: (647) 466-4037

E: frank.kordy@gunpowdercapitalcorp.com

Mr. Paul Haber

CFO

Gunpowder Capital Corp.

T: (416) 363-3833

E: paul.haber@gunpowdercapitalcorp.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. The forward-looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements included in this document are made as of the date of this document and the Corporation disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable securities legislation. Although Management believes that the expectations represented in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described herein and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such. Neither CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

- 30 -

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43592LONDON, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- CleanEquity No. 12, hosted by Innovator Capital, the London based investment bank and the Monaco Economic Board, closed on Friday 15th March with its award ceremony and a speech by His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco, the event co-founder, who presented the awards.

This was preceded by a signing, in the presence of His Serene Highness, of an agreement with the Investment Association of China ("IAC") to support the Nobel Sustainability Trust's new award for sustainability; and to support Innovator Capital's Sustainable Finance & Investment Corporation ("SFIC") initiative, with a US$1 billion contribution to sustainable technology innovation, in equal tranches over 3 to 5 years.

CleanEquity showcased 26 companies and His Serene Highness conferred with the judges, who selected three winners of the CleanEquity Awards for Excellence:

eggXYt (IL), for Research; addressing one of the egg industry's most pressing challenges, the culling and destruction of 7 billion male chicks each year; eggXYt's technology meets the needs of today's ethical consumer and dramatically improves the sustainability of egg production.

BL!XT (SE), for Development; it is the first and only to develop miniature, solid state circuit breakers, which, as part of electrical systems, are able to control and manage devices. BL!XT breakers show huge energy saving potential.

SUN Mobility (IN), for Commercialisation; creating smart batteries and enabling them to be swapped in minutes at interchange stations, focusing on 2-wheelers, 3-wheelers and buses, this 'pay-as-you-go' model, will enable the price of EVs to match their ICE equivalents.

The runners up, respectively, were Breathe Applied Sciences (IN), Taronis Technologies (US) and Edenworks (US).

The awards were sculptures created by emerging French artist, Samuel de Gunzburg, who lives and works in London.

His Serene Highness thanked China for "this wonderful commitment" and thanked Mr. Zhu Huiye, saying, "An incredible result and wonderful way forward and so I thank you very, very much for these announcements and the signing of this document here this evening." His Serene Highness congratulated also the award winners and runners up.

Mungo Park, Chairman of Innovator Capital and co-founder of CleanEquity, said:

"We thank His Serene Highness for His continued support. Your help, Monseigneur, has been and continues to be invaluable. We thank Mr. Zhu Huiye of IAC, Wang Qian and her team at EU Sino in Beijing, for all their help and hard work on today's achievements. We look forwards to accelerating innovation with you.

"A big thank you also to Ban Ki-moon. His opening speech will serve as guidance to us all on how to match and scale innovation with SDGs and NDCs.

"Lastly but by no means least, we thank Fondation Prince Albert II, APCO Worldwide, Cision, Covington & Burling, Cranfield, Hobbs & Towne, Monaco Economic Board, Parkview International and Reliance Industries."

Contact:

Conor Barrett

Innovator Capital

conor.barrett@innovator-capital.com

About Innovator Capital

Innovator Capital ("ICL") is a London based, specialist investment bank, regulated by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority. Established in 2003, by its Chairman Mungo Park, ICL's focus is on innovation of sustainable technology and life sciences. It provides strategic, commercial, intellectual property and capital markets advice, transaction arranging and M&A services to universities and companies, regardless of country of origin.

ICL sources over 600 new technologies every year and hosts its annual conference, CleanEquity, to showcase those that are best in class. CleanEquity was conceived of by His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco and Mungo Park, an investment banker with 40 years of experience in emerging technology. The Nobel Sustainability Trust is advised by Innovator Capital.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/787481/CEM2019_Logo.jpgModular water systems and strategic financial plans hold the key to leaving no one behind

SANTA CLARA, California, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The basic human right of accessing safe and sanitary water is the key to sustainable development. It determines livability, growth of industries, and human well-being, all of which are vital for the vibrant growth of society. Unfortunately, many marginalized groups, such as women, children, refugees, indigenous peoples and many others face various grounds for discrimination that result in challenges when it comes to retrieving safe or potable water. For World Water Day 2019, Frost & Sullivan sheds light on areas of innovation that have the potential to improve conventional systems and aid in efforts to leave no one behind on the worldwide journey to obtain water for everyone.

If you are interested in more or would like to speak to our experts, please email me (jaylon.brinkley@frost.com).

According to World Bank, with roughly 663 million people lacking access to drinking water and 2.4 billion people worldwide still lacking access to sanitation, water security is still considered to be one of the biggest global risks.

In addition, this year's World Water Day campaign notes that while many marginalized peoples are in need of accessible and reliable water resources, they commonly face additional interrelated challenges, such as population growth, climate change, and conflict, that compound this problem; a multifaceted solution is required for a truly sustainable future of water access and security.

"Potable water resources are easily disrupted or contaminated as a result of changing environmental conditions and human interference. The traditional model in delivery of drinking water and wastewater services is centralized, leaving little redundancy in place should one component in service delivery be shut down or impaired," said Seth Cutler, Principal Consultant at Frost & Sullivan. "Because of this, locations that are prone to disruption or without water services should think about new models for delivery that increase resilience."

To combat these disadvantages, Frost & Sullivan has outlined techniques and technologies that can play a significant role in making sure those in need of safe water around the globe have the necessary tools for access:

Decentralized water supply: Unlike centralized water systems, decentralized water and wastewater systems provide a sustainable and localized option for water supply that comes with a small footprint and quick installation allowing for a plug and play model needed in many rural areas and places facing environmental degradation. With major shifts in regulatory policies already underway, adoption of decentralized systems is expected to rise in developing countries .

Unlike centralized water systems, decentralized water and wastewater systems provide a sustainable and localized option for water supply that comes with a small footprint and quick installation allowing for a plug and play model needed in many rural areas and places facing environmental degradation. With major shifts in regulatory policies already underway, . Residential drinking water treatment systems: Growing urbanization and increasing concern of drinking water quality and associated health issues from questionable water supply has boosted the adoption of residential water treatment systems. Technological advances that can focus on niche purification requirements, such as differing needs in developed and developing countries, and the ease in installation, coupled with its compact size and relatively cheaper price, are key decision-making factors when identifying the right system.

Growing urbanization and increasing concern of drinking water quality and associated health issues from questionable water supply has boosted the adoption of residential water treatment systems. Technological advances that can focus on niche purification requirements, such as differing needs in developed and developing countries, and the ease in installation, coupled with its compact size and relatively cheaper price, are key decision-making factors when identifying the right system. New financing models: Investment vehicles, such as public-private partnerships (PPP), have the ability to connect investors, especially local financing, to develop water services in underserved areas while offering greater confidence in stable returns moving forward. The water sector can be averse to private ownership, but PPP offers a greater level of public ownership and accountability that can help bridge these concerns.

"It is often difficult to change the conventional way of thinking and action. However, in many instances, it is this mindset that has failed marginalized groups when it comes to equitable access to safe and reliable water services. To ensure an inclusive future for water, new delivery and management methods need to be adopted to provide a greater level of resiliency," stated Cutler. "These efforts combine highly localized quick-fixes, such as residential treatment solutions, to high-redundancy systems through decentralization, and new methods of generating capital investment and accountability through PPP efforts. While a great deal of effort is needed to reach 100% coverage in water services, the solutions are very much within society's toolbox."

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussionLONDON, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --

Market Definition:

 Biodegradable plastics are plastics made from traditional petrochemicals or with certain renewable resources.

 Biodegradable plastics are of two types namely; oxo-biodegradable and hydro-biodegradable.

 These plastics contain additives that cause them to break down more quickly compared to the conventional plastics and be decomposed by the action of living organisms, such as bacteria.

 Its ability to decay rapidly in the presence of light and oxygen makes it more environment friendly.

Market Overview and Trends

 With advancements in the technology and increasing population, the use of plastics has widely increased in various industries.

 The traditional or conventional plastic material are non-biodegradable and pose harmful effects on environment.

 This encouraged development of biodegradable plastics as an effective alternative for the traditional practices.

 Though these plastic materials are widely accepted, number of disputes were created regarding the betterment of these products.

 In 2014, some associates of the European Parliament tried to bring a complete ban on oxydegradable plastics in the European Union.

 Such actions resulted in more detailed study of the biodegradable plastics to confirm their affectivity.

 Not all types of biodegradable plastic can break down completely under soil or water conditions, however researchers say that if managed carefully, the biodegradable plastic blends are expected to create new possibilities for handling plastic waste.

Download samples here:

https://www.visiongain.com/report/global-biodegradable-plastics-market-2019-2029/

Market Dynamics:

Factors Influencing the Market Growth:

 Globally, governments are prohibiting use of plastic based products and compelling people to use alternative products that would be less harmful to the environment.

 Governments are also taking waste management initiatives that focus on enhancing the use of bio-based products.

 Based on this, consumer preference is also changing and shifting towards eco-friendly products.

 Growing packaging and agriculture industry is also highly contributing to the growth of this market.

 Growing research and development to improve the properties of these products and technological advancements are some of the additional factors propelling the growth of biodegradable plastics market during the forecast period.

Factors Restraining the Market Growth:

 High cost of biodegradable plastics

 Concerns with affectivity of biodegradable plastics products

To find out more about this report please contact Sara Peerun at sara.peerun@visiongain.comor refer to our website: https://www.visiongain.com/report/global-biodegradable-plastics-market-2019-2029/

Market Segmentation 2019-2029:

Type

 Starch Blends Market, 2019-2029

 PLA Market, 2019-2029

 PHA Market, 2019-2029

 Biodegradable Polymers Market, 2019-2029

 Others Market, 2019-2029

Biodegradable Polymers

 PCL Market, 2019-2029

 PBAT Market, 2019-2029

 PBS Market, 2019-2029

End User

 Packaging Market, 2019-2029

 Agriculture Market, 2019-2029

 Consumer Goods Market, 2019-2029

 Textile Market, 2019-2029

 Others Market, 2019-2029

Geographic breakdown

Focused regional forecasts and analysis explore the future opportunities:

 North America Market, 2019-2029

 Europe Market, 2019-2029

 Asia-Pacific Market, 2019-2029

 LAMEA Market, 2019-2029

Competitive Analysis:

 The companies operating in the biodegradable plastics market mainly focus on research and development and product launches as their primary growth strategies.

 Key players also collaborate with government organizations to conduct research studies and develop innovative products that would enhance their product offerings.

 Companies also adopt strategic collaborations and partnerships to improve their market presence.

 In January 2019, Nestle partnered with Danimer Scientific to develop biodegradable water bottle. Such development enables companies to gain significant market share in the global market.

Major Market Players:

NatureWorks, Braskem, Biome Bioplastics, Bio-On, Novamont, BASF, Total Corbion PLA, Toray Industries, Plantic Technologies, and Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation.

Did you know that we also offer a report add-on service? Email sara.peerun@visiongain.com to discuss any customized research needs you may have.

Companies covered in the report include:

Arkema

BASF

Be Green Packaging

Biome Bioplastics

Bio-On

Braskem

Cardia Bioplastics

DuPont

EcoWare

Green Dot Bioplastics

Greengran

Innovia Films

Matrica

Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation

NatureWorks

Novamont

Papelyco

Plantic Technologies

Purac

Solegear Bioplastics

Solvay

Tipa

Toray Industries

Total Corbion PLA

WorldCentric

To discuss this report please e-mail Sara Peerun on sara.peerun@visiongain.comBERLIN, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- In response to the decision by the European Council, BDI chief executive Joachim Lang says: "The suspense continues."

"The suspense continues. The extension of the deadline means that the agonizing uncertainty for business goes on. Our companies need clarity. And for this, the British government must conclude the Brexit process as quickly as possible.

"The EU has once again stretched out its hand to the United Kingdom . The ball remains in the British court. The House of Commons in London needs to consider the alternatives and pass the withdrawal agreement. Whether or not the deadline extension will lead to an orderly withdrawal is very uncertain. A genuine solution to the difficulties must be found.

. The ball remains in the British court. The House of Commons in needs to consider the alternatives and pass the withdrawal agreement. Whether or not the deadline extension will lead to an orderly withdrawal is very uncertain. A genuine solution to the difficulties must be found. " Europe has more to worry about than just Britain's withdrawal. The EU must support industry as an engine of growth and prosperity. It must decide to react rapidly to market-distorting interventions, in particular from China , using the tools of the market economy."

The Federation of German Industries (BDI) is the umbrella organization of German industry and industry-related services. It speaks for 35 trade associations and more than 100,000 enterprises with around 8 million employees in Germany and 3.5 million employees in other countries. Membership is voluntary. 15 organizations in the regional states represent the interests of industry at the regional level.

The Federation of German Industries

Member association of BUSINESSEUROPE



Contact numbers

T: +49(0)30-2028-1479

F: +49(0)30-2028-2479



Website:

www.bdi.eu



Email:

Presse@bdi.euTo Provide U.S.-Managed Pre-Press Production Services

DANBURY, Conn., March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Westchester Publishing Services, a U.S.-employee-owned company based in Danbury, Connecticut, announced today that it has reached an agreement with the U.S. division of Macmillan Publishers, a global trade book publishing company. Under the agreement, Westchester will be providing U.S.-managed book composition (typesetting) services for virtually all U.S. trade titles released by Macmillan each year.



Westchester's historic performance for Macmillan, for which it has been typesetting books since 1992, and continued investment in its market leading U.S. and company-owned offshore composition operations were critical factors for Macmillan in deciding to continue to handle its pre-press production work through Westchester. Following a thorough review of competing typesetting options, including the alternative to bring composition in-house, Macmillan selected Westchester as the right fit to affordably and reliably support the production of its prestigious trade publications list. Regarding this decision, Macmillan SVP of Technology, Leslie Padgett said, "Westchester has been our typesetting partner since the early 90's and during that time has handled award-winning and best-selling titles like the novels of Jonathan Franzen, epub and print versions of our children's book list like the Bad Kitty books, as well as Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury and James Comey's A Higher Loyalty. Westchester provides outstanding customer service, and the level of quality is predictably impressive on each project - which is why we rely on Westchester."

"Westchester is honored to be Macmillan's continuing exclusive provider for pre-press production," commented Paul J. Crecca, President & CEO at Westchester, "Macmillan's vote of confidence with this new agreement is proof of how hard Westchester works to provide extremely reliable composition services at very competitive prices, along with excellent customer service. Westchester looks forward to providing Macmillan with many more years of the same."

About Westchester Publishing Services:

Founded in 1969, Westchester Publishing Services is the only U.S. employee-owned company concentrating in editorial, composition, design, and digital conversion services. Westchester Publishing Services has been a trusted partner to the U.S. publishing industry for decades with clients including Macmillan, Harvard University Press, W.W. Norton, The MIT Press, Bloomsbury, and UCL Press. In 2014, Westchester Publishing Services became a 100% employee-owned company through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). In 2017, Westchester Publishing Services launched Westchester K-12 Publishing Services, based in Dayton, Ohio, to serve the needs of educational publishers. In 2018, Westchester Publishing Services opened an office in the United Kingdom to serve publishers in the UK and Europe.

For information about our expanded offerings, please contact: Nicole Tomassi, Marketing and Conference Manager at Westchester Publishing Services, at: 203-658-7135 or Nicole.Tomassi@westchesterpubsvcs.com . Further information is also available at: www.westchesterpublishingservices.com .

About Macmillan:

Macmillan Publishers is a global trade book publishing company with prominent imprints around the world. Macmillan publishes a broad range of award-winning books for children and adults in all categories and formats.

U.S. publishers include Celadon Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Flatiron Books, Henry Holt & Company, Macmillan Audio, Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, St. Martin's Press and Tor Books. In the UK, Australia, India, and South Africa, Macmillan publishes under the Pan Macmillan name. The German company, Holtzbrinck Deutsche Buchverlage, includes among its imprints S. Fischer, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Rowohlt, and Droemer Knaur.

Macmillan Publishers is a division of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, a large family-owned media company headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. www.us.macmillan.comNIEDERNHALL, GERMANY / ACCESSWIRE / March 22, 2019 / The Third China-German Fresh Air Ventilation Technology Forum (hereinafter referred to as "China-German Ventilation Forum" or "Forum"), which was initiated by (FGK) and organized by Dream Maker, was recently held in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. In the context of the Belt and Road Initiative, the Forum, themed by Intelligent Ventilation for a Win-win Future, gathered authoritative experts in the field of ventilation from China and Germany and discussed in depth the technical standards of the ventilation industry in China and Germany and the future development of the industry.

Main venue of China-German Ventilation Forum

Dipl. Ing. Claus Handel, Chairman of FGK Europe, addressed the Forum and gave a keynote speech titled Civil Ventilation & Heat Pumps and Energy Conservation Technologies. He said that energy conservation and environmental protection had become a pillar industry of Germany, making important contributions to Germany's economic development and improvement in living standards. At present, ventilation system has become a standard configuration of energy-saving, green buildings in Germany; as the renovation of old houses for energy conservation and the implementation of financial and tax incentive mechanisms continue, ventilation system should become a standard configuration of all buildings in Germany. Dipl. Ing. Bernd Klein, Director of IGE/HKL Inspection Department, said in his report that ventilation, heat pumps and energy-saving buildings were inseparable, as ventilation system was an effective means adopted by modern buildings to improve indoor air quality, while heat pumps were an effective means to save energy during heating.

After presenting a comparative study between ventilation system and natural ventilation, Dr. Sun Hejiang, Associate Professor at the School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, pointed out that ventilation system could reduce indoor air pollution concentration and improve indoor air quality. When the outdoor PM2.5 indicator is higher than 75ug/m3 , one should avoid opening windows for ventilation, but close the doors and windows and turn on the ventilation system. During sleep at nighttime, it's best to keep the ventilation system working the whole night.

After going through "coal-smoke pollution" and "photochemical pollution", China is entering into the third pollution period featured by "indoor air pollution". Ms. Deng Gaofeng, Secretary General of the China Air Purification Industry Alliance, emphasized that even though indoor air pollution was still serious in China, the harm brought by indoor air pollution was probably more serious. According to the data of the China Indoor Environmental Quality Testing Center, the number of excess deaths caused by indoor pollution in China is 111,000 every year and the number of excess emergency visits, 4.3 million. More importance must be attached to indoor pollution. Deng Gaofeng also mentioned that heat exchange ventilation system was a technology that had great development potential and was worth paying attention to. The improvement of air tightness of buildings can significantly increase the level of energy conservation. However, insufficient ventilation brought by that will have a negative impact on living comfort. Therefore, we need to adopt the heat exchange ventilation system to ensure that the buildings are both energy-saving and comfortable.

At the Forum, experts from China and Germany, with a focus on technologies and standards, discussed the future development of the ventilation industry in China and Germany. Technologies and standards can regulate the industry, while enterprises and products are the direct drivers for the development of the industry. After the main agenda of the Forum ended, experts and guests attended the opening ceremony of Dream Maker's new factory in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, and visited the factory. According to the introduction by Erwin Grohmann, CTO of Dream Maker, the factory has adopted an internationally advanced automated assembly line and mechanical arms, and after it is completed and put into operation, it will help Dream Maker double its capacity and further improve its product quality. Besides China and Germany, the products manufactured by the factory will also be sold in a number of countries in Europe.

Herr Zhu, Economic and Commercial Consul of the Chinese Consulate General in Frankfurt, pointed out in his congratulation at the China-German Ventilation Forum that German brands and quality enjoyed a good reputation in China, while Chinese market and capital would add wings to German technologies and brands. In the ventilation industry, Germany and China can complement each other's advantages. Germany has a high-quality manufacturing environment, world-top ventilation mechanical technology and a qualified and complete industry chain, as well as mature building codes; while China has a huge potential ventilation market, fast-growing economy and living standards, and relatively leading development in Internet of Things.

Conforming to the Belt and Road Initiative and the trend, the holding of The Third China-German Ventilation Forum 2019 can help build and improve a platform for communication and dialogs in the industrial field between China and Germany, make use of the two countries' complementary advantages in the industry and speed up industry integration between the two countries, thus facilitating common development of the ventilation industry in both countries.

CONTACT:

Tele:+49 7940 98 259 35

SOURCE: Dream Maker Technologie GmbH

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/539826/China-German-Fresh-Air-Ventilation-Forum-was-held-in-Germany-Ventilation-System-Should-be-a-Standard-Configuration-of-BuildingsVancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2019) -Ely Gold Royalties Inc. (TSXV: ELY) (OTCQB: ELYGF) ("Ely Gold" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that, Mr. Trey Wasser, President and CEO will be presenting at the 25th annual Bally Capital Swiss Mining Institute Conference taking place in Zurich on March 26 and in Geneva on March 27, 2019.

For further information regarding Ely Gold's participation in the Conference, please contact the Investor Relations Department.

About Ely Gold Royalties

Ely Gold Royalties Inc. is a Vancouver based, emerging royalty company with development assets focused in Nevada and the Western US. Its current portfolio includes 31 Deeded Royalties and 19 properties optioned to third parties. All 50 of these properties are being explored by third parties. Ely Gold's royalty portfolio includes producing royalties, royalties on fully permitted mines, mines under construction and development projects that are being permitted for mine construction. The Company is actively purchasing existing third-party royalties for its portfolio and all the Company's Option Properties will produce royalties, if exercised. The royalty and option portfolios are currently generating significant revenue. Ely Gold is well positioned with its current portfolio of over 20 available properties to generate additional operating revenue through option and sale transactions. The Company has a proven track record of maximizing the value of its properties through claim consolidation and advancement using its extensive, proprietary data base. All portfolio properties are sold or optioned on a 100% basis, while the Company retains net smelter royalty interests. Management believes that due to the Company's ability to generate option and royalty transactions, its successful strategy of organically creating royalties, its equity portfolio and its current low valuation, Ely Gold offers shareholders a low-risk leverage to the current price of gold, exploration in Nevada and low-cost access to long-term mineral royalties.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

Signed "Trey Wasser"

Trey Wasser, President & CEO

For further information, please contact:



Trey Wasser, President & CEO

trey@elygoldinc.com

972 803 3087

Joanne Jobin, Investor Relations Officer

jjobin@elygoldinc.com

647 964 0292

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.

Disclaimer: This press release contains certain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation, including statements regarding the Company's contemplated acquisition or sale of royalties and Properties, and any stated plans for further near-term exploration and development of the its Properties. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts; they are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "projects," "aims," "potential," "goal," "objective," "prospective," and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will," "would," "may," "can," "could" or "should" occur, or are those statements, which, by their nature, refer to future events. The Company cautions that Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made and they involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Consequently, there can be no assurances that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Except to the extent required by applicable securities laws and the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements if management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change. Factors that could cause future results to differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements include the risk of accidents and other risks associated with mineral exploration, development and extraction operations, the risk that its partners will encounter unanticipated geological factors, or the possibility that they may not be able to secure permitting and other governmental clearances, necessary to carry out their stated plans for the Properties, the Company's inability to secure the required TSXV acceptance required for any Transaction, and the risk of political uncertainties and regulatory or legal disputes or changes in the jurisdictions where the Company carries on its business that might interfere with the Company's business and prospects. The reader is urged to refer to the Company's reports, publicly available through the Canadian Securities Administrators' System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR) at www.sedar.com for a more complete discussion of such risk factors and their potential effect.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43612Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2019) - Castle Peak Mining Ltd. (TSXV: CAP) ("Castle Peak" or the "Company") hereby provides a first news release on corporate developments since its TSX Venture Exchange trading halt 30 days ago.

The Company is pleased to announce that following the initial due diligence study on the Kunsu PL from August - December 2018, it has embarked upon an independent review exercise by PGeo, Mr. Sam Torkornoo, who is a registered member of the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario, Registration Number 2340. His review should be finalized by next week latest and presented for final TSX Venture Exchange approval.

Furthermore, the Company has requested a Ghana law firm to undertake a title opinion on the Kunsu prospecting license, which is equally expected to be finalized and submitted for TSX consideration by next week at the latest.

Finally the Company is pleased to announce the following field progress report on follow-up exploration work. This work commenced on the 22nd February, 2019 and has covered the customary community consultation and traditional protocols within the project area. Crop compensation assessment for the period is underway. The Field Work includes line cutting (a total of 5.8km of lines) and an Induced Polarization (IP) geophysical survey at the North Grid zone to provide information on the extent and prospectivity of gold mineralization within the corridor.

ON THE KUNSU PROPERTY

The Kunsu PL is located approximately 35 Km Northwest of Kumasi and 240 Km Northwest of Accra. The property which is situated in close proximity to the Sefwi gold belt is strategically placed on the Asankragua Manso Nkwanta gold belt. The Kunsu concession is about 27 Km north of Asanko Gold's mine, and even closer to the Asanko Esaase gold prospect, all of which are inferred to be underlain by similar geology regionally as Kunsu.

TECHNICAL DISCLOSURE

Castle Peak's technical disclosure in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Sam Torkornoo, P.Geo., who serves as a Qualified Person under the definition in National Instrument 43-101 ('NI 43-101').

ABOUT CASTLE PEAK

Castle Peak Mining Ltd. is a Canadian-based junior exploration company focused on advancing greenfields and early stage gold projects. Castle Peak has successfully discovered and sold the high grade Apankrah deposit with an associated strategic land package. The Company is in process of acquiring the Kunsu prospecting license strategically placed on the Asankragua Manso Nkwanta gold belt in Ghana, West Africa.

On behalf of the Board of Castle Peak Mining Ltd.:

"Iyad Jarbou"

Chief Financial Officer

Tel: 604-362-7685

Email: iyadj@castlepeakmining.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD-LOOKING AND OTHER CAUTIONARY INFORMATION

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts,that address the planned operations are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes the forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements should not be in any way construed as guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices for metals, the conclusions of detailed feasibility and technical analyses, the timely renewal of key permits, lower than expected grades and quantities of resources, mining rates and recovery rates and the lack of availability of necessary capital, which may not be available to the Company on terms acceptable to it or at all. The Company is subject to the specific risks inherent in the mining business as well as general economic and business conditions. For more information on the Company, Investors should review the Company's Annual Form 40-F filing with the United States Securities Commission and its home jurisdiction filings that are available at www.sedar.com .

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43619Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2019) - Agau Resources, Inc. ("Agau" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has entered into a letter of intent (the "LOI") dated March 18, 2019 with Gen X BioSciences Corp. ("Gen X"), a leading cannabis extraction company, whereby the parties will complete a business combination by way of a transaction that will constitute a reverse takeover of the Company by Gen X (the "Transaction"). In connection with the Transaction, the Resulting Issuer (as defined below) will apply to list the common shares of the Resulting Issuer on the Canadian Securities Exchange (the "CSE"). In advance of the Transaction, Agau will also complete an offering of convertible debentures for minimum gross proceeds of $1,500,000 (the "Debenture Offering"). The debentures may be converted following the Consolidation (as defined below), into post-Consolidation shares of the Company at a price of $0.25 per share. On closing, each investor will also receive warrants exercisable for that number of post-Consolidation shares that is equal to the number of post-Consolidation shares issuable upon conversion of the debentures, with each such warrant exercisable at a price of $0.35 per post-Consolidation share of the Company. The conversion of the debentures can be forced by the Company, at any time after the expiry of any applicable statutory hold period, if the daily weighted average closing price of the shares is $0.50 or greater for 20 consecutive trading days following completion of the Transaction.

The resulting issuer that will exist upon completion of the Transaction (the "Resulting Issuer") will change its business to the cannabis industry and is expected to change its name to "Gen X Biosciences Corp." The final structure of the Transaction will be determined by the parties following receipt of tax, corporate and securities law advice.

In connection with the Transaction, Gen X intends to complete a private placement of subscription receipts (the "Subscription Receipts") to raise aggregate gross proceeds of a minimum of $1,500,000 (the "Offering"). The shareholders of Gen X will receive 122,048,000 common shares of the Resulting Issuer pursuant to the Transaction. Certain finders fees will also be payable on closing.

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Scientific Officer of Gen X Biosciences, Shea Alderete, has commented "This transaction with Agau Resources will allow Gen X to not only build its infrastructure but also allow us to have future expansion into market places that we have actively been engaging in. Our team has decades of knowledge and resource in the cannabis industry, and now with the combination of this financial support Gen X will be unstoppable."

Gen X and its Business

Gen X Biosciences is a cannatech firm focused on using innovative technology and scalable extraction methodologies to deliver premium cannabis products, specifically best-in-class distillate to the world.

Gen X was built on its scientific approach to extracting cannabis products and uses its proprietary 'Molecular Perfection' system to distil cannabis oil several times until the final product has THC potency of over 90%. The scalability of Gen X's technology allows it to sustain adaptable production capacity. Gen X leverages a team with extensive experience in cannabis. Shea Alderete, the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Scientific Officer, and Co-Founder of Gen X, has over 15 years of experience in creating high-quality products, and learned his trade with some of the first premium cannabis brands such as Moxie - the first company in California to receive a temporary license in the now-legal cannabis market. Shea has won several awards for the quality of his products, including the Chalice Cup of California and the Karma Cup of Canada.

GenX's mission is to create premium cannabis products where consistency, price, accountability and consumer experience are paramount for every patient/consumer purchasing a GenX product. GenX produces the cleanest form of distillate on the market all without solvents and pesticides.

Since GenX's inception in 2016, the Company has developed key cultivation and manufacturing relationships that allows for scale and expansion of its business model. The black and grey markets are the Company's number-one competitor as it allows for entities which are not fully legal to operate within the space. As regulations in mature markets like California tighten in 2019, GenX's deep structure and compliance background will allow the Company to thrive in the "Green Market" and competitively gain market share by transitioning patients/consumers from the black and grey markets to the legal cannabis market.

Agau Shareholder Meeting

Prior to, and as a condition of, the closing of the Transaction (the "Closing"), Agau will call a meeting of its shareholders (the "Agau Meeting") for the purpose of approving, among other matters:

a change of name of the Company to "Gen X Biosciences Corp." or such other name as is directed by Gen X and acceptable to applicable regulatory authorities effective upon Closing;

the approval of a new stock option plan to be effective upon Closing;

the election of a new slate of nominee directors appointed by Gen X to form the new board of directors, which slate will be effective upon Closing;

the appointment of a new auditor; and

if required by governing regulatory bodies and applicable securities and corporate laws, the approval of the Transaction.

The Transaction is an arm's length transaction. Agau will prepare and file a CSE Form 2A listing statement or other principal disclosure document (the "Listing Statement") with the CSE providing comprehensive disclosure on Gen X and the Transaction in connection with the proposed CSE listing.

Management of the Resulting Issuer

Upon closing of the Transaction, all of Agau's current directors and executive officers will resign and be replaced by nominees of Gen X approved at the Agau Meeting, all in a manner that complies with the requirements of governing regulatory bodies and applicable securities and corporate laws.

Details of insiders and proposed directors and officers of the Resulting Issuer will be disclosed in a further news release.

Closing Conditions

The completion of the Transaction is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to the following:

the execution of a definitive agreement;

completion of satisfactory due diligence;

completion by Agau of a consolidation of its shares on a 40 to 1 basis (the " Consolidation ");

"); completion of the Offering;

the conditional approval to the listing of the shares of the Resulting Issuer on the CSE; and

receipt of all required regulatory, corporate and third party approvals, including approvals by the CSE, applicable governmental authorities, and the fulfilment of all applicable regulatory requirements and conditions necessary to complete the Transaction.

MI 61-101 Disclosure

KW Capital Partners Ltd., an anticipated participant in the Debenture Offering, is considered a "related party" within the meaning of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101") and the Debenture Offering is therefore considered to be a "related party transaction" within the meaning of MI 61-101. The Debenture Offering, however, is exempt from the valuation requirement of MI 61-101 by virtue of the exemption contained in section 5.5(b) as the Company's shares are not listed on a specified market. The Debenture Offering is also exempt from the minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 by virtue of the exemption contained in section 5.7(e) of MI 61-101, in that (i) the Company is insolvent and in serious financial difficulty, (ii) the Debenture Offering is designed to improve the financial position of the Company, (iii) section 5.5(f) of MI 61-101 does not apply, (iv) the Company has one or more independent directors in respect of the Debenture Offering, (v) the Company's board of directors, acting in good faith, has determined, and the Company's independent director, acting in good faith, determined that (A) items (i) and (ii) in this paragraph apply, and (B) the terms of the Debenture Offering are reasonable in the circumstances of the Company, and (vi) there is no other requirement, corporate or otherwise, to hold a meeting to obtain any approval of the holders of any class of affected securities.

The material change report with respect to the Debenture Offering will be filed less than 21 days before the expected date of closing of the Debenture Offering. In the view of the Company, such shorter period is reasonable and necessary to improve the Company's financial position in a timely manner in the circumstances. Further, KW Capital Partners Ltd. has indicated a desire to fund on an expedited basis.

Further Information

Further details about the Transaction and the Resulting Issuer will be provided in a comprehensive news release when the parties enter into the definitive agreement.

Investors are cautioned that any information released or received with respect to the Transaction in this press release may not be complete and should not be relied upon. Trading in the common shares of the Company should be considered highly speculative.

The securities to be issued in connection with the Transaction have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons (as defined in Regulation S promulgated under the U.S. Securities Act) unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. 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 in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

Completion of the Transaction is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to, CSE acceptance, requisite shareholder approvals, and if applicable, disinterested shareholder approval. Where applicable, the Transaction cannot close until the required shareholder approval is obtained. There can be no assurance that the Transaction will be completed as proposed or at all.

Investors are cautioned that, except as disclosed in the management information circular or Listing Statement, as applicable, of the Company to be prepared in connection with the Transaction, any information released or received with respect to the Transaction may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon. Trading in the securities of Agau should be considered highly speculative.

Neither the CSE nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

About Agau Resources, Inc.

Agau Resources, Inc. is a mineral exploration company with no current activities or operations.

Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws relating to the proposal to complete the Transaction and associated transactions. Any such forward-looking statements may be identified by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "projects", "plans" and similar expressions. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Statements about, among other things, the expected timing and terms of the Transaction, the Debenture Offering, and the Offering, the number of securities of Agau or the Resulting Issuer that may be issued in connection with the Transaction, the ownership ratio of the Resulting Issuer post-closing, the required shareholder approvals or the ability to obtain such approvals, Gen X's strategic plans and the parties' ability to satisfy closing conditions and receive necessary approvals are all forward-looking information. These statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements. Although such statements are based on management's reasonable assumptions, there can be no assurance that the Transaction will occur or that, if the Transaction does occur, it will be completed on the terms described above. Agau and Gen X assume no responsibility to update or revise forward-looking information to reflect new events or circumstances unless required by applicable law.

For more information, please contact:

Agau Resources, Inc.

Binyomin Posen CEO and Director

Telephone: (416) 481.2222 x 246

Email: bposen@plazacapital.ca



MONTERREY, Mexico, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fomento Economico Mexicano, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE: FMX; BMV: FEMSAUBD) ("FEMSA" or "the Company") held its Annual Ordinary General Shareholders Meeting today, during which the shareholders approved the Company's annual report for 2018 prepared by the Chief Executive Officer, the Company's consolidated financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2018 and the election of the Board of Directors and its Committees for 2019.



The shareholders approved the payment of a cash dividend in the amount of Ps. 9,692 million, consisting of Ps. 0.6042 per each Series "D" share and Ps. 0.4833 per each Series "B" share, which amounts to Ps. 2.9000 per "BD" Unit (BMV: FEMSAUBD) or Ps. 29.0000 per ADS (NYSE: FMX), and Ps. 2.4167 per "B" Unit (BMV: FEMSAUB). The dividend payment will be split in two equal payments, payable on May 7, 2019 and November 5, 2019. In addition, the shareholders established the amount of Ps. 7,000 million as the maximum amount that could potentially be used for the Company's share repurchase program during 2019.

About FEMSA

FEMSA is a leading company that participates in the beverage industry through Coca-Cola FEMSA, the largest franchise bottler of Coca-Cola products in the world by volume; and in the beer industry, through its ownership of the second largest equity stake in Heineken, one of the world's leading brewers with operations in over 70 countries. In the retail industry it participates through FEMSA Comercio, comprising a Proximity Division operating OXXO, a small-format store chain, a Health Division, which includes all drugstores and related operations, and a Fuel Division, which operates the OXXO GAS chain of retail service stations. Additionally, through its Strategic Businesses unit, it provides logistics, point-of-sale refrigeration solutions and plastics solutions to FEMSA's business units and third-party clients.

Media Contact

(52) 555-249-6843

comunicacion@femsa.com.mx

www.femsa.comIf you binge on a lot of video content, the Galaxy M30 is your best bet under Rs 15,000.

Samsung has been off the pace when it comes to budget phones for a few years now and the company's new Galaxy M Series is a serious push towards setting things right in 2019. As with the Galaxy M10 and M20 launched earlier this year, the Galaxy M30 aims to offer good value at a price of Rs 14,990. Something that the Korean giant hasn't really tried over the past few years.

The competition when it comes to the Rs 15,000 budget range does heat up quite a bit. We have smartphones from the likes of Xiaomi, Realme, Asus and even Honor competing to grab eyeballs, and Samsung's Galaxy M30 gets right into the mix with what it packs.

Coming from the Galaxy M10 and M20, the Galaxy M30 slots right above the Galaxy M20 and packs in a gorgeous Super AMOLED display instead of LCD, a mammoth 5,000 mAh battery and triple rear cameras that certainly pack a punch. It's certainly a great phone, but does it do enough to topple the mighty Redmi Note 7 Pro?

The best display on a budget smartphone

I can comfortably state, and with conviction, that the Galaxy M30 has the best display (by some margin) on a phone that is priced under Rs 15,000. Samsung does make the best OLED panels for smartphones and it doesn't surprise me that the display on the Galaxy M30 is an absolute joy to look at.

The colours are punchy, the saturation levels are remarkable and the display gets bright enough to blind you for a few seconds if you suddenly flick the phone out of your pocket in the dark. Like the Galaxy M10 and M20, Samsung's packed in a 6.4-inch Infinity-U display here with slim bezels.

If you're coming from an LCD panel and you love watching videos, the Galaxy M30 is an absolute treat. If you don't like the way the colours turn out on the display by default, Samsung also throws in a bunch of display profiles to choose from in the display settings. I personally prefer the 'AMOLED photo' display profile but I did come across a couple of people at least who would rather leave the display at 'Adaptive', so that does boil down to preference.

Samsung also throws in a couple of handy options like a blue-light filter toggle and the option of changing font style and size if you want to.

The only niggle I had is with the auto-brightness feature which failed on me so often that I found myself turning the feature off within a day's use.

Two-day battery life with heavy usage

The Galaxy M30 packs a 5,000 mAh battery unit and while that sounds like a lot, we have seen phones like the Asus Zenfone Max Pro M2 pack similar units in the past. But the AMOLED display on the Galaxy M30 and the Exynos 7904 SoC make miracles happen, as far as battery life is concerned anyway.

Even with hours of video watching on mobile data, I was able to drain only a meagre amount of the battery. Add to that an hour of music streaming on Spotify, a couple of hundred WhatsApp messages, Slack, two mail accounts running in the background, selfies and photos every now and then and about half an hour worth of voice calls, I still managed two full days before I reached for the charger (the M30 still had 6 percent juice).

Samsung's bundled a type-C fast charger (about 18 W) in the box but since this is a big battery to fill, it did take me two hours and 25 minutes on average to charge the phone completely. But then again, I wouldn't complain with such a stellar battery life.

Triple-cameras that could have been better

A triple-camera setup on a budget phone is unheard of but Samsung's done that with the Galaxy M30. It was definitely something I was eager to put to the test since the last triple-camera Samsung smartphone I'd tried out was the Galaxy A7.

Well, I was a tad disappointed with what Samsung could have done with such impressive hardware but the cameras on the Galaxy M30 definitely do a decent job overall. However, pitted against the Redmi Note 7 Pro (review), the performance does fall short.

The phone packs a 13 MP f/1.9 primary camera supported by a 5 MP f/2.2 depth sensor and a 5 MP f/2.2 ultrawide-angle lens. Now, images shot in daylight turn out well with great contrast levels and natural-looking shades. Samsung does give you an easier way to turn on HDR but you can head to settings and turn that to 'Auto' if you like.

Focusing is fast and the wide-angle lens is a nice option to have if you're trying to squeeze in more into the shot. Images shot using the wide-angle lens do turn out horribly distorted at times though and Samsung does have a 'shape corrector' to let you fix the distortion. However, there were occasions when the images were just too distorted to fix.

The portrait mode (live-focus as Samsung calls it) works well with great edge detection and a very natural-looking separation of the background from the subject. The background blur looks quite natural and I love the fact that you can alter the level of background blur even after taking the picture.

Here's a portrait mode comparison against the Redmi Note 7 Pro and the Samsung's Galaxy A30.

In low light, the camera does well when you have a light source illuminating the subject but once you move to darker situations, you will notice a lot of noise which is aggressively dealt with, as it is on most smartphones. The resulting image is therefore washed out with little to no detail. Adding a night mode here would be really helpful though.

As for the 16 MP f/2.0 front camera, I was really pleased with the selfies, both in daylight as well as in tricky lighting conditions. Definitely, a thumbs up here if you click a lot of selfies. The 'live focus' mode also works well here and a dedicated sticker mode was also worth a try.

You can check out high-res images clicked by the Galaxy M30 here.

As for video, the resolution is capped at 1080p 60fps but EIS (electronic image stabilisation) works well here and you'll enjoy shooting some steady clips using the Galaxy M30.

A tall yet grippy device which could have been designed better

The Galaxy M30 may not be a smartphone that will wow you with its looks but Samsung has tried to make it look appealing in its unique way. What would otherwise look like a very dull phone, has an odd, dual-tone gradient finish which might not be breathtaking to look at but does make the phone stick out in a crowd.

The frame and back of the phone have been moulded completely out of plastic and though we understand Samsung wanted to cut costs on materials, the Galaxy M30 could have been designed better. The phone does feel rigid otherwise though. The rounded back also helps a great deal in gripping the phone, something which is a worry with glass on phones these days.

The back does have a glossy finish, which means that you will have to throw a case on if you don't want scratches to show within a day or two.

Talking about scratches, there no camera bump on the Galaxy M30, which means that you won't have to worry too much about scratching the camera lenses.

Now, the Galaxy M30 is not a small phone. It features a large 6.4-inch display and a mammoth 5,000 mAh battery but Samsung's been able to keep the weight fairly low. This has definitely been aided by the use of plastic but is still remarkable nonetheless.

No 'OneUI' but Samsung's 'Experience UI' has gotten marginally better

Something that distinguishes Samsung's new Galaxy A series from the M Series is the inclusion of OneUI. With the Galaxy M30, you're still stuck on Android Oreo 8.1 with the company's old Experience UI. I did receive a software update while reviewing the phone which updated the Android Security patch to February 2019 but apart from that, there nothing that we haven't seen before on Samsung phones.

That said, the software does feel fairly well-optimised and I did not come across any major stuttering with normal usage. You do see some stutter when using multi-window mode and when playing games. Having used the Galaxy A30 for a while, OneUI does feel far snappier to use, so this certainly isn't a performance issue.

Switching to a third-party launcher could help your cause but I really hope Samsung plans on bring OneUI to the M Series phones.

As for additions like face unlock, the feature does work fairly well with a decent amount of accuracy for an unsecure, 2D-based system.

The Exynos 7904 chip isnt a good bet for PUBG fans

Samsung's stuck with the same 14nm Exynos 7904 we saw on the Galaxy M20 and while it handles daily messaging apps and web browsing just fine, it's certainly doesn't handle heavy games like PUBG Mobile and Asphalt very well.

The phone also begins to stutter every now and then while trying to use the multi-window feature, which was a mild disappointment. RAM management on the 4 GB / 64 GB unit we have for review was good and I could toggle between multiple apps with relative ease.

The single, bottom-firing speaker gets fairly loud and the output off the 3.5 mm jack was also quite pleasing. The fingerprint scanner on the back is also fairly fast but we have seen faster scanners on phones in the same budget.

The earpiece on the front may be small, but I didn't have any issues worth noting while taking phone calls.

Verdict

The bright and punchy display coupled with the brilliant battery life certainly makes the Galaxy M30 a great pick for those who love watching a lot of videos on their phone. With Widevine L1 certification  essential for HD streaming on apps like Netflix, and a rarity among budget phones  this phone certainly has you covered for HD streaming on all the popular streaming platforms out there.

If you are picking the Galaxy M30 for its cameras, you won't be disappointed. The M30 does a great job with selfies and portrait shots and the wide-angle lens here is a definite bonus. It's only in low-light that you see the phone choke a bit. But again, this is a Rs 14,990 phone, and at this price, the M30 certainly packs a punch.

Overall, the Galaxy M30 does come across as a good device for the price. Its only major drawback is performance, which will be a factor if you are a gamer or a heavy multi-tasker.

However, you do have a number of other options to choose from including the Honor 10 Lite, the Oppo K1 (review) and also the Realme 2 Pro (review). The Redmi Note 7 Pro, though, for the time being, still keeps its crown.

Find latest and upcoming tech gadgets online on Tech2 Gadgets. Get technology news, gadgets reviews & ratings. Popular gadgets including laptop, tablet and mobile specifications, features, prices, comparison.Singhania senior and son Gautam are also locked in a legal battle over a duplex apartment in south Mumbai

Mumbai: The Bombay High Court has restrained industrialist Vijaypat Singhania from releasing his autobiography "The Incomplete Man" till 25 March.

In an order earlier this week, Justice Sandeep Shinde also directed a civil court in Thane to take up for final hearing a suit and other applications filed by Raymond Limited seeking to stop the book's release.

"...I deem it appropriate to request the civil judge of Thane to hear the suit and all applications filed therein seeking interim reliefs on 25 March," Justice Shinde said.

The high court was hearing an application filed by Vijaypat Singhania, praying that the suit filed by the company in Thane court be shifted to a civil court in Mumbai, where a similar suit has been filed by his son Gautam Singhania, current Chairman and Managing Director of Raymond.

Raymond's lawyer Kartik Nayar said the high court has restrained Vijaypat Singhania from publishing his book till 25 March.

"The high court has directed the Thane civil court to decide the suit filed by Raymond as expeditiously as possible," he said.

The company, in September 2018, moved the Thane court alleging that the book's contents were defamatory and it should not be allowed to be published.

Vijaypat Singhania then approached the high court seeking transfer of the matter to a Mumbai court, citing inconvenience.

The Singhania senior and his son Gautam are also locked in a legal battle over a duplex apartment in the 36-storey redeveloped J K House building in south Mumbai.

In a petition filed in the high court in 2016, Vijaypat Singhania claimed that his son was refusing to honour an arbitration order which awarded the duplex to him.The Gurugram-based IndiGo has already recruited about 130 expatriate pilots from all over the world to meet its aircraft crew shortage, the report said.

In order to overcome its shortage of flight crew, the country's largest carrier IndiGo may hire about 100 Boeing 737 commander level pilots, including those who are reportedly moving out of the cash-strapped Jet Airways, said a media report.

It may take six months to train the Boeing pilots, who will then be able to fly A320s, the aircraft models that IndiGo operates, said a report in The Economic Times quoting people in the know of the development.

The Gurugram-based no-frills carrier has already recruited about 130 expatriate pilots from all over the world to meet its crew shortage, the report said.

IndiGo's hiring plans for pilots come at a time amid allegations that it made attempts to poach aircraft crew, especially pilots from other domestic airlines operating ATR planes to expand its operations to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, said a report in The Times of India.

IndiGo, however, refuted the allegations.

On Thursday, the harried pilots of Jet Airways, which is on the brink of shuttering operations, approached SpiceJet seeking employment, said a PTI report.

Jet Airways pilots had earlier been wooed by IndiGo with compensation for their pending salaries and other benefits, leading to murmurs of protests from its own pilots.

IndiGo has been facing acute shortage of cockpit crew, leading to the cancellation of hundreds of its flights last month.

Jet Airways pilots along with engineers and senior management have not been paid for more than three months now as the airline is facing its worst existential crisis since its inception a quarter of a century ago.

SpiceJet, which has all its 12 Boeing Max planes grounded following the crash of an Ethiopian Airline plane early this month, is looking to hire pilots for its expansion plans and has also conducted walk-in interviews here, Wednesday.

"As many as 260 Jet Airways pilots, including 150 captains, appeared for the interviews in Mumbai on Thursday," a SpiceJet source said.

Unlike IndiGo, which flies majorly Airbus 320s, SpiceJet has Boeing 737s in the fleet. On the other hand, it can be noted that majority Jet Airways pilots are trained and type-rated for Boeing planes, the source said.

IndiGo is offering jobs to Jet pilots along with compensation for overdue salaries from the full-service airline. It can be noted that pilots at full-service carriers get higher pay and other benefits.

With no assurance on the payment of their pending salaries, Jet pilots had on Tuesday warned that they would stop flying from 1 April if the management failed to provide clarity on the revival plan along with a deadline to clear their salary dues by 31 March.

According to IndiGo, all job offers are in line with its current terms and conditions. But its own pilots have termed the move to hire Jet Airways pilots as an "injustice" and "unacceptable".

"They are taking us lightly. Offer to Jet Airways pilots is sheer injustice to us as they're being offered a two-month bonus along with same-designation salary," argued an IndiGo source.

Moreover, they have also been allowed to choose their operational base, which is unacceptable to the IndiGo pilots, the source added. Questions sent to IndiGo chief operating officer Wolfgang Prock-Schauer and also to its spokesperson did not elicit any response.

 With PTI inputsIndonesian rival Lion Air has been reconsidering its orders since one of its 737 MAX jets crashed in October.

Jakarta: National carrier Garuda Indonesia has sent a letter to Boeing Co asking to cancel an order for 49 737 MAX 8 narrowbody jets, Garuda chief financial officer Fuad Rizal said on Friday.

The airline could switch the order, valued at $6 billion at list prices, to other Boeing models, Rizal told Reuters. He said negotiations with Boeing were ongoing and Airbus SE jets were not under consideration.

Garuda is the first airline to publicly confirm plans to cancel an order for the troubled jets after the second crash of a 737 MAX 8, which killed 157 people in Ethiopia last week.

Indonesian rival Lion Air has been reconsidering its orders since one of its 737 MAX jets crashed in October.

Garuda CEO Ari Askhara told Reuters on Friday that customers had lost trust in the 737 MAX 8.

The airline has only one in its fleet at present.

They have been relooking at their fleet plan anyway so this is an opportunity to make some changes that otherwise may be difficult to do, CAPA Centre for Aviation chief analyst Brendan Sobie said.

Askhara said last week it was possible it would cancel the order for 20 of the jets, with a final decision depending on what the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration does after the Ethiopian crash.

He told Reuters before the crash that the airline had decided to reduce the Boeing 737 MAX order from 49 by swapping some to widebody Boeing models.

Boeing declined to comment on customer discussions.In February last year, the state transport department had asked Ola to stop its bike taxi services with immediate effect after a complaint.

The Karnataka government has suspended the licence of Ola Cabs on Friday for six months across the state for allegedly flouting the norms set for cab aggregators, said media reports.

Karnataka's transport department slapped a state-wide ban on Ola Cabs for six months after it was found that the Indian-origin firm violated rules, reported News18.

They have violated the Karnataka On-Demand Transportation Technology Aggregators Rules, 2016, hence we have decided to cancel the licence, an unidentified official from the department was quoted as saying by News18.

According to an India Today report, the reason for suspending the licence of Ola could be its operation of bike taxis in violation of license conditions set by the state government.

"The transport department officials had seized several bikes, which were operating as bike taxis for Ola, early this year. The officials submitted a report to the transport commissioner after investigation into the matter. According to Section 11 (1) the Karnataka On Demand Transportation Technology Aggregators Rules 2016, the transport department can decide to cancel the license of the cab aggregator as there is a violation of rules," India Today report said citing the government notice.

In February last year, the state transport department had asked the app-based ride-hailing firm to stop its bike taxi services with immediate effect after a complaint.

The body of drivers and owners of Ola, TaxiForSure and Uber sought the transport department to take action against Ola and another online bike taxi app Rapido, said a report in The Economic Times.

The transport department had not only asked Ola to stop the services immediately but also sought explanation from it for launching the service without its permission, the report said.On Monday, diversified L&T made an offer to buy up to 66 percent stake in Mindtree for around Rs 10,800 crore

New Delhi: The board of Mindtree, which on Wednesday deferred a decision on share buyback, will meet again on March 26 even as it faces a Rs 10,800-crore hostile takeover bid from L&T.

The board of the IT company had met on Wednesday too, but no decision was taken on the agenda item at handthe proposed buyback of equity sharesand the firm had informed the stock exchange that the meeting has been adjourned to a future date.

In a fresh filing on BSE Thursday, Mindtree said, "This is to inform that the adjourned board meeting is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, 26 March, 2019".

On Monday, diversified L&T made an offer to buy up to 66 percent stake in Mindtree for around Rs 10,800 crorea move that Mindtree promoters have vowed to oppose.

L&T has entered into a deal to buy Cafe Coffee Day owner V G Siddhartha's 20.32 percent stake in Mindtree and has also placed an order with brokers to pick up another 15 percent of the company shares from the open market. Further, the group would make an open offer to buy additional 31 percent stake in Mindtree.

Siddhartha was a director of Mindtree since 1999 and resigned in March 2018. He and Cafe Coffee Day group firms have 20.32 percent stake in Mindtree and that shareholding is to be acquired by L&T.

On Tuesday, Mindtree CEO and promoter Rostow Ravanan said the company's board would deliberate on the buyback or the open offer within the framework of the laws.

"Obviously there are lawswhat the board can do and cannot do under the circumstances," he had said.

'Hostile' takeover

L&T, best known as Indias largest engineer, announced late on Monday that it was buying a fifth of Mindtree for roughly $475 million and planned further acquisitions to raise its stake to 66 percent, spending $1.6 billion in total.

The hostility is not just in terms of the shareholding, but also because of the fact that this particular group has competing business with us, Mindtree chief executive Rostow Ravanan told reporters at the companys headquarters in the tech hub of Bengaluru.

The L&T group runs IT firm L&T Infotech and engineering services firm L&T Technology Services.

Whether the deal is done by reckless pursuit of scale or driven by ego is the question that needs to be answered, Ravanan added.

L&Ts hostile bid to acquire a controlling stake in Mindtree is the first in Indias over $154 billion software services industry and is rare for Indias corporate sector, where unsolicited suitors are usually deterred by founders with large shareholdings.

Mindtree founders, including Executive Chairman Krishnakumar Natarajan, and CEO Ravanan own a combined 13.3 percent stake in the company.

Nalanda Capital, Mindtrees biggest institutional investor with a 10.6 percent stake, is supporting the founders, Ravanan said.

Earlier in the day L&T executives sought to calm investors, promising they would run Mindtree separately from its tech services unit L&T Infotech Ltd, in which L&T owns a 74.8 percent stake.

Mindtree with our investment... will be run as an independent company with its board, with its management, L&T chief executive S. N. Subrahmanyan said at a news conference in Mumbai. What L&T at best would do is to provide board oversight, management connects, value additions, benefits.

We intend to take it forward in the same manner as Mindtree has been run right now - with the same purpose, with the same beliefs, with the same culture, with the same value system.

Mindtree founders however said they saw no strategic advantage in the transaction and believed that it would be value destructive for all shareholders.

Mindtrees management said its independent directors will set up a committee to evaluate the deal on merit.

Mindtree, with a strong client base, is an attractive asset for L&T, according to analysts covering the sector. It trades at 21.45 times forward earnings, compared with a sector average of 15.58, according to Refinitiv Eikon data.

This acquisition is in line with (L&Ts) stated strategy of focusing on services and asset light businesses ... and will help propel L&Ts technology portfolio to within the top tier of Indian IT companies, Morgan Stanley analysts said in a note.

The combined revenues of Mindtree, L&T Infotech and L&T Technology Services would be about $3 billion, the brokerage said.

The Indian IT services industry is dominated by the likes of Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys.

In addition to the acquisition of a fifth of Mindtree from Indian coffee baron V.G. Siddhartha and companies related to him announced on Monday, L&T has placed an order for an on-market purchase of up to 15 percent of Mindtrees shares at Rs 980 apiece.

It is also looking to buy an additional 31 percent from Mindtrees public shareholders at the same price.

--With inputs from agenciesEarly this week, A Delhi court allowed the ED to send extradition requests to Republic of Albania against two directors of a Gujarat pharma firm Sterling Biotech in a Rs 8,100-crore money laundering case.

New Delhi: Hitesh Patel, an accused in a case related to Rs 8,100 crore alleged bank loan fraud by Sterling Biotech group, has been detained in Albania on the basis of an Interpol notice issued by the Enforcement Directorate, officials said on Friday.

Patel, who allegedly handled the finances of Sterling Biotech, will be extradited to India.

Enforcement Directorate Sources: Hitesh Patel detained in Albania, a wanted fugitive in sterling Biotech Case. Red Corner Notice was issued on 11th March. He was detained by National Crime Bureau-Tirana in Albania on 20th March. pic.twitter.com/KvDBVApszp  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

They said Hitesh Narender Bhai Patel was apprehended by law enforcement officials of Albania in Tirana on 20 March.

"Patel is an accused in the case and is the brother-in-law of the main accused in the case, the Sandesara brothers (Nitin and Chetan Sandesara). He is expected to be extradited to India soon," officials said.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had ensued an Interpol red corner notice against him on 11 March.

They said Patel was instrumental in getting dummy directors for shell companies used by Sandesaras.

Early this week, A Delhi court allowed the ED to send extradition requests to Republic of Albania against two directors of a Gujarat pharma firm in a Rs 8,100-crore money laundering case, PTI reported.

The ED told the court that as per reliable sources, the accused  Nitin Jayantilal Sandesara and Chetankumar Jayantilal Sandesara, both directors of Sterling Biotech  have obtained the citizenship of Albania and non-bailable warrants (NBWs) were issued against them this year.

Special public prosecutor Nitesh Rana submitted that extradition requests needed to be certified by the court.

The court issued fresh NBWs against both the accused and will be attached with the requests.

ED had registered the alleged bank fraud case against the firm SBL under sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).Offering some packaging steel assets would address one of the areas that have been singled out by the European Commission in its review

Frankfurt: Tata Steel will likely offer parts of its European packaging activities in a bid to seek regulatory approval for a planned joint venture with Germanys , three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Offering some packaging steel assets would address one of the areas that have been singled out by the European Commission in its review.

Both firms would own about half of the European packaging steel market, industry sources have said.

No final decisions have been made and remedy proposals could still change or be amended before a new 1 April deadline, the people said.

The Commission aims to wrap up its antitrust investigation by 13 May.

Thyssenkrupp declined to comment.

A spokesman for Tata Steel said it was not appropriate to comment or speculate on the process.

Both companies are committed to working closely with all relevant regulators to ensure the success of this transaction, he said.A car rammed into a crowd in central China Friday, killing six people and injuring seven others, and the driver was fatally shot by police, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Beijing: A car rammed into a crowd in central China Friday, killing six people and injuring seven others, and the driver was fatally shot by police, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The injured were taken to hospital following the early morning incident in Zaoyang City in Hubei Province, CCTV said.

China has suffered a spate of similar incidents in recent months.

Last September, 11 people died and dozens were injured when a car struck a crowd in a public square in the central Hunan province city of Hengdong.

Police detained the driver, a man in his 40s, and described him as a "vengeful repeat offender" who had daggers in his car and intended to "cause serious damage".

In late November, a car ploughed into a group of children crossing a street in front of an elementary school in the northeastern Liaoning province, killing five people and injuring at least 19.

The driver said he "chose his victims at random" and had reportedly been contemplating suicide due to domestic troubles before the tragedy occurred.The Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was banned on Friday for a series of violent acts and being in the forefront of separatist activities in the militancy-hit state since 1988, Union home secretary Rajiv Gauba said.

New Delhi: The Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was banned on Friday for a series of violent acts and being in the forefront of separatist activities in the militancy-hit state since 1988, Union home secretary Rajiv Gauba said.

Listing out its subversive and violent activities, Gauba said the JKLF spearheaded the separatist ideology in Kashmir Valley and the action was taken following the "zero tolerance" policy of the central government against terrorism.

"Murders of Kashmiri Pandits by JKLF in 1989 triggered their exodus from the Valley. Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir Valley and is responsible for their genocide.

"The JKLF has many serious cases registered against it. This organisation is responsible for murder of four Indian Air Force personnel and kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of the then Union home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in the VP Singh government," he told a press conference in New Delhi after a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security took the decision to ban the separatist group.

Gauba said the central government has followed the policy of "zero tolerance" against terrorism and has acted strongly against terrorists and the securities forces have been given free hand to deal with terrorism.

"The central government, in its pursuit of strong action against terrorism, has today (Friday) declared JKLF (Yasin faction) as an unlawful association under the provisions of Section 3(1) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967," he said.

Gauba said the central government is committed to relentlessly pursuing the policy of curbing the activities of secessionist organisations which are threat to the unity and integrity of the country and the NIA and the Enforcement Directorate are taking strong action against these organisations.

"The JKLF is also responsible for illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism. The JKLF is actively involved in raising of funds and its distribution to Hurriyat cadres and stone-pelters to fuel unrest in Kashmir Valley as well as for subversive activities.

"Activities of the JKLF pose a serious threat to the security of the country and are prejudicial to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of India. The organisation has been actively and continuously encouraging feelings of enmity and hatred against the lawfully established government as well as armed rebellion," he said.

Malik is at present lodged in Kot Balwal jail in Jammu, and is likely to face trial in the three-decade-old case of kidnapping of Rubaya Sayeed and gunning down of four IAF personnel in Srinagar.

The JKLF was founded by Pakistani national Amanullah Khan in mid-1970 at Birmingham in the United Kingdom and came into prominence in 1971 when its member hijacked an Indian Airlines plane flying from Srinagar to Jammu.

A total of 37 FIRs have been registered by the Jammu and Kashmir Police against JKLF and two cases, including that of murder of IAF personnel, were registered by the CBI.

The NIA has also registered a case against the JKLF, which is under investigation. It is evident from these that JKLF continues to be actively engaged in supporting and inciting secessionist and terrorist activities.

The organisation was also involved in the kidnapping and killing of Ravindra Mhatre, an Indian diplomat posted the UK, in 1984. A week later, India executed Maqbool Bhat, a JKLF activist, who had been sentenced to death.

This is the second organisation in Jammu and Kashmir which has been banned this month. Earlier, the Centre had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir.

Gauba said the review of security of Jammu and Kashmir-based separatists would continue. The government withdrew security of several separatist leaders in Jammu and Kashmir after a review recently.With agriculture and cattle rearing being the only means of livelihood for locals of Thar desert, persistent drought has forced residents to migrate to other regions within the state while many others continue to cope with cascading effects of drought.

Editor's note: Rajasthans relationship with summer is not a pleasant one. The shortage of water in the region only adds to the misery of the people. Even before the onset of summer, over 5,000 villages in nine districts in Rajasthan  Barmer, Churu, Pali, Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Jalore, Jodhpur, Hanumangarh and Nagaur were declared drought-affected by the state government. The drought in this area affects the economy of the region as employment options dry up and people start migrating to neighbouring states like Gujarat to survive. This five-part series will examine the reasons and problems related to one of the worst drought conditions in the region. This is the first-part of the series.

***

Barmer: Barmer district in Rajasthan is evidence of alarming changes in ecological indicators across the Thar desert. While total rainfall received in the region has registered an increase, its uneven distribution during monsoon season has affected crops putting farmers in distress. In 2017, Sheo-Kawas and Dhorimanna-Gudamalani belt of Barmer district received 245 mm rainfall just in last week of July which caused flood-like conditions in many parts of the district, but the state government same year had to declare 1,900 out of 2,775 villages of the district drought-affected.

With agriculture and cattle rearing being the only means of livelihood for locals of Thar desert, persistent drought has forced residents to migrate to other regions within the state while many others continue to cope with cascading effects of drought, which hampers agricultural production, results in shortage of drinking water and fodder, and affects both, human and animal health. Crop loss and low purchasing power have pushed the region into poverty.

Of the total cultivated 15,73,029 hectare land in 2016, crops on 10,95,230 hectare were destroyed due to the failure of monsoon. While the losses were not as bad in 2017crop loss of 6,88,095 hectare of the total cultivated 15,50,213 hectare in 2018saw a severe drought as crops grown on 12,61,513 hectare were lost of the total cultivated 15,18,190 hectare area.

The rural population of Barmer depend on the government to provide relief during times of drought whose inefficient management of relief efforts pushes them towards the common practice of seasonal migration.

Erratic rainfall

This strange phenomenon where the district has registered an increase in average rainfall over the years but also had to face drought almost every year in the last decade has posed a challenge in this largely rainfed agricultural region. While the average rainfall of the district was 275 mm in the last 10 years, it is 343 mm at present.

Of the total geographical area of 28,17,332 hectare, 18,63,365 hectare in Barmer is cultivable area. Of the total cultivable area, about 80 percent is rainfed region while rest is irrigated. Among the irrigated land, 5.15 percent area is irrigated with canal water while 31.09 percent is irrigated with open wells and remaining 63.73 percent using tube wells.

Pradeep Pagariya, a scientist at Krishi Vigyan Kendra in Barmer, says the region has been receiving more rainfall since past few years, but across a shorter period. Away from the normal monsoon of four months, the region now receives rainfall only for two months, which could even be limited to only a month at times.

Barmer in 2017 received 95 mm rainfall in June and 245 mm in July, but only 18 mm in August and saw no rain in September. Some parts of the district, approximately 208 villages of Dhorimanna, Gudamalani, Sindhary, Balotra and parts of Sheo tehsil received excess rainfall and faced flood situation, which also affected the crops. The district administration takes into account the crop assessment report to declare a district drought-hit.

Overexploitation of groundwater

Western Rajasthan, which encompasses Jalor, Barmer, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Bikaner districts, comes under an arid zone that has a high temperature, low humidity, low rainfall, erratic and poor textured soils. Agriculture system in this region is mostly rain-fed, mono-crop and of subsistence type because of climatic constraints. Water scarcity is a serious problem in the region with good rainfall expected only in an interval of three to four years. Rainfall data of the last 100 years shows the region has dealt with famines in 61 seasons, of which 24 were severe famines, while the rest were medium. A recent report of Central Arid Zone Research Institute (CAZRI) claims the Thar desert has been witnessing major climatic changes over past decades. According to the report, Thar witnessed about 17 thunderstorms annually in 1966, which has now reduced up to 2.5 per year. The trend of shifting sand dunes has also affected weather patterns.

These conditions have led the farmers of Barmer to look towards other sources of irrigation for their crops. With easy access to pumping instruments, groundwater is being drafted at an alarming rate. Approximately 2,000 tube wells have been dug in this region and high dependency on groundwater has resulted in its over-exploitation, says Pagariya.

Barmer was declared over exploited region in the Ground Water Assessment Report 2013 prepared by Central Ground Water Department, which revealed the overdraft at 123.85 percent per annum. Six out of total eight blocks were categorised as over exploited while one was declared critical. Baitu block in the district, with 226 percent overdraft, was notified as Dark Zone.

Another alarm in the report was that while the districts groundwater recharge rate was 278.01 million cubic metre, the consumption rate was 312.14 million cubic metre. The groundwater level in the district has been declining at a rate of 5-6m each decade, according to the report.

Governments fault: Foreign flora

AK Changani, Head, Department of Environment at MGS University, Bikaner says, Extraction of groundwater has increased. Population density is increasing. Local flora and fauna are shrinking because of the uncontrolled growth of weeds and shrubs. Sand dunes are now covered with layers of Prosopis Julifolra (Vilayati Babool). This affects the natural phenomenon of sandstorm and rainfall distribution.

In this region, groundwater is available at three to four hundred feet deep. Due to which earlier people could not able to get the water for agricultural purpose. But with advanced technology, people are now able to access deep groundwater. As a consequence of it, there is a sharp increase in tube wells.

Pagariya says that changes in groundwater table and an increase in average rainfall and irrigated area have together increased the humidity in the region. He claims that the humidity in the region was around 10 percent two decades ago but has jumped to 35 percent at present.

The government initiatives, like the Desert Development Programme (DPP) launched around two decades ago to control desertification and adverse effects of drought, have only added to climate woes, according to experts. Sand dunes accounted for 54 percent area of the state in 1990, which has now come down to 48 percent. Pagariya blames this ecological imbalance on plantation of foreign flora species, such as the Israeli Tortilis by the forest department in order to stabilise the sand dunes while ignoring traditional native species such as Khejri (Prosopis Cineraria), Jaal (Salvadora Persica), Kummat (Acacia Senegal), Gunda (Cardio Mixa) and Rohida (Ticumula Undulata). While arguing that the varieties planted by forest department were not conducive to the ecology of the region, Pagariya vies for dense plantation and other sand dune stabilisation methods that havent been explored.

Environmentalist Bhuvnesh Jain says traditional plants are familiar with the desert ecology being natural species of the region. Tampering with nature results in punishment, says Jain, adding that traditional plant species not only balance the climate cycle in the desert region but also support the rural economy by providing a source of additional income to rural Indians since decades.

The author is Barmer-based freelance writer and a member of 101Reporters.com.Abdul Kadir Najmudin Sathak, a jeweller, has been arrested under the Prevention of Money Laundering (PMLA) Act for his role in 'actively assisting' Zakir Naik and aiding him in money laundering

New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday arrested a "trusted" aide of controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik from Mumbai in connection with a money laundering case against him and others, officials said.

Abdul Kadir Najmudin Sathak, a jeweller, has been arrested under the Prevention of Money Laundering (PMLA) Act for his role in "actively assisting Naik and aiding him in money laundering by transferring funds of dubious origin from the UAE to facilitate production and broadcasting incriminating videos for spreading communal hatred and radicalisation of a particular community", the agency said.

The agency will also soon file a fresh chargesheet in this case based on fresh evidence, they said.

The officials alleged that Sathak had directly sent about Rs 50 crore funds to Naik, which the preacher illegally routed and laundered.

Sathak was also the director of M/s Global Broadcasting Corporation FZE LLC that owned Naik's Peace TV channel, they said. He will be produced before a special PMLA court in Mumbai. It said the company Global Broadcasting was "controlled" by Naik, who is stated to be in Malaysia at present, through Sathak, who was his "trusted aide".

"An amount of Rs 79 crore was received from GBC to Ms Harmony Media Pvt Ltd. But for these monies, it would not have been possible to produce these controversial speeches of Naik and reach wider audiences through Peace TV," the ED alleged.

It claimed that the source of funds remitted by GBC to Harmony Media is "suspicious" as there were no advertisements run on this channel and Sathak had not submitted any details in this context.

Naik has been under investigation since 2016, when the Centre banned his Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) for five years.

Indian security agencies have been monitoring him ever since allegations surfaced that he had inspired one of the militants involved in the Dhaka restaurant attack on 1 July, 2016, which left 22 people dead.

Naik, wanted in India for terror-related activities and hate speech, reportedly left the country in 2016 and subsequently moved to largely Muslim populated Malaysia, where he was granted permanent residency.

The ED had registered a criminal case against Naik and others in December, 2016 after taking cognisance of a National Investigation Agency (NIA) complaint filed under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

The agency, which functions under the Union Finance Ministry, is looking into the charges of laundering of illegal funds in the case and the subsequent proceeds of crime thus generated.ED's move comes a day after Syed Ali Shah Geelani had slammed the arrest and summoning of pro-freedom leaders, activists and their relatives in Jammu and Kashmir, saying the government of India has planned a psychological crackdown using NIA and ED to make them surrender and stop voicing their sentiments

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday imposed a penalty of Rs 14.40 lakh on Hurriyat Conference leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) for illegal possession of foreign exchange worth $10,000, reported ANI. The amount has allegedly been confiscated.

ED Sources: Enforcement Directorate imposed penalty of Rs 14.40 lakh on Separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani for illegally possessing foreign exchange of 10,000 US Dollars. Amount confiscated. (file pic) pic.twitter.com/b4AGcUr5G0

ED's move comes a day after Geelani had slammed the arrest and summoning of pro-freedom leaders, activists and their relatives in Jammu and Kashmir, saying the Government of India has planned a psychological crackdown using NIA and ED to make them surrender and stop voicing their sentiments.

In 2002, the ED had confiscated over Rs 7 lakh that was seized from his premises during an Income Tax raid at his residence in Srinagars Hyderpora area.

In 2018 too, the ED had summoned the 87-year-old separatist leader for adjudication proceedings related to a foreign exchange violation case.

The latest development comes two days after a Delhi court allowed ED to quiz Geelani's son-in-law, Altaf Shah, and others in connection with a terror-funding case involving Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) chief and 26/11 Mumbai attacks mastermind Hafiz Saeed.France has approached the European Union (EU) to designate Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist and the 28-member grouping is expected to take a decision on the issue based on the principle of consensus, the External Affairs Ministry said on Friday.

New Delhi: France has approached the European Union (EU) to designate Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist and the 28-member grouping is expected to take a decision on the issue based on the principle of consensus, the External Affairs Ministry said on Friday.

"France has taken up the matter with the EU. We understand that the EU will take its decision once their process of designating a terrorist is complete," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

"It has to be a unanimous decision," he said. The EU functions under the principle of consensus. The move by France, a member of the EU, came days after China blocked a bid at the United Nations to ban Azhar.

The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council (UNSC) was moved by France, the UK and the US, in the wake of the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. JeM had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack.

Fourteen out of the 15 members of the UNSC supported the proposal, but China was the only country which did not go with the move.

Diplomatic sources said Germany is also in touch with several member-nations of the EU to list Azhar as a terrorist by the grouping.

"Once the process by the EU is complete, they will make an announcement," said Kumar.

Azhar's listing by the bloc will result in his travel ban as well as freezing of his assets in all 28 countries of the EU.

On 15 March, France imposed financial sanctions on Azhar and said it will work with its European partners to put the JeM chief's name on the EU list of persons and entities involved in terrorist acts.

The decision by France came two days after China put a hold on a fresh move to designate Azhar a global terrorist by the Sanctions Committee of the UNSC.Most media reports were rife with unverified facts that not only jumped the gun on the military operation, but also ended up slandering the Rohingya Muslim community.

Last week, as India Today reported a mega operation (by the Indian army) to eliminate threats posed by insurgents along the Indo-Myanmar border, a section of the Indian media went on a misinformation tizzy.

According to the report by India Today correspondent Abhishek Bhalla, published on 15 March, the Indian and Myanmar armies carried out a joint operation between 17 February and 2 March to destroy bases of the Arakan Army (AA), a Myanmar-based insurgent group. Citing a senior officer in the security establishment, the report said that most of these bases were set up in areas adjoining the Lawngtala district of Mizoram. It further stated that the AA posed a threat to the mega Kaladan Project.

BREAKING @IndiaToday: Big infra project vital for North East connecting Kolkata to Mizoram via Sitwe port in Myanmar under threat. How Indian Army thwarted the danger to #KaladanProject in a 2 week operation when focus was on responding to Pak post Pulwama More updates coming up pic.twitter.com/UgEzxCoHIw  Abhishek Bhalla (@AbhishekBhalla7) March 15, 2019

Simultaneously, several other media outlets carried the news about the so-called surgical strike 3.0 in various forms and under different headlines. However, most of these were rife with either outright misinformation or unverified facts that not only jumped the gun on the military operation, but also ended up slandering the stateless Rohingya Muslim community.

Non-existent Rohingya group

For instance, WION carried the news under the headline Joint India, Myanmar operation targets Rohingya insurgents and Naga terror groups, stating that in a two-week-long joint operation by India and Myanmar against the Rohingya insurgent groups Arakan Army and Naga terror group NSCN(K), the countries launched a massive crackdown destroying several camps of the terror organisations.

A similar report was carried by India News. Certain right-wing portals too picked up the news and gave it a Rohingya spin.

Contrary to what the above reports claim, the Arakan Army is not a Rohingya insurgent group. It is an ethnic Rakhine armed group that is fighting for the self-determination of Rakhine state. The outfit, proscribed by the Myanmar government as a terrorist organisation after an attack on border police outposts on 4 January, claims to represent the Rakhine Buddhist majority in Rakhine state. In fact, the Rohingya Muslim minority and the Rakhine Buddhists share a tense relationship.

In the same vein, a report in NewsX first rightly identifies the Arakan Army as a Rakhine insurgent group, but then goes on to discuss the motives of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA). The ARSA is a Rohingya insurgent group and is not associated with the Arakan Army in any way.

While news media routinely tends to peddle misinformation on critical military matters, what is perhaps most startling is similar misreporting by former army generals. In a 17 March commentary on The Times of India, former Commander of Indian Armys Western Command, Lt Gen KJ Singh, wrote:

AA and Rohingya Army camps had sprung all along Indo-Myanmar border, threatening flagship Kaladan, multi-mode project.

The author appears to have confused, like the rest, the Rohingya-led Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) with the ethnic Rakhine-led Arakan Army. So far, there is no credible evidence to suggest that ARSA has set up camps all along the Indo-Myanmar border or threatened the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project (KMMTTP).

While the error is understandable, it is not excusable, since it puts the Rohingya Muslim community in bad light in front of the Indian audience. Rohingya refugees in India have already faced much slandering and stereotyping from right-wing quarters who routinely label them as terrorists, security threats and infiltrators without any supporting evidence. Such mis-reportage only validates the communal, xenophobic diatribes.

What surgical strike?

As far as the operation and the reason behind it are concerned, most of the reportage glossed over nuances and facts, instead relying on attention-grabbing tropes like surgical strike and massive operation. None of the mainstream media reports actually bothered to go beyond their sources or the first exclusive report by India Today to find out what the Arakan Army really seeks and what the recent developments mean in the local context.

First, the recent operations can hardly be classified as mega strikes or surgical strikes as several Indian news media outlets announced. According to Guwahati-based senior journalist-author, Rajeev Bhattacharyya, who is also a close watcher of the India-Myanmar border region:

There was no surgical strike by the Indian army in Myanmar. There was deployment of a few companies by the army along the border in south Mizoram to check the entry of rebels and refugees into the state, which has happened earlier. The deployment was done since the presence of Assam Rifles is thin in Mizoram as compared to the other states in India's North East.

Further, in a recent report in The Diplomat, Bhattacharyya quoted the superintendent of police of Lawngtlai district in Mizoram (where most of the operations allegedly happened), Amit Goel, as saying that no Arakan Army cadres were arrested or convicted in the recent operations. According to Goel, ten of them were held last year.

It is clear that the deployments primary strategic objective was to prevent Arakan Army rebels from fleeing across the border into Mizoram, and in the process, inflict some damage to its remote positions along the border. More importantly, the Indian Army did not cross the border, as also stated by some of the better-informed reports in the Indian media.

Further, according to the India Today report (and reiterated by others), the Indian Army operation was undertaken to neutralise the threat that the Arakan Army posed to the KMMTTP  an India-led connectivity project that aims to connect Kolkata port with Sittwe port in Myanmars Rakhine state via Indias North East.

While the Arakan Army, by its very presence in and around Chin states Paletwa Township (which has a KMMTTP-linked inland river terminal), might pose a security threat to the Indian projects infrastructure in the long term, there is little indication of the outfit posing any immediate and imminent threat to Indian interests in Myanmar.

It is difficult to say at the moment if the Arakan Army would target the Kaladan project. Arakan Army has been demanding greater autonomy like the other outfits in Myanmar and it opposes the exploitation of the region's resources by the government. Therefore, it is quite natural that this group would expect benefits from the Kaladan project to trickle down to the local populace, Bhattacharyya told this author.

Clearly, the threat from Arakan Army to KMMTTP is a long-term potentiality, and not impending. What then was the actual reason behind the Indian army operations?

Returning a favour

According to senior journalists reporting from the region, India was simply returning a favour to Myanmar. Bhattacharyya in his recent report quoted an official as saying:

The Myanmar army has initiated action against the Indian insurgent groups from Assam and Manipur, two other states of Indias North East, operating from Taga. As a quid pro quo, the Indian army has committed that all efforts would be made to check the entry of Arakan Army rebels into Mizoram.

Further, one senior Indian army officer was quoted in a Northeast Now report by senior journalist, Subir Bhaumik, as saying that the operation was "reciprocal" to Myanmars earlier takeover of Naga camps in its territory.

This makes more sense than the KMMTTP theory. Earlier this year, the Myanmar army peacefully took over the main camps of the Myanmar-based Naga insurgent outfit, National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang (NSCN-K), close to the India-Myanmar border in Sagaing Divisions Taga.

The Indian government had been long requesting its Myanmar counterpart to act against the NSCN-K, which was behind an attack on an Indian army convoy in 2015 in Manipur. So, when the Myanmar army successfully took over the outfits camps, New Delhis diplomatic efforts were vindicated. Whats more, the takeover was preceded by a split in the NSCN-K, allegedly engineered by the Myanmar government, which saw the Indian Nagas in the outfit return to India and join the New Delhi-led peace process.

Further, the Arakan Armys primary strategic target is the Myanmar military, and not the Indian Army. So, it is understandable why the former would want India to deny safe havens or exit points to the rebels. Clearly, the Mizoram operations benefited Myanmar more than India. None of the other Indian media outlets highlighted these crucial bits.

Strangely, even the first India Today report quotes a security officer as saying that India and Myanmar governments have signed a give-and-take deal, but states that the NSCN-K takeover happened after the Indian army operations against Arakan Army in Mizoram. This cannot be true as the latter commenced only on 17 February (according to the same report), and the Naga takeover happened in late January.

Moreover, according to Bhattacharyya, the Indian army operation has offended not only the (Mizoram) state government but a large section of civil society organisations in the border state. Some human rights violations were also reported during the deployment, which involved forcibly displacing the locals. These details found no mention in the Indian mainstream media, which remains fervently obsessed with hyperboles and falsities.

With general elections approaching in India, the sound of another surgical strike to wipe out terror helps boost Prime Minister Narendras Modi image as a strong leader. But, between the overreaching lines and the exaggerated headlines, hide the finer details that tell a much more sober story.Narendra Modi sent a message to his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan, greeting people of the neighbouring country on the eve of its National Day.

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday sent a message to his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan, greeting people of the neighbouring country on the eve of its National Day, official sources said.

The prime minister, in his message, said it was time for the people of the sub-continent to work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive and prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence, they said.

Modi's message to Khan comes in the midst of severe strain in ties between the two nuclear-armed neighbours following the Pulwama attack and the subsequent air strikes by India on a JeM terror camp in Pakistan's Balakot.

Significantly, India on Friday boycotted a reception at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi to mark Pakistan's National Day, objecting to invites extended to several separatist leaders from Jammu and Kashmir for the event.

Imran Khan also tweeted PM Modi's message.

"Received msg from PM Modi: 'I extend my greetings & best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that ppl of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive & prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence'," Khan said.

Earlier, Pakistani envoy Sohail Mahmood, in an address at the reception in New Delhi, said Pakistan and India need to consolidate the process of de-escalation and stabilise the ties against further shocks, hoping that the "long winter" in bilateral relations would come to an early end.

He said both the countries should act with "wisdom" to normalise ties, asserting that "coercive measures" have not worked in the past and will not work in the future.

The envoy said a key takeaway from recent developments was that a lack of engagement creates "dangerous vacuum and serious risks" for relations between the two neighbours, adding Pakistan has "turned a corner" in its fight against the scourge of terrorism.

He said the release of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, return of the two High Commissioners to their respective missions, and bilateral meetings on the Kartarpur Corridor "are steps in a positive direction".

Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after Indian Air Force fighter jets bombed terror group JeM's training camp near Balakot deep inside Pakistan on 26 February.

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 Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama in which 40 soldiers were killed.The report was released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations on 20 March which has was declared as World Happiness Day by the UN General Assembly in 2012.

United Nations: Indians are not as happy in 2019 as they were in 2018 and the country figures at 140th place, seven spots down from last year, on this year's UN World Happiness Report released Wednesday which is topped by Finland for the second year in a row.

The report was released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations on 20 March which has was declared as World Happiness Day by the UN General Assembly in 2012.

The report ranks countries on six key variables that support well-being: income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy, social support and generosity.

According to the report, the overall world happiness has fallen over the past few years, which has mostly been fuelled by a sustained drop in India, which came in 140th place this year compared with 133rd place in 2018.

The UN's seventh annual World Happiness Report, which ranks the world's 156 countries on "how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be," also noted that there has been an increase in negative emotions, including worry, sadness and anger.

Finland has been ranked as the happiest country in the world for the second year in succession. The Nordic nation is followed by Denmark, Norway, Iceland and The Netherlands.

Pakistan is ranked 67th, Bangladesh 125th and China is place at 93rd, according to the report.

People in war-torn South Sudan are the most unhappy with their lives, followed by Central African Republic (155), Afghanistan (154), Tanzania (153) and Rwanda (152).

The happiness study ranks the countries of the world on the basis of questions from the Gallup World Poll. The results are then correlated with other factors, including GDP and social security.

The United States ranks at 19th place for happiness, despite being one of the richest countries in the world.The government on Friday decided to boycott the Pakistan National Day event to be held at its high commission as Kashmiri separatist leaders were also invited, an official said.

New Delhi: The government on Friday decided to boycott the Pakistan National Day event to be held at its high commission as Kashmiri separatist leaders were also invited, an official said.

Indian government officials will stay away from the reception scheduled on the eve of Pakistan National Day, which is celebrated on 23 March, the official said.

"The government of India has decided not to send any official representative to the Pakistan National Day event at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi," the official said.

The decision has been taken because Pakistan has decided to invite separatist leaders from Jammu and Kashmir to the event, the official added.India has been strongly opposed to Pakistan engaging with separatists leaders of Jammu and Kashmir.

New Delhi: India on Friday evening boycotted a reception at the Pakistan High Commission to mark Pakistan's National Day, objecting to invites extended to several separatist leaders from Jammu and Kashmir for the event.

The External Affairs Ministry said no Indian representative will attend similar events in Islamabad as well.

Over the years, India's representation at the annual event has been at the level of a Union minister.

"India has decided not to send any representative to attend the Pakistan National Day celebrations today. This decision was taken after the Pakistan High Commission decided to invite representatives of the Hurriyat Conference to the reception," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar earlier said.

Pakistani officials said no prominent Hurriyat Conference leader attended the reception.

Meanwhile, Delhi Police detained Kashmiri human rights activist Mohammed Ahsan Untoo outside the Pakistan High Commission when he was coming for the reception.

Pakistan Day is celebrated to mark the Lahore Resolution on 23 March each year.

At a media briefing, Kumar also said that India is very clear that any attempt by the Pakistani High Commission or Pakistani leadership to engage with the Hurriyat Conference will not be taken lightly.

India has been strongly opposed to Pakistan engaging with separatists leaders of Jammu and Kashmir.

"Our High Commission in Islamabad will also not be attending the reception there," Kumar said, replying to a question.

Sources said last week India conveyed to the Pakistan High Commission that it will not send any representative to the reception if Hurriyat leaders are invited to it.

They said India is boycotting the events for extending invitation to Hurriyat leaders and not because of any other issue.

Last year, the reception at the Pakistan embassy was attended by Union Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Gajendra Singh Shekhawat. Some low-ranking leaders from a number of separatist outfits from Kashmir also attended the reception.

India's decision to boycott the reception here and events in Islamabad comes in the backdrop of heightened tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours after the Pulwama terror attack and subsequent air strike by India on a training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) in Pakistan's Balakot on 26 February.

The JeM had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack.

Pakistan retaliated the next day by unsuccessfully attempting to target Indian military installations.

India has been mounting diplomatic offensive against Pakistan since the Pulwama attack to corner the country internationally on the issue of terrorism.With the appointment of former SC judge Pinaki Chandra Ghose as countrys first Lokpal, it will be interesting to see what tangible changes it can lead to or will it remain good for optics alone

The Compendium on Parliamentary Enactments prepared by the Rajya Sabha Secretariat has an interesting adjective for the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 that finally resulted in the appointment of Indias first Lokpal.

It reads, The Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, has had a long chequered history and the reason for attributing this chequered adjective is simple. It took more than five decades, which witnessed the coming and going of seven prime ministers to enact a Bill to appoint a constitutionally sanctioned ombudsman. Not only this, it took another five years, following the enactment of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, to appoint India's first Lokpal. And this could become possible only after the customary intervention of the Supreme Court.

It was on 17 January, hearing a contempt petition filed by NGO Common Cause against the government for delaying the appointment of the Lokpal that the Supreme Court asked the search committee on Lokpal to shortlist and recommend by February-end a panel of names for appointing the countrys first Lokpal.

The Chequered History

Political establishments cutting across ideologies lacked the will and intent to appoint a constitutional ombudsman, as it took a civil society movement, started in 2011 to compel the government to enact legislation for establishing the office of the Lokpal.

The Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha after it agreed to the amendments made by the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of the parliament, on 18 December, 2013, and got the assent of the President of India on 1 January, 2014, to become an Act. However, it could achieve its desired destination only after five years. President Ram Nath Kovind appointed on Tuesday, former Supreme Court Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose as countrys first Lokpal and other judicial members of the body, which includes serving Chief Justice of the Chhattisgarh High Court Ajay Kumar Tripathi.

The other judicial members are former Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court, Justice Dilip Bhosale; former Chief Justice of the Jharkhand High Court, Justice PK Mohanty; and former Manipur High Court Chief Justice Abhilasha Kumari.

The selection of the Lokpal and members have been done by a Selection Committee led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan and former Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi.

The five longs decades that marked the struggle for enacting the Lokpal Bill was marked with numerous corruption cases in the highest echelons of powers, with two cases where the prime minister of the country was directly accused of corruption.

While a legal and institutional framework existed to redress citizen grievances in the form of strong laws, commissions, and Lokayuktas in the state, what was lacking was an institution that could make the mightiest accountable.

Five years before the first Lokpal bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha for creating the office of Lokpal in 1968 on 3 April 1963, Member of Parliament LM Singhvi while participating in the discussion in the Lok Sabha, stressed the need for setting up of an ombudsman for tackling corruption and redressal of public grievances. According to Compendium on Parliamentary Enactments, the terms Lokpal and Lokayukta were also coined by Singhvi.

ARC and NCRWC recommendations

Another precursor to the first Lokpal bill was the first Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) of 1966 that too recommended two-tier machinery to redress the grievances of the public  Lokpal and Lokayukta. Apart from the first ARC and the Parliamentary Committees, the second ARC and the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution, 2002 (NCRWC) also made strong recommendations regarding the office of Lokpal.

Lokpal: The Ombudsman

The strength of the Lokpal Act lies in the fact that the act brought the Prime Minister of India under the purview of the Lokpal which means that it will have the power to deal with corruption allegations against the serving and former prime minister or a Union minister along with the top brass of civil services and central government employees in Groups A, B, C and D categories.

To ensure the independence and autonomy of the Lokpal, it has been provisioned that it will have its own inquiry wing and prosecution wing, and will have the power to supervise investigations by the CBI. The Act has provisions for the establishment of special courts for trying offences. Also, the Lokpal will have the power of superintendence and direction over any investigative agency including CBI for cases referred to them by the ombudsman.

Eight years ago, the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement was propelled by a slew of corruption charges against then Congress-led UPA government. The movement made Lokpal a household term. It was touted as the cure of all maladies that was affecting the countrys progress adversely. And now with the appointment of the first Lokpal, it will be interesting to see what tangible changes it can lead to or will it remain good for optics alone.At a media briefing, MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said due process was followed in the 2007 Samjhauta Express blast case and the court has given the verdict based on materials available to it.

New Delhi: India on Friday accused Pakistan of trying to politicise the court verdict in Samjhauta Express terror case to "deflect" attention from its "failure" to bring perpetrators of several terror attacks in India and the region to justice.

External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said there was a complete lack of understanding on the Pakistani side about how India's independent judiciary functions.

On Wednesday, a special court in Panchkula in Haryana acquitted all four accused, including Swami Aseemanand, in the case. Sixty-eight people, mostly Pakistanis, were killed in the terror attack on Samjhauta Express in February, 2007.

On 20 March, Pakistan foreign office summoned the Indian High Commissioner in Islamabad to protest against the verdict.

"We reject Pakistan's attempt to politicise the matter. It is being done to deflect attention from their failure in bringing perpetrators of several terrorist attacks in India and the region to justice," Kumar said at a media briefing.

He said due process was followed in the case and the court has given the verdict based on materials available to it.

"We respect the verdict of the court. We got no cooperation whatsoever from Pakistan including our request to serve summons to witnesses who are in Pakistan," Kumar said.

"We demand that Pakistan should take immediate, credible and irreversible measures against cross-border terrorism without any discrimination," he added.Massive rescue operations continued late into the night on Thursday after an 18-month-old child fell into a 60-foot deep borewell in Haryana's Balsamand village, officials said. A

Hisar: Massive rescue operations continued late into the night on Thursday after an 18-month-old child fell into a 60-foot deep borewell in Haryana's Balsamand village, officials said.

A team of Army experts and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) officials are being assisted by civil and police authorities as the rescue efforts continued for 24 hours after the infant fell into the borewell on Wednesday evening.

The authorities have also started digging a parallel well, about 20 feet away from the borewell, and also plan to dig a tunnel to bring out the child safely, they said. The child's movements are being monitored by a Night Vision Camera which had been dropped inside the borewell.

Hisar: Rescue operation underway to rescue 18 month-old-boy who fell into a 60-feet deep borewell in Balsamand village, yesterday. #Haryana pic.twitter.com/iGaQ7WU7VZ  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

During the day, the rescuers tried to pull out the child with the help of a net, but had to shelve the plan after facing some difficulties, officials said. "The rescue operations are still on. We are hoping to bring out the child safely. NDRF personnel and Army experts are being assisted by local authorities. The child's movements are being monitored and he is safe," Hisar deputy superintendent of police, Joginder Singh said.

According to a local, the child, identified as Nadim, was playing with some friends when he suddenly fell into the borewell. His family members and villagers later informed the police. The child's father is a labourer.

Earthmovers and other equipment have been pressed into service, even as oxygen tubes were dropped to help the child breathe. Biscuits and juices are being supplied to the child. A medical team has also been deployed at the incident site, they said.

Deputy Commissioner Ashok Kumar Meena said legal action will be taken against the person who dug the borewell without taking permission from the department concerned. The accident has once again brought to the fore the dangers posed by uncovered borewells, which have turned into death traps for children.

In 2006, a massive operation was launched to rescue 5-year-old Prince, who had fallen into a borewell in a village in Kurukshetra. He was pulled out safely nearly 48 hours later.Septuagenarian bureaucrats like Nripendra Misra and Bimal Jalan have been reinventing themselves to stay relevant even now

What is common between NK Singh, Vijay Kelkar, Nripendra Misra, Bimal Jalan and NN Vohra? They are all septuagenarians, born before the Indian Republic. They are all career bureaucrats who have made a defining contribution to public policy development in India. They are neither tired nor retired, but soldier on, redefining endurance.

NK Singh, 78, is the chairman of the 15th Finance Commission while Vijay Kelkar, who is two years younger, holds the same post at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPF).

Nripendra Mishra, 73 is the principal secretary, PMO and Bimal Jalan, 77, has just been given the mandate to chair the politically sensitive RBI Reserves Committee. NN Vohra, 82, is a retired 1959-batch IAS officer, who until recently served as the governor of Jammu and Kashmir. Boasting of an illustrious service record, these bureaucrats represent a tribe that has made a stellar contribution even post retirement. The list is merely illustrative and not exhaustive.

Vohra, who earlier served as defence and home secretary, stood out as an administrator navigating the Centres Kashmir policy during UPA and NDA governments for almost a decade. He also served as the principal secretary to Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral.

Jalan, a former RBI governor, previously held several positions, including those of finance secretary and chairman of the PM Economic Advisory Council. He was also a nominated Member of Parliament from 2003 to 2009. He was chairman of the Expenditure Management Commission during 2014-16.

Kelkar, who started off as an economic academician, was also the chairman of the Finance Commission until January 2010. He was earlier adviser to the finance ministry and is known for his role in economic reforms in India. Prior to that, he served as the finance secretary.

Singh, like Kelkar and Jalan, has been a key face of economic reforms in the country. He has been among the countrys top bureaucrats and handled important portfolios such as Indias expenditure and revenue secretary, a member of the Planning Commission as well as secretary to the prime minister. Post retirement, he crossed the line to embrace politics and till recently was a member of the Rajya Sabha representing Bihar.

Similarly, Misra, who is posted as principal secretary, to the prime minister since 2014, retired as telecom secretary in 2005 to take up the role of TRAI chairman in 2006 for a period of three years.

In their longevity, these bureaucrats have obviously aged well. Not only have they kept themselves in circulation, but also held on to the IAS brand. What makes them tick? Do they hold any mantras for the young babu talent? How does one sustain and reinvent so easily to stay ever relevant? For Singh, who joined service in 1964, and served in various key economic ministries, longevity is all about reinventing oneself continually.

I have been lucky to be able to exercise my domain knowledge being in service and politics. If I look back at my career, my academic interest in economics and the roles I was given over the decades have had a great fitment.

From being part of the 1997-98 dream Budget to being the economic adviser to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, how did Singh navigate the political transition? Successful management skills need an ability to implement successfully and have domain knowledge for policy formulation.

The veterans are generally a shy lot. But they are open to traversing the rich journey and hold some important lessons for the youngsters. A veteran who continues to guide India on building critical institutional framework has some words of wisdom to offer.

Endurance will only happen if there is no transgression. Bureaucracy has to be open to the process of consultation but things can go wrong if the policymaker gets into the habit of executing through micro-management.

But how does one draw the red line between a bureaucrat and the politician administering him?

For Anil Swarup, former education secretary and author of the recently released Not Just a Civil Servant, it is all about mapping the role play. Service is not meant for revolutionaries. If you wish to pursue a political agenda, it is best that you get out. Being in service, you have to be objective. Politics should not drive your agenda. A veteran though has no confusion about the role play.

There are clearly laid-out roles. While the political establishment has to lay out the policy, it is for the bureaucracy to execute using its administrative acumen. We must at all times respect the dividing line. Bringing in an outside perspective, Jagdish Sheth, professor of marketing at the Goizueta Business School of Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, has a solution on offer to optimise the outcome.

A good appraisal system will keep the meritorious and let go the mediocre. Finally, deploy them to mission-driven assignments but keep them engaged within the bureaucracy.

Amid talk of talent attrition (2010 IAS topper Shah Faesal quit earlier this year), Singh opines that people are becoming less risk averse.

An interdependent India which has become part of global economy gives many more choice patterns than those that existed in the old civil service establishment. I actually welcome induction of lateral talent in the civil service, because those who oppose it are not willing to take competitive pressure.

Is there a need to draw a distinction between brand IAS and individuals driving the service? Clearly, some of the veterans who continue to hold office have made a brand name for themselves.

Sheth does not see any challenge here.

In all professional services, it is very common to also develop a personal brand. This is true of economists, professors and scientists. Also, it is true among preachers and gurus. Therefore, the institution has to develop its own brand and then position and promote the brand. Swarup though has a word of caution.

Perception should not overwhelm. At times there is variance between the public and private view of any bureaucrat. There are a large number of civil servants who are doing a yeoman service without being visible. Visibility has become important. That is sad.

Going forward, what does the brand salience look like for IAS? Sheth is ever optimistic. There are three unique features of the IAS brand. First, it is merit based and requires extraordinary preparation to sit for the exam and score good marks.

Therefore, IAS officers are good rough diamonds and the bureaucracy polishes them to serve the government and its stakeholders.

Swarup concurs.

Brand IAS was always under challenge. It continues to be the first choice among youth when it comes to picking up a public service job. If I were to be born again, I would like to be in IAS again. Singh has a piece of advice for young bureaucrats to endure and stay relevant. Dont give up on your domain knowledge. Not just update it but actually upgrade it to stay contemporary. Deepen and diversify.LeT militants killed a 12-year-old boy after taking him hostage when security forces chanced upon them during a search and cordon operation Hajin area of Kashmir

On Thursday evening, Shareefa Bano stood near an army van, her hands shaking with fear and her dry lips murmuring divine verses, as an army soldier handed a microphone. Another soldier comforted her by placing his hand on her back.

Hours ago, a Pakistani militant from Lashkar-e-Taiba, Ali, active in Hajin belt since 2017, appeared at the Mir's house in Mir Mohallah and took the family hostage, demanding they bring back one of their daughters who was shifted to Sopore after Ali had started threatening her to get married to him.

On Thursday, the police and army had launched three cordon and search operations (CASO) in Hajin belt and during one such operation, they arrived at the Mir's house.

As forces cordoned off the house, two Pakistani militants, Ali and Hubaib, both affiliated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant outfit, took 12-year-old Atif Mir, a Class 6 student, and his uncle Abdul Hamid Mir, hostage.

For Allahs sake, for the sake of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), please let them go. I appeal to you, I used to give you food. Please, for Allahs sake, let them go. Let my husband and child go, Shareefa cried in Kashmiri on the microphone.

There was no response from the other side.

Much before the gunfight started on Thursday evening, the family had met a militant group, asking for their help to persuade their colleague against marrying their daughter. "They told us to solve the dispute among ourselves," a relative said.

The gunfight broke after the forces failed to get the two members of the family out. When the initial exchange of fire started, one militant was injured, a police officer said. Abdul, the uncle, managed to jump out of the window and was rescued by the police. But the militants kept the 12-year-old boy hostage, until he died, along with them.

Around a dozen of Shareefa's family had managed to give a slip to militants but two were stuck inside for hours. The day-long encounter in Hajin in northern Kashmir ended on Friday morning. Hajin was once a bastion of pro-government militia Ikhwan, but in recent years it has become a hub of Pakistani militants.

This was the first time in a decade that a child was held hostage by militants. At the funeral, the villagers seemed visibly angry and openly criticised Pakistani militants for using the boy as a human shield and refusing to let him go.

"This was a chance encounter. We rescued six civilians with the help of the mohalla committee. When the team went to the third floor, the militants opened fire on them," said Rahul Malik, SP, Bandipora, under whose jurisdiction Hajin lies.

The child was killed on Thursday evening only. The terrorists killed him inside, Malik added.

Mohammad Shafi Mir, the father of the child, said the family members were taken to the encounter site by the army to convince the militants to let the child go but that did not help. There was no response from the militants side, he said.

"The boy was being held hostage by Ali. He did not allow the boy to go and before we stormed the building, he killed the boy," Malik said, adding, "We showed a lot of patience for nine hours but they did not relent and killed the boy."

A video featuring the child's uncle went viral in Kashmir after the gunfight ended. "This is not jihad (crusade) but jahalat (ignorance)," the uncle was heard shouting towards the house where the militants were trapped. The videos of both the mother and uncle surfaced on social media, showing them pleading with the militants to release Atif Mir and his uncle.Days after his arrest in London, India on Friday said it was working towards expeditious extradition of Nirav Modi, the main accused in the $2 billion PNB scam case

New Delhi: Days after his arrest in London, India on Friday said it was working towards expeditious extradition of Nirav Modi, the main accused in the $2 billion PNB scam case.

Spokesperson in the External Affairs Ministry Raveesh Kumar also said that there was no delay in his arrest and that action was taken on completion of certain processes.

"There was no delay which can be attributed to our side. There were certain processes which had to be completed, and that is how he was arrested," he said at a media briefing.

"Government of India is committed to expeditious extradition of Nirav Modi," he added.

Nirav Modi was arrested by British authorities in London on 19 March.

Kumar said the UK's Crown Prosecution Service informed India on 18 March that a senior district judge in the West Minister Magistrate's court issued a warrant against Nirav Modi.

The arrest warrant against the businessman was issued in response to a request by the Enforcement Directorate for his extradition in a money laundering case.

On Wednesday, a court in the UK remanded him in custody till 29 March.

Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi are the main accused in the PNB scam and they both left India before the details of the fraud came to light in January 2018.

Nirav Modi was one of India's richest men, worth an estimated $1.75 billion, according to Forbes. He launched his own eponymous brand in 2010 and had stores across India, as well as in New York, London and Hong Kong.In the wake of heightened tensions with both China and Pakistan, the detection of strong radio and mobile signals from both the hostile neighbours in this Dharamsala suburb of Kangra district (Himachal Pradesh) poses serious questions.

Nestled in the Dhauladhars, the tiny town of Mcleodganj first shot to fame six decades ago when the Tibetan spiritual leader, His Holiness Dalai Lama, first set his foot here. As the 14th Dalai Lama chose to settle down in Mcleodganj with several thousands of his followers and also set up the Tibetan government in exile here, this hitherto nondescript hill town assumed strategic importance. And came forever under the Chinese radar.

Strong mobile and radio signals detected in high altitude areas adjoining Mcleodganj

In the wake of heightened tensions with both China and Pakistan, the detection of strong radio and mobile signals from both the hostile neighbours in this Dharamsala suburb of Kangra district (Himachal Pradesh) poses serious questions.

For instance, the village of Dharamkot, which is barely 9 kilometres from Mcleodganj, gets mobile signals from Zong and Ufone. Zong is a fully-owned state subsidiary of the world's largest telecom company China Mobile Communications Corporation. Ufone, on the other hand, is the third largest telecom operator in Pakistan.

Besides the two said operators, networks from Mobilink and Telenor PK, both Pakistan-based telecom companies, can also be detected in adjoining areas of Galu and Triund from time to time. The highly sensitive and heavily guarded Dalai Lama temple and his residence can be seen from these vantage points adjoining the town.

Ironical as it may sound, connectivity of any of the major Indian mobile networks in the said areas continues to be extremely poor.

Similarly, FM receivers in Dharamsala can catch radio signals from Pakistan-based radio networks at FM 93.0 and FM 93.4 frequencies. FM 93.0 is based in Pakistan capital Islamabad and is run by the Pakistan Broadcast Corporation, whereas FM 93.4, according to telecom experts, is most likely a low frequency private station operating on a 5 kilowatt transmitter.

The town of Dharamsala is of strategic importance to both our belligerent neighbours because it houses several important establishments of the Indian armed forces, and Yol cantonment in the Kangra valley, 10 kilometres southeast of Dharamsala.

Signals from both these sources, telecom and radio, pose a grave threat to national security keeping in view the fact that anti-India forces who sneak into the Indian territory across any of these porous borders can continue to be in touch with their handlers based in Pakistan or China using Pakistani SIM card, without being detected by Indian defence experts.

As per established international norms, mobile towers should be erected such that the signals are not available beyond 500 metres on either side of the border.

It is obvious that both our hostile neighbours, who have scant regard for international opinion or controversies, are openly flouting these norms in this area.

Not an isolated incident

Earlier in February this year, a phishing campaign was targeted specifically at pro Tibetans in the area by distributing ExileRAT Trojan malware, using the mailing list of Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), the Tibetan government-in-exile. This was done by sharing email(s) which seemed to have been sent by the CTA. The subject matter of these emails were "Tibet-was-never-a-part-of-China."

The email contained a message from HH Dalai Lama referencing 60 years of Chinese occupation over Tibet. Attached to it was a PowerPoint presentation which was actually a PDF copy of the book "Tibet was never a part of China." A part of the ExileRAT script was hidden in this book which would then go on to infect the computers where this was opened.

Once the systems of the Tibet sympathisers were infected, attackers could steal data from them nefariously, revealed security researchers at Cisco Talos.

"If you look at the attacking campaign's pattern and the nature of the malware, it is clear that this is part of a continuing trend of nation-state actors working to spy on the activities of Central Tibetan Administration and the Tibetan community at large," points out Tenzin Chokden, Malware Research Analyst at CTA, Dharamsala.

"There is a real sense of being monitored at every step and such (phishing) campaigns cause disruptions in the community, he asserted.

Recognising that hackers will continue to make efforts to snoop on the efforts of the sympathisers of the Tibetan cause, Tibetan Computer Resource Center, which functions under the aegis of Dharamsala based Department of Information and International Relations continues to train those on its roll on digital security from time to time, to minimize the possibility of such attacks in future.

Earlier Chinese efforts at espionage in the area have come in the form of sending spies, several of them in the garb of Tibetan monks and nuns, so as to avoid arousing suspicion. Intelligence reports had also gone on to suggest that Chinese officials were trying to lure in disgruntled Tibetans, especially the youth residing in India by offering them baits like easy and well paying jobs or easy cash in return for sensitive information from the area. Since most Tibetan refugees in India do not have good job opportunities and do not foresee a very bright future for themselves, it would not be wrong to assume that several of them can be thus lured into espionage.

Some of the spies earlier arrested from the area had all the required documents like Aadhar cards and voter cards in their possession whereas another impostor nabbed in 2008 was found to have served with the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) and in touch with high ranking military officials in Lhasa, as verified from his call details.

Official statement

The sighting of such signals in areas hugely popular with tourists and trekkers has often triggered off panic reactions among the public but strangely enough, none of the officials were aware of the issue.

While the IB officials were not available when contacted, Colonel Devender Anand, Public Relations Officer (PRO) Defence and Media coordinator, said he was unaware of any such mobile or radio signals in the area. Santosh Patial, Superintendent Police, Kangra, too claimed to be unaware of the same but promised to act upon the same after talking to experts.

"We were not aware of such signals in these highly sensitive areas earlier. Now that the issue has been brought to our notice, we will surely get in touch with defence experts," he assured. "We might also need to talk to telecom experts to see what can be done to check these signals which can be, to say the least, be taken advantage of by spies, smugglers, infiltrators and the like."

Among the various options available with the monitoring agencies is to ask their counterparts based in China and Pakistan to relocate their mobile towers farther away from the respective borders, or take up the issue with Ministry of Home Affairs and install powerful jammers along our side to block out such undesirable cross border signals.

Santosh Patial, the SP, agrees and confirmed with us that he has forwarded the suggestion of setting up jammers with the higher authorities and is hopeful of early action.A Delhi court Friday sent alleged Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Sajjad Khan, a close aide of Pulwama attack mastermind Muddasir Khan, to NIA custody till 29 March.

New Delhi: A Delhi court Friday sent alleged Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Sajjad Khan, a close aide of Pulwama attack mastermind Muddasir Khan, to NIA custody till 29 March.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had sought his custody for 10 days from Additional Sessions Judge Rakesh Syal.

Advocate MS Khan, appearing for Sajjad Khan, opposed the agency's demand.

Sajjad Khan (27), a resident of Pulwama was arrested near the Lajpat Rai market late Thursday night. Mudassir had tasked him with establishing a sleeper cell in Delhi, police said.

Forty Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14 after a JeM suicide bomber rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into their bus.The custodial death of Rizwan Pandit sparked protests across Kashmir as people hit the streets seeking that those involved should be brought to justice.

A government-appointed inquiry officer (IO) probing the custodial death of 29-year old chemistry teacher, Rizwan Asad Pandit, has sought a report from the police after the teacher's family stated that he was brutally tortured following his arrest on Sunday night, which led to his death.

The officer, Qazi Masood, said that he has sought the report from Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Pulwama over the incident, and that he will also record the statements of Rizwan's family members.

The death sparked strong protests across Kashmir as people hit the streets seeking that those involved should be brought to justice.

Rizwans brother Mubashir said that the body which was handed over to the family for the last rites bore severe torture marks.

Mubashir said that his head was stitched and even the clothes that he wore when he was detained from his home at Awantipora  a tracksuit and a jacket  were removed. He said Rizwan's body was wrapped in a blanket. The left eye had the kind of patches which appear after a blood clot. The left side of the face was swollen and the legs bore burn marks, he said, while seeking a fair probe in the matter.

"It is not possible that the torture marks were sustained when my brother was trying to flee from police custody, as certain reports suggest," he said.

Earlier, Rizwans father Asadullah Pandit said his son was detained by a local police team from the Awantipora police station on Sunday night. He said that after the family members visited the police station, they were informed that he has been taken away by the police personnel from the special operations group (SOG), based in Srinagar.

Even as the police have said that he was detained in connection with a terror case investigation, the family said that he was also arrested last year in a "false" case of recovery of arms.

Mubashir said that the police told them that they recovered arms which were hidden among the bushes in the premises of Islamic University of Science and Technology (IUST) when he was in police custody earlier between 16 to 26 August. Rizwan was also a visiting faculty member in a polytechnic college of IUST.

Rizwan was subsequently booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA) through an executive order, which was set aside by the court, paving way for his release from a jail in Jammu this year in January.

Mubashir said that only a revenue official visited the family to record their statements. He said, "We hope that the probe would not be a mere eyewash, as has happened with magisterial inquiries earlier in Kashmir."

Assadullah Pandit said that the raids at their house and those of his two brothers at Awantipora on Sunday were carried out by a large number of police personnel, who bundled them into a room and took away their laptops and mobile phones.

Superintendent of Police, Awantipora, Tahir Saleem, said that the police have issued a statement in the matter, and stated that a probe is going on.

The family has said that it is ready to co-operate with the magisterial probe and could even be prepared for the exhumation of the body to ensure that those responsible for the killing are punished.

I dont think that those who carried out this act are humans, and we want justice for this. We will fight the police, not through guns or bullets, but through the legal route," Mubashir said.Subhas Chandra Bose's grand-nephew, Chandra Kumar Bose, was named the BJP candidate to fight the South Kolkata seat, a seat of immense pride and prestige in West Bengal. By doing so, the saffron party has further underlined its tactical plan to lay claim and appropriate the legacies of leaders who exhibited an aggressive brand of nationalism. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Lal Bahadur Shastri and now Subhas Chandra Bose form part of the plan

In an apt demonstration of its political posturing and strategy, on 21 October, 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi wore the Indian National Army (INA) cap at the Red Fort in Delhi when he hoisted the Tricolour to mark the 75th anniversary of Subhas Chandra Boses proclamation of the Azad Hind provisional government. The cap was a signal of intent.

Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi hoists the national flag at the Red Fort to mark the 75th anniversary of the proclamation of Azad Hind Sarkar, today. pic.twitter.com/m17Jr46sz9  ANI (@ANI) October 21, 2018

On Thursday, Bose's grand-nephew, Chandra Kumar Bose, was named the BJP candidate to fight the South Kolkata seat, a seat of immense pride and prestige in West Bengal.

By doing so, the saffron party has further underlined its tactical plan to lay claim and appropriate the legacies of leaders who exhibited an aggressive brand of nationalism. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Lal Bahadur Shastri and now Subhas Chandra Bose form part of the plan. Sri Aurobindo may well be the next

The saffron party has been helped in its quest by recent Indian historical thought that have sought to redefine the importance and significance of the role of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) ratings mutiny (1946), Bhagat Singh or of Subhash Chandra Bose  and the fact that those roles had been undermined.

The effort is in keeping with the BJPs assertion that many past freedom fighters did not get what they deserved while the Gandhi-Nehru school of political thought dominated and overwhelmed the narrative on the freedom struggle and that there were several other strands that made up for the rising nationalism during the freedom struggle years.

In his 21 October, 2018 Red Fort address during the INA event, Modi made it clear: "In an effort to highlight the role of one family, efforts were made to deliberately ignore and forget contributions made by others in the independence struggle and later in creating a new IndiaBut our government is changing all that."

But there is a problem with BJP's appropriation of Bose as his legacy is a little complicated. First, Bose's family is politically divided. For a Chandra Kumar Bose, there will be another family member holding an equally-strong alternative political worldview.

Second, Bose remained an avowed socialist throughout. While his party, the Forward Block, opposed the Communists before Independence, after Independence though it became a part of the Left movement in West Bengal. The Indian communists looked at askance at Forward Block dalliance with the fascist forces of Germany and Japan during WWII. For the Indian communist, fascism was but a more exploitative form of capitalism.

But before Bose left for the foreign lands to take charge of the INA from Rash Behari Bose, his role, that of a very dynamic and assertive leader, although within the Congress, is ever without doubt.

On the other hand, the Sangh's uncertain ties with the freedom struggle and its contribution or the absence of it, have often been an issue of stringent criticism by its political opponents. And that is where the BJP comes in with its direct focus on the INA.

Therefore, the across-Line of Control surgical strikes in September 2016, air strikes inside Pakistan territory after crossing Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, aggressive military postures, a bellicose attitude when it comes to internal security in the three troubled regions of Kashmir, Naxal-dominated stretches of central India and the Northeast are fitting into a new carefully-crafted format of uber nationalism. And that is the space the BJP hopes to fill in.

But at the same time, the strategy also suffers from the pitfalls of militarisation of the political discourse of the day.

Coming back to Bengal, while the Subhas Chandra Bose legacy may stir emotions, it is expected to be so only in urban areas. In rural Bengal, Hindu and Muslim agriculture peasants share too much of a symbiotic and filial tie to think otherwise. But having said that, from the BJP point of view, a parliamentary seat in West Bengal is (literally) worth more than that in other states. The partys push for the Citizenship Amendment Bill is a testimony to that. Anything that enables the BJP to steal a march over Mamatas Trinamool Congress in her own bastion.

Well, anything.Despite government push for training schools, Dalit priests have not been able to find jobs in state-owned historic temples

G Balaguru stops talking mid-way and cranes his neck. Okay now, he says, swiftly jumping into action. He removes his shirt, wraps a saffron stole with Hindu symbols around him and poses for the camera. He is standing in the corridor leading to the inner sanctum of the Vaithamanidhi Perumal Temple near Tiruchendur in Tamil Nadu, imposing stone pillars flanking him.

Balaguru wants the photographs clicked before the priests of the temple return. The 33-year-old native of Pallipathu, a village in Tiruchendur taluk, is not a thrill-seeker trying to flout photography restrictions. What he is, however, is a threat to the dominance of the Brahmin community in some of the biggest temples in the state. He is a Dalit priest.

Twelve years ago, 206 men joined six training schools located across Tamil Nadu to receive instruction to become priests. These archakas were set up by the Tamil Nadu government to train non-Brahmin priests. It was a year-long course at the end of which the men, all from the SC/ST/MBC community, hoped they would get the job of priest in a government temple. Only one of them, T Marichamy, succeeded and that too in 2018. For the rest it has been a long wait, with no end in sight. The priests here cannot know who I am. If they did, they wont let us even sit here, Balaguru says wryly.

This is a saga that began in 1970 when the then chief minister of the state M Karunanidhi issued an order to amend the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religion and Charity Endowments (HR&CE) Act, clearing the way for all Hindus, irrespective of caste, to become priests in public temples. Karunanidhis order was challenged in court and in 1972 the Supreme Court struck it down. In 2006, the DMK government issued fresh orders, perhaps buoyed by a 2002 Supreme Court judgment which had allowed for non-Brahmins to become priests in Kerala. This too was challenged in court but the government managed to push its way, to a certain extent at least, as the schools were indeed set up and one batch trained.

The setting up of the schools was meant to be a turning point in our history. It was meant to break the stranglehold of one caste on at least one section in employmentpriesthood. Otherwise be it the IAS or the IPS or priesthood, Brahmins dominate professions and hence the money and power. This culture has to change, says V Ranganathan, the state coordinator for the Tamil Nadu Government Trained Archakar Students Association. Ranganathan, one of the 206 students, is the driving force behind keeping the campaign alive. It is he who decided to start the association in 2009 and is the brain behind every outreach, every protest of the group. Every year on Periyars birthday we take out a procession. The state and the temples dont want to recognise us. Theyd rather we be forgotten. But we wont accept it.

That it was never going to be smooth sailing for the non-Brahmin priest aspirants was always obvious. Legislations aside (even the 2006 order was challenged in court) even the teaching process in the schools was fraught with politics.

The students were to be trained in two ways  to perform the rituals in Tamil and the Agama tradition. There are many definitions of what exactly Agama a term that came up repeatedly during the course of reportingmeans. The Agama is a collection of scriptures that apart from philosophical doctrines also contains instructions for temple construction, ways of worshipping, mantras, and so on. The closest literal translation of the word is believed to be handed down by tradition. Nearly all major temples in Tamil Nadu are governed by Agama.

No one was willing to teach us the Agama way of doing things. In our school in Tiruvannamalai we got a teacher from outside the state to teach us. He was threatened, roughed up. Then when it came to our practical examination, we were not given idols by local temples. We fashioned the deities on our own, says Ranganathan.

Of the 206 students, nearly half have sought jobs in other fields. Some joined the police force, others took up teaching. The WhatsApp group they use to stay in touch has about 100 members. The programme carried with it the implicit promise of a government job. I have worked in several since, but if I were to get a job as a temple priest, I would go back to it in a heart-beat, says A Narayan.

The ones who have stuck on, who still don priestly garb, are the ones who truly want to serve god. For us answering the call in 2007 was not about getting a job but being allowed to do what we had always wanted, to lead prayers, says Balaguru. He functions as a local priest, presiding at weddings and private functions. The thought of giving it all up for another means of earning hasnt crossed his mind. Can you imagine the significance of one of us leading prayers? asks Rajkumar, a local temple priest in the same village as Balaguru who studied with him in the Madurai branch of the school. Unlike Balaguru, who questions the decision to not teach them the Sanskrit rituals, Rajkumar is content with what he does.

There are advantages to a government job, yes, but you dont need one to serve god, he says. Interestingly, the head priest at Sri Rajagopalaswamy Kulasekara Temple in Kovil filed a writ petition at the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court against the meagre salaries given to the priests and staff in the states old temples. According to a report in The Hindu, at the time of filing the petition, PNN Gopalan, the head priest, was getting a monthly salary of Rs 750.

It is not about not wanting non-Brahmin priests, but about the power enjoyed by the temples. There is a small percentage of people, mostly confined to the upper caste and class, who rant about redeeming temples from the tyranny of the state. But redeem it and give it to whom? The non-Brahmin priest debate touches a miniscule percentage because there are several thousand temples in Tamil Nadu that dont have Brahmin priests, says Dr Palanivel Thiagarajan, a member of the DMK and the sitting MLA from Madurai. His grandfather PT Rajan was one of the founders of the Justice Party and the first head of the HR&CE Board. It was under the Justice Party government in 1925 that the Madras Hindu Religious Endowment Act was passed, bringing temples under the direct control of the state government.

As of now, nearly 36,000 temples in Tamil Nadu are under state control, managed by the HR&CE Board. Non-Brahmin priests have been an integral part of the ritual fabric of Hinduism in the state, especially in temples dedicated to local gods and folk deities. But it is the older and bigger temples from the Shaivite and Vaishnavite sects that these men seek representation in. The priests in these temples are all Brahmins and have for decades practiced familial succession.

Most of the ads put out for government temple priest positions categorically state only Brahmins apply. The few that dont, we make a beeline for but a miracle is yet to happen, says Balaguru. He and Rajakumar along with a few others of their batch went for an interview for a Vinayaka temple in 2012. No one was hired and the post remains vacant. In some government temples, a few of the state-trained non-Brahmin archakas have been taken on as assistants by the priests, although this is not officially acknowledged. One such priest agreed to talk to Firstpost at the insistence of Balaguru and Rajkumar but requested anonymity. The priests share a small percentage of their salary with him, he said, while he is free to conduct pujas and ceremonies outside.

When the DMK government had introduced the reforms again in 2006, the Adi Saiva Sivacharyargal Nala Sangam had moved the Supreme Court challenging this move. In a 2015 judgment the court did not strike down the government order but did uphold the Agama tradition of appointing priests, which favours hereditary succession, saying it was not a violation of the right to equality.

It was a big blow to the non-Brahmin priests, with Ranganathan labelling the judgment confusing and controversial.

The only silver lining for the non-Brahmin priests in the past twelve years has been the appointment of their peer T Marichamy. He is presently a priest at an Ayappan temple in Madurai but refused to speak with Firstpost saying he is in a government job and not authorised to talk. The truth is, he is scared and so are we. If too much attention is called to this, who is to know what the consequences will be? says P Thiyagarajan, another non-Brahmin priest of the same batch, based out of Madurai. Thiagarajan gave up a job at Airtel to pursue the course but has no regrets.

Karunanidhi had referred to the Brahmin hegemony in temples as a thorn in the heart of Periyar. This was also an issue which was important to BR Ambedkar, who in his iconic Annihilation of

Caste speech had spoken about how priesthood itself needs to be abolished, or at the very least be accessible to every person who professes to be a Hindu.

It is not the students alone who have suffered since the school shut down after producing only one batch. Those who were appointed as teachers and headmasters are also struggling to stay afloat. M Balamurugan is one example. He was the headmaster of the Madurai branch and is now working as a warden for an orphanage run by a state temple in Tiruchendur. I had dreams too, of giving the temples priests who were not chosen by birth but rather by the extent of devotion, but all of it was laid to rest.

He says he filed a Right to Information plea last year to enquire about the status of the schools and the governments response was that they had not officially been shut down. But where are the subsequent batches? Sometimes inaction is the biggest action.

It can be argued that the appointment of non-Brahmin priests in state-owned historic temples will serve as little more than window dressing, while the real evils of casteism thrive all around us.

But the non-Brahmin priests reject this argument. It is a struggle for our rights. This is not symbolic but a question of our lives, says Balaguru. He has removed the saffron stole and is wearing his everyday shirt when the temple priest returns. Does he regret that he wasted time on the course? After all he once had an apprenticeship in Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited. He smoothens the edges of his archaka certificate, which features an image of the Meenakshi Madurai Temple. At least with this I can go for interviews when they dont specific only Brahmins. The course opened that door for me and just for that, I will never regret it.Half of Gora with a population of nearly 3,000 had been engaged in the cattle trade.

Editor's note: This is part of a multi-article series on the jobs crisis in the three states crucial to Lok Sabha election 2019: Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

***

When his elder daughter got married six years ago, Nabi Hussain smoothly conducted the ceremony. He had saved up for the wedding and the mood was buoyant. Four months back, when his younger daughter got married, Hussain had to sell a part of his 1.5-acre farmland.

Hussain had an operational business back then. He is unemployed now. And he has a definitive answer to what triggered the downfall. 2014, says the 50-year-old resident of Gora village in Bihars Darbhanga district.

Hussain used to be a cattle trader. I would buy milch cattle from Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and sell it to farmers here to be reared and used in farmlands, he says. We had been in this business since the time of our forefathers.

For as long as he can remember, Hussain has been attending cattle fairs in different states to locate the most productive bovines. I made anything between Rs 400-800 behind every calf, he says. My monthly income would be around Rs 30-40 thousand. I could take care of the family, and also save up for emergencies. I only engaged in trade, not slaughter.

However, cow-related violence in India has exploded since 2014, with Hindutva vigilante groups lynching Muslims and Dalits over suspicions of the slaughter of cow, which is considered sacred by upper caste Hindus. According to an IndiaSpend report, 97 percent of the attacks by cow vigilantes have happened since Narendra Modi became Indias Prime Minister. Victims of cow terrorism have accused the police and administration to have gone soft on the perpetrators.

In Hussains case, the impediments did not come through the right-wing groups, but it came from the police. Our trucks started being unnecessarily stopped, even though we had permits, he says. The police would threaten to file cases against us and ask bribes of Rs 50,000 or 1 lakh. When we said we could not afford it, they would beat us up black and blue.

The disruption of cattle trade that began 2014 onwards compelled Hussain to downsize. We thought it is a phase that would pass, and we could wait it out, he says. But by 2017, we had to completely shut shop.

Hussains story is the story of his village. Half of Gora with a population of nearly 3,000 had been engaged in the cattle trade. According to the Census 2011, more than 60 percent of its population is uneducated, which means they have been seeking odd jobs in Darbhanga. Not just our village, there are 7-8 more in the block that had cow traders, says Hussain. Today, we spend most of our time looking for a job as a daily wage labourer.

But finding a job in the unskilled sector is tough. According to the Centre for Monitoring India Economy (CMIE)s report as of December 2018, Bihars labour participation rate stood at 38 percent, almost 5 points below the national average, which reflects starkly considering Bihar is the third most populous state in India. The labour forces unemployment rate was 8.77 percent, more than 2 points above the national average. The states overall unemployment rate is 10.9 percent, much above Indias 6.9, as of 13 March.

Therefore, driving those who had been self-employed into labour work has only intensified the crisis.

Vijay Kumar Jha, director, Animal Husbandry, says there is no letter from the department that says cow trading is illegal. Cow slaughter is banned unless the local administration grants permission, he says. But trading is perfectly fine. Yet police harass traders by asking various questions. There is an Animal Cruelty Act, which prevents people from being cruel towards animals. If the truck carrying animals lacks enough space and the bovines are cramped for room, the trader can be charged under the Act. That is usually the pretext under which the police stops trucks carrying animals.

Mohammad Kamrul, 55, another resident of Gora, says a few years back the police seized his trucks carrying 84 calves, where he was accused of indulging in slaughter. That was the last nail in the coffin of his trade. We would have a cattle fair merely six kilometres from here, he says. Farmers would turn up to buy from us. They looked after the cows like their children. But police started parking barricades just ahead of the fair to hound us.

With the traditional family trade ruptured, Kamrul says he now barely gets 10 or 12 days of work at Rs 200 a day. Darbhanga is a flood-prone district, which means the activity in farmlands is often scarce, he says. And there are no industries or private companies here that would want labourers. Machines are doing our jobs these days. So we go to Punjab during the planting and harvesting of wheat and rice. Otherwise, we pass our time feeling worthless sitting at home.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which promises to provide 100 days of employment in the unskilled sector in rural India has not instilled promise either. In 2017-18, 82,768 households got employment under the scheme and only 82 of them completed 100 days or more at work. The following year, 1,27,735 households were employed while merely 216 managed to complete 100 days at work.

Lack of options has forced the second generation to migrate to places like Punjab, Delhi or Mumbai to toil as labourers. My son has done BA, says Kamruls wife, Makina Khatun. He is working as a labourer somewhere in Mumbai.

Khatun says when the cow trade ran smoothly, they would also pump in some money in their farmland, cultivating a bit of rice. Now we cannot afford the input costs, she says. Activity in our farmland has almost come to nought. Since 2014, it has been difficult to sustain a household. We taught our kids, educated them when the trade was operational. Today, we struggle to keep our kitchen functional.

First Person

While most of the cow traders lost their livelihoods in Gora, Najo Khatu lost something even more important. She shares her story.

How have the difficulties in cattle trade affected you personally?

Me, my family, my kids have all been devastated. Even though it became difficult to carry on with the trade after 2014, my husband would take the risk once in a while when we had no option and there was absolutely no money. Three months back, his truck was seized at Balliya. He was accused of slaughter, threatened with cases. He had a heart attack and died on the spot.

How old was he and what was his name?

His name was Jainuddin. He must be around 70. He had been a cattle trader all his life. Suddenly, you tell him he cannot do it. He was under a lot of stress. Where was he going to find labour work at this age? In any case, it is hard to come by.

How are you managing now?

I work as a daily wage labourer if and when I find something. As I said, there is not much I can do. I make Rs 2,000 a month at the most and run my household. Three of my kids have migrated to Mumbai and Delhi. They make their ends meet by doing whatever they can.

How old are you?

I am around 65. It is hard to indulge in labour work at this age. My back hurts, so do my joints. Also, contractors look at me and dont hire me. They want strong people who can work without taking breaks. And especially when there are so many younger men volunteering to do the job, I hardly get any work. But it is not just about money. He was the one who held the home together. He was our emotional support. We still dont know how to come to terms with that.The Tripura government issued a notice to all district chief medical officers Monday to stay sensitized and alert on any impending Nipah virus attack in the state.

Agartala: Tripura government Tuesday sounded an alert after the death of five members of a family in Nipah virus attack in a Bangladesh village bordering West Bengal, an official said here.

The Tripura government issued a notice to all district chief medical officers Monday to stay sensitized and alert on any impending Nipah virus attack in the state.

The alert was sounded to all district chief medical officers, Joint Director of Family Welfare and Preventive Medicine Dr P Chatterjee said.

"Five persons of a family died in Bangladesh due to Nipah virus attack. The deaths occurred near the West Bengal border, not the international border adjoining Tripura. Since the incident occurred in Bangladesh, Government of India asked us to stay alert," the official said.

Nipah virus usually transmits from infected bats carrying the virus. Drinking raw date palm sap is the most common way of transmission of the virus and the health department notice advised people not to drink that sap.Entire neighbourhoods in Jammu and Kashmir often march towards sites of gun battles between rebels and government forces, attempting to rescue militants. Scores of civilians have died during such clashes.

Srinagar: A 12-year-old boy was among six people killed in three separate gun battles between rebels and security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir, the police and army said Friday.

Clashes have raged in the restive mountainous region since the deaths of at least 42 CRPF jawans, in a suicide bombing on 14 February, provoked tit-for-tat air strikes between India and Pakistan.

The boy was killed after militants were trapped in his home in the northern town of Hajin and engaged in a two-day gun battle ending Friday, police told AFP. His father escaped.

Police later claimed the boy was "kept hostage" by the rebels."Despite repeated requests by community members and police for his release, he was brutally killed by the terrorists," a police statement said, referring to the two killed rebels identified as Pakistani nationals.

Two more militants were "eliminated" late on Thursday in the frontier district of Baramulla, Kalia added, while one soldier and two policemen were injured.

Another militant died in a clash with soldiers in the south of the Kashmir valley, army spokesman Colonel Rajesh Kalia said. At least a dozen villagers were wounded when government forces clashed with protestors near the site of the fighting, firing metal pellets and live bullets to push them back. Three of the villagers were taken to hospital in Srinagar and were in critical condition, a local police officer and hospital sources said.

Entire neighbourhoods in Kashmir often march towards sites of gun battles between rebels and government forces, attempting to rescue militants. Scores of civilians have died during such clashes.

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since British colonial rule ended in 1947. Both claim it in full and have fought two wars over the territory. India has about 500,000 soldiers in the part it controls, where armed groups are fighting for independence or a merger with Pakistan.

Last month's suicide blast was claimed by Jaish-e-Mohammed, a militant group based in Pakistan, and New Delhi has long accused Islamabad of backing a 30-year insurgency that has left tens of thousands of people dead, mostly civilians.

The death in police custody Tuesday of teacher Rizwan Asad Pandit  one of around 1,000 people detained in recent weeks  has further enraged locals. Pandit's family claimed the young man was tortured, saying his bones and even his spine were broken and that his body bore cuts and clear signs of torture.

An investigation is ongoing, but police have registered a case alleging he attempted to escape from custody, prompting angry demonstrations across Kashmir in recent days.After spending more than 60 hours under the rubble of the under-construction building which collapsed in Karnataka's Dharwad on Tuesday, Dilip emerged on Friday from underneath layers of concrete and building material, squinting at the sunlight.

After spending more than 60 hours under the rubble of the under-construction building which collapsed in Karnataka's Dharwad on Tuesday, Dilip emerged on Friday from underneath layers of concrete and building material, squinting at the sunlight.

A video of the final minute of the rescue effort was tweeted by News Nation, which also identified the rescued man. The nearly minute-long footage shows personnel from the National Disaster Response Force and State Disaster Response Force helping the man in a green shirt make his way out from beneath the wreckage. He is visibly weakened but can be seen walking amidst cheers from rescuers and those watching.

#WATCH | After 62 hours of being trapped in the basement of the collapsed multi storied building, Dilip being rescued alive by Fire Force. #DharwadBuildingCollapse pic.twitter.com/9vVb3f4Y0Q  News Nation (@NewsNationTV) March 22, 2019

On Friday, the toll of the collapse mounted to 14, after one more body was found from the debris as rescue operations continued for the fourth consecutive day. As many as 56 people people have been rescued from the site of the collapse, but the latest rescue gives officials reason to cheer as it comes nearly three days after the disaster, when chances of survival of those trapped are slim. On Thursday, two people were rescued. In a video of the same rescue tweeted by ANI, the man pulled out on Friday, can incredibly be seen making his way up the steep site of the wreckage, with a little help from rescue personnel.

#WATCH Man rescued from Dharwad building collapse site today after the under-construction building collapsed on March 19. #Karnataka pic.twitter.com/ODimTCxdoG  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy visited the site on Thursday and told the media that district administration has already announced a magisterial inquiry and the government is ready to appoint a retired high court judge if required.

In addition to 10 ambulances and five fire tenders deployed for relief and rescue operations, three teams of the NDRF have been flown in, two from Ghaziabad and one from Bengaluru.

About 150 police, fire and emergency personnel are a part of rescue operations.

With inputs from agencies

.Pictures of women carrying pots may be beautiful and widespread in popular culture, but it is a crime and outrage in the 21st century that women are girls are still carrying 20 litres on their heads for kilometres every day.

For most of us, accessing water is as simple as turning the taps on in our kitchens and toilets. But for a large number of the worlds population, access to clean and safe water remains a major challenge. Even as recently as in 2015, at least 844 million people across the world  12 percent of the global population  were still lacking basic drinking water services. These people still rely on unprotected wells, rivers and springs or take water directly from surface sources.

When water is not available at home, the burden of collecting, storing, and managing it usually falls on women and girls in most families around the world. Globally, in eight out of 10 households lacking water provision, it is women and girls who bear this responsibility.

Water scarcity has serious implications on womens health. When schools fail to provide adequate water and sanitation facilities, one of the reasons girls drop out is the difficulty in maintaining menstrual hygiene. When their homes do not provide access either, girls and women often limit their water and food intake  forced to spend entire days without relieving themselves or awaiting the privacy that darkness provides.

On Firstpost: Climate change will worsen the power imbalances that hurt women  it's time to address them

When they have to relieve themselves outdoors, they run the risk of contracting diseases like diarrhoea, hepatitis, and cholera which are worsened by undernutrition. Many-a-time, they may be bound by social norms to not venture out of their domestic spaces. They are also vulnerable to sexual assault when they do. We are still horrified by the incident in Katra (Uttar Pradesh) in 2014, when two girls  aged 14 and 15 years  were assaulted and found dead one evening when they ventured out to defecate in the open. Such stories show how poor access to water and sanitation not only affects the health and lives of women and girls disproportionately, but also negatively affects their wellbeing and dignity.

All over the global South, women and girls walk an average of six km each day to collect water.

In Tigray, in Ethiopia, one of us encountered 20 girls and women gathered patiently next to a water source. They had been waiting for almost three hours for someone to turn the tap on and release the supply of water for the catchment area. This is part of their everyday lives. Even in urban settings, women queuing up at taps to fill their buckets is a common sight. It is alarming that a source which can be accessed within 30 minutes (round-trip collection time) is considered an improved water source as per the new approach of the SDG indicators tracking progress in drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene. No doubt, poor women may need to make multiple trips like this with heavy water pots. That such a situation is considered acceptable reflects the critical need to ensure that more women are part of the decision-making processes when such standards and targets are being set.

In fact, globally, women spend up to 200 million hours every day collecting water.

The massive number of hours and the labour that these girls and women spend in simply collecting, providing, and managing water for their households/communities distorts their lives, and the labour spent is unaccounted for and unremunerated. If these millions of hours could be taken off from their hands, pathways and opportunities would open up, helping them lead more productive lives, either through time spent in education or in paid work.

Much has been made of the global water crises. However, most often than not, this has little to do with the physical availability of water. Access to water is usually linked with unequal social, gender and power relations as well as to distortions in policies, planning and management structures. In India, water crises usually emerge because access to and control over water is differentiated due to caste, gender, and wealth. Thus, the water crisis is a socially mediated one, with water often flowing uphill to money and power.

In December 2018, one of us was part of a panel discussion  Does Water Have Gender?  at a litfest in Mumbai, where the speakers deliberated on the debilitating impact that such politics have on womens lives and livelihoods. Nearly 163 million of Indias 1.3 billion people lack access to clean water, with rural populations worst-affected by this inequity. A co-panellist pointed out that though the Government of India aims to ensure that 90 percent households receive piped water supply in the next three years, if men would have been assigned the roles of collecting and managing water, this target would have been universal.

Also read: India's water future threatened by the combined effect of climate change and rising demand

On an average, a woman in rural India walks 5-20 km a day just to fetch water. The Indian governments Swachh Bharat initiative seeks to build toilets, end open defecation, and improve sanitation in the country. But we discussed that simply building infrastructure will not solve the problem. This initiative has become top-down and target driven. In many cases the money has been diverted elsewhere or toilets have not been used or are not functional, especially for women who have to bear the double burden of indignity and unsafe conditions when having to relieve themselves in the open.

The media has a key role to play in ensuring that conversations and decisions on resources like water include a womans perspective. Global and Indian cinema, in recent times, have tackled this issue from a womans lens and we need more such initiatives and conversations in public forums. The lack of access to water is a violation of poor women and mens human rights. Pictures of women carrying pots may be beautiful and widespread in popular culture, but it is a crime and outrage in the 21st century that women are girls are still carrying 20 litres on their heads for kilometres every day. Men and women from all walks of life need to be included in such conversations and, more importantly, governments and political leaders should be held to account for this situation.

Professor Lyla Mehta is at the Institute of Development studies, UK. Ria Basu is manager, Global Health Strategies, India.

Take our World Water Day 2019 Quiz here.Impressively curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt, fabric(ated) fractures was the consequence of an invitation extended by Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, founder of Alserkal, who perceives it as an attempt to foster a growing South to South dialogue which draws in the practices of cultural practitioners beyond our own borders, and broadening the context of contemporary global art conversations.

Three notes, each played by 34 musicians exploring the seven-note range of the harmonium; an instrument entrenched in Bangladeshi musical culture, meld to echo a reverberating assertion. The ensuing discordant chord repeats itself on loop, distilling its way into the 1,370-square-meter courtyard linking Concrete, a multi-disciplinary space, the first building in the UAE to be completed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), founded by Rem Koolhas, to the rest of Alserkal Avenue, a 500,000-square-foot arts and culture community founded in 2007. The overriding tonality is one of discrete subversion despite the ever-pervasive environment of violence, censorship, and migration.

Titled Harano Sur (Lost Tune), this artworks first manifestation was in the form of a live performance, conceived by Reetu Sattar, featuring 35 musicians who were poised on different niches within a scaffolding at the entrance of the Shilpakala Academy in Dhaka in February 2018, at the fourth edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, a biannual event founded and managed by the Samdani Art Foundation, helmed by artistic director, Diana Campbell Betancourt. At Concrete, the video was screened on loop, its aural rendering thus oozing into the exhibition, fabric(ated) fractures curated by Campbell Betancourt, forming its core soundtrack.

The wall, behind which the video had been mounted, rose eight meters from the earthen floor of Concrete. Its front facade bore a tapestry of garments shed by Rohingya refugees upon reaching Bangladesh from Myanmar, bound together through kantha stitching techniques by a community of internal migrant women who became victims of climate change when their villages did not survive flooding, forcing them to relocate to higher ground in northern Bangladesh. Conceived by Kamruzzaman Shadhin, the enormous quilt is monumentally displayed and serves to memorialise the histories of lived trauma to which the South Asian country has historically born witness. What could have been a closed-door space was intentionally opened out so that any visitor within the vicinity would be compelled to confront the reality of displaced lives.

Furthermore, on the floor marking the boundary between Concretes interior and its immediate exterior are Joydeb Roajas alpona-inspired drawings of indigenous women with tanks on their head. The word alpona derives from the Sanskrit word alimpana, which means to plaster or coat with, and like the mud floor inside the exhibition space, alpona is made of a rice-based paste derived from the soil, writes Campbell Betancourt, in a lovingly produced catalogue commemorating the ongoing exhibition at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai. For her, these drawings, viewed alongside the other artworks on display by 15 artists that were the result of commissions by the Samdani Art Foundation since late 2012-early 2013, attest to the violence unfolding in their locales and on their communities, with the work grounding the constricting present into a more porous past. Despite carrying the weight of enormous pain, the deeply poetic practices of these artists create spaces of empathy through which new modes of solidarity might be imagined, writes Campbell Betancourt. They break down reductive national and regional narratives and reformulate them from a more local and human perspective.

The impressively curated show, fabric(ated) fractures was the consequence of an invitation extended by Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, founder of Alserkal, who perceives it as an attempt to foster a growing South to South dialogue which draws in the practices of cultural practitioners beyond our own borders, and broadening the context of contemporary global art conversations. For Campbell-Betancourt, the show presented an opportunity to retrospectively consider Dhaka Art Summits journey since 2012 by bringing together commissions from various editions and encouraging a dialogue between them. Basically, we were invited as a Bangladeshi foundation to do a show, and I wanted to complicate what that means, she said in an interview. Theres something very different between being national and nationalistic, and so I think thats what we tried to communicate with this show.

Almost all works are by contemporary artists from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Thailand, Pakistan, and Myanmar, and are thereby reflective of a critical reconsideration of the subject of borders. They break down reductive national and regional narratives and reformulate them from a more local and human perspective, writes Campbell Betancourt, who used Concretes architectural facets as her curatorial starting point, while being conscious of the fact that many of the participating artists had barely travelled out of the country and faced limitations to their sense of artistic agency. This building speaks of money and power, and a lot of these works speak about powerlessness, she said. The mud floor, worked upon by a team of Dubai-based Bangladeshi diaspora builders, was conceived as an important exhibition design trope that could ground the show and the fragility of its contexts. The doors were kept open to welcome visitors. I wanted each of the art works to have an ability to breathe and be in conversation with each other, she said.

Within the context of Art Dubais ongoing 2019 edition, the show attests to the radically emerging presence of South Asian artistic voices in the Middle Eastern cultural landscape, as evidenced by the launch of initiatives such as Ishara Art Foundation, established by Smita Prabhakar, a longtime collector of South Asian art, and a UAE resident; and the slew of South Asian art work exhibited not just at the fair but also at the ongoing Sharjah Biennial and the newly-launched Jameel Art Cenre in Dubai.

Also read  Louvre Abu Dhabi: New addition to UAE's art world presents connections between culturesAnju Kish's objective behind setting up Untaboo was to bring about a change in mindset and rid kids of the shyness and self-consciousness associated with sex education.

Sex education is one of the most misconstrued word today. When people talk about sex education, the word sex gets magnified and education becomes invisible.

Its not the talk anymore: awkward, embarrassing and best avoided. Author and sex educator Anju Kish has attempted to make sex education dinner table conversation, to be discussed openly between parents and their kids with her book, How I Got My Belly Button. "The sexual act is a very tiny, minuscule part of sex education," she says and her book delivers a lesson on puberty, sex and growing up without any stutters, fumbles or lengthy sermons, but rather through a story.

In How I Got My Belly Button, the author narrates the tale of one family that tackles this topic together through the course of a weekend. Twins, a girl and a boy, converse with both, their mother and father, about growing up and the parents share with their nine-year-olds the story of the biological changes occurring in the body, from the womb to the tomb. By having two loving, involved grown-ups explain everything from menstruation to sexual intercourse to menopause to contraception to their children, she also creates a comfortable environment for the twins to openly ask questions and take notes without the fear of being judged or mocked.

Kish was first inclined to write this book on sex education shortly after she went looking for answers to her older sons relentless questions around puberty and adolescence. She realised, as she looked around for material, that not a lot had been written about the topic in a child-friendly manner and being a writer, decided to do so herself.

But she did not stop there. Kish also went on to certify herself as a sex educator and spent nearly a year creating engaging modules that could hold the childrens attention. And it was in 2011 that she started Untaboo, a Mumbai-based organisation that imparts sex education through workshops, plays, stand-up comedies and conversations with both, kids and parents.

According to the student councilor of a Mumbai-based primary and secondary school, conversations around sex are taboo in many households to this day; the subject is meant to be whispered about either behind closed doors or discussed in hushed tones in the kitchen by mother and daughter. Growing up, children thereby hesitate to ask questions to their parents, she added, but are absolutely outspoken and comfortable while talking to a councilor in a free and non-judgmental environment.

Kish says, Sex education is one of the most misconstrued word today. When people talk about sex education, the word sex gets magnified and education becomes invisible.

Her objective behind setting up Untaboo, according to the author, was to bring about a change in this mindset and rid kids of the shyness and self-consciousness associated with the subject to make it an something that could be tackled by the family as a whole. One of the most positive aspects of her workshops then is the icebreaker session that involves both, parents and children. She asks the grown-ups to step in and be a part of the discussion with the objective of essentially putting out in the open that now both parent and child know about the topic and that 'it is ok' to talk about it.

Age-appropriateness

The student councilor also pointed out that it was essential to sensitise children to issues around sex education and inculcate an element of empathy in them. It was also essential to understand that our bodies grow very fast, our minds dont.

In a similar vein, Kish too, opines that knowledge about sex education should be incremental, so that each child gets the appropriate amount of information at the right age. Her workshops, spread over the age groups of six to 16, focus on age-appropriate topics at each level. While fun, engaging activities are planned for young adults, the workshop for the 16-year-olds is more of an open forum for discussion. She also emphasises on making these sessions confidential spaces where children are not laughed at by one another and questions raised in its four walls are not taken outside.

To this effect, she says, "We make the children take an oath at the beginning of each session."

What is also crucial, is a talk on consequences. "We teach our children that their body is a temple and it should be treated such," the principal of a school in Mumbai said, and they should be made aware of the consequences of their actions. "At school, we then encourage the children to be careful and mindful of their decisions which is also inevitably a part of sex education."

Kish suggests that today, children are provided with everything from smartphones, to computers, internet access and social media and can, therefore, be exposed to a lot of misinformation online. In this climate, the onus falls on the parents to arm themselves with scientifically sound knowledge, empathy, gender sensitivity and openness to explain consequences to their children.

Even as sex educators and student councilors try to create a comfortable environment for individual children and small peer groups to satisfy their curiosities and answer their questions, several schools either completely do away with sex education or hold separate sessions for girls and boys. According to Kish, sex education must be made compulsory in both, public and private schools and if it becomes a part of the curriculum where in year on year kids get to know about its different aspects, the learning will be beautiful, it will cease to be a dirty joke.

Anju Kish's How I Got My Belly Button is published by Om PublicationsOne of the earliest known communities who believe in the sanctity of all life, the Bishnois have fiercely protected nature and animals around them, for over 500 years, allowing them to survive in the harsh Thar desert.

Editors note: You may have heard the saying the journey is the destination, but some travellers actually put that philosophy into practice. Presenting, #FTravellers  on-the-road (or air/sea) dispatches from travel enthusiasts on long journeys.

The travellers we're now featuring are Ambika Vishwanath and Hoshner Reporter of The reDiscovery Project. Ambika and Hoshner are doing an in-depth journey through Rajasthan, and will be sharing their travel journals on Firstpost.

***

Dispatch 3

Text by Ambika Vishwanath | Photos by Hoshner Reporter

Do you want to see the blackbuck? asked Thana Ram Bishnoi, with a slight smile.

We were sitting on a charpoy in his courtyard, getting acquainted. We readily agreed.

The sun had turned softer and the air cooler; soon it would be dusk. We strapped on our shoes as Thana Ram picked up his stick and we set off for the vast, dry land beyond his house, dotted with shrubs and bare trees. We left the last couple of houses behind us walking through the fields, towards the animals we could see in the distance. We inched ahead slowly; sudden movement would drive them further away, and our host was cautious. There was no sound except for the buzzing of flies and a slight breeze that whistled and deposited fine desert sand everywhere. In this desolate place, I half expected John Wayne to saunter up with one hand casually resting on his pistol, asking us to explain ourselves. I wasnt in a Hollywood western though, but on the outskirts of the village of Pheench, not easily found on the map, to spend a couple of days at the home of a Bishnoi family.

One of the earliest known communities who believe in the sanctity of all life, the Bishnois have fiercely protected nature and animals around them, for over 500 years, allowing them to survive in the harsh Thar desert. In modern times, they have also had a pivotal role in safeguarding the wildlife of the region and were thrust into the limelight during the infamous incident surrounding Salman Khan and the poaching of blackbuck in the late 1990s. But their commitment to nature dates much further back to the time of Maharaja Abhay Singh of Jodhpur, whose men were sent to cut the Khejri tree from a Bishnoi village, to be used as building material for a palace. The Bishnois, who consider the Khejri sacred, protested; they hugged the trees, refusing to allow their felling. For this impudence, it is said they paid with their lives, and were cut down along with the trees  359 of them massacred before the issue was brought to the attention of the King.

This incident from 1730 AD is narrated with sadness and pride by everyone we met, an important landmark in Bishnoi history. Followers of the faith propounded by sage Jambeshwar in the mid-1400s who had a vision of people living in harmony with nature or risk peril, the community follows the 29 principles that he set down: Bish meaning 20 and Noi nine, in Marwari. These included not felling trees, having a holistic and compassionate world-view, (following) hygienic living and (keeping) a clear conscience. It is these principles that have kept the community together for centuries, safeguarding all life around them; they even bury their dead so as to not waste trees for the funeral pyre.

Wed reached as close as we could and Thana Ram motioned for us to stop. A short distance away, we could see two males with their black upper sides and white undersides, and several younger faun blackbucks, having a quiet evening frolic. It was a beautiful sight, a slowly dipping sun in the background highlighting their wavy antlers. After some quiet observation, happy with what wed seen, we headed back to the house. Thana Ram pointed out the small watering ponds the villagers have built for the blackbuck and other animals. Water is scarce here, as in most of western Rajasthan, with even groundwater salty and undrinkable. There is one well that serves sweet water and the government has only in the last few years brought piped water to their village. The community in this region manage only one crop-sowing a year and are frugal, yet manage to still save some resources for the wildlife.

Our stay at Thana Ram's home, in a bid to understand and experience the Bishnoi way of life, was enlightening to say the least. Later, I (Ambika) sat with Dulli, the daughter-in-law of the house, as she made dinner in the indoor kitchen, using only cowdung, dead wood and shrubs for the cooking fire. As is dictated, she ensured that there are no insects on the wood before putting them in the fire; she cooked a dish with tomatoes, chillies and leftover malai from the days milk, churning out hot, thick rotis slathered in homemade ghee at amazing speed.

She hasnt studied beyond Class Eight. While her father and brothers tried to insist she went to school, she realised it wasnt for her and chose to learn how to sew. She wants to sell the clothes she makes, once her husband (Thana Ram's son) finishes university. Her face is covered, as is the custom when her in-laws are around. But when we are alone, she uncovers her head and shows me her lovely jewellery: the nose ring and trademark round maang tikka. I was asked the inevitable question of why I dont wear any obvious signs of marriage  nothing on my forehead, toes or neck  and the lack of children, and we talked a little about the availability of choice. We chatted, two women who have vastly different lives, yet find much to talk about: common threads that bind women around the country.

We were quite the anomaly in a village that doesnt see many outsiders let alone tourists and the next morning we walked through the village, house hopping and drinking copious amounts of chai. Extremely hospital people, not unlike many other parts of India, the Bishnoi will first serve you water and invite you home for tea before anything else, even if you have only asked them for directions. They were curious about us, most travellers do half-day visits to other Bishnoi villages closer to Jodhpur and were pleased that we were there to understand and learn their way of life. Conversations revealed more about their lives and fierce loyalty to nature as dictated by their guru, where the spirit of conservation has been deeply ingrained into their lives. They might still live in relative poverty in these parts with traditional values when it comes to equality, but there is much we can learn from this resilient community, the original environmental warriors.When you have chronic palpitations from anxiety, youre forced to know that your heart is beating  which makes anxiety, in a sense, a sign of life.

Editor's note: What does it mean to be mentally ill? In this weekly column, Sneha Rajaram writes about navigating through a mentally ill life  encompassing aspects that are both everyday (medications, rights) and contemplative (the universality of suffering).

One of the most familiar mood pendulums in the life of the functional and dysfunctional swings between depression and anxiety  and back again. Functional people might experience the former as near-catatonia on Saturday/Sunday mornings, and the latter as the galvanisation of Mondays. A days rhythms are also made up of micro-swings between the two states. Like so many other processes, this oscillation creates a cyclical rather than a linear life, and this particular cycle seems to be a natural part of all lives. The terms sympathetic nervous system (excitation) and parasympathetic nervous system (relaxation) seem to confirm this, at least when interpreted by a layman.

This pendulum describes a much wider arc in the lives of the mentally ill. We can be stuck in depression and fatigue for weeks, months or years. Anxiety, which is biologically meant to last a few hours, becomes a semi-permanent state for those suffering from panic attacks, phobias, social anxiety, generalised anxiety and post-traumatic stress  all of which have biological, social and psychological aspects. The biological aspect is reiterated ad nauseam on todays internet: In the primordial soup, the jungle, where it was supposed to be eat-or-be-eaten, we needed that flush of adrenaline for our temporary fight-or-flight response (add freeze here, especially for the socially vulnerable). Except, we are told, psychosocial stresses, traumas and anxiety disorders put us in that state permanently, causing adrenal fatigue, some say, and a host of other psychological and physiological problems.

Anxiety is a paradox for a couple of reasons: One, anxiety begets anxiety, because we learn to fear fear. It compulsively grows itself, like a crystal or a tumour. Two, anxiety is in fact a sign of life, of vitality, in the sense that the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality. Ive heard people with bipolar type 1 say that at least they lead more interesting lives than a person with unipolar depression (though I have a feeling thousands would disagree). Depression contains despair and loss of interest in life, whereas anxiety, though extremely distressing, is lively and comes with an in-built drive. Even as agoraphobia erodes your external life, it grows your internal one, albeit in a horrible way.

When you have chronic palpitations from anxiety, youre forced to know that your heart is beating and youre alive. Ditto hyperventilation.

Also: Fear, like love, sits at the heart of being alive. In fact, fear and love are inseparable, as anyone who has children knows. This is where the bodhichitta aspect of (mainly) Mahayana Buddhism comes into play.

Bodhichitta means awakened mind/ awakened heart, and it is constantly realising itself (not realised, mind you) on the path of meditation and Buddhist practice. In meditation we are taught to balance awareness and equanimity. In reality, though, the two progress somewhat like the race between the hare and the tortoise. Some meditators tend to start off with more equanimity than awareness; those who suffer from anxiety are the opposite. But all meditators are sent on a journey towards tenderness, compassion, empathy, and many meditators take a while to get to the core of their hearts  the most disconcertingly vulnerable, tender, wounded place from which the most unconditional compassion can arise. Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche explains the process like this:

When you sit in the posture of meditation, you are exactly the naked man or woman that we described earlier, sitting between heaven and earth. When you slouch, you are trying to hide your heart, trying to protect it by slumping over. But when you sit upright but relaxed in the posture of meditation, your heart is naked. Your entire being is exposed  to yourself, first of all, but to others as well. So, through the practice of sitting still and following your breath as it goes out and dissolves, you are connecting with your heart.

This takes time for the functional among us because of the dysfunctional functionality of our socio-economy, where wearing armour is compulsory if we want to fulfil our basic needs. This type of meditator needs time to get to the place where the armour comes off and the work of true empathy can begin. People who suffer from chronic anxiety, however, are already there. When were triggered, as the millennial coinage puts it, were there. We may not have learned the fear-love alchemy yet, but were perfectly placed to learn it. Trauma and anxiety might just put us on the fast track to bodhichitta. Quoting Rumi is the best cliche of our times, so here goes: The wound is the place where the Light enters you."

When American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron talks about insecurity and uncertainty, she often uses the word groundlessness (Buddhism works with the axiom that nothing is permanent, so all grounds are specious grounds). Anyone who has panic attacks knows exactly what this means. Panic attacks are characterised by the loss of the safe mental platform that one grew up with and always took for granted  on top of which we built our thoughts, assumptions, knowledge and personality. This unnerving feeling is precisely what meditators must work towards uncovering. Once found, how do we work with it? Or, as Chodron asks, How can we relax and have a genuine, passionate relationship with the fundamental uncertainty, the groundlessness of being human? Which is a question that answers itself.

Being afraid or running from a dog is the surest way to aggravate it. Relaxing into anxiety without being overwhelmed by it is in fact the only way to stop the snowball effect. This counter-intuitive process is the most redeeming one Ive come across in my journey with anxiety. It does involve courage, though, and is therefore again a cyclical process, or perhaps a helical one, as our courage pushes and then fails us in turn. And thats perfectly all right, as long as our expectations of anxiety arent linear.

Read more from this seriesAdvani's career and that of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi were inextricably linked, right up to the early 2000s. It is Modi who had encouraged Advani to contest from Gandhinagar.

In a list that signals more continuity than radical change, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has announced its candidates for 184 of 540 seats, for the forthcoming Lok Sabha election. Most notably, party veteran Lal Krishna Advani has not been given a ticket from the Gandhinagar seat from which he has won six times.

Naturally, the 91-year-old Member of Parliament (MP) and former deputy Prime Minister, being denied a seat has raised eyebrows. It sends a clear signal that party president Amit Shah  who as been allotted the Gandhinagar seat  has now inherited the party legacy. Shah getting the ticket also indicates the partys desire to consolidate its hold over North Gujarat, where the BJP chief has a strong following. In previous elections, Shah had even managed the electoral campaign for Advani in Gandhinagar.

So far, Shah is the only Gujarat candidate declared by the BJP for the state's 26 Lok Sabha seats. At least within the party in Gujarat, the nomination of Amit Shah, for his first Lok Sabha contest, was welcomed by workers. Gujarat, being Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state, has a symbolic value and carries a prestige. Advani's son Jayant has not been given the ticket as was initially speculated, along with his daughter Pratibha.

It is Advani who is credited with building his party up from scratch, scoring electoral victories in the nineties after his Rath Yatra across the country to push the idea of constructing a Ram temple in Ayodhya.

Advani's career and that of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi were inextricably linked, right up to the early 2000s. It is Modi who had encouraged Advani to contest from Gandhinagar. After the Lok Sabha election in 2014, Advani had been in charge of the partys margdarshak mandal, an informal think-tank, which did not end up being very active. Advani had strongly opposed Modi's selection by the party to lead the 2014 election campaign of the party and be its prime minister face. Some other members of the margdarshak mandal including Murli Manohar Joshi, Sushma Swaraj, Shanta Kumar and Kalraj Mishra are not contesting the upcoming general elections.

Opinion on the tall leader within the BJP, who has his own following too, not getting a ticket will no doubt be divided. However, Advani has become very old, and, as the BJPs leaders have pointed out, the oldest parliamentarian has said that he would not wish to contest elections for a seventh time. The only caveat here is that Advani himself did not announce plans to retire from active politics. Besides, his not joining the electoral race raises the possibility that the doors of the Rajya Sabha are not closed for the veteran parliamentarian.

Advani is one of the 24-odd MPs who have not been renominated by the BJP in its first list of candidates. The BJP appears to have striven more for continuing with its existing MPs rather than replacing them. The prime minister will also contest from Varanasi.

Smriti Irani has once again been given a ticket to contest from Amethi, where she was defeated by Rahul Gandhi by a 1 lakh margin in 2014. Ever since that election, in which she has put up a spirited fight, Irani has been visiting Amethi regularly and is expected to put up a tougher contest than last time. Nitin Gadkari, Hema Malini, Rajnath Singh, Mahesh Sharma and Babul Supriyo, VK Singh, Bhartendu Singh and Satya Pal Singh are among the partys other repeat candidates who have been prominent in the news over the governments term so far.

In fact, there were expectations that there would be a much wider rejig of candidates getting tickets, with speculation that upto half the ruling partys MPs would not be renominated.

The tickets announced so far by the BJP mostly cover the regions and constituencies where the Opposition parties or alliances have already declared their candidates. This is a sign of how nail-biting the coming elections are going to be. The list of ticket-gainers in the BJP can be described as unexpected and yet not unexpected. In Bihar, with the grand alliance including the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Congress and others yet to announce their candidates, the BJPs own contestants are yet to be declared.

There are a few reasons why the BJP has signaled such continuity. By changing a larger number of candidates a party can open itself up to the risk of existing MPs turning rebel. It is also worth speculating that the party does not have enough candidates to replace existing ones.

In addition there is also the question of loyalty  those who have been loyal to the Modi regime have been rewarded with renomination. By continuing with existing MPs and announcing them after the Opposition has declared its list, the BJP also ensures that there will be no defections to the rival camp. Nationally, so far, Congress has declared 128 candidates. The BJP replacing barely 10-15 percent of MPs on seats indicates that it also wants to avoid opening itself up to the charge that its MPs failed to perform. This is why, other than Advani, there are no big surprises in the candidates so far announced  other than Advani.

All said, it is not a shocker that Amit Shah is the partys Gandhinagar candidate. Even before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls it was being speculated that the veteran parliamentarian would shift to Madhya Pradesh and Shah would contest from Gandhinagar. This did not happen the last time, though Advanis victory in 2014 was partly attributed to Modis popularity. How the so-called Advani camp in the BJP responds to the partys decision not to field him again remains to be seen.Congress leader PL Punia said that LK Advani being replaced as the Gandhinagar candidate shows that the BJP is solely being run by party president Amit Shah.

New Delhi: The Congress on Friday slammed the BJP for dropping party veteran LK Advani's name from its first list of Lok Sabha candidates.

Speaking to ANI, Congress leader PL Punia said, "An outstanding Parliamentarian like LK Advani will be replaced by Taripar Amit Shah. Now, people are clear that BJP is only run by Amit Shah."

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala also tweeted about Advani's exclusion from the list, and accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of not caring for senior citizens.

Notably, Advani, who contested the Lok Sabha elections from Gandhinagar seat for the first time in 1991, retained the constituency in 1998, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. In the ensuing elections, BJP president Amit Shah will be contesting from Gandhinagar constituency.

It was only once that Advani did not contest the elections in the year 1996 after his name found mentioned in the Jain Hawala Diary Case.

The BJP on Thursday evening declared 184 candidates including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, party chief Amit Shah, Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Textiles Minister Smriti Irani for the ensuing Lok Sabha polls, beginning 11 April and concluding on 19 May.

The counting of votes will take place on 23 May.

With inputs from ANIThe Congress on Friday asked the prime minister's office (PMO) to confirm if Narendra Modi has exchanged greetings with his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan.

New Delhi: The Congress on Friday asked the prime minister's office (PMO) to confirm if Narendra Modi has exchanged greetings with his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan on the eve of their National Day after India boycotted a function at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi.

Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi asked whether Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan's claims that Modi extended his greetings to him on Pakistan's National Day was correct.

"I would hope the @PMOIndia clarifies that what Imran Khan has tweeted is the correct version of greetings exchanged or whether if they have been exchanged at all, especially after the function was boycotted in India by the govt. The nation would want to know...," she said on Twitter.

Imran Khan earlier tweeted, "Received message from PM Modi: "I extend my greetings and best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that people of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive and prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence."

Modi on Friday sent a message to Khan, greeting people of the neighbouring country on the eve of its National Day, official sources said in New Delhi.

The prime minister, in his message, said it was time for the people of the sub-continent to work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive and prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence, they said.

India, earlier in the evening, boycotted a reception at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi to mark Pakistan's National Day, objecting to invites extended to several separatist leaders from Jammu and Kashmir for the event.

The External Affairs Ministry said no Indian representative will attend similar events in Islamabad as well. Over the years, India's representation at the annual event has been at the level of a Union minister.

"India has decided not to send any representative to attend the Pakistan National Day celebrations today. This decision was taken after the Pakistan High Commission decided to invite representatives of the Hurriyat Conference to the reception," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar earlier said.Karnataka was where the alliance of Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) was put together in the shortest time in Indias political history.

This can be said without too much fear of contradiction: Congress president Rahul Gandhi was too busy fighting a Twitter war with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to think of alliances in states. He may have mistaken hashtags for Lok Sabha seats. Yet he remembered Karnataka. This was where the alliance of Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) was put together in the shortest time in Indias political history to keep BJP out of power after the May 2018 Assembly elections.

Almost the entire whos who of the Opposition attended the swearing-in of JD(S) chief minister HD Kumaraswamy. Sworn enemies shook hands, hugged and talked of destroying the demon called Modi. The embrace of Mayawati and Sonia Gandhi was the piece de resistance. Mamata Banerjee and Sitaram Yechury smiled at each other for so long, the nation was left wondering why their parties had ever fought in West Bengal. Deve Gowdas unity call to anti-BJP forces across the country had the grit and valour that the world had seen in Winston Churchills famous war cry  ... we shall fight in the fields and in the streets...

It was all hunky dory as long as it lasted, which wasnt too long. Soon, the Opposition forgot that the word mahagathbandhan existed. In Karnataka, JD(S) and Congress leaders began to fight so hard and so routinely that people switched on TV sets to see if their government was still there. But congratulate Rahul Gandhi: the coalition not only survived but also reached seat adjustments for the Lok Sabha polls. Of Karnatakas 28 seats, Congress will contest 20 and JD(S) 8. (In 2014, BJP won 17 seats, Congress 9, and JD(S) 2.)

If the attempts to forge alliances made little or no progress in other states, it was primarily for two reasons: One, Congress refused to budge from the high horse and spare enough seats to potential allies; Two, its local leaders were opposed to either an alliance or the number and choice of seats. On both counts, Rahul put his foot down in Karnataka and saw and ensured a deal.

Though JD(S) wanted 12 seats and settled for eight, and parted with a couple of constituencies where it is strong, the agreement is generally understood to be loaded in its favour. Congress, as the national party, had been similarly expected to be accommodating towards smaller entities elsewhere, but it wasnt. If it was, the Opposition might have been closer to a mahagathbandhan than it is today.

Deal for mutual survival

While it was a desire to defeat BJP that weighed on Rahuls mind, it was a feeling of mutual survival among Congress and JD(S) leaders that clinched the Karnataka agreement. For some leaders, a breakdown of seat-sharing talks meant losing seats to BJP and perhaps a subsequent collapse of the government in the state. This only meant loss of power, the primary objective of their politics.

For others, it was personal or family interests: the absence of an understanding would mean defeat for themselves or family members or political heirs. For instance, Kumaraswamy needs Congress in the Mandya constituency where his son Nikhil may face a tough challenge from actress Sumalatha. Congress leader DK Shivakumar needs JD(S) votes to guarantee a comfortable victory for his brother DK Suresh in Bengaluru North.

If you thought the alliance in Jammu and Kashmir is freaky  Congress and National Conference share some seats but will have friendly fights in others there  the arrangement in Karnataka may turn out to be simply outlandish.

Borrow-a-candidate scheme

Short of its own winning candidates in three constituencies, JD(S) leader Deve Gowda has hit upon a novel idea. He wants to field three Congress leaders on JD(S) tickets. Something like a person borrowing tomatoes from his/her neighbour. Some Congress leaders think it might be simpler for Gowda to hand over the three seats  Udupi-Chikkamagaluru, Uttara Kannada and Bengaluru North  to their party, but Gowda wants to keep his lot of the allotted eight. And of the eight, three go to the Gowda family alone: Gowda himself and his two grandsons (including Kumaraswmys son).

Its the vote transfer between allies that should worry the leaders of the two parties most. Transfer of votes between allies has been a nightmare for parties and psephologists for long. BSP leader Mayawati, for instance, has been lamenting that Congress had benefited from transfer of votes from its allies in UP in the past, but was never able to transfer its own votes to others.

In Karnataka, the alliance has brought leaders together but kept the workers divided. There is unhappiness in Congress over the party sacrificing four constituencies to JD(S), where it isnt strong enough to put up a tough fight against BJP: Shivamogga, Uttara Kannada and Udupi-Chikballapur and Vijayapura. The most disgruntled Congress leader is Deputy Chief Minister G Parameshwara, who is upset that the Tumakuru seat that falls in his home district has been given away to JD(S). This may have been the result of a ploy by former Chief Minister Siddaaramaiah, who has no love lost for Parameshwara. The seat that falls in Siddaramaiahs home district of Mysuru stays with Congress, while Tumakuru was given away to JD(S).

But the leaders of JD(S) and Congress are painfully aware of the importance of this election to both parties. For JD(S), a good show will mean the entry of two of Gowdas grandsons, besides expansion of partys footprint beyond its traditional stronghold in the south. And for Congress, Karnataka is where it can reasonably expect its best performance in the south.

But despite the problems that plague the Congress-JD(S) alliance, the parties throw up a more formidable challenge to BJP together than they did separately in the past.

Author tweets @sprasadindiaSpeculation was rife on Friday that Congress leader Jitin Prasada may join the BJP but the Congress rejected such reports.

New Delhi: Speculation was rife on Friday that Congress leader Jitin Prasada may join the BJP but the Congress rejected such reports, while the former Union minister termed them as "hypothetical".

Sources said some senior Congress leaders, including Jyotiraditya Scindia, met Prasada on Friday afternoon in a bid to placate him and Prasada relented after senior party leader Ahmed Patel spoke to him later in the evening.

Prasada, who has been been fielded by the party from Dhaurahra Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh, is reportedly unhappy at not being given a senior responsibility within the party, whereas his peers have been made PCC chiefs or in-charges in many states.

His name was earlier doing the rounds for the post of PCC chief in Uttar Pradesh. Prasada is the son of Congress veteran Jitendra Prasada who had unsuccessfully contested against Sonia Gandhi for the post of Congress president in 2000.

When asked about the speculation regarding Prasada quitting, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala was derisive in his response.

"Jitin bhai and I go back a long way. So even on personal capacity, I can say, and I do never use such words, but I think it is bullshit," said Surjewala.

Prasada said speculation about him joining the archrival BJP is "hypothetical".

"There should be some basis for such a question. Why should I answer a hypothetical question?" he said to queries about whether he was joining the BJP.

The sources said Prasada is also upset about the choice of party candidates around his constituency which he fears may harm his poll prospects.

Meanwhile, National Conference chief Omar Abdullah questioned Prasada's response.

"Why can't Jitin Prasada just give a categorical denial? It's hardly a hypothetical question when every news channel is carrying reports," he tweeted.Farooq Abdullah led the poll campaigns for Vikramaditya Singh and former minister Raman Bhalla, who is a Congress-NC candidate. They are contesting from Udhampur and Jammu Lok Sabha seats respectively.

Jammu: National Conference (NC) president Farooq Abdullah on Friday led the poll campaigns of the Congress-NC alliance candidates, and said the alliance was aimed to keep India secular and "save" it from divisive politics.

Vikramaditya Singh, grandson of erstwhile Sadr-e-Riyast senior Congress leader Karan Singh, and former minister Raman Bhalla, who is a joint candidate of the Congress and its alliance partner NC, are contesting from Udhampur and Jammu Lok Sabha seats respectively.

"We have given this sacrifice for one aim  to keep India a secular country and also keep India strong. There is no other goal (in entering into an alliance with the Congress)," Abdullah told reporters in Jammu."To bring the country out of this quagmire, we have come together. We ensure you (Congress) our full support," he said.

Abdullah said the NC has come out to save this country from divisive politics. "We have come out to save this country from forces (who are dividing the country on the basis of religion) and not to save this state only."

The former chief minister also said we have to live in this country and strengthen it and its secular ethos which was preached by Mahatma Gandhi. He asked the Congress candidates to keep an eye on forces about malpractice.

Vikramaditya, while speaking on the occasion, said they will fight at the grass-roots level together to ensure their victory.Inheritance has to come with inherent mettle. Without meritocracy in democracy, even inheritance is meaningless

The pre-Independence era was not really dynastic even though freedom fighters included, very often, complete clans, brothers and even tribes. But in post-Independence India, arguably, the first political dynasty was started when former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehrus daughter Indira Gandhi was appointed Congress president. In the rest of India, there were regional satraps who were independent leaders, not dynasts. Whether we consider Biju Patnaik in Odisha or the Swatantra Party leaders, they were freedom fighters who grappled alongside Congress leaders and later, in their own states, they became dynasts, while they also launched a resilient anti-Congress politics, especially after 1967. That anti-Congressism, incidentally, is what installed the federal structure that we still have today in India. After 1967, the Congress under Indira Gandhi managed to lose its hold over no less than 13 major states. Each of these was taken away by the ragtag Opposition of the day, which was not dynastic. So, we owe our federal structure to the non-Nehru freedom fighters.

Thereafter, this leadership, which had a distinct regional flavour, gave way to a second round of provincial powerhouses. We saw Jaiprakash Narayan, a strong anti-Emergency crusader, and this wave went all the way to Chaudhary Charan Singh and Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh and Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar. But these leaders were not related to each other. Nor did they inherit their parties. At the time, party mantles were handed over more in the guru-shishya parampara style. This is also evident in how, in 1989, the Samajwadi sections won the elections in Uttar Pradesh after Rajiv Gandhis rout.

Mulayams faction actually got more votes than Charan Singhs that year. That is why the SP patron became the chief minister. At the time, within the rank and file of Samajwadi politics, dynasty had not taken hold. Even in Haryana, Chaudhary Devi Lal did not automatically transfer the mantle of power to Om Prakash Chautala, his son.

All this was also true for the Congress till the children of the freedom-fighting generation were controlling the party. So, after Nehrus death, Indira could not become PM. The baton was passed to Lal Bahadur Shastri. His death was the cause for the partys slide into dynasticism. Now everybody is examining Priyanka Gandhis nose to see if its similar to Indiras. I have nothing against Priyanka Gandhi but if she feels she can wave her hands and swoop into politics, then it is not going to happen. This generation is not in awe of the Congress role in the freedom movement.

Without merit, without the capacity to further the legacy one inherits, a dynastic leader will flop. The Chautala clan have not been able to add political capital to the legacy of their ancestors. As in a corporate structure, the non-meritorious is bound to fail. Same is the question with Rahul Gandhi: whether or not he is in a position to take the Congress forward depends on his merit. Sachin Pilot, another dynast, fought really hard for three years to improve the Congress party in Rajasthan. Jyotiraditya Scindia, a dynastic scion himself, had merit too. They were not taken as chief ministers despite Scindia even being considered the most popular leader. But thats for Congress to decide.

Only in the 1990s, after Rajiv Gandhi got into the saddle following Indira Gandhis murder, slowly regional satraps drifted into dynasty rather than meritocracy. They decide at this point that it is better to pass on the legacy within the family. That is why even in the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and Samajwadi Party, political dynasties took hold. Even so, the sons and daughters in different political parties did contest elections but they had to struggle. For example, consider Akhilesh Yadav. He had to find his way up after contesting elections and doing work on the ground.

Similarly, Naveen Patnaik inherited Biju Patnaiks legacy but had to maintain a working profile so people kept appreciating him. Dynastic succession, in this way, is as good as any capitalist inheriting his legacy from his parents. He could eat up the dividends of his company, if he is not talented enough.

Of course, political parties must encourage talent from outside. But even the Congress was by and large democratic under Mahatma Gandhi. It was only in 1959 that we saw somebody being handed over the party reins. And to say that Indira Gandhi was a freedom fighter and, therefore, inherited the mantle is wrong. Yes, she proved her strong leadership, but she didnt get the party presidents post for having led it. She only got it because she was Nehrus daughter. Otherwise, there were enough leaders toiling away in the Congress who could have inherited the party.

Yes, the BJP is less dynastic, but that has everything to do with the RSS. Even a senior BJP leader like Rajnath Singhs son had to fight the elections from the ground up. He was not made minister. Same with Poonam Mahajan, Pramod Mahajans daughter, or Anurag Thakur. Gopinath Mundes daughter could not become chief minister though Devendra Fadnavis could become CM because of the RSS style of functioning.

Inheritance has to come with inherent mettle. Without meritocracy even inheritance is meaningless.Narendra Modi in a series of tweets said that Sam Pitroda's comments have made it clear that Congress has not been willing to respond to terror forces. He said this after Pitroda questioned the death toll in the airstrike conducted by the IAF in Pakistan on 26 February.

Just when Congress was hoping to bury the BJP's nationalistic narrative spurred by Balakot airstrikes, party's overseas chief Sam Pitroda has brought it back on the forefront by questioning the death toll in the airstrike conducted by Indian Air Force (IAF) in Pakistan on 26 February. Several BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday took to Twitter to respond to his comments.

In a series of tweets, the prime minister wrote:

The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning Indias armed forces. Shame! https://t.co/puSjTK8Y4x  Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 22, 2019

Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest! https://t.co/Mul4LIbKb5  Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 22, 2019

Opposition insults our forces time and again. I appeal to my fellow Indians- question Opposition leaders on their statements. Tell them- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics. India stands firmly with our forces. #JantaMaafNahiKaregi https://t.co/rwpFKMMeHY  Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 22, 2019

Pitroda, who is a close confidante of Congress president Rahul Gandhi, in an interview to ANI said: If they (IAF) killed 300, it is okay. All I am saying is can you give me more facts and prove it." Pitroda is also a part of the Congress manifesto committee for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, and is considered a senior ideologue of the party.

Alongside the prime minister, Union minister Arun Jaitley also reacted to Pitroda's remarks. He said, "He (Pitroda) believes what we did was wrong. No country in the world said this, not even the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) said this, only Pakistan was of this view. Unfortunate such people are ideologues of a political party"

Union minister Smriti Irani also tweeted criticism for Pitroda's comments, using the hashtag #JantaMaafNahiKaregi (The public will not forgive):

Naive to bring a terror state to justice? Now the Nation knows why @RahulGandhi UPA chose not to respond with the full might of India post 26/11. Congress sympathies with Pakistan stand exposed. No wonder you supported the Bharat tere tukde honge gang. #JantaMaafNahiKaregi https://t.co/Ce7H5gAgl9  Chowkidar Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) March 22, 2019

Other BJP leaders also used the hashtag in their tweets:

Mr. Sam Pitroda, I am appalled by your sense of sympathy towards the terrorists. Your statement doesn't only insult the Jawans fighting 24x7 to protect the country but also lacks compassion for all the Indians who lost their lives due to these terror forces. #JantaMaafNahiKaregi https://t.co/dLSBHUNtJv  Chowkidar R. K. Singh (@RajKSinghIndia) March 22, 2019

This statement by Sam Pitroda clearly shows the pain of the congress party when the terrorists in Pakistan are being attacked. Shame on you to question the valour of our Armed Forces. We are and will always be proud of our forces. #JantaMaafNahiKaregi https://t.co/e5vpIeqvAW  Chowkidar Jitu Vaghani (@jitu_vaghani) March 22, 2019

BJP MP Vijay Kumar Singh added that the Congress leader should "confine" himself to topics that he knows about, and not make comments that "support another country."

When asked on his views on the airstrike against the Jaish-e-Mohammad camp in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, Pitroda had said that international news outlets had an alternate view of the impact of the air strike and that the people of India deserved to know the facts of the Air Force operation. However, he is scheduled to issue a clarification on his statements later on Wednesday, ANI reported.

"I would like to know a little more because I read reports in the New York Times and other newspapers. Did we really attack? We really killed 300 people? I dont know that. As a citizen, I am entitled to know and if I ask it is my duty to ask, that doesnt mean Im not a nationalist, That doesnt mean I am on this side or that side. We need to know the facts. If you say 300 people were killed, I need to know that. We all need to know that, people of India need to know that and then comes global media which says nobody was killed. I look bad as an Indian citizen, he had said.

Pressed further to clarify if talks with Pakistan was an option post the Pulwama terror attack which killed 40 CRPF jawans, Pitroda said that it would be naive to assume that if some people came here and attacked, every citizen of that nation is to be blamed. I dont know much about (Pulwama) attack, it happens all the time, attack happen in Mumbai Taj hotel and Oberoi hotel. We could have reacted then and sent our planes but that is not the right approach according to me thats not how you deal with the World. Eight people come (referring to Mumbai 26/11 attacks) and do something, you dont jump on the entire nation, said Sam Pitroda in an interview to ANI.

With inputs from ANIThe talking point of BJP's first list of candidates, where one Amit Shah has replaced LK Advani in the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha seat, was undoubtedly Advani's absence from it. The 91-year-old has always been overshadowed by the likes of Narendra Modi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Times are bad for LK Advani. So bad enough that when the Bharatiya Janata Party's first list of candidates was announced on 21 March, even the Congress party noted that the absence of Advani's name was a decisive and disrespectful shove.

Few things could be more antithetical to Advani's politics than the Congress and it is a mark of how fortunes have deteriorated for the 91-year-old that he has been reduced to a topic for a pre-poll Twitter snub by the Opposition party.

The talking point of BJP's first list of candidates, where one Amit Shah has replaced Advani in the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha seat, was undoubtedly Advani and his exclusion.

No competition for Modi, Shah

He first filed his nomination from this seat in 1991  a photograph tweeted by the account @IndiaHistoryPics shows a young Narendra Modi helping him and a younger Amit Shah peering down from above. In the three decades since, Advani has only "given up" the seat once, to close friend and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The seat has been Advani's mainstay since 1998 in an incredible run of election victories to which the 2019 polls clearly will not be added.

Articles like these, therefore, look to be one of the last times when Advani dominates political news. Advani now has no opportunity to contribute to the country's legislation. His output in party matters, too, had long since been minimalised.

Like Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala observed on Twitter, in 2014 Advani was elevated and thus relegated into the non-performative echelons of a Margdarshak Mandal. On 26 August of the year, close on the heels of Modi's resounding victory in the General Elections, Amit Shah had announced the constitution of a new parliamentary board of the party with Vajyapee, Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi excluded from it for the first time in decades. The three were sent to the newly minted mentors' Mandal, which a report in The Hindu says has never met officially since.

Advani has not just been snubbed by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Under the Modi-Shah juggernaut, the man who in 1991 led a rath yatra that many credit with heralding the Babri Masjid demolition and shaping the BJP's aggressive Hindutva line, has dropped many popularity points from party workers too.

This time, reported DNA, the BJP's Gujarat unit had demanded of its central election committee that either Modi or Shah contest the Lok Sabha election from the state. To party observers sent to seek the opinion of grassroots political participants in Gandhinagar, the message was clear. The grand old man had to go.

Party observers Nimaben Acharya and Prithviraj Patel both noted that while BJP workers were keen on someone from the party's central leadership contesting from Gandhinagar, that person was no longer Advani.

Second to Vajpayee

Advani himself is no stranger to losing out to other figures. For a man so central to the BJP's revival and image, it is almost surprising how many of the big prizes he has been denied. Always the man who could be prime minister, Advani always remained in the shadow of a far less vocal figure, Vajpayee. The only time he was projected as a prime ministerial candidate, in 2009, he lost.

A report by Hindustan Times, after Vajpayee's death in 2018, noted that both leaders had had similar beginnings in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and had proven themselves selfless party workers. Vajpayee, who was older than Advani by three years took over the Jana Sangh after Deen Dayal Upadhyay's death in 1968. Advani followed soon after under the tutelage of Vajpayee.

In 1975, Indira Gandhi announced the Emergency, leading to jail stints for both the leaders. When it was lifted in 1977, Advani and Vajpayee spearheaded the decision to merge the Jana Sangh with the overarching Janata Party, that would win the election of that year.

At key moments, in key roles, it was always Vajpayee who was visible. In the first opposition rally in New Delhi since the Emergency, where leaders who had recently been released from prison spoke, it was Vajpayee's quiet poetry which drew the applause.

When the first non-Congress government was formed in the country in 1977, it was Vajpayee who got the Minister of External Affairs' role. Advani got the far less visible Information and Broadcasting Ministry.

In 1984, the BJP won only two seats, in the backdrop of a crumbling leadership and an emotional electorate voting Rajiv Gandhi to power after his mother's assassination.

When the whole of India was looking to a younger prime minister for the end of the licence raj, Advani acted cleverly and introduced to the political landscape an entirely new dimension by co-opting the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's murmurs on a particular issue. Thus began the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid stir, which would serve the dual purpose of bringing the BJP back to people's minds and earning for Advani a brand of notoriety that would cost him both popularity and position.

The highest Advani rose to was the position of the deputy prime minister, under Vajpayee in 2002. Several times, he has maintained that he sees himself as a prime ministerial candidate, but the 2004 loss of the BJP under his leadership took away the strength of his insistence.

The 2019 exit from the party's candidates' list have made sure that such a day will never come to pass.TRS targets winning 16 out of 17 Lok Sabha seats from Telangana, leaving one for its ally AIMIM.

TRS targets winning 16 out of 17 Lok Sabha seats from Telangana, leaving one for its ally AIMIM. The strategy includes consolidating on the gains received during recent Assembly elections, further weakening the Opposition by encouraging large-scale defections.

Ten of the newly elected Opposition MLAs (nine from Congress and one from TDP) have already shifted their loyalties to the ruling party in just weeks after the Assembly elections. Tirade on both BJP and Congress, the talk of launching a national party and forging a non-BJP, non-Congress federal front is all part of Chief Minister and TRS supremo K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR's) narrative to market his regional party in the national polls.

KCR intelligently de-linked Assembly and Lok Sabha elections by resorting to premature dissolution of the House. This was aimed at preventing national political narrative taking over the regional issues. KCR is comfortably placed in the state political context. He apprehended the possibility of Congress gaining certain sections of the electorate, especially the minority, who constitute 12 percent of Telangana's population. The strategy of KCR paid rich dividends, with TRS winning 88 out of 119 seats, decimating Congress despite the latter stitching together a four-party gathbandhan, including TDP,CPI and Telangana Jana Samithi (TJS) apart from itself. With the defections, the TRS tally rose to 100.

Sitting pretty comfortable on an impressive victory received in the recently held Assembly elections, KCR is chalking out a foolproof strategy to win 16 out of 17 seats. Thus, the TRS wants to further decimate the Opposition.

KCR hopes that neither BJP nor Congress would be able to get a comfortable majority in Lok Sabha. The TRS sources believe that KCR expects Modi to come back with reduced margin, making him dependent on regional allies. With 16 seats in his kitty and the personal chemistry he enjoys with Prime minister Narendra Modi, KCR hopes to play a key role in national politics.

The BJP will also consider TRS as a natural ally, given the fact that both parties have Congress as their main rival in their respective political battlefields. The TRS sources also opine that KCR, who is conversant in both Hindi and English, can prove to be a bridge between Modi and the regional allies, especially in the south and eastern India. This is precisely the reason why TRS is canvassing for the victory of YSR Congress in Andhra Pradesh.

All this will fructify only if KCR could win maximum seats from the state. If everything happens as per the expectations of KCR, he is expected to move to national politics, leaving the state to his son KT Rama Rao who has already been made the working president of the party, a move indicating the succession plan.

If one goes by the voting patterns of Assembly elections, TRS will easily win 14 seats and can also win the remaining two seats if extra efforts are put in. The Congress-led Opposition could establish a marginal lead over TRS in Khammam and Mahabubabad Lok Sabha segments. The TRS had one to three lakh vote margin in the remaining 14 Lok Sabha segments, leaving Hyderabad to MIM.

In fact, many developments subsequent to the Assembly election have further consolidated the TRS' position. The full swing Operation Aakarsh has rendered a body blow to the Opposition. The Congress-led Praja Kutami is in complete shambles. Besides, the defections from Congress has crippled the morale of the grand old party.

The TRS specifically targeted the Khammam district for weakening the Opposition, aiming at the Lok Sabha elections. However, the Congress intends to give a serious fight by fielding party seniors in the Lok Sabha race. But the party lost precious time since Assembly polls to change the political narrative for the Lok Sabha polls.

Congress would have certainly benefited if it succeeded in converting the poll battle into one of Modi versus Rahul Gandhi. Barring occasional statements to this effect, Congress did precious little to change the poll narrative. Meanwhile, sensing the dangers of polarisation for and against Modi, KCR is targeting BJP in a bid to create a perception that he is not with the saffron brigade, though he is fighting a straight war with the Congress.

Stating his political narrative for Lok Sabha elections, KCR  addressing public meetings at Karimnagar and Nizamabad  said, Both Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi are the same. They are degrading their nation by calling each other names everyday. They wont bother about the poor and the structural changes. We have to drive away incompetent people like Modi and Rahul Gandhi. A federal front is the need of the hour, which has the share of regional parties. I will play an important role and Telangana must lead the nation," he added.

KCR further asserted, "Our strength is not just 16 seats, we are talking to other parties and we are stronger than 150. We are getting things ready for a federal front government at the Centre...Not everything can be disclosed now.

KCR's talk of a national party and non-BJP, non-Congress federal front is part of such an electoral strategy. Besides, the TRS is trying to convert this election also into a referendum on KCR. This would certainly help TRS as it did so in Assembly elections.Lok Sabha Election 2019 Tracker LIVE updates: Speaking at Akhnoor in Jammu, Narendra Modi attacked the Opposition grand alliance, and said that the 'mahamilawati' leaders are bound to face 'mahagirawat' (great destruction).

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BJP chief Amit Shah will address rallies at Koliabor and Teok in Assam's Jorhat district in a daylong trip to the state.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to begin active election campaigning on Thursday with rallies in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, Rudrapur in Uttarakhand and Jammu in Jammu and Kashmir. All three seats go to polls in the first phase on 11 April.

Congress chief Rahul Gandhi will have a busy day in Haryana with five roadshows in a single day, at Jagadhri, Radaur, Ladwa, Indri and Karnal in Haryana.

Newly anointed Congress general secretary for Uttar Pradesh, Priyanka Gandhi has said that she is open to contesting elections. Priyanka has been campaigning at Amethi and is scheduled to visit Ayodhya on Friday.

Bollywood actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha, who has been associated with BJP for about three decades, will join the Congress on Thursday and is likely to be fielded from Patna Sahib.

The development came a day after, Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy raised fears about possible raids on Congress and JD(S) functionaries in the state. He had claimed that CRPF personnel were brought from various parts of the country to carry out the raids in the state.

In a pre-dawn swoop today, Income Tax officials along with CRPF personnel carried out raids at the residences of Karnataka Minor Irrigation Minister CS Puttaraju and his nephew, reported News18.

In what is being considered a very youth-oriented poll plank, the SP will form a youth commission to help formulate policies.

Samajwadi Party will release its 2019 Lok Sabha election manifesto on Thursday. The party manifesto will focus on jobs for youth, reported News18.

Reports say the high command upset with the allocation of certain seats and some Congress leaders have suggested calling off the alliance. Rahul will have one-on-one meetings with senior Congress leaders.

Amidst reports that discontent is brewing between the Congress and its Bihar ally, the Rashtriya Janata Dal over seat-sharing, Rahul Gandhi will meet his party's Bihar unit to finalize alliance details.

The state government has also cancelled the transfer of the intelligence chief. Naidu has called the EC's decision "undemocratic and one-sided". The EC's orders follow a complaint filed by Telugu Desam Party's rival, YSR Congress Party, alleging that phones of the party's leaders are being tapped by top police officials in the state.

The Chandrababu Naidu government in Andhra Pradesh has filed a writ petition at the High Court over the Election Commission of India's orders to transfer a few top cops in the state including the state's intelligence chief. The hearing is on Thursday.

A wall collapsed at Jagan's rally in Mandapet town, killing a woman and injuring 20, while Naidu's road show in Ananthpur saw 20 people injured after a wall gave away.

In a strange and tragic coincidence, both Telugu Desam Party chief Chandrabu Naidu and YSRCP chief Jaganmohan Reddy's rallies on Wednesday saw serious accidents take place.

In the video, the BJP has alleged that the UPA regime had compromised on providing assistance to the Indian armed forces to make it easier for Vadra (referred to as jijaji) to get "commission".

BJP has released a new campaign video, this time aimed at Congress president Rahul Gandhi's brother-in-law Robert Vadra, under investigation by the Enforcement Directorate in a land scam.

"He (Rahul) has said whatever he felt like. I won't like to make any comment on it. He is just a kid. What will I say about it?" Mamata said.

She also refused to comment on Rahul's minimum income promise ahead of the Lok Sabha election.

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday dismissed Congress chief Rahul Gandhi's allegations against her government, saying "he is just a kid".

"All those deployed at such polling stations - police, election officers and other employees - will be women. These booths, an initiative towards gender equality and involving women's participation in the electoral process, will be called as 'Sakhi Matdan Kendras'," it said.

As per the Election Commission's (EC) directions to set up polling stations entirely managed by women, such booths will be set up in all 40 Lok Sabha seats of the state, a release issued by the election office here said.

An all-women polling booth will be set up in every Lok Sabha constituency of Maharashtra during the next month's polls in a bid to encourage more female voters to exercise their franchise.

Speaking to a private news channel, JD(S) leader Puttaraju said three teams of Income Tax officials and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel carried out raids at his Chinnakurli residence in Mandya and his nephew's house in Mysuru.

In a predawn swoop Thursday, Income Tax officials along with CRPF personnel carried out raids at the residences of Karnataka Minor Irrigation Minister CS Puttaraju and his nephew.

JD(S) leader Madhu Bangarappa said Karnataka CM HD Kumaraswamy had already "spoken" about this, because he got inputs from the intelligence department and questioned why BJP leaders' houses were left unscathed, reported ANI.

"This is out in the open through I-T raids. The constitutional post offer for I-T officer Balakrishna has helped the PM in his revenge game. It is highly deplorable to use government machinery, corrupt officials to harass opponents during election time," he said.

28 March, 2019 | HDK tears into BJP over raids on JD(S) minister's house, says I-T official was offered post as bribe

Reports say the Congress high command is upset with the allocation of certain seats and some Congress leaders have suggested calling off the alliance.

This comes amidst reports that discontent is brewing between the Congress and its Bihar ally, the Rashtriya Janata Dal over seat-sharing.

A meeting has begun at Congress chief Rahul Gandhi's residence between the party brass and its Bihar leaders.

He also touched upon the safety of women, the respect accorded by his government to idealogues Chaudhary Charan Singh and Deenbandhu Chhoturam, the allegedly false promises made by Indira Gandhi ('gareeb, gareeb hi rehe gaya') and the numerous schemes brought by his government.

There is little that Modi did not speak on, when it came to issues at the Meerut rally. The prime minister spun his full repertoire of rhetorics for repeated slams on the Congress, the SP-BSP alliance and critics of his government. He, however, did give a new spin to the old 'saabka saath, saabka vikas' slogan and instead said 'saabka saath, saabka hisaab.'

"They wanted to become heroes of Pakistan. Will you forgive these people?" he asked to resounding cheers.

"Uttarakhand has four holy dhams to which I wish to add a fifth dham, the sainik dham," said Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He, once again, asked the crowds if it was okay to question whether India had indeed done the Balakot air strikes.

28 March, 2019 | Will add fifth dham for sainiks to Uttarakhand's four dhams, says Modi

"If Modi ji is elected again we will ensure every infiltrator is removed from Assam," Amit Shah said at his Assam rally on Thursday. The BJP has run into choppy waters in Assam over the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, which has seen widespread protests, and a firm promise by the BJP chief is likely to help the party at this point.

Biju Janata Dal (BJD) has written to Chief Electoral Officer of Bhubaneswar demanding action against BJP for alleged violation of Model Code of Conduct 'for surrogate advertising through a TV serial broadcast on a TV channel in which the characters talk about Atal Pension Yojana, ANI reported.

"There are two sets of parties today. Those who are neutral and those who are anti-BJP. I am anti-BJP, while Naveen Patnaik, according to me, is neutral. On 23 May (counting day), there will be a new prime minister. I can assure that."

"Jaganmohan is a criminal. He is a cheat. BJP is supporting Jagan as they feel he will support them post polls. There is a hidden nexus between them. Both TRS and YSRCP are with the BJP... I am not in the race to be the next prime minister, but we will all sit together post polls and work out a solution. Democratic compulsions far bigger today than political compulsions.

28 March, 2019 | I'm not in race to be PM, says Chandrababu Naidu In an interview, TDP chief and Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu said, "I am not a contender for prime minister's post. I am being targeted by the BJP government through YSRCP leader Jaganmohan Reddy.

ANI quoted Kumaraswamy as saying, "I-T department should work independently, but it's working under the instructions of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. After the BJP came to power, it (the situation) has become like a dictatorship. Do you think the I-T director in Bengaluru is innocent? I also have lot of records."

Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy, his deputy G Parameshwara, and other senior Congress-JD(S) coalition leaders are currently protesting outside I-T office against raids at residence of Karnataka minister CS Puttaraju in Mandya.

He further said, "I was once travelling in a bus while your vehicle was passing by. There was a traffic jam, so I got off the bus thinking maybe you would do a dance number or two to clear the jam."

The National Commission for Women has issued a notice to Samajwadi Party leader Firoz Khan over his remark on BJP Rampur candidate Jaya Prada. Khan on Thursday stirred a controversy by saying people of Rampur will get entertained in the ensuing polls, where Samajwadi Party's Azam Khan will face BJP's newly-inducted member Jaya Prada. "Evenings in Rampur will now become more vibrant during elections. Azam Khan has done enough for the people of Rampur, so they will surely vote for him. But they will leave no stone unturned in getting entertained during this one-off opportunity."

Asserting that the NDA government has worked for development in every field, Shah said, "To save Assam, infiltration has to be stopped and the Congress cannot do this work."

Addressing a rally in Assam's Teok, BJP chief Amit Shah claimed that he is hearing only slogans for Narendra Modi government's re-election these days. "Wherever I go, I'm hearing the same slogan: "Fir ek bar, Modi Sarkar (Once again, Modi government)."

Attacking the Opposition grand alliance, he said, "The Opposition that doesn't have a prime minister candidate or a policy can't develop the country or work for the welfare of the people."

" Former prime minister Manmohan Singh was an MP for 20 years from Assam. However, the Congress failed to do any development for the region," Amit Shah said while addressing a rally in Assam's Teok.

According to reports, an alliance between the Congress and the NCP is unlikely in Gujarat. The NCP also released its list of star campaigners on Thursday, featuring prominent names like Sharad Pawar, Ajit Pawar, and Supriya Sule..

According to ANI, BJP's Kozhikode Lok Sabha candidate Prakash Babu has been remanded to 14-day judicial custody by a Pathanamthitta court in connection with the violence in Sabarimala.

According to Samajwadi Party's new list, Nasir Qureshi will contest from Moradabad, Bhagwat Sharan Gangwar from Bareily,Pooja Pal from Unnao, Shyam Sunder Yadav from Jhansi and Nathuni Prasad Kushwaha from Kushinagar.

Lalu Prasad's son Tej Pratap Yadav tweeted that he has resigned as the chief of RJD's student wing.

Addressing a rally in Assam's Teok, BJP chief Amir Shah said, "Din mein to Congress ke Gogoi ji aur Ajmal (AIUDF Cheif Badruddin Ajmal) aamne saamne chunaav ladte hain. Magar jab raat hoti hai, dono ke beech mein ilu-ilu chalu ho jata hai (During the day, Congress' Tarun Gogoi and AIUDF's Badruddin Ajmal fiercely contest elections, but in the night, the two share a friendly relationship)."

Addressing a rally in Jammu, Narendra Modi said that it was an honour that he got to visit Jammu on the first day of his election campaign and that he was able to seek blessings of Vaishno Devi.

He further said, "After the strike in Balakot, the Congress leaders have been speaking such things that are not in the favour of the country. How can an individual find anything acceptable that is being lauded in Pakistan. They're asking for proof of the attacks, " he said.

peaking at Akhnoor in Jammu, Narendra Modi lashed out at the Congress for demanding proof of Balakot air strike. "Amid the call to end terrorism, what has happened to the Congress and its allies. I simply don't understand that is it the same Congress which belong to Sardar Patel. I don't understand is it the same Congress in which Subhash Chandra Bose had dreamed of an independent India? My soul says it's not the same Congress. What is your opinion?"

Narendra Modi accused the Congress, National Conference and PDP of praising the people who promote terrorism in the Valley. "They have a problem in saying 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' , but they are proud to hail those who promote terrorism," he said. He also blamed the three parties of stalling developmental projects in state.

Speaking at Akhnoor in Jammu, Narendra Modi attacked the Opposition grand alliance. "If the people of Jammu have faith in chowkidaar, then note it down that the mahamilawati leaders are bound to face mahagirawat (great destruction)," he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, "The guru of Congress naamdar (Sam Pitroda, Rahul Gandhi's media advisor), who accompanies Rahul on foreign trips, gave clean-chit to terrorists and Pakistan on television. Jab guru hi aisa hoga to chele kaise honge, aur chele ke sathi kaise honge. (When the guru is of such kind, then how would his followers be?)"

Speaking on development, Narendra Modi said, "Your chowkidaar (watchman) is committed to ensuring the fulfillment of the five points of development: Education for children, income for youth, medicine for the old, irrigation for farmers, and voice of the public."

In Dhaurahra, Congress workers staged a demostraction demnanding Jitin Prasad be giving ticket from the constituency. Prasada responded to it, saying, "I am a disciplined soldier of the party and will do what I am told."

Samajwadi Party releases another list of candidates. Nasir Qureshi to contest from Moradabad, Bhagwat Sharan Gangwar from Bareily,Pooja Pal from Unnao, Shyam Sunder Yadav from Jhansi and Nathuni Prasad Kushwaha from Kushinagar. #LokSabhaElections2019 pic.twitter.com/OJNTRjtMA4

According to Samajwadi Party's new list, Nasir Qureshi will contest from Moradabad, Bhagwat Sharan Gangwar from Bareily,Pooja Pal from Unnao, Shyam Sunder Yadav from Jhansi and Nathuni Prasad Kushwaha from Kushinagar.

Lalu Prasad's son Tej Pratap Yadav tweeted that he has resigned as the chief of RJD's student wing.

Addressing a rally in Assam's Teok, BJP chief Amir Shah said, "Din mein to Congress ke Gogoi ji aur Ajmal (AIUDF Cheif Badruddin Ajmal) aamne saamne chunaav ladte hain. Magar jab raat hoti hai, dono ke beech mein ilu-ilu chalu ho jata hai (During the day, Congress' Tarun Gogoi and AIUDF's Badruddin Ajmal fiercely contest elections, but in the night, the two share a friendly relationship)."

Addressing a rally in Jammu, Narendra Modi said that it was an honour that he got to visit Jammu on the first day of his election campaign and that he was able to seek blessings of Vaishno Devi.

He further said, "After the strike in Balakot, the Congress leaders have been speaking such things that are not in the favour of the country. How can an individual find anything acceptable that is being lauded in Pakistan. They're asking for proof of the attacks, " he said.

peaking at Akhnoor in Jammu, Narendra Modi lashed out at the Congress for demanding proof of Balakot air strike. "Amid the call to end terrorism, what has happened to the Congress and its allies. I simply don't understand that is it the same Congress which belong to Sardar Patel. I don't understand is it the same Congress in which Subhash Chandra Bose had dreamed of an independent India? My soul says it's not the same Congress. What is your opinion?"

Narendra Modi accused the Congress, National Conference and PDP of praising the people who promote terrorism in the Valley. "They have a problem in saying 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' , but they are proud to hail those who promote terrorism," he said. He also blamed the three parties of stalling developmental projects in state.

Speaking at Akhnoor in Jammu, Narendra Modi attacked the Opposition grand alliance. "If the people of Jammu have faith in chowkidaar, then note it down that the mahamilawati leaders are bound to face mahagirawat (great destruction)," he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, "The guru of Congress naamdar (Sam Pitroda, Rahul Gandhi's media advisor), who accompanies Rahul on foreign trips, gave clean-chit to terrorists and Pakistan on television. Jab guru hi aisa hoga to chele kaise honge, aur chele ke sathi kaise honge. (When the guru is of such kind, then how would his followers be?)"

Speaking on development, Narendra Modi said, "Your chowkidaar (watchman) is committed to ensuring the fulfillment of the five points of development: Education for children, income for youth, medicine for the old, irrigation for farmers, and voice of the public."

Dhaurahra: Congress workers stage demonstration demanding Jitin Prasada be given ticket from the constituency. Prasada says 'I am a disciplined soldier of the party and will do what I am told' pic.twitter.com/FYfHXOHUFl

In Dhaurahra, Congress workers staged a demostraction demnanding Jitin Prasad be giving ticket from the constituency. Prasada responded to it, saying, "I am a disciplined soldier of the party and will do what I am told."





Lok Sabha election 2019; pre-poll trends LATEST updates: Speaking at Akhnoor in Jammu, Narendra Modi attacked the Opposition grand alliance, and said that the "mahamilawati" leaders are bound to face "mahagirawat" (great destruction).

He also lashed out at the Congress for demanding proof of Balakot air strike. "After the strike in Balakot, the Congress leaders have been speaking such things that are not in the favour of the country. How can an individual find anything acceptable that is being lauded in Pakistan. They're asking for proof of the attacks, " he said.

Addressing a rally in Assam's Teok, BJP chief Amit Shah said, "Former prime minister Manmohan Singh was an MP for 20 years from Assam. However, the Congress failed to do any development for the region."

In an interview, TDP chief and Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu said, "I am not a contender for prime minister's post. I am being targeted by the BJP government through YSRCP leader Jaganmohan Reddy." However, he assured that on 23 May  which is the counting day, India will have a new prime minister.

Speaking at a campaign rally at Kaliabor in Assam, BJP chief Amit Shah on Thursday recited a list of the Narendra Modi government's achievements and vowed that if Modi is elected again, the BJP would ensure every infiltrator is removed from Assam.

On a day when it was widely expected that Shatrughan Sinha will join the Congress, it was announced by the party that he will join the party on 6 April. The actor-turned-politician has, however, met Congress chief Rahul Gandhi.

In a shorter speech than his Meerut one, Modi made it clear in Rudrapur that he is willing to rake up the Balakot air strikes in order to strike the nationalism chord when and where required. This was the second rally where he has called Rahul Gandhi "Pakistan's hero."

"The people of Uttarakhand have always been with me. This is a contribution which I never forget," he said. In the rally, he also highlighted the several measures taken by his government in the state.

PM Narendra Modi began the second of his three rallies of Thursday at Rudrapur in Uttarakhand by stressing that the Congress, which never thinks about the poor, sat on the Rafale deal for 10 years because they failed to make a profit out of it.

Modi uttered yet another invocation of the nation's Army in the beginning when he called Uttarakhand "the land of the brave, the land of sacrifices."

Reports have said that actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha who has been with the BJP for a very long time, is now headed to meet Congress chief Rahul Gandhi. The party has promised "good news" on the Sinha front soon, say reports.

Minutes after Modi had stopped speaking at his first campaign rally at Meerut, Congress communication in-charge Randeep Singh Surjewala said in a press conference that the prime minister should apologise for comparing three political parties of the country to alcohol with his "sarab" jibe and also for "mocking the poor of the country."

"It is unfortunate that when we speak of NYAY, Mr Modi mocks the poor of the country. Previously he had mocked the poor of the country during demonetisation, this shows his true character," Surjewala said.

There is little that Modi did not speak on, when it came to issues at the Meerut rally. He combined the 'sa' of Samajwadi Party, the 'ra' of RLD and the 'B' of Bahujan Samaj Party together form 'SARAB'. The acronym, it is understood, stands for alcohol.

The prime minister spun his full repertoire of rhetorics for repeated slams on the Congress, the SP-BSP alliance and critics of his government. He, however, did give a new spin to the old 'saabka saath, saabka vikas' slogan and instead said 'saabka saath, saabka hisaab.'

He also touched upon the safety of women, the respect accorded by his government to idealogues Chaudhary Charan Singh and Deenbandhu Chhoturam, the allegedly false promises made by Indira Gandhi ('gareeb, gareeb hi rehe gaya') and the numerous schemes brought by his government.

"If someone goes to the theatre to see a play, he or she expects drama, new sets. Sets is a common term in theatre. Some people who were confused, thought I meant theatre 'sets' when I said 'A-SAT'," Modi said, taking a dig at Rahul Gandhi over the latter's World Theatre Day snub of the PM's Mission Shakti announcement yesterday.

India has decided, phir ek baar Modi sarkar, Narendra Modi said at his first rally in Meerut on Thursday. He kicked off the rally by remembering the Chaudhary Charan Singh and saying that he has followed in the leader's footsteps in prioritising farmers over all others.

Speaking before Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Meerut, UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath repeated the selfsame chant of the BJP, 'Modi hain toh mumkin hain' and said Modi has been synonymous to development by now.

Fresh off the controversial speech on Mission Shakti  which has also attracted ECs scrutiny  after India's launch of an anti-satellite weapon on Wednesday, the prime minister will speak in rallies at Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, Rudrapur in Uttarakhand and Jammu in Jammu and Kashmir.

A meeting has begun at Congress chief Rahul Gandhi's residence between the party brass and its Bihar leaders. This comes amidst reports that discontent is brewing between the Congress and its Bihar ally, the Rashtriya Janata Dal over seat-sharing.

Reports say the Congress high command is upset with the allocation of certain seats and some Congress leaders have suggested calling off the alliance.

Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy called the raids of JD(S) minister Putturaju's house the "real surgical strike".

"This is out in the open through I-T raids. The constitutional post offer for I-T officer Balakrishna has helped the PM in his revenge game. It is highly deplorable to use government machinery, corrupt officials to harass opponents during election time," he said.

In a predawn swoop Thursday, Income Tax officials along with CRPF personnel carried out raids at the residences of Karnataka Minor Irrigation Minister CS Puttaraju and his nephew.

Speaking to a private news channel, JD(S) leader Puttaraju said three teams of Income Tax officials and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel carried out raids at his Chinnakurli residence in Mandya and his nephew's house in Mysuru.

The development came a day after, Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy raised fears about possible raids on Congress and JD(S) functionaries in the state.

Thursday promises to be a high octane day as far as developments in the road to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections is concerned. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hit the election trail for the first time since the dates of the election were announced on 10 March.

Modi's speech has also invited censure from Opposition parties which have questioned the timing of the speech and also alleged that Modi has chosen to dramatise the achievement for polltime gains.

TMC chief and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had said that the TMC will approach Election Commission to file a complaint on the speech.

It is, however, up to the Election Commission to interpret it in that manner. Modi did not explicitly turn the speech into a poll pitch, but the BJP leadership did pat Modis back for the success of the mission. The partys social media team has also been strategically pointing out that Modi deserved credit for having the courage to give a go-ahead for the project, something they allege that the previous UPA government stopped short of. The poll code does bar the ruling party from using the governments achievements in a way to further political interests.

For now, the Election Commission has sought an active transcript of Modis speech from the government. A committee headed by the Deputy Election Commissioner Sandeep Saxena will examine the prime minister's address on Mission Shakti for possible Model Code of Conduct violation.

BJP chief Amit Shah, meanwhile, will address rallies at Koliabor and Teok in Assam's Jorhat district in a daylong trip to the state.

In Bihar, the BJP will be losing its longtime member, actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha, to the Congress on Thursday. Sinha is likely to be fielded from the Patna Sahib seat in Bihar, which he currently holds.

Although not all is okay within the Congress either in the state of Bihar. Amidst reports that discontent is brewing between the Congress and its Bihar ally, the Rashtriya Janata Dal over seat-sharing, Rahul Gandhi will meet his party's Bihar unit to finalize alliance details.

Reports say the Congress high command is upset with the allocation of certain seats and some Congress leaders have suggested calling off the alliance. Rahul's Bihar meeting will come on a day when he will hold a whopping five roadshows at Jagadhri, Radaur, Ladwa, Indri and Karnal in Haryana.

Meanwhile in Uttar Pradesh, Rahul's sister, newly anointed Congress general secretary for Uttar Pradesh, Priyanka Gandhi, indicated on Wednesday that she would be open to contesting the 2019 election if the party wants her to.

Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party will release its 2019 Lok Sabha election manifesto on Thursday. The party manifesto will focus on jobs and in what is being considered a very youth-oriented poll plank, the Samajwadi Party will form a youth commission to help formulate policies.

In Karnataka, meanwhile, Putturaju claimed that CRPF personnel were brought from various parts of the country to carry out the raids.

"Three teams of I-T officials and CRPF soldiers comprising eight soldiers carried out raids at my Chinnakurli residence in Mandya and my nephew's residence in Mysuru," Puttaraju told a channel. The minister said he was not afraid of the raids and instead, it had instilled confidence in him.

Lok Sabha elections will begin on 11 April and continue for over a month till 19 May across seven phases, followed by counting of votes on 23 May, the Election Commission announced Sunday, kick-starting a mega electoral battle where the BJP will pitch for a re-election of the Modi government amid the Opposition's efforts for a united fight to unseat it.

The polling will be held on 11 April, 18 April, 23 April, 29 April, 6 May, 12 May and 19 May for 543 Lok Sabha seats across the country in which nearly 90 crore voters would be eligible to vote, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora said. Assembly elections will also be held in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Odisha simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls, the CEC said.Should Congress president Rahul Gandhi contest from a second Lok Sabha seat apart from his traditional bailiwick of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh?

Should Congress president Rahul Gandhi contest from a second Lok Sabha seat apart from his traditional bailiwick of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh? Or will the Congress president sit on his high horse and brave it out only in Amethi?

Union minister Smriti Irani will take on Rahul in Amethi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will pull out all stops to wrest the seat from him. Irani cannot be trifled with, as the 2014 election result showed. Rahul won by over three lakh votes in 2009, when Irani wasn't his rival. Then, everything changed in 2014, when she polled over three lakh votes to slash Rahul's winning margin to just over a lakh votes.

Despite Amethi's voters being loyal to the Gandhi family for over three and a half decades, the BJP now holds four out of the five Assembly seats that are part of this Lok Sabha constituency. This, and Irani's ability to take the fight into the rival's camp should be deeply worrying for the Congress.

Rahul losing Amethi will be a disaster not just for him but also for the future of the Congress and its allies who, in reality, are not many, given that the party has failed to seal seat-sharing pacts with its friends. If the Congress chief fails to make it to the 17th Lok Sabha and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance retains power, Rahul's humiliation will be complete.

To avoid the risk of an adverse verdict in Amethi, the Congress president will do well to contest a second seat. His party unit in Karnataka has formally invited him to contest a seat of his choice in the state.

Rahul contesting from a seat in the south makes good political sense. For one, the Congress shares power in Karnataka with the Janata Dal (Secular). And with the two parties finalising a seat-sharing deal, the chances of a safe victory for Rahul are bright.

The two parties have also announced a mega rally in Karnataka at the end of March, in which both Rahul and former prime minister HD Deve Gowda of the JD(S) will participate. Leaders of the two parties believe the event will become a big morale booster for the alliance not just in Karnataka but neighbouring states as well.

Second, a prime ministerial candidate contesting from the state, Congress leaders believe, will rub off positively on the chances of other candidates from the party.

Third, for a leader hailing from the north to contest from the south makes for a good outreach strategy. It will help the Congress drive home the point that their leader has a pan-India outlook, as opposed to Narendra Modi, who in 2014 opted to contest from two seats, neither of which was in the south.

Congress leaders, led by former chief minister Siddaramaiah, recall how Karnataka has been a happy hunting ground for the Gandhis ever since 1978, when Indira Gandhi won a remarkable by-election from Chikmagalur against the Janata Party's candidate Veerendra Patil. That victory paved the way for her resurgence and the Congress' sweep in the 1980 general elections.

Rahul's mother Sonia Gandhi too won from another seat in Karnataka in 1999, when she scored over BJP's Sushma Swaraj in Bellary. It is another matter that Sonia chose to give up Bellary in favour of her traditional Rae Bareli. Rahul may do the same if he wins from Karnataka.

Making the appeal to Rahul, Siddaramaiah tweeted: "Karnataka has always supported & encouraged @INCIndia leaders. It has been proved in case of Smt.Indira Gandhi & Smt. Sonia Gandhi. We also want our next Prime Minister @RahulGandhi to contest from Karnataka & herald new developmental paradigm (sic)."

Siddaramaiah has suggested that Rahul contest from Mysuru, the former chief minister's home district.

There has been pressure on Rahul to contest from Tamil Nadu too, but if he chooses to stand from a second seat, he will most likely do so from Karnataka, where there are obvious advantages.

We haven't heard from Rahul yet, but the clamour for him to contest from the south has led to sniggers from the BJP. Is Rahul running scared from Amethi, they ask. Trolling on those lines will only intensify if Rahul indeed contests from a second seat.

Interestingly, rumours were rife on Friday that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would contest from Bangalore South but state BJP chief BS Yeddyurappa clarified that no such decision has been taken. A BJP stronghold, Bangalore South was the late Ananth Kumar's constituency. His widow Tejaswini is tipped to contest from there but surprisingly, the party left out the seat from Thursday's list of candidates, leading to speculation that Modi may contest from here.The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) released its first list of 184 candidates for the Lok Sabha election on Thursday, and the attention is focused on the 'big wigs' who have been retained to make good on the party's ticket.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) released its first list of 184 candidates for the Lok Sabha election on Thursday and the attention is focused on the 'big wigs' who have been retained to make good on the party's ticket. Records show, however, that at least 35 of 78 BJP leaders who have been re-nominated have criminal cases filed against them.

The 35 BJP candidates  19 percent of the party's total candidates for the upcoming General Elections  declared criminal cases against them in 2014. The remaining 106 candidates could not be analysed in data compiled by this News18 report due to the lack of nomination papers which also include self-sworn affidavits declaring the number of criminal cases against them. However, the report said, that the number of candidates with criminal cases against them is "expected to rise" after the rest of the candidates file their nominations.

Myneta.info, a website run by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), compiles all available information about candidates and politicians across the political spectrum in India. According to records released by the portal, the BJP candidate with the highest number of criminal cases till 2014 is Hansraj Gangaram Ahir from the Chandrapur constituency in Maharashtra, with a total of 11 cases. A member of the 16th Lok Sabha, Ahir is currently holding the post of Minister of State for Home Affairs.

Following Ahir with 10 cases against him, is Odisha's Pratap Sarangi from the Balasore constituency, reports said. A BJP stalwart and Union minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari  who has been retained for the Nagpur Lok Sabha constituency  is also in the list with five criminal cases against him till 2014.

In 2014, ADR analysed records of members of the 16th Lok Sabha and found that BJP MPs topped the list with at least 98 of the total 282 winning candidates had criminal cases against them. "A candidate with a criminal background was almost twice more likely to win than a candidate with no criminal background. The winning chances of a candidate with criminal background were 13 percent, while those of a candidate with no criminal background were 5 percent."

EC issues new instructions for candidates with criminal records

In the outgoing Parliament, there were 186 lawmakers facing criminal charges or being investigated  some 112 of them involving serious cases such as murder or rape. This time, candidates under a legal cloud have to issue three newspaper and TV advertisements detailing any charges they face in the constituency where they're standing.

Candidates have to declare income and tax returns for the past five years  the information is made public before the vote  as well as submit details any of the assets and liabilities in their name abroad.

Supreme Court gives list of directions to curb 'problem' of criminal netas

In September 2018, the Supreme Court, headed by then-Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra passed a verdict on the disqualification of MPs and MLAs against whom a chargesheet has been filed, and said that the apex court is "not in a position" to order the disqualification of 'tainted' politicians. However, the bench also issued a list of directions to curb the problem.

Asserting that corruption has become a "national economic terror", the apex court held that each candidate shall declare his/her criminal antecedents to the Election Commission before contesting an election.

A 5-judge Constitution bench said that citizens have a right to be informed about the antecedents of their candidates. The verdict was unanimously passed by a bench comprising Justices RF Nariman, AM Khanwilkar, DY Chandrachud, and Indu Malhotra. The bench also said that the criminalisation of politics of the largest democracy is "unsettling".

The bench said that political parties are obligated to put all the information about their candidates on their websites. It asked the legislature to consider framing a law to ensure decriminalisation of politics. The bench said that informed choice is the cornerstone of democracy.

The apex court put the onus on the Parliament, to decide on action against politicians with criminal cases pending against them. The bench said "decriminalisation" of politics "is important" but that the Court cannot "legislate on behalf of the Parliament". The bench also said that a chargesheet against a politician is not enough grounds for disqualification.

The apex court favoured wider publicity, through print and electronic media about the antecedents of candidates affiliated to political parties.

However, in January 2019, the Supreme Court dismissed a public interest litigation seeking a direction to the Election Commission to not allow any member of a political party with criminal antecedent to contest elections.

Narendra Modi to fight 2019 Lok Sabha election from Varanasi, Amit Shah from Gandhinagar

The party with the largest majority in the Lower House of Parliament released its first list of candidates after hectic meetings of its central election committee (CEC). Prime Minister Narendra Modi will contest the Lok Sabha election from Varanasi, the seat he represents in Parliament, and BJP president Amit Shah will fight from Gandhinagar in place of veteran leader LK Advani, party leader JP Nadda said.

BJP heavyweights such as Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari have been fielded from Lucknow and Nagpur seats respectively with the party reposing its faith in almost all Union ministers for the constituencies they had won in 2014.

Union minister Smriti Irani will reprise her electoral battle with Congress president Rahul Gandhi from Amethi, where she had lost to him in 2014 but was seen to have put up a spirited fight.

The biggest surprise in the first list is dropping of Advani, the 91-year-old party stalwart who called the shots in the BJP for decades before Modi's rise eclipsed him, from Gandhinagar and Shah's decision to make his Lok Sabha poll debut from the constituency. Advani has been representing Gandhinagar in the Lok Sabha since 1998 and Shah was incidentally his poll manager in initial elections.

The BJP believes that Shah's candidature will signal the party president's intent to lead from the front and also energise workers, especially in Gujarat where it is facing a resurgent Congress. It is also now unlikely that Modi will fight from the state. He had won from Vadodara in 2014 as well but resigned from there and kept Varanasi.

With inputs from agenciesSocial media has made it a lot easier for political parties to get out their message to more voters. But nowadays, Indias masses want politics served with more pizzazz.

Pune: Ganesh Bhalerao is a cartoonist hoping to go viral in the battle to secure Prime Minister Narendra Modis re-election when India votes over the next two months.

Hired by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to find amusing ways to lionise Modi or lampoon Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, Bhalerao is a social media warrior in an election campaign being fought online as never before.

Political parties are realising the importance of cartoons as they elicit a huge response, the 29-year-old former art teacher told Reuters while feverishly sketching a piece glorifying the Modi government for ordering Indias recent air strikes against Pakistan.

Cartoons posted on BJP-run Facebook pages, Twitter handles and WhatsApp groups are shared hundreds of times and reach millions, Bhalerao told Reuters as he worked in his apartment in the western city of Pune.

A cartoon conveys the message of a 500-1,000 word article in just a minute, he said.

The scale of elections in India means voting is staggered, with the first regions going to vote on 11 April, and the count to be completed on 23 May.

Each day Bhalerao reads the local newspapers, watches the television news, and checks his WhatsApp messages, seeking ideas for an image or issue that might resonate with supporters of the Hindu nationalist BJP.

Being a Modi supporter himself makes it easier.

Like the BJP, Rahuls Congress and other rivals have their own armies of artists, video editors and journalists to create online content for the social media war.

Hired for the campaign season, they get paid a few hundred dollars a month, according to half a dozen party workers who spoke with Reuters.

Social media has made it a lot easier for political parties to get out their message to more voters. But nowadays, Indias masses want politics served with more pizzazz.

Nearly two-thirds of the population is under 35 years old. Most have little time or patience to attend political rallies, or wade through turgid party manifestoes.

The larger audience is now more inclined to short videos, cartoons and visuals, Diptansu Chaudhury told Reuters in Kolkata, where he heads the IT wing of the Trinamool Congress, a powerful regional party in West Bengal.

Limited oversight

India is by far the worlds biggest democracy, but most of its 1.3 billion population belong to lower income groups. And, at a time when more mature democracies than Indias are grappling with the impact of social media, there are concerns about the electorates susceptibility to false messages spread online.

As more than two-thirds of Indians live in rural areas, political parties are trying to extend their social media reach through regional languages, to go beyond urban areas where Hindi and English are more commonly spoken.

When Modis BJP won a landslide victory in 2014, social media had not become as pervasive as it is today. Data plans were expensive and pricey smartphones were unaffordable for far more people.

Now there are more than 400 million smartphones users and consumers are able to access nearly 50 gigabytes of data for as little as $3 per month.

It all helps explain why social media platforms like Facebook, its messenger WhatsApp and micro-blogging site Twitter have become such fierce political battlegrounds.

In 2014, parties spent less than half a million dollars on digital advertising, but this time round, it is likely to be closer to $26 million, according to a top media and marketing firm, which did not want to be named.

The Election Commission of India has asked candidates to report their spending on social media, and it also requires them to seek approval for advertisements, but such rules can be bypassed by the use of proxies.

The Model Code of Conduct, which prohibits political campaigning 48 hours before voting in any area, will apply for online campaigns, too, the commission said earlier this month.

But the new rule is unlikely to stop thousands of party workers from spreading messages on social media platforms.

Putting a cut-off on campaigning doesnt have any effect anymore, as the commission is unable to control what is posted online, according to Nikhil Pahwa, digital rights activist and editor of MediaNama, a Delhi-based publication.

It just doesnt know how to deal with the idea of content being available online in perpetuity, Pahwa said.Even though drug problem was the biggest election issue when Punjab voted a new assembly in 2017, the state continues to be in the grip of addiction

It was a news report of yet another drug bust and arrest that Punjab has got used to  and shrugged off  over the last few years. Saraj Singhs arrest in February, however, showed how deep the drug problem ran and how political patronage was feeding the menace that has laid a whole generation to waste.

Saraj was declared an absconder is 2015 but managed to get elected the sarpanch of Valtoha in Tarn Taran district, and when he was nabbed, he was carrying 1.5kg of heroin.

Drugs run politics now, a volunteer with the state governments drug abuse prevention programme in the Tarn Taran district said. A clampdown on the drug trade is impossible because of the give-and-take relationship between the dealers and politicians, he said, on condition of anonymity.

According to the activist, Saraj was considered close to the Shiromani Akali Dal but was also photographed with Congresss Amarinder Singh at an election rally.

The drug problem was the biggest election issue when Punjab voted a new assembly in 2017. I will break the back of the drugs menace within four weeks of coming to power, Amarinder had thundered at an election rally.

Two years after taking over as the chief minister, Amarinder is accused of failing to fulfil the promise.

Drugs deaths are on the rise. Fifty-six people died of overdose in 2018-19 against 11 in 2017-18, health minister Brahm Mohindra said recently. Amritsar reported 11 deaths, the highest in the state, followed by nine in Tarn Taran.

Swayed by Amarinders pledge, the family of a 30-year-old recovering addict in Tarn Taran switched loyalties from SAD to the Congress. Several others, too, voted the Congress in the hope of seeing an end to the drug problem.

The government says it has taken strong measures under its Comprehensive Action Against Drug Abuse policy. It has set up de-addiction and opioid substitution therapy centres, where treatment is free.

Activists say drugs are easily available. Chitta, variously described as heroin or a heroin-based concoction called so for its white colour, poppy husk, opium and over-the-counter medicines are the substances of abuse.

Farm debt coupled with limited job avenues have created an atmosphere of despair, providing a ready market for drugs, activists and academics say. A government of India-sponsored Punjab Opioid Dependence Survey of 2015 estimated the number of opioid users in Punjab at 2,32,856 or higher.

Drug abuse was a symptom of withdrawal from hopeful life and the outcome of marginalisation of the youth, said Jagroop Sekhon of Amritsars Guru Nanak Dev University.

The 30-year-old recovering addict from Tarn Taran took to drugs six years ago as he couldnt find a job after graduating in pharmacology.

Drugs were easy to come by then. The proliferation of the trade coinciding with the second successive term for SAD, 2012 to 2017, hasnt gone unnoticed. Drugs are a gift of the Akalis is the refrain in the border villages.

Sekhon believes SADs victory emboldened dealers it patronised. They thought they could continue, unhindered, he said. There are also concerns over the effectiveness of measures taken to fight drug abuse.

To prevent spread of HIV through shared syringes, the National Aids Control Organisation has set up opioid substitution therapy centres, providing a free and legal alternative addiction: bupenoprofen. The tablets are crushed and administered by health workers.

The pharma graduate is registered with one such facility. But there are now addicts who began their drug abuse with this, he said.

At another facility in Tarn Tarans civil hospital, dozens of men wait for their bupenoprofen fix. More than 600 addicts are given the pills, up to four times a day, every day. Eventually, the dose is tapered off.The Mulayam Singh Yadav clan and Ajit Singhs RLD have both gone in for partnerships as the old order changes and voter expectations rise. Lineage does help young politicians get a leg past the door, but daddy alone cannot get them elected

Elegant classical columns, Indo-Saracenic domes, latticed balconies, turrets: the shining white home stands in the middle of lush wheat fields, a mansion born from mud. Nearby, theres a guest house, a sprawling office complex, and a state-of-the-art stadium. Few of those driving down the spanking-new Yamuna Expressway past the town of Karhal even notice the village of Saifai, home to just 7,000 people. Yet, the white house is the sun at the centre of a universe of power.

From its rooms have emerged no less than 14 political careers: brothers, nephews, cousins and daughters-in-law of Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, as well as his son, former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh.

In an election cast as a contest between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi, along with his sister Priyanka Gandhithe humble chaiwalla against the scions of the great Nehru clanthis house holds the clues to understanding what political dynasties really mean to Indian democracy.

From the figures, it is clear that the fruit of the family tree plays a key role in Indian politics. In the 2014 Lok Sabha, the scholar Kanchan Chandra records, 22% of the Members of Parliament were the children of MPsdown from 30% in 2009, but about the same as in 2004. Even though Prime Minister Modi has been critical of privilege, almost a quarter of his Cabinet24%is made up of dynasts.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha, 69% of the 33 MPs not yet 40 years old were dynastsevidence that the shade of great trees is making it increasingly hard for new seeds to sprout. Fifteen per cent of all BJP MPs came from dynasties in 2014, to the Congress 47.73% and the Samajwadi Partys 80%.

But then, theres also these, perhaps-surprising, facts.

First, dynasts arent winning easily: in 2009, children from political dynasties had average winning margins of only 2 percentage points higher than their peers, and the gap has been declining, Chandra has shown. And in both the 2004 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the dynastys children were shown to be no more likely to win than those without pedigree.

Are Indias great political dynasties headed, then, towards demise?

From his cot in the Yadav familys cattle shelter, Abhayram SinghMulayams brother and father of another MP, Dharmendra Singh Yadav, who represents Badaunwatched his workers milk buffaloes and pour the frothy liquid into clattering steel buckets. Everybody is in their constituencies, he says, but theyll return on Holi, to celebrate with the entire village.

Dharmendra is contesting again from Badaun, while Mulayam, despite fading health, will fight from Mainpuri, the constituency in which Saifai falls. Tejpratap Singh Yadav, who is the Mainpuri MP, and assorted relatives are also likely to be accommodated.

The capable ones in the family get to join politics, says Abhayram, defending his party against the charge, levelled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, of being a family and caste enterprise.

It isnt news that Indian politics is built around families: lineage counts for everything, in everything  from medicine and law, to Bollywood. Families generously expend their wealth, clout and caste affinities to ensure children inherit their parents empires.

Perhaps it isnt surprising then that despite that birth-based discrimination that dynastic politics embodies, it doesnt seem to carry a pejorative meaning in Saifai, particularly among the Yadav familys own caste.

Mainpuri, Etawah and Etah were jungles in my youth, recalls Abhayram. The roads were terrible, people could barely afford chickpeas and farmers had no manure, water or seeds. The old days were hungry days, but Netaji changed everything, says Granth Yadav, a Saifai farmer.

Such is Netajis appeal for Yadavs, who make up a 35% per cent of the population in the Eta-Etawah-Mainpuri belt, that other parties hardly put up a fight in Saifai.

Families like the Yadav clan, thus, see themselves as catching up in the empire-building game that the upper castes have long had a lead in.

From the outskirts of Saifai, though, signs of disaffection begin to become evident. Valmiki Dalits, living on the villages fringes, are reluctant to speakevidence of the hegemonic status of Saifais Yadavs, and the costs of taking them on. Its unwise to go against big people and powerful communities, says one elderly Valmiki. He will not, in line with this wisdom, give his name.

Local women are less reluctant to speak. Sarla Devi, a home-maker in the Valmiki neighbourhood, says running water and electricity havent reached her home: the Yadavs have it better. Modi is right, the Samajwadi Party belongs to the Yadavs, says her neighbour, Guddi.

Guddis support for the Prime Minister and his party, though, also comes with caveats. The Rs 2,000 that the Centre promised farmers made it to her bank account, but it doesnt amount to much, given that she has to care for her two daughters, two sons, bedridden husband and an aged grandmother.

For several days now, Guddi has been nursing a fever, but cannot visit the local hospital, built when the Samajwadi Party ruled the state. Medicines are in a short supply, so she treks to a doctor in Karhal. Antibiotics have been scarce these past two years, says Rajiv Shakya, a hospital worker. Earlier, this was not a problem.

Even the present government didnt provide us a house despite assurances, Guddi says. Theres never enough food at home; her daughters Lakshmi and Seva, 13 and 12, look much younger.

In spite of the futility of her opposition to Saifais order, she still votes in every election: otherwise, someone else votes in my name.

Empire-buildingthe foundations of a political dynastyneeds patronage to be handed out, and favours dispensed. There are winners, and there are losers. And the losers, clearly, nurture dreams of striking back.

Five hundred kilometres from Saifai, in western Uttar Pradeshs Baghpat and Muzaffarnagar, the Rashtriya Lok Dal is trying an experiment to sustain another of the states great political dynasties. The RLD, founded by former prime minister Chaudhary Charan Singh, has joined the Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party in an alliance. The partnership seeks to build a Jat-Muslim-Dalit combination. The old assumption that Jats would support the RLD en bloc has fallen by the wayside; this dynasty now needs to reinvent itself.

Ajit Singh, RLD president and Charan Singhs son, is contesting from Muzaffarnagar. His son Jayant Chaudhary is fighting from Baghpat. Their challenge is to mobilise new social groups. We are not a party for Jats, but represent farmers interests, says Ajit Singh, who has been a Union minister in the past. This makes us natural allies of Gujjars, Muslims, Rajputs, Dalits and others.

For Jats in western Uttar Pradesh, the RLD is a platform not just for political representation, but of collective caste interestsjust as Mainpuris Yadavs back the SP. Sunil Rohta, RLD spokesperson, says, Sympathy for RLD comes from its legacy. Winning in Muzaffarnagar also has a symbolic value.

Local Jat politics has been energised by protests against the Centres decision to give the poor among the upper castes and religious minorities 10% reservationa decision they say falls well short of promises to bring about Other Backward Caste status for the community.

However, Jats make up 17% of the western Uttar Pradesh populationfar too few to decisively shape electoral outcomes. Besides, not all Jats support the RLD. Hence the party, like the SP, needs to woo non-core supporters. Jaibir Singh, a farm labourer in Bawli village of Baghpat says, We have never voted for Ajit Singh. I never thought I would vote for a party of Jats, but now I will.

After the RLD won the Kairana Lok Sabha bypoll in 2018, it cast itself as a symbol of Hindu Jat and Muslim unity, which had broken after the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013. Ahmed Hameed, the son of Nawab Kokab, a five-term legislator from Baghpat, recently joined the RLD. Before and after Independence, Hameeds family supported the Congress. With its decline, this influential clan has gravitated to the strongest regional player. We get respect here and this campaign helps prepare for state-level politics, he says.

In general, Chandras work shows, regional parties are more dynastic than national partiesall five RLD MPs in 2009 were dynasts, against one in four MPs overall. But factionalism goes hand in hand with dynastyand corrodes its power over time. While the Samajwadi Partys leadership has recently split along family lines, in the RLD, the flock struggles for a share in power. Recently Shivpal Yadav, one of Mulayam Singh Yadavs brothers, floated his own party that plans to contest the Lok Sabha election. He has done this, it is believed, because he was unhappy with his nephew Akhileshs rise to dominance.

In the Jat-dominated region, the battle for supremacy and respect is just as sharp. Every Jat believes hes a Chaudhary, as one RLD leader says. Its a challenge to keep the flock together.

In imperial courts, brother battled brother; son killed father. Family struggles for party power are generally less murderousbut no less intensely waged. As one SP supporter quips: Earlier, there was one Netaji. Now, there are many Netajis.

The dynasts havent proved adroit at dealing with the challenges. Neither Ajit Singh nor Akhilesh command anything like the heft of their fathers. Pankaj Thakur, union home minister Rajnath Singhs son, is no different. In the Congress, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot have yet to prove they can build on the constituencies their fathers left behind. K Karunandhi, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagams patriarch, has left behind a brood of bitterly-divided children, none with his mass reach or appeal.

Put simply, birth might open doorsbut in Indian politics today, it doesnt guarantee success. The wheels of democracy might grind slowly, but theyve shown they can grind the greatest incredibly small.Pitroda, who is part of the Congress manifesto committee for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and is considered a senior ideologue of the party, sought a dialogue with Pakistan as he said that the neighbouring country can't be blamed for every attack carried out by terrorists in India

Close confidant of Congress chief Rahul Gandhi and chairman of the Overseas Indian National Congress Sam Pitroda, in an interview with ANI, said that attacking Pakistan with an airstrike was "not the right approach" in the aftermath of the Pulwama attack as he advocated that talks should be held with the neighbouring country. Pitroda said that it is "naive" to blame the whole nation (Pakistan) for an attack undertaken by eight people, referring to the 2008 Mumbai terror attack.

However, after receiving backlash for his remarks absolving Pakistan of its role in sponsoring terror, Pitroda has said that he would issue a clarification on his interview shortly. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted and said, "Opposition insults our forces time and again." Modi added that 130 crore Indians will neither forgive nor forget Opposition's antics.

When asked about his views on the Indian Air Force's airstrike against the Jaish-e-Mohammad camp in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, Pitroda said that international news outlets had an alternate view of the impact of the air strike and that the people of India deserved to know the facts of the Air Force operation. I would like to know a little more because I read reports in the New York Times and other newspapers. Did we really attack? We really killed 300 people? If they (IAF) killed 300, it is okay. All I am saying is can you give me more facts and prove it, Pitroda said.

"I dont know that. As a citizen, I am entitled to know and if I ask it is my duty to ask, that doesnt mean Im not a nationalist, That doesnt mean I am on this side or that side. We need to know the facts. If you say 300 people were killed, I need to know that. We all need to know that, people of India need to know that and then comes global media which says nobody was killed. I look bad as an Indian citizen, said Pitroda.

Pitroda, who is part of the Congress manifesto committee for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and is considered a senior ideologue of the party, sought a dialogue with Pakistan. I am a Gandhian, I believe in more compassion and respect. I believe in more dialogues personally. I think we should have a dialogue with everybody. Why just Pakistan? We are having a dialogue with the whole world, added Pitroda.

Pressed further to clarify if talks with Pakistan was an option post the Pulwama terror attack which killed 40 CRPF jawans, Pitroda said that it would be naive to assume that if some people came here and attacked, every citizen of that nation is to be blamed. I dont know much about (Pulwama) attack, it happens all the time, attack happen in Mumbai Taj hotel and Oberoi hotel. We could have reacted then and sent our planes but that is not the right approach according to me thats not how you deal with the World. Eight people come (referring to Mumbai 26/11 attacks) and do something, you dont jump on the entire nation, said Sam Pitroda in an interview to ANI.

When asked if he questioned the Indian Air Forces version of the Balakot air strikes, Pitroda clarified that an attack is different from making a claim of 300 dead. We cannot be emotional. Data has to be neutral. So you come in today and say I killed 300 people and I say wait a minute, the World is saying we didnt kill anybody or kill less or kill more... I dont know, added Pitroda. Sam Pitroda added a caveat to his remarks on the Pulwama terror attack and Balakot air strikes by saying that the views expressed by him were his personal views and not those of the Congress party. I am talking as an individual. I am talking as a scientist. I believe in reason. I believe in logic. I believe in data. I dont believe in emotions, he added.

When asked if Manmohan Singh as prime minister was as decisive Modi, Pitroda said that Singh was one of the best prime ministers India has ever had. "A lot of people ridiculed, a lot of people have written articles, they have done movies. It is all bogus," he added. Pitroda also said that he disagreed with the way Modi acted post-Pulwama attack.

Pitroda further added that since 2014, a populist government had risen in both India and the United States. "The formula is to create fear by saying that there is an enemy at the border. In India, it is Pakistan. In the US, it is Mexican immigrants. Then say everything is bad because nobody is competent," he added.

He further commented on whether he thinks Modi's "strong" stance is what is required to deal with the current situation. "India will have to decide, strong is not necessarily a good thing for democracy. Hitler was also very strong, all dictators are strong, Chinese leader is very strong, is that what India wants?"?

With inputs from ANIThough Smriti Irani lost to Rahul Gandhi in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls from Amethi, she made Amethi her second home, preparing for the 2019 elections and taking up a series of developmental projects in the region

Editor's Note: This article was first published on 22 March. It is being republished in view of Congress president Rahul Gandhi conceding defeat in Amethi Lok Sabha constituency on 23 May to BJP's Smriti Irani.

Exactly five years ago, at the onset of the summer of 2014, the BJP surprised everyone by announcing Smriti Irani as its candidate from Amethi. Irani was BJP's giant killer, to take on Rahul Gandhi, heir of ruling Congress and prince of Indias mightiest political family.

Amethi was Congress first familys Pocket borough since the 1980s. The constituency has the distinction of sending Sanjay Gandhi, Rajeev Gandhi (four terms), Sonia Gandhi and whosoever it named, for example, Satish Sharma and Sanjay Singh. Rahul had won twice from Amethi, his victory margin in the election prior to 2014 was over 3.70 lakh votes. Congress had been projecting him as the future of the nation.

Smriti was tasked to take on the Gandhi scion on his home turf, which even the BJP, its supporters and Sangh Parivar thought was impenetrable. It was a challenge not many would like to take. She was a complete outsider to Uttar Pradesh. A television actor-turned-politician, Irani had contested one parliamentary election from Chandni Chowk against Kapil Sibal and lost it badly. She belonged to a community, Parsi (by marriage), which perhaps didnt have any voter in that backward area called Amethi. It was brave on part of BJP and Irani to go to a state where caste was a guiding and in some cases the abiding principle of politics.

But Irani had the grit and appetite to take the challenge, and stamina to pursue it relentlessly to succeed. Over a period of time, having worked in various posts in the party  secretary, Mahila Morcha chief and vice-president  and as a Rajya Sabha MP and campaigner, Irani had proved that she was a fighter and had a propelling capability to leave a mark.

Her beginning in Amethi was tentative. Two persons who believed (who mattered most) in her capacity were Narendra Modi, the then prime ministerial candidate of BJP and Amit Shah the then general secretary in-charge of Uttar Pradesh.

Kumar Vishwas, who was then with the Aam Admi Party, had made an early beginning in Amethi. And the people in the constituency lent an ear to him. That made it clear that a big segment of the constituency was willing to accept somebody else as their leader, provided they had the right quality, grit and the strong backing of a strong party, to give Rahul a run for his money. Vishwas had great oratorical skills but didnt have the party.

Irani with her energetic presence, sharp oratorical skills and the backing of BJP came as a person which the people, perhaps, had wanted to see for several decades. Still, not many in Amethi and outside the constituency believed that she may win.

Amethi had been a living example of how leaders, and that too the topmost leaders of the party which ruled India neglected their constituency and believed that only cosmetic work and occasional presence would ensure their victory in perpetuity. She was there to challenge that.

Though she had lost, as the result showed, she caused a great deal of scare in the Congress camp. Rahul's victory margin was reduced from 3.70 lakh to 1.07 lakh.

Those in the rival camps dismissed her as a one time phenomenon in Amethi and believed that she may not return after the 20014 election. But contrary to their beliefs, Irani made Amethi her second home, preparing for 2019 elections, and taking up a series of developmental projects in the region.

Her name figured in the first list of BJP's candidates for Lok Sabha, which was released on Thursday evening. No surprises this time. It was taken that she may be the candidate to challenge the Congress president.

The difference between Irani's candidacy in 2014 and 2019 is noteworthy  this time around, the BJP and its sympathisers believe that she may win to write one of important chapters in India's political history.

In the last five years, what Irani has done very effectively is, as they call "gherabandi (fencing)" of Amethi and Rahul Gandhi. Recently, a manufacturing unit for AK-203 Kalashnikov rifles, an India-Russia joint venture, was inaugurated in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and Union Minister of Defence Nirmala Sitharaman. Ironically, Rahul had laid the foundation stone for the arms factory in 2007 but not much had moved from there because there were a series of confusions.

By visiting Amethi to open a unit as big as this, Modi has clearly displayed his intent and purpose, how he values Irani as a leader and Amethi as her constituency.

In the upcoming election for the Amethi Lok Sabha constituency, Smriti has a strong start. She has already made Congress worry, forcing the party to look another seat for Rahul in Karnataka or in Maharashtra. One after another, senior Congress leaders from south and west India are offering a seat to Rahul in their state.tech2 News Staff

Apple is hosting a media event at the Steve Jobs Theater on 25 March where it is widely anticipated to share details about its new TV service, a News subscription service and its own credit card.

As per a report from Recode, Apple might not follow the footsteps of popular media service providers like Netflix of creating a subscription-based streaming service.

Initially, the report states that Apple will offer its original content to users free of charge. But it will also offer users access to video streaming subscriptions from third-party services as well, including HBO and Showtime. Reports suggest that the Cupertino tech company might provide a separate storefront from the main App Store just for these services. The storefront will likely offer recommendations based on the users viewing patterns.

The iPhone maker is also said to offer its own bundles, combining packages from popular channels for a price that could be cheaper than what each service might cost on standalone basis.

That wholesale/retail relationship also means Apple, not the streamers, can set the price for the stuff it sells. Apple isn't likely to sell, say, HBO for less than HBO sells itself on rival platforms like Roku. But it definitely plans to sell bundles of pay TV channels at a discount, just like pay TV operators have always done, Recode mentioned in its report.

The report further notes that Apples subscription-based TV service wont be a major Netflix or Hulu competitor as the focus would be to sell streaming video subscriptions service from other companies and taking a slice of the revenue.

While Apple is said to be still working to get a few holdout companies to agree to join its service, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings a few days ago confirmed that it wont be selling subscriptions of its services on the Apple streaming video platform.

While reports are yet to reveal the channels that Apple might include in bundles for its new TV service, Bloomberg recently mentioned that Apple has inked a deal with publisher Vox to be a part of the upcoming Apple News subscription service.

Apple reportedly faced major pushback from publishers for demanding to take a 50 percent of revenue from the news service. The Apple News subscription service is said to cost $10 a month.

Besides introducing the new Apple TV service and News subscription at the 25 March media event, the company is expected to announce a co-branded credit card by Goldman Sachs.Praveen Swami

In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet, exulted the chronicler Raymond dAguilers, as he surveyed the massacre of Jews and Muslims across Jerusalem in the summer of 1099CE. In the temple of Solomon, the horses waded in the blood up to their knee, nay, up to the bridle. It was a just and marvellous judgment of god, that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.

Last week, some nine centuries after dAguilers and his fellow soldiers set about their slaughter, the world has seen the same impulses at work.

For once, the person that will be called a Fascist, is an actual Fascist, wrote Brenton Tarrant, the White nationalist who killed at least 50 people in Christchurch. Force is power, he said. History is the history of power. Violence is power.

Tarrants fascism, however, is more commonplace than most of us care to admit. His was not mindless violence  his belief is the primary colour of our times.

It is blood that moves historys wheel, the Italian leader Benito Mussolini said in 1914, urging his country to fight the Great War of 1914-18. For him, as for other fascists, the sacrifice of life presaged the coming of a utopia in which a new kind of human could be born.

Fascism is, much like religion, a blood cult: through rites of mutilation and murder, it promises to usher in a new millennium. The Nazi philosopher Arthur Rosenberg saw this, arguing, Nordic blood represents that mystery which has replaced and conquered the ancient sacraments.

Blood, to fascist eyes, has two colours: ours, and theirs. In a world where religious and ethnic identity are ever-more important, this belief has normalised.

Pious Muslims were deeply outraged when worshippers in Christchurch were killed. Few, however, were moved to similar anger by bombings of churches in the Philippines or Nigeria. Those exercised by jihadist violence have rarely condemned anti-Muslim violence in the United States and Europe  or even jihadist violence directed at Muslims in Syria or Afghanistan.

In India, it has become possible  even commonplace  to at once condemn the jihadist and celebrate the violence of the gau rakshak, or to condemn Hindutva while simultaneously condoning Islamism or other religious nationalisms.

From Nellie to Bhagalpur and Gujarat, the expulsion of Kashmirs Pandits to Akshardham and 26/11: for each there was an audience that responded with evasions, silences and approval. This is because we comprehend the world through ethnic and religious lenses, not a universal ethical prism.

In essence, the new fascism challenges the idea that humanity shares a destiny, which must be shaped by the exercise of reason and human agency.

Europes intellectual journey in the decades before 1939 provides a useful road-map. In the late 1800s, repelled by Enlightenment values and industrial civilisation, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called for a new order which would grow up only out of terrible and violent beginnings. Where, he lamented, are the barbarians of the 20th century?

Martin Heideggers unashamed embrace of National Socialism; Hans-Georg Gadamers veneration of tradition; Carl Jungs description of Adolf Hitler as a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, Rosenbergs cult of the Nordic  these all grew from Nietzsches call.

This assault on the Enlightenment did not take place in Europe alone. Hindu-nationalist Dayanand Saraswati said whatever truth is to be found, it has proceeded from the Vedas and all untruth has its origin outside them.

For Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutbwhose manifesto Milestones fired the minds of generations of al-Qaeda leaders  modernity was an obscenity, with reason seeking to supplant gods word.

Politics, the reasoned negotiation of difference, has failed. Fascism holds; only a violent reordering of the world can bring about salvation.

Fascisms post-Second World War sunrise began in the 1970s, as the European order encountered de-industrialisation. changes in gender and class relations and conflicts over identity birthed by mass immigration. In 1978, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously voiced fears that Britain might be swamped by people of a different culture.

In an influential 1990 manifesto, German director Hans-Jurgen Syberberg lamented that post-Nazi culture was taken over by the plastic world. Tarrant, likewise, says, Western culture is trivialised, pulped and blended into a smear of meaningless nothing.

Fascism succeeded because it enabled a formless multitude to cover over the savage outpourings of passions, hatreds and desires with a varnish of vague and nebulous political ideals, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci said.

Besieged by multiple fundamentalisms, mired in social crisis, India must reflect carefully on its own fascist impulses. From the Khalistan movement to Kashmirs jihadists, to communal violence, our landscape is littered with the ruins of ethnic-religious dystopias built from blood.

Pope Gregory VII had this injunction for the Crusaders: cursed be the man who holds back from shedding blood. The poet Abul Musaffar al-Abiwardi called for vengeance: we have mingled blood with flowing tears; there is no room left for pity. The words were differentbut their paths both led to perdition.tech2 News Staff

Video streaming services are booming in India with the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar and more. However, Netflix occupies a very small portion of the streaming market in India and the main reason for that would be its high prices, as compared to the rest. Now it appears that the company is looking to change that.

As per a report by the Economic Times, Netflix is looking to start a mobile-only subscription service in India which will be costing Rs 250. This price is half the starting price of Netflix's entry-level subscription plan of Rs 500 which offers SD content and only one device usage at a time.

The report states that the mobile plan will also allow only SD streaming with users being able to access only one tablet or one phone at a time.

"We will be testing different options in select countries where members can watch Netflix on their mobile device for a lower price and subscribe in shorter increments of time," a Netflix spokesperson told ET.

While Rs 250 is still cheaper than other price options by Netflix, it is still a lot as compared to several other competitors such as Hotstar and Amazon Prime, which offer services for Rs 199 and Rs 129 a month respectively and give HD content. The prices fall down, even more, when we look at the yearly subscription fees of both these services. Netflix does not offer a yearly plan as of yet.

In more news about Netflix, Apple is all set to preview around 11 shows on 25 March. However, Netflix will not be present in Apple's video service.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has confirmed that it won't be selling subscriptions of its services on the Apple streaming video platform. According to Variety, Hastings said at a press event in Los Angeles, "Apple is a great company. We prefer to let our customers watch our content on our service. We have chosen not to integrate into their services.The Conversation

When word broke that the massacre in New Zealand was livestreamed on Facebook, I immediately thought of Robert Godwin Sr. In 2017, Godwin was murdered in Cleveland, Ohio, and initial reports indicated that the attacker streamed it on Facebook Live, at the time a relatively new feature of the social network. Facebook later clarified that the graphic video was uploaded after the event, but the incident called public attention to the risks of livestreaming violence.

In the wake of Godwins murder, I recommended that Facebook Live broadcasts be time-delayed, at least for Facebook users who had told the company they were under 18. That way, adult users would have an opportunity to flag inappropriate content before children were exposed to it. Facebook Live has broadcast killings, as well as other serious crimes such as sexual assault, torture and child abuse. Though the company has hired more than 3,000 additional human content moderators, Facebook is not any better at keeping horrifying violence from streaming live online without any filter or warning for users.

In the 24 hours after the New Zealand massacre, 1.5 million videos and images of the killings were uploaded to Facebooks servers, the company announced. Facebook highlighted the fact that 1.2 million of them were blocked at upload. However, as a social media researcher and educator, I heard that as an admission that 300,000 videos and images of a mass murder passed through its automated systems and were visible on the platform.

The company recently issued some analytic details and noted that fewer than 200 people viewed the livestream of the massacre, and that surprisingly, no users reported it to Facebook until after it ended. These details make painfully clear how dependent Facebook is on users to flag harmful content. They also suggest that people dont know how to report inappropriate content  or dont have confidence the company will act on the complaint.

The video that remained after the livestream ended was viewed nearly 4,000 times  which doesnt include copies of the video uploaded to other sites and to Facebook by other users. Its unclear how many of the people who saw it were minors; youth as young as 13 are allowed to set up Facebook accounts and could have encountered unfiltered footage of murderous hatred. Its past time for the company to step up and fulfill the promise its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, made two years ago, after Godwins murder: We will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening.

A simple time-delay

In the television industry, during broadcasts of live events. That time allows a moderator to review the content and confirm that its appropriate for a broad audience.

Facebook relies on users as moderators, and some livestreams may not have a large audience like TV, so its delay would need to be longer, perhaps a few minutes. Only then would enough adult users have screened it and had the chance to report its content. Major users, including publishers and corporations, could be permitted to livestream directly after completing a training course. Facebook could even let people request a company moderator for upcoming livestreams.

Facebook has not yet taken this relatively simple step  and the reason is clear. Time-delays took hold in TV only because broadcasting regulators penalized broadcasters for airing inappropriate content during live shows. There is effectively no regulation for social media companies; they change only in pursuit of profits or to minimize public outcry.

Whether and how to regulate social media is a political question, but many U.S. politicians have developed deep ties with platforms like Facebook. Some have relied on social media to collect donations, target supporters with advertising and help them get elected. Once in office, they continue to use social media to communicate with supporters in hopes of getting reelected.

Federal agencies also use social media to communicate with the public and influence peoples opinions  even in violation of U.S. law. In my view, Facebooks role as a tool to gain, keep and spread political power makes politicians far less likely to rein it in.

US regulation isnt coming soon

Congress has not yet taken any meaningful action to regulate social media companies. Despite strong statements from politicians and even calls for hearings about social media in response to the New Zealand attack, U.S. regulators arent likely to lead the way.

European Union officials are handling much of the work, especially around privacy. New Zealands government has stepped up, too, banning the livestream video of the mosque massacre, meaning anyone who shares it could face up to NZ$10,000 in fines and 14 years in prison. At least two people have already been arrested for sharing it online.

Facebook could  and should  act now

Much of the discussion about regulating social media has considered using anti-trust and monopoly laws to force the enormous technology giants like Facebook to break up into smaller separate companies. But if it happens at all, that will be very difficult  breaking up AT&T lasted a decade, from the 1974 lawsuit to the 1984 launch of the Baby Bell companies.

In the interim, there will be many more dangerous and violent incidents people will try to livestream. Facebook should evaluate its products potential for misuse and discontinue them if the effects are harmful to society.

No child should ever see the sort of raw and visceral content that has been produced on Facebook Live  including mass murder. I dont think adult users should be exposed to witnessing such heinous acts either, as studies have shown that viewing graphic violence has health risks, such as post-traumatic stress.

Thats why Im no longer recommending just a livestream delay for adolescent users  it was an appeal to protect children, when more major platform changes are unlikely. But all people deserve better and safe social media. Im now calling on Mark Zuckerberg to shut down Facebook Live in the interest of public health and safety. In my view, that feature should be restored only if the company can prove to the public  and to regulators  that its design is safer.

Handling livestreaming safely includes having more than enough professional content moderators to handle the workload. Those workers also must have appropriate access to mental health support and safe working environments, so that even Facebook employees and contractors are not unduly scarred by brutal violence posted online.

Jennifer Grygiel, Assistant Professor of Communications (Social Media) & Magazine, Syracuse Universitytech2 News Staff

Samsung is hosting a Galaxy A series launch event next month where it is expected to unveil the fifth Galaxy A series 2019 edition phone, the Galaxy A90. Leaks about the phone are slowly dripping from the rumour mill.

Rumours in the past have suggested that the Galaxy A90 might feature a pop-up front camera quite similar to the Vivo V15 Pro. And now Samsung has seemingly confirmed that the upcoming Galaxy A series smartphone will have a Notchless Infinity display. Details about the phones display surfaced on Samsungs Indonesia site. The listing first spotted by GalaxyClub.nl reveals a dedicated Samsung Galaxy A series microsite.

All screen and no bezel. The maxed out Notchless Infinity screen gives you the sharpest details, depth, and true-to-life colours for a super immersive experience. Whether you're into games, sharing photos, or just kicking back watching some flicks, the ultra-vibrant Super AMOLED screen makes all your media come to life, the listing on the microsite read.

To recall, Samsung introduced four different Infinity displays at its developer conference last year. The Infinity O that has a hole-punch cutout is embedded on the premium Galaxy S10 series. While the mid-range Galaxy A50 and A30 houses the dew-drop style Infinity-U screen. Meanwhile, the budget Galaxy A10 has an Infinity-V display. The notchless-Infinity display takes the fourth slot in the Infinity display list.

Besides, the notchless front panel, the Galaxy A series microsite doesnt reveal any details about the internal specs of the upcoming Galaxy A90 phone. However, previous reports have speculated that the phone might feature Qualcomms Snapdragon 710 processor. It is expected to sport a 6.41-inch display, and an optical in-display sensor. The Galaxy A90 is rumoured to come in two RAM options  6 GB/8 GB RAM which will be paired with 128 GB native storage.

Samsung is hosting events in multiple cities on 10 April where it is expected to introduce new Galaxy A series models. Reports indicate that the company might launch Galaxy A60 and Galaxy A70 alongside.Sourish Bhattacharyya

In a rare, humorous interlude in the darkly-intense second episode of the Netflix series Delhi Crime, an informer tells his cop handler, alluding to his reward, This time, dont send me a Johnnie Walker Black Label; I want something better. The cop mocks, Oh, you now want a Glenfiddich 18 Year Old.

The very basis of Scotch snobbery is the age statement. Like a fine wine from Bordeaux, the producers of Scotch whisky maintained that a good Scotch  a blended whisky or a single malt  acquires more flavours and greater complexity as it spends longer time in the casks. In the process, as a result of natural evaporation, the industry loses two per cent of the precious liquid every year  the famous angels share  and Scotch is able to command the cachet (and the prices) it does. The age on the bottle signifies the age of the youngest whisky in the blend  and yes, even single malts, unless specifically mentioned as single cask single malts, are blends of whiskies maturing in different casks, but in one distillery.

The world went along with this view until Hibiki  the Japanese single malt from Suntory  caused a tremor in the international market 17 years ago. The whisky flew off the shelves  perhaps because of the surrogate advertising time it garnered in Sophia Coppolas multiple-Academy Award-winning Lost in Translation, where the principal character, played by Bill Murray, arrives in Tokyo to shoot for a Hibiki commercial.

Suntory, explains Ankur Chawla, founder of Delhi-based beverage consultancy ScopeBev, was clearly not prepared for this explosion of interest. It was also quick to realise the first batch of the Hibiki 17 Year Old would run out much before the replacement stocks would mature for the market. And if the demand remained unmet, it would be bad news for the Japanese alcobev behemoth.

The ensuing debate  and the fact that the industry had completely misjudged the emerging demand-supply gap  gave birth to the paradigm-changing idea of NAS (No Age Statement).

Scotlands law requires whiskies to be kept in wooden casks for a minimum of three years to qualify for the appellation Scotch. Industry insiders argued a Scotch, whether produced in Scotland or Japan, can legally be bottled and sold from its fourth year. Today, at least eight countries outside Scotland  India, Japan, Taiwan, France, Italy, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand  produce award-winning Scotch whiskies.

The no age argument found immediate acceptance in India, where the average annual rate of evaporation is six per cent. Paul P. John, Chairman and Managing Director, John Distilleries, whose eponymous whisky in 2012, was the second-genuine Scotch after Amrut to be produced in India, had once told me, If I wait for 18 years for my whiskies to mature, I will be left with nothing to sell. The angels will drink all of it.

There are techniques such as the use of caramel to mask the pallor of a youthful whisky or artificially hastening the maturity process, or adding synthetic flavours that mimic those a whisky extracts from its cask. The last technique is widely used in the Indian alcobev industry, which passes off distilled, flavoured and coloured molasses-based extra neutral alcohol as whisky (Amrut, Paul John and Rampur being the recent exceptions).

Macallan, described by connoisseurs as the Rolls Royce of whiskies, became the most prestigious label to adopt the NAS philosophy when it dropped the age statement from its Rare Cask whisky sold in travel retail outlets in 2014. The Rare Cask, according to Macallan, is a blend of rare whiskies chosen by chief distiller from pre-selected 256 casks a year not because of their age, but to achieve a specific character and colour.

Likewise, another sought-after Macallan, the limited 1824 Series, does not have any liquid that dates back to the year mentioned in the label (it is the year when the Speyside distillery  the first in Scotland to be licenced  was founded by Alexander Reid). What it celebrates instead is a whisky that is at the peak of its perfection, irrespective of its age.

Sandeep Arora, Contributing Editor Whisky Magazine UK, says it is not necessary the longer a whisky stays in wood, the better it would taste. It is said that the longer you keep a whisky in a barrel, the happier it is (the angels certainly are), but eight years is the time it takes ideally for a whisky in Scottish conditions to extract all the flavours it can, he says. To produce Scotch, two kinds of barrels are favoured  ex-Bourbon, which adds vanilla, honey and caramel notes with a hint of oak to a whisky, and ex-sherry, which makes a whisky darker, spicier and more flavourful.

Beyond eight years, whiskies run into the risk of letting the wood in their barrels overpower the way they should taste. Theres, therefore, a clear commercial motivation for the push towards No Age Statement whiskies.

The Scotch whisky market has been experiencing an amazing growth  exports from Scotland shot up by a record 7.8 per cent in 2018 to touch a figure of 4.7billion  and much of this has been powered by millennial consumers, who have gone back to drinking whisky.

It is this generation that is more taste than age-oriented, says Arora. In the words of Chawla, the millennials are moving from the label to the liquid.

Each generation affixes its distinctive stamp on a popular product, even if it is as rooted in tradition as Scotch whisky. The age of the no age is well and truly here.

(Sourish Bhattacharyya has been a journalist for 33 years. He is now a blogger and founder director of the Tasting India Symposium)Samsung Galaxy A30 offers the best display for its price but it fails to stand out in the crowd when it comes to performance.

Just a year ago, Samsungs Galaxy A series was placed in the value flagship space, which a tier just below the premium Galaxy S lineup. But with the Chinese handset makers playing a dominant role in the Indian smartphone market, Samsung now seems to have rolled up its sleeves and decided to clobber these OEMs in an attempt to reclaim lost ground. It's weapon of choice? A revitalised Galaxy A series lineup.

For the past few years, Samsungs mid-range A series design language has been consistent  brick-shaped boring designs with chunky bezels. But this time around, Samsung has completely overhauled the design of its 2019 Galaxy A series smartphones. The new Galaxy A lineup now flaunts a sleek profile with rounded corners and a dew-drop style front panel.

The Samsung Galaxy A30 sits between the Galaxy A50 and Galaxy A10 and inherits Samsungs premium Super AMOLED display. The smartphone doesnt feature a gradient finish rainbow effect rear panel (as seen on the Galaxy A50), however, the glossy back panel and the smooth finish does give an elegant look to the Galaxy A30 phone. But although the Galaxy A30 is branded in the budget segment, the competition is stiff, given that you get a plethora of options in this segment with some devices sporting better aspects than the new A-series smartphone.

Undoubtedly, the Galaxy A30 features a gorgeous AMOLED panel and refreshing design but does it live up to the expectations in terms of performance and camera quality? We find out in our review.

Galaxy A30s sleek profile and tapered back provides the perfect grip

The very first time I got hold of the Galaxy A30 in my hand, I was pleasantly surprised. The sleek profile, glossy back and smooth flowing curves on the phone made me pinch myself twice to believe that is indeed a Galaxy A series device. I have used the Galaxy A9 (2017 Edition) and Galaxy A8+ (2018 Edition) and to be honest the new Galaxy A30 falls nowhere in the list when it comes to design aesthetics. The bulkiness and dated design are gone and you now get a lightweight device that you can easily handle and operate with one hand. The phone looks attractive and feels durable.

Ergonomically speaking, the Galaxy A30 is good, and the reduced weight and tapered back mean that the phone is comfortable to hold. As with the Galaxy A50, the Galaxy A30 features a plastic chassis and metal frame. Samsung has put a reflective coating on the back panel to make it look like it has a glass-like finish. Having said that, the phone is prone to scuffs and fingerprint smudges. But Samsung has bundled a transparent back cover, perhaps to save the phone from getting the scuff magnet title.

Another issue I have with the phone concerns the fingerprint sensor placement, which is put a bit too high up for my hands, and more often than not, I had to stretch my index finger to reach the sensor.

The phone has a dedicated microSD slot which means you dont have to ditch your precious SIM card to fit in a microSD card. The bottom side houses all the necessary ports  a 3.5 mm audio jack, USB-C and mono speaker grill alongside.

The audio quality on the Galaxy A30 is pretty decent, however, the sound tends to get shrill when the volume is ramped up to its highest level.

A gorgeous display

The Samsung Galaxy A30 features a 6.4-inch full HD+ Super AMOLED Infinity-U display. The phone has slim bezels on either side and a U-shaped notch at the top. However, the front-fascia is marred by a chunky chin.

But despite all this, the Galaxy A30 does manage to hold your attention with its bright and vivid AMOLED panel. The viewing angles are good and the display produces vibrant, saturated colours. The brightness levels and contrast on the phone are amazing and I barely had any issue while reading content under harsh sunlight. The phone offers a few display modes that you can choose from, which include Adaptive display, AMOLED cinema, AMOLED photo and Basic.

The Galaxy A30 has support for Widevine L1 DRM which means the phone is capable of streaming HD content from Netflix and Hotstar. The phone doesnt have a notification LED but it does offer an Always on Display mode that shows notifications. Besides the rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, the Galaxy A30 comes with facial recognition and surprisingly, the Face Unlock responds faster than the fingerprint reader. Though that might not be a good thing because it's a not very secure means of authentication.

The adaptive brightness is quite responsive and adapts quickly enough to changing lighting conditions.

The new Galaxy A series now comes with a refreshed user interface  OneUI

The Galaxy A30 runs Android Pie right out of the box and with Samsungs new interface  One UI skinned on top. The user interface is simple and intuitive and better than Samsung's previous attempts at a UI. The software on the Galaxy A30 offers a host of options that you can tweak based on your preference. Be it picking up a theme from the array of themes available, toggling options to display notifications on the AoD (Always on Display), or customizing the notification panel, OneUI caters to all.

The phone comes with a bunch of gestures as well as with support for one-handed use, finger sensor gestures, Smart stay, etc. The one-finger swipe down gesture on the home screen layout to pull down the notification shade comes in handy given the phone has a tall form factor. The Galaxy A30 includes a mini version of Samsung Pay service that works with the UPI payment network. The phone also has support for Android Pies Digital Wellbeing, which a good add-on. The notification shade once pulled down covers the entire panel and enables you to easily select the icons with one finger. The icons on the home screen are by default inanely large, but it can be scaled down.

But although the UI is not cluttered like the previous versions, the Galaxy A30 is not free from bloatware. The phone comes pre-loaded with a few unwanted apps including Dailyhunt, but thankfully these apps can be uninstalled. During the initial setup, the phone lets you select and install from a wide range of Samsung apps. While this seems good, it is recommended to tick the checkbox at the bottom before tapping the Finish button to avoid frequent promotion pop-ups from IronSource (the adware brand that Samsung has teamed up).

The dual cameras are just fine

Unlike the Galaxy A50 (Review), which boasts of triple rear cameras, the Galaxy A30 accommodates dual cameras at the back. However, the phone does include a wide-angle lens that captures a wide frame with good details in good lighting conditions.

The Galaxy A30 features a 16 MP primary camera and a 5 MP wide-angle camera. In daylight, the cameras on the phone manage to render a good image with a fair amount of detail and bright colours. The wide-angle lens captures a lot more from a scene in the frame. However, the wide-angle camera fails to retain detail due to the lack of autofocus and the edges get distorted giving the photos a fish-eye appearance from the sides.

The camera app on the phone offers a Scene Optimiser that detects objects automatically and adjusts the exposure depending on lighting conditions. The mode makes the photos appear more vibrant, however, it tends to soften the texture.

The low-light camera performance is one area where I was quite disappointed. Although the phone was able to capture good landscape shots in daylight, it was a different story altogether in low light. The cameras failed to lock focus on the subject accurately and the software took a good few seconds for processing the final output. Though the Scene Optimiser on the phone managed to adjust the exposure accordingly in low light, the Redmi Note 7 Pros dedicated Night mode could produce a better-exposed picture with decent details.

The camera app on the phone offers a bunch of features including Pro, Panorama, and Live Focus. The app offers AR emojis as well which are fun to play with. The 16 MP front camera does a decent job in good lighting condition. The colours appear good, however, the camera software tends to soften the image and misses out hairline detail.

The Live Focus which is Samsungs version of a Portrait mode, lets you adjust background blur post capturing a shot. The mode captured shots with a decent depth effect in daylight, but the edge detection and detailing wasnt so good when compared to the Redmi Note 7 Pros Portrait mode. Further, in low-light, the images had a lot of noise and looked patchy.

The Galaxy A30 is capable of recording full HD videos and has EIS support. The cameras on the phone take good videos in daylight, however, a lack of stabilisation causes the phone to fail in delivering stable footage.

You can check high-res photos clicked by the Galaxy A30 here.

The phone is not meant for gaming aficionados

While sleek design and vivid displays are all good things, they're not the only aspects you need to be concerned about. The phone is powered by the Exynos 7904 SoC, the same chipset that sits under the budget Galaxy M30 phone. The 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage onboard suffice for moderate and even heavy users. The phone manages to handle day-to-day activities and web browsing well. However, performance takes a beating when running heavy apps like games.

The Exynos chip manages to run casual games like Orbia with ease, however, to play graphic-intensive heavy games, for instance, PuBG or Asphalt 9: Legends, one needs to scale down the graphics settings. While playing Shadowgun Legends, I observed occasional frame drops in the initial stages.

Moreover, the phone heated up (near the fingerprint sensor) while playing heavier titles for extended hours. However, I didnt face any lag or stutter while multitasking with multiple tabs open in Chrome and when scrolling through social media feeds.

The battery on the phone easily squeezes out a days worth of juice

The Galaxy A30 packs in a big 4,000 mAh battery and supports USB-C port for charging. In terms of battery performance, the phone could easily last a day and a couple of hours with normal usage. However, running heavy games for more than 30 minutes does drain the battery quickly. My day-to-day activities, which involve streaming Netflix, texting on social, some photography, making phone calls and running casual games, netted me an average battery life of 15 hrs. The bundled Fast Charger can fully charge up the device in two hours on average.

Verdict

Samsung Galaxy A30 offers the best display for its price and the sleek design, refreshed UI and good battery backup round out the deal. The vivid Super AMOLED panel gives a pleasing experience while streaming videos on the tall screen. The wide-angle lens is another nice addition which is quite hard to find at this price point.

However, the phones average performance and struggles when rendering low-light photos brings into question its value at Rs 16,990 when compared to the stellar Redmi Note 7 Pro. More confusingly, the cheaper Galaxy M30 (Rs 14,999) is basically the same phone but with the addition of a triple camera and an even larger 5,000 mAh battery. The M30 does use the older Samsung Experience UI and a less exciting design, but those are its only shortcomings.

Bottom line, the Samsung Galaxy A30 would be ideal for those who wish to taste Samsungs new user interface and need a sleek, elegantly designed smartphone. In contrast, Xiaomis new Redmi Note 7 Pro is a far better performer, offers great value and has the best camera in the budget segment.

Find latest and upcoming tech gadgets online on Tech2 Gadgets. Get technology news, gadgets reviews & ratings. Popular gadgets including laptop, tablet and mobile specifications, features, prices, comparison.Agence France-Presse

The world can eradicate tuberculosis by 2045 if the fight against the killer disease is properly funded, an international team of experts has said.

Warning of the immense economic and social costs of inaction, they said that better screening, treatments and public awareness were needed to reduce the more than 10 million cases recorded every year.

A chronic lung disease which is preventable and largely treatable if caught in time, tuberculosis is the top infectious killer of our time, causing over 1.6 million deaths each year.

"That is huge and the economic burden of that to both developing and developed nations is staggering," Eric Goosby, the United Nations' special envoy for the disease, told AFP Wednesday. "It's not rocket science, it's really common sense. We need to initiate a new prevention strategy."

Tuberculosis has existed for millenia and is latent in around a quarter of the world's population.

Despite killing nearly as many people each year as HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, there has not been a new, commercially available tuberculosis vaccine in a century. The disease currently receives only around 10 percent of the research funding allocated for AIDS.

A team of experts from 13 nations, writing in The Lancet, said that funding for research and development would need to quadruple to around USD 3 billion per year if the disease is to be properly tackled.

In India alone, where one in three global tuberculosis deaths occur, providing better access to treatment and targeting at-risk communities for screening could cut deaths by nearly a third with an annually outlay of USD290 million.

That compares to the USD 32 billion each year in economic losses  including treatment costs and lost productivity  attributed to tuberculosis.

"The real key is that we are going to need much more new research and new tools," said Paula Fujiwara, scientific director at The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

"Even if we use the tools we have today it's not going to be enough. The goal is to end tuberculosis but the current decline is only 1.5-2.0 percent a year," she told AFP.

The Lancet study says that even if currently available treatments were given to 90 percent of tuberculosis sufferers, 800,000 people would still die given their inefficacy and the gaps in diagnosis.

A series of breakthroughs in recent months have provided some hope to patients.

In October, a new treatment for drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis cured 80 percent of sufferers in Belarus. The treatment has since been repeated in other high-incidence nations, with similar results.

A month earlier drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline unveiled a study showing that a new vaccine was effective in 54 percent of trial participants.

In parallel, doctors say a new testing method could help reduce the 240,000 deaths of children under five that tuberculosis causes each year.

Goosby said trials needed to continue to drive a production line of new treatments against the disease.

"The inevitability is that we will need new drugs as the disease evolves," he said. "We should  as a global health response  anticipate and expect (drug) resistance and continue the work."

The Lancet study said reducing tuberculosis deaths to less than 200,000 a year would cost around USD 10 billion annually.Kelowna students skipped classes last Friday to stage a protest march.

Their aim was to awaken politicians to the imminent danger climate change will bring to our planet and their future in it.

The students called on our government to prevent the devastation that climate change is bringing. This was a youth rallying call which politicians cannot ignore.

A number of older people also attended to support the students' call for action. They carried a few signs with

suggestions to save the Earth, including one that simply said: Save the world - Go vegan.

Please don't dismiss the suggestion.

Our government has so far been deaf to the fact that meat production is one of the largest contributing factors to climate change. Dairy production is close behind meat in greenhouse gas emissions.

And yet our government is investing $250 million in the "Dairy Farm Investment Program," seemingly unaware that milk consumption is declining, and that dairy has lost its special place in Canada's Food Guide.

The young marchers have offered us hope, however fragile it seems to me, and today's youth have grasped it.

Helen Schiele, KelownaBy David Shepardson and Cindy Silviana WASHINGTON/JAKARTA (Reuters) - Boeing Co plans to offer as standard a safety feature that might have warned earlier of problems that possibly played a role in the crashes of Ethiopian and Indonesian planes that killed almost 350 people, two officials briefed on the matter said on Thursday. Boeing will mandate a previously optional cockpit warning light as part of a software update to the 737 MAX fleet that was grounded in the wake of the fatal crashes, said the officials, who asked not to be identified

By David Shepardson and Cindy Silviana

WASHINGTON/JAKARTA (Reuters) - Boeing Co plans to offer as standard a safety feature that might have warned earlier of problems that possibly played a role in the crashes of Ethiopian and Indonesian planes that killed almost 350 people, two officials briefed on the matter said on Thursday.

Boeing will mandate a previously optional cockpit warning light as part of a software update to the 737 MAX fleet that was grounded in the wake of the fatal crashes, said the officials, who asked not to be identified.

The March 10 Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 on board has set off one of the widest inquiries in aviation history and cast a shadow over the Boeing MAX model intended to be a standard for decades.

Initial investigations show similarities between the Ethiopian crash and the Indonesian accident in October that killed all 189 crew and passengers. A direct link between the crashes has not been proven, but attention has focussed on an automated flight-control system, MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), that came into service two years ago with the MAX.

Chicago-based Boeing, which the officials said also will retrofit older planes with the cockpit warning light, previously offered the alert, but it was not required by aviation regulators.

It is unclear how long it will take Boeing to refit existing MAX planes with new software or hardware. Experts said it could take weeks or months to be done, and for regulators to review and approve the changes. Regulators in Europe and Canada have said they will conduct their own reviews of any new systems.

The software is designed to prevent a loss of lift which can cause an aerodynamic stall, sending the plane downwards in an uncontrolled way. In the Lion Air crash, it may have been erroneously activated by a faulty sensor, investigators believe. The FAA has said installation of the new software and related training was a priority.

STEPS TO IMPROVE SAFETY

Boeing did not immediately comment on the plan to make the safety feature standard.

However, in London Thursday, Randy Tinseth, Boeing's vice president of commercial marketing, said the manufacturer is moving quickly to make software changes and expects the upgrade will be approved by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the coming weeks.

"That includes changes in the control laws of the airplane, an update of the displays, the flight manual, as well as the training," he said at a conference, adding Boeing has tested the improvements in a simulator and in the air.

The product and training updates were being made "to further improve the safety that ensures that this will not happen again," Tinseth said.

He said it was too early to speculate on what the investigations will show, but defended Boeing's design and production processes.

Boeing also said it would slow work at its 737 plant in Seattle next week to allow employees to catch up on work that was previously delayed, but said this was because of winter storms and supplier delays and not fallout from the crashes.

Meanwhile, in Jakarta, Indonesian investigators described the panic of pilots grappling with airspeed and altitude problems in the last moments of the Lion Air flight.

"It seemed the pilot felt he could no longer recover the flight. Then the panic emerged," Nurcahyo Utomo, an investigator at Indonesia's national transportation committee, said.

Reuters reported Wednesday the Lion Air pilots scrambled through a handbook to understand why the jet was lurching downwards in the final minutes before it hit the water.

A final report on the Lion Air crash is expected in August.

Boeing has said there was a documented procedure to handle the automated system at the heart of the problem.

In both flights, crews radioed about control problems shortly after take-off and sought to turn back.

MULTIPLE INQUIRIES

Investigations of Boeing's conduct are starting to pile up, with several lawsuits already filed on behalf of victims of the Lion Air crash referring to the Ethiopian accident. Boeing declined to comment on the lawsuits.

Consumer advocate and former U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader lost a grand-niece in the Ethiopian crash and urged whistleblowers to help challenge the aviation industry and get to the bottom of what happened.

"They lulled us into complacency," he said in an interview in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

SIMULATORS

Simulators for the MAX are now being manufactured but they have yet to be delivered to most airlines that have ordered them. Ethiopian Airlines said on Thursday the simulators are not designed to replicate the MCAS problems.

The airline is among the few that do have such a simulator but the captain of the doomed flight had no chance to practise on it before the fatal crash, a pilot colleague said.

In Washington, Boeing faces a criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and executives also will be summoned to a U.S. Senate panel hearing for questioning.

(Additional reporting by Jamie Freed in Singapore, Bernadette Christina Munthe in Jakarta, Maggie Fick and Jason Neely in Addis Ababa, Tim Hepher in Paris, Tracy Rucinski in Chicago and Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Writing by Sayantani Ghosh, Georgina Prodhan and Ben Klayman; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne, Nick Zieminski and Grant McCool)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.Tightlipped and evasive, Theresa May parried questions until EU chiefs asked her to leave Thursday's Brexit summit meeting and embarked on a negotiation among themselves to draw up a new Brexit timetable.

Brussels: Over an agonising two-hour grilling, British Prime Minister Theresa May failed to convince exasperated European leaders she has any plan to deliver an orderly Brexit if MPs vote her withdrawal deal down.

Tightlipped and evasive, she parried questions until EU chiefs asked her to leave Thursday's summit meeting and embarked on a negotiation among themselves to draw up a new Brexit timetable.

"British politicians are today incapable of implementing what the people asked for," France's president Emmanuel Macron declared. EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker was "at the end of his tether", one diplomatic source told AFP.

May's government is in crisis and she has proved unable to muster a majority to approve the Brexit withdrawal deal struck at a previous Brussels get-together in November.

With a potentially catastrophic "no deal" departure looming on 29 March, the other 27 EU leaders were determined to take charge, and came to Brussels armed with the clear plan. As set out by host EU Council president Donald Tusk and in draft conclusions leaked to the media, they offered to postpone Brexit to 22 May if British MPs backed the prime minister's withdrawal agreement. But the leaders wanted to know what she would do if the deal fails again  as most observers believe is likely.

"She replied that she has no plan B, but was sticking to plan A," one source said. "She didn't have answers to all the questions," Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel told reporters on Friday morning.

May waits outside

Once May had left the room, Macron told the meeting that he had arrived believing there was a 10 percent chance that May would succeed, according to several European sources. But, after hearing from her, he said: "I think there is a five percent chance". To which Tusk retorted: "You are very optimistic."

While May lurked in her delegation's office space, and the leaders argued over dinner, a new conclusions document was drawn up.

After six hours, they eventually agreed to add to their original offer an unconditional proposal to delay Brexit to 12 April. They were forced to postpone a planned discussion on relations with China  for which May had been due to rejoin them, over dinner  as different leaders set out different options.

"It was very intense," said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, a reflection echoed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

At a press conference afterwards, Tusk insisted there was no rancour. "It was first and foremost a discussion about all possible scenarios. What if, what if  nobody knows," an EU source said.

May stayed in the building, and was briefed three times by Tusk  once before the talks, once during a break and again after they finally reached an agreement at 11.20pm. Some of her team followed developments as they leaked out onto Twitter, with one official admitting afterwards that some of the options considered "would have been quite challenging".

EU hopes for 'rational choice'

In the end, Britain accepted the offer, even if it fell short of May's proposal for a delay until 30 June, and several European leaders expressed satisfaction at the result. Belgian prime minister Charles Michel said the EU "hoped for a rational choice" from Britain, but there remains intense frustration at the deadlock in parliament.

The EU had previously floated the idea of an emergency summit next week if MPs reject May's deal, but Macron warned this would put the responsibility to decide onto the leaders.

"The EU doesn't have all the cards, because everything depends on the British vote," Macron told a late-night press conference. And Croatian prime minister Andrej Plenkovic said: "We're a little bit careful given the history of votes."

The discussion over the extension threatened to undermine the unity of the 27, which has held remarkably well since Britain's 2016 referendum.

But diplomats said that leaders are determined that Brexit wranglings will not disrupt preparations for European Parliament elections in May. "Now Brexit touches really the core of the functioning of the European Union," one said.SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Several Chinese regions, including the capital Beijing, saw birthrates decline again in 2018, the official China Daily reported, after a 2016 move to relax family planning controls failed to encourage couples to have more children.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Several Chinese regions, including the capital Beijing, saw birthrates decline again in 2018, the official China Daily reported, after a 2016 move to relax family planning controls failed to encourage couples to have more children.

Citing figures from local authorities, the newspaper said Beijing's birthrate fell to 8.24 per 1,000 people, compared to 9.06 in the previous year. And in Shanghai, the birthrate dropped to 7.2 per 1,000, down from 8.1 in 2017.

The birthrate in the northeast rustbelt province of Liaoning, which has experienced a net population decline in recent years after an exodus of younger residents, fell to 6.39 per 1,000, down from 6.49 in 2017.

Alarmed by the rapid rate of ageing in its population, China relaxed its controversial "one-child policy" in 2016, allowing all couples to have two children instead of just one.

But the policy change failed to reverse what demographers say is a long-term trend of falling birthrates, brought about by growing levels of prosperity along with concerns about the high costs of raising children.

Data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed that the number of births last year reached 15.23 million, down 2 million compared to 2017, and the second consecutive annual decline.

China's fast-ageing population was one of the major preoccupations during the annual session of China's parliament earlier this month, with delegates calling for radical new measures to reverse the decline in new births.

Think tanks expect China's population to peak at 1.4 billion in 2029 and then begin an "unstoppable" decline that could reduce the workforce by as many as 200 million people by the middle of the century.

(Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.Donald Trump called Golan Heights  a strategic area seized from Syria and annexed in a move never recognized by the international community  of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and regional stability.

Washington: President Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States should acknowledge Israeli sovereignty over the hotly-contested Golan Heights, in what amounted to a major pre-election gift for his ally Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights," Trump said in a tweet.

Trump called the Golan  a strategic area seized from Syria and annexed in a move never recognized by the international community  "of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

About 20,000 Israeli settlers live in the Golan, which overlooks Syrian territory.

Trump's abrupt announcement was immediately cheered by Netanyahu, who faces a tough reelection battle and visits Washington next week.

"At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights," the right-wing prime minister wrote on Twitter. "Thank you President Trump!"

There was also quick approval from the senior Republican in the US Senate, Lindsey Graham, who is pushing for Congress to recognize Israeli control over the Golan.

      .         .     ! pic.twitter.com/iGmMAhXV6d  Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) March 21, 2019



Trump's announcement coincided with a visit by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Jerusalem, where he became the first high-ranking American official to visit the Western Wall alongside an Israeli prime minister -- another boost for Netanyahu.

However, Leon Panetta a veteran Democrat who served as CIA director and defense secretary, among other roles, blasted Trump for "tweeting out another policy that obviously has not been worked out with our international partners."

Diplomatic bombshell

The Golan recognition is only the latest diplomatic bombshell dropped by Washington, which is Israel's principal backer, in seeking to redraw the fraught Middle East map.

In 2017, Trump also went against decades of practice in recognizing the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, rather than the previously accepted Tel Aviv.

The Golan Heights move was hinted at a week ago when the State Department changed its usual description of the area as "occupied" to "Israeli-controlled."

The Trump State Department has likewise dropped previous definitions of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as being "occupied" by the Jewish state.

Israel occupied the Golan Heights, West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War. It later annexed the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem in moves never recognized by the international community.

During Pompeo's Jerusalem trip, there was also speculation that his Western Wall visit with Netanyahu could be interpreted as tacit approval of Israel's claim to sovereignty over the site. The wall is one of Judaism's holiest spots, but located in mainly Palestinian east Jerusalem.

Netanyahu election ploy?

Trump will host Netanyahu at the White House next Monday and Tuesday. The Israeli leader will be in Washington for the annual conference of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) pro-Israel lobbying group.

Running for reelection under threat of indictment for corruption, Netanyahu is widely believed to be hoping that such strong US diplomatic backing will help push him over the finish line.

"This decision is intensely political," said Robert Malley, president of the Crisis Group consultancy, and "in disregard of international law."

But Trump denied trying to influence the Israeli election in Netanyahu's favor, telling Fox Business Network: "I wouldn't even know about that."

"I have no idea, I hear (Netanyahu's) doing okay. I don't know if he's doing great right now, but I hear he's doing okay. But I would imagine the other side whoever's against him is also in favor of what I just did."

Trump's latest shakeup also comes ahead of the delayed unveiling of a White House plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Palestinian leaders, who broke off contact with Washington after the recognition of Jerusalem by Trump, say they expect the plan to be blatantly biased in favor of Israel.

Panetta, who was speaking on CNN, said the Golan recognition "gives up one of the chips that everyone thought would be part of a Middle East peace agreement deal."

"It's going to create real problems with our Arab partners in that part of the world," he said.Britain would need time to legislate to take part in the 23 to 26 May election, and May has insisted it will not try, preferring in her words 'to honour' voters' decision to end London's 46-year-old membership.

Brussels: European leaders and British Prime Minister Theresa May agreed Thursday on a short delay to Britain's divorce from the European Union in the hope of ensuring an orderly Brexit.

Britain had faced a sharp cliff-edge deadline of 29 March to leave, but May's EU colleagues said the split could wait until 22 May if British lawmakers approve a withdrawal accord next week.

But if the House of Commons rejects the deal  as it has done twice before  Brexit will take place on 12 April, unless Britain has decided by then to take part in this year's European Parliamentary elections.

"April 12 is the key date in terms of the UK deciding whether to hold European parliament elections," EU Council president and summit host Donald Tusk said, announcing the arrangement.

Britain would need time to legislate to take part in the 23 to 26 May election, and May has insisted it will not try, preferring in her words "to honour" voters' decision to end London's 46-year-old membership.

"I believe strongly that it would be wrong to ask people in the UK to participate in these elections three years after voting to leave the European Union," May said, confirming the agreement.

Tusk said that if the vote is not organised then a further "extension will automatically become impossible" and that even with an election, all 27 remaining EU member states would unanimously have to approve it.

"29 March is over. As of tonight, 12 April is the new 29 March," an EU official said.

"On 12 April we have to know where things stand ... if we don't have a response by then we will have a no deal Brexit," Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel warned.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who had taken a harder public line than some of his colleagues declared: "The responsibility now lies with the British, and I think that's the big achievement of the day."

Despite a extraordinary joint warning from Britain's business and trade union leaders that the economic disruptions of a no deal Brexit would present a "national emergency", May had refused to rule out walking away.

Even as she was meeting the EU 27 in Brussels for the European Council summit, an online petition hosted by the UK parliament and calling for Brexit to be abandoned topped two million signatures.

It still remains far from clear that May will be able to get the withdrawal agreement she signed last November past the House of Commons, and she turned up the heat on her own MPs after the Brexit talks.

"What the decision today underlines is the importance of the House of Commons passing a Brexit deal next week," she insisted.

"Tomorrow morning I am returning to the UK and working hard on building support to get the deal through... I hope we can all agree we are now at the moment of decision."

May had requested a short delay until June 30 to allow time for the ratification of her deal if it approved, but European leaders decided they did not want Brexit concerns to linger into the election campaign.UN experts say China holds one million Muslims in camps in the heavily policed Xinjiang region where most of the country's ethnic Uyghur, the largest Muslim minority, live

Istanbul: For Muslims in China's re-education camps, indoctrination starts with early morning patriotic songs and sessions of self-criticism, and often ends with a meal of only pork, according to one exiled former detainee.

UN experts say China holds one million Muslims in camps in the heavily policed Xinjiang region where most of the country's ethnic Uyghur, the largest Muslim minority, live.

Beijing has rejected the accusations and says it runs education training centres as part of its fight against Islamist extremism in the Muslim-majority region.

The sites are a kind of "campus", according to China's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Yucheng speaking last week.

For Omir Bekali, an ethnic Kazakh who says he spent several weeks in a camp in Karamay in Xinjiang before fleeing to Turkey a year ago, it was more about trauma than education.

The camps had only one objective, he said, to strip detainees of their religious belief.

"Every morning, at 0700 to 0730, we had to sing the Chinese national anthem. We sang together, 40 or 50 people, facing the wall," Belaki told AFP, recalling the scene in his modest Istanbul apartment.

"I never really wanted to sing, but because of the daily repetition, it sinks in. Even a year later, the music is still resonating in my head," he said, adjusting the traditional patterned cap worn by Kazakh men.

Eat pork, speak Chinese

Born in Xinjiang to ethnic Uyghur and Kazakh parents, Bekali like many minorities from China, left for Kazakhstan in 2006 to look for work. There, he got Kazakh nationality.

His troubles began in March 2017 when he was arrested in Xinjiang after he returned on a business trip for his Kazakh travel agency.

After spending seven months in prison on charges of aiding "terrorism", he was sent to a re-education camp.

Among the obligations for detainees of all ages he says was to eat pork on Fridays, which is a holy day for Muslims. Consumption of pork is prohibited by Islam's religious restrictions.

He said the "students"  as officials called them  were also forbidden to speak a language other than Chinese and to pray or grow a beard, which authorities interpreted as a sign of religious radicalisation.

Bekali said he was able to leave after nearly two months in the camp, he believes, because of an intervention by Kazakhstan authorities.

The former detainee has been visiting overseas conferences to tell his story as one of the few survivors able to speak out. Most prefer to keep quiet, for fear of endangering their loved ones in China.

Bekali has no news of his parents and his three brothers and sister, who remain in China. After being released, he left Kazakhstan to settle in Turkey with his wife and children. He said he wanted to "put more distance" between himself and China.BERLIN (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on Thursday the European Union should cut funding and impose sanctions on members which pass laws that contravene core EU principles such having an independent judiciary and freedom of the press.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on Thursday the European Union should cut funding and impose sanctions on members which pass laws that contravene core EU principles such having an independent judiciary and freedom of the press.

Maas told German broadcaster ZDF that countries like Romania, Hungary and Poland received more EU funding than they provided, so curtailing that could provide important leverage.

"There are basic core principles that all must respect," Maas said on a ZDF programme. With members that breach them, "we'll have to investigate if that should have financial consequences," he added.

Cutting funding "is the only language that is understood there," he said of countries which pass laws to restrict freedom of the press, for instance.

The European Parliament's main centre-right bloc voted on Wednesday to suspend the Fidesz party of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban amid concerns it had violated European Union principles on the rule of law.

Orban, who took power in 2010, has tightened controls over Hungarian public life, including the courts, the media and the economy, as well as education and now scientific research.

The EU is also at odds with Poland and Romania over legal steps that critics say undermine the rule of law and other core European values.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Richard Chang)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.Police in Germany were investigating 10 of those detained for terror-financing and criminal conspiracy.

Berlin: German police arrested 11 people Friday accused of having planned an "Islamist terrorist attack" using guns and a vehicle, prosecutors said.

The suspects, whose nationalities were not specified, had plotted to "kill as many 'non-believers' as possible," Frankfurt prosecutors said in a statement.

Some 200 police commandos carried out raids in the states of Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate.

The chief suspects were two brothers aged 31 from the city of Wiesbaden and a 21-year-old from Offenbach.

They had allegedly made contact with various arms dealers, rented a large vehicle and amassed cash to cover the expenses.

Police were investigating 10 of those detained for terror-financing and criminal conspiracy. They were aged between 20 and 42 and lived in Frankfurt, Offenbach, Wiesbaden and Mainz.

During the raids, police confiscated several knives, more than 20,000 euros ($22,000) in cash, small amounts of drugs and written and electronic documents.

Germany is on the alert following several jihadist attacks in recent years.

The most deadly was committed in 2016 by 23-year-old Tunisian Anis Amri, who killed 12 people when he stole a truck and ploughed it through a Berlin Christmas market.Indias contribution to the reduction of institutional investment in fossil fuel remains modest

Its a brave country that begins to wash its hands off investing in oil as Norway just has. In the biggest divestment yet from hydrocarbons, Norway has announced that its trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund is going to sell its stocks in some  but not all  oil and gas exploration companies.

The government plans to pull $8 billion out of 134 firms at one go, still only a fraction of the $28 billion it holds in oil and gas stocks. The moves leaves oil and gas giants like Shell, BP, Total and the state-run Equinor untouched on the grounds that they do businesses other than oil exploration.

The Norwegian governments move is still not final, though. It still requires approval from Parliament, but with the support of the opposition it is very likely to be approved soon and then go for implementation, Yossi Cadan, senior divestment campaigner at the group 350.org, which is campaigning to substitute fossils with green energy, tells Firstpost.

The major exceptions Norway has made means the move still doesnt go as far as anti-fossil fuel campaigners would like it to. But this is still a big step that sends out a strong signal.

Its a good first step and we hope additional inclusions of mega oil corporations will follow, says Cadan. It also sends a strong signal to the market and increases the risk associated with fossil fuel stocks. We can draw parallels from the coal divestment that made coal finance very expensive.

Massive as it is, the Norwegian decision is only the largest among a thousand waves in this advance. 350.org has run campaigns across mostly North America and Europe that have brought success that is undoubtedly less than what is needed but just as certainly far greater than expected.

At the end of 2014, 181 institutions with $50 billion worth of assets had committed to divestment; that figure has now risen to more than a thousand institutions with managed investments worth almost $8 trillion, says 350.org.

This is a green revolution that India is mostly missing  amidst arguments that it needs to, at least in the short term. The scorecard of a thousand plus companies includes two Indian firms that are both faith-based  Caritas India that has pledged to divest from all fossil fuels, and Indian Catholic Matters.

Its not unusual for such groups to divest first and to divest most. Close to half of all companies around the world that have divested are faith-based investment companies or philanthropic organisations. Governments and educational institutions account for another 30 per cent. Only 4 per cent of the lot are companies operating for profit.

To the extent that reduction of institutional investment in fossil is going to green the world, or lessen its green losses, the Indian contribution so far is modest. The two commitments in India have very little financial capital  though some bigger moral capital  to influence any target in India, Cadan tells Firstpost.

In the face of such modest moves, 350.org is not campaigning among the bigger companies yet. Currently, were not targeting any specific institution in India and the divestment is more a general call for all investors to withdraw their investments from all fossil fuels. But the fresh move from the Norwegian government has the potential to impact India. If there are explorations they will be on Norway's divestment short list, says Cadan.

Norways sovereign fund investors have shown the economic underlining to the environmental move. The divestment is being sold primarily as protection from the kind of wild fluctuation in the oil market seen over recent months amidst fears of more to come. Such divestment inhibits exploration and tapping of more oil, and it could bring an upheaval in the energy market that could hurt no country more than India.

The International Energy Agency projected in its 2018 report that Indias energy demand would double by 2040, the highest in the world. Not all that the sun can shine or the wind blow could meet a substantial bit of that rising demand. Reduced investment in exploration companies of the Norwegian kind and the inhibiting influence that a move like this can signal could both lessen supply and raise oil prices at a time when India is hungry to grow on the strength of such energy.

India has launched an ambitious push to power itself on renewables but amidst signs that use of solar panels is slowing, and that these arent as inexpensive or as easy to use as hoped.

The debate over progressive policy on climate change dragged down by dangerous sources of energy hasnt gone away, not for developing countries such as India that hasnt bid goodbye to coal, never mind oil. The signal from Norway is a strong one for India: for its own economy and for everyones environment, New Delhi will certainly need a renewed push on renewables.Most of Mexico's 32 state-level governments prohibit underage marriage, but exceptions have been allowed, with parental consent

Mexico City: Mexico has moved closer to a total, nationwide ban on underage marriage with no exceptions after the Senate approved the prohibition.

The changes to the national legal codes still have to approved by the lower house. The law approved on Thursday would require people to be at least 18 to get married.

Most of Mexico's 32 state-level governments prohibit underage marriage, but exceptions have been allowed, with parental consent. According to the Interior Department, only Baja California state remains without a ban.

Just a few years ago, boys as young as 16, and girls as young as 14, were allowed to marry with their parents' consent.

The department said in 2015, 24,338 people under 18 got married in Mexico; the majority were young girls marrying older males.Chelsea Powrie

It has long been difficult for the South Okanagan General Hospital to fill gaps in staffing, which is why the Regional District of Okanagan Similkameen heard a plea Thursday for funding to support locum doctors' housing in the Oliver and Osoyoos area.

"Eight or nine months of the year, (housing) is really doable, you can find some amazing places for some amazing deals," said Petra Veintimilla, RDOS board member, hospital board chair and Oliver councillor. "But in the summer months it's hard."

The emergency room has had to close on a few occasions when staff simply couldn't cover all the hours.

Oliver and Osoyoos have already been working together to provide housing for locum doctors  those who stand in temporarily.

"We just think it needs to be expanded a little bit, I wasn't sure whether there could be a regional service," mayor Sue McKortoff of Osoyoos said. "It's really an important issue that we need to deal with at some level."

"That conversation, we felt, should be had a little bit more regionally, because the hospital is a regional hospital, not just Oliver and Osoyoos," Veintimilla agreed.

The board was not voting on a particular motion Thursday, but merely discussing the concept of working together to help out with doctor housing as a possibility.

"I think the concept on a whole was supported, the idea of making your community easily accessible to these locums who have the option to go anywhere was supported all around the table," Veintimilla said.

Several board members expressed interest in the idea of renting a property year-round to have available for locum doctors. Toni Boot of Summerland said a doctor shortage is an issue in her community as well, so any solutions should have broader impacts around the entire district.

The board decided to continue discussing the issue over the coming months.

"For the immediate future it might be a little bit smaller scale, maybe just Oliver and Osoyoos, or Oliver and Osoyoos and Area A and Area C, but we are going to continue to have a bit of a broader conversation with all of the communities in the regional district," Veintimilla said.(Reuters) - Five people arrested last August at a New Mexico compound where the body of a toddler was found pleaded not guilty on Thursday to federal terrorism charges their lawyers say were brought largely because they are Muslims. The three women and two men faced charges last week of conspiring to support planned attacks on U.S

(Reuters) - Five people arrested last August at a New Mexico compound where the body of a toddler was found pleaded not guilty on Thursday to federal terrorism charges their lawyers say were brought largely because they are Muslims.

The three women and two men faced charges last week of conspiring to support planned attacks on U.S. law enforcement officers, military members and government employees while living in their makeshift home in Taos County, New Mexico.

They have been in federal custody since August on separate charges filed following a police raid on the remote compound where they lived with 11 children.

"They're innocent, they plead not guilty and we probably wouldn't be in this position if they weren't Muslims," said defence attorney Amy Sirignano by phone.

The case gained significant attention after Taos County Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe said the group were "extremist of the Muslim belief" and prosecutors accused them of training two teenage sons to carry out school shootings.

Defendants Jany Leveille, 36, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 40, Hujrah Wahhaj, 38, Subhanah Wahhaj, 36, and Lucas Morton, 41, are all related as siblings or by marriage.

Prosecutors have said the 3-year-old boy found buried at the camp, the son of Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, died in a ritual to cast out demonic spirits, and his extended family believed he would return as Jesus to identify corrupt targets for them to attack.

Results of the boy's autopsy have yet to be made public.

All, except Ibn Wahhaj, are charged with the kidnapping of the boy resulting in his death and could face the death penalty, said Sirignano.

Under federal law, parents cannot be charged with kidnapping their own children within the United States, she said.

The five initially faced state child abuse charges, but that case was dismissed when prosecutors missed a procedural deadline.

Defence attorneys said the group were exercising their rights to teach their children how to shoot, practice their religion and live "off-the-grid."

"This case is about freedom of religion, freedom of association and the right to bear arms," defence lawyer Billy Blackburn told reporters.

(Reporting By Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico; Editing by Grant McCool)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.Headscarves were also worn as a mark of respect by policewomen and non-Muslim volunteers directing the crowds around the site in Christchurch holding communal prayers on Friday

Christchurch: Women across New Zealand wore makeshift hijabs as a statement of peace and solidarity on Friday, a week after a white supremacist killed 50 Muslims at two mosques in the southern city of Christchurch.

Rafaela Stoakes, a 32-year-old mother of two, said wearing the Islamic head covering gave her an insight into what it means to stand out and feel part of the minority.

On Friday morning she covered all but a few locks of her dark chestnut-coloured hair in a loose red and white scarf, crossed neatly beneath her chin and tucked into a black hiking jacket.

She was one of many women embracing #HeadScarfforHarmony, to make a stand against the hate espoused by the Australian man accused of killing dozens of worshippers.

Headscarves were also worn as a mark of respect by policewomen and non-Muslim volunteers directing the crowds around the site in Christchurch holding communal prayers on Friday.

Many were wearing a headscarf for the first time.

"It is amazing how different I felt for the short time I was out this morning," Stoakes said. "There were a lot of confused looks and some slightly aggressive ones," she said.

"I did feel a sense of pride to honour my Muslim friends, but I also felt very vulnerable and alone as I was the only person wearing one." "It must take a lot of courage to do this on a daily basis."

The gesture caught on nationwide  in offices, schools and on the streets  as well as at the ceremonies held in Christchurch to mark one week since the killings at the hands of a self-avowed white supremacist.

Women flooded Twitter, Facebook and other social media  which played a key role in allowing the gunman to spread his message  with their images.

Kate Mills Workman, a 19-year-old student from Wellington, posted a selfie on Twitter wearing a green headscarf.

"If I could I would be attending the mosque and standing outside to show my support for my Muslim whanau but I've got lectures and I can't really skip them," she said, using a Maori language term for extended family.

"Obviously this is all spurred on by the terrible tragedy in Christchurch, but it's also a way of showing that any form of harassment or bigotry based on a symbol of religion is never okay," she added.

"As New Zealanders, we have to make a really strong stand." Although the headscarf has been the subject of contentious debate over gender rights in the Islamic world, for Stoakes the day has been a lesson in how pious Muslim women often do not have the option to melt away into the background when they feel vulnerable.

"We can nod and pretend to agree with people who we are afraid of, or plead ignorance if we feel in danger of confrontation," she said.

"But a Muslim is just right out there. Like a bulls eye. Their hijabs and clothing speak before they do."Kim's rejection of US President Trumps demand of full denuclearisation prior to the lifting of harsh UN and US economic sanctions leaves the president with few good choices

North Korean leader Kim Jong Uns refusal at Februarys Hanoi summit to bow to Donald Trumps maximum-pressure approach may prove to be a watershed in the US presidents notion of foreign-policy making, his perception of the ability of the United States to impose its will on others and his faith in his self-acclaimed negotiating skills.

Kims rejection of Trumps demand that North Korea fully denuclearise prior to the lifting of harsh United Nations and US economic sanctions leaves the president with few good choices. How Trump decides to pick up the pieces could have far-reaching consequences for his approach towards other perceived disruptors of the existing world order, first and foremost Iran that similarly shows no signs of buckling under crippling US sanctions designed to suck life out of the Iranian economy.

For now, Trump is likely to opt for a carrot-and-stick approach towards North Korea involving continued maximum pressure coupled with dialogue, a stark contrast to Iran with whom the US leader has so far refused to engage. It could prove to be a long-drawn-out process, with little prospect in the foreseeable future of an outcome that would prove the value of his maximum approach.

That is true even though the dialogue signals to Pyongyang a degree of sincerity in the Trump administrations assertion that it is not seeking a regime change, a message Washington has decidedly refrained from sending to Tehran.

With elections in the United States less than two years away, Trumps alternatives are either risky or similarly fraught with uncertainty. Trump could revert to his initial threat of fire and fury like the world has never seen and pledge to totally destroy North Korea, which in his mind brought Kim to the negotiating table. That, however, could push the United States into yet another military encounter and trouble relations with major powers such as China with whom Trump has bigger fish to fry such as trade.

Trumps third and final option would involve a climbdown from his all-or-nothing strategy that aims to achieve full denuclearisation in exchange for lifting of the sanctions in one fell swoop and was advocated by his hardline national security adviser, John Bolton. Instead, Trump would have to acknowledge the failure of that strategy and adopt a step-by-step approach, the rewarding of each step that North Korea takes with the lifting or weakening of some element of the sanctions regime.

The Trump administration is not big on a gradual approach. Nobody in the administration advocates a step-by-step approach. In all cases, the expectation is a complete denuclearisation of North Korea as a condition forall the other steps being taken, a transcript of a briefing quoted a state department official, believed to be Stephen E Beigun, Trumps special representative for North Korea, as saying. The official said an incremental approach would take a long period of time, and quite honestly has failed on previous occasions to deliver the outcome that both sides at least ostensibly committed to.

Yet, a step-by-step approach is what North Korea seeks. Kim made that clear in his proposal that his country be granted partial sanctions relief in exchange for the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of its major nuclear complex at Yongbyon.

In a rare encounter with journalists, North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong Ho hinted at the reason Kim would not budge. Ri said the current level of

confidence did not justify an all-or-nothing deal.

The experience of Trump withdrawing from various international accords, including the 2015 deal that curbed Irans nuclear programme, has undermined confidence in North Korea and beyond in the presidents willingness to honour agreements he concludes and the value of American commitments when a new administration, which doesnt like the understandings reached by its predecessor, comes to power.

The administration position is that North Korea must surrender everything first and hope for the best, and North Korea is not nearly desperate enough to consider such a lopsided proposal, said analyst Daniel Larson.

The silver lining is that despite North Korea apparently preparing to resume missile testing in violation of Kims promise to Trump in Hanoi, neither country is pouncing to go to the brink. Both countries seem to want to keep the door to renew negotiations open even as they take their time.

For now, this may prove to be a positive development even if it kicks Trumps watershed moment down the road. The longer, however, Kim is able to live the fallout of the sanctions, the narrower Trumps choices get. That may not necessarily be a good thing as he gets close to the 2020 elections.

(James M Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapores S Rajaratnam School of International Studies and co-director of the University of Wuerzburgs Institute of Fan Culture)The US' sanctions on the China-based shipping companies are the first such steps since US president Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's summit meeting collapsed last month.

Washington: The United States on Thursday sanctioned two China-based shipping companies it says helped North Korea evade US and international sanctions over its nuclear weapons programme, the first such steps since US president Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's summit meeting collapsed last month.

The US Treasury also issued an updated advisory that listed 67 vessels that have engaged in illicit transfers of refined petroleum with North Korean tankers or were believed to have exported North Korean coal.

The Treasury Department identified the newly sanctioned firms as Dalian Haibo International Freight Co Ltd and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co Ltd, both based in China. The move prohibits US dealings with the designated companies and freezes any assets they have in the United States.

The US announcement came weeks after a second summit between Trump and Kim, in Hanoi, broke down late last month over conflicting demands by North Korea for relief from tough sanctions and from the US side for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

The United States has led international efforts to press North Korea through sanctions to give up its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. "The United States and our like-minded partners remain committed to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearisation of North Korea and believe that the full implementation of North Korea-related UN Security Council resolutions is crucial to a successful outcome," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement.

"Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk.

Limbo

US-North Korean engagement has appeared to be in limbo since last month's summit breakdown. Washington has said it aims to re-engage with Kim, but North Korea has warned it is considering suspending talks and may rethink a freeze on missile and nuclear tests in place since 2017 unless Washington makes concessions.

On Monday, two senior US senators called for the Trump administration to correct a slowing pace of American sanctions designations on North Korea, saying there had been a marked decline in such actions during the past year of US diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang. They pointed to a 2019 UN report which found that North Korea had continued to defy UN sanctions with a massive increase in smuggling of petroleum products and coal and violation of bans on arms sales.

The Treasury statement said Dalian Haibo was targeted for dealings with Paeksol Trading Corp, a company previously designated by US sanctions on North Korea. It said Dalian Haibo shipped cargo from Dalian, China to Paeksol in Nampo, North Korea, in early 2018 aboard North Korean-flagged vessels.

The statement also said Liaoning Danxing had "routinely used deceptive practices" to enable the work of North Korean procurement officials based in the European Union. The Treasury statement said evasion tactics employed by North Korea included disabling or manipulating automated identification systems, physically altering vessels, transferring cargoes between ships and falsifying cargo documentation.

It said ports visited by vessels involved in ship-to-ship transfers included those in Taiwan, China, Russia and South Korea.

The Treasury Department also said that in 2018, North Korean ports received at least 263 tanker deliveries of refined petroleum via UN-prohibited ship-to-ship transfers.

It said that if the tankers were fully laden, North Korea would have imported 3.78 million barrels - more than 7-1/2 times the 500,000 barrels per year allowed under a UN resolution.

Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, said early this month that the United States would look at ramping up sanctions on North Korea if Pyongyang did not scrap its nuclear weapons program.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on 4 March he was hopeful he could send a team to North Korea "in the next couple of weeks," but there has been no sign of direct engagement since the failed 27-28 February summit.worth paying multiplex prices for

worth a look, but wait for DVD, unless your favorite actor is in it

give it a miss

my reaction under consideration

my reaction under gag order for now

not yet seen by mePhoto: The Canadian Press British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves after addressing a media conference at an EU summit in Brussels, Friday, March 22, 2019.

Prime Minister Theresa May used to promise "strong and stable" government. Fellow EU leaders used to believe her.

But then came almost three years of Brexit missteps and mayhem. For the EU, Britain's 2016 vote to leave was a shock; what has happened since has left the reputation of Britain's prime minister, and the country's political institutions, badly tarnished.

May triggered the formal two-year countdown to Brexit while Britain was still divided over departure terms. Then she called a snap election to strengthen her bargaining hand  and lost her majority in Parliament.

Since then, Brexit has become gridlocked, with May too weak to push through her plans and lawmakers too divided to force an alternate course.

Leaders across Europe have watched with surprise, dismay and mounting frustration as Britain's widely respected institutions  a 1,000-year-old Parliament, an electoral system built to supply stable majority governments  failed repeatedly to make crucial decisions while the clock ticked down.

"The patience slowly, slowly is running out," one EU official said at this week's Brussels summit as the bloc's leaders  without May  debated whether to step in to prevent Britain crashing out of the bloc on its scheduled March 29 departure date.

In response to May's request for a three-month delay, the bloc offered a short two-step extension, with a deadline of April 12 for Britain to choose between May's deal, no deal, a long delay or no Brexit at all.

EU leaders said they had stepped in where Britain had failed, to avert the chaos of a messy Brexit next week

Newspapers in Britain and the EU were united in seeing the EU's offer as proof Britain had lost control of its Brexit destiny.

"EU takes control of Brexit as May is sidelined," said the front page of the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph. Spain's El Pais said the EU had given May a "20-day ultimatum." France's Le Figaro said the bloc's "confidence in Theresa May has evaporated," while Liberation summarized the mood of EU participants at the summit as "irritation, tiredness and a clear sense of being fed-up."

Some European politicians lay blame for the crisis squarely on May, a politician whose strengths  tenacity, stamina, a remarkable ability to keep plowing on in the face of opposition  have become weaknesses.

When May addressed EU leaders at the summit on Thursday, many were frustrated that she would not reveal a "Plan B" if her twice-rejected divorce deal was thrown out by Parliament again. They were downright alarmed by the impression that she would opt for a "no-deal" Brexit rather than accept a long delay.Photo: CTV News

A Supreme Court of Canada decision could jeopardize child luring convictions.

Douglas Morrison of Ontario was convicted after posting an ad on Craigslist that read "Daddy looking for his little girl," to which police responded, "posing as a 14-year-old girl named Mia."

But now, the court has ruled the law that convicted him violates the charter of rights because it shifts the burden of proof onto the accused to prove they're innocent, CTV News reports.

In its decision, the court wrote that "the Crown must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused believed the other person was underage."

The decision throws into doubt Creep Catchers stings and Vancouver Police operation that have snared 47 suspects over the past year.

"It's a little bit too early to tell, but we are aware of it and we're looking at the actual ruling," VPD Sgt. Jason Robillard told CTV.

Meanwhile, Crown lawyers are studying the ruling, and Morrison will get a new trial.

 with files from CTV VancouverIn an attempt to bring together all the features from Galaxy Apps and Galaxy Themes, Samsung Electronics has launched the Galaxy Store, a new platform for downloading apps and other content last month. Now it has detailed the features.

For the uninitiated, the Galaxy Store brings together all the features from Galaxy Apps and Galaxy Themes that Galaxy users love, creating a whole new digital marketplace optimized for individual users.

The Galaxy Store is exclusive for the Galaxy users allowing them to personalize the device with an array of apps and themes, ranging from Galaxy-exclusive content to partner apps that provide a diverse range of services.

In this Store, users can buy purchase and select a variety of themes and fonts, new camera filters, photos with stickers and stamps, and new edge panel as well. Moreover, the Galaxy Watch and Gear users can also adjust their watch faces and download apps directly from the phone using the Watch tab in the Galaxy Store.

Furthermore, the Galaxy Store has enhanced the recommendations feature, adding an AI-based analysis tool to the user-oriented UI. Moreover, there will be recommendations based on seasons, holidays and events throughout the year.

SourceCanopy Growth (NASDAQ:CGC) is Canada's largest marijuana stock by revenue, but its future is going to be far less determined by legal marijuana sales in Canada than it will be by sales in the United States. This leading purveyor of pot has already announced plans to create a hemp industrial park in New York state to establish a footprint in the world's biggest marijuana market, and on Thursday, it announced it's acquiring AgriNextUSA, a U.S. hemp-focused real estate company. Here's what Canopy Growth is saying about its plans to profit from potential U.S. legalization.

Reversing regulations

Marijuana remains a schedule 1 controlled substance in the U.S., so it's still illegal at the federal level. However, 33 states have passed pot laws establishing marijuana marketplaces in some form, including 10 states that have created recreational, adult-use markets.

The momentum for widespread legalization in the U.S. is accelerating. According to Gallup, 2 in every 3 Americans support ending federal marijuana prohibition of its recreational use, including 75% of Democrats and 53% of Republicans. The improving attitude among voters toward marijuana is likely to result in more states creating recreational-use markets, including in New Jersey. It's also causing legalization to become a cornerstone policy among U.S. presidential candidates.

If Congress eventually legalizes marijuana nationally, it would be a boon for publicly traded cannabis companies, including Canopy Growth. Until recently, Canopy Growth and its peers have been prevented from targeting the U.S. because of major stock exchange listing requirements that prevent stocks from engaging in business activities where federal law prohibits it. In December, the U.S. Farm Bill removed hemp, a nonpsychoactive form of cannabis sativa, from the controlled substance list, creating a pathway for individual states to set up regulated hemp markets that Canada's cannabis companies can participate in.

Check out the latest earnings call transcript for Canopy Growth.

Eyes on the big prize

The global marijuana market is worth an estimated $150 billion per year, according to the United Nations, and the U.S. accounts for a whopping $50 billion of that spending.

Most of the American market is conducted in the shadows, however -- billions of dollars per year in marijuana sales have been shifting to legal, regulated markets since Colorado became the first state in the U.S. to open an adult-use marketplace in 2014. Today, legal marijuana sales total about $8.4 billion annually, according to GreenWave Advisors' Matt Karnes, including $4.4 billion in recreational-use sales.

The change in regulating hemp doesn't mean Canopy Growth will be able to sell marijuana in the U.S. yet, but it does give the company the opportunity to establish infrastructure to develop and market hemp-based products, and that infrastructure could eventually be leveraged for marijuana if marijuana also gets a federal nod of approval.

Recognizing the opportunity associated with hemp, Canopy Growth announced in January it's received a license from New York state to create a hemp industrial park there. Canopy Growth expects to spend between $100 million to $150 million at a soon-to-be-announced location that will eventually allow it to process hemp and develop hemp-based products, including products containing cannabidiol, or CBD, a chemical associated with health benefits that's naturally occurring in hemp and marijuana. CBD products are widely available in the U.S., with all but three of the 50 states allowing its use as medicine.

The U.S. CBD market is valued at roughly $600 million, and it could grow into a billion-dollar-plus-sized market in the future if regulators cooperate and mass-market retailers begin selling the products. Today, CBD products are usually only available at smaller natural foods stores or head shops or via prescriptions through medical marijuana dispensaries.

The opportunity to use hemp as a gateway ahead of potential marijuana legalization nationwide has Canopy Growth CEO Bruce Linton excited. In announcing the AgriNextUSA acquisition, Linton said, "The United States is the next stop on Canopy Growth's desired path to becoming a leading, revenue-generating company focused on all aspects of cannabinoids and their potential."

AgriNextUSA's CEO is Geoff Whaling, a hemp advocacy pioneer who is chairman of the National Hemp Association. Its focus is on creating hemp-based parks like the one Canopy Growth is planning in New York. Whaling and AgriNextUSA will "accelerate Canopy Growth [CGC]'s entry into key American jurisdictions as regulations surrounding the full use of hemp as a crop begin to be implemented," according to the company.

The future hemp industrial parks they plan on building will allow hemp to be "fast-tracked through a production cycle that would result in commercial applications for all parts of the plant, from root to tip," providing farmers with a one-stop shop that can serve as a "single, regional destination for their hemp crops" that "connects them with the researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators whose ideas will turn their crops into new products and industries."

Canopy Growth thinks the hemp market and hemp-derived products could disrupt several industries, including cosmetics, textiles, food, and health. If so, then Canopy Growth may become increasingly dependent on the U.S. for revenue growth in the future.Raytheon (NYSE:RTN) is one of a select group of large and well-known military industrial companies that serve the United States and its allies. It has a diversified business, with a focus on key and emerging areas of the defense industry that should serve it and its shareholders well over the long term. But is that enough to make Raytheon a buy? There's more to know here before you jump in.

A good business

Raytheon has four main divisions: intelligence, information, and services (22% of sales), integrated defense systems (23%), space and airborne systems (23%), and missile systems (30%). The last two are really core specialties, and both relate to the changing face of warfare, in which air supremacy and the ability to attack from vast distances is vital to maintaining an edge. It also has a small but growing business in the cyberspace area, known as Forcepoint (2% of revenues), which is an increasingly important defense issue.

As one would expect, a huge portion of Raytheon's business is tied to the U.S. government (about 70% of sales). However, the company also works with U.S. allies, and roughly 30% of its top line comes from other countries spread across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. While the company's foreign sales offer diversification, it's important to remember that because of the products Raytheon makes, it can't simply sell to anyone. So even here, there's a tie back to the U.S. government, which generally must give its approval for foreign sales.

Financially speaking, Raytheon is on solid footing. It has an investment-grade balance sheet. Financial debt to equity is a very low 0.12 times, well below the levels of its closest peers. And it covered its trailing 12-month interest expenses by an incredible 21 times, vastly more than any of its peers. This is a company built to survive an industry downturn. It also has a 14-year history of annual dividend increases under its belt. (The roughly 1.9% yield is about what you'd get from an S&P 500 Index fund.)

As for the company's recent financial performance, 2018 was a pretty good year. Revenues were up nearly 7%, earnings advanced 46%, and the company generated record levels of cash flow. And, perhaps equally important, the company's $42.2 billion backlog of work at year-end was also at a record high. That suggests that the good times are set to continue for this military contractor. It's added a number of additional contract wins through the first few months of 2019, as well.

From a fundamental perspective, Raytheon looks like a great company to consider adding to your portfolio. The problem here is valuation, where the picture is a little more mixed.

Check out the latest earnings call transcript for Raytheon.

Price is what you pay

To paraphrase investing legend Benjamin Graham, a man who helped train Warren Buffett, even a great company can be a bad investment if you pay too much for it. Graham's preference was to buy stocks when they were on sale, usually when they were deeply discounted. That is definitely not the case with Raytheon today.

For example, the company's price-to-sales and price-to-book ratios are above their five-year averages. These metrics are also higher than the average for the SPDR S&P Aerospace & Defense ETF, which is a rough proxy for the industry. That said, Raytheon's price-to-earnings and price-to-cash flow ratios are both around 10% or so below their five-year averages. The P/E and P/S ratios are also below those of the broader group. This is a decidedly mixed picture, which likely suggests a company that's fairly valued.

Where the ratio analysis gets a little more interesting is the price-to-earnings-to-growth ratio, which is also known as the PEG ratio. This metric compares valuation and growth potential. Raytheon's PEG ratio of 2.4 times is well below its five-year average of 3.75 times. This ratio is also at the low end of its largest and closest peers. This suggests that investors may not be giving Raytheon enough credit for its growth potential. So from this perspective, the military contractor looks interesting.

But the big picture here is that, when looking at Raytheon, investors really don't come away with a definitive answer on the valuation front.

Is Raytheon right for you?

Raytheon is a well-run company that looks well prepared for the future, even if that includes some lean times. A great company, however, isn't always a great investment. Although it appears that investors may be underestimating Raytheon's growth potential, it's hard to suggest that the current price is a bargain. If you are a growth-minded investor and don't mind paying full price, or at least close to full price, Raytheon might be of interest to you. However, if you have a value bent and prefer to build in a margin of safety by buying at a discount, then it's still best to keep this name on your wish list and not your buy list. In other words, most investors should still be passing on this great company.Photo: The Canadian Press A worker walks next to a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane parked at Boeing Field in Seattle on March 14, 2019.

WestJet Airlines plans to stick with deliveries of Boeing 737 Max aircraft once regulators approve the plane for re-entry into service.

The Calgary-based airline says it won't follow the lead of Indonesia's flag carrier, which cancelled its multibillion-dollar order for 49 Max 8 jets, citing a loss of confidence after two deadly crashes in the past six months.

WestJet had expected to add two more of the planes this year to increase its fleet to 13, but Boeing has suspended all future deliveries.

Spokeswoman Lauren Stewart says the 37 remaining deliveries in its order won't take place until the grounding is lifted and it thoroughly evaluates any upgrades.

"If the grounding has been lifted and the aircraft is approved for re-entry into service by all relevant regulatory bodies, we will take all deliveries as intended," she wrote in an email.

Stewart said the narrow-body planes remain "a vital part of the fleet," having performed "safely, reliably and efficiently" since 2017.

"WestJet remains unrelenting in putting safety at the forefront and will thoroughly evaluate processes, procedures and any further required training before these aircraft once again take to the skies."

Air Canada and Sunwing didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

Garuda Indonesia is the first airline to cancel an order for the troubled planes.

J.P. Morgan transportation analyst Seth Seifman believes that most major players in global air travel would like to see the plane flying again soon.

But he said it can't take off again until investigators have reached preliminary conclusions about the March 10 Ethiopian Air crash and similarities with the Lion Air crash last October, which he said could come as early as next week.

"If the conclusion is that from an aircraft point of view, MCAS (computer system) was the main contributing factor, then the fix Boeing has developed post-Lion, combined with enhanced training, would be appropriate in this case as well," he wrote in a report.

However, if the investigation points to a different explanation then Boeing would have to address another cause.

"The worst case for ending the grounding is an inconclusive result," he added.

Regulatory approval could be delayed because foreign regulators, including the Canadians and Europeans, have already discussed conducting their own assessments of Boeing's MCAS fix separate from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.Photo: The Canadian Press Jody Wilson-Raybould appears at the House of Commons Justice Committee on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019.

Jody Wilson-Raybould plans to reveal more  in writing  about her accusation that she faced improper pressure to prevent the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

The former attorney general has written to the House of Commons justice committee to advise that she intends to make a written submission, as well as provide "copies of text messages and emails" that she referenced when she told her story in person last month.

"Related to these requests, I also have relevant facts and evidence in my possession that further clarify statements I made and elucidate the accuracy and nature of statements by witnesses in testimony that came after my committee appearance," Wilson-Raybould writes.

Her written statement will be "within the confines of the waiver of cabinet confidence and solicitor-client privilege," the letter notes.

The Liberal-dominated committee shut down its investigation into the affair on Tuesday, with Liberal members concluding no rules or laws were broken.

Opposition parties have been demanding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau grant a blanket waiver of solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidentiality to allow Wilson-Raybould to more fully tell her story.

Wilson-Raybould says the additional information she will provide in her written submission will stay within the confines of the waiver she has already been granted, covering the period last fall when she claims to have been pressured up to Jan. 14 when she was shuffled out of her dual role as justice minister and attorney general.

Her letter comes the day after former cabinet minister Jane Philpott fanned the flames of the SNC-Lavalin fire in an interview to Maclean's magazine, saying there is "much more to the story"  a report that landed in the midst of a Conservative-orchestrated filibuster over the controversy.

The filibuster, which continued until almost 1 a.m. Friday, was intended to protest Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's refusal to offer a blanket waiver of privilege and confidentiality that Wilson-Raybould has claimed is necessary if she is to fully tell her side of the story.

Philpott, who resigned early this month as Treasury Board president, told Maclean's that she raised concerns with Trudeau, during a Jan. 6 discussion about an imminent cabinet shuffle, that Wilson-Raybould was being moved out of Justice because of her refusal to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case.

"I think Canadians might want to know why I would have raised that with the prime minister a month before the public knew about it. Why would I have felt that there was a reason why Minister Wilson-Raybould should not be shuffled?" she said. "My sense is that Canadians would like to know the whole story."

But Philpott actually appears to already be free to talk about that Jan. 6 conversation with Trudeau: The government has waived solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidentiality for last fall, when Wilson-Raybould alleges she was improperly pressured, until Jan. 14, when she was moved to the Veterans Affairs portfolio. The waiver applies not just to Wilson-Raybould but to "any persons who directly participated in discussions with her" relating to the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin for alleged corrupt practices in Libya.

That waiver allowed Wilson-Raybould to testify for nearly four hours before the House of Commons justice committee.

On Thursday, Trudeau rejected the opposition parties' contention, echoed by Philpott, that a broader waiver is required to cover the period between Jan. 14 and Wilson-Raybould's resignation from cabinet a month later.

"It was extremely important that the former attorney general be allowed to share completely her perspectives, her experiences on this issue, and that is what she was able to do," he said after an announcement in Mississauga, pumping up the latest budget's promise to invest $2.2 billion more in municipal infrastructure projects.House Doctors Celebrates System Wide Successes at 2019 National Convention

Professional Handyman and Home Improvement Business Brings Team Together to Highlight Accomplishments and Reflect on Past Year

March 22, 2019 // Franchising.com // MILFORD, Ohio - House Doctors, the trusted source for handyman services, home repair and home improvement, recently celebrated significant system wide milestone achievements and set the stage for the balance of 2019 at its annual franchisee convention in Nashville, Tenn.

Themed Opportunity Rocks!, the convention created a space for franchisees from across the nation to reconnect and share knowledge and accomplishments from the previous 12 months. House Doctors, the brand known for its wide range of customer demographics and an array of work from small jobs to light remodeling and commercial opportunities, gave franchisees across the system the chance to exchange best practices and capitalize on business growth in the year ahead.

This years convention truly rocked, and allowed us the opportunity to learn from one another and to grow as professionals in the industry, said Jim Hunter, president of House Doctors. It was also a chance to recognize our franchisees who go above and beyond to promote the kind of behavior that will help us continue to expand into new regions and support our franchise development initiatives as we target several new growth markets in 2019.

David Lupberger, owner of Remodel Force and author of Managing the Emotional Homeowner, was the keynote speaker and shared knowledge on how remodelers and contractors can grow longer-lasting and more profitable businesses by developing lean and mean business systems. With over 30 years of experience, Lupberger was able to provide insight on the industry and stressed the importance of having proven systems and processes in order to see consistent results.

House Doctors also hosted an awards dinner to celebrate the accomplishments of high-performing franchisees in 2018. Several owners were awarded the 2018 Sales Increase, in addition to other special recognitions, including Tony Holt of East Alabama, who received the See you at the Top award; Daniel and Shenna Zurbrigg of Naples, Florida, who were presented the 212 Award,; Matt Mozkin of Redmond, Washington, who was presented the Rookie of the Year Award and Bart Williams of Somerset, Kentucky, who took home the title of Franchisee of the Year for the fourth year in a row. Attendees also participated in building exercises where they competed for the chance to win the highly coveted Golden Hammer Award.

Several new marketing initiatives were revealed during the convention, including the announcement of digital marketing support for franchisees to drive their business at the local level from Local Search Masters. Likewise, House Doctors introduced All Points PR, a leading national public relations firm, to franchisees at the convention, with the agency slated to provide support to current franchisees and drive growth in several new markets as targeted in House Doctors aggressive growth initiative for 2019.

About House Doctors

Known as the trusted handyman service for home repair and home improvement, House Doctors offers a myriad of services from drywall and gutter repair to kitchen and bathroom remodeling. Whether it takes two hours or two days, the House Doctors team of insured, bonded and uniformed handymen have a wide array of skillsets to tackle even the longest list of to-dos. With a one-year guarantee, prompt and precise service and a team of qualified craftsman and technicians, House Doctors is not only a handyman service, but a trusted home advisor among the customers it serves. Founded in 1995, House Doctors is located across the country and has targeted several growth markets for the next few years.

For more information about the brand, visit the company website at https://www.housedoctors.com.

Media Contact:

Alex Hopkins

All Points Public Relations

(847) 897-7469

ahopkins@allpointspr.com

SOURCE House Doctors

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DisqusMassage Envy Inks Multi-Unit Deal for 70 Additional Franchised Locations throughout Rocky Mountain & Great Plain Regions

Colorado-Based Venture Capital Firm to Continue Growing Brand in Colorado and Beyond

March 22, 2019 // Franchising.com // Scottsdale, AZ - Massage Envy, the leading provider of therapeutic massage and skin care services collectively across its franchise network, has signed a deal with Novarus Wellness Concepts to expand the brand through the purchase of existing franchised locations and the development of additional franchised locations. The franchise group signed on to add 70 additional franchised locations to its portfolio over the next five years in the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states.

Novarus Wellness Concepts, a Denver-based venture capital firm, is owned by longtime Massage Envy franchisee Eric Kenealy and Randall Brown serves as the companys President and CEO. After building three Massage Envy franchised locations in 2005, Kenealy has spent the last 14 years growing with the wellness brand and he now owns 18 franchised locations across Colorado. Novarus is looking to expand by eight or nine locations per year through the development of additional units and acquisition of existing locations. Notably, Novarus intends to explore the opening of a franchised location in Wyoming, which would mark the first-ever Massage Envy in the state - the only state currently without a Massage Envy franchised location.

Since Novarus has successfully scaled its multi-unit business, it is often invited to participate in testing for new products and services for the brand, allowing them to get an early look at where the franchise system is heading. While Massage Envy just recently announced its partnership with HyperIce to offer Rapid Tension Relief (RTR) massage services, Novarus and its massage therapists built up a fervent fan base for the service at Denver franchised locations months ago when they were piloting RTR.

One of the reasons we partnered with Massage Envy to grow by 70 more locations is because we have so much confidence in where the brand is headed, said Brown. Massage Envy is the first and largest massage franchise, but it isnt resting on its laurels. Weve had the pleasure of seeing whats next for the brand, and we are proud and excited to grow with it. Massage Envy is the market leader, and we want to be a part of the next chapter of its growth story.

The agreement with Novarus Wellness Concepts is part of Massage Envys ongoing strategy to optimize its franchise group through multi-unit operators. The brand is looking to accelerate and strengthen its national footprint by partnering with experienced operators like Novarus who can dedicate resources to help ensure each franchised location is set-up for success.

Across the country, we see meaningful opportunities for unit growth, said Joe Magnacca, Massage Envy Franchising President and CEO. The Kenealys track record of success with the franchise combined with their substantial knowledge of the region, make Novarus the ideal partner for continued Massage Envy growth in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains.

For interested parties, several company executives including VP of Franchise Development Tim Weiderhoft and Director of Franchise Development Scott Weidholz will be available to discuss the multi-unit franchise opportunities at this years Multi-Unit Franchising Conference in Las Vegas, March 24-27, 2019. Massage Envy will be located at booth 201, and registration for the event can be found at https://www.multiunitfranchisingconference.com/page/1357524/register.

About Massage Envy

Massage Envy, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, is a national franchisor and, through its franchise locations, is the leading provider of therapeutic massage and skincare services. The Massage Envy franchise system is, collectively, the largest employer of massage therapists and estheticians, with more than 35,000 dedicated wellness professionals that provide best-in-class service to over 1.65 million members. Founded in 2002, Massage Envy has more than 1,150 franchise locations in 49 states that have together delivered more than 100 million massages and facials.

Media Contact:

Klaudia Rudny

Fishman PR

847-945-1300

Krudny@fishmanpr.com

SOURCE Massage Envy

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DisqusThai Express Signs Multi-Unit Franchise Deal in North Carolina

Leading Thai Food Franchise Collaborates with Local Entrepreneurs to Open Three Locations throughout Charlotte Area

March 22, 2019 // Franchising.com // CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Thai Express, an Asian restaurant franchise that provides made-to-order Thai cuisine with fresh ingredients, quickly cooked in front of customers while they wait, announced today that it has signed a multi-unit franchise development agreement with husband-and-wife team Dipin and Neetu Chellani. The entrepreneurial duo will bring three Thai Express restaurants to the Charlotte area over the next three years. The new Thai Express locations are expected to bring more than 40 new jobs to the area.

Thai Express was founded in 2004 in Canada and quickly grew to more than 300 locations, becoming one of the most recognizable food brands in the country. Now, the brand is expanding throughout the US with the help of franchise owners like the Chellanis. Customers across Charlotte will soon find that Thai Express offers a vibrant environment, inviting customer service and a menu of more than 300 individual Thai dish options including classical Thai favorites. Each dish is tailored to meet the guests specific spice level preference and choice of protein.

The new franchisees, Dipin and Neetu are ideally situated to join the franchise brand. Dipin brings a background in finance and Neetu is already well versed in franchising; she owns a successful Kumon childrens learning center franchise in Charlotte. In addition to introducing Thai Express to North Carolina, the couple has plans to co-brand one of their locations with Ginger Sushi + Poke Shop, another brand that originated and grew wildly popular in Canada known as Sushi Shop.

With Thai Express focus on create-your-own, fresh, Thai menu items, its a brand new type of fast casual restaurant in Charlotte, said John Wuycheck, Senior Vice President of Franchise Development. We are confident in the Chellanis as franchise owners and were thrilled to see the brand enter into the new market of Queen City.

Owned by MTY Franchising USA and managed by Kahala Brands, the Chellanis and other franchisees of Thai Express have the benefit of the franchisors unrivaled franchisee support. Every franchisee has full access to an R&D team with chefs dedicated to sweet and savory menu innovations, an in-house social media team, an in-house creative team to help with ads, promos and coupons, a full-service construction team, a hands-on, week-long training program, continuing education and more.

The first of the Chellanis Thai Express restaurants in North Carolina is expected to open in late 2019.

About Thai Express

Thai Express is a new take on traditional Thai cuisine that began in Canada and is currently expanding into the U.S. Tailored to your taste and prepared fresh when you order, Thai Express provides fun, flavorful and healthy meals. As a premier Thai food franchise, the company believes in providing variety, quality and authenticity at modern food boutiques. In 2004, Thai Express was acquired by MTY Food Group Inc. and now has over 300 locations across North America.

Media Contact:

Mandi Gualtieri

Fishman PR

(847) 945-1300

agualtieri@fishmanpr.com

SOURCE Thai Express

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DisqusJay Palmer has always been an edgy guy. He loves the outdoors and activities such as biking, running, and swimming, and hes extremely competitive in all he does. The former Iron Man competitor also has a deep entrepreneurs streak in him. It was because of this background that Palmer discovered  and became a franchisee - with Floyds 99 Barbershop, the rapidly growing brand known for its unique, high-energy vibe, great music, and poster plastered walls of iconic musicians.

Palmer was familiar with the franchise business model. Prior to joining Floyds 99, he spent a half dozen years with Noodles & Company, where he managed locations, implemented training, and helped develop a catering program for the brand.

Then in 2007, Palmer was biking in Colorado while training for an Iron Man event. He met another biker who told him about the Floyds 99 brand, and after talking, Palmer ended up going along to the brands Discovery Day. I couldnt believe what I saw, I was blown away, recalls Palmer. The founders had developed a fantastic and unique brand that had the edgy kind of feel that I love and a fantastic product to boot. He became the brands second franchisee.

Between 2007 and 2009, Palmer opened five locations in his Northern Colorado territory. Clients loved the brands unique style and its engaging and friendly employees. And the brands integrated support structure from development to opening to training and marketing support made it easy for Palmer to grow his business and add units.

This is a proven concept, theres no need to reinvent the wheel here, he says. The founders have been focused on creating and sustaining a great brand. The results reflect it. Palmer has seen his same-store sales grow every year that hes been in the system.

He says he could have chosen other franchise brands but for his money, Floyds 99 was the best fit for him. I didnt want the food costs and equipment costs associated with a food franchise, he explains. He was attracted to the low overhead model of Floyds 99 and adds, Besides, everyone needs a haircut, its practically a recession-proof business.

Palmer emphasizes that Floyds 99 is truly unique. You could walk into a Great Clips, Sport Clips, or Supercuts and literally not know which one you were in, he says. But the music, decor, atmosphere, people, and focus on individuality makes Floyds 99 stand out from the crowd.

Floyds 99 also distinguishes itself with its employee first culture. These trained and dedicated people are an important part of the equation and the brands success. Individuality is embraced and employees feel like part of the family, says Palmer.

Palmer is a hands-on operator and believes thats the best way to grow the business. Hes in and out of stores daily, meets with and communicates regularly with his employees, and engages with clients. If theres ever a complaint, Palmer handles it himself. I want to resolve the issue and keep the client, he says.

Today, Palmer operates seven Floyds 99 locations in Northern Colorado and plans to open two more stores in 2019  one in Boulder and the other in Johnstown. All told, his stores give about 26,000 haircuts every month.

Floyds 99 Barbershop offers a full menu of services for men and women, including cuts, color, straight razor shaves, and signature massage shampoo, and every service is finished with a relaxing shoulder massage. Every Floyds 99 shop offers a unique high-energy vibe combined with a great value. And at Floyds 99, no two shops are the same, making the Floyds 99 experience truly one of a kind.

For more information about franchising with Floyds 99 Barbershop, visit www.floydsbarbershop.com/FRANCHISE/.Photo: The Canadian Press Jennifer Lopez, left, and Alex Rodriguez arrive at the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

Barack Obama is feeling the love about the engagement of Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez.

A-Rod shared a congratulatory handwritten note Thursday on Twitter he received from the former president and his wife, Michelle.

Obama wrote: "After 26 years together, we can say that whatever challenges life may bring, sharing them with someone you love makes it all better."

Rodriguez tweeted the note "means the world to us."

The former Yankees shortstop and the "World of Dance" judge got engaged earlier this month.

It will be Lopez's fourth marriage and Rodriguez's second. Each has two children from previous marriages.(CNN)  Emilia Clarke revealed on Thursday that she has undergone two brain surgeries in the last eight years.

The "Games of Thrones" star made the revelation in a story she wrote for the New Yorker. She said her health problems began in 2011.

"My trainer had me get into the plank position, and I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain," she wrote in the article. "I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn't. I told my trainer I had to take a break. Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain shooting, stabbing, constricting pain was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged."

She went on to write, "The diagnosis was quick and ominous: a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. I'd had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture. As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon thereafter."

She ended up going through a three-hour surgery and then spent four days in the ICU.

Two years later, Clarke's doctors found a second aneurysm that required another surgery.

"When they woke me, I was screaming in pain. The procedure had failed," she wrote. "I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn't operate again. This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way -- through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately."

Clarke then spent a month in the hospital.

"There was terrible anxiety, panic attacks ... I felt like a shell of myself," Clarke wrote. "So much so that I now have a hard time remembering those dark days in much detail. My mind has blocked them out. But I do remember being convinced that I wasn't going to live."

Clarke wrote she has since "healed beyond my most unreasonable hopes."

She said she wants to help others not just by sharing her story but encouraging donations to the charity, "SameYou," which provides treatment for people recovering from brain injuries.Galveston, TX (77553)

Today

Overcast skies and windy. High 61F. Winds N at 20 to 30 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy. Windy. Low 49F. Winds NNE at 20 to 30 mph.Irish outfit WarDucks has raised $3.8 million to expand its studio and develop a location-based augmented reality game.

As reported by VentureBeat, the Dublin-based developer secured funding from investors including EQT Ventures and Suir Valley Ventures.

In a notable move, the studio has brought in Doom co-creator John Romero to help shape its mystery project. The veteran designer will serve as a creative consultant, and will offer advice on how the build-out the augmented reality title.

WarDucks has also hired Doug Kaufman of Civilization II fame as its lead designer, and has appointed The Elder Scrolls Online writer Lawrence Schick as its new narrative lead.

Speaking about the deal, WarDucks chief exec and founder Nikki Lannen -- who previously served as a leading member of Facebook's gaming team -- claimed the cash injection will allow the studio to capitalize on the "huge opportunity" presenting itself in the augmented reality game space.In an interview with GameSpot, Googles Phil Harrison has confirmed that Google Stadia is going to have exclusive games.

While the platform is not a physical console and was never meant to be anything like that, it is going for exclusive similarly to Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One.

It was a conversation that I had with Google leadership before I joined the company, Harrison told the website.

[My] point of view was in order to really deliver on the promise of this platform, we had to build our own games. We had to build our own experiences, and that was a very fundamental, strategic direction that we needed to move in.

I understand that [for a gamer] the word exclusive can sometimes be a challenging terminology. [I would] rather we moved the narrative towards [games] that are built specifically for a data center. And if those games also show up on other streaming platforms, thats okay, because what that means is that the developers are starting to innovate and think about the future and [build] a 21st century game, rather than a 20th century game.

With that said, Harrison was quick to point out that there will obviously be a title that will release only on Stadia.

Itll be interesting what Jade Raymond and her Google Stadia Games and Entertainment team will be able to bring to the platform over the next few months.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.Hey, dude's gotta get his dough somehow right?

A man in New Jersey went viral after trying to smuggle an entire ATM machine onto a bus - you can watch the struggle above.

It's since come out that the video was actually just a prank by comedian Darius Kinney, saying: "it's really just a joke".



His mate filmed him trying to drag the machine onto a New Jersey Transit bus, saying "I'll split it with you" to the driver when he reaches the door.

"Everybody want to be rich but don't nobody wants to help you get it lol," Kinney captioned the video when he posted it.

President should not visit TV studios - Georgian president Salome Zurabishvili is in hot water again - GeorgianJournalAppeal judgment on Radovan Karadzic: Foreign Secretary's statement

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has commented on the appeals judgment by the IRMCT in the case of Radovan Karadzic.

20 March 2019

Today (20 March) the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) delivered an appeals judgment on the case of Radovan Karadzic, a former Bosnian Serb politician and President of the Republika Srpska, who was convicted in 2016 of genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In today's appeal judgement the IRMCT increased Radovan Karadzic's sentence from 40 years, to life imprisonment given the gravity of the crimes he committed.

Following the verdict, Foreign Secretary said:

"This judgment is an important result for international justice, confirming Karadzic's convictions for genocide in Srebrenica and increasing his sentence to life in prison. It sends a powerful message that those who carry out atrocities will be held accountable for their actions and will be sentenced accordingly."

"The thousands of victims and their relatives are foremost in our thoughts. Although this outcome will not erase their pain and suffering, we hope that it will provide some comfort to them."

"We remain committed to achieving justice for victims. We will continue to support the work of the tribunal and other organisations seeking justice, supporting survivors, and aiming to find and identify those still missing as a result of conflict in the region."

The UK's commitments to continue to seek justice are in line with the Joint Declarations on War Crimes and Missing Persons led by the UK and signed by Prime Ministers at the London Western Balkans Summit 2018.

The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals was established by the UN Security Council to continue the legacy work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ('ICTY'), including trying alleged war crimes from the conflicts in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.

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Venezuela: 'A worrying destabilizing factor in the region', Bachelet tells Human Rights Council

20 March 2019 - Expressing deep concern at the "magnitude and gravity of the human rights impact" of Venezuela's current crisis, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said on Wednesday that the country had become "a worrying destabilizing factor in the region."

Amid a protracted crisis from a faltering economy, political instability and violent anti-Government demonstrations, a technical team of five OHCHR staff members are currently touring the country, which rights chief Michelle Bachelet, described as "a positive first step".

She highlighted "dramatically" deteriorating "economic and social rights", exacerbated by the recent electricity blackout and expressed concern about the "continued criminalization of peaceful protest and dissent".

The UN rights chief cited reports of numerous violations and abuses by security forces and pro-Government armed groups, including the excessive use of force, killings, arbitrary detentions, torture, threats and intimidation.

She said her Office was continuing to investigate reports of "possible extrajudicial executions by security forces", naming the Special Actions Force or FAES, as reportedly responsible for killing "at least 205 persons. A further 37 were reportedly killed in the course of January 2019 in Caracas", she added.

"It appears that some of these killings have followed a similar pattern. They take place during illegal house raids carried out by the FAES, which subsequently reports the death as resulting from an armed confrontation  although witnesses report the victims were unarmed," said Ms. Bachelet.

I am also concerned about increasing restrictions on freedom of expression and of the press in Venezuela," she said, "and the allegations that the authorities have arbitrarily used the law against hatred, adopted in November 2017, to prosecute journalists, opposition leaders and anyone expressing dissenting opinions."

Divisions are exacerbating an already critical situation" the rights chief said, arguing that there was "a need for common agreement on a political solution by all stakeholders, with actions to improve a wide range of urgent human rights issues. I call on the authorities to take steps to demonstrate their real commitment to addressing the many challenging issues reported across the country."

Minimal progress on accountability in Sri Lanka

Turning to Sri Lanka, Ms. Bachelet said that despite progress on some issues, "there has been minimal progress on accountability" including on setting up a special judicial mechanism to deal with the worst crimes committed during the 2009 conflict between the Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the north-east of the country.

"Continuing impunity risks fuelling communal or inter-ethnic violence, and instability", she spelled out, calling for the establishment of an independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a vetting process to remove officers with questionable human rights records.

"This Council continues to have an essential role in accompanying the Government and people of Sri Lanka in their journey towards realizing the dignity, and rights of all members of society, irrespective of their sex, ethnic origin or belief", she concluded.

A 'glimmer of hope' in Yemen's 'dire situation'

On Yemen, Ms. Bachelet noted that while the fragile ceasefire in Hudaydah presents "a glimmer of hope", the situation across the rest of the country is "dire'.

More than 24 million people need aid, with 14.3 million in acute need, she told the Council. Moreover, basic resources have become "a luxury that few can afford".

"Salaries of teachers, doctors, nurses and other public employees have gone unpaid for years" she stressed.

Meanwhile, "periodic airstrikes, shelling and landmines continue to kill and maim civilians" and children continue to be conscripted or enlisted into armed forces or groups, she added.

The UN rights chief expressed particular concern about a recent escalation of hostilities in Hajjah governorate, where preliminary reports indicate that 22 people were killed earlier this month and thousands of families displaced.

"All States, including those not involved in the armed conflict, have the obligation to take measures to ensure that parties to a conflict respect the Conventions", she stated, calling "conditioning, limiting or refusing arms transfers" one such measure.



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UN allocates $20 million in emergency funding, as Cyclone Idai disaster unfolds

20 March 2019 - As the full scale of the devastation caused by Cyclone Idai in South-West Africa continues to be assessed, the UN and humanitarian partners are ramping up the provision of emergency food, shelter, water and health care supplies to hundreds-of-thousands who have been affected across Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

The UN's Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) allocated $20 million on Wednesday to ensure aid reaches those most affected.

The cyclone made landfall on Thursday night near Beira City, in central Mozambique, bringing heavy rains and flooding to the three countries and forcing thousands from their homes.

To date, it is feared that over 1,000 may have died in the disaster, with more than 200 confirmed dead in Mozambique, over 100 in Zimbabwe, and around 60 in Malawi. Hundreds are injured and many more unaccounted for.

The cyclone wreaked havoc in Mozambique, the worst-affected of the three countries, causing damage to 90 per cent of Beira City. Inhambane, Manica, Sofala, Tete and Zambezia provinces have been heavily affected. About 400,000 are internally displaced. A national state of emergency has been declared.

In Zimbabwe, the east of the country was particularly affected with close to 1,000 homes destroyed in the districts of Chimanimani, Chipinge, Mutasa, Mutare, Buhera, Chikomba, Gutu and Bikita districts. Through rapid needs assessments in Malawi, it is estimated that over 82,500 were displaced.

These figures are expected to rise in the days ahead as the full extent of the damage and loss of life becomes known.

"The CERF funds will complement the three Governments' immediate efforts to provide life-saving and life-sustaining assistance to affected communities, including in health, food security, protection, nutrition and education," said UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock. "Vulnerable groups such as children, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, people with disabilities, and those affected by chronic illnesses will be prioritized".

The allocation will also help humanitarian organizations to rapidly support critical logistics and emergency telecommunications and scale up water and emergency health services to reduce the risk of vector and waterborne diseases.

Mr. Lowcock explained that CERF funding was just the beginning, and much more will be needed, especially in terms of food assistance in the short- and medium-term as the flooding occurred in the middle of the crop-growing season. Much of the livestock is believed to have perished in the flooding, in areas that were already facing 'food-crisis' levels of food insecurity.

The warehouse of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) in Beira was badly damaged by Idai, but some food stores remain intact and is being distributed to displaced people in the city and in Dondo, higher north.

Twenty tons of high-energy biscuits have been airlifted in, to be distributed by helicopter in cut-off regions. WFP is also funding drones to support Mozambique's disaster management agency, the INGC, with emergency mapping. To enable the humanitarian workers to operate, an emergency wi-fi connection was set up in Beira by the UN.

The UN disaster and assessment coordination (UNDAC) team was deployed to help coordinate the response, but access to affected areas is a major constraint in the delivery of aid, as much of the infrastructure such as roads and bridges were destroyed by the cyclone.

"The situation is very bad. The damage is quite serious," said the head of the UN's migration agency (IOM) in Mozambique, Katharina Schnoering. "It Is very difficult to get a clear overview of what is going on. There are many communications issues, there's no power in Beira. There is no road access because the Buzi River came up and washed out the road."

In Malawi, the representative of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), Johannes Wedenig, said emergency supplies have started arriving in the country but that many were already "pre-positioned in areas of Malawi that are regularly affected by natural disasters", allowing the UN to move quickly to meet people's immediate needs, in particular in terms of water and sanitation, medicine, insecticide-treated bed nets, and schools supplies for the establishment of temporary classrooms.

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SNMG-1 and SNMCMG-1 Visit Plymouth

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS190321-08

Release Date: 3/21/2019 12:37:00 PM

By Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Mark Andrew Hays, Standing NATO Maritime Group One Public Affairs

PLYMOUTH, England (NNS) -- Sailors from Standing NATO Maritime Group One (SNMG) 1 and Standing NATO Mine Countermeasure Group One (SNMCMG) 1 successfully completed a scheduled port visit to Plymouth, England.

While in Plymouth, crewmembers immersed themselves in the city's rich maritime history and culture, and engaged with local community members through office calls, local media interviews, ship tours and community relations (COMREL) events.

Thirteen Sailors from the guided-missile destroyer USS Gravely (DDG 107), SNMG-1's flagship, visited Plympton Academy in Plymouth to interact and read with students.

"It was very flattering to host crew from USS Gravely," said Martin Edmonds, Plympton Academy teacher. "Meeting new people and talking about our lives and different experiences is hugely beneficial in developing our students' general knowledge and helping to widen their cultural horizons."

SNMG-1 and SNMCMG-1 staff took advantage of time in port by having force meetings and a pre-sail brief to prepare for future interactions and training evolutions while operating together during their next period at sea.

"This is one of those rare times when both NATO groups are working together outside of an exercise," said Danish Cmdr. Michael Madsen, SNMG-1 staff planning officer. "It's important to hold these briefs to coordinate our types of programs, and make sure if last minute changes come, we both know how to deal with it."

With one of NATO's missions being to strengthen the relationships among Allies, Rear Adm. Edward Cashman, Commander of SNMG-1, Royal Danish Cmdr. Peter Krogh, Commander of SNMCMG-1 and both groups' ship captains took time out of their busy schedule to visit with Her Majesty's Naval Base, Devonport Deputy Commander Col. Simon Chapman and the Lord Mayor of Plymouth Councillor Sam Davey.

"Each port call is planned so we can visit with our Allies, both military and civilian communities, and strengthen the relationships that make the Alliance so strong," said Cashman. "They offer valuable opportunities to discuss regional security and stability, and build awareness and confidence in NATO's ability to deter conflict and, if necessary, protect the members of the Alliance."

SNMG-1 is currently composed of the U.S. flagship guided-missile destroyer USS Gravely (DDG 107), the German navy replenishment tanker FGS Spessart (A 1442), the Danish support ship HDMS Absalon (L16), the British frigate HMS Westminster (F237), and the Polish guided-missile frigate ORP General K. Pulaski (FrR 272) and is one of four standing maritime task groups composed of ships from various Allied countries. These task groups form the core maritime capability of NATO's Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF). They provide a continuous maritime capability to execute NATO missions across the spectrum of operations, demonstrate solidarity, and strengthen diplomatic and professional links among Allied naval forces.

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Bosnian Massacre Survivors Hail UN Court Ruling on Karadzic Sentence

By RFE/RL March 21, 2019

Relatives of victims of the Srebrenica massacre have hailed a UN court decision that ordered Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic to serve the rest of his life in prison on genocide and war crimes charges.

A panel of appeals judges at The Hague war crimes tribunal on March 20 threw out Karadzic's original 40-year sentence, and increased it to life.

Karadzic was found guilty for his role in the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces.

It was the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

Several dozen survivors of the Srebrenica killings watched the proceedings at a memorial center in Potocari, just next to Srebrenica.

"Thank God for this, since another verdict would have killed us," said Bida Osmanovic, who said her 22-year-old son was killed in the massacre.

Nedzad Avdic, who said her father was killed in Srebrenica, said the verdict was important because, he said, many ethnic Serbs downplay the scale of the Srebrenica crime.

"This verdict comes very late, but for us this is a very important day due to a growing denial" that it was a genocide, he said.

"He got a life sentence, life in prison," Murat Tahirovic, the president of the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide, told RFE/RL. "In a nutshell, we got what we feel he must be judged for. And he received that verdict. Those are the facts that will remain."

In Srebrenica itself, people gathered in a memorial center to watch a delayed TV broadcast of the decision being delivered. Similar scenes were played out in Sarajevo City Hall, where hundreds gathered to watch the proceedings.

For many Serbs in Bosnia, however, Karadzic is a hero who protected his people.

Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb nationalist who now chairs Bosnia's tripartite presidency, said ahead of the verdict that he did not trust the legitimacy of the Hague court.

"It did not fulfill its task which was to build with its verdicts the basis for reconciliation," Dodik said.

Zeljko Komsic, the Croat member of the presidency, told RFE/RL that the verdict "presents partial satisfaction" to the relatives of genocide victims.

The Bosniak member of the presidency, Sefik Dzaferovic, said that only partial justice had been meted out.

With reporting by AFP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/karadzic-verdict-bosnian-srebrenica -survivors-reactions-un-court/29834207.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 Army Certifies Northrop Grumman to Compete to Develop Electromagnetic Weapons

Sputnik News

06:17 21.03.2019

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The US Army has selected Northrop Grumman as one of multiple companies to compete for orders issued in a $982 million effort to develop a range of offensive electromagnetic weapons, the defence contractor announced in a press release.

"Our work will help ensure our Army forces can rapidly identify, develop and leverage the full range of CEMA [Cyber Electromagnetic Activities] effects necessary to deter, deny and prevail on the battlefield," Northrop Grumman Mission Systems Vice President Ginger Wierzbanowski said in the release.

Northrop Grumman pointed out that an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract with a ceiling of $982 million will fund the project.

The contract will enable the US Army to procure an entire range of cyber electromagnetic activities aimed at advancing the force's lethality in non-kinetic engagements across warfare domains, the release said.

Potential electromagnetic weapons include microwaves that can pass through walls undetected and kill, laser and sound weapons, as well as yet-to-be-developed devices that can read the human mind, according to published reports.

 Sputnik

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Pentagon Investigates Acting Defence Secretary Over Pro-Boeing Bias - Reports

Sputnik News

03:51 21.03.2019(updated 09:41 21.03.2019)

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The US Department of Defence has opened an investigation about reports that acting Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan has backed Boeing, where he worked for more than three decades, at the expense of competitors, according to media reports on Wednesday.

"The Department of Defence Office of Inspector General [IG] has decided to investigate complaints we recently received that Acting Secretary Patrick Shanahan allegedly took actions to promote his former employer, Boeing, and disparage its competitors, allegedly in violation of ethics rules", Defence Department Inspector General spokesperson Dwrena Allen said, as quoted in a report by Politico.

Before coming to the Defence Department, Shanahan  an engineer by training  worked for Boeing for 31 years on the civil aviation side. He has signed an ethics agreement recusing himself from decisions involving Boeing, the report said.

On 13 March, an independent watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics requested the investigation based on a January report from Politico claiming that Shanahan, while he was deputy Defence Secretary, disparaged Lockheed Martin in Defence Department meetings and held up Boeing as an example, the report said.

The report also cited a December report by Bloomberg reporting that Shanahan had pressured the US Air Force to buy Boeing F-15X jets, even though the Air Force said it was not interested in the aircraft.

Shanahan's spokesperson Joseph Buccino said the acting secretary welcomed an investigation when he appeared before Congress last week, the report said.

Buccino added that Shananan had complied with an ethics agreement to ensure Boeing-related issues are handled by other defence officials to eliminate any perceived or actual conflicts of interest.

Although not directly related to work for the DoD, Boeing's civilian aircraft manufacturing division is facing criticism and multiple investigations over two crashes of its new 737 MAX 8 passenger jets that killed everyone on board.

 Sputnik

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Briefing With Traveling Press

Special Briefing

Michael R. Pompeo

Secretary of State

David Citadel Hotel

Jerusalem

March 21, 2019

MR PALLADINO: All right. Do we have any questions?

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary.

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah.

MR PALLADINO: Please, go ahead.

QUESTION: Thank you. There are reports that the United States is considering recognizing the annexation of the Golan Heights, which would obviously be of enormous strategic value to Israel. Can you give us any insight into where that would stand?

SECRETARY POMPEO: No.

QUESTION: Why not?

QUESTION: Is it being considered?

SECRETARY POMPEO: I don't have anything to say about that.

QUESTION: What is your view toward that? What --

SECRETARY POMPEO: I'm not going to comment. We  the administration's considering lots of things always, and I try to make sure we get to answers before we talk about them publicly.

QUESTION: And could you talk about what the downside of that would be? What would be the risks?

SECRETARY POMPEO: No. I'm just not going to comment on it.

MR PALLADINO: Let's move on. Next question, Barbara, please.

QUESTION: Just on that same idea and the question I've been asking previously, you said yesterday that the policy hasn't changed with regards to whether the U.S. considers the West Bank and Golan occupied territory. Can you just tell  you didn't say what the policy was. What is the policy?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah, so I'm not going to spend time talking about this. I've answered this question previously, and you'd asked yesterday. I'll give you the same answer. Our mission statement in the Human Rights Report is to --

QUESTION: No, it's not the Human Rights Report. Just generally speaking on --

SECRETARY POMPEO: But this is where the language  this is what you're  this is why you're asking. Am I mistaken?

QUESTION: Well, more than that because --

SECRETARY POMPEO: No, but this is where you saw the language, right?

QUESTION: That's what's triggered this round of questioning.

SECRETARY POMPEO: And that's the question I'm going to answer, yeah.

QUESTION: But the use of the term occupied or occupation has been decreasing over time, and when we ask the spokespeople doing the briefings, they always say the policy hasn't changed.

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yes.

QUESTION: So I just would like  it would be helpful for us to get a clear statement of what the policy is with regards to whether the U.S. considers the West Bank and the Golan occupied territory.

SECRETARY POMPEO: I understand the question you're asking. I understand why you're asking the question. We used that language in the Human Rights Report with great intentionality. We didn't make a mistake. It's there for a reason. It's not a change in U.S. policy. It was our intent, as it is in every element of the Human Rights Report, to be as factually descriptive as we can, and that's what we did.

QUESTION: Can I ask --

SECRETARY POMPEO: So it wasn't a mistake; it wasn't an error. It was done knowingly, and we believe we have the most factual actual description that was appropriate for the report.

Yes, sir.

MR PALLADINO: Go ahead, Matt.

QUESTION: Thanks. Slightly different. When you talk about this  what you're going to be doing this afternoon, in terms of going to the wall with the prime minister, you apparently are going to be the highest-ranking foreign official to go there with him. Is that meant to signify anything about Israeli sovereignty over that particular part of the city or not? Is it just a coincidence?

And then looking ahead to tomorrow, can you give us any kind of a preview about just how tough you're going to be on Hizballah and the Iranian role not just in Lebanon but in Syria and Iraq?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah. So the trip to the wall is something that I had talked with Prime Minister Netanyahu about doing some time ago, and it's our first chance to go there together. I think it's important. I think it's symbolic that a senior American official go there with the prime minister of Israel. It's a place that's important to many faiths, and I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be  I think I'll be very special.

With respect to the trip tomorrow, Hizballah is a terrorist organization. So when you ask how tough I'm going to be, we're going to --

QUESTION: But it's also part of the government.

SECRETARY POMPEO: No, it's a terrorist organization  period, full stop. These are  this is an organization underwritten by the Islamic Republic of Iran with the intention of the destruction of Israel and, if you listen to them closely, the destruction of Western democracy, including the United States of America as well. Maybe that answers your question about how tough I'm going to be. (Laughter.) But there's  we -

QUESTION: Well, that sounds like you're not to mince words, clearly. You're going to be on their home turf, and so that's --

SECRETARY POMPEO: We're going to be very clear about how America sees Hizballah and our expectations about how Lebanon's success depends on  the Lebanese people will demand that a terrorist organization not be in control of their government and not drive policies and create risk for their country as well. We all know the risk, right? Hizballah does something inside of Lebanon; the risk of escalation is real. The people of Lebanon don't want that. The people of Israel don't want that. The people of the United States of America don't want that. And we're going to make that abundantly clear, and then we're going to make sure that they have all the information we have about this as well.

MR PALLADINO: AFP, Francesco.

QUESTION: Thanks. Mr. Secretary, to follow on Matt's question on the wall, if it's important and special that a U.S. official goes there with the Israeli prime minister, why is it the first time? Why wasn't it the case for President Trump or Vice President Pence? Is this an evolution in the relationship and how you see the Western Wall?

SECRETARY POMPEO: I don't know. I don't know why they didn't go there before. I can't answer that.

QUESTION: It's not an evolution in the U.S. stance towards Israel and --

SECRETARY POMPEO: I'm looking forward to going to the wall with the prime minister.

MR PALLADINO: CBN, David.

QUESTION: Secretary Pompeo, anti-Semitism and the Democrats, did some of that come up with Prime Minister Netanyahu? And can you kind of term  give us a sense of what was discussed about the concern he has, you have, on that?

SECRETARY POMPEO: We didn't talk about it in terms of U.S.  I don't want to give  I try to stay away from conversations we have privately, but I will say we didn't talk about U.S. domestic politics. For that matter, I'm sure of your next question. We didn't talk about Israeli internal politics either. (Laughter.)

We did talk about anti-Semitism, that I made some remarks yesterday about it. It is a growing threat in Europe and around the world and something that this administration takes incredibly seriously and something that presents increasing risk not only to Jews but to all of us.

MR PALLADINO: New York Times, Ed.

QUESTION: The prime minister said yesterday that the two of you spoke about additional ways to apply pressure to Iran. Can you elaborate on that?

SECRETARY POMPEO: I won't say what we talked about, but each of the pillars that we have  each of the vectors we've used to put back  push back against them, the sanctions that are in place  we have another decision about waivers that'll be coming up in 60 days, I guess it is, the beginning of May. The sanctions regime that we've put in place for designating those connected to Iranian malign activity, wherever we find then, including in places like Iraq. You would have seen that recently we designated an organization inside of Iraq, which we had not done before. Our cooperation with Israel, our attempts to deny the Iranians the resources to continue to foment terror. We're going to continue to increase the pressure we're applying along each of those vectors of pressure.

Remember the simple goal. The simple goal is to get Iran to behave like a normal nation: stop blowing up things around the world; stop fomenting terrorism; stop their assassination campaign in Europe; stop underwriting the Houthis, Hamas, Hizballah. Simple things  the same things we ask every nation in the world to do we're asking of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

MR PALLADINO: LA Times, Tracy.

QUESTION: Thank you. President Rivlin this morning spoke to you about the Palestinians as a very important issue, and he even raised the idea of Israel having to take care of the Palestinians if the Palestinian Authority were to collapse. Is that something the United States is now thinking about, how to take  how to help Israel take care of the Palestinians?

SECRETARY POMPEO: You have to put this in context, right, of the larger U.S. Middle East policy and what we're trying to accomplish. I've been talking about this since I  since almost the beginning of my time as Secretary of State. The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is a component of that, right? These threats that I just talked about in Iran, these are all pieces of it. The work that we're doing in Syria, the Defeat ISIS coalition that we built up  these are all elements of the Trump administration's policy in the Middle East.

With respect to the particular question there, look, the Israelis and Palestinians live side-by-side. We need to help them figure out how to do that. And that's what I think the president was pointing to. He and I had a chance to talk about that a little bit more. It's a fact, and this administration wishes well for the Palestinian people.

QUESTION: But not necessarily a two-state solution, right?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah, we want the Palestinian people, whether they live in the West Bank or in Gaza or, frankly, Palestinians that live anywhere in the world  I mean, think about where we are, where we're sitting today. We're sitting in a country that has Christians, Jews, Muslims all living in a democracy.

This is unique and special and what we would hope for broader parts of the Middle East as well. It's a  this is an amazing, unique place in which we're sitting. And so you asked this question in the context of the Palestinians. We hope they have a brighter future as well, and as you see us lay out our plans over the coming months, I think you'll see that very clearly.

MR PALLADINO: Question? Let's go ABC, Conor.

QUESTION: You mentioned before we arrived in Kuwait that one of the things you'd focus on while here would be Syria. There have been some reports that SDF forces have taken the final square kilometers of territory.

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah.

QUESTION: Are you ready to declare the end of the ISIS caliphate?

SECRETARY POMPEO: We're close. People  there's  it's an amazing accomplishment that the coalition achieved there. I'm incredibly proud of having been a small part of continuing to build that coalition out and the work that United States did, Department of Defense did, that the folks fighting down the Euphrates River valley did. The threat from radical Islamic terrorism remains. We need to finish out the last few square meters there in Syria. Still work to do.

MR PALLADINO: One more. New York Times, Ed.

QUESTION: Can you give us a preview of the conversations that might take place between the prime minister and President Trump next week? What will be at the top of the agenda?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Oh, goodness, I think it'll be the same set of things I came here to help prepare for their meeting. I think it'll be the same set of issues, right: the great relationship between our two countries, the critical nature of that relationship, our common threats from terrorism, including terrorism that emanates from the Islamic Republic of Iran. I would guess those would be the issues that will dominate their conversation.

MR PALLADINO: NBC, Andrea.

QUESTION: Can you share whether you, in your conversation with the crown prince that was the day before yesterday, if my time is  did you discuss the women who were arrested? There have been reports of torture involving al-Qahtani, in fact, his close aide  Khashoggi  were any of those human rights issues more broadly discussed in that conversation?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah, it was actually a pretty short conversation. I had a couple of specific things I wanted to talk to him about, but never a conversation goes by where we don't talk about the human rights issues broadly, those in Saudi Arabia as well.

QUESTION: And the investigation, are they getting any closer to (inaudible) clearing it up for you?

SECRETARY POMPEO: There's still work to do. We are still keenly interested in making sure that all the facts come to bear and are brought, and that not only do the Saudis handle this properly inside the country, but that we get the information that we need so that we can make good decisions for the United States government as well as we continue to honor the commitment we have made since the beginning, which is that we will follow the facts to wherever they go.

MR PALLADINO: BBC, Barbara.

QUESTION: Mr. Netanyahu has been criticized by some elements in Israel and also amongst American Jews about aligning himself with the extremist right wing here in Israel ahead of the elections. Have you  does that concern you and have you expressed any concern about that?

SECRETARY POMPEO: I'm going to stay far away from the decisions that the Israeli people will make here in a few weeks. It wouldn't be appropriate for the U.S. Secretary of State to comment on Israeli domestic politics.

QUESTION: In that line  oh, sorry.

MR PALLADINO: Go ahead, please.

QUESTION: I'm sorry. In that line, though --

SECRETARY POMPEO: Go ahead. Yes, ma'am.

QUESTION: -- you spoke of Israel being this great democracy where everyone's living freely.

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah.

QUESTION: It's not the elections; what about the law that they passed that this is only a Jewish state?

SECRETARY POMPEO: The Israelis will have  this is Israeli domestic politics. I must say, as I stare around the world at democracies, this is pretty close to the top of the list, right? When you see the freedom, the pluralism, the ability to jostle, to ensure that rights are protected, Israel is something that the world can look up to in terms of its democratic values and institutions. I'm very comfortable saying that.

We don't get it right in the United States every day either, but this is what our republic, their democracy, does. We have competitive elections. People get to make judgments about their leaders  in our case, every couple years or every four years for our president; in Israel's case, their elections are timed differently. But in each case, these are places where the people get to have their voices heard on a recurring basis, and when they don't like the direction of travel of their nation, they can change it.

MR PALLADINO: Last question. CBN, David.

QUESTION: Has there been a narrative, Secretary Pompeo, that has frustrated you from what is dubbed the "mainstream media," whether it be U.S. policy or Middle East policy or what's been reported? Is there a story  not necessarily that's not being told, but you feel frustrated over at all when you see headlines and certain articles written?

SECRETARY POMPEO: I'm going to just pass on that. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Thank you.

SECRETARY POMPEO: But I must say, I'm not prone to frustration.

QUESTION: Why's that?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Because you  I'm a deep believer in our republic, and my task as the Secretary of State is to get up every day and drive towards achieving the mission that President Trump lays out for me. The Constitution that I'm sworn to defend and uphold, I work at it every day. I'm very focused on the mission. There'll be critiques from all across the political spectrum. I'm not immune to reading them. My son makes sure I don't miss the good ones. (Laughter.)

But my mission set is clear, and I'm  if we have a story to tell, if we have a thing that's important for you all to know, it's our task to make sure that we share that and we communicate what we're doing and why we're trying to do it. And we certainly have constraints on what we can say and what we can't from time to time, but our mission is to make sure that the American people understand what it is President Trump's trying to deliver, and how it is he's trying to deliver that for the American people.

QUESTION: As a matter of faith, can you just say --

MR PALLADINO: We need stop there. I'm sorry. We're out time, Mr. Secretary.

QUESTION: -- how important to you the events --

SECRETARY POMPEO: I'll take one more, and then I'll go.

MR PALLADINO: Okay.

QUESTION: As a matter of faith, can you just say how important the events here in Jerusalem are to you? You're going to be seeing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Wailing Wall and so on. What does it mean to you?

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah, so I don't know. I've been to Israel now a whole handful of times. I came here the first time as a private citizen, long before I entered Congress, brought my son here, because I wanted him to see this place that had a special meaning for the people of my faith of Christianity. We had a chance to see most of the main Christian sights and travel up north to the Sea of Galilee and see the Christian sights up there as well.

So each time I get a chance to come back and see the history and remind myself of the  of this place that you read about in the Bible, it's of enormous value to me personally. It always reminds me of the spirituality that I hope informs many of the things that I do, trying to fulfill my mission to the Constitution and on behalf of America and President Trump.

MR PALLADINO: Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

SECRETARY POMPEO: Thank you all very much.

QUESTION: Thank you.

MR PALLADINO: The embargo is lifted.

SECRETARY POMPEO: Yeah. You all have a good day.

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Airstrikes Target Last Defenders of IS Caliphate

By Jeff Seldin March 21, 2019

A series of airstrikes late Thursday slammed into two pockets of Islamic State fighters trying to cling to the last scraps of land to be part of the terror group's self-declared caliphate.

The strikes followed nearly two days of clearing operations in the northeastern Syrian town of Baghuz, where hundreds of IS fighters surrendered earlier this week to U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

A media official with the YPG, a Kurdish militia that has been supporting the SDF offensive, said some of the strikes targeted one group of IS fighters who had been pushed to the edge of the Euphrates River. The rest were aimed at a second group that had taken cover by a mountain on the outskirts of the town.

'Hard fight'

But despite the bombardments, the U.S.-led coalition said late Thursday that IS was putting up a "hard fight."

"Daesh is showing that they intend to keep fighting for as long as possible," the coalition said in a statement to VOA, using the Arabic acronym for the terror group.

The coalition also accused IS of deliberately putting the remaining civilians in harm's way.

"Daesh continues to resort to gruesome tactics like suicide attacks and using children as human shields," it said.

Aid groups, like the International Rescue Committee, have called on the SDF and the coalition to minimize the danger to any women and children still in the IS-held areas.

"Everything must be done to ensure that they are kept out of the line of fire," the IRC's Wendy Taeuber said in a statement early Thursday, noting that some of the thousands of women and children who evacuated Baghuz in recent days were now just arriving at the displaced persons camp in al-Hol.

Other groups, like the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, alleged Thursday that hundreds of civilians had been killed in an earlier round of airstrikes.

The coalition said it was aware of the allegations and would investigate, but "we have seen no signs that the numbers being reported are true."

Earlier Thursday, SDF fighters swept through the rubble in what was left of the IS enclave.

Sources close to SDF leadership told VOA that almost all of the area above ground had been cleared, but that the U.S.-backed troops were searching for additional IS fighters who might still be lurking in trenches and in a complex system of caves and tunnels.

Long, large passageways

The tunnels, which are thought to run for at least two kilometers, seemingly helped hide tens of thousands of people, mostly IS fighters and their families, through much of the early part of the SDF offensive.

Officials said some of the tunnels were large enough to accommodate vehicles. And there were indications certain tunnels even might extend into neighboring Iraq.

SDF officials said their advance had also been slowed at times by mines, as well as concerns that many areas would be booby-trapped.

"Our forces are still conducting combing and search operations, and as soon as they are finished, we will announce the liberation," SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali said in a note to journalists.

IS, though, remained defiant, releasing a new video Thursday showing scenes from inside Baghuz, while a fighter identifying himself as Abu al-Harith al-Ansari mocked U.S. efforts to destroy the terror group.

"The banner has been elevated, and the Ummah, whose sons are racing to martyrdom, does not know defeat," al-Ansari said, according to a translation by the SITE Intelligence Group.

"Those who are bewildered and think that our caliphate is over ... we will say that it's remaining and expanding, Allah willing, as long as it is on the right path," he added.

Anticipation for a final declaration of victory has been building, especially in Washington, where President Donald Trump promised Wednesday that the IS caliphate would be "gone by tonight."

But U.S. military officials have been wary of declaring victory too soon, pointing to numerous predictions over the past several months that all proved to be premature.

"We will continue fighting with our partners and allies, hunting ISIS wherever they may be," Pentagon spokesman Charles Summers told reporters Thursday, using an acronym for the terror group.

"The amount of territory they've held is smaller and smaller and smaller," he added.

Thousands of SDF troops have massed around Baghuz for weeks, laying siege to the town in an effort to liberate the final IS enclave in Syria. Officials said Kurdish special forces from Iraq also had been brought in to help with the operations.

Since then, SDF officials say, more than 5,000 IS fighters have surrendered or been captured, while another 1,300 have been killed.

In all, upward of 30,000 civilians, mostly family members of IS fighters, have fled Baghuz since the offensive began, and 5,000 left in just the past week.

Many fighters remain

Even once an official announcement is made, U.S. military officials cautioned that IS still had "tens of thousands" of fighters working either as part of sleeper cells or as part of an active, clandestine insurgency.

Additionally, senior officials said they thought most of the group's senior leadership, including its self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, remained at large.

VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb contributed to this report. Information from Reuters also was used in this report.

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UN: Afghan Peace Talks Offer Glimmer of Hope

By Lisa Schlein March 21, 2019

A report to the U.N. Human Rights Council says nascent peace talks in Afghanistan offer a glimmer of hope to a country that has been at war for decades.

The United Nations said 2018 was a particularly deadly year in the war between the government of Afghanistan and Taliban insurgents. It said nearly 11,000 civilians were killed and injured, including 927 children, the highest number since 2009. The U.N. blamed the Taliban and other terrorist groups for most of the casualties.

Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour said, with the exception of Islamic State in Afghanistan, all parties to the conflict appear to be taking measures to mitigate harm to civilians. But he said additional concrete steps are needed.

He welcomed the Afghan government's proposal last year for unconditional peace talks with the Taliban, saying this offers a glimmer of hope for peace.

"The country witnessed a large-scale civic movement, demanding that the  armed groups renounce violence and engage in peace negotiations," he added. "Civil society and women's groups also began mobilizing around human and women's rights concerns, pressing for the inclusion and meaningful participation of women in any peace process."

That is unlikely to happen as the Afghan government has been cut out of the peace talks that began in the last quarter of 2018 between the United States and the Taliban.

The militant group refuses to negotiate with the Afghan government, which it considers illegitimate.

Afghan leaders are furious at not being included in the peace negotiations. They accuse the Afghan-born American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, who leads the talks, of blocking them from playing a role in planning their future. The U.S. government rejects the accusation.

Gilmour made no mention of the claim. Instead, he weighed in on the importance of the talks to ensure human rights gains made by Afghans. He said no compromises must be made on issues of equality, non-discrimination, women's rights and the criminalization of torture.

Under Taliban rule in the 1990s, women and girls were denied their human rights. They were forced to wear the burqa and be under the guardianship of a male. They were banned from going to school, to work, and engaging in politics.

Afghan first secretary and Charge d'affairs Hamid Formuli said his country is committed to upholding and protecting women's rights. In response to criticism from Gilmour, he said the Afghan government has undertaken measures to prevent and combat violence against women.

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Explosions Rock Persian New Year Celebrations in Kabul Killing 6

By Ayesha Tanzeem March 21, 2019

Three explosions by landmines planted in the western part of Kabul killed at least six people and wounded more than 20 Thursday morning, as people were celebrating Nowruz, the first day of Persian new year.

Kabul police spokesman Baser Mujahid told VOA four mines were planted in flower beds near Ali Abad hospital and police later diffused one of them. The area is also close to a Shi'ite shrine called Sakhi, where thousands of people gather every year to celebrate Nowruz.

Eyewitnesses said the public was told to quickly vacate the area.

Last year, 29 people were killed and nearly 50 wounded in Kabul on Nowruz near the same shrine. According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, civilian and military deaths rose by 12 percent in Afghanistan last year. AIHRC statistics put the civilian casualties at 3010, with almost double that wounded in various attacks around the country.

The Afghan Ministry of the Interior puts Taliban casualties in the hundreds, including 600 commanders and shadow governors of the group killed from March 21 of 2018 to the same date this year.

Meanwhile President Ashraf Ghani, for the first time in his five years of government, attended a big new year celebration in Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province. Previously, his vice presidents attended this ceremony.

Addressing a large gathering, he said the Afghanistan needed peace even more than oxygen and hoped the new year, 1398 on Afghan calendar, will bring that peace to the country.

The United States Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation is engaged with the Afghan Taliban to try to find a resolution to an 18 year-long conflict that has also turned into America's longest war.



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UN Calls for More Relief for Democratic Republic of Congo

By VOA News March 21, 2019

The United Nations humanitarian chief and the U.N. agency for child welfare, UNICEF, are calling on the new government of the Democratic Republic of Congo to commit humanitarian aid to people in war-torn areas where some 13 million people are still struggling for access to food, housing and education after years of violent conflict.

UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore and Undersecretary for Humanitarian Relief Mark Lowcock returned from a trip to the DRC this week calling for "urgent and sustained funding" to help some 4 million malnourished children, as well as vulnerable communities like the disabled.

The U.N. representatives met with President Felix Tshisekedi and had what they called "constructive discussions" with him on humanitarian aid.

"In conflict-affected areas of the country," Fore said, "children and young people have been recruited as fighters, sexually assaulted and denied education, health, and protection services."

The representatives also met with health minister Oly Ilunga to discuss the recent Ebola virus outbreak in Beni and Butembo. The United Nations says over 1,000 children have been separated from their parents or orphaned due to Ebola, and in this outbreak, children account for one-third of all Ebola cases.

Lowcock, the humanitarian relief authority, said the key to defeating Ebola is community involvement.

"Only if local people are fully involved and consulted can the outbreak be defeated," he said. "That means engaging them actively in the response, as well as doing better to meet their wider needs."

Fore, the director of UNICEF, called on the new government of DRC and the international community to "do better for children."

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EU Weighs Designating Pakistani Militant a Terrorist

By Madeeha Anwar March 21, 2019

The European Union is reportedly contemplating designating the leader of Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) a terrorist.

The EU's decision comes nearly a week after a push by France and India to declare JeM leader Masood Azhar a terrorist and freeze his assets.

JeM is already a U.S.- and U.N.-designated terror group.

Focus on Kashmir

Azhar is an Islamist extremist who wants to end Indian control of a portion of the disputed Kashmir area and merge it with Pakistan. He was born in 1968 in Pakistan's Punjab province in a Deobandi (Sunni sect) Muslim family.

He reportedly received his early education in Bahawalpur, Punjab, and later enrolled in Jamia-ul-Uloom, an Islamic seminary in Karachi, where he became a teacher.

Azhar founded Jaish-e-Mohammad in 2000 and maintained his affiliation with several terror groups, including al-Qaida, Hurkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) and Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA), all U.S.-designated terror groups.

JeM is believed to be based in the Peshawar region of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir.

Azhar received his militant training in Afghanistan in the 1980s and fought Soviet troops there.

Spurred by jihad decree

Azhar reportedly traveled to Afghanistan in 1988 with his brother, Ibrahim Azhar, who according to analysts played a key role in shaping Masood's religious ideology.

"Azhar himself mentioned in one of the articles that his inclination towards jihad started when Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, head of the Karachi Jamia-ul-Uloom at that time, issued an Islamic decree for students to go and participate in Afghan jihad," Mujahid Hussain, an author and expert on terror outfits, told VOA.

It was during his time in Afghanistan that Azhar developed a relationship with al-Qaida and its leadership, and later worked closely with the terror group.

Azhar traveled to several countries, including Britain, Saudi Arabia, Zambia, India and Bangladesh, to raise funds and recruit youth toward jihad.

He has written over 20 books on Islamic history and the importance of jihad.

Location a mystery

Azhar's current whereabouts are unknown. Some experts in Pakistan believe he is living in Bahawalpur, a city in southern Punjab.

"I personally know many people who have met Azhar in Bahawalpur. Azhar reportedly goes to the mosques, gives sermons and greets people. And he continues to write for JeM's magazine," Hussain said.

On Feb. 5, when various religious parties throughout Pakistan marked Kashmir Day, an audio clip of Azhar was played during a JeM rally in Karachi. In the audio, Azhar invited people toward jihad.

"Stay determined," he said. "And instead of going one by one, if you all go out there together as a group, India won't be able to stand us for even one month."

VOA Urdu's Sarah Hassan contributed to this report.

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March 20, 2019

News

By C. Todd Lopez

Defense.gov

Shanahan: Space Force to Preserve Margin of Dominance, $19 Trillion Economy

WASHINGTON -- If the gap is to be maintained between what the United States has in space technology and capability and what its closest competitors have -- a gap that's closing fast -- it'll be the recently approved Space Force that maintains it, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan said here today.

Shanahan spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies about the Defense Department's reorganization to support space, Space Force's roles and responsibilities, providing some of the details of what it might look like.

"My goal and the department's goal is to grow what we call our 'margin of dominance' in space. This margin is now contested," he said. "What is vital is that we protect a $19 trillion economy and the systems our military runs on."

That protection includes ensuring U.S. satellites aren't incapacitated, the secretary said. "If our satellites were attacked, we would be blind, deaf and impotent before we even knew what hit us," Shanahan said. "Everything from ATM machines to Zumwalt destroyers would be paralyzed."

Shanahan said it makes sense that DOD would reorganize itself to make space a new warfighting domain and put as much effort and consideration behind that domain as it does for land, sea or air.

A Strategic Choice

"If you are faced with threats like this, you say yes to change," he said. "And so we make a strategic choice to organize to ensure American dominance in space for decades."

The department's reorganization to support space involves three large areas, he said. First is the much-discussed U.S. Space Force, which will fall under the Department of the Air Force in a way similar to how the U.S. Marine Corps falls under the Department of the Navy.

"To move forward effectively, space needs an advocate," he said. "That advocate will be the Space Force. The Space Force will operate like other branches of the armed services, organizing, training and equipping the force with Title X authorities. It will have formalized leadership, including a new undersecretary for space, and a chief of staff of the Space Force, to focus on developing space warfighting doctrine and culture."

Like the other military services, he said, the Space Force will have an internal culture that focuses on professional development of its members, and "creating a pipeline of space experts."

Compared to its sister services, Space Force will not be large. Shanahan estimates it will number about 15,000 to 20,000 people and will have a budget similar to that of U.S. Special Operations Command.

A second part of the department's reorganization to support space will include development of U.S. Space Command as the nation's 11th combatant command. DOD once had a space command, which operated from 1985 to 2002, but it was shuttered to make way for U.S. Northern Command, Shanahan said.

Space Command will change the mission of space from a support function to a leading role, Shanahan said. The commander of Space Command, he said, will "wake up every morning thinking of two things: how to win in space and how will space help the joint force win in the land, sea, air and cyber domain."

Finally, a Space Development Agency will be developed to perform what Shanahan called a "pacing function."

"Our space presence will be enabled by new capabilities delivered by the Space Development Agency," he said.

Leveraging Commercial Space Investment

Shanahan pointed out that about 2,500 active satellites are in orbit now. In the next 10 years, he said, American companies expect to launch an additional 15,000 satellites with capabilities such as communications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

"In the next decade, we expect to see commercially available persistent surveillance of the globe from space," he said. "We need to leverage this commercial space investment and tap into the advancements to help solve the next generation of warfighting challenges."

The Space Development Agency, he said, will focus at first on delivering capabilities related to hypersonic weapons tracking, warning and targeting, as well as alternatives to GPS-based position navigation timing for use in GPS-denied environments.

Shanahan also touched on why the decision was made to put Space Force underneath the Air Force, rather than making it a completely separate department. He explained that a lot of emphasis was placed on getting to the ability to deliver capability the fastest way, noting that might not be possible if DOD was focused on standing up a completely new department.

"What is the best organizational construct so you can go the fastest?" he asked. "Given the need for speed and how much time you might spend just reorganizing, we landed in a place that said, 'Draw off the synergy of the Air Force.' We have significant learning from the Marine Corps about how to have a service within a department. The biggest thing we've been working to do with the Space Force is focus on delivering capability faster.

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US imposes North Korea sanctions on Chinese shipping companies

Iran Press TV

Thu Mar 21, 2019 10:14PM

The United States has targeted two Chinese shipping companies over the alleged evasion of sanctions imposed on North Korea, the first such steps since US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's summit collapsed last month.

The Treasury Department said on Thursday the firms -- Dalian Haibo International Freight Co Ltd and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co Ltd -- will be banned from the American financial system and can no longer access any US-based assets.

It said Individuals and firms that do business with the companies could also face US penalties.

"The United States and our like-minded partners remain committed to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea and believe that the full implementation of North Korea-related UN Security Council resolutions is crucial to a successful outcome," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement.

"Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk."

The second summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim collapsed last month over differences on how far Pyongyang was willing to limit its nuclear program and the degree of US eagerness to ease sanctions. Trump abruptly walked away from the talks and held a press conference shortly afterwards.

During the presser, Trump said that "he had to walk away" from the talks because of the North's demands to lift all economic sanctions against Pyongyang as a prerequisite to denuclearization.

However, a few hours later, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho offered a completely different breakdown of the summit, telling reporters in a separate presser that Pyongyang had never asked for the removal of all sanctions, but was only seeking their partial removal.

According to a state media report published earlier this month, the people of North Korea blame the US for the collapse of the summit.

"The public at home and abroad that had hoped for success and good results from the second DPRK-US summit in Hanoi are feeling regretful, blaming the US for the summit that ended without an agreement," the Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the North's ruling Workers' Party, said in a commentary, referring to North Korea's official name  the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

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US Imposes First N. Korea-Linked Sanctions Since Failed Summit

By Steve Herman March 21, 2019

With negotiations at an impasse, Washington has imposed additional sanctions on those assisting Pyongyang  the first such action since February's failed summit in Hanoi between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

"This is not really about intensification of pressure," a senior U.S. administration official said. "This is about maintaining pressure as defined by the international community."

Thursday's sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department on two China-based shipping companies were the latest evidence of some "leakage" in the enforcement of sanctions by Beijing, but U.S. officials said that overall, China was abiding by the U.N. resolutions slapped on North Korea for its nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs.

Washington wants Pyongyang to surrender its entire nuclear arsenal and other mass-destruction weapons before being granted any relief from sanctions. The North Koreans insist on sanctions relief before halting production of fissile materials.

"Insisting on unilateral North Korean disarmament upfront is pushing on the wrong door. We should be pushing to first slow the program, then cap it, and ultimately keep rollback and disarmament the long-term goal," said Vipin Narang, associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But every month that passes without a grand deal is one in which North Korea's nuclear program continues to grow larger  increasing the risk of its own use and proliferation to other countries  and the chances of a deal grow smaller."

Analysts also worry Kim could grow impatient, turn away from diplomacy with Trump and look to China to provide sanctions relief that North Korea desperately needs.

"I'm not sure we can be confident that Beijing will uphold enforcement after Trump so abruptly walked away from negotiations with North Korea," said Jean Lee, who directs the center for Korean history and public policy at the Wilson Center, a global policy research group in Washington. "I do hope North Korea sticks to negotiation and does not resort to provocation. If Pyongyang doesn't get the response it craves and needs from Washington, North Korea may turn back to a tried and tested strategy: to get Trump, and the world's attention, with another illicit missile launch or test."

U.S. officials on Thursday, speaking to reporters on condition of not being named, expressed patience and confidence with their stance toward North Korea.

Patience

"What they're facing now is unprecedented," said one U.S. official of the sanctions on North Korea. "We'll give it some time."

Lee, currently in Seoul, told VOA she found it "interesting that we're back to a form of strategic patience. There was high hope, especially here in Seoul, that Trump's impatience and unpredictability would lead to fast movement on North Korea. But the Trump administration is finding that it's much tougher than the president may have thought of simply bullying Kim into acquiescence."

A prolonged lull in talks "could become risky, and maintaining maximalist positions will not be sustainable," said Duyeon Kim, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a national security research group in Washington.

"They need to negotiate a denuclearization-peace road map soon and preferably an interim agreement on fissile materials. Rapid and complete denuclearization is not realistic. Denuclearization will have to occur in stages but in accordance with an agreed road map on how this all ends," Kim told VOA.

The current primary point of pressure on Pyongyang by the international community is on entities, including their ships, involved with illicitly exporting North Korean goods, such as coal, and taking products  especially petroleum  into the impoverished country in violation of U.N. sanctions.

Unless North Korea denuclearizes, "we're going to maintain that pressure," a senior U.S official said.

Daily monitoring

A coalition of countries  using their vessels, aircraft and classified intelligence means  are daily watching the movement of ships involved in the illegal trade.

North Korea and those helping it are trying to obscure identities of ships and cargo by disabling or manipulating systems that identify the vessels for safety and navigation, physically altering vessel identifications and making ship-to-ship transfers to avoid ports, according to a sanctions advisory jointly issued Thursday by the U.S. Treasury and State departments and the Coast Guard.

Neither the United States nor any other country has moved to interdict the offending ships.

"I don't want to talk about potential steps we may or may not take," replied a senior administration official when asked by VOA whether there was discussion here about using the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard in international waters to take such action.

Trump and Kim have held two summits  the first in Singapore last June and the second in Hanoi this February. Trump has not ruled out a third such meeting.

"The door is wide open to continuing the dialogue with North Korea. The president wants to see progress at the working level, and he's engaged as well," a senior administration official said.

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Iran's Armed Forces in best position to counter enemies

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, March 21, IRNA -- Commander of Iranian Army's Ground Force Brigadier General Kioumars Heidari said the Armed Forces are more prepared than ever before to confront any kinds of threats by the enemies.

'Today, Iran's Armed Forces are at the peak of their preparedness and are relentlessly monitoring the enemies' movements so they are prepared to crush all their movements,' General Heidari said when he was meeting with border guards in along eastern border of Razavi Khorasan province in north east of the country.

He pointed out that the Iranian Army's forces have upgraded all their military equipment in accordance with the latest international technologies and are fully ready to confront the enemies.

'If the enemies make a stupid move, the will get a very harsh and strong response by the Iranian Army,' General Heidari added.

Chief of Staff of the Iranian Army Forces Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri had earlier announced that the Iranian Army's Ground Force has taken charge of guarding the common borders with Afghanistan.

'After ceding the guarding of the joint borders with Afghanistan to this force, the borders will become much safer as compared with the past,' he added.

2050**1424

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Kazakh Leader's Controversial Legacy Continues After Presidency

By Natalie Liu March 20, 2019

A day after Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev announced his resignation, the Central Asian nation south of Russia and northwest of China watched on live television as the outgoing president, seated at a position high above the stage, looked on as former chairman of the country's Senate, Kassym-Jomart Kemelovich Tokayev, was sworn in as the country's leader.

Tokayev immediately took action "to immortalize the name of our great contemporary" by renaming the capital city and main avenues of cities and townships across the country after Nazarbayev, as well as erecting a monument in his honor.

Another Nazarbayev on the rise

The physical monument won't be the only reminder of the longtime ruler's continued presence, according to observers.

On the same day Tokayev took over the presidency, Nazarbayev's daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, who has held different roles within the Kazakh political establishment, was elected chairman of the Senate. The position is the first in line to assume the presidency should the current president step down or be removed, according to the constitution.

Some experts see Nazarbayev's exit as "less a graceful bowing out" than a maneuver to exert continuing control over the country's political process, as Joanna Lillis, a Kazakhstan-based journalist who authored "Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan," put it.

William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corp. whose diplomatic career included serving as U.S. ambassador to both Kazakhstan and Georgia, categorizes the rise of Dariga Nazarbayeva as "a setback for political development in Kazakhstan," adding "opaque attempts to put in place dynastic rule unlikely to be popular or to endure."

In an interview with VOA, Courtney, who credits Nazarbayev with helping his country achieve "diplomatic and nonproliferation superstar" status, raising Kazakhstan's living standards and maintaining an openness to the outside world, thinks "it is important now for Kazakhstan to begin allowing more open political debate and discussion."

Some of the early steps "to build confidence and foster consensus," in his opinion, "ought to include releasing imprisoned journalists and allowing peaceful demonstrations and independent political parties."

These steps will constitute a test of whether the Nazarbayev era is fading or "only taking on a different structural form," Courtney said.

Stepping up instead of down

Even before Wednesday's announcements, some experts warned Nazarbayev's exit from the presidency is a step upward instead of downward, pointing to the "Singapore model" in which that country's longtime ruler and founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, stayed behind the scenes as "president mentor" as his son, Lee Hsien Loong, rose to the nation's top leadership position after an interlude in which a non-Lee governed Singapore.

Dmitri Trenin, director of Carnegie Moscow Center, warns the "president mentor" model's transcontinental reach may not end in Kazakhstan, but "is also likely to be used in due course in Russia by Vladimir Putin."

Nazarbayev's announcement to relinquish the presidency took many by surprise. Some experts believe that, despite his seeming intention to place his children in line to the presidency, Nazarbayev could have a largely positive legacy.

Bruce Pannier, who has traveled in Central Asia extensively since 1990 and writes a blog for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, tells VOA that Nazarbayev "enriched himself at the expense of his countrymen, rooted out legitimate political opposition and seriously curtailed the activities of independent media, Kazakhstan is not a free country."

However, Pannier credits Nazarbayev with holding the multi-ethnic state together in the post-Soviet era that has witnessed much tumult in and around the region, and by balancing relations with Russia, China and the West, "which is no easy feat."

As Kazakhstan, along with many other nations in Central Asia and beyond, celebrate Nowruz, the start of spring and the beginning of a new year by the ancient Persian calendar, some experts caution that overdependence on Nazarbayev's legacy may not bode well in seasons to come.

"The sheer volume of joyful reactions (following Nazarbayev's announcement that he was stepping down as president) was startling and may be worrying news for those seeking to ride off the coattails of Nazarbayev's legacy," warns David Trilling, managing editor of Eurasianet.

As former President Nazarbayev said in his farewell speech, delivered this past Tuesday, each generation has to tackle its own problems.

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UN Hopes April Conference Will Prevent War in Libya

By VOA News March 20, 2019

The U.N. will sponsor a conference on Libya next month that could spell out the details of the long-awaited elections in the divided and troubled country.

"If the opportunity presented by the National Conference is not seized, then we will be faced with only two options: prolonged stalemate or conflict," special envoy Ghassan Salame told the Security Council by videoconference from Tripoli Wednesday.

He said the conference scheduled for April 14-16 in Ghadames is an opportunity to "step back from the edge of this precipice."

The leaders of the two rival administrations have agreed to set the stage for general elections and have also discussed a possible power-sharing agreement.

But a recent surge in violence and the threat of all-out military conflict has put a damper on any goodwill that might have developed.

Salame told the Security Council that the humanitarian situation and infrastructure in Libya are deteriorating at an "alarming rate" and that water production in the largely desert country is "particularly fragile."

He said 823,000 people, including a number of migrants and children, need humanitarian aid.

Libya has been in social and political turmoil since dictator Moammar Gadhafi was toppled and killed in 2011.

A Western-backed administration in Tripoli and a rival pro-military government in the east are jockeying for power and control of the country's oil wealth, along with a number of armed militias.

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UN: Horrors Await Migrants in Libyan Detention Centers

By Lisa Schlein March 21, 2019

A United Nations report finds migrants are being subjected to what it calls unimaginable horrors from the moment they enter Libya. The report by the U.N. high commissioner for human rights has been submitted to the U.N. human rights council in Geneva.

U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour, who presented the report, says the accounts of torture and abuse suffered by refugees and migrants are among the most harrowing he has ever heard.

He says a few weeks ago, in Niger, he met with migrants and refugees recently freed from detention in Libya.

"Every one of them  women, men, boys and girls  had been raped, many repeatedly and tortured by electrocution," Gilmour said. "All testified about the widespread extortion technique, whereby the torturers force their victims to call their families, who are then subjected to the screams of their loved ones there which, they are told, will continue until they pay a ransom."

He says the perpetrators of the atrocities include smugglers, traffickers, Libyan state officials and members of armed groups.

Hundreds of thousands of African migrants have passed through Libya in recent years, trying to reach Europe. But European countries have grown increasingly hostile to the migration and work with the Libyan Coast Guard to intercept migrant ships in the Mediterranean.

He warns that the migrants and refugees are returned to Libyan detention centers where they are tortured and subjected to other human rights violations.

Gilmour is calling for an end to restrictions that prohibit nonprofit groups from rescuing the migrants at sea. He also urges the European Union to end its support of the Libyan Coast Guard.

Libyan Charge d'affaires Adel Shaltut reacted to Gilmour's criticism with astonishment. He said he was surprised that the report shows no appreciation for the contributions his country was making in assisting migrants who transit through Libya.

He says migrants are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse because they are illegal.



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Nuclear Weapons Use Threshold Lowering Due to US Actions - Moscow

Sputnik News

14:19 21.03.2019

SAN MARINO (Sputnik) - The threshold for the use of nuclear weapons is lowering due to the US actions and its new strategy, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said Thursday commenting on earlier statements by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

"The threshold for the use of nuclear weapons is lowering as a result of the adoption of a new strategy in the United States, which actually erodes the line between a national conflict and a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons", Grushko told reporters.

At the Munich Security Conference in February Stoltenberg claimed that Russia's 9M729 (NATO reporting name SSC-8) missile systems "lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons in a conflict".

The US has repeatedly accused Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty by testing the missile at ranges banned by the agreement. Russia has refuted the accusations, insisting that the missile's maximum range of 480km is in line with the INF Treaty's requirements.

 Sputnik

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Clearing Ops Underway in Islamic State's 'Tent City'

By Jeff Seldin March 20, 2019

U.S.-backed forces are starting to search through the remnants of the Islamic State's final enclave in northeastern Syria, looking for fighters, mines and booby-trapped explosives.

The effort Wednesday to sift through the broken buildings and shredded tents that litter the landscape in the town of Baghuz comes a day after Syrian Democratic Forces took the area from IS fighters in what officials described as a significant blow to the terror group.

SDF officials said as many as 1,500 more people surrendered following Tuesday's incursion into IS's final stronghold, including hundreds of injured IS fighters.

But concerns run high that fighters lurk in trenches dug all around the former IS enclave, as well as in a complex network of caves and tunnels, which some officials said could run for more than two kilometers.

An unknown number of IS fighters have also retreated to a sliver of land along the Euphrates River, and there are no estimates for how many fighters could be hiding in other parts of Baghuz.

"A group of Daesh in Baghuz still fight back and hold their families as human shields," Zana Amedi, a media official with the YPG militia, which has been supporting the SDF offensive, told VOA Wednesday, using the terror group's Arabic acronym.

Despite the official caution, small celebrations broke out Wednesday around Baghuz, with some groups of SDF fighters playing music and dancing.

"We have won. We have eliminated the enemy, the terrorists," Majid Hejjo, an SDF fighter, told the French news agency.

"The comrades are tired, and the battle is over," said another SDF fighter.

No 'complete victory' yet

In Washington, U.S. President Donald Trump was equally effusive, telling reporters on the South Lawn of the White House that the very last speck of IS-held territory would be liberated within hours.

"There is no red," Trump said just hours after an intelligence briefing, showing off a map that compared IS-held territory now and the day he was elected. "In fact, there's actually a tiny spot, which will be gone by tonight."

Still, SDF officials and U.S. defense officials have been wary of saying the fight against the terror group's self-declared caliphate is over.

It has been three months since Trump first announced the defeat of IS in a tweet, and more than a month since he told a meeting of ministers from coalition countries that the end of the caliphate "should be formally announced, probably sometime next week."

More recently, multiple SDF officials have also forecast the fall of IS within days or even hours, only to see efforts slowed by fierce fighting and the presence of tens of thousands of civilians, mostly the wives, children and family members of IS fighters.

They now say more than 5,000 people have fled Baghuz since SDF resumed its final assault on IS just over a week ago, despite earlier saying only about 1,000 civilians and 300 fighters were holed up in Baghuz shortly after the operation to liberate the town got under way last month.

In all, SDF says more than 5,000 IS fighters have surrendered or been captured over the past month, while another 1,300 have been killed in the fighting.

The U.S.-led coalition also said Wednesday there has been no letup in efforts to ensure the terror group is defeated.

"The ground offensive, coalition airstrikes and artillery continue as needed," coalition spokesman Col. Sean Ryan told VOA. "The SDF feel they are in control of the area, but as long as Daesh puts up any type of fight and hides in tunnels, they cannot declare complete victory."

'Tens of thousands' of fighters

SDF officials have raised the possibility that the remaining IS fighters may also be holding prisoners and hostages, but there has been no word as to their fate in recent days.

Thousands of SDF troops have massed around Baghuz for weeks, laying siege to the town in an effort to liberate the final IS enclave in Syria. Officials said Kurdish special forces from Iraq also had been brought in to help with the operations.

Even once an official announcement is made, U.S. defense officials caution IS still has "tens of thousands" of fighters working either as part of sleeper cells or as part of an active, clandestine insurgency.

Additionally, senior officials believe most of the group's senior leadership, including its self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, remain at large.

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Trump: Time for US to recognize Syria's Golan as Israeli territory

Iran Press TV

Thu Mar 21, 2019 05:42PM

US President Donald Trump says it was time to back what he described as the Israeli regime's "sovereignty" over the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory under Israeli occupation since 1967.

"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" Trump said Thursday on Twitter.

In December 2017, Trump's recognition of Jerusalem al-Quds as Israel's so-called capital touched off a wave of protests which continue to this day.

Trump's tweet comes ahead of a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington next week to meet with the US president and address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Netanyahu has been pressing for Washington to recognize its claim to the occupied Golan Heights.

Earlier this month, the US State Department changed its usual description of the Golan Heights from "Israeli-occupied" to "Israeli-controlled" in an annual global human rights report.

Washington's recognition of the Israeli-occupied area would mark a major shift in US policy. The United Nations emphasizes Syria's sovereignty over the territory.

In 1967, Israel waged a full-scale war against Arab territories, during which it occupied a large swathe of Golan and annexed it four years later, a move never recognized by the international community.

In 1973, another war broke out and a year later, a UN-brokered ceasefire came into force, according to which Tel Aviv and Damascus agreed to separate their troops and create a buffer zone in the Golan Heights.

Syria said last month that it is ready to go to another war with Israel in order to free its occupied territories.

Israel has over the past decades built dozens of settlements in the Golan Heights in defiance of international calls for the regime to stop its illegal construction activities.

Syria has repeatedly reaffirmed its sovereignty over the Golan Heights, saying the territory must be completely restored to its control.

Since 2011 when foreign-sponsored militancy first broke out across Syria, Israel has been using Golan to prop up Takfiri terrorists.

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US-Backed SDF Reportedly Contradict Trump's Claim on Last Daesh Stronghold

Sputnik News

10:28 21.03.2019(updated 12:28 21.03.2019)

On Wednesday, the US president announced that the last Daesh stronghold in Syria "will be gone by tonight," adding that some 400 US troops would remain in the country, with 200 of the military set to be deployed "closer to Israel."

Reuters reported citing a Syrian Democratic Forces' official that the Kurdish-led group has denied capturing the last Daesh* stronghold in Syria.

"Combing continues in the Baghouz camp and there is no truth [to the report] about the complete liberation of the village," SDF media official told Reuters, quoting the commanders of the offensive.

This comes in the wake of media reports, claiming that the US-backed SDF "liberated all of Baghouz from the Daesh mercenaries". The reports followed an announcement made by US President Donald Trump, who said on Wednesday that the final terrorist group's enclave would be "gone by tonight."

According to Trump, who earlier pledged to fully withdraw the US troops from Syria, 400 servicemen would still remain in the country, with 200 of them poised to be stationed in northeast Syria and 200 remaining at the US military base in al-Tanf.

Baghouz remains the last Daesh stronghold in the Arab Republic, with the Kurdish-led SDF conducting operations in the area and the US-led coalition conducting bombings. According to Syrian state media reports, the US-led coalition's strikes in the region caused multiple civilian casualties.

Since the beginning of February, around 15,000 people have left the village and only militants remain there, according to the head of the SDF press service.

*Daesh, also known as ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State is a terrorist group banned in Russia

 Sputnik

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Royal Navy's new offshore patrol vessel named HMS Tamar

HMS Tamar, which is part of a five-strong OPV contract with BAE Systems, worth a combined 635m, was formally named in Glasgow today.

21 March 2019

HMS Tamar, the fourth of the Royal Navy's five cutting-edge new Offshore Patrol Vessels, has been formally named in Glasgow today.

The next-generation River Class ship will boost Britain's counter-terrorism and anti-smuggling work and provide essential support to defence operations.

The 90-metre vessel, which is equipped with a 30mm cannon and flight deck capable of accommodating a Merlin helicopter, is part of a five-strong OPV contract with BAE Systems, worth a combined 635m.

Minister for Defence Procurement Stuart Andrew said:

"From patrolling our coastlines and protecting UK waters, to anti-smuggling and counter terrorism operations, these ships are a key part of our Royal Navy fleet."

"Today's naming marks an important milestone in HMS Tamar's programme ahead of starting sea trials and being accepted into operational service next year."

At Scotstoun today, the ship's sponsor, Lady Peach, officially named HMS Tamar by pressing a button to smash a bottle of Camel Valley 'Cornwall' Brut against the hull  in recognition of the ship being affiliated to Cornwall.

All the vessels are initially constructed in BAE System's Govan yard, before being moved to their Scotstoun site to be fitted out with their systems ahead of rigorous sea trials.

Alongside the Type 26 anti-submarine frigate programme, the Royal Navy work has filled the Glasgow shipyards' order books until the early 2030s, protecting 1,700 Scottish jobs and supporting a further 2,300 roles across the nation through the supply chain.

Sir Simon Bollom, chief executive for Defence, Equipment and Support, the MOD's procurement agency, said:

"HMS Tamar continues the legacy of ships being built on the Clyde for the Royal Navy and will perform a vital role defending the UK's interests."

"It is great news that we are celebrating this milestone alongside our partners in the Royal Navy and BAES."

"We look forward to the delivery of the remaining OPVs and the further progress on the Type 26 build programme."

All the Batch 2 OPVs, named HMS Forth, HMS Medway, HMS Trent, HMS Tamar and HMS Spey, are set to be delivered to the Royal Navy by the end of 2020.

Last year it was announced by Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson that the Batch 1 Offshore Patrols Vessels, HMS Tyne, HMS Mersey and HMS Severn, which currently support the Fishery Protection Squadron, would also be retained for at least the next two years.

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U.S. Rejects Ukraine Top Prosecutor's 'Don't Prosecute' Accusation

By RFE/RL March 21, 2019

KYIV -- The U.S. State Department has denied an explosive claim by Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko that U.S. Ambassador to Kyiv Marie Yovanovitch gave him "a list of people whom we should not prosecute" during their first in-person meeting.

"The allegations by the Ukrainian prosecutor-general are not true and are intended to tarnish the reputation of Ambassador Yovanovitch," a State Department spokesperson told RFE/RL in e-mailed comments on March 21.

"Such attacks redouble our resolve to help Ukraine win the struggle against corruption," the spokesperson added.

Lutsenko did not say when the purported meeting with Yovanovitch took place. She was nominated to be ambassador by President Barack Obama in May 2016 and was sworn in in August of the same year.

The back and forth comes less than two weeks ahead of a Ukrainian presidential election in which challengers have sought to paint incumbent Petro Poroshenko as failing to combat corruption and abuses of power since taking office in mid-2014.

"The statement of Ukraine's prosecutor-general does not correspond to reality and is meant to weaken the reputation of Ambassador Yovanovitch," the State Department said.

Lutsenko's assertion came in an interview broadcast by The Hill's TV arm on March 20.

Lutskenko also reportedly told The Hill's John Solomon that Ukrainian authorities would "launch a criminal investigation" into whether Ukrainians sought to interfere in the U.S. election in 2016.

The question of Kyiv's actions in the run-up to Donald Trump's election as president in 2016 took on added significance with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's U.S. prosecution for crimes connected with advisory work he did in Ukraine.

On March 20, Trump cited Solomon in a tweet repeating the allegation that Ukrainians had tried to "help" his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in 2016.

Poroshenko's administration was caught off-guard by Trump's election two years ago and pivoted abruptly to downplay perceived criticisms from Ukrainian officials of Trump during the campaign.

Kyiv has tried hard to maintain Western diplomatic and financial support as a simmering conflict continues in eastern Ukraine against Russia-backed separatists.

Lutsenko, a former interior minister who served jail time for charges that he and European officials described as politically motivated before a presidential pardon freed him in 2013, has served as an adviser to Poroshenko and is widely seen as the president's staunch political ally.

He was named prosecutor-general in 2016 despite having no law degree -- forcing parliament to amend legislation before approving his nomination.

He has since faced repeated calls from critics for his dismissal, and even announced his resignation as recently as November 2018.

In the halls of Ukraine's parliament after the reports of Lutsenko's comments about the U.S. ambassador, deputy speaker Oksana Syroyid said Poroshenko should either receive written, documented confirmation backing up the prosecutor-general's claim or fire Lutsenko.

"President Poroshenko this morning can only have [one of] two documents: either one substantiating the claim of Prosecutor-General Lutsenko or his submission to parliament that Lutsenko be dismissed as Ukraine's prosecutor-general," she said.

Lutsenko told Hill.TV that "from the first meeting with the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, [Yovanovitch] gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute," adding that such a thing was "inadmissible."

The State Department spokesperson said that "such allegations only serve the corrupt."

"The United States is committed to engaging with our partners in Ukraine, including on efforts to roll back the persistent corruption that continues to threaten Ukraine's national security, prosperity, and democratic development," the spokesperson continued. "Where there is a lack of political will on Ukraine's part, such as by the prosecutor-general's office, we exercise our fiduciary responsibility to the U.S. taxpayer and move assistance funds to where they can make a positive difference."

Yovanovitch in a recent speech was blunt in her criticism of Kyiv's anticorruption efforts, one of the key criteria for billions of dollars in lending from international institutions since the eastern Ukrainian conflict broke out in early 2014.

Yovanovitch also said that the chief of Ukraine's Special Anticorruption Prosecutor's Office, Nazar Kholodnytskyy, should be replaced to ensure the integrity of the anticorruption institutions.

Kholodnytskyy has been embroiled in a corruption scandal over allegations that he helped officials suspected of corruption evade prosecution.

The war of words between Lutsenko and the United States adds to a politically charged environment in the run-up to next week's presidential vote in Ukraine.

Polls consistently show Poroshenko trailing comic and television personality Volodymyr Zelenskyy and neck-and-neck with former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko ahead of the March 31 vote, which will go to a two-candidate runoff in April if no one surpasses 50 percent.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/us-rejects- top-ukrainian-prosecutors-dont-prosecute -accusation/29834853.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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Ascension Healthcare plc

Appointment of Medical and Scientific Advisory Board

LONDON, February 25, 2019  Ascension Healthcare plc (Ascension or the Company), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercialising innovative therapies for haemophilia and osteoarthritis, is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Edward Tuddenham, Dr Ulrich Thibaut, Dr Bill Henry and Dr Leysan Shaydullina to its newly created Medical and Scientific Advisory Board.

Biresh Roy, Chief Executive Officer of Ascension, said: We feel privileged to have assembled this eminent panel of clinicians, scientists and leading industry experts to form our medical and scientific advisory board. These appointments underline the outstanding quality of our science and the clinical and market potential of our products to improve prophylactic treatment care for all haemophilia A patients.

We warmly welcome each distinguished member of this panel to Ascension. I am very much looking forward to working with each of them and leveraging their respective expertise, as we forge ahead in achieving our objectives and continue to drive our haemophilia product candidates through clinical trials towards commercialisation.

Professor Edward Tuddenham is a pioneer in the field of haemophilia and considered one of the worlds leading haematologists having published over 300 original scientific papers, review articles and books. After receiving his medical degree from the University of London in 1968, he trained as a pathologist at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Liverpool before continuing his training in haematology at the University of Connecticut. From 1978 to 1982, whilst working as first director of the new Haemophilia Centre at the Royal Free Hospital in London, his group completed the first large scale purification to homogeneity of human factor VIII. This enabled the sequencing of the protein, cloning of its gene and production of recombinant factor VIII in cultured cells. From there he went on to set up the Haemostasis Research Group for the Medical Research Council, which he led for 20 years, during which time his group made many advances in rare bleeding disorders such as deficiency of factor VII, factor XI, combined factor V and VIII and platelet function disorders. Professor Tuddenham is now Emeritus Professor of Haematology at University College London where he is continuing his research on the establishment of gene therapies, Haemophilia A, Haemophilia B and factor VII deficiency and the structure, function and interaction of factor VIII with other proteins.

Dr Ulrich Thibaut has almost 30 years experience working in a variety of scientific and managerial roles in research and development. His most recent executive role was as Executive Board Member at Octapharma Group, a manufacturer of human proteins including haematology concentrates for patients with bleeding disorders. At Octapharma he held responsibility for the global R&D organization of the Group and he has a proven track record of several large and successful product launches. His previous roles include Executive Vice President Global R&D of ALTANA Pharma and Chief Technology Officer at Dragerwerk. Dr Ulrich Thibaut studied Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Tubingen University in Germany and has a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry. He is teaching at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.

Dr Bill Henry is an experienced executive in the healthcare industry who has specialised in process scale-up for the commercial supply of pharmaceutical actives and intermediates. He has held various senior positions throughout his career at Zeneca Bioproducts, Schering Plough, Vericore, Celltech, PowderMed and was a founder of the fund whose assets now form a part of Ascensions business today. Dr Bill Henry studied as a BP scholar at the University of Edinburgh and has a PhD in Organic Chemistry, which is complemented by a first degree in Biochemistry

Dr Leysan Shaydullina has more than 10 years experience working in the venture capital industry and currently leads early stage investment assets in life science companies at Management Company RUSNANO LLC. Leysan has held, and continues to hold, positions as a member of the Board of Directors of clinical stage biotech and medtech companies, including those that are developing products using nanotechnology approach in hemostasis and bleeding disorders, rare diseases, oncology and immunology. Previous roles include senior positions at Innovative Technopark IDEA, a Russian based tech incubator providing seed financing and early-stage equity investment, and a position of Surgeon for the Childrens Republican Clinical Hospital of the Ministry of Health in Russia. Dr Shaydullina holds a medical degree from Kazan State Medical University and MBA from the Academy of National Economy under the Government of the Russian Federation.

For further information please contact:

Ascension Healthcare plc



Tel: +44 (0)20 7291 5400 Biresh Roy, Chief Executive Officer



info@ascension.co.uk Consilium Strategic Communications (European Media and Investor Enquiries)

Lindsey Neville, Priscila Radu











Tel: +44 (0)20 3709 5700

ascension@consilium-comms.com









About Ascension Healthcare plc

Ascension Healthcare plc is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercialising innovative therapies for the treatment of haemophilia and osteoarthritis.

The Company has three products in clinical or pre-clinical development for the treatment of Haemophilia A and also a range of internationally marketed products for osteoarthritis sufferers.Washington, DC, March 21, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit issued a temporary stay of the bump stock ban announced late last year by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The stay only applies to NCLAs client, W. Clark Aposhian, a resident of Salt Lake City, Utah who has challenged the ban in federal court. The stay prevents the enforcement of the bump stock ban against Mr. Aposhian while the Court considers his Emergency Motion for Preliminary Injunction Pending Appeal.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed the preliminary injunction motion on Mr. Aposhians behalf on March 19th. The case is not about whether bump stocks should be banned. Instead, it is about whether ATF acted lawfully in the way it banned them. NCLA asked the Court of Appeals to halt enforcement of the ban while it considers NCLAs appeal of a district court order that denied a preliminary injunction last week. ATFs ban goes into effect nationwide on March 26th.

NCLA contends in this lawsuit that only Congress, not administrative agencies, can write criminal laws such as ATFs rule banning bump stocks. The lawsuit raises key issues about the proper role of administrative agencies, whether agency regulations may contradict a statute passed by Congress, and whether an agency can retroactively punish lawful purchasers of a device who may not hear about the ban before it turns them into felons.

The Courts decision to stay the bump stock rule is an important recognition of the high stakes in this case. While the order is limited, the Court recognizes that Mr. Aposhian has raised a substantial basis to question the rules validity. The Court sees that it would be unfair to allow the rule to take effect without giving him an opportunity to fully present the issue to the Court.

Today the Court of Appeals told the ATF that it could not rush through the bump stock ban without meaningful judicial review. The Court understands the stakes and is refusing to let an innocent owner be declared a felon, as scheduled. Caleb Kruckenberg, Litigation Counsel

Last Friday Judge Jill Parrish of the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah denied preliminary injunctive relief to Mr. Aposhian in his suit against the ATF challenging the Final Rule.





ABOUT NCLA

NCLA is a nonprofit civil rights organization founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State. NCLAs public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unchecked power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans fundamental rights. For more information visit us online: NCLAlegal.org.THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN IS NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION IN OR INTO AUSTRALIA, CANADA, ITALY, DENMARK, JAPAN, THE UNITED STATES, OR TO ANY NATIONAL OF SUCH JURISDICTIONS

NBPE Announces Appointment of New Directors

22 March 2019

NB Private Equity Partners Limited (NBPE or the Company) today announces the appointment of William Maltby and Wilken von Hodenberg as new Independent Non-Executive directors.

Further details are set out below.

Talmai Morgan, NBPE Chairman, said: Im delighted to welcome William and Wilken to the board of NBPE. We believe their wealth of industry and private equity experience and listed company knowledge will be highly valuable assets to our Board of Directors. These additions as well as the fact that, as previously announced, I will not be seeking reelection to the board at the 2019 Annual General Meeting, demonstrate our commitment to strong corporate governance. On behalf of the current directors, I welcome Mr. Maltby and Mr. von Hodenberg to the board.

Appointment of Two New Independent Directors

NBPE has appointed William Maltby and Wilken von Hodenberg as Independent Directors with effect from 21 March 2019, as part of the continuing process of refreshing the board of Directors. This selection process was initiated on 3 September 2018, and was led by NBPE's Nominations & Remuneration Committee, working with Cornforth Consulting.

Mr. Maltby brings experience in listed investment trusts, investment banking and private equity to the board of NBPE. He worked for more than 25 years as a Corporate Financier specialising in Leveraged Finance and Financial Sponsors at Deutsche Bank / Morgan Grenfell. He spent a further six years as a Senior Adviser to the Investment Banking Division of Deutsche Bank. He currently serves as Chairman of Ekins Guinness LLP. From 2012 to September 2018, Mr. Maltby served as Chairman of the Board of the Mithras Investment Trust Plc, a private equity fund of funds investment trust listed on the London Stock Exchange. He qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Peat Marwick and has a law degree from the University of Cambridge.

Mr. von Hodenberg brings significant experience in private equity, investment banking and senior management to the board of NBPE. He served as CEO of listed private equity company Deutsche Beteiligungs AG (DBAG) and its associated private equity funds and currently serves as a non-executive director on the DBAG supervisory board. DBAG was founded over 50 years ago and is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in Germany. Mr. von Hodenberg has 14 years of experience in investment banking. He held several senior positions in investment banking at Merrill Lynch and Baring Brothers. He began his career in 1983 at JP Morgan. He also served as CFO and Deputy Managing Director of Tengelmann Group. Mr. von Hodenberg was Chairman of the German Venture Capital association until 2017. He holds a Law degree from the University of Hamburg.





For further information, please contact:

NBPE Investor Relations +1 214 647 9593



KL Communications +44 (0)20 3603 2803

Charles Gorman nbpe@kl-communications.com





ABOUT NB PRIVATE EQUITY PARTNERS LIMITED

NBPE is a closed-end private equity investment company with class A ordinary shares admitted to trading on the Premium Segment of the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange. NBPE has 2022 and 2024 ZDP Shares admitted to trading on the Specialist Fund Segment of the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange. NBPE holds a diversified portfolio of direct equity investments, direct income investments and fund investments selected by the NB Alternatives group of Neuberger Berman, diversified across private equity asset class, geography, industry, vintage year, and sponsor.

LEI number: 213800UJH93NH8IOFQ77

ABOUT NEUBERGER BERMAN

Neuberger Berman, founded in 1939, is a private, independent, employee-owned investment manager. The firm manages a range of strategiesincluding equity, fixed income, quantitative and multi-asset class, private equity and hedge fundson behalf of institutions, advisors and individual investors globally. With offices in 22 countries, Neuberger Bermans team is more than 2,000 professionals. For five consecutive years, the company has been named first or second in Pensions & Investments Best Places to Work in Money Management survey (among those with 1,000 employees or more). Tenured, stable and long-term in focus, the firm fosters an investment culture of fundamental research and independent thinking. It manages $304 billion in client assets as of December 31, 2018. For more information, please visit our website at www.nb.com .

This press release appears as a matter of record only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase any security.

NBPE is established as a closed-end investment company domiciled in Guernsey. NBPE has received the necessary consent of the Guernsey Financial Services Commission. The value of investments may fluctuate. Results achieved in the past are no guarantee of future results. This document is not intended to constitute legal, tax or accounting advice or investment recommendations. Prospective investors are advised to seek expert legal, financial, tax and other professional advice before making any investment decision. Statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are based on current expectations, estimates, projections, opinions and beliefs of NBPE's investment manager. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, and undue reliance should not be placed thereon. Additionally, this document contains "forward-looking statements." Actual events or results or the actual performance of NBPE may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in such targets or forward-looking statements.Lithuanian English

Resolutions of the Ordinary General Shareholders meeting of INVL Baltic Farmland held on 22th March 2019:

Presentation of the public joint-stock company INVL Baltic Farmland consolidated annual report for 2018

Shareholders of the public joint-stock company INVL Baltic Farmland are presented with the consolidated annual report of INVL Baltic Farmland for 2018 (there is no voting on this issue of agenda).

Presentation of the independent auditor's report on the financial statements and consolidated annual report of the public joint-stock company INVL Baltic Farmland.

Shareholders of the public joint-stock company INVL Baltic Farmland are presented with the independent auditor's report on the financial statements and consolidated annual report of INVL Baltic Farmland (there is no voting on this issue of agenda).

Approval of the consolidated and stand-alone financial statements for 2018 of the public joint-stock company INVL Baltic Farmland

To approve the consolidated and stand-alone financial statements for 2018 of the public joint-stock company INVL Baltic Farmland.

Regarding profit distribution of the public joint-stock company INVL Baltic Farmland.

To distribute profit of the public joint-stock company INVL Baltic Farmland as follows:

Article (thousand EUR) Retained earnings (loss) at the begining of the financial year of the reporting period 6,167 Net profit (loss) for the financial year 1,113 Profit (loss) not recognized in the income statement of the reporting financial year - Shareholders contributions to cover loss - Distributable profit (loss) at the end of the financial year of the reporting period 7,280 Transfers from reserves - Distributable profit (loss) in total 7,280 Profit distribution: (323) - Profit transfers to the legal reserves - -Profit transfers to the reserves for own shares acquisition - - Profit transfers to other reserves - - Profit to be paid as dividends* (323) - Profit to be paid as annual payments (bonus) and for other purposes - Retained earnings (loss) at the end of the financial year 6,957

*0.10 EUR is paid per share.

Regarding purchase of own shares of the public joint stock company INVL Baltic Farmland

Until the day of the General Shareholders meeting the reserve for the purchase of own shares which is equal to EUR 3,079,669 is not used.

To use the reserve (or the part of it) for the purchase of own shares and to purchase shares in the public joint stock company INVL Baltic Farmland by the rules mentioned below:

1) The goal for the purchase of own shares - to ensure for shareholders a possibility to sell company's shares.

2) The maximum number of shares to be acquired - the nominal value of own shares by the public joint stock company INVL Baltic Farmland, which may not exceed 1/10 of share.

3) The period during which the public joint stock company INVL Baltic Farmland may purchase its own shares 18 months from the day of this resolution.

4) The maximum and minimal one share acquisition price: the maximum one share acquisition price- EUR 5.00, the minimal one share acquisition price - EUR 3.00.

5) The conditions of the selling of the purchased shares and minimal purchase price: the acquired own shares may be annulled by the decision of the General Shareholders Meeting or sold by the decision of the Board on condition the minimum price of sale of own shares shall be equal to the price at which they were acquired and the procedure of selling the shares shall ensure equal opportunities for all shareholders to acquire the said shares.

The Board of INVL Baltic Farmland is delegated on the basis of this resolution and the Law on Companies of the Republic of Lithuania to organise purchase and sale of own shares, to organise purchase and selling procedure of own shares and to determine an order and timing for purchase and sale of own shares as well as the amount of shares and shares price, and to complete all other actions related with purchase and sale procedure of own shares.

From the date of this resolution the resolution of the General Shareholders Meeting on 10 April 2018 on the acquisition of own shares expires.





Regarding the dividend payment for the shareholders and ex-date:

Persons, who will be shareholders of INVL Baltic Farmland at the end of 5 April 2019, the tenth day after the general shareholders meeting to approve the resolution to allocate part of companys profit for the payment of dividends, are entitled to receive dividends.

The ex-date is 4th April 2018. From that date the new owner of the shares of INVL Baltic Farmland, ISIN code LT0000128753, which were acquired on stock exchange with settlement cycle of T+2, is not entitled to dividends for the year 2018.

Regarding the Audit Committee report of the Company:

According to the Regulations of the Audit Committee of INVL Baltic Farmland (approved during the General Shareholders Meeting of the Company that was held on 22 March 2017), the Audit Committee informs the Annual General Shareholders Meeting of the Company about its activities providing a written report (attached).





The person authorized to provide additional information:

Egle Surpliene

Director

E-mail: egle.surpliene@invaldainvl.com

AttachmentsCALGARY, Alberta, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canacol Energy Ltd. ("Canacol" or the "Corporation") (TSX:CNE; OTCQX:CNNEF; BVC:CNEC) is pleased to provide the following production, drilling, and operations update.



Average Gas Sales Reach 126 MMscfpd in January and February 2019

Average gas sales for the months of January and February 2019 were approximately 126 million standard cubic feet per day (MMscfpd) at average wellhead sales price of US$ 4.99 / Mcf net of transportation, as compared to gas sales of 119 MMscfpd at an average wellhead sales price of US$4.95 / Mcf net of transportation for Q4 2018. Average net oil sales from the operated Rancho Hermoso field for the months of January and February were 430 barrels of oil per day.

Drilling Update

Nelson 13 Development Well Tests 33 MMscfpd

The Nelson 13 well is the Corporations 7th well drilled into its Nelson gas field, discovered in 2011. The well encountered 104 feet true vertical depth (ft TVD) of net gas pay with average porosity of 26% within the productive shallow Porquero sandstone reservoir, and 162 ft TVD of net gas pay within the deeper productive CDO sandstone reservoir. The resulting 266 feet TVD of net gas pay represents the thickest gas pay encountered in any of the Corporations wells drilled to date on any of its blocks in the Lower Magdalena Valley basin.

The CDO was perforated in six intervals over an interval from 8,765 and 8,984 feet measured depth (ft md) within the CDO reservoir and flowed at a rate of 33 MMscfpd directly into the Jobo processing facility to which it is now connected and on permanent production.

Palmer 2 Appraisal Well Encounters 81 Feet of Gas Pay

The Palmer 2 well is the Corporations 2nd well drilled into the Palmer gas field, discovered in 2015. The well was spud on February 21st 2019 and reached a total depth of 8,309 ft md in 20 days. The well encountered 81 ft TVD of net gas pay with average porosity of 23% within the CDO sandstone reservoir. The well has been cased and completed and will be tied into the Palmer 1 manifold and brought onto permanent production shortly.

2019 Drilling Program

The gas exploration wells planned for 2019 include the Acordeon-1 and Saxofon-1 exploration wells on Canacols operated 100% working interest VIM 5 contract, and the Arandala-1 exploration well on Canacols operated 100% working interest VIM 21 contract. Appraisal wells Pandereta-5 and Clarinete-4 are planned for its VIM 5 contract, while development wells Nelson-7 and Canahuate-2 are planned for its operated 100% working interest Esperanza contract. Flexibility has been built into the 2019 drilling program such that in the event of exploration success, funds may be reallocated for immediate follow-up appraisal drilling locations.

Upon moving off of the Palmer 2 drilling location, the Pioneer 302 rig will be mobilized to drill the Nelson 7 development well, which is anticipated to spud prior to the end of March 2019. Nelson 7 will take approximately 5 weeks to drill and complete, after which the rig will be mobilized to drill the Acordeon 1 exploration well which is anticipated to spud in early May 2019.

Facilities and Flowline Update

The Corporation has completed the construction of the Jobo 3 gas treatment plant, with treatment capacity of 130 MMscfpd, bringing total gas processing capacity of the Corporations operated gas facilities to 330 MMscfpd. Commissioning of the new facility is currently underway, and is expected to be completed in April 2019, well ahead of the planned completion of the Promigas S.A. pipeline expansion scheduled for June 2019.

The Corporation has also completed the Pandereta to Jobo 8 gas flowline. The 3 wells located at Pandereta have a productive potential of approximately 75 MMscfpd based on well tests. The Corporation has also completed the debottlenecking of the Bretana to Jobo twin 8 flowlines, which have the capacity to transport up to 140 MMscfpd from the Nelson and Palmer gas fields.

The Corporation will provide continuous updates of its 2019 drilling program as each well is completed.

Canacol is an exploration and production company with operations focused in Colombia. The Corporation's common stock trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the OTCQX in the United States of America, and the Colombia Stock Exchange under ticker symbol CNE, CNNEF, and CNE.C, respectively.

This press release contains certain forwardlooking statements within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forwardlooking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur, including without limitation statements relating to estimated production rates from the Corporation's properties and intended work programs and associated timelines. Forwardlooking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forwardlooking statements. The Corporation cannot assure that actual results will be consistent with these forward looking statements. They are made as of the date hereof and are subject to change and the Corporation assumes no obligation to revise or update them to reflect new circumstances, except as required by law. Prospective investors should not place undue reliance on forward looking statements. These factors include the inherent risks involved in the exploration for and development of crude oil and natural gas properties, the uncertainties involved in interpreting drilling results and other geological and geophysical data, fluctuating energy prices, the possibility of cost overruns or unanticipated costs or delays and other uncertainties associated with the oil and gas industry. Other risk factors could include risks associated with negotiating with foreign governments as well as country risk associated with conducting international activities, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Corporation.ORCO PROPERTY GROUP

Societe Anonyme

40, rue de la Vallee

L-2661 Luxembourg

R.C.S. Luxembourg B 44.996

(the Company)

CONVENING NOTICE

OF THE COMPANYS EXTRAORDINARY GENERAL MEETING

TO BE HELD ON 24 APRIL 2019

Dear Shareholders,

You are invited to attend the extraordinary general meeting of the shareholders of the Company (the Meeting) to be held at the registered office of the Company at 40, rue de la Vallee, L-2661 Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, on 24 April 2019 at 9:30 CET , in the presence of a Luxembourg notary public to discuss and to vote on the agenda indicated below.

The Meeting is convened in accordance with article 450-3 of the Luxembourg law on commercial companies dated 10 August 1915, as amended from time to time (the LCA) and article 3 of the law dated 24 May 2011 on the exercise of certain rights of shareholders in general meetings of listed companies, with the following points on the agenda:

AGENDA

Decision to change the name of the Company to CPI FIM SA and to amend article 1 of the articles of association of the Company to reflect such name change. Decision to fully restate the articles of association of the Company, without amending the corporate object and the authorized capital of the Company, to comply with and reflect recent changes in the Luxembourg corporate laws, in particular changes in the LCA.

* * *

ATTENDING THE MEETING

In order to attend the Meeting, shareholders must provide the Company with the following three items as explained in greater detail below: (i) Record Date Confirmation, (ii) Attendance and Proxy Form, and (iii) Proof of Shareholding.

Record Date Confirmation: This document shall be provided to the Company by a shareholder at the latest by 23:59 CET on the Record Date. The Record Date is 10 April 2019 (the Record Date, i.e. the day falling fourteen (14) days before the date of the Meeting).

The Record Date Confirmation must be in writing and indicate that a shareholder holds the Company shares and wishes to participate in the Meeting. A template form of the Record Date Confirmation is available on the Companys website at www.orcogroup.com . The Record Date Confirmation must be sent to the Company by post or electronic means so that it is received by the Company at the latest by 23:59 CET on the Record Date, i.e. 10 April 2019 , to: Orco Property Group

40, rue de la Vallee

L-2661 Luxembourg

Fax: + 352 26 47 67 67

email: generalmeetings@orcogroup.com

Attendance and Proxy form: A template form is available on the Companys website at www.orcogroup.com and is to be duly completed and signed by shareholders wishing to attend or be represented at the Meeting.

Proof of Shareholding: This document must indicate the shareholder's name and the number of Company shares held at 23:59 CET on the Record Date. The Proof of Shareholding shall be issued by the bank, the professional securities' depositary or the financial institution where the shares are on deposit. Please note that Proof of Shareholding is not necessary for those shareholders whose shares are still recorded as registered shares in the Companys shareholders register.

Shareholders wishing to attend the Meeting must send the Attendance and Proxy form together with the relevant Proof of Shareholding by post or electronic means so that they are received by the Company at the latest by noon (12:00 noon) CET on 19 April 2019 , to:

Orco Property Group

40, rue de la Vallee

L-2661 Luxembourg

Fax: + 352 26 47 67 67

email: generalmeetings@orcogroup.com

Please note that only persons who are shareholders at the Record Date and have timely submitted their Record Date Confirmation, Attendance and Proxy form, and Proof of Shareholding shall have the right to participate and vote in the Meeting.

Documentation and information: The following documents and information are available for the shareholders on our website: www.orcogroup.com and, in particular, in the "Shareholder Corner":

the present convening notice;

the total number of shares and the voting rights in the Company as at the date of this convening notice;

the draft resolutions of the Meeting. Any draft resolution(s) submitted by shareholder(s) shall be added to the website as soon as possible after the Company has received them;

the proposed restated articles of association to be resolved upon by the Meeting;

the Record Date Confirmation form; and

the Attendance and Proxy Form

The above documents may also be obtained by shareholders upon written request sent to the following postal address: Orco Property Group, 40, rue de la Vallee, L-2661 Luxembourg.

For further information, visit our website: www.orcogroup.com and, in particular, the "Shareholder Corner".

Quorum Requirement:

With respect to all items of the agenda, the Meeting shall not validly deliberate, unless at least one half of the corporate capital is represented and if the agenda of the meeting includes the statutory changes to be considered. In the event that such quorum condition is not fulfilled, a second meeting may be convened by publishing this convening notice in the Luxembourg official gazette (Recueil electronique des societes et associations), a Luxembourg newspaper and in such media which may reasonably be expected to be relied upon for the effective dissemination of information to the public throughout the European Economic Area, and which are accessible rapidly and on a non-discriminatory basis, seventeen (17) days prior to the date of the reconvened meeting provided that (i) the first Meeting was properly convened; and (ii) the agenda for the reconvened Meeting does not include any new item.

The second meeting shall deliberate validly whatever the part of the corporate capital represented thereat.

At both meetings, resolutions, in order to be adopted, must be carried by a majority of two-thirds of the votes cast. Votes cast shall not include votes attaching to shares in which the shareholder has not taken part in the vote or has abstained or has returned a blank or invalid vote.

Right to add new items on the agenda : One or more shareholders together representing at least five per cent of the share capital has the right to (i) put one or more items on the agenda of the Meeting and (ii) table draft resolutions for items included or to be included on the agenda of the Meeting.

Such requests must:

be in writing and sent to the Company by post (at the following address: Orco Property Group, 40, rue de la Vallee, L-2661 Luxembourg) or electronic means (at the following email address: generalmeetings@orcogroup.com ) and be accompanied by a justification or draft resolution to be adopted in the Meeting;

) and be accompanied by a justification or draft resolution to be adopted in the Meeting; include the postal or electronic address at which the Company may acknowledge receipt of the requests;

be received by the Company at least twenty two (22) days before the date of the Meeting, i.e. 2 April 2019.

The Company shall acknowledge receipt of requests referred to above within (forty-eight) 48 hours from receipt. The Company shall prepare a revised agenda including such additional items on or before the fifteenth (15th) day before the date of the Meeting.

If you need further assistance or information, please contact : Orco Property Group, 40, rue de la Vallee, L-2661 Luxembourg, Tel: + 352 26 47 67 1; Fax: + 352 26 47 67 67; email: generalmeetings@orcogroup.com

Luxembourg, 21 March 2019

Yours faithfully,

The board of directors of the Company

AttachmentHYUNDAI Motor Company Australia (HMCA) will target private buyers rather than fleet purchases for its alternatively powered models, having seen little government support for the electric vehicle market.

During a private meeting, prime minister Scott Morrison told HMCA that a national electric vehicle strategy would not be announced until after the federal election.

Speaking at the launch of the Hyundai Kona Electric this month, HMCA manager of future mobility and government relations Scott Nargar said that the brand wants the government to help make electric vehicles more accessible.

One of the biggest things we are looking for is fleet transition, he said.

We want to make sure the cars can get into government quickly and spread across Australia

and those cars get in the hands of mums and dads and the market.

By doing that we can also increase usage of electric vehicles, which then in turn allows for investment into infrastructure, we want investment into nationwide infrastructure for vehicles and roads.

Mr Nargar also suggested that he does not expect the government to legislate direct subsidies for EV purchases.

Its something we dont expect to come any time soon from the current government, he said.

Were working with both sides of politics and with state governments across Australia, but its something were not seeing any interest in at the moment.

(Electric vehicles) are more expensive than an average car, so we want to encourage people to get into those.

HMCA chief executive officer JW Lee said that while he was initially concerned about the limited EV support from the government, he was surprised by the take-up from private customers.

In terms of the government subsidy support for environmental cars, Australia seems a bit slow compared to any other countries, he said.

As a CEO, my concern was, if we cannot get support from government for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid vehicles, demand will be very limited and we wont be able to get good volumes.

The government sectors sales was not that much, but to private customers, demand was extraordinary  much, much higher than my expectations.

We know our customers are very excited to get these new (electric) vehicles.

Mr Lee pointed out that sales for its Ioniq, which hit the market in December with hybrid ($33,990 plus on-road costs), plug-in hybrid ($40,990) and electric ($44,990) powertrains, have been largely from retail customers.

Since we launched Ioniq in December, we have sold 197 Ioniq cars and out of that 88 was electric vehicles, so almost 50 per cent of our Ioniq sales were electric vehicles, he said.

That was more than my expectations.

Initially I thought that our major Ioniq buyer would be government and corporate sectors, but surprisingly most sales came from private customers.

HMCA expects this trend to continue with its Kona Electric small SUV which launched this month, with around 500 to 600 units allocated for Australia this year.

The all-new Kona Electric will go on-sale from $59,990 for the base Elite, or $64,490 for the range-topping Highlander, bolstering the South Korean brands stake in the slow-to-grow EV market in Australia.

The Road to Recovery podcast seriesHYUNDAI Motor Company Australia (HMCA) bolstered its electric vehicle (EV) line-up this month with the new Kona Electric small SUV joining its Ioniq Electric sedan in its Blue-Drive vehicle range, however the emissions-free models will be sold and serviced at just 18 dealerships nationwide.

Currently, there are four dealerships with Blue-Drive facilities in Melbourne and Sydney, three in Perth and Brisbane, and just one in Canberra, Adelaide and Tasmania.

Speaking at the launch of the Kona Electric, HMCA chief executive officer JW Lee said the brand plans to expand its Blue-Drive dealer network sometime in the future to accommodate the expected increase in popularity of EVs.

We currently have 18 Blue-Drive dealers that are now able to cater to the customers demands, he said.

We are planning to expand to some more Blue-Drive dealers, but they are yet to be designed.

For a proper service, these dealers need to be equipped with some special tools.

According to HMCA manager of future mobility and government relations Scott Nargar, working with alternatively powered vehicles requires a number of unique resources, including higher trained technicians.

You have to make sure the technicians are comfortable working with high voltages, they have to have the correct certifications, he said.

Hyundai is part of a group looking at national technician accreditation, figuring out what we need to be training our service technicians for the future.

Were not seeing too many carburettors anymore, were seeing high-voltage and even hydrogen vehicles with very high pressures of gas, and autonomous technology.

Blue-Drive dealerships are also equipped with facilities to train customers how to use EV charging stations, according to Mr Nargar.

The dealers have AC charging in the customer and technician bays, and also have (mock-up) chargers on the floor so they can show the customer how to plug in the vehicle, how to operate it, which is generally the same charger they can purchase as an accessory to their home, he said.

The Hyundai Kona Electric offers 449 kilometres of driving range, so the small dealer network may not be an issue for owners, particularly because the majority of EV customers live in urban areas.

However, it may be more difficult for owners of the Ioniq Electric, which offers just 230 kilometres of driving range.

Both the Kona Electric and Ioniq Electric are offered with a capped-price service program which prices each service visit at $165 and $160 for each respective model.

Moreover, the EVs come with a five-year/unlimited kilometre warranty with 12-month/15,000km service intervals, and benefits from an additional high-voltage battery warranty that extends to eight years or 160,000km, whichever comes first.

HMCA sold 88 Ioniq Electric from its launch in December to the end of February, making it more popular than its hybrid and plug-in hybrid siblings, despite being the most expensive of the bunch at $44,990 before on-road costs.

A spokesperson from HMCA told GoAuto that Australia has an initial allocation of around 500-600 units of the Kona Electric, with the all-new small SUV priced from $59,990.

The Road to Recovery podcast seriesManila (CNN Philippines Life)  This March, She Talks Asia hosted its annual conference with the theme We Are Enough. While the first summits theme was Every Girl Can, and last years conference centered on self-made and successful women, this year, the focus was on self-love and self-worth.

Happy Skin CEO and former model Rissa Mananquil-Trillo opened the conference as the first speaker, where she shared key moments in her life and career that taught her the importance of knowing and loving oneself. There were also five panel discussions, including a roundtable on balancing roles and obligations, negotiating your worth in business deals, handling the pressure that comes with social media use, establishing boundaries with friends, family, colleagues and even strangers, and dialogue on handling unconventional relationships and societal expectations. There was also a talk on the importance of investing in ones mental health. Actress Judy Ann Santos-Agoncillo and Iza Calzado closed the event with a laugh-out-loud and inspiring conversation on the formers life and the lessons she learned along the way.

Just as the last two She Talks Asia conferences, We Are Enough left us with new and powerful insights on navigating the world as an empowered woman. Here are some of the things we learned at the third She Talks Asia conference.

During her talk entitled The Journey to Saying I am Enough, Rissa Manaquil-Trillo spoke about being teased about having dark skin growing up, and learning to love her color. Photo courtesy of SHE TALKS ASIA

Life is tough, but when you have a strong sense of self, you can be too.

In Mananquil-Trillos talk, entitled The Journey to Saying I am Enough, she opened up about being teased about being morena growing up, and how being surrounded by people who were unapologetic about their own skin color  like her dad  taught her to love and appreciate her skin.

Later on, when she became a model, she made it a personal choice not to take any projects for skin whitening products because she said she felt that compromising what I believed in compromised my respect for myself.

You cant control what you feel, but you can control what you do.

The first panel discussion of the day involved a conversation among She Talks co-founder Lynn Pinugu, internist Dr. Geraldine Zamora, graphic designer and co-founder of Future Faces Manila Winnie Wong, and teacher and founder of the Purposeful Creative Arriane Serafico. The four talked about the pressure women often put on themselves and the difficulty of juggling multiple roles.

Zamora shared how being a doctor takes up a lot of her time  so much that she feels guilty for not spending enough time with her daughter. Zamora said that when these moments arise, she manages her feelings of guilt by trying to focus on whats present.

Its hard to know what you really want to know before exploring, said teacher and Purposeful Creative founder Arriane Serafico during the panel discussion on how women can manage and balance their multiple roles. You have to diverge before you converge. You have to allow yourself to have a period of exploration. Photo courtesy of SHE TALKS ASIA

Serafico talked about how she deals with the days when the pressure of being on top of ones game gets too much, especially after seeing other women like herself succeeding and living seemingly perfect lives online.

Its easy to say honor where you are... But for me  there are days when its much harder, said Serafico. Most of the time you cant control what you feel, but you can control what you do. She advised anyone feeling this way to get out of the house and get active, whether by going to the gym or by simply going for a walk. I go to a different place just to shift my attention for a while.

You have to diverge before you converge.

Serafico, who used to work in government before pursuing more creative endeavors, also spoke about the importance of exploring and being open to change, especially when it comes to your career.

Its hard to know what you really want to know before exploring, she said. You have to diverge before you converge. You have to allow yourself to have a period of exploration.

With the theme We Are Enough, this year, the focus was on self-love and self-worth. Photo courtesy of SHE TALKS ASIA

Dont associate your self-worth with getting accepted or rejected for work.

The second panel discussion had actress and Team Pangilinan manager Maricel Laxa-Pangilinan, brand and marketing strategist Jane Dee, P&G brand manager Nicole Villarojo, and Status Media Group CEO Rosario Herrera come together to discuss how women can negotiate their worth in the professional setting.

On dealing with clients and making smart business decisions, the group discussed the value of knowing your self-worth, your values, what you can bring to the table. Though over-promising feels like second nature, especially for women, the group highlighted that this often comes at a cost, whether in time or money.

Decide if [the job] makes sense for you, said Villarojo. When offers come, I look at, do I have the flexibility, does it provide a platform for growth, does the org have a culture I can thrive in?

The group also discussed what steps one can take when youre being low-balled by clients. They all agreed on the importance of learning how to take the emotions out of business deals  ones self-worth should never be associated with getting accepted or rejected for work. But they also agree that doing so does not always come easy.

Removing emotions comes from experience, says Villarojo. For the meantime, she says you can come up with objective criteria to help ground you and the people you serve. This way, theres an objective way to determine if a project is successful without leaving you to doubt yourself.

Decide if [the job] makes sense for you, said P&G brand manager Nicole Villarojo. When offers come, I look at, do I have the flexibility, does it provide a platform for growth, does the org have a culture I can thrive in? Photo courtesy of SHE TALKS ASIA

Checking social media should never be the first thing you do in the morning.

For the panel on dealing with the pressure of social media culture, newest She Talks co-founder Bianca Gonzalez was joined onstage by actress and Body Love advocate Iza Calzado, travel photographer and zero-waste lifestyle advocate Kimi Juan, and Slam Philippines editor-in-chief and Titan 22 brand content director Nikko Ramos.

There was a general consensus among the group that spending too much time on social media can be detrimental to your mental health and sense of self-worth. To combat this, Calzado advised users not to check on social media the first thing in the morning. The last thing you want is to have self-doubt and insecurity creep up on you.

While Juan reminded the audience that everyone curates their life on social media, putting their best self on Instagram and Facebook, Ramos said that its important to remember that other peoples wins arent your losses.

Its important to point out that social media is just an extension of yourself, its not real life, added Gonzalez.

During the panel discussion on the pressure of social media culture, Slam Philippines editor-in-chief Nikko Ramos shared that, for him, the best way to deal with the pressure of social media is to carefully choose not just what you post on your account, but what you let your feed become as well. Make sure that if everything you put out, you feel good about  sana happy ka din sa nakikita mo, nababasa mo. Photo courtesy of SHE TALKS ASIA

This year, Bianca Gonzalez joins Lynn Pinugu, Vicky Herrera, and Iza Calzado as a She Talks Asia co-founder. Photo from SHE TALKS ASIA/FACEBOOK

Curate what comes in as much as what goes out.

For Ramos, the best way to deal with the pressure of social media is to carefully choose not just what you post on your account, but what you let your feed become as well. This means deciding to unfollow, mute, or even block people whose posts no longer make you happy, or add additional stress to your life.

Make sure that if everything you put out, you feel good about  sana happy ka din sa nakikita mo, nababasa mo, said Ramos.

[Having] boundaries does not mean not loving. Having boundaries is all about demanding for respect.

In the second to the last panel discussion, Grrrl Gang co-founder Mich Dulce, Singapore-based Maori healer Amanda Scully, writer and entrepreneur G3 San Diego, and She Talks Asia co-founder Vicky Herrera talked nurturing healthy relationships and establishing boundaries. This conversation is timely, considering that more and more women are opening up about being in and leaving toxic relationships, and there is a growing movement to emphasize consent and boundaries.

The group concluded that there is a need to know your personal limits and verbalize your boundaries, whether to partners, friends, family members, colleagues, or even strangers. Ultimately, doing this also leads to reevaluating which kinds of people you wish to keep in our life. But for Dulce, this doesnt mean that you must cut people out completely.

In the second to the last panel discussion, Grrrl Gang co-founder Mich Dulce, Singapore-based Maori healer Amanda Scully, writer and entrepreneur G3 San Diego, and She Talks Asia co-founder Vicky Herrera talked nurturing healthy relationships and establishing boundaries. Photo courtesy of SHE TALKS ASIA

I like many friends but I know who to keep at a distance. Friendship becomes stronger when you tell people what you dont like about them, she said. When youre truthful and when youre real in saying what you want, you know when to stay away.

An audience member expressed concern about establishing boundaries with loved ones, posing the question, If we establish boundaries, how can we love unconditionally?

Boundaries does not mean not loving. Having boundaries is all about demanding for respect, said Dulce. If you love someone and they love you, they will respect your boundaries.

Unconditional love is about having the respect, being able to be vulnerable and clear, added Scully.

Dont let other people dictate your opinions and you happiness.

As the final speaker, Judy Ann Santos-Agoncillo joined Iza Calzado in a one-on-one conversation on embracing the many challenges of life. Santos-Agoncillo talked about growing up under the spotlight, motherhood, and body image.

As a body love advocate, Calzado asked Santos-Agoncillo how she dealt with the pressure put on female celebrities when it comes to weight gain. For Santos-Agoncillo, it was a matter of embracing her love of food, and learning not to compare herself to other people.

As the final speaker, Judy Ann Santos-Agoncillo joined Iza Calzado in a one-on-one conversation on embracing the many challenges of life, including growing up under the spotlight, motherhood, and body image. Photo courtesy of SHE TALKS ASIA

Santos-Agoncillo and Calzado closed the event with a laugh-out-loud and inspiring conversation. Photo courtesy of SHE TALKS ASIA

I cannot compare myself to each and every person, she said. Hindi ko pwede i-pressure yung sarili ko kasi alam kong malulungkot ako, magiging masama ugali ko.

You will never dictate my opinion, my goals, and my happiness, she added. And my self-worth. The only person Im going to listen to is myself.

Set time for yourself.

Having been working as an actress since she was little, Santos-Agoncillo also shared that it was only recently that she allowed herself to have time for herself. This, she says, is something that everyone should try at least once.

Dumating ako sa point last year na I had to do self care and self love I never had the chance to spend time alone. Nakaka-empower siya. I realized na I should have done this a long time ago. Hindi siguro ako nag-question ng self worth ko.

Masayang mabuhay kung pinipili mo ang sarili mo at pag minamahal mo ang sarili mo, added Calzado.Public consultation for the Tres Estradas Phosphate Project held in Lavras do Sul on the evening of March 20 th



Comments from speakers and response from attendees were overwhelmingly positive



Event was attended by +1,500 people with another 2,000 watching a livestream of the event online



Attendees included the Mayors of Lavras do Sul and Cacapava do Sul, State Deputies, senior representatives of the Chamber of Commerce of Lavras, the Rural Syndicate, Union of Public Servers and other important local community associations



FEPAM now has 30 days to request any final items or consider any further comments

TORONTO, March 22, 2019 - Aguia Resources Limited (ASX: AGR, TSXV: AGRL) (Aguia or the Company) is pleased to report the outcome of a highly successful community consultation event for the Tres Estradas Phosphate Project that took place on Wednesday, March 20, 2019 in Lavras do Sul, Brazil. The meeting date was set at the beginning of the year by FEPAM, the environmental regulator for the State of Rio Grande do Sul and the event was open to members of the local community. It is estimated approximately 1,500 people were in attendance and the overall response throughout the evening was extremely positive. The Company also streamed the audience live on Facebook, which was accessed by 2,000 viewers during the event.

The event was held at the public auditorium in Lavras do Sul and was at full capacity inside. Overflow attendees numbering in the hundreds were accommodated outside the auditorium and were able to watch the proceedings projected live on big screens. The event was opened by the FEPAM authorities, followed by a one-hour presentation of the Tres Estradas Phosphate Project by Aguia and finally a presentation of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) by Golder & Associates who produced the report. After the official presentations were finished, a 3-hour discussion took place with 50 individuals or groups stepping up to the microphone for questions and comments. This included the Mayor of Lavras do Sul who expressed his strong support for the project, the Mayor of the neighboring city of Cacapava do Sul, which has a long history of mining activity, State Deputies, representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, Public Servers Syndicate, Rural Syndicate, the Santa Maria Water Committee and other important associations from the local community. Most importantly, there was overwhelming support from the citizens of Lavras do Sul in attendance and online who strongly welcomed the project and Aguia to the community.

Aguia has now completed all requirements to obtain the environmental permit (called the Preliminary License or LP in Brazil). FEPAM will consider the results of the event and will have 30 days to consider any further comments and advise if any further follow up items are required from Aguia. Approval of the LP will be a major milestone for the Company. The next phase of development will be obtaining the Installation Permit or LI. The LI requires implementation of the programs and requirements prescribed in the LP to ensure Tres Estradas has a minimal impact on the environment and social wellbeing of the community. During this time, Aguia will be finalizing the design and plans for the project site, negotiating offtake contracts and sourcing debt for construction. The LI is expected to take up to 12 months to obtain after which construction can commence.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/2c5dc0f4-be14-4b1f-8f06-169af603cd3f

Commentary

Technical Director Fernando Tallarico commented: Our team in Lavras do Sul has been proactively engaged in intensive outreach for more than a year to provide a complete picture of the Tres Estradas project to members of the local community, politicians, educational institutions and any other interested parties. The very positive atmosphere at yesterdays community event sets the stage for a mutually beneficial future between Aguia and its neighbors. We want to thank all of the people who attended last nights event for their interest and support and in particular, Savio Prestes, the Mayor of Lavras do Sul and all of the local dignitaries in attendance. The support from members of the local community was beyond our expectations and we are very excited about moving forward and turning our phosphate deposit into a thriving business that will boost the local economy for many years to come.

Managing Director Justin Reid added: The environmental permitting process is exhaustive, but the objective is to ensure a healthy project that contributes to the region over decades. We really appreciate all the support we have had from the community combined with the impressive efforts of our team and look forward to finalization of the environmental permit. In our teams collective history of community consultation events for mine permitting we have never experienced such an outpouring of support and we are highly appreciative of all the people who took the time to attend. We look forward to working with the local community as development of the project continues to advance.

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at:

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/02feaff0-7ced-45ec-85b3-77c5dc6cd7b9

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/695c89db-8d3b-412f-a0ee-104dc5c20cbf



For further information, please contact:

Justin Reid, Managing Director

E: jreid@aguiaresources.com.au

T: +1 416-216-5446

Spyros Karellas, Investor Relations North America

E: spyros@pinnaclecapitalmarkets.ca

T: +1 416-433-5696

Released through: Ben Jarvis, Six Degrees Investor Relations: +61 413 150 448

Follow Aguia on Twitter: @ Aguia_Resources

About Aguia:

Aguia Resources Ltd., (Aguia) is an ASX and TSX Venture listed company whose primary focus is on the exploration and development of mineral resource projects in Brazil. Aguia has an established and highly experienced in-country team based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil with corporate offices in Sydney, Australia. Aguias key projects are located in Rio Grande do Sul, a prime farming area which is 100% dependent on phosphate imports. The Rio Grande phosphate deposits exhibit high quality and low cost production characteristics, and are ideally located with proximity to road, rail, and port infrastructure. Aguias experienced management team has a proven track record of advancing high quality mining assets to production in Brazil.

Cautionary Statement on Forward Looking Information

This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian and Australian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, without limitation, statements regarding the timing and impact of the scheduled consultation and the likelihood of successfully obtaining the preliminary license and/or the Installation license on the timeline predicted or at all, results of exploration activities, soil and assay results, plans for future drilling and exploration programs, the mineral resource estimates, production targets, the anticipated timetable, permitting, forecast financial information, bankable feasibility study and ability to finance the project, and the prospectivity and potential of the Tres Estradas project.

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 risks inherent in the mining industry and risks described in the public disclosure of the Company which is available under the profile of the Company on SEDAR at www.sedar.com, on the ASX website at www.asx.com.au and on the Company's website at www.aguiaresouces.com.au. These risks should be considered carefully.

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. Persons reading this news release are cautioned that such statements are only predictions and 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 disclaims any intent or obligation to update or revise any forward looking statements whether as a result of new information, estimates, options, future events, results or otherwise and does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.



NEITHER THE AUSTRALIAN STOCK EXCHANGE, TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR THEIR REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

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.A package of food labeled "cauliflower rice" containing no actual rice will, later this year, be considered mislabeled in Arkansas and the manufacturer subject to a fine under a state law signed Monday.HB1407, a bill led by Rep. David Hillman, R-Almyra, gained enough momentum through House and Senate committees the past two weeks to wind up on Gov. Asa Hutchinson's desk. He signed the bill Monday morning, creating Act 501.The "truth in labeling" bill was filed about a month ago, and almost half of the states have entertained similar legislation that regulates the labeling of some food products, including foods called meat that are derived from plants or lab-grown cells of beef, pork or poultry."This law only affects people who want to deceive the public about how their food originated," Hillman said. "And if you're not trying to deceive the public, this will not affect you or any of the outlets who sell these products."Arkansas is the sixth state to pass similar legislation into law, and the only one to include rice. Missouri, now defending itself against lawsuits because of a similar law, was the first.Efforts to mandate labeling requirements at the state level for certain foods came from growing concerns in agricultural communities that shoppers are mistaking foods that claim to look, feel and taste like meat and poultry, for the real thing. Talks are being held at the federal level about proper labeling of such products, but nothing has been done yet.Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is opening a new investigation into allegations that 4,700 absentee ballot requests went missing before November's election.Raffensperger, a Republican, announced the investigation Thursday after the Democratic Party of Georgia had alleged last fall that 4,700 DeKalb County voters sent ballot applications to the county elections office but never received their absentee ballots in the mail.It's unclear how Raffensperger's investigation is different from the inquiry opened after the Democratic Party questioned what happened to the lost ballots in October, when Republican Brian Kemp was secretary of state. Kemp was elected governor in November."There is nothing I take more seriously than guaranteeing election integrity and bringing free and fair elections to every eligible voter, whether they choose to vote absentee or on Election Day," Raffensperger said. "My office will exhaust every resource to investigate these allegations."The Democratic Party tracked the absentee ballot requests to a post office in the same zip code as the DeKalb elections office. It's unknown whether those ballot requests went missing at the post office, at the elections office or at some other point in the delivery process."We're still extremely concerned that we don't know what happened to the 4,700 DeKalb absentee ballots that went missing before the 2018 election," said Democratic Party of Georgia spokeswoman Maggie Chambers. "We are committed to continuing our work and doing our part to make sure the issues of last year's election do not repeat in future elections."The Native American Voting Rights act was signed by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee at a widely attended ceremony Thursday."We believe these three steps will allow tribal members to help us form a more perfect union and make good decisions about our destiny," said Inslee of the changes the bill makes.The state House of Representatives passed an amended version of the bill with a 95-3 vote on March 5. House members voting against were Reps. Bob McCaslin, R- Spokane Valley, Ed Orcutt, R-Kalama, and Matt Shea. R-Spokane Valley.The bill passed the Senate on Feb. 6 with 34 in favor, 13 opposed, and two excused. All 13 senators in opposition were Republicans; however, Minority Leader Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville, and other Republicans voted in support."This legislation provides us the opportunity to remove those barriers to be able to call to the Native Americans and tell them they matter," said Rep. Debra Lekanoff, D-Bow. Lekanoff is the first Native American woman elected to the House and previously worked for the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community."The excitement of an aunty going down to pick up her ballot with her little granddaughter and going to the kitchen table and filling it out and walking just another half a block and dropping it in a dropbox, on the reservation, in the middle of our America is wonderful for me," said Lekanoff."We welcome everyone to participate in our electoral process," said Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, in support of the bill.The passed amendment, proposed by Walsh, requires that a tribe's ballot box must be accessible to the county auditor via a public road.The Native American Voting Rights Act would allow the residential address portion of a voter registration form to be filled out with a nontraditional address.The bill modifies the minimum information required for voter registration under state law, to allow for "unmarked homes" and that "a nontraditional residential address may be used when a voter resides on an Indian reservation or on Indian lands."The bill also allows for voters to list a building designated by the tribe in their precinct as their residential address, if need be.The House State Government and Tribal Relations Committee amended the bill to let tribes choose a building, which is not a ballot pick-up location, to be used for mailing address purposes only. The amendment made other minor changes.The underlying bill modifies the minimum information required for voter registration under state law to allow for "unmarked homes" and "a nontraditional residential address may be used when a voter resides on an Indian reservation or on Indian lands."Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday blasted Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms over her decision last year to bar the city jail from holding federal immigration detainees."It is amazing to think the mayor actually said -- in her words -- she would not be complicit in an immigration policy that intentionally inflicts misery," said Pence, who met with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials during a stop in Atlanta."I would say to the mayor that criminal illegal immigrants -- gang members on our streets -- are what inflict misery. The flow of illegal drugs like cocaine and meth and fentanyl inflict misery and wreck our families and communities. Human trafficking inflicts misery."Flanked by Gov. Brian Kemp, U.S. Sen. David Perdue and U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, Pence said ICE officials "do not inflict misery. They bring safety and security to the people of Atlanta, and they deserve the respect of every elected official in this country."The mayor has said her move was prompted by the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy on the southwest border, which led to the separation of many of immigrant families last year."If there are politicians whose family values include ripping children from their parents' arms," she said in a prepared statement Thursday, "I fundamentally disagree and believe my decision to end that agreement fully reflects my values."In September, she signed an executive order to transfer all remaining ICE detainees out of the city jail and declared that Atlanta would no longer hold anyone for the federal agency."Atlanta will no longer be complicit in a policy that intentionally inflicts misery on a vulnerable population without giving any thought to the horrific fallout," Bottoms said before signing her executive order. "As the birthplace of the civil rights movement, we are called to be better than this."Pence took aim at Bottoms on his way to a campaign fundraiser for Perdue, who is up for reelection next year. Among Perdue's possible Democratic challengers is Stacey Abrams, a former Georgia House minority leader who narrowly lost the race for governor against Kemp last year. After Bottoms signed her executive order last year, a spokeswoman for Abrams commended the mayor's "efforts to combat the impact of the administration's cruel and inhumane family separation policy. Anyone who stands against keeping families together lacks any kind of moral compass."Pence also sought to link what is happening on the southwest border -- including the flow of illegal drugs and human trafficking -- to Atlanta."I don't have to tell any of the ICE agents gathered here that we have a crisis on our southern border," he said. "That crisis on our southern border is driving drugs and crime and human trafficking here in the streets of Atlanta."Last month, Trump declared a state of emergency so he could tap into billions of dollars Congress would not give him to expand the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Both houses of Congress have passed legislation to overturn his declaration, prompting Trump's first veto. But the battle is not over. A coalition of 16 states has filed suit in federal court to block the president.Pence's visit to Georgia came the same day the Trump administration released figures showing ICE arrests are down 12 percent nationwide for the first three months of this year compared to the same period last year. ICE arrests are down 16 percent for the same time-frame in the federal agency's Atlanta area of operations, which includes the rest of Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. ICE attributed the falling numbers to having to dispatch some of its officials to the southwest border."Walls work, and we are going to build that wall," Pence said. "We are going to secure our border, and we are going to continue to support the men and women of ICE here in Georgia and all across the country."The U.S. General Services Administration has picked Ernst & Young to come up with a new method of identifying contractors and grant recipients  including state and local governments  breaking a long-standing monopoly on the service.The move will replace Dun & Bradstreet, which has provided the Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) for the federal government since 1978  with some interruptions and changes to the relationship over time  as GSAs entity validation partner. It could also lead to a system that makes it easier to access data about federal grants and contracting.Thats because DUNS numbers have always been a proprietary system, with Dun & Bradstreet placing restrictions on access to its database and charging for information. The system became ubiquitous, with hundreds of thousands of entities using the identifiers to work with the federal government, making it a difficult system to replace.Tyler Kleykamp, chief data officer of Connecticut, said the system has made it difficult for the state to keep track of all its grant applications."The biggest issue that we have [is] that many of our state agencies and local governments have multiple DUNS numbers," Kleykamp wrote in an email. "Thus, it makes it quite difficult for us to work with that data, given that there are often duplicate [or more] entities at both a state agency and local government level."Connecticut also has a robust defense-sector economy  Electric Boat, Sikorsky and other big defense contractors are headquartered there  so the proprietary nature of DUNS makes it hard for the state to dig into the relationship between its native corporations and the federal government they serve.Dun & Bradstreets monopoly has chafed many people over time, including the Data Coalition, an advocacy group whose members include many tech companies that do business with government such as Esri, Booz Allen Hamilton and Deloitte.The Data Coalition is pleased to see the General Services Administration take a key step to move away from a proprietary identifier for federal procurement, wrote Jessica Yabsley, the groups senior director of communications, in an email. Our Coalition has long advocated for the end of the existing proprietary identifier and the adoption of a governmentwide nonproprietary entity identification system that is open and able to adapt to emerging technology. We are encouraged by GSAs March 18th announcement and the potential implications it will have for improving procurement data quality.The Government Accountability Office found in 2012 that the spreading of DUNS throughout the federal government had created several problems , including hampering agencies ability to understand the scope of their contracted work, a lack of public control of the system and ballooning costs.That finding led GSA to move toward a government-owned identifier, which it will call the System for Award Management Managed Identifier (SAMMI). To perform entity validation  including routine tasks like address confirmation  under that paradigm, the government has awarded a $41.8 million contract that could run for up to five years to Ernst & Young.A spokesperson for Ernst & Young declined to comment.Michigan to Host its First State Procurement Summit

Boston Launches New Birth Certificate App

Whats Next for 18F?

The federal government has launched a new website dedicated to artificial intelligence.Dubbed Artificial Intelligence for the American People , the site is essentially an informational hub for an increased effort toward helping the country stay at the forefront of the technology as it becomes increasingly vital. There are several AI-related sections on the site, including those related to innovation, industry and American values.The creation of the site comes after an executive order from the White House in February. That order created the American AI Initiative, described on the new site as a concentrated effort to promote and protect national AI technology and innovation. It also calls for a whole-of-government" strategy that involves collaborating with the private sector, academia, the general public and partners in the international community.The site also features a number of resources, including strategic documents related to federal AI support, a set of fact sheets and other materials that speak to the value of the tech.The site also features information about last years White House AI Summit. That event brought together government officials with AI experts from a number of sectors to hold breakout sessions in the service of furthering the countrys efforts as they relate to research and development, workforce development and several other areas.Finally, the site links to the federal governments current strategic plan relating to AI , which dates back to October 2016, noting that given the rapid pace of AI-related technology, a refresh of that plan is currently taking place.Michigan will host a summit in May related to procurement. The event will be held at Ford Field in Detroit, where the Detroit Lions play.A number of relevant state officials will attend, including the states Chief Procurement Officer Jim Colangelo, who will be giving the opening remarks, as well as participating in breakout sessions with other purchasing professionals from a range of state agencies. Organizers note on the events website that they have also extended invitations for a number of officials from local governments in the area.This will not be a boring lecture about procurement! the event website notes.There will also be a question and answer session with Michigans chief procurement officer and senior leadership team. This is all likely to be of interest to technologists because if there is one area that repeatedly comes up as a major barrier to government innovation, its procurement. This event is essentially a concentrated day during which companies that wish to work with government can attend, show off their products and even get some clarity on how best to work with/sell to government.This is the first time that Michigan has held such an event, but the wording on the website already dubs it as an annual occurrence, likely indicating that the procurement summit stands to become a regular tradition.Interested parties can find more information about attending on this RSVP page . The event is being sponsored by the National Association of State Procurement Officers (NASPO) Boston has launched a new app that residents can use to order copies of their birth certificates.This comes roughly a year after Boston launched a similar app that allowed people to order copies of death certificates online. In a medium post announcing the new app, Bostons developers noted that the death certificate apps was a useful jumping off point to build the similar birth certificate app . The post then goes on to describe the development process.Essentially, the creation of the app involved using human-centered design methodology such as researching the reasons people get birth certificates to better understand who the end user would be. This effort, the post notes, quickly determined that there were too many reasons to count in any way that would prove useful to the development process.It didnt take long to figure out that our audience was basically everyone, the developers wrote.The post also runs through the benefits of moving the birth certificate request process online  a list that includes rising demand for birth certificates due to the Real ID Act. That piece of legislation was passed by the federal government in 2005, and it mandates an enhanced drivers license or passport that will soon be required to do things like enter federal buildings or fly with an airline.Another key reason for creating the app was to save residents the time it takes to make a trip to city hall to get a certificate themselves. The latter point places this app firmly among a growing number of local government efforts to do a better serving constituents, essentially mirroring the high levels of customer service provided by the private sector.The post is interesting for anyone involved with civic, proceeding as it does to detail more facets of the research and development process. It also notes what the next like-minded process stands to be: an app to order marriage certificates.Its been about five years since the launch of the federal tech consultancy 18F, and to celebrate the group took to its blog with a post discussing some of its chief accomplishments, the lessons its learned along the way and where it plans to go in the future.The agency, which now has a team of 118, notes that it has worked with 22 different federal agencies as well as three states in the last year, with projects that range from modernizing schedulers for the Air Force to bolstering security for background investigations across the country. Other accomplishments for 18F include helping their partner agencies build a number of products, the most notable among them being the website managing tool Federalist cloud.gov and login.gov , which is a single sign-on platform.The group also notes that over the course of the past year alone it has wrapped up significant projects with the Federal Election Commission, the Department of the Interiors Office of Natural Resources Revenue and the National Science Foundation. Those projects have now been transitioned to the care of the home agencies they were designed for, where staffers are continuing to develop and maintain them.The post also goes into detail about what has been learned during 18Fs first five years. They cite specific examples to support each, but in summation the key lessons have been that delivery isnt the only strategy; trusts starts with humility; its not their role to try to do everything related to their projects; and they need to write down what theyve learned.Finally, the last section of the birthday post addresses the agencies future and plans to concentrate on three key initiatives. The first is that will have assisted acquisition authority, which will allow them to buy products and services on behalf of the agencies they partner with, thereby increasing their ability to achieve agile or modular contracting within government. Second, the group is now working to hire career track positions, rather than the four-year terms it has hired for during its early days. Lastly, 18F will be creating new portfolios aimed at better defining its areas of expertise for its partners.Todays 18F is different from the 18F of 2014, the group wrote in the blog. Were a little quieter, a little more pragmatic  and we can take that approach because previous 18F staff blazed a trail for us.(TNS)  The idea that Google is subtly pushing masses of voters to the left has the ring of conspiracy, and thus the work of Robert Epstein is warmly embraced by conservative lawmakers  as well as a president  convinced big tech is plotting against them.Yet even many scholars who think the San Diego-based psychologist is wrong about the political impact of search engines  he believes bias built in to Googles processes could have cost Republicans three California congressional districts in the last election  have started paying attention to his detailed work on how voters respond to tens of thousands of search results.At a moment when misinformation about search engines and social media bias is rampant, with both the left and the right amplifying unsupported claims, Epstein is asking the right questions, they say, about the unseen power of algorithms and how little most Americans understand about the way they work.The saga of the persistent San Diego psychologist versus the tech giant is a long-running one, full of twists. As Big Data shapes our opinions in ways scholars are only beginning to comprehend, his work has increasingly caught attention.The larger issue he is looking at is extremely important, said Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies at UCLA who focuses on the relationships between technology and politics. Srinivasan voices skepticism about Epsteins conclusion that the GOP is being victimized, but argues scholars need to look more deeply at how search engines can shape the views of those who use them.We turn to these efficient technologies to do almost everything these days without knowing why we see what we see from them, or what data is collected about us and how it is being used, he said.Epstein, a former Psychology Today editor in chief who runs a nonprofit institute in California, calls the phenomenon he has explored the Search Engine Manipulation Effect.These are new forms of manipulation people cant see, he said. The technologies can have an enormous impact on voters who are undecided.  People have no awareness the influence is being exerted.Google dismisses his research as the work of a misguided amateur. Company Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in December that Google had investigated Epsteins findings and found his methodology flawed.Company officials, while declining to comment about Epstein on the record, offered background material asserting that their algorithms are politically blind and respond to searches with news content based on its timeliness, relevance and authoritativeness.In his latest study, which he plans to present in April at the 99th annual meeting of the Western Psychological Assn., in Pasadena, Epstein tracked 47,300 searches by dozens of undecided voters in the districts of newly elected Democratic Reps. Katie Porter, Harley Rouda and Mike Levin. Mainstream outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, dominated the Google search results. By contrast, searches conducted on Yahoo and Bing more often showcased links from deeply conservative outfits such at Breitbart.Using a model he developed to gauge the subliminal impact of what he sees as tilted search results, Epstein projected 35,455 voters who were on the fence were persuaded to vote for a Democrat entirely because of the sources Google fed them.That conclusion is subject to much dispute. Safiya Noble, a UCLA professor and author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, is troubled by Epsteins argument that search engines ought to counter-balance the content of large, well-resourced and highly trained newsrooms with disinformation sites and propaganda outlets.Srinivasan thinks Epstein may exaggerate how many undecided voters use Google to help decide how to cast ballots.Google executives, for their part, argue it would be corporate suicide to use their influence over voters to sway elections.But many analysts say that is not the point. Even if Epstein is wrong about the impact of Googles searches, the real issue, they say, is how little people know about the ways that the companys algorithms manipulate what users see. Google engineers design their algorithms for a host of reasons  mostly related to boosting profits  and users just accept the top links as the most trustworthy and authoritative information on a topic.We need to understand the potential political impact of these underneath-the-hood choices by tech companies, said Jacob Shapiro, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton. The question we should be asking is what do we need to do to nail down how consequential this is? And what systems do we need to create as a society to minimize the negatives?Noble agrees with that broader point that Google should not be guiding crucial societal questions, such as how we vote.We use these search engines as if they are arbiters of truth, and they are not, she said. They are global advertising platforms. They are not fact checkers or public interest technologies.  The minute you start to engage these broader social issues on a search engine, you run up against its limits.The fix, Noble says, involves giving people viable alternatives to Google that are not designed for profit, but the public interest.Epstein calls for a worldwide passive network of monitoring systems to keep an eye on emerging technologies and what they are showing and telling people. Other scholars suggest equally bold government interventions, some of which align with Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warrens plan to break up big tech companies.But Congress is right now focused on using the potential flaws in search engines as a springboard to air political grievances and launch partisan attacks.The December hearing into Google was consumed by theatrics. Republicans, citing Epstein, presented themselves as victims of a cynical conspiracy , sometimes conflating his work with unrelated perceived biases. The committees top Democrat, Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, declared political bias in search engines a fantasy dreamed up by some conservatives.Epstein may be discouraged, but he isnt helping turn down the temperature. He supported Hillary Clinton, but has embraced his role as a fixture on right-wing media. Tucker Carlson sings his praises on Fox News. He gives talks at Tea Party meetings. He starred in a documentary called the Creepy Line that was produced by Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, who is among the journalists most reviled by Democrats.I have become a darling of conservatives, which is driving me crazy, Epstein said. But they love me because I am saying things they want to hear. People I am closer to politically dont want to hear what I have to say.The California Department of Technology, which on Monday announced a $10.5 million contract with the city of Los Angeles for data center services, will absorb the new workload without adding people or a lot of new hardware.Under the three-year deal, CDTs data center in Rancho Cordova will take over all the applications that the city now runs on its 30-year-old legacy mainframe, with an option for a second three-year add-on.CDT has sufficient staff and technology resources (hardware/software) to accommodate the city of L.A.s workload, CDT spokesman Bob Andosca told Techwire on Tuesday in an email.So how did the IT apparatus of the nations largest state come to host the computing and storage needs of one of the nations largest cities? Who initiated the talks?Andosca outlined the process: In 2016, the CIO of the city of LA, Ted Ross, reached out to CDTs chief deputy director, Chris Cruz, to discuss the possibility of the state hosting the citys mainframe applications. The development of the contract language was done in collaboration with the city of L.A. and CDT teams.Thats in keeping with a stated goal of Cruzs  to encourage more cooperation and collaboration between CDT and the states counties as a way of maximizing efficiencies and taking advantage of the economies of scale in purchasing, licensing and other functions that governments perform.But entering into large IT contracts with public-sector customers isnt a new thing for CDT.CDT already provides data center services to counties and municipalities, Andosca noted.For example, 86 percent of the customer base for our California Network and Telecommunication ( CALNET ) program contracts are non-state entities, which include cities and counties, he said.When the time comes for the city to cut the cord with its old mainframes and switch over to the states data center, it wont be a long, drawn-out process.This will likely be cut over on a specific date, rather than a phased migration, Andosca said. The date of that cut-over has not been determined at this point.(TNS)  It will be weeks, even months, before state officials can put their finger on the true cost of the ongoing flooding across eastern Nebraska.But Wednesday, the latest preliminary estimates of damage to homes and businesses, as well as state infrastructure, topped $1.3 billion, those officials said in a news conference.Three-fourths of the state's 93 counties have declared an emergency, Gov. Pete Ricketts said, as record crests have been reported on the Missouri, Platte, Elkhorn and Loup rivers in eastern Nebraska."The flooding is just devastating," Ricketts said.Damage to roads, bridges and other state infrastructure systems is estimated at $439 million.About 2,000 miles of state roads  roughly 20 percent of the entire state road system  have been closed at one point or another over the last week, according to Kyle Schneweis, director of the Nebraska Department of Transportation.All but 375 miles have reopened, with traffic now flowing on U.S. 75 between Bellevue and Plattsmouth, a crucial stretch for commuters in Sarpy County, and U.S. 275 between Wisner and Beemer in Cuming County, which is a major route used by ag producers.Crews continue working to clear and assess other closed roads, Schneweis added, while attempting to distinguish between roads that could safely reopen with temporary fixes, as well as those requiring long-term repairs.The number of state highway bridges Nebraska will need to replace increased between Monday and Wednesday, as receding waters revealed three more bridges, including two on Nebraska 14, unsafe for travel.The historic flooding has also caused an estimated $85 million in damage to more than 2,000 homes and 341 businesses, Ricketts said.The governor urged homeowners whose property has been damaged to document the losses, as the state works with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to get a federal disaster declaration.FEMA acknowledged receiving Nebraska's disaster declaration request Tuesday evening, Ricketts said, and after a review process the document could go to President Donald Trump for his signature, although it was unclear how quickly that could happen.Ricketts said he has also been in contact with the Small Business Administration about deploying field teams to assess underinsured businesses and farm operations in an effort to access loan programs.Losses to the state's largest economic sector  agriculture  include $400 million in cow-calf operations and $440 million in row crops.Steve Wellman, director of the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, said the state expects many producers in the hardest-hit areas will be unable to plant fields this year, while others will be delayed until they can prepare the ground or for county roads to be fixed.Wellman added that the department's hotline has been fielding calls both from producers as well as those interested in how they can help.> He asked farmers who have experienced losses to call their county Farm Service Agency as soon as possible to get enrolled in federal recovery programs.Tuesday, as Vice President Mike Pence toured flooded areas of the state with Ricketts, the Waterloo Fire Department conducted a water rescue, the governor said.But the Nebraska National Guard, which had been assisting local fire and rescue squads as well as the Nebraska State Patrol in getting stranded residents out of danger, has not performed any rescue operations within 36 hours of Wednesday's update, Maj. Gen. Daryl Bohac said.A Black Hawk helicopter remains on standby to assist with any further efforts.Meanwhile, the National Guard launched an operation along the Platte River in Colfax County on Wednesday to get hay to an isolated herd of cattle using a Chinook helicopter."It's been 50 or 60 years since we've had to do something like this," Bohac said.As operations to bring much-needed nourishment and water to livestock herds grows, the state has requested aid from the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, a multi-state consortium that allows for resources to be shared between the states.Wednesday, another Chinook helicopter was en route to Nebraska from Minnesota, Bohac said. The Minnesota crew has night-vision capabilities to aid in missions launched at dark. Nebraska's night-vision Chinook crew is currently deployed to the Middle East.Relief efforts are also growing."We know there are Nebraskans all across the state that have not been impacted but want to help their neighbors," Ricketts said.2019 Lincoln Journal Star, Neb.Visit Lincoln Journal Star, Neb. at www.journalstar.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Ferrari will run their Mission Winnow livery once again in Bahrain after advertising regulations in Australia prevented the Philip Morris branding appearing on the cars.

According to RaceFans, a request has been sent to the FIA to allow the reintroduce the original name Ferrari had been entered under on the 2019 Formula 1 season.

Any change in name requires FIA approval as well as seven days notice according to F1 regulations. The original change occurred due to links with tobacco advertising.

The livery used by the team during testing will return however another change in the future is likely to happen when Formula 1 arrives in another country that heavily regulates the advertising of tobacco products.Audi has put a new service-water supply center into operation at the Ingolstadt site. In conjunction with the existing treatment plant, about half of the wastewater produced at the site can now be recycled and treated for reuse. In this way, Audi will saves up to 500,000 cubic meters of fresh water each year. The heart of the service-water supply center is a membrane bioreactor (MBR).





Water is necessary in the entire manufacturing process of an automobilein the paint shop, for example. With the new service-water supply center, Audi is making more efficient use of water as a resource.

Thanks to this innovative wastewater treatment system, we are reducing the fresh-water requirements of production at the Ingolstadt plant by a third. At the same time, we are avoiding approximately 40 percent of wastewater. Rudiger Recknagel, Head of Environmental Protection at Audi

This underscores the premium manufacturers commitment to the sustainable use of water. At its Mexican plant in San Jose Chiapa, Audi has been producing cars without wastewater since 2018, as certified by independent experts. With the new supply center, the plant in Ingolstadt has also reached a milestone along the way to zero-liquid discharge (ZLD).

Before the company returns the wastewater as fresh service water to the production processes at the Ingolstadt plant, it is treated in up to three stages.

It first passes through a chemical-physical process. This neutralizes alkaline and acidic components and removes heavy metals, for example from the paint shop. The membrane bioreactorthe core element of water treatmentis then used.

Here the production water is mixed with sanitary wastewater and freed from organic components. The MBR then removes bacteria and viruses from the wastewater using pore-fine membranes. Audi is thus taking water treatment one step further than conventional sewage treatment plants that do not use this process. Finally, reverse osmosis removes residual salts. The treated wastewater is then returned to the production process as service water.

In order to save groundwater, Audi is also increasingly using rainwater for service water purposes at its Ingolstadt plant. Rainwater from more than 450,000 square meters of roof and parking space is collected in underground cisterns. Depending on weather conditions, up to 260,000 cubic meters of rainwater can be used annually.Scientists in China have developed a process for converting cellulose from plant waste from agriculture and timber harvesting into high-density aviation fuel: a polycycloalkane mixture. Tuning the reaction conditions also permits the selective production of methyl cyclopentane, which can be used as high-octane-number gasoline additive.





The researchers suggest that their new process offers many advantages, including the use of cheaper feedstock, mild reaction conditions, fewer steps, higher density, and a lower freezing point of final products. An open-access paper on their work is published in the journal Joule.

While chain alkanes (such as branched octane, dodecane, and hexadecane) have previously been derived from cellulose for use in jet fuel, the researchers believe this is the first study to produce more complex polycycloalkane compounds that can be used as high-density aviation fuel.

Ning Li, a research scientist at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics and an author of the study, believes this new biofuel could be instrumental in helping aviation go green.

Our biofuel is important for mitigating CO 2 emissions because it is derived from biomass and it has higher density (or volumetric heat values) compared with conventional aviation fuels. As we know, the utilization of high-density aviation fuel can significantly increase the range and payload of aircraft without changing the volume of oil in the tank. Ning Li

Li and his team found that cellulose can be selectively converted to

2,5-hexanedione using hydrogenolysis. They then developed a method of separating the compound 2,5-hexanedione by converting the 5-methylfurfural in hydrogenolysis product to 2,5-hexanedione, while keeping 2,5-hexanedione in the product unchanged.

This resulted in a 71% isolated carbon yielda 5% increase from the product yield in their initial work. Finally, they reacted hydrogen with the 2,5-hexanedione from wheatgrass cellulose to obtain the final product: a mixture of C 12 and C 18 polycycloalkanes with a low freezing point and a density about 10% higher than that of conventional jet fuels.

Although the researchers produced the biofuel at a laboratory scale in this study, Li and his team believe the process' cheap, abundant cellulose feedstock, fewer production steps, and lower energy cost and consumption mean it will soon be ready for commercial use. They also predict it will yield higher profits than conventional aviation fuel production because it requires lower costs to produce a higher-density fuel.

The biggest issue holding the process back is its use of dichloromethane to break down cellulose into 2,5-hexanedione; the compound is traditionally used as a solvent in paint removers and is considered an environmental and health hazard.

In the future, we will go on to explore the environmentally friendly and renewable organic solvent that can replace the dichloromethane used in the hydrogenolysis of cellulose to 2,5-hexanedione. At the same time, we will study the application of 2,5-hexanedione in the synthesis of other fuels and value-added chemicals. Ning Li

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, DNL Cooperation Fund, CAS, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Key Projects for Fundamental Research and Development of China, the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China, and an iChEM postdoctoral fellowship.

ResourcesJulieta Cervantes / Contributed photo

The Book of Mormon, which earned nine Tony Awards  including Best Musical and Best Score  is headed to Connecticut. The national touring production will be at The Palace Theater in Waterbury, Tuesday, April 9, through Sunday, April 14.

The show features book, music and lyrics by Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez. Parker and Stone are best known for creating the animated comedy, South Park. Lopez is a co-creator of Avenue Q, and has co-written music for films such as Frozen, among others.GREENWICH  The town of Greenwich and state and federal environmental regulatory agencies met Wednesday to discuss the contaminated soil in the fields at Western Middle School, the most recent movement forward on a remediation project that had been stalled due to the five-week government shutdown earlier this year.

Greenwich Public Schools last released a statement back in July, after federal and state regulators requested additional soil testing to confirm the depth and width of contamination by PCBs and other materials in the ground at Western Middle School.

The remediation work at Western and at fields six and seven at Greenwich High School has experienced delays in recent months, due to the nature of the projects as well as the workload at the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

Meeting and schedule delays can be largely attributed to the complexity of these projects, the substantial workload that both CT DEEP and EPA are facing, as well as the government shutdown putting EPA out of commission for five weeks, Public Works Commissioner Amy Siebert said in an email Thursday.

Significant work is still needed on these projects, she said.

It can take time to gather all the information required to create remedial action plans that are acceptable to all, Siebert said.

For Western, the meeting focused on the most recent round of testing completed by Langan Engineering and Environmental Services to confirm the nature and extent of contamination at the property. Members also explored remediation strategies and timelines, according to Dave Deegan, a spokesman for the EPA.

Part of Westerns fields reopened for student use in September 2017. But a large portion, including the softball infield, has remained closed and fenced off since August 2016, when high levels of PCBs, arsenic, lead and chlordane were found in the soil.

The Department of Public Works is not the lead agency on the Western Middle School project, but it is working with the Board of Education on it, Siebert said.

Remediation at GHS dates back even further. In mid-July 2011, during construction of the Music Instructional Space Auditorium, contaminated soil was discovered in the west parking lot. This prompted many rounds of environmental testing, which found PCB levels well above state and federal standards.

The last update from the school district went out last September, saying that the investigations were winding down but environmental monitoring would continue. Once documents were prepared and the regulatory agencies reviewed the progress, the next phase of remediation activities could begin in the summer of 2019, the update said.

The last time the town met with CT DEEP representatives was in mid-January, Siebert said. Unfortunately, the government shutdown kept the EPA from participating as had been planned, she said.

The town has been working diligently to gather information to address the regulatory agencies questions regarding the site and its remediation, and has been continuing to provide results and reports to the agencies, Siebert said of the GHS remediation project.

GHS is completing investigation efforts and will be submitting a plan to address the contamination, Deegan said.

In 2017, GHS presented a proposed schedule for testing and remediation, but that timeline established is behind schedule, he said, and the EPA has not received a revised schedule for submitting the schools plan.

Several reports are scheduled for submission shortly, Siebert said, and the town has been pursuing plans to address fields six and seven this summer.

Neither regulatory approvals nor the project schedule can be guaranteed, but the team made up of members of the BOE, DPW, Department of Parks and Recreation, as well as consultants, are working to keep the project moving forward, she said.

We are pleased that working together, we were all able to see the new scoreboard installed at Cardinal Stadium this summer, while continuing to work on the plans for sitewide remediation, Siebert added.

jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.comGREENWICH  When Richard Granoff moved into a home in a gracious old neighborhood in central Greenwich 25 years ago, he had big plans. He would renovate and expand the modest old structure to raise a family. But it would also be a design workshop where he could experiment and develop his professional skills to work, as a showcase of his abilities as an architect.

Granoff was a young architect who had worked on the design of trendy Manhattan restaurants such as Vong and Nobu, and he was later drawn to the Rock Ridge neighborhood of town, noted for its dramatic stoney outcroppings and traditional architecture. A house on Witherell Drive seemed just right.

I loved the neighborhood  and it was the cheapest house in Rock Ridge, he recalled. The architect was especially smitten with a Stonehenge-like array of big rocks in the backyard, formed by nature through the ages. This is the ridge of rocks that Rock Ridge is named after. I was told that by some of the old-timers when I moved in, he said.

The house was a modest 1926 carriage house, only 1,800 square feet. Granoff loved the setting, as well as the potential it offered: Over 25 years, Ive done a series of at least a half-dozen major projects, and a dozen normal projects. So in essence, this house has been my laboratory for 25 years as an architect.

Granoff decided to go with a traditional style on the exterior of his expanded home, with a more modern sensibility on the inside. He went with the shingle-style of architecture a style that was often used to clad summer mansions in places like Newport and Southampton in the late 1800s.

Rock Ridge is a classic Greenwich neighborhood, and I did feel shingle style can fit into a traditional context, the architect said. Its a shingle-style house, but I call it a neo-shingle style in that its a little edgier, a little more modern.

The shingle-style can also handle big windows, Granoff said, and he put in overscale windows to take in the spellbinding topography of the site, as well as dozens of specimen trees planted around the property. The very large windows captures the views of the spectacular wooded site, and the rocky outcroppings, he says.

It was an enormous undertaking, given the challenges of the site. It was a huge amount of grading, building retraining walls and drainage, Granoff said. The landscaping was easy, the hardscaping wasnt.

On the inside, the comfortable and spacious home reflects Granoffs years of attention to design details and experimentation, as well as his own personal tastes. Take the fireplace in the living room  a massive column of masonry. The fireplace was inspired by classic, Old World fireplaces. The stone is Pocono Boulder, theyre river stones. Theres a smooth finish, and they have a lot of purple in them  purple is my favorite color.

Granoff and his wife, Jill, have an extensive art collection, and the homeowners took special care to create the right kind of lighting and ambience to showcase their Modernist pieces. The paint scheme was deliberately muted. Its intentionally a neutral scheme. Its China white, and it highlights the very colorful art collection. The art is the shining star, the architect said, and each piece is complemented by specific lighting.

I learned lighting design from restaurants, which is very important. Im a lighting-design freak now, he says. He takes time to show off one of his favorite gadgets, a small task light embedded into a nozzle in the kitchen sink. Thats the coolest thing  I had to buy one, Granoff said with a laugh.

Theres a large wine cellar  very similar to the kind used in the restaurant trade  and an exercise room and ample space for a kids. I like to think its a really family-friendly house, and great for entertaining, the architect says.

Granoff is known locally for the Chase bank branch next door to the Greenwich Library; the renovation of an old post office into the Restoration Hardware off Greenwich Avenue; and numerous residential projects around the region. As someone who keeps a busy schedule, he also serves in a number of charitable, civic and educational organizations.

He preserved the old carriage house and installed its front door in the main residence he built alongside it  I love old buildings, he says emphatically. His professional office is located in the old Connecticut Light & Power building on Railroad Avenue, a 1928 Art Deco structure that he restored with a mix of modern and traditional elements.

He also embraces new challenges, and that means putting his house at 9 Witherell Drive on the market. The architect plans to build a new waterfront home in Old Greenwich, an exciting prospect for him.

I do enjoy new challenges. My wife says I always need a personal project going on, and a waterfront house is a big one. Were doing something new  a new beginning, Granoff says, and he wanted to explore a new design aesthetic. Its going to be very modern  its where my career is now.

But hell always have a good feeling about the old family home in Rock Ridge, a laboratory that came with a lifetime of memories.

The listing is being handled through Edward Mortimer at Sothebys International Realty.GREENWICH  Greenwich points with pride to The Nathaniel Witherell  the last municipally owned facility of its kind in Connecticut  as proof that the town takes care of its seniors.

But that comes at a big cost to the town  which covers deficits of about $3 million annually for the the rehabilitation and skilled nursing facility. And that in turns brings up the question, should the town continue to operate the century-old institution?

I think the committee agrees with the point where Nathaniel Witherell cannot remain going forward as it is, said Arthur Norton, chairman of a BET Strategic Planning Committee examining the facilitys future. What we havent yet agreed upon is what it will look like.

Health Dimensions Group, a consultant, presented its report evaluating Witherells operations Monday to the Board of Estimate and Taxation. The report recommended either transferring or selling control of the facility to a 501(c)3 nonprofit.

HDG looked at the health care marketplace and compared the Witherells performance to private nursing homes. And it found a dramatically changing environment for facilities such as the Witherell.

Fewer seniors are going into skilled nursing facilities for short- and long-term care, said Colin Higgins, HDGs director of analytics and research. Thats because there are now more options, including independent living, assistant living and memory care, he said.

People can delay or not go to the nursing home entirely, Higgins said.

Greater efficiencies and yearly losses

The facility needs to find greater efficiencies, the report said. Witherells wages and benefits, which are collectively bargained, are higher than at nearby facilities, the report found. It recommended adjusting the staff and starting new policies for paid time off and retirement benefits.

The Strategic Planning Committee is continuing its work, with its report to the full BET months away, Norton said. The committee will consider HDGs findings, but it is not required to follow the recommendations. However, Norton said some kind of a change will ultimately be recommended for the Witherell.

One focus of the Strategic Planning Committee will be demand, Norton said. The Witherell has 202 beds, but its occupancy rate is usually at about 82 percent, raising questions of how the space can be best used, he said.

But overall, Witherells operations have been running at a deficit consistently for the last several years, forcing the BET to allocate money to cover the losses. According to town Budget Director Roland Geiger, the average town yearly contribution to cover Witherells deficits is about $3 million.

In the 2013-14 budget, Witherells deficit was $5.1 million. In 2014-15, it shrank to $4.6 million and then to $2.9 million in 2015-16. The deficit went up to $3.1 million in 2016-17, but back down to $2.9 million in the 2017-18 budget.

Geiger attributed the higher costs from 2013 to 2015 to the work taking place at that time for Witherells Project Renew renovation. For 2019-20, a loss of nearly $3 million is expected. When the BET meets on March 28 to approve the full municipal 2019-20 budget, it will include a $2.276 million allocation for The Nathaniel Witherell.

Witherell survives on getting a grant from the town of Greenwich, Norton said.

Examining the reports findings

Larry Simon, a former member of the BET, is chairman of Witherells Board of Directors. Simon questioned many of the reports recommendations after he and several other board members attended Mondays presentation.

The report pointed to the Witherells higher salaries, but Simon noted the facility is bound by agreements with employee unions. He also cast doubt on finding a 501(c)3 nonprofit that could offer the level of service expected at the Witherell.

What would that result in? Simon said. Do you want to see it turn into a three-star or a two-star facility? I dont know how you go and find anyone who is going to be able to operate this as a five-star facility, but it depends on what you want.

Witherell had previously been ranked as a five-star facility by the state. But in 2017, it was downgraded to four stars, which Simon, at the time, attributed to two incidents: A patient bathing herself without the help of an aide broke her hip, and delays in getting medication to a resident in another incident.

The ranking system has been on hiatus since those most-recent rankings, but they are expected to return soon. I am optimistic were going to be five stars again, Simon said.

But overall, he said, the report was a good starting point for conversations with the BET about how the Witherell can improve in the current health care marketplace.

After Mondays presentation, BET Chair Jill Oberlander said the focus of the Strategic Planning Committee remains on improving the facilitys operations and fiscal stability, in the best interest of town residents, including the most vulnerable residents who benefit from (The Nathaniel Witherells) services.

Given the challenges facing all skilled nursing facilities with changing demographics and demand for services as well as the competition for limited revenue sources, TNW operations and fiscal stability will continue to be an area that the BET follows closely, Oberlander said.

The BET will consider the next step after the planning committee submits its final report, which is expected in the next few months, she said.

Finding the next step

First Selectman Peter Tesei, who watched parts of Mondays presentation from HDG, said steps have been taken to make Witherell viable and competitive. Tesei said he would not want to see the town transfer ownership of or sell the facility, calling Witherell a treasured asset for the town.

It is a legacy that the town has carried forward to care for its seniors, Tesei said.

A facility such as Witherell shows the towns commitment to its aging population, he said, tying it in with ongoing work by the towns Commission on Aging for Greenwich to join the AARP and World Health Organizations age friendly community network.

Tesei is not alone in backing the Witherell. Mondays meeting was full of supporters from throughout the community.

But what option the town will ultimately pursue remains unknown.

There are challenges ahead, and were looking forward to addressing them, said Simon, the board chairman.

We want to work with the BET, but we have to agree on where were going to go, he said. The committee cannot decide when were going to. Thats something the BET needs to vote on. But anytime there is a constructive discussion around this, that is to Witherells benefit. Thats something we are eager to be a part of.

And Norton said hes eager to be a part of it, too.

I dont want to see Wirtherell die, he said. And it can die because of the changes taking place in the marketplace. I want it to be around for another 100 years.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.comGREENWICH  Western Middle School ranks third out of all middle schools in the state, according to data released by the state.

And its students are growing academically at rates that place Western in the top 2 percent to 7 percent of all Connecticut middle schools.

The Connecticut State Department of Education measures schools on 12 metrics, from physical fitness to growth in math and English Language Arts to access to arts education. That generates a composite score that it uses to rank schools and identify ones that need extra attention.

Western ranked behind a grade 7 through grade 8 school in Orange and a magnet school in New Britain. Last year, it ranked sixth statewide.

The state education department previously measured academic success through raw scores on standardized tests. In the past few years, the state began tracking the scores of individual students on the Smarter Balanced Assessment, which is administered to students in grades 3 through 8, year-over-year to measure a new statistic: growth.

Growth is the gold standard of testing, because it better measures whether schools are helping kids learn. In September, the newer metric revealed some bright spots among Greenwich schools with the largest populations of students who typically score lower on tests  those using special education services, learning English or qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch.

Western Principal Gordon Beinstein advocates focusing on growth scores rather than absolute scores based on one-time test performance.

Absolute scores depend on the skills children possess when they enter his middle school, he said in a newsletter to Western families. Growth scores represent the work that goes on in schools and at home.

Western ranked fifth out of all middle schools in the state for high levels of English Language Arts academic growth and 19th out of all middle schools in the state highest for high levels of academic growth in math.

Of the three middle schools in Greenwich, Western has the highest population of high-needs students, those who qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch, require special-education services or are learning English. Growth among this population of students is also highly ranked among middle schools in the state.

Western is the seventh-highest ranked school for high levels of English Language Arts academic growth for high needs students, and the 15th-highest ranked school for high levels of math academic growth for high needs students.

jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.comGREENWICH  A three-week fundraising campaign to support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society came to a thrilling conclusion Friday for students at North Street School in Greenwich.

The student-supported campaign is called Pennies for Patients. For the final push, NSS students and staff purchased a piece of colored duct tape  for $1  that came with a zany twist.Authorities have identified the three people found dead in northwestern Minnesota as a mother and her two young children.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension on Wednesday said 28-year-old Emma LaRoque fatally shot herself at their home in rural Ogema in Becker County. The BCA says her children were homicide victims. They are identified as 4-year-old Frederick York and 9-year-old Shane Woods.On one of the first foreign trips I took with John McCain, he handed me his comb and asked me to straighten out his hair. He could not raise his arms above his shoulders to comb his own hair, a lifelong consequence - and not the only one - of the abuse he suffered during his more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison.

Years later, I traveled to Hanoi with McCain and visited that prison, which is now a museum. A group of Vietnamese high school students came through and when they recognized him, they began chanting his name, cheering, clapping and asking for pictures and autographs. McCain had become a hero to the Vietnamese people because he had sponsored the legislation that normalized U.S. relations with Vietnam, the country that had treated him so inhumanely.

Somehow, he had found it within his soul to put the past behind him and lead the way forward in U.S.-Vietnam relations because that was in the best interests of the United States. McCain was a passionate person, and he had a temper, but he rarely stayed angry at anyone. He liked people generally, but I also think he concluded that it wasn't worth staying angry, particularly at those you needed to work with to get things done. He was always looking forward, not backward.

That is a powerful example for all of us, including President Donald Trump, who has continued to attack McCain seven months after his death.

McCain's life on Earth has ended. His legacy as a great American patriot, hero and exemplary public servant is beyond revision. The person who suffers most from the strange, posthumous attacks by the president is the president himself. Respectfully, the president should let McCain rest in peace and give his family the peace they deserve during this difficult time after his death.

The two main grievances Trump seems to have against McCain are not well-founded. If he were alive now, he would probably not answer the president. But I feel a responsibility as his friend to do so.

First, when McCain turned a controversial dossier involving Trump over to the FBI in 2016, it was exactly what he should have done, what I would have done and what every senator I served with did in similar circumstances. Serious allegations were made in that file, so McCain turned it over to the FBI to investigate. Giving the file to anyone else or throwing it away would have been a dereliction of duty and improper in our rule-of-law country.

Second, I know the president and many other Republicans were angry that McCain came back to Washington in July 2017 after his first operation to remove cancer from his brain and surprised everyone by voting against the repeal of Obamacare. But I can tell you, because I talked to him about it, that he didn't vote that way to spite Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., or anyone else. People who heard his speech on the Senate floor that day or have read it since know that McCain cast that vote not against repeal of Obamacare but against the partisanship that had taken over the Senate and made it into a feckless, gridlocked, divided place.

After his brain cancer diagnosis, McCain understood he might not have long to live and that the vote might have been one of the last, best times he would have to make the points he needed to make. So he made them - and he did so brilliantly. As he said in his speech in the Senate: "Our deliberations . . . are more partisan, more tribal more of the time than any other time I remember. . . . We've been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle."

He continued: "The Obama administration and congressional Democrats shouldn't have forced through Congress without any opposition support a social and economic change as massive as Obamacare. And we shouldn't do the same with ours. . . . What have we to lose by trying to work together to find those solutions? We're not getting much done apart. . . . The times when I was involved even in a modest way with working out a bipartisan response to a national problem or threat are the proudest moments of my career, and by far the most satisfying."

That is the lesson Trump and every member of Congress should take away from McCain's acts and words in the U.S. Senate on that long day in July 2017. Trump, because he is president, has the greatest capacity to move our government in the direction McCain appealed for that day and that most Americans clearly want.

I pray Trump will follow McCain's advice and give Democrats in Congress an opportunity to work with him to solve some of our most pressing national problems and threats. And I also pray Democrats respond to Trump in good faith and with the national interest as their guiding light, which it consistently was for McCain.

- - -

Lieberman represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate from 1989 to 2013.On Thursday, major news firm of Norway, NRK reported about an issue where several units of the Nokia 7 Plus were inadvertently sending personal information to a Chinese server. These units were sold in the Norwegian market but quickly raised grave concern when the communication between the handset and Chinese server were discovered.

The report found that personal information about the device, including GPS coordinates, SIM card number, and the devices serial number were being transferred to the server, unencrypted. This was happening whenever the phone was switched on, screen fired up, or the phone was unlocked. This behavior is typical of smartphones intended for the Chinese market.

Nokia 7 Plus

The domain name of the server is vnet.cn which is the CNNIC or China Internet Network Information Center. The owner of the domain is Chinas state-owned China Telecom.

More than likely what happened was that a piece of software that was intended for Chinese variants of the Nokia 7 Plus slipped through the cracks and ended up being installed on a single batch of Nokia 7 Plus headed for the Norwegian market. HMD Global pushed a firmware update that removed the China-specific application for the Norwegian market.

The incident caused Finlands data regulator to launch an investigation against HMD Global regarding the incident, as it directly violated the GDPR guidelines for user data that the European Union launched last year. The violation is on the grounds that SIM card number, base stations, and serial number of a device are all considered personal information.

Weve seen this kind of thing happen in the past with OnePlus Oxygen OS and clipboard data that was allegedly being sent to Chinese servers. Although the information wasnt actually sent, the code discovered was residual code from Hydrogen OS  Chinese variant of OnePlus UI - it was discovered by an amateur developer.

Source | TranslatedSamsung's Galaxy S10 and S10+ were pretty predictable, but the S10e is something else entirely. Sure, the Korean company wants to emulate Apple's strategy by having an iPhone XR of its own, exact same price point and all, but the thing is the cheapest member of the S10 family does a lot of what its more expensive siblings do too. And you save quite a bit going for it. And it's the only high-end Samsung option for people who hate curved screens.

So, if this model intrigues you too, perhaps enough to make you want one, B&H has an interesting deal going on. There's no price cut yet - it's way too early for that, the S10e will still cost you $749.99. However, if you buy one soon you will receive a free Samsung Qi Wireless Charger Duo, in either black or white - your choice.

This is a $99 value on its own, so if you were thinking of grabbing the wireless charger as well, the phone has effectively become that much cheaper. The Wireless Charger Duo, as the name implies, can top up two phones at the same time, or one handset and a smartwatch.

To learn more about the Galaxy S10e, don't miss our freshly baked in-depth review.

ViaThe future of home-internet has begun in the US. Following Verizons recent announcement of 5G service and the eventual launch of its home 5G broadband service, T-Mobile is beating Verizon to the punch line. No, T-Mobile doesnt have a 5G network yet, but it believes it can deliver home internet via 4G LTE.

On Thursday, T-Mobile is announcing a limited pilot program called T-Mobile Home Internet. The service offers unlimited internet over a 4G LTE connection, fit enough for a household. T-Mobile is only offering the pilot to specific areas where the carrier has enough capacity to cover a number of households with download speeds of about 50 Mbps.

T-Mobile will offer this for $50 per month with AutoPay and no data caps. To be eligible, youll need to be in an area that T-Mobile can sustain a 50Mbps connection with strong LTE coverage and you must be an existing T-Mobile customer. T-Mobile will begin sending out invitations via email to join the program if you meet the initial criteria.

T-Mobile will let you borrow equipment without monthly leasing fees. This is in the form of a home router that can connect to the LTE tower and distribute data through either Wi-Fi or an Ethernet connection to your existing Wi-Fi network.

This pilot program will hopefully show the United States that disrupting the cable company oligopoly. Many Americans are forced to choose between cable companies that control the majority of the industry and many only have a single choice. Cable companies in the home internet industry are among the poorest in customer satisfaction according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

T-Mobile claims that it would be able to really compete with cable providers when it joins its network capacity with Sprint, should the merger be approved. It claims the new T-Mobile will be able to support 9.5 million American households by 2024 and cover more than half of mostly rural U.S. zip codes that currently dont have high-speed broadband available. It also hopes to offer double the speeds by the time the service migrates to 5G.

The entry-level cable speeds in many parts of the US is anywhere between 10Mbps and 20Mbps (Yeah, were behind on infrastructure). So if T-Mobile can manage consistent 50Mbps speeds to homes without constant interruptions, it should be able to disrupt the home internet industry in the States. Offering home broadband via 4G LTE network isnt a new concept, but it is not very common in the US.

T-Mobile is also planning to launch its TV streaming service, which would nicely compliment T-Mobiles Home Internet service to totally relieve The US dependence on cable companies. This is a change Ive personally been waiting for and Im excited to watch the cable industry change. This is how you get people pumped for 5G, not by rebranding 4G LTE as 5GE.

SourceSony launched the Xperia 1 with the first 4K OLED display in a smartphone. It arrived with a 21:9 ratio and the whole panel is trademarked under the moniker CinemaWide. According to moderators on an official Sony forum, it won't follow in the footsteps of the XZ2 Premium and revert to 1080p for most of the UI and apps - everything will be shown in the 4K resolution of 3840 x 1644 pixels.



Screenshot of the confirmation

Still, the apps that do not support native 4K and will work in Full HD until support is added. The native apps will all be updated to support the new resolution - Home Screen, Gallery, Settings, along with third-party platforms like Netflix are all going to be ready by the time the phone hits the shelves.

The phone is yet to arrive for sale, with expectations to appear in the United Kingdom in May for 849 (currently around 983/$1,110).

Via (in Japanese)Manila (CNN Philippines Life)  While news of the Philippines withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC) made headlines, the actual withdrawal was quite uneventful. Foreign affairs secretary Teddy Locsin, Jr. announced it through a tweet on March 16, 2018. The withdrawal took effect one year later. As of today, the country is de facto no longer a member of the ICC.

Not many are familiar with the ICC or its workings. But for the victims of extrajudicial killings in the administrations war on drugs, it represents one of the many channels by which they can secure justice.

The ICC is an international organization and court, and tries four main crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. When a State is unable and unwilling to resolve cases related to these matters, the ICC functions as a court of last resort.

Generally, only parties to the Rome Statute  an instrument signed by countries to signify their acceptance of the ICCs jurisdiction  can be subject to the courts processes. The Philippines withdrawal of its consent to the Statute means one less mechanism by which to hold the administration accountable for its alleged failures in upholding human rights.

But there are ways forward, if only for the thousands of families left behind by the killings. The challenge goes beyond our membership in the ICC, according to human rights commissioner Roberto Cadiz, in a forum organized by the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (Lente), youth collective Disgruntled Young People (DYP), and writers-artists group Sandata to discuss possible next steps after the Philippines withdrawal from the ICC.

The consensus was clear: while the Philippines has ceased to be a party to an important human rights instrument, the work to seek justice for victims of the drug war continues, in the following suggested ways.

Organize

There is no organized mass movement that represents the families affected by the drug war. Kailangang mag-organisa ang mga biktima. Kailangang makita ang mga mukha ng mga biktima, says Romel Bagares, senior consultant of the Center for International Law. Bagares is also the lead counsel of the Philippine Coalition for the ICC, and previously petitioned against the withdrawal from the ICC.

Bagares pointed out the need to organize  in consolidating efforts, empowering victims of the war on drugs, documenting their experiences, and ensuring that their cases see their day in court. This is easier said than done, however, since many victims fear reprisals for their testimonials, and will require strategic protection. Another concern is livelihood: many of those affected are from the poor and marginalized, and organizing takes up time and money.

Many victims fear reprisals for their testimonials, and will require strategic protection. Another concern is livelihood: many of those affected are from the poor and marginalized, and organizing takes up time and money.

A good starting point is to determine current services and efforts related to the campaign against drugs. One such attempt was launched in 2018 through angpangako.net, an online platform mapping 1) services and efforts, 2) rehabilitation centers, and 3) victims of the campaign against drugs. The website is an initiative of the Foundation for Media Alternatives.

The end goal should be to put the victims stories at the forefront of the fight to seek justice for the killings. Lets stop talking and start doing things, says Bagares. Lets start making things happen. Because weve been talking for the last two years and it has gotten us nowhere.

File cases

There are two views to the Philippines exit from the ICC: one view states that prosecutor Fatou Besoudas pending investigation on the drug war continues despite the withdrawal; the other states it cannot. There are strong legal arguments for both views, according to Emil Maranon III, an election lawyer who also works in transitional justice.

In both instances, building the volume of cases of extra-judicial killings filed before the court is crucial. Assuming the pending investigation continues, determining whether the Philippines is unable and unwilling to resolve drug-related cases depends on the number of cases filed, according to Dr. Aurora Parong, co-chairperson of the Philippine Coalition for the ICC.

Being unable and unwilling to resolve cases, says Bagares, simply refers to court inaction  even though there is a theoretical capacity to do so.

Assuming the pending investigation is invalid, litigating before the courts still provides a case for a crime against humanity, which has been posited as an offense of such gravity that does not need membership in the ICC to be recognized.

Most importantly, building cases  the act of recounting experience alone, when conducted safely and with sensitivity to victims needs  can help foster understanding, raise awareness, and bring forth solidarity among the community.

What cases should be filed? According to Maranon, victims of the drug campaign have options under the Revised Penal Code; the Anti-Torture Act (RA 9745); the Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act (RA 10353); and the Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide, and Other Crimes Against Humanity (RA 9851). The latter, in fact, is the law that localized the Rome Statute, and is still applicable despite the exit from the ICC.

Foreign courts may also provide redress: in the U.S., one can sue under the Alien Torts Claims Act, and in the U.K., one can sue under the International Criminal Court Act. A full list of States with statutes punishing crimes against humanity is found here.

The biggest challenge, however, is making all of this happen. Litigation is expensive, and building one case alone takes thousands of pesos. Building a case where witnesses may be unwilling to testify or where documentation may be missing is also deeply challenging, according to Bagares  thus emphasizing further the need to organize and coordinate with other concerned groups.

Aside from filing cases in local courts, Parong recommends exhausting all options, including filing administrative cases against erring officers, transmitting communications to UN human rights mechanisms and treaty bodies, reporting to the UN Human Rights Council, and maximizing transitional justice mechanisms. Ad hoc international criminal tribunals are also another venue, according to Maranon.

Create art

Sandata, one of the co-organizers of the forum, is comprised of activist rappers BLKD and Calix; playwright and screenwriter Mixkaela Villalon; and development workers and researchers Tanya Quijano, Abbey Pangilinan, and Ica Fernandez. It is a collective organized as a response to the growing trend of social media-led disinformation and the brutal Philippine drug war.

Villalon, Pangilinan, and Fernandez previously wrote about barangay officials making tough choices in the drug war, while BLKD and Calix produce hip-hop and rap music critical of the drug war, as heard in the recent EP Kolateral: Buelo. The first track, Makinarya, is a haunting four-part piece representing four actors involved in the drug war: the president, his government officials/mouthpieces, police officers  the final piece is of the families of victims, represented only by crying sounds.

Parong encourages young artists and writers to spread awareness of issues, such as extra-judicial killings in the drug war, in similarly creative ways.

The key is to reach out and mobilize, even beyond the scope of the drug war. Seek out peoples organizations, groups, individuals, and State officials abroad for solidarity work, she says, not only about the killings or the war on drugs, but on broader issues such as bad governance.

Sandata is currently raising funds to speak before two universities to the U.S., upon the invitation of the University of California Berkeley and Harvard Kennedy School. To support them, click here.



Haiti - FLASH : Ceant handed his resignation after the installation of Lapin





Thursday at the National Palace, President Jovenel Moise on the sidelines of the 36th Council of Ministers, in the presence of members of the ministerial cabinet proceeded to the inauguration and the presentation of Jean Michel Lapin as new acting Prime Minister.



It should be noted that in the history of Haiti it is a first that the same day is published the presidential decree of appointment in the official journal Le Moniteur #42 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27239-haiti-flash-appointment-of-an-interim-prime-minister.html and that is installed a interim Prime Minister. Jean Michel Lapin also retains his post of Minister of Culture.



Addressing the Ministers, the Head of State declared "I have the honor to present to you the Acting Prime Minister, Mr. Jean Michel Lapin, who replaces former Prime Minister Jean-Henry Ceant, as you know which was demissed following a motion of censure on March 18, 2019 by the assembly of the deputies" (without a word to congratulate Ceant, absent at this ceremony for the 6 months spent to manage the government) "By his constancy, dedication and professionalism, he deserves the confidence I have placed in him."



Addressing Jean Michel Lapin "As Acting Prime Minister, you must, as stated in Article 165 of the Constitution, dispatch the current affairs of the State until the ratification of a new Prime Minister by Parliament." To the ministers he reminded them "You are going to settle the current affairs with him, but it requires a lot of sense of responsibility..."



A few hours after the investiture, convinced to still be Prime Minister in office despite the vote of censure of the lower House which revoked him https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27219-haiti-flash-haiti-has-no-more-government.html and having filed the day before a lawsuit against the Chamber of Deputies https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27247-haiti-flash-interpellation-majority-divergence-in-the-senate-the-pm-seized-justice.html , Jean-Henry Ceant, handed his resignation to the President of the Republic while he is no longer in the Government !



Letter from Jean-Henry Ceant :

"Port-au-Prince, March 21, 2018



Mr. Jovenel Moise

President of the Republic of Haiti

National Palace,



Mr President,



I just read in the offical gazettz "Le Moniteur" #42 of March 21, 2019, the appointment of Mr. Jean Michel Lapin as Prime Minister ai to liquidate the current affairs.



I took note of it. To avoid the country, which is so in need of peace, a constitutional confusion, I have the advantage of giving my resignation as prime minister.



This decision dates from the signing of this letter.



Accept, Excellency, the President of the Republic, the expression of my deep respect.



Patriotically !



Me Jean-Henry Ceant"



It is not clear from this letter of resignation, if Ceant will abandon the lawsuits filed against the decision of the Chamber of Deputies.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27247-haiti-flash-interpellation-majority-divergence-in-the-senate-the-pm-seized-justice.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27239-haiti-flash-appointment-of-an-interim-prime-minister.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27219-haiti-flash-haiti-has-no-more-government.html



SL/ HaitiLibre





















Haiti - FLASH : Counterfeit medicine, HEALTH ALERT





The Ministry of Public Health advises the public in generaln health professionals and drug distributors in particular, that a counterfeit medicine is currently circulating in the country, sold under the name "Clarithromycin tablets, 500 mg".



This counterfeit product is presented in an opaque plastic bottle, white in color, containing 100 tablets of 500 mg. With reference to the original packaging in English, it wears a false "MYLAN" logo



his medicine may contain any dangerous molecule. As a result, it can lead to symptoms that can worsen the consumer's health and even cause death.



The Ministry calls the population to vigilance and prohibits the distribution, sale and consumption of this product throughout the territory.



In addition, the Ministry urges the population to buy their drugs exclusively in authorized pharmacies.



HL/ HaitiLibre





















Haiti - Politic : Approach to support the development of promising sectors of the economy





As part of the development of economic sectors, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MCI) believes that it is necessary to support entrepreneurs and channel their efforts in the creation of wealth.



The Ministry justifies its initiative by the need to give a new breath to the support of companies; the need to prioritize sectors of activity in the context of public policies in order to be efficient and the need to harmonize the actions of the various ministries of the economic sector.



The 3 areas of support for the development of sectors :



The creation of added values and quality and protected jobs;



The development of value chains with the bet on competitiveness;



The promotion of entrepreneurship and investment.



Results expected by the MCI :



The choice of priority sectors is defined on the basis of well-developed criteria;



The national policy document for the development of value chains elaborated and validated;



A Sector Support Program is implemented;



An information and data disclosure center on priority sectors for business intelligence;



Sector tables working continuously.



The Ministry has already identified certain sectors that have served as a basis for the development support mechanisms (programs and projects) of the private sector set up (agribusiness channels, study of typical products, based on the development of the bio economy, work on textiles etc...)



The approach of support to the sectors is not new to the MCI since it was engaged in 2015 but the initiative was interrupted. The need has become more important. This initiative was resumed in 2018 and the Ministry intends to make the work more structured, both in terms of the choices to be made and the level of support to be given to the sectors.



In this perspective, the Ministry has already drafted, proposed and published a concept note of the approach; Developed a prioritization methodology for the sectors; proposed to the Public Investment Program (PIP) an ad hoc project to support the development of value chains; seeks partners and donors for this project and wants to develop a synergy between the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation, the Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development and the Bank of the Republic of Haiti (BRH).



HL/ S/ HaitiLibre





















Haiti - News : Zapping...





The opposition excludes cohabitation

Me Michel Michel, fierce opponent of Jovenel Moise and one of the spokesmen of the radical opposition called "democratic and popular sector," said in a letter to his colleagues in the opposition that he excluded any possibility of cohabitation of opposition in the next Government, remaining committed to the initial goal of forcing the Head of State to resign...



Trial of Clifford Brandt : Perpetuity Required

In the trial of Clifford Brandt et al., on 19 March, the public prosecutor, in his indictment at the opening of the general hearings, required the life imprisonment of all the defendants. Me Denis Pierre Michel, the President of the Criminal Court of Gonaives, posponed the audience to eight weeks https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27248-haiti-news-zapping.html



Operation of the PNH in the Village de Dieu

Thursday, agents of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) began a vast operation in the Village de Dieu in Port-au-Prince territory of the gang leader "Arnel", near the Stade Sylvio Cator where will take place the decisive match Haiti - Cuba hhttps://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27235-haiti-league-of-nations-d-5-last-stretch-for-the-match-haiti-cuba.html . Several armored police vehicles would participate in this operation according to neighborhood residents.



J-C Moise greet the resignation of Ceant

Jean-Charles Moise leader of the radical opposition party "Pitit Dessalin", welcomed the resignation of Prime Minister Jean-Henry Ceant hhttps://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27249-haiti-flash-ceant-handed-his-resignation-after-the-installation-of-lapin.html he sees as a victory for the opposition sector. For him, the presence of Ceant in power had divided the political opposition on the need to clean slate after the departure of the Head of State. He says the opposition will now come together around a common goal of "tabula rasa" and choose an acting president of the Court of Cassation to govern the country.



The CFI assesses the consequences of the crisis

Following the period of socio-political turmoil, the Center for Investment Facilitation (CFI) has begun a series of courtesy visits to local and foreign companies operating in Haiti. These visits are part of the CFI efforts to support and promote investments as well as to assess the direct consequences of the crisis on investments in Haiti.



Launch of the ARISE global network in Haiti

On Friday, March 22nd, the Alliance for Risk Management and Continuity of Activities in conjunction with the Civil Protection Protection Directorate and the United Nations Office for Risk Reduction will launch the ARISE global network in Haiti. The ARISE Global Network was created in 2015 in Geneva (Switzerland) and includes private companies covering more than 150 countries around the world...



HL/ HaitiLibre

















Published on 2019/03/21 | Source

Actor Lee Sun-kyun interviewed regarding his latest film, "Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage".

Advertisement

He's been busy with the release of his latest film and he's going to start filming "Kingmaker: The Fox of the Election" in April. "Kingmaker: The Fox of the Election" is about a politician who dreamed of being president and a man crafted genius strategies in the 1960s to the 70s.

Lee Sun-kyun says, "The movie starts production in March and we start filming in April. This is my first period piece. It's going to be an important movie for me and I feel the weight of the pressure. I am working with such amazing cast and staff, but I have to do well for them. I feel anxious".

"Kingmaker: The Fox of the Election" stars by Sol Kyung-gu, Lee Sun-kyun, and Yoo Jae-myung. As a result, they have to go through the process of competing with other movies starring the same actors. Sol Kyung-goo alone starred in "Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage" and "Idol" which come out on the same day. 10 actors from the movies "Idol", "Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage" and "Money" are starring in "Kingmaker: The Fox of the Election".

Lee Sun-kyun says, "10 actors from three different movies star in "Kingmaker: The Fox of the Election", so I can't ask them to watch. All three movies are good movies and hopefully they create a synergy of success".

Lee Sun-kyun is also awaiting the release of director Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite". In a family where everyone is unemployed, their only hope Gi-woo (Choi Wooshik) goes for a tutor interview at Mr. Park's (Lee Sun-kyun). About this film, Lee Sun-kyun says, "I am sure it will receive good results because we have a trustworthy ally on board".

Expectation for the Cannes is likely as it is directed by Bong Joon-ho. "I saw the line-up of directors for the Cannes this year and it was amazing. There is a chat group and news comes up every day. Wooshik makes a list of directors from Canada and sends them. I would like to go but I would have to check my movie schedule first".

Lee Sun-kyun is also appearing in the JTBC drama "Diary of a Prosecutor", which comes out in November and he says, "I think I can fit in about 4 pieces this year".

Meanwhile, "Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage" is a story about a bad cop standing up to an even worse society.The Havre Public Schools Board of Trustees will meet Tuesday at 12:15 p.m. in the Robins School Administration building.

The agenda for the meeting is:

A. Call to order

1. Pledge of Allegiance

2. Roll call

3. Welcome to visitors

4. Agenda deletions or corrections, if any

B. New business

1. Personnel

Open Agenda  An opportunity for any member of the audience to bring to the attention of the board questions or relevant comments concerning district matters not on the agenda. The board will not discuss or take action on items not on the agenda but may refer a matter presented...Hill County Public Health Director Kim Larson said Thursday that the county is one step away from medical practitioners and officials having instantaneous access to more information for taking care of medical patients.

Pretty exciting stuff, Hill County Public Health Director Kim Larson said.

She gave an update on Connect Electronic Referral System during the Havres Trauma Sensitive School Initiative meeting Thursday.

Connects website says the Connect is a secure, web-based system for sending and receiving health and medical referrals while remaining confidential. It said tha...With three breweries and distillery, Havre's locally produced alcohol market has grown in a big way in Havre in the past five years.

Havre went from not having a single brewery since the mid-1900s to having three - Triple Dog Brewing Co., Old Station Brewing Co. and Vizsla Brewing - and a distillery, Cawford Distillery, in the past five years, which have all been a huge success. All of them are planning to grow their businesses in the next year.

An evolving trend, evolving market

Patrick Barkey, director of the University of Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Development, said the...The Hill County commissioners signed off on a support letter Thursday for the Montana Silver Jackets.

Commissioner Michael Wendland said the letter is to give the group a blessing to look at the (Milk River) levee.

The Montana Silver Jackets is a interagency group that works together to reduce flood risk at the state level. Through this program the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, additional federal, state and sometimes local and tribal agencies provide a unified approach to addressing a states priorities.

The Silver Jackets have helped Hi...Retired chemical engineer Liz Daley, from left, and Dr. Carley Robertson and retired Dr. Marcia Prather look over documents while in Tanzania in 2015.

A Havre-based group of volunteers is holding a fundraiser for a medical support trip to Tanzania.

The group of Montanans are heading to Tanzania to provide medical support in conjunction with the New Hope International Hospital Sakila Dispensary. Montanans have become an integral part of the communities in the area for several years. The group heading to Tanzania is made up of doctors, EMTs, physical therapists, nurses and physician assistants.

Dr. Carley Robertson said in a press release that, as Montanans, "we pride ourselves in lending a helping hand."

She said she wants to remind...Chippewa Cree Criminal Investigator Ed Long Knife said a shooting that was discovered at Rocky Boys Indian Reservation is still under investigation.

Long Knife said the victim, Joscayne Denny, 43, was in stable condition as of yesterday. He was transported from Northern Montana Hospital to Benefis Hospital in Great Falls because he was in critical condition after the gunshot wound was discovered Sunday, Long Knife said.

Long Knife said the investigation started with a report of a vehicle crash on Taylor Road Sunday at about 9:23 p.m.

The responders found Denny at the scene, apparently...Press release

The Montana Post Secondary Educational Opportunities Council and the Montana Tribal Colleges will host six events starting Monday, including two in north-central Montana.

We are very excited to offer this Tribal College/Career Fair Circuit for the 10th year in Montana, organizers said. It is our goal to serve hundreds of college students, high school students, non-traditional students, families, guidance counselors and community members with this event. Everyone is invited to attend for free.

The college fairs give students an opportunity to contemplate their h...Horse Shoe man sentenced to 16 years for child sexual offense

A Horse Shoe man was sentenced to 16 years in prison after pleading guilty to sexual offense with a child and indecent liberties with a child, District Attorney Greg Newman announced on Thursday.

John M. Hooper, of 83 Cedar Point Way, was sentenced during a Superior Court term March 4-8 with Superior Court Judge Athena Brooks presiding.

In other cases:

Dwight E. Morgan Jr, of 59 Herron Avenue, Asheville, pled guilty to two counts of Breaking and/or Entering, Larceny of a Firearm, Possession of a Firearm by Felon, and Attempted Breaking and Entering. Morgan Jr. was sentenced to 89 months in prison.

Nathan R. Wells, of 31 Shadow Ridge Drive, Fletcher, pled guilty to Possession with Intent to Manufacture/Sell/Deliver Methamphetamine, Possession with Intent to Manufacture/Sell/Deliver MDA/MDMA, Attempted Trafficking, and Maintain Vehicle/Dwelling/Place for Controlled Substance. Wells was sentenced to 73 months in prison plus 17 months suspended and 24 months supervised probation.

Crystal J. Matheson, of 306 Balfour Road, Hendersonville, pled guilty to seven counts of Obtaining Property by False Pretenses, Identity Theft, and Possession of Controlled Substance on Prison/Jail Premises. Matheson was sentenced to 52 months in prison plus 46 months suspended and 36 months of supervised probation. She was also ordered to pay $3,186.27 restitution.

Gregory Williams, of 182 N. Clear Creek Road, Hendersonville, pled guilty to Sex Act by Substitute Parent/Guardian and Indecent Liberties with a Child. Williams was sentenced to 42 months in prison, 60 months post-release supervision, and register as a sex offender.

Michael A. Davis, of 532 Ehringhaus Street, Hendersonville, pled guilty to Possession of Firearm by Felon. Davis was sentenced to 33 months in prison.

Jason P. Anderson, of 880 N. Rutherford Road, Taylors, SC, pled guilty to Habitual Impaired Driving. Anderson was sentenced to 24 months in prison.

Josh T. Hoots, of 97 Castle View Lane, East Flat Rock, pled guilty to Felony Flee/Elude Arrest with a Motor Vehicle. Hoots was sentenced to 21 months in prison.

Bobby W. Reed III, of 112 Fir Street, Hendersonville, pled guilty to Possession of Heroin and was sentenced to 19 months in prison.

Kelly D. Young, of 1665 Pace Road, Hendersonville, pled guilty to Break or Enter a Motor Vehicle and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Lowell A. Love, of 1524 Oleta Road, Hendersonville, pled guilty to Assault Inflicting Serious Injury. Love was sentenced to 150 days confinement.



The Honorable Judge Athena F. Brooks presided.A COUPLE are seeking permission to demolish and rebuild their historic riverside home after it was gutted in a fire.

Louise and Benedict Warner, who own The Boathouse, off High Street, Goring, say their insurers have condemned the 19th-century property as structurally unsafe after the blaze on March 2 last year.

The fire broke out in a thatched roof at the southern end of the timber-framed building and quickly spread throughout until flames could be seen from as far away as Didcot.

Passers-by called 999 and at least seven crews from across Oxfordshire and Berkshire worked throughout the night to contain it. They spent much of the following day cooling the debris with water to stop it reigniting.

One wing of the five-bedroom house was almost entirely destroyed while supporting elements like joists and rafters were weakened by the flames and water damage.

Initially it was hoped that the property had been saved but it was then deemed uninhabitable.

Now the Warners, who moved to the area from London in 2017, want to build a two-storey replacement dwelling with a footprint of 487 sq m, a similar size to the old house, but with six bedrooms instead of five.

It would have a master bedroom and two guest rooms along with living rooms and a working boathouse on the ground floor plus three additional bedrooms within the central roof space.

The building would be set 12m back from the river and would be slightly taller than the old one because of the need to reduce the flood risk by raising the floor.

It would be surrounded by terraces overlooking the River Thames and would be arranged in a series of pitch-roofed blocks connected by flat-roofed sections.

Anderson Orr, the Warners architect, says the new design is influenced by the rectangular shape and low profile of the previous house and would also have gables fronting the River Thames.

It would be built in red brick and flint in order to blend in with Gorings conservation area and clad in blackened timber as a hint to its unfortunate recent history. The four roofs over the living areas would be tiled but, as before, the boathouse roof would be thatched with additional thatch on the sides.

The architect says the design takes references from the original boathouse in terms of its traditional materiality, layout and form while providing contemporary detailing and modern living spaces that take advantage of the views out of the site.

The couples agent JPPC adds: The design... clearly expresses the form of the original building but in a contemporary manner to represent and reflect a new chapter in the history of the site. While the use of thatch is not typical of Goring, it nevertheless creates a noteworthy feature and creates a statement of architectural distinction and plays on the rural context.

South Oxfordshire District Council planning officers warned the plans were likely to be recommended for refusal because of the need to preserve the distinctive character and appearance of the site.

However, the couple have since scaled back the scheme in line with their advice.

Goring Parish Council doesnt object to the application but says the use of thatch on the boathouse sides would be inappropriate.

The district councils conservation officer says there is no need to build a replica of the old house and the modern design preserves its character, although windows in the thatched roof should be removed.

She says: The nod to the thatch on the existing building is appropriate and relevant and the contemporary finish is novel and exciting. I acknowledge that it is unusual but consider this an opportunity to explore something new.

The damaged property was built in 1894 and extensively refurbished before being sold to the Warners for 2.83 million.

It was once owned by explorer Charles Gardiner, after whom the villages Gardiner recreation ground is named, and later by Frederick Shoolbred, who owned Thames Bank in Thames Road.

The house is immediately upstream from Goring sorting office, formerly the boathouse of inventor Samuel Saunders, who pioneered the Consuta method of boatbuilding.

It is still subject to a covenant with Mr Saunderss estate that it must not be used for commercial purposes.

The district council will decide the application by April 3.A young entrepreneur who headbutted another man on a nightclub dance floor claimed the victim called him a "C***k f**k" after they bumped into each other.

James Putthaaree (25) "overreacted" to the alleged racial slur when he struck the man, inflicting dental injuries that required treatment costing thousands of euro.

Putthaaree, of Ballybay, Co Monaghan, but with an address at Charleston Road, Ranelagh, pleaded guilty to assault causing harm.

Judge Michael Walsh adjourned the case for a restorative justice report after the accused paid 6,000 in compensation.

Dublin District Court heard the incident happened at Dicey Reillys on Harcourt Street on November 29, 2017.

The victim, an accountancy student, collided with Putthaaree on the dance floor and the accused immediately headbutted him, knocking him to the floor.

The victim, whose teeth were displaced, had spent 3,350 on treatment and expected the future total to be 11,000.

Shouldered

Putthaaree, who had no previous convictions, was at the club with friends and while leaving, the injured party "shouldered him and called my client a 'C***k f**k'," defence solicitor Mary Arnold said.

He accepted he overreacted to this racial slur, she said.

Putthaaree was a software sales assistant at the time but had since returned to Monaghan and started out on a new career with a start-up fitness and food business, Ms Arnold said.

He had brought 6,000 to court in compensation.

Judge Walsh said "significant dental damage" was caused to the victim, who had to wear braces for a time and was left with "problems biting".

While the precise nature of the future treatment was unclear, it was undoubtedly "a very serious injury", he said.

The victim had felt self-conscious when people asked why he needed braces.

Judge Walsh said the accused was of previous good character and had shown genuine remorse. He adjourned the case to a date in May.Gardai need more resources to tackle criminals who are selling drugs to addicts near the proposed site of Dublin's first injection centre, a senior Fianna Fail politician has said.

Dublin Mid West TD John Curran branded the criminals "vultures" for selling drugs less than a minute's walk from the Merchants Quay drug and homelessness service.

"If the illegal actions of these dealers continue to be tolerated, they will pose a significant challenge to the success of the centre in breaking the cycle of drug abuse by heroin addicts," said Mr Curran.

"This is, in fact, one of the biggest fears presented by those that do not support the introduction of such a centre in the city.

"They are worried it will simply become a premises for dealers to profit from."

Mr Curran's comments follow a Herald expose that found open-air dealing, drug abuse and intimidating behaviour only metres from the Merchants Quay centre.

Filmed

Drug dealers were filmed openly selling illegal substances to addicts after they left the building, which will serve as the country's first injection centre.

The Herald also revealed that a local digital agency was forced to relocate after operating in the area for 17 years due to repeated incidents of drug related anti-social behaviour.

"This is a busy district of our city, situated as it is along a main bus corridor with steady passing traffic, but it also happens to be a well-known corner for public drug dealing," said Mr Curran.

"It's sadly obvious that the regular flow of dealers are targeting - in fact, preying on - some of the vulnerable people in addiction that may be en route to the nearby homeless and drugs services centre.

"I have previously noted the urgency for a well-resourced, co-ordinated garda response similar to Operation Pier in 2014 to bring the prevalence of open-air drug dealing under control.

"In the interest of ensuring the pilot centre can reduce drug-related overdoses, there must be a serious effort to rid the vicinity of those pushing illegal substances."Magic will be in the air in the capital this June when David Blaine arrives here for one night only.

The American magician, illusionist and stunt artist will take to the stage at Dublin's 3Arena on Saturday, June 8, as part of his first tour of Ireland and the UK.

Blaine's tour kicks off in Edinburgh on June 5 and will be followed by a string of dates, including two nights in London.

His one-man show is being billed as an "unforgettable interactive experience that both shocks and amazes".

Boundaries

Famed for his death-defying endurance acts, Blaine (45) has pushed the boundaries with some draw-dropping antics, including being buried alive in a clear coffin in New York for a week.

The following year he stood inside a six-ton block of ice for 63 hours with no food or sleep. In 2002, he spent 36 hours standing atop a 30-metre pillar without a safety net, and suffered concussion when he finally leapt from the 10-storey height into a pile of cardboard boxes.

He survived 73 hours with more than a million volts of electricity discharged at him continuously from Tesla coils.

Blaine also endured 44 days of starvation inside a glass box suspended by a crane near the River Thames in London.

At the age of 23, Blaine produced and directed his original television special Street Magic. His stage antics have also seen him enjoy sold-out performances across the US and Canada.

During his career, Blaine has performed for US presidents including Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, and other international leaders and prominent figures such as Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Muhammad Ali.

Tickets go on sale next Friday, March 29, at 9am via Ticketmaster.The threat of a no-deal Brexit remains very much alive after the EU wrangled over setting a point of no return for British prime minister Theresa May.

The UK's exit from the EU will not now happen in seven days' time.

Instead, Mrs May is expected to get an extension until May 22 if she can finally get support for the Withdrawal Agreement next week.

However, should the House of Commons reject the deal for a third time, the UK would have only until April 12 to decide whether to crash out or begin preparations for holding European Parliament elections.

Dinner

Mrs May was to have been a guest at the EU leaders' summit dinner last night, but that invitation was cancelled when disagreement over various Brexit dates persisted.

Efforts to stave off a cliff-edge scenario last night led to fighting between EU superpowers, with Germany leading the charge to show flexibility and France taking a hard-line.

During a private meeting in Brussels, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told Mrs May it is the British parliament's responsibility to make sure the UK does not crash out without a deal.

She then faced more than an hour of questioning from other prime ministers who wanted to know what chance, if any, there is of securing a consensus in Westminster.

A growing intolerance of the chaotic UK political system is evident among EU leaders, with French president Emmanuel Macron saying if MPs vote no to the Withdrawal Agreement again, "it will guide everybody to a no-deal for sure. This is it".

Planning for a no-deal scen- ario is continuing in Dublin, but many unanswered questions remain.

It is still not clear how much financial support the EU will supply for the agricultural sector in the event that devastating tariffs are applied on beef and other products.

There are still no answers as to how an open border will be maintained, other than an assumption there will be difficult talks in Brussels shortly after the UK falls off the cliff.

Ireland will argue that Mrs May must agree to regulatory alignment between Northern Ireland and the EU to maintain frictionless trade on this island.

Mr Varadkar told reporters that if the UK does end up leaving the EU without an exit deal, it will be entirely by its own choice.

Mrs May put a brave face on her predicament, saying she was still working on getting her parliament's approval.

"I am still working on ensuring that parliament can agree a deal so that we can leave in an orderly way," she said.

EU diplomats said Mrs May's request for a delay to June 30 was not acceptable because European Parliament elections must by law happen in the last week of May.

Over the course of last evening, France and Belgium are understood to have argued for the UK to get out of the EU before a May 9 summit in Romania to celebrate the "renewal" of Europe.Prison bosses are examining ways to stop drones operating near jails after two incidents in three days where drugs were dropped into Mountjoy using the remote-controlled devices.

Motion sensor cameras are to be installed at jails, and evolving technology such as signal jammers and interception techniques may also be explored.

Six drones have been recovered by the Irish Prison Service in the last 18 months in locations around the country after failed attempts to drop contraband into jail yards.

And with two attempts to drop drugs into Mountjoy in the past week prison bosses are determined to stop the hi-tech devices from delivering contraband to inmates.

This week the Herald reported how associates of convicted criminals used a drone to try to land a supply of drugs into a yard at the Dublin jail for the first time.

The drugs were stuffed into the plastic capsules used to hold small toys inside the popular Kinder Surprise eggs.

One prisoner climbed up a steel fence in a bid to get them but he cut his hands on the razor wire.

He didn't succeed in getting the package, which was later taken down by staff.

The efforts of prison staff to control the situation led to a confrontation in the yard.

Alert

The alert was sparked when prison staff spotted the high- tech drone flying in over the medical unit.

But the thwarted efforts to land the drugs didn't deter the suppliers, and another attempt was made last Sunday, just three days after the first mission.

"It was the same yard, and again the drugs landed on the net and one prisoner climbed up to try and get them down but cut himself on the razor wire," a source said.

"But this time they managed to get through the wire and onto the roof of the jail. They were taken down by staff using a cherry picker."

Staff later removed the contraband which had been dropped from the drone.

"The Prison Service is aware of an increase in the use of drones over the last couple of years and measures are in place to counteract this," said a prison service spokesman.

"Existing measures include regular patrols by staff and monitoring of cameras, while exercise yards have netting fitted to prevent contraband being dropped or thrown into that area.

"In addition, the installation of infrared and motion sensor cameras will commence shortly.

"The Irish Prison Service are also exploring a number of technology options to deal with the problem."I am a political essayist, cultural critic, educator, and host of the podcast known as "The Chauncey DeVega Show"





I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.





I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.





I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.





My writing has also been featured by Newsweek, The New York Daily News, Raw Story, The Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.





My work has also been referenced by MSNBC, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, Raw Story, The Washington Spectator, Media Matters, The Gothamist, Fader, XOJane, The National Memo, The Root, Detroit Free Press, San Diego Free Press, the Global Post, The Lost Angeles Blade as well as online magazines and publications such as Slate, The Week, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, Counterpunch, Truth-Out, Pacific Standard, Common Dreams, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, The Nation, RogerEbert.com, Ebony, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.





Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much.As of last week, customers at Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Meijers 23 stores in Chicago and Northwest Indiana can use a smartphone app to scan a bar code on items as they take them from the shelves and add them to a running tab. It still requires a stop at a self-checkout kiosk, but doesnt require pulling each item from the cart and makes it easier to search for coupons, said Thomas Dant, Meijers Chicago-area market director."United is excited to share with our customers, whether they identify along the binary of male or female or not, that we are taking the steps to exhibit our care for them while also providing additional employee training to make us even more welcoming for all customers and employees," United Chief Customer Officer Toby Enqvist said in a statement Friday.Pennsylvania high court throws out mask mandate for schools

The court ruled the masking mandate, which also applies to child care facilities, is not valid because it was imposed by Gov. Tom Wolf's acting health secretary without legal authorization. The practical impact of the decision will depend on how schools and school districts act."The BZA meeting was packed and voices of concern were expressed. After listening to various neighbors and property owners, it became quite apparent that the concept was absolutely not appropriate for that area," said Councilman John Brezik, D-5th, who was at the meeting.Duke doesn't just want to tawk. He needs to. Best known for his scene-stealing and thirst-trapping role as the "great gorilla" M'Baku in "Black Panther," the Yale-trained actor is cerebral in a way that shouldn't be surprising but is. He's constantly thinking, analyzing, breaking it down, while punctuating each thought with a conspiratorial "right?" He speaks not in paragraphs but in dissertations, like a professor who really wants his kids to get it, you know.Hong Kong: Govt rejects US report

The Government reiterated that foreign governments should not interfere in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Regions internal affairs in any form.

In response to media enquiries about the US Department of States Hong Kong Policy Act Report, the Government said human rights and freedom in Hong Kong are fully protected by the Basic Law, the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance and other legislation. The Government is determined to safeguard them.

It said relevant international human rights conventions and court cases have clearly pointed out that freedom of speech is not absolute.

Noting the Basic Law clearly stipulates that the HKSAR is an inalienable part of the People's Republic of China, the Government said any suggestion for Hong Kong's independence is a blatant violation of the Basic Law and a direct affront to the national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of the PRC.

Hong Kong's independence runs counter to the successful implementation of "one country, two systems" and undermines the HKSAR's constitutional and legal foundations as enshrined in the Basic Law, it added.

For other issues mentioned in the report, the Government said it has all along been handling Hong Kong affairs strictly in accordance with the one country, two systems principle, the Basic Law and the laws of Hong Kong.

This story has been published on: 2019-03-22. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.(CNN)  "The Scream" by Edvard Munch is one of the most famous images in the history of art, and even has its own emoji.

If you thought the artwork showed a figure screaming, however, it turns out you may have misinterpreted Munch's work.

With "The Scream" Munch is recalling a personal memory of a spectacular sunset in Oslo which gave the sky and clouds a dramatic red hue, according to Giulia Bartrum, curator of a forthcoming exhibition devoted to the artist at the British Museum in London.

"The blood-red sky had the effect of making him feel hugely anxious," Bartrum told CNN via telephone. "The artwork is very much a reflection of Munch's personal mood."

And the artist wrote an inscription in German on the black and white lithograph version which reads: "I felt the great scream throughout nature." Hands over its ears, the ghostly figure is in fact blocking out nature's scream.

'Moments of despair'

The waviness of the figure is a visual representation of what he is feeling, said Bartrum, and the black and white bands behind are almost vibrating like a tuning fork.

"It has an obvious emotive impact," said Bartrum, who added that it's very easy to misinterpret the artwork as a figure screaming.

"You can associate it with your own mood," said Bartrum. "Everyone has had those moments of despair."

Over the years the image has also been used in political campaigns, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but Munch was expressing a personal emotion and did not intend it to be used as a public message.

He was a private man, according to Bartrum, and even during his lifetime he feared that he had lost control of his work even though the reproduction of images was much slower than it is now. And it's easy to appropriate such an emotive image for a cause.

"You could take it in a personal way, you could take it in a political way," said Bartrum. "The image is there and it will be used."

Brexit coincidence

However the curator warned against drawing any connection between the arrival of "The Scream" in the UK and ongoing wrangling over Britain's exit from the European Union.

"We did not plan to have the exhibition at this time," said Bartrum, calling the timing "purely fortuitous."

Work on the exhibition started five years ago, and it will run from April 11 until July 21. "Edvard Munch: love and angst" is a collaborative effort between the British Museum and the Munch Museum in Oslo, which has lent almost 50 prints from its collection.

The upcoming show will be the largest exhibition of Munch's prints in the UK for 45 years, and will also feature other highlights such as "Vampire II," "Madonna" and "Head by Head."Actor Kangana Ranaut celebrates her 32nd birthday on Saturday. The actor is coming off the success of her latest film, Manikarnika, and is now looking forward to her next, Mental Hai Kya. While there is still a long time until we see her back on the big screen, we have just the right treat for her fans on her birthday.

Kangana was born in Bhambla, a small town in the Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh. While her parents wanted her to be doctor, she decided that it wasnt what she wanted for herself. She decided to go to Delhi, work for a modelling agency and also joined a theatre troupe. When her work as an actor got her a lot of compliments, she decided it was time to go to Mumbai for a career in movies.

She landed her first project in 2006 with director Anurag Basus Gangster. She won several awards for her role of an alcoholic woman in love with a criminal. She was then seen in movies such as Woh Lamhe and Life In A Metro.

Then came Madhur Bhandarkars Fashion and she was applauded for her role as a drug addict supermodel. While she wasnt the films lead, her work in the film won her the National Award for her supporting role.

But that award didnt spell instant success for Kangana. Her next phase in Bollywood wasnt as good. She starred in movies likes Game, Rascals and Miley Naa Miley Hum. This phase also gave her one of her best films, Tanu Weds Manu.

Also read: Delhi Crime review: Gut-wrenching, shocking; the best Indian Netflix show since Sacred Games

She then worked on Queen and the film marked a new beginning for Kanganas career. The film was an unexpected hit and earner Kangana great kudos for her work. Then came Tanu Weds Manu Returns, which established her as one of the most sought after female actors in Bollywood.

Though there was a slight lull after the two filmsKatti Batti, Rangoon and Simranshe bounced right back with Manikarnika, a film that she produced and even directed.

Even in a career as hectic as hers, Kangana has always found time for her family. She goes on holidays with her sister Rangoli and the rest of their family. She spends her vacations at her home in Manali, cuddling with her favourite person, hew nephew Prithvi Raj. So, to celebrate her birthday, we bring you her 10 best pictures with Prithvi. Check them out:

Follow @htshowbiz for more

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ONA lot of college kids are my fan following, says Kirti who has often spoken about not getting mass popularity even after portraying strong characters in Bollywood films. I havent done something which is massy. So, while I appeal to people who know me in different strata of society... They dont know this is Kirti Kulhari, she says on this trip where she came up and close with the city of Delhi.

While shooting for Pink I was also shopping for my wedding

My sister used to live in Gurugram, says Kirti who hadnt explored much of the Capital until she started shooting for the film Pink (2016). I spent good enough time here when we were shooting for Pink. That was the first time I was living here for like 20 days, and was travelling to work; thats when I felt the real vibe of Delhi because aap kahin bhi jayen 2-3 days are never enough to really feel the place. Uss waqt, I remember Dilli mein I was also shopping for my wedding. So, my mother-in-law came over and then I was shooting and travelling and shopping and eating out all of that happened quite a lot in Delhi that time. For my wedding lehenga, that I got stitched, I picked up the material from Delhi. I dont remember where in Delhi, but we went to one of the popular garment markets, recalls Kirti, who married Saahil Sehgal in June 2016 in Bhutan.

Kirti Kulhari says she has been on a bike tour of Delhi with her husband, Saahil Sehgal. (Sarang Gupta/HT Photo)

I would love to visit NSD

My husband, Saahil Sehgal, and I went around exploring Delhi on a bike, a few years back. Thats when we also went to Paranthe Wali Gali (in Old Delhi). I have also been to Khan Market a couple of times and like the place, shares Kirti who has a connect with Delhi theatre. I performed once in Delhi for a Tom Alter play called Marx My Word, written by (politician-advocate) Salman Khurshid. But, I havent really seen any plays here... I would love to visit National School of Drama (NSD). I have heard so much about it. Aise bahut kam institutes hain Delhi mein ya pure India mein jo acting ko utna seriously lete hain. And NSD is surely one of them. Probably the number one... maybe Ill go today, does it have a canteen?

The actor says she would have also liked to be a part of NSD if she was clear about choosing acting as a career when younger. Kirti says, I had already spent a lot of time doing my graduation. And if acting as a career choice had come to me much earlier, I would have surely joined may be an NSD or Film and Television Institute of India (Pune) post my 12th. But somehow, [acting] came to me too late and just happened by chance. Lot of people know very early what they want, but I didnt know I wanted acting. When I did become serious about acting, very soon I started off because I wanted to act in films  I was very clear about that  so the first thing that came to my mind to (be able to) learn acting was to do theatre. So, I did a workshop with Om Kataria, Yatri (theatre) group for a month, and then did plays with them. So theatre for me is my playing field. Thats where I learnt my craft... Film is a different experience. Mujhe theatre me waqt milta hai and I like to take time for acting and preparing my character. Thats the most important thing. When I go on a project where its like abhi shoot karna hai, theres no time, nobody is bothered about workshopping, its a big put-off for me because I dont wanna do it this way.

Films such as Pink highlighted her acting prowess while others such as Uri: The Surgical Strike made her a recognisable face from Bollywood. Yet, she feels disturbed when people ask her if Uri 2 is in the pipeline because of the recent air surgical strike by Indian Air Force in Pakistan. Referring to a fan who approached her for a picture at the India Gate, Kirti says, You saw this guy? He said Uri 2 kab ban rahi hai Ek aur air strike hua hai na. Jokes apart, but right now we are in the middle of some really serious crisis; anything can happen at any moment. My dad  who is from the Indian Navy  was telling me that all the defence forces are deployed everywhere.

I feel emotional seeing a defence person

Hailing from a family of defence personnel, Kirti feels happy that her portrayal of an air force officer in Uri has made family complete the trilogy in forces since her father is in the Navy and her sister is a doctor in the Army. Kirti says, One of the big reasons why I did Uri was because Im so touched by these things. Every time I see something where a defence person is involved, I just feel emotional about it because I know that life to some extent. My sister saw the film in Pathankot and she said that there were men crying through the film. I have grown up amid these people. Obviously you havent been to war yourself, but I think living in those kind of spaces, of course you are filled with a lot of patriotism. And, it just comes to a lot of us effortlessly If not patriotism, is there any other word that defines this feeling towards ones country?

Interact with the author on Twitter/@HennaRakhejaKesari

Director: Anurag Singh

Cast: Akshay Kumar, Parineeti Chopra

Rating: 2/5

One of historys most stunning last stands, The Battle of Saragarhi featured valour that warrants a legend. On 12 September 1897, a mere twenty one Sikh soldiers defied thousands of Afghan tribesmen attacking the strategic military outpost of Saragarhi in the Khyber Pass. It is something that has not been taught in Indian schools  perhaps because it was about protecting a colonial British Indian outpost from colonised Afghan locals  but the bravery of these men deserves salutation.

Does it also, however, deserve this film? Anurag Singhs Kesari first maps the terrain of comedy, with the valiant Jat Sikhs of Saragarhi depicted as a bunch of sloppy, inefficient men walking around without their uniforms and making feeble jokes, allowing the soundtrack to go wahu-wahu. This goes against the historical information that the 36th Sikhs infantry was composed of the boldest, best-trained soldiers. This film feels the need to present them as incompetent simply because one man needs to be highlighted.

Watch Kesari trailer here:

Also read: Priyanka Chopra, Jimmy Fallon and Thanos Josh Brolin send Holi wishes for fans. Check out their messages, pics

Akshay Kumar plays Havildar Ishar Singh, the man who led the battle, and as is the norm in an Akshay Kumar film, he takes charge. Not only does he tighten this unit of soldiers and get them to wear clean uniforms, but also sketches sundials freehand, hurls the Sikh chakram with the precision of a discus-thrower, and attaches a telescope to a gun to invent his own version of a sniper rifle. Cue the Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi theme music, because, to paraphrase a Kumar series of comedies: Singh Is Killing.

The film looks large, but doesnt make a sufficient impact. There is an occasional moment of intrigue, like when Kumars disciplinarian character is mocked by his subordinates who call him saala Angrez, but this talk of bloody Englishmen only leads to a strange situation later, where Kumar lies about the orders given to his men and then says they must fight, but not fight for the British. It feels dodgy to see soldiers fighting in uniform after first denouncing it.

Akshay Kumar plays Havildar Ishar Singh, the man who led the battle in Kesari.

Then, Kumar goes and gets himself a non-regulation saffron turban, which serves primarily to let us pick him out quickly in crowded combat scenes. The films coolest aspects are the chakrams, dangerous circular weapons forming tight halos around the turbans, and some glimpses of Gatka, the Sikh martial art. Most of the action is unmemorable, sadly. There is much bloodlust and regrettably little warcraft; these soldiers mostly prevail because the invaders choose to take turns shooting.

Kumar leaps about well and does his best Sunny Deol impression  or the best he can manage from behind a distractingly fake beard. The other soldiers appear more authentic, most of them caring enough about the film to leave their hair long and actually grow their beards, but they havent been given as much to do besides rally behind Kumar The Unbeatable.

There is much bloodlust and regrettably little warcraft in Kesari.

We must salute the brave soldiers of the Saragarhi. This movie merely gives us 21 angry men.

Follow @htshowbiz for moreAs the world celebrated Holi on Thursday, several Bollywood and Hollywood stars took to social media to wish their fans. Actors Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Priyanka Chopra, and even Avengers: Endgame star Josh Brolin shared colourful pictures and warm wishes for the festival.

Priyanka, who is currently in New York, shared a still from the Jonas Brothers Sucker music video. It showed her in a pink dress, surrounded by colour bombs. Priyanka wrote that she missed not being in India and with her family. Happy holi to everyone celebrating...Today, India is one giant, colorful street party! Holi is so vibrant and So.Much.Fun. Theres something magical about neighbours and neighbourhoods coming together over with food, music and gulaal! Holi has always been a favourite holiday of mine because I got to celebrate with my huge family... missing home! Love you guys!, she captioned the picture.

Also read: Delhi Crime review: Gut-wrenching, shocking; the best Indian Netflix show since Sacred Games

Mindy Kaling also took to Twitter to share her wishes with her fans. Happy Holi, everyone! Holi is the Hindu festival of color, signifying the arrival of spring, and the triumph of good over evil. What a wonderful time! #HappyHoli, she wrote in her tweet.

Happy Holi, everyone! Holi is the Hindu festival of color, signifying the arrival of spring, and the triumph of good over evil. What a wonderful time!  #HappyHoli pic.twitter.com/5IzpQxQ2md  Mindy Kaling (@mindykaling) March 21, 2019

Josh Brolin shared a throwback picture from 2013 when he celebrated Holi with his friends. Happy Holi Day! India 2013. #withshantaram, he captioned the picture. Late night show host Jimmy Fallon also shared a throwback picture from when he hosted Priyanka on his show and they played Holi together. #happyholi #TBT w/@priyankachopra, he captioned the picture.

Katrina Kaif shared a colourful picture on Instagram to wish her fans. Happy Holi everyone, she captioned the picture. Her Bharat co-star Salman Khan also shared a still from their upcoming film to wish their fans. #BharatKeRang #HappyHoli, he captioned the picture.

Shah Rukh wrote in a tweet: Wishing everyone the Happiest Holi ever! May Allah filll all your lives with the most beautiful colours of life & give u health & happiness. Alia Bhatt shared a video to promote an Instagram filter for Kalank and to wish her fans. Colour your world with the colours of joy this #Holi, she wrote in a tweet.

Follow @htshowbiz for moreActor Sunny Leone has shared a special family picture on the occasion of Holi. The new image, shared on Instagram on Thursday, shows Sunny posing with her husband, Daniel Weber, and their three children - Nisha, Asher and Noah.

The entire family is covered in colours, and theyre all smiling for the camera. Happy Holi from the Webers!! Sunny captioned the picture, which has over a million likes already.

Happy Holi, several fans commented on the post. God bless you guys, one person wrote.

Sunny and Daniel became parents to Asher and Noah in 2018, via surrogacy. They had adopted Nisha in 2017. Sunny said in a Hindustan Times interview, We chose to go for surrogacy. Asher and Noah are our biological children and God sent us an angel surrogate to carry our boys until they were born.

Also read: Sunny Leone on sons Asher and Noah: They are our biological children, born via surrogacy

Sunny, who will appear in a special dance number in Arjun Patiala (starring Kriti Sanon and Diljit Dosanjh), said in an interview to Hindustan Times, Ive also watched [dance numbers] while growing up. I was never told by my parents to change the channel because these are bad and I cant watch them. I, too, never felt that way. Most people in India are like me. Theres only a handful that reacts differently.

Sunny has appeared in dance numbers opposite several stars such as Shah Rukh Khan (Raees, 2017), Emraan Hashmi (Baadshaho, 2017), and Sanjay Dutt (Bhoomi, 2017).

Follow @htshowbiz for moreActor Varun Dhawan spent his Holi with family on Thursday. He shared pictures with girlfriend Natasha Dalal and parents David and Karuna Dhawan on Instagram.

Varun shared a picture of himself and Natasha on Instagram stories, sharing a hug. He wrote Happy Holi with the picture. Varun was seen in a white vest and blue shorts while Natasha was seen in a white top and colourful pants. Another picture showed his mother putting colour on his cheeks while his father gives them a hug.

Natasha is a fashion designer and has been in a relationship with Varun for a long time now. Varun confessed that the two are indeed dating, during an appearance on Koffee With Karan late last year. He said he is with Natasha Dalal because she has her own individuality, and he wants to be supportive of her dreams.

Also read: Delhi Crime review: Gut-wrenching, shocking; the best Indian Netflix show since Sacred Games

Where me and Natasha are concerned, I think, eventually, after we get married, we are together all that stuff, she has to, she has her own individuality, Varun said. Thats why Im with her because she has her own individuality, she has her own voice which is super strong with things she wants to do and things she wants to achieve in life. And, as her partner, that is something I want to support, you know. And, she has been so supportive where my career is concerned, always, from day one actually, he added.

Varun said: Because I have known her, we were in school together. We were just friends, we werent dating then. But since day one she has been supportive of my dreams and it has to be the same. It has to be equal from my side. From my side, I have to be supportive of her dreams also, or what she wants to achieve, or what she likes. Eventually, I think as a couple you want to evolve together.

The actor will also share a song from his upcoming release Kalank on Friday. Titled First Class, the song will also feature Kiara Advani.

Follow @htshowbiz for more392pp, Rs499; Penguin

If a womens courtyard is considered an enclosed inner space, this book is a canvas with streaks and splashes of unexpectedly vibrant colour and design. The women that inhabit the courtyard are strong and lifelike, and the qualities that each one epitomizes is perceived through her actions and speech. So while we never learn the given names of Amma (also known as Mazhars Bride) and Aunty, we experience them very clearly as real people.

This is a historical period and a segment of society where poets sing on the streets  but also where arrogance is native to wealth and privilege. Amma has been betrayed by her circumstances, and her constant taunts, bitter appraisals, never-ending self-pity and glorification are received with tolerance and even empathy simply because life has been cruel to someone who expected better. Her sister-in-law Najma, an MA in English and a working woman who in the 1940s arranges her own marriage (and later walks out of it), is vain and consistently demeaning of those she considers beneath her because they have not studied English. She flaunts elitist opinions such as, Only people who are incapable of getting a job know Arabic and Farsi. Najmas sister-in-law, Aunty, on the other hand, is that loving and giving woman  one whose eyes can be seen filled with centuries of grief  on whom every large household relies. Even when immersed in disappointment, loss and financial struggle, she labours on, almost always emanating warmth and kindness. Young Chammi  acknowledged as Shamima but once by the author  has the status of one whose mother died and whose father left to live elsewhere, his new life overrun by new wives and their offspring. Beautiful, unwanted Chammi, treated with love by Aunty, somehow became that wild, shrewish girl whose tantrums are feared to such an extent that when her marriage is arranged, no one dares to inform her. Kareeman Bua, who came with her mother in the mistresss dowry, lives a life of domestic servitude, devoted to the family, oblivious to scars formed by disproportionate rage on her body.

This book is not just about women and their cloistered existence; it also shows how global events infiltrate the courtyard and shape their lives. It is set in a period of Indian history of which authentic details have been so obscured by political propaganda and regressive patriotism, that what remains in textbooks and the general mindset is a trite caricature of what once truly was. Khadija Mastur was known for her own underprivileged background and her political views, and the lives and conversations in this book open a window on the actual terrain of the era. Here is a Muslim household, steeped in tradition and piety, and the nationalist reality portrayed is complex. There is an overwhelming love for country, which leads to sacrifice of family life and personal comfort, imprisonment, suffering and death. There is also an irreparable rift between members of the family, some of whom follow the Muslim League while others consider them traitors, believing that party to be an instrument of further divisiveness and a fundamental cause of inciting violence and continuing strife.

Read more: Author recounts her memories of turbulent Pakistan

The most enchanting voice in the book is of Aliya, the heroine, who shares her reality with the reader. Sensitive and thoughtful, Aliya feels the pain of the women  but just as much of the men and their inability to bring happiness to their families. The stories on which Aliya thrives mirror through romantic legend the lives of their characters, fueling their wellsprings of emotion and, more than once, resulting in ghastly tragedy. (Women would commit suicide for love and depart as examples of perfect fidelity, and then, some dark night, men would appear to momentarily light a lamp over the tomb, then leave, and that was that). Intertwined with the tradition of stories originating in Arabia runs a strong and persistent strain with the stories and symbols of Krishna and Rama making numerous appearances.

And the most beautiful scenes are as the book ends, in the newly-created Pakistan. The clamour and strife subside and wonderful fictional coincidences transpire, one bringing a tragic finality and another opening out onto a horizon of love and hope.

Saaz Aggarwal is an independent journalist. She lives in Pune.Jet Airways, on the verge of going belly-up, has suspended operations on as many as 13 more international routes till end-April, besides scaling down frequencies on seven other overseas routes, mostly from Delhi and Mumbai, according to airline sources.

The routes where services have been temporarily withdrawn include Pune-Singapore (seven a week), which was launched with much fanfare late last December, and Pune-Abu Dhabi (seven flights a week).

Jet Airways has already suspended services on the Mumbai-Manchester route.

Gasping for funds and no bailout on the horizon, the Naresh Goyal-controlled airline has now reduced its operations to one-fourth from over 600 daily flights earlier, with just one-third of its 119 fleet being operational.

The airline has discontinued services from Delhi to Abu Dhabi (nine a week), Dammam (14 weekly), Dhaka (11), Hong Kong and Riyadh (seven each a week) up to April 30, said the airline source.

Besides, the airline has also suspended services on the Bangalore-Singapore route, where it flies twice daily, till April 30.

The flights which have been suspended from Mumbai for this period include services to Abu Dhabi (12 weekly), Bahrain (4-7 weekly), and Dammam (14 weekly). These services will remain suspended till April 30, as per the source.

Similarly, flights on the Mumbai-Hong Kong (7 weekly) route will also not be operated between March 23 and April 30, while the Kolkata-Dhaka services have also been suspended till April 30.

In addition to this, services from Delhi and Mumbai to Kathmandu, Bangkok, Doha, Kuwait and Singapore have been also reduced significantly.

However, the airline has not yet informed the exchanges about these reduction and suspension of services.

PTI IAS BEN BENWith the widening of the Dabri-Palam road, over one lakh commuters using the stretch to enter Dwarka on a daily basis will now get relief from the gruelling traffic snarls, Delhi traffic police officials maintained.

A Dwarka court had, on March 14, vacated the permanent injunction it had passed against the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) in December 2016, restraining it from demolishing three shops in a building, situated in the middle of the slip road connecting Pankha Road to Dwarka.

The stretch had been witnessing snarls as the 150-feet-wide road shrinks to less than 20 feet at the point where the shops are located. The order, officials said, will help provide a much-needed route for entering Dwarka from west and north Delhi.

The widening of the road, traffic officials said, will not only ease congestion on the Pankha Road and Nala Road but will also provide relief to residents of Manglapuri, Dashrathpuri, and Dwarka sectors one, two, three, 11, and 12, who will now be able use the Pankha Road and ditch the incessant jams on the Dwarka flyover.

At present, the Dwarka flyover is the only way of entering the sub-city. Commuters usually do not prefer taking the Pankha Road because of jams near Sagarpur. Moreover, the building right below the Janakpuri flyover also blocks access, said a senior traffic official in the area.

The officer said removal of the shops will be a huge help in easing traffic snarls on Dwarka Mor. Vehicles turning towards Dwarka from Sagarpur are now met with the bottleneck below the Janakpuri flyover because of the building. From a four-lane carriageway, the road suddenly narrows to a single lane. The department has tried various measures to managing traffic on the stretch, and has finally placed barricades to direct the traffic through the narrow section of the road.

A senior PWD official said they will make a slip road on the stretch as soon as the land is handed over to them by the DDA. This will improve traffic flow and help manage spillovers.

Madhuri Kakoti, a resident of Dwarka sector 3, said though taking the Pankha Road from Delhi Cantonment is an easier way to reach her house from Delhi; she avoids the route because of traffic. She said, The move will help people like her.

Road design consultant Sudheer Upadhyay said, We do not have enough entry points to Dwarka. Most alternatives are riddled with encroachments. If authorities can find a solution, the traffic situation will improveIs the following an easy thing to imagine in the world of 2019? Three young, articulate, well-read members of a socialist revolutionary group, who court arrest in order to register protest against an Act passed by the imperial government; go on strike in prison to bring attention to the horrible state of prisoners; and are then hanged  all in their early twenties. That was Bhagat Singh (23 at the time of his death), who, along with his comrades, Sukhdev (23) and Rajguru (22), were hanged on this day in 1931. The arrest also brought to light, their earlier involvement in the killing of a policeman. In their deaths, they became immortal, underlining once again that the revolution will be led by the young; and inspiring generations of people to seize the day and fight for their beliefs.

In the coming election, the number of first-time voters in India is a staggering 15 million (to put things in perspective, thats more than the entire population of Switzerland and Finland put together). Most of them are between the ages of 18 and 25. It is at this age that Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru cut their teeth on the revolutionary ideologies that would make them household names. Even though we have come to know all three of them as committed revolutionaries, they were  not long before their deaths  just young kids, unsure about their future and struggling with everyday problems. To students in school and college  as many of the first-time voters of India might now be  Bhagat Singhs life would be a very recognisable one. In his famous essay titled, Why I Am An Atheist (written in 1930, in jail), he writes, I was never an industrious or studious boy[and] had certain pessimistic dispositions about [my] future career.

As members of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru were all politically aware individuals, instrumental in social mobilisation, and organised local political events. Bhagat Singhs commitment to the cause is evidenced in his letter to his father from prison in October 1930, in which he chides him for submitting a petition to the Special Tribunal in connection with his defence.

The lessons from the lives of these revolutionaries remain as relevant today as they were during the independence movement. Their lives are proof that one is never too young to be politically aware, to educate oneself about the truth of the world at large, and to actively play a role in shaping the society one wants to live in. Bhagat Singh the thinker, the revolutionary, and the philosopher continues to be a shining beacon for young people in India, and indeed, the rest of the world.The Madras High Court Thursday sought to know from the Centre and the Tamil government whether diabetic students can be allowed to carry required medicines like insulin while appearing for public exams.

Justices N Kirubakaran and S S Sundar of the Madurai Bench also asked if the governments had a proposal to include Type I Diabetes as a disability under the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act.

The bench was hearing a PIL seeking to direct the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the state education department officials to issue a circular enabling the Type I diabetic students to take tablets, chocolates, candy, fruits and insulin pump.

Besides, the petition also wanted the diabetic students to be permitted to attend natural calls as and when required while writing examinations.

Dr E subbiah, the head of the department of diabetology, and Dr S Rajakumar, chief civil surgeon in ESI hospital, who appeared in the court on the direction of the judges, agreed that the PIL prayer was important.

They said it was most important for the Type I diabetes students to carry insulin and also snacks in the examination hall.

The doctors said a sizeable population in the country was affected with Type I diabetes.

The judges posted the case for hearing on April 4 after asking the government to reply to a series of questions, including why not it come with a draft regulation to permit such students to carry tablets, sandwich, among others.

They also asked whether required number of diabetologists were available, if they were appointed in taluk level hospitals, or any camp had been conducted to identify Type I diabetes.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ONA minor held hostage by two Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba militants was killed by his captors in the Jammu and Kashmir town of Hajin, where security forces had launched an operation, the police said. The militants were killed in the operation.

The army,Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the police had launched the joint cordon-and-search operation in the Mimoh neighbourhood of the town on Thursday. The minor who died was identified as Atif Mir, a 12-year-old boy who studied in class VI at Army Goodwill School, the police and residents said.

The cordon covered the six houses of the Mir clan located close to one another on the main link road. At the time, two militants and six members were inside the three-storey house of Mohammad Shafi Mir, including his brother, son and other family members. I was at my shop when the search operation began in our locality. My minor son and my brother were inside the house and militants didnt allow them to leave, while others family members managed to escape from the house. In the afternoon yesterday, my brother also managed to escape, said Shafi Mir, who lost his only son.

The operation began in the morning and the forces could have ended it within a few hours, but the police and army officials present on the encounter site made every attempt to rescue my son. My son wasnt allowed to leave the house despite several pleas... 

To save the life of the boy, the police and army officers appealed to the militants through local village elders, asking the captors to release the boy. The appeals were made every few hours. The police and army tried to save the boy, but I dont know why the militants held him hostage. For this family it is going to be a lifelong pain, Nazir Ahmad, an uncle of the boy, said. This type of incident has never taken place here.

The mother, who was being consoled by relatives and neighbours, said: My brother-in-law, who was also held hostage along with my son, told me that he had pleaded with the militants to release his nephew but they refused. And when the militants got injured, my brother-in-law escaped from the house...

The operation ended on Friday morning and police the took bodies of the two militants and the minor boy with them. The body of the minor was handed over to family members in the afternoon.

The grave of the boy was being dug by his relatives some 500 to 600 metres away from his school. He (Aatif) was such a wonderful boy who didnt deserve to die this way. The security forces could have aborted the operation to save the boy. They would have killed the militants anytime after, said one of his neighbours.

Senior superintendent of police, Bandipora, Rahul Malik said the security forces had done everything possible to get the militants to release the boy and his uncle. The uncle eventually managed to escape.

A magistrate, too, had appealed that the boy be allowed to go but finally fire from that side intensified and we also retaliated and in process two militants, Ali and Hubaib, were eliminated, Malik said.

SSP Malik said the police received information from the rescued civilians that the minor boy was held hostage by Ali. He didnt allow the boy to go out and he killed the boy before we stormed the building.At least five militants, including two of the Jaish-e-Mohammed group, have been killed in the last 24 hours by security forces in three districts of the Kashmir valley, Indian Army and police officials said on Friday.

Two of the militants were killed in Baramullas Kalantara Payeen in north Kashmir, another two in Hajin in north Bandipora and one in Shopian in south Kashmir, they said.

The encounter between security forces and militants in Mir Mohalla area of Hajjin started around 10am on Thursday. Security forces comprising of units of the armys 13 Rashtriya Rifles, Central Reserve Police Forces (CRPFs) 45 Battalion and Jammu and Kashmir polices special operations group took part in the operation.

A gun battle also took place in Shopians Imam Sahib after security forces cordoned off the area following the information about the presence of militants. One of them was killed in the encounter.

A police spokesperson said on Friday one of the two militants killed in Kalantara Payeen in Baramulla has been identified as Aamir Rasool of Sopore and that the other was a Pakistani national. Both the bodies have been recovered and a search operation is in progress after the encounter started on Thursday, the spokesperson said.

According to the police records, both the killed terrorists were affiliated with proscribed terror outfit JeM and were wanted by law for their complicity in a series of terror crimes including an attack on security establishments and civilian atrocities. They were involved in conspiring and executing many terror attacks in the area. Several terror crime cases were registered against both the terrorists, the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said arms and ammunition, including AK 47 assault rifles, were recovered from the site of encounter. All these materials have been taken in the case records for further investigation and to probe their complicity in other terror cases, the officer said.

Citizens are once again requested not to venture inside the encounter zone since such an area can prove dangerous due to stray explosive materials. People are requested to cooperate with police till the area is completely sanitized and cleared of all the explosives materials if any, he said.

Another gunfight was also underway in Sopore between militants and security forces, police said. The firing exchanges took place in Warpora area of Sopore, the same site of an encounter where two policemen were injured on Thursday, and the area has been cordoned off they said.

Police said there were no reports of any casualties in this gun battle so far. All educational institutions in Sopore were closed and mobile internet services suspended as a precautionary measure.The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday raided AIADMK MP and Tamil Nadu Waqf Board Chairman Anwar Rajas house at Ramanathapuram and the Tamil Nadu Waqf Board premises at Chennai.

According to CBI sources, a five-member team carried out the raids at both places over the alleged irregularities in the appointment of staff and lecturers for a Waqf board-run college in Madurai. A person called Sardar Basha had petitioned the Madras High Courts Madurai Bench to pass orders for probing alleged irregularities. So Justice P Velmurugan had passed orders to CBI to conduct a probe into this issue in January, said a CBI officer. The CBI had been questioning Raja and his secretaries for the last two days.

The AIADMK had denied a ticket to Anwar Raja in this Lok Sabha polls as has given the Ramanathapuram seat to BJP. Raja was one among the 37 MPs to vote against Triple Talaq bill in the Parliament.

In spite of repeated attempts HT could not reach Raja.Multiple times each day, Chicago police officers encounter dangerous and potentially unstable situations in the name of creating a safer neighborhood for all Chicagoans. The department supports the officers measured response to a situation that could have deteriorated and put lives at risk. Our message to the offender  we know who you are, and you will be held accountable for your actions.Days after the death of south Kashmir teacher Rizwan Pandit in police custody, his purported friend has joined militancy and announced it on social media in a video.

A voice in the less-than-4 minute video behind a picture with name Shahid Manzoor claims that he was friends with Pandit and joined militancy as it was better to die than live a life where ones honour was not safe. While HT could not independently verify the authenticity of the video, a senior police officer said that they are looking into its contents.

...we will have to become like Shaheed Adil (suicide bomber who blew himself in a CRPF convoy in Pulwama in February), the voice claiming to be Shahid Manzoor, a resident of Awantipora, said.

...When I learnt that Rizwan was martyred, I joined militants... he said in the video along with text Hizbul Mujahideen and date of joining March 19.

Rizwan Pandit, a 29-year-old school teacher from south Kashmir, who was arrested in connection with a terror case on Sunday, died in police custody on Tuesday, triggering outrage and protests in the Valley. His family has since accused police of torturing him to death in custody.The central government on Friday banned the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), led by Yasin Malik, for allegedly funnelling funds into militancy and fomenting terrorism, in a move condemned by both separatist and political groups in the troubled Kashmir valley.

The ban was announced by Union home secretary Rajiv Gauba in New Delhi after a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), headed by the Prime Minister, the highest decision-making body on security-related issues.

JKLF led by Yasin Malik has spearheaded the separatist ideology in the valley and has been at the forefront of separatist activities and violence since 1989, Murders of Kashmiri Pandits by the JKLF in 1989 triggered their exodus from the valley. Yasin Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley, Gauba said, explaining the ban.

JKLF has many serious cases registered against it. This organization is responsible for the murder of four Indian Air Force personnel, the kidnapping of Dr. Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of the then Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed in December 1989. he said.

When asked what was the immediate trigger for the ban, Gauba chose not to answer. He said: The central government has followed the policy of zero tolerance against terrorism and has acted strongly against terrorists.

J&K police and other enforcement agencies have named the JKLF in as many as 37 first information reports. JKLF was banned under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967. Its proscription followed a ban imposed on the Jamaat-e-Islami (J&K) by the Centre in February.

The banning of JKLF is a clear message against the separatists and the Hurriyat who are linked to stone-throwing incidents in the valley. The JKLF aligned itself with the Hurriyat, and even though it has no mass following there is some sentimental connect with a section of people in the valley, said Avinash Mohananey, a former official of the Intelligence Bureau ,who has served in J&K and Pakistan.

The home secretary said a review of security of J&K-based separatists would continue. The government has withdrawn the security detail of several separatist leaders following the February 14 Pulwama terror attack in which 40 paramilitary troopers were killed.

Apart from the long history of violence, the Centre has noted with concern Maliks move of not facing the law, a senior home ministry official said, referring to the Maliks plea in court to shift the hearing of cases against him from Jammu to Srinagar.

Malik is at present lodged in Kot Balwal jail in Jammu, and is likely to face trial in the three-decade-old kidnapping of Rubaya Sayeed, and gunning down of four IAF personnel in Srinagar.

In Srinagar, moderate Hurriyat Conference leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said the ban will not change the reality over Kashmir issue. Strongly denounce the ban on JKLF after JeI. Such anti- Kashmir tactics will not change the reality of the Kashmir issue nor the urgency to resolve it, Mirwaiz tweeted.

Javeed Mir, one of the earliest members of the JKLF, who along with Malik, Ashfaq Majeed and Hameed Shiekh took to arms and became household names in the early nineties in Kashmir, linked the ban to upcoming general elections.

We think government of India is targeting separatists and youth here with an eye on coming elections. It is being done for petty political benefits, Mir, 58, who has given up militancy, said.

Former chief minister and Peoples Democratic Party president Mehbooba Mufti also denounced the ban.

Yasin Malik renounced violence as a way of resolving J&K issue a long time ago. He was treated as a stakeholder in a dialogue initiated by then PM (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee ji. What will a ban on his organisation achieve? Detrimental steps like these will only turn Kash(mir) into an open air prison, she tweeted.The Union health and family welfare ministry has issued draft amendments to the Clinical Establishments (Central Government) Rules, 2012, to regulate medical diagnostic laboratories and prevent them from making people undergo unnecessary investigations and diagnostic tests. Medical tests should normally be undertaken on the advice of a doctor, says the amended draft, which has been put up for public comment before it is notified in 45 days or so.

The rules are, however, in the nature of an advisory. They are not mandatory and no punitive action can be taken against those who flout them. It seems like a new marketing strategy, where some hospitals and labs ask people to undergo unnecessary tests as part of wellness packages at a discounted rate. The notification will address this unhealthy trend, a senior ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

The new rules make the authorised signatory on the diagnostic report liable only for the authenticity of the lab test, which must be analysed by a registered medical practitioner. The minimum requirement is an MBBS for basic tests; it could be more in case of interpreting advanced test results. There is a need to check the quality, said the official.

Since health is a state subject, the rules will be applicable only to states and Union territories that have adopted and ratified the Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Act, 2010.

This law allows for the registration and regulation of all clinical establishments in the country by setting minimum standards for facilities and services.

Since March 1, 2012, only 11 states and Union territories have adopted and ratified the law. The states are Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Sikkim, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam and Haryana and all Union Territories except Delhi.

Health is a state subject. States have to adopt the Act for the rules to be applicable. The rules can be taken as an advisory and act as points of reference for healthcare professionals, the health ministry official quoted above said.

Experts said this amendment has no relevance for states that have not adopted the Act. Theres a need to bring in uniformity in the healthcare delivery system, which is why the government needs to bring a legislation making health care a fundamental right, said Ashok Agarwal, advocate and activist of NGO Social Jurist.

We need a robust monitoring system for compliance and fixing accountability, he added.

Those into medical diagnostics business say the tests offered as part of packages are usually basic ones meant for screening high-risk people.

How will a common man go to a doctor if there are no symptoms? These tests are preventive tests meant for basic screening of liver, kidney, heart and other blood parameters. These are not specialised tests. If we are talking about a switch from illness to wellness, then we need to screen people to catch a disease early, said Dr Vandana Lal, executive director, Dr Lal PathLabs.After much delay, the grand alliance in Bihar on Friday announced a seat-sharing deal for the Lok Sabha elections. Under the arrangement, Rashtriya Janata Dal would contest 20 seats, with the Congress fighting in nine. The two national Left partiesCPI and CPMwere given a cold shoulder.

Under the arrangement, GAs other constituents like RLSP (Rashtriya Lok Samata Party) would contest five seats, Hindustani Awam Morcha (S) three seats and Vikashsheel Insaan Party (VIP) three seats. One seat has been offered to CPI-ML(liberation), a major Left force in Bihar, by the RJD from its own quota. CPI-ML is yet to respond to the offer.

The Congress having made a climb down from its demand of 11 seats and had to forgo its traditional Aurangabad seat as coalition leaders today announced that the seat had gone to HAM(S) led by Jitan Ram Manjhi. Former Governor Nikhil Kumar was vying for the ticket from the Aurangabad seat.

The non-allotment of seats to CPI or CPM has dashed hopes of former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student union president Kanhaiya Kumar of contesting from the Begusarai parliamentary seat as a grand alliance candidate.

Also read: Lok Sabha elections 2019: RJD to contest 20, Cong 9 seats in Bihar Grand Alliance poll pact

Opposition leader Tejashwi Yadav who was likely to announce the seat adjustment did not turn up at the press conference, which was addressed by RJDs Rajya Sabha MP and national spokesperson Manoj Jha, state RJD president RamChandra Purbe and Congress state president Madan Mohan Jha.

There were speculation Tejashwi skipped the event to evade questions on existing hitches on certain seats between RJD and Congress, a reason why the GA presser did not announce the names of seats to be contested by all allies. Only names of candidates of seats going to poll in the first phase were announced.

Congress has been given nine seats and would get the first seat of Rajya Sabha whenever there is a vacancy from Bihar as part of deal, Manoj Jha, adding that another ally and socialist veteran Sharad Yadav, a foe-turned-friend of incarcerated RJD chief Lalu Prasad, will contest the polls on a RJD ticket.

Sharad Yadav heading Loktantrik Janata Da(LJD) will also merge with RJD post the election, said Jha, signaling how the former NDA convenor has not been able to bargain much by joining the mahagatbhandhan. Sharad Yadav is likely to contest on a RJD ticket from Madhepura constituency, a seat he has represented several times.

In many ways, the seat-sharing deal has the imprint of Lalu Yadavs deft negotiations despite pressure from Congress to allot 11-13 seats.

In last few days, RJD and Congress had almost come to point of break-up over seat allotment but sources said senior Congress leaders and Congress boss Rahul Gandhi had the final say in clinching the deal.

Today, Congress state president Madan Mohan Jha did not make any official statement at the press conference related to the poll pact. We should have got at least 10 seats. Congress cannot be sidelined like that, said a state Congress leader.

The grand alliances seat-sharing exercise having gone for months has also clearly outlined that Lalu led RJD, commanding a sizeable share of votes with vote transferring ability of Yadavs and Muslims, is banking on smaller parties to take on BJP-JD(U) led NDA in the Lok Sabha polls.

On the question of the CPI-ML joining the grand alliance, the RJD spokesperson said the grand alliance had made the offer and is waiting for the left party to respond. If it accepts our offer, RJD would contest 19 seats, said, Jha.

On its part, CPI-ML state secretary Kunal said the party would consider the offer and take a decision in next two days. We will not say anything right now, he said.New Delhi decided to boycott the Pakistan Day reception after Islamabad did not respond to a message that Indian representatives would stay away if Hurriyat Conference representatives were invited to the event, people familiar with developments said on Friday.

The message was conveyed to Pakistans deputy high commissioner when he was called in to the external affairs ministry on Wednesday afternoon, the people said. The government waited till Thursday and decided not to send any official representative to the reception, held on Friday, after there was no response from the Pakistani side, the people added.

Pakistan Day, which commemorates both the passing of the Lahore Resolution on creating an independent country for the Muslims of British India in 1940 and the adoption of Pakistans first Constitution in 1956, is observed every year on March 23. The Pakistani mission in New Delhi decided to organise the reception this year on March 22.

No representative of the Indian high commission will also attend the reception to be held in Islamabad on Saturday, external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told a news briefing.

I can confirm that India has decided not to send any representative to attend the Pakistan Day (event in New Delhi). This decision was taken after the Pakistan high commission decided to invite the Hurriyat representatives to the reception, he said.

We are very clear that any attempt by the Pakistan high commission or the Pakistani leadership to engage with the Hurriyat representatives will not be taken lightly and this is what weve said in the past as well, Kumar added.

Since it came to power in 2014, the NDA government has frowned on Pakistans efforts to engage the separatist leaders of the Hurriyat. However, it has sent an official representative, usually a minister, to Pakistan Day receptions to which Hurriyat leaders were also invited.

Pakistans outreach to the Hurriyat has also led to the cancellation of official talks by India on two occasions since 2014. In January, India was angered by Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshis phone conversation with Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq about Kashmir-related events being held in London and officials had said at the time this amounted to crossing a red line.

During the briefing, Kumar also dismissed Pakistans criticism of the acquittal of the four accused in the 2007 Samjhauta Express train bombing, saying India has an independent judiciary whose functions are guaranteed by the Constitution. Due process was followed in the matter and the verdict was based on the merit of the case, the accounts of witnesses and others materials.

There was no cooperation from Pakistan whatsoever, including with the serving of summons to witnesses in Pakistan. We reject Pakistans attempt to politicise the matter, which is being done to deflect attention from their failure in bringing the perpetrators of several terrorist attacks in India and the region to justice, he said.

We demand that Pakistan take immediate, credible and irreversible measures against cross-border terrorism without any discrimination and without resorting to such gimmicks, he added.

Responding to a question, Kumar said France had taken up the issue of listing Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist by the European Union. This was done after Frances internal listing of Azhar as a designated terrorist.

We understand that the EU will take a decision once their process of designating a terrorist is complete. It has to be a unanimous decision which will involve all countries of the EU, he said.This is not jihad (armed crusade) but jahalat (benighted), a village elder pleaded to Pakistani terrorists in North Kashmirs Hajin area while asking them to release a 12-year-old boy who was held captive and subsequently killed on Thursday.

Videos of the village elder of Mir Mohalla of Hajin surfaced on social media, showing him asking the two Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists, Ali alias Furkan and Hubaib, to release Atif Mir.

The incident took place 33 km north of Srinagar where the terrorists had taken shelter in the boys house at gunpoint, police officials said on Friday.

The terrorists wanted to sexually abuse his sister but the family had helped her escape. This infuriated them and they started beating up the family members, including Atif and his old uncle Hameed Mir, they said. Hearing their cries, other people in the locality informed the police.

After assessing the situation, the police started rescuing the family. They managed to secure the release of the parents and other family members till they were fired upon by the holed up terrorists.

We knew that the boy and uncle were trapped inside and, so, we asked the villagers to appeal to the terrorists to release them, a senior official said.

Also read | 2 militants killed in encounter with Army personnel in J-Ks Baramulla

Speaking in Kashmiri, the village head was the first to ask the terrorists to release the innocent boy. Do whatever you want, but this is not Jihad but Jahalat. Please release the boy, he said.

The police also made an appeal through Aqeqa Begum, the wife of Hameed, who was virtually breathless as she asked the terrorists to release her husband and nephew.

Simultaneously, the police made a room intervention and brought Hameed out of the house. He told them that he was assaulted by the terrorists who hit him with iron rods and an AK rifle.

I tried my best to get my nephew out of this. I begged them but they remained unmoved, Hameed told the police.

As pressure mounted on the terrorists, they killed the helpless Atif, the police said, adding that the security forces later mounted a heightened operation and killed both the Pakistanis.

Ali had been active in the area for long and was involved in the killing of a BSF personnel and others, including death of a man whose throat was slit in front of his son.

Also read | Clashes erupt in south Kashmir after teacher dies in police custodyA Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Sajjad Khan, a close aide of Pulwama attack mastermind Muddasir was arrested here, police said on Friday.

Sajjad Khan (27), a resident of Pulwama was arrested near the Lajpat Rai market late Thursday night, they said.

Muddasir, the mastermind of Pulwama attack was killed in an exchange of fire with security forces in Jammu and Kashmir recently, Pramod Singh Kushwah, Deputy Commisisoner of Police (Special Cell) said.

Sajjad was tasked by Mudassir to establish a sleeper cell in Delhi, the officer added. Forty Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama district after a JeM terrorist rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into their bus, which was part of a convoy going to Srinagar from Jammu in February.A journalist of a news TV channel was attacked with knives and seriously injured in an attack in a restaurant Ganeshguri locality in Guwahati, police said Friday.

Chakrapani Parashar, a journalist of satellite news channel News18/AssamNE, was stabbed by some workers of a restaurant adjacent to his office when he was on duty on Thursday night, police said. Police have detained four accused in connection with the attack.

Parashar sustained serious injuries in various parts of his body and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he is stated to be out of danger, News 18/Assam NE editor Sanjoy Paul said.

Trouble began on Thursday afternoon when Parashar went with his unit to cover a fight between the main accused, who runs a restaurant in the same building as the news channel and some youths while playing Holi, News18 Assam/NE Deputy Manager (Operations) Aparup Barua said.

Though the news was not telecast, the restaurant owner started an argument with Parashar for covering the incident. In the evening when about five to six of our journalists, including Parashar, went to the restaurant to settle the matter amicably, the accused took out a dagger and stabbed him repeatedly, Barua said.

The accused has a criminal record and was arrested earlier too, he said.

Various political parties - national and regional and journalists organisations have condemned the attack on Parashar.

The Electronic Media Forum Assam (EMFA) has expressed concern over the attack and demanded stringent actions against the culprits. It also urged the state government to ensure security to media persons by enacting a special protection law at the earliest.

In a statement here on Friday, EMFA claimed that increasing instances of physical assaults are being reported from various parts of the country and the Centre should take the matter seriously.

It also appealed to all media persons across the country to be united over the issue.Karnataka minister CS Shivalli passed away in Hubballi on Friday after suffering a massive cardiac arrest.

Shivalli (58), a close associate of former chief minister Siddaramaiah, was elected from the Kundgol assembly seat in Dharwad district last year. He was made minister for the municipal administration in December last year, when the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) alliance went in for an expansion. A three-time MLA, Shivalli joined the Congress before the 2008 assembly elections having contested as an Independent candidate.

Karnataka Congress president Dinesh Gundu Rao expressed shock at the sudden passing of the minister. Shocked to hear the sudden demise of our minister Sri CS Shivalli. A truly grassroots, son of the soil poltician who served the people with great simplicity and commitment. A great loss for the Congress and for the Dharwad region, he tweeted.

Chief minister HD Kumaraswamy also conveyed his condolences. The death of minister CS Shivalli has caused me great pain. I am unable to believe that the person who was overseeing the rescue works in Dharwad over the past three days is no more, he tweeted.

Former chief minister Siddaramaiah said in a tweet that he was pained by the death of his friend of long-standing. He was a straight-forward and humble person.Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley launched a fresh attack at the Congress party after partys overseas wing head Sam Pitroda raised questions over the Indian Air Force strike on a terror camp in Pakistans Balakot.

Taking a swipe at the comments made by Pitroda, Jaitley trained his guns at Congress president Rahul Gandhi by addressing Overseas Indian National Congress chairman as his tutor.

Mr Sam Pitroda said what we did was wrong. No country has said so. Even the OIC did not say so. Only Pakistan said so. If someone, who toes that line comes to this country and becomes an ideologue of a party, it very unfortunate for the country, Jaitley told a press conference in New Delhi.

He said, If tutor holds such views then what his student, I think, will do what the present student is doing.

Jaitley said that Indias security doctrine has evolved under the Narendra Modi government.

He said the statement made by Pitroda is based on erroneous premise that there is a distinction between the non-state actors and state actors in Pakistan.

The Union minister said the non-state actors are an extended limb of the state actors in Pakistan. He said earlier Indian governments policy was to fight terrorists when they come to the country. The security doctrine has evolved under the present government, Jaitley said, since the UPA regime ended in 2004.

Now, we go and strike at the point of origin of terror, Jaitley said adding this approach of the government has received support from the international community. He alleged that the ideology of the Congress would India to fight terrorism with kid gloves and hands tied behind.

Pitroda, earlier in an interview to news agency ANI, raised questions over air strike by the Indian Air Force at a terror camp in Pakistans Balakot. Citing reports in American press, Pitroda sought to know facts related to Balakot strike.

The Congress leader also questioned the policy of carrying out an air strike across the border in response to terror attacks in India. Pitroda said incidents like Pulwama terror attacks happen all the time and it is naive to blame an entire nation (Pakistan) for the act of a few.

Jaitley responded to the comment saying, Mr Sam Pitroda will be very high in TRP on TV in Pakistan today.

Pitroda, who later clarified that he was not speaking on the behalf of the Congress party, created a fresh controversy on Friday morning drawing reactions from PM Modi, who posted a series of tweets to launch a counter-offensive on the opposition using Janta Maaf Nahin Karegi hashtag.

PM Modi said, Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!

Another tweet of the prime minster read, Opposition insults our forces time and again. I appeal to my fellow Indians- question Opposition leaders on their statements. Tell them- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics. India stands firmly with our forces.

The government and the opposition parties have traded charges in the election season over Pulwama attack and subsequent IAF strike on what was believed to be the biggest training centre of the Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistans Balakot. The JeM owned up the suicide attack on a CRPF convoy in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama on February 14 killing 40 soldiers.It absolutely depends on the context, she said. I totally agree its not something you would use as frequently as in the past. There are so many other ways to say the same thing without making it feel like its a secret or has some kind of negative connotation. But there are some times when thats the best phrase.Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday stepped up attack on the Congress after party leader Sam Pitroda sought more facts related to the Indian Air Force strike at a terror camp in Pakistans Balakot. In a series of tweets, PM Modi lashed out at the opposition alleging it has been insulting the armed forces.

PM Modi said, The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning Indias armed forces. Shame!

Pitroda, in an interview to news agency ANI, raised questions over the Balakot strike saying that international media did not agree with the claims made in India about the IAF action against terror camp in Pakistan. He also questioned the policy to launch air strike across the Line of Control. He said you dont jump on entire nation if some terrorists target a place in India.

Watch: Did we really killed 300 people?: Congress Sam Pitroda questions Balakot Strike

Reacting to Pitrodas comment, PM Modi said, Opposition insults our forces time and again. I appeal to my fellow Indians- question Opposition leaders on their statements. Tell them- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics. India stands firmly with our forces.

Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest, read another tweet posted by PM Modi.

Minutes after PM Modis attack, Pitroda clarified his remarks stating that he was speaking in personal capacity and not on the behalf of the Congress party.

I just said as a citizen I am entitled to know what happened. I am not talking on behalf of party, just speaking as a citizen. I have right to know, what is wrong in it, news agency ANI quoted Pitroda as saying.

The prime minister also hit out at Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav, who on Thursday said that Pulwama terror attack was a conspiracy in which soldiers were killed for votes.

Opposition is the natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners of our armed forces. This reprehensible statement by a senior leader like Ram Gopal Ji insults all those who have given their lives in protecting Kashmir. It humiliates the families of our martyrs, PM Modi wrote on Twitter.

A CRPF convoy was targeted in a suicide bombing on February 14 in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama killing 40 soldiers. Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility for the terror attack.

On February 26, the IAF carried a strike at a terror camp, believed to be the biggest training centre of the Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistans Balakot. The IAF later said that the mission was successful, which Pakistan denied.Congress leader Sam Pitroda raised questions about the Balakot air strikes on Friday, triggering a controversy that saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders launch an attack on the Congress and its chief, Rahul Gandhi.

Questioning the rationale for the February 26 air strikes deep inside Pakistani territory 12 days after the February 14 Pulwama suicide attack, Pitroda said one cannot jump on an entire nation (Pakistan) just because some people from there came here and attacked. In an apparent reference to the Pulwama attack, Pitroda, who heads the Indian Overseas Congress, said attacks happen all the time.

Referring to the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008 when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was in power, he said the then government could have sent its planes but that was not the right approach. He sought details from the Modi government on Balakot, citing foreign media reports that questioned claims on the number of terrorists being killed in the air strikes.

In response, Modi said: The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kickstarted the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning Indias armed forces. Shame!

Pakistan celebrates its National Day on March 23.

Modi also posted a series of tweets with the hashtag #Janta Maaf Nahi Karegi (people will not forgive): Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew  Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India  we will answer terrorists in a language they understand...! BJP chief Amit Shah tweeted: Difference between the opposition and BJP is clear. They suspect our army, we are proud of our army...Jaitley dubbed Pitrodas remarks unfortunate and a blessing for Pakistans narrative.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala countered saying his party had unequivocally said the Pulwama attack was a grave national security failure of the Centre.Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent his greetings to Imran Khan on the eve of Pakistan National Day on Friday, delivering a message of peace and calling upon people in the sub-continent to work together in an atmosphere free of terror and violence.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan tweeted the message that he had received from PM Modi.

In this message, according to the Pak PMs tweet, PM Modi said: It is time that ppl (people) of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive & prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence.

People familiar with developments in New Delhi described Modis message as a customary message sent to heads of government or state on national days and noted that the focus was on terrorism.

News of PM Modis message came hours after the External Affairs Ministry announced that the government would skip the Pakistan National Day reception held in New Delhi after Islamabad did not get respond to concern over its invitation to Kashmiri separatist Hurriyat Conference representatives.

Also read: India to skip Pakistan national Day event over invite to Hurriyat leaders

No representative of the Indian high commission will also attend the reception to be held in Islamabad on Saturday, external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told a news briefing.

Pakistan Day, which commemorates both the passing of the Lahore Resolution on creating an independent country for the Muslims of British India in 1940 and the adoption of Pakistans first Constitution in 1956, is observed every year on March 23. The Pakistani mission in New Delhi decided to organise the reception this year on March 22.

We are very clear that any attempt by the Pakistan high commission or the Pakistani leadership to engage with the Hurriyat representatives will not be taken lightly and this is what weve said in the past as well, Kumar added.

Since it came to power in 2014, the NDA government has frowned on Pakistans efforts to engage the separatist leaders of the Hurriyat. However, it has sent an official representative, usually a minister, to Pakistan Day receptions to which Hurriyat leaders were also invited.Two Tejas light combat aircraft will take part in the Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition (LIMA-2019) in Malaysia next week, at a time when the Southeast Asian country is planning to buy new fighter jets.

It will provide an opportunity to Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) to assess the capabilities of LCA, an Indian Air Force spokesperson said on Friday. The maritime and aerospace exhibition will be staged at Langkawi from March 26-30. The IAF said the Indian contingent, which left the Kalaikunda air base on Friday, consists of two Tejas fighters, a C-130J Super Hercules special operations plane, an IL-76 heavy lifter, 27 officers, 42 air warriors and 11 personnel from the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.

HAL chief R Madhavan had announced during Aero India-2019 last month that the state-owned plane maker was exploring opportunities to export the LCA to countries in the Asia Pacific and north Africa. The RMAF is planning to buy 12 new fighters, with an option for a follow-on order for another 24 jets.

Indigenious Dhanush guns to be inducted

The Indian Army will induct the first batch of the locally-made Dhanush guns at Jabalpur next week, as part of the forces much-delayed artillery modernisation programme, two officials said on the condition of anonymity on Friday. Manufactured by the Ordnance Factory Board, five 155mm 45-calibre Dhanush towed artillery guns will be inducted on March 26, and the raising of the first regiment with 18 guns is likely to be completed by the year-end, said one of the officials cited above.Indian authorities believe the case of fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya could serve as a template for ongoing efforts to extradite diamantaire Nirav Modi, who was arrested in London on Tuesday.

The Indian government has welcomed Nirav Modis arrest by the Metropolitan Police. He is the subject of an extradition request made by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

There is now a template that exists from Indias case for the extradition of Mallya. The Indian side has also been able to address the concerns of the UK judiciary about prison conditions in India. All of this should help in the efforts to extradite Nirav Modi, a person familiar with developments said on Friday.

Last month, UK home secretary Sajid Javid signed an order to extradite Mallya, wanted in India to face charges of financial irregularities running into thousands of crores of rupees. The beleaguered liquor tycoon has filed an appeal against the decision.

During a regular news briefing, external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said legal proceedings will take their own course in Modis case in line with the established practices in British courts.

The extradition request process has to be completed...there was no delay attributed to anything on the Indian side, he said. The government of India is committed to the expeditious extradition of Nirav Modi to India.

Kumar said UKs Crown Prosecution Service had informed India that a senior judge of the Westminster Magistrates Court had issued an arrest warrant for Modi on March 18. The Metropolitan Police arrested him in London on the evening of March 19, and the next day, he was remanded to judicial custody after a brief court hearing.

Also read | Nirav Modis sister Purvi Mehta helped divert 1,201 crore using shell firms: EDA six in the last over of a match can easily change the result. Six parties, although controlling only a few pockets or specific communities, wield a similar power in Maharashtras Lok Sabha battle, with a potential to upset the calculations of the four major parties  the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shiv Sena, Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).

Of the six, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) has decided not to contest the elections, but campaign against the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for misleading people. The Peasants and Workers Party (PWP) and Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana (SSS) will be part of the Congress-NCP-led Opposition coalition, while the Bahujan Vikas Aghadi (BVA) is expected to have a strategic understanding with the Opposition coalition. Ramdas Athawale-led Republican Party of India (A) will support the BJP-Shiv Sena, as it is part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), while another Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar has formed the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) and decided to contest all seats without any alliance with the ruling or Opposition parties.

Raj Thackeray not a Modi fan anymore

The MNS, considered a major force in the 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha polls, has lost much of its clout in the past few years. The party attempted to get into an alliance or seat adjustment with the NCP, but the bid fell through owing to the strong objection of the Congress, which does not want to antagonise its North Indian votes in Mumbai. Once a fan of Modis style, party chief Raj Thackeray is set to campaign against him. While he claims he will not support any party, Thackeray seems to have worked out an understanding with the NCP. Thackeray claims he doesnt care who will reap the benefits of his campaign, but he wants to ensure the BJP government at the Centre is defeated.

Ambedkar remains a riddle for Cong-NCP

The Vanchit Bahujan Aaghadi (VBA) seems to be the most formidable force among smaller parties, evident from the huge turnout in the rallies addressed by its chief Prakash Ambedkar. Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslameen (AIMIM) is a part of the VBA.

The Congress-NCP wanted the VBA to join its grand alliance, but Ambedkar played hardball. He upped his initial demand of 12 seats to 22. Ambedkar demanded Baramati and Nanded, strongholds of NCP chief Sharad Pawar and state Congress president Ashok Chavan. The Congress-NCP found these demands impractical. It is clear that Ambedkar is working on someone elses script. There is no point talking to him now, said a senior Congress leader.

Ambedkar insists that he is looking to chart an independent course and the allegations of joining hands with other parties to defeat the Congress are not new to him.

The VBA has influence in parts of central Maharashtra, Vidarbha and Mumbai-Thane region. It is targeting the backward classes and Muslim votes, which could affect the prospects of the Congress-NCP candidates and benefit the BJP. Ambedkar, who was in hibernation for years, found his calling when he led the agitation against the attacks on Dalits on January 1, 2018. His series of agitations struck a chord with Dalits and increased his stock in the community.

PWP joins opposition ranks

The PWPs presence is limited to Raigad district and a few pockets in western and central Maharashtra. The party has decided not to contest the Lok Sabha elections and instead support the Congress-NCP coalition.

Their votes will be crucial for the Congress-NCP in at least four constituencies  Raigad, Maval, Madha and Kolhapur.

Raju Shetti: Will he, wont he join the opposition camp?

For years, Raju Shetti, the strongest farmers leader in the state, fought against the sugar barons of western Maharashtra to ensure better purchase prices for cane growers. In 2014, he joined the BJP-led front against the Congress-NCP government and was re-elected from Hatkanangale constituency in Kolhapur district. However, he remained at loggerheads with the BJP governments at the Centre and in the state over farm loan waiver and prices for sugarcane farmers for the past couple of years.

Expectedly, he quit the NDA in 2017. Thanks to the alliance, the BJP made one of his aides, Sadabhau Khot, a minister in the state government. Khot refused to leave the NDA, and there was a split in the SSS.

However, Khot couldnt take away more than a few SSS workers.

The SSS, although in the Congress camp, is unhappy with the seat distribution and has threatened to contest 15 seats on their own if they dont give three Lok Sabha seats to the Swabhimani Paksh, the political wing of Shettis farmers outfit.

Shettis entry into the Opposition coalition will be a boost for the Congress-NCP, as he has influence over farmers across western Maharashtra and some other parts of the state.

Thakur takes the middle path in Vasai-Virar

Hitendra Thakur, a controversial legislator from Vasai, has maintained his hold over the Vasai-Virar belt in Mumbais neighbourhood and also has influence over Palghar. Thakurs Bahujan Vikas Aaghadi (BVA) has three MLAs in Maharashtra. In 2009, his nominee, Baliram Jadhav, was elected from the Palghar Lok Sabha constituency. In 2014, Thakur supported the BJP government in the state. However, the byelection to the Palghar Lok Sabha constituency, necessitated after the death of the sitting BJP MP, Chintaman Wanga, changed things.

The BJP fielded former Congress minister Rajendra Gavit, who defeated BVAs Jadhav.

In the seat-sharing negotiations for 2019 polls, the BJP has given the seat to the Shiv Sena. Thakur has sought the Congress-NCPs help to contest from Palghar. He doesnt want to formally join the Opposition coalition, but wants the two parties not to field any candidate in Palghar. Thakur enjoys the support of non-Maharashtrian voters, especially Gujaratis and North Indians, in the Vasai-Virar belt.

According to his aides, the BVA can get the anti-Sena votes, if they are not a part of the Opposition coalition. With the Congress-NCP inclined to support him, the saffron combine may have to brace for a new challenge.

Unhappy Athawale to support BJP?

Republican Party of India (Athawale) chief Ramdas Athawale is unhappy that he was not given a seat by the BJP in this Lok Sabha election. However, it is unlikely that he will go against the NDA. The Union minister will continue to support the BJP-led front.

The RPI (A) has a strong influence on Dalit voters in the Mumbai-Pune belt as well as several parts of Maharashtra. Significantly, a section of Dalit masses is unhappy with Athawale for not taking a strong stand during the controversy over Bhima-Koregaon violence and the failure of the Maharashtra government to arrest those behind the violence against Dalits. Still, Athawales campaigning will definitely prove to be an advantage for NDAs candidates in several parts of Maharashtra.

According to political analyst Prakash Bal, these parties will have limited role in the elections, as their influence is limited to a seat or two.

Raj Thackeray may look to split some votes of the Shiv Sena, if the MNS contests the elections, but we are unsure of the damage he can cause. Prakash Ambedkars popularity seems to be exaggerated. It is clear that Ambedkar does not want a tie-up with the Congress and is making unreasonable demands, said Bal.

Athawale does not have much influence in the current set-up and the BJP will pacify him in the coming days.

Also Read | Lok Sabha elections 2019: Maharashtra set for two-cornered contestAhead of next months Lok Sabha elections, the Shiv Sena is diluting its sons-of-the-soil stance and attempting to warm up to the citys north Indian, Gujarati, Marwari and Jain communities. In an attempt to strike a chord with the north Indian community, Yuva Sena chief and Sena leader Aaditya Thackeray addressed a gathering on eve of Holi and said the Sena could never oppose the Prime Minister, who gets elected from Kashi (Varanasi).

The Sena, which has come up with anti-north Indian and anti-south Indian campaigns in the past, now intends to change its image and move towards a broader ideology of Hindutva. In November 2018, Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray visited Ayodhya and reached out to north Indians to shake off its old image.

In a short speech on Wednesday evening in Mira Road, Aaditya Thackeray said he had come to seek blessings before the start of campaigning for the polls. People cannot be divided into north Indians or south Indians. For me, everybody is an Indian and everybody is ours here. Therefore Ive come here today. Many of you have spent more time in Maharashtra; speak better Marathi than I do. Then how can we differentiate. We are one, Thackeray said at an event organised by Sena MLA Pratap Sarnaik.

Sena, in the past, has contested elections on the pro-Marathi plank. However, the party has mellowed its stance and is now attempting to woo this section of voters too. Thackeray, while addressing the crowd in Marathi, added, I was asked if I will speak in Hindi. I will speak in English, Hindi, Marathi or French because here language is not important, but what is said from the heart. We in Maharashtra speak Marathi; Uddhav ji spoke in Hindi in Ayodhya.

Mira-Bhayander, which has a sizable north Indian, Gujarati and Marwari population, is part of the Thane Lok Sabha constituency that is held by Senas Rajan Vichare. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) holds the Mira- Bhayander Assembly seat. According to the 2011 census, Mira-Bhayander has over 68.96% Hindus and 5.67% Jains, apart from having a large chunk of north Indian migrants. Post an alliance with the BJP, the Sena is expected to gain these votes for its candidate in the Lok Sabha election. I am proud of the fact that we consider each other as one; we will help each other out I have not come here to make a political speech... I will only say that this colour (pointing to his saffron kurta), is what binds us, it is in our blood. We will not let it fade away, Thackeray said.

Thackeray said the Sena would win all 23 seats that it is contesting. The media asks us why we went for an alliance [with the BJP]. What we did is in front of everybody to see, but more importantly, how can we oppose the Prime Minister, who gets elected from Kashi (Varanasi)? How can we stand against him? We are standing by his side now, he said.Baijayant Panda, perhaps the second-most known Odia in Delhi after Naveen Patnaik, will be the most-watched candidate in Odisha as he will contest from Kendrapara constituency on a BJP ticket in the Lok Sabha election 2019.

The four-time BJD lawmaker was forced out of the ruling party last year following growing differences with chief minister Naveen Patnaik but sprang a surprise early this month when he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Quick to capitalise on his popularity in coastal Odisha, Modi-Shah duo made him the BJPs national vice-president at par with other senior party leaders like Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Vasundhara Raje Scindia. The BJP hopes the 55-year-old helicopter pilot-turned-politician would add the much-needed strength to the partys challenge against deeply entrenched Biju Janata Dal thanks to his connection with the youth and a suave personality.

A graduate from the Michigan Technological University in the United States, Baijayant Panda belongs to the first generation of entrepreneurs in Odisha once more known for mind-numbing deprivation and lack of entrepreneurial skills. His father Bansidhar Panda was a highly-respected industrialist, who started a ferroalloys industries in the southern Odisha district of Rayagada in the 1960s at the insistence of his close friend and former chief minister Biju Patnaik.

Thereafter, the friendship between the Patnaiks and Pandas flourished with Baijayant Pandas mother Ila Panda becoming the Rajya Sabha MP from the erstwhile Janata Dal between 1992 and 1998. The family friendship carried on till the next generation with Naveen Patnaik sending Baijayant Panda to the Rajya Sabha twice between 2000 and 2009. In 2009, Panda chose to resign from the Rajya Sabha to successfully contest from Kendrapara Lok Sabha constituency which he won again in 2014.

Long regarded as an articulate voice of the BJD in television studios in Delhi, Baijayant Panda became the bete noire for Naveen Patnaik after the 2014 polls as a perception grew that the Kendrapara MP was more of a Modi man. Baijayant Pandas numerous newspaper articles and TV debates extolling several policies of Modi including demonetisation did not go down well with Patnaik.

So bitter was the fallout that last year that when Bansidhar Panda died at the age of 87, Naveen Patnaik did not visit his house to pay his last respects. Baijayant Panda was at the receiving end when the state police seized one of his choppers and summoned him over allegations that he flew over the eco-sensitive Chilika lake with two Delhi-based journalists in September last year.

Apart from his suave image, Pandas biggest asset is the 21-year-old Odia TV channel that his wife Jagi Mangat owns and is likely to challenge the political narrative set by several pro-government TV channels and newspapers in the run-up to the elections. OTV owned by Jagi Mangat has perhaps more TRPs than all of the Odia TV news channels put together.

Baijayant Panda would play a key role in highlighting the failures of the BJD government through hundreds of meeting which he can easily attend using his choppers. A resourceful politician, Pandas choppers would come in handy for the BJP leaders during the election campaign.

Kendrapara is the plumbing capital of Odisha, perhaps even of all India, as the plumbers deftly fixing the leaky taps and pipes in metros invariably hail from the coastal Odisha district. But its also the political capital of Odisha that has long been the bastion of anti-Congress politics in the state.

After Independence, the Congress won the seat just once when its veteran leader Nityananda Kanungo won the Kendrapara seat in 1952. Later, Kendrapara became a bastion for anti-Congress parties as Socialist leader Surendranath Dwibedy won four times consecutively from the Lok Sabha constituency on a Praja Socialist Party ticket.

Former chief minister Biju Patnaik won three times from Kendrapara by contesting as a Janata Party candidate twice and once as the Bharatiya Lok Dal candidate. Since 1952, many prominent Congress leaders of Odisha like late Basant Biswal, Bhagabat Mohanty, Surendra Mohanty, Batakrushna Nayak, Srikant Jena and Archana Nayak have been defeated from Kendrapara as Congress candidates.

With huge resources at his disposal, the BJPs national vice-president would surely mount an aggressive campaign against the yet to be decided BJD candidate from Kendrapara. Between 2009 and 2019, Panda has done well to be in touch with his electorate, standing them during their hour of distress while taking care to publicise his benevolence through Facebook posts.

If Panda wins, it would mean a personal defeat of Patnaik and may lead to interesting equations in Odisha politics.The Grand Alliance in Bihar on Friday announced its seat sharing pact for 40 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state capping days of discussion among leaders of constituent parties.

According to the pact announced in Patna, Lalu Prasads Rashtriya Janata Dal will contest 20 seats, Congress 9, RSLP 5 and Jitan Ram Manjhi-led HAM-S three seats. The Vikasheel Insaaf Party has got three seats and the CPI-ML Liberation one from the RJD quota.

In another important decision, Sharad Yadav has decided to contest on RJDs lantern symbol and will merge his party Loktantrik Janata Dal with Lalus party after elections, RJDs Manoj Jha announced at a press briefing.

It was also decided that first vacancy that comes up in Rajya Sabha in the state will be filled up by a Congress candidate.

Senior leaders of the Congress were in talks with Grand Alliance or Mahagathbandhan partners the past few days to iron out last-minute differences.

The talks were reportedly stuck over the RJD asking the Congress to contest in nine seats instead of 11. It also wanted to allocate more seats to allies like RLSP and HAM-S, much to the discomfort of Congress.

Besides the dispute over number of seats to be contested, the RJD has asked to Congress to reconsider its plan of fielding candidates from Katihar, Darbhanga, Motihari and Valmikinagar, while RLSP is keen to contest from Karakat for which RJD has been preparing for many months.

The GA seat-sharing comes six days after the NDA announced the seats to be contested by each of its three allies in Bihar. The Janata Dal(United) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are contesting on 17 seats each while the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) will contest on six.

Bihar will vote in all the seven phases of the Lok Sabha election 2019. In the first phase, polling will be held in four constituencies on April 11 and in phase two, five seats will vote on April 18. In phase three, five constituencies will vote on April 23 and five seats will vote in the fourth phase on April 29.

The fifth phase will be on May 6 when polling will be held on five seats. Eight seats will vote in phase six on May 12 and the last phase will also see polling on eight seats on May 19.Sharad Yadav to contest on RJD symbol in Bihar

Sharad Yadav to contest on RJD symbol and merge his Loktantrik Janata Dal with the party after the Lok Sabha polls : RJD national spokesman Manoj Jha.

Twenty seats for RJD, 9 for Congress in Bihar seat-sharing deal

Twenty seats for RJD, 9 for Congress in Bihar mahagathbandhan poll deal

Mahagathbandhan is a natural alliance: RJD

Mahagathbandhan is a natural alliance... it is to save the Constitution, says RJD spokesperson, Manoj Kumar Jha.

RJD-Congress seal seat-sharing deal in Bihar

RJD-Congress seal seat-sharing deal in Bihar

Staring at defeat, Cong has lost balance: BJPs Ravi Shankar Prasad

Staring at defeat, Congress has lost balance,said BJPs Ravi Shankar Prasad.

Rahul absent from PC, knew report presented by Cong had no base: BJP

Rahul Gandhi was not present at the press conference because he knew the media report presented by Congress had nothing substantial, said Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

I-T dept already proved documents are forged: BS Yeddyurappa

Congress party and its leaders are bankrupt of ideas, they are frustrated with growing popularity of the Modi ji, they have lost the battle before it began. I-T Department officials have already proved that the documents are forged and fake, said BJPs BS Yeddyurappa, reported news agency ANI.

Diary released by Congress is fake, tweets Karnataka BJP

Randeep Surjewala just wasted good amount of media personals time talking absolute nonsense & releasing fake diary written & scripted by Congress themselves



Handwriting & the signature on the dairy released by @INCIndia is as fake as the diary itself.



Here is the proof  pic.twitter.com/tVjxnQHyfN  BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) March 22, 2019

LK Advani opted out of Lok Sabha race, sounded out BJP about retirement

A decision to field Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah from Gandhinagar in Gujarat was taken after veteran Lal Krishna Advani, 91, told the party leadership he was unwilling to contest the April-May parliamentary election, a person familiar with the issue said.

Advani told the party three-four days back that he will not contest, added this person who is close to the BJP leader and who did not wish to be identified.

Once he communicated that decision to the party, it was up to them to decide who it wanted to field.

PM should come forward and say whether this diary is wrong or right: Congress

PM @narendramodi should come forward and say whether this diary is wrong or right, whether 1800Cr bribe was received or not: @rssurjewala #YeddyurappaDiaries  Congress Live (@INCIndiaLive) March 22, 2019

PM must confirm authenticity of Yeddyurappa diary seized in IT raids: Congress

The diary which contains entries with @BSYBJPs signatures was available with IT department from 2017, is this true or not? If this diary wasnt legitimate, why didnt Modi govt agree for investigation, asked Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala in a special press briefing.

IT Department sought permission to investigate this diary from ED, but, Modi govt refused to permit. Is this true or not? : @rssurjewala #YeddyurappaDiaries  Congress Live (@INCIndiaLive) March 22, 2019

If there is no truth in this diary, why isn't @narendramodi ready for an investigation? Now, even the Lokpal is appointed. Why can't the first independent investigation be on this issue? : @rssurjewala #YeddyurappaDiaries  Congress Live (@INCIndiaLive) March 22, 2019

Probe Yeddyurappa diary on bribes seized in IT raids, says Cong

Is it true or false? The diary with BS Yeddyurappas sign on it was with the Income Tax Department since 2017. If that is the case why did Modi ji and BJP did not get it investigated?, asked Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala, reported news agency ANI.

Congress accuses BJP leaders of corruption

While addressing a special press conference today Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala accused BJP leaders of corruption.

BS Yeddyurappa made payouts to senior BJP leaders during his tenure as Ktaka CM. It (Yeddy diaries) mentions names of senior BJP leaders from Rajnath Singh to Jaitley. There is an allegation of bribe of Rs 1800 crore on the top BJP leadership, said Randeep Surjewala in a special press conference, reported news agency ANI.

Randeep Surjewala addresses Congress special press conference

Randeep Surjewala addresses Congress special press conference

Rahul Gandhis press conference deferred to 2 pm

Congress chief Rahul Gandhis special press conference has now been deferred to 2 pm instead of 1 pm at the AICC headquarters in Delhi.

Gautam Gambhir meets BJP chief Amit Shah

We will destroy the terror bases wherever it will perpetrate: Arun Jaitley

We will destroy the terror bases wherever it will perpetrate. Both Surgical strike and Air strike were meant to do that. We were supported by global leaders in our attempts, said Arun Jaitley.

Unfortunate such people are ideologues of a political party: Jaitley on Sam Pitrodas remark

He believes what we did was wrong. No country in the world said this, not even the OIC(Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) said this, only Pakistan was of this view. Unfortunate such people are ideologues of a political party, said finance minister Arun Jaitley on Sam Pitrodas airstrike remark.

Close confidant of Rahul Gandhi and Chairman of the Overseas Indian National Congress had earlier questioned the death toll in the Balakot airstrike conducted by the Indian Air Force in Pakistan in retaliation to the Pulwama terror attack.

Cant win by playing on back foot: Arun Jaitley

A match cant be won by playing on back foot, said finance minister Arun Jaitley on IAF strike in Balakot.

No country in the world criticised the IAF strike: Arun Jaitley

No country in the world criticised the IAF strike on Jaishs Balakot camp in Pakistan, said Arun Jaitley.

Inspired by PMs vision, former cricketer Gautam Gambhir joins BJP

Im inspired by Pms vision and work. I hope to do good work, said former cricketer Gautam Gambhir as he joined the BJP on Friday.

People of excellence joining party: Jaitley as Gambhir joins BJP

Former cricketer Gautam Gambhir on Friday joined the BJP in the presence of Union ministers Arun Jaitley and Ravi Shankar Prasad.

Cricketer Gautam Gambhir likely to join BJP today

Cricketer Gautam Gambhir is likely to join BJP today at around 12 pm.

Dhinakaran releases final list of 14 AMMK candidates for LS polls in TN

The Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) headed by TTV Dhinakaran Friday announced its second and final list of 14 candidates for the April 18 Lok Sabha elections in Tamil Nadu.

The list included three disqualified AIADMK MLAs owing allegiance to Dhinakaran, who floated the AMMK after being sidelined in the ruling party.

The AMMK is contesting 38 of the 39 seats in the state and Dhinakaran had earlier announced candidates for 24 seats.

It has alloted Chennai Central constituency to its ally Social Democratic Party of India.

Rahul Gandhis press briefing deferred to 1 pm

Congress president Rahu Gandhi will now address a press conference at 1 pm Friday. The briefing was earlier scheduled to take place at 10:15 am.

BJP announces names of 10 Lok Sabha candidates, 100 assembly nominees in Odisha

The BJP has announced its candidates for ten of the 21 Lok Sabha seats and 100 of the 147 assembly constituencies rewarding deserters like former BJD lawmakers Baijayant Panda and Balabhadra Majhi and BJD MLAs Prakash Behera, Damodar Rout and K Narayan Rao.

But the Bharatiya Janata Party is yet to declare the names of candidates for Kalahandi and Koraput Lok Sabha seats, which will go to polls in the first phase on April 11 along with Nabarangpur and Berhampur.

Voting in Odisha will be held in four phases on April 11, 18, 23 and 29 simultaneously for parliamentary and assembly constituencies. The results will be declared on May 23. The BJP had won one Lok Sabha seat and ten assembly seats in Odisha in the last elections.

AMMK releases 2nd list

TTV Dhinakarans Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) on Friday released its second list of candidates contesting Lok Sabha elections from Tamil Nadu .

Rahul Gandhi to address press conference at 10: 15 am

Ahead of Lok Sabha elections 2019, Congress national president Rahul Gandhi will today address a press conference at the party headquarters in Delhi .If a pothole damages your car, you may be able to get compensation from the city for some or all of the costs. Instructions on how to file a claim are on the city clerks website at www.chicityclerk.com/community-affairs/claims. For auto damage, you need to complete a claim form, submit two written estimates for the cost of repairing damages or a copy of the paid receipt for repairs, and get a police report.The Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday rejected the bribery charge levelled by the Congress, which referred to a media report to allege that the top leadership of the ruling party was paid a bribe of 1,800 crore.

BS Yeddyurappa, who was at the centre of the Congresss allegations, dismissed the charge calling it absolute nonsense, disgusting and desperate efforts by the opposition party. He also threatened with a defamation case.

Calling the diary fake, Yeddyurappa said, Prove it at the earliest or face defamation case.

The Congress party and its leaders are bankrupt of issues and ideasThe IT department officials have already probed the issue to find that the documents and signatures and handwritten notes are forged one, said Yeddyurappa.

Also Read | For brand-new Lokpal, Congress suggests its first case - Yeddyurappa diary

Union minister and senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad followed up the counter-attack on the Congress by Yeddyurappa. He said the Congresss charge is an attempt to divert peoples attention from the embarrassment the party faced due to statement by Sam Pitroda, the chairman of the Overseas Indian National Congress, over Balakot strike.

Prasad said, The Congress party, where in many top leaders are out on bail and suffering many court proceedings, has now resorted to create a web of lies.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala, earlier, demanded investigation by the newly appointed Lokpal into the allegation of bribes paid to top BJP leaders. He said it was a fit case for probe by the Lokpal as it involves allegation of corruption by those who have run the government in the last five years.

Presenting the BJPs counter, Prasad said the diary cited by the Congress to level allegations came into picture when the Income Tax Department conducted raids on senior party leader and Karnataka minister D Sivakumar in 2017.

When the IT officials asked Sivakumar to authenticate the diary, he refused to do so saying he is not sure about the genuineness of the documents, the Union minister told a press conference in New Delhi.

Will the Congress party now do its politics only on false, lies and misrepresentation, he said before linking the opposition partys demand for a probe into the report published by news magazine, Caravan under Yeddy Dairies with the statement made by Sam Pitroda over strike by the Indian Air Force at a terror camp in Pakistans Balakot.

Pitroda had raised questions over Balakot strike in the aftermath of Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF jawans were killed in February. The Congress leader referred to some international media reports seeking more facts about Balakot strike.

Also Read | Did we really attack: Congress leader Sam Pitroda questions Balakot strike

Prasad said the Congresss renewed attack over the bribery charge is an attempt to divert attention from Pitroda. It is the BJPs charge that the Congress has used the allegations to divert attention of the nation from the ridicule Sam Pitroda brought to the party with his statement since morning.

What is the conclusion? The Congress is desperate. In the view of imminent defeat of stark defeat (in the Lok Sabha polls), it has lost its balance, Prasad said.The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday arrested Dubai-based jeweller Abdul Kadir Najmudin Sathak for assisting Islamist preacher Zakir Naik raise and divert funds from dubious sources in the Middle East, including 79 crore for the production of videos for Naiks channel, Peace TV. The agency is expected to file a charge sheet soon. Sathak was remanded in ED custody till March 27.

In the remand application made before the special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court, the ED said Sathak was also a director of the Dubai-based Global Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), which owned Peace TV, a channel run by Naik.

GBC routed 79 crore to Harmony Media Pvt Ltd in Mumbai, which made the content for Peace TV. Two of Harmony Medias directors are Naiks aid Amir Gazdar, who was arrested in February 2017, and Naiks sister, Mailah Noorani. The source of funds remitted by GBC to Harmony is suspicious as there was no advertisement run of this channel and Sathak has not submitted any details of the same, said the ED.

Sathak has claimed GBC made its money from donations received from corporations owned by the crown prince and other members of the royal family of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It, therefore, appears that the UAE and other emirates funded the Peace TV and the content production for the Peace TV channel for reasons beyond pious religious activity, stated the ED.

Sathak has been in India since December 2017 , when to go to Chennai from Dubai, he travelled via Kathmandu, Gorakhpur and Varanasi. This amply shows that he was only trying to hoodwink the investigating authorities in India in order to avoid being detected/detained, stated ED in the remand report. Sathaks lawyer said that Sathaks travel itinerary was irrelevant to the case and that he had approached the Madras high court to cancel the look-out circular issued by the ED against Sathak. The ED had also seized his passport.

Between 2004 and 2017, Naik, who is currently believed to be in Malaysia, raised donations of approximately 65 crore from the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and India. He raised another 49 crore from dubious sources in Dubai and used the money to book at least 20 flats in Mumbai and Pune, often in the name of his wife, son, mother, father and sister. The agency has already attached assets worth 51 crore.Five Vasai residents who had gone to wash off the colours after a Holi celebration drowned in the sea at Kalambh beach in Nalla Sopara on Thursday evening.

While none of them could swim, there was no lifeguard at the beach.

The eight from the Mourya and Gupta families, neighbours in Gokul Park society in Vasai, reached the beach around 2.30pm.

Six of them got into the water during high tide, according to the rescue teams. At the time of going to press, body of a boy  Prashant Mourya, 17,  was recovered at Bhuigaon, two km from the spot.

Appasaheb Lengare, inspector, Arnala police station, said, Dinesh Gupta, 36, who is around six-ft tall, found that the water levels were rising owing to the high tide. He told his wife, Sheetal, 32; Nisha Mourya, 36; her daughter, Priya Mourya, 19; her son, Prashant, 17, and relative Kanchan Gupta, 35, to return to the shore. But before they could rush back to safety, all five of them were washed away. Only Dinesh came back safe.

The police have registered a case of accidental death and Prashants body has been sent for post-mortem.

Michael Lopez, a fireman with the Vasai fire brigade, said, Every year, hundreds of Holi revelers come to the sea to wash off the colour. The saline water works better than a facewash or soap. There was no lifeguard or warning signboards at the spot.

Meantime, the Coast Guard and fire brigade will continue the search on Friday morning, said Lengare.

The Kalambh beach is an isolated spot in Nirmal village in Nalla Sopara and is a favourite among picnickers.

It is the fourth beach connected in a row to Arnala, Navapur, and Rajodi beach in Palghar district. The beach is clean and is known for its grey, thick

sand.

Holi celebrations: 60 revellers injured in Mumbai, up from last years 52

At least 60 Holi-related injuries were reported across major hospitals in the city on Thursday. Last year, the figure was 52.

Doctors at KEM Hospital in Parel treated 27 patients for injuries ranging from eye irritation, fractures, sprains, abrasions, cuts and giddiness caused by bhang consumption. Many injuries were a result of assaults under the influence of alcohol, said a casualty medical officer at the hospitals outpatient department.

Dr Hemant Deshmukh, dean of the hospital said none of the patients required hospitalisation.

The civic-run Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital, Sion saw most cases of eye injuries. Patients complained of eye irritation. We gave them eye drops to prevent secondary infection and soothe the irritation, said the on-call assistant dean.

At BYL Nair hospital, Mumbai Central, 13 people were treated for skin abrasions, eye irritation, nausea and giddiness. This year, we didnt see any major injuries, said Dr Ramesh Bharmal, dean of the hospital.

Doctors at the state-run Sir JJ hospital, Byculla, said a 42-year old man who slipped while playing was referred to the orthopaedic department. We also got a patient who had trouble hearing owing to the colour in his ear, said Dr Sanjay Surase, medical superintendent of the hospital. (HT Correspondent)The teenager who allegedly killed 20-year-old aspiring model Mansi Dixit at his flat in Oshiwara after she rejected his sexual advances has applied for bail. He has claimed Dixit demanded money from him and threatened to file a false rape or molestation case against him if he failed to do so.

He also claimed to have mental ailment and submitted that he often initiates physical fights with other people due to his aggressive nature. He said he was a peace-loving person and termed Dixits death an accident.

Syed Muzammil, 19, the accused, allegedly killed Dixit on October 15 last year.

In his bail application, Muzammil claimed he had a friendly relationship with Dixit through social media. Muzammil, an aspiring photographer, said Dixit approached him for a portfolio shoot. [Muzammil] told her that he does not have his camera or material, [but] she informed him that she had a great fashion photography camera and she was ready to come [to his] home, reads the plea submitted before the Dindoshi sessions court.

Muzammil has claimed Dixit arrived at his house without the camera and there was a heated argument between them. She started demanding money and threatened to file a false rape or molestation case if he does not pay her, he claimed. If someone threatens him then he is not in his mental condition to handle the situation like a normal person, Muzammils advocate submitted before the court. The teenager said that after Dixits threat, he pushed her out and told her to get lost from here. Following his push, Dixit fell down and hit her head on the wooden stool, losing consciousness, he claimed.

The defence submitted that Muzammil was scared and thought the girl had died. So he put her in (a) bag and left her out.

The court is likely to decide on his bail application on April 3.

Also Read | Accused in Mansi Dixit murder has mental ailment, anger issues, say family

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ONThe Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a supplementary charge sheet filed before the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court has claimed that 1,201.18 crore or 175.1 million US dollars were diverted with the active participation of Purvi Mehta, Nirav Modis sister.

In the supplementary charge sheet filed on March 8, the ED has claimed that Mehta was a director in Dubai and Hong Kong-based companies which received funds obtained through LoUs by Nirav Modi.

The proceeds of crime generated through fraudulent acts has been siphoned off and laundered to various overseas companies and countries for concealment, layering and integration into main financial system through acquisition of properties or through investment in financial assets and layering through various accounts in different countries, with the active partaking by Purvi [sic], wrote the ED in its charge sheet.

Mehta has maintained she had no knowledge of these transactions.

In a reply before the court hearing of the plea filed by ED for confiscation of Nirav Modis properties, Mehta had said she had nothing to do with the alleged proceeds of the crime.

The agency had attached her savings account in Syndicate Bank (which had a balance of 1.96 crore).

Mehta is listed as director of Lili Mountain Investment Company, based in the British Virgin Islands and is one of the dummy companies Modi had set up. It was used to transfer 343.02 crore between March 2013 and March 2014.

The funds were further transferred to two companies, Forecom Worldwide Investment (USD 30M) and Jade Bridge Holdings Ltd (USD 20M). The same amount was then invested in Firestar International Private Limited (FIPL), India as FDl. FIPL is owned by Nirav. It may also to be noted that in the subsequent years, no other transactions are reflected in these intermediary companies i.e., Jade Bridge Holdings, Forecom Worldwide Investment, Lili Mountain Investment Company, emphasizing the fact that the companies were used only to layer the funds and to obfuscate the real source, which is the LOUs issued by playing fraud on PNB, reads the complaint filed by ED.

Mehta is also the owner/director of the Dubai-based Fine Classic FZE, which had, in a separate transaction, transferred 446.12 crore to Firestar Holding Ltd in Hong Kong, a subsidiary of Firestar International Pvt Ltd. For this transaction, Firestar issued preference shares to Fine Classic FZE and later transferred that amount to Mehta seemingly as redemption of those shares.

Additionally, Mehta is listed as a beneficial owner of Singapore-based Novelar Investments Private Ltd and Islington International Holdings Pvt Ltd.

She is a settler of The Ithaca Trust, which Nirav Modi used to buy at least two properties in New York within a month of leaving India in early 2018.Is the Congress eyeing 2024 instead of the 2019 contest? Has it simply decided to sit out this fight? Not literally, of course; but in terms of opting for a long-haul makeover strategy instead of a quick-fix survival tactic?

Have Rahul Gandhi and his sister, Priyanka, calculated that the chances of Narendra Modis coming back to power are considerably higher than their own and thus decided against strengthening any party that eyes the same potential vote base as the Congress?

Certainly, there is mixed messaging in the resistance with which the Congress has approached the possibility of an alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the slow pace with which it has closed other partnerships, including in Bihar and Jharkhand. Either that or the party believes it can cross the all-important psychological threshold of 100 seats on its own, by gathering bits and bobs from states other than Uttar Pradesh, perhaps Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Punjab.

Either way, there is a distinct exasperation within the non-BJP, non-Congress parties, whose leaders, in private at least, are convinced that the Congress has already shifted the goal post of 2019. Some have proffered rhetorical conspiracy theories, like Arvind Kejriwal, who went so far as to say that the Congress and the BJP have struck a secret deal. And while there is obviously no merit to that allegation, it is difficult to explain why the Congress would not want to consider an alliance with the AAP across 17 seats (10 in Haryana and seven in Delhi).

A section of the Congress leadership has been trying to convince Rahul Gandhi to connect with Kejriwal since 2018 when polls were held for the post of deputy chairman of the Rajya Sabha. The Congress president refused then and is said to be as averse now. At a recent meeting at the residence of Sharad Pawar, the two leaders apparently came face to face. It is said that when Kejriwal broached the topic of an alliance, Gandhi vigorously waved his arms in the air to indicate that it was out of the question. When other leaders present pushed him both on joining hands with the AAP  and how the Congress strategy in UP would end up splitting the anti-Modi vote  he reportedly retorted: Do you expect me to shut down my party?

This is the dilemma before the Congress. It appears to be hell-bent on revival instead of resuscitation. When the fight is existential, shouldnt the party opt for pragmatism over pride? Congress supporters point to how Kejriwals anti-corruption movement rode to prominence with the support of RSS workers. And that he even called for the Bharat Ratna to be taken back from Rajiv Gandhi, something even the BJP has never done. But, in the larger picture, politics is the art of the possible and when you are gasping for breath, should it matter who hands you the oxygen mask?

Congress supporters argue that Kejriwal in this instance needs them more to retain presence in Parliament. Or point to the unreasonableness of Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati in conceding only two seats to it in UP. These may have been valid arguments for another time. But, if (and this is the if that Opposition politicians are asking the Congress to confront) the goal is primarily to beat the BJP, then all these arguments are infructuous. If the goal, however, is to do a trickle-up project to rebuild the Congress, then 2019 is a blip in that timeline and not the calendar date that matters.

There are other messaging choices by the Congress that are just as perplexing. For instance, the partys clumsy ceding of the nationalism space entirely to the BJP. Sam Pitrodas statements are the latest in a slew of comments that place Pulwama and Balakot front and centre of an election narrative that other political parties have been fervently trying to draw back to the state of the economy and jobs. Or even the timing of Priyanka Gandhis entry: Her personalised, granular, micro approach or slow ride down the Ganga makes for great copy and images. But it is not necessarily the best time, two months before the election as an alternative to the high-decibel Modi blitzkrieg. Her formal launch in politics should have perhaps been a year before to allow her more space or perhaps right after the results of 2019  with a clearer mandate and role. Right now, she appears to be testing the waters, and there may not be enough time for that.

Fundamentally, the Congress must decide: What is its first priority in 2019? Beating Modi in 2019  or a five year plan to fight him in 2024?

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author

The views expressed are personal

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ONOver 90 people, mostly women and children, died as a ferry packed with families celebrating Kurdish New Year sank in a swollen river in the former jihadist stronghold of Mosul, in Iraqs worst accident in years.

There was an outpouring of grief among residents who only this year resumed the annual festivities on the banks of the Tigris after the northern citys recapture from the Islamic State group.

Prime minister Adel Abdel Mahdi decreed three days of national mourning as he visited the site of the tragedy. He ordered a swift investigation to determine responsibilities.

The vessel was crammed with men, women and children crossing the Tigris Thursday to go to a popular picnic area to celebrate Nowruz, the Kurdish New Year and a holiday across Iraq marking the start of spring.

The accident, which struck as the overloaded vessel turned back, also coincided with Mothers Day in Iraq.

The interior ministry, issuing a fresh toll, said 94 people had died and 55 were rescued, after its spokesman Saad Maan said at least 19 children were among the dead.

The premier said 61 women had died in the accident.

While war and jihadist attacks have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Iraq in recent years, such accidents are relatively rare.

Its a disaster, no one expected that, said a young man who had just managed to reach the shore.

There were a lot of people on the boat, especially women and children, he told AFP.

A Mosul security source said the high water levels and overcrowding on the boat, with well over 100 people on board, had been to blame for the disaster.

The boat sank because there were too many passengers on board, another security official based in Mosul told AFP.

Iraqs justice ministry said it had ordered the arrest of nine ferry company officials and banned the owners of the vessel and the tourist site from leaving the country.

The authorities had warned people to be cautious after several days of heavy rains led to water being released through the Mosul dam, causing the river level to rise.

Videos shared on social media showed a fast-flowing, bloated river and dozens of people floating in the water or trying to swim around the partly submerged boat.

Search operations stretched far downstream from the site where the boat sank, according to an AFP journalist.

Hundreds of people who had flocked to the forested area for the first days of spring gathered on the river banks as the disaster unfolded.

Ambulances and police vehicles transported the dead and wounded to hospitals in the city of nearly two million people.

Photos of victims, many of them women and children, were posted on the walls of a morgue for families unable to enter because of the large crowd who had gathered to identify their relatives.

One man, scanning over the pictures, stopped abruptly at the image of a woman.

In shock, he gasped: Its my wife, before collapsing in tears.

IS turned Mosul into their de facto Iraqi capital after the jihadists swept across much of the countrys north in 2014.

The city spent three years under the groups iron-fisted rule until it was recaptured by Iraqi troops backed by a US-led coalition in 2017.Since 2011, the number of Chicago police officers who have died by suicide each year has fluctuated between two and four, but the quickened pace has brought renewed scrutiny to the departments mental health care for its officers, two years after an investigation by the Department of Justice warned that care was severely lacking.An Afghan woman has become the first to win a popular singing competition, with her victory coming as fears grow that women could lose hard-won rights if the US does a peace deal with the Taliban.

Zahra Elham, in her 20s and from Afghanistans Hazara ethnic minority, snatched first place from her male runner-up on Afghan Star -- a local version of American Idol -- in which hundreds of men and women have competed for 14 seasons.

I popped the hearts of men out of their chests today, a happy Elham told the audience during the contests finale late Thursday.

I am so so happy, I cannot even find words to express my feelings... Today, I represent all the girls of Afghanistan. Today not only Zahra Elham but all the girls in Afghanistan have won, she said amid cheers, applause and even tears from the admiring audience.

Congratulations to Zahra Elham! First woman to win @Afghan_star. Great start to the year. @TOLO_TV #Afghanistan https://t.co/qMstTbVTJj  UK in Afghanistan (@UKinAfghanistan) March 22, 2019

Known for her high pitch and raspy voice, she had previously said she wanted to break the grasp of male winners on the competition, first launched in 2005 and one of Afghanistans most popular television shows.

Your win is a slap in the face of jealous Afghan men, Sonita Rasa wrote on Zahras Facebook page.

Hope you dont disappear after this big win and hope the situation allows you to continue to get to your dreams, Tanin, another user, wrote.

As talks between Washington and the Taliban aimed at ending the long war progress, many Afghans fear a premature US withdrawal could see the Taliban return to some semblance of power.

Young women, keenly aware of how their gender was banished behind doors and beneath burkas under Taliban rule, are among the most vocal in warning they will not compromise their hard-won rights if the insurgents return.

The Taliban have given few details of what they want in Afghanistan, and it is unclear what a post-conflict government would look like -- but under their strict interpretation of Islam the militants have never been in favour of women, or shows like Afghan Star.

Peace is on its way, hope the future peace has the Afghan Star contest in it, Mustafa Azizyar, the shows presenter said, after presenting the trophy.President Xi Jinping on Friday directed all-out efforts to be carried out for the search and rescue missions in the aftermath of an industrial park explosion in eastern China that has killed at least 47 and seriously injured 90 people until Friday.

The death toll has been steadily increasing since the explosion ripped apart a chemical plant in the Xiangshui area of Jiangsu province on Thursday afternoon.

Xi, who is in Italy on Friday, demanded all-out efforts to search and rescue victims

The explosion happened at about 2:48 p.m. on Thursday, following a fire that broke out in a factory located in a chemical industrial complex.

A total of 640 people are receiving medical treatment in hospitals. Among them, 32 are still in critical conditions and 58 others sustain severe injuries, official news agency, Xinhua quoted the accident rescue headquarters as saying.

Workers were trapped after buildings were knocked down by the shockwave, which also shattered windows of nearby residential houses. Witnesses said many workers were seen running out of the factory covered in blood after the blast, the Xinhua report said.

A tremor said to have been triggered by the blast crossed the 2 mark on the earthquake scale.

The China Earthquake Networks Centre said on social media Thursday that an earthquake of 2.2 magnitude struck Lianyungangs Guannan county - about 30 kilometers from the explosion site - also at 2:48 pm. The depth of the quake was listed as 0, the report.

During the explosion, many windows of nearby schools were shattered.

A witness told the Beijing Youth Daily that he saw four people were hurt by a shattered window and sent to hospital.

Another witness surnamed Zhang said that the explosion was like an earthquake; he was sitting in the car when it occurred and his car shook.

President Xi said all-out efforts must be made to search those trapped, and the injured must be timely treated and relief work must be well done to maintain social stability.

Meanwhile, environment monitoring and early warning should be strengthened to prevent environmental pollution as well as secondary disasters, the Xinhua report said.

Videos from the scene shared on Sina Weibo showed massive plumes of black smoke, with an enormous fireball rising over the site. Windows of nearby residential buildings were shattered by the initial blast, the report said.

Thursdays industrial accident is the worst to have hit China since August , 2015 when at least 163 people were killed, several hundreds injured in deadly chemical explosions in the city of Tianjin close to Beijing.

More than 17000 houses across seven communities were either destroyed or damaged within the area of impact of the Tianjin chemical blasts.D espite the ease of online shopping, Londoners still want one-to-one design advice for expensive items such as sofas, as well as real-life, real-time inspiration. Stores are queuing up to help.

John Lewis has long offered free in-store advice sessions, but the company recently asked 3,400 people how they use their living rooms.

Watching TV is top, but while more than half spend whole days glued to the set, a fifth are on the phone at the same time while a third fall sleep.

From eating to downing cocktails, to exercising, painting our nails, grooming pets and snuggling up with a duvet, we do everything in our living rooms, so we want furnishings that adapt.

To help visualise all this, the store has commissioned five living room capsules, on show at the Oxford Street flagship for 10 weeks with the designers on hand.

Artist Morag Myerscoughs flamboyant room has vibrant pink walls, a mustard sofa and giant footstool. Its a lot like her Hoxton home  she has even raided her own walls for artwork.

Dont be afraid of what you like, whether bright colours or patterns. Just go for it. Myerscough will do workshops in store on April 18, tickets 15.

The living room next door is by Emily Coxhead. She created The Happy Newspaper, with issue 13 out this month and 8,000 copies printed (thehappynewspaper.com).

Coxhead has replicated the desk and shelving of her Lancashire home office, with dark grey and pastel pink walls, plus neat sofas with rainbow cushions. Meet her in store this Friday.

The room by Shoreditchs Geffrye Museum of the Home has strong midcentury vibes. Home is a treasure store of gifts, heirlooms, purchases, says Vanessa Meade, Geffrye curator. A museum team will be in store on March 29.

London DJ and TV presenter AJ Odudu offers luxe, with green velvet sofa, velvet curtains and a marble table, perfect for entertaining, while John Lewis home design stylist Jacqueline Dalgarno fills her space with soothing natural materials, neutrals, and plants.

Customers can book a free 90-minute session with home designers at John Lewis, talk through ideas and problems, go on a shopping tour and use in-store blinds and curtain makers and carpet fitters.

The store also has a home solutions service to recommend vetted tradespeople (homesolutions.johnlewis.com).The 24-year-old woman was shot several times near 75th Street as the car traveled north on the expressway around 2:45 a.m., police said. The driver pulled over near 59th and State streets, and the woman was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center and stabilized.The first hard evidence of that gun is when it appears about three hours after the shooting in the trunk of a (police) car, said Irene Dymkar, one of the familys lawyers. Its just thrown in the back with a lot of junk in the trunk, and they claimed that that was the gun that they found at the scene.But state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, a Chicago Democrat and chief sponsor of legalization in the chamber, said the issue has been debated for years, with four public hearings, 11 town hall meetings, more than 100 stakeholder meetings, with many more to come. Sponsors recently began meeting with the staff of Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who supports legalization, to hash out details of the issue.Now Open

19 December 2018

Come Friday, 21 December, 2018, Pavilion Hotel Kuala Lumpur Managed by Banyan Tree - the first hotel property under the Pavilion Group - will officially open its doors to the public.

Pavilion Hotel Kuala Lumpur stands 13 floors above Pavilion Kuala Lumpur, the award-winning six-storey shopping centre, adjacent to the Couture Precinct extension. Right in the heart of the capital of Malaysia, hotel guests have easy access to popular shopping hotspots and attractions - from well-known street markets such as Bukit Bintang to the best dining and nightlife experiences such as Jalan Alor and Changkat Bukit Bintang. They can also explore world-renowned landmarks such as Kuala Lumpur Tower, Petronas Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, all within walking distance.

Impeccable service and unrivalled experiences await guests at Pavilion Hotel Kuala Lumpur. The hotel features 325 rooms and suites decked in contemporary decor for the discerning traveller in need of an urban getaway. These include 115 City Oasis rooms [32 to 43 square metres (sqm)], 60 Courtyard Oasis rooms (38 to 43 sqm) and 45 Grand Oasis rooms (42 to 60 sqm).

For guests who enjoy a bit more exclusivity, the hotel has four dedicated club floors, including 59 Club City Oasis rooms (32 to 49 sqm) and 20 Club Grand Oasis rooms (42 to 60 sqm). Club room guests have exclusive access to the Club Lounge located on Level 14, relaxing with a delectable breakfast spread, light bites or cocktails while taking in the magnificent view of Kuala Lumpur's cityscape.

There are also 26 contemporary suites available for an extra touch of luxe and space: 16 Urban Studio Suites, (64 to 72 sqm), eight Urban Suites(70 to 76 sqm), one Pavilion Suite (113 sqm) and one Presidential Suite (319 sqm).

In the world of dining, guests are in for a treat with a dedicated and skilful F&B team. Level 8 houses The Courtyard, Pavilion Hotel Kuala Lumpur's all-day dining restaurant that offers a mouth-watering smorgasbord of Southeast Asian-inspired cuisine. Guests can also dine at Ebisu, a restaurant and bar space featuring an array of Japanese cuisine with a twist. On Level 7M, the Whisky Cove is the place to unwind with a wide selection of whiskies and blends from around the world.

Pavilion Hotel Kuala Lumpur also offers a range of meeting and event facilities suitable for all occasions. The total event space measures 1,298 sqm, with a ballroom that can accommodate up to 500 persons, a crescent-shaped venue that sits 120 persons in banquet setting and five fully-equipped meeting rooms that can accommodate 40 persons per room.

The urban escapade is not complete without a rejuvenating experience at the award-winning Banyan Tree Spa. A selection of Asian-inspired treatments are available and with highly-skilled therapists who have undergone a minimum of 350 hours of training at Banyan Tree Spa Academy, guests are in for a pampering time.

The Sky Gym and Rooftop Infinity Pool are located on Level 18, offering an unparalleled view of Kuala Lumpur. Guests can shop at Banyan Tree Gallery, the hotel's dedicated retail outlet offering a collection of handicrafts, resort apparels and signature spa amenities.

"This effervescent and cosmopolitan city is filled with vibrant beauty and diversity. With the flourishing business landscape that Kuala Lumpur possesses, this charming city has become a mecca of sorts for both tourists and business travellers around the world. In addition, some of the best shopping malls in the world, as well as modern and historical landmarks - are within a stone's throw away. Pavilion Hotel Kuala Lumpur is in an ideal hotel destination for business travellers and holidaymakers  and even locals looking for a pampering staycation," said Anders Dimblad, General Manager of Pavilion Hotel Kuala Lumpur and Banyan Tree Kuala Lumpur.Appointment

22 March 2019

westdrift, Manhattan Beach's playful Autograph Collection Hotel where the laidback spirit of the West Coast meets the cosmopolitan appeal of the East Coast, has appointed James Wroblewski to the position of General Manager. Wroblewski brings 20 years of resort management experience to the position and has been noted as an esteemed leader within leading hospitality lifestyle brand portfolios across the country.

Most recently, Wroblewski held the position of General Manager at the W Los Angeles West Beverly Hills, where he helped drive a property-wide commitment to delivering guest experiences that grew exponentially year over year. While there, he was instrumental in managing the successful integration and implementation of cutting edge, brand systems and policies. Additionally, underscoring his passion for developing talent, during his tenure, he championed and helped facilitate an all-new mentorship program that recognized and rewarded team members with high potential and drive.

Wroblewski began his hospitality career as the Front Office Manager at The Westin Century Plaza Hotel and Spa in Los Angeles, Calif. While there, his passion, drive and infectious energy quickly elevated him to the position of Director of Operations. Wroblewski later served as Director of Operations at a variety of high-volume, lifestyle hotel properties including the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, Nev. In 2012 he took on his first role as General Manager at the W New Orleans, where he led the repositioning effort following a multi-million-dollar renovation. After four years in the Crescent City, Wroblewski moved back to the land of sand and surf to take the helm of the W Los Angeles West Beverly Hills as General Manager.

Wroblewski attended the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Hotel Administration. He lives in the South Bay community in Redondo Beach, Calif. with his wife and two daughters.Press Release

22 March 2019

London UK/Spokane WA - Magnuson Worldwide's global hotel brand is proud to announce the addition of the Ingleside Hotel 361 located in Ingleside, Texas to the collection.

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The freshly-renovated property is a 6.5-mile drive from Redfish Bay and is 7.2 miles from the South Bay Marina. Families may enjoy the Kohootz Dolphin Encounters only 4.3 miles away or Rialto Theater 3.68 miles from the hotel. Corpus Christi International Airport is a 30-minute drive from the property.

The air-conditioned rooms have desks, free Wi-Fi and flat-screen TVs, as well as minifridges, microwaves and coffeemakers. Amenities include free continental breakfast and free parking. There's also an outdoor heated pool, BBQs, and a business center available for guest use.

Thomas Magnuson, CEO of Magnuson Worldwide says: "We are delighted to be welcoming the team at the Ingleside Hotel 361 to the Magnuson family."Press Release

22 March 2019

NEW YORK -- Born in 1960s Paris, Le Meridien Hotels & Resorts continues to celebrate an era of glamorous travel - today announcing a collaboration with sustainable French beauty brand La Bouche Rouge to bring a fresh face and an unrivalled rouge to its global guests. Beginning today, a limited-edition lipstick exclusively created for Le Meridien will be available on a custom 'lip service' menu as part of a suite package at participating hotels in the United States, Canada, Europe and New Caledonia. Available through September 2019, the ultra-chic French red lipstick is part of (avec amour) by Le Meridien, a global programme celebrating the romance of travel - brought to life in a film series developed and produced by Atelier Dore.

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"There is romance in the journey of travel that is universal - whether business takes you from an overnight flight into a board meeting or an aperitif transitions your day to discover a new destination at night," said George Fleck, Vice President of Global Brand Marketing & Management, Le Meridien Hotels & Resorts. "This programme aims to inspire travellers to savour these moments in style."

Fleck continued, "Our partnerships with Atelier Dore and La Bouche Rouge - brands who share our European spirit and effortless savvy to live the good life - remind us that the signature French lip is a state of mind, and we are delighted to bring that mentality to our hotels around the world."

La Bouche Rouge Created Custom Lipstick for Le Meridien Hotels and Atelier Dore, both available as part of the brands (avec amour) global programme  Marriott International

J'adore Amour: Le Meridien Celebrates the Art of Love with Atelier Dore and La Bouche Rouge

With French savoir-faire and a shared passion for image and attitude, Le Meridien looked to La Bouche Rouge - Parisian-based makeup Maison that is equal parts: elegant, sustainable and adaptable - to reimagine a rouge for travelers. Together both brands developed LM (avec amour) by La Bouche Rouge, a deep rouge that pays homage to the timeless French red of the mid-century, which also influenced Le Meridien brand's colour palette.

"Embracing that certain Parisian elegance is one of our core values at La Bouche Rouge," said Nicolas Gerlier, Founder and President, La Bouche Rouge. "We are delighted to share this common vision with Atelier Dore and Le Meridien Hotels, while giving them the opportunity to create a unique and iconic red of their own."

Following its light-hearted Au Soleil: a Summer Soiree programme, Le Meridien once again collaborated with Atelier Dore, this time to complement Le Meridien's signature lipstick shade with a shade inspired by creative lead and founder, Garance Dore. A fresh take on the classic rouge, Le DORE by La Bouche Rouge embodies the spirit of the Dore woman - a shade both bright and happy for daytime and playfully seductive for evenings.

At Le Meridien hotels from Santa Monica to Rome, and from Barcelona and Noumea, guests who book the premium suite package will choose their lip shade from a branded 'lip service' menu: dial for 0 for the concierge and their rouge will arrive complimentary with a bottle of Sparkling. Packages begin at 305 euro. Beginning today, Le DORE by La Bouche Rouge will also be available for retail for usd $37 or with the leather case for usd $160 at laboucherougeparis.com.

To punctuate Le Meridien's (avec amour) programme with panache, Atelier Dore developed and produced the second installment of their "Art Of" film series starring Garance Dore: The Art of Love. The film, comprised of three chapters, captures the dualities of romance with a playful elegance, in two iconic cities: New York and Paris, the birthplace of Le Meridien brand.

"If you know me, you know I am a romantique - I can't help it, I just love love!" says Garance Dore, creative lead and founder of Atelier Dore. "Like love, travel opens us up to experience the world in new ways - sometimes even giving us butterflies! While our latest film "The Art of Love" celebrates the romance of travel, our first, "The Art of Life," takes us back to longer days, endless amounts of rose, and chasing eternal summers.

Dore continued, "With a shared appreciation of the European spirit of savouring the good life, my team at Atelier Dore is delighted to keep telling stories with our friends at Le Meridien Hotels about exploring the world in style."

Stay Avec Amour with Le Meridien

Beyond Valentine's Day through April 2019, Le Meridien hotels will celebrate (avec amour) by Le Meridien with a global offer that features effervescent Kir Royale aperitifs and decadent dark chocolate amenities. The brand's signature Le Meridien Hubs, which transform from a bright and fresh coffee house by day to a sophisticated cocktail bar by night, will feature a curated soundtrack by French Bossa Nova collective Nouvelle Vague that puts a light-hearted, modern twist on the classic love anthems.

As part of (avec amour) by Le Meridien, Le Meridien Versailles, Le Meridien Denver Downtown and Le Meridien Noumea Resort & Spa will offer exclusive Marriott Bonvoy Moments  the company's ever-expanding travel experiences platform - part of Marriott International's new travel program, which replaced Marriott Rewards, The Ritz-Carlton Rewards and Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG).

For more information about (avec amour) by Le Meridien programme, please visit www.lemeridien.com/avec-amour and follow along on social media with #LMAvecAmour.Press Release

22 March 2019

Centara Hotels & Resorts, Thailand's leading hotel operator, is focusing on three key sustainability initiatives as part of the company's recently announced 2019 Sustainability Plan: eliminating single-use plastic products; reducing its food waste footprint; and expanding its support of local farming and produce-growing communities.

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1. No Single-Use Plastic Products by end-2019

The elimination of single-use plastic items is part of the "Centara Earth Care" programme aimed at encouraging hotel guests and tourists to be proactive about energy saving, waste reduction and sustainable environmental tourism. The sustainability plan covers five types of single-use plastic items, including drinking straws, laundry bags, take-away food containers, fitness centre and poolside plastic bottles, and plastic guest room amenities. They are being replaced with items made from materials designed to minimise environmental impact.

"Centara strives to operate ethically and sustainably in a balanced manner across the entire portfolio whilst providing an exceptional level of Thai hospitality," said Thirayuth Chirathivat, Chief Executive Officer. "We are committed to selecting environmentally friendly produce which, in turn, enables us to further incorporate sustainable strategies and development into our products and services, creating shared value at an environmental, social and economic level wherever we operate. We are also committed to ensuring a respectful, safe and healthy environment to the larger society and our future generations."

Centara began phasing in its elimination of single-use plastic products in 2018 across all 39 of its operating properties. Under the plan, alternative products which are reusable and made from environmentally friendlier materials, including plant-based, compostable and bio-degradable plastics, will be fully phased in by year-end.

Phase I , targeting the elimination of plastic straws, began in August 2018. The single-use plastic straws being eliminated take up to 200 years to decompose; the new bio-straws replacing them decompose within six months. Once the change is fully enacted throughout all Centara properties, the reduction in plastic straw consumption will total nearly 2.2 million straws per year.

, targeting the elimination of plastic straws, began in August 2018. The single-use plastic straws being eliminated take up to 200 years to decompose; the new bio-straws replacing them decompose within six months. Once the change is fully enacted throughout all Centara properties, the reduction in plastic straw consumption will total nearly 2.2 million straws per year. Phase II, eliminating the use of plastic laundry bags, began in December 2018. Moving forward, these practices will also become Centara's standards for all existing and new properties.

2. Food Waste Reduction

Centara's new and continuing food-related sustainability initiatives include:

further reducing food waste and minimising each property's carbon footprint with expanded purchasing of fresh local foods from herb, fruit and vegetable growers

making same-day donations of surplus food to charities located near each property

providing local farms with pre-separated organic waste for composting

transforming waste at select properties into biogas fuel, a blend of mostly methane and carbon dioxide gases which can be used in place of fossil fuels.

In 2018, Centara supported the Bangkok-based foundation Scholars of Sustenance (SOS Thailand) by making same-day donations of more than 28,000 kilogrammes (kg) of quality surplus food. The donations provided over 86,000 servings to those in need, while the reduction in Centara's food waste saved over 54,000 kg of GHG equivalent emissions.

Both Centra by Centara Maris Resort Jomtien and Centara Grand Beach Resort Phuket have biogas machines on-site capable of converting 30-100 kg of organic waste each day into an equivalent number of litres of organic compost and biogas comparable to nearly five kg/day of LPG fuel. Since July 2018, the Cowtec Composting & Biogas Production Machine installed at Centra by Centara Maris Resort Jomtien has been processing organic waste from the property's kitchens, staff canteens and landscaping works. By the end of 2018, the machine had composted more than 5,700 kg of organic waste and produced 262 kg of biogas equivalent LPG.

3. Strengthen Local Communities

Centara's 2019 Sustainability Plan further expands the company's support for local communities' small farms and producers who grow food for Centara hotels and resorts in their area.

The company attributes much of its carbon footprint reduction to making approximately 70% of total produce purchases from local sources. Beyond the economic benefits to the community, expanding farm-to-table dining enables each property to provide the freshest available food items to guests.

The company's ongoing engagement with EarthCheck, the world's leading scientific benchmarking, certification and advisory group for travel and tourism, continues to yield consequential improvements in key sustainability metrics. To date, 15 Centara hotels and resorts have achieved EarthCheck certification and another four properties are enrolled in EarthCheck's Evaluate Plus programme, leading to significant reductions in carbon footprints and greenhouse gas emissions across a number of Centara's certified properties.

Most recently, the company's leadership in environmental sustainability was recognised by the Stock Exchange of Thailand, which awarded Centara Hotels & Resorts (CENTEL) its "Thailand Sustainability Investment (THSI)" designation, an annual recognition for listed companies that operate with responsibility for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) aspects.

Further recognition for properties includes the "Green Hotel 2018 Award" from the Department of Environmental Quality Promotion at Thailand's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, awarded to Centara Grand Beach Resort & Villas Hua Hin and Centra by Centara Maris Resort Jomtien.Press Release

22 March 2019

Mainland Chinese tourists visiting Hong Kong tend to visit different shopping outlets to buy luxury goods according to their different motivations, conclude Dr Sam Kim of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and his co-researchers. In a recently published study the researchers revealed that mainland tourists who shop for luxury goods are motivated by "materialism, a desire for social status or to conform with others", and these differences in their nature influence not only what they buy, but where they buy.

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Shopping is a major driver of tourism worldwide, and cities such as Las Vegas, Dubai, Paris, London and Singapore have "all become destinations associated with shopping tourism", the researchers note. These destinations attract both regional and international shoppers - many tourists from Europe and the US "travel to Asia-Pacific shopping destinations", while tourists from the Asia-Pacific "also tend to arrange shopping tours to Europe and the United States". Destination marketers use shopping "as a tool with which to build a destination's brand equity" and enhance its competitiveness.

Shopping tourism benefits not just the national economy of such destinations, but also local communities, because while an upscale downtown shopping mall sells luxury international branded goods, rural farms and traditional craftspeople sell their homemade products directly to foreign tourists. Shopping, according to the researchers, provides huge economic benefits. For instance, in Hong Kong, one of the most renowned shopping destinations worldwide, more than 60% of the HK$359 billion income from tourism is spent on shopping.

In a more general sense, mainland Chinese tourists spend a particularly large proportion of their budget on shopping - over 70%, compared with only 20% for North American tourists. The researchers explain that "Chinese is a Confucian culture" that is "very prone to outrageous consumption", and the "visible signs of luxury are the major motivation to buy luxuries". Chinese tourists value social relationships and social status, and one way of achieving high status is through material possessions. Thus, many Chinese visit Hong Kong either to buy luxury goods in upscale retail outlets or to buy counterfeit luxury goods at local street markets. Shopping also offers these tourists "enjoyable experiential value during travel" and encourages return visits.

Recently, however, Hong Kong's reputation as a shopping heaven has been threatened by an apparent downturn in retail sales, suggesting that it may be losing its allure. Hence, the researchers aimed to examine mainland Chinese tourists' motivations and satisfaction and how different outlets for shopping "drive tourists' intentions to shop for luxuries" in Hong Kong.

The researchers conducted an online survey of mainland Chinese who had bought luxury brands during a trip to Hong Kong within the last year, attracting 314 usable responses. The respondents were mainly young adults with a high level of education (more than 80% had a postgraduate degree) and what the researchers describe as "good purchasing power". They had visited Hong Kong more than three times on average, and for about three and a half days per trip.

Apart from demographic information, the survey assessed the respondents' level of agreement with 17 statements about their motivations for shopping in Hong Kong. After analysing the data, the items were grouped into three factors reflecting "materialism", "desire for social status" and "conformity with others".

The materialism factor included items such as "If I could afford it, I would travel for shopping purposes more often in HK" and "Shopping in HK increases my value from the point of view of others". People who endorse these views "value possessions due to their cost, rather than the possessions' utility", argue the researchers.

The second factor, desire for social status, included items such as "Shopping in HK is a symbol of success and prestige" and "Shopping in HK means wealth". Shoppers who agree with these statements buy luxury products "to improve their self-esteem and social status", the researchers suggest.

In contrast, the conformity factor included statements such as "I want to shop in HK because my acquaintances have been shopping here". Respondents who endorse these views, the researchers, reason, are likely to buy luxury goods so that they will "be accepted by a particular social group".

The researchers then used the information on motivations together with information on "shopping experience satisfaction" and three types of retail outlets - markets, malls and shops - to analyse how these factors influence the intention to shop for luxury goods in Hong Kong.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tourists with a high sense of materialism had a high intention to shop for luxuries. However, this only seemed to be true for shopping in markets, not in shops. The researchers explain that this may be because "materialists are very concerned with costs" and they can "buy more for less" at markets, either by buying counterfeits or by bargaining for lower prices.

Those tourists with both high and low desires for conformity had high intentions to shop for luxuries, indicating that they "use luxuries to strengthen their interpersonal relationships". However, the relationship was only evident in shops, rather than in markets, which suggests that tourist shoppers driven by conformity tend to buy genuine goods that indicate their membership of a particular reference group.

The surveyed tourists who placed a great deal of importance on social status had higher intentions to shop for luxury goods, and again they are more likely to do so in shops rather than markets. Shops, the researchers explain, have higher status than markets because they are "selling originals whereas the markets are selling counterfeits or bargains".

Interestingly, however, satisfaction had a greater influence on intentions to shop in markets than in shops, which suggests that "shopping is all about interaction with locals". Indeed, the authors suggest that this finding reinforces "the conclusion that the absence of human relationships in malls is decreasing their importance as a tourism retail outlet".

The researchers conclude that luxury is an "intrinsic motivation" that provides shoppers with social standing and fulfils their need for conformity. Their findings provide tourism managers with a better understanding of the factors that motivate tourists to "shop for luxury items across different retail outlets". Tourists who are motivated by social status and conformity prefer to shop for luxury goods in shops, whereas those who are motivated by materialism prefer to shop in markets, where they enjoy bargaining for better prices and derive greater satisfaction from interacting with the locals.

Overall, though, the researchers argue that "conformity with others is the most important driver of tourist shoppers in HK". Yet they caution that the findings relate specifically to Chinese tourists, and further research is needed to explore whether the same results would be found in different cultures and destinations.

Correia, Antonia, Kozak, Metin, and Kim, Seongseop (Sam). (2018). Luxury Shopping Orientations of Mainland Chinese Tourists in Hong Kong: Their Shopping Destination. Tourism Economics, 24(1), 92-108.Opinion Article

22 March 2019

Having a poke around Bing's XML sitemap (a file which helps search engines to pick up and index content on a website) there are a few interesting references listed, one of which being the "travel guide" sitemap which is accessible at the link below: https://www.bing.com/travelguide/sitemaps/sitemap.xml.

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Viewing the sitemap shows a list of search queries apparently listing a variety of cities/counties along with their respective countries. This mainly features the United States, but also spans most of the globe as you can see below.

Screenshot showing a part of the travel guide XML sitemap on the Bing website  Photo: Matt Tutt Digital Marketing

Opening any of those URL's currently shows an error page, which to most SEO specialists would be a bit of a red warning flag. Including them in the XML sitemap in this way is done to help search engines (like Google) find these pages, but if those pages don't exist and return what's called a 404 error status, it defeats the point of including them here in the first place.

Checking on the Way Back Machine it seems the travel guide URL was crawled and indexed in May 2018, but the cached page also shows a 404 page. So that begs the question - why were they added to the XML sitemap, and where is the travel guide (or what happened to it)?

Trying to access any of the travel guides as listed on the XML sitemap  Photo: Matt Tutt Digital Marketing

Could the sitemap have been updated a bit too eagerly, with Bing planning a new travel guide series? Or could this have been a failed or aborted project - the likes of which happens all the time with Google and Bing, more affectionately termed as project "sunsetting".

The Google Travel Guide - First-mover Advantage?

Google on the other hand released their travel guide series a few months back, and have slowly but surely been pushing deeper into the travel sector - first with Google Flights, and now with Google Hotels. Searching for most major cities shows the Google Travel Guide as the first result, linking out to the Destination URL - such as https://www.google.com/destination?q=new+york+travel+guide.

Mobile-view of Googles travel guide feature, showcasing London  Photo: Matt Tutt Digital Marketing

This auto-generated page contains information on things to do nearby, places to visit (with suggested day itineraries), hotels to stay at, best times to visit, plus other related articles from the web.

It's clear that many travel companies will be aiming to optimise for these destination guide pages, as they'll be driving huge amounts of traffic almost directly from the search results. This is something Tim Capper wrote about a few months ago over on the SEM Rush blog. As a side note - I was lucky enough to interview Tim back in August where we discussed this, and other elements of search marketing for hotels and travel, in some more detail.

It's unclear whether Google will be allowing these Travel Guides to get indexed in the traditional search results (none of these pages are currently indexed and it looks as if they're blocking this from happening, although there's no "noindex" tag used on these pages just yet) but I'd guess they'd really be pushing their luck if they did ever allow indexing- and risking further punishment from the EU.

Is Bing launching it's own Travel Guide series?

It's hard to say for sure but it does look like Bing might have something planned. Very recently they made clear strides in optimising on Google through their new Collections feature, as highlighted in the below Tweet by SEO expert Dan Shure.

Bings new Collections feature has been performing impressively in Googles search results  Photo: Matt Tutt Digital Marketing

And to put it nicely, Bing does have a history of imitating their massive rival, looking to see the impact of Google's updates and following suit when appropriate. And who would blame them should they decide to launch their own travel guide - one which makes use of their current partnerships with OpenStreetMaps, TripAdvisor, KAYAK, and various others.

Bings results for a New York hotels search; not too dissimilar from Googles hotel finder offering  Photo: Matt Tutt Digital Marketing

Could the travel guide be Bing's next attempt at getting more ingrained as a new layer in the lucrative travel search market, or perhaps am I just reading too much into their XML sitemaps? If history is anything to go by its highly likely that Bing will indeed follow Google's lead, much in the way they've done to date.JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.



You should upgrade or use an You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.You should upgrade or use an alternative browserMeanwhile, prosecutors said in court Friday that they do not intend to make a copy of a videotape at the center of one of the indictments. The footage purports to show Kelly sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl  believed to be the same girl at the center of Kellys 2008 child pornography trial. He was acquitted of those charges.InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) announces the opening of the InterContinental Houston - Medical Center. Developed by Medistar Corporation, the 354-room luxury hotel is located next to the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical complex.

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) announces the opening of the InterContinental Houston - Medical Center. Developed by Medistar Corporation, the 354-room luxury hotel is located next to the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical complex. The hotel boasts unrivaled accommodations, amenities, guest services, and significant conference facilities and event space for both business and leisure travelers.

The striking 21-story hotel features 124 deluxe king bed guest rooms, 193 deluxe double queen guest rooms, 37 stylish suites and the brand's world-renowned Club InterContinental Lounge that combines highly personalized service and exclusive privileges. The outstanding hotel amenities include the new Mediterranean restaurant, Safina Restaurant & Bar, an outdoor pool and a state-of-the-art fitness center.

The hotel includes expansive conference facilities designed to host large groups and conventions, with 18,000 square feet of meeting space, including board rooms and a 7,646-square foot grand ballroom. An additional 6,000 square feet of pre-function event space, an outdoor terrace mezzanine and supplementary outdoor pool terrace event space all combine to make the hotel the largest conference space of any building on the Texas Medical Center campus.

Elie Maalouf, Chief Executive Officer, Americas, IHG, said: "InterContinental Houston  Medical Center is an exceptional addition to this luxury brand's portfolio. InterContinental's deep global heritage and unique experience creates the ideal destination for guests and patients seeking luxury accommodations and high-touch hospitality next to world-class medical science and care. We are very pleased to work with Monzer Hourani and Medistar on this landmark project to host guests from all over the world."

InterContinental Houston-Medical Center is owned by Medistar and managed by IHG. Medistar, one of the leading real estate development companies in the United States, specializes in the design, development, financing, acquisition and construction of healthcare, commercial, hospitality and mixed-use projects nationwide.

Monzer Hourani, Founder and CEO of Medistar, said: "In conjunction with IHG, we are delighted to open the InterContinental Houston - Medical Center next to the internationally recognized Texas Medical Center and welcome guests who are visiting or doing business with the world's largest medical campus. This luxury hotel project is the result of a large team of people, and I'm proud to see this come to fruition."

Nathalie Urban, General Manager of InterContinental Houston-Medical Center, said: "We look forward to welcoming business and leisure travelers to experience the personalized service, modern elegance and sophistication that are synonymous with the InterContinental brand, and becoming a landmark destination at the Texas Medical Center and the greater Houston area."

Texas Medical Center (TMC), home to Texas Children's Hospital and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, is the largest medical complex in the world, and boasts 10 million patient encounters each year and 50 million square feet of developed space. TMC offers more than 9,200 patient beds and has $3 billion in construction projects underway.

InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, the largest luxury hotel brand in the world, is experiencing exciting growth in the United States, with recent openings in Houston, San Diego, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Minneapolis, and a new hotel under development in Bellevue. The brand also recently celebrated the opening of the 200th InterContinental hotel, the InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland, an 18-story resort built in an abandoned quarry. With more than 200 InterContinental hotels open worldwide and 60 in the global development pipeline, IHG continues to expand the brand's portfolio in the most sought-after destinations around the world.

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 2021 Hotel News ResourceThe complex is strategically located in the heart of one of the most sought-after areas in the city with easy access to key embassies and major corporate headquarters, just a 30-minute drive from King Khalid International Airport.

Marriott International and Dur Hospitality yesterday announced the opening of Riyadh Marriott Hotel Diplomatic Quarter and Marriott Executive Apartments Riyadh, Diplomatic Quarter. The complex is strategically located in the heart of one of the most sought-after areas in the city with easy access to key embassies and major corporate headquarters, just a 30-minute drive from King Khalid International Airport.

"We are delighted to enhance our footprint in Saudi Arabia with the opening of two strategically important hotels that not only complement each other but also deliver very distinct brand experiences. Saudi Arabia continues to be one of our key markets and we are delighted to further strengthen our partnership with Dur Hospitality," said Alex Kyriakidis, President and Managing Director, Middle East & Africa, Marriott International.



The hotel is inspired by the scenic and fertile Wadi Hanifa, a beautiful desert oasis running through Riyadh. The low-rise hotel resembles the smooth, dry canyon walls that make for a dramatic arrival experience. Once you step inside, the waterways guide the way into the heart of the building, ushering guests through the arrival court into the palm dotted oasis in the heart of the hotel's lush courtyard. Planted cacti, flowering vines, plentiful blooming desert flora and native date palm trees create a soothingly calming ambiance, providing shaded secluded areas from the scorching desert sun. Here, life happens against a scenic lush backdrop in one of the restaurants and cafes.

The complex is the first five-star full service hotel in the Diplomatic Quarter and features 80 spacious modern rooms, and 140 fully equipped apartments. The deluxe rooms feature modern decor and ample work space, allowing guests to stay connected with in-room technology including high speed WiFi and bedside USB outlets. Guests staying in one of the six Premium Suites or the Presidential Suite can enrich their experience in the M Club Lounge offering an international buffet, hors d'oeuvre and local specialties 24 hours a day.

Sparking brilliance through spaces that seamlessly blend work and play with state-of-the-art business facilities and innovative spaces such as The Greatroom, the hotel caters for the needs of both business and leisure travelers. Guests can enjoy an elevated experience through the Mobile Guest Services, delivered with the warm and professional service for which the brand is globally renowned.

Riyadh Marriott Hotel Diplomatic Quarter houses three dining venues, Gojia Kitchen  a sophisticated all day dining destination, a la carte restaurant Mesquite and Agave Cafe located in the lobby. The hotel offers multiple recreational areas surrounded by lush greenery. An open-air swimming pool serves as an ideal spot to unwind after a long day. Other facilities include 24-hour Fitness Centres for both men and women and a sublime Saray Spa featuring a Turkish Hammam and female and male treatment rooms.

Meeting the highest standards for energy and environmental (LEED) Gold Certification requirements, the hotel site creates a protected micro-climate and maximizes on environmental impacts. By amplifying useful daylight via a complex reflection processes, the hotel can decrease its illumination needs during the day. Plentiful shaded areas and the building's structure allow for natural ventilation, reducing the need for air conditioning and additional cooling.

The opening of Riyadh Marriott Hotel Diplomatic Quarter and Marriott Executive Apartments Riyadh, Diplomatic Quarter marks the fifth collaboration between Marriott International and Dur Hospitality following Riyadh Marriott Airport, Marriott Executive Apartments Riyadh Convention Center, Courtyard by Marriott Riyadh Diplomatic Quarter and Riyadh Marriott Hotel  the Marriott Hotels first property in the Middle East.







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 2021 Hotel News ResourceMicrotel by Wyndham, the economy hotel brand under Wyndham Hotels & Resorts (NYSE: WH), today unveiled its newest prototype, a reimagined interior and exterior concept designed to elevate the brand, reduce building costs, optimize efficiencies and drive greater returns for developers.

Microtel by Wyndham, the economy hotel brand under Wyndham Hotels & Resorts (NYSE: WH), today unveiled its newest prototype, a reimagined interior and exterior concept designed to elevate the brand, reduce building costs, optimize efficiencies and drive greater returns for developers. The prototype is the first step of Wyndham's overarching new construction growth strategy focused on delivering long-term value and quality for owners.

The new prototype, Moda, represents the evolution of the Microtel brand emphasizing modern efficiency and minimalism for today's guest and owner. The new exterior architecture and interior design elevate the brand's spaces to match the midscale experience it already delivers  now at an even more competitive, efficient cost to build. Moda reduces Microtel's total footprint by 28 percent versus the prior prototype. The design also delivers more than 70 percent of rentable space  one of the strongest in both the economy and midscale segments.

"Microtel is the epitome of efficiency: it outperforms the segment, offers streamlined operations and leads its peers in guest satisfaction," said Keri Putera, vice president, Brand Operations, Microtel by Wyndham. "As we build on the brand's existing model, we've identified small, purposeful details which can drive large, incremental savings for developers and create a significant impact on the experience for our guests. Moda  a term symbolizing both style and precision  simplifies operations through design while tapping into the growing trend of minimalism, addressing the changing needs of today's travelers and owners."

The first hotels leveraging the new prototype are set to break ground in 2019.



Advertisement Development Disruptor

Microtel's transformative next step is the first of a multi-pronged growth strategy for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts as it builds the foundation for future expansion just over nine months into its tenure as a pure-play hotel company.

Wyndham's new development strategy prioritizes quality and longevity in the economy and midscale segments via smart investment and partnering with growing entrepreneurs. Taking a page from the industry-leading practices of its newly acquired La Quinta by Wyndham brand, the company's strategy underscores new construction growth, design-driven conversions and a redesigned franchisee journey emphasizing added value over the lifetime of the investment.

"Microtel is already a category-killer in the economy segment and is poised to disrupt in the midscale segment where it often competes, making it the perfect first step as we set out to transform the new construction landscape in both these segments," said David Wilner, senior vice president, New Construction Development, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. "With a focus on streamlined new construction models like Moda, we are paving the way for continued expansion across our economy and midscale brands and creating a foundation of long-term support for entrepreneurial hoteliers growing their businesses."

A More Efficient Microtel by Wyndham

Developed in collaboration with seasoned Microtel owners and award-winning architect firm, Hoefer Wysocki, Moda incorporates modern architecture, smart interior staples like wall-hung furniture and minimalist interior design trends to appeal to millennials and today's business and leisure travelers.

According to Mayflower, millennials are leading the way when it comes to streamlined living spaces with the bare essentials, with 23 percent significantly more likely to say they're minimalists when it comes to purging things or belongings. The Moda prototype delivers a sleek, minimalist look and feel contributing to an elevated guest experience while also streamlining costs to develop.

Exterior Highlights

The new design includes a four-story exterior facade option and features a new, flat-roof design, elevating Microtel's visibility, signage and status from its previous pitched-roof design.

The building itself is sleeker, reducing the total number of cut-outs in the foundation by modeling a Bauhaus architectural style  at 34,700 to 35,700 square feet, it's saving developers significant square footage material costs.

The design changes minimize the brand's land requirements by 11 percent, affording developers more freedom and flexibility to build.

Interior Highlights

The interior design delivers layout and maintenance efficiencies inspired by conversations with owners and operators across the industry.

Leaner and more modular, Moda uniformly positions guestrooms by unit type  suites, doubles and singles  allowing for natural building breaks and flow.

Wall-mounted headboards, desks and televisions help housekeepers turn guestrooms faster, maximize open guest space and appeal to the personal aesthetic of today's millennial travelers.

Incorporating the Franchisee's Fingerprint

Helping to ensure Moda fits the owner and guest bill at each stage of the design process  from first conceptualization to final prototype  is a team of Microtel owners and industry vets, including a 15-person Microtel Developer Advisory Council offering feedback and expertise. The brand tapped owners, operators and general managers from various brands, markets and segments to work hand-in-glove with designers integrating additional operational feedback into the design.

Microtel owner and Franchise Advisory Board member Chad Moore is one of the first to sign executed agreements to build two new Moda prototypes in Milford and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware in 2019.

"I like to keep things simple, especially in business, and Microtel lets me do this," said Moore, seasoned owner of the Microtel by Wyndham Georgetown in Delaware. "Moda streamlines the development and operations of the hotel  while strongly upholding the defining design and service principles that have made Microtel the economy champion it is today  making the new Microtel an even more attractive, lucrative and valuable long-term investment."

As of December 2018, Microtel has 82 hotels in the development pipeline  59 in the United States and 23 internationally.

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 2021 Hotel News ResourceH. Brandt Niehaus, president of Huff, Niehaus & Associates, Inc. located in Louisville, Kentucky, received HBIs highest honor  Broker of the Year. Niehaus received this recognition of excellence in hotel real estate brokerage based on outstanding sales volume and participation in the industry. Mr. Niehaus earned this honor previously in 2017 and in 2004.

Hotel Brokers International, the nations leading hotel brokerage network, announced top sales performers of 2018. HBI President Jennifer Church presented the following hotel real estate sales achievement awards during the organizations 60th Annual Meeting held last month in Las Vegas:

H. Brandt Niehaus, president of Huff, Niehaus & Associates, Inc. located in Louisville, Kentucky, received HBIs highest honor  Broker of the Year. Niehaus received this recognition of excellence in hotel real estate brokerage based on outstanding sales volume and participation in the industry. Mr. Niehaus earned this honor previously in 2017 and in 2004.

Ronald R. McCord, vice president of Wisconsin-based Milmark Hotel/Motel Investments, LLC, received HBIs most prestigious award for a sales associate  Salesperson of the Year.

Awards were given to the Top Producers by U.S. Region in 2018. Ford C. Barton, Principal of Lodging Partners  a specialized hotel brokerage firm located in Charlotte, North Carolina  was named Top Broker of the U.S. Eastern Region. While Kenneth Olipra, Vice President of Greene, Canfield, DeGeorge, LLC located in Clearwater, Florida, was named the regions Top Salesperson.

Jennifer Church, President of Milmark Hotel/Motel Investments, LLC, was recognized as the Top Broker of the U.S. Central Region.

Joseph P. Kennedy, President of Crystal Investment Property, LLC of Portland, Oregon was awarded Top Broker in the U.S. Mountain/Pacific Region. While Kathryn Seo, Vice President of Lodging Brokers Network, Inc. located in Napa, California, was named the regions Top Salesperson.

Founded in 1959, Hotel Brokers International members lead the industry in hotel real estate sales. HBI hotel brokerage specialists have successfully negotiated nearly 10,000 hotel real estate transactions and consistently account for the largest share of all select-service and economy hotel sales in the United States. The organizations database currently comprises more than 100 property listings and the HBI website attracts visitors from around the world. Founder and host of the popular Hotel Investors Marketplace Webcast, HBI also developed the Certified Hotel Broker professional designation program. In addition to hospitality real estate advisory services, HBI offers affiliate membership to professionals in allied fields, including franchising, lending, appraisals and investment services. For more information about HBIs hotel listings or to become a broker or affiliate member, visit www.hbihotels.com.

Contact:

Glenda J. Webb

Executive Director

Hotel Brokers International

+1.816.505.4315

gwebb@hbihotels.com

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 2021 Hotel News ResourceSad news has been reported from Miami after 19-year-old Sydney Aiello committed suicide last weekend. The young graduate was a survivor of February 2018's Parkland Shooting that took the lives of 17 students and staff combined, one being Sydney's best friend Meadow Pollack. Sydney's mother, Cara, told CBS that her daughter suffered from PTSD and survivor's guilt.

https://twitter.com/_/status/1108539119611842560



It breaks my heart that weve lost yet another student from Stoneman Douglas, Ryan Petty, whose daughter was a victim in the shooting, told the publication. My advice to parents is to ask questions, dont wait.

He added: Some of the questions that need to be asked are  do you wish you were dead and not wake up? Second question  have you had thoughts of killing herself?

Sydney was described as a vibrant young woman who enjoyed yoga and wanted to pursue medicine. "She lit up every room she entered. She filled her days cheerleading, doing yoga, and brightening up the days of others," the GoFund account reads. "Sydney aspired to work in the medical field helping others in need."

https://twitter.com/_/status/1109145143528050691

Ever since debuting the Jordan Why Not Zer0.2, Russell Westbrook has been out on the court flexing some pretty incredible PE's. Westbrook's latest signature shoe is a sneaker designers paradise as there are multiple materials and toolings that make up the upper. It's one of the most interesting shoes on the market purely because of the potential for unique colorways. Westbrook has always been known to dress in an eclectic way and these shoes definitely fit his personality to a tee.

In a recent showcase in Paris, Jordan Brand showed off some brand new colorways of the Jordan Why Not Zer0.2 which will be sure to get the attention of fans once they release. The colorway above shows a "salmon" offering that has a gum bottom. Meanwhile, there looks to be an all-white/pure platinum colorway in addition to two others. One of those colorways is reminiscent of the Pure Platinum Air Yeezy, while the other has volt, pink, khaki, black, and white accents. Needless to say, all four colorways are pretty unique in their own right.

According to Sneaker News, there are no official release dates for these although you can expect them to drop some time in the Summer for $125 USD.

Image via Jordan Brand

Image via Jordan Brand

Image via Jordan BrandLil Uzi Vert currently finds himself in a pretty tricky spot. The Philadelphia rapper is seemingly unable to release any new music because of his label, Don Cannon and DJ Drama. He is allegedly being held back from even spitting a guest verse on Nav's upcoming album Bad Habits. With Eternal Atake still being one of the most anticipated projects for this upcoming year, the chances of us actually receiving the work get slimmer and slimmer with each passing day. Uzi has been vocal with fans about his frustration, pretending to be satisfied with his decision to retire early. However, we all know how badly Uzi wants to get back in the booth. A few days ago, Uzi made waves by signalling that he would be chopping off his dreads in a bizarre video. Now, he's debuting his new hairstyle on his Instagram story.



Christopher Polk/Getty Images

After cutting off a few strands of his own hair on social media, Uzi finally showed off the results of his haircut on his story. A few of his dreads are still intact while most of his head is filled with his natural curls. Uzi listened to some new Koffee while rocking the look, feeling himself to the fullest.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BvCcuX5nPCc



Gone are the days of Uzi sporting different-colored dreads. Say hello to the new Lil Uzi Vert.

https://twitter.com/_/status/1108816086810673153

Jamaican dancehall star Spice is trying to make it big in the American mainstream, altering her entire image and taking things to the extreme. When she bleached her skin last year, many of her fans were outraged. They asked why she would ever do such a thing, accusing her of hating herself and vowing to stay away from her music. It turns out that it was all for a music video that she filmed called "Black Hypocrisy," but the story is being followed on the upcoming season of Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta. New episodes will air next week and today, VH1 released a sneak peek into what we can expect from the upcoming season.

Spice is seen during a doctor's appointment, consulting a dermatologist about the best way to achieve her goal of having lighter skin. "I believe that a lot of people kind of bash me or degrade me because of the color of my skin," says Spice. She explains her reasoning behind wanting to bleach her skin, saying, "I'm kind of provoking them a bit."

When the doctor starts to inform Spice of the risks of skin bleaching, the Jamaican star tunes out. Then, the dermatologist explains that Spice will need to have a psychological evaluation, like with any cosmetic procedure, to make sure she's not making any rash decisions. That's when Spice absolutely blows up, saying that she feels insulted and offended, grabbing her bag and leaving on the spot.

Spice storms out of the office and says that when she goes through with the procedure, she'll send the doctor a picture. Watch the preview below.

[via]The prices U.S. producers get for their exports in Latin America and Canada rose this year, relative to the cost of goods imported to the U.S., the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Thursday.

At the same time, prices for American-made goods sold in China and Japan fell.

The value of U.S. exports to Latin America and Canada increased by 2.6 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively, between February 2018 and 2019 , compared to the value of imports to the U.S.

The BLS indicator, the terms of trade index, measures the competitiveness of U.S. goods in the global market. The index increases as the value of U.S. exports rises relative to imports to the U.S. from other countries.

The increase is good news for Houston and for Texas, where strong prices for goods in foreign markets should help domestic producers, as long as foreign buyers do not find cheaper alternatives.

Mexico is by far the No. 1 trading partner for Texas, said Raymond Robertson, director of the Mosbacher Institute for Trade, Economics and Public Policy at Texas A&M University. When Mexico increases its purchasing power, that translates to jobs for Texans.

With trading relationships with more than 200 countries, according to the Greater Houston Partnership, Houstons economy is deeply intertwined with global trade and foreign investment. The Brookings Institution estimated in 2017 that more than 17 percent of the regions economy was tied to exports, supporting more than 330,000 jobs.

In Texas, the automobile and energy sectors are tied most tightly to Mexicos economy, Robertson said. Rising prices for? The stronger value of U.S. goods sold in Mexico and other Latin American countries is a good sign for those industries.

Such international trade is dependent in large part on currency fluctuations and political uncertainty, which can affect countries trade behavior, , Robertson said. Hanging over trade relations between the U.S. and its Latin American trading partners is the fate of the trade pact intended to update the North American Free Trade Agreement.

President Donald Trump, a longtime critic of NAFTA, signed a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico at the end of November, but it still is awaiting approval from Congress. At the time of the agreement between the countries respective leaders, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau referred to it as the new NAFTA.

Ever since Mr. Trump started saying nasty things about NAFTA and Mexico, a lot of American, Canadian and Mexican businesses have simply been slowing, said David Gantz, a fellow in trade and international economics at Rice Universitys Baker Institute for Public Policy. They dont hire as much, they dont invest as much, because theyve been very confused as to whats going to happen (with the trade agreement).

On HoustonChronicle.com: New trade deal would keep NAFTA mostly intact, Rice analysis says

While trade with Latin America was strong, the value of U.S. goods sold by American producers in China and Japan decreased, sending the terms of trade index with those countries falling 1.8 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively. .

The president imposed tariffs on China nearly two years ago, starting a trade war between the two global powerhouse economies that has affected everything from steel manufacturers in Houston to plastic shipments . Most recently, Trump said tariffs may stay for a substantial period of time.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Texas companies requested most steel tariff waivers of any state

Experts also theorized that the terms of trade index fell for China because the countrys economy is slowing, reducing its demand for U.S. goods.

The (Chinese) government and individuals are just not buying as much stuff, said Gantz. The world economy, except for the U.S., is not doing very well.

erin.douglas@chron.com

Twitter.com/erinmdouglas23Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22) - President Rodrigo Duterte addressed the graduates of the Philippine National Police Academy (PNPA) Friday, telling them their service was invaluable to the country.

Reading from a prepared speech, Duterte told the 201 students of the Sansiklab Class of 2019, "That you have overcome the challenges within the four corners of the PNP is enough proof that you are bound to be country's future leaders."

As the graduates begin their duties in different government agencies, the President said they should bring with them "the principles of integrity and loyalty, as well as the values of patriotism and compassion that your alma mater has instilled in you."

The values, he added, would guide them as they served the country and its people.

"Now, more than ever, the Philippines needs optimistic and brave men and women like you who have the qualities to be effective and efficient public servants," said the President.

Top of the class Cadet Jervis Allen Ramos said in his speech while there may be many challenges as new officers, they should never forget the goals they strive to attain.

"Ipakita natin ang husay at kalidad ng isang Sansiklab," he said.

[Translation: Let us show the greatness and calibre of a Sansiklab.]

Among the top 10 graduates are six women, including Cadet Merriefin Carisusa and Cadet Mary Grace Pabilario - top two and three respectively.

Also present during the commencement exercises was Vice President Leni Robredo.

The graduates will serve in different offices: 138 at the Philippine National Police, 22 at the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology, and 41 at the Bureau of Fire Protection.

The Presidential Communications Operations Office said the "Sansiklab" stood for "Sandigan ng Mamamayan na may Sigasig na Itaguyod ang Kapayapaan at Ipaglaban ang Bayan."Lightfoot offered a no while Preckwinkle said: I think we have to look at all the options as were dealing with our budget crisis, but Im not prepared to commit to any particular tax. A wise answer for someone whose first campaign for county board president focused on repealing a penny tax, which she did when she got elected, only to later reinstate it. And then there is the countywide pop tax she pushed through but was so unpopular it had to be repealed.In the $40 trillion global oil-trading market, the smallest clue can be worth millions.

Take the number of people working at a refinery: Outside contractors are brought in for routine maintenance or to handle accidents that could limit demand for crude oil or curb the supply of fuels. While oil companies rarely reveal such sensitive information, traders can gain insight into refinery operations by tracking the number of mobile phones at the plant, a proxy for the arrival of support crews.

FUEL FIX: Get energy, oil and gas news updates each weekday

Its the latest example of how traders, rival companies and analysts are turning to new sources of information to get an edge in markets where trading is increasingly driven by algorithms that crunch vast troves of data. By using so-called geolocation information that can originate from mobile apps, data scientists can track human behavior, from shopping habits to hotel occupancy rates.

PRICE TO PAY: As petroleum exports grow, so do risks

For oil traders, knowing where the workers are and how many there are will absolutely help traders know how much output the refinery is producing, Claire Curry, BloombergNEFs head of digital industry, said in an email. Unconventional forms of data -- like where people are in a plant, or the levels of oil in tankers -- will become available not to just large companies who collect the data, but to the cleverest data scientist with the best algorithms.

One company mining this information is Orbital Insight Inc., which uses mobile phone geolocation data -- providing the times and locations for individual devices -- to track staffing changes. The Palo Alto, California-based company, which also monitors global oil inventories via satellite imagery, says it can access location data for more than 800 million mobile devices worldwide through vendors.

While most geolocation data use has focused on consumer-facing businesses such as retailers, hotels and amusement parks, valuable insights can be gleaned from the data by examining activity at specific manufacturing facilities, said Octavio Marenzi, co-founder of Opimas LLC, a capital markets management consultant. Thasos Group has used the data to show increases in shifts at Tesla Inc.s factory in Fremont, California, the Wall Street Journal reported.

CLEANER FUEL: IMO 2020 could trigger refinery closures outside U.S.

Refinery outages, whether planned or unplanned, can have a huge impact in the oil market and plants routinely delay or accelerate maintenance to maximize profit based on oil and fuel prices. The disruptions are closely tracked by press and data services, including Bloomberg News.

For example, Bloomberg reported Jan. 1 that Philadelphia Energy Solutions LLC planned to shut about 200,000 barrels a day of capacity at its Philadelphia refinery starting Jan. 15 for approximately 30 days of maintenance. Orbitals data shows a spike in maintenance crews at the plant that lasted through February. PES wouldnt comment about its operations.

In another instance, Orbital data appeared to confirm planned maintenance at HollyFrontier Corp.s refinery East Plant in Tulsa, Oklahoma, started on schedule. Bloomberg News reported Nov. 30 the planned work would start in mid-February and last until late March. Craig Biery, director of investor relations at HollyFrontier, confirmed that the company is due to complete the maintenance at Tulsa East by the end of March.

The sale of geolocation data has come under scrutiny in the U.S. amid concerns over consumer privacy, fueled by the disclosure that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook Inc. users.

AT THE PUMP: Refinery fires could drive rising gas prices higher

Virtually all of the data originates from mobile apps or providers of software development kits for mobile apps that have geolocation routines built into their offerings, according to Opimas. Orbital receives location data without any personal identification information and aggregates it.

The companys service, which started Thursday and monitors about 85 percent of U.S. refining capacity, may be useful to identify changes in planned maintenance schedules that can be fluid as plants delay or accelerate work, said Michael Tran, a commodity strategist at RBC Capital Markets LLC in New York, an Orbital customer that had early access to the data.

The ability to sharpen a view, or to really gain an edge, based not on anecdotal but more statistically significant signals, is extremely advantageous, Tran said in an interview arranged by Orbital. There is an information asymmetry in this market and Orbitals product lifts the hood and evens the playing field, he said.

Orbital has received funding in the past from Bloomberg Beta, a venture-capital unit of Bloomberg LP.

--With assistance from Dan Murtaugh and Barbara Powell.

2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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.Argentina-based Tenaris said it will pay more than $1.2 billion to buy the Houston-based piping company IPSCO Tubulars.

Tenaris, which has is North American headquarters in Houston, will bolster its rapidly growing U.S. presence by acquiring IPSCO from its Russian parent company TMK.

In Texas, IPSCO has piping facilities in Baytown and Midland, but its headquarters and research and development center are in Houston. IPSCO employs close to 400 people in Houston and Baytown.

The companies specialize in manufacturing the piping and connections that go into oil and gas wells.

"Over the past 15 years, we have been expanding our manufacturing presence and positioning in the U.S. market," said Tenaris Chief Executive Paolo Rocca. "This acquisition would mark a further step in our journey as a domestic producer and supplier to the U.S. oil and gas industry."

In recent months, Rocca has touted Tenaris' interest in continued U.S. expansion, including Texas. This deal gives Tenaris more steel-making capacity not subject to tariffs.

RELATED: Tenaris to reopen Conroe steel pipe plant after three years

Tenaris has expanded rapidly in the Houston area in recent years, including opening a sprawling $1.8 billion pipe mill southwest of Houston in Bay City in 2017. Tenaris also reopened its Conroe plant last year.

IPSCO's biggest presence is in Pennsylvania, where it has steel and pipe-making plants. IPSCO also counts facilities in Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kentucky, Nevada and Canada.

Rocca noted IPSCO's steel making would help feed the new Bay City plant.

Tenaris was founded in Italy by Rocca's grandfather and later moved its main operations to Argentina. It's formally headquartered in Luxembourg for tax purposes.

Rocca is currently facing bribery charges in Argentina, but Tenaris has downplayed the legal concerns.

Tenaris was virtually unheard of in Texas until just over decade ago, when it bought St. Louis-based Maverick Tube Corp. and Houston-based Hydril Co. for a combined $5 billion. In short order, Tenaris grew from about 50 Houston employees to more than 2,000.WASHINGTON  President Donald Trump declared Thursday that the United States should recognize Israels authority over the long disputed Golan Heights, delivering a valuable election-eve gift to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but jettisoning decades of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Trumps announcement, in a midday Twitter post, came after persistent pressure from Netanyahu, a close political ally who is fighting for his survival in the election scheduled for April 9, and has invoked his friendship with the American president as a prime argument for staying in office.

But Trumps move, while popular in Israel and among some lawmakers in Congress, is likely to be condemned almost everywhere else. The United Nations has rejected Israels occupation of the Golan Heights since 1967, when Israeli troops seized the 400 square miles of rocky highlands from Syria during the Arab-Israeli war.

It will also reverberate throughout the Middle East and could undermine Trumps long anticipated peace proposal for Israel and the Palestinians. The White House has been enlisting support for the plan among Arab leaders who now face the prospect of acquiescing in the loss of land they had long claimed as Arab.

As a practical matter, Trumps announcement changes little. There is no negotiation underway on the status of the Golan Heights, nor any expectation that Israel is going to withdraw from it. The United States could veto any U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the move.

But as a symbolic step, the decision is momentous  underlining Trumps willingness to flout diplomatic orthodoxy and shake up a debate over the Middle East that has changed little since the 1970s.

Ive been thinking about doing that for a long time, Trump said to Fox Business Network in an interview scheduled to air Friday. Every president has said do that,' he said, Im the one that gets it done.

Trump brushed aside suggestions that he was trying to help Netanyahu in the election, professing to be only vaguely aware of the Israeli leaders political challenges. He plans to welcome Netanyahu to the White House next Monday.

Yet unlike the presidents earlier decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which was mandated by Congress and fulfilled a promise he made during the 2016 presidential campaign  one made by previous presidential candidates  this latest move was both a first for an American president and almost purely a gesture to Netanyahu.

The Israeli leader welcomed it as such during a meeting in Jerusalem with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

President Trump has just made history, said a beaming Netanyahu, who said he called the president to thank him on behalf of the Israeli people after his tweet. He did it again.

Praising Trump for moving the embassy and for withdrawing the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu stridently opposed, the prime minister said, The message that President Trump has given the world is that America stands by Israel.

Netanyahu called it a miracle of Purim, referring to an ancient Jewish holiday being celebrated this week.

Palestinian officials, who have been alienated from the Trump administration since it moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, predicted that the latest move would ignite a new wave of violence in the region.

What shall tomorrow bring? Saeb Erekat, a veteran Palestinian Authority peace negotiator, said in a tweet. Certain destabilisation and bloodshed in our region.

The announcement was the latest in a series of steps that have radically reshaped the United States role in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians  overwhelmingly to the benefit of Israels right-wing government.

The president cast his decision as being of critical and strategic importance to the state of Israel. Other administration officials and defenders of the policy, including Republican senators, said that Israels control of the Golan Heights was critical, with Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militants threatening it from inside war-torn Syria.

In Jerusalem, Pompeo appeared caught off-guard by the timing of Trumps tweet. Hours earlier, Pompeo told journalists that the United States long-standing policy on the Golan Heights had not changed. He then visited the Western Wall with Netanyahu  the first time that a U.S. Cabinet official had done so with an Israeli prime minister.

After the announcement, the two showed up nearly an hour late for a news conference, during which Pompeo called Trumps decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty a tribute to Israels warriors. The tank battle that opened the way to Israels seizure of the Golan Heights was a testament to amazing Israeli bravery, Pompeo said, adding that he had studied it as a West Point cadet.

Still, Trumps announcement puts him at odds with international law and decades of U.S. policy.

The United Nations and the United States have steadfastly refused to recognize Israels seizure of the Golan Heights or the West Bank, arguing that the contours of Israel and a new Palestinian state must be negotiated diplomatically. In 1981, when Israel effectively annexed the Golan Heights, the Reagan administration retaliated by suspending a strategic cooperation agreement between the United States and Israel.

Israel, however, has continued to administer the territory as part of its country, and the Jewish population there has grown with the expansion of Israeli settlements. Since the outbreak of war in Syria in 2011, and the intervention of Iran and Russia, there was little international pressure on Israel to pull out of land widely viewed as critical to its security.

Former diplomats said Trumps action was unnecessary and would inflame an issue that had been largely dormant. They also said it would embolden other world leaders who seized territory in violation of international norms.

Putin will use this as a pretext to justify Russias annexation of Crimea, said Martin S. Indyk, a former peace negotiator and U.S. ambassador to Israel. The Israeli right will use it as a pretext for Israels annexation of the West Bank. It is a truly gratuitous move by Trump.

Dennis B. Ross, another former Middle East negotiator, said the move would make it more difficult for Arab leaders to support the plan being drafted by Trumps son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. The White House is expected to table the plan sometime after the Israeli election.

If it looks like theyre acquiescing to the giving up of Arab land, that makes it harder for them to support a plan that will require other compromises, Ross said. If what you wanted to do was to present a plan that is likely to succeed, this is not a step you would take.

When he is in Washington, Netanyahu is expected to speak at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group that has wide support among American politicians.

Trump is playing host to Netanyahu at both an Oval Office meeting and dinner. The president is weighing other gestures to the Israeli leader, people familiar with the deliberations said, including allowing Jonathan J. Pollard, a U.S. intelligence analyst and convicted spy, to travel to Israel.

Pollard, who was convicted of spying for Israel, was paroled in 2015 but his travel has been restricted. He remains a heroic figure in Israel, and Netanyahu lobbied for his release from prison.

There had been signs that the administration was moving in the direction of recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. A recent State Department report on human rights issues used the phrase Israeli-controlled instead of Israeli-occupied to describe the territories of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza.

And late last year, the United States voted against a symbolic U.N. resolution that annually condemns Israels presence in the Golan Heights, the first time the United States had done so.

As they did after the embassy announcement, Trump administration officials said the Golan Heights decision merely recognized reality  something that is necessary for the Israelis and Palestinians to achieve peace.

Under any conceivable circumstance, Israel could not give up the Golan, said Jason D. Greenblatt, Trumps envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. To do so would endanger Israels very existence. What President Trump did today was to recognize this.

No one who understands the region would think that Israel would allow the Golan to be controlled by the failed-state of Syria or by rogue actors operating in the area, including Iran, he added. Postponing that realization does nothing to advance the cause of peace or regional stability.

The Arab League condemned the decision, describing it as completely beyond international law.

The Arab League stands fully behind the Syrian right to its occupied land, the secretary-general of the league, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said in a statement carried by Egypts state news agency MENA.

Before Trumps statement, Syrias ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Hussam el-Din Ala, warned against Israels malicious attempts to exploit the situation and the latest developments in Syria and the region to consolidate the occupation of the Golan Heights.

Critics of President Bashar Assad of Syria have noted that for as much as he and his government have talked about liberating the Golan Heights, they have taken little action to do so in decades.

During the early years of the Obama administration, U.S. diplomats tried to broker a peace deal between Israel and Syria. It called for Israel to agree to return the Golan Heights if Syria pledged to stop funneling rockets to Hamas and Hezbollah.

The talks broke down after Assads government cracked down on anti-government protesters.

Fred Hof, a former State Department official who led those talks, said Thursdays announcement would be welcomed by Israels bitterest enemies  Iran and Hezbollah  who would see annexation as additional justification for terror operations. He also said it would allow Assad to change the subject from his war crimes to Israels unlawful occupation.

Some analysts pointed out that Trumps gesture amounted to a form of compensation to Israel, since he has ordered U.S. troops to withdraw from Syria  leaving Israel more vulnerable to attacks.

For Pompeo, the timing of Trumps tweet was awkward. He was in Jerusalem as part of a Middle East tour that will take him next to Lebanon, where he said he would talk to officials in Beirut about the threat posed by Hezbollah, a military group that is a major political player in the government.

Lebanon also claims a small sliver of territory that Israel occupies and administers as part of the Golan Heights.

In Washington, however, Trumps move found support among Republican supporters of Israel, several of whom had pushed legislation that recognized Israels sovereignty.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., applauded Trumps decision, calling it strategically wise and overall awesome.

But Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, described the move as blatant electioneering.

It is the deployment of U.S. foreign policy  and an extremely radical move at that  to aid a specific foreign politician who is close to Trump and his family personally and politically, he said.

In Israel, the popularity of the move was evident in expressions of support from Netanyahus main rivals.

Yair Lapid, leader of the Blue and White coalition, called Trumps move a dream come true. In a statement, Lapid said, the Golan is an inseparable part of Israel, and we call on the rest of the world to follow President Trump and recognize our sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

This article originally appeared in The New York TimesHouston ISDs monthly school board meeting clocked in 5 hours and 15 minutes Thursday.

Moving forward, trustees want that to change.

A board proposal put forth Thursday called for shortening often-lengthy board meetings, focusing more on student outcomes and creating more meaningful  albeit potentially abridged  public engagement on meeting days. Trustees said the changes would improve board operations and perceptions about the much-maligned governing body, which has often been criticized due to public displays of acrimony and inattention to issues impacting students.

The system we currently have isnt working, and we need to try something different, HISD Board President Diana Davila said.

Trustees voted 7-1 to advance parts of the proposal through first reading, meaning that it will continue to receive consideration before heading to a second vote. Other sections of the proposal can be implemented by trustees without a vote.

The proposed changes include limiting the maximum time allocated for public comment and trustee discussion, and shifting some public comment time to agenda review, which board members hold days before voting on items. The proposal also calls for trustees to submit written questions they have about agenda items before board meetings, with HISD administrators responding in writing and publicly posting the answers.

Under proposed timelines, agenda review meetings would last about three hours, while regular meetings would take two hours and 30 minutes. Currently, agenda review typically lasts about two to three hours, with regular meetings lasting three to five hours.

Trustee Anne Sung, who helped spearhead the proposal, said the changes could improve public engagement prior to votes on issues impacting the district.

We can hear what you have to say, consider it and really do our due diligence, Sung said.

HISD board meetings have occasionally brought negative publicity to the board, highlighted by a heated meeting last April where police arrested two people on misdemeanor trespassing and resisting arrest charges when they refused to leave the boardroom. The order came from then-board President Rhonda Skillern-Jones, who grew frustrated with interruptions by members of the public. The charges later were dropped.

The proposal faced mixed reviews from members of the public Thursday. Some applauded trustees for refocusing attention to student performance and district practices.

I think this is a move in the right direction. I think this needs to be one of our biggest priorities, said Leah Salinas, the mother of a student at Black Middle School.

However, others criticized the potential limitation of public comment. The recommendation calls for a maximum of 60 minutes of public comment during agenda review, when trustees only discuss agenda items, and 30 minutes during regular meetings, when trustees vote on items. If more people sign up to comment than time allows, speakers would be chosen on a first-come-first-served basis, with preference given to those who had not addressed the board in the previous 30 days.

Currently, all public comment occurs during regular meetings, with no limitations on the number of speakers and no preference given to those who do not regularly engage in public comment. Speakers are limited to no more than two minutes.

This is anti-democratic and unacceptable, said Ryan Booker, who addressed trustees Thursday. Democracy requires far more than elections of trustees every few years.

Davila said trustees will consider giving the board president some discretion in setting time limits on public comment.

Trustees hope to create more time to discuss student outcomes, which state officials have urged in recent years. HISD adheres to Lone Star Governance, a state-approved framework that calls for school boards to spend at least half of their time in public meetings addressing student achievement. A state-appointed conservator monitoring HISDs board meetings has reported that trustees frequently spend less than 10 percent of their time on student outcomes.

jacob.carpenter@chron.com

twitter.com/chronjacobA 5-year-old boy died Thursday night after a table fell on him at a church in the Greenspoint area, according to the Harris County Sheriff's Office.

The boy has not been identified. Police said they are still investigating what caused the table to fall.The U.S. Chemical Safety Board on Wednesday announced it would investigate the three-day chemical blaze at the International Terminals Co., hours after emissions of carcinogenic benzene spiked near the Deer Park plant, prompting city officials to order residents to shelter in place for most of the morning.

The independent federal agency, which also investigated the 2017 Arkema plant fire in Crosby, does not fine companies or issue violations. Instead, it conducts what is known as "root cause" investigations to determine how an incident occurred and make recommendations to the company, government regulators and other stakeholders on how to prevent it from happening again.

One CSB investigator already is in the area and two more will arrive next week once they can get access to the ITC site, according to CSB interim Executive Authority Kristen Kulinowski.

In communities around the Houston Ship Channel, relief residents felt that the fire was out  and its miles-long dark plume of smoke dissipated  gave way to anxiety over the volatile compounds sitting in damaged tanks at the petroleum storage facility or streaming into nearby waterways.

With some nearby schools closed for another day, some local leaders grew exasperated with the companys handling of the incident. Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, who represents east Harris County, said he is disappointed ITC officials have not disclosed more information about the fire and its aftermath during the companys news conferences.

Theyre an important part of the economy; we need to recognize that, Garcia said. But this event demonstrates how one tank farm, on fire, can create destruction and impact the economy, can create fear, and to a certain extent, chaos.

State Rep. Brisco Cain, R-Baytown, issued a statement calling on the Texas House of Representatives to hold a hearing on the incident, which he called devastating to our community.

The nation has been captivated by dramatic images of flames and smoke plumes, but our community has had to deal with the very real questions about air and water quality while waiting for information from ITC. Our community deserves transparency and accountability as we recover from this incident, Cain said.

The section of the ship channel facility where the fire damaged 11 of 15 storage tanks sat covered in flame-retardant foam, which resembles a blanket of snow. The substance, used to fight stubborn chemical fires, is designed to deprive flammable compounds of oxygen.

The foam, however, is susceptible to wind shifts and evaporation. On Wednesday afternoon, a gap in the foam ignited into a fireball that crews quickly put out. The benzene leak early Thursday morning likely was caused by wind gusts that blew the foam off a tank containing roughly 40,000 barrels of pyrolysis gasoline, ITC spokeswoman Alice Richardson said at a morning news conference.

Pyrolysis gasoline, also known as pygas is a benzene-rich liquid byproduct that can be blended with other chemicals for use as a gasoline additive.

This tank was compromised quite a bit, Richardson said, adding that its roof and interior sealant had been destroyed by the fire.

Richardson declined to say whether residents near the burn site were safe and urged the public to heed warnings from safety officials. As she had in previous appearances before reporters, Richardson grew emotional while answering questions.

"ITC cares. We care a lot," she said through tears. "We have been good stewards. We have been good neighbors."

With the most immediate danger addressed  a raging blaze at a facility with more than 200 tanks of combustible chemicals  ITC now faces a more complicated set of challenges. Spokesman Dale Samuelson described the companys options since the fire started Sunday as a hostage choice, though he said putting out the fire and attempting to contain leftover fuels is the least hazardous path forward.

The issue with the foam being blown off the top of the pygas was a much lower risk than letting the tank farm burn, and run the risk of it jumping to other tanks, and the weather changing, and smoke coming down on residents in the area, Samuelson said.

The smoldering burn site continued to radiate heat Thursday and the company had yet to determine when investigators may visit. Samuelson said to lower the risk of further flare-ups or chemical releases, crews carefully were siphoning fuel from the pygas tank to another part of the facility.

By 3 p.m., he said about 14,000 barrels of the volatile compound remained. The company has yet to disclose the volume of substances in other damaged tanks, which contain gasoline blends, base oils, xylene and naptha. Samuelson said ITC is unable to estimate when the chemicals will be removed from the burn site.

As outside investigations begin, including a probe by the Harris County Fire Marshals Office, more attention is shifting to how ITC could have prevented the incident from happening in the first place.

Such facilities should have a number of layers of protection to aid in that effort, said Jim Holste, interim director of the Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center at Texas A&M University. The center is a worldwide authority on chemical safety.

Such protections, Holste said, would include frequent tank inspections should reveal leaks that can be addressed quickly, chemical detectors to find any leaks or problems with the tanks, and a foam-equipped fire suppression system to help put out smaller fires before they grow to infernos that can overwhelm local firefighters, as was the case in Deer Park.

"The whole intent is to contain it before it causes another sort of damage," Holste said.

Those who live in Deer Park spent Thursday wondering when their lives would regain a sense of normalcy.

At a Harris County Public Health mobile clinic, 26-year-old Ashley Elizondo arrived for a screening with her husband and 16-month-old daughter. The confusion of the shelter-in-place order, as well as mixed messages from ITC and local officials, have made assessing the situation difficult, Elizondo said.

We just never knew what to do, she said. At what point should we leave, should we stay?

Ingrid Cortez, 35, loaded groceries into the bed of her truck on Thursday afternoon after a trip to Food Town. She said she was reluctant to leave her home, but needed provisions.

You dont know whats coming next, Cortez said. We might make a decision, maybe overnight, if were going to leave. Its scary to be asleep and theres stuff going on.

Residents also have raised concerns about possible water pollution from the burned tanks, which sit on the south bank of Buffalo Bayou.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality first mentioned the collection of water samples Tuesday, and on Wednesday said a state contractor was working with the EPA, the Coast Guard, and an ITC contractor to assess impacts of firefighting foam on waterways adjacent to the facility, including Tucker Bayou and the Houston Ship Channel.

The agency had not released testing results as of Thursday afternoon, and a TCEQ web page devoted to the incident included references to air monitoring but no information about water quality. Latrice Babin, deputy director of the Harris County Pollution Control Services Department said her agency took water samples Thursday but had not yet received test results.

The lack of information about contamination downstream spurred the Galveston Bay Foundation, in partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M, to begin taking water samples, President Bob Stokes said. The groups planned to begin sampling late Thursday or Friday morning.

When we called them directly they werent willing to share any details, Stokes said of the TCEQ. I dont think theres been a lot of transparency on the water side to date. Were concerned with all the things that might have run off that site. Theyve got it boomed at the base of Tucker Bayou, but those booms didnt stop all water flow, and you can see a sheen outside the boom already.

Stokes said he chiefly is concerned about the chemicals that burned and any byproducts produced when those materials combusted, as some of the substances known to be involved are toxic to marine life.

We want to do a test for a wide spectrum of VOCs (volatile organic compounds) in the water, he said. We are entitled to understand whats going on out there and then we can make conclusions about how big a problem it is.

Jordan Macha, of the nonprofit Bayou City Waterkeeper, echoed that.

Were not entirely sure what the makeup is of the chemicals that have been used for the foam spray or what chemicals have been flowing down into the ship channel or, potentially, the bay, she said. What impact are they going to have on the nurseries and fisheries that operate and live in the bay? Its important for TCEQ to be fully transparent about the risks that are there and what theyre doing to fix the problem.

Staff writers Samantha Ketterer, Matt Dempsey, Nichole Hensley and Julian Gill contributed reporting.

zach.despart@chron.com

mike.morris@chron.comShannon McDuff tasted something sweet in the back of her throat. She figured it was from the benzene.

While she has faith in those dealing with the aftermath of a chemical blaze at a Deer Park plant, McDuff said she cannot ignore concerns over the detection of the known carcinogen, which Thursday morning briefly triggered a shelter-in-place order in the city .

I am scared, though, she said. Im scared right now for my body.

The 48-year-old sat among dozens of others waiting for screenings in the afternoon at Harris County Public Healths mobile clinic at a Deer Park activity center on West 13th Street. Some seeking treatment at the clinic assumed that their symptoms were triggered by the fire that formed a plume of black smoke over the Houston area.

CLOSER LOOK: Investigations begin amid anxiety over Deer Park chemical plant fire

The Intercontinental Terminals Company Deer Park facility on Sunday was engulfed in flames. The company, which stores petrochemcials for companies, has said it strives to comply with the law.

The elevated benzene levels that were detected after the fire was extinguished Wednesday, however, added to the growing sense of confusion some residents such as McDuff are feeling in the wake of the fire. Is the air safe to breathe? Can we stick around? Are leaders telling the truth?

Other people were more certain  they would go on, business as usual.

It is what it is, Lonnie Baker, 63, said. He threw a plastic ball to his dog at the park. Youve gotta live with it, Im sorry.

Ashley Elizondo, 26, arrived at the activity center for a health screening with her husband and 16-month-old daughter. The tot couldnt verbally express how she was feeling, but she let out a series of coughs that made Elizondo think the environmental concerns were to blame.

FEDS INVOLVED: Chemical Safety Board plans to investigate plant fire

The Intercontinetal Terminals Company Deer Park facility was engulfed in flames on Sunday. The company, which stores petrochemcials for companies, has said it strives to comply with the law.

The shelter-in-place order was lifted after being in effect for about seven hours Thursday morning.

A UTHealth School of Public Health medical toxicologist noted that the standard applied in the recommendation of a shelter-in-place warning was a conservative one not meant to suggest benzene levels had risen to the level of a "health effects concern."

"Their standard for the shelter-in-place recommendation was to be absolutely protective of people should a larger concentration of materials be emitted from the plant," said Dr. Arch Carson, whose expertise is exposure to industrial and environmental toxins. "Fortunately, that did not occur."

The shelter-in-place, lifted a few hours later, was urged because benzene was measured downwind of the Intercontinental Terminals plant at 1 to 5 parts per million. The actual threshold for acute health effects is 50 parts per million.

At such levels, benzene can cause light-headedness, eye irritation, a rapid heart rate, headaches, tremors and confusion, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most people fully recover after the exposure ends, said Carson.

One expert warned that there could be more benzene leaks in store.

"We're in a different phase of this incident," said Dan Cohan, a Rice University professor of environmental engineering. "We've gone from black smoke at high altitudes to invisible toxic gases in the neighborhood. Until the leak gets controlled, there's a possibility we may have more temporary spikes in air toxicity levels."

Mixed messages from the petrochemical plant and local officials have made it difficult to assess the situation, Elizondo said.

We just never knew what to do, she said. At what point should we leave, should we stay?

Elizondo and her family did leave multiple times after the onset of the fire on Sunday  and they werent the only ones.

Katy Powers, 17, wore a protective mask while she was outside Thursday morning during the shelter-in-place order. After it was over, she said she was getting ready to leave Deer Park for Austin. Some of her family members were also going to Dickinson.

They lifted the shelter-in-place, but I still dont trust it, she said. I just want to get out.

Lauren Frazier, 37, came to work at a vape shop on Center Street, despite the order being in place. She was shocked to see people walking into the nearby Food Town with towels on their faces. She did some research and determined that it seemed safe enough to be outside, she said.

I feel like people are overreacting maybe, Frazier said. The fact that they did shelter-in-place for Deer Park put people in a panic. People are evacuating and I think its kind of silly.

F.E. Sullivan, 91, filled up a gallon of water at the Food Town next door to the vape shop. He said people shouldnt get bent out of shape because of the weeks events, but they do deserve to know the facts.

Its kind of hard to keep up, he said.

Ingrid Cortez, 35, loaded groceries into the bed of her truck after a trip to the grocery store. She didnt want to leave her home, but she needed water and food.

You dont know whats coming next, she said. We might make a decision, maybe overnight, if were going to leave. Its scary to be asleep and theres stuff going on.

Stephen Wilson, 27, and his fiancee didnt think too much of the change in events.Wilson said he smelled a sweet, pungent odor, but since he works for a chemical cleaning service company, hes used to it.

Ive dealt with that stuff every day, Stephen Wilson, 27, said. All the bad stuff that can kill you, so it dont bother me at all.

Todd Ackerman contributed to this report

samantha.ketterer@chron.com2 1 of 2 Ana Ramirez, MBO / Associated Press Show More Show Less 2 of 2 Sergio Flores / Bloomberg Show More Show Less



NEW BRAUNFELS  Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick hinted Friday lawmakers could find themselves in Legislative overtime if they cant come to an agreement on legislation that would ease the growth of skyrocketing property taxes and improve how schools are funded.

I don't want to pass a shiny bill to get out of Dodge, Patrick told roughly 400 attendees at the New Braunfels Chamber of Commerces annual legislative conference.The tussle between government officials and the ordinary Texans determined to keep tabs on them has been going on for as long as there has been a Texas. And in recent years, its been a mostly losing campaign for those who demand greater transparency from elected officials and the bureaucracies they oversee.

But this month could mark a breakthrough moment in that long struggle. Lawmakers in Austin are grappling with a series of bills that could turn the tide back in favor of the people by restoring to them once-potent tools necessary to monitor officials and the tax money they spend.

Two of these bills would add teeth back to the Texas Public Information Act, which has been weakened steadily over the years, most grievously by a series of court rulings that have poked holes in key aspects of the law. A third, co-authored by Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, would close a loophole in the Open Meetings Act which was recently stretched beyond recognition by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Most readers will have scant experience with Texas so-called sunshine laws but many have felt their benefits. Together, the open meetings and open records laws are the surest guarantors Texans have that public business will be conducted both in public and for the public.

First Amendment attorney Joe Larsen of Houston has fought for open government in Texas for decades. He said conservatives and liberals should back lawmakers efforts this session to restore potency to the states sunshine laws.

Philosophically, my background is that of a small-government conservative, Larsen told the editorial board. But these laws are not partisan issues. If youre a conservative who wants to limit the role of government in our lives, then these laws are going to help you to know what the government is doing.

And if you believe government can solve societys problems,  then youll still want to know what your government is doing. Or else, how can you know if its doing what you want it to do?

Thats why were urging support for legislation aimed at strengthening the states sunshine laws. Among the most important bills is SB 943 by Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, taking aim at two disastrous Texas Supreme Court rulings that have maimed the Texas Public Information Act.

In its 2015 Boeing decision, the high court turned on its head an exception lawmakers had written into the TPIA to protect local governments from having to reveal competitive commercial information if doing so would clearly disadvantage them in future negotiations.

When the Port Authority of San Antonio was asked to disclose aspects of its deal with Boeing to locate one of its headquarters there, the private company claimed the exception should apply to them, too. The attorney general, a trial court and the appeals court all rejected the argument. The law, they held, was designed to benefit the public. And the exception to the law was justified by public, not private, concerns.

But the Supreme Court ruled otherwise. Ever since, companies have needed only to show that if a public entitys disclosure of information about their business might help a private competitor, they can block the release. Left unsaid was the simple reality that any release of information a private company would prefer to be kept secret could be construed as giving a competitor a slight advantage.

Thats an extraordinarily low standard, said Larsen.

He ought to know. Last year, that same ruling was used to block the Houston ISD from disclosing pertinent details about a contract it had awarded for bus services, citing the possibility that a competitor could benefit from its release.

Watsons bill would also undo damage done by another, older case as well, Greater Houston Partnership v. Paxton . In 2008, Houston-area resident Jim Jenkins had asked the Greater Houston Partnership for a copy of its check register, claiming that because Houston contracted with the GHP, essentially outsourcing a large part of its economic development efforts, citizens like him deserved to know how it spent their money.

The GHP balked. Again, the attorney general, the trial court and the appeals court all ruled that the information must be provided. But then the Texas Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that GHP neednt share its records with the public or the press.

Donnis Baggett, executive vice president of the Texas Press Association, hailed the momentum toward transparency apparent in the Legislature. He said the bills aimed at strengthening open government, including one that would ease requirements that state agencies remove dates of birth before releasing public documents, are getting attention this session.

We hope they get more than that. Lawmakers should stand up for the states sunshine laws. They are essential guarantors of the transparency upon which democracy depends.

Correction: This editorial was updated March 22, 2019 to reflect the accurate bill number of legislation carried by Sen. Kirk Watson to strengthen the Texas Public Information Act. It is SB 943, not SB 944, which deals with a related matter.There are some scenarios where you might expect an outfit to raise eyebrows  for example, wearing white to a wedding, a Longhorns shirt in College Station or a dress made of meat to a celebrity awards show.

But when Houston resident Jillian Ostrewich went to her local polling place last fall wearing a Houston Fire Fighters T-shirt, she never expected to cause a stir.

Jillians husband is a Houston firefighter, and she often wears a yellow shirt with Houston Fire Fighters across the front to show support for her husband and their fire department family. Shes worn that shirt all over town with no problem.

But when Jillian wore it to vote, she suddenly had to check her First Amendment rights at the door.

At the polling place, an election worker said Jillians shirt violated a Texas law against electioneering because there was a proposition about firefighter pensions on the ballot. If she wanted to vote, Jillian would have to turn her shirt inside out, even though it said absolutely nothing about the ballot initiative or even anything about voting. If she refused, she could not vote.

Texas voter apparel law is vague, overly broad and randomly enforced. It prohibits voters from wearing anything that could possibly be related to any person or issue that is currently on the ballot, has ever been on the ballot or might possibly be on the ballot in the future. Whats more, the law applies not only inside a polling place, but within 100 feet of the polling place doors, putting public areas like sidewalks or parks within its no-speech zone.

The laws enforcement is left up to the election workers at each polling place, resulting in on-the-spot judgments about whether a voters clothing is electioneering. Acceptable attire at one polling place might get voters at another polling place kicked out. And theres no way to know beforehand whether your outfit might cause problems.

Lets say that during the next election, the ballot includes a proposal on public funding to replace Minute Maid Park. Under the Texas law, a voter could potentially be barred from the polls for wearing an Astros shirt, or even just wearing orange!

Absurd outcomes like this arent just hypothetical. In the 2008 presidential election, for example, another Houston voter was kicked out of her polling place for wearing an Alaska souvenir shirt , because the election worker thought it supported vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The problem isnt limited to Texas, either. In both Colorado and Florida during the 2012 presidential election, voters wearing Massachusetts Institute of Technology shirts were hassled by election workers who believed the MIT logo supported presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

These stories may sound absurd, but Texas law is no laughing matter. Breaking this particular law is a class C misdemeanor and carries up to a $500 fine. No one should risk a criminal charge and a fine, not to mention the inability to vote, just because of what theyre wearing.

If this all sounds familiar, its because the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar law from Minnesota just last year for violating the free speech rights of voters. After that, Texas should have known better than to keep enforcing its own unconstitutional law. Instead, the state continues to force voters to choose between their clothing and their vote.

Today, Jillian is causing an even bigger sensation by taking a stand against Texas unjust law. Represented for free by the Pacific Legal Foundation, Jillian filed a lawsuit in federal court to protect the First Amendment rights of all Texans. Polling places are not exempt from the First Amendment, and Texans deserve better.

Wilcox is an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation and based in Austin.Though it has been 85 years since the United States ended Prohibition, the state of Texas in many ways regulates distilled spirits as if we are still in the 1930s.

Texas has been a model of economic growth through promoting free market policies and encouraging entrepreneurship, but it lags far behind the rest of the nation when it comes to regulating the distilled spirits industry. The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code is filled with outdated and contradictory provisions that serve no purpose other than restricting competition and protecting entrenched special interests.

From protectionist and unconstitutional ownership restrictions for package stores and murky trade regulations to antiquated blue laws banning the retail sale of spirits on Sundays, Texas laws remain severely outdated and in need of reform.

As a native Texan, I know our state is all about free and fair markets and an entrepreneurial spirit. The 86th Texas Legislature has an opportunity to address the states antiquated system and establish a modern regulatory framework for the industry that is reflective of the Texas of today.

House Bill 1100, sponsored by Rep. Richard Raymond, D-Laredo, would go a long way toward modernizing state distilled spirits laws by allowing Texas package stores - or retail liquor stores - to open on Sundays.

With its roots in the repeal of Prohibition in the 1930s, the law banning retail sales of spirits on Sundays is one of the last remaining blue laws on the books in Texas. The Texas Legislature repealed most blue laws more than 30 years ago.

Separate legislation, Senate Bill 785 by Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, would give package store owners the freedom and the flexibility to choose which days to open, including Sunday.

Today, 43 states across the nation allow retail sales of distilled spirits on Sundays. In fact, West Virginia adopted Sunday sales for distilled spirits on Feb. 28. Additionally, more than 50,000 locations in Texas are open on Sundays and selling alcohol, including bars, restaurants, clubs, grocery stores, convenience stores and hotels. Texas law singles out just one segment from conducting business on Sunday - package stores.

Consumers want more choices and the freedom to purchase distilled spirits when and where they want them. It is time to implement a modern framework consistent with modern consumer preferences.

At the same time, Texas laws governing distilled spirits are anticompetitive and pick winners and losers in the market. There are state laws restricting the ownership of package stores  including limits on how many stores an individual can own  that do not exist in any other state or industry and have been ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge. At the same time, the laws governing trade practices for spirits are outdated and often murky when it comes to marketing issues.

The distilled spirits industry in Texas supports more than 82,000 jobs and has a $7.5 billion impact on the states gross domestic product.

The Texas Legislature is reviewing the TABC and has an opportunity to address these outdated and anticompetitive laws and promote a free and fair market in Texas. In 2019, a free and fair market would allow retailers that want to open seven days a week the ability to serve consumers. And retailers who prefer to stay closed on Sundays can choose that option if it better suits their individual business model.

By implementing a modern regulatory framework for all players  distilled spirits, beer and wine  state lawmakers can promote competition and spur innovation while providing more choices for consumers and drive economic growth.

Swonger is president and CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.Despite the talks, Afghanistan is suffering from crippling violence, with a record number of civilian casualties last year. On Thursday, a string of bombs exploded in Kabul as Afghans celebrated the Persian New Year, Nowruz, killing six and wounding 23 more. The Islamic State claimed responsibility Friday for the bombings near a Shiite shrine and cemetery, saying the aim of the attack "was to spoil the ritual of the polytheists."As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content.

When you click get started below it will walk you through creating an online account to attach your print subscription number to.

After your account is created it will ask you to either add a subscription for online access or click on the print subscriber button. Click the print subscriber button header and it will open a dropdown, now click on get started. The page will reload and you will be prompted to enter an account number and a zip code.

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO USE THE NUMBER OFF OF THE MOST RECENT ISSUE OR ANYTHING AFTER JANUARY 28, 2019 TO GAIN ACCESS!

OLD ACCOUNT NUMBERS WILL NOT WORK

The account number and zip code are easily available on your most recent issue of the High Plains Journal or Midwest Ag Journal in the address fields as is shown here. Sometimes the account number has extra zero's in front of it, just ignore those.Subscribing to our services is a three step process. First you have to create an account and then you have to pick if you want to subscribe to digital and or print.

Some people only want to be a digital subscriber to get access online and others want to also receive the print edition.

If you are already a print subscriber and want online access, it is free, you simply have to create an online account and then attach your print subscription account number to the online account you create.Spotify Begins Label Licensing Talks Amid Major Disputes

Spotify has begun negotiations to renew its licencees with all three major labels and other rights holders. The talks begin with Spotify on the offensive against the music industry on multiple fronts.

The streamer must reach new deals this year with Universal Music, Sony Music, and Warner Music, which together control about two-thirds of Spotify's catalog.

But in just the last three weeks, Spotify has filed an anti-trust complaint against Apple in the EU, lodged an objection to an increase in songwriter streaming royalties with the US Copyright Royalty Board and became locked in battle with Warner Music Group after launching in India without a signed deal with its music publishing arm, Warner/Chappell.

It's those last two disputes that most concern labels and music publishers, and will likely make coming to an agreement much more difficult.

Rightsholders are also very concerned about the revenue they receive from Spotify's free tier, particularly as the streamer expands into more emerging markets with an audience far less likely to pay for music and ultra-low subscription pricing for those few that that do.

If negotiations get tough, all sides could just extend their current arrangements for another year, reports The Financial Times.

Share on:The results for Google Code-in (GCI) are in, with the judges reporting big increases in entrants from Austria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Taiwan. Code-in is Google's competition for 13-17 year olds for writing open source software, used by some as a stepping stone to Google Summer of Code.

The contest closed in December having seen 3,124 students from 77 countries completing 15,323 tasks. In the competition, the students spent 7 weeks working online with 27 open source organizations.

What makes GCI different to most competitions is that the students get to choose what they want to work on from over 2,500 tasks created by open source organizations, and they also have mentors available to help answer their questions as they work on each of their tasks.

To take part in GCI, students search for a task that interests them and claim it. They have at least three days to complete it, with guidance from mentors, if needed. Once students submit the work for review, mentors from the organization evaluate the work and provide feedback.

If the task has been successfully completed, it is accepted and the student can select another one. If it needs more work, specific feedback will be provided - or a student can abandon the task and it goes back into the pool of those available.

Tasks range from writing code, writing and editing documentation, designing UI elements and logos, conducting research, to developing videos teaching others about open source software.

This year over 2000 students managed to complete at least three tasks. The number of girls entering the competition was up again; 17 percent of the students worldwide were girls, and 23 percent of the US entrants.

In June all 54 grand prize winners will be taken by Google to the San Francisco Bay Area for a fun-filled trip. The trip includes the opportunity for students to meet with one of the mentors they worked with during the contest. Students will also take part in an awards ceremony, meet with Google engineers to hear about new and exciting projects, tours of the Google campuses and enjoy a fun day exploring San Francisco.

More Information

Google Code-In Website

Related Articles

Announcing Google Code-in 2018

Google Code-in 2017 - An Epic Achievement

Record Breaking Google Code-In 2017

Google Code-In 2016 Progress Report

Google Code-In 2016 Underway

Google Code-In 2014 Announced

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or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.infoA World Water Day surprise - The moon may be a great place to make water

by Marshall Shepherd

March 21,2019 | Source: Forbes

World Water Day is March 22nd, 2019, and the theme is "leave no one behind." In 2010, the United Nations (UN) established that access to water is a human right.



Billions of people still live without safe drinking water, particularly marginalized groups around the world. Water is essential to life on Earth and other places in the solar system that we may visit at some point.



Earlier in the week, I delivered a keynote lecture at Athens Academy Water Day. I ended the lecture with a picture of the dry, barren landscape of the Martian surface. I made the point that even if we go to the Moon or Mars, water will be required because it is essential to life.



Ironically, I ran across a new study last night by a group of NASA scientists. They argue that our Moon may be natural "water-making" factory. Here's why.



To explain the water-making potential of the Moon, I have to start with a definition of the solar wind. If you are scratching your head at this point, don't worry it will make sense shortly. The solar wind is a stream of charged particles (protons and electrons mostly) flowing outward from the Sun.



The basic concept is simple. Every rock or speck of dust on the Moon has the potential to make water after being irradiated by the Sun, according to William M. Farrell, a plasma physicist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center.

Theme(s): Others.It's unclear whether Trump's decision was related to North Korea's move on Friday to abruptly withdraw its staff from a liaison office with South Korea. The development is likely to put a damper on ties between the North and South and further complicate global diplomacy on North Korea's nuclear program. The withdrawal also is seen as a major setback for South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has sought improved relations with North Korea alongside the nuclear negotiations between the North and the United States."We go to a place like Iowa, and we go see, knock on the door at, say, I make up a name, John's place, and say, 'John, you got water in your basement, we can write you a check, we can help you,'" King said. "And John will say, 'Well, wait a minute, let me get my boots. It's Joe that needs help. Let's go down to his place and help him.'"The 56,000-member organization calls Sanders "the only democratic socialist running for president in 2020" and "the only socialist in American history with a serious chance of winning the presidency."The International Federation of Journalists join the campaign of its Ukrainian affiliate, the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), to call on all presidential candidates to sign the Declaration on the Defence of Freedom of Speech before 2019 elections.

IFJ president, Philippe Leruth, sent an open letter calling on "all the candidates of the 2019 presidential elections to commit to guarantee and protect freedom of speech in accordance with international standards if elected as President of the country.

NUJU recorded 86 attacks against media workers in Ukraine during 2018.



Read the full NUJUs statement here:

The National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) that is a member of the IFJ and the EFJ appeals to Ukrainian top politicians to sign the Declaration on the Defence of Freedom of Speech prior to the 2019 elections. The politicians undertake to guarantee freedom of speech, effective protection of journalists' rights and fighting against impunity by signing the document.

The declaration was elaborated by the board of the NUJU in partnership with Ukrainian journalists and the IFJ experts. The document urges the candidates to adhere to seven basic principles:

 Respect for freedom of speech and expression.

 Do not take any action that illegally restricts these freedoms. Publicly condemn attempts to do so.

 Do not interfere in journalistic work; do not put pressure on journalists and the media.

 Do not use security forces to prosecute journalists. The persecution of journalists for their work is inadmissible.

 Annual public law enforcement reports on the results of investigations on crimes against journalists and the fight against impunity.

 Respect for the journalists' work; do not divide the journalists into "loyal" and "bad"; do not to put labels and not to encourage hostility.

 Respect current laws in the field of freedom of expression; legislative innovations must be agreed with the journalistic community and the media within broad consultations.

President of the International Federation of Journalists Philippe Leruth supports the efforts of the Ukrainian Union:

"I write to you on behalf of the 600000 journalists represented by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) to back the campaign led by our affiliate, the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), calling on all the candidates of the 2019 presidential elections to commit to guarantee and protect freedom of speech in accordance with international standards if elected as President of the country", said Mr Leruth to the candidates for the presidency in an open letter.

Twelve candidates signed the Declaration within the campaign launched by the NUJU in last November. One of the race leaders and former Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko, democratic leader Anatoliy Hrytsenko, members of the Ukrainian parliament are among them.

The proposal to sign the Declaration on the Defence of Freedom of Speech was sent to the incumbent President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko and a famous comedian Volodymyr Zelensky who is a current race leader (according to sociological research).

"Our efforts are aimed at ensuring that those who attack journalists will realise the inevitability of severe punishment, understand that the defence of freedom of speech is a priority for the government", said the President of the NUJU Sergiy Tomilenko.

The NUJU believes that systemic impunity, physical attacks on the journalists and open hostility towards the media from the politicians are among the main challenges for media workers in Ukraine. Taking into account the crisis with the safety of media workers in the state, the Ukrainian union demands urgent appointment of parliamentary hearings on journalists' physical safety and freedom of speech in Ukraine.Imperial Valley News Center

President Donald J. Trump is Improving Transparency and Promoting Free Speech in Higher Education

Washington, DC - "We reject oppressive speech codes, censorship, political correctness, and every other attempt by the hard left to stop people from challenging ridiculous and dangerous ideas. These ideas are dangerous. Instead, we believe in free speech, including online and including on campus." ~ President Donald J. Trump

PROMOTING FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS: President Donald J. Trump is committed to promoting free speech on college campuses.

Today, the President is signing an Executive Order that promotes free speech on college campuses.

Agencies will take appropriate steps to ensure that college and university campuses are places of free thought and debate.

The Trump Administration believes that public schools should fulfill their obligation to uphold the First Amendment and private schools should comply with their stated institutional policies regarding free speech.

The Trump Administration believes that schools should promote free speech and be transparent about their speech policies.

IMPROVING TRANSPARENCY: The Trump Administration will ensure students have access to information they need to make the higher education decisions that work best for them.

The Executive Order will provide students with the information they need to make smart and informed decisions about their postsecondary education.

The Department of Education (Department) will make improvements to its mobile application so borrowers are better informed about loan balances, payments, and repayment options. The Department will also expand data available on College Scorecard, including program level earnings, debt, and loan default and repayment rates.

Access to this information and additional data will improve borrowing behavior and help students better understand their educational options.

Improved transparency will help in the development and implementation of options that will improve student outcomes and accelerate degree completion. The Department will support efforts of States and institutions to reduce barriers to degree or program completion and save students money.

The Executive Order requires the Department to develop policy proposals that help ensure postsecondary institutions share more of the financial risk associated with student loans.

The Trump Administration will explore options for a common sense approach to debt collection.

ADDRESSING STUDENT LOAN DEBT: Across the country, students are taking on massive student loan debt that inhibit them from prospering in todays booming economy.Imperial Valley News Center

Executive Order on Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities

Washington, DC - Executive Order on Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Purpose. The purpose of this order is to enhance the quality of postsecondary education by making it more affordable, more transparent, and more accountable. Institutions of higher education (institutions) should be accountable both for student outcomes and for student life on campus.

In particular, my Administration seeks to promote free and open debate on college and university campuses. Free inquiry is an essential feature of our Nations democracy, and it promotes learning, scientific discovery, and economic prosperity. We must encourage institutions to appropriately account for this bedrock principle in their administration of student life and to avoid creating environments that stifle competing perspectives, thereby potentially impeding beneficial research and undermining learning.

The financial burden of higher education on students and their families is also a national problem that needs immediate attention. Over the past 30 years, college tuition and fees have grown at more than twice the rate of the Consumer Price Index. Rising student loan debt, coupled with low repayment rates, threatens the financial health of both individuals and families as well as of Federal student loan programs. In addition, too many programs of study fail to prepare students for success in todays job market.

The Federal Government can take meaningful steps to address these problems. Selecting an institution and course of study are important decisions for prospective students and significantly affect long-term earnings. Institutions should be transparent about the average earnings and loan repayment rates of former students who received Federal student aid. Additionally, the Federal Government should make this information readily accessible to the public and to prospective students and their families, in particular.

This order will promote greater access to critical information regarding the prices and outcomes of postsecondary education, thereby furthering the goals of the National Council for the American Worker established by Executive Order 13845 of July 19, 2018 (Establishing the Presidents National Council for the American Worker). Increased information disclosure will help ensure that individuals make educational choices suited to their needs, interests, and circumstances. Access to this information will also increase institutional accountability and encourage institutions to take into account likely future earnings when establishing the cost of their educational programs.

Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the Federal Government to:

(a) encourage institutions to foster environments that promote open, intellectually engaging, and diverse debate, including through compliance with the First Amendment for public institutions and compliance with stated institutional policies regarding freedom of speech for private institutions;

(b) help students (including workers seeking additional training) and their families understand, through better data and career counseling, that not all institutions, degrees, or fields of study provide similar returns on their investment, and consider that their educational decisions should account for the opportunity cost of enrolling in a program;

(c) align the incentives of institutions with those of students and taxpayers to ensure that institutions share the financial risk associated with Federal student loan programs;

(d) help borrowers avoid defaulting on their Federal student loans by educating them about risks, repayment obligations, and repayment options; and

(e) supplement efforts by States and institutions by disseminating information to assist students in completing their degrees faster and at lower cost.

Sec. 3. Improving Free Inquiry on Campus. (a) To advance the policy described in subsection 2(a) of this order, the heads of covered agencies shall, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, take appropriate steps, in a manner consistent with applicable law, including the First Amendment, to ensure institutions that receive Federal research or education grants promote free inquiry, including through compliance with all applicable Federal laws, regulations, and policies.

(b) Covered agencies for purposes of this section are the Departments of Defense, the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Energy, and Education; the Environmental Protection Agency; the National Science Foundation; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

(c) Federal research or education grants for purposes of this section include all funding provided by a covered agency directly to an institution but do not include funding associated with Federal student aid programs that cover tuition, fees, or stipends.

Sec. 4. Improving Transparency and Accountability on Campus. (a) To advance the policy described in subsections 2(b)-(e) of this order, the Secretary of Education (Secretary) shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law:

(i) make available, by January 1, 2020, through the Office of Federal Student Aid, a secure and confidential website and mobile application that informs Federal student loan borrowers of how much they owe, how much their monthly payment will be when they enter repayment, available repayment options, how long each repayment option will take, and how to enroll in the repayment option that best serves their needs;

(ii) expand and update annually the College Scorecard, or any successor, with the following program-level data for each certificate, degree, graduate, and professional program, for former students who received Federal student aid:

(A) estimated median earnings;

(B) median Stafford loan debt;

(C) median Graduate PLUS loan debt (if applicable);

(D) median Parent PLUS loan debt; and

(E) student loan default rate and repayment rate; and

(iii) expand and update annually the College Scorecard, or any successor, with the following institution-level data, providing the aggregate for all certificate, degree, graduate, and professional programs, for former students who received Federal student aid:

(A) student loan default rate and repayment rate;

(B) Graduate PLUS default rate and repayment rate; and

(C) Parent PLUS default rate and repayment rate.

(b) For the purpose of implementing subsection (a)(ii) of this section, the Secretary of the Treasury shall, upon the request of the Secretary, provide in a timely manner appropriate statistical studies and compilations regarding program-level earnings, consistent with section 6108(b) of title 26, United States Code, other applicable laws, and available data regarding programs attended by former students who received Federal student aid.

Sec. 5. Reporting Requirements. (a) By January 1, 2020, the Secretary, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, shall submit to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, a report identifying and analyzing policy options for sharing the risk associated with Federal student loan debt among the Federal Government, institutions, and other entities.

(b) By January 1, 2020, the Secretary, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, shall submit to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, policy recommendations for reforming the collections process for Federal student loans in default.

(c) Beginning July 1, 2019, the Secretary shall provide an annual update on the Secretarys progress in implementing the policies set forth in subsections 2(b)-(e) of this order to the National Council for the American Worker at meetings of the Council.

(d) Within 1 year of the date of this order, the Secretary shall compile information about successful State and institutional efforts to promote students timely and affordable completion of a postsecondary program of study. Based on that information, the Secretary shall publish a compilation of research results that addresses:

(i) how some States and institutions have better facilitated successful transfer of credits and degree completion by transfer students;

(ii) how States and institutions can increase access to dual enrollment programs; and

(iii) other strategies for increasing student success, especially among students at high risk of not completing a postsecondary program of study.

Sec. 6. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

DONALD J. TRUMP

THE WHITE HOUSE,

March 21, 2019.Imperial Valley News Center

Vice President Pence to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Employees

Atlanta, Georgia - Vice President Pence to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Employees:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you, Special Agent Annan. Thank you for making us so welcome here at Homeland Security Investigations. It is an honor to be with you all. To Governor Kemp, Senator Perdue, Congressman Collins, Director Gallagher, Im here on behalf of the President of the United States to say to the men and women of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement here in Atlanta, Georgia: We are grateful for you, we are standing with you, and we will keep standing with you as you enforce our laws and keep our communities safe. (Applause.)

Its remarkable to think that this month marks 16 years since Immigrations and Customs and Enforcement was created. And every single day since then, the men and women across this country  20,000 American patriots, a part of this agency  have been enforcing our laws and making America safe.

And I want to commend each and every one of you for being a part of that incredible tradition. And its a remarkable contribution worth dwelling on.

In a time when Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has come under criticism by some politicians, not only here in Georgia but across the country, where its become fashionable to be critical of the men and women of ICE, its important to remember what this agency accomplishes every day for the American people.

In 2018 alone, ICE agents and officers made more than 34,000 criminal arrests of illegal immigrants in this country. Together, removing 3,635 gang members from our streets, over 900 criminals affiliated with MS-13. You seized nearly 10,000 pounds of opioids, 2,700 pounds of fentanyl, and you rescued more than 300 victims of human trafficking, including 800 children who were victims of exploitation. That is a record of remarkable success, and the American people are grateful to the men and women of ICE. (Applause.)

And here in Georgia, the Atlanta Field Office is, frankly, and sadly, it is one of the busiest offices in the country. Here at Homeland Security Investigations, across a three-state region, you face the challenges that come with being in a city and being in a region that is a critical transit point in the life of this nation.

I dont have to tell any of the ICE agents gathered here that we have a crisis on our southern border. But that crisis on our southern border is driving drugs and crime and human trafficking here in the streets of Atlanta. You face it and you confront it every day. And you face it oftentimes without regard to your personal safety. You enforce our laws and you make the streets of Atlanta, the streets of Georgia, safer. And you have our thanks.

Its remarkable to think that, over the last two years, without any additional personnel, this Atlanta office actually removed nearly 14,000 illegal immigrants from this country. And I understand, Sean, that just yesterday, in Riverdale, Georgia, this Atlanta office arrested a Mexican national who is a subject of an Interpol Red Notice from Mexico on murder charges. Atlanta and Georgia are safer today because of the outstanding work of the men and women of ICE in Georgia. (Applause.)

But not to be outdone, Atlantas Office of Homeland Security Investigations has truly a remarkable record of success. Fifth in every category across the country of arrests, indictments, convictions, and seizures.

In the last year alone  and I just learned this from Nick  2,000 criminal arrests last year, 7,000 pounds of narcotics. And in 2016, it was this office, in cooperation with all of the men and women in this room  and some extraordinary law enforcement work at the state and local level  Homeland Security Investigation indicted over 40 individuals, freed 50 young women exploited, in what was the largest sex trafficking ring in ICE history. That is an extraordinary contribution to the safety and security of this state and of this nation. And you have our thanks. (Applause.)

But its not just statistics; its the men and women of ICE. And I want you to know Ive taken some time on my way down to reflect on some of the stories of each and every one of you.

Scott Sutton. Is Scott here in the room? I hope he is. Scott. Scott is a Deportation Officer and the Team Leader of the Atlanta Special Response Team. Works alongside the U.S. Attorneys Office to prosecute criminal illegal aliens, individuals who have violated federal criminal law.

Im told that, earlier this month, Scott led the effort in concert, Governor, with Georgia State Troopers to find and arrest an illegal alien who had escaped from a detention facility on the previous night. Scott, Georgia is safer, America is safer, because you are doing your job with such great effectiveness. Thank you very much. Great job. (Applause.)

And its not just being  its not just being out front in law enforcement. Its also  its also demonstrating the extraordinary compassion that each one of you shows, enforcing the law and understanding that this crisis on our southern border is harming vulnerable populations on both sides of the border.

And I want to single out  in particular, I want to single out an agent of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement who is with us today. I just met her a moment ago, and I asked her how many languages she actually speaks. She told me that she actually  where is she now? Can you introduce her to me, Nick?

AGENT ANNAN: Alia El-Sawi.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Alia El-Sawi. Where are you, Alia?

AGENT ANNAN: There she is.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Lets give Alia a round of applause. Shes doing an amazing job. (Applause.)

And one of the elements of the crisis on our southern border is that, for the first time ever  for the first time ever, the majority of individuals crossing our border illegally are families and unaccompanied minors. Theyre being driven by human traffickers and drug cartels that are exploiting vulnerable populations and enticing them to take the long and dangerous journey north to our border.

Its driving human trafficking all across this country. And Alia has done a remarkable job to reach out, to come alongside  to come alongside young people that have been exploited in this human trafficking that the drug cartels are driving. And youre doing it with compassion. Youre doing it with care. Youre doing it with the heart of the people of Georgia and the American people. And you have our thanks, Alia. Great job. (Applause.)

But I want you to know, as you do your work, President Trump and I have your back. Its one of the reasons why this President stood so strong over the month of January to make sure that we got the resources that we need to secure our border  $23 billion for border security, additional personnel, additional resources, and resources to construct a border wall.

And the President declared a national emergency to make even more resources available. I dont have to tell all of you that walls work. And were going to build that wall. Were going to secure our border. And were going to continue to support the men and women of ICE here in Georgia and all across the country as we do it. (Applause.)

Now, I know youve got a hard job. And unfortunately, with the debate in the public square today, sometimes it gets harder. I heard on my way down here that the mayor of Atlanta recently announced that the city government wouldnt cooperate with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement when it comes to the detention of criminal illegal aliens in this city.

And I  it is amazing to think  the mayor actually said that she would, in her words, not be complicit in an immigration policy that intentionally inflicts misery. Well, I would say to the mayor that criminal illegal immigrants, gang members on our streets, are what inflict misery.

The flow of illegal drugs, like cocaine and meth and fentanyl, inflict misery and wreck our families and communities. Human trafficking inflicts misery. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the men and women who enforce our laws do not inflict misery. They bring safety and security to the people of Atlanta, and they deserve the respect of every elected official in this country. (Applause.)

So thank you all for coming out today. You know, the Bible says, If you owe debts, pay debts. If honor, then honor. If respect, then respect. And I just wanted to stop by today on behalf of President Donald Trump and our entire administration just to pay a debt of gratitude to each and every one of you.

Youre doing a hard job. And these days it can be a little bit harder because of the criticism thats coming in. But I got to tell you, the work this office is doing is truly inspiring. And I know the people of Atlanta, the people of Georgia, and people all across this country are grateful every day.

Whatever you might hear in the political debate now or in the days ahead, just be assured the American people are with you and were with you. They understand, just like this President understands, that the work you do every day makes America safer, makes our communities safer, and ultimately contributes to the strength and the prosperity of our nation as we uphold the rule of law.

So today, whatever you might hear in the public debate, let me say to all of you who are here and all those colleagues that are looking on: Be assured the American people are with you. And with President Donald Trump in the White House, we will always have your back, and we will always stand with the courageous men and women of ICE, so help us God.

Thank you very much for your service. (Applause.) God bless you. And keep up the great work. All right?Trump to Issue Order Tying Federal Grants to Free Speech on Campus

Washington, DC - President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.



Mr. Trump announced his intention to issue an executive order concerning free speech on college campuses last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, citing allegations that conservatives on campuses across the U.S. were being silenced.



The directive is the latest move on the part of the Trump administration, which has been flexing unprecedented legal muscle to defend conservative students in free-speech lawsuits against their universities. The suits broadly claim the universities have violated students free-speech rights by restricting where or when they could hold protests or host speakers.

Cabinet agencies will be free to draw up their own guidelines that could outline what the administration considers noncompliance with the First Amendment, a senior administration official said.

Free inquiry is an essential feature of our Nations democracy, and it promotes learning, scientific discovery, and economic prosperity, the order reads. We must encourage institutions toavoid creating environments that stifle competing perspectives, thereby potentially impeding beneficial research and undermining learning.

Separately, the presidential order will require the government to seek more detailed data from colleges and universities on the debt and earnings of their graduates, broken down by their major or program of study.

The goal is to allow prospective students to compare not just schools, but programs within them, before going into tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a degree that may not pay off financially.



The move brings into focus the current administrations belief that more information about the value of a college degreerather than government moves to punish what it deems the worst actorsis the best way to create a better-functioning market in higher education.



The senior administration official said that, once the more detailed data begins to be published, the administration can develop a more targeted mechanism to keep the worst actors accountable. The official mentioned one possible measure to place colleges on the hook if former students default on their student loans, a proposal the order doesnt include.

Read the full article here.No, no I made a mistake, says the indignant Gio. His mistake was statutory rape. From the way he talks, youd think rape was moms-home-cooking compared to the crimes of the other three offenders who have been warehoused in this group home in Illinois. They were found guilty of sex crimes against minors. But Gio is on the same public database that keeps ya ... in legal purgatory rest of yer f***ing life.

Bruce Norriss studiedly provocative play (which is mounted now in the Nationals mordantly well-acted co-production, directed by Pam McKinnon, with Chicagos ace Steppenwolf Company) plunges us into the purgatory of the post-prison paedophile. One foresees indignant letters from people who feel that focusing on such people with clear eyes is an abuse of compassion. Norriss play is not easy to sit through (given the contentious subject, it would be bizarre if it were) but thats not because it virtue-signals a bleeding heart liberalism. Far from it: any potentially clammy sequences are wryly, wrenchingly subverted. Someone once asked the musician John Cage what he thought would be the right degree of suffering in the world. He mocked the terms of the question by answering that he thought the degree we have at the moment was just right.

By a similar token, Downstate asks how long and to what extent do we expect a paedophile to suffer for his heinous acts, a consideration obviously linked to the length of time society deems it appropriate for the victims to hold onto their suffering. At the start of the play, we see that a man called Andy (played with exactly the right born-again nerves and fervour by Tim Hopper) has come to the house, with his prompting wife, to confront Fred, the piano teacher who raped him when he was 12. Fred (the superb Francis Guinan) is the soul of flustered gentleness in his motorised wheelchair (to which he was confined after a vigilante shooting). Andy talks of taking ownership and dismisses the good life he seemingly had beforehand as just a story he told himself.

The best theatre of 2018 Show all 10 1 /10 The best theatre of 2018 The best theatre of 2018 10. Girls & Boys, Royal Court One of those plays that had you staggering slightly as you left the stalls. This one-woman show was performed with amusing self-possession and fierce grace by Carey Mulligan, as a woman recounting how she met her husband, and how they navigated her more successful career and having a family. Dennis Kellys play began deceptively light and funny, but its snark turned to harrowing tragedy via a twist that left you winded  and delivered a howl against the conditioned violence of men. Designer Es Devlins painterly approach to light and colour was perfect and also paid painful dividends. Marc Brenner The best theatre of 2018 9. Fun Home, Young Vic This American musical was keenly awaited  and didnt disappoint. An adaptation of Alison Bechdels graphic novel about her in-the-closet father who ran a funeral home, and her own journey towards coming out, it felt important to see such a story onstage  and was so very beautifully told, with book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music Jeanine Tesori (who also scored the terrific musical Caroline, or Change, which stormed London in 2018 too after opening in Chichester last year). Although the show doesnt totally burn in the memory, Zubin Varla was magnificent as the father, and Eleanor Kanes song of sexual discovery and first love  Changing My Major (to Joan)  was one of my favourite moments of the year. Marc Brenner The best theatre of 2018 8. Dance Nation, The Almeida By American writer Clare Barron (pictured), this play followed a group of teenage dancers, with their earnest dreams, petty rivalries, and general angst. Sounds like a bad TV series but it was so, so much more. Barron had these girls discovering their power. Power theyre thrilled by; power theyre afraid of. A slippery beast, the play flirted with the supernatural and the mythical in its depiction of the transformation of puberty. Among a strong cast of adults making no attempt to disguise their adulthood, Ria Zmitrowicz was especially memorable as Zuzu. Almeida The best theatre of 2018 7. Company, Gielgud Theatre I spend more reviews than Id like moaning about old-fashioned musical revivals that fail to tackle #problematic material. Stephen Sondheims musical about Bobby, whose friends harp on at him to get married, could have been one  but Marianne Elliott unlocked it with a smart, coherent approach to gender-swapped casting. Bobbie as a woman in her mid-thirties made a lot of sense, as did the switcheroos in several other couples, which gave a fresh fillip to the shows meandering investigation of relationships. The score sounded divine, Rosalie Craig was a glinting Bobbie, and Getting Married Today had me actually breathless with laughter. Brinkhoff Mogenburg The best theatre of 2018 6. Sweat, Donmar Warehouse A late addition: Sweat has just opened, although after rave reviews tickets are in short supply  catch it if you can before 26 January. Lynn Nottages play  about factory workers in Pennsylvania whose friendships and families fracture when job losses loom  was always likely to be good; it won a Pulitzer, after all. But Lynette Lintons production was ferociously good. Plumbing the emotional depths of Nottages heart-breaking story, it had fine, firmly controlled performances and a terrific set by Frankie Bradshaw. And while this incredibly empathetic play has plenty to tell us about blue-collar America, it couldnt have struck harder in Brexit Britain either. Johan Persson The best theatre of 2018 5. Misty, The Bush/Trafalgar Studies A game-changer, this show built up a thrilling momentum, galvanising audiences and transferring to the West End, allowing us to kick once and for all the bone-headed notion that there isnt an audience for black plays into the long grass. And how: Arinze Kenes piece of gig-theatre explored and exploded exactly the notion of a black play, with the mesmerising Kene playing himself as a writer struggling to work out if hes pandering to what producers expect of him by writing urban safari jungle s**t. This was art about art that felt pressingly topical, and while there were rough edges to it, there was also vital vim and intent. Helen Murray The best theatre of 2018 4. John, National Theatre American playwright Annie Bakers much-hyped The Flick left me a bit underwhelmed; this swept me up completely. A synopsis  a fighting couple stay in a strange, kitschy B&B filled with uncanny china dolls  doesnt do it justice. Here was the finest dissection of a floundering relationship and look at how gender politics infects us all. Here, too, was a kind of metaphysical mysteriousness that was truly stirring  John wasnt quite a ghost story, but rather, it eerily tilted towards the darker depths of the human soul. It was long, it was slow, and I loved every minute. Stephen Cummiskey The best theatre of 2018 3. The Writer, The Almeida Yes, another from the north London theatre  but what a year they had. And this was a play that really grappled with the specifics of its own setting: Ella Hicksons meta-theatrical masterwork began with a scene set at a theatre, where a young female writer castigated a sleazy older male director. But Blanche McIntyres production perpetually snatched the rug from under your feet, and was frighteningly smart and formally thrilling as it did so, asking potent questions about gender, power, capitalism and art. As theatre-about-theatre, it could also be maddening, and had a wildly ambiguous final scene that drove everyone nuts. Quite possibly the most written-about, talked-about, argued-about play of the year. Manuel Harlan The best theatre of 2018 2. Ear for Eye, Royal Court The year saw a genuine increase in the diversity of stories getting told in British theatre, and Debbie Tucker Greens incendiary play was a pinnacle of that: brilliantly tough, absolutely necessary. A large black cast moved through elliptical scenes exposing racial prejudice and police brutality  some beautifully poetic, some just vibrating with fury. And a long final filmed section demanded that audiences face the hard truth about British and American slave laws. It was a play that stayed with me long after it finished. Stephen Cummiskey The best theatre of 2018 1. Summer and Smoke, The Almeida If youd told me in January that top of my list would be this lesser-known Tennessee Williams play, surely the least enticing show on the Almeidas absolutely stellar programme, I might have scoffed. But Rebecca Frecknalls direction of this tale of thwarted love was as delicate and distinctive as it was wonderfully heart-squeezing. Matthew Needham was a burningly intense leading man, but it was Patsy Ferrans incredibly detailed, funny performance that rocketed this to number one. The best news? It transferred to the West End, where you can catch it until 19 January. Marc Brenner

With salutary cunning and insight, Norris makes it damnably difficult to know where to plant a firm foot, in regards to sympathy. Negotiating his play sometimes seemed to me what it would be like trying to race confidently up an escalator designed by Escher. It would be wrong to give away the telling detail that shows how compromised the confrontation is. But just when you think Fred is going to wind up mitigated, if not vindicated, he reaches out to put a hand on Andy. Suddenly, you see the cunning ambiguity of the plays approach. In humanising the paedophiles, it simultaneously demonstrates how they go about grooming their victims.

The acting is excellent throughout. I particularly liked K Todd Freeman as Dee, the flamboyant ex-actor with the willowy Isadora arm movements who takes Andy to flirty task for believing that there are things worse than death  not a lotta cases of death by blowjob, he jests. The artful dialogue is mined with cant terms from popular sex psychology that are like the crannies into which the bilge water of false thinking and feeling are destined to surge. I admired, rather than liked the play. Its to its credit that I occasionally wanted it to be over. Its the first time, watching a piece of this ilk, that my mind has chosen to distract itself by wondering what the grue means in gruesome.

To 27 AprilWhen I was a student, my girlfriend and I went on a winter weekend trip to Paris. We wore long black coats and stayed in a forlorn hotel in a narrow street in Bastille. We spent the weekend drinking in peculiar half-empty bars, and our one activity was to go on a romantic tour of Pariss sewers.

Descending a stone staircase from street level, visitors step down from the busy riverside pavement into the cool gloom where the sewers vapours slowly envelop you. A rush of water can be heard, a moistness in the air becomes apparent, and ahead, a wide river flows from a tunnel into a well-lit central atrium.

It is like stepping into a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, though instead of gazing upon an edible paradise, everything smells like weak s**t and occasionally a floater sails swiftly along. Pariss cavernous sewers have been one of the city of lights proudest achievements since they came into operation in their modern form in the 1850s, and it's easy to understand why. They are a no-nonsense powerhouse of efficient waste evacuation.Emilia Clarke has revealed that she suffered two brain aneurysms that required life-saving surgery.

The Game of Thrones actor, who plays Daenerys Targaryen in the HBO show, said she was unable to remember her own name after the haemorrhage left her in intensive care.

The 32-year-old shared her story for the first time in a powerful essay for The New Yorker, explaining that her health problems began in February 2011, soon after she had finished filming for Game of Thrones first season.

Clarke revealed that she was working out with her trainer in London when she experienced a painful headache that felt like an elastic band were squeezing my brain.

She revealed the pain eventually became so intense that she had to almost crawl back to the locker room before falling to her knees and becoming violently, voluminously ill.

Game of Thrones characters - ranked Show all 70 1 /70 Game of Thrones characters - ranked Game of Thrones characters - ranked 70. Rickon Stark Played by: Art Parkinson : Art Parkinson Easily the most annoying Stark child  an impressive feat next to Bran  Rickon was at least handed one hell of a death scene: taken out by an arrow courtesy of Ramsay Bolton. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 69. Robin Arryn Played by: Lino Facioli : Lino Facioli Robin Arryn is remembered by most Thrones fans as being the 10-year-old breastfed by his mother (still weird). That's about it. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 68. Renly Baratheon Played by: Gethin Anthony : Gethin Anthony The Rickon of the Baratheon brothers. His claim to the Iron Throne was tenuous, considering his older brother, Stannis, was still alive. When Stannis's shadow monster came to kill him, it was only good news for the show. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 67. Leaf Played by: Kae Alexander : Kae Alexander A lot of mystery may surround Leaf, one of the show's mythical Children of the Forest, but her noble sacrifice to save Bran, Meera and Hodor from a horde of wights robbed her of any worth. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 66. Tommen Baratheon Played by: Dean-Charles Chapman : Dean-Charles Chapman Another boring younger brother. Whereas Joffrey was pure evil, Tommen was innocent and, inevitably, very boring. His cat, Ser Pounce, was an asset to the show. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 65. Lysa Arryn Played by: Kate Dickie : Kate Dickie Lysa, the creepy sister to Catelyn Stark, was first seen with Robin Arryn, her 10-year-old son, latched to her breast. Her death  being pushed through the Moon Door  couldn't have come sooner. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 64. Benjen Stark Played by: Joseph Mawle/Matteo Elezi : Joseph Mawle/Matteo Elezi Having gone missing in season one, Benjen returned during season six to save his nephew, Bran. The moment was a surprise to TV watchers  book readers, however, had long speculated that Coldhands was an undead version of the Stark. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 63. Syrio Forel Played by: Miltos Yerolemou : Miltos Yerolemou The ill-fated Syrio's appearance way back in season one was a formative experience for one Arya Stark (Maisie Williams); he's the one who helped her on her way to becoming the vengeful assassin fans know and love today. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 62. Jeor Mormont Played by: James Cosmo : James Cosmo Father of Jorah Mormont, Jeor was an honourable leader of the Night's Watch  perhaps to a fault. After giving Jon Snow the sword Longclaw, Mormont inadvertently showed the Stark bastard that Valerian steel can cut through White Walkers. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 61. Roose Bolton Played by: Michael McElhatton : Michael McElhatton Let's be honest: it's hard to really like as scheming a character as Roose Bolton, the man who orchestrated the violent Red Wedding  the most infamous scene in the show's six-year history that saw the death of Robb, Catelyn and Talisa. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 60. Ellaria Sand Played by: Indira Varma : Indira Varma Ellaria Sand may have been a more enticing creation on the page, but in the series, her screen time regrettably amounts to reacting to loved ones being killed off in increasingly awful ways. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 59. Grand Maester Pycell Played by: Julian Glover : Julian Glover The secretly sprightly Pycell had seen a lot of things in his time, but there's an element of "unfulfilled potential" surrounding Glover's character whose late betrayal of Cersei Lannister saw a grisly end to his life of luxury at King's Landing. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 58. Three-Eyed Raven Played by: Max von Sydow : Max von Sydow Perhaps it was the casting of Max von Sydow that heightened anticipation for the Three-Eyed Raven in the series, but the half-hearted story arc left a lot to be desired. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 57. Gilly Played by: Hannah Murray : Hannah Murray Gilly's long journey from Craster's Keep to Winterfell sounds exciting on paper. But, unfortunately, she has been merely a passenger on Sam's journey for far too long. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 56. Daario Naharis Played by: Michael Huisman : Michael Huisman The man who won the heart of Daenerys Targaryen, only to be left behind in Essos. Ed Skrein originally played the character, but was soon replaced after the actor landed a role in Deadpool. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 55. Shae Played by: Sibel Kekilli : Sibel Kekilli Oh Shea. Her ill-fated betrayal  sleeping with Tywin (Charles Dance)  was a slap in the face not just for lover Tyrion, but the viewer also. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 54. Grey Worm Played by: Jacob Anderson : Jacob Anderson Leader of the Usullied, Grey Worm remains unmoved at all times  unless around Missandei. While their romance can be heartwarming, it's hard to invest in two characters who are so wooden. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 53. Talisa Maegyr Played by: Oona Chaplin : Oona Chaplin To be fair to Robb Stark's wife Talisa, should she have avoided being murdered in arguably the most horrific way during the Red Wedding, she would most likely have been higher on this list. Alas. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 52. Shireen Baratheon Played by: Kerry Ingram : Kerry Ingram All the Greyscale-suffering Shireen ever wanted to do was read stories in her chamber, but due to her impressionable power-hungry father, Stannis, she was tragically reduced to ashes after being sacrificed to the Lord of Light. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 51. Viserys Targaryen Played by: Harry Lloyd : Harry Lloyd Viserys wanted the Iron Throne at any cost, giving away his own sister in exchange for an army. Dany, though, had other plans. Her new husband, Khal Drogo, covering Viserys in molten gold made for one of the show's most memorable death scenes. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 50. Maester Luwin Played by: Donald Sumpter : Donald Sumpter The kindly Maester Luwin was one of the nicest characters in the first few seasons, becoming a stand-in father for Bran and Rickon while the Starks endured horrors elsewhere. He was eventually killed when Ramsay Bolton took over Winterfell. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 49. Thoros of Myr Played by: Paul Kaye : Paul Kaye Thoros spent the majority of his time on the show resurrecting Beric and was most recently seen wielding his flaming sword alongside Jon Snow beyond the wall. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 48. Mance Rayder Played by: Ciaran Hinds : Ciaran Hinds Ciaran Hinds brought an intensity to Mance Rayder, a character who would otherwise have got lost in the crowd. As a result, his death at the hands of Melisandre was unexpectedly affecting. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 47. Podrick Payne Played by: Daniel Portman : Daniel Portman Ever loyal, Podrick Payne has become a fan favourite for being surprisingly brave in the face of adversity. He and Brienne of Tarth make an excellent duo. HBO/Helen Sloan Game of Thrones characters - ranked 46. Euron Greyjoy Played by: Pilou Asbk : Pilou Asbk While Euron Greyjoy may have only joined the show in season six, his presence was immediately felt. A wildcard character, Greyjoy's cut-throat, power-hungry nature has proven exciting to watch. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 45. Jaqen H'ghar Played by: Tom Wlaschiha : Tom Wlaschiha Jaqen H'ghar  one of the Faceless Men of Braavos  had such promise, but ultimately ended up being the one responsible for sapping Arya's story of the energy she'd had seasons before, alongside The Hound (Rory McCann). HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 44. Missandei Played by: Nathalie Emmanuel : Nathalie Emmanuel Missandei has somehow managed to come up trumps within the new world order, being an advisor to Dany. However, her stilted nature can make for some awkward encounters  but at least she and Grey Worm are happy together. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 43. Ygritte Played by: Rose Leslie : Rose Leslie Ygritte  the Wildling lover of Jon Snow  will go down in Thrones lore for providing the series the with oft-quoted famous line: "You know nothing, Jon Snow." Spoken with a northern accent, obviously. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 42. Hot Pie Played by: Ben Hawkey : Ben Hawkey Has an actor ever been more suited to a role? Ben Hawkey, after all, has gone on to run a bakery of his own, even selling Thrones-themed goods. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 41. Walder Frey Played by: David Bradley : David Bradley One of the orchestrators of the Red Wedding, Walder Frey was a lurching, terrifying villain. When Arya unmasks herself and kills the old man, it's a sweet, sweet moment of revenge. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 40. Gendry Baratheon Played by: Joe Dempsie : Joe Dempsie The true heir to the Iron Throne. Gendry may have spent a few seasons rowing out at sea, but his return hints at big things to come for the Baratheon bastard. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 39. Robert Baratheon Played by: Mark Addy : Mark Addy Mark Addy brought a certain gravitas to Robert Baratheon, making him a believably world-weary king. Despite only having a few scenes, his character's presence is still felt on the show thanks to Gendry. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 38. Barristan Selmy Played by: Ian McElhinney : Ian McElhinney After being fired by the Lannisters, Selmy pledged allegiance to Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), bridging the gap between two of the show's key characters. He was also a bloody good warrior. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 37. Yara Greyjoy Played by: Gemma Whelan : Gemma Whelan Lily Allen was initially wanted for the role of Theon's sister. However, she declined: 'I felt uncomfortable because I would have had to go on a horse and he would have touched me up and s***.' Seeing as Allen's brother, Alfie, had already been cast as Theon, it was probably for the best. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 36. Margaery Tyrell Played by: Natalie Dormer : Natalie Dormer Margaery Tyrell was one of Game of Thrones's biggest players, wheedling her way into the Lannister family politics and actually becoming Queen for a spell. Her number was up the moment she made an enemy of Cersei, and her fiery death, while underwhelming, was a huge moment. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 35. Samwell Tarly Played by: John Bradley : John Bradley There's a theory going around that Samwell Tarly, who trains as a maester, is actually the author of the Song of Ice and Fire  AKA the book series. In other words, Sam is George RR Martin. Go figure. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 34. Osha Played by: Natalia Tena : Natalia Tena The underused Osha was our very first wildling, an unpredictable knife-wielding danger to the characters we loved. Her subsequent evolution into Stark servant was interestingly played, which made the fact she was sidelined for multiple seasons, before being brought back just to be unceremoniously offed, a travesty. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 33. Ramsay Bolton Played by: Iwan Rheon : Iwan Rheon Ramsey cut off Theon's penis and sent it to the Greyjoy's father. He imprisoned and raped Sansa Stark. He killed Rickon Stark in front of his brother. And Ramsay eventually died by being fed to his own dogs. A terrifying death for a terrible human. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 32. Night King Played by: Richard Brake, Vladimir Furdik : Richard Brake, Vladimir Furdik The embodiment of evil. Why, exactly, the Night King marches South to destroy mankind remains somewhat a mystery. But, whatever the reason, he's a terrifying foe. Winter has, as the Starks say, finally come. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 31. Beric Dondarrion Played by: Richard Dormer : Richard Dormer Beric danced on the outskirts of the series until its third season when he surfaced as the leader of the Brotherhood Without Banners. His introduction paved the way for the Lord of Light's ability to resurrect the dead, a mystical sub-plot that would become very important for Jon Snow. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 30. Bran Stark Played by: Isaac Hempstead Wright : Isaac Hempstead Wright It says a lot that Bran Stark has become marginally more interesting since he sacrificed his personality in favour of becoming the spiritualistic heart of the series. His role in the final season looks set to be a huge one what with the long-standing theory that he could become the fearsome Night King. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 29. Theon Greyjoy Played by: Alfie Allen : Alfie Allen While Theon starts as a cocky kid, after being neutered by Ramsay he becomes the annoyingly weak Reek. Thankfully, Theon comes back around again in the later seasons, but not without us still hating his guts for not saving Sansa sooner. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 28. The High Sparrow Played by: Jonathan Pryce : Jonathan Pryce While at first a seemingly wise old man, the High Sparrow quickly becomes a tactical villain, using his newfound powers under King Tommen to turn King's Landing into his own domain. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 27. The Mountain Played by: Hafor Julius Bjornsson : Hafor Julius Bjornsson The hulking Clegane brother known as The Mountain  now a zombie-esque servant to Cersei  may not have come face-to-face with lots of characters in the series, but his presence is known by all in Westeros. His biggest moment? Battering poor Oberyn's head into mush. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 26. Khal Drogo Played by: Jason Momoa : Jason Momoa To the world he's now Aquaman, but for a brief time, Jason Momoa was Khal Drogo, the beloved Dothraki husband of his Khaleesi, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke). HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 25. Jon Snow Played by: Kit Harington : Kit Harington Every show needs a hero, and they do not come more obvious than Jon Snow. Rising from discarded bastard to King of the North, his climb has been one of the show's best storylines. A shame, then, that Snow can be such a bland person, doing only what is right and seemingly having no faults. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 24. Stannis Baratheon Played by: Stephen Dillane : Stephen Dillane With his propensity to make tough decisions for the greater good, Stannis could have been a heroic warrior. However, the Baratheon brother's continual fall from grace  including sacrificing his own daughter and murdering his own brother  were horrendous decisions that eventually doomed him. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 23. Hodor Played by: Kristian Nairn : Kristian Nairn Once you get over the fact that Kristian Nairn was essentially getting paid to repeat the word "Hodor" over and over, it's hard to deny that Bran Stark's protector was a heartwarming addition to the show. His death  the breathtaking "Hold the Door" sequence  will go down as one of the show's most memorable moments. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 22. Tywin Lannister Played by: Charles Dance : Charles Dance Stannis was a horrible father. His two favourite children became incestuous lovers, and he blamed his youngest for the death of his wife. Without Tywin, though, the Lannister family would not be nearly as riveting as they are to watch. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 21. Tormund Giantsbane Played by: Kristofer Hivju : Kristofer Hivju Tormund has some of the best lines in the series, particularly when expressing his admiration for Brienne. Here's one of the least explicit: "I want to make babies with her. Think of it. Great big monsters. They'll conquer the world!" HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 20. Daenerys Targaryen Played by: Emilia Clarke : Emilia Clarke "Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, First of Her Name, the Unburnt, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons." Every time Dany meets someone new, she forces Missandei to read out her entire CV. I guess everyone would if theirs was as impressive. Dany really has had a great journey to the top  a shame she could not have come to Westeros slightly earlier. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 19. Olenna Tyrell Played by: Dianna Rigg : Dianna Rigg Olenna's scenes were always ones to cherish. The Queen of Thorns was as cunning as the best of them and seemed like she could worm her way out of any situation, all from the comfort of her own chair. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 18. Jorah Mormont Played by: Iain Glen : Iain Glen Poor Ser Jorah. Dany may be 25 years younger than him, but that never stopped the disgraced warrior from loving her. He even fought off Grey Scale to fight by her side. If that's not true love, then what is? HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 17. Davos Seaworth Played by: Liam Cunningham : Liam Cunningham Liam Cunningham's performance as the curt Davos Seaworth has quietly been one of the best things about the series since his introduction. As Jon Snow's kingly advisor, he's recently seen himself thrust into the heart of the series and, simply put, Game of Thrones would be a less enjoyable show without him. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 16. Melisandre Played by: Carice van Houten : Carice van Houten Lest we forget that Melisandre is actually a shrivelled old witch who has been manipulating men for hundreds of years. Her faith in the Lord of Light, though, could very well be misplaced. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 15. Oberyn Played by: Pedro Pascal : Pedro Pascal Few shows can bring in characters midway through their run that have such an impact as Oberyn. The Viper quickly became a fan favourite, and his death remains one of the show's most squirm-inducing moments. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 14. Eddard "Ned" Stark Played by: Sean Bean : Sean Bean Killing off a main character during a show's first season was practically unheard of before Game of Thrones. Yet, as dictated by George RR Martin's books, they cut off Sean Bean's head without a second thought, setting the tone for everything to come. No death has impacted the Thrones quite as much since. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 13. Varys Played by: Conleth Hill : Conleth Hill Early on in the series, it was hard to pin down Varys, a slippery eel of a character who has "little birds" fluttering around Westeros, feeding back crucial information. Going into the final season, his true intentions are clear: he's all for Daenerys taking the Iron Throne, even if he doesn't live to see the day (I have to die in this strange country, just like you," Melisandre prophesied last season). HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 12. Bronn Played by: Jerome Flynn : Jerome Flynn Perhaps the show's best wise-cracking side-kick, Bronn only has one loyalty: money. Paired with either of the Lannister lads, Tyrion or Jaime, Bronn makes for excellent company. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 11. Robb Stark Played by: Richard Madden : Richard Madden Before Bodyguard, Richard Madden was the extremely temporary king of Westeros. Robb was a man of honour, trying to bring light to the Thrones universe. He was a likeable presence who ruled with his heart, an act that ultimately saw him die during the infamous Red Wedding in season three. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 10. Brienne of Tarth Played by: Gwendoline Christie : Gwendoline Christie Brienne is a reassuring force of good in a world filled with scheming layabouts. She's also one of the most deadly. Her time on the series has been spent protecting the likes of Renly Baratheon, Catelyn Stark and Jaime Lannister, the latter of which made for an interesting turn as it put her at odds with her loyalty. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 9. Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish Played by: Aidan Gillen : Aidan Gillen There would be no Game of Thrones without Littlefinger. The silver-tongued manipulator had Jon Arryn killed, setting off a snowball that turned into an avalanche. As smart as he may have been, Littlefinger was finally outplayed by his own pupil, Sansa Stark. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 8. Sansa Stark Played by: Sophie Turner : Sophie Turner Sansa has perhaps had the most interesting story arc of any character on Thrones. Beginning as a cliched annoying teenager, she gradually became a stone-cold killer, capable of holding Winterfell and outsmarting even Littlefinger. With any luck, she could sit upon the Iron Throne when the war is over. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 7. Arya Stark Played by: Maisie Williams : Maisie Williams Arya Stark, arguably the greatest character of the first few seasons, was one of the biggest victims of the series overtaking George RR Martin's source material. Her limited screen time, due to being away from the central action, robbed us of classic moments that we're grateful she's been a part of in an otherwise lacklustre season eight. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 6. Sandor "The Hound" Clegane Played by: Rory McCann : Rory McCann From his regular delivery of the phrase"F** the king" to that chicken scene, The Hound is a reckless creation whose high ranking on this list can be attributed to the searing performance from Rory McCann. Most effective when paired with Arya Stark. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 5. Joffrey Baratheon Played by: Jack Gleeson : Jack Gleeson No character has been as hated by the fandom as Joffrey. His wicked ways and disgusting behaviour haunted the show's first four seasons. You never knew what was going to come next: whether he was about to behead your favourite character or start crying to his mother. It made for thrilling television. But, as The Hound says, "F**k the King". HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 4. Catelyn Stark Played by: Michelle Fairley : Michelle Fairley The lady of Winterfell, Catelyn Stark, became the show's honorary lead after the untimely beheading of her husband, Ned (Sean Bean) at the end of season one. As she tried to take control of spiralling events in the second and third run, Thrones was handed its most resilient character. Michelle Fairley's guttural cry of anguish before meeting her tragic end during the Red Wedding will always be the show's most horrific moment. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 3. Jaime Lannister Played by: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau : Nikolaj Coster-Waldau If the characters above Jaime in this list are the show's greatest characters, Jaime is the show's most disarming. The Lannister brother  the Kingslayer  started the series as a long-haired bad guy of the tallest order, but his humbling over the past few seasons have seen him inch his way into the hearts of viewers. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 2. Tyrion Lannister Played by: Peter Dinklage : Peter Dinklage Blamed for the death of his mother and hated for being a dwarf, Tyrion turned to drink and prostitutes to numb the pain. However, Tyrion has a fierce intellect, capable of outsmarting the toughest enemies (and offering cutting lines that George RR Martin says often take weeks to write). More importantly, despite being betrayed and cast away time and time again, Tyrion selflessly only wants the best for the people of Westeros. A true hero. HBO Game of Thrones characters - ranked 1. Cersei Lannister Played by: Lena Headey : Lena Headey The Mad Queen, alone on the Iron Throne. Cersei has, over the course of seven seasons, seen her three children die, driven her lover/brother away, blown up a church with a half dozen major characters inside, arranged the death of her husband (King Robert) and attempted to have her other brother (Tyrion) killed multiple times. Yet, thanks to Lena Headey's empathetic performance, you still feel sorry for the terrifying Queen of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. As one of the most complicated character to have ever reached television screens, there's no denying her place as the best Thrones character to date. HBO

Meanwhile, the pain  shooting, stabbing, constricting pain  was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged, she wrote.

The actor was quickly rushed to hospital where she received a quick and ominous diagnosis that she had experienced a subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH)  an uncommon type of stroke caused by bleeding on the surface of the brain.

It's a very serious condition and can be fatal, the NHS states.

Recommended How to spot someone having a stroke and what to do

In the essay, Clarke explained that a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon after the aneurysm ruptures.

She explained: "If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have urgent surgery. And, even then, there were no guarantees.

Clarke underwent a three-hour surgery and spent nearly two weeks recovering from the surgery in an intensive care unit.

However, the surgery wasnt entirely successful and Clarke was left unable to remember her name after suffering from a condition known as aphasia  when a person has difficulty with their language or speech caused by damage to the left side of the brain.

In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug, she revealed.

I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job  my entire dream of what my life would be  centred on language, on communication. Without that, I was lost. I was sent back to the ICU and, after about a week, the aphasia passed. I was able to speak.

After about a week, the aphasia passed and Clarke regained her speech before eventually she felt well enough to return to work.

However, the actors ordeal didnt stop there. During promotion for Game of Thrones, she often felt weak and revealed that she had to take morphine for pain relief in between interviews.

In 2013, a brain scan revealed that Clarkes second aneurysm had doubled in size and required another operation.

Unfortunately, the procedure failed and Clarke suffered a massive bleed forcing doctors to operate again, this time accessing her brain through her skull.

While in recovery from the second operation, Clarke said she suffered from anxiety and panic attacks and felt like a shell of [herself].

The actor concluded by revealing that her health has improved in the years since her ordeal beyond [her] most unreasonable hopes and it is now at a hundred per cent.

Now, Clarke has launched SameYou, a charity aimed at supported young people with brain injuries.

She said she wants to break her silence over her near-fatal health scare to help others who are suffering from the invisible illness.

I know from personal experience that the impact of brain injury is shattering, Clarke said.

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Recovery is long-term and rehabilitation can be difficult to access. Brain injury can be an invisible illness and the subject is often taboo.

We must help young adults take control of their recovery and allow them to open up without fear of stigma or shame.There are a number of reasons why people should consider energy efficiency, from the clear environmental benefits to the financial perks.

But, while many of us are motivated by the need to reduce our utility bills, a new study has discovered another reason you should do your bit for the environment.

According to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, saving energy could also save lives and alleviate the costs of health problems caused by air pollution.

Sharing their findings in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, the team said that conserving energy comes with a host of health benefits.

By saving electricity, we can also save lives, says Dr Abel, team leader and postdoctoral research at the University of Wisonsin-Madison.

Environment news in pictures Show all 8 1 /8 Environment news in pictures Environment news in pictures Davos 2019: David Attenborough issues stark warning about future of civilisation as he demands practical solutions to combat climate change Sir David Attenborough has issued a stark warning about climate change to business figures gathered in Davos, telling them that "what we do now...will profoundly affect the next few thousand years". On the eve of this year's World Economic Forum, the renowned naturalist told the audience that the worlds of business and politics should "get on with the practical solutions" needed to prevent environmental damage. "As a species we are expert problem solvers. But we've not yet applied ourselves to this problem with the focus it requires. "We can create a world with clean air and water, unlimited energy, and fish stocks that will sustain us well into the future. But to do that, we need a plan," he said. The broadcaster made his speech after receiving a Crystal Award, which is awarded by the forum to "exceptional cultural leaders". AFP/Getty Environment news in pictures At least 60% of wild coffee species face extinction triggered by climate change and disease Two decades of research have revealed that 60 per cent of the worlds coffee species face extinction due to the combined threats of deforestation, disease and climate change. The wild strain of arabica, the most widely consumed coffee on the planet, is among those now recognised as endangered, raising concerns about its long-term survival. These results are worrying for the millions of farmers around the world who depend on the continued survival of coffee for their livelihoods. As conditions for coffee farming become tougher, scientists predict the industry will need to rely on wild varieties to develop more resilient strains Alan Schaller Environment news in pictures Warming Antarctic waters are speeding the rate at which glaciers are melting The Antarctic ice sheet is losing six times as much ice each year as it was in the 1980s and the pace is accelerating, one of the most comprehensive studies of climate change effects on the continent has shown. More than half an inch has been added to global sea levels since 1979, but if current trends continue it will be responsible for metres more in future, the Nasa-funded study found. The international effort used aerial photos, satellite data and climate models dating back to the 1970s across18 Antarctic regions to get the most complete picture to date on the impacts of the changing climate. It found that between 1979 and 1990 Antarctica lost an average of 40 gigatonnes (40 billion tonnes) of its mass each year. Between 2009 and 2017 it lost an average 252 gigatonnes a year. This has added 3.6mm per decade to sea levels, or around 14mm since 1979, the study shows Nasa/Getty Environment news in pictures Greater Manchester to ban fracking, paving way for confrontation with government over controversial industry Greater Manchester is to effectively ban fracking, raising the prospect of fresh confrontation with the government over the controversial industry. All of the regions 10 councils are to implement planning policies which create a presumption against drilling for shale gas in their areas, Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has announced. Campaigners said the move was the latest sign that the tide was turning against fracking, which has been the subject of multiple legal battles across the country. Critics of fracking say it poses environmental and health risks. Drilling at the UKs only operational fracking site, run by Cuadrilla in Lancashire, has repeatedly been halted due to earth tremors. But ministers support the industry and last year unveiled plans to accelerate the development of new drilling sites Ross Wills Environment news in pictures Japan confirms plan to resume commercial whaling in its waters from next year Japan will resume commercial whaling next year for the first time in more than three decades, in a move that has provoked strong criticism from campaigners and the international community. Chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga said his nation would leave the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to resume hunting the marine mammals in Japanese waters. However, he stated the activity would be limited to Japans territory and the 200 mile exclusive economic zone along its coasts. This means controversial scientific trips to Antarctica in which Japanese vessels killed hundreds of whales, as well as activity in the northwest Pacific, will stop in 2019 AP Environment news in pictures COP24: Environmental groups criticise morally unacceptable climate deal reached after major Poland summit Diplomats from around the world have agreed a major climate deal after two weeks of United Nations talks in Poland. But climate campaigners warned the deal  effectively a set of rules for how to govern the 2015 Paris climate accord  agreed between almost 200 countries lacked ambition or a clear promise of enhanced climate action. Activists cautiously welcomed elements of the plan, saying important progress had been made on ensuring that efforts to tackle climate change by individual nations can be measured and compared. But environmental groups were also highly critical of the agreement, warning it lacked ambition and clarity on key issues, including financing for climate projects for developing countries. The COP24 deal, which is aimed at providing firm guidelines for countries on how to transparently report their greenhouse gas emissions and their efforts to reduce them, was confirmed on 15 December, after talks overran Reuters Environment news in pictures Unprecedented changes needed to stop global warming as UN report reveals islands starting to vanish and coral reefs dying Greenhouse gas emissions must be cut almost in half by 2030 to avert global environmental catastrophe, including the total loss of every coral reef, the disappearance of Arctic ice and the destruction of island communities, a landmark UN report has concluded. Drawing on more than 6,000 scientific studies and compiled over two years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) findings, released this morning, warn enormous and rapid changes to the way everyone on Earth eats, travels and produces energy need to be brought in immediately. Though the scientists behind the report said there is cause for optimism, they recognised the grim reality that nations are currently nowhere near on track to avert disaster AFP/Getty Environment news in pictures Africas three biggest elephant poaching cartels exposed using DNA from illegal ivory shipments DNA taken from massive shipments of ivory has been used to identify the three largest wildlife trafficking gangs operating at the height of Africas elephant poaching epidemic. Ivory tends to be shipped around the world from African ports in bulk, and scientists have used genetic evidence gleaned from intercepted batches to reveal their origins. Led by Dr Samuel Wasser from the University of Washington, they traced a number of these shipments to three cartels operating out of Kenya, Uganda and Togo. Evidence collected by Dr Wasser has already helped convict ivory kingpin Feisal Mohamed Ali, and as his team joins the dots between shipments they plan to shore up the cases against more of the continents most prolific smugglers Art Wolfe

For the study, Abel and his colleagues organised a collection of three widely used models used to calculate power plant emissions, air quality and human mortality over the summer months, when energy use is high.

After three months, the researchers found that a 12 per cent increase in energy efficiency during the summer would reduce exposure to air pollution.

The team concluded that this cleaner air would save 475 human lives each year in the United States, worth an estimated $4bn (3bn).

"We're trying to clarify how changes in energy systems have benefits for public health," says Tracey Holloway, senior author and professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

"For the most part, the energy community is not focused on the human health effects of air pollution."

A recent study by the World Health Organisation (WHO) found that nine out of 10 people breathe air that contains high levels of pollutants, and that air pollution kills an estimated 7m people worldwide every year.

According to the report, air pollution, such as ozone and fine particles, caused by emissions from power plants adversely affects human health. They are known to contribute to the development of asthma attacks and other respiratory diseases in susceptible populations.

Through the study, the researchers are hoping to unite researchers and policymakers who work in different worlds - those who seek to improve air pollution and those who focus on energy  by finding common threads that will help to not only save money bit also improve air quality and human health.

"This seems like a missed opportunity," Holloway concludes.

"Energy efficiency is free, yet it is not being included in the basket of solutions."Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has questioned why so many grown men at Fox News are obsessed with her.

The democratic representative for New York's 14th congressional district made the comments during an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers.

Meyers asked the politician whether she felt surprised the news channel's had shifted all its attention and programming to her so quickly following her election to US Congress last year.

In response, Ocasio-Cortez drew applause from the audience when she described the channel's coverage of her as "weird", and asked: "Why are so many grown men obsessed with this 29-year-old? It's really funny."

Reflecting on her relationship with Republican colleagues who may watch Fox News, the New York-born congresswoman added: One of the side effects of this Fox News lunacy is that other actual members of Congress believe it and see it uncritically.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Show all 15 1 /15 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez greets fellow lawmakers ahead of the State of the Union address Getty Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez participates in an event with Democratic members of Congress EPA Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures The Democrat senator speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol January 30, 2019 Getty Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and fellow Democrat Rashida Tlaib AP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Senate chamber to watch two votes on January 24, 2019 Getty Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives with Chellie Pingree at a House Democratic Caucus meeting Getty Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Ocasio-Cortez during Donald Trump's State of the Union address Reuters Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures New York State Assembly member Catalina Cruz with Ocasio-Cortez AFP/Getty Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Nydia Velazquez talks with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Reuters Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Ocasio-Cortez casts her vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House EPA Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez poses with a campaign worker during a whistle stop in the Queens borough of New York Reuters Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Ocasio-Cortez outside the US Capitol AFP/Getty Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Ocasio-Cortez after casting her ballot in the 2018 midterm general election at a polling site in New York EPA Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez looks on during a march organised by the Women's March Alliance in Manhattan Reuters Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - the Democratic congresswoman in pictures Ocasio Cortez looks on at the Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 16, 2019 AFP/Getty

It comes hours after Ocasio-Cortez responded to comments the channel's Laura Ingraham show, which saw her described as doing the Latina thing when she pronounces her own name.

She does the Latina thing, attorney Joseph diGenova, who is a frequent commentator on the network, told Ingraham. Where she does [with Spanish accent] Anastasio [sic] Ocasio-Cortez, he continued.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks at a rally calling on Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) to reject Judge Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court on 1 October 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts (Getty Images)

Ocasio-Cortez later responded to a tweet from journalist Issam Ahmed, who wrote that some pundits dislike it when people of colour pronounce their own names correctly.

How dare they refuse to say their name in a wrong accent & not mangle their own family name so that I can feel more comfortable instead of look inside myself & examine why something as small as *a persons name* makes me uncomfortable in the first place?? This is an outrage! Ocasio-Cortez wrote, in faux indignation.

During the interview with Meyers, Ocasio-Cortez also spoke of her pride for the fact her office pays a living wage of no less than $52,000 (39,400) a year to her staff.

Two of my staffers have managed to be able to quit their second jobs in restaurants and be fully present at work and so I hope its a lesson to our folks on the other side of the aisle that if you pay your staff, youll be prepared, she noted.

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The 29-year-old became the youngest women in history to be elected to Congress when she unseated Rep Joe Crowley last November.

Before launching a career in politics, Ocasio-Cortez worked as an organiser for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign, and as a bartender in a New York restaurant.

Despite facing constant derision as a high-profile politician, she recently said it can be empowering to tell people to make fun of her, as doing so makes her critics looks childish.

"When you burst out that door and you're like, 'No, I'm not going to let you make me feel that way' - it's kind of jarring," Ocasio-Cortez told Vanity Fair earlier this month.Amy Schumer has revealed why she chose to talk about her husband Chris Fischers autism on her latest Netflix special, Amy Schumer: Growing.

In the hour-long stand up show, the 37-year-old comedian says she knew from the beginning that Fischers brain was a little different from hers, describing him as on the spectrum for autism spectrum disorder.

Now, speaking to US TV host Seth Meyers on his namesake talk show, Schumer explained that she wanted to open up about her husbands diagnosis in order to tackle some of the stigma surrounding autism.

Its been totally positive, she told Meyers. I think a lot of people resist getting diagnosed because of the stigma that comes along with it.

But youre not just diagnosed and then they throw you out, the I Feel Pretty star continued before praising the medical support her husband has been offered.

Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks Show all 11 1 /11 Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 14 January 2019 In an unusual style choice for the Duchess, who traditionally favours neutral hues, this ensemble offers a vibrant twist on the colour-blocking trend with a red Sentaler coat, matching heels and a bright purple Aritzia dress. It was a playful choice for the royal couple's visit to Birkenhead Town Hall. Getty Images Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 30 January 2019 The Duchess wore head-to-toe blush for her visit to the National Theatre, where she is now a patron. The ensemble is by US designer Brandon Maxwell but the suede shoes are Aquazurra. Getty Images Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 1 February 2019 Oscar de la Renta can do no wrong when it comes to flirty patterned dresses. This theatrical bird and rose-covered number was an apt choice for the Duchess; visit to Bristol Old Vic. AFP/Getty Images Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 7 February 2019 This Givenchy skirt offers some pizzazz thanks to its knee-high slit and its flattering waistline. Markle paired the look Aquazzura mules and a white collared shirt. Getty Images Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 12 February 2019 Who said you couldn't wear all-white everything? Markle paired her turtleneck Calvin Klein dress with an Amanda Wakeley coat for a gala performance at the Natural History Museum. Getty Images Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 23 February 2019 The Duchess was a lady in red for her visit to Casablanca, Morocco in this bespoke Valentino midi-dress, which she paired with nude court heels and a matching clutch. Getty Images Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 24 February 2019 Markle arrived at a reception hosted by the British Ambassador to Morocco in this full-coverage caped gown by Dior, which came in an opulent shade of champagne. Getty Images Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 25 February 2019 This billowing Carolina Herrera dress was the perfect choice for the Duchess' outing to brace the balmy climes of Rabat, Morocco, where she'd been visiting King Mohammed VI of Morocco with Prince Harry. This hypnotic sea blue gown was a custom-made number, obviously. Getty Images Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 8 March 2019 Proving that maternity hemlines needn't be restricted to one's ankles, Markle stepped out in this 1960s-inspired shift dress by high street label, Reiss. Paired with a black blazer and a pair of matching Manolo Blahnik pumps, it was a classic but delightfully retro look. AFP/Getty Images Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 11 March 2019 The Duchess has a penchant for rich emerald green hues, and this ensemble exemplifies just how suited the shade is to her complexion. The outfit was designed by Erdem, which was a symbolic choice given she wore the Canadian designer's pieces to a Commonwealth Day Youth Event at Canada House in London. Getty Images Meghan Markle's best pregnancy looks 11 March 2019 For the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey, the Duchess wore a cream chain-print dress by Victoria Beckham, which made its runway debut just a few weeks ago at London Fashion Week. The look was topped off with a matching pillbox hat, emerald green stilettos and a satin clutch. Getty Images

The tools that weve been given have made his life so much better and our marriage and our life more manageable. So I just wanted to encourage people to not be afraid of that stigma.

Schumer went on to say that she suspects many people with autism go undiagnosed, which she suggested is unfortunate given how many resources there are out there to support patients.

Hes an amazing guy, she added.

In the comedians Netflix special, which is based on her pregnancy, Schumer explains how the qualities and traits that her husband has a result of his autism are all of the reasons [she] fell madly in love with him.

Autism is a lifelong developmental disability that affects how people perceive the world and interact with others, the National Autistic Society (NAS) states.

Recommended Autism could be diagnosed at birth with a hearing test

An autistic person experiences their surroundings differently from others, which can impact their communication skills and their ability to relate to the people closest to them.

As the name suggests, autism is a spectrum condition meaning that while all autistic people share certain difficulties, they can also experience the condition in different ways.

You can read more about autism spectrum disorder here.Tony Blair has thrown his weight behind the Put it to the People march, saying that a second Brexit referendum is now the only way out of the political crisis engulfing the UK.

The former Labour prime minister said the mass procession through London would be a visible reminder to MPs that there remained huge support for a final say vote on Britain leaving the European Union (EU).

His intervention comes after yet another week of Brexit chaos  and as a petition asking for Article 50 to be revoked topped more than 2 million signatures.

Writing in the Evening Standard, Mr Blair said: The case for a fresh referendum gets stronger by the day.

It is not undemocratic to say that before we take a decision of this magnitude  and after all this mess  we should have the right to think again. We should go back to the people. Are they really going to riot because we are asking them if what they thought then they still think now?

People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Show all 30 1 /30 People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Rex People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty Images People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal A young protestor shouts as she takes part in the People's Vote demonstration against Brexit Getty Images People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Reuters People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal A protester's pro-EU t-shirt EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty Images People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Gina Miller and Caroline Lucas EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Tens of thousands of people march through London EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Demonstrators at the People's Vote March Getty People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal 'Two months too young to decide on my future' REUTERS People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal A young girl joins in the march PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal An EU flag is draped across the statue of Winston Chruchill in Parliament Square REUTERS People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty Images People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Vince Cable MP, Pro-EU campaigner Gina Miller, Tony Robinson and Caroline Lucas MP join with crowds PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Crowds gather on Pall Mall PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal A man resembling Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, joins EU supporters Reuters People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Reuters People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal People gather in Trafalgar Square REUTERS People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Pro-EU campaigner Gina Miller and Tony Robinson PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EU supporters, calling on the government to give Britons a vote on the final Brexit deal, participate in the 'People's Vote' march REUTERS

But to be clear: the hyperbolic reaction to the idea of a new vote is less to do with fear of what it will do to democracy than fear of the result democracy might yield. This weekend a huge rally will take place in London in support of a Peoples Vote. It will be a reminder to all MPs that the Brexiteers are not the only section of opinion that matters.

The march, organised by the Peoples Vote campaign and supported by The Independent, will begin in Park Lane at 12pm before making its way to Parliament Square where a number of speeches

A similar rally in October attracted almost 700,000 people and hundreds of thousands are expected to take to the streets once more.

With parliament divided, and a no deal Brexit remaining the default legal position if nothing else is agreed, a recent survey for The Independent found that a second referendum was the most popular option, ahead of remaining in the EU, renegotiating with the EU or leaving without a deal.

Mr Blair said: The British people want closure and an end to the agony. The route is to do what up to now Parliament has not had the opportunity to: debate properly the genuine Brexit options and decide on one; or decide on one but put the final say with the people.A pro-Brexit march between Sunderland to London, which has been heavily promoted by Nigel Farage, has been banned from National Trust properties.

The March To Leave procession has been told it is not welcome because the charity is apolitical.

The revelation comes after it emerged marchers, who are walking the 270 miles over 14 days, had already been asked to leave a property run by the organisation in North Yorkshire.

Plans to start Tuesdays leg of the walk  organised by Leave Means Leave  at picturesque Fountains Abbey had to be hastily rearranged after the trust said walkers should not gather at the sites car park.

Marchers instead met in a nearby lay-by with many of the roughly 80 participants emailed new Google Maps coordinates minutes before the start time.

"Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Show all 15 1 /15 "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage waves from the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus on the march from Sunderland to London Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers pass a sign to "Cuckoo Land" in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher holds up a blue passport as the march passes Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses for a photo in a pub in Hartlepool Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage pays his respects to Tommy, the statue of a First World War soldier in Seaham, County Durham Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march An anti-Brexit van has been graffitied in Sunderland on the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher carries a Union flag reading "Storm Brexit" in Sunderland Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A couple push a Save Our Sovereignty trolley through a tunnel in Easington, County Durham during the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage enjoys a pint with fellow marchers in Hartlepool Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A pro-European counter-marcher lets off a smoke grenade with the colours of the EU flag Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage leads the march in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage takes part in the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses on the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus in Seaham Getty

Walkers themselves were given no indication of why the change of venue had occurred with organisers saying logistical issues caused the alteration.

Further plans to begin Thursdays march at Nostell Priory, in West Yorkshire were cancelled by Leave Means Leave to avoid further embarrassment, The Yorkshire Post reports. A pub car park was announced as the convening point instead.

A spokeswoman for the National Trust, which looks after some of the UKs most famous stately homes, told the newspaper: We were not contacted by the organisers of the march for permission to gather at Nostell. As a charitable organisation, the National Trust is apolitical, and in view of this we would not agree, nor did we agree, to Nostell being used for a political event.

A Leave Means Leave spokesman confirmed the march will now stay away from the charity's sites for the remainder of the journey to London.

It is not the first time the march has run into difficulties.

On its second day, plans to cross the River Tees by the famous Transporter Bridge had to be abandoned when the group arrived only to find the bridge did not operate on Sundays.

The walk, which started on Saturday, is set to finish in London on 29 March where a political rally in Parliament Square will demand the UK leaves the EU immediately.Britains busiest rail station, London Waterloo, was once again closed for the start of the morning rush hour due to overrunning engineering works  for the second time in four months.

The station is normally the arrival point for around 250,000 commuters every morning, from south-west London, Surrey, Hampshire and beyond.

With many of them finding their morning journeys impossible, the financial damage to the wider economy will run into millions of pounds.

The vast majority of trains serving London Waterloo are electric. One diesel train arrived from Salisbury just after 7am  with thousands of commuters squeezed on board. It departed for Exeter 10 minutes later.

By 7.30am, a number of trains had started to arrive, including some from the suburbs.

The most stressful Tube stations Show all 15 1 /15 The most stressful Tube stations The most stressful Tube stations 15. Bond Street Data on the most stressful tube stations was compiled by PowWowNow Getty The most stressful Tube stations 14. Piccadilly Circus Getty The most stressful Tube stations 13. Tottenham Court Road PA The most stressful Tube stations 12. Green Park Getty The most stressful Tube stations 11. Canary Wharf PA The most stressful Tube stations 10. Euston Getty The most stressful Tube stations 9. Paddington PA The most stressful Tube stations 8. London Bridge PA The most stressful Tube stations 7. Liverpool Street PA The most stressful Tube stations 6. Oxford Circus PA The most stressful Tube stations 5. Victoria PA The most stressful Tube stations 4. Waterloo PA The most stressful Tube stations 3. Stratford PA The most stressful Tube stations 2. Bank Getty The most stressful Tube stations 1. King's Cross PA

A Network Rail spokesperson said: We apologise to passengers for the disruption to services across the South Western network this morning owing to a possession overrun.

Disruption, including severe delays and cancellations, will last until the afternoon.

South Western Railway, the train operator, said: We were earlier informed of over-running engineering work in the London Waterloo area.

Network Rail engineers have now resolved the issue. However during the closure, trains were unable to leave a number of depots and enter services. As a result there will be residual delays and alterations to services throughout the morning.

We are very sorry for any delay that this may cause to your journey.

As trains and train crew are in the wrong locations for their planned operations, services are unlikely to be back to normal until the start of the afternoon rush.

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Support free-thinking journalism and subscribe to Independent Minds

Passengers are being told that they can use CrossCountry, Great Western Railway and Southern services.

On 19 November 2018, overrunning work involving a single buckled rail led to the closure of Waterloo station for the morning rush hour.

One commuter, Silvia Mendes, demanded to know from Network Rail: What will you be doing to ensure theres no repeat of this?

Overrunning engineering works seems to be a recurring theme.

Quite frankly, when paying 400 a month, it really isnt good enough.

The shutdown happened as the rail industry announced that trains which arrive late will now be recorded as delayed.

Previously official figures allowed a delay of five minutes, or 10 minutes for long-distance services.Theresa May was left waiting while European leaders decided the future of Brexit behind closed doors.

The prime minister had hoped to be handed an extension of the Article 50 period until 30 June before making a statement from Brussels in the early evening.

Instead, the 27 presidents and prime ministers were locked in talks long into the night after they tore up draft proposals and produced a complicated conditional plan.

Diplomats in the room painted a disorientating picture of discussions, with proposals for shorter and longer deadlines made by different countries.

EU leaders ultimately agreed that the UK could have an unconditional extension until 12 April, and a further extension until 22 May if MPs approved the withdrawal agreement next week.

"Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Show all 15 1 /15 "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage waves from the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus on the march from Sunderland to London Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers pass a sign to "Cuckoo Land" in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher holds up a blue passport as the march passes Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses for a photo in a pub in Hartlepool Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage pays his respects to Tommy, the statue of a First World War soldier in Seaham, County Durham Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march An anti-Brexit van has been graffitied in Sunderland on the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher carries a Union flag reading "Storm Brexit" in Sunderland Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A couple push a Save Our Sovereignty trolley through a tunnel in Easington, County Durham during the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage enjoys a pint with fellow marchers in Hartlepool Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A pro-European counter-marcher lets off a smoke grenade with the colours of the EU flag Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage leads the march in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage takes part in the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses on the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus in Seaham Getty

The so-called flextension would also give the UK the option of a longer delay if needed, but only on the condition of deciding to join in European Parliament elections before April 12.

One EU official said: "March 29th is over. As of tonight, April 12th is the new March 29th."

Speaking after the agreement was struck, European Council president Donald Tusk said Ms May accepts the extension scenarios.

He added: Frankly speaking I was really sad before our meeting  now I am much more optimistic.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker added: This closes and completes the full package. Theres no more we can give. Were hopeful that the agreement will be adopted by the House of Commons.

"I hope we can all agree that we are at the moment of decision," Theresa May said at a press conference in the early hours of the morning.

Recommended Jeremy Corbyn refuses to rule out revoking Article 50

"It gives us the opportunity, MPs next week, to look at the choices that clearly face them: we can leave with a deal, in an orderly manner, have that extension until 22 May - or, if we don't get that deal through, if we don't get that vote through then before 12 April we have to come forward with another plan, and if that plan means a further extension it means standing in those European Parliamentary elections."

At the start of the mammoth Brussels drafting session Theresa May took questions from EU leaders about her Brexit strategy, with diplomats privy to discussions describing her responses as unconvincing and wooden.

According to several accounts, the prime minister was unable to answer what would happen if she could not pass the vote in parliament and had no apparent plan B, spooking her fellow leaders.

After Ms May was sent out of the room, the 27 leaders discussed options for an extension that included dates in April, May, and delays until the end of the year. Both conditional and unconditional extensions were considered by EU leaders.

Discussions and drafting of the new plans spilled over into a late night dinner, with a planned meeting about China-EU relations pushed back until Friday. Planned press conferences by Theresa May, Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker were postponed until just before midnight.

Leaders ultimately agreed a text which read: The European Council agrees to extension until 22 May, provided the withdrawal agreement is approved by the House of Commons next week. If the withdrawal agreement is not approved by the House of Commons next week, the European Council agrees to an extension until 12 April and expects UK to indicate a way forward before this date for consideration by EUCO.

Arriving at the summit in the afternoon Theresa May said the prospect of a delay was a matter of regret for her. She also confirmed she would seek an extension until 30 June.

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On the way into the meeting Emmanuel Macron had perhaps the starkest warning of Ms Mays European counterparts, telling reporters: We have to be clear: we can discuss and agree an extension if it is a technical extension in the case of a yes vote. In the case of a no vote, it will guide everybody to a no deal, for sure.

The French president said that a longer delay would require a deep political change in the UK, adding: We cannot have a long-lasting situation where there is no visibility, no purpose, no political majority.

Meanwhile Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar described the situation in London as somewhat chaotic and said a no-deal Brexit would be a decision by the UK because it had the power to revoke Article 50.Conservative MPs will be offered free votes if the Commons succeeds in seizing control of the Brexit process to find a plan B, a government minister has suggested.

Kwasi Kwarteng said it would be surprising if Theresa May decided to whip Tory MPs against alternative options likely to be debated next Wednesday.

Free votes  as demanded by pro-EU cabinet ministers  would dramatically increase the chances of MPs backing a softer Brexit, or even a fresh referendum.

Many ministers are believed to favour staying in the customs union or single market  while others are ready to back a Final Say public vote, supporters believe.

Answering an emergency question in the Commons, Mr Kwarteng, a junior Brexit minister, twice said he expected free votes  something refused by the prime minister so far.

Recommended EU leaders decide Brexit fate in private as May secures deal extension

It came as he was lambasted by MPs for refusing to say when the promised third meaningful vote on Ms Mays deal would take place  or even if it definitely would.

"Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Show all 15 1 /15 "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage waves from the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus on the march from Sunderland to London Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers pass a sign to "Cuckoo Land" in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher holds up a blue passport as the march passes Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses for a photo in a pub in Hartlepool Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage pays his respects to Tommy, the statue of a First World War soldier in Seaham, County Durham Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march An anti-Brexit van has been graffitied in Sunderland on the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher carries a Union flag reading "Storm Brexit" in Sunderland Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A couple push a Save Our Sovereignty trolley through a tunnel in Easington, County Durham during the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage enjoys a pint with fellow marchers in Hartlepool Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A pro-European counter-marcher lets off a smoke grenade with the colours of the EU flag Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage leads the march in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage takes part in the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses on the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus in Seaham Getty

Mr Kwarteng was asked if Tories would be released from the whip so the public could truly see that we are acting in a way to try to find the best way forward, if the deal is defeated again.

Obviously, if the house is being asked to find a way forward, it would be surprising if those votes were not free votes, he replied.

Amid surprise, the minister repeated: I was referring to the indicative votes that were suggested by my right honourable friend [Tory MP Vicky Ford] in her question.

He said the decision was a matter for the business managers and will be taken as and when the debate will take place.

In reality, it is a crucial decision for the prime minister  amid growing pressure for free votes, given the near certainty of defeat for the deal and the danger of a crash-out no-deal Brexit as early as 12 April.

Last month, an alliance of Amber Rudd, the work and pensions secretary, Greg Clark, the business secretary, and David Gauke, the justice secretary, forced a free vote on vetoing leaving the EU without an agreement.

Senior Tories descended into open warfare over the issue, as David Lidington, Ms Mays de facto deputy, met with opposition leaders to discuss how to facilitate the indicative votes.

The Independent was told that Mr Lidington was willing to engage in advanced discussions about how they should be carried out, including whether to use preferential ballots to find a clear winner.

But Steve Baker, the deputy leader of the hard Brexit European Research Group, said: National humiliation is imminent through these indicative votes. The wrong Conservatives have the levers of power.

The issue will come to a head on Monday, when a cross-party group of backbenchers attempts to commandeer the Commons business for Wednesday, to trigger a series of indicative votes on the best way forward.

The Monday amendment is expected to succeed, after losing by only two votes last week, given the escalating threat of a no-deal Brexit.

One suggestion is for MPs to tick boxes on a piece of paper listing the various Brexit options, perhaps allowing them to show support for more than one, before a winner is announced.

Despite Mr Kwartengs evasions, it is understood that No 10 is gearing up to bring the vote back on Tuesday, or possibly Wednesday.

MPs and peers must pass legislation to change the date of Brexit from 29 March by Friday, in secondary legislation that must be brought forward by Thursday.The agreement to extend Article 50 struck by EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday night means that anything is possible  even cancelling Brexit, Donald Tusk has said.

The president of the European Council said the UK would have time to change its strategy or even cancel Brexit, which is the prerogative of the UK government.

His comments come after millions of people signed an official parliamentary petition calling for the UK to revoke Article 50 to avoid a no-deal Brexit, and ahead of a major demonstration in central London on Saturday calling for a second referendum.

It [the deal] means that until 12 April anything is possible: a deal, a long extension, if the UK decided to rethink its strategy or revoke its strategy, or revoking Article 50, which is the prerogative of the UK government, Mr Tusk told reporters at the end of the European Council meeting.

The fate of Brexit is in the hands of our British friends. As the EU we are prepared for the worst but hope for the best. As you know, hope dies last.

Recommended EU leaders decide Brexit fate in private as May secures deal extension

He was speaking the morning after a late-night negotiating session where EU leaders thrashed out the future of the UK over dinner.

Leaders agreed that Britain would get an unconditional Brexit delay until 12 April  much earlier than the 30 June date Theresa May had asked for.

But the UK will also get an additional delay until 22 May if MPs approve the withdrawal agreement next week, and the door has been left open for a longer extension if the UK participates in European parliament elections in May.

The date is chosen so it makes [a long extension] possible for the UK, one senior EU official said. The beauty of it is that it keeps those options open.

The senior official said member states would realistically consider a long extension in three scenarios: if the UK went for a general election, a second referendum, or produced some kind of workable plan to build a majority in the UK parliament for the withdrawal agreement.

Theresa May made her case to EU leaders last night but fled the summit this morning, missing a planned discussion about Europe-China relations despite earlier plans to attend.

Speaking after the meeting concluded, German chancellor Angela Merkel said leaders had a very candid talk with the prime minister who has put a lot of her efforts into defending British interests.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, put less of a gloss on the conversation, telling reporters: It was much easier to talk about China than it was to about the United Kingdom.

EU leaders publicly put the chance of the UK ratifying the withdrawal agreement from about 5 per cent  Emmanuel Macrons estimate  to 50/50  a guess favoured by Dutch PM Mark Rutte and his Luxembourg counterpart Xavier Bettel.

Theresa May at the meeting (Reuters)

One senior EU source familiar with what went on in the room last night painted an unvarnished picture of the meeting: While the discussion was conducted in civilised and friendly atmosphere, it left the leaders with the impression that chances for an early positive vote in the House of Commons are not very high. Some said 5 per cent, some said 10 per cent, some said... thats too generous. That also influenced the discussion on the text.

The source added: The exchange of Theresa May reinforced the belief that the chance of something constructive coming out of this in one week were not very high and that maybe a couple of more weeks would increase the chances at least a little bit.

Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Show all 12 1 /12 Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Derry, Londonderry A garage door displaying unionism, bolted shut, like a visual representation of Brexit Britain, locked to outsiders, safeguarding whats inside Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Derry, Londonderry Rossville Street, the site of Bloody Sunday, where messages demand a severance with England. From this perspective, Britain is England in sheeps clothing, the real empire, the centre of colonial power Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Bangor A political message in paint not yet dry, still forming, setting, adjusting, or in old paint finally eroding, melting away Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Bangor Moral judgement frames a residential view. The message seeks to make everybody involved in the religious narrative: those who dont believe are those most in debt Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Castlerock The beach is sparse and almost empty, but covered in footprints. The shower is designed to wash off sand, and a mysterious border cuts a divide through the same sand Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Belfast Two attempts to affect and care for the body. One stimulated by vanity and social norms and narratives of beauty, the other by a need to keep warm in the winter night Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Belfast The gate to an unclaimed piece of land, where nothing is being built, where no project is in the making, where a sign demands the creation of something new Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Derry, Londonderry Under a motorway bridge a womans face stares, auburn and red-lipped, her skin tattooed with support for the IRA and a message of hostility to advocates of the Social Investment Fund Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Derry, Londonderry The Fountain Murals, where the curbs and the lampposts are painted the red, white, and blue of the Union Flag. A boy walks past in the same colours, fitting the scene, camouflaged Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Coleraine A public slandering by the football fields, for all to see or ignore. I wonder if its for the police or for the community Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Belfast A tattoo parlour, where the artist has downed tools, momentarily, bringing poise to the scene, which looks like a place of mourning, not a site of creation Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northern Ireland Derry, Londonderry A barrier of grey protects the contents of this shop, guarding it from the streets outside, but it cannot conceal it completely, and the colours of lust and desire and temptation cut through Richard Morgan/The Independent

Belgian prime minister Charles Michel told reporters on his way out: I believe in miracles, but they are not frequent. If the political debate in the UK allows their red lines to change, that would create a different scenario to reach an agreement and bring stability to all.

The EU sees the objective of the extension as being to create the conditions in which the UK government can find a solution, but if they dont find a solution its not because of us, according to a Brussels source familiar with the thinking of member states.

Many in the room, indeed, find it difficult to believe that suddenly national consensus breaks out in the United Kingdom and in the Conservative Party and on that basis there will be a clear plan. That is not for us to judge: we leave the door open for that and it is for the UK to establish that.The Democratic Unionist Party has appeared to read the last rites on Theresa Mays Brexit deal by saying nothing has changed ahead of a third and final meaningful vote.

The party propping up the Tories in power, and whose support is essential to any hopes the prime minister has of rescuing her agreement, scotched any prospect of it switching sides.

It also echoed the language of Brexiteer Tories by accusing her of being far too willing to capitulate to the EU, after the agreement to delay withdrawal this week.

And it attacked Ms Mays disastrous Downing Street speech on Wednesday night for putting the blame on others instead of accepting her own responsibility for the current debacle.

The prime minister has now agreed with the EU to kick the can down the road for another two weeks and humiliatingly revoke her oft-stated pledge that the UK would leave the EU on 29 March, said Nigel Dodds, the DUPs deputy leader.

Recommended Watson defies Corbyn by backing fresh Brexit referendum

On the deal itself, he said: Nothing has changed as far as the withdrawal agreement is concerned.

"Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Show all 15 1 /15 "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage waves from the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus on the march from Sunderland to London Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers pass a sign to "Cuckoo Land" in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher holds up a blue passport as the march passes Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses for a photo in a pub in Hartlepool Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage pays his respects to Tommy, the statue of a First World War soldier in Seaham, County Durham Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march An anti-Brexit van has been graffitied in Sunderland on the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher carries a Union flag reading "Storm Brexit" in Sunderland Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A couple push a Save Our Sovereignty trolley through a tunnel in Easington, County Durham during the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage enjoys a pint with fellow marchers in Hartlepool Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A pro-European counter-marcher lets off a smoke grenade with the colours of the EU flag Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage leads the march in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage takes part in the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses on the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus in Seaham Getty

Nothing fundamentally turns on the formal ratification of documents which the attorney general has already said do not change the risk of the UK being trapped in the backstop.

Mr Dodds said his party would only support a deal that protects the union, adding: That remains our abiding principle.

We will not accept any deal which poses a long-term risk to the constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom.

Without DUP support, scores of anti-EU Tories will continue to oppose the deal  threatening another three-figure defeat and a fresh Brexit crisis.

Ministers refused to say when the final vote would take place, but it is understood that No 10 is gearing up to bring Ms Mays deal back to the Commons on Tuesday, or possibly Wednesday.

MPs and peers must pass legislation to change the date of Brexit from 29 March by Friday, in secondary legislation that must be brought forward by Thursday.

Before then, a cross-party group of backbenchers will attempt, on Monday, to commandeer the Commons business for Wednesday, to trigger a series of indicative votes on the best way forward.

The Monday amendment is expected to succeed, after losing by only two votes last week, given the escalating fears about a no-deal Brexit.

One suggestion is for MPs to tick boxes on a piece of paper listing the various Brexit options, perhaps allowing them to show support for more than one, before a winner is announced.Membership of the European Economic Area (EEA) may not be the right solution for the UK after Brexit, the prime minister of one of its key members has said.

Icelandic prime minister Katrin Jakobsdottir expressed hesitancy at the idea that Britain could join the EEA, suggesting that the debate in the UK was far from the realities of the agreement.

She was in Brussels to meet her EU counterparts for a celebration of 25 years of the EEAs existence  joking that maybe some of the EU leaders have other things on their mind after a late night Brexit negotiation that spilled over into the early hours of the morning.

What do I advise Mrs May? Ms Jakobsdottir, who is from Icelands left-green party, said when asked by reporters on arrival at the meeting.

I dont know if our circumstances are fitting for the UK. Obviously the discussion there isnt maybe exactly what the EEA agreement is about.

"Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Show all 15 1 /15 "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage waves from the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus on the march from Sunderland to London Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers pass a sign to "Cuckoo Land" in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher holds up a blue passport as the march passes Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses for a photo in a pub in Hartlepool Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage pays his respects to Tommy, the statue of a First World War soldier in Seaham, County Durham Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march An anti-Brexit van has been graffitied in Sunderland on the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher carries a Union flag reading "Storm Brexit" in Sunderland Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A couple push a Save Our Sovereignty trolley through a tunnel in Easington, County Durham during the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage enjoys a pint with fellow marchers in Hartlepool Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A pro-European counter-marcher lets off a smoke grenade with the colours of the EU flag Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage leads the march in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage takes part in the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses on the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus in Seaham Getty

Were members of the four freedoms, people, movement, services and all that. I dont know if thats the right solution for the UK.

She added: But I think its very important for the UK as well as Iceland to think about how we can progress with our European cooperation which has been very important for Iceland.

The European Economic Area replicates most aspects of the EUs single market  including freedom of movement of people and goods. Some campaigners have suggested that the proposal, sometimes terms the Norway option, would be a good compromise in a country split down the middle on the question of Brexit.

Recommended EU leaders decide Brexit fate in private as May secures deal extension

Norways prime minister Erna Solberg, who was also at the summit, said the EEA had been of benefit to us all and that the agreement ad contributed to securing welfare and jobs both in the EU and in Norway.

The glowing picture painted of the arrangement by Ms Solberg, a conservative, was a far cry from the one she painted before the UKs 2016 EU referendum, when she described the EEAs arrangements as frustrating.

Some EU leaders appeared to nudge Britain towards the Norway model, however. After the celebration, Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar tweeted: Good to meet up with the Norwegian, Icelandic and Liechtenstein prime ministers. All in the single market for 25 years but not in the EU. Sensible solutions are possible once red lines dont restrict them.

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Theresa May left the summit early in the morning after securing an extension to Article 50 on Thursday night, and did not attend the EEA celebration.

The EEA would require the UK to be aligned with EU rules but have little say over their formulation. It does not include a customs union, and as such would not alone provide frictionless trade  though Brussels has suggested such a double arrangement could be considered if the UK decided it wanted one.

The close relationship with the EU that the agreement brings would however be likely to limit the economic hit from Brexit compared to other suggested approaches.The Put it to the People march will take place in London today  just six days before the UK is meant to leave the European Union.

Taking part could be the last opportunity to demand a Final Say on Brexit. A similar rally in October attracted almost 700,000 people and hundreds of thousands are again expected to take to the streets.

Why another march?

Since the last march, Theresa Mays deal with the EU has been rejected by MPs in two meaningful votes.

With parliament divided, and a no-deal Brexit still the default legal position if nothing else is agreed, a recent survey for The Independent found that a second referendum was the most popular option, ahead of remaining in the EU, renegotiating with the EU or leaving without a deal.

The organisers of the rally, the Peoples Vote campaign, say the debate needs to be taken out of parliament and into the streets.

A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Show all 65 1 /65 A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit An estimated 700,000 people marched through London to demand a final say on the withdrawal agreement Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Red smoke from a canister hangs in the air as around 100,000 demonstrators march through London during a People's Vote anti-brexit demonstration savings banners and placards Anti-Brexit People's Vote March for the Future in London Rex A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Mayor of London Sadiq Khan takes part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 Protesters wearing final Say shirts and holding placards Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit MP Chuka Umunna (left) and MP Vince Cable (right) as MP Anna Soubry (centre) addresses Anti-Brexit campaigners at a rally after the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A Peoples Vote march attendee calls for a Final Say Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators with banners 'We're with EU' during the People's Vote March for the Future in London, Britain, 20 October 2018. Reports state that the 'March for the Future' is to be led by a column of young people and call for a Peopleas Vote on the Brexit deal. After marching through central London, there will be a rally on stage in Parliament Square, including speeches from Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. EPA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Protesters at Londons march for the future in October The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Editor of The Independent Christian Broughton speaks to demonstrators in Parliament Sqaure after they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A poster at the March for the Future in October The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators hold placards as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 campaigner wrapped in EU flag Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators pass Trafalgar Square as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators wave Union and European flags and hold up placards as they pass Trafalgar Square, taking part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators hold placards as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A demonstrator holds a message during a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators take part in the 'People's Vote March for the Future,' in central London, Britain, 20 October 2018. Reports state that the 'March for the Future' is to be led by a column of young people and call for a Peopleas Vote on the Brexit deal. After marching through central London, there will be a rally on stage in Parliament Square, including speeches from Mayor of London Sadiq Khan EPA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A protester brandishes an Independent t-shirt during the Brexit March Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Tens of thousands of people take part in People's Vote March for the Future in central London. The march organised by the People's Vote campaign is led by young people calling for a People's Vote on the Brexit deal Rex A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum PA

Why on 23 March?

The timetable for Brexit remains uncertain, but we do know that there is so far no way forward that has attracted enough support in a divided parliament to move ahead.

Ms May could ask for an extension at the European Council meeting on 21 and 22 March, but it is totally unclear at this point what that extension would be for.

Labour MP David Lammy said: It is in those final days that we have the biggest chance to convince MPs to give this decision back to the public.

What will the march be demanding?

The key demand is that any Brexit deal should be put to a public vote for final approval.

Instead of letting Theresa May kick the can down the road until the 29 March deadline, hundreds of thousands of people will march on parliament offering a solution to a crisis that threatens our rights, our living standards and our environment, said former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas.

One proposal for securing a second referendum involves tabling an amendment in the last week before 29 March.

MPs would then approve any deal only if it was subject to a public vote.

Where will the march take place?

The march is set to begin at 12pm, or high noon, on Saturday 23 March, on Londons Park Lane.

An hour later, marchers will begin heading down the east side of Hyde Park to Green Park, before making their way around the top of St Jamess Park to Parliament Square. The march will end with a mass rally and keynote speeches.

Who will be joining the march?

Several leading politicians including Caroline Lucas, David Lammy, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable, Independent Group MP Anna Soubry, Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon and the leaders of the SNP and Plaid Cymru in Westminster, Ian Blackford and Liz Saville Roberts, have already confirmed their support. The Independent is supporting the march and encouraging readers to attend.

Speaking on the morning of the march, mayor of London Sadiq Khan posted a message of support for everyone taking part to send the message "enough is enough".

The organisers are hoping to widen their appeal beyond those who have previously supported the Peoples Vote and Final Say campaigns. The Independents petition calling on the prime minister to give the people a Final Say on Brexit has attracted well over 1.1 million signatures.

Another petition calling on the government to revoke Article 50 and cancel Brexit has now hit over four million signatures.

The only way forward out of this Brexit mess is through a Peoples Vote, said Sir Vince.

 Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events

For more details about the Put It To The People march  and to sign up  please visit peoples-vote.uk/march

For updates on whats going on with Brexit, you can register here to receive our new Brexit in Brief newsletter and other benefits. If you already have a registered account with The Independent you can sign up for the newsletter via your Account details tab Close 'I do not believe that we should be revoking Article 50' Theresa May speaks after EU agrees plan to delay Brexit

Labour's deputy leader, Tom Watson, has said a fresh Brexit referendum is "the only way" to solve the current crisis.

Speaking before the major Put it to the People march in London on Saturday, he said the best way to unite the country was to "have a final say - and then live with the result".

It came as Theresa May faced mounting pressure after European Union leaders seized control of the Brexit timetable during late night talks in Brussels.

EU leaders said they would be prepared to defer Britains departure until 22 May if the governments deal is approved next week - if not, then a deadline of 12 April has been set, they added.

Reports suggested that the chairman of the influential 1922 group of Conservatives, Sir Graham Brady, visited Ms May this week and relayed the message that MPs in the party want her to stand down.

Please allow a moment for the liveblog to loadMuch is made of the experience in Australia, which outlawed all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns in the wake of a mass shooting  and has had only one mass shooting since. But mass shootings there were rare prior to the ban. Gun homicides did fall after it went into effect  but they had been declining before, and other types of homicide also declined, suggesting that the ban was not a factor.Ex-Ukip leader Nigel Farage has been accused of hypocrisy after claiming that many signatures to a record-breaking petition to cancel Brexit came from Russia and the majority for a no-deal exit was increasing by the week.

The prominent Brexiteer said he was disgusted by the news that Brexit would be delayed, which he claimed would be seen by millions of people as a failure of leadership by Theresa May.

Mr Farage, who has taken the reins of a new Brexit party, also sought to dismiss criticism of his sparsely attended pro-Leave march, saying it was the symbolism that mattered.

He also made unsubstantiated claims that there is a very, very clear majority for a no-deal Brexit and its gaining a few per cent every single week.

Mr Farage made the claims despite more than 3 million people have signed a petition calling for Article 50 to be revoked, and ahead of a major demonstration in favour of a Final Say referendum on Saturday, organised in partnership with The Independent.

Recommended Three million sign petition calling for Brexit to be cancelled

Labour MP Jo Stevens, who supports the Best for Britain campaign, said: The hypocrisy of Farage and his billionaire bully boys knows no bounds. He and his gang broke electoral law and are under investigation for Russian collusion.

With around 3 million signatures already, the revoke petition shows the genuine depth of anger in the country at the governments shambolic mismanagement of Brexit  and the damage which has already been done.

Of the emails Im receiving from worried constituents, 95 per cent are calling on MPs to revoke Article 50 and stop the clock on this process to prevent a disastrous no-deal Brexit.

"Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Show all 15 1 /15 "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage waves from the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus on the march from Sunderland to London Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers pass a sign to "Cuckoo Land" in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher holds up a blue passport as the march passes Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses for a photo in a pub in Hartlepool Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage pays his respects to Tommy, the statue of a First World War soldier in Seaham, County Durham Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march An anti-Brexit van has been graffitied in Sunderland on the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher carries a Union flag reading "Storm Brexit" in Sunderland Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A couple push a Save Our Sovereignty trolley through a tunnel in Easington, County Durham during the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage enjoys a pint with fellow marchers in Hartlepool Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A pro-European counter-marcher lets off a smoke grenade with the colours of the EU flag Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage leads the march in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage takes part in the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses on the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus in Seaham Getty

Mr Farage told BBC Radio 4s Today programme that there was a very big shift going on in the country as he said people were saying can we please end this agony  its dominating everything.

When the presenter pointed to the millions of signatures to the petition to cancel Brexit, he said: I know, and a lot of them are from Russia so perhaps there should be an inquiry into collusion, whos to say?

He went on: Opinion polls are now very clear ... there is a big clear majority who want to leave with no deal as opposed to having an extension of any kind at all.

Mr Farage also claimed that about 20 million people would have joined the Leave Means Leave march in spirit, but it was the symbolism of it that matters.

 Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events

There is no majority in parliament for a no-deal exit, as MPs voted to delay Britains departure rather than crash out without a deal on 29 March.

A recent YouGov poll found 61 per cent of the population would vote to Remain rather than back Ms Mays deal if the choice was offered in a referendum while 39 per cent would opt for the existing deal.

If people were asked in a public vote whether they would prefer to remain in the EU or leave with no deal in place, Remain would still win, though by the smaller margin of 57-43 per cent.

EU leaders agreed on Thursday night to give Ms May more time to get her deal through parliament but she is widely expected to lose a third meaningful vote.

The prime minister also faces a Tory party losing patience with her leadership and threats that MPs could now seize control of the withdrawal process.Seven Labour frontbenchers have announced that they will take part in the Put it to the People march tomorrow to demand a fresh Brexit referendum.

They will join hundreds of thousands of people in London on Saturday to support calls for public to be given the Final Say on Brexit.

Their presence, along with that of London mayor Sadiq Khan, is likely to add to pressure on the Labour leadership to fully endorse another public vote.

Jeremy Corbyn has backed a fresh referendum on Theresa May's deal if it is approved by MPs but has suggested his priority is securing a softer version of Brexit.

He is under pressure from MPs and party members to wholeheartedly endorse calls to give the public a Final Say vote regardless of what Brexit deal, if any, is passed.

The march, which is being supported by The Independent, will also include former Conservative deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine, Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon and a host of celebrities.

They will be joined by Labour shadow ministers Clive Lewis, Rosena Alin Khan, Marsha de Cordova, Luke Pollard, Rachael Maskell, Steve Reed and Matt Rodda.

Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to attend, making the event one of the biggest political marches in UK history.

Speaking ahead of the protest, Mr Khan said: "Brexit is a complete and utter mess. We're now days away from falling off a cliff edge with catastrophic consequences. Enough is enough. It's time to take this out of the hands of politicians and put it back to the people.

Ill be marching on Saturday with people from every part of our country  from every walk of life - to demand that the British people get the final say. No matter how you voted in the referendum, we can all agree that the path were being forced to follow is not in the national interest. Everyone now deserves to have their say in how we move forward as a country."

Dozens of MPs and peers from all of the main political parties will also take part, including former Conservative cabinet ministers Justine Greening and Dominic Grieve, The Independent Group's Anna Soubry and SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford.

A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Show all 65 1 /65 A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit An estimated 700,000 people marched through London to demand a final say on the withdrawal agreement Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Red smoke from a canister hangs in the air as around 100,000 demonstrators march through London during a People's Vote anti-brexit demonstration savings banners and placards Anti-Brexit People's Vote March for the Future in London Rex A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Mayor of London Sadiq Khan takes part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 Protesters wearing final Say shirts and holding placards Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit MP Chuka Umunna (left) and MP Vince Cable (right) as MP Anna Soubry (centre) addresses Anti-Brexit campaigners at a rally after the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A Peoples Vote march attendee calls for a Final Say Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators with banners 'We're with EU' during the People's Vote March for the Future in London, Britain, 20 October 2018. Reports state that the 'March for the Future' is to be led by a column of young people and call for a Peopleas Vote on the Brexit deal. After marching through central London, there will be a rally on stage in Parliament Square, including speeches from Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. EPA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Protesters at Londons march for the future in October The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Editor of The Independent Christian Broughton speaks to demonstrators in Parliament Sqaure after they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A poster at the March for the Future in October The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators hold placards as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 campaigner wrapped in EU flag Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators pass Trafalgar Square as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators wave Union and European flags and hold up placards as they pass Trafalgar Square, taking part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators hold placards as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A demonstrator holds a message during a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators take part in the 'People's Vote March for the Future,' in central London, Britain, 20 October 2018. Reports state that the 'March for the Future' is to be led by a column of young people and call for a Peopleas Vote on the Brexit deal. After marching through central London, there will be a rally on stage in Parliament Square, including speeches from Mayor of London Sadiq Khan EPA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A protester brandishes an Independent t-shirt during the Brexit March Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Tens of thousands of people take part in People's Vote March for the Future in central London. The march organised by the People's Vote campaign is led by young people calling for a People's Vote on the Brexit deal Rex A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum PA

Announcing his attendance, Lord Heseltine said: The Put it to the People march will give voice to the growing concern in the nation that Brexit is going horribly wrong.

This is a march to stop this madness. The last two years has seen a great unravelling, of the promises made during the referendum, of the prime minister's deal and of trust in politics. Now, with a deal barely no-one supports and certainly no-one loves and with time running out to free our parliament from deadlock the only way I can see to resolve this national crisis is to take this decision back to the British public."

He added: There is another way. A final defeat for the prime minister's deal should be the signal for MPs from across the political divide to work together to find first the political will and then the time and space to hold a People's Vote.

Europe stands ready to help but we need to work together to find a solution to this crisis of our democracy.

Protesters will also hear speeches from young campaigners and people from across the UK, including a 96-year-old Second World War veteran who is travelling from Devon and a man who is walking from Swansea to London to join the march.To those in Brussels, the mother of parliaments has never looked more juvenile. Believe it or not, many countries genuinely looked up to the UK as some sort of model parliamentary democracy. You could argue they were wrong to do this in the first place anyway: either way, theyre really not doing it now.

Speaking to foreign journalists in Brussels and London, you always get a sense that they are, more than anything, disappointed. One senior EU official, speaking after EU leaders stayed up all night to agree an Article 50 extension, spoke for a lot of people in the EU capital.

Some said in the room that actually we give the impression that we are more responsible about this than the actors in the political theatre in the United Kingdom, he said.

A few of the same aspects of UK political culture get mentioned by different people. The conduct in the Palace of Westminster  shouting  is often interpreted by some foreign observers that things arent being taken seriously. Mairead McGuinness, one of the European parliaments debate moderators, has been known to admonish British MEPs with cries of: This is not the House of Commons!

The Eurosceptic parts of the British press are also often raised as particularly weird: for years Brussels has had a dedicated blog to debunking so-called Euro myths spread by tabloids (and sometimes broadsheets), mostly from Britain. But with Brexit the view that Britain simply does not understand its neighbours because of bad information and lack of attention is going more mainstream than ever.

Britain is genuinely treated as a bit unstable: officials talk about giving Theresa May political space to operating as if she is carrying some kind of bomb. These concerns were factored into leaders thinking when they decided how and whether to give the UK an Article 50 extension.

On the one hand the UK has been behaving in accordance with the obligation of sincere cooperation until now, one Brussels source familiar with their discussions says.

And at the same time, we do also read the British press, and we have seen some comments that maybe we should take this opportunity to break the union from the inside.

I dont think that will be possible and I think any British government will understand that thats not a promising way forward. We luckily have qualified majority voting on most issues these days and if we dont, Im sure wed find ways of dealing with it if these things were to happen.

Wherever the Brexit process ends up, one thing will never be the same: Britains political reputation.More than two million people have signed a petition calling for the government to revoke Article 50 and cancel Brexit.

It has become the fastest growing petition ever created on the governments petition website despite the service crashing several times on Thursday unable to cope with demand as people voiced their discontent for Theresa Mays plans for the UKs withdrawal from the European Union.

The 2 million mark was passed shortly after EU leaders agreed to a plan which would delay Brexit from 29 March to 22 May on condition that MPs approve Theresa May's withdrawal deal next week.

The European Council published the conclusions agreed by the 27 other members, saying they agreed to an extension to 22 May, on the proviso that Mrs May's deal is approved in the Commons.

The document said: "The European Council agrees to an extension until 12 April 2019 and expects the United Kingdom to indicate a way forward before this date for consideration by the European Council."

"Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Show all 15 1 /15 "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage waves from the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus on the march from Sunderland to London Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers pass a sign to "Cuckoo Land" in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher holds up a blue passport as the march passes Grangetown, Tyne and Wear Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses for a photo in a pub in Hartlepool Reuters "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage pays his respects to Tommy, the statue of a First World War soldier in Seaham, County Durham Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march An anti-Brexit van has been graffitied in Sunderland on the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A marcher carries a Union flag reading "Storm Brexit" in Sunderland Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A couple push a Save Our Sovereignty trolley through a tunnel in Easington, County Durham during the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage enjoys a pint with fellow marchers in Hartlepool Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march A pro-European counter-marcher lets off a smoke grenade with the colours of the EU flag Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage leads the march in Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Marchers plod on near Easington Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage takes part in the Brexit Betrayal march Getty "Leave means leave" - Brexit Betrayal march Nigel Farage poses on the top deck of the Brexit Betrayal bus in Seaham Getty

After the number of signatures passed 1 million, the Petitions Committee, a cross-party group of MPs appointed to examine petitions to parliament, said the rate of signing was the highest its website had ever had to deal with.

The petition first went live on the government website in February, but received little attention until Wednesday evening when interest appeared to spike following Ms Mays statement from Downing Street, in which she blamed MPs for the current impasse threatening to dump Britain out of the EU without a withdrawal deal in a little over a weeks time.

Organiser Margaret Anne Georgiadou wrote: The government repeatedly claims exiting the EU is the will of the people. We need to put a stop to this claim by proving the strength of public support now for remaining in the EU. A Peoples Vote may not happen  so vote now.

The petition has eclipsed the 370,000 signatures attracted on a petition started in November calling for Britain to leave the EU without a deal.

Asked about it however and Ms May said she did not believe in halting the deadline after the EU offered a delay plan.

She added: "I do not believe that we should be revoking Article 50."Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is favourite to become the next prime minister, according to British bookmakers.

Both Betfair and Paddy Power have shorter odds on the Labour leader becoming prime minister than any Conservative candidate.

Mr Corbyn is 6/1 to succeed Theresa May at No 10  ahead of leading Tory figures including Boris Johnson on 13/2, Michael Gove on 7/1 and Jeremy Hunt at 11/1, according to Oddschecker, which compiles odds from all the leading bookies.

It follows a tumultuous 48 hours at Westminster, with Ms Mays Wednesday night Brexit speech attacking parliament causing intense anger among MPs.

Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of her partys influential 1922 committee, has reportedly told Ms May that many Tory MPs want her to quit after he was bombarded with text messages.

Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Show all 9 1 /9 Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Boris Johnson Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson has long been hopeful, he previously stood in the leadership contest that followed the Brexit vote and has at many times since been thought to be maneuvering himself towards the goal. He remains a darling of the party's right wing, particularly those in the ERG, and is the most popular choice among Tory voters but his leadership bid would be fiercely opposed by many MPs PA Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Michael Gove Environment secretary Michael Gove is another member who has long wanted to be leader. He has lately been known for rousing his party in the commons, his recent speeches on the Brexit deal and Labour's no confidence motion have overshadowed the Prime Minister's. He has been loyal to the Prime Minister, partly to shed his reputation as a backstabber who abandoned Boris Johnson to stand against him in the 2016 leadership election Getty Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Dominic Raab Former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab has emerged as a favourite to be the Brexiteer candidate in a contest to succeed to Ms May. He displayed a grip on detail in his role as Brexit secretary. When asked recently if he would like to become prime minister he replied "never say never" Getty Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Rory Stewart International development secretary Rory Stewart is pitching himself as the sensible candidate, promising to rule out both a second referendum and a no-deal Brexit. He was only recently promoted to the cabinet, previously serving as prisons minister, where he caught headlines with a pledge to resign if he could not reduce levels of violence within a year PA Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Esther McVey The former work and pensions secretary announced that she will be standing for the leadership when May leaves. McVey is the first to explicitly state that she intends to stand. She resigned from the cabinet in protest over May's Brexit deal AFP/Getty Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Sajid Javid Home secretary Sajid Javid is said to have a plan in place for a leadership race. He made headlines over Christmas when he declared that people smuggling over the English channel was a "major incident" and more recently when he revoked the citizenship of ISIS bride Shamima Begum. Son of a bus driver, he wants the Conservatives to be seen as the party of social mobility PA Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Jeremy Hunt Foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt was recently thought to be the favourite in the event of a leadership race as he could sell himself as the man to unite the party. Critics worry that his long stint as health secretary could return to haunt him at a general election. He has reportedly been holding meetings with Tory MPs over breakfast to promote his leadership PA Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Andrea Leadsom Following the Prime Minister's second defeat over her Brexit deal, Leader of the house Andrea Leadsom hosted a dinner party at which "leadership was the only topic of conversation", The Times heard. Leadsom ran against Theresa May in the 2016 leadership election before dropping out, allowing May to become Prime Minister AFP/Getty Who could succeed Theresa May as Conservative leader? Priti Patel Former international development secretary Priti Patel is thought to be positioning herself as a contender. One MP told The Independent "she knows she's from the right of the party, the part which is going to choose the next leader, so she's reminding everyone she's there." Patel left the government late in 2017 after it emerged that she had held undisclosed meetings with Israeli officials PA

The prime minister is facing a third Commons defeat on her deal next week, and a rift has reportedly opened up between No10 and Chief Whip Julian Smiths office over her handling of Brexit.

With the government in turmoil, the odds of general election taking place this year have been slashed, with Ladbrokes putting the chances at 5/4. The month of May  at 5/2  is deemed the most likely time it could take place.

Jessica Bridge of Ladbrokes said: If the odds are to be believed, Mays speech doesnt seem to have done the trick.

The odds of Ms May being replaced at No.10 this year have been cut by Ladbrokes to 1/6. As far as the odds are concerned things are going from bad to worse for the prime minister, Ms Bridge added.

Betfair has the Labour leader as 4/1 favourite to be the next prime minister, compared with 6/1 odds for Mr Johnson, while William Hill has Mr Gove as 4/1 favourite ahead of Mr Corbyn and Mr Johnson on 5/1.

Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer leave the European Commission headquarters in Brussels after a meeting (Reuters)

Although Ms May won a Conservative party no-confidence vote in December, preventing her opponents from bringing the formal process again until the end of 2019, Tory MPs could put pressure on her to resign.

Another route to Ms Mays exit comes from the opposition. The Labour leader has threatened to call a fresh confidence vote in the government if Ms Mays deal fails to pass the Commons a third time  although such a move is unlikely to win backing from Tory MPs.

At that point the confidence motion would be appropriate, Mr Corbyn told Sky News Sophy Ridge on Sunday ahead of another meaningful vote. I think at that point we should say there has to be a general election.

Editor of The Spectator Fraser Nelson has suggested an offer by Ms May to stand down soon might be enough to get her deal through, describing resignation as her most powerful card.

Goldman Sachs analysts have increased their estimated likelihood of the UK crashing out of the EU without a deal to 15 per cent from 5 per cent.A former City minister under Gordon Brown has disclosed he made a "significant" donation to the newly-formed Independent Group.

Lord Myners, an ex-chairman of Marks and Spencer, said "most of the population don't live at the extremes" and praised the group for gathering together a broad range of voices.

The Independent Group (TIG) sent shockwaves through Westminster when they formed last month, after a string of Tory and Labour MPs quit their parties in protest at the direction each was headed.

The group is not yet registered as an official party, so it does not have to declare its donations, but Lord Myners revealed that he had made a major gift to support the TIG MPs.

Lord Myners ahead of Saturday's ballot (PA)

The crossbench peer told BBC Radio Cornwall: "Ive given a significant amount of money. Theyre not even at this stage a political party.

"I dont know how theyll approach future elections but I like the idea of a party which brings together people like Chris Leslie and Chuka Umunna from the Labour Party and Heidi Allen and Anna Soubry and the wonderful Dr [Sarah] Wollaston from Totnes from the Conservatives into a single group.

Thats where I believe a lot of us actually live in that middle, in the bell shaped distribution. Most of the population dont live at the extremes.

"Were not ardent right wing or ardent left wing, most of us are in the middle area and yet somehow weve lost our voice.

 Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events

Former Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who acts as a TIG spokesman, has confirmed that the group is in talks with the Electoral Commission about becoming a fully fledge political party.

He said the group was "absolutely overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of people who have signed up to our website, who have shown support for what we are doing".

The collective is currently run through a private company, of which TIG MP Gavin Shuker is listed as a director.A petition calling for Article 50 to be revoked and the UK to remain in the EU enjoyed the fastest rate of new signatures on record, the official parliamentary petitions committee said, as the figure surpassed three million.

The website repeatedly crashed on Thursday as millions registered their support for Brexit to be cancelled.

By Friday the petition had reached three million signatures, having attracted more than two million in the space of 24 hours.

The petitions committee, which monitors requests on the parliament website, tweeted that the rate of sign-ups was the highest the site has ever had to deal with and we have had to make some changes to ensure the site remains stable and open for signatures and new petitions.

At one point it said nearly 2,000 signatures were being added every minute.

Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Show all 29 1 /29 Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Remain protesters with pro-EU banners sit next to a Leave campaigner in Trafalgar square during the Peoples Vote march in London. The pro-Brexit protester holds aloft the back cover of a newspaper to show his opposition to the Peoples Vote campaign Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Anti-Brexit protester dressed as widow holds a sign in mourning of the future Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A protester holds a pro-Brexit sign on the march Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Child with anti-Brexit banner at the Peoples Vote march in London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Protesters in central London attend the Brexit Betrayal rally in support of the Leave vote Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Writing on a wall in support of Remain at the Peoples Vote march in London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens The power of the ballot box is mightier than the sword, how wrong was I ? A banner near Trafalgar Square after the Brexit Betrayal rally Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Kid holds anti-Brexit banner at the Peoples Vote march Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A pro-Brexit demonstrator marches with a sign Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A protester holds a sign in support of Remain at the Peoples Vote march in London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A protester holds a Ukip sign at the Brexit Betrayal march in London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A protester with a sticker sign Bollocks to Brexit on her face joins the crowds in Trafalgar Square at the Peoples Vote march Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A pro-Brexit protester carries a Union Jack at the Brexit Betrayal march Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A protester in Trafalgar Square holds a sign that reads Brexit is an Epic Fail Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A pro-Brexit supporter attends the Peoples Vote march and stages a one-man counter-protest, holding what appears to be a newspaper with a re-edited back page in support of the Leave Vote Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A sign opposing Brexit at the Peoples Vote march in London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A sign in support of the Leave vote at a pro-Brexit rally in London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A young protester with an anti-Brexit sign in Trafalgar Square Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A pro-Brexit demonstrator holds a sign in the Brexit Betrayal rally Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A family attends the Peoples Vote march in support of remaining within the EU Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Pro-Brexit protesters hold banners in central London at the Brexit Betrayal rally Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Young protesters gather in Trafalgar Square at the Peoples Vote March Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A pro-Brexit protester and his sign at the Brexit Betrayal rally in London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Protesters sit by Trafalgar Square holding a sign in Spanish in support of the Remain vote, at the Peoples Vote march, London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Out means Out. A protester holds a pro-Brexit sign at the Brexit Betrayal rally Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A woman stands by anti-Brexit signs at Whitehall after the Peoples Vote march in London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens Dog and owner at the Brexit Betrayal rally in London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A protester dressed as a dinosaur holds the EU flag as anti-Brexit protesters walk past at the Peoples Vote march in London Angela Christofilou Both sides of Brexit: Remain and Leave through a lens A protester dressed as a dinosaur holds a sign rallying against Davocracy  in reference to the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos Angela Christofilou

Huge demand persisted into the evening, with the committee tweeting shortly before 7pm that the website was experiencing another spike in new signatures.

It warned that the huge amount of traffic meant some validation emails, which contain a link that must be clicked on to confirm a persons signature, were taking as long as 24 hours to reach inboxes.

As the number of signatures continued to grow, Theresa May was asked whether she thought the public's view had shifted.

The 'Leave the EU without a deal' petition failed to break the 400,000 barrier (Statista)

But the prime minister appeared to rule out a change of course, instead pointing to the 2016 referendum as the biggest democratic exercise in our history.

MPs may yet be given a chance to debate the petition, however, as it has passed the 100,000-signature threshold.

A House of Commons spokesman said: "We know that the petitions website has been experiencing problems due to the number of people using the site.

"This is a mixture of people signing petitions and refreshing the site to see changes to the number of signatures.

"The majority of people are now able to use the website and we and the Government Digital Service are working to fix any outstanding problems as soon as possible."

EU leaders have said Brexit could be delayed from 29 March to 22 May  but only on the condition that MPs vote for Mrs May's deal next weekAs the Brexit crisis deepens, commentators have begun to liken Theresa May to perhaps the most disgraced leader in western history  Richard Nixon.

They dont mean she lied about a dirty tricks break-in at a hotel called Watergate, but that shes adopted the former US presidents tactics for defeating an opponent by threatening an action so disastrous it suggests the person making the threat is now irrational. It has come to be known as the madman theory.

In Nixons case, it was proposing nuclear war to end the Vietnam quagmire  in the prime ministers world, a crash-out Brexit that would trigger a recession and arguably open the borders to terrorists.Fears are rising that the death toll from Cyclone Idai could soar when bodies are revealed as flood waters begin to recede in parts of Mozambique on Friday,

The number of deaths could climb beyond the 1,000 predicted by the country's president earlier this week, said Elhadj As Sy, the secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

In addition to worries about the number of dead, Mr As Sy told the Associated Press that the humanitarian needs are great.

"They are nowhere near the scale and magnitude of the problem," Mr As Sy said. "And I fear we will be seeing more in the weeks and months ahead, and we should brace ourselves."

Thousands of people were making a grim voyage towards the city of Beira, which although 90 per cent destroyed has become a centre for frantic rescue efforts throughout the region.

Cyclone Idai Show all 11 1 /11 Cyclone Idai Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-2eb64421bc0e4e6ba11299605d38a558-0.jpg (AP Photo/Cara Anna) Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-770d7832e45f440eba41e5c9995c02fe-0.jpg (AP Photo/Cara Anna) Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-1b19f61d6c51490ca832d8e734f062d0-0.jpg (AP Photo/Cara Anna) Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-37be953c801c4e739671237ee2d03b55.jpg (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-6fbd78b1c11c49319697b455cbd52c5b.jpg A woman carrying her child walks alongside a collapsed bridge in Nhamatanda, about 100km west of Beira, Thursday, March 21, 2019 Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-094ce7a0e1604db3a128f03de6c09520.jpg (Australian Broadcasting Corporation via AP) Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-ab8b0595a6534966833e66938f673d9e.jpg (Australian Broadcasting Corporation via AP) Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-b14bf74be72645a9966056a75c9cdaea.jpg (Australian Broadcasting Corporation via AP) Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-fe4a87a55392492ab8218a55c8af9cb3.jpg (Australian Broadcasting Corporation via AP) Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-049d78415c2a4e3cb078b734721b1404.jpg (AP Photo/Cara Anna) Cyclone Idai urn-publicid-ap.org-ea7a95d63cfd4235b1ec119b920124ed.jpg (Australian Broadcasting Corporation via AP)

Some walked along roads carved away by the raging waters a week ago. Others, hundreds of them, were ferried in an extraordinary makeshift effort by local fishermen who plucked stranded people from small islands.

Helicopters set off into the rain for another day of efforts to find people clinging to rooftops and trees.

For those who reach Beira with their few remaining possessions, life is grim. Waterborne diseases are a growing concern as water and sanitation systems were largely destroyed.

"The situation is simply horrendous, there is no other way to describe it," Mr As Sy said after touring transit camps for the growing number of displaced. "Three thousand people who are living in a school that has 15 classrooms and six, only six, toilets. You can imagine how much we are sitting on a water and sanitation ticking bomb."

 Aerial view showing aftermath of cyclone Idai's course through Mozambican city of Beira

What moved him the most was the number of children without their parents, separated in the chaos or newly orphaned.

"Yesterday [we] did a reconnaissance and we found another [inland] lake. So we are still very early in the phase of identifying what the scope of this is, for who is affected and how many are lost," Emma Batey, coordinator for the consortium of Oxfam, CARE and Save the Children, told the AP.

Luckily, the area is a national park and less densely populated, she said. Still, "there were devastatingly small amounts of people".

She estimated that another 100 people would be airlifted out on Friday: "We're only picking up those in absolute dire need."

No one is still clinging to roofs and trees, she said.

Pedro Matos, emergency coordinator for the World Food Program, said that what rescuers are seeing now is "sometimes it's just a hut completely surrounded by water".

"If islands are big enough, we can even see smoke coming out, meaning that they're cooking," he said, adding that it remains "super difficult" to estimate a death toll or even the number of missing.

For residents of Beira, life staggered on. People salvaged the metal strips of roofs that had been peeled away like the skin of a fruit. Downed trees littered the streets. And yet there were flashes of life as it used to be. White wedding dresses stood pristine behind a shop window that hadn't shattered.

Zimbabwe was also affected by the cyclone and as roads began to clear and some basic communications were set up, a fuller picture of the extent of the damage there is beginning to emerge.

The victims are diverse: a mother buried in the same grave with her child, headmasters missing together with dozens of school students, illegal gold and diamond miners swept away by raging rivers and police officers washed away with their prisoners.

The Ministry of Information said 30 pupils, two headmasters and a teacher are missing.

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa said Thursday that officers and prisoners were washed way.

In Mutare, fear gripped residents even though they are more than 140 kilometres (85 miles) from Chimanimani, the worst-hit part of Zimbabwe.

Maina Chisiriirwa, a city resident, said she buried her son-in-law, who had left the city to go to Chiadzwa diamond fields to mine illegally.

"There are no jobs and all he wanted was to feed his family. He was with his colleagues. They thought it would be easier to mine since the rains would keep the guards and the police away from patrolling," Ms Chisiriirwa said. His colleagues survived but her son-in-law was swept away, she said.

A man who travelled several kilometres (miles) to a reception centre for survivors in Chimanimani said several of his colleagues were swept away as they tried to cross a river while fleeing from a mountain known for rich gold deposits and frequented by hordes of illegal miners.

 Cyclone Idai wreaks havoc across Zimbabwe

In downtown Beira, a sidewalk is Marta Ben's new home. The 30-year-old mother of five clutched a teary child to her hip as she described the sudden horror of the storm.

"I've never seen anything like this," she said, barefoot, a cooking pot bubbling nearby. "We were not warned. Suddenly the roof flew away."

She said she and neighbours in their home near the beach hurried their many children away but "we lost some of them." Hers survived.

Now they claim a patch of sidewalk among others newly homeless. They beg passers-by for aid. They say they have received nothing from the government or aid groups, "not even bread."

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

And yet she knows others have suffered more. She described seeing the ragged people who had been ferried by fishermen from communities outside the city. "They looked sad," she said.

The survivors from inland Mozambique arrived by the boatload, some 50 at a time, mostly children, witnesses said.

"Some were wounded. Some were bleeding. Some had feet white like flour for being in the water for so long," said Julia Castigo, who watched them arrive Friday morning.

The 24-year-old said the cyclone came as a surprise to her, her husband and two children. It blew away the roof, the door, the windows. Water filled the home.

She looked resigned. "We survived. We're still here," she said simply.

"The people didn't even have clothes, nothing to cover them," said Ignacio Dango, who watched them arrive on the beach. The 24-year-old boat builder said he saw sick, wounded and very young. "Like five years old."

They came from Buzi, he said.

Residents of Beira muttered "Meu Dio!" ("My God" in Portuguese) as they went about the city and came across new scenes of destruction.

Associated PressUS Customs and Border Protection officials detained a nine-year-old girl who was on her way to to school for more than 30 hours, despite her being a US Citizen.

Julia Isabel Amparo Medina and her brother Oscar Medina, 14, cross the border from Mexico to California every weekday to attend school in San Ysidro.

On Monday, the children were being driven by a family friend and her two children, when they reached standstill traffic at 4am.

To ensure that the children, who have US passports, made it to school on time, Michelle Cardenas told them to walk across the border, at which point she would order them an Uber.

However, Julia never made it to school, as she was detained by CBP officers who accused her of lying about her identity.

According to NBC 7, CBP officers reportedly told Julia that she did not look like the picture in her passport, and accused her of being her cousin Melanie.

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 nine-year-old also said agents told her if she admitted she was her cousin, she would be released sooner.

Under pressure from agents, Oscar reportedly signed a document that said his sister was his cousin.

Border agents also allegedly accused the children of smuggling and other crimes, before taking the nine-year-old into custody.

Recommended Trump vetoes Senate measure blocking border wall

A CBP spokesperson told The Independent Julia provided inconsistent information during her inspection and was taken into custody so agents could perform due diligence in confirming her identity and citizenship.

When the childrens mother Thelma Galaxia found out her daughter had been detained, she called on the Mexican consulate for help.

Galaxia also said her son was told he would be taken to jail and charged with human trafficking and sex trafficking during the incident.

After more than 30 hours, Julia was finally released to her family at the San Ysidro port of entry.

In a statement, US Customs and Border Patrol defended the decision to detain the nine-year-old.

CBP prioritises the safety of the minors we encounter, a spokesperson said. Its important that CBP officials positively confirm the identity of a child travelling without a parent or legal guardian.

The family was reunited after more than 30 hours (NBC 7)

The CBP spokesperson declined to share information regarding how its agents confirmed Julias identity, or why it took so long, telling The Independent: Some specifics of our techniques for determining the true identity of a person crossing the border are law enforcement sensitive information.

In addition, some details of this case are restricted from release due to privacy concerns.

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The familys situation is not unique, as more than 1,000 students with US citizenship reportedly cross the border from Mexico into the US each day to attend school.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  The government is racing against time in looking into reports of over 60,000 personalities involved in illegal drugs.

These are contained in the National Drug Information System (NDIS), an intelligence system maintained by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA).

The country's top drug buster, PDEA Director General Aaron Aquino, admits the government cannot verify the drug links of all 60,000 public figures and civilians within President Rodrigo Duterte's term. Duterte is stepping down in 2022, six years after he took office and launched his controversial war on drugs.

"One hundred one percent hindi natin mavavalidate lahat 'yun Sana yung susunod man kung sino man ang maging president ganun din ang maging priority program na yung war on illegal drugs ay ipagpatuloy ng Presidente na 'yun," Aquino told CNN Philippines in an interview Friday.

[Translation: "I am 101 percent sure we cannot validate all those... I hope the next President will also prioritize the war on illegal drugs."]

He revealed authorities have not started validating the tens of thousands of personalities in the NDIS since the government's priority is to go after over 40 drug-linked officials recently named by President Rodrigo Duterte as part of the illegal drug trade.

These public officials, including local executives and at least three congressmen, are facing administrative charges before the Office of the Ombudsman for grave misconduct and serious neglect of duty, but authorities have yet to file criminal complaints against them.

"We do not file a case just for the sake of filing There should be a tight case para ma-convict yung supposedly mafa-file-an ng kaso (to reach a conviction)," Aquino said.

Long validation process

Aquino added that the government is also "revalidating" the drug involvement of 28 other so-called narco politicians. The revalidation will determine the personality's recent drug activities.

Aquino revealed it took PDEA one year and two months to verify the drug involvement of the 46 alleged narco politicians. He said it might take them another year to look into reports concerning 28 other others - down from 36 since eight of them had left public office and are therefore considered as civilians now.

They are all part of the "PRRD list," containing more than 6,000 public officials and civilians initially validated to be part of the illegal drug trade. Aquino explained that once an individual in the NDIS has been confirmed of drug links, that person will be part of the "PRRD list."

He said the list also contains 13 judges and 10 prosecutors, whom he did not name, along with members of the media and celebrities.

How accurate is the narco list?

Some of the officials in the recently released narco list have denied links to the drug trade, including Leyte Rep. Vicente Veloso, who said he will sue those responsible for putting his name on the watchlist.

The President earlier said the list was "somewhat validated," but PDEA insists it was a product of more than a year of "revalidation and workshop" with other law enforcement agencies including the police and military.

Critics, including Vice President Leni Robredo, said cases should be filed against the suspected drug personalities instead of publicly naming them - resulting in trial by publicity.

"Kapag nilabas mo kasi iyong listahan na wala ka pa namang ebidensya laban sa kanila, violation ito ng karapatan nila, eh, kasi 'di ba, isa sa mga pinapaniwalaan natin, na everyone is presumed (innocent) until proven otherwise," Robredo told reporters Wednesday.

She added the narco list is being used to discredit some candidates ahead of the May 13 midterm elections.

Malacanang has said candidates on the drug watchlist waived their right to presumption of innocence when they ran for public office, adding that they could simply file libel charges if they refute their inclusion in the list.Lawmakers passed what are known as parental involvement laws in 1977 and 1983, only to have the courts strike them down. But in 1995 proponents and opponents of abortion rights negotiated a moderate compromise bill that required the notification  significantly, not the consent  of a parent, stepparent, guardian or grandparent that a girl under 18 was planning an abortion. The bill permitted exceptions for medical emergencies, and allowed a judge to waive the requirement if notifying a family member would not be in the girls best interest and if she was mature enough to make the decision on her own.Several senior citizens in southern Canada required medical help after eating cannabis chocolate brownies served at a community lunch, Canadian media reported.

Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) launched an investigation into how the drug found its way into the chocolate treats given to elderly people in the tiny Ontario township of Whitestone.

Police said 10 people needed medical attention after eating the brownies, with some saying they felt dizzy and disoriented, and others experiencing nausea and vomiting.

OPP constable Miles Loach told CBC News that police officers would try to track down where the brownies came from.

These luncheons are catered, he said. Its still part of the investigation whether that was what happened  [that] somebody brought the wrong batch or somebody spiked them.

Where cannabis is and isn't legal Show all 10 1 /10 Where cannabis is and isn't legal Where cannabis is and isn't legal UK Having been reclassified in 2009 from a Class C to a Class B drug, cannabis is now the most used illegal drug within the United Kingdom. The UK is also, however, the only country where Sativex  a prescribed drug that helps to combat muscle spasms in multiple sclerosis and contains some ingredients that are also found in cannabis - is licensed as a treatment Getty Where cannabis is and isn't legal North Korea Although many people believe the consumption of cannabis in North Korea to be legal, the official law regarding the drug has never been made entirely clear whilst under Kim Jong Uns regime. However, it is said that the North Korean leader himself has openly said that he does not consider cannabis to be a drug and his regime doesnt take any issue with the consumption or sale of the drug MARCEL VAN HOORN/AFP/Getty Images Where cannabis is and isn't legal Netherlands In the Netherlands smoking cannabis is legal, given that it is smoked within the designated smoking areas and you dont possess more than 5 grams for personal use. It is also legal to sell the substance, but only in specified coffee shops Getty Where cannabis is and isn't legal USA Although in some states of America cannabis has now been legalised, prior to the legalisation, police in the U.S. could make a marijuana-related arrest every 42 seconds, according to US News and World Report. The country also used to spend around $3.6 billion a year enforcing marijuana law, the American Civil Liberties Union notes AP Photo/Ted S. Warren Where cannabis is and isn't legal Spain Despite cannabis being officially illegal in Spain, the European hotspot has recently started to be branded, the new Amsterdam. This is because across Spain there are over 700 Cannabis Clubs  these are considered legal venues to consume cannabis in because the consumption of the drug is in private, and not in public. These figures have risen dramatically in the last three years  in 2010 there were just 40 Cannabis Clubs in the whole of Spain. Recent figures also show that in Catalonia alone there are 165,000 registered members of cannabis clubs  this amounts to over 5 million euros (4 million) in revenue each month Getty Where cannabis is and isn't legal Uruguay In December 2013, the House of Representatives and Senate passed a bill legalizing and regulating the production and sale of the drug. But the president has since postponed the legalization of cannabis until to 2015 and when it is made legal, it will be the authorities who will grow the cannabis that can be sold legally. Buyers must be 18 or older, residents of Uruguay, and must register with the authorities Getty Where cannabis is and isn't legal Pakistan Despite the fact that laws prohibiting the sale and misuse of cannabis exist and is considered a habit only entertained by lower-income groups, it is very rarely enforced. The occasional use of cannabis in community gatherings is broadly tolerated as a centuries old custom. The open use of cannabis by Sufis and Hindus as a means to induce euphoria has never been challenged by the state. Further, large tracts of cannabis grow unchecked in the wild Getty Where cannabis is and isn't legal Portugal In 2001, Portugal became the first country in the world to decriminalize the use of all drugs, and started treating drug users as sick people, instead of criminals. However, you can still be arrested or assigned mandatory rehab if you are caught several times in possession of drugs Getty Where cannabis is and isn't legal Puerto Rico Although the use of cannabis is currently illegal, it is said that Puerto Rico are in the process of decriminalising it RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP/Getty Images Where cannabis is and isn't legal China Cannabis is grown in the wild and has been used to treat conditions such as gout and malaria. But, officially the substance is illegal to consume, possess and sell Getty

The incident happened at the community centre in Whitestone, a community of just over 900 people around 185 miles north of Toronto.

James McNurdo, a semi-retired man involved organising the monthly lunch club, said the brownies were served buffet-style.

Ive done these events for a number of years for this particular group so, obviously, Im as mortified as anybody, he told The Globe and Mail. Weve got to get to the bottom of this, no doubt about it.

Mr McNurdo added: The rumour mill is in overdrive.

 Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events

Police had initial concerns some of the lunch club attendees might have been allergic to the substance  or could even have even driven home inadvertently stoned.

But Mr Loach said no-one had suffered any seriously adverse effects from the cannabis-laced cake. OPP officers got the names of everyone present at the lunch and made follow-up calls to make sure everyone was okay.

Canada legalised and regulated cannabis last year. But there are criminal offences related to administering a noxious substance to cause harm or aggrieve.Three female flight attendants claim they were drugged and two of them raped by two JetBlue pilots during a layover in Puerto Rico, a new lawsuit filed this week in New York federal court has claimed.

The pilots remained on the job following the alleged incident without receiving any sort of reprimanding or punishment, the suit said. At least one of the female flight attendants said she was forced to work with one of the accused pilots after the alleged rape.

After making their way to a beach in Puerto Rico near the hotel they were staying during their layover in May of last year, the women were offered sips from one of the flight attendants alcoholic beverages.

Shortly after, they recall being raped by the pilots through flashes of memory during a hazy experience, the suit read.

The 24-page suit goes on to name JetBlue and the two pilots, Eric Johnson and Dan Watson, who are accused of drugging and raping the flight attendants who also worked for the same airline.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

We work to create a respectful workplace for all our crewmembers where they feel welcome and safe, JetBlue said in a statement to Washington Post.

The airline added it takes allegations of violent or inappropriate behaviour very seriously and investigates such claims thoroughly.

However, an attorney for two of the women told the newspaper the pilots were not suspended and faced little to no repercussions for their alleged misconduct.

They were not put on any sort of leave, the attorney, Abraham Z Melamed, said. They continued to work and continue to work to this day without any ramifications.

Recommended Utrecht suspect previously accused of rape but cleared of manslaughter

Mr Johnson thanked the women for making his fantasy come true, the lawsuit read.

One of the women  who are each named Jane Doe in the lawsuit, along with corresponding numbers  said she developed a common sexually transmitted disease following the alleged rape.

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The three of them looked up the symptoms of rape drugs and found their symptoms were consistent with having been drugged, the lawsuit read. The two alleged rape victims also expressed to each other that they were stunned by what had happened, according to the suit.

The three women all worked a return flight the day after the reported incident.Teachers in Indiana have demanded legislative change after being forced to endure execution-style shootings by local law enforcement using pellet guns during an active-shooter drill.

The elementary school teachers in Monticello, Indiana suffered physical wounds, including bruises, welts and abrasions when they were shot by the plastic pellets, according to a new report.

The teachers reportedly screamed in horror and pain during the training, as they were told to face the walls of their classrooms and kneel down before being shot by the officers.

The Indiana State Teachers Association has called on lawmakers in the state to add an amendment to a new school-safety bill so that more reasonable limits are placed on these drills.

"The teachers were terrified, but were told not to tell anyone what happened," the group said in a statement. "Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated."

No one in education takes these drills lightly, the statement continued. The risk of harming someone far outweighs whatever added realism one is trying to convey here.

New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Show all 11 1 /11 New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Zakaria Bhuiyan People gather hoping to find out information about Zakaria Bhuiyan who is still missing after the mosques shootings in Christchurch. David Moir/AFP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Mucad Ibrahim Three-year-old Mucad Ibrahim, the youngest known victim of the mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019. Abdi Ibrahim via AP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Nadeem Rasheed Nadeem Rasheed, brother of Pakistani Naeem Rashid who died alongside his son Talha Naeem, 21, who were killed in shooting at a Mosque in Christchurch, at their home town in Abbottabad, EPA New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Omar Nabi Omar Nabi speaks to the media about losing his father Haji Daoud Nabi, 71, in the mosque attack REUTERS New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Ash Mohammed Ash Mohammed, right, talks to a police officer about his father and two brothers who are missing near the Masjid Al Noor mosque AP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Akhtar Khokhur Akhtar Khokhur, 58, shows a picture of her missing husband Mehaboobbhai Khokhar, 65. AP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Wasseim Alsati A note is seen on a window of a door at the family home of Wasseim Alsati in Christchurch on 17 March 2019. AFP/Getty Images New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Haroon Mahmood Relatives offer condolences to nephew (centre) of Haroon Mahmood, a Pakistani citizen who was killed in Christchurch mosque shootings. AP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Farid Ahmed Farid Ahmed (pictured) survived the Al Noor mosque shootings but his wife Husne was killed. AFP/Getty Images New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Syed Areeb Ahmed A relative shows a picture of Syed Areeb Ahmed, a Pakistani citizen who was killed the Christchurch mosque shooting. AP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Naeem Rashid A relative looks at a picture on a mobile phone of Pakistani nationals Naeem Rashid and his son Talha Naeem (right) who died in the Christchurch shootings. AFP/Getty Images

Officers conducting the voluntary training did not initially inform the school teachers they would be shot at with plastic pellets, according to a report published in the Indianapolis Star.

This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing, said one of the officers, according to a teacher who spoke to the local newspaper anonymously.

Gail Zeheralis, director of government relations for the Indiana State Teachers Association, told the outlet the group was seeking a simple statement in this bill that would prohibit the shooting of some type of projectile at staff in an active-shooter drill.

Other officials with the teachers association said the shooting of teachers is not the normal practice and had not occurred in other state active-shooter trainings.

The active-shooter training carried out at the Indiana school is known as ALICE, which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate.

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The drills typically inform teachers and students how to escape shootings by exiting the building through classroom windows, throwing objects and distracting intruders, among other responses. They do not always involve officers firing pellets and other plastic products, though it has occurred in several other reported examples.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hillary Clinton have teamed up to mock the Trump administration amid new revelations that White House adviser Jared Kushner has potentially been communicating with foreign officials using the messaging service WhatsApp.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez, noting the apparent hypocrisy of a top Trump administration official using private communication methods after the president repeatedly railed on Ms Clinton for her use of a private email server while secretary of State, tweeted a simple response to the news.

But his WhatsApp, she wrote, referring to the scandal that plagued Ms Clinton even though she was ultimately not charged with crimes.

Ms Clintons use of the private email server became a major point of contention in 2016, and was often seen as overshadowing Ms Clintons campaign.

Since Mr Trumps win that year, the phrase But her emails has become a meme, employed whenever the Trump administration does something that seems untoward.

Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Show all 7 1 /7 Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights An Israeli soldier stands next to signs pointing out distances to different cities on Mount Bental, an observation post in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights Reuters Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Druze people take part in a rally in Majdal Shams near the ceasefire line between Israel and Syria Reuters Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Israeli Druzes sit together watching the Syrian side of the Israel-Syria border on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights Reuters Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights A European member of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) using binoculars to look towards the Syrian side of the Golan Heights AFP/Getty Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights A file photo taken on October 19, 1973 shows Israeli Defence Minister General Moshe Dayan (R) looking towards the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, four days after the beginning of the Yom Kippur War AFP/Getty Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights A file photo taken on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on September 5, 2014 shows members of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force Zone (UNDOF) using binoculars to look towards the Syrian side of the Golan Heights AFP/Getty Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Members of the United Nations peacekeepers standing on a watch tower during a visit by the Israeli Defence Minister in 2018 AFP/Getty

Tell me about it, Ms Clinton wrote in response to Ms Ocasio-Cortez.

Mr Kushner is the presidents son-in-law, and was accused of using WhatsApp for official business in a letter by a top House democrat, Representative Elijah Cummings.

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Since joining the White House, Mr Kushner has been given broad authority and responsibility. He has been tasked with, among other things, negotiating peace in the Middle East and working towards criminal justice reform in the US.

Mr Cummings also said in the letter that Ivanka Trump has continued to use her personal email address for official business, alongside other White House officials.Donald Trump may have been sent by God to save the Jewish people from any threat posed by Iran, his secretary of state has claimed.

In an interview in Jerusalem with the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Mike Pompeo was asked whether the US president was a latter-day Queen Esther, a figure who appears on both Christian and Jewish stories as a person who halted an attempt to wipe out the Jewish people.

Mr Pompeo claimed that because of the presidents hardline stance against Iran, Mr Trump may indeed fit such a role.

Could it be that President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace, CBNs interviewer asked Mr Pompeo.

As a Christian I certainly believe thats possible, replied the US secretary of state. It was remarkable. So we were down in the tunnels where we could see 3,000 years ago, and 2,000 years ago  if I have the history just right  to see the remarkable history of the faith in this place and the work that our administration's done to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state remains.

Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Show all 7 1 /7 Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights An Israeli soldier stands next to signs pointing out distances to different cities on Mount Bental, an observation post in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights Reuters Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Druze people take part in a rally in Majdal Shams near the ceasefire line between Israel and Syria Reuters Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Israeli Druzes sit together watching the Syrian side of the Israel-Syria border on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights Reuters Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights A European member of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) using binoculars to look towards the Syrian side of the Golan Heights AFP/Getty Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights A file photo taken on October 19, 1973 shows Israeli Defence Minister General Moshe Dayan (R) looking towards the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, four days after the beginning of the Yom Kippur War AFP/Getty Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights A file photo taken on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on September 5, 2014 shows members of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force Zone (UNDOF) using binoculars to look towards the Syrian side of the Golan Heights AFP/Getty Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Members of the United Nations peacekeepers standing on a watch tower during a visit by the Israeli Defence Minister in 2018 AFP/Getty

He added: I am confident that the Lord is at work here.

The comments from Mr Pompeo were delivered as Mr Trump announced on Twitter that Washington will from now on recognise Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, overturning longstanding US policy towards the area, which was seized from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967.

In December 2017, the US president broke with decades of precedent to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the international community having long said the final status of the city was something that should be part of a comprehensive deal between Israel and the Palestinian authorities

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Last May, Mr Trump again broke with international consensus to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal and start reimposing sanctions on Tehran. While UN inspections had confirmed Iran was keeping its part of the agreement, Mr Trump always believed it was a "bad deal". At the same time, Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons.

On Friday, Mr Pompeo tweeted: Our maximum pressure campaign on #Iran continues with todays sanctions on targets involved in the regimes nuclear program, including former nuclear weapons scientists. Well be relentless in denying Iran the ability to engage in WMD proliferation and all its outlaw activities.

Also on Friday, the UN Human Rights Council criticised Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights

The UN rights forum adopted an annual resolution on the Syrian Golan, brought by Pakistan on behalf of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), with 26 states in favour, 16 against and 5 abstentions. European members including Britain voted against it.

Voting for such a resolution should send a clear message...to the occupying power and to all who support Israel inside this Council and outside, Syria's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Hussam Edin Aala, told the talks, Reuters said.

The United States is justifying the practices by the Israeli occupation and ignoring Security Council resolutions. The occupied Syrian Golan was and shall remain Arab and Syrian.President Donald Trump is intensifying his efforts to discredit a highly anticipated report on the special counsel's Russia investigation.

In an interview with Fox Business Network to be aired Friday, Mr Trump said: "I have a deputy, appoints a man to write a report on me, to make a determination on my presidency. People will not stand for it."

Trump and Farage - a working friendship Show all 7 1 /7 Trump and Farage - a working friendship Trump and Farage - a working friendship Donald Trump and Nigel Farage pose in the golden elevator at Trump Tower on 12 November 2016, four days after Trump was elected president. Farage was the first British politician to meet with Trump after the election LeaveEUOffical/Twitter Trump and Farage - a working friendship Not long after their meeting at Trump Tower, then-president elect Trump tweeted in favour of Nigel Farage being appointed ambassador to the US Trump and Farage - a working friendship Farage appears at a Trump campaign rally in Jackson, Mississipi on 24 August 2016. Farage drew parallels between the recent vote for Brexit in the UK and a vote for Trump in the US, saying "they could take back control of their country, take back control of their borders and get back their pride and self-respect" Getty Images Trump and Farage - a working friendship Trump introduced Farage as "Mr. Brexit" Getty Images Trump and Farage - a working friendship President Trump with Nigel Farage when they met met face-to-face to discuss why the President should back a no-deal Brexit on 3 March 2019 PA Trump and Farage - a working friendship From left to right: Gerry Gunster (US pollster and campaign adviser to Leave.EU), Arron Banks (Leave.EU founder who is being investigated over the funding of the Brexit campaign), Donald Trump (then president-elect), Nigel Farage (then leader of UKIP), Andy Wigmore (communication director of Leave.EU) and Raheem Kassam (then-advisor to Farage and later UK editor of Breitbart news) Trump and Farage - a working friendship Farage and his adviser Raheem Kassam arrive to meet with Trump on November 12 2016 Getty Images

Mr Trump's comments came as special counsel Robert Mueller is expected to soon deliver a report to the Justice Department on his investigation into Russian election meddling.

Mr Trump complained about Mueller's appointment, calling him a "best friend" to James Comey, who succeeded Mr Mueller as FBI director. Mr Trump fired Mr Comey while he was leading an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. There's no evidence the two are close friends.

AP Close Donald Trump launches furious tirade against Mueller on White House lawn as he calls Comey a 'bad cop'

Special counsel Robert Mueller has submitted a report to the attorney generals office, signalling the end to a two year investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.

Mr Mueller did not recommend any further indictments, a senior Justice Department official said. Although no specific information from the report has been made available yet, this announcement may suggest no more criminal charges against Donald Trump associates from the investigation.

The report has been handed to Attorney General William Barr, who President Trump selected at the end of 2018.

Donald Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida when the Justice Department announced the reports arrival.

In response to the report White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said: The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course. The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsels report.

Mueller investigation: The key figures Show all 12 1 /12 Mueller investigation: The key figures Mueller investigation: The key figures Robert Mueller is the special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election, and potential obstruction of justice by the president. Mr Mueller has a pristine reputation in Washington, where he was previously in charge of the FBI. Throughout his investigation, he and his team have been notoriously tight lipped about what they know and where their investigation has led. REUTERS Mueller investigation: The key figures Former FBI director James Comey was the catalyst that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. Mr Comey was fired by the president after Mr Trump reportedly asked him to drop his own Russia investigation. Mr Trump has long maintained that the investigation is a "witch hunt". AFP/Getty Images Mueller investigation: The key figures Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein had authority over the special counsel investigation for much of the two years it has been active. Mr Rosenstein found himself with that responsibility after then-attorney general Jeff Sessions recused himself from that oversight. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Attorney general Jeff Sessions's decision to recuse himself from oversight of the special counsel investigation may have cost him his job in the end. Mr Sessions resigned last year, after weathering a contentious relationship with Donald Trump who vocally criticised his attorney general for taking a step back. Mr Sessions recused himself from the oversight citing longstanding Justice Department rules to not be involved in investigations overseeing campaigns that officials were apart of. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Attorney General William Barr is currently responsible for oversight of the special counsel investigation. Mr Barr's office will be the first to receive the Mueller report when it is finished. His office will then determine what portion or version of that report should be delivered to Congress, and also made public. EPA Mueller investigation: The key figures Michal Cohn is the president's former personal lawyer, who has been helping the special counsel investigation as a part of a plea deal over financial crimes, and campaign finance crimes, he has pleaded guilty to. Among those crimes, Cohen admitted to facilitating $130,000 in hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign. Cohen has said he did so at the direction of Mr Trump. Cohen has also admitted that he maintained contacts with Russian officials about a potential Trump real estate project in Moscow for months longer than Mr Trump and others admitted. The talks continued well into 2016 during the campaign, he has said. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Stormy Daniels has alleged that she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, soon after Melania Trump gave birth to Baron Trump. The accusation is of particular importance as a result of the $130,000 hush money payment she received to keep quiet about the affair during the 2016 campaign. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Paul Manafort was Donald Trump's former campaign chairman. Manafort was charged alongside Rick Gates for a slew of financial crimes, and was convicted on several counts in a Virginia court. He then pleaded guilty to separate charges filed in a Washington court. Manafort has been sentenced to just 7.5 years in prison for his crimes  in spite of recommendations from the special counsel's office for a much harsher sentence. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures George Papadopoulos was one of the first individuals associated with the Trump campaign to be charged by the Mueller probe. He ultimately received a 14 day prison sentence for lying to investigators about contacts he had with Russian officials. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Roger Stone is a well known political fixer and operative, who has made a name for himself for some dirty tactics. He has been charged by the Mueller probe earlier this year, and he has been said to have had prior knowledge that WikiLeaks planned on publishing stolen emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. Getty Images Mueller investigation: The key figures Rick Gates was charged alongside former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for a range of crimes. Gates, who worked alongside Manafort for a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party. The two were charged with conspiracy and financial crimes. Gates pleaded guilty. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Former national security adviser Michael Flynn was one of the first casualties of the Russia scandal, and was forced out of his position in the White House weeks after Donald Trump took office. Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to "willfully" making fraudulent statements about contacts he had with Russian officials including former Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Flynn then lied to Vice President Mike Pence about that contact. REUTERS

After news of Mr Mueller finishing his report, Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer spoke to press, emphasising the party message that the report must be made public.

The White House must not be allowed to interfere in what parts of the report are made public, Mr Schumer said. The demand of the public is overwhelming ... it will be made public.

The US special counsels investigators have looked into a large number of contacts between people associated with Mr Trumps 2016 campaign and Russia.

Mr Mueller sought to determine whether the campaign coordinated with Moscow, though it was not immediately clear whether the special counsel found evidence of a conspiracy.

Follow events as they happened below

Additional reporting by ReutersHow much of Special Counsel Robert Muellers highly-anticipated report into Russian interference in the 2016 election will be seen by Congressional lawmakers and the public Thursday largely depends on one man  William Barr.

The attorney general under Donald Trump has vowed to release the report this week with redactions that fall under four colour-coded classifications: classified information, grand jury information, information pertaining to ongoing investigations and information that may infringe on the privacy of peripheral third parties.

Mr Barr, who was confirmed earlier this year after being appointed to lead the Justice Department under Mr Trump, stopped short of vowing to release the full findings of the special counsel during his Congressional hearings.

He released a statement to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees prior to his testimony confirming he received the report. I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the special counsels principal conclusions as soon as this weekend, the attorney general wrote.

The Senate voted 54-45 to confirm Mr Barr, mostly along party lines in February. Mr Barr, who previously served as attorney general from 1991 to 1993, succeeded Jeff Sessions after the former head of the Justice Department and Mr Trump became entrenched in a public feud over Mr Sessions decision to recuse himself from overseeing the Russia probe.

Democrats, who largely voted against Mr Barr, said they were concerned about his non-committal stance on making Mr Muellers report public.

Mr Barr promised to be as transparent as possible, but said he takes seriously the Justice Department regulations that dictate the report should be treated as confidential.

Opponents of Mr Barr also pointed to a memo he wrote to Justice officials before his nomination. In it, he criticised the Russia investigation for the way it was presumably looking into whether Mr Trump had obstructed justice.

Mueller investigation: The key figures Show all 12 1 /12 Mueller investigation: The key figures Mueller investigation: The key figures Robert Mueller is the special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election, and potential obstruction of justice by the president. Mr Mueller has a pristine reputation in Washington, where he was previously in charge of the FBI. Throughout his investigation, he and his team have been notoriously tight lipped about what they know and where their investigation has led. REUTERS Mueller investigation: The key figures Former FBI director James Comey was the catalyst that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. Mr Comey was fired by the president after Mr Trump reportedly asked him to drop his own Russia investigation. Mr Trump has long maintained that the investigation is a "witch hunt". AFP/Getty Images Mueller investigation: The key figures Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein had authority over the special counsel investigation for much of the two years it has been active. Mr Rosenstein found himself with that responsibility after then-attorney general Jeff Sessions recused himself from that oversight. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Attorney general Jeff Sessions's decision to recuse himself from oversight of the special counsel investigation may have cost him his job in the end. Mr Sessions resigned last year, after weathering a contentious relationship with Donald Trump who vocally criticised his attorney general for taking a step back. Mr Sessions recused himself from the oversight citing longstanding Justice Department rules to not be involved in investigations overseeing campaigns that officials were apart of. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Attorney General William Barr is currently responsible for oversight of the special counsel investigation. Mr Barr's office will be the first to receive the Mueller report when it is finished. His office will then determine what portion or version of that report should be delivered to Congress, and also made public. EPA Mueller investigation: The key figures Michal Cohn is the president's former personal lawyer, who has been helping the special counsel investigation as a part of a plea deal over financial crimes, and campaign finance crimes, he has pleaded guilty to. Among those crimes, Cohen admitted to facilitating $130,000 in hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign. Cohen has said he did so at the direction of Mr Trump. Cohen has also admitted that he maintained contacts with Russian officials about a potential Trump real estate project in Moscow for months longer than Mr Trump and others admitted. The talks continued well into 2016 during the campaign, he has said. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Stormy Daniels has alleged that she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, soon after Melania Trump gave birth to Baron Trump. The accusation is of particular importance as a result of the $130,000 hush money payment she received to keep quiet about the affair during the 2016 campaign. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Paul Manafort was Donald Trump's former campaign chairman. Manafort was charged alongside Rick Gates for a slew of financial crimes, and was convicted on several counts in a Virginia court. He then pleaded guilty to separate charges filed in a Washington court. Manafort has been sentenced to just 7.5 years in prison for his crimes  in spite of recommendations from the special counsel's office for a much harsher sentence. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures George Papadopoulos was one of the first individuals associated with the Trump campaign to be charged by the Mueller probe. He ultimately received a 14 day prison sentence for lying to investigators about contacts he had with Russian officials. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Roger Stone is a well known political fixer and operative, who has made a name for himself for some dirty tactics. He has been charged by the Mueller probe earlier this year, and he has been said to have had prior knowledge that WikiLeaks planned on publishing stolen emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. Getty Images Mueller investigation: The key figures Rick Gates was charged alongside former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for a range of crimes. Gates, who worked alongside Manafort for a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party. The two were charged with conspiracy and financial crimes. Gates pleaded guilty. AP Mueller investigation: The key figures Former national security adviser Michael Flynn was one of the first casualties of the Russia scandal, and was forced out of his position in the White House weeks after Donald Trump took office. Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to "willfully" making fraudulent statements about contacts he had with Russian officials including former Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Flynn then lied to Vice President Mike Pence about that contact. REUTERS

Mr Barr wrote that the president could not have obstructed justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey since it was an action the president was constitutionally entitled to take.

That view has alarmed Democrats, especially since the obstruction inquiry has been central to Mr Muellers investigation.

Mr Barr vowed that he would not be bullied, said Mr Muellers investigation is not a witch hunt and agreed that Mr Sessions was right to recuse himself from the probe. He said he was a friend of Mr Muellers and repeatedly sought to assuage concerns that he might disturb or upend the investigation as it reaches its final stages.

When the president nominated Mr Barr, he called him a terrific man and one of the most respected jurists in the country.

I think he will serve with great distinction, Mr Trump said.

The position catapults him from Justice Department outsider free to theorise and speculate on the special counsels investigation, to the man at the centre of the legal and political firestorm that will accompany its conclusion.

Friends say Mr Barr is accustomed to pressure-cooker situations by virtue of his experience as attorney general under President George HW Bush and other senior Justice Department jobs.

He oversaw the departments response when Los Angeles erupted in riots after the Rodney King verdict and when Cuban inmates took hostages at a federal prison in Alabama. He blessed Bush administration pardons in the Iran-Contra scandal and offered legal advice on the White Houses ability to invade Panama.

Lawmakers in both parties said a permanent replacement for Mr Sessions was urgently needed when Mr Barr was nominated by the president.

All I can say is if America ever needed a steady hand at the Department of Justice, it is now, Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on the Senate floor in February. [Matthew] Whitaker has done a good job as interim attorney general, but we are looking for a new person to bring stability, improve morale, and be a steady hand and mature leadership at a time when our country is very much divided.

Mr Graham said Mr Barr stood out head and shoulders above others who could have been nominated.

To the American people, you can go to bed here soon knowing that the Department of Justice is in good hands, he added.

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The Associated Press contributed to this reportAn Indonesian airline is looking to cancel its multi-billion dollar order for dozens of Boeing 737 Max 8 jets following two deadly crashes involving the model.

Garuda Indonesia, the countrys national carrier, said customers had "lost trust" in the planes following the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines disasters, which together killed 346 people.

The airline has written to Boeing asking to scrap an order for the remaining 49 of 50 aircraft it agreed to buy for $4.9bn (3.7bn) in 2014.

Garuda Indonesia, which has grounded the one Max 8 already in its fleet, is the first to publicly confirm plans to cancel an order for the troubled aircraft. It said it could switch to other Boeing models.

A Boeing spokeswoman said the company would not "comment on discussions with any of our customers".

Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Show all 9 1 /9 Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures This picture taken on March 11, 2019, shows debris of the crashed airplane of Ethiopia Airlines, near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometres southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. - An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 crashed on March 10 morning en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi with 149 passengers and eight crew believed to be on board, Ethiopian Airlines said. (Photo by Michael TEWELDE / AFP)MICHAEL TEWELDE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Family members mourn the victims at the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines operated Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, at Hama Quntushele village in the Oromia region, on March 13, 2019. - A Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines Boeing crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, killing all eight crew and 149 passengers on board, including tourists, business travellers, and "at least a dozen" UN staff. Families of the victims were taken to the remote site on March 13, 2019, where the plane smashed into a field with 157 passengers and crew from 35 countries, leaving a deep black crater and tiny scraps of debris. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA / AFP)TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A page of a Boeing flight crew operations manual is seen at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Baz Ratner REUTERS Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures epa07434278 Rescue workers search the site for pieces of the wreckage of an Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, 13 March 2019. Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew was en route to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed on 10 March 2019 by yet undetermined reason. All passengers and crew aboard died in the crash. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft has come under scrutiny after similar deadly crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia within a few months. Several countries have banned the plane type from their airspace and many airlines have grounded their 737 Max 8 planes for safety concerns after the Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after take-off on 10 March. EPA/STRINGER EPA Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A grounded Boeing 737 MAX 8 passenger plane of the Norwegian low-cost airline Norwegian is parked at the tarmac at Vantaa airport in Vantaa near Helsinki, Finland on March 13, 2019. - A number of countries have banned Boeing's 737 MAX 8 medium-haul workhorse jet from their airspace in response to the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 people on board. (Photo by Heikki Saukkomaa / Lehtikuva / AFP) / Finland OUTHEIKKI SAUKKOMAA/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Rescue workers search the site for pieces of the wreckage of an Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, 13 March 2019. Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew was en route to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed on 10 March 2019 by yet undetermined reason. All passengers and crew aboard died in the crash. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft has come under scrutiny after similar deadly crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia within a few months. Several countries have banned the plane type from their airspace and many airlines have grounded their 737 Max 8 planes for safety concerns after the Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after take-off on 10 March. EPA/STRINGER EPA Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A heap of debris from the wreckage of an Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft are piled at the crash site near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, 13 March 2019. Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew was en route to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed on 10 March 2019 by yet undetermined reason. All passengers and crew aboard died in the crash. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft has come under scrutiny after similar deadly crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia within a few months. Several countries have banned the plane type from their airspace and many airlines have grounded their 737 Max 8 planes for safety concerns after the Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after take-off on 10 March. EPA/STR EPA Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A crew working with an investigative team to clear the site after the Sunday crash of the Ethiopian Airlines operated Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, carry debris at Hama Quntushele village in the Oromia region, on March 13, 2019. - A Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines Boeing crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, killing all eight crew and 149 passengers on board, including tourists, business travellers, and "at least a dozen" UN staff. Families of the victims were taken to the remote site on March 13, 2019, where the plane smashed into a field with 157 passengers and crew from 35 countries, leaving a deep black crater and tiny scraps of debris. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA / AFP)TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures FILE PHOTO: An American Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8, on a flight from Miami to New York City, comes in for landing at LaGuardia Airport in New York, U.S., March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo REUTERS

The Ethiopian Airlines disaster on 10 March, following the Lion Air crash in Indonesia in October, set off one of the widest inquiries in aviation history and has cast a long shadow over the Boeings 737 Max model, which had been expected to be a standard for decades but has now been grounded across the world.

While a direct link between the crashes has not been proven, initial investigations show similarities between the two and initial investigations have focused on an automated flight-control system implemented by Boeing two years ago.

The software is designed to prevent a dangerous aerodynamic stall by pitching the plane downwards if it is detected to be tilting up sharply. In the Lion Air crash, the system is believed to have been erroneously activated by a faulty sensor, causing it to plummet to the ground minutes after take-off.

Garuda Indonesia's only Boeing 737 Max 8 at Jakarta International airport (Getty Images)

Boeing is to retrofit all 737 Max jets with a previously optional cockpit warning light that might have flagged up problems that could have played a role in the disasters, according to officials at the company.

Airlines previously had to pay extra for the safety feature, and neither Ethiopian Airlines nor Lion Air had taken up the option.

Unidentified officials told Reuters the warning light would be offered as part of a software upgrade to the 737 Max fleet.

Randy Tinseth, Boeing's vice president of commercial marketing, said changes would be made to the control laws of the plane, displays, the flight manual, and training.

It is unclear how long it will take Boeing to refit existing planes with new software or hardware, but experts predicted it could take months. Regulators in Europe and Canada have said they will conduct their own reviews of any new systems.

Since the Ethiopian crash, which killed 149 passengers and eight crew, Boeing shares have fallen 12 per cent and $28bn has been wiped off its market value.

 Ethiopian Airlines crash

Pressure has mounted on the company from US legislators, who are also expected to question the Federal Aviation Administration. The firm also faces a criminal investigation by the US Justice Department.

Several lawsuits have been filed on behalf of victims of the Lion Air crash, which killed 189 people when the jet plunged into the Java Sea after take-off from Jakarta.An explosion at a chemical plant in China has killed 47 people and injured more than 600 others, Chinese state media said on Friday.

The blast occurred shortly before 3pm local time on Thursday at Tianjiayi Chemical Company factory in Yancheng in Jiangsu province.

A fire which broke out at the facility, which then spread to neighbouring factories, was brought under control at 3am on Friday, state television reported.

Survivors were taken to 16 hospitals with 640 people being treated for injuries, including 32 who were were critically injured. Children at a nursery near the factory were among those injured in the explosion.

Nearly 1,000 residents were moved to safety as a precaution against additional explosions, the Yancheng city government announced.

Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Show all 10 1 /10 Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Smoke billows from behind a building damaged in the fire at a chemical plant in Yancheng, China Reuters Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Smoke billows from the fire at a chemical plant in Yancheng, China Reuters Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Firefighters work to extinguish the flames at a chemical plant in Yangcheng, China AFP/Getty Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Firefighters work to extinguish the flames at a chemical plant in Yangcheng, China Reuters Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Fire rises following an explosion at a chemical plant in Yancheng, China AP Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Fire rises following an explosion at a chemical plant in Yancheng, China AFP/Getty Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Fire rises following an explosion at a chemical plant in Yancheng, China Reuters Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Fire and smoke rises following an explosion at a chemical plant in Yangcheng, China AFP/Getty Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Firefighters work to extinguish the flames at a chemical plant in Yangcheng, China Reuters Fire rages after explosion at chemical factory in Yancheng, China Fire spreads after an explosion at a chemical plant in China AFP/Getty

According to the South China Morning Post, the China Earthquake Administration reported a magnitude-2.2 earthquake in Jiangsu, likely trigged by the blast.

The cause of the explosion is under investigation, but the company  which produces more than 30 organic chemical compounds, some of which are highly flammable  has been cited and fined for work safety violations in the past, according to the China Daily.

President Xi Jinping, who is in Italy on a state visit, said the authorities must step up action to prevent such incidents from happening and find out the cause of the blast as quickly as possible, state television reported.

There have recently been a series of major accidents, and all places and relevant departments must fully learn the lessons from these, Mr Xi said.

Paramilitary police officers transfer injured man after explosion (AFP/Getty Images)

The Jiangsu environmental protection bureau said a monitoring station in the area had found no abnormal concentrations of toluene, xylene or benzene.

Concentrations of acetone and chloroform outside the perimeter of the explosion zone were also within normal limits, it added.

The Jiangsu agency will launch inspections on chemical producers and warehouses, according to an emergency notice published by official media on Friday.

Recommended At least six dead after Chinese factory blast which caused earthquake

The notice, published on the news website of Jiangsu provinces Communist Party, said the government would shut down any chemical firms found not complying with regulations on dangerous chemicals.

Public anger over safety standards has grown in China over industrial accidents ranging from mining disasters to factory fires.

In 2015, 165 people were killed in a series of explosions at a chemical warehouse in the northern city of Tianjin.

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The explosions at Tianjin, one of the worlds busiest ports and not far from the capital Beijing, were big enough to be seen by satellites and register on earthquake sensors.

Despite repeated pledges by the government to tighten safety, chemical plants in particular have been plagued by disasters.

In November, a series of blasts during the delivery of a flammable gas at a chemical manufacturer killed 23 people.

Additional reporting by agenciesIn the real world, though, family dynamics can be fractured and strained. In the real world, such disclosures can be complicated by the normal conflicts between adolescents and their parents that sometimes take the form of emotional and physical abuse and financial blackmail. In the real world, the threat of estrangement looms.Muslims imprisoned in Chinas re-education camps are forced to eat pork and banned from praying or growing beards, according to a former inmate.

Omir Bekali said the treatment of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang province was designed to strip them of their religious beliefs.

Called "students", by the authorities, Mr Bekali said that prisoners were forced to line up facing a wall and sing the Chinese national anthem for half an hour every morning.

I never really wanted to sing, but because of the daily repetition, it sinks in, he told the Hong Kong Free Press. Even a year later, the music is still resonating in my head.

More than a million Uighurs have been detained in Xinjiang province, in what China claims is a clampdown on religious extremism and terrorism.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. 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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. 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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

International concern over conditions in the camps prompted Sweden to announced on Thursday that it would grant refugee status to Uighur Muslim asylum seekers

Mr Bekali was born in Xinjiang to Uighur and Kazakh parents but moved to Kazakhstan for work in 2006.

He said he was arrested when he returned to the province in March 2017 and locked up in prison on charges of aiding terrorism.

After seven months he was transferred to a re-education camp in Karamay where he said he was chained.

Every Friday, when Muslims traditionally pray, detainees were made to eat pork, which is prohibited by Islams religious restrictions, he said, adding that inmates were forbidden to pray or grow a beard, both of which were seen as a sign of extremism.

The only language allowed in the camp was Chinese, he said.

Former inmate Omir Bekali shows how he was chained during his detention in China (AFP/Getty Images)

When Mr Bekali refused to follow orders, he was forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time.

He claimed he was later sent to solitary confinement and deprived of food for 24 hours.

The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticise yourself, denounce your thinking  your own ethnic group, he said in a separate interview last year. I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I cant sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time.

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This week China responded to growing international criticism by issuing a lengthy report claiming it had detained 13,000 terrorists and broken up hundreds of terrorist gangs in Xinjiang.

It also described the camps as boarding schools.The family of an Indian man who died in Saudi Arabia were shocked to find the body of a woman inside a coffin sent back home for his burial, media in India have reported.

A 29-year-man from the state of Kerela named Rafeeq died of a heart attack while working in the Gulf state last month.

His family believed the remains had been safely returned, but Rafeeqs father Razak was appalled to discover a dead female body when he opened the casket shortly before his sons burial on 20 March.

The body of Rafeeq, who passed away on February 28 in Saudi Arabia, arrived late last night, a police official in Konni, where the family live, told the Hindustan Times.

When the family opened the casket, they found the body was of a lady, believed to be a Sri Lankan. The police have been notified.

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

One police official told the Press Trust of India (PTI) that the unfortunate mix-up could have occurred at the cargo section of a Saudi airport.

The womans body has since been moved to Kerelas Kottayam Medical College Hospital, with arrangements being made to send her home to Sri Lanka.

After Rafeeqs family filed a petition with the police and the Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia is reportedly making efforts to locate his body and send it home.

The 29-year-old man is survived by his father, mother, wife and four-year-old son, according to the Deccan Chronicle.A treasure trove of new species have been discovered in a newly-unearthed fossil site in southern China that dates back 518 million years, according to a new study.

More than half of the remains found at the Qingjiang site, in Hubei province, were previously unknown to scientists.

They include a range of prehistoric animals, from corals and sponges to jellyfish and tiny invertebrates called mud dragons. They have been so well preserved their muscles, guts, eyes, mouths and other openings are still visible.

Researchers said the discovery, which will help fill in gaps in the fossil record, was comparable in importance to the Burgess Shale site in the Canadian Rocky Mountains - famous for its exceptionally well-preserved fossils.

In a study published in Science, they said the site revealed a "treasure trove of Cambrian secrets" that should "help to elucidate biological innovation and diversification during this period".

Money for old bones: Dinosaur fossils become big business Show all 2 1 /2 Money for old bones: Dinosaur fossils become big business Money for old bones: Dinosaur fossils become big business 419328.bin Money for old bones: Dinosaur fossils become big business 419329.bin

Both sites feature fossils from the so-called Cambrian Explosion, considered by many experts the most important evolutionary event in history, when an immensely diverse aquatic animal population exploded into life around 542 million years ago.

Scientists at the Qingjiang site believe their discovery may eclipse other similar sites because it has the highest density of species diversity.

"[This is an] excellent preservation of so many Cambrian creatures," Xingliang Zhang, study author and a geology professor at Northwest University, told CNN. "Some are weird, some exactly look like what we have today."

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The fossils were found in rocks on the bank of the Danshui River after they became entombed in an ancient underwater mudslide. The 4,351 fossils uncovered so far represent 101 different species  53 of them new.

Ms Zhang and her co-author, Dongjing Fu, found the site in 2007 while searching the rocks around the river bank for fossils. They and other scientists are already in discussions with the local government to protect the site.Thailands major political parties held their final rallies on Friday ahead of a general election where critics say the odds are heavily stacked in favour of the incumbent military junta.

Sundays vote will see a return to democracy after five years of army rule.

Polls suggest a populist opposition party linked to former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra will once again be the single largest vote-winner.

But even if Pheu Thai and its allies win more than half of the 500 seats in the lower house of parliament, that may not be enough to take control.

A bizarre constitutional system drawn up by the junta in 2017 means the 250 seats in the upper house are appointed by the military.

Thailand's transgender candidate Show all 6 1 /6 Thailand's transgender candidate Thailand's transgender candidate transgender2.jpg (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe) Thailand's transgender candidate transgender3.jpg (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe) Thailand's transgender candidate transgender4.jpg (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe) Thailand's transgender candidate transgender5.jpg (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe) Thailand's transgender candidate transgender6.jpg (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe) Thailand's transgender candidate transgender1.jpg (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)

In order to win a majority to form a government, a party needs to have more than half of the votes from the 750 seats in both houses  leaving a magic number of 376.

Any of the current opposition parties would therefore need to win 376 seats entirely from the lower house. But the proxy party formed by the military need only win 126 there, to add to its guaranteed 250 senate seats.

The ruling military party Palang Pracharat was established with the aim of continuing the premiership of the 2014 coup leader Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former general.

Pheu Thai party leader Sudarat Keyuraphan said the rules laid out by the junta meant the election was, from the outset, anything but free and fair.

She nonetheless urged the Thai public to turn out in force if they want any chance at removing the junta from office.

We have to tell the people that its the only day that we can stop Prayuth extending his power, Sudarat said on Friday, as her party held its largest rally yet in Bangkok before the official close of campaigning. Therefore we need many people to go vote. I believe the power they have is not any bigger than the power of the people.

Pheu Thai remains affiliated with former prime minister Thaksin, the controversial telecoms tycoon who won a landslide in 2001 before becoming the first prime minister in history to complete a full term in office.

Thaksin was ousted by a coup in 2006 amid accusations of corruption. He denied the charges as politically motivated but was forced into exile.

And while the new army-backed constitution makes external involvement in Thai politics illegal  particularly from an exile such as Thaksin  Pheu Thai insists he remains the ideological leader.

Sudarat said: We use his principles. But using Thaksins ideas doesnt mean he owns the party because Thaksin is not involved with the partys administration any more.

She said the partys supporters remain loyal to him because his policies were able to improve their lives. They love Thaksin because Thaksin was able to solve their problems, she said.

Supporters of the junta have warned that a return to Pheu Thai leadership would be a return to the political unrest that has dogged the country for more than two decades.

Those who back Prayuth and his Palang Pracharat party also gathered for their largest rally yet on Friday. Asked if another coup was possible in the event of a landslide victory, deputy junta leader Prawit Wongsuwan told Reuters news agency: No, no, no.

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Pheu Thais long-time rival, the Democrat Party, is the other major player in the election. Though not a military proxy, it does lean towards the establishment and a pro-business approach, and hopes to position itself as a kingmaker in the event of an inconclusive election.

In doing so, it hopes to return its leader, Abhisit Vejjajiva, to the prime ministers office he held unelected from 2008 to 2011 after yet another coup, that time by the judiciary.

Abhisit told Al Jazeera he believed his party could take as many as 150 seats, and that it could be willing to work with Palang Pracharat as long as Prayuth is removed from the equation.

We want to be at the core of the next government, he said. We want to lead the country out of the current economic situation and into a new political era.

Parties are allowed to keep campaigning until 6pm local time on Saturday. At 8am on Sunday, 93,200 polling stations will open and voting runs to 5pm.

The election commission has said unofficial results will be available within three hours of the close of voting on Sunday.In the aftermath of the darkest day in modern New Zealand history, a nation blanketed in shock continues to answer hate with unity.

This was in evidence on Friday afternoon, at a service in Christchurchs Hagley Park which marked the passage of a week since terror was visited on two mosques in the city by a lone gunman who espoused white supremacist views.

It was the best attended and perhaps most poignant public gathering yet to be held in remembrance of victims and in support of the Muslim community nationwide.

Surrounded by a crowd of thousands, the Islamic faithful gathered to pray, metres away from the place of worship first targeted by the gunman.

In attendance was the prime minister Jacinda Ardern who, wearing a hijab as a mark of respect, cited a saying of the Prophet Muhammad: When any part of the body suffers, the whole body feels pain. New Zealand mourns with you  we are one.

Her brief speech was followed by the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, seemingly appreciated by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Show all 11 1 /11 New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Zakaria Bhuiyan People gather hoping to find out information about Zakaria Bhuiyan who is still missing after the mosques shootings in Christchurch. David Moir/AFP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Mucad Ibrahim Three-year-old Mucad Ibrahim, the youngest known victim of the mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019. Abdi Ibrahim via AP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Nadeem Rasheed Nadeem Rasheed, brother of Pakistani Naeem Rashid who died alongside his son Talha Naeem, 21, who were killed in shooting at a Mosque in Christchurch, at their home town in Abbottabad, EPA New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Omar Nabi Omar Nabi speaks to the media about losing his father Haji Daoud Nabi, 71, in the mosque attack REUTERS New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Ash Mohammed Ash Mohammed, right, talks to a police officer about his father and two brothers who are missing near the Masjid Al Noor mosque AP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Akhtar Khokhur Akhtar Khokhur, 58, shows a picture of her missing husband Mehaboobbhai Khokhar, 65. AP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Wasseim Alsati A note is seen on a window of a door at the family home of Wasseim Alsati in Christchurch on 17 March 2019. AFP/Getty Images New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Haroon Mahmood Relatives offer condolences to nephew (centre) of Haroon Mahmood, a Pakistani citizen who was killed in Christchurch mosque shootings. AP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Farid Ahmed Farid Ahmed (pictured) survived the Al Noor mosque shootings but his wife Husne was killed. AFP/Getty Images New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Syed Areeb Ahmed A relative shows a picture of Syed Areeb Ahmed, a Pakistani citizen who was killed the Christchurch mosque shooting. AP New Zealand shootings: Victims of Christchurch mosque terror attacks Naeem Rashid A relative looks at a picture on a mobile phone of Pakistani nationals Naeem Rashid and his son Talha Naeem (right) who died in the Christchurch shootings. AFP/Getty Images

Then two minutes of silence, observed nationwide.

Gamil Fouda, imam of the Al Noor Mosque, himself a survivor of the violence, told the crowd that he had seen hatred and rage in the eyes of the killer, but that the nations response to the terror wreaked on innocent worshippers had, by contrast, shown the world an example of love and unity.

Continuing, he echoed the prime ministers call for heightened global action against hate and racism, noting pointedly: Islamophobia kills.

Jacinda Arderns response to the tragedy has offered both solace and strength, comforting mourning communities while moving quickly to address the availability of devastating weapons  her government has already banned the semi-automatic weapons used by the killer.

But behind her words stand New Zealanders themselves, who have organised rings of human shields around mosques and fundraising drives, with countless volunteers donating time and resources to those in need.

Among those who have put themselves forward to guard mosques are members of the Mongrel Mob, New Zealands best-known gang, which has active chapters in most large towns. Three members visibly displaying symbols of the movement on their clothing were spotted paying their respects at Fridays vigil.

One of the trio, identifying himself as Rome da World, said he had been at Hagley almost every day since the terror attack and had [lent] out my car ... weve been there to deliver food, to help them shop, weve just been here practically every day to just support in whatever way we can.

The group wanted to show the wider community, our Muslim community that were here, he said, adding that he was willing to protect worshippers at Friday prayers for as long as necessary.

The scarves in solidarity campaign was organised in response to reports that some Muslim women were feeling too afraid to wear their headscarves in public following the attacks (Emanuel Stoakes)

Also on visible display were the first fruits of a campaign to wear scarves in solidarity with Muslims. The quickly organised national movement developed on social media, inspired by reports that some Muslim women were feeling too afraid to wear their headscarves in public following the attacks.

Carolyn Robertson, who is active in organising Wear a Headscarf Friday in Christchurch, told The Independent that: I thought this was something we could all do, to help Muslim women feel safe and to know they are not alone.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. From the Facebook pages, it looks like over 15,000 women across New Zealand are involved, but there will be more who have heard about it through other channels. Ive heard of shops selling out of headscarves, she added.

Fridays vigil was followed by a more sombre affair, as burials continued elsewhere in the city. The public were invited to attend if they wished.

 New Zealand opens parliament session with reading from Quran

Kokab, who declined to give her full name, attended many burial ceremonies this week. She lost nine friends in the attacks and is coping with her grief, she says, by giving and receiving support in the community.

All the Muslims are cooking, helping each other, bringing food to the families. And not just Muslims: Kiwis, Hindus, Sikhs, everyone is together, she added.

Pausing for a moment, and referring to the killer for the first time in the conversation, she added: He is alone, everyone else is together.Women across New Zealand have donned headscarves to show solidarity with Muslims a week on from the Christchurch attack.

Prime minister Jacinda Ardern joined television presenters, police officers, nurses and others in wearing a hijab after 50 people were shot dead at two mosques.

Newsreaders began broadcasts with Islamic greetings as the countrys national TV and radio stations aired coverage of the first Friday call to prayer since the atrocity.

New Zealand newspaper, The Press, printed Arabic text reading "Salam", or peace", on a striking front page along with the names of the victims of last week's attack.

It comes after a spate suspected Islamophobic hate crimes in the wake of the shootings.

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Samantha Hayes, an anchor of current affairs programme Newshub, said: This week a young Auckland woman was abused on a train for being Muslim and wearing a headscarf. This happened after 50 people had been killed in Christchurch.

Im wearing a headscarf today for her, and for the families and friends of those killed in Christchurch a week ago.

An Auckland doctor, Thaya Ashman, had led calls for women to wear headscarves on Friday after hearing about a Muslim who was too scared to go out as she feared her hijab would make her a target for terrorism.

Ms Ashman said: I wanted to say: We are with you, we want you to feel at home on your own streets, we love, support and respect you.

As Christchurch geared up for prayers at a park in front of the Al-Noor mosque, where most of the victims were killed, women in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch posted pictures of themselves in headscarves on social media.

Bell Sibly, in Christchurch, said: My primary reason was that if anybody else turns up waving a gun, I want to stand between him and anybody he might be pointing it at. And I dont want him to be able to tell the difference, because there is no difference.

Ms Ardern won widespread praise last week for putting on a black headscarf when meeting members of the Muslim community after the shootings.

A police officer kept guard at a Christchurch cemetery, where shooting victims were buried on Thursday, with a scarf over her head and an automatic weapon in her hands.

Many Muslim women cover their heads in public with the hijab as a sign of modesty, although some critics see it as a sign of female oppression.

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While movement in New Zealand won support and appreciation from the Islamic Womens Council of New Zealand and the NZ Muslim Association, it also faced opposition from some.

In an anonymous opinion piece for news website Stuff, a Muslim woman described it as "cheap tokenism", "a gimmick and pretty distasteful".

Washington journalism professor Asra Nomani, who has campaigned for Muslim reform, urged women not to wear a headscarf for harmony.

It is a symbol of purity culture antithetical to feminist values. We have women in jail and dead, for refusing the interpretation of Islam you promote, she wrote on Twitter.Police in Berlin had to break up a mass brawl of more than 400 people  after fans of two rival social media influencers clashed in Germany.

Nine arrests were made and multiple knives confiscated as officers were forced to use tear gas to break up the organised dust-up in the citys famous Alexanderplatz.

Rocks were also thrown as the violence spilled into the squares underground station.

Referring to the incident afterwards, the German Police Trade Union wrote on Twitter: Influencers are negligent with their influence; it seems to be in fashion to inflame tensions simply to get more clicks and more followers.

The trouble flared from an online dispute between YouTube stars ThatsBekir a 20-something from Stuttgart and 17-year-old Bahar Al Amood from Berlin.

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

After weeks of goading each other, the pair arranged to meet in Alexanderplatz on Thursday evening and encouraged their fans to turn up to support them.

Recommended Cars abandoned and city centre gridlocked as popular YouTuber visits

It took police four hours to return calm, the Berliner Morgenpost reports. Criminal charges have been lodged against 13 people.

Writing on Instagram afterwards, Mr Al Amood, who has 14,000 online subscribers, claimed he had tried to speak to officers to deescalate tensions, but, he claimed, they refused to listen.

His rival, who has 250,000 YouTube followers, told fans he had been injured during the violence and wrote: I need a break.

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His manager told the Morgenpost he did not believe he was accountable for the trouble.A seven-year-old boy has been stabbed to death by a 75-year-old woman in an apparently random attack in the Swiss city of Basel, prosecutors said.

The woman, who was not named, allegedly stabbed the boy in the neck as he was making his way home from school on Thursday.

The boy, whose family comes from Kosovo, died shortly afterwards.

The woman, who is not believed to have known the boy or his family, turned herself in after the attack.

Prosecutors said they were trying to determine what motive the suspect may have had but the woman, who is Swiss, may not be criminally liable and a psychological evaluation is being prepared.

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 boy was discovered by his teacher shortly after midday lying injured on the ground around 200 metres from the school. He had been travelling home from school by bike.

Recommended Two people shot dead outside Swiss bank

He was taken to the University Children's Hospital of Basel where he underwent emergency surgery but died a short time later.

Swiss media reported the boys mother had been living in Switzerland for seven years after moving from the Kosovan town of Lipljan.A letter bomb discovered at a sorting office in Ireland is believed to be part of a campaign that saw similar devices sent to targets in the UK.

Bomb disposal experts were called to the An Post depot in Limerick after staff raised the alert on Friday morning.

Investigators said the package appeared to be identical to four bombs received earlier this month at Heathrow, London City Airport, Waterloo railway station and the University of Glasgow.

Irelands justice minister said the package could be the last of five devices that a group calling itself the IRA claimed they sent out earlier this month.

Charlie Flanagan said a distinctive limited edition stamp on the suspicious item was the same as that used in the bombs that sparked security alerts in London and Glasgow.

Suspicious packages delivered to various locations in Britain Show all 7 1 /7 Suspicious packages delivered to various locations in Britain Suspicious packages delivered to various locations in Britain An improvised explosive device that was sent to The Compass Centre at London Heathrow Airport. The package burst into flames upon opening AFP/Getty Suspicious packages delivered to various locations in Britain An improvised explosive device that was sent to London City Airport AFP/Getty Suspicious packages delivered to various locations in Britain An improvised explosive device that was sent to London's Waterloo train station AFP/Getty Suspicious packages delivered to various locations in Britain Emergency responders are seen outside Glasgow University after a suspicious package was found Lilli Schlossbach/Reuters Suspicious packages delivered to various locations in Britain Counter-terror police investigated a suspicious package at Heathrow on Tuesday 5 March AP Suspicious packages delivered to various locations in Britain London's Waterloo station was closed after a suspicious package was found on Tuesday 5 March PA Suspicious packages delivered to various locations in Britain Counter-terror police investigated a suspicious package at London City Airport on Tuesday 5 March PA

This is a despicable act, he told RTE. The sending of incendiary devices like this is totally unacceptable. I hope the people responsible are brought to justice.

When asked whether the suspicious package could be the fifth bomb the IRA claimed to have sent out, he replied: We have reason to believe this could be the case.

A claim of responsibility said three parcel bombs were sent to commercial targets while the remaining two were directed to British army recruitment officers.

But only four had been discovered, at Heathrow, London City Airport, Waterloo railway station and the University of Glasgow, and police warned the public to be vigilant for other devices.

Investigators in Ireland believe the package discovered in Limerick failed to reach its intended destination in the UK and was returned to the National Return Letter Centre  the depot for all undeliverable mail in Ireland.

A Garda spokesperson said: An Garda Siochana are currently investigating a parcel of interest identified at the Limerick An Post sorting office shortly after 6am this morning.

This parcel appears to be identical to parcels (pending closer forensic and ballistic examination) discovered earlier this month in London and Glasgow. The Army explosive ordnance disposal team are currently at the scene.

An Garda Siochana continue to liaise with the UK authorities in relation to these investigations.

 Scotland suspicious packages: Edinburgh Street and Dumfries campus evacuated over security fears

Londons Metropolitan Police confirmed the IRA had made a claim of responsibility last week and said the investigation continues.

Officers said extensive advice has been issued to armed forces personnel, businesses and the transport sector to be vigilant for potential suspicious devices.

Given the packages bore similarities to devices sent in the past which were linked to dissident groups associated with Northern Ireland-related terrorism, officers were already looking at this as a line of enquiry. However, we continue to keep an open mind and enquiries continue, a spokesperson for Scotland Yard added.

The discovery of four devices on 5 and 6 March sparked a wave of evacuations and security alerts, but only one device partially detonated and no one was seriously injured.

Police said the packages were all A4-sized white postal bags and contained small improvised explosive devices that were capable of igniting an initially small fire when opened.

Bomb disposal personnel outside the University of Glasgow (PA)

They had been posted from the Republic of Ireland, with false senders addresses in Dublin written on the outside.

The identical packages were addressed by hand, with stamps from a limited 2018 Valentines Day range produced by Irelands An Post service, featuring the words Love Eire.

The IRA fought a paramilitary campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland and has launched deadly bombing campaigns on the British mainland that culminated during the Troubles.

It previously targeted British army recruitment centres in February 2014, when devices were sent to seven offices across the southeast of England.

The most recent incarnation of the republican terrorist group, the New IRA, was also suspected of being behind a car bombing that struck Derry in January.

Police Service of Northern Irelands assistant chief constable Mark Hamilton described the faction as small, largely unrepresentative and determined to drag people back to somewhere they dont want to be.Attackers on a motorcycle threw an explosive device, possibly a hand grenade, at the Russian consulate in Athens early on Friday, police said.

It was probably a hand grenade. No one was injured, a police official told Reuters, adding that it was not a powerful explosion.

AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands Show all 10 1 /10 AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax A fan throws a flare towards Ajax supporters AP AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax Greek police confront Ajax supporters AP AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax The incident occurred shortly before kick-off at the Olympic Stadium in Athens EPA AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax Ajax fans after the clashes with police REUTERS AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax An Ajax appears to be bleeding after clashes with riot police AP AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax Another fan is shown to be sporting injuries from the incident REUTERS AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax Fans back away from a fire in the stadium REUTERS AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax Ajax fans try to shield themselves from flames AFP/Getty Images AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax Injured supporters in the crowd AFP/Getty Images AEK Athens vs Ajax: Clashes in the stands AEK Athens vs Ajax Smoke raises from the stand of Ajax fans after flares are thrown AP

No one claimed responsibility for the attack on the consulate in the Athens suburb of Chalandri, where police cordoned off the area.

In 2016, a security guard was wounded in a similar incident at the French embassy in central Athens.

 Athens sees rare dusting of snow as deadly winter weather continues to pummel Europe

Small-scale attacks on businesses, police, politicians and embassies are frequent in Greece, with its long history of political violence.

ReutersBut Lightfoot counters its better to have people with her background of growing up in a low-income, minority family working in law enforcement than not be represented. She has also defended her record on the Police Board by saying she was tougher on troubled cops than predecessors. At a news conference unveiling Green and Calloways endorsements, Green was asked about Chances comments that activists arent comfortable with Lightfoot.The main suspect in the Utrecht tram shooting that left three people dead has confessed to the attack, prosecutors have said.

Gokmen Tanis told investigators he was acting alone during Mondays incident, which saw the Dutch city go into lockdown.

The attack is being investigated as terror related although, in its statement, the public prosecutor's office declined to offer any light on the 37-year-olds motives.

The suspect this morning confessed the criminal acts he is charged with," it said following a closed hearing on Friday.

Tanis, an Utrecht resident with a long criminal record, was arrested hours after the shooting and was held on charges including multiple murder or manslaughter with terrorist intent. He did not know any of those who were killed  which included a teenage girl.

Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Show all 30 1 /30 Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Special Police Forces inspect a tram, after a shooting took place on a tram at the 24 Oktoberplace in Utrecht EPA Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack This image made available from the Twitter page of Police Utrecht shows an image of 37-year-old Gokman Tanis who police are looking for in connection with the tram shooting incident Police Utrecht/AP Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack AFP/Getty Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Police, including heavily armed officers, flooded the area after the shooting Monday morning on a tram at a busy traffic intersection in a residential neighborhood AFP/Getty/Twitter/michadrost Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Dutch counter terrorism police use a robot as they prepare to enter a house AP Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Dutch counter terrorism police prepare to enter a house after a shooting incident in Utrecht AP Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Forensic police search the interior of the tram EPA Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack An armed Police officer patrols at a train station in Rotterdam EPA Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Special Police forces inspect a tram AFP/Getty Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack AFP/Getty/Twitter/michadrost Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Police officer with a service dog Reuters Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack According to the the Dutch Police, several people have been injured and the perpetrator is still at large EPA Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Members of the military police stand guard around the Binnenhof, The Hague AFP/Getty Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Rescue workers install a screen AP Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Several people were wounded on a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht Sky News Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Police forces walk near a tram AFP/Getty Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Reuters Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Police secure the site Reuters Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Members of the military police arrive to heighten security around the Binnenhof, The Hague EPA Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Local media reported counter-terrorism police at the scene AFP/Getty Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack A body lays next to a tram as emergency services attend the scene AP Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Armed police at the scene EPA Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack EPA Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Martijn van der Zande/AP Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack "Shooting incident... Several injured people reported. Assistance started," the Utrecht police Twitter account said. "It is a shooting incident in a tram. Several trauma helicopters have been deployed to provide help." EPA Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack AFP/Getty Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Martijn van der Zande/AP Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack AFP/Getty Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack Lilian Bruigom/AP Utrecht shooting: Man opens fire on passengers in Dutch tram attack EPA

Investigators say that a note found in a getaway car also indicates an extremist motive.

Recommended Utrecht suspect previously accused of rape but cleared of manslaughter

They have asked a forensic psychiatry and psychology institute to carry out a personality test on him.

A 40-year-old man who was detained a day after the shooting because Tanis was arrested at his home has been released without charge after no evidence was found that he helped in the shooting, prosecutors said.

Gokmen Tanis, who police said had confessed to the attack (AFP/Getty Images)

The confession comes as mourners prepared on Friday for a silent march through Utrecht to remember the attack's victims, which included a 19-year-old woman from the town of Vianen and men aged 28 and 49, both from Utrecht.

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Prime minister Mark Rutte and the mayors of the Netherlands' four biggest cities will take part in the show of solidarity.No matter what side of the political divide in Israel, everyone seemed to agree on one point: US president Donald Trumps decision to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights just weeks before the election was handing Benjamin Netanyahu his fourth consecutive term in office.

The embattled Israeli prime minister has navigated rough seas ahead of the 9 April elections.

Every poll has consistently shown his ruling Likud party losing to the Blue and White Party, a new centrist alliance spearheaded by popular ex-army chief Benny Gantz.

Campaigning under the shadow of possible incitement in multiple corruption cases, Mr Netanyahu has shrilly defended his qualifications as premier.

While trying to secure history book recognition for being Israels longest-ever serving prime minister, he was fast heading for the ignoble accolade of being the countrys first leader to be indicted while in office.

Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Show all 7 1 /7 Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights An Israeli soldier stands next to signs pointing out distances to different cities on Mount Bental, an observation post in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights Reuters Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Druze people take part in a rally in Majdal Shams near the ceasefire line between Israel and Syria Reuters Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Israeli Druzes sit together watching the Syrian side of the Israel-Syria border on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights Reuters Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights A European member of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) using binoculars to look towards the Syrian side of the Golan Heights AFP/Getty Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights A file photo taken on October 19, 1973 shows Israeli Defence Minister General Moshe Dayan (R) looking towards the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, four days after the beginning of the Yom Kippur War AFP/Getty Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights A file photo taken on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on September 5, 2014 shows members of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force Zone (UNDOF) using binoculars to look towards the Syrian side of the Golan Heights AFP/Getty Trump backs Israels annexation of Golan Heights Members of the United Nations peacekeepers standing on a watch tower during a visit by the Israeli Defence Minister in 2018 AFP/Getty

Normally known for launching wars ahead of elections to ensure the security vote, Mr Netanyahu was also batting off stinging criticism from all sides for not ordering a full military operation in Gaza.

But just when it appeared that Lt Gen Gantz, and his band of former generals, could unseat the Likud, Mr Trumps seemingly spontaneous tweet, sent out during Israeli prime-time TV, shifted everything.

And it landed just days ahead of Mr Netanyahus scheduled four-day visit to the US, where he is expected to meet twice with Mr Trump.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognise Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability! the American leader wrote.

In just one tweet, he parted with decades of US foreign policy, as well as international consensus on Israels 1967 seizure and later de facto occupation of the Golan Heights.

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Israels annexation of the Golan Heights has repeatedly been declared illegal by the United Nations, and the international community considers it Syrian territory.

Nonetheless in Israel, the media and social media exploded.

Allies of Mr Netanyahu were quick to attribute it to his prowess.

Gilad Erdan, Israels minister of public security and strategic affairs, called it another tremendous achievement for the state of Israel, the Likud Party and the prime minister.

Moshe Kahlon, head of the Kulanu Party, which could be an important coalition partner for Mr Netanyahu, said it was an important accomplishment.

Supporters, including local right-wing media, dubbed it a substantial elections present of impeccable timing.

All of a sudden the submarines and Blue and White Party allegations that Netanyahu illicitly profited from the deal seem like toy boats in a bathtub, Herb Keinon of The Jerusalem Post wrote.

It was the elections gift Netanyahu dreamed of, he added.

Critics opted for the term electioneering.

No one is even trying to pretend any longer that Donald Trump isnt intervening in Israels election on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus behalf, Anshel Pfeffer wrote in a Haaretz front page column.

Facing more ugly revelations about corruption charges swirling around a $4.3m submarine deal, Mr Pfeffer concluded that the Golan Heights tweet was the perfect distraction.

Arab-Israeli lawmakers came to a similar conclusion.

Aida Touma-Sliman, an Arab member of the Knesset for the leftist Hadash party, told The Times of Israel the American president was trying to save Netanyahu from his desperate situation and return him to power.

Hadashs leader Ayman Odeh meanwhile said the move was a cheap and cynical provocation.

It has also forced Mr Netanyahus rivals into an embarrassing position.

There was nothing Mr Gantzs party could do other than thank and praise Trump for helping Mr Netanyahu to his fourth term in office  otherwise they would appear at best petty, and at worst, anti-Israel.

Attempts to steal a bit of the limelight fell painfully flat.

Yair Lapid, Mr Gantzs partner in the Blue and White Party, was quick to point out their coalition had started a campaign for recognition of the Golan Heights a year before.

He hastily shared a video montage of all the times he had mentioned Israeli sovereignty over the disputed area.

The replies to his tweet, which was only shared a few dozen times, says it all. Send flowers to Netanyahu, wrote one user.

Stealing someones copyright posted another. This is thanks to our dear prime minister not you wrote a third.

Meanwhile Mr Gantz, looking tired and noticeably less steely, shared a video reminding his followers he would be flying to the US in a few days to meet with American Jewish leadership at a policy conference of the powerful pro-Israeli lobby group AIPAC.

There, he will no doubt have to confront renewed adoration for Mr Netanyahu, who is also due to speak and will likely take every opportunity to milk the Golan Heights recognition.

It will be a great opportunity to thank President Trump, Mr Gantz says, looking uncomfortable.

The elections gift Netanyahu dreamed of Herb Keinon, The Jerusalem Post

That said, Mr Netanyahus path to the throne is not yet set.

Shortly after expressing joy over the news, Naftali Bennett, Mr Netanyahus right-wing education minister and a powerful coalition partner, was quick to shoot out a veiled warning.

The premier could and would lose his support base if the US recognition of the Golan Heights was a pay off or precursor to Israels recognition of a Palestinian state  a major no-no for Israels far right.

People close to Mr Bennett told The Independent he feared Golan Heights recognition was tied to Mr Trumps long-awaited and mysterious peace plan.

In short, the prime minister is not out of the woods just yet.What is the Golan Heights and what is its current status?

The Golan Heights is a narrow strip of mountainous land, roughly 1,800sq km, bordering Syria, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon.

It has officially been recognised as part of Syria since 1944  when the country was recognised as an independent republic  but was captured by Israeli forces in the 1967 Six-Day War, thereafter becoming Israeli-occupied territory.

No country in the world has recognised Israels annexation of the Golan Heights  which might change soon, following Donald Trumps call for recognition.

Syria tried to get it back in a surprise attack in the 1973 Arab-Israel War, but was defeated in a huge tank battle and forced to sign a ceasefire deal.

A UN peacekeeping force has been deployed in the Golan Heights since that time to monitor the ceasefire and patrol the demarcation line between Syrian and Israeli-controlled areas.

The United Nations considers the Golan Heights as part of Syria, and passed UN Resolution 242, which calls on Israel to withdraw from all territory it occupied in the 1967 war  including the Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank. Israel has refused to do so.

How much control does Israel have over the Golan Heights?

Israel occupies two-thirds of the territory, and in 1981, formally recognised it as part of the country.

It has also  in violation of international law  began construction in the territory and moved settlers there.

Initially secret talks began in the late 2000s between Syria and Israel that reportedly included the possibility of Israel returning the territory in exchange for a peace deal with Damascus, but negotiations collapsed after Israel launched a war in Gaza in 2008.



Why do both Syria and Israel want sovereignty over the Golan Heights?

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that the Golan Heights will always be part of Israel, and Syria, which does not recognise Israel, wants the territory back.

It is a strategically important territory for the two enemy countries with its elevated position  nearly 3,000m above sea level  allowing a viewpoint into southern Syria, northern Israel and southern Lebanon.

When Syria had control of the Golan Heights, its military was able to use positions to shell Israeli communities below.

But Israels possession of the land also gives its military a clear view into Syria, all the way to the capital Damascus some 60km away.

It is also resource-rich and borders the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus allegedly walked on water.

The sea is an important freshwater source and Israels largest reservoir  once accounting for 30 per cent of the countrys water sources.

But it is starting to dry up, which is having a knock-on effect on the Jordan river, which it feeds into, and the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea.

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Why has the US made this announcement about the Golan Heights now?

The US, in line with international law and consensus, had refrained from accepting Israels claim to sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

But although Mr Trumps announcement is controversial, it is unlikely to have taken many by surprise.

It follows a series of moves that have delighted Israel but infuriated the Arab world, including recognising Jerusalem as Israels capital and moving the US embassy there.

This announcement has also reportedly been in the works for some time.

According to a Reuters interview with the countrys intelligence minister Yisrael Katz in May 2018, the matter was topping the agenda in bilateral talks, with Israel pressing the Trump administration to recognise its sovereignty over the territory as part of the US pushback against perceived regional aggression by Iran.

Iran is a key ally to Damascus and its military support in the Syrian war has been crucial to giving Syrian president Bashar al-Assad the upper hand.

This is the perfect time to make such a move. The most painful response you can give the Iranians is to recognise Israels Golan sovereignty  with an American statement, a presidential proclamation, enshrined [in law], Katz said.



Who lives in the Golan Heights now?

Today more than 40,000 people live in the Golan Heights, according to Israeli government estimates.

The population is a mix of Syrians and Israeli settlers. Most of the Syrian residents are those that fled there during the 1967 war and are members of the Druze faith.A ferry overloaded with people celebrating the Kurdish new year and Mother's Day capsized in the Tigris River near the Iraqi city of Mosul on Thursday, killing nearly 100 people, officials said.

Many of the dead were women and children who could be seen struggling to swim against a strong current, opposite restaurants and an amusement park where people had been celebrating minutes earlier.

An Interior Ministry official said 94 people were killed in the accident, which residents said was the worst in recent memory.

Colonel Hussam Khalil, head of the Civil Defense in Iraq's northern Nineveh province, told The Associated Press the accident occurred as scores of people were out in the tourist area, known as Ghabat, celebrating Nowruz, which marks the Kurdish new year and the arrival of spring.

The boat had been ferrying people to a small island nearby.

Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum Show all 35 1 /35 Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dianamore-9272.jpg Diane More Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dianamore-9179.jpg Diane More Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dianamore-9079.jpg Diane More Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dianamore-9049.jpg Diane More Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dianamore-9012.jpg Diane More Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dianamore-8887.jpg Diane More Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dianamore-8599.jpg Diane More Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dianamore-8588.jpg Diane More Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum bp-musume-0635.jpg Safa Kadhim Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum bp-musume-0300.jpg Safa Kadhim Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum bp-musume-0045.jpg Safa Kadhim Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum bp-musume-0249.jpg Safa Kadhim Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum bp-musume-0037.jpg Safa Kadhim Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum bp-musume-0265.jpg Safa Kadhim Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06429.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06369.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06430.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06425.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06423.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06422.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06416.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06371.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06454.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06413.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06412.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06411.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06407.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06405.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06403.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06381.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06374.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06445.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06443.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06391.jpg Anu Shukla Protest of BP-sponsored Iraqi exhibition at British Museum dsc06388.jpg Anu Shukla

Abdulrazzaq Falih, a rescuer with the river police of Mosul, said he pulled more than 20 bodies from the water.

"Children, women, and young, what can I tell you? It was a difficult situation," he said.

A man who identified himself as Abdul-Jabbar al-Jbouri appealed for the police to look for his wife and children.

"My wife and three daughters are in the water!" he screamed.

Mosul was devastated by the war against the Isis group, which occupied the city for three years.

 Boxing Sisters: Pilot boxing scheme launched in Iraq for young girls and women affected by conflict

Iraqi forces drove the militants from Mosul in 2017 after a gruelling campaign that left entire neighbourhoods in ruins, and residents are still struggling to rebuild.

Videos of the ferry disaster posted online showed people struggling against the strong current. Young men who had been lunching on the banks jumped into the water with their clothes on to try to save people.

The usually tame Tigris is running high this time of year, fed by snowmelt from mountains in Turkey.

The river swelled further after a rainy season that brought more precipitation than in previous years.

Falah al-Taii, director of Nineveh health department, said the number of victims that arrived at the forensic department and in the hospitals in Mosul is more than 60, the majority of them women and children.

"There is a large number of fathers and mothers who are looking for their children until now," he added.

Col Khalil said the ferry sank because of a technical problem, and that there were not many boats in the area to rescue people.

He said more than 80 people were on the ferry when it sank. Others said the number of people on the boat was much higher.

Saudi Aziz, a 23-year-old Kurd, said he was on another ferry crossing the river.

He said the stricken ferry was overloaded with around 150 people when it capsized.

He said he jumped in the water and managed to save a 20-year-old woman.

"I cannot describe the scene, it's a catastrophe," he said.

Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi ordered an investigation and, according to Iraqi TV, arrived in Mosul later on Thursday, where he declared three days of national mourning.

Iraqi television reported nine workers operating the ferry have been detained and an arrest warrant is out for the owner of the tourist island where it was headed.

The US Embassy said charge d'affaires Joey Hood and the entire mission "express our deepest condolences to the families and friends of those who lost their lives in the tragic ferry accident on the Tigris River near Mosul".

Associated PressUS secretary of state Mike Pompeo launched a blistering attack on Hezbollah during a visit to Beirut on Friday, as he wrapped up a regional trip aimed at piling pressure on Iran and its proxies in the region.

Lebanon was the last stop on tour of the Middle East, following stops in Kuwait and Israel, in which Mr Pompeo has made the case to US allies for a more aggressive stance against Iran.

Speaking in the capital Beirut, he said Irans local ally Hezbollah had put the Lebanese people at risk, with unilateral and unaccountable decisions on war and peace, and life and death.

The Lebanese people face a choice: bravely move forward as an independent and proud nation, or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future, he said following a meeting with the countrys foreign minister, Gebran Bassil.

President Donald Trumps administration has implemented sweeping sanctions against Iran in an effort to pressure it to return to renegotiate a landmark nuclear agreement reached under his predecessor, and to curb its military activity across the region. The White House described it as the toughest sanctions regime ever imposed on Tehran.

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. 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Hezbollah has also been hit with sanctions, with key financiers and entities tied to the group recently targeted by the US Treasury.

But Mr Pompeo has received a mixed reception in Lebanon, where the the president, parliament speaker and foreign minister are all allies of Hezbollah.

The country has long been divided over Irans role, and is suffering an economic crisis caused by years of political deadlock.

Many here fear that sanctions against Hezbollah might make the crisis even worse, and there are concerns that a renewed push against the group by the US may disturb the countrys fragile political balance.

The pro-Hezbollah Al Akhbar newspaper welcomed the secretary of state with a front page photograph calling him a dirty Yankee as he touched down in the country, and those who supported him as lackeys.

Mr Bassil, the foreign minister, said the group is a Lebanese party and not a terrorist organisation.

Its categorisation as a terrorist organisation concerns the state which categorised it, rather than Lebanon, he added.

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, pictured in 2012 (AP)

That sentiment was echoed by the president, Michel Aoun, who told Mr Pompeo that Hezbollah is a Lebanese party that has a popular base representing one of the main sects in the country.

The president said in a separate statement on Friday that sanctions against the group are hitting all Lebanese people as well as Lebanese banks.

While the government of Lebanon is officially a US ally, Washington has grown increasingly concerned over Hezbollahs growing strength.

Together with its electoral allies, it won more than 70 of parliaments 128 seats in an election last year. The group has taken three of the 30 portfolios in the government formed by the western-backed prime minister Saad al-Hariri in January, including the health ministry  the first time it has held a ministry with a significant budget.

There were few surprises in Mr Pompeos speech, but the combativeness of his remarks on such a high profile visit is likely to cause a stir.

Hezbollah was founded in the early 1980s with the support of Iran, and spent much of its early existence fighting the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

Following Lebanons devastating 1975-1990 civil war, Hezbollah was the only militia in the country which did not fully disarm, justifying its weapons as a necessary deterrent to another Israeli invasion.

Today, Hezbollah is the most powerful armed group in Lebanon, surpassing even the countrys national army. In recent years, it has played a key role in the Syrian civil war, intervening on the side of President Bashar al-Assad.

The group said it was motivated by a desire to stop the war spreading to Lebanon, but it also sought to protect the main delivery route for weapons from Iran, and prevent a majority Sunni opposition taking power.

Mr Pompeo said that sanctions against Iran and Hezbollah were working, and that the US would continue to pursue all peaceful means to weaken them.

Our pressure on Iran is simple. Its aimed at cutting off the funding for terrorists and its working. We believe that our work is already constraining Hezbollahs activities, he said.

Mr Pompeos Lebanon stop comes hot on the heels of another controversy, as President Trump faced criticism for an abrupt declaration that Washington will recognise Israels sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The announcement on Thursday marks a major shift in American policy and gives Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a political boost a month before what is expected to be a close election.

The administration has been considering recognising Israels sovereignty over the strategic highlands, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967, for some time and Mr Netanyahu had pressed the matter with Mr Pompeo during his visit this week.

Additional reporting by agenciesSuppose you are flying via one of the European hubs, such as Amsterdam, Paris or Frankfurt, and the connection goes wrong  leaving you stranded overnight.

As long as you are travelling on a through-ticket (for example on KLM, Air France or Lufthansa), your rights are clear.

Whatever the cause of the delay  bad weather, air traffic control problems or an unauthorised drone  the airline must provide a hotel room, arrange an alternative flight as soon as possible and pay for meals until you are on your way.

At some distant airports, where an airline may have few staff, that obligation is sometimes easier to state than to meet. Yet at a hub airport, the home airline should surely have no problem meeting its obligation?

As 19-year-old Isobel Colleton found when she turned up at Amsterdam airport to find her flight to Manchester cancelled, that assumption is misplaced.

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Ground staff for KLM handed her a letter that claimed: Hotels do not allow us, an airline, to book rooms for our passengers.

We are left with no other option but to inform you of ways to book accommodation yourself.

Recommended KLM refuses to book hotel for stranded passengers

Total tosh, as the Dutch airline later conceded. But only after Ms Colletons mother, at home in the UK, found herself phoning around hotels in the Amsterdam area at midnight to find a room for her teenage daughter.

After I wrote the story, other travellers got in touch with similar tales.

Fergus McKenzies inbound flight to Amsterdam was late and he missed the last connection to Edinburgh. Ground staff told him that he would have to find a hotel for himself and that he should spend no more than 120 (104).

The rate for the nearest room he could find was twice this figure. Hence, I decided to spend the night sitting in a cold, uncomfortable seat in the airport entrance, until the KLM lounge opened the next morning, he told me.

After I asked the Dutch airline for an explanation, a spokesperson told me: KLM sincerely apologises to Mr McKenzie for the lack of information provided to him in Amsterdam when his flight was delayed late at night.

 Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events

The amount of 120 is a guideline reflecting the hotel prices in the Schiphol area and is mentioned to manage our passengers expectations.

KLM is aware of its duty to offer assistance to its disrupted passengers and will refund all reasonable costs incurred.

Should you be booked to fly with the Dutch airline any time soon, you might want to print this article out and deploy it (respectfully) if ground staff are trotting out fanciful nonsense.

Mr McKenzies understandable decision to stay up all night at the airport, rather than risk not being refunded, saved KLM 240.

Yet if more passengers exercised their rights to accommodation, the airline might finally start managing disruption as the law requires.

There is a deeper question to be discussed about whether the passengers rights rules are disproportionately slanted in the travellers favour. I happen to think they are, and that helps to explain (though not excuse) the behaviour of some airlines. But while the regulations exist, they should be observed  and enforced.If youre short on time and want to get to know a city, food is the ultimate passport. Slow-braised vegetables in Berlin or moreish tostadas in Mexico City will tell you more about a place, its history and culture than a whole afternoon on an open top-tourist bus.

For the ultimate inside scoop, top chefs in six international cities have shared what they like to eat once theyve hung up their whites for the night.

Berlin

On a desolate street, just minutes from the former Check Point Charlie site, isnt where youd expect to find one of Germanys best restaurants  but thats where Nobelhart and Schmutzig sits with its Michelin star and innovative menu thats redefining German cuisine. Owner and sommelier Billy Wagner is usually behind the restaurants distinctive counter pouring fine German wines alongside the 10-course tasting menu, but if you turned up at his house after a busy weekend shift, youd likely be served vegetables picked up at Markthalle Neun market.

Nobelhart and Schmutzig is redefining German cuisine (Nobelhart and Schmutzig)

Ill roast, braise or boil it using butter and oil, then add acidity like apples, vinegar or grape verjus. If the ingredient is really good you dont have to do too much. As I like to have time with guests, I try not to make it too complicated.

London

Between Victorian townhouses and St Peters Church in the leafy streets of Notting Hill, Clare Smyths Core restaurant has won her two Michelin stars and the honour of catering Harry and Meghans wedding. A classically trained Northern Irish chef, Clare turns out artisanal British dishes like jellied eel with malt vinegar, Isle of Mull scallop tartare and her signature confit potato with fish roe. But at home, Clare is all about the traditional Sunday roast: Roast chicken is a special meal for me. It was something we looked forward to as a family and never missed. With a busy lifestyle, I rarely have time these days, so its even more special now and a great way of bringing people together. My favourite part is the roast potatoes cooked in duck fat, and I like stealing all the little nuggets of meat on the back of the bird, including the oysters.

Clare Smyth's signature confit potato with fish roe (Core)

New York

Daniel Humms Eleven Madison Park restaurant might be a hop across the Atlantic, but hes a big fan of roast chicken too. Its my go-to dish. Its an easy-to-prepare crowd pleaser, and its a great centrepiece to build a meal around, with salads, sides, some French bread and a nice bottle of wine. My mother made roast chicken when I was growing up, and Ive found it an important to dish in my culinary career. Its comforting, familiar, and you can make it simple or use it as a canvas for diverse flavours.

Tasting menus are served in Eleven Madison Park's art deco dining room (Eleven Madison Park)

Eleven Madison Park is one of the citys most prestigious dinner spots,overlooking New Yorks iconic Madison Square Park. An eight to 10-course menu is served in the impressive art deco dining room, and while roast chicken doesnt make a regular appearance, the restaurant is famous for serving possibly the oldest steak in New York, with its 140-day dry-aged beef.

Chicago

Chicagos food scene has the buzz of New York without the Big Apple attitude. Everest is one of the citys oldest fine dining institutions, rising above the South Loop like its mountainous namesake on the 40th floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange building. With one Michelin star, chef J Johos menu is firmly rooted in Alsatian cuisine, including his renowned Maine lobster with Gewurztraminer butter. Chef J Johos favourite family meal is another Alsatian classic: Baeckeoffe or bakers oven is a traditional casserole I remember fondly from my childhood. Its a hearty dish thats meant to be shared with friends and family. Its cooked slowly and the aroma of meat, simmering with potatoes, leeks and Alsace Riesling wafts through the room. Its perfect for a winter evening in Alsace, or in Chicago, where I live now.

Chef J Joho has taken Alsatian cuisine to Chicago (Everest)

Mexico City

Pujol restaurant is in the affluent Polanco district of Mexico City, just a few blocks from the largest and most iconic park, El Bosque de Chapultepec. Enrique Olveras restaurant playfully elevates Mexican street food to haute cuisine, serving aged moles or smoked baby corn with chicatana ant dust. But his favourite dish is pulpos en su tinta, or stewed octopus. My mother always made it for my birthday, he says. I love it with white rice. Its a very simple dish.

The 20 best food scenes in film Show all 20 1 /20 The 20 best food scenes in film The 20 best food scenes in film Lady & the Tramp Who would have guessed one of the most romantic scenes in cinema would involve two dogs eating scraps in an alleyway? And, yet, the iconic spaghetti kiss from Disneys 1955 animated film has been oft imitated but never surpassed, as the two pups indulge in an Italian delicacy, all soundtracked to Sonny Burke and Peggy Lees Bella Notte. And, as Tramp proves, theres no greater act of chivalry than offering your date the last meatball Moviestore/Rex The 20 best food scenes in film Babette's Feast Gabriel Axels Oscar-winning 1987 Danish film is a visual treat for any self-confessed gourmand. The story sees two pious Protestant sisters offer refuge to a French woman fleeing the political tumult in Paris after the collapse of the Second Empire in 1871. They agree to hire her as a housekeeper, discovering later that shes the former chef of one of Pariss best restaurants. When she wins the lottery, she uses the funds to whip a meal to remember for her kindly hosts. The 20 best food scenes in film Hook All the very best chefs know that a dash of pure imagination is key to creating a true culinary wonder. Its a lesson well-taught in Steven Spielbergs 1991 classic, Hook, as a grown-up Peter Pan (Robin Williams) looks on in disbelief as the Lost Boys tuck into what appears to be nothing at all. Its only when he truly believes that he can see the brightly colour feast laid out before him. And what childish feast would be complete without an old fashioned food fight? Sony The 20 best food scenes in film Breakfast at Tiffany's Sure, the 1961 films title may be a little misleading. Its protagonist, Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), in reality only has breakfast outside of Tiffanys, popping out of a cab in the early morning light to peer into the jewelry shop window, all while enjoying a pastry and some coffee in a paper. The moment has still remained the peak of glamour, decades later, so who cares if its all a little white lie? Keystone Features/Getty Images The 20 best food scenes in film The Godfather Its a classic scene that proves to be surprisingly instructional. Francis Ford Coppolas 1972 film has a full-blown recipe tucked within its elegant drama, as Vito Corleones close associate, Peter Clemenza (Richard Castellano), offers his version of the perfect pasta sauce. As he explains: You start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it; you make sure it doesn't stick. You get it to a boil; you shove in all your sausage and your meatballs. And a little bit of wine, and a little bit of sugarthat's my trick." Rex Features The 20 best food scenes in film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Although the 1971 musical is, as a whole, a sugary delight, its hardest to resist the temptation of Willy Wonkas Fizzy Lifting Drinks, a soda described as so bubbly that it lifts anyone who drinks it right off the ground. Its no wonder that it was the one stop on the tour that ended up tempting the pure-hearted Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) and his grandfather (Jack Albertson). Now, the real question is: does it come in different flavours? Getty The 20 best food scenes in film Eat Pray Love For anyone who considers pizza to be the true love of their life, Ryan Murphys 2010 romcom is a perfect cinematic match. Its hard not to relate to the moment Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) bites into a piece of authentic Italian pizza, during the Naples stop on her global adventure of self-discovery, and declares: Im in love. Im in a relationship with my pizza. Rex Features The 20 best food scenes in film Beauty & the Beast Although we might not fully be convinced that the grey stuff is delicious, the dinner and show approach to Lumiere (Jerry Orbach)s hospitality is something we could certainly get used to. In Disneys 1991 animation, Belle (Paige O'Hara) is presented with a whole cavalcade of sumptuous dishes: including beef ragout, cheese souffle, pie and pudding "en flambe". And theres a sage piece of advice to go with it all, too: If you're stressed, it's fine dining we suggest! Indeed. Disney The 20 best food scenes in film Steel Magnolias While theres been a growing fad of ambitious, unusually themed cakes  you need only look at the success of the TLC reality series Cake Boss  there are few cinematic cakes that quite stick in the memory like Jackson (Dylan McDermott)s armadillo-shaped groom cake from 1989 comedy-drama Steel Magnolias, a spin on the tradition from the American South of having another cake separate to the main wedding cake. And did we mention that its red velvet on the inside? REX FEATURES The 20 best food scenes in film Marie Antoinette When it came to director Sofia Coppola conjuring the ultimate image of decadence for her 2006 biopic on the French queen, there was no more perfect treat than Ladurees famous macarons. Delicate and pastel-toned, the meringue-based confection has long been the speciality of the French bakery, first established in 1862. A new flavour was even created in honour of the film, with the Marie Antoinette offering a combination of rose and anise flavours. Columbia Pictures The 20 best food scenes in film The Hundred Foot Journey Food is often regarded as one of the best ways to understand a culture, and The Hundred-Foot Journey is wonderful for showing the efforts the talented, self-taught novice Hassan (Manish Dayal) goes to in order to comprehend that. During a picnic he reveals he has mastered the five mother sauces of French cuisine, and the delicate tasting process that follows demonstrates just how important food is to France. The 20 best food scenes in film Goodfellas In prison, dinner was always a big thing. So much so that the Wise Guys ate better than most people on the outside. Beyond the Sea plays in the background as the gangsters prepare their meal: Garlic sliced so thin with a razor blade that it would liquefy in the pan with just a little oil, meatballs in a tomato sauce thats a little too oniony, steak cooked medium rare, iced lobsters, prosciutto, salami, cheese, red wine and good Scotch. Maybe crime does pay after all. The 20 best food scenes in film Chocolat There are few pleasures in life more fulfilling than that of cooking for others. In Chocolat  based on the book by Joanne Harris  a slow-motion scene where dinner party guests tuck into the feast created by expert chocolatier Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche) is full of warmth and laughter. AP The 20 best food scenes in film Pulp Fiction In a world where people seem more than happy to fork out 15 for some mushy avocado on toast, $5 for a milkshake doesnt seem too unreasonable. Vincent Vega (John Travolta) takes his boss wife Mia (Uma Thurman) out to Jack Rabbit Slims for a burger, where she decides she wants the $5 dollar shake. You dont put bourbon in it or nothing? a bewildered Vincent asks the waiter. When it arrives, Mia takes a long sip: Yummy. I gotta know what a $5 shake tastes like, Vincent says. He takes a sip. Then another. Goddamn, thats a pretty f***ing good milkshake. Miramax/YouTube The 20 best food scenes in film Julie & Julia Nora Ephrons feature film based on the intertwining stories of chef Julia Child and Julie Powell, the blogger who rose to fame after documenting her pledge to cook all 524 recipes in Childs cookbook, is all about the joy one can find in food. It is some of the earlier scenes that capture this best, like when Julia (Meryl Streep) and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) arrive in Paris and stop at a French restaurant, where Julia is served a sizzling platter of sole. It looked so mouth-watering in the final edit that Ephron wanted to call up Martin Scorcese and say, youve never shot a fish like that before. Rex The 20 best food scenes in film Ratatouille Fearsome critic Anton Ego takes a bite of ratatouille and is transported back to his childhood, where it was a favourite comfort food, in the best scene from Pixars wonderful animated film. The detail is superb, from the process of Remy the rat preparing the dish to the moment Egos pen falls to the ground as he remembers the power of a favourite meal in evoking memories we thought were lost. YouTube screengrab / Jeugos para ninos / Disney Pixar The 20 best food scenes in film Spinal Tap I dont want this, I want large bread but I can rise above it, Im a professional. The miniature bread catastrophe is a beautiful parody on every self-absorbed rock star to have kicked off over something as ludicrous as the food theyre served backstage. Guitarist Nigel Tufnell sits next to a tray of sandwiches looking baffled as his manager walks over. "Look," he says, picking up a sandwich. "This, this miniature bread. It's like... I've been working with this now for about half an hour. I can't figure it out. Let's say I want a bite, right, you've got this..." "Why do you keep folding it?" Ian asks. Nigel looks down at the broken bits of bread, then tries again: "This. I don't want this." He throws the sandwich to the ground, disgusted. "I want large bread!" Embassy Pictures The 20 best food scenes in film The Help After all the trauma she has been through  at the hands of her abusive husband and a racist ex-employer  Minny (Octavia Spencer) arrives at her employer Celia Foote to find a beautiful dinner cooked for her as a thank you for everything she has done for Celia and her husband. You see the care that has gone into it as Celia lays everything out on the table, from a mile high meringue to the fried chicken Minny taught her how to make. That table of food gave Minny the strength she needed, the narration explains. She took her babies out from under Leroy and never went back. AP Photo/Disney DreamWorks II, Dale Robinette The 20 best food scenes in film Five Easy Pieces Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson) just wants some toast to go with his omelette, but the waitress is stubbornly sticking to the diners no substitutions rule. Ill make it as easy for you as I can, goes the famous order. Id like an omelette, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast. No mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce and hold the chicken. Columbia Pictures The 20 best food scenes in film Big Night It was a scene that helped propel a revolution in American dining. Il Timpano, a dish inspired by the notoriously tricky-to-make Italian meal, is the star of a moment in Big Night where chef brothers Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci) prepares it as the centrepiece for a feast attended by their rival, Pascal. Goddamit, I should kill you, he screams, throwing his fork down after tasting Il Timpano. This is so f***ing good, I should kill you.

Tokyo

Recommended Why Budapest has great Chinese food

In the buzz of Chiyoda in central Tokyo, opposite the immaculate Hibiya Park and Imperial Palace, youll find Chef Seiji Yamamotos three-Michelin starred Nihonryori RyuGin restaurant. Yamamoto is credited as the first chef to bring modern techniques to the ancient multi-course tradition of kaiseki cuisine, which showcases hyper-seasonal ingredients in a dazzling 12-course menu. At home, his food is pared back: I love cooking yosenabe Japanese hot pot with crab, prawns, meat, and vegetables. The yuzu, kombu kelp and bonito flakes are my favourite flavours, and I prepare many kinds of sauces and condiments. Ill share one hot pot with all my friends; each person makes their own dipping sauce and with a beer and some Japanese sake we always have a lively conversation.

If all this talk of food gets your creative juices flowing, check out this years Nespresso Talents contest. The unique competition asks filmmakers to tell a story through the format of vertical video on the theme of We are what we eat. To find out more*, visit Nespresso.com/Talents

*18+. Terms applyQ Almost a year ago I booked flights to Northern Cyprus via Istanbul. I was originally due to fly out from Gatwick to Istanbul on Saturday 6 April at 5pm with a connection to Ercan getting me there in the early hours of 7 April. But due to the opening of the new Istanbul airport the airline has cancelled my outbound flight and is offering me only a flight on 10 April  even though flights are available on 7 April, but only in business class. Can I insist on these?

Emin H

A After two false starts, Turkish Airlines move to the new Istanbul airport is finally due to take place over the weekend of 6 and 7 April. During this time, many flights have been cancelled in order to ease the pressure  including your original departure.It has been seven months since John McCain died but Donald Trump cannot appear to let the feud he started with the late senator rest in peace.

The president has come out with a new set of rambling rants and insults ranging from complaints about his voting record to his funeral and the Russia inquiry.

Embarrassed senior Republicans have asked Mr Trump to put an end to the disturbing and distasteful venom, but he seems to be driven to continue what is now a bizarre, one-sided affair.

Their feud began 19 years ago when Trump was first considering running for the presidency. McCain was also a possible candidate, and one lauded as a courageous Vietnam veteran. Trump had dodged the Vietnam draft not on ideological grounds, but for a medical condition  bone spurs, a condition that later miraculously disappeared.

Apprehensive about unfavourable comparison, Trump focused on the time McCain, a naval pilot, had spent as a prisoner of war after being shot down.

He was captured, he said in an interview with CBS. Does being captured make you a hero? I am not sure.

Trump was roundly criticised for his comments. But this did not stop him from questioning McCains valour again years later.

Fifteen years on, when Trump again began a presidential campaign, McCain expressed unhappiness when the real-estate businessman declared that immigrants were rapists and drug smugglers. Trump, smarting, sought revenge at a rally in July 2015, denouncing McCain as being weak on immigration.

Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Show all 20 1 /20 Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Donald Trump's Cabinet Donald Trump's Cabinet is one the richest in American history, filled with billionaires, conservatives and several career politicians. AFP/Getty Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Mike Pence US Vice President Mike Pence has defended Donald Trump throughout his presidency while walking a fine line to avoid any public involvement in major scandals. AFP/Getty Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Mike Pompeo Secretary of State Mike Pompeo replaced Donald Trump's previous appointment to the post, Rex Tillerson, and has led talks with North Korea in establishing high-profile summits between the president and Kim Jong Un. Getty Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Wilbur Ross Secretary of Commerce Wibur Ross raised controversy when he was accused of falsely claiming to have sold stock in a bank and violated a government ethics agreement. AFP/Getty Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Robert Lighthizer US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has been a fixture in Donald Trump's ongoing trade spat with China. AFP/Getty Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet William Barr Attorney General William Barr replaced Jeff Sessions as the nation's top cop in early 2019 and has refused to commit to recusing himself from the Russia probe despite an unsolicited memo he sent to the Justice Department decrying the investigation. EPA Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Rick Perry Energy Secretary Rick Perry has held his post throughout Donald Trump's presidency despite previously undermining the need for the agency he now leads in past public statements. Ken Shipp / United States Department of Energy Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Betsy DeVos Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has also held her post throughout the presidency, despite major backlash to her apparent undermining of the nationwide public school system and advocacy for charter programmes. Getty Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Steven Mnuchin Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has faced numerous controversies throughout his tenure as the head of Treasury, including costing taxpayers at least a million dollars in travel expenses. AP Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Robert Wilkie Veterans Affairs secretary Robert Wilkie was appointed after Donald Trump's White House doctor Ronny Jackson withdrew over allegations he provided prescription drugs to patients without prescriptions. AFP/Getty Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet David Bernhardt Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt took office in January 2019 after the resignation of Ryan Zinke after previously serving as Zinke's deputy. Before taking office Bernhardt worked for many years as a solicitor for the Department of the Interior. Tami Heilemann / United States Department of the Interior Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Elaine Chao Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has held her post throughout the presidency and has mostly avoided controversy, despite a report claiming her office has been in frequent coordination with her husband's, Mitch McConnell. AFP/Getty Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Kevin McAleenan Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan took over from Kirstjen Nielsen after she resigned in April 2019. He previously worked as the executive director of the executive director of the Office of Anti Terrorism in the Customs and Border Protection agency United States Customs and Border Protection Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Ben Carson Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson was appointed shortly after Donald Trump took office and raised controversy over an exorbitant furnishing bill for his office. Reuters Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Gina Haspel CIA Director Gina Haspel was appointed in 2018 and faced backlash surrounding her oversight of Guantanamo Bay. Getty Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Dan Coats Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats could be the next person to leave Donald Trump's administration over his refuting the president's claims surrounding ISIS. Reuters Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Sonny Perdue Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has been dogged by ethics questions throughout his tenure and faced controversy when emails showed the agency appeared willing to eagerly work with lobbyists under his leadership. Reuters Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Alex Azar Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is a former pharmaceutical lobbyist and former drug company executive. Getty Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Mick Mulvaney Acting Chief of Staff and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney has described himself as one of the most conservative officials in the White House. EPA Trump's inner circle: Meet the members of the US president's cabinet Robert Wilkie Secretary of State for Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie has spent his career on Capitol Hill serving in various roles in foreign affairs and defence. He holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force Reserve. Gene Russell / United States Department of Veterans Affairs

We have incompetent politicians, not only the president [Barack Obama]  right here in your own state you have John McCain, he went on, encouraging the crowd to boo the senator. McCain tried to ignore Trump for a few days, but after the candidates rabble-rousing continued, he responded in a scathing piece in the New Yorker, accusing Trump of firing up crazies.

Trump, in turn, called the senator a dummy and, three days later, repeated that he was not a war hero because he was captured... I prefer people that werent captured.

The irony of a draft dodger attacking someone who had made great sacrifices for his country in a war was pointed out yet again.

McCain should, perhaps, have kept the higher moral ground. But the following year, in an interview on the Vietnam War, he said: We drafted the lowest income level of America, and the highest income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur.

Relations had deteriorated badly by then. McCain, now the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had severely criticised Trump over remarks he made about Captain Humayun Khan, a Muslim soldier in the army who died in Iraq in 2004. He withdrew support for Trumps candidacy after a recording emerged of Trump discussing grabbing women by the pussy.

There were other spats after Trump got to the White House, with the president accusing McCain of caving in to the Democrats over Obamacare and the senator expressing grave concern about Trumps views on Russia and Ukraine.

In May 2018, after McCain had been diagnosed with cancer, it was reported that the senator did not want Trump to attend his funeral. The following month, the president again attacked McCain over Obamacare.

Senator McCain died in August 2018. There was a public outcry and protests from the American Legion and other veterans groups after Trump ordered the raising of US flags just 48 hours after they had been lowered.

The flags were lowered again, but Trump refused to release a White House statement praising McCain  countermanding officials including, it is said, defence secretary James Mattis. General Mattis, in his own statement, lauded McCain for a life embodying the military motto not for self, but for country  the opposite of the conduct of the sitting president, according to his many critics.

The following month, respecting McCains wishes, Trump did not attend the senators funeral at the Washington National Cathedral. The presidents daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner turned up at the service. The senators daughter, Meghan McCain, said they had not been invited by the family.

That is where matters remained until Trumps latest outbursts. These included complaints that he had never been thanked (presumably by the senators family) for giving approval for the funeral to be held at the Washington National Cathedral. He also returned to criticism of McCains stance on Obamacare and on the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into allegations of Kremlin manipulation of the 2016 US presidential election.

In response, the cathedral said in a statement: There was no need for the president to give approval to the funeral services held at the cathedral for the late Arizona senator John McCain... All funerals and memorial services at the sathedral are organised by the family of the deceased; only a state funeral for a former president involves consultation with government officials. No funeral at the cathedral requires the approval of the president or any other government official.

Meghan McCain observed about Trump: He spends his weekend obsessing over great men because  he knows it and I know it and all of you know it  he will never be a great man.

But there was something Trump said while complaining about the funeral that is of great significance. He accused McCain of giving the FBI a report by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele about Trump and Russia for a very evil purpose.

It is indeed the case that the senator played a key role in the report becoming a highly important part of the Russia inquiry. McCain met Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, who had spent 10 years in Russia and is highly respected for his knowledge of Russian affairs, at a security conference in Halifax, Canada.

The Steele dossier was discussed. Sir Andrew stressed to McCain that he had not read the dossier, but vouched for Steeles professionalism and integrity. McCain then sent an emissary to London who picked up the dossier from an intermediary acting on behalf of Steele. The senator then personally took the material to James Comey, the head of the FBI.

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Comey, of course, was later fired by Trump, and this in turn led to the launch of the investigation into Kremlin collusion by Mr Mueller. As we know, the quest to discover whether the current president of the United States was the Muscovian candidate for the White House very much continues.

Trumps former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, national security advisor Michael Flynn and personal lawyer Michael Cohen have been arrested and charged amid explosive revelations. Robert Muellers report is expected to be delivered in the near future.

The fallout from the feud Donald Trump started with John McCain is still to fully play out. And it is former Captain John McCain of the US Navy, rather than Donald Trump the self-proclaimed genius with the disappeared bone spur, who will most likely end up the resounding winner.All praise to whoever wrote the headline on our report of an auction: I knew you were bidding: George Michaels art collection fetches 11.3m. Marvellous.

However, Paul Eustice wrote to point out a common crime against The Independents style in the story itself. We wrote: The collection, comprised of more than 150 lots .... As he said, comprised means consisted of, so the convention is that it is not followed by of. We should have said, The collection comprised more than 150 lots  or, The collection, consisting of more than 150 lots 

The simple things you see are all complicated: A number of readers wrote to draw my attention to another common departure from convention in an article about Tim Martin, the Brexit-supporting boss of Wetherspoon, who blamed Remainers for a fall in profits.

Perhaps we were enjoying the unintended comedy too much to attend to details as we reported: Wheat beer and alcohol-free beer from Germany, which are currently stocked by the chain, will be substituted for UK-brewed products.

As Terence Carr and others pointed out, the conventional usage is substituted with. When you are substituting, you are talking about the thing you end up with, rather than the thing that has been replaced. When the Who sang substitute your lies for fact, they ended up with the lies.

Ease tensions: We reported that Li Keqiang, the Chinese prime minister, said the government was not telling Chinese tech companies to spy abroad, in an effort to defuse tensions with Washington and Europe. I wonder about this phrase. To defuse a bomb means to take the fuse out, to make it safe. But that is not really what you do with tensions, which you try to reduce. The reason the phrase is so popular may be because it sounds like diffuse, which means spread out to make less concentrated, which is more like what Keqiang was trying to do.

Over the cliff: The Brexit imbroglio continues to generate ugly phrases that make it harder for readers. We have had problems with the idea of a no-deal Brexit, a negative formulation sometimes shortened to no deal as a noun. Then people talk about ruling out a no-deal Brexit, which becomes a double negative: not leaving the EU without a deal.

Generally, I hope we have succeeded in making it reasonably clear what we mean. But yesterday we combined no-deal as an adjective with that common Brexit metaphor, the cliff edge, in a subheadline on the front of our Daily Edition: EU leaders push back no-deal cliff edge by two weeks.

I think that is too complicated, leaving aside the quibble that cliff edges cannot be moved forwards, only eroded backwards. Something simpler such as push back deadline for no-deal Brexit by two weeks might have been easier to understand.The British army has set up a command centre in an underground bunker as part of contingency plans for the UK crashing out of the EU without a deal.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said it had committed to holding 3,500 troops at readiness to help the government with any disruption after a no-deal departure from the EU.

It is understood the underground command centre under the ministry in London will act as a base of operations to deal with requests for support from other departments as well as directing the troops.

It is the same operations centre which was used by the ministry as a base for the London 2012 Olympics response.

An MoD spokesman said: "We are always willing to support wider government planning for any scenario, and we have committed to holding 3,500 troops at readiness to aid contingency plans.

"We will consider any requests from other government departments if they feel defence capability could contribute to their no-deal planning."

The MoD said requests for support would be considered under the Military Aid to the Civil Authorities principles.

Under these rules the military can be authorised to provide aid when there is a definite need to act, the armed forces are being set clear tasks and other options including "mutual aid and commercial alternatives" have been discounted.Talks: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer on the way to EU discussions in Brussels. Picture: PA

Jeremy Corbyn has twice refused to rule out revoking Article 50 and cancelling Brexit if he became prime minister.

The Labour leader was meeting European Commission chiefs in Brussels yesterday.

He vowed to prevent a no-deal Brexit after holding "constructive" talks with Michel Barnier, the EU's chief negotiator, and Martin Selmayr, the commission secretary-general in Brussels.

Asked directly on two occasions whether that would include supporting moves for a lengthier extension to allow for another referendum or to cancel Brexit outright, Mr Corbyn would say only: "These are hypotheticals."

Later on the same day, at a summit in the Belgian capital, Theresa May asked the EU27 heads of state and government for a short Brexit extension.

Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, said on Wednesday that the EU would grant a short extension if MPs passed the deal.

"Our determination is to prevent a no-deal exit from the European Union next Friday," Mr Corbyn told reporters.

"The problem is that the prime minister seems to think that she can run down the clock by constantly threatening the British parliament with a no-deal exit unless they support her deal."

A Labour spokesman later said the party respected "the result of the referendum". "We do not believe that revoking Article 50 is in any way necessary," he said.

A European Court of Justice ruling found Britain had the right to unilaterally revoke Article 50 without the EU's permission. It would retain all its rights and opt-outs, including the EU budget rebate.

In contrast, the request to extend the Article 50 period, which was meant to last two years, has to be unanimously approved by all 27 of the remaining EU member states.

Standing outside the commission headquarters, Mr Corbyn claimed he was building a majority for an alternative Brexit approach in the Commons.

Accompanied by Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, Mr Corbyn said Labour was "building a majority in parliament that can agree on a future constructive economic relationship with the European Union".

"We've been discussing how this could come about and trying to reach out here as both Keir and myself have been reaching out to colleagues in all parties in the UK parliament," he said.

"This morning's meetings have been positive and we have done what I believe the government ought to be doing - instead of bringing back a twice-rejected deal to the British parliament, looking for constructive solutions."

EU sources said the meeting had been at Mr Corbyn's request and that Mr Barnier's "door was always open" to parties involved in the Brexit process.

Labour backs remaining in a customs union with the European Union.

Mr Barnier has signalled the EU would be open to such a closer relationship with the UK, if there was a majority in favour of it. ( Daily Telegraph, London)THERE'S no chance of a free trade deal between America and Britain if there's a risk of a post-Brexit hard border in Ireland a US Senator has said.

Senator Chris Murphy also hit out at US President Donald Trump claiming he doesn't understand international trade and pointing out that Congress has the final say on such deals.

Meanwhile, he also said there's no excuse for the post of US ambassador to Ireland being unfilled for more than two years.

Mr Murphy made the remarks at the end of a visit to London, Belfast and Dublin.

Last week Mr Trump tweeted about how his administration looked forward to negotiating a large-scale trade deal with the UK.

It came hours before his meeting with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in the White House.

Mr Varadkar's attempt to promote the possibility of a free trade deal between the US and EU prompted a tirade from Mr Trump who complained about America's treatment in negotiations with Europe in the past.

Mr Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, is a member of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

He said the US Congress is waking up to the potential consequences of Brexit to the peace process in Ireland.

He said: I think there is very little chance there is going to be US-Britain free trade agreement.

But I think there is no chance for that agreement if there is any potential for a border to go back up between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

He said that this message is the purpose of his visit and that there are a lot of Democrats and Republicans who are going to be very reluctant to move forward on any new economic relationship with Britain if there's potential for the Good Friday Agreement to be compromised.

He argued that the Trump administration has way over-sold the ability for the US to do a free trade deal with the UK.

Mr Murphy said any trade agreement would have to be ratified by the Senate and I don't think there is the support to ratify any trade agreement with Britain if there are big outstanding questions about the peace process.

He also said: I wish that the President wasn't such an unconditional cheerleader of Brexit. I wish he personally was making it clear that the peace process has to be fully, 100pc protected.

But without that assurance, without that statement by the President, I think members of Congress need to make that clear.

Mr Murphy said that he'd prefer to see a free trade deal between the US and EU prioritised over one with Britain.

I think there's a growing worry in the United States Congress about the long-term stability of the European Union and Nato given Russia's constant attacks on both.

Part of the reason why I want to see us get back to the table on an EU trade agreement before we negotiate a Britain agreement is that we should show preference to multilateral institutions above bilateral agreements.

I worry that if we reward Britain's departure from the EU with a quick trade agreement it's another arrow in Russia's quiver when it's trying to encourage another country to leave the European Union.

Mr Trump last year nominated billionaire Ed Crawford to be the next ambassador to Ireland but he must be approved by the Senate.

Mr Murphy said: There's no excuse for this post remaining unfilled this long. The administration should have made this a priority.

He said Mr Crawford's application was just submitted to the committee last week and he hasn't looked at it yet.

If there are no red flags I would hope that we schedule an immediate hearing and an immediate confirmation vote in the Senate... assuming that there are no issues I would hope that we could get him on the ground here as quickly as possible.

He said he's supported other ambassadors put forward by Mr Trump that he disagrees with politically.

The President deserves to have his people in posts overseas.

So I'm not going to be looking at Crawford based on his political views.

I'm happy to get somebody over here who's an ally of the President.

That's how it's supposed to work.Could the price of a pint of beer really rise by as much as 5? Scientists are warning that the impact of climate change could take a long-term toll on the quality of barley.

Alltech research project manager Dr Mark Gaffney said that the knock-on effect of climate change on barley means it is costing more to process the grain into product suitable for beer consumption.

"A study in China conducted at the start of the year showed that climate change is going to make your beer more expensive (over the coming decades). It said that you could see an increase as high as 5 extra on what you're paying, so we're always battling against that climate issue," he told the Guild of Agricultural Journalists discussion at an Alltech conference in Dublin.

"Yield in Ireland fluctuates slightly year to year. It's always going to be an issue. Crops didn't get a chance last year."

Alltech researchers in Dunboyne found that it took 1.5C more to get to the gelatinisation stage where the starch breaks down, which is needed for beer.

"With increased growing temperatures, you get increased lipid deposition within the grain and reduced starch - and the characteristics of that starch change as well. There's a lot of energy going into it on the back of a bad year," said Dr Gaffney.

He said pesticide usage is also something that the industry needs to be aware of as studies have detected residue levels in beer. Dr Gaffney said these were within legal limits.

"We're using more pesticides than we have ever used before. The more pesticides in the crop mean more in beer. You don't think pesticides will prolong through harvest to the glass, but they do," he added.

The conference heard that there is a craft beer boom in Ireland, with currently 75 breweries - a growth of 400pc on 2012.

Colm Fingleton of the Irish Grain Growers Group pointed out that Irish farmers aren't feeling the benefit of the craft brewery revolution as many traditional malting barley growers are leaving the industry as the price received is too low.US ambassador has again repeated the line that agriculture had to be part of plans for trade negotiations with the European Union.

Gordon Sondland, however, did acknowledge that the two sides could build up deals piece by piece, as long as they did move though the issues.

But, the U.S. ambassador to the EU said on Thursday that the European Unions plans for trade negotiations with the United States fall far short of what is required and any idea of delaying formal talks would not work,.

The European Commission, which negotiates trade deals on behalf of the 28 EU countries, has presented two negotiating mandates to governments for approval, one on reducing tariffs on industrial goods, the other on making it easier for companies to clear their products for sale on both sides of the Atlantic.

The mandate that is being circulated falls far short of what even (Commission) President Juncker and President Trump discussed in July in Washington. The idea was to have a wide-ranging conversation about all aspects of our relationship, Gordon Sondland told an AmCham business conference in Brussels.

EU negotiators have said they do not want to include agriculture in the bilateral discussions, one of a series of negotiations the United States has kicked off to secure better terms of trade.

Speaking to attendees of a U.S. Department of Agriculture annual forum recently, Chief Agricultural Negotiator at the U.S. Trade Representatives office Gregg Doud said it was high time for the EU to get with the program on issues like biotechnology, or genetically engineered ingredients known as GMOs.

I cant express my frustration with European agricultural and the way they deal with things like biotechnology, the way they deal with things like beef hormones, USTR official Gregg Doud told attendees at USDAs Agricultural Outlook Forum.

Their politicians, you ask them a question, and they say, Well, maybe I need to check with Greenpeace before I answer.

The United States has said that the EUs lengthy process for biotechnology approvals slows down innovation and curtails U.S. access to the European market.

USDA Undersecretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs Ted McKinney said that regulations in the EU are ripe for a change.

The EU and the United States ended months of standoff in July when President Donald Trump agreed with Jean-Claude Juncker not to hit EU car imports with extra tariffs while the two sides worked on improving economic ties.

EU governments have failed so far to agree on launching formal trade talks, Germany pressing for a quick start, and France bidding for more time.

Stalling, said Sondland, would have consequences.

The more the EU leadership plays the delay game the more we will have to use leverage to realign the relationship, he said.

Some in Europe, he said, believed they could simply wait for a new U.S. president, but this tactic would not work.

The (U.S.) Democrats disagree with President Trump on many issues.... but when it comes to fixing our trade imbalance with the EU there is no daylight between (us), none, he said.

A key part of the July agreement was to remove import duties on non-auto industrial goods. The EU has said cars should be included and rejected Washingtons demand that agriculture should feature in talks too.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told Congress last week that discussions were at a complete stalemate.

The EU says progress has been made - its two negotiating mandates, discussions of possible regulatory cooperation and the doubling of U.S. soybean imports into Europe since July, although mainly because they are cheaper than rival imports.A "perfect storm" occurred last week at Bandon mart when word came through that ships would not sail to Cherbourg due to Storm Gareth, which resulted in "the dampening of the price of calves".

That was the view of Sean Clarke, IFA Development Officer, who told The Corkman that the perfect storm was also tied into "the fact that it was the busiest week at the mart".

"An exporter would be left with looking after calves during the night and the next day until they could sail," he said. He was responding to comments made by Senator Tim Lombard who attended the mart in Bandon and who told the Seanad that at the mart "1,800 calves went through, some of which were sold for less than 50c, when they were making 110 the year previously."

However, Mr Clarke readily admitted that "calf prices are down" compared to last year. Moreover, he said that there are also a number of poor quality calves on the market, such as the jersey cross.

"There is a saying that all greyhounds are dogs but not all dogs are greyhounds. There can be a huge difference in the quality of calves also," said Mr Clarke.

"As I was saying, due to word coming through at Bandon mart that the ships wouldn't sail, and it also tied into the big volume of calves that were at the mart, well, it all led to a perfect storm," he said.

Mr Clarke said that when ships did sail and the backlog was greatly eased, he said prices at the mart then went back up.

He also said the WB Yates sailed from Dublin Port yesterday on its "first maiden voyage" with calves as part of a pilot scheme and, if successful, it will go three times per week.

"Good calves are still making money but not as strong as it was before and poorer calves are getting poorer prices," he said. He also pointed to Brexit which is presently having a chilling effect on the farming community as farmers are "afraid to commit to anything" due to its uncertainty.

Mr Clarke said: "We need to export 90pc of everything that we are producing. Having said all of that, we will see a significant increase in the export of calves this year.

Last year, 160,000 was exported and this year we will be up another 20,000." Headlines were made last week when FG Senator Tim Lombard reported seeing very poor prices for calves at Bandon Mart. Commenting afterwards, he said:

"Last year, dairy calves were costing anything between 60 and 110. Yesterday, 380 bull calves were sold for less than 50c each. This is the stuff of 1960. It is bizarre that we have such an issue nowadays."

He also said that dairy farmers will let bull calves go at 14 days old for that low price because it is not sustainable to keep them if they are running a dairy farm.

He said the chaos in the market was not Brexit related because these calves were being exported to Continental Europe where there is significant demand for veal and calves.

The calves, exported live, are held in lairage when they arrive in Cherbourg and are put in large sheds where they are fed and rested for 24 hours before they are moved on to markets in France, the Netherlands and Spain. It was the view of North Cork IFA chairperson Anne Baker that "compact calving" has resulted in a glut of calves on the market.

"A huge number of calves have been born from February until now and this year in Ireland there will be an extra 50,000 calves born," she said. She said Friesian bulls and dairy calves is "where the real problem is".

"I have heard of Friesian bulls being sold for 5 and that is the lowest price that I have heard.

This time last year a Friesian bull (depending on its condition) would have sold for anywhere between 80 and 100, so to be offered 5 for a Friesian bull now is a dramatic drop in price," said Ms Baker.

"For very intensive farmers, they will not be in a position to raise the calves over a prolonged period of time and again you have to consider the onslaught of possibly a hard Brexit. Farmers do not know what the situation will be with beef in two years time. People are also holding off buying any stock," she said.

As with Mr Clarke, she also pointed to the sailing difficulties to Cherbourg because of Storm Gareth.

"This would also have had an impact on price," she said. She also said that extra capacity must also be made on the ferries.

She said the issue of space on ferries has been raised by IFA with the Dept of Agriculture and it was Ms Baker's view that "extra capacity is needed on the ferries along with extra periods of rest time for the calves".

She readily acknowledged that members of the farming community she has been in contact with have certainly raised the issues of the price of dairy calves. But it was her view "that in a few weeks that glut of calves will be gone and the price of calves will begin to increase again."The Environment Secretary spoke in support of a public interest test for significant land transfer (Jane Barlow/PA)

A public interest test for the transfer of significant areas of land would be a powerful tool to reform land ownership in Scotland, the Environment Secretary has said.

New legislation to introduce the test was one of a series of recommendations made in a recent Scottish Land Commission report.

The report found concentrated land ownership appeared to be causing significant and long-term damage to communities in parts of Scotland.

Yesterday we published our evidence report + recommendations into issues associated with large scale + concentrated land ownership in #Scotland. Have a look at this short summary to find out more:https://t.co/FuwqMjSQOd#landreport #landreform pic.twitter.com/rk9sVU6Zxr  Scottish Land Commission (@ScottishLandCom) March 21, 2019

A public interest test to prevent excessively concentrated market power, similar to regulations governing corporate acquisitions and mergers, is one of the commissions proposed solutions.

In a Holyrood debate on land reform, Roseanna Cunningham said the Government would consider the reports recommendations.

The Cabinet Secretary for the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform said the public interest test would apply to proposed land transactions over a certain size.

This would enable the public interest to be considered before such transactions can take place and would help ensure the negative effects of scale and particularly concentration of ownership were kept in check, Ms Cunningham added.

This would certainly be a powerful tool to help stop and reverse the kind of ownership patterns that have hampered Scotland for so many years.

Labours Claudia Beamish criticised the inequitable and unjust land ownership pattern Scotland still has.

There should be limits to how much land can be owned by any one person  a difficult issue, but Scottish Labour supports this  unless it is shown to work in the public interest, she said.

Conservative Edward Mountain accused the SNP and Labour of obsessing on land ownership, adding: We do not believe that land reform is all about who owns what.

It is more important what people do with the land that they own.

Todays @ScotParl debate on #LandReform already featuring tired Tory argument that ownership not relevant because real issue is how land is used. But ownership dictates usage so it is at the root of the problem and must be tackled, as @ScottishLandCom has said this week.  Michael Russell (@Feorlean) March 21, 2019

Mr Mountain said: We will support an individuals property rights whether they own a house, a croft, a farm or an estate, it will make no difference to us.

He said he had deep reservations about the recommendations in the Scottish Land Commission report and alleged some points were based on unsubstantiated evidence.

The report has been written to support, in my opinion, pre-determined conclusions that do not reflect anything more than misconception of some of the members of the Land Commission, he added.

Green MSP Andy Wightman said a key issue facing land ownership was how to democratise land and put forward an amendment calling for the term community ownership to be replaced by common ownership to include areas such as parish commons and land held by councils.The ESB expects to almost triple its British retail customer numbers to as many as 100,000 by the end of this year, intensifying its battle for consumers there as its base in its home market continues to be eroded.

ESB chief financial officer Pat Fenlon told the Irish Independent that the group had 36,000 customers in Britain at the end of 2018 following a tentative launch into the market in late 2017.

He said that Brexit and a UK government-imposed price cap on energy costs for consumers don't alter the ESB's longer term view of the market there as being attractive.

"We are building up gradually," said Mr Fenlon of the ESB's British consumer arm. "We are in a position to temper or accelerate the growth depending on demand. We'll be keeping a close eye on how events unfold in the UK."

Mr Fenlon said that the current British customer base had been secured with a "competitive price offering".

The ESB also has a sizeable power generation business in Britain and owns Northern Ireland Electricity Networks. It also has 86,000 residential customers in Northern Ireland through its Electric Ireland division.

Mr Fenlon was speaking as semi-State ESB published results yesterday that showed its operating profit fell almost 8pc to 455m last year, while it shouldered 140m in non-cash impairments as it wrote down the value of power stations including a gas-fired asset at Dublin Port.

The executive also said that a planned joint venture announced last month with semi-State forestry company Coillte could earmark between 1.5bn and 2bn to develop the 1,000MW of wind farms that it has targeted.

"If all the projects took off, you could be looking at 2bn of investments," he said. "It depends on different sites."

He also said that a number of options could be considered for the future of the ESB's coal-fired Moneypoint power plant in Co Clare - the country's biggest.

The station's three 305MW power units generate output equivalent to about 20pc of the electricity demand in the Republic of Ireland, but it must stop burning coal in 2025. A report on Moneypoint future is due to be delivered to government soon.

Mr Fenlon said a range of options are being evaluated, including how Moneypoint could fit into LNG terminal usage, or if it could accommodate a combined gas turbine cycle power plant, or biomass energy generation, for example.

Determining the future use is "quite complex", he said.

The ESB said that 2018 was a "challenging year", with its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation falling by 101m to 1.17bn. Its revenue rose 5.2pc to 3.43bn.

Operating profit at its Electric Ireland business tumbled by just over 20pc to 54m last year.We need to demonstrate we are here and to pray with one another, Rasicci said. Weve been on heightened alert the last week because of what happened in New Zealand and there have been threats before. We were once picketed because there are Islamic services held here, but we have to demonstrate our support and solidarity.The owners of polling and market research firm Red C last year paid themselves a dividend of 1.15m. (stock photo)

The owners of polling and market research firm Red C last year paid themselves a dividend of 1.15m.

The well-known polling company has a host of blue chip clients and also won the State contract to select the members for the Citizens' Assembly.

New accounts show that the company recorded profits of 73,472 in the 12 months to the end of June last, more than double the profits of 33,748 in the prior year.

The dividend payout contributed to the company's accumulated profits last year reducing from 1.77m to 894,774.

The company's cash pile during the year increased from 740,782 to 1.136m.

Five directors served on the company during the year, Richard Colwell, Sinead Mooney, Arthur Vincent Wallace, Carol Flanagan and Michelle Lowry.

Pay to directors last year increased from 776,069 to 1.079m, made up of 837,332 in remuneration and pension contributions of 241,946.

Numbers employed by the firm last year increased from 125 to 131, made up of 15 directors and executive officers, 31 administrators and researchers along with 85 field and research assistants.Thousands of people who took out basic health insurance plans to avoid policy loadings have been warned that their cover is next to useless.

About 50,000 people opted for cheap, entry-level plans to get into the system and avoid having to pay penalties.

Age loadings were introduced four years ago, prompting 100,000 consumers to take up health insurance for the first time.

They were keen to avoid age loadings that now apply to anyone over the age of 34 taking out health cover for the first time.

A loading of 2pc of the premium applies for every year of age over 34 when first purchasing in-patient private health insurance after April 2015.

A continuing influx of young people are needed in the system to ensure everyone pays the same for the same plan, irrespective of their age. This is known as community rating.

But health insurance expert Dermot Goode said half of those who joined up four years ago took out the most basic cover possible, and these plans were now dated and offered very little cover.

Mr Goode, of TotalHealthCover.ie, said many of the basic plans did not cover private hospitals and did not even allow scans in every public hospital. The basic plans offer minimum cover for maternity services, are costly for child members, and do not provide any refunds on out-patient expenses.

"In reality, they are not health insurance at all, which is designed to fast-track your medical treatment and to give you access and full cover for all public and private hospitals."

He said consumers on these plans should now consider upgrading their cover to include access to all public and standard private hospitals.

"They should consider plans such as VHI One Plan 250 at 832, Irish Life Health Benefit Plan at 899 or Laya Essential Health 300 at 895, as these cover all standard private hospitals such as the Beacon Hospital, the Hermitage Clinic, Whitfield Clinic in Waterford, and Galway Clinic."

Mr Goode said families would benefit most by upgrading their cover because there were a number of special offers now on the market.

Laya is offering free cover for the second and subsequent child on three of its plans and it has announced a similar deal that will apply throughout April and May. This would be a minimum saving of 235 for a family with two children under 18, Mr Goode said.

VHI is continuing with its 25pc discount for children under 18 on all its One Plans. The One Plan 250 is now available for 180 per child.

Irish Life Health has been running continuous offers for children under 18 on its Select Plus and its new Benefit Plan. The cost per child on the latter plan is now 179 each, which Mr Goode said was good value.Ted Baker reported its first drop in annual profit since the 2008 financial crisis, highlighting tough conditions on Britain's high streets, as the fashion retailer faces life without its founder. (Jonathan Brady/PA)

Ted Baker reported its first drop in annual profit since the 2008 financial crisis, highlighting tough conditions on Britain's high streets, as the fashion retailer faces life without its founder.

Ray Kelvin, who developed the Ted Baker brand and had been CEO since the company's launch in 1988, resigned last month after an investigation into "forced hugging" and "a culture that leaves harassment unchallenged".

Mr Kelvin, who denies all allegations of misconduct, remains the biggest shareholder.

Ted Baker had already warned last month that full-year earnings would miss forecasts due to volatile exchange rates, higher costs and a writedown on inventory.

Shares in the group, known for suits, shirts and dresses with quirky details, were down 2.9pc at 1002am yesterday, having hit their lowest since a January boost from a reassuring Christmas trading update. "The fashion house has been under pressure recently due to the tough trading environment, and the management shake-up might add to the existing uncertainty," CMC Markets analyst David Madden said.

Ted Baker said it was investigating its policies, procedures and the handling of staff complaints and would reach conclusions early in the second quarter.

Acting CEO Lindsay Page told Reuters the board was determined to learn from what has happened.

"One thing that we did do was implement a revamped hotline where if people had any grievances to bring forward they were able to do that," commercial director Phil Clark said.

Ted Baker said 2018 pretax profit fell 26.1pc to 50.9m (58.7m), hurt by discounting.

Annual retail sales rose 4.2pc to 461m including its online business, the company said.

ReutersDavid Blaine will tour the UK and Ireland in June (Myung Jung Kim/PA)

David Blaine will demonstrate his unique style of modern magic and experimental performance techniques in his first ever UK and Ireland tour.

The American illusionist and magician will entertain audiences in Edinburgh, Dublin, Manchester, Birmingham, Bournemouth and London in June on his Real or Magic tour.

The tour is described as an experiment in and of itself, with the promise that no two shows will be exactly the same.

A one-man show, his interactive performances will combine Blaines sleight of hand with his death-defying endurance acts.

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Blaine, 45, rose to fame in 1997 with his debut TV special Street Magic, and since then has hosted a number of programmes and has pushed his body to the limits in a number of dangerous stunts.

The tour comes more than 15 years after Blaine spent 44 days suspended in a glass box over the River Thames.

He made headlines for the 2003 feat, during which he was on camera at all times and did not eat at all.

His other stunts have included being buried in a clear coffin for one week in 1999, and standing atop a 30-metre pillar without a safety net for 36 hours straight in 2002, both in New York City.

Tour promoter Live Nation has warned Blaines performance will only be suitable for viewers aged 13 or over.

Video of the Day

Tickets go on sale on Friday March 29 at 9am.The trouble with making a brilliant debut feature film is what to do next. Jordan Peele's 2017 movie Get Out was universally adored, did serious business at the box office and won an Oscar for its screenplay. Though ostensibly a horror movie, it brilliantly satirised the state of American race relations. In the era of Trump it seemed razor sharp, archly relevant, an instant classic. Now how on earth do you follow that?

By doing something completely different, is Mr Peele's answer, because although Us expands on the doppelganger theme implicit in Get Out, it's a bigger, bolder, weirder and more operatically creepy production. Jordan is a big Twilight Zone fan, and will shortly be fronting up a TV revival of the 1960s sci-fi series: Us embraces the classic show's off-kilter eeriness, and is based on a 1960 Twilight Zone episode called Mirror Image.

Young couple Gabe and Adelaide Winston (Winston Duke, Lupita Nyong'o) have retreated to their coastal Californian beach house for a break with their children Zora (Shadadi Wright) and Evan (Jason Wilson). Gabe's an affable, happy-go-lucky sort, but Adelaide is anxious, and something doesn't feel quite right. In a haunting prologue, we discover that when she was a child, Adelaide got lost in a seafront amusement park and wandered into a hall of mirrors, where she met a little girl who looked exactly like her.

She's never quite gotten over the experience, and has been afflicted ever since by a creeping sense of dread. With good reason, as it turns out, because as they're settling down one evening four shadowy figures appear in the driveway. They stand stock still, saying nothing, and when Gabe goes out to investigate, they attack him, then scatter, quickly infiltrating the house. And as a wounded Gabe retreats to join his family, they discover to their horror that the four intruders look exactly like them.

They seem different, though, ragged, feral, communicating through screeches, snorts and grunts. Only the woman talks, in a scratchy, pained voice that suggests she hasn't had occasion to speak in quite a while. The soliloquy she delivers is oblique but charged with menace: they've come from underground, and mean to usurp their sun-kissed counterparts.

Adelaide and the family manage to escape, but the doppelgangers follow. What's worse, it's an epidemic: when the family reach their friends Josh and Kitty (a dreadful, bitter, bickering pair hilariously played by Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss), they quickly realise they've already been replaced. All over the State and possibly the country, lookalikes are lurching from the depths to kill. And as she fights for her life, Adelaide finds untapped reserves of strength but is troubled by new and lurid flashbacks.

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In Us, Jordan Peele proves once again that horror films don't have to be stupid. On the contrary, supernatural stories can be the perfect template for metaphors, allegory, big political themes. In Get Out, white America's inability to move beyond its fear and distaste for black people was the issue, but in Us, refreshingly, race is irrelevant. The Winstons are an American family that happens to be black, but their skin colour has nothing to do with their misfortune, which is universal.

Apart from having a tremendous amount of fun on a bigger canvas, what Mr Peele appears to be addressing here is iniquity, America's growing underclass, and the worrying idea that if you live well, you do so at someone else's expense. You could call them zombies, but the people from beneath might as easily be seen as the risen proletariat, and Us uses images from Adelaide's 1980s childhood to imply that the present rot set in with Reagan.

None of this, though, is conveyed in an obvious or heavy-handed manner, and could be blithely ignored by cinemagoers (God forgive them) in search of a good night out. Us is great fun, very funny, and uses a banging soundtrack to very skilful effect. It also looks great: Jordan Peele has upped his cinematic game since Get Out, and this film is very nicely directed for the most part, beautifully photographed. Maybe the plot does become a little grandiose late one, but it would be churlish to criticise that and not applaud Us's scope, and ambition.

And what a performance, or rather double performance, from Lupita Nyong'o, who shifts with wonderful ease between the nervy, intuitive Adelaide and her terrifying, dead-eyed doppleganger. At any other time of year, there'd be talk of Oscars.

Video of the Day

4 stars

(16, 116mins)

Also releasing this week:

Minding the Gap

4 stars

Bing Liu's grungy debut feature is a remarkable, unusual film. Part documentary, part episodic reality drama, it starts slowly, even scrappily, before gathering an extraordinary cumulative power. Bing Liu grew up in Rockford, Illinois, a once-thriving industrial hub that has seen rapid decline in recent times. In his teenage years, Liu bonded with his two best friends, Keire Johnson and Zach Mulligan over a shared love of skateboarding. Liu began filming Keire and Zach as they ran their boards along Rockford's roads and sidewalks and mulled over what adult life might have to offer them. But for them skateboarding was no mere hobby - it was a means of escape. For as Liu's film slowly reveals, all three young men had unhappy home lives blighted by violent, bullying or absent fathers. And as it came time for them to become men, the question was would they do any better. Filmed over a number of years, Minding the Gap is many things at once: an ode to friendship, a lament for lost childhoods and a damning indictment of an increasingly iniquitous society.

The White Crow

4 stars

On June 16th, 1961, Rudolf Nureyev walked up to two plain clothes policemen in Le Bourget Airport and announced that he wanted to defect. The 23-year-old dancer was on tour in the west with the Mariinsky Ballet, and had dazzled Parisian audiences with his bravura performances, but his enthusiasm for the French capital's nightlife had outraged his KGB handlers, and when it came time to go home, Rudy decided he'd had enough. That incident forms the climax of Ralph Fiennes' diligent and lovingly made biopic, which works backwards from Le Bourget to Nureyev's Siberian childhood and his struggles to get to the top. Born on a train, raised in poverty, Rudolf (Oleg Ivenko) battles his way into the elite Vaganova Academy in Saint Petersburg, where the kindly, intuitive ballet master Pushkin (Ralph Fiennes) takes him under his wing. Screenwriter David Hare handles the story very well, and Oleg Ivenko is a good enough dancer to convince as Nureyev in the performance sequences. It's a fine, soulful film.Magic will be in the air in the capital this June when David Blaine arrives here for one night only.

The American magician, illusionist and stunt artist will take to the stage at Dublin's 3Arena on Saturday, June 8, as part of his first tour of Ireland and the UK.

Blaine's tour kicks off in Edinburgh on June 5 and will be followed by a string of dates, including two nights in London.

His one-man show is being billed as an "unforgettable interactive experience that both shocks and amazes".

Famed for his death-defying endurance acts, Blaine (45) has pushed the boundaries with some draw-dropping antics, including being buried alive in a clear coffin in New York for a week.

The following year he stood inside a six-ton block of ice for 63 hours with no food or sleep. In 2002, he spent 36 hours standing atop a 30-metre pillar without a safety net, and suffered concussion when he finally leapt from the 10-storey height into a pile of cardboard boxes.

He survived 73 hours with more than a million volts of electricity discharged at him continuously from Tesla coils.

Blaine also endured 44 days of starvation inside a glass box suspended by a crane near the River Thames in London.

At the age of 23, Blaine produced and directed his original television special Street Magic. His stage antics have also seen him enjoy sold-out performances across the US and Canada.

During his career, Blaine has performed for US presidents including Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, and other international leaders and prominent figures such as Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Muhammad Ali.

Video of the Day

Tickets go on sale next Friday, March 29, at 9am via Ticketmaster.A school is discontinuing the practice of having students write their sins on artwork for display at Mass amid claims it breaches privacy, GDPR and the seal of confession.

Children at Cratloe National School, Co Clare, were asked to write their sins on artwork to be displayed at first confession Mass in the local church on March 13.

Around 30 had made a paper cross, each with the child's photograph at its head.

Stretching across the arms of the cross was the word "sorry" in decorative writing completed by the child. The child's sins were written at the shaft of the cross.

They were laminated and had a ribbon to attach them to the end of the pew.

A relative of one of the children said a parent had contacted Fr Richard Keane and requested him not to display the cross made by their child on the night.

The source pointed out the same crosses had been provided in the church in the spring of 2017.

Once the parent became aware that similar artwork would be displayed, they met Fr Keane.

The relative said Fr Keane promised to ring the school to state that these crosses would not be used for any child during the first confession Mass. However, this wasn't done.

"The use of this cross is a breach of the seal of confession, GDPR and privacy rules.

"It was bizarre and inappropriate for children to write their sins on a cross that can be viewed by other people in a church. Naming and shaming sins is medieval.

"The parent was very angry to be faced with the cross after specifically asking the priest not to display it," the relative said.

Fr Keane said he worked in the Marriage Tribunal in Cork on Monday and Tuesdays and due to his busy schedule completely forget to contact the school to pass on the message.

He didn't introduce the practice, which was done "for years", and wasn't made aware of any issue until he was contacted by one parent.

School principal Dr Susan Frawley said the school hadn't been aware one parent didn't want the cross to be displayed on the pew at the Mass.

She confirmed the practice would be discontinued in the future, which was confirmed to the mother.

Acknowledging the same crosses were provided two years ago in the church, she stressed this was the first time that someone had been upset about it and noted no concern was communicated to the school two years ago.Our orders pretty much skyrocketed once word spread it would be a fundraiser, added Lesly Mendoza, one of the student cooks at The Iron Paw and the student in charge of setting the March 8 menu. It wasnt about the money really. For us, it was more about giving back ... to lose someone like that, it really changes everything.A former army officer who groomed and sexually abused two teenage boys during the 1990s has been refused extra time to appeal his 11-year sentence.

Timothy O'Sullivan (67) of Marlborough Road, in Dublin pleaded guilty to sexual assault as well as oral and anal rape of two boys on dates between 1991 and 1996 at locations in Dublin.

The Central Criminal Court heard that O'Sullivan was in his forties at the time while the boys were aged between 13 and 16 years old. He subjected the two boys to abuse and threatened them they would be shot or buried in the mountains.

Sentencing OSullivan to five years and six years consecutively, Mr Justice Tony Hunt commended the bravery of the two victims in coming forward and noted their courageous victim impact statements.

I will carry this with me for the rest of my life and will never forgive him, wrote one of the men.

In mitigation, the court was told that O'Sullivan had grown up in West Cork and joined the army as a cadet where he was an officer for twenty years. His previous lawyers said O'Sullivan had served with distinction and had been on one of the first tours of Lebanon.

His barrister told the court that O'Sullivan was very ashamed for what he had done and the hurt he had caused.

OSullivan was refused an extension of time to appeal the severity of his sentence today. He lodged an appeal approximately 13 weeks late.

President of the Court of Appeal Mr Justice George Birmingham said OSullivan was advised in the aftermath of his sentence hearing that an appeal was unlikely to succeed.

Despite that advice, and despite the fact his sentence was very much in line with what was to be expected, he said OSullivan came to the conclusion that he wished to appeal.

In any criminal case, Mr Justice Birmingham said there was a public interest in finality being achieved. That objective was particularly acute for sexual offences where out-of-time appeals were potentially damaging for victims.

He said the courts were presented with victim impact statements on a daily basis which showed how victims find engaging with the criminal justice system very difficult and traumatic. Victims were entitled to put proceedings behind them and get on with their lives, the judge added.

Mr Justice Birmingham said no information had been put before the court to suggest an appeal had any real prospect of succeeding. Given the aggravating factors, he said OSullivans sentence was as likely to be increased as it was likely to be decreased.

In the Court of Appeals assessment of the limited information before the court, he said there was little prospect of a successful appeal and the interests of justice would not be served by extending time.

Mr Justice Birmingham, who sat with Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy and Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy, refused the application.A DANGEROUS driver who led gardai on a high-speed chase in west Dublin had already been banned from driving for 40 years, a court heard.

Graham Taylor (29) sped away from a garda who recognised him while stopped at a junction, driving at more than 120kph in a 50kph zone while families were out and about in the area on Fathers Day.

Taylor, from Kiltalown Park, Tallaght, had pleaded not guilty to three counts of endangerment and three of dangerous driving. He was tried by Dublin Circuit Criminal jury and found guilty.

Judge Karen OConnor adjourned sentencing to next week.

At a sentence hearing today, Detective Garda David Jennings said he was driving an unmarked patrol car at Brookfield Road in Tallaght at 12.30pm on June 19, 2016.

As he waited for lights to change at a junction he saw a blue VW Passat coming from the direction of the Naas Road. He recognised the accused driving and saw he had grown a beard.

When the lights turned green, the Passat took off at high speed, breaking another red light and overtaking traffic, driving on the wrong side of the road and forcing oncoming cars to brake hard to avoid a collision.

The Passat went the wrong way around Molly Heffernans Roundabout, nearly colliding with cars. Traffic had to brake hard and mount the footpath to avoid it on Fortunestown Lane. The patrol car followed at 120kph in a 100kph zone, with the Passat pulling away from it, Det Gda Jennings continued.

It drove past Lidl at high speed on the wrong side of the road and up Citywest Road before the gardai lost sight of it.

There were lots of families out and about as it was Fathers Day, Det Gda Jennings said.

Taylor had 121 previous convictions, including nearly 100 for motoring offences, 11 of which were for dangerous driving.

Det Gda Jennings agreed with defence barrister Karl Monahan that the area was largely industrialised but said it was also a route for people going in and out of housing estates.

The incident lasted for two minutes and there were no collisions or injuries.

Taylor previously worked in a garage and now wanted to get work as an electrician. He had succumbed to drug use at and early age and many of his prior convictions were from when he was a juvenile.

Taylor now had a young child and was motivated to tackle his difficulties with cannabis and cocaine use, Mr Monahan said. He had been drug free for 18 months.

He was remanded in custody to a date next week.A man who set fire to an apartment with three children inside has been jailed for ten years.

Ian O'Connor (29) of Emmet Crescent, Inchicore, Dublin threw a pipe bomb at another family home less than a month later, Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard.

He pleaded guilty to arson at Tyrone Place, Inchicore on September 18, 2017. He also pleaded guilty to arson at Ailesbury Road, Dublin on October 15, 2017.

The court heard that in the first arson, the heat of the fire caused a hearing aid to melt in a seven-year-olds ear, leaving her with a permanent scar.

Judge Melanie Greally sentenced O'Connor to twelve year's imprisonment for the first arson, but suspended the final two years on condition that he keep the peace and engage with the Probation Service for two years on his release.

Judge Greally also sentenced him to six years imprisonment for the later arson, to run concurrently with the other sentence. She backdated all sentences to the day OConnor went into custody, March 9, 2018.

Detective Inspector David Harrington told Tony McGillicuddy BL, prosecuting, that on the date in September, Margaret Green was asleep in her apartment along with her three children and woke to find the stairs on fire.

Ms Green was trapped upstairs by the fire and tried unsuccessfully to smash the windows to escape. She covered her two youngest children with wet towels in her bedroom and was choking on smoke when they were rescued by the fire brigade.

Her eldest son had fallen asleep while watching television downstairs and woke up to the sight of the front door on fire. He escaped via a balcony at the back of the apartment with the help of a neighbour who brought him a ladder.

O'Connor admitted to starting the fire by pouring petrol in the letterbox and on the front door. He said he owed money to certain persons who had instructed him to light the fire and had told him that there would be no one in the house.

Inspector Harrington agreed with Caroline Biggs SC, defending, that O'Connor believed that had he not lit the fire, then his family would have been pipe-bombed. O'Connor was given a bag of cocaine beforehand, but said he did not do it for the drugs.

In a victim impact statement which was read out in court, Ms Green said that her seven-year-old daughter's hearing aid had melted in the fire causing a permanent scar to her ear. The court heard all four members of the family had sustained injuries.

Ms Green said she thought that she and her family were all going to die. She said she remembered her youngest son telling her that he was going to heaven and that he would come back and help them escape the fire.

Detective Garda Shane Cahill told Mr McGillicuddy that in the second attack, William Godson woke to find flames outside the kitchen window of the home of his parents and two younger siblings. He grabbed bottles of water and used them to douse the fire.

O'Connor told gardai that he got an offer of 2,000 to put a petrol bomb through a window and was told that there was no one in the house, but he had not been paid as it had not worked. He said he had brought two petrol bombs to the house but had only thrown one.

Det Gda Cahill agreed with Ms Biggs that her client had been in debt and felt he had no option of getting money anywhere else. He agreed that there was some speculation that the wrong house had been targeted.

O'Connor has previous convictions for drunk driving and for being drunk in charge of a vehicle. He is unmarried and has one child.

Judge Greally said the aggravating factors in the case were that the acts of arson took place at residential homes while its occupants were asleep, the high degree of recklessness, the severe harm to the victims and the fact that O'Connor was acting as an agent of organised crime.

She said the mitigating factors in the case were his plea of guilty, his remorse, his admissions to gardai, his lack of relevant previous convictions, the traumatic events of his youth, his health issues and that he was pressured to act out of concern for the safety of his family.

Judge Greally said the case highlighted the invaluable service provided by the fire brigade. She commended the neighbour who brought one of the children at Tyrone Place a ladder for his bravery in acting to save the boy's life.A search for 'Bobby Ryan' was carried out on Mary Lowry's computer the day before Mr Ryan's remains were discovered, the Tipperary murder trial has heard.

Detective Garda Paul Fitzpatrick agreed under cross examination that analysis of Ms Lowry's computer revealed that on April 29 2013, the viewer had searched for the key words 'Trace Ireland Bobby Ryan.'

Under questioning by Bernard Condon SC for the Defence, Dt Garda Fitzpatrick agreed that he was unable to say whether searches carried out on a computer taken from Patrick Quirke's house had been as the result of predictive text.

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.

Mr Condon put it to Detective Garda Fitzpatrick that when somebody is doing a google search, google has the facility whereby it uses predictive text to some extent and can offer alternatives to the person conducting the search.

He said there had been "an enormous amount of material" on this computer. Dt Gda Fitzpatrick agreed there was, with 1.6m results based on key search terms provided by the Investigations team, though there were false positives, he said.

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Some of the items found on the computer had been as a result of 'redirects', he agreed, explaining that within a website the user could be redirected to another website.

Mr Condon put it to him that searches found on the computer included the colour 'red' and 'colour scheme for living room'. Dt Garda Fitzpatrick said: "I didn't see it. It was of no relevance to my investigation."

Mr Condon said that when somebody is conducting a google search, google has the facility whereby it uses predictive text to some extent, giving the example that if he were to search for "how high is....", google might come up with "a tree, a building, a house."

"I'm of limited imagination in these things but google can offer you alternatives," Mr Condon added.

Dt Gda Fitzpatrick agreed: "It definitely does now, I don't know what it was like five or six years ago."

Put to him that he was not able to say what specific words of the google search were typed by the person operating the computer, he replied:

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"All I can say was the key words entered that were searched for."

A cookie file had been created as a result, but Dt Garda Fitzpatrick: "As you say it could've been predictive text, I don't know."

Mr Condon said to Dt Gda Fitzpatrick that he had also conducted an analysis of Mary Lowry's computer and found searches of "'Bobby Ryan missing', 'Bobby Ryan Tipperary', 'Trace Ireland Bobby Ryan'.

One was a day before the body was found, he put it to him. Dt Gda Fitzpatrick agreed that at 21.45 on April 29 2013, the viewer had searched for the key words "Trace Ireland Bobby Ryan."

The trial continues.A thief with 115 previous convictions who stole medical students laptops from outside lecture halls in Trinity College has been jailed for three years.

Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard one of the students could not afford to replace her laptop immediately and felt she had failed one of her exams as a result of being without it.

Stephen Finn (32) was identified on CCTV after managing to evade detection during the thefts.

He is currently serving a four-year sentence with the final 18 months suspended for offences committed on bail after he was released on these charges. His prior convictions include 21 burglaries, as well as public order and road traffic offences.

Finn, of Georges Court, Georges Hill, Balbriggan, Co Dublin, pleaded guilty to burglary at two departments in Trinity College in January and February 2017. He also admitted burglary at the Central Hotel, Exchequer Street and at a business premises on Pearse Street on dates in February 2017.

Judge Melanie Greally said the laptops were of immeasurable value to the students and noted that there had been severe consequences for one of the students who failed a final medical exam.

She said they were extremely thoughtless and damaging offences which were distressing for the victims. She said Finn had a well-established tendency to steal to fund his drug habit and lifestyle.

She noted Finn presents well and doesn't arouse suspicion, managing to steal without detection.

Judge Greally took into account his remorse, his efforts to address his drug addiction, that he is using his time in custody constructively and his anxiety to take a responsible role as a father.

She imposed a four-year sentence, with the final year suspended, to start from the sentence date, today.

Garda Barry Keegan told Garrett McCormack BL, prosecuting, that on January 31, 2017, Finn entered the Biomedical Science Anatomy area in Trinity, where he stole a bag containing two laptops and a passport from outside a lecture hall.

Two days later on February 2, 2017 Finn entered the Biomedical Science Institute at Trinity and stole a laptop from outside a lecture hall. None of the laptops were recovered.

On February 7, 2017 Finn stole a computer monitor from the Central Hotel. Ten days later on February 17, he stole a bicycle from an architects premises on Pearse Street.

Finn was identified by gardai on CCTV in relation to all incidents and arrested. He was later admitted to bail and committed further burglaries in June 2017.

The students victim impact statements outlined how they were at a financial loss due to the theft of their laptops and the cost of replacing them. One reported feeling uncomfortable around lecture halls, an area they had previously considered secure.

One of the victims was an international fee-paying student and could not afford to replace her laptop straight away. She outlined how she had failed one of her exams which she felt was a result of being without her laptop in the run up to the exam.

Carol Doherty BL, defending, said Finn was remorseful for the offence and acknowledged that what he did had a serious impact on his victims. She said he had thought only of himself when he was a drug user but now had some awareness of the effect of his offences on individuals.

Ms Doherty said Finn had addressed his drug issues in custody. She said he was a trained roofer and was now the father of young child.

Finn wrote a letter of apology which was handed into the judge. Finn told the court he was truly sorry for what I done and was sorry for what he had put the injured parties through.TANAISTE Simon Coveney warned that Dublin Port's controversial decision to restrict cruise liner traffic could have serious knock-on implications for Cork, Waterford, Belfast which have massively benefitted from the expansion of the money-spinning tourism sector.

Dublin Port defended its decision to reduce the number of cruise liners allowed berth each season from 160 down to 80 by 2021 because of the imminent demands imposed by Brexit.

The port is desperately trying to increase provision for freight and container traffic in light of the UK's departure from the EU and its implications for Irish imports and exports.

However, Mr Coveney confirmed he has raised the issue within Government because of its potential knock-on cost to other Irish ports.

"I have raised this issue - I know that (Transport) Minister Shane Ross is aware of this issue," he said.

"The decision that Dublin makes has an impact on other ports because of course the capital city has a very strong draw in terms of cruise liner traffic.

"Cruise liner traffic has been increasing year-on-year in Dublin but of course there is a space problem for Dublin Port. They have to prioritise how they use that space in the context of Brexit planning and more freight and more bulk product coming in and out of that port.

"But I do think there needs to be a further discussion in terms of how Dublin Port can find a way of giving leadership on cruise liner traffic because of course that impacts on Cork, Waterford, Killybegs, Dingle and Belfast in terms of attracting more cruise liner ships.

"When they visit Dublin, they will also visit ports around the island of Ireland. So, we do need to try to ensure these decisions are made in the context of the national interest as well as the difficult commercial decisions that Dublin Port has to make given the confined nature of the port facilities that they have."

Dublin Port insisted its cruise liner decision was rooted in commercial pragmatism.

Dublin Port chief executive Eamon Reilly insisted they had no option but to ration available port capacity given the competition for berth spaces and the looming implications of Brexit.

However, the decision to restrict cruise liner numbers is seen as a body blow to ports including Cork, Waterford and Belfast given the boom in the cruise liner trade over the past decade.

Dublin, Cork and Belfast have enjoyed their greatest seasons since the heyday of the liner trade in the 1950s.

Both Dublin and Cork are set to welcome record liner numbers in 2019 with cruise passengers now the highest per capita spenders of any segment of the tourist industry.

Cork hosted a total of 92 cruise ships last year - and hopes to exceed that figure by 10pc in 2019.

However, any Dublin decision to restrict cruise liner visits will inevitably hit other ports like Cork.

So great is the recent expansion of the cruise liner sector in Ireland that Cobh, Ireland's busiest liner port, is now examining the development of a second cruise liner berth at Lynch's Quay.

A total of 157,000 passengers and 69,000 crew visited Cork in 2018 delivering a 12m boost to the Cobh and Cork economies.

A new study has revealed cruise liner passengers spend an average of 81 per visit - the highest spending element of the Irish tourism sector.

Further, while the cruise liner trade is hugely lucrative for Dublin and Cork ports, it has also involved a massive spin-off benefit for day trip destinations including the Guinness Hop Store, Jameson Distillery in Midleton, Blarney Castle and even Killarney.

In 2018 it is estimated that 27.2 million people will have taken a cruise on over 450 cruise ships worldwide.

Dublin and Cork were expected to enjoy another decade of expansion given that the the cruise liner sector now has 113 new ships, many of them super liners, on order from shipyards worldwide.

Feedback from the leading cruise companies has been very positive about Ireland with the country seen as a high quality, safe and varied destination.

Cruise itineraries featuring Ireland are amongst the most popular over recent years.The HSE's "deeply flawed" policy on when to tell patients that mistakes have been made in their care is still in place - months after an investigation into the CervicalCheck scandal called for it to be urgently changed.

The revelation is made in a new progress report by Dr Gabriel Scally, who delivered a damning inquiry into CervicalCheck last September.

His latest progress report - on how much headway has been made in implementing his 50 recommendations - found work on a revised system of open disclosure is "on track" but it will not be ready until the end of this year.

Most of the 221 women in the CervicalCheck scandal who developed cancer, and relatives of the deceased, only discovered last year that audits were conducted by the screening service showing they got incorrect smear test results.

The failure to come clean on the audits came despite the HSE having a policy since 2013 of open disclosure when mistakes are made.

An ex-gratia scheme is now being set up by the Government to compensate women and families affected by this breach.

In his inquiry report last September, Dr Scally said the HSE's open disclosure policy "should be revised as a matter of urgency." He wanted the revised policy to reflect the rights of patients to know of any failings in their care.

It was only after CervicalCheck campaigner Vicky Phelan took a High Court case in April last year that the existence of the audits became public.

Dr Scally, in his progress report, also refers to his original recommendation to establish an independent Patient Safety Council and train staff in open disclosure.

He said while the work so far "appears to be a reasonable response", it is notable "that the previous policy, which has been judged to be deeply flawed, remains in place".

The HSE recently indicated an interim open disclosure policy revision has been circulated for discussion.

Dr Scally's latest report - monitoring his recommendations - found that five have been completed and some are behind schedule. Most are "on track".

No actions have been planned yet to follow up on some of his recommendations relating to laboratories which carry out the screening.

His previous report called for further investigation into why laboratories were producing different results for a low-grade abnormality found in some women's slides.

No progress was made on this until CervicalCheck could recruit a specialist known as a Cytopathology lead.

It also emerged that auditing of tests after a woman has been diagnosed with cervical cancer is still on hold by CervicalCheck.

This form of lookback would examine if anything was missed in the test.

Dr Scally's report also found an expert group is reviewing clinical audit processes across all the screening programmes.

He said he is very encouraged with the progress so far.

The HSE and the Department of Health appear to have the resources to complete the actions but the HSE may be over-ambitious in frontloading so many of the recommendations with the aim of completing 82pc at the end of June. There may be "too many activities concentrated in one time period".

His "future progress reviews may find some of the activity has been subject to delay and has been unable to be completed as desired".

Dr Scally also said the Department of Health has few staff for whom implementing the recommendations is their sole job.The suspect package identified at the Limerick An Post sorting office. Photo: An Garda Siochana

The Armys Bomb Squad have made safe the viable improvised explosive device recovered from a Limerick An Post office this morning.

The device has now been handed over to gardai who are continuing to liaise with their colleagues in the UK as part of the investigation.

In a statement the Defence Forces said: This morning, following a request from An Garda Siochana, an Army Bomb Disposal Team was tasked to investigate a suspect package in the An Post Collection Centre, Docklands in Limerick City where they arrived on scene at 9.50am.

On arrival a cordon was established and the building was evacuated for the duration of the operation. A viable improvised explosive device contained in a plastic envelope was identified and made safe. The device was then handed over to An Garda Siochana for further investigation and the scene was declared safe.

Expand Close The suspect package identified at the Limerick An Post sorting office. Photo: An Garda Siochana / Facebook

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Should members of the public encounter suspicious items, or hazardous substances, they are advised to maintain a safe distance and inform An Garda Siochana.

Gardai have released images of the package, which appear to show a white coloured plastic envelope addressed to a location in London.

The envelope features the 'Love Eire' heart stamps and an address to Charring Cross, with the letters 'RTS' pointing at the circled return to sender address: 'Ireland tourism Dublin'.

Gardai believe the suspicious package discovered this morning at a postal sorting office in Limerick is the fifth incendiary device sent by dissident republicans to the UK.

Gardai said they are investigating the parcel which was discovered at the An Post facility on the Dock Road, Limerick at around 6am this morning.

They said the parcel appears to be identical to parcels discovered earlier this month in London and Glasgow and that An Garda Siochana are continuing to liaise with the UK authorities.

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Whatsapp Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan. Photo: Tony Gavin

Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said the sending of a suspected letter bomb was "an absolutely despicable act".

Mr Flanagan also linked the finding of the suspect package in Limerick to the recent discovery in the UK of explosive devices posted in letters.

He said that the incident is "a dreadful consequence of the uncertainty surrounding Brexit where in the context of the heightened tensions in Northern Ireland, on the island of Ireland - that people have taken it upon themselves to send letter bombs  an absolutely despicable act."

Mr Flanagan noted that four similar letters arrived in Britain around two weeks ago and intelligence had suggested that there had been five.

He said: "This could well be the fifth. As yet its unconfirmed but I understand gardai are actively engaged on the ground in Limerick".

Mr Flanagan told RTE Radio's Today with Sean O'Rourke that he has reason to believe today's discovery is linked to those in the UK.

He also said: "I have to say that the sending of incendiary devices or letter bombs like that is a totally unacceptable act and I would hope that those responsible could certainly be brought to justice.

"I know that gardai are actively engaged as we speak."

Asked if there are similarities between what found in Limerick and what found in UK, Mr Flanagan said: "I understand that to be the case with particular reference to the type of postage stamp that was used."

A Garda spokesman said: "Shortly after 6am Gardai in Henry street received a report of a suspect package at the An Post sorting office, Dock Road, Co Limerick. The building has been evacuated and the army EOD team have been notified.

"No other information is available at this time."

Packages containing homemade explosive devices were found at Londons City and Heathrow airports and Waterloo station on March 5 and at the University of Glasgow in Scotland on March 6. None of the devices exploded and no injuries were reported.

Last week a media outlet in Northern Ireland received a claim of responsibility for the four devices and said a fifth has not been discovered.

In a joint statement the Londons Metropolitan Police and Police Scotland said: "The claim was allegedly made on behalf of the IRA".

The packages all bore stamps from the Irish Republic and Dublin as a return address.

The suspect device found in Heathrow Airport briefly ignited and burned part of the packaging, but no one was injured.When I came into office our city was broke, he said. We have a healthy fund balance and the best bond rating we have ever had. People see the activity going on around town and the way our finances are. I have been getting a lot of good feedback.Exhibitions: National Museum of Ireland director Lynn Scarff at the launch of the programme of activity for 2019. Photo: Julien Behal

The National Museum is launching a new exhibition on the legacy of Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes in Ireland.

The exhibition, by glass artist Alison Lowry, will be an "artistic response" to the Catholic-led institutions that were once prominent throughout the country.

Opening on March 27, and running until 2020 at the Museum of Decorative Arts and History at Collins Barracks, Dublin, '(A) Dressing Our Hidden Truths' will also explore "the ongoing hidden truths of rape culture, consent and domestic violence".

The exhibition combines art and artefacts, including aprons inspired by the Magdalene laundries, photographs of the incarcerated women, and audio testimonies.

Its announcement comes as the National Museum of Ireland reveals its programme of activities for 2019.

Meanwhile, campaigners have demanded the site of a notorious mother and baby home be fully excavated after they claimed a newly discovered historic map indicated a plot where hundreds of babies could be buried.

Bessborough in Cork, which at one time was Ireland's largest mother and baby home, is infamous for having one of the highest infant mortality rates of any such facility.

Now, campaigners claim a newly discovered map has indicated a burial site on the former mother and baby home site.

They fear hundreds of babies could have been interred there over almost six decades.

Campaigner Maureen Considine said: "While I have seen the words 'burial ground' on other maps, the location of the burial ground was within the folly area. But this burial ground indicates a much bigger area and also to the southern and south-eastern side of the folly which is not the area indicated previously."A pensioner who was attacked while sleeping in a parked van remains in a serious but stable condition in a Cork hospital.

The 73-year-old man was attacked shortly before 1am yesterday and was dragged out of his vehicle before being viciously beaten by a lone assailant.

The attack occurred at Sleaveen East in the mid-Cork town of Macroom.

It is believed the man - well known in the area for his work with greyhounds - may have been attacked after a bungled robbery. Locals said the pensioner had been sleeping over recent days in the van which was parked in a car park.

After the assault, the assailant fled the scene.

A short time later, a passer-by noticed the injured pensioner and raised the alarm. He was rushed to Cork University Hospital where he was treated for multiple injuries.

One source indicated that the elderly man sustained a suspected fractured cheekbone, a suspected fractured hip, several broken ribs and a suspected punctured lung as well as facial and torso injuries.

A Garda source described the assault as "nasty and vicious". "This elderly man was subjected to a very serious assault which could easily have had tragic consequences," he said.

A man in his early 30s, who is from the Macroom area, was arrested close to the scene a short time later by gardai,

He was taken to Bandon garda station for questioning by detectives. The car park was sealed off to allow for a full forensic examination.

Gardai are also examining CCTV security camera footage from business premises in the area to determine if the movements of key individuals were caught on tape.

Macroom gardai have appealed to anyone who may have heard or seen anything suspicious in the town between 11pm on Wednesday and 2am yesterday to contact them on (026) 20590.Hundreds of people hailed HPV vaccine campaigner Laura Brennan as a hero as they turned out to say their final farewell.

A steady stream of people queued at the offices of Clare County Council from 10am yesterday to sign a book of condolence for the 26-year-old from Ennis, who died of cervical cancer on Wednesday morning.

Catherine Meere, from Dublin, was among the first to sign.

"Laura was just a champion for women and she fought so hard to increase the numbers taking the HPV vaccine knowing it wasn't going to help her but it was going to help others," she said.

"It is such a terrible shame that young women are getting cervical cancer and they are not being checked."

The HSE offers free cervical cancer screening tests for women aged 25 and over, but Ms Meere said it should be checking girls from 16 upwards.

"My heart is broken for Laura."

Ennis man Eugene Drennan said he had an acute sense of the loss felt by Ms Brennan's parents, Larry and Bernie, after his own daughter, Katie, died at the age of 24 just over four years ago. Katie lived with cystic fibrosis (CF) and was a tireless advocate for those with CF.

Eugene fought back tears as he spoke of the difficulty of losing a child.

"Today only opens the door on what Laura's parents will have to go through," he said. "Today is a black day."

By mid-afternoon, one book of condolence was full, making it necessary for the council to provide a second.

Sean McDermott, a retired teacher from Ennis National School, said Ms Brennan left a huge imprint.

"She leaves an incredible legacy," he said.

Tom Carey, a retired director of the council, described Ms Brennan as a true hero. "Quite simply, Laura was an inspiration to all of us."

Her remains will repose at her family home on Tuesday from 4pm to 8pm. Her celebration and remembrance mass is on Wednesday at the Ennis Cathedral at 1pm.A 16-year-old girl has been reported missing since Wednesday morning, March 20.

Alannah Corrigan was last seen in Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, but is known to frequent the OConnell Street / Mountjoy areas of Dublin.

She is described as 140 cm in height, of slight build, with black hair and blue eyes.

Anyone who has seen Alannah or who can assist in locating her is asked to contact Dun Laoghaire Garda Station on 01 6665000, The Garda Confidential Telephone Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.BUDDING stargazers have been advised to keep an eye on the skies this weekend as a phenomenon similar to the Northern Lights may be visible over Ireland, am astronomy expert has said.

The glowing in the sky, known as an aurora borealis, are mostly known as the Northern Lights and are quite often visible over Iceland.

They are created by disturbances in Earth's magnetosphere caused by a flow of particles from the Sun, and are usually concentrated around the Earth's magnetic poles.

Editor of Astronomy Ireland magazine, David Moore, said that there is a "good chance" that the lights will be visible over Ireland.

"There is definitely a good chance, we never know with these things. We're hoping it would be visible," Mr Moore told Independent.ie.

"Certainly over Donegal as the horizon looks over the ocean where are there no facing lights, but it's been seen all over the country before, even as far down as Cork."

Mr Moore explained that a dark sky will be needed to see the lights clearly, but advised the public to keep an eye out on Saturday night.

"We're hoping it'll be extra strong. We're advising everyone to be watching the northern horizon, especially if youve got a great dark sky.

CME forecast to arrive late 23rd March following C5 flare from sunspot AR2736. Active-minor geomagnetic storm periods possible with low risk of moderate storms. As a result, aurora may be visible in Scotland where cloud breaks. Latest forecast available https://t.co/JL4kEFnjRa pic.twitter.com/kxTtoqolDc  Met Office Space (@MetOfficeSpace) March 21, 2019

"We haven't a good one in years so this could be the one."

The southward shift of the lights on Saturday is caused by an ejection of plasma, known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) from the Sun, which followed a solar flare on Wednesday.

According to Met Eireann, tonight will see clear skies, but Saturday is expected to be cloudy during the day.

However, some bright spells are expected to emerge and it will be mainly dry overnight - meaning the lights may be visible.

In the UK, The Met Office's Space account tweeted: "CME forecast to arrive late 23rd March following C5 flare from sunspot AR2736. Active-minor geomagnetic storm periods possible with low risk of moderate storms.

"As a result, aurora may be visible in Scotland where cloud breaks. Latest forecast available."

Astronomy Ireland are encouraging members to submit any photos of the aurora to magazine@astronomy.ie

With additional reporting from Press AssociationAN Irish man has appealed to the public for donations for his girlfriend's recovery fund, who suffered a serious spinal injury on holiday over two years ago.

Manus Gallagher (48) from Co Donegal met his partner Anita Jackson (42) in an Irish pub in London in 2011.

In December 2016, the couple went on what should have been a "dream holiday" to Kenya, where Anita was born. They had planned to spend time along the coast, on a safari, and then to spend Christmas with Anita's mother in Nairobi, who she had not seen in three years.

On the first day of their holiday, the couple were sunbathing on an elevated area above the beach when Anita lost her grip while turning her sunbed.

Expand Close Anita fell 8ft off an elevated beach area on what should of been a 'dream holiday' in Kenya. / Facebook

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Whatsapp Anita fell 8ft off an elevated beach area on what should of been a 'dream holiday' in Kenya.

She stumbled backwards and fell 8ft on the beach below, resulting in T12 Vertebral Fracture and incomplete Spinal Cord Injury.

Anita spent seven hours in surgery at Mombasa Hospital and three days in intensive care before she was airlifted back to London.

After spending time in rehabilitation at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, the pair realised that they wouldn't be able to return to the apartment they lived in for the last three years as it wasn't wheelchair accessible.

They spent some time in an adapted flat in Canary Wharf before making the decision to move to Burtonport in Co Donegal, where Manus was raised.

"It was a big shock to us. Before that we were living and working in London, going out at the weekends, seeing the city and the markets in Camden, and all of that suddenly came to a stop," Manus told Independent.ie.

"Everything was harder, so we decided to go home to Donegal where I'm from."

Expand Close Anita uses a Motomed Viva 2 leg and arm trainer, which maintains her strength and fitness, in between rehab appointments. / Facebook

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Whatsapp Anita uses a Motomed Viva 2 leg and arm trainer, which maintains her strength and fitness, in between rehab appointments.

Anita has continued her rehab and has two sessions a week on the Ekoskeleton Bionic Suit, which allows her to get up and walk with the No Barriers Foundation.

However, between appointments she uses a Motomed Viva 2 leg and arm trainer, which maintains her strength and fitness and "is of huge benefit to her rehab", Manus said.

"Unfortunately it's supplied on a three month rotation through the HSE which means, she has it for three months and then it goes to someone else, so the hard work she done for the three months is lost until the machine gets returned again.

"As soon as it was gone, she was lost without it."

Alongside his family, Manus set up a GoFundMe page last week to help foot the bill for a Motomed of Anita's own, with over 3,000 raised so far.

"Its been brilliant, most of the response has been from family and friends. We're very grateful," Manus said.A LEADING MP from the DUP is to be a surprise guest speaker at Fine Gaels annual conference in Wexford this weekend, Independent.ie has learned.

Jeffrey Donaldson is to take part in a debate with other Northern Ireland politicians and Tanaiste Simon Coveney.

He has previously clashed heavily with the Irish government and in particular Taoiseach Leo Varadkar who he accused of playing politics with the Good Friday Agreement.

It also comes after the DUP made their latest attempt to kill off the Brexit deal which the Irish government desperately wants to be approved in Westminster next week.

Earlier the DUPs Nigel Dodds said the Brexit extension negotiated by British Prime Minister Theresa May with EU leaders amounted to a disappointment and inexcusable failure.

"Lectures by the Prime Minister putting the blame on others cannot disguise the responsibility her government bears for the current debacle and the fact that her agreement has been twice overwhelmingly rejected," Mr Dodds said.

The session Mr Donaldson will take part in is being hosted by Young Fine Gael is titled North-South relations into the future.

Other panellists include the leader of the Alliance Party, Naomi Lon and former SDLP MP Claire Hanna who quit the party over their recent partnership with Fianna Fail.

The topics being discussed include the lack of an functioning executive in Northern Ireland.

The agenda for the Fine Gael conference is heavily focused on Brexit. Another special guest is the European People Partys candidate to be the next president of the European Commission Manfred Weber.FIANNA Fail has added frontbench TDs Billy Kelleher and Anne Rabbitte to their ticket for the upcoming European elections.

Mr Kelleher, a TD for Cork North Central, suffered an embarrassing defeat to Wexford councillor Malcolm Byrne at a convention in recent weeks.

The final vote count showed the ex-minister losing by 451 to 443 votes despite being the hot favourite.

The partys National Constituencies Committee has decided he will be added as a second candidate for Ireland South. It means there is now likely to be a fierce battle between two men for the one seat Fianna Fail hold in the constituency.

Mr Kelleher previously clashed with the party hierarchy over his desire to run for Brussels. Party leader Micheal Martin has initially opposed the idea but has since softened his attitude.

Meanwhile Ms Rabbitte becomes the only women to contest the European elections on the European ticket. She will be teamed up with another TD, Brendan Smith in the vast Midlands-North West constituency.

They have a one candidate strategy in Dublin where Barry Andrews will hope to be their first MEP for the capital in a decade.There are many reasons a victim stays: some have economic reasons; others may stay to protect children; families and friends of the victim may be receiving threats from the perpetrator; and some may feel love for the perpetrator and believe their promise to never hurt them again.The window has all but closed: With London property prices teetering and a final Brexit date looming, UK-based buyers are probing for Irish boltholes

The window has all but closed: With London property prices teetering and a final Brexit date looming, UK-based buyers are probing for Irish boltholes

Your anxious Brexit buyer in Ireland is typically an Irish ex-pat who today owns a house in the London area and is now worried about its value. He or she wants to sell there and buy here and is looking to spend in excess of 500,000 on a one-off house in a rural Irish location; but the exchange rate (86c per Stg 1) is softening.

What to do? Just like the British Parliament, many are dithering. At this late hour for Brexit, most parts of Ireland are now experiencing a surge of anxious Irish ex-pats and Brexiting Brits looking to come and live here; or at least to buy an Irish property, so that they can move over in the near future.

A good measure of Brexit bedlam in the Irish property market comes this week courtesy of the Real Estate Alliance (REA) network, whose member firms countrywide have just participated in a Brexit buyer survey at the request of Irish Independent Property.

The results show that a whopping 74pc of REA firms report an increase in interest from British-based buyers in the last 12 months while sales to UK buyers have risen by 12pc on average in the year.

It shows that more than one in 20 homes offered for sale are being sold to a British-based buyer (suggesting around 3,600 British bought properties over twelve months). "UK buyers now make up 10pc of overall enquiries and 6pc of sales in the Irish market, with our agents reporting an average of 4.3 sales to UK buyers," said REA spokesperson Barry McDonald.

The difference between enquiries for properties and those biting the bullet and actually buying, highlights that aforementioned Brexit 'dither'.

As a 'bad' Brexit becomes increasingly likely, some counties have been experiencing an influx of buyers while others are being adversely affected. To sum up, the late 'chaos' stage of Brexit appears to be giving a boost to the regional markets while at the same time continuing to cool the upper end in Dublin, the border counties, holiday locations beloved of English buyers and farm locations heavily dependent on exports to the UK.

While emmigrants who left in the 1980s or after the 2008 crash make up the majority of buyers, it is also telling that a full quarter (25pc) of enquiries from the UK are now from 'true' British buyers with no Irish connections at all, marking an historic change in migration patterns.

Prior to the survey, Brexit fallout has already been blamed for flattening demand and softening prices in the luxury home market in Dublin (a realm of business Brits based here and of Irish with big business dealings in the UK). It has already been blamed for squashing demand in the holiday home markets of West Cork and Donegal (the usual Engish- and Northern Ireland-based buyers have stayed away).

Of the UK-based parties contacting Irish estate agents in the last 12 months, almost one third (30pc) have openly cited Britain's EU departure as the reason for wanting to move to Ireland. This is an increase of 13pc on a previous survey carried out six months ago. And 14pc of subsequent sales resulting have directly come about because of the buyer's job being moved to Ireland.

The average uplift in enquiries in areas where demand has increased is 23pc, while those locations reporting a Brexit decrease are seeing British enquiries down by 20pc. There has also been a marked change in where British-based buyers of Irish property are coming from. Not surprisingly, given that British industries like finance are likely to be among those most adversely affected, demand from London and the South East of England has shot up by 40pc on six months ago.

This trend is also likely linked to recent price slippages in the London market (4pc in the last year). Many fear this could mark the beginning of a more pronounced tumble in values in the British capital as the realities of Britain's departure kicks in for banking and financial services sectors in particular.

It also means the timing couldn't be better for Irish estate agents looking to proactively engage the departure lounge. Around 7,000 UK-based buyers are expected to view Irish properties at the UK Property Investor Show being organised by the REA network on April 12-13 at ExCel London. "After April's event we will have a much better picture of what's going on," says Mr McDonald.

The REA Brexit survey also tells us quite a bit about the type of people looking to buy. Almost a quarter (23pc) are buying for eventual or immediate retirement, while 8pc are investors, 8pc are looking for a change in lifestyle, and 9pc are purchasing holiday homes despite slippage in that segment.

The most typical UK-based buyer wants a rural property (54pc), with 66pc looking for a one-off home rather than an estate property. And UK-based purchasers are spending more than an average buyer with the over-500k category accounting for the largest tranche (22pc).

Brexit is also driving an upswing in commercial property investment on the vital M1 north-south corridor, according to REA agents in Co Louth, with REA Dundalk reporting a doubling of UK and Northern Ireland enquiries in the past 12 months. Around the country the effects are still very mixed. For example, while REA in Roscrea reports a doubling of sales from the UK this year, in contrast, REA Clonmel has reported a notable increase in sales by rural-based vendors who are getting out of Ireland and heading back to the UK.

If we also look to Central Statistics Office (CSO) data we can see that since 2016 considerably more British residents are now coming to Ireland in search of a property, a life and a job; instead of an Irish tide going the other way.

While 300 or so more people came here than went there in 2015, it is symbolic that the big reverse occurred in 2016, the year of the Brexit vote, when the net difference shifted up to 3,800 incoming.

In 2012, 8,000 more people moved to the UK from Ireland than those who made the reverse move. But in 2017 (the latest figures available) a massive sea change saw 6,600 net incoming to Ireland from the UK.

In truth the latest REA and CSO data really only shows us the latter effects of Brexit bedlam - the uncertainty phase. Where 'Brexit reality' will leave the Irish property market is still a great big unknown. For a clear answer to that million dollar question, you'll need to tune in again, likely at the end of this year.The world is getting smaller - and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Design doesn't do well in a vacuum. Twentieth century Ireland learnt that one the hard way.

In the 1950s, Irish manufacture was protected by tariffs. If you wanted a chair or a teacup, you were stuck with buying Irish or paying the premium for something fancy from abroad. Isolated from the wider world, Irish design was almost universally poor. In the end, the Irish Export Board called in some Scandinavian experts to advise. The outcome of their visit was the Kilkenny Design Workshops (1966-1988), which brought in talented European and British designers to help pull Irish design up by its bootstraps. A bit of cultural crosspollination did us a power of good.

Fast forward to 2019 and the Design Indaba Festival in Cape Town, South Africa, where Ikea has just launched its Overallt collection, designed in collaboration with 10 African designers. In terms of multi-cultural collaborative design, it looks like the Scandinavians have done it again! The Ikea spin doctors describe it as, "a limited-edition collection that is all about building bridges and not walls, ultimately creating room for better habits together. Including larger pieces of furniture, tableware, textiles, and a fashionably sustainable tote bag." The collection is expected to hit the shops in May.

What's interesting about Overallt is that is showcases the cutting edge of African design. And it's not just about craft. Unlike projects designed to create sustainable trade in indigenous communities, Overallt was made with input from 10 high-profile professionals from five different African countries. Many of these already have an international profile.

Expand Close Bright and beautiful: Shadowy outdoor armchair from the MAfrique range / Facebook

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This sets the Ikea collaboration apart from other initiatives like the TK Maxx sustainable trade programme, which aims to help Ugandan families send their children to school by marketing their traditional woven baskets.

"This is how design makes the world smaller and brings people from different cultures closer together," says Bibi Seck, who designed the Overallt rocking chair (70) and footstool (40) with Ikea designer Mikael Axelsson. The furniture is designed for indoor and outdoor use and, although it could be used in any country, carries the influence of Western Africa, where the pace of life is more reflective and less rushed. "I imagine people sitting in this rocking chair, rocking and reflecting. I imagine my father, who is in his eighties, sitting in it, smoking his cigar; my sister-in-law with her newborn baby; my niece and nephews playing on it," Seck says.

Born in Paris, with Senegalese heritage, Seck is a product designer based in New York. He was one of the designers, with Ayse Birsel, for the M'Afrique collection from Italian brand Moroso. Their Madam Dakar sofa, also an indoor/outdoor piece, is handwoven in Senegal using polyethylene cord normally used for fishing nets. It's a beautiful piece and costs 2,090 from Milia. The Overallt rocking chair shares the combination of a metal structure and a woven seat, but it's a fraction of the price.

Ikea is all about affordability. The Overallt Easy chair (50; or 95 with cushions) is designed by Issa Diabate, an architect from the Ivory Coast, and Mikael Axelsson. To my mind - and I haven't yet sat on it - it is a stunning piece of design. It's made from plywood and held together with wooden slats. This means that it can be assembled without nails, glue, or screws or even that bugbear of Ikea assembly, the Allen key. "I wanted to design a pleasant and functional object without using costly materials or sophisticated technology," Diabate says. The range also includes a bookshelf (45) designed with the same incredibly simple construction.

"Our dream is to have a blueprint and make the design open source," says Johanna Jelinek, one of the Ikea designers who collaborated on the project. This, were it to happen, would make the chair available to people living in Africa. At the moment, there's no Ikea store in South Africa, or any other countries on the African continent apart from Egypt and Morocco.

Jelinek collaborated with textile designers Renee Rossouw and Sindiso Khumalo on the printed textiles in the collection. Originally from Durban, South Africa, Khumalo studied in Central St Martin's, London, and works between the two countries. Internationally she's known for graphic patterns that draw on her Zulu and Ndebele heritage.

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I spoke to Khumalo on Skype during the Design Indaba Festival. "It's not traditional African handcraft - it's contemporary - but you can see the colours coming through," she says. For her, the joy of working for Ikea was that the designs will reach a far wider audience. "It was an honest collaboration," she said. "Ikea didn't have a top-down approach." This part of the collection ranges from the bright bold graphic Overallt padded blanket (20) to a cushion cover for 5. The trio have even designed a multi-coloured elephant patterned shower curtain (7).

The woven textiles in the collection were designed by the Egyptian design duo Mariam Hazem and Hend Riad, who work together as Reform Studio, with Ikea designer Hanna Dalrot. Sustainability is the Reform Studio thing, and their contribution to Overallt was no exception. "We found this beautiful material, silver food package waste, which can be found in crisp bags and chocolate bar wrappers. Tons of waste come out of the production and it's hard to recycle because it is mixed aluminium and plastic so we wanted to find a way to use it," they explain.

"At first we thought that making use of this waste material would be really hard to achieve on a mass production scale but Ikea loved the concept and pushed the extra mile to make it come true in their production." The material is used, to a greater or lesser extent, in the Overallt flatwoven rug (75), cushion (8) and tote bags (8 and 10).

It's hard not to see Ikea as an all-powerful, all-seeing roaming eye, observing design around the world and waiting for the moment to pounce. One day, maybe, the Swedish giant will turn its benevolent eye on Ireland.

In the meantime, Irish manufacture has already been discovered. Last year, Ikea launched the Omedelbar collection, a Gothic and slightly terrifying ensemble in collaboration with stylist Bea Akerlund. The mesh hands in the collection - a type of ornament that you could use to stash your rings - were made in Tralee by the 3D printers, Wazp.

See ikea.com, tkmaxx.ie, miliashop.com, lolaandmawu.comI know we're not supposed to say things like this, but I always found Samuel Beckett's play 'Waiting for Godot' excruciating. And without further apology, here's a spoiler alert: in the play, Godot never comes.

But at the Brussels conference centre yesterday there was a man you don't hear about every day, the Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, and he was pouring out his Brexit frustrations.

"So, at the moment there are more non-options on the table than options... I sometimes have the feeling that we are in the waiting room, a bit like 'Waiting for Godot'. But Godot never came so I hope this time they will come," the Luxembourg leader said.

Two years and nine months after Brexit was visited on us all, the other 27 EU leaders did show they are human after all.

There was a lot of Brexit weariness as they signalled a short extension - provided Mrs May can reverse her two crushing defeats in a third vote next week.

Leading the hawkish pack was French President Emmanuel Macron. "If there is a negative British vote, we would go towards No Deal," he said.

Even the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar - while munificently urging "a little slack for the entire British establishment" - could not contain his impatience for a result.

"Everyone wants to avoid a No Deal but we can't have a situation whereby we have a rolling cliff edge, where we just put off decisions and deadlines every couple of months," the Taoiseach said.

"Brexit was never going to be clean. Brexit would always require some very hard choices for the United Kingdom to make. It was never going to be all good and no bad. And those decisions now need to be made," Mr Varadkar added emphatically.

So this is how things will roll from here. The EU leaders have given an extension until May 22, the eve of European Parliament elections.

But this is conditional on Mrs May achieving the near-impossible in a House of Commons vote next Tuesday or Wednesday. If she somehow does win that vote, then it's an orderly Brexit on May 22.

If, as is more likely, the vote fails again, we are all headed for even tougher and more uncertain times. The EU leaders have decided to send the UK on its way on April 12 in that case.

For the umpteenth time, they will be saying London must make some proposals. But an abrupt no-deal Brexit will be hard to avoid.

A very long extension, based on a very different UK attitude, might be possible. But it would require big changes - possibly an election or new referendum.

Ireland will need German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose patience is more durable, to dial down the hawkishness which is growing. Overall, there was a feeling last night that Godot - aka Brexit - is really about to arrive at its finale. And there is a sinking feeling that the ending could be tragic.That, then, is the end of Theresa May. She may get to serve longer as prime minister than Gordon Brown, whom she will overtake on May 28, but that will be that.

All political careers end in failure, but she never really had any success.

As prime minister, she had one job: "Brexit means Brexit and we're going to make a success of it," she said. Now it turns out that Brexit means something else and she has given up.

The significance of what she said on Wednesday evening has not yet sunk in. "As prime minister, I am not prepared to delay Brexit any further than June 30," she said in the House of Commons and repeated in her broadcast to the nation. That means that if the House of Commons rejects the Brexit deal again next week, she is going to resign.

This is because Donald Tusk, the EU Council president, said the EU would agree to a short delay only if the UK parliament approved the deal.

If parliament votes against the deal, the EU is likely to offer a long extension to the Brexit timetable, such as to the end of the year. I do not believe it would refuse an extension, because then the EU27 would be responsible for forcing a disruptive no-deal Brexit.

And I do not believe that May would try to take the UK out of the EU without a deal next Friday, or that parliament would allow her to do so.

So, if the Commons votes against the deal next week, whoever is prime minister will have to agree a long delay to Brexit with the EU. Theresa May says that won't be her - although she could agree the extension and announce her resignation at the same time.

Or she could change her mind and decide that, as prime minister, she is prepared to delay Brexit further than June 30 after all.

It wouldn't be the first time she said one thing and did another, but we are approaching the point where the cabinet could simply decide that one of its number should take over temporarily.

This could all be a cunning plan on May's part to engineer such a crisis of uncertainty that MPs feel they have to vote for the deal and an orderly exit, only briefly delayed, next week. Although it seems more likely that she is losing control of events and knows that she cannot survive if Brexit is delayed for so long that the UK has to hold European Parliament elections.

Either way, I think it is unlikely that she can win the vote next week. Even before Labour MPs decided to take offence at her Downing Street speech last night, in which she tactlessly but accurately said, "so far parliament has done everything possible to avoid a choice", the prospect of enough of them switching to vote for the deal seemed remote.

In which case, I think Britain is heading for a new prime minister and a long delay to Brexit.

There are other possibilities. The UK may leave next Friday, without a deal, if one EU leader vetoes an extension and parliament finds itself unable to cancel Brexit by legislating to revoke the Article 50 notice.

Or parliament may suddenly vote for a softer Brexit, if Jeremy Corbyn offers to support a deal including a permanent customs union hastily added to the non-binding political declaration. Would he really save May's premiership?

The probable outcome of May's likely defeat in "meaningful vote 3" seems to me that she announces her resignation, and the Conservative Party elects a successor while Brexit is put on hold. Then we really are into the unpredictable.

The bookies have Boris Johnson as the favourite in an unusually wide field. A lot of Tory MPs tell me they won't allow him on to the shortlist of two names who would be put to the members for the final choice.

But it is not easy to manipulate the Tory leadership election rules in that way.

What seems probable is that the Tory members - a small but not particularly aged group, average age 57, only four years older than the average Labour member - would choose the more Eurosceptic of the final two candidates.

That means someone who advocates leaving the EU without a deal. Which is a position supported at most by 204 MPs out of 638.

Theresa May's departure is not going to make the Brexit riddle any easier to solve. ( Independent News Service)Britain will hold all the cards. Michael Gove said that, during the referendum campaign. Britain will hold all the cards.

Unfortunately, it seems, they were the two of spades, a joker, and a supermarket loyalty card. And Theresa May has been holding them the wrong way round.

Yesterday's big Brexit summit in Brussels was supposed to be a doddle.

After all, Mrs May had already submitted her request to delay Brexit the day before. In theory, she would turn up, field any questions from the EU leaders, and then, at 6pm, they would all hold triumphant press conferences, to announce their agreement.

But this, of course, is Mrs May's Brexit, where absolutely nothing ever goes to plan, or happens on time. Six o'clock came and went. Then seven o'clock. Then eight. Then nine.

What was going on? What could everyone possibly have found to argue about? The size of font for the press release? What vintage of Bordeaux to have with dinner? No. The problem, it seemed, was the new leaving date. Mrs May had requested June 30. The EU had offered May 22. Mrs May had then, apparently, spent 90 minutes begging them for more time.

In response, the EU had offered her even less. According to one rumour, they'd cut the deadline to May 7. According to another, they'd cut it to April 11. Incredible, isn't it? Has there ever, in the history of politics, been a negotiator quite like Mrs May?

To be fair to the EU, I suppose you can understand their position. If you were subjected to Mrs May droning at you for an hour and a half, you probably wouldn't be in a generous mood either. Maybe we should just be grateful that after 20 minutes or so the EU didn't say: "Arrrgh! That's it! We can't take any more! The UK's leaving date is now yesterday! Your right to freedom of movement no longer applies, Mrs May! Get out now!"

Honestly. We often wonder what our grandchildren will make of all this. I'm starting to think they won't even be allowed to study it, for the sake of their mental well-being. Books about Mrs May's handling of Brexit will be sold only to people who can prove they're over 18.

But perhaps it wasn't all Mrs May's fault. Perhaps this was EU reverse psychology. They know that Tory Brexiteers will disagree with anything they say. So they're calculating their reaction will be as follows.

"How dare these Brussels bullies tell us what we can and can't do!" "If we want a longer extension, we'll jolly well have one!" "We demand at least six months!" "A year!" "Two years!"

"In fact, if these Eurocrats aren't careful, we'll stay for good! See how they like that!" ( Daily Telegraph, London)The famed British writer of the early 20th century GK Chesterton once expressed the view that "the reformer is always right about what is wrong" before adding wryly that "he is generally wrong about what is right".

The thought came to mind recently as I read the latest speech from the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin on the need for reform in the Church.

In a little over a month, Dr Martin - a long-time Vatican diplomat who expected to finish out his days in Rome - will be 15 years at the helm in his native Dublin.

His high-flying career in the Holy See came to a halt when he was sent back to Ireland in 2003 as the 'Pope's man' to take over from an embattled Cardinal Desmond Connell.

Mary Raftery's 'Cardinal Secrets' documentary, exposing the mishandling of abuse allegations in Dublin, had dealt a heavy blow to Dr Connell's moral authority, and the Vatican wanted one of its own to take the lead.

Dr Martin has always been the Church's good servant, and he quickly built on the child protection reforms that his predecessor had begun, and ushered in a cultural sea-change in Dublin. Gone were the days of minimal and reluctant co-operation with the State on abuse probes, and transparency and accountability became the order of the day. Dr Martin even stood firm when Cardinal Connell took him to the High Court in a bid to stop the archbishop handing over confidential files to the Murphy Commission investigating abuse mishandling. The cardinal was persuaded to withdraw.

To a sceptical faithful, angered and dismayed at their Church's slowness to act, Dr Martin was a breath of fresh air. His contribution to the Church's now evident culture of putting child protection front and centre is beyond dispute and he has built up considerable capital in that sphere.

His leadership on the much-needed reform of the Church in Ireland is less discernible.

Despite the fact that Dr Martin has been one of the most senior Irish churchmen in the early decades of the 21st century, there is precious little by way of blue-sky thinking when it comes to the reform of the Church. The archbishop has more often resembled a casual observer on Church affairs rather than one of the men with the levers of power.

In Limerick this week, for example, he spoke about the disconnect many women feel from the Church. "We all agree on this, but nothing seems to happen. The alienation of so many women only increases."

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Dr Martin is not in a leadership position to bring about the sort of reform he seems so unable to articulate. Could you imagine the laceration Taoiseach Leo Varadkar would get in the media if he were to express the need to end homelessness before adding wistfully "but nothing seems to happen".

A political leader has maybe four years to make a dramatic impact on his or her country. By the time Dr Martin is due to step down next year, he will have had four times four - a whole 16 years to bring about the reforms he says the Church needs.

Everyone knows the Church in Ireland is haemorrhaging young people in particular. It's a subject the archbishop has spoken about extensively, even expressing the view that one of his biggest regrets is that the Church in Dublin doesn't do more for young people. But here's the rub: under Church law, the bishop is in complete control in his diocese. What he says goes, and what he doesn't want doesn't happen. Yet, Dr Martin has not pioneered any meaningful outreach to young people during his 15 years back in the capital.

Priests and other bishops often speak with frustration about Dr Martin. They speak of a man who is second-to-none in diagnosing what is wrong with the Church. A man who has a keen eye for what has gone wrong and what should be done better, but curiously has no prescription for exactly how to do things better.

But then perhaps Dr Martin had one great mission in him - bringing about accountability for the cover-up of abuse. And in that regard, he has certainly left the Church a lot better than he found it and everyone should be grateful for that.

It's nine years this week since Benedict XVI wrote his landmark letter to the Catholics of Ireland in response to the abuse crisis. In it, he excoriated the bishops for their failings.

He told them that the scandals had "obscured the light of the Gospel to a degree that not even centuries of persecution succeeded in doing".

He was, of course, right. And it's a sobering thought for anyone who knows anything about the history of Catholicism in Ireland and the sacrifices previous generations made to hold on to their faith.

The question now is: will the ancient faith survive in Ireland? It's not at all a given. Practice rates remain high, but if there isn't a priest to celebrate Mass in the future, will people miss it?

Faith is fragile. There's so much talk of Church reform and Church renewal that doesn't lead anywhere. Many committed Catholics are frustrated that there is still no real role for lay voices in Church decision-making.

The mission that Diarmuid Martin has left for his successor is to - with the other bishops - help chart a vision of the future that all people of faith can get behind and find their voice in a Church that is reformed and renewed. He will need to be a man of both vision and action. He will need to be someone who cannot just talk about reform, but who can walk the walk.

This is a defining issue for the Church, and if it does not get it right the institution will continue to decline.Funnily enough, I had the same thought as reader Damien Carroll (Letters, Irish Independent, March 19), but then the alarm clock sounded and I woke up.

Any credence given to Joe Schmidts Machiavellian strategy was immediately discounted upon seeing Wednesdays picture of Schmidt. What he (and all of us) witnessed at Cardiff last Saturday was indeed hair-raising. Time for somebody to tell Joe that hes not infallible, merely a genius. Also its time to cease worshipping at the feet of Sexton and Murray.

A star is only as good as his last game. When that has been pounded into the skulls of these two lads, they will soon return to their original brilliant form, but we must stop idolising them. I think all the Os would agree. No need to mention who all the Great Os of Irish rugby have been.

John W Condon

San Francisco, USA

Brexit vote is being replicated by MPs in House of Commons

The House of Commons represents the people. The people voted by 52pc to 48pc to leave the EU, a slim majority. Why then are we surprised at the apparent impasse in the Commons at present, especially as political games are being played by so many factions inside and outside the governing party?

Perhaps more than a simple majority should be required in future referendums.

Joe Harrison

Spanish Point, Co Clare

Elected mayors would be bureaucracy, not democracy

I was wondering am I alone in thinking that the Governments recent proposal of having elected mayor titles for our cities is not only unnecessary and wasteful of funds, but also shows the same pattern of following in the UKs footsteps. What are they thinking? That Boris Johnson was so popular as an elected mayor of London that this format could work here for would-be politicians to build up a suitable profile and perhaps a stepping stone to higher office, maybe even President?

Or could it be they have planned a last resting station for those soon-to-be-retired politicians who have given their all to public life, spent and worn out, but yet so dedicated that they will manage one last term as mayor, if, and only if, the good people vote for them, of course. What sacrifice, a true public servant.

Perhaps I am too simplistic and it has nothing to do with jobs for the boys and girls.

Instead it is just another planned voting distraction to keep the people busy, thinking they have a say and are changing things, hoping to make the country work.

Brian Walsh

Ballymacarbry, Waterford

Why Bercow is right to tell May to change deal or drop it

If I were a member of Dail Eireann and I put a motion forward that all citizens must wear Leo Varadkar T-shirts to work on Tuesdays, no doubt it would be voted down. That is how it works.

If I came back week after week with slight amendments to that proposal, eventually I would be taken aside and asked to drop it.

Rightly so. You cant keep coming back to parliament with the same proposal week after week, just to watch it fail.

The British speaker of the House is well within his rights to tell the British prime minister: Enough! Otherwise, we could hypothetically go on forever asking the Dail to vote on the motion requiring every Irish citizen to wear T-shirts with Leo Varadkars photo, and nothing else would get done.

Imagine the prospect.

Billy ORiordan

Clonmel, Co Tipperary

US voters need to engage with progressive Democrat values

There has been a lot of comment over the past week concerning the latest Democrat to throw his hat into the ring for the Democratic nomination for its presidential candidate. Beto ORourke wowed the mid-west voters in his foray into their unknown land, albeit mostly Republicans.

Beto raised $6.1m (5.4m) for his campaign in 24 hours. Beto is the good-looking equivalent of Jack Kennedy or Justin Trudeau, but of similar centrist, millionaire, big-business values. In short, ORourke is of what Noam Chomsky refers to as the donor class. That is, the subscribers and recipients of monetary, and other support, to enable both to continue to dominate and control the USA for their own continued benefit. The Kennedy family, the Bush family, the Clinton family, Reagan, Carter. Isnt this precisely why America voted in Trump as president?

Is it asking too much of the American people to understand their own history and open their eyes to the progressive political strands of the Democratic Party gathering increasing speed. Would that these changes were taking place in our own politically regressive and moribund country.

Harry OSullivan

Mount Merrion, Co DublinPrincess Eugenie of York during a visit to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital to open the new Stanmore Building on March 21, 2019 in Stanmore, Greater London. (Photo by David Mirzoeff - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Princess Eugenie of York and Jack Brooksbank arrive at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital to open the new Stanmore Building on March 21, 2019 in Stanmore, Greater London. (Photo by David Mirzoeff - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Princess Eugenie of York and Jack Brooksbank during a visit to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital to open the new Stanmore Building on March 21, 2019 in Stanmore, Greater London. (Photo by David Mirzoeff - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

If there's one things royals love, it's a hair accessory and Britain's Princess Eugenie added the perfect injection of youthful elegance during her first official engagement since her wedding last year.

Eugenie, who made positive headlines around the world when she showcased her scoliosis surgery scar in her wedding dress, joined her father Prince Andrew and husband Jack Brooksbank for a visit to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH) in London to officially open the new Stanmore Building.

Although Eugenie isn't a full-time royal (she works as director of art gallery Hauser & Wirth), she joins her father and grandmother Queen Elizabeth on select occasions and uses her profile to boost personal causes. It was also favourable timing as Meghan Markle is officially on her maternity leave preparing for the impending arrival of her first child with Prince Harry and Kate Middleton is in the process of stepping up her own role to play a more central part in the family business, but the appetite for royal content remains as voracious as ever.

The 28-year-old went for a contemporary twist on vintage elegance, wearing a cream tweed dress by Maje, a pair of black suede pumps, shunning the traditional clutch in favour of Chloe's Nile small bracelet bag and a leather headband, in a subtle fashion power move which has separated her from the inevitable comparisons between her famous family members. She's previously championed the look at Christmas service in December, spurring more than a few websites to note the similarities between her ensemble and that of Gossip Girl's Blair Waldorf.

At the age of 12, Eugenie underwent eight hours of surgery to correct a spinal misalignment at the RNOH and is a patron of the hospital. "During my operation, which took eight hours, my surgeons inserted eight-inch titanium rods into each side of my spine and one-and-a-half inch screws at the top of my neck. After three days in intensive care, I spent a week on a ward and six days in a wheelchair, but I was walking again after that," she said last year.

"Without the care I received at the RNOH I wouldn't look the way I do now; my back would be hunched over. And I wouldn't be able to talk about scoliosis the way I now do, and help other children who come to me with the same problem. My back problems were a huge part of my life, as they would be for any 12-year-old. Children can look at me now and know that the operation works. Im living proof of the ways in which the hospital can change peoples lives."

Expand Close Princess Eugenie of York and Jack Brooksbank arrive at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital to open the new Stanmore Building on March 21, 2019 in Stanmore, Greater London. (Photo by David Mirzoeff - WPA Pool/Getty Images) / Facebook

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In recent months, she has has become a more visible spokesperson for other scoliosis sufferers and told the Telegraph in December that she has found a sense of healing in sharing her journey to self-acceptance.

"Your scars are a way of communicating, and sharing a trauma can be healing in so many ways. It can release that stigma you might have given to yourself and by talking about it you can show people how they can heal, too. I believe scars are like memories that tell a story on your body, that remind you how strong you had to be, and that you survived to talk about it."PHOTOS How often you should wash your jeans and everything else in your life

Laundry is, by nature, a chore. The sort of task you push further and further down the to-do list until its been three weeks and you cannot stand to wear those out-of-fashion jeans any longer. But clothes are not all that need washing. There are carpets and curtains and stuffed animals and makeup brushes too. Heres a breakdown of how often to wash everything in your life from gym joggers to that pesky carpet. But remember, check all product labels for brand-specific recommendations before starting your spring cleaning spree.Ethiopian Airlines crew members mourn as pallbearers carry coffins of their colleagues at the Holy Trinity Cathedral Orthodox church in Addis Ababa. Photo: Tiksa Negeri/Reuters

The captain of a doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight did not get a chance to practice on his airline's new simulator for the Boeing 737 Max 8 before he died in a crash with 157 others, a pilot colleague said.

Captain Yared Getachew (29) was due for refresher training at the end of March, his colleague said, two months after Ethiopian Airlines had received one of the first such simulators being distributed.

The March 10 disaster, following another Max 8 crash in Indonesia in October, has set off one of the biggest inquiries in aviation history, focused on the safety of a new automated system and whether crews understood it properly.

In both cases, the pilots lost control soon after take-off and fought a losing battle to stop their jets plunging down.

The Max, which came into service two years ago, has a new automated system called MCAS (Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System). It is meant to prevent loss of lift which can cause an aerodynamic stall sending the plane downwards in an uncontrolled way.

"Boeing did not send manuals on MCAS," the Ethiopian Airlines pilot told Reuters, declining to give his name.

"Actually we know more about the MCAS system from the media than from Boeing."

The world's largest planemaker has said airlines were given guidance on how to respond to the activation of MCAS software. It is also promising a swift update.

"I think that the differences between the 737 NG and the Max were underplayed by Boeing," said John Cox, an aviation safety consultant.

"Consequently the simulator manufacturers were not pushing it either. The operators didn't realise the magnitude of the differences."

Ethiopian Airlines said its pilots had completed training recommended by Boeing.Theresa May has ruled out cancelling the Brexit countdown despite a public petition soaring past two million signatures.

The Prime Minister said she did not believe in halting the deadline after the EU offered a delay plan, adding: I do not believe that we should be revoking Article 50.

With the highest sign-up rate on record, more than 2,000,000 people had pledged their support by the time she fielded questions from reporters in Brussels on Thursday.

Asked by the Press Association whether she thought the publics view had shifted towards revoking Article 50, Mrs May said: If you look back to what happened in the referendum, we saw the biggest democratic exercise in our history.

And there was a clear result that we should leave the European Union.

We said heres the vote, what is your decision, and we will deliver on it.

And I believe its our duty as a Government and as a Parliament to deliver on that vote.

There was a clear result that we should leave the European UnionTheresa May

The petition on the Parliament website quickly gained support in the wake of the Prime Ministers speech on Wednesday night and Revoke Article 50 started to trend on Twitter.

As of 6am on Friday, nearly 2.3 million people had pledged their support to the cause.

Data from the petitions website shows support for the petition concentrated in London and constituencies around Cambridge, Brighton, Bristol, Oxford and Edinburgh.

In the 2016 referendum, these six cities were also in favour of Remain.

During her Downing Street statement, Mrs May controversially blamed MPs for failing to stick to the result of the 2016 vote and told the public: I am on your side.

The Petitions Committee said nearly 2,000 signatures were being completed every minute over Thursday lunchtime, crashing the website because of the unprecedented hit-rate.

It quickly passed the 100,000-signature threshold needed for it to be debated in Parliament.

The rate of signing is the highest the site has ever had to deal with and we have had to make some changes to ensure the site remains stable and open for signatures and new petitions. Thanks for bearing with us.  Petitions Committee (@HoCpetitions) March 21, 2019

On Thursday, EU leaders said Brexit could be delayed from March 29 to May 22  but only on the condition that MPs vote for Mrs Mays deal next week.

If it is rejected in the third meaningful vote then the UK would have until April 12 to tell the European Council a way forward.

An extension could continue for several more months if Britain agreed to vote in Mays European Parliament elections.

A House of Commons spokesman said: We know that the petitions website has been experiencing problems due to the number of people using the site.

This is a mixture of people signing petitions and refreshing the site to see changes to the number of signatures.

The majority of people are now able to use the website and we and the Government Digital Service are working to fix any outstanding problems as soon as possible.Ethiopian Airlines crew members mourn as pallbearers carry coffins of their colleagues at the Holy Trinity Cathedral Orthodox church in Addis Ababa. Photo: Tiksa Negeri/Reuters

Indonesia's national airline is seeking the cancellation of a multibillion-pound order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 jets, citing a loss of confidence after two crashes in the past six months.

It is the first announcement of a cancellation since Boeing's new model aircraft were grounded following fatal crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

PT Garuda Indonesia, which ordered 50 Max 8 jets in 2014 and had received just one plane last year, sent a letter to Boeing last week requesting to cancel the order worth 4.9 billion dollars (3.7 billion), the company's spokesman Ikhsan Rosan said.

The carrier has so far paid Boeing about 26 million (19 million) for the order.

Garuda joined other airlines worldwide in grounding Max 8 jets after the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight this month which killed all 157 people aboard.

It came less than five months after 189 people died in the October 29 crash of another Max 8, operated by Indonesian private airline Lion Air.

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"Passengers always ask what type of plane they will fly as they have lost trust and confidence in the Max 8 jet," Mr Rosan said. "This would harm our business."

He said Garuda plans to meet Boeing representatives next week in Jakarta to discuss details of cancelling the order.

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"We don't want to use Max jets ... but maybe will consider switching it with another Boeing model of plane."

He said Indonesian passengers are afraid to take flights using any Max model, whether it's the 8, 9 or 10 series.

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A preliminary report from Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee in December stopped short of declaring a probable cause of the October crash.

Officials have provided scant details since then, saying they are still analysing data from a cockpit voice recorder that was only recovered from the sea in January.Vietnamese authorities have ordered monks at a popular Buddhist pagoda to stop "soul summoning" and "bad karma eviction" ceremonies after an investigation found the rituals were a scam.

The state-run Lao Dong newspaper said tens of thousands of worshippers have been paying the 18th century Ba Vang pagoda in northern Quang Ninh province between 32 and 10,000 to have their bad karma vanquished.

The Committee for Religious Affairs, a government body, issued a statement on its website saying "the ritual goes against Buddhist philosophy and violates Vietnam's law on religion and folk beliefs".

"It has a negative impact on social order and security," it added.

Monks at the pagoda teach that all illnesses and misfortune result from bad deeds in previous lives.

Three times a month, they hold a two-day ceremony to "summon wandering souls" and "remove bad karma", demanding donations, supposedly representing good deeds, to help cure bad karma and make up for supposed bad deeds in previous lives.

Such rituals have been going on for years, but the practice has drawn unfavourable attention as the amounts demanded by the monks soared to the point where they began taking payments by bank transfers and instalments.

Public outrage flared when an inspirational speaker associated with the pagoda blamed a victim for being gang raped, saying she had committed evil acts in a past life.

The 20-year-old college student was taken hostage and raped by five men for two days before she was killed on the eve of the February 5 Lunar New Year.

"The teaching was hurtful and disrespectful to the soul of my daughter," Tuoi Tre, another official newspaper, quoted the woman's mother as saying.

The monks also teach that homosexuality comes from bad karma and should be "cured" by having people of the opposite sex spend time together.

"Vindictive wandering souls follow people. They bring you illness, marriage problems and make your children unwell. We have the power to summon the souls and evict them," the abbot of the pagoda, Thich Truc Thai Minh, told followers during a gathering that was live-streamed on social media on Thursday.

A reporter for Lao Dong shot a video at the pagoda showing a monk telling another woman, who was distraught over losing her only child: "It's your karma. In previous life, you were a witch.

"And the wandering soul says it will take your life, too. Not just your child."

Ba Vang pagoda was built on a mountain slope in the Uong Bi district of Quang Ninh province. It was recently renovated and expanded to become one of Vietnam's largest pagoda complexes.

Only a minority of Vietnam's 95 million people follow Buddhism, but many non-Buddhists go to pagodas and temples and practice a form of folk religion that includes some Buddhist practices.

Religions that are not registered with the government are prohibited. The Ba Vang pagoda belongs to a registered Vietnamese Buddhist association.New Zealand will ban all military-style semi-automatic (MSSA) weapons and assault rifles under tough new gun laws following the killing of 50 people in its worst mass shooting, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.

In the immediate aftermath of last Friday's shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, Ms Ardern announced New Zealand's gun laws would change.

"On March 15 our history changed forever. Now, our laws will too. We are announcing action today on behalf of all New Zealanders to strengthen our gun laws and make our country a safer place," she said.

Ms Ardern said she expected the new laws to be in place by April 11 and a buy-back scheme costing up to NZ$200m (121m) would be established for banned weapons.

Massacre

Australia banned semi-automatic weapons and launched a gun buy-back after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 in which 35 people were killed.

Ms Ardern said that the law would allow for strictly enforced exemptions for farmers for pest control.

"I strongly believe that the vast majority of legitimate gun owners will understand that these moves are in the national interest, and will take these changes in their stride," she said.

Federated Farmers, which represent thousands of farmers in New Zealand, said it supported the new laws.

"This will not be popular among some of our members, but we believe this is the only practicable solution," a spokesman said.

Australian Brenton Tarrant (28), a suspected white supremacist who was living in Dunedin, on New Zealand's South Island, has been charged with murder. He was remanded without a plea and is due back in court on April 5.Rescuers near the site of the explosion (Chinatopix/AP)

The death toll in an explosion at a chemical plant in eastern China has risen to 47, with hundreds of others injured.

Thursdays blast at the Tianjiayi chemical plant in the city of Yancheng is one of Chinas worst industrial accidents in years, and has left 90 people in a serious condition in hospital.

Nearly 1,000 area residents have been moved to safety as a precaution against leaks and additional explosions, the city government said.

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Windows in buildings as far as three miles away were blown out by the force of the blast.

The city government statement said 3,500 medical workers at 16 hospitals had been mobilised to treat the injured, dozens of whom remain in critical condition.

The blast created a crater and more than 900 firefighters were deployed to extinguish a fire that burned into the night.

The cause of the explosion remains under investigation.

Chinese president Xi Jinping, on a state visit to Italy, demanded all-out efforts to find and rescue victims, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

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He added: Relief work must be well done to maintain social stability. Meanwhile, environmental monitoring and early warning should be strengthened to prevent environmental pollution as well as secondary disasters.

China experiences frequent industrial accidents despite orders from the central government to improve safety at factories, power plants and mines.

Among the worst accidents was a massive 2015 explosion at a chemical warehouse in the port city of Tianjin that killed 173 people, most of them firefighters and police officers.

In November, at least 22 people were killed and scores of vehicles destroyed in an explosion outside a chemical plant in the north-eastern city of Zhangjiakou, which will host competitions in the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Thursdays disaster occurred at a factory run by the Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical company. Located among a cluster of chemical factories in Yancheng, it has a dismal safety record.

In February 2018, Chinas State Administration for Work Safety cited 13 types of safety hazards at the company, including mishandling of tanks of toxic benzene, the source of Thursdays explosion.

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Those violations came despite the plant having racked up 1,790,000 RMB (203,000) in fines since 2016 for violations of environmental regulations, according to judgments issued by local county and city environmental protection bodies.

Those included improperly dealing with hazardous waste and evading air pollution supervision.

A 2017 explosion that killed 10 at a nearby plant prompted Chinas national safety regulator, the State Administration of Work Safety, to dispatch inspectors.

They discovered over 200 safety hazards at chemical factories in Yancheng and four nearby cities, including 13 at the Tianjiayi plant.

Safety hazards cited included leaks and drips, employees who did not understand safety procedures, and a lack of emergency shut-off valves on tanks carrying flammable chemicals.

In 2014, the companys chairman, Zhang Qinyue, and Wu Guozhong, its former supply chief, were arrested on suspicion of dumping and burying hazardous waste by-products near a temple and a village landfill, according to a Jiangsu court criminal judgement.

They were convicted in 2017 and the company was fined 1,000,000 RMB (113,000).The "calculating and remorseless" teenager who raped and murdered six-year-old Alesha MacPhail has been locked up for at least 27 years as he admitted the crime.

Aaron Campbell (16) snatched Alesha from her bed as she slept at her grandparents' home on the Isle of Bute last summer.

He was convicted at the High Court in Glasgow last month where a jury found him guilty unanimously following a nine-day trial.

Campbell finally admitted the crime in a psychological report prepared ahead of his sentencing yesterday.

Lord Matthews sentenced Campbell to life imprisonment and ordered him to spend at least 27 years behind bars before he can apply for parole, but warned he may never be released. The judge said social work and psychologist reports "had painted a clear picture of a cold, callous, calculating, remorseless and dangerous individual".

After the sentence was read out, members of Alesha's family shouted "evil" and "beast" as Campbell was led down to the cells.File photo dated 22/11/74 of the outside of the Mulberry Bush public house and surrounding buildings in Birmingham the day after the bombings. Photo: PA/PA Wire

A convicted bomber has named four men he claims carried out the 1974 Birmingham pub attacks after telling inquests he had been given permission to do so by the head of the IRA.

The blasts at the Mulberry Bush at the bottom of the city's landmark Rotunda, and the basement Tavern in the Town in nearby New Street, killed 21 people and injured 220 others.

Bereaved families have waited 44 years for fresh inquests, which are now in their fourth week.

On Friday, in a dramatic turn, an anonymous ex-IRA volunteer giving evidence at the inquests, said he had been told by the current head of the IRA, six months ago in Dublin, that he could name those he knew were involved.

The man, identified only as Witness O - speaking over a secure video-link - named the officer commanding (OC) the Birmingham IRA at the time, Seamus McLoughlin, as the person responsible for selecting the targets.

He added that Mick Murray was "one of the bombers", and claimed he recalled Murray telling him there would be "no harm" if similar attacks had been repeated, because of the "chaos" caused.

Pressed by Leslie Thomas QC, the barrister representing nine of the bereaved families, that another member of the bombing team was Michael Hayes, he replied: "Hayes, Hayes - I'll give it (the name) to you now."

But he added, in apparent reference to the Good Friday Agreement: "But he can't be arrested.

"There is nobody going to be charged with this atrocity.

"The British Government have signed an agreement with the IRA."

Then asked about "James Gavin", he replied: "Well, he was (involved), I met him in Dublin and he said he was."

Earlier, the witness had said "I only know about five", claiming at least one of the men was still alive, before adding: "He's no harm to anybody now."

Mr Thomas then asked whether a fifth man, Michael Patrick Reilly, had been involved.

The witness, who earlier told the jury he was a convicted IRA bomber who served a prison sentence in the 1970s, replied: "No, I don't remember him at all.

"Reilly? I would remember that."

The barrister then used an alleged reference to Mr Reilly, used in the book Error Of Judgement by former MP and journalist Chris Mullin, when he asked the former IRA man: "Michael Patrick Reilly, sometimes referred to as 'The Young Planter'?

"You know who he is, don't you?

"He's the one you're protecting, isn't he?"

The witness replied: "Who? Protecting who? No.

"My situation was I was in Manchester, and I came to Birmingham and I was only in Birmingham a couple of weeks."

He made reference in his evidence to two others, identified as "Dublin Dave" and "Socks", who may also have been connected to the bombings.

But it was unclear if either reference was a pseudonym for the other five men named, or were separate individuals.

The witness added of the men he had named: "The police already know who they are, and they haven't done anything."

Witness O, who was in jail at the time of the attacks and said he had no knowledge they were being planned, described the bombings as "an atrocity".

He added that the Birmingham IRA active service unit responsible was "stood down" by the organisation's Army Council following the blasts.

The witness said he had been given permission to speak to the inquests, including giving the bombers' names.

When coroner Sir Peter Thornton QC asked him who had given that authorisation, he replied "The head of the IRA", adding that he had approached the organisation's chief in Dublin six months ago.

Asked by barrister Mr Thomas who that man was, the witness replied: "Well, I'm not telling you his name."

Asked why not, the former IRA man said: "Because he's the head of the IRA. He could be shot dead."

He also claimed to have given McLoughlin's name to two detectives while in HMP Winson Green just days after the bombings, but heard nothing more.

Counsel to the coroner Peter Skelton asked: "Was it the OC of Birmingham who would take decisions about which places to target for the bombs?

"Yes," Witness O replied.

All the men have been named before in connection with the bombings, but never in a formal setting.

Mr Reilly and Mr Hayes have always denied any involvement in the blasts, though Mr Hayes has said he took "collective responsibility" for all IRA attacks in England, including the pub bombings.

Six men, known as the Birmingham Six, were jailed in 1975 for the double bomb attacks, but their convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal in 1991.

Their case remains one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in English legal history.An Irish businessman has won the latest stage of a divorce court fight over money with his English lawyer wife.

The pair met in Australia and lived in the Caribbean but the woman said their last "habitual residence" was in England.

A High Court judge in London has ruled against her.

Mr Justice Cohen, who analysed the latest stage of the case at a private hearing in the Family Division of the High Court, concluded that they had been living together in the Caribbean when they separated.

The man, who works in financial services, began legal proceedings in Australia and Mr Justice Cohen said the woman's cash claims could be dealt with by an Australian judge.

Detail of the case has been outlined in a ruling published by Mr Justice Cohen.

He said the pair, who have a child aged nearly two, could not be identified in media reports of the case.

The judge said the man, whose family live in Dublin, moved to Australia nearly 15 years ago.

The woman, a solicitor, moved to Australia a decade ago.

They married in Australia four years ago and had lived in the Caribbean during 2017 and 2018 after the man got a new job in St Lucia.

The woman left their home in the Caribbean about a year ago and returned alone to England, where she filed a divorce petition.The wreckage of the bus in Milan. Photo: Local Team via Reuters TV/Reuters

A bus full of schoolchildren was hijacked and set on fire by its own driver in an apparent protest against migrant drownings in the Mediterranean, Italian authorities said.

All 51 children managed to escape unhurt before the bus was engulfed in flames on the outskirts of Milan, Italy's business capital.

Police named the driver as Ousseynou Sy, a 47-year-old Italian citizen of Senegalese origin.

"He shouted, 'Stop the deaths at sea, I'll carry out a massacre'," police spokesman Marco Palmieri quoted Mr Sy as telling police after his arrest.

A video posted on Italian news sites showed the driver ramming the bus into cars on a provincial highway before the fire took hold. Children can be seen running away from the vehicle screaming and shouting "escape".

One of the children told reporters that the driver had threatened to pour petrol over them and set them alight. One of group managed to call the police, who rushed to the scene and broke the bus windows to get everyone to safety.

Mr Palmieri said some children were taken to hospital as a precautionary measure because they had bruises or were in a state of shock, but none suffered serious injuries. A teacher with the middle-school children was quoted by Ansa news agency as saying that the driver had said he wanted to get to the runway at Milan's Linate Airport.

An unnamed girl was also quoted as saying that Mr Sy blamed deputy prime ministers Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio for the deaths of African migrants at sea.

The United Nations estimates that some 2,297 migrants drowned or went missing in the Mediterranean in 2018 as they tried to reach Europe.

A Libyan security official said on Tuesday that at least 10 migrants died when their boat sank off the Libyan coast near the western town of Sabratha.

The Italian government has closed its ports to charity rescue ships that pick up migrants off the Libyan coast. Mr Salvini says this has helped reduce deaths because far fewer people are now taking to the sea.

Human rights groups say deaths might have increased with hardly any boats now searching for the would-be refugees.A tram passes flowers at the site of a shooting incident in a tram in Utrecht, Netherlands (Peter Dejong/AP)

The main suspect in a deadly shooting in a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht has confessed to the attack and said he acted alone, prosecutors announced.

The shooting is being investigated as a possible extremist attack, but prosecutors would not say if the suspect, Gokmen Tanis, has said anything about his motive.

"The 37-year-old suspect this morning confessed the criminal acts he is charged with" at a hearing before an investigating judge, the public prosecutor's office said in a statement.

Prosecutors did not elaborate on the confession and said the motive for Monday's attack, which left three people dead and three more seriously wounded, remains under investigation.

Tanis, a Utrecht resident of Turkish descent, was arrested hours after the shooting and is being held on charges including multiple murder or manslaughter with terrorist intent.

Prosecutors have said Tanis, who has a long criminal record, did not know any of those who were shot on the tram, according to their investigations so far.

They say the nature of the shooting and a note found in a getaway car led to strong suspicions of an extremist motive.

On Thursday, the local prosecution office said investigations are also continuing into whether the suspect's actions "flowed from personal problems combined with a radicalised ideology".

The team investigating the shooting has asked a forensic psychiatry and psychology institute to carry out a personality test on Tanis.

At Friday's closed hearing, an investigating judge extended Tanis's detention by two weeks so investigations can continue. In a statement, the court said the judge ruled that "the suspicion is strong enough to detain the man for longer".

A 40-year-old man who was detained a day after the shooting because Tanis was arrested at his home has been released without charge after no evidence was found that he helped in the shooting, prosecutors said.

Later on Friday, a silent march will be held from Utrecht's main railway station to the junction where the shooting happened in a show of solidarity with the victims.

Prime minister Mark Rutte and the mayors of the Netherlands' four biggest cities are to take part.Masked security forces detained a key aide to Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido in a raid on his home early yesterday, arriving in a convoy of vehicles and breaking down his door in a show of force that escalated tensions with the United States.

Lawyer Roberto Marrero was taken away by intelligence agents in an overnight operation that was promptly condemned by Mr Guaido as well as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who called for the immediate release of the opposition figure. "We will hold accountable those involved," Mr Pompeo tweeted.

The US has imposed oil sanctions on Venezuela as well as individuals linked to President Nicolas Maduro in an attempt to force him from power. President Donald Trump has said tougher sanctions could occur and that "all options are on the table", a remark Mr Maduro and his ally, Russia, have interpreted as a possible prelude to military intervention.

The Venezuelan government had no immediate comment on Mr Marrero's detention, which represented a sharp increase in police pressure on the opposition after a period of relative calm.

Mr Guaido had even said that the government was ignoring him in an attempt to sap the energy of the opposition, though Mr Maduro has often described his adversary as a "puppet" and a "clown".

Mr Marrero reported the raid in a telephone call whose recording circulated on social media soon after the operation occurred. As he described how a large group of intelligence officials was entering his home, heavy thuds could be heard in the background.

The neighbouring home of opposition lawmaker Sergio Vergara was also searched.

Mr Vergara said he was woken up by heavy banging at his door and agents pointed weapons at him.An Iraqi rescue helicopter searches for survivors over the site where an overloaded ferry sank in the Tigris river near Mosul in Iraq. Photo: Reuters

A ferry overloaded with people celebrating the Kurdish new year sank in the Tigris River near the Iraqi city of Mosul yesterday, killing at least 55 people, mostly women and children, officials said.

Col Hussam Khalil, head of the Civil Defence in the northern Nineveh province, told the Associated Press the accident occurred as scores of people were out in a tourist area celebrating Nowruz, which marks the Kurdish new year and the arrival of spring.

Health Ministry spokesman Seif al-Badr said the dead include 33 women, 12 children and 10 men. He said 30 people were rescued, adding that search operations were still under way as it was not known how many people were aboard the ferry.

Col Khalil said the ferry sank because of a technical problem, and that there weren't many boats in the area to rescue people. He said more than 80 people were on the ferry when it sank.

The river's level was high because of a rainy season that brought more precipitation than in previous years.

Nowruz, or the Persian new year, dates back to 1700BC and incorporates Zoroastrian traditions.

It is celebrated across territories that once made up the ancient Persian empire, stretching from the Middle East to Central Asia.New Zealands deputy prime minister says the man accused of killing 50 people in two mosques will spend the rest of his life in isolation in prison and called for solidarity to eradicate hate-filled ideologies.

Winston Peters was speaking at an emergency session of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Co-operations executive committee called by Turkey to combat prejudice against Muslims after the attack.

Mr Peters attendance comes amid controversy sparked by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who, at election campaign rallies, has been screening video clips of the attack, despite efforts by New Zealand to prevent the videos spread.

Mr Erdogan also drew Australias anger for comments suggesting Australians and New Zealanders with anti-Muslim sentiments would be sent back in coffins like their ancestors who fought against Turks in the First World War Battle of Gallipoli.

Mr Peters took a conciliatory tone on Friday, welcoming comments by Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who said at a news conference at the end of the OIC meeting that Australians and New Zealanders visiting Turkey would be greeted at Gallipoli remembrance ceremonies next month with the same welcoming hospitality as they always were.

Mr Peters said: We are returning home to New Zealand with a grateful assurance that our people will come here to commemorate Anzac and will be as welcome as they always were.

He said he did not discuss Mr Erdogans use of the footage with Turkeys foreign minister or president.

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I did not see any sound, peaceful purposes in raising it, Mr Peters said, adding that they had received very assuring information from the Turkish presidency.

Mr Peters told representatives of Muslim nations: No punishment can match the depravity of (the gunmans) crime but the families of the fallen will have justice.

He also screened moving photographs of New Zealanders mourning the victims.

Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, was arrested and charged with murder. The gunman livestreamed the attack and released a manifesto describing his white supremacist views and how he planned the shootings.

The OIC urged all countries to refrain from statements and policies that associate Islam with terror and extremism. It also demanded that March 15  the day of the Christchurch attack  be marked as the International Day of Solidarity Against Islamophobia.

Family Photo of the #OIC open-ended emergency meeting of the Executive Committee at the level of Foreign Ministers in #Istanbul, #Turkey, to discuss the terrorist attack on two mosques in #Christchurch, #NewZealand. #OICNewZealandTerrorism #ChristchurchMosqueAttack pic.twitter.com/Nv3GyeijuE  OIC (@OIC_OCI) March 22, 2019

Addressing the OIC meeting on Friday, Mr Erdogan praised New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, saying her reaction, the empathy displayed, and her solidarity with Muslims should serve as an example to all leaders.

He condemned populist politicians who he said encouraged attacks on Muslims and refugees.

Politicians who pave themselves the road to power by alienating Muslims and creating enemies out of refugees must pull themselves together.

He also called for neo-Nazi groups to be considered terrorists.

He said: If we dont show our reaction in a strong manner, the neo-Nazi virus will engulf the body even more. If we dont raise our voices, Western governments will not disrupt their comfort.Special Counsel Robert Mueller has handed in a keenly awaited report on his investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election and any potential wrongdoing by US President Donald Trump, the Justice Department said on Friday.

Mueller submitted the report to Attorney General William Barr, the top U.S. law enforcement official, the department said.

The report was not immediately made public - Barr will have to decide how much to disclose - and it was not known if Mueller found criminal conduct by Trump or his campaign, beyond the charges already brought against several aides.

Mueller, a former FBI director, had been examining since 2017 whether Trump's campaign conspired with Moscow to try to influence the election and whether the Republican president later unlawfully tried to obstruct his investigation.

Trump has denied collusion and obstruction. Russia has denied election interference.

In a letter to lawmakers, Barr said Mueller had concluded the probe, that he is reviewing the report and will be consulting the deputy attorney general and Mueller to determine what information from it can be released to Congress.

Barr, a Trump appointee confirmed by the Senate in February, told the lawmakers he may be able to provide information to Congress on the report's findings as soon as this weekend. He offered no details of Mueller's findings.

"The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course. The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsel's report," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

Under the regulations governing special counsel investigations, the attorney general must share an outline of Mueller's report with Democratic and Republican leaders of the judiciary committees in Congress but it is largely up to him what to make public.

Read More

The Russia investigation has cast a shadow over Trump's presidency and ensnared key figures including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and national security adviser Michael Flynn, who already have either been convicted or pleaded guilty to charges brought by Mueller. The big question now is whether the report contains allegations of wrongdoing by Trump himself.

Trump has sought to discredit the investigation, calling it a "witch hunt" and accusing Mueller of conflicts of interest. On

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Moscow meddled in the election with a campaign of email hacking and online propaganda aimed at sowing discord in the United States, hurting Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and helping Trump.

Mueller's investigators have looked into a large number of contacts between people associated with Trump's campaign and Russia such as a meeting in New York's Trump Tower between members of the president's inner circle including his eldest son and a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer five months before the election.

Mueller sought to determine whether the campaign coordinated with Moscow, though it was not immediately clear whether the special counsel found evidence of a conspiracy.

Mueller also examined whether Trump committed obstruction of justice by trying to hinder the investigation, looking into acts such as urging FBI Director James Comey to drop a probe of Flynn's contacts with Russia, the subsequent firing of Comey, his attacks on the special counsel, dangling of pardons for former aides and the ouster of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Mueller has brought charges against 34 people, including Russian intelligence officers, and three Russian companies, including one described as a "troll farm."

Regardless of whether the report is released, Mueller's team already has signaled the direction of the investigation through indictments and hundreds of related court filings that have offered extensive details about Russian interference in the election.

Trump fired Flynn in February 2017 after it emerged that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and the FBI about his dealings with the then-Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. In May 2017, he ousted Comey, whose agency had been leading the Russia investigation. Comey's firing led the Justice Department's No. 2 official, Rod Rosenstein, to appoint Mueller to take over the probe.

Congressional Democrats, who took over control of the U.S. House of Representatives in January, have said they plan to push for a release of the full Mueller report and said they would subpoena it and file suit if necessary.

A small number of House Democrats have pushed for Congress to impeach Trump and remove him from office but the party's leadership including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged caution. No president has every been removed from office via impeachment.

Several House committees in the meantime are conducting aggressive investigations of Trump and people around him.

The last president to be impeached by the House, Democrat Bill Clinton, was acquitted by the Senate in 1999 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, meaning he was not removed from office.

In prosecuting Manafort, Mueller showed how the former campaign chairman made millions of dollars working for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, while also exposing his ties to a consultant who the special counsel said was connected to Russian intelligence. Manafort in the two cases prosecuted by Mueller's team was sentenced to 7-1/2 years in prison.

The special counsel's case against Cohen revealed that Trump was negotiating to build a skyscraper in Moscow late into the 2016 campaign, contradicting statements from Trump at the time that he had nothing to do with the Russians.

The special counsel also indicted longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, a Republican operative and a self-proclaimed political "dirty trickster." Stone is accused of telling members of Trump's campaign that he knew in advance of plans by the WikiLeaks website to release emails damaging to Clinton that were stolen by Russia.Residents in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul have blocked a road where a presidential convoy was passing, in a protest over the sinking of a ferry in the Tigris River that killed 95 people.

The crowds chanted no to corruption and pelted the provincial governors car with stones.

The visit to Mosul by President Barham Saleh came as search teams were still trying to find more bodies after the ferry capsized on Thursday with dozens on board, including families with children.

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The boat was overloaded with holidaymakers celebrating both Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and also Mothers Day,

The death toll rose to 95 on Friday, after another body was found.

The protesters did not harm Mr Saleh but shortly afterwards, pelted the SUV of the governor of Nineveh province, Nofal al-Akoub, with bottles and stones, demanding that he be sacked.

A video soon emerged showing the two incidents. In one, Mr Saleh is seen speaking from his car window with the protesters, many of whom were young men.

He had rushed to Mosul where he held meetings with security officials over the sinking of the ferry.

The other video shows protesters pelting the governors vehicle and breaking the windscreen before it speeds away.

The spiritual leader of Iraqs Shia majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called for accountability for those responsible for the sinking and urged officials whose ministries were linked to the tragedy to resign.

His message was delivered by his representative Ahmed al-Safi in the Shia holy city of Karbala.

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Prime minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi ordered an investigation and also briefly visited Mosul, where he declared three days of national mourning.

Judicial authorities ordered the arrest of nine workers operating the ferry. The men were detained and an arrest warrant is out for the owner of the tourist island where it was headed.

The sinking of the ferry was a tragic blow to Iraqs second-largest city which is still struggling to overcome the devastation wreaked by the Islamic State group.

IS captured Mosul in summer 2014, making the city its main stronghold in Iraq. After US-backed Iraqi forces retook the city three years later, in July 2017, much of the area was in ruins.President Donald Trump said the sanctions were not needed (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

Donald Trump said he has reversed his administrations decision to slap new sanctions on North Korea.

His press secretary explained that the President likes leader Kim Jong Un and does not think the measures are necessary.

It is unclear, however, which sanctions Mr Trump was referencing in his tweet, which took Treasury officials by surprise.

It was announced today by the US Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea, Mr Trump wrote from his private club in Palm Beach.

I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about which sanctions Mr Trump was referring to.

On Thursday, his administration did sanction two Chinese shipping companies suspected of helping North Korea evade sanctions  the first targeted actions taken against Pyongyang since Mr Trump and Mr Kim met in Hanoi, Vietnam, last month for negotiations about North Koreas nuclear weapons programme.

The summit ended without a deal.

Mr Trumps national security adviser John Bolton had described that step as Important action, tweeting, The maritime industry must do more to stop North Koreas illicit shipping practices.

Important actions today from @USTreasury; the maritime industry must do more to stop North Koreas illicit shipping practices. Everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Koreas sanctions evasion. https://t.co/AVnOPrWbH6  John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) March 21, 2019

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said that Mr Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesnt think these sanctions will be necessary.

The White House had said Thursdays sanctions were evidence the US was maintaining pressure on North Korea in an effort to coax its leader to give up his nuclear weapons programme.

The Treasury Department sanctioned Dalian Haibo International Freight and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding for using deceptive methods to circumvent international and US sanctions and the US commitment to implementing existing UN Security Council resolutions.US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has told a Christian broadcast network it is possible that Donald Trump is like Queen Esther, who saved Jews in the Old Testament.

Mr Pompeo made the statement in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network on his trip to the Middle East.

The interviewer asked if the president is like Queen Esther, who interceded with her husband to save Jews in what was then Persia and is now Iran.

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Mr Trump has backed new sanctions on Tehran aimed at reducing its ability to threaten Israel.

Mr Pompeo said in response to the question: As a Christian, I certainly believe thats possible.

The secretary of state recently drew criticism for holding a briefing exclusively for faith-based journalists.The main suspect in a deadly shooting in a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht has confessed to the attack and said he acted alone, prosecutors announced.

The shooting is being investigated as a possible extremist attack, but prosecutors would not say if the suspect, Gokmen Tanis, has said anything about his motive.

The 37-year-old suspect this morning confessed the criminal acts he is charged with at a hearing before an investigating judge, the public prosecutors office said in a statement.

Prosecutors did not elaborate on the confession and said the motive for Mondays attack, which left three people dead and three more seriously wounded, remains under investigation.

Tanis, a Utrecht resident of Turkish descent, was arrested hours after the shooting and is being held on charges including multiple murder or manslaughter with terrorist intent.

Prosecutors have said Tanis, who has a long criminal record, did not know any of those who were shot on the tram, according to their investigations so far.

They say the nature of the shooting and a note found in a getaway car led to strong suspicions of an extremist motive.

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On Thursday, the local prosecution office said investigations are also continuing into whether the suspects actions flowed from personal problems combined with a radicalised ideology.

The team investigating the shooting has asked a forensic psychiatry and psychology institute to carry out a personality test on Tanis.

At Fridays closed hearing, an investigating judge extended Taniss detention by two weeks so investigations can continue. In a statement, the court said the judge ruled that the suspicion is strong enough to detain the man for longer.

A 40-year-old man who was detained a day after the shooting because Tanis was arrested at his home has been released without charge after no evidence was found that he helped in the shooting, prosecutors said.

Later on Friday, a silent march will be held from Utrechts main railway station to the junction where the shooting happened in a show of solidarity with the victims.

Prime minister Mark Rutte and the mayors of the Netherlands four biggest cities are to take part.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  A bus went up in flames along EDSA-Shaw during rush hour Friday night, and is expected to stall traffic in the coming hours.

"Traffic is bad as always pero malala to hindi nagalaw hanggang Magallanes," Metro Manila Development Authority spokesperson Celine Pialago told CNN Philippines.

[Translation: Traffic is bad as always. It gets worse up to EDSA-Magallanes.]

Police officer Jerome Maggay, who was stationed near the area, said that the Alabang-Novaliches bus was able to park properly and evacuate the passengers before the bus completely caught fire.

"Mga 6:30 umuusok na po siya... mga five to ten minutes yun na po nasunog na po siya. Umapoy yung pwetan... nakababa po lahat ng pasahero," Maggay told CNN Philippines.

[Translation: Smoke was already seen from the bus around 6:30 pm, it was completely engulfed in flames five to ten minutes later. The fire started from the rear end. All passengers were able to leave the bus safely.]

Bus driver Judan Repuela said that a passenger alerted him about the smoke. He told every one on board not to panic so they can all get off the bus safely.

"Sabi ng pasahero 'kuya, umuusok.' Sabi ko wag kayong mag-panic. Itabi ko ng ayos para makababa kayo ng ayos," Repuela told CNN Philippines.

[Translation: A passenger told me about the smoke. I told them not to panic because I'll pull the bus over so they can all alight safely.]

Asked about how the fire started, the driver said that it was faulty electrical wiring.

Firefighters on the scene suspected the same thing, adding that the explosion heard by people nearby came from the gas tank.

Witnesses said that Repuela was last to leave the bus.

CNN Philippines' Carloyn Bonquin, Luchi de Guzman, and Xave Gregorio contributed to this report.As special counsel Robert Mueller concluded his Russia investigation, here is a look at the key names who are likely to feature in the report.

 Paul Manafort

The former campaign chairman of Donald Trumps campaign has been convicted in Washington and Virginia of crimes related to years of Ukrainian political consulting work, including allegations he concealed his foreign government work from the United States and failed to pay taxes on it. Though the charges do not directly touch Mr Trump, he nonetheless remained a figure of considerable intrigue and enjoys the continued sympathy of the President, who has left open the door for a pardon. He is now serving a more than seven-year prison sentence.

 Michael Flynn

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Mr Trumps former national security adviser pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI just days after Mr Trump took office by telling agents that he had never discussed sanctions with the-then Russian ambassador to the United States. The White House said Flynn had misled administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, about the conversation and ousted him weeks later. He has since become a vital cooperator for Mr Mueller, having met 19 times with investigators. Prosecutors are not recommending any prison time when he is sentenced next week.

 Michael Cohen

Mr Trumps long-time lawyer and fixer is at the centre of not only Mr Muellers investigation but also a separate, and rapidly mushrooming, investigation into hush-money payments. In Mr Muellers investigation, Cohen has admitted lying to Congress about a proposed real estate development in Moscow. He told lawmakers the negotiations were done in January 2016 when in fact they stretched deep into the campaign. He also pleaded guilty in New York to campaign finance violations stemming from the payments, with prosecutors saying last week that he acted in coordination and at the direction of Individual 1  or Mr Trump.

 George Papadopoulos

The former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser served a 14-day prison sentence after admitting lying to the FBI about a 2016 conversation with a Maltese professor who told him that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of stolen emails. Information about Papadopouloss contacts during the campaign started the FBIs Russia investigation.

 Russian intelligence

Twelve Russian military intelligence officers were charged in July with hacking into email accounts of Hillary Clintons presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and then facilitating the release of tens of thousands of private communications. It remains perhaps the most direct example of what intelligence officials say was a broad conspiracy by the Kremlin to meddle in the 2016 election on Mr Trumps behalf.

 Russian online trolls

A separate indictment charges 13 Russians with funding a covert social media propaganda campaign to sow discord among Americans in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Prosecutors say the scheme was run by a Russia-based troll farm that used bogus social media postings and advertisements fraudulently purchased in the name of Americans to try to influence the race.

 Roger Stone

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Whatsapp Roger Stone, an associate of President Donald Trump, is facing charges (Cliff Owen/AP)

A long-time Trump confidant, and self-proclaimed dirty trickster of Republican politics, Stone is charged with witness tampering and lying to Congress about his efforts to gain advance knowledge of WikiLeakss plans to release damaging information on Mrs Clinton during 2016. Though a Stone tweet from 2016  Trust me, it will soon the Podestas time in the barrel  appeared to presage the disclosure of hacked emails, Stone has said he had no inside knowledge about the content, source or timing of WikiLeakss disclosure. He has also pleaded not guilty to the federal charges brought by Mr Mueller.

 Julian Assange

The WikiLeaks founder, under Justice Department scrutiny for years for the groups role in publishing government secrets, has been an important figure in the Mueller investigation as investigators examine how WikiLeaks obtained emails stolen from Mrs Clintons campaign and Democratic groups. Prosecutors have also investigated whether any Americans were involved in coordinating that effort. Separately, prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia inadvertently disclosed the existence of a sealed criminal complaint against the WikiLeaks founder, though no details have been publicly announced.

 Donald Trump Jr

The presidents eldest son has attracted scrutiny for his role in arranging a Trump Tower meeting in June 2016  also attended by Manafort and Mr Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner  at which he expected to receive damaging information on Mrs Clinton. He has said the meeting was a waste of time because he did not receive anything interesting from the attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Both he and his father have suggested that anyone in that position would have taken such a meeting in hopes of getting dirt on a political opponent.Send to Email Address

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Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.MX Original Series - "Love Ok Please" explores what happens when 8 single and ready to mingle travel enthusiasts set out on an epic road trip across the picturesque Himachal Pradesh, on the quest to find love. And this first of its kind social experiment marks the digital debut of heartthrob Karan Wahi as the host. Karan who is also an avid traveler himself, shares his experience.

Karan Wahi speaks about his travel plans when asked about which countries visas he wants, "Luckily, I have most of them. I don't have an Australian Visa right now because I have not applied for it but I'd really want an Australian Visa now because I've heard it's beautiful down under. But, if there's one stamp that I really really desire on my passport, it has to be Pakistan. I want to go to Pakistan."

And when further asked about who his favorite travel companions are, Karan quickly and happily replied "I have been traveling with Rithvik and Asha a lot. So, I think the two of them. Till now, I have travelled the most with Asha. We've gone to Dubai, South Africa, together we've also explored the outskirts of Mumbai, a couple of times. So as of right now, it's them. I have traveled with them a lot."

While Rithivika and Asha are Karan's fav travel buddies, you can tell us who are your's? Also share your travel bucket list in the comments below...Sometimes things go so well, the goodwill overwhelms the Good Samaritan.

That was the case Wednesday morning when a half-dozen non-Native volunteers struggled to find a way to transport piles of donations they gathered over the course of several days to help the Santee Sioux Tribe

The group had begun loading the toilet paper, bottled water, baby formula, shovels, buckets and cleaning supplies into their own trucks and SUVs when one of them decided to contact her companys beer distributor.

Sarena Freet, manager of The Hot Mess, a downtown Lincoln bar, managed to reach the bars distributor and he agreed to send one of his drivers to the groups donation site.

Donations gathered in Lincoln, Nebraska to help the Santee Sioux Tribe in the wake of devastating flooding wait to be loaded onto a truck on the morning of March 20, 2019. Photo by Kevin Abourezk

Just minutes later, Joe Bernadt of Mills Transfer pulled up in his box truck and, with barely a word spoken, he began loading the donations atop pallets before wrapping them in plastic and hoisting them into his truck using a lift.

Why did Mills Transfer agree to haul six pallets of donations from Lincoln to Omaha, where the Ponca Tribe planned to take the load on to northeast Nebraska and eventually to the Santee Sioux?

Its a good thing to give, help people out in need, Bernadt said.

Indianz.Com on SoundCloud: Santee Sioux Chairman Talks About Flooding and Relief Efforts

Last week, dozens of communities across Nebraska saw historic flooding following a devastating snow and rain storm that was preceded by several weeks of record snowfalls. When the snow melted, the states rivers and creeks swelled, leading to the collapse of dams, bridges and roads throughout the state.

The states tribes, especially those with land and properties in northeast Nebraska, have been impacted by the flooding. The Santee Sioux Tribe suffered a water line break and a brief power outage after five power lines were toppled by floodwaters and ice. The tribe was forced to evacuate some elderly citizens and families with children to its casino just south of its main community.

The tribe has since managed to repair its water system enough to allow water to begin flowing again, though it wont be drinkable for several more days.

In the meantime, the community has had to depend partially on the goodwill of others, including the Ponca, Winnebago, Yankton Sioux and Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux tribes.

Volunteers, including Nick Svoboda, left, and Joe Bernadt, right, load donations onto a pallet on the morning of March 20, 2019.. The donations are bound for the Santee Sioux Tribe, whose reservation in Nebraska was hit hard by a winter storm. Photo by Kevin Abourezk

Santee Sioux Chairman Roger Trudell said Wednesday that the tribe still needs bottled water and baby supplies, such as diapers, baby formula and baby powder.

He expressed appreciation for the donations gathered in Lincoln.

Those donations were gathered primarily through a nonprofit called the Dandelion Network, which focuses on providing disaster relief to disenfranchised communities that are often forgotten when disasters strike.

In desperate disaster relief situations, the folks that are already vulnerable are even more vulnerable than usual, said Brady Usher of the Dandelion Network.

He said systems of oppression throughout the world continue to protect those in power when disasters occur, leaving already poverty-stricken communities to fend for themselves.

Weve just been focusing on trying to find those voices that maybe arent being heard, that dont have access to aid where they are, he said.

The Dandelion Network gathered supplies to send to Santee at several locations throughout Lincoln.

Jordan Hasselbalch of The HUB, a youth empowerment organization in Lincoln, said the nonprofit provided storage space for the donations gathered by the Dandelion Network.

This morning we deployed our Mobile Unit to assist the Santee Sioux Nation of Nebraska as it recovers from devastating floods impacting the region. The Mobile Unit is currently packed with 4,000 bottles of water and 12,000 boxes of freeze-dried food. #SMSCgives pic.twitter.com/TlwwFPhU0I  Shakopee Mdewakanton (@ShakopeeDakota) March 20, 2019

He said he doesnt want the two organizations to be considered white saviors, providing support to people who couldnt survive without them. Rather, he said, their motivation in providing support to the Santee Sioux was also an act of self-preservation.

We just recognize our interdependence and thats why something like mutual aid support of our neighbors in northeast Nebraska is important to us, he said.

Freet said she didnt expect to see so many donations provided for the Santee people.

Its incredible, she said. I guess I didnt really know what to expect. I dont think any of us did.

And she reiterated how important Mills Transfers contribution to ensuring the donations got to where they needed was.

We really appreciate them donating their time and their truck for helping us out, she said. Otherwise we maybe would have been in over our heads.

Ways to Help

To assist the Ponca Tribe with flood relief efforts, visit poncatribe-ne.org and click on the "Donate to Ponca Flood 2019 Relief Efforts" button at the top of the page.

Danielle Red Owl has posted on social media an extensive list of ways to assist the Santee Sioux Tribe. A PDF version is available.

Santee Sioux Nation Flood Relief needs: if you are in the Lincoln area and would like to donate any items I'm planning a trip to Santee next week and I'm happy to take as many donations as I can! #NebraskaStrong #NebraskaFlood #OyateStrong pic.twitter.com/7P7l0Auu8I  Danielle Red Owl (@DanielleRedOwl) March 20, 2019

Additionally, Owl's company, Owl Dreams Company, is selling t-shirts to raise funds for impacted flood victims of Nebraska. More info can be found at this link: goo.gl/uYZ55S

All proceeds will be donated to:

50% My hometown Santee, Nebraska flood relief fund.

50% American Red Cross for Nebraska Flood relief



Click the form below to place you#Nebraskastrong #NebraskaFloodhttps://t.co/iUMKKfcKU0 pic.twitter.com/mSNcpveJd9  Danielle Red Owl (@DanielleRedOwl) March 19, 2019

Join the Conversation

Related StoriesA self-confessed cynic, I generally dont believe in lifes mysterious ways and how it can bring the most unexpected turns, especially when you least expect them to. However, things are completely different now. Hello, I am Bhavya Sadhwani, a recently turned optimist who is now a firm-believer in the power of the universe.

Cut to - 9th March 2019, sitting at a press conference in Singapore, waiting with baited breath for the big double doors to open!

bhavya sadhwani/indiatimes

But before that, a quick rewind of a week before:

First things first, its important that we state the obvious. No matter how much you like or dislike cinema, there has to be at least one celebrity that you would want to meet once in this lifetime, right? Come on, if you are about to deny it, then please dont. No one can be that indifferent towards the world of glamour and showbiz. Anyway, back to me, an ordinary person who spends five days of her life behind a laptop screen and dreams of running in the circles of Hollywood biggies, sipping wine and discussing the fine nuances of movie-making.

Well, i do have a long bucket list of concerts id like to attend, celebs id like to interview and then some. Now, during one very random, monotonous and bland day of work last week brought a whole new yet best surprise of my life. Yes, the universe threw the best project that i wasnt even working towards in the first place, directly in my lap. I was chosen to fly to Singapore to attend the press conference of a movie called Triple Frontier and meet Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam and Garrett Hedlund.

bhavya sadhwani/indiatimes

As if this wasnt enough, the cherry on the very decorated cake was that I had to interview the three gentleman one-on-one for their upcoming which also stars Oscar Isaac and Pedro Pascal along with the trio.



I could go on and on, giving you every minute detail of my two-day trip but fret not! That kind of information is exclusive only for my own journal.

When you are high-spirited, there are not many things that can bog you down, but let me tell you a cancelled flight, after sitting inside the aircraft for almost 6 hours, isnt one of them. I still didn't let the exhaustion and irritation in its highest form, deter my excitement. Every waking moment was spent in anticipation of the meeting.

D-Day: The day of the meeting!

bhavya sadhwani/indiatimes

All dressed up, in a super parched state and with my heart in my mouth, there i was sitting inside the ball room, waiting with for Ben Affleck to descent in his Batman suit. Okay, not really, but to see the actor in person had me on cloud 9, and if possible then even higher.

Eyes stuck on the double doors, without even registering what the compere was even announcing on the microphone, there i was waiting for what would later become one of the most cherished moments of my life.

Fractions of seconds later, the doors finally open and in walked Ben Affleck with Hunnam and Hedlund in tow, looking dapper in a denim button down shirt, jeans and sneakers, with a cuppa coffee in his hands. In full Hindi film style, i had my main thehri rahi, zameen chalne lagi moment, right then and there.

gifer

40 minutes later, waiting inside the green room, i was a ball of nerves, unable to decipher whether the beads of sweat on my forehead was due to the sultry Singapore weather or because i was about to interview Affleck and his posse.

The minute I walk inside the studio, there they were engaged in their own silly banter and I dived right in, head first!

Ben Affleck indulged in a grave yet important discussion

bhavya sadhwani/indiatimes

During my chat with them, I happened to ask the trio about their take on Patriotism v/s War-mongering. Taking the lead and giving a sound answer, Ben Affleck said,

This is a question that has no great one answer to this but I can tell you one thing, you know the acts of patriotism in service when you see them. War-mongering is something that is engaged in by the political class. The military folks are there serving, so whatever service they do is in the name of their country and they put their trust in their commanding officer to make the right decision and the politicians who lead them to make the right decisions. But naturally there is a line - Patriotism, nationalism, jingoism. We have to be mindful of that."

He then went on to share his own experience and defined what patriotism means to him. He said,

One example of patriotic service that i got to see myself, was to work alongside some Indian peacekeepers who were working, thousands of miles away from home, in the democratic Republic of Congo where many Indians soldiers were serving in order to make the transition of another country to democracy more peaceful. I found that admirable and to me that form of service is the true act of patriotism.





The Bollywood intrigue





Well, what else do you expect from an out and out Bollywood buff? I then went on to enquire about their interest and knowledge on Bollywood and whether the Gone Girl actor would like to direct a Bollywood movie someday, to which Affleck said,





Bollywood is an incredible cinematic phenomenon that exists. Productive India has done this incredible contribution to global cinema. If I had to, I would be very intimidated if i had to step in. Its folly to just think that you can swoop in from one genre, one culture to another and pick up and do something excellent. I would consider myself a student of Bollywood more than a filmmaker.





Interestingly, Sons Of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam happened to tell me how our culture and cinema intrigues him. So much so, that he is all set to visit India for two and a half weeks to get acquainted with the phenomenon that is Bollywood! If you are a Mumbaikar who happens to be a fan of Hunnam, look out for the tall blonde gentleman near you. He might be in your vicinity, wearing a hat and dark shades, trying a vada pav and sipping bottled water!Indian-origin Jagmeet Singh has become the first non-white leader of the Opposition in Canadas House Of Commons. The 40-year old New Democratic Party leader has quite a life story. He grew up in Scarborough, St. Johns, and Windsor.

Singhs parents had moved to Canada hoping to provide a better life for their kids and make them believe that their dreams they could be fulfilled.

Twitter

As a little boy, Jagmeet faced a lot of bullying at school and never felt a sense of belonging.

And, that feeling stuck with him for a long time as he encountered many kids who couldnt even think about chasing their dreams because they did not have enough resources. And this unfairness had a profound effect on him.

He started learning French and as his own culture became suppressed, he identified other groups with similar issues.

Reuters

The activist in him sprang when he went to college. His awareness led him to stand up for injustice. Studying law at university, he fought against the rising tuition fees.



There came a tough time in his family when he became the sole earner when his father fell ill. He worked in retail and slogged to support his family.

Then came a time where politics intrigued him even though people discouraged him.

Reuters

He went on to become an MPP in Ontario till and Deputy Leader of the NDP. He raised his voice for a fairer society and the need for a good job for the youth and improving facilities for the public in general. With the vision of making Canada a better country, Jagmeet launched his campaign to lead the NDP on May 15th, 2017. He focussed on issues like inequality, climate change, reconciliation, and electoral reforms.

He was named the leader of the NDP on October 1, 2017.

Reuters

His journey was not easy and was filled with obstacles but that didnt stop him for making his name and fulfilling all his dreams.A Kashmiri youth who had been missing from his home in Awantipora, Pulwama for the past couple of days has joined Pakistan-based terror outfit Hizbul Mujahideen, local reports have claimed. Images and an audio message of the youth, identified as Shahid Manzoor have been making rounds on social media since Wednesday indicating that he has joined Hizbul.

In his audio message, Shahid claims that he joined militancy after his friend, Rizwan Asad Pandit, the principal of a private school in Awantipora was arrested by police and allegedly tortured to death in custody.

Rizwan was picked up by police on Sunday for his alleged links with Jamaat-e-Islami which was recently banned. Two days later his family was informed about his death.

According to the initial findings of the autopsy report, Rizwan died because of "extravasation of blood" after multiple injuries.

Shahid who claims to be a friend of Rizwan said he too was arrested along with his friend last year and had to face torture in custody.

I was reluctant of the views of those who pick up guns but now I have realized that they are on the right track. I ask my family to forgive me as I have taken this step without their permission but there was no second option available for me other than joining jihad he said in the audio message.

Meanwhile, the family of Rizwan is continuing what their demand for a proper investigation into his death.

AFP

"We are not fighting with guns or bullets or stones, we will fight with them legally," Rizwan's brother Mubashir told NDTV adding that the family has photos and videos of injuries on his body and that they are even ready for the exhumation of the body to show that torture marks.A nomadic tribe in Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh-Yanadi will cast their votes for the first time as a group of 10 people unsung volunteers has helped almost 2000 Yanadi tribal people enrol as voters.

A nomadic tribe, the Yanadi lives majorly in Krishna district and remain on move constantly in search of livelihood from one place to another in different seasons. The official said that since the majority of them live in mangrove forest and marshy land and keep travelling from one place to another.

The nature of livelihood practices of our tribe is the prime impediment to taking part in societal activities, Nakka Vijaya Babu, the leader of the volunteer group The Hindu.

Lack of education would further distance our tribe from awareness of our political rights and the importance of our vote, he added, claiming that nearly half of the newly enrolled voters had only recently become eligible to vote.

The six mandals have particularly been focussed on by the volunteers and these six mandals are:, Machilipatnam, Pedana, Nagayalanka, Koduru, Bantumilli, and Krithivennu, and a total of 1,520 families were covered with total population of 4, 597.

The Krishna District Yanadi Girijana Aikya Sangham- a society was registered by the group in 2016 in order to create awareness on education and also to benefit them from different government welfare scheme.Women all over New Zealand donned headscarves on Friday to show solidarity with Muslims a week after 50 people were killed at two mosques in the city of Christchurch.

Meanwhile in #Christchurch 

Headscarf for Harmony, is an event organised by a group of women wanting to show solidarity with the Muslim community after last Friday's mosque shootings in Christchurc. #ChristchurchTerrorAttack #Christchurch #KiaKaha pic.twitter.com/cK9qJFKEQz  Fabricio Werdum (@WerdumMMA) 21 March 2019

#headscarfforharmony was trending on Twitter with women posting photos of themselves in the Muslim attire. Read More

1. Indian Soldier Killed In Pakistani Firing

An Indian soldier was killed on Thursday in Pakistani firing on the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district. Army rifleman 24-year-old Yash Paul lost his life in ceasefire violation by Pakistan in Sunderbani sector. Read More

2. Kerala Student Forced To Defecate Inside Exam Hall After Invigilator Refused A Toilet Break

BCCL

In a shocking case of insensitivity, a school teacher who was an invigilator during ongoing Kerala State Board Exam allegedly refused a student a toilet break, forcing him to defecate inside the exam hall. Read More

3. South Korean Hotels Caught Secretly Live Streaming Couples Having Sex, 800 Videos Uploaded

AP

In probably the biggest breach of people's privacy and trust, more than 800 South Korean couples were live-streamed having sex in love motels in South Korea. One of the largest sex scandals ever has been busted and the police said on Thursday that it was one of most intrusive examples of the spycam epidemic active in the country. Read More

4. 'Initially Thought It Was A Prank By Kids,' Recalls Indian Who Survived The Christchurch Attack

afp

Out of 50 terror victims who lost their lives in the attack on the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, seven were Indians and there are other Indian survivors as well who are thanking almighty for their survival. Read More

5. Nirav Modi Had A Lot Of Things In Mind To Evade Arrest, One Was Getting A Plastic Surgery Done

The Telegraph

After being on the run for over a year, fugitive Nirav Modi ran out of luck earlier this week and was arrested by the Scotland Yard on Tuesday from London on the extradition plea by India.

In the past one year, Modi had reportedly tired a number of options to get away, since his crime came to the fore.Part of the movement to get equality for women also involves improved representation in jobs hiring. The tech industry is one that's particularly guilty of sidelining women, and that realisation reflects in the sentiments of women in tech, who want their companies to do more.

Reuters

Booking.com conducted research regarding the tech industry and its diversity across the world, and it seems female tech entrepreneurs and engineers in India might actually be slightly better off than their global counterparts.

A massive 75 percent of women in tech in India think gender diversity is the industry's top priority. In addition, only 26 percent think their company does not hire or promote enough women, as compared to the global average of 54 percent. It's still clear however that, despite a few existing efforts, tech companies still need to do more to nurture female talent, both of new entrants and veterans in the field.

For instance, 83 percent of women entering the field of tech believe that taking a break could badly torpedo their careers, whether that's maternity leave, a job change, or otherwise. An overwhelming 87 percent believe the industry needs to actively do more to support their reintegration into the workforce. Experts believe that focusing their efforts in this direction could actually yield some great results with regards to companies attracting talent.

In order to boost their chances, a lot of women forced to leave the industry for a while also take the time away to focus on up-skilling, with 45 percent of them believing it's essential for their success. More so, these women also want to have some level of support when they return to their profession, with 88 percent saying their companies helped by aiding them in updating their technical skills. This number is also the highest anywhere in the world.

Flickr

"Driving greater gender diversity in tech is as much about unearthing untapped talent as it is about supporting women who have already built the skills, knowledge and expertise in our sector," says Gillian Tans, CEO of Booking.com. "Over the last ten years there have been significant changes to drive positive progress towards making the tech industry a more gender diverse place to work. We need to make sure that we continue this momentum. Companies that prioritise inclusivity at every level and tap effectively into the existing talent pool as well as encouraging new talent will continue to grow and thrive."

Women are well aware of the positives they bring to the workforce as well. Around 90 percent believe more women among company employees leads to more flexible HR benefits as well as an improved work environment. They also believe it contributes to a brand's reputation as one that supports gender equality, and inspires more trust from the general public.Alcoholism can be as bad an addiction as drugs like cocaine and heroin. Not only can it have dozens of bad effects on your body, it can also drain your finances and cause emotional trauma to your family. Now, researchers are trying to find an easy "cure" for it.

Rehab and therapy is inarguably the best way to get rid of an addiction, but what if you could simply get rid of the craving entirely with science? That's what scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in California want to do.

Through their research, they say they've found a way to reverse rats' dependency on alcohol by firing lasers at particular neurons in their brains. They said the change is like the "flip of a switch".

"What is so exciting about these findings is that we were able to control the motivation to drink alcohol in severely dependent individuals with the flip of a switch," Scripps professor Olivier George, told Digital Trends. "By implanting fiber optics deep in the brain and turning on a laser that inhibits these neurons specifically we could dramatically decrease alcohol drinking and the physical symptoms of withdrawal."

In their studies, they were able to identify particular bunches of neurons that deep in the brain that are activated when you go through alcohol withdrawal, as well as the downstream pathways from these neurons that trigger addiction-like behaviors in your brain.

Unfortunately, it's not that easy for alcoholics just yet. Though this is huge progress, George believes they have a lot of work to do before they can use something like this on humans.

"This work requires the use of cutting-edge technologies that are not approved to be used in humans yet so it may take 15 to 30 years before we see alcoholics with brain implants that help them control their craving," he said.Every time a rare fish washes ashore, it just shows how much of the ocean is yet to be discovered. And for those who bump in to these fascinating creatures, it's an unforgettable experience.

Two fishermen in South Australia discovered a 1.8 metre specimen  believed to be a Mola mola, or ocean sunfish.

A photo of the creature was posted on social media on Monday, with two fishermen standing over it on the sand and it has gone viral.

Facebook

"He thought it was a piece of driftwood as they were driving past on the work truck," Jones' partner Linette Grzelak told CNN.

They find all sorts of sea life along the beaches they dig but it has been mostly sharks and seals. This was something very different, Grzelak added.

Steven said it was extremely heavy, and its skin was leathery like a rhinoceros.

National Parks South Australia said these sunfish are the worlds largest bony fish; they can exceed 10 feet and weigh close to a ton.

The Mola Mola can be found in temperate marine waters globally, according to the Fishes of Australia database. Their features include a large, blunt head, a disproportionately small mouth, and long dorsal and anal fins.After hogging the spotlight for the strict warning issued to students asking them to stop gate crashing weddings, NIT Kurukshetra has yet again drawn attention for a blatantly sexist rule for girls.

You guessed it right, it's the hostel curfew timing.

NIT Kurukshetra's Kalpana Chawla Girl's hostel circular recently went viral for its sexist curfew timings. The circular signed by the chief warden states, 'After 6 pm heavy fine will be imposed on defaulters.'

Reddit

The hostel deadline has been a topic of controversy across universities and institutions in India. For instance, Pinjra Tod, a women's collective of Delhi University staged multiple protests for the past three years demanding curfew-less nights for women's hostels.

Pinjra Tod/Facebook

Now, we all know that curfew timings are almost never imposed on boy's hostels and imposing this rule on the pretext of women's safety is more than just ridiculous.

The circular sparked a debate on Reddit and people just couldn't ignore the irony behind the rule and the name of the hostel.

One Reddit user wrote, "Yeah.. Just like Kalpana Chawla, who never dared to venture out!"

Take a look at the reactions below:

#1

Reddit

#2

Reddit

According to this Wire.in article, the University Grants Commission in 2016 explicitly stated that curfews cannot be imposed on women. Another report on Live Law clearly states that in one case High Court of Kerala came down heavily on the stipulation in Hostel Rules saying girls have equal freedom as boys.

The report adds that the 'curfew timing' almost seems to be the moral choice of the management more than anything else.Indian American jurist Neomi Rao was sworn in March 19 to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, the second highest court in the nation. Her ceremonial swearing-in ceremony was attended by President Donald Trump. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)Chinas soda ash industry has set its sights on a larger share of the global market. Although it has scaled back its capacity expansion plans considerably in the last year, production levels are still rising and the countrys producers are looking for external markets to offload material that cannot be consumed domestically.

According to Marguerite Morrin, senior director of chlor alkali and soda ash at IHS Chemical, China produced 25.28m tonnes soda ash in 2014, although total capacity in the country stands at around 32m tonnes. IHS estimates that China exported 7-8% of its soda ash production last year, with 90% going to Asian markets: of this, 17% went to the Indian sub-continent; 27% to northeast Asia; and 45% to Southeast Asia.

Chinese exports to Asia are increasing and, significantly, encroaching on the market share of the American National Soda Ash Corp.

Soda ash is mainly used in glass and detergents. A decline in glass consumption and excess soda ash capacity in China is shifting more material into export markets (source: Novacarb).



(ANSAC)  the marketing body in charge of exporting US-produced soda ash. For its part, the US produced around 11.66m tonnes soda ash last year and is the single biggest exporter of the material in the world, accounting for 49% of all soda ash traded globally. Around 36% of US exports go to Asia, having increased significantly since 2011. In 2014, US soda ash exports were higher by 43%, or 348,000 tonnes, than they were in 2011, whereas Chinese exports had only increased by 18%, or 137,000 tonnes, over the same period.

This year, however, China has been much more aggressive with its exports, and its share of the Asian market has grown much more rapidly than that of the US.

"In the first five months of 2015, the US was still a bigger supplier to the rest of Asia (excluding China) than China," Morrin told IM. "But Chinese volumes to Asia have increased by 200,000 tonnes, or 34%, whereas US exports in this period only grew by 33,000 tonnes, or 3%."

"The single biggest increase in Chinese exports in the first six months of this year was to Indonesia, where volumes increased by 52,000 tonnes, or 73%. The second biggest increase was to Bangladesh, with volumes up by 48,000 tonnes, or 66%," Morrin explained.

Chinas soda ash industry is at a cost disadvantage compared to the US, which produces the material from natural mineral (trona) deposits in Wyoming.

China, by contrast, has very little natural soda ash production and makes most of its material synthetically from limestone and salt, using either the Hou process (developed by Chinese chemist, Hou Debang, in the 1930s, which produces ammonium chloride as a by-product) or the Solvay process (developed by Belgian chemist Ernest Solvay in the 1860s, requiring less energy and fewer raw material inputs than the Hou process, but without the ammonium-chloride by-product).

According to Morrin, in 2014, 45% of Chinese soda ash was produced via the Hou process while 48% came from the Solvay process.

Chinese overcapacity

The increase in Chinese exports is due to a combination of excess domestic capacity and a decline in local demand. Because the main market for soda ash is glass manufacturing, its consumption is linked to the construction market, which has effectively stalled in China.

According to the RICS China Construction Market Monitor, Chinese construction stabilised in the first quarter of 2015, after two consecutive quarters of decline. Early indications for Q2 suggested that the market remained flat during this period, although house prices had started to inch up.

"Continuing weakness in the wider economy has affected the prospects of the construction industry. More specifically, the residential and commercial markets have witnessed a continued downward trend, which is unlikely to improve notably this year," said Andy Wu, senior economist at RICS.

"Looking ahead, the construction market is expected to remain flat at best this year and then show some pick-up next year," Wu added. This, combined with a slumping automotive market, which contracted by 6.6% in July, has had a knock-on effect on the glass industry.

Nearly a quarter of all Chinese glass companies saw their profits shrink in the first half of 2015. For flat glass, Chinese production dropped by 3.9% year-on-year (y-o-y) in H1 this year, while annual demand growth declined from 11.3% in 2013 to 1.1% in 2014, and is expected to fall into negative growth this year, pushing the market into depression and leaving a gap in soda ash demand.

Even though the country already produces more soda ash than it consumes and prices are falling, production capacity continues to rise at a rapid rate. More than a million tonnes is set to be added to Chinas soda ash output by the end of this year, with additional supply expected to come, for instance, from China Salt Kunshan Co. Ltd and Qinghai Salt Lake Magnesium Co. Ltd, which are each scheduled to commission new production lines of 600,000 tpa.

The recovery of the ammonium chloride market, helped by a relaxation in Chinese export policies for the material and the introduction of a 5% flat export tax replacing a seasonally variable rate, has also boosted soda ash output.

"Ammonium chloride prices have been very weak for a number of years," Morrin said. "Recently, though, prices have improved, which has given a boost to the Hou-based producers  this is also supporting the strong exports that we have seen recently."

In the Hou combined-soda process, the output ratio of soda ash to ammonium chloride is 1:1 and the rising price of ammonium chloride has pushed previously loss-making producers of soda ash into profit. According to China Customs data, in H1 2015, China exported 576,056 tonnes ammonium chloride, up 189.3% y-o-y.

It is hoped that, by increasing exports, Chinese soda ash producers can ease some of the pressure on their mounting inventories, with estimates placing the countrys present overproduction at somewhere between 5m and 10m tpa.

Global demand

In its "2014 Chemical Soda Ash Analysis" report, IHS forecast that global soda ash demand will increase by 34% from 55m tpa in 2014 to 73m tpa in 2023, which may absorb some of Chinas additional capacity.

However, Chinese market observers have suggested that the rate of increase in consumption is not expected to keep pace with Chinas production, and with large new projects set to come on stream in Turkey by 2018 and US output showing no signs of slowing down, there is likely to be competition for market share.

ANSAC did not respond to requests for comment when contacted by IM, but the corporation has been vocal in its support for US trade policies that aim to protect and promote domestic soda ash producers.

In May this year, ANSAC applauded a US Senate vote to begin debating the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act 2015, also known at the trade promotion authority (TPA), which aims to set priorities for US trade negotiators and allow free trade agreements to be brought to Congress without amendment.

"Allowing Congress to assert its authority over ongoing trade negotiations paves the way for future passage of new free trade agreements," said Christopher Douville, ANSACs president, following the vote on 14 May. "Such agreements are vital for the elimination of foreign market access barriers for soda ash and the continued growth of US soda ash exports," he added.

Other recent policies have included The American Soda Ash Competitiveness Act, introduced by California congressman, Paul Cook, in April, which would reduce government royalties on soda ash from 4% to 2%, fixed for the next five years.

Cook said that China was becoming an ever more dominant soda ash presence, thanks to its "heavily subsidised" domestic industry  referring to the credit Chinese manufacturers receive for ammonium chloride production  and that the US needs find ways to maintain market share.

"While American soda ash is found naturally, Chinese soda ash is produced synthetically. Chinese synthetic production uses twice the energy which results in over three times the carbon emissions as natural soda ash production," a US Government press release on the matter said.

In a statement on his personal website, Cook said that protecting the US soda ash industry was a matter of national security. "This is an important bill that will protect a vital industry, grow jobs, and do this with little impact to the federal budget. [Soda ash] production is a $1.8bn industry within the US, providing over 3,000 direct jobs," he outlined.

India has also raised concerns about the threat of Chinese exports to its domestic soda ash industry, which is likewise based on synthetic production, and currently benefits from an anti-dumping duty (ADD) on imports, although this is set to expire in 2017.

India produced 2.375m tonnes soda ash in 2013-2014, according to official estimates, and local manufacturers have plans to increase this to 4m tpa before the ADD is lifted. Industry leaders have also indicated their intention to approach the government and request an extension to the tariff, in a bid to protect to the domestic market. On 21 July the All India Glass Manufacturers Federation (AIGMF) initiated an anti-dumping review to determine whether the ADD should remain in place, giving relevant parties 40 days to respond.

Soda ash prices

This decline in demand has also been reflected in prices for Chinese soda ash. Chinas export prices for dense and light soda ash weakened in July as Chinese producers cut offers by around $5/tonne in an effort to stimulate demand.

Industry participants have diverged in their outlook for prices for the remainder of this year. US-based suppliers have suggested that there is still some margin for growth, but others have warned that the rise in Chinese export capacity may erode selling values sooner than predicted.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...Switch the Market flag

Open the menu and switch the

Market flag for targeted data from your country of choice.

for targeted data from your country of choice.In the Outstanding Social/ Digital Media Campaign category, AXA gained an Excellence award for its multi-year series of social media-driven challenges to engage Singaporeans and demonstrate its role as a health partner to customers and the wider community.

Read more: AXA Singapore brand campaign encourages people to rewrite the rules

AXA was also recognised with Merit awards for financial communication, corporate responsibility, and outstanding integrated campaign  financial services.

We are extremely honoured to have been recognised at the PRISM Awards 2019 for the work that we do to live out our purpose of empowering people to live better lives in the areas of road safety, health prevention and community outreach, said Diane Yap, head of marketing, AXA Insurance Singapore. Even as we celebrate 50 years in Singapore, we remain fully committed to partnering our customers and the community across their life journey.

The IPRS, a non-profit organisation and the only accrediting body for public relations practitioners in Singapore, has presented the PRISM Awards biennially since 1987 to recognise the best in PR efforts in Singapore and the region. PRISM 2019 saw a record number of entries and nominations for its 32 categories. Organisations in the public, private, and non-profit sectors are eligible to compete.Little joined Coface Australia in 2007 as risk underwriter. Since then, he has held a number of leadership roles, more recently in acting roles in Coface Japan, first as commercial head then as country manager. He will report to Bhupesh Gupta, CEO of Coface Asia Pacific.

Boyle, who has been with Coface since 2012, brings to her new role extensive knowledge and experience in the commercial function. She started her career in insurance in 2003 and been involved in various key functions such as client service, claims, administration, and sales. She will report to Little.

Crozier will commence as country manager of Coface Singapore in April, reporting to Gupta. He has 34 years of experience in trade credit insurance, both as an insurer and a broker. He began his insurance career in the UK in 1985 and was appointed country manager for Coface Australia in 2016. Crozier also owns his own trade credit insurance broking business.She will be based at the companys headquarters in Detroit/Farmington Hills, Michigan and report to H.W. Kaufman Group chairman, president, and CEO Alan Jay Kaufman, a release said.

The creation of this new position for H.W. Kaufman Group and our companies is a valuable leadership addition as we continue to expand our global business, said Kaufman. Koris deep expertise in compliance, regulatory and state government relations will be critical for our worldwide compliance strategy, especially as the complexities of our business increase.

Johanson has more than 20 years of insurance experience within corporate compliance, regulatory and government affairs. She joins Kaufman from PURE, where she was based in the greater New York City area overseeing legal, compliance and regulatory relations as vice-president, associate general counsel.

Before her time with PURE, she was serving as chief compliance officer for ACORD. She also spent 15 years at Travelers serving a variety of roles of increasing importance.

I look forward to supporting Kaufman and its subsidiariesbuilding on the global expertise, unmatched vertical depth, and operational excellence that their insurance brokers and agents have come to expect for the past 50 years, commented Johanson.

Johanson received her J.D. from the Western New England University School of Law and Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Trinity College. At present, she is the vice-chair for the Annual Conference for the Association of Insurance Compliance Professionals for the 2018-2019 term. She is also co-editor of the Federation of Regulatory Counsel journal publication. Johanson is an active participant in many industry organizations.Donna Barclay will also continue to serve as president and chief operating officer of The Guarantee Company of North America, reporting to Ruschak.

Ruschak joined The Guarantee in 2009 as president of the North America USA operation. In that role, he built a strong team and has driven profitable growth in the USA, a release said. Ruschak has a diverse background in insurance, which includes experience in claims, underwriting, reinsurance and surety.

He graduated from Albion College in Michigan, with a BA in History. Ruschak earned his JD from the University of Detroit School of Law and his MBA from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Ruschak is a member of the board of directors of the Surety and Fidelity Association of America, serving on the executive committee.

Ruschak is also a former president of the National Association of Independent Sureties.NJM Insurance Group, a property and casualty insurer in the Mid-Atlantic region, has named Chris Malone as chief financial officer.

Malone joins NJM with more than twenty-five years of financial and leadership expertise. In this role, he will oversee the companys Financial and Actuarial departments.

Malone most recently served as the vice president and lead financial officer for Ameriprise Auto & Home Insurance in DePere, Wisc., where he led the companys financial operations as well as data analytics, workforce planning, vendor management and quality assurance.

He has also held various leadership positions at Plymouth Rock Assurance Company, Travelers Companies and The Hartford, where his experience spanned finance, product management, field operations and marketing.

In addition to his responsibilities as CFO, Malone will be a member of NJMs executive leadership team, reporting directly to NJM President and CEO Mitch Livingston.

Founded in 1913, NJM provides workers compensation insurance, personal auto, renters and umbrella coverage in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It is headquartered in West Trenton, N.J., with locations in Hammonton and Parsippany, N.J.

Source: NJM Insurance Group

Topics New JerseyH.W. Kaufman Group, a global network of companies headquartered in Farmington Hills, Michigan, has added Kori M. Johanson to its executive team as corporate vice president and chief compliance officer. She will be based at the company headquarters.

In this newly created position, Johanson will oversee the companys compliance team and be responsible for corporate and regulatory compliance, government affairs and state insurance taxation for Kaufman and all its subsidiaries. She will report to Alan Jay Kaufman, chairman, president and chief executive officer of H.W. Kaufman Group, parent company of wholesale insurance broker and underwriting manager Burns & Wilcox.

With more than 20 years of insurance experience within corporate compliance, regulatory and government affairs, Johanson joins Kaufman from the greater New York City area where she was responsible for legal, compliance and regulatory relations at PURE, a high-net-worth personal insurance carrier. At PURE, she served as vice president, associate general counsel, and led the compliance and regulatory function. Earlier in her career, Johanson served as chief compliance officer for ACORD, the organization that sets industry standards, and spent 15 years at Travelers in roles of increasing responsibility.

Johanson currently serves as the 2018-2019 vice chair, Annual Conference for the Association of Insurance Compliance Professionals, is co-editor of the Federation of Regulatory Counsel journal publication and is active in many industry organizations.

Source: H.W. Kaufman Group

Topics LegislationScientists cant, for the most part, prove that a given product caused a particular person to get cancer  not the way you can prove, say, that a car with faulty brakes caused a fatal crash. And so when a federal jury in San Francisco District Court decided that the weed killer Roundup was a substantial factor in causing someone to get a type of cancer called non-Hodgkins lymphoma, they didnt actually have proof for the individual case. What they had was evidence that the product was a probable factor in the mans cancer, based on studies that follow large populations.

Of course science should be the deciding factor in such cases, but theres no sense in implying that scientists can do the impossible. What scientists and society at large have come to agree upon is that its reasonable to award people compensation if its more likely than not that they would have avoided the cancer if theyd been able to avoid the product in question. This latest verdict, announced yesterday, is the second in favor of a plaintiff who got cancer after using Roundup, made by Monsanto, which was recently acquired by Bayer. In the first case, the plaintiff was awarded $80 million.

Why cant scientists prove individual cancer cases? Cancer epidemiologist Richard Stevens of the University of Connecticut explains using a seemingly straightforward example: cigarettes. Theres abundant evidence that they cause lung cancer. But some nonsmokers get lung cancer, and many smokers never do. This is because there are other factors at work in the determination of who gets cancer, including, some say, random copying errors in DNA.

There will always be a few smokers who would have gotten lung cancer regardless of their smoking habits. So scientists can say smoking causes cancer in the population at large, but cant say for sure that Uncle Joes lung cancer was caused by his smoking habit.

The same thing goes for ionizing radiation, which is a well-studied cause of cancer. There, scientists have the advantage of data gathered from the survivors of the Hiroshima bombing, which show the higher the exposure, the greater the cancer risk.

That means if an exposed worker from a nuclear weapons facility gets cancer, and shes worn a dosimeter to measure her exposure, its possible to calculate how likely it is that she would not have gotten cancer if not for the exposure.

But as Stevens says, once you do that analysis, youre left with the thorny issue of deciding how much probable causation should lead to compensation for plaintiffs. If its 99 percent likely that a product caused your cancer, its easy, but what if theres just a 10 percent chance that the product had anything to do with the disease? For most such cases, people have settled on 50 percent.

When scientists try to determine whats a potential carcinogen, they can also use evidence from basic biology  does the substance damage DNA in a test tube?  as well as evidence from animal studies. It was a mix of these kinds of evidence that led the International Agency for Research on Cancer (part of the World Health Organization) to declare Roundup a probable human carcinogen in 2015. Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has deemed the herbicide most likely not a carcinogen.

A new paper combining different human studies was published in the February issue of the journal Mutation Research. The authors concluded that overall, in accordance with evidence from animal experiments and mechanistic studies, our current meta-analysis  suggests a compelling link between exposure to GBHs [the active ingredient in Roundup] and non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.

On the face if it, this new study looks quite good, said UCLA statistician and epidemiologist Sander Greenland, who corresponded with me by email. As for cause and effect, there is no consistent definition in law or science. In both arenas, people usually define cause as a counterfactual statement: Both reduce to saying X caused Y if Y would not have occurred if X had not acted or occurred.

But for cases like the current Roundup trial, Greenland said, such counterfactuals cannot be established for individuals, so both law and science have to fall back on probabilities of causation, and there, things get so complicated that both jurists and scientists make huge blunders in connecting this concept to real data.

To illustrate how, he sent several articles hes co-written, including this one in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. There, he cautioned that the current system for estimating probable cause could grossly underestimate the number of people affected.

Thats because theres an underlying assumption that someone was either going to get cancer or not. But in reality, a person exposed to radiation might have gotten cancer at 70 with no exposure, but instead gets sick at 66. Radiation, and other carcinogens, might accelerate cancer and thus rob people of healthy, productive years. He suggests that scientists calculate average years of lost life to determine compensation.

That deserves a closer look, because it could produce a fairer system of compensation and could avoid the problem of using the language of proof to describe probabilities. According to the New York Times, about 11,200 other people are also suing Monsanto over Roundup, so there will be plenty of opportunity to improve the way science is used in a courtroom and the way its communicated.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics PollutionBayer AG had hoped a new trial strategy focusing jurors on scientific evidence could stem a burgeoning tide of U.S. lawsuits over its glyphosate-based weed killer Roundup, but a second jury finding on Tuesday that the product caused cancer has narrowed the companys options, some legal experts said.

Bayer shares tumbled more than 12 percent on Wednesday after a unanimous jury in San Francisco federal court found Roundup to be a substantial factor in causing California resident Edwin Hardemans non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

The jury decision was a blow to Bayer after the judge in the Hardeman case, at the companys request, had split the trial, severely limiting evidence plaintiffs could present in the first phase. Tuesdays defeat on terms considered advantageous to Bayer sets up the second phase to be even tougher and limits the grounds on which the company could appeal any final verdict, the experts said.

The fact that Bayer lost this trial despite it being set up in the most favorable way for them is a huge setback, said Thomas Rohback, a Connecticut-based defense lawyer.

Bayer in a statement on Tuesday said it stood behind the safety of Roundup and was confident the evidence in the second trial phase would show that Monsantos conduct was appropriate and the company not liable for Hardemans cancer.

The company, which bought Monsanto last year, on Wednesday declined to comment beyond that statement.

Tuesdays finding did not address liability, which will be determined following the second trial phase that began on Wednesday.

Bayer denies glyphosate or Roundup cause cancer. The German company faces more than 11,200 lawsuits over the popular weed killer. Last August, following the first Roundup trial, a California state court jury issued a $289 million verdict against the company.

Two weeks after that verdict, which was later reduced to $78 million and is being appealed, Bayer Chief Executive Werner Baumann reassured analysts that the company had a new legal strategy based on focusing jurors on the scientific evidence.

Bayer and the joint litigation team are working to ensure that, going forward, this overwhelming science will get the full consideration it deserves, Baumann said in an Aug. 23 conference call.

A LOT AT STAKE

There is a lot at stake for Bayer, which acquired Roundup maker Monsanto last year for $63 billion. Though Bayer does not break out sales figures for Roundup, glyphosate is the worlds most widely used weed killer, and Roundup is the leading brand.

Bayers new strategy was focused on keeping out plaintiffs allegations that the company improperly influenced scientists, regulators and the public about the safety of Roundup. Bayer has denied it acted inappropriately and said in public statements following the August verdict that it thought the jury was inflamed by the claims of corporate misconduct.

Vince Chhabria, the San Francisco federal judge overseeing the Hardeman case, agreed with the companys argument that such evidence was a distraction from the scientific question of whether glyphosate causes cancer. He agreed to split the trial in a January order.

Had Bayer had won the first phase, there would have been no second phase looking at company liability. Now that it has lost, almost all of the previously excluded evidence can be presented to the jury.

Plaintiffs lawyers hit Bayer with those allegations in their opening statements for the second phase on Wednesday. Aimee Wagstaff, one of Hardemans lawyers, said Monsanto influenced the science around Roundup through its cozy relationship with regulators.

Bayer could convince the jury in the second phase that, despite their finding that Roundup played a substantial role in Hardemans cancer, the company was not liable. Experts said that was unlikely.

They could present evidence of how careful they were in developing Roundup, but thats an uphill battle given that the scientific evidence was their strongest argument, said Alexandra Lahav, a law professor at the University of Connecticut.

A lawyer for Bayer on Wednesday argued that Bayer could not be held liable because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as other regulators worldwide, approved Roundup without a cancer warning.

If the Hardeman trial had not been split and a final verdict went against Bayer, the company might have been able to appeal any damages award to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals by claiming the jury had been improperly swayed by inflammatory evidence, said Lori Jarvis, a Virginia-based mass tort defense lawyer. That argument will now be difficult to make.

It would not be surprising at all for the 9th Circuit to uphold what the jury did in this case, particularly given the great effort Chhabria put into creating a level playing field for Monsanto, Jarvis said.

Some lawyers said Bayer could still argue on appeal that plaintiffs experts and their scientific evidence were insufficient and statistically invalid and should not have been admitted at trial. But they noted the 9th Circuit, which oversees the San Francisco federal court, has generally been permissive in allowing expert testimony.

However, experts said it was probably too soon to write off Bayers legal strategy, noting future Roundup cases could result in different outcomes.

Its a relatively early phase in this litigation as a whole and we just need to see more trials to understand Bayers liability, said Adam Zimmerman, a law professor at Los Angeles-based Loyola Law School.

(Reporting by Tina Bellon; Editing by Anthony Lin and Bill Berkrot)

Topics USA PollutionThe Trump administration and coal industry allies are insisting that a federal black lung trust fund will continue to pay benefits to sick miners despite a drastic cut in funding.

But the expected shortfalls will be covered by taxpayers instead of coal companies, adding more debt to the already struggling fund. And at least one Republican congressman from the coalfields has added his voice to the chorus of miners and advocates worried that the funds promise to sick workers and their families ultimately might not be kept.

Longtime U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, a Republican from Kentuckys Appalachian region, said a government report shows the trust fund is on an unsustainable path, potentially putting the benefits on which many families in my region rely in jeopardy.

The cut potentially means hundreds of millions in savings for coal companies, though Trumps Labor Department acknowledges that the trust funds purpose was for the industry to pay for the health of workers who got sick mining coal.

In January, the tax rate coal companies pay to support the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund was cut in half, leaving sick miners and their advocates fearing future benefit cuts from a fund that is already about some $4 billion in debt.

The trust fund is billions of dollars in debt and we just cut the revenue stream that funds it in half, in the face of the most serious outbreak of black lung disease that weve seen in the U.S., said Wes Addington, a Kentucky lawyer who helps coal miners seek black lung benefits. Theyre not explaining how the math works on that, and at what point it becomes a problem, and whats the solution to that problem in a year or two years?

The Department of Labor said in a statement that it is obligated to continue paying benefits to sick miners, so a shortfall would be covered by borrowing from taxpayers.

The U.S. Treasury is required by statute to make repayable advances to the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund so that it can meet its obligations, the statement said.

With cash trickling into the fund at less than half its usual rate, federal budget officials estimate that by the middle of 2020 there wont be enough money to fully cover the funds benefit payments. The 1977 law establishing the trust fund was designed to shift fiscal responsibility for black lung benefit payments from the federal government to the coal industry, according to a congressional budget justification document created by the Department of Labor this year.

Miners say coal operators want to foist their obligations back on the government.

It only seems fair that since this is an industry-caused problem, the industry should be paying for these benefits instead of shifting the burden onto taxpayers, as they have done, United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts said in a statement Wednesday. Roberts said miners are concerned that the mounting deficit in future years will force lawmakers to cut benefits.

Lawmakers could restore the tax rate to its 2018 level, but that hasnt happened. Some Democratic senators, including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, have sponsored a bill to extend the 2018 tax rate for another 10 years. The rate of $1.10 per ton of underground mined coal was cut by more than half to about 50 cents in the new year. The fund took in about $450 million in revenue in fiscal year 2017.

The mining industry supported the higher tax rates expiration.

We must provide peace of mind to American miners and their families by restoring the excise tax on coal, Sen. Warner said in a statement. Anything else is an empty promise.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had pledged last year to not let the tax rate expire, but that didnt happen. McConnell has maintained that benefits would continue to be paid despite the cuts.

In a statement, McConnell spokesman Robert Steurer said Wednesday that an increase in the tax would require a bipartisan and bicameral effort that can pass both chambers. Steurer noted that that effort would have to begin with a bill in the House of Representatives.

Carl Shoupe, an ex-miner in Harlan County, said he believes lawmakers and the industry are just kicking the bucket down the road.

I honestly believe theyll start cutting benefits, if people dont start speaking up and standing up for them, Shoupe said.

Addington, executive director of the Appalachian Citizens Law Center in Whitesburg, Kentucky, said he has seen a spike in miners seeking black lung claims, and the CDC has reported on the proliferation of a serious strain of black lung that is sickening miners at younger ages.

Were not only seeing more claims, most of the claims were getting are much more severe cases of black lung than ever came into this office a decade ago, Addington said. And its not even close.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Legislation Mining KentuckyCoalition, a cyber insurance company for small and midsize businesses, has launched a full-spectrum coverage to insure manufacturers against security failures and data breaches.

The Coalition policy encompasses the physical, technological, and financial damages  including bodily harm, property damage and pollution  that manufacturers may experience as the result of a cyber incident or technology failure.

According to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, manufacturing is the second-most targeted industry for cyber attacks, based on the number of reported attacks. Manufacturers are prime targets because many are unaware of exposures across their infrastructure and lack the security measures to protect themselves from an attack.

As a result, manufacturers are often choice targets for cyber criminals. According to Verizons 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, 86 percent of cyber attacks against manufacturers are highly targeted in nature, whereas the majority of attacks in other industries are opportunistic. Manufacturing is also unique for its exposure to physical damages that can result from an attack.

According to Joshua Motta, CEO and co-founder of Coalition, there is currently a significant gap in cyber insurance coverage for manufacturing firms who experience property damage, bodily harm, and pollution resulting from a security failure or breach.

This is a major exposure, especially for these companies that have industrial control systems (ICS) that control physical processes, he said.

Coalitions policy for manufacturers addresses this gap while also providing coverage for the losses most frequently experienced resulting from external data breaches, Motta added.

Coalitions offering provides coverage for manufacturing firms in the following areas:

Property damage, bodily harm, and pollution resulting from a security failure

Supply chain interruption from cyber attacks against the insured or their suppliers

Invoice manipulation that results in payments being misdirected or fraudulently directed

Technology disruption that affects operational and industrial controls, hardware, and/or software

Wire fraud losses from payment or delivery of money or securities

Costs to replace computer systems, including industrial control systems, damaged in a cyber attack

Coalitions coverage policy for manufacturing companies is available immediately.

Coalition offers insurance and free cybersecurity tools to help businesses manage and mitigate cyber risk. Backed by A+/A rated insurers Swiss Re Corporate Solutions and Argo Group, Coalition provides companies with up to $10 million of cyber and technology insurance coverage in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Coalitions cyber risk management platform provides automated security alerts, threat intelligence, expert guidance, and tools to help businesses remain resilient in the face of cyber attacks. Coalition is headquartered in San Francisco.

Topics Cyber Pollution ManufacturingFederal employment regulators say BlueCross/Blue Shield of Texas (BCBS), based in Dallas, will pay $75,000 and furnish other relief to settle a disability discrimination lawsuit.

According to the suit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Sheryl Meador, who is deaf, applied through an online process for an open claims examiner position. After submitting her resume, Meador was invited to complete a 35-minute assessment exam that included an audio portion. The audio portion was inaccessible to Meador, because it contained no captions or other visible accommodations for applicants with hearing impairments.

Because of her disability, Meador was unable to complete the audio portion of the exam, and thus, she was unable to complete the application process.

The EEOCs suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas (Civil Action No.3:17-CV-02626-D), says Meador contacted BCBS and informed the companys recruiting coordinator of her disability and requested a reasonable accommodation for the audio portion of the assessment exam. However, before Meador could obtain a reasonable accommodation, the company stopped communicating with her. Meador made repeated attempts to follow up with the companys human resources staff to no avail. As a result, she was not able to complete the application process and was denied hire.

The EEOC charged in its suit that BCBSs failure or refusal to hire Meador, a qualified individual with a disability, violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which protects employees from discrimination based on their disabilities and requires employers to make reasonable accommodations to employees and applicants disabilities. The EEOC brought its suit after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process.

The EEOC was joined in this litigation by Lia Davis of Disability Rights Texas, a federally designated legal protection and advocacy agency for people with disabilities in Texas that directly represented Meador.

A two-year consent decree, signed on March 18, 2019, by U.S. District Court Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater, calls for BCBS to provide monetary relief to Meador. The decree also specifies that BCBS will conduct annual training on the ADA and will inform applicants and employees with disabilities of their rights  including the right to receive reasonable accommodation during the application process. BCBS will also implement a policy for communication with applicants who are deaf or have hearing impairments to ensure they are able to apply for open positions without unlawful barriers.

Source: EEOC

Topics Lawsuits Texas USAPolice in West Virginia say an electric company employee has died in an accident at a customers home.

News outlets report the accident happened Wednesday morning in the Harts community of Lincoln County.

State police say an Appalachian Power truck with the driver inside was on a private driveway along a hillside when the driveway appeared to give way, causing the truck to roll over the hill. The driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

Appalachian Power spokesman Phil Moye identified the victim as 47-year-old Christopher Canterbury. Moye says Canterbury joined the company in 1998 and was based in Logan.

State police are investigating.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics VirginiaThree California police departments have reached a settlement with a man who was paralyzed after being shot by officers.

The Fresno Bee reported this week that 19-year-old Adonis Serna has reached a $2.5 million settlement over injuries sustained when he was shot in Woodlake in 2017.

The May 2018 lawsuit accuses three detectives from Tulare County, Exeter and Woodlake of excessive force, assault and battery negligence.

Sernas attorney says he was shot five times in the back and is now paralyzed from the chest down.

The attorney says felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon on police officers and possession of a stolen vehicle will be dismissed, but Serna will serve probation for misdemeanor charges.

The paper reports that representatives from the municipalities could not be reached for comment.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits CaliforniaMarch 22, 2019 (Investorideas.com Newswire) A Raymond James report recapped the energy company's Q4/18 and discussed what is expected in 2019 and 2020.

In a March 18 research note, analyst John Freeman reported that after Raymond James revised its estimates on Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK:NYSE), it reiterated its Outperform rating and increased its target price on the company to $4.50 per share from $4. Chesapeake's stock is currently trading at around $3.24 per share.

Freeman noted that Raymond James updated its model of the energy firm to reflect newly available data, all of which he covered.

Regarding Q4/18 earnings, they were as expected, the analyst wrote. Pricing and costs were mixed, leading to an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) that was in line with Raymond James' forecast and above the Street's. Earnings per share fell in between both entities' projections.

Guidance for 2019, announced with Q4/18 earnings, included production of 475,000505,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (475505 Mboe/d) versus Raymond James' new estimate of 485 Mboe/d. Management anticipates oil volumes of 116122 Mboe/d and reaching an oil mix of 25% by Q4/19, whereas Raymond James forecasts 118 Mboe/d and just under a 25% oil mix.

Chesapeake guided to 2019 capital spending of about $2.4 billion, which is similar to that of 2018. Raymond James forecasts a bit less spending at $2.3 billion.

With the new data in hand, Raymond James lowered its 2019 forecast and scaled back rig count in 2020 to 19 from 22, "resulting in a cash flow neutral drilling program under NYMEX strip pricing," Freeman pointed out. In 2020, however, Chesapeake could become cash flow neutral in 2020, "a very positive step as the firm looks to continue paring down debt."

Freeman touched on Chesapeake's operations, indicating that "the integration of WildHorse Resource Development's assets looks to be progressing well, with significant cost savings already being realized." Chesapeake will operate five rigs in the Permian Basin, concentrating primarily on the Turner Formation.

He highlighted that the company "placed online its highest producer yet in the Permian Basin, delivering an IP24 of 2,387 boe/d (78% oil) (note that we model an IP30 of 1,344 boe/d [52% oil])."

Disclosure:

1) Doresa Banning compiled this article for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise Reports as an independent contractor. She or members of her household own securities of the following companies mentioned in the article: None. She or members of her household are paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None.

2) The following companies mentioned in this article are billboard sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees.

3) Comments and opinions expressed are those of the specific experts and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

4) The article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports.

5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article until three business days after the publication of the interview or article. The foregoing prohibition does not apply to articles that in substance only restate previously published company releases.

Disclosures from Raymond James, Chesapeake Energy Corp., March 18, 2019

ANALYST INFORMATION

Analysts Holdings and Compensation: Equity analysts and their staffs at Raymond James are compensated based on a salary and bonus system. Several factors enter into the bonus determination, including quality and performance of research product, the analyst's success in rating stocks versus an industry index, and support effectiveness to trading and the retail and institutional sales forces. Other factors may include but are not limited to: overall ratings from internal (other than investment banking) or external parties and the general productivity and revenue generated in covered stocks.

The analyst John Freeman, primarily responsible for the preparation of this research report, attests to the following: (1) that the views and opinions rendered in this research report reflect his or her personal views about the subject companies or issuers and (2) that no part of the research analysts compensation was, is, or will be directly or indirectly related to the specific recommendations or views in this research report. In addition, said analyst(s) has not received compensation from any subject company in the last 12 months.

RAYMOND JAMES RELATIONSHIP DISCLOSURES

Certain affiliates of the RJ Group expect to receive or intend to seek compensation for investment banking services from all companies under research coverage within the next three months.

Raymond James & Associates, Inc. makes a market in the shares of Chesapeake Energy Corporation.

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Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions.

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Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.aspMarch 22, 2019 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Technical analyst Clive Maund explains why he sees this zinc explorer as a good value.

To be sure, Group Eleven Resources Corp.'s (ZNG:TSX.V; GRLVF:OTCQB) stock looks cheap here and good value. It is an advanced zinc explorer based in Ireland, the Emerald Isle, and it is understood that it is very much liked by Peter Megaw, of MAG Silver Corp. (MAG:TSX; MAG:NYSE.MKT) fame. MAG Silver in fact owns 21.4% of its stock (fully diluted) while Teck Resources Ltd. (TCK:TSX; TCK:NYSE) owns 4.3% fully diluted.

An 18-month chart is sufficient to show the entire history of the stock. After starting trading in December of 2017 it wasted no time in going straight into a bear market, which persisted until last November when a trading range started to form that is believed to have evolved into a Triple Bottom. With the current quite tight bunching of the price and its moving averages, the conditions are ripe for a reversal here, with the stock trading at less than a third of its price at inception. We would like to see stronger volume indicators, but these sometimes improve with the price rather than ahead of it.

Although it is of limited use technically, the 6-month chart shows recent action in more detail, and on it we can see that the stock is oversold here near to the bottom of its trading range and cheap. It is completely "off the radar" of most investors, which is a big reason why it is good value.

The attractive and interesting Corporate Presentation includes pages showing the long-term course of the zinc price and current low LME inventories as well as the capital structure and usual details about projects, management etc.

The conclusion is that Group Eleven is an attractive, good value zinc investment here, which due to its low price must be classed as speculative Because it is still in a basing phase, we cannot and do not expect it to go storming out of the gate two days after we buy it, but on the other hand it is certainly not overvalued, and when it does decide to move it should make good percentage gains from the current price.

A disadvantage for company employees recruited from overseas is the rotten cloudy damp maritime climate in Ireland, but this can be mitigated by listening to Irish music in pubs, assisted by drinking Irish beer, songs such as The Orange and the Green, which is about a lad who turns the apparent misfortune of having a Catholic (Irish Republic) mother and a Protestant (Ulster) father to his advantage. Here is a clearer version with lyrics and a version including the U.S. Army Band in Florida.

Group Eleven Resources website.

Group Eleven Resources Corp ZNG.V, GRLVP on OTC, closed at C$0.12 on 18th March 2019.

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: MAG Silver. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees.

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.

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.

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Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions.

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Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.aspHOUSTON - March 21, 2019 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Speedcast International Limited (ASX: SDA), the world's most trusted provider of remote communication and IT solutions, announced today that it has been awarded a new contract to deliver fully managed communications to a worker camp in Mozambique providing housing for employees of a top ten global oil and gas major operator.

The camp will have 30 rooms for housing employees working in the region on nearby offshore LNG drilling and production assets, set to begin operations over the next four years. Speedcast's solution will leverage C-band VSAT to provide reliable internet communications across the camp, allowing those on base to communicate with colleagues, friends and family in addition to maintaining critical operational and emergency communications connectivity.

"Mozambique is a booming market for energy exploration and production, and we are proud to have the global reach and regulatory capabilities to be one of the first providers of reliable communications in the region for our top customers," said Keith Johnson, Speedcast's EVP of Energy. "This new project in Mozambique instills confidence that a strong return in the industry is upon us as our Energy customers begin to build upon their operations in new locations. We look forward to the opportunity to support all of our customers as they activate new sites and revitalize previously active assets in remote locations onshore and offshore."

For more information about our communications, IT solutions and systems integration capabilities for the Energy sector globally, please contact marketing@speedcast.com.

About Speedcast International Limited

Speedcast International Ltd (ASX: SDA) is the largest provider of remote communications and IT services in the world. Speedcast's fully-managed service is delivered via a leading global, multi-access technology, multi-band and multi-orbit network of 70+ satellites and an interconnecting global terrestrial network, bolstered by extensive on-the-ground local support from 40+ countries. This global "network of networks" allows customers to fully rely on the most robust, integrated infrastructure available in the market for their mission critical applications. Speedcast is uniquely positioned as a strategic business partner, tailoring communications, IT and digital solutions to meet unique customer needs and enable business transformation. Speedcast extends its managed services through differentiated technology offerings including cyber-security, crew welfare, content solutions, data and voice applications, and network systems integration services. With a passionate customer focus and a strong safety culture, Speedcast serves more than 2,000 customers in more than 140 countries in sectors such as Maritime, Energy, Mining, Enterprise, Media, Cruise, NGOs and Government. Learn more at www.speedcast.com.

Speedcast is a trademark and registered trademark of Speedcast International Limited. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective owners.

 2019 Speedcast International Limited. All rights reserved.

Contact Information:

Toni Lee Rudnicki

Vice President, Global Marketing

Speedcast International Ltd

ToniLee.Rudnicki@Speedcast.com

+1-832-668-2634

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Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.aspWhen it comes to connecting assets securely, there are few applications more challenging than the energy grid, especially as the grid continues to evolve with new sources of energy coming online, including renewable and sustainable wind, water, solar and more.

Given our dependence on energy to power nearly every moment of our lives, whether we are connecting with our smart phones, or in our smart cars and smart homes, working in smart factories and living in smart cities, we cannot risk attacks that can cut off electricity as part of terrorist and ransomware plots.

We have so much to gain with cleaner sources of power, and the orchestration of that through interconnected providers that building out critical infrastructure that is both reliable and secure is worth doing.

Today, Dispersive Networks, whose software-define, programmable networking technology has already been connecting much of the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) for the last nearly two years, announced it was selected by the Yuba Water Agency (YWA), which owns and operates the fifth-tallest dam in the U.S., to connect its renewable energy assets to the Independent System Operator in California.

YWA joins Humboldt Redwood Company and Greenleaf Power LLC as the third renewable energy generator to make the move to Dispersives CI-SDN since the regional grid operator approved it as an option less than two years ago.

The YWA is a public agency that serves the people of Yuba County, California. The agency's primary missions are flood risk reduction, water supply reliability, fish habitat protection and enhancement, hydroelectric generation, and recreation at New Bullards Bar. It owns and operates facilities with a capacity of storing approximately one million acre-feet of water and generating nearly 400 megawatts of hydropower.

Dispersive is providing a fully managed SaaS connectivity solution based on its Critical Infrastructure Software-Defined Network (CI-SDN). The company is using mission-critical programmable networking to provide ultra-secure, real-time and high-performance data transport between Yuba and the Regional ISO.

The solution securely transports SCADA data to the California grid. YWA benefits from ultra-secure data transport between its energy assets with the flexibility and cost-efficiency of SDN. Dispersive Networks' carrier-grade programmable networking splits session-layer IP traffic into independent encrypted streams that automatically change keys and paths. This mitigates the threat of network eavesdropping, data intercept and denial-of-service attacks.

Dispersive's CI-SDN was used to replace a T-1 line connection, which was both unreliable and inefficient. CI-SDN enables resource owners to connect to the grid over a range of connection types, including private circuits, wireless, and broadband to the internet, with a 100% software-defined network. Programmable networking enhances resiliency by virtualizing any combination of connections as one logical pipe.

"Renewables are transforming the energy sector and at the same time driving the need for new networking models," said Edward J. Wood, President and CEO, Dispersive Networks. "Our programmable networking offers new levels of security, reliability and performance as new types of assets add more complexity to the grid and create new cybersecurity challenges. Our work with YWA demonstrates the value that secure, real-time connectivity can deliver for energy businesses of all kinds and shows how networking can be a driver for optimizing the energy grid."

"The legacy approach to networking was directly impacting our bottom line and could not deliver the uptime we required," said David DeVore, Information Systems Manager at YWA. "We needed a new approach that better matched our needs and could evolve with our operations. Dispersive was able to offer us a radically different managed network solution that ensures both security and mission-critical availability."

The deployment was implemented in partnership with Pacific Power Engineers (PPE).

PPE works with government, utilities, military, and private enterprises. Their skilled engineers and technicians offer a range of services in protection relays, arc flash, CAISO revenue metering, project management, and more.

Christian Arechavaleta, Systems Integration Engineer at Pacific Power Engineers, said, "Since Dispersive CI-SDN requires only a standard broadband connection to the Internet, it's much easier and less expensive to install than a T-1 line. The network can be deployed in days rather than weeks, enabling utilities and renewable energy facilities to generate electricity  and income  much faster."

The California Independent System Operator is a non-profit Independent System Operator serving California. It oversees the operation of California's bulk electric power system, transmission lines, and electricity market generated and transmitted by its member utilities.

Edited by Ken BriodaghSo thats nearly Friday wrapped up. Heres some of the stories we published on irishexaminer.com today which we hope will help you make sense of it all this evening.

TO INFORM

Brexit: What did we learn from a chaotic EU summit on Brexit?

Central Criminal Court: Patrick Quirke told Tusla: Mary Lowry has 'lost the run of herself' with new relationship.

Good Friday Agreement: ]UK has prime responsibility for protecting Good Friday Agreement, Tanaiste says

Mistaken identity: Large rodent warning a case of mistaken identity, says Waterways Ireland.

Online abuse: Gardai investigating claims of online abuse targeting Munster rugby players.

TO ENGAGE

Legalising drugs: Its time for the world to change its approach to drugs, with governments needing to legalise and regulate all illicit substances, say Juan Manuel Santos, Ernesto Zedillo, and Ruth Dreifuss.

Readers' Blog: The essence of two Mental Health Reform surveys published last week exposes high levels of dissatisfaction with current mental health services as provided by the HSE.

TO ENTERTAIN

Guide-dog puppy: A blind golden retrievernamed Charlie was given his very own guide dog when he lost his eyes to glaucoma in January.

Yaaaas qween: Can you believe? Jonathan Van Ness announces second Dublin show.

MOST READ STORY

Irish people living in US lockdowns and fearing for the lives of their children.Central Bank governor Philip Lane has been confirmed as the European Central Bank's next chief economist.

He will take up the role on June 1, replacing Peter Praet who has held the position since 2011.

As a result, the Government has formally started the search for Mr Lane's replacement as head of the Central Bank.

Mr Lane will serve an eight-year non-renewable term as ECB chief economist. He has also been appointed to the ECB's executive board by the council of EU leaders.

Up until now, Ireland has been the only eurozone country never to have had a banker on the ECB's executive board.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe welcomed the appointment, calling Mr Lane "an outstanding economist" who has made "an important contribution over the last four years as governor of the Central Bank".

"This is an important and prestigious position. I am confident that Philip will excel in his new role at the ECB, and I wish him every success," said Mr Donohoe.

Mr Lane's ECB appointment was recently approved by the European Parliament and European finance ministers.Ireland and Britain have been dragged back from the Brexit brink after EU leaders agreed to delay the divorce deadline at least until April 12.

A temporary delay to Brexit was agreed between British prime minister Theresa May and EU leaders during chaotic and frantic talks in Brussels.

Leaders were keen to allow breathing space be given to Ms May in order to avoid a crash-out Brexit this day next week.

European Council president Donald Tusk last night tweeted: EU27 unanimously agrees on its response to UKs requests.

Under the deal, hammered out between EU Mr Tusk and Ms May, she will seek to have the withdrawal agreement passed by the House of Commons next week. Should it pass, the deadline would move back to May 22.

If it is defeated again, the deadline would move to April 12.

Leaders were locked in discussions for several hours over proposals to postpone Brexit, amid wrangling over the final deadline for the UK to leave.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and 26 other EU leaders spent the day struggling to resolve how to solve the Brexit riddle, with dates of April 11, May 7, and May 22 being offered up as a means of pulling Britain back from the brink.

Almost two hours after the expected conclusion of discussions, the leaders broke up for dinner with no agreement reached. Further discussions continued late into the night.

Ms May endured a torrid time at the summit having being warned directly that any promises to the DUP must not undercut the Irish border backstop.

Despite Ms May asking for a delay until June 30, EU leaders rejected the idea out of hand and said an extension could only stretch to May 22 as anything further would cause mayhem to plans for the May 24 MEP elections.

However, despite the new date being included in a draft conclusion document after EU summit talks, the clarity was soon engulfed by Brexit fog, with May 22 being deleted and an internal EU battle beginning over what should be offered. In late night talks, the Irish Examiner understands Mr Varadkar and other EU leaders debated three proposals:

To give Britain an extension until April 12; To give Britain a delay until May 7; Or return to a May 22 extension.

Sources said the April 12 date, which was being pushed by Ireland and is the final day for Britain to decide if it is running MEP candidates, would not be conditional on Britain passing the deal before March 29.

The president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, told the leaders that MEPs do not want any extension to run beyond April 12.

And the draft communique proposed May 22 as the cut-off date, as it falls a day before voting begins in the May 23-26 elections.

Given that the UK does not intend to hold elections to the European Parliament, no extension is possible beyond that date, said the draft.

And while it was expected a final delay date was likely to have been agreed by this morning, the lack of unity during the discussions has led to fresh fears of the EU and UK sleep-walking into a no-deal Brexit.

Ms May had earlier told Mr Varadkar in a short bilateral meeting she wants to avoid a no-deal crisis and that her deal would be passed through parliament by now if it was not for House of Commons speaker John Bercows veto.

However, her claim was given little sympathy, with EU leaders forming a brick wall of criticism by saying her preferred June 30 delay date is impossible and that she must find a way to end the crisis.

French president Emmanuel Macron went further, warning Britain in case of no, it will guide to a no deal. For sure. This is it. We are ready.

Mr Tusk and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker tried to give the same no deal cliff edge threat message while saying the EU is still ready to work with Britain to find a solution.

However, noting Mrs Mays failure to rule out a no-deal Brexit and her commitment to finding a short extension, Luxembourg prime minister Xavier Bettel said Brexit is like waiting for Godot.The Government has been accused of backing down in the face of racist arson attacks by shelving plans for a direct provision centre in Rooskey in Leitrim.

The disused Shannon Key West Hotel had been intended to open as a direct provision centre for 80 asylum seekers. It suffered two arson attacks this year, after the town was earlier visited by Irish and international far-right agitators.

The Department of Justice said its decision to abandon plans to house asylum seekers there was made following legal advice from the Chief State Solicitors Office, which found difficulties with the lease agreement between the owners of the hotel and the operator renting it. It said the decision was taken solely in relation to the difficulties with the lease.

However, Leah Doherty of Leitrim And Roscommon United Against Racism said the decision would be seen as a victory for those who carried out the attacks.

Nobody apart from the Government thought it was a good idea to house 80 asylum seekers in Rooskey, said Ms Doherty.

However, it is regretful that the Government appears to have backed down in the face of racist arson attacks and a vocal hard-right minority in this area.

This will be portrayed by the far-right minority in our communities as a victory for them.

Fianna Fails immigration spokeswoman, Fiona OLoughlin, expressed concerns that the decision sends a message to the perpetrators of the arson attacks that they have won.

Liam Herrick, executive director of the Irish Council of Civil Liberties, said the use of hotels for asylum seekers is inconsistent with family life and human dignity but also expressed concerns about sections of the far right stirring up hostility toward asylum seekers.

We are concerned about recent incidents of far-right demonstrations and online activity, which has targeted refugees and migrant communities in Ireland, he said. It appears that a small number of racist activists are trying to stir up hostility against refugees.

There is virtually no popular support for such activity in Ireland and it must be resisted strongly.

Nick Henderson, chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council, said the decision showed the need for a change in approach from the current system that relies on private operators, to long-term, strategic planning and investment.

Jennifer DeWan of Nasc, the Migrant and Refugee Rights Centre, said the reliance by the Government on hotels and B&Bs for emergency accommodation is not sustainable. She also expressed concern that those behind the arson attacks may see the decision as a win.

If those who perpetrated the attacks on the hotel see this as a win then will they try and do the same in other areas that propose to have a centre? That would be extremely worrying, she said.Former sugar plant in Mallow could be sold and/or developed Greencore says it is ready to talk about future options for the use of what was the last sugar manufacturing plant in Ireland.

Cork County Council wrote to the company recently to ask what it is intending to do with the former sugar factory in Mallow.

After 77 years of production, the factory closed in controversial circumstances in May 2006, with the loss of 240 jobs.

Andy Beach, Greencores head of property, wrote to the local authority, suggesting that his company meet with officials from its planning department, in order to understand the options available for the future of the site and any zoning designations which may be put on it.

Mr Beach said that, since the factory closed, the company has been working with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ensure the site is up to a standard that it could be reused.

We are now at a stage where we can look at the options for the future of the site, including its development and/or sale, Mr Beach wrote.

The councils northern division wrote to Greencore, asking what its future plans are for the site and urging it to consider using it for new, bio-economy developments.

The suggestion was made by Fine Gael councillor John Paul OShea and got unanimous backing from other councillors.

They also wrote to Minister for Agriculture, Food, and the Marine, Michael Creed, asking him to look at the plant for such a development.

Mr OShea welcomed the response from Greencore, outlining its willingness to have future development on the site considered, or, indeed, to dispose of the site in its entirety to other interested parties.

The bio-economy is a new and emerging economy and it is part of the joint government committee chaired by Minister Richard Bruton and Minister Michael Creed to create and foster new bio-economy development in the country, said Mr OShea.

I believe the old sugar factory site is an ideal site for this form of development.

Mr OShea said that the site and the Mallow area itself are ideally located to accommodate this type of development, with close access to the N20 and N72. The site also has a spur line, connecting it to the railway network.

I will be encouraging the planning staff in Cork County Council to arrange a meeting with Greencore as soon as is possible, as requested in their reply, and progress development plans for the site. This may or may not include the bio-economy, said Mr OShea.

Whats critical is that we, as a local authority, need to ensure we encourage development of some nature on this site in the near future.

The plant ceased operations as a result of EU reforms on sugar production. However, a subsequent report, four years after, from the EU Court of Auditors, said it shouldnt have closed.

In an analysis of the EUs sugar reforms, auditors found that the European Commission was working off old figures that did not take into account Greencores previous closure of its other sugar plant in Carlow.Gonzalez, first elected in 2011 and managing partner of accounting firm GW & Associates in Chicago Heights, said that priorities for the city include economic development and job creation, street repairs and investment in storm and sanitary sewer lines. He said the city is pouring more than $6.2 million into sanitary and storm sewer upgrades to resolve flooding problems on the citys west side, which is the first phase in a comprehensive citywide initiative.More needed to be done to call out the nonsense and the lies that are being spread about vaccinations, Health Minister, Simon Harris, has said.

We really need to call on the anti-vaxxers to cop on; we need to call them out, he said.

Mr Harris said they also needed to call out the TDs who continued to write nonsense in relation to vaccination.

They continue to send representations to me questioning the benefits of vaccinations about constituent X and Y.

Yes, we need to supply parents with all of the information. Yes, we need to help parents make informed decisions.

But if you want medical advice you should get it from a doctor or healthcare professional; not from a member of Dail Eireann propagating nonsense.

We have seen far too much of TDs coming into Dail Eireann and standing on the floor of the Dail criticising the HPV vaccine.

Some of the people in the Dail most vocal around the time of the CervicalCheck audit were the same people who actually spoke out against a vaccine that can prevent cervical cancer.

That is complete and utter hypocrisy; it's rank hypocrisy; it's dangerous and going to cost lives.

We need to be really, really concerned about what is going on here. We have a measles outbreak in our country; we have a mumps outbreak in part of our country," said Mr Harris.

Yes, the HPV vaccine rate is increasing but we really need to get it a hell of a lot higher if we want to eradicate cervical cancer within a generation.

The minister also paid tribute to the incredible HPV vaccine campaigner Laura Brennan who died this week.

Mr Harris said he had no doubt that Laura's advocacy saved lives and described her as the most amazing person he had ever met.

It was never about Laura; it was always about making sure other women in this country could avoid getting cervical cancer, he said.

When Laura started advocating that girls get the HPV vaccine, the uptake rate was about 51%. It now stands at 70%.

Mr Harris said the way Laura had inspired everybody in the health service to work really hard had contributed to vaccine uptake.Serious shortcomings in the quality and safety of a community home for people with disabilities have been found by the States health services watchdog.

Inspectors from the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) made an unannounced inspection last November of Clew Bay, in Dublin, operated by St Michaels House.

They noted that significant improvements were needed in residents rights and their personal plans, risk management, safeguarding, and the premises.

There were also issues around the effectiveness of management and ongoing concern regarding the compatibility of some residents.

Two terrace houses within walking distance of each other are used to provide a community home for eight adults with an intellectual disability.

The centre was inspected three times last year, with the provider having to provide assurances because of concerns raised following previous inspections.

When inspectors last visited the centre they found that an abuse allegation had not been reported to the Office of the Chief Inspector.

The incident had been escalated within the organisation by the person in charge but had been incorrectly deemed as not being a notifiable event.

The inspectors also found that the organisations policy on protecting adults from abuse and neglect was ineffective in guiding staff practice.

Meanwhile, inspectors revisited a centre in Co Louth  Chestnut Heights, operated by St John of God Community Services  because they previously identified significant failings.

While some issues had been addressed more improvements were needed so that the centre which had 16 residents was homely, clean, and updated.

During an unannounced visit last September the inspectors found that transport was even more limited, with the number of vehicles reduced from two to one. Taxis were provided for medical appointments, but management was told that availability of transport must improve.

Plans to move residents into new community homes will result in the centre closing by 2021. Inspectors are particularly concerned about one unit expected to close by the year-end.

St Lukes and St Matthews, two other residential units in Co Louth operated by St John of God Community Services, were deemed not fit for purpose during an unannounced inspection last September and there were concerns about the use of restrictive practices. There were seven residents living there at the time.Irish women will be the first in the world to take part in a clinical trial to treat one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer.

Women with advanced triple-negative breast cancer will be treated with the oral drug COTI-2, together with chemotherapy, at St Vincents University Hospital in Dublin.

More than 250 people are diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer each year that is often difficult to treat and tends to be more common in younger women.

Research on the targeted therapy carried out by Dr Naoise Synott in University College Dublin and St Vincents was funded by the Irish Cancer Societys Breast-Predict research programme and the Clinical Cancer Research Trust.

The Irish Cancer Society is announcing the clinical trial today which is also Daffodil Day, to show how the public can contribute to such vital research.

Money collected on Daffodil Day, the charitys biggest fundraiser, is used to fund cancer research and support cancer patients by providing advice and support.

Irish Cancer Society chief executive Averil Power said it would support more potentially life-saving research projects if it has enough funds to support them.

Catriona Plunkett was 35 years old when she was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer in June 2016.

Later that year, the Dublin mother of two got the all-clear after having chemotherapy, a mastectomy, and reconstruction.

Ms Plunkett said she was terrified when she found out she had cancer but in the end realised she was one of the lucky ones  she was caught early.

Currently, the only form of drug treatment available to patients with triple-negative breast cancer is chemotherapy.

It is hoped that the trial, to be funded by Cotinga Pharmaceuticals, will begin recruiting patients later this year.

The trial will be aimed at women whose triple-negative breast cancer has spread beyond the breast.

Any cancer patients with queries on clinical trials should talk to their medical team or see cancertrials.ie for information on cancer trials open in Ireland.A man who set fire to an apartment with three children inside has been jailed for 10 years.

Ian O'Connor (29) of Emmet Crescent, Inchicore, Dublin threw a pipe bomb at another family home less than a month later, Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard.

He pleaded guilty to arson at Tyrone Place, Inchicore on September 18, 2017. He also pleaded guilty to arson at Ailesbury Road, Dublin on October 15, 2017.

The court heard that in the first arson, the heat of the fire caused a hearing aid to melt in a seven-year-olds ear, leaving her with a permanent scar.

Judge Melanie Greally sentenced O'Connor to 12 years imprisonment for the first arson, but suspended the final two years on condition that he keep the peace and engage with the Probation Service for two years on his release.

Judge Greally also sentenced him to six years imprisonment for the later arson, to run concurrently with the other sentence. She backdated all sentences to the day OConnor went into custody, March 9, 2018.

Detective Inspector David Harrington told Tony McGillicuddy BL, prosecuting, that on the date in September, Margaret Green was asleep in her apartment along with her three children and woke to find the stairs on fire.

Ms Green was trapped upstairs by the fire and tried unsuccessfully to smash the windows to escape. She covered her two youngest children with wet towels in her bedroom and was choking on smoke when they were rescued by the fire brigade.

Her eldest son had fallen asleep while watching television downstairs and woke up to the sight of the front door on fire. He escaped via a balcony at the back of the apartment with the help of a neighbour who brought him a ladder.

O'Connor admitted to starting the fire by pouring petrol in the letterbox and on the front door. He said he owed money to certain persons who had instructed him to light the fire and had told him that there would be no one in the house.

Inspector Harrington agreed with Caroline Biggs SC, defending, that O'Connor believed that had he not lit the fire, then his family would have been pipe-bombed. O'Connor was given a bag of cocaine beforehand, but said he did not do it for the drugs.

Family thought they were going to die

In a victim impact statement which was read out in court, Ms Green said that her seven-year-old daughter's hearing aid had melted in the fire causing a permanent scar to her ear. The court heard all four members of the family had sustained injuries.

Ms Green said she thought that she and her family were all going to die. She said she remembered her youngest son telling her that he was going to heaven and that he would come back and help them escape the fire.

Detective Garda Shane Cahill told Mr McGillicuddy that in the second attack, William Godson woke to find flames outside the kitchen window of the home of his parents and two younger siblings. He grabbed bottles of water and used them to douse the fire.

O'Connor told gardai that he got an offer of 2,000 to put a petrol bomb through a window and was told that there was no one in the house, but he had not been paid as it had not worked. He said he had brought two petrol bombs to the house but had only thrown one.

Det Gda Cahill agreed with Ms Biggs that her client had been in debt and felt he had no option of getting money anywhere else. He agreed that there was some speculation that the wrong house had been targeted.

O'Connor has previous convictions for drunk driving and for being drunk in charge of a vehicle. He is unmarried and has one child.

Judge Greally said the aggravating factors in the case were that the acts of arson took place at residential homes while its occupants were asleep, the high degree of recklessness, the severe harm to the victims and the fact that O'Connor was acting as an agent of organised crime.

She said the mitigating factors in the case were his plea of guilty, his remorse, his admissions to gardai, his lack of relevant previous convictions, the traumatic events of his youth, his health issues and that he was pressured to act out of concern for the safety of his family.

Judge Greally said the case highlighted the invaluable service provided by the fire brigade. She commended the neighbour who brought one of the children at Tyrone Place a ladder for his bravery in acting to save the boy's life.

Fear of assassination

Ms Biggs told the court that her client's uncle and cousin had been assassinated over drug debts in particularly gruesome killings, adding: He had seen what happens if you dont pay.

She said OConnor had a history of dependence on cocaine, benzodiazepam and alcohol since the age of 12 and had been under the influence of vast amounts of drugs at the time of the offences.

She said that O'Connor has been diagnosed with ADHD at the age of four and had suffered from panic attacks, anxiety and depression since his teens.

A psychiatrists report said OConnor displayed the traits of schizoid personality disorder. She said her client was genuinely remorseful for his actions and had considered suicide.

The court heard OConnor was working as a cleaner in prison and was willing to take whatever steps necessary to rehabilitate himself.Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin has ruled out pulling the plug on the Government in the immediate aftermath of any Brexit breakthrough, saying it would be reckless to hold a vote before the end of the year.

Despite ongoing rumours of a snap election anytime between May and late summer, Mr Martin insisted he has given Taoiseach Leo Varadkar the year to work through the ongoing Brexit difficulties and will not change his position.

Speaking to reporters on the outskirts of the EU summit in Brussels and after the meeting of the ALDE political umbrella group of which Fianna Fail is a member, Mr Martin said the one-year confidence and supply extension remains.

And, pointing to the instability in the House of Commons, he said it would be wrong and reckless to cause an election while Ireland is still at real risk of suffering fallout from Brexit.

The language Ive always used is that weve facilitated the continuation of a Government in the context of confidence and supply, said Mr Martin. I made it very clear before Christmas that Brexit, the instability around Brexit, made my view essential, and that is to give [the Government] 2019, to give it the year, to facilitate all of that.

I think Ive been proven right in agreeing that... I think it [an election] would have been a reckless thing to do, and it would be an irresponsible thing to do if we had an election right now or in January or February, given what has happened.

We had a sense before Christmas we would be where we are today [in terms of Brexit], and weve given Government space to negotiate Brexit without having to look over their shoulder. I think it stands in stark contrast to the incoherence the absence of cohesion in UK to put their country first.

While publicly backed by the party, Mr Martins stance not to call an election in the immediate aftermath of any Brexit breakthrough is likely to cause fresh anger among grassroots Fianna Fail members and backbench TDs who believe the party is strangled by confidence and supply.

Some TDs have formally raised the matter, with John McGuinness and public expenditure spokesman Barry Cowen arguing over Mr McGuinnesss call for an election last month.Four mussel seed fishermen and their companies have lost a High Court action for compensation against the State.

It arose after the Supreme Court found in 2016 that Northern Ireland-registered boats had been unlawfully allowed harvest seed in our territorial waters.

The compensation case came before the High Court where Mr Justice Charles Meenan today rejected all their claims because, in his view, the law prevented any remedy being provided to them.

However, he said, the fact remained that for many years the State permitted Northern Ireland-registered vessels to fish for mussel seed unlawfully "to the detriment" of the industry.

He added:

"Thus it cannot be said the plaintiff fishermen were well served by the State."

In the 2016 Supreme Court decision, it was found Northern Irish mussel vessels fishing in our waters was unlawful because the harvesting of mussel seed constituted the exploitation of a natural resource belonging to the State.

Northern Irish mussel vessels had enjoyed this privilege under a 1965 cross-border co-operation deal between agricultural/fishery authorities in Dublin and Belfast called the "Voisinage Agreement".

The four fishermen were among a number who invested in mussel seeding fishing in the 1990s when its economic potential became apparent.

However, they claimed that as a result of "aggressive" fishing by the Northern Irish vessels and because of being given fishing allocations that were too small, the businesses were not viable. They said this resulted in significant losses following major investment which had been encouraged by the State.

Mussel fishing involves special vessels dredging the sea for mussel seed which is then "transplanted" to aquaculture sites until the seeds mature into full-grown mussels. One of the vessels in this case cost 3.45m.

Following their Supreme Court victory, the case by the four - Paul Barlow of Woodstown Bay Shellfish, Dunmore East, Waterford; Michael Crowley of Riverbank Mussels, Killinick, Wexford; Gerard Kelly of Fresco Seafoods and Tardrum Fisheries, Greencastle, Donegal; and Alex McCarthy of Halcome Merchants, Kildimo, Limerick - continued in the High Court in relation to their claim for damages.

The case was against the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, the Registrar General of Fishing Boards and the State.

Among their claims were breach of constitutional rights, negligence, breach of duty, and breach of legitimate expectation.

They also claimed unlawful delegation of the role of allocating of how much mussel seed each vessel could harvest to a body called the Seed Mussel Advisory Committee (SMAC).

The fishermen, in applying for allocations, decided to bypass the SMAC because of the involvement of officials from Northern Ireland on that committee.

They claimed they were not receiving sufficient allocations from the SMAC. The took part in "protest fishing" in Northern Irish waters to highlight the unfairness of the 1965 Vosinage Agreement which did not allow vessels from here to fish in their waters.

The defendants denied their claims.

Mr Justice Meenan found if the Northern Irish vessels had not been fishing in territorial waters, there would have been additional mussel seed available for fishermen here.

However, there was insufficient evidence of how much extra would have been available if that had not been happening or how much of the extra might have been fished by other local boats.

While the manner in which allocations of seed was made to the four might be open to criticism, the evidence showed, for the most part, the amount of seed they fished fell short of their respective allocations.

There was also no evidence to quantify the claim the Minister failed to manage the mussel seed resource appropriately even if it had been established he had done so.

He found no breach of constitutional rights because the four could not be said to have a proprietary interest in mussel seed which is a State resource.

The State did not have a duty of care to manage that resource in order to protect the fishermen's commercial interests and therefore there was no negligence.

He also rejected the claim that they had a legitimate expectation the State would act in accordance with law in relation to the allocation of mussel seed or that there was unlawful delegation of that role to the SMAC.

He further rejected their claim, under the European Convention on Human Rights, in relation to property rights because the property in question belongs to the State.Help could be on the way for women with aggressive breast cancer.

Patients in Ireland could benefit from a potentially life-saving new clinical trial to treat it, according to the Averil Power.Supporters of directly-elected mayors for Cork, Limerick, and Waterford have called on the Government to flesh out its vision for the office.

The Cork Mayoral Campaign welcomed Cabinet approval of the proposed powers for the office, but said it was disappointed that the only specifics seemed to be in relation to the near-130,000 annual salary.

We need more details about what we will be voting for on May 24, said Oliver Moran, spokesman for the cross-party campaign.

Local election candidates are knocking on doors now and we are being asked questions about this proposal and we cant answer the questions. People need answers now.

Aodh Quinlivan, the director of the Centre for Local and Regional Governance at University College Cork, also welcomed the initial detail, saying: Its coming a little bit late in the day but its better late than never.

We need more details though. The salary got the headlines, but I dont see that as a big deal when you consider the job will combine the political head of a local authority with major executive functions  it is a serious job, with a large staff and a large budget.

He said it was important the minister of state for local government, John Paul Phelan, follow through on his pledge to hold town hall-style meetings before the vote. He also repeated concerns that the creation of a directly-elected mayor as a standalone reform will not achieve much unless it is accompanied by wider local-government reform.

Plebiscites on the issue will take place in the three cities on May 24, the same day as the local and European elections.

In Dublin, the proposal is being put to a citizens assembly. If approved, it is hoped the first mayors could be elected in 2022.

The new mayors would replace council chief executives in preparing policies in housing, planning, and roads, and replace the current council head as the person responsible for ensuring all decisions of the elected council are lawful.

Chief executives, however, will retain powers to allocate social housing, grant licences or permits, and to deal with enforcement matters such as planning.

Mayors will serve a five-year term and be restricted to a maximum of two terms, but the initial term will be for two-and-a-half years to allow for transfers of power.

The council would have oversight of the mayors performance and would also have the power, in certain circumstances, to remove the mayor from the role.

Tanaiste Simon Coveney said the Cork mayor would be the most powerful politician outside Cabinet.Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has denied the last minute decision to delay the Brexit divorce day until either April 12 or May 22 means the crisis is now facing a "rolling cliff edge" - insisting no further extensions will be allowed, writes Fiachra O Cionnaith in Brussels.

At the end of the EU summit in Brussels, Mr Varadkar confirmed the EU has "unanimously" agreed to give British Prime Minister Theresa May more time to drag the EU-UK deal over the line.

After lengthy late-night talks, the EU agreed to scrap the March 29 Brexit deadline day and replace it with a May 22 deadline on condition the House of Commons passes the deal next week.

However, if it rejects the deal, the new deadline will be cut short to April 11.

This morning, Mr Varadkar said a "rolling cliff edge" Brexit must be avoided as the crisis cannot go on endlessly.

However, asked if the new dual deadline has created this exact problem, the Taoiseach insisted this is not the case.

"I had that thought myself last night; is this a rolling cliff edge? It's not. There won't be further extensions.

The EU has taken control of the timeline which in the past had been set by the UK.

"If they do not [pass the deal] then the UK will leave with no deal on April 12 unless it's possible in that brief interim period for an alternative plan to be agreed," he said.

Mr Varadkar separately ruled out a rumoured lengthy nine-month delay if Britain agrees to run MEP candidates, saying there is understandable "Brexit fatigue" across the EU.

He said Ms May made it "clear" she does not want to run MEP candidates.

Mr Varadkar repeatedly stressed it is now time for Britain to decide if it wants a deal, no deal or a series of votes on what to do next.

Asked if he agrees with French president Emmanuel Macron's prediction this morning that Ms May's deal has just a 5% chance of being backed by MPs next week, the Taoiseach added: "I don't know, I'd just be picking a figure out of the air... Brexit is uncharted territory. I've almost given up speculating on what's going to happen next."When you work in the kitchen you dont really get to go out in the dining room and see the reaction on peoples faces, so it is kind of nice to actually see people try your food and talk to them and just see what they think, Flores said. It is really rewarding if people like the food.Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has denied the extension offered by the EU to the UK is an example of the rolling cliff-edge Brexit scenario.

Asked whether the EU was now in the midst of a rolling exit, he replied: "It's not. There won't be further extensions.

"We've set out now what the timeline is and in many ways the European Union has taken control of the timeline which in the past had been set by the UK."

Mr Varadkar made the comments at the end of the summit of EU leaders in Brussels. He said the choices were now "very obvious".

"It's this agreement; no deal; or the parliament taking indicative votes for a much closer long-term relationship with the EU which would allow the joint political declaration aspect of the withdrawal package to be amended," he said.

"I don't see any other choices."

Irish leader Varadkar speaking bluntly about differences within EU27 and solidarity pic.twitter.com/vHlPqOWJAf  Lili Bayer (@liliebayer) March 22, 2019

He added: "I hope the Withdrawal Agreement will be ratified by the House of Commons. If it isn't I imagine they'll go onto indicative votes and that may point the way to a closer long-term relationship."

The Taoiseach said the view of Theresa May is that it would be a "farce" for the UK to participate in the European Parliament elections.

"(Mrs May) gave some indication in that from her point of view, there is no desire whatsoever to take part in the European elections.

I think she feels, and most British politicians feel, it would be a farce for the UK to participate in the elections if it were to leave and that's mainly the reason why the date of April 12 was chosen, because that is when they have to trigger the European elections and so they need to know they're definitely going by then, or if they're going to stay or there's going to be a long extension well then the European elections will have to happen in the UK.

Mr Varadkar said Mrs May is confident she can win her upcoming vote.

"Prime Minister May feels there is a pathway to victory and getting a majority in the House of Commons, and I hope she can achieve that," he said.

"I wouldn't be in a better position than she is to access the parliamentary arithmetic that exists in the UK and it's a political matter for the British Parliament."

Meanwhile, DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds has said Theresa May failed to secure changes to her Brexit deal - including the Northern Ireland backstop - at the summit in Brussels.

"The Prime Minister missed an opportunity at the EU Council to put forward proposals which could have improved the prospects of an acceptable Withdrawal Agreement and help unite the country," he said.

"That failure is all the more disappointing and inexcusable given the clear divisions and arguments which became evident amongst EU member states when faced with outcomes they don't like."

He added: "Nothing has changed as far as the Withdrawal Agreement is concerned. We will not accept any deal which poses a long-term risk to the constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom."

PA & Digital DeskSorting out Cork people for ages...

Cmere, whats the story with dying your pubes?

Im back in the dating game after my old doll found out I was part of a WhatsApp group called Norries Up for a Shag with 20 Minutes Notice. (She originally thought I was in a rapid-response animal rescue unit, which I kind of was if you saw some of the wans who got in touch.)

Anyway, Ive had a long hard look at myself in the mirror and I still have it, except my pubes are gone grey and some old dolls hate that. Can I dye them?

 Dowcha Donie, Blackpool, I was thinking of red and white for the hurling.

A: Im hurling alright, just thinking about it. My friend from college is out four nights a week on Tinder.

I said, what do you say when you see grey pubes on a date? She said, put that away a while, I havent even ordered a drink. #Keen

Im after falling in love with my hairdresser, which is a little bit awks because shes only from Ballyvolane.

Were moving in together tomorrow but Im worried about telling my parents, this is just the kind of thing that could get them kicked out the bridge club. (The members were fine with the news that Im a lesbian, except for Mrs Dwyer from the Model Farm Road, who tabled a motion at the AGM insisting that she isnt one. Now thats what I call coming out.)

Anyway, Ive invited the olds over for dinner on Sunday, how do you think I should break the news?

 Anna, Maryborough Hill, would it be hilarious if I just dressed her up as a majorette?

A: No. Your parents sound like cultured people, so your best bet here is to greet them with a Limerick. (Limerick and culture in the same sentence, what next?)

So, here goes. Youre welcome to Maryborough Hill, Sit down there and eat up your fill, Id like to say sorry, my girlfriends a norry, just dont write me out of the will.

Now listen up Paddy. Ive just come up from a meeting of the British Aristocracy, where we dressed up as babies and got a jolly good thrashing from Tiggy Land-Grabber, who was pretending to be Nanny. (Never did us any harm.)

Weve all decided to move to Ireland, before the oiks over here blame us for Brexit and say, Oy, Trev, lets kill all them nobs.

Im minded to move to a big house in north Cork but Jacob Rees-Mogg wants to live in Dublin so he can be close to his money. Which would be a better?

 Lord Herbert Von Maid-Snatcher, Wiltshire, my family came over with the Normans.

A: Like a virus. I think I speak for everyone in Cork when I say youd be better off in Dublin.

The dress circle of Cork society will just follow you around the place until you agree that Pres is better than Eton. Youll have so much in common with the Dublin 4 crowd  the only difference is the accent, theirs is slightly more English than yours.

Anxiety levels up to 11 here in Lindville on the Blackrock Road.

Our new neighbours have moved in and theyre from Kerry.

Thats not a bad thing in itself, the husband is a bit sleazy like all Kerry guys, but I definitely would, do you know that kind of a way.

The problem is I have no way of telling if they are appropriate for someone like me  for all I know they might have got a payout from a whiplash case. So, how can you tell if a Kerry person is well-bred?

 Nicola, Lindville, their kids are a bit feral.

A: Only a bit? That would make them like the Hapsburgs in Tralee. Im friends with the agony aunt in The Kerryman, most of her letters are from people asking if its ok to be in love with a goat.

I said, whats a sign of class in Kerry?

She replied, saying creature instead of crater. #MadeInChelsea

Howre oo goin on?

Herself is after falling in with a group of fanatical sexperts inside in Dunmanway and didnt she come the other night and say were heading for divorce if we dont have it off once a week.

I said thats a fair ramp up from once every two years, but she didnt hear me because she already had the Credit Union calendar out, asking me how are you fixed Wednesday afternoon.

I said, I usually listen to Joe Duffy then and its hard to get randy while listening to some fella above in Dublin who got caught in a tarmacadam scam. So like, when is the best time for that kind of carry on?

 Dan Paddy Andy, head out beyond Dunmanway until you see a man googling cheap Viagra.

A: Every couple has this problem. The other day, My Conor said, when would you like to have sex?

I said, less often. He laughed his head off at that and said, imagine for a moment that it isnt with me.

I said, I imagine that every time we get going, but it still doesnt work. #CallTheRelationshipCounsellorIrish people living in the United States fear for the lives of their children, who are only armed with active shooter drills if a gunman targets their school. Some miss home, writes Aileen C. OReilly.

It was Tom Wolfe who said of the US: America is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.

These days America is waiting on a miracle as opposed to providing them and for the Irish who have moved there and are now raising their children stateside the reality of active shooter drills at school means the dream is well and truly over.

There is a poster in a Boston Kindergarten classroom which bears a nursery rhyme. Set to the same singsong rhythm as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star it reads: Lockdown, Lockdown, Lock the door, Shut the lights off, Say no more.

Go behind the desk and hide. Wait until its safe inside. Lockdown, lockdown Its all done. Now its time to have some fun!

The rhyme, designed as a memory aid for very young children, is a shocking 21st-century reality check  just as Ring a ring oroses was an apparently innocuous rhyme about the plague, this little ditty might just save your childs life in the US.

Companies like ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) already go from school to school helping to implement security plans and evacuation procedures should a shooter open fire on campus. One Pennsylvania school is even reported to be arming its children with rocks.

Yvonne Watterson and her daughter Sophie.

Sinead McLoughlin Desmond left Ireland and moved to America 20 years ago to marry a Cork man. They now live in Chicago, Illinois with their children, Orla, Cian and Rory.

Growing up where we did in Rathcoole, Co Dublin, we would never have seen guns except for maybe when the securicor van went to the Bank of Ireland once a week, she recalls.

Qwas a shock to the system immediately over here seeing every police officer having one on them in plain view. Be it at the shop or on the street. Even now I find myself staring directly at the gun. I was here a year when Columbine happened and it shook the country to its very core.

But immediately it felt as though the defences went up and the NRA sprang into action  now is not the time to talk about it, have respect for the deceased, thoughts and prayers blah blah blah... she sighs in disdain.

Since then we have had hundreds of similar incidents. Sandy Hook, Vegas, Parkland etc. Its life as usual in the USA. My God, if kindergarteners getting slaughtered isnt going to move the needle what is?

Sinead McLoughlin Desmond and her husband.

It was after Sandy Hook that my kids started doing active shooter drills at school. Its the craziest thing and they dont bat an eyelid because they have never known anything else.

Just recently here in Chicago, we had an incident where there was an African American teen shot by a police officer. There was a lot of controversy about it and the police officer was charged. We knew the verdict was coming out on a Friday and our neighbourhood and kids were threatened if the verdict didnt go the right way.

We were told to pick our children up early because the school was going into lockdown for safety purposes. I think that was the first time I was genuinely frightened.

There is a percentage of the country whose identity seems to be wrapped up in the second amendment ( the right of the people to keep and bear Arms). But its not the majority of the country. Unfortunately, the system is set up though where the majority are being ruled, so to speak, by the minority.

Yes, of course, we all think about going home. No one ever really thinks theyll stay but you get married, have kids and keep pushing it back.

"Eventually, you wonder if youd ever settle back down at home and its 20 years since Ive lived there. We do have a house at home though in Cork. Its a wee farmhouse we renovated and its nice to know the kids will always have an Irish base.

Writer and school teacher Yvonne Watterson, from Antrim, left her hometown when she was 18. Initially, she lived in New York but later moved to Arizona where she married and had a daughter.

I often feel guilty for having left Northern Ireland. I often wonder if perhaps the better thing would have been to stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our television screen at six oclock every night. But I didnt stay. I fled, she admits.

Jessica Scheller.

I remember watching my mum ironing and reacting to more news of bombs and deaths on the radio and I knew with certainty from a very young age that I would leave once I was old enough. And I did.

I became an immigrant in an America I now no longer recognise, and turned my back on the vulnerable, tiny country that shaped and scared me.

Not much younger than my now 22-year-old American daughter I spent most of the 1980s planning my escape. It was a turbulent and traumatic time in Northern Ireland. We lived and worked and played and prayed within a national crucible of doubt and suspicion, a half-empty glass. I suppose I always anticipated the worst; as such, I was rarely disappointed.

Yvonne, who has written extensively about the Northern Ireland she grew up in, recalls a quiet Sunday morning, following a week of murder in the United States four years ago  the fatal shootings of two more African American men, Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota, and a sniper attack on 12 police officers at a peaceful protest in Dallas by a military veteran who had served in Afghanistan and who authorities said wanted to kill white people.

America is now the place where my 22-year-old daughter, Sophie, has learned from an early age what to do in the event of a school shooting. She deals with it far, far more calmly than I do.

When we first discussed the drills I was affected by her sadness for ME! She has heard all my stories about growing up  I was born in 1963 so I suppose Im a child of the Troubles. She was far more accepting of the situation that she had to face in school than I was.

It seems that some of the most powerful people in America care more about guns than children. I listen to people talking about arming teachers and Im just horrified. Its not the America of my dreams, thats for sure. And I feel so guilty for having left my Northern Ireland for this.

Jessica Scheller, a co-founder and President Emeritus of Womens March Chicago, a group organised out of the aftermath of the November 2016 national general election, explains that the frequency of the active shooter drills is decided by each individual school and the area in which they are located.

Jessica Schellers children, Orla and Aidan.

My children (aged 7) go to Catholic school and conduct active shooter drills in the same way that they practice tornado drills and the like. I believe they practice this a couple of times per year and yes, in Chicago, these drills are routinely conducted with students in Kindergarten and above.

I was raised in South Dakota where gun violence is rare and firearm ownership is common. Citizens there are more open to having armed teachers in the classroom. I currently live in Illinois. Most people here are staunchly opposed to these measures.

The public sentiment seems to vary depending upon how great an issue gun violence is within their region on a day-to-day basis. I think most people believe this to be a very bad plan, but the gun lobby is very powerful and pushes out a lot of propaganda.

Speaking about gun violence its easy to misconstrue her pragmatic approach as one of resignation which it certainly is not.

In urban areas, children, particularly in depressed areas, face gun violence every day. I think many feel lost or forgotten in the gun violence conversation.

"For children in more affluent areas, gun violence is not a daily issue. Mass shootings are far too common but remain rare by comparison to random gun violence in urban centres.

I certainly feel more anxious but I cannot say as to how children feel. I believe some feel uniquely empowered to organise for change.

"Out of all of the terror of the mass shootings of the past years, there has been a beautiful development in the mass mobilisation of teens and young adults to organise and demand common-sense gun laws and to challenge the National Rifle Association.

I watch them with hope.Body piercing was once an act of rebellion - now its a fashion statement. Carolyn Moore meets the woman who drove the craze - celebrity piercer Maria Tash.

Do you remember your first piercing? Twenty years ago that would have been something of a redundant question, since most peoples first piercing would also have been their last. You got your ears pierced, and if you went through a rebellious phase you might have stuck a darning needle through your lobe to give yourself a second piercing; it was far from sophisticated but it did the job.

Then the '90s gave birth to grunge, and with it came a revival of some of the aesthetic markers of the punk movement. First nose piercings had an alt fashion moment, and then in 1993 supermodel Christy Turlington stalked the catwalk with a sparkling appendage nestled in her navel and a trend was born. Slowly but surely the subculture of body piercing began to go mainstream. Piercing guns were out, needles were in, and nobodys eyebrows, nipples or navels were safe from fashions latest obsession.

In the 25 years since, weve been through so many trend cycles with piercing that most people over the age of 30 can remember their first, second or third piercings, and many of us still bear the scars of our dalliance with a needle even if we left our navel rings in the noughties along with our ultra low rise jeans and crop tops. Whether Britney inspired you to bedazzle your midriff or Xtinas facial studs were more your style, like every passing trend, the kind of piercing you had and the jewellery you wore in it remains frozen as a moment in time.

Whats clear today though is that while piercing trends may come and go, the art of body adornment is here to stay  hardly surprising given its long history. When the 5,000-year-old mummified Otzi was found in the Austrian Alps, his pierced ears offered yet more proof that body modification has been part of the story of humans for thousands of years. There are records of body piercings from ancient civilisations who used them for symbolism, spirituality or status, right up to the 1890s when an apparent embrace of nipple piercing by the demimonde of Parisian society first indicated that piercing had taken a turn towards the subversive in Western culture.

It was this subversive edge that was seized upon by the punk movement in the late 70s, and again in the early 90s, but if the broad appeal of body piercing in the noughties saw it transition from an act of rebellion to a mere fashion statement, then this decade has seen it evolve into something altogether more personal; charting a course back to its roots as a form of self-expression with an almost spiritual intent. From the 30-something beauty editor I spoke to who pierced her bellybutton to own her post-pregnancy stretch marks to the influencer who told me she adds a diamond stud to her ear to mark every career milestone, todays piercings are chic, meaningful, and more than a passing fad.

One woman in particular has played a pivotal role in that transition. Her name is Maria Tash, and when todays It Girls want to add a new piercing to their collection, they make a dash to their nearest Tash store.

Youll recognise her work instantly  ears adorned with multiple glistening studs, hoops and chains  and though she didnt coin the term, if you search curated ear on Instagram, youll find upwards of 20,000 examples of what is now her signature look. If not pierced personally by Tash or a highly trained professional at one of her six international salons, these curated ears are likely inspired by the look she has popularised, or showcasing the exquisite fine jewellery range she has designed with todays more sophisticated piercing devotee in mind.

The 90s were a period of great piercing experimentation, she says, recalling her early days piercing friends and clients in her apartment in New York. I tried so many variations and clients were very open to receiving the first of certain looks, but weve come a long way since then. Tools are better, metals are better, and we know what works in all parts of the body  especially the ears.

Tash too has come a long way since those early days. Unable to find jewellery she liked, she started making her own in 1993, replacing the chunky surgical steel and garish gems that defined body piercing in the 90s with precious metals and gemstones. Combining her delicate jewellery with a specialist technique called forward-facing piercing, which takes the angles of the piercing into consideration rather than going in perpendicular to the tissue, she has raised the bar for piercing. Since launching her first eponymous piercing spa in New York's East Village in 1993, shes become the queen of high-end piercing, with an aesthetic that derives less from the grungy roots of contemporary piercing and more from the delicate embellishment of Eastern piercing traditions, but she rejects any accusation that shes taken the edge off a rebellious subculture.

I have been in the industry for such a long time, she says. I know many of the original artists who invented certain piercings, and I paid my dues by doing thousands of piercings in Manhattan in the early to mid 1990s.

I think most piercers now have embraced the idea of creating beautiful looks with fine jewellery thats not tribal, she adds, and as more and more people saw higher quality jewellery and more attractive piercings, it allowed piercing to infiltrate the culture and become more acceptable, she says of its enduring appeal.

Large steel spikes and thick industrial rings to me are symbolic of the genesis of the piercing era, but are now almost throwback wear, she says of the way the industry has evolved, but this shift has enabled piercers to stay in the industry as a career.

As with her other stores in New York, London, Rome and Dubai, the Maria Tash salon in Brown Thomas began life as a pop up, but she has aspirations to open stores in every major city. And why not? Beloved of celebrities, Tash counts everyone from Hailey Baldwin to Queen Rania of Jordan among her clientele. When Scarlett Johansson debuted an edgy crop in 2017, it showcased her curated ear to perfection, and when fashion darling Zoe Kravitz wants to give her high fashion red carpet looks some edge, she accessorises with an assortment of luxurious fine jewellery in her septum or her ear.

Tash has brought the beauty back to the art of adornment, in a way that transcends age, fads, and cultural boundaries. With her background in astronomy, its hard not to draw a parallel between the almost celestial clusters of jewels she embeds in the ear and sparkling stars nestled in the night sky, but she says her inspiration is more grounded.

My interest in astronomy is more of a cosmological one. What I love is the medical aspect of piercing  it appeals to my science background  and its beauty and rebellious edge.

In the mid-1980s I was mesmerised by goths and punks. London goths were pretty punks who borrowed from Indian aesthetics with multiple nostril and septum piercings and elaborate silver jewellery, she recalls, explaining that smaller, more specialist and curved needles have made once unimaginable piercings possible  like the daith, for example; the wedge of cartiledge in the middle of the ear, so popular with Dublin clients it was quickly christened the Dublin daith.

With all its nooks and folds, the ear is a fun and versatile canvas to embed with gorgeous jewellery that makes you feel more beautiful, she says. I like when the ear is used to tell a story, like that of a flower whose jeweled petals are coming off and landing in different pierced parts of the ear. Some of the piercings you see in the modern piercing industry are without cultural precedence. The rook, daith and other hidden planes of ear tissue  you dont see those piercings in old imagery, even in elaborate Indian or Pakistani wedding photos that show 22k jewellery climbing up the ear rim.

This, she says, is down to the creativity of western piercers who have applied modern surgical techniques to the body and ear. Curved needles for sutures served as inspiration to curve piercing needles, she explains, enabling piercers to put jewellery where it had never been seen before.

When it comes to experimenting, shes far from done. There is always new ground to explore with piercing and jewellery design. Part of my purpose is to figure that out.

For more spring fashion and beauty features, pick up your free 64-page glossy magazine, IE Style, in Saturday's Irish Examiner.Leslie Williams went to sample the food at Sisu Izakaya in Dublin.

Recently I was lucky enough to get a table at Ichigo Ichie in Cork City where, as you have no doubt heard, chef Taka Miyazaki is conjuring extraordinary flavours in the classical Japanese Kaiseki style. That meal was something of a revelatory experience and many of the flavours and textures still linger on weeks later.

Japanese cooking, when done well, is so precise and orderly, so focused, with such intricate flavours and textures that it can leave you breathless. If you are reading this in Cork, I envy you as you have Takashi Miyazaki  Dublin has been less lucky.

What Dublin does have is lots of casual Japanese cooking typified by Sisu Izakaya on Stephen St opposite Luna and Masa Taqueria, both of which I reviewed here positively last year.

An izakaya is the Japanese word for pub (or more correctly tavern) and is the kind of place you go after work for a few beers, but instead of a toasted sandwich and a packet of scampi fries you order edamame beans and deep-fried tofu.

I first visited Sisu for a Bento Box lunch which costs a mere 10 for a selection of small courses including miso soup, sushi, tempura, salad, and dumplings.

Everything worked, the miso was light and refreshing with just enough umami to whet the appetite, the sushi was freshly made, the tempura crispy and moreish and the pickled vegetables rounded off the meal perfectly  Im not sure I can think of a better way to spend a tenner.

The success of the bento box sent me back one evening with the Engineer to try a full meal. The room seemed a little gloomier in the evening, but I later discovered there is a downstairs which is cheerier and is probably the best option.

Sisu does have typical izakaya dishes, but it also has a broad mix of Japanese dishes such as sushi and ramen and is not claiming to be a replica of what you would find in Japan (where if you want ramen you go to a ramen restaurant and for sushi you go to a sushi restaurant). Does this matter? I think not.

First to arrive was a mound of cod tempura (9) in a light crisp batter  I liked the batter, and the fish was fresh, but the whole could have done with seasoning and the dipping sauce was not up to the job.

Before we had eaten even two pieces of slightly disappointing tempura, the wagyu tataki (16) seared beef arrived  tender, sweet-savoury and delicious. Approximately three minutes later, all the dishes we ordered were fighting for space, and we realised we had massively over-ordered and should have paced ourselves.

Dragon roll sushi with deep-fried prawn and avocado had good rice and balanced flavours and quickly disappeared  not the best Ive tasted, but a solid B grade.

Our charming Japanese waiter admitted she had not seen this type of sushi before coming to Ireland, but why would she, given that it was (likely) invented in Vancouver and made famous as a California Roll before it spread to Europe?

Yakatori chicken thigh skewers were tasty and tender and glazed with a sweet Yakatori glaze which seemed closer to teriyaki, I thought  a quick Google search later and it seems that the two are similar.

Kimchi beef ramen is unlikely to be traditional, but every town and city in Japan has their own version of ramen, so I expect there is a Korean-run restaurant in Japan (of which there are many) making a kimchi ramen.

The bottom line is that it was tasty and rich with good heft from the stock and a nice kick from the pickled spicy veg.

The drinks menu offers a choice of eight beers (including Kona from Hawaii), sake and plum wine and around 15 wines to cover most tastes (Rioja, Malbec, Picpoul and Gruner Veltliner)  our bottle of French Puy de Dome Pinot Noir was decently priced for the quality at 29.

Sisu Izakaya is not necessarily the place to bring your homesick Japanese English-language student, but it is a good addition to Dublins dining scene and for the lunchtime bento box, it is a must-visit.

Sisu Izakaya, Stephen St Lower, Dublin 2

Tel: 01 4757777

sisuizakaya.ie

The Tab

Dinner for two with a large selection of dishes, including sushi, gyoza, tempura, and ramen, plus a bottle of wine and a beer, cost 115. A bento box lunch costs 10 per person.

How To: Sunday-Wednesday, 12-10pm Thursday-Saturday, 12-11pm

The Verdict:

Food: 7/10

Drink: 7/10

Service: 8/10

Atmosphere: 7/10

Value: 8/10

In a sentence: A great lunch spot for a bento box or a bowl of ramen and a solid casual Japanese restaurant in the evening.Its time for the world to change its approach to drugs, with governments needing to legalise and regulate all illicit substances, say Juan Manuel Santos, Ernesto Zedillo, and Ruth Dreifuss.

The market for illicit drugs represents the worlds largest criminal commodity business.

With an estimated annual turnover of up to 650bn, it is approximately one-third the size of the global oil market, and it is controlled by criminals who care little for others health, rights, and safety.

Around the world, drug-related deaths have been surging, rising from 183,500 in 2011 to roughly 450,000 in 2015  an increase of 145% in just four years.

Meanwhile, more than 100bn continues to be spent every year in a futile attempt to eradicate the illegal drugs market. Over the last 50 years, many countries have even gone so far as to militarize their response.

But while some drug cartels have been dismantled, some kingpins brought to justice, and the area under cultivation for cannabis, coca, and poppy reduced, these successes have proved only temporary.

Worse, in many cases, the problem has simply been foisted onto other countries, causing a balloon effect. For instance, after the early 2000s, coca production declined in Colombia and rose in Peru, only to double back to Colombia in more recent years. Because drug traffickers can adapt and change, progress is always reversible.

The human costs have been nothing short of shocking. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, there were more than 250,000 recorded homicides in Mexico between 2006 and 2017.

In the Philippines, there have been as many as 20,000 extrajudicial killings since President Rodrigo Duterte assumed office in 2016.

And in Colombia, many political leaders, policemen, soldiers, judges, and prosecutors have been murdered, while coca farmers  mostly poor smallholders  have been caught in the crossfire between the army, paramilitary groups, insurgents, and gangs.

Sadly, this level of violence should come as no surprise. When drugs are banned, they are pushed into illegal markets where physical force, intimidation, discrimination, and corruption take the place of state-based regulatory tools.

Moreover, prohibition exacerbates the health and social harms associated with drugs by contributing to epidemics of HIV and hepatitis C, overdose deaths, prison overcrowding, stigma and discrimination, poverty, and weakening institutions.

It is time for the world to change its approach. The use of psychoactive substances is a risky behaviour, and managing such risks is a key function of government.

That is why the Global Commission on Drug Policy, in its recent report, Regulation: The Responsible Control of Drugs, recommends that governments legalise and regulate all currently

illegal drugs.

Legalisation is often portrayed inaccurately as an intervention by the state to promote drug use. But what it really means is that authorities acting in the public interest provide a legal framework for the production, distribution, and sale of drugs for adult consumption, with appropriate consideration given to the harms associated with each particular substance. It is a policy that specifically addresses the realities of drug use and the presence of drug markets.

As with all regulation, reforms should be implemented incrementally, and guided by evidence of what works and what does not. Different drugs will naturally require different levels of regulation depending on their relative risks, and approaches will vary from one country and locale to another.

Whereas cannabis might be sold exclusively in licensed retail stores, pharmaceutical-grade heroin could be made available with a prescription to people who are dependent, and for whom other addiction treatments havent worked.

Neither policymakers nor voters can hide behind the argument that people who use drugs deserve to be treated differently because they have chosen to engage in potentially harmful activity. Putting aside the fact that drug dependency tends to override ones capacity to make such choices freely, we all engage in risky, harmful behaviours, from smoking to consuming alcohol, trans fats, processed sugar, and so forth.

Fortunately, we know already how to manage risky behaviours and potentially dangerous products, not just from the legal cannabis markets emerging across the Americas, but also from the successes and failures of food safety, alcohol, and tobacco control.

The lesson from those over-commercialised legal markets is that we need to place appropriate controls on marketing practices and curtail the incentives for commercial enterprises to encourage harmful consumption in pursuit of profits.

We also need more prevention and monitoring programmes, which would be the case with or without legalisation. Experiences with alternative models might also help guide the transition from criminal to regulated drug production and use when they are implemented alongside sustainable socioeconomic development policies.

Thailand, for example, has phased out opium by creating other economic opportunities for rural farmers. And Bolivia and Turkey have introduced legal, regulated coca and poppy cultivation, respectively, to push out illegal operations.

By calling for legalisation, we are not surrendering to the problem posed by drugs. Rather, we are advocating a more effective, lasting, and humane solution.

Though legal regulation is not a panacea for all drug-related problems, it is the best hope we have for building a healthier, safer, and more just world.

Ultimately, the choice is simple. We can hand control to governments or to criminal organisations. There is no third way.

Juan Manuel Santos, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is a former president of Colombia and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Ernesto Zedillo is a former president of Mexico and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Ruth Dreifuss is a former president of Switzerland and Chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy.The wider aim of the EU crackdown on Google is to give more space to startups or competitors to offer the same kinds of services on a more level playing field, writes Lionel Laurent.

The EUs top antitrust official, Margrethe Vestager, is closing out her term  possibly her last  with a 1.49bn fine on Google. Shed accused the search giant of abusing its market dominance to thwart advertising rivals.

It rounds out a hat-trick of fines against Google that have resulted in clear changes to its business model, and which have gone some way to opening it up slightly to more competition (as limited as this might be).

The Brussels approach, despite the protectionist howls from the US, shows Big Tech can be regulated without a breakup.

The latest fine concerns the online advertising market  specifically the ads placed alongside search results on all kinds of websites, from news to travel bookings.

Googles grip as a go-between for the sale of these ads in Europe is impressive: It accounted for 70% of them between 2006 and 2016, according to the European Commission, leaving just a sliver for rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo.

During that time Google abused its dominant position, according to the EU, through exclusivity clauses in its contracts with publishers. These were designed to block or limit the presence of ads from competitors, an illegal advantage.

Google has dismissed these concerns in the past, arguing that the EU regulators were drawing conclusions from just a few complaints and that its products were popular because they were the best.

However, the timeline of the EUs case shows a very clear change in Googles behaviour in 2016 after the Commission sent the search engine detailed objections from its search- advertising probe.

The US firm simply dropped the illegal practices that had triggered the case in the first place. Its hard to believe it would have done so without the EUs investigation.

The same holds for the EUs other Google penalties: A 2.4bn fine over Googles preferential treatment of its own shopping comparison service in 2017, and a 4.3bn fine related to Android and the preferential treatment of its own search engine within the mobile operating system.

Google has appealed against both rulings. But on Monday  in a move no doubt designed to steal some of Vestagers thunder  the company ran through the changes it has made after both decisions, including more links to other shopping sites and options for handset-makers to install rival apps. More changes will come.

Its true that theres still a lot to complain about regarding the search engines remedies.

They havent exactly been financially painful, given that Alphabet generated almost 130bn of revenue last year. Google remains free to charge its rivals to give their links extra prominence, and handset makers to include its apps.

Yelp claimed this week that Google still only delivered a marginal percentage of clicks to rivals.

My colleague Alex Webb says Googles changes are too little and come too late to make a big difference, and he has a point.

But little by little the EU is improving Google, and Big Tech as a whole. The larger aim is to give more space to startups or competitors to offer the same kinds of services on a more level playing field.

Eric Leandri, co-founder of the French search engine Qwant, tells me that there are now genuine opportunities to grab more market share in businesses dominated by Google. Online advertising is one example.

It might not even be entirely crazy to try to create a rival from scratch, stapling together data and advertising analytics startups with a pure-play search engine, Leandri says.

Nobody seriously expects to topple Google from the top spot; it has the advantage of many years, and many tens of billions of dollars, spent building its dominance. But the fence guarding its turf isnt as high as it used to be.

Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Brussels. He previously worked at Reuters and ForbesThe reaction to the incendiary remarks of the Northern Ireland secretary Karen Bradley who said that the killings by the British army and police during the Troubles were not crimes is extraordinarily naive.

In 1999 the disbandment of the RUC, the B Specials and the UDR, along with most of the 175 changes recommended in the Patten Report on policing which brought about the new PSNI, were implemented.Aaron Anderson got into the womans car and drove away while the other two men took her to her bank to withdraw money from the automated teller. Chavall Anderson went through the contents of her purse and took out her credit cards and other items before dropping the woman off at 167th Street near Interstate 57 shortly after midnight, Platek said. The three men were caught on video at a Walmart store after trying to use the womans credit cards.Asia When Is It Going to Stop?', Malaysia's Marital Rape Victims Ask

A flower decoration is seen in a Chinese bride's hair before her wedding on December 17, 2017. / REUTERS

KUALA LUMPURWhen Neelambikas husband slapped her, she decided to end their marriage, but this only made him angrier and he began to repeatedly rape her while she tried to sleep on the sofawhich is legal in Malaysia.

Neelambika, 60, a part-time teacher with one child, could not afford to move out as divorce proceedings dragged on for more than a year.

My bed was on the couch in the living room and thats where the marital rape happened, Neelambika, who declined to give her full name to protect her identity, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation from the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

It was about wielding his power and control over me  I endured it but something died inside of me.

In more than 50 countries, including the United States, Nepal, Britain and South Africa, it is a crime for a husband to rape his wife, but this is not the case in most of Asia, where campaigners are pushing for legal reform.

Like other forms of domestic violence, marital rape can lead to trauma, depression, loss of income due to injuries, loss of work, poor school performance by children and even murder.

Although statistics on marital rape are hard to come by, one third of women who have been in a relationship say they have experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of their intimate partner, according to the World Health Organization.

A spokesman for Malaysias law minister Liew Vui Keong did not respond to requests for comment.

Last year, a deputy minister in Malaysias prime ministers department, Mohamed Hanipa Maidin, told parliament that the government had no plans to make marital rape a crime as it was hard to prove in court, according to local media reports.

Neelambika said she didnt even consider going to the police as they had no powers to stop the assaults, and she was keen that the small community where her family lived didnt find out.

She was too ashamed to confide in anyone. When she did stay overnight with friends or family, her husband turned up at her work or parents house, demanding she return home.

He knew I just wanted a divorce, so he was going to make use of me during that period, she said.

He just felt he had that rightthat he was still my husband and he could do anything he wanted.

Work to be done

While many Asia-Pacific countries have introduced domestic violence and harassment laws over the last decade, only 15 out of 39 states in the region have criminalized marital rape, according to the gender equality agency UN Women.

Many countries do not collect data on marital rapenot just because it is not a crime, but also because social pressures mean it is rarely reported or discussed.

Victims of sexual violence are often blamed and stigmatized, said Ingrid Fitzgerald, a regional gender expert at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which promotes sexual health.

East Timor has Asias highest rate of reported sexual violence by an intimate partner, at 40 percent, while Myanmar is among the lowest, at 4 percent, UNFPA said, based on countries where survey data is available.

Women are often torn between wanting the violence to end by reporting it and not wanting the husband and main breadwinner to be jailed, Fitzgerald said.

Their decision depends on how easy and socially acceptable it is to get a divorce and on womens financial independence.

Rape is rapewhether it occurs to a woman of a particular age, in marriage or a relationshipits still rape, Fitzgerald said.

Even where marital rape laws do exist, police often do not take womens complaints seriously and blame victims, while authorities fail to provide adequate protection, said Melissa Alvarado, a program manager at UN Women.

There is definitely work to be done to create that more sensitized and empathic response for women so they can more boldly tell their stories, she said.

No shame

Despite the taboos, positive changes are happening.

In 2017, Indias top court struck down a decades-old clause in the countrys rape laws permitting a man to have sex with his wife if she is aged between 15 to 18ruling that it was rape, and therefore a criminal offence.

Ahead of Indias elections next month, womens rights groups have been urging political parties to include criminalizing marital rape in their manifestos.

Last month, Singapores parliament proposed a billbacked by the governmentto make marital rape a crime.

The bigger problem is whether they will be able to get spouses to come forward, said Pratap Kishan, a director at Kishan Law Chambers LLC in Singapore.

Women are reluctant to report such matters because they feel it is something that is within the family and they should maintain that.

To boost support for criminalization, there needs to be a shift in mindset on marital rape, challenging traditional gender roles and victim blaming myths, using government-backed public awareness campaigns, gender experts said.

It feeds into this bigger concept of mens access to womens bodies  whether its date rape, marital rape or sexual harassment, that womens bodies exist for male pleasure, said Jennifer Wells-Qu of womens rights group Equality Now.

To help rape victims come forward, countries can also introduce women-only community courts, like in India, said Wells-Qu, the charitys Beijing-based Asia associate.

Meanwhile, activists are trying to educate lawmakers about the impacts of marital rape, such as miscarriages, poor newborn health, HIV infection and increased suicide rates.

Removing the exception to marital rape protects wives and sends a strong message that all rape is heinous, said Sumitra Visvanathan, head of the Womens Aid Organization in Malaysia.

When Neelambikas divorce eventually came through, her husband moved out of their family home.

In an attempt to overcome her trauma and change public perception on marital rape, Neelambika published a book this month on her experiences and is campaigning for reform.

Many rape victims dont have any recourse, she said. If theyre still married, they fear retaliation from their husbands. When is it going to stop?Asia Vietnam Protests to China Over South China Sea Boat Sinking

A ship of the Chinese Coast Guard (top) is seen near a ship of the Vietnam Marine Guard in the South China Sea, about 210 km off shore of Vietnam, on May 14, 2014. / Reuters

HANOI  Vietnam has lodged an official protest with China following the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing vessel in the disputed South China Sea, Vietnam said late on Thursday.

Vietnam and China have for years been embroiled in a dispute over the potentially energy-rich stretch of waters, called the East Sea by Vietnam.

The fishing vessel was moored near Da Loi island in the Paracel archipelago on March 6 when a China Maritime Surveillance vessel chased it and fired water cannon at it, Vietnams Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The boat sank after hitting rocks while it was being chased. All five fishermen on board were rescued by another Vietnamese fishing boat, the ministry said.

A Vietnamese rescue agency said earlier that the Chinese vessel rammed the fishing boat.

The Chinese vessel committed an act that violated Vietnams sovereignty over the Hoang Sa archipelago, threatened the lives and damaged the properties and the legitimate interests of Vietnamese fishermen, the ministry said in the statement, referring to the Paracel islands by their Vietnamese name.

Vietnam had lodged a protest with Chinas embassy in Hanoi and demanded that China deal strictly with its Maritime Surveillance agency to prevent similar incidents and to compensate fairly the fishermen for their losses.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing was cited by Chinese media as saying earlier that the fishing boat had sunk when the Chinese vessel approached, and that the Chinese crew had rescued the fishermen.

China claims 90 percent of the South China Sea, where it has steadily expanded military and other installations on artificial islands and reefs, unnerving the region and angering Washington.

In addition to Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have claims to parts of the sea.No provision of the Election Code prevented him from circulating a second set of petitions for this nonpartisan election, the court wrote. We will not invent one. Nor will we judicially re-write an existing provision that does not apply to his election. The General Assembly, as always, is free to speak on this matter.Burma 5 Civilians Killed as Tatmadaw Troops Open Fire on Village in N. Rakhine: Witnesses

The bodies of slain villagers are transported from Say Taung village to Buthidaung Hospital on Friday afternoon.

MRAUK-U, Rakhine StateAt least five people were killed when government troops opened fire on Say Taung village in northern Rakhine States Buthidaung Township on Thursday night, according to several witnesses. The soldiers were said to be from the Myanmar Army (or Tatmadaw)s Light Infantry Division No. 22

Upper House lawmaker U Maung Kyaw Zan of the Arakan National Party (ANP), who went to Say Tang village on Friday morning, confirmed that five bodies were found, and that eight villagers had been wounded and were receiving medical treatment. Say Taung village is currently housing more than 2,000 people who fled neighboring villages due to armed clashes in the area.

U Maung Kyaw Zaw speculated that the victims had been shot dead while hiding in a bomb shelter.

If [they had been killed by] artillery shells landing in the bomber shelter, their bodies would have been blown to pieces, the lawmaker said.

U Maung Tun Aung, a resident of Say Taung village who managed to escape, told The Irrawaddy over the phone that Myanmar Army troops surrounded the village at about 3 p.m. on Thursday. At around 9 p.m., an Army unit entered the village while firing on homes with both small arms and artillery.

Even in the morning, they continued firing into the village, prompting most of the villagers to try to escape.

There was no battle in my village [prior to the incident]. About 200 soldiers previously crossed and surrounded the village, but did not attack it. And then at about 9.00 p.m. they started firing into the village.

Monk Narya Ka, who also traveled to Say Taung village on Friday morning, said that each of the bodies found in the bomb shelter had at least two bullet wounds to their heads and/or torsos. The victims were identified as Maung Aye Tun, 54, Ma Than Nyunt, 53, their son Myat Swe Thein, 23, and nephew Maung Aung Than Htay, 17, and a blind elderly woman, Daw Hla Nu Phyu, 88.

A 10-year-old girl, Khinzar Tun, a Grade 5 student, was the only one spared during the killing [in that incident]. She is with us now on a motor boat and we are taking care of her at the moment, the monk said.

After the fighting, villagers found spent bullet casings and artillery shells believed to be products of a Myanmar military munitions factory, as some had Burmese writing on them.

Daw Bu Lone Ma, who also managed to flee the shooting, recalled that soldiers entered the village from four directions. At 9.00 p.m, many villagers were visiting their neighbors and many children were watching movies at a local TV booth. Then gunfire started at 9.30 p.m. and didnt ease until about 12.00 a.m.

This was so terrifying; we have never experienced this before. They were shouting f***ing Rakhine come out! in Burmese, she said.

According to her, four head of cattle were also shot dead with small arms. Several villagers contacted by The Irrawaddy said Army soldiers intentionally fired into the village from four directions, so that anyone attempting to flee was in danger of being shot.

A statement issued by the Office of the Commander-in-Chief on Friday afternoon said the government troops were responding to AA attacks launched from the village. It accused the AA of using a civilian settlement as cover.

Daw Bu Lone Ma said, There were no AA in our village. That is absolutely wrong. She added: I recognized the number 22 [printed on the soldiers] assault rifle stocks. Soldiers in the Myanmar Army carry rifles with their unit numbers printed on the butts.

Another villager U Kyaw San said, We are experiencing cruelty on the ground.

Ko Naing Oo from Zaydi Taung said many locals from Say Taung village sought refuge in his village just a mile away. He had heard about the shootings and the arrival of displaced villagers and was preparing to evacuate his family to a safer location as soon as possible.Burma AA Denies Issuing Online Call for Arakanese Statehood

Colonel Kyaw Han, commander of the Arakan Armys eastern military region, attends a meeting at the NRPC in Naypyitaw on March 21. / Htet Naing Zaw / The Irrawaddy

NAYPYITAWThe Arakan Army (AA) has denied issuing a statement that went viral online containing a proposed timeline for Arakanese statehood.

Government officials questioned AA representatives about the statement at a meeting in Naypyitaw on Thursday between the National Reconciliation and Peace Center (NRPC) and representatives of non-signatories to the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA). The Arakanese ethnic armed group told the officials that it did not issue the statement.

We told them the statement that details a timeframe for establishing an Arakanese state was not issued by us, Colonel Kyaw Han, commander of the AAs eastern military region, told reporters.

He said the AAs primary military goal is to establish a base in Rakhine State, despite the opposition of the Myanmar military (or Tatmadaw). The Tatmadaw must accept this if it wants peace, he said.

We are doing our duty, because only the Arakan Army can assume responsibility for the security, peace and development of the Arakanese people. And we are taking responsibility in Rakhine State, the colonel said.

Government delegate Dr. Tin Myo Win urged the AA to take part in political dialogue instead of rising up against the government.

He justified the Tatmadaws military actions there, saying the government had no choice but to respond when an armed group attempts to establish a base, which he said was a threat to national security.

Since Nov. 30, clashes between the Tatmadaw and the AA in Rathedaung, Buthidaung, Kyauktaw, Ponnagyun and Mrauk-U townships have displaced over 10,000 people.

Thirteen police were killed and nine injured when the AA launched coordinated attacks on four police outposts in Buthidaung Township on Jan. 4, just days after it announced together with two allied groups that it would sign the NCA.

The government responded by launching counter-insurgency operations in Rakhine.

Local people are suffering as a result. For example, Mrauk-U is a tourist spot for foreign travelers. And as the clashes have expanded to such areas, the government has had to respond accordingly, said Presidents Office director-general U Zaw Htay.

On March 15, artillery shelling damaged heritage sites in Mrauk-U, the ancient capital of the Arakanese Kingdom. Both the Tatmadaw and the AA denied responsibility.

We said sincerely that we did not launch an attack in Mrauk-U. We called for an end to attacks on civilians, whether with artillery fire or small arms, Colonel Kyaw Han said.

Thursdays meeting was attended by the United Wa State Army, the Kachin Independence Organization, Monglas Eastern Shan State Peace and Solidarity Committee, the Shan State Progressive Party, Kokangs Myanmar National Truth and Justice Party, the Palaung State Liberation Front, the United League of Arakan (the political wing of the AA) and the Karenni National Progressive Party.

The meeting issued a joint statement vowing to continue negotiations to de-escalate armed conflicts, to ensure nationwide peace and stability, and to heed regional development and the interests of local people, to solve political problems through political means, and to hold frequent meetings between decision-makers.

If those points are implemented with good will by both sides, there is potential for the clashes to de-escalate. Otherwise, nothing will change, Col. Kyaw Han told reporters.Burma RCSS Invites Rival Shan Group to Join Ceasefire, Excludes TNLA

RCSS fighters participate in a military parade in Loi Tai Leng, southern Shan State, in 2017. / Kyaw Kha / The Irrawaddy

The Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS) has called for a ceasefire with its fellow Shan armed group the Shan State Progressive Party (SSPP), but the proposed truce does not extend to the Taang National Liberation Army, the RCSS said.

The RCSS and SSPP have been fighting each other for over a year. More than 2,000 people in Hsipaw and Namtu townships have recently become internally displaced persons (IDPs) after fleeing the fighting. The clashes have resulted in a number of civilian casualties over the past year. The fighting has continued despite repeated pleas from prominent members of the Shan community including Buddhist monks and leaders of political parties.

This is the first time the RCSS has announced such a ceasefire, which includes an order to its ground troops to remain in their current positions and not to try and take more territory.

These RCSS and SSPP have repeatedly clashed over territory in northern Shan State, mostly in Namtu, Hsipaw and Kyaukme townships.

The RCSS issued a statement yesterday announcing the ceasefire. When contacted by The Irrawaddy RCSS spokesperson Colonel Sai Oo said it was too early to discuss details about how the ceasefire with the SSPP would be implemented.

His organization has not completed its internal discussions on the matter yet, he added.

He said the RCSS was announcing the ceasefire because the Shan people were suffering greatly due to the armed conflict. Many Shan had become IDPs, he said.

We are calling the ceasefire because our people have lost a great deal of property due to the fighting, he said.

The RCSS and SSPP have held meetings before, but they did not produce a lasting agreement. In previous talks, the SSPP asked the RCSS to return to its stronghold in southern Shan, where it has a headquarters in Loi Tai Lang. The RCSS refused. Early this month, the RCSS invited respected Shan leaders to a meeting at its headquarters in Loi Tai Lang for discussions on how to solve the armed conflict with the SSPP.

In its statement, the RCSS urged the SSPP to respect its ceasefire announcement. We want them to maintain peace, stop fighting and protect our peoples property, Col. Sai Oo said.

Colonel Sai Phone Han, a spokesperson for the SSPP, told The Irrawaddy on Friday that he could not comment other than to say that his organization would hold a meeting soon to discuss its response to the RCSSs call for a ceasefire.

It is good to stop fighting. But a ceasefire alone is not enough to solve the problem. Just saying pretty words is not enough. We need to talk about how we will settle our [conflict over] where our troops are based on the ground. And how we will resettle our IDPs, Col. Sai Phone Han said.

The main problem is the territorial dispute between the two Shan armed groups, he said.

Everyone has their own boundaries. Problems will always break out when someone comes to attack [the other sides] land. We need to mark our boundary lines to be able to build trust in each other, he said.

No ceasefire with the TNLA

Brigadier-General Tar Phone Kyaw, a spokesman for the TNLA, dismissed the RCSSs ceasefire announcement, saying it had no meaning. The SSPP is sometimes joined by the TNLA during armed clashes with the RCSS.

Brig-Gen. Tar Phone Kyaw said the RCSSs announcement had not affected the situation on the ground, with fresh clashes being reported on Friday.

He said leaders of the SSPP and TNLA believed that the RCSSs latest action was just a political game, and that they did not believe the RCSS had any intention of ending its effort to grab territory from the SSPP and TNLA.Burma Women Sold into Marriages in China with Help of Police: HRW Report

A young woman who was trafficked at age 17 by a friends mother, who had promised her a well-paid child-care job and then sold her to a family in China as a bride. Once purchased, she was confined and subjected to sexual slavery, but managed to escape after several months and return to Myanmar. / HRW

YANGONWomen and girls in northern Myanmar are being trafficked to China as brides at prices ranging from US$3,000 to $13,000 (about 4.5 to 20 million kyats), with the complicityand often for the financial benefit ofpolice on both sides, Human Rights Watch said.

HRWs new report Give Us a Baby and Well Let You Go: Trafficking of Kachin Brides from Myanmar to China, includes harrowing accounts of sexual slavery from 37 Kachin and Shan women who escaped back into Myanmar after being trafficked into China.

They recalled that people they trustedeven family members, including a sister-in-lawlured them across the border with job offers. When in China, they found themselves being locked up and raped until they were pregnant.

Myanmars Kachin and eastern Shan states share a border with China. The area has long been socially and economically unstable due to decades of war between autonomy-seeking ethnic armies and central government troops. With many men in the ethnic areas involved in the fighting, women are forced to become breadwinners for their familiesoften after being settled in internally displaced camps along the porous Chinese border.

HRWs Heather Barr said plenty of employers in China are willing to hire people from Myanmar, and this situation creates a huge opportunity for traffickers. Usually, someone in Myanmar tells a woman they know a farm or a restaurant that needs workers. Often these jobs are real, but sometimes theyre not.

Most of the 37 women and girls we interviewed accepted these types of jobs. But the people who recruited them turned out to be traffickers who sold them to Chinese families, she said.

HRWs acting womens rights co-director explained that a serious gender imbalance in China, driven in large part by the countrys one-child policy, is the main factor fueling bride trafficking. In China, sons traditionally stay with their parents and support them in old age, while daughters live with their husbands and in-laws, creating an incentive to ensure that your only child is a son.

Today there are 30 to 40 million more men than women in China. So many men have had a hard time finding wives, creating a demand for trafficked brides, she added.

She said Myanmar and Chinese authorities look the other way while unscrupulous traffickers sell Kachin women and girls into captivity and unspeakable abuse.

While trafficking is illegal in both countries and there have been some attempts on both sides to stop the trade, HRW said most of their interviewees escaped on their own. The group reported hearing many stories of police on both sides of the border being complicit in trafficking, and even benefiting financially.

Some victims families had repeatedly gone to Myanmar policeincluding anti-trafficking policebut no action had been taken. Chinese police take little action against traffickers and often treat the women and girls as criminals for violating immigration law.

In one case we learned about, the Chinese police demanded a US$800 bribe from the family the woman had escaped from, and then handed her back to them, Barr said.

On Anti-Human Trafficking Day last year, Myanmar police said there had been no decline in the number of human trafficking cases in recent years, and that a new form of trafficking had emerged.

They said Chinese men now legally marry Myanmar women before selling them in China, and in some cases even force them to act as surrogate mothers.On This Day Independent Myanmars First Deadly Student Crackdown

Harry Tan, the seventh-grade student who was shot dead by police in Myanmars first post-independence student protest.

Seventy-three years ago today, Harry Tan, a seventh grader, was shot dead by police who forcibly dispersed a group of students staging a protest against the governments cancellation of the seventh grade State examinations. The death of the 16-year-old student on March 22, 1956 signaled the governments first bloody crackdown against students in post-independence Myanmar.

Blaming a leak of exam questions, the government cancelled the examinations in their fourth day. Students staged a protest in front of the offices of the education minister and the Bama Khit (Burma Times) newspaper which was responsible for publishing an exam question. Harry Tan, who had been studying at St. Pauls School, was killed and two others were injured as police shot into the crowd of youths who were staging a protest in front of the newspapers office at Boundary Road, which is now called Dhammazedi Road.

The government later formed an investigation commission and passed all seventh graders without asking them to re-sit the examinations. The students set up a monument in honor of Harry Tan in front of the Bama Khit office in commemoration of the incident which was seen as a milestone in the history of student movements in Myanmar. According to some records, Harry Tans monument was demolished during the time of the Union Revolutionary Council government.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  The anti-graft court on Friday found former Maguindanao Governor Sajid Ampatuan guilty of graft, malversation, and falsification of public documents over a fund misuse case.

The Sandiganbayan Fourth Division convicted Ampatuan for the anomalous purchase of construction materials for school building repairs in 2009.

The court sentenced him to reclusion perpetua or 40 years in prison for one count of malversation, six months to eight years for 63 counts of falsification, and eight to 12 years for one count of graft.

Ampatuan was given until Monday to post a 1.58-million bail for his temporary liberty while he appeals the decision.

The former Maguindanao official was charged for conspiring with other local officials in the fake purchase of construction materials for the repair of school buildings. They supposedly pocketed the money used for the materials which amounted to almost 38 million.

He was ordered to pay a fine equivalent to the amount misappropriated.

Ampatuan was the acting governor when the 2009 Maguindanao massacre took place. He was detained as one of the major suspects in the massacre, but was allowed to post bail in 2015 worth over 11 million for 58 counts of murder.

In July 2018, Ampatuan was also slapped with graft and malversation charges for supposed misuse of a 500-million road project fund.

Ampatuan refused to comment on his conviction.

CNN Philippines Correspondent AC Nicholls contributed to this report.In one part, (the statute) says the state preempts home rule and is exclusively regulating assault weapons. In the second place, it says if a municipality has adopted or does adopt a regulation within a certain time period, it can concurrently regulate, Elrod said. The way in which this judge resolves the conflict is by essentially cutting out the second clause.March 21, 2019



POCATELLO  Five Idaho State University Honors Program undergraduates will present research at the Western Regional Honors Conference hosted by Montana State University March 29-31.

Those students include communications major Madeleine Coles, political science major Kayla Parnin, anthropology major Joseph Effingham, geosciences major Emily Chojnacky and management major Daniel Heithoff. They were all selected to give oral or poster presentations at the conference.

I am extraordinarily excited that they are getting a chance to take their research and show it off to a broad audience of other honors students from around the region, said Shannon Kobs Nawotniak, ISU University Honors Program director. They will get a chance to receive great feedback from other students and faculty. Theyll really have to learn how to communicate effectively because they will not be talking to specialists in their field, and that can really add challenges to giving a good presentation.

The states that participate in the Western Regional Honors Conference include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

ISU is the only university in Idaho that offers a full undergraduate honors degree. One requirement for attaining the Honors degree is carrying out original research under the guidance of a faculty mentor.

For most of these students, their WRHC presentations are preparation for defending their research before a faculty committee, just like for a masters thesis, Nawotniak said.

Coles research is an analysis of the work of Janet Malcolm, who was a prominent writer for New Yorker magazine for many years and whose work often questioned the way ethics and journalism are viewed.

I examine the field of journalism and reporting practices especially within the realm of duty-based ethics and consequence-based ethics, Coles said. I'm very excited to be able to present my research at WRHC, as it will be the first time I have ever participated in an academic conference.

Chojnackys research consists of using petrographic analyses to determine the amount of void space in samples collected from Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve (Idaho) and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. These samples were collected as part of NASA's Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains (BASALT) research project, which uses lavas in Idaho and Hawaii to study where microbes might live in rocks on Mars.

Using these analyses for my portion of this larger project, I examined the relation between void space and a rocks overall alteration, Chojnacky said. Internal voids created by naturally occurring gas bubbles in lava, called vesicles, and cracks in a rock increase the surface area that can be affected by water-rock interaction and can also create additional space for potential habitat for endolithic microbes.

She said that the type of research she is engaged in could help determine whether future missions to Mars should focus their search for evidence of past microbial life on low-density, altered basalts.

The students will be financially supported to attend the conference thanks to funds raised at the ISU University Honors Programs 10th-annual An Opportuni-Tea fundraiser that was held in early March at the Stephens Performing Arts Center. Some of the proceeds of this event will go towards travel expenses for the students. Support from fundraisers like An Opportuni-Tea is critical, Nawotniak said.

The average undergraduate doesnt have the money to be able to participate in research conferences, so they lack that opportunity, she said. It is really important for their development as researchers to learn how to talk about their work and connect with leaders in their field. Its wonderful to see the community come together to help us create these opportunities for ISU Honors students.

An Opportuni-Tea received donations from businesses and individuals across Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Washington, and as far away as Michigan.

Student photo: This is geosciences major Emily Chojnacky, who is one of five students presenting at the conference, when she was in Hawaii where lava samples she is studying were collected.



Idaho State University, a Carnegie-classified doctoral high research activity university and teaching institution founded in 1901, attracts students from around the world to its Idaho campuses. At the main campus in Pocatello, and at locations in Meridian, Idaho Falls and Twin Falls, ISU has nine Colleges, a Graduate School and a Division of Health Sciences that together offer more than 250 certificate and degree programs. More than 12,000 students attend ISU. Idaho State University is the state's designated lead institution in health professions.Deerfield Mayor Harriet Rosenthal said she was concerned about deferring the work since the projects included upgrades to Essex Court at the entrance and exit of Walden Elementary School and Rosemary Terrace, as well as the reconstruction of Birchwood Avenue, between Central Road and Rosewood Avenue, and resurfacing it between Laurel Avenue and Lake Cook Road.Australia's biggest telco Telstra has prevailed in a Federal Court trademark case against an energy firm known as Belong Energy which was founded late in 2018.

Telstra set up a low-cost Internet service provider under the name Belong in 2013, offering two ADSL+ plans at the time.

It now offers both NBN and mobile plans, geared towards users whose demands are moderate.

The court told Belong Energy, which is based in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray, to cancel belongenergy, its registered business name, according to the Domainer website.

The company will also have to transfer the domain names belong.energy and belongenergy.com.au to Telstra.

There are a number of other domains which contain the word "belong" like belong.net.au which is owned by Credit Union Australia, and belong.org.au which is owned by Acacia Ridge Community Support.

The two companies  Telstra's Belong and Belong Energy  offer products that could not be confused with each other and in the past such bids to take over a trading name have been rebuffed.

For example, Microsoft filed an objection with the Registrar of Trade Marks on 22 September 1995, protesting against the use of the word Microsoft by a company that made pillows.

This was rejected in 1997 and Purax Feather Holdings was allowed to hold the trademark for its range of goods.

iTWire contacted Belong Energy this morning to find out what name it intended to adopt for its business and website. The company is yet to respond.Students in grades 2-12 will tackle assignments via the districts digital learning software, accessible through their district-issued Chromebook computers. The work for one day will take about four to five hours to complete, Heid said, and can be done when students choose before the deadline of April 4 for the March 25 day. For students with no internet access at home, the content will be downloaded at school, accessible offline, and uploaded once on a wireless network, he added.Confusion arose over when the contracts were to take effect and back pay. The union thought the date was Dec. 1, 2017, for the deal Lauzen said provided a 2 percent wage increase over four years with no change in the amount of employee insurance contributions and no retroactive pay. The county said the contract would take effect December 1, 2018, with the beginning of the fiscal year.For a better experience on our website and avoid any trouble, we strongly recommand to activate Javascript ( click here ).

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Check out our questions and answers here !Several of the children in our programs have never been to the Gail Borden Library and do not get the opportunity to read as often as they should, Suffredin said. This would be a wonderful way to introduce them to the world of reading and what a library is like. It would give them an opportunity to develop a love of reading and explore the world in a new exciting way. For our Little Learners children, ages 3-5, this would help enhance their kindergarten-readiness skills. For our older children, this would allow them to expand their knowledge of the world while staying close to home. A bookmobile would be an excellent addition to the community.Today

Cloudy and damp with rain early...then becoming partly cloudy. Thunder possible. Low 34F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%.

Tonight

Cloudy and damp with rain early...then becoming partly cloudy. Thunder possible. Low 34F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%.

Tomorrow

Sunny. High 54F. Winds light and variable.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Macarthur Minerals Limited (TSX-V: MMS) (OTCQB: MMSDF) (the Company or Macarthur) announces that, as a result of a review by the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, the Company is issuing the following news release to clarify certain statements in the Companys news release dated March 21, 2019 entitled Macarthur Minerals Signs 10 Year Iron Ore Off-Take Agreement for the Lake Giles Iron Project in Australia With Glencore International A.G. (the March 21 News Release).

In addition to the retractions and clarifications contained in this news release, the Company would like to clarify that the intention of the Company in issuing the March 21 News Release was to immediately disclose the entering into a material contract with Glencore International A.G., as required by Policy 3.3  Timely Disclosure of the TSX Venture Exchange Corporate Finance Manual (the TSX-V Manual). The Company regrets any confusion to the shareholders of the Company that may have resulted from the March 21 News Release.

The disclosure in the March 21 News Release relating to the gross value of the iron ore off-take agreement, projected revenue to the Company, projected spot price for iron ore during the term of the off-take agreement and the resource estimates and economic forecast of the combined Moonshine Magnetite and Ularring Hematite operation (collectively, the Disclosure) is inconsistent with:

section 2.1 (Requirements Applicable to All Disclosure) of National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (NI 43-101) because the March 21 News Release did not contain the required statements that the scientific and technical information contained in the March 21 News Release has been approved by a qualified person under NI 43-101; section 2.3 (Restricted Disclosure), subsections (1)(b) and (1)(c), of NI 43-101 because the Disclosure discloses the results of economic analyses that includes or is based on inferred mineral resource and the gross value of metal or mineral in a deposit; section 2.3 (Restricted Disclosure), subsection (3), and section 3.4(e) of NI 43-101 because the March 21 News Release did not contain the required cautionary language, including the qualifications and assumptions made by a qualified person under NI 43-101; section 4.2(6) (Production Decision) of Companion Policy 43-101CP to NI 43-101 because the March 21 News Release did not contain the required cautionary language that Macarthur has not filed a technical report to support a production decision; and section 8.1 (Content of News Releases) of Policy 3.3  Timely Disclosure of the TSX-V Manual because the March 21 News Release only discloses the projected revenue of the Life-of-Mine Off-Take Agreement.

In addition, the preliminary assessment titled The Technical Report on the Moonshine and Moonshine North Prospects, Lake Giles Project Western Australia dated March 25, 2011 (the 2011 Technical Report) prepared for Macarthur is not a current NI 43-101 technical report prepared in respect of the combined Moonshine Magnetite and Ularring Hematite operation and does not reflect the economic forecast of the combined Moonshine Magnetite and Ularring Hematite operation.

The portions of the following statements from the March 21 News Release in quotations, italicized and underlined are hereby retracted for the foregoing reasons:

Securing this approximately US$4 billion purchase arrangement ensures consistent long-term revenue to the Company.; Macarthurs management is pursuing debt financing discussion with European banks and international financial institutions. Achieving this key milestone is the beginning for Macarthur to transition into a large scale global resource production company.; The Agreement is currently valued at approximately US$4 billion in revenue over the first 10-year term ensuring Macarthur long term revenue and consistent sales per year.; Metallurgical test work on the Lake Giless Moonshine Magnetite Project indicates that an export product of high margin +65% Fe can be achieved. Current market price for 65% Fe product is quoted at US$98/tonne (A$140 per tonne). (1 - Custeel Iron Ore Price Index) The value of the initial 10-year Glencore off-take at current market price for Moonshine iron ore would be ~US$4 billion.; and The Capex for a combined Moonshine Magnetite and Ularring Hematite operation is now estimated to be US$335 million. Magnetite Opex costs are estimated to be A$55/tonne free on board (FOB) and Opex costs of A$42/tonne FOB for hematite..

Qualified Person

Mr Ian S Cooper, B.Sc., A.R.S.M., F.G.S. FAusIMM, a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (membership number 107348, is a consultant of Macarthur and is a Qualified Person as defined in NI 43-101. Mr Cooper has reviewed and approved the technical information contained in this news release.

Caution Regarding Forward Looking Statements

Certain of the statements made and information contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking information and forward-looking statements (collectively, forward-looking statements) within the meaning of applicable securities laws. The forward-looking statements in this press release reflect the current expectations, assumptions or beliefs of the Company based upon information currently available to the Company. With respect to forward-looking statements contained in this press release, assumptions have been made regarding, among other things, the timely receipt of required approvals, the reliability of information, including historical mineral resource or mineral reserve estimates, prepared and/or published by third parties that are referenced in this press release or was otherwise relied upon by the Company in preparing this press release. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct as actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include fluctuations in exchange rates and certain commodity prices, uncertainties related to mineral title in the project, unforeseen technology changes that results in a reduction in iron ore demand or substitution by other metals or materials, the discovery of new large low cost deposits of iron ore, uncertainty in successfully returning the project into full operation, and the general level of global economic activity. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements due to the inherent uncertainty thereof. Such statements relate to future events and expectations and, as such, involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release and except as may otherwise be required pursuant to applicable laws, the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

MACARTHUR MINERALS LIMITED

Cameron McCall

Cameron McCall, Executive Chairman

Company Contact

Joe Phillips, CEO and Director

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Telephone: +61 448899247

Website: www.macarthurminerals.com

For further information, please contact:

Investor Cubed Inc.:

Neil Simon

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Telephone: (647) 258-3310

Fax: (416) 363-7977March 21, 2019 / TheNewswire / Vancouver, Canada - Guyana Goldstrike Inc. (the "Company" or "Guyana Goldstrike") (TSXV: GYA, OTC: GYNAF, FSE:1ZT) is pleased to announce that it will conduct a non-brokered private placement to raise up to $2,000,000 through the issuance of up to 10,000,000 units (each, a "Unit") at a price of $0.20 per Unit. Each "Unit" will consist of one common share and one common share purchase warrant entitling the holder to acquire a further common share at a price of $0.30 for a period of thirty-six months.

Gold Mountains Asset Management Ltd. (a subsidiary of Zijin Mining Group Ltd.), through its Zijin funds, has elected to participate in the placement on a pro-rata basis in order to maintain its 24.4% ownership interest in the Company as a strategic partner.

The proceeds from the placement will be used towards ongoing exploration work at the Company's Marudi Gold Project, as well as for general working capital purposes.

The Company may pay finders' fees to eligible parties who have assisted by introducing subscribers to the placement. All securities to be issued in connection with the placement will be subject to a four-month-and-day statutory hold period in accordance with applicable securities laws. Completion of the placement remains subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange.

About the Marudi Gold Project

The Company is developing the Marudi Gold Project located in Guyana, South America. The project has 18-year mining license in good standing, all-season road access, infrastructure in place, with an established camp serviced by employees, service buildings, and a full-time camp manager. The Property has three known gold bearing areas: the alluvial areas, the saprolite, and the underlying hard-rock.

There has been 42,000 metres of historic diamond drilling (141 holes) completed on the project by prior operators that have delineated two zones of mineralization: Mazoa Hill and Marudi North zones. The Company has recently completed a mineral resource estimate on the Mazoa Hill zone containing 259,100 indicated gold ounces within 4,428,000 tonnes grading 1.80 g/t and 86,200 inferred gold ounces within 1,653,000 tonnes grading 1.60 g/t. The Company has recently discovered a third mineralized zone: Toucan Ridge. This zone is the current focus of the Company's 2018 trenching program. There exists excellent exploration upside for the further discovery of mineralized zones through the development of previously and newly identified mineralized bedrock targets on the project.

For information concerning the mineral resource estimate and the project, readers are encouraged to review "Technical Report: Marudi Property Mazoa Hill Mineral Resource Estimate", a technical report prepared for the Company by Global Mineral Resource Services and is available at (Click Here)and under the Company's profile on SEDAR www.sedar.com.

About Guyana

The Republic of Guyana is located in South America adjacent to Suriname. The country is English speaking and under British Common Law with a democratically-elected government. It has an established mining act and a rich history of gold production. In 2016, 690,000 ounces of gold was produced by operators mining in the country. The Fraser Institute's 2016 Annual Survey of Mining listed Guyana as the third best mining jurisdiction with regards to investment attractiveness in the Latin America and Caribbean Basin sub-group. The Guiana Shield is the geographic gold-hosting region, and is world-recognized as a premier gold region that is highly prospective, under-explored and has geological continuity with West Africa.* In 2016, two mines in Guyana declared the commencement of commercial production: the Aurora deposit (Guyana Goldfields) and the Karouni deposit (Troy Resources).

* Independent Technical and Environmental Review Karouni Gold Project - Guyana, Behre Dolbear Australia Pty Ltd, April 29, 2016

On behalf of the Board of Directors of

GUYANA GOLDSTRIKE INC.

Peter Berdusco

President and Chief Executive Officer

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release may contain certain "Forward-Looking Statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. When used in this news release, the words "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "target, "plan", "forecast", "may", "schedule" and other similar words or expressions identify forward-looking statements or information. These forward-looking statements or information may relate to future prices of commodities, accuracy of mineral or resource exploration activity, reserves or resources, regulatory or government requirements or approvals, the reliability of third party information, continued access to mineral properties or infrastructure, fluctuations in the market for gold, changes in exploration costs and government regulation in Guyana, status of artisanal mining activities and associated rights, and other factors or information. Such statements represent the Company's current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social risks, contingencies and uncertainties. Many factors, both known and unknown, could cause results, performance or achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements that are or may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements or information to reflect changes in assumptions or changes in circumstances or any other events affections such statements and information other than as required by applicable laws, rules and regulations.VANCOUVER, March 22, 2019 /CNW/ - FireFox Gold Corp. (TSX-V: FFOX, FSE: A2PDU7) ("FireFox" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that new ground magnetic surveys have verified a major structure thought to be the continuation of the Sirkka Shear Zone through its Jeesio gold project in the Central Lapland Greenstone Belt (CLGB) of northern Finland. The Sirkka Shear Zone is the major deep crustal shear zone that provides the structural control for numerous gold deposits in Central Lapland.

Late last year FireFox outlined five promising new gold targets on the Jeesio property based on results from its Bottom-of-Till (BOT) sampling program and a compilation of gold and geochemical data from historic sampling (See Company news release dated Dec. 27, 2018). The Company immediately prioritized the Utsamo and Homelampi targets for follow-up work and conducted ground magnetic surveys at both targets. At Utsamo, the survey results identified a 2.8 km long structurally distinct zone, associated with numerous gold anomalies in till, that follows the contact between mafic intrusive rocks and metasediments. This feature is believed to be the continuation of the Sirkka Shear Zone (See Figure 1: https://bit.ly/2YdaPlt ).

"We believe that our Utsamo Target occupies an important flexure in the Sirkka Shear Zone where it deflects from easterly to a southeasterly strike," commented Carl Lofberg, CEO of FireFox Gold. "These types of large regional shear zones control many of the world-class orogenic gold districts throughout the world, and inflection points such as this often focus much of the tonnage and grade."

The prospectivity of the Jeesio Project, and the Utsamo Target particularly, is further highlighted by the discovery of a gold-bearing quartz vein system by another company, about 1.7 kilometres to the south-southeast (see Aurion Resources news release dated Feb. 12, 2019). A number of boulders and quartz vein surface samples from this area reportedly assayed as high as 74 g/t Au and 379 g/t Au. Both target areas appear to be related to the Sirkka Shear Zone (See Figure 2: https://bit.ly/2JslqpH ).

Dr. Richard Goldfarb, technical advisor to FireFox Gold, commented on the new interpretation: "Along a major structure, such as the Sirkka Shear Zone, areas of greater geological complexity, both structurally and lithologically, are favorable locations for mineralization. Gold-transporting fluids traveling along primary faults will be largely focused along curvilinear segments of the structures, where segments of this main structure are characterized by major bends where spaces are preferentially opened. The Utsamo Target represents the location of just such a flexure along the Sirkka Shear Zone."

The Company is continuing its exploration activities at the Jeesio Project. Additional ground magnetic surveys are ongoing and induced polarization (IP) surveys are planned to delineate drill targets for later this year. FireFox geologists have also prepared plans for the summer detailed mapping and sampling programs.

Additional details on the project are available from the Company's website, here.

Methodology and Quality Assurance

The ground magnetic survey at Jeesio NE included a total of 35 east-west oriented lines with lengths ranging between 1.0 and 1.8 kilometres. Line spacing was 50 metres, for a total of approximately 50 line-kilometres covering an area of ~300 hectares. The sampling crew employed industry standard controls on the survey quality, including the use of a base station.

Dr. Petri Peltonen, Exploration Manager of FireFox Gold, is a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Dr. Peltonen has supervised the collection and interpretation of the technical data generated in the Company's field program and has helped prepare and approves the technical information in this news release.

Patrick Highsmith, Certified Professional Geologist (AIPG CPG # 11702) and director of the Company, is a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Highsmith has helped prepare and approves the technical information in this news release.

About FireFox Gold Corp.

FireFox Gold Corp is listed on the TSX Venture stock exchange under the ticker symbol FFOX. The Company is focused entirely on gold exploration in Finland where it is actively exploring its project portfolio that includes over 100,000 hectares of prospective ground.

Finland is one of the top mining investment jurisdictions in the world as indicated by its multiple top-10 rankings in recent Fraser Institute Surveys of Mining Companies. Having a strong mining law and long mining tradition, Finland remains underexplored for gold. Recent exploration results in the country have highlighted its prospectivity, and FireFox is proud to have a Finland based CEO and technical team.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

"Carl Lofberg"

Chief Executive Officer

Forward Looking Statements: The information in this news release contains forward looking statements that are subject to a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in our forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause such differences include: exploration results, changes in world commodity markets, equity markets, costs and supply of materials relevant to the mining industry, change in government and changes to regulations affecting the mining industry. Forward-looking statements in this release may include statements regarding the potential scale and orientation of the mineral system, future exploration programs and the timing thereof, including follow-up drill testing of exploration targets, operational plans and Finnish mining prospects. Although we believe the expectations reflected in our forward-looking statements are reasonable, actual results may vary. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release represent the expectations of FireFox as of the date of this press release and, accordingly, are subject to change after such date. Readers should not place undue importance on forward-looking statements and should not rely upon this information as of any other date. FireFox does not undertake to update this information at any particular time except as required in accordance with applicable laws.

It should also be noted that while FireFox's properties are sometimes adjacent to or nearby operating or historic gold mines or active gold projects being advanced by other companies, the mineralization on properties nearby FireFox's land packages is not necessarily indicative of mineralization on FireFox's properties.Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2019) - Castle Peak Mining Ltd. (TSXV: CAP) ("Castle Peak" or the "Company") hereby provides a first news release on corporate developments since its TSX Venture Exchange trading halt 30 days ago.

The Company is pleased to announce that following the initial due diligence study on the Kunsu PL from August - December 2018, it has embarked upon an independent review exercise by PGeo, Mr. Sam Torkornoo, who is a registered member of the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario, Registration Number 2340. His review should be finalized by next week latest and presented for final TSX Venture Exchange approval.

Furthermore, the Company has requested a Ghana law firm to undertake a title opinion on the Kunsu prospecting license, which is equally expected to be finalized and submitted for TSX consideration by next week at the latest.

Finally the Company is pleased to announce the following field progress report on follow-up exploration work. This work commenced on the 22nd February, 2019 and has covered the customary community consultation and traditional protocols within the project area. Crop compensation assessment for the period is underway. The Field Work includes line cutting (a total of 5.8km of lines) and an Induced Polarization (IP) geophysical survey at the North Grid zone to provide information on the extent and prospectivity of gold mineralization within the corridor.

ON THE KUNSU PROPERTY

The Kunsu PL is located approximately 35 Km Northwest of Kumasi and 240 Km Northwest of Accra. The property which is situated in close proximity to the Sefwi gold belt is strategically placed on the Asankragua Manso Nkwanta gold belt. The Kunsu concession is about 27 Km north of Asanko Gold's mine, and even closer to the Asanko Esaase gold prospect, all of which are inferred to be underlain by similar geology regionally as Kunsu.

TECHNICAL DISCLOSURE

Castle Peak's technical disclosure in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Sam Torkornoo, P.Geo., who serves as a Qualified Person under the definition in National Instrument 43-101 ('NI 43-101').

ABOUT CASTLE PEAK

Castle Peak Mining Ltd. is a Canadian-based junior exploration company focused on advancing greenfields and early stage gold projects. Castle Peak has successfully discovered and sold the high grade Apankrah deposit with an associated strategic land package. The Company is in process of acquiring the Kunsu prospecting license strategically placed on the Asankragua Manso Nkwanta gold belt in Ghana, West Africa.

On behalf of the Board of Castle Peak Mining Ltd.:

"Iyad Jarbou"

Chief Financial Officer

Tel: 604-362-7685

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD-LOOKING AND OTHER CAUTIONARY INFORMATION

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts,that address the planned operations are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes the forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements should not be in any way construed as guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices for metals, the conclusions of detailed feasibility and technical analyses, the timely renewal of key permits, lower than expected grades and quantities of resources, mining rates and recovery rates and the lack of availability of necessary capital, which may not be available to the Company on terms acceptable to it or at all. The Company is subject to the specific risks inherent in the mining business as well as general economic and business conditions. For more information on the Company, Investors should review the Company's Annual Form 40-F filing with the United States Securities Commission and its home jurisdiction filings that are available at www.sedar.com .ST. PAUL, Minn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Poly Met Mining, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of PolyMet Mining Corp. (together PolyMet or the company) TSX: POM; NYSE American: PLM, announced today that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has issued its Record of Decision and Section 404 wetlands permit for the NorthMet Project. Along with recently issued state permits, PolyMet now holds all necessary permits to construct and operate the NorthMet copper-nickel-precious metals mine and processing plant located near Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota.

PolyMet also announced today that it has entered into an extension agreement with Glencore AG (Glencore) with respect to the approximate US$243 million in secured convertible and non-convertible debt owing to Glencore which is due to mature on March 31, 2019. Glencore has agreed to extend the maturity date of the debt to provide PolyMet time to prepare for and complete a rights offering by June 30, 2019, fully backstopped by Glencore, to raise sufficient funds to repay the outstanding debt. In connection with the extension agreement, the company has also agreed to issue additional purchase warrants to Glencore and to make certain amendments to the existing exchange warrants held by Glencore, subject to applicable stock exchange approval. The company will provide further information with respect to the pricing and timing of the rights offering in due course.

While our immediate goal is to address the Glencore debt, we are proud to be the first mining company to be fully permitted to responsibly build and operate a copper-nickel-precious metals mine within the world-class Duluth Complex, said Jon Cherry, president and CEO. Our employees, shareholders, Iron Rangers, labor and business partners all share in this historic achievement. They have steadfastly believed in, worked tirelessly toward and provided unwavering support for this project for so long.

The issuance of the federal wetlands permit follows Minnesota regulators issuance late last year of the Permit to Mine, dam safety, water appropriations, water and air quality, and public waters work permits; representing a total of 18 state and federal permits and approvals.

The company is refining the technical details of the project as planning for final engineering and construction are underway. Initial site preparation work has already begun such as monitoring well installations, asbestos abatement, infill and geotechnical drilling. Importantly, receipt of this final permit enables us to move forward with project financing which is expected to take several months, Cherry said.

PolyMet aims to be the first mining company to commercially produce copper and nickel, in addition to platinum, palladium, gold and cobalt, from one of the four world-class Duluth Complex base and precious metal deposits in the historic Iron Range mining district in northeastern Minnesota.

The company expects to build and operate open pit mining operations that are expected to yield approximately 1.2 billion pounds of copper, 170 million pounds of nickel, 6.2 million pounds of cobalt and 1.6 million ounces of precious metals including 1.2 million ounces of palladium and 290,000 ounces of platinum, over a 20-year mine life. The 225 million tons of ore permitted for extraction represent roughly one third of the NorthMet 649-million-ton Measured and Indicated Resource as described in the companys 2018 National Instrument 43-101 Technical Report, which is filed under the companys SEDAR and EDGAR profiles.

The Record of Decision and Section 404 wetland permit can be found on the USACE website at: Click Here

The information in this release related to the 2018 Technical Report has been reviewed and approved by Herb Welhener, an Independent Qualified Person within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101.

About PolyMet

PolyMet Mining Corp. (www.polymetmining.com) is a publicly traded mine development company that owns 100 percent of Poly Met Mining, Inc., a Minnesota corporation that controls 100 percent of the NorthMet copper-nickel-precious metals ore body through a long-term lease, and owns 100 percent of the Erie Plant, a large processing facility located approximately seven rail miles from the ore body in the established mining district of the Mesabi Iron Range in northeastern Minnesota. Poly Met Mining, Inc. has completed its Definitive Feasibility Study. The NorthMet Final Environmental Impact Statement was published in November 2015, preparing the way for decisions on permit applications. NorthMet is expected to require approximately two million hours of construction labor, create approximately 360 long-term jobs directly, and generate a level of activity that will have a significant multiplier effect in the local economy.

PolyMet Disclosures

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements concerning anticipated developments in PolyMets operations in the future. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as expects, anticipates, believes, intends, estimates, potential, possible, projects, plans, and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions or results will, may, could, or should occur or be achieved or their negatives or other comparable words. These forward-looking statements may include statements regarding the ability to receive environmental and operating permits, job creation, and the effect on the local economy, or other statements that are not a statement of fact. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore involve inherent known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements due to risks facing PolyMet or due to actual facts differing from the assumptions underlying its predictions.

PolyMets forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, expectations and opinions of management on the date the statements are made, and PolyMet does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or managements beliefs, expectations and opinions should change.

Specific reference is made to risk factors and other considerations underlying forward-looking statements discussed in PolyMets most recent Annual Report on Form 40-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2017, and in our other filings with Canadian securities authorities and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Annual Report on Form 40-F also contains the companys mineral resource and other data as required under National Instrument 43-101.

The TSX has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.ONTARIO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / March 22, 2019 / Condor Gold (AIM: CNR; TSX: COG) is pleased to announce its audited results for the year ended 31 December 2018 and provides notification that the Annual General and Special Meeting of shareholders of the Company will be held on Thursday 16 May 2019 at 11:00 am at the offices of Numis Securities Limited, The Stock Exchange Building, 10 Paternoster Square, London EC4. Extracts from the Accounts are set out below.

HIGHLIGHTS

Dual listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange in January 2018;

Appointment of Andrew Cheatle as a non-executive Director based in Canada with 30 years' industry experience, strengthens the Board;

Amendment to the application for the Environmental Permit to construct and operate a 2,800 tonnes per day (''tpd'') processing plant with capacity to produce 100,000 ounces (''oz'') gold per annum filed in January 2018;

Final site visit inspection completed by the ''Inter-Institutional Committee'' which comprises of three Ministries and representatives from the local Mayors' offices;

Additional technical studies completed and submitted to Nicaragua Ministry of Natural Resources (''MARENA'') following the site visit inspection;

2.5 million raised through a private placement in March 2018;

Positive rock chip assay results and detailed geological mapping progress the plan to define a major Gold District at the La India Project;

MARENA completed a positive review of the technical aspects of the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, including amendments, and formally notified the Company to proceed to a Public Consultation on 13 July 2018;

A total of 499 people registered and attended the Public Consultation at which the technical, environment and social aspects of a new mine were presented and discussed in a transparent manner. During presentations of the Project to community groups and house-to-house visits the Company received over 600 expressions of interest in/applications for new jobs;

On 6 August 2018, the Company announced that MARENA had granted the Company the key Environmental Permit for the development, construction and operation of a processing plant with capacity to process up to 2,800 tpd. Gold production is expected to be between 80,000 and 100,000 oz gold per annum from a single open pit, with the La India Project representing a US$120 million investment and creating an estimated 1,000 new jobs; and

In December 2018, the Government of Nicaragua granted Condor the 142.6 km Las Cruces concession for a 25 year period, which expands the La India Project area by 45 per cent to 455 km.

POST PERIOD HIGHLIGHTS

In January 2019, Condor announced a Mineral Resource update on La India Project totalling 9.85 million tonnes (''Mt'') at 3.6 grammes per tonne (''g/t'') gold for 1,140,000 oz gold in the Indicated category and 8.48Mt at 4.3g/t gold for 1,179,000 oz gold in the Inferred category;

Total open pit Mineral Resource of 8.58 Mt at a grade of 3.3 g/t gold, for 902,000 oz gold in the Indicated category and 3.01 Mt at a grade of 3.0 g/t gold, for 290,000 oz gold in the Inferred category. Total underground Mineral Resources of 1.27 Mt at a grade of 5.8 g/t gold, for 238,000 oz gold in the Indicated category and 5.47 Mt at a grade of 5.1 g/t gold, for 889,000 oz gold in the Inferred category;

Of note is the new open pit Mineral Resource on Mestiza of 92 Kt at a grade of 12.1 g/t for 36,000 oz contained gold in the Indicated category and 341 Kt at a grade of 7.7 g/t gold for 85,000 oz contained gold in the Inferred category. The four satellite open pits outside the main, permitted La India open pit have combined open pit resources of 206Kt at 9.9 g/t gold for 66,000 oz gold in the Indicated category and 2,127 Kt at 3.23 g/t gold for 221,000 oz gold in the Inferred category;

The Company raised 1.75 million by way of a private placement of new Ordinary Shares in February 2019; and

In March 2019, the Company announced it was permitting the Mestiza and America satellite feeder pits, which has the potential to increase production to 120,000 oz gold per annum for a seven year life of mine. The Mestiza and America open pits have, in aggregate, 206 Kt at a grade of 9.9 g/t (66,000 oz contained gold) in the Indicated category and 1,018 Kt at 4.6 g/t (152,000 oz contained gold) in the Inferred category.

CHAIRMAN'S STATEMENT



FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2018

Dear Shareholder,

I am pleased to announce Condor Gold Plc's (''Condor'', the ''Company'' or the ''Group'', www.condorgold.com) annual report for the 12-month financial year to 31 December 2018. Following the release in December 2014 of a NI 43-101 technical report detailing a Pre-Feasibility Study (''PFS'') and two Preliminary Economic Assessments (''PEAs''), the Company spent 2015 to 2018 executing a twin strategy of permitting the construction and operation of a base case processing plant with capacity of up to 2,800 tonnes per day (''tpd'') capable of producing approximately 100,000 oz of gold per annum and proving a major Gold District at the 455km La India Project, in Nicaragua. The highlight of 2018 came in August when Condor succeeded in a key component of its strategy and announced that the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, Nicaragua (''MARENA'') had granted the Company an Environmental Permit for the development, construction and operation of an open pit mine and associated infrastructure at the La India Project, thus materially de-risking the Project.

On 26 February 2018, Condor announced that it had formally submitted a 130-page amendment to the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (''ESIA'') to MARENA to construct and operate a processing plant without the need to resettle approximately 330 houses or 1,000 people. This followed several months of discussions and collaborative meetings with MARENA and the Ministry of Energy and Mines (''MEM''), such that the technical components within the amended ESIA required by both Ministries were agreed in advance and submitted in the final amended application.

The general feedback from MEM, MARENA and local stakeholders was that permitting would be much easier with a mine that has been redesigned to proceed without resettling 1,000 people. Condor's technical team redesigned the La India open pit and believe it is both technically viable and economically attractive, should future funding be received, to proceed with a redesigned open pit that does not require community resettlement. It includes the relocation of the processing plant approximately 1,200 metres from the village. A five to 10 metre high berm is planned between the redesigned open pit and the village to reduce noise and dust pollution. Mine scheduling studies are on-going, further details will be provided in due course. Condor does not anticipate a material change in the total ounces of gold expected to be recoverable from the redesigned open pit compared to the open pit disclosed in the PFS. The PFS details an open pit gold Mineral Reserve in the Probable category of 6.9 Mt at 3.0 g/t gold for 675,000 oz gold, producing 80,000 oz gold per annum for seven years.

The revised ESIA document considers the environmental and social impacts of gold production from the La India open pit mine plan, which is a single pit, detailed in the NI 43-101 compliant PFS released in December 2014 and the Whittle Enterprise Optimisation study which was finalised on 22 January 2016. The ESIA draws on data from 15 different environmental and social baseline studies, some of which commenced in 2013. In addition to describing the potential impacts of a future commercial mine on the environment, the ESIA also contains detailed environmental management plans and social management plans to monitor and control any such impacts.



The ESIA describes a processing plant that will have a capacity of up to 2,800 tpd or 1.0 Mt per annum with an upfront capital cost of approximately US$120 million. All-in-sustaining-cash-costs are circa US$700 per oz gold. The ESIA includes processing of an additional 10,000 oz of gold per annum from artisanal miners through the main processing plant, but the artisanal miners' ore is excluded from the PFS, PEAs and optimisation studies.

In June 2018, MARENA approved the technical studies in the ESIA and provided written notification to Condor detailing the procedural requirements and the date for the Public Consultation (a public hearing in the village of La Cruz de La India). The Company provided due notice of the Public Consultation by placing advertisements in the national newspapers and on the local radio stations. Condor's social team conducted 287 individual house-to-house visits explaining the Project to villagers at La Cruz de La India and three nearby villages and handed out leaflets detailing the re-designed mine infrastructure and benefits of the mine. Furthermore, group meetings covered 411 people including landowners and artisanal miners. Banners advertising the Public Consultation were posted in the village a week prior to the Public Consultation. A considerable amount of information about the Project is available at an Information Office, manned by Condor's social team and established four years ago in the village of La Cruz de La India.

On 13 July 2018, the Company held its Public Consultation Meeting in the village of La Cruz de La India. The Public Consultation is a key step in the ESIA permitting process. The meeting was attended by representatives from MARENA, MEM, the National Forestry Institute (''INAFOR'') and a variety of businesses, municipal authorities, a non-governmental organisation, local judicial and political party representatives, as well as members of the public. The Public Consultation was attended by 499 people, who signed the attendance sheet and who voiced overwhelming support for a new mine. Over 600 people have registered to be considered for new jobs to work in the mine.

In August 2018, Condor announced that MARENA had granted the Company an Environmental Permit for the development, construction and operation of an open pit mine, a 2,800 tpd or 1.0 Mt per annum CIL processing plant and associated infrastructure at the La India Project. Following the grant of the Environmental Permit the Company's objective is to progress the redesigned mine site infrastructure for the La India Open Pit to a bankable level of Feasibility Study (''BFS''). In addition, under the conditions of the Environmental Permit, the Company has to submit to MARENA final engineered designs for several key components of the mine prior to construction. For example, the final design and operations manual for the Tailings Storage Facility. Subject to financing, completion of a BFS and completion of the final engineering designs, construction is expected to commence within 18 months of the grant of the Environmental Permit. The construction period is expected to take 18 to 24 months.



I have mentioned that the Company's strategy is to build a ''base case'' 2,800 tpd processing plant. The objective is to materially increase production by supplementing the mill feed from the La India open pit with mill feed from satellite open pits and eventually bring the underground mineral resource into production. With this in mind, a considerable part of management time in the second half 2018 was spent working on a mineral resource update for the La India Project.

In January 2019, Condor announced a Mineral Resource update on the La India Project totalling 9.85 Mt at 3.6 g/t gold for 1,140,000 oz gold in the Indicated category and 8.48 Mt at 4.3 g/t gold for 1,179,000 oz gold in the Inferred category and is a timely reminder of the high grade nature of this gold deposit. The Mineral Resource update includes 8,222 metres drilling completed since the previous Mineral Resource update in September 2014. The Mineral Resource Estimate was prepared by SRK Consulting (UK) Limited (''SRK'') and uses the terminology, definitions and guidelines given in the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (''CIM'') Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves (May 2014). Total open pit Mineral Resource is 8.58 Mt at a grade of 3.3 g/t gold, for 902,000 oz gold in the Indicated category and 3.01 Mt at a grade of 3.0 g/t gold, for 290,000 oz gold in the Inferred category. Total underground Mineral Resources are 1.27 Mt at a grade of 5.8 g/t gold, for 238,000 oz gold in the Indicated category and 5.47 Mt at a grade of 5.1 g/t gold, for 889,000 oz gold in the Inferred category.

Of note is the new open pit Mineral Resource on Mestiza of 92 Kt at a grade of 12.1 g/t for 36,000 oz contained gold in the Indicated category and 341 Kt at a grade of 7.7 g/t gold for 85,000 oz contained gold in the Inferred category. The four satellite open pits outside the main, permitted La India open pit have combined open pit resources of 206 Kt at 9.9 g/t gold for 66,000 oz gold in the Indicated category and 2,127 Kt at 3.23 g/t gold for 221,000 oz gold in the Inferred category. The Company is conducting mining studies to determine the possibility of adding the contained gold within the satellite pits to a mine schedule to supplement the ore feed from the permitted La India open pit to the processing plant. This has the possibility to either increase annual production and/or extend the life of mine.

During 2017, SRK completed two scoping level studies each aimed at examining the likely production scenarios in the event that the mineral resource in the three main vein sets of La India, America and Mestiza is increased from 2.1 Moz gold to 3.0 Moz gold. The studies conclude that the three vein sets could be mined simultaneously from a combination of open pit and underground mining methods and possibly double the annual production rate.

Condor has been working on a land acquisition programme for over five years and plans to acquire approximately 850 hectares of rural land required for the mine site infrastructure for the permitted La India open pit.

Exploration activities during 2018 took second place to the key objective of permitting the mine. Nonetheless, during 2018 our geologists continued their efforts to prove a 5.0 Moz Gold District. The re-log of 207 drill holes at La India and America was completed to help understand the shape of oreshoots and identify new ones. New wireframes have been created, and new drill targets generated. These are both down dip of known oreshoots and lateral. An exciting new target has been identified in the hanging wall of the America vein set.

Secondly, Cacao (about 6.0 km east of La India) is a top priority for drilling. It has the best potential to add ounces to the global resource. Mapping and drilling demonstrate it has a long strike length (> 3.0 km) and that the entire epithermal system is preserved. Drill intercepts reported in 2017 include 7.85 m at 3.75 g/t gold, 7.85 m at 2.95 g/t gold and 17.1 m at 1.74 g/t gold. The vein becomes more like La India vein at depth and is as thick, or thicker.

Thirdly, the Andrea East target (about 8.0 km north of La India) is now drill ready and shows excellent grades at surface. It is a high priority for drilling. Trenches along it demonstrate significant width and grades. Best intercepts are observed at LICT15 (4.0 m at 1.79 g/t gold), LICT20 (5.6 m at 1.65 g/t gold) and LICT21 (3.0 m at 3.6 g/t gold). Grab samples give up to 9.7 g/t gold. Vein textures are very similar to La India and very encouraging.

Lastly, Condor sampled an average grade of over 13.5 g/t gold from 41 artisanal mining sites on the America and Mestiza vein sets which is a further reminder that the La India Project is a high-grade gold deposit. There are so many veins in the district that the Company is effectively 'drowning' in targets and a major issue is how to prioritise exploration. As the land package, mapping and sampling coverage grow, it allows us to understand the big picture. We can then focus on those targets with the best chance of adding ounces to the permitted mine schedule.

In December 2018, the Government of Nicaragua granted Condor a major exploration and exploitation concession adjacent to the La India Project. This confirms that the country is pro-mining and open for business. The 142.6 km2 Las Cruces concession expands the La India Project area by 45 per cent. Las Cruces was granted by the government under a 25 year exploration and exploitation concession. Condor's geologists have identified a major north-northeast-striking basement feeder zone through the Project (the ''La India Corridor''), which hosts 90 per cent of Condor's 2.4 Moz gold resource. The feeder zone can be projected south-east into Las Cruces. Mapping and early prospecting/sampling show that Las Cruces lies inside a volcanic caldera and has extensive clay alteration and rare vuggy silica. This alteration appears to be a 'lithocap', which raises the possibility of underlying porphyry-style mineralisation (copper and/or gold). This porphyry is potentially the 'heat engine' and metal source that caused gold mineralisation across the entire La India Gold District. We are particularly keen to follow up on anomalous samples of up to 0.1 per cent copper.

As a British company, Condor believes in, and promotes, constructive dialogue for a peaceful resolution of the current political uncertainty in Nicaragua. It is encouraging that the national dialogue restarted on 27 February 2019 after being suspended for seven months. In spite of the political upheaval and civil unrest in Nicaragua in 2018, Condor had very constructive meetings with key Ministries responsible for granting the Environmental Permit and was successfully granted the permit to construct and operate the mine and granted the 142.6 km2 Las Cruces concession, which expands the La India Project area by 45 per cent to 455 km2. During 2018, the Company has focused on supporting its 70 direct and indirect employees, and their families, who confirmed their desire to continue to work and maintain stability within their communities as much as possible. Condor has been operating in Nicaragua since 2006 and, as a responsible gold exploration and development company, continues to add value to the local communities and environment by generating sustainable socio-economic and environmental benefits. The new mine would create approximately 1,000 jobs during the construction period with priority given to the local community. The upfront capital cost of approximately US$120 million would have a significant positive impact on the economy. The Government and local communities would benefit significantly from future royalties and taxes.

In January 2018, Mr Andrew Cheatle joined Condor as a non-executive Director. Andrew previously held a high profile position as the Executive Director of Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (''PDAC''), the trade body representing both exploration companies and producers. He has lived in Canada for 19 years and worked in senior positions at Goldcorp, AMEC plc, Treasury Metals, and Unigold Inc. In January 2018 Roger Davey retired from the Board and in June 2018, Peter Flindell retired from the Board. I thank them for their contribution to the Company during their tenure.

Turning to the financial results for the year 2018, the Group's loss for the year was 2,299,329 (2017: 3,023,615). The Company raised 2.5 million during the financial period. The net cash balance of the Group at 31 December 2018 was 220,975 (2017: 946,261). The Company raised 1,750,000 by way of a private placement of new Ordinary Shares in February 2019.

Following the grant of the key Environmental Permit to construct and operate an open pit mine at La India, I think 2019 will be a transformational year for the Company. Production from the permitted La India open pit is expected to be approximately 600,000 oz gold. The Company will advance the La India open pit from PFS to BFS. Simultaneously, the Company is conducting technical mining studies to see if it is possible to generate production much earlier by mining a ''mini pit'' within the permitted La India open pit and trucking the mineralised ore to a nearby processing plant to be processed. There are significant benefits of transitioning Condor from an exploration and development company to a gold producer in the near future. The most obvious for shareholders is the generation of revenues and cashflow and the experience Condor will gain from managing contract miners together with bulk metallurgical tests and an advanced understanding of the geology. However, maintaining a social licence to operate is highly important. The historic mine at Mina La India closed in 1956 resulting in a high level of poverty in the village of La Cruz de la India. The commencement of production by toll refining will result in further investment in the communities and much needed new jobs. Both the Government and local communities will benefit from a three per cent royalty payable on gold produced from the La India Project. The Company has begun the permitting process for the Mestiza and America satellite feeder open pits, which has the potential to increase production to 120,000 oz gold per annum for a seven year life of mine. The Mestiza and America open pits have, in aggregate, 206 Kt at a grade of 9.9 g/t (66,000 oz contained gold) in the Indicated category and 1,018 Kt at 4.6 g/t (152,000 oz contained gold) in the Inferred category. Adding a higher average open pit grade of 5.5 g/t gold from the satellite feeder pits to the mill feed from the permitted La India open pit of 3.0 g/t gold will enhance the Project NPV, IRRs, reduce the payback period and reduce the already low All In Sustaining Cash Cost of US$690 per oz gold as detailed in the PFS.

M L Child

Chairman & CEO

Date: 22 March 2019

CONDOR GOLD PLC

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF COMPREHENSIVE INCOME

FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2018

Year Ended 31.12.18 Year Ended 31.12.17   Administrative expenses (2,067,413) (3,023,953) Loss on disposal of subsidiary (234,210) - Operating loss (2,301,623) (3,023,953) Finance income 2,294 338 Loss before income tax (2,299,329) (3,023,615) Income tax expense - - Loss for the year (2,299,329) (3,023,615) Other comprehensive income: Other comprehensive income to be reclassified to profit or loss in subsequent periods: Currency translation differences 144,006 (57,303) Other comprehensive (loss) / income for the year 144,006 (57,303) Total comprehensive loss for the year (2,155,323) (3,080,918) Loss attributable to: Non-controlling interest - - Owners of the parent (2,299,329) (3,023,615) (2,229,329) (3,023,615) Total comprehensive loss attributable to: Non-controlling interest - (6,352) Owners of the parent (2,155,323) (3,074,566) (2,155,323) (3,080,918) Earnings per share expressed in pence per share: Basic and diluted (in pence) (3.49) (5.04)



CONDOR GOLD PLC

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION

AS AT 31 DECEMBER 2018

31.12.18 31.12.17   ASSETS: NON-CURRENT ASSETS Property, plant and equipment 211,064 271,319 Intangible assets 20,644,243 18,927,968 20,855,307 19,199,287 CURRENT ASSETS Trade and other receivables 219,077 320,974 Cash and cash equivalents 220,975 946,261 440,052 1,267,235 TOTAL ASSETS 21,295,359 20,466,522 LIABILITIES: CURRENT LIABILITIES Trade and other payables 251,316 445,030 TOTAL LIABILITIES 251,316 445,030 NET CURRENT ASSETS 188,736 822,205 NET ASSETS 21,044,043 20,021,492 SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY ATTRIBUTABLE TO OWNERS OF THE PARENT Called up share capital 13,435,868 12,273,077 Share premium 33,662,309 32,426,049 Exchange difference reserve 959,791 581,575 Retained earnings (27,013,925) (25,174,153) 21,044,043 20,106,548 Non-controlling interest - (85,056) TOTAL EQUITY 21,044,043 20,021,492



The financial statements were approved and authorised for issue by the Board of directors on 22 March 2019 and were signed on its behalf by:

M L Child - Chairman

Company No: 05587987

CONDOR GOLD PLC

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF CHANGES IN EQUITY

AS AT 31 DECEMBER 2018

Share Capital Share premium Exchange difference reserve Retained earnings Total Non Controlling Interest Total Equity        At 1 January 2017 10,582,129 28,875,061 632,526 (23,075,118) 17,014,598 (78,704) 16,935,894 Comprehensive income: Loss for the year - - - (3,023,615) (3,023,615) - (3,023,615) Other comprehensive income: Currency translation differences - - (50,951) - (50,951) (6,352) (57,303) Total comprehensive income - - (50,951) (3,023,615) (3,074,566) (6,352) (3,080,918) Adjustment New shares issued 1,690,948 3,550,988 - - 5,241,936 - 5,241,936 Share based payment - - - 924,580 924,580 - 924,580 Total transactions with owners, recognised directly in equity 1,690,948 3,550,988 - 924,580 6,166,516 - 6,166,516 At 31 December 2017 12,273,077 32,426,049 581,575 (25,174,153) 20,106,548 (85,056) 20,021,492 Comprehensive income: Loss for the year - - (2,299,329) (2,299,329) - (2,299,329) Other comprehensive income: Currency translation differences - - 144,006 - 144,006 - 144,006 Total comprehensive income - - 144,006 (2,299,329) (2,155,323) - (2,155,323) New shares issued 1,162,791 1,337,210 - - 2,500,001 - 2,500,001 Issue costs - (100,950) - - (100,950) - (100,950) Share based payment - - - 544,613 544,613 - 544,613 Recycle through profit or loss on disposal of subsidiary - - 234,210 - 234,210 - 234,210 Transactions with non-controlling interest - - - (85,056) (85,056) 85,056 - Total transactions with owners, recognised directly in equity 1,162,791 1,236,260 234,210 459,557 3,092,818 85,056 3,177,874 At 31 December 2018 13,435,868 33,662,309 959,791 (27,013,925) 21,044,043 - 21,044,043



Share premium reserve represented the amounts subscribed for share capital in excess of the nominal value of the shares issued, net of cost of issue.

The exchange difference reserve is a separate component of Shareholders' equity in which the exchange differences, arising from translation of the results and financial positions of foreign operations that are included in the Group's Consolidated Financial Statements, are reported.

Retained earnings represent the cumulative net gains and losses recognised in the consolidated income statement.

CONDOR GOLD PLC

COMPANY STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION

AS AT 31 DECEMBER 2018

31.12.18 31.12.17   ASSETS: NON-CURRENT ASSETS Property, plant and equipment 515 1,472 Investments 751,977 751,977 Other receivables 24,394,310 22,329,897 25,146,802 23,083,346 CURRENT ASSETS Other receivables 22,324 71,392 Cash and cash equivalents 191,166 913,257 213,490 984,649 TOTAL ASSETS 25,360,292 24,067,995 LIABILITIES: CURRENT LIABILITIES Trade and other payables 182,561 302,286 TOTAL LIABILITIES 182,561 302,286 NET CURRENT ASSETS 30,929 682,363 NET ASSETS 25,177,731 23,765,709 SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY Called up share capital 13,435,868 12,273,077 Share premium 33,662,309 32,426,049 Retained earnings (21,920,446) (20,933,417) TOTAL EQUITY 25,177,731 23,765,709



The loss for the financial year dealt with in the financial statement of the parent company was 1,531,642 (2017: 1,951,935).

The financial statements were approved and authorised for issue by the Board of directors on 22 March 2019 and were signed on its behalf by:

M L Child - Chairman

Company No: 05587987

CONDOR GOLD PLC

COMPANY STATEMENT OF CHANGES IN EQUITY

AS AT 31 DECEMBER 2018

Share capital Share premium Retained earnings Total     At 1 January 2017 10,582,129 28,875,061 (19,906,062) 19,551,128 Comprehensive income: Loss for the period - - (1,951,935) (1,951,935) Total comprehensive income - - (1,951,935) (1,951,935) New shares issued 1,690,948 3,550,988 - 5,241,936 Share based payment - - 924,580 924,580 Total transactions with owners recognised directly in equity 1,690,948 3,550,988 924,580 6,166,516 At 31 December 2017 12,273,077 32,426,049 (20,933,417) 23,765,709 Comprehensive income: Loss for the period - - (1,531,642) (1,531,642) Total comprehensive income - - (1,531,642) (1,531,642) New shares issued 1,162,791 1,337,210 - 2,500,001 Issue costs - (100,950) - (100,950) Share based payment - - 544,613 544,613 Total transactions with owners recognised directly in equity 1,162,791 1,236,260 544,613 2,943,664 At 31 December 2018 13,435,868 33,662,309 (21,920,446) 25,177,731



Share premium reserve represents the amounts subscribed for share capital in excess of the nominal value of the shares issued, net of cost of issue.

Retained earnings represent the cumulative net gains and losses recognised in the Company's income statement.

CONDOR GOLD PLC

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF CASH FLOWS

FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2018

Year Ended Year-Ended 31.12.18 31.12.17   Cash flows from operating activities Loss before tax (2,299,329) (3,023,615) Share based payments 544,613 740,362 Recycle through profit or loss on disposal of subsidiary 234,210 - Depreciation 77,739 88,800 Exchange differences (8,318) (54,365) Finance income (2,294) (338) (1,453,379) (2,249,156) Decrease in trade and other receivables 101,900 224,274 (Decrease) / Increase in trade and other payables (193,715) 93,480 Net cash used in operating activities (1,545,194) (1,931,402) Cash flows from investing activities Purchase of tangible fixed assets (15,422) (128,667) Purchase of intangible fixed assets (1,566,015) (2,819,554) Interest received 2,294 338 Net cash used in investing activities (1,579,143) (2,947,883) Cash flows from financing activities Net proceeds from share issue 2,399,051 5,241,936 Net cash from financing activities 2,399,051 5,241,936 (Decrease)/Increase in cash and cash equivalents (725,286) 362,651 Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of year 946,261 583,610 Exchange (loss)/gains in cash and bank - - Cash and cash equivalents at end of year 220,975 946,261



CONDOR GOLD PLC

COMPANY STATEMENT OF CASH FLOWS

FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2018

Year Ended Year Ended 31.12.18 31.12.17   Cash flows from operating activities Loss before tax (1,531,642) (1,951,935) Share based payment 544,613 740,362 Depreciation 957 1,196 Finance income (2,294) (338) (988,366) (1,210,715) Decrease / (Increase) in trade and other receivables 49,068 (40,014) (Decrease) / Increase in trade and other payables (119,725) 116,054 Net cash used in operating activities (1,059,023) (1,134,675) Cash flows from investing activities Interest received 2,294 338 Loans to subsidiaries (2,064,413) (3,735,135) Purchase of fixed asset investments - (2,405) Net cash used in investing activities (2,062,119) (3,737,202) Cash flows from financing activities Proceeds from share issue 2,399,051 5,241,936 Net cash from financing activities 2,399,051 5,241,936 (Decrease) / Increase in cash and cash equivalents (722,091) 370,059 Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of year 913,257 543,198 Cash and cash equivalents at end of year 191,166 913,257

A copy of the audited annual report to 31st December 2018 together with Management's Discussion and Analysis and Notice of Meeting and Management Information Circular with respect to the Annual General and Special Meeting of Shareholders are available on the Company's website at www.condorgold.com and on Sedar at www.Sedar.com and will be posted to shareholders shortly.

The comparative figures for the financial year ended 31 December 2018 are not the Company's statutory accounts for that financial year but the consolidated accounts. Those accounts have been reported on by the Company's auditors and delivered to the registrar of companies. The report of the auditors was (i) unqualified, (ii) did not give any reference to any matters to which the auditors drew attention by way of emphasis without qualifying their report, and (iii) did not contain a statement under sections 498 (2) or (3) of the Companies Act 2006, relating to the accounting records of the company.

- Ends -

For further information please visit www.condorgold.com or contact:

Condor Gold plc Mark Child, Chairman and CEO +44 (0) 20 7493 2784 Beaumont Cornish Limited Roland Cornish and James Biddle +44 (0) 20 7628 3396 Numis Securities Limited John Prior and James Black +44 (0) 20 7260 1000 Blytheweigh Tim Blythe, Camilla Horsfall and Megan Ray +44 (0) 20 7138 3204

About Condor Gold plc:

Condor Gold plc was admitted to AIM in May 2006 and dual listed on the TSX in January 2018. The Company is a gold exploration and development company with a focus on Nicaragua.

In August 2018, the Company announced that the Ministry of the Environment in Nicaragua had granted the Company the Environmental Permit (''EP'') for the development, construction and operation of a processing plant with capacity to process up to 2,800 tonnes per day at its wholly-owned La India gold project (''La India Project''). The EP is considered to be the master permit for mining operations in Nicaragua. Condor Gold published a PFS on La India Project in December 2014, as summarised in the Technical Report (as defined below). The PFS details an open pit gold Mineral Reserve in the Probable category of 6.9 Mt at 3.0 g/t gold for 675,000 oz gold, producing 80,000 oz gold per annum for seven years. La India Project contains a Mineral Resource of 9,850Kt at 3.6 g/t gold for 1,140Koz gold in the Indicated category and 8,479Kt at 4.3g/t gold for 1,179Koz gold in the Inferred category. The Indicated Mineral Resource is inclusive of the Mineral Reserve.

Disclaimer

Neither the contents of the Company's website nor the contents of any website accessible from hyperlinks on the Company's website (or any other website) is incorporated into, or forms part of, this announcement.

Qualified Persons

The Mineral Resource Estimate has been completed by Ben Parsons, a Principal Consultant (Resource Geology) with SRK Consulting (U.S.), Inc, who is a Member of the Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, MAusIMM(CP). Ben Parsons has some eighteen years' experience in the exploration, definition and mining of precious and base metal Mineral Resources. Ben Parsons is a full-time employee of SRK Consulting (U.S.), Inc, an independent Consultancy, and has sufficient experience which is relevant to the style of mineralisation and type of deposit under consideration, and to the type of activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a ''qualified person'' as defined by NI 43-101 and as required by the June 2009 Edition of the AIM Note for Mining and Oil & Gas Companies. Ben Parsons consents to the inclusion in the announcement of the matters based on their information in the form and context in which it appears and confirms that this information is accurate and not false or misleading.

The technical and scientific information in this press release has been reviewed, verified and approved by Andrew Cheatle, P.Geo., who is a ''qualified person'' as defined by NI 43-101.

Technical Information

Certain disclosure contained in this news release of a scientific or technical nature has been summarised or extracted from the technical report entitled ''Technical Report on the La India Gold Project, Nicaragua, December 2014'', dated November 13, 2017 with an effective date of December 21, 2014 (the ''Technical Report''), prepared in accordance with NI 43-101. The Technical Report was prepared by or under the supervision of Tim Lucks, Principal Consultant (Geology & Project Management), Gabor Bacsfalusi, Principal Consultant (Mining), Benjamin Parsons, Principal Consultant (Resource Geology), each of SRK Consulting (UK) Limited, and Neil Lincoln of Lycopodium Minerals Canada Ltd., each of whom is an independent ''qualified person'' as defined by NI 43-101.

Forward Looking Statements

All statements in this press release, other than statements of historical fact, are 'forward-looking information' with respect to the Company within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including statements with respect to: the Mineral Resources, Mineral Reserves and future production rates, plans and expenditures at the La India Project. Forward-looking information is often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as: "seek", "anticipate", "plan", "continue", ''strategies'', ''estimate'', "expect", "project", "predict", "potential", "targeting", "intends", "believe", "potential", ''could'', ''might'', ''will'' and similar expressions. Forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and is based upon a number of estimates and assumptions of management at the date the statements are made including, among others, assumptions regarding: future commodity prices and royalty regimes; availability of skilled labour; timing and amount of capital expenditures; future currency exchange and interest rates; the impact of increasing competition; general conditions in economic and financial markets; availability of drilling and related equipment; effects of regulation by governmental agencies; the receipt of required permits; royalty rates; future tax rates; future operating costs; availability of future sources of funding; ability to obtain financing and assumptions underlying estimates related to adjusted funds from operations. Many assumptions are based on factors and events that are not within the control of the Company and there is no assurance they will prove to be correct.

Such forward-looking information involves known and unknown risks, which may cause the actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including, risks related to: mineral exploration, development and operating risks; estimation of mineralisation, resources and reserves; environmental, health and safety regulations of the resource industry; competitive conditions; operational risks; liquidity and financing risks; funding risk; exploration costs; uninsurable risks; conflicts of interest; risks of operating in Nicaragua; government policy changes; ownership risks; permitting and licencing risks; artisanal miners and community relations; difficulty in enforcement of judgments; market conditions; stress in the global economy; current global financial condition; exchange rate and currency risks; commodity prices; reliance on key personnel; dilution risk; payment of dividends; as well as those factors discussed under the heading ''Risk Factors'' in the Company's annual information form for the fiscal year ended 31 December 2018 dated March 22, 2019, available under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com.

Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise unless required by law.Nicaraguas government and opposition delegations resumed stalled peace talks Thursday aimed at ending a deadly 11-month political crisis.

The resumption follows an agreement on Wednesday by the government of President Daniel Ortega to release all opposition prisoners within 90 days.

Its a big step forward, said Max Jerez, a student representative on the opposition delegation.

The agreement includes a call on sanctions against Ortegas regime to be lifted.

On Monday, the opposition alliance suspended talks that had begun on February 27 after 100 protesters were temporarily detained on Saturday by police who used tear gas to prevent a protest against Ortegas government.

The number of prisoners due to be released was not given.

According to a list compiled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 647 people being held as a result of the anti-government protests that began in April last year. The government says it is holding 350 detainees while a committee of relatives maintains 807 people are being held.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is due to monitor the release process.

The two parties have agreed on a six-point negotiation process to accompany the releases and have asked for international support in implementing the agreements reached, according to a statement issued by the presidency.

The 90-day release period has been greeted with suspicion by relatives and local human rights organizations.

Vilma Nunez, head of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, said she feared the prisoners would be treated as hostages, released one by one as the agenda items are discussed.

 Ongoing monitoring-

The government has repeatedly shown that its goal is to do as little as possible in the negotiations, and I believe there will be a need for ongoing monitoring and pressure to ensure that all detainees are released within the next 90 days, Geoff Thale of the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA), told AFP.

Meanwhile, the IACHR put Nicaragua on its human rights blacklist along with Venezuela and Cuba.

In its annual report, citing a group of experts conclusion in December, the IACHR said authorities committed crimes against humanity during the brutal crackdown on the protests.

The IACHR has watched closely as Nicaraguas human rights situation continued to worsen, particularly since the start of violence from April 18, 2018, as part of state repression of protests, it said a statement.

Also in the report by the independent body of the Organization of American States, Venezuela and Cuba again were described as countries that did not meet respect for human rights.

Nicaragua has been mired in political crisis since April last year, when a protest initially against a now-scrapped pension reform snowballed into opposition to Ortegas rule.

The 73-year-old former left-wing guerrilla leader has been in power for more than 11 years but alongside his wife Vice President Rosario Murillo, he has been accused of ruling with an iron fist and committing rights abuses.

The deadly unrest has left at least 325 people dead, 2,000 people wounded, and sent 52,000 people into exile, human rights groups say.After his arrest, during a review of school district payments, auditors discovered that LTHS had not been paying all of the fees they owed, though LTHS officials argue they had an agreement with Healy not to pay for certain services they could manage in house.One of Oregon's most reviled murder cases will receive the 20/20 treatment on Friday night.

In 1983, Diane Downs drove her blood-spattered car to a hospital in Springfield, Oregon  claiming that a strange man had shot her and all three of her children.

Downs told police that a shaggy-haired man had waived them down on a deserted road, then pulled a gun, asked for the keys, and opened fire when Downs refused to hand them over. While her children received serious injuries, Downs' only injury was a gunshot wound to the left arm.

Downs' daughter Cheryl died from the gunshot wounds. Her other daughter Christie and son Danny miraculously survived after medical staff fought to keep them alive, though both remained in critical condition.

Initially, police began a manhunt based on the information that Downs had provided, looking for the "bushy-haired man." But in the meantime, both investigators and medical staff became increasingly suspicious of Downs' demeanor. She seemed completely unfazed by the incident, the death and wounding of her children  but she was incredibly agreeable when it came to attention from investigators and the press.

Surgeon who helped save one of Diane Downs' kids in 1983 after she shot her recalls chilling interaction: "I knew within 30 minutes of talking with that woman that she was guilty. https://t.co/ehW2Gc8QgL  20/20 (@ABC2020) March 22, 2019

Over time, no leads emerged on the supposed attacker. Police were also unable to find the murder weapon, a .22 caliber semi-automatic handgun.

Eventually, nine months after the bloody incident that claimed the life of one child and nearly ended the lives of two more, police arrested Diane Downs for one count of murder and two counts each of attempted murder and criminal assault. As the investigation shifted, evidence began to point more and more convincingly toward Downs being the perpetrator.

Prosecutors alleged that Downs had shot her children so that she could be unencumbered in carrying on an affair with a married man. During the trial, 9-year-old Christie Downs, having recovered the ability to speak following treatment of her grievous injuries, testified against her mother.

Downs would be convicted in 1984, and sentenced to life in prison. However, she was still eligible for parole after 25 years.

Christie and Danny Downs were adopted by the prosecutor who had tried their mother. Meanwhile, Diane Downs had become pregnant with a fourth child before her arrest, giving birth following her conviction. The baby was taken by the State of Oregon and adopted by a family, naming her Rebecca Babcock.

Woman on finding peace after learning mother is child killer Diane Downs: "Though that's biologically my makeup, it's not who I am inside." https://t.co/j41YYBxUxy  20/20 (@ABC2020) March 22, 2019

In 1987, Downs escaped from the Oregon Women's Correctional Center in Salem. She was arrested ten days later, staying just a few blocks from the prison. She was then transferred to out-of-state prisons so that she would not be a threat to her surviving children.

Downs has been denied parole several times after serving 25 years, and she continues to argue her innocence. Her next parole hearing is in 2020.

The ABC 20/20 two-hour special "My Mother's Sins" premieres tonight at 9 p.m.SALEM, Ore.  Oregon's Department of Human Services (DHS) revealed on Thursday that the private data of more than 350,000 clients may have been accessed in a massive data breach that began earlier this year.

The agency said that the breach stemmed from a phishing scam that infected the emails of nine separate employees after they clicked a suspicious link. The link "compromised their email mailboxes," and allowed the scammers to access the employees' emails.

"Unfortunately, Protected Health Information under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was compromised and potentially exposed," DHS said.

DHS had a security issue affecting employee e-mail accounts. Please see our announcement for what you need to know: https://t.co/KNWCnvNQ4l  Oregon DHS (@OregonDHS) March 21, 2019

Officials have not yet been able to confirm that the personal information of any specific clients was taken during the breach, but the potential size of the breach  more than 350,000  means that the agency is required to notify the public under Oregon law.

According to DHS, scammers may have had access to the first and last names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, case numbers, and other information from thousands of clients.

"While there is no indication that any personal information was copied from its email system or used inappropriately, the department will be offering identity theft recovery services for impacted individuals," DHS said.

DHS discovered the breach on January 28, and believe that the phishing scam targeting DHS employees began on January 8.

The agency said that it has hired an outside company called IDExperts to look into the breach and find out exactly how many people may have been compromised  and what specific information may have been available on each client.

On Thursday afternoon, Oregon Republican lawmakers quickly released a statement panning DHS officials' handling of the breach.

Transparency continues to be a systemic problem at DHS. Oregonians deserve better from government agencies and departments. Protection of personal information they are required to provide the state should be given the highest priority. Beyond that, were seeing a growing accountability issue when DHS fails to quickly inform the public about embarrassing matters, said House Republican Leader Rep. Carl Wilson (R-Grants Pass).Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  Facebook has failed to convince the country's privacy body that there is nothing to worry about after millions of its users' passwords were mishandled and stored in readable formats.

In a statement on Friday, the National Privacy Commission (NPC) said it met with a Facebook official who reaffirmed the social media giant's earlier statement that there was no evidence that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed the sensitive information.

But Privacy Commissioner Raymund Enriquez Liboro said, "Even if there is shown to be no evidence of abuse, there is little comfort in knowing that the world's largest repository of personal data practices such lax internal controls."

He cited a 2018 study of a security think tank that says many businesses have said their data breaches come from negligent employees or contractors.

"If you are affected and you receive notice from Facebook, change your passwords immediately and enable multi-factor authentication," Liboro said, further advising Filipino Facebook users to take necessary measures to protect their personal information.

Facebook said it has since fixed the issues and committed to notify those affected by the glitch.

"We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users," said Pedro Canahuati, Vice President for Engineering, Security and Privacy in a statement on Thursday.

READ: Facebook staff had access to hundreds of millions of people's passwordsBecause if were going to live out here in this lay of the land and pay taxes, and if youre not in that board room where decisions are being made for you every day based on your daily lives, then you are nonexistent. and that is not other peoples fault, it is our African American race fault because we get out here, we get complacent we think we have a ride, Brent said. Were a Prince of Bel-Air, some of us, and we feel like weve made it, but we havent, if you want to be true to yourself.152 Shares Share

Parkinsons disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects movement, resulting most notably in tremor, slow movement, stiffness and balance issues. While Parkinsons patients benefit from medicine that can alleviate some of these symptoms, there are no available treatments to slow, halt or reverse the progressive destruction of dopamine-producing brain cells and abnormal clumping of alpha synuclein, an otherwise normal brain protein. The disease affects roughly 10 million people worldwide and is the 14th leading cause of death in the United States.

While the research community continues to deepen its understanding of how to stop Parkinsons disease, theres consensus that the genesis of the disease is rooted in a misfolded protein that become toxic to the brain. Protein misfolding is common in the body; Its normal for proteins to misfold on a daily basis. A healthy body simply corrects the misfolding and moves on. However, as the body ages, it becomes less equipped to correct the misfolding; this is when toxicity can occur.

Two decades of searching identifies a root cause

Protein misfolding is at the root of several neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinsons, Alzheimers and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrigs disease). In Parkinsons disease, the misfolding process occurs within alpha-synuclein, a brain protein with natural protective properties. However, when -synuclein misfolds, it can create toxic aggregates (clumps) called toxic oligomers. These errant proteins are adept at converting other healthy forms of -synuclein to toxic forms, and can propagate through the brain, killing neurons in their path. Identifying this process as a root cause of Parkinsons disease was the breakthrough result of two decades of research beginning with the discovery of genetic links between -synuclein and the risk of developing Parkinsons disease. Researchers have also determined that the toxic oligomeric version of otherwise normal protein in the brain was at the root of several other neurodegenerative diseases. The protein misfolding process is the same; the brain protein affected is different.

Identifying a root cause of Parkinsons gave researchers a viable target for drug development efforts. However, drug developers learned quickly that targeting the toxic forms of -synuclein and only the toxic forms is challenging. Toxic oligomers contain unstructured regions and are relatively unstable. It is for this reason that traditional methods are unable to develop antibodies with adequate precision to selectively target these toxic forms. Rather, these methods produce antibodies that also bind to the many other normal variants of -synuclein. This is problematic because new data show one form, in particular, -synuclein tetramer, performs a protective function in the brain and must be preserved.

At the end of March, scientists engaged in neurodegenerative disease research worldwide will gather in Lisbon at AD/PD, the international conference on Alzheimers and Parkinsons disease. At this conference, researchers will highlight their progress toward therapies for these diseases. Several of these therapies are promising. However, antibodies created using traditional development methods may lack the level of selectivity the toxic oligomer requires. New tools for developing antibody therapy candidates are needed for this very unique target.

The role of supercomputing in drug development is an exciting new trend, particularly in neurodegenerative diseases. In Parkinsons disease, supercomputing combined with world-class biology and physics offers researcher a new way to make drugs that can selectively target the toxic forms of a -synuclein while preserving the normal forms. AD/PD will highlight several new potential antibody candidates for Parkinsons disease that can block the toxic forms of a-synuclein while preserving the normal forms better than antibody drug candidates in development.

The ability to target the root cause of neurodegenerative diseases with precision will continue to capture headlines as drugs in development take aim. Drug development for Alzheimers disease, which is more mature than that for Parkinsons disease, has suffered numerous failures. Theres new opportunity to avoid this outcome for Parkinsons disease. And quite honestly, we cant afford it. Parkinsons patients are in a vulnerable state when they are diagnosed. Symptoms do not occur until 80 percent or more of the midbrains capacity to produce dopamine is lost. By contrast, Alzheimers disease patients retain 90 percent of their brains function when symptoms first appear. Drug developers urgently need new tools to develop drugs to avoid the same disappointing trajectory as Alzheimers disease.

New developments coming out of AD/PD suggest we wont have to. Todays drug discovery methods have developed some wonderful medicines, but for the toxic oligomer, they deliver drug candidates that are as imprecise as a shotgun. New approaches can deliver drug candidates that act like a sniper. This allows exacting precision on the toxic oligomer, reducing the potential for side effects related to targeting the non-toxic forms of proteins in the brain. This kind of precision hasnt been available before and the hope is that it will shorten the path to treatment not only for Parkinsons disease but for a host of other neurodegenerative diseases that remain without effective treatments.

Neil Cashman is a neurologist, academic director, Vancouver Coastal Health ALS Clinic, Vancouver, British Columbia, and chief science officer, ProMIS Neurosciences, Inc.

Image credit: Shutterstock.comINTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION -- Astronauts began the first of three spacewalks to bring upgrades to the International Space Station Friday morning.

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nick Hague are working to replace old nickel-hydrogen batteries with new lithium-ion batteries. They are first-time spacewalkers.

Throughout the excursion, they will stay in contact with NASA's master control in Houston, Texas.

Then, next week McClain and Christina Koch will make history when they participate in the first all-female spacewalk.EUGENE, Ore. -- A Lane County deputy accused of making inappropriate sexual comments has resigned as the investigation into his conduct continues.

The Lane County Sheriffs Office said they received the initial complaint about Bryan Holiman, 42, on Nov. 1, 2018. A community member alleged that Holiman made the inappropriate comments while he was on duty. The Office of Professional Standards opened an investigation the same day.

During the investigation, the sheriffs office learned of a previous incident involving similar behavior with a different community member, which reportedly occurred in 2016. That incident was not reported to the sheriffs office at the time.

It is unfortunate the conduct reported to have occurred in 2016 was not reported to the Sheriffs Office earlier to allow a more timely investigation, Sheriff Byron Trapp said. We want to remind the community the Sheriffs Office remains available to receive complaints at any time and reviews all allegations of misconduct for appropriate action. We take these allegations very seriously and the behavior reported in this case is not tolerated by the Lane County Sheriffs Office. We are thankful to the brave community members who came forward to provide information during the investigation.

A day after the investigation began, it was placed on hold to investigate the possibility that the allegations could rise to a criminal level. The sheriffs office asked the Florence Police Department to take on a criminal investigation.

Holiman was placed on paid administrative leave during the investigation.

RELATED: Lane County deputy on leave pending investigations

The Lane County District Attorneys Office decided not to pursue criminal charges Dec. 11. But on Jan. 11, investigators again considered the possibility that Holimans conduct could rise to the level of criminal charges, and the Florence Police Department conducted a second criminal investigation.

The Douglas County District Attorneys Office was asked to review the second criminal complaint to avoid conflict of interest concerns.

Holiman had been with the sheriffs office since 2001.I received a call on Wednesday from the Nokia real estate development team, and they informed me that the deal with Glenstar did not mature and as a result, they are exploring opportunities with other partners to maximize the Naperville campus, Chirico wrote in the Facebook post.What do you like to do in your free time? In my free time, I am usually at Ultimate Ninjas (in Naperville) watching my son work on learning new obstacles. He is very passionate about American Ninja Warrior and I do all I can to support him. My husband and I have yet to try any of the obstacles, but it is amazing to watch strong boys and girls take on challenges that are bigger than themselves. We also watch a lot of American Ninja Warrior and movies on the Hallmark channel.After an absence of many years, Kilkenny's internationally renowned tenor, Dr Ronan Tynan is coming home to play a concert. He is the headline act for a series of concerts at Ballykeeffe amphitheatre this summer.

The double amputee medical doctor whose life story is the thing of fairytales is a huge star in the US and recently sang at the funeral of former US president, George Bush senior. The Johnstown native will play the award winning outdoor venue on Saturday, August 10. Tickets available from eventbrite.ie

For many The Villagers will be a huge draw and they are on stage July 20. This indie folk group are magical live.

The Kilmanagh venue will also host the legendary Finbar Furey as well as Irish rockers The Stunning while 2019 will see the return of Monaghans Marty Mone, following a hugely successful gig last year.

Another new addition to the bill, the Amphitheatre will play host to the critically-acclaimed Chasing Abbey, a rising Dublin three-piece with a unique urban pop sound.

Also on the programme are the instantly recognisable traditional Irish band, Altan, who have recently released a brand new album, while the iconic Aslan will round off a bumper season with favourites from their much-loved repertoire spanning 25 years.

The ever-popular Chapterhouse Theatre Company will return with an open-air production of Shakespearean classic A Midsummer Nights Dream for whats set to be a magical evening under

the stars.

Nestled at the foot of the old Ballykeeffe Quarry, Ballykeeffe Amphitheatre, which is run entirely by

volunteers, brings the authentic atmosphere of an open-air Italian theatre to the quaint Kilkenny

countryside.

Programme

Fri 21 st June: Chapterhouse Theatre Company presents A Midsummer Nights Dream

Sat 29 th June: Marty Mone

Sat 6 th July: Finbar Furey

Sat 20 th July: Villagers

Sat 3 rd August: The Stunning

Sat 10 th August: Ronan Tynan

Sat 17 th August: Chasing Abbey

Sat 24 th August: Altan

Sat 31 st August: AslanEveryone had so much fun last year Reed said. The NICK Foundation is there in our time of need when we need them. We are encouraging the public to come out and help us help them.Editor's Note: Get caught up in minutes with our speedy summary of today's must-read news stories and expert opinions that moved the precious metals and financial markets. Sign up here!

This mornings price action shows exactly why Im more bullish on precious metals in 2019 than I have been for years. News of more global economic slowing was the apparent cause of all major US stock indices fallingand gold rising.

Whatever happens next, this is important. Consider that it wasnt just stocks falling. Also hit were oil, platinum, palladium, and other industrial metals.

Gold being the safe-haven asset it is, its no great surprise to see it bucking the overall metals trend. But whats strikingand a departure from what we saw so often in recent years, until late 2018is that the US dollar was up at the same time.

Gold

This clearly shows gold breaking away from the commodities pack. As mentioned, this started in late 2018, which is why I came out as much more bullish on precious metals for 2019. Right now, gold is trading like the form of cash that it really is, and not just like pork bellies or copper, as it so often has.

Its important to see that this change in the market continuesas well as to be able to document it, as with the screenshots above.

Silver

Remember that silver prices usually lag when gold prices break out, and then go on to outperform. Remember also that most silver is produced as a byproduct of industrial metals mines, such as copper, lead, and zinc. If the global economic slowdown does turn into a global recession, that could reduce silver production at a time when precious metals prices are rising. Im not predicting it for 2019, but its possible that this combination of trends could send silver into one of its famous manias this year. That would take silver prices much higher, much faster than golds.

Uranium

Finally, I want to point out that the other yellow metal is marching to the beat of a different drummer entirely. Prices are rising because enough uranium cant be mined at current prices to keep the lights on in large parts of the worldincluding the US. Uranium cant be substituted, not for years. Its essential now. And major sources have been shutting mines down due to low prices. That can and will be reversed, but not quickly.

In short, uranium is not a precious metal, but I see its price as largely immune to the global economic slowdown.

And thats not even counting any tailwind from the possibility of new US demand driven by the Department of Commerces Section 232 investigation into US dependency on foreign sources of uranium.

Metals vs. Stocks

I like buying gold and silver when I have extra cash to put away as savings. Thats simple prudence.

But when I think prices will rise, I speculate on related stocks. Its not convenient to buy enough zinc to matter and store it in the basementnever mind uranium. More important is that the stocks typically give me leverage over the underlying metals. That multiplies my gains if Im right. And right now, its gold, silver, and uranium stocks Im looking to buy.

If youd like to see which stocks Im buying, youre welcome to subscribe to The Independent Speculator.

Regardless, you now know the essentials of what and why Im looking to buy in 2019.

Caveat emptor,

LROME (Reuters) - Italy and China want to revive the spirit of the ancient Silk Road by deepening their trade and investment ties, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Friday during a trip to Rome that has raised eyebrows in Washington.

Xi is set to sign a deal on Saturday that will see Italy become the first of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations to join Chinas giant Belt and Road infrastructure project which is inspired by the old trade routes that linked the two nations.

We want to revitalize the ancient Silk Road in order to better share the fruits of humanitys progress, Xi said following talks with Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

We want to strengthen the synergies between our respective development strategies to enhance cooperation in the infrastructure, port, logistics and maritime transport sectors in order to build a series of concrete projects along the Silk Road, he added, speaking through a translator.

Besides the Belt and Road initiative, various deals worth up to 7 billion euros ($7.9 billion) are expected to be agreed in an array of sectors, including accords opening up the northern ports of Trieste and Genoa to Chinese containers.

In a sign of the improved ties, the Bank of China said on Friday that Italian state lender Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP) would be allowed to sell so-called Panda bonds to investors in mainland China  another first for a G7 member.

Italys decision to get closer to Beijing has caused concerns among its Western allies  notably in Washington, where the White House National Security Council urged Rome not to give legitimacy to Chinas infrastructure vanity project.DUBAI/LONDON (Reuters) - Budget needs are forcing Saudi Arabia to push for oil prices of at least $70 per barrel this year, industry sources say, even though U.S. shale oil producers could benefit and Riyadhs share of global crude markets might be further eroded.

Riyadh, OPECs de facto leader, said it was steeply cutting exports to its main customers in March and April despite refiners asking for more of its oil. The move defies U.S. President Donald Trumps demands for OPEC to help reduce prices while he toughens sanctions on oil producers Iran and Venezuela.

The export cuts are designed to prop up prices, sources close to Saudi oil policy say. Saudi officials say the kingdoms output policies are merely intended to balance the world market and reduce high inventories.

The Saudis want oil at $70 at least and are not worried about too much shale oil, said one industry source familiar with Saudi oil policy.

Another source said Saudi Arabia wanted to put a floor under oil prices at $70 or slightly lower, and added: No one at OPEC can talk about output increases now.

Officially, Saudi Arabia, which plans to raise government spending to boost economic growth, does not have a price target. It says price levels are determined by the market and that it is merely targeting a balance of global supply and demand.

Even a price of around $70 a barrel would not balance Saudi Arabias books this year, according to figures cited by Jihad Azour, director of the International Monetary Funds Middle East and Central Asia department in February. For that, he said, Riyadh needs oil prices at $80-$85 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest oil exporter, also wants to make sure it avoids a repeat of the 2014-2016 oil price crash below $30 per barrel, sources familiar with Saudi policy said.

LOSS OF MARKET SHARE

Saudi Arabia plans to reduce March and April oil production to under 10 million barrels per day  below its official OPEC output target of 10.3 million bpd.

A Saudi official told Reuters this month that despite strong demand from customers, state oil giant Saudi Aramco had cut its allocations for April by 635,000 bpd below nominations  requests made by refiners and clients for crude.

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said such swings were not unusual because last year the kingdom had raised output and exports above targets to avoid imminent shortages.

Saudi Arabia has also been advocating an extension of OPEC-led supply cuts beyond June until the end of 2019.

Russia, which is not an OPEC member but is cutting output in tandem with OPEC, can balance its budget at oil prices of $55 per barrel and has not made clear yet whether it is prepared to extend them when OPEC next meets in June.

With budget needs at above $85 per barrel, the Saudis desperately need prices at above $70 per barrel, said Gary Ross, CEO of Black Gold Investors and a veteran OPEC watcher.

They also need to convince Russia that the strategy of output cuts makes sense despite the loss of market share to the United States, he said.

The United States and Russia produce 12 million and 11 million bpd respectively. Unlike Russia, the United States pumps at will via its commercial energy sector, led by shale. The International Energy Agency forecasts its output will soar by another 4 million bpd in the next five years.

Those increases would be likely to outpace the growth of global demand and give Washington an even bigger share of the global market, making it a bigger exporter than Saudi Arabia.

PRESSURE FROM TRUMP

Riyadh has long been a close ally of the United States and the two countries have coordinated oil policy more closely since Trump became president than under his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Trump has supported Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite a global outcry over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government, and has made clear he expects OPEC to help lower global oil prices.

Last year, Saudi Arabia raised output steeply under pressure from Washington. But it later heard that the United States had granted Iranian oil customers unexpectedly generous waivers and the price of oil subsequently fell to $50 per barrel.

On Monday, OPEC and its allies, led by Russia, scrapped a planned meeting in April and will decide instead whether to extend output cuts in June, once the market has assessed the impact of new U.S. sanctions on Iran due in May over its non-compliance with a deal to curb its nuclear program.

We have to wait and see what the Americans will do first, a second OPEC source said.

There is, however, no guarantee Saudi policy will remain unchanged if Washington puts pressure on Riyadh to raise supply.

They (the Saudis) do care about Trump, but they cant do whatever he says every time, an OPEC source said.(Reuters) - Clete Willems, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, is planning to leave the White House in the coming weeks, CNBC reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the top trade officials plans.

The main reason for Willems exit was attributed to the wear of frequent travel on his young and growing family, CNBC reported, adding that his departure was expected to take place as U.S. trade talks with China linger into April.

The report, citing a source, also said that a replacement for Willems was in the works.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said trade negotiations with China were progressing and a final agreement will probably happen, adding that his call for tariffs to remain on Chinese imported goods for some time did not mean talks were in trouble.

Trump, in a television interview aired on Friday, also said he expected to keep a 25 percent tariff on European light trucks amid separate ongoing trade talks with the European Union, but that companies could avoid it by building factories in the United States.

The Trump administration is engaged in ongoing trade talks with both the European Union and China as part of the Republican presidents America First agenda. Top U.S. officials are headed to Beijing in coming days, with a summit possible between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to seal any final deal.

The European Union ... frankly, treats us as badly as China, Trump told Fox Business Network.

Our deal is coming along very well. Well see what happens, Trump said regarding China. I think the deal will probably happen. I think they need it very badly.

Asked about his remarks earlier this week about U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods staying in place for a period of time and whether that meant there was a snag in the negotiations, Trump said, No, not at all.

Trump then segued to the European auto sector, including trucks. We get a 25 percent tariff on that segment - thats our best segment by far. And yes, we will absolutely be able to keep it - not only keep it going, I really think we have tremendous potential, he told the network in the interview, which was taped on Thursday.

Ill tell you what the end game is. Theyll build their plants in the United States and they have no tariffs, Trump added. Then, asked if he would agree to zero tariffs, he said: I would do it for certain products, but I wouldnt do it for cars.

Shares of German automaker Daimler jumped briefly after the interview.

The United States in July agreed not to hit EU car imports with extra tariffs while the Washington and Brussels sought to improve economic ties, but the U.S. ambassador to the EU on Thursday said Europe was falling short in trade talks.

Additionally, the U.S. Commerce Department has given the White House a report regarding the legal basis to impose steep tariffs on cars on national security grounds.

Asked if autos and auto parts posed a security risk, Trump said: well, no.

What poses a national security risk is our balance sheet. We have to have  we need a strong balance sheet. Otherwise you dont have national security, Trump added. Were straightening it out.

Separately, Trump also told Fox that if U.S. lawmakers do not pass his new deal to supersede the North American Free Trade Agreement trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, he might go pre-NAFTA but gave no other details.

The leaders of the three countries last year reached a deal to replace NAFTA with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. But it must be approved by the U.S. Congress, which is split between Trumps fellow Republicans, who control the Senate, and Democrats, who hold the majority in the House of Representatives and have been cool to the new pact.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he does not mind if the public is allowed to see the report that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is preparing about his investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and any possible links to the Trump campaign.

Let it come out, let people see it, thats up to the attorney general ... and well see what happens, Trump told reporters at the White House.

Well see if its fair, he added.

Mueller is preparing to submit a report to U.S. Attorney General William Barr on his findings, including Russias role in the election and whether Trump unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction. Russia has denied interfering in the election.

Barr already is coming under pressure from lawmakers to make the entire document public quickly, though he has wide latitude in what to release.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 420-0 last week on a non-binding resolution calling for Muellers report to be released both to Congress and to the public, but it is not clear how the measure will fare in the Senate.

Asked if the public should be allowed to see the report, Trump said: I dont mind. He said he had no idea when it would be released.

As he has before, Trump questioned the legitimacy of Muellers investigation.

I had the greatest electoral victory - one of them - in the history of our country, tremendous success, tens of millions of voters and now somebodys going to write a report who never got a vote, he said.

Mueller was appointed to handle the Russia investigation in May 2017 after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who had been overseeing the effort. Mueller has previously held several senior positions in the Justice Department, including FBI Director.(New throughout after hit from German data)

By Medha Singh

March 22 (Reuters) - European stock markets fell back on Friday after downbeat manufacturing data from Germany reignited fears of a recession in the region's biggest economy, erasing early gains on relief at the extension of Britain's Brexit deadline.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index slipped for a third day, down 0.6 percent led by losses of almost 1 percent in Milan and Paris while Frankfurt and London indexes lost just over 0.5 percent.

The flash PMI survey of purchasing managers showed German manufacturing contracted further in March, registering its lowest reading since June 2013 and compounding fears that unresolved trade disputes are exacerbating a slowdown. The euro zone-wide flash PMI showed businesses also performed much worse than expected this month, while French business activity slowed unexpectedly. Industrial goods and services stocks and automobiles and parts makers , all fell about 1 percent after the data and Siemens AG and Airbus SE were among the biggest weights on the STOXX 600.

"With numerous headwinds facing the manufacturing sector in Germany  including a slowdown in the automotive sector, Brexit, U.S.-China trade and a global economic slowdown  there's little to be optimistic about," said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at Oanda in London.

Most European bourses had opened on a stronger footing, relieved at the European Union's agreement to at least a two-week reprieve that precludes Britain crashing out of the bloc without a deal next week.

The communique from Thursday's meeting of EU leaders kept the door open to a longer extension if Prime Minister Theresa May, as expected, fails at the third attempt to gain parliament's approval for her negotiated exit deal. Shares in Deutsche Bank , up earlier this week on the prospect of a merger with Commerzbank , initially rose more than 2 percent after disclosures showed its board members received their first bonuses in four years. The bank's stock, however, was last down 0.3 percent as investors worried over banks exposure to defaults in another European downturn. The euro zone banking index after industrials was the heaviest weight on indexes, with Italian lenders among the hardest hit.

STILL PREPPING

Retail shares squeezed out gains of 0.4 percent led by Tesco , while tech stocks fell back, after surging the previous day following surprisingly upbeat results from U.S. chipmaker Micron.

Adidas AG and Puma SE both gained after a disappointing quarterly report from rival Nike Inc which hinted at a slowing of the U.S. firm's momentum in its home market.

Despite the relief from the summit overnight, there were more signs of firms making preparations for a no-deal Brexit, which could well have a depressive effect on Europe's major economies.

Goldman Sachs analysts reduced the likelihood of May's deal passing to just 50 percent, while raising the chances of "no-deal" to 15 percent. The bank continues to put the chances of no Brexit at all at 35 percent. The odds of a no-deal exit had fallen to just 5 percent on online betting market Betfair.

Reporting by Medha Singh and Patrick Graham; Editing by Hugh Lawson)* European stocks hit session lows after poor U.S. PMI

* German flash manufacturing PMI shows lowest reading in 6-1/5 yrs

* Banks, auto stocks post steep falls (Updates to include U.S. PMI data, closing prices) By Susan Mathew and Medha Singh March 22 (Reuters) - European stock markets deepened losses on Friday, closing near session lows, as fears of a slowdown in global growth after weak manufacturing data from across Europe were exacerbated by dismal data from the United States. After downbeat manufacturing activity from Germany reignited fears of a recession in the region's biggest economy, the inversion of the U.S. yield curve after similar U.S. data stoked fears that the world's largest economy may also be slipping into recession. The pan-European STOXX 600 index , which had opened higher on relief at the extension of Britain's Brexit deadline, slipped for a third day to close down 1.2 percent to take weekly losses to 1.3 percent - its steepest this year. The London and Paris bourses sank more than 2 percent, while Frankfurt and Madrid fared only slightly better with roughly 1.5 percent declines. The euro zone-wide flash PMI also showed businesses performed much worse than expected this month, while French business activity slowed unexpectedly. The classic gauge of fear  known as implied volatility, which tracks demand for options in European stocks  hit more than 9-week highs and posted its biggest weekly rise in a year, the first concrete sign of activity in a while. Almost all sectors within the STOXX 600 were in the red with banks , auto and chemicals sectors down more than two percent each, along with industrial goods and services stocks . The bank sector posted its biggest daily drop sine early February. Italian lenders Unicredit , Banco BPM , and UBI led losses among banks after Credit Suisse said the market is underestimating Italian banks' net interest income challenges. Nestle , the world biggest food group, was the biggest drag on the benchmark, down 1.7 percent, followed by more than 2 percent dips in HSBC Holdings and oil and gas majors Total BP PLC . "With numerous headwinds facing the manufacturing sector in Germany  including a slowdown in the automotive sector, Brexit, U.S.-China trade and a global economic slowdown  there's little to be optimistic about," said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at Oanda in London. Most European bourses had opened on a stronger footing, relieved at the European Union's agreement to at least a two-week reprieve that precludes Britain crashing out of the bloc without a deal next week. Despite the relief from the summit overnight, there were more signs of firms making preparations for a no-deal Brexit, as British Prime Minister Theresa May now faces task of persuading a deeply divided parliament to back her Brexit deal. A no-deal exit could well have a depressive effect on Europe's major economies. Goldman Sachs analysts reduced the likelihood of May's deal passing to just 50 percent, while raising the chances of "no-deal" to 15 percent. The bank continues to put the chances of no Brexit at all at 35 percent. The odds of a no-deal exit had fallen to just 5 percent on online betting market Betfair. (Reporting by Medha Singh, Patrick Graham and Susan Mathew; Editing by Toby Chopra)

outside U.S. +91 80 6749 1130; Twitter: ; Reuters Messaging: medha.singh.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))* FTSE 100 down 2 pct* FTSE 250 down 1.8 pct* Sterling rise hits international companies* Weak data from Europe, U.S. also weighs* Pearson gains on upgrade, bullish comments from JPM* All sectors on both UK indexes end in the red (Adds news item, analyst comment, updates to closing prices) By Muvija M and Yadarisa Shabong March 22 (Reuters) - London's FTSE 100 retreated from multi-month highs to endure its worst day so far this year as a surge in the pound weakened exporter stocks and poor manufacturing data from the euro zone and the United States pulled the index deeper into the red. The FTSE 100 shed almost 150 points as it sank 2 percent and the more domestically-exposed FTSE 250 slipped 1.8 percent or almost 350 points. Both indexes suffered their worst day since December. Sterling rallied after the euro weakened and as European Union leaders gave Prime Minister Theresa May two more weeks, until April 12, to decide how to leave the European Union. "It's clear the EU for now doesn't want to be seen to force Britain out, but its patience won't last forever," Markets.com analyst Neil Wilson said. Weighing on the main index were drug maker AstraZeneca , which hit a high in the last session on the pound's weakness, British American Tobacco and Diageo , the world's largest spirits company. "The pound may want to enjoy its gains while it still can  it is in for another go around on the Brexit rollercoaster next week," said Spreadex analyst Connor Campbell. Poor manufacturing data from Europe and the United States implicated trade tensions for hurting factory output and once again fanned fears of an economic slowdown. CMC Markets analyst Michael Hewson said there would probably be a lot more concern about a global manufacturing recession following the downbeat German data, which he called unexpected.

The worry led to losses across the board on FTSE 100 with financials falling to their lowest since Jan. 14. Oil majors Shell and BP also dragged as crude prices slipped, capping off a forgettable day for the main bourse. Housebuilders , which tend to be most exposed to any economic hit, handed back early gains to be down 1.4 percent.

Pearson , however, rose 1.7 percent after JP Morgan upgraded its rating and said the education publisher's model adjustment from print to digital would see long-term growth Among midcaps, Aggreko , the world's largest temporary power provider, rose 3.5 percent as brokerage Stifel upgraded the stock. Struggling department store group Debenhams plummeted over 45 percent after saying some restructuring options it was considering would result in no equity value for its shareholders. <^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Uk & European markets lag Wall St. since Brexit referendum ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^> (Reporting by Muvija M and Yadarisa Shabong, additional reporting by Shashwat Awasthi in Bengaluru; editing by Gareth Jones)

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..................... ))Politik reported:

The Government has effectively rejected a radical proposal from the Productivity Commission which could have opened up the Budget process to non-governmental organisations.

The previous National Government in 2017 asked the Commission to examine productivity in the state sector.

Predictably the Commission produced a report which drew heavily on private sector market-driven ways of improving performance.

It particularly suggested that the Minister of Finance should set aside money in the Budget dedicated to high impact initiative proposals that had a high probability of making a significant impact on social wellbeing.

These would need to be evidenced through robust business cases, and returns on investment and then the Government would progressively increase the share of the budget allowance devoted to that portion.

The Minister of Finance should restrict access to the high-impact initiative portion of future budget operating allowances to those departments that can credibly demonstrate productivity gains from existing baselines, the report said.

But even more controversially it proposed that the process be opened up beyond the state sector.

The Minister of Finance should allow non-government organisations to make budget bids directly to the Treasury for the high- impact initiative portion of the operating allowance, the report said.

In other words, NGOs would be able to bid for Budget funding on the same basis as a Government Department like Social Development or Education.The bedroom Walker was found in was badly burnt, and there was a suspicious burn pattern on the floor and walls inside the residence, according to the affidavit. Walker's body and the house smelled similar to gasoline, and investigators found a pattern consistent with an ignitable liquid trail from the entry door area to where the victim was found by fire crews, according to court records.After almost two weeks of turmoil, the Porter County Election Board, with a new president at the helm, breezed through a routine meeting that included a report from the clerk on preparations for the upcoming municipal primaries and an overview of suggestions from the Indiana Secretary of States Office, many of which are already in place.Often in these situations we hear the phrase thoughts and prayers. Its a phrase that should be honored, not mocked and put aside. But too often its used as a way to do nothing and move on, Estwani said. When we say that, we must think, pray for the victims. We must remember them. If your prayer is not met with action then it is useless.As published in my From the Farm cookbooks throughout the years, the campus bakers competing in this annual competition will often select recipes connected to a theme or story. The last time I judged cupcakes for this Purdue event was in 2014, when the crowned winner was Leona Thurn, who was a freshman studying computer science and also originally from the Philippines. Her winning recipe included one of her country's crop claim-to-fames, yams, as the key ingredient for her Purple Yam Cupcakes or "Ube" Cupcakes. (The term "ube" is the word for purple yam in the language of the Philippines).



South Korea said Thursday it will provide Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi with a total of $500,000 worth of humanitarian assistance after they suffered huge damage from a cyclone.







The southern African countries were recently hit hard by Cyclone Idai, which has killed hundreds of people and left many others missing or displaced.







"The government plans to offer $300,000 to Mozambique as well as $100,000 each to Zimbabwe and Malawi in consideration of the scale of the damage and the international community's request for support," the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.







"The humanitarian aid at this time is expected to contribute to the stabilization of the people in the three nations and recovery from the damage."







South Korea, as a middle-power country, will continue to provide such assistance, the ministry said. (Yonhap)





By Oh Young-jin



"Until now, the absence of ROK diplomatic missions in the Republic of Latvia, the Republic of Lithuania and the Republic of Estonia in the Balkan region has caused difficulties in providing consular assistance and services"



You may laugh at this thinking it is a prank, but it is actually the work of professionals  the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.



The extract was part of its press release March 19 until the Latvian Embassy in Seoul protested that its country belonged to the Baltic region, not Balkan, and the ministry changed it.



A foreign diplomat told The Korea Times, "The Latvian ambassador was really mad."



"The ministry needs geography lessons."





President Moon Jae-in talks with former U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at Cheong Wa Dae, Thursday. Yonhap



By Kim Yoo-chul



Former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, also chief of a newly established national committee to fight fine dust, said Thursday South Korea will "soon begin" discussions with China for "comprehensive measures" aimed at addressing the worsening air quality.



"South Korea designated the worsening air pollution as a national disaster. Record levels of fine dust have blanketed most of the country. Yes, this is a national disaster. We have to address it by developing relevant talks with countries in Northeast Asia including China," Ban said in a press conference at Cheong Wa Dae.



President Moon Jae-in thanked the former U.N. chief for his decision to accept an offer to lead the committee upon his visit to the presidential office. The meeting lasted for 40 minutes from 2 p.m., Thursday, according to presidential spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom.





Angola, IN (46703)

Today

Mostly clear and windy. Low 28F. WSW winds at 20 to 30 mph, decreasing to 5 to 10 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph..

Tonight

Mostly clear and windy. Low 28F. WSW winds at 20 to 30 mph, decreasing to 5 to 10 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  House Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo flatly denied accusations she was behind alleged realignments in the budget ratified by Congress.

Speaking to reporters at an event of the Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce on Friday, Arroyo said she did not have any involvement in the proposed 2019 spending bill.

"They (Reps. Rolando Andaya, Edcel Lagman and Ronaldo Zamora) were the ones who worked on the budget, not me. And they have been setting the record straight," she said.

Andaya, Lagman and Zamora form the three-man House team tasked to negotiate with Senators Loren Legarda, Panfilo "Ping" Lacson and Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan on the delayed budget. Lawmakers are deadlocked on the budget bill which has been kept from being enacted over concerns on the legality of the House's itemizations of lump sums in the spending bill after its ratification.

Lawmakers are deadlocked on the budget bill which has been kept from being enacted over concerns on the legality of the House's itemizations of lump sums in the spending bill after its ratification.

Arroyo said she has instructed the House contingent to end the impasse as soon as possible.

"I did not micromanage the putting together of the budget. I don't wanna micromanage also their negotiations," she said.

Lacson has accused Arroyo of giving her allies' congressional districts in the House 25 million each from the Health Facilities Enhancement Program, while other congressmen only received P8 million. This supposedly happened after the ratification of the budget bill.

Arroyo has denied this through Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo.

Senators have also pointed out that the House has shaved off 96 billion from funds of the Public Works department and realigned these to their respective congressional districts.

Congressmen have also accused senators of realigning billions of funds from several government agencies.

Andaya, Lagman and Zamora are expected to meet with Legarda, Lacson and Honasan on Monday to break the budget deadlock.

Senate President Vicente "Tito" Sotto III said all the House needs to agree to is to remove the realignments they made after the ratification of the budget and stick to what was approved in the bicameral conference committee.

But if the House would remain stubborn, Sotto said the Senate will just wait for a new House leadership to takeover in the next Congress to push for the enactment of the budget bill.

The 2019 budget has been delayed for three months, leaving some infrastructure projects underfunded. Meanwhile, economic managers expect slower economic growth due to the budget's delayed enactment.The reason that Trump makes meaningless remarks is so we get used to it. Every now and then, he actually tries to make one of his remarks work and no one seems to care anymore. He just wears us out with Twitter and no one takes him serious anymore.Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Mainly clear. Low 28F. WSW winds at 15 to 25 mph, decreasing to 5 to 10 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear. Low 28F. WSW winds at 15 to 25 mph, decreasing to 5 to 10 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph.My mom posted a video of me on Facebook asking for donations and people wanted to give money, Max Hardford said. It is not fair that other kids have to lose their hair and by us shaving our heads we can make them feel better.You are here: Arts

Hindus celebrated Holi, the festival of colors, across India with religious fervor and gaiety on Thursday.



Jubilant people gathered outside their houses shouting and laughing. The participants holding colored powder in plates, applied them on each other to express love and affection.

"The festival of colors signifies the victory of good over evil and the arrival of spring," Suman Jothshi, a Holi reveller said. "The festival is a harbinger of joy in our lives."

The Hindu celebration of colors is India's merriest festival. It is marked by throwing colored paint on each other.

Young and old including women and children were seen splashing and smearing colored powder on each other, besides exchanging pleasantries.

Joyful teenagers and youth drenched in water colors walked along roads and streets throwing colors and hitting each other with color-filled balloons, besides aiming at passers-by.

"Early in the morning my sister and brother-in-law came to our house. They had brought colors along," said Ashutosh, a Green Park resident. "No sooner they entered the house they smeared colors on us to express their love."

According to Ashutosh, the festival brings people close to each other and helps them to cheer up.

"In this otherwise busy world this festival at least brings some respite and allows people to forget worries," he said.

Holi is an ancient Indian festival, which marks the end of winter and the onset of spring.

Reports pouring in from many states said at many places people gathered in parks and open spaces to celebrate the festival. Hued in colors, participants were seen dancing to the beats of drums and songs of famous Bollywood music.

Many people were seen taking selfies with their mobile phones and freezing the colorful moments during the celebrations.

The major events took place in Mathura city, northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the birth place of Hindu god Krishna.

Celebrations start 40 days ahead of main Holi festival in the city.

Holi, a public holiday in most Indian states, is being celebrated by Hindus every year in India.

However, many Indian politicians this year decided not to celebrate Holi as a mark of respect to the paramilitary troopers killed in suicide bombing on their convoy in Pulwama district of Indian-controlled Kashmir.

The attack left at least 40 paramilitary troopers belonging to the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) dead.

The CRPF announced that it would not hold any official event to mark Holi in solidarity with the bereaved families of the paramilitary troopers.

Originally known as Holika, historians say the festival was introduced in India by Aryans.

The festival is mostly popular with the young and grown-up children, who begin the colorful celebrations several days ahead of the main festival. On the eve of Holi, elderly people also join in.

For revellers anyone and everyone is a fair game in playing Holi.

"During celebrating Holi whosoever comes by is applied color," Ashutosh said.

The social networking websites on internet were abuzz with the Holi greetings and colorful pictures.

To coincide with Holi, Google released a new doodle on its homepage to celebrate the ancient Indian festival. The doodle features Google logo showcasing graphics of men and women enjoying splashing colored powder.

People also wished each other by sending Holi messages and animated graphics interchange format (GIFs) on their mobile phones.The natural marble coffee table top is a fantastic product.In addition, we can use rich materials to produce it too. Some times, different area with different culture.Of course, they like various styles product too. What color of product is special popular? Is this product can be used for outdoor?

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SpecificationsChinese Premier Li Keqiang on Thursday stressed the implementation of larger-scale tax cuts to further boost the vitality of market entities.

Li, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, made the remarks at a symposium held during his inspection at the Ministry of Finance and the State Taxation Administration.

Vice Premier Han Zheng, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, attended the symposium.

China's tax and fee cuts will bring benefits to the country both in the short and long term, as it not only reduces corporate burden and helps stabilize employment but also optimizes economic and income distribution structure and promotes sustainable fiscal spending, Li said.

China should accelerate the implementation of tax cut measures to further unleash the vitality of companies, which will help the economy keep running within a reasonable range and promote high-quality development, Li said.

Li said that this round of tax cuts must ensure that the tax burden on major industries such as the manufacturing sector is decreased significantly and lowered to various extents in some industries.

"All industries will see their taxes go down, not up," Li said.

The government will work out targeted solutions to solve potential tax burden rise as a result of a decrease in input tax deductions in some industries, Li added.

Li said the government must live on a tight budget to support the tax cuts.

Except for those projects that must be done and key programs, the central fiscal authority will cut its expenditures by 10 percent, Li said.

Local governments should also resolutely cut general expenditures and improve the efficiency of existing resources, Li said.

The central government should increase the transfer payments to local governments, especially the fiscal authorities in the central and western regions.

"The tax cuts will be effective only when the market entities enjoy the concrete benefits," Li said.

Li said that all regions and government departments should strengthen coordination to tackle the issues reported by companies and the people in a timely manner.Birthrates across China saw a general decline last year, with more developed regions generally recording lower birthrates, according to population statistics released by local authorities.

Beijing's birthrate last year was 8.24 per 1,000, compared with 9.06 in 2017, the Beijing Bureau of Statistics said on Wednesday.

Shanghai's birthrate in 2018 was 7.2 per 1,000, compared with 8.1 a year prior, according to the municipality's statistics bureau.

Liaoning province's birthrate last year was 6.39 per 1,000, down from 6.49 in 2017, according to the provincial statistics bureau.

Compared with developed regions such as Beijing and Shanghai, where birthrates are among the lowest in the nation, less-developed western regions recorded higher birthrates. For example, Qinghai province's birthrate last year stood at 14.31 per 1,000, down from 14.42 in 2017, the provincial statistics bureau said.

As a whole, births on the Chinese mainland saw further declines last year to 15.23 million, a decrease of 2 million compared with 2017, with a birthrate of 10.94 per 1,000, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Last year was the second consecutive year the birthrate declined since the universal second-child policy was adopted in 2016a move meant to counter problems such as population aging and a dwindling work force.

The decline in births has prompted concerns among some population experts that a general decrease in the total population may come earlier than expected.

Huang Kuangshi, a population researcher at the China Population and Development Research Center, said disparities in birthrates between different regions may be linked with migration.

"In big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, a large proportion of the total population has migrated from other places, and includes many women who are unmarried or will marry at a more advanced age," the researcher said.

"This causes lower overall birthrates," he said.

In Northeast China, lower birthrates result from the area having a net outward migration, resulting in loss of a number of young women of childbearing age, Huang said.

Yuan Xin, a professor of population studies at Nankai University, said that with greater economic and social development, people's minds are evolving on traditional concepts of marriage and parenthood.

"Young people's ideas of family and giving birth are changing, and traditional values such as sustaining family lineages through giving birth have been weakening," he said.

In more developed areas such as Beijing and Shanghai in particular, an increasing number of people are choosing to delay marriage and childbirth or to remain single and childless, which resulted in a drop of overall births over the past few years, he said.

In big cities, couples are less willing to give birth considering the relatively higher costs of raising children, including higher housing prices and fierce competition for quality education, Yuan said.

Throughout China and the whole world, it is generally the trend that people in more developed areas tend to have fewer children, he said.

In addition to worries about the financial burdens of raising children, difficulty in finding day care for offspring when the parents are at work is also a major reason why couples are reluctant to have children, according to a survey by the National Health Commission.

The commission will work with other departments to research and improve policies involving taxation, employment, social security and housing to support the implementation of the universal second-child policy, according to the commission.Free admission to top tourist venues, hotel rooms at half price, and cheaper flights have made the Tibet autonomous region a hot destination for tourists this winter, which is traditionally a quiet tourist season.

The region received 2.46 million visits from tourists from Nov 1 to March 15, an increase of 84.2 percent year-on-year, the region's Tourism Development Bureau said in a statement on Wednesday.

This has been the second winter that the regional government promoted its "travel to Tibet in winter" campaign to attract tourists. Between Nov 1 and March 15, people got free admission to top tourist sites, including Potala Palacea UNESCO World Heritage Sitewhere admission during other periods will set visitors back 200 yuan ($29.70), and advance reservations are required during peak season. The winter campaign also requires all hotels in the region to offer rooms at half price, including five star hotels such as the Shangri-La in the regional capital of Lhasa.

The measures showed immediate results when they were introduced from February to April in 2018, said Go Khok, mayor of Lhasa. Compared with the 2016-17 winter season, the number of visits doubled from November 2017 to April 2018.

"Traditionally, tourism in Tibet only booms between May and October and then becomes very quiet in the winter, which has resulted in low rates of return on investments in tourist infrastructure," said the mayor.

This winter, the average occupancy rate of hotels in Lhasa reached 60 percent, and soared to 90 percent in some hotels. In the past, many hotels chose to send their staff to branches outside Tibet to cut costs in winter, but this season was quite different, he added.

About 130,000 people in the city make their living from tourism, and some 70 percent are local farmers and herdsmen. So the boost in tourism will significantly increase their incomes, Go Khok said.

Meanwhile, Tibet has stepped up efforts in environmental protection to cope with the increasing number of tourists, he said.

"The city's 13 districts and counties will be equipped with wastewater treatment plants by June 1. We must plan environmental protection measures ahead of tourist development," he said.

Siga, manager of Pingcuo Kangsang Hotel in Lhasa, had a very busy winter. The hotel, which offers rooms with a view of Potala Palace, was fully booked during the Spring Festival holiday in February.

What surprised her even more was that reservations kept coming in after the holiday, she said.

"Many small businesses such as restaurants normally decide to close down for the winter because business has typically slowed to a crawl. This year, they chose to stay open," said Siga, who was born in the city.

Some hotel quests even came to Tibet for weekend getaways because cheap flights from Chengdu, Sichuan province to Lhasa were offered over the winter, she said.

Although the region's climate in the winter months is relatively mild, there is a large temperature difference between day and night.

Also, people are more likely to suffer from altitude sickness in the winter when they travel to Tibet, which is located on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and has an average altitude of more than 4,000 meters, because there are fewer leafy trees pumping out oxygen in the cold months.

To attract tourists in the winter, many hotels including Pingcuo Kangsang have installed floor-heating systems in rooms. What's more, many hotel rooms are equipped with oxygen-generating machines to help people ease symptoms.Death toll has risen to 47 and 90 others were seriously injured after an explosion ripped through an industrial park Thursday afternoon in Yancheng, east China's Jiangsu Province, the rescue headquarters said Friday.

Firefighters put out the blaze at the scene of the accident in Yancheng, Jiangsu province, March 21. [Photo/VCG]

A total of 640 people are receiving medical treatment in hospitals. Among them, 32 are still in critical conditions and 58 others sustain severe injuries, according to the rescue headquarters.

The explosion happened at about 2:48 p.m. Thursday, following a fire that broke out in a factory located in a chemical industrial park.

Workers were trapped after buildings were knocked down by the shockwave, which also shattered windows of nearby residential houses. Witnesses said many workers were seen running out of the factory covered in blood after the blast.

The Ministry of Emergency Management has dispatched a team of experts to the site and urged all-out efforts in the rescue.

The National Health Commission said Friday it has dispatched three batches of medical experts on burns, neurosurgery, psychological intervention, intoxication, and public hygiene to help with rescue and relief work.

Health authorities in Jiangsu have also mobilized medical staff around the province to help with the treatment and transfer of the injured.Daya Thussu, the Disney Chair in Global Media at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. [Photo courtesy of Daya Thussu]

Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, visited China 95 years ago. During the Indian poet's visit, he was mesmerized by the premiere of his one-act play-"Chitra"-starring Chinese poet Xu Zhimo and architect Lin Huiyin.

Despite the profound implications of Buddhism, which was introduced to China from India several centuries ago, exchanges between the two neighboring countries had been minimal. However, Tagore's path-breaking visit revived China-India relations. The Indian poet was impressed by China's charismatic culture and in 1937 opened Cheena Bhavana at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India.

"This is the first modern institution in India dedicated to the study of Chinese language, philosophies, literature and history," said Daya Thussu, the Disney Chair in Global Media at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

Having visited China several times since 2004, Daya Thussu, professor of International Communication and Co-Director of the India Media Center at the University of Westminster in London, expects China and India to form closer ties with increasingly frequent exchanges and deepened mutual understandings between people in the digital age.

He recalled several years ago, when visiting Xi'an, the capital of China's northwestern Shaanxi province, he visited the Dayan Pagoda twice. Dayan Pagoda is a historic site first built to commemorate Buddhist Xuanzang's return from a pilgrimaging odyssey to India, where he brought back a considerable amount of Buddhist scriptures, sculptures, and paintings during the 7th Century. During Thussu's second visit, he was happy to meet some young Indians at the Pagoda.

Xuanzang's lifetime endeavor was to translate Buddhist texts into Chinese. Thussu believes people should bow their heads in respect to the greatest scholar who initiated the civilized dialogue between the two major ancient civilizations in the world.

"This is a huge connection between India and China. This is neither about war, nor conflicts. This is about ideas. It is an intellectual exchange. It is a civilizational exchange," Thussu added.

The constellation of wisdom in the past is still glittering. As the two emerging countries in the developing world, China and India have made headways in response to the world's newest round of technological innovations.

"When the internet was first introduced as a global phenomenon in the middle of the 1990s, more than 40 percent of people who were using the internet were Americans," Thussu said, "today that figure is less than 10 percent. Therefore, the majority who are using the internet now are Asians, with the largest number from China followed by the second largest number from India, because they have huge populations."

Thussu is especially impressed by China's essential role in modern technologies, represented by globally recognized brands, including, Tik Tok, Alibaba, and Tencent. Moreover, he is deeply concerned with China's efforts to bring the 5th Generation Wireless System (5G) into reality.

"5G is absolutely crucial," Thussu said, "because it is not just about phones. It is about the 'Internet of Things.' Internet of Things means more than what we have had in today's internet, and China is ahead of the curve."

Despite being a professor in international communication, Thussu is cautious about computers' replacing manual jobs. This is exemplified by the adoption of automatized journalism as stories are being finished by tapping in several data and keywords. In addition to the Associated Press and many other news agencies, which adopted automatic news reporting system, Xinhua is also running a virtual reality studio, and CGTN has employed anchors who are not human beings.

"Journalism is not about information or data. It is about feelings, sentiments, and emotionshumans are not machines. So if you use machines to analyze social realities, it can be a problem," Thussu said.

When talking about the recent New Zealand massacre, the professor said he is concerned with the downside of people's obsession with social media, particularly those who use the virtual reality technologies, which may misguide people to be emotionless and apathetic. Therefore, he called it a process of de-humanization and warned that it would be dangerous if people looked at a massacre like a game.

Despite all the negatives mentioned above, he is hopeful, with the advancement of society, that visualized media will facilitate cross-border communication. "There is a huge gap to be tappedand the communication makes the world a better place," he said.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  Former government officials who filed a complaint against Chinese President Xi Jinping at the International Criminal Court (ICC) are hoping for his arrest and the possible financial reparation for Filipino fishermen whose livelihood were affected in the South China Sea dispute.

"If enough credible witnesses are produced, we could be reaching a point of having a formal investigation which could lead to a warrant of arrest," former Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario said in a press briefing Friday.

He was joined by fellow complainant, former Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, who stressed that the ICC can prosecute China, a non-state party because the "crime (was) committed within the territory" of a state party - the Philippines.

Del Rosario and Morales were signatories in the 17-page complaint - which the ICC calls communication - that was filed on March 15, two days before the Philippines' withdrawal from the international tribunal took effect.

Morales said the ICC had acknowledged receipt of the communication. It could next launch a preliminary examination, similar to what is being conducted now on alleged extrajudicial killings in President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs. The initial review would determine if the ICC could launch a full-blown investigation, which could later progress to a trial and conviction.

Del Rosario said Xi "is the one that directly caused significant problems" in the South China Sea, including the building and militarization of artificial islands, damage to marine environment, and harassment of Filipino fishermen.

"We demand accountability from those who destroy marine areas," Morales said.

Fishermen's plight

Aside from Xi's arrest, Morales said "among other things that we expect to result from this (filing) would be reparation."

"That's not bad if it will be used to improve the lives of the fishermen. We are looking at hopefully bringing the issue to that point where there can be some negotiations on how the lives of our people can be improved," del Rosario said.

Their communication cited written testimonies from fishermen who said they lost their livelihood as China took over Scarborough Shoal in 2012. They recalled the controversial standoff which prompted Manila to file a case against China at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

In July 2016, the international tribunal invalidated China's sweeping claims to the South China Sea. It also and recognized the Philippines' sovereign rights in areas within its 200-nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone where China has built artificial islands, prohibited Filipino fishermen from fishing and interfered in petroleum exploration.

The tribunal did not rule on which country has sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal - located around 120 nautical miles off Zambales - but said China violated its duty to respect traditional fishing rights of Filipino fishermen there. China has refused to recognize the landmark ruling.

Jowe Legaspi, one of the fishermen whose affidavits were used in the communication, fears fishermen will all the more be harassed by Chinese vessels because of the legal challenge at the ICC.

"Ang concern ko lang baka di kaya pag-initan na naman yung mga mangingisda," Legaspi told CNN Philippines in a phone interview. But he said he is not losing hope that fishermen will one day enjoy the freedom to explore the country's marine resources without any fear or threat from anyone.

David and Goliath

"Are you reminded of the case of David and Goliath?" Morales asked as she stressed being unfazed in fighting a "powerful" Xi. "That he is powerful does not deter anyone to file a case against him," she added.

She revealed that the decision to file a complaint against Xi was reached after Del Rosario and his friends, whom they did not name, talked about the fishermen's plight over breakfast.

"If it took that long for the group to file the case it was because given the friendliness of the Philippines to China, we expected reciprocity from the point of view of China but it seems there was no reciprocity that was shown," Morales said.

The Duterte government has been criticized for pursuing friendlier ties with China amid the long-standing maritime row in the South China Sea. Duterte has also refused to bring up the arbitral ruling with China, although he promised to do so within his term. Del Rosario said the "shelving" of the country's win in The Hague also contributed to their decision to take the issue to the ICC.

"There used to be a sense that would be expressed that international law only applies to small countries and very early on we took the opposite view," Del Rosario said. "We have that we're very strong in terms of international law being applicable to all countries no matter what size and I think we proved our point when we won the arbitral tribunal outcome."

"We hope to win our point again in this ICC effort," he added.

A futile exercise?

In a statement Saturday, however, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo reiterated the challenges that the complaint may face.

He said while Morales and del Rosario may have the right to file the complaint at the ICC, but whether it would prosper was another matter.

Aside from the country not being a member of the ICC, he said, the court has no jurisdiction over China.

"The filing of the complaint may be a futile exercise," said Panelo.

Panelo also said neither Morales nor del Rosario has the right to file a complaint on behalf of the country, adding that even if they were so authorized, the Philippines was never under ICC jurisdiction as the Rome Statute never took effect  meaning the country was not a State Party to the ICC.

The Rome Statute does not also include environmental damage as a crime, he added.

"The critics and detractors will have a field day criticising the President in the event the case is dismissed by the ICC for lack of jurisdiction. They can claim that it was a mistake for the Philippine government to withdraw its membership from the Rome Statute as the ICC can no longer serve as a venue to prosecute President Xi for an alleged commission of crime against humanity. We reiterate, however, that the Philippines under the Duterte Administration is engaged in a diplomatic negotiation, through a bilateral consultation mechanism (BCM), over the West Philippine Sea issue," Panelo said.

CNN Philippines' Anjo Alimario contributed to this report."Road maintenance directly concerns traffic safety, so we must be meticulous in our work", said Lodro, a road maintenance worker in Qamdo, a city in the eastern part of China's Tibet Autonomous Region.



Lodro, who turns 50 this year, started his current job in 1985. He is now responsible for 43.025 kilometers of road from Qamdo Bamda Airport to Bamda Transport Station, which is part of the China National Highway 214.

He said that the road, which stands at an altitude of over 4,000 meters, was built by many soldiers, civilians and technicians more than 60 years ago. Due to the high altitude and harsh environment, the builders, he said, endured extremely tough conditions and faced many technical challenges during construction.

As a "second generation" road maintenance worker, Lodro believes that his working conditions have improved significantly compared with that of his parents', especially after the road was paved with asphalt and concrete in 2004.

"When I was a child, my parents often took me to their workplace, which was very rundown. And since the roads were generally in a dreadful state, we had to walk for nearly three hours from our home just to get there," he said in an interview on Wednesday.

"Now we can enjoy a shuttle bus service," Lodro continued. "and our workplace is well-equipped with good facilities, including a canteen, a gym and a reading room."

He said that shovels, pickaxes and handcarts were the only working tools available to them in the past, whereas now workers have patrol vehicles and heavy machinery designed specifically for road maintenance.

"These machines help us remove the road blocks caused by natural disasters such as landslides and blizzards, it helps conserve manpower and greatly increases our work efficiency," Lodro said.

Five years away from retirement, Lodro said he hopes his 25-year-old elder son, who is also working as a road maintenance worker in Ngari prefecture, can do a good job. He hopes that his son will in turn hand over the baton to his children in the future.

"We will continue the spirit demonstrated by our predecessors when building the Sichuan-Tibet and Qinghai-Tibet highways, and contribute more to the development of Tibet's transport networks," he said.China on Friday urged the United States to stop arms sales to Taiwan and its military links with the island.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang made the remarks in response to reports that the U.S. government had approved a request by Taiwan to buy more than 60 F-16 fighter jets.

Geng said China's resolute opposition to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan is consistent and firm, and the country has lodged solemn representations with the United States over the issue.

The U.S. side should fully recognize the high sensitivity and severe harm of relevant issue, abide by the one-China principle and the three Sino-U.S. joint communiques, especially the Aug. 17 Communique, according to Geng.

He urged the U.S. side to stop arms sales and military contact with Taiwan, and prudently handle Taiwan-related issues to avoid severely damaging the Sino-U.S. cooperation in important spheres as well as the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait.London [UK], Mar 22 (ANI): The United Kingdom has put 3,500 troops on standby to "aid contingency plans" in the face of a probable no-deal Brexit, according to a spokesman for the British Ministry of Defence.The spokesman told CNN that the contingency plans are part of Operation Redfold - the British military's crisis management operation in the scenario of a no-deal Brexit.Apart from this, the UK's military bunker under the Ministry of Defence has become "operational" on Monday. Known as Pindar, the bunker is a defence crisis-management centre which is used to plan for operations deemed significant, like the 2012 London Olympics."We are always willing to support wider government planning for any scenario, and we have committed to holding 3,500 troops at readiness to aid contingency plans. We will consider any requests from other government departments if they feel defence capability could contribute to their no-deal planning," a Ministry of Defence spokesman told CNN.European Union leaders are currently holding intense discussions in Brussels regarding the extension to Brexit which has been sought by the United Kingdom. Speculations are rife that extension may be granted till May. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)The Boracay Islands, a world-class tourist spot famous for its clear beaches and surrounding beauty will be closed for 6 months starting April 26, Thursday. No more foreign or local tourists will be allowed to enter this beauty harbouring a lot of marine life. The island has been closed for environmental rehabilitation. The Department of Tourism (DOT) in an advisory issued said, "The Boracay closure will begin on April 26, 2018 as it undergoes environmental rehabilitation for the next six months. We urge the public to be guided accordingly as we restore the island to its former glory."

The DOT also warned that "identified tourists will be stopped at the jetty port" if they would attempt to enter the island. Only the residents, workers and resort owners with proper identification cards and terminal passes will have the access to these islands. And it will be only the residents who can swim in designated beach. The visitors to the residents will also not get an entry into the island unless "emergency situations with the clearance security of the (government) security committee," the DOT said.

There order says that there should be no floating structures allowed up to 3 kms from the shoreline of the beach. The Bureau of Immigration will thoroughly check the foreign residents and re-validate them. The Boracay Islands has close to 2 million tourists pouring in to enjoy the beautiful beaches with white sand and crystal clear waters.

The government is now making efforts to clean up and rehabilitate the island under the order of the President Rodrigo Duterte. Malay Mayor Ciceron Calawaing and Caticlan port administrator Never Maquirang are implementing the said order. A popular hub for tourism, some business owners and resort owners had opposed the shut down of the island but care has been taken to deal with the opposition. Armed security personnel have been sent to provide "maximum" security to the island. Another 600 policemen will be posted to ensure peace and order on the islands, informed the police.

Not just this, the police have had practice of the likely disturbances which could be faced during the clean up period. Police conducted exercises simulating clashes with protesters, terrorist attacks and even hostage incident. The military and the Coast Guard will also help the police maintain order.

"We (Coast Guard) will extend whatever help we can give...We will help in the patrol and enforcement of regulations.....We will monitor the development there," Capt. Armand Balilo, Coast Guard spokesman said. The army troops from Cebu nearby in the central Philippines have also been tapped to help ensure security on the island.

This shut-down will likely affect the lives of of almost 47,000 residents on the island. The President had issued the order for temporary closure on April 4 and the rehabilitation will take about 6 months starting from April 26. The shut down will also affect the economy of Philippine as tourism will hit the low. It is estimated to affect about 1.96 billion pesos (roughly 34.5 million U.S. dollars), according to Economic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia. Tourists will have to wait for a good six months to enjoy the beauty of Boracay Islands all over.As the president issues the first veto of his tenure after Congress rejected his declaration of a national emergency to fund his wall, its hard to imagine that the dynamics along the U.S.-Mexico border were once different, when people shuttled back and forth between the two nations. Facundo Bernal marks such a moment in Palos de Ciego, his manuscript of poetry translated to English for the first time by Anthony Seidman as A Stab in the Dark for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

This iteration of Palos de Ciego comes to us when the political climate turns its attention to the border and to migrant caravans. Perhaps it is ironic, then, that this body of writing, only recently rediscovered, surfaces now as a reminder of a time, before fences, walls, and the Border Patrol, when the border only existed to be crossed, writes Josh Kun, a 2016 MacArthur Fellow and USC professor, in the books introduction.

Palos de Ciego stands as one of the earliest bodies of literature chronicling the experiences of Chicanos in Los Angeles.

The poems collected in Palos de Ciego were first published in the newspaper La Prensa in 1921. Writing under the pseudonym Mister Blind, Bernals work offers a unique perspective on the experiences of Latinos during a period when the city was in the midst of an economic boom and Los Angeles Mexican American population swelled in numbers. Palos de Ciego is one of the first books of poems about the city, and yet it is nowhere to be found in accounts of L.A. literary history, Kun continues. In fact, one is hard pressed to find any information about the writings of Facundo Bernal  or anything on the man himself, for that matter. A quick online search reveals a few scant details about the life and work of a writer whose poetry provides keen insight into the lives of Mexican Americans during the early 20th century. Palos de Ciego stands as one of the earliest bodies of literature chronicling the experiences of Chicanos in Los Angeles, a radical new telling of a subject we thought we already knew, one we thought had already been written.

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A true fronterizo, Bernal was born in Hermosillo, Mexico, in 1883 and came of age during the reign of one of the countrys most recognized despots  Porfirio Diaz. Along with his brother Francisco, Bernals work and political and artistic views were shaped and influenced by the countrys burgeoning literary community. Bernal first came to Southern California in 1913 as an exiled journalist whose brash and belligerent screeds against the dictatorship of Diaz and the political corruptions of Mexico had resulted in death threats and stints in jail. He found sanctuary in Los Angeles, in [our] divine city/ of beachside resorts/ and parks brimming/ with lush lakesides,/ in the beautiful Angelo-polis/ he tells us in his poem, The Crime Wave.

Anthony Seidman, the translator of A Stab in the Dark by Facundo Bernal. (Anthony Seidman)

Crossings, in all their permutations  cultural, political and linguistic  abound in Bernals work. Yet these are not done blindly and without rhyme or reason. In a very public forum, we see a writer documenting the emergence of a border subjectivity, documenting an identity formed from two cultures that are inextricably linked by geography, history and language. These poems remind us of the messiness that is bi-culturalism, of the way selves overlap, spilling over and out, again and again, decade after decade. Himself a composite of many selves, Bernal flaunts and revels in the fragmented bricolage of identity that is the hyphenated American at a time when such concepts were still nascent.

Bernals linguistic acrobatics stretch and pull words, both English and Spanish, calling attention to their elasticity. This is often demonstrated with the incorporation of hybrid phrases in his poetry such as gud taim (good time), What su mara? (Whats the matter?) and Cheeses Cries! (Jesus Christ!). Here is a prototype of the mixed idiomatic phrases future generations would come to adopt, before calo or Spanglish, languages largely used by zoot suiters and urban Mexican American youths across L.A. and the greater Southwest. And perhaps this is the books greatest achievement: that an artist writing during such a pivotal time in the formation of a city like Los Angeles would be so bold as to adopt this renegade identity, flirting with words and language before such things in written texts were common. Palos de Ciego lays the foundation for the formation of a literary identity for Mexican American writers in Los Angeles.

But its not just language Bernal toys with and chops up. He takes stabs at the ruling establishment back home, commenting on the political machinations of Mexico in poems such as Ah, that Don Felix! named for the general who, along with several others, including Victoriano Huerta, led a coup to overthrow Francisco I. Madero. Is poor Don Felix / completely blind to facts? Bernal writes.

His delirious plots

have always failed him.

Hasnt the White House

told him their No no nos,

because they dont want

Mas Revoluciones?

Weightier subject matters such as the Mexican Revolution and coup d'etats are moderated by more playful pieces that interrogate culture and identity. In Raking Up the Past, for example, he dedicate[s] a few stabs / to the people of [his] Raza / who leave Mexico, and when theyve barely set foot in Yankee-landia, forget their Spanish / and disown their Homeland. While in the poem Better Off Being Chinese, he writes:

Dear Reader, after a prolonged hiatus of three days,

I return to my bitter task

of talking trash

against those of our ilk

who disown their ancestors in a most inhuman manner,

then set themselves up as model Bad Mexicans.

In her book Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria E. Anzaldua writes, The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country  a border culture. Bernals Palos de Ciego works to remind us that all borders, real and imagined, exist only to be crossed and recrossed. This cultural divide, this ambiguous space, scarred and tattered by the throngs of immigrants seeking asylum from poverty, political turmoil and violence, is the domain of revolutionaries and outlaws. Of his own work, he wrote: And so, here are my poor and blind stabs at the dark; let the reader receive them knowing full well what they are: coarsely cut spears, chopped up at random, useless, except perhaps as serving for fuel, as purification from all sin. Amen.

Palos de Ciego is one of the first books of poems about the city, and yet it is nowhere to be found in accounts of L.A. literary history. Josh Kun

The book jacket for A Stab in the Dark. (LARB Books)

Here is a testament to the ambiguity that is born out of collision and conflict, where one identity does not fold into the other, where one cultural marker does not give way for another to take its place, but where the two remain in an equal balance. The result is a sensibility that manages somehow  someway  to cut through the darkness forever threatening to engulf us all.::

A Stab in the Dark / Palos de Ciego

Facundo Bernal, translated by Anthony SeidmanLos Angeles Review of Books, 280 pp., $16

Espinozas book, Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime, will be published in June by Unnamed Press.We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

This is the first line of Joan Didions 1979 essay The White Album, and it remains among the most recognizable, and resonant, openings in contemporary American literature. Yet like so much in Didions writing, it is often misread. Think about it: What the author appears to be saying is that stories bestow meaning in a universe of chaos, that it is in the tendency to make narrative out of experience that redemption may reside. The White Album, however, resists such clear-cut definitions  or really, any definitions at all. Constructed as a set of fragments, it evokes both the necessity and the futility of narrative, the way the stories we tell ourselves no longer (if they ever did) add up.

In part, this has to do with the era it describes. Composed between 1968 and 1978, the essay seeks not only to record but also to replicate a kind of cultural disintegration; it is the literary version of an exploding universe. Charles Manson, Huey Newton, Jim Morrison, the death of Robert Kennedy, Didions residence in a large house in a part of Hollywood that had once been expensive and was not described by one of my acquaintances as a senseless-killing neighborhood  we are in the back end of the 1960s, and the author is losing her grip. Certain key concepts have ceased to make sense; basic reality contact, she writes, quoting her own psychiatric evaluation, is obviously and seriously impaired at times.

Lars Jan is a director, visual artist, writer and founder of Early Morning Opera, a genre-bending performance and art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences and experiences. (Kawai Matthews)

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For Didion, the solution is to try to find the thread of something, a story or a conglomeration of stories, even as she can no longer put her faith in anything so direct. Its no accident that almost as soon as she asserts the necessity of telling stories, she contradicts herself: Or at least we do for a while, she writes in the second paragraph. Here we see the tension that animates the essay, between the notion that stories will save, or at least console, us and the counter argument, that what she is, what we all are, witnessing did not fit into any narrative I knew.

Four decades later, in the midst of another era that does not fit the narrative, The White Album is having an unexpected sort of second life. On April 5, 6 and 7, at UCLAs Ralph Freud Playhouse, the Center for the Art of Performance in association with the Center Theatre Group will stage an adaptation directed by multimedia artist Lars Jan. For Jan, this is the fulfillment of a longtime fascination with the essay; he first read it as a high school student 25 years ago. That voice, he enthuses on a recent morning at his studio in the industrial flats south of the 10 freeway and the Arts District, there are two things about it. First, I love the collage structure, the way she keeps circling, doubling back. Then, theres her suspicion of all intentions, the way she cuts everyone off at the knees, including herself.

An image from director Lars Jans staging of Joan Didions The White Album. (Lars Jan)

Jan is 40, tall in a hoodie and glasses, with a beard and short dark hair. We are sitting at a long table up a flight of stairs from his main workspace, and as he speaks, he often stands and walks around. Its as if his ideas, his language, are a function of the physical, as if they cant be accessed any other way. Performative, in other words, not unlike his rendering of the essay, which seeks to take the chaos, the dislocation Didion is tracking, and embody it in three dimensions on the stage.

As to how that happens, Jan insists The White Album is a work in progress, even though it had its world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Musics Next Wave Festival last fall. This is partly a matter of necessity  the performance was developed under the auspices of Early Morning Opera, a multidisciplinary collective Jan founded in 2004 to push the boundaries of traditional storytelling, creating work that blurs text and technology, performance and social commentary.

But it is also a reflection of how Jan works. Because we are an independent company, he says, we have to take out support where we can get it. This means were constantly juggling stuff. At the same time, that juggling, that moving back and forth between projects, suits his aesthetic practice as well. Basically, Jan says, the process is me daydreaming and working on stuff that wont go away. In the case of The White Album, this begins with his love of the essay itself. Its the piece of writing I most return to, he tells me. Ive read it 20, 25 times. The structure is mystifying; it shouldnt hang together, but theres something about her point-of-view that makes it work. What shes doing is telling a beautiful story about no longer being able to tell a story. We are watching a woman in crisis, describing a culture in crisis. I think of her as Ishmael in Moby-Dick.

UCLAs Center for the Art of Performance will present Lars Jans multimedia performance piece the White Album, based on the essay by Joan Didion. (Lars Jan)

Jan is right  thats one of the points Didion is making, that the received narratives, whether individual or collective, can no longer sustain us, or themselves. And yet, she is skeptical of the narratives that have replaced them, especially when it comes to politics. For Jan, this emerges most fully in passages on the murder trial of Black Panthers founder Huey Newton and the 1968 strike at San Francisco State University. Didion regards such incidents as another kind of breakdown; The place simply never seemed serious, she writes of the campus in revolt. What shes saying is that the protests are more about theater than activism, a perspective Jan disputes.

The late 1960s, he insists, was full of potential energy. Thats the genesis of this production  or no, not genesis, more like reading tea leaves, a retrospective realization  to have a conversation about those issues and what they mean. To highlight that, Jan and his collaborators, including actress Mia Barron, who gives voice to the essay, have built a frame involving an inner and an outer audience: the former younger, mostly in their 20s like the people in the essay, and the latter older, more traditional, kept at a distance by the productions design.

The inner audience arrives early and shares a meal with the company; during the performance, they are onstage, where they receive instructions via in-ear monitors, and interact with materials including a library of contemporaneous books and every record mentioned in The White Album, which Jan used as research. The outer audience sits watching from the house until the show ends, at which point, members participate in a talk-back session with the inner audience and cast.

For Jan, these conversations are not add-ons; they are the whole idea. In that sense, the audiences function not unlike Greek choruses, commenting upon and enlarging the narrative. The White Album, then, is less play than extrapolation, an attempt to re-create the essay in dramatic form. Unlike Vanessa Redgrave  who portrayed Didion in the authors adaptation of her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, a one-woman show that ran on Broadway in 2007  Barron plays the essay more than she plays a character, performing it as if it were a score.

I am not mimicking her, the actress says by phone from Manhattan, where she has been working on a play. I am bringing the speaker to life. Its a subtle distinction but an important one, allowing Barron to function as something like the narrator of the production; there are others onstage, both performers and the inner audience, but she is mostly on her own. In this piece in some ways, she suggests, the language doesnt calls for coherence but more a feeling of being deeply unsettled. Ive had to find a way to attach to that, to develop a sense of internal need.

Internal need, of course, is what The White Album is all about  the need for a resolution that is no longer available, if it ever was. The essay, Barron notes, is almost a space for people to experience that contradiction. Jan, for his part, agrees. The two of them are life partners and have a child together, but this is the first time they have collaborated on a piece of work. That intimacy, that sense of the private bleeding into the public, also radiates through Didions work.

The essay ends with another contradiction, another disavowal or complication of the declaration with which it begins. Citing the broken narratives shes been tracing, Didion admits that writing has not yet helped me to see what it means. This is another reason Jan first sought to stage the essay, not to look back but to project outward, past the conditionality, the inconclusiveness, of that final line. I want to be faithful to the essay but also to build on it, is how he puts it, pushing back from the table and wandering his studio again. We need to learn how to talk to one another. We need to think about the stories we tell and what they mean.

#####

The White Album by Joan Didion

Who: Lars Jan & Early Morning Opera

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA

When: 8 p.m. April 5, 3 and 8 p.m. April 6, 7 p.m. April 7

Cost: $29-$59

Info: cap.ucla.edu, (310) 825-2101

Ulin is a former book editor and book critic at The Times. He is editing the collected works of Joan Didion for the Library of America.The Washington Post and Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner are planning to release a book version of special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs report if it ever becomes public, the publisher announced Thursday.

The book is expected to contain the special counsel offices findings in its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, as well as reporting by the Post into the controversy that has dogged President Trump and his administration in connection with the probe.

Its not a sure thing that the report will become public. The special counsel office is to submit its work to Atty. Gen. William Barr, who will then determine what to do with it, and its far from certain that hell release it to the public.

Andrew Coan, a law professor at the University of Arizona, told The Times that nobody can predict what will happen after Mueller submits his report to Barr.

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No one really knows or can predict with any uncertainty how this is going to play out, Coan said. Not only do we not know what the attorney general is going to do with Robert Muellers report, we dont know what Robert Muellers report is going to look like.

The Posts book is to feature an introduction by journalists Rosalind S. Helderman and Matt Zapotosky, Scribner said, and be edited by Peter Finn, the Posts national security editor.

It will also cover the criminal indictments that have resulted from Muellers investigation, Scribner said. So far, over 30 people have faced charges related to the investigation, including Trumps former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who was convicted of fraud last year.

Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said that the planned book will come at a supremely important moment in American history.

The Post has dedicated vast reporting resources to the special counsels investigation and the events that led to it, and we are now proud to join with Scribner in providing context and perspective, he said.

Government reports have been published as books before, sometimes to critical acclaim. In 2004, W.W. Norton & Company published the 9/11 commission report as a book; it was later named a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction.

And in 2014, indie press Melville House published the Senate Intelligence Committees report on torture by the CIA.

The Mueller report is the most anticipated investigative document of this century, and its findings are of vast importance to the United States and to the rest of the world, Scribner publisher Nan Graham said in a news release. We are thrilled to partner on this book with The Washington Post, whose reporters and editors have provided indispensable and authoritative analysis of Robert Muellers historic investigation and the related filings.A fierce struggle over automation has erupted at the Port of Los Angeles, as local union officials representing some 12,000 dockworkers demand that one of the worlds largest shipping firms abandon a plan to introduce driverless electric cargo trucks.

Shouting, whistling and jeering, more than 1,200 union members, local business owners and community activists packed a four-hour hearing Thursday before the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners. The board voted to postpone a construction permit for the automated system after an offer by Mayor Eric Garcetti to mediate the dispute.

The decision before the board may have far-reaching impacts on the pace of automation at our port and could define how the port will compete and sustain jobs into the foreseeable future, Garcetti wrote in a letter unveiled at the hearing.

The mayor called for a 28-day delay in deciding on the permit, adding that negotiations should serve as the basis of a new task force to explore automation and its impacts on the future of the Port of Los Angeles and others across the state.

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Port automation dates to the 1960s, when dockworker unions agreed to the introduction of containers, and consequent job losses, in exchange for higher pay and benefits. Today a typical full-time Southern California longshore worker earns more than $100,000 a year. But thousands of so-called casuals, who are not yet registered union members, earn far less, are eligible only for part-time hours, and do not yet get health or retirement benefits.

 Dockworkers battle plan to bring driverless trucks to the port of Los Angeles.

A 2008 International Longshore and Warehouse Union contract, renewed in 2015, explicitly allowed West Coast ports to continue automating. Two large terminals  one at the Port of Long Beach and one in Los Angeles  have already introduced the driverless vehicles known as UTRs, or utility tractor rigs.

But automation at the 484-acre facility operated for Denmarks Moller-Maersk by APM Terminals is prompting an uproar from local union members who are having second thoughts about the current contract and believe the permit will lead to automation across all 12 of the port complexs terminals.

The struggle comes as Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest ports in the nation, are enjoying record cargo traffic, despite the threat of an escalating trade war with China. The twin ports handle a third of U.S. container traffic, but they have lost market share to facilities along the Gulf of Mexico and, since the widening of the Panama Canal, along the East Coast.

APM officials decline to say how many jobs will be eliminated if what they call self-guided container handling equipment is introduced. Union officials say hundreds are at stake. One in nine jobs in the five-county region is linked to commerce flowing through the port complex, according to port officials.

A driverless, electric-powered vehicle is seen at the Port of Long Beach. Maersk and APM Terminals say proposed battery-powered vehicles would replace diesel rigs as a response to the Port of L.A.s clean-air rules. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

APM characterizes its proposed automated, battery-powered vehicles, which would replace diesel-fueled rigs, as a response to the ports clean air rules. But union officials say APM could introduce manned electric vehicles instead.

This proposal is not about clean air and streamlining business practices, Mark Mendoza, president of ILWU Local 13 told the five-member commission. It is about Maersk maximizing their profits at all costs. It will ultimately ensure the economic demise of the Southern California region.

Port staff members have recommended approving APMs permit request to install infrastructure to support the automated vehicles, along with scaffolding for containers and an upgraded Wi-Fi system. Economic impact is not part of the permit process, which falls under the ports coastal land-use plan, port officials said.

The permit is in compliance with the ports master plan and the California Coastal Act, said Eugene Seroka, the ports executive director.

Maersk attorney Peter Jabbour said at the hearing that there is no legal basis for the unions opposition to granting the permit. The company proposes only minor infrastructure changes to the terminal, with no adverse environmental impacts. Objections to automation are not part of the coastal development process.

Hundreds of union members and community members from San Pedro and Wilmington show their opposition to automation during a Harbor Commission meeting. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

James McKenna, president and chief executive of the Pacific Maritime Assn., which represents 70 port companies, accused Local 13 of making an end run around the current Pacific Coast Longshore contract, the federally governed collective bargaining process that led to it, as well as the ILWUs democratic election that resulted in its ratification.

Nonetheless, political pressure is building to halt the automation expansion.

Robots do not pay taxes, Local 13 Vice President Gary Herrera told the hearing, as hundreds in the audience rose to their feet applauding and yelling approval. Robots do not shop in our communities. Robots do not vote!

Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn urged the board to block the automation plan, saying, I support reduced pollution, but we do not need to automate to achieve it. She added that the ports are prime targets for terrorism. Our dockworkers are the first line of defense. Theres nothing like a pair of human eyes and ears.

City Councilman Joe Buscaino alluded pointedly to the fact that the City Council has the power to overturn any commission decision.

We should work together, so this doesnt have to come to the City Council, but I will exercise that option if needed, he said. We need a green and efficient port while preserving jobs.

Mark Mendoza, center, president of ILWU Local 13, spoke at a Harbor Commission hearing over whether to allow APM to use driverless electric cargo vehicles. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Two congresswomen, and more than a dozen state senators and Assembly members, including Speaker Anthony Rendon, along with seven neighborhood councils in San Pedro and Wilmington, and the Los Angeles Democratic Party wrote letters expressing reservations or outright opposition to the automation plan, calling for the preservation of jobs.

The fact that the ILWU, which represents 30 ports along the U.S. and Canadian Pacific coasts and in Panama, agreed to automation in past contracts is often contrasted with the stance of the International Longshoremens Assn., which represents East Coast dockworkers.

In October, under a six-year extension of their contract, East Coast terminals agreed not to automate.

In Southern California, dockworkers disrupted port traffic for months in 2014 and 2015, and officials have counted on the 2017 ratification of an extension of the ILWU contract through 2022 to guarantee labor stability.

Some 40 ports around the world have spent about $10 billion to install some form of automation. But overall, ports have been slower to automate than many industrial sectors such as mining, auto manufacturing and warehousing.

Speakers at the hearing noted that a 2018 McKinsey & Co. report, The Future of Automated Ports, raised questions as to whether the high upfront cost of automation is likely to be recouped by shipping firms. More automation is on the way, McKinsey reported, but executives interviewed for the report found that automated ports, especially fully automated ones, are generally less productive than their conventional counterparts.

margot.roosevelt@latimes.com

Twitter: @margotrooseveltLess than a minute into the first episode of Conviction, the latest release from the Gimlet Media podcast network, the narration takes on a hardboiled tone.

Manny Gomez, private eye, lives alone in a small apartment in a quiet part of the Bronx, says Saki Knafo, the shows host and writer. Hes got this watch thats really a camera, and he has a pen thats really a knife. He says his favorite book is the Bible, but the one he talks about most often is The Art of War. 

Those sentences carry echoes of classic pulp detective fiction, whose tough-talking gumshoes were also the stars of old-time radio serials, the podcasts of an earlier age.

Its a nervy move to begin a nonfiction tale of crime, cops and municipal corruption with a big sidelong wink at Raymond Chandler. But Knafo knows what hes doing. That Chandleresque introduction, like nearly all the writing in the seven-part series, is fine and sharp and gives off a gleam; its Knafos pen thats the knife. He is invoking the hardboiled tradition ironically, setting us up for a real-life detective story that leaches out all traces of glamour  a darker shade of noir than any Philip Marlowe mystery.

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Knafo is also laying thematic groundwork. Figuratively speaking, Conviction is all about watches that are really cameras and pens that are really knives: about the distance between what things appear to be and what they really are, about the moral fog that clouds distinctions between justice and vengeance, good guys and bad guys, truth and lies.

These conflicts are embodied by the series central figure, Gomez, a garrulous former cop, now private investigator, who calls himself a punisher of the wicked  a bringer of justice for the good.

Private Investigator Manuel Manny Gomez, subject of the new podcast Conviction, in a scene from the 2018 documentary Crime + Punishment now streaming on Hulu. (Mud Horse Pictures / Hulu)

REVIEW: Crime + Punishment, a potent documentary on the NYPD12' whistle blowers and cop turned investigator 

Gomez specializes in the cases of poor young men, usually black and Latino, who are subject to aggressive police practices and the Kafkaesque indignities of New Yorks Blindfold Law, which permits prosecutors to withhold nearly all the evidence against defendants until the day their trial begins. Conviction focuses on the case of Pedro Hernandez, a Bronx teenager who was arrested in 2016 in a shooting during a street corner melee. Hernandez maintains his innocence  he insists he wasnt anywhere near the site of the shooting  but bail is set at $250,000, and he spends more than a year in jail awaiting trial.

Into the breach swaggers Gomez, who is hired by the Hernandez family to root out the truth. Conviction chronicles the months the detective spends stalking the Morrisania neighborhood in the South Bronx, on a hunt for exculpatory evidence. He brings his crusade to the press, railing against police brutality and what he calls a hornets nest of corruption in the Bronx district attorneys office.

Gomez is fascinating: charismatic, bombastic, indefatigable, with a gift of the gab that could power a dozen podcasts. (Gomez appears in Hulus Crime + Punishment, an award-winning Sundance documentary.) He wears double-breasted suits, professes love for Picasso and arrives at housing projects with the top dropped on his silver Corvette convertible, blasting Phil Collins In the Air Tonight because, he says, its important to make an impression.

ALSO: From its new $38-million home, can radio tastemaker KCRW adapt to a podcast world? 

We follow Gomez on sleuthing missions to upstate prisons and accompany him on hours-long stakeouts in apartment building hallways, where he comes armed with an empty 2-liter Coke bottle in case he needs to relieve himself. (One thing about my job: You gotta have a strong bladder.) We learn about his past as an Army intelligence officer and his tenure in the NYPD, which ended badly and in part explains the fervor he brings to his battle with the cops. Gomez is both appealing and unnerving; as Conviction progresses, its portrayal of the private eye becomes more complicated, and the righteousness of his actions seem less certain.

I found my thoughts drifting back to the podcasts opening moments. Is Gomezs crusade based in the lofty ethical absolutes of his supposed favorite book, the Bible? Or do his machinations reflect the slipperier realpolitik of Sun Tzus The Art of the War, with its famous dictum, All warfare is based on deception?

Those questions, and the unfolding mystery of the Hernandez case, keep a listener hooked. But Conviction is not a straightforward procedural. It belongs to a podcast subgenre that includes the third season of Serial and USA Todays The City, shows that focus on structural ills and racial inequities in urban America and the criminal justice system. Meticulously, soberly, Conviction exposes the toll of stop-and-frisk policing, the absurdities of the plea-bargain system, the brutal conditions faced by prisoners on New Yorks Rikers Island. The result is a melancholy piece of public service journalism that is far more disturbing than the grisly true crime serials clustered at the top of the podcast charts.

Pedro Hernandez awaiting trial at Rikers Island, as seen Stephen Maings documentary Crime + Punishment, a chronicle of the lives and struggles of black and Latino whistleblower cops, the young minorities theyre pressured to arrest and an unforgettable private investigator. (Mud Horse Pictures / Hulu)

ALSO: Podcast pioneer Jesse Thorn and his Maximum Fun team are building a quirky audio empire 

But the strength of Conviction lies less in muckraking than in portraiture. The show leans heavily on the testimonials of its characters, from Gomez to Hernandezs mother, Jessica Perez, to various bit players  Bronx teens hanging outside street corner bodegas, rumpled defense attorneys. These people inhabit a New York that rarely appears in the countless mass media depictions of the worlds most famous city. In their voices  meaty outer-borough accents tinged with world-weariness and humor  you hear individuals struggling to maintain their dignity in a system rigged to strip them bare.

Much of the credit for Conviction goes to Knafo, an investigative reporter who has written for the New York Times and other publications. His storytelling is smart, restrained and, in a gruff way, formal; the phony familiarity and twee interjections that mar so much podcast narration are nowhere to be heard in Conviction. The show is crisply produced by Meg Driscoll, Chris Neary and Saidu Tejan-Thomas. The music, by Haley Shaw, is moody and subdued, a good fit for a tale that shuns sensationalism and finds humanity and complexity in unexpected places.

Conviction so assiduously avoids cliches that it comes as a shock when, in the final episode, it suddenly turns formulaic, knotting its loose ends in a too-tidy bow. Knafo asks: Which is [Manny Gomez]? A hero? Or a villain? I finally figured out the answer.

But that answer will surprise no one, and whats more, I dont believe that Knafo finally figured out anything. Knafo himself is too shrewd a detective, too wise about human nobility and human failings, to spend his time pondering the banal question of heroism versus villainy. This framing is simply a concession to convention: the genre rule dictating that a narrative podcast must be a first-person quest-saga, which resolves with a whodunit solution and Big Thematic Takeaways spelled out in flashing lights.

Earlier this year, Knafo published an article in the New York Times Magazine about Gomez and the Hernandez case, and that piece offered no such simple-minded denouement. In 2019, the podcast is a mature medium; audiences can abide the same subtlety in their earbuds that they encounter on the printed page. Besides, in Conviction, the words of the main characters strike such ringing cadences, resound with such authority, that there is no need for outside editorializing.

I feel like I was targeted for  growing up with the wrong people, says Hernandez. I didnt deserve anything that happened to me.Perseverance in the face of adversity is a common theme this week on The 99-Seat Beat, our selections from L.A.s theater scene. The human spirit endures, whether in the mythic quests of ancient Greece (Argonautika), the bonds of friendship nurtured in a Southern beauty salon (Steel Magnolias), the human heart beating within a Victorian-era monstrosity (The Elephant Man) or the intermittent miracles wrought by the self-doubting man at the center of Faith Healer.

Argonautika at A Noise Within

The essentials: Perils are faced and conquered, hearts are won and broken, and gods make sport of mortal foibles  all on an epic scale in Argonautika, a modern adaptation of Jason and the Argonauts legendary quest for the Golden Fleece. Playwright Mary Zimmerman, whose wildly imaginative Metamorphoses stunned Mark Taper Forum audiences with its dreamlike tableaux, again employs her signature wit, insight and compassion to humanize archetypal figures from Greek mythology. This retelling offers a distinctively strong female perspective courtesy of the goddesses Hera and Athena, who narrate and participate in the action. Fresh takes on familiar characters include a lovestruck, pre-filicidal Medea and a pompous, blowhard Hercules unexpectedly overcome with romantic tenderness.

Why this? A Noise Withins producing artistic director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott promises amplified visual spectacle in her staging, with an original music score by Robert Oriol and more singing, dancing, fights and aerial tricks than what Zimmerman had originally intended. There is a sense of play and adventure, Rodriguez-Elliott said, that will hopefully remind audiences of what it is like to be a child again and what our collective imaginations are capable of creating.

Details: A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays, through May 5. $25-$77. (626) 356-3121, www.anoisewithin.org

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Trisha Miller, center left with Veralyn Jones, in Argonautika at A Noise Within in Pasadena. (Craig Schwartz)

Faith Healer at the Odyssey

The essentials: Desperate, despairing and derelict  such are the easy marks seeking divine intervention in Brian Friels 1979 masterpiece about a morally conflicted, alcoholic faith healer scavenging the seedier outskirts of the United Kingdom. The Fantastic Frank Hardy may be a con man, but his performances succeed just often enough to lace his self-loathing with the possibility of a genuine gift. In a series of monologues, Frank (Paul Norwood), his long-suffering wife (Diana Cignoni) and their unshakably perky manager (Ron Bottitta) trace the contours of Franks tawdry life through the prisms of their respective struggles and damaged psyches. Frank offers the observation that people come to him not in hope but for the elimination of hope  to seal their anguish, for the content of a finality.

Why this? Friels elegant script embodies the Irish gift for storytelling, packed with character-illuminating details, metaphysical mysteries and poetic self-reflections that defy easy classification or judgment. Odyssey Theatre Ensemble founder Ron Sossi revisits the play he last directed in 1989.

Details: An Odyssey Theatre Ensemble production at Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays (see website for additional weeknights), through May 12. $32-$37. (310) 477-2055, www.odysseytheatre.com

Paul Norwood in Faith Healter at Odyssey Theatre. (Enci Box)

Steel Magnolias at Actors Co-op

The essentials: Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion, declares Truvy, the Southern beautician who presides over the ups and downs of her close-knit circle of customers whom playwright Robert Harling calls Steel Magnolias. Infectious comic banter goes hand-in-hand with stoic resilience in Harlings homage to the colorful, strong-willed women who populated the sleepy Louisiana hometown of his youth.

Why this? The interplay between Harlings vividly drawn characters is far more intimate and engaging onstage than in the movie adaptation. This accomplished Actors Co-op ensemble includes Nan McNamara (33 Variations, Wit) as Truvy and, in a more mature role, Lori Berg, who played Truvy in the companys memorable 1996 staging. The production also marks a homecoming of sorts for director Cameron Watson, whose first L.A. gig was with Actors Co-op in 2005 and who has since gone on to work at many of the Southlands prestigious theater. Watson approaches the plays sentimentality with period authenticity and blunt honesty.

Details: Actors Co-ops David Schall Theatre, 1760 N. Gower St., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays, through May 5; also 2:30 p.m. March 30 and April 6; dark Easter weekend. $35. (323) 462-8460, www.actorsco-op.org

The Elephant Man at El Portal

The essentials: When it comes to overcoming physical challenges, its hard to think of a more poignantly heroic example than that of The Elephant Man, the congenitally misshapen Joseph (John) Merrick, who began life as a reviled circus freak and ended up the toast of Victorian society by the time of his death at age 27. Drawing on the same historical sources as the better-known David Lynch film, this earlier stage biodrama by Bernard Pomerance takes a different approach in representing Merricks deformities entirely through the actors body posture, without elaborate makeup and prosthetics. The play shows us the gentle, civilized soul trapped inside the horrific prison of flesh that the other characters see.

Why this? Reviving Merricks story on NoHos El Portal stage fulfills a long-held personal mission for Thursday Night Theater Club co-founder Tom Vitorino, who urges compassion and reminds us not to judge others by their outward appearance. In performing the title role, Vitorino draws on his struggle with the after-effects of Bells palsy. I did not choose this play, Vitorino said. Oddly enough it chose me, and I am grateful. Director Robyn Cohens staging features period set and costumes, with further dedication to historical detail on view in a lobby display of contemporaneous books, letters, photos and an anatomically correct replica of Merricks skeleton.

Details: A Thursday Night Theater Club production at El Portal Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays, through April 14; dark March 28-31. $20. www.elportaltheatre.com

Tom Vitorino, on the ground, and John Ralston Craig in Thursday Night Theater Clubs The Elephant Man at El Portal Theatre. (Jason Ross Levy)

The 99-Seat Beat appears every Friday. Our reviewers shortlist offerings with an emphasis on smaller venues. Some recommendations are shows weve seen; others are based on the track record of the company, playwright, director or cast. Check out our picks from last week.

Support our coverage of local artists and the local arts scene by becoming a digital subscriber.

See all of our latest arts news and reviews at latimes.com/arts.

UPDATES:

An earlier version of the photo caption for Steel Magnolias misspelled the last name of actress Lori Berg, and gave the incorrect closing date for the production at Actors Co-op; it closes May 5.Before there was Photoshop, there was Oscar G. Rejlander.

In fact, about 130 years before.

In 1857, the Swedish-born British artist cobbled together a slew of negatives to make one of the most vexed photographs of the 19th century. Titled Two Ways of Life (Hope in Repentance), the epic work is shown in two versions in Oscar G. Rejlander: Artist Photographer, a fascinating new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Surprisingly, its the first full survey of the quirky artists work.

Prince Albert, an aficionado of the still relatively novel invention called a camera, liked Two Ways of Life so much that he acquired three prints in order to have one for each royal residence  Windsor, Osborne House and Balmoral. The photograph was certainly a technical feat. More than 30 negatives had been painstakingly merged to make the single large combination-print, which features an array of more than two dozen figures.

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Not everyone was as enchanted as the prince. A critic for a journal in Edinburgh, Scotland, rebuked the complex picture for stiffness and vulgarity. Another decried it as degraded.

That was mostly because of all the female nudes. Two Ways of Life shows a lot of them, most prominently one seen from behind smack in the extreme foreground at the center. Repoussoir figures such as this one are commonly used in art to direct a viewers attention into a visually complicated scene. The contrast in scale also heightens an illusion of depth.

Oscar G. Rejlander, Two Ways of Life (Hope in Repentance), 1857, albumen silver print (J. Paul Getty Museum)

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The hitch: A repoussoir figure is a kind of stand-in for the viewer, who is also peering into the scene. Rejlanders use of a naked lady on the left-hand side made many observers gasp. Of the two ways of life being depicted, one full of virtue and the other filled with vice, her side features the wicked one. She is like the sirens of Greek mythology luring sailors to their shipwrecked doom on the rocky coast.

In a loose echo of The School of Athens, Raphaels famous Renaissance fresco in the Vatican, a robed and bearded thinker is flanked by two young country lads. The sage is introducing his innocent charges to fateful choices available in the big city  scenes of upright piety such as prayer and ministering to the sick on the right, the debauchery of sloth, lust and gluttony on the left.

In this particular contest between virtue and vice, however, neither is especially compelling. Rejlander has composed an elaborate tableau vivant, something like the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, in which a troupe of players has been assembled to enact a work of art.

It looks like a lot of effort to make. In the Victorian England of Prince Albert, labor was highly valued  presuming you were not an aristocrat.

In class-bound Britain, maybe that distinction about labor had something to do with the noisy dustup Rejlanders photograph inspired among the newly emerging community of photographers. Its easy to see why the queens husband would admire the masterful handiwork of a fellow from the lower orders  an obviously productive immigrant making good as a British subject as the Industrial Revolution roared on. Yet photography was still so new and experimental that other lensmen were anxious about inclusion in public life among the fine-art ranks of painters and sculptors.

Oscar G. Rejlander, Hard Times (The Out of Work Workmans Lament), 1860, albument silver print (J. Paul Getty Museum)

CHARLES WHITE: LACMA show pinpoints the power of an underappreciated black artist 

The show, ably organized by Lori Pauli, curator at the National Gallery of Canada, and Getty curator Karen Hellman is subtitled Artist Photographer to emphasize Rejlanders primary aim. His fondest ambition was to secure a place for photographs as equal in importance to any other kind of art.

He began as a painter and continued to paint throughout his life. (Rejlander died in 1875 at age 61.) A few modest examples are on view, together with 150 photographic portraits, landscapes and allegorical subjects.

Like many converts to a new faith  he didnt take up photography until he was nearly 40  Rejlander was an adamant proselytizer. Conjoining negatives composed a photograph much the same way a painter combines drawings in composing a picture. (David Hockney is one artist whose recent work is a descendant.) Dressing up his wife, Mary, an accomplished actor, and other thespians was like using models in a painters studio.

Looking back, the kitschy Two Ways of Life is ironically less admirable than Rejlanders portraits, which are among the shows most compelling works. Some are as fine as any of the exquisitely honed portrait photographs of his friend Julia Margaret Cameron, a keen student of his expressive work.

In one, a young woman is seated next to a painted ancestral portrait. Both women are similarly attired, deftly linking the younger woman to her familys past. However, just as important, Rejlander yoked a modern photograph to paintings history.

In another, a young woman is shown in profile, arms folded across her chest. The inky velvet of her dress and the drapery behind her form a dark contrast to the soft light of her delicate features.

Whats unusual is that the composition is not centered on her face, which is positioned off to one side. Instead, the central focus is on the gently knotted twists of her upswept hair.

Those twists echo the intertwined hands, gently folded below. Marvelously composed, the subtle image emphasizes that the artistry of the hand supersedes a cameras mechanical recording qualities.

Oscar Rejlander, Self-Portrait with Parrot, about 1865, albumen silver print (J. Paul Getty Museum)

Oscar Rejlander, Mental Distress (Mothers Darling), 1871, carbon print of a polychrome drawing from a photograph (J. Paul Getty Museum)

ALLEN RUPPERSBERG: Hammer Museum show is a dont-miss tour de force 

Many of Rejlanders photographs carry a similar subtext, picturing his stance on the raging debates about whether or not camerawork could be art. A portrait of Mary and a self-portrait of the artist are exemplary.

Both show the sitters with a pet  a parrot emerging from a cage, its door wide open. The bird is a mimic, standing in for the cameras capacity to parrot whats in front of the lens. Nature and art possess the ability to repeat the reality before them.

Mary smiles at the bird in delight. As for Rejlander, in the self-portrait his head is bowed as if in deference, while his pencil is poised on a sketchpad. That the cage door is open seems to matter: A photograph can do more than merely record.

The negotiation between the new medium of photography and traditional forms of art is encapsulated in an odd work Rejlander made at the behest of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. The scientist was preparing an innovative study about facial recognition of emotions in humans and animals. Rejlander rounded up actors to perform a variety of demonstrative expressions that could illustrate Darwins pioneering text.

One was a very small picture of a crying baby  too small, in fact, to be published effectively. So Rejlander copied the little photograph as a larger drawing, and then photographed that.

Today, the argument between photography and art is long gone. But an evolutionary photograph of a drawing of a photograph is one clear indication of just how discombobulated the subject was at the very start.

         

Oscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood

When: Tuesdays-Sundays, through June 9

Admission: Free; parking is $15

Info: (310) 440-7300, www.getty.eduIf playing violin for 18,000 people at the Hollywood Bowl is your dream and not the nightmare you had last night, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is heading your way: The Los Angeles Philharmonic and world-renowned violinist Ray Chen are expected to announce Friday the Play With Ray competition, the winner of which will perform Bachs Double Concerto alongside Chen on Aug. 8 at the Bowl.

The contest is open to non-professional violinists of all ages internationally. The idea is one that Chen has been nursing for some time. The 30-year-old former child prodigy has become known for his savvy use of social media in service of making classical music more accessible to young people and expanding the reach of the art form.

Chen plans to promote the competition to his 130,000 Instagram followers (and his 15,000-plus Twitter followers too), and hes encouraging all kinds of players to participate.

The idea was always about community, Chen said over the phone from a retreat on the border of Germany and Austria. The classical music community is a very small one. You know everybody, and, sometimes, it gets a little competitive. I feel like there could be more done to help people within this industry.

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Chen chose to pitch his idea to the L.A. Phil because of its worldwide reputation as a progressive institution with an edgy vibe, one thats at the forefront of where classical music and technology collide.

REVIEW: L.A. Phil revives the neglected dean of African American composers 

So it was a dream come true when they said, Yeah, lets go for it, and lets do it at the Hollywood Bowl, Chen said.

Contestants will submit a video of themselves playing along with a personal essay. The essay will help Chen and fellow judges from the L.A. Phil get a full picture of the applicant.

Chen said he would love to discover a young talent who dreams of becoming a professional musician, or an older person who had to give up the dream but is still passionate about music and practices on a regular basis.

I want to give them the opportunity to make that dream sparkle, Chen said.

Three finalists will fly to L.A. in early August, play with Chen and attend master classes and concerts. Rare violins will be provided for use by the auction house Tarisio, which specializes in stringed instruments and bows.

One winner then will be picked to accompany Chen and the L.A. Phil onstage at the Hollywood Bowl. Chen said he chose Bachs Double Concerto because its one of the first pieces many students learn in chamber music.

Its fun and enjoyable to play, and you get it to play with someone, which kind of takes the edge off when youre onstage in front of 18,000 people, Chen said.

For more information, and to submit an entry, go to hollywoodbowl.com/playwithray. The contest closes May 1.

SPRING ARTS PREVIEW: Mahlers Eighth, Hannigans Ojai, Central Park Five and other music picks In the 1960s and 1970s, assemblage  the practice of creating artwork from discarded items  gave black L.A. artists the chance to reclaim their community while calling out the indignities they faced. Central players in the movement  including Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, Melvin Edwards and John Outterbridge  found inspiration for their assemblage from the 1965 Watts riots.

The art was bold: In her 1972 work Ive Got Rhythm, Saar emblazoned part of a metronome with racist headlines and its pendulum with a black skeleton. One headline is circled in red: Lynched After Refusing to Dance on Whites Command.

For the record: An earlier version of this article referred to Sarah Loyer as an assistant curator; she is an associate curator. The museums scheduled was incorrectly listed as Mondays-Saturdays; it is open Mondays-Sundays.

An amalgamation of tin cans, rusted nails and other cast-off materials make up Outterbridges 1969 Containment Series, a collection of rectangular pieces exploring the concept of constraint. Daniel LaRue Johnsons early 1960s black box series confronted racial violence of the civil rights movement. The Big N shows a doll hand ensnared in a mousetrap, surrounded by a chain link fence, all coated in a black lacquer paint.

These works go on view Saturday at the Broad in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983, highlighting the rich history of black assemblage in L.A.

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For many years, I had been collecting derogatory images of black people, and I decided to use those images, to recycle them and transform them. Betye Saar

The exhibit follows assemblage but also painting, photography, sculpture and performance art through the civil rights and black power movements with more than 60 artists and about 150 works of art. Soul of a Nation also delves into artists collective power, highlighting Spiral group, Harlems Kamoinge Workshop for photographers, Chicagos AfriCobra and other groups.

Organized by Londons Tate Modern, the exhibit opened in 2017 before traveling to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas and the Brooklyn Museum. The Broad show runs until Sept. 1 and features three distinct galleries dedicated to local artists.

One gallery pays respect to the 1971 LACMA exhibition Three Graphic Artists, showing works by Charles White, David Hammons and Timothy Washington. The exhibit was the result of a campaign started by the Black Arts Council, founded by LACMA employees Claude Booker and Cecil Fergerson in 1968 to demand the museum show works by black artists.

Another gallery focuses on assemblage, exploring how an art movement can be born from literal ashes.

In August 1965, crowds gathered in Watts as a white California Highway Patrol officer arrested a young black man suspected of drunk driving. It was the spark that catalyzed the Watts riots, igniting long-bubbling tension over police brutality, segregated housing and education, and other issues. For six days the community raged and burned  cafes, markets, shoe stores  reduced to rubble. The aftermath was devastating: 34 people died, more than 1,000 were injured and an estimated $40 million in property was damaged.

Watts Riots Remembered 

But out of the wreckage came an arts reckoning.

In his essay Before and After Watts: Black Art in Los Angeles, UCLA African American studies scholar Paul Von Blum writes that the uprising forced public dialogue about race and pushed government agencies to fund social and cultural programming in the city.

Before the Watts riots, black people were struggling to secure a place in American society, said Daniel Widener, history professor at UC San Diego and author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles. After the rebellion, black people as a whole are saying, this is a sick place that has to change if were going to be part of it. If it wont change, we have to force it in a new direction.

The Watts uprising played a central role in both the black assemblage movement and efforts to elevate the work of black artists in mainstream institutions.

Regarded as the father of the black assemblage movement, Purifoy scoured the streets of Watts almost immediately after the fires died down with his artist friend Judson Powell. Purifoy and Powell found beauty in the debris, digging through the rubble and loading up their wagon with what they called junk.

We took our wagon into the streets and looked for things that looked beautiful: the signs of neon, the signs that had melted and broken and pieces that were infused with glass, Powell recalled in a 2015 Times interview. They looked like beautiful jewels in the sunshine.

Watts Riot by Noah Purifoy is part of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983" at the Broad. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Several of Purifoys Watts sculptures from the rebellion are on view at Soul of a Nation. Purifoy created Watts Riot, about 3 feet wide and 4 feet high, using scorched wood, plaster paint and signage. His whimsical Totem is a sculpture constructed of shoe trees, tobacco pipes and wheels and adorned with narrow wooden spikes.

Born in 1917 in Alabama, Purifoy spent a career as a teacher and studied social work before graduating from Chouinard Art Institute in 1956. He was 49 when he made Watts Riot. The artist, who died in 2004, was also a founding director of the Watts Towers Arts Center at the site of the massive assemblage landmark built by Simon Rodia.

In spring 1966, Purifoy organized the traveling show 66 Signs of Neon featuring assemblages made from artifacts of the Watts uprising. The exhibit featured 66 works by Purifoy, Powell and other artists and influenced key figures in the assemblage movement, including David Hammons and Outterbridge.

It was an epically successful show, said Sarah Loyer, an associate curator at the Broad. It was  looking at the symbolic moment of the Watts rebellion in L.A. and what that meant locally and nationally.

Black assemblage art is inherently revolutionary and political, Widener said. And in a time when black artists were barred from mainstream museums, using nontraditional methods was one way to build a legacy.

It breaks with the American idea that when something is done you throw it away, the professor said. Its got renewal at its heart, which is a radical message for people who are told theyre disposable and in a country that praises disposability.

The prolific Saar was born in L.A. in 1926. After a career in design, she turned to assemblage, often searching flea markets and garage sales for her found items. For Saar, assemblage was a tool to express her rage, beginning with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

For many years, I had been collecting derogatory images of black people, and I decided to use those images, to recycle them and transform them into an army against racism, said Saar, 92, by email.

Her first warrior was her iconic work made in 1972, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which is on view at Soul of a Nation. The shoe-box-size assemblage is derived from a stereotypical mammy figurine, except this one is armed with a grenade and a rifle. She was a symbol for both black civil rights and for womens rights, Saar said.

The Liberation of Aunt Jemima by Betye Saar at the Broad (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Preparator Arturo Guzman, left, and Nya Abudu, assistant preparator, install Rainbow Mojo, 1972, acrylic painting on cut leather by Betye Saar. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Soul of a Nation dedicates another gallery, re-creating Saars first survey exhibition at Cal State L.A. in 1973, to her work exploring spirituality and assemblage.

Similarly, Kings assassination had a profound impact on Outterbridge, now in his mid-80s. Growing up in depression-era North Carolina, Outterbridge inadvertently came to know assemblage through his father, an avid salvager. After serving in the military, Outterbridge moved to L.A. from Chicago in 1963.

The artist frequently used hair, wood scraps and rags for his acclaimed doll sculptures. About Martin, one of his works in Soul of a Nation, is Outterbridges 1975 homage to the civil rights leader. Inside a wood cabinet, a teeny suit jacket hangs above a laundry receipt made out to King, stamped with the words Paid in full.

During the civil rights and black power movements, assemblage art communicated that black freedom could emerge from ruins. Now, as the world grapples with the challenges of sustainability, the art form might take on a new meaning.

Out of the wreckage of America comes a sustainable way of living, Widener said. Most people dont draw the link between black liberation and ecology, but its there.

About Martin by John Outterbridge, 1975. Mixed media, 61 by 18 by 6.5 inches (Pablo Enriquez / The Broad)

         

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983

Where: The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Exhibition opens Saturday, ends Sept. 1; museum open Tuesdays-Sundays (advance timed entry tickets recommended)

Admission: $12-$18; free entry 5-8 p.m. Thursdays with last entry at 7 p.m. (general admission to the rest of the museum is free)

Info: (213) 232-6200, thebroad.orgRoseanne Barr apparently does not like Sara Gilbert anymore. Not one bit.

Not since Gilbert, her former costar, tweeted that the Roseanne stars Ambien-fueled comments about Valerie Jarrett were abhorrent and do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show.

Barrs remarks, comparing Jarrett to an ape, swiftly got her fired last year from ABCs successful reboot of her sitcom.

[Gilbert] destroyed the show and my life with that tweet, Barr told the Washington Post in an extensive, behind-the-scenes look at her firing published on Thursday, which included coverage of her January travels to Jerusalem. She will never get enough until she consumes my liver with a fine Chianti.

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Somewhere, Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs is wincing.

Gilbert, who played a key role in getting the reboot on the air and ran with The Conners spinoff show once Roseanne was axed, was diplomatic in her comments to the paper, noting that she would always love her former costar, whom she considers family.

I knew that Roseanne, the person, was unpredictable at times, but she told me this was her redemption, Gilbert told the Post. I chose to believe her.

It seems that the demise of Roseanne was bubbling away on the back burner at ABC even as the show roared to TVs No. 1 spot, with executives well aware of Barrs history on Twitter and gambling that she would play nice. Well, play nice enough.

It was always this back and forth of ABC not wanting to appear they were censoring Roseanne but also not quite pulling out the big guns, James Moore, Barrs longtime publicist, told the Post. Going, Youre one tweet away from us canceling the show.

At 2:45 a.m. on May 29, 2018, that tweet came  Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj  and the rest is history.

Barr credits Americas Rabbi Shmuley Boteach for checking in on her after the shows cancellation, when she was, according to the Post, holed up in her moms basement in Utah, chain-smoking and in tears.

Shmuley saved my life, Barr says. I was suicidal. He was the only person who stood by me and said they were going to destroy me because I love Trump and Israel.

Meanwhile, The Conners reportedly has been renewed for a second season.

cdz@latimes.com

@theCDZ on Twitter and InstagramAt the opening of the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2018 in south China's Hainan province last April, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a string of measures to expand opening up. They included broadening market access, improving the investment environment, strengthening intellectual property right (IPR) protection and expanding imports. The past year has seen these measures implemented and bearing results.

Broader access

The National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Commerce jointly released a revised version of the Special Administrative Measures for the Access of Foreign Investment, commonly known as the National Negative List, on June 28, 2018, lowering the threshold for foreign investors in 22 areas. A new negative list for foreign investment in the country's pilot free trade zones (FTZs) was issued two days later, further expanding opening up in these zones that have been established as test sites of new policies to explore new development models and better integrate the Chinese economy with international practices.

The most eye-catching move is the broadened access to the financial sector including banking, securities and insurance. The restrictions on foreign ownership in joint ventures and the businesses open to foreign financial institutions have been eased.

In addition, China reformed the renminbi exchange rate regime and accelerated the process of making the renminbi convertible under the capital account. While broadening access for foreign capital, the country also highlighted risk prevention and supervision over the financial sector.

With the implementation of the shortened negative list for foreign investment, substantial progress was made in streamlining related administrative approval procedures and promoting investment liberalization and facilitation. In particular, the openness of the financial sector has allowed foreign capital to invest and operate in China in a freer manner. This has enabled them to share the opportunities stemming from China's financial market development and increase the supply of capital. The measures have promoted competition, stimulated innovation, improved the capacity of financial services and invigorated the capital market. More open Chinese financial and capital markets hold out the prospect of fast development.

Better investment climate

Since April 2018, China has stepped up the creation of a law-based, internationalized and facilitated business environment. Specific measures were introduced to keep in line with advanced international economic and trade rules, increase transparency in the government's decision-making process and improve the legal system. Reforms were also launched to streamline the administrative approval procedures, reduce corporate costs, grant equal treatment to domestic and foreign enterprises, and build up a fairly competitive market environment.

According to the World Bank's Doing Business 2018 report, China's ranking in the ease-of-doing-business index improved from 78th to 46th place out of 190 economies.

With the adoption of the Foreign Investment Law by the National People's Congress on March 15, China's business rules, regulations and policies will become more predictable.

As part of China's efforts to speed up the establishment of a new system for open economy and promote the formation of a new pattern of opening up, Xi announced on April 13, 2018, that the entire island province of Hainan would become an FTZ, China's largest, by 2020, and then a free trade port. A general plan for the Hainan pilot FTZ was rolled out on October 16, 2018.

Stronger IPR protection

In 2018, the State Intellectual Property Office was restructured, seeking to integrate both patent and trademark administration into one regulatory authority. The new agency led the establishment of a cross-department mechanism for punishing serious patent violations, carried out trademark and patent law enforcement campaigns and established more intellectual property protection centers.

China is also amending the patent law to give it more teeth. The fourth draft amendment increased the compensation for patent infringements to a range of 100,000 yuan ($14,910) and 5 million yuan ($745,500). For online violations, Internet service providers will be held liable. In December 2018, the Supreme People's Court established an intellectual property court, a milestone in the history of intellectual property litigation in China.

IPR has to be protected not only because it is in the interests of both Chinese and foreign enterprises, but also because it provides an institutional guarantee of technological innovation. It is an institutional basis for transforming and upgrading the economy and making China a country of innovators.

More imports

China substantially lowered import tariffs in 2018. On May 1, 2018, import tariffs on all imported cancer drugs were scrapped and the value-added tax on the production and import of cancer drugs reduced. The 20-25-percent tariffs for cars were cut to 15 percent and duties on auto parts were lowered to 6 percent from the previous levels of 8-25 percent on July 1, 2018, followed by a reduction of import tariffs on over 1,500 investment products and consumer goods on November 1, 2018. The overall tariff level fell from 9.8 percent in 2017 to 7.5 percent in 2018.

Moreover, comprehensive measures were implemented to expand imports. On July 2, 2018, the State Council, China's cabinet, issued a guideline on expanding imports to promote balanced development of foreign trade. It proposed 15 policies to optimize the import structure. Multiple channels were directed to promote imports and improve the conditions for trade liberalization and facilitation.

The first China International Import Expo, held in Shanghai in November 2018, was a major initiative to support trade liberalization and economic globalization. Over 2,800 exhibitors from more than 130 countries and regions and nearly 150,000 purchasers attended the six-day expo, contributing to trade exchanges and cooperation among countries, promoting global economic growth and stimulating the development of an open economy.

By expanding imports, China aims to better meet people's growing consumption demands, increase the supply of high-end goods and offer more export opportunities to trading partners.

China has accelerated negotiations to join the Agreement on Government Procurement of the World Trade Organization (WTO). As part of the preparatory work, it is seeking to improve transparency in government procurement of goods and services and in awarding project contracts. Both domestic and foreign enterprises are treated equally in the process. Problems such as lack of transparency, high costs and poor quality are being addressed.

In 2018, China actively participated in global governance to provide a stable and sound external environment for foreign investors. The Belt and Road Initiative continued to be implemented, and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Summit in Beijing and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Qingdao strengthened cooperation among participating countries.

The country played a positive role in negotiations on regional trade agreements and regional and multilateral governance conferences such as the G20 Summit in Argentina and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Economic Leaders' Meeting in Papua New Guinea. It negotiated with the United States to ease economic and trade frictions. Its proposals on the reform of the WTO were widely accepted by member economies. All this contributed to safeguarding the multilateral trading system and advancing global trade and investment liberalization.

This year, the aim is to transform China's opening up from a policy-oriented initiative to a rule-based one with an improved legal system and institutional arrangements. The increasingly broadened market access, stricter IPR protection, high-standard liberalization and facilitation of trade, and a transparent and sound legal system will provide the rest of the world greater opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation.

The author is dean of the Institute of International Economy at the University of International Business and Economics.

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors only, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.Despite what you might imagine, Tim Burton has never cared for circuses.

Sure, many of Burtons films  from Pee Wees Big Adventure to Beetlejuice to The Nightmare Before Christmas to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory  have featured the same blend of fantasy, whimsy and visual spectacle one finds under the big top. And, yes, the circus is the setting of his latest movie, a live-action re-imagining of the much-loved 1941 Disney animated film Dumbo that will hit theaters March 29. But actual circuses have never been his thing.

Its funny, but I truly never liked the circus, Burton, 60, said on a recent afternoon, clad from head to toe in black and radiating an impish, hyper-caffeinated vibe. Youve got animals being tortured, youve got death-defying acts, and youve got clowns. Its like a horror show. Whats to like?

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There is one thing Burton does appreciate about the circus, though: the idea that it represents a thrown-together family of oddballs. This idea of feeling weird and wanting to join this mixed family of misfits and weirdos  thats sort of the appeal of it, said Burton, who, over the years, has created his own rotating circus of collaborators, several of whom  including Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito and Eva Green  star in Dumbo. Making films is a dysfunctional family. That was the lure of the circus for me.

While the titular giant-eared flying elephant takes center stage in Burtons Dumbo, now as a CGI creation, the underdog pachyderm is placed in an entirely new story, featuring Colin Farrell as a wounded World War I vet who returns to a struggling circus run by DeVitos ringleader and helps train the baby Dumbo, while Keaton plays a ruthless businessman who tries to exploit the elephants special talents for his own ends. The film is just the latest in a string of live-action remakes of Disney animated hits, including 2017s Beauty and the Beast, 2016s The Jungle Book and 2010s Burton-directed Alice in Wonderland, with The Lion King due this July.

The titular flying elephant in a scene from Disneys Dumbo. (Disney Enterprises, Inc.)

When I heard Tim Burton was doing Dumbo, I thought, What a gorgeous marriage of material and imagination that would be,  said Farrell. For 20-plus years now, Ive been a fan of his. There was an element of wish fulfillment to it. I leapt at the opportunity.

The whole movie is very Tim  he understands the heart of the misunderstood, and Dumbo is the perfect example for that, said Green, who plays a French trapeze artist and has also worked with Burton on 2012s Dark Shadows and 2016s Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children. He was like, Yeah, this is Dumbo, but it cant be too sweet. He still wanted an edge and something real, not rainbows and unicorns and all that.

As a newcomer to Burtons troupe, Farrell was fascinated to watch the director at work. Hes very frenetic, Farrell said. Hes all over the place, and there are a lot of gestures and unfinished sentences. Every cell in his body vibrates with energy. To give birth to the worlds hes given birth to  its a deep well of creative strength and imagination that he draws from.

Having appeared in several of those worlds, Keaton and DeVito have a deep familiarity with Burtons way of working. Both starred in Burtons 1992 superhero sequel Batman Returns, with Keaton as the caped crusader and DeVito as the villainous Penguin. Keaton also played the title character in 1988s Beetlejuice, while DeVito appeared in 1996s Mars Attacks! and 2003s Big Fish.

Along with separate interviews with Farrell and Green, The Times spoke with Burton, Keaton and DeVito about reuniting to re-envision a Disney classic. Despite the more than 25 years that have elapsed since their last collaboration, the three shared an easy, joking rapport, with Burton gently teasing DeVito for having tripped on some stairs at a press conference for the film in Mexico City a few days earlier.

Break a leg, Burton said to the actor, deadpan.

Thank you, DeVito responded with a laugh. I told you I always throw myself at the press.

Actor Michael Keaton (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

What were all of your histories with the original Dumbo? Was it a movie you remember connecting with as a kid?

DeVito: Ive seen it a lot. My sisters took me when it played in theaters when I was a kid in Asbury [Park, N.J.]. We had five movie theaters and they used to re-run all kinds of stuff. Id go to those theaters every weekend. Thats where I first saw Dumbo. Then, of course, I have three grandkids, so, over the course of the years, it became one of their favorites.

Keaton: I didnt have that experience Danny had. I never really knew Dumbo from seeing it. It was just kind of like, Yeah, I know what it is. I grew up seeing movies on television because we lived fairly far from, like, these little mill towns [in Pennsylvania]. To go to Pittsburgh  there was like one car and seven kids, so there was no way.

Burton: I loved it growing up. But you know, I didnt love it necessarily as the best movie  I just loved the idea of it. That idea of a character that is weird and doesnt quite fit in, being taken in by a large family. Dumbo felt like it was for people that feel like that. It was a very simple symbol for all of that.

DeVito: We all have that. I mean, I have it big time. When Id walk into a room, no matter where I was, people would look at me and Id feel very self-conscious. I felt like a very odd creature-y looking kind of person. I wanted to go behind things, not be seen. And, ironically, the thing that really gave me confidence and a whole other outlook on myself was when I got up on stage in front of people and found this thing that I suddenly loved to do. That was my magic feather. So I relate to that in a big way with Dumbo.

Keaton: I always felt like I fit in, and I had a lot of friends. But my friends were as diverse as you could get, therefore, I never felt like I was in a slot and I always felt a little bit outside. Not in a disturbingly bad way, but I think almost everyone has that general feeling.

In a scene from Dumbo, Keatons V.A. Vandevere convinces DeVitos circus owner Max Medici that they can make a star out of Medicis flying elephant. (Disney Enterprises Inc.)

Michael and Danny, in the years since you first worked with Tim, has he changed a lot or is he pretty much still the same guy?

Keaton: Theres definitely a consistency. From the very first time I worked with him, I thought, This guy sees something  I just have to get on his train. However, I will say that what I notice now is hes calmer. Its a huge job, and that undertaking is a lot to put on your shoulders, but it never really felt hectic. And Id forgotten how funny he is.

DeVito: Theres always a certain amount of kinetic artistic energy thats flowing through him. From the beginning, when I met him on Batman Returns, what you noticed is the visual language that he has. I remember his office was filled with these amazing drawings of every character and where he was going with it.

Hanging out with him on the set, I get the feeling that were part of his paintbox. He gives you leeway and you can go various ways to give him what colors he wants. But everybody is serving the master that hes serving. Thats what makes it exciting.

A lot of people probably have an image of Tim as being this tortured, macabre guy based on some of his movies. Batman Returns, for one, is a pretty dark movie. Do you think those people would be surprised to see him making a sweet family-friendly movie like Dumbo?

DeVito: I guess they might be surprised. But I mean, a lot of people get it right away when he walks into the room. Hes jolly and buoyant.

Burton: Can you help me with this? You bring up a point: People said Batman was dark. But, then, half of the people I would talk to about Batman Returns would say it was much darker, and half of them would say its much lighter. Thats one I dont understand. [shrugs] I mean, Im supposed to be the king of darkness, so I should know. But its weird.

The original Dumbo is one of the first Disney movies a lot of kids see because its a very simple sort of fable. But Tim, when I spoke with Eva, she said it was important to you that this version have some edge to it as well.

Burton: Yeah, I mean, its already sweet. You can only take so much cute. Thats the reason I think the original movie is so short.

Thats what I liked about this idea when I was presented with it: it tells a parallel story to Dumbos about this dysfunctional circus family, this guy who comes back from the war whos shellshocked and has lost his arm. Hes displaced. His kids are displaced. Everybody is displaced. And the little flying elephant is the symbol of that.

Actor Danny DeVito (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

When youve done these movies where youre re-imagining an existing property  whether its Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland or now Dumbo  do you approach them differently from an original project like, say, Beetlejuice?

Burton: Definitely. Theres something perverse about these sorts of challenges. But I didnt see this like that. When I was first talking about the idea, it was not about, Oh, were doing all these Disney live-action [remakes]. I just liked the idea of it.

Actually, Dumbo is probably one of the only original [Disney animated] movies that you cant remake. The things everybody I know remembers about Dumbo are all the politically incorrect things. I mean, you cant have him getting wasted [like in the original Pink Elephants on Parade sequence]. Whenever we talked about Dumbo, theres an elephant in the room there, you know what Im saying? [laughs]

So there was a certain liberation to say, You cant really tick all these boxes. Peoples love of it is not tied into something literal. Its tied into a feeling that they got from the movie. So its a different medium, different story, but were trying to have that same feeling.

DeVito: In our new Dumbo, you feel all the values that were in the original movie: all the empathy and all the caring and the idea of trusting yourself and nailing the xenophobia. Tim kept all of that but brought it to another level. Its really great to see that realized.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

josh.rottenberg@latimes.com

Twitter: @joshrottenbergIn one of the most terrifying moments of Jordan Peeles latest horror thriller, Us, now playing in wide release, the Wilson family (played by Lupita Nyongo, Winston Duke and young actors Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex) are confronted by their own menacing doppelgangers in the darkened living room of a Santa Cruz vacation home.

The sequence, which brings the Wilsons face to face with their seemingly nefarious counterparts  known as the Tethered  for the first time, required multiple days of shooting, four body doubles and occasional facial replacement. It would have been a daunting task for the most experienced veteran, let alone two budding stars under the age of 18.

That took about three days, said Joseph during a press day at the London West Hollywood hotel following the films world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. The 13-year-old plays eldest daughter Zora and her counterpart, Umbrae.

Oh yes, said Alex, 10, who plays Zoras younger brother, Jason, and his shadow, Pluto. That was hard. Especially because we were in front of the fire.

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Yeah, the fire was really hot, Joseph agreed. We were crying for a long time; we were dehydrated. It was great, though. The end product was incredible.

What makes that initial confrontation so impressive is the dramatic contrast between the ordinary Wilson family and their murderous counterparts, especially considering that the actors were tasked with playing both roles in the same filming day. Alex called it a challenge.

Sometimes, I had to go into makeup to put in [Plutos burn scars], he said. Wed come back as the bads and we took like five minutes to get in sync with our character.

Right, agreed Joseph. Because it does take a while to really get into character and to really understand him or her. But it was actually a lot of fun. And Jordan really helped us by talking with us.

The director, whose 2017 debut feature Get Out revolutionized black horror and won him a screenplay Oscar, would pull the young actors aside to convey what the scene meant to him, what he wanted to portray and what he wanted the audience to feel, Joseph recalled. So that helped a lot. And it really pulled the team together.

Hes really silly and goofy on set, she added. But he gets into a different zone whenever we had to play our doppelgangers because he knows that we have our own processes for it.

When we were the goods, hed joke around, said Alex. When we were bad, he wouldnt goof around that much. Hed be focused.

The Wilson family, from left: Adelaide (Lupita Nyongo), Jason (Evan Alex), Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Gabe (Winston Duke) are confronted by their seemingly nefarious doubles in Jordan Peeles Us. (Claudette Barius/Universal)

The Wilson family doppelgangers, from left, Abraham (Winston Duke), Umbrae (Shahadi Wright Joseph), Pluto (Evan Alex) and Red (Lupita Nyongo) in Us. (Claudette Barius / Universal Pictures)

REVIEW: The evil is Us in Jordan Peeles smart, relentlessly scary follow-up to Get Out 

After sending in a self-tape, Joseph was invited by Peele to come in for a formal audition. I was like, Oh my God, this is incredible,  she said.

Alex followed a similar audition process, reading for Peele three times before being offered the role. The two actors first met during a chemistry read. Jordan had to pick good actors, Alex said. But if they couldnt work together well, the movie wasnt going to do well.

Working with Oscar-winning actress Nyongo, who plays the Wilson matriarch Adelaide and her shadow (dubbed Red in the films end credits) was as instrumental as working with Peele, Alex said.

She would teach us things and really help us get in the mood when we were working with her. You really got to feel the mood because how she would feel, youd have to feel that way too.

Both Joseph and Alex say they preferred playing the Tethered versions of themselves to the straight-laced Wilsons. Theyre so cool because theyre like, We have trained for years for this day,  said Alex of the Tethered and their master plan. Theyre amazing. Like how their movements were  how fast they could move just to kill their other selves.

RELATED: This is Us: Jordan Peele wants Americans to face their demons in new home-invasion horror film 

Evan Alex, left, and Shahadi Wright Joseph have dual roles to play in Jordan Peeles Us. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Alex, who has performed in over a dozen shorts and a handful of TV series, became interested in acting after his mom encouraged him to perform mini-scripts in exchange for treats.

I didnt even need treats because I already enjoyed doing it, he said. And then we moved to California and thats where my acting career really [started].

By contrast, Joseph got her start in musical theater, appearing in 2016s Hairspray Live! and in the Broadway production of The Lion King before nabbing the role of young Nala in Jon Favreaus upcoming photorealistic animated remake (Beyonce voices her adult counterpart).

Unfortunately, I did not get to meet Beyonce and Donald Glover [who voices Simba], she said. But I hope to. Ill definitely see them, probably, at the premiere and during press stuff. But it was great. I got to work with J.D. McCrary who plays young Simba, so I wasnt totally alone.

Both Joseph and Alex are self-described horror fans, though their film choices belie their young ages. (Born after 2005, they belong to Generation Alpha, or the generation that follows Gen Z.)

I like Halloween  said Alex, referring to last years sequel to the classic 1978 film. Joseph named 2014s The Babadook as her favorite horror movie.

The two are also fans of Peeles directorial feature debut, Get Out, though are careful not to liken that film with this one.

I loved it, said Alex, whose charmingly hyper personality is miles apart from both characters he portrays in the film. It was creepy. I think the creepiest part is when you actually saw brain. It was just so nasty because it was like, ew.

Yeah, it was great, said Joseph. I think its definitely really different because of the theme. Jordan definitely wanted Get Out to be about race and this one definitely isnt.

Instead, the film mostly sidesteps political and social commentary, focusing instead on the duality of the self and the finger-pointing that has intensified in the post-Trump era. Though Joseph has her own ideas about the films latent messages.

The theme is, We are our own worst enemy,  she said. So I think the story really circulates around that. You can definitely see how the Wilsons take simple necessities for granted that the Tethered dont.

sonaiya.kelley@latimes.com

follow me on twitter @sonaiyakIt takes a lot to get bumped off the air at Fox News. Just ask one of the networks star hosts, Tucker Carlson.

Hes still there after calling women extremely primitive and Arabs semiliterate primitive monkeys. And those are tame examples of the unprintable lines from the audio clips  things he said this century  recently unearthed from his run as an occasional guest on the Bubba the Love Sponge Show.

In the age of Trump, Tucker Carlsons ship has come in at Fox News 

The suspension of host Jeanine Pirro over her incendiary remarks about Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, however, may be a sign that the network, like the Republican party, is starting to have some moral qualms about itself. Or at least some nagging concerns about its image.

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Lachlan Murdoch, Ruperts oldest son, this week officially became chairman and CEO of Fox Corp. after the completion of Disneys acquisition of 21st Century Fox. But unlike his father, Lachlan is reportedly not a friend or fan of the Trumps, although he hired Hope Hicks, Trumps former communications director, to be the new companys chief spokeswoman.

While Republicans have largely been in lockstep with Trump, in a dance to distance themselves from the Washington establishment, the news network thats been politely characterized as having a symbiotic relationship with the president of the United States appears to be moving in a decidedly different direction.

Just as Pirros show was whisked off the air, Democratic National Party Chair Donna Brazile made her debut on the network as a regular contributor and it was announced that former House Speaker Paul Ryan, one of the few red-state reps who dared criticize Trump (however mild that criticism was), is now a board member of the freshly minted company Fox Corp.

That doesnt mean Rachel Maddow will soon be replacing Sean Hannity, as amusing as that might be. Lachlan and Fox are conservative through and through, but the network may no longer be comfortable serving as the unofficial media arm of the administration. And that could be as much of a business decision as a philosophical one.

A recent protest outside Fox NYC headquarters during an event for advertisers was led by the liberal-leaning watchdog group Media Matters. The brandished signs read Fox News Is Toxic. The goal was to get advertisers to take their business elsewhere, as protesters marched in front of story-high images of Foxs star personalities.

Many of the hosts whose faces are emblazoned on the side of the networks headquarters have spent two years debunking the Russian collusion witch hunt, special counsel Robert Muellers investigation and the entire FBI.

Tensions peaked throughout the media Friday upon news that Muellers report had been delivered. The impending biggest story of the year, or replay of Al Capones vault, will certainly present challenges inside Fox, where sources have been quoted saying the newsroom wants to put its reporting and journalism front and center.

Hannity and others have breached critical ethical lines between the press and the White House by privately advising the president and even jumping on campaign stages with him.

Pirros commentary is at the top of that list. She was suspended after saying Omar was unpatriotic because she wears a hijab, and that means she honors Sharia law over the Constitution. It was as logical an equation as adding two plus two and coming up with 22.

That sort of bad math didnt appear to rattle Fox before. But less than a week after Pirros loaded commentary, 50 Muslims were killed in two New Zealand mosques by a gunman espousing hate for Muslims and others on social media.

Never have TV viewers seen such contrast in Muslim images after New Zealands attacks 

Her comments had already triggered widespread criticism, and Fox issued a rare apology.

It was a particularly busy week for Trump, who tweeted that Fox should bring Pirro back, then defended Tucker Carlson, then criticized three of the networks news anchors, at least one of whom hadnt apparently been supportive enough of his other tweets attacking the late Sen. John McCain.

The divisions between old school, conservative ideals and reactionary nationalist ideology, and the battle between lifetime career politicians vs. a millionaire heir populist, were on full display as he denigrated the late war hero throughout the week.

Appealing to his bases distrust of the partys political elite, Trump ripped McCain apart in a series of tweets, and later, sound bites. He campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare for years, and then he got to a vote and he said thumbs down. ... I think thats disgraceful, plus there are other things.

McCains daughter Meghan said Monday on ABCs The View that Trump spends his weekends obsessing over great men because he knows he will never be a great man. She also said, My father was his kryptonite in life. Hes his kryptonite in death.

Republican lawmakers remained, for the most part, silent as he desecrated their former friend and colleagues memory. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell avoided locking horns with his leader by releasing a statement highlighting McCains attributes. He was a rare patriot, he tweeted.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, once a close friend of McCains but increasingly a pal of Trumps, released a statement that belied about as much conviction as a wet sponge. I think the presidents comments about Sen. McCain hurt him more than they hurt the legacy of Sen. McCain, Graham said. My job is to represent the people of South Carolina. They want me to work with the president where I can. Ive gotten to know the president. We have a good working relationship. I like him. I dont like it when he says things about my friend John McCain.

Its worth noting both McConnell and Graham are up for re-election in 2020. Its yet to be seen which side of Fox News, or the Republican Party, will be behind them.

lorraine.ali@latimes.com

@lorrainealiAfter the run of major fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan and Paris, L.A.s twice-yearly slate of runway shows and presentations  loosely clustered around the market-week calendar  tends to suffer by comparison. However, the City of Angels has always had an A-list roster of influential folks to help define  and more important, export  Los Angeles style to the rest of the world. To be sure, its an ever-changing list (exhibit A: our picks from a decade ago), but the style icons below have recently demonstrated  in their own way  the ability to capture, reflect, channel or otherwise leverage the slippery beast that is L.A. style and bolster Southern Californias fashion bona fides to the world.

The muse

Wear LACMA founder and re:la co-founder Katherine Ross at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles on March 19, 2019. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles TImes)

For the record: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified one of stylist Ilaria Urbinatis collaborative partners. It is the Muay Thai-inspired brand Roots of Fight, not Roots of Flight.

Katherine Ross, whose fashion-focused background includes public relations and communications stints at Prada and LVMH, has worked to leverage L.A.-centric style on two fronts. Her longer-running project is the Wear LACMA program that taps local design talent to create limited-edition apparel and accessories inspired by pieces in the permanent holdings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Ross husband, Michael Govan, has been the director since 2006. For seven years, the art-meets-fashion mash-up has featured creations from Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, Libertines Johnson Hartig, Lisa Eisner, Oliver Peoples, the Elder Statesmans Greg Chait and many more.

Her second  and more recent  effort was the early 2018 launch (with co-founder Angelique Soave) of re:la (as in regarding Los Angeles), a line of upscale T-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets and accessories that pays homage to Los Angeles by showcasing quotes from some of the cultural creatives whove made the city their home, including artist David Hockney (California is always on my mind is one of several featured quotes) and director Werner Herzog (Things actually get done in Los Angeles. Look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and a wild excitement of intense dreams opens up; it has more horizons than any other place.)

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The sustainable standouts

John Moore, left, and Kelly Slater at a 2015 launch event for their sustainable surf-inspired label Outerknown. At right, a pair of 100% nylon, completely recyclable board shorts ($98), part of the brands latest collaboration with Levi Strauss & Co. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times (left), Levi Strauss & Co. (right))

When world champion surfer Kelly Slater and creative director John Moore launched their Culver City-based Outerknown label in 2015, they vowed to build their surfing-inspired, eco-conscious menswear label slowly and transparently, determined to work out the kinks in the supply chain on the fly. Now, four years later, their sustainability-meets-style long game is paying off handsomely  and showing that its not impossible to plot a planet-friendly path forward. Look for brand awareness to rise (hopefully faster than sea levels) this spring thanks to the addition of womens offerings (a 17-piece collection of tops, dresses and bottoms 100% made from organic, recycled and/or regenerated fibers) as well as a collaboration with Levi Strauss & Co. that blends cotton with rain-fed hemp to decrease the amount of irrigation water used.

However, 2019 may be the year Outerknown becomes best known as the label that helped Levis close the recyclability loop. The partnership has rolled out a pair of $98 board shorts that, because theyre 100% nylon (including eyelets and stitching), can be completely recycled.

The ambassador

At left, designer and freshly minted CFDA chairman Tom Ford at the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar party on Feb. 24, 2019. At right, looks from his fall and winter 2019 runway collection presented on Feb. 6, 2019, during New York Fashion Week. (Frazer Harrison / Getty Images (left), Johannes Eisele / AFP Getty Images (right))

Although Tom Ford isnt originally from L.A.  hardly a disqualification  the Texas-born fashion designer, screenwriter and director of two Oscar-nominated movies (2009s A Single Man and 2016s Nocturnal Animals) is one of the rare high-profile, high-glamour designers living and working here. (In December 2016 he bought the estate of late socialite Betsy Bloomingdale; and the following year he moved his womens design headquarters to L.A.) Throw in that he dresses James Bond for the big screen, that his February 2015 runway show here single-handedly touched off rumors of a reinvigorated L.A. Fashion Week and Tuesdays announcement that hes succeeding Diane von Furstenberg as chairman of the New York-based Council of Fashion Designers of America, and youd have to look long and hard to find a better ambassador of L.A. luxe.

The mini-influencer

Barbies dolled up in Juicy Couture in 2004 (at left) and the Gigi Hadid Barbie and a 2017 Barbie kitted out in Tommy Hilfiger in 2017. (Mattel Inc.)

Who needs L.A. fashion week? Not these designers 

Sure, Barbara Millicent Roberts, better known as Barbie, may have first dipped her super-teeny toes into our collective consciousness at the New York Toy Fair 60 years ago this month, but she had a (small) hand in representing SoCal style to the rest of the world long before the sisters Hilton, Kardashian or Hadid were on the scene. Thats thanks to her Malibu Dreamhouse and myriad fashion collaborations over the years that helped put L.A.-born and based brands and designers like Juicy Couture, Rodarte, Trina Turk, Paul Frank, Tarina Tarantino and legendary costume designer Bob Mackie in front of future shoppers. She also had a collaboration with Moschino, whose creative director is L.A.-based designer Jeremy Scott. With a rumored live-action Barbie movie (with Margot Robbie attached) on the horizon, its a safe bet that the pint-size princess in pink  whose home base is technically El Segundo (where parent company Mattel is based)  will continue to represent an idealized version of L.A. style to the world.

The company store

Exterior and interior views of the Fred Segal flagship circa its 2017 opening. (Fred Segal)

There are nearly as many boutiques curating the L.A. aesthetic as there are neighborhoods and miles of freeway to traverse, but only one name has become nearly synonymous with SoCal cool: Fred Segal, which dates to the 1960s. The current majority stakeholder of the brand (worldwide rights to the Fred Segal name were sold in 2012) is Evolution Media Capital. It is determined to export the Los Angeles fashion experience  ivy-covered walls and iconic red, white and blue logo and all  around the globe. There are outposts as far afield as Taipei, Zurich and Kuala Lumpur and as near as the Tom Bradley terminal of LAX and Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The last of those, a 13,000-square-foot flagship, bowed in late 2017 and has prided itself on trying to recreate the meandering retail experience of its namesake shopping centers (the two original Fred Segal centers are no more, though the ivy walls and signs remain at the intersection of Melrose Avenue and Crescent Heights Boulevard). Its also worked hard to showcase hometown brands that have included George Esquivel, Libertine, Wolk Morais, Staud and Simon Miller.

Next up? Thatd be the retailers return to Malibu; a 4,000-square-foot boutique is scheduled to open in the former Malibu Cinemas space at 3822 Cross Creek Road on April 6.

The king and queen of L.A. cool

Union co-owner Chris Gibbs and wife Beth Birkett, creator of the line Bephie, in Union on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

Chris Gibbs and his wife, Beth Birkett, (along with their kids and dog) were anointed the first family of streetwear in the March issue of GQ, but as any tuned-in Angeleno will tell you, thats old news. After all, Gibbs has been the co-owner of the store Union on La Brea Avenue since 2008, helping make it an indispensable stop on the global menswear shopping circuit. Though Gibbs is Canadian by birth and cut his teeth in New York, his point of view on style has developed into something distinctly Californian: relaxed, playful, funky  an effortless type of cool thats never self-serious or, God forbid, formal.

Now, as the rest of the fashion world embraces the aesthetics of skate, surf, and streetwear  effectively taking SoCal style to the highest rungs of the luxury sector  Union, with its mash-up of graphic T-shirts, hippie-inflected frontier wear and conceptually leaning European designs, suddenly looks prophetic in its vision of how men dress. In true L.A. style, Gibbs intuited the quickly evaporating boundaries between the high-end and the casual and made that the guiding principal of his store. Unions racks seem to whisper: No rules apply here. Today, Gibbs has his own in-house label, while Birkett designs the earthy and Afrocentric line Bephie. Brands clamor to be stocked on Unions shelves  its the ultimate seal of approval  while others are lucky enough to make products in collaboration with the store.

In a world dominated by chain stores, corporate conglomerates and fast fashion, Union, with its one diminutive storefront, may seem small, but theres no denying that its influence looms large.  Max Berlinger

The image-maker

Fashion stylist Ilaria Urbinati in her Los Angeles studio, at left, and client Rami Malek on the 2019 Academy Awards red carpet in Saint Laurent. (Brinson+Banks / Washington Post (left), Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times (right))

If youre an A-list actor who has graced a best-dressed list in the past few years, chances are it was Ilaria Urbinati who helped get you there. The super-stylist has long held a powerful place in the pantheon of behind-the-scenes image-makers, and shes already having a banner year: She landed at No. 2 on the Hollywood Reporters annual ranking of the citys most powerful stylists, was given a glowing profile in the Washington Post, and then, to top it all off, she dressed Rami Malek (in Saint Laurent) for his Academy Award win last month.

In addition to Malek, Urbinatis star-studded roster includes Bradley Cooper, Donald Glover, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Ben Affleck and Armie Hammer. Her own high-flying career is a reflection of two industry trends: that of the stylist as a celebrity in his or her own right and the recent explosion of and fascination with mens style that has yielded a new generation of fashion-forward guys unafraid to flex their sartorial might on red carpets across L.A.

Lately Urbinati, who was honored with the style curator award at Daily Front Rows Fashion L.A. Awards on Sunday, has been stepping out from behind her clients, parlaying her insider influence into a variety of side projects, including starring in a Walmart commercial shown during the Super Bowl, collaborating with the tailoring brand Strong Suit, and, more recently, designing a very on-trend souvenir jacket with the Muay Thai-inspired brand Roots of Fight. Keep in mind that the next time you see a leading man with great style, Urbinati probably had a hand in it.  Max Berlinger

The streetwear savant

Designer John Elliott at the finale of his fall and winter 2019 runway show on Feb. 9, 2019, during New York Fashion Week. (JP Yim / Getty Images)

John Elliotts spring 2019 show may have been shown in New York, but it was undeniably a love letter to Los Angeles, where the designer is based. Under the blazing sun in a skate park with new Angeleno (and Laker) LeBron James sitting front row, he sent out a collection that was equal parts Venice Beach surf rat, Silver Lake hipster and Hollywood swagger.

No surprise there. Since launching in 2013, Elliott has taken California style  laid-back, sporty, functional, elegant yet effortless, and undeniably cool  and distilled it to its essence, creating a wardrobe that reflects the nuanced and rapidly evolving lifestyle scene around him. So much so that in 2014 he was named best new menswear designer by GQ. He helped define the new line-up status items (a perfectly worn-in sweatshirt; slim, distressed jeans; a slouchy hoodie; a supple leather jacket; and a long-line T-shirt) and created a modern paradigm of power dressing that is undoubtedly inspired by the contrast of grit and insouciance native to the City of Angels.

If you need proof of his status, just look to his collaborations with Nike, the worlds biggest sportswear brand, and James, the NBAs top-ranking athlete, on a sneaker collaboration that sent the internet into a feeding frenzy. Fans include a whos who of modern-day style stars like Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake and, of course, James, proving just how influential Elliotts imprint has become. In a world where casual dressing rules, Elliott not only led the way but created a new language for fashion while he did it.  Max Berlinger

The blue gurus

READ MORE: Who needs L.A. fashion week? Not these designers 

Lela Becker and Tim Kaeding, founders of Mother Denim. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Designer Tim Kaeding has been at the helm of several brands that defined the premium denim market in Los Angeles, including 7 For All Mankind, where he was a former creative director, and as womens denim designer at Gap. In 2010, Kaeding and his business partner Lela Becker co-founded Mother, a denim and lifestyle line that harnesses the free-spirited, 1970s-tinged nostalgia of L.A. With a cheeky and irreverent attitude found in each collection, the Mother line exports the dreamy, sun-drenched vibe of the city thats so attractive to the rest of the world.

Case in point: Mother has a massive fan following in Europe and Asia. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex; Emma Roberts; Kate Moss; Alessandra Ambrosio; and Miranda Kerr (with whom the label did a collaboration in 2017) are well-known fans of Mother.

A little disco, a little rock n roll and with plenty of vintage California references, Mother has managed to evolve what denim from L.A. looks like and how relevant the city is not just when it comes to jeans but with contemporary clothing in general. Expanding its offerings in recent years, Mother debuted a gender-neutral collection called Love Your Other in 2016 that featured 10 pieces, including graphic T-shirts, sweatshirts, jeans and a flight suit. And last year, Mother launched a mens line that carries the same California-inspired aesthetic as the labels womens collection.  Melissa Magsaysay

The house band

Beck performs at the 2018 LACMA Art + Film Gala honoring Catherine Opie and Guillermo del Toro on Nov. 3, 2018. (Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images)

Beck  yes, he of Loser and Devils Haircut fame  might not seem like the most logical booster of L.A.s fashion bona fides, but he has done precisely that by performing at some of the citys most memorable fashion moments of the last few years. Chief among them: kicking off the after-party of Hedi Slimanes penultimate runway show for Saint Laurent at the Palladium in February 2016 (Hedi asked us to come down and make some noisy music, he told the crowd) and closing out the Gucci-sponsored LACMA Art + Film Gala last November (backed by Dave Grohl on the drums, no less), where he performed clad in a dark blue velvet, one-button, peak-lapel GG-logo jacket and purple crepe de chine blouse from the Italian luxury labels pre-fall 2018 runway collection.

When he closed the night with Where Its At, it felt like hed stuck a pushpin into L.A., marking it as a city that celebrates style on its own timetable and in its own way.

Photo credits for lead image collage: Top row, clockwise from left: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times, Jon Kopaloff / Getty Images, Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times, Frazer Harrison / Getty Images, Yuchen Liao / Getty Images. Bottom row, clockwise from left: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times, Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times, Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times, Fred Segal and Mattel Inc.

adam.tschorn@latimes.com

For more musings on all things fashion and style, follow me at @ARTschornThe fashion designer Zoe Latta seeks inspiration at Los Angeles gas stations, where people from all walks of life emerge from their cars. Ive seen some obscene looks in L.A. gas stations, like six-inch stilettos with sweat pants, the co-designer of Eckhaus Latta says with an enthusiasm that makes a compliment of obscene.

Eckhaus Latta is known for quirky luxe knitwear thats made in L.A., the city primarily responsible for the labels anything-goes attitude, Latta says. She moved five years ago from New York. Her design partner Mike Eckhaus remained in New York, where the label shows on that citys runways, most recently in Brooklyns Bushwick neighborhood. Their sales showroom is in Paris.



For the record: An earlier version of this story said the Los Angeles Fashion Week events at Petersen would start March 25. They are being held March 22 to 24.

That multi-city approach is common to a growing number of labels that are created in and around Los Angeles. Designed in L.A. by people who have largely arrived from elsewhere, a cornucopia of brands are broadening L.A.s fashion ethos from its famous focus on denim and surf wear into something akin to the eclectic styles that tribes of Angelenos wear in their daily lives.

READ MORE: Meet the power players shaping L.A.'s fashion future 

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L.A.s stature is rising with many of these new entrants  the latest of whom is the artist Sterling Ruby, who last week announced his own new ready to wear line, S.R. Studio. LA. CA. Also this week, the Council of Fashion Designers of America announced that its short list of nominees for Menswear Designer of the Year includes Mike Amiri of the L.A. label Amiri, whose backwoods-rough look has an air of Carhartt-meets-Saint-Laurent.

Los Angeles artist Sterling Ruby has just announced he is starting a ready-to-wear fashion line. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Ask someone to describe what Los Angeles style is all about, and, these days, theres no telling what theyll say. It might be more sensible to describe style by the neighborhoods that define L.A.s subculture: Brentwood conjures daytime yoga looks, while Venice Beach is the epitome of the original surf and denim look. High-powered Hollywood agents at CAA strut about in Tom Ford suits, while Beverly Hills brides wear Monique Lhuillier gowns. Skate culture kids don Fear of God or Palm Angels on Fairfax Avenue, while art enthusiasts wander Little Tokyo in Jeremy Scott, and starlets on red carpets pose in Rodarte gowns that were designed in Pasadena and sewn near downtown L.A.

If L.A. owns any aspect of fashion, its a casual, comfort-driven approach to even the most formal occasions and an attempt to look careless even when great care is involved.

Cocktail attire and black tie invite a totally different interpretation here; black tie may not even require a tie at all, says Gretchen Pace, general manager of Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. Denim goes everywhere and with everything. Even when there is considerable effort involved, L.A. style aspires to appear chic, effortless and unexpected.

Eckhaus Latta designers Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus. (Fernando Leon)

Fueled by the citys reemergence as a center of contemporary art, music, and food, the L.A. fashion scene is presenting an alternative to New York  albeit lacking the runways that have traditionally driven the industry there. For years, competing groups have tried to jumpstart versions of an L.A. fashion week without great success. This season, Arthur Chipman, an independent show producer who formerly organized fashion shows in Toronto and Vancouver, will have several evenings of fall 2019 L.A. Fashion Week shows beginning Friday at the Petersen Automotive Museum  a location that Chipman feels is just right in a city known for its love of the automobile.

When I first got here, everyone was calling themselves Los Angeles Fashion Week, says Chipman, who began producing the shows three years ago. He acquired the legal trademark for the week, but  highlighting the challenges of establishing a fashion week in this multifarious city  he hasnt managed to buy the domain LAFW.com. That belongs to the Los Angeles Food and Wine Festival, a five-day epicurean showcase that takes place in August.

Chipman is attempting to harness the power of the social-media influencers and Hollywood stylists who have been raising L.A.s stature on the world fashion map. Stylists have more power here than the major department stores, the producer says. I dont like to compare fashion weeks because I think thats a little tacky, but I really want L.A. Fashion Week to be L.A.-esque.

Yet only about half the brands showing actually hail from L.A.; the rest are seeking exposure to the citys influential stylists and residents. Naeem Khan, from New York, will be the headliner.

I think in L.A, theres a tolerance thats a plus for me, says designer Peter Cohen, a South African native who moved to Los Angeles in 1983. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles-based fashion designers mostly dont feel they need a catwalk in the city that inspires their form of art. If they show on runways at all  and many dont  they mainly choose New York, Paris or Milan. Those are crowded, well-organized fashion weeks that better capture the attention of media and retailers from around the globe.

Ben Taverniti showed his fall 2019 collection for Unravel Project  a streetwear label that applies many of the fabric processes of the denim industry to unusual fabrics such as silks and nylon  at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in February. The collection was a cross section of L.A. street style and Parisian street chic  a beige trench coat with a wide vertical yellow plaid stripe worn with cropped snake-print trousers, for instance. The label owes its lightning growth to Los Angeles, where Taverniti and his wife, Joyce Bonelli Taverniti  a former makeup artist for the socially astute Kardashians  live and work.

Im French  I went to fashion school in Paris, Taverniti says. Ive had this L.A. dream since I was a kid. In Los Angeles, he discovered a relaxed, open-minded ethos that contrasted with the more rigid French rules to which he was accustomed. Moving to L.A. was like breaking free, Taverniti says.

It was also a springboard to high-profile personalities that helped publicize his work, with the help of his extroverted wife and business partner. I would just say to stylists, come by, have some wine. And Id put a jacket on them. Then, theyd feel the garment, says Bonelli Taverniti, whose marketing instincts are sharp. It was just like a machine that took off  a little too fast for us.

Steady work with the performing artists who surround them offers priceless exposure. Were working with someone right now  its a little early to say it  Taverniti says.

Ill say it, Bonelli Taverniti interjects: Ariana Grande.

Dont say it. No, says Taverniti.

A few days later, Grande appeared in a gathered tangerine skirt and matching boots by Unravel on her Sweetener world tour, in Albany, N.Y.

Im French  I went to fashion school in Paris, says designer Ben Taverniti, working in his Hermosa Beach studio with design assistant Vanessa Casino. Ive had this L.A. dream since I was a kid. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

To help with the growth, Unravel took on a financial backer with the means to produce in Italy and for that Paris show. The backer, Milan-based New Guards Group, also backs Off-White and the L.A.-skater-based Palm Angels label. There are more European connections arising each year. An Italian fabric mill Taverniti has worked with now has a laundry laboratory in Los Angeles.

Taverniti had a tricky transition from L.A. production to the expert Italian factories that now manufacture his collection. In L.A., he had begun to break the rules of tailoring  stretching out the necks of garments, making one sleeve longer than the other. He sent his painstakingly made patterns to Milan to be turned into sample garments. But the samples came back with sleeves measured evenly, necks shortened. They thought I made a mistake, he says.

Peter Cohen, a designer who arrived in L.A. in 1983 from his native South Africa  after a two-year stint in New York  takes an opposite approach: He dispenses with runways entirely. Its a wonderful fiction, that world. Its beautiful, he says, but designing from a runway perspective would be distracting to his minimal approach. Clothes for me are intimate objects, how they feel, how they breathe, how they fit, he says. They reveal themselves over time. Theyre not about imposing impact  they work in peoples lives.

Californias lenient mien gave him the time to get established in the 1980s, Cohen says. New York was either you made it in the first few collections or you were out.

I think, in L.A., theres a tolerance thats a plus for me, he notes. His early androgynous collections drew raves from American Vogue and Harpers Bazaar. His first wholesale account was San Franciscos Wilkes Bashford. Today, Cohens eponymous label is sold at independent stores around the world. His shop-in-shop at Dallas Stanley Korshak sits opposite Brunello Cucinelli, and his collections are a fixture at Savannah in Santa Monica and Amarees in Newport Beach. His wholesale showroom is in New York, and he sells in Paris to reach stores globally that dont buy in New York.

The model Angelica Delli poses in one of Peter Cohens designs in his Los Angeles studio. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles offers Cohen an advantage that he couldnt afford in the biggest fashion cities  his own factory, where 30 longtime employees produce his collections on Washington Boulevard near the Underground Museum. They represent a tiny fraction of the 97,000 apparel and textile workers in Southern California that reported income on W-2 tax forms, according to the California Fashion Assn., whose offices are in Los Angeles downtown garment center on Flower Street. Thats about twice the 47,000 in New York.

Having a dedicated factory close at hand is a luxury that few designers outside of Milan and Paris know. Im a very hands-on designer  it lets me make clothes in a way I know, which is not to send specs to some factory, Cohen says.

Even more hands on these days is Tracy Feith  a onetime favorite of Michelle Obama whose 20 years in New York saw him own six stores in New York and L.A. until the financial crisis forced him to shut down and retreat. He moved to Los Angeles nine years ago and took a gig leading design at Toms footwear, then went on to develop the L.A. brand Warm. When that contract was up, he sewed a pretty dress at home in Beachwood Canyon  a frothy short prairie-style dress with full sleeves  and posted it to his Instagram account. He received eight orders for the $795 dress in two hours.That was the birth of Feith Club, the label he designs from home  sewing his own samples  and manufactures in downtown L.A. He has no website, though hes thinking about working toward one, and sells almost entirely through Instagram direct messaging. (Customers come from as far away as Latvia.) Occasionally, itll progress to email, he says.

Feith Clubs concept is like an underground society, Feith says. Everything is made in limited editions, and while certain styles come back, they return in different fabrics and details. Prices range from $175 for a sweatshirt to $1,395 for some of the feminine dresses for which he is best known.

Designer Tracy Feith at work at his home in Beachwood Canyon. Several years ago, he created a frothy prairie-style dress and posted it to his Instagram account. He received eight orders for the $795 dress in two hours. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

When I was starting, if you were in America and wanted to be taken seriously in fashion, you couldnt live anywhere other than New York, Feith says. Now a designer doesnt have to live in New York to be taken seriously.

Zoe Latta, of Eckhaus Latta, says she moved from New York to L.A. for better access to the knitwear factories that have become essential to the label. She quickly realized that living in the city was having an impact on her designs  seasonality seemed less important, for instance, and a sense of humor about clothes emerged.

Theres that certain je ne sais quoi attitude that comes from a lot of good weather, an acceptance that a comfortable lifestyle is an admirable life goal, and the maker mentality that originally gave birth to Hollywood and has been drawing people ever since. L.A., after all, doesnt take itself so seriously.

L.A. is camp, Latta says. Not intentionally camp, but it is camp.With birria filling every other bowl in L.A. these days, that other beloved weekend staple, menudo, must be feeling about as relevant as Ricky Martins old band right now.

But a new Compton food stand named Mr. Menudo Oficial could change all that.

Owner Roger Mendez launched the business in mid-February, setting up every Saturday and Sunday morning along a street food-rich stretch of Atlantic Avenue.

His aim? To upgrade Mexicos customary hangover cure of beef tripe soup.

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His secret weapon? His father, Joel, who ran operations and handled the lions share of the cooking at East L.A. legend Juanitos Tamales for over 25 years.

Joel Mendez, right, enjoys a light moment with customers at his Mr. Menudo pop-up stand. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

He was the main guy, Roger Mendez says.

After the death of its namesake, Mendez parted ways with Juanitos to pursue construction work. This was long before 2017, the year Juanitos closing would leave a gaping, tamal-shaped hole in the heart of the citys tamale scene, according to L.A. Times critic Jonathan Gold.

Now Joel is back with the menudo recipe he first began absorbing at his grandmothers side in General Panfilo Natera, Zacatecas, then honed at a taqueria in Aguascalientes, and later perfected at Juanitos.

A fresh bowl of menudo is ready to be eaten at the Mr. Menudo pop-up stand in Compton. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

I wanted to bring quality food to the community, Roger says. Not many people make menudo like this and I knew my dad had the talent. I knew it was something that makes him very happy too.

The younger Mendez says he sources the highest available grade of fresh, never-frozen veal tripe from a cooperative of Fresno-based farms that keeps the young cattle untethered and pen-free.

Utilizing past skills as a butcher, he spends two to three hours cleaning and trimming the tripe, a mix of the first three stomach chambers of a cow.

Pobres Tacos is poor in name only  just take a bite of that rich quesabirria 

The overall cooking process of the menudo can take anywhere from 6 to 10 hours, including the addition of a cows foot and beef tendon a few hours into the process. Later, blended chiles rojos and sun-dried guajillos imported from Zacatecas are introduced. The final product then sits overnight to develop deeper flavors.

The end result is a fluorescent orange soup brimming with substantial cuts of springy, tender meat; a pearly jumble of honeycombs, smooth strips and spiny tongues of tripe.

Roger Mendez and his father, Joel. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

If too many local bowls of menudo appear rife with stringy viscera, heavy odors or a sticky excess of collagen, a serving at Mr. Menudo is superlative; more meat than broth, which is conspicuously clean, light and focused in its flavors; balanced in its kick.

Hominy is offered as a mix-in and large, coarse tortillas are served on the side. You can customize your menudo with oregano, cilantro, onion, lime, chile flakes and the fierce, ground chile called chiltepin imported from Mocorito, Sinaloa.

Come holiday time, Mendez says you can expect the appearance of tamales that begin with an in-house nixtamalization, including the return of Juanitos red pork and green tomatillo chicken tamales.

Review: At Teddys Red Tacos, Tijuana-style birria takes its place in the beef canon 

Currently, Mr. Menudo Oficial is taking off with the neighborhood, often selling out by noon. Mendez, who hopes to develop additional locations in the future, thinks the food has broader appeal, particularly in L.A.

Anybody could like this menudo, he says. It tastes like youre at home eating food that grandma and mom makes. Not restaurant-made menudo. Its hard to find that anywhere.

15323 Atlantic Ave., Compton, (323) 448-6894, www.instagram.com/mr.menudoficial/As you know from your poppy-populated Instagram feed, Los Angeles has been in the grips of super bloom mania for the last few weeks.

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, currently experiencing a top-notch wildflower season, is one of the most popular destinations in Southern California for super-bloom-seeking crowds. Around three hours from Los Angeles, its also a bit of a trek and youre bound to get hungry.

Where to find the super blooms in Southern California 

Lucky for you, there are no shortage of restaurants, bars and bakeries along the way to try. Heres where to stop on your drive:

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The pork BBQ short rib at Kra Z Kais Laotian barbecue restaurant on Wednesday, February 13, 2019. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

Kra Z Kais: As Times restaurant critic Patricia Escarcega noted in her February review, this is (probably) the only Laotian barbecue spot in Southern California. The small counter-service restaurant, situated at the edge of a strip mall, specializes in Laotian-style barbecued meats. Escarcega recommends ordering dishes such as the Laotian sausage, papaya salad, beef dip and barbecue chicken. After a long day of wildflower hunting, youre going to need some protein.

Kra Z Kais, 1218 Magnolia Ave., #110, Corona, (951) 268-6968 instagram.com/kra_z_kais_bbq/

Oak Mountain Winery: Whats more quintessentially Californian than the California poppy? California wine. Oak Mountain Winery, just a 10-minute detour off Highway 79, serves wines grown and produced in Temecula. Stop by before 5 p.m. for a hard-earned post-hike wine tasting. Or schedule a tour of the winerys caves, the first of their kind in Temecula.

Oak Mountain Winery, 36522 Via Verde Road, Temecula, 951-699-9102, oakmountainwinery.com

Yes, you still have time to see the super bloom  if you know where to go 

Padua Pasta Makers: Passing by Upland on your way down to the wildflowers? Padua Pasta Makers is known for its freshly made pasta but also offers boxed lunches that include a sandwich, side dish, pickle and chocolate hazelnut truffle for dessert. Between the drive and the inevitable crowds, its bound to be a long day. Having lunch ready to go will help. (Hat tip to Daily Bulletin reporter David Allen  Escarcega passed along his recommendation.)

Padua Pasta Makers, 300 E Arrow Hwy, Upland, (909) 985-4900 paduapastamakers.com

The Mission Inn: After a day spent in the great outdoors, battling the selfie-obsessed hordes it attracts, youre going to need a drink. Up for a slight detour to Riverside? In 2011, Jonathan Gold listed the Reagan Martini at the Mission Inns Presidential Lounge in a roundup of L.A.'s Best Cocktails for L.A. Weekly, calling it as strong, undiluted and unpalatable as the man himself. With a long day in the wildflowers and a few Reagan Martinis under your belt, you might want to book a room for the night. Trust us on this one.

The Mission Inn, 3649 Mission Inn Avenue, Riverside, (951) 784-0300 missioninn.comGale Holland covers homelessness and poverty for the Los Angeles Times. Starting in 2005, she edited the cops and courts beat, wrote news columns and covered higher education. A series about college construction abuses that she wrote with Michael Finnegan won a 2012 investigative reporting award from the Nieman Foundation. A Los Angeles native, she has worked for USA Today, Copley News and L.A. Weekly and wants to understand the consequences of urban inequality. Flash

Brazil's former President Michel Temer was arrested on Thursday in a corruption investigation, according to local media.

The arrest was ordered by Judge Marcelo Bretas, who is in charge of the Operation Car Wash investigations on corruption in the government.

Seven others were arrested, including Moreira Franco, who served as minister of Mines and Energy in the Temer government and retired Colonel Joao Baptista Lima Filho, a close friend of Temer.

The former president has been mentioned in several different cases of corruption, but was arrested for a particular case of bribe-taking.

He is accused of taking 1 million reals (about 262,000 U.S. dollars) in bribes from construction company Engevix, in exchange for favoring the company in a contract with nuclear power plant Angra 3.

Franco and Lima are accused of having acted as middlemen in the case.

According to the prosecution office, participants of the scheme, including Temer, committed crimes of corruption, embezzlement and money laundering, which involved other companies and governmental contracts as well.

Temer is "the head of a criminal organization" which has been active in Rio for decades, said Judge Bretas.

Temer, the predecessor of current President Jair Bolsonaro, left office last year. He is the second Brazilian president that has been arrested for corruption, following Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is currently serving a 12-year-and-one-month prison sentence for corruption and money laundering.A Native American tribe has given the city of Lake Elsinore a grant of up to $100,000 to help handle crowds drawn to the areas super bloom of wildflowers.

The gift comes on the heels of the citys announcement of new crowd control measures that will be put in place this weekend.

Lake Elsinore officials can use the money from the Pechanga Tribal Council for increased law enforcement or other safety personnel, traffic control and shuttle services, said Nicole Dailey, the assistant to the city manager.

It gives us the ability to continue to implement these measures for the next few weeks and will help cover some of our costs not recovered by the shuttle rides, she said.

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Following a miserable and unbearable weekend, during which 50,000 to 100,000 people visited Walker Canyon to see the blooms each day, Lake Elsinore officials shut down access to the canyon Sunday evening and again Tuesday afternoon after officials ran thin on resources.

Where to find the super blooms in Southern California 

The chaos has prompted many to wonder whether tourists can behave enough to leave a little beauty behind for the next guests. Lake Elsinore Mayor Steve Manos, optimistic that the city could handle the influx of visitors and excited about the increased revenue for local businesses, scrambled to come up with a better plan.

On Thursday morning, the city announced that access to Walker Canyon would be closed and all visitors traveling to see the blooms would have to pay $10 for a shuttle service. Residents would be allowed through on some local roads after many were denied access to their homes last weekend.

Pechanga Tribal Chairman Mark Macarro said Lake Elsinore is part of the tribes ancestral territory, and the group felt a responsibility to help preserve the areas natural beauty.

This natural wonder is a treasure to be enjoyed by Californians, but we need to be responsible about it, Macarro said in a statement. Conservation and protection of our natural resources are important values to our tribe.

alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com

Twitter: @r_valejandraA 26-year-old man was arrested early Saturday on suspicion of shooting another man at a Metro Red Line station in East Hollywood, the same station where a woman was reportedly raped earlier this month, police said.

The shooting occurred about 1 a.m at the subway station at the intersection of Vermont Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, said Officer Sal Ramirez, an LAPD spokesman.

The 45-year-old victim was taken to a local hospital, where he was listed in stable condition, Ramirez said.

No other details were immediately available.

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Meanwhile, police are still looking for a suspect who allegedly raped a woman recently at the same Metro station.

Police said the woman, who is in her 60s, asked the suspect for directions around 6 p.m. March 14 before he lured her into a secluded emergency exit stairwell at the station. The man then choked, punched and sexually assaulted the woman.

An LAPD release described the man as a transient who has been seen in Santa Monica and may frequent the Compton area. He is described as being between 5-foot-7 and 5-foot-10 and weighing 165 to 180 pounds. He has a shaved head, wears an earring in his right ear and has a 2- to 3-inch scar on his left forearm, police said.

The stations emergency exit stairwell is required to remain open for public safety and is patrolled regularly by security personnel, Metro spokesman Brian Haas said Friday. Metro and the Los Angeles Police Department are reviewing video surveillance footage to help in the investigation.

Metro extends its sincere condolences to the victim in this case, Haas said in an email. We have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual assault on the Metro system, and we will continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners to ensure the suspect is arrested for this crime.

Anyone with information can contact Det. Rodriguez at (323) 561-3328. During non-business hours or on weekends, calls should be directed to (877) 527-3247.

Those wishing to remain anonymous should call Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-8477.

javier.panzar@latimes.com

Twitter: @jpanzarThe cost of imprisoning each of Californias 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year

A guard watches prisoners being escorted across the yard at San Quentin State Prison. Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

More than tuition at Harvard University

Thats enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer

Gov. Jerry Browns spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates.

California State Prison in Corcoran. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

Cost per prisoner has doubled since 2005

The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase.

The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nations highest  and $2,000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard.

Since 2015, Californias per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13%. New York is a distant second in overall costs at about $69,000.

Critics say with fewer inmates, the costs should be falling.

Now that were incarcerating less, we havent ramped the system back down, said Chris Hoene, executive director of the left-leaning California Budget & Policy Center.

For example, the corrections department has one employee for every two inmates, compared with one employee for roughly every four inmates in 1994.

Costs rising even as prison population declines

California was sued over prison overcrowding, and to comply with a federal court-imposed population cap, the Brown administration now keeps most lower-level offenders in county jails instead of state prisons. Additionally, voters in 2014 reduced penalties for drug and property crimes and last fall approved the earlier releases.

State Sen. Jim Nielsen (R-Gerber) said reformers falsely promised a prison dividend from savings related to the changes. Instead, theres now an uptick in many crimes and hes worried it will lead to an influx of new inmates that will cost more to house.

Joan Petersilia, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, said it was highly predictable that per-inmate costs would increase even as the population decreased.

We released all the low-risk, kind of low-need, and we kept in the high-risk, high-need, she said.

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'I took someones life  now I am giving back': In California's prisons, inmates teach each other how to start overMississippi on Thursday became the latest state to sign into law a ban on most abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, usually about six weeks into pregnancy, despite criticism from opponents who called the move cruel.

Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed Senate Bill 2116 at the state Capitol in Jackson less than a week after a similar ban was passed in Kentucky, forcing workers at that states only abortion clinic to call patients to cancel appointments before the clinics lawyers were able to temporarily block the law. Two months ago, a state court struck down an abortion law in Iowa also based on when fetal heartbeats are detected.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents Mississippis last remaining abortion clinic, Jackson Womens Health Organization, called the ban cruel and unconstitutional and vowed to challenge it in court before it becomes law on July 1.

This ban is one of the most restrictive abortion bans signed into law, and we will take Mississippi to court to make sure it never takes effect, Hillary Schneller, staff attorney at the center, said in a statement.

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The new six-week ban would prevent the vast majority of women from obtaining abortions, some health providers said.

Most women dont find out theyre pregnant until about six weeks, said Shannon Brewer, the clinics director. The point is to outlaw abortion.

Mississippis new law offers few exceptions  an abortion would be allowed if the pregnancy threatens a womans life or would cause serious injury, but not in the case of incest or rape.

Hours before Bryant signed the law he took to Twitter to signal his support for the ban:

We will all answer to the good Lord one day, Bryant tweeted. I will say in this instance, I fought for the lives of innocent babies, even under the threat of legal action.

We will all answer to the good Lord one day. I will say in this instance, I fought for the lives of innocent babies, even under threat of legal action. https://t.co/4bHEmCqN74  Phil Bryant (@PhilBryantMS) March 20, 2019

Since conservative Justice Brett Kavanaughs confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, Mississippi and other Republican-dominated states have passed a flurry of abortion restrictions in the hope that they can eventually overturn Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that legalized abortion.

Last week, lawmakers in Ohio passed a ban similar to Mississippis, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has signaled he will sign it. A string of other states, including Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Texas and Florida, are also considering similar bans.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 297 state antiabortion bills have been introduced since the 2019 legislative session began.

Thats unprecedented, said Kelly Krause, a spokeswoman for the center.

Mississippi has been at the forefront of steadily chipping away at abortion rights, imposing a raft of hurdles to abortion access, such as requiring women to receive counseling that abortion providers say is biased and then wait 24 hours before returning to the facility to get the procedure.

Mississippi approves the most restrictive abortion ban in the nation, in a state with only one clinic 

Last year, Mississippi lawmakers passed what was then the nations most restrictive abortion law  a bill that would prohibit women from obtaining an abortion more than 15 weeks after their last menstrual cycle.

That law was struck down last November by a federal judge, who argued the law infringed on womens 14th Amendment rights to due process and defied existing Supreme Court precedents on abortion.

The state chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decades-long campaign, fueled by national interest groups, to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, District Judge Carlton W. Reeves wrote in his ruling.

Reeves also dismissed Mississippi lawmakers professed interest in womens health as pure gaslighting and questioned why they sought to limit abortion rights while choosing not to lift a finger to address the tragedies lurking on the other side of the delivery room: our alarming infant and maternal mortality rates.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the nation, with 8.6 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2017.

The bans lawfulness hinges on a single question: whether the 15-week mark is before or after viability, Reeves added. The record is clear: States may not ban abortions prior to viability; 15 weeks  is prior to viability.

Reeves ruling is being appealed.

Lawmakers didnt get the message, said Schneller of the Center for Reproductive Rights. They are determined to rob Mississippians of the right to abortion, and they are doing it at the expense of womens health and taxpayer money.For nearly two years, the nation has been bitterly divided by special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs ongoing investigation into the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath. To President Trump, the Mueller investigation has been the single greatest witch hunt in American political history  a disgrace and scandal that is nothing short of corrupt, illegal and rigged. To Trumps opponents, on the other hand, it has been merely justice at work, a necessary effort to determine whether an unfit and undeserving candidate (or those who reported to him) colluded with another country to seize control of the most powerful job in the world.

Now, finally, the work is done, the report is filed, and the U.S. attorney general has in his hands the most comprehensive study yet of the connectionsamong Russia, the election and the Trump campaign. But this must not be the end of the story.

It is vital that Congress and the public see the full report. The nation deserves to learn what Mueller has concluded not only about possible cooperation by the Trump campaign with Russia, but also about possible obstruction of justice by the president. Thats crucial whether or not Mueller has decided that Trump violated the law or committed actions that require further action by Congress. The report must not be buried.

Of course, we already know much of what Muellers team believes happened and, assuming it is true, it tells a shocking story about the fragility of the American election system and the willingness of malign outside forces to subvert our democracy. Muellers team has already asserted in court documents that there was an intricate, sophisticated Russian effort to meddle in the 2016 election through deception and disinformation  including the dissemination of fake news and the hacking of emails  to help Trump win. Though collusion has not been proved in any of the documents that have as yet become public, the indictments filed so far point to dozens of contacts between the Trump campaign and various Russians and their associates, many of whom had connections to the government.

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READ MORE: The biggest indictments, guilty pleas and dramas in the Russia investigation 

For example, campaign advisor George Papadopoulos sought repeatedly to arrange a Trump-Putin meeting. Trump lawyer Michael Cohen struggled to broker a Trump Tower deal in Moscow while the campaign was underway. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort had repeated contacts during the campaign with a Russian associate with ties to that countrys intelligence services. Donald Trump Jr. held a meeting at which he was promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton from Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. And the list goes on.

But what does it add up to? What does it mean? Is it collusion or isnt it? Was justice obstructed after the fact? Was Trump in the loop or out of it? This is what Mueller still has to tell us. And even if he has concluded that no further crimes were committed than the ones hes already charged, the details need to be revealed so Congress and the country can figure out what needs to happen next.

For example, suppose that Mueller has concluded that Trump didnt violate laws against obstruction of justice by dismissing former FBI Director James B. Comey or by expressing the hope that Comey could go easy on former national security advisor Michael Flynn (an accusation by Comey that the White House has denied). Considering the same evidence that Mueller adduced, Congress might come to a different conclusion, or decide to use Muellers report as a resource in its own investigations. Or voters might conclude, on the basis of that evidence, that they cannot vote for President Trump again in 2020.

This week, Trump insisted that he would like the report to be released. But the final decision rests with U.S. Atty. Gen. William Barr, who was less than completely reassuring during his Senate confirmation hearings when he was asked whether he would do so. Barr noted that the regulations governing Muellers appointment provided for the special counsel to send the attorney general a confidential report.

But Barr also acknowledged that, under the same regulations, the attorney general makes a follow-up report to Congress that could be made public. Barr promised senators to provide as much transparency as I can consistent with the law. He repeated that promise in the letter he sent to top members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees Friday reporting that Mueller had concluded his investigation. Barr said he would consult with Mueller and Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein about what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute 

The longer the report remains under wraps, the more that Trump and his allies will be able to advance whatever narrative they please about it. Lately, the spin has been that Mueller somehow vindicated Trump because he has not brought charges against the president or alleged explicitly that the campaign worked with Russian agents. Thats ridiculous.

And its all the more reason Barr must err on the side of transparency, resisting any efforts by the White House to cloak some contents of Muellers report by invoking national security. Because Muellers investigation was at least in part a counterintelligence probe, its possible that some information in his report could compromise sources and methods and should legitimately be withheld. But redactions should be minimal and based on recommendations from professionals in the intelligence community, not on political considerations.

For almost two years, the nation has waited for Mueller to finish his work, while worrying with good reason that Trump might move to dismiss the special counsel or abort or drastically rein in his investigation. While the prosecutors have worked quietly, Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation  hundreds of times, in speeches, on Twitter and elsewhere. No doubt some who are insisting that Muellers conclusions be made public have already made up their minds about Trumps culpability. But you dont have to prejudge Muellers conclusions to recognize the importance of sharing them with the public. Barr must move quickly to do that.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook.

UPDATES:

5:40 p.m.: This editorial was updated to clarify the recipients of the letter Attorney General William Barr sent to Congress Friday.A federal judge this week ordered the Trump administration to redo environmental reviews of oil and gas leases on several hundred thousand acres of federal lands in Wyoming that were approved by the Obama administration in 2015-16, agreeing with environmental groups that the Bureau of Land Management failed to properly estimate the leases impacts on climate change. The judge also blocked approvals of drilling permits on those lands until the new studies are done, a move that could at least slow the Trump administrations wrongheaded efforts to increase oil and gas production on federal lands at a time when the nation and the world face devastating effects from burning too much of those fuels for far too long.

The court decision covers only the Wyoming leases sold in 2015-16, but its significance is much broader. U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that the government failed to properly assess the broad effects of greenhouse gas emissions when it auctioned off the leases. The government had acknowledged that wells would emit greenhouse gases, but argued that it couldnt quantify the amount at the time it auctioned the leases because it couldnt know exactly where on the leased territory wells might ultimately be drilled, or how many. But Contreras ruled that the government had enough data from decades of previous leases to make an educated guess.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute 

The judge also ruled that the BLM must consider the leases impact on climate change more broadly, not just in the area around the wells. The decision wont stop the Trump administration from auctioning more oil and gas leases, but it will probably slow it down. It also could help opponents challenge recently awarded leases in court because, advocates argue, the current administration has been even less stringent than was the Obama administration.

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This is not just a run-of-the-mill tussle between industry and environmentalists over arcane issues. If humankind is going to confront the unfolding global crisis of climate change in any meaningful way, it cannot keep expanding the amount of fossil fuel it produces and consumes. And we cant keep approving projects without properly understanding the effects they will have on global warming.

One of the easiest and most obvious ways to counter the increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere is to stop adding to it. Its true that this one judges decision wont necessarily stop more oil and gas leases on federal land. But it will help make sure the scope of the damage from such projects is better accounted for.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or FacebookDemocrats were incensed when former FBI Director James B. Comey went public during the 2016 campaign with his conclusion that Hillary Clinton had been extremely careless in handling classified information. He made that judgment even as he declined to recommend that Clinton be criminally charged in connection with the private email server on which she transacted State Department business.

But if Comeys statement was wrong, wouldnt it also be unfair for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to issue a public report about his investigation of Donald Trump if he concluded the president hadnt committed a crime? Or for the Justice Department to do so?

Democrats dont seem to think so. At Senate confirmation hearings this week for William P. Barr, Trumps nominee for attorney general, Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee pressed Barr not only on whether he would let Mueller finish his job  Barr promised he would  but also on whether he would release the special counsels report or allow it to be edited by the administration.

On Tuesday, Barr seemed to hedge his earlier assurance that it is very important that the public and Congress be informed of the results of the special counsels work.

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By results, Barr apparently didnt mean the full text of Muellers report to the attorney general.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute 

Responding to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (who was passing along a question from the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee), Barr said: Im going to make as much information available as I can consistent with the rules and regulations that are part of the special-counsel regulations. He also noted that Muellers report would be confidential, whereas the report that goes public would come from the attorney general.

These distinctions didnt seem to impress Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. On Wednesday, she said: This is a big report, and the public needs to see it, and with the exception of very real national security concerns, I dont even believe there should be very much redaction. So, I am hopeful that that report will be made public, and my vote depends on that. She didnt qualify that statement by saying the report should be released only if Mueller concluded that Trump colluded with Russia or obstructed justice.

Shes right. Even if it comes wrapped inside a report by Barr, Muellers conclusions should see the light of day  even if Mueller concludes the president didnt obstruct justice or violate the law in any dealings with Russia.

How can that be squared with the notion that Comey overreached in publicizing his conclusions about Clintons extremely careless conduct?

First, Trump is the president of the United States, and the questions Mueller has been investigating have transfixed the nation for most of his time in office. They need to be ventilated.

Second, as was not the case with the Clinton email investigation, Trump has apparently been investigated not only for possible criminal wrongdoing but also as part of a counterintelligence operation aimed at determining whether he was a witting or unwitting agent of Russia. (The Clinton email investigation had a less significant counterintelligence angle involving whether her email server had been accessed by hostile foreign actors. The FBI concluded that such penetration was possible.)

Having loudly complained about a witch hunt and sabotage by the Deep State, Trump supporters and the president himself should support maximum transparency about what that investigation has (or hasnt) found. That means disclosing not only the results of the Mueller investigation but also how the special counsel reached his conclusions.Republicans had a field day criticizing Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) when her remarks crossed the line between legitimately criticizing Israel and engaging in anti-Semitic tropes. But will they say anything about President Trump crossing the line between legitimately criticizing anti-Semitism and painting all Democrats as anti-Semites?

Of course not.

Trump has criticized Democrats often in the weeks since Omar first came under the heat lamp. On Friday he made the point again to reporters, saying: The Democrats have very much proven to be anti-Israel. Theres no question about that. And its a disgrace. I mean, I dont know whats happened to them but they are totally anti-Israel. Frankly, I think theyre anti-Jewish.

Anti-Jewish. That would be anti-Semitic, and its a heck of an assertion. You might even call it calumny. And its typically Trumpian in its disregard for relevant evidence. Of the 34 Jewish members of Congress, 94% are Democrats, and 70% to 80% of Jewish voters back Democratic candidates.

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Trump may simply be trying to give himself some cover for the latest jaw-dropping gift to Israels right-wing president, Benjamin Netanyahu. Seemingly unbidden, the president declared on Twitter on Thursday that the United States should recognize the Golan Heights in Syria as officially part of Israel now.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

In an interview on the Fox Business Network on Thursday, Trump likened his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights to his decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Every president has said, Do that, Trump told interviewer Maria Bartiromo. Im the one that gets it done.

Actually, no president said Do that about the Golan Heights. In fact, up to the Trump administration, the United States routinely joined United Nations resolutions criticizing Israels ongoing occupation of the Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967 and annexed in 1981.

Theres no mystery about why Israel wants to keep the high ground overlooking Israel, Syria and Lebanon. But one principle that the U.S. and other Western democracies have tried to enforce in the wake of World War II is that countries should not expand through military conquest. Thats why we helped push Iraq out of Kuwait and slapped sanctions on Russia after it annexed Crimea, to pick just a couple of examples.

Previous administrations viewed the status of the Golan Heights, like other occupied territories and divided Jerusalem, as bargaining chips in an overall regional peace deal. The area was also a key negotiating point in a more narrow peace deal the U.S. had sought to broker between Israel and Syria. But as the New York Times noted, Syria has other issues to work through, to put it mildly, before it can focus on resolving the status of the Golan Heights. Several Arab leaders blasted Trumps pronouncement, but the damage the Assad regime inflicted on Syria may quite simply have settled the disputed areas fate in Israels favor.

Yet youd think the United States wouldnt break from past policy and its principle regarding forcible annexations unless it had a very good reason to do so  something real it would get in return. Sadly, our dealmaker in chief appears to equate helping the embattled Netanyahu get reelected with advancing U.S. interests, even if doing so further diminishes the prospect of a U.S.-brokered peace deal in the Middle East and makes it harder to push back against the Crimean-style land grabs by aggressive foreign governments.

Of course, Trump has something to gain from the gesture too. Many evangelical Christians, who are a key part of his base of supporters, are strongly pro-Israel and its current government. The Golan Heights move is a nod to them, as well as a potential lure to the many Jewish Americans who have been voting Democratic. The latter also helps explain the repeated efforts by Trump to cast Democrats as the anti-Israel party.

Although foreign policy is the presidents prerogative, Congress should give a thorough airing to the pros and cons of recognizing Israels sovereignty over the Golan Heights. And lawmakers shouldnt let Trumps bluster about who is and isnt anti-Jewish impede them from asking how his foreign policy via Twitter is affecting the long-term interests of this country and that region.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute A key section of President Trumps latest executive order, issued Thursday, aims to protect free speech on campus. But in reality it does little to further that goal. Meanwhile, the order is so vague and ambiguous, it makes compliance by colleges and universities extremely difficult  and it is almost certainly unconstitutional.

The executive orders key provision with regard to free speech is just one sentence: The heads of covered agencies shall, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, take appropriate steps, in a manner consistent with applicable law, including the First Amendment, to ensure that institutions that receive Federal research or education grants promote free inquiry, including through compliance with all applicable Federal laws, regulations, and policies.

It is tempting to shrug and say that this changes nothing. Colleges and universities receiving federal funds already must comply with all applicable laws, regulations and policies and what university doesnt believe in free inquiry.

But what makes the executive order so disturbing is that it doesnt set clear guidelines for what colleges and universities need to do to comply, leaving them uncertain of how to ensure that their federal funding is not in jeopardy.

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Indeed, the examples that President Trump has pointed to of campuses failing to protect free speech make this vaguely worded executive order particularly troubling.

In February 2017, provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak on the UC Berkeley campus. Extensive security had been arranged at significant cost to the campus. Nevertheless, 150 radical Antifa protesters engaged in violence and vandalism on campus. Then-Chancellor Nicholas Dirks felt he could not ensure campus safety in light of the ongoing riot. He canceled the scheduled speech and asked that it be rescheduled when even greater security could be provided.

There is no crisis concerning free speech on campuses in the United States. Every day on virtually every campus, speeches are given without incident.

Trump quickly responded with a tweet threatening to cut off federal funds if Berkeley does not allow free speech. But the school did not violate free speech by postponing Yiannopoulos speech under these extraordinary circumstances. The legal and moral duty to protect free speech coexists with the legal and moral duty to protect students, staff and faculty. Is the purpose of the executive order to withdraw funds from campuses if they ever declare an unlawful assembly and postpone a scheduled event?

Trumps more recent example, which he mentioned in announcing his executive order, concerned Hayden Williams, a conservative activist who was punched while working a recruitment table on the Berkeley campus. Neither Williams nor his assailant are students, staff or faculty at the school. As soon as university officials learned of the assault, they condemned it and conducted an investigation that led to the arrest of the suspected assailant. Is the purpose of the executive order to withdraw federal funds from a campus because two outsiders had an argument on campus that led to an assault?

This kind of uncertainty is what makes the order unconstitutional. The Supreme Court long has held that any conditions on federal funds must be clearly and explicitly stated. This executive order obviously does not meet this requirement.

Beyond that, the Trump executive order is unnecessary. There is no crisis concerning free speech on campuses in the United States. Every day on virtually every campus, speeches are given without incident, including some by very controversial speakers. Walk across either of our campuses on just about any day of the week, and the cacophony of diverse speakers is readily apparent.

To be sure, there are isolated instances of campus officials making bad decisions concerning expression. All campuses should ensure that the rules governing campus speech are viewpoint neutral, transparent and easy to understand. There is a need for more education about basic free speech principles.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute 

Many difficult issues need to be addressed. At what point does speech that attacks people on the basis of race, nationality, sex, religion and other legally-protected categories become sufficiently severe or pervasive to create a discriminatory learning environment under federal law? When does speech over social media constitute harassment that can be the basis for discipline? How much do campuses need to spend to ensure safety when there are controversial speakers?

Trumps executive order addresses none of these hard questions. At best it is an act of political grandstanding that imposes no new obligations on campuses. But any effort by federal agencies to threaten campuses with the loss of federal funds would be an unconstitutional abuse of power.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the UC Berkeley Law School. Howard Gillman is the chancellor of UC Irvine. They co-chair the national advisory board for the University of California National Center on Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and are the authors of the book Free Speech on Campus. Flash

Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) and his wife Peng Liyuan disembark from the airplane upon their arrival in Rome, Italy, on March 21, 2019. Xi arrived in Rome Thursday for a state visit to Italy to map out the future of the bilateral relationship and move it into a new era. [Photo/Xinhua]

Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Rome Thursday for a state visit to Italy to map out the future of the bilateral relationship and move it into a new era.

It is the first visit by a Chinese head of state to the European nation in 10 years.

Two Italian fighter jets escorted Xi's plane as it entered the country's airspace.

Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, were greeted by senior Italian government officials at the airport.

While delivering a written speech upon arrival, Xi said that the China-Italy relations have withstood the test of time and international vicissitudes since the two countries forged diplomatic ties 49 years ago.

Upholding the principle of mutual respect, trust and benefit, China and Italy have constantly promoted their friendship and cooperation, setting an example of developing bilateral ties between two countries of different social systems, cultural backgrounds and development stages, Xi said.

The practical cooperation between the two countries has yielded fruitful results, bringing tangible benefits to the two peoples, said Xi, adding that the bilateral cultural and people-to-people exchanges are rich and colorful, and have enhanced mutual understanding and friendship.

The Chinese president noted that he is looking forward to meeting the Italian leaders to jointly draw the blueprint for the future development of bilateral relations.

"I believe with the concerted efforts of both sides, the China-Italy comprehensive strategic partnership will enjoy a better tomorrow," Xi said.

Italy is the first stop of Xi's three-nation Europe tour, which will also take him to Monaco and France.Finally, the office of the special counsel filed its report on Donald Trumps ties  or not  to the Russian Federation.

More hurry up and wait. We know the report contains no new indictments, but that doesnt mean its free of bombshells. Indeed, Atty. Gen. William Barr, who received the report Friday, initially said he might summarize its principal conclusions this weekend. Now he seems to want time to catch his breath. Whatever he saw in the report, he wasnt ready to tell on Saturday. Even Trump took a break from tweeting.

Expect  as we cram into this latest waiting room  more rumors, leaks, spins, guesses and conspiracy theories. Rightwing figures such as Tucker Carlson are already flashing victory signs, while Democrats in Congress such as House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) are agitating to see the whole report, and more, from the special counsel  and he says hell subpoena it if he has to.

Last week, Mimi Rocah, legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, suggested on Twitter that the report should be considered a beginning and not an end to the republics reckoning: Waiting for the Mueller Report is like waiting for the baby to be born. Were in the end of the third trimester and just want it to be over. But, as every parent knows, once the baby comes - thats when all the real work begins.

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Precisely. With just one adjustment: The gestation period of the special counsels findings has been nowhere near as predictable as the human kind. It took more than seven trimesters to finish the work.

On May 17, 2017, acting Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert S. Mueller III, then best known as the former director of the FBI, to investigate a stupefying range of matters that concerned Trump: Any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R.  600.4(a).

That last code translates, roughly, to everything.

No wonder Mueller and his team have been holed up and head-down for 22 months, rendering 37 indictments, with seven guilty pleas and five prison sentences.

We can be sure the team has looked deeply into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. As in 2001 in Manhattan and Washington, it was clear in 2016 that the U.S. had been attacked. The first goal of the Mueller probe was fact-finding, as with the 9/11 Commission. Who attacked our country, why and how? A consensus exists in the Justice Department that crimes were committed and the American people deserve justice.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute 

A detailed Feb. 16, 2018, indictment, signed by Mueller alone, began to lay it out: a Kremlin-linked troll farm called the Internet Research Agency hacked American social media with a pervasive disinformation campaign in a conspiracy to defraud the United States.

The next indictment signed by Mueller alone appeared on July 13, 2018. It exposed an extensive Russian military operation against the United States, charging officers of the GRU  Russian military intelligence  with a jaw-dropping series of cyberattacks on the digital infrastructure of the Democratic Party.

These two indictments alone could constitute a Mueller report: The Internet Research Agency and the GRU attacked the U.S. to elect Trump.

But did the Kremlin do it just out of the goodness of its Trump-loving heart, expecting nothing in return? Or might Trumpworld have coordinated with Russia, so they could mutually prosper at the expense of American democracy?

The answer to that is what were stillwaiting for  was the president an accomplice? The special counsels other indictments at least show some Trumpworld complicity with Russians, and many show efforts to hide that complicity.

Consider just one document: Michael Flynns plea deal. Filed on Dec. 1, 2017, that plea was made public with the very first batch of Muellers indictments.

In case Flynn has slipped your mind: He was Trumps surrogate and national security advisor during the campaign, the transition and the early days of his presidency.

The special counsels filing says that both Flynn and the U.S. agree that the facts in it are true. On the same day  on or around Dec. 28, 2016  President Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for hacking the campaign, the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, contacted Flynn. The next day, Flynn called a senior member of Trumps transition team to find out what to say to Kislyak about the potential impact of those sanctions on the incoming administrations foreign policy.

The answer: Russia should sit tight, refrain from retaliation. And presto, Russian President Vladimir Putin shortly thereafter announced Russias forbearance.

Finally, according to Muellers plea deal filing, Flynn lied about it, falsely telling the FBI that he did not ask Russias Ambassador to the United States to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions.

The double negative is a beaut: Flynn is pleading guilty to lying about the transition team not having Russia ties.

Since Flynn flipped, presumably no longer lying to investigators about Trumpworlds Russia connections, weve seen indictment after indictment of Trumps circle: advisors George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone, campaign manager Paul Manafort , deputy campaign manager Richard Gates, and personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Most have been caught or accused of lying; some have been fingered for obstructing justice and/or defrauding banks and taxpayers.

With all this, what do concerned citizens need with the report? A team of legal eagles to cut our meat for us, evidently.

And thats forgivable: The heart craves the whole truth, or should, whatever its partisan implications. As Garrett Graff wrote recently in Wired, all patriots would do best to hope the Mueller report finds Trump blameless in any conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Thats because its unthinkable that an American president would sell out his country to the Kremlin. But, depending on Muellers conclusions, it might have to become thinkable. Remember Rocahs words: Thats when all the real work begins.

Twitter: @page88Medicare for all and the Green New Deal may be bad ideas. But they arent the worst ones being floated by the growing band of Democratic presidential hopefuls. That honor is reserved for the disastrous notion of expanding the Supreme Court.

So far former Rep. Beto ORourke, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sens. Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren have expressed a willingness to consider the idea. As Harris said: everything is on the table to address what she calls a crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court.

For many Americans, however, the court isnt broken. Polls consistently place public confidence in the Supreme Court higher than in Congress and the president. Those who say they want to expand the court cite high-minded reasons: individual justices have exaggerated power because of their small number; more voices on the court would produce more thoughtful decisions; a larger court would have more gender and racial diversity.

The biggest reason Democrats love the idea is simple political retaliation.

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But the biggest reason Democrats love the idea is simple political retaliation. They believe that Republican senators stole a Supreme Court seat in 2016 by refusing to vote on Merrick Garland, President Obamas nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia. They argue that keeping the seat open for Neil M. Gorsuch in 2017 unfairly tipped the Supreme Court toward conservatives.

Keeping the Scalia seat open, however, just escalated an ongoing fight over judicial appointments. Senate Democrats launched the spiral with their unprecedented attacks on Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas in the 1980s and 1990s. They descended furthered in the mid-2000s by filibustering for the first time to block prominent George W. Bush nominees to the federal appeals courts. Then, as the 2014 election approached, Democrats eliminated the filibuster to rush through Obamas last judicial picks.

While the new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell kept the Scalia seat open so that the next president could appoint his or her own nominee (a move previously threatened by Democrats during Bushs last year), Democrats retaliated by filibustering Gorsuch. In response, Republicans eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees.

Expanding the Supreme Court would go far beyond this kind of tit-for-tat. Until now, Democrats and Republicans have fought over internal Senate procedures. Senators have the right to choose the rules that govern their own deliberations. But changing the courts size to alter its outcomes and jurisprudence would constitute Senate interference with the judiciary.

Todays proposal by progressives are even more threatening to republican government than Franklin D. Roosevelts failed 1937 attempt to pack the court. FDR sought to expand the court because of its opposition to the New Deal. He claimed the justices still lived in a horse and buggy era and could not grasp the need to regulate a nationwide economy. Thus, he would appoint six new justices to help the older justices. While Congress rejected FDRs cynical plan, the threat pressured the justices into upholding the New Deal.

Roosevelts failed proposal at least had the virtue of removing judicial obstacles to policies supported by the two-thirds of the American people who supported his reelection and voted for Democratic majorities in Congress. Today, Democrats want to alter the Supreme Court for the opposite reason: to change laws and create new rights they know wouldnt make it through Congress or a popular vote.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute 

If Democrats win in 2020 and launch this attack on judicial independence, a rapid descent of the court into pure politics will surely follow. They might be able to get support for expanding the court to whatever number they would need for a progressive majority. (Eleven? Fifteen?) But then Republicans will merely return the favor when they regain power. And Democrats and Republicans will continue to nominate justices who pass their litmus tests and will pursue their agendas, especially as the courts size starts to resemble a legislature rather than a court. It would be a classic race to the bottom, at the price of judicial independence and the rule of law.

The Constitution leaves the size of the Supreme Court up to Congress, and the number of justices fluctuated during the countrys first eight decades. In 1789, the first Supreme Court had six seats, and then varied between five and 10. But in 1869, Congress set the number at nine, and it hasnt changed in 150 years.

The answer to fighting over the courts direction is not to ramp up politicization of the Supreme Court, but to depoliticalize it. How? By not treating every controversial social or political issue as a constitutional one. As long as the court continues to take up and issue rulings on such things as abortion and gay marriage, the courts size and composition will remain the subject of political conflict.

John Yoo is a law professor at UC Berkeley, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. James Phillips is an attorney in private practice and a nonresident fellow with the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School.To the editor: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare) often shows ignorance and disdain for the U.S. Constitution, and now hes done it again. His frivolous lawsuit against parody accounts on Twitter that ridiculed his politics clearly violates well-established 1st Amendment law.

In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an 8-0 ruling, threw out a lawsuit filed by Jerry Falwell against Hustler magazine for publishing a parody characterizing him as an incestuous drunk.

In the majority opinion that Nunes should have studied before he filed his meritless lawsuit, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote that at the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern.

Stephen F. Rohde, Los Angeles

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The writer is a constitutional lawyer.

..

To the editor: If Nunes defamation lawsuit against Twitter and certain individuals proceeds, do Hillary Clinton, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), among a plethora of others, get to sue Trump over crooked Hillary, little Marco and shifty Schiff?

Bruce N. Miller, Playa del Rey

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and FacebookTo the editor: Holding gun makers accountable for the misuse of their products is analogous to blaming General Motors for the 1999 incident in which a man drove his Cadillac through a Costa Mesa schoolyard. (Remember that?)

Apparently, the best argument the Connecticut plaintiffs can muster against gun maker Remington is that the Bushmaster XM15-E2S used in the 2012 Newtown massacre was marketed irresponsibly. So, what industry is next? Auto manufacturers that feature speeding cars in their ads?

Moreover, the editorial failed to mention the fact that there is no functional difference between military-style and regular semiautomatic weapons. And, virtually every handgun made in the last three decades, including the .45-caliber handgun used in the Thousand Oaks shooting last year, happens to be a semiautomatic.

Does the L.A. Times editorial board want these handguns banned too?

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Lloyd Forrester, Simi Valley

..

To the editor: The National Rifle Assn. should be included as one of the defendants.

The NRAs Americas 1st Freedom website lists 10 Reasons To Own An AR-15. The second reason includes this: The gun is easy to shoot  and easy to hit targets with. And, as you know, nothings more fun than hitting what you shoot at.

The first reason amplifies the virtues of an AR-15: Its easy to learn and easy to use. Its accurate. Its reliable.

So, if you are inclined to take out a lot of people all at once, the NRA has advice.

Tom Budlong, Los Angeles

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and FacebookAll Islamic State-held territory in Syria has been100% eliminated, the White House announced Friday, though officials said sporadic fighting continues on the ground between coalition forces and the groups holdouts.

The complete fall of the last Islamic State stronghold in Baghouz, Syria, would signal the end of the groups self-declared caliphate, which at its height stretched across large parts of Syria and Iraq. Controlling territory gave it room to launch attacks around the world.

President Trump said Friday its about time that the group no longer controls territory in the region, after a campaign by U.S. and coalition forces that spanned five years and two U.S. presidencies, unleashed more than 100,000 bombs, and killed untold numbers of civilians.

U.S. officials familiar with the situation in Syria said again Friday that the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, are still battling the last remaining Islamic State fighters who are holed up in tunnels along the river cliffs in Baghouz and have refused to surrender.

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Officials said that the SDF has not made any formal declaration of victory, and there was no announcement planned for Friday.

According to the officials, the SDF is moving slowly and carefully, and is willing to wait out the Islamic State fighters, who are out of food and low on water. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss mission details.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters aboard Air Force One that Trump was briefed about the development by acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan.

ALSO: Pompeo denounces Iran in Lebanon, even as he meets with its proxies 

Trump showed reporters a map of Iraq and Syria that showed that the terror group no longer controlled any territory in the region. Heres ISIS on election day, he said, referring to the group by a commonly used acronym and pointing to a swath of red area signifying its previous territorial holdings, and then to one without any red, Heres ISIS right now.

Trump has been teasing the victory for days, most recently Wednesday when he said the milestone would be achieved by that night, but sleeper cells of fighters have reemerged.Washington has spent the past week consumed with the expectation that Robert S. Mueller III will soon wrap up his nearly two-year investigation of the Trump administration and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

More on that in a moment. But since Muellers report hasnt been filed as of this writing, lets jump past the immediate headlines for a moment.

The invaluable Pew Research Center has produced a new report this week on what Americans think the country will be like in 2050. Such studies dont tell us much about the future  none of us do well at prediction  but the numbers tell us a lot about the present and its discontents.

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ANXIOUS, PESSIMISTIC WHITE PEOPLE

Americans used to be known for their optimism, but after a decade and a half of war, economic recession and deep political division, gloom pervades the peoples view of the future.

As Pews researchers summarized, majorities of Americans foresee a country with a burgeoning national debt, a wider gap between the rich and the poor and a workforce threatened by automation.

Majorities predict that the economy will be weaker, healthcare will be less affordable, the condition of the environment will be worse and older Americans will have a harder time making ends meet.

While some of the pessimism focuses on economic concerns, a lot appears rooted in the changing makeup of the countrys population.

Many whites, especially white Republicans, worry about the prospect of losing majority status by 2050, as demographers predict. Anxiety about the coming shift to a majority-minority country strongly correlated with voting for President Trump in 2016, and Pews numbers suggest its strongly driving attitudes about the future, as well.

Nearly half of white Americans, 46%, said that having a nonwhite majority would weaken American culture and values, Pew found. Fewer than one in four whites said the change would strengthen American culture and values, while 30% were neutral.

Blacks and Hispanics are much more likely than whites to say a majority nonwhite population will strengthen American culture https://t.co/waJkBjRGsN pic.twitter.com/Dv6kGkpPt1  Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) March 22, 2019

Among Republicans, the vast majority of whom are white, about six in 10 said the shift would weaken American customs and values, while about one in eight said it would strengthen them.

Democrats were about twice as likely to foresee a strengthening (42%) than a weakening (22%). Similarly, blacks and Latinos were about twice as likely to see the change as strengthening the countrys values.

Asked flat out whether having a nonwhite majority would be good or bad for America, 37% of Republicans said bad, while 47% said neither and 16% said good. Among Democrats, 50% said the change would be good, 37% said neither and 12% said bad.

Overall, white Americans divided almost evenly when asked if they were optimistic or pessimistic about the nations future. Blacks and Latinos were optimistic by more than 2-1.

Pew surveyed 2,524 adults in a nationally representative sample conducted online Dec. 11-23. The margin of error for the full sample is 2.5 percentage points in either direction.

SUPPORT FOR ACTIVE GOVERNMENT, BUT ...

Pew also found that nearly nine in 10 Americans say they are very or somewhat worried about the ability of political leaders to solve the countrys problems.

That doesnt mean Americans dont want government to try, however. By roughly 60% to 40%, the public worries more about the government doing too little than interfering too much.

Providing high-quality, affordable healthcare to all Americans topped the list of things the public thinks the federal government should do to improve the lives of future generations. More than two-thirds of American adults, 68%, put that as their top priority, while only 12% categorized it as a low priority or something the government should not do.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats overwhelmingly supported that goal. Among Republicans, however, opinion split. Among more affluent Republicans, those with family incomes above $75,000, 38% put expanded healthcare as a high priority, but among those with family incomes $30,000 or below, 62% called it a top priority.

Americans were far less likely to put a priority on two other issues that partisans often focus on. Just 44% put a top priority on reducing the gap between rich and poor, a major issue for activists on the left, while only 39% put a top priority on avoiding tax increases, which for years has animated Republicans.

Among Democrats, the top priorities for the federal government were providing high-quality, affordable healthcare to all Americans (83%), dealing with climate change (69%), increasing spending for education (66%), reducing the gap between the rich and the poor (58%) and increasing spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (56%).

For Republicans, reducing the flow of immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally topped the list at 65%. Lowering the national debt (57%), avoiding tax increases (50%), providing healthcare to all Americans (48%) and increasing spending for education (36%) followed.

WAITING FOR MUELLER

Officials have told reporters to be ready any day now for news that Mueller has filed a final report with Atty. Gen. William Barr.

The only thing likely to become public on the day of that filing, however, is a letter saying that Mueller has submitted a report. The report itself almost surely will not be made public for days or perhaps weeks.

A lengthy tug of war between the White House and Congress could take place over what to keep secret. And, in the end, the final report may not shed a lot of new light.

If youre expecting a detailed accounting of new facts, like Ken Starrs report two decade ago on President Clintons sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, youll almost certainly be disappointed. The rules governing Muellers investigation are much stricter than those that Starr worked under, in large part because leaders in both parties came to believe that Starr went overboard.

But as Del Wilber and Chris Megerian wrote, we already know a lot about what Mueller has found because of the extensive indictments that he has filed.

Meanwhile, search warrants that were made public in federal court this week provided new details about the investigation of Michael Cohen, Trumps former lawyer, Megerian reported.

FIXATED ON MCCAIN

Trump went to Ohio this week, ostensibly to tout job creation. He visited a plant that, David Cloud reported last year, churns out tanks which in the past the Army has said it doesnt really need.

But Trump couldnt keep focused on his topic. Instead, as Eli Stokols and Noah Bierman wrote, he veered into a lengthy tirade against a dead rival  the late Sen. John McCain.

Why Trump has such a fixation on McCain remains a mystery: jealousy, perhaps; his mistaken but firmly held belief that McCain played a major role in sparking the Russia investigation, maybe; anxiety over his own lack of wartime service, possibly.

Aides, who almost all believe the attacks hurt Trump politically, have largely given up trying to get him to stop. Theyve been more successful on another front, as Jennifer Haberkorn wrote: Trump has curbed attacks on other Republicans. He has yet to lash out at the Republican senators who voted against his national emergency declaration, for example.

LOOKING AT THE DEMOCRATS HISTORIES

Howard University played a big role in shaping Sen. Kamala Harris identity. Evan Halper took a detailed look at that chapter in Harris life.

Janet Hook examined the public record of former Vice President Joe Biden. His 40-year career includes many positions that dont match the Democratic Partys current stands.

As Biden prepares to launch his presidential campaign  an announcement seems likely at some point in April  a key question will be whether Democratic voters will hold that history against him.

And Sen. Bernie Sanders opened up a multiday swing through California by joining a picket line at UCLA to highlight his longtime support for organized labor, Melanie Mason wrote.

All those candidates are focusing a lot of attention on Iowa, which will kick off the primary voting season  although not for more than 10 months yet. Mark Barabak looked at how Iowa is shaking up its caucus system and why that matters.

UNACCEPTABLE RISK

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller wrote in two internal memos obtained by Molly OToole that repeatedly deploying troops to the border has forced delays in training and repairs that pose an unacceptable risk to the readiness of the Corps. Democrats eagerly seized on the disclosure.

The Pentagon has continued to hide any final list of military projects that it could tap to pay for Trumps border wall. As Sarah Wire wrote, Defense officials gave Congress a long list of projects that might be used, but didnt specify which were actually on the chopping block.

DRILLING THE STATES

The administration is moving forward on another Trump priority, increased offshore drilling for oil and gas. As Anna Phillips and Rosanna Xia reported, the administration plans to limit the ability of states to slow or stop development offshore, and alarms are ringing in California.

ORANGE COUNTYS DEMOCRATS

A fight over offshore drilling could be a boon to the recently elected Democratic members of Congress representing Orange County. The issue has helped Democrats in the county as far back as the late Sen. Alan Cranston in the 1970s.

As Sarah Wire reported, the four newly elected Democratic lawmakers have carved different paths while seeking to consolidate their holds on their districts.

One of the states dwindling number of Republican lawmakers, meantime, went off on an odd tangent, Wire reported: Rep. Devin Nunes sued Twitter over parody accounts that made fun of him.

Legal experts said the suit faced tough hurdles. Its immediate impact was to vastly increase the audience for one of the parody sites, @Devin Nunes Cow.

JEOPARDY FOR IMMIGRANTS

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld federal power to detain and deport immigrants for long-past crimes, David Savage reported. The 5-4 ruling split the court along partisan lines, with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, saying that the law gives the government broad power to detain immigrants without bail, even if their offenses took place years earlier.

The courts liberal members seemed more likely to prevail in a case argued this week that involved a Mississippi prosecutors efforts to keep blacks off juries in a murder case against a black defendant who was tried multiple times. In addition to the four liberal justices, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. seemed inclined to toughen the rules limiting so-called peremptory jury challenges.

HITTING HUAWEI, BOOSTING BIBI

Major U.S. research universities are cutting ties with Huawei, the giant Chinese telecom company, Don Lee reported. Theyre responding to pressure from the Trump administration, which argues that Huaweis software could pose a national security threat.

The administration is doing its best to help a friend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces a tough election next month. As Tracy Wilkinson reported, Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo flew to Israel to give Netanyahus campaign a boost. Then, Trump announced on Twitter that he wants the U.S. to recognize Israels sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

IS GOOGLE BIASED?

Robert Epstein, a psychologist from San Diego, has become a favorite among conservatives because of his claims that Google search results unfairly steer voters to the left. And, as Evan Halper reported, even researchers who disagree with Epsteins conclusions say hes raising legitimate issues about the companys lack of transparency on how its algorithms work.

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The idea that Google is subtly pushing masses of voters to the left has the ring of conspiracy, and thus the work of Robert Epstein is warmly embraced by conservative lawmakers  as well as a president  convinced big tech is plotting against them.

Yet even some scholars who think the San Diego-based psychologist is wrong about the political impact of search engines  he believes bias built into Googles processes could have cost Republicans three California congressional districts in the last election  have started paying attention to his detailed work on how voters respond to tens of thousands of search results.

At a moment when misinformation about search engines and social media bias is rampant, with both the left and the right amplifying unsupported claims, Epstein is asking the right questions, they say, about the unseen power of algorithms and how little most Americans understand about the way they work.

Facebook, Twitter and Google have become political footballs for the left and right 

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The saga of the persistent San Diego psychologist versus the tech giant is a long-running one, full of twists. As Big Data shapes our opinions in ways scholars are only beginning to comprehend, his work has increasingly caught attention.

The larger issue he is looking at is extremely important, said Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies at UCLA who focuses on the relationships between technology and politics. Srinivasan is not convinced by the claims from conservatives that the GOP is being victimized, but he argues scholars need to look more deeply at how search engines can shape the views of those who use them.

We turn to these efficient technologies, he said, to do almost everything these days without knowing why we see what we see from them or what data is collected about us and how it is being used.

Epstein, a former Psychology Today editor in chief who runs a nonprofit institute in California, calls the phenomenon he has explored the Search Engine Manipulation Effect.

These are new forms of manipulation people cant see, he said. The technologies can have an enormous impact on voters who are undecided.  People have no awareness the influence is being exerted.

Google dismisses his research as the work of a misguided amateur. Company Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in December that Google had investigated Epsteins findings and found his methodology flawed.

MORE ON POLITICS: How Howard University shaped Kamala Harris identity 

Company officials, while declining to comment about Epstein on the record, offered background material asserting that their algorithms are politically blind and respond to searches with news content based on its timeliness, relevance and authoritativeness.

In his latest study, which he and a co-author plan to present in April at the 99th annual meeting of the Western Psychological Assn., in Pasadena, Epstein tracked 47,300 searches by dozens of undecided voters in the districts of newly elected Democratic Reps. Katie Porter, Harley Rouda and Mike Levin.

Mainstream outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, dominated the Google search results. By contrast, searches conducted on Yahoo and Bing more often showcased links from deeply conservative outfits such as Breitbart.

Using a model he has developed to gauge the subliminal effect of what he sees as tilted search results, Epstein projected 35,455 voters who were on the fence were persuaded to vote for a Democrat entirely because of the sources Google fed them.

Facts about fake news influence on U.S. elections and the fight against misinformation 

That conclusion is subject to much dispute.

Srinivasan questions how many undecided voters use Google to help decide how to cast ballots.

Safiya Noble, a UCLA professor and author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, is troubled by what she sees as an argument that search engines ought to counter-balance the content of large, well-resourced and highly trained newsrooms with disinformation sites and propaganda outlets.

Epstein says the large readership that sites such as Breitbart receive should earn them more prominent Google exposure. It is astonishing that Breitbart and some similar websites are not more present, given the enormous traffic some of these websites get, Breitbart especially, he said. What you are seeing here might be indicative of a kind of blacklisting.

Google, he says, is trying to make judgments based on some measures of what they consider to be quality. They have said this publicly. They are trying to judge what is good and bad.

Google executives, for their part, argue it would be corporate suicide to use their influence over voters to sway elections.

MORE ON POLITICS: The burden of a 40-year career -- some of Joe Bidens record doesnt age well 

But many analysts say that is not the point. Even if Epstein is wrong about the effects of Googles searches, the real issue, they say, is how little people know about the ways that the companys algorithms manipulate what users see. Google engineers design their algorithms for a host of reasons  mostly related to boosting profits  and users just accept the top links as the most trustworthy and authoritative information on a topic.

We need to understand the potential political impact of these underneath-the-hood choices by tech companies, said Jacob Shapiro, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton. The question we should be asking is, what do we need to do to nail down how consequential this is? And what systems do we need to create as a society to minimize the negatives?

Noble agrees with that broader point that Google should not be guiding crucial societal questions, such as how we vote.

We use these search engines as if they are arbiters of truth, and they are not, she said. They are global advertising platforms. They are not fact checkers or public interest technologies.  The minute you start to engage these broader social issues on a search engine, you run up against its limits.

The latest look at the Trump administration and the rest of Washington 

The fix, Noble says, involves giving people viable alternatives to Google that are not designed for profit but for the public interest.

Epstein calls for a worldwide passive network of monitoring systems to keep an eye on emerging technologies and what they are showing and telling people. Other scholars suggest equally bold government interventions, some of which align with Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warrens plan to break up big tech companies.

But Congress is right now focused on using the potential flaws in search engines as a springboard to air political grievances and launch partisan attacks.

The December hearing into Google was consumed by theatrics. Republicans, citing Epstein, presented themselves as victims of a cynical conspiracy, sometimes conflating his work with unrelated perceived biases. The committees top Democrat, Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, declared political bias in search engines a fantasy dreamed up by some conservatives.

Robert Epstein and Hillary Clinton, whom he supported for president in 2016. (Courtesy Robert Epstein)

Epstein may be discouraged, but he isnt helping turn down the temperature. He supported Hillary Clinton, but hes become a frequent guest on right-wing media. Tucker Carlson sings his praises on Fox News. He gives talks at Tea Party meetings. He starred in a documentary called The Creepy Line that was produced by Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, who is among the journalists most reviled by Democrats.

I have become a darling of conservatives, which is driving me crazy, Epstein said. But they love me because I am saying things they want to hear. People I am closer to politically dont want to hear what I have to say.

More stories from Evan Halper Michael Cohen

Former Trump lawyer

CHARGES Lying to Congress Tax evasion Bank fraud Campaign finance violations

Cohen admitted to lying to Congress about Trump's push for a Moscow real estate deal during the campaign. He's cooperating with special counsels office. In a separate investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, Cohen pleaded guilty to several charges including campaign finance violations for arranging hush money to two women who said they had affairs with Trump.

SENTENCE

Sentenced on Dec. 12 to three years in prisonPresident Trump undermined his administrations sanctions aimed at forcing North Korea to end its nuclear program, surprising his staff and confusing the American public and the world with a tweet Friday afternoon seeming to lift some of them.

It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea, Trump wrote soon after arriving for the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Fla. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!

The president initially appeared to be referring to a pair of sanctions that his Treasury secretary announced Thursday against two Chinese shipping companies accused of helping North Korea evade sanctions. Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin issued a strong statement in Thursdays announcement, taking a hard line against North Korea that was greatly at odds with Trumps retreat and his spokeswomans subsequent attempt at an explanation.

The confusion was compounded later in the day as officials familiar with the issue said Trump was probably referring to sanctions that were planned but not yet announced.

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Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement earlier in the day that did little to explain what was behind Trumps tweet. She reaffirmed Trumps personal relationship with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un, with whom he has had two summits that failed to yield a deal on nuclear disarmament.

President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesnt think these sanctions will be necessary, she said.

The presidents precipitous and puzzling action, however, could go beyond simply erasing the day-old sanctions to undercut long-standing ones that Trump has said would stay in place until North Korea gave up its nuclear program. China and Russia, the two powers most crucial to North Koreas economy, are unlikely to fear violating the U.S.-backed sanctions after Trump seemed to lift penalties after the Treasury Departments finding of wrongdoing.

Mnuchin, in his statement a day earlier, said, The United States and our like-minded partners remain committed to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea and believe that the full implementation of North Korea-related U.N. Security Council resolutions is crucial to a successful outcome.

Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, he added, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk.

National security advisor John Bolton had also tried to underscore the tough stance against North Korea signified by Thursdays sanctions move, tweeting after they were announced that they were important actions.

The maritime industry must do more to stop North Koreas illicit shipping practices, he wrote. Everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Koreas sanctions evasion.

Trump often surprises his staff with his tweets, but the stakes get much higher when his bursts involve the U.S. relationship with North Korea, an outlaw nuclear nation that has been among the United States foremost adversaries.

Trumps advisors could not immediately explain why he sent the tweet, which sanctions he was referring to or why he would allow sanctions to be announced if he planned on revoking them hours later.

It all made for a muddled message, not just to North Korea but also to allies, whose cooperation in upholding economic sanctions is critical, and the disarray once again suggested an administration at odds with its chief executive. Critics assumed Trump was speaking of sanctions just imposed, not prospective penalties.

Ive been working on sanctions policy for 15+ years. Dont recall ever seeing a president overrule a Treasury announcement AFTER it was announced, tweeted Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the right-leaning Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) tweeted that Trump is being played by Kim Jong Un  one of the worlds most vicious dictators.

Sidestepping his own Treasury Dept. and withdrawing sanctions against North Korea the same day they were announced defies logic, Van Hollen added. He urged Congress to act.

It was the second time in as many days that Trump unexpectedly made a foreign policy announcement on Twitter. On Thursday, he reversed half a century of American policy in the Middle East by tweeting that the United States would recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, territory seized from Syria in 1967.

Trump has been eager to strike a deal with Kim, lavishing him with praise and insisting on meeting in two summits despite calls from many foreign policy analysts to hold out until North Korea makes concessions.

Follow the latest news of the Trump administration on Essential Washington Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in California on Friday and waived environmental regulations to expedite nearly three dozen local forest management projects to protect communities from the deadly wildfires that have decimated regions up and down the state.

The governors action marks the latest effort by the state to offset the possibility of catastrophe after back-to-back years of savage wildfires that killed more than 100 people and burned nearly 2 million acres in total. The projects will cost a total of $35 million, which will be paid with forest management funds in the 2018-19 budget.

The increasing wildfire risks we face as a state means we simply cant wait until a fire starts in order to start deploying emergency resources, Newsom said before making his announcement at a news conference in Lake County on Friday morning. California needs sustained focus and immediate action in order to better protect our communities.

 Gov. Gavin Newsom waives environmental regulations to expedite nearly three dozen local forest management projects to protect communities from wildfires that have decimated regions up and down the state.

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Critics voiced concern about the governors decision to suspend guidelines put in place to protect the environment and the precedent his executive order might set. Some argued that regulations do not pose a problem and the state should have prioritized the projects earlier.

This is like deferred maintenance on a building, said Char Miller, professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College. We just kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off.

Californias forests have become a hot-button political topic, with President Trump fueling assertions that poor management practices and environmental laws have made wildfires worse.

Experts have refuted the notion that heavy timber fueled the states most destructive fires in urban areas and say much of the millions of dead and dying trees grow on lands controlled by the U.S. Forest Service. The Camp fire in Paradise, for example, burned through a region scorched and logged a decade earlier.

Ironically, Miller and others said, Newsoms decision to walk back regulations co-opts the presidents message.

Unfortunately, its a very Trumpian approach, said Douglas Bevington, forest director of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. Its the false notion that more logging paired with rolling back environmental protections is going to protect communities.

At the news conference, Newsom acknowledged the criticism, and rebutted it.

Some people, you know, want to maintain our processes and they want to maintain our rules and protocols, the governor said. But Im going to push back on that. Some of these projects quite literally, not figuratively, could take two years to get done, or we could get them done in the next two months. Thats our choice.

Weve got to step up our game, dare I say, get our act together, Newsom added.

Thom Porter, director of Cal Fire, also disputed that the governors order was Trumpian.

This administration and Cal Fire has been committed to the protection of life, property and the environment well beyond President Trump even considering what that actually means, he said.

Porter said his crews on the ground will continue to work with state agencies and experts to ensure that resources are protected.

While were asking for an exemption from the paperwork process of doing the upfront deep analysis, we are not asking for an exemption from the need to protect the resources, Porter said.

Newsom signed an executive order in his first week in office that directed Cal Fire to develop recommendations to prevent wildfires.

The agency published a report in late February that said forest management efforts by the state, federal government and private landowners were inadequate to improve the health of millions of acres of forests and wildlands that require maintenance. The agency reported that up to 15 million acres of California forest need some form of restoration.

The report recommended that the state waive and streamline regulatory requirements and direct Cal Fire to immediately begin 35 fuel reduction projects, such as the removal of dead trees, brush clearing and prescribed burns to create fuel breaks, defensible space and safe travel corridors on 90,000 acres of land around cities and towns vulnerable to wildfires.

Newsoms new order does just that and waives laws that fall under the jurisdiction of the California Environmental Protection Agency and the California Natural Resources Agency and would typically apply to the projects. The laws include the California Environmental Quality Act, which requires state and local agencies to identify and mitigate the environmental impacts of their work.

According to the emergency declaration, Cal Fire must seek a confirmation from the state agencies that its activities fall under the order and will take protection of the environment into account while ensuring timely implementation.

The governor is also allowing the Office of Emergency Services to use any state-owned properties that it determines suitable for temporary shelter for crews and troops completing the work.

Porter said the governors intervention will help expedite the plans, which are in various stages of approval. His agency has been struggling for the last 15 years to certify a sweeping statewide environmental impact report, which once completed later this year, will allow them to move forward with individual wildfire mitigation projects more quickly.

In lieu of having that document for environmental clearance purposes, this is the means to get these 35 emergency projects done to help protect these communities, Porter said.

Bevington of the DiCaprio Foundation criticized the Cal Fire report for relying on logging and fuel breaks to prevent fires over what he and others say are more effective mitigation methods focused on homes, such as replacing flammable materials on roofs and clearing vegetation directly around buildings.

Its damaging the ecosystem as well as not being an effective way of keeping communities safe, said Bevington, whose organization recently published a report that questioned the states direction.

Kathryn Phillips, executive director of the Sierra Club California, said fuel breaks have failed to stop the spread of wildfires against strong winds, including the Carr fire in Shasta County last year.

I think they have a new leader and they are under extraordinary pressure to do something, she said.

Porter said the state will continue to encourage home hardening, but his agency does not have jurisdiction over local governments to require work on existing homes. He agreed that fuel breaks wont have an impact on every fire, but said they have stopped the spread of blazes under certain wind conditions.

Most of the 35 projects are in Northern and Central California and would be completed over the course of the next year. Cal Fire worked with its local fire units to determine which projects to prioritize, assessing risk and socioeconomic factors, such as age of the nearby populations, poverty and access to vehicles.

The work includes prescribed burns and tree and brush removal over 26,500 acres of land in Ukiah. Other projects would establish fuel breaks, or areas of reduced vegetation to slow or stop wildfires, around Crest in San Diego County and 393 acres of treatment along roads in Fresno County, according to Cal Fire.

Some of the work would create safe ingress and egress corridors, or exit routes to escape blazes, after Paradise residents became trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic when they tried to flee the flames on congested roads in November.

The only project in Los Angeles County calls for more than 400 acres of prescribed burns to clear brush and chaparral in the coastal region near Malibu, where hundreds of homes were destroyed in the Woolsey Fire that killed three people in November. But the burns, like many of the projects, would do nothing to prevent wildfires this year.

Susan Duenas, public safety manager for the city of Malibu, said the project will be presented to the city council in May and the prescribed burns are tentatively scheduled for late November or December, when conditions lessen the risk that a controlled fire may spread, she said.

Based on early feedback, she anticipates environmental and safety concerns from residents.

You have two camps of opinion here: Those who are afraid of it and dont want it, and those who think its what we need to be doing more of, Duenas said. There was a sensitivity to fires before but now even more so because of the trauma of the Woolsey fire.

In addition to streamlining the mitigation projects, Newsom is expected to announce a $50-million public awareness campaign to help communities inform residents about local emergency action plans and the need to make their homes more resilient to wildfires, according to the governors office.

The governor also launched a request for innovative ideas from the private sector to mitigate wildfires as part of a new technology procurement model announced earlier this year.

More stories from Taryn Luna 

taryn.luna@latimes.com

Follow @tarynluna on Twitter. Flash

Representatives of leading Chinese and Italian media pledged on Wednesday in Rome to renew and expand collaboration to facilitate mutual understanding between the peoples and to promote bilateral ties.

On the eve of Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Italy, some 200 government officials, media executives, reporters and experts of the two countries participated in a dialogue in the National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome.

In a speech delivered at the dialogue, Jiang Jianguo, deputy head of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, proposed the establishment of a regular exchange and cooperation mechanism between the two countries' media to boost integrated media development and experience-sharing.

He said media of both sides should contribute positive energy to the development of friendly Sino-Italian relations through various forms of interaction and cooperation.

Chinese Ambassador to Italy Li Ruiyu urged the two countries' media staff to seize the historic opportunity of Xi's visit to forge closer links and to help usher in a brighter future for the friendly ties between China and Italy.

Vito Crimi, Italian state secretary of the Council of Ministers with responsibility for information and publishing, said there are cultural and informational implications of furthering bilateral ties, in addition to the economic perspective.

Sun Shangwu, deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily, said China and Italy are both ancient civilizations, and there are many famous historical figures known to the peoples of both countries in the history of bilateral exchanges, such as Marco Polo, Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi that can be tapped and covered by the media.

Alessandro Banfi, a director with the Italian TV network Mediaset, said he has just returned from a trip to China, where he had in-depth discussions with Chinese counterparts and found ample room for collaboration.

The dialogue also featured the inking of a cooperation accord between China's Economic Daily and Italy's Il Sole 24 Ore.John Burroughs High School is presenting Pop Show 40: Change the World, showcasing the award-winning Powerhouse and Sound Sensations advanced choirs, as well as the Decibelles, Sound Waves choirs and Men at Work choirs this weekend.

Performances will be at 2 and 7 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday in the auditorium at the school, located at 1920 W. Clark Ave, Burbank.

Tickets are available at jbhsvma.com.

Presented by Burroughs Vocal Music Assn., the production features a variety of small groups, duos and soloists performing music and choreography they have chosen themselves, as well as a special performance by the schools dance ensemble.

In total, Pop Show 40 features more than 200 students, as well as select students from the Burroughs Instrumental Music Assn.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Pop Show, which was launched in the fall of 1978, by Mary Rago, who, at the time, was the vocal music director of Burroughs High.

Rago was succeeded as director in 2006 by her former student, Brendan Jennings, who is now assisted by artistic director and former student Jen Oundjian, musical director Dan Scoville and a team of choreographers.

Along with Pop Show 40, the choirs will be busy this spring competing in numerous regional competitions, traveling to Boston, Mass. to compete in a national show-choir competition and hosting their own music showcase on April 12 and 13, where more than 60 choirs will compete during the two-day event.

The choirs season will finish on May 16 with the presentation of the vocal music associations annual spring concert.A Burbank city official gave an overview Tuesday about the pros and cons of implementing a housing regulation in the city, and touched on alternatives, such as relocation allowances and affordability covenants that could be useful for Burbank to deal with its affordable-housing issue, she said.

Simone McFarland, an assistant community development director for the city, said that cities in California are limited in how they can implement rent control within their jurisdictions due to three state laws.

The main legislation is the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which was enacted in 1995 and exempts housing units built after February 1995 from local rent controls. Additionally, the law states that single-family homes and condominiums are exempt from those controls.

Should Burbank decide to have rent control on its books, McFarland said that about 10,416 units, or 46% of the multifamily housing units in the city, could be eligible.

She added that the leases of rent-controlled units can be reset by landlords to any price if existing tenants move out.

Another state law is the Ellis Act, which was passed by the state legislature in 1986 and allows property owners to take their housing units off the market and repurpose them for another use, such as converting them to condominiums, hotels or to be demolished. The law states that if a city has a rent-control ordinance, property owners cannot withdraw their units from the market and bring them back into the market for five years.

Additionally, the Ellis Act allows local agencies to mitigate any adverse impacts on residents who are displaced by their property owners withdrawing housing units from the market.

McFarland said the city of Pasadena does not have rent control, but has a tenant-protection ordinance. Its law requires that a landlord must pay their tenants a relocation allowance if they are at or below 140% of the median income of Los Angeles County if the tenant is required to leave their unit due to demolition, a government order to vacate or permanent removal of the housing unit from the market.

Pasadena established the relocation allowance be equal to two months of fair market rent as established by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD. Additionally, landlords are required to pay tenants a moving expense allowance of $1,120 for adult households or $3,364 if the household has dependents, or disabled or senior tenants, McFarland said.

Burbank has a similar ordinance on its books, in which the landlord is required to pay a relocation amount of $2,500 for each unit they are converting from an apartment into a condominium. The citys law also requires a 180-day notice of intention to convert to tenants and gives tenants whose building is being converted an exclusive right to purchase the unit, McFarland said.

The final state legislation cities have to be mindful of is AB 1505, which was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on Sept. 29. The new law, which was a part of a 15-bill housing-reform package, allows for inclusionary housing and lets local agencies require that new housing projects include a specific percentage of affordable units for extremely-low, very-low, low and moderate income households, McFarland said.

She said Burbank has not been meeting its Regional Housing Needs Allocations numbers set by HUD, but has been trying to do so with its Inclusionary Unit Requirement Ordinance. Burbanks law requires that at least 15% of all newly constructed housing units in residential developments be offered to and sold or rented to very-low, low and moderate income households.

Aside from traditional rent control, McFarland said the City Council could pursue affordability covenants with developers, in which a certain number of units in a housing project would be deed-restricted for a given number of years.

The city was recently successful in this venture with approval of the First Street Village mixed-use project, in which 14 deed-restricted micro-units would be affordable to qualifying moderate-income households.

The agreement states that those units would remain affordable to that specific group of renters for 30 years. Additionally, the covenant remains in effect even when the tenant moves out within the 30-year period, McFarland said.

She added that the covenant for the First Street Village project also requires that the starting rent of those units be $3 per square foot and rent increases will be limited to 2% per year during the 30-year term.

anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com

Twitter: @acocarpioDozens of nurses and healthcare employees picketed outside two area hospitals this week, making various workplace demands as the end of their contracts looms.

No contract, no peace, chanted several dozen healthcare employees and their union representatives outside USC Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale Wednesday, their voices slicing through an otherwise quiet morning.

Picketers claimed hospital management officials have been dragging their feet during negotiations for a proposed contract that includes employees requests for increases in pay and staffing, as well as free healthcare, for workers represented by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, known as SEIU-UHW.

Everything has just been pushed back. We presented our proposal, but they havent responded to anything, said Carlos Martinez, a nursing assistant who has worked at the hospital for seven years.

A bargaining meeting held the day before the picket did not result in meaningful progress, and no firm follow-up date has been set, Martinez said.

The existing contract is set to expire Jan. 31.

If the agreement continues to stall, Martinez said there would likely be additional picketing and even a potential strike.

Hospital management, including Chief Executive Keith Hobbs, declined to comment through a spokesperson.

Meanwhile, as workers marched and bullhorns blared outside the hospital, surgical buyer Andrew Brown held a simultaneous anti-union gathering in one of the hospitals conference rooms.

Since October, Brown has been fighting to dissolve the union formed three years ago, when he filed a petition that was rejected by the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, because it arrived two days too late.

According to Brown, he has the support of a majority of the 230 workers in the bargaining unit, which includes patient services representatives, obstetrics technicians and phlebotomists.

He plans to resubmit a petition on Jan. 2  the earliest date he can.

What the union was telling us was lies ... and the majority of the people in the unit have realized that, said Brown, referring to what he said was an unfulfilled promise by union leaders to secure 5% pay raises.

Grisell Rodriguez, who is leading SEIUs field campaign for the contract, said hospital management promised employees the same raise if they voted to dissolve the union.

If an employer wanted to give a 5% raise, they wouldnt be stalling on the proposal that we gave, Rodriguez said.

Pointing out that a decertification petition requires only 30% of a bargaining units support to file, Rodriguez also dismissed Browns claim to have a majority of workers behind him.

Over the course of the contentious battle that has been playing out between pro- and anti-union forces at the hospital since Brown filed his petition, Hobbs has said several times that he supports all employees, whether they want representation or not.

Having inherited a financially failing hospital in January 2016, Hobbs in October said the morale was low all around the medical facility.

He previously said hes helped instill a cultural and financial shift by cultivating personal relationships and introducing meritocratic raises.

Now they feel they have enough trust in leadership that they dont need a third party to represent them anymore, Hobbs said after Brown filed the decertification petition.

On Wednesday, Martinez denied having that type of relationship with the relatively new management.

When it comes to my living, and theyre not willing to help me improve that, when I come here and work hard for them, it makes it hard to really trust them, Martinez said.

The biggest sticking point is low staffing levels, which some of the workers think jeopardizes their safety and the safety of patients, Martinez said, adding that, in particular, there is a need for more personnel in psychiatric units.

When someone is taking care of three patients, as opposed to one, thats a safety-hazard concern, Rodriguez said.

No employees showed up at Browns lunchtime meeting, which he attributed to a combination of the unions bullying tactics and the fact that it was difficult for employees to take time off from work.

About 100 employees signed up to take turns marching during the two-hour picket, according to Martinez. Roughly 40 people were marching at any given time.

David Acosta, a consultant not employed by the hospital and the only attendee at Browns meeting, questioned whether the majority of the marchers were hospital employees, suggesting they could be union employees or paid protesters.

In Burbank, numerous vehicles driving past Providence St. Joseph on Thursday honked in support of the nurses and members from SEIU Local 121RN, the unions St. Joes chapter, as picketers chanted Safe staffing saves lives.

Labor negotiations were being conducted that day, with both sides trying to come to an agreement before the end of the year, when the current contract expires.

In addition to the protest held outside the hospital, the union held a strike vote, which garnered about 98% support from the nearly 900 members that voted on Thursday. That vote authorizes the bargaining team to call a strike, said Terry Carter, a spokeswoman for SEIU Local 121RN.

Providence St. Joseph respects employees rights to participate in union activities but much prefers meeting at the bargaining table to reach agreements that meet the needs of employees, the hospital and the community, officials from St. Joes said in a statement. Our goal is to settle this contract as soon as possible and in a way that allows the hospital to continue providing safe, excellent and compassionate care to our patients and their families.

Mario Isaac Cardenas Soriano, a third-year orthopedic vascular nurse, was one of the many that walked along Alameda Avenue with a sign in his hand.

Soriano had worked his way up from being a certified nursing assistant, or CNA, to a registered nurse, saying he loves working at Providence St. Joseph.

He said that this years flu season has not been as bad as previous years, but the workload he and his colleagues are given has reached a point where it could negatively affect patients.

We have three [certified nursing assistants] on our floor, but wed love to have more, Soriano said. I cant tell you how often I get a patient that says theyre too embarrassed to wet the bed and tries to get out of bed on their own. Ive seen too many falls happen for that exact reason.

He added patients sometimes refuse to drink liquids because they assume the nurses and CNAs cannot help them in time.

For Soriano, he wants the management to understand the nurses at St. Joes need an appropriately sized support staff to assist them with patients.

Im not above anything. Ill do whatever I need to do to help the patients, he said. I was an aide at one point in time, so I know exactly how difficult that job is when you have nine to 15 patients that you single-handedly have to look after, but this is crazy. We definitely need a lot more staff.

Staffing levels for certified nursing assistants at St. Joes has been an issue since July, when the hospital opted to change the model to allow three CNAs for every 30 patients.

After pushback from the nurses and the union, management reverted back to the previous staffing model of three CNAs for every 24 patients, said Gity Khazan, a nurse from the neuro-cardiac unit of Providence St. Joseph.

However, she said the hospital has been moving toward changing the CNA-to-patient ratio again, and she and her colleagues dont want that to happen again.

Khazan, who has been a nurse at St. Joes for 11 years, said her breaking point with management occurred when she had to take care of four patients who were in critical condition and only had the help of two CNAs.

She said those patients needed to be turned to prevent bedsores from occurring, but because she was shorthanded, one of those patients ended up developing those sores.

Were hoping we can negotiate terms that will really benefit the patients, Khazan said. That means that we need adequate staffing and resources to take care of our patients.

anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com

Twitter: @acocarpioYears ago, I worked for a team of editors who hired someone from another department in the company.

It became clear pretty quickly that the newly minted editor was out of his element  not the born wordsmith his colleagues were.

Like those other editors, he would send me, the copy editor, an email to tell me when an article was waiting to be reviewed in a shared computer folder.

But, whereas the others would tell me there was a story waiting for me in the queue, he would report hed sent me something in the cue.

Some things youve just got to know. If youve heard the expression eek out a living, youre not going to check your dictionary to see if thats a valid definition of eek.

Only by having read and noted, either consciously or subconsciously, that the correct term is eke out a living, would you understand that eek is an error.

Here are some other things that, as Ive learned in my editing career, youve just got to know.

Ordnance. I once edited an article that mentioned unexploded ordinance. An ordinance is a rule or law passed by a local government, often dealing with things like parking or potholes, which are unlikely to massively combust.

The writer wanted ordnance, which means military weapons, often artillery, which you dont want left lying around unexploded.

Till. Everyone, or almost everyone, uses the one-syllable alternative to until. Its pretty natural to assume that the shorter term is actually a shortened form, a truncation that lobs off the first syllable and replaces it with an apostrophe: til.

You can contract it that way if you like, but youll be out of sync with every professional editing style in American English. They all agree that the term you want is till. This did not evolve from an error. Till actually predates until and means essentially the same thing.

Commas around etc. The abbreviation etc. is a bad choice for news-quality writing because journalism calls for specificity. Terms like etc. and and much more! gloss over details and serve as sort of a cop-out by the writer.

But in marketing writing and feature articles, these terms have their place. In the case of etc., that place is between commas. Traditional use dictates that the abbreviation etc.  is preceded and (unless it ends a sentence) followed by a comma, according to the Chicago Manual of Style.

Sleight. If youve heard someone talk about a magician doing card tricks, you may have heard the expression slight of hand. But if youd read those same words, you would have seen sleight of hand. The noun sleight means deceitful craftiness and it can also mean dexterity or skill.

Out of curiosity, I did a Google search for the word sleight minus the words of and hand. Except for a German film by that title and some references to people with the last name Sleight, I found no indication that people uses this word outside the sleight of hand expression.

No serial comma before an ampersand. The serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma, has a lot of fans. Its the optional comma before a conjunction in a series, as in red, white, and blue. Its neither right nor wrong. You can opt for red, white and blue if you prefer.

But if youre going to replace that and with an ampersand, the choice is no longer yours. When an ampersand is used instead of the word and (as in company names), the serial comma is omitted: Winken, Blinken & Nod is a purveyor of nightwear, notes the Chicago Manual of Style.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know. She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.Have you ever noticed that some publications write advisor while others write adviser?

If so, youve noticed that it happens a lot  so much that youve probably figured out that neither spelling is a mistake. No way would half the professional publishing world spell a word wrong every time they use it. Indeed, its no mistake.

Adviser and advisor are both correct, advises Merriam-Websters dictionary. Some people feel that advisor is more formal, and it tends to be found more often when applied to official positions, such as an advisor to a president. When referring to someone who is serving in a military role, especially when using the term as a euphemism (as when claiming that troops are actually military advisers), then adviser is somewhat more common.

People guess that the biggest thorn in an editors side is bad grammar. Its not. Grammar errors are easy to spot and fix. Alternative correct spellings, on the other hand, are a never-ending pain in the neck.

Spell check doesnt flag them. You have to spot them yourself. And, although most people faced with a choice between adviser and advisor cant go wrong, editors can. Part of the job is ensuring consistency. So we have to pick not just a correct spelling but the one thats been preselected by whatever style were following.

Interestingly, in Associated Press Style, the correct spelling is adviser. Why? Thats not clear, but its probably because APs default dictionary, Websters New World, has long preferred adviser. And because AP influences a lot of newswriting, you may have noticed the er spelling in newspapers.

The Chicago Manual of Style, followed by a lot of book and magazine editors, doesnt express an opinion. They leave it up to their default dictionary, Merriam-Webster, which as weve seen has no express opinion on the subject.

But if youve spent enough time with your nose in dictionaries, you can tell that Merriams does appear to have a preference.

The dictionary has a listing for adviser. The definition: a variant spelling of advisor. That suggests they consider the er spelling a nonstandard alternative to the standard advisor.

Look up advisor, and you get further evidence Merriams prefers the or spelling. There is no separate listing for advisor. Instead, the noun is listed under the main verb that forms its root: advise.

Its the same treatment they give thinker, dancer and squealer. Theyre listed under think, dance and squeal, respectively. Not all noun forms derived from verbs are listed this way. But plenty are, meaning this is a standard way of indicating how to write certain nouns.

Of course, adviser and advisor are just one pair of correct spellings that editors must either commit to memory or look up in a style guide or dictionary.

Others include amuck and amok, ambience and ambiance, tureen and terrine, breeches and britches, brooch and broach (yes, broach is really a correct option for a lapel pin) and, of course, the famously confounding choice of health care and healthcare.

For the record, AP Style has long preferred health care. Thats in defiance of their own preferred dictionary, which likes healthcare. But its in sync with Merriams, which prefers health care. Use whichever you want. And if you use the two-word form in front of a noun and you think a hyphen makes it clearer, thats acceptable: health-care policy.

For my money, the most interesting both-are-correct pair is probably predominantly and predominately. It seems a no-brainer to me that predominately would be a botched attempt to write predominantly. After all, -ly adverbs are often formed based on adjectives: nice, nicely; quick, quickly; clever, cleverly. Predominant is an adjective. The idea of forming an adverb from the verb predominate seems bizarre.

Yet predominately is acceptable. It just goes to show you why this whole business of multiple correct spellings is a serious annoyance for editors.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know. She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.President Trumps plan to pull funding from military construction projects to pay for a Mexican border wall could delay more than $139 million in critical infrastructure funding for U.S. Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach.

The stations needs include replacing a 60-year-old ammunition pier, dredging Anaheim Bay and constructing missile storage warehouses.

The installations strategic importance is expected to increase in coming years because the Navy plans to base 60% of its ships in the Pacific Ocean by 2020, up from 40% a decade ago, according to a Navy study.

Seal Beachs primary missions are to store ordnance for the Navy and Marine Corps, load and unload ammunition and maintain weapons on warships departing San Diego.

At the request of Sen. Jack Reed (D- R.I.), the Joint Chiefs of Staff released a list of military construction projects this week that could be used as funding sources for the border wall. Seal Beachs earmarked funding was listed as an eligible source.

Gregg Smith, public affairs officer for the weapons station, said the bases construction funds have only been identified as a potential source of border wall funding.

Especially knowing that, it would definitely not be appropriate for me to speculate on potential impacts to the base or the Navy at this time, he said.

U.S. Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Laguna Beach), whose district includes Seal Beach, wrote in a statement that Trump chose to veto a Congressional resolution terminating his border emergency, defying the consensus of both parties in the House and the Senate.

I will not sit still and let the president raid hundreds of millions from California disaster relief funding, and put $139 million more in military construction projects for Seal Beachs brave service members and their families on the chopping block, Rouda wrote.

The replacement of the ammunition pier is considered vital by the Navy because it was built prior to modern earthquake standards and a major seismic event could halt operations.

Dredging Anaheim Bay and reconfiguring the turning basin will allow Seal Beach to serve larger amphibious assault ships, which currently have to be resupplied at sea by Marine Corps helicopters off Camp Pendleton.

To allow vehicles to access the new wharf, the Navy will build a causeway across the east side of the bay and create an entirely new public navigation channel for Huntington Harbour.

The Navy currently closes Anaheim Bay to public boating traffic while ships are entering or leaving the base.

The new navigation channel will eliminate the need for such closures, which can last for about an hour and a half, said Paul De Graw, commodore of the Huntington Harbour Yacht Club.

The yacht club was excited about the option that they came up with because it separates the harbor from the naval base, De Graw said. The members of the yacht club would be disappointed if the project didnt go through.

Its unclear when the Trump administration will tap specific military construction projects for funding and how it long it would take to restore funding to those that get defunded.

If the Navy decides to move ahead with funding Seal Beach on schedule, construction crews could break ground later this year or in 2020.

Daniel Langhorne is a contributor to TimesOC. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielLanghorne and follow @timesocofficial for more news and features about Orange County.Monday marks the quiet end for a corner of Eastside Costa Mesa and its culinary history.

Dick Churchs, a classic Americana diner known for its vintage decor and friendly service, is changing owners.

Since March 1981, Irvine residents George and Tracey King have run the place on the corner of Newport Boulevard and Mesa Drive and kept things classic. They say their little restaurant embodied their American dream, but now theyre handing over the keys.

Its time, George, 71, said in an interview on a recent afternoon. He then joked that letting go will help him achieve better blood pressure.

For George in particular, it will be a tender moment. Dick Churchs, founded in 1947, has been not only his family-run business, but the centerpiece of his social life.

Tracey and George King, pictured in the 1980s, bought Dick Churchs restaurant in 1981. They have sold the Costa Mesa establishment to a Tustin coffeehouse owner. (Courtesy of George King)

On a recent afternoon, the restaurant was sparsely populated. The Kings were conversing with some of their regulars. They are not planning a big goodbye party for the public, but are having a private event for their employees.

Before then, theyre passing out special Dick Churchs coffee mugs that note that the Kings have owned the restaurant since 1981.

Dick Churchs has a long history. It opened in 1947 as Babys Beef Burger, making it among the oldest continually-operating restaurants in Costa Mesa and Orange County.

It has had a few different names , including Buds Drive In and Arts Coffee Shop. It was named Dick Churchs in 1972, reportedly after its owner, Dick Church.

George King poses for a photo in the late 1980s with a group of regular customers who used to visit Dick Churchs from their native Canada. (Courtesy of George King)

The Kings immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in 1978, partially because they wanted a better education for their oldest son, John, now 48. They also have two younger sons: Hsuan, now 45, and Adam, 37.

George, a veteran of the Taiwanese Navy, first got work as a mechanic at the Chino airport. He also worked a second job as a dishwasher and went up the restaurant ranks to busboy and cook.

The Kings soon realized they needed to own their own business to live the American dream they strived for.

Sandra Cotten, center, joins Dick Churchs restaurants retiring owners George and Tracey King, server Brittany Patch, and 25-year customer Lee Littrell. (Spencer Grant)

In 1981, they achieved their goal by purchasing Dick Churchs restaurant and later the property itself. Under their ownership, they made more of their food in-house, like pies, muffins, soups and dressing. They also did some remodeling.

But even when running the restaurant and raising three children, the Kings never stopped having side jobs. One of them was selling ornaments at the Orange County Market Place. Tracey, 63, also worked as a real estate agent.

When a portion of the 55 Freeway opened through Costa Mesa in the early 1990s, the Kings saw their business decline dramatically, by as much as 30%. They used to get more drive-by traffic along Newport Boulevard. When the freeway went in, those cars were re-routed, bypassing the boulevard. It made Dick Churchs far more remote.

The Kings realized they needed to supplement their income. So George co-founded KTI Hydraulics, Inc. in Costa Mesa in 1996. The business is now in Santa Ana. He said hes not retiring from it just yet.

When describing how the Kings have run Dick Churchs, Sandy Cotten, a waitress there for 34 years, repeatedly used the word family.

George King, pictured inside Dick Churchs restaurant in the early 1980s, bought the business in 1981 with his wife, Tracey. The two are selling the business, effective Monday. (Courtesy of George King)

She noted how the Kings often hired siblings. Two of their own boys worked there. One company Christmas card from 1992 had three sisters in it, all Dick Churchs employees. George stood in the back of the pack wearing a Santa hat.

They only hire sisters, Cotten joked.

Dick Churchs new owner, Bodie Rasmussen, who owns the Lost Bean, a Tustin coffeehouse, plans to add more coffee concepts to the restaurant. He takes over Tuesday.

George said he wants to take the vintage cash register with him when he goes.

But hell have mixed emotions that last day. Hell miss the people and employees, but on the other hand, we are happy we finally can be retired. Im happy to still see this place open and employees still working.

bradley.zint@latimes.com

Twitter: @BradleyZintA Newport Beach man was sentenced Thursday to 60 days in Orange County Jail for striking an Uber driver last year in an altercation recorded on the drivers dashboard camera and posted online.

Benjamin Golden, 33, pleaded guilty Thursday in Orange County Superior Court to a misdemeanor count of battery on a taxi driver. In addition to his jail sentence, Golden will spend the next three years on informal probation and was ordered to pay restitution, according to the Orange County district attorneys office.

Golden was originally charged with and pleaded not guilty to four misdemeanor counts, including assault on a public transportation worker, battery on a public transit employee, assault and battery. The reduced charge was a result of a plea deal with prosecutors.

Golden was arrested shortly after 8 p.m. Oct. 30, 2015, at a Costa Mesa shopping center where his Uber driver, Edward Caban, had parked in order to get Golden out of the car, police said at the time.

Benjamin Golden (File photo)

Caban told police that Golden, who was in the back seat, hit him repeatedly and pulled his hair, prompting him to pepper-spray Golden, authorities said. Caban shared video of the incident with police and posted a clip on YouTube showing what he said were the final minutes of the ride.

Police said Caban had picked up Golden in a parking lot on the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach and that Golden appeared to be intoxicated.

In the video, Golden argues with Caban about directions. The driver eventually pulls into the parking lot of a shopping center in the 1800 block of Newport Boulevard in Costa Mesa, where Golden is seen falling over in his seat.

The two continue to argue and Caban orders Golden out of the car. Golden refuses to leave and asks Caban to take him to Park Newport, an apartment complex near Jamboree Road.

Get out of my car or I will call the police, Caban says.

Golden opens the back door, then repeatedly strikes Caban, shouting expletives at him and pulling his hair. Caban then pepper-sprays him.

Goldens employer, Irvine-based Taco Bell, said soon after the incident that Golden was no longer working as a corporate manager for the company.

He also was banned from using Uber.

In December, Golden sued Caban for $5 million, claiming the recording had been made without his consent and caused him severe emotional distress, humiliation, anxiety, the loss of his employment and the inability to get another job, according to court documents.

Caban had sued Golden in November, claiming assault, battery and infliction of emotional distress and seeking $1.6 million, according to a statement of damages provided to the Los Angeles Times by Goldens attorneys.

Both lawsuits were dismissed in July, according to court records.

hannah.fry@latimes.com

Twitter: @HannahFryTCNConstruction is gaining steam at Golden West College in Huntington Beach on a series of new buildings intended to accommodate increasing enrollment and foster innovation and invention, college officials say.

When all is said and done, Golden West will boast a new math and science building, a language arts complex, a cosmetology building and a business, social sciences and administrative office facility, said college spokesman Chris McLaughlin.

Earlier this year, the community college celebrated the completion of a new criminal justice training center and a student services center.

The new student services center at Golden West College in Huntington Beach is pictured Tuesday. (Kevin Chang / Staff Photographer )

Construction on the new math and science building began last year. McLaughlin said the three-story, 120,516-square-foot structure will provide more classroom space and offer a STEM center for science, technology, engineering and math. Officials estimate completion in 2019.

The existing math and science building is about 40,000 square feet and will be used until the new facility is complete. After that, it will be used for additional classes and programs. Math and science classes also are held in several other buildings on campus, McLaughlin said.

The new language arts complex will replace the humanities and health sciences building at the center of campus. McLaughlin said the college is waiting for state approval to break ground.

The cosmetology building will include retail and salon space to support an existing campus program that provides hair care to the community.

Smaller buildings will be demolished to make room for a multi-use facility for business, social sciences and administrative offices. Conference facilities will be included that could accommodate special events.

The new criminal justice training center at Golden West College in Huntington Beach was completed earlier this year. (Kevin Chang / Staff Photographer )

The expansive refurbishment project, with a budget estimate of $333.9 million, is part of the Coast Community College Districts Vision 2020 Facilities Master Plan, which district trustees approved in 2011.

Golden West allocated $198.84 million from Measure M, a $698-million bond issue that local voters approved in 2012 to help fund new academic buildings, technology upgrades and facility repairs at all Coast district colleges, which also include Orange Coast and Coastline. The project funding also includes more than $135 million from other sources.

District spokeswoman Letitia Clark said Golden West has used more than $153 million so far.

Clark said deadlines for projects in the pipeline depend on limitations on bond spending.

Golden West, built in the 1960s, comprises many buildings that have exceeded their expected duration of 50 years. Upgrades have been made to the air conditioning units, but facilities throughout the campus also need to be refurbished, according to the districts plan.

Priscella.Vega@latimes.com

Twitter: @vegapriscellaRe: Border walls might be an unfortunate reality but they are a necessity, (July 2). Who would have thought that the ongoing tumult over immigration and border security could serve as a prism for taking a broader look at the American Dream?

The most interesting part of Juli Haydens commentary is not her thoughts regarding immigration, calls for border security or her perception that fleeing Central American migrants are an imminent threat. After all, weve heard all that before.

Whats most telling is her outlook: her hopes, her dreams and ultimately her resignation. In her commentary she seems to both hope for a perfect world, yet is sadly resigned to settling for an unfortunate reality.

Her perspective is striking because it provides a vivid picture illustrating the current psyche of Americans and, more broadly, their apparent abandonment of the American Dream.

Everyone has dreams, and many dream of a perfect world, but most learn at an early age that the perfect world doesnt just happen. Traditionally, American parents teach children to work hard and encourage them to overcome obstacles standing between them and their perfect world.

It was this thinking that defined many generations of Americans and served as the underpinning for what most understand to be the American Dream. This ethic powered the belief that anything was possible, and that ones world could be just as perfect as you chose to make it.

And while Ms. Hayden laments about the difficulties of accepting a situation she finds troubling and far from ideal, it is ironic that her concerns appear to stem from the plight of those who have chosen to actively embrace a traditional American ethos. Right now, the torchbearers for the American Dream are those fighting to simply make it to America.

The people Ms. Hayden believes must be stopped are coming from a world dominated by violence. A world where parents believe the best chance  perhaps the only chance  for their children is to flee. Imagine for a moment the level of desperation required for a parent  any parent  to believe that leaving behind everything and everyone they know is the best option; that exposing themselves and their children to a perilous 2,500 mile journey through unknown lands rife with danger is actually their childs best chance to survive beyond their teens.

If anyone was to give this even the briefest of consideration they would come to understand these migrants will not be deterred, not by a wall, not by extra border security, not even by an overtly cruel and deeply evil policy that might separate them from their children. They are determined to overcome all obstacles in search of a perfect world.

So, while todays Central American migrants are risking everything, and past generations of Americans risked everything by fighting two world wars, overcoming the Great Depression and leading the new world order, why are todays Americans resigned to settling for far-off dreams and warm memories of a past that no longer exists?

The passive acceptance of a world perceived as less-than sadly shows an all-too-common willingness by an entire generation to simply raise the white flag and surrender their hopes and dreams.

If you wish to live in a perfect world, it doesnt just happen.

There is nothing more human than to dream, but a dream without constructive action is little more than a wish.

Steve Shepherd

Huntington Beach

Administration is making the world far less perfect

If I lived in a perfect world, I wouldnt have to put up with a megalomaniac as president who has billion dollar delusions that would need to be funded or born by the American taxpayers. If I lived in a perfect world, I wouldnt have to put up with a venal, incompetent, anti-community administration that makes the bumbling of George W. Bush look almost benign.

If I lived in a perfect world, I wouldnt have to worry about justice and the rule of law being victimized at every turn by majorities of one party controlling all three branches of government that are heartless, insensitive and arrogant.

In her commentary, Juli Hayden concludes: My prayer is that the American people, through our system of government, will wake up and protect our country from those officials and groups who would undermine and steal our future. She adds at the end, What say you?

I would like to agree with Ms. Hayden about her prayer, although I am sure not in the way she intended. It seems that facts, truth, reason, common sense and compassion have been kicked to the curb by a sizable slice of the electorate who only care about winning and getting their own way.

The needs, cares and concerns of even the majority of our citizens are inconsequential and subservient to this rabble-rousing crowd who are mesmerized by their own Svengali. Our future posterity depends upon ridding our body politic of such a threat to our society.

Tim Geddes

Huntington Beach

Clooney proves helmets save lives

It is said that speed kills, but that prudence and a will to survive can dissuade the Grim Reaper from doing his thing. Case in point: the simple wearing of a helmet when riding a motorcycle. George Clooney was doing an estimated 60 mph on a scooter in Olbia, Italy, when he collided head-on with a Mercedes. Not only did his helmet shatter the windshield, but the helmet itself cracked. If ever there was a positive reinforcement for mandatory helmet laws, this is it.

Bill Spitalnick

Newport Beach

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.

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. Flash

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that it is time for the United States to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria in 1967.

Such a bold move marking a major shift in U.S. policy would further complicate the situation and escalate tensions in the region, U.S. experts said.

In a surprise tweet, Trump said that "after 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

In response, Israel's Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer tweeted "THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!"

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has always asserted that the Israeli presence in the Golan is "thwarting" Iran's ambitions of expansion and "is a guarantee for stability" in the region, also tweeted that "at a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump!"

Richard N. Haass, head of U.S. think tank Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted that he "strongly disagree(s) @realDonaldTrump; now NOT the time 4 US to recognize Israel sovereignty over Golan Hts."

"No Arab govt would make peace w Israel & would violate UNSCR 242 which rules out acquiring territory by war and serves Israel as it says all states have right 2 live in peace," he added, refering to United Nations Security Council Resolution 242.

Trump's statement came after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Wednesday, when Netanyahu said "I think it's time that the international community recognizes Israel's stay in the Golan, the fact that the Golan will always remain part of the state of Israel."

Pompeo said earlier on Wednesday at a joint press conference with Kuwait's Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah Al-Khalid Al-Sabah that "there's been no change in U.S. policy with respect to" the position on the Golan Heights.

But recent signs have shown otherwise, indicating that the Trump administration was moving in accordance with Israel's appeal.

A State Department human rights report unveiled earlier this month used the term "Israeli-controlled" instead of "Israeli-occupied" to describe the status of the Golan Heights, sparking wide speculation and worry among observers.

Pompeo told the press traveling with him in the Middle East on Thursday that "we used that language in the Human Rights Report with great intentionality."

"We didn't make a mistake. It's there for a reason. It's not a change in U.S. policy. It was our intent, as it is in every element of the Human Rights Report, to be as factually descriptive as we can, and that's what we did," he said, according to the transcript provided by the State Department.

Israel seized the land in a war in 1967 and annexed it in the 1980s, but the international community has never recognized the move.

The UN peacekeeping force tasked to patrol the buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights was deployed in 1974 to separate Syrian and Israeli forces. Since then, the buffer zone had remained quiet until the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

In July 2018, the Syrian state media outlets said the rebels in southern Syria near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights accepted plan to evacuate and surrender their heavy weapons to the Syrian army, which has restored control of large swathes of territories in the region, including the crossing with the Golan Heights.

Netanyahu called on the White House in January this year to recognize "Israeli sovereignty" over the Golan Heights in a joint statement with U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton in Jerusalem.

The White House said Wednesday Trump will host next week at the White House the Israeli prime minister, who is now seeking re-election for a fifth term in the April 9 elections.Authorities say they arrested the man who was seen on cellphone video late last month ramming his car into a Glendale police cruiser before speeding away and evading capture.

Ryan Alvarez, 36, was taken into custody from a Lancaster home on Aug. 31 by officers from a U.S. Marshals task force. He is suspected of being the man involved in a La Crescenta shoplifting incident that escalated into a short pursuit with officers from the Glendale Police Department.

The incident began at the Vons at 3233 Foothill Blvd. around 10 a.m. on Aug. 21, according to Sgt. Dan Suttles, a spokesman for Glendale police.

He said a call came in about a man shoplifting alcohol from the grocery store.

The man was still in the store when officers arrived. They attempted to stop him but he got into a white Ford Mustang and sped away.

Several police vehicles attempted to box in the car, but Suttles said the suspect kept pushing into one of the cruisers.

A video of the encounter that was shared on social media showed the suspect ignoring officers telling him to turn off the vehicle and exit it.

The Mustang was able to break free, running over an officers foot in the process.

The man eventually abandoned the vehicle near Foothill Boulevard and Boston Avenue, fleeing from police on foot. A search perimeter was set up, but police were unable to locate him.

Suttles said officers discovered the Mustang the man was driving was an unreported stolen vehicle from Burbank. When they searched the vehicle, they found 156 car keys that were stolen two weeks prior from a Los Angeles-area Ford dealership.

Officers were able to link Alvarez to the incident as a result of DNA evidence left behind in the car, according to Suttles.

He was tracked down to a home in the 5300 block of West Avenue in Lancaster; its unknown what link he has to the residence. Suttles said a Ford Explorer in the driveway of the home turned out to be stolen.

Alvarez was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon against police officers, driving or taking a vehicle without consent, receiving stolen property, petty theft and driving a suspended or revoked license due to a DUI conviction with a prior offense.

andy.nguyen@latimes.com

Twitter: @Andy_TrucThe so-called heiress to an Armenian cracker-bread company was sentenced to three years in prison on Tuesday for her involvement in the 2015 choking death of a 31-year-old man in a Glendale apartment.

Sparkle Soojian, who claimed on her website to be the heiress to the Ak Mak cracker-bread company, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the Sept. 10, 2015 death of John Michael King-Smith.

Soojians then-boyfriend, Jared Kasiewicz, has pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for his part in King-Smiths death. His sentencing is scheduled for June.

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King-Smith was the ex-boyfriend of Soojians roommate and had showed up unannounced at their apartment in the 200 block of West Windsor Road on the night of Sept. 10, according to court testimony from last year.

An altercation broke out, and Soojian texted Kasiewicz to come over.

When the former Marine arrived at the apartment, he tackled King-Smith and placed him in a choke hold, according to court testimony.

Video recorded during the incident reportedly shows Kasiewicz choking King-Smith and asking people nearby for rope to tie him up. He then bound King-Smiths wrists to his feet.

Kasiewicz washed off the blood he had gotten on himself during the scuffle, then told several people in the apartment he wasnt here and left, according to court testimony.

Soojian then called police to report a break-in had occurred and that neighbors tied up King-Smith.

When officers arrived, they found King-Smith in a state of medical distress, and he was transported to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

According to the Los Angeles County coroners office, King-Smith died of asphyxia and a compressed neck.

andy.nguyen@latimes.com

Twitter: @Andy_TrucLa Canada Flintridge will be able to take an important first step in restoring its Flint Canyon Trail  a vital connector path threatened by downslope erosion  after receiving Monday a $300,000 grant from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

The grant is funded by Proposition 68, a $4-billion bond for parks, environment and water infrastructure projects passed by California voters in June. It will cover the cost of a preliminary engineering report and concepts for possible repairs and will assist the city in seeking public input and developing a final design.

State Sen. Anthony Portantino (D-La Canada Flintridge) is one of several regional legislative participants for the conservancy. At Mondays SMMC board meeting, he spoke in favor of the grant via a conference call. He later told the Valley Sun it would help the city create a plan of action.

We need to figure out whats needed so we dont lose this important historical trail connection, he said. Then we need to figure out how much its going to cost to do this whole thing.

La Canada Public Works Director Pat DeChellis said the city estimated in 2012 full slope stabilization with a 2,000-foot reach would cost around $4 million to $5 million. He said while a funding source has not yet been identified for the physical work, the conservancy grant will increase the citys chances of securing future funding.

The city currently maintains roughly a 500-foot portion of the 2-mile trail, which connects Hahamongna Watershed Park to Cherry Canyon and the city of Glendale and ultimately provides access to the Angeles National Forest.

Steve Del Guercio, a former member of the La Canada Flintridge City Council, represents the city on an advisory committee for the conservancy. He said the city has been working for decades to preserve the important access point to other recreational areas.

This is really a pretty significant and unique spot, he said of the trail, which runs above the Flint Wash, an important flood control channel. It would be an absolute travesty not to have that segment.

In 2009, the city paid about $500,000 to help repair the trails upslope. Another $336,500 was set aside in the 2012-13 budget for downslope repairs, aided by a $50,000 conservancy grant.

Weve had some success, but its always been temporary solutions, Del Guercio said. I think its wonderful weve had so much support from Sen. Portantino. Theres no question the likely magnitude of a fix is going to require a joint effort by multiple agencies.

While theres been no formal talk of how a full restoration would be paid for, Portantino said he plans to help La Canada identify and secure funding.

Im reasonably confident that over the next several years we will be able to fully fund the restoration, he said.

sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardineYour kids may never again want to play with Tonka toys when they can operate the real deal in Las Vegas. Dig This, an attraction off the Las Vegas Strip, recently added an area that allows kids to operate big mechanical shovels to dig holes.

[At] 6 years and older, they can operate by themselves, founder and owner Ed Mumm said. Theyre supervised by an instructor. This is on real equipment. Children as young as 3 can have a go, provided they are with an adult.

Billed as the Worlds Heavy Equipment Playground, Dig This has been bringing out the inner child in adults for eight years, adding a dedicated Kids Digs area in mid-February.

Spring in Las Vegas brings blossoms inside. Take a peek at the Bellagios garden 

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Children 6 and older can take the controls of a real digger in the new kid-focused space at Dig This. (Dig This)

Toddlers can sit on Mom or Dads lap as 1.5-ton side-by-side diggers spring into action, lifting gravel from a lot to dig holes in the earth or use giant, mechanical shovels to pluck plastic ducks out of a pond. The tracks on the kiddie machines have been rendered immobile so the vehicles never move.

Grownups, however, can operate bulldozers and 30,000-pound excavators that do move.

A lot of us never really grew up out of our sandboxes. Theres always been that want and desire to continue to play on heavy equipment, but this time its for real, Mumm said. Youd be amazed at how many people want to enjoy the thrill of operating heavy equipment.

Dig This visitor Jonathan Schaeffer dumps a bucket of dirt from an excavator at Dig This. Adult experiences start at $169. (Sam Morris / Las Vegas News Bureau)

Mumm said his adult guests are equally divided between men and women. Before being let loose to roam across five acres of desert, visitors learn how to operate various pieces of equipment.

We get people up and running in five to 10 minutes, he said.

A visitor drives a bulldozer up a hill of dirt he created minutes earlier at Dig This, an attraction for kids and adults. (Sam Morris / Las Vegas News Bureau)

Kids Digs start at $20 for a 15-minute session. Individual Digs for grownups start at $169 for 70 minutes at the controls. (Guests must pass a breathalyzer test before being allowed near the machines.)

And theres something called an Aggression Session, the ultimate stress reliever. For $650, visitors spend a half hour using a 15-ton excavator to smash a perfectly good car to smithereens. Its quite therapeutic for a lot of people, Mumm said.

Info: Dig This, 800 W. Roban Ave., Las Vegas; (888) 344-8447

travel@latimes.com

@latimestravelFor Fabio Alberto Alves, discussing feelings was something only women did.

But the judge had sentenced the 53-year-old machinist to group therapy for men convicted of domestic violence, so he didnt have much choice. It was either that or prison.

During the first two of 20 weekly sessions, he didnt say a word. He shouldnt even be here, he thought. His wife of 25 years had blown the situation out of proportion. He was drunk when he grabbed her and caused a scene at her church. The cops should have never been involved.

Then, on his third night as part of the group, he opened up.

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Being here for me now is like being with family, he said. I realized that what I did was wrong, but that no one is here to judge me. When Im here, I feel like I can talk, express myself.

Fabio Alberto Alves takes the elevator to a meeting of E Agora, Jose?, a therapy group for men serving alternative sentences for domestic violence convictions. (Flavio Forner / For The Times)

The shift in attitude  from indignant and detached to temperate and open  is what groups like the one Alves participates in are after. As Brazil continues to register startling rates of domestic violence and femicide, therapists, prosecutors, judges and womens right activists all agree on one thing: If saving women from becoming victims is the goal, working on men is the answer.

Brazils 2006 domestic violence law, supported by then-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and named for Maria da Penha  a pharmacist who became the voice for women suffering domestic abuse when two attacks by her husband left her a paraplegic  is considered one of the best in the world.

Properly implementing it, however, is still a struggle.

In an annual report this year, Human Rights Watch notes that police in Brazil do not properly investigate thousands of domestic violence cases each year and that many are never prosecuted. The countrys court system is clogged, with more than 1.2 million cases of domestic violence pending as of December 2017. Left unchecked, domestic violence often escalates, with serious injuries or death the result.

A 2015 study conducted by the Latin American Social Sciences Institute showed that more than half the homicides in Brazil where women were killed happened at home. And more than 1 in 3 were committed by partners or former partners.

Between 2003 and 2013, the number of female homicide victims in the country increased 21%.

In January, 126 more women were killed in Brazil, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a figure the organization referred to as alarming, particularly as most of the women had previously denounced their aggressors, faced serious acts of domestic violence, or suffered previous attacks or attempted homicides.

In 2015, Brazil criminalized femicide  the killing of women or girls, usually by men, because of their gender  and started imposing sentences of up to 30 years on those who commit the crime. In 2017, 4,539 women were killed, a 6.1% increase over the previous year, the Brazilian Forum on Public Security reported. The number of killings police registered as femicides was 1,113, which the nonprofit believes is low because the motives behind many of the killings were initially unknown.

The killing of women and girls is part of a larger violence epidemic in Brazil. In 2017, according to the Brazilian Forum on Public Security, there were 63,880 homicides, a rate of 30.8 per 100,000 residents. That compared with the rate of 6.2 per 100,000 in the U.S. that year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At Alves group in Santo Andre, a city in the greater Sao Paulo area, men break off into smaller groups depending on how long theyve been part of the program. Named E Agora, Jose?, or What now, Jose?, after a poem by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade about loneliness, the feeling of abandonment and a lack of hope or path in life, it takes the men, who are serving alternative sentences under Brazils domestic violence law, through discussions on misogynistic, sexist and patriarchal ideologies by way of their everyday experiences.

Womens rights, masculinity and how one becomes a man are some of the broader topics the participants debate with one another and group facilitators, who are often psychologists, sociologists, social workers and lawyers. Questions like whether they would allow their sons to play with dolls, help them examine how they view the world and where their views come from.

Ricardo Serafine talks about what he has learned during his time in E Agora, Jose? and how he has already brought that education into his everyday life. (Flavio Forner / Los Angeles Times)

For men like Ricardo Serafine, its the first time theyve reflected on these issues and found ways to deal with the ensuing anger to which they react violently.

Coming here has changed my way of thinking, said the 51-year-old, who works in an auto body shop and just completed his last session at E Agora, Jose?. I used to blow up over the smallest things. Now I stop, take a breath, reflect and then act. I was so angry when they first told me I had to come here. Now Im grateful for it all.

Serafines and Alves gratitude is not the only evidence that groups like E Agora, Jose? work. While cross-country statistics arent available its rare that any group sees a participant return.

According to Flavio Urra, the psychologist and sociologist who started and coordinates E Agora, Jose?, no man who participated in his group has re-offended since it became a form of alternative sentencing in 2014.

Groups started by prosecutor Erica Canuto in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte also have a 0% return rate. Prosecutor Gabriela Manssurs program Tempo de Despertar, or Time to Wake Up, which operates in Sao Paulo and a handful of other cities in the area, has a rate of 2%. Before she started the groups, it was 65%.

Even with the group therapy models obvious success  both as alternative sentencing and for men who participate voluntarily before theyre sentenced  a misogynistic and patriarchal culture isnt something easily reversed. Perspectives on the best way to put an end to it are also difficult to change.

Flavio Urra, founder and coordinator of E Agora, Jose?, a therapy group for men serving alternative sentences for domestic violence convictions, welcomes a new participant and walks him through how the group works. (Flavio Forner / For The Times)

Theres often the thought that everything related to stopping domestic violence should be directed at the woman who is already a victim, said Conceicao de Maria, co-founder of the Maria da Penha Institute. But the protagonist of domestic violence is the man. Hes the one who commits it. Even if the woman is able to escape that relationship with an order of protection and build a better life, that man will continue on with that same model of toxic masculinity. Hell end up in a new relationship and another woman will become a victim of domestic violence.

If we want to stop this from happening, we have to start by looking at the men involved. Changing the way they think means well have fewer victims who need help or who dont survive. Preventing the violence is much better than dealing with it afterward.

Specialists realize they still have a long way to go for their efforts to make a significant dent in Brazils ongoing domestic violence problem. While the groups they run are making changes in their communities, there arent yet enough to reach every corner of the country. The ones that do exist are standalone operations and there is no one place or organization that helps them streamline things like training and research.

Alves still has most of his group sessions to attend, but says he already knows hell never repeat the behavior that landed him there. He has even suggested to group facilitators that they run classes with these same types of discussions in schools, so that boys can learn to talk about their feelings and to respect women and girls from a young age.

Serafine finished the program, but still plans to attend the Wednesday night group when he can. He wants to be able to catch up with the friends he made and continue discussing whats going on in his life. He knows he still has work to do.

Im not 100% fixed, but Im halfway there, he said. Im better than I was before. If I keep talking, Ill get there.

Langlois is a special correspondent.Worn down by three years of indecision in London, European Union leaders on Thursday grudgingly offered the U.K. more time to ease itself out of the bloc, delaying by several weeks  but not eliminating  the threat of a chaotic British exit.

After a meeting that stretched through the afternoon and over dinner, the bloc said Britain could postpone its March 29 departure to May 22  if the British Parliament approves Prime Minister Theresa Mays divorce deal with the EU next week.

If the twice-rejected deal is thrown out again, the bloc says Britain has until April 12 to indicate a way forward.

Now it is finally up to the British political system to provide a clear answer, French President Emmanuel Macron said, adding that any final decision must come ahead of the May 23-26 European Parliament election.

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May  who has spent almost three years telling Britons they will leave the EU on March 29, 2019  put a positive spin on the delay.

She said the EU decision underlines the importance of the House of Commons passing a Brexit deal next week so that we can bring an end to the uncertainty and leave in a smooth and orderly manner.

European Council President Donald Tusk expressed relief that a cutoff date had been delayed. I am really satisfied, especially that we have still open so many options, he said. It is a good sign.

The late-night offer eased some of the deep uncertainty among leaders at an EU summit in Brussels, which was exceeded only by the high anxiety being felt by politicians, businesses and citizens in Britain. The British military has even set up a command post in a bunker under the Defense Ministry in London to help coordinate no-deal planning.

The House of Commons is split, both among and within its political parties, over whether and how to leave the European Union. It has twice rejected the deal May brokered with the blocs leaders late last year.

This week, May finally acknowledged the Brexit gridlock and asked the EU to delay Britains departure until June 30, to create time to win parliamentary approval for her deal in a third attempt and then pass the legislation necessary for a smooth departure.

But opposition to Mays agreement among British politicians appeared to be hardening, rather than softening, after she blamed Parliament for the Brexit impasse.

In a televised address Wednesday night, May accused lawmakers of infighting, 'political games and arcane procedural rows, but acknowledged no personal error in creating the deadlock.

A lawmaker from Mays Conservative Party called the speech toxic. Legislator Anna Soubry, of the breakaway Independent Group, described it as the most dishonest and divisive statement from any prime minister.

May struck a conciliatory note at a late-night Brussels news conference, saying, I know MPs on all sides of the debate have passionate views, and I respect those different positions.

Last night I expressed my frustration. I know that MPs are frustrated too. They have difficult jobs to do, she added.

But May also refused to change course, calling on lawmakers to back her agreement and refusing to rule out a no-deal exit if they did not back her.

May said that if the deal falls, by April 12 we would either leave with no deal, or put forward an alternative plan that involved participating in EU Parliament elections.

I believe strongly that it would be wrong to ask people in the U.K. to participate in these elections three years after voting to leave the EU, she said.

Businesses and economists say a no-deal Brexit would cause huge disruptions and billions in costs to the economies of both Britain and the EU.

Underscoring the sense of dread gripping the nation, one of Britains biggest business lobbies and a major trade union federation said in a rare joint appeal that the country is facing a national emergency.

The Confederation of British Industry and the Trades Union Congress warned May that if Britain crashes out of the EU, the shock to our economy would be felt by generations to come.

Britains military said the command post under the Defense Ministry was set up as part of Operation Redfold, a plan to minimize disruption in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The ministry said in a statement it had 3,500 troops on standby to help with any disruptions if the government asks for assistance.

Worry about a chaotic departure has been rising among EU leaders, who fear May no longer has the clout in Parliament to get her way.

Nobody wants no-deal here, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar told reporters.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed to work until the last hour to ensure that Britain doesnt leave without a deal, even though her government has enacted emergency measures to deal with such a scenario.

May plans to begin the third attempt to get her deal through Parliament next week. But many pro-Brexit legislators still oppose it, saying it does not deliver the clean break they long for. And pro-EU lawmakers will try to derail May and wrest away control of the Brexit process to steer Britain toward a close relationship with the bloc.

Its a struggle that has been going on for almost three years and brought the U.K. to within eight days of a chaotic Brexit.

Macron said that risk remained.

The European Union is not holding all the cards because everything depends on the British vote, he said. The European Union is clearly facing a British political crisis. British politicians are incapable of implementing what their people have asked for.

Some EU leaders felt sympathy for Mays quandary.

I have the highest respect for her, said Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Her tenacity is enormous. But she is working in an extremely difficult situation.

Its not her mistake that we are where we are  its because too many people have so far played party politics on this issue.Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo embraced the idea that President Trump could be on a mission from God to save the Jewish people from a new Persian menace, responding to a reporters question concerning the Jewish holiday of Purim.

And perhaps befitting a holiday that observant Jews celebrate with merrymaking, mockery and satire, critics of the administration greeted the comparison with a round of guffaws.

Pompeo, currently visiting the Middle East, waded into biblical waters when asked by a local correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network, in an exclusive one-on-one interview Thursday: Jews worldwide and here in Jerusalem are talking about the fact that Esther 2,500 years ago saved the Jewish people with Gods help from Haman, the anti-Semitic grand vizier of the Persian Empire, who intended to kill the Jews. Could it be that President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from an Iranian menace?

A man wears a mask of President Trump during the Purim festival in the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood in Jerusalem on March 22, 2019. (Oded Balilty / AP)

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In the Purim tale, Esther, an assimilated Jewish woman married to Persian King Ahasuerus, who met her while conducting a beauty contest, succeeds through subterfuge in foiling Hamans plans.

As a Christian I certainly believe thats possible, Pompeo replied.

Pompeo, a devout evangelical, added that having visited 3,000-year-old tunnels beneath the Old City of Jerusalem, hed seen the remarkable history of the faith in this place and the work that our administrations done to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state remains. I am confident that the Lord is at work here.

Critics, however, quickly said that Pompeo appeared to be confused by the Book of Esther, noting myriad differences between the storys Persian queen and the current president of the United States.

Esther was loyal, tweeted Dan Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel. Esther was discreet. Esther was humble. Esther rarely tweeted insults of dead war heroes. Esthers courage in saving our people enhances the fact that she was a role model in many other ways.Two American service members were killed during an operation in Afghanistan on Friday, U.S. and NATO officials said, providing no other details on the combat deaths.

The fatalities, which bring to four the number of U.S. soldiers killed so far this year in Afghanistan, underscore the difficulties in bringing peace to the conflict-racked country even as Washington has stepped up efforts to find a way to end the 17-year war, Americas longest.

The U.S. and NATO Resolute Support mission said the names of the service members killed in action were being withheld until after notification of the next of kin, in accordance with Pentagon policy. The statement also did not specify the location of the combat or say who the soldiers were fighting.

The incident is under investigation and we have no additional information to provide, said Sgt. 1st Class Debra Richardson, a Resolute Support spokeswoman.

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There are about 14,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan, supporting embattled Afghan forces as they struggle on two fronts  facing a resurgent Taliban, who now hold sway over almost half the country, and an Islamic State affiliate, which has sought to expand its footprint in Afghanistan even as its self-proclaimed caliphate has crumbled in Syria and Iraq.

In 2001, after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and ousted the ruling Taliban regime in a matter of weeks. But the Taliban subsequently regrouped while Washington shifted its attention to Iraqs Saddam Hussein, and by 2009, the war had become a stalemate.

The Pentagon has recently been developing plans to withdraw up to half of the American forces still in the country while at the same time stepping up military efforts and having the U.S. negotiate with the Taliban.

U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, the Trump administrations main negotiator with the Taliban, earlier this month concluded a 13-day marathon session with leaders of the insurgent group.

Following the talks, held in Qatar where the Taliban maintain an office, 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 Taliban have consistently refused to talk with the government in Kabul, describing it as a U.S. puppet.

The two sides seem to be in agreement about the withdrawal of American forces, but divided over the timeline and whether a residual American force would remain.

Last year, 13 U.S. service members were killed in Afghanistan. Flash

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Thursday that his country will defeat the United States in the latter's anti-Iran "economic war."

"The enemy has waged economic war on us. We must defeat the enemy in this war," said Khamenei in Iran's northeastern city of Mashhad.

He made the remarks, broadcast live on the state IRIB TV, on the first day of the Iranian New Year.

"We must establish economic deterrence so that it (the United States) cannot use economic loopholes to harm the country," he added.

Iran will manage to turn the U.S. "oppressive and malicious" sanctions into opportunities to free the economy from relying on oil, the Iranian top leader noted.

Meanwhile, Khamenei warned against relying on western countries' assistance or cooperation over Iran's economic issues.

He described the Instrument in Support Of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), Europe's new transanctions channel designed to secure Iran's interest under the Iranian international nuclear deal, as a "bitter joke."

"The Europeans did not implement their obligations," said Khamenei.

On Jan. 31, the European Union announced the setting up of the INSTEX to secure trade with Iran and skirt U.S. anti-Iran sanctions after Washington pulled out of the 2015 landmark nuclear deal last May.

Although the EU remained in the nuclear deal, "in practice, they themselves have dropped the deal" and are imposing sanctions against the Islamic republic, said Khamenei.

As per the nuclear deal, "the Europeans stabbed us on the back," he warned.

Earlier in the day, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said the United States has failed in its "illegal" sanctions against Iran.

Iran's achievements in the past year, including "victory over terrorism" and the "Iranian nations' victory in the international arena and international courts," are evidence that the United States has not succeeded in its anti-Iran policies, said Rouhani.

"Those who broke the oath revealed their nature; those who committed crimes must know that the end of this path will not be in their favor," the Iranian president said, referring to the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal in May last year.- The World Health Organisation said 3.3 million unimmunised Nigerian children are prone to measles attack

- Borno state coordinator of WHO said despite the availability of safe and effective vaccines, Nigeria accounts for the highest burden of measles globally

- The Ministry of Health, United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) and WHO are organising a campaign for the eradication of the disease

The Borno state coordinator of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Audu Idawo, on Wednesday, March 20, said Nigeria sits at the front aisle among the country with global burden of measles with over 3.3 million unimmunised children.

Speaking during a stakeholders meeting ahead of the launch of the measles vaccination campaign in the state, Idawo said despite the availability of safe and effective vaccines, Nigeria accounts for the highest burden of measles globally, with 3.3 million unimmunised children."

Legit.ng gathers that the campaign for the eradication of the diseases was organised in partnership with Ministry of Health, United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) and WHO.

READ ALSO: APCs victory is a loss for the country - Saraki

The campaign is set to hold between March 21 and 25 with 1.7 million children from the age of six months to 10 years the target.

Speaking on the need for the immunisation, the director of Disease Control in the states Primary Health Care Agency, Babagana Adiso, said: Immunisation remains one of the most effective ways to protect children from killer diseases.

"This campaign gives us the opportunity to protect the lives of children at risk of missing out on routine immunisation in Borno."

UNICEFs Borno chief of field office, Geoffrey Ijumba, promised that the body will continue to partner with Nigeria for the effective eradication of disease.

He said: "UNICEF will continue to support Nigeria to reach every child with the measles vaccine. I urge everyone to ensure that all children access the vaccine during the campaign period.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) on Thursday, March 14, disclosed that the south-south region of the country had the prevalent record of people leaving with the HIV disease.

The director general of NACA, Dr. Sani Aliyu, made this disclosure during an event officially unveiling of the agency's statistics of people living with the disease to President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja.

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) upgrades to Legit.ng to provide its reader high-quality journalism

Signs You Need to Go For An HIV/AIDS Test ASAP | Legit TV

Source: LegitEditor's note: A former president of the Senate has written an open letter to the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump.

Ameh Ebute in this piece said he believes that certain assumptions as contained in the "2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" on Nigeria did not reflect the reality in our country under the President Muhammadu Buhari's administration.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Legit.ng.

Your own opinion articles are welcome at info@corp.legit.ng drop an email telling us what you want to write about and why. More details in Legit.ngs step-by-step guide for guest contributors.

Contact us if you have any feedback, suggestions, complaints or compliments. We are also available on Twitter.

Read the open letter to President Trump from Ameh Ebute below:

March 20, 2019

His Excellency,

President Donald Trump,

The President,

United States of America,

The White House,

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,

N.W. Washington, DC 20500.

Your Excellency, Sir,

Time To Break off The Disintegration Of Nigeria: An Open Letter.

Permit me to extend special compliments to you; the Government and people of the United States of America (USA) in the spirit of the Christian season of Lent.

I am encouraged as an elder citizen and leader in Nigeria to write you this open letter in order to correct certain erroneous impressions and strengthen the records on the punchy assault on the human rights direction of the incumbent leadership of the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) under President Muhammadu Buhari, and the Nigerian Military, especially the Nigerian Army.

My motivation for this open epistle is energized by a report recently released through the US Department of State titled, 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. In the report, the American Government accused the FGN and state agents, particularly, the Nigerian Army of arbitrary and unlawful killings and an array of other sundry crimes bothering on human rights violations allegedly perpetrated in our country in the year under review.

First, let me commend the friendly interest of the US Government in the affairs of Nigeria. It is a demonstration of the finest pursuit of the global agenda of upholding human dignity, peace, unity and security of nations of the world. I dare say, Nigeria relishes the good and smooth diplomatic ties with America in the last few years and believe it will further deepen in the years ahead.

I accept in totality that the US 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, is one of the many ways the American Government keeps independent nations around the world on their toes, foster global communism, respect for human dignity and the fundamental human rights of all races of the world.

READ ALSO: Breaking: INEC fixes April to resume collation of results, announcement of winners in Rivers

However, I believe certain assumptions as contained in the report on Nigeria, which hinged on human rights violations by the Nigerian Army did not reflect the reality in our country under the Buhari Presidency. We must first acknowledge that Nigeria is facing one of its toughest times in history, since independence.

With an array of threatening insecurity issues ranging from Boko Haram terrorism to other insurrectional uprisings and near senseless agitations, our country has been on the cliffhanger to say the least. It is glaring to all Nigerians that the veiled and open plots to destabilize Nigeria and possibly cause its disintegration spearheaded by internal actors is actively backed by foreign forces.

The gang-up against Nigeria to cause its break-up is strong, thick, scary and penetrative, as reflected in the barrage of existing and emerging insecurity threats across the country.

Our military, especially the Nigerian Army are overstretched in efforts to contain the pervading terrorism and insurrections. But the Nigerian Army under the able leadership of the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Lieutenant General Tukur Yusufu Buratai, who also doubles as the leader of the counter-insurgency operations in Nigeria have been the saving grace and they have never flinched.

It is needless to chronicle the steadfastness and sacrifices the Army as an institution and our soldiers have made in the last three years to anchor the relative peace and security we savour today in the country. We are proud of them for repressing our foes.

We owe them a debt of gratitude; Nigerian soldiers deserve our collective applause for the wonderful outings, especially against Boko Haram insurgency.

However, external enemies of Nigeria in league with devious internal allies are saddened by the unbreakable patriotism, loyalty and commitment of our troops to the cause of the emancipation of Nigeria, by mounting an effective, impenetrable and strong bulwark against these dark agents of destabilization and break-up of Nigeria.

Therefore, it is common knowledge that they have conspired to break the resolve of the Nigerian Army in winning the war against terror and insurrections. They have deployed various antics, including, but not restricted to false accusations of the Army on human rights violations, smear campaigns and outright vilification of the institution of the Nigerian Army to dampen the fighting spirit of soldiers and weaken their morale. But these gimmicks have failed to post the results the detractors expect.

A portion of the US report interested me; It said, There were several reports the government or its agents committed arbitrary and unlawful killings. The national police, army, and other security services used lethal and excessive force to disperse protesters and apprehend criminals and suspects and committed other extrajudicial killings. But this is not factual and indeed, inaccurate as it concerns the Nigerian Army.

READ ALSO: Atiku releases his own state by state result of presidential election (Full Report)

The Nigerian Army under the leadership of General Buratai has always held itself accountable to the people and government of Nigeria. In all operations of soldiers, especially in the Northeast, the Army leadership has always ensured compliance with international best practices in observing human rights obligations and rules of engagement.

Your Excellency, it may interest you to know that the Nigerian Army under the leadership of Gen. Buratai has set up the Human Rights Desk in Army Headquarters, Abuja. It is the first of its kind since the establishment of the Nigerian Army. And its mandate is to pry into cases of alleged human rights violations of Nigerians by Army personnel. The Human Rights Desk is replicated in all Army Divisions in the country for ease of access.

An Army leadership with such disposition cannot be adjudged as courting human rights abuses. And truly, no innocent Nigerian citizen has been killed by either the military or any other security agencies without the appropriate sanctions.

And for the first time since the inception of the Nigerian Army, court summons are served soldiers by aggrieved litigants and the Army appears in court to defend allegations against their personnel. It is a remarkable departure from the tradition of the past, known to us, when soldiers were untouchable or never submitted themselves to lawful institutions for public trial.

When Amnesty International (AI) released its 2017 report on human rights abuses titled, Stars on their shoulder, blood on their hands, in which they elaborately accused soldiers fighting insurgency in the Northeast of various human rights abuses, the first reaction of the Army was to set up a Military Panel of inquiry to ascertain the veracity of the claims and possibly punish culprits.

Furthermore, the Presidency also constituted a Presidential Panel of Inquiry to probe the same allegations and or, review compliance of the armed forces with human rights obligations and rules of engagement. It was chaired by a distinguished jurist, Justice Biobele A. Georgewill. I attended one of the sittings of the panel in Abuja, I found it strange, the discovery that Amnesty Internationals published the report on alleged rights abuses against soldiers in the Nigerias northeast without visiting Maiduiguri, the epicenter of the reported human rights violations.

Notwithstanding, the appalling reality, the Presidential Panel submitted its report in 2018. It is still being processed by the relevant authorities and a white paper would soon be issued. I believe based on the disposition of Mr. President, no one found guilty or complicit in the alleged crimes against humanity will be spared. The Buhari Presidency has zero tolerance for impunity and corruption, which shielding the probe panels report would amount to a self-indictment of his administration which has earned the trust and confidence of Nigerians on confronting these malaises.

I have no doubt that President Buhari has placed the security of lives and property of Nigeria paramount on his list of priorities and monitors security agents over rights abuses of Nigerians. And despite the overwhelming presence of soldiers drafted to assist civil security in virtually all the 36 states of the federation, there are fewer reported cases of human rights violations or undignified treatment of civilians by soldiers on special assignments.

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And Nigerians can testify to several instances where the Army leadership penalized soldiers found to have indulged in professional misconducts and human rights abuses of Nigerians.

Sir, it is my firm conviction that the contents of the US Department of State titled, 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, are misplaced. I believe strongly that the researchers were misled into crafting the report based on speculative assumptions to erode the credibility of the FGN, the Nigerian Army and other security agencies.

I submit that the contents were not fair, truthful and completely in dissonance with the reality in Nigeria. I urge the US Government to investigate the researchers who packaged the report and apply appropriate sanctions on them for official ineptitude as advertised by the poor job.

Thank You for your kind audience. And may God bless the United States of America.

Yours Sincerely

Senator Ameh Ebute,

Former President of the Senate,

Federal Republic of Nigeria,

Abuja

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng. We have upgraded to serve you better.

INEC announces Buhari as 2019 election winner, Nigerians react | Legit TV

Source: Legit.ngMetro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  The long-time executive assistant of Makati mayoral candidate Junjun Binay remains in critical condition Friday after a gunman shot her in front of her home in Makati City.

The police said Monaliza "Monet" Bernardo was shot by one of two assailants on a motorcycle in Barangay Olympia on Thursday night. She sustained a gunshot in her right hand that went through her abdomen.

"According to her family, Monet's doctors are doing everything in their power to help her recover from her serious injuries," Binay said in a statement.

Initial police report said Bernardo had just arrived from work and was about to enter the gate of her house when the incident happened. In a CCTV footage released to the media, the suspect was seen shooting Bernardo once before escaping with an accomplice. The victim was immediately rushed to the hospital.

Binay said that based on his personal knowledge, his aide has no enemies.

He raised the possibility that the attack is related to the upcoming local elections. Binay is running against his sister, incumbent Makati Mayor Abby Binay.

"This unsolved murder and the timing of Monet's attack - just one week before the start of the campaign period for local candidates, and right after the Court of Appeals upheld its ruling that cleared me of administrative charges involving the Makati City Hall Parking Building - lend credence to suspicions that the attack is politically motivated, and meant to intimidate those who have committed to support my candidacy as Makati City mayor," he said.

Mayor Abby Binay said she has ordered the police to investigate the attack. She also ordered the village chiefs to submit security footage that will help authorities find the perpetrators.

"Tahimik at payapa kami dito sa Makati. Hindi ako papayag na sirain ito ng mga gustong manggulo sa aming lungsod," she said in a statement.

[Translation:It's peaceful here in Makati. I won't allow those who want to sow trouble to ruin the peace in our city]

Meantime, former Vice President Jejomar Binay has already offered a 1 million bounty for anyone who could give information that could lead to the culprit's arrest. Flash

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) withdrew from the joint liaison office with South Korea in the DPRK's border town of Kaesong, Seoul's unification ministry said Friday.

The ministry said in a statement that the DPRK side notified South Korea on Friday morning of its decision to pull out of the Kaesong liaison office according to instructions from the superior authorities.

All of the DPRK officials, who had stayed in Kaesong for the round-the-clock communications with the South Korean counterparts, withdrew from the office.

The inter-Korean liaison office opened in Kaesong last September as agreed upon by South Korean President Moon Jae-in and top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un during their first summit in April in the truce village of Panmunjom.

The DPRK allowed South Korean officials to stay and work in the Kaesong liaison office. The Seoul officials planned to work in Kaesong over the weekend.

The Seoul ministry said the DPRK's withdrawal decision was regrettable, expressing hope that the DPRK side would rapidly return to the office and normally operate it as agreed upon by the two Koreas.

Chung Eui-yong, top security adviser for President Moon, chaired a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) to discuss situations after the DPRK's pullout from the liaison office and measures to tackle it, according to the Blue House.

South Korean Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung told an emergency press briefing that it came to get difficult to make detailed discussions on the video reunions of Korean families, separated by the 1950-53 Korean War.

However, he noted that except the liaison office, other inter-Korean communication channels are in normal operation.

Seoul had prepared to consult with the DPRK on the video reunions and the exchange of video messages between the separated families as agreed upon by Moon and Kim during their third summit in Pyongyang last September.

South Korea recently won sanctions waiver from the UN Security Council to send necessary equipment to the DPRK for the video reunion event.

The families of the two Koreas have been banned from meeting and contacting their relatives on the other side of the Korean Peninsula since the Korean War ended with armistice in 1953.

Seoul's defense ministry also recently offered the DPRK holding military talks, but Pyongyang had yet to respond to it, according to local media reports.

South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo reported to President Moon earlier this month his ministry's plan to hold inter-Korean military talks to draw up measures to implement the Sept. 19 military agreement.

The Sept. 19 military agreement was inked by defense chiefs of the two Koreas during the Pyongyang summit last September between Moon and Kim.

Under the agreement, the two Koreas agreed to stop all hostile acts near the inter-Korean border and set up buffer zones on the ground, in the waters and the air.

Last year, the two sides withdrew a part of guard posts inside the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and disarmed the Joint Security Area (JSA) as part of efforts to implement the military agreement.Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed, the finance minister of Nigeria, was on Thursday, March 21, appointed by the Africa Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as the chairperson of the Board of Trustees (BoT) of its peace fund.

This Day reports that the board is made of five members drawn from each region of the continent. The board also has non-African members (United Nations and European Union) as international partners.

According to the report, the finance minister represents the Western African sub-region on the board.

READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda

The report quoted a statement by the special adviser to the minister on media and communications, Paul Ella Abechi, as saying Ahmed expressed appreciation and commitment towards achieving the agenda of the special fund.

Accordingly, it was learnt that the protocol relating to the African Union Peace and Security Council (PSC) provides for the establishment of a special fund to be known as the peace fund.

This fund comes with the objective of providing the necessary financial resources for peace support missions and other operational activities related to it in Africa.

According to the report, the peace fund is meant for the prevention and management of conflicts, and the promotion of peace in Africa.

It also said the board of trustees was established by the assembly of the union in July 2016, to ensure strategic coherence, enhanced governance, financial and administrative oversight of the peace fund.

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Legit.ng earlier reported that Zainab Ahmed, in September 2018, assumed duty 72 hours after President Muhammadu Buhari picked her to oversee the ministry following the resignation of Kemi Adeosun on, September 14.

Until her appointment, Ahmed was the minister of state, budget and national planning.

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng. We have upgraded to serve you better.

Nigerians set 2nd term agenda for President Buhari | Legit TV

Source: Legit- Community leaders in Michika, Adamawa, state appeal for more military presence following a robbery attack by Boko Haram insurgents on the only commercial bank building in the town

- Some of the leaders say the appeal was imperative to fast track and revamp socio-economic activities in the community

- Jidda Kwache, an elder and district head of Michika, notes that the deployment of more troops in the area would complement the efforts of the fighting troops on ground

Community leaders in Michika, Adamawa, have appealed to Nigerian Army to deploy more troops and armoured tanks to the town to enhance security.

The appeal followed an attack by Boko Haram insurgents on March 18 on the only commercial bank building in the town on a robbery mission but were repelled by the army.

Some of the leaders made the appeal during an operational visit to the town by Brig Gen Bulama Biu, the acting General Officer Commanding, 7 Division of the army, and Commander Sector 1 on Friday, March 22, The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.

Muhammed Usman, an elder and Head of Muslim Community in Michika, said the call was imperative to fast track and revamp socio-economic activities in the community.

READ ALSO: INEC lists 18 states where supplementary elections will hold on March 23

He explained that additional checkpoints should be mounted in Kuburshosho Goni and Shuwa areas in the town to check future attacks.

He also urged the army to furnish residents with means of reaching out to them when distressed, saying many locals heard the news of the Monday attack but were constrained to reach out to military authorities.

He said sometimes we hear news of the movement of the insurgents just five kilometers away from the town but we dont know how to communicate to army. There is the need for army to give us telephone numbers to call when distressed.

Jidda Kwache, an elder and District Head of Michika, said that the deployment of more troops in the area would complement the efforts of the fighting troops on ground.

Kwacha said that the last time the town witnessed any attack was in 2014, noting that the Monday attack left uncertainty in the minds of the people in the community.

He added that we thank Brig.-Gen. Bulama Biu, the acting General Officer Commanding, 7 Division of the army, and Commander

Sector 1 for the visit to Michika to sympathise with us.

This visit is an indication of your firm commitment toward civic protection and restoring peace. You have restored our hopes and confidence to remain in our community.

We assure you of our total support and commitment to provide you with the neccesary support to discharge your duties.

Alhaji Saidu Lawal, the District Head of Bazza, also commended the GOC and troops of the 143 battalion for responding to their calls to prevent the terrorist from causing havoc in the community.

Lawal said we need more soldiers to complement the efforts of those on ground. We also notice that the artillary and armoured

tanks we use to have in 2014, are no more in Michika; we are appealing that those equipment be deployed again.

Initially, we thought the whole town will be overran by the insurgents but through the gallent efforts of your troops, the attack

was repelled and for this, we want to say thank you.

Yakubu Jaha-Michika, the Commander of Hunters in Michika, appealed to the Adamawa Government to deploy more security operatives to the area.

Jaha-Michika said that the state government should arm and equip local hunters to help in providing local vigilance patrol.

The Caretacker Chairman of Michika Local Government Area, Bitrus Vandi, narrated his ordeal during the Monday attack, saying that the report came from Kofa, a naighbouring village.

Vandi said that when he recieved the distress call of the impending attack, he quickly alerted the DPO and the troops commander

in the town, who rushed to the scene to repel the attack.

He added that the insurgents stormed the town with gun trucks mounted with Anti-Air craft and motorcycle.

Reacting, Brig.-Gen. Bulama Biu said he was in the town to sympathise with the people on behalf of the Chief of Army Staff, Lt-Gen. Tukur Buratai.

He urged the community, traditional and religious leaders in the town to support the militarys effort to defeat Boko Haram and other undesirable elements.

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He said security is everybodys business and not for army alone, I, therefore, urge you to always provide prompt information on any suspiciousactivities.

He reiterated the commitment of the Nigerian Army toward restoring peace and dignity of the people.

Meanwhile, a News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) correspondent who visited Michika, reports that nomalcy has

returned to the town as people were seen going about their daily businesses.

In another report, the Nigerian Army on Friday, March 22, extended its Show of Force Exercise to six violence-prone local government areas in Sokoto state preparatory to the Saturday, March 23, supplementary elections in the state.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the affected local government areas are Raba, Kebbe, Gada, Goronyo, Sabon Birni and Isa.

Addressing the motorcade before taking off from Sokoto, Maj.-Gen. Hakeem Otiki, General Officer Commanding (GOC), 8 Division, Nigerian Army, said the exercise was to arouse public attention to the presence of the military.

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng. We have upgraded to serve you better.

Can Nigerian Soldiers really not deal with Boko Haram fighters?| Legit TV

Source: Legit.ngTurns out you arent wasting your time if you call your Congress person to share your thoughts.

The Lehigh Valleys newest Congresswoman Susan Wild stopped at Penn State Lehigh Valley Friday afternoon to take some prepared questions from faculty and students. The Democrat was welcomed by a packed crowd, eager to hear her thoughts on topics ranging from the best ways to get involved to how the sausage -- er... legislation -- gets made.

I really am humbled by the number of people in this room, said Wild, who calls South Whitehall Township home and is a mom to two twenty-somethings.

The former Allentown city solicitor and attorney says she was inspired to run to improve the world her children will inherit. She told the young people gathered that shes continually impressed by their energy and activism. Congress is talking about global warming and student loan debt seriously because of their work, Wild said.

Heres a look at what Wild tackled in the Q-and-A session:

Keep calling, emailing and Tweeting at your elected officials when you want them to know what you think. Theyre really listening, Wild said. In fact, her most important source of information is her constituents back home. At least once a week, she sits down with her staff to get a breakdown of what callers are saying and studies data stemming from those communications. She wants to know where Lehigh Valley voters stand on the issues -- like voting to overturn President Trumps border wall funding -- before taking a vote, she said

Those comments are not going into a bottomless pit, Wild said.

The congresswoman encouraged the students to get involved politically early and at the local level. She grew up in a house where her parents talked politics over the dinner table. She protested the Vietnam War and volunteered for Jimmy Carters presidential campaign in 1976. She unsuccessfully ran for Lehigh County commissioner in 2003 and she wishes she started sooner. Learn about your local government and get involved, she urged. Be willing to step up when theres a vacancy. If running for office isnt for you, get involved in a cause youre passionate about and advocate for that.

Turns out that second special election wasnt actually stupid. While It seemed rather silly and confusing to voters to have two races on the ballot to replace U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Lehigh Valley, winning gave Wild a major boost over her freshman colleagues. (This dual election was necessary because Dent stepped down mid-term. So, voters were being asked to elect someone to finish out the end of his term in the old Congressional district and then select someone to be sworn-in in January in a new district. It took awhile for the votes to be tallied in the race for the unexpired seat and, for a time, it looked possible that Republican Marty Notstein might serve for a few weeks. Wild ultimately won.) Being sworn into Congress in November, meant that Wild was able to jump the line ahead of the incoming new lawmakers arriving in January, putting her at 346 of 435 members. That seniority is important when getting crucial committee assignments, she explained. Wild serves on the education and labor, and foreign affairs committees.

Wild is committed to protecting the planet, but shes also not going to hang workers out to dry. She says we cant substitute environmental justice for economic justice. She sees the country moving more towards renewables. Legislation needs to be done while protecting the retirements of coal workers and helping younger coal miners get job retraining. She noted theres a big fear among labor unions about the Green New Deal being floated by the progressive arm of her party because they think it will cost many jobs.

The jobs of the future will primarily be in STEM-fields and our education system needs to change to meet that demand, she said. STEM exposure needs to happen early on and continue from kindergarten to college, Wild said. And the U.S. needs to stop promoting colleges over vocational and technical education. Theres a severe shortage of workers for technical jobs, many which pay good salaries, in the trades, she said. Wild suggested expanding federal Pell grants to apply to students pursuing vocational and technical education.

Wild isnt just talking the talk on the environment, shes trying to walk the walk in her own way. Shes banned plastic bottles in her Washington, D.C., office and bought her entire staff reusable ones to tote instead. She declines the ubiquitous plastic bottles, which seem to drive her nuts, at all committee hearings and wishes more of her colleagues would do the same.

Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.Some Bethlehem residents are disappointed in recent news of the Martin Towers future demolition. The building will be coming down in by late spring or early summer with plans to turn the property into a mix of homes, offices and stores. However, local artist Rachael Gorchov is using the Martin Tower as the inspiration behind her artwork.

Artist Rachael Gorchov's Martin Tower art | photo credit: Rachael Gorchov

Having grown up in the Lehigh Valley, Gorchov saw Martin Tower as a long-time landmark of the area. Over time, she recognized how a time lapse was deteriorating its look -- something many were seeing as a bad thing. During a visit to the area in 2014, Gorchov left inspired to construct conglomerated landscape paintings with the basis of her creativity coming from the tower itself.

Artist Rachael Gorchov's Martin Tower art | photo credit: Rachael Gorchov

According to Gorchov, the Martin Tower works highlight artifacts hidden in plain view: idiosyncratic, romantic, calming, ominous imagery and secret aspects of the campus.

Artist Rachael Gorchov's Martin Tower art | photo credit: Rachael Gorchov

Gorchovs art will be on display at the Helene Whitaker Gallery at the NCC Fowler Family Southside Center 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. every Monday through Friday starting March 22 through April 18. An opening reception was scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the same location.A former New Jersey priest convicted of molesting two boys in 2004 and is now teaching children at a school in the resort town of Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, according to a report.

Hadmels DeFrias, 47, is teaching English at the Colegio del Caribe in Punta Cana, according to NBC News. He told the reporter who tracked him down he is no longer a threat to minors, and doesnt see the children with those eyes anymore.

DeFrias, a native of the Dominican Republic, worked as a priest at the St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Elizabeth. While assigned to the New Jersey church, he was accused of fondling two brothers in 2001 and 2002. The boys, both less than 14 years old, did part-time clerical work with the church.

He was charged with criminal sexual contact and pleaded guilty in August 2004. DeFrias was sentenced to three years of probation and was barred indefinitely from future contact with minors in New Jersey. He was laicized from the church shortly after.

DeFrias did not respond to messages on Facebook or Twitter, and a call to the Punta Cana school went unanswered on Friday.

According to his LinkedIn profile, DeFrias is a priest of the Progressive Celtic Church, which he claims is within the Anglican tradition of churches. It also says he has been working at the Colegio del Caribe since February 2018 and teaches to all grades from primary school to high school.

DeFrias name was included on a list released by the Archdiocese of Newark of 188 New Jersey priests who had been credibly accused of sexual abuse of minors. He claimed he was unaware his name was posted, but said it was good for the church to be honest, according to an interview he gave to NBC News.

The Archdiocese of Newark told NJ Advance Media they were unaware of his whereabouts.

Fr. Hadmels DeFrias was permanently removed from ministry and all ties with the Archdiocese of Newark were permanently severed when he was laicized by the Vatican at our request, the Archdiocese said in a statement. Weve had no contact or involvement with any of his actions since he became a private citizen.

In an interview outside the school with NBC, DeFrias expressed regret for molesting the brothers, and explained he was diagnosed with ephebophilia, a sexual attraction to adolescents. He claimed he gave into temptation due to depression and not having proper sexual education, including the ability to manage abstinence, NBC reported.

DeFrias told NBC he informed school officials about his criminal past before he was hired, even though he said he didnt have to because he was never convicted of a crime in the Dominican Republic. The defrocked priest also said he has a teaching assistant in the classroom so hes never alone with the children, and the classroom has no doors.

Mark Crawford, a spokesman for the N.J. chapter of Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, said he was disturbed to hear the news, but not shocked.

Its a problem that these guys go on their way and here they are working with children in a third-world country where kids are really vulnerable. Its frightening, he said. SNAP feels the church has a greater obligation to ensure that these men are not at large.

The Union County Prosecutors Office confirmed DeFrias is the same person prosecuted nearly two decades ago.

It is deeply concerning to hear that a defendant prosecuted, convicted and sentenced here for criminal sexual contact with children has resurfaced overseas, apparently with supervisory capacity over children, the Union County Prosecutors Office said in a statement. We would urge anyone in any jurisdiction to be vigilant and immediately report allegations of such conduct to local authorities.

After the church cut ties with DeFrias, he worked as a marriage minister in Florida, a telemarketer and owned an auto body shop from 2003 to 2010. He earned a religious studies degree and a master of divinity in theological Studies from Seton Hall University in the 1990s.

DeFrias joined the priesthood in 1999. He left the ministry after the allegation was made, and had moved to Maryland. It is unknown when he returned to the Dominican Republic.

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Sophie Nieto-Munoz may be reached at snietomunoz@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her at @snietomunoz. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.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.

As the debate on New Jersey legal weed comes to a head, its still unclear if supporters  including Gov. Phil Murphy  will be able to scramble together enough votes in the state Legislature over the next few days to pass a bill that would legalize marijuana in the state.

That could be bad news for supporters: If the bill fails  the big votes are now scheduled for Monday  state leaders have said the vote might have to wait until November or even later.

Also at stake is the potential expansion of medical marijuana, a billion-dollar recreational industry, and the expungement of thousands of pot convictions in the Garden State.

It seems counterintuitive that legislators are holding back when recent reports show that 60 percent of New Jersey residents support recreational marijuana use, according to a recent Rutgers-Eagleton poll.

But lawmakers have expressed concern over how legalization would be implemented under the current bill, or are dead-set against the availability of adult-use marijuana because of public-safety concerns.

NJ Advance Media contacted lawmakers to glean their stance on the upcoming vote. Though theres plenty of room for changed minds in the days ahead, this tool  created for New Jersey Cannabis Insider  is a starting point for how the vote breakdown might go.

Click on an individuals name to see details on their stance, or click on column header to sort the table below.

NJ Advance Media staff writers Matt Arco, Claude Brodesser-Akner, Payton Guion, Brent Johnson, Susan K. Livio, and Justin Zaremba contributed to this report.

Erin Petenko may be reached at epetenko@njadvancemedia.com.Follow her on Twitter @EPetenko. Find NJ.com on Facebook.The seizure of 1,185 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $38 million at the Port of Philadelphia this week marked the third major drug haul discovered in shipping containers in New Jersey area ports in the past few weeks with a total value estimated at $117 million.

At a news conference Thursday, Customs and Border Protection Officials revealed the path of the shipping container that had 13 large, black duffel bags stuffed with 450 bricks of cocaine. The shipment originated in Colombia and made stops in Panama and the Bahamas before arriving in Philadelphia, 6abc.com said. Officials said the drugs were hidden in a container aboard the MSC Desiree filled with liquid rubber from Guatelmala and was next bound for the Netherlands.

The 450 bricks of cocaine seized at the Port of Philadelphia this week weighed 1,185 pounds and has a street value approximately $38 million, authorities said.

"South and Central American trans-national criminal organizations continue to smuggle their dangerous drug into the United States, " said Joseph Martell, Customs and Border Protection director for the area Port of Philadelphia at the news conference.

The cocaine seizure Tuesday is the fourth-largest at the Port of Philadelphia and the biggest in two decades since a 1,945-pound cocaine seizure on May 23, 1998, customs officials said.

Among the other agencies assisting Tuesday were the U.S. Coast Guard, Coast Guard Investigative Service, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Delaware State Police, Pennsylvania State Police, Philadelphia police and the Nether Providence (Pa.) police, the customs officials said.

Its the latest in whats been a busy month for the customs agents at ports in the region. Customs officials said the agency seizes an average of 4,657 pounds of narcotics every day across the United States, but three major busts in a span of weeks have been some of the biggest on record for Port Newark and Port of Philadelphia.

The first huge bust came Feb. 28 when authorities found 60 packages of cocaine inside a shipping container at the Port of Newark with an estimated street value of $77 million - the largest bust there in nearly 25 years. The largest bust at Port Newark - in May 1994 - resulted in 6,400 pounds of cocaine being seized.

Authorities seized 3,200 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $77M at Port Newark. It's the largest cocaine bust in 25 years. (Department of Homeland Security)

On March 8, more than 600 pounds of marijuana bound for New Jersey was seized from a shipping container at the Port of Philadelphia. The container held 252 bricks packed with more than 613 pounds of marijuana and had an approximate street value of $2.5 million.

The marijuana was concealed in the floor of a shipping container that arrived from Puerto Rico with packages of rice addressed to North Jersey, officials said.

It was the largest marijuana seizure in the Port of Philadelphia since the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection were formed in 2003.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 614 pounds of marijuana concealed inside a shipping container destined for New Jersey.

In addition to the major drug busts, customs agents at Port Newark discovered 1 million pounds of illegal pork products shipped from China, where a dangerous outbreak of African swine fever continues to decimate the livestock industry. The 50 shipping containers of pork products is the larges agricultural seizure in the history of the Customs and Border Patrol, officials said.

The pork was smuggled in various different ways including in ramen noodle bowls to Tide detergent, officials said.

The disease has never been reported in the United States, and does not affect humans. If African swine fever spread to American livestock, it could cause $10 billion in damage to the pork industry in just one year, officials said.

US Custom and Border Protection agents seized thousands of kilos of pork smuggled from China at the port of entry in Newark.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tipsConstruction is to start immediately on over 500 social housing units in Kildare, Dublin, Louth, and Wicklow, according to the government.

The 74 Kildare homes will be built at Craddockstown, Naas.

Minister Murphy said: I am very pleased to confirm that the formal contracts have been signed for the first bundle of sites under the PPP (Private Public Partnership) social housing programme, which will deliver 534 new homes across six sites in Dublin City, South Dublin, Kildare, Louth and Wicklow County Councils areas. This is the first of three bundles of schemes which will deliver around 1,500 new social homes and is an important and innovative delivery mechanism within Rebuilding Ireland.

"I remain committed to continuing to deliver under our targets as set out under Rebuilding Ireland. This innovative way of delivering social housing through a Public-Private Partnership structure, which will secure delivery of over 500 homes in a single bundle, represents another important means that my Department are developing in order to increase our social housing stock.

Cathy Bryce, Director of the National Development Finance Agency (NDFA), said: This is great news for over 500 families who need a home that fits their needs and a landmark development in providing new social housing in Ireland. The project includes accommodation for a wide range of citizens including some assisted living, senior citizen living and one bedroom accommodation.

"For the first time ever, we are extending the PPP model, which has successfully delivered high-quality roads, schools, healthcare facilities and other public buildings for the State, to deliver social housing.

"This shows PPP works for social housing and opens up an important new avenue for delivering more homes for people who need them.

"I am delighted that the hard work of five local authorities, the Department, the EIB and the NDFA has led to the successful closing of this critical project and we look forward to the delivery of these homes as quickly as possible.

"I would particularly like to thank the Minister Eoghan Murphy, Department of Housing and the Chief Executive of Dublin City Council, Owen Keegan, for their sponsorship and support in developing this new channel for social housing delivery.

The Comhar consortium is 100% owned by Macquarie Capital Group Ltd. and supported by John Sisk & Son (Holdings) Ltd. as works contractor, Choice Housing as facilities management provider and Oaklee Housing as tenancy management provider. The project is being funded by the EIB, Bank of Ireland and Korea Development Bank.

Mark Bradshaw, Head of Infrastructure Projects for Macquarie Capital in Europe and the Americas said: As the need for greater social and affordable housing provision continues to grow globally, awarding agencies are increasingly looking to PPP frameworks. We invest in the early development stages of projects globally, applying both balance sheet capital, development capital and infrastructure expertise to make critical projects such as this happen.

"We have a longstanding relationship of over 10 years with Sisk Group, including currently being on-site together on the 250 million Grangegorman Campus and look forward to working with them, the NDFA and Choice to deliver this vital social infrastructure development for Ireland.Freshly arrived in Killenard, Sinead Harrington will be opening a new hat hire and workshop near from the Heritage Hotel, on March 25.

Read also: Construction to start immediately on 74 new Kildare social homes

Having returned to her native Ireland, from the UK, Sinead hopes to emulate the success of her original studio in the UK where she built a flourishing millinery business and one of the UKs largest collections of hats for hire.

Originally from Ballymore Eustace, Sinead later moved to Hollywood, Co Wicklow with her family. She also attended school at Killashee National School in Naas.

"I haven't forgotten my Kildare roots," said Sinead, who explained she still has lots of family and friends still living in the county.

With her designs gracing the pages of the likes of Tatler and The Telegraph, Sinead quickly established herself on the UK millinery scene, and has seen her hats attend events at Buckingham Palace, Royal Ascot, Cheltenham, Goodwood, and more than a few high society weddings.

In addition to creating bespoke pieces for sale, and undertaking commissions and repairs, she maintains a huge hire collection from established and up-and-coming milliners including pieces from Philip Treacy, Julien Macdonald, Vivien Sheriff, Rachel Trevor Morgan, Nigel Rayment, Peter Bettley, Walter Wright, Marie Mercie, Carol Kennelly, Jennifer Wrynne and Jane

Taylor.

The designer has high hopes for her re-located venture.

Having moved over from the UK with a young family, Im really enjoying being back in Ireland and embracing the family focused culture. It was a big endeavour bringing over more than 350 hats from the UK, and now the showroom is ready I

cant wait to start meeting new clients," she said.

With a pre-launch evening on Saturday March 23, Sinead will be showcasing her showroom and toasting her new initiative with friends, family and fellow hat lovers.Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content.

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Support our mission and join our community now.A man who pleaded guilty of possession of a stolen chihuahua dog was remanded in custody for seven days at Naas District Court on Wednesday, March 20.

Patrick Keenan, 22, of 20 Inchera Park, Mahon, Blackrock, Cork answered an advert in 2015 for a missing dog, a chihuahua called Lilly, which offered a reward for 1,000.

He told the owner of the dog that he had bought the dog for 1,000 at a car boot sale, and he wanted a further 50 for the expense of driving to Kildare Village to meet the owner. When he arrived in Kildare he was arrested on suspicion of possession of stolen property.

Representing the defendant Matt Byrne explained that his client was a teenager at the time of the offence. He is now 22, married with three children and with a lot of responsibility. He has moved to the UK to care for his mother since his fathers death.

He would also be a man who, in certain parts of the country would be in danger, Mr Byrne explained. The defendant later said that he was a state witness.

He apologises to the court and to the owner of the dog, Mr Byrne said. He has not come to garda attention since.

Judge Zaidan said the matter still warranted a custodial sentence and remanded him in custody for seven days.A Maynooth local election candidate, Seamus O Riain, is calling for the abolition of rent controls and property tax.

Mr ORian, a Saggart native and living in Clane since 2010 with his wife, Aine, and family, will stand for Renua.

Mr ORiain said that the government is failing the people in terms of housing. Most of this is due to the implementation of policies that stifle and distort the market, he said.

He is proposing that rent control be abolished. It has not worked anywhere it has been implemented. It is not working in Dublin and it will not work in Kildare.

Ease up on building restrictions in the county.

Mr ORiain also called for the elimination of the property tax in Kildare. This is another of the many taxes introduced as a temporary measure but has since become perennial."

SEE ALSO: Construction to start immediately on 74 new Kildare social homes

Mr ORiain is a history and music teacher in Colaiste Chilliain where I have been teaching for the past nine years. He recently started working as an advisor to the Department of Education.

He and his wife have four children. Their two eldest attend Scoil Ui Riada in Kilcock.

Citing his reason for getting involved in politics, he quoted Edmund Burke: Society is indeed a contractit becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

He said: If you, like me, are worried about the future Ireland our children grow up in, then Renua is the party for you. My children and yours should be able to work and stay in Ireland and not have to emigrate. I have no desire to see my future grandchildren through the medium of Skype.

He is calling for a 10% cut to councillors allowance which are proposed to rise following the May election. The money recouped would then be put towards a scholarship fund for a student wishing to advance to third level education but unable to because of financial difficulties. I would also ask that TDs and senators take a 10% cut to their wages.A father-of-one has been sentenced to life in prison for murdering a fellow drug dealer, whod threatened his family over a 100 debt. He chased him across a busy street and stabbed him to death in broad daylight.

The Central Criminal Court heard that Rihards Lavickis (26) admitted that he went out with a knife on 1st November 2016 to get Akadiusz Arik Czajkowski for threatening his family and breaking their windows.

The Latvian native with an address at Annaly court in Longford pleaded not guilty to murder, but guilty to the manslaughter of the Polish father-of-two outside Longford Shopping Centre at Rue Noyal Chatillon, Townspark in the town.

The trial heard that both men had become friendly while neighbours in Annaly Court. However, the deceased had set a number of bins on fire, causing an electricity outage lasting several days in a number of apartments.

The deceased had moved elsewhere in the town by the time Lavickis bought 300 worth of drugs off him on tic. However, the money wasnt paid on the day the deceased wanted. So, he went with an associate to the home Lavickis shared with his partner, her mother and sister and their three young children, and attacked him with a knuckle duster.

Although Lavickis reported the attack to the gardai, he decided not to press charges, and the drug debt was reduced to 100 as a result.

However, the trouble continued between the two men, with Lavickis holding the deceased responsible for his familys windows being broken on up to five different occasions. During one of these incidents, his sister-in-laws friend was sleeping in the room under attack.

The night before the killing was Halloween and Lavickis was out and about with two friends. The jury saw CCTV footage of the three men standing behind a wall before a car pulled up and the deceased and two other men getting out. The footage then showed the first three men running away.



One of Lavickiss friends, Michael Godla, told the court that the deceased had shouted at Lavickis: Where is the money? and that Lavickis had replied: I give you nothing because you beat me with a knuckle duster.



Mr Godla testified that the deceased had warned that he would get out of the car and give Lavickis a beating.



Then another guy get out of the back of the car so we run away all of us, he said, explaining that they were afraid. They were big guys, like both bodybuilders. There were three people inside.



He said they were hiding for 15 minutes as the men in the car drove up and down looking for them.



Mr Godla said that he was awoken by glass breaking around 3 oclock the following morning and saw that Lavickiss window had been broken. He later told Lavickis what he had seen.



Gardai testified that Lavickis called them to report the broken window that morning. They went to his home and he nominated the deceased as a suspect, telling the officers that he would get him. They had warned him not to, that they would deal with it.

However, he had gone out with a knife looking for the deceased. He later saw him walking down the street, hid in a gap in a wall and gave chase as he passed by.



The jury saw CCTV footage of him chasing him with a knife raised, and heard that hed stabbed him three times just seconds later. The stabbing wasnt caught on camera.



A post-mortem exam found that the victim died of a single stab wound to the heart. The other two wounds were not fatal, with one to his finger classed as defensive.



The defence had argued that he did not have the intent necessary for murder when he stabbed the deceased. His barrister also said that, if the jury found he had the intent, it could then find that he had been provoked by the deceased. Both defences could reduce murder to manslaughter.



However, the prosecution argued that the natural and probable consequences of sticking a knife into someones chest was death or serious injury, either of which could lead to a conviction of murder.



The jury spent just over three hours deliberating and found him guilty of murder by unanimous verdict.



Mr Justice Michael White thanked the jury of eight men and four women and imposed the mandatory life sentence on Lavickis.From descriptions of the failed potato crop to calls for more sources of employment for starving men, the description of Leitrims starving have come to light following a new study into Famine Relief Papers from 1844-1847.

The study shows the real-life scale of the destitution faced by Irish people in the lead up to the famine, providing an intimate insight into a defining moment in Irish history.

The Relief Commission and subsequent relief committees around Ireland were formed just prior to the official beginning of the famine to oversee relief efforts, distribute food, collect information and advise the government on the famine, the people and aid efforts.

Soup kitchens were set up, but in 1847 the government shut them down, anticipating a better crop which never materialised. Another piece of the relief plan was creating government work projects, so that those who were able could earn money to buy food.

During the Great Famine over 1 million people died, and a further million left Ireland. More than a century and a half later, Irelands population had still not returned to pre-Famine levels.

Hand-written letters and documents provide first-hand accounts of the levels of destitution faced by starving people in Leitrim.





Failure of the crop in Mohill

On 23 March 1846 A Moore, PLC forwarded an extract from the minutes of the Mohill Board of Guardians to the commission. The minutes expressed their concerns of the levels of destitution and the failure of the potato crop.

The Guardian of the Mohill Union having carefully collected every information in their power relative to the state of the poor and their measures of supporting themselves, have come to the following resolutions.

That they entertain the most serious apprehensions as to the measures in their reach of the poor offices union to provide for their families.

That there can be no doubt of the extensive failure of the potato crop excepting in the Southern part of the parish of Mohill and that vicinity they are expecting such as are good and that there is every reason to fear that the people will not have potatoes for seeding their land.



Raid in Carrigallen

On 29 March 1846 Sub-Inspector Wray, to Colonel Duncan McGregor, Inspector General of the Constabulary, sent a report to the commission of a raid by three men on the residence of Widow Lemon of Gortnacamdarragh to warn her son, Patrick, against taking up the position of driver on Dr Crawford's lands in Corduff.

About the hour of 10 o clock on the night of the 25th just a party of three men unknown one of who was armed with a pistol went to the residence of the Widow Lemon of Gortnacamdarragh and on entering inquired for her son Patrick  who was then absent at the Fair of Armagh  and on having informed he was not at home they states if we had got him he would be sorry for attempting to become the driver in the lands of Corduff it having circulated he was anxious to obtain that situation from the Landlord Doctor Crawford  the man around with the pistol then fires a shot in the direction of the [word missing] which several article of the delf were broken  they then went away without doing further injury.

Great distress in Ballinamore

On 14 October 1846 subscription lists and certificates were sent to the commission. Within this was a note by Captain RG Layard on his report of the County of Leitrim.

The soup kitchen established here, was a failure, gratuitous relief is given out weekly, in bread and meal. Death occur daily to a fearful extent apprehends great distress to the North of Ballinamore.

No potatoes in Rosclogher

On 25 June 1846 JC Walker of the OPW wrote to the commission enclosing an extract from Lieutenant Baillie's report on the barony of Rosclogher.

The distress at present existing in this Barony is in general but trifling, with the exception of a portion of the parish of Rossinver, between Glenaniff and Lough Melvin, which from all the testimony I have been able to gather is in a very distressed state, and I have reason to believe that there is not a potato into it, with the exception of those purchased principally at Ballyshannon, Co Donegal where on last Market day they were selling at the low price of from 3 to 3 1/2 per stone, yet still great number in the district I have mentioned can only obtain them, even at that price, on trust.

Plea for coffins in Aughrim

On 22 February 1847 Patrick Browne, poor law guardian to the Parish of Aughrim, wrote a letter to Colonel Duncan McGregor, Inspector General of the Constabulary. His letter noted 16 deaths in the parish in the last week and noted the difficulties people had in affording proper burial for their dead.

They go about collecting money to bury the dead but in fail the small sums they are able to process are expended in purchasing food for the surviving starving family [] I beg and solicit your interference with some of the relief committees in Dublin to find me some means to have a number of coffins made under my own inspection and read for those melancholy calls.

Ancestrys Joe Buggy commented, Documents and letters sent to the Famine Relief Commission provide a unique insight into the level of destitution, pain and hunger around Ireland during this time.

From the collection one can sense the rising panic, with stock and food levels rapidly running out and committees pleading with the commission for help.

Through the collection it is now possible to search for family names and local areas to see how exactly people were affected by the turmoil of the Great Famine.

Ancestry is the worlds leading family history site containing the largest collection of family trees with over 100 million family trees from over 100 countries.

In previous years they have completed new research into Irish collections including records of Irish convicts sent to Australia and an interesting look at Irish first names that are becoming endangered.

To search the Famine Relief Commission Papers log onto www.ancestry.ie. The records are searchable by name, date and the county in which they occurred.More than 25 tourism businesses  including Leitrim Surf Company and Tawnylust Lodge  joined Tourism Ireland and Ireland West Airport Knock in Cologne over the St Patricks weekend, to promote the new Ryanair flight from Cologne to Knock, which begins in June. Their aim was to highlight the new route and to bring a taste of Wild Atlantic Way hospitality to important travel professionals in that part of Germany.

Tourism Ireland arranged for tourism businesses from Sligo, Galway, Roscommon, Leitrim, Mayo and Donegal to meet and do business with over 70 German travel agents at a special St Patricks Day business networking event in Cologne Bonn Airport. Representatives of B&B Ireland welcomed guests with a special taste of Wild Atlantic Way hospitality.

Some of the group also attended the greening of Colognes Lanxess arena, one of the largest arenas in Europe, which took part in Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative for the first time.

Commenting on the visit, Tourism Irelands Head of Mainland Europe, Finola OMahony said: We were delighted to work with Ireland West Airport, Failte Ireland, B&B Ireland and tourism businesses across six western counties to bring a taste of the Wild Atlantic Way to Cologne on St Patricks Day and to highlight this important new service from Cologne to Knock. Germany is an important and growing tourism market, which delivered over 750,000 visitors to Ireland last year. Our aim is to generate further growth in 2019 and years to come and, in particular, to encourage more visitors to explore the regions and less-visited areas. This new service will help us deliver on that objective.

Tourism Ireland has an extensive programme of promotional activity under way in Germany this spring. Activity has included a major TV campaign on a range of channels including ARD, ZDF, SAT.1, RTL, Super RTL, VOX and Disney  which reached around 17 million viewers. A second TV campaign will run in the autumn. A busy programme of co-operative activity with key partners is under way; and Tourism Irelands publicity programme in Germany will generate positive coverage for the island of Ireland this year worth more than 60 million.A DEFENCE Forces Explosive Ordinance Disposal team has arrived at the An Post sorting depot in Limerick where a suspicious package was discovered this Friday morning.

Gardai attached to Henry Street requested the assistance of the bomb squad following the discovery at the Dock Road premises shortly after 6am.

It's understood the letter, which arrived at the National Returns Letter Centre in the early hours of the morning, is similar to letters which were posted to a number of transport hubs in London earlier this month,.

The sorting depot was evacuated early this morning with around 100 staff being sent home for the day.

Gardai are maintaining a presence at the gates to the compound and a number of customers have been turned away.

A @dfpo EOD team has arrived at the An Post sorting office on the Dock Road where a suspicious package was discovered this morning @Limerick_Leader pic.twitter.com/kGaU3zM28k  David Hurley (@DHurleyLL) March 22, 2019

The EOD team arrived from Cork shortly before 9.30am and it's understood inspections of the suspect package are continuing.

A garda spokesperson says no further information is available in relation to the discovery.

An Post has declined to comment.THE Defence Forces have confirmed a suspicious package which was discovered at the An Post Depot in Limerick this Friday morning contained a viable improvised explosive device.

The alarm was raised shortly after 6am when the plastic envelope was discovered by a worker at the National Mail Returns Centre on the Dock Road. The device did not go off and nobody was injured.

The package, gardai have revealed, was posted earlier this month to an address at Charing Cross, The Strand, London.

After the alarm was raised, the building and surrounding area were evacuated for a number of hours as a precaution.

Following a request from gardai, an Army Bomb Disposal Team was dispatched from Cork and arrived at the scene shortly before 10am.

On arrival a cordon was established and the building was evacuated for the duration of the operation. A viable improvised explosive device contained in a plastic envelope was identified and made safe. The device was then handed over to An Garda Siochana for further investigation and the scene was declared safe, said a Defence Forces spokesperson.

#WATCH The @dfpo EOD team has left the An Post sorting depot where a suspicious package was discovered this morning. Gardai say the package has been removed for further examination. Full details shortly at https://t.co/CBUIPigLvK @Limerick_Leader pic.twitter.com/ysYibvGMNz  David Hurley (@DHurleyLL) March 22, 2019

Workers were cleared to return to the depot shortly before midday.

The discovery of the package has been linked to recent similar incidents in London and Glasgow and gardai say they will be liasing with their counterparts in the UK.ENABLING works are due to commence for the crucial 60-bed modular block at University Hospital Limerick next week.

This comes after the HSE announced earlier this month that UHL was to receive 2m for the delivery of enabling works for the 19.5m development.

But the UL Hospitals Group has yet to confirm, in writing, that the important piece of infrastructure will receive full funding in this years HSE capital plan.

Minister for Health Simon Harris has, however, indicated that the 60-bed block will be included in the capital plan, which has yet to be announced.

It was originally hoped that the 60-bed block would be ready by autumn 2019. However, the financial framework for the projectsand other capital projectshad to be revisited due to the Governments controversial overrun in the National Childrens Hospital.

Senator Kieran ODonnell told the Limerick Leader on March 1 that the 60-bed project will be included in its entirety in the upcoming capital plan.

It is understood it will be announced later this month.

Senator ODonnell said he has told Taoiseach Varadkar, Minister Harris and Minister Donohoe that any further delay with hospital project would not be acceptable.

He said the 2m allocation shows that it is a priority for the Government.

I am interested in getting the physical structures on the ground as quickly as possible. Because of the delays in planning, that was always going to be early 2020 before it was completed. The HSE are now saying June 2020, something I will be holding them too.

Labour TD Jan OSullivan said that the Minister should have granted funding to build the unit at the same time [of the 2m allocation].

I am now calling on him to give a clear commitment to do this. Otherwise, not only will the original 2019 deadline be missed but delivery in 2020 is also in doubt. This is typical of the glitzy launches and spin from Fine Gael. If the unit is to be delivered as promised by June 2020, then the Minister needs to grant funding for construction to begin offsite as soon as possible.

The 96-bed acute block is due to be built sometime in the 2020s. There is no delivery date yet.THE EXPRESSIONS on their faces say it all - what are you doing here!

Minister for State Patrick ODonovan met up with Galbally nun Sr Enda while representing the country in the Far East.

Minister ODonovan visited Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia as part of the annual St Patricks Day celebrations. It was at a reception in Kuala Lumpar that Minister ODonovan met Sr Enda.

The Fine Gael TD said it was an honour to meet the Franciscan nun, who is aged in her nineties but certainly doesnt look it.

Speaking to the Limerick Leader from the other side of the world, Minister ODonovan said Sr Enda is a proud Galbally lady.

She arrived in Malaysia to set up village schools in the aftermath of the Second World War, founding Assunta primary and secondary schools in Petaling Jaya, near Kuala Lumpur, in 1958, said Minister ODonovan, who had a great chat with the nun.

Over the years, Sr Enda has played a central role in the education of a great number of Malaysian girls, some of whom, former Central Bank Governor, Dr Zeti, have been prominent in public life. She is an extremely popular and valued member of the local community, he said. It really is a small world.

During Minister ODonovans time in Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia he met with representatives of the business community to look at opportunities for Irish businesses. Meetings with members of the respective governments were also part of his busy schedule. Indeed, Minister ODonovan made history as he became the first Irish minister in Thailand for St Patricks Day. He also visited an Irish Aid project and presented certificated to students who participated in the Irish Embassys scholarship programme in Vietnam.LEO Varadkar has been asked to intervene in a local row which has seen a long-serving Fine Gael member passed over in favour of a 20-year-old student.

There is anger in Fine Gaels Willie OBrien branch in Patrickswell after Daniel McSweeney was added to the partys election ticket in City West instead of Fergus Kilcoyne, who ran for the party in the last local election and came within a whisker of being elected.

Now, 14 members of his branch have written a letter to An Taoiseach urging him to kick Mr McSweeney off the ticket, and replace him with Mr Kilcoyne, a publican in the village.

In the letter, seen by the Limerick Leader, the members say the move to put Mr McSweeney on the ticket is undemocratic and an injustice.

They add: Fergus stood for us in the 2014 local election and was narrowly defeated on the 13th count after securing 516 first preference votes and ending up as the last person standing with 771 votes before Fianna Fail took the last seat. We as a group feel it is an injustice by not choosing Fergus to try and secure an extra seat in City West for our party that he narrowly missed out on in 2014.

The selection of Mr McSweeney, a student at the Limerick Institute of Technology, had caused controversy after he sought a nomination from Young Fine Gael after missing out on the nod from his local branch in Patrickswell.

The 14 party members now claim Fine Gael head office overruled a recommendation made by the Limerick Constituency Strategy Committee that Mr Kilcoyne should run  and instead picked Mr McSweeney to seek election at the first time of asking.

As it stands, he is on the Fine Gael ticket alongside metropolitan mayor Daniel Butler and Cllr Elenora Hogan.

For his part, Mr McSweeney said: I was added by the National Executive body of Fine Gael and Im absolutely delighted to be selected. Ive hit the road, and I look forward to meeting the constituents of Limerick City West in the near future.

As a consequence of all this, the letter states that Mr Kilcoyne has resigned as the chairman of the local Willie OBrien branch, and is now considering his membership of Fine Gael.

At a meeting earlier this month, a number of other members also walked out in support of Mr Kilcoyne, the letter goes onto state.

They are also considering their future in the party.

Mr Kilcoyne also bid to be co-opted to the council back in October 2016 following Maria Byrnes election to the Seanad.

However, the partys grass roots instead decided Cllr Hogan, a cousin of Ms Byrne, take her seat instead.

When contacted by the Limerick Leader, Mr Kilcoyne said he will not make any comment until a reply has been received from Mr Varadkar. Fine Gael HQ has also been contacted for comment.

Limerick, and the rest of the country, will go to the polls on May 24 next.CONTROVERSIAL plans to erect a war memorial on the edge of the Peoples Park have been approved by An Bord Pleanala  despite Limerick Council rejecting the scheme.

The national appeals body has also gone against the views of its own inspectors to grant permission for the development.

A planning application was made in the name of the seventh Earl of Limerick Edmund Pery for the structure to honour fallen civilian and military personnel from the city and county in World War One, with the project led by the Limerick Civic Trust.

However, while local planners rejected the proposal, saying they are not satisfied the applicant has sufficient estate or interest in the relevant land to carry out the scheme, as well as expressing concern that granting this would set a precedent for similar types of developments in the park.

It came on foot of a number of objections to the local authority, including from northside Independent councillor John Gilligan.

However, An Bord Pleanala has taken a different view.

In its report, the authority stated: It is considered the proposed development would integrate in a satisfactory manner with and not detract from the character and setting of the existing public open space and would not adversely impact on its continued use for passive and active recreational and amenity purposes.

At the heart of the memorial the plans show there would be a four-metre high stone-central cross.

As well as this, there would be eight stone tablets, two metres high, inscribed with the names of all the victims of the great war from Limerick.

Stone benches measuring 3.7 metres and 0.45m high are also planned alongside gravel paths.

Local Solidarity candidate Seonaidh Ni Shiomoin, who is a primary school teacher, criticised the decision of An Bord Pleanala.

She said: The park is a very important community and family facility and it would be a real shame for a whole section of it to be taken over by grey slabs and a giant cross.

The colourful horse sculptures are really appealing and attractive to children who visit the park. We need more lively, interactive art in the park, not less, she added.GARDAI say a suspicious package which was discovered at the An Post sorting depot in Limerick city this Friday "appears to be identical" to the parcels which were discovered in London and Glasgow earlier this month.

The package has now been removed from the scene and will be examined by gardai and members of the Defence Forces who attended the scene for a number of hours.

#WATCH The @dfpo EOD team has left the An Post sorting depot where a suspicious package was discovered this morning. Gardai say the package has been removed for further examination. Full details shortly at https://t.co/CBUIPigLvK @Limerick_Leader pic.twitter.com/ysYibvGMNz March 22, 2019

Gardai at Henry Street requested the assistance of the bomb squad following the discovery of the package at the An Post sorting office on the Dock Road shortly after 6am.

A spokesperson for An Garda Siochana said: "This parcel appears to be identical to parcels (pending closer forensic and ballistic examination) discovered earlier this month in London and Glasgow."

In an interview on RTE Radio, the Minister for Defence Charlie Flanagan also confirmed the similarities.

"This could well be the fifth (package). As yet its unconfirmed but I understand gardai are actively engaged on the ground in Limerick," he said.

Mr Flanagan told Today with Sean O'Rourke that he has information that suggests the discovery is linked to those in the UK.

"I understand that to be the case with particular reference to the type of postage stamp that was used."

Mr Flanagan added. "I have to say that the sending of incendiary devices or letter bombs like that is a totally unacceptable act and I would hope that those responsible could certainly be brought to justice. I know that gardai are actively engaged as we speak."

Gardai say they will continue to liaise with the UK Authorities in relation to the investigation into the discovery of the package in Limerick.

"An Garda Siochana will not be making any further comment at this time."

#WATCH: An Post staff have begun returning to the sorting depot on the Dock Road following this morning's security alert @Limerick_Leader pic.twitter.com/lwWupj0MAO  David Hurley (@DHurleyLL) March 22, 2019

The sorting depot was evacuated following the discovery but some some staff returned after the all clear was given shortly before midday.

THE launch of the Limerick Soviet 100 celebrations took place this Friday afternoon.

The event, which was launched by Mayor James Collins sees Limerick mark 100 years since the 1919 strike against British Militarism.

Speaking at the launch was Mary O'Donnell of the Limerick Soviet 100 Committee.

"One of the greatest events in Limerick and Irish labour history deserves a great celebration, One of the important lessons of the Limerick Soviet is that it offers a clear example of the fact that when ordinary working class people possible", said Mrs ODonnell.

A host of events will take place over the coming weeks to mark the centenary of the 1919 strike.

The strike, which made international headlines, was against a permit system introduced by the military authorities. The workers took over all aspects of the running of the city, produced their own daily paper, policed the city, controlled all food and fuel supplies and even printed its own currency.

Present at the launch were representatives of the Limerick Soviet 100 Committee, the Limerick Council of Trade Unions, the Limerick District Council of SIPTU and a number of Community/Artistic groups.

Mike McNamara of the Limerick Council of Trade Unions said he was delighted with the commitment of so many people to celebrate the Limerick Soviet.

"This indeed is a very impressive programme and I am sure the public will appreciate, and take advantage of the many opportunities the planned events will provide to become more familiar with this aspect of our city's history, said Mr McNamara.

I wish to extend a warm welcome to the many visitors and trade unionist who will visit Limerick for the various Limerick Soviet events during the year and I applaud the voluntary and community spirit of so many involved in providing Limerick with such an impressive festival of events, Mr McNamara added.

Mayor Collins took the opportunity to encourage the people to attend the events around the city.

The scene was really set around the Condensed Milk Factory at Cleeves. There is a lot of discussion at the moment about the future for Cleeves. But you must remember Limericks History and what happened. I think that will be remembered particularly by a play that is being written by Mike Finn, called Bread Not Profits, which will be performed on site in Cleeves on April 16, said Mayor Collins.There was joy for a number of Limerick establishments in the Munster Regional Final for the 2019 Irish Restaurant Awards which took place in the Limerick Strand Hotel.

Wade Murphy of 1826 Adare was thrilled to take out the two biggest awards of best chef and best restaurant.

We're really delighted about it, Wade told the Limerick Leader, It's the sixth year in a row 1826 has won the best restaurant in Limerick award and that's testament to all the hard work and effort from the team - past and present and everyone has contributed to putting 1826 where it is.

As for the chef award, I'm absoutely delighted, there are some great people cooking in Limerick at the moment and that makes it even better, but the best restaurant is one for the team and we're always delighted and never take it for granted that we're going to achieve it.

Any plans for celebrations will however have to be put on the long finger. Indeed, so busy is Wade and the crew that he had to come back to work after picking up the awards to close the kitchen in his Adare eaterie

Plus we have a 10-month baby boy, so the time for celebrating is very slim, he revealed.

Another restaurant celebrating double success was The East Room at Plassey House in UL which took awards for Best Emerging Irish Cuisine and Best customer service.

Chef Derek Fitzpatrick, pictured above, told the Leader, We are delighted to win in the best emerging Irish cuisine and customer service categories.

Our team always strive for the highest standards and take great pride in the food we serve and the service we give.

The Strand Hotel also took two gongs on the night, winning best hotel and guest house while its executive head chef Tom Flavin was named best local food hero.

As always food is enhanced by the right drink and in the beverage department, Limerick again scored well. Mother Macs won pub of the year, while Adare Manor won best wine experience, Hook And Ladder won best cafe and Rift Coffee won best newcomer.

Other local winners were John Edward Joyce of The Mustard Seed at Echo Lodge; Collins Bar Dooradoyle; Taikichi; Copia Green; Coqbull; Chad Byrne of Chef Collab and La Cucina Centro

All of those who won at regional level will compete for All Ireland Titles, which will be announced at the Irish Restaurant Awards in the Clayton Hotel, Dublin on Monday May, 13.

Speaking at the awards, Adrian Cummins, Chief Executive of the Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI) said: Now in their 11th year, the Irish Restaurant Awards continue to showcase the incredible food that is on offer in the cafes, pubs and restaurants of Ireland, as well as recognising the teams behind these establishments and the hard work and dedication that they put in. With well over 90,000 nominations received from the public this year, the standard for the judging process was higher than ever.

Ireland may be a small country, but it boasts everything from fine dining to high quality gastropubs, from the comfort of traditional Irish food to exploring the world though exotic world cuisine, the Irish restaurant industry has much to offer. We have an appreciation for what we eat and where our food comes from, as well as the dedication of those working in the food industry.AN ANTI-EU conference being held in Limerick this April has been criticize by a local Fine Gael Senator.

Fine Gael Senator Maria Byrne said the sham gathering will seek to promote incorrect information about Irelands role in the EU.

Not content with destroying the UK through the idiocy of Brexit, Nigel Farage and his cronies have now set their eyes on Ireland, Senator Byrne said.

The conference advertised for April is being promoted by the Irexit Freedom Party, led by Hermann Kelly Director of Communications for the Ukip-led Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group in the EU Parliament, she added.

Senator Byrne appealed to the public not to engage with the conference or the false information being spun by its organisers.

One of the key reasons Brexit came to pass was the decades of unchallenged euro scepticism from Farage that was allowed seep into the public mind and take root, said Byrne.

This Thursday, Mr Hook confirmed to the Limerick Leader that he has been asked by the group to give a lecture at the event, which will focus on the politically correct Irish media.

Ireland has benefitted greatly from its European membership and while it is positive that 90% of Irish people repeatedly say in opinion polls that they wish to remain in the EU, we cannot be complacent, Senator Byrne said.

We must take on the lies and mistruths being spread; stand up for Ireland; and say no thanks George, she added.

George Hook, who retired from Newstalk last December after 16 years with the station, was suspended from the national radio station following his comments about rape in September 2017.

The broadcaster drew further criticism in October 2018 following a series of tweets focused on an Irish schoolboy who was facing deportation because of his mothers Chinese nationality.Mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck is the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Abel Prize for her groundbreaking work in geometric analysis and gauge theory.

U.S. mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck won this years Abel Prize, becoming the first woman to take home the prestigious math award, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters announced March 19.

Uhlenbeck, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin and currently a visiting scholar at Princeton University, won for her "pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics," according to a statement from the academy, which awards the prize. [Female Firsts: 7 Women Who Broke Barriers in Science and Tech]

"I can't think of anyone who deserves it more," said Penny Smith, a mathematician at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, who has worked with Uhlenbeck and says she has become her best friend. "She really is not just brilliant but creatively brilliant, amazingly creatively brilliant."

Uhlenbeck is considered one of the pioneers of the field of geometric analysis, which is the study of shapes using what are known as partial differential equations. (These equations include the derivatives, or rates of change, of multiple different variables like x,y and z.)

Curved surfaces (imagine a doughnut or a pretzel), or even difficult-to-visualize, higher-dimensional surfaces, are generally called "manifolds," Smith said. The universe itself is a four-dimensional manifold defined by a set of partial differential equations, she added.

Uhlenbeck, along with a couple of other mathematicians in the 1970s, developed a set of tools and methods for solving partial differential equations that describe many manifold surfaces.

In her early work, Uhlenbeck, along with mathematician Jonathan Sacks, focused on understanding "minimal surfaces." An everyday example of a minimal surface is the outer surface of a soap bubble, which normally settles on a spherical shape because that uses the least amount of energy in terms of surface tension.

But then, say you drop a cube made of wire into a soap solution and pull it back out. The soap still seeks the lowest-energy shape, but this time, it must do so while also somehow clinging to the wire  so, it will form a bunch of different planes meeting at 120-degree angles.

Defining the shape of this soap bubble becomes more and more complicated the more dimensions you add, such as a two-dimensional surface sitting in a six-dimensional manifold. Uhlenbeck figured out the shapes that soap films can take in higher-dimensional curved spaces.

Uhlenbeck also revolutionized another area of mathematical physics known as gauge theory.

Here's how it goes. Sometimes when trying to study surfaces, mathematicians run into trouble. The trouble has a name: a singularity.

Singularities are points in the calculations that are so "horrible" you can't do calculus, Smith said. Imagine an upside-down, pointy hill; one side goes up and has a positive slope, and the other side goes down and has a negative slope. But there's a point in the middle that neither goes up nor goes down, and it wants to have both slopes, Smith said. That's a problematic point  a singularity.

It turned out that gauge theories, or a set of quantum physics equations that define how subatomic particles such as quarks should behave, had some of these singularities.

Uhlenbeck showed that if you don't have too much energy and you're operating in a four-dimensional space, you can find a new set of coordinates where the singularity disappears, Smith said. "She gave a beautiful proof of that." This new set of coordinates satisfy a partial diffential equation that makes the guage theory equations more tractable, she said.

Other mathematicians extended this idea to other dimensions. "We all used Uhlenbeck's ideas in an essential way," Smith said.

But her reach extends beyond her mathematical prowess; she has also been an important mentor to women in science and math. For example, she co-founded a program called Women and Mathematics at Princeton, according to a statement from the university.

"I am aware of the fact that I am a role model for young women in mathematics," Uhlenbeck said in the statement. "It's hard to be a role model, however, because what you really need to do is show students how imperfect people can be and still succeed  I may be a wonderful mathematician and famous because of it, but I'm also very human."

Originally published on Live Science.The discovery of a fossil showing an ancient sea creature with 18 tentacles surrounding its mouth has helped to solve a modern-day mystery about the origins of a gelatinous carnivore called a comb jelly, a new study finds.

The previously unknown "sea monster," which scientists dubbed Daihua sanqiong, lived a whopping 518 million years ago in what is now China. And the extinct animal shares a number of anatomical characteristics with the modern comb jelly, a little sea creature that uses so-called comb rows full of loads of hair-like cilia to swim through the oceans.

The discovery suggests that this newfound species may be the comb jelly's distant relative, said study lead researcher Jakob Vinther, a paleobiologist at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. [Photos: Ancient Shrimp-Like Critter Was Tiny But Fierce]

"With fossils, we have been able to find out what the bizarre comb jellies originated from," Vinther told Live Science. "Even though we now can show they came from a very sensible place, it doesn't make them any less weird."

This finding, however, has sparked a debate. While the discovery of D. sanqiong is impressive, it's hard to say whether this ancient creature is part of the lineage that produced comb jellies, said Casey Dunn, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, who was not involved with the study.

"I am highly skeptical of the conclusions they draw," Dunn told Live Science.

A magnified shot of the rows of cilia on Daihua sanqiong, which suggest that it might be a distant relative of the modern comb jelly. (Image credit: Jakob Vinther)

18 incredible tentacles

Vinther came across the D. sanqiong fossil while visiting colleagues at Yunnan University in China. The scientists there showed him a number of fossils in their collection, including the mysterious creature they later named Daihua sanqiong, which was discovered by study co-researcher Xianguang Hou, a paleobiologist at Yunnan University. The genus name honors the Dai tribe in Yunnan; "hua" means flower in Mandarin, and refers to the critter's flower-like shape.

On each of D. sanqiong's tentacles are fine, feather-like branches with rows of large ciliary hairs, which likely helped it catch prey. These hairs, according to Vinther, grabbed his attention "because we only find big cilia on comb jellies." To swim, comb jellies move their cilia, which then flicker in beautiful iridescent colors.

A living comb jelly, known as Euplokamis. The creature's rainbow iridescence is caused by the movement of the ciliary comb bands on the animal's body. (Image credit: Photograph by Alexander Semenov)

Moreover, the D. sanqiong fossil bears an intriguing resemblance to other known ancient animals, including Xianguangia, another ancient creature with 18 tentacles, and the tulip-like sea creatures Dinomischus and Siphusauctum.

"To make a long story short, we were able to reconstruct the whole [early] lineage of comb jellies," by doing anatomical comparisons, Vinther said. This is a big deal, because some scientists argue that these swimming carnivores were among the first animals to evolve on Earth, based on family trees analyses and genetic modeling of modern comb jellies. But now, this international team has possibly shown that comb jellies have a long lineage that precedes them, Vinther said.

This newly described lineage suggests that some of the ancestors of comb jellies had skeletons and that their ancient tentacles evolved into the combs with the densely packed cilia seen on comb jellies today.

An artist's illustration of Daihua sanqiong. (Image credit: Xiaodong Wang)

The discovery also sheds light on where these ancient animals likely sat on the tree of life. For instance, researchers previously thought that Xianguangia was a sea anemone, but it "is actually part of the comb jelly branch," study co-researcher Peiyun Cong , a professor of paleobiology at Yunnan University, said in a statement.

These findings also make a strong case that comb jellies are related to corals, sea anemones and jellyfish, the researchers said. "Those [ancient] tentacles are the same tentacles that you see on corals and sea anemones," Vinther said. "We can trace comb jellies to these flower-like animals that lived more than half a billion years ago." [Photos: Strange, Eyeless Creatures from the Cambrian Period]

But not everyone agrees with this analysis. While Dunn commended the researchers for their detailed description of D. sanqiong and its proposed relatives, some of these creatures have such different body shapes that it's challenging to see how they could be related, he said. It's possible that the tulip-looking Dinomischus and Siphusayctum creatures are related to each other. But Siphusauctum has ciliary rows on the inside of its body, and the animal purported to come after it, Galeactena, has these rows on the outside of its body. It's hard to see how this animal would, in effect, turn inside out as it evolved, Dunn said. Given that some of these claims are tenuous, the burden of proof is higher, and the researchers don't quite get there, Dunn said.

"These are exciting animals no matter how they're related to each other," Dunn said. "Even though I'm skeptical that tentacles and comb rows are homologous [evolutionarily related], I think that as we describe more diversity from these deposits, certainly we're going to learn a lot more about animal evolution."

The study was published online yesterday (March 21) in the journal Current Biology.

Originally published on Live Science.Scientists hunting for signs of alien life shouldn't be so quick to dismiss carbon monoxide (CO), a new study suggests.

The substance is highly poisonous to people and most other animal life here on Earth because it latches firmly onto hemoglobin, preventing this blood protein from carrying vital oxygen in the required quantities.

And the gas hasn't typically rated as a promising "biosignature" that astrobiologists should target in the search for ET. Indeed, many researchers regard CO as an anti-biosignature, because it's a readily available source of carbon and energy that life-forms should theoretically gobble up. So, finding lots of CO in an exoplanet's atmosphere would suggest the absence of life as we know it, according to this line of thinking.

Related:10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life

But it may be time to revise such reasoning, the new study said. In it, researchers used computer models to better understand the atmospheric chemistry of Earth about 3 billion years ago, when our planet's air contained very little oxygen. Microbial life was common on Earth back then, but animal life was a long way off. (The earliest fossils of multicellular organisms date to about 600 million years ago.)

The team's results indicated that CO could have accumulated in significant quantities in those long-gone days, reaching concentrations of around 100 parts per million (ppm), or about 1,000 times higher than current levels.

"That means we could expect high carbon-monoxide abundances in the atmospheres of inhabited but oxygen-poor exoplanets orbiting stars like our own sun," study co-author Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), said in a statement.

The scientists also applied their models to exoplanetary systems  specifically, those centered on red dwarfs, the small, dim stars that make up about 75 percent of the Milky Way galaxy's stellar population.

The team found that inhabited red-dwarf planets with lots of oxygen in their atmospheres likely sport high levels of CO as well. In fact, CO concentrations on such worlds could be as high as several percent.

"Given the different astrophysical context for these planets, we should not be surprised to find microbial biospheres promoting high levels of carbon monoxide," study lead author Edward Schwieterman, a postdoctoral researcher in UCR's Department of Earth Sciences, said in the same statement.

"However, these would certainly not be good places for human or animal life as we know it on Earth," he added.

The new study, which was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal, serves as a reminder that the hunt for alien life is a very complicated endeavor. Given the incredible abundance and diversity of alien worlds, there's certainly no reason to assume that ET will look like Earth life or employ the same biochemical pathways.

So, researchers, such as Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are greatly expanding the list of possible biosignatures beyond the handful (such as methane and oxygen) that work for Earth-like life.

Such work will likely have practical applications, and soon. NASA's $8.9 billion James Webb Space Telescope will search for biosignatures in the air of some nearby exoplanets after the observatory's planned March 2021 launch. And three huge, ground-based scopes scheduled to come online in the mid-2020s  the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope  will do some atmosphere-sniffing as well after they come online in the mid-2020s.

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate, is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.(Image credit: Composite by Jayanne English, University of Manitoba, using data from NRAO/F. Schinzel et al., DRAO/Canadian Galactic Plane Survey and NASA/IRAS)

A pulsar shoots away from the supernova remnant CTB 1 in this image created with composite data from the Very Large Array and the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory's Canadian Galactic Plane Survey.

Astronomers have clocked a pulsar careening through space at a mind-boggling 2.5 million mph (4 million km/h). It seems to have been kicked to such high speeds by its parent supernova.

Researchers announced the discovery March 19 at the High Energy Astrophysics Division meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Monterey, California. They spotted the pulsar from low Earth orbit with NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico.

"Thanks to its narrow dart-like tail and a fortuitous viewing angle, we can trace this pulsar straight back to its birthplace," Frank Schinzel of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico, said in a statement. [The 12 Strangest Objects in the Universe]

Speedy star

Pulsars are one of the most dramatic phenomena in the universe. They are rapidly spinning neutron stars, which are the cores of collapsed giant stars. As these dense neutron stars spin, they emit beams of electromagnetic radiation that can be detected only when pointed toward Earth. Thus, their signals seem to pulse, giving them their name.

The speedy pulsar was discovered in 2017 using Fermi data and a citizen-science project called Einstein@home, which uses regular computers' idle time to process astrophysical data. After crunching 10 years' worth of numbers, Schinzel and his colleagues calculated the new pulsar's incredible speed and its direction as it moves through space.

The pulsar, dubbed PSR J0002+6216 (or J0002 for short), is 6,500 light-years away from Earth and 53 light-years away from CTB 1, the remnant of a supernova. The pulsar is trailed by a 13-light-year-long tail of magnetic energy and particles, which points right back to CTB 1.

Ancient explosion

About 10,000 years ago, a supernova exploded, leaving behind CTB 1 and shooting J0002 outward. According to the new research, which has been submitted for publication to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the pulsar is faster than 99 percent of pulsars for which the speed is known, as it's cruising at five times the speed of the average pulsar. It will eventually leave the Milky Way.

The researchers plan to study J0002 to better understand the supernova explosion that sent it flying, drawing in more observations from the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

"Further study of this object will help us better understand how these explosions are able to 'kick' neutron stars to such high speed," Schinzel said.

Originally published on Live Science.Organizers of an annual conference that brings together people who believe that the Earth is flat are planning a cruise to the purported edge of the planet. They're looking for the ice wall that holds back the oceans.

The journey will take place in 2020, the Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) recently announced on its website. The goal? To test so-called flat-Earthers' assertion that Earth is a flattened disk surrounded at its edge by a towering wall of ice.

Details about the event, including the dates, are forthcoming, according to the FEIC, which calls the cruise "the biggest, boldest adventure yet." However, it's worth noting that nautical maps and navigation technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) work as they do because the Earth is  a globe. [7 Ways to Prove the Earth Is Round]

Believers in a flat Earth argue that images showing a curved horizon are fake and that photos of a round Earth from space are part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by NASA and other space agencies to hide Earth's flatness. These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the Flat Earth Society (FES), allegedly the world's oldest official flat Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s.

However, the ancient Greeks demonstrated that Earth was a sphere more than 2,000 years ago, and the gravity that keeps everything on the planet from flying off into space could exist only on a spherical world.

But in diagrams shared on the FES website, the planet appears as a pancake-like disk with the North Pole smack in the center and an edge "surrounded on all sides by an ice wall that holds the oceans back." This ice wall  thought by some flat-Earthers to be Antarctica  is the destination of the promised FEIC cruise.

There's just one catch: Navigational charts and systems that guide cruise ships and other vessels around Earth's oceans are all based on the principle of a round Earth, Henk Keijer, a former cruise ship captain with 23 years of experience, told The Guardian.

GPS relies on a network of dozens of satellites orbiting thousands of miles above Earth; signals from the satellites beam down to the receiver inside of a GPS device, and at least three satellites are required to pinpoint a precise position because of Earth's curvature, Keijer explained.

"Had the Earth been flat, a total of three satellites would have been enough to provide this information to everyone on Earth," Keijer said. "But it is not enough, because the Earth is round."

Whether or not the FEIC cruise will rely on GPS or deploy an entirely new flat-Earth-based navigation system for finding the end of the world, remains to be seen.

Originally published on Live Science.For the first time ever, physicists at the worlds largest atom smasher have observed differences in the decay of particles and antiparticles containing a basic building block of matter, called the charm quark.

The finding could help explain the mystery of why matter exists at all.

"It's a historic milestone," said Sheldon Stone, a professor of physics at Syracuse University and one of the collaborators on the new research.

Matter and antimatter

Every particle of matter has an antiparticle, which is identical in mass but with an opposite electrical charge. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate one another. That's a problem. The Big Bang should have created an equivalent amount of matter and antimatter, and all of those particles should have destroyed each other rapidly, leaving nothing behind but pure energy. [Strange Quarks and Muons, Oh My! Natures Tiniest Particles Dissected]

The notion of the CP violation came from Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, who proposed it in 1967 as an explanation for why matter survived the Big Bang.

"This is one of the criteria necessary for us to exist," Stone said, "so it's kind of important to understand what the origin of CP violation is."

There are six different types of quarks, all with their own properties: up and down, top and bottom and charm and strange. In 1964, physicists first observed the CP violation in real life in strange quarks. In 2001, they saw it happen with particles containing bottom quarks. (Both discoveries led to Nobel prizes for the researchers involved.) Physicists had long theorized that it happened with particles containing charm quarks, too, but no one had ever seen it.

Charmed, I'm sure

Stone is one of the researchers on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) beauty experiment, which uses CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the 16.5-mile (27 kilometer) ring on the French-Swiss border that sends subatomic particles careening into one another to re-create the flashes of mind-boggling energy that followed the Big Bang. As the particles smash into each other, they break into their constituent parts, which then decay within fractions of a second to more stable particles.

The latest observations involved combinations of quarks called mesons, specifically the D0 ("d-zero") meson and the anti-D0 meson. The D0 meson is made up of one charm quark and one anti-up quark (the antiparticle of the up quark). The anti-D0 meson is a combination of one anti-charm quark and one up quark.

Both of these mesons decay in many ways, but some small percentage of them end up as mesons called kaons or pions. The researchers measured the difference in decay rates between the D0 and the anti-D0 mesons, a process that involved taking indirect measurements to ensure they weren't just measuring a difference in the initial production of the two mesons, or differences in how well their equipment could detect various subatomic particles.

The bottom line? The ratios of decay differed by a tenth of a percent.

"The means the D0 and the anti-D0 don't decay at the same rate, and that's what we call CP violation," Stone said.

And that makes things interesting. The differences in the decays probably isn't big enough to explain what happened after the Big Bang to leave behind so much matter, Stone said, though it is large enough to be surprising. But now, he said, physics theorists get their turn with the data. [Big Bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events]

Physicists rely on something called the Standard Model to explain, well, everything at the subatomic scale. The question now, Stone said, is whether the predictions made by the Standard Model can explain the charm quark measurement the team just made, or if it will require some sort of new physics  which, Stone said, would be the most exciting outcome.

"If this could only be explained by new physics, that new physics could contain the idea of where this CP violation is coming from," he said.

Researchers announced the discovery in a CERN webcast and published a preprint of a paper detailing the results online.

Originally published on Live Science.A. Marcus Nelson resigned Thursday as superintendent of Waco ISD, about two weeks after he was arrested on a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge.

Nelson, who was named Texas Association of School Boards' Superintendent of the Year in 2014 when he was at Laredo ISD, said in his resignation letter that "the discussion has become more about me and my poor decisions than our schools, our students and their success."

"I have to acknowledge that people disagree about what consequences I should face, and if this debate continues, I fear that it may end up dividing this community and distracting us from what should be our focus  the kids," Nelson wrote.

READ ALSO: Petition to support former LISD superintendent charged with possession gets thousands of signatures

The school board voted unanimously to accept the voluntary separation agreement. Nelson had been superintendent in Waco since 2017. Prior to that, he served as superintendent of LISD for eight years. In December, the Waco school board renewed Nelson's contract, extending it through 2024. His annual base salary was $272,000.

The WISD school board met in closed session for 4  hours Tuesday, weighing potential consequences for Nelson. The board emerged from executive session shortly before midnight and adjourned without taking action. They had already scheduled a meeting for Thursday in the event that they did not reach a decision.

Board members spoke with Nelson for about an hour Tuesday but spent the rest of the time in conversation among themselves.

"I think the board members who had questions and wanted to visit with him, not only about the arrest but also about his ideas about moving forward, had a chance to do so," board President Pat Atkins said. "Obviously, he was contrite and remorseful."

About 245 people attended the Tuesday meeting. They overwhelmingly supported Nelson. Some wore T-shirts bearing a phrase he often uses, "hard work pays off." Others voiced their support to the board during public comment.

When Atkins asked audience members to stand if they were attending to support Nelson, almost everyone in the boardroom stood. Out of 14 people who spoke Tuesday, only two spoke against keeping Nelson as superintendent.

A state trooper stopped Nelson at about 9:25 p.m. March 6 on U.S. Highway 190/State Highway 6 outside of Hearne, about 55 miles southwest of Waco, for driving in the passing lane, according to an arrest affidavit.

RELATED: Ex-LISD superintendent Nelson to seek forgiveness from WISD board for pot arrest

Nelson said the arrest occurred when he was driving back from an interview with the Houston Independent School District board, although he said he was never a formal applicant for the superintendent position there. Before leaving Houston, he stopped at a friend's house, and in conversation, he mentioned he had chronic back pain, Nelson said.

The friend suggested Nelson try marijuana, and Nelson smoked "a small sample" at the house, he said. He said he was not under the influence hours later when the trooper stopped him.

On Friday, Nelson signed a plea agreement with the Robertson County District Attorney's Office and paid $500 to enter a pretrial diversion program. The charge will be dismissed if Nelson avoids trouble for 90 days.More than a dozen individuals and an alleged human smuggling guide were recently apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents near Laredo.

The incident occurred on Thursday when agents assigned to the Laredo Sector Marine unit and Laredo South Station observed individuals along the Rio Grande attempting to enter the United States illegally.Webb County Sheriff's Office

A man was paid $5,000 to begin electrical work at a property but never completed it, according to Laredo police.

Juan Carlos Garcia, 41, was charged with deceptive business practice after being served with an arrest warrant on Wednesday.Some 19 months after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Gulf Coast, Liberty County Commissioners are still dealing with the aftermath.

County officials are seeking federal funding to repair roads and buyout land that will soon be designated Disaster Risk Reduction areas.

The court held a discussion with their grant managers Grant Works to discuss the process and procedures to recover money in two major areas: infrastructure and disaster risk areas during a meeting on March 19.

Infrastructure improvements

Numerous county roads and bridges suffered damage during Harvey and the county will receive nearly $5 million in federal funds administered by the General Land Office of Texas to help with those repairs.

Bruce Spitzengel, chief administrator with Grant Works, said they were seeking help from the county precincts to document the roads that were closed, how long they were closed, and based on that information, they could prove impact.

The roads that were impacted, however, cannot be rebuilt the same.

It would have to be an improved road or widened road according to their eligibility guides. Raising it or widening it would meet the guidelines, and that would allow you to clean out your ditches if youre putting in larger culverts in the widening process, he said.

In addition to the road conditions themselves, he also suggested it would be good to know whether emergency vehicles were able to get down those roads or not.

A new federal act proposed in September and signed into law in October, called the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, affected FEMA and requires them to consider latent damage that happened to roads as well.

Some of the damage to the roads could have come from debris trucks and heavy equipment going down the roads and tearing them up, he said.

After the roads sat under water for as many days as it did, it softened up the base and the road would be deteriorated.

To aid in the financial recovery, he suggested that they get maps of the roads before Harvey, which would be difficult since many of them are not shown on Google.

Instead, they may have to get statements from an engineer acknowledging that the roads were damaged as a result of Hurricane Harvey. Some $4.9 million has been earmarked for infrastructure: roads, bridges, and ditches.

At least 6 percent would go toward grant administration, while 15 percent would be consumed by engineering services.

Work on providing the necessary details is underway.

Buyouts on the way

There are populated areas along the river that flood every time there is a water event. Tyler Smith, who was hired Feb. 1 by Grant Works for his strong background in buyouts and acquisitions, addressed questions of the commissioners on how the process would work.

Smith pointed out the county has received $6.7 million for buyouts.

Were not going to be able buy everyone out. Were going to concentrate on homes along the river, said County Judge Jay Knight.

Some commissioners thought it might be fair to allow each to name the properties they wanted to see bought out from their own areas, but one commissioner disagreed.

I dont see that its going to do any good for us to buy out one, two or three homes in our area, have another flood and more homes to still deal with, said Commissioner James Reaves.

Instead, his proposal would see the money buy out one particular area like Sam Houston Lake Estates or New River Lake Estates.

At least once a month I have to send a dozer down there in the middle of the night to pull out an emergency vehicle, said Commissioner Greg Arthur.

Arthur estimated about 60 families still live in the New River area that could be bought out.

Lake Livingston Water Company still has a plant in the back, and they cant hardly get to it, Arthur said.

They have to go and check it about every two weeks.

Arthur met with a company official who said they were about to cut their losses and give it to the people back there and move on.

Theres a half-a-mile of road that goes into the subdivision thats been washed into the river.

We built a temporary road on a sandbar around there and when they get the next flood, it will be gone. Theres really no place there to build a road. Wed have to come back around through another subdivision, and it would have to be a bridge for about three-quarters of a mile, Arthur said.

But that project would be costly, he noted.

Knight suggested once the buyouts would be complete, the land could be deeded to the Texas Parks and Wildlife.

One commissioner said that about 80 percent of Sam Houston already belonged to the agency.

Smith told the commissioners that the process would be to buy out the land, demolish the homes, and return it to its original state or deed it for parks and recreation, but no development would be allowed on the land.

Acquisitions are fundamentally different, he said, in that after you buy out the land, you can redevelop it for a resilient housing activity.

In New York, where Smith worked formerly, they did elevated rental housing for low income people.

Voluntary and involuntary buyouts

With the funds that are available to commissioners, they qualify to use imminent domain to buy parcels of land.

The caveat to the buyouts is that commissioners must decide to use one or the other for all the buyoutseither all voluntary, or all by imminent domain.

All those in the county must fall under the same designation. You cant do 80 percent voluntary and 20 percent involuntary. All the owners in the Disaster Risk Reduction areas must be notified upfront that you will be using imminent domain or voluntary buyout to acquire their homes, he told commissioners.

Once the addresses are targeted, commissioners must send out voluntary acquisition notices or a letter of imminent domain.

Buyouts also allow us to pay people the pre-storm fair market value on the properties. So we will be using forensic appraisals that value the homes before they were impacted by Hurricane Harvey, Smith said.

They will also be able to offer relocation incentives.

You dont want to lose your tax base and so you can use part of your budget to offer incentives to keep them in your county outside of the dangerous area, he said.

The money comes from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and so income verification will be done as well as a review of any monies that were already given to the homeowner for Harvey relief. Each offer to buy out would be based on each homeowners individual assessment.

Verification includes making sure they are U. S. citizens, that they are the actual owners of the property, and various other forms of documentation.

The buyout program has an approximate budget of $6.74 million. At least 12 percent would be used for administrative and project delivery costs. The remaining $5.93 million is for buyouts, eligible incentives and demolishing costs.

Lead-based paint and asbestos removal would also be included in demolishing costs.

Smith did suggest that demolition costs would be lower if they did do neighborhoods versus scattered site selections.

Demolition was expected to cost close to $1 million-plus leaving approximately $4.1 million for the actual buyouts.

Commissioners have been tasked with deciding the areas they want to buyout and then it will be broken down parcel by parcel on which properties will be subject to either voluntary or involuntary buyout.

The project could last up to two or three years and the process could begin as soon as a few weeks. No decisions were made during the workshop and proposals would next appear in regular commissioners court.

dtaylor@hcnonline.comFor more stories like this, check out The Chronicle's weekly Travel newsletter! Sign up here.

For anyone looking to spend a day outside, there is nothing more frustrating than driving an hour or three out to a large park, only to find that its missing some feature you were counting on  parking, restrooms, picnic tables or a fire pit, for example. For people who use wheelchairs or have other mobility impairments, its especially important to have clear and specific information about the park youre visiting.

Thats why Bonnie Lewkowicz created Access Northern California (http://accessnca.org), an online database of accessibility information in parks throughout the northern half of the state. California cant call a trail accessible if it doesnt meet certain standards, Lewkowicz says. I just say, These are the access features. You decide if it works for you.

The Chronicle asked Lewkowicz to name a few standout parks for people with mobility impairments in California  including the southern part of the state. It was hard narrowing down my picks, she says, because every place offers a different kind of experience.

Mason Trinca / Special to The Chronicle

1. Clear Lake State Park, Lake County

Often overshadowed by its larger cousin Lake Tahoe, Californias second-largest freshwater lake matches many of Tahoes scenic offerings without the high prices and traffic jams caused by the more famous lakes steady flow of tourists. Clear Lake features seven accessible campsites at two campgrounds, as well as one accessible rustic cabin. This park offers less than 2 miles of wheelchair-accessible trails, but one path leads to several fishing spots, and the other passes by three scenic overlooks of this beautiful lake. Additional features include picnic tables designed to accommodate wheelchairs, and an accessible visitor center with information about the parks history and natural features. It would be even more accessible, Lewkowicz pointedly hints, if a beach wheelchair was available.

More info: http://access.parks.ca.gov/parkinfo.asp?park=69&type=0

Penni Gladstone / The Chronicle 2006

2. Coyote Point Recreation Area, San Mateo

This one is great for families, Lewkowicz says of this bay-facing park on the Peninsula, because its got something for everyone: several wheelchair-accessible playgrounds for the kids, a shooting range and a fishing jetty for the grown-ups, along with bay views and an accessible nature museum for everyone. The CuriOdyssey Museums open floor plan is easy to maneuver and includes ecology exhibits as well as live specimens of Bay Area wildlife. Coyote Point is also home to a small slice of the Bay Trail; a 2.5-mile trek southward will take you to the base of the San Mateo Bridge.

More info: http://accessnca.org/access-northern-california/explore/explore-detail-view/?site_id=156

Alan Beymer

3. Calaveras Big Trees State Park, northwest of Yosemite

The trees have to be pretty large to earn a park the name Big Trees in a state full of sequoias and redwoods. Calaveras, in Calaveras and Tuolumne counties, does not disappoint  a network of compacted-soil trails and raised-boardwalk trails runs through a grove of massive sequoias. One trail ran directly into a tunnel carved through the famous Pioneer Cabin Tree until it came down in a 2017 storm. A more durable landmark is the Discovery Stump, whose 24-foot diameter was once the base of 1,200-year-old tree standing 363 feet tall until loggers cut it down in the frenzy of the Gold Rush. Later, this massive stump was a venue for social dances. Calaveras also features nine campsites and one cabin that are accessible by wheelchairs.

More info: http://access.parks.ca.gov/parkinfo.asp?park=109&type=0

Tom Stienstra / The Chronicle

4. McArthur-Burney Falls State Park, northeast of Redding

For a taste of Northern Californias northernmost reaches, the mobility-impaired traveler might consider this Shasta County park, best known for its 129-foot waterfall  which can be viewed from multiple angles along various accessible trails. The Pioneer Cemetery Trail follows a route originally chosen for wagons, so the grade and surface have always accommodated wheels; the soil is rutted in some places, providing a mild challenge depending on ones mobility level. The Headwaters and Burney Creek Trails are smoother. This park also features a wheelchair-friendly visitor center, picnic areas, campsites, and a fishing pier.

More info: http://access.parks.ca.gov/parkinfo.asp?park=26&type=0

Ken Steinhardt / Orange County Register 2012

5. Doheny State Beach, Orange County

Californias 840 miles of Pacific coastline are a quintessential component of the states scenic offerings  especially for the sunbathers and surfers who bask in Southern Californias warm climate at sites like Doheny State Beach, the oldest coastal plot in the state park system. But the sandy beaches at many coastal parks pose obvious challenges for wheelchair users and others with mobility impairments. To mitigate this low-traction terrain, Doheny boasts three boardwalk paths that extend onto the beach, including one that leads to a shady palapa. This park is also one of a growing number to keep a small fleet of fat-tire wheelchairs on hand for those looking to explore beyond the boardwalk. Looking inland, the San Juan Creek Trail offers more than 4 miles of paved, mostly level paths for visitors seeking a stroll.

More info: www.wheelingcalscoast.org/site.php?site=167WASHINGTON - Pentagon plans to take money away from military construction projects to pay for President Donald Trump's border wall would potentially deal an outsize blow to Puerto Rico and particularly affect a program helping European allies deter Russia, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Under pressure from lawmakers, the Defense Department released a list Monday detailing $12.9 billion in military construction projects that had received money from Congress but had yet to be contracted. That status puts them in a pool of funding that Trump could take for the wall, using emergency powers.

The Pentagon hasn't said which specific projects would be defunded. But it has ruled out taking money from military housing projects or contracts due to award before the end of the fiscal year. When those are stripped out, the refined list decreases to $4.35 billion worth of projects that are actually vulnerable. The Trump administration plans to take up to $3.6 billion, or 83 percent, for the wall, meaning most of the projects on the shorter list could be defunded.

Puerto Rico is the most affected U.S. territory or state, with 10 projects at a value of $403 million on the smaller list, according to The Post's analysis.

The projects in Puerto Rico that would potentially have their funding taken away include the construction of a school for military children on what was once Ramey Air Force Base and improvements to Camp Santiago, a training facility operated by the Puerto Rico National Guard.

Also on the most-vulnerable list is some $745 million worth of projects for the European Deterrence Initiative and its predecessor program. President Barack Obama launched the program in 2014 to shore up the defenses of European allies after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine.

The initiative is the bedrock of the Pentagon's efforts to deter Russia from taking military actions in Europe against American allies, a mission at the heart of the national defense strategy that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis rolled out before his resignation in December.

The 23 European projects in the program at risk are aimed at making it easier for allied forces to respond to any Russian military actions in Europe, part of a broader effort to deter Moscow from armed aggression.

The initiatives at risk include a plan to build a facility for Special Operations forces and their training in Estonia; projects to construct ammunition and fuel storage facilities and staging areas in Poland; and planned upgrades to aircraft surveillance facilities in Italy and Britain, as well as airfield and fuel storage upgrades in Slovakia and Hungary.

A relatively obscure statute in the U.S. code governing the military, known as Section 2808, allows the defense secretary, in the event of a national emergency requiring the use of troops, to tap military construction funds to build projects necessary to support those forces. The secretary can tap only funds not yet awarded under contract.

The Trump administration says the military construction projects that lose funding for the wall would be "backfilled" in the coming year's budget, as long as Congress passes the request in full and on time, and therefore none of the projects ultimately would be delayed or scrapped. But Democrats in Congress have balked at the idea of appropriating money for construction projects they have already funded, setting up a political battle that could leave the projects in question frozen, delayed or scrapped.

One challenge the Pentagon faces in trying to take up to $3.6 billion from the military construction account is that the account is an agglomeration of many small projects costing tens of millions of dollars each across many states and countries. The $4.35 billion worth of vulnerable construction projects are located in 31 states and 18 foreign countries.

Washington is the most affected state by amount of money, with three projects totaling $185 million at risk of losing funding, including a project at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor that would expand the pier there to accommodate two additional Seawolf-class fast-attack submarines.

New York is the second most affected state by the amount of money at risk because of two sizable projects with $160 million in funding at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The academy is slated to get a new parking garage as well as a state-of the-art engineering center.

Virginia is the most affected state by number of projects potentially affected, with seven plans valued at $143 million, including construction to improve security at the Pentagon and a cyberoperations facility at Joint Base Langley-Eustis. It is followed closely by Alaska, with five projects potentially affected at a value of $131 million.

More than 40 percent of the potentially impacted funding is going to international construction projects at facilities outside the United States, many of them American military facilities. Operations in Germany would be most affected, with 13 projects at a value of $513 million on the list. Operations in Japan are a close second, with 10 projects at a value of $490 million potentially affected.

The types of projects vary, but schools for the children of U.S. military personnel at home and abroad would be among the most impacted. Some $664 million in at-risk funding is money that was appropriated by Congress for the construction or renovation of elementary schools, high schools and middle schools. About $132 million of that funding is for two school projects that the Pentagon says have been canceled for unrelated reasons.

Within the Pentagon, the Air Force is by far the service that is most affected, with $1.31 billion worth of projects on the refined list. It's followed by the Navy, with $786 million worth of projects, and the Army, with $680 billion.

Lawmakers and officials representing the areas with military construction projects potentially most at risk expressed anger and frustration on Thursday.

"President Trump promised that Mexico would pay for his wasteful wall, and now he wants taxpayers, Washington state families, and our national security priorities to pay the price," Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a statement. "This is outrageous and I'm going to fight back with every tool at my disposal."

Ramon Luis Nieves, a former state senator representing San Juan, said it was "very sad" that Puerto Rico was being targeted, even as it continues a slow recovery from Hurricane Maria that has been hampered by what many view as an inadequate response from the Trump administration and Congress.

"You cannot say you're building a wall to protect national security in the continental U.S. while taking moneys away from the people of Puerto Rico and the preparedness of our troops who train here," Nieves said.

Anger from lawmakers comes as internal frustration at the Pentagon over the border expenditures spills into public. In recent memos published by the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller warned that "unplanned and unbudgeted" items including the border operation, border security funding transfers and recovery costs related to Hurricanes Florence and Michael would divert money away from important military tasks. The net effect of those budgetary pressures, Neller wrote, pose an "unacceptable risk to Marine Corps readiness and solvency."

In a statement, Lt. Col. Joe Buccino, a spokesman for acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan, said the Pentagon was working with Congress on several proposals for funding hurricane repair. "With the support of and rapid action of Congress, we anticipate the Marine Corps will maintain its current high level of combat readiness," he said.

The Pentagon's refusal to publicly detail which military construction projects would be defunded to pay for Trump's wall has angered lawmakers already upset about his decision to circumvent Congress by declaring a national emergency.

Lawmakers anticipate getting more precise details from the Pentagon in coming weeks, but Democrats say they have no intention of using their spending bills to "backfill" money for projects the Pentagon chooses to cancel.

"I will not support any backfill of funds diverted from military construction projects to pay for Trump's wasteful wall," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who leads the military construction and veterans affairs appropriations subcommittee in the House. She said the coming year's bill "will not include replacement funding for any projects clawed back for this purpose."

Republicans, however, insist that they will backfill the affected projects.

"Securing our southern border is of the utmost importance," Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said this week in a statement. "While no final decisions have been made regarding specific funds to be used for border projects, I will work with my colleagues to backfill any funding that may be diverted from military construction projects.""Fort Huachuca has a long overdue project from Fiscal Year 2018 that we are actively working to keep off any chopping block and will fight tooth and nail to backfill if needed," Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for McSally, said in a statement.

That puts the Democrats who control the House on a collision course with the Senate Republican majority over the issue. How it ultimately shakes out will probably remain unclear for months, as lawmakers work toward a Sept. 30 deadline, when government funding will expire if they don't pass new spending bills for the 2020 fiscal year. The threat of another shutdown will loom.

Numerous other issues will also be at play, including Trump's demands for still more money for the border wall and the need to raise the federal government's borrowing limit.

Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., said ahead of casting her vote in favor of Trump's national emergency declaration last week that she had received commitments from the Pentagon that it would leave certain projects in Arizona untouched. But a project to build a ground transport equipment building at the state's Fort Huachuca is on the most-vulnerable list.

In addition to the possibility of using appropriations bills to limit the Trump administration's authority going forward, Democrats have another powerful tool at their disposal in the conflict over the national emergency declaration: The National Emergencies Act allows them to bring up resolutions of disapproval every six months, potentially forcing Republicans to take another tough vote on the issue six months from now.

They are likely to exercise that ability, according to a senior Democratic aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of a public announcement, but no final decisions have been made and other issues will be considered including the disposition of any court cases.

The developments come as the House prepares to vote Tuesday to override Trump's veto of Congress's disapproval resolution that sought to overturn the president's national emergency declaration. The vote is expected to fall short of the needed two-thirds majority but will give Democrats another opportunity to denounce Trump for what they call unconstitutional overreach. Most Republicans are likely to defend the president.

- - -

The Washington Post's Jeff Stein contributed to this report.WASHINGTON - Democrats are scrambling to reinforce their party's support for the U.S.-Israel relationship as accusations of anti-Semitism roil the party and President Donald Trump upends decades of bipartisan consensus by endorsing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing priorities.

Two Jewish House Democrats introduced a resolution Thursday that condemns a boycott movement against Israel and reaffirms support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a move to counter the perception that the party is fractured in its support of Israel. The legislation, however, was overshadowed by Trump's endorsement of permanent Israeli control over the disputed Golan Heights - a pronouncement hailed by Netanyahu, who is seeking re-election next month.

Longtime Democratic supporters of close U.S.-Israel ties have been forced to regroup after freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., suggested Israel's supporters are motivated by political donations and have "allegiance" to a foreign country, sparking a messy public reckoning over anti-Semitism. Democratic presidential candidates, meanwhile, have shown a new willingness to challenge Israeli government policy under Netanyahu.

Few Democratic leaders believe the party is in danger of seeing a mass defection of Jewish voters, but many say they need to redouble their efforts to police anti-Semitic rhetoric and prevent further erosion of support for Israel. Jewish voters typically favor Democrats over Republicans by a remarkably consistent ratio of 2 to 1 or more, according to exit polling dating to 1980.

"What I'm hearing from the community is, 'Do we have a problem?' " said Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a moderate Jewish Democrat. "My answer to that is: There are a few individuals who are on the fringes, but that's not where the party is, and we need to reinforce that message and ensure this never becomes a partisan issue."

That mission is set to play out next week as thousands of politically active Jewish Americans and allies gather at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference. The headliners include top-ranking Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, all considered stalwart supporters of Israel.

They will be tasked with countering a narrative of polarization and division that has been developing since at least 2015, when Netanyahu openly challenged President Barack Obama over his decision to pursue nuclear rapprochement with Iran. That narrative only accelerated with Trump's election and close embrace of Netanyahu and his priorities - canceling the Iran nuclear deal, moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and, in a tweet Thursday, endorsing Israel's sovereignty in the Golan.

But the frenzy over Omar's comments has emboldened Republicans who argue that they are the more ardent supporters of Israel and Jewish interests - even as a new Gallup poll found that only 16 percent of Jewish Americans identified as Republicans last year.

Trump this month called the Democratic Party "anti-Israel" and "anti-Jewish" after House leaders broadened a resolution responding to Omar by condemning all forms of hatred. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the House Republican Conference chairwoman, in a fundraising message accused Democrats of "enabling anti-Semitism." And GOP campaign committees are targeting Democratic incumbents who have shied away from directly rebuking Omar.

According to lawmakers and congressional aides, as well as activists and strategists, Democratic leaders and others in the party are planning to push back on the narrative at the AIPAC conference, where Netanyahu also is slated to be in attendance. Some will emphasize the importance of keeping the U.S.-Israel relationship bipartisan. Others will argue that the more significant threat is anti-Semitism on the political right. And some will directly challenge the rhetoric that landed Omar and her defenders in a political firestorm.

"There are thousands of people who will be coming to Washington this week who are Democrats and Republicans who care deeply about the U.S.-Israel relationship and understand that it can't be used as a political wedge issue - and that applies on both sides," said Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., who delivered an impassioned floor speech on the dangers of anti-Semitism during the Omar imbroglio this month. "I think what the community wants is clear assurance that attacks on the Jewish community won't be tolerated and can never be normalized."

Part of that effort is the new resolution sponsored by Reps. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Bradley Schneider, D-Ill., which strongly rejects the global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or BDS. That movement aims to apply economic pressure to compel Israel to change its policy toward the Palestinians; its critics say the changes BDS supporters want would effectively end Israel's identity as a Jewish homeland.

AIPAC supports the resolution, according to an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the group's strategy.

While the majority of Democrats are opposed or at least silent on the movement, two freshmen House members - Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., who is of Palestinian descent - have made statements of support. And many more Democrats have pushed back on legislative efforts to rebuke the movement, saying they infringe on free speech.

Tlaib's office said in a statement Thursday that she would oppose the resolution "because it is aimed at suppressing free speech and moves us no closer to peace and understanding."

"The economic boycott of Israel or any other government based on violations of human rights is about highlighting the injustices that need to stop," Tlaib's spokesman Denzel McCampbell said.

Twenty-three Senate Democrats opposed a separate bill last month that would allow state and local governments to cut off contracts with companies that embrace BDS.

Democratic leaders are intent on sending a straightforward message of support at AIPAC as they share a stage with Netanyahu and Trump administration officials eager to tout their close bond.

The task for Democrats, said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, is that "support for Israel needs to be defined as support for Israel, not support for Bibi Netanyahu," he said, using a common nickname for the Israeli leader.

Hoyer, long one of the most fervent Democratic supporters of Israel, plans to speak Sunday about the shared democratic values of the two countries and the need to counter threats from Iran - standard fare for the annual conference. But, according to an aide familiar with his planned remarks, he also will rebut the notion that Israel's American supporters have a "dual loyalty" - the anti-Semitic trope at the center of the recent accusations against Omar.

"He will argue there should be no confusion about Americans who support Israel - they do so out of patriotism for the United States and its ideals," said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the speech.

Pelosi and Schumer have spoken out about GOP efforts to create a partisan breach on Israel, and both have pointed to Trump as a culprit in rising anti-Semitism.

Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said that her "strong message of support for the vital U.S.-Israel relationship will speak for itself" and that "politicians who seek to weaponize this relationship and turn it into a wedge issue are no friends of Israel."

After Trump called Democrats anti-Jewish, Schumer pointed to Trump's equivocal response to the 2017 white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and said he was "only interested in playing the politics of division."

"Mr. President," he added, "you have redefined chutzpah."

Not appearing at AIPAC - at least at official events - are any 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, with some openly announcing that they are skipping the event amid pressure from left-wing activists.

The liberal group MoveOn Political Action urged White House hopefuls to skip the conference, citing the group's opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and its close embrace of Netanyahu.

An aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., cited concerns "about the platform AIPAC is providing for leaders who have expressed bigotry and oppose a two-state solution." Sanders, who is of Jewish descent, has been among the prominent Democrats most critical of the Netanyahu government, and he offered some support of Omar amid the firestorm this month.

"She has been critical of the Israeli government, and I think that that is a fair criticism," he said of Omar in an interview with WMUR in New Hampshire. "I have been very critical of the Israeli government in terms of their treatment of Palestinians."

Both Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., another liberal presidential hopeful, skipped Netanyahu's 2015 speech to Congress. And when the Senate voted last month on the anti-BDS measure, nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates voted against it, citing free speech concerns. The one exception was Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

"The task for presidential candidates used to be convincing the electorate of their bona fides in being aligned with the Israeli government," said Ben Rhodes, a former senior foreign policy aide to Obama. "I think now it's incumbent on Democrats to articulate how they can both be supportive of Israel, in terms of its survival and its security, but also critical of this Israeli government."

That emerging reality is making some traditional Israel supporters inside the Democratic Party nervous. This year Mark Mellman, a prominent Democratic pollster and strategist, launched a new group, Democratic Majority for Israel, aimed at shoring up support as a new generation of liberals express fresh doubts about Israel under a right-wing government.

Mellman said "the overwhelming majority" of Democrats are pro-Israel, "and we want to keep it that way." The GOP pressure campaign highlighting Israel's Democratic critics, he said, had little chance of success.

"We've got a few who are problematic from a pro-Israel point of view," Mellman said. "That's a few too many, as far as I'm concerned, on the one hand. On the other hand, it's not a bad score. So I don't think it's a particularly precarious moment."WASHINGTON - He pulled back the curtain on a sophisticated Kremlin hacking operation - identifying by name the 12 Russian military officers who he said sought to sway a U.S. election.

He exposed a Russian online influence campaign - bringing criminal charges against the 13 members of a Russian troll farm now accused of trying to manipulate U.S. voters and sow division through fake social media personae.

And he revealed how those closest to President Donald Trump defrauded banks, cheated on their taxes and, time and time again, lied to deflect inquiries into their ties with Russia.

After 22 months of meticulous investigation, charges against 34 people - including six former Trump aides or confidants - and countless hours of all-consuming news coverage, special counsel Robert Mueller today submitted the long-anticipated report on his findings to Attorney General William Barr.

Barr said in a letter to lawmakers that he may be able to inform Congress of Mueller's "principal conclusions" as early as this weekend.

It's not clear whether or when Mueller's full report will become public - or how his conclusions might impact Trump's presidency.

Barr said he plans to consult with Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to determine "what other information from the report" could be made public.

But through legal documents and court hearings, Mueller has already revealed rich details about the Russian attack on the U.S. democracy in 2016 - and his investigation has triggered unpredictable ripple effects.

The special counsel indirectly helped expose hush money that Trump's lawyer paid an adult-film actress, shed new light on secret foreign-backed lobbying efforts and helped force a reckoning at major technology companies over how social media can be used to divide and inflame.

Mueller's investigation also severed the bonds between Trump and some of his most loyal confidants, brought down a national security adviser and spawned spinoff criminal probes that appear likely to live on even after the special counsel's office disbands.

"He's almost like a venture capital incubator who has spun out multiple lines of business," said David Kris, a former Justice Department national security division chief and founder of the consulting firm Culper Partners. "He's shown us an awful lot, and yet I think there's an awful lot more to come."

The special counsel team worked amid an unrelenting onslaught of insults and attacks from the president and his party - ensuring that its findings will probably be viewed through the lens of tribal partisan politics.

While polling has found that more Americans are likely to trust Mueller than Trump, those views break down sharply on partisan lines.

"I think the question of whether you assess it as a success or a failure," Kris said, "is probably really just holding up a mirror to your own expectations, hopes and dreams."

- - -

From the start of his investigation, Mueller and his team followed a consistent pattern. They would toil in silence for months, saying nothing about what leads they were exploring. Then - often on a Friday - they would reveal indictments packed with more detail than needed to substantiate the charges, though perhaps less than an insatiable public might have preferred.

Mueller struck first at the heart of Trump's campaign - charging its former chairman, Paul Manafort, and deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates, with crimes related to their work for a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine.

The infractions Mueller alleged were not related to possible coordination with Russia, a fact Trump and his allies were quick to seize on. But the October 2017 indictment sent a message: Mueller was alleging that the president's campaign had been led by people who had engaged in serious criminal wrongdoing.

Mueller also revealed that another campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had secretly pleaded guilty earlier that month to lying to the FBI about his contacts with foreigners claiming to have high-level Russian connections.

He was one of at least 14 Trump associates who had contact with Russian nationals during the campaign and transition.

Papadopoulos's plea agreement described his extensive efforts to try to arrange a meeting between Russians and the Trump campaign. And he said that in April 2016, a London-based professor claiming to have Russian connections confided that he had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, including "thousands of emails."

That same month, Mueller would later allege, Russian hackers had accessed the networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee.

The plea deal previewed what Mueller would show over and over: Those surrounding the president sought to hide or downplay their dealings with Russia.

One of the persistent mysteries has been why.

In December 2017, former national security adviser Michael Flynn admitted that he lied to the FBI about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn had claimed the two did not discuss Obama-era sanctions directed at the Kremlin, when in fact they had.

Nearly a year later, Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen similarly pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts to pursue a possible Trump Tower project in Moscow. Cohen had told lawmakers that discussions about the project ended in January 2016, when in fact - contrary to what Trump had said publicly - they continued into the summer of that year, in the heart of Trump's presidential campaign.

When longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone was indicted in January, accused of making false statements and obstruction, he became the sixth Trump aide ensnared by Mueller's investigation, a group that included some of the president's closest confidants.

Earlier this month, Manafort was sentenced to a total of 7 1/2 years in prison for conspiracy and fraud. Cohen is set to start serving a three-year prison sentence in May.

"When your campaign manager goes to jail, that makes presidential history," said Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University. "And then to have your personal lawyer go to prison also. These aren't bit players - these are people who were part of the heart and soul of the Trump operation."

- - -

One of Mueller's core assignments from the start was to dissect exactly how Russia sought to influence the 2016 presidential campaign.

Four months before Mueller was appointed, the U.S. intelligence community laid out in a terse 14-page report how it said Russia - on the order of President Vladimir Putin - had waged an online campaign to help Trump win the election.

The special counsel added to that 66 richly detailed pages of his own, outlining in two indictments the granular specifics of the cyberoperations.

In the first, which accused 13 Russians of waging a social media influence effort that ran afoul of U.S. law, Mueller revealed he had access to the group's internal communications, including an email from September 2017 in which one of those charged wrote to a family member: "The FBI busted our work (not a joke)."

Mueller also described how the group worked offline, visiting states to gather intelligence on U.S. politics and enlisting unwitting Americans to hold rallies in support of Trump - providing the clearest window yet into Russia's covert efforts.

In the second, which charged a group of Russian military officers with hacking Democrats' emails and laundering them through fake online personae so they could be posted online, Mueller identified by name those he asserted were responsible for the attack. The indictment expanded considerably on the intelligence community's assessment.

Former independent counsel Robert Ray, now in private practice at Thompson & Knight, said it was particularly remarkable how quickly Mueller was able to work, bringing his complicated investigation to a close inside of two years.

"That's a big accomplishment, and that's also recognition of where investigations steered off course in the past," Ray said.

Notably, the indictments did not accuse any Americans of conspiring with Russia - one of the main questions the special counsel was asked to examine.

The most Mueller's team has said publicly on that topic was in court papers related to Stone, which alleged that the longtime Trump adviser made efforts to get information about the release of the hacked emails in consultation with the campaign - then lied to Congress about it.

Court filings also revealed that Manafort, as Trump's campaign chairman, provided 2016 polling data to a Russian associate who the FBI has assessed had ties to Russian intelligence - although Manafort was not charged with conspiring with Russia.

Still, the revelations throughout the course of the investigation about the extent of Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 campaign, Trump's interest in building a tower in Moscow, and repeated Russian outreach to Trump aides formed a compelling narrative, some analysts said - one muted only by how it dribbed out over time.

"It's so much, it's so gradual, it's so complicated, people don't have a chance to sort of pause, catch their breath and really sort of survey the whole story that [Mueller has] found," Kris said. "I think if you took it all in in one day, it would kill you. It's simply too much."

Ray said Mueller's careful handling of the investigation is likely to set a precedent for future special counsels.

"The whole purpose of appointing a special counsel is either to find and prosecute what you were appointed to do, or to fully investigate something and render a judgment that it wasn't appropriate to bring charges within the core of that mandate," Ray said. "My view is, either way, that's a success."

- - -

Mueller's impact has gone far beyond the work of his own prosecutors.

His revelations have fueled calls for greater government oversight of Silicon Valley, following years in which the tech industry grew into one of the nation's wealthiest and most important economic sectors while facing little regulatory scrutiny.

Facebook, Twitter and Google were forced to contend with nationally televised questioning on Capitol Hill and internal upheaval in the wake of news that Russia used social media to promote Trump.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who at first downplayed the extent of the Russian influence operation on his platform, has since apologized in the face of mounting evidence and is leading a major overhaul of the company to address public demands for greater accountability and privacy.

Mueller has also referred additional investigations to at least three U.S. attorney's offices.

One of those cases, a handoff to prosecutors in Manhattan, led to a guilty plea from Cohen, Trump's longtime personal attorney, for tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations that he told a judge were directed by Trump.

That case ruptured a key personal relationship for the president, spilling into public view embarrassing details about Trump's efforts to pay off the adult-film actress known as Stormy Daniels and allowing prosecutors to pry into Trump's personal business.

The Cohen case appears to have been the spark for yet another investigation - this one related to Trump's inaugural festivities. Prosecutors in Manhattan issued a wide-ranging subpoena in February to Trump's presidential inaugural committee seeking records related to its fundraising and spending.

Meanwhile, this summer in Virginia, prosecutors will try a former business partner of Flynn, the former national security adviser, on charges that he acted as an illegal agent of Turkey.

The case underscores how the Mueller probe shined new light on a lucrative and largely unseen American lobbying industry financed by foreign interests.

Flynn will probably be the star witness. As part of a plea deal with Mueller agreeing that he had lied about his contacts with a Russian ambassador, Flynn admitted that he, too, worked as an unregistered agent of Turkey - even while advising Trump's campaign.

That revelation drew a sharp rebuke from the federal judge in Washington overseeing Flynn's case: "Arguably," U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan told Flynn in December, "you sold your country out."

Similarly, Manafort and Gates have admitted that they did not register for work they did for a Ukrainian political party. So has W. Samuel Patten, another political consultant, whose case in Washington began with another Mueller referral.

At Manafort's tax and bank fraud trial in Virginia in August, operatives from both parties took the stand to describe how American political consultants flock to foreign capitals to earn side money in years when there are not U.S. elections, a legal but previously less-well-understood practice.

In the wake of Mueller's appointment, the attention on foreign influence led to a dramatic rise in the number of lobbyists who have filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law from before World War II intended to bring transparency to the work for foreign entities that until recently had been only loosely enforced.

This month, the Justice Department revealed it is creating a new unit of prosecutors to more aggressively enforce the law. It will be led by Brandon Van Grack, a Justice Department prosecutor and veteran of Mueller's team.

- - -

The Washington Post's Craig Timberg contributed to this report.Washington

A number of unexpected costs, including major hurricane damage repairs and unplanned deployments to the U.S.-Mexico border, are forcing the Marine Corps to cancel training exercises and will degrade combat readiness, the top Marine general warned.

Gen. Robert Neller said in a memo this week to the Navy secretary that the Marines have pulled out of three military exercises and cut equipment maintenance. And he warned that Marine participation in more than a dozen other exercises will also be canceled or reduced and other cuts will be needed if the service doesn't get budget help.

The problem, said Neller, is "imposing unacceptable risk" to Marine Corps combat readiness.

"Marines rely on the hard, realistic training provided by these events to develop the individual and collective skills necessary to prepare for high-end combat," Neller said in the memo sent to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer. "Although some effects can be mitigated, the experience lost by these units at a critical time in their preparation cannot be recouped."

In the memo, which was first reported by the Los Angeles Times, Neller asks Spencer for help getting funding freed up for the Marine priorities.

Neller lists nine unplanned factors that led to the problem, but the Marine Corps said that, by far, the most significant issue forcing the training cuts is the widespread hurricane damage.

About $3.5 billion in damages was done to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and surrounding facilities by Hurricanes Florence and Michael.

Neller said that earlier hopes that Congress might approve requests to move larger amounts of money around in the budget now appear unlikely. He called the situation in North Carolina critical, noting that hurricane season begins in June and Marines and sailors are working in "compromised structures" that must be repaired quickly.

The Defense Department is seeking more than $2 billion in funding for hurricane damage in the 2020 fiscal year budget. But Neller said the Marine Corps needs more than $600 million in this current fiscal year to do those needed repairs and address other shortfalls.

The other shortfalls include the ripple effect of the ongoing debate over President Donald Trump's plan to build a wall on the southern border.

Currently there are about 500 Marines deployed to the border mission, where U.S. service members are helping in wall construction, transportation, surveillance and other tasks requested by the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition, the Pentagon is shifting funding from various department budget accounts to pay for the wall construction costs.

Other cost issues, Neller said, include an unbudgeted civilian pay raise, unfunded increase in Marine deployment to Australia and unplanned cuts in funding for the Marine Reserve.WASHINGTON - Special counsel Robert Mueller submitted a long-awaited report to Attorney General William Barr on Friday, marking the end of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump.

The submission of Mueller's report ends his closely watched inquiry - a case that has engulfed the Trump administration since its inception, leading to criminal charges against 34 people, including six former Trump associates and advisers.

A senior Justice Department official said the special counsel has not recommended any further indictments - a revelation that buoyed Trump's supporters, even as other Trump-related investigations continue in other parts of the Justice Department. It is also unclear whether a Mueller report that does not result in additional charges could still hurt the president politically.

Justice Department officials notified Congress late Friday that they had received Mueller's report, but they did not describe its contents. Barr is expected to summarize the findings for lawmakers as early as this weekend.

Only a small number of people inside the Justice Department know the document's contents, but it immediately sparked a furious political reaction, with Democrats vying for the presidential nomination in 2020 demanding a public release of the findings and the two top Democrats in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., calling for the full report and its "underlying documentation" to be provided to Congress.

Trump's supporters viewed the news as an optimistic indication that he was on the cusp of being vindicated.

"The fact that there are no more indictments is a big deal," said David Bossie, a Trump ally. "This president has had his entire two-year presidency under a cloud of this fake, made-up Russian collusion story."

Trump flew to his Florida resort Friday, accompanied by senior aides and White House lawyers. Trump did not immediately speak or tweet about the report's delivery. Privately, some Trump advisers expressed relief that the report had been filed, but the president's spokeswoman and lawyers were more guarded in their initial reaction.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the next steps "are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course. The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsel's report."

In a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate judiciary committees, Barr wrote that Mueller "has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters."

Barr wrote that Mueller submitted a report to him explaining his prosecution decisions. The attorney general told lawmakers he was reviewing the report and anticipated that "I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend."

The attorney general wrote he would consult with Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Department's long-standing practices and policies."

Barr said there were no instances in the course of the investigation in which any of Mueller's decisions were vetoed by his superiors at the Justice Department.

"I remain committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review," Barr wrote.

After a week of growing expectation that Mueller's report would soon arrive, a security officer from Mueller's office delivered it Friday afternoon to Rosenstein's office at Justice Department headquarters, according to spokeswoman Kerri Kupec. Within minutes of that delivery, the report was transmitted upstairs to Barr.

Around 4:35 p.m., White House lawyer Emmet Flood was notified that the Justice Department had received the report. Around that same time, Rosenstein called Mueller to personally thank him for his work, according to a Justice Department official.

About a half-hour after the White House was notified, a department official delivered Barr's letter to the relevant House and Senate committees and senior congressional leaders, officials said.

One official described the report as "comprehensive" but added that very few people have seen it.

Even with the report's filing, Mueller is expected to retain his role as special counsel for a wind-down period, though it is unclear how long that may last, officials said. A small number of his staffers will remain in the office to help shut down the operations.

"The investigation is complete," said Kupec.

Two of the president's lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, said in a joint statement: "We're pleased that the Office of Special Counsel has delivered its report to the Attorney General pursuant to the regulations. Attorney General Barr will determine the appropriate next steps."

Giuliani said he did not know if he would get a briefing this weekend on the report's contents.

Well before its completion, Mueller's report was a hotly debated issue. Lawmakers sought to wrest guarantees from the Justice Department that the special counsel would give a complete public accounting of what he found during the two-year inquiry.

According to Justice Department regulations, the special counsel's report should explain Mueller's decisions - who was charged, who was investigated but not charged, and why.

Mueller's work has consumed Washington and at times the country, as the special counsel and his team investigated whether any Trump associates conspired with Russian officials to interfere in the election.

It is unclear how much of what Mueller found will be disclosed in Barr's summary for Congress. Congressional Democrats, anticipating an incomplete accounting, have already sent extensive requests to the Justice Department for documents that would spell out what Mueller discovered.

Five people close to the president have pleaded guilty:Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates; former national security adviser Michael Flynn; former personal attorney Michael Cohen; and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.

A sixth, Trump's longtime friend Roger Stone, was indicted in January and accused of lying to Congress. He has pleaded not guilty.

More than two dozen of the people charged by Mueller are Russians, and because the United States does not have an extradition treaty with Russia, they are unlikely ever to see the inside of a U.S. courtroom.

None of the Americans charged by Mueller is accused of conspiring with Russia to interfere in the election - the central question of Mueller's work. Instead, they pleaded guilty to various crimes including lying to the FBI.

The investigation ended without charges for a number of key figures who had long been under Mueller's scrutiny, including conservative writer Jerome Corsi, who said Friday that he felt "vindicated" by the development.

Corsi met with prosecutors repeatedly about communications he had before the November 2016 election with Stone about the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. In November, Corsi took the unorthodox step of publishing draft court documents Mueller's team had provided to him, as they urged him to plead guilty to lying in an October 2018 debriefing. He said his memory had been faulty but he had not intentionally lied and refused to take the deal.

"They lost. They tried to give me a plea deal that was a lie and I exposed it," he said. "They wisely left me alone. Seven months through absolute hell when all I did was try to cooperate."

The special counsel's investigation was launched May 17, 2017, in a moment of crisis for the FBI, the Justice Department and the country.

Days earlier, President Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey. The purported reason was Comey's handling of the 2016 investigation of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, but Trump said in an interview with NBC News shortly after the firing that he was thinking about the Russia inquiry when he decided to remove Comey.

Comey's firing set off alarms in the Justice Department and in Congress, where lawmakers feared the president was determined to end the Russia investigation before it was completed.

After then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Rosenstein chose Mueller as special counsel in part to quell the burgeoning political crisis.

The Mueller investigation pursued a number of investigative tracks, including whether the president's behavior leading up to and after Comey's firing amounted to an attempt to obstruct justice.

As the investigation proceeded, Republican opposition to Mueller's work grew, encouraged in part by the president's repeated declarations that the investigation was a "witch hunt."

While those fights raged on, Mueller said virtually nothing. In part because of this silence, political factions tended to say almost anything they wanted about his work. Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus called it a money-wasting farce; Democrats touted every new investigative step as further evidence that the probe was so serious that Trump's days as president could be numbered.

In 2018, Mueller's office took direct aim at Moscow. Thirteen Russians were charged as part of an online "troll farm" accused of sowing political division and distrust among Americans via social media. Five months later, Mueller's office indicted a dozen Russian military intelligence officials, saying they conspired to hack into Democrats' computer accounts and publicize the stolen files.

Last year saw much of Mueller's time and energy focused on the question of obstruction. Whether Trump or his senior advisers had sought to stop or cripple the Russia inquiry was a key reason that Mueller's job as special counsel existed in the first place.

Proving a suspect's intent is an important element of any obstruction case, and there was one witness Mueller was never able to get in a room: Trump. After negotiating for months, the president's lawyers agreed to submit written answers to questions from the special counsel. Ultimately, Mueller and the Justice Department did not serve the president with a subpoena, which could have led to a fight at the Supreme Court.

Barr's letter to Congress revealed Mueller's superiors never rejected an investigative step he wanted to take - meaning Mueller never formally sought permission to subpoena the president.

Behind the scenes, however, Mueller and his team continued to hold over Trump's lawyers the vague threat of a subpoena up until December, insisting they had to interview Trump to complete their work. Up until January, Mueller's team had sought to have Trump answer additional questions.

- - -

The Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman, Ellen Nakashima, Carol D. Leonnig, Karoun Demirjian, Rachael Bade, Seung Min Kim and Colby Itkowitz contributed to this report.Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke is joining in calls for higher taxes on the wealthy, an issue that's taking hold among the contenders for the party's nomination in 2020.

Making his first campaign trip to the crucial early primary state of South Carolina, O'Rourke said one of his first acts in the White House would be moving to repeal what he called the worst excesses of President Donald Trump's 2017 cuts in corporate and individual tax rates.

"Fundamental to this experiment to America and our democracy is ensuring we don't have princes and princesses, kings and queens, a concentration of wealth and power and privilege," the former U.S. representative from Texas said at a campaign stop Friday in Rock Hill, South Carolina. "That is exactly what we have in this country right now."

A wealth tax would generate revenue for "our common benefit," such as infrastructure projects and health care, he said.

South Carolina will be a key test for the crowded Democratic field, fourth in line of the caucuses and primaries that get underway in February 2020. With 15 candidates so far vying for the Democratic nomination, those early contests are likely to provide a winnowing.

O'Rourke, 46, didn't give any specifics about tax rates or income levels he thinks should be part of any wealth tax. The issue has been brought to top of the Democratic debate by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who's proposed an annual 2 percent levy on household wealth over $50 million, and 3 percent on every dollar above $1 billion.

Senators and presidential hopefuls Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Cory Booker of New Jersey would expand the estate tax, with Sanders calling for a tax of as much as 77 percent on the portion of estates worth more than $1 million. Booker, who's set to campaign in South Carolina this weekend, would increase estate taxes to pay for a $1,000 savings account for each American child at birth.Princeton Theological Seminary last year released a report describing its founders' and early faculty's ties to slavery. Now, some of its students want the school to take it a step further and provide reparations as financial restitution for its role in the slave trade.

A group of black seminarians have collected more than 400 signatures in an online petition calling on the New Jersey school to "make amends" by setting aside $5.3 million annually - or 15 percent of what the seminary uses from the school's endowment for its operating expenses - to fund tuition grants for black students and establish a Black Church Studies program.

A progressive seminary like Princeton could be a pioneer by distributing reparations, said Justin Henderson, president of the Association of Black Seminarians, the group behind the petition. The school has confessed and repented for the "sin" of its role in slavery, but "repentance doesn't end with confession," said Henderson, who will finish his master of divinity studies in May.

"Restitution is evidence of the repentance.," he said. "This is how we know the person has repented."

The idea of reparations was popularized by Ta-Nehisi Coates' 2014 cover story in The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations." It has resurfaced in recent months as an issue in the 2020 presidential race, finding support among Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro. They have not revealed specific plans, but those Democratic candidates signaled a shift from other leaders, such as former president Barack Obama, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who is running again for the Democratic Party nominee, and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who declined to support reparations in the past.

Princeton's report resulted after a two-year research period launched by seminary President Craig Barnes in 2016. It found that the seminary did not own slaves, and slave labor was not used to construct buildings. But it found that money given by slaveholders and the interest income it generated accounted for 15 percent of the total revenue of the seminary in the pre-Civil War era. It also stated that donors whose wealth was in some measure derived from the slave trade made up as much as 30 to 40 percent of the seminary's revenue.

The first president of the seminary's board of directors condemned slavery, but he owned several slaves. The seminary's first three professors owned slaves, including Samuel Miller, for whom the chapel is named. The school also had graduates who were part of the abolitionist cause, including Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a pastor and newspaper editor, who was killed by a mob.

Founded in 1812, Princeton is the second oldest seminary in the U.S., and is tied to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which claims about 1.4 million members. The seminary has grown to 450 students, 13 percent of whom are black.

Other schools have launched projects to make public their historic ties to slavery, and some have called for financial restitution. Princeton University, which is separate from the seminary, unveiled a project on slavery in 2017.

A group connected to Georgetown University in the District of Columbia, called for a $1 billion foundation for reconciliation as a result of the school's role in the sale and profit of slaves in 1838, though the leader of that group said the idea wasn't considered "reparations."

Nyasha Junior, a religion professor at Temple University in Philadelphia who graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary's doctoral program from 2008, said "reparations" can be a loaded term and "sounds big and imposing." She said the seminary must move beyond simply acknowledging its past, but she isn't sure what the specifics should look like or if they should be called reparations.

"I think when people hear reparations, that might sound like, 'specifically, I want a check,'" she said. "Sometimes 'restitution' is preferable." The seminary has money, and we knew where that money had to come from."

The Association of Black Seminarians, the group of students forming a petition, are calling for full tuition grants for all African American students and student loan forgiveness for African-American alumni annually. The association also suggests 10 grants for Liberian students, citing the report's disclosure of the seminary's support for the colonization project in Africa, where slaves were returned to Liberia. And then it calls for 10 grants for West African students from countries where many slaves originated.

The students propose a budget of about $5.3 million for the student endowment, estimating about 15 percent of the $35 million the school used from it's the seminary's endowment during its 2017-18 school year.

The seminary created a task force to consider proposals, and it will consider this group's petition before it makes recommendations to the board of trustees in May, said Rev. Anne Stewart, who is associate vice president for communication for the seminary. She said changes at the seminary as a result of the report will be "substantial," since the school's report on slavery was intended to spark "real and lasting change."

"The report itself uses language of repentance, confession of sin, acknowledging this history," Stewart said. "The Christian tradition implies change, a response to confession."

Stewart said 90 percent of students receive some form of financial aid, and most of those students have 80-100 percent of their tuition covered. The school's endowment is valued at about $1 billion, she said.

Keri Day, a professor of constructive theology and African American religion, who sits on the task force making recommendations, says she could see pushback against reparations from some white students who don't believe they should be held accountable for something in the past. Or, she said, there's a suspicion among some students that providing reparations could be a stunt for the seminary to look good. But she expects the seminary to do something financial as a result of its report.

"Reparations is our theological response," Day said. "We believe repentance is repairing. Repairing is not just saying 'I'm sorry' but restoring."

Frank Yamada, executive director of The Association of Theological Schools that accredits seminaries, said he has heard of other seminaries producing reports similar to Princeton's divulging their ties to slavery, but he hasn't heard of student groups seeking reparations.

In December, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, the oldest Southern Baptist seminary in the country, published a 71-page report detailing the school's ties to slavery and white supremacy. The seminary included quotes from its founders' defenses of slavery and showed how many slaves they owned. Seminary's president Al Mohler announced in February that the school would honor its first black full professor, T. Vaughn Walker, who died in January, with an endowed chair in Christian ministry.

Kirt von Daacke, a historian at University of Virginia, said at least 50 schools have looked at their historical ties to slavery, but their approach to financial "repair" or "restitution" varies. Some schools provide preferential treatment in admissions, some provide scholarships and others use money for diversity initiatives within the school.

"Many schools are doing a deeper dig on the research, doing a lot of public acknowledgment and then atonement," he said. "We have no mechanism for a national way to address this. It's asking these institutions to bear a lot of weight."

Princeton Seminary students and alumni will discuss reparations at a town hall meeting on March 23 at Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton. The seminary will host an academic conference on theological education and the history of slavery on April 8-9.

- - -

The Washington Post's Scott Clement contributed to this report.Rachel Ingalls, an expatriate American writer who made her home in London, where she died March 6 at 78, was "not exactly a hermit," she once told the Daily Telegraph. But neither, she said, was she any "good at meeting lots of strangers."

Obscurity suited Ingalls, who grew up near Boston, the daughter of a Harvard Sanskrit professor, and found herself drawn to England by the quadricentennial celebrations of Shakespeare's birth in 1964.

She remained largely anonymous for the first two decades of her writing career, as she turned out short stories, novellas and works of hard-to-categorize lengths in between. Her chosen genre was what the London Independent once described as "the kind of macabre, fantastic and haunting fiction called American Gothic," ranking Ingalls as "one of the most brilliant practitioners of this Gothic since Poe."

But in 1986 came an event that Ingalls described as a "fluke." The influential British Book Marketing Council ranked her 1982 book "Mrs. Caliban" - the story of a California housewife with a dead child, a dead dog and a dying marriage who undertakes an affair with a 6-foot-long sea monster called Larry - among the 20 best novels by living American writers after World War II.

Suddenly, Ms. Ingalls, in her mid-40s, found herself alongside such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty and John Updike - the last of whom lauded the work as "so deft and austere in its prose, so drolly casual in its fantasy. . . . An impeccable parable, beautifully written from first paragraph to last."

"I wasn't prepared at all for what happened with the Book Council," Ingalls told The Boston Globe after the honor was announced, in one of the few major interviews she granted over the years. "I was astounded. Still am. . . . I was just sort of muddling along."

"Mrs. Caliban" had until that point sold roughly 200 copies in the United States, according to the Los Angeles Times. With the recognition she received in Britain, Ingalls was thrust into relative fame among readers of serious fiction on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Mrs. Caliban" never "beats us over the head with meaning, but somehow we are moved," novelist Michael Dorris wrote in a New York Times review. "The book is a strange conversation overheard on a bus: sketchy, incomplete, maddening, but totally unforgettable."

The celebrity Ingalls achieved peaked just before her death. In 2017, the publishing house New Directions reprinted "Mrs. Caliban." This year, the same house reprinted her 1983 novel "Binstead's Safari," about an anthropologist whose wife accompanies him to Africa in search of a supernatural lion.

Around the same time, the New Yorker magazine featured Ingalls in a profile that described her as "unjustly neglected." This attention followed rumblings that the 2017 Academy Award-winning film "The Shape of Water," about a janitor who falls in love with a merman at a government laboratory where she works, bore suspicious similarities to "Mrs. Caliban." The director, Guillermo del Toro, said that he had not read ngalls' fiction, and that if there were any parallels between the two works, Ingalls did not complain.

"The main thing to me is just being published," she had told The Globe in the 1980s. "And, really after that I don't care."

Rachel Holmes Ingalls was born May 13, 1940, in Boston and grew up mainly in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her early literary influences included "Grimm's Fairy Tales," with their stories of frog princes that helped inspire "Mrs. Caliban."

"These fairy tales spread all through Europe - some of them were fireside tales told by women to young girls to warn them against grown-up life in the world outside of the family," she told Harvard Magazine shortly before her death. "But they go deeper than that - they are about the connection between the human and the animal worlds in which we still live."

She attended several private high schools before dropping out. She wanted to lead "the free, happy, student life," she told The Globe. "Going to the theater. Going to the opera. Everything like that. But, you see, when I wanted all that . . . I was only 15 instead of the usual 25!"

After studying in Germany, she returned to Massachusetts, where she received a bachelor's degree in English from Radcliffe College in 1964. She moved that year to England, where she had a great-aunt, working for a time for a publishing house and as a ballet critic for the London Tatler.

Her first book, the novella "Theft," was published in 1970. "Mrs. Caliban" was her third.

Among her subsequent volumes were "I See a Long Journey" (1985) - a collection of three novellas that included "Blessed Art Thou," about a monk impregnated by the angel Gabriel - and "The Pearlkillers" (1986), another collection whose characters "are swept along through tepid, flat circumstances until suddenly all hell breaks loose, and the Furies erupt to claim their prey," the novelist William Packard wrote in a Los Angeles Times review. She wrote 11 books in all.

Ingalls' sister, Sarah Daughn, confirmed her death and said she had multiple forms of cancer, including myeloma. Besides her sister, survivors include a brother.

Reflecting on the influences that had shaped her storytelling, Ingalls recalled the radio shows and fairy tales of her girlhood.

"It's interesting that the conventions of melodrama are such that I realized straightaway - at the age of 6 or 7 - that the soap operas on the radio were meant to be entertaining and not real," she told The Globe. "I knew that life wasn't like that. I still think life is exactly like Grimm's Fairy Tales."Texas tops for two taps on Instagram, according to a global list.

Big Seven Travel, a website for adventurers, curated "America's Most Instagrammable States 2019," a global list where the Lone Star State beats out New York. While Laredo isn't specifically credited for helping Texas get to the No. 1 spot, the Rio Grande is, which can conveniently be snapped in the Gateway City.

Other spots around Texas cities include Houston, Dallas and Austin.

RELATED: Things that test even the most veteran San Antonians

According to the website, the states were ranked by their "visual allure and popularity on social media." The site used a scoring system that looked at the amount of hashtags per place, surveyed their readership of 1.5 million and votes cast by a panel of travel experts.

"It's exciting to see Texas take the top spot as America's Most Instagrammable State for 2019. With its on-trend cities such as Houston, Dallas and Austin, as well as beautiful nature (Hamilton Pool Natural Preserve instantly comes to mind!), it's clear to see why Texas was such a favourite with both our readers and judges," Sarah Clayton-Lea, head of content at Big 7 Media, said in a news release.

See which Texas spots made the list in the gallery above.

Madalyn Mendoza is a breaking news reporter and general assignment writer. Read her on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | mmendoza@mysa.com | @MaddySkyeCHESTERFIELD, Mo. - From a glassy four-story building in the St. Louis suburbs, doctors and nurses at Mercy Virtual Care Center give checkups and monitor vital signs for patients located miles away - sometimes even in other states.

Yet much of its long-distance treatment isn't yet compensated by Medicare, the largest insurance payer in the United States.

Mercy Virtual - often referred to as the country's first hospital without beds - is part of a new frontier in medical care. Virtual care, or telehealth, is increasingly adopted by hospitals and clinics not only to fill in shortages in rural areas but also to care for patients more proactively than many hospitals have resources for.

Mercy and other hospitals say virtual care has allowed them to achieve better patient outcomes with fewer staff. Doctors and nurses can oversee many more patients virtually than if they were to make their rounds on foot, and they're able to simultaneously monitor blood pressure, pulse, temperature and other vital signs for dozens of patients - and intervene early if needed.

In one wing of Mercy's virtual care center, nurses and assistants sit at six-monitor work stations where they might video into a patient's hospital room on one screen while viewing vital signs and medical records on another. In another wing of the building, staffers hold video calls with patients in their own homes who have been equipped with iPads and medical equipment for remote monitoring.

The idea is "to meet the patients where they are, as opposed to expecting the patients to come to us," Mercy Virtual President Gavin Helton told me during my visit last month to the hospital. "To me, that's foundational."

But every hospital must ultimately be paid to be sustainable, and that's still an open question when it comes to treating patients with diabetes, congestive heart failure or other serious conditions via virtual care.

Under a long-standing restriction in federal law, the Medicare program generally only pays for telehealth services when they're provided to patients in rural settings, where there are often doctor shortages.

From within the walls of Mercy Virtual, doctors and nurses supplement in-person care to patients in the health system's 32 acute care hospitals. But they don't get reimbursed by the traditional Medicare program for telemedicine in nearly half of those hospitals because of where the facilities are located.

Fourteen of the hospitals don't qualify for telemedicine coverage for most services, under Medicare's strict reimbursement rules.Maureen Kozlowski, director of support services for Mercy Virtual, told me they still offer virtual services throughout the hospital network because "Mercy sees providing the same level of telemedicine care in urban areas as the right thing to do for our patients."

It's a similar story for Providence St. Joseph Health, the nation's third-largest hospital network, based in Washington state. Of the 110 hospitals where it provides virtual care services, at least several dozen of the facilities are ineligible for Medicare telehealth payments.

Rather than operating an entirely virtual hospital, like Mercy, Providence deploys physicians and nurses from its hospitals in Seattle and Portland to deliver virtual care to other facilities with fewer specialists present. The approach has helped rural hospitals lower their overhead costs, said Amy Compton-Phillips, Providence's executive vice president and chief clinical officer.

"If they're paying people to sleep in the hospital for every specialty service, that's a lot of sunk costs," Compton-Phillips told me. "One stroke doctor can probably cover 50 hospitals versus one hospital."

Helton said the same. "You leverage technology to take limited clinical resources across a much larger area . . . as opposed to a facility having to hire that specialist, hire that physician," he told me.

Rural hospitals are undoubtedly facing steep challenges. The rate of rural hospital closures doubled between 2013 and 2017 compared with the five years before that, the Government Accountability Office found. The closures were generally linked to financial distress and were concentrated in the South and in states that haven't expanded Medicaid.

In light of this reality, there are some exceptions to the tight set of Medicare rules around payment for virtual care. Chief among them is a geographic provision allowing telehealth reimbursement if the patient is located within a rural area as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau or within an area designed by HHS as lacking enough health professionals.

But telehealth advocates say it's insufficient. It's not only rural areas that lack access to enough health providers, said Christa Natoli, deputy executive director of the Center for Telehealth and eHealth Law. Natoli pointed to low-income areas of the District where many reports have detailed a lack of medical facilities.

"You have patients literally living all over the country . . . and we're not able to provide them access to good care," Natoli said. "We have the solution that could bridge that gap but the regulations for reimbursement are not in line with what our pragmatic, modern-day need is."

Congress has recently lifted some of the telehealth restrictions for specific illnesses, and there's evidence the Trump administration is also on board with expanding payment opportunities as much as it's able under current law.

As of January, providers may bill Medicare for services provided to hospital-based stroke patients and at-home patients with end-stage renal disease located in urban or suburban areas. Both changes were approved by Congress as part of a bipartisan spending agreement early last year.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has also removed the geographic limitations on end-stage renal disease treatment if the patient is located in a renal dialysis facility where stroke patients are also being treated via telehealth.

Indeed, CMS has appeared eager to encourage use of telehealth. In the physician payment schedule the agency released in the fall, it included a new billing code allowing doctors to be paid for "check in" phone calls with patients. The agency got around the legal restrictions by declaring that these checks-ins aren't considered telehealth services at all. (Some physicians, however, have raised concerns this could have a chilling effect on patients because they'd have to start paying a co-pay for services doctors say they're already providing free of charge.)

The agency is also seeking comments on removing the geographic restrictions for treating patients with substance abuse via telehealth and allowing reimbursement if they're at home during a virtual appointment.

"It showed CMS - particularly this administration - they want to push the boundaries," said Sean Cavanaugh, who directed Medicare's payment policies at the agency during the Obama administration. "What can we do within the current rules?"KABUL, Afghanistan - Two U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan on Friday while carrying out an operation, the U.S.-led NATO coalition said, bringing the total number of American combat deaths in the country to four this year.

Their deaths, which the Taliban and an Afghan security official said occurred in the northern Kunduz province, come as the U.S. plans to withdraw its 14,000-troop advisory mission in Afghanistan.

The Taliban said that three Americans and nine Afghan soldiers from the country's elite commando force were killed during a house raid in the province and that fighting was ongoing.

"American occupying forces and their local slaves wanted to raid a house but faced tough resistance," Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said through a messaging app.

It was not immediately clear whether the Taliban, which contests or controls nearly half of the country's districts, was engaged in the fighting. The insurgent group often exaggerates death tolls in its favor.

The NATO coalition declined to provide more details and will not disclose the names of the Americans until 24 hours after their next of kin are notified, according to Department of Defense policy.

President Donald Trump recently tied the withdrawal to progress toward a peaceful settlement aimed at ending the 18-year war.

Despite the talks, Afghanistan is suffering from crippling violence, with a record number of civilian casualties last year. On Thursday, a string of bombs exploded in Kabul as Afghans celebrated the Persian new year, Nowruz, killing six and wounding 23 more. The Islamic State claimed responsibility Friday for the bombings near a Shiite shrine and cemetery, saying the aim of the attack "was to spoil the ritual of the polytheists."

Peace talks between the United States and the Taliban have intensified in recent months, negotiations that have rankled the Afghan government in Kabul, which has been excluded from the process.

Parallel talks have also been held in Moscow, and in an effort to expand internationally, the U.S. chief negotiator, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, is hosting his Russian, Chinese and European Union counterparts in Washington on Thursday and Friday.

Last week, relations between Washington and Kabul hit a new low when Afghanistan's national security adviser, Hamidullah Mohib, charged that any U.S. deal with the Taliban would "sell out" his country and "dishonor" American troops who fought and died in the conflict. He added that Khalilzad was acting out of personal ambition.

In response, Mohib was barred from any future dealings with U.S. officials, Afghan and U.S. media reported.CARACAS, Venezuela - The chief of staff of opposition leader Juan Guaido was detained in a pre-dawn raid on his home Thursday by Venezuela's intelligence forces, igniting a new flash point in the U.S.-backed effort to drive President Nicolas Maduro from office.

Guaido since January has led a growing challenge to Maduro's authority, calling the socialist leader illegitimate and demanding his resignation following elections last year that were widely decried as fraudulent.

Guaido - who declared himself the nation's rightful interim president - was briefly detained early on in the effort. But thus far, the government - facing stern warnings from Washington - has exercised relative restraint in dealing with the Guaido's inner circle.

Yet the detention Thursday of Roberto Marrero, 49, suggests an important and potentially dangerous shift toward more-aggressive tactics. In a statement suggesting serious charges, Maduro's interior minister, Nestor Reverol, said Marrero was part of a "terror cell" plotting against the government. He said authorities had identified a "bigger group" of suspects and were searching for them and a cache of weapons.

Marrero "is directly responsible for these criminal groups," Reverol said. He said "war weapons and money in cash were found" during the raid.

The opposition said that the weapons were planted and that the terrorism charges are a fiction. U.S. officials quickly condemned the detention of Marrero.

The arrest suggests a wider crackdown on dissent.

Maduro's government has detained dozens of journalists in recent months. Many have been quickly released, but at least one remains in jail. The government has also arrested two workers from the state utility who publicly denounced the poor state of the power grid that led to a massive nationwide blackout this month.

"The United States condemns raids by Maduro's security services and detention of Roberto Marrero, Chief of Staff to Interim President @jguaido," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted. "We call for his immediate release. We will hold accountable those involved."

The United States and more than 50 other countries have recognized Guaido, the leader of the National Assembly, as Venezuela's interim president.

Guaido urged the opposition to increase pressure on the government in response to the detention, but he did not outline specific steps.

"I call the people to double or triple efforts if necessary," he said. "Since they can't take the president to jail, they seek to threaten and kidnap those close to him."

He warned Maduro's government that the "international community is watching."

"We are in direct communication with them," he said. "We do have very powerful allies in the world that are willing to help."

Earlier Thursday, Guaido said Marrero's whereabouts were unknown. He said he should be released immediately.

The home of opposition official Sergio Vergara, a neighbor of Marrero, was also raided. Vergara claimed that intelligence forces - known as the SEBIN - had planted weapons, including a grenade, at Marrero's home.

Vergara said the security forces - 15 armed men wearing caps - entered his home and pushed his head to the floor as they searched his apartment.

"They asked me if I knew where Roberto Marrero lived, which I didn't respond to," he said in a video on Twitter.

A voice message sent by Marrero as the raid on his house was underway circulated on social media.

"In this moment, the SEBIN are in my house," he said. "They sadly came for me. Keep fighting. Don't stop. Please take care of the president. And let it be what God wants. God bless you. The Venezuelan people should not stop because of this. We have to understand that the one who gets tired loses."

Vergara's driver, Luis Aguilar, was also detained, according to Guaido spokesman Edward Rodriguez.

Opposition media websites showed images of Marrero's ransacked apartment after the raid. The entrance door appears broken, dresser drawers are open and their contents - sheets, child's toys, boxes and folders - are strewn over the floor.

Vergara said he saw Marrero before he taken away.

"Marrero shouted at me that they had planted two rifles and one grenade," Vergara said in the video. "The men told him to shut up. I told him to be strong."

In addition to serving as Guaido's chief of staff, Marrero was the longtime lawyer of opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, Guaido's mentor.

Lopez was detained in 2014 and remains under house arrest.

"The government is closing Guaido's circle, measuring reactions domestically and abroad," said political analyst Felix Seijas, director of the Delphos polling agency in Caracas. "And sending a message: We are still here."

The Trump administration has warned Maduro against acting directly against Guaido. Officials have threatened unspecified consequences.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted word of Marrero's arrest early Thursday.

"This is a significant escalation of repression & could signal the beginning of efforts to arrest Guaido himself," he wrote.

The Venezuelan opposition has been seeking to regain momentum in its effort to force Maduro from office.

Guaido orchestrated an effort last month to push humanitarian aid largely from the United States into the country. Maduro sent the Venezuelan military to border crossings to block the food, medicine and supplies; Guaido hoped the soldiers would defy Maduro's orders and join the opposition.

That mostly did not happen. But the effort succeeded in focusing international attention on the plight of Venezuelans. A failing power grid has caused massive blackouts, and a broken economy has left millions struggling under shortages of food and medicine.

Guaido has won the backing of dozens of countries, leaving Maduro increasingly isolated. After a break in diplomatic relations, the United States pulled the last of its diplomats from Caracas earlier this month.

- - -

Faiola reported from Miami.Peter George Callins was a man of quiet passions, an architect who left his mark on several San Antonio buildings and always put his family first.

But his greatest passion was for St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Church, the historic house of worship on North St. Marys Street that his Greek immigrant parents helped found close to 100 years ago.

Callins died March 16 from age-related illness. He was 94.

He was very proud of his Greek heritage and very involved at St. Sophias, said daughter Terri Callins, who grew up attending the church and volunteering at the Greek FUNstival, the popular celebration that started in 1961 and is on hiatus until 2020, said a church spokesman.

My father was a quiet, humble kind of guy who never called a lot of attention to himself, Callins said. He loved his Greek church very much and it was the most important thing in his life. Its what he lived for. It was central to his identity.

The Greek community Peter Callins grew up in was close-knit, where baklava, moussaka and other Greek culinary delights were as common as church services and get-togethers, and Terri Callins and her two brothers enjoyed the same sort of family-oriented fellowship, she said.

We helped operate some of the booths at the FUNstival, she said. Her father didnt have to work too hard to pass down his love of Greek heritage to his children, because it was all around us, all the time.

We had four Greek grandparents, we ate Greek food, both my parents were Greek, she said. We spoke Greek, we went to a Greek church.

Her father attended Thomas Jefferson High School and was a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Field Artillery during World War II. He returned to Texas and earned a degree in architecture from Texas A&M University. For more than 50 years, he served as principal architect in the design of many area buildings and schools, including Barbara Bush, Driscoll and Omar Bradley middle schools.

Peter George Callins Born: April 19, 1924, in San Antonio Died: March 16, 2019, in San Antonio Survived by: Wife Sue Dial Callins; daughter Terri Dial Callins, sons George and Tom Callins; and their mother Olga. Services: Funeral was held Thursday. See More Collapse

In the 1960s, he partnered with well-known San Antonio architect Cyrus Wagner Sr. and was instrumental with others in the design and planning of the Paseo del Rio  the extension of the original River Walk  and the Institute of Texan Cultures.

Callins, whose small firm of two or three architects was called Callins Associates, worked until the ripe age of 80, his daughter said. She spent many childhood Saturdays hanging out at her fathers office.

Terri Callins, an interior designer, said: I guess it just rubbed off on me.

After a 30-year marriage to his first wife, Olga, he married Sue Dial Callins 16 years ago.

Sue Dial Callins, 81, said her late spouse loved to tell stories about all these little Greek men who didnt have more than $50 to their names built this really pretty church.

Peter Callins parents were among them. They raised $22,000 from the Greek and non-Greek communities to plan and build what would become a classic Byzantine-style church. The first liturgy was held in 1926.

Sue Dial Callins said her husband designed their Greek-influenced home in Lincoln Heights, which was particularly fun for him. When they first married, they agreed to alternate Sundays between St. Sophias and her Methodist church. But the deal soon became lopsided.

The liturgy, the music, the services at St. Sophias were just so beautiful, we ended up going there all the time, she said. It just happened.

Tom Callins, a photographer who lives in Houston, said his father traveled a couple of times to the Greek village where his own parents grew up, to get a sense of his roots.

Toms grandparents wound up in San Antonio because word spread among the far-flung Greek immigrant community that Texas was a really nice place, and his fathers running buddies growing up were mostly all Greek, he said.

He was the last one, and I know hes happy to be back with them now, Tom Callins said. I know theyre all there in heaven together.

Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje is a general assignment reporter covering breaking news, cultural trends and interesting people and goings-on around San Antonio and Bexar County, as well as all across South Texas. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | mstoeltje@express-news.net | Twitter: @mstoeltjeDanny McFarland went into a Plano hospital with three broken vertebrae after injuring himself while building a barn. He came home to a $10,000 medical bill. His insurance paid $6,000 of it, leaving him with a 24-month payment schedule because a doctor who treated him wasnt in his insurance network.

Orlando Felix brought his adult daughter into a Houston-area emergency facility because she had a weeklong headache. He checked online and spoke to a hospital receptionist about his insurance coverage. He felt confident that the care would be covered by his health plan. A month later, he got a surprise bill for $1,000. It turns out that a physician who saw his daughter wasnt in their insurers network.

Charles White sought help at an emergency room north of Fort Worth after he fainted and hit his head. He was given an electrocardiogram, chest X-rays, and tests of his blood and urine. The cost of the care reached $18,000. Insurance covered most of it, but hes still paying $50 a month to deal with a $2,000 balance.

At AARP Texas, our inbox is full of stories like these: Texans who have been hit with surprise medical bills, often because the health care providers they received help from during an emergency werent in their health insurance plans.

The Texas Legislature has been wrestling with the issue of surprise medical bills for several years and has made strides toward protecting consumers. Those who are saddled with a bill that exceeds $500 can bring it to a mediator with the Texas Department of Insurance. Still, the problem of surprise medical bills hasnt gone away.

Unexpected medical bills top the list of health care costs that people are afraid they will not be able to afford. A 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that two-thirds of Americans worry about surprise medical bills more than insurance deductibles, prescription drug costs or the staples of life: rent, food and gas.

Texans would avoid the pinch of surprise medical bills under landmark legislation filed by state Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, and Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio. Senate Bill 1264 and House Bill 3933 would take the consumer out of the payment dispute between doctors and insurers. The bills will stop out-of-network health providers from sending consumers surprise medical bills. Patients wouldnt be charged more than theyd have to pay if the medical care was in network. Health care providers who think theyre underpaid by insurers could take their dispute to mediation.

This bipartisan legislation would accomplish what Texans have been demanding: protection from annoying and financially crippling surprise medical bills. This is a real opportunity for lawmakers to take some of the financial pain out of health treatments.

Bob Jackson is the state director of AARP Texas, a nonprofit and nonpartisan advocacy association with a membership of 2.3 million Texans older than 50.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  A local police official linked to the killing of the Sariaya, Quezon mayor's son is now in police custody.

Supt. Mark Laygo, Tayabas police chief and one of the men linked to the death of Mayor Marcelo Gayeta's son Christian and his companion Christopher Manalo, surfaced at the CALABARZON police headquarters on Friday together with two other policemen.

CNN Philippines on Friday managed to get copies of sworn affidavits of some policemen linked to the murder.

According to their affidavits, Laygo, who has since been relieved from his post, was the one who allegedly planned and ordered the killing of the victims.

Documents revealed that Christian Gayeta and Manalo first encountered the authorities evening of March 13 in a checkpoint in Barangay Angustias, Tayabas. The two were supposedly apprehended after violating the imposed gun ban of the Commission on Elections ahead of the May polls.

The affidavits likewise said no real "shootout" took place, and that the two victims were shot while in handcuffs.

Officials on Thursday already addressed the possibility that the "shootout" may have been staged.

Police accounts added that involved officers tampered with the crime scene, allegedly planting gunpowder on the hands of Christian Gayeta and Manalo.

Officials insist allegations 'not true'

Laygo and the two other policemen, however, denied the allegations against them. They stood by the original police report that a shooutout happened.

"Wala po kaming motibo para gawin ang binibintang nila laban sa amin. Hindi po namin kilala si Gayeta at wala kaming personal na galit sa pamilya nila," Laygo said on Friday.

[Translation: We don't have a motive to do such thing-those allegations against us. We don't know Gayeta and we don't have a personal problem against their family.]

The relieved Tayabas police chief explained they did not surface immediately upon learning that Mayor Gayeta was looking for them and allegedly ordered to have them killed.

Laygo even linked the mayor to illegal drug trade in Quezon-- an allegation Gayeta also denied.

The Philippine National Police placed 18 men linked to the incident under restrictive custody of the Quezon Provincial Police. Five of them have been relieved, including the Quezon and Tayabas police chiefs and three other officers.

Initial report from the police stated that the two victims on March 14 threatened an attendant at a gasoline station in Tayabas with firearms while saying, "Dumapa ka, p******** ka, papatayin kita."

[Translation: Get down, you son of a b****, I will kill you.]

The two supposedly fired twice at the attendant "for unknown reason," but missed.

Police responded, leading to a shootout that resulted in the death of the mayor's son and Manalo.

The Gayeta family was unconvinced of the police's story, as medico-legal report earlier showed that Christian Gayeta and Manalo had ligature marks on both of their wrists.

Meanwhile, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) in Quezon said one of the policemen who surfaced may serve as a primary witness of the case. NBI-Quezon said it will also coordinate with the justice department to place the official, who remains unnamed as of writing, under the Witness Protection Program of the government.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Longford Daffodil Day organisers have appealed for the publics support as volunteers prepare to take to the streets this Friday, March 22 to raise crucial funds for cancer patients.

On average, 261 people in Longford are diagnosed with cancer annually.

The Irish Cancer Societys Daffodil Day, which is supported by Boots Ireland, funds crucial support services for people affected by cancer and lifesaving cancer research.

Members of the public can volunteer to sell daffodils on the day, or simply buy a daffodil from local volunteers or their local Boots store.

At the joint Longford / Roscommon Daffodil Day launch in Hannons Hotel, Night Nurse Ann Howard, from Newtownforbes, spoke about the role she plays in supporting patients during their final days.

Last year, 35 terminally ill cancer patients in Longford received 148 nights of care, allowing them to remain at home during their final days.

In order to provide the night nursing service and other free supports, the Irish Cancer Society needs to raise over 4m nationally on Daffodil Day this year.

Ann said, Each year local night nurses support terminally ill cancer patients to spend their final days at home. The night nurse ensures the patient and their family members are supported during this difficult time. Losing a loved one to cancer is heart-breaking, but it can be a source of comfort that the patient gets to spend those precious moments in their own home.

Public support is crucial. People of Longford have always been generous in their support of Daffodil Day, but with more people being diagnosed with cancer, we need to ramp up our efforts to ensure they get the help they need.

Not only will donations fund services like night nursing, but also cancer research to help more people survive cancer. Please help us by volunteering to sell daffodils, or simply by buying a daffodil this coming Friday, March 22.

Over 2,000 potted daffodil plants grown by inmates in Castlerea Prison will be sold on the day along with daffodil pins.

Boots Ireland is the official main sponsor of Daffodil Day and over six years Boots Ireland have raised over 1.4m for the night nursing service.

Rachel Clegg, Boots , said: We are delighted to support Daffodil Day again this year. Pop in store to buy a pin or add a 1 donation when making a purchase.

To get involved in Daffodil Day, contact Lorraine on 087 793 6499. For more information visit www.cancer.ie/daffodilday.Earlier this month, I joined my colleagues in celebrating Sunshine Week, because I believe transparent government is better government. Thats what Sunshine Week is all about, recognizing the need for a government thats open and honest with its constituents.

We have a right to hold our elected officials accountable, and when given that right, our government is stronger. But in Michigan, were not as transparent as we should be.

Its disappointing that Michigan is one of just two states in the nation that exempts its governor, lieutenant governor and Legislature from public disclosure requirements, keeping its constituents in the dark. Thats why this week I supported a bipartisan measure introduced by my Michigan House colleagues to remove these exemptions and make state government totally transparent.

The plan will subject the governor and lieutenant governor to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and create a new law, called the Legislative Open Records Act (LORA), to hold state representatives and senators to similar disclosure rules without violating the Michigan Constitution.

While the Legislative Open Records Act package mirrors FOIA in many ways, there are exemptions for constituent inquiries to ensure that when you contact your state legislator, your information is protected and kept private.

As a legislator, I think my records should be open to the public, and thats why I support this legislation. I have nothing to hide and neither should any other elected official.

This plan is supported on both sides of the aisle and is among our top priorities this term. I look forward to voting in support of it soon because Im committed to implementing a plan that will allow my constituents to hold their Michigan legislators accountable and help restore their trust in government.

The time is now for openness and honesty, not just during Sunshine Week, but every week.

Steve Marino is the 24th District State Representative covering Harrison Township and portions of Macomb and Clinton townships.This content is from: Features

Paul England of Taylor Wessing says there are two Brexit possibilities that pharma and medical devices companies really need to be aware of. Here he explains what their impact is likely to be on patents and regulatory rightsBackground

The Australian government subsidises access to approved drugs via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). Under the scheme, the majority of the approved drug's cost is borne by the government in order to improve patient access.

A generic drug manufacturer may apply for listing on the PBS for their copy of the drug at any time because there is no patent linkage in Australia. The application for listing on the PBS, of itself, by the generic does not constitute patent infringement.

Upon listing of a generic drug on the PBS, there is a 25% immediate and mandatory price reduction for the originator drug. Significantly, this price drop is irreversible even if the generic drug is later removed from the market due to, for example, patent litigation. This issue forms the core of many pharmaceutical patent litigation cases in Australia, which highlights the different forms of patents that can be used to delay or prevent generic entry.

Preliminary injunctions

The irreversible price reduction of originator drugs resulting from listing of a generic may support an originator's claim that it would suffer irreparable harm, thereby strengthening their case for a preliminary injunction (PI) to prevent a generic from entering the market.

PIs are a useful way for originators to prevent generics from entering the market, as the law in Australia tends to favour patentees. Typically, an Australian court will only briefly consider the validity of the claims in question before granting a PI and the generic must establish a very strong case for invalidity for a court to not grant an injunction. Even if there is a good argument for invalidity courts tend to grant the PI; however, very recently the federal court decided against granting an injunction in a case involving a biosimilar, in part due to the strength of the invalidity claim.

Value of MoT and Swiss-style claims

In Australia, patent claims directed to methods of treatment (MoT)  a method of treatment comprising administering molecule X to treat disease Y  as well as Swiss-style claimsuse of molecule X in the manufacture of a medicament for the treatment of disease Yare both allowable.

Inclusion of both forms of claims covering approved indications in patents can be advantageous in the context of PIs. For example, Pfizer was awarded injunctive relief against Apotex for threatened infringement of its patent covering methods of treatment and Swiss-style claims relating to pregabalin. The court held that an offer made during the term of the patent to supply an infringing product after the term of the patent has expired will infringe a Swiss-style claim, but not a method of treatment claim. This decision highlights the importance of including both claim types in Australian pharmaceutical patents.

Method of manufacture patents

In addition to patents covering uses of drugs, claims directed to the methods of manufacture of approved drugs can be a valuable tool for companies to delay generic market entry. Recently, Janssen was granted a PI against Alphapharm (Mylan) for threatened infringement of Janssen's patent covering methods of manufacturing a precursor to its HIV drug darunavir. In that case, Alphapharm argued that the claims were not infringed and invalid. However, the court held that there was a risk of infringement and that the invalidity arguments were triable. The court granted the PI, which blocked the PBS listing of Alphapharm's generic version of darunavir, thereby preventing the price reduction of Janssen's products.

Australian courts are also relatively generous to patentees in obtaining preliminary discovery of manufacturing methods. For example, Pfizer was recently granted preliminary discovery of Samsung Bioepis' manufacturing process for producing etanercept. In that case, Pfizer successfully argued that due to the biosimilarity of Samsung's etanercept product with Pfizer's, there was a reasonable chance that it was produced using a similar method to Pfizer  with Pfizer's method protected by several patents  and preliminary discovery was granted.

Beware of the government

The government is under pressure to reduce its PBS expenditure from its current level of A$12 billion. One step taken by the government is to sue pharmaceutical companies, including Sanofi, Wyeth and AstraZeneca, whose patents were relied on for preliminary injunction but then later held invalid. In these cases, the government sought to recover its costs in continuing to subsidise the drug at the higher price, which would have been reduced by 25% if the generic copy had been allowed to list on the PBS. The first decision on this issue is expected this year and the defendant (Sanofi) is considering the risk sufficiently serious to mention in its overview of financial risk factors in its global investor report.

Therefore, although Australian law is generally favourable to originators, if the patent claims relied on for a PI are held to be invalid, then they risk being sued by the Australian government.

Jarrod Voss

FB Rice

Level 23, 44 Market St Sydney NSW 2000, Australia

Tel: +61 2 8231 1000

Fax: +61 2 8231 1099

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Share this articleThe most recent decision of the Dusseldorf Appeal Court of January 9 2019 (Case No. I-2 U 27/18) in the legal dispute concerning the active substance fulvestrant contributes to solidifying the new liability requirement of "sufficient scope of use". This was formulated by the court for the first time in the Ostrogenblocker decision of May 5 2017 (Case No. I-2 W 6/17). Subject to the proceedings was European patent EP1272195B1, which protects the use of fulvestrant in the preparation of a medicament for the treatment of a patient with breast cancer who was previously treated with an aromatase inhibitor and tamoxifen and where such previous treatment failed.

The appeal court upheld the Regional Court's decision (Case No: 4c O 46/17) which was in effect that a sufficient scope of use could not be proven by the patentee. In this context, the court formulated a two-step programme: firstly, it is a matter for the court to decide that there has been patent-compliant use to a sufficient extent and, secondly, that the generic company could not have been completely unaware of this fact. The probability of such a judicial finding being made increases with the number of patent-compliant use cases that have demonstrably occurred.

Further, the court stated that there could be particular outstanding benefits of the patented use compared to other therapeutic purposes which invite use of the preparation in accordance with the patent. Despite this jurisprudence in Germany, which, in a patentee-friendly manner, has come to a wide interpretation of the scope of protection of second medical use patents, the Dusseldorf Appeal Court has shown that the requirements for demonstrating these liability criteria can be stringent. But at least it is clear that a skinny label is no longer sufficient to avoid liability.

However, patent owners have an even harder time before the English courts. In the Warner-Lambert case concerning the drug pregabalin, the UK Supreme Court made clear in its decision of November 14 2018 (Case No. [2018] UKSC 56) that there is no liability on the part of the manufacturer based on foreseeability of the patented use. Especially Lord Sumption and Lord Reed recommended a new test, termed "outward presentation". According to this test, the only decisive factor for liability is how the product is presented after its manufacture. This is comparable with the German requirement of "manifest arrangement" ("sinnfallige Herrichtung"). Even if the Supreme Court addressed the question of infringement only in the context of an obiter dictum, it is now obvious that the UK court does not intend to follow Germany's patentee-friendly jurisprudential line.



Marco Stief Ulrike Zorr



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Elisenhof, Elisenstr 3D-80335, Munich, GermanyTel: +49 89 74 72 660 Fax: +49 89 77 64 24 info@maiwald.eu www.maiwald.euNegotiations are underway for a European Union (EU)New Zealand Fair Trade Agreement (FTA). The EU proposal on intellectual property includes a chapter on geographical indication (GI) names for protection. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade recently concluded a consultation period on the proposed list of EU GIs, but what remains to be seen is the scope of protection that will be afforded to the agreed terms. A review of the EU's proposed FTA provides us with some insight into what the EU expects to achieve.

The correct use of GIs

GIs shall operate as a collective right (akin to collective marks already recognised by the Trade Marks Act 2002) and will be available for use by any operator marketing a product that conforms to the corresponding specification. The applications will be open to opposition prior to registration.

The protection of GIs

The EU proposes to set a high level of protection for GIs. This includes prohibiting direct and indirect use of a protected name for comparable products not compliant with the product specification, or any other products if that use exploits the reputation of a GI, including where it is used as an ingredient.

It is unclear what use would amount to an exploitation of the reputation of a GI, in particular where the product is being used as an ingredient only. A conservative interpretation may restrict use of the GI to the ingredients list only.

Any misuse, imitation, or evocation, even if the true origin of the product is indicated, will be prohibited. This includes use of expressions such as "style", "type", "method", or similar, including when those products are used as an ingredient. This is a practice readily utilised by New Zealand producers and, if included in the final agreement, those producers will need to update their marketing strategies.

The relationship to trademarks

New trademark applications with a priority date later than the priority date of a protected GI shall be refused registration. This could cause an issue for unregistered rights that may otherwise have been afforded protection through those provisions, allowing for registration of trademarks that have acquired distinctiveness through use. The proposal suggests that these will not be granted protection as a registered trademark if they include a GI.

Parties must agree to protect GIs even where a prior trademark exists. It is unclear what will be considered a 'prior trademark' with the proposal stating that this includes trademarks which have been applied for, registered, or established by use before the date on which the application for protection of the GI is submitted. This suggests that existing unregistered rights may be recognised even in the absence of a registration (and thus softening the impact of the proposal for new applications).

Prior trademark registrations may continue to be used and renewed for that product, notwithstanding the protection of the GI, provided that no grounds for invalidity or revocation exist. Owners of prior trademarks will need to take care to ensure that their marks do not become generic, and therefore subject to removal. While there is a provision preventing registered GIs becoming generic, this is not the position for prior trademarks, and once removed the trademark would be unlikely to be afforded registered protection if a new application was filed.

While New Zealand stands to gain from the protection of GIs in the EU, the final terms of the FTA will need to strike a balance between the high level of protection proposed by the EU and the rights of existing traders in New Zealand.

Nadia Ormiston

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Level 15, HSBC House, 1 Queen St, Auckland 1010, New ZealandTel: +64 9 373 3137Fax: +64 9 373 2123 email@baldwins.com www.baldwins.comAn action for unfair competition in the Philippines has two essential elements as stated by the Supreme Court in a number of cases: (1) confusing similarity in the general appearance of the goods, and (2) intent to deceive the public and deceive a competitor. On the issue of confusion, two types have been noted. These are confusion of goods and confusion of business or source of origin. In the case of Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings, Ltd. v PAPERONE, INC. (G.R. Nos. 213365-66, December 10 2018), the Supreme Court found Paperone guilty of unfair competition.

Asia Pacific, a manufacturer and seller of pulp and premium wood free paper, is the owner of the trademark PAPER ONE applied for at the Intellectual Property Office (IPOPHL) in 1999 and registered in 2003. The respondent PAPERONE, on the other hand, is engaged in the business of paper conversion, manufacturing table napkins, notebooks and writing pads, and the corporation has existed since 2001. It averred that the Department of Trade and Industry and Securities and Exchange Commission had allowed it to use PAPERONE as its corporate name, and that it did not use PAPERONE as a trademark, but to identify itself only as the manufacturer of the product, as shown below:

ASIA PACIFIC RESOURCES

PAPERONE, INC.

The Supreme Court affirming the decision of the IPOPHL, and reversing the Court of Appeals noted that: (i) the goods of both parties are related as paper products, (ii) PAPER ONE as a trademark of Asia Pacific had been used even before its application in 1999, (iii) some of Paperone's stockholders had knowledge of the existence and use of the mark PAPER ONE and even wrote a letter expressing a desire to be the exclusive distributor of PAPER ONE multi-purpose copy paper, as the evidence showed. The court admitted that while there was a noticeable difference in how the trade name of the respondent PAPERONE was being used on its products in comparison with the trademark of Asia Pacific, "there could likely be confusion as to the origin of the products." Thus, a consumer might conclude that PAPER ONE products were manufactured by or were products of Paperone.

Editha R

Hechanova Grace Christy

G Carbonell

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Salustiana D. Ty Tower104 Paseo de Roxas AvenueMakati City 1229, PhilippinesTel: (63) 2 812-6561Fax: (63) 2 888-4290 editharh@hechanova.com.phLuis Caballero, a famous Spanish liquor company filed a trademark application No 2016718658 for goods in Class 33 (alcoholic beverages except beer).

As expected, the patent office rejected the application because, as is easily understood in any language, it means illegal traffic of goods through the border. The examiner referred specifically to this fact. He reminded the applicant that unlawful transit of goods through the border violates customs regulations which is in contradiction of public interest and Russian law in general.

The applicant appealed the decision to the Chamber of Patent Disputes. He pointed out that the designation rejected by the patent office had been in wide use for quite a while in Russia. The goods are being sold in many big shops, chain stores and on the Internet. The goods are popular with buyers. Controlling bodies (customs etc.) do not have any objections to such sales, nor are there objections to the labelling of the goods.

The Chamber of Patent Disputes agreed with the arguments raised by the applicant and explained its position as follows.

It is true that the claimed designation includes word elements meaning "contraband". The designation elicits associations in the minds of consumers which are directly connected to the meaning of the word.

On the other hand, consumers understand that the claimed goods in Class 33 are necessarily subject to customs clearance when they cross the Russian border. They are subject to excise duty, and in such circumstances the designation is perceived by the consumer as something jocular and original in character. Besides, the applicant submitted documents showing that rum labelled with the claimed designation has already been on sale in the Russian Federation and has become famous as a drink characterised by a balanced taste. It has a bright, vibrant colour and bright golden tinge. As for the name used on the label of the alcoholic drink, it has interesting historical roots. The applicant produced documents supporting the choice of the name.

The name came about as a result of a notary public, Fernando Mora, who spent a holiday in the Dominican Republic. There he tasted a variety of rum and was enchanted by it. He packed several bottles of the drink in his trunk and smuggled it home to Spain. His friends also liked it. By chance, Mr Luiz Enrique Caballero Domingues, president of the old vinery, Luis Caballero, tasted it too and liked it.

He decided to buy the rum in 2012 and called it "Contrabando". The choice was clearly good because in 2013 the rum won a gold medal at Congreso Internacional del Ron.

The Chamber of Patent Disputes considered this and also took into account the fact that the claimed designation had obtained registration in the European Union (Reg. No 10606101).

Thus the Chamber of Patent Disputes concluded that registration of the claimed designation would not contradict public interest.

Vladimir Biriulin

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Russia 129010, MoscowB. Spasskaya Str25, stroenie 3Tel: +7 495 937 6116 / 6109Fax: +7 495 937 6104 / 6123 pat@gorodissky.ru www.gorodissky.comEarlier this year, the Singapore Court of Appeal reversed a High Court decision that held Singapore legislation, including the Singapore Patents Act, did not afford the High Court with original jurisdiction in patent revocation matters.

The case of Sunseap Group and Others v Sun Electric Pte Ltd [2019] SGCA 4 arose on appeal from a Singapore High Court ruling that held that the High Court did not have original jurisdiction to hear applications for patent revocation or to order that a patent be revoked. The High Court's reasoning was that all applications for patent revocation must be heard in the first instance by the registrar of patents and the High Court can only hear appeals from the registrar's decision.

The Court of Appeal reversed the High Court's decision and held that the High Court has the power to hear applications for patent revocation and to revoke patents. However, the Court of Appeal's decision clarified that the High Court's power to revoke patents is confined to instances where the revocation proceeding is brought by way of counterclaim or defence in infringement proceedings.

In looking to the Singapore Patents Act for legislative basis of the High Court's revocation powers, the Court of Appeal cited Section 80(1) of the Patents Act for the premise that if a defendant is able to establish invalidity of all claims of an asserted patent based on any grounds in Section 80(1) of the Patents Act, the defendant has established that the asserted patent should be revoked. The Court of Appeal further stated that Section 91(1) of the Patents Act gives the High Court the power to revoke patents when the grounds for revocation have been established by the defendant.

In regards to original jurisdiction, the Court of Appeal held that the High Court does not have original jurisdiction for patent revocation actions brought independently of infringement proceedings because such jurisdiction has been excluded by the Singapore Patents Act (Sections 82(1) and 82(2) of the Patents Act).

The Court of Appeal also stated that the High Court may only revoke a patent when the validity of the entire patent is challenged as a defence or counterclaim in an infringement proceeding. If the validity of the entire patent is not in issue (i.e. only certain patent claims are asserted in the infringement action), the High Court does not have the power to revoke the patent. In this case, the defendant's only recourse is to seek revocation of the patent before the registrar of patents.

On the point of the entire patent being at issue, the Court of Appeal reviewed a situation where all the independent claims of a patent were asserted and found to be invalid. In this case, the Court of Appeal concluded that the dependent claims must also be invalid if all the independent claims are invalid. The entire patent, the Court of Appeal continued, could then be regarded as invalid and it would be proper for the High Court to revoke the same. While presented as a scenario where the High Court had the power to revoke a patent, this scenario differs from earlier Singapore and English precedence where dependent claims and independent claims stand and fall together only when a patentee concedes such.

So, while the High Court decision of original patent revocation jurisdiction being the province of the registrar of patents was a surprise for many Singapore practitioners, the Court of Appeal has clarified that the High Court also has original patent revocation jurisdiction when the issue of the entire patent's validity is raised as a defence or counterclaim in an infringement action brought before the Hight Court.

Daniel Collopy

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152 Beach Road#37-05/06 Gateway EastSingapore 189721Tel: +65 6333 7200Fax: +65 6333 7222 mail.asia@spruson.com www.spruson.comTrademark professionals may be familiar with the Thai Trademark Appeal Board (TTAB), a body encountered when a trademark applicant wishes to appeal any decision of the Thai trademark registrar. The TTAB is established by the Trademark Act B.E. 2534, comprising 11-15 members chosen by the Cabinet from the Council of State, the judiciary and experts in international trade and IP. Section 96 of the Trademark Act empowers the TTAB to examine all appeals and cancellation petitions filed under the act. The TTAB's duties and powers regarding examination of appeals are regulated by various versions of the TTAB's Regulations on the Procedure for Examination of Appeal and Cancellation Petitions. On March 25 2019, a new edition of the regulations will come into force, with repercussions expected to be felt by most trademark applicants in Thailand.

Added burden on applicants

The TTAB's Regulations B.E. 2561 (A.D. 2018) were approved by the Director-General of the Department of Intellectual Property on December 12 2018 and will become effective from March 25 2019. The regulations will eliminate former appeal submission requirements that 19 copies of an appeal be submitted, replacing it with just one copy. Evidence accompanying appeals is required to be filed in only one copy as before. While this change reduces the photocopying expenses incurred by trademark applicants, the added translation and certification requirements will outweigh the practical benefits. Section 10 of the new regulations demands that a comprehensive list of evidence be submitted along with each appeal, and that all document copies submitted as appeal evidence be certified as correct by the applicant or its authorised agent. Further, Section 11 requires that all foreign-language documents be translated into Thai before submission, and that such translation be duly certified as correct by the translator.

Previously, the list of evidence had never been a requirement  the TTAB was capable of examining evidence submitted in English. At first glance, the new requirements seem to tighten up the process of appeal examination and increase legal certainty, as supporting evidence will be presented more rationally. However, these new requirements, modelled on evidence submission requirements of the Thai courts of justice, are unlikely to have added benefits for trademark applicants. While the amendments will rationalise the supporting evidence for appeals, there is no indication that such rationalisation will result in a more correct or comprehensive consideration of the evidence by the TTAB. The Central Intellectual Property and International Trade Court Thai, which is competent for considering IP cases, is able to examine evidence in English under certain conditions. Thus, the new TTAB regulations' exigency of translation of documents into Thai is excessive when compared to requirements of a law court. Further, evidence compiled for the TTAB under court-like standards will not be readily admissible to the court in case of a subsequent litigation.

With the new regulations, we advise that trademark owners intending to file an appeal with the TTAB be prepared to provide their representatives with sufficient time, and factor in additional costs to translate non-Thai documentary evidence and draw up a comprehensive list of evidence for submission along with the appeal. Generally, applicants are able to file appeal evidence 60 days after submission of the appeal, and we expect this option to be exercised more regularly with the additional burden of evidence preparation imposed by the new regulations.

Substantive examination of appeals

The TTAB, under Section 12 of the regulations, is authorised to substitute grounds of rejection during its examination of an appeal. This provision has been transposed from previous versions of the regulations. In our experience, the TTAB increasingly relies thereon and its transposition to the latest version of the regulations indicates that the TTAB has not relinquished this specific power. In the past the TTAB's authority to substitute grounds of rejection during an appeal has resulted in, for example, a mark rejected by the registrar for similarity to a prior mark being rejected for descriptiveness by the TTAB.

The possibility of grounds substitution was probably established to provide the TTAB with an opportunity to review the registrar's basis for rejection and to bring such basis more into line with the law. However, the effect of grounds substitution is such that the applicant, once notified of the TTAB's new basis for rejection, must submit a response equivalent to an entirely new appeal. The TTAB's power to substitute grounds for rejecting an application engenders legal uncertainty, whereby an applicant can never be sure why exactly its mark was rejected until a year after it appeals to the TTAB, at which point the TTAB may reveal a different cause of rejection from the one appealed on. As this uncertainty results from a valid legal source, the simplest advice is that patience is a virtue  it is always possible to appeal the TTAB's decision to the court.

Dhanasun

Chumchuay Saowaluck

Lamlert

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Nos. 496-502 Amarin Plaza BuildingUnit Nos. 1806-1807, 18th Floor, Ploenchit Road, Lumpini Sub-District, Pathumwan District, Bangkok 10330 ThailandTel: +66 2 256 9164 mail.asia@spruson.com www.spruson.comWu Dongliang, Echo Lin and Simon Tsi of Chang Tsi & Partners evaluate the decision of the UK High Court to issue a global FRAND licence in Unwired Planet v Huawei, provide an insight into the way in which Chinese courts determine royalties for SEPs, and advise Chinese businesses on how to manage SEP litigationWelcome to Politics of Style  a column wherein I will consider all manner of presentation in popular culture through the lens of identity politics. With each installment, Ill seek to contextualize the media we consume by connecting the dots between aesthetics, cultural production and social/cultural/political significance with levity or not.

Happy Mardi Gras my little booty bouncers! Did you celebrate? If you (like me) live in the northeast, perhaps not. But even if my body resides in Brooklyn, my soul is fully domiciled in New Orleans, where Ive lived no fewer than three past lives. My deep love for the city, which is sometimes called the most African city in the nation and sometimes called the most Caribbean city in the nation (and no matter what you call it, the point is that its got some very rich, very diasporic cultural heritage), means that I get a little tingle in my spine every year around the end of February/beginning of March, because thats Mardi Gras time, baby.

Despite not being there physically, in the home of bounce music and beignets and streetcars and spirits (yes, I do mean ghosts), I dedicated time every day this season to pretending I was via Instagram. Which is how I stumbled across what Tahj Williams, a queen in The Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indian Tribe, was wearing for this years Carnival celebrations. AND I ALMOST DIED, YALL. Just take a look:

Why yes, that is a hand-beaded, hand-sequined rose gold Mardi Gras suit. Why yes, that is her grandmothers jewelry bedazzling the top, and the images of over 50 women detailed around the base of the skirt. And, oh, what is that you ask? YES, this 20-year-old did spend an entire year sewing and otherwise hand-making this entire fit herself while also majoring in Cyber Security and Homeland Security as a junior at Tulane University.

Imma give you a second to catch your breath.

Got it? Good. Now, I love a good boob-flashing as much as the next gay, but Mardi Gras isnt just about collecting beads and getting shitfaced in the street. Its also the time of year when people like Tahj display the suits theyve spent all year making and pay homage to the Native Americans that helped Black folk who had escaped slavery. They took [Black folk] in and gave them shelter and let them live with them and have lives, Tahj tells me of the Indigenous people that helped inspire what has become a Black American tradition specific to New Orleans.

Back in the day, Black folk were barred from participating in the mainstream Carnival celebrations that took place along St. Charles, so they developed their own ways of celebrating, which is how the masking that Tahj practices was born. Tribes of Black Masking Indians (Black folk who celebrate Carnival by masquerading in this tradition) arose out of resistance to whites, well, whiting. I gotta acknowledge that this practice does beg the question of whether one marginalized group can appropriate another  something Indigenous scholar Dr. Adrienne Keene dissects thoughtfully here. Id like to have that convo in another Politics of Style, but today, this space is for telling Tahjs tale  the narrative of a deep-seated (complicated! complex!) cultural tradition:

Now that Mardi Gras is so mainstream, so many people are wanting to learn how to sew  now its important to them all of the sudden, says Tahj, explaining why those who mask work hard to protect their sacred practices (beyond sewing: how we meet, what we say, how we dance, the songs). But we are not supposed to teach anybody outside of the culture how to sew. We were never accepted into Mardi Gras in the past, so [masking] is our thing now. Just like Native people struggle to protect their sacred spaces, people like Tahj try hard to preserve what they do and how they do it, because as 500 years of colonial conquest on this continent goes to show, letting just anyone in is a double-edged sword at best.

Youll hear [us called] Mardi Gras Indians because that is what people who didnt know what we were would call us, Tahj says. But I dont feel like that term is all the way correct because how can we be Mardi Gras Indians if we werent even allowed to participate in Mardi Gras? We are moving toward being called Black Masking Indians. Culture bearers like Tahj work hard to ensure their traditions like this are kept alive  and archived appropriately  necessary (radical!) work.

Others may think of [our outfits] as costumes but we think of that [term] as a mockery, so we dont say costume  we say suit, Tahj continues. Every year, we hand-sew and hand-bead suits and, on Carnival day, on Mardi Gras day, we wear them. Making a suit is a serious endeavor: You get no help in constructing. You never reuse past suits.

Tahj was introduced to the Black Masking tradition through her uncle, a culture-bearer and masker himself. They always say, If you wanna mask Indian, you have to learn how to sew. So she did just that. It was 2009  she was 10. (We have kids that mask that are younger than me that know how to put suits together, she tells me, when I express my surprise. We have all youth tribes, we have babies that mask. We start learning this at a very, very young age.)

And now, at 20, Tahj knows the importance of cultural preservation: You cannot forget where you come from. Cultural preservation is necessary because, like we sing in our songs, we have to carry on. I think its important that the next generations are involved in [masking]. Thats why I make the kind of suits that I make.

The kind of suits that she makes feature flat patch sewing, a style that tells a specific story (as opposed to 3D  more like creative art). Im inspired by women every day. Im raised by majority women, so I just wanted to show that it kinda takes a village to raise a queen and I wanted to incorporate all the women that have helped me along the way, Tahj says of this years suit.

She also pays attention to fashion trends, incorporating them into traditional masking motifs: In 2017, she masked in a crop top vest, which had never been done before. This year, she brought rose gold to the Super Sunday streets for the first time. (Sunday is the traditional second line day; Super Sunday is the most significant day for Indians aside from Mardi Gras Day.)

We always say in New Orleans that Sunday is the most important day, but I dont think many know why. Im actually gonna tell you why right now, Tahj says, her contextualizing of Black Maskings significance as steadfast as her distinctly New Orleans-style of speech. Louisianas Code Noir, introduced in 1724, were laws that regulated Black bodies  everything from our movements to our manner of dress, she explains. Slaves had every Sunday off from work, so they would gather in Congo Square in what was called their Sundays Best. They would dress in their nicest outfits and they would listen to the drums in Congo Square.

And this is exactly what maskers do during Carnival today, Tahj says; exactly what folks who show out at second lines on Sundays do. I feel like Mardi Gras here is so important because history like that gets revealed when we talk about it.

There ya have it folks  the politics of (one specific) Mardi Gras style. As usual, this was a joy to write, and I hope it was a joy for you to read. Until next time, cuties. xE

Photos via Justen Williams/343 Media.On 15-17 March, around 180 workers and students met in London for the annual national conference of supporters of Socialist Appeal, British section of the IMT. The meeting was, without a doubt, the best in the history of Socialist Appeal, as evidenced by the record attendance, the extremely enthusiastic mood, and the impressively high political level of the discussions.

All attendees left the weekend-long conference with a real sense of purpose about the tasks ahead. The ruling class in Britain  and internationally  is in a deep crisis. There is a polarisation and radicalisation taking place in the depths of the working class. Mass movements of workers and students are on the order of the day. What is urgently needed is a strong Marxist voice for Labour and youth.

The conference kicked off on Friday evening, with Alan Woods  editor of the international Marxist website, In Defence of Marxism  introducing a discussion on perspectives for world revolution / Image: Socialist Appeal

Perspectives for world revolution

The conference kicked off on Friday evening, with Alan Woods  editor of the international Marxist website, In Defence of Marxism  introducing a discussion on perspectives for world revolution.

Capitalism is a global system. We therefore cannot separate events in Britain from the wider processes taking place globally. Alan outlined the key economic and political developments worldwide, with a focus on the rising conflict between China and the USA, and the never-ending crisis in Europe.

Overall, the perspectives for the future indicate intense instability, as the ruling class attempts to make workers pay for the crisis of capitalism. Alan pointed out that this is a recipe for social explosions everywhere, as anger, frustration and rage builds up below the surface. This can be seen in the revolutionary movement in Algeria, taking place as the conference met.

Contributions from the floor filled in this international picture, with comrades highlighting the global student strike movement against climate change; the 200 million strong general strike in India; the political crises taking place in the heart of Europe, in Germany, France, and Italy; and the prospects for class struggle in Brazil, in the wake of Bolsonaros election.

Britain: crises everywhere

The main discussion on the Saturday was on perspectives for the class struggle in Britain.

Rob Sewell, author of In The Cause of Labour and editor of Socialist Appeal (eponymous journal of the British comrades), explained the background to Brexit, which represents the deepest political crisis for the British establishment in living memory.

Most significantly, the ruling class has lost control of the situation. Big business is no longer able to rely on the bulk of the Tories, nor on the leadership of the Labour Party. Splits in both major political parties are therefore inherent in the situation  and are already taking place.

The main discussion on the Saturday was on perspectives for Britain, led by Rob Sewell, editor of Socialist Appeal / Image: Socialist Appeal

Rob discussed how the civil wars inside both the Conservatives and the Labour Party are heating up and reaching boiling point. The Blairites are cynically using the question of anti-semitism as a weapon against the left. But in response, the demand for mandatory reselection is growing stronger by the day.

It is only a matter of time before we see a Corbyn-led Labour government come to power. This could happen in the coming months, or even weeks. The struggle to kick out the big-business wing of the Labour Party has therefore never been more urgent.

Comrades from across Britain contributed to the discussion, coming in on a range of topics. Many reported on the mood in their local Labour parties  particularly on how grassroots members were seeing right through the Blairites and their anti-semitism smears.

Others highlighted the dire social conditions facing working class communities in Britain today. And young activists noted the incredible radicalisation taking place amongst students and youth  but also stressing that this anger is not being channelled by the NUS or Young Labour.

The conclusion of the discussion was clear: a determined Marxist tendency must be built inside the British labour movement. Only in this way can we bring in a socialist Labour government and address the burning issues facing workers and youth in Britain today.

Guide to action

Theory and perspectives are a guide to action. On the Sunday of the conference, therefore, attendees discussed the tasks that lie ahead in building support for the ideas of Marxism in the movements of workers and students.

With the deepening crisis of the political establishment, there is a massive potential for Marxist ideas to gain a wide echo in the labour movement / Image: Socialist Appeal

With the deepening crisis of the political establishment, combined with the open sabotage of the Blairites, there is a massive potential for Marxist ideas to gain a wide echo in the labour movement.

In this respect, comrades emphasised the success of the Labour4Clause4 campaign, which has helped to put socialism back on the agenda within the Labour Party. In addition, supporters highlighted the role of the Socialist Appeal paper, which provides a much-needed Marxist voice within the labour movement.

Student activists also noted the success of the local Marxist societies in the universities, who, as well as bringing Marxist ideas to a new generation, have also linked up with workers in struggle  particularly those in precarious sectors, who are fighting for decent pay and conditions.

Across the country, the Marxist Student Federation is now a recognised force on the student left. This is reflected not only in the impressive turnout at the MSF conference last month, but also by the victories seen for Marxist candidates in NUS delegate elections. As a result, the MSF will be sending almost a dozen delegates to this years national conference of the NUS, who will argue the case for socialist ideas.

Aiming high

A highlight of the conference was the collection for the fighting fund, which provides the much-needed finance to support the analysis Socialist Appeal produces and the campaigns being run.

Comrades from across Britain raised an impressive 35,000 to help develop the work into new areas. This is a testament to the confidence that comrades have in the ideas of Marxism  and the high level of sacrifice that Socialist Appeal supporters are willing to make to put these ideas into practice.

All comrades left the conference inspired with an increased determination to transform society  not just in Britain, but across the whole world / Image: Socialist Appeal

Mina from London, attending the conference for the first time, said:

I was so impressed with the high political level of the speakers, of both older and younger comrades alike. In times of such political chaos, the energy, enthusiasm and absolute dedication of all who took part in the conference was a refreshing and inspiring thing to see.

In closing the conference, Alan Woods called upon all comrades to set their sights high. We are aiming for the socialist transformation of society  not just in Britain, but across the whole world. We must therefore make the necessary sacrifices to achieve this aim: of our time, energy, and finances.

Following a rousing rendition of the Internationale, all comrades left the conference inspired with an increased determination to make this aim a reality.Massport officials are proposing higher fees and new drop off locations for ride-share services at Boston Logan Airport, in an attempt to cut down on congestion.

At a meeting on Thursday, officials proposed moving all Uber and Lyft pickups and drop offs to the central parking garage, rather than passengers being dropped off directly at their terminals, WCVB reports.

This would cut down on the number of ride-share cars idling by the terminals waiting to pick up or drop off passengers. Officials anticipate this could reduce passenger-less ride-shares by about 30 percent, officials said in a news release.

Ride-share vehicles account for about 40 percent of curbside traffic during the airports busiest hours, WCVB reports.

The growing congestion at Logan is significantly impacting our passengers and our surrounding communities, Massport Acting CEO John Pranckevicius said in a statement. The bottom line is we need more people to get to and from the airport in fewer vehicles, and we think we can do that with these new strategies. This plan is better for our customers, better for the community and better for the environment.

Officials are also mulling an increase in ride-share fees from $3.25 to $5 to be dropped off or picked up from Logan Airport. Massport would charge only $2.50 to people who agree to split their ride with another traveler. They will also encourage riders to take the shuttle buses from Logan to downtown Boston, according to The Boston Globe.

Under the proposal, Massport would also add new buses between Logan and North Station. Trips to the airport would cost $3 and trips from the airport would be free, according to the Globe. Fares on Logan Express buses from Back Bay, which now cost $7.50 would drop to $3, the Globe reports.

The airport would also test a giving expedited security screening in the terminal to those who rode the Logan Express, the Globe reports.

The changes still need to be approved by the board.Four New England Patriots players suited up Friday morning to promote Sen. Sonia Chang-Diazs education bill, the PROMISE Act.

These young people have inspired us in our day-to-day lives. We know that they are the future of our region, our nation and our world," said Patriots safety Devin McCourty. "And we are confident that if we give them everything, we could give them a million things.

McCourty testified with his brother, Jason, Duron Harmon and Matt Slater, who are members of the advocacy group Players Coalition, Friday at the Joint Education Committees education hearing.

Harmon asked the committee to make sure schools with low-income students use funding for resources that help children cope with trauma and prepare for the workforce, rather than for police officers in the hallways.

Being arrested, suspended, is not always the answer," said Harmon, a safety for the Patriots. "Is it the easiest? Yes, but the easiest way is not always the best way.

The committee has more than a dozen education-related bills to consider, including ones by Chang-Diaz, D-Suffolk, Gov. Charlie Baker and Rep. Paul Tucker, D-Salem.

The group said they want to see the next education law implement recommendations that were made in the Foundation Budget Review Commissions 2015 report, which recommends adding more money to the state education funding formula to cover increasing costs in employee health benefits, special education, English language learners and low-income districts.

Chang-Diazs bill has been backed by teachers, parents, mayors and education advocates, who have said that Bakers bill to increase the formula by $1.1 billion over seven years is not enough.

When asked by the committee about the cost proposed in the PROMISE Act, Chang-Diaz said the bill would add north of $1 billion over a four- to seven-year period.

Devin McCourty said Massachusetts is long overdue for education reforms that offer more resources to the states most vulnerable students. We are prepared to battle for our children, he said.As the New England Treatment Access Brookline business prepares for its first recreational marijuana sales on Saturday, the company is encouraging visitors to use public transportation instead of driving. The opening day, however, coincides with the start of maintenance on the MBTA Green Line "D" Branch, which provides direct access to NETA Brookline.

We are strongly encouraging people to take the T, Amanda Rositano, NETAs director of compliance, said at a press conference on Friday. Being the first dispensary accessible by public transportation, we think thats the best option.

The MBTA Green Line "D" Branch, which typically drops off passengers at the Brookline Village stop about a 2-minute walk away from NETA, will be shut down as part of an initiative to repair tracks and signal systems, according to the MBTA website.

Shuttle buses will replace "D" trains between the Kenmore and Reservoir stops every weeknight, starting at 8:30 p.m., and weekends, except April 13-14 and April 27-28, from March 23 through May 5. The MBTA encourages riders to factor in an extra 20 minutes of travel time when using the shuttle buses.

Rositano addressed the scheduled "D" Branch maintenance at the press conference on Friday, adding that NETA suggests those traveling by train use the Green Line "E" Branch to the Riverway station, which is about an 8-minute walk away from the marijuana shop.

MBTA Bus Routes 39, 60, 65 and 66 also stop in the Brookline Village neighborhood, according to Neil Wishinsky, the chairman of the Brookline Board of Selectman. Wishinsky is slated to be the ceremonial first customer to buy recreational marijuana at the business on Saturday.

A transportation guide provided by NETA Brookline said there are about 28 parking spots available to customers and medical patients at a lot next to the property and the Homewood Suites lot a few minutes down the road.

The parking lot next to the marijuana shop will not be available to vehicles on Saturday, however, because it is being reserved for what are anticipated to be long lines of customers. A few parking spaces across the street from NETA will be reserved for medical marijuana patients, Rositano said.

When asked how many people are expected, Rositano said it is hard to estimate how many people will come out for the first day of recreational sales. She anticipates turnout may be similar to the NETA Northampton recreational opening in November, which marked the first recreational marijuana shop to open in Massachusetts and saw more than a couple thousand customers.

The NETA Brookline location, which has already existed as a medical marijuana dispensary since 2016, will be the first business in Metro Boston to sell recreational cannabis products.NORTHAMPTON  An audience of hundreds  including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman  sang Happy Birthday at Smith College Thursday night to legendary activist Frances Crowe, celebrating her 100th birthday.

Goodman gave a talk honoring Crowes lifelong dedication to peace activism.

On Crowes shirt was a pin that said no war  a cause shes been working toward for decades, giving a human voice to war casualties.

When I asked (Crowe) how many times shed been arrested, she responded with not enough, Goodman said, citing a conversation theyd had earlier that day.

In her talk, Goodman told stories about actions Crowe has taken throughout her life, including a time she was arrested during the Vietnam War. She and other activists had dressed as Vietnamese women and stood outside Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee, in sight of several pilots.

It had an impact. When pilot Donald Dawson was sent back to Vietnam, he found himself weeping rather than bombing and refused to carry out his mission. Dawson became one of the first conscientious objectors of the Vietnam War, in a demonstration of the remarkable act of bearing witness that activism can have, Goodman said.

Goodman also talked about the power peace activism has today. She cited the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline standoff at Standing Rock in North Dakota, where native people and allies stood their ground in front of bulldozers and police dogs.

Goodman herself was scheduled to be arraigned on charges of rioting after her news coverage of the standoff surfaced  she found out through a text from a North Dakota number telling her, Youre under arrest, she said  but the charges were ultimately dropped.

Crowe and her late friend Ed Russell were the first to broadcast Democracy Now! in the Pioneer Valley during the 1990s when the show was new, first from an antenna at the summit of Mount Holyoke and later from a walnut tree in Crowes backyard.

Over the years, Crowe has also had a hand in organizing activist groups in the Pioneer Valley. She is a co-founder of the Traprock Peace Center in Deerfield and the Committee to End Apartheid in Springfield. She also founded the Northampton chapter of the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom, the Sane Nuclear Policy Committee and the Valley Peace Center.

Crowe urged activists not to work alone, which can be discouraging, but to build their own little movements.

Look around and youll find other people who agree with you, Crowe said. There are many different people trying to resist with compassion and change the world.PITTSFIELD - Laura Reilly, the Easthampton woman accused of giving misleading statements to police in the Joanne Ringer investigation, pleaded guilty Friday in Berkshire Superior Court.

Reilly, according to the officer of Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington, pleaded guilty to lying to state police. She was sentenced to 2 to 4 years in state prison.

Prosecutors had recommended a sentence of 3 to 4 years.

Harrington, in a prepared statement said, The judge agreed this was an egregious example of misleading police."

Harrington said a prison sentence was appropriate because "Laura Reillys lies not only stymied police in apprehending a murder suspect, they also had a devastating and lasting effect on Joanne Ringers family and friends.

Judge John Agostini, in announcing his sentence, said The public was really the victim in this case. It was not just the police that were misled. It was all of us.

Ringer, 39, of Clarksburg, was reported missing March 2, 2017, after she failed to show up for her first day of work at a taxi service in Easthampton. Her car was found in Easthampton four days later.

Laura Reilly of Easthampton pleaded guilty Friday to lying to State Police detectives during the criminal investigation into the suspected killing of Joanne Ringer and received a 2 to 4 sentence in State Prison. More to come. #Berkshire County #Massjustice  Berkshire County DA (@CountyBerkshire) March 22, 2019

The missing persons search very quickly became a possible murder investigation, and her husband, Charles "Chad" M. Reidy, 42, emerged as the only suspect.

He committed suicide a little over a month later on April 7, 2017.

Ringers body was discovered in a wooded area in Hatfield on Feb. 27, 2018, almost one year to the date she was reported missing.

Reilly was arrested on April 20, 2017 and charged with three counts of misleading authorities after a grand jury indicted her.

Prosecutors accuse Reilly of lying about her and Reidys actions on the day Ringer disappeared. Police believe she gave Reidy, an ex-boyfriend, a ride home from downtown Northampton that day, while Reidy told police he only left his Clarksburg home to visit a friend in Worthington. She also said she did not see Reidy the following day, but surveillance video shows the pair together in Chicopee.

Her misleading statements wasted time for police and obstructed the investigation in to Ringers disappearance, Harrington said.

If Laura Reilly told the truth about driving Reidy home on the day he reported Ringer missing and spending time with him the day after, police could have questioned Reidy about the killing prior to him committing suicide, Harrington said.

I offer my condolences to Ms. Ringers loved ones, and we hope that this plea and sentence gives them some measure of comfort.Neil Wishinsky, chairman of the Brookline Board of Selectman, will be the first customer in line to buy recreational marijuana when the first Greater Boston shop opens on Saturday.

New England Treatment Access, or NETA, has asked Wishinsky to be first to buy from their Brookline store, which will open for adult-use sales at 9 a.m.

Wishinsky said he has not yet figured out what he will buy. But, he said, Im looking forward to it.

Amanda Rositano, NETAs director of compliance, said at a press conference on Friday that the store has closely cooperated with the town and its police department in coordinating the opening of its store.

It is a really significant moment standing with our town officials, with the police department really acknowledging that cannabis does indeed have a place in our society, and through thoughtful regulation and responsible operators, we can really bring this out of the shadows and into the light, Rositano said.

Wishinksy said if anyone asked him 10 years ago whether he would be a top municipal official welcoming the opening of a marijuana retailer, I would have said you were crazy. But here we are, and this is really a sign of how times have changed, and that elections really have consequences, Wishinsky said. And 60 percent of Brooklines voters voted to legalize adult use cannabis.

NETA opened one of the two first legal marijuana stores in the state for adult-use sales, when it opened its Northampton store in November. The Brookline store is the first to open for adult-use sales in the Greater Boston area. Both locations will continue to sell medical marijuana to patients.BROOKLINE  When it opens its doors for recreational marijuana sales on Saturday, NETA in Brookline will become the first adult-use marijuana store in Greater Boston and the first store accessible by public transportation.

Store officials are encouraging patrons to take advantage of that fact. Parking is very, very limited in this area, said Amanda Rositano, NETAs director of compliance. We are strongly encouraging people to take the T, to utilize public transportation.

NETA is expecting massive crowds when it opens at 9 a.m. as the first legal recreational marijuana store within easy reach of Boston. NETA officials have experience handling hubbub  their Northampton dispensary was one of the first two stores in the state to open for recreational sales. The store opening attracted a few thousand people, according to company officials.

This is an urban location, the first in Greater Boston, it is unique, Rositano said. I think our close coordination with the police department really prepares us for whatever might come.

The store will be open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday and from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday. The store will sell edibles, flower, pre-rolled joints, topical creams, vape pens, extracts and concentrates.

Well have a robust menu, Rositano said.

NETA is urging customers to place their orders ahead of time through its website. There will be separate lines for full-service and for customers who order online.

The company is also stressing the benefit of taking public transportation. NETAs small parking lot will be closed to cars for the first few days after the store opens for recreational sales, and will be used to handle the long lines.

There is a parking lot across the street, on Route 9, solely for medical marijuana patients. NETA has reserved 25 spots at the Homewood Suites parking lot nearby, some of which will be reserved for patients. There are several nearby public parking garages, including a 377-car garage at One Brookline Place, and some metered spots. But Rositano warned that it will be difficult to find parking.

The store is located near the Brookline Village MBTA stop on the Green Line D branch and the Riverway station on the Green Line E branch. Due to construction this weekend on the D branch, shuttle buses will replace trains between Kenmore and Reservoir. The store is also near several bus lines  routes 39, 60, 65 and 66.

Some dispensaries have used far-away parking lots and shuttle buses to accommodate opening day crowds, but Rositano said NETA did not think that was necessary since the store is accessible via public transportation.

The store is capping sales of flower at one-eighth of an ounce for adult use sales. Patients will not be subject to that limit.

Rositano said NETA expects to have enough inventory to meet the demand.

Medical patients will have a separate line, and 35 percent of inventory each day will be reserved for medical patients. Staff will still offer in-depth consultations to patients.

Were trying to prioritize the patients, said Andy Epstein, director of patient education for NETA.

NETA has doubled its staff in preparation for adult-use sales and now has more than 100 employees at the Brookline store.

The store has coordinated closely with Brookline officials. There will be at least 15 Brookline police officers on hand to direct traffic and control crowds, according to Brookline Police Lt. Philip Harrington. NETA will pay for the extra police detail.

Neil Wishinsky, chairman of the Brookline Board of Selectman, will be the first customer.

Wishinksy said if anyone asked him 10 years ago whether he would be an elected official welcoming the opening of a marijuana retailer, I would have said you were crazy.

But here we are, and this is really a sign of how times have changed, and that elections really have consequences, Wishinsky said. And 60 percent of Brooklines voters voted to legalize adult use cannabis.

Wishinsky said the towns focus will be on ensuring traffic moves smoothly, that parking works and that the disruption to neighbors is minimal. The store is located next to a day care center.

Theres been very little controversy about this opening, but theres been a lot of concern, and well be working hard to make sure things go smoothly, Wishinsky said.

Only adults over 21 with a valid ID will be allowed into the dispensary.

NETA will be the 13th legal marijuana store to open in Massachusetts. The next closest store to Boston, Alternative Therapies Group in Salem, has suspended recreational sales due to a problem uploading their inventory into the state tracking system.Progressive groups critical of U.S. Rep. Richard Neals approach to requesting President Donald Trumps tax returns are reportedly looking to back a challenger to unseat Neal in Massachusetts 1st Congressional District primary next year.

The Springfield Democrat has represented Western Massachusetts in Congress for more than three decades and won his 2018 re-election bid by a decisive 40-point margin against a Democratic challenger. But those unhappy with his stance on progressive issues, and his actions as the newly minted House Ways and Means Committee chairman, are already looking ahead to 2020.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said his national grassroots organization is keeping an eye on how Neal approaches requesting Trumps taxes and his stance on a Medicare for All health care system. Green argued those issues will directly determine whether the congressman faces a strong primary challenger or not.

There is a hunger in this country for Medicare for All and there is a hunger among Democratic voters for accountability by party leaders. There will likely be one or multiple big primaries of incumbents in 2020 and Richie Neal is sticking his neck out as the obvious first person on the list," Green said in an interview.

Trump is the first president in recent history not to release his taxes. Critics say making the information public is important for transparency. Neal has repeatedly said that hes working with House counsel on a request for the presidents tax information that will stand up to expected legal challenges.

The congressman has said hes open to considering his colleagues Medicare for All proposal, but believes Democrats first order of business should be to work on expanding and improving the Affordable Care Act.

Green argued that Neals failure to take up Medicare for All in the Ways and Means Committee or formally request the presidents tax returns thus far could receive further scrutiny as more Democratic presidential candidates focus on these issues ahead of next years election.

If hes the one guy blocking Medicare for All nationally as nearly every presidential candidate  including Elizabeth Warren  are campaigning on it, that just makes him a very objectionable status quo Democrat and would invite a primary challenge and national attention," Green said.

Green said he has definitely heard rumors of there being specific people thinking about running against Neal. He would not provide further details about possible challengers, noting that theres ducks being put in a row right now.

He said he believes an ideal candidate to face off against the congressman would be a young woman of color who has a very compelling story and a core set of values who can make a very personal case for things like Medicare for All, and maybe even had a political awakening when Trump got elected and is shocked his tax returns still arent released.

That would really inspire people across the country to take out their checkbooks or credit cards and donate to a campaign," he said.

Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, a Springfield attorney and political newcomer who unsuccessfully ran against Neal in the 2018 Democratic primary, said she is unlikely to be that candidate. She lost to Neal by a 71-to-29 percent margin after failing to match the congressmans fundraising and name recognition in the district.

I dont imagine that it will (be me) at this moment, she said in an interview. I really am focused on just trying to get my bearings about myself following the past election. Im paying very close attention to all of the issues, staying in touch with all of the folks here in Western Massachusetts who are very supportive or vocal, and I havent ruled it out. But at this point, I dont have specific plans to do that.

She added that while she hasnt heard any specific names of possible Democratic candidates, she knows conversations continue in the district about challenging the longtime incumbent.

Id be willing to bet money that there will be a Democratic challenger in 2020 for him, she said, adding that she finds it interesting to see national groups, like Need to Impeach, target Neal.

Tom Steyer, whose Need to Impeach effort has called on Neal to immediately request Trumps tax information with billboards, ads and at a Western Massachusetts town hall, told reporters that his focus has been on getting the presidents tax returns.

Gosh, the primary  we have not considered that, he said after a recent Agawam event. But you know what weve been trying to do is to show how much ... support there is in this district for, in fact, getting the information for the American people, for getting the tax information."

Local progressive organizations, meanwhile, have formed their own coalition to engage Neal and ensure he supports the needs and aspirations of his constituents.

The CD-1 Progressive Coalition includes groups like Indivisible Williamsburg that have been vocal critics of the congressman. It held its first town hall-style event in Holyoke last month and recently invited Neal to attend a similar town hall in Pittsfield.

Like Green, Sean McElwee, co-founder of Data for Progress, said its still too early for his organization to keep an eye on polling and other data in the 1st Congressional District, which spans all of Berkshire County, as well as parts of Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire and Worcester counties.

He said that could change in the coming months, offering that recent political shifts in the Democratic Party toward more progressive ideas could put the congressmans chances of winning re-election in 2020 in jeopardy.

I know there are people who are looking at this race. If three months go by and we start to see a challenger emerge, then absolutely its something where we go in and do a poll, he said.

Neals office declined to comment about possible primary challengers in 2020. The congressman told reporters Thursday that hes more concerned about getting his request for Trumps tax returns correct than criticism from left-leaning groups.

You end up with these moments answering what if questions. I think that the better answer is, as Ive noted earlier, is to make sure its done right, he said.

The Republicans Shira Schoenberg contributed to this report.He died while serving on the USS Oklahoma along with 429 sailors and marines on Dec. 7, 1941. And for more than 70 years, the body of Navy Electricians Mate 3rd Class Roman W. Sadlowski remained unidentified.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced Friday that Sadlowskis body has finally been accounted for.

Sadlowski was assigned to the battleship USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor when the ship was attacked by the Japanese in what President Franklin D. Roosevelt would deem a date which will live in infamy.

At only 21, Sadlowski was one of two Pittsfield residents to die in the attack, the other being Edward Burns.

The struggle to identify the remains of those killed in the attack has been a long-fought one.

Navy personnel spent three years after the attack on Pearl Harbor recovering the remains of the deceased crew of the USS Oklahoma. The bodies were interred in the Halawa and Nu'uanu cemeteries.

The first subsequent attempt to identify remains happened in 1947, when members of the American Graves Registration Service disinterred the remains from the two cemeteries and transferred them to a laboratory for identification, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Only 35 servicemen were able to be identified. The rest of the remains were buried in 46 plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. In 1949, a military board classified those who could not be identified as non-recoverable.

That changed in 2015.

On June 15, 2015, on the order of the Deputy Secretary of Defense, members of the Department of POW/MIA Accounting Agency began exhuming remains for analysis.

To identify Sadlowskis remains, scientists from DPAA used anthropological analysis, as well as circumstantial and material evidence. Additionally, scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used mitochondrial DNA.

Funeral arrangements have not yet been announced.Dumplings and a plank contest are in store for an event celebrating Samuel Adams new beer celebrating Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

When There Are Nine is inspired by Ginsburgs answer to the question, When will there be enough women on the Supreme Court?

Sam Adams brewed the Belgian Bruit IPA on International Womens Day and plan to release it in their tap room on March 29.

We wanted to name it Brut Bader Ginsburg but our legal team, uh, dissented, Sam Adams wrote on the event page.

The event, a 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. celebration, costs $20 to enter and includes a pint of the beer, a serving of four dumplings from Mei Mei and a $5 donation to the Pink Boots Society, which fosters advancement and education for women in the beer industry.

In addition, the team is holding a plank contest in honor of RBG and her infamous workout routine.

The contest will benefit the ACLU Womens Right Project, which Ginsburg co-founded.Special Counsel Robert Mueller has delivered his completed report on possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to Attorney General William Barr.

I am reviewing this report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsels principal conclusions as soon as this weekend, Barr wrote in a letter to members of the House and Senate judiciary committees. Separately, I intend to consult with Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Special Counsel Mueller to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Departments long-standing practices and policies. I remain committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review.

The filing of the report signals the end of the special counsels two-year criminal inquiry, which led to the criminal convictions of President Donald Trumps campaign chairman, deputy chairman, personal attorney and two policy advisers.

Mueller was appointed in May 2017 by the Justice Department to probe Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, possible collusion by the Trump campaign, obstruction of justice and given the broad authority to pursue evidence where ever it led.

Trump has railed against the special counsel investigation and claimed it has been a big hoax and a witchhunt.

Mueller has laid out 10 criminal cases, seen four people sentenced to prison, secured one conviction at trial, extracted seven guilty pleas and charged 37 people and entities with crimes.

Trumps campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has been jailed. The presidents personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, who cooperated with the investigation, begins his prison term next month. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is awaiting sentencing. Roger Stone, an adviser to the Trump campaign, is awaiting trial.

Further indictments are not expected, a senior DOJ official told CNN and the Associated Press.

Speaking on Fox Business earlier on Friday, Trump said that it the Mueller report was unfavorable to him, people will not stand for it.

Members of Massachusetts congressional delegation called for the report to be made public.

Attorney General Barr should make the full report public and provide its underlying documentation and findings to Congress, said U.S. Sen. Ed Markey in a statement Friday evening. A summary of the report or Mr. Barr simply briefing Congress on its contents would be insufficient. We cannot have the Attorney General or the White House interfere in decisions about the findings of the investigation and what evidence is made public."

The American people have a right to the truth about what happened in the 2016 presidential election," Markey added. "Nothing less than the sanctity of our democracy is at the heart of this investigation, and that requires complete transparency.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., took to Twitter to call on Barr to release the Mueller report to the American public. Now.

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Worcester, sounded a similar note. Make. The. Whole. Thing. Public, he tweeted.

Robert Mueller has done his job, now its time for Congress to do ours, U.S. Rep. Seth Mouton, D-Salem, tweeted. That means investigating this report ourselves, and making sure that every American gets to read every word.

Make. The. Whole. Thing. Public.  Rep. Jim McGovern (@RepMcGovern) March 22, 2019

Attorney General Barrrelease the Mueller report to the American public. Now. https://t.co/sqz8eoTjLD  Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) March 22, 2019Springfield narcotics detectives Friday arrested two men, and will summon a third, after a months-long investigation into heroin sales in the Belle Street area, where investigators believe suspects used a modified childs car seat as a hiding place for drugs.

Ryan Walsh, spokesman for the Springfield Police Department, said detectives executed a search warrant at a Belle Street apartment Thursday afternoon. During the search police arrested Carlos Rodriguez, 51, and confiscated more than $1,800 in cash.

Arrest photos of two of the three men arrested during a Belle Street narcotics bust Thursday.

An hour later, two men believed to be associates of Rodriguezs were taken into custody in the vicinity of Wilbraham Road and Albemarle Street. Arresting officers said they found Pablo Torres to be in possession of heroin when he was arrested. A second man, 42-year-old Pedro Benitez, was also taken into custody but requested medical attention. He will be summoned to court at a later date.

While searching Benitezs car, officers found a child car safety seat that had been modified with a hiding place for half packs of heroin. It was empty when police inspected it.

In all, police said they seized 106 bags of heroin and $2,463 in cash.

Rodriguez was charged with two counts of distribution of a Class A substance and single counts of possession of heroin with the intent to distribute and conspiracy to violate drug laws.

Torres is being charged with two counts of distribution of a Class A substance and single counts of possession of a Class A substance with the intent to distribute and conspiracy to violate drug laws.SPRINGFIELD  The City Council will conduct public hearings on Monday to consider special permits for two multi-million-dollar housing projects in Springfield involving restoration of long-vacant historic buildings.

One developer, First Resource Companies, of Hanover, is proposing an estimated $23 million apartment complex project at the Indian Motocycle property on State Street. The renovation-restoration project is at "Building B" on State Street and includes the adjacent former Mason Square fire station, both buildings vacant and deteriorated.

The second developer, Davenport Companies, is proposing to renovate the former Willys-Overland building at 151 Chestnut St, in the downtown, for a 60-unit market rate housing project. The historic restoration-renovation project is estimated to cost $11.5 million.

The public hearings begin at 6:30 p.m., in the council chambers at City Hall.

The Indian Motocycle project in the Mason Square area will create 60 apartments along with retail uses on the first floor of the former fire station, according to plans.

"Both structures have been vacant for a number of years and have been a priority redevelopment site for the City of Springfield," said the Planning Department staff in a report to the City Council.

First Resource announced in February that it has hired NEI General Contracting of Randolph as project contractor and hopes to have the project begin soon and be completed by late 2020.

The fire-story main building, which once housed the Indian Motocycle company, produced motorcycles from 1901 to 1953. That building will be converted to 45 apartments while the former fire station will have 15 apartments and retail space, according to submitted plans.

The Indian Motocycle property also has a separate, occupied 139-unit apartment building on Wilbraham Road.

The redevelopment project will also include demolition of two commercial buildings on State Street, across the street from the new apartments, to provide additional parking. The buildings were formerly 858 and 864 State St., and demolition will create 73 parking spaces, plans state.

First Resource had initially received a special permit from the City Council in April of 2016 for the housing development, but it expired after two years as the company sought to finalize funding for the project, officials said. The project is being funded with a mix of private and public money including historic tax credits, officials said.

Davenport Companies had purchased the former Willys-Overland property on Chestnut Street in December of 2017 for $450,000. The site was subsequently approved as a single-building local historic district by the Historical Commission and City Council.

The building has been vacant since damaged in a gas explosion in the downtown area in November of 2012. The Willys-Overland Motor Co. building was constructed in 1916 as the sales floor and regional office for its cars.

The council approved tax incentives for the housing development last July that will provide tax savings totaling $310,000 over a 10-year period. The city, however, will gain taxes totaling $350,000 over the same 10-year period, the Assessors' Office estimated.

In addition to apartments, there are plans for storefronts facing Chestnut Street, and conversion of a vacant lot for parking.

The Planning Department is recommending approval.REVERE -- Police arrested three males after finding an unlawful gun and marijuana in their car during a routine traffic stop.

Christopher Ciano, 21, of Revere, and Ayoub Haddad, 18, of Malden, were charged with possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, possession of a firearm, defacing a firearm serial number and conspiracy to violate drug laws, Massachusetts State Police said.

Trooper Ricky Chiampi pulled over a Chevrolet Silverado pickup with an expired inspection sticker around 5 p.m., Wednesday, on Squire Road. When he approached the vehicle from the passenger side, Ciano opened the door to talk to him. Chiampi then saw a gun at his feet and placed him in custody, police said.

He then also handcuffed Haddad and the driver, who is a juvenile. During a search of the truck, troopers found 9 ounces of marijuana and $3,100 in cash, police said.

Ciano and Haddad were booked at the Revere Barracks. The juvenile was issued a criminal summons and was allowed to leave when his mother arrived on the scene, police said.SPRINGFIELD - A 61-year-old city woman suffered critical burns Friday morning in a bathroom fire at her home on Cornwall Street, a fire official said.

Dennis Leger, aide to Fire Commissioner Bernard J. Calvi, said the woman suffered third-degree burns to her head, face and torso. She was rushed to Baystate Medical Center and is listed in critical condition.

The fire, at 6 Cornwall St., was reported at 10:34 a.m. The fire caused roughly $1,000 damage to the bathroom but did not spread beyond it.

The cause of the fire is being investigated by the Springfield Arson and Bomb Squad and state troopers assigned to the office of the Massachusetts Fire Marshal.

Cornwall Street is located in the Liberty Heights neighborhood, off Chapin Terrace.Although Joe Biden has yet to officially join the growing field of 2020 presidential hopefuls, Democratic and independent voters have signaled that theyre most excited about the former vice presidents possible White House run, according to a new poll.

A Suffolk University/USA Today national survey released Friday found that nearly six in 10 Democrats and independents are looking forward to Bidens rumored presidential campaign -- nearly double the excitement reported for most other party hopefuls.

Specifically, 59 percent of Democratic and independent respondents said theyre excited by the idea of Biden running in 2020, while 21 percent said they had no strong feelings" about his potential campaign.

Bernie Sanders trailed Biden with 42 percent of Democrats and independents excited about his 2020 run, followed by former Texas Congressman Beto ORourke, with 34 percent of respondents looking forward to his campaign.

Other big name candidates, including U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker, saw similar support with about a third -- 36 percent, 32 percent and 31 percent respectively -- of Democratic and independent voters excited about their 2020 bids.

David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk Political Research Center in Boston, noted that the poll further found that Democratic and independent voters want a demographic balance on the ticket, with 44 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of independents rejecting the idea of an all-white-male ticket.

"When Democrats and independents were asked if they would be satisfied if their partys nominees for president and vice president were two white men, a plurality of respondents said no, he said in a statement. "This means that if Biden or Sanders were nominated, they might see voter intensity drop should they tap a white male vice presidential candidate.

Beyond weighing in various candidates, a majority Democratic and independent voters said they believe whomever is nominated to represent the party in the 2020 contest should support policies like the Green New Deal, Medicare-for-All health care, higher taxes on the wealthy and free higher education.

Specifically, three-quarters of them said they believe the Democratic Partys nominee should support increased taxes on wealthy Americans, while more than two-thirds agreed that the candidate should back a Medicare-for-All health care system.

Respondents, meanwhile, said the Democratic nominee should back free higher education by a 63 to 27 percent margin, and the Green New Deal -- a wide-ranging policy agenda aimed at addressing climate change -- by a 45 to 28 percent margin.

The poll surveyed 600 Democratic and independent voters nationwide via telephone from March 13 to 17. It has a margin of error of plus of minus 4 percentage points.SPRINGFIELD  A Hampden Superior Court judge on Friday found Dequan Muhammad guilty of home invasion, armed kidnapping and nine other crimes, and sentenced him to state prison.

In a jury waived trial, Judge Karen Goodwin found the 27-year-old Hartford man not guilty of two other counts: impersonating a police officer and larceny from a building.

Goodwin sentenced Muhammad to two years probation on the home invasion charge and six to eight years in state prison on the charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. The judge ordered concurrent sentences for the other charges.

The legislature has set a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence for home invasion convictions, but allows judges to give a probation sentence instead.

Muhammad was charged in a home invasion in Chicopee on Jan. 20, 2017. The homeowner was alone when two armed men came in, using zip ties to secure her wrists and holding a gun to her head, she testified at trial.

Assistant District Attorney Nina Vivenzio asked for a sentence of 20 years for Muhammad on home invasion. Defense lawyer Joe A. Smith III asked for probation on home invasion and five years on assault and battery with a dangerous weapon with concurrent sentences on other counts.

A tearful Muhammad asked to speak to Goodwin. I never hurt these people, he said, looking at the two victims sitting in the courtroom.

He pleaded with her to give him a lesser sentence, saying he has changed.

Muhammad has 791 days credit on his sentence for days spent in the Hampden County Correctional Center in Ludlow awaiting trial.

Smith said Muhammad was on parole for second degree robbery in Connecticut when he was charged in this case. Smith said Muhammad has a possible six years to serve waiting for him in Connecticut for violating parole.

Vivenzio said the man and woman who were victims of the home invasion, along with the 10-year-old daughter, have lost their sanctity in their home. She said this is the type of home invasion the Legislature had in mind when it set the 20 years minimum mandatory sentence for home invasion.

The victims wanted the judge to give Muhammad the 20 year sentence, Vivenzio said.

Muhammad testified he was with other men when the home invasion was planned, even getting a fake police badge and mask, but said he did not participate in the crime. He said police found him in the area near the address where the crime happened because the other men had taken his car and he wanted to get it.

In his closing argument Smith said, I think this case is replete with reasonable doubt.

He said even though Muhammads testimony in some places was inconsistent with a statement he gave to police, testimony of Chicopee police officers was also inconsistent.

Smith said the investigation showed a sloppy handling of evidence.

He said investigators conducted a sham investigation. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Smith said when Muhammad gave his statement to police, the day after he was arrested for the home invasion, he was nervous.

At this point he knows hes in a world of trouble, Smith said.

Vivenzio said Muhammad forced his way into the home as part of a joint venture with other people. After securing the woman victims wrists and holding her at gunpoint, Muhammad pistol whipped the male who came home while the home invasion was in progress, Vivenzio said.

In the struggle with the man, Muhammads gun went off and shot through the ceiling and roof, Vivenzio said.

She said even if the judge were to believe Muhammad was with the other men during the planning but didnt go to the Chicopee home, it is legally insufficient to show he withdrew from the crime in time.

While Smith said the physical evidence doesnt allow a conclusion that Muhammad participated in the crime, Vivenzio said the physical evidence does prove Muhammad broke into the home.On her familys farm, Samya Stumo enjoyed driving the large farm equipment, including the tractor shed use to haul piles of firewood.

Being able to maneuver the large equipment was empowering for Stumo, family recalled.

She wasnt physically large in size, but she could drive a tractor and accomplish as much as anyone else," family members wrote in Stumos obituary. "Such formative experiences shaped her awareness of her own power.

Stumo was one of 157 people who died on March 10 when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed. The 24-year-old was on her way to Kenya for her first assignment with ThinkWell, a non-profit organization working to disrupt the status quo in global health development.

In a touching obituary, family described Stumo as a bright, energetic child who taught herself to read at age 4 and loved raising pigs.

Stumo was born in Farmington, Connecticut. Her family lived in Winsted, Connecticut, until she was 4, and moved to Sheffield - a small town in the Berkshires - in 1998 after the death of her 2-year-old brother, Nels. In Sheffield, Stumo was homeschooled on the family farm.

Samyas innate drive came to the fore during her school career, the obituary read.

Stumo transitioned to public school in eighth grade, then quickly advancing to high school because she was determined to compete on the regional swim team, according to the obituary.

For a year at age 14, Stump attended Mary Baldwin College. She returned to high school where she graduated at 16 after spending her final school year in Peru as part of a Rotary Youth Exchange.

It was an experience that spurred her subsequent interests in anthropology and global healthcare, the obituary read.

At age 17, Stumo started college at UMass Amherst, majoring in anthropology and Spanish.

Friends remember her as an enthusiastic, energetic, and joyous presence on campus, where she was a member of the UMass Pre-Medical Society, Toastmasters, and Campus Kitchen, the obituary continued.

After graduating in 2015, Stumo received a full scholarship to attend the University of Copenhagen Global Health masters program, which she completed last year.

Samya was passionate about revolutionizing global health. She cared most about treating all people and patients as human beings, particularly in the context of their culture, family, and individuality, the obituary read. Samya was infectiously vibrant, intensely curious, and lived her life to the fullest. She had leadership, compassion, and intellectual rigor.

Stumo leaves her parents, Michael Stumo and Nadia Milleron, her brothers, Adnaan and Tor, her grandparents, Charles Stumo and Laura Nader, and her partner, Michael Snavely.

Following a private funeral, Stumos family will hold a memorial reception at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday at the Stumo family farm in Sheffield.Diagnostic technology has been proven as the most effective technology in the field of healthcare and gained significant importance across the globe. Diagnostic technology has resolved many issues such as data errors, complexities, and other outcomes. It is aiming for escalating the volume of molecular insights and translating it into products with high medical significance for physicians and patients.

This intelligence report provides a comprehensive analysis of the Diagnostic Technology Market. This includes investigating past progress, ongoing market scenarios, and future prospects. Accurate data on the products, strategies and market share of leading companies in this particular market are mentioned. This report provides a 360-degree overview of the global markets competitive landscape. The report further predicts the size and valuation of the global market during the forecast period.

Major Key Players in This Report Include,

Roche Diagnostics SpA (Italy),Danaher Corporation (United States),Abbott Laboratories, Inc. (United States),Siemens AG (United States),Sysmex Corporation (Japan),Thermo Fisher Scientific (United States),Becton, Dickinson, and Company (United States),Biomerieux SA (France),Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (France),Johnson & Johnson (United States)

Get Free PDF Sample Pages of Diagnostic Technology Market @ https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/sample-report/81898-global-diagnostic-technology-market

Competitive landscape gives a description of the competitive nature of the market, market shares, and a description of the leading companies. Key financial deals which have shaped the market in the last five years are identified. The trends and strategies section highlights the likely future developments in the market and suggests approaches.

Challenges

Operational Obstacles Faced in Conducting Diagnostic Tests

Changing Regulatory Landscape

On 3 Aug 2018, Sysmex Corporation and JVCKENWOOD Corporation have reached an agreement to jointly establish a new company, Creative Nanosystems Corporation, to develop and manufacture bio devices. These in vitro diagnostic devices will consist of microfluidics to achieve rapid reactions amongst tiny amounts of specimens and reagents. and On 9 March 2018, Danaher Corp., a leading diagnostic technology firm and Integrated DNA Technologies, have announced a definitive agreement to acquire IDT, a privately-held provider of high-value consumables for genomics applications in molecular biology, next-generation sequencing, qPCR, synthetic biology, gene editing and molecular diagnostics.

On the basis of geography, the market of Diagnostic Technology has been segmented into 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). If we see Market by End User, the sub-segment i.e. Hospitals will boost the Diagnostic Technology market. Additionally, the rising demand from SMEs and various industry verticals gives enough cushion to market growth.

Buy this Premium Report @ https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/buy-now?format=1&report=81898

The Diagnostic Technology 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.

Strategic Points Covered in Table of Content of Diagnostic Technology Market:

Chapter 1: Introduction, market driving force product Objective of Study and Research Scope the Diagnostic Technology Market

Chapter 2: Exclusive Summary  the basic information of the Diagnostic Technology Market.

Chapter 3: Displaying the Diagnostic Technology Market Dynamics- Drivers, Trends and Challenges.

Chapter 4: Presenting the Diagnostic Technology 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 Diagnostic Technology 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

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sales@advancemarketanalytics.comGlobal Beauty Device Market: Outlook

Global Beauty Device Market report provides analysis for the forecast period 20182024. The market study reveals that the market is projected to grow with a CAGR over 19.14% during the anticipated period in terms of value. The market is expected to reach over USD 106.314 billion by 2024. The given market growth is influenced by increasing inclination of consumers towards beauty devices which are easy to use at home, launch of innovative products and increasing utilization of electronic beauty devices. Moreover, consumers increasing dependency on electronic products will significantly drive the electronic beauty devices over the forecast period.

The market overview section of the report demonstrates market dynamics such as trends, drivers, restraints, and opportunities that talks about the current nature and future scenario of the said market, key market indicators, end-user adoption analysis. Further, key market indicators included in the report provide the significant factors which are capable to define the market position of global beauty device product.

Global Beauty Device Market: Scope of the Report

On the basis on the type of products, the global beauty device market is segmented into hair removal devices, cleansing devices, acne devices, light/LED therapy and photo rejuvenation devices, oxygen & steamer devices, hair growth devices, skin dermal rollers, cellulite reduction devices, and others. Based on application, the beauty devices market is segmented into salon, spa, at home and others. Finally, the report covers the analysis of these segments across based North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World along with the qualitative analysis for market estimates that boosts the growth of the global beauty device market during the forecast period. Among different regions, the largest market is North America, while the fastest growing market for the Beauty Device is Asia-Pacific. The report also highlights the competitive landscape of the global beauty device market that includes the company overview, the products & offerings, strategic decisions taken by the company, launch of new products and financial highlights.

Global Beauty Device Market: Key Stakeholders

Beauty devices manufacturing companies

Suppliers and distributors of beauty devices

Hospitals, surgical centres, cosmetic clinics, retailers and consumers

Market research and consulting firms

Government bodies and municipal corporations

Global Beauty Device Market: Key Findings of the Report

According to BlueWeave Consulting, the key findings of the report Global Beauty Device Market Size, Share, Development, Growth and Demand Forecast to 2024 are:

North America led the global beauty devices market, over a 51.9% contribution to the global market in 2017. The North American beauty devices market was valued over USD 16,225.3 million in 2017 and is expected to grow with a CAGR over 18.82% during the forecast period 2018-2024

Based on type of product, Hair removal devices generated significant revenue in 2017 and it is expected to exhibit strong growth during the period 2018  2024

Salon hold major share in the global beauty device application market in 2017 and it is expected to grow with a CAGR over 19.06 % during the projected period

Based on application, SPA segment generated largest revenue in the global beauty Device market in 2017 and it is expected to exhibit the fastest growth during the period 2018  2024

Among the different types of beauty devices, Light/LED therapy and photorejuvenation devices market is expected to witness the fastest growth, with a CAGR over 21.1% during the forecast period and is expected to reach over USD 16,784 million by 2024

Request Free Sample Report at https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3819140-global-beauty-device-market-by-type-hair-removal

Global Beauty Device Market: Research Methodology

The research was conducted covering the desk research and primary research. Extensive secondary research was conducted using paid data sources, including Bloomberg, Factiva, OneSource, and Hoovers. Additionally, several publicly-available data sources were used, including American Geriatrics Society (AGS), Bureau of Labour Statistics (BEA), Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), The World Bank, and various journals. These data sources were used to gather industry related information to develop an understanding of beauty devices. Data sources used for primary research included, but were not limited to, distributors, manufacturers, physicians, cosmetic surgeons, store managers, suppliers and various salon and spa owners. Additionally, interviews were conducted through connecting with various industry respondents including C-level executives, directors, divisional heads, regional heads, expert consultants, and independent consultants. The primary research was conducted to gain market insights from industry respondents and validate the gathered information through desk research.

Global Beauty Device Product Market: Research Summary

The global beauty device market is growing at a significant rate due to the increased utilization of electronic products for enhancing beauty and treating beauty related problems. Various beauty devices manufactured to meet the need of self-grooming population will accelerate the market growth over the forecast period. Beauty devices can help to treat skin diseases and minimizing the effect of ultraviolet radiation. However, prevailing traditional and cheap beauty products may impact market growth. United States was the largest country for global beauty device market, which holds significant market share in 2017 and is expected to continue being the largest market during the forecast period.

The demand for beauty device is expected to grow at a faster rate owing to shift in consumer preferences toward the need to improve appearance and confidence during the anticipated time frame. Asia Pacific is likely to witness significant growth in terms of revenue. Countries such as India, South Korea, China, Japan, Thailand, etc. will significantly contribute to the global beauty device market.

Global Beauty Device Product Market: Competitive Dynamics

The global beauty device product market is dominated by a number of players, amongst them the prominent players are Panasonic Corporation, Lumenis Ltd, Nu Skin Enterprises Inc, TRIA Beauty Inc, Home Skinovations Ltd, The Procter & Gamble Company, Koninklijke Philips N.V., YA-MAN LTD, MTG Co. Ltd, Carol Cole Company, LOreal SA, etc.

Table of Content

Chapter 1. Research Background

Chapter 2. Research Methodology

Chapter 3. Executive Summary

Chapter 4. Introduction

Chapter 5. Market Size and Forecast by Type

Chapter 6. Market Size and Forecast by Application

Chapter 7. Global Beauty Devices Market, by Geography

Chapter 8. Competitive Analysis

Chapter 9. Company Profiles and Strategic Developments

About Us:

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.

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Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)by Wayne Friedman , March 20, 2019

Viacoms stock closed sharply down on Wednesday after issuing a warning that its networks could be dropped from DirecTV this Friday.

Viacom, which owns MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, was down 5.5% to $26.01. It has accused AT&T, which owns DirecTV, of unfair marketplace leverage after buying Time Warner.

The company stated: AT&T is abusing its new market position by favoring its own content  which significantly under-performs Viacoms  to stifle competition. AT&T-DirecTVs behavior is also consistent with a recent pattern of gouging their customers by charging them higher prices for an inferior product with fewer channels.

According to MoffettNathanson Research, in January, Viacom amassed an average 2.05 million prime-time 18-49 viewers in Nielsens C3 metric -- the average commercial-minute rating plus three days of time-shifted viewing. This was down 15% from the same month in 2018.

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By comparison, AT&Ts WarnerMedia networks were collectively down 21% to 1.88 million 18-49 Nielsen C3 viewers.

DirecTV is the second-biggest U.S. pay TV provider with 20 million subscribers; Comcast Corp. is the biggest with 22 million.

Analysts have been wary of Viacom and other cable TV network-focused companies such as Discovery Inc. and AMC Networks when it comes to declining cable subscribers. Overall, cable TV networks continue to see average annual subscriber reductions of 2% to 3% over the last few years.

For its part, Viacom says it has renewed its network pay TV distribution deals in more than half its subscriber base over the last two years.

Analysts also worry about lower prospects from new virtual pay TV providers pursuing low-cost skinny bundles of live, linear TV networks. Many big legacy cable TV companies have 10 to 15 or more networks in their group rosters.by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 22, 2019

Our modern world looks none too pretty in the new crime drama called The Fix on ABC.

This series, which premiered last Monday, presents a fictionalized version of the O.J. Simpson murder case and imagines what would happen if the case were to play out today instead of in the pre-social media 90s.

In The Fix, social media takes center stage as an unscrupulous and ruthless defense attorney employs a modern-day public relations guru to try and gin up support on social media for this show's version of O.J. -- a fictional, aging Hollywood movie actor named Sevvy Johnson (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).

As in the real Simpson case, this fictional movie star was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and her friend, in this case a female friend. In The Fix, this acquittal took place in 2010 -- eight years before The Fix is supposed to take place in the present day (the show was produced principally last year, in 2018).

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Now, he is back in the news after his current girlfriend turns up dead and he is once again a prime suspect.

This development brings back the female prosecutor in the first case -- a woman named Maya Travis (Robin Tunney) -- who took an eight-year sabbatical from work in the aftermath of the 2010 trial, in which she was vilified in the news media.

Tunney is pretty obviously playing a fictionalized version of Marcia Clark here -- the famed lawyer who was one of the L.A. prosecutors on the losing side of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial.

And since Clark is an executive producer of this series, and seems to have had a hand in creating it, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Clark has engineered a way, with ABC's help, to perhaps retry O.J., at least fictionally, and get a better outcome such as a guilty verdict.

The question of whether this will happen eventually cannot at all by answered by the first two episodes of The Fix. At this point early in the series, it is far from certain that this fictional O.J. even committed this new murder.

However, he is already being tried in the court of public opinion, and so is his prosecutor. She seeks closure and redemption. He seeks to be acquitted again, especially since he insists he didn't do it.

When the real O.J. criminal trial was going on, followed by the civil trial some time later, the proceedings were cited then (and continue to be cited) as one of the first real examples of how the outcome of a well-publicized trial can be affected or manipulated in the context of the then-new 24-hour news cycle, represented by the nascent cable news channels and Court TV.

The Fix tries to demonstrate that that was nothing compared to the news cycle we live in today, in which actual news -- i.e., facts -- is obscured by a cacophony of commentary both in the news media and on social media.

In The Fix, defense attorney Ezra Wolf (Scott Cohen) stages various stunts in which he appears live on social media to poke holes in the police investigation and try and steer their attention away from his client onto someone else.

When he goes too far with one of these stunts, he feels an unfamiliar emotion -- remorse. But his PR manager sets him straight. Says the PR man: We're people of our time, and it's a terrible time. In other words: Don't sweat it. This is the world we live in.

The Fix is nothing if not cynical. In fact, it may be the most cynical drama series on network TV this season.by Sarah Mahoney @mahoney_sarah, March 21, 2019

As evidence emerges that competitors are closing in on Amazon faster than expected, the ecommerce giant is launching Belei, its first dedicated skincare line.

The beauty industry has been chewing its fingernails over what the expected Amazon incursion may mean for other brands. And earlier this year, Amazon launched a makeup brand called Find, available in the U.K.

The 12 Belei products, which include moisturizers, masques, serums and eye cream, are priced between $9 and $40. Featuring some of the buzziest ingredients  peptides, retinol, Vitamin C  they seem competitive not just with drugstore brands like Neutrogena, ROC and Olay, but higher-end lines as well. And they bump right up against Glossier, currently the hottest online beauty name.

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Amazon says Belei is free of parabens, phthalates, sulfates and fragrances, that bottles are made of post-consumer recycled resin and that its packaging is fully recyclable. Products were not tested on animals.

Our goal is to help customers spend less time and money searching for the right skincare solutions, said Kara Trousdale, head of Amazons beauty for private brands, in a statement. We took a simple, no-nonsense approach, developing products with ingredients that are both proven to deliver results and also offer customers great value for the quality.

Amazons reach and dominance are still massive. But it appears other retailers, including Kroger and Walmart, are doing better in the battle against Amazon that many might think, as their own CPG ecommerce operations strengthen. New research from Nielsen, powered by Rakuten Intelligence, shows Amazons dominance in digital sales of CPG products is slipping.

Walmart, Kroger and Target have all increased their online customer base by at least 90% more than Amazon in the past two years. Nielsen says the gains are coming from effective click-and-carry models, which increased from 4% to 11% of all CPG ecommerce sales in the two-year period. And online CPG sales have gained 30% year over year, with 60% of shoppers browsing and ordering online. Some 28% have purchased CPG online a few times per month.

Growth is a bit slower in the beauty business, with Internet Retailer reporting an annual category gain of almost 24% and $5 billion in sales.

While the online beauty business is also a key focus for retailers like Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid and specialty chains Sephora and Ulta, some beauty brands are soaring with direct-to-consumer offers.

Forbes recently named Kylie Jenner, owner of Kylie Cosmetics, the worlds youngest self-made billionaire. And Glossier, for example, just announced another $100 million in funding, pushing its market valuation past $1 billion.by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, March 21, 2019

Facebook, Google and other tech giants may soon have to disclose otherwise secret details of their data handling practices to the Federal Trade Commission, Chairman Joseph Simons recently told the Senate.

I agree with you that the FTCs section 6(b) authority could be used to provide some much needed transparency to consumers about the data practices of large technology companies, Simons said in a recent letter to Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota), referring to a provision in the FTC Act that allows the agency to subpoena private business information. We are developing plans to issue 6(b) orders in the technology area.

The advocacy group Public Knowledge quickly cheered news of the planned investigation, adding that the results could shape new laws.

A study is no substitute for strong enforcement, but a 6(b) study, which allows the agency to compel production of documents, can lead to enforcement and can build a record for new legislation if needed, Charlotte Slaiman, policy counsel at Public Knowledge, stated. We hope the agency will focus on the ways that data practices can further entrench incumbent firms and make it more difficult for newer or smaller firms to compete effectively.

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Word of the impending investigation comes a little more than one year after news broke that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested information from millions of Facebook users. Since then, there's been a steady stream of reports detailing questionable privacy practices by tech companies.

Among other examples, The Associated Press reported last October that Google stores location data gleaned from some services -- including search and maps -- even when people turn off the "Location History" setting. People who want to prevent Google from storing any location data must turn off a separate setting -- "Web and App Activity."

In December, The New York Timesreported that Facebook shared unsuspecting users' data with partners like Microsoft, Amazon and Spotify. And earlier this year it emerged that Facebook distributed a research app to teens that scooped up a trove of data -- including the sites they visited, their locations and phone use.

And those are only some of the known practices. A full investigation may well uncover yet more examples of problematic approaches to privacy, adding further fuel to calls for new laws.by Steve McClellan @mp_mcclellan, March 22, 2019

The Martin Agency has tapped competing shops for talent to bulk up its own management team in the wake of a string of new business wins, including Buffalo Wild Wings and UPS.

Jordan Muse has been hired as senior vice president, group account director for the UPS business. He joins from Wieden+Kennedy New York, where he spent the last four years leading the Sprite, Jordan Brand and Vitaminwater brand. Muse also worked on the Nike and Old Spice The Man Your Man Could Smell Like teams.

Lance Koenig has been named senior vice president, global group strategy director and will lead strategy work for UPS and Mondelez.

Koenig joins from Forsman & Bodenfors in Toronto, where he was the Chief Strategy Officer for the agency Canadian region. He previously held global strategy leadership positions with Leo Burnett Chicago, DDB Chicago and MullenLowe Boston.

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Stephanie Jones has been named account director on TMAs Mondelez team. She joins from VMLY&R Chicago, where she worked on Kraft Heinz business leading social campaigns, such as Heinzs Twitter Mayochup launch and Kraft Mac & Cheeses Fork vs. Spoon. Prior to Kraft Heinz, she worked across Bomb Pop, Tyson, Tazo, and was a founding member of VMLs Inclusion and Diversity Council.

Filip Williander has been appointed creative technology director and will work with various creative and design teams at Martin. He joins from BBDO New York, where he worked on Bacardi, FedEx, AT&T, GE, and Lowes. Prior to that, he founded a digital agency called Pretty Handsome Nerds.by Alex Weprin , March 22, 2019



The cloud-based content creation platform Ceros announced version 6.0 of its Ceros Studio platform at an event in New York City Thursday evening.

Ceros Studio is used by marketers and editorial outlets to create interactive, cloud-based content. The companys clients include Vice, United Airlines, Conde Nast, McKinsey, and the Dallas Cowboys.

The company raised $14 million in a series C funding round earlier this year; it has raised more than $30 million since launching in 2013.

The updated studio product will include adaptive layouts, image editing, expanded animations, offline viewing and a desktop application. It also includes a full integration with Getty Images, bringing thousands of videos and photos to users of the service.

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The company will update its education and inspiration products, which help users create better and more tailored content, as well as expanded editorial content produced under the Ceros Originals brand.

Ceros cofounder-CEO Simon Berg told attendees the companys goal was to bridge the divide between the physical world and the digital content world by enabling marketers to create digital content as engaging as offline experiences can be.

The company used its event, which it dubbed Experience Matters, to create multiple experiences underscoring the difference between engaging content and poor-quality content.

Attendees entered the event either on a red carpet (the good entrance), with champagne being poured into their glasses, or through a kitchen (the bad entrance), with drinks placed on a folding table in red plastic cups.

The company also created a faux DMV at the event, representing the Department of Mediocre Content, as well as a sleek nightclub, which represented high-quality content.by Ray Schultz , March 22, 2019

Mailchimp has killed its integration with Shopify over concerns regarding data security, the firm announced on Friday.

In an online post, Mailchimp says: Yesterday, we asked Shopify to remove the Mailchimp for Shopify integration from their marketplace.

The post cites updated terms on the part of Shopify that would negatively impact our business and put our users at risk.

Mailchimp has asked Shopify to leave the integration in place for existing connected users through May 12, when the data sharing provisions of Shopifys new terms take effect.

The move reflects apparent frustration over the new terms.

For months, weve been trying to work with Shopify on terms that would be fair and equitable for both of our businesses, Mailchimp states.

It adds: Throughout these negotiations, we refused to agree to terms that jeopardize our users privacy and require us to hand over customer data acquired outside of Shopify. From our perspective, that's not our data to share.

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Shopify responds in a post: Over the past 18 months, Shopify has had growing concerns about Mailchimps app because of the poor merchant experience and their refusal to respect our Partner Program Agreement. Our terms require app partners to share all important data back to the merchant using Shopifys API to help them run their businesses.

But Mailchimp charges that the new terms make it clear that Shopify wants to control which providers their partners work with and how they conduct their business.

It continues: We believe small businesses are best served when they can choose which technology they use to run their businesses, which is why Mailchimp integrates with more than 150 different apps and platforms. We won't compromise on that just because Shopify sees it as a competitive threat.

Shopify argues: Its critical for our merchants to have accurate, complete insight into their businesses and customers, and this isnt possible when Mailchimp locks in their data. Specifically, Mailchimp refuses to synchronize customer information captured on merchants online stores and email opt-out preferences. As a result, our merchants, other apps, and partner ecosystem cant reliably serve their customers or comply with privacy legislation.

In addition, Shopify states: Effective today, the Mailchimp app is no longer available in the Shopify App Store. There are no immediate changes for merchants currently using Mailchimp, and we offer many other incredible email marketing apps."

Once known mainly as an email service vendor, Mailchimp has evolved into an omnichannel provider.by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, March 22, 2019

Netflix is asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the interactive show Black Mirror: Bandersnatch infringes the trademark of Chooseco, which publishes the Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Netflix argues in court papers filed Thursday that its show is protected by free speech principles, and that the program doesn't dupe viewers into believing there's an association between itself and Chooseco.

There is no plausible case of consumer confusion, Netflix argues in court papers filed with U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions III in Burlington, Vermont. Nor is there anything in Bandersnatch that could support a plausible theory of consumer confusion. The films opening credits and its marketing both prominently display Netflixs own trademark and identify the film as a part of Netflixs well-known Black Mirror anthology -- including in the title of the film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

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The company's papers come in response to a lawsuit filed earlier this year by Chooseco, which alleged that Netflix drew on the Choose Your Own Adventure books to benefit from nostalgia for the series.

Netflix's interactive show featured a character who referred to a fictional book, Bandersnatch, which he described as a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Books in that children's series -- popular in the 1980s and 1990s -- allow readers to decide the outcome of the story.

Netflix argues in its new papers that the use of the phrase choose your own adventure is legal, given the context.

A party does not have the right to prevent its trademark from being used to evoke nostalgia or situate a narrative within a particular time and place, Netflix writes. Because the use at issue does not identify the source of the film or the streaming service, and is instead used within the film 'to entertain' or 'to comment and entertain,' it is protected.

Netflix also says that fair use principles allow the company to use the phrase choose your own adventure to describe the show's format.

Chooseco cannot -- under any legal theory -- prevent Netflix from referring to a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' book in a descriptive sense -- in other words, to describe the branching storytelling technique used in the fictitious book 'Bandersnatch,' the video company writes.by Sarah Mahoney @mahoney_sarah, March 22, 2019





Nike, which just reported sales results that disappointed observers, says investment in its direct-to-consumer push continues to pay off all around the globe.

Revenues rose 7% to $9.6 billion in the fiscal third quarter, with sales from the Nike brand coming in at $9.1 billion, while sales from Nike Direct initiatives saw double-digit gains in both apparel and footwear.

And while sales in North America also rose 7%, to $3.81 billion, some analysts had expected it to do better. And it didnt help that sales at its Converse brand fell 2%.

Net income topped expectations, rising to $1.1 billion, compared to the $921 million loss the company took in the year-ago period.

In a conference call, CEO Mike Parker also outlined progress the Beaverton, Ore.-based company is making in its Consumer Direct Offense, the realignment it announced back in 2017 to sell more products directly to customers, bypassing other retailers.

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Parker said. the company achieved its first-ever billion dollar quarter in digital sales, up 36% in the quarter. And Nike is introducing an advanced algorithm in its apps, making membership in the Nike + community more rewarding, and creating an ever-more-seamless bridge from physical shopping to digital efforts.

In our House of Innovation stores in New York and Shanghai, over 50% of transactions are with [Nike +] members, he says, with members of the longtime loyalty rewards/training community spending 40% more than nonmembers in its wider fleet.

The SNKRS content/ecommerce app continues to deliver, too, with traffic and revenue up in the triple digits, and 17 of the top 20 SNKRS launches reaching a 100% sell-through. During the introduction of the Air Jordan 11 Concord launch, the app processed 300 transactions per second, Parker said.

Separately, the company has been hit with another discrimination suit, according to the Portland Business Journal, this one alleging racial discrimination. The company is already fending off actions stemming from alleged widespread sexual harassment and gender discrimination in its executive ranks. Those include lawsuits from former employees, as well as investors objecting to the companys toxic boys club culture.ORANGE, Calif.

March 22, 2019

Chapman University

Uri Maoz

$7.04 million

$5.34 million

$1.55 million

$150,000

Berlin

Germany

Dartmouth

Duke

Florida State University

Harvard

Indiana University Bloomington

Australia

NYU

Sweden

Tel Aviv University

Israel

University of Edinburgh

UCLA

Yale

Crean College

Chapman University

Chapman University

Daniele Struppa

Chapman University

Uri Maoz

Chapman University

Aaron Schurger

Amir Raz

Chapman University

Janeen Hill

Crean College

Chapman University

Crean College's

Glenn Pfeiffer

Chapman University

Chapman University

Thomas Piechota

Chapman University

Irvine

Orange

John Churchill

Chapman University

Mohammed Mohammed

John Templeton

$3.4 billion

$129 million

the United States

Philadelphia, PA

Kalamazoo, Michigan

John E. Fetzer

Chapman University

Chapman University

California's

City of Orange, California

Orange County's

Chapman University

/PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The newly-minted Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Science (The Brain Institute) at, with Dr.as project leader, is the recipient of a total ofto study how the human brain enables conscious control of decisions and actions. The John Templeton Foundation funded; the Fetzer Institute funded; and the remainingcomes from the Fetzer Memorial Trust. This is Chapman's largest non-federal research grant to date. With the Chapman Brain Institute serving as the central hub, this grant supports research efforts at 17 universities spanning four continents, including Charite),, NIH, Monash University (),, Sigtuna (),), University College London (UK),(UK),and. The project launched at an international conference on the Neuroscience of Free Will that the Brain Institute andof Health and Behavioral Sciences athosted in mid-March."We were pleased to establish Chapman's Brain Institute and to bring the faculty associated with it tolast year," said, Ph.D.,president. "Their approach to research reflects Chapman's goal of combining research with teaching and involving undergraduate and graduate students at all levels in the process. We are grateful for this grant from the Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute, which recognizes Chapman as a leader in this developing field.""This grant aims to create a new field in the study of the brainthe neurophilosphy of free will," said, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology and computational neuroscience at. "The extent and scope of human free will has been debated by philosophers for millennia. In recent decades, neuroscientists have joined the discussion, leading to some interesting discoveries. The current project, however, represents a four-year effort forging structured, close collaborations on these questions between eight neuroscientists (including Dr., assistant professor of psychology, the latest faculty recruit to the Brain Institute at Chapman) and nine philosophers from around the world. Hopefully, in 10 years we will look back at the grant and say that's where it all started," said Dr. Maoz."This large-scale investment, by the John Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute, comes to the Brain Institute even before its official launch next month," said, Ph.D.,professor of psychology and brain sciences and director of the Brain Institute. "Work at the Brain Institute addresses fundamental questions of human experience: do we have free will? Are we, in fact, free to do what we wish? What is the role of consciousness in our decisions? We are grateful for the opportunities the combined grant offers as well as the testament it provides to confidence in our work.""The Templeton Foundation and Fetzer Institute grant acknowledge that consequential, complex questions find answers only when approached through the lenses of multiple disciplines and their research techniques," said, Ph.D., dean of. "andcommitment to brain science and its inherent interdisciplinarity is reinforced by the significance of this combined grant."Entitled "Consciousness and Free Will: A Joint Neuroscientific-Philosophical Investigation," the grant aims to advance efforts in the neurophilosphy of free will. For example, researchers at the Brain Institute and their collaborators will use advanced analysis techniques of brain activity and strive to decode decisions and actions before they take place. Or they will use various techniques to compare human brain activity when people make arbitrary decisions (e.g., when asked to randomly raise their left or right hand) and deliberate ones (e.g., when asked to raise their left or right hand to donate to one charity or another)."This grant, placing Chapman as a leader in neuroscience, reflects our deepening commitment to research and to academic excellence," said, Ph.D., provost of. "This announcement comes soon after the recent elevation ofto Carnegie Classification R2, signifying 'high research activity.' We have never been stronger as a research institution than we are right now.""In fact," said, Ph.D., PE, vice president of research, "this is an opportune time to partner with. The research being conducted by the Brain Institute and throughout Chapman is exciting and innovative. Our faculty are exemplary researchers and the involvement of students of every level  including first-year undergraduates  is a fundamental part of the personalized education that we offer."Hosted at the Rinker Health Science campus in, as well as on thecampus, the Brain Institute comprises a network of interdisciplinary researchers who conduct empirical investigations into the cognitive neuroscience of altered planes of consciousness, neuropsychology, volition, formal models of higher brain functions among other fields. Our work draws on clinical populations, healthy volunteers, and innovations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data."Questions about consciousness and free will are of enduring interest in both philosophy and the sciences. This project will feature field-leading researchers on these two topics, using rigorous and collaborative methods to advance our understanding of both of them. It is therefore a perfect fit for the John Templeton Foundation, and we are pleased to support Chapman in this initiative," said, director of philosophy and theology programs at the John Templeton Foundation."We are drawn to this work because of its cutting-edge exploration of free will, the breadth of the research efforthas developed, and the scale of this major funding collaboration with Templeton," said, Fetzer Institute program director of research, discovery, and development. "We are excited about this venture into the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience."About the John Templeton Foundation Founded in 1987, the John Templeton Foundation supports efforts to advance human well-being through rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. Its founding benefactor, the late Sir, held the conviction that rigorous scientific research could reveal ever-deeper truths about the universe and humanity's place within it.With overin assets and annual grants ofin 2017, it ranks among the 25th largest grantmaking foundations in. Headquartered outside, the Foundation's philanthropic activities have engaged all major faith traditions and extend to 35 countries around the world. The Foundation is dedicated to the ideals of humility, open-mindedness, and curiosity.About the Fetzer Institute The Fetzer Institute is a nonprofit, private operating foundation based in. Established by broadcast pioneer(1901-1991), the Institute uses its philanthropic resources to advance programs that help build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Its current priorities include understanding spiritual formation at the individual and community levels, healing the heart of democracy, and exploring the intersection of science and spirituality. Learn more at fetzer.org.Aboutisthird largest private university and ranks fifth in the U.S. News & World Report listing of Best Regional Universities in the West. Chapman is categorized by the Carnegie Classification as an R2 "high research activity" institution and offers personalized education to more than 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Chapman strives for diversity and inclusion by recruiting and supporting students representing a variety of backgrounds, experiences, learning styles and unique talents. The campus has produced a Rhodes Scholar, been named a top producer of Fulbright Scholars and hosts a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's oldest and most prestigious honor society. Founded in 1861 and based in the, Chapman also includes the Harry and Diane Rinker Health Science Campus, 21 miles south, in the Irvine Spectrum,technology hub. In 2020, the university will open its 11th college, the Fowler School of Engineering in its newest facility, Keck Center for Science and Engineering.SOURCEHave you ever been on Twitter and accidentally liked a tweet while scrolling? Yep, almost every single person has done that, it just happens sometimes. But nope, if a celebrity makes that mistake - that too with the most stupid tweet ever - they have to be crucified. People aren't allowed to make a mistake now, especially when you're in the public eye.

That's why as soon as someone spotted Karan Johar liking a tweet on the social media website which was praising Akshay Kumar and his new movie 'Kesari', while also simultaneously abusing Shah Rukh Khan, the hashtag #ShameOnKaranJohar starting making the rounds.

' @iamsrk it's high time you should know that you have been keeping Snake on your Neck. This ungrateful @karanjohar can stoop low for money and fame. If he doesn't apologize publicly, we will trend day and night against him and fill his mention with abuses.#ShameOnKaranJohar pic.twitter.com/mSlJ0OKyvm  BRK. (@iamsrk_brk) March 22, 2019

I can't help but laugh at this, this is so extra.

SRK @iamsrk Almost Took A Bullet From Underworld Don Abu Salem For @karanjohar in 1998.



HE Said : "I'm standing here in front of you, lets see who shoots you , I'm standing right here"#ShameOnKaranJohar for liking abusive tweets against SRK. https://t.co/ieBocIcYLQ  RahuL Choudhury (@Rahul_SRKians) March 22, 2019

Then KJo of course came out to apologise for the technical problems.

Guys having a technical problem with my twitter account! Strange things are going on!from uploading shoe picture and gibberish to liking tweets I haven't even read and would NEVER even acknowledge! Please bear with me and I apologise for any inconvenience! Sorting it out asap!  Karan Johar (@karanjohar) March 22, 2019

Good tweet, KJo.

Aaj twitter pe thodi gadbad ho gayi but baaki sab #firstclass hai.   Karan Johar (@karanjohar) March 22, 2019

But, the best tweet came from the man himself. SRK hates 'SM clarifications' but had to defend his bestie so his fans could stop abusing Karan. And, I couldn't stop laughing when I read this tweet, it's the most SRK tweet ever, tbh.

I hate clarifications on SM. @karanjohar is technologically challenged but has other good qualities like his taste in clothes!?Just like Life, twitter doesn't come with instructions, so mistakes r natural....& also he has fat fingers. Go easy all, Make Lov not War...it's more fun  Shah Rukh Khan (@iamsrk) March 22, 2019

Everything that can be said about King Khan and his famous wit has been said before but the fat fingers comment had me DED. The king of wits, indeed.Emila Clarke aka 'the Mother of Dragons' is a brilliant actress but sometimes, actors draw inspiration from their real-life journey to ensure the strong portrayal of their on-screen character. Emilia Clarke, turns out, is a true warrior in real-life as well.

The 'GOT' actress recently opened up about her insane struggle fighting two life-threatening brain surgeries right after the first season closed back in 2011.

Speaking about how it began and what actually happened, she explained in detail, It was in 2011 after the filming of the first season of GoT. The publication quoted Emilia saying, At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged. For a few moments, I tried to will away the pain and nausea. She was only 24 then and was desperate to give up on life. "In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug. I asked the medical staff to let me die.

As an actor, everything changed for her and life felt like a big question mark after her first major surgery. I'd never experienced fear like that  a sense of doom closing in. I could see my life ahead, and it wasn't worth living. I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn't recall my name. For a few moments, I tried to will away the pain and the nausea. I said to myself, I will not be paralyzed. I moved my fingers and toes to make sure that was true. To keep my memory alive, I tried to recall, among other things, some lines from Game of Thrones.

The struggle continued when she had to undergo another surgery and her struggle resumed. I emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head. Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium. These days, you can't see the scar that curves from my scalp to my ear, but I didn't know at first that it wouldn't be visible. And there was, above all, the constant worry about cognitive or sensory losses. Would it be concentration? Memory? Peripheral vision? Now I tell people that what it robbed me of is good taste in men. But, of course, none of this seemed remotely funny at the time.

Who knew that a human, who takes up the task of entertaining people with her job, is undergoing and enduring so much pain in her life off-camera. This story proves that Emilia is a real-life warrior, a true 'Khaleesi' in the real sense!We unequivocally condemn the attack that took place today in the courtyard area of the Consular Office of the Russian Embassy in Athens, resulting in material damages.

The traditional and centuries-old excellent relations of friendship and cooperation with Russia are not going to be affected by such illegal and fully condemnable actions.

The competent Greek authorities are taking all necessary action to investigate the incident and to bring those responsible to justice.Hong Kong: Youth Devt Commission meets

The fourth meeting of the Youth Development Commission chaired by Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung today agreed to implement three cross-bureau collaborative initiatives on youth life planning work.

The initiatives are the formulation of strategies on life planning education at school, upgrading the Education Bureaus career information website and developing it into a one-stop interactive platform, as well as enhancing the Funding Scheme for Youth Life Planning Activities.

The committee also took note of the IT Innovation Lab in Secondary Schools Programme under which $500 million is proposed to be spent in the next three school years to provide financial support for 500 publicly funded schools to set up laboratories.

A one-stop support centre will also be set up to provide advice and support on the procurement of IT equipment and various thematic extracurricular activities for schools.

The Youth Development Commission's three task forces have also made considerable progress in their work.

Of them, the Task Force on Youth Exchange & Internship has enhanced the Funding Scheme for Youth Internship in the Mainland, the Funding Scheme for Youth Exchange in the Mainland and the Funding Scheme for International Youth Exchange.

The three funding schemes have received a record number of applications, at 185, 459 and 179 applications respectively.

Meanwhile, the Youth Development Fund has completed a review and decided to launch new funding schemes to provide more support to young people planning to start their own business.

These funding schemes are open for applications.

Click here for details.

This story has been published on: 2019-03-22. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  The U.S. Catholic Church is setting up a fund to compensate around 50 altar boys from Biliran province who were allegedly sexually abused by Father Kenneth Bernard Pius Hendricks.

"A fund to compensate sexual abuse victims by Hendricks is being set up by the US Catholic Church. I am here to gather information and the jury will have to decide on the amount," lawyer McDonald Worley said.

Worley said the civil case for damages filed by families of Hendrick's alleged victims is separate from the criminal charges he is facing.

The lawyer, who heads a U.S. law firm specializing in personal injury cases, was in the country this week to visit Hendrick's alleged victims and their families in Biliran.

Hendricks has been charged in an Ohio federal court for illegal sexual conduct in a foreign place. This has prompted Philippines authorities to arrest him in Biliran.

The Bureau of Immigration said it will be deporting the Catholic priest from the country. Hendricks has been staying in the Philippines for nearly 40 years.

Leyte-based journalist Wil Mark Amazona contributed to this report.LANSING  A bill aimed at requiring more helpful information in notices published in foreclosure sales is making its way through Michigan legislature.

House Bill 4306, sponsored by Representative Triston Cole, R-Antrim County, would revise foreclosure notice language by amending Section 3212 of the Revised Judicature Act to expand public notice for mortgage foreclosure sales to assist all affected parties in making informed decisions.

Proponents HB 4306 say there has been a long-standing practice in the industry to include non-statutory language to assist borrowers, lenders and the public. The bill provides requirements for the content of notices published in foreclosure sales.

The legislation requires more notice information that would be helpful to borrowers, including information about assistance programs. It is also intended to help homeowners by fostering higher bids.

Recent lawsuits claim notices violate the Federal Fair Debt Collection Act when the notices include non-statutory language, even if the language is helpful to consumers.

Prior to the lawsuits, notices included information on how a borrower could contact the lender and attorney representing the lender and information for borrowers in active military service who have specific statutory rights to stop the foreclosure under current law.

Following the litigation, the language was deleted.

Consistent with prior practice and other state and federal laws, the proposed amendments in the bill include the following additional notice requirements:

 Information on how a borrower can contact the lender and attorney representing the lender.

 Information for borrowers in active military service.

 Information on how the borrower can reference the Michigan State Housing Development Authoritys website for information about local resources.

 Street address of the property.

 Information about auction sales and bidding process, including closing time.

HB 4306 was part of legislation that passed both houses of the Legislature last session, but it was vetoed by the governor for reasons related to other provisions in the legislation. There was no testimony in opposition to the bill in the Legislature last session.GREENLEAF TOWNSHIP  Greenleaf Township officials have agreed to still meet for board meetings, but just not as often.

There hasnt been much going on so we changed how often we meet, said township Clerk Judy Keller. The meetings have mostly centered on paying bills. Altogether, the meetings have been lasting about 20 minutes, so we went to meeting every other month in January.

In recent years, Greenleaf Township meetings have been a hotbed of controversy over a variety of issues such as alleged violations of the states Open Meetings Act, alleged assaults, and the new township hall that was bought in 2016.

Its been status quo for a while now, and thats good, said township Supervisor Bob Delong about meetings. We still have one lawsuit hanging out there.

That lawsuit was initiated against the township clerk Judy Keller, against her personally, and against the township by Grant Toner in Sanilac County. He alleges violations of the states Open Meetings Act at a meeting on July 19, 2018.

Delong noted Greenleaf is not the only township being sued, and suing is getting to be a trend.

There are 35 to 40 lawsuits against government bodies all for alleged violations of the Open Meetings Act, said Delong, noting there are a lot of rules and regulations governing meetings. Not doing a roll call vote for a closed session is an oversight.

While Toners lawsuit is still pending in Sanilac County, a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Detroit filed by Township residents Christina Gibbard and Shelly Cook has been settled. They claimed assault and battery, violations of the Michigan Open Meetings Act, violations of the Freedom of Information Act, and violations of free speech under the First Amendment against Clerk Judy Keller and her husband, Dave, against Trustees Ken Brown and Randy Schuette; and Treasurer Rosie Quinn from an Oct. 18 2016 meeting.

Jurors denied the claims of: First Amendment violation filed against Keller and Quinn; Cooks claim of First Amendment violation against Keller; Cooks claim of Open Meeting violations against Schuette and Keller; and Gibbard and Cooks claims of assault by Judy and Dave Keller.

Jurors upheld claims of battery/physical harm against both Kellers. For that, the court awarded Gibbard $750 in injury compensation against each Keller, and also awarded Cook injury compensation of $1,000 against each of the Kellers.

However the jury decided against Gibbard and Cooks claims of violation of First Amendment Rights.

Jurors also upheld Gibbards claim of Open Meetings Act violations against Schuette and Keller, and award $250 in damages against both defendants.

Another area of contention that still remains in the township is the purchase of a new hall and relocation from the former township hall on Gilbert Road that was built in 1900.

There are still some that dont agree with the purchase of our new town hall. We had the money and it turned into a good investment for the township. It was a wise investment because we needed a new hall, said Delong. It has offices, a conference room, safe to keep township documents in instead of them being kept in homes.

He also noted the new hall at 6435 Bay City Forestville Road, Cass City, is making the township money.

We lease part of the hall to Agri-Valley Communications/Thumb Cellular for $36,000 a year. The lease brings in more money than we get in one mill for taxes in the township. One mill only generates about $28,000, Delong explained. They pay their own heating and electric bill and upkeep to the building. Its a win-win for the township. We have some money to work with just from the lease of the building.

The company is required by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to store repair and emergency equipment in a central location.

The lease is for five years.

In other Greenleaf matters, the township is in the process of having a website developed where it can post information and minutes.MIDDLETOWN  The Oddfellows Playhouse Teen Repertory Company has scheduled auditions for This Is Important!, an original, ensemble-created play with music. Auditions are open to anyone ages 14-20 and will be held March 25 and 28, 6:30-8:30 p.m. at Oddfellows at 128 Washington Street in Middletown.

The performance is devised from a series of workshops that Oddfellows held this winter under the title "This Is Important. Participants worked with Connecticut State Troubadour Nekita Waller and Playhouse Artistic Director Dic Wheeler over five weeks to generate performance material around the issues that the participants felt were most important to themselves and to our culture/world including writing, group brainstorming, interviewing, scene-making, movement, dance, singing and songwriting. Waller and Wheeler, along with collaborators Cecilia Kurachi-Ube and Bryan Titus are developing that raw material into a new play with music, which will be performed in May by the Teen Repertory Company.

Participants are only required to come to one of the two audition evenings. Everyone who attends one of the audition nights and commits to the rehearsal and performance schedule will be cast into the show. Please arrive on time, dress to move, and plan to stay for the entire two hours.

Rehearsals will be Mondays and Thursdays, 6:30-9 p.m., starting April 1. Performance dates are May 16-18 and May 24-25. Additional rehearsals are set for April 28 and May 11, then every evening May 13 - 15.

New material for the piece will be generated during rehearsals by the cast members, so each performer will be part of the creative team for the production. It will be a play with music, not a musical. There will be some songs, and a live band, but not everyone will be expected or required to sing. The show will have the flexibility to play to the strengths of the people who are in it.

There is a $250 tuition fee for the Teen Repertory Company, but full or partial financial aid and work-study are available. It is Oddfellows policy that programs should be available to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.

To register, or for more info, go to www.oddfellows.org, call 860-347-6143 or email info@oddfellows.org.

Church to hold annual quilt show

HADDAM NECK  The 2019 Haddam Neck Congregational Church Quilt Show will be held on April 6 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and April 7 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the church sanctuary and historic schoolhouse, 408 Quarry Hill Road, Haddam Neck.

The annual event features dozens of hand made vintage and new quilts, a tea room and quilt shop, raffles and vote for your favorite quilt. Admission is $6. Children may attend for free. To exhibit quilts in the show, contact Dianne McHutchison, 860-267-2671 or email rdmchutchison@sbcglobal.net or Suzie Olsen, 860-267-2848. Proceeds support continued church maintenance and restoration projects.

Visit www.haddamneckcongregationalchurch.org for information and directions to the church

Blood needed; drives scheduled in area

MIDDLETOWN  The American Red Cross has a severe shortage of type O blood and urges type O donors - as well as eligible blood and platelet donors of all blood types - to give now to ensure lifesaving patient care isnt impacted this winter.

Type O blood is the most in-demand blood type, helping patients facing life-threatening conditions and emergencies every day. Type O negative blood can be transfused to patients with any blood type and is what emergency room personnel reach for when theres no time to determine a patients blood type. Type O positive blood is also especially needed because it is the most transfused blood type and can be given to Rh-positive patients of any blood type.

Middlesex County

Middlefield: March 24, 9 a.m. - 3 p.m., Jafaria Association of CT, 1 Meriden Road

Middletown: March 29, 1 p.m. - 6 p.m., CEUI CT Employees Union, 110 Randolph Road,

Old Saybrook: March 29, 7:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m., Old Saybrook High School, 1111 Boston Post Road

To donate blood, download the American Red Cross Blood Donor App, visit RedCrossBlood.org or call 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767) to make an appointment or for more information.

Kates Camp For Kids presents summer programming

OLD SAYBROOK - The Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center and Community Music School are partnering again for the seventh year under the umbrella of their performing arts summer camp, Kates Camp for Kids, to present a full summer of programming at The Kate, 300 Main St., Old Saybrook. The camp runs for five week-long sessions, 9 a.m.- 5 p.m., starting July 8. Launched in 2013, Kates Camp for Kids is a performing arts camp for children ages 5-10 incorporating music, dance, theater, and visual art.

Directed by Martha Herrle, a 17-year member of the Community Music School faculty and certified Kindermusik educator, this years camp themes will be Yee Haw, Everyone Needs Superhero, Arf, Sing Me a Story, and Dinostars. Each show features original songs and easy-to-learn rhyming dialog, and the program culminates in a lively performance for friends and family. Tuition for this camp is $295 and scholarships are available for families with a financial need.

For additional information and to register, visit www.cmsct.org or call 860-767-0026.

Community Music School offers innovative music programming for infants through adults, building on a 35-year tradition of providing quality music instruction to residents of shoreline communities. CMS programs cultivate musical ability and creativity and provide students with a thorough understanding of music so they can enjoy playing and listening for their entire lives. Learn more at visit www.cmsct.org or call 860-767-0026.

MARC to hold forum for host families

MIDDLETOWN  MARC Community Resources is now an approved Community Companion Home (CCH) Provider through the Department of Developmental Services (DDS).

According to the DDS website, the CCH model offers a family setting to people with intellectual disabilities. This is a great alternative to the traditional group home. When the host family or individual (CCH Licensee) opens their home to someone with a disability a new family dynamic is created, said Tateisha Perry, CCH Manager. It is similar to a foster care program for adults, when living with family is no longer an option. MARC conducts extensive backgrounds, interviews, home studies and more to find compatible matches.

A CCH Licensee receives a non-taxable monthly stipend, however, the life-changing impact on a person with a disability is a far greater reward, members said

MARC is holding an educational forum for interested parties to learn more. Kathy Calo, CCH Manager South Region DDS, will be available to discuss the process, benefits and answer questions.

The forum will take place on March 28, 5-7 p.m. at 199 Shunpike Road, Cromwell. Light refreshments will be provided. For more information or to register, contact Tateisha Perry at 860-342-0700 ext. 216 or tateisha.perry@marc-cr.org.MIDDLETOWN  They say habits, either good or bad, can be formed in as little time as 30 days. At Middlesex United Way, we are excited for a new partnership that helps lower-income families develop savings habits that can last a lifetime.

Connecticut United Ways have joined together to promote financial stability for working families statewide, and, today, we are excited to help share this new program being held for the first time anywhere.

ALICE Saves is a new program designed to help families develop a lifelong habit of saving and other positive financial behaviors. The program is designed to encourage ALICE (Asset-Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) to begin their habit of saving by enrolling in two free, award-winning programs.

To be defined as ALICE, you must be asset-limited. According to the 2018 ALICE Report, a study of financial hardship within working families, United Ways found that 46 percent of Connecticut households do not have enough savings to cover expenses for three months. This means that an unexpected hospital trip or car repair can have the potential to devastate an ALICE household. Sadly, it is often these unexpected expenses that lead to further financial hardships for these families.

While 37 percent of state residents did not set aside any money for emergencies last year, research shows that families with a savings of just $250 are less likely to be evicted or miss a housing or utility payment. SaverLife, a proven savings product from the California-based nonprofit EARN, and Trusted Advisor, a successful financial counseling program operated by the New York based Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners, will be available to help families build emergency savings and begin a journey to financial security.

ALICE Saves is open to all Connecticut residents over age 18 until the end of the year. In addition to Connecticut United Ways, it is funded by JPMorgan Chase and Webster Bank.

By joining SaverLife, participants receive financial rewards for consistent saving. Savers earn $10 for every month that they save at least $20, and have the potential to earn up to $60 in rewards at the end of the six-month program. Savers who securely link their savings account to SaverLife earn rewards, and have access to other supports as well.

Savers will also be offered an opportunity to take an additional step toward financial security by enrolling in Trusted Advisor, a technology-enabled financial counseling program. A Trusted Advisor counselor, available through Skype or by telephone, will help Savers develop a financial action plan with concrete steps to meet financial goals.

Middlesex United Way has invested in financial stability efforts that help families in numerous ways, including free tax preparation, job training, and employment support.

For more information or to register for ALICE Saves, please visit ctalicesaves.org or contact your local United Way.

Kevin Wilhelm is executive director and CEO of the Middlesex United Way in Middletown.The U.S. Coast Guard continues to experience a "hangover effect" from the 35-day government shutdown earlier this year, but continues to focus on homeland and national security missions such as Arctic operations, maritime transportation, drug interdiction and disaster response, the service's top officer said.

In his first "State of the Coast Guard" speech on Thursday held in Los Angeles, California, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Karl Schultz said the service will require a 5 percent annual increase in operating and support monies to ensure operational readiness.

It's unfair, he said, not to provide sufficient operating and support funding to maintain the current fleet, train and equip service members and support their families.

According to Schultz, the service's operations and support budget has "flatlined" in the past eight years, resulting in a $1.7 billion backlog of deferred maintenance, outdated information technology and a "strained and undersized workforce."

"That's particularly problematic for an organization with facilities spread far and wide across the nation," Schultz said. "In addition, we need to build modern infrastructure to support home porting our newest assets, including polar security and offshore patrol cutters."

The Department of Homeland Security has requested $11.3 billion for the Coast Guard for fiscal 2020, an increase of 7 percent from the previous year.

The proposed and current budgets would fund adding the ScanEagle unmanned aerial system on the service's national security cutters, several offshore patrol cutters, the next icebreaker (the fiscal 2019 budget funded the service's first new icebreaker in 20 years as well as preliminary parts for the next), and several new offshore patrol cutters and fast response cutters.

Schultz said he hoped Congress would recognize the importance of the service's budget request.

"I feel well supported by Secretary [Kirstjen] Nielsen and the administration ... it allows us to sustain frontline operations. But what I said today, and I won't shy away from it, we've been kind of flatlined. And if I have the opportunity to talk about Coast Guard readiness, that's the place I am most concerned."

Against a backdrop of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Schultz, who has been in the Coast Guard's top position for eight months, said the service is vital to the U.S. economy, with 90 percent of U.S. trade coming into ports, and protecting vessels on U.S. waterways by ensuring safe transit. It is upgrading the technology for its 600 marine inspectors and following a new maritime commerce strategic outlook to ensure that everyone associated with marine commerce stays focused.

The Coast Guard also continues to conduct counter-drug operations, capturing 1.4 million pounds of cocaine in the past three years, and it is gearing up for a mission it has spent more than a decade trying to call attention to: Arctic patrols.

Schultz said the country needs six icebreakers, including three of the largest, the polar security cutter. It currently has one heavy icebreaker in working order, the 43-year-old Polar Star, and that suffered a fire during its most recent deployment that caused crew members to endure 30-degree bilge water during repairs.

"I'm proud to say we will award the construction contract this spring for our first [new icebreaker]," Schultz said.

A congressional champion for the icebreaker funding, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, attended the speech and said in remarks that the U.S. desperately needs to increase its presence above the Arctic Circle.

"We are an Arctic nation. We may not look like it, standing in the sunshine here in this beautiful environment, but we are," she said.

During his speech, Schultz made a number of personnel announcements, to include providing tuition assistance to members of the Coast Guard Reserve.

He later added that he plans to expand the Coast Guard's reserve component.

"[It''s] a key element of our operational success, which is why we are shifting governance of our reserve program directly under our deputy commandant for operations," Schultz said.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @patriciakime.A week before releasing results of a study on retaining women in the Coast Guard, the service's top leaders said they will institute a policy to better support families during parental leave and are considering changing weight standards they say disproportionately affect females.

Commandant Adm. Karl Schultz also told reporters during a briefing Thursday that the service plans to study minority retention in order to grow -- and keep -- diversity in the ranks.

The Coast Guard last year hired Rand Corporation to explore why many women leave the Coast Guard after their first enlistment or officer obligation. In the first five years, Schultz said, women and men stay in the service at the same rates, but from after that, and through the 14th year, female retention drops, with up to a 14 percent gap between gender.

To address one retention concern, Schultz said members of the Coast Guard Reserve will now be used to backfill members while they are on maternity, convalescent or caregiver leave.

While the details have not been finalized, Schultz said he wanted men and women in the Coast Guard to see success in the service and also be successful parents and caregivers.

"There is policy work that needs to go into it. But ... I want the Coast Guard to be an employer of choice. I want the Coast Guard to be a place where you see a future, you see opportunity."

The service's top leaders said that because the Coast Guard is so small and its members are scattered across the United States and abroad in remote locations, there are no replacements for members -- men and women -- when they take leave related to childbirth, caregiving and convalescence.

The proposal to use Coast Guard Reserve members in their places is designed to ease anxiety and ensure that members take their full allotment of leave, Schultz said.

"I want men and women to see success as a Coast Guardsmen and success as a parent," he said.

The Coast Guard is 14.6 percent women and 17 percent persons of color, including 5.9 percent African-American. To address what Schultz called a disparity between the service and the general population regarding diversity, the Coast Guard plans to commission a study on retaining underrepresented minorities, similar to the report it will release next week.

It also is examining its tattoo restrictions, policies that prevent single parents from enlisting and physical standards based on body mass index that limit recruitment and retention.

Master Chief Petty Officer of the Coast Guard Jason Vanderhaden explained that the Coast Guard's physical standards are largely based on body mass index, a measurement that doesn't account for fitness, ability to do one's job, muscle mass and overall body composition.

Acknowledging that Coast Guard men and women must maintain a level of fitness to perform their jobs, he said that the current BMI restrictions could be adjusted to ensure that the service retains those who are qualified and perform well.

"We've heard from women who said they left the service because they had so much anxiety every April and October [when the Coast Guard measures]. They were starving themselves or doing other things," Vanderhaden said.

Again, the service has yet to develop the policy but Schultz said the leadership team is exploring these "forward-leaning policy changes to recruit and retain a workforce reflective of the nation we serve."

After the commandant's speech, Ensign Abby Mann said she was excited about Schultz's proposals. A deck watch officer on the Fast Response Cutter USCGC Benjamin Bottoms, she called the Reserve replacement proposal a "great idea."

"I really like what he said to retain women ... right now, when you leave, it can be a real burden on a unit. If you knew someone was stepping in, it would give you more flexibility and definitely relieve anxiety."

-- Patricia Kime can be reached Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @patriciakime.The commandant of the Marine Corps personally challenged a sergeant who made history last year when she reached a major training milestone to rethink leaving the service and instead consider a career as an officer, Military.com has learned.

Gen. Robert Neller called Sgt. Bailey Weis, the first female Marine to complete second phase of the intense selection process for special operators, to encourage her to attend Officer Candidates School. The call followed Military.coms story about Weis after she completed the physically demanding Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command training, which no woman had passed before.

Sgt. Weis has the leadership, grit and resolve to be a Marine officer, said Col. Riccoh Player, a spokesman for Neller. This is all about talent management.

Neller has called on Marine leaders to help the service retain its top talent throughout his time as commandant. In a Marine Corps-wide message, Neller the service must attract, develop, promote and retain the best talent the nation has to offer in order to more effectively operate across the range of military operations.

Weis could attend OCS as soon as this summer, a Marine with knowledge of her case said. Reached by phone, Weis declined to comment, saying she wanted to remain focused on her future career options.

After completing Phase Two of Assessment and Selection Course, Weis was not chosen to move ahead in the training pipeline. Its not uncommon for some Marines who pass the highly secretive and physically demanding training not to be selected, according to MARSOC officials, but the reasons theyre not selected are highly guarded.

Since Weis made that far into MARSOCs training, shes not eligible to repeat it. The thinking is that she knows too much about what to expect, which could give her an advantage over other candidates. Weis, an aviation maintenance controller, told Military.com in the fall that she would be leaving the Marine Corps, since a MARSOC career was no longer an option for her.

Instead, she said she planned to complete a master's degree in international relations, and work toward earning a commission in the North Carolina National Guard.

[MARSOC] would've been a nice option," she said. "But there are a lot of other opportunities out there.

Thats when Neller stepped in. He called Weis, Player said, and challenged her to consider OCS and referred her to the Marine Corps manpower division to determine whether she was qualified. She was, Player added.

Weis, who previously graduated from Infantry Training Battalion, called MARSOCs Assessment and Selection process one of the most challenging things she's ever done. She was the only woman in her training cycle, but she said she earned the other Marines respect by doing everything with them.

"You really just push your body to the limit and then past it," she said. "You learn that you can do more than you thought you could."

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.Unforeseen storms that have slammed two Air Force bases in six months may force the service to dip into next year's yet-to-be-approved budget -- money that had been earmarked for updates to bases worldwide.

Without extra funding from lawmakers, reconstruction to both Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, and Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, will force the Air Force to draw from next year's operations and maintenance funding, said John Henderson, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations, Environment and Energy.

The service earlier this week unveiled a new plan to update bases with eroded infrastructure and those that haven't received modernization improvements in the last 20 years. Dubbed the Air Force infrastructure investment strategy, or "I2S," the effort is set to be funded starting next fiscal year, if the budget request made public earlier this month is approved by Congress.

Henderson said the service is planning for a $2 billion increase from last year's O&M request: an additional $1.3 billion in facility sustainment, restoration and modernization, and $700 million in military construction recapitalization.

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Because of neglected maintenance over the last two decades at all 180 of its installations, the service has racked up $33 billion in backlogged work that needs to be done to fix buildings, runways, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems officials said.

The backlog is expected to triple over the next 30 years.

Much like a Navy battle carrier group, Henderson explained, Air Force bases are at the core of how the service projects airpower across the world.

"Bases have to be ready now, they have to be ready for major conflict, and so we can only take so much risk there before the foundational readiness of the infrastructure starts to impact the readiness of our warfighting operations," Henderson said.

The I2S strategy will not necessarily be a "worst-first" strategy, Henderson said. Instead, he said, each base will get incremental updates over time in order to avoid getting to a point of "triage."

While urgent repair needs are typically attended to, officials find themselves running out of money for other bases that are more slowly degrading, Henderson said.

The fundamental strategy to invest in base infrastructure gradually in coming years will not change. But the service is hoping a supplemental funding bill from Congress will keep it from having to divert funds from early stages of the effort.

"We're going through ... the current-year Air Force operations and maintenance funds to do those repairs" to Tyndall Air Force Base under the assumption that there will be supplemental funding or reprogrammed money to assist with the work, Henderson said.

He added, "We're kind of counting on that."

Last week, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said the service has already used up $410 million operations and maintenance funds for Tyndall, "and we expect by the end of this year, it's going to be about $750 million for recovery."

Wilson also said the service will rely heavily on a supplemental funding bill, and that lawmakers should be discussing how best to move dollars forward.

"There is nothing in the constitution that says that you have to propose something from the administration in order to get a supplemental going. I used to work this on [Capitol] Hill on the House side," Wilson told reporters after a Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing March 13.

When asked if Congress should be already moving forward with a proposal, Wilson responded, "You bet."

Officials at Offutt -- which has been swamped by floodwaters -- have yet to determine a cost for damages sustained over the last few days.

But the backlog of projects is already growing, aside from Tyndall and Offutt repairs.

The Air Force has been working through "60 to 70" backlogged projects, and if funding continues to be diverted, the backlog can only grow, Henderson said.

"None of this really gets better until we can defend the budget and get the funding in the system to make better investments," he said.

The investments also include downsizing -- to a degree, Henderson said.

"The goal is to create enduring plans for the installations we need while reducing total facility square footage by five percent in 20 years through divestment, demolition, conversion, and consolidation," the plan states.

Not all bases will see a five percent cut at their installations; some may see more, others less depending on their mission, Henderson said.

According to the strategy, bases can optimize their resources through use and reuse of existing facilities, and "offset new construction growth, and divest failing and underutilized facilities."

Some bases in Europe and the Pacific are also slated to grow, so cuts wouldn't necessarily make sense, he said.

Henderson said environmental and civil engineers will use data analysis and technology to establish better business models to run each facility. In some cases, they'll use IBM Watson, an artificial intelligence "supercomputer" which can predict or flag items that may need upgrades as well as solutions for how to fix them.

"We're testing some of those technologies right now, and we would like to get those on all of our buildings so they can be centrally monitored and tracked ... and be able to be predictive about the maintenance," he said.

The strategy is about "having a 'get well' plan," Henderson said. "It's unsustainable to continuously plan for things to fail."

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oriana0214.Two U.S. service members were killed while conducting an operation in Afghanistan on March 22, according to a statement from NATO'S Resolute Support mission.

The names of the deceased are being withheld until 24 hours after next of kin are notified.

The statement did not say where the operation was conducted.

The deaths are the third and fourth for the U.S. military in Afghanistan this year. In January, Army Ranger Sgt. Cameron Meddock, 26, and Green Beret Sgt. 1st Class Joshua "Zach" Beale, 32, died in separate incidents.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan is now in its 18th year. Some 14,000 American troops are deployed there and are charged with counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida and Islamic State fighters and with training and advising Afghan security forces in their fight with the Taliban insurgency.

More than 2,400 U.S. military personnel have been killed and more than 20,000 have been wounded since the beginning of the Afghan War in October 2001.ISLE ROYALE, MI - In hopes of saving four to six wolves facing starvation on a Canadian island after their main food source was taken away, parks and research teams are working together over the next few days to net-trap the big animals and fly them to Michigans Isle Royale.

If the capture-and-release is successful, it would be a big predator infusion for the remote Michigan island in Lake Superior where the National Park Service has been working since last fall to bring in more wolves to target the growing moose population. The concern has been that the islands 1,500 moose could deforest the wilderness there, an archipelago which is also a national park.

Since last September, six wolves from Canada and tribal lands in Minnesota have been re-homed on the island. They joined Isle Royales older existing pair of wolves, who have not had viable offspring in years. The NPS hopes to bring up to 30 new wolves to Isle Royale in the next few years.

The newest wolves targeted for transport are what remains of the pack on Canadas Michipicoten Island, which is about 146 miles away, on the eastern side of Lake Superior. Earlier this month, project managers said they didnt intend to trap and release any more wolves onto Isle Royale this spring because it might interfere with the wolves breeding season.

But the small group of wolves left on Michipicoten has been a big concern for researchers. The last of the caribou were removed from that island by Canadian officials last year, leaving beaver and hares as the only prime food sources for the remaining big predators.

On Michipicoten, natures lessons can be cruel and starvation is one of them, said Sona Mehring, the chair of the National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation, which is helping to fund the transport. For the remaining wolves on Michipicoten, that will be their fate unless we help move them to Isle Royale National Park, where their hunting skills and genetics can add value to establishing a new population of wolves on Isle Royale.

Isle Royale officials are hoping the hunting skills shown by the Canadian wolves to track and kill even bigger prey will be put to good use on their island, which is twice the size of Michipicoten. Two of the wolves caught and relocated to Isle Royale earlier this year were from Michipicoten, including that packs large alpha male.

We can use the good skills of those wolves, and this will match them with a larger island that will give them a better opportunity, Isle Royale National Park Superintendent Phyllis GreenGreen said, according to the Associated Press.

An effort to fund this impromptu transfer is being led by two private organizations: the National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation and the International Wolf Center. Together, they are covering $75,000 of the total cost for the four-day airlift, and have started a GoFundMe to pay for the remaining $25,000.

Just like before, research and government teams will use net-guns, helicopters and crews on the ground to trap the wolves on the Canadian island. The wolves will be vet-checked and get GPS tracking collars before they are flown to Isle Royale for release.

There have been a few losses to the wolf re-location project since last fall. One wolf caught in Minnesota died before she could be released on the island. A male wolf brought over last year was found dead on Isle Royale several weeks later. And a female wolf from Minnesota used an ice bridge formed by the Polar Vortex to trot back to the mainland and the end of January.ORION TOWNSHIP, MI  General Motors will invest $300 million in its Orion Township assembly plant, a move that will create 400 new jobs in suburban Detroit.

The decision announced by the auto manufacturer on Friday was made to produce a new Chevrolet electric vehicle designed and engineered off an advanced version of the existing Chevrolet Bolt EV already produced at the plant.

We are excited to bring these jobs and this investment to the U.S., said GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra during an announcement at the plant with employees, elected officials and community leaders.

This new Chevrolet electric vehicle is another positive step toward our commitment to an all-electric future. GM will continue to invest in our U.S. operations where we see opportunities for growth.

Initially slated to be produced outside the United States, GM pivoted and brought production of the new vehicle to Michigan because the Orion plant currently builds the Bolt EV.

Moving production to a U.S. manufacturing plant also supports the rules of origin provisions in the proposed United States, Mexico and Canada Agreement, according to a news release.

Its the latest commitment GM has made in Michigan. GM is in the process of adding 1,000 jobs at the Flint Truck Assembly Plant and new investments at the Lansing Delta Township Assembly Plant and Romulus Propulsion Plant.

It also recently revealed the all-new Cadillac CT5 to be produced at the Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant.

In addition to the Chevrolet Bolt EV, the Orion Assembly plant currently builds the Chevrolet Sonic and the Cruise AV test vehicles.

It currently employs about 880 hourly and 130 salaried employees. Including the new investment, GM has invested nearly $1 billion at Orion Assembly since 2009, according to the company.MONTCALM COUNTY, MI -- An investigation into the Dec. 30 death of an inmate at the Montcalm County Jail determined that no jail policies were violated and no criminal acts were committed.

Investigators with the Michigan Sheriffs Association found no wrongdoing by jail staff during an extensive two-month investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Amber Lynae Bills, 34, of Big Rapids, according to the Montcalm County Sheriffs Office.

Bills died of natural causes due to an undiagnosed perforated ulcer with peritonitis, according to her death certificate.

She was booked into the jail Dec. 22 on a charge of driving while suspended and had bond set at $500. She also had an outstanding warrant for failing to appear in court with an additional $500 bond.

Days after arriving at the jail, Bills complained of stomach pain and was examined by the jail nurse on multiple occasions, police said. Police said Bills informed the nurse she had used methamphetamine and was withdrawing from the drug.

Bills was moved to a cell with direct observation Dec. 28-30, and was given Librium -- a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety disorders or withdrawal. On Dec. 30, Bills received another dose of Librium.

Soon after, she was found unresponsive in her cell. Attempts to resuscitate her were unsuccessful, police said.

The death investigation was handled by Allegan and Barry county sheriffs officials, assigned at the request of the Michigan Sheriffs Association.

In a February interview with MLive/The Grand Rapids Press, Michigan Sheriffs Association Executive Director Blaine Koops said Montcalm County Sheriff Mike Williams would determine if the case was to be forwarded to a prosecutors office once the investigation into his staff was complete.

No member of the jail staff was disciplined.Adoption agencies with state contracts for placing children with families cant turn away prospective LGBT parents under a federal court settlement announced by Attorney General Dana Nessel.

On Friday, Nessels office announced a settlement had been reached in the case Dumont v. Gordon, in which same-sex couples represented by the American Civil Liberties Union sued the state, claiming St. Vincent Catholic Charities and Bethany Christian Services refused to let them adopt children the agencies accepted through referrals from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

The case was a challenge to a law signed in 2015 by former Gov. Rick Snyder stated adoption agencies that contract with the state can decline service to prospective parents on religious grounds.

Under the settlement, adoption agencies could deny adoption services to LGBT people only if the children involved were not referred to them by the state. If an agency refuses service to same-sex couples or LGBT individuals based solely on sexual orientation in state cases, the Department of Health and Human Services could enforce non-discrimination provisions or terminate the contract.

Leslie Cooper, deputy director of the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, called the settlement a victory: "Our children need every family that is willing and able to provide them with a loving home. When agencies choose to accept taxpayer dollars to provide public child welfare services, they must put the needs of the children first.

In a statement, Nessel said the settlement will connect children with critical and needed services and help more Michigan residents complete their families.

Discrimination in the provision of foster care case management and adoption services is illegal, no matter the rationale, Nessel said. Limiting the opportunity for a child to be adopted or fostered by a loving home not only goes against the states goal of finding a home for every child, it is a direct violation of the contract every child placing agency enters into with the state.

Kristy and Dana Dumont, the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement they were hopeful the decision will mean more families are available to children who have been waiting years for a family to adopt them.

We are so happy that for same-sex couples in Michigan who are interested in fostering or adopting, opening their hearts and homes to a child no longer comes with the risk of being subjected to the discrimination we experienced," they said.

A spokesperson for Bethany Christian Services said the agency is currently reviewing the announced settlement, adding: As always, our focus is on the children and families that we serve.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clark Lake, said he was saddened and outraged by what he characterized as blatant political actions taken by Nessel to limit opportunities for so many kids.

Nessels actions make it clear that she sought the office of attorney general to further her own personal political agenda, Shirkey said in a statement. The legislature wrote and passed a law regarding adoption practices in Michigan to both protect religious freedom and guard against discrimination.LANSING, MI  Ask Francis Bus Spaniola about the current PFAS pollution crisis and hell likely respond with a Yogi Berra quote: Its like deja vu all over again.

Spaniola, a former state representative from Corunna, successfully pushed for regulations lowering the amount of polybrominated biphenyl, or PBB, allowed in Michigan meat and dairy products following the infamous 1970s statewide chemical poisoning.

The Michigan Farm Bureau opposed the legislation, which sought to reduce human exposure to the toxic fire retardant, which was inadvertently mixed into livestock feed in 1973.

Today, Spaniola sees parallels in the pushback against proposed regulations to reduce exposure to PFAS from business groups, utilities and Republicans, who are blocking a Democrat-sponsored bill to establish a state drinking water standard of 5 parts-per-trillion (ppt).

Nothing has changed. Its the same old story, said Spaniola, 83, who served in the state House from 1974 to 1990. People dont want to admit its a problem.

Some political courage is needed.

Spaniola was among the group of legislators and staffers who gathered Thursday in Lansing to discuss policy lessons from the PBB crisis from a historian, public health expert and researcher who has been studying the long-term impacts of the mass poisoning.

The event was among several spring stops for the Michigan PBB Registry research team from Emory University, which is holding an oral history event at the St. Louis city hall on Friday, March 22; and will stop in Grand Rapids on April 27 and Fremont on April 28.

Michele Marcus, lead PBB researcher, said consumption of PBB-tainted food in the 1970s has been linked to increased risk of thyroid problems and breast cancer, and blood testing through the PBB registry has helped guide exposed people to regular screening for those diseases.

Some academics and independent experts say the same preventative measures can also benefit those exposed to PFAS, even though the state has downplayed the value of individual blood testing, saying that doctors arent well informed enough overall by the current scientific literature to interpret results and offer health guidance.

The health department is doing some blood testing of people exposed to PFAS in the Rockford and Belmont areas, but has not thus far expanded that testing to other highly-exposed communities like Parchment, Oscoda or Grayling, but says it plans to. Those exposure assessment studies are meant to develop population-wide statistics.

Although theres been no formal discussion of a registry for those exposed to PFAS in Michigan, Marcus said such blood testing is needed to inform long-term research.

The cancer findings related to PBB were specifically because the (Michigan Department of Health and Human Services) was able to link those registry records with the cancer registry, PFAS said. So, we could calculate rates of cancer incidence by peoples initial PBB level.

Doug Farquhar, a program director at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said states are grappling with the PFAS issue in lieu of clear direction from the federal government, which has produced conflicting guidance on health policy from different agencies.

The Environmental Protection Agency has a health advisory level of 70-ppt for two of thousands of PFAS compounds, PFOS and PFOA. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has published minimum risk levels for those compounds which are substantially lower, while the Department of Defense  which faces huge liability as a polluter  has been pushing for much higher levels in order to reduce the burden it faces for toxic site cleanups.

As the chemicals are found in more places, state legislators and administrations are being forced to act in response to citizen outcry. However, states do not have a federally-delegated chemical safety regulatory program as they do under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which governs how the EPA regulates the introduction of new or existing chemicals, largely ignores states, said Farquhar, who moderated the panel.

Every state has come up with a different response to it, he said. New York has done some biomonitoring. New Hampshire has looked at changing its standards. North Carolina has put money into university research. Michigan has devoted millions to finding the contamination in public drinking water supplies and groundwater across the state. Theres no ability for states to say well use our TSCA dollars to look at chemical safety, Farquhar said. There are none.

Lisa Halbert, whose father, Rick, is credited with discovering the delivery mix-up between Nutrimaster, a cattle feed supplement, and Firemaster, a flame retardant, also sees parallels between how early voices of alarm in affected communities were disregarded.

In the Kalamazoo suburb of Parchment, where PFAS more than 20 times the EPA advisory level was found in city water last summer, Halbert said there were community concerns raised about the paper factory, which has been blamed for the contamination. In mid-Michigan, there were documented objections to contamination from the chemical plant in St. Louis between the 1930s and 1970s, when the PBB disaster hit.

The potential exposure to PFAS from U.S. food supply is under-explored but getting more attention, Halbert said, citing recent examples in New Mexico and Maine where dairy cows were shown to be producing PFAS-tainted milk after ingesting polluted water.

In Maine, the contamination is being blamed on biosolids, or sewage from municipal utilities spread on farm fields. In Michigan, the Department of Environmental Quality has halted some biosolid land application and is investigating the extent of contamination in connection to high PFAS levels entering wastewater plants from industrial users.

Ed Lorenz, an Alma College historian, said after the PBB poisoning became national news, there were also efforts to falsely reassure the public this isnt really as bad as you think.

The panel stressed that mass contaminations like PBB and PFAS need to be taken seriously, not dismissed as overblown hand-wringing.

Even in the absence of absolute certainty about the effects certain compounds can have on human health, theres often enough data warrant precautionary steps, Marcus said.

We need to seriously consider the consequences of wide exposure to these chemicals that we dont know what the health effects are, but, based on some of their characteristics, we can predict that they are likely to be harmful, she said.

These chemicals were not meant to be eaten. They were not meant to be in our bodies, but they get there. We have to recognize that because it impacts the people who were directly exposed, but also their children and grandchildren. Thats why it matters.ANN ARBOR, MI -- Within six months, University of Michigan animal testing laboratories accidentally lost a mutant rabbit, poisoned nearly 11,500 zebra fish with bleach, caused 53 mice to die of thirst and gave an unknown number of mice terminal gastrointestinal cancer, federal records show.

Four legally required letters detailing the research animal losses, which occurred between March and September of last year, were mailed to the federal Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare by the UM Research and Animal Care and Use offices.

Stop Animal Exploitation Now, an animal advocacy group, obtained the correspondence through records requests sent to the federal Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare and is now calling on UM President Mark Schlissel to do an independent investigation.

These incidents of negligence indicate serious systemic issues within the University of Michigan animal experimentation system, says a March 20 letter sent to the president and Board of Regents by Stop Animal Exploitation Now Director Michael Budkie.

Budkie said all registered laboratories that receive funding from the federal government are required to self report certain incidents that result in the death or loss of lab animals. Stop Animal Exploitation Now regularly analyzes those reports.

We are not aware of any other institution that has had this excessive a number of deaths in such a short time, Budkie told MLive."

While the advocacy group calls the series of incidents an indicator of serious systemic issues, UM describes them as isolated incidents.

" We deeply regret the loss of these animals, most of which were zebrafish," university spokesman Rick Fitzgerald said. "Upon discovery in 2018, these incidents were corrected immediately by our animal care team, and corrective action plans were put into place to prevent any future issues.

The university has many strong policies and controls in place to monitor all projects involving the use of animals.

Summary of UM reports to Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare:

Sept. 4, 2018: Water from a reverse osmosis pressure tank was used to fill an 80-gallon bleach sanitation tank. Tubing from the pressure tank was left in the bleach reservoir and inadvertently pumped into a fish tank resulting in the deaths of 11,548 zebra fish.

June 13, 2018: While cleaning the cages of lab mice, workers accidentally dislodged the water source from a rack of mice. Because of this, 53 mice died of dehydration.

May 7, 2018: While conducting an animal health check on April 2, the caretaker discovered that a rabbit bred with artificially introduced DNA was missing. The location of the animal is unknown," the lab concluded following a search of the premises.

March 18, 2018: A study of gastrointestinal cancer involved the development of internal tumors in mice. Preset indicators established when mice were expected to be removed from the study, but nine mice were inadvertently left in the study too long and developed gastrointestinal tumors that required them to be euthanized.

UMs full statement:

The University of Michigan recognizes that working with animals to advance human and animal health is a privilege that requires constant diligence and a commitment to the highest standards of animal welfare in all aspects of our research and teaching. We deeply regret the loss of these animals, most of which were zebrafish.

Upon discovery in 2018, these incidents were corrected immediately by our animal care team, and corrective action plans were put into place to prevent any future issues. The university has many strong policies and controls in place to monitor all projects involving the use of animals.

As part of that oversight, and in the interest of full transparency, U-M self-reported each of these events to the National Institute of Healths Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW). OLAW reviewed these matters and found that U-M took all necessary steps to self-report and correct these isolated incidents.

Again, we deeply regret the loss of all animal lives. We will continue to explore new approaches and refine our practices to maintain our commitment to not only achieving, but exceeding, national and professional standards in animal care and use.UPDATE: Exit 4 on eastbound M-14 is now open, as of 3:30 p.m.

ANN ARBOR TOWNSHIP, MI - A fire at an abandoned home blocked traffic on M-14 during the morning commute on Friday, March 22 just north of Ann Arbor.

A resident from a neighboring subdivision called officials about 7:45 a.m. to the house at 75 Barton Drive, between Pontiac Trail and M-14, Ann Arbor Township fire Capt. Lewis Kempf said.

All lanes of exit 4 on eastbound M-14 at Barton Drive were closed about 9 a.m., according to the Michigan Department of Transportation.

The home is surrounded by Onder Park in the city of Ann Arbor, though its in a so-called island of Ann Arbor Township.

Its been vacant for about seven or eight years, except for squatters, Kempf said as firefighters worked and family members of the owner looked on.

Before turning to speak firefighters, one family member said he spent his childhood there.

It was a beautiful home, he said.

There was evidence of recent squatters in the home, but its believed to have been unoccupied when firefighters arrived Friday, Kempf said.

The first and second floors of the home collapsed Friday as the fire blazed, forcing firefighters to attempt to douse the flames from the outside.

They were still on scene about 10:20 a.m.

Further information was not immediately available.

Photojournalist Jacob Hamilton contributed to this story.SWARTZ CREEK, MI  A 16-year-old girl was hospitalized this morning after being struck by a vehicle on her way to school.

About 7:20 a.m. on Friday, March 22, the girl and others were crossing Fairchild Street near Cappy Lane on their way to Swartz Creek High School when a vehicle struck her, said Genesee County Metro Police Lt. Joel Grahn. The girl remained conscious and was transported to Hurley Medical Center for treatment of minor injuries.

The driver of the vehicle that struck the girl was not issued a citation by police, Grahn said.

Swartz Creek Community Schools Superintendent Ben Mainka said he is working with city officials to add pedestrian safety features.FLINT, MI-- A group of activists rallying for clean water and lower water bills were escorted out of Flint City Hall by police officers on World Water Day Friday, March 22.

Color of Change, a activist group aiming to raise awareness about the Flint water crisis, rallied at City Hall to present Mayor Karen Weaver with a petition that ensures affected residents get free hot water tanks and the replacement of interior lead pipes. The online petition has garnered 12,627 signatures.

Weaver, who was at an event welcoming Elon Musk to a Flint school, didnt come out to address the activists.

Instead, two police officers escorted the group out of City Hall.

Ariana Hawk, Color of Change field organizer, said she felt rejected by Weavers response to the petition.

Citizens are footing the bill for something they shouldnt be having to foot the bill for, Hawk said. They shouldnt have a mayor whos like (Weaver) whos not addressing you or addressing whats happening. We just want her to acknowledge us, we just want her to come out and acknowledge its been five years and were still going through this. Can you at least respect the people who put you in this seat?

The group set up their press conference outside City Hall after being removed by police. Dawn Lawler, who launched the petition, spoke out about her struggles as a homeowner in Flint. Lawler said shes struggling to pay Flints high water bills and her 5-year-old son has been suffering a skin condition from the water.

If I take a shower for three days and take a bath on the fourth (day) my water is coming out orange, Lawler said.

City Administrator Steve Branch called the rally a farce." He said the six boxes the group dropped off were filled with blank paper, though they did have a smaller stack of petitions with signatures. Branch was skeptical of the petitions that had signatures, however.

This has nothing to do with the City of Flint, Branch said. All of these zip codes seem to be outside of Michigan.

The petition was started in Flint where about 2,000 of the signatures were collected, then the organization opened it to all the states residents, Hawk said. The group had been in contact with city administration since Monday, March 18.

They didnt want us to hold this, Hawks said. They wanted us to meet with them and talk about it, but we feel like its been five years of us talking about it and letting this issue be heard and we havent gotten any good feedback.

Hawk said she was disappointed with Weavers reaction because the Concerned Pastors for Social Change, who held a press conference at City Hall on March 11, were treated better.

For them to basically put us out and call the police, were not here to harm nobody, Hawk said. We were all here when the pastors came here and set up their press conference. There was no structure to it... no one came to kick them out or called the police. They just came in here and did what they wanted and we got kicked out on World Water Day.

Color for Change plans on holding two events to raise awareness about the five year anniversary of the water crisis and will release further details when the dates get closer to avoid potentially being shut down, Hawk said.ADA, MI -- Just a 5-minute drive from downtown Ada, Michigan, a gorgeous, custom-made farmhouse lights up a private wooded area.

The home, built in 2016, features a modern look with its European white oak exterior and matte black window frames in a country setting. The home also is packed with high-end essentials.

The luxury estate, 7530 2 Mile Road NE, was built by the homeowners and real-estate agents Becky and Nathan Vandenbroek. The family built the modern farmhouse on 13.86 acres of land.

The modern vibe of the Vandenbroeks home was inspired by HGTV stars Chip and Joanna Gaines, according to the couple. The design also includes their own original ideas in hopes of creating the modern farmhouse.

38 Modern $1.8 million farmhouse in Ada

I spend most of my time in the living area, said Becky Vandenbroek. I love the restoration hardware, all the natural lighting and fireplace.

Entering the property, you are greeted with a long driveway paved with fiber cement and a four-stall garage attached to the house, professional landscaping and underground sprinklers. Located out back, the matching exterior barn adds to the scenic view of the property.

As you walk into the home, you are surrounded by nature lighting through all the windows in the main living room, which features a grand stone fireplace. Located on the main floor is the master bedroom, which includes two walk-in closets. The master bathroom includes a walk-in shower and claw-foot bath tub.

If you love cooking, the gourmet kitchen might be just what youre looking for.

Again, the theme is a spacious area and the kitchen is perfect for family gatherings or even a cooking class. The farmhouse-style kitchen is supplied with AGA and Viking appliances, concrete and quartz countertops, and a walk-in butler pantry. It wouldnt be complete without a farmhouse sink, of course.

Across from the kitchen is a three-season porch, perfect for lounging. Four bedrooms with two full bathrooms and a lounge area make up the second floor of the house.

The basement features a sixth bedroom with a full bathroom. The Vandenbroeks recently added a new kitchenette/bar area and Nathan Vandenbroek renovated a poker room with a bar area.

I think my husbands man cave downstairs is unique ... I was kind of fighting him on it in the beginning, said Becky Vandenbroek. I think that it will really sell the house. Now the guys have a place to go.

The modern farmhouse is now on the market for $1.75 million and can be viewed on the Vanenbroeks real estate site here. The price was recently decreased from $1.85 million.

This is part of a MLive series of posts about High End Homes. See more of MLives High End Homes here.UPDATE: The Ionia County Sheriffs Office originally reported the inmates first name as Stuart" but later corrected the spelling to Stewart. The story has been updated to reflect this.

IONIA COUNTY, MI -- Authorities are investigating the death of an Ionia County Jail inmate after he complained about not feeling well and collapsed early Friday, March 22.

Stewart Nelson Hill, 48, of Portland, Michigan died after he collapsed about 5:30 a.m., Ionia County sheriffs investigators said.

Hill had been in the jail since March 19 on warrants involving the countys Friend of the Court office.

Investigators said Hill had alerted jail staff at 4:53 a.m. that he was not feeling well. After speaking with officers, he was placed in a holding cell for observation and medical staff was contacted.

Jail staff had just given Hill a breakfast tray at 5:30 a.m. when he collapsed, police said.

Officers began CPR and performed other first-aid, including using an automatic defibrillator. They also called for an ambulance.

Life EMS paramedics took over the life-saving measures when they arrived and transported Hill to Sparrow Hospital. The paramedics continued life-saving measures during the trip but could not revive Hill.

An autopsy is planned at the hospital and Ionia County sheriffs detectives are investigating circumstances surrounding the death.GRAND RAPIDS, MI  Medical school graduates can receive a $75,000 loan repayment by working in Michigans medically underserved urban and rural communities through a program developed by four universities.

Michigan Doctors, or MIDOCs is an innovative state-funded program that aims to attract and retain physicians in the state with the loan repayment incentive in exchange for a two-year, post-residency commitment to practice in a rural or urban setting.

Michigan State University, Western Michigan University, Central Michigan University, and Wayne State University medical schools have worked for five years to bring the program to fruition.

Our ultimate goal is not only to deal with shortage of health care professionals in underserved areas but to increase access to care, said Jerry Kooiman, Assistant Dean for External Relations at Michigan States College of Human Medicine.

If all goes well, somewhere around 40 to 50 new residents per year will be trained in underserved areas of the state between our four universities.

The program is supported by a $5 million appropriation the state Legislature included in the fiscal year 2019 budget. The universities will match the appropriation for a total of $10 million, Kooiman said.

Each of the four universities was designated two residency slots for 2019.

MSUs first two residents, Tovah Aho and Ann Marie Botros, are headed to the Upper Peninusula (UP) to participate in rural psychiatry residency program until July 2021.

Helping physicians to stay in our state to practice medicine will make Michigan a healthier place in the long run and ensure access to care in all communities, said Robert Gordon, director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

It will also empower medical students to choose a career based on impact rather than financial necessity, allowing them to commit their career to helping the underserved.

Data from the Upper Peninsula Community Health Needs Assessment 2018 (UPCHNA 2018), published by the Western Upper Peninsula Health Department, provides insight on the lack of mental health providers in the UP.

Every UP county but Marquette is a federal designated Health Professional Shortage Area for mental health care based on the number of psychiatrist per capita, according to 2018 data from the Upper Peninsula Community Health Needs Assessment.

Additionally, the data shows a ratio of roughly one psychiatrist per 39,000 people across the Upper Peninsula. Officials say the capacity of inpatient beds are not being utilized due to the shortage of care providers.

Kooiman said people in need of mental health care in the UP can wait up to eight months or more. He said the shortage of doctors in rural and urban areas across the state also includes, general practitioners, OB/GYN physicians, pediatricians, surgeons, and other doctors.

According to estimates cited in a MIDOCs report, some 1.7 million Michigan residents dont have access to primary care health services.

My district and communities across the state need more primary care physicians, said State Sen. Peter MacGregor, R-Cannon Township, chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Health and Human Services.

This program will not only create the physicians we need in the communities that need it the most, but will also help ensure they stay in those communities after their training is complete.

In five years, Kooiman said his hope to see program participants staying and practicing in those areas they were assigned. He said the $75,000 is a good incentive when you consider the average medical student has $250,000 in debt between medical school and their undergraduate degree.

"Sixty percent of residents practice within 50 miles of where they did their residency,'' he said.

Of Michigans 83 counties, 90 percent have at least a partial designation as a primary care physician shortage area.

While the number of medical schools in Michigan has increased in recent years  graduating the most doctors in history  the number of Graduate Medical Education residency slots remained capped until the MIDOCs program, according to a press release.

This innovative legislation and collaborative effort expands capacity in residency programs. It provides unique financial incentives for new doctors to choose to practice in primary care and commit to care for medically underserved regions and patients, said State Rep. Mary Whiteford, R-South Haven), chair of the House Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee.

MIDOCS represents a new avenue for the state to support participating medical schools in a highly targeted and effective way.LEONI TWP., MI  Kerry Pickett, the newly appointed interim clerk in Leoni Township, wont have time to ease into the role.

Mark Carpenter resigned Wednesday, March 20, citing health concerns and township discord. But election work hasn't been touched since Carpenter took office in November, township and county officials said.

With less than seven weeks until the May 7 election, a slew of deadlines loom for Pickett  who was unanimously appointed as interim clerk at a special meeting Thursday, March 21.

The first election deadline is Saturday, March 23, as absentee ballots must be sent to uniformed military and overseas citizens whove requested one. The May ballot in the township includes an $8.75 million bond proposal from East Jackson Community Schools.

"Even in the recall election, (Carpenter) said when he filed he didn't plan on wanting to do any type of election work," Jackson County Elections Director Colleen Garety said. "I explained to him, it is his legal obligation  that's what you'd be elected to office to do. So he's known that."

Pickett inherited four months of death records and more than 600 items in the Qualified Voter File inbox, which could include items like voter registrations or assignments from Michigans Bureau of Elections, Garety said.

Carpenter only worked in the township office a few hours a week, multiple township officials said. The clerk receives $38,500 per year, although that will shrink to $19,500 starting in 2021, the board decided in December.

The state bureau confirmed to Garety the inbox hasnt been touched since longtime clerk Michele Manke left office in November after being recalled. Manke cant be appointed to the seat, per state law, until the current term expires in 2020.

Carpenter said he couldnt access voter files because the state didnt give him the class he needed until last week and never sent him the access codes.

So its not like I neglected it," Carpenter said. I never refused to do anything.

He didnt attend Thursdays special meeting, where the board formally accepted his resignation. The county was no help to Carpenter during the process, he said.

Before resigning, Carpenter asked the county if he could hire out for election work, Garety said.

"It's not an option to have someone else do your election for you," Garety said.

The state bureau has requested all communications between the county and township on the issue, Garety said.

Ive never really heard of (a clerk) say, No, Im not going to do it, said Cindy Dodge of the Michigan Townships Association.

The elections bureau can and has prosecuted people before for election law violations, Dodge added.

If its a law and you took the oath to do the job and you dont do it and you dont meet the legal requirements  if its election law  its a felony, Garety said, citing conversations with officials from the elections bureau.

Taking legal repercussions against Carpenter isnt currently on the states radar since hes no longer the clerk, said Shawn Starkey, communications director for the Secretary of State.

He has resigned. What were focused on right now is our bureau of elections providing any guidance they can to ensure that the township has a smooth election in May," Starkey said.

Elections take months of preparation, Garety said. With only weeks to tackle the task, multiple board members have volunteered to help Pickett and the board approved spending up to $3,000 to hire help for election duties.

"We need some more help," Supervisor Howard Linnabary said. "For the position we're in, we don't have much of a choice."

Other townships, including Napoleon Township, have offered to lend a hand.

Pickett started with Leoni Township in November as the deputy clerk to Carpenter. Her husband was on the township board as a trustee from 2012 to 2016.

The board has 45 days from Carpenters vacancy to appoint a new clerk, otherwise a special election is called. The board meets again before that deadline, with a meeting scheduled for Tuesday, April 9.

The board also approved a change to the office hours at township hall during Thursdays special meeting. Hours were set to change on April 1 to open the office five days per week. The board voted Thursday to keep the hours as they are, due to staffing levels.

Instead of being open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., the offices will keep the current schedule of 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Wednesday.JACKSON, MI  Following a motion hearing Friday, Jackson County Circuit Judge John McBain will decide within 21 days whether or not police investigating an arson case violated attorney client privilege and unjustifiably seized evidence in their investigation.

Defense attorney Andrew Abood asked McBain on Friday, March 22 to toss out an email between the Abood Law Firm and Nikki Joly that the Jackson Police Department obtained as evidence while investigating the arson of Jolys home.

Along with the email, the defense wants any evidence obtained through the email to be tossed out as well, calling it fruit from the poisonous tree."

The government was not involved in recovering the evidence mentioned in the email until after they obtained the email, Abood said.

Joly, 53, is accused of intentionally starting the Aug. 10, 2017 fire that destroyed his home in the 1800 block of Pringle Avenue and killed his two German shepherd dogs and three cats.

He was bound over for trial Dec. 11, 2018 on one felony count of first-degree arson and two counts of killing or torturing an animal.

Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Steve Idema said he has no intention of introducing the email at trial, and that the evidence Abood wants to suppress includes items police were searching for long before the email was obtained unintentionally.

Police had photos of the items they were looking for from the day of the fire and when they went looking for them to collect them, they were gone, Idema said.

A Michigan State Police fire investigator determined the fire was started intentionally after traces of gasoline were detected in five places in the home.

Jackson Police Detective Arron Grove and Sgt. Holly Rose, who was lead detective at the time of the fire, both testified they investigated the fire and collected evidence suggesting Joly started the blaze.

During Jolys preliminary examination, it was revealed that investigators executing a search warrant on Jolys computer had obtained an email between Joly and his attorneys discussing the case.

In the email, Joly mentions the location of his lawn mower and a gas can that Joly asked two neighbors to hold on to for him.

Police obtained a search warrant for the two items and collected them as evidence.

(Joly) knew where they were and had an ethical obligation to give them up, Idema said. It is a fact that the evidence was removed from the scene and we have witnesses who will testify (Joly) asked them to hold on to these items and then never asked for them back.

Abood countered that the lawn mower and gas can were removed from the scene six months after the fire when the property was no longer identified as a crime scene.

Based on a timeline of events leading up to the fire, cellphone records, physical evidence collected by police and witness statements, Joly had the means and opportunity to start the fire, according to a Jackson Police Department arson investigation report obtained by MLive/Jackson Citizen Patriot through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Joly has been an advocate for LGBTQ rights in Jackson, leading the push to establish the citys non-discrimination ordinance, which was approved in 2017. He was director of the Jackson Pride Center, which opened in February 2017, and an organizer of the Jackson Pride Festival and Parade in 2017 and 2018.

Jolys next court hearing is scheduled for April 23.

Jolys is free on a $25,000 bond. First-degree arson is punishable by up to life in prison and a fine of $20,000, or three times the value of the property destroyed.

Killing or torturing an animal is punishable by up to four years in prison.WISCONSIN -- Police in Kenosha, Wisconsin are looking for a Kalamazoo area woman after her vehicle was found unoccupied there.

Kenosha police said Amanda Hanover, 39, is considered missing-endangered."

She was last seen by family in Michigan on March 18.

Kenosha police found her vehicle unoccupied near Fishermans Circle at the Lake Michigan shoreline, although it wasnt immediately clear when the vehicle was located.

Police found a cell phone in the vehicle.

Officers searched the lakefront with an aerial drone but did not locate Hanover.

Anyone with information about Hanover can call Kenosha police at 262-656-1234 or a Crime Stopper hotline at 262-656-7333.KALAMAZOO, MI -- Questions remain on the details of why a Kalamazoo student brought a handgun to school and how long the gun was on school property.

Kalamazoo Township Police Department Chief Bryan Ergang said police are continuing to investigate after a student, 16, brought a loaded handgun to Kalamazoo Central High School Tuesday, March 19.

The school received a vague report there was possibly a gun on school property, Ergang said Friday in an interview with MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette. School security officials found the student and took the gun, which was tucked in the students waistband, into their possession, he said. Police were called shortly after noon and arrested the student for carrying a concealed weapon, Ergang said.

Police do not yet know how long the student had the gun while at school. Police are working to determine how the student got the gun, whether someone else gave it to the student or whether the student brought it to school, he said.

The school district and police announced the incident Tuesday but the school district has declined to give further information, referring questions to police.

Police are continuing conversations with the student to piece together a complete narrative of the day, but said they dont believe they are getting the entire story from the student, Ergang said.

Ergang declined to disclose what the student cited as a reason for bringing the gun to school. He did say police know the student did not intend a mass event."

Ergang would not say what evidence police had to know of the students intentions and declined to say what the student said when interviewed by police.

The student was arrested without resistance, the police chief said.

There was no evidence the student meant harm to the school community, and the weapon was not discharged, police said earlier in the week.

The police and school district issued a joint press release to the public Tuesday afternoon. Parents were notified of the incident through a robocall at about 2:35 p.m., after students had left school for the day, district spokesperson Alex Lee said.

Response to the news incident included criticism of the districts response and requests for further details on the incident. On Wednesday, Kalamazoo school board member Jermaine Jackson toured the high school to offer support to the staff and learn more about the buildings security measures. Jackson said he understood the parents concerns but felt the district responded correctly by handling the situation before alerting parents.VICKSBURG, MI -- Vicksburg Community Schools reports this week that air quality testing at Sunset Elementary School found no hazardous airborne environmental contaminants that could cause illness.

The school district is responding to concerns posted on social media that illness of children and staff at the elementary building could be linked to environmental factors within a kindergarten classroom, Vicksburg Community Schools Superintendent Keevin ONeill said at a news conference Thursday, March 21.

After a kindergarten teacher at the school fell ill and was hospitalized in December, staff expressed concern that the teachers illness was similar to that of a former staff member who worked in the same room a prior year.

The school district identified the teacher as a female employee, but declined to release her name and age, citing employee privacy concerns.

In response to concerns from the community, the school district hired contractors to perform an environmental air quality inspection in the teachers classroom, room 401.

Extensive diagnostic testing of the indoor air quality was conducted Thursday, Jan. 31, by Ann Arbor-based environmental testing agency Nova Environmental, Inc., the district said. The resulting air quality report did not find any harmful levels of tested contaminants.

Obviously Vicksburg Community Schools is committed to the safety, security and health of all of our students and staff," ONeill said. That is our priority and it will always be our top priority.

The superintendent did not comment on the symptoms or type of illness that raised the initial concerns. The symptoms worrying parents now are also hard to pinpoint, ONeill said.

What we have is a wide range of symptoms that have been exhibited -- everything you can think of that happens in the winter time," he said. Because of that, its hard to determine exactly one symptom."

The teacher who fell ill in December returned to her classroom for a period of time, but has returned home since on her doctors request, ONeill said. She is awaiting clearance from her doctor to return to work.

Within the past week, school officials saw worried parents posts on social media, suggesting links between their childs illness and the environmental quality at the school, Assistant Superintendent Stephen Gross said.

While the district cannot say for sure the teachers illness is due to environmental factors in the classroom, were committed to ruling out everything," Gross said.

In addition to the air quality tests preformed earlier this year, the district plans to create an environmental safety committee consisting of employees, parents and community members. The group would study current practices, share information with the community and make suggestions to the Board of Trustees regarding environmental safety.

In the spirit of transparency, a letter was sent to parents Tuesday, March 19, addressing concerns seen on social media. The district also released a copy of the air quality testing report.

The district said a representative from the environmental testing firm will be at the school to answer questions from employees, parents and the general public Monday, March 25. The representative will be available from 4 to 6 p.m. Monday in the gymnasium of Sunset Lake Elementary School, 201 N. Boulevard St. in Vicksburg.

A new environmental safety section will be added to the districts website to include reports, communication documents and information about the school districts next steps. Those with questions regarding the air quality inspection or environmental concerns at the district may contact Stephen Goss at sgoss@vicksburgschools.org or 269-321-1005.MUSKEGON, MI  The city of Muskegon is close to finalizing a $2.16 million purchase agreement for former prison property, which will be used to expand the citys Port City Industrial Park.

The city and the state of Michigans Land Bank Fast Track Authority have agreed on the terms of a final purchase agreement for the 62-acre parcel that housed the former West Michigan Shoreline Correctional Facility, 2500 S. Sheridan Drive.

State officials closed the prison in March 2018 due to a decline in the statewide prison population. The state prison previously known as the Michigan Temporary Facility included nine buildings.

Muskegon City Commissioners approved the purchase agreement on March 12 and authorized officials to close the deal. City Manager Frank Peterson said he expects both parties to sign the document within the next 30 days.

According to the agreement, a total of $2.16 million will be spent on buying the land, demolition costs, new fencing and other expenses at the time of closing. The money will be drawn from Muskegons public improvement fund, which will be reimbursed by a state grant.

Peterson has said that the city wants to incorporate the land into the industrial park to attract new businesses. The focus is on food processing and manufacturing, and Peterson said in January that he has begun courting a food processing business interested in the property.

This map shows the location of the defunct West Shoreline Corrections Facility, located at 2500 S. Sheridan Dr.Courtesy of Google.com

Infrastructure updates, road improvements and potential demolition work would begin shortly after the city buys the property.

The land itself will cost the city close to $1.4 million, according to the agreement. The city is to pay the state that amount at the time of closing, at which time the city will be refunded a $50,000 earnest money deposit.

In the waning months of his administration, former Gov. Rick Snyder awarded up to $4 million in grant money to the city of Muskegon so it can purchase the property without dipping into city coffers. That money will be deposited into the public improvement fund once the deal is finalized, according to the agreement.

The West Shoreline Correctional Facility was among three facilities in a complex near the Port City Industrial Park that also includes the Muskegon Correctional Facility and the Earnest C. Brooks Regional Correctional Facility, both of which remain open, said Chris Gautz with the Michigan Department of Corrections.MUSKEGON, MI  Two West Michigan men have been arrested for child pornography after investigations by the Michigan State Police.

Edward-Richard Naill, 34, of Muskegon and James Crawford, 56, of Baldwin, were arrested following investigations by the police agencys Computer Crimes Unit/Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

Naill was the focus of an undercover investigation into his online activity, according to a press release from the Michigan State Police. Following the execution of a search warrant at Naills home, he was arraigned for child sexually abusive activity and using a computer to commit a crime, according to the press release.

Crawford was investigated after a tip about possession of child sexually abusive material was received from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to the state police. Detectives investigated and ended up executing a search warrant at Crawfords residence.

He was arrested by the Michigan State Polices Sixth District Fugitive Team and arraigned in Lake County for child sexually abusive activity, child sexually abusive material and two counts of using a computer to commit a crime.

Michigan State Police were assisted by the Lake County Sheriffs Department.PINCONNING, MI  Police are investigating the burglary of a Pinconning pharmacy.

About 4 a.m. on Wednesday, March 20, Bay County Sheriffs deputies responded to an alarm at Town & Country Supermarket, 704 S. Mable St. Upon arrival, they found a door had been forced open with a pry device, said Sheriff Troy R. Cunningham.

Deputies entered the building and found the culprits had already fled the scene. They discovered the markets pharmacy had been broken into with a large amount of prescription medication stolen, Cunningham said.

Deputies reviewed surveillance camera footage, which showed two men enter the business. Both had their faces covered and were wearing gloves, sweatpants, and hooded sweatshirts, Cunningham said.

Its possible a third suspect remained outside, the sheriff added.

The burglars had arrived in a dark, small SUV, possibly a Hyundai Tucson, Cunningham said.

Similar incidents have recently been reported in Genesee County, though its not known if those incidents are connected to the Pinconning one, the sheriff said.

Anyone with knowledge of the burglars identities is urged to call the sheriffs office at 989-895-4050.SAGINAW, MI  Interim Bishop Walter A. Hurley of the Catholic Diocese of Saginaw has issued a statement following one of the dioceses priests being acquitted of sexually assaulting two teens.

The not guilty decision regarding Rev. Robert DeLand by the jury brings to resolution one part of a long and difficult process for all involved, Hurley wrote in a statement posted Thursday, March 21, on the dioceses website.

A 9-woman, three-man jury on Thursday deliberated for about two hours before finding DeLand not guilty of second-degree criminal sexual conduct and attempted second-degree criminal sexual conduct.

DeLand, 72, has two more trials pending on charges of second-degree criminal sexual conduct causing personal injury, attempted second-degree criminal sexual conduct, gross indecency between two males, manufacturing or distributing a controlled substance, and furnishing or selling alcohol to minors.

DeLand had previously pleaded no contest to all of the charges, but later withdrew his pleas.

We await the results of the continuing legal process, Hurley wrote. My hope, that as the criminal court process continues to evolve, a sense of peace and healing for all will be the final result. Because these matters are ongoing, I will refrain from making any additional comments until all the criminal proceedings are completed."

The Catholic Diocese of Saginaw has suspended DeLand while the cases play out in court. He most recently worked in Freeland.

DeLand remains free on bond.

Jury selection in DeLands second trial is to begin Tuesday, March 26.Democratic presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar is scheduled to visit Michigan in May, joining other candidates targeting the state as a key battleground in the 2020 election.

Klobuchar, D-Minn., is scheduled to attend a womens caucus luncheon before the Michigan Democratic Partys fourth annual legacy dinner on May 18 in Detroit. MDP Press Secretary Paul Kanan confirmed Klobuchar will be featured as a guest speaker at the luncheon.

We are thrilled to have so many great Democrats visiting Michigan, and you can expect to see that increase and continue, Kanan said. We cant wait for our grassroots Democrats to have the opportunity to hear from them all, including Sen. Klobuchar, (about) the role Michigan will play in their respective visions for the country.

The legacy dinner will honor the legacy of the late John Dingell Jr., who was the longest serving member of Congress before his death in February at the age of 92. The womens caucus lunch is scheduled for 11:30 a.m., at the Detroit Marriott-Renaissance Center.

Rep. John Dingell fought for the ideals he believed in &the people of Michigan his entire life. The ACA was his crowning achievement. We will miss his good work, his wit, and of course his tweets. Thinking of his incredibly strong wife/congresswoman Debbie Dingell &family tonight  Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) February 8, 2019

Klobuchar has not announced other Michigan campaign events. Messages left with Klobuchars campaign were not returned Friday morning.

Early polling indicates Klobuchar may have the best chance of beating President Donald Trump in Michigan among candidates who have announced so far. According to an Emerson College poll, she only trails former Vice President Joe Biden, who has not announced his plans for 2020, in a hypothetical head-to-head match up against the president.

Klobuchar formally declared her candidacy on Feb. 10, joining a crowded field of Democrats seeking their partys nomination in 2020. Presidential candidates have prioritized early campaign stops in Michigan in an effort to claim the state, which helped elect Trump in 2016.

Michigan was long considered part of the Democrats blue wall," but Trump narrowly took the state by 10,704 votes. The state swung back for Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections, setting the stage for a competitive presidential race.

U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and former U.S. Rep. Beto ORourke, D-Texas, made several stops in metro Detroit on March 18. Trump will visit Grand Rapids for a campaign rally on March 28.

Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said she will connect any Democratic candidate who comes to Michigan with local organizations and participate in campaign events. Whitmer said all roads to the White House lead through Michigan.

The May visit will be Klobuchars first stop in Michigan, though the Midwestern Democrat has also visited Wisconisn, Iowa and California.

Klobuchar, 58, became the first Minnesota woman to serve in the U.S. Senate in 2007. She was re-elected to a third term in 2018, defeating her Republican opponent by 24 percentage points.

Klobuchar was a corporate lawyer in Minneapolis before running for U.S. Senate.

Last years MDP legacy dinner featured U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who is also running for president.by Cait Bladt

Mere days after a white nationalist murdered 50 people in two mosques in New Zealand, the countrys prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced a nationwide ban on semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles. Mirroring a similar ban in Australia that went into effect in the 90s, New Zealand is instating a buy-back program. Many activists and politicians think the U.S. should take a page from New Zealands book. Others say gun ownership is a right in the U.S. and that should not change. What do you think?

New Zealand had a strong culture of gun ownership and use. According to NPR, there are 1.2 million guns registered in the countryroughly one for every four people. But Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern took swift action after the shooting in Christchurch and enjoyed roundly bipartisan support in her effort to change the laws. Per Refinery29:

"I strongly believe that the vast majority of legitimate gun owners in New Zealand will understand that these moves are in the national interest, and will take these changes in their stride," Ardern said on Thursday. "What we're banning today are the things that were used in last Fridays attack." ...Gun reform advocates praised Ardern's leadership. "It is heartening to see Jacinda Ardern's incredible leadership and how quickly her administration is acting in the wake of this horrific mass shooting," Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, the grassroots arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, told Refinery29 earlier this week. "We've had at least 200 mass shootings in America since 2009...and yet our leaders have done very little."

The plan in New Zealand mirrors similar reform in Australia, which allows individuals to request exemptions. Per Vox:

The plan seems similar to what Australia did in response to a mass shooting in 1996  changes that have been linked to fewer gun deaths in the subsequent years. When Australia undertook similar reforms, their approach was to allow for exemptions for farmers upon application, including for pest control and animal welfare, Ardern said. We have taken similar action to identify the weapons legitimately required in those areas, and preclude them.

American politicians, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, praised Arderns actions and called for similar reforms in the U.S.

This is what real action to stop gun violence looks like. We must follow New Zealand's lead, take on the NRA and ban the sale and distribution of assault weapons in the United States. https://t.co/lSAisDG9Ur  Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 21, 2019

Not everyone in New Zealand supported the reforms. NPR talked to several gun owners in the country who were concerned about the lack of protections for gun owners in the countrys laws.

ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: ...[Gun owner Thomas] Jones says gun ownership isn't enshrined into New Zealand's constitution like it is in the U.S. And gun enthusiasts like him don't have an organization like the NRA to represent them. That's left him and his friends feeling vulnerable after Friday's attack. THOMAS JONES: And it's really disappointing to have the government throw on us what one person did and punish 250,000 gun owners at least just because of what one man's done. SCHMITZ: A quarter-million new Zealanders would have to give up their semi-automatic guns if the government bans them. For Jones, that would mean giving up four of his 12 guns. He says he uses these semi-automatic guns as part of his livelihood. He owns a hunting business.

Conservative political pundits decried the action in New Zealand and emphasized that American gun owners are protected by the Constitution.

First, define assault weapon. Words are important and certain laws come into play depending on which words are used, so define this.



Secondly, the US isnt NZ. While they do not have an inalienable right to bear arms and to self defense, we do. https://t.co/E3M7Qh1fbV  Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 21, 2019

The Washington Post reported that making similar changes in the United States would be far more difficult, given the power of the gun lobby and precedent set by the Supreme Court.

Ardern is also less likely to face challenges from the courts than politicians would in the United States, where the Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment as giving people the right to own guns. Those legal hurdles have been exacerbated by a gun lobby that has conveyed a perception that tighter laws are by definition a violation of the Second Amendment. The gun lobby has been very influential in convincing people the [Second Amendment prohibits any] form of gun control, which affects the politics over even modest measures, Webster said. As a result, the United States is likely to remain an outlier on gun reform.

The Tylt is focused on debates and conversations around news, current events and pop culture. We provide our community with the opportunity to share their opinions and vote on topics that matter most to them. We actively engage the community and present meaningful data on the debates and conversations as they progress. The Tylt is a place where your opinion counts, literally. The Tylt is an Advance Local Media, LLC property. Join us on Twitter @TheTylt, on Instagram @TheTylt or on Facebook, wed love to hear what you have to say.Catholic churches in France are being targeted with arson attacks, vandalism, desecration of holy statues, and the destruction of the Eucharist. The attacks have been happening since the start of the year.

The Church of St. Sulpice in Paris, where the Da Vinci Code movie was filmed, was set on fire just after midday mass on Sunday, Le Parisien reports. Firefighters and police said the blaze was an arson attack.

In February, a 19th century statue of the Virgin Mary was smashed at the St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Houilles. The statue was completely pulverized, Father Francois-Laurent Heart said. It is irreparable. The church reported three incidents in 10 days, with a cross also thrown on the floor by vandals.

At Saint-Alain Cathedral in Lavaur, statues and crosses were smashed and an altar cloth was burned in February. A statue of Christ on a cross was also interfered with, as vandals twisted one of the arms to make it appear that Jesus was dabbing, La Depeche reports. Two teenagers were later arrested over the damage.

Meanwhile, the Notre-Dame des Enfants church in Nimes was looted and vandals used human excrement to draw a cross on the wall in February. Consecrated hosts of unleavened bread, which Catholics believe is the body of Jesus Christ, were found scattered outside with rubbish.

Also in February, eucharistic hosts were stolen and scattered around Notre-Dame church in Dijon, with Father Emmanuel Pic denouncing the attack as on the heart of the Catholic faith.

Nothing of value has been broken, but its the intent thats very shocking, he told Bien Public.



If you like this story, share it with a friend!Egypts Foreign Ministry said on Friday that Cairo considers the Golan Heights as occupied Syrian land. The statement rejects a call by US President Donald Trump to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war. The Egyptian ministry cited UN Security Council resolution 497 of 1981 which rejected Israels annexation of the territory. Cairo stressed that everybody should respect the resolutions of international legitimacy and the UN Charter in respect of the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force.An opposition lawmaker tore into Canadas proud feminist Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus record on women, saying that the PM has tried to shut them up as he faces a political corruption scandal.

Conservative lawmaker Michelle Rempel blasted Trudeau for muzzling strong, principled women during a debate in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

He asked for strong women, and this is what they look like! she proclaimed, referring to the former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould who recently accused the Trudeau-led government of meddling in a large-scale corruption probe.

Thats not what a feminist looks like Every day that he refuses to allow the attorney general to testify and tell her story is another day hes a fake feminist!

The PM was visibly taken aback by someone casting doubt on his feminist credibility  so much so that, as he rose to reply to Rempel, he forgot which language he planned to use that day.

Trudeau quickly jumped to respond in English, only to revert back to French several phrases later. That earned him loud jeers and boos from the opposition.

In his defense, the prime minister said that his government invested millions of dollars in helping women all across the country and will continue to fight for gender equality.

Im proud to have strong and outstanding women serving not just in the Cabinet but within our caucus, he claimed.

But Rempel wasnt finished yet. She immediately recalled how Trudeau used similar defense tactics last year when he said that there was no need to investigate the groping allegations put forward against him by a female reporter.

Earlier Rempels conservative colleague, Candice Bergen also attacked Trudeau in similar language, slamming him as nothing but a fake feminist.

Justin Trudeau has been promoting himself as a champion of womens rights. He even once insisted that the word peoplekind should be used instead of mankind.

His image, already tarnished by the groping allegations, received another blow as Trudeau became embroiled in the high-profile scandal over construction company SNC-Lavalin.

The company was accused of using bribes to secure government contracts in Libya. In late February, former attorney general Wilson-Raybould testified to lawmakers that government officials barraged her with demands to drop the probe. She said that she believed her stance led to her eventual dismissal.

Also on rt.com Trudeau refuses to resign after claims he tried to meddle in multi-million-dollar bribery probe

The opposition then tried to summon Wilson-Raybould for additional testimony, but the meeting to discuss this issue was abruptly shut down by the members of Trudeaus Liberal Party.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!By Li Xia, Xinhua | Mar. 18, 2019

The Nadi International Airport in Fiji has achieved Level 2 Airport Carbon Accreditation from Airports Council International (ACI) which is a great achievement for the island nation.

According to Fiji Broadcasting Corporation (FBC) on Monday, Fiji Airports Executive Chair Faiz Khan said this latest achievement was a testimony of Nadi International Airport's positive contribution towards the mitigation of climate change.

Nadi is Fiji's third largest city and is popular for tourists. Nadi International Airport is the main international airport for Fiji as well as an important regional hub for the South Pacific islands.

It is the main hub of Fiji Airways and its domestic and regional subsidiary Fiji Link. In 2016, the airport handled 2,697,504 passengers on international and domestic flights. It handles about 97 percent of international visitors to Fiji, of which 85 percent are tourists.

Khan said Nadi International Airport has received two major ACI recognitions within one month, which is a fantastic achievement by the entire team at Fiji Airports.

Khan said that the transformed and modern Nadi International Airport has a state of the art Building Management System, LED lights and there is more focus on natural light throughout the terminal.

The Airport Carbon Accreditation is a global carbon management program. It independently assesses and recognizes airports'efforts to manage and reduce their carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, there are four different levels of accreditation: Mapping, Reduction, Optimisation and Neutrality.Hard Brexit is step closer if British parliament rejects deal again  Austrias Kurz

Hard Brexit is step closer if British parliament rejects deal again  Austrias Kurz

Austrias Chancellor Sebastian Kurz hopes the withdrawal agreement negotiated between Britain and the remaining EU states would now pass the British parliament after EU leaders granted Britain extra time. Arriving for the second day of an EU summit on Friday, Kurz said a disorderly Brexit would become more likely if the British House of Commons rejected the withdrawal agreement for a third time. If there isnt a majority then a hard Brexit will once again move a step closer, he noted. Leaders agreed that a longer delay would be possible if Britain participated in Mays European Parliament elections, but Kurz expressed doubts over this, Reuters reported.Source : RT - Daily newsHezbollah sanctions hurt Lebanon, parliaments speaker Berri tells Pompeo

Hezbollah sanctions hurt Lebanon, parliaments speaker Berri tells Pompeo

The long-serving speaker of Lebanons parliament, Nabih Berri, told visiting US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday that US sanctions on the Hezbollah group were having a negative impact on Lebanon and the Lebanese. Berri told Pompeo that Hezbollah is a Lebanese party in the government and parliament. The speaker also added that the movements armed resistance against Israel was a result of continuing Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory, Reuters reports. Pompeo highlighted US concerns about Hezbollahs destabilizing activities in Lebanon and the region and the risks posed to Lebanons security, stability and prosperity, a US spokesman said.Source : RT - Daily newsAt least two online bookstores stopped selling the manifesto compiled by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who reportedly inspired the mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand last week.

Breivik, an extremist white supremacist, is currently serving a maximum 21-year sentence for slaughtering 77 people and injuring over 300 in an act of political violence. He timed his 2011 bomb and gun attack with the release of an anti-Muslim manifesto explaining his motivations. The 1,518-page text is mostly a compilation of what other people wrote and Breivik liked, and is available freely online.

Until recently, one could also order a hard copy of the manifesto from Amazon. This was the case until the British news outlet the Times highlighted this fact on Sunday in an accusatory report. A text by Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine people at a black church in Charleston in 2015, was also available for purchase, the newspaper said, accusing the international giant of profiting from hate literature.

Also on rt.com Norway appeals Breivik inhuman treatment ruling: How does his prison regime compare?

Online retailers  just like social media companies  need to stop playing into the hands of terrorists by giving them the notoriety they crave and even selling their so-called manifestos, the Times was told by Brendan Cox, the husband of Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered by a white supremacist in June 2016. Too many corporates are actively making future attacks more likely.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment, but pulled down the controversial products soon after the story was published.

Scandinavian book retailer Adlibris was also found selling Breiviks manifesto by Norwegian broadcaster NRK. Adlibris quickly withdrew the three-volume book and explained that the text showed up among its products due to an automated publication process. The product was created through a self-publishing website and was not pre-moderated.

As a rule, we read the incoming titles. Of course, we cannot control all 15 million titles, but we actively remove them, Adlibris Nordic sales manager Sakari Luovio told NRK. He added the records showed not a single copy of the book had been sold and that if the opposite were true, the firm would have donated all proceeds to charity.

Also on rt.com Mistake sees Christchurch suspect charged with murder of woman who turned out to be alive

Breiviks manifesto returned to the public spotlight after a terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand last week, which left 50 people dead. The suspect got inspiration from the Norwegian murderers crimes, or at least thats what he claimed in his own manifesto, which he published before going on a gun rampage in Christchurch.

Like this story? Share it with a friend!Indonesias national airline Garuda has announced the cancellation of its multi-billion-dollar order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 passenger jets after two fatal crashes involving the aircraft in less than five months.

In 2014, Garuda Indonesia signed a $4.9 billion agreement for the delivery of 50 of the Boeing planes, one of which was handed to the company.

The air carrier has now reportedly sent a letter to Boeing to cancel the order for the remaining 737 MAX jets with the representatives of the worlds biggest aerospace group expected to visit Jakarta in late March for further discussion of the issue.

Also on rt.com Profit v passenger safety: Why the US was the last to ground troubled Boeing jets

The move comes amid the latest crash of Boeings best-selling passenger jet in Ethiopia. The tragedy, which killed all 157 people on board, followed a similar deadly accident in Indonesia that took the lives of 189 people in October.

Our passengers have lost confidence to fly with the MAX 8, Ikhsan Rosan, spokesperson for Garuda said, as quoted by CNN.

Earlier this month, global air carriers and aviation authorities had to ground the troubled jet over safety concerns until the results of a probe into the crashes are known.

The investigation, currently in its early stages, was launched after the first crash of a 737 MAX aircraft operated by Indonesias Lion Air.

Also on rt.com Global airlines face huge losses due to grounding of Boeing 737 MAX 8

Earlier this week, Russian airlines including UTair, Ural Airlines, Pobeda Airlines, and S7 indefinitely suspended contracts for the delivery of 737 MAX 8s, according to Vladimir Afonsky, a member of the State Duma Committee on Transport and Construction.

Boeings best-selling 737 Max 8 has been extremely popular among the companys customers since it hit the market in 2017. Global airlines and leasing corporations have placed some 5,000 orders for the jet.

For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business sectionPyongyang pulls out of liaison office with South Korea  ministry

Pyongyang pulls out of liaison office with South Korea  ministry

North Korea has pulled out of a liaison office with Seoul just north of their armed border. The move is seen as a setback for South Korean President Moon Jae-ins effort to end hostility and in the wake of a failed summit between the North and the United States, Reuters said. North Korea conveyed the decision during a weekly meeting with the South on Friday morning saying it was on instructions from a higher level, Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung said in Seoul.Source : RT - Daily newsFormer UKIP leader Nigel Farage has reacted to a tweet making fun of the fact some Russians have signed a petition calling for Brexit to be stopped, suggesting that an investigation should be launched into Russian collusion.

Hugh Bennett, news editor at right-wing blog Guido Fawkes, took to social media on Thursday night after the Revoke Article 50 petition had passed the 1 million signatures barrier.

READ MORE: I will take over as Brexit Party leader: Nigel Farage back on the frontline

Bennett attached a data image from the petitions website, revealing that 12 Russians had signed up and cheekily asked: I thought they were meant to be against foreign interference in our democracy?

The tweet got picked up by the Independent MEP, who could soon be officially registered as leader of his new Brexit Party in the coming weeks. He seized on the irony of Russian involvement in a pro-EU, UK petition, arguing that an inquiry was needed.

Bennett also noted verifiable interest in the stop Brexit petition from other countries such as Saudi Arabia and even North Korea, which has one signature. It couldnt be from the big man, surely?!

The tweet triggered an avalanche of seemingly irate Remainers, not seeing the funny side and instead insisting it was fake news. Others living in various countries around the world felt the need justify their signatures.

Russia has been at the center of accusations concerning collusion in foreign nations internal affairs, from the 2016 US presidential election to the 2016 EU referendum in Britain, despite a lack of concrete evidence to support such claims.

Farage announced on Friday that he will lead his new Brexit Party into the European elections if UK MPs decide to delay Brexit beyond May 22.

At the time of publishing this article, the petition had broken the 3 million barrier.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

to RT newsletter to get stories the mainstream media wont tell you.Trump may be Gods chosen one to save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed in a baffling interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network.

Specifically, the interviewer asked Pompeo if Trump could be a modern day version of the biblical character Esther, a beautiful woman chosen to be married to Persian King Ahasuerus.

Presumably the comparison wasnt invited in light of Trumps feminine charm, but due to the fact that Esther spoiled the plans of the kings chief advisor Haman, who wanted to kill all of the Jews living in Persia.

The interviewer states rather factually that there is a new Haman in the Middle East who wants to eradicate the Jewish people, also known as Iran, and asked if President Trump had been chosen, just like queen Esther, in order to save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?

As a Christian I certainly believe that's possible, Pompeo answered with a smile. The interview took place during Pompeos visit to Jerusalem on the day Jews mark the foiling of Hamans plans with a holiday called Purim.

Aside from the holiday, the secretarys comments came in light of Trumps announcement that the US would recognize the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel, despite a UN resolution which condemns Tel Avivs forceful acquisition of the territory.

I am confident that the Lord is at work here, Pompeo added, describing the role the United States has played in preserving the Jewish state.

Pompeos bizarre comment fetched a number of responses from people on Twitter that ranged between concerned and terrified.

Others, perhaps, took the comparison a bit more literally than the interviewer had intended.

Pompeo is currently engaged in a Middle East tour aimed at forming a united front against Iran. Having stopped in Kuwait before heading to Israel, he will next visit Lebanon before heading back to the States.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!By Irene Garcia Perez, Christopher Jasper, Bloomberg News | Mar. 20, 2019

Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA's reliance on the fuel-saving Boeing Co. 737 Max to underpin its ultra low-cost trans-Atlantic strategy has exposed the loss-making carrier as the most vulnerable in Europe to the worldwide grounding of the plane.

Norwegian was among the earliest adopters of the new narrow-body, using its extra range to launch services on Europe-U.S. routes traditionally dominated by twin-aisle planes. But after the fatal crash in Ethiopia on March 10 put the Max out of action, the airline has had to scrap some flights and switch others to bigger aircraft, increasing costs and reducing competitiveness in an already cut-throat market.

The 737 crisis has hit Norwegian at a time when it can least afford disruption. The carrier is already grappling with a cash squeeze from splurging on planes and was forced to raise fresh funds in a rights issue this month. The move came after British Airways parent IAG SA dropped a takeover approach, helping to send send the stock down 43 percent so far this year.

The 737 grounding is costing Norwegian as much as 15 million kroner ($1.8 million) a day, according to Ole Martin Westgaard at Oslo-based DNB bank. The carrier has said "it is obvious" that expenses should be reimbursed by Boeing, but the situation is unclear and the reduced market value of the Max could "significantly hurt" the company's sum-of-parts valuation, the analyst said.

The discount carrier has 18 Max jets, making it the biggest operator of the model in Europe ahead of German holiday company TUI AG, which has 15. Norwegian usually deploys them on services from Scotland and Ireland to the U.S., and between Norway and the U.K.

Bus Trip

While it's now using older 737s on the latter routes, flights from Edinburgh to Stewart in upstate New York were terminated. Services from Dublin to Stewart and Providence, Rhode Island, were combined into a single flight to the New York town using a Boeing 787 sourced from Norwegian's London Gatwick wide-body hub. People going to Providence have to complete their journey by bus.

"Passengers will be taken care of," Bjorn Kjos, the carrier's co-founder and chief executive officer, said in a video message on its website. "We are combining flights, reallocating aircraft and booking customers to other departures. Only a small part of our operation is affected."

TUI is relying on other planes to cope with the Max grounding, which affects 10 percent of its 150-strong fleet, while leasing in one or two extra jets a day and more on weekends. It has also rerouted some flights, changed departure times and will postpone non-critical work, such as repainting, to maximize resources, a spokesman said.

Software Fix

In the Middle East, FlyDubai, which has 13 Max planes representing 12 percent of total capacity, is canceling up to 15 flights a day. Customers are being given the option of re-booking with the airline, transferring to sister carrier Emirates, or receiving a refund.

The 737 Max was grounded around the world amid concern the African tragedy that killed 157 people on board was caused by the same combination of malfunctioning sensors and a computer system that took over the plane that was blamed for a Lion Air crash last October. Boeing has said it's finalizing software and pilot-training updates to address the issue, though the company's best-selling jet is expected to remain grounded at least through April.

Norwegian's use of the 737 Max and 787 allowed it to steal a march on bigger rivals by utilizing the improved efficiency of the new aircraft to offer transatlantic fares they couldn't match. But problems with the planes have made the bet look like a bad one. The 787 fleet has already been affected by engine problems at Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc.

Norwegian said in October that the 787 engine issues had already cost it 1 billion kroner, including customer claims after airports struggled to cope with a rented A380 superjumbo.

Like other Northern Hemisphere airlines, the grounding has come during the low season for Norwegian, when part of the fleet typically stands idle, and could prove more disruptive once demand begins to climb toward summer. The carrier has already been slowing its capacity growth with the closing of four European bases and a slowdown in its long-haul expansion. The Edinburgh-Stewart route was earmarked to shut later in the year.China Daily | Mar. 21, 2019

Boeing Co faced growing pressure in Washington on Wednesday as US lawmakers called for executives to testify about two crashed 737 MAX jets while the world's biggest planemaker worked on returning the grounded fleet to the skies.

The Senate hearing, at an unspecified date, would be the first time that a US congressional committee has called Boeing executives to appear for questioning about 737 MAX passenger plane crashes in October in Indonesia and March 10 in Ethiopia.

Meanwhile, the FAA on Wednesday sent a notification to global aviation authorities saying the installation of Boeing's new automatic flight software in the grounded jets and related training was a priority for the agency.

The Ethiopian Airlines crash has shaken the global aviation industry and cast a shadow over the flagship Boeing model intended to be a standard for decades to come, given parallels with the Lion Air calamity off Jakarta in October. The two crashes killed 346 people in all.

Boeing was sued on Wednesday in federal court in Chicago by the estate of one of the Lion Air crash victims in which the plaintiffs referred to the Ethiopian crash to support a wrongful death claim against the company. A Boeing spokesman said the company does not respond to, or comment on, questions concerning legal matters.

Also on Wednesday, the Seattle Times reported the Federal Bureau of Investigation was joining the investigation into the MAX's certification. An FBI spokeswoman in Seattle would neither confirm nor deny that it was a part of any investigation.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon Inspector General said it would investigate a complaint that Acting US Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, violated ethical rules by allegedly promoting Boeing while in office.

Chicago-headquartered Boeing has promised a swift update of software, but regulators in Europe and Canada are shifting away from previous reliance on FAA vetting, saying they will now seek their own guarantees of the MAX planes' safety.

Aviation experts suspect an automated system, meant to stop stalling by dipping the nose, may be involved in both cases, with pilots struggling to override it as their jets plunged downwards.

But they stress neither investigation is complete and crew actions and training will also be closely scrutinised.

As Ethiopian investigators pored over black box data from their crash, sources with knowledge of the doomed Lion Air cockpit voice recorder revealed how pilots searched a manual to figure out why they were hurtling down to sea.

Investigators examining the Indonesian crash want to know how a computer ordered the plane to dive in response to data from a faulty sensor and whether pilots had enough training to respond appropriately.

Communications showed that in the final moments, the captain tried in vain to find the right procedure in the handbook, while the first officer was unable to control the plane.

Boeing has said there was a documented procedure to handle the problem.

Regulators want to be absolutely sure of Boeing's new automated control system, known as MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), and that pilots are fully prepared to handle it. MCAS is meant to prevent a loss of lift which can cause an aerodynamic stall and send the plane downwards in an uncontrolled way.

Facing high-profile scrutiny, Boeing reshuffled executives in its commercial airplanes unit to focus on its response.

The FAA said its "robust processes" and "full collaboration with the aviation community" were key to safety worldwide.

For now, more than 350 MAX aircraft are grounded, and deliveries of nearly 5,000 more - worth more than $500 billion - are on hold.

Development of the 737 MAX began in 2011 after the launch by its main rival of the Airbus A320neo. The MAX entered service in 2017.Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.

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Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349(CNN)  The White House is rejecting a request from congressional Democrats to obtain documents tied to President Donald Trump's communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In a letter to three Democratic committee chairmen, White House counsel Pat Cipollone said that the courts have long established that presidential communications with foreign leaders are protected and confidential.

"The President must be free to engage in discussions with foreign leaders without fear that those communications will be disclosed and used as fodder for partisan political purposes," Cipollone wrote in the letter, obtained by CNN. "And foreign leaders must be assured of this as well."

Three Democrats  House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel and House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings  sent a letter to the White House earlier this month asking for information on communications between Trump and Putin.

The Democrats say they're investigating whether the President his associates attempted to conceal or misrepresent the nature of Trump's contacts with Putin. Schiff, Engel and Cummings are still mulling whether to subpoena the translators of Trump's meetings with Putin, following reports that Trump kept his aides in the dark about the meetings and took his interpreter's notes following his 2017 meeting with Putin in Germany.

The chairmen responded to Cipollone's letter Thursday, confirming they had seen the rejection.

"Our Committees are in receipt of the White House Counsel's letter, which continues a troubling pattern by the Trump Administration of rejecting legitimate and necessary congressional oversight with no regard for precedent or the constitution," the chairmen wrote in a statement.

Thursday's letter is the latest instance in which the White House has rejected documents requests from House Democrats who are investigating the Trump administration on a whole host of issues.

Cummings wrote in an op-ed this week that his committee had not received any documents yet from the White House on any topic his committee is probing, while the White House missed a Monday deadline set by the House Judiciary Committee to respond to a document request for their investigation.

"The White House is engaged in an unprecedented level of stonewalling, delay and obstruction," Cummings wrote.

In his letter, Cipollone argued that the courts have long respected the executive branch's right to conduct foreign policy without interference from the legislative branch.

"Presidents from all political parties have determined that the law does not require the Executive Branch to provide Congress with documents relating to confidential diplomatic communications between the President and foreign leaders," he wrote. "No foreign leader would engage in private conversations with the President, or the President's senior advisors, if such conversations were subject to public disclosure (or disclosure to committees of Congress)."

In a sign of growing tension between the White House and House Democrats, Cipollone also chided the committees for being "unwilling to make reasonable efforts" to accommodate the executive branch's interests.

"It appears that the practice of the Committees has been to request information that the Committees have no legal entitlement to receive and then to unfairly criticize the White House for simply adhering to consistent bipartisan past practice in its response," he wrote.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "White House rejects Dem requests for info on Putin communications."live bse live

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In November 2018, when Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran presented the board a proposal to buy into Jet Airways, he was cautioned not to rush into a deal.

Coming just a week after the holding company of the Tata Group had released a statement accepting that it was in 'preliminary talks' for a deal, the caution felt like a suggestion to keep away. The Tatas were not keen to board the flight as long as it had Naresh Goyal, its founder Chairman.

In the next few weeks, Tata Group seemed to have lost interest in buying the distressed airline and attention shifted to Jet Airways' attempt to raise money from partner Etihad Airways.

But in less than four months, the caution may have probably resulted in the right opportunity for India's oldest conglomerate to finally make the decisive moment in achieving its aviation dreams.

Jet Airways is in a precarious situation. Just about a third of its planes continue to fly, the rest are grounded because of non-payment to lessors and for want of spare parts. Its pilots have threatened to go on strike from April 1 , if their three months' salary dues are not cleared. And if funds don't come by immediately, the airline may default - fourth time within three months - yet again.

Much of that urgent funding, part of the resolution plan prepared along with lenders was meant to come from Etihad Airways, which owns 24 percent stake. But the Abu Dhabi-based airline is now keen on exiting.

Goyal reached out to others, including Qatar Airways, but no one seems to be willing to invest.

With no immediate solution in sight to take off the Rs 8,000 crore debt pile off Jet Airways, its lenders have now taken up the onus to land the airline safely.

State Bank of India, the lead lender, has Jet Airways' lenders have worked out an alternate rescue plan for the debt-ridden airline that involves taking majority control and reconstituting the entire board of the countrys second largest carrier. With just 11 days left to the end of this financial year, lenders are in a rush to seal a resolution plan. They have asked promoter Naresh Goyal to step down immediately and make way for a new management. As per the plan, Goyal's stake will likely be capped at 10 percent by diluting the rest at a nominal value. "Nothing else is working out, so they (lenders) will take control and then once things stabilise, they will engage with the new investor," said a senior banking official, who did not wish to be named. "Any new investor will also be interested only when there is a change in management and stakeholders." While there are talks of new investors including Tata Sons being approached, another source said it will take at least a couple of months to bring them in, as regulatory norms require due diligence on the part of the lenders too asked Goyal to step down, will reconstitute its board and also bring in a long-term investor at a later stage. In return, banks are expected to inject some much needed cash into the airline.

Rumour mills have been working overtime on who that 'long term investor' could be. IndiGo

The Rahul Bhatia-airline, which is hoping to make a big international splash this year, would benefit from Jet Airways' expansive overseas operations. The Goyal-led airline flies to 20 countries and has a code share agreements with about 20 airlines.

But IndiGo would be saddled with Jet Airways' domestic presence, something that had put it off when it came to the Air India divestment too.

There was also buzz that SpiceJet could come in with a stake buy in Jet Airways. To the credit of Chairman Ajay Singh, the airline has turnaround impressively since it changed hands from Kalanithi Maran. But with a market capitalisation of about Rs 5,500 crore, can the airline chew its bigger peer that will come with a debt of Rs 8,000 crore?

And not to forget, acquisitions in India's airline industry haven't done well. Think of Kingfisher-Air Deccan, and Jet Airways continues to suffer because of its buy of Air Sahara in 2007.

Perhaps the banks could do with a strategic investor, like the kind of Yussuf Ali of Lulu Group. But Ali is not interested, and the banks would prefer an investor who could immediately take the controls at Jet Airways.

The Tatas started India's first airline. Their ambition to re-enter the industry and start an airline in the 1990s didn't take off - some say Goyal had a role to play

The Group at present has a presence in the industry through two partnerships. The Tatas hold 51 percent in Vistara, its joint venture with Singapore Airlines, and also own 49 percent stake in AirAsia India.

The two airlines are relatively new in the market and need a push to garner market share, especially when IndiGo is adding capacity at a furious pace.

Jet Airways may fit in better with Vistara, given the latter's international ambition. Vistara is a full service airline, just like Jet Airways (it was at least until a few months ago when it introduced seats without frills).

Financially, Tatas won't have much of a problem taking over Jet Airways. "It won't be the first time that SBI would have gone to the Tatas when it needed bailing out," quipped a senior executive long associated with Tata Sons.

For the banks, the Tatas offer an option that will help them minimise haircut on their loan exposure to Jet Airways. And that is why they are keen to first change the leadership at Jet Airways before bringing in a long-term investor.India has been co-operating with the US on the Venezuelan sanctions and it is the "understanding" of the Trump administration that private Indian companies have stopped importing oil from the Latin American country, a top official has said.

The US official's comment came as Washington ramps up actions on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's regime, which is battling to hold onto power in the face of heavy domestic and international pressure.

Venezuela is the third largest supplier of oil to India which is the world's third-biggest oil consumer.

The senior Trump administration official said: "My understanding is that Indian private companies, who were importing Venezuelan oil, have stopped".

These companies, which also have interest in the US, are unlikely to ignore the US sanctions, he told reporters on Wednesday.

Responding to a question on India's response to the US efforts against the "authoritarian regime" in Venezuela, the official said that India has been co-operative with the US.

"The Indians have been cooperative in communicating to the private companies," he said, adding that the issue has been part of India-US discussion.

"We value our relationship with India and the strategic partnership," the official said, adding that it is natural that Venezuela, which is very important right now, would be raised in its discussions with India.

Last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a meeting with the visiting Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale, said that he hoped India will not be the "economic lifeline" to the "authoritarian" regime of Maduro by purchasing oil from the Latin American country.

The Latin American country's Oil Minister and state-run oil company PDVSA's President Manuel Quevedo told reporters in Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh last month that his sanctions-hit country wants to sell more crude oil to India.

The US has slapped sweeping sanctions on PDVSA with a view to curb Venezuela's crude exports and put pressure on socialist President Maduro to step down.

Venezuela produces around 1.57 million barrels of oil per day, half of what it produced two decades back.

With the US stopping imports from Venezuela, PDVSA is seeking to retain buyers in other big consuming countries such as China and India.

Maduro is facing a challenge from opposition leader Juan Guaido who declared himself acting president in January.

The US views Guaido as Venezuela's legitimate leader and has imposed sanctions on the country's oil sector besides taking other actions targeting top government officials.Representative image

RN Bhaskar

Last week, the Karnataka High Court quashed an order issued by the Karnataka Electricity Regulatory Commission (KERC) relating to an increase in wheeling charges for open access power consumers in the state. The high court order has provided relief to renewable energy generators trading power through open access in the southern state.

Wheeling is the transportation of electric power over transmission lines of the grid. A solar plant owner wanting to sell power needs only a connection to the network or grid. He then pays the company owning the transmission line based on how much power is being moved and how congested the line is, and these charges are called wheeling charges.

The move could make the case stronger for captive solar power producers on one hand and for rooftop solar power producers on the other, for reasons explained further in this article.

Meanwhile, the court in its order, reiterated the principle of settled contracts which lends certainty to power purchase agreements (PPAs) and imposes confidence in investors.

It all began in May 2018 when the KERC issued an order imposing high wheeling or transmission charges on renewable energy projects across the state. Units that were less than 10 years old (meaning all units as advocacy for solar projects began less than 10 years ago), had to pay additional transmission or wheeling charges fixed by the CERC in cash. This was a five-fold increase in wheeling charges for open access consumers in the state of Karnataka. The order was brought into effect from April 1, 2018, and was scheduled to be in force until March 31, 2020.

However, certain renewable energy project developers operating in Karnataka filed writ petitions in the High Court challenging this order.



KERC had promised solar photovoltaic (PV) project developers that they would be exempted from wheeling charges for 10 years after commissioning.



KERC was wrong in first guaranteeing exemption and then seeking to remove that guarantee. Such exemptions if withdrawn were not in public interest and could lead to project developers and investors suffering monetary loss leading to issues in serviceability of loans and would affect the economy.



KERC's action boils down to discriminatory treatment.



KERC can only determine wheeling and banking charges prospectively not retrospectively.



Renewable energy project developers do not have to pay increased charges.

In fact, this is the problem all power suppliers especially renewable power producers face when dealing with state-owned power utilities. States have sought to undermine the sanctity of contracts by imposing arbitrary charges. They have sought to reduce competition in the power generation space by levying charges that make competition extremely risky, hence difficult.



They promote higher cost for power generators and distributors. And they have sought to make renewable power more expensive than it could be.

Almost all states levy standby charges, capacity charges, and BED (Bombay Excise Duty) to ensure that surplus power sold by a private captive producer would not be allowed to undermine the profitability of more expensive conventional or grid-sourced power.

At the central level, the government has slapped a 25 percent safeguard duty on solar panel imports  ostensibly to protect domestic producers of solar panel. It has thus promised promotion of solar power on one hand, and slapped it with higher imposts on the other.

Finally, despite pious sounds being made about the need to promote rooftop solar, there are no indications that this is being done. On the contrary, it is almost certain that the government will slip on its targets for solar power generation in general and for rooftop power in particular.

The two main reasons

But why do governments in India try to sabotage plans relating to solar power and private distribution of power?

One reason is that solar power prices have crashed to levels not foreseen earlier (see chart on India's solar power tariffs below). This makes solar power  inclusive of the battery  cheaper than conventional power. This is true for business establishments that pay around Rs 8 to Rs 12 rupees a kWh (unit).

Obviously, when they can get power (inclusive of battery costs) at around Rs 6 a unit, why not save money? And these prices are likely to slide further as batteries are likely to become cheaper and popular. As mentioned earlier, battery demand is likely to soar 15 times over the next few years and prices expected to fall. As state grids end up selling less expensive power to companies (who can generate solar power in abundance from their factory roofs), states will have less money to offer subsidised power to farmers and other vote banks. Hence the heartburn, and the desire to hike tariff through the imposition of other levies.

Nonetheless, there is a another reason to hike tariffs. Most governments know that power is stolen from state grids. Yet this theft is concealed, by "misclassifying" the stolen power as agricultural consumption. To justify this, states like Maharashtra actually show a higher population of pump sets per acre of arable land  far in excess of actual numbers. Much of the power theft is linked to powerful people most often than not, politicians. They run factories and other businesses on this stolen power.

That in turn makes honest companies unviable on one hand, and bankrupts state power grids on the other. Few states like the idea of enterprises using power independent of the control that grids used to exercise on them until now. Hence the disincentives. Clearly, the government of India wants to do everything to restrict the growing popularity of solar power worldwide (see chart below on the surging solar demand).

The centre as spoiler

The situation can become so terrible that the central government does not listen to reason. Thus, in spite of promoting power to the remotest household, and paying lip service to solar power, it needed the chief minister of Tripura to personally plead with the union power ministry to allow his state to instal solar power facilities for the remotest households.

His argument was simple. Grid connectivity would cost him at least Rs 2 lakh per household in the remotest region. There were over 50,000 such households in the state. Solar power connectivity would cost just Rs 50,000 each.

Moreover, the longer the grid wires, the more expensive would reaching the power become. There is also risk of both power and wires being stolen. The chief minister finally had his way, but only after he gave a written assurance to the centre that the state would pay for the solar power installations.

The central government forgot that rooftop solar is an employment generator, and can create over 80 million jobs within a few years.

Forgotten were the rooftop solar targets, the economics and the employment generation.

The Karnataka Court's order is a harbinger of things to come. With solar costs plummeting, and the state grids nearing bankruptcy, expect changes in the power sector that few have imagined before. The tide's coming, but it seems unlikely that the bunds will withstand the force of the waves.

The author is Consulting Editor at Moneycontrol.live bse live

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Private life insurer HDFC Life is looking to offer pre-approved sum assured to customers in order to boost penetration in India. In an interaction with Moneycontrol, Suresh Badami, Executive Director, HDFC Life Insurance said the idea is to simplify the process of insurance purchase.

We are in talks with the distribution partners to look at the modalities of distribution of such a product proposition. This will help improve the penetration of insurance, especially term insurance, he added.

At the end of the December, HDFC Life had 49 banks, 129 non-banking financial companies, 22 microfinance institutions and nine small finance banks as its distribution partners.

At present, banks offer such pre-approved loans to their credit card customers. These are small ticket size loans that are offered to customers who require them at short notice.

Depending on the type of channel, Badami said they will be able to offer specialised products for each segment.

He said even among the slew of distribution channels, the idea is to improve productivity. Badami said for the agency channel, they have a programme Agency LIFE that focusses on recruiting quality agents.

HDFC Lifes Q3 investor presentation showed 75 percent of branches and 90 percent of agents are covered under the programme.

With respect to bancassurance, Badami said while they have a large network of banks it is necessary that open architecture is followed in spirit.

All banks should adopt the spirit of the open architecture of bancassurance and look at selling products of multiple insurers. This will enable customers to get adequate choice while buying an insurance product, he added.

Apart from the banks, Badami said there could also be possibilities for insurers to sell products of fellow companies including health and general insurance. This could be a win-win from a customer perspective since they will be able to get multiple solutions from a single touchpoint, he added.

HDFC Life Insurance posted an 18.5 percent year-on-year (YoY) rise in its December quarter (Q3) net profit at Rs 245.63 crore. The life insurer posted a 4.1 percent YoY increase to Rs 1,252.34 crore in its first-year premiums in Q3FY19.Sachchidanand Shukla

Whichever government takes charge after the elections will have its task cut out for it. It will need to push the accelerator harder on reforms. The reason: slowing growth.

Global growth predictions for 2019 and 2020 have already been revised downward by most forecasters to factor in the negative effects of tariff increases enacted in the United States and China. The commodity price backdrop has been quite volatile too. Crude oil prices have yo-yoed, reflecting supply issues as well as a global demand scare. Crude oil prices are up 25 percent this calendar year. Note that the India story can look vastly different when oil prices move up $10-15/ bbl in a short span. The recent change of heart at the US Federal Reserve and its dovish language as well as any breakthrough in the US-China trade deal can give a fresh leg up to commodity prices.

Back home, Indias GDP growth was down to 6.6 percent in the third quarter of FY19, the lowest in the last five quarters, with a drag from consumption. Q4 growth is also estimated to be in the slow lane with growth forecasts being pared across the board.

Thus there remains much to be done on the reforms side before the growth engine cranks up sustainably. Comprehensive reforms will be needed to raise productivity and set the stage for higher sustainable growth with employment generation.

Trade policy reform

At a time when countries have an increased propensity to close or restrict business with the rest of the world, exports are an obvious casualty. However, there is further trouble lurking around for India. Recently, US President Trump announced his decision to withdraw the preferential trade status granted to India and Turkey. India has now crossed the income threshold, above which a country becomes subject to the prohibition on export subsidies. Unless India comprehensively reforms its subsidy regime in entirety, countries such as the United States will continue to challenge Indias export subsidy schemes at the WTO.

Agriculture and the rural economy

The fact remains that agriculture is still in the clutches of hugely restrictive laws which have inhibited it from developing into an efficient market place for agricultural produce. This is an area where the central government can continue to play the lead role. There exists a maze of laws especially the Essential Commodities Act, the Land Ceiling Act, the APMC Act and the Foreign Trade Act, 1995, which enables arbitrary slapping of export restrictions, minimum export prices, and unfair imports. Unless there is an effort to rid the agriculture sector of this maze, farm distress will not be cured with sporadic measures to spur prices or announcement of loan waivers.

Reinvigorating the investment cycle

Gross fixed capital formation has moved up for five quarters in a row. However, given excess capacities and the focus on correcting the balance sheet stress, the private sector has remained a laggard in investing. If a company makes money incrementally in this scenario, it will try to repay existing loans or address operational issues first rather than think of putting up new capacities. Thus, a continued public investment push to create and enhance infrastructure, both soft (education, skilling, health) and hard (roads, railways) remains a must.

Giving a boost to manufacturing



Labour: Fast-tracking of labour reforms, including simplification and ease of compliance of the four labour codes reforms could spur the formalisation of the economy and create fiscal space for higher social and infrastructure spending.



Land: Land acquisition remains a challenge and it will be interesting to see how this issue is dealt with especially when the Rajya Sabha numbers remain tricky for both the NDA and UPA.



Ease of Doing Business: There is also an urgent need to continue to improve quantitatively as well as qualitatively on the Ease of Doing Business. Improving the business climate would help with a more integrated, domestic market. This should now be pursued with vigour in partnership with state governments.



Manufacturing has remained a weak spot despite the Make in India push. A huge supply-side effort is needed especially on the land and labour reforms which have been the Achilles Heel for India. Thus, going forward, acting on some of the factor reforms such as land and labour will be critical as they remain on top of the unfinished business heap.

Regulatory reforms



Goods & Services Tax (GST): The immediate focus should be on simplification and ensuring enhanced coverage by lowering the number of rates and then gradually focus on the exclusionselectricity, fuel, and alcohol etc-and try to get these within the ambit of GST to make the standard rate lower. GST, once fully actioned and implemented in its ideal/ desirable state, will be a big multi-year driver for growth.



Direct tax laws also need an overhaul and the government should endeavor to expand the tax net without sacrificing revenues.



Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC): Must be fast-tracked and issues ironed out on the go without diluting the desired objective. This will free up locked capital and sapped entrepreneurial energy and provide much needed "Exit" to businesses.



A stable and predictable tax regime along with the improved mechanism for resolution of tax disputes will also be needed to push corporate sector growth.



A hectic reform agenda has been pursued of late. However, there is a need to work these reforms to their logical conclusion despite some short-term pain.

Administrative reforms

It is about time the much delayed administrative reforms are initiated to improve the performance, accountability and governance structure of the administrative machinery. Simultaneously, The Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill should be passed and implemented to augment delivery of justice. There should be an endeavour to continue to simplify laws and weed out outdated laws accompanied by police reforms.

Simply put, if we are to increase Indias potential growth rate and provide decent jobs to the millions joining the workforce every year, we can no longer put off the next generation of reforms.Representative Image

GVK Power & Infrastructure Friday said its step-down subsidiary GVK Airport Holdings will acquire 12 crore shares of Mumbai International Airport (MIAL) for Rs 924 crore from ACSA Global.

After completion of this 10 per cent stake buy from ACSA along with the earlier purchase of 13.5 per cent from Bidvest, GVK Group's shareholding in MIAL will increase to 74 per cent from the existing 50.5 per cent, a company statement said.

"GVK Airport Holdings Ltd...has exercised it right, under Right of First Refusal in terms of the Shareholders Agreement dated April 4, 2006....to acquire 12 crore equity shares of MIAL, constituting 10 per cent of the total paid-up share capital of MIAL, from ACSA at the rate of Rs 77 per share," it added.live bse live

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Kansai Nerolac Paints shares fell nearly 5 percent intraday on Friday after global brokerage house CLSA downgraded the stock to sell from underperform.

The stock was quoting at Rs 445.00, down Rs 15.50, or 3.37 percent on the BSE, at 12:17 hours IST.

The global investment firm also slashed price target on the stock to Rs 385 from Rs 450 apiece following cut in FY19-21 EPS estimates by 2-4 percent.

"India's auto sector has been facing demand headwinds, and the pressure was further accentuated this month. After near-flat YoY volume in January and February 2019, media reports indicate Maruti Suzuki cut its Mar 2019 production by 25 percent. This is a big concern for Kansai Nerolac, the market leader in auto OEM paints, which contributes over a third of its revenue," CLSA said.

The brokerage further said a weak macroeconomic environment raised concern over decorative demand too, although it continued to model for double-digit growth.

Concern is also emerging over margins with the rise in crude oil prices, although a stronger rupee should help along with product price hikes, it added.

: The above report is compiled from information available on public platforms. Moneycontrol advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.A Filipino port worker looks as the Japanese Ship Akebono (DD-108), a Murasame-class destroyer of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, prepares to dock at Manila's south harbor, Philippines. The JS Akebono is in the country for a three-day goodwill visit. (AP/PTI)

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Tata Power shares gained more than 2 percent on bagging air surveillance radars contract from the Ministry of Defence.

The stock was quoting at Rs 73.25, up Rs 1.25, or 1.74 percent on the BSE, at 11:32 hours IST.

Tata Power Strategic Engineering Division (Tata Power SED) signed a deal with the Ministry of Defence to supply 23 ship-borne 3D Air Surveillance Radars to the Indian Navy over the next 10 years.

The contract, estimated value is about Rs 1,200 crore, was signed under the Buy & Make (India) category of the Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) 2013 that will be offering the Indian Navy a proven solution with a production arrangement in India under Transfer of Technology (ToT) and thereby furthering substantive self-reliance for Indias defence requirements, the company said.

It further said the contract will be executed by Tata Power SED as the prime contractor with foreign OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partner Indra Sistemas, Spain.

Tata Advanced Systems (TASL) has entered into an SPA with Tata Power for purchase of Tata Power SED, subject to regulatory and other approvals.

In November 2017, Tata Power SED had signed a contract with the Ministry of Defence for the supply of portable diver detection sonar (PDDS) for Indian Naval applications.In a moment that marks victory for British Prime Minister Theresa May over her political opponents who wanted a softer approach to leave the European Union (EU), British lawmakers on Wednesday voted in favour of the government's legislative blueprint for Brexit. (Image: Reuters)

Highlights:

- EU offers a two-part Brexit extension plan- Extension until May 22 if UK Parliament agrees on a deal next week- Extension until April 12 if no agreement reached next week

- Advise investors and exporters to maintain Pound sterling exposure hedged

When British citizens voted for a decisive Brexit  leaving the European Union  33 months ago, no one would have anticipated a strikingly contrasting indecisiveness at the political leadership level towards the Brexit deadline. Each day brings new developments from voting out a no-deal scenario to pledging to respect referendum vote, but intriguingly with no easing of uncertainty. Options before the UK remain the same as they were a few months ago; a no-deal exit, a second referendum or an alternate deal.

After the defeat of Mays revised Brexit deal proposal, the UK government had put forward a formal request to the European Union (EU) for an extension of the March 29 Brexit deadline to June 3o. EU, in response, has agreed for an extension, but with conditions.

Pls also read: Brexit: Political logjam to persist

Whats the EU offer?

EU has proposed a two-part timetable. It has agreed for a Brexit delay until May 22, provided the UK House of Commons agrees on a withdrawal deal next week.

If Theresa Mays withdrawal deal is rejected again, then Brexit deadline changes to April 12, without any condition.

What does this mean?

Positive takeaway is that the UK gets an about two-week breather. The flip side is there is no alternative withdrawal agreement on the table, which means all it still has is this two-week extension.

As of now, there is a slim chance that the UK parliament agrees on Theresa Mays deal proposal which it has voted down twice.

It remains to be seen if the EUs game theory works for the UK. EU has made it clear that they dont have any more tangible assurances to offer other than the earlier commitments on Irish Backstop. The UK, assumingly, is also left to fend for itself with Mays withdrawal proposal. Would that make British Parliamentarians fall in line for an agreement? That remains a cliffhanger.

Countercurrents

Meanwhile, an online petition is doing the rounds, backed by more than two million people, asking to revoke Article 50 and prevent Brexit. While petitions having more than 100,000 signatures calls for a parliamentary debate, official government stand remains that there is no intention of reversing the Brexit process.

As far as a contingency plan is concerned, Operation Redfold is on stand-by for a no-deal Brexit, which means a military unit of 3,500 soldiers would be operationalised for crisis management in such a case.

Takeaway:

The pound sterling has shown surprising resilience in 2019; GBP/USD is up about 6 percent from the December lows. However, given the political backdrop and to err on the side of caution, we think its prudent for Indian investors and exporters to keep the pound sterling exposure hedged.

Follow @anubhavsaysHighlights:



- Subdued performance in Q3 FY19- Venkys has to comply with changing industry regulations- Favourable socio-economic factors support long-term outlook- Valuations reasonable

-------------------------------------------------

Poultry-producer Venkys reported a tepid performance in Q3 FY19. While topline came in higher, the twin impact of weaker realisations and higher input prices resulted in subdued profitability. Despite a disappointing performance in Q3, we remain optimistic on the company's growth prospects as the increase in volumes was heartening and indicates a positive trend for non-vegetarian consumption.

- Revenue increased 17 percent year-on-year (YoY) to Rs 812 crore and was driven by a healthy growth across its three business verticals. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) declined to Rs 112 crore in Q3 FY19 from Rs 123 crore in corresponding quarter of last year. However, profit after tax (PAT) came in stable at Rs 68 crore.

- Topline for the poultry and poultry products segment increased 15 percent aided by higher volume. However, profit margin for the segment came under pressure due to soft realisations and higher poultry feed (soya up 15-20 percent and corn up 25-30 percent YoY) prices.

- The same for the animal health products segment grew 24 percent with steady margin. Revenue from the oil seed business increased 18 percent YoY to Rs 361 crore, but profits continued to remain under pressure.

- Capacity expansion is underway and its new specific pathogen free eggs capacity at Patan (Maharashtra) and solvent extraction plant at Srirampur (Maharashtra) will come on-stream by Q1 and Q3 FY20, respectively.

- Cash flow from operations continue to be strong and has been used for debt reduction. The leverage ratio continues to improve and interest costs for the quarter gone by has nearly halved to Rs 5.9 crore in comparison to Rs 13.2 crore in the year ago period.

- In a recent sectoral development, the government is also contemplating a ban on the usage of colistin  an antibiotic used to fatten chicken. The developments regarding the proposed ban on cage farming of poultry and meat animals also need to be monitored closely as the company needs to remain compliant with changing industry requirements and environmental norms to ensure smooth running of the business.

- Backed by favourable socio-economic factors, the domestic poultry industry is expected to grow at a steady pace over the medium to long-term. Consumption preferences are increasingly tilting towards snacking and convenience. Quick-service restaurants such as Burger King India, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds etc have been riding this trend through aggressive store expansion. Venkys being a primary supplier to majority of these fast food chains stands to benefit from overall growth in this sector.

- The stock is trading at a reasonable valuation of nearly 12 times FY20 estimated earnings. Long-term investors interested in steady earnings growth can look to accumulate this stock on dips as there exists significant scope for multiple re-ratings in the future.

Also Read: Alcoholic beverages: Which stocks will give your portfolio a high?





For more research articles, visit our Moneycontrol Research page

Moneycontrol Research analysts do not hold positions in the companies discussed hereThe ban on upfront commission seems to have dampened interests of those wishing to become independent financial advisors (IFAs).

According to Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI) data on status of registration of new ARNs, registration for new AMFI Registered Number (ARN) for IFAs was a mere 951 in February compared to 1,189 in January.

We conduct our business transparently, even then our earnings are reduced because of the SEBI (Securities Exchange Board of India) ban on upfront commission. Who would want to undertake such a business activity if there is no proper remuneration, said a Mumbai-based IFA.

In September 2018, the markets regulator banned upfront commissions paid to mutual fund (MF) advisers. SEBI directed fund houses to move to an trail model. After SEBIs circular, trail commissions are expected to drop by 20-25 basis points (100 bps=1 percentage point).

SEBI has further trimmed the annual total expense ratio (TER) that very large size MF schemes would charge to 2.25 percent. Earlier, TER was below 2.5 percent and there was scope for market competition to determine adviser commission incentives. With TER now reduced to critically low levels, the adviser community is seeing a decline in new entrants, leaving investors alone to decide on MF schemes.

AMFI data indicates that in Q3 FY19 the industry had added 3,346 new distributors under the individual category as against 18,555 quarter-on-quarter.

In FY19, new IFAs registered with AMFI declined nearly six percent to 951 in February.

The number of new IFA registrations in FY18 stood at 20,339 as against 16,451 so far in FY19.

Status of new ARN registrations for IFAs

Source: AMFI

Existing distributors said lower commissions and fund inflows are going to affect their business.

Another Mumbai-based IFA said the MF advisory business may turn unviable because of rising operating cost and dwindling commissions.

Decade old advisers have already generated a high revenue surplus during the erstwhile high commission structure when the spread on a MF investment was shallow. With new commission regime, it's the new age skill-based IFAs that are facing the heat alone.Much of the debt market is still reeling under the after-effects of the Infrastructure & Leasing Finance Services Companys (IL&FS) debacle. But theres one financial instrument that appears to have benefitted from the devastation. This instrument is market linked debentures (MLD), also known as structured notes.

According to report titled Market Linked Debentures: Issuances at its all-time high by CARE Ratings, the net outstanding MLDs grew to Rs 21,191 crore as on December 31, 2018 as against Rs 11,356 crore as on September 30, 2017 and Rs 32,165 crore as on June 30, 2017 (when they hit a peak).

Financial year that begun on April 1, 2018 has so far seen issuances worth Rs 12,910 crore.

Experts attribute the strong uptick in the issuances of MLDs to two factors - the necessity of corporates to raise funds in a tight market and investors looking for some extra returns on post-tax basis.

That sounds like a win-win situation. But is it so simple and should you even go near it?

Why MLDs have made a comeback?

Ashish Shankar, head-product advisory, Motilal Oswal Private Wealth Management says, The supply of money from both banks and mutual funds to NBFCs has dried up after the IL&FS issue. But NBFCs have to raise money to fund their growth and to pay for existing bonds maturities. So they have taken the MLD route.

Issuances of MLD works in favour of NBFC in multiple ways. It lets an NBFC issue additional 5 ISINs apart from limit of 12 for NCD in a year as per SEBI mandate. Put simply, an NBFC can raise money more number of times.

Each ISIN stands for each issue of debt instrument issued by borrower. It also helps them raise 25% of their borrowings from capital market, as it is a guideline by regulators on large borrowings. MLDs help service debt with one payment at the time of maturity, whereas most NCDs expect issuers pay interest at regular interval in the form of pre-determined coupon.

Going forward, more issuances of these products are expected as more NBFCs line up for raising more capital. CARE Ratings expects issuances to increase to Rs 14,000 crore by the end of this financial year.

What does an MLD offer?

For the beginners, MLD are of two types  principle protected and non-principle protected. They are issued for the period of 13 months to 60 months and generally require minimum investment of Rs 25 lakh and more. Unlike a bond that pays a fixed interest either monthly, quarterly, half yearly or annually, MLDs do not pay any regular income. Your income from an MLD comes only at maturity.

This is how it works: An MLD is linked to some underlying financial security like a stock market index such as Nifty or a 10-year government security paper. As there is no income to be had during its tenure, the gain from an MLD is ascertained at the time of maturity, depending on how its underlying asset has moved.

For example, if an investor has bought an MLD which is linked to movement in Nifty with a promise to pay 70% movement (participation, as it is termed) in Nifty, then at the time of maturity if the Nifty has moved 50% (point to point), then the investor takes home his principle plus 35% (70% of 50%) return.

Here, at the maturity, the investor would see a payoff equal to 135% of principal invested. Note that Nifty may have actually moved up or down in the interim, but its final position at the time of MLDs maturity is accounted for to ascertain how much money it pays you- the investor- at maturity.

An MLD being a debt instrument- even though it could be linked to an equity instrument like Nifty- may come with a credit rating. The participation rate can be higher to entice investors, if the MLD come with a lower rating. In the past, MLDs have come with a variety of credit ratings ranging from AAA (connotes the highest level of creditworthiness) to AA or even an A rating; the latter of which denotes low credit worthiness of the borrower (the firm that issues the MLD).

This may sound too attractive. But in case of non-principle protected MLD one may see losses also, if the underlying security goes down. Of course, they offer higher participation in the movement of underlying index or security.

Each issuer is free to choose the underlying index or security with which the payoff for investor is linked. This underling index or security could be nifty, bank nifty, 10 year government bond yield, gold. The idea is to choose a security which is widely traded and not easy to manipulate.

As per CARE Ratings, principle protected MLDs account for approximately 95% of the issuances in nine months ended December 31 2018. Investors prefer to invest in the principle protected MLD because they are sure that there downside is protected. And they have to risk only on the upside and credit risk, says Prateek Pant, head of products and solutions, Sanctum Wealth Management.

Though the MLDs come with tenures ranging between 13 months to 60 months, the average maturity of MLDs issued has been 2.85 years in nine months ended December 31, 2018 as compared to 2.92 years in financial year ended March 31, 2018.

Investors are seen opting for principle protected MLD with AAA rating that mature between 24 months to 36 months, said Nishant Agarwal, managing partner and head- family office, ASK Wealth Advisors. The fall in average tenure of MLD is partly attributed to reduced investor appetite arising out of increased uncertainty in the market.

Tax efficient

Though the investors are worried about the increasing risks in fixed income market, there is a tendency to pick these MLDs in high networth individuals given the tax treatment they attract.

Like all other listed bonds, long term capital gains earned on listed MLDs are taxed at 10%, if MLDs are sold after a year. Bond funds impose a long  term capital gains tax 20% (after indexation) on gains on investments, if held for 36 months. Interest income earned on traditional fixed deposits and debentures is taxed at marginal rate of tax.

After the payoff is ascertained just before the maturity of the MLD, the investor sells the MLD on the exchange close to fair value. This ensures that his gains so realised are taxed as long term capital gains at 10%. And the remaining amount of money is taxed as interest. This can best be understood with an example.

An investor buys an MLD at Rs 100 and the expected payoff at the time of maturity is Rs 135. Just before the maturity, the MLD is sold on the exchange at say Rs 134. Here, Rs 34 is taxed as long term capital gain.

If Investor A sells his MLD to investor B and investor B sells his MLD to investor A, then both of them will book large part of their gain as long term capital gain. Remaining return, if any (Re 1 in this case) will be taxed as interest earned at marginal rate of tax.

If the investor does not sell the units and receives the payoff as maturity proceeds, then the same will be taxed as interest at marginal rate of tax. A point to note is, capital gains on unlisted MLDs are taxed at 20% rate of tax post indexation if held for 36 months. And if held till maturity, proceeds are taxed as interest. All short term capital gains are taxed at marginal rate of tax.

Ashish Shanker says, The favourable tax treatment of listed MLDs helps the high networth individuals pocket substantially more returns than they would otherwise earn on other comparable fixed income options.

Stable issuers such L&T Finance, Tata Capital Financial Services, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services are an added attraction to high networth individuals.

Investors across the risk spectrum are opting for MLDs since this allows them to create pay out in line with their risk profile and investment preferences. For example, an aggressive investor will be looking at outperforming the markets using MLDs by investing in a product with higher participation. The conservative investor may be willing to accept lower participation and higher certainty of returns, says Gaurav Awasthi, Senior Partner, IIFL Wealth Management.

but highly complex

While MLDs appear to be juicy, these are highly complex products. It is not a plain vanilla bond offering and the outcomes may vary based on the movement of underlying securities. Two MLDs issued by the same issuer may have diagonally opposite payoffs and investors should not be blindly signing above the dotted line.

The money raised through MLD is used partly in the business activities of the NBFC and partly to buy derivative instruments to be able to pay you back your money. Like any other bond, MLD too come with credit risk. Whether MLD pays off investors at maturity, depends partly on how the underlying instruments have moved (linked to the participation rate) and how the company itself performs, that is recovers money from its businesses.

If the underlying security moves in the opposite direction, investors just get their principal, and nothing else, back. Lower ratings connote higher risk. AA rated MLDs offer more participation than their AAA rated counterparts, says Agarwal while explaining that high returns come with high risk. Return of capital is an important parameter and one should ignore it while chasing return on capital. Prateek Pant says, We stick to good quality names while advising our clients on MLD and do not go below AA rated papers.

The ability to manage the derivatives book is a tricky area. Investors look at nifty linked debentures as they can generate extra returns than Nifty. However one must understand that the issuer should be continuously managing his options positions right. Investors should not ignore this risk while buying MLDs, says Feroze Azeez, deputy CEO, Anand Rathi Private Wealth Management.

Some issuers prefer to enter into forward agreements to buy and sell options to mimic the agreed payoffs on their MLDs outstanding. This ensures low costs but they come with high counter-party risk. Some issuers prefer to trade long term options on the stock exchange which nullifies counter-party risk.

Though principle protected MLDs are listed on stock exchanges, they are rarely traded. You should be prepared to hold on to your investments till maturity.

Investors should also understand that they have to get the quantum of move in the chosen direction and time taken for that move right to make money in products where promised returns are high. Getting both right is a difficult call, says Vishal Dhawan, founder and chief financial planner, Plan Ahead Wealth Advisor.

This is not just an ordinary assured return instrument. Market linked debentures are complex instruments that are best avoided by lay investors or even those who understand markets well but dont still get the complexities. Look at MLDs only if you fully understand them.live bse live

nse live Volume Todays L/H More 

Jet Airways, on the verge of going belly-up, has suspended operations on as many as 13 more international routes till end-April, besides scaling down frequencies on seven other overseas routes, mostly from Delhi and Mumbai, according to airline sources.

The routes where services have been temporarily withdrawn include Pune-Singapore (seven a week), which was launched with much fanfare late last December, and Pune-Abu Dhabi (seven flights a week).

Jet Airways has already suspended services on the Mumbai-Manchester route.

Gasping for funds and no bailout on the horizon, the Naresh Goyal-controlled airline has now reduced its operations to one-fourth from over 600 daily flights earlier, with just one-third of its 119 fleet being operational.

The airline has discontinued services from Delhi to Abu Dhabi (nine a week), Dammam (14 weekly), Dhaka (11), Hong Kong and Riyadh (seven each a week) up to April 30, said the airline source.

Besides, the airline has also suspended services on the Bangalore-Singapore route, where it flies twice daily, till April 30.

The flights which have been suspended from Mumbai for this period include services to Abu Dhabi (12 weekly), Bahrain (4-7 weekly), and Dammam (14 weekly). These services will remain suspended till April 30, as per the source.

Similarly, flights on the Mumbai-Hong Kong (7 weekly) route will also not be operated between March 23 and April 30, while the Kolkata-Dhaka services have also been suspended till April 30.

In addition to this, services from Delhi and Mumbai to Kathmandu, Bangkok, Doha, Kuwait and Singapore have been also reduced significantly.

However, the airline has not yet informed the exchanges about these reduction and suspension of services.Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua said that the acquittal of all four accused in the 2007 Samjhauta train blast case showed India's "insensitivity" towards the victims' families as she raised the issue with the Diplomatic Corps.

The blast in Samjhauta Express occurred near Panipat in Haryana on February 18, 2007, when the train was on its way to Attari, the last railway station on the Indian side. The blast killed 68 people, mostly Pakistanis.

A special court in Panchkula in Haryana acquitted main accused Swami Aseemanand and three others in the case on Wednesday.

In a statement, the Foreign Office said that she briefed the Islamabad-based Diplomatic Corps on the "historic injustice" done to the 44 Pakistanis killed in the Samjhauta Express terrorist attack.

"The Indian decision to gradually exonerate and finally acquit the perpetrators despite the presence of clear evidence against them, is a reflection of India's callous insensitivity to the plight of the 44 families of the deceased Pakistanis, who have been waiting for more than a decade to see these terrorists brought to justice," she said.

She stressed that "despite repeated requests by Pakistan for a fair trial and expeditiously bringing the perpetrators to justice, after a lapse of more than 11 years, Indian courts have now exonerated the accused."

Janjua urged all fair minded people to call upon India to "explore all judicial remedies to ensure that the terrorists are brought to justice."Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday accused all BJP leaders of being "corrupt" and cited a media report that claimed former Karnataka chief minister B S Yeddyurappa had allegedly paid bribes to the tune of Rs 1800 crore to the top party leadership. The report by The Caravan magazine cited a diary of Yeddyurappa containing details of the alleged pay-offs to senior BJP leaders.

"All 'chowkidars' (watchmen) of the BJP are thieves. NoMo. Arun Jaitley. Rajnath Singh...,"he tweeted, tagging the report.

The Congress has demanded an investigation into the diaries by the Lokpal to confirm whether the bribes were actually paid.

BJP president Amit Shah claimed that after all the "fake" issues have collapsed, "the desperate are now relying on forgery".

"The Congress campaign is in shambles. Now even forgery can't save them. Few loose sheets given by a Congress minister is only as credible and reliable as Rahul Gandhi's leadership skills," Shah claimed on Twitter.The Congress released its manifesto on Friday for the April 11 general elections in Andhra Pradesh, promising to accord Special Category Status to the state on the first day of coming to power (at the Centre).

It also promised to implement all other provisions of the AP Reorganisation Act, 2014.

Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee president N Raghuveera Reddy, Manifesto Committee chairman Kanumuri Bapiraju and other leaders released the manifesto at the state party office here.

The main promises include waiver of loans up to Rs two lakh for all farmers, tenant farmers and women Self Help Groups; extension of interest-free loans to farmers, tenant farmers and SHGs; creation of a Rs 5,000 crore price stabilization fund to ensure remunerative prices for farm produce and introduction of a minimum income guarantee scheme.

All vacant government posts would be filled up within 100 days if the Congress came to power,the manifesto promised.

"We will implement a Bundelkhand-type special development package for backward districts in the state.

Prakasam will also be included in the backward districts along with four in Rayalaseema and three north-coastal Andhra.

We will establish a full-fledged railway zone in Visakhapatnam if voted to power," Raghuveera Reddy told reporters on the occasion.

The Right to Information Act and the Right to Education Act would be effectively implemented, he said.

While petrol and diesel would be brought under GST regime, the handloom sector would be exempted.

"We will bring out district-specific manifestos within a week, in tune with the wishes of the people.

We will ensure their implementation in five years," the PCC chief promised.

Old-age pension of Rs 2000 a month would be given to those aged under 60 years, Rs 2,500 up to 70 years and Rs 3,000 to those above 70 years.

Pension for differently-abled and single women would also be raised to Rs 3,000 a month, he added.live bse live

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State-owned Power Grid Corporation said Friday that it has paid Rs 1,629.62 crore as interim dividend for 2018-19 to the central government.

Power Grid Corporation handed over electronic payment remittance advice for payment of Rs 1,629.62 crore for 2018-19 to the Government of India, a company statement said.

The total interim dividend disbursed was Rs 3,050.02 crore for 2018-19 to about 5.91 lakh shareholders of the company, it added.

The company has declared an interim dividend of Rs 5.83 per equity share of Rs 10 each for 2018-19. Power Grid is an electricity transmission utility and has a wide network of 1,51,507 circuit kilometres transmission lines, with 239 sub-stations and transformation capacity of 355,029 megavolt ampere.Ali Ahmed

The year 2019 had an ominous start in Jammu & Kashmir under conditions of rule by Delhi with the six months period of governors rule transitioning into Presidents Rule for the first time in 22 years on December 20. With the Election Commission of India deciding to not hold simultaneous elections to Parliament and to the assembly on security grounds, Presidents Rule may well end up being extended in case the incoming government at the Centre takes its time to settle in and decide on new dates.

This extension of rule by Delhi has one bright side. It gives Shah Faesals newly-launched political party, Jammu and Kashmirs Peoples Movement, time to find its feet. Launched on March 17, it gets off to a flying start fielding candidates in the parliamentary elections, including possibly Shehla Rashid, the Jawaharlal Nehru University student leader who shot to fame in the episode of alleged sedition in 2016. Its plunge would provide it an indication on the political winds that it could in the breather between the two elections build on or course correct.

The new political party ticks all the right boxes in its vision document, pledging to make people politically empowered, economically prosperous, socially emancipated, ethically evolved, culturally enlightened and environmentally conscious. It comes as a breath of fresh air in otherwise rather bleak prospects in Kashmir over the coming summer.

The jury is still out whether Delhis rule can be brought to a close any time soon. The last time in the early nineties it lasted six years. The bypoll in the Anantnag constituency, vacated by Mehbooba Mufti on taking over as chief minister in 2016, became the longest delayed bypoll since 1996, being postponed thrice over on security grounds in 2017. The bypoll in the Srinagar constituency held in April 2017 had a record-low seven per cent turnout. The urban local body elections in October last year witnessed a further fall, with Srinagar City recording merely two per cent polling. A low turnout in assembly elections could prove embarrassing for India and show up the hardline in Kashmir as politically vacuous.

The latest round of troubles in Kashmir, dating to the killing of Burhan Wani in July 2016, have registered an uptick with the Pulwama car bomb terror attack on February 14 and by security forces killing at least 18 terrorists in J&K since then. The latest incidence of the hardline is in the banning of the Jamaat-e-Islami, despite its distancing itself from terror long back.

Since the summer would be in full swing, the prospects of Pakistan-supported infiltration would be higher, as would violence indices. The recent India-Pakistan crisis may prompt Pakistan to be more proactive than it has been lately in its proxy war. All this would increase the likelihood of the next Union government  even if it is a second term for Prime Minister Narendra Modi  considering postponing the assembly elections. This is even thought the current position of the Union home ministry is to hold it in June before the spell of Presidents Rule ends in early July.

People staying away from polls would also reflect their disaffection from the nature of democratic politics in the state. This is already seen in the insurgency being largely centred in south Kashmir where people were angered by their chosen party, Mehbooba Muftis Peoples Democratic Party, aligning with the Bhartiya Janata Party to form the government. The BJP pulled the rug from under the PDP in June last year.

Soon thereafter, rumours were rife that the BJP connived with Sajjad Lone  whose party had just two legislators  and potential PDP defectors to attempt to form a government. Finally, in November, the governor dissolved the assembly under circumstances in which rival claims were made through social media.

Faesals arrival on the scene in a political avatar after leaving the administrative service helps with alleviating this bleakness. His topping of the civil services 2010 batch served as an inspiration to Kashmiri youth back then. He hopes to repeat the same a decade on. It remains to be seen if he can live up to his slogan, Ab hawa badlegi.

Ali Ahmed, a former UN official, is a strategic analyst and blogger. Views are personal.

For more Opinion pieces, click hereAbhinav Prakash Singh

Mayawatis decision to not contest the 2019 general elections has come as a surprise to a lot of people. Many were expecting that to increase the morale of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) workers and galvanise her core voters, she would take to the electoral battle. Raising the expectation was the open staking of claim to the post of Prime Minister by her.

However, a quick reality check will tell us that Mayawati hasnt contested a single election since the Lok Sabha elections of the 2004. No one has any explanation for this bizarre phenomenon, not even her supporters and party workers. Perhaps she feels that it is no longer necessary for her to prove her legitimacy via elections, or maybe she doesnt want to get down into the gruelling campaigning Indian elections involve  and instead just focus on the party organisation.

Whatever the reason, it is a disastrous decision for any mass political leader. In democracy, legitimacy is ultimately derived from the elections and Mayawati is no exception. Even the Gandhi family has never eschewed electoral fight.

Mayawati built her political career not just because of Kanshi Ram but also due to her street fighting image. In 80s and early 90s, she would travel to remote villages on a bicycle with the party workers braving assaults by the castist-feudal goons in those pre-social media and 24X7 news era. One doesnt forge such a strong bond with the party workers and populace for nothing. She would work with the local party units during elections and built a rapport with the people.

However, over time she has grown aloof not just from the public but even from her own elected MPs and MLAs. Not contesting elections means she has no direct way of understanding the changed demography and even aspirations of the Dalit youth. This was quite apparent in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections when the BSP strategy and campaign was completely desynchronised from the popular mood. Disconnected from the people, Mayawati bought into the bogus narrative of Dalit-Muslim unity promulgated by the Left-leaning voices in JNU and paid heavily for it with not just the Muslims not voting for her but even Dalits abandoning her in droves for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Refraining from contesting the elections this time may turn out to be Mayawatis fatal mistake at a time when she is faced with a political opponent who leads from the front. Prime Minister Narendra Modi fights even state elections as if he is the candidate for the chief ministership. He isnt afraid to expose himself to defeat, as seen in Bihar, Delhi or any election, if it infuses his party and voters with enthusiasm. In 2017, this approach was on full display during the roadshow by Modi. Here was the Prime Minster and the most powerful political leader in decades going door-to-door asking for votes. Compare that to the distant Mayawati locked up in her fortress like home. No wonder the public today favour Modi.

Apart from not contesting elections, Mayawati has also staunchly opposed an alliance with the Congress despite the common goal of unseating Modi. This is not surprising given that the BSP movement started opposing the Congress and its brand of clientele politics where the Dalits and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) were only treated as vote blocks with patronage dispensed from the above with little to no change on the ground.

Mayawati understands that she has already taken too much of a risk by allying with the Samajwadi Party (SP), the traditional rival of the BSP. The alliance has confused the BSP supporters and voters alike and she doesnt want to take further risk by allying with the Congress. For that would be negating the anti-Congressism to which the BSP owes large part of its origin. Moreover, if there is no difference between the BSP and the SP and the Congress, then whats the raison d'etre of the existence of the BSP?

While the social base of the SP and the BSP are characterised by rivalry, the social base of the BSP and the Congress are overlapping. They both lay claim to the same social constituency of the Dalits, lower OBCs, the Brahmins and the Muslims. For the BSP to ally with the Congress is to risk the loss of this constituency to the Congress, which is their older home. A revival of the Congress in UP is the last thing that Mayawati would want under her watch.

Where does all this leave Mayawati in the larger battle of the 2019?

Despite brave rhetoric of being a candidate for the prime ministership, the truth is that the BSP is fighting for its survival. The internal organisation is in a shambles and party has lost much appeal even among the Dalits. Its local leaders and cadre are leaving in droves for the BJP, the Congress and the SP. This is more evident in the case of the non-Jatav Dalits who have anyways always got a raw deal under the BSP. Even the Jatavs and the Chamars, especially in the eastern UP, are exploring new avenues. Mayawati is at loss as to how to stop this exodus.

It is difficult to see how she can offer any solution because she herself is part of the problem. She has failed to understand the changed socio-political dynamics and evolving nature of the political leadership that the public expect. Her feudal brand of the command and control model where distance from the public adds to the aura of the leader has few takers in the new generation addicted to the social media. While her political opponents are using social media platforms to address millions of supporters in real time, she has only taken preliminary steps of setting up a Twitter account.

It is clear that sooner than later, Mayawati has to cede control over the party to a younger leadership. The problem is that this younger leadership is missing and her 24-year-old nephew is no leader.

Abhinav Prakash Singh is assistant professor, Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi, Delhi. Views are personal.

For more Opinion pieces, click hereThe Centre has banned Yasin Malik-led separatist outfit Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) under the anti-terror law.

The outfit has been banned for alleged promotion of secessionist activities in Jammu and Kashmir, officials have said.

Home Secretary Rajib Gauba told media persons, "The JKLF has been at the forefront of separatists activities. Yasin Malik was the mastermind of the Kasmiri Pandit genocide. JKLF was also responsible for the murder of 4 IAF officers. JKLF has also been known to be a source of funding for terror in Kashmir"

Officials have said the organisation has been banned under various provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Its chief Yasin Malik is under arrest and at present lodged in Jammu's Kot Balwal jail.

Tanvir Sadiq, advisor to NC leader Omar Abdullah, has tweeted:

This is the second organisation in Jammu and Kashmir which has been banned this month. Earlier, the Centre had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir.

Earlier today, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had cracked down on Malik and Syed Ali Shah Geelani slapping a penalty of over Rs 14 lakh and confiscating their assets.Moneycontrol Contributors

Swift  except for the few people in the area of financial transactions very few others knew about SWIFT, let alone what it was all about. It was with the unravelling of Nirav Modis manipulation of SWIFT in his scamming of Punjab National Bank that we, at least in India, came to grips with SWIFT. Nirav Modi is back in the news, so now is as good a time as any to examine the method that was at the heart of the Rs 13,000 crore scam. All you need to know about SWIFT is what we dig deep into on this edition of Digging Deeper with Moneycontrol with me Rakesh Sharma.

WHAT IS SWIFT?

Even though it entered our consciousness only in the recent past, SWIFT has been around for decades. SWIFT is the acronym for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. Its expansion makes it pretty much self-explanatory. It is a system, or network, that enables communications making financial transactions easy across banks and across locations. It succeeded Telex, which was the earlier system based on teleprinters. Telex, though, had quite a few problems. It was operated manually, and so data that was entered was prone to human error. Further, there was little security built into the system, which made it rather undependable when sensitive financial information needed to be transmitted. So, a group of banks got together to find a better alternative to Telex in 1973. Hence was born SWIFT, headquartered in Brussels.

Since its inception, SWIFT has become more or less universal, and has been accepted by more than 3500 financial institutions in more than 200 countries. Messages sent over the network are protected by the security of encryption, which makes it a much safer alternative to Telex. Besides, in todays computerized and automated world, there is little chance of human error in the processing and transmission of financial inputs.

SWIFT AND NIRAV MODI

So, how does SWIFT tie in with the Nirav Modi Imbroglio? To understand, we need to understand how SWIFT works. It kind of follows the pattern that we have all become familiar with where personal banking transactions are concerned. There are numbers and codes and other security features that enable us to transact safely and electronically. SWIFT uses unique identification codes and account numbers to make it possible to make financial transactions across countries. Similar to the IFSC codes of bank branches that are required to make transactions between savings accounts, international transactions require the SWIFT code. A SWIFT code is also required to borrow from international bank accounts.

As you can see, SWIFT is virtually indispensable where international financial transactions are concerned. And, though security has been built into the system in the form of encryption, the network, like all computerized networks, is susceptible to hacking through external or internal agents, or a combination of both. In the case of Bangladeshs central bank, from which $81 million was stolen, external hackers were responsible. In the case of Nirav Modi, it also required the assistance of people in the banking system, and the process was long-winded and involved manipulation of various instruments.

The Nirav Modi case highlights the problem inherent in the SWIFT network, and how given the right  or wrong  circumstances, the system could be tampered with to bypass the built-in safeguards. A detailed look at the process would be instructive.

It is important to remember here that SWIFT is only messaging system, as specified by the T, which stands for Telecommunications. For a system to fail, there have to be weaknesses in it that can be exploited. In the Nirav Modi case, there was laxness in implementation in different components of the banking transaction system. Apart from SWIFT, which has come into focus following the disclosure of the scam, other instruments such as LoU and CBS have also been in the mix.

CHEATING IN THE NAME OF LOU

Employees of Punjab National Bank were instrumental in issuing Letters of Understanding, or LoUs in favour of Nirav Modis various businesses, on the basis of which Modi could get loans from the international branches of Indian banks. Exporters are routinely given credit in connection with the shipment of goods, and Modi was given this credit for the import of pearls for his jewellery businesses.

LoU, or Letter of Understanding, is a document that a bank issues. It is in essence a guarantee of the creditworthiness of a person or an agency. In short, the bank, by issuing an LoU, states that it guarantees the borrowers credentials and takes upon itself the liability of the repayment of any loan and interest the client might renege on. If everything is done right and the process of due diligence is followed, there is little to worry about, except for the usual risks that would apply.

In the case of Nirav Modi, the system had weaknesses and there were also interlopers to take undue advantage of these. The process of issuing LoUs was circumvented, and the system was tampered with, which affected the sharing of information.

Employees at the Brady House branch of Punjab National Bank issued LoUs fraudulently to international branches of Indian banks, which made it possible for Nirav Modis jewellery businesses to get credit from these banks. But it was not as simple as that. To avoid detection or the possibility of red flags being raised, the corrupt employees also bypassed the CBS, or Core Banking System, where the LoUs would have had to be documented. CBS is a central database which records, or at least, is meant to record, details of all the financial transactions of bank branches, and also the entire credit history of all account holders. So, none of these suspicious activities were registered, making detection more difficult.

Further, they also were involved in breach of trust, whereby they accessed the SWIFT system and were guilty of unauthorized sharing of the SWIFT password with outsiders. This became possible because the CBS was not linked to SWIFT, and hence the SWIFT data had to be manually input. Primarily, this need for manual intervention was what made it possible for corruption to creep in.

As a result, Nirav Modi was afforded credit, and was able to take out loans, which he should not have been. It was a simple matter of unauthorized access to the SWIFT password, but the point that the case highlighted was that there was no facility to crosscheck or cross-reference, or a secondary level of security, preferably at the other end of the transaction, to catch the foul.

It is, of course, apparent that without internal corruption and manipulation of the system, this couldnt have happened. Every now and then, an instance of overreach in, or manipulation of, the banking system shows up its weaknesses, which leads to disastrous consequences, and this was perhaps the biggest of them all where the Indian banking system is concerned.

Anyway, what the Nirav Modi case meant was a Rs 11,400 crore in the balance sheet of Punjab National Bank. To put this in perspective, the net worth of the bank in 2017 was Rs 43,164 crore. Or, the amount PNB received through the bank recapitalization scheme of the government was Rs 5,473.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story of one of the biggest basket of bad loans.

SWIFT INTERVENTION?

Of course, the government has responded to the shock of the PNB crisis. While this began the process of how to set the system right, the investigation has also shown that the LoUs were issued for a duration of one years, whereas according to the rules of Reserve Bank of India, it should not have been for more than 90 days.

As both the cases mentioned above show, the problem lies more with the implementation, or lack of it, in the case of individual banks rather than with the SWIFT system itself. After the Bangladesh bank hack, the people at the helm of SWIFT introduced a two-factor authentication system, which also mandates stronger passwords. It has also launched a Customer Security Programme, which helps client banks investigate security issues.

However, the fact remains that unless the individual banks and banking systems also ramp up their security to match, there will always remain the risk of an attack. A broken system that requires manual intervention to send information to the SWIFT is a throwback to the earlier Telex system, and is an invitation for disaster.

In the immediate aftermath of the Nirav Modi scam, the Reserve Bank of India instructed Indian banks to put in measures to tighten security to prevent such manipulations. This included ensuring that all SWIFT messages were sent only after first verifying that the transaction had been entered in the CBS. This was to be followed by the logical integration of CBS with SWIFT, obviating the need for manual intervention. A system was also to be put in place which would immediately flag anything unusual in a transaction and lenders were to continually square off payment messages every couple of hours. Another immediate consequence was that LoUs, which were an easy, quick and cheap way to transact across national boundaries were banned, making it time-consuming for both financial institutions and for customers to disburse and gain access to funds.

However, by the end of August, 2018 not enough seemed to have been done, because the RBI felt constrained to issue show cause notice to 25 banks as to why the security measures hadnt yet been implemented.

The response from the banks following this doesnt seem to have been quick enough because the RBI proceeded to penalize almost 20 banks, to the tune of nearly Rs 40 crore, including State Bank of India and ICICI Bank over their non-compliance with rules regarding SWIFT.

Most of the offending banks, since then, say they have set things right.

The thing is this. The system cannot work in a vacuum. It is for the constituents, especially in a crisis like the one Nirav Modi precipitated, for things to come back together and work seamlessly. Individual responsibility plays a big role in this. Whether it is SWIFT or RBI, they can only set the rules. It is for the other to follow. Hopefully, there wont be an opportunity for another Nirav Modi to emerge.The BJP on Thursday announced names of its candidates for 99 of the 147 Assembly seats in Odisha which will go for a simultaneous polls along with Lok Sabha in four phases beginning from April 11.

The list was released by the party following the BJP's Central Election Committee meeting in New Delhi. Earlier, the party had announced names of its candidates for Odisha's 10 of the 21 Lok Sabha seats.

The BJP, which has set a 120-plus mission for Odisha, has fielded many new entrants who joined the BJP after resigning either from the ruling BJD headed by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik or the Congress.

The prominent BJD leaders who recently joined the party and given ticket are Damodar Rout (Balikuda-Ersama) and Kusum Tete (Sundergarh).

Congress MLA from Salipur Prakash Behera, who too joined the BJP recently, has been named as the party's candidate from his own constituency.

The party has also nominated its senior leaders to contest from different assembly segments. While former minister Samir Dey has been named as the BJP candidate from Cuttack-Barabati assembly segment, former minister Jaynarayan Mishra will contest from Sambalpur seat.

BJP's state general secretary Prithviraj Harichandan will contest from Chilika assembly segment, while Padmapur MLA Pradeep Purohit has been re-nominated from the seat.

Leader of the BJP Legislature Party K V Singhdeo will contest from his Patnagarh assembly segment, while his wife Sangeeta has been named as a BJP candidate to contest from Bolangir Lok Sabha seat.

The BJP's Brajrajnagar MLA Radharani Panda has been named as the party candidate from her own seat. Remuna MLA Gobind Das has also been made a candidate from his constituency.

BJP Mahila Morcha president will contest from Nimapara assembly segment, while former minister Surama Padhi will contest from Ranpur. Irani Ray and Bharati Behera will contest from Nayagarh and Khalikote assembly seats respectively.

In the first list, the BJP fielded nine women.RLSP chief Upendra Kushwaha (right) with RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav. (PTI)

The Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) finally finalised their seat-sharing arrangement from Bihar with only weeks to go for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

Addressing a media briefing, RJD Bihar chief Ram Chandra Purve said the RJD will contest 20 seats in the state, while the Congress will contest nine.

Bihar has a total of 40 parliamentary constituencies. The remaining 11 seats were given to the regional allies of the Grand Alliance:

# Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM)  3,

# Upendra Kushwaha's Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP)  5,

# Mukesh Sahni's Vikasshil Insan Party (VIP)  3

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) will be contesting from one seat under RJD quota . This means that the RJD will not field a candidate from the constituency where CPI(M) is contesting.

Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) leader Sharad Yadav will also be contesting on an RJD ticket, and will later merge his party after the general elections, RJD national spokesman Manoj Jha told mediapersons.

Sharad Yadav had floated his own party in May last year after breaking from the parent Janata Dal (United), led by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

On the distribution of seats, RSLP general secretary Madhaw Anand told Moneycontrol, "We should say der aaye durust aaye [better late than never]. We have worked towards giving equal amount of respect to every member of the Grand Alliance. Every member has got a good share of seats within the alliance formation. This is a natural alliance of all the parties, where every party has been accorded equal respect."

"Our aim is to change the government at the centre, and in Bihar, and we are working towards that by the way of this alliance. We have announced candidates for the first phase, and we will announce the rest of the candidates soon," Anand added.Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Rahul Gandhi confidant Sam Pitrodas remarks on Balakot airstrike a shame and appealed Indians to question Opposition leaders on their statements.

Pitroda, on March 22, questioned the death toll in the Balakot airstrike conducted by the Indian Air Force (IAF) in Pakistan in retaliation to the Pulwama terror attack, in an interview to news agency ANI. He added that international news outlets had an alternate view of the impact of the air strike and that the people of India deserved to know the facts of the Air Force operation.

"If they (IAF) killed 300, its ok. All I am saying is can you give me more facts and prove it," said Pitroda in a wide-ranging interview to ANI. He added that international news outlets had an alternate view of the impact of the air strike and that the people of India deserved to know the facts of the Air Force operation.

"I would like to know a little more because I read reports in the New York Times and other newspapers. Did we really attack? We really killed 300 people? I don't know that. As a citizen, I am entitled to know and if I ask it is my duty to ask, that doesn't mean I'm not a nationalist, That doesn't mean I am on this side or that side. We need to know the facts. If you say 300 people were killed, I need to know that. We all need to know that, people of India need to know that and then comes global media which says nobody was killed. I look bad as an Indian citizen," said Pitroda.

Soon after Pitrodas remarks, PM Modi took to Twitter and said: The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning Indias armed forces. Shame!

In a series of tweets, the PM targeted Pitrodas comment on 26/11 Mumbai attack that We could have reacted then and sent our planes but that is not the right approach according to me that's not how you deal with the World. On this, the PM said, Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror.

However, he added, that it was a new India and we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!

The PM further said that the Opposition is insulting Indian forces time and again and appealed people in India to question Opposition leaders on their statements.

Tell them- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics. India stands firmly with our forces, tweeted Modi with hashtag #JantaMaafNahiKaregi.

Meanwhile, Union Minister Smriti Irani condemned Pitrodas comment, and said: Naive to bring a terror state to justice? Now the Nation knows why @RahulGandhi UPA chose not to respond with the full might of India post 26/11. Congress sympathies with Pakistan stand exposed. No wonder you supported the Bharat tere tukde honge gang.Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Friday said sacrifices of the armed forces should never be questioned, but advised the government "to stop pretending to be the Indian Army".

He also said that in a democracy it was a "fundamental right" to ask questions of politicians.

His remarks assume significance in the light of his party leader Ram Gopal Yadav claiming that the Pulwama terror attack was a "conspiracy" to garner votes.

The SP chief tweeted, "This government needs to stop pretending to be the Indian Army."

Politicians who say they cannot be questioned are dangerous, he said.

SP leader Ram Gopal Yadav Thursday alleged the Pulwama terror attack was a "conspiracy" to garner votes.

Ram Gopal, a general secretary in the Samajwadi Party (SP), also said once there is a change at the Centre, investigations will be conducted into the incident and claimed that prominent people will come under the scanner.

"For the first time, it happened that there was no checking between Jammu and Srinagar. It was for the first time that the CRPF jawans were sent in simple buses. The point where the armoured vehicles were available, no one stopped there and they proceeded, and lives were lost," Ramgopal Yadav said.

"This was a conspiracy...But, when there will be a change of government, investigations will be done and prominent people will come under the scanner, who had pushed our youth to death to garner votes," he alleged.

The SP leader was speaking at a programme at Saifai -- the ancestral village of Samajwadi Party (SP) patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav.

"A number of paramilitary jawans were unnecessarily killed to increase votes. I do not want to speak these things now.live bse live

nse live Volume Todays L/H More 

The proposed realignment of partnership between Bajaj and KTM is aimed at deepening the 12-year-old alliance by leveraging future mobility opportunities across the world, said a senior Bajaj official.

This move is the first step in a process that will unfold progressively in the coming weeks to broaden and deepen this partnership between KTM and Bajaj, Rajiv Bajaj, managing director, Bajaj Auto told Moneycontrol.

The partnership so far has made the Austrian brand world's biggest premium bike manufacturer, beating US heavyweight Harley-Davidson (in volumes) last year.

Pune-based Bajaj Auto, in return, has benefitted from technology sharing and becoming the sole manufacturer of KTM (and soon Husqvarna) bikes outside of Europe with exports reaching the US, Japan and South Asia.

The restructuring

On Thursday, Bajaj Auto said that its Netherlands-based subsidiary Bajaj Auto International Holding BV is in talks for transferring its 48 percent stake in KTM AG, to the promoter company KTM Industries AG.

After a proposed 50 percent increase in share capital in KTM Industries AG, subject to legal and economic requirements, the promoter company's total stake in KTM AG would increase to 51.7 percent from 99.7 percent presently. It was not clear how much will be Bajaj's stake in KTM Industries AG in lieu of the equity transfer.

Bajaj has termed the next phase of the alliance as KTM-Bajaj 2.0. However there were no strategic details shared by either companies. Further details are expected to be shared towards the second quarter of this year.

KTM-Bajaj 2.0 will be the basis for developing strategies and technologies to leverage future mobility opportunities across the world. It is to broaden and deepen the partnership. We will share details soon, added Bajaj.

The success of KTM prompted German heavyweight BMW to engage with TVS Motor Company to jointly build performance bikes in India.

The enormous global success of the KTM-Bajaj partnership has become the benchmark for many premium brands that are seeking to grow their business by smartly addressing emerging markets through more competitive product development and manufacture added Bajaj.

Till the end of last financial year Bajaj Auto has invested a total of 198.1 million euros (Rs 1,219 crore) in KTM AG since first acquiring stake in 2007. Two in every five motorcycles of KTM were manufactured by Bajaj in 2017.

Calendar year 2017 was a record year for KTM, with highest sales in units and highest turnover in the history of the company. It sold 238,408 motorcycles globally, a growth of 17 percent and achieved a turnover of Euro 1.33 billion, a growth of 17 percent. Profit after tax was at Euro 78.9 million (Rs 600 crore), a growth of 10 percent.

During the year, Bajaj Auto manufactured 98,132 units of KTM branded bikes at its Pune-based Chakan plant. Of these, 46,321 units were sold through the Pro-Biking network in India and 53,211 were exported worldwide.

Besides KTM Bajaj Auto also has a tie up with UK-based Triumph to make middle-weight category bikes for India and world markets.live bse live

nse live Volume Todays L/H More 

In October 2018, Bollywood actor Aamir Khan was chosen to be the face of Datsuns new campaign in India. This was done to give some lift to the sagging fortunes of the Nissan-controlled Japanese automobile brand.

Five months later, Datsuns sales have only headed south. As per available sales data, volumes of Datsun branded cars have fallen to a monthly average of 2,173 units between October 2018 and February this year. This is a 29 percent fall compared to the average monthly sales 12-months prior to his appointment as brand ambassador when it stood at 3,045 units.

Datsun sells the hatchback Go, its elongated version called Go+ and a mini hatchback called RediGo in India. The brand was revived from the dead as a rival to Maruti Suzuki since Nissan, which is struggling even more, wished to stay at the premium end.

Peter Clissold, Vice-President Marketing, Nissan India, said, We view the partnership with Aamir (Khan) as a long-term strategic collaboration, intended to help us grow the brand, in conjunction with building the network and introducing new products. We dont view this partnership as a short-term tactical sales activity.

Aamir is associated with Datsun and we expect that to continue. We have further campaigns that are in the planning phase for execution in the next several months. We have shot a TVC (TV commercial) with him, lots of video content and print photography, Clissold added.

But Datsuns is not an isolated case. During October last year, actor Hrithik Roshan was brought on-board by Tata Motors to market the Tigor, a compact sedan rivalling segment leader Maruti Suzuki Dzire.

As per available data, average monthly sales of the Tigor during the October to February period declined to 2,091 units, a 10 percent fall year-on-year.

Sources at Tata Motors, however, said bringing on-board Roshan was in the larger interest of boosting the overall image of Tigor and not just for short-term volume gains. A mail sent to Tata Motors did not elicit a response at the time of publishing the article.

Though companies call the association with celebrities as a long-term brand-building strategy, there is no clear evidence of that as sales continue to go downhill.

For instance, actor Ranbir Kapoors association with French car brand Renault, where he endorsed models like the Duster, Kwid and Captur has had little effect on Renaults fortunes in India.

As per available data, Renaults sales during the April-February FY19 stood 23 percent lower YoY at 72,527.

Similarly, Mahindra Two Wheelers, the motorcycle and scooter making arm of the Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) had roped in Khan and Kareena Kapoor to endorse the Stallio (motorcycle) and Rodeo (scooter), respectively. The company is on the verge of shutting down its Mahindra-branded two-wheelers business and instead focuses on Jawa, BSA and Yezdi brands.

Other companies associate with celebrities to bring in youthfulness to the brand and keep it relevant. For instance, Maruti Suzuki appointed actor Ranvir Singh to campaign for Ciaz and recently for Baleno. The market leader also brought on board actor Varun Dhawan last year for promoting Arena, a modern showroom concept that looks to entice the young buyer, aided by a digital buying experience.PayLogic, a payment systems technology company, and eCurrency, Digital Fiat Currency technology company, has announced a partnership to deploy new generation of National Retail Payment Solutions.

The solution comprises of Digital Fiat Currency, payment switch and e-money wallets with improved security, usability, interoperability, and settlement efficiency.

The joint solution significantly reduces risks of payment processing and promotes financial inclusion for the businesses and people across the globe.

This partnership expects to enable fast and secure payments between banks, e-money services providers, and merchants. The solution can be connected with banking networks and existing e-money systems.

Transactions and settlements between the senders and recipients will be instant and final, executed in Digital Fiat Currency issued by the central bank, also known as CBDC (central bank digital currency).Boeing Co plans to offer as standard a safety feature that might have warned earlier of problems that possibly played a role in the crashes of Ethiopian and Indonesian planes that killed almost 350 people, two officials briefed on the matter said on Thursday.

Boeing will mandate a previously optional cockpit warning light as part of a software update to the 737 MAX fleet that was grounded in the wake of the fatal crashes, said the officials, who asked not to be identified.

The March 10 Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 on board has set off one of the widest inquiries in aviation history and cast a shadow over the Boeing MAX model intended to be a standard for decades.

Initial investigations show similarities between the Ethiopian crash and the Indonesian accident in October that killed all 189 crew and passengers. A direct link between the crashes has not been proven, but attention has focussed on an automated flight-control system, MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), that came into service two years ago with the MAX.

Chicago-based Boeing, which the officials said also will retrofit older planes with the cockpit warning light, previously offered the alert, but it was not required by aviation regulators.

It is unclear how long it will take Boeing to refit existing MAX planes with new software or hardware. Experts said it could take weeks or months to be done, and for regulators to review and approve the changes. Regulators in Europe and Canada have said they will conduct their own reviews of any new systems.

The software is designed to prevent a loss of lift which can cause an aerodynamic stall, sending the plane downwards in an uncontrolled way. In the Lion Air crash, it may have been erroneously activated by a faulty sensor, investigators believe. The FAA has said installation of the new software and related training was a priority.

STEPS TO IMPROVE SAFETY

Boeing did not immediately comment on the plan to make the safety feature standard.

However, in London Thursday, Randy Tinseth, Boeing's vice president of commercial marketing, said the manufacturer is moving quickly to make software changes and expects the upgrade will be approved by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the coming weeks.

"That includes changes in the control laws of the airplane, an update of the displays, the flight manual, as well as the training," he said at a conference, adding Boeing has tested the improvements in a simulator and in the air.

The product and training updates were being made "to further improve the safety that ensures that this will not happen again," Tinseth said.

He said it was too early to speculate on what the investigations will show, but defended Boeing's design and production processes.

Boeing also said it would slow work at its 737 plant in Seattle next week to allow employees to catch up on work that was previously delayed, but said this was because of winter storms and supplier delays and not fallout from the crashes.

Meanwhile, in Jakarta, Indonesian investigators described the panic of pilots grappling with airspeed and altitude problems in the last moments of the Lion Air flight.

"It seemed the pilot felt he could no longer recover the flight. Then the panic emerged," Nurcahyo Utomo, an investigator at Indonesia's national transportation committee, said.

Reuters reported Wednesday the Lion Air pilots scrambled through a handbook to understand why the jet was lurching downwards in the final minutes before it hit the water.

A final report on the Lion Air crash is expected in August.

Boeing has said there was a documented procedure to handle the automated system at the heart of the problem.

In both flights, crews radioed about control problems shortly after take-off and sought to turn back.

MULTIPLE INQUIRIES

Investigations of Boeing's conduct are starting to pile up, with several lawsuits already filed on behalf of victims of the Lion Air crash referring to the Ethiopian accident. Boeing declined to comment on the lawsuits.

Consumer advocate and former U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader lost a grand-niece in the Ethiopian crash and urged whistleblowers to help challenge the aviation industry and get to the bottom of what happened.

"They lulled us into complacency," he said in an interview in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

SIMULATORS

Simulators for the MAX are now being manufactured but they have yet to be delivered to most airlines that have ordered them. Ethiopian Airlines said on Thursday the simulators are not designed to replicate the MCAS problems.

The airline is among the few that do have such a simulator but the captain of the doomed flight had no chance to practise on it before the fatal crash, a pilot colleague said.

In Washington, Boeing faces a criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and executives also will be summoned to a U.S. Senate panel hearing for questioning.Hyundai Motor shareholders voted on Friday against Elliott Management's proposals for dividend payouts.

Elliott Management had called for a hefty special dividend and a board shake-up at Hyundai Motor Group, South Korea's No.2 family-run conglomerate, to address its "poor governance" and "excess cash".The number of Indians who obtained conditional US citizenship through the EB-5 visa route has gone up nearly four times in the past two years, according to data from the US Department of State.

As many as 585 such conditional green cards were given to Indians in the 12-month period that ended September 2018, as against 174 issued a year ago, The Economic Times reported. During fiscal 2016, only 149 such green cards were issued.

India zoomed past Taiwan and South Korea to take the third place in terms of the number of visas issued in FY18, behind China and Vietnam.

The EB-5 visa has become the preferred option for the hundreds of Indians studying and working in the US as the H-1B visa has become difficult to obtain.

Under this programme, an individual has to invest at least $1 million (about Rs 7 crore) and create at least 10 jobs in the US. This amount goes down to $500,000 in some sectors. In many cases, it has been used to make investments in the real estate sector.

An investor having the EB-5 visa for 21 months can then apply for a permanent residence.

There is a 7 percent per country cap on the number of EB-5 visas issued. Only 10,000 can be issued in India. If any country fails to use up its limit, the remaining visas are distributed to other countries. There is currently an 18-to 30-month waiting time for Indians to obtain a green card through this route.

A law expert told the ET that the demand for EB-5 has increased after the US government tightened H-1B laws, making it difficult for spouses of H-1B holders to continue to have work authorisations.

"Children of several H-1B workers, especially those in the queue for a green card under the employment category, are also ageing out. After 21 years of age, they can no longer hold the dependent H-4 visa, but need to migrate to another visa or self-deport to India," Mitchell L Wexler, partner at global law firm Fragomen, told the paper.

Meanwhile, the number of applications coming from China and Vietnam exceeded the cap allowed for those countries. India could face a similar situation after July or August this year, which may increase the waiting period by a few years.The Boeing 737 Max jets, which were involved in the unfortunate Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10 and the Lion Air crash in October 2018, lacked two important safety features in the cockpit. This is because Boeing charged extra for them, according to media reports.

Many aircraft manufacturers including Boeing charge extra to upgrade a standard model with bonus features. Airlines around the world have to shell out huge amounts to get the customised services in their orders. These features may include comfort or aesthetics like premium seating or extra bathrooms.

But, there are other features involving communication, navigation or safety systems that contribute to the plane's operation. Low-cost airlines like Lion Air did do not opt for these features and aviation regulators have not mandated these features.

Since these two deadly crashes occurred, Boeing has decided to make one of these safety features a standard on its airplanes.

The main reason for both crashes, which happened shortly after the planes took off, is still unknown. Authorities are trying to find if Boeing's new software, which was added recently, is the reason the planes became inoperable to the pilots.

In the Lion Air crash, it is speculated that faulty data from sensors may have led to a malfunction in the system of the plane. This software, known as the MCAS, takes the readings of two devices called angle of attack sensors. These sensors determine the position of a plane's nose with respect to the oncoming air.

The MCAS picks up signals when the aircraft is at a dangerous angle. It then automatically pushes the nose of the plane to prevent it from stalling. Media reports suggest Boeing's add-on safety features could have partly assisted the pilots in both the incidents.Cash-strapped Pakistan will receive over USD 2 billion loan from its "all-weather" ally China by Monday to provide a boost to its ailing economy, the Finance Ministry has announced. Ministry's adviser and spokesperson Khaqan Najeeb Khan said that "all procedural formalities" for the transfer of the USD 2.1 billion (15 billion yuan) loan being provided by the Chinese government have been completed, and "the funds will be deposited in the State Bank of Pakistan's account by Monday, March 25", the Dawn newspaper reported.

Pakistan has received USD 1 billion each from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as part of the bailout packages by the two Gulf nations to help shore up Islamabad's dwindling foreign currency reserves.

Saudi Arabia's assistance was part of the USD 6 billion bailout package - USD 3 billion balance-of-payments support and another USD 3 billion in deferred payments on oil imports - which Riyadh had agreed in October last year.

Islamabad is also in talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout package.

The loan facility "will further strengthen foreign exchange reserves and ensure balance of payment stability," the spokesperson said.

Following a meeting in Beijing between Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Prime Minister Imran Khan in November 2018, China said that it was willing to offer assistance to Pakistan to help it weather its current fiscal woes but the terms of such aid were still being discussed.

Shortly after, Chinese Consul General Long Dingbin had said during an interview that in order to "boost Pakistan's economy", Beijing was investing in multiple sectors and launching business ventures instead of providing loans.

Earlier, Pakistan officials said that Islamabad would seek around USD 8 billion from the IMF which would be the biggest package by the Fund for Islamabad.

Although the Pakistan government has secured a breathing space from Saudi Arabian and the UAE loans, an IMF programme is essential to unlock access to resources from other multilateral lenders like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, as well as the global capital markets.The top US military officer plans to meet with Google representatives next week amid growing concerns that American companies doing business in China are helping its military gain ground on the US. Gen Joseph Dunford says efforts like Google's artificial intelligence venture in China allow the Chinese military to access and take advantage of US-developed technology.

He told an audience at the Atlantic Council on Thursday that it's not in America's national security interest for US companies to help the Chinese military make technological advances.

Last week acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan expressed similar concerns and noted that Google is stepping away from some Pentagon contracts. Google has said it would not renew a defense contract involving the use of artificial intelligence to analyze drone video.The United States imposed sanctions on Thursday on two Chinese shipping companies it says helped North Korea evade sanctions over its nuclear weapons program, the first such steps since a U.S.-North Korean summit collapsed last month.

The U.S. Treasury Department also issued an updated advisory that listed 67 vessels that it said had engaged in illicit transfers of refined petroleum with North Korean tankers or were believed to have exported North Korean coal.

The department identified the newly sanctioned firms as Dalian Haibo International Freight Co Ltd and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co Ltd, which it said had helped North Korea evade U.S. and international sanctions.

Reuters was unable to locate contact details for either company to seek comment.

The move prohibits U.S. dealings with the designated companies and freezes any assets they have in the United States.

Washington announced the measures three weeks after a second meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un broke down over conflicting demands by North Korea for relief from sanctions and from the U.S. side for Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons.

The United States has led international efforts to press North Korea through sanctions to give up its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

"The United States and our like-minded partners remain committed to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea and believe that the full implementation of North Korea-related U.N. Security Council resolutions is crucial to a successful outcome," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.

"Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk," he added.

The latest sanctions showed there was some "leakage" in North Korea sanctions enforcement by China, but Beijing was mostly abiding by U.N. resolutions, a senior U.S. official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official said that financial as well as shipping companies risked U.S. action if they were found to be in violation of sanctions.

The official insisted, however, that Thursday's announcement was meant to maintain sanctions enforcement on North Korea rather than intensify the pressure.

While declining to say whether Washington was trying to send a post-summit message to Pyongyang, the official said Trump "has made clear that the door is wide open to continuing the dialogue with North Korea."

LIMBO

U.S.-North Korean engagement has appeared to be in limbo since the Feb. 27-28 summit in Hanoi, despite U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying on March 4 he was hopeful he could send a team to North Korea "in the next couple of weeks."

Washington has said it aims to re-engage with Kim, but North Korea has warned it is considering suspending talks and may rethink a freeze on missile and nuclear tests in place since 2017 unless Washington makes concessions.

On Monday, two senior U.S. senators called for the Trump administration to correct a slowing pace of American sanctions designations on North Korea, saying there had been a marked decline in such actions during the past year of U.S. diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang.

They pointed to a 2019 U.N. report that found that North Korea continued to defy U.N. sanctions with an increase in smuggling of petroleum products and coal and violation of bans on arms sales.

The Treasury statement said Dalian Haibo was targeted for dealings with Paeksol Trading Corp, a company previously designated by U.S. sanctions on North Korea.

It said Dalian Haibo shipped cargo from Dalian, China, to Paeksol in Nampo, North Korea, in early 2018 aboard North Korean-flagged vessels.

The statement said Liaoning Danxing had "routinely used deceptive practices" to enable the work of North Korean procurement officials based in the European Union.

The Treasury statement said evasion tactics employed by North Korea included disabling or manipulating automated identification systems, physically altering vessels, transferring cargoes between ships and falsifying cargo documentation.

It said ports visited by vessels involved in ship-to-ship transfers included those in Taiwan, China, Russia and South Korea.

The Treasury Department said that in 2018, North Korean ports received at least 263 tanker deliveries of refined petroleum via U.N.-prohibited ship-to-ship transfers.

It said that if the tankers were fully laden, North Korea would have imported 3.78 million barrels - more than 7-1/2 times the 500,000 barrels a year allowed under a U.N. resolution.Larsen & Toubro (L&T) is an engineering firm that has also spawned two software companies: L&T Infotech and L&T Technology Services. It is now the largest shareholder of Mindtree and is aiming to win its hostile takeover battle for Mindtree, a medium-sized software services company. Mindtrees promoters are intending to fight L&T; but they may have too little ammunition and are, possibly, too...A few weeks back, when a leading national daily launched a campaign highlighting what it called Lost Votes, it was like old wounds being reopened. The campaign attempted to draw attention to the countless people who are unable to vote because they are not at the place where they are enrolled as a voter.

I am a senior citizen, but I have voted only three times till date. Why? Because the rigour of my employment made me move across India ever so often that, most of the times, I was not even registered as a voter in the place of my employment, and, if registered, would have moved on to a new place before I could vote in the next round of elections at that place.

More than the above-mentioned difficulties, however, my reopened wounds reminded me of the difficult journey I had to undertake to get myself and my family members enrolled as a voter, once I retired and moved to a new place to settle down. It took me nine months of battling the electoral authorities to get enrolled.

My experience made me study the problems associated with the voter enrolment process. Largely, there are three sections of the population that are unable to vote:

1) Those who have never registered as a voter and, hence, unable to vote. This is the very basic problem of ease of doing business with Election Commissionhow easy it is to get one-self enrolled as a voter?

2) Those who are registered at their place of living but unable to vote as they are not around on the day of the voting. These people want the polling booth to be mobile  e.g. proxy voting, absentee voting, online voting, postal ballots and the like.

3) Those who have moved permanently (or semi-permanently) from the place where they are registered as a voter (mostly their native place  their home town/village) and hence are unable to vote. Let us call these people migrants. These people require their vote/enrolment to move with them.

My interest lies in the last category of people.

Where Can One Vote?

There were close to 454 million Indians classified as migrants in the last census. Of these, 72 million migrated over one year back, 69 million over 5 years back and a vast majority, 291 million had been a resident at their present place for over 10 years. Only about 21 million had moved less than a year back.

Looking at it from another perspective, 217 million were females who moved to a new place due to their marriage. Of the remaining, 46 million had moved due to work/employment, 48 million had moved after birth and another 70 million had moved with household. None of these are temporary movements.

If the vast majority of the migrant population has moved on permanent basis, the demand for these people to be able to vote at their home towns or villages is mis-informed to say the least.

Where should the interests of this permanently moved/migrated population lie - at their current place of residence or at their home town/village that they left permanently?

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that a voter continues to have interest in his home town/village. The question then arises is - On what basis and with what knowledge would someone vote at a place that he left long back? How well informed an individual is about the issues affecting the people/place he left years back, permanently? More importantly, from the point of view of the current residents and electors at his home town/village, why an outsider should, one who has moved out years back, be allowed to influence the election outcomes at their place.

In any case, as per electoral laws, a person to register as a voter, should be ordinarily resident in the constituency concerned. It is, therefore, clear that a migrant cannot continue to be registered as a voter at his home town/village where he is no more an ordinary resident. He can only register at a place where he sleeps regularly.

The Real Issue

The real issue is ease of doing business with Election Commission of India  i.e. timely and convenient way of registration of a voter at his current place of ordinary residence. Seen in this context, the issue of mobility of votes is indeed very real. Why should the transposition of votes not be automatic? Why should one get his current enrolment deleted before enrolling at the new centre? Why should he even be required to enrol again. It should just be a process of change of address.

Let us now examine the impediments faced by persons desirous of enrolment for the first time or re-enrolment at a new place due to migration.

Primarily, a person is requited to provide the following information for enrolment as a voter

1. Name

2. Age/Date of Birth

3. Gender

4. Current Address

5. Permanent Address

6. Name of a Relative (immediate family member)

7. If the applicant is already enrolled elsewhere -

a. details of previous enrolment

b. address of earlier place of Residence

In addition a photograph, proof of age and proof of residence is also required (surprisingly, proof of identity is not required). A first-time registrant is also required to submit annexure III, whereas someone switching to a new constituency is required to submit Form No. 7 also. Thus everyone is required to submit at least two forms. But these forms are absolutely redundant as a provision for these already exists on Form no. 6 (enrolment).

While above requirements are fairly simple to comply with, problem arises in their enforcement on the ground. Some examples are 

a) The electoral officials ask for multiple proofs of address. Election Commissions says that it is solely the discretion of the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) to satisfy himself about the current resident status of a person seeking enrolment. However, they have issued no guidelines for the circumstances under which he may seek additional evidence. While it would be perfectly in order for ERO to ask for additional documents when in doubt, in actual fact it has resulted into a ridiculous practice where every applicant is required to produce multiple documents as a proof of address. Many a people are turned away after having stood in queues for long hours to bring additional documents, unnecessarily. Many of them may not turn up again.

b) Those applying for a change in constituency are asked to first get their names deleted from their earlier constituency. This is problematic for several reasons. Let us examine these.

Section 23(2) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 states

(2) The electoral registration officer shall, if satisfied that the applicant is entitled to be registered in the electoral roll, direct his name to be included therein:

Provided that if the applicant is registered in the electoral roll of any other constituency, the electoral registration officer shall inform the electoral registration officer of that other constituency and that officer shall, on receipt of the information, strike off the applicant's name from that roll.

Thus it is clear that the onus of getting the name deleted from the other constituency rests solely with the electoral authorities and the applicant is only required to provide the relevant details of his previous enrolment. Form no. 6 already captures all the required details.

However, if the onus for deletion were to be on the applicant, as most of the EROs insist upon, how does one ensure that the concerned ERO acts promptly and deletes the name from the rolls of his constituency? In fact how does he even verify the genuineness of the request in the first place? Moreover, the deletion of the names from the rolls takes inordinately long time. Sometimes even years. Does this mean that the applicant will not be enrolled at the new place till such time? The electoral laws do not permit this, but this is what happens on the ground.

This brings us back to the core issue. Why not make the voter-id transferable across India, just like a bank account or a mobile phone number? Why should one even be required to enrol again? It should just be a process of change of address.

However, these changes, even if accepted for implementation, will take a long time to get implemented. But can the Election Commission address the ease of enrolment, in the meantime.

The Attempted Reforms

Election Commission of India claims that revision of electoral rolls has come a long way since independence of the country and evolved into a robust and institutionalized system. The Election Commission of India has indeed worked tirelessly to set up processes and rules/regulations to make it easy to enrol as a voter and made revision of electoral rolls an annual process with year-round registration of voters. However, these reforms take unduly long to percolate down and are at best half-hearted efforts. Let us examine how these reforms have been implemented on the ground?

Let us examine a major reform at ease of doing businessonline application for registration as a voter. This is done through the National Voters Services Portal of Election Commission of India.

Information provided by Election Commission of India, in response to RTI query, regarding online applications received on its NVSP portal during the period 01/01/2017 to 30/09/2017 and their current status is so absurd that I am not even inclined to reproduce it here. Suffice it to say that the fate of these applications is not known to Election Commission of India as it considers that its role ends with forwarding the applications to the concerned EROs. It begs the question  How is the Election Commission of India fulfilling its objective of monitoring the adequacy, efficacy and efficiency of this portal and indeed of the EROs?

Let us now examine this with reference to another facet of these reformsinternal computerisation of the process of registration as voter. This is done through EROnet. Election Commission of India states

This year (2016), the Election Commission IT team has also created a web-based system named as ERO Net to provide a platform to Electoral Registration Officers and other officials to process claims & objections received online/offline and to closely monitor the enrolment process throughout the country.

Data provided by Election Commission of India, in response to an RTI query is tabulated below.

(Please note that this data is for the applications received during the period 01/01/2017 to 30/09/2017. The numbers are relatively small because most of the states migrated to EROnet only in the latter half of 2017. The status of applications (approved/rejected/pending etc.) is as of April 2018.)

Most glaring is the unacceptably high percentage of rejections at almost 40% of the total applications received. There could be several reasons for that but how the root cause for such high rejection rate have been dealt with? Secondly, more than 5% applications were pending for over 6 months at least. This implies that despite all the information being available online, virtually no monitoring is being done. One only hopes that the situation has improved in the race to forthcoming national elections, however doubts remain.

Now, let us look at another attempted reformthe simplification of various forms required to be filled up for first time registration and for subsequent changes. Sometime in the middle of 2014 Election Commission set out to simplify most common forms to be filed for enrolment. The then CEC observedAt present various forms are very complicated and unduly long, whereas the quantum of requisite information for above activities is very limited from legal point of view.. As such voters show indifference to registration.

The simplification process went through various iterations for next few years but in the end they became even longer and more cluttered. Form 6 required for enrolment, which is the most common form in use, in fact grew in size and additional information such as Permanent Address was included without any rationale. In fact this inclusion goes against the basic premise of the simplification process which was to prune them down to the bare minimum information required as per law. The rationale for continuing to ask for name of the immediate relative but removing his enrolment detail is also not clear. Form 7, which was meant for raising objections, has been modified too to include deletion of ones own name from the electoral rolls of a constituency. This is strange because as per the EC Manual, primarily the applicant (claimant) is only required to declare whether he is already enrolled elsewhere or not. The rest of the job i.e. the deletion of the name from the previous constituency is the responsibility of both the concerned EROs.

Thus instead of simplification, the forms and the process became even more complicated.

Conclusion

While it is clear that the Election Commission of India, at the apex level, has made serious attempts at reforms to ensure that everyone eligible can enrol and indeed vote, it needs to examine why these attempts are not as successful on the ground as they should have been. Why ground level implementation is not in sync with the apex level objectives? Every Vote Counts should not remain merely a slogan.We had mentioned in last weeks closing report that Nifty, Sensex were in the grip of bulls. The major indices of the Indian stock markets were range-bound during the week and closed with small gains on Friday over last Fridays close. The trends of the major indices during the course of the weeks trading are given in the table below:

The benchmark Sensex jumped over 300 points higher, while the Nifty crossed the 10,500 mark during the morning trade session on Monday.

The country's largest life insurer Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) may propose a timeline of 3-5 years for cutting down its stake in the recently acquired IDBI Bank to comply with insurance regulators norm of 15% stake in a listed investee firm.

The major indices of the Indian stock markets rallied on Tuesday and closed with gains over Mondays close. On the NSE, there were 924 advances, 827 declines and 338 unchanged. Despite witnessing volatility throughout the session, key equity indices advanced for the seventh straight day over sustained inflow of foreign funds and firm global markets. Almost all the Asian markets closed on a positive note while the European indices such as CAC 40 and FTSE 100 traded in the green.

The S&P BSE Sensex closed 268.40 points or 0.70% higher at 38,363.47, while the broader Nifty finished 70.20 points or 0.61% higher at 11,532.40. Among the top gainers were ITC, NTPC, HCL Technologies, Reliance Industries and Bharti Airtel were among the top gainers on the Sensex in the range of 1.81% to 2.45% while Bajaj Finance, Vedanta, Coal India, Bajaj Auto, Maruti Suzuki, Larsen & Toubro and Hero MotoCorp were the losers on the index (lost in the range of 0.15% to 2.10%).

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) would start accepting new H1-B visa petitions for the fiscal year 2020 starting April 1, the media reported. The employment start date for these visas would be October 1, the American Bazaar daily reported on Monday.

Muthoot Capital Services Ltd (MCSL), the non-banking finance company (NBFC), announced conclusion of a Rs236 crore two-wheeler securitisation deal with HDFC Mutual Fund (HDFC-MF). "This deal is one of the largest securitisations deals in the two-wheeler finance space and the biggest securitisation transaction so far for MCSL," a company statement said. "HDFC-MF subscribed to the entire issuance. The underlying loan pool received from Crisil an AA rating, a significant achievement in this asset class," it said. Muthoot Capital, the micro-financing arm of the Muthoot Pappachan group, is primarily into auto-finance business. Securitisation refers to transactions wherein a lender sells a portfolio of future receivables, and has recently become a preferred mechanism for NBFCs to raise funds. Muthoot Capital has a portfolio of around Rs2,600 crore with 7 lakh customers, spread across 18 states, the statement added.

The major indices of the Indian stock markets were range-bound on Wednesday and closed with marginal gains over Tuesdays close. On the NSE, there were 667 advances, 1,086 declines and 332 unchanged.

The State Bank of India will auction non-performing assets (NPAs) amounting to Rs6,169 crore in the next 10 days to recover its dues from various defaulting business outfits. The country's largest lender carries out auctions of financial assets of those defaulters who have not paid their dues. From March 22-30, the bank, which has already put out a list of the assets, will auction these to asset reconstruction companies (ARCs), banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and FIs.

The assets include Jain Infraprojects Ltd, Kamachi Industries Ltd, Parenteral Drugs, which will go on sale on March 22. The total outstanding of this sale, which also includes a few minor properties, is Rs1,300 crore. On March 26, the bank has put on sale assets worth Rs3,645 crore of some big accounts like the India Steel Corporation (Rs929 crore) and Jai Balaji Industries (Rs859 crore). There are other companies also on sale like Kohinoor Planet Construction (Rs207.77 crore) and Mittal Corp (Rs859.33 crore). The SBI will also auction assets worth Rs1,748 crore of BMM Ispat Ltd. On March 29, the bank will sell assets worth Rs776 crore where Yashasvi Yarns, Sumita Tex Spin, Shekhawati Poly-yarn Ltd and Shakumbhari Straw NPAs stand at Rs305 crore.

The Punjab National Bank (PNB) stock surged over 4% on Wednesday following the arrest in the UK of Nirav Modi, who is accused in the Rs13,500- crore PNB fraud case reported last year. After rising over 4% in afternoon trade, the PNB stock closed on Wednesday at Rs93.55 share, up Rs3.05, or by 3.37%. Official sources said the fugitive diamantaire was arrested in London more than a year after he fled India. UK Police made the arrest seven days after the London Westminster Court issued an arrest warrant against Modi. The Interpol had issued a Red Corner Notice against Nirav Modi in July 2018 at the request of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation.

On Thursday, the stock markets were closed for trading on account of Holi.

The Sensex reversed early gains and closed lower on Friday, as investors took to booking profit after gaining for eight straight sessions. All sectors, except real estate index, on the NSE ended in the red. The Nifty banking index which touched an all-time high also succumbed to the overall decline. The BSE Sensex closed 222.14 points lower at 38,164.61 while the Nifty declined by 64.15 points or 0.56%. Nair also added that global bond yields were on decline as global central banks were tweaking their monetary policy to support growth. This is likely to benefit emerging markets like India in the medium term.

The Bank of Baroda may get Rs5,000 capital infusion from the Finance Ministry ahead of its united operations as a merged entity along with the Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank from April 1. In February, the government approved Rs48,239-crore recap bonds in 12 PSBs.

The government has so far pumped Rs1.90 lakh crore into PSBs since it announced the recapitalisation plan in October 2017. The Finance Ministry has kept around Rs5,000 crore as buffer for any last-minute contingency, for possible infusion into the merged entity of Bank of Baroda, Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank.

The merger will create India's third largest bank with a total business of over Rs14.82 lakh crore. When the three banks are merged, the combined entity's capital adequacy ratio will be at 12.25%, with tier-1 capital at 9.32% and net non-performing assets at 5.71%. The merged entity will have nearly 9,500 branches. Bank of Baroda shares closed at Rs119.95, down 4.19% on the NSE. Vijaya Bank shares closed at Rs46.10, up 2.67% on the BSE.WPS Office is a very strong contender for a replacement for Microsoft Office. And you will love it because it is freeofficially!

This is the smallest size (less than 37MB) and all-in-one complete free office suite on Android mobile and tablets. It integrates all office word-processor functions: Word, PDF, presentation, spreadsheet , memo and docs scanner in one application and is fully compatible with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Doc and Adobe PDF format.

The free templates included are great for making good-looking documents on the fly. PDF converter, PDF reader and PDF editor are all bundled in. You can automatically save office documents to cloud platformsDropbox, Google Drive, Box, Evernote and OneDrive. Keep your all documents always up-to-date via cloud service. The free templates included are great for making good-looking documents on the fly. PDF converter, PDF reader and PDF editor are all bundled in. You can automatically save office documents to cloud platformsDropbox, Google Drive, Box, Evernote and OneDrive. Keep your all documents always up-to-date via cloud service.

It also has a desktop version, which you can sync with, once you register and login.March 22, 2019

Trump's Golan Move Was Timed To Guarantee Netanyahoo's Reelection

The people who paid for Trump's election campaign, foremost casino magnate and zionist Sheldon Adelson, want to keep the Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahoo in office. Netanyahoo is under investigation in several corruption cases and has a serious competitor in the upcoming general elections in Israel. Trump needs money for his re-election campaign and is willing to do anything to get it.

Trump is colluding with Netayahoo to influence the Israeli election. It is the reason why he decided yesterday to claim that Israel has sovereignty over the Golan Heights:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump - 16:50 utc - 21 Mar 2019

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!

The Heights are Syrian lands that were occupied by Israel during its 1967 war of aggression against Egypt and Syria.

The Heights are of strategic-military value. Whoever controls them can also control the plains east, west and south to it. Israel built several radar and spy station on the heights that allow it to see deep into Syria.



This profile picture falsely depicts the occupied Heights territory as Israeli.

The internationally recognized border runs near the river line.

bigger

McClatchy has the tic toc of Trump's decision:

President Donald Trumps tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials. U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next weeks meetings between Trump and Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential announcement this week.

Trump's declaration was expected, but not for yesterday. The reason for the premature ejaculation is obvious. Yesterday a new case of Netyahoo's utter corruption came to light:

State prosecutors are reportedly considering opening yet another criminal graft investigation against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this time in the so-called submarine affair, citing dramatic new information.

Netanyahoo made a profit of $4 million from shares he owned in a company that was bought out by Thyssen-Krupp, a German conglomerate from which Israel under Netanyahoo ordered submarines and corvettes.

The new revelations threatened to blow up Netanyahoo's reelection campaign. Trump's sudden Golan Heights move was timed to bury them.

Back to McClatchy:

The wording of Trumps tweet likely falls short of a formal, declarative recognition, according to Dan Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel under former President Barack Obama. But little more than a statement from the president or secretary of state is necessary to secure the major U.S. policy shift. The White House is mulling several ways to formalize the policy decision, including a potential executive order signing ceremony on Monday with Netanyahu present.

...

Administration officials said that National Security Advisor John Bolton was instrumental to the decision, after visiting Israel in January to assure officials there that the United States would not abandon them in Syria despite Trumps sudden withdrawal of troops from the battlefield.

The hasty move itself was typical Bolton. There was no policy process to plan and announce the decision. Long standing legal advise from other departments which warned of the move was ignored.

Trump has no power to give Israel sovereignty over anything. Several UN resolutions determined (UNSCR242) and reconfirmed (UNSCR497) that the Golan Heights are Syrian territory illegally occupied by Israel. The European Union, Russia and others rejected Trump's move and called it illegal.

Trump's move though might have some standing in U.S. courts. That will become important when law suites are filed against Genie Energy Ltd., an oil company in Newark New Jersey that wants to drill for oil in the Golan Heights area:

Genie Energy is no penny stock run-of-the-mill oil company. Its board of Advisors includes Dick Cheney. It includes former CIA head and chairman of the above-mentioned Foundation for Defense of Democracies, James Woolsey. It includes Jacob Lord Rothschild of the London banking dynasty and a former business partner of convicted Russian oil oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Before his arrest Khodorkovsky secretly transferred his shares in Yukos Oil to Rothschild. Further this little-known Newark, New Jersey oil company board includes former US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, pro-Israel media mogul and owner of Trumps favorite Fox News TV, Rupert Murdoch. Also on the board are former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and hedge fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt. Steinhardt, a philanthropic friend of Israel and of Marc Rich, is also a board member of Woolseys neo-con Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which advises Trump among other things that it would be good for Washington to recognize Israel as legitimate owner of the Golan Heights lands taken by Dayan in the 1967 War.

Under international law it is illegal to draw natural resources from occupied territory. With Trump's move the owners and board members of Genie Energy receive an additional layer of legal cover in U.S. and Israeli courts.

The international consequences of the move are for now subtle. On the ground nothing changed. The Israeli occupation was and is illegal.

The occupied Golan Heights include the Sheeba farms which are Lebanese territory. The resistance axis of Hizbullah, Syria and Iran is strengthened by Trump's move and will use it move to justify further activities against Israel and perhaps against United States interests elsewhere. The move will be used to recruit more resistance fighters, especially from the Druze on the Syrian side of the Golan who have brethren living on the Israel controlled side.

It further delegitimizes the Syrian 'rebels' and the Syrian Kurds who are allied with the U.S. while Trump gives away Syrian land. It demonstrates the weakness of those Arab rulers who are allied with the U.S. but were not even informed that Trump planed to hand off Arab land. It will incite their domestic population against them. That makes it much more difficult for them to continue their policy of detente with Israel.

The 'deal of the century' for peace between Arabs and the Zionists that Trump's son in law Jared Kushner was supposed to arrange is now dead.

Posted by b on March 22, 2019 at 16:36 UTC | Permalink

Comments

next page The governments of Canada and Alberta have finalized a 10-year agreement that will invest $678 million in the renewal and expansion of affordable housing in the province.

Of this sum, both governments will be responsible for $339 million each. This long-term funding will support Albertas initiatives concerning housing repair, construction, and affordability.

The new agreement marks the beginning of a partnership that will be supported by long-term and predictable funding starting April 1, 2019, the governments stated in the announcement.Equality, whether its economic equality or relates to pay or gender, is a rising priority that is being felt among the nations businesses.

The oil and gas industry is no exception, and several companies with a major presence in the Permian Basin are taking steps to address the issue. Among them is Chevron, with 600 employees at its Midland campus and more in its field locations.

Late last month, the company provided a $5 million grant to Catalyst, a global nonprofit working toward workplace gender equality, to support its Men Advocating Real Change program.

The Midland location last year was one of Chevrons first to launch a MARC program. The Chevron Womens Network and Chevron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mike Wirth brought the program to the company in 2017. The company instituted a pilot program in Houston, and it has expanded to seven Chevron locations globally and includes more than 750 employees. It joins other employee networks at the Midland campus, including a Womens Network and Black Employees Network that brings the workforce together with cultural events, networking, volunteering and speaker events.

Catie Matthews, public affairs representative in Chevrons Midland office, told the Reporter-Telegram by email, Men have a critical role to play in creating inclusive workplaces, yet are too often an untapped resource in gender initiatives. MARC (Men Advocating Real Change), launched in Midland in 2017, was created for and is led by men who are committed to creating a culture of inclusion. Participants, both men and women, learn how inclusion impacts our business, the role we all play in creating an inclusive culture and are given opportunities to develop their inclusive leadership skills. They meet to discuss the role gender can play at work and becoming aware of unconscious biases.

She continued, The program is run through our Midland Womens Employee Network, which is active in leadership, networking and community initiatives. They also help drive Chevrons investment in STEM education in our communities, as we believe this is the key ingredient to creating a more diverse work environment. In fact, on March 30, Chevron is the STEM sponsor at Girls World Expo at the Horseshoe Arena, and our Womens Employee Network is planning and volunteering.

Matthews pointed out that Chevrons programs extend to supporting parents, especially new mothers, by providing a certified lactation consultant to provide breastfeeding workshops in Midland. The same lactation consultant is available to provide in-home return-to-work lactation consultations to women returning to work following maternity leave. The program mirrors the program that is in place in Houston and other Chevron locations. The breastfeeding workshops will be held at the child care center to benefit all families at the center, and not just Chevron's families. Parenting workshops for mothers and fathers are being offered through a Nurse Practitioner in Midland.

The goal of the MARC program is to engage and empower male executive and leaders to model inclusive behaviors, influence more equitable talent management systems and processes and build effective partnerships across gender. Chevrons grant will support expansion of the MARC leadership training efforts.

Katie Mehnert, chief executive officer and founder of Pink Petro, which advocates for women in the energy industry, applauded Wirth and Chevron for focusing investments where we can make a real impact and men as change agents is key.

She told the Reporter-Telegram by email that she doesnt believe the energy industry is doing enough toward gender equality.

Tech, despite its privacy issues, continues to take quality talent. The war for talent is real and we need to truly transform our culture. We need to show the value of what a career in energy provides the next generation. Its pretty impactful work, but were not investing enough in the positive stories and sharing who we are. Having great culture and value proposition for meaningful work is what attracts and retains a workforce, regardless of gender. As of late Pink Petro has expanded and created Experience Energy, a careers site and culture practice with the GapingVoid to help accelerate progress for energy.

She went on to note that equality has been discussed for five years.

We need to go beyond allyship and giving women a seat at the table, she said. Thats now a 5-year-old discussion. Men need to champion women and challenge the traditions and customs that maintain the status quo. It gets back to culture and what society accepts as the standard. I also think we need to de-politicize the equality movement. Inequality weakens our nation, compromises democracy and lowers our standards by which we can all thrive. America was founded on the principle of All Men are Created Equal. We need to extend that to all genders, nationalities and cultures and truly embrace inclusionA Croatian big game hunter was preparing to shoot a lion during a hunting expedition in South Africa when he himself was shot and killed.

Pero Jelinic, whose friends say had "hunted everything that could be hunted in Europe," had already killed one lion and was sighting in a second Saturday at a remote lodge near Setiagole, according to Total Croatia News.



So, you have decided to go back to school to brush up on your business skills. Well done mate! That is a good move for your business or career growth.





You're currently searching through the web to find some of the best business schools around the world to apply to. Might I suggest applying to Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) at Erasmus University? RSM is one of the best business schools in Europe and graduating with their international MBA will open doors for you anywhere you go around the globe. What to know more about why to choose Rotterdam ? Here are my top 5 reasons to study there.





1. Erasmus University has been consistently ranked among the top 100 institutions in the world. That statement alone is a good enough reason to want to study at this prestigious university. When you enroll in this university youre certain that youll get the best education that will propel you to greater heights in business or career. Their Business and Management and Accounting and Finance courses, for example, were ranked number one in the 2018 QS World University Rankings by Subject.





2. Located in the second largest city in the Netherlands the Rotterdam Business School is in a vibrant and multicultural city. There are actually more than 170 nationalities in Rotterdam. You will, therefore, be part of a global community and get to interact with people from many different cultures and background and learn a lot from them.





3. The university has a number of famous alumni in its global network of over 120,000 former students. Some of the notable alumni include:





 Former EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes

 Netherlands former Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers

 Economic Science Noble Prize winner Jan Tinbergen

 Former Shell CEO Cor Herkstroter





4. As a student, youll be learning and networking with future world leaders, top researchers or economists. This is a good opportunity to build strong relationships with some of the brightest minds and people aiming to achieve great success.





5. The city is strategically located. From Rotterdam, you can easily travel to other European cities. When youre not hitting the books you can get on a train, bus or tram and take a quick trip to cities like Paris, Brussels, London or The Hague. If you have always dreamt of touring Europe you can affordably do so while studying at Rotterdam.





If you decide to do your MBA at Rotterdam you can apply to get accommodation on campus or find your own accommodation off campus.





Finding accommodation off campus can be difficult if you have never been to the city before. It would be therefore to seek help for online platforms like HousingAnywhere where you can search for rooms and apartments for students in Rotterdam . Such a service will make it easier for you to find accommodation before you move to your new destination.





Conclusion





Moving to a new city can be challenging and you might even experience some culture shock. But the people in Rotterdam are so welcoming and if you go there with an open mind you will adapt to their lifestyle in no time. All the best in your business studies









I hope you enjoyed this blog post about how to study for your MBA in Rotterdam Netherlands to get your business degree





Interested in more articles about getting an MBA?





Read Related Resources:















Funny Man

Mel Brooks

By Patrick McGilligan

Harper. 624 pp. $40

---

Patrick McGilligan's new biography, "Funny Man: Mel Brooks," seeks to undermine the cultivated image of the lovable, goofy uber-Jew who has worked in film, television, audio recordings and theater. He has earned an Oscar, four Emmys, three Tonys, three Grammys, a Kennedy Center Honor and a National Medal of the Arts. If one were to hold up these accolades as evidence of Brooks's genius, McGilligan's response might resemble the soundtrack from a certain vulgar scene in "Blazing Saddles."

The book's organizing principle is that Brooks is bifurcated, a Jekyll-and-Hyde-type being, comprising "Good Mel" and "Bad Mel." Good Mel, resembling Yogurt from "Spaceballs" - kindly and ever ready with a pun or an endearingly crude joke - is the public Mel. But Bad Mel - like the nasty, greedy and uncaring President Skroob - is most of Mel.

McGilligan distinguishes three phases in the comedian's life: pre-famous Mel, famous Mel and little old man (Lilolman!) Mel. Young Melvin Kaminsky was the innocent Good Mel. Making his widowed mother and older brothers laugh as a boy, he grows to idolize the Borscht Belt saxophonist and rising comedy star Sid Caesar as a late teen, becoming Caesar's personal jester, forever at his heel trying to make him laugh to gain validation. Adopting a truncated version of his mother's maiden name, Brookman, he becomes a mixture of vulnerability and tenacity, yearning for Caesar's approval so that he may glom onto his accelerating success.

At the end of the book, as a senior citizen, Good Mel again resurfaces. He ages into the 2,000-year-old man: a cute old Jew who reminisces and makes jokes that come across as innocuous, even in their occasional vulgarity.

But for the vast majority of McGilligan's telling, the Mel of the Mel Brooks brand is Bad Mel. And not just bad, but a new Jewish supervillan, the Incredible Schmuck, who, whenever anyone else receives credit or compensation for creative work, turns green with envy and rages in a destructive, often litigious fury that wrecks anything and anyone who gets in his way, friend or foe. Good Mel becomes a mere mask that Bad Mel could wear when trying to sway judges or woo potential investors.

McGilligan's cataloguing of the artistic, financial and personal atrocities of Bad Mel constitutes the main thrust of the telling of Brooks's life story. You do not come away from the book feeling like you have spent time with Mel Brooks. Rather, you feel like you were on a long car ride with Brooks's gossipy, catty accountant. In exploring a prolific figure in show business, we get lots of business and much less show.

Brooks has warts. From his serial womanizing during his first marriage and the shielding of his wealth during the divorce, to squabbles over on-screen credits and revenue from creative work, there are morally worrisome elements that should complicate our understanding of him. But McGilligan is so enthusiastic about the destructive aspects that the complexity becomes caricature. We are regaled with many instances of Brooks craving more money and credit than he deserves, obliterating those who labored beside him and were forced to survive his violent, cutting outbursts.

The minimal descriptions of his caring thereby seem peculiar. "Brooks could surprise people with behavior that seemed the opposite of his reputation: sudden sensitivity or gestures of extravagant generosity." McGilligan describes one such act, when Brooks found a small role in "Spaceballs" for an actor who otherwise would not have met his annual minimum earnings for union-provided health insurance for his family. The actor, Ted Sorel, wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times saying, "When I mentioned this thoughtfulness to one of Brooks' associates on the movie, he remarked that I was one of many remembered with similar favors." Yet the few examples of thoughtfulness sit oddly among an overwhelming abundance of stories showing, as McGilligan puts it, "Rude Crude Mel with cruel quips or verbal assaults on people."

And if there is not evidence of wrongdoing, innuendo will suffice. "Had Brooks ended the trifling and womanizing that helped poison his first marriage? ... He had a reputation among Hollywood insiders for having a 'zipper problem,' in the words of one associate, who traveled with him. But was it a real 'zipper problem' or just the whispering of detractors?" We are told that "Brooks and [wife Anne] Bancroft enjoyed the image of a perfect couple, the parents of a happy family, spouses who might bicker, might quarrel, but always ended up in each other's arms. In an industry that manufactured pleasant fakery, they seemed the romantic ideal." But were they really? Either way, McGilligan provides us with the whispers.

There is some of what Brooks's fans would hope for in a biography, the sort of behind-the-scenes insights that provide us with background into the bits and characters that have become so beloved. We meet the real-life model for the character Max Bialystock. We see the connection between Brooks's early love of the comedic song-and-dance team the Ritz Brothers and the performance of "Puttin' on the Ritz" in "Young Frankenstein."

We are told of the squeezing out of co-writer Richard Pryor from the cast of "Blazing Saddles." Brooks had fought to have him placed in the role of Sheriff Bart, but the studio's concerns about his reliability eliminated him from consideration. While devoted Brooks fans may recognize some of these tidbits, there are enough new trivia nuggets that most readers will come away with something they did not know before.

For those who want an in-depth account of Mel Brooks, the ruthless businessman, "Funny Man" is for you. For those who want a genuine funny book about the man, you'll feel more like you were ruthlessly given the business.

---

Steven Gimbel is the author of "Isn't That Clever: A Philosophy of Humor and Comedy" and a professor of Judaic studies and philosophy at Gettysburg College.When the National Portrait Gallery in London announced Tuesday that it was forgoing a grant from the Sackler family, observers could be forgiven for a certain degree of skepticism about the decision's impact on the art world. The Sacklers, owners of the pharmaceutical behemoth Perdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, had promised $1.3 million to support a public-engagement project. The money, no doubt, was welcome, but the amount involved was a relative pittance.

Now another British institution has said no to Sackler money, which has become synonymous with a deadly and addictive drug that boosted the family fortune by billions of dollars and caused immeasurable suffering. The Tate art galleries, which include the Tate Modern and the Tate Britain in London as well as outposts in Liverpool and Cornwall, announced Thursday that it will also not accept money from the family.

The Sacklers are mired in legal action, investigations and looming congressional inquiries about their role in marketing a drug blamed for a significant early role in an epidemic of overdose deaths that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans since 1997.

Is this a trend? These moves may affect immediate plans but won't put much of a dent in the museums' budgets. The impact on the Sackler family's reputation, however, will force American arts institutions to pay attention.

The Sackler family, which includes branches with differing levels of culpability and involvement with the issue, has a long history of donating to cultural organizations. Arthur M. Sackler, who gave millions of dollars' worth of art and $4 million for the opening of the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery in 1987, died long before the OxyContin scandal began. Members of the family involved with OxyContin vigorously contest the claims that Perdue Pharma was unscrupulous in the promotion of a drug, though company executives pleaded guilty to violations involving OxyContin in 2007 and the company paid more than $600 million in fines.

A million here or there is one thing. Having a whole building named for a family with blood on its hands is another, and seeking yet more money for new projects will become even more problematic. And every institution that bears the Sackler family name, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (which has a Sackler wing) and the University Art Museum at Princeton (which has a Sackler gallery) is now faced with the distasteful proposition of forever advertising the wealth of a family that is deeply implicated in suffering, death and social anomie.

Will any major U.S. institution that has benefited from Sackler largesse remove the family's name?

The usual arguments against this are stretched to the breaking point. Like arguments about Koch family money, which has benefited cultural institutions but is inextricably linked to global warming and the impending collapse of the Anthropocene, the issues at stake seem, at first, to be consistency and pragmatism.

The pragmatic argument is this: Cultural organizations need the money, and if they don't take it, that money will go somewhere else. And this leads quickly to the argument from consistency. Almost all of our major cultural organizations were built up with money derived from family fortunes that are tainted - by the exploitation of workers, slavery and the lasting impacts of slavery, the depredations of colonialism and the destruction of the environment. So why should contemporary arts and cultural groups be required to set themselves a higher, or more puritanical, standard when it comes to corrupt money? And if consistency matters, should we now be parsing the morality of every dollar that built every opera house and museum a century ago?

Both arguments are cynical. Arts organizations that engage in moral money laundering cannot make a straight-faced claim to a higher moral purpose when they seek other kinds of funding, including donations and membership dollars from the general public and support from government and foundations. But the consistency argument - that the whole system is historically wrapped up in hypocrisy about money - needs particular reconsideration in the age of rapid information flows, which create sudden, digital moral crises and epiphanies.

Moral (or social) hazard is a funny thing. For as long as cultural institutions are in the money-laundering business, companies such as Perdue Pharma will have an incentive to take greater risks. If the taint of public health disaster can be washed away, then other companies may choose to put profits over public safety. But this kind of hazard isn't a finely calibrated tool. It involves a lot of chance and inconsistency in how it works. That has only increased in the age of viral Twitter campaigns and rapid conflagrations of public anger fueled by new social media tools.

Why is it that the Sackler family is in the crosshairs and not any of the other myriad wealthy people whose money was made through products that are killing us? Because it is. And that seeming randomness is built into the way we now police our billionaires. It seems haphazard, and sometimes unfair, and inefficient. Are there worse malefactors scrubbing their toxic reputations with a new hospital wing or kids literacy program? Surely. Maybe they will find their money unwelcome at some point in the future, and maybe not. The thing that matters is that the risk is there.

Much of the Sackler family money was made off a drug that deadens the mind and reduces the human capacity for thought and feeling. There is a nice alignment between that fact and what may now, finally, be the beginnings of a new distaste about using Sackler money to promote art and cultural endeavors, which must always increase our capacities for engagement with the world. It is immensely satisfying that the artist Nan Goldin, whose work has explored the misery of drug culture, is playing a leading role in the emerging resistance to Sackler family money. (Goldin, who was considering a retrospective of her work at the National Portrait Gallery, said to the Observer: "I have told them I would not do it if they take the Sackler money.")

More artists should take a lead role in these conversations, to the point of usurping the usual prerogatives of boards and executive committees and ethical advisory groups to make decisions about corrupt money.

Ultimately, it is unlikely that any arts organization will manage to find a consistent policy or somehow finesse the challenge of saying all that money we accepted from gilded-age plutocrats a century ago is now clean. But we may think twice about taking money from people who are killing our planet and our people today. What matters is that sometimes lightning strikes, and there is hell to pay, and suddenly a name is blackened forever. That kind of justice may be terrifying and swift and inconsistent, but it sends a blunt message: When the world finally learns that what you have done is loathsome, it may not be possible to undo the damage through the miraculous scrubbing power of cultural detergent.The stage is set for unprecedented major flooding this spring for most of the nation, U.S. weather officials said Thursday.

More than 200 million Americans are at risk for some kind of flooding, with 13 million of them at risk of major inundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its spring weather outlook. About 41 million people are at risk of moderate flooding.

Major flooding now occurring in Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Missouri and other Midwestern states is a preview of an all-too-wet and dangerous spring, said Mary Erickson, deputy director of the National Weather Service.

In fact, we expect the flooding to get worse and more widespread, she said.

This years flooding could be worse than anything weve seen in recent years, even worse than the historic floods of 1993 and 2011, she said.

Those floods caused billions of dollars in damage; officials said this years damage in Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota already has passed the billion-dollar mark.

Forecasters said the biggest risks include all three Mississippi River basins, the Red River of the North, the Great Lakes, plus the basins of the eastern Missouri River, lower Ohio River, lower Cumberland River and the Tennessee River.

This is the broadest expanse of area in the United States that weve projected with an elevated risk that I can remember, said Thomas Graziano, a 20-year weather service veteran and director of the Office of Water Prediction. Is this the perfect storm? I dont know.

A lot depends on how much rain falls in the next couple of months, Graziano said, but forecasters say it will be more than average.

The Missouri River already has set records with historic flood marks measured in 30 places in Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota, Kansas City forecaster Kevin Lao said.

The river remains vulnerable to moderate flooding for the remainder of the spring and early summer, Lao said. People should be prepared for major flooding along the Missouri River  going into the future.

Most of Nebraska, except right along the Missouri River, is unlikely to see major flooding again this year, but the rest of the flooded area still is prone to more, Low said.

Several factors likely will combine to create a pulse of flooding that eventually will head south along the Mississippi: above average rainfall this winter  including from 10 to 15 inches earlier this year in a drenching along the Ohio and Tennessee valleys; the third wettest year in U.S. history; and rapidly melting snow in the Upper Midwest.

Extra rain will bring more farm runoff down the Mississippi, which likely will lead to more oxygen-starved areas in the Gulf of Mexico and likely make the summer dead zone larger than normal, said Edward Clark, director of NOAAs National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Its too early for scientists to make the complex calculations to see if human-caused climate change played a role in the flooding. However, scientists said the conditions are consistent with what they expect from global warming.

In addition to the year-to-year natural variability of weather, there is a long-term, climate change-driven trend that is making extreme rainfalls even more intense, Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said.

You can think of climate change as steroids for these rain events, he said.

University of Illinois climate scientist Donald Wuebbles, co-author of a report released Thursday on climate change and the Great Lakes, said we have been seeing a significant increase in precipitation coming as larger events, especially in the Midwest and Northeast, over the last five to six decades.

It will get worse, so flooding will get to be a bigger concern, he said.

In parts of the South, it already is.

Major flooding already is occurring this week on the Mississippi River near several Southern cities, including Arkansas City, Arkansas; Natchez, Mississippi; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, according to river gauges and data from NOAA. Since Feb. 8, about 100 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers personnel have been monitoring levees and other flood protections in Memphis; Clarksdale, Mississippi; and Helena, Arkansas.

The swollen river has been flooding some unprotected western Mississippi communities since last month.

One Mississippi region protected by levees also is flooding. The smaller rivers there cant drain into the Mississippi River as normal, because a floodgate that protects the region from even worse flooding by the big river has been closed since Feb. 15.

Residents around Rolling Fork, Mississippi, first noticed water rising from swamps in late February. The water eventually invaded some homes in that community, about 40 miles north of Vicksburg.(CNN)  The Trump administration on Thursday issued its first set of sanctions aimed at North Korea since the failed summit last month between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump, going after two Chinese shipping companies that have helped Pyongyang evade restrictions imposed by the U.S. and United Nations Security Council.

A senior administration official told CNN that this action should not be seen as a sign the U.S. is ramping up economic pressure on North Korea but as part of the continuous push to ensure that entities and countries are not taking their foot off the gas pedal.

"It is really meant to be a continuous activity of the U.S., and it really needs to a continuous activity of ... all of the UN members to maintain the integrity of the sanctions," the official said.

In Hanoi, the North Koreans wanted the majority of sanctions lifted in return for some action on denuclearization. It was their aggressive demand for substantial sanctions relief, coupled with unclear commitments on denuclearization, that sank any possible deal.

With these new sanctions, the Trump administration is reiterating that it will not cede to North Korea's demands. Instead, it is reminding companies like the Chinese ones targeted Thursday that they will not get away with any illicit activity with Pyongyang.

"We will find out, and they are at risk," the official said, threatening other companies  either shipping or financial  that any illicit activity with North Korea could result in sanctions.

Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, echoed that sentiment on Twitter.

"Everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Korea's sanctions evasion," Bolton wrote, particularly calling out the maritime industry as needing to do more to clamp down on the illicit activity.

Members of Congress have encouraged the U.S. to slap more sanctions on North Korea in recent weeks. They note that the sanctions regime on the country has substantially slowed in the last year. The Trump administration has sanctioned 182 persons or entities for North Korean violations since March 2017 but only 26 since February of 2018, according to research from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Members of Congress also worry that the U.S. is not putting enough resources toward enforcing the sanctions that are already in place, according to a senior aide on Capitol Hill.

For now, the administration believes the sanctions are working, and that more effective enforcement will have to come from influential countries, like China.

"It is really a matter of international will, more than a question of resources," the official said, noting there has been "leakage," specifically from China. The official noted that the sanctions are working given that North Korean imports and exports are both down.

Despite the Trump administration being in the midst of trade negotiations with China, Bolton also pointed a finger directly at Beijing when he discussed the new sanctions on Thursday.

"China could really hold the key to this here if they press North Korea hard enough," Bolton said during an interview with Breitbart on Thursday. "China is obviously North Korea's dominant trading partner. Over 90% (of) North Korea's external trade is with China. We continue to press China to enforce all the sanctions against North Korea."

The move comes as diplomacy has once again hit a standstill, despite an administration official's insistence that "the door is wide open for continued discussions with North Korea."

Since the Hanoi summit almost a month ago, no working-level meetings between the US and North Korea have been publicly announced. While the White House and the State Department maintain that the door is open on the US side, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made it clear that he is done chasing Pyongyang, given the disproportionate amount of outreach that came from the U.S. side last year.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "US slaps sanctions on 2 Chinese firms doing business with North Korea."Cookie Preferences Cookie List

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If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page.Sonora, CA  State transportation officials have released more than $758 million for 91 highway projects  including two in area counties.

Out of that money, the California Transportation Commission is allocating $90.4 million in SB 1, the 12 cent per gallon gas tax passed by lawmakers in 2017, funds for 26 fix-it-first projects.

While we are thankful for the rain, our crews worked around the clock this winter responding to the harsh weather conditions that took a toll on our roadways and culverts, said Caltrans Director Laurie Berman. The funds from SB 1 allow us now to proactively maintain our bridges, repair our roadways, and ensure our drainage systems can handle the winters ahead.

With the funds, Caltrans crews will improve 21 bridges and 189 miles of pavement, upgrade 292 devices to reduce congestion, and repair or replace 81 culverts to prevent flooding on highways. Alpine and Mariposa counties have been flagged to receive a total of nearly $5 million. Below is a breakdown of that funding provided by Caltrans:

Bridge Replacement and Upgrade Project in Alpine County: This estimated $9.3 million project will replace and upgrade bridge rails at the Silver Creek Bridge on SR-4, the West Fork Carson River Bridge on SR-88 and the Markleeville Creek Bridge on SR89. The project was allocated approximately $1.9 million.

Drainage Project Along State Route 41 in Mariposa County: This estimated $4.3 million project will repair or replace culverts (underground drainage systems) in 19 locations on SR-41 from the town of Fish Camp to south of the Yosemite National Park boundary. The project was allocated approximately $3 million.

Caltrans notes that since SB 1 was enacted, crews have repaired or replaced 89 bridges and paved more than 1,300 lane miles on highways throughout the state.San Andreas, CA  A Calaveras County child has been diagnosed with measles prompting an alert to the public  including individuals in a neighboring county.

Calaveras Public Health Officer, Dr. Dean Kelaita reports the unvaccinated child got the measles after returning to his Valley Springs home from a trip overseas. Health officials are now in the process of notifying people that may have come in contact with the child in both Calaveras and Amador counties. They are offering them information to hopefully prevent the spread of the illness.

We have seen a decrease in the number of children protected with vaccinations in Calaveras states Dr. Kelaita. A person with measles can transmit the infection to others not protected by immunization.

Measles is a highly contagious airborne viral disease spread by an infected person coughing or sneezing. Kelaita advises the symptoms begin with fever, cough, runny nose and red, watery eyes followed by a rash on the face that spreads to the body. He adds infected individuals are contagious four days before and four days after the rash appears.

Health officials recommend two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine during childhood for immunity. They caution that anyone traveling outside the United States should get the full measles vaccination.

Measles is a completely preventable disease, notes Dr. Kelaita, who advocates, Parents should check their childrens shot records and ensure they are fully protected against measles.

For further information regarding measles contact the Calaveras County Public Health at (209)754-6460.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 21)  President Rodrigo Duterte announced Thursday that he has permanently ended peace negotiations between the government and the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

"I am officially announcing the permanent termination of our talks between the government panel and the Communist Party of the Philippines," Duterte said at the122nd Philippine Army Founding Anniversary at Fort Andres Bonifacio in Manila.

He said he is no longer entertaining any interventions or moves to persuade him to change his mind.

"You can maybe talk to the next President of this Republic, one day," he said.

The announcement comes a day after Malacanang terminated the services of its peace panel members, including chief government negotiator and Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III.

Joma Sison: His mind is set

Jose Maria Sison, CPP's founder, said Duterte is like an "old broken record" for repeating what he said when he signed Proclamation No. 360 in 2017.

"Since then, what Duterte has been doing is merely driving more nails into the coffin of the peace negotiations," he said.

Sison said he is using the armed conflict against communists to justify the extensions of martial law in Mindanao.

However, the National Democratic Front (NDF) -- the umbrella organization representing communist rebels in the peace talks -- is also not closing its doors.

"Negotiations can be resurrected in the future by a new administration. In that regard, Duterte is correct. The peace negotiations are dead as far as he's concerned," he explained. "His mind is set."

Talks were shelved in November 2017 after government and the CPP accused each other of violating announced ceasefires. Duterte meanwhile, is pushing for localized talks with communist rebels.

A bid aiming to tag the CPP and its armed wing the New People's Army (NPA) as a terrorist group is still pending before the court.UPDATE: TPWD today tweeted "It's official! This 67 lb blue catfish caught by Brayden Rogers from Lake Tawakoni is now the junior state record, junior lake record, and the angler has received a Big Fish Award for this impressive catch from our Angler Recognition Program. Way to go, Brayden!"

ORIGINAL STORY:

A massive 67.1-pound fish caught by a 13-year-old may have set a new Texas record.

On Saturday, Brayden Rogers of Cisco hooked the massive blue catfish while fishing at Lake Tawakoni with Michael and Teri Littlejohn's Guide Service.

Fishing scandal: Fisherman charged with fraud after allegedly cheating at bass tournament

Before a new state record can be declared, the genetic results of fish are under review by the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department (TPWD) Angler Recognition Program, according to a release from the TPWD.

MORNING UPDATES: Get all the news you need to start your day delivered to your inbox

As of now, a 66.2-pound blue catfish reeled in at Lake Worth in 2011 holds the Texas record for junior anglers, according to the TPWD website.

Rogers' giant fish was kept alive and is currently being held at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens, the TPWD reported.

It will remain in quarantine for at least 60 days before being placed in a large tank for public display.

Marcy de Luna is a digital reporter specializing in social media, the famous, and food. You can follow her on Twitter @MarcydeLuna and Facebook @MarcydeLuna. Read her stories on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com. | Marcy.deLuna@chron.com | Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text messageGreasy vent hoods, dirty walls and bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat foods were among the violations spotted by health officials during inspections of San Antonio restaurants this week.

City inspectors also found "rodent droppings" by the kitchen exit door at a popular North Side ice house, "dead roaches" at a North Side Mexican cafe and "fly strips over open foods" at a grill and seafood spot on the East Side.

Notable spots on the dirty list include Tony G's Soul Food, Beto's Comida Latina, Dignowity Meats on Houston Street and Silo Prime and Nona Osteria, where an official observed "raw beef stored in the same container as quail eggs," according to a city health report. In 2018, Food Network star Guy Fieri visited Dignowity Meats for his show "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives."

LAST WEEK'S INSPECTIONS: San Antonio restaurant inspections: March 15, 2019

Click through the gallery above to see the gross highlights spotted by city health inspectors 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.Return your seats to the upright position and fasten your safety belts: Jet-Setter, a stylish new cocktail lounge downtown from noted San Antonio bartender Benjamin Krick, is poised to make a smooth landing April 1.

Krick and business partner Lucas Bradbury are putting the final touches on the new 80-seat project at 229 E. Houston St. in the former home of The Last Word.

Jet-Setter is styled as a mid-century international lounge evoking a kind of Pan Am-inspired aviation romance. Drinks on the extensive cocktail list are named for or inspired by major global destinations. Posters depicting exotic locales are mounted over streamlined leather sofas. Bartenders will be dressed in vests, slacks and skirts modeled after flight attendant uniforms.

Krick established a reputation as a bartender with international flair while working as manager of the since-closed Juniper Tar, which earned best bar honors in the Express-News Top 100 Dining & Drinks guide in 2017 and 2018. He said Jet-Setter customers can expect the global flavors, spirits and techniques he championed at Juniper Tar, but with an all-new aesthetic and menu.

The soul, the spirit, of Juniper is here, Krick said. Were picking up where we left off there.

On ExpressNews.com: Express-News Top 100 Dining & Drinks

Krick has traveled to many of the destinations his menu celebrates, and that materializes in drinks such as one dubbed Whirling Dervish, inspired by a recent trip to Turkey.

The drink is made with the grape-based spirit singani, Turkish black tea and the herbal liqueur Strega, and prepared with a technique sometimes called tossing, or throwing, in which the ingredients are poured between mixing tins from a distance of several feet. The technique, popular in Europe but seldom seen in the U.S., incorporates a large number of small air bubbles for a unique textural experience.

Krick serves the drink in a Turkish coffee glass misted with the anisette liqueur arak, and presents a piece of the sugary dessert Turkish delight on the side.

Since Juniper Tar closed in June, Krick has been busy developing several projects. He is a few months away from opening a near East Side bar called Pastiche at 1506 E. Houston St. on the, of which he is the sole proprietor. Pastiche is styled as a European retreat with an emphasis on wine and tea in addition to the complex, spirits-forward cocktails Krick is known for.

Krick is also a licensee for the international month-long holiday-themed cocktail pop-up bar Miracle. Construction and permitting delays prevented Krick from hosting Miracle at Pastiche during the 2018 holiday season, but he said hes signed on to stage Miracle at Pastiche this year.

On ExpressNews.com: Opportunity rises from sticky situation at shuttered bar Juniper Tar

Last March, months before Juniper Tar closed, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien for almost $26,000 in unpaid payroll taxes against the bar.

Juniper Tar owner Chris Erck was then sued in June by Viva Tacoland co-owners David Adelman and TV star Ricardo Chavira, who had hired Erck to manage the business. The suit, still pending, alleges a breach of partnership and seeks at least $200,000 in damages.

Paul Stephen is a food and drink reporter and restaurant critic in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pstephen@express-news.net | Twitter: @pjbites | Instagram: @pjstephenWhere is the best taco? Where is the best margarita? Where is the best barbecue?

If youre a San Antonian, these are the questions that really matter  whether its to satisfy our own cravings or those of the countless visiting friends, family members and random strangers who ask. Culinaria has proposed an answer to all three of those questions in a trio of San Antonio Food Trails celebrating the citys best tacos, barbecue and margaritas.

Such food trails are one of the goals the city's World Heritage Office included in its application to be named a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, which was approved in 2017. Culinaria's trails are independent and not part of the World Heritage Office's efforts. Colleen Swain, director of the office, said that their official trails were still in the works and have yet to be released.

The designation honors the food traditions in San Antonio left by numerous cultures beginning with American Indians followed by Spaniards, Canary Islanders, Mexicans, Germans and others who have migrated through the region over the past 13,000 years. Numerous area chefs, Culinaria, Visit San Antonio and other organizations have been involved in establishing the trails.

A total of 30 restaurants  10 in each category  were named to the trails. Longtime area favorites including Henrys Puffy Tacos, Garcias Mexican Food and Los Barrios represent the taco category; 2M Smokehouse, The Big Bib and South BBQ and Kitchen are among the barbecue representatives; and margaritas at Aldacos, La Fonda on Main and Soluna are included.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonios UNESCO City of Gastronomy title could be big business

For the time being, the trails exist solely as lists published at culinariasa.org, although Suzanne Taranto-Etheredge, Culinarias president, said guided tours and a mobile phone app will be offered in the near future. Culinaria intends to roll out new trails celebrating seasonal foods and geographical parts of the city every quarter moving forward.

Taranto-Etheredge said more than 100 people voted to identify the initial batch of recognized restaurants. In addition to exceptional food, trail honorees had to meet a set of criteria including consistently high health scores and a visible web presence.

The establishments will enjoy a one-year tenure on the list, at which point the trails will be re-evaluated by the electing committee.

NOTE: Because of incorrect information provided to the Express-News, this story has been updated to state that these these food trails are an independent project not affiliated with the World Heritage Office.

Paul Stephen is a food and drink reporter and restaurant critic in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pstephen@express-news.net | Twitter: @pjbites | Instagram: @pjstephenBrett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

A wall surrounding the damaged tank farm at ITCs charred facility in Deer Park breached shortly after noon Friday, ITC and Harris County officials said, increasing the risk that airborne and liquid toxins will be released from the site.

We have learned that a portion of the tank farm containment wall containing the product has partially collapsed. Industrial neighbors and the Texas Battleship and Monument State Park should consider taking shelter-in-place precautions," said ITC spokesman Dale Samuelson. "We are coordinating with federal, state and local officials to resolve the issue as soon as possible.Texans have a lot of pride when it comes to repping where they're from in the Lone Star State.

Just think of how many "H-Town" shout-outs you hear in songs by Houston rappers. Or the amount of Dallas Cowboys bumper stickers you see in the DFW. And, of course, the variety of Spurs gear spotted on proud San Antonians.An Uber driver is in "dire" condition after he was shot Thursday by two passengers on San Antonio's Southwest Side, police said.

The driver picked up the two suspects at an unknown location and took them to the 7400 block of New Laredo Highway, where they shot him, at about 8:20 a.m., officials said.A Missouri City man was sentenced Thursday to 15 years in federal prison for sex trafficking of a minor, according to a U.S. Attorney's Office news release.

Eddie Charles Larue, 33, pleaded guilty in October. The release states that Larue admitted to recruiting a 12-year-old girl to engage in sexual acts for money July 3-4, 2017 along a 1.3 mile stretch of Bissonnet street referred to as "The Track".A Katy man is behind bars after a fatal stabbing Thursday at a southeast Houston motel.

Jasper Ethan Linbrugger, 23, was seen arguing with Yoel Hagos, 24, around 11:25 a.m. at the Red Carpet Inn and Suites in the 6100 block of the Gulf Freeway, just south of Wayside Drive, according to the Houston Police Department and court documents.

At some point in the argument, Linbrugger allegedly pulled a knife and stabbed Hagos several times, according to HPD and court records.

As police officers rushed to the scene, Linbrugger ran but was apprehended moments later, police said. He's facing up to life in prison on a first-degree felony murder charge, if convicted.

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BEND, Ore. (AP)  There are challenges that come with running the last Blockbuster Video on the planet.

The computer system must be rebooted using floppy disks that only the general manager  a solid member of Gen X  knows how to use. The dot-matrix printer broke, so employees write out membership cards by hand. And the store's business transactions are backed up on a reel-to-reel tape that can't be replaced because Radio Shack went out of business.

Yet none of that has kept this humble franchise in an Oregon strip mall from thriving as the advent of on-demand movie streaming laid waste all around it. When a Blockbuster in Australia shuts its doors for the last time on March 31, the Bend store will be the only one left on Earth.

RELATED: Things you'll never see again in San Antonio

"It's pure stubbornness, for one. We didn't want to give in," said general manager Sandi Harding, who has worked at the franchise for 15 years and receives a lot of the credit for keeping it alive well past its expiration date. "We did everything we could to cut costs and keep ourselves relevant."

The store was once one of five Blockbusters owned by the same couple, Ken and Debbie Tisher, in three central Oregon towns. But by last year, the Bend franchise was the last local Blockbuster standing.

A tight budget meant no money to update the surviving store. That's paying off now with a nostalgia factor that stops first-time visitors of a certain age in their tracks: the popcorn ceilings, low fluorescent lighting, wire metal video racks and the ubiquitous yellow-and-blue ticket stub logo that was a cultural touchstone for a generation.

"Most people, I think, when they think about renting videos  if they're the right age  they don't remember the movie that they went to pick, but they remember who they went with and that freedom of walking the aisles," said Zeke Kamm, a local resident who is making a documentary about the store called "The Last Blockbuster" with a friend.

"In a lot of towns, the Blockbuster was the only place that was open past nine o'clock, and a lot of them stayed open until midnight, so kids who weren't hoodlums would come here and look at movies and fall in love with movies."

The Bend store had eight years under its belt as a local video store before it converted to a Blockbuster in 2000, a time when this high desert city was still a sleepy community with a small-town feel to match.

Customers kept coming back, drawn by special touches like staff recommendations, a "wish list" for videos to add to the rental selection and even home delivery for a few special customers who couldn't drive in. Dozens of local teens have worked there over the years.

Then, in 2010, Blockbuster declared bankruptcy, and by 2014, all corporate-owned stores had shuttered. That left locally owned franchises to fend for themselves, and one by one, they closed.

When stores in Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska, shut down last summer  barely outlasting a Redmond, Oregon, store  Bend's Blockbuster was the only U.S. location left.

Tourists started stopping by to snap selfies, and business picked up. Harding ordered up blue-and-yellow sweat shirts, T-shirts, cups, magnets, bumper stickers, hats and stocking caps from local vendors emblazoned with the words "The Last Blockbuster in America," and they flew off the shelves.

Then, this month, she got a phone call: The world's only other Blockbuster, in Perth, Australia, would soon close its doors. A new T-shirt order went out  this time with the slogan "The Last Blockbuster on the Planet"  and the store is already getting a new wave of selfie-snapping visitors from as far away as Europe and Asia.

On a recent weekday, Michael Trovato of Melbourne, Australia, stopped by while visiting his twin sister in Bend.

After posing for a photo, Trovato said he misses a time when choosing a movie meant browsing hundreds of titles and asking a video clerk for insight instead of letting a movie-streaming service recommend one for him based on a computer algorithm.

RELATED: Things you'll never see again in San Antonio, Part 2

"I miss quite a bit being able to walk into a Blockbuster or CD store and have that social experience and see people looking at stuff and talking to people," Trovato said. "It's something you don't get from the slick presentation of a music service or, you know, from the internet."

The Bend store doesn't seem to be in danger of closing anytime soon.

Its newfound fame has been a shot in the arm, and customers stream in to buy $40 sweat shirts, $20 T-shirts and even $15 yellow-and-blue beanies hand-knit by Harding herself. The store pays Dish Network for the right to use the Blockbuster logo and has several years left on its lease.

People regularly send the store boxes of old VHS tapes and DVDs. They also donate Blockbuster memorabilia: a corporate jean jacket, key chains and old membership cards.

Employees always send a thank-you note, store manager Dan Montgomery said.

Recently, Harding has noticed another type of customer that's giving her hope: a new generation of kids dragged in by their nostalgic parents who later leave happy, holding stacks of rented movies and piles of candy.

Jerry Gilless and his wife, Elizabeth, brought their two kids, John, 3, and Ellen, 5, and watched with a smile as the siblings bounced from row to row, grabbing "Peter Pan" and "The Lion King" and surveying dinosaur cartoons.

"How could we not stop? It's the last one," said Gilless, of their detour to the store while on vacation from Memphis, Tennessee. "They need to see that not everything's on the iPad."

___

Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccusThe 26-year-old woman shot to death by a police officer on Wednesday was holding a "non-functional replica" Uzi when she was killed, according to a statement from the police department.

Police encountered Hannah Westall at about 5:15 p.m. in the Huebner Commons Shopping Center near Huebner Road and Vance Jackson after receiving reports of an "agitated woman," the report says.When a terrorist massacred 50 people at two New Zealand mosques last week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern immediately grasped the nettle. I can tell you one thing right now, she told a news conference. Our gun laws will change.

Thats what effective leadership looks like. New Zealands Cabinet has now agreed in principle to overhaul those laws, experts are reviewing ways to make the country safer from firearms and, Ardern promised, within 10 days of this horrific act of terrorism, we will have announced reforms.

Contrast that with the United States, where just since 1970, more Americans have died from guns (1.45 million, including murders, suicides and accidents) than died in all the wars in U.S. history (1.4 million). More Americans die from guns every 10 weeks than died in the entire Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined, yet we still dont have gun safety rules as rigorous as New Zealands even before the mosques were attacked.

The National Rifle Association (not to be confused with the vast majority of gun owners) will turn to its old smoke-and-mirrors standby, arguing that the killers hate, not his guns and bullets, were the real problem.

But while its true that white supremacy is deadly and needs to be confronted  something our vote-obsessed president blindly ignores  without the weapons of mass murder, 50 New Zealand worshippers would still be alive; 17 Parkland, Fla., schoolchildren and staff members would still be alive; nine Charleston, S.C., churchgoers would still be alive; 11 Pittsburgh congregants would still be alive; 58 Las Vegas concertgoers would still be alive; 26 Newtown, Conn., first-graders and adults would. ...

Why cant leaders in America learn from experience, the way leaders in other countries do? After a massacre in Australia in 1996, the government there took far-reaching action to tighten gun policy. In contrast, every day in America, another hundred people die from gun violence and 300 more are injured  and our president and Congress do nothing.

In fairness, liberals have often been unhelpful, broadcasting their own ignorance about the firearms they propose to regulate, or speaking blithely of banning guns or of gun control in ways that drive responsible gun owners into the arms of the NRA. I suggest dropping references to gun control and instead speaking of gun safety.

Its also true that there are no simple solutions. The U.S. now has more guns than people, so criminals have a steady supply  and so do ordinary Americans at a time when suicides are at a 30-year high.

But gun laws do make a difference. When Connecticut tightened licensing laws in 1995, firearm homicide rates dropped by 40 percent. And when Missouri eased gun laws in 2007, gun homicide rates surged by 25 percent.

Polls show some measures have broad backing. For starters, more than 90 percent even of gun owners support universal background checks to ensure that people are legally allowed to own a gun before they buy one.

Astonishingly, about 22 percent of guns in the U.S. are still acquired without a background check. In parts of the U.S., you need a more thorough background check to adopt a dog than to acquire a semi-automatic AR-15 weapon.

Another basic step: Keep guns out of the hands of people shown to present a danger to themselves or others, such as when they are suicidal or threatening a domestic partner. Fourteen states have such red flag laws, and similar legislation is before Congress to achieve something similar at a national level.

We should likewise invest more in smart guns that can be fired only by an authorized person; its outrageous that my phone requires a pin or fingerprint but an AR-15 doesnt. That would help with the estimated 200,000 guns stolen each year.

The regulatory model to follow is automobiles. We havent outlawed cars, but we have required safety modifications (seat belts, air bags) and limited access to them (licenses, bans after drunken driving) in ways that have sharply reduced the fatality rate per miles driven.

If we took this approach to guns, many Americans would still die. But experts have suggested to me that we could plausibly reduce gun deaths by about one-third, saving 13,000 lives a year.

Slowly, the tide of public opinion is shifting. The NRAs extremism is turning some people off, and it seems on the defensive, so eventually we may follow New Zealand. But how many more people will die before the president and Congress act?Donald Trump has given success a bad name.

That is, the presidents much-boasted-about wealth has soured many Americans taste for even the Horatio Alger bootstrapping stories. These days, as income inequality has become a leitmotif of Democratic politics, being rich is a liability.

So, whos too rich for democracy these days? Billionaires, obviously. Millionaires are such dimes-a-dozen, they hardly count anymore. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who has proposed increasing marginal tax rates on the very rich to as high as 70 percent, set the baseline at $10 million.

Decamillionaires, beware.

This caveat might even extend to former Vice President Joe Biden, whose 2017 purchase of a $2.7 million beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., is inspiring fresh speculation about his middle-class bona fides.

Of course, calling Bidens everyday-Joe-ness into question is ridiculous. Despite his yachtsmans appearance, he has forever been the workingmans champion. But, apparently, you cant have grown up in a middle-class family only to distinguish yourself as an adult and monetize your success. Isnt that the point of being an American (she jested)?

The fact that Biden now earns $100,000 per speech and landed a handsome, multimillion-dollar book deal hardly negates his lifetime in the Senate advocating causes that benefited minorities, women and working-class Americans. Besides, this ones for you Jeopardy players, hes from  Scranton!

As Biden accidentally said recently, he has the most progressive record of anybody running, except that he isnt running  yet. Ol Joe and his tongue have been wrangling for decades, which is why we love him. Hes the guy who cant tell a lie  or keep his own secrets.

Another wealthy possible candidate, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, recently has been the focus of skepticism  and not just because he proposes running as a centrist independent. Schultz, on book tour the past couple of months, has spoken of his childhood growing up in a Brooklyn housing project and his familys dire circumstances. In his book From the Ground Up, he describes a noisy, smoke-and-alcohol-infused household often filled with poker players who kept him up late and his family afloat during destitute times.

The Washington Post tracked down other contemporaries of Schultzs who grew up in the same housing project to report that it was actually a very nice, state-of-the-art complex. This may be so, but Schultzs experience cant be disproved or discredited. When your parents cant make the $96 monthly rent, youre not living in paradise.

By the strange political calculus of the income equalizers, Schultz was first too rich and then not poor enough. It would seem that theres no satisfying the left until everyone is equally miserable.

Even Beto ORourke ran into a bit of trouble when he-of-the-barrio (but not really) was revealed to be a prep-school alumnus with a near-billionaire father-in-law. Uh-oh. Can an upper-middle-class guy relate to the poor and lower-class Americans?

Of course, he can. As can Schultz and Biden, and other wealthy people, many of whom share their good fortune through philanthropy.

One problem with this wealth-as-liability perspective is that we risk losing the considerable contributions of the uber-successful. What would this crowd say today to Democrats John Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom enjoyed inherited wealth? You dont have to be poor to want to improve opportunities for the less fortunate.

Nor do you always need a government program to create those opportunities. As head of Starbucks, Schultz accomplished through free enterprise what some Democrats want to do through government  for free. He made sure workers, including part-time staffers, had health insurance; he paid college tuition for those who wanted to go; and he made it possible for every employee to be a shareholder in the company.

Once upon a time, Americans celebrated others success and aspired through grit and sacrifice to improve their own circumstances. No more, apparently.

The anti-wealth sentiment in vogue isnt, of course, a rational response to challenges. Its an emotional reaction to politicians barnstorming about inequality that, they say, can only be resolved by punishing the wealthy and subsidizing the rest. If you hear enough times that you deserve to have more, you begin to believe it. Inevitably, this means that others must have less.

Thusly, my friends, is socialism born.

kathleenparker@washpost.comThe hot button word between now and the 2020 election is socialism.

The Republicans will try to pin this philosophy on the Democratic Party.

Well, guess what, the United States is already experiencing some form of democratic socialism in the form of Social Security and Medicare. Seniors, are you ready to give these two programs up?

You will hear the Republicans point to the failure of socialism in Venezuela as a scare tactic to get you to vote for their candidates.

Venezuela is not a socialist country; it is a dictatorship  a big difference. I support health care for all; a democratic socialist idea, but one that is voted on by the people. Dont let fear guide your vote.

Richard Caldwell

Good job, Pelosi

Ive never been prouder of Nancy Pelosi. She wisely counseled her House members not to rush to impeach the most impeachable president since Nixon. I mean, come on, can you even imagine the alternative? Mike Gen. George Armstrong Custer Pence nobly absorbs the slings and arrows meant for Trump. What a guy!

Mark A. Hall

Texas vs. Tesla

I bought a Tesla in 2013. Point, click, click, click ... new car, delivered. There was no hassle, no haggle and zero surprise fees. Tax, title and license? I did it myself in 90 minutes.

Tesla service is even easier. The mechanic came to me  he fixed the car in my driveway.

Now theres a bill in the Texas Legislature aimed at making it illegal for Tesla to service a vehicle in Texas. They couldnt keep me from buying my car, so now they are lobbying to make it harder to own. This is not a win for the consumer.

Peter GreenburgResidents in Bulawayos Entumbane suburb have encountered a stunning situation of an aunt and nephew who decided to get married amid reports that the woman is now two months pregnant in what the man also claims was a pre-planned arrangement with his late uncle so that they could safeguard the familys wealth.

Antony Mawewe (25) and his aunt, Chipo Mugati believed to be in her 40s decided to steal the limelight for all the wrong and unbiblical reasons when they got married following the death of his uncle Mike Mawewe on 3 December last year.

Antonys father, Mawewe-Munyaradzi and the late Mike Mawewe were biological brothers, making the aunt his mother in a traditional sense. Mugati and Mikes eight-year-old marriage was blessed with one child.

According to a mole close to the development, Mugati decided it was better to marry her nephew because she didnt want to marry her late husbands brothers, who had been reportedly looking to get her as a wife.

Antony was also more than willing to marry his mother, and even told his aunts family he was going to pay off part of the lobola his uncle still owed them when he passed away.

What makes the twos sins so obnoxiously unforgivable is that Mugati invited Antony from the village to come and assist her to nurse Mike when he was not feeling well. Mugati also claimed she wanted to teach Antony to sew since she is self-employed as a dressmaker.

Shockingly, when Mike died and a few weeks after his burial, the family was stunned when they discovered that the two-Antony and Mugati  were now staying as husband and wife.

When they were confronted by family members the two confessed that they were madly in love and were now staying together as husband and wife with Mugati saying that it all started at work during a joke which led to se_x later in the night when they returned home.

Chipo told the family gathering that she agreed to her nephews demand for se_x and thought it was just to satisfy his sexual feelings, but somehow, it became a daily thing until they decided to get married, said the mole.

In an interview Mugati, who said she was not ashamed or rattled by the development, promised to take their relationship to another level by walking down the aisle.

She said they would not allow anyone to derail their plans to solemnise their illicit relationship.

We started staying together in December last year when his uncle died. I dont see anything wrong with that since the practice of a son inheriting his widowed mother is prevalent in my home area in Bikita.

Antony has always been there for me, when his uncle was ill and even after his death. Thats why I saw it better for me to marry him because my late husbands other brothers were also looking to get me as a wife, said Mugati unashamedly.

She said her family had since endorsed Antony as their new son-in-law.

People, especially some men at our workplace are just jealous that I have moved on with my nephew as a husband. This is because I turned down their proposals. Before we got married Antony was single and searching and I dont see any reason why people are casting aspersions on me as if I snatched him from another woman, said Mugati.

Nothing will separate us and we are planning to wed anytime soon, said Mugati while expressing her undying love for Antony who had accompanied her to the B-Metro newsroom to set the record straight on their weird relationship.

Antony also echoed his wife-cum-aunts sentiments saying the marriage was a pre-planned arrangement with his late uncle so that he could look after the family.

My uncle was the one who proposed that I take her in as my wife when he was ill at that time. This is because upon his death, he didnt want her (Mugati) to go back to her family. When he died my family also saw it fit that I take over. I really love her and nothing will separate us. People should just come to terms with the news that I am the one who is now in charge. We are also not the first to have such a marriage arrangement, boasted Antony.

This rare act of a man sleeping with his aunt is the reason why it is no longer raining favourably in our city, a neighbour who refused to be named tersely said as she threw her hand helplessly into the air.

Contrary to claims by Antony that his family blessed the marriage, his father in a telephone interview from his rural home in Muzarabani, breathed fire over the two parties marriage describing it as an abomination and disgrace to the family.

Im distressed. I dont know how to handle this matter. It would have been better for her (Mugati) to get another man to satisfy her rather than going into a love affair with Antony who is culturally her son. It is a very shameful thing and an abomination, fumed Antonys father.

He added: The whole family is against the marriage and as a biological father I have since disowned him as my son. Anything that happens to him I am not involved. I am suspecting the two started sleeping together when my brother was still alive.

It is really an embarrassment to the family and when we reported the matter to the chief he said it was an abomination and that the two should pay 10 beasts for putting the name of the family and area into disrepute.

Views from Zimbabwe Traditional Healers Association (Zinatha):

Zinatha president George Kandiero: This is not allowed in our culture, makunakuna chaiwo aya, (This is an abomination). In the past they would have been killed but today we cannot do it because we are afraid of the law. They should immediately break off their marriage or they risk experiencing a bad omen in their lives.

View from a traditional leader:

Chief Mpakwa: The whole act is evil and not part of tradition. As one of the traditional leaders from Bikita where the woman claims the practice is allowed, let me say we dont have such a weird practice where a son is allowed to marry his mother.

The man might not be the womans biological son but the nature of their relationship does not allow them to sleep together and they should be severely punished for what they did.

View from a pastor: Pastor Jacob Katsekera of Apostolic Faith Mission of Zimbabwe (AFM): This is an abomination and not acceptable at all. The two should face the wrath of God. The prohibition of their marriage is found predominantly in Leviticus 18:8-18 and the chapter in question specifies punishments for incestuous unions.

 BMetro

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Related Zimbabwe Latest NewsYves here. This post presents a classic example of why medical care in America sucks. Its too much about billing and not enough about patient care. I know patients who can have a yearly visit to an MD covered under their plan as either a physical or a medium complexity visit for conditions for which they are already being treated, and have to remind their doctor how to code the any tests so as to have the insurer accept the claim.

And its not efficient from a health care system perspective to have Medicare patients go for what is essentially a pro-forma visit (which sounds as if it could be handled by a nurse rather than an MD, and the article indicates that the subject would have seen a non-doctor for this visit) and then have to come back to deal with real issues, which anyone of Medicare age is likely to have? If nothing else, most people that age are taking some medications, and in every state I am aware of, scrips are valid for only a year, necessitating a doctor visit.

And FWIW, my Manhattan MD charges less for my annual physical than the case study in this article.

By Michelle Andrews. Originally published at Kaiser Health News

Shorter: patients should not be required to play games in order to escape paying costly medical bills.

When Beverly Dunn called her new primary care doctors office last November to schedule an annual checkup, she assumed her Medicare coverage would pick up most of the tab.

The appointment seemed like a routine physical, and she was pleased that the doctor spent a lot of time with her.

Until she got the bill: $400.

Dunn, 69, called the doctors office assuming there was a billing error. But it was no mistake, she was told. Medicare does not cover an annual physical exam.

Dunn, of Austin, Texas, was tripped up by Medicares confusing coverage rules. Federal law prohibits the health care program from paying for annual physicals, and patients who get them may be on the hook for the entire amount. But beneficiaries pay nothing for an annual wellness visit, which the program covers in full as a preventive service.

Its very important that someone, when they call to make an appointment, uses those magic words, annual wellness visit, said Leslie Fried, senior director of the Center for Benefits Access at the National Council on Aging. Otherwise, people think they are making an appointment for an annual wellness visit and it ends up they are having a complete physical.

An annual physical typically involves an exam by a doctor along with bloodwork or other tests. The annual wellness visit generally doesnt include a physical exam, except to check routine measurements such as height, weight and blood pressure.

The focus of the Medicare wellness visitis on preventing disease and disability by coming up with a personalized prevention plan for future medical issues based on the beneficiarys health and risk factors.

At their first wellness visit, patients will often fill out a risk-assessment questionnaire and review their family and personal medical history with their doctor, a nurse practitioner or physician assistant. The clinician will typically create a schedule for the next decade of mammograms, colonoscopies and other screenings and evaluate people for cognitive problems and depression as well as their risk of falls and other safety issues.

They may also talk about advance care planningwith beneficiaries to make decisions about what type of medical treatmentthey want in the future if they cant make decisions for themselves.

At subsequent annual wellness visits, the doctor and patient will review these issues and check basic measurements. Beneficiaries can also receive other covered preventive services such as flu shots at those visits without charge.

When the Medicare program was established more than 50 years ago, its purpose was to cover the diagnosis and treatment of illness and injury in older people. Preventive services were generally not covered, and routine physical checkups were explicitly excluded, along with routine foot and dental care, eyeglasses and hearing aids.

Over the years, preventive services have gradually been added to the program, and the Affordable Care Act establishedcoverage of the annual wellness visit. Medicare beneficiaries pay nothing as long as their doctor accepts Medicare.

However, if a wellness visit veers beyond the bounds of the specific covered preventive services into diagnosis or treatment  whether at the urging of the doctor or the patient  Medicare beneficiaries will typically owe a copay or other charges. (This can be an issue when people in private plans get preventive care, too. And it can affect patients of all ages. The ACA requires insurers to provide coverage, without a copay, for a range of preventive services, including immunizations. But if a visit goes beyond prevention, the patient may encounter charges.)

And to add more confusion, Medicare beneficiaries can opt for a Welcome to Medicare preventive visit within the first year of joining Medicare Part B, which covers physician services.

Meanwhile, some Medicare Advantage plans cover annual physicals for their members free of charge.

Many patients want their doctor to evaluate or treat chronic conditions like diabetes or arthritis at the wellness visit, said Dr. Michael Munger, who chairs the board of the American Academy of Family Physicians. But Medicare generally wont cover lab work, such as cholesterol screening, unless its tied to a specific medical condition.

At Mungers practice in Overland Park, Kan., staffers routinely ask patients who come in for a wellness visit to sign an advance beneficiary notice of noncoverage acknowledging that they understand Medicare may not pay for some of the services they receive.

As long as beneficiaries understand the coverage rules, its not generally a problem, Munger said.

They dont want to come back for a separate visit, so they just understand that there may be extra charges, he said.

Beneficiaries may not be the only ones who are unclear about what an annual wellness visit involves, said Munger. Providers may be put off if they think that its just another task that adds to their paperwork.

A recent studypublished in the journal Health Affairs found that in 2015 just over half of practices with eligible Medicare patients didnt offer the annual wellness visit. That year, 18.8 percent of eligible beneficiaries received an annual wellness visit, the analysis found.

Primary care physicians generally want to see their patients at least once a year, Munger said, but it neednt be for a complete physical exam.

A wellness visit or even a visit for a sprained ankle could give doctors an opportunity to check in with patients and make sure theyre on track with preventive and other care, Munger said.

When Dunn called the doctors office about the $400 bill, she said, the staff told her she had signed papers agreeing to pay whatever Medicare didnt cover.

Dunn doesnt dispute that.

There were lots of papers that I signed, she said. But nobody told me I would get a bill for $400. I would remember that.

In the end, the clinic waived all but $100 of the charge, but warned her that next year shell have to pay $300 if she wants an annual physical with that doctor. If she comes in just for an annual wellness visit, shell be seen by a physician assistant.

Dunn is considering her options. She would like to stay with her new doctor, who came highly recommended, and shes worried she might have trouble finding another one just as good who accepts Medicare. But $300 seems steep to her for a checkup.

This whole thing was so stressful for me, she said. I lost sleep for nights. Its not that I couldnt afford it, but it didnt seem right.JPMorgans Kolanovic Says Bad Liquidity Is Behind Stock Chaos Bloomberg

Flood Damage to Midwestern Levees, Roads, Farms May Run Well into the Billions Weather Underground

Federal judge demands Trump administration reveal how its drilling plans will fuel climate change WaPo (opinion). From the opinion: Given the national, cumulative nature of climate change, considering each individual drilling project in a vacuum deprives the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land before irretrievably committing to that drilling.

Researchers embrace a radical idea: engineering coral to cope with climate change Science

Researchers Develop Process to Remove Oil in Produced Water Interesting Engineering. Theyre working on a patent

After Earlier Assurances Over Air Quality, Benzene From Petrochemical Fire Triggers Shelter in Place Order for Texas City Common Dreams

Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras NYT. You want seat belts and turn signals? Itll cost ya.

Brexit

EUs Antitrust Enforcer Starts Campaign for One of Blocs Top Jobs Bloomberg

Charts that show why Italy wants Chinas Belt and Road Initiative FT

Venezuela

Syraqistan

China?

India

Trump Transition

2020

Have the UBI People Turned to the Dark Side? Benjamin Studebaker

Health Care

Black Injustice Tipping Point

Mock Executions? Real Screams and Blood? Just Another School Shooter Drill Rolling Stone. The true curriculum

Change Is Closer Than We Think. Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs Unlikely Rise Time. I just hope AOCs head can still fit through the door.

Scientists rise up against statistical significance Nature

Antidote du jour (via):

Bonus antidote: I think its time to look in again on Larry the Cat (via):

Larry seems not to have completely made up his mind

See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here.Yves here. Public pension funds like CalPERS have been throwing money at alternative investments like private equity in the hope they will rescue the pensions from underfunding. This post explains the dangers of this sort of wishful thinking and depicts it as irrational.

Also note that the dispersion of returns in private equity is understated due to the fact that investors acknowledge that the returns are smoothed, as in understate the degree of poor performance in unfavorable markets.

By Ben Carlson, CFA, and the the Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Originally published at A Wealth of Common Sense

The late-Peter Bernstein once wrote, The markets not a very accommodating machine; it wont provide high returns just because you need them.

When you do need higher investment returns because of a perceived shortfall in assets for a specific goal you generally have 3 options to remedy the situation:

(1) Adjust your expectations, and therefore, your lifestyle or goals.

(2) Increase your savings rate.

(3) Take more risk.

The first two options are for the realists while the third option is for the optimists.

It appears CalPERS is an optimist.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the behemoth public pension plan for the state of California would like to double down on risk by placing an additional $20 billion in private investments:

Board members are expected to vote on Monday to indicate whether they support the plan, which represents a dramatic new bet for the $356 billion retirement system known as Calpers. Chief Investment Officer Ben Meng has said the expansion will help the system meet its 7% future return targets. Calpers currently has $28 billion devoted to private-equity bets.

The transcript for the CalPERS board meeting, which took place last month, highlights their desire to make these changes. This was one of their consultants:

You know, private equity really is the one asset class that has a significantly higher return that can drive the CalPERS expected returns and hopefully realized returns higher.

And here is the chief investment officer:

So the very first question is why private  why  why do we need private equity? And the answer is very simple. So if I could give you a one-line exact summary of this entire presentation would be we need private equity, we need more of it, and we need it now. So lets talk about the first question, why do we need private equity? And the answer is very simple, to increase our chance of achieving the seven percent rate of return, and to stabilize employer contribution, and to help us to secure the health and retirement benefit of our members. if you are trying to achieve seven percent return, and theres only one asset class that is forecasted to deliver more than seven percent of the return, you need that asset class in the portfolio and you need more of it.

He actually repeated the phrase we need it now four times over the course of this one meeting in reference to PE. Theres just a hint of desperation hidden inside the optimism.

Its possible private investments have a higher expected return but there are a host of risks involved in this strategy.

Brian Portnoy shared this graph in his book The Geometry of Wealth to show how the relationship between risk and reward tends to work:

Increasing risk in a portfolio can increase returns but it also increases your range of potential outcomes. There are no guarantees that taking more risk automatically increases returns.

Brians illustration can be seen in real-world results when we look at the dispersion of returns from money managers in the various asset classes (courtesy of Michael Mauboussin):

Going from right to left, dispersion among the managers increases drastically from liquid public markets to illiquid hedge funds to really illiquid private markets. This dispersion has two distinct outcomes:

(1) There is the possibility for higher returns in the illiquid space

(2) There is the possibility for much lower returns in the illiquid space

Basically, if youre able to consistently choose top quartile private money managers, you can earn pretty nice returns on your capital. If youre unable to choose top quartile managers, watch out below.

Theres the potential to do better but also much worse, so doubling down on risk works in both directions.

When investors are disappointed with their results, ground zero for their source of frustration almost always comes down to expectations.

The old saying is that stress is the gap between expectations and reality. In the investment world, irrational investor behavior is the gap between expectations and reality.

Its also worth mentioning that while CalPERS is looking to add $20 billion to their private equity book, they manage more than $350 billion in total. Thats an increase in the allocation of around 6% of the total portfolio.

To put this number into perspective, lets assume public markets achieve a 7% annual return from here over the long haul. Now lets further assume CalPERS picks private investments that knock the cover off the ball and outperform public markets by 50%, for an annual return of 10.5%.

With a 6% increased allocation to PE, that additional 3.5% in excess return would add a whopping 0.21% to the overall portfolio return.

Thats 21 basis points and they need it now.

When you get into multi-billion dollar portfolios its important to remember investment principles are often trumped by politics. My guess is this Hail Mary attempt is more political posturing than anything. Its a way to show that the investment office is trying to do something, anything, to right the ship and improve the funded status of the pension.

CalPERS is attempting to take more risk to fix their potential shortfall in assets for future beneficiaries. It may increase their returns or it could hurt performance.

But they would probably be much better off if lawmakers began putting more money into the fund or adjusted everyones expectations by lowering future payouts. Thats not an optimistic assessment but it is probably closer to the reality they will one day face.

Further Reading:

Does Private Equity Deserve More Scrutiny?The EU Council did what no one expected, which was to come up with a compromise on the UKs request for a Brexit extension which was different than the UKs proposal and any of the pre-meeting rumors about the EUs position. Although well likely learn more about how this was arrived at, superficially, it looks like it resulted from heated arguments between Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, as well as allowing for the point of view of Donald Tusk (and whatever other national leaders who hold similar views) that the UK should have the opportunity to have a long extension if it can come up with a credible Brexit plan.

Specifically, as most readers likely know, the EU has agreed to extend the departure date to May 22 if Theresa May succeeds in getting her Brexit deal approved by Parliament next week, to enough time to pass necessary legislation if she succeeds. If she fails, the UK can still seek a long extension by April 12 if it presents a plausible plan for getting to a different type of Brexit:

NEW: updated draft conclusions: 'EUCO agrees to an extension to 22 May, provided WA is approved by the HoC next week. If the WA is not approved by the HoC next week, EUCO agrees to an extension until 12 April, expects UK to indicate a way forward for the consideration of EUCO'  Alberto Nardelli (@AlbertoNardelli) March 21, 2019

Later reports explained that if the UK seeks a longer extension, it has to commit to participating in European Parliament elections (April 12 is the last day it can make that decision).

This solution may seem to be a well-balanced or even elegant compromise, but it does have the risk of being the prototypical horse designed by a committee winding up being a camel.1 For starters, the EU gave the UK more than it asked for, and some of the motives for doing so looked iffy. The press reported that Merkel argued that the EU should not go down in history as pushing the UK out. This was the Financial Times account:

The French president emerged as the head of a hardline group of EU leaders arguing that Brussels should rule out any extended delay of Britains exit date unless London fundamentally rethinks its Brexit policy. But on Thursday he was challenged by Angela Merkel, German chancellor, who said the union had to do whatever it could to avoid a hard Brexit. The two leaders clashed at a private meeting, which nearly erupted into a row, according to one EU diplomat. Ms Merkel told her French counterpart they would be judged harshly by history if they allowed a chaotic fracture with Britain to occur.

Needless to say, thats a peculiar construction when its the UK that decided to leave and then has been unable to manage deadlines it created by sending in an Article 50 notice.

Even though many UK businesses were in freakout mode upon getting the memo that Brexit really might happen next week, the flip side, as Macron and others have stressed, many have prepared for a March 29 event, and pushing the drop dead date to June 30 (Mays original request) would requires businesses to go through all that preparation a second time. Tweets during the day suggested Macron was pushing for May 7, not May 22, presumably to somewhat lessen business uncertainty.

As Clive said by e-mail:

Even my mother in laws cat knows the Withdrawal Agreement aint gonna pass in the next week as-is. If the EU27 were serious, theyd be saying a limited technical extension on condition the Meaningful Vote is passed and there will be no extension if it isnt passed, no matter what, and it will then be a No Deal Brexit. Anything else is a prelude to Hoping Something Turns Up.

However, the part that concerns me is giving the UK an opportunity to seek a long extension. Its one thing if the EU were to stick to its resolve before this summit of requiring the UK to present a credible plan as to how it will purse a different sort of Brexit.

The problem is that when various EU officials started mentioning a possible extension, they offered justifications like to hold a second referendum or to have general elections. These measures dont assure that a deeply divided Britain will reach a consensus on Brexit. For instance, how do you formulate meaningful referendum options? Its almost certain a second referendum would not offer binary choices. What happens, if say, Remain won but by a plurality, not a majority? What kind of legitimacy would that have? And that approach also pushes the UK in the further direction of being a direct democracy as opposed to a Parliamentary democracy, when the experience of California suggests that running a large state with the regular use of referendums hasnt been such a hot idea.

There are at least two big risks with the UK pursuing a long extension on nebulous grounds like a second referendum or a general election, which the EU would find difficult to reject given prior statements by its officials. And those would be risks not just for the EU but the UK.

Lack of leadership. Its become fashionable to bash Theresa May, and lets face it, she is terribly ill suited to her role.

EU official says that when leaders asked May what she was going to do if her deal was voted down, she would only reply that she was following her 'Plan A' of getting it through. It was then they decided 'she didn't have a plan so they needed to come up with one for her'.  Nick Gutteridge (@nick_gutteridge) March 21, 2019

However, shes still standing because no one all that much better has shown up. Yes, anybody but May would annoy her EU counterparts less. But the entire UK leadership class has been unwilling to hear the EU saying in every way possible, No means no on the UKs desire not to have to adhere to Single Market requirements yet still have all the bennies.

Who exactly could lead the UK to a better Brexit? I cant come up with anyone in either major party. Phil Hammond might have been a contender but he may have tainted himself by being such a dogged May supporter. Corbyn has shown himself to have no grasp for the issues, and worse, no concern that hes sputtered nonsense.

And between now and April 12, there is no getting rid of May without creating a leadership vacuum. As Clive has pointed out, even if May were to resign, unless the Tories had pre-aggeed on her replacement, a leadership contest would take a bare minimum of a fortnight. And if there were a ready alternative in the Conservatives for May, she would have been gone long ago.

Similarly, a vote of no confidence would also come close to assuring a no deal exit. Parliament has 14 calendar days in which it can reverse itself and vote the Government back in; otherwise, the election process starts and that takes 25 business days. A no-confidence vote is the Ultras best hope for jamming the controls and assuring a no deal.but how many would be willing to get themselves deselected to try, particularly since Labour might realize that theyve laid a trap?

Lack of comprehension. Over 1000 days past the vote and UK pundits and pols are still clueless. Recall how in the last couple of months, both our posts and reader commentors have lamented how many unicorns are still alive and kicking. Just one of many: Corbyn and the press are depicting a customs union as a magic solution when it is not at all the same as being in the internal market and therefore does not end the need for hard borders or solve the Irish border problem. And dont get me started on Norway.

Does the EU have the stomach for the possibility of years more of what it went through with May, with different personalities with new fantasies from which they need to be weaned? How long can the EU leadership take this much brain damage, consumption of resources, and uncertainty?

Now it is possible that a reconsideration of Brexit would eventually lead to the revocation of Article 50. And it is still remotely possible that could happen after Mays Meaningful Vote fails again (charitably assuming Speaker Bercow reverses himself and lets the House have at it). But that isnt costless. The hard core Leave faction would feel betrayed and would be disruptive. And would the UK return to being a resentful and divisive member of the EU?

For what its worth, Richard North views the EUs offer to the UK of presenting a way forward to cinch a long extension as a face-saving gesture. Im not so sure, but I may also be over-estimating the odds of the UK making a last-ditch effort to kick Brexit into the long grass. The pink paper reports that trade union and business lobbyists are on the same page, jointly petitioning May to Do Something to prevent a national emergency. Where have they been for the last year?

Similarly, Tusk made the rounds in Europe to sell the idea before the summit, plus ideas that make their way into documents often assume a life of their own.

Presumably well have answers in a few weeks. But we may simply be left with different questions.

____

1 This is a bit unfair to camels, since they are sturdier and less flighty than horses.By David Autor, Ford Professor, MIT Department of Economics. Originally published at VoxEU

Labour markets in US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were 50 years ago, but urban non-college workers now perform much less skilled work than they did. This column shows that automation and international trade have eliminated many of the mid-skilled non-college jobs that were disproportionately based in cities. This has contributed to a secular fall in real non-college wages.

In the last 40 years, less-educated workers in most advanced economies have experienced a sustained fall in real wages. (Dustmann et al. 2009, Acemoglu and Autor 2011, Blundell et al. 2018). In the US, for example, wages have risen robustly among the most-educated workers, but since 1980 they have fallen in real terms among men with no college education (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Cumulative change in real weekly earnings of working age adults 18-64, 1963- 2017

Source: Autor (2019), based on Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

There are many potential explanations for this, including eroding union penetration and bargaining power, falling federal and state minimum wages, rising trade pressure stemming from Chinas rise as a manufacturing power, and changes in employer practices that decouple the wages of less-educated workers from the productivity and profitability gains of their employers (Card 1996, Lee 1999, Autor et al. 2013, Weil 2014, Autor et al. 2016).

In recent work (Autor 2019), I document another force that has contributed to the declining fortunes of less-educated workers: the rapid erosion of middle-skill employment  both production work and administrative and clerical work  among non-college workers in high-wage urban labour markets.

Many readers will be familiar with the occupational polarisation that has reshaped the landscape of work among less-educated workers: CPS data tell us that in 1980, US employment of non-college workers was roughly split between low- and middle-skill occupations, with 42% in the former category, 43% in the latter, and the remaining 15% in high-skill occupations. Broadly, these groups are: (low-skill) service and manual occupations; (mid-skill) production, office, administrative, and sales occupations; and (high-skill) technical, professional, and managerial occupations. In the intervening (nearly) four decades, the share of non-college employment in middle-skill occupations fell from 43% to 29%. The share in high-skill occupations increased only slightly (15.4% to 16.8%), and so most of the decline in non-college middle-skill employment is proximately explained by the movement of non-college workers into traditionally low-educated, low-paid work. In contrast, for college-educated workers, the decline in middle-skill employment has resulted in an equal outflow into high- and low-skill occupations.

But does occupational change explain the post-1980 divergence in real wages by education (see Figure 1)? A short answer is no. A simple counterfactual exercise that holds the occupational wage structure fixed while allowing the distribution of workers by education and gender to shift across occupations as occurs in the data shows that only a small fraction of the divergence in the data is accounted for by simple movements of education and gender groups across occupations. Thus, changing occupational composition cannot by itself explain most of the evolution of wage inequality between groups. Something else is happening.

The Decline of Middle-Skill jobs in Urban Areas

The structure of work differs systematically across places, and one of the key predictors of occupational structure is population density. Some activities, such as agriculture, naturally take place in low-density areas, but knowledge-intensive industries tend to locate in cities, where educated workers are most concentrated (Glaeser and Mare 2001, Moretti 2004, Berry and Glaeser 2005).

In the decades following WWII, there was a steep positive urban gradient in the skill and wage levels of workers in non-college jobs in the US. Non-college urban adults disproportionately held middle-skill, blue-collar production and white-collar office, administrative, and clerical jobs. These workers laboured in close collaboration with the high-skill, urban professional, managerial, and technical workers who oversaw factories and offices. This meant that middle-skill jobs for non-college workers were prevalent in cities and metropolitan areas, but scarce in suburbs and rural labour markets.

Figure 2 depicts the aggregate relationship between population density and occupational structure at the level of 722 commuting zones (CZs) covering the contiguous US states between 1970 and 2015.

The three panels of this figure report the CZ-level share of employment among working-age adults into the three broad occupational categories described above: traditionally low-education, low-wage services, transportation, labourer, and construction workers; traditionally mid-education, middle-wage occupations made up of clerical, administrative support, sales, and production workers; and high-education, high-wage, professional, technical, and managerial workers.

The horizontal axis is the natural log of population density (the number of residents divided by CZ land area). For consistency, I used each zones population density in 1970 throughout, and the data are weighted by the count of working-age adults in each CZ. Each plotted point in the bin-scatter represents approximately 5% of all workers in each year.

The rising set of upward-sloping curves in the right panel show that while denser CZs have traditionally been more intensive in high-skill work, the level and slope of this relationship between density and skill-intensity has risen consistently over multiple decades. The overlapping downward-sloping curves in the left panel show that the fraction of workers engaged in low-skill occupations has historically been much smaller in high-density CZs, and this pattern has changed little over decades. In the middle panel, the fan-shaped set of curves show that the denser CZs were exceptional in the 1970s for having far more middle-skill work than suburban and rural CZs. But this exceptional feature attenuated. By 2015, the densest CZs had less middle-skill work than the suburbs or rural areas.

Figure 2 Occupational employment shares among working-age adults by commuting zone population density, 1970-2015

Source: Autor (2019), based on US Census for 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, and pooled American Community Survey data for 2014-2016.

We can decompose this into the different experiences of college-educated and non-college-educated adults (Figure 3). For college-educated adults, there was a decline of about eight percentage points in the share of college workers working in middle-skill occupations, and this shift was most pronounced in denser CZs. For non-college workers, at no point was there any meaningful density gradient in high-skill work among non-college workers. But in 1970 non-college workers in the densest CZs were approximately 25 percentage points more likely to work in middle-skill occupations than those in low density CZs. By 2015, the low-skill employment share among non-college workers was several points higher in the most- versus the least-dense CZs, while the middle-skill employment share was several points lower.

Figure 3 Occupational employment shares among working-age adults by commuting zone population density for college and non-college adults, 1970-2015

Source: Autor (2019), based on US Census for 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, and pooled American Community Survey data for 2014-2016.

Where have all of these middle-skill jobs gone? Two secular demand-side forces have contributed substantially to their disappearance (Autor and Dorn 2013, Autor et al. 2016, Acemoglu and Restrepo 2017): one is the decline of manufacturing production work in the face of automation and rising trade pressure; the second is the proliferation of increasingly capable and user-friendly office computing tools that have reduced demand for workers in routine office tasks. While manufacturing had already departed the densest urban areas by the 1970s, the march of office computing has been particularly significant for urban, non-college workers. In 1980, the share of non-college workers in clerical and administrative occupations was 15-plus percentage points higher in the most versus least dense CZs. As office computing capabilities advanced, clerical and administrative employment among non-college workers fell steeply from the 1980s onwards. By 2015, there was almost no remaining (positive) density gradient in office work among non-college workers.

Wage Polarisation Has Been Disproportionately Urban

It is a robust empirical regularity that urban workers earn more than observably similar non-urban workers (Glaeser and Mare 2001, Moretti 2004, Glaeser and Resseger 2010). Given that land prices are intrinsically higher in dense locations, it is logical that higher urban wages compensate workers for the higher cost of urban living (holding amenities constant). For this to be an equilibrium, however, the productivity of urban workers must also be commensurately higher; otherwise, firms would locate elsewhere.

It is easy to imagine why urban productivity is greater for highly educated workers. In knowledge-intensive work, in-person interactions appear to have few close substitutes, meaning that proximity is critical. It is less obvious, however, why these productivity spillovers accrue to less-educated workers  but historically they clearly did so. One possibility suggested by the evidence above is that, in past decades, less-educated workers performed higher-skilled work in urban areas  specifically, production, clerical, and administrative jobs. If so, the secular decline of middle-skill urban occupations might have served to depress the urban wage premium among non-college workers.

Figure 4 Real log hourly wages among college and non-college adults, 19702015

Source: Autor (2019), based on US Census for 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, and pooled American Community Survey data for 2014-2016.

Figure 4 shows that this has indeed occurred. Between 1990 and 2015, the urban wage premium among non-college workers declined by roughly two thirds, even as the urban wage premium among college workers steepened. A similar pattern is documented by Baum-Snow et al. (2018). As I demonstrate in Autor (2019), this striking pattern is not driven by other obvious confounds such as changes in age structure in urban areas, shifts in the educational composition of the broad non-college category, lingering after-effects of the Great Recession, or artefacts of the rising immigrant share of urban workers. Rather, it appears to be a genuine change in urban wage structures. In short, occupational polarisation has disproportionately occurred in high-wage urban and metro labour markets, and it appears likely that the geography of polarisation has magnified its wage impacts.

Conclusion

Non-college workers in US cities perform substantially less skilled work than they did four decades ago. This change reflects the effects of automation and, to a lesser degree, international trade, which have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labour markets. The unwinding of the urban non-college occupational skill gradient has shunted non-college workers out of specialised middle-skill occupations into low-wage occupations, diminished the set of non-college workers that hold middle-skill jobs in high-wage cities, and attenuated the steep urban wage premium for non-college workers that prevailed in earlier decades. Changes in the nature of work  many of which are technological in origin  have been more disruptive and less beneficial for non-college than college workers.

See original post for referencesThe NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg will travel to Tbilisi on Sunday, 24 and Monday 25 March 2019.

Mr. Stoltenberg will have meetings with the President of Georgia, H.E. Ms. Salome Zourabichvili, the Prime Minister, H.E. Mr. Mamuka Bakhtadze, the Chairman of the Parliament, H.E. Mr. Irakli Kobakhidze and other high level officials.

The Secretary General will visit the NATO-Georgia Joint Training and Evaluation Centre (JTEC) together with the Minister of Defence, Mr. Levan Izoria, where he will receive a briefing on the NATO-Georgia Exercise.

Media Advisory

Monday, 25 March

09:50 (local time) - Secretary General joint press conference with the Georgian Prime Minister

The press joint press conference will be streamed live on the NATO website. Still and video images will be available on the website after the event.

Professional-quality videos and b-roll will be available for download from www.natomultimedia.tv.

Please register for access. Contact: content@natomultimedia.tv

Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress and @jensstoltenberg)(Natural News) Traveling to outer space is a pretty tough gig for astronauts trying to stay healthy, as shuttling back and forth to places like Mars and the Moon significantly increases ones risk of developing infections from antibiotic-resistant superbugs, experts claim.

Not only is there a higher risk of contracting bugs like MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) out in the great unknown, but the human body also apparently has a tougher time fighting them off once theyve developed, new research suggests.

Perpetual lack of sleep, combined with having to live in radiation-saturated microgravity chambers, makes astronauts far more susceptible to disease, in other words  and scientists arent really sure what to do about it, just yet.

With astronauts venturing to the moon and Mars more in the future, scientists are worried about how to keep them safe and healthy on such long haul trips under foreign environments, reports the UKs Daily Mail Online.

Its a bigger challenge than usual to keep astronauts healthy onboard spacecraft if bugs develop antibiotic resistance, given no additional medical assistance can be offered.

Superbugs thrive better in space than they do on Earth

For their experiments, researchers from the University of Houston in Texas first treated harmless strains of E. coli with an antibiotic known as chloramphenicol. They then put this E. coli into a space-simulating environment, microgravity and all, to see what would happen.

After the bacteria multiplied over the course of 1,000 generations, the researchers observed that it had developed resistance not only to chloramphenicol, but also several other varieties of antibiotic. They then removed the initial antibiotic that caused the resistance to develop in order to test whether or not it would revert from superbug status, only to learn that the resistance persisted even after 100 subsequent generations.

What this all suggests is that space travelers, and especially those who go on longer, multi-year missions, face the very real threat of contracting a deadly infection for which theres no available treatment, let alone a nearby hospital to receive critical care if needed.

When youre going to be in space for more than six months, bacteria are subject to several thousand generations of growth, says Madhan Tirumalai, one of the lead authors of a new study on deadly superbugs in space.

Space is a high-risk environment for microbial contamination

NASA is already well aware of the problem of space-based superbugs, as the government agency recently discovered five never-before-identified strains hiding aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

In another recent study, scientists from NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory found that not only do superbugs love the space environment, they also love to mutate there, triggering the formation of all sorts of novel superbugs that, like their predecessors, cant be cured with any known treatments.

Its exactly what the World Health Organization (WHO) has been warning about for years: the rise of deadly superbugs as a result of antibiotic overuse and misuse. Since hospitals and care facilities have essentially been handing out antibiotics like candy for many decades now, superbug proliferation is now completely off the charts  including in space.

If we find resistance is higher in microgravity, we can do something, because well know the gene responsible for it, and be able to design countermeasures, says A.C. Matin, head a of project known as E. coli Anti-Microbial Satellite project, or EcAMSat, which is working on solutions to this growing problem.

If we are serious about the exploration of space, we need to know how human vital systems are influenced by microgravity.

Sources for this article include:

DailyMail.co.uk

NaturalNews.com(Natural News) With each successive generation since the 1960s, the Left has successfully managed to debase our culture, degrade our sense of morality, and alter our cultural mores in such a way that Americans born even 60 years ago no longer recognize the country in which they were born in.

But no matter how bad the degradation has gotten, the Left is never quite finished with the job. One head-shaking outrage begets another. And another. Soon, the only thing that we will be able to say about American cultural values is that they no longer exist, and it will be at that moment that the country will cease to exist as well.

While men have dressed up as women for hundreds of years, only recently has the practice become so mainstream that we would tolerate and even encourage a drag queen to read stories to our children, and in a publicly-funded venue.

And yet, thats what was going on in Houston  that is, until just recently. As PJ Media reports, the Houston Chapter of Drag Queen Story Hour was a real thing, but organizers have been forced to cancel their future events after they discovered that one of their performers had been convicted for sexually assaulting an eight-year-old boy.

Eight.

The Houstonia added that the founders of the Houston Drag Queen Story Hour  Trent Lira and Devin Will  announced the programs end in a statement that provided additional details surrounding the events that in another time would have outraged a parent to do physical harm upon the offender:

News broke that one of our former readers was a sex offender. She was part of story time before [Houston Public Library] started enforcing background checks for every performer, and hasnt been back since they started. When Trent spoke to the queen in question this weekend, she confirmed that she had been convicted in 2009. It was devastating. We had insisted and insisted that what we were doing was safe for children, and yet here was a performer who had been charged with sexual assault of a minor.

The she in the statement is Alberto Garza, whose stage name is Tatiana Mala-Nina, a 32-year-old child sex offender, convicted, who had been involved in reading to children throughout the duration of the program.

When youre a busted Leftist, just claim to be the REAL victim

Whats even more unbelievable is that the Houston library in question had to be legally forced into conducting background checks. The library was subjected to a lawsuit by several protestors who claimed, presciently, that allowing drag queens that kind of intimate access to children was an inherently bad idea and potentially endangering to the kids. (Related: Female HS student files federal civil rights complaint over sharing locker room with transgender: I felt violated.)

Who could have predicted that?

In part, the lawsuit read, With the governments symbolic stamp of approval, the Drag Queen Story Hour amounts to a form of sexual grooming of 2 to 10-year-olds by adult males dressed as females The event is not about diversity, it is about grooming children for government-approved sexual exploitation.

The lawsuit was eventually dismissed but again, only after the public institution agreed to do even a cursory safety check on men who have an abnormal  yes, its abnormal  proclivity: Not just dressing as women but performing as dressed-up women.

Will and Lira confirmed in their statement that had the lawsuit not been filed, no background checks would have been done. But as is also becoming the norm, the offenders or, in this case, the enablers to the offense, Will and Lira, are claiming victimhood status.

We have tried so hard to take the high road, to not stoop to mud-slinging. We have patiently listened to the people that declared we were sexualizing and molesting children. We have asked counter-protesters to be peaceful or not show up at all. We have been calm. We have been collected. But we are angry. And we are tired. And we are sick of well-intentioned but misinformed news stories that have only polarized people more, their statement said.

As bad as the cultural rot in our country has become, it would be much worse if none of us fought back.

Read more stories about how social justice warriors are destroying our gender-confused culture at SocialJustice.news and GenderConfused.com.

Sources include:

NaturalNews.com

PJMedia.com

HoustoniaMag.com

CourthouseNews.com [PDF](Natural News) Having an acne breakout? Try red ginseng. A recent study published in the journal Phytotherapy Research reports that red ginseng (Panax ginseng) improves the symptoms of acne, making it a safe and effective natural remedy.

Acne  a chronic inflammatory disease of the skin  develops when bacteria abnormally grow in hair follicles. The most common treatment for this skin disease is antibiotics. However, due to the rise of antibiotic resistance and the harmful side effects they bring, researchers have turned to potential natural treatments like red ginseng.

Researchers from South Korea conducted the study to determine the active ingredients, as well as the antimicrobial properties, of red ginseng and compared it to other antibacterial substances. They found that red ginseng ethanol extract exhibited similar, if not even better, antimicrobial activity against Propionibacterium acnes compared to benzoyl peroxide or azelaic acid. In addition, the antimicrobial component derived from red ginseng selectively demonstrated a high antimicrobial effect on P. acnes. Moreover, they discovered that the most active ingredients responsible for the antimicrobial activity of red ginseng were panaxynol and panaxydol.

The researchers also determined the potential efficacy of red ginseng as a natural treatment product. To do this, they tested red ginseng on people with acne symptoms. Twenty individuals who had acne symptoms participated in their study. The researchers treated them with cream that contains 3 milligrams per gram (mg/g) of red ginseng ethanol extract. After four weeks of treatment, the results revealed that red ginseng reduced the oxidized sebum contents and redness of the skin. In addition, it effectively improved the symptoms of the early to middle stage of acne.

Based on these findings, the researchers conclude that red ginseng extract that contains panaxynol and panaxydol can be used as an effective natural treatment for acne.

How red ginseng treats acne

Red ginseng, also known as Asian ginseng, is a perennial herb widely used for its medicinal properties, especially in countries like China and Korea. It has anti-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory, anti-stress, anti-aging, and antioxidant properties. (Related: Acnes location on your body could reveal specific health issues.)

Research has shown that red ginseng can relieve acne symptoms in various ways, such as:

Enhancing sleep: Sleep is also one of the factors that influence acne development. When you are sleep-deprived, your skin is affected. Having a better sleep cycle leads to reduced acne. Red ginseng can enhance the sleep quality of those who are sleep-deprived and cannot sleep peacefully.

Sleep is also one of the factors that influence acne development. When you are sleep-deprived, your skin is affected. Having a better sleep cycle leads to reduced acne. Red ginseng can enhance the sleep quality of those who are sleep-deprived and cannot sleep peacefully. Reducing hormonal imbalance: Hormonal imbalance, which mostly happens in women, is also one of the main causes of acne. Red ginseng contains natural estrogen, which can serve as a supplement to estrogen hormone in women. By maintaining normal hormone levels, red ginseng helps reduce acne outbreaks.

Hormonal imbalance, which mostly happens in women, is also one of the main causes of acne. Red ginseng contains natural estrogen, which can serve as a supplement to estrogen hormone in women. By maintaining normal hormone levels, red ginseng helps reduce acne outbreaks. Boosting the immune system: In most cases, acne occurs due to bacteria and digestive problems. Red ginseng can strengthen the immune system by warding off bacteria and removing impurities in the body. By fighting bacteria, red ginseng prevents one of the main causes of acne and reduces the duration of acne lesions. A healthy immune system is also more resistant to illness like inflammatory diseases and other infections.

Acne occurs commonly in teenagers, but it also occurs in people of all ages. It develops because of oil, bacteria, or dead skin cells that are congested in skin pores. Acne also occurs due to various factors, such as genetics, puberty, menstruation, and infections.

Read more stories on natural acne remedies like red ginseng by going to NaturalCures.news.

Sources include:

Science.news

KGCUS.com(Natural News) A study published in The American Journal of Chinese Medicine suggested that red raspberry (Rubus idaeus) can be used to treat and prevent nasopharyngeal cancer. In the study, researchers at Chung Shan Medical University in China examined the antimetastatic properties of red raspberry extract on human nasopharyngeal carcinoma cells.

Nasopharyngeal cancer is characterized by a high incidence of metastasis in the neck lymph nodes, which leads to a poor prognosis and makes it difficult to treat.

In the study, the researchers treated human nasopharyngeal cancer cells with red raspberry extract.

They then analyzed the extracts effects on the migration and invasion of tumor cells.

The results showed that red raspberry extract inhibited the migration and invasion of nasopharyngeal cancer cells.

Based on these findings, the Chinese researchers concluded that red raspberry extract exhibits anti-metastatic properties against nasopharyngeal cancer cells, and can, therefore, be used to treat and prevent nasopharyngeal cancer.

To read more studies on foods that prevent and treat cancer like red raspberry, visit AntiCancer.news.

Journal Reference:

Hsin CH, Huang CC, Chen PN, Hsieh YS, Yang SF, Ho YT, Lin C-W. RUBUS IDAEUS INHIBITS MIGRATION AND INVASION OF HUMAN NASOPHARYNGEAL CARCINOMA CELLS BY SUPPRESSION OF MMP-2 THROUGH MODULATION OF THE ERK1/2 PATHWAY. The American Journal of Chinese Medicine. 26 September 2017; 45(7): 1557-1572. DOI: 10.1142/S0192415X17500847(Natural News) A study published in The American Journal of Chinese Medicine reported that red sage (Salvia miltiorrhiza), also known as Chinese sage, has the ability to suppress the progression of diabetic nephropathy due to its antioxidant properties. Diabetic nephropathy is a common cause of chronic kidney disease and end-stage renal disease that can be triggered by oxidative stress.

Researchers from China and Sri Lanka assessed the renoprotective effect of red sage extract on diabetic nephropathy and analyzed the underlying molecular mechanism in an experimental diabetic nephropathy model.

To imitate the hyperglycemic conditions in people with diabetic nephropathy, the researchers treated mouse mesangial cells with a high dose of glucose and treated mice with streptozotocin.

The researchers observed that the treatment with red sage extract reduced metabolic abnormalities associated with hyperglycemic conditions in the experimental diabetic nephropathy model.

In streptozotocin-induced mice, red sage extract treatment attenuated albuminuria, enhanced renal function, and mitigated the pathological alterations within the glomerulus.

Red sage extract also inhibited high glucose-induced reactive oxygen species both in the cells and mice.

In sum, these findings indicate that red sage extract reduces the progression of diabetic nephropathy, which may be attributed to its antioxidant properties.

To read more studies on Chinese medicines like red sage, visit ChineseMedicine.news.

Journal Reference:

An L, Zhou M, Marikar FMMT, Hu X-W, Miao Q-Y, Li P, Chen J. SALVIA MILTIORRHIZA LIPOPHILIC FRACTION ATTENUATES OXIDATIVE STRESS IN DIABETIC NEPHROPATHY THROUGH ACTIVATION OF NUCLEAR FACTOR ERYTHROID 2-RELATED FACTOR 2. The American Journal of Chinese Medicine. 26 September 2017; 45(7): 1441-1457. DOI: 10.1142/S0192415X17500781(Natural News) There are a lot of different types of planets in the universe. But the exoplanets recently identified by British and Swiss researchers are special because they contain large amounts of ruby and sapphire.

This exotic class is made up of super-Earths, rocky planets that are bigger than our world. Formed in immense heat and found in close proximity to their parent stars, these exoplanets contain numerous metals and the oxide forms of those same elements.

The core of these planets are not made of iron. Instead, they are rich in aluminum and calcium. The oxidized form of aluminum with red coloration is better known as ruby, while the blue variant is called sapphire.

There are currently three candidates for this new class of planets. One of them is HD219134 b, which is located 21 light-years away in the Cassiopeia constellation. The others are 55 Cancri e and WASP-47 e.

Researchers from the University of Zurich and the University of Cambridge are using theoretical models to determine how these planets were born. Their results are then compared with data from other studies. (Related: Has the second alien megastructure been found?)

A new class of exotic exoplanets comprised of high-temperature condensates

Planets form from the dust and gas that remains after the birth of a star. Rocky planets, in particular, are formed in areas close to the star that have plenty of iron, magnesium, silicon, and other similar elements. The internal arrangement of these planets are similar to Earth, down to the dense core of iron. Most of the super-Earths follow this pattern.

But there are areas around the star that are much hotter than normal. The aforementioned elements are going to be in their gas phase in this region. Any rocky planets formed there will be made out of different materials that can condensate despite the heat.

The Zurich-Cambridge researchers suggest that an exoplanet in this area will be made out of aluminum, calcium, magnesium, silicon, and other high-temperature condensates. There will also be almost no iron present, which means the planet will not generate a magnetic field.

Furthermore, these rocky planets will have a different internal structure, cooling method, and atmosphere compared to the typical super-Earth. They therefore merit a new and unique class of their own.

These new planets could be covered in sapphire and ruby

Calculations suggest that a rocky planet formed from high-temperature condensates will have 10 to 20 percent lower density than Earth. The disparity continues to puzzle researchers.

One theory for the lower total density is the presence of a thick atmosphere. But this cannot work for 55 Cancri e and WASP-47 e. These exoplanets orbit their parent stars so closely that their atmospheres would have been completely burned away.

HD219134 b is positioned farther away from its parent star, so it is cooler than the others. It is also not alone, as it shares its star with another planet.

The second planet is found slightly farther back from the star. Its properties nix another theory about HD219134 b  there can be no deep oceans of liquid on HD219134 b, not when the second planet did not demonstrate similar oceans.

Of course, there could always be oceans of magma on HD219134 b. But the jury is still out if such bodies of molten metal have less density than solidified aluminum.

Weve thus found three candidates that belong to a new class of super-Earths with this exotic composition, said Zurich researcher Caroline Dorn, who served as the main author of the study. She also adds that 55 Cancri e will need to be downgraded from a planet that is supposedly covered in diamonds to one covered in mere sapphire.

See Space.news for more breaking news about discoveries in astronomy and space travel.

Sources include:

SciTechDaily.com

Academic.OUP.com(Natural News) If you told me five years ago that I would wake up one day in America and have Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google all banning natural health news, and that the entire U.S. Congress and President of the United States would do absolutely nothing about it, and that there wouldnt be a single prominent voice on the political Left who would speak out against the scourge of censorship, I wouldnt have believed you.

Yet thats where we are right now in America. Actually, its even worse. Our Brighteon.com free speech video platform is under such intense threats and assault from upstream internet infrastructure providers that we are now being forced to implement outrageous limitations on speech in order to avoid the entire platform being annihilated (new announcement to come soon). Certain ISPs in New Zealand have now blocked the entire domain of Brighteon.com, even after all the mosque shooting videos were removed from the platform under threat from other infrastructure providers. (New Zealand and Australia are now essentially Communist China in terms of internet censorship, with NZ rapidly becoming a new Islamic state that celebrates hijabs, a symbol of the oppression of women and gays.)

We have now reached the point where the tech giants are banning all questions about vaccines where anti-cancer content is being stifled on Facebook and Google where any opinion that opposes the authoritarian left-wing techno-tyranny is silenced into oblivion. Our elections are no longer fair and free, given that Democracy depends entirely on public knowledge and public debate so that citizens who vote might decide for themselves which candidates and policy decisions to support, yet we now find ourselves in a world where tech giants like Google and Twitter are now deciding all future elections by silencing conservative, pro-Trump, pro-Christian, pro-America speech while granting artificially high visibility to pro-Democrat, pro-socialism, pro-communism and pro-Islam speech.

New research from psychologist and search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein shows that biased Google searches had a measurable impact on the 2018 midterm elections, pushing tens of thousands of votes towards the Democrat candidates in three key congressional races, and potentially millions more in races across the country, reports Breitbart News. According to Epsteins study, at least 35,455 undecided voters in the three districts may have been persuaded to vote for a Democrat candidate because of slanted Google search results. Considering that each vote gained by a Democrat is potentially a vote lost by a Republican, this means more than 70,910 votes may have been lost by Republicans in the three districts due to Google bias. In one of these districts, CA 45, the Democrat margin of victory was just over 12,000 votes.

What the tech giants are doing today is far worse than the book burning of the Third Reich

We have truly reached the point of peak insanity, vastly outpacing the Third Reich and its systematic book burning agenda to deprive the people of access to unauthorized information that might be found in printed books. Its not just books that are under attack today, of course: Its all human knowledge which runs counter to the insane, deranged narratives of the political Left.

We are now being told that biology no longer exists and that gender is fluid. Despite the fact that this insane idea violates the basic sciences of physiology, this is now such an ingrained position in the minds of the tech giants that anyone who opposes the gender fluidity delusion is labeled as being engaged in hate speech. Facebook has even announced it will no longer allow advertising companies to market to women or women by gender selection, claiming there is no such thing as biological gender. (Yes, Leftists now literally believe there is no such thing as a man or a woman.)

Were also being told that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and that the world will end in 12 years if we dont shut down all combustion engines and fossil fuel consumption (the Green New Deal). This is pure insanity on its face, especially given the fact that India and China are the worlds largest producers of CO2 by far, and they would obviously not be stupid enough to collapse their entire air travel, agriculture and transportation industries in order to appease some insane, deranged Democrat from New York whose IQ is so low that is strains the very definition of intelligent species.

Even more, carbon dioxide is actually the greening molecule of life for nearly all plants across Earth, and higher CO2 levels would restore rainforests, grasslands and crops which are currently suffering under near-record low concentrations of CO2 which are near the lowest point in the history of our planet.

Note the RED line in the chart below, showing how todays CO2 levels are near the lowest ever experienced in the history of our planet:

As all of this is happening, were being told that all conservative speech is hate speech because Leftists  snowflake crybullies  have trained themselves to feel afraid of any conservative ideas, including religion, gun ownership for self-defense and even the fundamental idea of a nation controlling its own borders. Hate speech is now whatever the lunatic Left says it is, and even their own definition keeps wildly expanding into territory thats so far beyond sanity and reason that it begs the question of what sort of mass mental illness affliction has taken hold on liberal cities. (Seriously, are these people being mass poisoned with heavy metals or pesticide chemicals? Is there something in the food?)

No prominent Leftist has spoken out against censorship by the tech giants

Amazingly, there isnt a single prominent Leftist who thinks that total censorship, oppression of speech, gun confiscation and the collapse of the entire fossil fuel-powered agricultural industry is a problem. Almost without exception, every single Democrat in America has essentially joined the Fourth Reich of modern fascism. They cheer it. They demand it. And they see nothing wrong with it.

Fake Native American Elizabeth Warren recently declared that housing was a human right, yet she refuses to proclaim that speech is a human right. In fact, among all the rights demanded by Democrats  including the right to murder their own babies in the name of womens health  the freedom to speak is no longer one of them.

In censoring the speech of those with whom they disagree, many Leftists now demand the outright murder of all white people, Christians, Trump supporters and gun owners. They are systematically demonizing people for the color of their skin, too, claiming that being born white makes you evil by definition. The term white privilege is a racial slur, but the Left gets away with it because they dont perceive their own bigotry and racism and racism at all. Yes, the very same political party that once embraced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s call for a merit-based, color blind society is now ready to leap at the idea of genocide  the nationwide extermination of people based entirely on the color of their skin. To them, this isnt intolerance or hate its justice!

Even the ACLU has been silent on the mass censorship of conservative speech, confirming it cares nothing about civil liberties and has collapsed into nothing but another left-wing hate branch of the SPLC. The left-wing media itself, meanwhile, has collapsed into journo-terrorism, where its primary goal is to psychologically terrorize its own viewers rather than keep people informed about important events. Every world event is now another panic-driven bout of hysteria to try to demonize President Trump, and every idea proposed by lunatic Democrats is embraced and celebrated as being genius even if its incredibly stupid and destructive to society. (How would race reparations really work, anyway, given that all living humans today can trace their ancestry back to Africa?)

The fake news is beyond fake: It is criminal in its intent.

And tech giants are beyond dangerous; they are running criminal racketeering and vote fraud schemes which are designed to suffocate the voices of the People and grant powerful corporations total control over the future of America. (Which, by the way, doesnt even include America as a sovereign nation, since every last one of the tech giants wants to see America overrun with illegal immigrants and turned into a Third World despotic authoritarian socialist craphole run by Democrats.)

The tech giants must be stopped, or America is lost

We have now reached the point where if either the government or We the People dont rise up and defeat the tech giants, humanity will be forever enslaved under a globalist system of techno-fascism. Yet U.S. Senators sit and twiddle their thumbs. Congress does nothing. There is no organized outcry, and even the President has taken no decisive action against the tech giants and their growing threat to freedom and democracy.

Where are the DOJ indictments of the CEOs of the tech giants? Where are the mass citizens protests in front of the offices of Facebook and Twitter? Why is Jack Dorsey free to silence whomever he wants, for any reason, with zero transparency and no due process whatsoever?

Conservatives are coming together, across a broad spectrum, of enterprises and joining forces to fight what some of us believe to be, potentially, the greatest threat to liberty in history I think were heading for an all-out war, said Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, as reported by Fox News:

Bozell dined with leaders from the Washington Times, The Federalist, The Daily Signal, LifeSite News, Breitbart, Regnery Publishing, Prager U, Sinclair Broadcasting, The Heritage Foundation and others to discuss what they say is a left-wing bias among billionaire tech titans who are using their power to push a political agenda, with Google, Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube being their primary targets.

Google is potentially the most dangerous because of the power it has with its search engine, Bozell said. Youve also got service companies that are getting into the act, whether its PayPal or Microsoft or numerous others, theyre now starting to either flat-out censor or demonize conservative online publications.

As for Twitter, Bozell said it has a global group of influencers who are able to spout their messages, while people with beliefs that dont coincide with the companys agenda are often muted. He said users are forced to abide by speech control, which gets to be Orwellian after a while because a ruler is essentially telling you what rhetoric is acceptable.

Some of us have been cognizant of this emerging threat from the beginning, Bozell said. Only recently has everyone started realizing how big this problem is and how existentially necessary it is to fight them. Everyone is in agreement that its an all-hands on deck situation for freedom.

We have reached the point in this insanity where it may appear that the only remaining solution to save America and the First Amendment is going to be a mass uprising of concerned citizens who occupy and dismantle the tech giants, server by server, desk by desk, cubicle by cubicle. If the DOJ will take no action, the thinking goes, and if the President will say nothing to defend the First Amendment (since his own Twitter account is not yet banned), and the legal system has been corrupted under Sec. 230 to grant tech corporations absolute legal immunity even while they run mafia-style racketeering operations to stifle their political enemies, the remaining option comes down to pitchforks and torches, so to speak. But there may be a better option: Seizing the domain names of the tech giants and prohibiting them from operating at all (see below for more details).

If the tech giants are not stopped, they will inevitably be targeted in a coming civil war that we all hope to avoid

A day of reckoning is coming in America. We are one spark away from an open civil war, and that spark could be something as simple as the initiation of nationwide gun confiscation laws which would be fiercely resisted by armed patriots, law enforcement officers and both active duty and former military veterans. The tyranny that was just unleashed in New Zealand by an authoritarian government simply wont be tolerated in America. The people will fight it.

It has become clear that the most important strategic assets in any civil war will be the tech giants. Control over online speech is now even more important than control over the establishment media which has all but committed credibility suicide since 2016. I do not condone the use of violence against technology companies  I call for peaceful protests and occupation  but in my analysis, its clear that if a second civil war is unleashed in America, the tech giants will be obvious tactical assets that get prioritized for control.

In my analysis of this theoretical civil war, until the tech giants are overrun by patriot forces, all pro-America forces in such a scenario would be designated as terrorists by the tech giants, which would also permanently ban all pro-America voices from every single online platform, including Google and Facebook. Seizing control over these assets and forcing a restoration of First Amendment freedoms for all Americans would be one of the most urgent priorities for pro-America forces. At the boots-on-the-ground military tactical level, this would be made difficult by the fact that tech giants tend to reside in left-wing Antifa-ridden areas of the country where anti-America forces would fight any patriots, National Guard troops or military forces that attempt to halt the Lefts Fourth Reich crimes against humanity via speech oppression.

Its worth noting that the tech giants really are engaged in crimes against humanity. Silencing the speech of human beings in the way now being conducted by the tech giants is an assault on human dignity and basic human rights. All those who use peaceful, lawful means to halt these crimes against humanity and restore the basic human dignity of free speech would be well justified in doing so, including those taking part in the defense of America against the communist-leaning insurrection and treason thats now being carried out daily by the techno-fascists.

How President Trump could protect America and halt the tech giants insurrection all at once

The ace in the hole in all this would be a conservative president declaring a national emergency and seizing the domain names of Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other tech giants. By declaring these tech companies to be engaged in an active insurrection against the United States of America  and operating in open complicity with Antifa terrorists and Mexican drug cartels that engage in human trafficking across the open border  the President could demand those domains be seized by the U.S. State Department and prohibited from operating.

This is the solution that avoids the entire issue of people on the street, battling for control over physical servers and server farms. Seizing Google.com and halting Googles insurrection against America  and its active complicity with Communist China  is a simple, non-violent solution that would end the techno-dictatorship which has now been put in place by the tech giants.

On the flip side, a left-wing President could exercise the same power against conservatives sites and seize domain names such as Infowars.com or ZeroHedge.com  two independent media websites which are already targeted and largely de-platformed by leftist tech giants. Control over the domain space is the ultimate control over online speech, and thats exactly why President Trump needs to give the tech giants this ultimatum:

If you will not halt your oppression of human rights and your censorship of Americans based on political and religious bigotry as well as active election meddling, you will no longer be allowed to operate as the dominant public square content controllers.

Join me in spreading the word. Seizing the domain names of Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Apple, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest is exactly what President Trump should order right now. These tech giants are engaged in an active insurrection against America; they are engaged in active election meddling and election fraud; and they are depriving Americans of their basic civil rights and human rights by silencing important voices of dissent.

If Google, and the other tech giants are not going to honor the basic social contract of freedom of speech, they must be seized and prohibited from operating at all. Believe it or not, any President of the United States has the power to seize corporations if they are engaged in treason against America. It is time to exercise that power and restore a level playing field of free speech for all Americans.

It is time to end the techno-dictatorship in America by using the power of government to protect the First Amendment rights of the citizens. Tech companies that engage in politically biased censorship and election meddling must be halted from operating, period.

Stay informed about more news concerning the tech giants at TechGiants.news, updated daily.(Natural News) NASA researchers may have found a sweet surprise in outer space. Apparently, the inhospitable environs of space can produce sugar molecules. Better yet, this sugar is not any of the common ones found in foods; instead, it is the complex molecule found in the DNA of living organisms.

In a recent experiment, the researchers replicated the conditions found in outer space. Then they demonstrated how this harsh setting could enable the formation of 2-deoxyribose, the complex sugar molecule in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

The findings of the NASA researchers indicated that one of the most important chemical ingredients for the formation of life could be quite common in the universe. If this was true, 2-deoxyribose could have seeded planets, which would make the development of alien life much more likely.

We dont yet know whether life is common in the universe, but were pretty sure the presence of lifes building blocks is not a limiting factor, said Ames Research Center researcher Michel Nuevo, the primary author of the science paper. Ames is run by NASA. (Related: Bacteria found to use new DNA bases in creation of a new kind of protein.)

Replicating the conditions of outer space to make sugar molecules

Outer space is cold, vast, and mostly empty, but it is not completely empty. Interstellar space contains dust and gases that were exposed to cosmic radiation. The constant influx of highly energized photons and particles provides energy for chemical reactions, although the extremely cold temperatures of space slow these processes down to a crawl.

Nuevo and his fellow Ames researchers replicated these conditions in a cosmic chamber at their lab. They cooled aluminum to near absolute zero temperatures and moved it into a vacuum chamber to simulate space.

Next, they added a gaseous mixture of water vapor and methanol, a compound that contained carbon. The extremely cold temperature caused the water and methanol to freeze on the surface of the aluminum. The entire set-up was then bathed in ultraviolet light that represented cosmic radiation.

When the researchers evaluated the treated material, they discovered a number of different types of sugar molecules on the aluminum. One of the sugars turned out to be 2-deoxyribose.

The results of the Ames experiment mirrored those of a preceding French study in 2016. The French researchers were able to create ribose, a related sugar molecule that served a similar purpose in ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA was responsible for producing proteins in the body and could be a precursor to the more complex DNA.

Sugars and other organic compounds that formed in space eventually ended up on Earth

2-deoxyribose and ribose are just two of the organic molecules that have been found on meteorites. Space rocks are also known to have amino acids, nucleobases, and amphiphiles, all of which are important ingredients in living organisms.

Amino acids are used to create proteins. Nucleobases served the same purpose for the genetic code. Finally, amphiphiles made up the cellular membranes around cells.

The universe is an organic chemist, Ames researcher and secondary author Scott Sandford remarked. It has big beakers and lots of time  and the result is a lot of organic material, some of which is useful to life.

These organic compounds may have first formed in space, but they eventually ended up on planets due to meteorites and comets that brought those compounds to the surface of said planets. Samples of those space rocks are known to have acids, alcohols, and other derivatives of sugars.

When exposed to water, these derivatives could eventually turn into the more complex sugars used in RNA and DNA. Life could potentially develop from those compounds, as it did on Earth.

Sources include:

SciTechDaily.com

Nature.com(Natural News) Liberal echo chamber MSNBC mocks conservatives when they speak out about being banned on social media. The liberal network recently took aim at California Congressman Devin Nunes (R) because Nunes is taking legal action against Twitter for shadow banning his account.

Shadow banning is used by social media companies to limit the influence and outreach of targeted users. The user is allowed to post on their social media account, but that post is not seen in part or at all by other users. This silent banning technique is being used to censor certain political views and ways of thinking. Machine learning (AI) helps sort out specific terms and ideas that the social media company does not want to spread online. Social media companies are adopting vague hate speech policies so they can get away with banning certain terms and ideas they deem to be harmful, offensive, or not up for debate. The practice of shadow banning has become a modern day censorship tactic to restrict the spread of conservative ideas or beliefs that go against the liberal agenda of social media companies. At Twitter, the culture is unashamedly anti-Trump. The bias of Twitters content reviewers bleeds through.

But according to MSNBC commenter Kasie Hunt, Twitter does not shadow ban conservatives because Twitter has widely debunked that theory. In other words, the public should just believe Twitter reps and take them at their word, even when serious allegations and lawsuits are staring them in the face. MSNBC liberals explain that Twitters investigation of itself is good enough and everyone should take CEO Jack Dorsey at his word, that political and ideological censorship is not taking place.

So why have prominent conservatives, independent thinkers, and Pro-Trump lawmakers such as Devin Nunes, Matt Gaetz, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and John Ratcliffe been shadow banned? Why is Julian Assange banned, and what about InfoWars? Why were Natural News and the Health Ranger removed from Twitter right after the Health Ranger questioned on air the shady crypto-currency scam peddled by Twitters CEO Jack Dorsey?

Of course Jack Dorsey denies the shadow bans are targeted attempts. In an interview with Sean Hannity, Dorsey defended his company, We do not shadow ban according to political ideology, viewpoint or content, period. Every model we have on the network is really looking at behaviors on the network. We take those behaviors as signals evolve minute by minute, hour by hour.

Its time to subpoena Twitter engineers and unveil politically-motivated censorship tactics

If this is true, then its time to hold Dorseys feet to the fire and subpoena Twitter engineers and top level executives. Its time for Twitter employees to testify in court about Twitters shadow banning practices. Its time to unveil their filters and find out what ideas and people they target and what terms they eliminate using machine learning.

Olinda Hassan, policy manager for Twitter trust and safety, was interviewed by Project Veritas about the type of people that Twitter targets. Were trying to get the s****y people to not show up. Its a product thing were working on, she says.

Twitter is not a neutral platform, thats for sure. Twitter is a tool to promote a political agenda. Former Twitter content review agent, Mo Norai, admitted that employees make decisions to ban pro-Trump content. Steven Pierre, software engineer for Twitter admitted that these algorithms aim to ban a way of talking.

Pranay Singh, direct messaging engineer for Twitter responded to an impromptu interview. He said Twitter uses machine learning to identify targeted words such as Trump, or America or any words that describe a redneck. Then he says all related content, includes messages and pictures are parsed through so they can be relegated. He even admitted that political figures can be banned due to pressures within the U.S. government to protect certain people and political ideas.

Watch the full Project Veritas investigation into Twitter:

For more visit Censorship.News.

Sources include:

Breitbart.com

TheGateWayPundit.com

NaturalNews.com

ProjectVeritas.comThe world's smallest bears can exactly mimic another bear's facial expressions, casting doubt on humans and other primates' supremacy at this subtle form of communication.

It is the first time such exact facial mimicry has been seen outside of humans and gorillas.

The research, by Dr Marina Davila-Ross and PhD candidate Derry Taylor, both at the University of Portsmouth, is published in Scientific Reports.

The researchers studied sun bears - a solitary species in the wild, but also surprisingly playful - for more than two years.

They found bears can use facial expressions to communicate with others in a similar way to humans and apes, strongly suggesting other mammals might also be masters of this complex social skill and, in addition, have a degree of social sensitivity.

Dr Davila-Ross said: "Mimicking the facial expressions of others in exact ways is one of the pillars of human communication. Other primates and dogs are known to mimic each other, but only great apes and humans, and now sun bears, were previously known to show such complexity in their facial mimicry.

"Because sun bears appear to have facial communication of such complexity and because they have no special evolutionary link to humans like monkeys are apes, nor are they domesticated animals like dogs, we are confident that this more advanced form of mimicry is present in various other species. This, however, needs to be further investigated.

"What's most surprising is the sun bear is not a social animal. In the wild, it's a relatively solitary animal, so this suggests the ability to communicate via complex facial expressions could be a pervasive trait in mammals, allowing them to navigate their societies."

Facial mimicry is when an animal responds to another's facial expression with the same or similar expression. Mr Taylor coded the facial expressions of 22 sun bears in spontaneous social play sessions.

The bears, aged 2-12, were housed in Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre in Malaysia in which enclosures were large enough to allow bears to choose whether to interact or not.

Despite the bears' preference in the wild for a solitary life, the bears in this study took part in hundreds of play bouts, with more than twice as many gentle play sessions compared to rough play.

During these encounters, the research team coded two distinct expressions - one involving a display of the upper incisor teeth, and one without.

The bears were most likely to show precise facial mimicry during gentle play.

Mr Taylor said such subtle mimicking could be to help two bears signal that they are ready to play more roughly, or to strengthen social bonds.

He said: "It is widely believed that we only find complex forms of communication in species with complex social systems. As sun bears are a largely solitary species, our study of their facial communication questions this belief, because it shows a complex form of facial communication that until now was known only in more social species.

"Sun bears are an elusive species in the wild and so very little is known about them. We know they live in tropical rainforests, eat almost everything, and that outside of the mating season adults have little to do with one another.

"That's what makes these results so fascinating--they are a non-social species who when face to face can communicate subtly and precisely."

Sun bears, also known as honey bears, stand at 120-150 cm tall and weigh up to 80kg. They are endangered and live in the tropical forests of south-east Asia.

Social sophistication aside, sun bear numbers are dwindling due to deforestation, poaching and being killed by farmers for eating crops. Increasingly, new mother bears are killed so their cub can be taken and raised as a pet or kept in captivity as 'bile bears' where their bile is harvested for use in some Chinese medicines.

The field research was funded by the Royal Society and the Leakey Foundation.

Previous research at the University of Portsmouth showed dogs alter their facial expressions if they know someone is looking at them.The Royal Navy may have plans to task its aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, leading a strike-force that will include the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales, some Type 45 destroyers and the next generation of Type 26 frigate fleet, to enforce maritime law in the South China Sea.

The Royal Navy may have plans to task its aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, leading a strike-force that will include the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales, some Type 45 destroyers and the next generation of Type 26 frigate fleet, to enforce maritime law in the South China Sea.

HMS Queen Elizabeth (Picture source : Royal Navy)

During this operation in 2021, the strike-force lead by the HMS Queen Elizabeth would go through the Mediterranean Sea, the Middle-East and the Pacific Ocean. Whitehall defense boss Gavin Williamson also considers using the carrier group to enforce maritime law in the South China Sea during this operation.

Speaking in the House of Lords, Labour peer Lord Don Touhig said "My Lords, is this sabre-rattling in the Pacific intended to give our friends in the region confidence, or to make the Chinese tremble? Then he added "When the Americans deploy a carrier they provide an escort of a cruiser, four destroyers, a carrier wing, a submarine and 7,500 sailors. Can we do that?"

The Government insists Queen Elizabeth's deployment is not an opportunity to 'antagonise' the Chinese. Earl Howe, defence minister and deputy leader of the House Lords, said "My right honourable friend the defence secretary (Gavin Williamson) announced that the first operational mission of the Queen Elizabeth would include the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Pacific region, thereby enabling the Royal Navy to maximise the opportunities we have to exercise and interact with our key regional allies and partners, and to make a statement about upholding the international rules-based system, including freedom of navigation." Mr Howe added that 'Dutch allies' would also be drawn upon to support QE out in the Pacific - whilst the finer details of her deployment still remain in 'the planning stage'.

Defense tensions continue to dominate the headlines in 2019, after some clashes arose between the Royal Navy and the Russian one, and between the Royal Navy and the Spanish one (around Gibraltar claimed waters).What to Know City Lights Bookstore was founded by iconic poet and artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood.

City Lights was the nation's first all-paperback bookstore.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is celebrating his 100th birthday this month.

City Lights is a legendary gem nestled in San Franciscos North Beach neighborhood - a place where diversity and art meet.

Our redesigned local news and weather app is live! Download it for iOS or Android  and sign up for alerts.

The bookstore was founded by iconic poet and painter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 and quickly became the nations first all-paperback bookstore. Since its inception, City Lights has served as a meeting place for writers, artists and creatives seeking to engage with poetry and literature.

In the early 50s, there werent a lot of independent bookstores and particularly, independent bookstores that thought about younger artists, younger people and communities of color as part of their audience, said Paul Yamazaki, a coordinating buyer at City Lights. The independent bookstores that existed at the time tended to be what I call, white glove stores that were more proper.

For Yamazaki, City Lights has been his university since he first started working at the bookstore in 1970. At the time, Yamazaki had just completed serving a six-month jail sentence and recalls leaving San Francisco Hall of Justice, seeing his family and within a span of four days, getting a job at City Lights.

City Lights has been my university, so year by year Ive been exposed to books, artists and dedicated readers, Yamazaki said.

For the last 49 years, Yamazaki has not only witnessed the evolution of North Beach and American literary writing, but hes also worked closely with Ferlinghetti, making sure the bookstore continues to stock meaningful diverse literature.

Iconic poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti poses in front of his beloved City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.

Lawrence is a rare combination of poet, visionary and very practical, Yamazaki said. Most people think of Lawrence as kind of this great poet and painter, which he is, but they almost take it for granted that were still here after almost 70 years.

Despite the effects of the digital tech boom in the Bay Area, Yamazaki says hes noticed much of the younger generation understands the importance of reading paperback books.

The biggest change Ive seen in my close to 50 years of doing this is that young people of color that are both politically active and culturally active, recognize the desire and need within their own communities for bookstores, Yamazaki said. [They] understand the value of screen-based reading but have a bigger appreciation of the difference between screen and print.

The legacy of Ferlinghetti and City Lights is more than just a book lovers literary dream, its as Yamazaki described, a place of discovery. In celebration of Ferlinghettis 100th birthday, the bookstore will be holding several events to honor him and his work. Although Ferlinghetti will not be attending, he stated he was happy to hear people are celebrating his birthday.

Events:

Ferlinghettis 100th Birthday Celebration

When: Sunday, March 24th, 1-5 p.m.

Where: 261 Columbus Ave. San Francisco

A celebration of Ferlinghettis 100th Birthday with a day or readings and reminiscences

Also that day:

Where: Vesuvio, 255 Columbus Ave., San Francisco

When: Sunday, March 24th, 3-4 p.m.

Bay Area poets readings

Where: Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery St., San Francisco

When: Sunday, March 24th, 1-5 p.m.

Screening of the documentary Lawrence: A Lifetime in Poetry

Where: Cafe Zoetrope, 916 Kearny St, San Francisco

When: Sunday, March 24th, 2-3 p.m.

Poetry Readings

Where: Specs Bar, 12 William Saroyan Place

When: Sunday, March 24th at 6 p.m.

Birthday after-party with appearances from poet Jessica Loos and Specs owner Elly SimmonsFormer FBI Director James Comey will speak to a sold-out audience at Cupertino's De Anza College Thursday night for its 51st annual Celebrity Forum.

The series has brought former presidents, journalists, humanitarians and dignitaries to the college since 1968, and Comey is scheduled to give remarks both Thursday and Friday.

Comey was appointed as FBI director in 2013, and was fired by President Donald Trump in 2017 amid his ongoing investigation into Trump's alleged ties with Russia.

He drew criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for his role in investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails during her 2016 presidential run. In April 2018, he published a book about his career, titled "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership."

Comey is the second-to-last speaker in the Celebrity Forum's 2018-19 season, with previous appearances by Rick Steves, John Cleese, Ian Bremmer and Diane Keaton. National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner will wrap up the series in April.

Comey will be introduced by moderator Dick Henning, who founded the series, and will share remarks and answer audience questions from 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. The event will follow the same schedule Thursday and Friday, both taking place at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts at De Anza College, 21250 Stevens Creek Road, Cupertino.An Oakland man who was only 16 at the time was sentenced Friday to 25 years to life in state prison for the shooting death of an off-duty paramedic in the Oakland hills six years ago.

Christian Burton, now 22, was convicted Oct. 31 of first-degree murder and the special circumstance of committing a murder during a carjacking for the fatal shooting of Santa Clara County paramedic Quinn Boyer, 34, shortly before noon on April 2, 2013.

However, jurors didn't find that Burton was the person who shot Boyer, who lived in Dublin and had been married for less than a year.

Boyer crashed his car down a ravine in the 5200 block of Keller Avenue after he was shot and died two days later of a single gunshot wound to his head.

Boyer grew up in Oakland and had been in the city that day to take his father to a medical appointment.

Alameda County prosecutor Jimmie Wilson said after the verdict that he believes Burton was the shooter but jurors had reasonable doubt about that because the only eyewitness in the case, a woman who's now 80 years old, identified another teen, Nazhee Flowers, as the person she thought shot Boyer.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Kevin Murphy said the "ambiguity" about whether Burton, who was with five other teens at the time, was the shooter is one of the reasons he decided to sentence Burton to 25 years to life instead of life in prison without parole.

Murphy said another reason is that Burton didn't have a significant previous criminal record.

Burton's lawyer Ernie Castillo said sentencing Burton to life in prison "would be too oppressive, too excessive" because he has a very low IQ, suffers from a learning disability and grew up in a troubled and abusive home.

But Wilson asked for the maximum sentence possible, saying, "I don't think Mr. Burton cares about what he did. I think that's sad and that's tragic."

Boyer's wife Liz Boyer also said that during the six years of Burton's legal proceedings, "I've seen nothing to show that Mr. Burton really cares about the level of devastation he's caused, the amount of pain."

Liz Boyer said she and Quinn Boyer had been married for less that a year when he was killed and the day before the shooting he had surprised her by buying plane tickets to Hawaii to celebrate their first anniversary.

Wilson said during Burton's trial that the fatal shooting of Quinn Boyer occurred during a crime spree in which he and the five other teens who played hooky from school on that spring day committed two carjackings and a robbery in addition to the shooting.

Wilson alleged that the teens wanted to carjack Boyer's Honda Civic, as he had pulled his car off to the side of the road to use his cellphone.

But Castillo told jurors in his closing argument that they should find Burton not guilty because the eyewitness's description of the shooter matched Flowers, not Burton.

This was Burton's second trial for the death of Boyer because his first trial in 2015 ended in a mistrial with jurors deadlocked 7-5 in favor of finding him guilty.

Co-defendant David McNeal, who was 15 at the time of the shooting, was found guilty of first-degree murder in that same 2015 trial and was sentenced to 48 years to life in state prison for his role in the crime, which was providing the gun that was used to kill Boyer.

Three of other teens involved in the crime pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in juvenile court for being accessories and are serving their sentences with the state Division of Juvenile Justice.

Flowers, the person who Castillo alleges was the teen who shot Boyer, pleaded guilty in adult court to a carjacking charge and was sentenced to 15 years in state prison.

Boyer's family created a foundation in his honor and will have a fundraiser scheduled for Sunday, April 7, at the Richmond Arts Center. For more information, visit QuinnsKids.org.Maria Vides, who allegedly shot her husband Paul Shatswell after a dispute Saturday morning in Pittsburg, has been accused of murder with special enhancements for causing brain injury and using a firearm, according to Contra Costa County prosecutors.

Shatswell was taken to a hospital and placed on life support after emergency crews responded to Barrie Drive on March 16.

Vides was arrested and booked into jail for her alleged role in the shooting and charged in a criminal complaint filed Wednesday.

The principal of Pittsburg Unified School District's adult education program is clinging to life after being shot by his wife during a domestic dispute early Saturday, according to authorities. Roz Plater reports.

Shatswell is principal of the Pittsburgh Unified School District's adult education program. He's also a father of eight, and a former reserve deputy with the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office. An update on the victim's medical status was not immediately available, but as of Sunday he was listed in critical condition.

School district officials said on social media Sunday morning that Shatswell has had a wide impact on the Pittsburg community, and they would have many memories of his love of music, family, friendship, Pittsburg and education.

An update on Vides' entry of plea was not immediately available Thursday afternoon.A San Jose neighborhood fears it's becoming a dumping ground for stolen vehicles, and one man said he even caught the problem on camera Thursday morning.

Neighbors who live around East San Fernando Street, near Santa Clara Street, point out the area has two major streets that create a dead end for traffic and apparently for investigations.

Residents of the neighborhood are used to calling police to report abandoned cars that turn out to be stolen. In one resident's home security video, two men are seen dropping off a car on East San Fernando around 1:30 a.m. Thursday then returning later to switch vehicles and drive off again.

Several residents say they have repeatedly reported cars that turned out to be "hot," and theyre frustrated by it.

"I suspected at the time that something was going on, and in fact, there was a stolen car and a couple of criminals," said Jeff Levine, Roosevelt Neighborhood Association vice president. "And its happened on a number of occasions around here."

Neighbor Stephen Coldwell added: "Its usually not a nice car. Its usually some broken down car, dented up car, just ugly. It bothers me to look out your door and see that."

Another resident says the fact there are two major dead ends, including one with limited lighting, makes it easy to dump vehicles without being seen..

"On the corner, its clear right now because I called police, and they took all the cars out of there," Alejandro Ayala said.

Police provided a map revealing the location of vehicles stolen during the past 30 days, and it shows the problem is widespread. But the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association ironically shows very few thefts because the map indicates where vehicles are stolen, not where theyre abandoned.

"Its the perception that this is a safe area for criminals to dump stolen cars," Levine said.

The neighborhood association is now meeting regularly with the police. Residents say theyve noticed more patrols in the area and are encouraging neighbors to be more vigilant and report unfamiliar vehicles immediately.Two days after getting an earful from constituents, a Santa Clara County supervisor is proposing some changes to the county's sanctuary policy.

Supervisor Dave Cortese said the goal is to prevent another heinous murder like the Bambi Larson homicide.

Cortese is proposing police agencies in the county re-engage with immigration officers on a warrant system. The debate re-ignited after San Jose police arrested Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza for the Larson's murder.

Carranza is an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador with a long criminal rap sheet. Immigration agents say both Santa Clara and Los Angeles counties repeatedly refused to hold Carranza for deportation after the agency filed prior detainers on him.

On Thursday, Cortese said local police agencies should be working with ice to improve communication.

"To re-engage ICE one more time and get on an arrest warrant system with us so we know what's going on in real time and there's no communication break down," Cortese said.

In other words, Cortese suggests ICE should have issued an arrest warrant for Carranza after one of his prior convcitions, instead of relying on detainers, which is a tool he calls unconstitutional.

Cortese says ICE only issued three arrest warrants for undocumented immigrants in Santa Clara. All three happened last year and the sheriff complied each time.

"We're trying to make some improvements so there can be enough communication, enough notification," Cortese said.

Cortese is also recommending better evalution of mental health patients and inmates, whether they're undocumented or not. The supervisor also suggests community stakeholders and police agencies work together on public notifications upon the release of a serious violent criminal from jail, in accordance with the law.Tens of thousands of veterans and service members stationed at military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan say exposure to trash fires or burn pits has left them with breathing problems and other chronic illnesses, including cancer. They are fighting for health benefits, but say the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is turning its back on them.

Veterans say everything went into the burn pits  plastic water bottles, spent munitions, tires, human and medical waste. They say the heaping piles of trash were often then doused with jet fuel and lit on fire. The pits burned 24 hours a day in or next to their military bases.

June Heston, of Richmond, Vermont, lost her husband Mike Heston last year.

"How can that even happen? I was mad. So mad," she said.

A Vermont widow blames the death of her husband on exposure to toxic smoke from military burn pits overseas.

Brig. Gen. Mike Heston was in the Vermont National Guard and volunteered for three tours of duty in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom.

"He was a soldiers soldier," June Heston said. "It meant everything."

But in 2016, nearly four years after his last tour, Mike Heston started having back pain. He went to a slew of doctors who performed countless tests. He lost 75 pounds. For almost a year, no one could figure out what was going on.

"I said, 'I feel like he's dying and I'm the only one who sees it,'" Heston recalled, choking back tears.

Mike Heston was dying. He had stage 4 pancreatic cancer. But it would take new doctors in Boston and an article the veteran stumbled upon to connect the possible dots. It was about a young mother in the Minnesota National Guard, Amie Muller, whose family blamed her pancreatic cancer, and eventual death, on the burn pits at her military base in Iraq. The same kind of burn pits in Mike Heston complained to his wife about at his base.

"The military failed him. The doctors failed him," June Heston said. "I was angry."

The military started using burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s. Veterans tell NBC10 Boston Investigators they were the fastest and cheapest way to get rid of trash. Veterans say the garbage was often doused with jet fuel and set on fire. They burned day and night.

June Heston, of Richmond, Vermont, lost her husband Brig. Gen. Mike Heston last year to stage four pancreatic cancer. The Hestons believe Mike's exposure to burn pits during his time in Afghanistan is to blame.

Dr. Tom Abrams, an oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said hed never heard of burn pits before meeting the Hestons.

"It was shocking to learn about them," Abrams said. "I asked, 'why is this happening? How could this be happening? This is clearly a threat to health.'"

It was Abrams' team that found Heston's cancer and while he can't prove it definitively, he told the VA the exposure "....more likely than not..." made Heston sick.

"Mike and the other patients are the canaries in the coal mine," he said. "And I think we're going to see more and more of these patients with cancers of all stripes."

Abrams' letter helped Heston gain disability medical benefits through the VA. Veterans are only eligible for health insurance for five years after service unless their illness is determined to be service related.

The VA has approved just 20 percent of the nearly 12,000 medical claims related to burn pits over the last decade. The agency admits there are toxins in the smoke, but insists most health effects are temporary.

Dr. Tom Abrams, an oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, says he had never heard of burn pits until he treated Brigadier General Mike Heston.

"In some people it may be making them sick," said Dr. Drew Helmer, who directs the VA's War Related Illness and Injury Study Center in New Jersey. "Who it is making sick, how many people it is making sick and what is the sicknessthose are still questions we dont have answers for."

The VA says it is continuing to study the issue and in 2014, Congress mandated they create a burn pit registry to collect data on exposed veterans to better evaluate the issue and potential risk. Nearly 170,000 veterans and servicemen have signed up. Forty-two hundred of them are from New England.

June Heston said her husband did sign up for the registry once he had learned of it.

"He said, 'You don't start a registry unless you know there's a problem,'" she recalled.

Veterans and families call the registry a start, but want more education for doctors, especially civilian practitioners, and guaranteed medical care for veterans exposed. Those health benefits could cost the VA billions.

Images: From Service to Sick

Heston lost her warrior in late 2018. The husband and father of two was 58 years old.

Heston says her husband told her to keep fighting for other veterans.

Families often compare burn pit exposure to Agent Orange, the defoliant used in Vietnam, which was eventually linked to cause cancer and other diseases in exposed veterans. By the time the VA recognized the illnesses as service related, many veterans had already died without VA health benefits.

"Most of these men and women will die before any responsibility is taken and the help that they need is given," June Heston said. "That's the reality."

The Department of Defense turned down the NBC10 Boston Investigators request for an interview. They said they are now largely using incinerators, a more expensive method of getting rid of trash, but the military admits burn pits are still being used near about a dozen bases in the Middle East.

Legislators have introduced a bill called the Burn Pits Accountability Act that would require the military to track service members and veterans exposed to burn pits, require health evaluations and share data about burn pits with the public. It was referred to the House Subcommittee on Health.

If you or a loved one were exposed to burn pits in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Djibouti and you'd like to share your story with Ally Donnelly, she may be reached at Ally.Donnelly@nbcuni.com.U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials are defending the decision to detain a 9-year-old girl for more than 30 hours as they worked to verify her identification.

Thelma Galaxia said her friend, Michelle Cardenas, was driving each of their two children from Tijuana, where they live, to their schools in San Ysidro Monday morning, as they do nearly every day.

Galexia's 9-year-old daughter, Julia Isabel Amparo Medina, attends fourth grade at Nicoloff Elementary School and her 14-year-old son, Oscar Amparo Medina, attends ninth grade at San Ysidro High School. Both are passport-holding U.S. citizens.

When they got in line at the border at 4 a.m. Monday, traffic was moving slow. Cardenas told the four children to walk across the border instead. She was going to call them an Uber so they could make it to school on time.

NBC 7's Danica McAdam spoke with the girl's mother after their emotional reunion in San Ysidro.

But Oscar and Julia Medina never made it across, according to their mother.

Galaxia says CBP officers accused her daughter of lying about her identity. Officers told the girl she didnt look like the girl in her passport card picture.

Julia Medina told NBC 7 that CBP officers accused her of being someone else, her cousin Melanie.

CBP said the girl "provided inconsistent information during her inspection," and officers took her into custody "to perform due diligence in confirming her identity and citizenship."

"Its important that CBP officials positively confirm the identity of a child travelling without a parent or legal guardian, CBP Public Affairs officer Jackie Wasiluk told NBC 7 in a statement.

The girl showed NBC San Diego her passport card, which has a picture of her from when she was much younger.

When asked why it took 32 hours to verify Julia's identification, CBP would not give specific information.

Some specifics of our techniques for determining the true identity of a person crossing the border are law enforcement sensitive information," Wasiluk added. "In addition, some details of this case are restricted from release due to privacy concerns."

The sibling told NBC 7 said officers also accused Oscar Medina of smuggling and other crimes which he said he didnt understand.

My daughter told her brother that the officer told her that if she admitted that she was her cousin, she would be released soon so she could see her mom, Galaxia said.

I was scared. I was sad because I didn't have my mom or my brother. I was completely by myself, Julia Medina said. She said she woke up several times throughout the night, sad because she wasnt with her family.

Galaxia said officers made Oscar Medina sign a document that said his little sister was his cousin.

That is not true, Galaxia said. She is my daughter. He was told that he would be taken to jail and they were going to charge him for human trafficking and sex trafficking.

Oscar told NBC 7 he felt terrible for signing the document. He said he just wanted to see his sister.

When CBP officers told Galaxia that Oscar and Julia Medina were detained, she got the Mexican consulate involved.

At about 6 p.m., while Galaxia interviewed with NBC 7 in Kearny Mesa, the consulate called her and told her Julia Medina would be released to her at the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

Galaxia and her family rushed to the border where they were reunited with Julie almost two days later. The family of three hugged, cried and embraced, but Galaxia said the emotional reunion should never have had to happen.

NBC 7 reached out to CBP, asking why officers detained a 9-year-old U.S. citizen and kept her from her mother for 36 hours. The agency said it would respond to questions when it had more details on the case.

The Mexican consulate told NBC 7 it will also provide more information as to how they were able to reunite the family.With Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel stepping aside, and a number of challengers vying for aldermanic seats, City Council could look quite different after the Apr. 2 municipal runoff elections. Here's a look at 10 big races happening across the city 

MAYOR

No matter who wins the April runoff election, Chicago's next mayor will be an African-American woman for the first time in the city's history. Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle both advanced to the runoff election, garnering 17.5 percent and 16 percent of the vote, respectively. They prevailed over 12 other candidates in the most crowded field of mayoral hopefuls in Chicago history, a field that grew after outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced in September that he would not run for a third term.

Lightfoot is the former president of the Chicago Police Board. Emanuel appointed Lightfoot to head the board in 2015, and to chair the Police Accountability Task Force in 2016, in the wake of the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald. A former federal prosecutor from 1996 to 2002, Lightfoot has also held various roles in city government, including as chief of staff for Chicagos Office of Emergency Management and Communications in 2005.

She most recently was a partner at Mayer Brown LLP and entered the race before Emanuel dropped out - criticizing the candidates, including Preckwinkle, who launched their bids after his announcement. A late surge, seemingly fueled by an endorsement from the Chicago Sun-Times and other candidates' perceived ties to the so-called "machine," was enough to put Lightfoot at the top.

Preckwinkle is the current Cook County Board President and chair of the Cook County Democratic Party. Long seen as one of the most viable challengers to Emanuel, Preckwinkle has been board president since 2010, and prior to that was elected to five terms as alderman of the 4th Ward on the city's South Side. In April 2018, she became chair of the Cook County Democratic Party. She enjoys significant support from organized labor, particularly Service Employees International Union Local 1 and the Chicago Teachers Union.

The race has been contentious from the start, with both candidates on the attack as each touts her progressive credentials. Lightfoot has painted Preckwinkle as a politician entrenched in the so-called "machine," while Preckwinkle has highlight Lightfoot's background as a "wealthy corporate lawyer" who's worked for Wall Street.

A victory by either woman would be historic in more ways than one. Both in contention to be Chicago's first black female mayor, Lightfoot would also be the city's first openly-LGBTQ mayor, while Preckwinkle would be the first mayor to chair the Cook County Democratic Party since Richard J. Daley.

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TREASURER

Melissa Conyears-Ervin and Ameya Pawar will face off once again in the runoff election for Chicago treasurer.

Conyears-Ervin earned 44.3 percent of the vote, while Pawar earned 41.6 percent in the Feb. 26 match, according to the Chicago Board of Elections. Those totals were not enough for either candidate to reach the 50 percent threshold to win the election outright, sending them to the runoff over the third candidate Peter Gariepy, who earned 14.2 percent of the vote.

Conyears-Ervin is currently an Illinois state representative, serving the 10th District since 2017. She has a masters degree in business administration from Roosevelt University and has garnered some key endorsements, from the likes of SEIU Local 73, the Chicago Teachers Union, and Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, as well as Gariepy, her former opponent. She is married to 28th Ward Ald. Jason Ervin.

Pawar is currently the 47th Ward alderman, running for a new office after vowing to only serve two terms on City Council. He ran on a progressive platform for Illinois governor last year, but dropped out of the Democratic primary early on, citing a prohibitive lack of funding.

Hes floated the idea of creating a publicly-owned bank, which would aim to provide low-interest loans for residents and would essentially cut private banks out of the business of handling the citys finances. His progressive approach to ethics and transparency in particular has earned him the endorsements of both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, as well as SEIU Local 1 and Rep. Mike Quigley.

The two will square off in April for the open position vacated by current Chicago Treasurer Kurt Summer. Summers, often seen as a rising political star, unexpectedly announced in 2018 that he would not seek re-election. He was Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkles ex-chief of staff and served just one term.

The position of treasurer can be seen as the citys accountant, managing Chicagos operating funds, controlling the citys investments and overseeing the citys increasingly-troubled pension funds.

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5TH WARD

Ald. Leslie Hairston is headed to a runoff against a prominent activist in the 5th Ward on Chicago's South Side.

Hairston earned 48.5 percent of the vote against two opponents in the Feb. 26 election. Community activist William Calloway came in second place with 26.7 percent, meaning the two will square off once again in April.

Calloway is credited with pushing for the release of dashcam video showing Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times in 2014. The release of the footage made international headlines and set off a series of events that included the ouster of the Chicago police superintendent, a second-degree murder conviction for Van Dyke and a U.S. Department of Justice investigation that concluded CPD engaged in a pattern of civil rights violations - prompting a series of reforms under a new consent decree.

Calloway is a documentary filmmaker who founded Christianaire, a violence prevention nonprofit organization, and previously ran for Illinois state representative for the 25th district in 2018, falling short in the Democratic primary.

An attorney who was first elected in 1999, Hairston has highlighted her membership in the City Council's Progressive Reform Caucus and touted her experience working on infrastructure and business development in the ward, like a multimillion-dollar reconstruction of South Lake Shore Drive, renovations to the South Shore Cultural Center, construction of the Comer Childrens Hospital and more.

A major issue in the race where the candidates differ is their approach to the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center, slated for construction in the ward's Jackson Park, to be completed by 2021. Hairston has said she opposes a community benefits agreement between developers and residents to guarantee jobs at the center to area residents and protect them from being displaced by the development.

Calloway has expressed support for such an agreement to be made with the Obama Foundation, the City of Chicago and the University of Chicago. The 5th Ward includes parts of the Hyde Park, Jackson Park, South Shore and Greater Grand Crossing neighborhoods.

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20TH WARD

One of the largest field of aldermanic candidates in the city last round has whittled to two in the runoff election for the 20th Ward.

Jeanette Taylor and Nicole Johnson emerged victorious from the initial nine candidates vying to replace Ald. Willie Cochran, who was indicted on federal criminal charges in December 2016.

Taylor garnered 28.8 percent of the vote in the Feb. 26 election, while Johnson earned 22 percent.

Taylor is a community activist who led a 34-day hunger strike to stop the closing of Dyett High School and has advocated for a community benefits agreement for the Obama Presidential Center, a proposal Johnson has also said she supports. Johnson is an education consultant and has worked as a policy and program manager at Chicago Votes, as well as for Sen. Dick Durbin, among other elected officials.

Both are looking to succeed Cochran, who was charged with a total of 11 counts of wire fraud, two counts of federal program bribery and two counts of extortion. Authorities allege Cochran, a former Chicago police officer, solicited bribes from area businesses and used money from a charitable fund in part to pay for his daughters college tuition and roughly $25,000 on gambling at casinos.

Cochran originally entered a plea of not guilty in 2016, then rejected a plea deal in 2018, setting the stage for a trial before ultimately pleading guilty and resigning his seat on March 21.

He had previously announced in 2017 that he would not run again, though he said his decision had nothing to do with his indictment. Cochran is the third 20th Ward alderman to face charges, with two of his predecessors - Cliff Kelley and Arenda Troutman - imprisoned for fraud. The ward includes parts of the Woodlawn, Back of the Yards, Canaryville, Washington Park and Englewood neighborhoods on the citys South Side.

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25TH WARD

The race to replace 25th Ward Ald. Danny Solis has gotten heated. Byron Sigcho-Lopez and Alex Acevedo topped the field of five candidates on Feb. 26, with 29.2 and 22.1 percent of the vote, respectively.

Sigcho-Lopez is an educator and public policy researcher at the University of Illinois-Chicago, who has previously worked as the director of the Pilsen Alliance, an organization focused on social justice for working class and immigrant communities on the Lower West Side. A Democratic Socialist, he was one of four candidates who previously challenged Solis in 2015, coming in second with 19 percent of the vote - falling about 80 votes short of forcing Solis into a run-off election.

Acevedo is a registered nurse who has previously worked as a community relations manager at Oak Street Health, a clinic for senior citizens. He is the son of former state Rep. Eddie Acevedo and unsuccessfully ran for his fathers seat in the state legislature in 2016. Both candidates currently sit on local school councils for schools in the community.

This race has been plagued by plenty of controversy, one of which was allegations of vote-buying.

On March 11, Acevedo said he identified workers for Sigcho-Lopez's campaign handing out gift cards on the Feb. 26 election day, with a Chinatown polling place official corroborating the accusation. Sigcho-Lopez categorically denied employing any vote-buying tactics and in turn accused Acevedo of a "desperate 11th hour attempt to mislead and distract voters."

The Chicago Board of Elections opened an investigation into the "extremely serious" vote-buying allegation and said it would devote "additional resources" to the ward for the runoff election.

The 25th Ward is no stranger to controversy. Outgoing Ald. Danny Solis has gone silent since late January, when the Chicago Sun-Times reported that he secretly recorded conversations with embattled Ald. Ed Burke as part of a criminal investigation that resulted in a charge of attempted extortion against Burke on Jan. 3.

Solis himself became the subject of a federal criminal investigation in 2014, according to a source familiar with the probe, which is why Solis cooperated in the investigation into Burke. No charges have been filed against Solis, who resigned from his position as chair of the powerful City Council Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards, which votes on where developers can build multi-million to multi-billion dollar projects across the city.

Solis has represented the ward since he was appointed in 1996, meaning this election will mark the first time in nearly a quarter-century that the 25th Ward - which includes parts of the Lower West Side, Pilsen, Greek Town, Chinatown and University Village neighborhoods - will have a new voice on City Council.

Both candidates are about half the age of 70-year-old Solis, meaning that no matter who wins, the 25th Ward will also for the first time be represented by a millennial. Solis was a major flash-point in the race, as the candidates for the 25th Ward have attempted to distance themselves from him and paint themselves as reformers.

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30TH WARD

Separated by just 27 votes in the first round, the longtime 30th Ward alderman is headed to a runoff against the daughter of a former congressman.

Incumbent Ald. Ariel Reboyras finished the Feb. 26 election ahead of Jessica Gutierrez by a razor-thin margin, setting the stage for the two to face off once more.

The election pits two longtime allies of outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel against one another.

Reboyras chairs the City Council Committee on Public Safety, which oversees the Chicago Police Department, and has backed Emanuels agenda items on multiple occasions, including police reform.

Emanuel offered Reboyras his support at a fundraiser in September, according to a video Reboyras posted on his Facebook page, in which Emanuel gave Reboyras credit for bringing a new elementary school to the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood. Reboyras, who was first elected in 2003, also earned the endorsements of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Jessica Gutierrez is daughter of former Rep. Luis Gutierrez, another Emanuel ally who chaired the mayor's re-election campaign in 2015. Luis Gutierrez announced in 2017 that he would not seek re-election the following year, engineering the victory of his chosen successor, now-Rep. Jesus Chuy Garcia - who was Emanuels mayoral opponent in 2015.

Jessica Gutierrez most recently worked as a field director on Garcias Democratic primary campaign for her fathers Congressional seat. She ran to Reboyras left, with the Chicago Teachers Unions endorsement, a vow to join the Progressive Caucus, and hope that Emanuels support would prove detrimental to Reboyras.

The 30th Ward includes parts of the Belmont-Cragin, Portage Park and Irving Park neighborhoods on Chicagos Northwest Side.

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33RD WARD

After avoiding it by the slimmest of margins in her last election, Ald. Deb Mell is headed to a runoff election against Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez in Chicago's 33rd Ward.

Rodriguez-Sanchez took 42.1 percent of the vote and Mell earned 41.3 percent, separated by a margin of 83 votes, with a third candidate playing spoiler to send them to a runoff.

Mell ran for the first time in 2015 to defend her appointment to her fathers old seat, avoiding a runoff election by 17 votes, the slimmest of leads that materialized thanks to absentee ballots counted after Election Day.

This time around, she faced perhaps an even tougher challenge from Rodriguez-Sanchez - a Democratic Socialist that the Chicago Reader said could be the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Rodriguez-Sanchez is a Puerto Rican activist who currently works as an internship and career adviser for theater and dance at Columbia College.

When Mells last opponent Tim Meegan, a member of the Chicago Teachers Union, lost in 2015, the remnants of his campaign operation - including Rodriguez-Sanchez, a founding member - turned into the 33rd Ward Working Families independent political organization. That organization is, in part, what propelled Rodriguez-Sanchezs campaign, plus the backing of unions like CTU and SEIU.

Mells father Dick Mell was once the Northwest Side kingmaker, as 33rd Ward alderman beginning in 1975, the wards Democratic committeeman starting the following year and the father-in-law of disgraced Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

After 38 years, Dick Mell resigned as alderman in 2013, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed his daughter - then a state representative in her third term - to fill his seat. He lost his position as the wards Democratic committeeman in 2016, meaning this time around, he wasn't able to give his successor as big of a boost.

This time, Deb Mell earned the endorsement of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, which pointed to her upgrades to parks in the ward and her more progressive-leaning voice on the City Council.

Seemingly the most important issue in the 33rd Ward - which includes parts of the Albany Park, Irving Park, Avondale and Ravenswood Manor neighborhoods - is affordable housing.

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40TH WARD

Chicago's second longest-serving alderman is headed to a runoff in a race that's been rife with controversy in the 40th Ward on the city's Far North Side.

Ald. Pat O'Connor is Mayor Rahm Emanuel's floor leader who succeeded Ald. Ed Burke as chair of the powerful City Council Committee on Finance when Burke was forced out amid a corruption charge. O'Connor was first elected in 1983 and, along with Burke, is one of the last two remaining City Council members who were part of the "Vrdolyak 29," a majority-white group of aldermen who stymied the agenda of Mayor Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, in the 1980s.

O'Connor - who had previously floated the possibility of retiring - earned 33.3 percent of the vote against four other candidates in the Feb. 26 election, and will now face Andre Vasquez, who took 20.1 percent of the vote, in the runoff election.

Currently working as a senior manager for AT&T, Vasquez is a Democratic Socialist who has said he got seriously involved in politics when he backed Sen. Bernie Sanders for president in the 2016 Democratic primary. He now chairs the North Chapter of Reclaim Chicago and has been endorsed by several progressive organizations and officials, as well as unions like the Chicago Teachers Union, Service Employees International Union Local 73, and more.

The race has seen some controversy, as Vasquez was a rapper under the stage name "Prime" in the late 1990s and early 2000s. O'Connor's campaign unveiled a website ahead of the runoff, documenting Vasquez's history of misogynistic and homophobic remarks made in hip-hop forums or in his lyrics.

Vasquez said in a statement that he's "not proud" of who he was when he made this comments, between 2001 and 2010, but that "some people grow and learn and change."

He also pointed to a racial controversy surrounding O'Connor, highlighting his opponent's remarks at an October forum with all five original candidates, in which O'Connor attacked one of his challengers, Ugo Okere, for a fundraising invitation that advertised "building Nigerian political power."

O'Connor's criticisms, in part saying the flier "doesn't talk about community," drew boos from the crowd and widespread condemnation from the candidates as well as the forum moderator, who later tweeted that O'Connor was "a racist troll."

The 40th Ward includes parts of the city's West Ridge, Andersonville, Bowmanville, Ravenswood and Edgewater neighborhoods.

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46TH WARD

Ald. James Cappleman is headed to a runoff election against a scientist in the 46th Ward on Chicago's North Side.

Cappleman won 44.1 percent of the vote against five other candidates, with Marianne Lalonde coming in second with 18.1 percent, sending them both to the April runoff.

Cappleman is a former social worker who was first elected in 2011 and touts his work on developments in the ward, including the renovation of the CTA's Wilson Station, the rehabilitation of the Uptown Theatre and the introduction of new businesses.

Lalonde is a scientific research consultant with a Ph.D in chemistry who has worked on Capitol Hill and has lived in Uptown for three years. Running to Cappleman's left, she boasts a long resume of community involvement, as a member of the Clarendon Park Advisory Council and president of the Lakeside Area Neighbors Association, among other groups.

As is the case in several other races, perhaps the biggest issue in the 46th Ward is affordable housing. Cappleman has come under fire for the eviction of dozens of homeless people from Uptown's "tent city" under the Wilson Avenue viaduct in 2017, and drawn ire from critics who say he has not fought to keep single room occupancy buildings for low-income residents in the ward, or pushed for affordable units as a requirement for new housing developments.

Now seeking his third term in office, Cappleman was previously forced to a runoff election in 2015 and prevailed with 53.7 percent of the vote. The 46th Ward includes parts of the Uptown, Buena Park and Lake View East neighborhoods.

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47TH WARD

Two candidates with deep ties to Chicago politics advanced to the runoff election in the city's 47th Ward.

Matt Martin and Michael Negron earned 39.3 percent and 21.4 percent of the vote, respectively to prevail over seven other candidates running in the 47th Ward - Mayor Rahm Emanuels home turf that had no incumbent.

The field exploded after outgoing Ald. Ameya Pawar made good on his vow to only serve two terms and is now running for treasurer instead.

Martin is a civil rights lawyer at the Illinois attorney generals office and serves on a local school council in the area. He also co-founded the Heart of Lincoln Square Neighbors Association, and served on Pawars zoning advisory council. Martin's also got the backing of organizations like the Chicago Teachers Union, Service Employees International Union and more, plus several progressive elected officials.

Negron is an attorney and ex-White House staffer for former President Barack Obama. He most recently worked as a policy adviser to Emanuel, touting his work over the last seven years on the city's minimum wage increase, paid sick leave ordinance, investment in affordable housing and more. Negron also served on an area local school council.

The 47th Ward includes parts of the Ravenswood and North Center neighborhoods on the city's North Side.The details of this story are disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.

The father of 2-year-old Ja'hir Gibbons tells NBC 5 hes haunted by thoughts of what his son endured.

"I haven't been to sleep in a few days, I don't have an appetite to eat, Im just real devastated right now," Robert Gibbons said.

Chicago police say the childs mother, 28-year-old Brittany Hycm returned from work and found Ja'hir unresponsive he was left in her boyfriends care. Dejon Waters, 21, eventually admitted to physically abusing the child the day he died, police said.

"The victims abdomen torso and arms were covered in new and old bruises, the victims face was covered in bruises and abrasions," assistant state's attorney James Murphy said. "Defendant Waters said he got mad at the victim and struck him multiple times with his hands and a rolled up shirt. After striking the victim, he began foaming at the mouth."

Gibbons says there were numerous reports of abuse made to Department of Children and Family Services and multiple times he found bruises on his son Ja'hir and his 5-year-old son Josiah.

A DCFS investigator last visited the home this weekend but Ja'hir was not there. The caseworker made plans to follow up next week.

"They went in the house and said everything was fine ... and the next day my son was dead," Gibbons said.

Waters is charged with murder. Police say Hyc endangered the life of her son by leaving him in Waters care even though her boyfriend had battered the child before.

"Its like she had no motherly instinct, how could you let someone just beat on your kids in front of you like that," Gibbons said.

Police say a medical examination of the childs body revealed numerous injuries, old and new, including rib and wrist fractures, lacerations on his liver and contusions on his lungs.

"DCFS is supposed to be something to step in and prevent this and I feel that they have failed me and they failed my son," Gibbons said.

Hyc's and Gibbons son Josiah has been temporarily placed in foster care.

A spokesperson for DCFS says they have been in contact with the family since 2010 and continue to investigate.

Donations are being accepted for Ja'hir's funeral here.March madness takes on a whole new meaning for Illinois lottery players Friday.

Lottery officials are giving away 500 free Powerball tickets to those who play the pop-a-shot game at a Jewel grocery store in Chicago. Anyone who scores a basket will receive a special prize, according to the Illinois Lottery.

Players can purchase additional Powerball tickets from the retailer. According to officials, a quarter of every dollar spent on the lottery goes back to K-12 public education and other special causes.

The #PowerballMadness free ticket giveaway will take place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Jewel located at 2940 N. Ashland Ave.

No Powerball ticket matched all six winning numbers in the $562 million drawing Wednesday night, and the jackpot rose tens of millions of dollars more ahead of the next drawing.

Saturday's drawing will be an estimated $625 million, game officials said Thursday. That makes it the fourth largest in game history, and the seventh-largest in U.S. lottery history.Kiernan Clark is used to being in the hospital. Having been diagnosed with Hirschsprungs Disease, an illness which affects his colon, the 8-year-old boy has underwent 43 surgeries. And hell be forced to spend his 9th birthday on Friday at Wilmingtons A.I. duPont Hospital for Children where hell also likely stay for the next month.

Its going to be a long month but weve been through it before, Clarks father, Kevin Clark, told NBC10.

To help cheer him up, Kevin asked for the public to send his son a birthday card. He made the request on social media.

Im trying to get him better and hopefully this whole thing will put a smile on his face and it will make me feel a lot better seeing him smile," he said.

Despite his situation, Kiernan is constantly considerate of other kids dealing with illnesses. The third-grader has gathered up Christmas gifts and delivered them to sick children for the past two years.

It was all his idea. He has all the credit for it, Kevin said. I picked stuff up and I drive it there but its all on him.

The well-wishes and cards are now pouring in for Kiernan and he even got a message from the Philadelphia Flyers.

"I can't believe that they know about me," Kiernan told NBC10.

Kiernan is also hoping to get a messsage from a Philadelphia 76er.

"I want JJ Redick to sign my jersey and I hope I meet him," he said.

If youd like to give Kiernan a birthday card, please send it to the following:

Kiernan Clark

Nemours/A.I. duPont Hospital for Children

Floor 2, West Room 6

1600 Rockland Road, Wilmington, Delaware 19803Connecticut lawmakers are considering legalizing recreational marijuana, including how they might regulate and tax it. Two committees held hearings Friday.

The proposed bills would limit the sale of marijuana to people who are 21 years old and older and they also call for erasing criminal records for people who were previously convicted of possessing less than an ounce and a half. The legislation also proposes a 20 percent tax.

The General Law Committee is considering regulating the retail sale of cannabis. Read the full bill here.

Members are also looking at a bill that would amend palliative use of marijuana statutes by adding opioid use disorder as a debilitating medical condition and eliminating the qualifying patient and primary caregiver registration certificate fee. Read that bill here.

The Judiciary Committee also met. They are considering an act concerning the legalization of the retail sale and possession of cannabis and concerning erasure of criminal records in the case of convictions based on the possession of a small amount of cannabis. Read the proposal here.

They also discussed a bill that says no employer would be required to make accommodations for or allow employees to use or possess cannabis in the workplace.

The committee also saw a bill to prohibit driving while smoking, inhaling or ingesting a cannabis-type substance, to prohibit a passenger from smoking a cannabis-type substance and to provide funding to train law enforcement officers as drug recognition experts.

No votes are scheduled for Friday. The General Law Committee is expected to vote during their last meeting on Monday, while the Judiciary Committee has until the second week in April to vote.

The hearings come a week after a group of state and local leaders held a rally on the steps of Wallingford town hall and expressed concerns about legalizing marijuana.

The concerns include that recreational marijuana use doesnt provide a public health benefit and people could be driving under the influence.

Other people are in favor of it, as long as there are some conditions.

I think it's fine as long as it's regulated and taxed, Joe Pizzella, of West Hartford, said

I want to see regulations around it and controlled and obviously not abused. Thats the most important thing. But you know again, I don't have anything against bringing it in at all. I think it's a good thing if it brought in tax revenue, Bill Murphy, of Farmington, said.

State Sen. Gary Winfield (D), chief deputy majority leader, said if marijuana is legalized in Connecticut, he wants to make sure anyone previously adversely impacted by laws against the drug gets the same access opportunities as everyone else.

We want to look at expungement of those whove had convictions for marijuana. We want to make sure theyre able to get into the industry. We have what well call equity applicants who have a different threshold for entering, Winfield said.

But opponents, like Rep. Vincent Candelora (R  86th Dist.) say equity is a separate issue and shouldnt come at the expense of whats right for Connecticut.

I think weve already decriminalized marijuana. If we want to have a conversation about expunging records for people that were convicted of possession of marijuana absolutely, we should put it on the table and have a conversation, he said.

Candelora said the concerns over addiction, public safety and the wellness of at-risk communities should be a bigger priority than following the footsteps of neighboring states.

Those are the conversations that we need to have before we take a leap and say we are going to allow businesses to come into the state and spend millions really selling a product thats addictive and dangerous to our people, he said.

The state of Massachusetts legalized marijuana and the first marijuana shop opened in November.

In the four months since, $54 million worth of marijuana have been sold, according to the states cannabis control commission.What to Know Cops in Westport, Connecticut, are trying to crack a bizarre case

Two people keep leaving boxes at random on a homeowner's front lawn, authorities say; it's happened for the past year

It's not clear if anything was inside the boxes; anyone with information is asked to call 203-341-6039

Police are asking for help identifying two people in a bizarre mystery that has plagued a homeowner in a wealthy Connecticut town for the past year.



They keep leaving boxes on the person's front lawn.



Authorities in Westport say boxes have been left in the Franklin Street yard on random occasions over the past year.

Some of the boxes have contained headless chickens, according to Westport police.

It's not clear why the boxes are being left on the lawn, but police say the headless chickens may be tied to religious or cultural rituals.

Police say there is no reason to believe the homeowner is being targeted.



Footage released by police shows two people walking down the street. One of them, who appears to be a man, pauses when he reaches a fenced yard. He lifts a medium-sized cardboard box over the fence, places it down in the yard.



Then he walks off in the direction of the Westport train station.



Authorities ask anyone with information to call 203-341-6039.A man has been charged with murder after police responded to an early morning 911 call to a Sherman home Wednesday.

Connecticut State Police said that the suspect, 65-year-old James Maharg, called 911 around 2 a.m.to report that someone fell and hit his head on a countertop. When officers arrived at the home at 99 Church Road they found a victim dead inside the home. That person has not been identified.

Due to what police described as suspicious circumstances the Western District Major Crime Squad and Danbury States Attorney were called in.

As police were interviewing Maharg, he collapsed, fell out of his chair, stopped breathing and was beginning to turn blue.

Detectives performed CPR and provided him with oxygen until the ambulance arrived and transported Maharg to the hospital, police said.

He was arraigned at his bedside and is in custody at the hospital.

Maharg was is charged with murder and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence. More details of the investigation were not released.

Maharg was held on a $2 million bond and is due in court on Friday.President Donald Trump abruptly declared Thursday the U.S. will recognize Israel's sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights, a major shift in American policy that gives Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a political boost a month before what is expected to be a close election.

The administration has been considering recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the strategic highlands, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967, for some time and Netanyahu had pressed the matter with visiting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just a day earlier.

U.S. and Israeli officials said Wednesday they had not expected a decision until next week, when Netanyahu is to visit the U.S.

But in a tweet that appeared to catch many by surprise, Trump said the time had come for the United States to take the step, which Netanyahu warmly welcomed as a "miracle" on the Jewish holiday of Purim.

"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" Trump tweeted.

The U.S. will be the first country to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, which the rest of the international community regards as disputed territory occupied by Israel whose status should be determined by negotiations between Israel and Syria. Attempts to bring Israel and Syria to the table have failed. It was not immediately clear how a U.N. peacekeeping force in the Golan might be affected by the U.S. move. That force's mandate expires at the end of June.

There had been signals a decision was coming. Last week, in its annual human rights report, the State Department dropped the phrase "Israeli-occupied" from the Golan Heights section, instead calling it "Israeli-controlled."

Pompeo had brushed questions about the change aside, insisting even earlier Thursday that there was no change in policy. However, in comments to reporters ahead of a Purim dinner with Netanyahu and his wife at their Jerusalem home, Pompeo hailed the shift.

"Tonight, President Trump made the decision to recognize that that hard-fought real estate, that important place, is proper to be a sovereign part of the state of Israel," he said.

Netanyahu, who is embroiled in a fierce re-election campaign ahead of April 9 voting, smiled broadly while delivering his own remarks.

"We have the miracle of Purim," he said. "Thank you President Trump."

Netanyahu has for weeks been stepping up longstanding Israeli requests for the U.S. and others to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan. He has bolstered Israel's traditional argument that the area has for all practical purposes been fully integrated into Israel by accusing Iran of trying to infiltrate terrorists from Syria into the plateau.

"At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights," Netanyahu tweeted.

Trump's announcement came as Pompeo was wrapping up a two-day visit to Jerusalem during which he lauded warm ties with Israel, met with Netanyahu on at least three separate occasions and promised to step up pressure on Iran.

Pompeo's events with Netanyahu included a visit to the Western Wall that made him the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the Jewish holy site with any Israeli leader and appeared to further signal the Trump administration's support for Israel's control of the contested city. Trump has recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv, prompting the Palestinians to sever ties with the administration.

Pompeo's presence also appeared to signal Trump's support for Netanyahu the political candidate. Netanyahu, facing a tough challenge from a popular former military chief and reeling from a series of corruption allegations, has repeatedly sought to focus attention on his foreign policy record and strong ties with Trump.

"The Trump administration is absolutely endorsing Netanyahu," said Alon Pinkas, former consul general of Israel in New York. "It's very rare for a secretary of state to come visit an Israeli prime minister without any apparent diplomatic reason justifying it, without a peace process, without any regional agenda."

Pompeo said his trip had nothing to do with politics or U.S. policy on Jerusalem, although for decades American officials refrained from visiting the Western Wall with Israeli leaders to avoid the appearance of recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the city's most sensitive holy sites. Israel captured east Jerusalem and the Old City in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek east Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

"I'm going to stay far away from the decisions that the Israeli people will make here in a few weeks," Pompeo told reporters. "It wouldn't be appropriate for the U.S. secretary of state to comment on Israeli domestic politics."

The Old City is home to the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where tradition says Jesus was entombed and resurrected. Pompeo, a Christian, also stopped at the church.

Next to the Western Wall is a hilltop compound revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The spot, which once housed the biblical Jewish Temples, is the holiest site in Judaism and today is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

The competing claims to the site are a frequent source of tension and lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, he said it did not determine the city's final borders. But the gesture was perceived as unfairly siding with Israel and prompted the Palestinians to cut contacts with U.S. officials. The Palestinians have already rejected a planned Mideast peace initiative by the administration.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said Pompeo's visit added additional obstacles to peace hopes. "While they are claiming to be trying to solve the conflict, such acts only make it more difficult to resolve," he said.

While previous secretaries of state have traditionally met with the Palestinians when visiting the region, Pompeo has no such talks planned.The struggle continues for stores, restaurants and businesses in a highway construction zone in Colleyville along busy, business-heavy Texas 26 between John McCain Road to Brown Trail.

Some businesses have relocated to unaffected areas of the city while others have not been able to survive at all and closed.

Driving through the construction zone many will notice a sign in front of Kountry Klippers that seems to echo what many business owners are feeling.

"Well, we decided to put 'bless this mess' up here because it has been a mess and for almost two and half to three years," Sandra Allman said. "Multiple lane closures, multiple business driveway closures. Its just been a mess and the best we can do it just say bless it and hope that we survive it at the end of the day."

Kountry Klippers has been in Colleyville for nearly 40 years and they have been luckier than most because they have longtime customers who have continued coming to the location, but even those customers have had issues.

"Our customers will still call us and say, 'how do we get into your shop?' Theyre still confused about it," Tracy Tollett said.

The city of Colleyville have launched several initiatives to help affected businesses.

Now, the city has launched a joint program with the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District to drive business to the construction zone.

Schools and parents will collect receipts businesses that are affected by the construction. The school PTA with the most receipts will win cash for their schools. The top three schools will get $5,000, $3,000 and $2,000 respectively which every participating school getting $500.

"Colleyville understands that these businesses have chosen to invest in Colleyville and we want to support them," Assistant City Manager Adrienne Lothery said. "We understand that going through a major corridor of construction can be challenging, but the city is here to work with them and partner so that they can be successful."

City officials hope the program is mutually beneficial. It will pump money into the businesses and local schools.

A similar version of this plan was used last year to help the struggling businesses.

"Our estimate was $2 million in taxable sales generated from the program," Lothery said.

Businesses owners are also rallying around each other to make sure no one else has to close.

"We all went and had lunch [at a local barbecue restaurant] to support other businesses in the area and let them know that we know what you are going through," Allman said.Ethan Couch was allowed to remove his ankle monitor this week, nearly a year since serving time in jail.

Tarrant County court documents show a judge allowed Couch to remove the GPS monitor on March 18. It tracked his location and monitored any alcohol use since his April 2 release.

On June 15, 2013, the then-16-year-old Couch was driving drunk and under the influence of marijuana and Valium when he slammed into a group of people who had stopped to help a disabled driver along Burleson-Retta Road in southern Tarrant County. In addition to the four killed, nine were injured, several critically.

The crash occurred after Couch had stolen beer from a nearby discount store, police said.

The case had disappeared from the national spotlight when Couch was caught on camera in 2015 apparently drinking at a party. The video had been posted on social media.

He and his mother Tonya fled to Mexico, arrested in the resort town of Puerto Vallarta and extradited back to Fort Worth. Couch was then sentenced to two years in jail, which he completed in April of last year.Northwest Dallas Business people secured promises Thursday for increased police protection from Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall. In return police asked the business people for cooperation confronting prostitution and other problems.

Rolando Rosales runs Wild Turkey, a restaurant and bar thats been a landmark on Walnut Hill Lane for 40 years. But Rosales said the area around his business has declined sharply in recent years.

Offices and warehouses nearby that once had lunchtime customers are vacant. Prostitutes are a common sight along the street at all hours, but Rosales said police are not as common.

"There's not enough officers," he said. "A lot of customers tell me, 'Oh the area, the area is becoming bad and so that's why I don't bring my children no more.'"

His concerns were among the issues shared with Chief Hall at a meeting of the Northwest Dallas Business Association Thursday.

"Law enforcement plays a major role in everything, economic growth, development," Hall said.

Hall said the Police Vice Squad that was disbanded for a year is back in business and will be a part of addressing the Northwest Dallas issues along with patrol officers.

"We know that this is not an overnight cure," Hall said.

Hall admitted the police department is around 600 officers smaller than it was a few years ago, but she asked the business people to stop blaming that for a lack of police performance.

"We are not unable to do our job because we're short of manpower. So please stop saying that. We want you to stop saying that. We are able to do our job. We have to do it differently. And we may have to reach out to our partners to assist us in doing some things, but we are not unable to do our job," Hall said.

It was federal officials who shut down the Han Gil Hotel on Dennis Road in Northwest Dallas earlier this month. The place was notorious for prostitution and homicide.

Hall also said an efficiency study underway now will help make better use of the officers Dallas has.

Northwest Dallas Deputy Police Chief Rick Watson challenged the business people to file criminal trespass affidavits with Dallas Police that will grant officers the power to remove unwanted people from a business location, even if the owner is not present. Watson told the Association members to call 911 and help report problems.

"We want you to call," Watson said. "We're not going to use that against you."

Some business people fear retaliation from police or city code enforcement if too many crimes are reported at a business location.

Rosales said business people also fear retaliation from criminals if they are identified for calling police.

"It's a major risk for us," he said.

After the meeting Thursday, Rosales said he had heard similar promises from police in the past.

"In reality, it's always been kind of sort of the same thing. So we probably get a little more attention this time," he said.

The long time Northwest Dallas businessman said he hopes the new dialog with police will help turn the neighborhood around.Dallas police have arrested a man who they say was involved in an argument in a Deep Ellum parking lot.

The argument was caught on video by a witness and shows a man punching a woman at least five times. The man who recorded the video did not intervene, but did call police for help, according to civil rights attorney, Lee Merritt, who now represents the victim.

Investigators said 30-year-old Austin Shuffield got out of his truck and asked the woman involved to move her car, since it was blocking the parking lot exit.

The unidentified 24-year-old woman told police she moved her car into the parking lot and said Shuffield then approached her and started arguing, police said.

Police said the verbal dispute then turned physical when Shuffield slapped the woman's phone from her hand as she tried to call 911.

Video obtained by NBC 5 from witnesses on-scene shows moments after Shuffield slapped the woman's phone from her hand, she hits him, then he starts punching the woman, at least five times.

Shuffield has been charged with Assault - Bodily Injury and Interference with an Emergency Call. He was booked into the Dallas County Jail, but has since been released on $2,000 bond. Merritt tells NBC 5 his client is now fearful because he's out of jail. He's also seeking stiffer felony charges.Dallas police Friday linked a sting of armed robberies in three North Texas cities to the suspects in a Friday morning robbery at a Tom Thumb store in far North Dallas.

One suspect was in custody and another on the run after the holdup near the intersection of North Preston Road at Belt Line Road.

About 5:30 a.m. Dallas police officers arrived to find two armed men walking out of the building. One man was arrested, but the second ran back into the store.

As the first one tried to escape he dropped a gun that was later recovered from a trash can in front of the pet store next to Tom Thumb.

Police helped nine employees leave the store. Two were injured. The SWAT Team entered to search for the second suspect but found no one inside.

"Therefore we believe we have one suspect at large at this time," said Deputy Dallas Police Chief Albert Martinez.

Later in the day, police confirmed another robbery Wednesday of a Dallas Tom Thumb at 10455 North Central Expressway was believed to be connected to the same suspects. Robberies in Grapevine and Denton were also linked to the men. Police were also investigating whether the same men robbed construction workers at a Golden Corral Restaurant on Forest Lane in Dallas before midnight, about six hours before the Preston Road crime.

Dallas police reported a 30 percent increase in armed robbery so far this year, but Michael Doan who owns the pet store beside the Preston Road Tom Thumb, said violent crime in his part of Dallas is rare.

"And so to see it spill this far north, and to be so brazen as to go into a grocery store at 5:30 in the morning, that is concerning," Doan said.

He said his workers normally arrive around the same time as the Tom Thumb opens at 6 a.m. to tend to animals boarded at the pet store.

"Early in the morning is now on the radar for us to be paying attention," Doan said.

His wife Sherry Redwine spoke with the police officers about the robberies.

"They were worried that it might result in injury or fatality at some point so they were glad that they got the one guy," she said.

Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall recently announced a task force has been formed to help combat the rise in armed robbery. The task force is working with surrounding cities to solve cases.

"It only makes common sense that we would work together in trying to solve crimes that are taking place in this city," Hall said Friday.

Dallas City Councilman Lee Kleinman represents the area where the Friday Tom Thumb robbery occurred. He praised the task force approach and the fast police response Friday morning.

"Fortunately the police were here right away. They were able to catch one of the suspects and clear the employees out of the store and respond really quickly," Kleinman said.

The councilman and the neighbors said the location and the time of the early morning robbery shows that people should be aware of their surrounding everywhere, at all times.

"And always, just anything suspicious, just call 911. Just call us," Kleinman said.

The suspect at large was described by police only as a man wearing all black clothes.Lake Elsinore, overwhelmed by throngs of visitors seeking out a rare wildflower bloom, says it has a parking plan.

The city's police chief Michael Lujan said Thursday that weekend visitors will no longer be allowed to park on streets by a popular trail leading through patches of orange poppies.

Photos: After Winter's Onslaught of Storms, It's Wildflower Showtime in Southern California

Rather, they will be sent to parking areas to buy tickets to board a shuttle to Walker Canyon.

The city about a 90-minute drive from Los Angeles was swamped last weekend with about 150,000 people craving to see the super bloom spawned by heavy winter rains.

[NATL-LA GALLERY UPDATED 4/17] Photos: California Bursts With Spring Colors

Officials shut access to the area Sunday as traffic was jammed and people fainted in the heat.

Authorities also asked travelers not to park on the freeway to look at the flowers.The Mexican government announced on Thursday that it will place buoys to delimit the reserve where the vaquita lives, the smallest and most threatened porpoise in the world, in an attempt to save the approximately 10 individuals that survive.

[NATL-LA]Meet the Vaquita, the Endangered Sea Mammal With 30 Members Left

The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources promised to provide social programs and jobs for fishing communities in the Upper Gulf of California, the only place in the world where the vaquita marina lives.

He indicated that tourism, fish farms and better fishing practices in the area will be promoted.

The government faces the challenge of ending the use of gillnets for the illegal fishing of totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is considered a delicacy in China.

Environmental groups said on Thursday that the government program lacks sufficient details, and stressed that more urgent measures are needed to save the vaquita from extinction.

Alejandro Olivera, representative of Mexico for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the plan "is not up to the urgency that is required."

"With 10 remaining vaquitas, it is necessary the total protection and the elimination of illegal nets of their habitat of immediate form", said Olivera.

In a report published earlier this month, an international commission of experts estimated that only about 6-22 vaquitas survive.

The figure of six was the number of vaquitas that they managed to see on the surface during a research trip towards the end of last year. The highest figure was the number of specimens that could have been heard in an acoustic system that captures the distinctive clicks of the species.

The commission noted that it is most likely that the number of surviving vaquitas is around 10.

Activists have said on previous occasions that the few surviving vaquitas are concentrated in such a small area - a rectangle of about 24 by 12 kilometers (15 by 7 miles) - that some type of floating barrier could be built around them to keep away from the area to the illegal fishing boats.

But the program announced on Thursday seems not to reach such an extreme. Instead, it simply proposes the delimitation with buoys of the vaquita reserve - a more extensive area - although it is very clear that the smugglers know very well where the reserve begins.

The plan proposes fish farms, safe nets for the vaquita and sport fishing for totoaba as a potential source of income for fishermen.

But it will be difficult for these measures to replace the thousands of dollars sometimes perceived by fishermen for a swim bladder of good size totoaba.What to Know Widows of police officers killed in the line of duty packed a courtroom for the sentencing of Lorraine Shanley, a fellow widow who they say spoiled their charity's reputation

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein sentenced the 69-year-old widow to two years in prison for stealing $400,000 from the Survivors of the Shield charity

A woman who let Shanley handle finances say other widows now think she was in on it and won't talk to her anymore

Widows of police officers killed in the line of duty packed a courtroom Tuesday for the sentencing of a fellow widow who they say spoiled their charity's reputation by stealing $400,000.

Several widows told U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein about the damage done by Lorraine Shanley before he sentenced the 69-year-old widow to two years in prison for stealing from the Survivors of the Shield charity, formed in 1988 to aid surviving spouses and their children.

Shanley pleaded guilty in September to bank and tax fraud, admitting to defrauding the charity from 2012 to 2017 of $400,000, more than 20% of the donations received during the time period. A defense lawyer said about $290,000 can be paid back of roughly $406,000 ordered owed as restitution to the charity.

Prosecutors say she spent the money on personal indulgences, including concert tickets, shopping sprees, landscaping, taxis, groceries and family vacations.

Defense arguments that she made errors in judgment in response to family hardships and financial pressures drew skepticism from prosecutors.

To be sure, Shanley has faced terrible tragedy and many difficulties  the premature death of her husband and several family members, as well as children and other relatives struggling, emotionally, physically, and financially through drug addiction, divorce, disability, and special needs, prosecutors wrote in court papers.

But they added that her personal hardships are counterbalanced by her victimization of those very people who faced similar circumstances.

She learned about their struggles, comforted them, and assured them that SOS was there to help. Yet all the while, she was pocketing the money that had been donated to support them, prosecutors said.

Shanley apologized, saying she had no one to blame but myself, before several women who once trusted her to write checks for the charity spoke.

Mary Beth O'Neill, a co-founder of the group whose husband was shot and killed by a career criminal in February 1984, said she was in disbelief when she learned of Shanley's crime.

She has really stolen our reputation and that hurts, O'Neill told the judge. I do not speak out of anger or revenge. There's no happiness in this. There's no happy ending.

Kathleen Vigiano, the group's president and the widow of a police detective, said she has worked for the past two years trying to restore the charity's reputation, including by tightening financial controls, by seeking legislation to provide scholarships for children and by reducing homeowners' taxes.

Our reputation is ruined, she said. She stole from us.

The women said they felt most hurt because of the damage Shanley did to the charity's ability to raise money, harming the aid to women who often must rely on small pensions.

Marie Dziergowski said she considered Shanley her friend after she was the first widow to come to her home after her husband was killed in 1999, but she now feels betrayed because she and Shanley shared check-writing duties and some widows now think she was also to blame.

Now, my reputation is ruined. I have widows who won't talk to me," she said. I say: Merry Christmas. They won't answer."

She said Shanley had signed her name on some checks.

Thank God the federal agents were able to see that wasn't my signature, Dziergowski said.In the midst of a regional crisis over Venezuela and tough economic straits, the Cuban government is about to launch a sweeping makeover of its centrally planned, single-party system with dozens of new laws that could reshape everything from criminal justice to the market economy.

Nearly a year of debate and discussion ended last month with the approval of Cuba's first constitutional reform since 1976. Some observers see the new constitution as a merely cosmetic update aimed at assuring one of the world's last communist systems won't get another revamp until long after the passing of its founding fathers, now in their late 80s and early 90s. Others see the potential for a slow-moving but deep set of changes that will speed the modernization of Cuba's economically stagnant authoritarian bureaucracy.

Cuban legal experts told The Associated Press that they expect the government to send the National Assembly between 60 and 80 new laws over the next two years to replace ones rendered obsolete by the new constitution. The assembly is virtually certain to unanimously approve all government proposals, as it has for decades.

"I expect to see big changes in Cuba with the new constitution," said Julio Antonio Fernandez, a constitutional law professor at the University of Havana. "A new state structure, a transformed political system, led by the Communist Party, of course, but different and confronting big challenges."

One of the first changes will be in Cuba's political system. Within five months, the government is required to pass a new electoral law that splits the roles of head of state and government between the current president and the new post of prime minister. A new set of governors will replace the Communist Party first secretaries as the highest official in Cuba's 15 provinces.

While the Communist Party remains the only permitted political group, the wording of the new constitution could allow voters to choose between various candidates rather than simply voting yes or no for a candidate pre-selected by a government commission, experts said.

A new business law could create a formal role for small and medium-sized businesses. Until now, all private workers and employers are legally classified as "self-employed," leading to situations in which hundreds of thousands of "self-employed" waiters, cooks, maids, construction workers and janitors go to work each day for the "self-employed" owners of restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts and construction contractors.

Business owners hope legal recognition will bring them privileges like the right to import and export, now held only by state monopolies.

"There's a full-on effort to give life to the new constitution, to accompany it with laws so it doesn't become a dead letter," Homero Acosta, the secretary of the Cuba's Council of State and one of the key figures in the reform, said on state television this month.

A new family code is expected to address the issue of gay marriage, which was struck from the new constitution after popular resistance.

A new criminal code will for the first time create the right of habeas corpus, requiring the state to justify a citizens' detention, and give Cubans the right to know what information the government holds about them.

The revamped criminal law could also, experts said, contain stronger provisions against domestic violence, greater environmental protections and animal rights and create tougher punishments for government mismanagement and corruption.

Cuba's powerful military and intelligence ministries employ tens of thousands of agents and informants, control much of the economy and are often exempted from the rules governing civilian sectors of the government. Whether the Interior Ministry and Revolutionary Armed Forces will be subject to the new limits in the legal reform remains an open question.

Cuba is in its fourth year of expected zero to minimal growth, and the government feels increasingly threatened by the Trump administration's effort to overthrow Venezuela's Cuban-allied government as the first step in an offensive against socialist states throughout Latin America.

Only 78 percent of registered voters, some 6.8 million out of 8.7 million, said "yes" to the new constitution in a Feb. 24 referendum. That's a massive approval rate in any other country but relatively low for Cuba, where voters usually approve government proposals by margins well over 90 percent.

In this case, some 700,000 voted "no," while others abstained or filed marred or blank ballots.

That could put unusual pressure on the government to come up with new laws that win widespread public approval, rather than simply imposing new regulations after closed meetings of Communist Party and government leaders.

"The referendum showed that Cuba is a more politically diverse society than it often seems on the surface," constitutional lawyer Raudiel Pena said. "Now let's hope that lawmakers really take that into consideration."Embattled Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax compared himself to Jim Crow-era lynching victims in a surprise speech Sunday, as he resists widespread calls to resign prompted by allegations of sexual assault.

Fairfax strongly defended himself and lashed out at his critics from his rostrum in the state Senate as the 2019 legislative session was coming to a close.

"I've heard much about anti-lynching on the floor of this very Senate, where people were not given any due process whatsoever, and we rue that," Fairfax said, referencing legislation the General Assembly passed expressing "profound regret" for lynchings in Virginia between 1877 and 1950.

"And we talk about hundreds, at least 100 terror lynchings that have happened in the Commonwealth of Virginia under those very same auspices. And yet we stand here in a rush to judgment with nothing but accusations and no facts and we decide that we are willing to do the same thing," Fairfax said.

When he finished his five-minute impromptu speech, stunned senators sat in awkward silence.

Fairfax, who is black, has been accused by two women of sexual assault. Both of the alleged victims are African American.

Earlier this month, Vanessa Tyson publicly accused Fairfax of forcing her to perform oral sex in his hotel room during the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004. Her lawyer said last week that Tyson plans to meet with prosecutors in Massachusetts to detail her allegations.

Meredith Watson has also publicly accused Fairfax of sexual assault. She issued a statement accusing him of raping her 19 years ago while they were students at Duke University.

The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they are victims of sexual assault, but both women have come forward voluntarily.

House Republicans announced plans Friday to hold a public hearing where Fairfax, Tyson and Watson can testify, a move that Fairfax and some Democrats have panned as a political ploy.

Fairfax has indicated he won't participate in the hearing, leaving it an open question whether Republicans will try to compel him to testify. Fairfax has said the accusations should be investigated by law enforcement.

Republican House Majority Leader Del. Todd Gilbert said Fairfax's comments about lynchings were highly inappropriate.

"That is the worst, most disgusting type of rhetoric he could have invoked," Gilbert said. "It's entirely appropriate for him to talk about due process and we would intend to offer him every ounce of it, and he's welcome to take advantage of that anytime he would like."

But black lawmakers did not object to Fairfax's speech.

"He said what he needed to say," said Sen. Mamie Locke.

Virginia Legislative Black Caucus Chairman Del. Lamont Bagby said he's heard similar rhetoric from his constituents, who have expressed concerns that Fairfax is being treated unfairly because of his race.

Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, both Democrats and both white, are embroiled in their own scandal after acknowledging they wore blackface in the 1980s. Northam has also resisted widespread calls to resign and instead said he intends to devote his remaining years in office to addressing the state's deep and lingering racial divisions.

The trio of scandals has rocked Virginia politics and exposed deep divides among Democrats.

State Democrats have expressed fear that the uproar over the governor could jeopardize their chances of taking control of the GOP-dominated Virginia legislature this year. The party made big gains in 2017, in part because of a backlash against President Donald Trump, and has moved to within striking distance of a majority in both houses.

At the same time, the Democrats nationally have taken a hard line against misconduct in their ranks because women and minorities are a vital part of their base and they want to be able to criticize Trump's behavior without looking hypocritical.Classrooms across the state may soon be required to restrict or ban smartphones under a new bill making its way through the California State Assembly.

The bill, introduced by Assemblymember Albert Muratsuchi of Torrance, was sent to the State Assembly Education Committee for the second time Wednesday.

Cell phones can be a distraction in the classroom, and there are social and emotional consequences to too much use, said Muratsuchi.

While California school districts currently have the authority to prohibit or not prohibit smartphones in their schools, the new bill would require districts to adopt a policy that limits phone use in some capacity.

The smartphone restriction or ban would be in effect when students were under the supervision and control of teachers or staff.

Though, there would be instances that students would be allowed to use their phones, including in cases of emergencies, if a teacher gives permission, or if a licensed physician decides a phone is necessary for the health or well-being of a student.

The proposed ban stated that when students use their phones during classes, it interferes with the educational mission of the schools, lowers pupil performance, particularly among low-achieving pupils, promotes cyberbullying, and contributes to an increase in teenage anxiety, depression, and suicide.

In a released statement, Muratsuchis office said 95 percent of families with children as old as eight years old have smartphones. In 2013, that number was 63 percent.

The number of 14- to 17-year-olds who experience clinical levels of depression jumped more than 60 percent, according to the assemblymembers office.

According to studies, kids who are heavy users of social media are showing signs of depression and other mental health problems in greater numbers, Muratsuchi said. Studies have also shown that restricting cell phone use improves pupil performance.

The assemblymember pointed to France, which in September 2018, adopted a nationwide ban on smartphones in elementary and middle schools.

Muratsuchi also referenced a study published in May 2015 by the London School of Economics and Political Science that showed test scores reportedly improve when schools banned smartphones.

Lastly, the bill discussed the 2017 book iGen by San Diego State University professor Dr. Jean Twenge. The proposal cited Twenges work, saying eighth graders who spend 10 or more hours per week on social media are 56 percent more likely to describe themselves as unhappy than those who devote less time to social media.

Under the bill, schools would be reimbursed for any costs associated with the restriction or ban, according to Muratsuchis office.

The bill was read for the first time on Jan. 24. It was referred to the State Assembly Education Committee on March 18, where it was amended and re-read over the following two days.

The bills next scheduled committee hearing is April 10, where if approved, it would move to the Appropriations Committee. If approved there, the State Assembly would then vote on the bill.

To read the bill in its entirety, click here.We kick off our Friday with crisp conditions out the door. Temperatures will be in the low to mid-50s across the area. Don't forget the jacket this morning!

Full sunshine is expected from start to finish today with highs landing slightly below normal at 76.

1. - Miami Beach Police Cracking Down on Spring Break Chaos

Miami Beach is adding dozens of additional officers this weekend as the city vows to crack down on out of control spring breakers.

Commissioners held a special meeting Tuesday to discuss beefing up its police presence following an increase in traffic and multiple brawls and other incidents that were caught on camera and posted on social media. In addition to the increased officers, police will be more strictly enforcing some city ordinances concerning drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana in public.

For more information, click here.

No. 2 - Body Found in Tamarac is Missing Airport Worker: BSO

Authorities have confirmed that a body found behind an abandoned building in Tamarac Wednesday is a Fort Lauderdale airport worker who went missing last week.

The body discovered behind the building at 3700 W. Commercial Boulevard was confirmed to be 40-year-old Mackoni Hall, of Hollywood, Broward Sheriff's Office officials said Thursday.

For more information, click here.

No. 3 - Coast Guard to Offload 27,000-Pound, $360M Cocaine Seizure

The U.S. Coast Guard on Friday will offload some 27,000 pounds of cocaine seized in waters worth some $360 million.

The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Tampa will offload the cocaine seized in the international waters of the Eastern Pacific Ocean at Miami Beach.

For more information, click here.

No. 4 - President Trump to meet with Caribbean leaders at Mar-a-Lago

The White House says President Donald Trump will meet with leaders of five Caribbean nations on Friday in an effort to strengthen cooperation on security and trade issues.

The meeting at Mar-a-Lago, the President's Florida resort on Palm Beach, will feature leaders from the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia.

No. 5 - Trump Confident Mueller Report Won't Show Conspiracy, Sources Say

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he believes special counsel Robert Mueller's report should be released to the public, even as he disparaged its very existence as "ridiculous."

"Let it come out, let people see it," Trump told reporters as he left the White House on Wednesday for a trip to Ohio. "Let's see whether or not it's legit."

Mueller is expected to present a report to the Justice Department any day now outlining the findings of his nearly two-year investigation into Russian election meddling, possible collusion with Trump campaign officials and possible obstruction of justice by Trump.

For more information, click here.

No. 6 - Miami-Dade Police Department Introduces Pet Therapy Program

The Miami-Dade Police Department's Kendall District and Miami-Dade Animal Services are holding a pet therapy program event in which residents will have the opportunity to meet MDPD's dog Sparky and his handler.

The event will be held at 10 a.m. at the Petco located at 6200 S Dixie Hwy. in South Miami.Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship.

They pay anywhere from $20,000 to sometimes more than $50,000 to brokers who arrange their travel documents, accommodations and hospital stays, often in Florida.

While the cost is high, their children will be rewarded with opportunities and travel advantages not available to their Russian countrymen. The parents themselves may benefit someday as well.

And the decidedly un-Russian climate in South Florida and the posh treatment they receive in the maternity wards  unlike dismal clinics back home  can ease the financial sting and make the practice seem more like an extended vacation.

The Russians are part of a wave of "birth tourists" that includes sizable numbers of women from China and Nigeria.

President Donald Trump has spoken out against the provision in the U.S. Constitution that allows "birthright citizenship" and has vowed to end it, although legal experts are divided on whether he can actually do that.

Although there have been scattered cases of authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies for visa fraud or tax evasion, coming to the U.S. to give birth is fundamentally legal. Russians interviewed by The Associated Press said they were honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even showed signed contracts with doctors and hospitals.

There are no figures on how many foreign women travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter immigration laws, estimated that in 2012, about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the U.S., then left the country.

The Russian contingent is clearly large. Anton Yachmenev of the Miami Care company that arranges such trips, told the AP that about 150 Russian families a year use his service, and that there are about 30 such companies just in the area.

South Florida is popular among Russians not only for its tropical weather but also because of the large Russian-speaking population. Sunny Isles Beach, a city just north of Miami, is even nicknamed "Little Moscow."

"With $30,000, we would not be able to buy an apartment for our child or do anything, really. But we could give her freedom. That's actually really cool," said Olga Zemlyanaya, who gave birth to a daughter in December and was staying in South Florida until her child got a U.S. passport.

An American passport confers many advantages. Once the child turns 21, he or she can apply for "green card" immigration status for the parents.

A U.S. passport also gives the holder more travel opportunities than a Russian one; Americans can make short-term trips to more than 180 countries without a visa, while Russians can go visa-free only to about 80.

Traveling to the U.S. on a Russian passport often requires a laborious interview process for a visa. Just getting an appointment for the interview can take months.

Some Russians fear that travel opportunities could diminish as tensions grow between Moscow and the West, or that Russia might even revert to stricter Soviet-era rules for leaving the country.

"Seeing the conflict growing makes people want to take precautions because the country might well close its borders. And if that happens, one would at least have a passport of a different country and be able to leave," said Ilya Zhegulev, a journalist for the Latvia-based Russian website Meduza that is sharply critical of the Kremlin.

Last year, Zhegulev sold two cars to finance a trip to California for him and his wife so she could give birth to their son.

Trump denounced birthright citizenship before the U.S. midterm election, amid ramped up rhetoric on his hard-line immigration policies. The president generally focuses his ire on the U.S.-Mexico border. But last fall he mentioned he was considering executive action to revoke citizenship for babies born to non-U.S. citizens on American soil. No executive action has been taken.

The American Civil Liberties Union, other legal groups and even former House Speaker Paul Ryan, typically a supporter of Trump's proposals, said the practice couldn't be ended with an order.

But others, like the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, said the practice is harmful.

"We should definitely do everything we can to end it, because it makes a mockery of citizenship," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an outspoken Russian lawmaker, said the country can't forbid women from giving birth abroad, and many of them also travel to Germany and Israel.

"Trump is doing everything right, because this law is used as a ploy. People who have nothing to do with the U.S. use it to become citizens," Zhirinovsky said.

Floridians have shown no problem with the influx of expectant mothers from Russia.

Yachmenev, the agency manager, says he believes it's good for the state because it brings in sizable revenue.

Svetlana Mokerova and her husband went all out, renting an apartment with a sweeping view. She relished the tropical vibe, filling her Instagram account with selfies backed by palm trees and ocean vistas.

"We did not have a very clear understanding about all the benefits" of a U.S. passport, she said.

"We just knew that it was something awesome," added Mokerova, who gave birth to a daughter after she was interviewed.

Zemlyanaya said that even her two nights in the hospital were a treat, like "a stay in a good hotel."

In contrast to the few amenities of a Russian clinic, she said she was impressed when an American nurse gave her choices from a menu for her meals.

"And then when she said they had chocolate cake for dessert, I realized I was in paradise," Zemlyanaya added.

She even enjoyed how nurses referred to patients as "mommies," as opposed to "rozhenitsa," or "birth-giver"  the "unpleasant words they use in Russian birth clinics."

Zemlyanaya said she was able to work remotely during her stay via the internet, as were the husbands of other women, keeping their income flowing. Yachmenev said his agency doesn't allow any of the costs to be paid by insurance.

Most of the families his agency serves have monthly incomes of about 300,000 rubles ($4,500)  middling by U.S. standards but nearly 10 times the average Russian salary.

Yachmenev said he expects that birth tourism among Russians will only grow.

Business declined in 2015 when the ruble lost about half its value, but "now we are coming back to the good numbers of 2013-14," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Curt Anderson in Miami and Varya Kudryavtseva in Moscow contributed to this report.A man fatally shot the mother of his child then tried to shoot and kill himself Thursday in their Miami home, police said.

Officers responded to a home in the 2300 block of Southwest 16th Terrace around 3:40 p.m. and found a man and woman with gunshot wounds, according to Miami police.

Both were taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital's Ryder Trauma Center, where the woman died from her injuries. The man remained hospitalized in critical condition.

The couple's son told officers that his father shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself.

"They are low-key people," said neighbor Mercy Suarez. "They are just a family that gets together a lot. I can't believe something like that would happen with that family."

Officials have not released the identities of those involved.What to Know A worker for the Connecticut town where a woman was found dead in a suitcase is facing discipline for taking and sharing photos of her body

He will not face criminal charges for taking photos of Valerie Reyes, of New Rochelle, New York, whose body was found Feb. 5

Clifford's attorney says his actions were an "error in judgment," but there was no ill will or bad intention

A worker for the Connecticut town where a woman was found dead in a suitcase is facing discipline for taking and sharing photos of the victim's body.

The Greenwich Time reports that Greenwich officials announced Wednesday that James Clifford will be demoted from his position as foreman of the Department of Public Works for six months, suspended without pay for five days, and lose five vacation days.

He will also be required to complete sensitivity training.

Clifford will not face criminal charges for taking photos of 24-year-old Valerie Reyes, of New Rochelle, New York, whose body was found Feb. 5.

Clifford's attorney says his actions were an "error in judgment," but there was no ill will or bad intention.

Police have charged Reyes' former boyfriend in connection with her death.A week after Cyclone Idai hit coastal Mozambique and swept across the country to Zimbabwe, the death, damage and flooding continues in southern Africa, making it one of the most destructive natural disasters in the region's recent history.

Floodwaters are rushing across the plains of central Mozambique, submerging homes, villages and entire towns. The flooding has created a muddy inland ocean 50 kilometers (31 miles) wide where there used to be farms and villages, giving credence to Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi's estimate that 1,000 people may have been killed.

Torrential rains lifted  at least temporarily  Thursday, and floodwaters began to recede in Beira, the worst-hit city, and in the countryside, according to a Mozambican government report. Aid groups were working non-stop to rescue families clinging to tree branches and rooftops for safety from the surging waters.

"Yesterday, 910 people were rescued by the humanitarian community," said Caroline Haga of the International Federation of the Red Cross in Beira. She said 210 were rescued by five helicopters and 700 were saved by boats.

"We're hoping to rescue as many as we can today as it is not raining," she said. "Rescue activities will continue until everyone is brought to safety."

Aid organizations are trying to get food, water and clothing. It will be days before Mozambique's inundated plains drain toward the Indian Ocean and even longer before the full scale of the devastation is known.

Zimbabwe's eastern mountains have been deluged and the rain is continuing.

Aid has been slow to reach affected villagers due to collapsed infrastructure, although the military has been handing out small packets of cooking oil, maize meal and beans.

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa received a somber welcome in the eastern town of Chimanimani Wednesday. Zimbabwean officials have said some 350 people may have died in their country. The force of the flood waters swept some victims from Zimbabwe down the mountainside into Mozambique, officials said.

With the search for survivors finished, Philemon Dada is has begun rebuilding his life in Chimanimani, once a picturesque town.

With a machete and a hoe, he began salvaging poles from the mud to construct a hut to shelter his small family, a first step in what he sees as a long and backbreaking journey to rebuild a life shattered by Cyclone Idai.

He is one of many villagers trying to pick up the pieces in Chimanimani after losing homes, livestock and, in many instances, family members. Some have been taken in by neighbors and others are sheltering with church pastors.

"I can say I am a bit lucky, my wife and son are still here with me but for everything else, I have to start from scratch," he said.

Dada has a few food items handed out by the Zimbabwe military, but he knows that like most aid it is unlikely to last long, and he is eager to start growing crops again. Like many people here, he survives on agriculture.

"My bean crop was ready for harvesting before the cyclone, the maize was close. I am back to zero," he said.

He is particularly pained by his two prized bulls that did the heavy work of drawing the plow for his field. They were killed in the floods.

"It may take a year, maybe even more years just to get back on my feet," he said.

Associated Press writer Andrew Meldrum contributed to this report.A Mesa Airlines flight attendant, who as a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program recipient is barred from traveling outside the United States under the Trump administration's rules, was released from immigration detention Friday after being taken into custody when she returned to the U.S. on a flight from Mexico that she had worked.

Selene Saavedra Roman, 28, who works for the regional airline based in Phoenix, walked out of the immigration facility Friday evening dragging her Mesa-issued flight bags, according to a representative for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA who went to meet her and her attorney. She had been held for more than a month.

"Being released is an incredible feeling. I cried and hugged my husband and never wanted to let go," Saavedra Roman said in a statement sent by her attorney Belinda Arroyo to NBC News. "I am thankful and grateful for the amazing people that came to fight for me, and it fills my heart. Thank you everyone that has supported. I am just so happy to have my freedom back."

Mesa erroneously reassured Roman that she could fly to Mexico. But she was taken into custody Feb. 12, upon landing at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston and placed in immigration detention in Conroe, Texas, Arroyo told NBC News.A former Roman Catholic priest who was defrocked and convicted of molesting two boys in New Jersey has found a new vocation in a new location  teaching children English at a private school in this resort town.

The former priest, Hadmels DeFrias, 47, told the NBC News reporter who tracked him down that he is no longer a threat to minors and also claimed to be a bishop in the "progressive Celtic church."

"I don't see the children with those eyes anymore," DeFrias said in an extensive interview outside the Colegio del Caribe school in Punta Cana, where he watched over dozens of young boys and girls while shielding himself from the sun with an umbrella.

After being contacted by NBC News, the Union County Prosecutors Office in New Jersey issued a statement disapproving of DeFrias' position working with children.

NBC News has reached out to both Dominican Republic educational officials and the school where DeFrias is employed to find out if they were aware of his criminal past. So far, neither has responded.What to Know A mumps outbreak at Temple University has now reached 86 cases  adding 12 cases in the past day.

Temple's health clinic will offer free, walk-in vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella, the school said.

Health officials recommend anyone showing symptoms of the infection seek medical care and avoid contact with others for at least five days.

As a mumps outbreak continues to grow at Temple University, school health officials said Thursday they will offer free vaccinations to students and staff.

Temple's health clinic will offer the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine on Wednesday and Friday of next week. The vaccinations will be doled out on a walk-in basis and will be free. All students and staff will need to present is their school ID.

The outbreak caused U.S. Senator Bob Casey to postpone his town hall meeting at the school, which was scheduled for Saturday. He plans on announcing a new date within the next few weeks.

"In the meantime, Senator Casey urges Temple community members to heed the advice of the university and city public health officials: individuals who feel sick should stay home and avoid contact with other individuals," a spokesperson for Casey wrote.

At least one student petition is also calling for Temple to close until the outbreak is contained.

At least 86 people are tied to the mumps outbreak at the North Philadelphia university which has some 40,000 students and 4,500 staff members. The Philadelphia health department said Thursday that 16 of the cases have been confirmed through laboratory testing while 70 others are probable.

Probable diagnoses are used in cases where a person in the community experiencing the outbreak shows mumps-like symptoms. Garrow said since the viral infection can't be cured, there's no reason to spend money to carry out confirmatory testing.

Mumps can be easily spread among people in close quarters through kissing, the sharing of cups and fluids or competing in sports, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms include fever, headache, muscle aches, tiredness, and loss of appetite. Swelling in a person's salivary glands causes puffy cheeks, a signature feature of the disease.

It can take nearly two weeks for mumps symptoms to manifest in an infected person. There is no cure for the virus, but the vaccine has an 88 percent chance of preventing a new infection, the CDC says.

The outbreak prompted Temple University to change its immunization policy for incoming students by requiring them to have received two doses of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine before entering school.

The vaccine's effectiveness can wane over time, however, meaning a booster shot may be necessary to keep up the body's defenses against the virus. City health officials previously said that may be why the number of cases is blooming.

Health officials recommend students who may be infected limit contact with others for at least five days and seek medical care.Its been 18 months since Temple University student Jenna Burleigh was brutally murdered just days before classes started.

The 24-year-old had been out drinking with friends at a popular bar near campus in 2017 when she met 29-year-old Joshua Hupperterz. The two went back to his apartment and she was killed some hours later.

Burleighs family endured months of misery. After the death of her daughter, Jackie Burleigh sat in court as lawyers poured over the grisly murder details and showed horrifying pictures of her child's final moments.

Those images are not what Jackie Burleigh wants remembered of her daughter. Instead, Burleigh wants the world to honor Jenna Burleigh for the vibrant and sassy person that she was, and the person she wanted to become.

She really believed in equality but the underdog is who she always fought for, Jackie Burleigh said.

To that end, her family is honoring the young woman's memory through Jennas Blessing Bags. Its a project she started before her death. Jenna Burleigh would fill up backpacks with gently used goods - such as gloves, jackets and sleeping bags - and deliver them to people in need. Her family joined in the effort initially, but they are now taking it to new heights.

Nearly 1,000 bags have already been distributed in Philadelphia and throughout the five surrounding counties. The Burleighs have also enlisted the help of their relatives, who have distributed backpacks as far as Massachusetts, Colorado, Florida and even Canada.

We just wanted to make sure that people didnt forget her, Jackie Burleigh said. It makes my heart smile because [people] are so grateful every time you give them a bag.

The family also created a new foundation dedicated to helping people in need - a mission that inspired Jenna Burleigh even as a child.

She would go to 7-11 and buy people food, her mother said.

The foundation has already raised more than $100,000, and they are accepting more donations both in the form of cash but also volunteer time. Anyone interested in learning more can visit the groups Facebook page here.A 24-year-old North Philadelphia man held a 19-year-old babysitter at gunpoint while attempting to rob the Medford, New Jersey, home of professional poker player Darren Elias Thursday afternoon, police said.

The suspect, identified by Medford Township police as Shannon Soroka, allegedly forced his way into the South Jersey house while Elias' babysitter watched over his 2-year-old daughter, according to police.

Soroka was charged Friday with robbery, aggravated assault, making terroristic threats, unlawful possession of a weapon, criminal mischief and related offenses.

Elias was out with his wife when Soroka attempted to rob his home. It's the second time in about a week that his house was targetted, Elias said.

"It's incredibly scarry for me and my family," he told NBC10. "It was an awful feeling."

Police said Soroka walked into Elias' house and demanded to see where the poker player kept his cash. He then held a gun to the babysitter's back and walked her around the home before leaving her in a bathroom. She then called 911.

"I would say he was familiar with what I do for a living and thought that I might have things of value in the house," Elias said.

Soroka could be seen on surveillance video leaving the scene in a car, police said.

The babysitter and Elias' toddler were not injured, police said.

Investigators did not say whether Soroka took anything from the home.

The armed robbery appeared to be targeted, not random, according to police.What to Know Montgomery County, Pa.'s medical director says 20 suspected cases have been reported to health officials.

The first case of mumps popped up at Drexel University where a graduate student who lives off-campus is suspected to have the infection.

Temple University has reported 93 cases over the past two weeks.

Suspected cases of mumps have popped up at Drexel University and two Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, school districts. The admissions from health officials came Friday as an outbreak of the viral infection continues to expand at Temple University.

A Drexel University graduate student is believed to have the disease, Dr. Sabir Sahu, the school's Dean of Students, said in an email message to students on Friday. The student lives off-campus.

In Montgomery County, there were 20 suspected cases of the infection as of Friday afternoon. Dr. Richard Lorraine, the county's medical director, said none of the cases have been confirmed positive through laboratory testing at this point.

Among the probable cases are two students: a high schooler from Abington Senior High and an elementary student from North Wales. Both districts sent home letters to parents warning them to be on the lookout for symptoms.

Mumps can be easily spread among people in close quarters through kissing, the sharing of cups and fluids or competing in sports, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms include fever, headache, muscle aches, tiredness, and loss of appetite. Swelling in a person's salivary glands causes puffy cheeks, a signature feature of the disease.

It can take nearly two weeks for mumps symptoms to manifest in an infected person. There is no cure for the virus, but the vaccine has an 88 percent chance of preventing a new infection, the CDC says.

The vaccine's effectiveness can wane over time, however, meaning a booster shot may be necessary to keep up the body's defenses against the virus. Philadelphia health officials previously said that may be why the number of cases is blooming.

Temple's outbreak tally stands at 93 cases. The university has 40,000 students and more than 4,500 staff. The North Philadelphia school is offering free vaccinations to students and staff next week.What to Know A nonprofit Safehouse wants to open the first supervised drug injection site in Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood.

Kensington is a neighborhood at the center of the city's opioid crisis.

The announcement comes a month after Philadelphia's top federal prosecutor filed a suit to stop Safehouse from opening a site.

The city with the highest opioid death rate of any large city in the United States could soon become the location of the nation's first supervised drug injection site.

The vice president of Safehouse, a nonprofit that wants to open the first such site, said Thursday the group is in negotiations to sign a lease in Kensington, a neighborhood known as the center of the city's opioid crisis. She said the lease was for a "nominal fee," Philly.com reported.

Ronda Goldfein said Safehouse had considered more than two dozen locations around Philadelphia but found a property on Hilton Street. Goldfein said the goal is to open more sites throughout the city where people can use heroin, methamphetamine and other illegal drugs under medical supervision, with staffers able to intervene in case of an overdose.

The announcement comes a month after Philadelphia's top federal prosecutor filed a suit to stop Safehouse from opening a site. The lawsuit pits U.S. Attorney William McSwain's stance on safe injection sites against those of Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who sits on Safehouse's board. McSwain believes supporters should try to change the laws, not break them.

Krasner said McSwain is relying on the failed drug policies of the past.

Philadelphia has the highest opioid death rate of any large U.S. city, with more than 1,000 deaths per year. Kenney and others have come to support Safehouse's plans. Goldfein said neighbors have been notified of the pending lease.

Rendell said Thursday that the owner of the Kensington property wished to remain anonymous. He spoke at a conference in Washington on addition and harm-reduction research. Radio station WHYY was first to report the latest developments.It turns out there's a "Florida Man" in all of us.

A new social media challenge is urging people to look up what version of "Florida Man" they are based on their birthdays.

"Florida Man" has become shorthand for a unique brand of idiocy mined from the Sunshine State's never-ending news stories about people doing stupid stuff, usually with guns, drugs, booze or reptiles.

The challenge asks people to run their birthday and "Florida Man" in a search engine to find out what "Florida Man" headline pops up. Then, like all good things, they must post the answer on social media.

The challenge has become a social media sensation, which isn't surprising since the idea of "Florida Man" crept into the nation's consciousness with the @_FloridaMan Twitter account.

Since the "Florida Man Challenge" first gained traction through a Twitter post, South Florida's NBC 6 has received significant traffic on numerous "Florida Man" stories.

Three stand out:

1. Florida Man Who Told Cop He 'May Have Some Needles Between His Cheeks' Arrested on Drug Charges

2. Florida Man Tossed Over Bridge During Fight

3. Florida Man Claims Trump Bumper Sticker Motivated Road Rage Attack

Florida's Sunshine Law, a law first enacted in 1995 that grants the public access to government records, helps keep "Florida Man" alive. Many counties in Florida give the public online access to jail records  many of which provide mugshots and charges issued by police.

News outlets then have the opportunity to request additional information from law enforcement agencies, including arrest reports with possibly eyebrow-raising details.

The same standards apply for "Florida Woman" as similar stories make national headlines, such as the arrest of a Florida woman after she ran naked through a public park thinking she had a giant spider on her because she was high on drugs, according to authorities.

Another factor helping Florida unearth these tales is the fact that it's the United States' third-largest state with more than 20 million residents.What to Know A JetBlue crew member from Queens says she was sexually assaulted by a fellow employee in San Francisco, according to a lawsuit filed last week

She also alleged that the NYC-based airline did nothing even after its investigation substantiated the physical assault

The employee was forced to work alongside the accused or lose her seniority status as well as pay, the lawsuit said

A Queens woman who works for JetBlue says she was sexually assaulted by a flight attendant after a night out with a few other coworkers --- and alleges the airline failed to take action even after its investigation substantiated her allegations, according to a lawsuit filed last week.

The employee, only identified in the lawsuit as Jane Doe, is suing the New York City-based company and flight attendant Steven Tenorio for sex discrimination, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, hostile work environment and retaliation.

In a statement, JetBlue told News 4 it could not comment on pending litigation but said it takes "allegations of violent or inappropriate behavior very seriously and investigates such claims thoroughly."

"We work to create a respectful workplace for all our crewmembers where they feel welcome and safe," the statement said.

According to the lawsuit, Jane Doe and Tenorio worked on a San Francisco-bound flight on Feb. 22, 2019, and they discussed plans to go out for dinner and dancing with other coworkers. The two later met up, grabbed something to eat and were then joined by another colleague, Ronald Banks.

While waiting for Banks at their hotel lobby, Tenorio allegedly sat down and placed his head on Jane Doe's chest in a sexual manner. She asked, "Why are you laying on my chest?" and Tenorio got up and moved away.

After Banks joined them, the three went out to dinner and another JetBlue employee, Andy Rawlins, joined them back at the hotel lobby. They talked until around 4 a.m. and decided to end the night, according to lawsuit.

When they all got inside the hotel elevator, Tenorio allegedly grabbed Jane Doe from behind and pressed himself tightly against her body and said, in front of other JetBlue employees and hotel guests, "She don't know she going to my room tonight. We going to have some fun."

Jane Doe was unable to overpower Tenorio and get away from his grasp and when the elevator stopped at his floor, Tenorio pulled her out of the elevator, picked her up off the ground and walked towards his room, the lawsuit claims.

She managed to get her right hand free and dug her nails into Tenorio's neck to escape back to her room, according to the lawsuit.

Later that day, Jane Doe told Banks what happened and called the police, as well as contacting Jet Blue Crew Services. The lawsuit said that Banks confronted Tenorio, saying Jane Doe felt like he violated her, to which he "repulsively responded, 'Oh no, I was just playing with her. Did she think I was trying to rape her?'"

Jane Doe also contacted JetBlue's human resources departments. In response, she says she was pulled from the next flight but Tenorio continued working.

Another JetBlue employee reportedly told Jane Doe that Tenorio kept his scarf on the entire flight, violating company policy, and they were unable to see if there were markings on Tenorio's neck.

On Feb. 26, 2019, a Crew Relations investigator contacted Jane Doe and rather asking questions about the sexual assault, Julie Paulino asked her about sex, her divorce, and a dream she had told Banks about, the lawsuit said.

Paulino then stated that JetBlue had substantiated that Tenorio had physically assaulted Jane Doe, but he was not going to be fired. She also allegedly indicated that the victim "be respectful and profession with him, and that she could try to avoid him based on seniority but there was nothing they could do to ensure [Jane Doe] would not be forced to interact with Tenorio."

Having to check her schedule all the time to avoid contact with Tenorio caused Jane Doe mental distress and her only options were to call in sick or bid out of those flights, resulting in loss of seniority status and loss pay.

Attorney information for Tenorio was not immediately known.President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday requiring U.S. colleges to protect free speech on their campuses or risk losing federal research funding.

The new order directs federal agencies to ensure that any college or university receiving research grants agrees to promote free speech and the exchange of ideas, and to follow federal rules guiding free expression.

"Even as universities have received billions and billions of dollars from taxpayers, many have become increasingly hostile to free speech and to the First Amendment," Trump said at a White House signing ceremony. "These universities have tried to restrict free thought, impose total conformity and shut down the voices of great young Americans."

The order follows a growing chorus of complaints from conservatives who say their voices have been stifled on campuses across the U.S. Joining Trump at the ceremony were students who said they were challenged by their schools while trying to express views against abortion or in support of their faith.

Trump initially proposed the idea during a March 2 speech to conservative activists, highlighting the case of Hayden Williams, an activist who was punched in the face while recruiting for the group Turning Point USA at the University of California, Berkeley. He invoked the case again Thursday, noting that Williams was hit hard "but he didn't go down."

Under the order, colleges would need to agree to protect free speech in order to tap into more than $35 billion a year in research and educational grants.

For public universities, that means vowing to uphold the First Amendment, which they're already required to do. Private universities, which have more flexibility in limiting speech, will be required to commit to their own institutional rules.

"We will not stand idly by to allow public institutions to violate their students' constitutional rights," Trump said. "If a college or university doesn't allow you to speak, we will not give them money. It's very simple."

Enforcement of the order will be left to federal agencies that award grants, but how schools will be monitored and what types of violations could trigger a loss of funding have yet to be seen. White House officials said details about the implementation will be finalized in coming months.

Many colleges have firmly opposed the need for an executive order. Following Trump's speech, Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California, said many schools are "ground zero" for the exchange of ideas.

"We do not need the federal government to mandate what already exists: our longstanding, unequivocal support for freedom of expression," she said. "This executive order will only muddle policies surrounding free speech, while doing nothing to further the aim of the First Amendment."

The American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,700 college presidents, called the order "a solution in search of a problem."

"No matter how this order is implemented, it is neither needed nor desirable, and could lead to unwanted federal micromanagement of the cutting-edge research that is critical to our nation's continued vitality and global leadership," said Ted Mitchell, the organization's president.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has spoken against a government answer to campus speech issues, issued a statement that only briefly mentioned free speech, and instead largely focused on another part of the order dealing with transparency in college performance data.

Her statement said students "should be empowered to pursue truth through the free exchange of all ideas, especially ideas with which they may not agree. Free inquiry is an essential feature of our democracy, and I applaud the president's continued support for America's students."

The order was supported by conservative groups including Turning Point USA, which has pushed for action on the issue. In Trump's speech, he specifically thanked Charlie Kirk, the group's founder, who has pushed for action on the issue. On Twitter, Kirk called the order "historic," adding that while harassment by campus faculty is not uncommon, "it ends today!"

Several free speech groups raised concerns about the order, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which took issue with "the partisan nature of the administration's rollout of this executive order."

The top Republican on the Senate education committee, Sen. Lamar Alexander, said he supports the push for free speech but criticized Trump's approach.

"I don't want to see Congress or the president or the department of anything creating speech codes to define what you can say on campus," said Alexander, R-Tenn. "The U.S. Constitution guarantees free speech. Federal courts define and enforce it. The Department of Justice can weigh in."

Debate over campus free speech has flared in recent years following a string of high-profile cases in which protesters shut down or heckled conservative speakers, including at UC Berkeley and Middlebury College in Vermont. Republicans called hearings on the issue when they controlled both chambers, but proposed legislation backing campus speech never made it through committee.

Some colleges leaders have said they worry the order could backfire. If a speaking event threatens to turn violent, for example, some say they might have to choose between canceling the event for safety and allowing it to continue to preserve federal funding. Some say it could force religious universities to host speakers with views that conflict with the universities' values.

Still, the order has gained support from some religious institutions including Liberty University, a Christian school in Virginia whose leaders say they denounce censorship of either the left or right.

Separate from the free speech requirement, the order also calls for several measures meant to promote transparency in the student loan industry and in how well colleges prepare students.

By January 2020, Trump is directing the Education Department to create a website where borrowers can find better information about their loans and repayment options, and he's calling on the agency to expand its College Scorecard website to include data on the graduates of individual college programs, including their median earnings, loan debt and their default rates.

Trump, a Republican, also is asking the Education Department to prepare a policy that would make sure colleges "share the financial risk" that students and the federal government take on with federal student loans.Senator Bernie Sanders brought his 2020 presidential campaign to California, kicking off a weekend of free events with a Rally at Waterfront Park in San Diego.

The two-time presidential hopeful launched his bid on a Vermont radio program in February and said he plans to continue championing for progressive proposals like universal health care, a $15 minimum wage and to reduce student debt.

Sanders echoed those campaign points at Waterfront Park.

He reminded San Diego that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech from the exact same spot and championed for economic rights in addition to political rights, like the right to a job and the right to health care for all Americans -- points which Sanders said he agrees with.

"And that is why today, we say to the private health insurance companies, whether you like it or not, the United States will join every other major country on earth and guarantee healthcare to all people as a right. All Americans are entitled to go to the doctor when they're sick and not go bankrupt after staying in the hospital. We will no longer accept the absurdity of paying almost twice as much per capita on health care, while we have a lower life expectancy and worse health care outcomes than many other countries," the senator said.

Sanders went on to criticize the imbalance between costs paid by customers and revenues taken in by health insurance companies.

"We will pass a Medicare-for-all single-payer program. Health care is a right, not a privilege," Sanders said.

Sanders didn't spend much time on tuition and student debt relief but did vow to make public colleges and universities free.

"Today, we say to our young people that we want you to get the best education that you can, regardless of the income of your family. Good jobs require a good education. That is why we are going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free, and substantially lower the outrageous level of student debt that currently exists," he said.

Sanders said he's been criticized for proposing a federal minimum wage increase, but said he will keep fighting for what once seemed like an "impossible dream."

Today, we say to Walmart and other low wage employers: Stop paying your workers starvation wages. Yes. We are going to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage - $15 an hour. Nobody who works 40 hours a week in this country should live in poverty. And yes. We're going to make it easier for people to join unions, not harder.

"Four years ago, when we talked about the idea of a $15 an hour minimum wage, it seemed like an impossible dream. Well, since then, we have successfully pressured Amazon and Disney to raise their minimum wage to $15, and just today Costco raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour. We have also seen five states, including California, pass $15 an hour legislation and, just a few weeks ago, the U.S. House Committee on Labor and Education reported out a bill that will raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour. And, I believe, that bill will pass the full House within the month," Sanders said.

In response to the candidate's visit, the chairman of the Republican Party of San Diego County issued a statement criticizing Sanders and calling him a socialist.

"As a naturalized citizen originally from Sweden, I'd like to remind Bernie Sanders that Sweden is not socialist. For example, it has lower corporate tax rates than the United States, offers school choice, and has no death tax."

"We remind our fellow citizens that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have. America will never be a socialist country," the chairman wrote.

Next, the Vermont senator will travel to Los Angeles for a rally at Grand Park across from Los Angles City Hall, 200 N. Grand Avenue, at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday. RSVP here.

The California tour will wrap up in San Francisco on Sunday with a 12:30 p.m. rally at Great Meadow Park at Fort Mason, Bay Street. RSVP here.

Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary. He became renowned for long, impassioned stump speeches in which he railed against political corruption.

One of those rallies was held in San Diego County's National City but his campaign was accused of failing to pay for the event.

More than a year after the rally, National City Mayor Ron Morrison told NBC 7 the Bernie Sanders Campaign still owed the city more than $31,000.

After several attempts to reach the candidate, a collection agency, on behalf of the city, filed a lawsuit against the campaign in Vermont.

Payment was received in Oct. 2017, nearly a year-and-a-half following the May 2016 rally, according to the city.

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is already filled with a dozen candidates, including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, California Sen. Kamala Harris failed Senate candidate from Texas, Beto O'Rourke.A failed effort to gut the state's open records law has landed the City of San Diego in court for violating the same law it tried to change.

On March 21, the advocacy group San Diegans for Open Government, represented by attorney and recent mayoral candidate Cory Briggs, filed a lawsuit alleging that the city violated the California Public Records Act for refusing to turn over email attachments that San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliotts Office sent to State Senator Ben Hueso about State Bill 615.

The legislation, sponsored by the City Attorney, placed additional requirements on the public before filing public records lawsuits. At the same time, the bill made it harder for attorneys to collect fees when a public agency was found to have improperly withheld public documents.

Elliott defended her push for the changes to the law in a March 1 editorial in the Times of San Diego. In it, she stated that frivolous public records lawsuits divert hundreds of thousands of dollars from essential city services into the pockets of attorneys. Those attorneys, wrote Elliott, benefitted from mistakes public agencies make while compiling requests for public records.

If just one sheet of paper is inadvertently overlooked by any one of the dozens of city employees who are asked to search for records, it can lead to an expensive judgment against taxpayers, wrote Elliott.

The bill, however, drew wide-ranging criticism. And, within weeks, Hueso pulled it from consideration.

After hearing from stakeholders on both sides, I concluded the discussion about how to accomplish efficiency in that system requires a lengthier conversation between all interested parties, said Hueso in a statement.

However, before Hueso pulled the bill, media, as well as advocates, submitted requests to view emails and writings to and from Elliotts office and Huesos staff.

NBC 7 Investigates requested the same emails San Diegans for Open Government is suing for on Wednesday. The city attorneys office said they were withholding the records under a work product exemption.

In response to the requests to view the correspondence between Hueso and Elliott, the city attorney released a series of emails between Elliotts Chief of Staff Gerry Braun and Huesos office.

Thank you and (Senator Hueso) for considering adding City Attorney Mara Elliotts unbacked bill to your legislative portfolio, wrote Braun in a Feb. 21 email to Hueso staffer Ana Molino.

In the email, Braun touted the bill as a vehicle to diffuse CPRA disputes and expedite production of public records. The email mentioned part of the proposal required that members of the public meet with the city before filing any lawsuits. It did not mention, however, another facet to the bill which made it harder for attorneys to collect fees.

Missing from the documents released were two attachments that were included in the email thread.

When asked about the attachments, the City Attorneys Office cited the work product exemption as the reason for not turning the attachments over.

The following day, Briggs sued the city for open records violations. Thus, sending the city back to court for the 24th time since 2010 for violating the California Public Records Act.

According to documents obtained by NBC 7, the city has paid more than $576,000 in public records lawsuits since 2010. Briggs has sued the city 10 times and has recovered $247,882 in fees; four of those cases are pending.

NBC 7 Investigates

The city attorneys office has not stopped its efforts to keep the public in the dark when it comes to how the publics business is conducted, Briggs told NBC 7 Investigates. First it was trying to gut the California Public Records Act. After that failed, when the public asked to see her offices communications with the Legislature, she claimed that some of those communications are confidential and cannot be viewed by the public. My client is certain that the judge will see things very differently.

Experts of the states public record law agree.

Terry Francke is lead counsel for open government advocacy group Californians Aware. Francke told NBC 7 that a government attorneys work done to show an author the need for or elements of a bill would not be covered by the work product rule because it was done in anticipation of legislation, not litigation.

NBC 7 Investigates

Expert Kelly Aviles, who sued the City of San Diego for withholding public records pertaining to police surveillance and was awarded $70,000 in fees, also believes the city attorney may be on shaky legal ground when defending Briggs clients lawsuit.

Aviles also questioned the city attorneys classification of attachments to a state legislator as work product.

First, it is extremely unlikely that the documents were ever work product since they were unlikely to be related to any case or legal advice. Second, sending them to a third party would always waive privilege. So even if a document had once been privileged, it loses its privileged nature when transmitted to other people.

Elliott's did not immediately respond to NBC 7 Investigates' request for comment.A North Park man was taken into custody Friday, accused of shooting his neighbor in the shoulder with birdshot.

San Diego police were called to Louisiana and Landis streets after 4 a.m. where a man was making a commotion in his backyard.

The man's neighbor heard the noise and stepped outside to see what was going on.

Unless you hear screams or something horrific going on, you dont pay much attention, Rob Wallace, a resident in the area, told NBC 7. Always want to be observant.

That's when the neighbor was shot in the shoulder with a shotgun loaded with small pellets used to scare birds.

The neighbor was rushed to a nearby hospital with what police described as a superficial injury.

Wallace said he hoped this was a singular incident in his community, a place hes always considered safe.

Well, theres a lot of bars and stuff around and a lot of people doing drugs and stuff like that. Its like my grandma would say  4 oclock in the morning, nothing good happens if youre out. So, you just have to be careful, Wallace said.

The suspect was taken into custody.

SDPD officials said the shotgun was retrieved by officers.Video captured by an NBC 7 viewer showed a truck in flames next to a plane at San Diego International Airport (SAN) on Thursday.

Matt Chase said he saw the lift truck catch fire underneath a Delta plane. Djournee Sonny also sent photos to NBC 7 showing the fire next to a plane with several crews on the ground.

SAN fire crews confirmed that a truck caught fire underneath an airplane just after 11 p.m. Thursday.

A spokesperson for Delta said the truck was a cabin service vehicle that was next to one of their planes, an Airbus A321. No one was aboard the plane at the time of the fire and no injuries were reported.

"Delta commends the quick work of its employees as well as those from the San Diego Airport who worked to extinguish a fire on a cabin service vehicle," the spokesperson said.

The plane was thoroughly evaluated by maintenance technicians before it was put back in service. The airbus' next flight was from SAN to Detroit, Michigan Friday morning, Delta said.What to Know A victim told her mother Boykin touched her inappropriately in March 2018.

Investigators identified four victims of molestation and at least 15 of improper touching, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors also said Boykin took inappropriate photos of children with his smart watch.

After emotional victim impact statements from parents of young children who were sexually abused at a Virginia preschool, a judge sentenced a former teacher to spend the next 41 years in prison.

Taylor Keith Boykin, 27, admitted sexually molesting four girls, but prosecutors also revealed as many as 15 children were victims of improper touching by Boykin.

The judge imposed one of the more severe possible sentences on Boykin: He was sentenced to life in prison with all but 41 years suspended. That means Boykin could leave prison in a program like parole or probation in 2060.

Boykin pleaded guilty to 14 charges of sexually abusing children in his care at the Minnieland Academy in Bristow and taking inappropriate photos of them.

The mother of a girl enrolled at Minnieland sparked the investigation in March 2018 when she saw Boykin's strange behavior near the playground slide and asked her 5-year-old daughter what was happening. She told her Boykin, who the children called Mr. Taylor, tickled her all over her body, including her private parts, according to the prosecution.

Boykin would reach into the tube of the slide and sexually assault them, telling them he was tickling them, according to the prosecution. Often he pulled down their pants and underwear and took photos with his smart watch. Investigators found 120 images.

The mother told Child Protective Services, and police quickly identified other victims.

Police arrested Boykin April 20. Boykin confessed to police, saying, "I knew I shouldn't have been tickling there. I knew I shouldn't have been in that area."

At least 50 former Minnieland parents packed one side of the courtroom Thursday, often wiping away tears as the young victims parents testified about the impact of the crime on their family.

For my child, we deal with nightmares; we deal with anxiety, one victims mother said. It makes it difficult.

She told the judge about the impact of the assault on her daughter. Her husband also testified.

As a father, hes confided in me that this has been difficult, she said. Every father protects their child, specifically their little girls.

Nothing could prepare you for that moment, said one mother as she recounted getting the phone call that her child had been improperly touched by Boykin on multiple occasions. At night, my daughter has deafening, paralyzing screams. This assault has ripped through our family. It has changed our dynamic and who we are.

Her husband, a law enforcement officer, said he struggles with the fact that its his job to protect others, yet his own daughter became a victim. He spoke directly to the defendant: Mr. Boykin, you have been described as a monster. That description does not do it justice ... God forgives. I will not.

Even more heart-rending testimony given by another mother who said her daughter now suffers from low self-esteem, telling her mom, I wish I was never born ... I want to die. Then the child would go hide in a closet.

In tears, her mother added, Nothing will give my daughter back what she lost  her innocence, her security, her trust.

A father described the disruption to his family this way: We try to live our daily lives, but the actions of this predator have rippled through our community in a way no one could possibly understand.

In court Monday, it was revealed another mother first reported improper behavior to the director of Minnieland in 2016. Another teacher told the director in January 2018 she saw Boykin tickling children between the legs, and that same month, the lead kindergarten teacher told the director Boykin made improper comments about children's pants being pulled down.

Parents also directed some of their anger at Minnieland Academy management.

I will never forgive them for failing to stop the abuse in the months before it spiraled out of control, one parent said.

My child specifically, a teacher saw her in a compromised position with the teacher (Boykin), and it was not reported to me nor was anything done to report it to the authorities, another parent said.

Minnieland sent News4 a statement about the verdict, saying, "The sentencing of Taylor Keith Boykin is appropriate following his guilty plea in Prince William County Circuit Court, but can never make up for the harm and pain he caused. Minnieland Academy remains appalled by Boykins violation of trust of children, their families and his co-workers. We took immediate action to implement enhanced security measures and are moving forward from this ordeal steadfast in our commitment to provide the safest and most nurturing environment."

Minnieland's Bristow location closed in June 2018 because of parents taking their children out of the program and reopened in January 2019.

Boykin pleaded guilty to charges including indecent liberties, aggravated sexual battery and production of child pornography.

He apologized in court Thursday, saying, I hate the choices I made. Im incredibly sorry for everything Ive done.

Taylor understood from the very first time that law enforcement got involved that he had done something very bad, said Boykins attorney, Robert Jenkins. I think he was very sincere with his expressions of remorse.

It helps that some form of justice was served and that we are a little bit closer to having some closure to this but there is still concern with the day care that they allowed this to happen, a victims mother told News4.

Parents are considering legal action against Minnieland. There were no fewer than 10 attorneys in court Thursday looking at the prospect of filing civil suits.

When Boykin is released sometime in his 60s, he will face another decade of supervised probation and a lifetime of other rules. If he slips up, the rest of the life sentence could be imposed.Virginia public schools can now decide to start classes as early as two weeks before Labor Day, after the state approved new rules amending a decades-old provision known as the "Kings Dominion Law."

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed two bills into law that would allow Virginia schools to open up to two weeks before Labor Day, while also providing students a four-day Labor Day weekend.

This law will go into effect July 1, replacing the "Kings Dominion Law," named after Virginia's King Dominion amusement park.

That law, dating back to 1986, prohibited schools from opening before Labor Day unless they qualified for a waiver.

WTOP reports that for the last 20 years, the amusement park has lobbied for a later school start because it has benefited from vacationing families and working teenage students.

That law ensured the park could benefit from economic activity in the region during the last weeks of the summer.

Additionally, Northam signed into law a bill that would allow Stafford County, Spotsylvania County and Fredericksburg City Schools to open on the same day in the 2019-2020 school year.

In Maryland, a similar bill was passed on Monday, when the Maryland General Assembly gave final approval to let local school boards decide when school starts.

A final vote from Senate on Monday sent the measure to Governor Larry Hogan, who opposed the bill. However, the House and Senate passed the measure with enough votes to override a veto by the governor.A trash truck driver who had marijuana in his system likely caused a fatal collision last year with an Amtrak train that was carrying Republican lawmakers, federal investigators concluded Thursday.

The National Transportation Safety Board's final report said the crash in rural Virginia was likely caused by the truck driver's decision to go around a rail crossing's lowered safety gates. The agency also cited the driver's "inaction" while stopped on the tracks.

Drugs likely played a role as well, the NTSB said. The driver's blood contained the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana as well as an anti-seizure medication for which investigators found no prescription.

The ensuing collision killed a passenger in the trash truck and severely injured another. Several people on the train were hurt, including a congressman who suffered a concussion.

The train was carrying Congress members to a strategy retreat at the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The crash occurred in Crozet, just outside of Charlottesville.

The report said marijuana impairment is evident through slower decision-making and noted the driver's "indecision when he encountered obstacles while trying to cross the tracks."

"The truck driver's lack of response after stopping the truck and being positioned between two obstacles for several seconds is an example of slow decision-making," the report said.

The trash truck's driver, Dana William Naylor Jr., had already been indicted locally on involuntary manslaughter and DUI charges.

But a charge of maiming under the influence was dropped after a judge ruled out certain scientific testimony and blood evidence, the Daily Progress reported.

Last month, a jury found Naylor not guilty of involuntary manslaughter. He still faces civil suits filed by people who were on the train.

William Tanner, Naylor's attorney during the criminal trial, did not immediately respond to a phone call from The Associated Press seeking comment on the NTSB's report.

The NTSB's findings may have little impact on Naylor.

NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway wrote in an email that the agency "does not have any enforcement authority" and that "there is no legal action that can be taken by the board."

Former Minnesota Republican Congressman Jason Lewis was in one of the train's passenger cars and suffered a concussion after his head struck a seat.

"There but for the grace of God it could have been a lot worse for some of us on the train," Lewis, 63, said on Thursday.

Lewis said the crash raises concerns about driving under the influence of marijuana at a time when the drug is being legalized in more states across the U.S.

"We have to find a way to prevent this sort of thing," said Lewis, who lives in Woodbury, Minnesota, outside St. Paul.

"Most people don't want to go back to prohibition, but they're certainly opposed to drunk driving," he said. "You can be the most ardent advocate for decriminalizing marijuana, but nobody I know would want somebody who is high on the job."The northbound lanes of the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Fairfax County, Virginia, were expected to reopen about 2 p.m. Saturday after a sinkhole opened up during the Friday morning commute.

The lanes were closed between Interstate 495 and Route 123 (Chain Bridge Road), according to the National Park Service, which maintains the parkway. Officials previously believed that the lanes would be closed through the weekend, but the work was finished sooner than anticipated.

The 10-foot-deep sinkhole was discovered just before 6 a.m. Friday when a car traveling north hit the sinkhole next to the road. That driver apparently lost control of their car, hitting a stone wall before pulling over on the side of the parkway. First responders then arrived on the scene and found the sinkhole under the road, the NPS said.

The sinkhole opened below the road near the Dead Run creek, likely because a storm water pipe opened deep underground, an NPS spokesperson said. Authorities didn't detail if the sinkhole is related to the soaking rainstorm that dumped upward of 2 inches of rain on the D.C. area.

Road crews and engineers spent Friday assessing the damage to the road and worked overnight to repair the massive sinkhole, which was 12 feet wide and 30 feet long. Crews refilled the sinkhole with more than 350 square feet of new asphalt Saturday.

The NPS will monitor the area for settling and will repair the median in coming weeks, a release said. Drivers should expect single-lane, night-time closures to allow for the work to be done.Nigerian officials on Thursday halted search efforts a day after a school building collapsed in Lagos with an unknown number of children inside. The death toll was eight and could rise.

As some anguished families protested and sifted through the rubble for any sign of their children, National Emergency Management Agency official Ibrahim Farinloye said workers had reached the foundation of the collapsed three-story building and did not expect to find more people.

He declined to give an updated toll of dead and rescued. Officials late Wednesday said 37 people had been freed.

An unknown number of people remained missing. Frantic efforts had gone into the night to find signs of life in the debris.

It was not yet known what caused the collapse of the building containing a school in a crowded neighborhood at the heart of Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos.

Building collapses are all too common in the West African nation, where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight.

Lagos state Gov. Akinwunmi Ambode said the building, which had been marked for demolition, was classified as residential and the school was operating illegally on the top two floors.

Official moved through the neighborhood on Thursday, marking other derelict buildings for demolition.

Obiora Manafa with the Standards Organization of Nigeria told reporters that they would analyze samples of the collapsed building's concrete and steel bars "to ascertain the quality ... and know whether they complied with the national building code."

A crowd of hundreds of people had cheered on Wednesday as dust-covered, shocked-looking children were carried out one by one. Other small bodies, however, hung limp over workers' shoulders.

As many as 100 children had been in the primary school on the building's top floors, witnesses said. Some authorities disputed that, but all grieved.

"It touches one to lose precious lives in any kind of mishap, particularly those so young and tender," Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said.

The collapse came as Buhari, newly elected to a second term as president, tries to improve groaning, inefficient infrastructure in Africa's most populous nation.Joe Biden says he has "the most progressive record" of any Democrat running, or mulling a run, in 2020. But many progressive activists disagree.

As the former vice president inches closer to a third White House run, several moments in his long career loom as immediate political liabilities. From his vote for the Iraq war to his key role in passing a bill that made it harder for debt-ridden Americans to declare bankruptcy, Biden would have to reconcile his past with a party that's moved to the left.

Biden leads many early polls, but his handling of those issues will determine whether that support fades in a primary fight. He is aware of his critics, using a speech last week before friendly Delaware Democrats to declare himself a progressive while also describing some of his detractors as "the new left" and defending his record. But several progressive activists are urging him to do more to address doubts about his progressive credentials by owning up to past missteps and developing a forward-looking agenda that recognizes the Democratic base's center of gravity has shifted.

"For him to actually own the label of progressive, he needs to acknowledge and reconcile that prior harm  not just in words, but by putting forth a policy agenda that's really rooted in challenging white supremacy and economic exploitation," said Jennifer Epps-Addison, co-executive director of the activist group Center for Popular Democracy.

As for Biden deeming his record progressive, she warned that "simply labeling yourself something doesn't make it true."

Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the activist group Indivisible, described Biden's progressive self-definition as "a confusing comment" given the number of other prominent liberals in the Democratic primary.

"He's going to need to reconcile his record on policy with where he is now and what kind of policies he's proposing as a presidential contender," Greenberg said, adding that "if he's trying to understand what animates the new left. I'd recommend that he talk to grassroots leaders on the ground."

A Biden spokesman declined to comment.

The 76-year-old Democrat has expressed some regrets for past actions. He was contrite in January about supporting a 1994 crime bill whose stiffer sentences fell disproportionately on minority offenders, telling an audience that the bill's harsher punishment was "a big mistake" that has "trapped an entire generation." He has called his vote to support the Iraq War "a mistake."

And Biden is known for pushing the rest of his party leftward on some key issues. He backed same-sex marriage in 2012 before Barack Obama did, effectively nudging the then-president into his corner on what was a politically volatile issue. He was also a lead architect of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 and later used his perch as Obama's vice president to advocate for sexual assault victims, particularly on college campuses.

Sen. Chris Coons, who holds the Delaware seat Biden occupied and is a close ally, said he read Biden's "most progressive" comment as a way of championing the Obama administration's accomplishments on health care, climate change and other fronts.

"On the core issues progressives claim to care about most, Joe Biden actually has a record of leadership," Coons said in an interview. "Anybody can give a great speech on a college campus, but actually getting things done. That's something worth talking about and running on."

But progressives say he'll have more atoning to do, should he enter the 2020 race.

Karine Jean-Pierre, a senior adviser at MoveOn.org who worked with Biden during her time in Obama's administration, predicted "there are things he's going to have to answer to."

"Sometimes you're so popular, and then you jump into an election, and then you become less popular," she said. "He could avoid that by just going head-on and dealing with it from the get-go."

Even as Biden leads most early polls of the sprawling Democratic field, those surveys can't gauge how much of his advantage stems from voters' favorable views of his role as Obama's vice president  and whether that wellspring of goodwill would fade if Biden enters the presidential race to criticism from liberals.

Activists looking to push the party toward a progressive agenda aren't prepared to give Biden a pass based on Obama-era successes.

"You can only go so long on the coattails of a former president, no matter how well-liked a former president is," said Charles Chamberlain, chair of the progressive group Democracy for America.

Biden's advisers have talked for weeks about the prospect of assuaging concerns regarding his age and ideology by tapping a younger running mate early in the primary, before the Democratic nomination is secured. Those discussions, which have not coalesced into any firm decision, at one point focused on former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke of Texas and have shifted to former Georgia gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, who met with Biden in Washington last week.

Allying with Abrams could bear fruit in bolstering Biden's relationships with progressives, but she's also being heavily courted by Democratic elders to challenge Republican Sen. David Perdue of Georgia in 2020 and has yet to rule out a presidential bid herself.

"There is an important dynamic to having your name considered as part of the national conversation because someone like me is not often on that list," Abrams, a 45-year-old African-American woman, said last week at a conference in Washington.

Even if Biden adds younger, more left-leaning energy to his prospective ticket, some activists won't be deterred from scrutinizing elements of his past. In addition to his votes on bankruptcy, the crime bill and the Iraq War, Biden is likely to face further questions about his treatment of Anita Hill during the 1991 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his recently resurfaced 1970s remarks against the use of busing to diversify schools in his home state.

"I don't think his choice of running mate will matter that much," said Justice Democrats communications director Waleed Shahid, whose group worked to elect Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and other rising young liberal candidates in 2018. "Biden can't trick progressives who are at the center of energy in the Democratic Party right now into rebranding himself into someone he's not."U.S.-backed forces declared military victory over the Islamic State group in Syria on Saturday after liberating the last pocket of territory held by the militants, marking the end of a brutal self-styled caliphate the group carved out in large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014.

The nearly five-year war that has devastated cities and towns across north Syria and Iraq ended in Baghouz, a minor border village where the cornered militants made their last stand, under a grueling siege for weeks.

On Saturday, the Syrian Democratic Forces raised their bright yellow banner from a shell-pocked house where the militants once flew their notorious black flag. Below it stretched a field shattered by the battle, pitted by trenches and bomb craters and littered with scorched tents, twisted wreckage of burned out vehicles, unspent explosives and few remaining corpses.

"Baghouz is free and the military victory against Daesh has been achieved," tweeted Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led SDF, referring to ISIS by its Arabic acronym.

The fall of Baghouz brings to a close a nearly 5-year global campaign against the Islamic State group that raged in two countries, spanned two U.S. presidencies and saw a U.S.-led coalition unleash more than 100,000 strikes. The campaign has left a trail of destruction in cities in Iraq and Syria, likely killed tens of thousands and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes.

The campaign put an end to the militants' proto-state, which at its height four years ago was the size of Britain and home to some 8 million people. But the extremist group still maintains a scattered presence and sleeper cells across Syria and Iraq. It's not known whether the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is still alive or where he might be hiding.

ISIS affiliates in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, Afghanistan and other countries continue to pose a threat, and the group's ideology has inspired so-called lone-wolf attacks that had little if any connection to its leadership.

The "caliphate's" end also marks a new phase in Syria's civil war, now in its ninth year. The country is carved up, with the Iranian- and Russian-backed government of President Bashar Assad controlling the west, center and south, the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces holding the north and east, and Turkish allies controlling a pocket in the north. The fear now is of new conflict among those players.

At a ceremony held later Saturday at the nearby al-Omar oil field base, a senior U.S. diplomat, William Roebuck, said the territorial defeat of the Islamic State group is a "critical milestone" that delivers a crushing and strategic blow to the extremist group. But he stressed it remains a significant threat.

"We still have much work to do to achieve an enduring defeat of ISIS," he said.

The commander in chief of the SDF, Gen. Mazloum Abdi, appealed for continued assistance to his group until the full eradication of the extremist group. He spoke at the ceremony during which fighters marched to a military band.

The victory declaration sets the stage for President Donald Trump to begin withdrawing most of the 2,000 U.S. troops stationed in northern Syria, as he abruptly announced in December that he would do. Trump, however, later agreed to leave a small peacekeeping force of 200 soldiers in Syria to ensure Turkey will not get into a conflict with the SDF. Turkey views Kurdish members of the SDF as terrorists.

The Kurds fear being abandoned by the Americans. They are squeezed between a belligerent Turkey from the north, which regards them as a national threat and Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces from the south.

Saturday's announcement came a day after Trump declared that Islamic State militants no longer control any territory in Syria, a victory he had been teasing for days.

Associated Press journalists in Baghouz on Saturday, however, reported hearing mortars and gunfire directed toward a cliff overlooking the village, where U.S.-led coalition airstrikes were carried out a day earlier. SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel said Friday there were ISIS fighters hiding in caves near Baghouz and that clearing operations were still underway.

The site of ISIS's last stand was centered on a tent encampment in Baghouz where, unknown to the besieging SDF forces, thousands of civilians were holed up. During the weeks-long siege, an estimate 30,000 men, women and children were evacuated from the pocket, most of them ISIS family members, a mix of Syrians, Iraqis and foreigners. They were exhausted, hungry, many of them wounded and traumatized by the loss of relatives, but some remained die-hard supporters of the "caliphate."

On Saturday, journalists were taken to the encampment  a wasteland of wrecked vehicles, torn tents and scorched trees. A few bodies could be seen and a faint smell of rotting corpses hung in the air.

Scattered across the dirt amid empty foxholes and trenches were personal belongings, blankets, generators, oil barrels, water tanks and satellite dishes. Cars and motorcycles were turned to rusted, twisted heaps of metal. There were unused rockets, mortars and grenades, as well as a pile of suicide vests.

Ciya Kobani, an SDF commander, announced the end of the operation from the roof of the building with the SDF flag: "We have been victorious against Daesh," he declared.

At its height, the Islamic State group ruled a third of both Syria and Iraq, holding millions hostage to its harsh and violent interpretation of Islamic law. The group carried out massacres and documented them with slickly produced videos circulated online. It beheaded foreign journalists and aid workers and burned alive a captured Jordanian pilot. During a rampage through Iraq's Sinjar region in 2014, it captured thousands of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority and forced them into sexual slavery. Many remain missing to this day.

The group also used its caliphate as a launchpad for attacks around the globe, including the assaults in Paris in 2015 that killed more than 130 people.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that "a major danger to our country is now eliminated, yet the threat remains and the fight against terrorist groups must continue." France has been a member of the coalition fighting the ISIS since 2014.

While it imposed its unforgiving interpretation of Islamic law through public beheadings and crucifixions, the group also carried out the mundane duties of governance in its territories, including regulating prices at markets and repairing infrastructure.

Cornered in Baghouz, the group fought fiercely and desperately to hang on to the last shred of territory it controlled, using thousands of civilians, including women and children, as human shields. In the final weeks, they streamed out of Baghouz, bedraggled, angry and hungry, overwhelming Kurdish-run camps in northern Syria where they are being held.

Aid organizations say more than 100 people have died in the journey from Baghouz to the al-Hol camp in Hassakeh province, or soon after arriving.

Associated Press writer Zeina Karam contributed to this report.Bands of heavy rain are moving north out of southern New England, and into New Hampshire and Maine. Bands of snow are intensifying from northern New Hampshire throughout much of Vermont, to western Massachusetts and Western Connecticut.

Near the center of the low-pressure system, the wind is fairly light along the Massachusetts coast for a time Friday morning.

Gusts will initiate from the northeast past 40 mph, then diminish to near calm, then increasing from the southwest Friday afternoon. On the Maine coast, wind from the east will become lighter, and then pick up from the west late Friday night and Saturday.

In a rapidly intensifying storm like this, we often get surprises. One of the unusual aspects of the system is that its warmer in parts of eastern Maine than southern New York and Connecticut Friday. This is due to such a powerful counterclockwise circulation pulling warm air north on the front side, and cold air north on the backside.

A winter storm warning is in effect for Vermont where, much like the November 27th storm, its a very heavy at least 10 inches of snow. Power outages are likely due to the weight of the snow on trees, causing branches to break over the powerlines.

Timing of the wind reduction lines up close to the time of high tide. Nevertheless, we still may have some minor coastal flooding due to the astronomical high tide early Friday afternoon.

Temperatures Friday are rising into the 40s in eastern New England, but cooling through the 30s in western New England. Rain tapers to showers early this morning in southern and eastern New England, but changes to snow in the hills west.

Most of the mountains see snow all day. The exception is eastern Maine, where rainfall amounts in excess of an inch or resulting in deep puddles. We may have some flooding.

Rain showers change to a period of snow overnight Friday in southern New England with the coating possible right to the coast and Cape Cod and the islands. So we all may wake up to slippery weather Saturday morning. Once again, the exception is in Maine where it may still be too warm for snow.

As most of New England dries out Saturday afternoon, Maine will get a period of snow. The big story Saturday is wind from the northwest gusting past 50 mph, additional scattered power outages are possible due to wind damage.

[NATL] Extreme Weather Photos: Record Heat Threatens Europe

Temperatures Saturday in the 30s and low 40s.

A warm front moves north of us Sunday, with a reduction in wind speed and plenty of sunshine. We should make it into the 50s and southern and eastern New England.

A very cold front for this time of year crosses New England from north to south Monday. It is likely a wave of low pressure develops on the front. That means we may have rain changing to snow once again all the way to the south coast. Temperatures may be near 50 degrees in the morning, but cooling rapidly late day.

Cold, to record cold air moves in on Tuesday with increasing sunshine, and a stiff breeze from the north. High temperature in the 20s in northern New England, 30s to low 40s and southern New England. Wind may be gusting past 30 mph adding to the chill.

Looks like another cold and bright Wednesday, and then a late week warm-up may get us into the 60s to start next weekend. The next front not expected until later Saturday.

Stay ahead of it all with our First Alert 10-Day Forecast.An unlikely duo at MSPCA-Angell's animal shelter in Boston is hoping to be adopted together after they were surrendered in the same crate.

A cat named Kitty and her chihuahua best friend Leila were surrendered to the Jamaica Plain animal shelter on March 14 after their owners lost their home and could not find a new place to accommodate the pets.

The pet pair's bond is so paws-itively unique and true, that the two were even surrendered to the shelter in the same pet carrier. Staff initially tried to follow protocol by housing the pets with their respective species, but Kitty would yell when she would be separated from Leila.

Now, staff at MSPCA-Angell's are determined to keep them together and have even broken protocol for that very reason.

"Leila is 2 years old and has lived every moment of her life with Kitty," said Anna Rafferty-Fore, associate director of the MSPCAs Boston adoption center. "They are each others best friend and keeping them together has made a very difficult situation much easier for them to handle."

The animal shelter is seeking adopters who are willing to welcome both Kitty, age 6, and Leila into their homes. The dynamic duo are described by staff as "playful, affectionate and gentle."

Those who are interested in adopting these best friends can email adoption@mspca.org or visit the MSPCA's Boston adoption location in Jamaica Plain.A funeral mass has been scheduled for a New Hampshire couple shot dead earlier this month by an 11-year-old boy.

Friday's funeral will be held at St. Katharine Drexel Parish in Alton, where the couple lived. Forty-eight-year-old James Eckert was pronounced dead on March 15 after he was taken to a hospital in critical condition. Fifty-year-old Lizette Eckert was found inside the home with gunshot wounds. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

An autopsy revealed they both died from a single gunshot wound to the head.

Authorities arrested and charged the boy with two counts of second-degree murder after the bodies were discovered at the home. Officials did not provide the relationship between the boy and the two adults; however, the Eckerts' pastor told NBC10 Boston that the 11-year-old is their adopted son.

The child's name has not been released.A worker for the Connecticut town where a woman was found dead in a suitcase is facing discipline for taking and sharing photos of the victim's body.

Officials said the DPW employee admitted to taking photos of the body of 24-year-old Valerie Reyes after she was found in a suitcase off Glenville Road on February 4.

Reyes had been missing for nearly a week when her body was discovered.

Greenwich officials announced in a statement Wednesday that the employee will be demoted from a position at the Department of Public Works for six months, suspended without pay for five days, and lose five vacation days. The town did not publicly identify the employee.

The employee will also be required to complete sensitivity training. There will not be criminal charges.

Police have charged Reyes' former boyfriend in connection with her death.Police in Lawrence, Massachusetts, are asking for the public's help to find a missing woman Thursday.

Lawrence Police said a woman had been reported missing. They released her photo, but did not immediately share her name, age or any physical description. They also did not say when or where she was last seen.

Police believe the woman is driving a 2015 Toyota RAV4 with Massachusetts plates reading "8DN682."

Anyone with information is asked to call Lawrence Police.More than five dozen people were reportedly arrested Thursday following a massive investigation out of Rhode Island for welfare fraud.

WJAR reports 62 people were arrested and warrants have been issued for 26 people who collected about $469,000 in public assistance.

State police said the individuals failed to disclose outstanding felony warrants when they applied for welfare, which would have made them ineligible for the benefits.

The outstanding warrants ranged from shoplifting to attempted murder, according to WJAR. The suspects age range is from 22 to 79.A program aimed at killing foxes and other predators to protect piping plovers on a Massachusetts beach is heading into its second year and dividing residents.

According to the Patriot Ledger, more than 5,000 Duxbury residents have signed a petition to end the program which resulted in the killing of ten foxes and five coyotes last year in order to protect the endangered birds.

"I don't think we should kill foxes because its the circle of life," said one young woman on the beach Thursday.

Donovan Lee, a wildlife photographer, spends a lot of time at the beach watching and taking pictures of animals including foxes.

"They're hunting for a mouse and rabbit and some time for the birds, too," Lee said.

The hunter is now the hunted along Duxbury Beach because the federally protected piping plovers, have been returning to lay their eggs and raise their young. The Duxbury Beach Reservation manages the shoreline and is required by law to protect the birds.

"There is a problem. Their habitat is being reduced by people and by climate so it's important to protect them," said Krissie Lynch, who grew up in Duxbury.

Last year, 24 plover nests were destroyed, half of them by foxes.

"If you're losing half your nests due to one predator then you start to look at that predator," said beach reservation Executive Director Cristin Luzzati.

In recent years, about a dozen foxes have been killed at the beach to protect the small birds. Under the law, the plover's natural predators are eliminated because humans use the beach. If the beach were closed to the public, the risk to the birds would diminish and killing off those predators may not be necessary.

"They are at higher risk. They do get run over and to kind of balance that out, it's, 'what's their biggest threat if the cars were here?' And that would be predators," said Luzzati.

The beach reservation does have a cleanup scheduled for Saturday. It's done twice a year and officials try to keep the plover's natural predators away.A 35-year-old behavioral therapist from Woonsocket, Rhode Island was arrested for allegedly sending explicit photographs of himself to a 13-year-old girl.

WJAR reports Michael Hart met the teen when he was working at a middle school in Pawtucket. He reportedly gave her his cell phone number and inappropriate communication between the two ensued.

Hart reportedly first texted the girl on Sept. 21 and continued to contact her through Dec. 12. He and the child exchanged nude images during their contact, according to WJAR.

The suspect allegedly instructed the child to break her phone after he learned an investigation was underway. When the girl refused, he instructed her to do a factory reset. Police said no evidence has been recovered from the phone due to the reset.

Hart was charged with electronically disseminating indecent material to a minor and has been ordered to not have any contact with the child.

It was not immediately known if he had an attorney.President Donald Trump tweeted Friday that he has reversed his administration's decision to slap new sanctions on North Korea, with his press secretary explaining that the president "likes" leader Kim Jong Un and doesn't think they're necessary.

It's unclear, however, which sanctions the president was referencing in his tweet, which took Treasury officials by surprise.

"It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea," Trump wrote from his private club in Palm Beach, Florida.

"I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!"

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about which sanctions Trump was referring to, or what large-scale sanctions were poised to be added to existing ones already imposed on North Korea.

On Thursday, his administration did sanction two Chinese shipping companies suspected of helping North Korea evade sanctions  the first targeted actions taken against Pyongyang since Trump and Kim met in Hanoi, Vietnam, last month for negotiations about North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

In addition to Trump's talks with North Korea, the U.S. is knee-deep in delicate trade negotiations with China.

A person familiar with the action told The Associated Press that Trump's tweet was not a reversal of existing sanctions, but that the president was talking about not going forward with additional large-scale sanctions on North Korea at this time. The person was not authorized to discuss the president's comments and spoke on condition of anonymity.

It's unclear whether Trump's decision was related to North Korea's move on Friday to abruptly withdraw its staff from a liaison office with South Korea. The development is likely to put a damper on ties between the North and South and further complicate global diplomacy on North Korea's nuclear program. The withdrawal also is seen as a major setback for South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has sought improved relations with North Korea alongside the nuclear negotiations between the North and the United States.

North Korea said it was withdrawing its staff under instructions from unspecified "higher-level authorities," according to a Unification Ministry statement. It didn't say whether the withdrawal would be temporary or permanent. South Korea called the North's decision regrettable and urged the North to return its staff to the liaison office soon.

It was the latest example of Trump's governance-by-tweet, which has often sent agency heads scrambling, trying to figure out what he meant and trying to implement policy proclamations that have not gone through traditional vetting processes. That includes when Trump announced, via tweet, that transgender people would no longer be allowed to serve in the military.

And it came hours after Trump made the official announcement that Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria had been reduced to zero from an airport tarmac, using a printed map he held upside-down, instead of a formal statement or ceremony.

His North Korea tweet prompted reporters to bombard officials at the White House National Security Council and Treasury Department with questions. All declined to comment. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders issued a brief statement saying only that Trump "likes Chairman Kim and he doesn't think these sanctions will be necessary."

When the administration announced the sanctions on Thursday against the Chinese shipping companies, administration officials briefed reporters. They said Thursday's sanctions were evidence the U.S. was maintaining pressure on North Korea in an effort to coax its leader to give up his nuclear weapons program.

The Treasury Department sanctioned Dalian Haibo International Freight Co. Ltd. and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co. Ltd. for using deceptive methods to circumvent international and U.S. sanctions and the U.S. commitment to implementing existing U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Calls to the two companies rang without response Friday or were answered by people who immediately hung up the phone.

The Treasury Department, in coordination with the State Department and the U.S. Coast Guard, also updated a North Korea shipping advisory, adding dozens of vessels thought to be doing ship-to-ship transfers with North Korean tankers or exported North Korean coal in violation of sanctions.

Two senior administration officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. policy on North Korea, said that illegal ship-to-ship transfers that violate U.S. and international sanctions have increased and that not all countries, including China, are implementing the restrictions. They said the deceptive practices include disabling or manipulating ship identification systems, repainting the names on vessels and falsifying cargo documents.A 50-year-old New Milford man will be spending time behind bars after failing to pay $1.2 million in federal taxes.

William F. Anderson was sentenced Thursday by U.S. District Judge Stefan R. Underhill in Bridgeport to 18 months of imprisonment, followed by two years of supervised release, for tax evasion.

Anderson is required to cooperate with the IRS to pay all outstanding taxes, interest and penalties, which total more than $1.7 million, said John H. Durham, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut.

According to court documents and statements made in court, Anderson owns several companies, including W.F. Anderson, LLC, a landscaping and excavation business based in Danbury; 1959, LLC; Retaining Wall Solutions; Wil-Rent; and Jacobs Creek Farm, LLC. For the 2007 through 2014 tax years, Anderson failed to pay more than $1.2 million in federal income taxes on nearly $4 million in income.

Anderson committed multiple acts of evasion including using business income to purchase cashiers checks to keep income out of his accounts and conducting structured transactions to avoid the filing of Currency Transaction Reports. He also misrepresented on a form that was filed with the IRS in May 2015 that he had less than $1,000 in a business checking account when, in fact, he had written checks for tens of thousands of dollars shortly before the submission of that form to conceal those assets from the IRS.

Federal law requires all financial institutions to file a Currency Transaction Report for currency transactions that exceed $10,000.

To evade the filing of a CTR, individuals will often structure their currency transactions so that no single transaction exceeds $10,000. Structuring involves the repeated depositing or withdrawal of amounts of cash less than the $10,000 limit, or the splitting of a cash transaction that exceeds $10,000 into smaller cash transactions in an effort to avoid the reporting requirements.

On Nov. 5, 2018, Anderson pleaded guilty to one count of tax evasion.

Anderson, who is released on a $50,000 bond, was ordered to report to prison on April 24. This matter was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation Division. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney David T. Huang.SHERMAN  A Sherman man has been arrested and charged in connection with a homicide Thursday, according to State Police.

James Maharg, 65, of Church Road, called state police to his residence Thursday, reporting an individual in the home had fallen and hit his head on a countertop, according to a release.

Police found a deceased individual in the home, and due to several suspicious circumstances, called the Western District Crime Squad and the Danbury States Attorney office to respond to the scene.

After an extensive investigation, police obtained a warrant and arrested Maharg in connection with the incident, according to the release.

In addition to homicide , Maharg has been charged with tampering with physical evidence.

He was held in lieu of $2 million bail and is scheduled to appear Friday in state Superior Court in Danbury.

Police did not identify the deceased individual in the release, but indicated the person was 63 years old.

The arrest warrant affidavit in the case has been sealed for two weeks, police said.

On a request to seal the affidavit, police indicated that the arrest is part of a continuing investigation which could be adversely affected by its immediate disclosure.

william.lambert@hearstmediact.comTrinity Lutheran Church at 107 Kent Road in New Milford will hold a spring bazaar March 30 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The event will feature handmade goods, jewelry, crafts, an Easter basket raffle, food and more.Burnham Library in Bridgewater will present a program about World War I memorials in Connecticut March 28 at 6:30 p.m.

Historian Richard Franklin Donohue will present a lecture and discussion, with a special emphasis on Litchfield County, at the 62 Main St. South library.

Having visited and cataloged more than 220 monuments throughout the 169 towns in Connecticut, Donohue will display images of the monuments and explore trends in their design and placement.

His original research has formed the basis of museum exhibits, traveling lectures and living history programs.

For more information and RSVP, call 860-354-6937 or email cfisher@burnhamlibrary.org.Students of Mentor High School and Lake Shore Compact are engaging in real world experience at the same time as they vie for a chance at the SkillsUSA state competition for career and technical students.

Mentor High Schools Programming and Software Development pathway is a two-year program at Lakeland Community College, which allows students to pursue career-based projects from start to finish.

Projects are about eight weeks long and during the process, senior students have the opportunity to partner with local businesses.

On March 20, students involved in a dozen IT-focused projects and one welding project presented their work at a SkillsUSA Expo event in Lakeland. According to Melinda OConnor, Mentors Programming and Software Development instructor, the showcase was open to community members as well as competition judges.

OConnor said that the students provide real solutions for the businesses they work with.

The senior year, they partner with a company in order to deliver an IT solution, she said. The junior year, they have more creative flexibility  they can come up with their own prototype; their own concept.

One senior group developed an app called Valkyrie that aids first responders by sharing the users location and providing built-in medical emergency information, as well as an automatic 911 call button.

All three of the companies who worked with students this year decided to back the Valkyrie project, OConnor said. The projects team members added that they came up with the idea during their junior year and are building a new version of the app from scratch this year.

Dolbey Systems Inc. in Concord Township is one of the companies that worked with the students developing the app, as well as other groups.

As a company, since we started it, weve found a lot of value in it, said Tiffany Smith, talent acquisition and administrator for client services. Every year (students) have done something thats actually very solid and can be used in business.

She highlighted that, every day, employees of Dolbey use a check-in board that was designed by past students.

Another senior student project worked to redesign the website of Wilde Enterprises. The students noted that the project has helped them learn new skills related to their career interests.

This kind of gave me an insight at what I could be expecting when I go into IT, said Zachary McWilliams. We had a meeting with him (the owner of Wilde) every Tuesday and every week he would give us our task. Hed review and then hed also give us constructive criticism in what we were doing, what werent we doing, what we should stop doing.

For me, as a developer, Im learning code, said Shemar Cox, I need that logic to make a (video) game Thats what Im learning, learning how to write a lot of code.

He added that he used W3Schools tutorials to learn HTML and CSS coding languages during the course of the project.

Annabelle Skebe and Avery White worked together on a project for Progressive insurance, which required them to hack their own website in order to learn more about online security. Although it was a real website, it was constructed specifically for the project and the hacking was done with purpose.

(Progressive) gave us the direction to go, White said, they didnt tell us what to do.

Or how to do it, Skebe added. It was up to us.

They both added that they decided for themselves on some of the software programs to use for the project.

During the expo, officials judges visited student tables to judge projects. Based on the judges evaluation, OConnor said she will decide which teams advance to the SkillsUSA state competition.

From their results, I get to determine who goes into career pathways showcase for business and IT, OConnor said. I usually get to send one or two teams, depending on numbers.

She added that teams in entrepreneurship, interactive application and video game design, cyber security, web design, computer programming and more have a chance to move up.

With SkillsUSA, the traditional route is we have a regional competition, OConnor added. This (expo) kind of helps us figure out the straight-to-state events.U.S. Rep. Dave Joyce, R-Bainbridge Township, was joined by county commissioners and area state lawmakers March 22 at the annual Lake County Legislative Breakfast.

The annual event put on by the Lake County Development Council and the countys three chambers of commerce featured a new format this year, focusing on a town hall style question-and-answer session. This years breakfast was held at the American-Croatian Lodge in Eastlake.

Joyce spoke briefly before joining the rest of the panel for the question-and-answer session. Joining him were Lake County Commissioners Jerry Cirino and John Hamercheck, state Representatives John Rogers, D-Mentor-on-the-Lake, and Jamie Callender, R-Concord Township, and state Sen. John Eklund, R-Munson Township. The questions came from audience members who wrote them on index cards.

In his opening remarks, Joyce said this is the first time hes been a member of the minority party since he joined the House in 2012.

Joyce said that hes told the Democratic friends hes made over his years in Congress that the new class of Democrats entering the House is their version of Freedom Caucus.

We had that when we were in the majority and its tough to get to 218 (votes needed to pass a bill), but eventually Im hopeful theyll get to a point where theyll get to what we refused to do and when they have 180 people and a good idea, theyll come over and let us get the other people necessary to take it to 218 and keep it moving forward, Joyce said.

He added, however, some of the stuff just isnt going to work, singling out the Green New Deal, the climate change proposal introduced in the House by New York freshman Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

When it was first brought up, I thought it interesting to see the Democratic senator from Hawaii say, I dont think my constituents are going to like this so much, since theres no trains to Hawaii at the moment,' Joyce said.

Joyce also addressed that once again, the Trump Administration proposed significant cuts to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which funds projects that have removed toxic wastes from industrial harbors, fought invasive species such as Asian carp, restored wildlife habitat and supported efforts to prevent harmful algal blooms.

In this years proposal, as with last years, the administration proposed cutting the programs budget from $300 million to $30 million.

Were making some progress in that the first year they did it, they cut it to zero, Joyce said.

He said the administration almost did them a favor by making the cuts to the program so drastic because it made it easier to drum up support to get back full funding than if the proposed cuts had only been 10 percent. In each of the past two years of the Trump administration, the program ultimately received full funding.

Rest assured were going to get it back to $300 million, he said.

Topics in the question-and-answer phase ranged from the proposed increase in the states gas tax to efforts to save the Perry Nuclear Power Plant.

Everybody up here is working together, Callender said of the efforts to keep open the plant that is slated to close in 2021. Were all communicating and we all realize how important this is.

Callender was appointed chairman of the House Public Utilities Committee. He previously said the position puts him in the best position in order to try to protect the Perry Nuclear Power Plant.

More than 700 people work at the plant located in North Perry.

Legislative efforts to save the states two nuclear power plants stalled during the last General Assembly, but officials expressed optimism this time around.

Were really, really going to be helped by the fact that Governor DeWine and Lt. Governor Husted have expressed all throughout their campaign and since a willingness and appreciation for the significance of what these facilities mean to the state of Ohio, Eklund said. That was not the case under the prior administration unfortunately.

Rogers said the challenge is getting the support of legislators from parts of the state without a nuclear power plant. About 45 state lawmakers have taken tours of either Perry or the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ottawa County.

One question asked of the state lawmakers was what they are doing to reduce the size and expense of the state government. Eklund said Ohios government basically does three things: we educate, we medicate and we incarcerate.

Sometimes its not a matter of cutting, its about looking at our policies like criminal justice reform as a mechanism through which the results will be a smaller state government, he said.

Eklund is sponsoring a sentencing reform bill that would among other things make possession of small amounts of drugs an unclassified misdemeanor charge with a presumption of treatment. Fentanyl would be excluded from the reclassification.

Our prisons are teeming with people and one way we can address that is creative ways to reform our criminal justice system so as to incarcerate those people were afraid of and find some other way to deal with the people were just mad at, Eklund said.New research by academics at Royal Holloway, University of London, urges scientists that are looking to finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease to focus on the role of proteins in the brain that cause Alzheimer's disease. This change in focus could enable the development of new treatments.

It has long been recognised that genetically inherited (familial) Alzheimer's disease is caused by mutations in a group of proteins within the human brain known as the gamma secretase complex. The role of these proteins was first identified when mutations in the proteins caused the formation of plaque deposits found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, leading to the death of nerve cells in the brain. Scientists have spent many decades analysing this effect without identifying effective treatments.

Alternatively, some researchers have suggested that the gamma secretase complex also control a process called autophagy. Autophagy is a process where proteins are broken down into amino acids and reused within the cell, and when autophagy is blocked by mutations in the gamma secretase complex in Alzheimer's disease, cells in the brain die.

New research led by Professor Robin SB Williams and Dr Devdutt Sharma from the Centre for Biomedical Sciences at Royal Holloway, has found that the gamma secretase complex also controls autophagy in a single-celled organism amoeba, known as Dictyostelium, which shared a common ancestor with humans around a billion years ago. The conservation of this role in autophagy for all these years illustrates its critical importance in cell health. This therefore suggests that researchers should look at this process to develop new treatments for Alzheimer's disease.

During this research, Professor Williams and his group used the amoeba, Dictyostelium, as a model to investigate the role of the gamma secretase complex. The group was able to delete individual proteins from the complex, such as the presenilin protein, and monitor changes in cell function. They found that when proteins from the gamma secretase complex were deleted, the process of autophagy was blocked, and so cells were unable to recycle proteins.

Professor Williams, said: "These findings suggest that the role of the gamma secretase complex is conserved across a huge evolutionary distance, indicating a fundamentally important role in maintaining healthy cells. From this, we propose that researchers looking to find new approaches to treat patients with Alzheimer's disease should focus on restoring normal levels of autophagy in neurons of Alzheimer's disease patients to block the death of brain cells in these patients.

"Up until now, there has been very little progress in finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease. However, if scientists begin to take a different approach to investigating this illness, we may be able to find a way to block the disease. Whilst current medication slows the development of some symptoms, these are not long term solutions, but simply delay the disease progression.

"We are hopeful that, using our innovate approach to this research, we will help to refocus researchers in this area, to successfully develop new treatments for patients with Alzheimer's disease."The U.S. Surgeon Generals office estimates that more than 20 million people have a substance use disorder. Meanwhile, the nations drug overdose crisis shows no sign of slowing.

Yet, by all accounts, there arent nearly enough physicians who specialize in treating addiction  doctors with extensive clinical training who are board-certified in addiction medicine.

The opioid epidemic has made this doctor deficit painfully apparent. And its spurring medical institutions around the country to create fellowships for aspiring doctors who want to treat substance use disorder with the same precision and science as other diseases.

Now numbering more than 60, these fellowship programs offer physicians a year or two of postgraduate training in clinics and hospitals where they learn evidence-based approaches for treating addiction.

Such programs are drawing a new, talented generation of idealistic doctors  idealists like Dr. Hillary Tamar.

Driven To Connect With Patients In Need

Tamar, now in the second year of a family medicine residency in Phoenix, wasnt thinking about addiction medicine when she first started medical school in Chicago.

As a medical student, honestly, you do your ER rotation, people label a patient as pain-seeking, and its bad, Tamar said. And thats all you do about it.

But in her fourth year of med school, she happened to be assigned to a rotation at a rehab facility in southern Arizona.

I was able to connect with people in a way that I havent been able to connect with them in another specialty, the 28-year-old recalled.

Working with patients there transformed Tamars understanding of addiction, she said, and showed her the potential for doctors to change lives.

They can go from spending all their time pursuing the acquisition of a substance to being brothers, sisters, daughters [and] fathers making breakfast for their kids again, she said. Its really powerful.

When Tamar finishes her residency, she plans to pursue a fellowship in addiction medicine. She sees addiction medicine, like primary care, as a way to build lasting relationships with patients  and a way to focus on more than a single diagnosis.

I love when I see addiction patients on my schedule, even if theyre pregnant and on meth, she said. More room to do good  its exciting.

Build A Program And They Will Come

Doctors with Tamars enthusiasm are sorely needed, said Dr. Anna Lembke, medical director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and a longtime researcher in the field.

Even 10 years ago, Lembke said, I couldnt find a medical student or resident interested in learning about addiction medicine if I looked under a rock. They were just not out there.

But Lembke sees a change in the upcoming generation of doctors drawn to the field because they care about social justice.

I now have medical students and residents knocking on my door, emailing me; they all want to learn more about addiction, Lembke said.

Historically, the path to addiction medicine was through psychiatry. That model started to change in 2015, when the American Board of Medical Specialties  considered the gold standard in physician certification in the U.S.  recognized addiction medicine as a bona fide subspecialty and opened up the training to physicians from other medical fields.

Until then, Lembke said, there had been no way to get addiction fellowships approved through the nationally recognized Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. And that made recruiting young talent  and securing funding for their fellowships  difficult.

Last year, ACGME began accrediting its first batch of addiction medicine fellowship programs.

We have got an enormous gap between the need and the doctors available to provide that treatment, Lembke said.

At least the medical community has begun to wake up to consider not only their role in triggering this opioid epidemic, but also the ways they need to step up to solve the problem, she said.

Laying The Foundation

When Dr. Luke Peterson finished his residency in family medicine in Phoenix in 2016, there were no addiction medicine fellowships in Arizona.

So he moved to Seattle to complete a year-long fellowship at Swedish Cherry Hill Family Medicine Residency. There he learned, among other things, how to treat pregnant women who are in recovery from drug use.

I really needed to do a fellowship if I was going to make an impact and be able to teach others to make the same impact, said Peterson, who went on to help found an addiction medicine fellowship program in Arizona. His program is based in Phoenix at the University of Arizonas medical school and its teaching hospital, run by Banner Health and the Phoenix VA.

Arizonas two addiction medicine fellowships received ACGME accreditation last year  a stamp of approval that made the programs desirable choices for up-and-coming physicians, Peterson said.

Not every doctor who plans to treat substance use disorder needs to do a fellowship, he said. In fact, his goal is to integrate addiction medicine into primary care settings.

But a specialist can serve as a referral center and resource hub for community doctors.

For example, physicians can learn from a specialist such as Peterson how to provide medication-assisted treatment like buprenorphine.

Public health leaders have been pushing to get more physicians trained in evidence-based treatment like buprenorphine, which has been shown to reduce the risk of death among people who have recovered from an opioid overdose.

As we provide more education and more support to primary care physicians, they will feel more comfortable screening and treating for addiction, Peterson said.

Petersons own journey into addiction medicine began during a rotation with a family doctor in rural Illinois.

In moments that most doctors find uncomfortable  maybe a patient comes in to request pain medication and youre seeing the negative side effects  he did not shy away from that situation, Peterson said. He addressed it head-on.

It was a formative experience for Peterson  one he wants other young doctors to have. And he recognizes the urgency.

In 20 or 30 years from now, Peterson said, those medical students are going to look back at my current generation of doctors, and we will be judged by how we responded to this epidemic, in the same way he and his peers now look back at how doctors handled the HIV epidemic.

One of the first steps in stopping the epidemic, he said, is making sure there are enough doctors on the ground who know how to respond.

Many of todays medical students, people like Michelle Peterson (no relation to Luke), say they feel the calling, too.

Shes in her first year at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and became interested in addiction after working at an outpatient treatment center.

She said shes already learning about addiction in her classes, hearing from doctors in the field and seeing others classmates equally engaged.

Its definitely not just me, she said. There are quite a few people here really interested in addiction.

Its a trend she and her mentors hope will continue.

This story is part of a partnership that includes KJZZ, NPR and Kaiser Health News.Beware the ball pit. Ball pits used in children's physical therapy - similar to those made popular by restaurants catering to families - may contribute to germ transmission between patients, according to new research published in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC), the journal of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, published by Elsevier.

The popularity of ball pits has increased since mainstream commercial restaurants installed them nationwide for children in the 1980s, and they are often found to be contaminated with visible dirt, vomit, feces, or urine, providing a permissive environment for contamination. Similar ball pits are commonly used in pediatric physical therapy to provide stimulation to children with sensory or motor impairments. According to the study, clinics may go days or even weeks between cleanings, allowing time for microorganisms to accumulate and grow to levels capable of giving children infections and making them sick.

Investigators from the University of North Georgia examined six ball pits located in inpatient physical therapy clinics or outpatient clinics in the state of Georgia. Nine to 15 balls were randomly selected from different depths of each sampled ball pit.

The study found considerable microbial colonization in ball pits that were tested, including eight bacteria and one yeast that could cause disease. Bacterial colonization was found to be as high as thousands of cells per ball, clearly demonstrating an increased potential for transmission of these organisms to patients and an increased possibility of infection.

"We found considerable variation in the number of microorganisms between the different ball pit samples," said the study's lead researcher Mary Ellen Oesterle, EdD, PT, Department of Physical Therapy, University of North Georgia, Dahlonega, GA, USA. "This suggests that clinics utilize different protocols for cleaning and maintenance, potentially representing a broader need to clarify and establish standards that reduce the risk of transmission."

Overall, researchers identified 31 bacterial species and one species of yeast. The human-associated bacteria found in the ball pits included:

Enterococcus faecalis, which can cause endocarditis, septicemia, urinary tract infection, and meningitis;

Staphylococcus hominis, a cause of bloodstream infections and reported as a cause of sepsis in a neonatal intensive care unit;

Streptococcus oralis, known to cause endocarditis, adult respiratory distress syndrome, and streptococcal shock;

Acinetobacter lwofii, which has been reported to cause septicemia, pneumonia, meningitis, and urinary tract and skin infections.

"This research shows that ball pits may pose an infection hazard," said 2019 APIC President Karen Hoffmann, RN, MS, CIC, FSHEA, FAPIC. "Facilities should establish a program for regular cleaning to protect patients and healthcare workers from potential infection risks."Children's positive perception of moving is an important supporter for natural physical activity and developing motor skills. A study at the University of Jyvaskyla suggests that children had high perceptions of motor skills. Some gender differences were identified, however: girls were better in locomotor skills and boys had higher perception and actual skills in ball skills.

"Because ball skills are typically utilized in versatile surroundings and good ball skills are a predictor for more frequent physical activity levels in adolescence, we should encourage girls to play more with balls already in early education," says PhD student Donna Niemisto from Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences. "In boys, there could be more locomotor skills like galloping and hopping involved. Niemisto concludes, "All children regardless of gender have a right to have positive and encouraging experiences of movement."

The Skilled Kids study, conducted at the University of Jyvaskyla from 2015 to 2017, investigated perceptions of motor competence among children between the ages of 5 to 7 years. Perception is a measure of how good children feel they are at doing given motor tasks. Perception and actual motor competence were measured with 13 different skills subdivided into movement and ball skills. The results showed that young children have high perceptions of their actual skills, for which Niemisto credits the Finnish early education system and parents.

"The interest, feedback and more importantly the time spent together with adults supports children's positive perception of their motor skills. As children become older, the more critically they start to evaluate their actual skills. Reasonable depth enhances children's safety in moving but it should not passivate him. Therefore, the adult's role as supporter along the way is important."

Age and BMI are the most important factors for perception

A child's perception of their actual skills can either motivate or demotivate the child to be physically active. If a child trusts in their actual skills and is eager to be physically active, he will similarly accumulate better motor skills.

Even though perceptions are crucial for motivation and for actual skills, knowledge about associated factors with better perceptions:

"We managed to explain less than 10% of related factors of perceptions locomotor and ball skills. Most strongly associated with higher perceptions were lower age and higher BMI SDS (body composition)."

The study showed that the older children become, the more realistically they evaluate themselves. The result supports earlier international research findings. Additionally, higher BMI SDS was associated with higher perceptions:

"When it comes to body composition and its association with perceptions, the result was exceptional. It is in line with previous studies that suggest body composition is associated with evaluations, but the direction of the association is surprising. However, it is important to bear in mind that this exceptional result might reflect different phases of maturation rather than body composition itself. Either way, there is a need to study the association further," Niemisto says.The increase in cesarean sections is on the verge of a global epidemic. Though the World Health Organization recommends an optimal C-section rate of 10-15 percent, the United States' C-section rate is more than 30 percent.

In many Latin American countries, the procedure is sky rocketing, reaching more than 50 percent in some.

While C-sections are lifesaving in some cases, they are increasing beyond recommended rates with harmful consequences for children's health.

Cesarean delivered children tend to be susceptible to infections, obesity, asthma and allergies. This occurs in part because many mothers are unable to successfully breastfeed them after a C-section.

However, recent research shows that this may be culturally mediated. In some parts of the world, mothers are able to breastfeed successfully after C-section deliveries, and this practice may reduce their negative child health effects.

Amanda Veile, an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, and her team report that indigenous mothers in farming communities in Yucatan, Mexico, breastfeed for about 1.5 months longer following cesarean deliveries than they do following vaginal deliveries. Veile believes this is possible because the mothers live in an exceptionally supportive breastfeeding environment.

"Moms living in this Mexican community don't have to hide in a bathroom to feed their child when they are in public," says Veile, a biological anthropologist who specializes in infant and child development. "Here, it is a cultural norm to breastfeed anytime, anywhere, and to sustain breastfeeding for longer than two years. And we think that prolonged breastfeeding offers protective benefits that reduces some of the health problems we often see in children delivered by C-section."

Veile's research appears in the American Journal of Human Biology's special issue on the evolutionary and biocultural causes and consequences of rising cesarean delivery rates. Veile and collaborator Karen Rosenberg, a professor from the University of Delaware, are the guest editors for the special issue. It features 10 research articles written by anthropologists, biologists and healthcare practitioners, which are available open access through spring 2019.

In Veile's study, she and her team compared breastfeeding durations and childhood infection rates based on how the child was born to Yucatec Maya farmers. Following 88 children from birth until age 5, the results show that those children born via C-sections were breastfed for about 2.7 years, whereas vaginally delivered children were breastfed for just over 2.5 years. There was no difference in infection rates between the two groups of children.

"What a powerful message supporting breastfeeding," Veile says. "We need to continue studying this issue, but it seems that these mothers, perhaps subconsciously, increased their breastfeeding efforts post-cesarean."

Veile says that Yucatec Maya women do experience post-cesarean challenges in the hospital environment, such as prolonged separation from their infants, latching issues and delayed milk let-down reflex. Still mothers overcome these challenges through determination, consumption of special foods, and the use of herbs and compresses. They also receive emotional support and breastfeeding advice from their family and friends.

"Now that C-sections are becoming more universal, it is important to understand more about the consequences for children's health in a variety of settings," Veile said. "This includes very rural communities worldwide that are transitioning to increased health care access, while simultaneously experiencing poor community sanitation and the double burden of malnutrition."The newly-minted Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Science (The Brain Institute) at Chapman University, with Dr. Uri Maoz as project leader, is the recipient of a total of $7.04 million to study how the human brain enables conscious control of decisions and actions. The John Templeton Foundation funded $5.34 million; the Fetzer Institute funded $1.55 million; and the remaining $150,000 comes from the Fetzer Memorial Trust. This is Chapman's largest non-federal research grant to date. With the Chapman Brain Institute serving as the central hub, this grant supports research efforts at 17 universities spanning four continents, including Charite Berlin (Germany), Dartmouth, Duke, Florida State University, Harvard, Indiana University Bloomington, NIH, Monash University (Australia), NYU, Sigtuna (Sweden), Tel Aviv University (Israel), University College London (UK), University of Edinburgh (UK), UCLA and Yale. The project launched at an international conference on the Neuroscience of Free Will that the Brain Institute and Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences at Chapman University hosted in mid-March.

"We were pleased to establish Chapman's Brain Institute and to bring the faculty associated with it to Chapman University last year," said Daniele Struppa, Ph.D., Chapman University president. "Their approach to research reflects Chapman's goal of combining research with teaching and involving undergraduate and graduate students at all levels in the process. We are grateful for this grant from the Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute, which recognizes Chapman as a leader in this developing field."

"This grant aims to create a new field in the study of the brain--the neurophilosphy of free will," said Uri Maoz, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology and computational neuroscience at Chapman University. "The extent and scope of human free will has been debated by philosophers for millennia. In recent decades, neuroscientists have joined the discussion, leading to some interesting discoveries. The current project, however, represents a four-year effort forging structured, close collaborations on these questions between eight neuroscientists (including Dr. Aaron Schurger, assistant professor of psychology, the latest faculty recruit to the Brain Institute at Chapman) and nine philosophers from around the world. Hopefully, in 10 years we will look back at the grant and say that's where it all started," said Dr. Maoz.

"This large-scale investment, by the John Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute, comes to the Brain Institute even before its official launch next month," said Amir Raz, Ph.D., Chapman University professor of psychology and brain sciences and director of the Brain Institute. "Work at the Brain Institute addresses fundamental questions of human experience: do we have free will? Are we, in fact, free to do what we wish? What is the role of consciousness in our decisions? We are grateful for the opportunities the combined grant offers as well as the testament it provides to confidence in our work."

"The Templeton Foundation and Fetzer Institute grant acknowledge that consequential, complex questions find answers only when approached through the lenses of multiple disciplines and their research techniques," said Janeen Hill, Ph.D., dean of Crean College. "Chapman University and Crean College's commitment to brain science and its inherent interdisciplinarity is reinforced by the significance of this combined grant."

Entitled "Consciousness and Free Will: A Joint Neuroscientific-Philosophical Investigation," the grant aims to advance efforts in the neurophilosphy of free will. For example, researchers at the Brain Institute and their collaborators will use advanced analysis techniques of brain activity and strive to decode decisions and actions before they take place. Or they will use various techniques to compare human brain activity when people make arbitrary decisions (e.g., when asked to randomly raise their left or right hand) and deliberate ones (e.g., when asked to raise their left or right hand to donate to one charity or another).

"This grant, placing Chapman as a leader in neuroscience, reflects our deepening commitment to research and to academic excellence," said Glenn Pfeiffer, Ph.D., provost of Chapman University. "This announcement comes soon after the recent elevation of Chapman University to Carnegie Classification R2, signifying 'high research activity.' We have never been stronger as a research institution than we are right now."

"In fact," said Thomas Piechota, Ph.D., PE, vice president of research, "this is an opportune time to partner with Chapman University. The research being conducted by the Brain Institute and throughout Chapman is exciting and innovative. Our faculty are exemplary researchers and the involvement of students of every level - including first-year undergraduates - is a fundamental part of the personalized education that we offer."

Hosted at the Rinker Health Science campus in Irvine, as well as on the Orange campus, the Brain Institute comprises a network of interdisciplinary researchers who conduct empirical investigations into the cognitive neuroscience of altered planes of consciousness, neuropsychology, volition, formal models of higher brain functions among other fields. Our work draws on clinical populations, healthy volunteers, and innovations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data.

"Questions about consciousness and free will are of enduring interest in both philosophy and the sciences. This project will feature field-leading researchers on these two topics, using rigorous and collaborative methods to advance our understanding of both of them. It is therefore a perfect fit for the John Templeton Foundation, and we are pleased to support Chapman in this initiative," said John Churchill, director of philosophy and theology programs at the John Templeton Foundation.

"We are drawn to this work because of its cutting-edge exploration of free will, the breadth of the research effort Chapman University has developed, and the scale of this major funding collaboration with Templeton," said Mohammed Mohammed, Fetzer Institute program director of research, discovery, and development. "We are excited about this venture into the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience."

Source: https://news.chapman.edu/2019/03/05/brain-institute-receives-over-7-million-for-research-on-neurophilosophy-of-free-will/Thanks to a generous $750,000 gift from the Jim and Julie Cardwell Fund and the Cardwell Family Foundation, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso (TTUHSC El Paso) is establishing an endowed chair in the department of neurology.

TTUHSC El Paso is matching the gift, establishing the Jim and Julie Cardwell Endowed Chair in Neurology. The chair will be supported by a $1.5 million fund thanks to the combined gift and match. The gift and endowed chair are part of a long-term effort to increase the number of neurologists available to treat the El Paso community. The Cardwell Family Foundation is an affiliate of the El Paso Community Foundation.

"We have a serious physician shortage in El Paso and Southern New Mexico," El Paso businessman Jim Cardwell said. "This is an opportunity to bring TTUHSC El Paso to the forefront in the training of physicians. Hopefully some of them will stay here in El Paso, but if not, at least we're training more, so there are more doctors. We need more access to medical providers so that families do not have to leave our region to receive specialty care."

"The inspiration for this gift was to help the future generations of this region," Cardwell said. "This is a building block of many things to come."

Matching funds are being leveraged by TTUHSC El Paso to recruit and attract physicians in specialty areas that are underserved in our region. The goal is to build upon these specialties so that both patient care and research expertise expand over time. There are additional matching funds for endowed chairs and professorships in several areas, such as psychiatry, emergency medicine, orthopedics, surgery and internal medicine.

There is a shortage of neurologists nationwide, leading to a "neurology desert" in areas with no neurologists. Though El Paso is not in that situation, with about 20 practicing neurologists, there are too few for a city this size, and El Paso patients are faced with waiting lists, said Dr. Salvador Cruz-Flores, professor and chair of TTUHSC El Paso's department of neurology. According to the American Academy of Neurology, a city should have three to five neurologists for every 100,000 inhabitants - a minimum of 35 if there are 700,000 people in El Paso County. El Paso neurologists serve patients from the entire Paso del Norte region, Dr. Cruz-Flores said.

About 45 percent of the care provided by neurologists at TTUHSC El Paso is uncompensated care for the uninsured or underinsured. Though part of their mission, Dr. Cruz-Flores said this adds to the need for more neurologists.

"This endowment is meant to grow the activities of the department of neurology, perhaps creating more residency opportunities and clinical lines of service such as a multiple sclerosis clinic, or growing an epilepsy service," Dr. Cruz-Flores said. "In general, this will expand the services of the neurology department with the idea of providing more access to neurological care for our community."GamesRadar+ is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn moreSorry!

This content is not available in your region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New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi slammed the Opposition leaders for demanding proofs of the Indian Air Forces Balakot air strike. In a series of tweets, the Prim Minister launched a point-by-point rebuttal against those saying that the government must give details of the February 26 air strike. Opposition insults our forces time and again. I appeal to my fellow Indians- question Opposition leaders on their statements. Tell them- 130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics. India stands firmly with our forces, Modi said in a stinging against Congress chief Rahul Gandhis close aide Sam Pitroda. The Congress overseas chief today sparked a fresh controvbesry after he said, wheres the proof that 300 people were killed in the air strike in heart of Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The Prime Minister also categorically took on Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav for his Pulwama remark. Opposition is the natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners of our armed forces. This reprehensible statement by a senior leader like Ram Gopal Ji insults all those who have given their lives in protecting Kashmir. It humiliates the families of our martyrs.

Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest, the Prime Minister said on Pitroda saying, dont know much about attacks, it happens all the time, attack happened in Mumbai also, we could have then reacted and just sent our planes but that is not right approach. According to me thats not how you deal with world.

The Indian Air Force carried out pre-dawn airstrikes on February 26 and destroyed major launch pads of the terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed, which was behind the February 14 Pulwama terror attack. The initial reports suggested that the Surgical Strike 2.0 decimated Jaish-e-Mohammeds Alpha 3 Control Rooms located in Balakot, Muzaffarabad and Chakothi in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. More than 10 bombs were dropped by the multi-role fighter jet Mirage 2000 at around 3:30 am on February 26 morning. Understandably, Pakistan has downplayed the airstrike. The aerial attack came day after Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman held a high-level meeting with all three service chiefs.New Delhi:

Sam Pitrodas controversial statement on the Indian Air Forces air strike on Jaish-e-Mohammeds terror camp in Pakistans Balakot sparked a massive political controversy on Friday. Sam Pitroda asked the government to come out with "more facts" on the Balakot air strikes, and said that he was "baffled" by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reaction to his question which he was entitled to ask. Pitroda, chief of Indian Overseas Congress, also said it was good to have a debate, discussion, dialogue and discourse, and it does not amount to questioning anyone.

The Congress, however, distanced itself from Pitrodas Balakot remark and said that it was an individuals personal venom. Instead, it countered Prime Minister Narendra Modi over issues ranging from job crisis to agrarian distress. Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala took to Twitter to put the partys perspective in the wake of Pitroda controversy.

INC has unequivocally said-: Pulwama Terror Attack was a grave National Security failure of Modi Govt, Balakot Air Strike was a shining example of valour of our Airforce, Pakistans terror outfits like JEM, LET & others will never succeed in their evil design, Surjewala said.

Truth also is - 1. Modiji was busy shooting films in Corbett Park & speech as Nation mourned Pulwama martyrs, 2. Modi Govt was clueless as RDX, MI Carbines & Rocket Launchers were smuggled in to be used in Pulwama, 3. BJP Govt released Masood Azhar & other terrorists, Surjewala added.

Modiji & BJP should stop using an individuals personal opinion to spread venom! Instead of hiding behind the sacrifice of our armed forces, PM must answer to Nation on- Jobs crisis, Agrarian distress, Demo & GST disasters & Economic downturn, the Congress spokesperson added.New Delhi:

Danish Ali, the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) general secretary who until recently was involved in alliance negotiations with the Congress and the JD-S in Karnataka, had joined the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) on February 16. And now BSP chief Mayawati has given him the ticket from the Amroha Lok Sabha constituency. The BSP released a list with names of 11 candidates on Friday.

Speaking to media after joining the BSP, Ali had said that he took the permission of former prime minister and JD-S leader Deve Gowda and will do whatever work is assigned to him by Mayawati.

I never asked for anything even when I was in JD(S), it was upto HD Deve Gowda ji to decide what work to assign me. I have come here after taking the blessings & permission of Deve Gowda ji. I will work wherever Behen ji assigns me, news agency ANI quoted Ali as saying.

Ali, who was born in Uttar Pradesh, said that despite all his efforts, he could not help the JD-S grow in his home state. Given the threat to the Constitution, he said, it became essential to use his energy with a strong leadership.

JD(S) doesn't have a large orga structure in UP. Despite all my efforts I could not have raised it in my 'janmabhoomi, my 'karmabhoomi'....The way in which there is a threat to constitution today, it has become essential to use our energy with a strong leadership, he said.

Danish Ali was a close associate of Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy and he had played the crucial role in Congress-JD(S) alliance in Karnataka. He was also involved in the seat sharing negotiations between the parties for the Lok Sabha elections.New Delhi:

The Grand Alliance of opposition parties led by Lalu Prasad Yadavs Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar has announced the seat-sharing agreement for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. According to the list announced, the RJD will contest on 20 seats, Congress on 9, Upendra Kushwahas Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) on 5, Jitan Ram Manjhis Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) 3 and, Vikasshil Insan Party (VIP) 3 and Left will contest on one seat from RJDs quota.

Former Janata Dal  United president Sharad Yadav will contest on RJD ticket. HAM president and former Bihar CM Jitan Ram Manjhi will contest from Gaya Lok Sabha seat. Addressing the media on seat sharing with Congress, RJD spokesperson Manoj Kumar Jha said, "The alliance is being formed to save the Constitution. The grand alliance is a natural one." "We have decided nine seats for Congress and 20 seats for RJD," state RJD chief Ram Chandra Purve said.

'CPI(ML) will contest one seat from the RJD quota. Five seats have been allocated to the RLSP and three to VIP and HAM(S) respectively. Jitan Ram Manjhi will contest from Gaya," Purve said.

Former chief minister and HAM(S) leader Jitan Ram Manjhi will be contesting from Gaya, while RLSP candidate Bhudeo Chaudhury has been fielded from Jamui. HAM(S) leader Upendra Prasad will contest from Aurangabad and RJDs Veebha Devi from Nawada.



The Shiv Sena has also announced its first list of 21 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha Elections, from its quota of 23 seats and retained most of the sitting members. As per the BJP-Sena alliance, the two ruling allies are contesting 48 parliamentary seats in the state in the ratio of 25:23, leaving nothing for its five smaller allies.

The BJP announced on Thursday evening its first list of candidates for Lok Sabha elections that begin next month. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will contest from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, the parliamentary seat he retained after winning two seats in the 2014 election while BJP president Amit Shah will fight from Gandhinagar in his home town Gujarat; a seat where BJP veteran LK Advani is the sitting lawmaker.

New Delhi:

Popular and National Award winner actor-turned-politician Prakash Raj had announced in January that he would contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as an Independent from the Bengaluru Central constituency. Hours before filing his nomination on Friday, the election official slapped a case against him for violating the model code of conduct. The complaint said the actor had used a mike and campaigned to canvas for votes at a public meeting near on March 12 in Bengaluru.

Raj will be pitched against BJP's PC Mohan, who defeated Congress candidate with over 40,000 votes in 2014. The BJP leader has held Bangaluru Central's seat ever since it was carved out from Bengaluru north and south after the delimitation process in 2019.

When Raj made the announcement of his entry into politics, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had offered its support to the actor-turned-politician.

The announcement was made during a Aam Aadmi Party meeting in Bangalore which was attended by Delhi's Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and other party leaders. The actor, who was present at the meeting, took to Twitter to thank the deputy chief minister and party cadres for extending support to his political journey.

Raj is considered to have an anti-BJP stance and has criticised PM Narendra Modi government on many occasions. He became vocal after his friend and senior journalist Gauri Lankesh was murdered.

The Bollywood actor is considered to have an anti-BJP stance and has been critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi government on many occasions. His demands include a fare and speedy justice for his friend and murdered journalist Gauri Lankesh in September 2017.New Delhi:

Bharatiya Janata Partys decision to field its president Amit Shah from Gujarat's Gandhinagar parliamentary seat was taken after veteran leader LK Advani expressed his unwillingness to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha election, reports Hindustan Times. Advani told the party three-four days back that he will not contest, the report quoted a person, considered closed to Advani, as saying.

91-year-old Advani, who has served as Union home minister and deputy prime minister, has won from Gandhinagar six times since 1991, barring the 1996 Lok Sabha polls. In the 1996 general elections, former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had won the Gandhinagar seat as well as from Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh.

Credited for orchestrating the BJP's rise to a pre-eminent position in the late 80s and 90s along with Atal Bihari Vajpayee after it won only two Lok Sabha seats in 1984. Advani was moved out of the BJP's highest decision-making body, Parliamentary Board, in 2014 after Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the party to victory and Shah was made its president.

He was made a member of Margdarshak Mandal (group of mentors), a body which has never met.

Earlier on Thursday, senior party leader JP Nadda while announcing party first list of 184 candidates said Shah will contest Lok Sabha elections from Gujarat's Gandhinagar parliamentary seat. This is the first time when Shah will be contesting the general elections. Currently, he is as a member of the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat.

Naranpura, from where Shah had won the Assembly election in 2012 before he became Rajya Sabha member, is located in Ahmedabad city, but falls in Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency.

With PTI InputsNew Delhi:

The Congress' Central Election Committee will hold a crucial meet today. Names of candidates likely to be announced after that. The BJP has finalsied the names of all 17 candidates from Bihar, however, the names will be announced jointly with the allies. TRS MP Kavitha to seek re-election from Nizamabad. Actor-turned-politician Prakash Raj will file his nomination today as an Independent from the Bangalore Central constituency.

18:51 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In OP Ravindranath Kumar, son of Deputy Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, O Panneerselvam files nomination from Theni parliamentary constituency.

18:23 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In YSR Congress chief YS Jagan Mohan Reddy files his nomination from Pulivendula of YSR Kadapa district, says "Every vote that is cast will be a vote not just for Jagan but also for the future of Andhra Pradesh".

17:25 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Raj Babbar refuses to contest Lok Sabha polls from Moradabad. He has reached 10 Janpath.

16:42 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Bihar Grand Alliance: Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) to contest on 20 seats, Congress to fight from 9 seats, Upendra Kushwaha's RLSP gets 5 seats while Jitan Ram Manjhi's HAM and VIP will be in the fray from 3 seats each.



16:17 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Shiv Sena releases first list of 21 candidates for Lok Sabha polls, fields Arvind Sawant from South Mumbai.

16:16 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Priyanka Gandhi reaches Jyotiraditya Scindias residence to meet 'sulking' Jitin Prasada: Reports



15:12 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Rajya Sabha MP Rapolu Ananda Bhaskar has resigned from the Congress. He is set to join Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

14:55 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Randeep Surjewala, Congress on media reports of Jitin Prasada joining BJP: It is bullshit.

14:33 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Sapna Choudhary likely to join Congress, may contest against Hema Malini from Mathura. Read More here

14:52 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress leader and former Union Minister Jitin Prasada joins BJP. Read here

13:05 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Former Uttarakhand chief minister Harish Rawat to get Congress ticket from Nainital, according to sources.

13:04 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Nara Lokesh,Andhra Pradesh IT Minister and son of CM N Chandrababu Naidu to file nomination shortly. He will contest from Mangalagiri constituency in Amaravati.



Nara Lokesh,Andhra Pradesh IT Minister and son of CM N Chandrababu Naidu to file nomination shortly. He will contest from Mangalagiri constituency in Amaravati. #AndhraPradeshAssemblyElections pic.twitter.com/CL4qv1JBXv

 ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019



13:03 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Prajwal Revanna will file his nomination at Hassan DC office shortly in Karnataka.

13:02 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Prakash Raj rally reaches BBMP office in Bengaluru. Raj to file his nomination to contest as Independent from Bangalore Central today.

13:01 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party alliance had given a ticket to SP candidate Surender Kumar Munni for the Ghaziabad Lok Sabha constituency. However, Suresh Bansal, who was inducted into the SP on Friday, is now the new ticket holder from the seat.

12:32 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Gautam Gambhir: I am joining this party(BJP) after getting influenced by PM Narendra Modi's vision. I am honoured to get the opportunity to join this platform.



Gautam Gambhir: I am joining this party(BJP) after getting influenced by PM Narendra Modi's vision. I am honoured to get the opportunity to join this platform pic.twitter.com/barD8XA7W9

 ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019



12:31 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Sam Pitoda's controversial statement on the Balakot airstrikes:

"The sacrifices of our Armed Forces should never be questioned.



To ask questions of politicians in a democracy is our fundamental right.



This government needs to stop pretending to be the Indian Army. Politicians who say they cannot be questioned are dangerous."



The sacrifices of our Armed Forces should never be questioned.



To ask questions of politicians in a democracy is our fundamental right.



This government needs to stop pretending to be the Indian Army. Politicians who say they cannot be questioned are dangerous.

 Akhilesh Yadav (@yadavakhilesh) March 22, 2019



12:18 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Gautam Gambhir joins BJP in the presence of union Ministers Arun Jaitley and Ravi Shankar Prasad.

11:55 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress special press conference has been further deferred to 3.30 pm.

11:39 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In PM Modi took to Twitter to respond to Pitrodas 26/11 statement. Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew - Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest! he tweeted.

11:39 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress president Rahul Gandhis close aide and Congresss Indian overseas chief Sam Pitroda was quoted by ANI as questioning the Balakot airstrikes and also saying that Dont know much about attacks, it happens all the time, on the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed by Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists.

11:35 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Former Cricketer Gautam Gambhir likely to join Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) today, news agency ANI reported.

10:42 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In PL Punia, Congress: LK Advani jaise dhurandhar parliamentarian,uski jagah tadi paar rahe Amit Shah (LS candidate from Gandhinagar,Guj) unki jagah le rahe hain. Janta sab jaanti hai ki shift kidhar hua hai aur poori tarah se ek vyakti ke shikanje mein poori party chali ja rahi hai.



PL Punia, Congress: LK Advani jaise dhurandhar parliamentarian,uski jagah tadi paar rahe Amit Shah (LS candidate from Gandhinagar,Guj) unki jagah le rahe hain. Janta sab jaanti hai ki shift kidhar hua hai aur poori tarah se ek vyakti ke shikanje mein poori party chali ja rahi hai pic.twitter.com/ttjstezCNZ

 ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019



10:39 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In This is what the BJP has to say on Congress preident Rahul Gandhi postponing the press meet from 10.15 am to 1 pm:



It seems Rahul Gandhi cant wake up in the morning. Anyway, its better not to spread lies in the morning :) https://t.co/5sn9eMnFRj

 BJP (@BJP4India) March 22, 2019



10:20 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In A group of BJP workers in West Bengal's Cooch Behar protested at the party office after Nisith Pramanik (left), who recently joined the party, was given a ticket to contest from the parliamentary constituency.





10:17 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Actor-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha will be fielded from Patna Sahib seat, said a source.

10:17 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In A senior Congress leader from Bihar, told PTI, on condition of anonymity that former BJP MP Uday Singh, who joined the Congress on Wednesday, may be fielded from Purnea on a Congress ticket.





10:16 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In In Assam, the BJP has fielded former mayor Queen Ojha from Guwahati replacing former union minister Bijoya Chakraborty, who has represented the seat thrice since 1999.

10:36 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress special press conference today which was scheduled to be addressed by Rahul Gandhi, has been deferred to 1 pm from 10.15 am

10:13 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The announcement of the grand alliance of opposition parties in Bihar and its list of candidates for all the 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state is expected to be announced today.

09:12 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In TTV Dhinakaran's Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) releases second list of 9 candidates for Lok Sabha elections in Tamil Nadu.

08:37 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Actor-turned-politician Prakash Raj will file his nomination today as an Independent from the Bangalore Central constituency.

08:37 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The BJP has finalsied the names of all 17 candidates from Bihar, however, the names will be announced jointly with the allies.New Delhi:

Amit reports that sulking leader Jitin Prasada may join the Bharatiya Janata Party, Congress general secretary for Uttar Pradesh (east) has reached Jyotiraditya Scindias residence to reportedly convince him about not leaving the party.

Meanwhile, the Congress Rajya Sabha MP, who won from Shahjahanpur and Dhaurahra Lok Sabha constituencies in the 2004 and 2009 Lok Sabha elections, has refused to give any direct reply to a question regarding the same.

Forty-five-year-old Jitin Prasada was the Minister of State for Steel from April 2008 to May 2009 in UPA-I government of prime minister Manmohan Singh. He held the portfolios of Minister of State, Petroleum and Natural Gas, Road Transport and Highways, and Human Resource Development in UPA-II.

Jitin Prasada, who was considered to be very close to Congress president Rahul Gandhi, is an alumnus of The Doon School, Dehradun. He did his graduation in B Com (Hons) from Delhi University's Sri Ram College of Commerce and then went to do his MBA from IMI, New Delhi.

The report comes close on the heels of Tom Vadakkan, senior Congress leader and close aide of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, joining the BJP. He joined the party in the presence of Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

After joining the BJP, the former Congress leader said, "It gives me great pleasure to join BJP. He said, "It hurts me deeply when you question the integrity of Armed Forces. The reason I left Congress was that I did not like their reaction on Pulwama attack."

A staunch Congress supporter, Vadakkan was chosen by Sonia Gandhi to send out the message of her willingness to enter active politics. In 1998, Vadakkan witnessed the power shift at 24, Akbar Road.New Delhi:

Akshay Kumar starrer Kesari has become the latest victim of online piracy. The film has been leaked online by the piracy website Tamilrockers. The much-anticipated film was leaked just a day after its release.

This isnat the first time that a movie has been leaked online by Tamilrockers.A Earlier, films likeA Gully Boy, 2.0, Petta, Uri: The Surgical Strike, Aquaman, The Fantastic Beasts, Manikarnika, Accidental Prime MinisterA and more also became the victim of piracy.A This piracy website has been banned innumerable times. But, every time a new movie is leaked online, they come out with a different proxy server.

Meanwhile, Kesari has been receiving rave reviews from all quarters. It has broken Gully Boy's record to become the biggest opener of 2019. The Karan Johar produced war epic is the first film of 2019 to go past Rs 20 crore mark on its day one itself.A

KesariA is based on the battle of Saragarhi fought between the British Indian armyas Sikh Regiment and Afghan tribesmen in September 1897. A total of 21 Sikh soldiers, who were part of the British Indian Army, were attacked by 10,000 Afghan tribal warriors. These 21 soldiers fought like lions to protect their country from the enemy.A

Kesari also stars Parineeti Chopra, Siddhant Sharma, Ashwath Bhatt, Pawan Malhotra and Rana Ranbir. The film is slated to release on Holi on March 21, 2019.A

For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.Mumbai:

Superstar Salman Khan said if he ever produces content for digital medium, he would make sure it caters to the family audience. The 53-year-old actor said he has been approached for producing content for web.

"Web series is fine but the content should be clean. I don't like all that rubbish that is going on. I have been approached and I have not said no. I will produce web content but it is going to be 'Hum Aapke Hai Kaun' type," Salman said in a group interview here.

There were reports that the actor will be producing a web series for children, but he did not confirm working on the project. Salman is currently busy promoting his upcoming home production Notebook, which marks the debut of actor Mohnish Bahl's daughter Pranutan and Zaheer Iqbal. It releases on March 29.

His next acting venture is Bharat and Salman said the trailer of the film, which is scheduled to release on Eid, will be out soon. Directed by Ali Abbas Zafar, the film also features Katrina Kaif, Tabu, Disha Patani and Sunil Grover.

Apart from this, Salman is set to collaborate with Sanjay Leela Bhansali after close to two decades. Titled Inshallah, the film is a love story and features Alia Bhatt as the female lead.

The Sultan star refrained from sharing any details on the project.

For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.Srinagar:

Six terrorists were killed and seven security personnel were injured as the anti-terror operations at various locations entered day 2 in Jammu and Kashmir on Friday. The forces are battling it out at four locations  three in north Kashmir and 1 in south Kashmir. The internet services in the area have been suspended to thwart any rumour-mongering. In Bandiporas Hajin, the security operation is in last stage. The forces have launched a search operation to retrieve the bodies of the terrorists killed in the encounter. Generally, the bodies are strapped with explosives to cause maximum damage. Two people were made hostage out of which one boy is still missing. As of now, two terrorists have been neutralised.

In a fresh statement on Baramulla security operation, the Indian Army said that, one of the two terrorists killed in the gunfight has been identified as Aamir Rasool of Sopore. Incriminating material has also been recovered at the site of encounter, it is understood that the other killed terrorist is a Pakistani national.

According to the police records, both the killed terrorists were affiliated with proscribed terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed and were wanted by law for their complicity in a series of terror crimes including attack on security establishments and civilian atrocities. They were involved in conspiring and executing many terror attacks in the area. Several terror crime cases were registered against both the terrorists, the statement added.

Arms and ammunition including AK 47 rifles were recovered from the site of encounter. All these materials have been taken in the case records for further investigation and to probe their complicity in other terror cases, the army said.

In Sopores Warpora, gunfight is still underway, one terrorist is believed to be cornered in a building. In Baramullahs Kandi Kalantara, 2 terrorists have been killed. However, seven got injured in the operations. Among them, two 2 are said critical. In Shopians Ratnipora, brief exchange of fire happened between terrorists and security forces during night, one local terrorist believed to be dead however body has not been retrieved yet.

Internet services have been snapped in all four places as precautionary measures.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

After Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khans claim that he received a message from his Indian counterpart on Pakistan National Day, the Congress on Friday asked the prime ministers office (PMO) to confirm if Narendra Modi has exchanged greetings with his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan on the eve of their National Day.

I would hope the @PMOIndia clarifies that what Imran Khan has tweeted is the correct version of greetings exchanged or whether if they have been exchanged at all, especially after the function was boycotted in India by the govt. The nation would want to know..., Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi said on Twitter.

Earlier in the day, Imran Khan had tweeted that he received a message from Modi in which the latter extended "greetings & best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan".

"It is time that (the people) of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive & prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence," PM Modi said in the message, according to a tweet by the Pakistani prime minister.

Khan also said that that it was time to begin "comprehensive dialogue with India" to resolve bilateral issues, including that of Kashmir. "I welcome PM Modi's message to our people. As we celebrate Pakistan Day I believe it is time to begin a comprehensive dialogue with India to address & resolve all issues, esp the central issue of Kashmir, & forge a new relationship based on peace & prosperity for all our people," he said.

The tweet from the Pakistani prime minister came hours after India boycotted a reception at the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi to mark Pakistan's National Day. India was against the Pakistan High Commission's move to invite separatists for the event. Subsequently, the External Affairs Ministry said Indian representative will not attend any events in Islamabad.

This was also the first friendly gesutre by PM Modi since the February 14 Pulwama attack following which the nuclear-armed neighbours came to the brink of war. Over 40 CRPF personnel were killed after a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists rammed an explosive laden truck into their convoy in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama district.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

A villager in Jammu and Kashmirs Hajin area on Thursday pleaded to Lashker-e-Taiba terrorists to release the 12-year-old boy, who was held captive by them and later killed. In a viral video on social media, one of the villagers is heard telling the Pakistani terrorists that what they are doing is not jihad (armed crusade) but jahalat (benighted). However, the requests from the villagers fell to dumb ears as the boy, identified as Atif Mir, was brutally killed by the LeT terrorists.

The incident took place in Hajin area near Srinagar where the terrorists had taken shelter in the boys house at gunpoint, the police officials said. The terrorists - Ali alias Furkan and Hubaib  allegedly wanted to sexually abuse Mirs sister but the family helped her escape. This infuriated them and they started beating up the family members.

Hearing their cries, the locals informed the police. Reaching the spot, the police started the rescue mission and successfully extracted Mirs parents and other family members. Before the police could rescue Mir and his uncle Hameed, the terrorists open fire.

We knew that the boy and uncle were trapped inside and, so, we asked the villagers to appeal to the terrorists to release them, news agency PTI quoted a senior official as saying.

On the request of police, the head of the village asked the terrorists to release the boy. Do whatever you want, but this is not Jihad but Jahalat. Please release the boy, he pleaded. Later, wife of Hameed also made appeals to release her husband and nephew but the stone-hearted terrorists didnt reciprocate.

Later, the police made a room clearing intervention and managed to bring Hameed out of the house. Hameed told police that he was beaten black and blue by the terrorists with an iron rod and AK rifle. I tried my best to get my nephew out of this. I begged them but they remained unmoved, Hameed told the police.

Meanwhile, the area was completely seized by the security personnel and realising that there was no escape, the terrorists killed the boy before being neutralised by the forces.

(With inputs from PTI)

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

The Delhi Police Special Cell has arrested a man affiliated with terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed from Delhi. The arrested has been identified as Sajjad Khan. He was arrested from near the Red Fort area on Thursday night. According to the police, Sajjad Khan was in contact with the mastermind of the Pulwama attack, Mudassir Ahmed Khan. Sajjad Khan had moved to Delhi and living as a shawl seller before the Pulwama attack that killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir on February 14.

Sajjad Khan, a resident of Jammu and Kashmir, knew the details of the Pulwama attack on the CRPF convoy. His two brothers were also Jaish terrorists but were killed by the forces in an encounter in Jammu and Kashmir, as reported by India Today. One of his brothers was killed in an encounter along with Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar's nephew Usman in South Kashmir's Tral in October 2018.

Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist Sajjad Khan (in grey sweatshirt) who was arrested by Delhi Police Special Cell, earlier today. He was a close associate of Pulwama attack mastermind Mudassir who had been eliminated earlier this month.



Y: ANI



Read full story: https://t.co/NSgybvaB6a pic.twitter.com/G1puUTUnNt a News Nation (@NewsNationTV) March 22, 2019

As per reportsA Mudassir Ahmed Khan was killed in an encounterA on March 11. Mudassir was the one who had arranged the vehicle and explosives used in the Pulwama terror strike. Suicide attacker Adil Ahmed Dar, who blew his explosive-laden vehicle next to the bus, had been in constant contact with Mudassir. The investigation has revealed that Sajjad was communicating with Mudassir and Pakistani terrorist Yasir via an app using fake numbers.

News Nation had reported on March 20 that the National Capital is on high alert following a specific input by the intel agencies. We hadA learnt that the sleeper cell of the terror outfits will try to mingle in the public disguised as Holi revellers to carry out the attack. Delhi DCP Chinmay Biswal told News Nation that security has been beefed up across the city. More police force had been deployed at the sensitive locations. The PCR vans of Delhi Police are also making public announcements to spread awareness among the general public. Biswal said that the cops stationed in all 15 districts of the National Capital have also increased the patrolling in their respective areas.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

The Narendra Modi government on Friday banned Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) for promoting secession of the militancy-hit state of Jammu and Kashmir. JKLF, founded by Amanullah Khan and Maqbool Bhat in Birmingham, England on 29 May 1977, has been spearheading separatist ideology in Valley for decades.

Khan had established JKLF's branches across UK, US and middle east before coming to Pakistan-administered Kashmir in 1982 and then in Jammu and Kashmir in 1987. The organisation is the descendant of Khan's PoK-based Plebiscite Front's unofficial armed wing called National Liberation Front, which carried out sabotage activities in Jammu and Kashmir as well as the hijacking of a Delhi-Srinagar commercial plane. The aircraft was then taken to Lahore where the passengers were released and the plane was burnt down.

In 1987, following the alleged rigging in state elections, the JKLF indoctrinated Kashmiri youth to take up arms against the Indian rule and started sending them across the border to receive arms training. The organisation waged a war against security forces and kidnapped the daughter of then home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. The war against the military had an ill-fated end and JKLF leader Yasin Malik was arrested in wounded condition. By 1992, most of the JKLF militants were either killed or captured.

In 1994, under the leadership of Yasin Malik, the JKLF in Jammu and Kashmir announced indefinite ceasefire and reportedly disbanded its military wing. The organisation decided to take the political route for achieving its objective of Jammu and Kashmirs independence and sowed the seed of separatist ideology.

However, the decision didnt go down well with the organisations PoK branch which split off from the group. Over a decade later, the two factions merged again in 2005 retaining the original identity. JKLF is often accused of sponsoring the stone pelting against security personnel in Valley.

The JKLF claims to be a secular with one single goal of secular, independent Kashmir free of both India and Pakistan. JKLF leader Malik is currently lodged in Kot Balwal jail in Jammu, and is likely to face trial in the three-decade-old case of kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of then Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, and gunning down of four IAF personnel in Srinagar.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

The Pakistan Army violated ceasefire for the fifth consecutive day by shelling forward areas and posts along the LoC with mortar bombs in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district, according to reports. At 03.45 pm Monday, the Pakistan Army initiated unprovoked ceasefire along the LoC in Mendhar sector. The Indian Army retaliated strongly and effectively. The firing was underway when the last reports came in.

"Jammu and Kashmir: Pakistan violated ceasefire in Poonch district today at about 15:45 hours by shelling with mortars and firing of small arms along LoC in Mendhar sector. Indian Army is retaliating befittingly," the news agency ANI reported.

Jammu and Kashmir: Pakistan violated ceasefire in Poonch district today at about 1545 hours by shelling with mortars and firing of small arms along LoC in Mendhar sector. Indian Army is retaliating befittingly. a ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

Early in the day, two Army jawans were injured as Pakistani troops continued night-long mortar shelling and firing in Pallanwala, Sunderbani and Nowshera sectors of Jammu and Kashmir. The two Army jawans, who were injured in Pallanwala sector, were admitted to a hospital, the officials said.

On Thursday, an Army jawan was killed as Pakistani troops shelled forward areas and Indian posts with artillery and mortar bombs heavily along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district.

The border skirmishes witnessed a spurt after India's air strike on a Jaish-e-Mohammed terror camp in Balakot on February 26 in response to the February 14 Pulwama terror attack in which 42 CRPF personnel were killed and dozens of others injured.

Pakistani troops have violated ceasefire over 110 times along the Line of Control (LoC) this year. The year 2018 witnessed the highest number of ceasefire violations, numbering 2,936 by Pakistani troops, in the last 15 years along the Indo-Pak border.

Pakistan continues to violate the 2003 ceasefire agreement with India despite repeated calls for restraint and adherence to the pact during flag meetings between the two sides.

(With inputs from agencies)

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

In another self goal by the Congress, Sam Pitroda, party chief's close aide, on Friday questioned the death toll in the Balakot airstrike by the Indian Air Force in response to the Pulwama terror attack and said it was wrong to attack Pakistan.A aIf they (IAF) killed 300, its ok. All I am saying is can you give me more facts and prove it,a said Pitroda in a wide-ranging interview to news agency ANI.

When asked his views on the airstrike against the Jaish-e-Mohammad camp in Pakistanas Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, the Chairman of the Overseas Indian National CongressA said that international news outlets had an alternate view of the impact of the air strike and that the people of India deserved to know the facts of the Air Force operation.

A aI would like to know a little more because I read reports in theA New York TimesA and other newspapers. Did we really attack? We really killed 300 people? I donat know that. As a citizen, I am entitled to know and if I ask it is my duty to ask, that doesnat mean Iam not a nationalist, That doesnat mean I am on this side or that side. We need to know the facts. If you say 300 people were killed, I need to know that. We all need to know that, people of India need to know that and then comes global media which says nobody was killed. I look bad as an Indian citizen,a said Pitroda.

"Donat know much about attacks, it happens all the time, attack happened in Mumbai also,we could have then reacted and just sent our planes but that is not right approach. According to me thatas not how you deal with world," said Pitroda on the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF jawans were killed by Jaish terrorists.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a scathing attack on the Congress and used Pitrodaas comment to reiterate that the Congress-led UPA governments didnat act against Pakistan despite repeated provocations and terror attacks.

Loyal courtier of Congressa royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror.



This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest! https://t.co/Mul4LIbKb5 a Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 22, 2019

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

Delhi Police on Friday took Separatist Mohammad Hasan Antoo into custody from national custody when he was trying to enter Pakistan High Commission. According to reports, Antoo runs an organisation International Forum of Justice and Human Rights.A

Reports suggest he was invited by the Pakistan High Commission to attend the Pakistan Day.A

Spot visuals: One person has been detained from outside the High Commission of Pakistan in New Delhi, where Pakistan National Day is to be celebrated today. pic.twitter.com/BGgLqBrYiJ a ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

Ahead of Pakistan High Commission's reception of the Pakistan National Day, intelligence agencies had alerted the Delhi police.A A

India will not send any official representative to the Pakistan National Day event at the Pakistan High Commission on Friday in protest against the invitation extended to Hurriyat leaders from Jammu and Kashmir, informed sources told IANS.

The invitation to the separatists indicated that Pakistan was again meddling in India's internal affairs and hence the time was not conducive to send an official representative to the event, the sources said.

Diplomatic ties between the two nuclear-armed neighboursA have been strained following the Pulwama attack on February 14 Pulwama for which Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility. Pakistan National Day is observed every year on March 23 through the Pakistan High Commission decided to organise the event this year a day earlier.A

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

The Centre has banned separatist Yasin Malik's Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The outfit has been banned for alleged promotion of secessionist activities in Jammu and Kashmir, officials said.

They said the organisation has been banned under various provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Malik is currently under arrest and at present lodged in Jammu's Kot Balwal jail.

"Central government has today declared Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (Yasin Malik faction) as unlawful association under Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. This is in accordance with policy of zero tolerance against terrorism followed by government," Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba said.

Gauba said that JKLF led by Malik has spearheaded the separatist ideology in the valley and it has been at the forefront of separatist activities & violence since 1988.

Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba: 37 FIRs have been registered by Jammu and Kashmir Police against JKLF. Two cases including the case of murder IAF personnel were registered by CBI. National Investigation Agency (NIA) has also registered a case which is under investigation. https://t.co/fHVpvQsN4F a ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

He said that the Jammu and Kashmir Police has registered 37 cases against JKLF. "Two cases including the case of murder IAF personnel were registered by CBI. National Investigation Agency (NIA) has also registered a case which is under investigation," Gauba said.

Central government bans Separatist Yasin Malik led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front. pic.twitter.com/W9R2NrdOFj a ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

This is the second organisation in Jammu and Kashmir which has been banned this month. Earlier, the Centre had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir for five years under anti-terror law on grounds that it was ain close toucha with terrorist outfits and was expected to aescalate secessionist movementa in the state.

A notification, banning the group under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, was issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs after a high-level meeting on security, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa yesterday held a bilateral session of talks with visited Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow at the presidential palace in Ashgabat. President Berdimuhamedow delivered a speech welcoming HM the Kings visit to his country, announcing that Turkmenistan and Bahrain would celebrate 25 years of diplomatic relations. He commended political, trade and economic relations binding the two countries, stressing the importance of the visit which will further expand business cooperation. He also wished the Kingdom further security and stability, led by HM the King. HM the King thanked Turkmen president for the invitation, stressing Bahrains strides in the sectors of culture, sciences, medicine, infrastructure and education. His Majesty extended an invitation to President Berdimuhamedow to pay an official visit to Bahrain to further bolster bilateral relations and expand joint co-operation. The two leaders then held an expanded session of talks in the presence of delegations representing the two countries. Addressing the session, HM the King recalled the visit of President Berdimuhamedow in 2011, stressing Bahrains keenness on following-up on the agreements and memoranda of understanding and strengthening relations. His Majesty stressed the importance of developing joint cooperation, underlining keenness on expanding trade, economic and investment ties and exploring oil and gas cooperation. HM the King hailed the neutrality of Turkmenistan, which reflects its commitment to development, security and peace in the Central Asian region and the world. The two sides welcomed the establishment of a joint council between the two countries. Key issues of mutual interest were also discussed between the two leaders. The two leaders then attended the signing of a string of joint agreements and memoranda of understanding. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between the heads of central banks of both nations while Foreign Minister Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa signed deals to extend co-operation in the areas of transportation, eGovernance, education, youth and women empowerment and culture with Turkmenistan ministers. A separate MoU was signed in the field of tourism by Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism Zayed Al Zayani and Turkmenistan Government Committee for Tourism. HM the King and the Turkmenistan president hailed the signing of the agreements and the memoranda of understanding which would herald a new phase in bilateral relations binding the two countries. President Berdimuhamedow conferred the medal of Neutral Turkmenistan, on HM King Hamad, in recognition of his role in supporting bilateral relations binding the two brotherly countries.Bahraini and German experiences when combined would pave the way for attaining great strides in boosting energy efficiency in both countries, said Electricity and Water Affairs Minister Dr Abdulhussain Mirza. The minister was holding a discussion with German Ambassador Kai Boeckmann, who said Germany is looking forward to welcoming experts from Bahrain.

The visit, the German ambassador said, would help learn from the German experience in developing energy efficient buildings and dealing with the challenges of climate change. He added a German delegation would visit Bahrain. The ambassador invited Dr Mirza, on behalf of the German Economic Energy Affairs Minister, to participate in the fifth session of the Berlin Dialogue for ministers and decision makers on the transformation of energy next month.

Dr Mirza thanked the ambassador for the invitation and said the Bahrain government pays great attention to encouraging the use of clean and green energy. The ambassador thanked the minister and officials for the welcome and hospitality, stressing readiness to strengthen this cooperation between the two countries.The Joint Commands Drill (Taawun4) held with the participation of Bahrain and Kuwait concluded yesterday. On behalf of the National Guard Commander General Shaikh Mohammed bin Isa Al Khalifa, the National Guard Staff Director Major-General Shaikh Abdulaziz bin Saud Al Khalifa attended the conclusion of the Joint Commands Drill (Taawun4).

Shaikh Abdulaziz said Taawun helped increase the level of readiness and security vigilance in the protection of oil installations. He stressed that this drill reflects the depth of military cooperation between the two branches of the National Guards. The ceremony was held in the presence of Kuwait National Guards Undersecretary, Lt-General Hashim Abdulrazzaq Al Refai.Bahrains new commercial legislation demonstrates its commitment to attract entrepreneurs, promote the private sector, and improve the commercial legal framework existing in the country, said US Ambassador Justin Siberell. Speaking during a luncheon and panel discussion on Bahrains new business laws, the US Ambassador said that the discussion and the ideas and partnerships that it will form today will serve to improve our joint efforts, as government representatives, to provide the private sector what it needs.

The event was organised by the American Chamber of Commerce in Bahrain (AmCham) in cooperation with the US Embassy and the Commercial Law Development Program (CLDP). President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Bahrain (AmCham) Qays Zubi said: The aim here is to get a better understanding of these laws to provide further confidence to businesses venturing into new sectors and at the same time making business easier.

Bankruptcy Restructuring Law, Electronic Transactions Law, Electronic Transferable Records, Data Protection Law, and SME Procurement Law were discussed during the meeting. Arezo Yazd from the Commercial Law Development Programme (CLDP) said the new commercial laws in Bahrain will enable the business environment for all companies, both small and large. By enabling the legal environment in Bahrain, CLDP hopes to sustain economic growth and development for years to come.H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media

BETHEL  The town is again seeking input on the communitys goals for the next decade.

A workshop will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday on the update to the Plan of Conservation and Development. This document must be revised every 10 years and details the towns priorities for open space, zoning, retail growth and more.BROOKFIELD  The tax rate would increase 2.87 percent under the finance boards latest budget proposal.

This budget, I think, is pretty solid, Sean Hathorn, chair of the finance board, said at the boards recent meeting. It helps us in this first fiscal after the new school project got approved (to) stick to the plan of sustainable growth. And hopefully we can sustain (that) going forward, especially when the new school does roll into actual use.

The $70 million operating budget would raise spending by 5.18 percent from the previous year. The board also recommended borrowing $3.4 million for various capital projects.

That budget includes $44 million for the schools, $18.8 million for municipal operations, $5.2 million for debt service, $1.8 million for capital projects and $130,000 for teacher retirement.

Some finance board members had said they wanted to keep the spending increase under 3 percent in light of the $78.1 million Huckleberry Hill Elementary School project.

The board ultimately sliced about $59,000 from the selectmens proposal. Finance board members chose to allocate $130,000 for teacher retirements, which was not part of the selectmens plan.

Meanwhile, the education boards request has been slashed by about $384,000, but school spending would still rise by just over 3 percent from the previous year.

Administrators are looking into how to handle those possible cuts and will present ideas to the school board at its next meeting, Superintendent John Barile said. He said he hopes the board will know by the town meeting how the proposed budget would affect the district.

However, the $50,000 the board requested for a new world language lab was moved into the towns capital plan. The school district had hoped to open this lab this school year, but last year removed the plan from the budget.

The high school has this lab, which offers technology that better helps students practice a foreign language. Brookfield has a district-wide world language program and has noted a rise in English language learners, who also benefit from the lab.

Residents will discuss the operating budget proposal at a public hearing at 7 p.m. April 2. A special town meeting on the capital plan will be held at 7 p.m. April 4.WASHINGTON  President Donald Trump on Thursday fulfilled a promise he made to conservative activists earlier this month by signing an executive order that makes federal research dollars for universities and colleges contingent on assurances of free speech on their campuses.

Trump said his new policy will send a powerful message to professors and power structures who want to keep young Americans from challenging rigid, far-left ideology.

If a college or university does not allow you speak, we will not give them money, the president said.

Connecticuts universities said Thursday they already protect free speech.

The Trump administration did not define what would have to occur for a school to lose its funding and how the administration would enforce the rule.

I wont get into implementation details but OMB (the Office of Management and Budget) will work with each agency on implementation, an administration official said. That will be coming in the next several weeks and months.

Public universities, like the University of Connecticut, must already uphold the rights protected in the Constitutions First Amendment. Private universities like Yale have leeway to set up their own rules around free speech. But an administration official said they must comply with their stated institutional policies regarding free inquiry.

UConn does not have a free speech policy  the First Amendment is its guiding principle, said UConn spokeswoman Stephanie Reitz. Free speech is one of UConns bedrock values, regardless of the content of that speech.

However, Reitz said, the university does regulate speech that is not protected by the First Amendment - specifically such as true threats and harassment, through the Student Code of Conduct and a policy against discrimination and harassment.

Yale did not respond to a request for comment on Trumps executive order, sending instead a link to a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by university President Peter Salovey in 2017 entitled Yale Believes In Free Speechand So Do I.

Yale does not censor invited speakers, nor does the administration discipline faculty members or students for the expression of ideas, no matter how unpopular, Salovey wrote. The answer to speech one finds offensive is more speech.

Salovey also wrote no invitation to any speaker has been withdrawn as the result of concerns about viewpoint or potential disruption, adding that a commitment to free speech does not mean that one has to think all speech is equally valuable, respectful or helpful to the educational mission.

Conservative activists, however, say Yale and other universities are liberal bastions that value political correctness over free speech.

They point to a 2015 incident at Yale, where Professor Nicholas Christakis stepped down from his post as the head of a residential college- but retained his tenured teaching position  after confronting students who protested an e-mail sent to them by his wife, Erika Christakis. The e-mail questioned the schools policy against various insensitive forms of behaviors, like wearing offensive Halloween costumes.

Last year, Christakis was awarded the universitys highest faculty honor, the Sterling Professorship.

John Morgan, spokesman for Quinnipiac University, said the school does not have a free speech policy.

But we are very supportive of free speech, Morgan said.

Fracas over free speech

Yale is among the top schools in the nation when it comes to federal research dollars.

The National Science Foundation ranked Yale 15th in spending on research, having spent more than $950 million in 2017, of which $541 million came from federal grants.

UConn received nearly $215 million in federal research grants in 2018.

Trump initially proposed the idea to tie research dollars to free speech during a March 2nd speech to conservative activists, during which he highlighted the case of activist Hayden Williams, who was punched while recruiting on the University of California, Berkeley campus in February.

While conservatives say universities discriminate against visiting conservative speakers, the schools say that when they allow controversial speakers to exercise their First Amendment rights on campus, they must do their best to defuse tensions and keep students safe.

Last year, UConn was criticized for its handling of an appearance by Ben Shapiro, author of Bullies: How the Lefts Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans.

The school approved a request from the College Republicans for Shapiros appearance only after holding a so-called pre-event review process. It restricted access to the event and offered counseling to students who might be offended by Shapiros talk.

Lucian Wintrich was heckled at UConn when he tried a couple of months before that to deliver his speech, Its OK To Be White. The event ended when a protester took his notes from the lectern and a fracas ensued.Gov. Ned Lamonts latest school bill would encourage districts to share resources, but Danbury-area superintendents said they already do.

Local districts partner on buying technology and transporting students with special needs  initiatives that would fall under Lamonts proposal and a proposal state Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, introduced last week.

Lamont last week pulled back some of his demands for schools to create regional districts. His latest plan would create a committee to come up with recommendations on how to share resources and doesnt force regionalization.

Its smart to not force the issue, but look at it from the perspective of savings and joint services to keep costs down, Danbury Superintendent Sal Pascarella said. So, people can have their districts, but have them run efficiently and effectively.

Superintendents said they are already doing much of what the bills encourage. Administrators from several local districts have been meeting monthly for more than a year to discuss how they can better share services.

Frankly, my colleagues and I, we dont need the state of Connecticut to tell us to save money, Brookfield Superintendent John Barile said. Thats something weve already been working on. Thats a constant mission of ours, to try to be more efficient.

Many area residents feared they would lose local control over their schools if the original plan was approved.

But concern remains over the proposal to cut state funding for districts with fewer than 2,000 students, only two schools or less, or towns with fewer than 10,000 residents that dont share a superintendent or make their school board chairman a superintendent.

Smaller districts that act like a regional school district, such as Easton, Redding and Region 9, worry they could be forced to take it a step further and become one district, which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in realigning salaries under union contracts.

Rob Blanchard, spokesman for the governors office, said the committee would create advisory recommendations and districts would be encouraged to partner with other towns by receiving more school construction money.

Megan Bennett, Region 12 superintendent, said she does not know how the proposal specifically affects her district, which includes three towns but does not hit the 2,000 student threshold.

But she said she likes the governors new idea for the committee.

Already partnering

Districts have saved thousands of dollars by purchasing Chromebooks together and sharing transportation for special education students placed out of the district. A newly created interactive map, showing where students live and where they travel to for school, has assisted with the latter.

The reason we created it was to not only see if we can share rides with other districts, but to look at what other transportation companies are charging as a mechanism for negotiations, Bethel Superintendent Christine Carver said.

The high cost to bus these students out of district has been a major factor in the increase in special education spending, which has driven up school budgets across the Danbury area.

Administrators are looking into sharing special education services, including possibly creating a regional school .

EdAdvance and Cooperative Educational Services, two organizations that assist local school districts, plan to study whether this would save costs in the long run.

Thats a long-term goal though because that involves a lot of work, Carver said.

She said area superintendents plan to ask whether local districts could better make use of the states system for comparing student data. This would allow districts to avoid paying for their own systems.

Thats the crux of these bills, Carver said. There are things we all do that we can come together on.

Already regional

Its unclear what the governors proposal would mean for the smaller districts already doing what he recommends.

Redding, Easton and Region 9 all have less than 2,000 students on their own, but the three districts already share a central office, bus contract and some employees.

Thomas McMorran, the superintendent for all three, said consolidating them into one would not generate the savings the governor and other politicians predict. Instead, he said the forced regionalization would cost the town hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring all of the union contracts to the same level. He added teachers would probably be cut to cover the difference and result in large class sizes.

I dont see this as saving any money at all, simply because of the contract resolution, he said.

While all of the employees have good salaries, McMorran said the contracts in Region 9 are higher than those in Easton and the bargaining units wont accept decreases, meaning all of the contracts would have to be brought up to the highest level in the group.

He said if the overall goal is to create greater efficiencies and better services for students, then the challenge lawmakers face is how to do that without costing the towns a lot of money.

McMorran said combining the three districts would find efficiencies at central office because right now the staff of 13 is doing everything in triplicate  three bus schedules, three budgets and three calendars. It also means McMorran attends meetings for three school boards.

If you could unify all of that without the most expensive contract becoming the norm for the whole district, you could find savings, he said. I still think it will be too expensive.RIDGEFIELD  Plans to clean up the former property of the late Michael Venus  a contractors yard containing an abandoned fuel-oil tank and several storage trailers containing landscaping equipment  will go before the Planning and Zoning Commission on Tuesday.

The 1.6-acre property at 865 Ethan Allen Highway, which backs up against a swampy section of the Norwalk River behind the Ace Tire shop on Route 7, has been the subject of a lawsuit by the town against Michael Venus for the past four years.

Venus, a prominent Ridgefielder who served on the Board of Selectmen, was chairman of the Parks and Recreation Commission. He also served on the Police Commission, clerked for the Board of Finance, and served as a volunteer firefighter. Venus died in July 2018.

The property is now under the control of his estate, managed by his daughter, Kelly Molony.

The property has been operating as a contractors yard for several years without a permit from the town, according to a remediation plan outlined by Molonys attorney.

Molony plans to ask for a special permit to continue to run a contractors yard on the property, according to the plans submitted by attorney Peter Olson.

It is the intent of this application to gain an approval which recognizes the long-standing use of the property and ensures that the Town considers the use to be in compliance with the zoning regulations, Olsons plan states.

The plans before the commission would also remove around 60 to 100 yards of asphalt millings, a concrete pad and other fill from the western area of the property.

Three storage trailers now in use by tenants would be pulled back away from the banks of the Norwalk River toward the front of the property and closer to the Ace Tire shop. Other trailers on the property will be removed entirely, as will a loading dock and filling structure, the plan states.

Topsoil will be put down and vegetation planted, according to the plans submitted by Olson.

Oil tank

The remediation plan does not mention the removal of the 45-foot oil tank, which Venus had originally intended to do.

Issues on the property first came to light in August 2014, when Venus began excavating the ground around the fuel tank to create more parking on the site and prepare to remove the tank.

Excavation done around the fuel tank and remaining lines has led to a strong odor of gasoline in the area, Richard Baldelli, Ridgefields zoning enforcement officer told Michael Narcisi in a Army Corps of Engineers report.

Narcisi is an ecologist and soil scientist with the Army Corps of Engineers.

The corps became involved due to the proximity of the work to the Norwalk River, but ultimately decided that Venuss alleged work on the property did not fall under its jurisdiction.

The smell led to a complaint from one of the neighboring businesses on Route 7, which gave the town reason to inspect the property.

Baldelli, and Betty Brosius (who at the time was the director of planning and zoning and the town inland wetlands agent) issued a notice of violation for the removal of earth adjacent to the Norwalk River.

The lawsuit filed by the town alleges the excavation involves soils potentially containing leaked or leached home heating oil, but does not claim directly that the tank has leaked.

The notice of violation from the town notes that the 45-foot tank has not been properly abandoned, according to the CTDEEP representative on site, referring to a member of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, which oversees cases of pollution.

When the Planning and Zoning Commission walked the property on March 17, Molony said the oil tank had been empty for years.

Some areas of digging  filled with water  could be seen around the perimeter of the oil tank.

Allegedly, Mr. Venus is preparing to remove the abandoned fuel tank to create additional parking and storage, said Narcisi, in a 2014 email to both the town wetlands agent and zoning enforcement officer. He was in the process of excavating around this structure until the town issued their notices. The tank still has underground utilities and is in close proximity to the Norwalk River.

Read more of this story at theridgefieldpress.comSHERMAN  How the marriage of two well-regarded men ended with the younger one dead from chop wounds to the head continues to trouble friends who knew them in this small New England town.

But if anything stood out about one of Shermans leading couples, its that their marriage troubles seemed to increasingly involve alcohol.

The madness that fueled this murder was caused by several forces, but the driving force was alcohol, said Don Lowe, the first selectman of Sherman. This is certainly something that many people in the town recognized.

The death of 63-year-old Thomas Conley and the arrest of 65-year-old James Maharg ends the story of two accomplished designers in Manhattans fashion retail trade, who made their name as good neighbors in this pastoral town of gentlemen farmers.

For now, all that police are saying is that Maharg is in police custody at Waterbury Hospital, charged with murder and tampering with evidence.

His husband, Conley, was found dead in the white hilltop farmhouse they called home when they werent at work designing custom retail displays in lower Manhattan.

Police did not believe Mahargs explanation that his husband had fallen and hit his head on the counter.

I think I was probably as shocked as everyone else, said Michael Aleksandrowicz, owner of Sherman Wine & Liquors, the only store of its kind in town.

More News Sherman man charged in murder

Aleksandrowicz saw the well-dressed pair as much as three times a week, buying everything from beer to bourbon.

Both were nice guys  they were everywhere, Aleksandrowicz said. Youd see them in the bank and in the Town Hall and in the grocery store and at summertime functions  so this is just a weird thing.

State Police would not discuss details of the investigation or release the warrant for Mahargs arrest.

A top prosecutor, Danbury State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky, said police are not allowed under law to release investigation details because Conley is the victim of domestic violence.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which performed the autopsy Friday, would only say that Conley had died from chop wounds to the head.

Details about the Wednesday night incident were not immediately available, except that Marharg called 911 shortly after 2 a.m. to say his husband had fallen and struck his head.

Troopers grew suspicious and called in the Western District Crime Squad.

While this rural town was buzzing with positive words Friday about the highly visible couple, those who knew them best said they had seen a change in their relationship, which had grown tense in recent months.

One merchant who would see them multiple times a week said in recent months they were not dressed with the same spirit, and they didnt seem as happy to be sharing each others company.

Lowe said their fights were often fueled by alcohol.

I am not going to diagnose them, but this is certainly something that many people in the town recognized, Lowe said. I dont think there is anything wrong with putting a lot of the cause on alcohol for that reason, because it is true.

State police would not comment on the investigation, except to say that troopers found a dead man in the home, and due to several suspicious circumstances, launched a homicide investigation.

The couples trouble was in contrast to their synergy and success as a team a decade earlier in 2009, when they founded Hudson & Broad after distinguished careers in retail fixture design.

Their company custom designs signs, graphics, lighting and other display features for Manhattans merchandizing industry.

In addition to a Manhattan property on West 23rd Street, the couple owned a 20-acre farmhouse on Church Hill Road, overlooking the wooded hills of Sherman.

A neighbor whose family has lived in Sherman for 90 years said they were delightful men who cared about the community and cared about the land.

In return, the neighbor said, the men deserve to be treated with the benefit of the doubt. The neighbor said she and others who live nearby were reserving judgment about what happened until all the facts come out.

Staff writer Kendra Baker contributed to this article. rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342DANBURY  For the second time this month, a two-alarm fire has forced city residents from their homes.

About 25 people were evacuated after a fire broke out at 5 Main St. about 11 p.m. Thursday night. No injuries were reported.

The Danbury Fire Marshals Office was called to the scene and is investigating the cause of the fire, which was undetermined as of last night.

Firefighters responding to the three-story building discovered smoke and suspected there was a fire in the wall. The blaze was upgraded to a second-alarm fire minutes later, bringing in additional units to assist. Crews made quick work of the fire, which was in the floor and wall of apartments on the second floor.

Even though damage was kept to a minimum, about 25 people were displaced for the night because of problems that were found and where the fire was, said Fire Department spokesman James Gagliardo.

It is unclear when residents will be allowed to return to their apartments.

Gagliardo said the building was turned over to the insurance company for investigation, and that the fire marshal will have to clear it before residents can move back in.

He said he did not know the exact number of apartments in the building, but noted there was a business  Cargo Express  on the street level.

The business apparently was not affected by the fire, he said. No one from Cargo Express could be reached Friday for comment.

The American Red Cross Connecticut was helping eight of the displaced residents  a family of six adults and two children.

We really work to meet each familys immediate needs, which are different for each family, said Stefanie Arcangelo, chief communications officer for the American Red Cross Connecticut Chapter.

In addition to helping with shelter, food and clothing, the Red Cross provides families with comfort kits containing personal care items like toothbrushes, soap and deodorant.

Arcangelo said the Red Cross typically does not go directly to fire scenes.

Sometimes well hear about a fire and respond to see if anyone needs assistance, but usually fire departments or dispatch offices will let us know, she said.

The Main Street fire comes two weeks after a fire displaced a family of five from their 14 Clairann Drive home.

The cause of the Clairann Drive fire is also still under investigation, said Gagliardo.

kendra.baker@hearst.comPolice in Massachusetts arrested a man this week after a delivery service reported that he was refusing to return a television he did not buy.

According to WCVB, the delivery service said it had delivered two televisions to Nicholas Memmo's home in Freetown, but one of them was a mistake.

"The delivery service contacted police after several unsuccessful attempts to recover the television," police said.

Police also said Memmo refused to cooperate when officers visited his home.

Police obtained a search warrant and returned to Memmo's home, where they found the 86-inch LG television mounted to a living room wall.

"They surrounded the house and knocked on the door with flashlights coming through all the windows. They told me to come outside then handcuffed me," Memmo told Fox 25.

He is now charged with larceny of over $1,200 by false pretense and misleading a police officer.

Memmo admitted police tried to talk to him about the television days before the arrest.

"I said, 'Do I need to hire an attorney?' and they said I wasn't under investigation at that point. They were just asking questions. I answered a lot of questions with, 'I dont know,' just so I didnt jeopardize myself," he said.

Memmo claims he researched whether he had to return the TV that was delivered by mistake.

"I did and I looked into all the laws and said, 'You know, its a scratch ticket. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,'" he said. "Amazon said I had nothing to worry about. I made no wrong decisions at that point."I was housebound in February and watched, through windows, that famously gray month outdo itself with one awful storm  sodden snow, rain, ice  after another. The days dawned and the sun rose, but clouds got in the way and it got sleety.

So maybe a week ago, sprung from confinement, I walked out onto my driveway, then stopped. Freezing rain wasnt falling, and a tufted titmouse was singing out Peter, Peter, Peter. I knew it was spring and something in me relaxed a bit. I was outside, I was reasonably OK, and the sun and the whole world was stirring the pot.

Real spring weather, complete with green grass, daffodils and warblers, is still a few weeks away. But now, you can see and feel the changes coming as we switch to a more obliging season.

Cathy Hagadorn, director of the Connecticut Audubon Societys Deer Pond Farm nature center in Sherman, said shes seen turkey vultures flapping their wings instead of soaring, with one vulture chasing after another  maybe a little spring mating aggression.

Something was going on, she said.

In Bethel, Billy Michael has begun his annual quest to find frogs and salamanders as they emerge from their winter quarters and head to open water to breed.

Earlier this month, on a hunch, he drove up to Eureka Reservoir and found a Jefferson salamander in the road, heading to spawning territory  an early amphibian with an icy pond awaiting him.

He was a lone soul, Michael said.

Plants are emerging. Skunk cabbage is thermogenic  it produces its own heat and melts the snow around it as it begins to grow. Sarah Breznen, director of education at the Woodcock Nature Center in Ridgefield, has seen its buds poking up already.

In New Milford, Diane Swanson, the executive director of the Pratt Nature Center, said shes seen two budding species.

Ive seen skunk cabbage, and lots of children playing outside, she said.

And, bluebirds. And, Swanson said, maybe a killdeer.

At Woodcock Nature Center, educator Sam Nunes has seen and heard a red-winged blackbird, which makes sense. Red-winged blackbirds like swamps and the Woodcock preserve has lots of wetlands. Cardinals are sounding their clear mating call around the property, Nunes said.

He said, he may have also seen an osprey soaring by, checking out the territory.

This is about the time they show up, Nunes said.

Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society, said the states bird population is never static  somethings always on the move.

Along the states shoreline, the wintering waterfowl is clearing out and heading north to breed. So fare-thee-well, buffleheads and canvasbacks and long-tailed ducks.

But egrets and herons and other shorebirds will soon be returning, Comins said. If great cormorants  the cormorant species that winters in Connecticut  are taking leave, double-crested cormorants  the summer species  are coming back.

Its quite an amazing time, he said.

Inland, woodcock are setting up territories and the males will be making their circling courting flights. Woodpeckers are drumming and owls are already sitting on their nests.

Although robins now overwinter in the state, theyve been seen bob-bob-bobbin along in larger flocks  and are still welcome as the first sign of spring.

At New Pond Farm nature center in Redding, three new lambs are scampering around.

Our chicks are coming in, said Tim Laughlin, New Ponds program director. Now is the time to order them.

Some of the bees in the farms hives survived the winter and will be buzzing as soon as it warms up. Some of the hives, Laughlin said, didnt make it  the fate of beekeeping in Connecticut.

When the ice comes off the ponds  and sometimes even before that happens  tree frogs and wood frogs and peepers will add their chorus of chirps and quacks to the world. Live close enough to a wetland, and you need earplugs to preserve your hearing.

Comins, of the Connecticut Audubon Society, said you can see the first soft red blush of maple trees starting to bud.

Hagadorn of Deer Pond Farm said she can see a weeping willow tree at the nature center beginning to turn yellow.

So after a unforgiving winter, these first warm colors, the sounds of birds singing, not merely chirping; spring peepers; the sight of turkey vultures back on the scene, are all welcome.

From now on, Hagadorn said, everything is going to be better.

Contact Robert Miller at earthmattersrgm@gmail.comThe following are recent arrests released by the Danbury Police Department on March 22, 2019.

March 20

A 30 year-old Brewster, NY man was charged with assault and interfering with an emergency call.

A 35-year-old Olive Street man was charged with identity theft, stalking, harassment, criminal mischief and breach of peace.

A 41-year-old Crown Street man was charged with disorderly conduct/fight capable of causing minor injury.

A 37-year-old Wildman Street Street man was charged with threatening and criminal violation of a protective order.

March 21

A 39-year-old Elwell Place man was charged with disorderly conduct and assault.

A 42-year-old Danbury man was charged with criminal trespassing.

As of January 2019, Hearst Connecticut Media does not include names in online police blotters.Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.

Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.

A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.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.BRIDGEPORT  The Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, which earlier this week agreed to pay $3.55 million to five people who claimed they had been sexually abused by priests when they were children, on Friday updated its list of priests who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse.

The updated list adds 10 names, eight of whom are deceased diocesan priests; one visiting priest from a Venezuelan diocese who spent the summer of 1991 in the Diocese of Bridgeport, and one living diocesan priest who has not served in the diocese since 1984.

The update brings the total to 38 credibly accused priests. The diocese also listed nine other priests who it has paid out settlements for abuse claims without determining whether the priests were credibly accused.

I am committed to remaining transparent and instituting whatever change is needed to better respond to those affected by abuse, said Bishop Frank J. Caggiano in a letter to parishioners released Friday. I recognize that any restoration of trust will require a continued diligent effort on my part, as well as on the part of all of us who love the church.

Added to the diocesan list of credibly accused are: the Rev. James A Gay, a retired priest who served in the diocese from 1959 to 1984; the Rev. John Draper, ordained in 1953, died 1966; the Rev. William Fletcher, ordained 1944, died 1988; the Rev. Martin Hitchcock, ordained 1951, retired 1991, died 2014; the Rev. James McCormick, ordained 1916, died 1965; the Rev. Bartholomew Laurello, ordained in 1946, died 2004; the Rev William R. Nagle, ordained 1927, died 1979; the Rev. Boleslaus Bill Rarus, ordained 1940, died 2005; the Rev. Paul Spodnick, ordained 1927, died 1976; the Rev. Jose Daniel Alberran a priest from the Diocese of Barcelona in Venezuela spent one summer at St Peter Parish in Bridgeport in 1991.

The diocese notes that the accused priest William R. Nagle, who served at St. Clement in Stamford and St. Vincent Hospital in Bridgeport, among other places, is not the same man as Monsignor William Aloysius Nagle, a priest at The Basilica of St. John the Evangelist in Stamford from 1973 to 1998.

The bishop stated that the list will continue to be updated as ongoing investigations continue into past allegations relating to deceased priests or as other matters come forward.

In a report last October, the bishop said the diocese has paid $52.5 million to settle 156 allegations of sexual abuse by priests since 1953. He also appointed a retired judge, Robert Holzberg, to look into claims that the diocese covered up priests sexual abuse of children for decades.HARTFORD  The battle between electric car maker Tesla and Connecticuts auto dealerships came to an abrupt halt following Teslas Feb. 28 announcement that it was changing its strategy in favor of an online-only sales model.

In late February, Tesla announced that it was abandoning its push to sell directly to consumers through brick-and-mortar retail locations.

Legislators in Connecticut who have been supportive of Teslas agenda for years arent at all happy that they were given no advance notice of the sudden decision to abandon its push for direct sales through stores.

We had a long, drawn out public hearing in late February and 72 hours later we find out that their business model has completely changed, Rep. Roland Lemar, D-New Haven, said Thursday.

(Transportation) Committee members were frustrated, Lemar, who is co-chair of the committee, said. Lemar said the bill wont be raised again, unless we hear from someone at Tesla that something changes down the road.

Lemar, who was a proponent of allowing Tesla to open stores in Connecticut, added: Weve been talking to Tesla for a long time  years, and we never heard a single word of a change in its strategy to sell cars. After having this happen, and being given no notice, committee members were almost unanimous that there was no space to move this forward.

Lemar said that after Tesla CEO Elon Musk made his announcement, he had a conversation with Albert Gore, a policy and business development manager at Tesla. Greenwichs showroom closed soon after the announcement.

He was apologetic, Lemar said, but Lemar added that Gore, too, was caught flat-footed by the change in corporate direction.

After years of battling state legislatures in Connecticut and elsewhere in order to sell vehicles directly to consumers, Tesla recently said it would close all but a small number of its existing company-owned stores to save money.

Musk said the company will only sell cars online to enable us to lower all vehicle prices by about 6 percent on average. That means most Tesla dealerships across the United States will be closing over the next few months, Musk said.

Musk said an unknown number of Tesla stores in high-traffic locations will stay open, but will no longer sell cars. Instead, they will become galleries where prospective customers can get a closer look at the vehicles. Service centers, Musk said, wont be impacted.

A Tesla spokesperson reached in California Thursday would not directly address Lemars criticism of Tesla blindsiding Connecticut lawmakers.

Instead the spokesperson who declined to be identified said: Regarding ongoing efforts to obtain sales licenses in Connecticut, Teslas move to online sales does not change our support for the principle that manufacturers of electric vehicles who have chosen not to franchise should not be required by states to sell through franchised dealers.

The spokesperson said an increasing number of Tesla customers were shopping  and buying  the cars online, so the shift in business model simply made sense.

In Connecticut, Tesla and the Connecticut Automotive Retailers Association were unable to reach an agreement that would allow the company to sell directly to consumers. Both sides had left it up to lawmakers to decide whether the dealer franchise laws should apply to companies like Tesla.

Last years bill made it through two committees before it was tabled in April. Lawmakers asked Tesla to broker a deal with the car dealers, but the two sides were never able to reach an agreement.

At the Transportation Committee public hearing in February, proponents said that electric vehicles are good for the environment; opponents, mainly car dealers, said that selling cars without paying a franchise price gave Tesla an unfair advantage.

Tesla owners in Connecticut generally travel to New York or Massachusetts to purchase their vehicles. The closest sales location is in Mount Kisco, New York, which is only 17 miles from Greenwich.

There is a Tesla service center in Milford if repairs are needed, but no cars can be sold there.

Tesla maintains 102 stores across 23 states, including Washington, D.C., with the majority clustered in California and Florida, according to the most recent list published on its website.

Its unclear whether Tesla will abandon its appeal of a decision by a Connecticut judge, which agreed with the Department of Motor Vehicles that the company was violating state law by selling out of its Greenwich gallery without a license.

Tesla had appealed the decision to the Connecticut Supreme Court, but asked the high court for an extension of time to file its documents.ANSONIA  The room was quiet, almost silent, save for the scratching of graphite against paper.

It was cold, but model Keri Carlson was dressed in a sheer nightgown. And it was bright  illuminated by two spotlights and overhead lights as an English teacher, a painting contractor, a sales manager and a sculptor each tried their hand at sketching Carlson.

It was a night of firsts: the first time Carlson had ever posed for artists; the first Valley Arts Council life drawing class in its new Ansonia digs.

Im starting with this exercise  drawing without looking at the paper, said Seymour resident Betsy Rosenberg, who kept her eyes on the model instead of her hands. This is the first time Ive done this in 36 years. I need to get my bearings.

Rosenberg was one of 10 participants in the class who arrived carrying portfolios and boxes of colored pencils, pens and chalks. One brought just a pad and two No. 2 pencils.

Most sat in chairs to do their work, but Vasil Rakaj, a transplanted Albanian living in Ansonia, brought his own carved bench with a built-in easel.

Richard DiCarlo, the councils president and one of the 10 participants, said the Arts Council programs moved from downtown Derby to an Ansonia storefront across from City Hall last fall.

(Mayor) Dave (Cassetti) and Sheila (OMalley, Ansonias economic development director) opened their doors to us, DiCarlo said. Theyve given us a lot of opportunity to showcase art in the Valley.

The gallery, located on Main Street in what had been Joe Diglios barbershop for the past half century, allows artists to exhibit and sell their pieces.

The Arts Council also uses three small rooms in the Armory for its activities. One holds the studio where Art Talks is filmed and will be appearing on YouTube and Comcast. Another is where Rakaj works on his sculpture of George Kastrioti, an Albanian nobleman and military commander in the 1400s. He intends to enter the finished piece in an European competition.

Were going to be doing something different every month, DiCarlo said of the new storefront studio.

Plans include a watercolor class, one on bookbinding, another on polymer clay and one on Zentangle  the practice of using dots, lines and curves to create patterns. Each will last two hours with an instructor.

With Carlson perched atop a stool under two spotlights, DiCarlo offers no instructions for this first venture except to urge participants to loosen up their strokes.

Everyone perceives things differently, so tonight is non-instructional, he said.

Sitting next to DiCarlo was George Pudimat, a friend and Derby painting contractor.

My challenge is drawing to proportions, Pudimat said. Accomplishing that is my whole goal between now and the end of the year.

He said he came in with no expectations so he wont be disappointed ... the worse case is I gave it a shot.

Its good to sketch a live model, added Rakaj, whose bust of Martin Luther King Jr. was recently unveiled outside City Hall. His other works have been displayed in the United Nations, Buckingham Palace, the White House and the Vatican.

The first thing you need to assess is proportions ... you want to look at the face, then take in the body  its muscles and bones. Sketching a model is the best teacher to have.

Lisa Cheneys figures only have faces early on in the evening.

Im good at drawing faces, not so good at drawing bodies, said Cheney, a Seymour High School English teacher. Everybody needs to have their hands in their pockets if Im drawing them.

But, she added, my daughter can draw people like nothing.

Her daughter, Gabrielle, who also was at the class, majored in illustration at Parsons School of Design in New York. Sitting behind her mother, Gabrielle dabbled with a rainbow box full of colored chalks. Her sketches were marked by bright and deep colors.

I like messing around with watercolor pens, charcoal, pastels, she said. Its a nice opportunity to do something you wouldnt do alone at home.

When the two-hour session ended, Mary Kohler, a B.J.s sales manager, said she found it relaxing. She had attended Paier College of Art in Hamden and the Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida.

I havent done this in a long time, she said. I think I did pretty good.KILLINGWORTH  Efforts to build a 1.98 megawatt solar farm on 25-acre wooded area near Chatfield Hollow State Park are facing opposition as the project makes its way through Connecticuts regulatory process.

A group calling itself Killingworth Advocates for Responsible Solar said in an 11-page letter to the Connecticut Siting Council that the solar farms proposed location is environmentally objectionable. The Siting Council is responsible for determining the appropriate location for utility infrastructure.

The only reason for the proposed location would appear to be its proximity to three-phase power lines on Route 80, saving the applicant the cost of tying in to a distant hook up, the letter says in part, referring to Maryland-based Standard Solar. If this petition is approved, the question arises as to what locations could then possibly be deemed off limits for solar farms. There are right and wrong locations for solar installations; this location is the latter.

Among the specific objections the group cites in its letter to the Siting Council last month is the potential for increased erosion and storm water run off from the site as well as the scenic impact it would have on the surrounding area.

Standard Solar submitted its application for the project in late October 2018 and Tuesday in New Britain, the Siting Council will hold its final public hearing on the application. A draft decision in the case is expected to be released on May 9 with a final decision scheduled for May 24.

Although some Killingworth residents object to the plan, the towns First Selectwoman, Catherine Iino, said the project would provide between $80,000 and $85,000 in annual tax revenue. Right now, because the property is a forest, it is only yielding a few hundred dollars in taxes, Iino said.

Another reason Iino said she is supportive of the project is that if the Siting Council rejects the plan for the solar farm, it could end up hurting the town in the long run.

If it doesn't get done, its not guaranteed that the property will stay the same as it is now, she said. If there is residential development on that property, it would actually cost the town money (in terms of the need for additional expenditures on schools and public safety as a result).

Eric Partyka, director of business development for Standard Solar, said the company acquired development rights to the property last June from BeFree Solar, which pulled out of the Connecticut market.

Partyka said one of the benefits of the project is electricity it produces will be used locally. The project calls of whatever electricity the solar panels produce to be fed into Eversource Energys distribution network and delivered to the utilitys Green Hill substation in Madison.

The solar farm will produce enough electricity to power 300 homes annually, according to company officials.

Partyka said the proposed solar farm has undergone significant levels of scrutiny designed to make sure the environment is protected. And the company has committed to installing a screening fence and additional trees around the orders of the property to make the solar panels less obtrusive visually.

Its really for when the leaves are off of the trees that the panels would be visible, he said.

Mike Trahan, executive director of the industry trade group SolarConnecticut, said while some of the public concerns about solar projects are legitimate, developers who play by the rules should have access to properties.

It's difficult for developers to have additional roadblocks thrown in their way when there are long standing rules in place that govern this process, Trahan said. These developers are bending over backwards to address concerns because ultimately the projects that get done are the ones where there is a good relationship.. We cant afford not to listen to what the public has to say.

The amount of land need for solar farms has been a bone of contention for some in Connecticuts agricultural community for much of the current decade.

Concern began when a 5-megawatt project with 23,000 panels was built on 50 acres of Somers farmland in 2013. Another in East Lyme was placed on inactive farmland and in 2016, a former Norwich dairy farm was turned into a solar site.

And the trend isnt limited to Connecticut. By leasing some of their land to energy companies for solar farms, farmers can boost their incomes exponentially while still selling vegetables and other crops.

luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.comNEW HAVEN  A state-hired psychiatrist testified Thursday that LeRoya Moore has had a sad life of simmering longstanding stress but the witness maintained Moore was not psychotic when she allegedly killed her two children.

Dr. Catherine Lewis, a professor of psychiatry at the UConn Health Center, spent the entire day on the witness stand being cross-examined by Supervisory Assistant Public Defender Jennifer Bourn. The three judges hearing the case absorbed hours of complex psychological testimony.

The defense team is trying to prove that Moore, now 39, was in a psychotic state when her children were killed in their East Haven home four years ago. The key witness hired by the defense, Dr. Paul Amble, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, testified earlier that Moore was indeed psychotic at that time.

Moore is charged with two counts of murder for the deaths of 6-year-old Aleisha Moore and 7-year-old Daaron Moore.

Lewis said she spent a total of about 11 hours interviewing Moore in 2017 at the York Correctional Institution. Moore has been held there in lieu of $2 million bail since her arrest in June 2015.

Lewis diagnosed Moore with having an anti-social personality disorder.

Bourn asked Lewis about her testimony Wednesday that a text message Moore received from her boyfriend a day or two before the children apparently died might have triggered the events that followed. The boyfriend told Moore: My hearts not in this relationship anymore.

Lewis told Bourn that rather than being the sole trigger, the text message could have contributed to Moore making a fateful decision.

Working all the hours she did was a contributing factor too, Lewis said, noting Lewis was working at the Gateway Community College bookstore during the day hours and holding down a second job at Yale in the evenings.

She had simmering, longstanding stress, Lewis said. And then came the rejection over a text. I think that contributed substantially.

Lewis said she had tried in vain to find the boyfriend for an interview but for a long time she didnt know his name. She said Moore wouldnt tell her the mans name, saying only that he was a white man from Glastonbury.

Lewis testified Moore was also angry at her ex-husband, Michael Moore, who had moved out of the residence they were sharing around 2011. Lewis testified Wednesday that LeRoya Moore had expected him to share fully in the child-rearing and she felt abandoned and betrayed by his inability to spend more time at home. He worked a double shift.

Lewis said the Moores got married in January 2007 and Daaron was born later that year. Aleisha was born two years later. Moore had given birth to three children previously via other men and had lost custody of two of them, apparently because of concerns by the state Department of Children and Families over how she was treating them.

Her hope was that when she married Michael Moore, I can have children in a marriage. I dont want to be a single mother again, Lewis testified. Shes trying to make a better life for her family and it didnt work out. Thats the sadness.

Lewis said she did interview Michael Moore. She said he was angry at his former wife.

Lewis testified LeRoya Moore had gotten into trouble with DCF for the way she disciplined her kids. The fact she hit her children, thats what she grew up with.

Lewis said Moore told her that her father beat her with a leather belt and her mother was an alcoholic.

Lewis recalled Moore also told her she was sexually abused for years by a relative who was a few years older than she was. She said they would exchange candy for oral sex. She alleged a long period of molestation. She said it stopped when she was 9 or 10.

Lewis had testified Wednesday she could find no written record in which Moore had reported this allegation.

Lewis reaffirmed her testimony from Wednesday that Moore never told her she had heard the voice of God telling her to kill herself and her children so that they could go to Heaven together. Amble had testified Moore told him she had heard this voice.

Lewis recalled Moore telling her she had received a message from God that it was time to come home. But Lewis added, That was not a hallucination. She never described a command that was hallucinatory.

Lewis later said, I cant say its delusional. People hear messages from God all the time and its not psychotic.

Lewis stated Moore told her My children are happy and Theyre in Heaven, theyre at peace, theyre not crying anymore. But Lewis noted: Its common in bereavement to hear voices of lost loved ones.

Moore, who slit her wrists in an apparent suicide attempt after her kids died, told Lewis: Im sorry I didnt die, according to Lewis testimony. But she told me, Im not sorry the kids are dead. Theyre where they need to be.

Lewis also quoted Moore telling her: The children didnt suffer. they did not die in vain.

Lewis repeated her skepticism, first expressed Wednesday, over Moores account of baptizing her children by drowning them in the bathtub so that they could go to Heaven with her.

Lewis noted a state medical examiner ruled Daaron died from acute intoxication of diphenhydramine and Aleisha died from acute intoxication of diphenhydramine and alcohol. Why would she also give them Benadryl? Lewis asked. That isnt related to baptism in any way. And she (Moore) told me she wasnt baptized. How is she going to get into Heaven? It doesnt hang together. Delusions, even if theyre psychotic, tend to hang together.

randall.beach@hearstmediact.comExpect a strange twist or two from the Bloomquists first feature film.

By design, were looking to invoke some kind of palpable sense of discomfort, says writer/director Erik Bloomquist.

Newington-raised Bloomquist, who is in his mid-20s, already has some acting credits under his belt and a five-episode CPTV series he wrote and directed. Add to that a psychological thriller that is winning awards at film festivals.

The new Mainframe Pictures movie Long Lost was filmed entirely in Greenwich and will have screenings starting March 29 in 30 places nationwide, including Norwalk, New Milford, Southbury, Bridgeport, Hartford and New London.

In some ways, its a meditation on loneliness and the roles that we find ourselves playing in every part of our lives, says Bloomquist. ...Which is why our tagline is Life is how you see it.

The film stars Adam Weppler (who was in Bloomquists CPTV series, The Cobblestone Corridor) as Seth, a young man invited to spend a weekend at the Connecticut mansion of his long-lost-millionaire half-brother Richard (played by Middletown native and Yale alum Nicholas Tucci).

The brother and his young live-in girlfriend, Abby, lead Seth down a psychological rabbit hole amid luxury and temptation. Abby is played by Catherine Corcoran of Return to Nuke Em High.

The whole weekend just sort of devolves into this strange, status play (with) relationship politics, says Bloomquist in a phone interview from a film fest in North Carolina the other day.

Love triangle perhaps?

Weve gotten compared to the sexy, 90s thrillers like Basic Instinct; weve gotten compared to more modern thrillers like The Invitation, says Bloomquist. Weppler, traveling with Bloomquist for the film fest, adds a viewer reaction in the background. Hitchcock, repeats Bloomquist, chuckling at that lofty comparison.

Sharing a writing credit with his brother Carson Bloomquist (their parents Kathleen and Craig are also listed in the credits) and filming in Connecticut in one location, the indy films cost was unspecified but manageable.

I will say that with all of my projects, by being able to produce them in Connecticut, were able to take advantage of available resources and good will that we couldnt in the same way in other markets, says Bloomquist, a Trinity College grad and a member of Connecticut Magazines 40 Under 40: Class of 2019. ...Weve been able to make a movie that definitely would have cost far more anywhere else.

Tucci also worked on Cobblestone, says Bloomquist, who had him in mind for Long Lost based on his strengths  particularly playing a juicy, fun, strange character. And he got very, very into it and brought a lot of his sensibilities, even more so than what was on the page.

In an email exchange, Tucci writes that the part was an easy yes based on working with the Bloomquists and Weppler in the past.

My character fits in some ways into the familiar trope of the overbearing, aggressive big brother, writes Tucci, however, he has a few novel quirks that I think make him unique and theres a late-stage revelation about his true nature that I hope will throw audiences for a loop.

Tucci brings a high level of intensity combined with a sense of play and experimentation, says Bloomquist. Weppler is super consistent, he adds, so it was really great to just let them do their thing.

Shot in just 10 days, Long Lost still has managed to earn best feature honors from midsized festivals such as Eastern Oregon Film Festival, Nevermore, Laughlin, Queen Palm International, jellyFEST, Sherman Oaks and Reading film fests.

Festivals can provide some grassroots buzz but theyre also about networking with programmers and taste-makers, says Bloomquist, and planting seeds and letting people discover your movie in a really organic way. Movie-goers tend to focus more on special screenings; and Q&As often follow. (The filmmakers will be at most of the Connecticut screenings.)

And with this specific movie... its designed to do that; its designed to start conversation and its designed to be something that, if you were to watch it again, its a very different experience. (pause) Thats all I can say.

Theres one more element that comes into play in the film.

There is this slow-burn, kind of throbbing question mark mixed in with some pitch-black eccentricities... (and) some very dark humor. Sometimes people actually dont realize they can laugh until like a half-hour in, says Bloomquist.

The screenings are scheduled at Riverview Cinemas in Southbury April 3, Wall Street Theater in Norwalk and Bank Street Theatre in New Milford April 4, the Garde Arts Center in New London April 7, Real Art Ways in Hartford on Monday April 8 and Bijou Theater in Bridgeport April 11.

jamarante@nhregister.com; @Joeammo on TwitterWEST HAVEN  Mayor Nancy Rossi released her recommended $163.3 million city budget for fiscal year 2019-20 and its a balanced one, she said, with no tax increase.

The public will get the chance to weigh in on the budget recommendations April 2 during a public hearing at Bailey Middle School.

Rossi gave copies of her budget proposal Thursday to City Council members in a quick special meeting. She then read an optimistic letter written by her that is part of the budget package.

After the April public hearing the budget will be voted on by the council and must gain the approval of the state Municipal Accountability Review Board, which is overseeing city finances.

I am pleased to report that the city of West Haven is living within its budget and is well on the way to recovery, Rossi wrote in the cover letter.

There is no tax rate increase in her budget.

She said the local economy is showing signs of improvement, including a $29.7 million increase in the grand list. And Rossi said the city for the first time in many years, has an operating budget surplus, referring to the fiscal year that closed June 30, 2018. The surplus is $3.1 million.

Rossi said one of her top priorities has been education and the Board of Education will actually receive more than requested under her spending plan due to the school districts state status as an Alliance District.

The Board of Education requested a $1.2 million increase, but will get $1.6 million in her budget, Rossi said.

Her total proposed budget is $163.3 million  with $73.6 million for city side expenses and $89.6 for education.

Rossi notes in her letter to the council that the budget includes $6 million in a restructuring grant from MARB, which provided restructuring grants of $8 million each for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. She said the restructuring funds will phase out to $4 million in fiscal year 2021 and $2 million in 2022.

Rossi said Thursday night the budget she submitted is, balanced, responsible and respectful to our taxpayers, businesses, employees, students and other stakeholders.NEW HAVEN  South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority customers would see their bills increase by 6.7 percent, or $43.08 per year, under a proposed rate increase presented to the utilitys governing body.

The authoritys Representative Policy Board held a public hearing late Thursday on the proposed increase. But nobody from the public spoke at the meeting, which was adjourned at its Sargent Drive headquarters after about 90 minutes without the Representative Policy Board voting.

Spokesman Dan Doyle said the board, which is made up of individuals representing each of the 15 towns served by the utility, is expected to vote on the proposed rate hike at the Authoritys April 18 meeting.. The increase, if approved, would take effect on July 1. The authority serves 430,000 people in Greater New Haven..

Linda Discepolo, the authoritys chief financial officer and Rochelle Kowalski, who is vice president of finance, told board members the rate increase is needed, in part, to show national bond rating agencies the quasi-public utility is continuing its decade long effort beef up its financial condition.

Jeffrey Donofrio, a North Have attorney who is the consumer counsel for the authoritys Office of Consumer Affairs, said significant progress has been made in reducing the utilitys debt burden.

If you read the ratings (service) reports, you see evidence of stronger (financial) planning, Donofrio said. It (the utility) was over-leveraged 10 years ago and it still is. Kicking the proverbial can down the road is not an option.

The authority needs to show the debt rating agencies that it has a sufficient revenue stream to make the necessary debt service payments. If the Representative Policy Board elects to reject the proposed rate increase, Linda Discepolo, the Authoritys chief financial officer, said the utility would have to delay the issuance of $41.8 million in new bonds to pay for infrastructure upgrades in the coming year.

Some of that money would be used to convert interim debt, which helped pay for part of last years nearly $15 million fix of a tunnel and pipe system, to more manageable long term debt. That project involved repairing and upgrading a system that brings water from Lake Galliard, the utility's largest reservoir, to a treatment facility in North Branford.

We continue to look at all areas of the business for possible savings, Kowalski said.

Discepolo said following the hearing that the utility has been over burdened with debt ever since it was created in 1977 by state lawmakers to take over the assets of the New Haven Water Co. Over the past decade, the authority has gradually chipped away at its debt levels, she said.

All in all, our efforts are working, Discepolo said.

But despite the progress made in reducing the utilitys debt overall, Discepolo said a pair of wetter than unusual summers in a row forced the authoritys executives to draw down its rate stability fund from $10 million to $3 million.

Doyle said authority officials recognize that the rate hike request comes in the midst of a continuing challenging economic environment affecting many of our customers.

Unfortunately, even in tough economic times, the systems carrying water to our customers homes continue to age, he said. The RWA has one of the most reliable water distribution systems in the country, and maintaining that service level means we must invest in upgrades to aging infrastructure.

luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.comNEW HAVEN  Assistant Chief Otoniel Reyes was officially named New Havens interim police chief Friday, which was the last day on the job for Police Chief Anthony Campbell.

Mayor Toni Harp made the announcement and said she will take the next few months to look for a permanent chief in a statewide search. She said a national search would be too time consuming.

I want it to be a faster process, Harp said.

The mayor said, however, if qualified persons from outside the state want to apply, they are welcome to do so.

Currently, Reyes is the assistant chief for patrol.

The mayor said she feels Reyes will provide the leadership needed to continue the fine work that the citys Police Department is already doing, as crime in the city has dropped precipitously.

Reyes was grateful for the mayors decision.

I want to thank Mayor Harp for the confidence she has placed in me to lead the men and women of the New Haven Police Department and the opportunity to serve as the interim police chief in the city where I was born and raised, Reyes said.

Campbell shocked the city when he announced Feb. 1 that he was leaving as the top officer after a meeting with the aldermanic leadership where he warned them that the exodus of officers to other towns would continue with the proposed changes in retirement medical benefits.

The police union is in mediation after being without a contract for three years.

Forty-nine officers retired from the department last year, while 10 more put in for retirement in January. Campbell said 39 more were in a position to retire, which would leave the department with a roster of officers where the most experienced would only have 11 years on the job.

Campbell has been an officer for 21 years, the last two as chief.

He decided he had to go after a confrontation with Alder Dolores Colon, D-6, at that leadership meeting in January.

I feel you are blackmailing us, Campbell said Colon said to him after he explained the dire position the department was in as personnel flee to suburban communities for less stressful work and more money.

Campbell said he had planned to leave in any event by the end of the year. He, too, said he could not wait for a new contract that would change his retirement health benefits. Campbell, at the time, said he could not stay in a place where his integrity and morals were questioned.

Reyes is the only assistant chief on staff who does not yet have the 20 years in the department to retire with a full pension. Assistant Chief Racheal Cain and Assistant Chief Luis Casanova have been applying for jobs outside the department.

Campbell has taken a job as an inspector with New Haven States Attorney Patrick Griffin starting next month.

Harp said when she visited the Police Department today on Campbells last day, there were representatives from three out-of-state departments who were consulting New Haven law enforcement on some of its initiatives.

They were from Baton Rouge, La., Wilmington, Del., and York, Pa. Harp said she was proud of the fact the New Havens police are viewed as leaders with success stories other professionals want to hear.

mary.oleary@hearstmediact.coml 203-641-2577.Ben Lambert / Hearst Connecticut Media

NEW HAVEN  The New Haven Police Department issued a last call Friday for those wishing to make a donation to its effort to collect diapers for the less fortunate.

Along with the Delta Foundation of Greater New Haven, the New Haven Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., and Bridgeport Parole and Community Services, the department has been collecting diapers for those in need during the month of March, Capt. Anthony Duff said in a Friday release.Lawrence Dorfmans novel Elm City Blues: A New Haven Noir opens with its wise-cracking protagonist, private detective Tommy Shore, sitting at my usual half booth at the Anchor.

Shore muses that its too early for a good cup of coffee and a cigar next door at the Owl Shop.

The fun of this book comes not just from its fast-moving plot of colorful, oddball characters. Anybody who knows New Havens streetscape with its landmark bars, restaurants, pizzerias, cemeteries and other sites will instantly be able to picture every scene.

Its a great city and the book was intended as part travelogue, mystery, food guide and love letter, Dorfman told me in an email after I read the book and tracked him down.

He agreed to meet me at, of course, the Owl Shop on College Street.

Heres how Dorfman described the place in Elm City Blues: The Owl Shop has been in New Haven since 1929. Started as a cigar store, the owners son added a bar just before the smoking laws changed and it was the only bar in Connecticut you could smoke and drink in. At night it could get pretty crazy, a mix of different crowds from different parts of the city. But in the day it was usually quiet.

Indeed, it was rather quiet last Monday afternoon, and not too smoky. Dorfman was sitting at a table by the front window, as Shore himself would do, when I entered the Owl.

I started smoking cigars 25-30 years ago, he told me. I began coming here when it was just a cigar shop. Ive been coming here ever since. Ive made a lot of friends here.

Dorfman nodded toward Joe Raffaele, the Owls tobacco manager, who was standing behind the bar. One of the characters in my book, Joe, is that guy right over there.

Another character in the book, Jay Reilly, is Dorfmans friend of the same name. In the book Reilly is a lanky Irishman sans clothes throwing paint at a canvas.

Dorfman told me, Hes a character (in true life), so I thought Id make him my (Shores) sidekick. The real Reilly once had an apartment at the Taft Building, across the street from the Owl. Shore lives there in this novel.

Dorfman wrote Elm City Blues over the last year and-a-half, then self-published it Jan. 1. (Its available only on Amazon). Some of it I wrote late at night in bed and some of it I wrote right here.

This is Dorfmans first novel but he earlier wrote The Cigar Lovers Compendium. In addition, he wrote and got into stores via Skyhorse Publishing about 10 editions of Snark Handbooks, which play around with language. He showed me two he had brought with him to the Owl: The Snark Handbook Insult Edition: Comebacks, Taunts and Effronteries and The Snark Handbook: A Reference Guide to Verbal Sparring.

They took off! he said with evident surprise. The first one made the L.A. Times best-seller list. The first two sold 80,000 to 90,000 copies. I also wrote a sex edition and a parenting edition. I made a few dollars.

But when I asked Dorfman how Elm City Blues is selling, he replied, Not well. He estimated he has sold a couple hundred copies. I havent promoted it. (I stumbled upon it when I spotted a pile of incoming books in my office. The title drew me in.)

When I told Dorfman I had found it disorienting to read a book that has no page numbers, he smiled and said, Amazon doesnt paginate unless you do it yourself.

Elm City Blues echoes the style of Dorfmans favorite writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Lawrence Block, John D. MacDonald and Robert Parker.

I love Parker, Dorfman said. His Spenser novels are Boston-based. I wanted to do the same thing for New Haven. He said he likes the Elm City because Its got that same sort of feel as Boston, except on a smaller scale.

Both cities are wonderfully walkable and thats what Shore does in the novel: roams from the Anchor to the Owl to Donut Crazy (for its maple bacon doughnuts), Louis Lunch, Willoughbys Coffee (an artisanal coffee shop which had been there long before Starbucks came to town), Modern Pizza (described as a rung of the Holy Trinity with Pepes and Sallys) and then on to the Grove Street Cemetery.

Shores work also takes him to a rendezvous in West Haven with some dangerous characters in a motorcycle gang, the Druids. (Dorfman made up that name but based them on a local group). Their meeting takes place in Jimmies of Savin Rock, that catered to the elderly and the obese. The food here came in piles that were bigger than your head and almost everyone left with a doggie bag.

Dorfman also has a sardonic description of the many Starbucks all over New Haven: Every table was occupied by Yale students, most alone, staring deep into the morass of their laptops. I always thought that a bomb could go off and they would only pause for a second and then Google the word bomb.

In a passage where Shore walks down Yales Broadway strip, sneering at the recently installed fancy-pants stores, Dorfman makes his attitude clear about this change: shaking my head at the Apple store that was packed this early in the morning and looking at the gentrification that seemed to have affected this street more than most. Urban Outfitters, Patagonia, J Crew  all the names were here for students to spend their stipends in. I missed the old stores like Cutlers Records and Whitlocks Rare Books. Even the food joints got fufu. The Educated Burgher was replaced by Salsa Fresca and the Yankee Doodle crowd was now being serviced by Maison Mathis. It made me sad.

Dorfman, who once managed the 45 RPM section at Cutlers, told me, Those places like the Educated Burgher and the Doodle, they were New Haven. There used to be seven different places to buy records in New Haven and about eight bookstores. The worlds changing but you miss that  especially when you get to a certain age. (He is 63.)

Those inevitable changes have also hit the Anchor, now known as The Anchor Spa. Dorfman doesnt go there anymore. Now its just generic and sterile.

Shores character clearly is based in part on Dorfman. Shore, the narrator, tells the reader: I had been in the book business for many years when that industry caved in on itself...I was a dinosaur without a place to go off to and get extinct in. Never really trained for anything, I had always been an avid reader of crime novels.

Dorfman told me, Tommys in a dying industry so he hangs out a shingle and becomes a P.I.

Dorfman said he lacks the patience to be a P.I. and stake out errant husbands. Instead, he is a book trade sales manager for Capstone, a publisher of childrens books, based in Minnesota. Thats where the strength seems to be these days, in kids books.

He said he loves his job, especially because he can work out of his Hamden home. I do some traveling, dealing with people who love books. Im getting books to kids, keeping it alive, the whole reading thing.

Dorfman has already written the second in what he envisions as a series of Tommy Shore novels. Number two is about a Yale sophomore who is being stalked, so her rich dad hires Shore to help out. The third book, now being written, centers on a stripper at the Catwalk.

Dorfmans wife, Rosalind Post, who also turns up in Elm City Blues, reads every word of his rough drafts. Dorfman told me, Shes my proofreader, editor and critic.

Contact Randall Beach at 203-680-9345 or srandall.beach@hearstmediact.comA Florida teenager has killed herself after surviving the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.

WTSP reports 19-year-old Sydney Aiello, a former student, died Sunday, according to police in Coconut Creek.

The recent graduate was reportedly friends with Meadow Pollack, one of the 17 students killed on Feb. 14, 2018.

Sydney Aiellos mother, Cara Aiello, told CBS Miami that her daughter was on campus the day of the massacre. She said her daughter struggled with survivor's guilt and was recently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sydney Aiello was reportedly struggling to show up for college classes because she was afraid of being in a classroom.

Cara Aiello said her daughter never asked for help before killing herself.

It breaks my heart that weve lost yet another student from Stoneman Douglas, said Ryan Petty, whose daughter died in the shooting. My advice to parents is to ask questions, dont wait.

Cindy Arenberg Seltzer, president and CEO of the Childrens Services Council of Broward County, said it is important for parents to look for suicide warning signs, such as kids hurting themselves or not taking part in important activities.

Parents have to be a little more aggressive when they see those signs and not just wait for the child to ask for help and maybe take them to those resources, Seltzer said.

A GoFundMe page titled "In Loving Memory of Sydney Aiello" has raised more than $7,000.

"Sydney spent 19 years writing her story as a beloved daughter, sister and friend to many. She lit up every room she entered. She filled her days cheerleading, doing yoga and brightening up the days of others. Sydney aspired to work in the medical field helping others in need," the page reads.



National Suicide Prevention

1-800-273-8255

SuicidePreventionLifeline.orgA Facebook user who posted the now-viral video of Corinne Magoveny-Terrones racist ShopRite tirade said they did so in order to lay bare the reality of racism.

Theres a lot of racism that goes on out there.... theres a lot of racism in the South but theres racism in the North as well, said the poster, who was also a bystander at the supermarket.

Experts point to the power of social media to expose just what the onlooker described. They warn, however, that not only does mass shaming come with risks, but the isolated progress it might bring for racial justice needs to be furthered with a long-term response.

A tool for justice

As the scene in ShopRite unfolded, the onlooker who later posted to Facebook had no idea Magoveny-Terrone would use the n-word, they said. But, sensing the situation might take a bad turn, they pulled out their phone regardless  and the resulting footage caught the nations attention.

Despite some upsetting comments, the bystander, who asked not to be identified, was generally happy with the widespread support many social media users expressed for victims of the tirade. I am grateful for all the positive feedback that it [the post] has received.

With social media, we have the ability to capture it [racism] when its happening said Don Sawyer III, chief diversity officer and associate professor of sociology at Quinnipiac University. Moreover, social media provides a means to show rather than merely tell about racist behavior, making it harder for those who would diminish the existence of racism, he said.

Kica Matos, director of Immigrant Rights and Racial Justice for the Center for Community Change, said social media exposure brings racist behaviors to otherwise blind eyes.

Too often I hear weve made a lot of progress and live in a post-racist society, Matos said. But these videos are forcing white folks to confront reality in that every day, Americans do engage in open hostile acts of racism.

Matos said the video of Magoveny-Terrone shows that racism doesnt only come from members of the KKK or self-proclaimed white supremacists; everyday people  they could be neighbors, or locals with kids in the school system  can exhibit racism.

Its waking people up that its much more pervasive than they thought, Matos said. Far too often we dont contextualize whats happening on social media. The footage we keep seeing that captures racial incidents makes visible how pervasive everyday racism is and the challenges people of color deal with.

Posts such as the Magoveny-Terrone video have impacts beyond documentation and exposure. According to Matos, sharing the incidents on social media is one avenue to hold someone responsible for their racist or discriminatory actions.

Or, as Sawyer put it, social media allows people to bring about their own defense or bring about their own justice.

Magoveny-Terrones case had tangible consequences. After the viral video exposed her behavior, she resigned from her job as a clerk in the Hamden Public Schools Central Office, she was shamed on a massive scale, and  because her children witnessed the incident  a report was filed with the state Department of Children and Families. East Haven police also encouraged those targeted in the incident to come forward and make a report.

This kind of public exposure is an opportunity for people to hold her accountable and hopefully, shes working to repair the damage shes done, Matos said. Anyone whos watching that video should be horrified, including her and her family, and she should be working to rectify the pain shes brought on all the people who have viewed it, not just here, but across the nation.

The risks of mass shaming

Social media shaming encompasses every variety of cases, from people who are ridiculed for riding planes barefoot to accused sexual predators outed by their victims.

Overall, said Quinnipiac University Associate Professor of Journalism Richard Hanley, mass shaming is a significant trend. The Magoveny-Terrone case both shows the power of social media to reveal repulsive acts and reveals racism in the most mundane of places, he said.

Users engage in the trend because it permits people to vent their anger and disgust about behavior they find repulsive, Hanley said. He noted major benefits to the practice, including the advantage it provides in monitoring public figures.

Of the Magoveny-Terrone case, Hanley said, Thats something that ought to be revealed and exposed. Bringing public attention to such repulsive acts helps enforce norms that should be followed and thus build a society that values respect, Hanley continued.

But there are elements of online shaming with which society must grapple.

Hanley noted the Magoveny-Terrone case was not a nuanced one. But in other circumstances, there is a danger that innocent people will get caught up in it, Hanley said.

According to Hanley, this particular pitfall can come about via two main avenues: either someones comment gets misconstrued, or a reputation is harmed with fake video, which presents a huge concern to social media applications.

The capacity with malicious intent to harm someones reputation exists, Hanley said.

Hanley also said that, as a society, we need to ask whether shaming can go too far and what that would look like. He encouraged people to use discretion when they post, and to explain the reason for their content.

As is common on posts exposing discrimination, many comments on news articles and social media posts featuring the Magoveny-Terrone videos expressed hate and violence toward her.

The challenges are when the discourse that follows is unregulated, youre elevating vitriol and animosity thats not healthy, so we need to figure out what the social norms are around this, Matos said.

Stanford researchers revealed another risk of public shaming, the Telegraph reported in 2018. Shaming on a massive scale, the researchers study showed, can engender sympathy for the original villain.

Whats more, hateful comments can even undermine the purpose of sharing these incidents by providing a platform whereby white supremacists justify racist behaviors, Matos said.

Hanley had his own thoughts on this pitfall, which he referred to as a backfire effect whereby people interpret media based on their own cognitive biases. He gave an example related to the Magoveny-Terrone video: If somebody is already inclined to see the view from the white supremacist perspective, theyll say this is just people picking on white people...Theyll try to turn it so the person uttering those remarks becomes the victim.

The Facebook user who posted the video may have seen the manifestations of a backfire in comments that suggested that Magoveny-Terrone had reason to use racial slurs. It shouldnt matter how it started. You shouldnt use that word, the poster said.

Though comments defending a perpetrator reflect the individual making them rather than the objective reality of the video, they can percolate to a wider audience and cause misinformation, Hanley said. The comments might [plug] into the cognitive bias of others and cause them to question the content of the video. At a certain point, the story itself becomes somewhat blurred.

Matos said a balance needs to be struck between exposing someones wrongdoing and public shaming.

Actions have consequences, Matos said. You cant engage in these painful, deeply offensive acts and expect that you wont be held accountable. We should be rejecting it and acting out against these social acts, but the challenge is that figuring out that we dont engage in equally offensive behavior thats paralyzing that doesnt encourage them to change.

Social media and long-term change

While social media shaming can spark justice in one form or another, the extent of that justice remains a looming question.

Though Sawyer said he thinks the Magoveny-Terrone incident can further a larger cause, he also implored people to ask what really changes.

Viral incidents such as Magoveny-Terrones frequently precipitate band-aid responses, Sawyer said. In other words, they may be dealt with immediately, but the larger implications quickly become forgotten  until the next incident, that is.

Sawyer gave a hypothetical example: in Magoveny-Terrones case, she was an employee of Hamden Public Schools, sparking questions about racism in the system. The school could bring in someone for diversity training classes, which, while valuable, is not a long-term solution, Sawyer said.

You cant change the socialization that people have had over the course of their lives in two classes, Sawyer said. He did not know how Hamden would respond, nor could he say whether Magoveny-Terrones behavior was an isolated incident or part of a pattern, he said.

But, Sawyer emphasized, he has frequently seen cases where incidents are swiftly dealt with and then forgotten.

What we should be asking in the wake of this incident, Sawyer said, is how we continue to impact structural racism.

Sawyer also warned that, in general, social media shaming can stifle conversations about race: people choose to stay silent rather than risk saying something offensive. He sees that effect among his students, where people have a fear of discussing race.

When it comes to this pattern, Sawyer said, it has more to do with subtler acts for which people may be shamed. The ShopRite incident was cut-and-dry. Even so, it underscores a larger anxiety around these dialogues, he said.

To resist the tendency toward silence, Sawyer said, we do not simply need a safe space but a brave space, a setting that he tries to establish in his classrooms. That space still includes some safety but it also includes some space to challenge.

Sawyer encouraged students to express their views  being challenged for a problematic remark can actually lead to productive dialogue, he noted. (He gave the caveat that using language in the manner of Magoveny-Terrone is a different circumstance entirely).

Overall, Sawyer said, the continued facilitation of important conversations is integral to addressing racial injustice. It takes creating a space for intentional dialogues for things to shift.

By exposing how racism remains in the country, social media allows an organizer or advocate to rise up and speak out against it and become much more involved, Matos said, but racism isnt only perpetuated by individuals.

We have social media that can bring awareness, but alone it cant end racism, Matos said. Change will come at people actively fighting. Its not enough to just watch and shake your head.

meghan.friedmann@hearstmediact.com; mdignan@hearstmediact.comHARTFORD  The Digging Into History: WWI Trench Restoration In Seicheprey France program recently selected 15 Connecticut high school students to participate in a one of a kind history program.

The chosen students are Lucas Rodriguez of Torrington, a student at Connecticut River Academy in East Hartford; Emily Borges of Shelton, St. Joseph High School; Alani Burke of Bridgeport, Lauralton Hall; Aaron Cohen of Ridgefield, Ridgefield High School; Lillith Davies-Smith, a homeschooled student from New London; Katherine Hitson, Simsbury High School; Riana Klisus, Joseph A. Foran High School, Milford; Mairead Lacey, Ridgefield High School; Daniella Lebron, North Haven, Engineering and Science University Magnet School; Latasha McClain, Stamford, Stamford Academy; Josh Picoult, Simsbury High School; Julia Proto, Orange, Lauralton Hall; Samuel Robinson, New Haven, Engineering and Science University Magnet School; Elijah Santiago, New Britain, Connecticut River Academy; and Joseph Viski, Durham, Coginchaug High School.

The students will travel to the small French village of Seicheprey, which was the site of the first German offensive against American troops. The students will work side by side with 15 French students to restore a section of the trenches once occupied by the Connecticut soldiers who fought in that battle.

Digging Into History: WWI Trench Restoration in Seicheprey is a unique and innovative learning opportunity that will teach the history of WWI through hands on activity. During the next four months, the students will learn the personal stories of the men who fought there and how their own communities responded to the battle and the war. Theyll then spend two weeks in the village of Seicheprey, working with local historians to restore a section of trench, touring other WWI battlefields, and immersing themselves in French culture.

The goal of this program is to create a historic site where visitors can learn about this important battle and American contributions to the war. Through signage at the site theyll learn the story of the 102nd Infantry Regiment and soldiers like Cpl. Edward Dion of Hartford who was wounded and earned a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions at Seicheprey. The students will be ambassadors in this work, re-affirming the friendship once held so dear between Seicheprey and the people of Connecticut.

"Restoring and preserving historic sites provides a connection to the past that words and images cannot, said Connecticut State Librarian Kendall Wiggin. Restoring this section of WWI trench honors those brave United States and especially Connecticut troops who fought and died in a war synonymous with trench warfare.

The application process for this program was competitive, with students completing three essays and providing two recommendations. After careful consideration of each package, we are happy to announce the successful candidates chosen to take part in this program.

Joining the students as chaperones are Christine Pittsley, Project Director for the Connecticut State Librarys WWI Commemoration projects; Kathryn Christolini, a French teacher from Simsbury High School; and Erik Johnson, a history teacher at Park City Magnet School in Bridgeport. Also joining the team is Dr. Brian Jones, the Connecticut State Archaeologist and UConn professor, who will be advising on the archaeology of the site.

A scholarship fund has been set up to help the students succeed in this program and donations may be made at https://ctstatelibrary.info/digging-into-history/.

To learn more about the trip, visit https://ctinworldwar1.org/trenchproject/ .

This program is being organized by the Connecticut Heritage Foundation on behalf of Connecticut State Library and the Communaute de Communes Mad et Moselle. The American Legion, 102nd Association and the New Haven Museum are providing support for this program and the American Council for International Studies is providing travel arrangements.

Learn more at www.ctstatelibrary.orgNEW HAVEN  The Tweed New Haven Airport Authority will cut both daily and weekly long-term parking rates slightly as part of a new schedule of rates and charges the authority unanimously approved this week.

In addition, Tweed New Haven Regional Airport now will offer free parking for the first 30 minutes in both the long-term, up from the first 15 minutes under the current rate schedule.

Tweed currently offers regional jet flights to two locations, Philadelphia and Charlotte, on one airline, American Eagle.

Officials have been working for years to try to expand service and are hoping to get the state General Assembly to approve a bill that would remove restrictions on the length of Tweeds main runway during the current legislative session.

Under the existing rate schedule, long-term parking rates were the same as in the daily lot: $3 an hour, with a $15 daily maximum and a $60 weekly maximum.

Under the new rate schedule, daily lot rates will remain the same, but rates in the long-term lot  just a few hundred yards away  will drop to a $12 daily maximum and a $50 weekly maximum. The long-term hourly rate will remain $3.

The original proposal from Airport Manager Jeremy Neilson would have left the daily and long-term lot rates the same, as they currently are.

But several board members raised questions at a meeting Wednesday.

Board member Vincent Petrini, senior vice president of public affairs for Yale New Haven Health System, said he was worried about putting Tweed at a competitive disadvantage. He said he worried about anything that might be a deterrent to other airlines coming to Tweed.

Authority Secretary Peter Leonardi also raised questions about it.

The new rate schedule also will raise security badging fees from $30 to $50 for new badges, from $15 to $30 for renewal badges and from $75 to $100 for lost badges.

It will add a $25 hourly and $100 daily rental fee for use of a private airport conference room. Currently, there are no fees.

The charges for counter space and office space leases for air carriers and airport concessions in Tweeds main terminal will rise from $21.60 per square foot to $22.70 per square foot, and the charge for common areas rental will drop from $21.60 per square foot to $11.35 per square foot.

The charge for use of the airports loading bridge will double from $25 to $50 per use.

The charges to lease counter space and office space in the airport administration building will rise from $23.40 per square foot to $24.60 per square foot, while the charge to lease common areas in the administration building will drop from $23.40 to $12.30 per square foot.

Weve significantly discounted the charges to common areas, said Neilson.

Tweed also will raise terminal ramp parking fees for commercial air carriers from $15 to $25 per 12-hour period, with the first two hours free, and landing fees in five different weight and classification categories.

Fuel flowage fees will remain at the current 12 center for both air carriers and general aviation.

Under Neilsons original proposal, enacting the new fees would have added $122, 462 to Tweeds annual bottom line.

mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.comEAST HAVEN  The town has struggled with race issues in the past but many here think it got an undeserved black eye when stories and video of a recent slur-filled tirade at a grocery store went viral.

Many stories included the words racist and East Haven in the headlines.

But this time, the racist being referred to, and shown on video using the n word and spitting at African-American shoppers, was a New Haven woman who worked  and has since lost her job  in the Hamden school system.

The only connection to East Haven was the location where it played out: the ShopRite on Foxon Road. The woman who uttered the epithets, Corinne Magoveny-Terrone, lives just over a mile away in New Haven.

Yet numerous headlines, along with TV broadcasts, focused on East Haven.

East Haven is no more of a racist town than any other town in the United States, said resident Steve Foley, as he recently came out of the Super Stop & Shop supermarket across town from ShopRite in East Haven Center.

Foley, like many East Haveners, was revolted when he saw video of what went on in the ShopRite store on Foxon Road, Route 80, the evening of March 15. The video, first posted on Facebook late Friday, went viral, garnering tens of thousands of hits on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

YouTube posts bore titles such as, Racist Woman in East Haven and East Haven CT ShopRite Racist.

The first New Haven Register story on the incident, with the headline, Racist tirade caught on video costs Hamden school employee her job, was quickly viewed more than 1 million times.

When I saw that woman, it was a genuine rant, said Foley. She went off.

But nobody knows exactly how it got to that point, he said.

I think whats sad is, over a million people would want to look at that stuff and judge East Haven based on scattershot journalism, Foley said.

East Haven has been in the news before for racially-based things many residents would rather not have hanging over them, including:

When a white East Haven police officer shot a black New Haven young man, Malik Jones, after a chase from East Haven into New Haven on April 14, 1997,. The incident resulted in immediate and subsequent protests and years of litigation and other repurcussions

When the FBI arrested four East Haven police officers as part of a federal investigation of profiling, excessive force and civil rights violations against Latino residents on Jan. 24, 2012. The incident prompted federal lawsuits and a consent decree, under which the U.S. Department of Justice oversaw reforms in the East Haven Police Department over the next five years.

The same day as the four arrests, Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr. told a TV reporter, I might have tacos when I go home. Im not quite sure yet, when asked what he planned to do for East Havens Latino community. The statement, for which Maturo later apologized, became national news.

In the supermarket case, East Haven is at the center of it because of the supermarket location, something the East Haven Police Department, which went through years of federal oversight as part of a consent decree after the 2012 arrests, is very aware of.

The town, once overwhelmingly white and largely Italian-American, also has been changing demographically in recent years.

According to U.S. Census Bureaus 2017 population estimates, East Haven, with 29,257 people, was 82.5 percent white (76.8 percent white but not Latino), 14.6 percent Latino, 4.5 percent Asian and 2.5 percent African American or black.

Back in 2000, East Haven was 93.92 percent white only, 4.36 percent Latino, 1.91 percent Asian and 1.4 percent African American or black.

According to the state Department of Education, the East Haven school systems student body as of 2016-17 was 66.1 percent white, 24.1 percent Latino, 3.8 percent Asian and 3.7 percent African American or black.

We have made considerable progress, both at the Police Department and in the community as a whole to move on from the negative stereotype East Haven has had in the past, said Police Chief Ed Lennon.

I am proud of the men and women of the East Haven Police Department, and of the strides the department has taken to improve our relationship with our community and the communities around us, Lennon said.

We have made it a top priority to treat every race and ethnicity with the utmost respect, because at the end of the day we are all human beings., he said.

In 2015, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch called East Haven a model for improving police-community relations.

That makes the latest incident, and the attention focused on the town as a result of it, all the more frustrating to those who went through the past issues.

I can tell you that I think its frustrating for the East Haven community, said Lt. Joseph Murgo, the police departments spokesman. Weve worked so hard, especially the police department, to come out from under that stigma that was created 25 or 30 years ago.

I dont think that that reflects the current values of the police department, said Murgo, who is originally from the Dominican Republic and was among the first non-white officers hired in East Haven. In 2012, he became the first ever promoted to sergeant.

I think the demographics of this town have changed, and were seeing people of all walks of life calling East Haven home, and they seem to be enjoying it, Murgo said. Thats why its frustrating for East Haven to be brought back into the spotlight regarding racism, because we feel weve gotten out from under that stigma.

Ive talked to a lot of my African-American friends who have spent time in this community, some of whom live in this community, Murgo said. Theyre comfortable spending time here.

We work hard to break down the racial barriers, he said. I guess this is proof that there is work to be done.

But there also is notable, on-the-street progress.

East Havener Michael H., who did not want his last name to be used in print, said he sees it.

Ive got to say, theres been progress made, said Michael, an African-American man who lives in East Haven and works at the VA hospital in West Haven. I know the history ... back when the police were bothering people, and the police got arrested...

But Michael, interviewed in the parking lot at Stop & Shop, can measure the change this way: not long ago, when he got stopped by an East Haven police officer for having a burned-out headlight while driving home from work, the officer asked him some questions  then let him go, he said.

Michael said he knows his East Haven neighbors and they accept me...

From what Ive experienced in this town, its all good, he said.

Nevertheless, to him, what happened last Friday night in the ShopRite store doesnt surprise me, because racism is still existing.

But whatever someone might feel inside, You show restraint, said Michael. As an African American, weve been doing that for a long time.

Michael felt some empathy for Magoveny-Terrone.

Im pretty sure that she regrets it and wishes she could take it back, he said.

On Wednesday, another longtime East Haven resident, who would only give her name as Elaine, said she didnt feel as if East Haven was any different from anywhere else  and didnt feel news accounts of the ShopRite incident reflected poorly on the town because they pointed out that Magoveny-Terrone lived in New Haven and worked in Hamden.

But I wish she hadnt done it here, Elaine said.

It was on TV a lot  over and over, on every channel, she said. Thats a lot.

Her daughter, Gail, said some people say its a racist town. But East Haven is no different from anywhere else.

Board of Education Chairwoman Michele DeLucia, said she and her husband were both among those who groaned when they heard the latest incident had happened in a local store.

Since then, shes been getting email from people all over the country.

Its sad, DeLucia said. Its sad that were still portrayed in that sense.

When I was growing up, in East Haven, you were considered exotic if you were Irish, DeLucia said. But the town has changed since then, she said.

I know that theres racism that exists today, but over the years, Weve grown to such a diverse community... DeLucia said. Im happy to say my kids wouldnt even think to look at everyone differently.

What this woman did was reprehensible, DeLucia said. But in no way should her actions be considered representative ... Its unfair. It is. Because I dont feel that way.

East Haven Superintendent of Schools Erica Forti and Assistant Superintendent Jennifer Murrihy issued a statement Thursday saying the school system has long promoted an environment that fosters respect for diversity in a way that all students feel accepted, connected, and valued.

We believe in respecting and embracing our diversity in meaningful ways that enhance the educational experience for all our students, the statement said.

Among the school systems programs that work toward the goals of celebrating and fostering diversity, tolerance, acceptance and multiple opportunities for dialogue that empower our learners and teachers to explore are the following, they said:

Middle school Habits of Success and high school Civic/Social Expectations programs that include criteria for respecting others that are reinforced and assessed in every class. The East Haven Public Schools Advisory program in both schools includes several lessons related to responsible citizenship, they said.

The middle school whole-school reading of Refugee, which offers an interdisciplinary opportunity for students to examine the dangers of adversity and the power of social justice.

English language arts and social studies teachers have attended Teaching Tolerance training, and embed multicultural literature, resources, perspectives, and diverse viewpoints into the curriculum and their daily instruction.

An entire EHHS course, Study of the Holocaust, uses elements of the Facing History curriculum to expose students to combating prejudice and injustice in our society, the statement said. In addition, Holocaust survivors have met with students at both Melillo Middle School and East Haven High.

East Havens elementary school social studies curriculum includes opportunities to analyze aspects of culture and examine the legacies of various immigrant groups who have made the United States home, the statement said.

The ongoing curriculum revision process includes the review of curricular materials for bias and the inclusion of materials that are representative of our student population, and culturally responsive teaching practices are embedded within, they said. We have Dr. Bill Howe, past president of the National Association for Multicultural Education ... and former CT State Department of Education consultant providing professional development on multicultural education later on this year.

Magoveny-Terrones diatribe was very difficult to listen to  it was disgusting to listen to, as a matter of fact, said Mayor Maturo, who ultimately apologized for his taco comments back in 2012. Unfortunately, the press and a lot of people are too easy to blame our community and the town, which is unfortunate. But it happens all the time to East Haven.

In the wake of this most recent incident, I got a call from the NAACP, wanting to know what were doing about it  and I had to explain that the person who uttered the epithets neither lived nor worked in East Haven, he said.

East Haven has been, is and always will be a great community  and anybody who says anything different has got a chip on their shoulder ... and Im sick of it, Maturo said.

mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.comBRANFORD - A Wallingford man is facing threatening and reckless endangerment charges after he allegedly threatened to blow up a local bank Tuesday, according to police.

David Poulton, 72, of Wallingford made the threat to TD Bank's corporate customer service because his funds were not available, police said in a release.NEW HAVEN  If you are located in a flood zone, you are bound to run into problems.

Yale New Haven Hospital knows this now, which is why its proposal to relocate its primary care clinics to 150 Sargent Drive, has been delayed for almost a year.

The Office of Health Strategy recently ordered the public hearing on the proposal be reopened and the hospital answer questions on its new opening date; the impact of amended Title X rules on abortion services and why it rejects running a shuttle service for patients from the current clinic sites.

The hospitals pediatric unit will be run by Fair Haven Community Health Care, while adults will be served by the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center under a new entity they are calling the New Haven Primary Care Consortium.

On upgrading the facilities at 150 Sargent Drive, where the hospital currently offers some services, the hospital discovered that it had to flood-proof certain parts of the building. The National Flood Insurance Program coordinator didnt weigh in with an approval until late February.

While the radiology and blood draw upgrades on the first floor had been approved for phase one, with work scheduled to be completed by March 2020, the second floor, which needs to be abated, wont be finished until July 2020.

Because of this, the hospital has put off transitioning to the new site to late summer 2020, instead of the original September 2019 date. All of this is contingent on City Plan Commission approval on May 15.

On the controversial amendments to Title X, the hospital said the impact on its plans for the clinics were as yet unknown, but the rules do apply to both clinics.

Basically, the clinics may not perform, promote, refer for, or support abortion as a method of family planning, nor take any affirmative action to assist a patient to secure such an abortion.

To this end, it can recommend a list of providers, that includes comprehensive primary care providers some, but not the majority, of which also provide abortion as part of their comprehensive health care services. It does allow referral for abortion because of emergency medical situations, such as an ectopic pregnancy.

There can be nondirective pregnancy counseling, where abortion may be included in a list of options, although it may not be the only option. The material has to be presented in factual, objective, an unbiased manner.

The harder rules involve the separation of the Title X project physically and financially from abortion activities. Mere bookkeeping separation of Title X funds from other monies is not sufficient, the hospital wrote in its letter to the Office of Health Strategy.

Physical separation includes separate accounting records; shared phone numbers, email addresses, websites; separate personnel, electronic or paper-based health care records and workstations.

As reflected in this list of factors, the concept of physical separation is very broad, extending beyond whether the Title X project and the prohibited activities are conducted in distinct and separate facilities. It is unclear as of yet how HHS will apply these concepts and whether there will be a process for confirming with HHS whether sufficient separation has been maintained, the hospital wrote.

Yale New Haven Hospital offers abortion services at a separate site.

The effective date on the final rule change is May 3,with compliance on nondirectional pregnancy counseling set for July 2; the rules on physical separation is mandatory as of March 3, 2020.

On providing a shuttle service from 20 York St. and the St. Raphael campus to 150 Sargent Drive, the hospital, as it had answered in December, said it would not materially improve the situation for persons dependent on inconvenient bus schedules.

The applicant has concluded that a door-to-door ride service is the most patient-centered and effective option to meet the need for the majority of patients facing transportation challenges to access the new site.

The hospital also sent the Office of Health Strategy documentation on how it will bill patients unable to pay for medical evaluation and treatment.

The Office of Health Strategy has to approve the hospitals Certificate of Need application to proceed with its plans. YNHH has to show the proposal is financially feasible, improves the quality of care, accessibility and cost effectiveness.

mary.oleary@hearstmediact.coml 203-641-2577

.Its difficult now, as we look at the current configuration of Wooster Square, to imagine and appreciate the magnitude of the Italian settlement there in the early part of the 20th century. Looking at the official census documents or copies of the city directory during that period gives us a sense of the density and homogeneity of the area. On street after street, the residents are identified as being of Italian origin.

While the original Yankee mansions on Chapel Street and around the park were eventually carved up into smaller rental units, there were some exceptions. The two businessmen, Pepe and Maisano, for instance, partners in an importing company, occupied large homes opposite each other, facing the park. The Maisano home at 11 Wooster Place is now the site of Iovanne Funeral Home, while Mr. and Mrs. Pepe lived at 10 Academy St.

Meanwhile, at the turn of the century, the Maresca family purchased what was the home of the English family on Chapel Street for use as a funeral home. Mr. English was, at one time, the owner of the New Haven Clock Co., in addition to being governor of Connecticut. As time passed and the neighborhood grew with the influx of immigrants, larger apartment and tenement buildings were built to accommodate them. It was not unlike the kind of development that you can still see on the Lower East Side of New York.

Very few people had the luxury of living in a single-family home. Yes, there were some on Green Street, St. John Street and others bordering State Street, but that was the exception. Living in such close proximity amplified the sense of community and contributed to the development of self-sufficiency through the establishment of small stores and businesses throughout the area. That created a thriving, customer-driven, service-oriented industry that was only limited by the imagination of the first-time entrepreneurs.

Sometimes we have a tendency to think of Wooster Street and Wooster Square as being synonymous, but the neighborhood stretched out for many blocks in a large grid, whose boundaries were identified by major streets such as Grand Avenue, Water Street, and State Street.

The phenomenon of Wooster Square as an enclave of everything Italian was surely linked to the availability of work throughout the area and the need for workers to be able to walk to work from their homes. Couple that with the aggressive recruiting that was undertaken by Sargent Co. in the early 20th century and you find the neighborhood being defined by the places where the residents worked. The efforts by Joseph Bradford Sargent and his brothers to bring men over from Italy was a unique undertaking, in that the company would basically hire men in Italy and then bring them here marked with a sign noting that New Haven, and Sargent Co. in particular, was their destination.

Legend has it that one of the Sargent brothers wives was an admirer of the Italian virtue of industriousness and encouraged her husband to seek workers in Italy.

One can only imagine the challenges that the workers were faced with inasmuch as they came from nonindustrialized communities and had no experience working in a manufacturing environment. Yet, their toil helped the city thrive as a goods-producing center of hardware, clocks, garments and guns.

Solemn Lent anticipated joy

This Lenten season always brings me back to the observances that marked our lives, both religious and food-based. As the weeks passed through the solemn season, there was always the anticipation of the celebratory cooking and baking that was to come. As a child, it wasnt so much about anticipating the Easter bunny as it was knowing that the candy-decorated cassatelle would be appearing in the pastry shop windows. In the center would always be a lamb made of almond paste resting serenely and worthy of keeping uneaten. That was my treat, in addition to the sweet breads that were baked with eggs nestled under crisscrossed strips of dough.

Traditional foods highlighted the celebration and, of course, new clothes. Our tradition was to dress in our finery for Palm Sunday as well as Easter, since the Italians observe Palm Sunday as the most important of the minor church observances. Even though we were deep into the Lenten season, Palm Sunday was a day for celebrating family and the exchange of palm fronds.

Even now, as we are into the fourth- and fifth-generations of Italian Americans, the most popular Easter food is the ubiquitous pizza cheina, as it is called in the dialect, which translates into full pie. This is a rich, quiche-like pie filled with cured meats, cheeses and eggs  all the foods that were missing from the Lenten meatless meals. Every family has its own traditional recipe for the dish, but they always contain those ingredients. This is surely the most traditional and beloved holiday food.

The feast of St. Joseph on March 19 was also a highly anticipated event, celebrating all those who carried the name Joseph or Josephine. Special pastry or zeppole were made in the pastry shops and eaten in observance of the day. The delicious fried rings of pastry are filled with vanilla or chocolate Italian cream and topped with a cherry or the traditional sour Amarena cherry. They used to be available just for the day, but now they are sold for several months in advance because of their popularity. The celebration of ones name day, or onomastico, is very much embedded in the Italian tradition.

All of these simple observances, steeped in tradition and family oriented, marked our lives in Wooster Square.

Frank Carrano lives in Branford. Contact him at f.carrano@att.net.Attorney Jennifer Bonjean told jurors in Camden federal court Thursday that her client was guilty of a crime and has taken responsibility for repeatedly driving drunk on Nov. 14, 2012.

She said Charlie Harrison should have gone to jail that night.

But he shouldnt have gone to jail looking like this, she said, as photographs of Harrison in a hospital bed appeared one after another on screens in the courtroom. His eyes were blackened and swollen shut, and his left leg was torn and bloodied by a police dogs teeth.

Harrison, now 58, is suing the Atlantic City Police Department and five of its officers, alleging they used excessive force when they punched him and ordered a K-9 to attack his leg after stopping the inebriated man.

In opening statements Thursday, Bonjean said Harrison was drunk and confused when police stopped him, but tried to comply before he was assaulted.

But William F. Cook, the attorney for the five officers, described Harrison as bombed" and belligerent, including when he was twice tossed from a casino and tried to bite a cop. The officers are Michael Oldroyd, Anthony Alosi, Michelle Clarke, Rebecca Seabrooke, and Bounthamal Thavisack.

Harrisons lawsuit also accuses the Atlantic City police of allowing a culture of excessive force to flourish by not monitoring or disciplining officers who break the rules. In the last two years, Bonjean won awards or settlements for two other plaintiffs who were hurt by Atlantic City police dogs during arrests.

Charlie Harrison's booking photo (Provided)

Harrison, a former middleweight boxer who splits his time between homes in New York and Atlantic City, sat quietly in the courtroom while Bonjean told jurors about his embarrassing night of bad decisions in 2012.

She said he spent the day making repairs at a rental property he owns in Atlantic City and at night drank a bottle of wine. He then went to the former Atlantic Club Casino and having several more drinks while playing craps, Bonjean said.

She said that when he was asked to leave the casino because of his drunkenness, he drove to another club, was denied entry, drove back to the casino, and was again denied entry. She said he always went quietly, but Cook said Harrison refused to leave, pounded his chest, threatened to kill security guards and was spoiling for a fight.

Officer Michael Oldroyd saw Harrisons vehicle swerving on Pacific Avenue and but Harrison didnt stop, instead driving on at 5 or 10 miles per hour. When he finally stopped, Oldroyd and several other officers pulled their guns on Harrison as they shouted orders at him to get out of the car.

Bonjean said Harrison was confused by the many shouted orders, but he eventually walked toward Oldroyd as requested. Oldroyd then gave him a nice punch in the face followed by several more, Bonjean said. She said Harrison will testify that it wasnt until a police dog came up behind him and bit him on the leg that he went to the ground, along with Oldroyd.

On the ground, Bonjean said, the officers were raining punches on him until he blacked out.

However, Cook told jurors that Harrison shouted expletives at the officers and started resisting once one handcuff was on. Oldroyd took him to the ground and the impact hurt the officers arm, so he needed help from the other officers to control the fighting, biting Harrison, Cook said. Thats when Alosi punched him in the face, Cook said.

Clark released her K-9 on Harrison while he was on the ground, Cook said, and officers cuffed him.

He was treated and released from the hospital and taken to jail, the attorneys said. The lawyers told jurors they have to decide who is telling the truth and whether the force was reasonable and necessary."

Bonjean said Alosi will testify that he hit Harrison twice on one side of his face, but that doesnt explain all the injuries to his face and neck seen in his mugshot.

People lie, photos dont, she said.

Harrison later pleaded guilty to eluding in a plea deal, and the prosecutors office dismissed other charges including aggravated assault on a police officer.

Cook told jurors that as a result of hitting the ground during the incident, Oldroyd had to have shoulder surgery and was out of work for six months.

The incident predates the citys body or dashboard cameras, so there is no video of the struggle and arrest.

Judge Noel L. Hillman ordered that the trial happen in two phases: First, jurors will hear evidence and consider whether the officers violated Harrisons rights by using excessive force. If they decide against any of the officers, then they can hear evidence about whether the department is responsible, too.

Oldroyd, an officer for 14 years, has had 91 internal affairs complaints lodged against him, 46 of which were for excessive force, according to a deposition in a previous lawsuit.

He reported using force in 50 incidents from 2012 to 2016, making him one of the most frequent users of force in the state during that time period, according to The Force Report, NJ Advance Medias project analyzing New Jersey cops use of force reports.

Rebecca Everett may be reached at reverett@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @rebeccajeverett. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.One of South Jerseys most prominent cities is moving forward with a plan to bring itself out of a food desert  and put the only other grocer out of business.

During a public presentation in the Tyner City Council Chambers on Wednesday, Atlantic City councilman Kaleem Shabazz and Uplift Solutions spoke about the progress being made in bringing a supermarket to the resort city.

In 2017, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) entered into an agreement with Westville-based Uplift Solutions, a company that brings supermarkets into cities that have challenges attracting those specific businesses. Uplift assisted with opening supermarkets in locations such as North Philadelphia, Memphis, Tenn. and Hartford, Conn.

Uplift Solutions Executive Director Atif Bostic said for the next month and a half the company will travel around to the citys wards to make a presentation on the progress of the supermarket and to listen to community suggestions and concerns to integrate the plan.

Next, a request for proposals (RFP) will be made for developers and supermarket operators, allowing 3 to 4 weeks to submit their proposals. Bostic said their hope is a groundbreaking for a supermarket could happen as early as the end of the third quarter, with the store being finished nine to twelve months later.

The estimated $12 million, 40,000 square-foot supermarket with a planned cafe will be in between Indiana and Ohio Avenues on property owned by the CRDA. It is expected to bring a total of 100 jobs to the city. During the meeting, CRDA executive director Matthew Doherty talked about the CRDAs involvement with the project.

Our mindset is to bring the best store to Atlantic City, Doherty said. Whether that means we contribute $2 million or $8 million, I do not know, but that is our goal. It will be the land $1 a year rent and, depending on who Uplift is able to bring, pay to bring the best market to the city.

For residents in Atlantic City, grocery shopping options are limited to going to smaller stores or heading to Ventnor or Brigantine to find a full-fledged supermarket. There is a Save-a-Lot  a discount grocer  in the city. However, not everyone is happy with the way the store is being operated. When one resident voiced his concern about the Save-A-Lot being possibly being put out of business if the new supermarket is successful.

We have been in that Save-a-Lot several times and were completely disappointed in what they were doing there, Bostic said. We really think its a disgrace in what they are doing.

Bostic said hed be more than happy to offer jobs to those who are employed at Save-A-Lot if the store were to go out of business. "But as far as the operator, we dont accept poor operators. Im not going to make any bones about it. The intent is that they are going to go away.

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Authorities arrested a 45-year-old computer auditor in Voorhees Thursday after he allegedly solicited explicit photographs from a 13-year-old girl in the Philippines.

Amitava Das of Voorhees used a social media messenger application to get the girl to send the photos, according to a release from the Camden County Prosecutors Office. Voorhees police began investigating him after getting a cybertip about his social media activity, the office said.

Officers from Voorhees police, the prosecutors High-Tech Crimes Unit and the Homeland Security Investigations Cherry Hill Office executed a search warrant at his home on the 100 block of Van Buren Road Thursday. They seized digital devices that will be analyzed and arrested him, the release said.

Das works as a computer auditor at Deloitte & Touche LLP US, based in Voorhees and Philadelphia, according to the prosecutors office. Among other things, the company performs audits to analyze how businesses, public bodies and other entities use information technology, according to its website.

Das was charged with manufacturing child pornography and possessing manufacturing child pornography, the prosecutors office said. He is being held in the Camden County jail until a judge rules on the prosecutors request that he be held pending trial.

Prosecutors said the investigation 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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Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.It was early morning about three years ago, and Patience Roberts was dragged out of her apartment half-naked by police in front of her crying and screaming children.

All because she had an unpaid New Jersey Transit ticket from five years before, she said.

I was traumatized and Im sure my kids were traumatized as well, Roberts said as she fought back tears. Its police brutality, and it scars you.

Roberts story was one of many told about police use of force against the black community on Thursday night at the Bethany Baptist Church in Newark.

Its one of the first of a series of public hearings organized by the Rev. Charles Boyer, a pastor and founder of the civil rights group Salvation and Social Justice, to collect stories from residents about police brutality.

The hearings are the result of The Force Report, a 16-month NJ Advance Media investigation published at the end of 2018, which found that black N.J. residents were three times more likely to be the subjects of police use of force than whites.

The investigation also spurred the New Jersey attorney general into hosting a series of public forums on police use of force  the first of which was held in Bridgeton in January. Boyer said the attorney general asked him to join the listening sessions, but he refused.

Im not that kind of black pastor, he said. Im not gonna go and put my arm around you and your officers, open the doors and ask my clergy folk and the communities to embrace you.

Among those in the crowd Thursday night was Thomas Eicher, who is leading police reform efforts as head of the attorney generals newly formed Office of Public Integrity and Accountability. He was among the 80 or so gathered to hear the stories of several black residents, who talked in detail about their multiple, harrowing experiences with police over the course of their lives.

Thomas Afrika Ibiang still has the scars from when he was a teenager and a police officer grabbed his head, put it against the wall and stomped on his leg.

When he did that, in the back of my mind, I was thinking how can he do this? Ibiang said. How can he do this? Where is his humanity?

Some of the most compelling testimonies came from two black mothers whose sons were killed after interactions with police.

They just didnt just take my son. They took a part of me. Not just my heart, but a part of my life, said Tawanna Graham, the mother of Jacqui Graham, who was found dead in East Orange police headquarters in 2009.

When police let her see her sons body almost 20 days after his death, Graham found he had bruises from head to toe.

Sheila Reid, the mother of Jerame Reid, who was shot seven times by two Bridgeton police officers in 2014, urged everyone to join her to protest outside the Newark federal building every Monday to demand justice for all victims of police brutality.

Because talking dont get you nowhere, Reid said. We gotta have action. And when I say action, I mean action now.

In 2016, federal investigators decided not to press charges against the Bridgeton police officers who shot Jerame Reid.

Both black mothers also talked about how losing their sons to police brutality has negatively impacted their health. Tawanna Graham now uses a wheelchair, and Sheila Reid said she has suffered from blood pressure problems and diabetes bad enough to need a kidney transplant.

After the hearings were done, several activists then stressed the importance of a strong civilian complaint review board for every town in order to keep police departments accountable. Civilian review boards would allow community members additional oversight of police operations so that police department would not entirely police themselves.

If we do not have control of the police, then we dont have democracy, said Zayid Muhammad of Newark Communities for Accountable Policing.

In 2018, a Superior Court judge took away the subpoena and investigatory powers from Newarks civilian complaint review board. There are other such review boards in the state, but none were formed with any subpoena power.

Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose said that his department was not made aware of the meeting" but encouraged residents to reach out to the department with complaints.

Any questionable actions by a police officer can be reported to any police precinct or to police headquarters at 480 Clinton Avenue," Ambrose said in a statement.

The Rev. Boyer said during the hearing that he wanted to make it a safe space to all those who told their stories and ended the night with a call to action to fight injustice.

Change never comes from the power structure, Boyer said. It always comes from the people to the power structure."

The next hearings are April 2 at the Bethel AME Church in Paterson, April 16 in New Brunswick and May 21 in Pleasantville.

Carla Astudillo may be reached at castudillo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @carla_astudi.As it stands right now, the Eagles defensive end rotation is going to look quite similar to the one that helped them win a Super Bowl last year.

Thursday, the Eagles signed defensive end Vinny Curry back after he spent one year away with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Now, hes back in a group that (still) includes Brandon Graham, Derek Barnett and Chris Long. Plus, of course, Fletcher Cox at defensive tackle.

The Eagles likely arent done building their defensive line for 2019, though.

First, Long has yet to actually announce if he plans to play in 2019, a decision which could be impacted by the additions of Curry and defensive tackle Malik Jackson, as Long as expressed a desire for a significant role if he returned.

Whether he comes back or not, though, the Eagles could still stand to make a few moves to upgrade the defensive line.

Here is how they should approach it.

1. Bring back Timmy Jernigan. It seems the defensive tackle hasnt quite found a market in free agency since the Eagles declined his $13 million team option. Thats perhaps tied to his struggles with a back injury that cost him most of last season. When he did play, he was pretty good, and it would make sense for both parties to bring Jernigan back on a one-year prove-it deal and allow him to takeover the No. 3 defensive tackle role behind Cox and Jackson. Its a low-cost option that wouldnt impact the compensatory pick formula at all.

2. Draft Jeffrey Simmons: The Mississippi State defensive tackle tore his ACL in the pre-draft process and might not play this season. But, with Jackson and Jernigan in the fold  plus Treyvon Hester  the Eagles can afford to take a flier on a potential top-10 talent and let him heal up. Hes worth the wait talent-wise. Im not sure if that means picking him in the first-round or the second, but getting him in the fold would be a smart move.

3. Draft a defensive end: Even if Long returns, the Eagles should still draft a defensive end. The Eagles did draft Josh Sweat in the fourth-round last year, but its unclear as of yet what kind of player he will be and its worth doubling down at a premium position, especially in this deep draft class on the defensive line. The Eagles have a first-round pick (No. 25) and two second-round picks (No. 53 and 57) and should use one of those three picks on a defensive end. Logical targets (barring a trade-up for someone like Clelin Ferrell or Brian Burns) include Floridas Jachai Polite, Michigans Chase Winovich, Alabamas Christian Miller, Louisiana Techs Jaylon Ferguson, TCUs L.J. Collier and Georgias DAndre Walker. The first three of that group are the most intriguing.

Zack Rosenblatt may be reached at zrosenblatt@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ZackBlatt. Find NJ.com on Facebook.New Jerseys controversial school funding formula is prompting wide-ranging outcomes in districts -- including those that are threatening teaching and other jobs throughout the state.

For some of the nearly 200 districts whose state funding is being decreased, layoffs and programming cuts may be unavoidable. School systems throughout the state are putting together their initial budgets for the 2019-2020 school year now. Though the numbers have not yet been finalized, many districts say cutting jobs may be their only option.

Under a proposed $609 million budget introduced at a board of education meeting in Jersey City Wednesday, about 630 employees would lose their jobs and residents would be hit with a 10 percent tax increase.

The Jersey City district is facing a $120 million budget shortfall, exacerbated by a $27 million decline in state aid.

We have to recognize the position weve been put in over the past decade, board member Mussab Ali said at the meeting. Ever since 2012, almost every single year our state aid has gone down. Keep in mind our population growth has increased.

In Somerset County, the Hillsborough school district reportedly is bracing for the loss of approximately 50 jobs stemming from the defeat of a $8 million referendum on March 12.

The referendum drew much attention because it would have enabled the district to offer full-day kindergarten, but it also included funding to help offset a projected $5.3 million decrease in state aid over the next 6 years.

In a presentation to the Township Committee a month before the vote, Schools Superintendent Jorden Schiff said the district is boxed in by the 2 percent cap, which limits tax increases, and costs that are outside the boards control.

We are on an unsustainable path, Schiff said, warning that in addition to the job cuts the district might have to increase class size and activity and building fees, among other steps.

Schiff expressed frustration, stating Hillsborough spends $657 per student less than the state average.

This is very frustrating for us, because we run a very efficient district," he said, according to a video of the meeting.

Melisssa McCooley, the superintendent for both the Little Egg Harbor School District (Pre-K through 6th grades) and Pinelands Regional School District (7th through 12th grades), said the two districts combined are facing a reduction of $1 million in state aid over the next five years. The school systems already share a business administrator and a facilities department.

McCooley said while Little Egg Harbor is financially stable, Pinelands Regional is trying to cut down on administrative costs to ensure that it is not cutting student programs. To save money, the special education director at Pinelands Regional was given a notice of pending layoffs  often referred to as a reduction in force or RIF notice  then requested to retire.

When we analyzed the situation and decided to share services with our special education department, its always a touchy subject because they are special needs students, McCooley said.

The superintendent also said there might be future cuts.

Weve already balanced our budgets for the upcoming school year that includes a lower amount of administrators at Pinelands, McCooley said. We may have to RIF some employees, but that has not been finalized yet.

The districts do still have some time to figure out other solutions, as most final budgets do not need to be passed for another month, or more.

Jersey City board members said the end result in their district may prove less onerous, and recent history offers some hope in that regard. There were no layoffs last year despite initial fears that up to 400 jobs could be lost.

Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh, whose school district is reportedly facing massive job and programming cuts despite a state aid increase, said he isnt giving up.

I have been lobbying both the Governors Office and our state delegation to help our school district address this tremendous financial challenge and to atone for the underfunding of our schools from the Christie Administration, Sayegh said in a statement.

Hes not the only one hoping for additional help from the state.

New Jersey Education Association Vice President Sean M. Spiller and Secretary Treasurer Steve Beatty said in a statement at separate committee hearings this week in the Senate and Assembly that districts should not have to fight one another for state aid.

We urge the Legislature and the administration to work together to ensure that every student, in every district, has access to the resources they need to learn and thrive," the statement said.

That includes listening to and working with affected districts to explore additional avenues to obtain revenues to fill the gaps in districts experiencing cuts under this proposed budget.

Jersey Journal reporter Corey W. McDonald contributed to this story.

Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@RobJenningsNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.A man accused of killing his wife and dumping her body in their swimming pool before going to Applebees to get takeout recently took a plea deal that calls for him to serve 15 years in prison.

Norman F. Long was charged with murder six weeks after Michelle Long, 47, was found floating in the backyard pool at the couples Woolwich Township home on June 17, 2017.

Long, 53, pleaded guilty earlier this month to an amended charge of first-degree aggravated manslaughter, according to a copy of the plea agreement. Gloucester County prosecutors are recommending a 15-year sentence under which he would be required to serve 85 percent before he is eligible for parole. He also waives his right to appeal.

Charges of tampering with evidence and obstruction will be dismissed under the plea deal.

Sentencing is scheduled for May 3.

Prosecutors believe Michelle Long was planning to leave her husband of 15 years. Her last online search revealed she was looking at homes, officials said.

Officials alleged Long killed his wife and then drove to Applebees to pick up takeout for two as an effort to create an alibi.

When he returned home, he claimed he found his wife floating in the pool and called 911 to report she had drowned.

Arriving officers found Long and neighbors trying to revive the victim. Neighbors told police that the husband became combative while CPR was being performed and had to be restrained.

Michelle Long was killed in 2017. Her husband now faces 15 years in prison.

The investigation revealed Long had tried to clean up the crime scene in the home. Paper towels containing the victims blood were found in the kitchen trash can.

An autopsy determined the woman died of blunt force trauma to the head and neck.

Officers also found a small dog dead at the bottom of the pool, thought how it got there has not been disclosed.

Following his August 2017 arrest, Long was taken to a psychiatric hospital in Trenton for evaluation after expressing suicidal thoughts, officials said.

Longs attorney, David Bahuriak Jr., said his client has accepted responsibility for what happened and regrets his actions.

It was the result of a sudden provocation, intoxication and a number of mental health issues all converging in a perfect storm, Bahuriak said Friday. He wishes he could take it back. The best that he can do is accept responsibility and ask for forgiveness.

Speaking at a press conference announcing the arrest, one of the victims daughters, Brittany Maguire, spoke about the pain the family was feeling.

"She was definitely the best mom and she did not deserve this at all," she said. "We are all broken without her."

Maguire is not biologically related to Long.

The family has turned its pain into activism for victims of domestic violence.

Maguire and her sister, Kerrie Engelhardt, along with Michelles mother, Susan Direso, partnered with a Philadelphia company to promote a wearable personal safety device that allows users to alert a pre-set list of contacts if they are in trouble.

We wanted to direct our energy into something positive, meaningful and honor my daughter's life, and leave a lasting legacy for her," Direso said last year. "This mission to help at-risk victims gives us a purpose to turn our tragedy into a meaningful project."

Prosecutors declined to talk about the plea agreement Friday.

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.

Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.With a federal court challenge threatening to upend the Affordable Care Act, Gov. Phil Murphy on Friday announced he will seek state control over the health insurance marketplace from President Donald Trumps administration within two years.

New Jersey would use the $50 million it raises through a premium tax and sends to the federal government every year to allow us to better tailor and regulate our marketplace to the unique need of New Jerseyans, Murphy said at a news conference in Livingston.

There are 257,000 people in the state who obtained insurance this year through Healthcare.gov, the federal marketplace, according to the most recent federal enrollment figures available.

New Jersey could do a better job, Murphy said, from managing the website, promoting the law and designing the health plans.

The Trump administration shrank the open enrollment period in the fall from three months to six weeks and cut by 90 percent the money was spent to advertise the program deadline, noted Murphy, a Democrat who frequently challenges the Republican president.

The takeover requires the state to seek federal approval and to pass laws that transfer authority for the exchange to the state Department of Banking and Insurance, according to the governors announcement, delivered from Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston on the eve of the ACAs ninth anniversary.

Requested by a letter Friday to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the transfer is expected to be finished in time for the open enrollment period in the fall of 2020, Murphy said.

New Jersey would join 11 states and the District of Columbia in operating its own insurance-shopping marketplace.

The second part of Murphys proposal would involve enacting state laws that protect the most popular aspects of landmark health care law, such as free preventive care, protecting people with preexisting medical conditions from losing coverage and allowing adult children to remain on their parents plans until age 26.

The fact is because we operate on the federal exchange, we are subject to the whim of the Trump administration and directly impacted by its efforts to damage and destabilize the market," Banking and Insurance Commissioner Marlene Caride said.

These steps are necessary, Murphy said, in the wake of a Dec. 14 federal court ruling declaring the ACA unconstitutional. The decision is expected to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, a process that could take a year or more.

A Texas court found that by changing the tax code in 2017 and repealing Congress authority to fine people who dont buy a health insurance policy every year, the law is no longer enforceable. This individual mandate has been one of the more distasteful parts of Obamacare for lawmakers and the public who argue it drove up premiums and allowed government to intrude into peoples lives.

State Attorney General Gurbir Grewal is representing New Jersey to defend the law in this enormous battle," Murphy said.

A year ago, the governor signed a law reinstating a statewide individual mandate, which requires all New Jerseyans who dont have health coverage through a government program like Medicare or their jobs to buy a policy, or pay a fee at tax time.

He also signed a law creating the New Jersey Health Insurance Premium Security Fund, which uses the fees to help pay the claims of people who are catastrophically ill.

Imposing the individual mandate helped stabilize the health insurance market, leading to a 9.3 percent decrease in rates from the previous year, according to urphy administration officials.

State Sen. Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, who sponsored both laws, said he supports Murphys plan.

Establishing our own state-based exchange, in addition to the other elements of these proposals, allows us to maximize enrollment opportunities for New Jersey residents while protecting them from the Trump administrations efforts to do the exact opposite, Vitale said.

Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.JERSEY CITY  Ex-mayor Jerry McCann, facing an internal city investigation that has him fighting for his job, has told council members in an email that he is the target of a cabal of Trump Republicans working for City Hall.

The fiery McCann, who appears to be at the center of the city probe, sent the email on Tuesday, about a week after The Jersey Journal first reported that a law firm hired by the city is asking city employees and others about McCann's actions. The former mayor, a Democrat, works for the city Department of Public Works, until recently as a code enforcer.

McCanns suggestion that he is the target of Republicans centers around the law firm that is digging into him: Calcagni & Kanefsky. A senior partner, Eric Kanefsky, once led the state Division of Consumer Affairs under former Gov. Chris Christie. Another attorney at the firm, Ralph Marra Jr., took over for Christie as New Jerseys U.S. Attorney and headed that office when it arrested dozens in Hudson County and beyond as part of Operation Bid Rig in 2009.

I can only conclude that there is (a) rogue element within City Hall led by Republican lawyers and their associates, McCanns email says.

Its not clear whether the famously hyperbolic McCann genuinely believes he is the target of lawyers who love President Trump or whether he believes painting himself as a Democrat under fire is the best way to gain sympathy from the Democrats on the City Council. A phone call seeking comment from McCann was not returned.

Requests for comment from Kanefsky and Marra were not returned.

McCann, 69, urged council members in the email to save the cost of the outside lawyers and interrogate him themselves. The city hired Calcagni & Kanefsky for $50,000.

I would gladly answer all of the questions in a public forum of the City Council, he wrote. You could save $50,000 by doing it.

City Hall has been tight lipped about the reasons for hiring Calcagni & Kanefsky in November and requests for comment from the city spokeswoman were not returned.

Most recently McCann raised the ire of property owners, including some major real estate developers, when he led the citys effort last year to ticket taxpayers for not registering vacant lots.

Recently a Calcagni & Kanefsky attorney asked one of McCanns co-workers, Joseph Russo, to respond to their repeated requests for an interview regarding a workplace investigation. City Business Administrator Brian Platt on March 4 forwarded Russo an email from that attorney, which Russo forwarded to McCann and McCann sent to council members on Tuesday.

In the email, McCann criticizes the Newark-based law firm for its all-white leadership.

But again they are Trump Republicans so maybe they just didnt notice anyone of color in Newark, he wrote.

He also alleges Councilman James Solomon is behind the investigation as well. Solomon, a Democrat, and McCann sparred via email last year (emails that included a Jersey Journal editor) when Solomon chided McCann for issuing veiled threats toward constituents and McCann responded by threatening to file criminal charges against Solomon for interfering with me doing my job and telling him remember who you are talking to.

Asked to comment, Solomon called the most recent email delusional ranting.

McCann was first elected mayor in 1981, voted out of office in 1985, then re-elected in 1989. He was removed from office in 1992 after being convicted of fraud in federal court. A city agency hired him in 2002 and he joined the city payroll in 2016.

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.HOBOKEN  Hoboken council nights all right for fighting.

The nine-member body that governs Mile Square City has been known to tussle, but Wednesday nights meeting was something else, with a conversation about the citys proposed budget and unpopular new parking meter rates devolving quickly into a game of I know you are but what am I.

"When someone doesn't agree with you, Councilman Mike Russo told Council President Jen Giattino at one point, you try to just bully them into your way of thinking."

Councilman Russo, there's really only one bully at this table, Giattino said. And when you look in the mirror, thats him.

The verbal sparring offers a peek into the near future, as the citys political world readies for what may be another brutal election season. The councils six ward seats are all up for grabs in November.

Wednesdays discussion started with administration officials presenting the citys proposed budget for 2019, a $112.2 million spending plan that comes with a $56.7 million tax levy, a 2.5 percent increase from last year. The average homeowner, with an assessment of $565,750, would see municipal taxes rise $47 for the year.

Parking soon became the chief topic of discussion because the budget includes $1.2 million in anticipated revenue from the parking meter hikes that Mayor Ravi Bhalla announced on Tuesday he wants to repeal. The council approved them in November and it was implemented only weeks ago, but they appeared to be widely opposed by the public. Some meter rates went as high as 90 cents for 15 minutes.

Giattino asked Business Administrator Steven Marks why the budget presentation would include revenue from meter hikes that the council planned to vote to repeal later in the same meeting. Marks responded that he can only prepare a budget based on current law, not on what might be introduced. The council postponed a vote to introduce the budget.

Russo jumped in with a plan to revert to the old parking fees while adding a provision that would have exempted residents from paying for parking for up to four hours along Washington Street, the citys central commercial corridor. Bhalla critics pounced on the plan, saying it would harm businesses and accusing Russo of carrying the water for the Bhalla administration.

You all played that game, a smiling Russo said in response. Who are you kidding? I sat at this council with you, council president, with you, councilman, with you, councilwoman  youve all sat here and you carried the water for Mayor Zimmer. You wouldnt even let me get a word in edgewise. Are we kidding? Are we absolutely kidding about this?"

The council voted to postpone a vote on Russos measure. It then voted to approve a measure that simply repeals Novembers ordinance that led to the higher parking fees. The repeal measure requires a second vote before it is adopted.

Late in the conversation Councilman Mike DeFusco called for civility  a half-hour earlier he called Bhalla a dysfunctional mayor that is barely in this town  and Russo howled.

You're the one who opened this debate being very, very uncivil, Russo said.

One council member acknowledged to The Jersey Journal that everyone may not have been on their best behavior during Wednesdays discussion.

It brought out the worst in all of us, this person said.

There was some levity. After Giattino told Russo to look in the mirror, Russo said, Every day I look in the mirror, I love the guy I see.

Giattino smiled.

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.Changes to New Jersey City Universitys annual commencement ceremony have angered students who will not hear their names called individually at the schools graduation in May.

The rancor has even resulted in an online petition aimed at returning to the tradition of every graduate getting their chance to walk on stage and receive their diploma during the May 16 ceremony at Prudential Center in Newark.

NJCU spokeswoman Sherrie Madia said this year there will be more than a dozen smaller graduation ceremonies in addition to the main event. The graduates of each college at the university will be called to stand as a group during the main ceremony, common practice at many large universities, she added.

But the changes arent sitting well with some students at NJCU, which has around 6,500 undergraduates.

Jessica Gilbert, 28, of Bayonne, is graduating cum laude with a degree in graphic arts. Gilbert, whose tuition was footed by the government due to her service in the Army, was stationed in South Korea and several bases stateside. She couldnt be more opposed to the changes and said its disrespectful to students parents.

A lot of my blood, sweat and tears went into this through my military service, said Gilbert, who is the first member of her family to attend college. Having worked so hard for my education that way, now we are being written off as though it was a trivial accomplishment.

Gilbert, who maintained a 4.0 grade point average, added: My parents want to see the tradition, want to see their child walk across the stage, hear my name read and hear cum laude. She said she emailed NJCU President Sue Henderson about the issue but got no response.

In an email to The Jersey Journal, Henderson said she will be meeting with students next week so they can voice their thoughts to me directly," but that students are a part of the commencement committee and have had the opportunity to express their opinions throughout the planning process.

Lauren Deiso, a senior from Old Bridge, said she is fine with the changes.

I know that there will be a separate ceremony for individual colleges and because of the size of our school, its fair, said Deiso, who is set to graduate with a degree in psychology. Personally, I know the work that I did, and I will still get recognition.

Regarding the smaller ceremonies, Madia said Friday that Our goal is really to give our commencement a more personal flavor, so students can really be recognized.

Deiso has helped out at previous graduations in which each graduates name was read and each walked across the stage to receive their diploma. She said that most of the students and their guests had already cleared out of the venue by the end of the very long ceremony.

Suhas Vittal, of Jersey City, is a senior at NJCU and would have graduated this year but changed his major and will have another year of studies. He does not like the changes and also said they go against tradition.

It takes away some of the students individual acknowledgement of what they have accomplished, Vittal said Friday.

The online petition  which had more than 1,800 signatures as of Friday  says that students will not be allowed to enter the graduation venue in a procession, but Madia said that is incorrect.

Madia added that families have been asked to provide quotes and pictures of their grads, which will be shown on the scoreboard during the main graduation ceremony.

While we understand that change of any kind can be hard, we believe that the evolution of this event will result in a more meaningful and personalized experience for all, Henderson said.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.

When PharmaCann, an Illinois-based cannabis company licensed in eight states, looked to gain a foothold in New Jersey, it sought help navigating the states political and regulatory landscape. The best person for the job, it was told, was Brendan Gill, who managed Gov. Phil Murphys election campaign and has the ear of the governor.

He has a deep understanding of the sense and sensibility of New Jersey policy and stakeholders, said Jeremy Unruh, director of regulatory and public affairs for PharmaCann.

Despite Gills connection to the governor, Unruh said his advice did not come with Hey, I can get you a meeting with the governor. According to Unruh, lobbying was not what was expected of him.

I dont have a recollection of him talking about setting up meetings with people in the administration, he said.

But he did say that Gill told executives who they should be talking with in Trenton.

Gill, the Essex County Freeholder President, runs the BGill Group, which promotes itself as a full-service advocacy firm that combines government affairs, digital media and government consulting to wisely meet the needs of corporations, organizations, and public leaders." He acknowledged that he advises several cannabis clients, including PharmaCann. However, he said his role was not to be a go-between with the administration.

I dont set up meetings with the administration, he said. We do local community affairs and strategic counseling and advice.

Whatever his role, Gill is one of a growing number of influential power players in the state  including high-profile lawyers, public relations firms and public strategy consultants with ties to the administration or relationships with the state Legislature  now advising cannabis clients as the state moves closer to adult recreational use of weed. And unlike lobbyists, they are not required to report that activity.

Former campaign manager Brendan Gill (right) speaks with then-candidate Phil Murphy during the gubernatorial campaign.

Nearly $1.4 million was spent in New Jersey last year for lobbying over weed, according to reports released earlier this month the Election Law Enforcement Commission. Industry experts, however, say at least as much was likely spent on lawyers, consultants, financial advisors, public relations firms and others like Gill, as advocates and businesses seek to either shape legislation, or capture a share of what could ultimately be what they estimate as a billion-dollar market for marijuana in the state.

Ben Dworkin, director of the Rowan Institute for Public Policy & Citizenship who closely follows the states political scene, said cannabis companies who hope to do business here may well be looking for political juice. At the same time, though, he said they are also seeking out those who know how things work in New Jerseys political culture.

I think there is overlap, he said. Any private company thats going to be engaged in the emerging cannabis industry wants people who understand the New Jersey political ecosystem.

Dworkin said those entering New Jerseys fledgling cannabis market will likely need more than just political influence.

Cannabis is the Wild West of legislative activity right now. The technology of the industry is changing so frequently, with new products coming on line or in development constantly, that everybody is trying to handle the legal aspects and the public relations aspects and the legislative aspects of any regulatory system that is created, he remarked.

For example, Dworkin pointed out the federal government still considers recreational cannabis sales illegal. That could create problems for a federally regulated bank, which might have legal questions about whether they can serve a business selling weed. Questions about siting businesses will require public affairs specialists, he said. And legislative action means there will be lobbyists involved.

The ELEC report revealed many of the states most influential lobbyists have become players in just the past year  representing the interests of a once-controversial business where few had clients in 2017.

Optimus Partners, the lobbying firm led by Jeff Michaels, a former chief of staff to Republican Gov. Donald DiFrancesco, and Philip Norcross, the brother of longtime Democratic power brother George Norcross, was retained by Acreage Holdings, one of the nation's largest cannabis cultivation, retail and real estate companies, the ELEC data showed. The lobbying firm of 1868 Public Affairs, headed by former state legislator Leroy Jones Jr. has multiple cannabis clients, according to its ELEC filings.

The former lobbying firm of Peter Cammarano, who until recently served as the governors chief of staff, also had a client, the ELEC filing showed. But Cammarano, who receives a separation payout from the firm, said he no longer has ties to his old firm, and that has had no involvement with the cannabis industry.

When I was there, there were no cannabis clients, Cammarano said. Ive never made a dime on marijuana.

For New Jersey law firms, cannabis has also become a big business, even for staid partnerships once reluctant to get involved in the business. According to the state bar association, it has become a booming new specialty.

In the infant stages of the movement there were a lot of people that wouldnt get near this, said William Caruso, an attorney and marijuana lobbyist who helped found the New Jersey Cannabis Industry Association.

Thats no longer the case, he said. Its not a lonely place, Caruso observed. This is a significant practice area for law firms.

Genova Burns, one of the states most recognizable law firms and long known for its involvement in campaign finance issues, recently created a cannabis law practice. Among the attorneys assigned to the group is Rajiv D. Parikh, the former chief counsel for Murphys transition team.

Michael C. McQueeny, the co-chair of the firms cannabis practice group, said with the proposed New Jersey legislation envisioning an unknown and unnamed group of regulatory commissioners  as well as more than 500 town interpretations of the law and yet-to-be created rules  businesses are looking to partner with law firms who understand the states new laws and regulations.

We have clients who have had remarkable success elsewhere, but they come to us because they seek an on-the-ground appreciation for the process with some uniquely New Jersey features contained within the developing law, McQueeny said.

The New Jersey CannaBusiness Association said most of those looking to establish a business here are not paying for lobbyists. Theyre paying for services to establish a business, said Scott Rudder, who heads the trade association. Just like any other business.

PharmaCann said it did hire a lobbyist from Washington to represent its interests in the state, albeit one with little in the way of New Jersey connections,. The company retained a public relations consultant as well.

But Unruh, the companys regulatory affairs director, said Gill was referred to the company as someone who could help them identify and develop a feel for the state of New Jersey from a local and hyperlocal level.

Part of his scope is to understand who we should be meeting with, Unruh explained.

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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With a landmark vote on whether to legalize marijuana in New Jersey just a few days away and the votes for passage remaining uncertain, the mayors of the states two largest cities have come out in support of the legal weed bill.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop called marijuana legalization the most important and controversial policy issue of our time, and their support could help swing a couple of key votes, as several skeptical lawmakers are from the counties anchored by those two cities.

Several lawmakers from Essex and Hudson counties  state Sens. Richard Codey, Ronald Rice, Nia Gill, Brian Stack and Nicholas Sacco, and state Assembly members Ralph Caputo and Shavonda Sumter  have either said they plan to vote no on legalization or are still on the fence. Having the mayors from the biggest cities in their districts behind legalization could be enough to swing a couple of those votes.

This legislation has the ability to give hope and new beginnings to communities that have historically dealt with the impacts of failed drug policy and the criminalization of communities of color, disenfranchised and poor communities which have disproportionately been impacted, Fulop and Baraka, both Democrats, said in a joint statement on Friday. We stand together in solidarity representing the two largest cities in our state with a combined total population of over 500,000 in support of the legislation currently being proposed that will be voted upon on Monday.

This week has seen a real push from Gov. Phil Murphy and legislative leaders to get the votes necessary to legalize marijuana, but they remain a handful of votes short, particularly in the state Senate.

Were working the phones hard, the Democratic governor said at a news conference this week. We all have to pull our weight. I have no reason to believe we all are not, but its gonna be an all-in."

Its gonna take a village to get this one done, Murphy added.

Just a couple of months ago, both Baraka and Fulop said they would pull their support from legalization if they didnt see the expungement provisions they wanted. Expungement is the technical term for clearing an old conviction from someones record, and its been a big part of the legal weed debate.

Lawmakers introduced language this week that said, if marijuana became legal in the state, people with convictions of distributing up to one ounce of marijuana and possessing up to five pounds of marijuana would be eligible to clear their records. Those changes appear to have assuaged Fulop and Baraka, though both stressed that more work remained to be done on expungements.

While we support this legislation, it is with the assurance from our leaders at the state level that they understand that more work must be done, the two said in their statement. No matter Mondays outcome, our stance still remains that the state must be diligent in creating the mechanism to ensure that the expungement process is automatic for all non-violent cannabis arrests. From day one, we have been vocal on this issue and working with our state leadership on this and making recommendations on an ongoing basis.

How the mayors support ends up affecting legalization remains to be seen, but the margins on Mondays vote looks like theyre going to be razor thin.

NJ Advance Media staff writer Brent Johnson contributed to this report.

Payton Guion may be reached at PGuion@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @PaytonGuion.

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With just days to go until state lawmakers are set to vote on marijuana legalization, its far from certain theyll be able to pass legal weed.

What is clear at this point, however, is that there are dozens of towns in New Jersey that dont support legalization. So far, no fewer than 60 municipalities have taken some steps to prevent marijuana businesses from opening within their borders.

But despite all these local ordinances, if marijuana does become legal, theyd have to do them all over again. The latest legalization bill says that any marijuana ban passed before legalization is void. Expect many of the below towns, and a bunch of others, to take those steps if the bill does become law.

While these towns are free to ban businesses, they would not be able to prevent their residents from buying weed elsewhere and possessing or using it in town, as long as they dont use in public.

Lets take a look at the towns that have already banned marijuana:

Allendale

County: Bergen County

Population: 6,820

Date passed: Sept. 27, 2018

Barnegat

County: Ocean County

Population: 22,783

Date passed: July 3, 2018

Berkeley

County: Ocean County

Population: 41,554

Date passed: Jan. 22, 2018

Brick

County: Ocean County

Population: 75,506

Date passed: March 12, 2019

Bridgeton

County: Cumberland County

Population: 24,505

Date passed: Nov. 6, 2018. Bridgeton voters opposed allowing marijuana businesses from operating in their town. While the vote is non-binding, it gives town officials an idea of what the people want.

Bridgewater

County: Somerset County

Population: 44,999

Date passed: Sept. 6, 2018

Brigantine

County: Atlantic County

Population: 9,042

Date passed: June 20, 2018

Carlstadt

County: Bergen County

Population: 6,249

Date passed: May 3, 2018

Chatham Township

County: Morris County

Population: 10,528

Date passed: April 12, 2018

Chester Township

County: Morris County

Population: 7,931

Date passed: Nov. 20, 2018

Clifton

County: Passaic County

Population: 86,607

Date passed: Sept. 4, 2018

Cranbury

County: Middlesex County

Population: 3,803

Date passed: March 12, 2018

East Rutherford

County: Bergen County

Population: 9,928

Date passed: July 17, 2018

Elmwood Park

County: Bergen County

Population: 20,429

Date passed: Oct. 18, 2018

Emerson

County: Bergen County

Population: 7,739

Date passed: Aug. 14, 2018

Fair Haven

County: Monmouth County

Population: 5,950

Date passed: May 29, 2018

Franklin Lakes

County: Bergen County

Population: 11,255

Date passed: June 19, 2018

Freehold

County: Monmouth County

Population: 11,894

Date passed: Oct. 9, 2018

Garfield

County: Bergen County

Population: 31,456

Date passed: Feb. 27, 2018

Harding Township

County: Morris County

Population: 3,887

Date passed: Sept. 20, 2018

Hasbrouck Heights

County: Bergen County

Population: 12,124

Date passed: Feb. 13, 2018

Hawthorne

County: Passaic County

Population: 18,950

Date passed: March 23, 2018

Hazlet

County: Monmouth County

Population: 20,108

Date passed: Feb. 20, 2018

Jamesburg

County: Middlesex County

Population: 6,068

Date passed: Sept. 19, 2018

Lodi

County: Bergen County

Population: 24,961

Date passed: June 19, 2018

Lumberton

County: Burlington County

Population: 12,390

Date passed: Oct. 23, 2018. According to town minutes, Lumberton banned pot shops but would allow cultivators as a conditional use in industrial areas.

Lyndhurst

County: Bergen County

Population: 21,937

Date passed: Dec. 19, 2018

Mahwah

County: Bergen County

Population: 26,759

Date passed: May 31, 2018

Mannington

County: Salem County

Population: 1,721

Date passed: Feb. 7, 2019

Mansfield Township

County: Warren County

Population: 7,507

Date passed: Oct. 24, 2018

Manville

County: Somerset County

Population: 10,414

Date passed: May 14, 2018

Midland Park

County: Bergen County

Population: 7,384

Date passed: May 10, 2018

Montvale

County: Bergen County

Population: 8,440

Date passed: Aug. 14, 2018

North Caldwell

County: Essex County

Population: 6,519

Date passed: Feb. 27, 2018

North Haledon

County: Passaic County

Population: 8,570

Date passed: Feb. 21, 2018

North Plainfield

County: Somerset County

Population: 22,092

Date passed: Oct. 9, 2018

Oakland

County: Bergen County

Population: 13,224

Date passed: Nov. 24, 2018

Oceanport

County: Monmouth County

Population: 5,763

Date passed: April 19, 2018

Old Bridge

County: Middlesex County

Population: 66,573

Date passed: April 23, 2018

Old Tappan

County: Bergen County

Population: 6,042

Date passed: Nov. 19, 2018

Palisades Park

County: Bergen County

Population: 20,988

Date passed: Sept. 25, 2018

Parsippany-Troy Hills

County: Morris County

Population: 53,515

Date passed: March 20, 2018. Parsippanys resolution doesnt outright ban marijuana businesses from the borough but strongly opposes marijuana legalization.

Pleasantville

County: Atlantic County

Population: 20,732

Date passed: Aug. 6, 2018

Point Pleasant Beach

County: Ocean County

Population: 4,594

Date passed: Dec. 19, 2017

Ramsey

County: Bergen County

Population: 15,242

Date passed: March 28, 2018

Ridgewood

County: Bergen County

Population: 25,692

Date passed: Oct. 24, 2018

Saddle Brook

County: Bergen County

Population: 14,169

Date passed: Sept. 6, 2018

Sea Girt

County: Monmouth County

Population: 1,774

Date passed: March 14, 2018

Secaucus

County: Hudson County

Population: 20,215

Date passed: July 24, 2018

Shrewsbury

County: Monmouth County

Population: 4,122

Date passed: Oct. 3, 2017. Shrewsbury's ordinance bans medical marijuana facilities. The town has yet to take a stance on recreational marijuana.

Spotswood

County: Middlesex County

Population: 8,418

Date passed: Feb. 21, 2018. Like Parsippany, Spotswoods resolution doesnt outright ban marijuana businesses from the borough but strongly opposes marijuana legalization.

Surf City

County: Ocean County

Population: 1,178

Date passed: March 14, 2018

Union City

County: Hudson County

Population: 70,387

Date passed: Feb. 13, 2018

Upper Freehold

County: Monmouth County

Population: 6,975

Date passed: March 1, 2018

Upper Pittsgrove

County: Salem County

Population: 3,397

Date passed: Nov. 13, 2018

Upper Saddle River

County: Bergen County

Population: 8,415

Date passed: June 7, 2018. The Upper Saddle River resolution is like a few other towns on this list in that it opposes legalization but doesnt outright ban sales.

Wall

County: Monmouth County

Population: 26,000

Date passed: Feb. 28, 2018

Waldwick

County: Bergen County

Population: 9,985

Date passed: Oct. 9, 2018

Wayne

County: Passaic County

Population: 55,072

Date passed: Sept. 5, 2018

Weehawken

County: Hudson County

Population: 15,342

Date passed: Feb. 28, 2018

West Caldwell

County: Essex County

Population: 11,021

Date passed: Sept. 11, 2018

West Long Branch

County: Monmouth County

Population: 7,972

Date passed: June 6, 2018

Westwood

County: Bergen County

Population: 11,326

Date passed: Oct. 2, 2018

Woodcliff Lake

County: Bergen County

Population: 5,903

Date passed: June 4, 2018

Wyckoff Township

County: Bergen County

Population: 17,322

Date passed: July 17, 2018

Payton Guion may be reached at PGuion@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @PaytonGuion. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Are you interested in the N.J. cannabis industry? Subscribe here for exclusive insider information from NJ Cannabis Insider.Dylan Chidick, the once-homeless teen accepted to 18 schools, may be making national headlines, but that doesnt mean hes planning to leave Jersey behind.

And Gov. Phil Murphy is certainly happy about that.

Oh man, I love that, Murphy told the 17-year-old in a phone call. Youre keeping in New Jersey.

Dylan was accepted to 18 colleges, including his top choice, The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) in Ewing. He plans to commit enroll there and begin classes this fall.

Its a huge deal for me, like, youre the governor, Dylan told Murphy.

I am the governor, and maybe someday youll be the governor based on everything Ive heard," Murphy responded.

Dylan was homeless during 2017, along with his mother and younger twin brothers, who suffered from a heart condition. The family, who immigrated from Trinidad when Dylan was 7, now lives in Jersey City.

He is senior class president and student council president at Henry Snyder High School. Dylan plans to study politics, and has spoken of becoming a lawyer.

His triumphant story has touched many, including a generous donor who has pledged to cover his tuition and board at TCNJ.

All of New Jersey is proud of you, Murphy said. We bless you, we salute you. You are the American dream, my friend.

Amanda Hoover can be reached at ahoover@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @amandahoovernj. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.A former Rutgers University police sergeant has filed a suit against the university alleging he was fired in retaliation for sending an anonymous complaint to supervisors calling out fellow officers illegal activities.

Former officer Michael Jason Farella, who joined Rutgers Newark police department in 2001, filed the complaint on March 6 in Essex County Superior Court.

He alleges that he sent an anonymous letter to Rutgers Police Chief Kenneth Cop, Deputy Chief Michael Rein and Lt. Matt Gulsy, who is also the union representative, detailing several conduct violations by high-ranking officers and the cover-ups that followed.

While a Rutgers University spokesperson said they will not comment on pending litigation, as an accredited law enforcement agency, the Rutgers University Police Department holds its employees to the highest standards in order to provide professional policing services for the community.

The RUPD takes any allegations of employee misconduct seriously and investigates them thoroughly and appropriately in accordance with proper procedures, the statement continued.

Farella claimed in the anonymous August 2017 letter that officers drank beer, slept on duty, stole overtime, ran a side business, failed drug tests and covered up a drunk driving incident that injured a female, among other allegations.

A month later, Rein questioned Farella during an internal affairs investigation about the letter, which he admitted to writing, according to the complaint.

Two days later, during Farellas shift as a duty supervisor, a new officer radioed that she was attempting to stop a driver and pursued the driver, despite Farella ordering her several times not to, the suit alleges. Eventually, the officer stopped, the complaint states.

The incident sparked an administrative memo, which the suit says determined was properly monitored by a duty supervisor, meaning Farella. But despite the review, Farella was brought up on disciplinary charges in April 2018  seven months later  by Chief Carmelo Huertas, he alleged in the complaint.

Huertas then fired Farella on May 7, 2018 based on those charges. In a final notice of disciplinary action," Huertas claimed Farella failed to properly supervise the pursuit scenarios by not immediately taking control and providing direction to field units...resulting in an unauthorized pursuit being permitted to continue.

He claims in the lawsuit other officers involved in the incident were given written warnings while the new officer was suspended for three days. Farella also said the finding is clearly contradicted by the radio recordings during pursuit and the ... administrative review memo.

The termination was in retaliation for Farellas letter, he alleges, which is a violation of the state Conscientious Employee Protection Act.

Farellos attorney, Christopher Lenzo, did not respond to request for comment. He told NorthJersey.com Farella has been working as a security officer because he hasnt been able to get a job in a police department.

"Hes the only one that blew the whistle on unlawful conduct, and he got the most severe discipline, Lenzo told the news organization.

Sophie Nieto-Munoz may be reached at snietomunoz@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her at @snietomunoz. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.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. The vote on legalizing recreational marijuana is scheduled for Monday, and all sides say it is short several votes, even though both the governor and legislative leaders support it. What can they do to put this over the finish line?

DuHaime: There are some compromises being called for by both Democrats and some Republicans that show some current no votes are still willing to talk.

Roginsky: It's possible that the votes could still be there but only the governor really has the power at this point to negotiate for those votes because he constitutionally holds so much leverage. There are a small number of absolutely hardened no-votes in the Democratic caucus but still others are up for grabs, as are a few Republicans.

DuHaime: I will be surprised if it passes next week.

Q. Among the sticking points is expungement. On the left, some say its too tough because the expungements are not automatic. On the right, some say its too lenient because it allows expungement for selling up to five pounds. Is there a sweet spot to find political agreement?

DuHaime: Again, theres room for compromise, probably on both the left and right, which is rarely the case. Expungement could be made easier for those who were convicted of using, but it could be eliminated for dealers, or the threshold could be lower. I know that will make some people mad on both sides, but if this was easy to figure out, it would already be done.

Roginsky: There are legislators who wholeheartedly support legalization. There is a handful who will not support it under any circumstances. There are about a dozen who are undecided. The deal on expungement, as on everything else, should be cut to ensure that there is a majority for the bill's passage in the Assembly. To some people, the final decision on expungement will be a deal breaker. The key is to ensure that whatever the agreement is, it is not a deal breaker to enough senators and Assemblymen to guarantee passage.

Q. Rep. Frank Pallone, a leading liberal in Congress and among the authors of Obamacare, is pushing back against the two favorite initiatives of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her allies  Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Whats the likely fallout, in Congress and in his district?

DuHaime: You are right that Rep. Pallone is a proud liberal, but hes not a socialist, and hes smart politically. He represents Middlesex and Monmouth counties, not San Francisco, Seattle or the Bronx. His core constituency is center-left Democrats, not Socialists. Believe me, Republicans wish Democrats will push Medicare for All and Green New Deal harder, because once fully examined, voters across the political spectrum will reject them, helping reinstate President Trump for four more years and giving Republicans a shot at winning back the House. The best chance for Republican success in 2020 is a clear ideological battle between capitalism and socialism. And no one in Middlesex County wants 70% tax brackets for anyone. Rep. Pallone just may save Democrats from themselves.

Roginsky: Rep. Pallone was my first boss in New Jersey politics almost twenty-five years ago and I know full-well that there is no stronger champion of the environment in Congress. He was advocating for both environmental protections and greater access to healthcare well before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born. The reason we don't have dumping off the Jersey Shore is in large part because of Frank Pallone. The reason we have the Affordable Care Act is in large part because of Frank Pallone. And there is no one in our state  and I mean no one  who understands as well as he does what it takes to win time and again in a competitive district, which is why he is both so politically and intellectually savvy. So, despite the fact that I agree with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez on many things, I would strongly urge her to understand that what sells in Queens and the Bronx doesn't sell in Monmouth or Middlesex counties or in Orange County, Calif., or even on Staten Island in her own home state. As Mario Cuomo famously said, you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Rep. Pallone governs in prose and has actually moved the needle forward quite effectively on the very same issues Rep. Ocasio-Cortez cares about.

DuHaime: Some left-wing activists are already threatening primaries against NJ Democrat members who dont tow the line 100% of the time on their agenda. We saw it just this week when the left was angry with Reps. Sherrill, Van Drew and Gottheimer on immigration reform.

Q. Lizette Delgado-Polanco won fulsome praise from Gov. Phil Murphy and Democratic Chairman John Currie at a recent meeting of the Democratic Party, despite the patronage scandal at the agency she runs, the School Development Authority. Is this what we get when one party rules the state?

DuHaime: It is what you get when the party in charge fails to police itself. The hiring scandal looks bad for the governor, even if he personally had nothing to do with it, but no one seems to have the courage to tell him that someone needs to be held accountable. Otherwise it looks like fear.

Roginsky: It has nothing to do with one-party rule. The governor obviously has confidence in Lizette Delgado-Polanco, whom he has the right to appoint to her position constitutionally, regardless of which party controls the legislature.

Q. Al Alvarez, the man Katie Brennan accused of rape, now says he was slandered and will sue Brennan and others, after two county prosecutors declined to press charges. How do you see this scandal wrapping up? Will Murphy be hurt by it, in the end?

DuHaime: I dont see it wrapping up, ever. Gov. Murphy will only be hurt if it becomes part of a larger narrative where it looks like he doesnt have control of whats going on around him. Eventually it could trip him up on things voters actually care about. Will voters really punish him for SDA patronage hires or a lack of clarity on Alvarezs hire? Probably not. But if they start to believe hes got the wrong people in positions of authority and then other things slip  like no positive changes to NJ Transit, taxes going up or job growth is below the national average again  then people will point back to these moments as evidence of a pattern.

Roginsky: For the life of me, I don't understand why the governor's press people are not more aggressive in pushing good news, rather than constantly keeping their heads down and refusing to comment on scandals that fall in their laps. You can't repeatedly hunker down, refuse to comment and hope that scandals pass because they ultimately become like Chinese water torture, where drip after drip eventually really hurts you.

Q. Beto ORourke, a former Congressman from El Paso with few achievements to claim, joined the race and broke records by raising $6 million in his first 24 hours. What are his prospects in the 2020 race?

DuHaime: Betos a legitimate threat for the nomination for two reasons. Hes smart, and hes got political talent. That said, the act of standing on tables wildly waving his arms while offering exactly zero substance might get old quick. Lets not forget that even with a ton of money, he lost in a great year for Democrats to someone who is not exactly warm and cuddly.

Roginsky: Beto is a very legitimate candidate. And Mike, I might caution that a presidential candidate waving his arms wildly while offering exactly zero substance never got old quickly for Republicans. The guy who has done that for years controls your party totally today and is more popular than Ronald Reagan among Republicans.

DuHaime: Sounds like you just endorsed Beto.

Roginsky: Not at all. Just pointing out that wild hand gestures dont disqualify you from the White House, based on current events.By Darrell Armstrong and W. Deen Shareef

Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. Michael Brown.

These names have been seared into the national consciousness, sparking a reckoning over the use of force by police against communities of color that has swept over the country in recent years.

Yet the problem of excessive police force is not confined to the national headlines. It is also found here in our home state, in day-to-day interactions between police officers and people of color.

A recent NJ Advance Media investigation found vast disparities in how police officers use force and who they use it against, finding that black residents were three times more likely than their white counterparts to face some sort of police force over a five year period  despite the fact that white New Jerseyans were more likely to show aggressive behavior toward law enforcement during arrests.

And it found that a small group of police officers was responsible for the disproportional use of force.

The report exposed poor reporting practices from local police departments that fostered lax oversight and a culture that fails to treat every New Jersey resident, regardless of race, equally.

While we are heartened that Attorney General Gurbir Grewal has announced listening sessions and plans to step up reporting requirements on local police, we feel like these moves are not enough to address the epidemic of police violence that plagues our communities and damages relationships between communities of color and law enforcement.

Thats why we are working with members of the New Jersey Legislative Black Caucus to explore ways to enhance oversight and impose best practices on local police departments.

Weve seen that political will and public pressure can prompt change. Following a series of racial profiling scandals in the late 1990s, the New Jersey State Police enacted a series of reforms, including ensuring more diverse applicant pools, that have begun to repair trust with communities of color. These reforms were enacted in consultation with a broad-based coalition of black faith leaders, lawmakers and civil rights advocates.

Yet local police departments, which are the most visible arm of law enforcement for most New Jerseyans, have largely escaped similar scrutiny.

This must change.

Thats why the NJ Black Multifaith Alliance is working with state lawmakers to hold a series of hearings in four New Jersey cities: Newark, Paterson, New Brunswick and Pleasantville. We will be taking testimony from concerned residents. This testimony will inform a series of potential legislative solutions  in the same spirit of the 1990s-era reforms of the State Police.

While we are still exploring what type of legislation we would support, one thing is clear: Local police departments are unable to properly address this problem on their own.

These disparities have persisted for decades.

While some large police departments, like Newark, have faced scrutiny from civil rights monitors to ensure reforms, most departments across New Jersey have little oversight. And we have no confidence that municipal law enforcement officers can police themselves.

Any reforms adopted in response to these troubling findings must have teeth and must involve increased oversight from Trenton to ensure that changes are properly carried out.

We must create a culture of policing in our state that values black and brown New Jerseyans and recognizes that the over-policing and brutalization of communities of color makes us less safe.

Rev. Darrell Armstrong is the pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton. W. Deen Shareef is the imam at Masjid Waarith ud Deen in Orange.

The article was also signed by:

Rev. Dr. Cory Jones, pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church, Burlington City

Rev. Timothy Jones, pastor of Bethany Baptist Church, Newark

Rev. James Dunkins, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, Vineland and Port Norris

Bishop Fred Rubin, pastor of Community Refuge Church, Manalapan

Rev. Dr. Charles F. Boyer, pastor of Bethel AME Church, Woodbury

Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow us on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and on Facebook at NJ.com Opinion. Get the latest news updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.By Rob Duffey

Legislators have recently begun hearings on Gov. Phil Murphys budget proposal. Its a strong framework that identifies savings, calls for smart investments in education, shores up our underfunded pension system, and includes a surplus for a rainy day. After Gov. Chris Christies years of trickle-down economics, shameless gimmicks and shortfalls, Murphys budget is a breath of fresh air.

But Trenton could still have a fight on its hands. Some Democratic legislative leaders have yet to get behind a key plank of the plan: raising taxes on people who make more than $1 million a year. This should be a no-brainer, not a flash point of debate. There is no credible policy or political argument against raising taxes on millionaires in New Jersey.

First, New Jersey needs the revenue. Gov. Murphys responsible state budget is a strong step toward righting New Jerseys finances. But we still have a long way to go before we can regain the trust of the credit agencies, fully fund public schools, invest in clean energy needs, fix the transit system and more. The millionaires tax would raise nearly half a billion dollars of sustainable revenue year-to-year that New Jersey could use to make smart investments and help move the state forward.

Second, New Jersey needs a healthy dose of tax fairness. The state ranks 7th in income inequality. According to a United Way study on financial hardship in New Jersey, a staggering 40 percent of households are among the working poor. Meanwhile, New Jerseys wealthy contribute a smaller share of their income in taxes than most working families do. For years, some Democratic legislators worked hand in hand with Chris Christie to cut taxes for wealthy heirs and heiresses by abolishing the estate tax, cutting taxes on the sale of yachts, and forking over $11 billion in wasteful tax subsidies to profitable and politically connected corporations.

Some legislators say changes to the SALT deduction through federal tax legislation has already hit wealthy New Jerseyans too hard and we cant afford to pile on. But research organization New Jersey Policy Perspective has the real facts: thanks to Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, the average person making $1 million a year in New Jersey got a $27,000 tax cut in 2018.

To sum up: New Jerseys wealthiest arent over-taxed. They are under-taxed. New Jersey isnt broke. Its been robbed.

Theres a lot of fear-mongering about millionaires tax flight, mainly promoted by millionaires. But lets be clear. Millionaires are not going to sell their house(s) to pick up and leave the state in response to modest tax hikes. Wealthy individuals are less likely than others to relocate to other states due to their business and social networks. When the state raised taxes on the rich in 2004, revenue loss from exiting millionaires made up less than 2 percent of the revenue gained from the remaining millionaires.

Places like California, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and Washington D.C. have adopted millionaire taxes to meet their needs. In California, a strong millionaires tax has helped right the states finances and allowed them to significantly expand mental health programs to reduce homelessness, incarceration, and hospitalization.

Democratic lawmakers who oppose the millionaires tax are swimming against the current of popular support, particularly within their own party. Nationally, leading Democratic presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and New Jerseys own Cory Booker have proposed significant taxes on income and wealth to help close the growing gap between the super-rich and the rest of us. And New Jerseys working families and voters get that the states current tax structure is rigged against them in favor of the rich. Thats why more than two-thirds of New Jersey voters support a millionaires tax.

Democratic lawmakers reluctance to tax millionaires is newfound. Throughout the Christie years, many of these same legislators repeatedly included a millionaires tax hike in the state budgets, knowing full well that Chris Christie would veto it out. Now that New Jersey has a governor who champions the kind of tax fairness the state needs and voters want, legislative leaders have suddenly changed their tune.

We can have a real debate about the New Jersey budget and revenue. But raising taxes on the rich is obviously the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. The only reason for Democratic legislators to oppose Gov. Murphys proposal is if they care more protecting the pocketbooks of the super-rich donor class than fixing our states finances, and believe voters wont notice.

That would be a bad bet. Voters want more from their elected leaders than talk about tax fairness and fiscal responsibility. They want action and leadership, and they are paying attention. Legislators who get behind the millionaires tax included in Gov. Murphys budget will find popular support at their backs. Politicians who would rather carry water for millionaires than stand up for working families risk the wrath of the people who elected them in the first place.

Rob Duffey is the interim director of New Jersey Working Families.

Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow us on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and on Facebook at NJ.com Opinion. Get the latest news updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.Police officers raided and shutdown a strip club in Paterson last week after an undercover investigation led to prostitution charges against the manager and seven dancers, authorities said.

The citys vice unit also issued a slew of Alcoholic Beverage Control violations to El Cabaret gentlemans lounge on Cianci Street, according to Paterson Police Director Jerry Speziale.

Police seized a total of $8,799 from the club, calling the money illegal proceeds from prostitution, authorities said.

Last month, police received complaints from concerned citizens regarding acts of prostitution at the club, Speziale said.

Dancers would openly solicit patrons for sexual acts in exchange for (money), Speziale said in an email.

The citys vice unit, narcotics and patrol divisions raided the club about 11:30 p.m. on March 14. The manager, Horacio Piccinini, 54, of Paterson along with seven women who worked there.

Piccinini was charged with promoting prostitution and maintaining a nuisance. Police seized $8,091 from Piccinini, calling the money proceeds from prostitution.

Before the raid, undercover detectives went into the establishment and were solicited for sex several times, Speziale said.

The women, who are from Northern New Jersey and New York City, ranged in age from 24 to 62.

They were all charged with prostitution and police seized the money they had on them, which ranged from $95 to $240, Speziale said.

Police wrote 15 Alcoholic Beverage Control administrative tickets, including nine violations of the states prostitution statute, illegal and lewd activity in an ABC-licensed establishment, not having a complete list of employees and operating as a public nuisance, Speziale said.

The night of the raid, they shut the establishment down and hit them with numerous violations, Speziale said Friday. Mayor Andre Sayegh has made it abundantly clear that we will take these matters to the ABC to ensure compliance.

Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.A teacher who was terminated from her job at a Paterson charter school has filed a lawsuit against school officials claiming she was sexually harassed by middle-school students and discriminated against by the administration when she complained.

Denise Kruse, 36, of Garfield, claims in court papers that students in a remedial math class at Community Charter School asked sexually suggestive questions, came up behind her and made thrusting motions and recorded video of her buttocks that was posted to Snapchat.

The students also called out in class to say they were aroused, placed their hands down their pants and made comment about her buttocks and then laughed loudly with each other, states the suit, which was filed March 18 in Superior Court in Bergen County.

The suit also alleges the schools African-American CEO, Curtis Palmore, decided not to renew her contract because he wanted to replace white teachers with people he worked with in The Bronx, New York.

Kruse alleges a hostile work environment and says when she complained that her rights were being violated, she was retaliated against and wrongfully terminated.

The circumstances surrounding (the administrations) failure to renew (Kruses) contract for the 2018-19 school year and then replace her with African-American teachers, is sufficiently suspicious to warrant the conclusion that she was discriminated against, her attorney, Heidi Weintraub wrote in the suit.

Palmore did not immediately respond Friday to a request of comment.

However, the charter school released a statement to NorthJersey.com saying the school "is deeply committed to creating a workplace and learning community that is free of harassment or discrimination of any kind, where students and staff alike feel safe, supported and cared for.

Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.The bathtub in a New Jersey familys house was apparently just too alluring for a powerful hawk.

Police in Cranford were called to a home earlier this week after the bird flew through the bathroom window. Not through an open window -- through two panes of glass, the family told CBS2. The family found the hawk hanging out in the tub and called for help.

Upon arrival, officers found this little hawk relaxing in the jacuzzi, Cranford police wrote on Facebook.

An officer later coaxed the bird outside and back to a tree nearby.

Joe Brandt can be reached at jbrandt@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JBrandt_NJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.A man wounded by police during a December encounter in Elizabeth has signaled his plans to file a $3 million lawsuit over the incident.

Michael A. Bates, 37, of Orange, was shot by officers responding to a domestic violence call after he allegedly threatened to harm them, police said.

His attorney said police concocted the threat to cover up their own bad behavior.

Bates filed a notice of intent to file suit earlier this month naming the police department and others as defendants. He also declined a prosecutions plea bargain in his case.

Bates attorney, Abraham Rubert-Schewel, made public in January body camera footage of the chaotic incident and called police use of force in the case excessive and unwarranted. He then asked the state Attorney General to investigate the shooting.

Officers had separated two people and were speaking with them in the early hours of Dec. 22 when Bates walked up to the scene at Court and Third streets.

He allegedly claimed he had a firearm and threatened to hurt the officers, prosecutors said.

Body camera footage of the incident shows two officers racing down a flight of stairs in response to a commotion in the street, while footage from officers already outside records someone, apparently Bates, yelling as he approaches the scene. While his words arent clear, he seems to say Im Michael Bates at one point.

Some in the videos can be heard yelling that Bates has a gun and he allegedly confirmed that he did, though that cannot be heard in the footage.

Several shots are fired and a wounded Bates is seen on the ground as officers surround him, asking what he did with the gun.

Bates responds that he had no weapon and was only holding his cellphone. He also tells the officers that they did nothing wrong.

Relax, relax, relax, he tells them. I got yall. Yall did what yall supposed to do.

Prosecutors also released body camera footage of the incident on YouTube.

Bates was treated for a non-life threatening wound and charged with making terroristic threats, a third-degree charge, and causing or risking widespread injury or damage, a fourth-degree offense.

Rubert-Schewel said his client threatened no one and that he was shot without warning.

As for his comment to the officers in which he seemed to let them off the hook, Rubert-Schewel said he has discussed that with Bates.

He was really terrified. He had just been shot by the cops, the attorney said. He didnt know what was going to happen. He was worried he was going to get shot again.

A judge ordered Bates released from custody in early January after saying the evidence she had reviewed didnt show the claims made by police. Im not saying it didnt occur. Im just not sure how it occurred, she said at the time.

The Essex County Prosecutors Office is reviewing the shooting rather than Union County because one of the Elizabeth officers in the case has a professional relationship with the Union County office.

The Attorney Generals office has not gotten involved and the Essex County review is ongoing, officials confirmed.

Bates attorney filed the tort notice, an official document served against defendants in a potential lawsuit, with the City of Elizabeth, Elizabeth Police Department, and prosecutors officers in Union and Essex counties. The four Elizabeth officers involved in the incident are also named.

In it, he accuses police of excessive force, false arrest, fabrication of evidence and malicious prosecution.

Bates recently declined a prosecution offer to plead guilty to a disorderly persons offense in return for dismissing the other charges. The case has now been referred to a grand jury for possible indictment on the original charges.

He declined this offer because he did not believe he was guilty of this offense and because it could harm his civil suit, Rubert-Schewel explained.

Bates continues to receive treatment as a result of the shooting, according to his lawyer, and still has bullet fragments in his chest.

Rubert-Schewel also accused Elizabeth police of continuing to harass his client. Bates was arrested and wrongfully detained in February over an alleged robbery, the attorney said. He was released the next day without seeing a judge, according to the tort.

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.

Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.Several high school students are in hot water after they were able to log into their schools computer systems to change grades and attendance records.

A letter was sent out Wednesday to parents of high school students in the Elizabeth Public School system informing them of the data breach.

Unfortunately, a number of our students have made some poor choices by participating, to varying degrees, in compromising our student information system to manipulate attendance and classroom grades, a letter from the districts Superintendent Olga Hugelmeyer read.

The first student involved was able to gain access to the system by stealing a teachers password, district spokesman Pat Politano told NJ Advance Media. About six students accessed attendance records, and two unsuccessfully tried to change grades, he said.

The district has and is continuing to increase technological security by changing and increasing the complexity of passwords to its system and other security measures, Politano said.

According to the letter, the breaches happened at various high schools throughout the district.

The consequences for the individual(s) who lead the data compromise are likely to be severe. Due to student privacy laws, were restricted from disclosing more information but we can assure you that we are working within the full extent of the law and our Student Code of Conduct Board policy, Hugelmeyer said in the letter.

The Elizabeth Police Department has also been contacted in regard to the matter, the district said.

The letter said it was a sad day for Elizabeth Public Schools, and the actions of the students involved do not reflect what the district teaches or represents.

Kason Little, a senior who serves as student advocate in the district, blamed some of the schools high performance standards for the break-ins.

Students are under a lot of pressure to maintain good grades, he said.

Hugelmeyers letter also said her heart aches for the parents of the students involved in the incident and said the students would likely be learning a very difficult lesson. She asked that the school community keep the parents of those students in their thoughts during the trying time.

As Superintendent, Im personally saddened and embarrassed by this discovery, but am also very determined and committed to address this issue and continue our support of every student and providing them the innovative and personalized learning environment in which they can achieve excellence and fulfill their dreams, Hugelmeyer said.

Olivia Rizzo may be reached at orizzo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @LivRizz. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.The New Orleans African American Museum, a picturesque complex of historic buildings in Treme has been closed for five years. But the museum, which was a showplace of art and historical artifacts relating to the citys African American heritage, plans to begin the process of reopening in April with an exhibit at 1417 Governor Nicholls St., a pale blue building across the street from the main museums site. The date of the exhibits opening has not been announced.

The rebirth of the African American Museum will be guided by new Executive Director and Chief Curator Gia Hamilton, who spent five years as the director of the Joan Mitchell Center, a nationally known artist residency on Bayou Road. Hamilton said that she hopes to present a series of shows in the small 1417 Governor Nicholls St. building as she campaigns to raise money to protect and restore the cluster of historic buildings across the street.

The museum, which opened in 2000, is anchored by the historic Treme Villa, an 1828 mansion at 1418 Gov. Nichols St. thats also known as the Villa Meilleur or the Meilleur-Goldthwaite House. The museum property stretches along North Villere Street, from Gov. Nicholls to Ursulines Street and includes former slave quarters and the Passebon Cottage, once owned by free African Americans before the Civil War.

In 2011 the non-profit institution received $3 million in public money through a City of New Orleans grant funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The grant was part of a projected $6 million renovation of the museum that included the acquisition of the house at 1417 Gov. Nicholls. But the money apparently didnt stretch as far as expected and the project was never fully realized.

New Orleans African American Museum begins $6 million renovation

In 2012 the museum cut expenses by eliminating its executive director position. At the time, a board member said that NOAAMs yearly income had fallen to $200,000, less than half the ideal $500,000 operating income. In March 2013 the museum announced it had closed to complete renovations and never reopened.

According to a report by WWL-TV, the museums troubles continued when Trumpeter Irvin Mayfield briefly became a board member. Mayfield had served as chairman of the New Orleans Public Library Foundation, and was accused of unlawfully steering nearly $1.4 million from that organization to the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He left the African American Museum board in 2016 after reportedly incurring a $1 million bank loan on behalf of the museum. The loan had been granted by First NBC bank, which dissolved in 2017.

According to WWL, a philanthropic group called Treme Guardian led by businessman John Cummings assumed the bank loan in the interest of the museum. In 2014, Cummings, an attorney, opened the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, La., an institution designed to confront the history of slavery. But in 2018, Treme Guardian sued the NOAAM in Orleans Parish Civil District Court, alleging the museum had failed to make payments on the $1 million loan, continued to allow it historic properties to deteriorate and neglected to carry proper insurance.

How the Whitney Plantation became a different kind of Confederate monument

Hamilton said that at this juncture the lawsuit has been replaced with an agreement between Treme Guardian and the museum. The NOAAM is in good standing with its investors, Treme Guardian, who were generous and insightful enough to support it, she said. Neither a NOAAM board member nor Cummings could be immediately reached for comment.

Hamilton said that, as she understands it, the problems that closed the museum in 2013 included preservation issues, funding issues and leadership changes. In that light, she said she appreciates the challenge of bringing the Treme landmark back into public service.

The proposed budget for the coming year, Hamilton said, is $200,000. She said she has no timeline for the ultimate reopening and is awaiting contractor bids to arrive at a budget for the renovation of the 1418 Gov. Nichols properties, which are valued in the museums most recent tax filing at over $5.5 million.

In the meantime, Hamilton said, she is busy consolidating the museums files and helping seat some new board members. Her principles going forward, she said, are patience, integrity and transparency.

As a New Orleans native and Treme resident, the African American Museum is too important as a cultural epicenter, not to put the work in, she said.

Doug MacCash covers art, music and culture in New Orleans. Contact him via email at dmaccash@nola.com. Follow him on Instagram at dougmaccash, on Twitter at Doug MacCash and on Facebook at Douglas James MacCash. As always, please add your point of view to the comment stream.New Orleans police arrested a woman in the French Quarter Thursday (March 21) who allegedly told officers she cut her ex-boyfriend in the head with her keys, records show, over a dispute involving the shared custody of their dog, Bobbie.

Eleonora Little, 25, faces a charge of aggravated battery stemming from the cutting police responded to about 5 p.m. Thursday in the 900 block of Decatur Street.

Orleans Parish Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell assigned a lawyer from the Orleans Public Defenders office to represent Little in court on Friday, court records show. He set her bond at $1,500.

A summary of the probable cause for arrest written by the responding NOPD officers states when they arrived to the scene after a bystander called police, they saw Little sitting on a bench holding two leashed, barking dogs. The man she is accused of cutting, her ex-boyfriend, was sitting about 10 feet away, on the ground, holding a third dog. He had a laceration above his left temple, and blood down his face, near his eye, and in his hairline, the summary states.

According to NOPD, the bleeding man said Little tried to take his dog, Bobbie, from him, and he refused to give up the dog. Little then, took her keys, which were attached to chain link dog collar approximately 8 inches in length, and struck (her ex-boyfriend) with them on the head, one of the police officers wrote in the summary. A passerby then called 911, police said, citing interviews.

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Little told officers she was walking two of her dogs when she saw her ex-boyfriend walking their dog, police wrote. She admitted she took her keys and struck her ex-boyfriend, while trying to grab Bobbies leash, the summary states. Bobbies leash came out of the grip of the ex-boyfriends hand and the dog ran to the ex-boyfriend, police wrote, citing Littles statement.

When the couple broke up, Little told police, the two were supposed to have shared custody of Bobbie, including occasional visits of Ms. Little to (her ex-boyfriends) new residence to see her, police wrote in the summary. Little claimed her ex did not hold up his end of the agreement, and she had not seen Bobbie in two months, police said. She also told police she believed her ex-boyfriend was abusive toward the dog.

Representatives from the Louisiana Society for the Prevention and Cruelty to Animals responded to the scene, officers wrote, and determined Bobbie was thin but had no signs of abuse.

A friend of Littles took care of her dogs at the scene, officers wrote, and Little was arrested.

Little, whose home address was listed in the 7th Ward, remained jailed as of 4:15 p.m. Friday.The former top lawyer for the failed First NBC Bank has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the New Orleans-based lender. The bank collapsed two years ago in the largest American bank failure since the 2008 financial crises.

Gregory St. Angelo, the banks general counsel for 10 years prior to its $1 billion collapse, is accused of conspiring with two other former bank officials to defraud the bank, including falsifying personal financial statements and repeatedly taking out loans, which appeared to be paid off in bank books, but never actually were.

The bill of information identifies the two other bank officials only as Bank President A and Bank Officer B. However, the relatively detailed descriptions provided in the document indicate the unnamed officials are former First NBC President and CEO Ashton Ryan and former Chief Credit Officer Bill Burnell. Neither currently faces charges in the federal case.

Attorney Phillip A. Wittmann, who is representing St. Angelo, said his client is cooperating with Eastern District U.S. Attorney Peter G. Strassers office in an ongoing investigation.

All I can tell you is that Mr. St. Angelo is a cooperating witness, Wittmann said.

Edward J. Castaing Jr., Ryans attorney, said Ryan is not named in the bill, had no knowledge of any illicit activities at the bank and completely denies any of the allegations in that bill of information as it would pertain to him.

The bill of information accuses St. Angelo, 54, and the anonymous bank officials of more than a decade of fraudulent dealings starting in 2006. The goal, the documents says, was to enrich themselves unjustly by disguising the true financial status of St. Angelo as well as the financial health of the bank itself and that of other borrowers.

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The bill claims St. Angelo repeatedly received loans from First NBC Bank based on materially false and fraudulent documents and statements that overstated his wealth and omitted key information. When he couldnt pay the loans, St. Angelo borrowed more money. The new loans appeared current in bank books, helping the bank avoid reporting the older lines of credit as bad loans, the bill said.

In addition, St. Angelo and the two bank officials pushed back the maturity date on loans St. Angelo could not pay, issued loans to St. Angelos associates that ultimately went to him, and funded fraudulent tax credit investments in entities owned by St. Angelo, the bill said. Again, the bill claims the purpose was to avoid having to report the loans as soured assets in First NBCs books.

Federal prosecutors estimate First NBC had advanced roughly $46 million total to St. Angelo and his entities on the eve of its April 2017 collapse. The bank had also paid St. Angelo an additional $9.6 million through the fake tax credit investments, the bill said.

If found guilty, St. Angelo faces up to 30 years in prison, five years of supervised release and a fine of more than $1 million, or twice the gross gain to him or the gross loss to any victims of the alleged crimes. St. Angelos first appearance in federal court is set for March 29.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sharan E. Lieberman, Matthew R. Payne, Nicholas D. Moses, and J. Ryan McLaren are prosecuting the case. The case is being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Office of Inspector General, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Correction: An earlier version of this article reported the incorrect name for the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Peter G. Strasser is serving as the Eastern District U.S. Attorney, not Shane Jones.

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.The NOPDs Public Integrity Bureau has opened a formal investigation into a possible violation of NOPD chase protocol leading up to the Wednesday night (March 20) crash that set off a three-alarm fire at a Broadmoor beauty salon, killing two and injuring seven others.

NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson announced the opening of the formal investigation on Thursday afternoon, citing additional factors uncovered by investigators since Wednesday nights fatal crash and fire. Ferguson did not specify what those additional factors include.

The crash and ensuing blaze began after NOPD 6th District Task Force officers tried to conduct a traffic stop on a vehicle believed to be stolen, police said. Instead of pulling over, the driver accelerated, Ferguson said Wednesday night.

During a briefing at the scene on Washington Avenue at South White Street, Ferguson told reporters that the officers did disengage at some point during the encounter with the stolen vehicle, reportedly deactivating their lights. Ferguson said he did not know exactly when officers stopped pursuing or following the vehicle.

Shortly thereafter, they saw what they believed to be smoke in the air," Ferguson said at the scene. Upon doing so, they traveled to this intersection, of South White and Washington, where they discovered the crash and went into rescue mode," pulling several people from the building, Ferguson said Wednesday night.

As we said last night, it was too early to say for sure what happened when officers attempted to make a traffic stop on what they believed to be a stolen vehicle, Ferguson said Thursday in a written statement. Through further investigation, we have gathered additional factors that warrant a formal investigation into a possible violation of the NOPD vehicle pursuit policy.

The NOPDs Public Integrity Bureau is leading the investigation into the possible administrative violation, he said. When I became Superintendent, I made it clear that transparency would continue be a top priority for me and this department.

Police have not said whether any chase occurred but at least one bystander, Kevin Kenner, said he was leaving a store at South Broad and Washington when he saw police chasing a vehicle that ultimately flipped on its side, slid and then burst into flames.

The NOPDs vehicle pursuit policy, which was updated in December 2015 with input from the U.S. Department of Justice and federal consent decree monitors, is on the restrictive side compared to some other police departments: It permits officers to chase offenders in vehicles only if the person is suspected of having just committed a violent felony.

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Upon completion of the Public Integrity Bureaus investigation, Ferguson said he will review the information uncovered, determine the status of the officers involved and take appropriate action.

The NOPD did not include further details on the investigation, such as how long the investigation is expected to take or the identity of the officers involved.

The crash killed the two people inside of the vehicle. Their genders and ages were unknown as of Thursday evening.

Seven others were injured, including:

A woman who was getting her hair styled inside the salon when the car crashed into it and caught fire, officials said. She was rescued from the second story by New Orleans firefighters. As of 6:30 a.m. Thursday, police said she was alive but had serious burns. Authorities initially said she had died.

The fire also left Unity 1 Beauty Supply & Hair Salon, a neighborhood fixture, in ruins. Owners John and Beverly Smith have owned the business for 38 years. At the scene, several onlookers, watching as flames devoured the two-story building, lamented the loss of a local staple.

Were just like family to everybody, Beverly Smith told a reporter of Unity 1 Beauty Supply & Hair Salon and the Broadmoor community it serves.

Broadmoor beauty shop destroyed in fatal, fiery crash a pillar of the community

Laura McKnight covers crime and breaking news for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and can be reached at 504-655-6571 or lmcknight@nola.com.

Carlie Kollath Wells and Emily Lane contributed to this report.A 41-year-old man was arrested Tuesday (March 19) after police say he shot a man in the leg and arm while trying to rob him and a woman underneath the elevated Interstate 10 overpass along North Claiborne Avenue in January.

Roderick Foxworth was booked with armed robbery, armed robbery with a firearm and aggravated battery, according to jail records.

New Orleans Police say a man and a woman were leaving a building in the 1200 block of North Claiborne around 2:20 a.m. on Jan. 5, when a man wearing black, later identified as Foxworth, approached them underneath the overpass.

Foxworth pulled out a silver revolver and pointed it at the man, while demanding money, police said. After the man dropped his money, Foxworth shot him in his forearm.

The man then tried to grab Foxworths gun but was shot in his left thigh during the process, police said. After a struggle over the gun, Foxworth lost control of the gun and the man ran to seek help. The woman hid herself behind a car and saw Foxworth get inside a dark-colored car.

Man shot in Treme early Saturday, New Orleans police say

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During an interview with detectives, the male victim provided a photo of the man who he said 1,000 percent shot him, according to court documents. The woman, who was reached by phone during the interview, also confirmed that the picture was the same man who approached them Jan. 5. Police are still investigating the source of the photo.

After a detective sent out an email through NOPDs internal email system with Foxworths photo, another detective confirmed Foxworths full name, court documents said. Foxworths address was listed in the polices database in connection with previous investigations.

A neighbor confirmed that Foxworth  who was known as Rabbit in the community  lived at the same address that NOPD had recorded in their database, police said.

Police also confirmed that the photo of the suspect provided by the male victim matched body-worn camera footage of Foxworth from previous NOPD investigations, according to court documents.

Foxworths bond was set at $190,000 and he was appointed a public defender.A man in his late 20s asked an employee for help with his taxes before putting a gun to her back and demanding money in Read Boulevard East area Wednesday afternoon (March 20), police said.

After another employee went to the back of the building to retrieve forms, located in the 4900 block of Bullard Avenue in New Orleans East, the man approached a 37-year-old employee at the front desk and held a gun to her back, NOPD said in an initial report.

The suspected robber said give me what you have and the employee gave him her purse with her wallet, cash, a debit card and drivers license inside, police said. Then the man fled in an unknown direction.

The armed robbery was reported around 2:30 p.m.

NOPD also reported an armed robbery in the French Quarter and a carjacking in the 7th Ward Wednesday:

Around 9:10 a.m., a 31-year-old man was walking toward his hotel when two men wearing all black clothing approached him, police said. The victim was in the 300 block of Royal Street, about three blocks from his hotel, when one of the strangers revealed a gun and demanded the mans wallet and phone.

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The man complied and the armed men fled.

About 12 hours later, police reported a carjacking in the 7th Ward. After a 29-year-old mans car stalled in the 2600 block of AP Tureaud Avenue around 9:45 p.m., two men in a brown Suburban stopped and said they would help him.

The victim was handing the men jumping cables when one of the strangers put a silver gun to his side and demanded his belongings, police said. The other man got out of the Suburban and pushed the victim to the ground.

One of the men then jumped inside the victims car and drove off. The other man drove off in the Suburban, police said.

Broadmoor beauty shop destroyed in fatal, fiery crash a pillar of the communityDaniel Meridy, the man authorities have accused of raping at least eight women in two states, was formally charged Thursday (Mach 21) in five rapes in New Orleans, according to the Orleans Parish District Attorneys Office.

Meridy, 35, was charged with five counts of aggravated and first-degree rape and five counts of aggravated kidnapping. He can face a mandatory lifetime prison sentence for each of the ten counts, the office said.

DNA linked the 35-year-old New Orleans native to five rapes of women in Treme and Central City between June 2015 and October 2018, and three rape cases in Kansas City, Missouri between 2004 and 2005, authorities said.

An investigation found that the rapes occurred at the following locations in Treme and Central City:

In the 1800 block of Bayou Road, around 9 p.m. on June 7, 2015;

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New Orleans police said Meridy held five women in New Orleans at gunpoint or knifepoint, before taking them to a secluded location or abandoned property and raping them.

An NOPD sex crimes detective began an investigation in September 2018 after the same unknown DNA was found in the first four unsolved New Orleans cases. In one of the attacks, a woman reported a license plate that led the detective to Meridy, the district attorneys office said.

After obtaining a DNA swab in December 2018, police found that Meridys DNA matched all five New Orleans rapes cases. He was arrested in connection to the kidnappings and rapes on December 10, 2018.

Meridys DNA profile was uploaded to a federal database and matched with three similar unsolved cases in Kansas City, according to the the District Attorneys office. He has not yet been charged by Kansas City authorities.

New Orleans man accused in 4 different rapes committed in less than 4 years: recordsA man accused in a fatal mid-day shooting at a New Orleans East gas station in 2017 was convicted of second-degree murder, and is expected to be sentenced to life in prison without parole next week.

Charles Monroe, 36, was charged with shooting 24-year-old Lance McCormick outside Discount Zone in the 6700 bock of Chef Menteur Highway on April 30, 2017. The shooting happened around 12:30 p.m.

Prosecutors said video surveillance showed McCormick collapsing outside the store, struggling to his feet, then attempting to fight off his attacker inside the store before he was shot in the head.

A New Orleans police officer identified Monroe as the perpetrator from a still-frame photo from the video.

Defense attorneys argued that identification was unreliable, as the photo was of poor quality and the gunmans face was partially covered, and not corroborated by physical evidence.

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A jury was seated Monday (March 18) evening, and a 10-2 verdict was reached Tuesday night.

Jurors convicted Monroe of second-degree murder, and acquitted him of obstruction of justice in a homicide investigation, according to District Attorney Leon Cannizzaros office.

The verdicts were announced after 10 p.m., according to Cannizzaros office.

Criminal District Judge Paul Bonin is expected to impose a statutorily required life sentence on March 29.

Assistant District Attorneys Michael Trummel and Inga Petrovich prosecuted the case. Jennifer Hull and Brian Woods of the Orleans Public Defenders represented Monroe.A man charged in the hit-and-run death of bicyclist in 2016 pleaded guilty this week to manslaughter, six unrelated counts of armed robbery, and 20 additional crimes.

Alvin Berfect, 29, pleaded guilty to the criminal charges Wednesday (March 20), according to District Attorney Leon Cannizzaros office. In a plea deal, Berfect will be sentenced to 33 years in prison.

Berfect was accused of robbing six people at gunpoint in late 2016 in separate incidents across the city.

He also was charged with manslaughter in the Nov. 7, 2016, hit-and-run death of Eddie Ray King, a sous chef at the French Quarter steakhouse Doris Metropolitan. King, 51, was biking home from work after midnight when he was struck by a car and killed near North Claiborne and St. Phillip Street in Treme.

According to state law, a person can be charged with manslaughter if a homicide is committed while he or she is engaged in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of any felony.

Authorities said Berfect was driving the car that hit King, and alleged the car was stolen.

Berfects defense attorney, Kevin Kelly, said Berfect did not intend to kill or injure King.

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Cyclist killed in Treme hit-and-run was French Quarter sous chef

Berfect also pleaded guilty as a double felony offender to two counts of felony illegal possession of stolen things, seven misdemeanor counts of illegal possession of stolen things, three counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm, one count of attempted access device fraud, two counts of obstruction of justice, one count of second-degree battery, two counts of introducing contraband into a correctional center and two counts of possession of contraband inside a correctional center or jail. Prosecutors said Berfect was in possession of a shank and handcuff key in one case, and marijuana in another.

His guilty pleas closed four cases, according to Cannizzaros office.

This defendant has shown no regard for the safety of others or for obeying the law, Cannizzaro said. I am very pleased to see him removed from this community for the next three decades so that he cannot cause harm to another innocent victim.

Criminal District Judge Franz Zibilich is expected to sentence Berfect to 33 years in prison on March 29.

Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Tucker prosecuted the case.An unspecified number of New Orleans Police Department officers have been reassigned to desk duty pending the outcome of an internal probe into a possible violation of the departments car chase policy. NOPD announced the internal investigation Thursday, a day after a car police had sought to pull over crashed into a hair salon and beauty supply store in Broadmoor, setting the building on fire and resulting in three deaths and injuries to six people.

The New Orleans Police Department said Thursday the three-alarm fire at Unity 1 Beauty Supply & Hair Salon ignited after a car crashed into the side of the building on Washington Avenue, near South White Street. The two people in the car, who were said by neighbors in the area to have been teenagers, under 18, were killed. A woman who was getting her hair done when the building caught fire was taken from the second second story through a window, and was hospitalized with serious burns. She died Thursday, authorities said. Six others, including a woman, two minors, two NOPD officers and an NOFD firefighter, were injured  the officers and firefighters were treated for smoke inhalation.

The NOPDs vehicle pursuit policy, which was updated in December 2015 with input from the U.S. Department of Justice and federal consent decree monitors, is on the restrictive side compared to some other police departments: It permits officers to chase offenders in vehicles only if the person is suspected of having just committed a violent felony.

Investigation opened into possible violation of NOPD chase protocol in fiery salon crash

NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson announced the opening of the formal investigation on Thursday afternoon, citing additional factors uncovered by investigators since Wednesday nights fatal crash and fire. Ferguson did not specify what those additional factors include.

Police have said the crash and ensuing blaze began after NOPD 6th District Task Force officers tried to conduct a traffic stop on a vehicle believed to be stolen. Instead of pulling over, the driver accelerated, Ferguson said Wednesday night.

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During a briefing at the scene on Washington Avenue at South White Street, Ferguson told reporters that the officers did disengage at some point during the encounter with the stolen vehicle, reportedly deactivating their lights. Ferguson said he did not know exactly when officers stopped pursuing or following the vehicle.

Police have not said whether any chase occurred but at least one bystander, Kevin Kenner, told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune on Wednesday night that he was leaving a store at South Broad and Washington when he saw police chasing a vehicle that ultimately flipped on its side, slid and then burst into flames. Broadmoor resident Randon Dusty said on Thursday he saw part of what he described as a car chase just before the crash, with two NOPD vehicles following a fleeing car.

WVUE Fox8 obtained surveillance video showing a car that looks to be moving fast with three cars, which appear to have flashing lights, following behind. The TV station reports the video was captured about 8:30 p.m. from a business on Toledano Street. Police said the fiery crash at Washington Avenue and South White Street occurred shortly after 8:30 p.m. Toledano Street turns into Washington Avenue after crossing over Broad Street, northwest-bound.

NOPD announced in an email to reporters on Friday that the unidentified officers would be reassigned pending the investigation by the Public Integrity Bureau. A spokesman did not immediately answer when asked how many officers were reassigned, or how many police cars the reassigned officers occupied.

Broadmoor beauty shop destroyed in fatal, fiery crash a pillar of the community

Staff writer Laura McKnight contributed to this report.A woman pulled from a fire Wednesday night (March 20) at a Broadmoor salon and beauty supply store has died of her injuries, the New Orleans Fire Department confirmed Thursday night.

The woman, who has not been identified, was getting her hair styled when a car crashed into the salon, sparking the three-alarm blaze, police and fire officials said.

Police initially reported the woman had died but on Thursday said she had received serious burns but was alive.

The fire department learned about 5 p.m. Thursday that the woman had succumbed to her injuries, said firefighter Michael Williams, an NOFD spokesman.

Car crashes into Broadmoor hair salon, ignites building: What we know Thursday

The two occupants of the crashed car were also killed. Authorities have not released any identifying information on those occupants.

Six other people were also injured in the crash and ensuing blaze, which began about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, after NOPD officers tried to conduct a traffic stop on a vehicle believed to be stolen. Officers activated their lights after spotting the car around Toledano and South Derbigny streets but instead of pulling over, the driver accelerated, according to NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson.

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What happened next is unclear. During a media briefing at the scene on Washington Avenue at South White Street, Ferguson told reporters that the officers had disengaged at some point during the encounter with the stolen vehicle, reportedly deactivating their lights. He said he did not know exactly when officers stopped following or pursuing the vehicle.

Investigators have since uncovered additional factors involved in the attempted traffic stopand those factors have prompted a formal investigation into a possible violation of NOPD chase protocol, Ferguson said in a statement Thursday afternoon.

The NOPDs Public Integrity Bureau is leading the investigation into the possible administrative violation, he said. When I became Superintendent, I made it clear that transparency would continue be a top priority for me and this department.

The NOPD did not include further details on the investigation, such as how long the investigation is expected to take or the identity of the officers involved.

Investigation opened into possible violation of NOPD chase protocol in fiery salon crash

Laura McKnight covers crime and breaking news for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and can be reached at 504-655-6571 and lmcknight@nola.com.Shake Shack, the hamburger chain from well-regarded New York restaurateur Danny Meyer, has already announced that it will open restaurants locally in Metairie and the new airport terminal. Now it looks like Shake Shack is eyeing a third, flagship location in New Orleans at the Shops at Canal Place mall.

A request was made to the city to let a potential Shake Shack at Canal Place operate as a standard restaurant, which would allow it to sell alcohol. Fast food restaurants in New Orleans are prohibited from selling alcohol.

A representative from Shake Shack refused to confirm that a location was planned for New Orleans. We have no concrete plans to share at this time, said the spokeswoman.

The news of a possible Shake Shack in New Orleans was first reported by the food website Eater.

Meyer, known for his New York fine-dining restaurants like Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern and The Modern, opened the first Shake Shack in 2001 as a summer pop-up at Madison Square Park. He applied his fine dining approach to burgers, french fries and milkshakes. Shake Shack is now a publicly traded company with more than 100 locations around the world.

Shake Shack told investors that it plans to open 30 to 40 new locations in 2019, according to Investors Business Daily. It is also pushing delivery, automated kiosk ordering and its new chicken nuggets to increase revenue.

Check back to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune for updates.The Algiers Charter Schools Association has launched a nationwide search for a new chief executive officer. Former chief financial officer Stuart Gay has managed the school network as interim CEO since July 2018.

There have been two other CEOs at Algiers Charter since Andrea Thomas-Reynolds decided to step down in 2012. Algiers Charter now appears to be ready to select a permanent leader by June, according to the networks announcement.

The next CEO will have to manage a network competing for students within a system of schools unlike anywhere else in the nation. More than 90 percent of New Orleans 48,000 public schoolers attend schools managed by a charter board. Most charters in New Orleans are authorized by the Orleans Parish School Board, which oversees 79 schools, including 75 charters.

Algiers Charter managed nine schools at one point after it was established in 2005 following Hurricane Katrina. The networks students made impressive gains and the majority showed growth beyond officials' expectations, according to a NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune report from 2009. However, grades at the networks remaining schools have declined in recent years.

OPSB Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. didnt renew the charter contracts for the F-rated McDonogh 32 Charter School and William J. Fischer Academy last November, so those schools will close at the end of June. McDonogh 32 and Fischer have received F grades based on their school performance scores since 2016. Fischer also had an "F" grade in 2015.

In October 2018, Algiers Charter relocated McDonogh No. 32 students to the Fischer campus for the remainder of this school year because of low enrollment at both schools. Earlier that year, the OPSB cut those schools off from enrollment of more students due to poor academic performance.

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Meanwhile, Landry-Walker and Behrman were once deemed B schools by the Louisiana Department of Education in 2014. Behrman slid to a C and Landry-Walker declined to a D in 2017. Landry-Walkers letter grade declined to an F and Behrman dropped to a C in 2018.

Candidates interested in applying for the CEO position at Algiers Charter can submit a resume to Katie Lynne Morton, an associate at the public policy and advocacy firm HCM Strategists, at katie_lynne_morton@hcmstrategists.com.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the date of Gays time as CEO. Gay became CEO in 2018.

2 Algiers charter schools will close in 2019 amid failing grades, low enrollment

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.Childrens Hospital of New Orleans recently added 120 new pediatric health professionals as part of a new affiliation with Tulane University Medical School.

Tulane Medical Schools pediatric faculty, residents and medical students started seeing pediatric patients in the critical care units at Childrens Hospitals Uptown campus and its specialty clinics on March 1. As a result, inpatient pediatric intensive care services at Tulane Lakeside Hospital, shifted over to Childrens Hospital this month. The hospital also changed its name from Tulane Lakeside Hospital for Women and Children and is shifting its focus to provide adult intensive care services and a new orthopedic surgery center.

A total of 65 Tulane medical school providers joined Childrens medical staff, as well as 30 Tulane nurses and other pediatric health professionals, and a total of 25 Tulane residents and fellows.

Through their agreement with Hospital Corp. of America, the company that operates Tulane Medical Center and Tulane-Lakeside Hospital, Tulanes outpatient clinics will remain open.

The affiliation will help the hospital and medical school integrate certain specialized servicessuch as organ transplantsallowing the hospital to receive a Center of Excellence recognition, making it easier to recruit talent and national grants, according to Childrens president and chief executive officer John Nickens IV.

Childrens Hospital also has a longstanding academic affiliation with the Department of Pediatrics at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans. A total of 120 LSU providers and 100 residents and fellows are on staff at Childrens.

Faculty from both medical schools will function as one unit, said Nickens. They compete academically but operationally they will provide the same standard of care.

Tulane University School of Medicine is the largest pediatric research organization in the state, with more than $5 million annually in federally funded pediatric research. Tulane officials said in a press release that the collaboration will give them the opportunity to significantly expand clinical research in pediatrics.

Childrens Hospital, a founding member of our health system, has long shared Tulanes mission of academic excellence, said Greg Feirn, CEO of LCMC Health in a press release. Through this collaboration, we are collectively providing the best possible training experience for the next generation of pediatricians, and strengthening our community, economy and health outcomes of our state in the process.David Lema knows what its like to have his dreams ripped away by a power that is beyond his control. He also knows what its like to have those dreams restored.

Lema is seated at the dining table in his Kenner home while his wife Esther prepares cafe cubano (Cuban coffee). The coffees rich, delicious aroma fills the room. At times, Lemas voice fills with emotion as he recalls events that took place more than a half-century ago.

When I left Cuba, the Communists had killed all my dreams, said Lema, 81.

But when I came to the United States, I started living again. Im not rich, but I have a wonderful family and I can pay my bills. I give the credit to Jesus. Im also thankful for the liberty Ive found in the United States. I love America. Ive received so many acts of love and kindness from the American people. I pray for this country every day.

Said Esther while serving cafe cubano to her guests: Im super content, super happy being in the United States. Once Fidel Castro and the Communists took control of Cuba, I wanted to leave. I had been reading about the Communists. I felt my family would have a much better life if we left Cuba.

Leaving Cuba and starting over wouldnt be easy.

David and Esther were teachers in Cruces, Cuba, when Castro began to tighten his control over the country. Lema also served as a deacon and leader in a Baptist church.

In 1966, Lema received a telegram instructing him to report to the local police station. He was informed hat he had been chosen to assist the Revolution. Lema was sent to  what today he refers to as  a concentration camp. He would spend a year there.

A typical day began at 4 a.m. and included working in the sugar cane fields until 5 p.m. This was followed by several hours of indoctrination. The food allowance consisted of a quotidian serving of a small quantity of rice, an egg and green pea soup.

It was really brain washing, Lema said. We were constantly being told what a bad place the United States was.

That year, however, would change Lemas life forever.

I suffered much with hunger and sickness and saw so much injustice at the hands of the guards towards all of us, Lema said.

The time I spent in the concentration camp changed me. When I went in, I was one person, but when I came out I was a different person. I was timid and shy before, but when I left the concentration camp I was outspoken and refused to be quiet about my faith and what was taking place in Cuba.

The depth of Lemas faith was profoundly affected.

When I went into the concentration camp, I believed in Jesus, he said. But while I was there, my faith became much more real and personal. I didnt care any more about material possessions. I just wanted to go to the church and pray. I wasnt afraid anymore. I didnt care what the government did to me, I wasnt going to deny my faith or accept Communism.

That would cause Lema problems when he was released.

I couldnt find a job teaching and every other job opportunity was closed to me, and the government was constantly watching me, Lema said.

They finally gave me a job working on a farm doing work that no one else would do  fertilizing the sugar cane with chemicals. I was paid very little money.

Meanwhile, the leaders in Lemas church in Cruces began encouraging him to leave Cuba.

They were afraid I was going to be killed, Lema said. But I refused to deny my faith or go along with what the Communists were doing.

In 1969, Lema and Esther along with their two young sons David Jr., 7, and Joel, 6, boarded a plane in Havana and flew to Madrid, Spain, where they would live for almost three years before coming to the United States.

David Jr., is now 56 and lives in Miami, where he is professor of missions and coordinator for the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminarys South Florida Extension Center.

He has vivid memories of those days when his family left Cuba and faced an uncertain future.

We knew we would probably never see our grandparents again, David Jr. said. When I look back and think about it, I find it incredible that we made it through.

Our parents did an incredible job sheltering us and protecting us during a very difficult time. As children growing up in a Communist society, our father had taught us to look, listen and stay quiet. We knew that if we complained the government could take us away from our parents.

When the Lemas arrived in the Madrid airport, Esther turned to David and asked him, What are we going to do now?

I almost cried when she asked me that, said Lema his voice filling with emotion. I didnt know what we were going to do. But I prayed, and I heard Gods voice telling me I am with you.

Lema soon began working with and assisting the director of Cuban refugees in Madrid. He would later become the director.

Almost three years later, Lema and his family left Madrid and came to New York City where another child, Annie, would be born.

Meanwhile, Lema had made contact with the Southern Baptist Conventions Home Mission Board (now the North American Mission Board). Lema would stay less than a month in New York City before the North American Mission Board asked him to come to New Orleans and Kenner and minister to the growing Spanish speaking population in East Jefferson and New Orleans.

In Kenner, Lema began teaching a Bible study class for Spanish speaking people at Williams Boulevard Baptist Church.

Lema started the class with one person. The class grew rapidly and would soon become a church, Iglesia Bautista Hispana Emmanuel, with a membership of almost 200 with Lema as its pastor. Iglesia Bautista Hispana Emmanuel was also the name of Lemas church in Cruces, Cuba. Lema served as pastor of the Kenner church for almost four decades before he retired in 2011.

Jack Hunter is the executive director of the New Orleans Baptist Association, which includes 135 churches in six parishes in the New Orleans area. Iglesia Bautista Hispana Emmanuel is one of those churches.

My chief impression of David Lema is how lionhearted he is, Hunter said. He is so courageous and a strong advocate for the gospel and so passionate about Jesus. He has supported all the churches in the New Orleans Baptist Association for many years. He has been a pole around which others can rally and draw strength. David has become a senior statesman in our association.

Added David Jr.: My parents faithfulness to God is a gift that theyve passed on and its a gift to be treasured. Were not perfect, but we can be faithful. And thats what theyve taught us to do.

When Lema and his family left Cuba in 1969, apatride, which means without a state or country, was stamped on their passports by Cuban officials. In 1977, Lema and Esther became citizens of the United States followed by Joel and David the following year.

The United States is our home, Lema said. The day we became citizens of this country was a great day for us. We were no longer without a country. This (United States) is our country now.

Earl Hodges writes about people and events in East Jefferson. He can be contacted at earlhodges@msn.com.The 11th UNO-Japan summer study abroad program at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, will be held May 26-June 29; and the online Intro Session will be May 15-25.

The program will offer five classes:

Intermediate Japanese

Each student takes two classes, Monday through Thursday. Credits earned on the program are fully transferable. Cultural activities will include calligraphy, ikebana, origami, kendo and more.

UNO students, age 18 or older, as well as students from around the U.S., are eligible to apply.

The tuition is $4,595 for UNO students, and &5,095 for guest students. The fee covers six credit hours, tuition, housing, lunch on campus, 30-day bus pass in Kyoto, study abroad health insurance, cultural activities, guided city tours, participation in Tomodachi and more.

Tomodachi means friends in the Japanese Language. It is a unique lunch program to connect UNO-Japan students with Doshisha students.

Optional field trips in Kyoto, Osaka and Nara are available for an additional cost.

The program intends to offer a well-rounded experience. Combining academic learning, inquiry with social and cultural experiences and free time to travel, said Jennifer Torres, new program coordinator, UNO-Japan Summer Study Abroad Program.

We also hope you will follow us to Japan through social media and start considering joining us in 2020. With the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, Japan will be more accessible and interesting. Applications for the 2020 UNO-Japan program will open at the end of October, said Torres.

For further information, go to http://New.uno.edu/studyabroad/Japan.

China and the Philippines will be included and featured in the 21st Childrens World Fair, presented by the Louisiana Childrens Museum, on March 23, at the museum. The Early Explorers Party will be 10 a.m. to noon. All the adventurers are welcomed to join the fun at noon.

The fair provides children, ages 2-12 with an appreciation of the unique and universal customs of our global community in an interactive learning environment.

At the China Pavilion, the visitors will make panda bookmarks, play Chinese checkers, take a picture at the Great Wall, visit a fortune teller, search for hidden pandas around China.

For STEM experiment, the children will explore the Albedo effect and use the terrain of China to learn about how different terrains effect our climate and temperature.

On central stage, the visitors will enjoy an interactive martial arts demonstration from the Shaolin Institute. In addition, the visitors will learn how to use chopsticks and sample shrimp fried rice.

Visitors to the pavilion of the Philippines, will play the popular Filipino game of SIPA, create their own fishing lines, decorate fishes, practice fishing skills, and make puppets of Tamara, an endangered dwarf buffalo that can be found only in the Philippines.

The Philippines Archipelago comprises about 7,641 islands.

For STEM experiment, the children will learn about how the islands form and become volcano builders and harness the earths power to create new islands.

In addition, the visitors can taste a juice from a calamondin citrus tree, pancit, fried noodles, and abode, a dish consisting of marinated meat, seafood or vegetables.

The Asian community is important fabric of New Orleans over the past 20 years. The Childrens World Fair has showcased the beauty of many Asian countries, their rich customs and unique traditions. Each year, children are introduced many contributions of the Asian community in an engaging and dynamic celebrations, said Julia Blanc, CEO, Louisiana Childrens Museum.

Tickets are $16 per person for LCM members, and $20 per person for non-members.

Tickets are available for purchase online at www.lcm.org or call 504.266.2415

For information of the Childrens World Fair and/or Louisiana Childrens Museum, also visit www.lcm.org or call 504.266.2415.

Tina Soong writes about people and events of interest to the Asian American community. To reach her, email tsoongtotherim@aol.com.The remaining five Louisiana delegates to the U.S. House joined Rep. Cedric Richmond of New Orleans on Friday (March 22) in challenging the Iowa congressman who belittled Hurricane Katrina victims while touting how Iowans take care of each other. They were reacting to the latest eye-popping utterance from Rep. Steve King, who, in pumping up his own constituents, gave the Louisiana delegation an opening to praise their own.

Steve Scalise: His comments about Katrina victims are absurd and offensive, and are a complete contradiction to the strength and resilience the people of New Orleans demonstrated to the entire nation in the wake of the total devastation they experienced, Rep. Steve Scalise of Old Jefferson said of his fellow House Republican.

Richmond on Thursday said, Steve King is a white supremacist and I wont stand for it.

King, first elected to Congress in 2002, has a history of racially insensitive comments. He delivered the latest on Thursday during a community meeting in Charter Oak, Iowa, while talking about riverine flooding in his 4th Congressional District. He contrasted local self-sufficiency with government handouts to majority-black New Orleans in 2005, after Katrina struck and federal levees failed.

Were Iowans, and Im always proud of our reaction to this. Ive worked with the FEMA people for a long time," King said, recalling four trips to New Orleans after Katrina. "I saw that from the air and from the ground and went back and did what we could to help those folks down there.

But heres what FEMA tells me: We go to a place like New Orleans and everybodys looking around saying, Whos going to help me? Whos going to help me. ' ... Theyre just always gratified when they come and see how Iowans take care of each other.

Kings district is about 92 percent white - more than Scalises 1st District (77 percent white), Higgins 3rd District (70 percent), Johnsons 4th District (61 percent) and Abrahams 5th District (61 percent). Richmond was elected from the 2nd District, which is about 31 percent white.

The Louisiana congressmen joined Gov. John Bel Edwards, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and others in challenging Kings comment.

. . . . . . .

Drew Broach covers Jefferson Parish politics and education plus other odds and ends. Email: dbroach@nola.com. Facebook: Drew Broach TP. Twitter: drewbroach1.Louisianas U.S. senators upbraided fellow Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa on Friday (March 22) for disparaging Hurricane Katrina victims who sought government help while praising his constituents civic response to riverine flooding in their hometowns. Both Louisiana senators cited the Cajun Navy in their retorts.

With all due respect to Congressman King, what he knows about Louisiana would fit in a mosquitos brain," Sen. John Kennedy said. "Louisianians dont whine and wail when disaster strikes; Louisianians jump into fishing boats and help their neighbors. Were not helpless; were resilient.

"If Congressman King doesnt believe that, then he needs to enlist with the Cajun Navy. Theyll show him how we help each other and folks all across this country when disaster strikes.

Watch Donald Trump hail the Cajun Navy in White House ceremony

Said Sen. Bill Cassidy: As someone who personally participated and witnessed people from Louisiana helping people in Louisiana affected by Hurricane Katrina and also welcomed people from elsewhere in our country to help, I know that you do not have to build up one group by tearing down another. Im sorry for the victims of flooding in Iowa, Nebraska, or anywhere. I applaud the Cajun Navy [that] repays the favors given to us by the rest of the country by giving their service to others.

"Most of all, I remember the great fondness, respect and admiration of the people of my state who selflessly gave to support those whose lives and homes were destroyed and threatened by the ravages of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

After Steve Kings latest, Louisiana representatives challenge Iowa congressmans Katrina put-down

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Cassidy and Kennedy thus joined Louisianas six U.S. House members, Gov. John Bel Edwards and New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell in challenging the Iowa congressman. In a community meeting Thursday in Charter Oak, Iowa, King contrasted his constituents self-sufficiency during flooding with government handouts in majority-black New Orleans in 2005, when Katrina struck and federal levees failed.

Were Iowans, and Im always proud of our reaction to this. Ive worked with the FEMA people for a long time," King said, recalling four trips to New Orleans after Katrina. "I saw that from the air and from the ground and went back and did what we could to help those folks down there.

But heres what FEMA tells me: We go to a place like New Orleans and everybodys looking around saying, Whos going to help me? Whos going to help me. ' ... Theyre just always gratified when they come and see how Iowans take care of each other.

King, elected to Congress in 2002, has a history of racial flaming. His 4th Congressional District district is about 92 percent white. Louisiana is about 63 percent white, New Orleans about 60 percent black.

. . . . . . .

Drew Broach covers Jefferson Parish politics and education plus other odds and ends. Email: dbroach@nola.com. Facebook: Drew Broach TP. Twitter: drewbroach1.Now that GB Sciences Louisiana and LSU AgCenter, have received approval to move into their main facility, production of medical marijuana products can begin after months of delays.

The LSU AgCenter and its medical marijuana partner GB Sciences Louisiana got the ok from state regulators to move into their main growing facility and start full production on Friday (March 22). Its a big step forward allowing the company to work in a space that has more than five times the production capacity of the small temporary facility they have been using since last summer while waiting for approval from the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, the regulatory body for the states medical marijuana program.

LSU AgCenter and its medical marijuana grower approved to move into main grow facility

GB Sciences Louisiana has conducted two successful harvests out of their temporary facility and will soon begin creating the final products that will be sold in the states nine licensed dispensaries, officials said. The LDAF will have to test these final products for homogeneity, potency and any contaminants before they are sold to consumers. No timeline has been set for when this part of the process will be completed.

Since we have been restricted to the exterior pod, we have not been able to grow enough plants that would result in enough product for pharmacies, said Ashley Mullens, with the office of the Vice President for Agriculture with the LSU AgCenter. We did not want to put product out until we had enough supply. Moving into the main facility will make this possible.

LSU AgCenter said that the increase in space will allow for a perpetual harvest cycle, ensuring a continuous supply of product for patients with qualifying disease states.

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Patients with only certain kinds of medical conditions are allowed access to medical marijuana in Louisiana. Some of these conditions include severe autism, chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, severe muscles spasms, and HIV/ AIDS.

State regulators will be inspecting the main facilitys manufacturing facility with the assistance of the Department of Health on Weds. March 27.

LSU AGCenter officials responded Friday to the news, which came after several weeks of uncertainty over how production would move forward after regulators said GB Sciences LA had started moving plants in the main facility on March 1 before they had cleared required background, financial and criminal checks.

This is a great day for patients, said John Davis, the president of GB Sciences Louisiana. Full-scale operations means a consistent and continuous supply of medical cannabis. We are thrilled to move into our main facilities.

GB Sciences Louisiana completed the construction of their main production facility in October 2018.GB Sciences Louisiana, the company hired to grow medical marijuana for the LSU AgCenter, passed its background checks and now has approval to move into its main facility and start full production effective immediately, state regulators said Friday (March 22).

The inspection of the main facilitys manufacturing area will be conducted by the LDAF and the Department of Health on March 27.

Production of the long-awaited product has been held up by a public feud between the grower, LSU AgCenter and Mike Strain, the commissioner for the Department of Agriculture and Forestry. The most recent delay centered around whether or not GB Sciences started moving marijuana plants inside two rooms in their permanent facility before they had received proper approval from state regulators.

The LDAF said that GB Sciences LA had to pass suitability, which includes criminal and financial background checks, before its employees could work inside of the main grow facility in Baton Rouge without LSU AgCenter having a staffer on site.

Last summer, GB Sciences LA was asked to grow and harvest the plants inside a secure temporary pod outside their main facility while they awaited all of the necessary approvals from state regulators. They harvested their first crop in October and it was sent to the LDAF for testing the following month.

The company received those test results on Jan. 28, and said then that testing delays could push back product availability until this May.

The state of Louisiana licensed the LSU AgCenter and Southern Universitys AgCenter to grow medical marijuana. Both contracted with private companies to grow marijuana. Last November, Southern Universitys partner changed ownership to the Pennsylvania-based company Ilera Holistic HealthCare. University officials said during the January meeting that they have finalized the location for their grow facility and expect to have product available for testing by this fall.

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Its been about 4 years since legislators approved a framework to provide medical marijuana in Louisiana. But the state stands to be among the states that have taken the longest to implement their programs, according to data tracked by the Marijuana Policy Project, an organization that works on marijuana policy reform. But other states have also had long roll-outs.

Delaware took up to four years before dispensary sales began in 2015. It took the same amount of time in Rhode Island after its dispensary law passed in April 2013, according to MPP.

Karen OKeefe, the director of state policies for MPP, said that Louisianas program could be best compared to New Yorks and Minnesotas medical marijuana programs.

These were two of the most strictly regulated states, but both quickly integrated their programs, she said.

New York was limited to five growers, but like Louisiana, the state did now allow sales of whole flowers and initially did not include chronic pain as a qualifying condition to access medical marijuana.

Minnesota bears an even more striking resemblance to Louisianas program, with only two growers and sales limited to extract of the plant.

Dispensary sales began in that state 13 months after their law passed. In New York, it took about a year and a half for sales to begin, according to data provided by MPP.A state project to improve drainage and repave a section of Louisiana 22 in Mandeville is scheduled to begin Monday (March 25) and officials say drivers should prepare for some lane shifts.

Beginning Monday, the stretch of roadway from U.S. 190 to Dalwill Drive will be reconfigured with westbound traffic being rerouted into the center turning lane. The current highway has one lane westbound and one lane eastbound, with a center turning lane.

In a news release, the state Department of Transportation and Development said the lane shifts are required so crews can remove and replace the asphalt and curbs. Drainage work will be included in the project.

Magee Excavation and Development is working under a $2.58 million contract, DOTD said. The work is expected to be completed in the fall.

U.S. 190 and left turns

DOTD said motorists can visit the agencys 511 Traveler Information Web site at www.511la.org to keep up with this project and others in the area.

Louisiana 22 from Mandeville to Madisonville will also be a discussion topic during a traffic forum April1 hosted by Mandeville City Councilman Clay Madden. He said city, parish, state and DOTD leaders will attend the forum, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Lions Club at 720 Lafitte St. in Mandeville, and discuss work and anticipated projects on Louisiana 22, Louisiana 59, U.S. 190, Interstate 12 and several other roadways.Imagine a 45-year stretch of your life where all your days are the same. There is no variation. For 23 hours of every day, you are caged in a 6x9 foot cell. For one hour a day the cell is opened, which allows you to take more than three steps in one direction.

How would you keep yourself from going mad?

Albert Woodfox, born in New Orleans in 1947, was serving time for armed robbery at the Louisiana State Penitentiary when he was accused of killing a guard and then put in a solitary cell. Woodfox was one of three members of the Black Panther Party subjected to a cruelty that we can assume Louisiana would have let continue until they all died.

Theres no reason to believe that Woodfox or Herman Wallace killed Angola guard Brent Miller in April 1972. (The guards widow doesnt even believe it.) Nor is there reason to believe that months later, Robert King killed a fellow inmate.

There is reason to believe the Angola 3 were punished for calling out the racism and the brutality exhibited by law enforcement officers and for encouraging inmates to demand that they be treated with dignity.

So they were pulled away from other inmates and pulled away from one another. Woodfoxs torment lasted the longest: 44 years and 10 months.

In October 2013, more than 41 years into that torture, he released a statement that was read to people whod gathered on the steps of the state Capitol in Baton Rouge to protest on his behalf: I do not have the words to convey the years of mental, emotional, and physical torture I have endured. I ask that for a moment you imagine yourself standing at the edge of nothingness, looking at emptiness. The pain and suffering this isolation causes go beyond mere description.

Angola 3's Albert Woodfox released Friday after decades in solitary

In Solitary, Woodfoxs new book about that torturous experience, he vigorously denies that he or Wallace had anything to do with Millers murder or that King had anything to do with the other inmates, and he explains with great detail, why no reasonable person should believe they did. He also admits that before he discovered the Black Panthers and developed a political consciousness, he was an awful person: I robbed people, scared them, threatened them, intimidated them. I stole from people who had almost nothing. My people. Black people. I broke into their homes and took possessions they worked hard for... I beat people up. I was a chauvinist pig. I took advantage of people, manipulated people. I never thought about the pain I caused.

But Angola was and always will be full of people who hurt others. So Woodfox wouldnt have stood out because of that. But he and Wallace and King did stand out. Because they expressed political rhetoric incompatible with the prisons goal of complete and utter submission from its inmates.

The case against solitary doesnt depend on their innocence, though. Even if the Angola 3 were murderers, subjecting them to decades of solitary confinement or what the state called Closed Cell Restricted (CCR) would still count as merciless and inhumane.

But the fact that their decades of solitary followed a farce of an investigation, and the fact that prison officials didnt really concern themselves with concealing their motives, makes what happened to them even less forgivable.

Woodfox quotes a 2008 deposition where Warden Burl Cain, then the warden at Angola, says that even if Woodfox hadnt killed Miller, I would still keep him in CCR. I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates.

Twice, a federal court threw out Woodfoxs murder conviction because of a racist grand jury process, and twice, a state prosecutor persuaded another grand jury to re-indict him. Woodfoxs attorneys warned him that there was no guarantee that jurors at his third trial would acknowledge his innocence, and they asked him to consider pleading no contest. By pleading nolo contendere I wouldnt be innocent in the eyes of the law. But I knew I was innocent. He agonized daily, he writes, at being forced to choose freedom over the integrity of my word, which was everything to me.

Wednesday night at the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library, Woodfox talked about his ordeal with Emily Maw, senior counsel of Innocence Project New Orleans. Maw described the book as being  paradoxically  about solitary and solidarity. Woodfox agreed, saying that he never had reason to question the other two mens commitment to him or to their cause.

King was released from prison in 2001. Wallace, whose conviction was tossed in 2013, was released from prison the day before he died of liver cancer. But he died outside of prison, which was important to those who loved him.

Their desire was to break us  which they failed miserably at  or have us die in a 6x9 foot cell, Woodfox said Wednesday. But, somehow he kept the madness at bay. The State of Louisiana, he said, never come close to breaking me.

Jarvis DeBerry is a columnist on the Latitude team at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Latitude is a place to share opinions about the challenges facing Louisiana. Follow @LatitudeNOLA on Facebook and Twitter. Write Jarvis at jdeberry@nola.com or @jarvisdeberry.The images from across the Midwest are hauntingly familiar to South Louisianians. The terrain is different, but the floodwaters covering the landscape are similarly devastating.

Waves of icy water from melting snow is washing through the Missouri and Mississippi river basins, inundating Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa and Kansas.

Flooding caused water to rise to 41 feet in Plattsmouth, Neb., and more than 30 feet in Iowas Fremont County, NPR reported. Some communities are seeing the worst flooding in a half century. The governor has declared an emergency in 41 of 99 counties in Iowa. In Nebraska, 65 of 93 counties are under an emergency declaration.

We have more in common with these communities than the propensity for flooding.

The Corps of Engineers said about 200 miles of levees have been breached or overtopped by the flooding in these four states.

There is no quick fix. The levees are busted, and we arent even into the wet season when the rivers run high, Tom Bullock, emergency management director for Holt County, Missouri, told the Associated Press. Many homes in that county were flooded by 6 to 7 feet of water from the Missouri River.

So far, three people have died in the flooding, including an 80-year-old woman who was trapped in her home by rapidly rising floodwaters from the Loup River.

Residents in and around New Orleans understand that heartbreak.

This time, we are the fortunate ones.

Despite massive amounts of water flowing into the Mississippi River, the flooding isnt supposed to put pressure on us. The river crested below flood stage at the Carrollton station here this week, and the water level around New Orleans is expected to start falling by the end of March or early April, according to the National Weather Service in Slidell.

But, as so many people did for us in the past, we can help.

Residents in South Louisiana, whether devastated by the broken levees during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or historic flooding in Baton Rouge in 2016, know how much help is needed to recover.

There are immediate needs for food, water and other emergency supplies and help for farmers who have lost everything. Here are a few ways to donate from PBS, the Omaha World-Herald and the Des Moines Register:

The Salvation Army has set up a relief center in Omaha to provide food and cleanup supplies. Donations can be made at salarmyomaha.org.

The United Way of the Midlands is raising money for relief in Nebraska and Iowa. Go to unitedwaymidlands.org/floodrelief, to donate.

The Nebraska Farm Bureau Disaster Relief Fund is collecting money to provide emergency aid to farmers, ranchers and rural Nebraska communities affected by the flooding. Priority will be given to efforts to restore health and safety in rural communities and to farm and ranch households that have been damaged or displaced by the natural disaster. 100% of the donations will be distributed to Nebraska farmers, ranchers, and rural communities affected by the disasters, according to a message on the Farm Bureaus website.

To donate, go to https://www.nefbfoundation.org/ways-to-give/disaster-relief-fund.

Convoy of Hope, a faith-based nonprofit that provides food, water and other supplies, has set up a donation page titled Hope for the Midwest on its website, convoyofhope.org.

Any amount will help.

Think about all the people who have helped us, and pay if forward, if you can.An ugly fight over an audit that found the city of Zachary paid two vendors $3.5 million without having contracts in place has died down some, but the city councilman most upset about the matter has made clear he is not giving up on his quest for A dozen-plus citizens from both North Augusta and Augusta had the chance to make public comments about the New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam out loud during a public meeting held in Augusta on Thursday.

Held at the Augusta Commission chambers, members of the public alongside elected officials made their comments, which were recorded by a court reporter to be sent to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

My main goal is to keep South Carolinas riverfront, not South Carolinas creek front, and I want to keep Augustas riverfront, not Augustas creek front, said South Carolina state Rep. Bill Hixon, R-North Augusta.

Many of the people making comments spoke about the simulation held by the Corps in February, which caused dramatic river pool lowering.

+4 CSRA officials react to Savannah River drawdown The Savannah District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers held a drawdown simulation of the Savannah River last week demonstrating their preferred alternative for the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project fish passage project and received a lot of backlash for the effects it had on the river level.

Augusta Mayor Hardie Davis said the Corps of Engineers assured the communities that the riverfront would not be significantly affected.

The simulation demonstrated that the Army Corps of Engineers was wrong, Davis said. The leadership, the citizens and the stakeholders of Augusta, Georgia, and North Augusta, South Carolina, have made it clear that the conditions of the river during the simulation was not and is not what we want to see every day 24/7, 365 days of the year.

Many at the meeting spoke about the Corps' preferred alternative  a fixed crest weir with floodplain bench  versus the alternative local governments have supported, which would repair the lock wall and include Georgia-side fish passage.

+2 Reps. Wilson, Allen hold joint press conference on Lock and Dam U.S. Reps. Joe Wilson from South Carolina and Rick Allen from Georgia held a joint press conference Thursday morning near the riverfront to talk about the fish passage project and the New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam and what needs to be done to maintain the rivers pool level.

A post on the Corps' blog Balancing the Basin shows a chart with costs for the two projects. The fixed crest weir would cost $105,456,000, while the alternative that retains the lock wall would cost $380,319,000.

The post also says the Corps eliminated Alternative 1-1 from further consideration due to a lower ability to pass fish.

The Corps is required to build an alternative that would allow fish, mainly shortnose and Atlantic sturgeon, to pass the structure along the river.

I find it frightening quite honestly to find that the Endangered Species Act is being used to damage our cities and this community, said North Augusta Mayor Bob Pettit.

Aiken Legislative Delegation takes action regarding Lock and Dam Just before midnight Tuesday, the Aiken Legislative Delegation took a step forward in the fight to keep the New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam.

Pettit said the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project is providing the money for the fish passage project but that, in his opinion, North Augusta and Augusta residents are paying the price.

Russell Wicke, corporate communications officer for the Corps of Engineers Savannah District attended Thursdays meeting and listened to the public comments.

I understand that a lot of people want higher water than what they saw in the simulation and thats understandable, he said. What the simulation demonstrated is that some peoples property was adversely impacted, so thats basically the main thing I walked away with understanding tonight.

U.S. Reps. Joe Wilson from South Carolina and Rick Allen from Georgia each spoke at the meeting.Samsung released the S10 phones a few weeks ago and is hoping to use the devices as a tool in a bid to claw back its lost market share in China. It appears to be working, too, with sales said to be already twice that of the Galaxy S9 phones.

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Samsung released the Samsung Galaxy S10 phones last month, and the devices have sold extremely well, as they broke pre-order records in both the US and UK. The South Korean company is hoping to use the S10 trio as leverage in a bid to win back some much-needed market share in China.

Samsung had a hefty 20% market share in China back in 2013 but that figure has plummeted over the years, with the company having under 1% about a year ago. That fall is, in part, due to the rise of local OEMs like Huawei and Xiaomi, with OPPO and Vivo also providing competition from the sidelines.

It also doesn't help that Samsung's pricing in China has been a tad out of sorts, with locals preferring high-value offerings from Xiaomi and Honor. And even when premium devices are wanted, iPhones are the flagships of choice, with Huawei a second best.New South Wales Labor leader Michael Daley says he played no part in organising full-page ads featuring him on the front of several Chinese language newspapers after he was criticised suggesting Asian migrants were taking local jobs.

The front-page advertisements published on Wednesday, March 20three days from Saturdays state electionfeature a large photo of Daley and his family with his key election slogans written in Mandarin.

Headshots of 10 Labor candidates are also featured in the ads published in at least four locally-produced papersthe Australian Chinese Daily, Australian New Express Daily, Daily Chinese Herald, and Sing Tao Daily Australia.

Its not something I had any role in, Daley told reporters on Wednesday.

The Labor leader has faced criticism after a video emerged of him telling a pub forum in September 2018 that our young children will flee to be replaced by young people from typically Asia with PhDs.

He admitted on Tuesday he could have used better language when discussing the issue of housing affordability and apologised if anyone was offended.

He made that apology unqualified on Wednesday.

Im not (a racist), I never have been, people who know me know that Im not, Daley said.

I did use words that I shouldnt have, I accept that and my apology is unqualified.

The opposition leader said hed discussed the comments with some Labor MPs including Kogarah MP Chris Minns who later issued a bilingual statement on Chinese social media platform WeChat.

Bankstown MP Tania Mihailuk said voters at polling booths on Tuesday didnt raise Daleys comments with her.

The point he wanted to make was that everyone deserves a fair go, she told reporters.

The main issues people raised with me was they are really tired of this government not looking after them.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Wednesday denounced the state opposition leaders comments as he announced a cut to Australias immigration intake.

He described the remarks as appalling, very upsetting and offensive.

I reject the comments and I think that Bill Shorten should disassociate himself as well, he told ABC News.

Shorten acknowledged on Tuesday that the comment was very poorly worded but said Daley had apologised.

The immigration changes include two new visas requiring skilled workers to stay in the regions or smaller capitals like Adelaide and Darwin for three years.

Daley said he was worried the policy was a sign the government wouldnt invest in large-scale infrastructure projects in Sydney and instead focus on regions.

There needs to be more attention on helping Sydney keep up and there hasnt been from this federal coalition government, he said.

The Labor leader also committed to having regular meetings with Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and other NSW mayors about planning issues.You are clearly a super-user of NUVO.net. Thats a good thing. It means you depend on independent and local news sources to keep you informed. You are a smart person.



Coincidentally, independent and local news sources depend on you too. Youve read 25 articles this month and now, wed like you to be join our mission and become a NUVO Supporter. For as little as $4 a month, you can keep us alive and fighting -- and can have unlimited access to the independent news that cant be found anywhere else.The news is the latest sign of the changing climate in the art world toward the Sacklers, who are major donors to museums. Family members own Purdue Pharma, which makes the painkiller OxyContin and is facing hundreds of lawsuits as a result of the epidemic of opioid addiction.

Tates statement came two days after Britains National Portrait Gallery said it would not accept a long-discussed $1.3 million donation from the London-based Sackler Trust, one of the familys charitable foundations. It said the decision was taken jointly by the gallery and Trust.

But the Thursday announcement, affecting Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, as well as Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives in Cornwall, could have a bigger impact in the art world. All these galleries are major tourist attractions as well as home to large, high-profile exhibitions.

In an email, a spokesman for the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler family said, We deeply sympathise with all the communities, families and individuals affected by the addiction crisis in America. The allegations made against family members in relation to this are strongly denied and will be vigorously defended in court. He did not comment on Tates decision.

Much of the focus on the Sacklers donations to art institutions has been in the United States, where deaths and addiction associated with prescription opioids have become an unrelenting crisis. But awareness of the crisis is high in Britain, and that has led to pressure on galleries, with the news media asking frequent questions about donations from the Sacklers.The episode happened in Puerto Rico last May when the plaintiffs and a third female crew member, who is not a party to the lawsuit, were on an overnight layover in San Juan after working a flight from Washington, the lawsuit said.

After checking in to their hotel, the women went to the beach, where they noticed two men nearby who were drinking beers they had brought in a lunch bag, court filings said. The group began chatting and soon realized they all worked for JetBlue.

Mr. Johnson handed a beer to one of the women, who drank some and passed it to the other two, the lawsuit said. The beer was laced with a drug, and after that point, the rest of the night became a blur, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit said that after the women became incapacitated, the pilots took them to the InterContinental Hotel. Neither plaintiff could remember leaving the beach or how they got to the hotel, the lawsuit said.

Mr. Watson took Jane Doe 2 to her room but did not rape her because she was vomiting from the drugs, which he found to be a turnoff, the lawsuit said. Mr. Watson left her room after having been scratched but was accused in the lawsuit of drugging the woman with the intent to rape.

In court filings, Jane Doe 1 said her first memory after being on the beach was of Mr. Johnson raping her while her co-worker, the third woman, lay beside her. Court filings said Jane Doe 1 felt the influence of the drug but was unable to react to the situation and was simply aware that it was happening.

The lawsuit said that after Mr. Johnson raped Jane Doe 1, he raped her co-worker and then told the women, Thank you for making my fantasy come true.Two years ago, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that there existed a constitutional imperative to purge racial prejudice from the administration of justice.

In the case of the Mississippi death-row prisoner Curtis Flowers, which the justices heard on Wednesday, the court is once again poised to send a message that racism has no place in the courtroom  this time in the area of jury selection, which remains an especially urgent issue in capital cases.

Mr. Flowers has faced trial an astonishing six times for the 1996 murder of four people at a furniture store in Winona, Miss.  a crime that he has said all along he did not commit. At question in Flowers v. Mississippi is whether District Attorney Doug Evans, who tried Mr. Flowers all those times, unconstitutionally excluded a number of blacks from serving as jurors at the sixth trial. (Mr. Flowers is black.)

With all-white or nearly all-white juries that Mr. Evans helped put together, each of Mr. Flowerss first three trials resulted in guilty verdicts and death sentences. Those convictions were later reversed by the Mississippi Supreme Court on the basis of repeated instances of prosecutorial mischief. Mr. Flowerss fourth and fifth trials resulted in mistrials because the jurors, some of whom were black, could not agree on a guilty verdict. And the sixth trial  the one the Supreme Court examined on Wednesday  resulted in Mr. Flowerss conviction, again with a nearly all-white jury.Mr. Williamss case highlights gaps in the body of legislation that has been passed to protect against wrongful convictions, particularly as DNA science grows more sophisticated. In all 50 states, those who have been convicted can, with a judges permission, run DNA evidence through a national database, sometimes yielding a hit on someone else. The same is not true of the national fingerprint database.

Mr. Williams first requested that the fingerprints be run against the national database in 1999, but prosecutors opposed the move and there was no statute entitling him to do so. About four out of five exonerations are achieved without DNA evidence, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Yet only a handful of states allow post-conviction access to the fingerprint database, much less account for emerging technologies such as facial recognition.

It was incredibly frustrating to know that there was technology out there that would lead to the truth, that would give him his innocence  and we were blocked from it, said Vanessa Potkin, a lawyer with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization that assisted Mr. Williams with his exoneration.

As the wave of exonerations continues, more attention has been placed on the severe consequences of letting the real perpetrator go free. The man now believed to have committed the Baton Rouge rape that landed Mr. Williams in prison, Stephen Forbes, died in prison in 1996. He had gone on to commit at least five more rapes, according to his own confessions.

There has been no comprehensive accounting of the number of such crimes. But one woman, Jennifer Thompson, who misidentified the perpetrator of a sexual assault against her and wrote a book with the man who was wrongfully convicted, was later approached by another woman who had been assaulted by the real perpetrator.Five residents of a squalid New Mexico compound where a child was found dead last year pleaded not guilty on Thursday to terror charges that they were plotting to kill United States government officials, military personnel and F.B.I. employees.

While federal authorities say the five family members were planning deadly attacks, their lawyers contend they were charged because they are Muslim.

The new charges are included in an indictment handed up last week. The two men and three women  who have been incarcerated on weapons charges since August, after the authorities raided the compound  stand accused of running a terror training camp and using malnourished children, who lived on site, as pawns in their plot.

Their remote desert outpost near the Colorado border was used to store firearms and served as a base from which to prepare to engage in jihad, to die as martyrs, and to engage in violent acts, according to the recent indictment.SAN PEDRO, Calif.  The Coast Guards top officer laid out a dedicated campaign on Thursday to improve diversity in a military branch that has long struggled to recruit women and minorities, weeks after the service was shaken by the arrest of a lieutenant and self-described white nationalist accused of plotting terrorist attacks from its headquarters.

Adm. Karl L. Schultz, speaking in his first State of the Coast Guard address since being named the services 26th commandant in June, later acknowledged that the goal to make the service more inclusive would be challenging after the Defense Department issued a policy that will force future transgender members of the military to identify as their biological sex.

Were going to treat everybody with respect. Theres some changes that come with this policy, and were bound to follow that policy, Admiral Schultz said at the Coast Guard Los Angeles-Long Beach Base before scores of Coast Guard and California law enforcement officials. Theres some that feel, Hey, youre breaking ranks with the transgender community. I would say, well see how it goes.

He also faces a major challenge on other diversity fronts: Out of its 41,159 members, just 14.6 percent are women, 13.7 percent are Hispanic and 5.9 percent are African-American.I am grateful for a few friends like Senator Isakson, who stood forward and said clearly what everyone is thinking but not enough senators are saying, Mr. Coons said.

Mr. Coons was correct about what everyone is thinking on Capitol Hill. Despite the lack of a robust Republican defense on behalf of Mr. McCain, party strategists and top congressional officials said privately that they and many senators believe the presidents persistent onslaught against the senator was, by various accounts, ugly, bizarre, disgusting, disturbing, counterproductive and just plain weird.

Not only did it call attention to Mr. Trumps own failure to serve in Vietnam despite his being of prime draft age at the time, it rankled veterans who tend to rally around their own and detracted from the economic and national security message Mr. Trump was trying to present.

Former Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who lost a leg in Vietnam, appeared on CNN to challenge Mr. Trump to show Americans the bone spurs in his foot that kept him out of the war. (The New York Times last year located the daughters of a podiatrist from Queens, Dr. Larry Braunstein, who said their father, who died in 2007, often told the story of coming to the aid of a young Mr. Trump during the Vietnam War as a favor to Fred C. Trump, his landlord and the presidents father.)

Mr. Trumps attacks continued on Thursday. When Maria Bartiromo, a Fox Business Network anchor, asked about Mr. McCain in an interview, the president insisted the news media had brought up the issue first  when in fact he had begun his tirade in Ohio unbidden and on television.

When I went out yesterday to the scrum, they asked me the question, he said falsely, before again hitting the senator for voting against a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. When they ask me the question, I answer the question. But you people bring it up, I dont bring it up. Im not a fan. He was horrible  what he did with repeal and replace. What he did to the Republican Party and to the nation, and to sick people that could have had great health care, was not good. So Im not a fan of John McCain and thats fine.

There are multiple potential reasons Republican senators were steering clear of the dispute between the president and a man interred with military honors at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. First, it is a fact that Mr. McCain had a temper and could be difficult to deal with  and not all senators, despite their appreciation and respect for his service, have such fond recollections.TICA, Mozambique  Hundreds of villagers labored under a blazing sun on Thursday to salvage what they could from cornfields that just days earlier were submerged by storm-driven floodwaters.

With the waters from Cyclone Idai starting to recede, it was time to take stock, and in Tica, a central Mozambique village where many of the residents are subsistence farmers, the news was not good. Homes, clothes and crops  all vanished.

Everything we have is gone, said Armindo Fernando Lazaro, 52, a father of eight who was taking shelter at the Muda Mufo Complete School.

For aid agencies, the waters retreat allowed better access to scores of communities that had been cut off by the cyclone, which hit last Thursday, and by the floods that followed.SANTIAGO, Chile  A judge in Chile on Thursday convicted 11 former members of the countrys army for the 1986 murder of Rodrigo Rojas, a United States-based Chilean photographer who was burned alive during protests against Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990.

In a 546-page ruling, Judge Mario Carroza sentenced three ex-officers, Julio Castaner, Ivan Figueroa and Nelson Medina, to 10 years in prison. Eight other soldiers were given suspended sentences and two were acquitted.

Mr. Rojass mother, Veronica De Negri, a government critic, went into exile in the United States in 1977. Her son joined her and attended Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, where he practiced his passion for photography.

On July 2, 1986, a few months after Mr. Rojas returned to Chile at age 19, he and a university student, Carmen Gloria Quintana, 18, were detained by a military unit commanded by Lt. Pedro Fernandez in a working-class neighborhood of Santiago, the capital, during a tense day of street protests. Mr. Rojas had planned to photograph the days events.But that move was never recognized internationally, and a United Nations Security Council resolution that year said that the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect.

There have been halting negotiations over the Golan Heights, but in 2011 the conflict in Syria introduced new tensions to the area and effectively shut down those efforts.

Who lives there?

The Golan Heights is not densely populated. According to some estimates, there are around 50,000 people, with Israeli Jewish settlers making up nearly half. The rest are mostly people of Syrian ancestry who are Druze, a religion that has been described as an offshoot of Ismaili Islam.

[Sign up for the weekly At War newsletter to receive stories about conflict and consequence.]

Druze residents of the Golan Heights have largely resisted obtaining Israeli citizenship and have maintained a strong connection to Syria for decades. Despite the proximity  megaphones and binoculars have connected people in the Golan Heights with friends across the border  that connection has been tested by the devastating conflict in Syria.When the Batsheva Dance Company takes the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week, it will look very much like the company that audiences have come to love: a bit mysterious, a bit cheeky  qualities associated with its longtime director and choreographer Ohad Naharin.

The company, based in Tel Aviv, will perform Mr. Naharins latest work, Venezuela, which contains familiar ingredients like ferocious solos, kaleidoscopic ensemble scenes and moments of theatrical audaciousness. Here, its all hung on a bold conceptual structure: Its performed twice. After 40 minutes, the choreography repeats, although with different music, different lighting and different dancers.

And something else will be different on this visit: Mr. Naharin is no longer in charge of Batsheva. Last September, after nearly 30 years as the companys artistic director, he handed the reins to Gili Navot, a former dancer with the company, while he assumed the position of house choreographer. In that role, Mr. Naharin will continue to create new work, while Ms. Navot will be responsible for the daily decision-making and long-term direction of the company.

Is this the beginning of a new era or just an administrative reorganization? Sometimes it feels like, wow, its a huge change, Ms. Navot said in a phone interview from Tel Aviv. And I feel that were different, very different, Ohad and I. On the other hand, she said: Ohads here. Hes creating. Hes very vital and continuing to invent himself every day. So, it feels like both at the same time.Holy milestones, Batman! Detective Comics, where the caped crusader debuted on March 30, 1939, will reach issue No. 1000 on Wednesday, just days before the heros 80th birthday. It is evidence of the greatness and power of the Batman concept that the character has appeared continuously over eight decades, Peter Sanderson, a comic book historian, said.

Growing up, I saw versions of Batman in comics and on TV, but one of the great leaps forward was Frank Millers The Dark Knight Returns, a four-part story which presented an older version of the hero coming out of retirement to protect Gotham City once more. Millers vision of Batman helped pave the way for Tim Burtons Batman, starring Michael Keaton, perhaps the first time my love of comics was less childish and more socially acceptable.

Since then, weve had many film Batmen  his onscreen incarnations have oscillated between campy (Joel Schumacher) and dignified (Christopher Nolan)  but his guiding principle has remained the same. Batman never gives up on his mission to protect the innocent from evil, Sanderson said.The haunting daguerreotypes of seven enslaved men and women taken in South Carolina in 1850 have long been an awkward matter at Harvard.

Made in a portrait studio at the request of Louis Agassiz, a renowned Harvard biologist out to prove the inferiority of people of African descent, the images have been the subject of scholarly exposes and intellectual property skirmishes since they resurfaced in 1976 in the attic of the universitys anthropology museum. Now they are the subject of a lawsuit brought by a Connecticut woman who says she is a descendant of two of the enslaved people in the photographs, and wants what she sees as stolen family property back.

The lawsuit involves charges of profiteering and exploitation, calling the images spoils of theft and Harvards dominion over them itself the equivalent of slavery.

But to scholars, it also raises broader moral questions. Who owns African-American history: the generally white-dominated institutions that house many of its traces, or the descendants of the enslaved? And who, if anyone, should control  and profit from  it?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.

Biden Plays Hide and Seek

Seth Meyers is tired of waiting for Joe Biden to announce whether hes running for president. Biden has been dropping hints, and members of his inner circle have leaked tidbits about his decision-making process. But no date has been set for an official announcement.

Meyers said that there was hardly any ambiguity left  but that its still painful to have to wait.(Updated on July 23, 2019)

In a rare public statement in May, Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, tried to lower expectations that he might give any explosive testimony about his findings during the Russia investigation. Instead, he referred the public to his 448-page report.

The report is my testimony, he said.

That apparently didnt satisfy Democrats in Congress, who subpoenaed Mueller to testify before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, a spectacle that will take place this week and is sure to be closely watched.

Anyone eagerly awaiting Muellers appearance on Wednesday can get a preview of his findings in his report, which became an unexpected best seller this spring after several publishers released it in print.I CAN ONLY DRAW WORMS

Written and illustrated by Will Mabbitt.

Maybe Mabbitt cant draw many things, but boy, can he conceive and execute a witty, surprising, maximum fun picture book. Oh, and this one doubles as a counting exercise. Having announced that worms are his entire repertoire, Mabbitt proceeds to wrangle 10 neon-bright ones onto the pages, with hilarious difficulty. Theyre so hard to tell apart. And poor worm No. 8: Its not true that if a worm is cut in half it makes two worms, we learn. It makes two half worms.

32 pp. Penguin. $14.99. (Ages 3 to 5)

THE SUN SHINES EVERYWHERE

Written by Mary Ann Hoberman.

Illustrated by Luciano Lozano.SOUNDS LIKE TITANIC

A Memoir

By Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

As the Summer of Scam yielded to fall and now winter, we might come to realize, two Fyre Festival documentaries later, that we live in an era (or, indeed, a nation) of scam: We love stories about people with big dreams and minimal credentials, whether they succeed or fail. The truest American heroes are the people to whom Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman dedicates her new memoir, Sounds Like Titanic: those with average talents and above-average desires.

Sounds Like Titanic follows Hindman when, as a desperately broke senior at Columbia, she seems to catch a huge break. Despite her only musical training being lessons she took as a child in West Virginia, she is hired to play violin in an ensemble led by a composer who has sold thousands of albums and played at Lincoln Center. She realizes why his staff has overlooked her lack of skill when, onstage with the rest of the ensemble, a deafening CD track begins to play. It is what she calls a Milli Violini situation: The audience is in fact listening to a recording.

The book jumps between Hindmans first gigs with the Composer (the only name she gives him), her Appalachian childhood and her travels with the Composer on his God Bless America Tour in 2004, when he played a series of concert benefits for PBS stations around the country. Hindman dedicates several sections to the Composer, but all we really learn about him is that he is both shrewd and stupid. He struck gold in the classical contemporary market by blatantly ripping off the Titanic soundtrack and taking a direct sales approach, hocking CDs at live performances at shopping centers and art fairs. In the end, he may be a true innocent, just like the American mall-goers who buy his CDs. When Hindman plays Beethovens Fifth Symphony on their tour bus, he says to her: I like this music. What is it?

As scams go, the Composers is relatively benign  playing to a backing track isnt illegal  and Sounds Like Titanic is not ultimately interested in skewering or exposing him. It is more a memoir of millennial economic ennui, a clever illustration of navigating impostor syndrome and the gig economy, since Hindman literally takes gigs as an impostor violinist. She was a Middle Eastern studies major at Columbia and was studying abroad in Cairo on 9/11. She longs to be a foreign correspondent at a newspaper, but she finds her expertise works against her: It will be more difficult to make a living by providing accurate information about the Middle East to an American audience than it will be to make a living by fake-playing the violin.E.U. grants Brexit delay on conditions May didnt want

Turning down terms requested by Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, E.U. leaders on Thursday agreed to extend the deadline for Britains looming March 29 exit from the bloc to May 22 if next week Mrs. May can persuade lawmakers in Parliament to come around to her plan for leaving, which they have roundly rejected twice.

If she cannot persuade lawmakers to accept her plan, Mrs. May will get a shorter delay in exiting the E.U.  until April 12. Mrs. May accepted the terms.

And Britain could stay in the bloc much longer if it decided it needs more time for a bigger rethink. If Britain were to get the longer delay, it would have to take part in European Parliament elections in May.That is not Mr. Guptas approach. He is aggressively unrepentant. He maintains he is innocent despite the jury verdict against him on three counts of securities fraud and one charge of conspiracy. (He was found not guilty on two other counts.)

Mr. Guptas book, Mind Without Fear, to be published next week, tells the story of how his career unraveled. It is a propulsive narrative filled with boldfaced names from business and politics. At times, it is a dishy score settler.

Mr. Gupta never testified at his trial, a decision he said he regretted. While he gives a full-throated self-defense in the book that is fuller than the one the jury heard, much of the outlines were already heard  and rejected  in court. The book requires the reader to suspend disbelief in the judicial system. Some readers may sympathize with him while others may find his arguments unconvincing.

Mr. Gupta recounts virtually every scene in the past decade of his life, from the moment he learned that he was under investigation (he got a phone call from the general counsel of Goldman Sachs while he was in line at airport security) to when he was released from prison.

The closest Mr. Gupta comes in the book, or in his interview with me, to acknowledging any error on his part is when he notes that he shouldnt have trusted Mr. Rajaratnam and that he spoke a little too loosely when he discussed Goldmans corporate secrets on a phone call that the F.B.I. secretly recorded.

Mr. Gupta, it seems, spent his time in prison trying to make the best of his circumstances  and occasionally hanging out with Mr. Rajaratnam.

We played Scrabble in prison together. We played chess. We had breakfast together, he told me. Most of their conversations were about prison stuff, you know?General Motors is moving to widen its lineup of electric cars, and adding jobs in the process.

The automaker said Friday that it would begin producing a new electric vehicle as part of its Chevrolet lineup, resulting in the addition of 400 jobs at its plant in Orion Township, Mich.

The vehicle will share some characteristics with the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt EV, a small wagon that is already produced at the Orion factory, the company said in a statement. The addition of the vehicle will be accompanied by an investment in the plant of about $300 million. The company did not offer any other details about the new vehicle.

G.M. has said since 2017 that it planned to substantially expand its lineup of all-electric cars. The push comes as other carmakers, including Hyundai and Audi, prepare to unveil new plug-in hybrids and fully electric models in a bet that car owners are ready to switch from gasoline-powered vehicles.

Its an ongoing story of just trying to get realigned with where they see the business going in the future, said Jeff Windau, an equity analyst at Edward Jones. This is a capital-intensive business, and it takes time for the investments to be made and for the products to start being manufactured.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.

With floods submerging expanses of the Midwest and government scientists warning that this spring could bring a historic flood season in the United States, its natural to ask why it is happening. What causes catastrophic flooding? And what is the role of climate change?

The first thing to understand: Its complicated

Each flood is its own phenomenon, tied to the specific circumstances in the area.

Flooding is complex, Deke Arndt, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , said Thursday in a briefing on the potentially dire flood season.

It has to do with precipitation falling to the ground, Mr. Arndt said, but also with the way that water is managed and the surface hydrology  how it flows across the land and is collected and runs off.

The question of water management involves the building and maintenance of dams, levees, reservoirs and spillways. The surface hydrology part is about the landscape and how it affects the flow of water (for example, places rich in steep hills and valleys like Vermont can see severe destruction from intense rain events). And the development of housing, malls and other paved-over areas reduces the amount of open land that can absorb runoff.The Canadian city of Nanaimo, in British Columbia , has been a scrappy outpost of the Hudsons Bay Company, a coal mining center and a timber town. But its place in history may be forever entwined with its culinary namesake, one of the worlds sweetest treats.

The Nanaimo bar (pronounced nuh-NYE-mo) is a three-layer no-bake square that for the last seven decades or so has been a steadfast source of comfort to Canadians at weddings and funerals, birthdays and bar mitzvahs. Across the country, youll find the sugary bars for sale at small-town gas stations and supermarkets, where they compete with Nanaimo bar baking kits. In 2017, the Tim Hortons restaurant chain created a filled doughnut with the flavors of the Nanaimo bar for the nations sesquicentennial, a nod to its status.

Even its name is proudly Canadian.

I like to call it the Kardashian of Canadian desserts because really, if it had been named anything else, I dont think it would have lasted, said Lenore Newman, the author of Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey. But its the Nanaimo bar, so of course people make it.LONDON  Every dish has a story to tell, but that story often isnt what you expect or, indeed, want it to be.

Take paella as an example, arguably the most famous of Spanish dishes around the world and the inspiration behind my recipe here. I thought, naively, that I would start my preamble with some historical notes about the humble origins of this Valencian star dish, and those would then naturally and smoothly lead me to my own adaptation of the recipe. In short, my modern take on a classic. In reality, things turn messier, and I find myself embroiled in an Anglo-Spanish wrangle.

The very beginnings are more or less indisputable. Paella, named after the round, shallow metal pan in which the dish is cooked, has its origins in Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. In the 10th century, North African Muslims, who ruled the region at the time, started planting rice in the Albufera lagoon. Their love of saffron as a way of seasoning the rice and painting it a voluptuous gold was still there in the mid-1800s, centuries after the Muslim departure, which is when paella as we know it was established . It was a communal dish cooked by laborers over open fire, which gave it a distinct smokiness.Instead of simply focusing on the butterflys wings (because their shape and size offers space to fill), this season some designers are emphasizing other parts of the insects body. Consider the Hong Kong-based jeweler Wallace Chan, who has elongated the antennae of his latest pair of Nebula butterfly brooches so the butterfly is visible from all angles  front, back and side, he said. And, in Milan, Giampiero Bodino has prettified the butterflys body, using rose-cut diamonds for the first time to add softness and scaling the body down at the curled ends for fantasy, he said.

Signs are that the pieces will fly: A client immediately grabbed Cindy Chaos 10-carat red diamond butterfly, its undulating wings splattered with yellow diamonds, on its debut in January during the Spring couture collections in Paris. (Every year since 2008 Ms. Chao has made a one-of-a-kind butterfly; in 2013, she donated the 2009 brooch, with fancy colored sapphires and diamonds, rubies and tsavorite garnets, to the National Museum of Natural Historys gem and mineral collection at the Smithsonian).

Butterflies are easier to experiment with than other animal motifs, according to Kimberly McDonald, the New York-based jewelry curator turned designer, who is using Yowah opals from Australia for her new butterfly pieces with a black rhodium finish. You dont have to be bogged down in details like other animals, like hedgehogs, she said. You can make it as complicated with movement or size or as simple as you want.

But avoiding a cliche design is a tough challenge. Mr. Bodino, for example, chose to create a brooch depicting a butterfly from the side, with its wings up and closed, as if resting on an imaginary flower. It shows lightness, the moment of interaction between the animal and flower as shes not flying; shes staying and it is a moment of calm, he said.In the upwardly mobile East, the opposite is happening.

We dont cater to need, we cater to desire, Mr. Vigneron said. So more and more, pricing in luxury is an art in itself and you need to ensure the right product is available for customers at every entry point to the Cartier brand. People of all backgrounds are more than willing to buy into a dream, but it has to be at the right price.

In an evermore competitive market, however, this also means meeting customers in new ways. For Cartier, that meant investing heavily in renovating key flagship locations, including New Bond Street in London, which reopened in December, and ensuring these stores could also be used for meetings and events. The house also has hosted several high-profile museum-style exhibitions of key pieces from its archives, and reconsidered its product introductions. To celebrate the unveiling of the new Santos de Cartier watch in San Francisco last year, for example, Cartier held three days of talks with modern-day creative figures, campaigners and entrepreneurs.

As digital gets evermore important so, too, has sharing, learning and finding a community in the physical world, too. If a luxury brand can move beyond product and also facilitate those relationships as they then develop both on and offline, then it is a very powerful thing, Mr. Vigneron said.

A greater focus on such encounters, and on data to understand market changes better and to identify potential customers and how to reach them, has become paramount, he said. So has adapting to client needs and desires as they are shaped by shifting societal trends.

Traditionally, luxury has always been a very centralized business, both physically and philosophically, Mr. Vigneron said. The guardian of the temple will remain an artistic director, but today you also need to democratize and spread and test yourself across new markets  far beyond just your stores  in order to really resonate wherever you are.

Inclusivity is critical to most many luxury shoppers who are shaping todays industry.

For Cartier, beyond building its local teams worldwide, this has meant experimenting by, for example, adapting its video and social media campaigns for different cultures (like deciding its Sofia Coppola-directed video was too provocative and creating a different video for Middle Eastern markets) or male celebrities (like Lu Han in China) to model high jewelry designs directed at women. A retail innovation lab to test new technologies has been opened in Brooklyn, with sites in Tokyo and Shanghai planned for later this year.LONDON  Feng Ji said she was feeling proud. One of Chinas new generation of homegrown luxury jewelers, she was in London for a meeting to discuss a confidential collaboration with a global brand whose name you would recognize. (But she wont disclose it.)

The explosion of Chinese fashion designers over the last five years has led the way for Ms. Feng and her jewelry-making counterparts.

Consider the enduring memes featuring the lavish yellow cape and gown by the Beijing-based designer Guo Pei that Rihanna wore at the 2015 Met Gala. Or the expansion of Chrisou by Dan, the label that Chris Ouyang of Nanjing established in 2013 right after graduating with a fashion degree, which now can be seen in Shanghai, Beijing and even second-tier cities like Wenzhou.

But it hasnt been easy. Ms. Feng, 33, whose limited jewelry-making education has included study at London College of Fashion and the Gemological Institute of America in Shanghai, recalled her fears during some initial meetings at the Paris atelier that now executes many of her designs.The same louche sensibility drew Sapphire, the one-named designer behind the Sapphire Collective in Los Angeles, to create a green sapphire ring in 2015 that resembled a bud of marijuana dotted with little white diamonds for the THC  the chemical responsible for most of marijuanas effect  and rose gold for the hairs, or pistils. (A second version uses purple sapphires to evoke the hue of an Indica strain.)

She followed up with the Lit pendant, a satin-finished 18-karat gold joint with 1.3 carats of orange and silver sapphires dotting its burned end.

Right after I finished my first five pieces, I posted some photos to Instagram, Sapphire recalled. I got a like and a repost from Carine Roitfeld, the former editor of French Vogue.

In 2017, Just One Eye, an ultrachic fashion boutique located in Howard Hughess old Art Deco headquarters in Hollywood, picked up Sapphires Stoned Immaculate collection. In a testament to the proclivities of the stores clientele, its not the only bejeweled ode to grass on display. A few cases away sits a $48,000 one-of-a-kind vape holder-slash-pendant by the Mexico-born designer Daniela Villegas; green tourmaline and prehnite stag beetles decorate the slender tube, which is capped by a 10.03-carat bullet-shaped cabochon of  wait for it  smoky topaz.

Like her fellow Southern Californian jewelers, Nikki Erwin of the Los Angeles-based Established brand, felt the time was right to design a few cannabis-inspired jewels. In 2016, she created a pair of diamond earrings and a matching bracelet featuring a string of cannabis leaves that sweet little old ladies often mistake for stars, she said.Of course, the tiara remains a show  and a showing off  of wealth. And it takes a lot: at Chaumet, a simple tiara might cost around 300,000 euros ($340,835), and the price can rise quickly and steeply into the millions. But to maximize the use of such an investment, a tiara can be designed to be transformable (an enduring approach in haute joaillerie), with removable parts that can be worn as, say, a necklace or brooch.

Yet theres another aspect of the special order today: The allure of the experience, the rising appeal of memories over material goods that is changing the face of modern retail and marketing. Some very rich people just want to order a tiara for the pleasure of the creative process, Mr. Mansvelt said, adding that they can be present from the first discussion, through sketches, stone selection, mock-up and fittings. The process can take as long as 18 months.

Chaumet produces about 10 tiaras a year, usually three for its high jewelry line and the rest for special orders. Often, Mr. Mansvelt said, the customers are parents ordering for their daughters nuptials  but one father was really planning ahead; he ordered a tiara for his daughters wedding although she was still a baby.Mr. Arison, who took his Americanized name for professional use, was drilled in English from the time he started to talk. Because of his grandfathers connections, the family could access C-Span from which Mr. Arison learned the names of the entire United States Congress while still in middle school. He developed a passion for American politics and American cartoons.

Yet under restrictive Soviet policies, the influence of the conservative Georgian church, and his fathers English-learning mandate, Mr. Arison found his childhood oppressive. At 14, he landed a scholarship to a boarding school in Maine, thanks to a chance relationship with two American teachers. By then, the Soviet Union was collapsing and Georgia was embroiled in a civil war. In the United States, he developed an appetite for bananas and M&Ms and immediately, though separated from family, felt entirely at home.

After high school, Mr. Arison earned a degree from Middlebury College in political science. A brief stint in Georgia followed  to explore the possibility of a political career there  but he returned to the United States in 2005. While living in Washington, he wrote a book on Georgian politics, worked as a business consultant, and in 2007 successfully founded Taxi Magic, an early ride-share start-up.

Despite having started an American company, his green card application was rejected. So in 2010, in order to remain in the United States, he left Taxi Magic to join an international tech firm in the Bay Area. There, his career continued to soar but his love life stalled. His criteria for a partner weighed heavily on intellect, worldliness, and political engagement, and the photo-driven gay dating platforms left him cold.

Plus, and this was a factor in many dead-end dates, he wanted children. To say that scared a lot of guys is an understatement, Mr. Arison said.Before reading the article:

What do you know about the relations between the Dutch settlers and Indigenous people in the 17th century?

Where did you learn this information? In schools? Museums? Textbooks? Pop culture? Family and friends?

How accurate do you think your knowledge and understanding is?

Next, look closely at the photographs of this diorama (from before the exhibit was altered) from the American Museum of Natural History in New York depicting Dutch settlers and an Indigenous tribe.

 What do you notice?

 What do you wonder?

 What story does the diorama tell?

Share your findings with a partner and discuss:

 How historically accurate is the diorama?Should the United States follow New Zealands example and ban all military-style semiautomatic weapons in an attempt to prevent future mass shootings? Or would such a ban be unconstitutional or impractical here?

In New Zealand to Ban Military-Style Semiautomatic Guns, Jacinda Ardern Says, Damien Cave and Charlotte Graham-McLay write:

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand  Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand on Thursday announced a national ban on all military-style semiautomatic weapons, all high-capacity ammunition magazines and all parts that allow weapons to be modified into the kinds of guns used to kill 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch last week. What were banning today are the things used in last Fridays attack, she said, adding: Its about all of us, its in the national interest and its about safety. Ms. Ardern is expected to encounter little resistance to the weapons ban in Parliament; the largest opposition party quickly said it supported the measures. Ms. Ardern said her goal was to eliminate from New Zealand the weapons that the killer used in Christchurch. She emphasized that it would require a buyback of banned weapons in circulation now, plus regulation around firearms and ammunition. The guns used in these terrorist attacks had important distinguishing features, she said at a news conference at Parliament in Wellington, the capital. First, big capacity, and also their delivery. They had the power to shoot continuously, but they also had large capacity magazines. Ms. Arderns plan for immediate gun policy changes, announced six days after a mass shooting, stands in stark contrast to the stalemate and resistance to change that has stymied similar calls for restrictions on firearms in the United States. Many Americans can buy a gun in less than an hour. In New Zealand, the process can take weeks or months. Ms. Arderns handling of the massacre and its aftermath have resonated around the world and thrust her into the spotlight as a force on the issue of guns. The shooting in New Zealand comes after the United States has experienced an alarming number of mass shootings in recent years, including the Sandy Hook, Conn., school shooting that took 27 lives in 2012; the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016, which killed 49; the Las Vegas concert shooting in 2017 that left 58 dead; and the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, which killed 17 people in 2018.

Ms. Arderns overhauls have been inspired in part by neighboring Australias response after a mass shooting in 1996. The article continues:

Mr. Alpers said the challenge for New Zealand would mainly be getting the ammunition and guns that already exist out of circulation. Half of Australias states had some kind of gun registration plan in place before the 1996 reforms, making it easier for the authorities to know what weapons were out there and what needed to be brought in. New Zealand only registers 4 percent of its weapons. According to the police, about 250,000 people in the country own an estimated 1.2 million to 1.5 million firearms. It is unclear how many of them would be affected by the ban. New Zealand is at a considerable disadvantage to countries that have had registries, because theres no way of tracing the firearms because they dont know whos got them, Mr. Alpers said. Were relying entirely on the honesty of the gun owner to turn it in. Ms. Ardern said that fair compensation would be paid to all those who participate.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

 What is your reaction to Prime Minister Arderns decision to ban semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines? Should the United States do the same? If not, how should our country address the issue of guns and mass shootings?

 In a related Opinion column, Nicholas Kristof writes:

When a terrorist massacred 50 people at two New Zealand mosques last week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern immediately grasped the nettle. I can tell you one thing right now, she told a news conference. Our gun laws will change. Thats what effective leadership looks like. New Zealands cabinet has now agreed in principle to overhaul those laws, experts are reviewing ways to make the country safer from firearms and, Ardern promised, within 10 days of this horrific act of terrorism, we will have announced reforms. Contrast that with the United States, where just since 1970, more Americans have died from guns (1.45 million, including murders, suicides and accidents) than died in all the wars in American history (1.4 million). More Americans die from guns every 10 weeks than died in the entire Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined, yet we still dont have gun safety rules as rigorous as New Zealands even before the mosques were attacked.

Do you agree with Mr. Kristof? Has America lacked leadership on the issue of gun violence? How would you assess the quality of leadership by elected officials in the United States?

 New Zealand has a population of 4.6 million and an estimated 1.2 million to 1.5 million firearms. The United States has a population of 327 million people and over 300 million guns. In what ways do you think New Zealands weapons ban is relevant to the situation in the United States? Do you think the ban represents a realistic model of legislation that could happen here? Or are there too many obstacles or logistical issues that would make such a ban more difficult to enact?

 Additionally, the United States has an explicit amendment protecting gun rights that New Zealand does not. The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

However, the Library of Congress writes, The meaning of this sentence is not self-evident, and has given rise to much commentary but relatively few Supreme Court decisions. What do you think these words mean? What relevance should they have for the debate about guns? Do you think a ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons would be constitutional?

 In her announcement on Thursday, Ms. Ardern said, Its about all of us, its in the national interest and its about safety. Do you think it is possible for the government to find a healthy balance between protecting peoples right to own a gun and public safety? Do you believe the government is currently striking the right balance? Why or why not?

Other Resources:

How to Buy a Gun in 16 Countries

How Australia, Canada and Other Countries Responded to Mass Shootings

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer

6 Stories and Charts to Help You Better Understand Gun Violence in the U.S.

From The Learning Network:

Learning With: New Zealand Attack: Quick Action, Near Miss and Courage in Christchurch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.

The deadliest attack took place in Faryab Province, where a Taliban Red Unit attacked a military base and security outposts in Arkalik village. At least 22 Afghan security forces were killed, eight police officers were wounded and four police officers were taken prisoner. The Taliban captured the military base and four outposts, looting all weapons and equipment. In Badghis Province, the Taliban carried out the biggest known capture of Afghan soldiers of the war, taking 150 prisoners after they chased units into neighboring Turkmenistan and that country forced them back, Afghan officials said on Sunday. The operation took place in Bala Murghab District in the northwestern Afghan province of Badghis. The Taliban later announced that they had released 58 soldiers who promised that they would not rejoin the Afghan security forces.

[Read the Afghan War Casualty Report from previous weeks.]

March 20 Nangarhar: one civilian killed

One civilian was killed and two others were wounded when unknown gunmen opened fire on them in Jalalabad City, the provincial capital.

March 19 Herat Province: one civilian killed

One person was killed and six others were wounded by an I.E.D. blast in the Ninth Police District of Herat City.

March 18 Kunduz Province: two civilians killed

Two civilians were killed in clashes between Afghan commandos and the Taliban in the village of Sar Asia in Chardara District. Local officials claimed that four Taliban fighters were also killed in the clashes.Taliban Capture About 150 Afghan Soldiers After Chase Into Turkmenistan: The neighboring country forced the troops back across the border, officials said, in what is believed to be the biggest setback for the Afghan security forces since a Taliban offensive in August.

He Says His Work as a Jihadist Spy Caused PTSD. Denmark Awarded Him $27,000.: Morten Storm, who outlined his life as a Qaeda jihadist who became an informant, was found to have experienced exceptionally dangerous events.

U.S.-Backed Forces in Syria Arrest Suspects in Attack That Killed 4 Americans: The captives are suspected of involvement in a restaurant bombing in January, in which at least 11 Syrians also died.

Report Says U.S. Airstrikes Have Killed 14 Civilians in Somalia: Since President Trump relaxed rules on airstrikes in Somalia, a number of civilians have been killed, Amnesty International said.

Pentagon Opens Internal Inquiry of Acting Defense Chiefs Ties to Boeing: Patrick M. Shanahans relationship with his former employers, and complaints that he disparaged Boeing competitors while at the Pentagon, have come under scrutiny.

Trump Wants U.S. to Recognize Israeli Sovereignty Over the Golan Heights: Israel claimed the territory from Syria in a 1967 war and annexed it in 1981 in a move that has never been recognized internationally.

Lauren Katzenberg is the editor of The New York Times At War channel.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

For more than a year, a group of Hollywood actresses waving the banner of the Times Up movement have been pressing Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to apply New Yorks minimum wage to workers who earn tips, arguing that it would make waitresses less vulnerable to sexual harassment.

Among the celebrities weighing in are Sarah Jessica Parker, Michelle Williams, Amy Poehler and Amy Schumer.

Not surprisingly, the restaurant industry is pushing back, saying the proposed change would spell doom for many businesses.

But it has also created an unexpected divide: Waitresses and other servers are resisting the proposal, saying they can make more money from tips and do not need celebrities to help protect them from harassment.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

Anthony Comello was known as an aimless young man on his familys block in Staten Island, where he lived in his parents house. He could be helpful, offering during snowstorms to plow the streets with his pickup and to clear snow from neighbors driveways. But he also believed in far-right conspiracy theories, had an OxyContin habit and could be aggressive when he was high, people who knew him said.

Still, he was not the kind of person anyone imagined would someday pull off the highest-profile mob killing in decades.

Mr. Comello, a 24-year-old born and raised on Staten Islands South Shore, is accused of gunning down a Gambino crime family leader, Francesco (Franky Boy) Cali, on a quiet street in Todt Hill last week.

The shooting rocketed Mr. Comello, an otherwise unsensational young man who was struggling to launch his adult life, into true-crime infamy. But in the days since Mr. Cali, 53, was shot 10 times, Mr. Comello  as well as his motive  has remained a cipher.The Southern District of New York, as the United States attorneys office in Manhattan is known, has long displayed independence from the Justice Department in Washington, prosecuting politicians of all political stripes. The offices reputation for autonomy earned it a nickname: the Sovereign District of New York.

Mr. Khuzamis decision to leave the Southern District of New York caps a consequential 15-month tenure as Mr. Bermans deputy; most notably, he oversaw the investigation into hush money payments made during the 2016 campaign to two women who had said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in that case and is scheduled to begin a three-year prison sentence in May.

Mr. Berman, who was appointed in January 2018 by the Trump administration, made Mr. Khuzami his first hire. A prosecutor in the same office earlier in his career, Mr. Khuzami assumed responsibility for the Cohen investigation after Mr. Berman was recused from the case for undisclosed reasons.

With Mr. Khuzamis departure, Ms. Strauss would assume oversight of any remaining aspects of the Cohen investigation that were subject to Mr. Bermans recusal; she would not come to the Cohen case cold, as she has been working with Mr. Khuzami on the investigation. Craig A. Stewart, a former Southern District prosecutor now at the law firm Arnold & Porter, will become Mr. Bermans chief counsel.

Mr. Khuzamis plans were unclear. He had bounced between the private sector and government service for years. In taking the job as the deputy United States attorney, Mr. Khuzami left behind a lucrative partnership at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, where he has lived even while commuting to New York. He had told friends that he had always planned to return home to his family this year, and Mr. Berman said Friday that Mr. Khuzami would return to Washington.michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today: Nearly 900 students have been offered admission to New York Citys most elite public high school. Just seven of those students are black. Its Tuesday, April 2.

[music]

archived recording (bill de blasio) Hi, Im Bill de Blasio. Im an outer-borough working dad and proud public school parent.

eliza shapiro

In 2013, Bill de Blasio 

archived recording (bill de blasio) Im currently serving as New York City public advocate, and Im running to be your mayor.

eliza shapiro

 runs for New York City mayor 

archived recording (bill de blasio) Right now, were living a tale of two cities  one where the rich keep growing richer, while middle-class New Yorkers struggle, and nearly half our city lives at or near the poverty line.

eliza shapiro

 on this promise that hes going to vanquish inequality in every part of city life.

archived recording (bill de blasio) Without a dramatic change of direction, generations to come will see New York as little more than a playground for the rich.

eliza shapiro

And his number one priority 

archived recording (bill de blasio) Each and every child deserves a future that isnt limited by their zip code.

eliza shapiro

 is to tackle decades of inequities that have been built into Americas largest public school system.

archived recording (bill de blasio) The answer is to fix the entire system.

eliza shapiro

He wants to end a system in which theres this understanding that theres good schools and bad schools.

archived recording (bill de blasio) We have to work from the assumption that we will save every child, that we will reach every child, that no system is actually working unless every child has opportunity. [APPLAUSE]

eliza shapiro

And really what hes talking about here is the fact that middle-class white students have often gone to the quote, unquote, good schools  the most funding, the best resources, the highest-quality teachers  and low-income black and Hispanic students have gone to schools with the poorest performance and the least resources for decades.

[music]

michael barbaro

Eliza Shapiro covers education in New York City.

archived recording (bill de blasio) [APPLAUSE] Now, to all the educators in the room, I hope youre going to be proud of this next one.

eliza shapiro

So five years in to de Blasios term 

archived recording (bill de blasio) We set the all-time record for graduation rate in New York City. [CHEERING]

eliza shapiro

 hes trying to get the rest of the city, and, really, the rest of the country to pay attention to inequality in this massive public school system.

archived recording (bill de blasio) That number was less than 50 percent not long ago in this town, before we had mayoral control of education, which created real accountability.

eliza shapiro

And then a few weeks ago 

archived recording Well, now, to those disturbing admissions numbers in New York Citys elite public high schools  a new report is intensifying the debate of racial disparity.

[music]

archived recording Only a handful of black and Latino students are getting into some of New York Citys elite high schools compared with other ethnic groups.

eliza shapiro

 these numbers come out.

archived recording Only seven black students were offered admission to Stuyvesant High Schools freshman class of 895 students. And the numbers are similar for other elite schools that use entrance exams to determine who gets in.

eliza shapiro

At New York Citys most elite public high school, out of 900 seats, only seven were offered to black students.

michael barbaro

So thats less than 1 percent admissions.

eliza shapiro

Thats right. And its actually getting worse.

archived recording The numbers at Stuyvesant are not a surprise. Last year, 10, and 13 the year before.

eliza shapiro

The percentage of black and Hispanic students at these schools has gone down year after year. And now, weve basically reached rock bottom.

archived recording 1 Its abysmal. You know, I would dare say an atrocity was happening in terms of education. archived recording 2 Its absolutely abhorrent and unacceptable.

eliza shapiro

So many people were asking, how could we have allowed this to happen?

archived recording And now to the latest scandal rocking the halls of academia.

eliza shapiro

Just as weve been talking about with the college admissions scandal 

archived recording 50 people have been charged in a nationwide admissions scam, many of them well-to-do parents trying to get their kids into some of the highest profile schools in the country.

eliza shapiro

 and 

archived recording Harvard systematically raises the bar for Asian-Americans and systematically lowers it for whites, African-Americans 

eliza shapiro

 the affirmative action case at Harvard 

archived recording Whether or not you support affirmative action, I think its an important time to be critical of Harvard and to look at how affirmative action policies have impacted or discriminated against Asian-American communities.

eliza shapiro

 and this number went into the center of that storm.

michael barbaro

And so what are these elite public schools youre referring to in New York that have admitted so few black students?

eliza shapiro

So they were created at the beginning of the 1900s. And the idea was that these schools would offer students who could have never afforded a fancy private school the same rigorous academics and extracurriculars and resources that their wealthier, more privileged counterparts get. The idea was that you didnt have to be anyones son. Your parents didnt have to give a donation. This was a meritocracy. And the meritocracy was based on the idea that you passed one test and you got in.

michael barbaro

So a single test is all you need to get in.

eliza shapiro

A single test.

michael barbaro

And whos getting into these schools at this point?

eliza shapiro

So in the 20s and 30s and 40s, the schools were mostly attended by immigrants from all over Europe, Jewish immigrants in particular. And these students are going on to win Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry, become famous authors and writers and academics. And the schools are really seen as the way out of poverty  really, this golden ticket. So over the years, these schools really become household names in New York City. You have Stuyvesant High School. You have Bronx High School of Science. You have Brooklyn Technical High School. And they seem to be working the way they were designed to work.

archived recording All we want is equal education. Thats all  equal education.

eliza shapiro

But in the 1960s, in New York City, as school segregation became the biggest boiling point in the city 

archived recording Our hope is that the Board of Education will decide to come up with a really comprehensive plan for citywide school desegregation.

eliza shapiro

 some black and Hispanic educators and parents were beginning to wonder why their kids werent getting into these mythologized schools.

archived recording Freedom! Now!

eliza shapiro

And they were wondering, can we change something about this admissions process to help our kids get into these schools and have their own path into the middle class? And thats where things started to get really contentious.

[music]

So there was this seed of a plan to say, can we think about a different way to offer kids admission beyond this one standardized test? And there was this immediate backlash from the alumni of the schools, from the leaders of the schools, to say, our schools are under threat, and we need to do something to protect them.

michael barbaro

What happens?

eliza shapiro

So these groups who want to keep the test rush up to Albany 

michael barbaro

Our capital.

eliza shapiro

Our capital. And they lobby politicians to make the test a law. And just a few months after this debate begins, in the spring of 1971 in Albany, a law is passed. The only way to get in is by taking the test. And thats been our system ever since.

michael barbaro

And what becomes of these schools once this single-test admission system is codified in the law?

eliza shapiro

So their stature only grows. They continue to churn out generally extremely accomplished alumni.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

eliza shapiro

But now that this test is part of the state law, theres this growing obsession with this exam. How do you ace this exam to get your way out of poverty? So as the years go on, we see this enormous rise in an industry to prepare for this test. And then in the 1970s, as we see this new wave of immigration from Asia, where there is a very strong culture that tests can determine your future, a lot of Asian immigrants say, we want these schools to propel our kids out of the poverty we found ourselves in after we came to America.

michael barbaro

And did they succeed?

eliza shapiro

They did. So the schools, in the decades since, have become, instead of mostly white and Jewish, mostly Asian-American. But the percentage of black and Hispanic students has only shrunk. And thats where we are today.

michael barbaro

Help me understand those statistics. What exactly are they? And how do they reflect the citys actual population?

eliza shapiro

So these elite schools are about 60 percent Asian-American. The city school system as a whole is about 16 percent Asian American.

michael barbaro

Wow.

eliza shapiro

These elite schools are about 10 percent black and Hispanic, but the system is 70 percent black and Hispanic.

michael barbaro

Eliza, how do we explain these numbers? Why arent black and Hispanic public school kids getting into these elite schools?

eliza shapiro

So this is really complicated. But it all starts with the fact that a lot of these black and Hispanic students dont know these schools exist in the first place. And they definitely dont know this test exists that they have to prepare for.

michael barbaro

And how can that be, that they dont know? You, just a few minutes ago, said that the city is kind of obsessed with the tests.

eliza shapiro

So in some schools that are really underperforming, Ive just heard from students that this is not a top priority.

student So in fifth grade, my teacher, she pulled me to the side, and she was, like, hey, have you heard about the school? Its called Stuyvesant. You have to take a test called the SHSAT.

eliza shapiro

For some of them, it was this one teacher who tapped them on the shoulder and said, youre doing really well in school. You should think about these elite public schools.

student She recommended that I buy the Barrons book and start studying for it. And then thats how I knew about it.

eliza shapiro

And I had students say to me, all of the kids at my mostly black or mostly Hispanic middle school were smart. But Im the only one who got tapped on the shoulder.

student But the rest of my peers did not know about the specialized high schools or Stuyvesant or any of the schools or the SHSAT until eighth grade, one month before the test.

eliza shapiro

And that shows just how uneven just the knowledge of this system really is throughout the city.

student So I took the test. I think a handful of other students in my grade took the test. But since I had been the only one preparing for it, I was only one who got in. eliza shapiro Right. student So its just like, you cant aim for something if you dont know it exists.

michael barbaro

How have Asian students that youve spoken to explained their awareness of the test?

eliza shapiro

So Ive spoken to many Asian-American graduates of these elite schools who said, from the earliest age they can remember, their parents and their teachers were encouraging them to study and prepare for this test.

student I think that most of the pressure I feel is just from myself. My parents are just there to support me.

eliza shapiro

And the week the admissions letters would come out, everybody in their community in Chinatown, in Flushing, in Asian-American neighborhoods all across New York City, this is all anybody was talking about. So theres this awareness piece. And then we get to preparation for the test. This test is really hard. It really helps kids to prep for it. And some kids, particularly white and Asian-American students, will prep for months, if not years.

michael barbaro

How do you prep for years for a test like this?

eliza shapiro

There are summer academies all the way through middle school where students are taking practice tests every single day, five days a week, hours a day.

michael barbaro

And I assume that that costs a decent amount of money.

eliza shapiro

Right.

michael barbaro

So does all that suggest that this has a lot to do with income?

eliza shapiro

So its really much more complicated than that. New York City schools are overwhelmingly attended by poor students. But poverty doesnt mean the same thing for every student and in every neighborhood. There are low-income Asian-American students whose parents have said they scraped together every last dollar for test prep. But there are also poor students in black and Latino neighborhoods for whom the test is not this be-all, end-all. And so within this basically impoverished school district, we have some really different realities on the ground.

michael barbaro

It sounds like youre saying in certain, for example, Asian communities in New York City, that this test is just known. And people are talking about it, and they are preparing for it. You almost cant avoid the subject of the test. Whereas in other communities  black, Latino communities  that may not be the case, for whatever reason.

eliza shapiro

Absolutely. And remember, these schools were created to find the diamonds in the rough, the kids who needed a push into a better life. And one big concern here is that black and Hispanic students who are brilliant and would do wonderfully at these schools dont even know that theyre an option for them.

michael barbaro

That actually feels like a pretty solvable problem. Why not just tell everybody in New York City public middle schools, make it mandatory  they have to know about the test, and they have to take the test? How much has that been seen as part of a solution to the problem?

eliza shapiro

So the city has been trying for decades  first, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, now under Bill de Blasio  to raise awareness and to provide, actually, free test prep for kids who would have problems affording it. But Ive found that even when all of those things technically go right, theyll show up to test prep day one, take a practice test, and realize that the test is quizzing them on concepts theyve never learned.

michael barbaro

Why would that be the case for some students more than others, that theyre arriving at a test, and its all new concepts?

eliza shapiro

So this gets back to this huge question of quality. Theres this huge discrepancy in quality among these hundreds of middle schools in New York City. So in some schools, you might be taking an advanced geometry course. And in some schools, you might be really still on the basics. So when you show up and take this practice test, it can be a really harsh dose of reality for some of these kids.

student I do not understand why we give eight graders ninth and 10th grade math, 11th grade math, et cetera.

eliza shapiro

And I spoke to some students who had an experience like that.

student But then also, the amount of pressure of that exam is insane. Its one test. And its also so quickly paced. You have to go in knowing what to do. You cant 

michael barbaro

So in a sense, this test to get into these elite high schools, they may actually be assessing how good your middle school was.

eliza shapiro

Exactly.

student So its mind-boggling to me that we think that that test is like a good way of measuring anybodys 

eliza shapiro

So for all of these reasons 

archived recording (bill de blasio) We have to make a major change. We have to make sure the very best high schools are open to every New Yorker.

eliza shapiro

 the mayor, Bill de Blasio, the guy who ran on this platform of tackling inequality, is basically saying, times up.

archived recording (bill de blasio) Time for a change? archived recording Yes. archived recording (bill de blasio) Time for a change? archived recording Yes. archived recording (bill de blasio) Time for a change? archived recording Yes.

eliza shapiro

Its time for a much more radical solution.

archived recording (bill de blasio) The test has to go.

eliza shapiro

Scrap it altogether, and replace it with a system that would automatically give seats to the top students at every city middle school. And the impact of that change would be that the schools racial and ethnic makeup would be transformed overnight.

michael barbaro

How much?

eliza shapiro

The schools that are now about 10 percent black and Hispanic would become about 45 percent black and Hispanic. Thats because most middle schools in New York City are mostly black and Hispanic. So if you take the best students in every single middle school, thats what these elite schools are going to look like.

archived recording (bill de blasio) These schools will get better when they reflect all of New York City 

eliza shapiro

The mayor is saying 

archived recording (bill de blasio)  because so much talent is being locked out right now. So much talent is being missed because of a broken system.

eliza shapiro

 not only is it clear that this test is missing some of the brightest black and Hispanic kids in the system, but that diversity is in and of itself a value and something that will make these beloved schools even better and stronger.

archived recording (bill de blasio)  Because beauty and intelligence and strength comes in all shapes and sizes, all colors, all genders.

michael barbaro

You told us earlier that when this test was challenged several decades ago, there was an incredible amount of pushback. So what is the reaction this time to de Blasios plan to get rid of it?

eliza shapiro

So I have never seen such a vitriolic reaction to a proposal out of City Hall.

archived recording 1 [CHANTING] A group of protesters gather in front of New Yorks City Hall. archived recording 2 They chanted. archived recording 3 Keep the test! archived recording 4 And they marched, hundreds of them, across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall.

eliza shapiro

There are parents and alumni of these schools who are saying this proposal would all but destroy these schools.

speaker 1 Theres absolutely no doubt that once this door is open, who your father is is going to make a difference as to which school you get into. speaker 2 Everyone has an opportunity to sign up to take the test. If you step forward and you sign up, then youre up for the challenge. If you didnt, then you didnt want to be challenged.

eliza shapiro

They would water down their academics. And they would let in kids who simply cant cut it at the expense of kids who are acing this test that they revere.

speaker It is not a crime. We should not be punished for sending our kids for better education.

eliza shapiro

And then you have Asian-American families who feel that the mayor is discriminating against them.

speaker This solution is going to be borne solely on the backs of essentially poor Asian families. The Asian Exclusion Act of 2018  I dont know. It sounds sort of like it, because what people are basically saying is, hey, this school is too Asian.

eliza shapiro

They would lose half of their seats in this system under the mayors plan.

speaker De Blasio is a little biased. It showed implicit bias when he said, all Asians are economically sound. Well, we can afford tutoring. That sounds like a racist statement to me.

eliza shapiro

And they know the history of these schools. They know these schools were built to propel immigrant and poor kids out of poverty.

speaker Their parents decided to put their money towards that best. Its not rich people that are taking these courses. These are poor, working-class immigrants that are directing their resources towards enrichment.

eliza shapiro

And theyre saying, what about us? We are immigrants. We need these schools.

archived recording The plan to eliminate the specialized high school admissions test will not move forward as of this year. But it could be put to a vote in the future.

eliza shapiro

And losing our seats would be a profound loss, and something that really, really, really feels painful for these parents.

michael barbaro

I mean, given those numbers, this argument from Asian-American families would seem to be quite compelling, right? Why should some kids who are clearly bright, who have aced these tests, lose their seats in the name of diversifying the entire schools?

eliza shapiro

Absolutely. But the flip side of this is I think we need to recognize that the best public high school in the city doesnt seem to need to be diverse in order for us to consider it 

michael barbaro

The best.

eliza shapiro

 the best. And I think, for 50 years in this city, weve said segregation is simply a fact of life. And theres not much we can do about that. And I think right now in New York City, we are in this really intense moment of reckoning with whether thats really true, and whether thats going to change. And its these elite schools that are in the middle of that shift.

michael barbaro

All this is making me wonder what these elite public schools are actually like for the students who attend them. What is it that makes them so special?

eliza shapiro

So what I hear over and over again from alumni and from students is that its all about the other kids. Theres this magical quality in these schools of  youre around all the kids who want to study as hard as you do, who love math and English and environmental science as much as you do. And its this really safe place for smart kids. Its cool to be smart there. And that can feel really, really special.

michael barbaro

Right. And I guess the question is, if you change the admissions process in the name of that diversity, does that magic you just described of being in these schools surrounded by only the best who have aced this test, does that go away somehow?

eliza shapiro

I think thats the fear. But I think the argument against that is, could these schools change, but actually become something better? Could these schools become more vibrant, more special if they were more diverse, and if they looked more like the city in which all these kids live?

eliza shapiro O.K. Im just going to put this here and then cover  I think 

michael barbaro

Im curious about this very small number of black and Hispanic students at these schools. How do they feel about being deemed the best and the brightest, but also about being such a tiny minority there thats now at the center of this big debate?

eliza shapiro I wanted to start the conversation by just asking how you reacted to the news this week?

eliza shapiro

So the day after this number came out, I went down to Stuyvesant. And I spent a late afternoon in the park next to the school with a group of nine black and Hispanic students. And we spent a long time talking about what its like for them.

student So to be honest, when I saw the number, I was angry. And I think my first reaction was anger, because Ive seen a lot of people putting in effort and putting in time to try and remedy the discrepancies in our school system.

eliza shapiro

I heard a lot of pain and anguish about that number.

student Ive been told that the only reason I got into Stuyvesant was because Im black, even though the test doesnt even factor that in. The test doesnt even factor that in. People get so aggressive. They personalize these issues, because these are your children. So people get angry. They find a way to demonize you, to vilify you in a way that makes you alien. And of course, not only is that discouraging and alienating, but it makes you feel like maybe you dont deserve your spot, even though I know that I worked just as hard as every other sophomore in my class to get into this high school.

eliza shapiro

And I was talking to one of these students who remembered that his mom said to him, youre going to be one of the only black students at this school. Youre going to have to put on your armor every day.

student Obviously, its not us versus them. I think its important to say, its not us versus them. Its very true that in this circumstance, black and Latinx communities and Asian communities have been pitted against each other. And I think what its so important for people to realize is that when we have a more representative school system, when we have a school system in which everyone has an equal opportunity, that benefits all of us. That benefits us collectively as a society.

eliza shapiro

And I also just saw, in this time we spent together, this really profound sense of camaraderie  that theyd gotten themselves through Stuyvesant together as a group.

michael barbaro

Eliza, thank you very much.

eliza shapiro

Thank you.

[music]

student Sorry, one more quick thing. I have so much trouble believing that, of all of the top students in New York City who are able to change the world and who are able to perform the best in this really rigorous environment, that only seven of them are black. Right? That, to me, its just wrong.

michael barbaro[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

The Explorers Club is exactly what it sounds like: a members-only institution, established more than a century ago, and dedicated to scientific inquiry. Many of those admitted  there are currently 3,500 members  have touched upon uncharted territories, and all are active in the field of science research. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were part of the club, as was Thor Heyerdahl. Recently, Elon Musk joined.

For 115 years, members have gathered annually for a weekend of science and a black-tie dinner at the New York headquarters, on the Upper East Side. The most recent event, held on March 16, featured 10 astronauts who were part of the Apollo program and an auction where attendees could bid on joining a world-renowned paleontologist on a dinosaur fossil dig.

The weekend of science also introduced something new: The club let its youngest members, some still undergraduates in college, present their initiatives.

There was Alex Borowicz, a Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University, who uses high-resolution satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to track whales. It used to be that people had to go on a boat with binoculars to do that, he said, during his presentation. I do it from my couch.Ms. McCray implores those she meets to take the course, which includes discussions and role playing. So far, she has not been able to get the mayor to take it. (Hes kind of busy, she said.)

But the vast majority of city spending on the program goes to more than 40 other endeavors, such as a crime victim advocate program; social and emotional learning in public schools; and a corps of young behavioral health clinicians paid by the city to work at nonprofits for three years.

Even as the city has poured money into mental health programs and training, nonprofit directors said they still struggle with providing treatment, citing inadequate Medicaid reimbursement rates and even less generous reimbursements from commercial insurers. Some have closed their doors; others have chosen to stop providing mental health services.

David Woodlock, president of the Institute for Community Living and a former top state health official, praised Ms. McCray for her courage in taking on mental health issues. But he bemoaned the inadequacy of state funding, and called the citys contracting process broken.

People are being asked to do more in this system that is not built for expansion, he said.

Helping the seriously mentally ill remains a challenge, especially in a crisis. Those moments often involve the police, and have led to confrontations where officers have been injured, and the person the officers came to help getting physically hurt or killed.

During one such episode in 2012, a man whose family members called 911 to try to help him, attacked one of the responding officers, stabbing him in the neck and face.

The man, Benedy Abreu, 31, served five years in prison and is now in a program funded through Thrive to help those with serious mental illness and a criminal past. He receives regular visits from a psychiatrist and a peer counselor.Anita Silvers, a philosophy professor who was a leading voice in the interpretation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, arguing that disability rights should be viewed the same as other civil rights and not as an accommodation or as a social safety net issue, died on March 14 in San Francisco. She was 78.

San Francisco State University, where Dr. Silvers taught for half a century, said the cause was pneumonia.

Dr. Silvers was already a well-regarded scholar with an expertise in aesthetics in the 1990s when she started to focus on disability law and definitions related to it. She knew about disabilities firsthand: She had polio as a child, and the disease left her with limited mobility. The Americans With Disabilities Act had been passed in 1990, and Dr. Silvers began to examine how it was being interpreted, whether philosophically, in the courts or on her own campus.

A critical thing for her was to understand the A.D.A. as a civil rights statute, said Leslie P. Francis, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Utah who wrote papers and edited a book with Dr. Silvers. Not as an approach to giving people special privileges, but as a way of giving people the rights that everyone else has.In her native Cuba in the 1950s, Antonia Rey was a leading lady of the stage, playing Madge in William Inges Picnic, the title character in George Bernard Shaws Candida and Elizabeth Proctor in Arthur Millers The Crucible.

But when Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 and established a Communist dictatorship, Ms. Rey and her husband, Andres Castro (no relation), a prominent theater director, were forced to consider their options: Stay in Cuba, secure in their theater world but living under a repressive regime, or flee to the United States.

They fled, in 1961.

Ms. Rey, who died on Feb. 21 at 92, went on to become a busy actress in New York, with scores of small parts on the stage (including in A Streetcar Named Desire), in movies (Klute) and on television (Whos the Boss?).

But with few leading roles available for Hispanic actresses in the New York theater world of her era, she would not regain the stature she had achieved in Havana. Still, she did not regret leaving.Maya Turovskaya, a Russian film and theater critic, once called the Susan Sontag of Soviet aesthetic thought, who also co-wrote a popular documentary in the 1960s that drew parallels between Stalin-era totalitarianism and Nazism, died on March 4 at her home in Munich. She was 94.

Her son, Vladimir Turovsky, confirmed the death. She had lived in Germany for more than 15 years.

Ms. Turovskaya established a reputation for writing cultural criticism that was erudite and cleareyed  and that managed not to outrage the Soviet authorities.

In making the documentary Ordinary Fascism (also known as Triumph Over Violence), which was directed by Mikhail Romm, she avoided running afoul of censors because it is substantially an anti-Nazi film.

She and the co-writer, Yuri Khanyutin, dug deeply into archives, including the Soviet Unions, for Nazi propaganda footage; film from Hitler and Joseph Goebbelss private collections; soldiers amateur film; childrens drawings from the Theresienstadt concentration camp; and photographs of Nazi victims at Auschwitz.To the Editor:

Re E.U. Pushes Back Britains Exit Date, but Chaos Still Looms (news article, March 22):

We should appreciate that Brexit is Britains equivalent of our electing Donald Trump, only much worse. In both instances, a hard core of frustrated, resentful but highly motivated voters used their vote to send a message to what they regarded as out-of-touch elites in Washington, London or Brussels.

In the United States, dangerous and deplorable as the result has been, there is an automatic recall date on the package of hopefully 2020, and, at worst, 2024. With Brexit, there is no recall date, and the result will likely be the ultimate diminution of Britain as a world political and economic power.

Steven Bavaria

Norwalk, Conn.To the Editor:

Re A Leading Jewish Philanthropist Is Accused of Sexual Harassment (front page, March 21):

Michael Steinhardt is a 78-year- old man who, by his own admission, engaged in degrading banter that he acknowledged was boorish, disrespectful, and just plain dumb . He apologized for his actions openly. As the article makes clear, there are no accusations that he ever forced, or even attempted, unwanted physical contact.

And yet The Times devotes a coveted front-page slot and two full inside pages to the story. Isn t that a bit of overkill? While we all do the very necessary work of eliminating sexual harassment and assault, we cannot create equivalencies between all people accused of wrongful talk and action. By running this story at this length, The Times does a disservice to the cause it has championed so valiantly.

I fully acknowledge that I know Michael Steinhardt and that I consider him and his family to be friends. I have heard him make bawdy, personal comments, but while that is not appropriate, it was always clear he was doing so in jest. He should not be given a pass for his behavior, but nor should he be pilloried so disproportionately.

Wendy Belzberg

New Yor kWe also know that senior members of the Trump campaign, including the presidents son, son-in-law and campaign chairman, met with Russians who promised dirt on Mrs. Clinton. If there was in fact no collusion, as the president so often claims, it apparently was not for lack of trying. The special counsel has secured guilty pleas on serious federal felony charges from Trump associates, including Mr. Trumps campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; the deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates; a former national security adviser, Michael Flynn; a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos; and Mr. Trumps former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

What do all these men have in common? They lied to investigators about the nature of their relationships with foreign powers, and they worked for the Trump campaign. And thats before we even start talking about Roger Stone.

Regardless of whether efforts by Trump associates to coordinate with or benefit from interference by Russia or WikiLeaks were criminal, the fact that Mr. Trump and his campaign strategists sought to benefit from a foreign adversarys efforts to undermine our democracy is one of the greatest breaches of public trust our country has ever witnessed. If Mr. Mueller ultimately determined that indicting the presidents associates for this conduct was not appropriate, that does not mean that there should not be consequences for this outrageous breach of trust.

Though these and other findings have already been made public, many key questions remain. Chief among these is whether the special counsel found evidence that Mr. Trump obstructed justice by engaging in a pattern of conduct calculated to impede investigations of his campaign and his administration, including by firing Mr. Comey; attempting to force out the previous attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and pushing Mr. Sessions to reverse his recusal from the Russia inquiry; and potentially by dangling pardons to key defendants. Congress and the American people deserve to know the truth about the facts and circumstances of the presidents possibly obstructive acts. Obstruction of an investigation is not only criminal conduct, but also an affront to our system of government and the faith that the American people have in it.And dont forget Roger Stone, whose adventure through the justice system has only just begun. Mr. Stone, a longtime Trump adviser and political dirty trickster with roots going back to the Nixon administration, was arrested in January in an early-morning raid at his home and charged with multiple counts of false statements, obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

Quite a team Mr. Trump surrounded himself with! And we havent even gotten to his son Donald Trump Jr., who needed no arm-twisting to accept a Russian offer of assistance during the campaign (If its what you say I love it, especially later in the summer) , and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who seemed to have his hands in everything.

At the heart of it all is Mr. Trumps own behavior  his unexplained affection for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his knack for knowing just the right time to encourage election interference. Russia, if youre listening, I hope youre able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, Mr. Trump, in a reference to Hillary Clintons emails, said on July 27, 2016  the same day, as it happened, that the Russians began doing just that. (Last year, Mr. Mueller gained the indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers for their role in hacking computer servers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.)

Then there are the times Mr. Trump interfered in the investigation himself  first urging then-F.B.I. director James Comey to drop the bureaus investigation into Mr. Flynn, then firing Mr. Comey when he refused. Two days later, Mr. Trump said on national television that hed fired Mr. Comey at least in part because of this Russia thing with Trump and Russia.

This doesnt count roughly a dozen other investigations into the president, several of which could ultimately expose him to even greater legal or political peril than Mr. Muellers. Most serious is the investigation by federal prosecutors in New York, which has already resulted in a three-year prison sentence for Mr. Cohen for his role in committing federal campaign-finance crimes to cover up hush-money payments to women claiming they had affairs with Mr. Trump  a cover-up that prosecutors say Mr. Trump aided after becoming president.

Last month, Mr. Cohen spent some of his last moments as a free man testifying before Congress that Mr. Trump also lied during the campaign about negotiations to build a long-planned skyscraper in Moscow, which were continuing through much of 2016. Didnt he worry that the lies could come back to hurt him? He never expected to win the election, Mr. Cohen said.

Whether or not a sitting president can be indicted is a long-running debate among lawyers, but either way, Mr. Trump is sure to be under investigation for the rest of his term in office, and probably in court for the rest of his life.This article is part of David Leonhardts newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.

Yes, I know yo uve heard this before, but many observers think its finally true: The Mueller report seems to be coming soon. I want to step back this morning and review what Roberts Mueller investigation (and others) have already uncovered.

The brief version: So far, there is no clear evidence that the Trump campaign and Russian officials worked together to coordinate campaign strategy. Trump and his defenders have tried to conflate this with innocence. The presidents mantra is No collusion.

[Listen to The Argument podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]At a time when would-be autocrats around the world are doing what they can to stay on the throne, the reigning master of their breed, Kazakhstans Nursultan Nazarbayev, unexpectedly announced his retirement as president after a mere 30 years. What gives?

Most likely not much. Mr. Nazarbayev may no longer be president, but among the titles conferred by a subservient Parliament on the only leader independent Kazakhstan has known is father of the nation, a status that, among other things, grants him and his family (all fabulously wealthy) lifelong immunity from criminal and civil prosecution.

He also remains head of the ruling Nur Otan party and the powerful Security Council. And among the first acts of the new acting president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, was to have Mr. Nazarbayevs 55-year-old daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, named speaker of the Parliament and therefore next in line for the presidency, and to have the nations capital, Astana, renamed Nursultan after Mr. Nazarbayev. The father of the nation, Mr. Tokayev assured the nation, will have special, one might say priority, importance in developing and making strategic decisions. Sculptors are no doubt at work on some giant new statues.

By ceding the presidency, Mr. Nazarbayev also deftly stepped out of the firing line at a time of irksome civil unrest. Last month, following persistent protests triggered by the deaths of five children in a house fire on Feb. 4, Mr. Nazarbayev dismissed the government , accusing it of failing to raise living standards and diversify the oil-dominated economy.A few days earlier, on the other side of town, a group of academics, business owners and aging democracy activists had met with Piyabutr Saengkanokkul, a young leader of the Future Forward Party, to discuss the fledging partys long-term strategy in the region. Future Forward  created only a year ago by the 40-year-old billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit  is popular among young, tech-savvy voters and progressives who want to break with old-school politics and players (including the Shinawatras). The party also wants to keep the military out of politics for good and reverse decades of centralization by giving more power and more money to local authorities.

The Northeast represents about one-third of the countrys population of more than 68 million , and for nearly two decades the way the Northeast has voted, Thailand has too. That outcome seems less certain this year  largely, the governments opponents say, because it has rigged the system in its favor .

In a recent survey of voters in the Northeast by the E-Saan Poll project at Khon Kaen University, two-thirds of respondents said they were likely to vote for Pheu Thai or Future Forward in Sundays election. But according to a study by the Nation media group early this month, pro-democracy parties looked like they would fall short of securing a majority of seats in the 500-member House of Representatives (and that was before one of those parties was dissolved).

I have met leaders of all the main pro-democracy parties in recent weeks , and they were cautiously optimistic that together they could nonetheless take a majority of seats in the lower house. But even if they win, they could be relegated to being, curiously, a kind of majority opposition: Under the military-drafted 2017 Constitution, the next prime minister is to be selected by a vote of the full Legislature  which also includes 250 senators nominated by the military.

The Constitution does allow a majority of the lower house to hold a no-confidence vote on the prime minister  meaning that Mr. Prayuth, even if selected for the post, might not be certain to keep it for long. On the other hand, the Constitution also reserves major, overriding powers for unelected, military-controlled bodies  for example, the one tasked with overseeing a vast 20-year development plan.Indeed, Mr. Trumps statement on Thursday was a major development. It is the final nail in the coffin of the 1967 line  the armistice line that separated Israel from its neighbors before the Six Days War. More than 50 years since this line was crossed by the Israeli military, we can finally kiss it goodbye.

The part of the Golan Heights controlled by Israel is a 500-square-mile territory wedged between northeast Israel and southwest Syria. Syria ruled this area until 1967. Then Israel occupied it. Since then, there have been about 50 years of negotiations, with Syria demanding the territory back and Israel demanding a peace agreement.

Many Israelis, though, knew that it never should  or would  be returned to Syria. The area was too important strategically and historically. In 1981, the Knesset passed a law essentially annexing the territory. And yet, negotiations continued, with successive prime ministers making overtures to the Syrians, until the Syrian civil war  and the takeover of much of Syria by Iran and its proxies  put an end to the charade.

Israel had no choice but to give up on the idea of withdrawing from the Golan Heights. But this reality involves a complete overhaul of the way the international community thinks not just about the Golan Heights but also about all the lands Israel occupied in 1967. The land for peace formulation for the past five decades has been a basis of all peace processes between Israel and Egypt, Syria and the Palestinians. Mr. Trump seems to have accepted the position of Israels government and given up on the idea that Israel has to withdraw to a decades-old line to get peace.

Withdrawal worked for Israel once, in 1979, when it signed a peace agreement with Egypt and left the Sinai Peninsula, which was also occupied in 1967. But that set a problematic precedent. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt insisted that Israel hand back the entire peninsula to the last inch. Israel decided that the reward was worth the price, as a major Arab country agreed to break with other Arab states and accept Israels legitimacy. But there was a hidden, unanticipated cost: Israels adversaries, in future negotiations, would demand the same kind of compensation. The 1967 line  what Israel controlled before the war  became the starting point for all Arab countries, including Syria. It became a sacred formula, worshiped by the international community.On April 9, Israelis will go to the polls to choose their next government. The campaign has largely been a referendum on whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should remain Israels leader in light of his expected indictment in three corruption cases for bribery and breach of trust. With those scandals front and center, policy disagreements have largely been ignored, leaving Israeli voters at risk of unwittingly bringing an avoidable disaster on themselves by annexing territory in the West Bank.

President Trump just raised that risk.

How so? On Twitter on Thursday, he wrote that it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability! It is the latest, and most important, signal from Washington that Mr. Trump is ready to acknowledge Israeli control of the Golan Heights.

But those signals are also being read by the Israeli right wing as an encouragement to pursue annexation of territory in the West Bank  a far more dangerous step that would present Israel with an unparalleled existential threat to its Jewish and democratic character.

To be sure, there is a big difference between the two territories, both of which came under Israeli control in the 1967 war. The sparsely populated Golan Heights, seized from Syria and annexed by Israel in 1981 in defiance of international criticism, were being used by Syria to bombard Israels Galilee region below.In 1992, recording artist Lisa Williamson, better known as Sister Souljah, opined, If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? She also said, If there are any good white people, I havent met them.

Sensing a political opportunity, Bill Clinton went before Jesse Jacksons Rainbow Coalition to rebuke Williamson. If you took the words white and black, and you reversed them, the Arkansas governor said, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.

Jackson was furious. But Americans were reassured that Clinton really was a new kind of Democrat, not in thrall to the partys left wing. He was elected president later that year.

American politics could use another Sister Souljah moment. Two, in fact.

The obvious need is among Republicans. In the last week, Donald Trump has renewed his campaign of insult against John McCain, proving that the lowest place on earth isnt the Mariana Trench  its the presidents soul. Yet with the notable exception of Mitt Romney, no Republican of national stature has done much more than clear his throat by way of objection, as if the president were no worse than a bumptious uncle passing gas at a Thanksgiving table.People lie to hide the truth. They lie to hide crimes. And while everyone is dying for a peek at Robert Muellers bombshell report to see if he says any crimes were committed by the Trump campaign in 2016, the truth is actually already out there, hidden in plain sight.

Mr. Muellers report may never go public, but we dont need a peek at the recommendations he delivered on Friday to Attorney General William Barr to credibly assess that something unethical and likely illegal went on in 2016. The repeated lies told by Trump campaign staff members  lies about their connections to Russian figures  already spin a grand tale of conspiracy and deceit. And its a tale so suspect and sordid that President Trump and his associates felt the need to lie to hide it from law enforcement.

This is not conjecture; some of Mr. Trumps people are already in jail, having been convicted in federal court for lying to investigators about their connections to and interactions with Russians during the 2016 campaign. Others have pleaded guilty to similar crimes, which  it bears repeating  is what one does when presented with overwhelming evidence of ones guilt. Still others await trial. Many more have been indicted.

Theres the top Trump campaign official Paul Manafort, who is serving time for lying about his history of lobbying for Russian interests and sharing Trump campaign polling data with a Russian intelligence asset during the campaign.Florida voters approved a ballot measure in November to restore voting rights to up to 1.4 million people with felony convictions who have served their sentences and thus paid their debt to society. The passage of Amendment 4, which went into effect in January, righted 150 years of injustice.

But Republican lawmakers in the state immediately went to work to undermine that progress. On March 19, a state House panel on criminal justice approved, along party lines, a measure that would erect new roadblocks for the Floridians who just regained the right to vote.

The new proposal would require those who want their voting rights restored to first pay all outstanding court fees and costs arising from their prior convictions  a move that one Democratic lawmaker denounced as an unconstitutional poll tax.

Under Amendment 4,  any disqualification from voting arising from a felony conviction shall terminate and voting rights shall be restored upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.[Update: Robert Mueller has submitted his full report on President Trump and Russia to the attorney general. Read more here.]

It could be any day now.

After nearly two years, 34 indictments or guilty pleas, and countless angry presidential tweets, the Mueller report, we are told, could be winding down.

When Robert Mueller finally sends his findings to the attorney general, what will we do? It depends, in part, on when that happens. For some big stories that have broken outside our typical production schedule  like on a Friday  weve put out special editions, a kind of emergency show. We did that when President Trump fired Steve Bannon, his closest White House adviser; when Trumps national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I.; and when the president bragged to Russian diplomats about firing F.B.I. director James Comey, saying it would take the heat off the Russia investigation.

We dont yet know when the report will land, but weve approached this story feeling that our greatest responsibility is to set the right expectations. Thats why we did something weve never done before: a series of explanatory episodes designed to set the table for the Mueller report  how its release could happen (or not happen), what it might conclude (or not conclude), and what it would trigger next (or not trigger next).Where do kids who go to specialized high schools go to college? Theres been lots of debate about whether a diploma from a specialized high school is a ticket to the Ivy League. Many students who graduate from specialized high schools go to SUNY (State University of New York) schools and other state colleges.

Eliza explained the factors parents use to decide between a private school and a public one.

This is a huge question right now as the city considers integration measures  especially considering the last time the city tried to integrate its schools, in the 1960s, some white parents boycotted their public schools and others fled to the suburbs or enrolled their kids in private schools. The question of students fleeing the public school system has kind of been a specter looming over this whole debate, even beyond the specialized high schools.

Though the percentage of white families enrolling in New York City public schools has declined over the last few decades, its been pretty flat at 15 percent for a few years, relative to their 30 percent representation in the city population as a whole. While some parents have threatened to pull their kids out of the system, its certainly not an easy thing to do: N.Y.C. private schools are extremely expensive  $50,000 a year or more  and their admissions are just as competitive as at the elite public schools, if not more so.

One user asked about a lawsuit, filed by civil rights organizations, contesting the use of the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. The groups say that black and Latino students do not receive the same preparation and that a single high-stakes test is not a fair measure of merit.

I have also been surprised by how little theyve participated in a debate they helped start. They put out a statement after the results came out this week (Its clear that the barriers to entry that keep talented black and Latinx students out must be dismantled, and yet the city is being challenged over its modest efforts to begin that process. Expanding diversity at these schools benefits all students, and the city should be encouraged to do more to address acute racial disparities, not less.)

But I thought that was pretty vague. As far as I know that lawsuit has gone nowhere. You also raise a broader issue: why hasnt the mayor been able to build a coalition to support his plan? To me, it seems like Richard Buery and a few other specialized high school alumni are doing all the work for City Hall. Why isnt there a broader coalition of civil rights groups, or black and Hispanic politicians, as youve asked many times.

Dont know whether that speaks to the mayors apparent inability to create political coalitions or whether the people you would think would support the plan  including the Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams, whose reversal from one of the strongest advocates of an admissions overhaul to vaguely opposed speaks volumes about this debate.Its what I call a two-person view, Mr. Peters said. If one of you hangs out the window and the other one holds onto his legs, you can see a tiny bit of the river or whatever view is being touted.

Brokers use all kinds of verbal gymnastics in blurbs that could be applauded if there werent a potential buyer at the other end of these colorful but ultimately obscure paragraphs. Since the possibilities to create your own piece of New York are endless, according to one TriBeCa listing I came across recently, your imagination could really take you anywhere, maybe even to one of the listing photographs of a virtually staged bedroom with walls where none currently exist.

Theres a reason for the euphemisms. Listing agents work for sellers, not buyers, and they have a delicate dance to do. They must simultaneously avoid offending their client while also conveying to the buyer that, say, although the kitchen was recently updated, the sellers penchant for flamingoes may have led to some interesting wallpaper choices.

Brokers are also bound by federal and local rules that require them to use inclusive language instead of phrases like great for families, which might imply that those without a family would not be welcome. So, if you want to let a buyer know that an apartment would be an ideal space for children, you might list the nontoxic paints the seller used in the bedrooms, giving a nod to anxious parents.

Brokers and their sellers, after all, want to get bodies into the open house, and who wants to see a dark basement apartment when they could instead see one facing an inner courtyard?They sing at such a low frequency, Dr. Cerchio said, that when he was diving in their habitat, he felt rather than heard their distinct, rhythmic patterns of song, and typically had to speed up the recordings to actually hear them.

Dr. Cerchio said many whale experts and amateurs thought they had seen Brydes whales, a slightly larger species of baleen whale, when they were really watching Omuras whales. Its like the difference between coyotes and wolves, if you didnt know they were two species, he said.

Japanese researchers first identified Omuras whales in 2003, based on a 1998 stranding in Japan and tissue from eight animals killed during Japanese scientific whaling operations in the 1970s. The Omuras whales have relatively small bodies, distinct genetics and unusually shaped skulls , leading researchers to conclude that the new species had split off from its genetic cousins 17 million years earlier.

Omuras whales are baleen whales, meaning they are filter feeders, and they can be identified by their asymmetric coloration. The right side of their jaws are white, with a swirling, smoky splash of light coloration and four bisecting dark stripes on the right side of their heads, and their backs are decorated with asymmetrical chevrons. They favor tropical environments more than than most whales and dont migrate, Dr. Cerchio said.

After publishing his 2015 paper, in which he described more than 40 whales seen in the wild and expanded their range beyond the Indo-Pacific, Dr. Cerchio said people sent him pictures of similar looking whales.

Little by little it became clear that there were a lot more out there that could be researched and tallied, he said.

At the urging of Bob Brownell, the papers senior author, Dr. Cerchio counted images he received, those hed stumbled across on the internet, as well as sound recordings and historical sightings dating back to a 1955 magazine article from Hong Kong University that misidentified an Omuras whal e as an immature fin whale.That conclusion was in line with that of another study published this month, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, published by the American Psychological Association.

For that study, researchers at Flinders University in Australia recruited 1,600 people online to look at photos that could be interpreted as positive, negative or neutral. They similarly measured mood throughout the experiment and found that while trigger warnings provoked an immediate decrease in mood, they had little other effect  a result that the authors noted was in line with the then-unpublished research conducted by Dr. Sanson and her colleagues.

While preliminary evidence suggests that trigger warnings are neither helpful nor harmful, both studies note that more research needs to be done on how such warnings specifically affect trauma survivors, the population for which they were originally intended.

Psychologists working with traumatized patients have long used the word "trigger to refer to sensations or experiences that remind individuals of their original trauma, but trigger warnings are commonly attributed to feminist spaces online.

Those communities began using such warnings years ago to alert readers to sensitive discussions, but it was not until the past decade that the alerts gained more widespread adoption. (For example, Slate, the online magazine, called 2013 the year of the trigger warning.) More recently, students on college campuses have increasingly called for their adoption in classrooms and on syllabuses.

Opponents of the idea say that trigger warnings coddle students and allow them to avoid discomforting perspectives. Proponents disagree, arguing that they can help those with a history of trauma avoid potentially disturbing material without banning it outright or brace themselves for it.

The thought behind trigger warnings isnt just that these states are highly unpleasant (although they certainly are), Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, wrote in The New York Times in 2015. Its that they temporarily render people unable to focus, regardless of their desire or determination to do so. Trigger warnings can work to prevent or counteract this.As he walked away, my friend jagged her thumb at Cupid and said, I think he likes you. I looked again at his thin body and corduroys and shrugged. After our single drink, my friend and I went home.

The next night, we ended up at the same bar. This time her ex-boyfriend joined us. I was mostly there for support. Amid their tart exchanges, I saw Cupid again, now wingless, wearing beat-up Sperrys and skinny jeans. He sidled up on the bar stool beside me and started asking questions, as if he were tapping around a wall looking for a hollow where he might put in a door.

The conversation grew intimate, and I began to recount my ex-boyfriend woes. He told me about his ex-girlfriend, who had cheated on him while she was in rehab. She had a habit, he said, of pushing him out to sea and then reeling him in when she felt lonely.

As the bar was closing, he flashed me a puckish smile and invited me back to his place to make out and snuggle.

Our clothes came off quickly. Staring up at him while we were having sex, a nervous itch came over me. Afterward, he asked me to sleep over and promised to make eggs and bagels in the morning.

I smiled and said, Sure.

Instead, I woke up when the sky was still black and slipped out with my boots in hand so as not to wake him. Outside, I was surrounded by old warehouses and leering industrial machinery. I followed the horizon back to my apartment and slid into bed as the sun came up.And yet, its hard to see how places like New Zealand can ever feel safe without some changes internationally. We need to understand American laws because they affect us, one commentator said on Radio New Zealand this week.

Indeed the lack of legislative effort by American lawmakers on the issues that helped spawn the Christchurch attack  guns, racism and tech platforms  is no longer just a frustration in the United States. Now it wounds the world.

Theres hard work to be done for that to change. The solution is not praying for victims or praising Ms. Ardern on Twitter. What New Zealanders want is for Americans to learn from others, for globalization to go the other way, even if it means limitations on fundamental U.S. of A. freedoms.

On guns, countries like New Zealand have less to confront: Of the 3.9 million New Zealanders of gun-licensing age, 238,000  just 6 percent  have a firearm license, according to the website GunPolicy.org. In the United States, three in 10 adults say they own a firearm.

Tech companies are another challenge. Despite a growing body of research showing that the algorithms of YouTube, Facebook and other social media platforms push people further into violent extremism, getting those companies and their employees to dial back their self-regard and shift their priorities may be as hard as persuading gun owners to give up their AR-15s.

And lets be honest: Those are the easy things to fix compared with racism and white supremacy.

Some Muslims in Christchurch are hoping that the unity of the community and New Zealand officials will set a new standard.

If we can use what happened here to say enough is enough, if we can promote what we call in New Zealand aroha, said Mustafa Farouk, president of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, using the Maori word for love, maybe the people behind these shootings will change.THOUGH THESE THREE represent only the most historically visible of the citys artists, the current vein of work being produced, much of it by the citys majority black population, is fueled by many of the same conditions that have long made Baltimore a site of such originality. The longstanding availability of cheap space in which to work and experiment combined with the interconnected collegiality of its arts communities has fostered this energy, even as Baltimores residents, artistic and otherwise, struggle with the citys dire political conditions. This paradox  the devils bargain of a city that operates as a laboratory for bold visions in exchange for social and economic precariousness  is at the heart of the citys creative life.

The option to leave for somewhere bigger, more important, is always present, which makes staying a conscious act of loyalty. (Adam Jones, the Orioles most popular player for the last 10 seasons, once quipped that his favorite place in Baltimore was the airport; fans forgave him.) But the best way to understand the citys strangeness  its ability to be not a lesser New York or a quieter Atlanta  is the richness of its underground, a place that feels very much alive in Baltimore. The work of the musician Abdu Ali, for example, combines the influences of punk, rap and Baltimore club (the citys explosive, ecstatic brand of hip-hop inflected house music) to create something bracingly new. A gender nonconforming artist, Ali spoke about the need to recognize the contributions of women and queer artists to the citys musical history  particularly the pioneers of Baltimore club, such as Miss Tony, who recorded tracks and spun records in drag through most of the 90s, and K-Swift, one of the citys most popular young D.J.s at the time of her death in 2008  while also expanding the scope of whats possible in the city. In 2013, Ali co-founded a concert and party series called Kahlon, which had the explicit goal of putting alternative and experimental black, L.G.B.T.Q. and women-identified artists on the same stage. As a Baltimore native, Ali noticed that too many of the shows they were going to, often dominated by straight, white artists, didnt reflect what the city really is, and what brings the charm to the city.

Its the only city left thats cheap enough to have a bohemia, John Waters told me, still willing, on a hectic day, to fulfill his lifetime role as ambassador to Baltimores creative byways. It used to be people said, I moved here, and people said, Why? And now, when I say I have an apartment in New York, people say, Why? Its the opposite of what it used to be. (As if his committed relationship with the city needed any more emphasis, a huge exhibition of his visual art, John Waters: Indecent Exposure, opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art last fall.) In the wake of the family-friendly musical adaptations of Hairspray (1988), including a live television version two years ago that reached more than 11 million viewers, its easy to forget how subversive much of Waterss work remains. Pink Flamingos has not been tamed by time; if anything, it might be even more shocking now, removed from its immediate post-60s context of ritualized taboo breaking. The entire movie feels like looking through a keyhole into a very particular, and quite varied, fetish party. A large woman in a baby crib relentlessly demands eggs; a man flexes his anus (in close-up!) in time to Surfin Bird; a live chicken is crushed between a couple as they have sex. Divine is treated throughout as a kind of dominatrix deity, responding to all dissent with violence. There are many places in America, one imagines, that would disinherit the person who produced such scenarios, or at least treat them warily. But Waters has become a synecdoche for the city  the embrace of queerness, of perversion of all kinds, a stand-in for Baltimores willingness to accept all comers and to make art out of whatevers around.Ms. Pugh initially responded to the scrutiny by telling a reporter from The Sun, which first reported the story, that the newspapers inquiry was a witch hunt.

The mayor, who did not respond to a request for an interview on Friday, said in a statement that she had self-published the first Healthy Holly title in about 2011. Shortly thereafter, she said, she took the book along to a board meeting of the University of Maryland Medical System.

I recall passing the time by thumbing through the first book before an U.M.M.S. meeting, Ms. Pugh said in the statement. One of my colleagues loved it and thought it would help advance childrens health. Despite all that has happened, I am glad that the important messages in the book reached our citys children.

The mayors misadventure is just the latest installment of crisis in Charm City, which has churned through five police chiefs in four years, suffered a record number of murders, and is a place where teachers must sometimes buy space heaters for their freezing classrooms.

The city has also struggled to provide decent health care and health care education to residents, particularly its children, according to city data.

A 2017 report from the citys health department found the citys age-adjusted mortality rate was 40 percent higher than the rest of the state; one in three high school students was either obese or overweight; one in four high school students drank one soda or more every day, but fewer than half ate one or more servings of vegetables. Fewer than half of middle school students, the report said, ate breakfast each day.

Ms. Pugh has written four titles so far: Healthy Holly: Fruits Come in Colors Like the Rainbow; Healthy Holly: Exercising is Fun!; Healthy Holly: Not all Vegetables are Green; and Healthy Holly: A Healthy Start for Herbie. She is currently at work on Healthy Holly: Walking With My Family.The authorities in Charlottesville, Va., arrested a 17-year-old boy on Friday in connection with an online threat targeting black and Hispanic students, bringing a sense of relief to a saga that had forced the closing of the citys public schools for two straight days.

The teenager, who was not identified, is believed to have published a post on the web forum 4chan that threatened an ethnic cleansing at Charlottesville High School, the authorities said.

The post set off a rapid investigation and prompted the Charlottesville public school district, which serves about 4,300 students from kindergarten to high school, to shut down all of its campuses on Thursday and Friday.

By midday Friday, the Charlottesville Police Department had announced that a suspect was in custody and had been charged with threatening to commit serious bodily harm on a school property, as well as harassment.The teachers have not been publicly identified, and none have spoken on the record about their experience.

One teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said trainers fired pellet guns at the teachers during several training exercises, not just the execution-style shooting. But in other exercises you were allowed to try to not get hit, she said in a phone interview on Friday.

She said the teachers were not told they were going to be shot before the execution-style shooting exercise began, and the trainers did not ask the teachers about their medical histories before subjecting them to physical force.

It hurt really bad, said the woman, who said she was left with bruises, welts and bleeding cuts that took almost two weeks to heal. You dont know who you are shooting and what types of experience those individuals had in the past, whether they had PTSD or anything else. And we didnt know what we were going into.

She described the training as frightening, painful and insulting.

What makes it more outrageous is they thought we would need to have that experience of being shot to take this seriously, she said. When I thought about it that way, I really started to get angry. Like we are not professionals. It felt belittling.A 9-year-old United States citizen was detained at a Southern California border checkpoint for more than 30 hours this week while the authorities said they worked to verify her identity.

The girl, identified by NBC 7 San Diego as Julia Isabel Amparo Medina, had been making her daily commute from Tijuana, Mexico  where she and her 14-year-old brother, Oscar, live  to school in San Ysidro, Calif., on Monday, the news station said. Because traffic was moving slowly, Julia and Oscar opted to walk across the border rather than wait in the car and risk tardiness, according to NBC 7, which first reported the story.

In an email on Friday, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman said two children arrived at one of the San Ysidro port of entry facilities for pedestrians at 10:15 a.m. on Monday. The children, whom the spokesman did not identify, presented a C.B.P. officer with United States passport cards, according to the spokesman, Ralph DeSio.

[Read the latest edition of Crossing the Border, a limited-run newsletter about life where the United States and Mexico meet. Sign up here to receive the next issue in your inbox.]House Democrats are almost certain to seek the evidence that Mr. Mueller received during the course of his investigation. A number of House committee chairmen are planning to ask executive branch agencies to preserve documents that they provided to the special counsel.

 Maggie Haberman

What would the worst-case scenario version of the report look like for Trump? What conclusions would it reach, and why would those be bad for Trump?

Dakota Gardner, Brooklyn

We dont know whats in the report. I dont want to speculate on what the worst-case scenario might be. But we do know that the special counsel had been investigating whether the president obstructed justice when he fired James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, in May 2017.

Mr. Mueller had also been examining Mr. Trumps ties to Russia and whether anybody associated with his campaign conspired with the Russians during the 2016 election. Mr. Muellers investigation led to charges against more than 30 people, but none of them tied the president to a Russian conspiracy.

 Adam Goldman

Why was Trump not interviewed? What effect will this have on the investigation?

Beth Long, Knoxville, Tenn.

We really dont know the answer, but Mr. Trumps lawyers consider it one of their greatest accomplishments that he never sat for an interview.

In early 2018, Mr. Mueller threatened to subpoena the president, setting off months of negotiations between the special counsels office and Mr. Trumps lawyers. Ultimately, in November, Mr. Trump answered several questions in writing about what occurred during the campaign. But he refused to answer questions about his time in office  including whether he tried to obstruct justice. This meant that Mr. Muellers prosecutors were only left with the statements of other witnesses when they sought to determine why Mr. Trump may have interfered with the investigation.

Mr. Trumps lawyers believed heading off an interview was such a great success because if he had testified, he would have been at risk of making an inaccurate statement and increasing his criminal exposure.

 Michael S. Schmidt2014: Russia sends troops into Ukraine and occupies the Crimean Peninsula. That helps set in motion a chain of events that brings us to here. I call it the Russian witch hunt. The public release of special counsel Robert Muellers report, the investigation into whether people associated with Donald Trumps campaign  Lock him up!  conspired with Russia in 2016  Its a whole big fat hoax. and whether Trump or his aides tried to obstruct this investigation. The people doing that investigation, theyre dirty cops. So how did we get here, from this to this? There was no collusion, theres no Russia. O.K., starting with Crimea, Russia enters and eventually annexes the region from Ukraine. The U.S. supports Ukraines government, so the U.S. responds with sanctions. To impose a cost on Russia. Russia decides to strike back to undermine U.S. democracy. Show me what hypocrisy looks like! How? Use Americas polarized politics to turn people against each other. Dont shoot! Perfect timing, because its 2015, and here comes the presidential election. The months tick by. Trump does well. I consider myself the presumptive nominee. Then several members of his campaign get approached by people with ties to Russia. Those people claim to have information that can hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign. See, the Russians dont like Clinton. They dont want her to become president. They say that she meddled in Russian affairs when she was secretary of state. But Trump  Wouldnt it be nice if we actually got along with Russia? Then we learned that Russian hackers had infiltrated the Democratic National Committees computer system. And just over a month later, Wikileaks publishes 20,000 hacked Democratic emails. All of this makes the F.B.I. more suspicious of Russian meddling and suspicious of ties between Trump campaign aides and Moscow. Trumps campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, denies this. We have no relationship. The F.B.I. investigates. Then  election victory, and the stakes get higher. President Obama gets ready to leave office. But before he does  The Russians were responsible for hacking the D.N.C.  he announces new sanctions on Russia. Enter Michael Flynn, Trumps soon-to-be national security adviser. He urges Russias U.S. ambassador from Moscow not to retaliate over those Obama sanctions. Russia agrees. Thats a problem because Trump hasnt been inaugurated yet. Flynn isnt part of the U.S. government. He may have broken federal law by doing this. Then  So help me God. Soon Flynn has to resign because he misled the vice president and others  I was disappointed.  about those conversations with the Russian ambassador. These chats become part of the F.B.I. investigation into Russian ties with the Trump campaign. The day after Flynn resigns, Trump meets with F.B.I. Director James Comey. According to Comey, Trump asked him to stop investigating Flynn. I took it as this is what he wants me to do. Three months after that meeting, Trump fires Comey. According to the White House  He fired him because he was not fit to do the job. Its that simple. Eight days later, the Justice Department taps former F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller to lead the investigation now that Comey is gone. His inquiry now includes Comeys firing. Did Trump try to obstruct the investigation by asking Comey to stop investigating Flynn? Lets move ahead to five months after Mueller took the job. He begins charging several Trump associates with a variety of crimes, like lying to the F.B.I. and bank fraud. See, thats important because they may have information that helps Muellers investigation. He can offer them lesser punishments in exchange for that information. Now its been almost 11 months since Mueller took over the investigation. And who gets caught up in this? Michael Cohen, Trumps personal lawyer. Hes mostly charged with crimes that arent part of the Mueller investigation. Mr. Cohen will continue to cooperate. But Mueller wants to talk to him to see if he knows anything about Trump business dealings in Russia while Trump was running for president. How do you feel about you may have changed an election? By the time Cohen testifies before Congress, its clear hes done being loyal to Trump. He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat. And so we come to the present, about five years since Russia annexed Crimea. The investigation  You wouldnt oversee a witch hunt, would you?  speculation  There was no anything, so thats the nice part.  and anticipation  Robert Mueller may be ready to submit his findings.  are all in the past. Only the future will tell us how the Mueller report will go down in American history.WASHINGTON  The report on the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, will be made public on Thursday, and unless youre a counterintelligence analyst, you may have lost track of how we got to this point in the saga and what Mr. Mueller was investigating in the first place. Here is a guide to what has happened over the past three years (yes, its been that long) and what we learned.

March 2016

Russia attacks the American presidential campaign.

Military intelligence officers in Moscow, working for the agency known as the G.R.U., used phishing emails and malware to hack into the Democratic National Committee and the Gmail account of John Podesta, Hillary Clintons campaign manager.

Meanwhile, operatives at the Internet Research Agency, a private company in St. Petersburg with Kremlin ties, accelerated their influence campaign, posing as Americans on Facebook and Twitter to mock Mrs. Clinton, promote Mr. Trump and sow discord. Other operatives came to the United States to gather intelligence and coordinate with unwitting Trump campaign staff to organize rallies, according to an indictment.

They were all aspects of a broader Russian operation that began in 2014, court papers show. American intelligence agencies would conclude that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered the intervention. Though it began well before Mr. Trump announced his run, Mr. Putin, who had long despised Mrs. Clinton, was later drawn to Mr. Trumps Russia-friendly stances. As Mr. Trump gained ground in the race, the Russian operatives adjusted their targets accordingly.michael barbaro

So its here.

michael schmidt

Well, its in the hands of Bill Barr. Its not here in the sense that we can publicly consume it and see what Bob Mueller found. It has just moved from one pocket, which we cant see into, into another pocket that we cant see into.

michael barbaro

But it has moved pockets, at least, which is something. Something weve been waiting two years for.

michael schmidt

Correct. Bob Mueller is done with his investigation.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is a special episode of The Daily. Today: The Mueller report has been sent to the attorney general. Its Friday afternoon, March 22. So Mike, talk me through your day today.

michael schmidt

So knowing it was going to be a big day, I turned on the recorder as soon as I left the house this morning and made my way into the office to hurry up and wait.

[music]

michael schmidt All right. 10:05 a.m.

michael schmidt

I left my house at 10:00 a.m.

michael schmidt We expect the report to be finished today around noon.

michael schmidt

Walking down 17th Street, heading to the office.

michael schmidt I got a call from the office from my editor wanting to know what I knew. Told her I knew nothing. Last thing an editor wants to hear  nothing new.

michael schmidt

Not a ton of people on the streets.

speaker Excuse me. michael schmidt Yes? speaker Do you know where the Jamaican Embassy is? michael schmidt I do not, Im sorry. Do you know what the address is?

michael schmidt

Was stopped by a woman who couldnt find the Jamaican embassy.

michael schmidt O.K., so youre going to want to go this way. Go to DuPont Circle, and make a right. Just keep on following that trail. speaker Oh, O.K., so Im going the wrong way. michael schmidt Well, were all going the wrong way.

michael schmidt

Come up to Massachusetts Avenue.

michael schmidt Cold March day. Fairly cold here in Washington. 45 degrees.

michael schmidt

Just had a normal sort of walk into the office.

michael schmidt [HUMMING] Half a block away, coming up to 17th 

michael barbaro

It doesnt seem like youre in a big hurry to get to the office.

michael schmidt

Well, all the work has been done. We know whats coming.

michael schmidt How are you? speaker Hey, Mike. michael schmidt Whats going on?

michael schmidt

So come into the building.

michael schmidt Big day? No? Not a big day? All right.

michael schmidt

Get on the elevator.

elevator voice announcer Floor seven.

michael schmidt

Walk into the office. And everyone wants to know 

speaker 1 What do you got? What do you got? speaker 2 Chasing the report.

michael schmidt

Whens it going to happen?

speaker This is the question I ask him every five  michael schmidt Days or  speaker Days or weeks. michael schmidt Days or weeks?

michael schmidt

The whole apparatus of The New York Times is jacked up for this moment.

michael schmidt We got Nick here. Were all ready. speaker Gangs all here.

michael schmidt

Theres been a lot of time and planning thats gone into this. Theres a lot of stories that have been written that are ready to go.

speaker Does that seem right? michael schmidt Yep. speaker O.K.

michael schmidt

Everyones sitting around waiting, and they want answers.

dean baquet So whats the latest?

michael schmidt

Dean Baquet, our executive editor, calls down to Washington to ask Elisabeth Bumiller, our bureau chief, what do you know?

elisabeth bumiller Youre not so sure about it? michael schmidt Im less sure about the timing, but 

michael schmidt

Elizabeth calls me over to her desk, puts him on speakerphone. Mikey, what do you know?

dean baquet Do you know much of a heads-up we may or may not get? michael schmidt My guess is not a lot because I dont know what there is to get a heads-up on.

michael schmidt

And I said, I dont know.

michael barbaro

[LAUGHS] You tell them that you dont know.

michael schmidt

We dont know!

dean baquet O.K. elisabeth bumiller Thats what we got. michael schmidt So thats all we got. elisabeth bumiller And we have stories ready. Once we get the word from Justice, we just push a button. michael schmidt All the work is done. elisabeth bumiller Were just tourists hanging around. michael schmidt Were sort of lemmings at this point.

michael schmidt

So its sort of just having the same unsatisfying conversation with different people throughout the office for several hours while eating doughnuts.

michael barbaro

[LAUGHS]

michael schmidt

And then it happens.

archived recording The special counsel investigation is over. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination with associates of President Donald Trump. That report has been submitted. Now the question is, what happens to it? How much gets released and when? That is up to the new attorney general, Bill Barr.

michael barbaro

So what do we know at this stage? It is Friday afternoon. Whats our understanding?

michael schmidt

Our understanding is that the attorney general and his deputies now have a long weekend of reading ahead of them. They have to go through the report, see whats there, digest it, and then figure out what to do with it. How much of it should be made public, how much of it should be given to Congress, and how much of it should remain secret.

michael barbaro

Is that really all we know at this point? Is there anything about how this unfolded that tells us anything about the report or what Mueller has found, if hes decided to bring any charges against any figure in the White House, or how hes thinking about this?

michael schmidt

We just know that Mueller is done. There are no more individuals that will be charged by the special counsels office in the investigation. If anyone else has gotten caught up in this, they will be indicted by other U.S. attorneys across the country who have absorbed investigations from the special counsels office.

michael barbaro

So the version of the report that will go to Congress and be seen by the public is the version that the attorney general has had a chance to go through and decide which parts should be seen by the larger world and which should not. And thats still going to take a while for him to figure out.

michael schmidt

Correct. And its a very difficult process, because if there is criminality in regards to the president, its a very tricky issue to navigate. The Justice Department has a policy that says the president cant be indicted. But if the president cant be indicted, Congress should deal with that behavior. How do you give that information to Congress? Its not a snap decision you can make  like, O.K., Muellers done, this is what he found. Lets put this in another box and send it to Congress. Its far trickier.

michael barbaro

So how does the A.G. make the decision about what to include and what not to include in this report?

michael schmidt

Barr is in this incredibly difficult spot, because he has to figure out how much information to share with the public and Congress in a way that is enough to leave people convinced that this investigation was done thoroughly and based on following the facts. But he has to protect the president from disclosures about him that the public may be interested in, that his political enemies may want to know, but that has no bearing on the actual criminal investigation that was done.

michael barbaro

And does how the attorney general handles that balance depend, in your mind, Mike, on what the report from Mueller finds and says and recommends?

michael schmidt

Yes. If Mueller says the president didnt break the law, then Barr has to figure out how much information to give to Congress so that Congress takes those findings seriously. The problem is Barr is in a very difficult spot politically, because the Democrats have already concluded the president did something wrong. So if Barr learns from Mueller that theres no criminality on the president, how does Barr then win over those Democrats and show them that Mueller truly made a decision based on the facts? How much of what the investigation found does he have to give to the Hill? In a normal criminal investigation, all of that information would not become public because the Justice Department would want to protect the individual who they have found did not commit a crime. But this situation is different, because a lot of people do think the president committed a crime. So how do you show the Democrats and the rest of the country that hey, look, this is what Mueller found. He only found X, Y, and Z. And if we wanted to make a case, he would have needed to have uncovered these other things, which he did not. And thats why were confident with his findings.

michael barbaro

And on the other hand, if Mueller does find criminality and perhaps recommend charges against the president, how does Barr have to proceed?

michael schmidt

Well, how much of the evidence that Mueller uncovered should go to Congress? What should be told to Congress? Should Congress be told explicitly, look, Mueller believes the president violated these laws, and heres the evidence to back it up? But what if some of that evidence has been obtained from a grand jury? The Justice Department cant just hand over grand jury information to Congress. What if the information is classified? Theyre not going to want to hand over classified information to Congress. They think Congress leaks like a sieve.

michael barbaro

Is it safe to say though, Mike, that if criminality is found by Mueller, Congress and the public will see more of the Muller report than if that is not found?

michael schmidt

Maybe. Maybe. But look, this is a highly unusual situation. The person who runs the executive branch, the president, has just been under investigation by folks inside of his own branch for the past 22 months. Very awkward situation.

michael barbaro

And the person making the decision about what we all will learn about that investigation is a direct appointee of that president.

michael schmidt

Correct. Has the job because the president put him there. So the perception here is one where the average person looks at this and says, well, how can a guy who was made attorney general by the president look at this situation and make a decision that is free of politics? And how can I have confidence that this was done based on the facts?

michael barbaro

So when will we know more? When will we know what the attorney general has decided on that front?

michael schmidt

Oh, now you want to know more.

michael barbaro

[LAUGHS] Yes, please.

michael schmidt

The greed of the news business.

michael barbaro

If youll indulge us.

michael schmidt

When will we know more? Barr and his deputies will go through this, and I dont know  sometime in the next few days, sometime in the next few weeks. It may be a difficult process to unbraid. Mueller has been rummaging around the presidents life for 22 months. We dont have clarity into everything Muellers found. What if Barr looks at it and says, eh, Mueller thinks he violated this law and that law. But actually, I dont think he has it. Maybe theres not enough there. Maybe Barr disagrees with what Mueller has found, simply on a legal basis. The other thing is that Barr only really gets one shot to get it right. Whatever he goes out the door with in terms of handing over information to Congress, hes got to have it right. Hes not going to have a second chance to say, well, you know, I gave you that stuff. But like, meh, maybe its not what I thought it was. Or, oh, lets give you more. He has to get it right the first time. Otherwise, hell look like hes waffling.

michael barbaro

And how much of how Barr handles this will be with a mind toward the expectation that a Democratically controlled House of Representatives is already into a series of investigations that they only want to redouble once this report is in their hands?

michael schmidt

Barr clearly knows Congress is going to jump up and down until it is satisfied with the information that it wants about this investigation. He can drag that out and probably lose it one way or another, either in the court of public opinion or in the actual courts. So he probably just wants to get it over with as soon as possible. He knows this has been an enormous weight on the country, and that the sooner it is resolved, the sooner the country can move on.

michael barbaro

And Mike, what is the likelihood that the way we find out more about the Mueller report is not from the version thats sent to Congress, but from something else? I think were all really mindful of the fact that this is the era of the leak, and that this is the biggest potential leak in recent memory.

michael schmidt

Yeah.

michael barbaro

Will it leak?

michael schmidt

I dont know. I mean, the number of people who will have access to this document will be very small. And they will know that if there are a lot of leaks about this, then the president can start to raise questions about whats really going on. It will look nefarious. The Democrats will get their backs up and say, well, if this stuff is leaking out, why cant we have access to it? They will know that their lives will be much more difficult if there are leaks here. Obviously, you could come up with a scenario where someone working on the investigation is frustrated that the Justice Department has decided to go one way or the other on the report, and they think, ah, screw it, Im going to make this public. But my guess is they have gone to great lengths to ensure that this is heavily protected.

michael barbaro

So now we wait again.

michael schmidt

Hurry up and wait.

michael barbaro

Mike, thank you very much.

michael schmidt

Thanks for having me.

michael barbaroGood Friday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.

_____________________

 President Trump said that the United States should recognize Israels authority over the Golan Heights, one of the worlds most disputed territories, reversing decades-long American policy. The United Nations has rejected Israels occupation of the Golan Heights, which was seized from Syria in 1967.

 Joe Biden, aware that concerns about his age could weigh on his candidacy if he runs for the White House, is considering two ideas to reassure voters: announcing a running mate well before the nomination, or pledging to serve only one term.

 The man in charge of Saudi Arabias ruthless campaign to stifle dissent used a secretive Israeli company offering technology developed by former intelligence operatives to spy on people. Read the investigation here, and our takeaways here.WASHINGTON  At 23, Elizabeth Pipko has branded herself on social media as a onetime figure skater, a part-time poet and a former Trump campaign aide, an Instagramista whose feed spotlights her Mar-a-Lago wedding and racy swimsuit and lingerie modeling shots.

But when President Trump latched onto Ms. Pipkos concept of a Jexodus  a fledgling, and some would say crass, effort by Republicans to woo Jews away from the Democratic Party  even Democratic leaders found themselves defensively responding to a young woman they did not know existed a month ago.

The rise of Ms. Pipko and the notion of a Jexodus  there is no evidence that any such thing is occurring  is an object lesson in how an idea can migrate from a no-name messenger to the broad body politic, through the organ of Fox News and the megaphone of the presidents Twitter account.I have to use this umbrella to protect myself from the torrent of illegal leaks. Roger Stone. Hes a Republican political consultant and a self-described  Agent provocateur. He was an adviser to longtime friend Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. Trying to stop Trump is like stepping in front of a hurtling freight train. Now, Stone is back in the spotlight. Hes been charged as part of Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation over his communications with WikiLeaks, the organization that released Clinton campaign emails stolen by the Russian government to help Trump win. In 2016, Stone said he had an in with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. I actually have communicated with Assange. We have a mutual acquaintance who is a fine gentleman. But now, he says it was all part of his political game. I set a Google News alert for Julian Assange. I read every interview he gave. And I used that information to posture and to bluff and to punk the Democrats. Stone has built a reputation on winning at all costs, even if it means bending the truth. I assumed he was lying. Its something Roger does. Posture and bluff. Thats politics. Stone started his career as a political operative at a young age. At 19, he was an entry-level trickster for Nixons re-election campaign. His name later came up in the Watergate investigation. I paid $100 to Mr. Roger Stone on one occasion to leave a leaflet, I believe, at Senator McGoverns headquarters. Stone and Trump have been friends and associates since the 1980s, when Stone was working as a political consultant with Paul Manafort. Yes, that Paul Manafort, Trumps former campaign manager, who has since been convicted of financial fraud. Stone says he has been encouraging Donald Trump to run for president since 1988. I would say that I would have a hell of a chance of winning. Between his outspokenness, his national name identification and his issue positions, he could be a formidable candidate. I guess were looking at it very seriously. After he got into some trouble working for Bob Dole in 1996, he bounced back  but has largely worked outside of political campaigns. Stone has a unique personal brand: a mix of provocation, politics and fashion. He can often be found discussing some of his favorite topics: the Clintons, how L.B.J. was behind the assassination of J.F.K. and fake news. Fake news. Stone strongly denies any wrongdoing in 2016. I havent done anything illegal. Ive been targeted for one reason and one reason only: I am loyal to the president of the United States. But emails and interviews suggest that he sold himself to the Trump campaign as a conduit to WikiLeaks. He is also connected to a web of associates, some of whom have been interviewed as part of Muellers investigation. Stone has been charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements, and witness tampering.RIO DE JANEIRO  The news coverage was breathless, political speculation was rampant and satirical Twitter memes flew after former President Michel Temer of Brazil was taken into custody on Thursday in connection .with a sweeping corruption probe known as Carwash.

Mr. Temers arrest did not come as a surprise. The 78-year-old politician, who for decades wielded enormous influence in Brazils notoriously transactional political system, has long been dogged by accusations of corruption.

But it was the second jailing of a former Brazilian president in as many years. And, in an unusual step some saw as overly harsh, a federal judge in Rio de Janeiro ordered Mr. Temers detention as a precautionary measure as the authorities investigate what they say is a pattern of kickbacks and money laundering he oversaw. The continuing Carwash scandal has tarnished much of Brazils political elite and could threaten the current governments agenda.

What is Carwash?

In 2014, federal police officers and prosecutors with expertise in money laundering exposed a wide-ranging scheme that came to be known as Lava Jato, or Carwash, after they stumbled onto suspicious currency transactions at gas stations in Brasilia, the capital.Were inside a Venezuelan prison with the minister for the prison service, Iris Varela. She is a close confidante of President Nicolas Maduro. And today, she is escorting a delegation from the Red Cross on a visit that will air on state television. Ms. Varelas press office had invited us here. But it appears she didnt want us to take the full tour. We tag along anyway, curious to see what the system supporting Maduro looks like. The government had closed this building down after a deadly riot. Then they reopened it and named it the Center for the Formation of the New Man. None of the men here are Venezuelan. We learned that theyre mostly Colombians held for crimes like murder and drug trafficking. Ms. Varela tries to show that the state treats people with dignity. The reality we see tells a different story, starting here on this staged tour, where theres no real mention of the one issue consuming the prison and the country: a nationwide blackout. Venezuela has been in crisis for years, but this power failure that lasted about a week is unprecedented. Even in the capital, it practically paralyzed life and showed that things could still get worse. We visit Alberto Diaz and his wife, Miriam. Alberto runs a small watch repair shop with his sons. Its the familys main source of income, and they use most of it just to put food on the table. They also depend on government handouts. Its clear to us theyre frustrated. But theyre careful when it comes to criticizing the government. Without electricity, the family also has no access to running water. So Miriam stores what she can and rations it. During the day, we see Venezuelans scramble to get water. Some are so desperate, they try and collect it from dirty drain pipes. We cant shoot freely on the streets. Security is everywhere, restricting access to places where hardship is most visible, like here at this public childrens hospital. Doctors are outside, speaking about the dire conditions on the inside. Were not allowed in the hospital, so we meet with Andrea Verde in the car. Andrea is the mother of a 7-year-old cancer patient. She tells us she sold her apartment and her car to cover a fraction of the treatment. Now shes living at the hospital with her daughter. We cant say that its the blackout that sent her into intensive care. But whats certain is that people are feeling the compounding effects of one crisis after another. And thats pushed some to take the risk and speak out. But not everybody blames Maduro. We head to the 23 de Enero slum, where the government still enjoys widespread support. Murals of Hugo Chavez, Venezuelas former leader, are everywhere. Hes seen as a hero here for pouring money into social programs to lift the poor. And before he died, he picked Maduro as his successor. Jesus Arellano is 25, and hes unemployed, and so he relies almost exclusively on government benefits. Benefits like access to food baskets, medicine and pensions, but these perks are not doled out purely based on need. Fatherland cards carry personal information  voting records, social media activity, political affiliation. So government benefits favor pro-government behavior. Its why this show of support for Maduro doesnt feel entirely genuine. Thousands gathered when the government called for a protest during the blackout. But are they here out of choice or need? We asked them why they came out. We hear it over and over, people repeating what the government claims  that the United States is responsible for the most recent disaster. There is no evidence of direct sabotage. But that claim fits into a popular narrative here: that U.S. sanctions against Maduro are generally making peoples lives worse. Jesus is referring to Juan Guaido. In January, Guaido declared himself interim president and used U.S. support to mobilize the opposition and try to force Maduro out of power. At this Guaido rally were attending, he appears strong and defiant   inspiring thousands of supporters. Guaido continues to provoke, but so far Maduro has withstood the challenge. And for now, he still sits in the presidential palace.KABUL, Afghanistan  Two United States service members were killed during a joint operation with Afghan forces in northern Afghanistan on Friday, bringing to four the American combat deaths in Afghanistan so far this year, Afghan and American officials said.

A spokeswoman for the American-led NATO mission in Afghanistan confirmed the two deaths in a brief statement, but it did not release any details of the attack.

The incident is under investigation and we have no additional information to provide, said the spokeswoman, Sgt. 1st Class Debra Richardson.

Qayum Nuristani, a spokesman for the Afghan special forces, said that the operation was in northern Kunduz Province. One Afghan commando was killed and three others were wounded, he said, adding that many Taliban had also been killed in the fighting.HONG KONG  The police on Friday detained personnel from a chemical plant in eastern China after an explosion killed at least 64 people, setting off an inferno that firefighters battled through the night and raising fears of toxic substances spreading in the air and water.

The blast Thursday afternoon at Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical Company, on the outskirts of the city of Yancheng in Jiangsu Province, was believed to have caused a tremor equivalent to a magnitude-2.2 earthquake, the China Earthquake Administration said.JAKARTA, Indonesia  Indonesias national airline has told Boeing that it wants to cancel an order of 737 Max 8 jets, the carriers spokesman said on Friday, the first publicly confirmed attempt to cancel a deal for the planes since they were grounded around the world this month after two deadly crashes.

The airline, Garuda Indonesia, said that its passengers had lost confidence in the model after the crashes. It said that it sent a letter to Boeing on March 14 seeking to cancel its order of 49 more planes; it had ordered 50, just one of which has been delivered. The deal is estimated to be worth $4.9 billion.

Continuing the Max order does not benefit Garuda, said the spokesman, Ikhsan Rosan. Our passengers, psychologically, they dont trust flying with Max anymore. They often asked during booking what type of aircraft they would be flying on.

A Boeing spokesman declined to comment. More than 4,000 737 Max planes, Boeings best-selling aircraft, are on order by airlines around the world. Boeings stock, which has dropped about 12 percent since the March 10 Ethiopian Airlines crash in which 157 people died, fell nearly 3 percent on Friday.The past few days have included a flood of proposed solutions to the violence, along with challenges.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern unveiled a ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons and the ammunition and parts that were used in the shootings  an overhaul of gun laws that she hopes to have fully in place by April 11.

Her quick action is a source of pride for many New Zealanders. Within the first few hours of the prime ministers announcement, more than 300 gun owners filled out forms to turn in weapons that were the targets of the ban.

Ms. Ardern also pledged this week to work with other countries on holding social media companies accountable for letting hateful speech thrive on their platforms.

Funerals, which were few and far between for most of the week as families pressed officials for the bodies of their loves ones, suddenly were being conducted with heartbreaking efficiency.SEOUL, South Korea  North Korea on Friday withdrew its staff from the joint liaison office it has operated with South Korea since September, signaling a hardening of its position toward the South weeks after the failed summit meeting between the Norths leader, Kim Jong-un, and President Trump.

North Korean staff at the liaison office in Kaesong, a North Korean town just north of the two countries border, packed up and left on Friday, saying they had been ordered to do so, the Souths Ministry of National Unification said. They did not ask their South Korean counterparts to leave, the ministry said.

We consider the North Koreans decision regrettable and hope that they will return as early as possible so the liaison office can resume its normal operation, the ministry said in a statement.

It was the Norths latest show of discontent since the talks in Hanoi, Vietnam, between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump over the Norths nuclear arms program ended without a deal. North Korea blamed what it called an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust created by Washington for the breakdown in negotiations.WASHINGTON  President Trump undercut his own Treasury Department on Friday with a sudden announcement that he had rolled back newly imposed North Korea sanctions, appearing to overrule national security experts as a favor to Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.

The move, announced on Twitter, was a remarkable display of dissension within the Trump administration. It created confusion at the highest levels of the federal government, just as the presidents aides were seeking to pressure North Korea into returning to negotiations over dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea, Mr. Trump tweeted. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!

The Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Friday against Iran and Venezuela, but not North Korea.In the hours after the shooting, she wore a black head scarf while comforting victims families, embracing and grieving alongside them.

When President Trump asked her what he could to to help, she responded: Sympathy and love for all Muslim communities.

And on Wednesday, just six days after a man gunned down worshipers in two New Zealand mosques, killing 50, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made a swift gesture: banning military-style semiautomatic weapons.

We are one, they are us, she said of her countrys Muslims, many of whom are migrants or refugees. That unifying cry has become a symbol of her response.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Ardern h as strayed from the usual post-attack script  drawing international praise for her ability to mix empathy with concrete action, shaping her path as a compassionate but defiant and decisive leader.Britain does not have the physical infrastructure or bureaucracy to manage such checks, nor do some of its European trading partners. The British government has said it will wave trucks through the border, at least for the first several months, but the European Union will not. So trade would slow down, particularly on the Continental side, hurting merchants of perishable goods and manufacturers; some products could be barred from crossing borders; and experts predict higher prices and shortages.

In addition, Britain has no trade treaties with most of the world, including the United States, because it has operated under the European Unions treaties, and negotiating new ones can take years. In a no-deal Brexit, the existing arrangements would abruptly cease to exist and Britain would default to rules set by the World Trade Organization, upending the way every importer, exporter and regulator in the country operates.

Economists and the government say that leaving without a plan in place would do severe economic harm. But the most ardently pro-Brexit lawmakers in Britain insist that the cliff edge is nothing to fear, and preferable to a long delay.

What is all the talk about elections?

There is at least one set of elections approaching that could affect Brexit, and others are possible.

European Union member countries are scheduled to hold elections for the European Parliament from May 23 to 26.

But if there were a two-year delay for Brexit, as some European officials have proposed, then Britain would be in an awkward position: It would be required to participate in elections, which the major British political parties do not want to take part in, to govern a bloc it intends to abandon.

The exit dates set in Brussels were chosen with these European elections in mind: May 22 is the day before Britain would have voted, and April 12 is the last day it could start preparations to hold a vote.LONDON  A small but influential party aligned with Prime Minister Theresa Mays government suggested on Friday that it still cannot support her plan for Britains departure from the European Union, a development that could doom her hopes of persuading Parliament to pass the deal next week on the third try.

The Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland holds just 10 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons. But the central sticking point in the talks on a British withdrawal has been how to handle the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and the partys position carries disproportionate weight with others in Parliament.

Parliament has twice rejected the agreement that Mrs. May negotiated with the European Union for Britains departure, known as Brexit, and both times the D.U.P. has voted against it, largely because of concerns about the border issue.

If Parliament rejects the deal again, there is still the possibility of a cliff-edge Brexit in the short term or a much longer delay to renegotiate the agreement to leave.It is no secret that the French telegraphic service treated the public with scant courtesy during the war, delivering despatches when and to whom it pleased, but the extent of its abuses as elicited by the committee appointed by the Chamber of Deputies to investigate into State contracts during the war will nevertheless astonish everybody.

This investigation  the results of which are published in the Temps  shows that the Telegraphic Control Section, of which M. Tannery was the head and Captain Ladoux and M. Pierre Lenoir were active members, was responsible for scandalous abuses.

For instance, in the course of the investigation M. Tannery recognized that on an average at the Paris Telegraph Bureau 40,000 despatches were held back daily. The majority of them were never delivered and the others were distributed after great delay. The despatches which were retained were in the main thrown into a basket and when the accumulation had become too great they were destroyed. The Control Section never made any inquiry and neither the senders or those to whom the despatches were addressed were ever informed.

It must be admitted that these telegraph authorities were no respecters of persons. Telegrams sent by or to foreign sovereigns, princes, and diplomatists were treated like the despatches of Tom, Dick or Harry. In fact, the close attention and all the patience of the Delegation of Foreign Affairs was needed to prevent the systematic holding up of these State telegrams.ROME  President Xi Jinping of China arrived on Friday at Romes presidential palace with a cavalry escort usually reserved for royals. For a three-day visit, Italy pulled out all the stops for an economic superpower promising billions in investment and trade deals in exchange for officially signing on to Chinas vast new Silk Road.

But even as Mr. Xi and his wife were serenaded at a state dinner by Andrea Bocelli, the leaders of France, Germany and the European Union huddled in Brussels hoping to strengthen the Continents defenses against what they considered to be Chinas economic incursion.

The disconnect between the two scenes laid bare the divisions and tensions in Europe, caught in the middle of a trade war between the United States and China, while trying to find its bearings and assert its power in a volatile era of shifting geopolitical alliances and American retrenchment.

China plays on our divisions, President Emmanuel Macron of France, speaking in Brussels, told reporters on Friday, adding that the European Union had finally woken up to China. The period of European naivete is over.The primary suspect in the shooting aboard a Dutch tram that left three people dead and five wounded confessed on Friday to the attack, and said that he acted alone, prosecutors said.

The public prosecutors office has said that it intends to bring terrorism charges against the suspect, Gokmen Tanis, in the attack Monday morning in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands, but it is also investigating whether he had other motives.

Mr. Tanis confessed in a closed court hearing on Friday, the office said  his first appearance in court since he was arrested hours after the shooting. The judge ordered him held for 14 days, the maximum allowed in an initial hearing, but pretrial detention can be extended up to 90 days.

The 37-year-old suspect admitted to a judge the criminal facts he was suspected of. He also testified that he acted alone, prosecutors said in a statement. It is in the best interest of the investigation not to say anything further about his testimony.ROME  On the flight back to Rome after a papal trip to the United Arab Emirates last month, the Mexican journalist Valentina Alazraki got an unexpected surprise.

As the popes customary news conference with the reporters was winding down, a large square cake was wheeled into the cabin and placed next to him. They told me were celebrating Valentinas 150th birthday, he said with a laugh, adding: She doesnt look so mummified to me.

The celebration was actually for a milestone that even the most seasoned Vatican correspondents rarely reach: It was the 150th papal trip for Ms. Alazraki, who has covered Italy and the Vatican for Televisa, Mexicos largest media conglomerate, since 1974.

After cutting the cake, she offered the first piece to the pope, but he declined, saying, It will make me get fat. Then the pope  and the cake  were whisked away.Today, the Gulf countries are more interested in partnering with Israel against Iran than in standing up for abstract notions of Arab dignity, and unrest and economic troubles have left other Arab countries more concerned with their own affairs.

As for Syria, its own war has left the country so weak and ostracized that few care what it wants.

The Golan was always seen as the carrot that Israel would cede for peace with Syria, and now peace doesnt matter, Syria doesnt matter and maybe Syria doesnt exist at the table as the legitimate owner of the land, said Kareem Sakka, editor in chief of Raseef22, an Arabic news site.BEER TUVIA, Israel  The military chiefs appeared on screen in full battle dress, commanding troops, sitting in cockpits or charging across deserts with assault rifles.

The video clip that opened a pre-election town hall meeting at the small, prosperous farming community of Beer Tuvia in southern Israel was not a trailer for the next war against the militant groups Hezbollah or Hamas. It was a promo for how the triumvirate of ex-soldier statesmen leading the new centrist Blue and White coalition intends to oust the longtime conservative incumbent, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Election victories by prominent military veterans are nothing new in Israel. Two former chiefs of staff, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, served as prime minister. But after a drop-off in recent years in the political involvement of retired generals, they are back in the vanguard, posing the most formidable challenge in a decade to Mr. Netanyahu.

Even though Mr. Netanyahu is facing possible indictment in three corruption cases this summer, he has maintained a strong, popular base of support. The Blue and White leaders and other critics of Mr. Netanyahu have presented the return of the generals as a one-time, emergency call-up for the sake of the country and clean government.BEIRUT, Lebanon  In tense meetings on Friday, United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pressed leaders of Lebanon to curb the growing power of Hezbollah, the political and military group supported by Iran that holds government posts and runs the health ministry.

Lebanon and the Lebanese people face a choice: bravely move forward as an independent and proud nation or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future, he said while standing next to the foreign minister, Gebran Bassil, after an afternoon meeting. Mr. Pompeo added that it would take courage for Lebanon to stand up to what he called Hezbollahs criminality, terror, and threats.

Mr. Bassil, who is an ally of Hezbollah, countered Mr. Pompeo in his own post-meeting statement, saying: For us, Hezbollah is a Lebanese party, not terrorists. Its members of parliament were elected by the Lebanese people, with high popular support.

Mr. Pompeos meetings in Lebanon, which included sessions with President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister Saad Hariri, were bound to be awkward, since he had been announcing for days that his express purpose for going to Lebanon was to denounce Hezbollah and its allies in the government. It is rare for a countrys top diplomat to publicly declare that a visit is aimed at berating a government or a party within it.WASHINGTON  Clashes are continuing with Islamic State fighters in eastern Syria, United States military officials said on Friday after the White House claimed that American-backed forces had retaken the extremist groups final sliver of territory.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters aboard Air Force One that the Islamic States caliphate in Syria had been 100 percent eliminated. She said Acting Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan had briefed President Trump during the flight.

Mr. Trump has declared the Islamic States defeat several times in recent weeks. Each time, Pentagon officials have gingerly tried to clarify that the groups remnants remain hunkered down  first in the town of Hajin and now outside the small village of Baghuz on the Syria-Iraq border.

Ms. Sanders told reporters to refer questions to the Pentagon, but the Defense Department declined a request for comment.Every year around this time, people grumble about their tax bills. This year, taxpayers who lost the deduction for state and local taxes in the 2017 tax overhaul bill  mainly those in California and states in the Northeast  are going to grumble even more. And for some, that grousing has turned to talk of fleeing to lower-tax states.

Those wealthy enough to own homes in multiple states will want to have their cake and eat it, too. Some will try to establish residency in one of the seven states that have no state income tax: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.

In doing so, they will reduce their tax bills substantially: up to 13 percentage points for California residents, for instance, or nearly nine points for those in New York and New Jersey.

The people trying to take advantage of this strategy have always been a target of state tax collectors, but financial advisers say states like California and New York have stepped up their collection efforts, and they urge caution for anyone considering this approach.The whale sighting happened right away, minutes into Day 1. Jon, Dave and I had just been dropped off on a remote Alaskan shoreline, an hour and a half by boat from the closest speck of a town. Jon was working as a sea-kayaking guide that summer in Glacier Bay National Park, and he had invited us up for a seven-day excursion during his week off. As the boat that delivered us vanished, the drone of its engine dampening into a murmur and then finally trailing off, it became unthinkably quiet on the beach, and the largeness and strangeness of our surroundings were suddenly apparent. It was a familiar phenomenon for Jon from the start of all his trips: a moment that people instinctually paused to soak in. To me, it felt like those scenes of astronauts who, having finally rattled free of the earths atmosphere, slip into the stillness of space. Except we werent in space. We were on earth  finally, really on earth.

We were only starting to move around again, packing our gear into the kayaks, when we heard the first huff of a blowhole, not far offshore.

Jon was ecstatic. It seemed to him as if the animal were putting on a show, swimming playfully in the kelp, diving, resurfacing, then plowing its open mouth across the surface to feed. He took it as a good omen. Though I had no idea at the time, he was anxious that Dave and I might feel intimidated about making the trip; such a big payoff, so quickly, would get us excited and defuse any apprehensions.

For Dave, the whale-sighting had exactly the opposite effect. Once, when he was a kid, his dad took him scuba diving with dolphins. They were friendly, awe-inspiring creatures, purportedly, but they terrified Dave instead. He could still conjure the feeling of hanging defenselessly in that water while the animals deftly swirled around him, less like solid objects than flashes of reflected light, while he could move only in comparative slow-motion. Ever since, he had harbored a fear of large sea creatures  a niche phobia, particularly for a young man who lived in the Bronx, but a genuine one still. And so, even as Dave understood that a chance to see whales up close like this was a major draw of a kayaking trip in Alaska, and though he feigned being thrilled, some second thoughts were kicking in: We were going out there, he realized.

The whale left me exhilarated and gleeful, like Jon; but deeper down, I also remember feeling shaken, like Dave. Nothing about the animal registered to me as playful or welcoming. It just appeared in the distance, then transited quickly past us, from left to right. My uneasiness had something to do with the whales great size and indifference  its obliviousness  as it passed. Watching it made me feel profoundly out of place and register how large that wilderness was, relative to me.

At the time, I was working at a literary magazine in New York City called The Hudson Review, picking poems out of the slush pile and mailing them to an outside panel of editorial advisers. I was trying hard in my letters to impress one of them: Hayden Carruth, a gruff and irreverent 81-year-old poet who lived far upstate. I loved Carruths work but was more enamored with his persona: his yeoman life in the woods, his intolerance for phoniness and, most of all, the precision with which he articulated common suffering, including one strain of his own suffering that I related to, particularly in those years, but wouldnt have had the courage, or clarity, to examine.

I had always been aware, Carruth once wrote of his youth, that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars, was enveloped in the great sadness, pervaded by it. ... Never then or now have I been able to look at a cloudless sky at night and see beauty there. A kind of grandeur, yes  but not beauty. The profusion and variety of celestial lights have always frightened me. Why are they there? Why these instead of others? Why these instead of nothing?

That was how I felt, watching the whale from the beach: afraid that everything was accidents. Then again, maybe its just hard to picture the start of the trip in retrospect without amplifying some feeling of foreboding. Something else Carruth wrote that has always stuck with me: The wilderness begins at the edge of my body, at the edge of my consciousness, and extends to the edge of the universe, and it is filled with menace.

[Read about Aleksander Doba, the 71-year-old who kayaked across the Atlantic 3 times.]

It was mid-August 2002, and we were 23, 24 and 25. We had graduated from college together two years earlier. Dave, whom I also grew up with, shot out of undergrad knowing he wanted to be a doctor and had just finished his first year of medical school. Any similar momentum I had after graduation was instantly sapped. Three nights after I returned to my parents house from school, I found myself driving my father to the emergency room. Three weeks after that, he died. My grief was disorienting and total; at a moment in life when everything is supposed to feel possible, making any single decision became impossible. I gave into that sadness for the better part of a year, resettling at home in New Jersey with my widowed mother and sliding back to the summer job I worked during school, glumly breaking down beef at a butcher shop two towns over.

I coped with my fatherlessness and confusion in ways Im not proud of and still dont understand. I read a lot of books about Ronald Reagan, for example, even the collection of his love letters to Nancy. I also lashed out at Dave, who was living at home that summer, too, studying for the MCAT. He withdrew awkwardly after the funeral, and I suppose I was happy to hold that against him. It triggered some longstanding jealousy. A part of me always resented how he seemed unfairly exempt from the self-doubt and heaviness that I was prone to.

Jon, meanwhile, was teaching at a rustic little boarding school in Switzerland, where his mother was from. The summer after graduation, before starting the job, he set out for Alaska with a friend, sleeping in the bed of their old pickup. In the minuscule town of Gustavus, the gateway to Glacier Bay, he picked up seasonal work in the warehouse of a kayak-tour company. Jon had little actual experience of sea kayaking but had always felt drawn to the ocean in the abstract. In college, he and another friend plotted out a paddling expedition near Glacier Bay, across the border in Canada and applied for a grant from our school to fund it. The grant was set up in memory of an alumnus who died in an avalanche while mountaineering. It was meant to encourage the responsible and conscientious pursuit of wilderness expeditions. Safety was key. But the committee rejected Jon and his partners application. They seemed insufficiently prepared.

That wasnt surprising. Jon grew up doing a lot of backcountry camping and was a competent outdoorsman, but putting together a grant application required a kind of administrative fastidiousness he didnt always possess. He was bright but scatterbrained, forever picking up things and putting them down, both figuratively (music projects, conversations) but also literally. I can still picture him hustling around the house we shared in college, hunting for his keys or his soldering iron, having gotten in over his head rewiring some device. He was an artist; one piece I remember consisted of a half-peeled banana, implanted with circuitry and suspended in a jar of formaldehyde. Once, he grew grass in our upstairs bathroom  a living bathmat, he said  until the turf became muddy and flooded the downstairs.

This was Jons third summer in Alaska, and hed worked his way up to leading expeditions, taking out vacationers for days at a time. Our trip, however, would venture beyond the typical circuit, into a remote corner of the park that hed never been to. Jon had no serious concerns about our safety, but he felt he bore responsibility for our emotional well-being. To enjoy ourselves, we would need to feel comfortable, not just in the wilderness but also with him as a leader.

He suspected we wouldnt trust him entirely. We didnt. We knew him before he became a professional guide, and our perception of his expertise lagged behind the reality. With Jon, Dave told me, it was always unclear to what extent hed thought everything through. Dave remembered landing in Gustavus the night before we got underway and casually asking Jon a lot of questions: Where are we going, exactly? Do we have everything we need? Jon seemed to have solid answers for all of them. As we headed back to his place for a good nights sleep, he told us to wait in the yard. He was living alone for the summer in a house that an acquaintance was building in the woods. The structure was framed-up but largely wall-less, and Jon, to be safe, needed to check that no moose had wandered in.

After a spectacular first day of paddling, we came ashore on a rocky tidal flat about two miles from where we were dropped. Jon gave us his detailed tutorial about bear safety while we set up our campsite. He taught us, for example, to holler Hey, bear! if we heard any rustling but also preventively, ahead of us, when we walked through the woods. The last thing you wanted was to come across a brown bear unannounced.

Hey, bear! Jon kept hollering, by way of demonstration. He said it goofily, like a childrens TV host greeting some down-on-his-luck ursine neighbor at the doorway to their clubhouse. This was intentional. Jon had noticed that the people on his trips often resisted bellowing Hey, bear! into the wilderness. It was essential for their safety, but it felt silly or vulnerable somehow, like singing in public. So he learned to turn it into a shtick, spinning it into a stream-of-consciousness narration: Hey, bear, Im coming into the trees now. Hope youre having a fantastic evening, Mr. Bear! It loosened everyone up. They were performing for their friends now; the whole group was in on the joke.

I had never seen a wild bear, though I have backpacked in bear country a handful of times. I felt comfortable with the animals in the abstract. But here, the bears werent abstract; they breached the material plane. There were bear trails everywhere, leading from the tree line to the water, and disquietingly close, I felt, to where we were pitching our tent. We found heaps of their scat. We saw trees where the animals had slashed off the bark to eat the inner layer, tufts of fur from their paws still plastered in the sap.

I pretended I was having fun. But that evening I grew increasingly petrified, almost delirious. My eyes tightened, scanning for bears. The sound of the wind became bears, and so did the mossy sticks cracking under our feet. I gave myself a migraine, then phased in and out of sleep.

At sunrise, I woke feeling foolish. While Jon cooked pancakes, I reasoned with myself, privately, in a notebook I brought on the trip. I tried to conceive of the situation as a geometry problem. Yes, some number of bears roved this landscape, I wrote: relatively tiny, independent blips, going about their business randomly, just like us. In all that empty space and confusion, a lethal collision of their moving blips and our moving blips would be an improbable coincidence. Id been distorting those odds, mistaking myself for the absolute focus of all bears attention, I wrote. It was embarrassing, really. To be afraid of bears, I concluded, is to be narcissistic.

I was reminding myself that freakishly horrible things are, by definition, unlikely to happen. Even now, my reasoning feels sound.

[Read about the search for a missing hiker in Joshua Trees wild interior.]

Day 2 was a slog. We paddled through a spitting drizzle in an endless straight line, along the high granite walls of the coast. We talked less and less, just pushed through the emerald chop. Then eventually we gave up, hauling in our boats and making camp in a wide, crescent-shaped cove, short of the site that Jon originally picked out on his map.

We had entered Dundas Bay, a rarely visited pocket of the national park that, Ive since learned, has a storied history as a hide-out for solitary misanthropes. In the 1930s, one prospector built a cabin not far from our campsite and brandished a gun at the Alaska Natives who passed through.

We intuited that the scenery was beautiful, but we could see very little of it through the fog. Our guidebook explained that the east side of the bay  where we were  can get extremely rough during foul weather, since large waves roll in ... and batter this shoreline. That was happening now: The weather that plinked at us all afternoon was roiling into a storm. Soon, the big rain started. We rushed through dinner, then loafed in our tent until, eventually, the loafing turned to sleep.

A local newspaper would later describe the storm as short but intense. In Gustavus, a creek swelled to about a foot higher than its previous record. Gale winds, with gusts up to 59 miles per hour, turned back two cruise ships in Skagway, about 85 miles north. Around 2 a.m., we woke to discover the wind had shorn the rain fly off our tent. Jons sleeping bag and mine were soaked, while Dave was snug and dry between us. We heard torrents of water lashing down and the waves crashing in the cove.

We got up three or four hours later. The rain and wind no longer felt ferocious but were still too gnarly to paddle through; there was no question, Jon said, that we were staying put. We cooked breakfast and took turns playing chess in the tent. By late morning, the storm seemed to have passed. We were antsy. We figured we would take a look around.

The terrain was crammed with thickets of alder and spruce, underlain by ferns and a furor of prickly things. Jon pointed out devils club: three or four feet tall and leafy, armored up and down with spines. The plant pierced fleece and hurt like fire.

Jon, a friend of the author, at the start of the trip in Glacier Bay National Park. He was the most experienced of the three friends and was working as a guide in Alaska. From Jon Mooallem

There were no trails. Wed been trudging for some time when we reached a fast-moving stream, maybe 10 feet wide. Jon was surprised; it wasnt on his map, most likely just a drainage bloated by the storm. We followed it downstream, looking for a way across, and eventually found it bridged by a hefty tree trunk. It seemed like an easy crossing. Jon stepped up and led the way, and Dave and I waited in a single-file line on the stream bank behind him. The creek was loud, like a factory with all its gears and rollers churning. Looking down, Jon realized there was more water than hed thought.

Thats when I heard the snap in the woods behind me. After all my paranoia, I instantly understood that the many bears Id thought I heard before were absolutely not bears  were nothing  because this sound was so unmistakable and crisp, so explicitly something. I turned and hollered, Hey, bear! then waited a beat. Maybe I said Hey, bear! again; Im not sure. But I must have scanned those trees long enough to feel satisfied and safe, because I know I was turning my head, to go back to my friends, when I saw the dark shape rushing forward in my peripheral vision.

What I heard must have been roots popping. If a tree is large enough, you can apparently hear them cracking underground like gunfire.

The thud was seismic. The trunk crashed down right next to me. Mapping out bits of evidence later, we concluded that the tree must have been about 80 feet tall and perhaps two feet in diameter. It was some kind of conifer  a spruce or cedar. I screamed, involuntarily, Look out! then watched Dave, a few steps directly in front of me, dive sideways and hit the ground. When I got to him, he was crouching, stunned but O.K. He looked up and said, Go get Jon.

It hadnt clicked back in for me: There were three of us. The sight of Dave going down had canceled out everything else. I scrambled out over the creek, running across the tree that had just fallen, shouting Jons name, then spotted him in the water, tangled in a snarl of sheared-off branches near the bank behind me  a cage, which kept him from hurtling downstream.

He did not know hed been hit by a falling tree. It had narrowly missed his head, struck his left shoulder, shearing it from his collarbone and breaking many of his ribs. Later, a doctor would explain that the downward force had been so powerful that it had probably squashed Jons entire upper body, and all the organs inside, down toward his waist, momentarily compressing him like a bellows; for a split second, his shoulders headed in the direction of his bellybutton, before his torso sprang up again.

Jon had heard nothing, seen nothing. He was turning around to help Dave onto the log  again, feeling responsible for our safety  and the next thing he knew, he was in the water. He tried to reach out his left arm but could not make it move. He could not move his legs. He felt a bolt of pain down his spine.

Jon later described flashing through an idiosyncratic sequence of thoughts, all in a few milliseconds, as if watching a deck of cards fanning across a table. One was an image of himself in a wheelchair, sitting behind a mixing console in a fancy recording studio. I guess I can become a recording engineer in a wheelchair, he remembered thinking. He had never worked in a recording studio and, though he played music, he had no particular plans to. Still, this vision apparently felt like an acceptable future and freed him to resurface in the present. That was when he registered me, screaming his name.

Jon told himself he shouldnt move. He knew from his many wilderness first-responder trainings that moving a person with spinal injuries risks paralysis. Then again, he also knew that most of his body was submerged in cold water, and he recognized that he risked dying of hypothermia if he didnt move. If Im already paralyzed, he concluded, I may as well move.

He somehow hoisted himself out of the stream before Dave or I got to him, using his right arm and his chin and biting into something loamy with his teeth, for additional leverage. He reassessed the situation: better. Also: worse. He now realized that we were at least a mile inland from our camp.

Suddenly, his body was walking; his legs just started working. Dave and I put him between us, supporting his frame. He was moving faster than we expected, but uncoordinatedly. Then he crumpled between us. We tried again; Jon was dead weight. Dave noticed that his breathing was shallow and his voice was low  signs, Dave knew from med school, of a collapsed lung. He began battering Jon with a pep talk, telling him, firmly, that he had to get up, that we had to get out of here. Jon didnt need that explained to him; he was cogent and still trying to plot our next steps in his mind. He looked down to see why this log he was resting on was so lumpy and realized that he was, in fact, sitting on his left arm. The arm was slack, obviously broken; his sleeve, pierced up and down with devils club. Jon had zero feeling in it. He found it amusing, this sensation of complete estrangement from one of his limbs.

Jon had been stressing that it was important to stay together. But this was another theory of wilderness survival that appeared to be breaking down in practice. Someone would have to get on the radio back at our camp. By chance, while marooned in our tent during the rainstorm the night before, Jon showed us how to use the device, though he did it almost as a formality; the hand-held VHF unit was merely a line-of-sight radio, he told us, meaning its range was small, its signal too weak to pass through most obstacles. You were unlikely to reach anyone you couldnt see, and we hadnt seen anyone since a faraway fishing boat, early on Day 1.

There was a moment of discussion, or maybe just an exchange of looks between me and Dave. I told Dave he should go. I didnt trust myself to find my way back. I also knew that I lacked the courage to try; whether I was being sensible or cowardly, I still dont know. Besides, I took for granted that Dave would make it. He was more capable in my mind, less likely to cinch himself in indecisive knots.

Recently, though, Dave told me: You probably had no idea how much in my own head I was. I know that you, growing up, definitely felt insecure about things, and I think you looked at me and thought, Dave has everything figured out. But I had so much anxiety. He brought up the tremor he used to have in his hands. I knew about it; in high school, we waited tables together, and I occasionally had to carry out Daves soup orders, so he wouldnt spill. But I guess I thought of the tremor as strictly physiological. I couldnt see the vulnerability causing it.

Now, as Dave sprinted away from me and Jon, swatting devils club from his path with the rubberized sleeve of his rain jacket, his nerves rose up and rattled him. He worried he wouldnt be able to find the radio once he got back or know how to turn it on. What if he broke the radio, foreclosing whatever marginal chance we had of getting help? There were lots of ways to screw this up, Dave realized. More occurred to him as he ran.

He found the radio. He turned it on. Then, having solved these problems, he encountered another he hadnt anticipated: What is the appropriate thing youre supposed to say? he remembered thinking. On TV, you see a lot of people saying Mayday. And so, Dave faced the open water and started broadcasting into the fog: Mayday, Mayday. Even in that moment, though, alone on a beach in the middle of nowhere, he felt slightly self-conscious about it. This is so goddamn cliche, he thought.

Back in the woods, kneeling over Jon, I was having the same problem: I didnt know what to say. He was lying near a log on his injured side, his beard and glasses flecked with dirt and tendrils of moss. He seemed to be on the brink of losing consciousness. At no time would the possibility of Jons dying surface concretely in any of our minds. Still, I knew I was supposed to keep talking to him, to tether him to the world with my voice somehow.

I started vamping platitudes: We were going to get out of here soon, and so forth. But I could feel myself treading water, even blundering, at one point, into a long-winded apology, worried I overstayed my welcome that one Christmas with his family. I was afraid that the helplessness in my voice might be counterproductive, unsettling Jon instead of steadying him. It was a tremendous silence to fill.

What can a person say? I had two literature professors in college who made us memorize poems. You never knew when some lines of verse would come in handy, they claimed. One liked to brag that, while traveling through Ireland, he found that if he spat out some Yeats at a pub, he could drink free. This is how I wound up reciting a love poem to Jon.

It was The Shampoo, by Elizabeth Bishop, a lyric poem about the enormity of time, which turns startlingly intimate at the end, when Bishop offers to shampoo her lovers silvering hair: Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,/battered and shiny like the moon.

After that, I imagine I also did some W.H. Auden; I knew a fair amount of Auden back then. The stuff in rhyme and meter was always easiest to memorize  Looking up at the stars, I know quite well/That, for all they care, I can go to hell  which is why I had a lot of Robert Frost at my disposal as well: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken. For the most part, I trafficked in hits.

Jon and I would spend about an hour and a half together alone on the forest floor. I ran through everything in my quiver  Kay Ryan, A.R. Ammons, Michael Donaghy  padding each poem with little prefatory remarks, while Jon said nothing, just signaled with his eyes or produced a sound whenever I checked in. I felt like a radio D.J. playing records in the middle of the night, unsure if anyone was listening. And heres one about owls by Richard Wilbur, I would tell Jon, and off we would go.

I must have also done at least one by Hayden Carruth, my curmudgeonly pen pal at the literary magazine. Carruths poems didnt lend themselves to memorization, but Id worked hard to nail one of my favorites, in which he describes stopping to notice a deer standing in an apple thicket, then realizing the northern lights are flaring overhead. Hayden and the animal pass a moment in stillness together. We are proud to be afraid, he writes, proud to share/the silent magnetic storm that destroys the stars. Relative to that boundless violence above them, he and the deer are momentarily allied, though still not entirely connected: a glimpse, an acknowledgment/it is enough and never enough.

Thats what I said to my friend, powerlessly, tenting my jacket over his face when it started to rain. The title of the poem is: I Know, I Remember, But How Can I Help You.

The Coast Guard cutter Mustang wasnt where it was supposed to be. The 110-foot patrol boat normally spent its time coursing through the Gulf of Alaska, inspecting halibut-fishing vessels, or circulating, as a terrorist deterrent, near the oil terminals at Valdez. It was home-ported in Seward, hundreds of miles from Glacier Bay. But the crew was transiting to Juneau for a training when, a few days earlier, they were smacked by the same storm that later poured inland, over us. We had gotten absolutely pummeled, John Roberts, a petty officer on the Mustang, told me recently. For two days, the boat swished around in 15-foot-plus seas. Many on the crew had been hunkered in the mess deck, vomiting, while Roberts and a couple of his shipmates did their best to cover everyones watches. Finally, the Mustang slipped into Glacier Bay to find some protection. The weather started to ease. That afternoon, as Roberts piloted the Mustang east, toward Dundas Bay, his pallid crewmates were finally staggering back up to the bridge, asking where the hell they were.

That was when Daves Mayday call came through. The signal on the Mustangs radio was thin and faint, barely edging into range. Another of the ships petty officers, Eamon McCormack, explained to me that in retrospect the connection feels mind-boggling. Glacier Bay National Park extends over more than 5,000 square miles. Our signal would have covered two or three miles at most. And yet, a boat  a Coast Guard boat, no less  happened to be passing through that exceedingly small window at precisely the right time. I dont know if, nine times out of 10, you play that over again and the outcome would be the same, McCormack said. A moment earlier or later  seconds, potentially  and we might have slipped out of alignment. The moving boat would have cruised out of range, uncoupling from us forever.

It was 1:25 p.m. when the Mustang received Daves call, according to one of the subsequent Coast Guard reports. Roberts couldnt believe it. Come on, man, Im tired, he said aloud, wearily, to the receiver in front of him. Roberts waited for a moment, per protocol, on the off chance that the Coast Guards central communications center in Juneau would pick up the call instead. Then he turned and asked his watch commander to pull out all the standardized search-and-rescue paperwork. He was steeling himself, resummoning his professionalism. I guess were doing this, he said.

Roberts was the crew member on the Mustang with the most current medical training; he would complete his E.M.T. certification the following month. As he started firing questions at Dave on the radio, he didnt like the answers that he heard coming back: the shallowness of Jons breathing, the likelihood of a punctured lung. More fundamental, Roberts remembered: Any time a tree falls on somebody, its not good. He was also unsettled to learn that Dave and I both lived in New York City  a red flag, he had found, when someone winds up in trouble in the wilderness.

We were 100 nautical miles from the nearest hospital; a half-day trip, even in ideal conditions. The Mustang requested that the Coast Guard Air Station in Sitka send a helicopter, but the immediate plan was for Roberts and three crewmates to peel toward shore in the ships Zodiac and track us down. Dave had found the flare in Jons emergency kit and now, at 2:20, with the Zodiac underway, the Coast Guard asked him to fire it. He was still in front of our campsite, facing the water. Hed never shot off a flare before. He aimed straight up, then watched as the bright tracer rose and arced somewhere far behind him, deep in the woods. He was uncertain whether this counted as a success. He started scanning the fog in front of him, but the Zodiac never appeared.

Someone on the Mustang caught sight of the flare near the end of its arc and immediately directed the crew on the Zodiac toward it, steering them far away from Dave to the opposite side of the little peninsula wed camped on. And yet, this was lucky: they wound up coming ashore much closer to where I was waiting in the woods with Jon. Soon, whatever poem I was reciting was interrupted by whistles blowing and voices calling, and eventually three shapes, wearing hard hats and heavy orange rain gear, rushed toward us out of the trees.

Roberts was especially impressive, a reassuringly large Boston-area native with a booming voice. He knelt and took Jons vitals. The information was troubling: his pulse was 60 beats per minute; his breathing, fast and shallow. They put his neck in a brace and eased him onto a kind of truncated backboard, called a Miller board, to move him out to the beach. Dave had returned by then. He and I crouched at one end of the board, near Jons feet, as someone  presumably Roberts  bellowed a count of three to lift.

Later that night, lying down to sleep in a bed-and-breakfast in Gustavus  stunned and depleted, but dry and warm  Dave and I would talk and talk, reviewing the entire ordeal. We had drooped into a long silence, coasting toward sleep, when Dave spoke up with one last observation. When we were getting ready to lift Jon on the backboard, he said, it occurred to him that this was one of those crisis moments you hear about, like when mothers are suddenly able to lift a car off their baby. Dave expected we were going to have superhuman strength.

We did not have superhuman strength. On Robertss command, the men raised Jon to waist height, swiftly and seemingly perfectly level, as though their arms and deltoids were hydraulic. Then, in one motion, they took off downhill, with negligible help from us. This cant be accurate, but I remember the sensation of being almost dragged, like children in a sled.

A National Geographic television crew was embedded at the Coast Guards air station in Sitka, filming an installment of a thrill-ride reality series. The network had sent crews to other Coast Guard stations around the country too, though this assignment appeared to hold the most dramatic potential. Air Station Sitka was unique: Its pilots were responsible for 12,000 miles of coastline, a sprawling, treacherous wilderness riven with fjords, inlets and glaciers, often buffeted by implacably horrible weather. People who went into the backcountry in Alaska had a way of getting themselves into a different magnitude of trouble, too; as Roberts put it, When stuff happens in Alaska, its big. Still, this was the television crews eighth day in Sitka, and as the shows producer, Annabelle Hester, explained: I was having calls with my bosses at headquarters saying, Nothing is happening! We were scrambling to come up with Plan B. Then, the Mustangs call came in at 1:42.

What type of injuries are we looking at? asked the dispatcher. She was taking the call from behind a semicircular counter, like the reception desk at a midlevel corporate branch office. She had a framed snapshot of a parakeet to brighten her work space, and a photograph of a dog with a heart that said, I Woof You. A cameraman stood conspicuously beside her, holding a tense, tight shot.

Probable broken ribs, a definite broken arm, said the man on the other end. Then his voice faltered, seemed to give up: And whatever else would happen to you if a tree fell on you, he added.

The dispatcher retrieved the appropriate paperwork and scribbled Tree fell on person on one line. She read the current weather aloud: 30 knots wind, 300 ceiling, heavy rain and one-mile vis. That would soon be revised: the ceiling had dropped to 100 feet. Entering the weather conditions on one of the Coast Guard incident reports, someone would write, in a kind of nihilistic catchall: Extremely terrible.

The Coast Guards policy was to deploy a helicopter within 30 minutes of the initial request, but the Air Stations operations officer, Cmdr. Karl Baldessari, informed everyone that this mission would take longer to plan. Baldessari was a 25-year veteran of the Coast Guard, a fast-moving, sinewy man in a blousy flight suit, with a tidy mustache and spiky hair. His role at the air station was that of a firehouse chief. He was responsible for the safety of everyone working there, which meant making judicious decisions about what warranted sending them hurtling through the sky.

That calculus got knotty in conditions like these, though there was a baseline volatility to flying in Alaska at all. The Coast Guard didnt let its helicopter pilots fly lead out of Sitka, no matter how much experience they had at other air stations, until they practiced difficult landings at specific locations in the region and got their egos battered a little by logging a full winter in the state. Visibility in Alaska was frequently poor; conditions changed quickly. One pilot told me about blindly tunneling through fog in the dark when his co-pilot got caged: The man lifted his eyes momentarily from his instruments and, without any visual references or a horizon to latch onto, found it impossible to reorient himself, lost all sense of direction and was felled by vertigo.

During much of the year it was also cold enough, with sufficient moisture in the air, that ascending to clear the regions many minor mountains or even just flying through a cloud risked the aircrafts icing up. To mitigate this, the Coast Guard had laid out virtual track lines across the entirety of their range: a grid of GPS points and a network of paths connecting them, along which pilots could chart a course and fly at a relatively low altitude, confident they werent going to smash into a mountain. The system wasnt comprehensive; the track lines got the pilots close to their destination, but ultimately they had to diverge from this GPS superhighway and fly the remaining distance the old-fashioned way, with their radar and eyes. It was like taking an exit off the interstate, except there might be a granite wall in front of you wherever you chose to get off. It was possible the pilots would travel very far  a half-mile away from whoever needed their help  only to discover that the last leg was too risky and be forced to turn back.

Baldessari gathered the two pilots on duty that afternoon and the Air Stations flight surgeon, then unrolled a large paper map. He pointed to our location, explaining: Thats probably one of the lousiest places we fly in and out of. This Inian Pass, right here, is the worst place we could possibly go.

Inian Pass is a slim channel near the center of the Icy Strait, the long, interconnected system of waterways stretching through Glacier Bay. Conditions in the Icy Strait can be bad 300 days of the year, Baldessari recently told me; wind, rain and storm surges all push through it fast from the open ocean. But Inian Pass is a narrow keyhole at the center of the strait  a mile-wide opening between a few uninhabited islands and a rocky point  where all that weather speeds up. The only way for the pilots to reach us would be to fly straight through it.

Nothing in the National Geographic footage, at this point, feels reassuring. The flight surgeon holds his hand over his mouth and bites his lip. The co-pilot, Chris Ferguson, only a few months into his posting in Alaska, mills around and fidgets with his ear. Its obvious Baldessari needs convincing. He wasnt eager to send his men up if he didnt have to and wasnt certain they would make it all the way there if he did.

Its kind of funny, he told the pilots, pointing at the map. Youve got a boat right here.

Lying on his backboard like a burl of driftwood, Jon was conscious and cognizant of his pain, but he had started to feel somehow buffered from his body, uninterested in connecting with the world beyond it. He would later describe himself as a thinking blob. It was a very passive experience. He didnt know what was happening but could tell our momentum had stalled. He was confused and felt impatient. In his mind, the three of us had solved the impossible problem: Wed managed to get help. This was supposed to be the simple part, when everyone rushed him to the hospital. Instead, his condition deteriorated. Within 10 minutes of reaching the beach, Jon threw up. Id never seen anything like it, a kind of dark purple gristle. I took out my wool cap to wipe his face, and he retched a second time, straight into my hat.

I got that all over me, John Roberts told me recently. Hed seen vomit like that before; it meant Jon had ingested a fair amount of blood and signaled internal injuries. It made Roberts anxious. He had been on the Mustang for two and a half years at that point but had spent the previous four years in Palm Beach, a busy but less extreme posting that often involved rescuing weekend boaters from relatively close to shore  and where, Roberts pointed out, the water is warm and wont necessarily kill you if you go in. Moreover, the bulk of the Coast Guards training is for maritime rescues, not rescues on land. Counterintuitive as it sounds, Robertss comfort level and confidence had dropped significantly once he hopped off the Zodiac and set foot on the beach.

He reported back to the Mustang that Jon had thrown up, then soon radioed again, explaining that Jon was going into shock. He kept giving and requesting updates, trying to gauge how long this might take, and eventually started erecting a makeshift shelter out of plastic sheeting and medical tape, hoping to keep Jon out of the rain. Out of earshot of us, Roberts explained to his crew mate Eamon McCormack what the vomit meant: The possibility of Jon dying, here under their care, was real. At one point in the National Geographic footage, as Robertss calls are relayed to the air station in Sitka, you can see where the dispatcher clearly writes on her form: E.M.T. does not feel comfortable.

By this time, the air stations flight surgeon had received enough information to be alarmed. It sounds like hes got a pretty significant chest injury, he told Baldessari. Baldessari understood they would need to launch a helicopter but warned the Mustang that the aircraft might not make it through the weather; ultimately it would be the pilots call, once they veered off their last track line and tried to shoot through Inian Pass.

They would go and give it a look, Baldessari explained over the radio, but the outlook was iffy. The guys on the beach, he said, must be prepared to get Jon back on their cutter and haul him to a hospital themselves, as fast as they could.

One evening this winter, my phone rang, and it was Karl Baldessari. Long retired from the Coast Guard, he was teaching aviation at a community college in Oregon, where I left a voice mail message earlier that day. I meanwhile had metamorphosed into a 40-year-old father of two and fumbled to explain to Baldessari that, as thrilled as I was to have tracked him down, I was, at the moment, racing to finish a risotto for my daughters before gymnastics practice and would have to call him back. Without missing a beat, Baldessari blared orders at me, joking, but still sounding as instinctually in charge as he did in the National Geographic footage: O.K., he said, you want to stir it constantly, but slowly!

I didnt expect any of the Coast Guardsmen I was cold-calling to remember that day. However dramatic it remained for me, I assumed it would have been obscured in a yearslong wash of more sensational incidents. But everyone I spoke to did remember it, immediately and in detail. Baldessari had been involved in hundreds of rescue operations during his 30-year career, and yet, as I stood at the stove on the phone that evening, he told me: The moment I listened to your voice mail, I knew exactly the case! It was almost like it was yesterday.

There was something about the supreme freakishness of the accident that left a lasting impression. For those who came ashore, the experience was also marked by a feeling of subtly escalating chaos and the pressure to surmount it. McCormack told me that ours was a story he retold endlessly, often to the younger Coast Guardsmen he was eventually tasked with training. In it was a lesson about not taking situations that look impossible at face value, he said. When things start to go wrong, dont panic or lose sight of what resources youve got. Keep working the problem until its absolute end  even, McCormack added, if it means deviating from official policy.

McCormack was not supposed to be landing an inflatable boat on an unforgivably rocky Alaskan shoreline, for example. But there he was, anyway, beaching the Zodiac as gingerly as he could, so that Roberts and the other men could load Jon aboard. They slid him in on his side like a folder into a filing cabinet, as Jon put it, and started motoring through the chop, very cautiously, back to the Mustang, about a mile away.

As relieved as Jon had been when the Coast Guard first arrived, he also felt instantaneously more vulnerable. Strapped to the back board, his neck in the collar, he surrendered control of his body, however imperfect that control had been. He was being hauled around as an object now, with no ability to wriggle or shift positions, to manage his pain or even to turn his head and see what was happening. He was helpless, entirely dependent on the upright people operating around him, those voices he could hear discussing him on the far side of some gauzy divide. About 10 minutes into the trip on the Zodiac, Jon heard one of those voices say, Oh, shit, were losing air.

A section of the Zodiacs sponson  the inflatable fender that wraps around the boat  had punctured. One side was completely deflated. Its a big deal, McCormack recently explained to me, sounding surprised that I had to ask. The sponson increases the boats buoyancy and stability, as well as keeping water from cresting over the side; under normal conditions, a Zodiac with a broken sponson would have been taken out of service automatically. Instead, McCormack found the puncture and wedged the nozzle of a small pump inside. Then  steering the boat with one hand, operating the throttle with the other  he started working the pump with his foot, essentially doing leg presses, to keep the fender partly inflated. The ride was already bumpy in four-foot seas. Now McCormack began tracing a slow, zigzagging course, doing what he could to tamp down the turbulence and the violence to Jons spine, as well as to guard against the possibility of the injured mans suddenly bounding over the side on his backboard.

Roberts and the other Coast Guardsmen on the Zodiac leaned over Jon to shield him from the splash. The pain was heinous; Jon seemed to be passing out. Roberts talked to him, held his hand. Roberts felt crushed, he told me; he was torturing this guy in order to save him. When they finally reached the Mustang, rather than hoist Jon off the Zodiac, they swung the ships crane around and simply lifted the entire boat out of the water, level with the deck, and then carried him aboard, to keep from joggling him any more.

McCormack eventually returned for me and Dave, and a half-hour later we were reunited with Jon in the Mustangs athwartship passageway, a cramped, steel hallway, like the space between two cars of a train. Jon was still battened to the backboard, wedged up to keep the weight of his body on his less-painful side. They had cut off his clothes, though hed murmured a plea not to  he was wearing a brand-new Patagonia jacket that he had borrowed from a friend  then swaddled him in a hypothermia blanket. Dave and I knelt and rubbed his feet.

The coast guard rescue operation was documented by a National Geographic crew who happened to be in Alaska. Video stills from National Geographic Image Collection

The helicopter was going to make it. I dont remember there being a grand announcement. Im not sure we were ever made aware of the possibility that it wouldnt. Now the crew got busy below: tying down anything that could be blown off by the rotor wash or stashing it in the mess. I also dont remember hearing the helicopter when it finally arrived. Instead, I remember only a heavy door to our left swinging open to reveal, like a scene from an action movie, the silhouette of a man in a blue flight suit, feet planted shoulder-width apart to steady himself as the ship rocked sideways. The cable hed been lowered on drew back into the ocean spray and fog behind him. Im flight surgeon Russ Bowman, he said and stepped inside.

Bowman took Jons vitals and gave him several, successive shots of morphine. Soon, everyone was working to squeeze him back through the narrow doorway and onto the deck where the helicopter, an MH-60 Jayhawk, was idling overhead.

Until recently, the story I told about the accident unfolded in two basic acts: the tree fell, instantaneously unleashing a kind of unfathomable chaos; then the Coast Guard appeared and, just as swiftly, regathered that chaos into order. It was like watching footage of an exploding object, then watching it run in reverse. The maneuver the Coast Guard was readying to execute now, on the deck of the Mustang, would be the climax of that progression.

The helicopter hovered 30 or 40 feet over the boat, mirroring its speed and trajectory, while both vehicles moved slowly forward. Looks like youre heading for a rain squall, the co-pilot, Chris Ferguson, radioed the Mustang at one point, and asked the ship to adjust its course, to keep them in as forgiving weather as possible. Soon the flight mechanic was calling out instructions to tuck the aircraft into alignment: Forward and right 30. Forward and right 20. Forward and right 10. Then, finally  speaking, in the flight recordings, with an almost galling air of imperturbability  the lead helicopter pilot, Rich McIntyre, radioed the flight mechanic to begin the hoist.

The whole procedure, from our vantage point, seemed seamless and routine. In a way, it was: After the agonized deliberation at the air station, the pilots exited off their GPS route into fairly manageable conditions around Inian Pass. The winds were workable; the water wasnt excessively choppy. Ultimately, scooping Jon off the deck of the Mustang would resemble a standard exercise that the pilots drilled in their trainings. Not to dumb it down, the co-pilot, Chris Ferguson, told me  plucking someone with a spinal injury off a moving boat and hoisting them into a moving helicopter is a pretty insane thing to do. But we normalize what isnt normal.

A few moments earlier, as the men scurried around Jon on his backboard, packaging and fastening him for the hoist, Jon worried that the second he got airborne he would start twirling uncontrollably, like the feathery end of a cat toy, and potentially thwack his head on the equipment on deck. But now, he was levitating smoothly  a solitary, swaddled bale of a man, perfectly perpendicular to the ground. Dave and I watched it happen: our friend rising steadily away from us, improbably, to safety. As Jon floated higher, he could hear the Coast Guardsmen on the Mustang beneath him begin to cheer. He felt it was safe to open his eyes. When he did, he saw someone, hunched in the open cargo door of the helicopter, pointing a television camera at him.

Video Clip From National Geographic Image Collection

Jon was rushed into surgery at the hospital in Sitka that evening. Hed punctured both lungs, one to the point of collapse, sustained multiple fractures on eight of his ribs, broken several vertebrae, shattered his left shoulder blade and snapped his brachial plexus nerves. His spleen had been macerated into countless flecks. After awakening from surgery, Jon was disappointed that the doctors had swept those shards into a bag and thrown his spleen in the trash; he wanted to get a look at it, maybe even keep it preserved in a jar, alongside his cyborg-banana.

Once back in Gustavus, Dave and I realized that we would need to call Jons parents in Switzerland. I didnt have to push the job on Dave this time; he was adamant. He felt he would need to face conversations like these if he was going to be a doctor. It was Jons father who picked up, and after absorbing the news, he paused and caught Dave off guard. Thank you, he said solemnly. You guys saved my sons life.

Daves stomach dropped. I remember thinking about it, he told me recently, and realizing, Yeah. I guess, logistically, we did. I had the same reaction when Dave hung up the phone and, clearly shaken, relayed his conversation to me. Until that moment, the idea that we saved Jons life had never occurred to us, possibly because the idea that Jon might have died still hadnt occurred to us. We had zero sense of accomplishment, or even agency. In our minds, all we did was avoid screwing up until the real help could arrive and save him.

But Jon hadnt absorbed the story that way. From the instant he willed himself out of the water, he felt all of us locking into that same seamless flow of order steadily displacing chaos that Dave and I only experienced once the Coast Guard arrived. It was amazing to him how the three of us managed to generate solutions for each successive problem. Even my reciting those poems, which to me had always felt like a moment of utter helplessness, became, in Jons telling, a perfect emblem of that streak of serendipitous problem-solving. You conveyed a calmness, he told me recently. I remember it being this nice moment. He added that if he ever has to spend two hours dying on a remote forest floor again, having me there to recite poetry would be one of his top ways to do it.

The feeling of inevitability that day became only more pronounced for Jon as time passed and the entire story of our rescue receded into a prologue to the rest of his life. The surgery in Sitka was only the first of half a dozen, and it would take several years for him to regain 60 percent of the use of his arm, wrist and hand, as the nerves gradually regrew along his injured side. He was in good enough shape to go back to Alaska the summer after the accident  repairing boats in the companys warehouse and occasionally helping out at the bed-and-breakfast  but he struggled. He could repair kayaks but needed help lifting them. He was unable to wrestle the mattress corners into the fitted sheets when he made the beds. After that, he started working at a recording studio in Portland, just as he envisioned while stuck in the water, and he now runs his own audio-mastering company: Spleenless Mastering.

Eventually Jon seemed to have recovered from the accident without any conspicuous disabilities. But his life has been quietly corroded by chronic pain and, almost equally, by the stresses of navigating the doctors, medications (and their side effects) to manage it. About two years after the accident, he learned he had PTSD. The trauma wasnt the falling tree, but his experience of powerlessness as a perpetual patient in the American medical system. It manifested as a kind of unbearable empathy for anyone who was suffering. Jon found himself shouting at doctors, on his own behalf but also on behalf of strangers in waiting rooms who werent being seen. He would hear interviews with natural-disaster victims or the homeless on NPR and have to pull his car over. There continued to be other tribulations, too  more mundane ones. A few times a year, he still rebreaks a rib out of nowhere; once or twice, Jon told me, all it has taken is an especially affectionate hug from his wife.

Jon found early on that he could cordon off this suffering, both in his own mind and in conversation, by making jokes about the accident itself and sticking to the happy ending of our rescue, a trick that got much easier after the National Geographic show aired later that year. Mission Rescue: Final Frontier, the program was called. The soundtrack was all heart-thwacking synth drums and shredding guitar. A foreboding, Ken Burns-effected snapshot of Dave and Jon looking joyful before the trip gave way to a whirring re-enactment of someone elses legs  cast in the role of Daves legs  sprinting through the blurry woods for our radio. A melodramatic narrator pondered the fate of Kayaker Jon Cohrs.

Initially, the schlockiness of the production felt like a blessing. The show depersonalized the accident, giving us all a shorthand to convey how dramatic that day had been, without confronting how destabilizing and senseless it might have felt. At a party, you could lay out the basics  a tree fell on Jon  then say, National Geographic even made a TV special about it, and everyone would go wide-eyed but then move on, figuring you would unspool the real story some other time.

Jon, in Sitka Community Hospital, celebrates his rescue with the author, center, and their friend Dave. From Jon Mooallem

But we never realized the degree to which that kitschy shorthand started to obscure the real story  then, gradually, to replace it. Im embarrassed to admit that, though Jon and I have remained close, I did not know the extent to which he has continued to suffer for the last 17 years until talking to him for several hours in order to write this account.

The morning after the accident, Dave and I traveled back to Dundas Bay to pack up our campsite and collect the kayaks we abandoned the previous evening. We were shuttled there from Gustavus by the same boat captain who dropped us off three days earlier, a forbiddingly taciturn commercial fisherman named Doug Ogilvy.

The tide in the cove was way out when we arrived; it was, as Ogilvy put it, a suck-ass beach. The approach was so shallow that he had to drop anchor a hundred yards or more from shore. He asked if we had waders. We did not. So Ogilvy put on his, climbed down the ladder and told Dave to get on his back. Then stoically, like an ox or an old-timey strongman hauling a safe, he trudged through the thigh-high water, dropped Dave on the gravel beach, then lurched back and hauled me the same way, as if I were a man-size infant in a papoose.

Dave told me hed had a strange feeling on the ride out, as if we would discover that an even more massive tree had fallen on our tent since we last slept there and that all three of us would have been crushed and killed if wed spent another night in Dundas Bay, as planned. That is, he half-expected to find evidence that the accident had been fortuitous somehow, that there was a reason, or redemptive value, behind it. My mother had the same instinct when I called her the night before. On the phone I strained to emphasize for her  she was only two years into her cruelly premature widowhood, and I was new at being the overprotective son of a widow  that Jon was going to be all right, and that Dave and I were safe. She told me that my dad must have been up there looking out for us somehow.

I resented all the supernatural thinking. If it comforted other people, fine, but Id somehow known right away that I didnt need a reason for the accident. It was senseless, but straightforward, as unequivocal a fact as my fathers death had been. A tree fell in the woods. It might not have, but it did. Jon could have died, but he didnt. Other possibilities spiraled infinitely outward from there, though apparently I wasnt too interested in contemplating them. As strange as it sounds, it was years before I realized that the tree could have hit me  and only after a friend pointed this out, as I told the story around a fire one night. And it was only a few weeks ago, while on the phone with Jon, that it occurred to me that the tree could have hit all three of us  we were standing in a single-file line, after all, waiting to cross the creek  and that we all might have wound up clobbered and scattered in that river, dying slowly and watching each other die.

Its also probably true that I helped preclude these possibilities by being so feverishly paranoid about bears, wheeling around at the sound of the snapping roots. Thats what allowed me to see the tree coming, just barely, and scream that infinitesimal heads-up for Dave. And so, the real meaning of the accident, if I felt compelled to find one, might be that it validated my most exaggerated fears. But instead, it somehow helped cleanse me of them. There was comfort for me in accepting the arbitrariness of what happened, in regarding it as a spasm of random damage in time and space that, just as randomly, a small number of human beings got the opportunity to repair. We were more capable than I had understood. We were also far more helpless.

On the ride back to Gustavus with our gear, I pictured myself, again, as a small blip in empty space. The ride was rough and jumpy as Ogilvy impatiently pounded his boat through the last vestigial wave energy of the storm; Dave and I had to hold on, to plant ourselves on the bench behind him. But there was a moment when I felt so safe that I loosened my grip, leaned slightly into the motion of the boat, and, closing my eyes, felt myself lift off the seat.

Jon Mooallem is a writer at large for the magazine who is working on a book about the great Alaska earthquake of 1964. His last feature for the magazine was about our climatological future.It began with a trickle  curious developments that mostly raised more questions. There was evidence of election hacking  but could it really have been directed by the Kremlin? Certain Americans on Facebook, pitching for Donald J. Trump and stirring up anger, turned out to be impostors  but who had concocted them? One Trump campaign aide after another surfaced in sketchy reports of meetings with mysterious Russians  but did the encounters add up to anything significant?

Then there was the candidates famously twitchy Twitter finger, scathing toward so many public figures but oddly respectful of the Russian president. Was that a signal of dark secrets, or just of a soft spot for a strongman?

And so, in 2016, began the F.B.I.s epic investigation  and the attempt by journalists to track it. On Thursday, barring a natural disaster or alien attack, the public should get its first real look at the report of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel.

Questionnaire for National Security Positions. The F.B.Is interview with Michael T. Flynn, President Trumps former national security adviser. The director of national intelligence released a report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election in January, 2017.

There are a thousand ways for reporters to inquire into the slow unfolding of a complex investigation, many of them producing mostly frustration. Making call after call to lawyers for those under scrutiny  and to their friends and frenemies, rivals and business associates. Poring over a so-called dossier that makes shocking claims but offers little evidence sufficiently detailed to allow a true fact-check. Haunting congressional hearings and trailing the witnesses through the hallway mob scene afterward.

And while some F.B.I. inquiries are helpfully leaky for journalists, the special counsels investigation proved hermetically sealed. The skimpy summary provided last month by Attorney General William P. Barr  that Mr. Mueller found no criminal conspiracy with Russia but declined to clear the president on obstruction of justice  simply set off more partisan squabbling.

So if an investigation is a jigsaw puzzle, the mosaic of the two-year inquiry by Mr. Mueller remains incomplete, at least for the public and the press. We have seen major parts laid out in staggering detail in the 199 charges he has filed against 34 people and three companies  the only way Mr. Mueller, 74, a former F.B.I. director, has so far chosen to speak.

Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, recommended Mr. Comeys firing. President Trump fired Mr. Comey The special counsel was appointed.

We know what keywords a particular Russian military intelligence hacker searched for on the web on a particular date. We know that Putins niece, introduced to a Trump campaign adviser by a suspicious professor, was not Putins niece. We know that a Trump Tower in Moscow, a longtime business dream of Mr. Trump, was still being secretly pursued even as the candidate took public stands that might please or offend Russia.

Senator Mark Warner, ranking member of the Intelligence Committee. Senator Richard Burr, Chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

In that sense, the trickle has long since become a flood. The cast of characters has grown, and grown familiar  Flynn, Manafort, Cohen, Papadopoulos; the pattern of lying to investigators and Congress has become routine; the presidents shifting stories have become the norm. News coverage has become background noise, like a sea that periodically surges and retreats.

But for all of that, much of the investigation remains guesswork. We dont know whether we know 90 percent or 50 percent or 20 percent of the findings. It is possible that Mr. Muellers team of aggressive prosecutors has already revealed virtually all of its work in public indictments and courtroom pronouncements. And it is also possible that Mr. Muellers report, approaching 400 pages before Mr. Barrs redactions, will still contain some bombshells.

Mr. Sessions Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. William P. Barr, the attorney general.

In a polarized country, with different news outlets offering divergent partisan spins, different factions fill the Mueller vacuum with radically different realities. Many Democrats, though deflated by Mr. Barrs preview, still expect to find new evidence in the report of serious misdeeds by the president.

The special counsels office indicted twelve Russians for interfering with the 2016 presidential election. Paul Manafort, Mr. Trumps former campaign manager, was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison.

Yet many of Mr. Trumps supporters, drawing their information from different sources, believe the real story is something else entirely: enemies of Mr. Trump misused government agencies to spy on his campaign, then began a bogus investigation to undermine his presidency. Mr. Barrs qualified affirmation that there was, in fact, spying, has energized them.

It is an alarming divide, not because the two sides harbor different opinions, but because they believe different sets of facts.

So the capital is once again on edge, awaiting Thursdays revelations. For now  for just a little longer  the special counsel, sphinxlike, keeps his counsel.[Sign up for With Interest, a Sunday newsletter to catch you up and prep for the coming week in business and tech news.]

With hundreds dead, the popular 737 Max jet remains grounded as investigators examine how an automated system on the planes contributed to the crashes.

 In October, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed just minutes after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing 189 people.

 In March, another Max, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, crashed minutes after takeoff; all 157 people on board died.

 In response, all Max flights were grounded around the world, and carriers like United dont expect them to be flying again until January at the earliest. Some international regulators, including the Europeans and Chinese, are expected to take even longer to clear the Max to fly.

 Evidence, including black box data from the two crashes, has indicated that a system designed to help the plane avoid stalls appears to have malfunctioned, contributing to the accidents.

Investigators have faulted Boeing and the F.A.A. over how parts of the 737 Max was designed and certified.

 The automated system at the heart of the inquiries, known as MCAS, was new to the Max, but most pilots were not aware of it until the first crash. The system also had a single point of failure, and was made more aggressive and powerful late in the design process.

How the MCAS system was designed to work: By Mika Grondahl | Source: Boeing

 A multi-agency task force known as the Joint Authorities Technical Review concluded that Boeing failed to adequately explain to regulators how MCAS worked, and the Federal Aviation Administration lacked the capability to effectively analyze much of what Boeing did share about the new plane.

 The National Transportation Safety Board, one of the agencies that has been investigating Boeing, also faulted Boeing and called for the company and federal regulators to revamp the way they assess the risk of key systems on planes, like emergency notifications in the cockpit. The Justice Department has also opened a criminal inquiry, and is being assisted by the F.B.I.

 Nearly one year to the day after the Lion Air crash, Indonesian investigators came to similar conclusions: They blamed Boeing for introducing MCAS without adequately instructing airlines and their crews about how to override the software should it malfunction.

They completely discounted the human factor component, the startle effect, the tsunami of alerts in a system that we had no knowledge of that was powerful, relentless and terrifying in the end,  Dennis Tajer, the spokesman for the American Airlines pilots union, said of Boeing.

 A senior engineer at Boeing said the company, to keep costs down, rejected a safety system that could have reduced the risks that contributed to the two deadly crashes, according to an internal complaint he submitted this year.

 The chief technical pilot for the Max complained to a colleague in 2016 that MCAS had egregious issues  eight months after he had asked the F.A.A. about removing mention of the new automated system from the pilots manual.

 The F.A.A., which in recent years has delegated more authority to companies like Boeing, in particular remains under scrutiny. New York Times investigations revealed that key officials at the F.A.A. never fully reviewed the final version of the MCAS software and that Boeing helped craft legislation related to approving designs to its liking.

 In the companys most direct response to the accidents, a committee of the Boeing board suggested several changes designed to make the company safer. It stripped the C.E.O., Dennis A. Muilenburg, of his chairman title and the executive leading the division that produces the Max is leaving.

Boeing is under financial pressure as the impact of the crisis takes a toll on the company.

 The financial impacts of the crashes and groundings have been hitting Boeing. The company said it would take at least a $7.3 billion hit associated with the prolonged grounding of the jet, in addition to the $100 million it set aside for the families and communities of victims.

 It has reported three straight quarterly losses since the second crash. Revenues and profits are likely to keep falling, and the costs connected with the crashes could keep growing.

 Boeing scored a major win with an order for 200 Max jets from the parent company of British Airways in June. But other airlines have suggested they may reconsider their orders for the Max, and a Saudi airline recently rescinded its commitment to buy 50 Max jets, placing an order with Airbus instead.

 Carriers like Southwest Airlines and American Airlines have cancelled thousands of flights, and some are demanding compensation from Boeing while their Maxes have been unable to fly.

We dont have to have 300-plus people die every time to find out that something is unreliable.  A shareholder at Boeings first annual meeting after the crashes.

 New problems with Max keep cropping up as Boeing works on a fix, and the timeline for the return of the Max has been pushed back several times.

 Boeings woes arent limited to the Max. It is also facing scrutiny over the production of the 787 Dreamliner in North Charleston, S.C. After a New York Times investigation into conditions in the factory, the executive in charge of the plant left Boeing, the F.A.A. stepped up its oversight there and the Justice Department expanded its investigation to include the factory.

The 737 Max is a legacy of the past, the latest update of a decades-old airplane.

 The 737 was first developed in the 1960s, and has been updated several times over the decades, becoming the most popular commercial jet of all time.

 Boeing was considering building an all new airplane in 2011. But under intense pressure from its chief rival, Airbus, Boeing decided to update the 737 instead. That decision proved to be pivotal.

 Boeing designed the Max  a single-aisle jet that seats about 200 passengers  to fly farther and more efficiently than previous 737s. To do that, it equipped the Max with larger engines, which changed the planes aerodynamics and made it more likely to stall in some conditions.

 To offset the risk of a stall, Boeing developed MCAS, which pushes the planes nose down in some circumstances in order to stabilize the aircraft.

 But MCAS relied on data from just one of the planes two so-called angle of attack sensors that are mounted on the planes exterior to monitor its position in the sky.

Until the two crashes, the Max was Boeings most successful plane ever.

 The Max was an instant hit. Boeing quickly took orders for more than 5,000 planes, securing billions of dollars worth of orders that would keep the company building the Max for years to come.

 For airlines, part of the appeal was that pilots who knew how to fly older versions of the 737 would be able to fly the Max without much additional training, which is time intensive and costly.

 Within months of entering commercial service in 2017, the Max became an integral part of the global aviation system. Before the second crash, the nearly 50 carriers that flew the Max were using it for an estimated 8,600 flights per week.Solothurn is a picturesque town in the north-west of Switzerland known primarily for its special affinity for the number 11. It seems like everything in this place was designed around this magical number, from the fact that there are precisely 11 churches and chapels, as well as eleven historical fountains, eleven museums and eleven towers in Solothurn, to the rather bizarre clock in the town square that features an 11-hour dial and the number 12 missing.

Although virtually everyone in Solothurn knows about the towns obsession with the number 11, its origin is shrouded in mystery. Some say it was inspired by a folk legend about magical elves coming down from the nearby Weissenstein mountain to hearten the people of Solothurn, who worked hard but never prospered. The grateful inhabitants started incorporating the number 11, or elf in German, as a tribute for the creatures aid. But there are also those who claim that the number 11 has biblical connotations, deeming it holy and prophetic. One things for sure, though, Solothurns obsession with this number can be traced back centuries.

Photo: Ch-info.ch/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The first mention of 11 in Solothurns history dates back to 1252, when the guilds that first voted for the towns council elected 11 members. Then, in 1481, Solothurn became the 11th canton of the Swiss Confederation, and a century later it was divided into 11 protectorates. The fact that there are 11 different medieval societies, or guilds, mentioned in the history of this place is definitely no coincidence either.

Another great example of Solothurns obsession with the number 11 is the magnificent Cathedral of St. Ursus. Designed by Italian architect Gaetano Matteo Pisoni, it was built in 11 years, features three sets of steps, each numbering 11 rows, 11 doors, 11 bells and 11 altars, one of which is made out of 11 different types of marble. Interestingly, the altars can be viewed simultaneously from only one place in the cathedral, the 11th black stone in the nave.

Photo: YouTube screengrab

The kneelers in the cathedral are arranged in rows of eleven, the pews as well, and even the number of pipes on the large organ is divisible by 11. The Romanesque facade is 3 x 11 meters high and the tower measures 6 x 11 meters up to the weathercock. 11 is everywhere in this place.

Pisoni ran riot with the idea, Solothurn native Therese Stahlin recently told the BBC. He was ordered by the government at the time to include the number 11. And he did. Everywhere. Even one of the altars is made from 11 types of marble.



The people of Solothurn have also incorporated this fascination with the number 11 into their daily lives. For example, there are special celebrations held on 11th birthdays and multiples thereof, and there are local products and businesses that include the special number. There is Oufi-Bier (Beer 11), 11-i Schokolade (11-Chocolate), and even oufiyoga (11 oclock yoga). An 11-year-old whisky matured in beer barrels is also in the works.

The mysterious relationship between Solothurn and the number 11 has become one of the towns primary tourist attractions, and there is even a themed tour about the number 11.

Natalie Best

French/West/Vaughan has named Natalie Best as its first chief operating officer. Best has been with FWV since 2002, most recently as executive vice president and director of client services. She has been an agency principal since 2009. Before coming to the agency, she was assistant director of public relations for the Charlotte Hornets. Best also serves as secretary/treasurer for IPREX, the network of worldwide communication agencies, which includes FWV. As COO, she will be responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of FWV together with president David Gwyn, reporting to chairman & CEO Rick French.



Gerard LaFond

LEWIS has appointed Gerard LaFond as senior vice president of east coast digital and picked Megan Maguire to head up the agencys new Chicago office. LaFond joins LEWIS from Weber Shandwick, where he was executive vice president, client experience digital. He was previously vice president of digital communications at Cone Communications and executive director, marketing and digital product at Wolters Kluwer Law & Business. At LEWIS, LaFond will work to strengthen the agencys digital footprint across North America, as well as support client demand in social media marketing, paid search advertising, design and development. Maguire comes to LEWIS from MSLGROUP, where she served as vice president. She was previously director, influence lead at Leo Burnett.



Joanna Horn

MERGE Atlanta has brought on Joanna Horn as vice president. Horn comes to the agency from LEWIS, where she most recently served as vice president, managing the firms day-to-day operations and strategic relationships with global partners, as well as leading some of the agencys top accounts. Previously, while with Davies Murphy Group (which was acquired by LEWIS in 2013), Horn opened its first European office in London. At MERGE, she will oversee client partnerships, help drive enhanced performances through strategic communications and work to build and manage client teams. Horn will work out of the agencys Atlanta office. The agency also has Boston and Chicago offices.



Rick Gomes

Allied Global Marketing has named Rick Gomes to lead its New York national publicity department as vice president, national publicity, entertainment. Gomes most recently ran his own media relations consultancy. He previously was director, public relations & talent relations at Travel Channel, where he led publicity campaigns for such franchises as Andrew Zimmerns Bizarre Foods America. Gates has also served as vice president at Sayles Winnikoff Communications, where his clients included ION Television, THIRTEEN/WNET and Bravo. In addition to leading Allieds New York team, he will help manage PR efforts for the agencys film, television, streaming and brand clients.Cribs for Kids, a nonprofit promoting safe sleeping environments for babies, has retained private consulting firm Murphy Strategic Consulting to handle crib-related consumer safety issues on Capitol Hill.

Cribs for Kids was formed to educate the public and the health community on safe sleeping practices for babies and infant sleep-related deaths, such as accidental suffocation, asphyxia and sudden infant death syndrome. The Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, which was founded in 1998, also provides support for the families whove lost children from these types of deaths and partners with organizations to donate portable cribs to low income families.

Cribs for Kids has hired Murphy Strategic Consulting to advocate for funding, education and research on SIDS-related issues, according to lobbying registration documents filed with Congress in March.

Murphy Strategic Consulting is led by Sheila Murphy, who was formerly senior policy advisor to Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD). She also served as legislative director to Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Tom Carper (D-DE) and Ben Nelson (D-NE).

Prior to founding Murphy Strategic Consulting, Murphy was senior director at advocacy organization Save the Children Action Network.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

What is the genius of Fox News? It may be the network's ability to mount opposition to progressive ideas way before most liberal-leaning people are even aware of them.

That's a big takeaway from the March 21 Navigator survey, a project of Democratic-leaning GBAO Strategies (DC) and Global Strategy Group (NY), about the Fox echo chamber.

Let's take a look at the hammer job Fox pundits Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson did on New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and sidekick Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey for their "Green New Deal" proposal to address climate change.

In warming up, Hannity called the Green New Deal a "real serious threat to our way of life."

And then he let loose: "Ocasio-Cortez and others put forth one of the most dangerous, impractical, misguided, economically guaranteed-to-be-devastating plans ever championed by any American politician.

Not to be outdone, Carlson called the Green New Deal a "scam," "religious document" and insulted Ocasio-Cortez as a "screechy moron" to boot.

Since the former "fair and balanced" network pays attack dogs like Hannity and Carlson to consistently trash anything that hints at being progressive, Fox viewers become highly aware of the new (and apparently hated) policies.

Navigator found that nearly seven-out-of-ten (69 percent) of Foxers heard "some" or "a lot" about the Green New Deal.

That compares to just a third of Democrats who expressed awareness of the climate change proposal.

Navigator's upshot: "When evaluating national polling about progressive items like the Green New Deal, it should be acknowledged that opinion can often be driven by this highly aware, but relatively narrow slice of Fox News-watching Republicans."

The reality: only 34 percent of Americans admit to watching Fox, which now fancies itself as "Most Watched. Most Trusted," a few times a month.

Navigator did uncover a shocker: 15 percent of Fox viewers are not Republicans. They must be watching Sean and Tucker for laughs.

And there's an opinion chasm between Republican and non-Republican Fox watchers.

Ninety percent of Republican Fox-watchers support Trump's job performance to the point where 78 percent of them say the Tweeter-in-Chief has accomplished more in his first two years in office than almost any other president. [Pass the Kool-Aid.]

Those figures compare to 24 percent on job performance and 16 percent on greatest of all time among non-GOP Fox-viewers.

Eighty-nine percent of Republican Fox watchers buy the president's "fake news" rant against the mainstream media and 79 percent say the FBI and other intelligence agencies are out to get their guy.

Comparable percentages for non-GOP Fox people are 32 percent and 24 percent, respectively.

The Democratic National Committee shouldn't write Fox off and reconsider its ban on the network from participating in the presidential candidate debates.

Navigator shows there is a glimmer of hope for the Dems to pick up some votes from Fox fans.

After all, less than one-in-five (18 percent) of non-Republican Fox watchers voted for the GOP Congressional candidate in the 2018 election.Longstanding recruitment firm, Noel Recruitment, has opened a brand new office on Tullamore's main street.

With over 30 years experience in the recruitment industry, providing resources to many of the leading brands in Ireland, the Noel Group is one of Irelands best recognised and largest recruitment organisations.

With seven specialised brands operating from 11 locations throughout Ireland, their industry-specific recruiters supply your business with the people who are best suited to your requirements.

With offices in Galway, Waterford, Limerick, Cork, Naas, Co Kildare, Dublin  Dawson Street, Tallaght and Santry and now on Main Street, Tullamore, Noel can guarantee efficiency, best customer service, reliability and a recruitment company you will want to recommend.

How can we help you as an employer?

As an employer, whether you require a recruitment service for temporary or permanent positions or are seeking a recruitment partner to supply and manage a flexible workforce we can support you. Whether you are one of Irelands leading multinational employers or a growing SME we at the Noel Group can meet your requirements.

With a network of 10 offices in Ireland and over 100 permanent staff, our 24/7 service offers each customer a variety of services from tailored permanent recruitment campaigns to high volume temporary supply solutions. As a customer using our services you will benefit on site from a well prepared and experienced account management structure taking care of everything from Inductions to check-ins, appraisals, disciplinary and full payroll production working to ISO 9001 service requirements.

How can we help YOU find a job?

Our team at the Noel Group work with companies right across the country to match you with the job you are looking for. Whether it be permanent, temporary or a contract position we will ensure you as our candidate will be well prepared and supported throughout the process.

We have positions available in:

Healthcare  Healthcare Assistants, Catering, Porters, Accommodation

Assistants, Industrial , Manufacturing, Construction , Sales & Marketing, Retail,

Hospitality,

How can you register with Noel Group?

- Call to our office in Tullamore  Monday to Friday 8 30 am  5 00 pm

- To make an appointment - Email tullamore@noel.ie or call 057 8508000

- Bring your CV and a form of identification with you

- We will then arrange a date and time suitable to you for a private consultation

- Strictest confidence is always assured

- Saturday consultations are by appointment

Registration Open Days:

Friday, March 22 - Greville Arms, Mullingar, Co Westmeath. 10am  4pm - Musgraves and Noel Group

Longford  EDI Centre, Athlone Road Longford, Thursday, March 28 - 10am  4pm.A Tullamore-based community food initiative has been announced as one of 14 projects awarded funding from safefood for the 2019-2021 Community Food Initiatives (CFIs) Programme launched yesterday.

Offaly Local Development Company aims to promote healthy eating and overall wellbeing for families across the county.

The CFI programme is designed to positively influence the eating habits of families with children in low-income communities across the island of Ireland. Safefood is investing a total of 630,000 over the three years of the initiative to help each of the 14 successful projects set up, manage and sustain their work.

Speaking at the launch, Niamh McKernan, Community Development Worker said:  Offaly Local Development Company wishes to invite and empower local communities across the county, to promote healthy lifestyles by using fun initiatives which will leave families feeling more equipped with transferable knowledge, skills and confidence to continue to adapt healthier lifestyles.

Welcoming the new projects, Ray Dolan, Chief Executive safefood said: Our Community Food Initiatives are inspirational examples of how investing in local communities can make a tangible difference to peoples lives, not only for today but for the future. The community-led approach has the potential to positively influence the food habits of families, which can impact on health, from childhood through to adult life."

"At safefood, we have been funding community food projects on the island of Ireland since 2010 and these have helped upwards of 30,000 people during that time. We are proud of the ambition, commitment and passion shown by previous CFIs and those communities about to embark on the new programme. The funding stream announced today will build on that legacy and we look forward to these projects acting as champions in our local communities and beyond.

The CFIs are administered at a local level by SECAD Partnership CLG. Speaking at the launch, Ryan Howard, Chief Executive, said: We are delighted that we are once again coordinating the Community Food Initiatives on behalf of safefood and are looking forward to working in partnership with groups in local communities to develop new approaches to raising awareness and developing skills around healthy living and eating."

Our CFI Leaders are drawn from a range of local development groups who have wide experience of working with families. They will develop programmes that will create opportunities for people to improve their skills in relation to planning, purchasing and preparing better quality meals for themselves and their families in a sustainable, affordable fashion."

"The approaches and innovations developed will be shared throughout the three years with other communities, service providers and stakeholders to improve awareness of the benefits of incorporating healthy eating programmes into their own work plans.

Since first launched in 2010, 30 communities across the island of Ireland have received funding under successive CFIs. A key feature of the programme is that learnings and experiences from previous programmes are shared among the new initiatives. New initiatives are also encouraged and supported to enhance the long-term sustainability of their work from the outset.A father-of-one has been sentenced to life in prison for murdering a fellow drug dealer, whod threatened his family over a 100 debt. He chased him across a busy street in Longford and stabbed him to death in broad daylight.



The Central Criminal Court heard that Rihards Lavickis (26) admitted that he went out with a knife on November 1, 2016 to get Akadiusz Arik Czajkowski for threatening his family and breaking their windows.

The Latvian native with an address at Annaly court in Longford pleaded not guilty to murder, but guilty to the manslaughter of the Polish father-of-two outside Longford Shopping Centre at Rue Noyal Chatillon, Townspark in the town.



The trial heard that both men had become friendly while neighbours in Annaly Court. However, the deceased had set a number of bins on fire, causing an electricity outage lasting several days in a number of apartments.



The deceased had moved elsewhere in the town by the time Lavickis bought 300 worth of drugs off him on tic. However, the money wasnt paid on the day the deceased wanted. So, he went with an associate to the home Lavickis shared with his partner, her mother and sister and their three young children, and attacked him with a knuckle duster.



Although Lavickis reported the attack to the gardai, he decided not to press charges, and the drug debt was reduced to 100 as a result.



However, the trouble continued between the two men, with Lavickis holding the deceased responsible for his familys windows being broken on up to five different occasions. During one of these incidents, his sister-in-laws friend was sleeping in the room under attack.



The night before the killing was Halloween and Lavickis was out and about with two friends. The jury saw CCTV footage of the three men standing behind a wall before a car pulled up and the deceased and two other men getting out. The footage then showed the first three men running away.



One of Lavickiss friends, Michael Godla, told the court that the deceased had shouted at Lavickis: Where is the money? and that Lavickis had replied: I give you nothing because you beat me with a knuckle duster.



Mr Godla testified that the deceased had warned that he would get out of the car and give Lavickis a beating.



Then another guy get out of the back of the car so we run away all of us, he said, explaining that they were afraid. They were big guys, like both bodybuilders. There were three people inside.



He said they were hiding for 15 minutes as the men in the car drove up and down looking for them.



Mr Godla said that he was awoken by glass breaking around 3 oclock the following morning and saw that Lavickiss window had been broken. He later told Lavickis what he had seen.



Gardai testified that Lavickis called them to report the broken window that morning. They went to his home and he nominated the deceased as a suspect, telling the officers that he would get him. They had warned him not to, that they would deal with it.



However, he had gone out with a knife looking for the deceased. He later saw him walking down the street, hid in a gap in a wall and gave chase as he passed by.



The jury saw CCTV footage of him chasing him with a knife raised, and heard that hed stabbed him three times just seconds later. The stabbing wasnt caught on camera.



A post-mortem exam found that the victim died of a single stab wound to the heart. The other two wounds were not fatal, with one to his finger classed as defensive.



The defence had argued that he did not have the intent necessary for murder when he stabbed the deceased. His barrister also said that, if the jury found he had the intent, it could then find that he had been provoked by the deceased. Both defences could reduce murder to manslaughter.



However, the prosecution argued that the natural and probable consequences of sticking a knife into someones chest was death or serious injury, either of which could lead to a conviction of murder.



The jury spent just over three hours deliberating and found him guilty of murder by unanimous verdict.



Mr Justice Michael White thanked the jury of eight men and four women and imposed the mandatory life sentence on Lavickis."I love to break taboos. Thats my hobby!"

Oyungerel Tsedevdamba is a human rights activist who has been breaking taboos to promote human rights in her native Mongolia. Since 2015, the former member of parliament and author has championed better sanitation as a means for improving the lives of Mongolians. The best way to do this, she said, is to tackle the taboo surrounding the word "toilet."



"The word toilet is a very prejudiced word," Tsedevdamba said. "In legal papers, advertisements, and in every day conversation, the word toilet doesnt come out, until we ran a nationwide campaign."

Tsedevdamba created am NGO called Local Solutions which has a two-pronged approach for changing attitudes and improving sanitation. First is to de-stigmatise the word "toilet." The second was to educate people across Mongolia on toilet and toilet technologies.

Clean water and sanitation are indispensable to sustain development, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet told an audience during an event to commemorate World Water Day. A report released this week by UN Water looking at the state of water and sanitation worldwide, shows that access to safe sources are still out of reach for much of the global population.

"The fact that billions of people still lack safe water and sanitation is not merely a development emergency, its a human rights failure," she said.

Better toilets = better lives

In Mongolia, Tsedevdamba believes that access to safe and reliable sanitation is a matter of life and death and not just from disease. Each year poorly designed toilets, claim the lives of children and the elderly. The toilets amount to outdoor huts, with deeply dug trenches with planks of wood balanced precariously above them.

For example, during particularly bad flooding in the western part of Mongolia in 2016, Tsedevdamba learned that at least five children died from drowning in pit toilets. These deaths, she said were underreported. She found out that police do not keep records of such deaths, labelling them simply as drownings because families will not report them because of the shame associated with toilets, she said.

"After hearing these death stories, I thought I wished to change (physical) toilets as soon as possible so that we can save one childs life," Tsedevdamba said.

Part of breaking the toilet taboo has been getting people to talk about toilets. Tsedevdamba and her team did this through trainings in local areas, as well as publishing a book on toilets. There was even a photo campaign (based on a book she wrote called "Lets Change Our Toilets") which had Tsedevdamba and others pictured in modern toilets while wearing the latest fashions by Mongolian designers.

She also helped produce a manual of types of toilets that could be constructed in different settings across the country. The NGO has also been working on ways to help communities and individuals to improve, import and adapt, finance and build their own better toilets.

"In the beginning, people were actually disgusted by what we were talking about," Tsedevdamba said. "But the more we talked about it freely and in many good examples, the less became the prejudice. Soon people started seeing toilets in a very different way."

Listen to Oyungerel Tsedevdamba talk more about her campaign to break the toilet taboo in Mongolia in the film below.Charlottesville Schools Close Over Racially Charged Threats Against Black, Minority Students Elijah C. Watson Elijah Watson serves as Okayplayer's News & Culture Editor. When

Public schools have been closed since Thursday.

All public schools in Charlottesville, Virginia, have been closed this week following an anonymous threat made on 4chan against black and minority students at Charlottesville High School.

READ: Suspect In Charlottesville Car Attack Faces Life In Prison

According to a report from NBC News, the message not only targeted black and minority students but warned white students to stay home. The schools have been closed since Thursday.

As the Richmond Times-Dispatch notes, the person who made the threat claimed to be a student at Charlottesville High School, and said that they wanted to shoot dead non-white students in an act of ethnic cleansing.'

We heard clearly that you, too, want us to prioritize the safety of our students and staff, the Charlottesville City Schools posted on its Facebook page. Based on extensive conversations with law enforcement, we have decided to remain closed on Friday.

We would like to acknowledge and condemn the fact that this threat was racially charged,the post continued. We do not tolerate hate or racism. The entire staff and School Board stand in solidarity with our students of color  and with people who have been singled out for reasons such as religion or ethnicity or sexual identity in other vile threats made across the country or around the world.

As Reuters notes, African-Americans make up around 19 percent of Charlottesvilles population of nearly 50,000 people.

The district also said that the Charlottesville Police Department is still working to determine the credibility of the threat. In a post from their own Facebook, the police department wrote that This threat remains under investigation and we are urging anyone with information to call police.

https://www.facebook.com/charlottesvillepd/posts/1561478230662273?__xts__[0]=68.ARCrm3J0M7s5cZ9G3h2NGB4V8PSERku4blr09OLhftxqCJBAZDGPLYbKDGXh2fs5vE6LwNu8P6KBWZs4N4yNFypVycIwKA6k9LcB4Remdwc8NfO_EY4lWm1TqFdxyZ-HpyWMJnbKIDDNF04a3C0bDNHLNzilCY2BulTRBLAHcwHBTFcCdOjcHU76DHyt8R0oSiHEjuvqYrRHvmttdn9JTAosm7kwN1HO3k376NpeeA3sYMOUdmHIdGendxKnB8UCWpKAq0iQF5qlC6ZW6ajRrI1H5H_36PG8_U6MnL_tFuDQMdulv5QwGCtYbCRPTtF2GzIrXxaYRO-uGomp0O1LMq3DmlO7jgf8FsxVXXvyrGyswRan0SrkTycsXJS1Awa2EWLfqEgHxn8zkHe6OjrMt43FIYCRilGFyTy7pJLW_ARbYJggvWAwQEhY8gekhANGWURPCKC2IrOoiOG-qukFSk5jXT8B1J0CJLXFSqKWKChRfeW8J6cwZA&__tn__=-R

Source: NBC NewsHow Jordan Peeles Us Navigates Michael Jackson In A Post-Leaving Neverland World Elijah C. Watson Elijah Watson serves as Okayplayer's News & Culture Editor. When

Although Jordan Peele was unaware Leaving Neverland would be released shortly before Us, the film examines the duality of the late pop icon from the moment it starts.

The scene happens shortly after Us begins.

A young Adelaide Thomas (portrayed by Madison Curry) tells her father that she wants the Michael Jackson Thriller t-shirt as her prize from a carnival game. The shirt is slightly oversized. But she puts it on as soon as its handed to her, walking alongside her parents as she eats a candy apple.

In a post-Leaving Neverland world, its difficult to not be taken aback by the scene. If the documentary, which is centered on Jacksons alleged sexual abuse of two children throughout the 90s, didnt exist, the scene wouldve probably evoked a more endearing recollection of our own first experiences with Thriller. The first time witnessing the late pop star transform into a yellow-eyed werewolf or decrepit zombie, as him and a horde of other zombies surround his terrified girlfriend, only for her to wake up and realize it was a dream.

The fear is relieved, but its brief. Jackson wrapping his arm around the girl to comfort her, only to turn and face the camera with those same glowing yellow eyes, made even more menacing by his Cheshire cat smile.

Now, its difficult to think of that impressionable and innocent fear without considering the harmful and real fear James Safechuck and Wade Robson  the two at the center of Leaving Neverland  allegedly endured from Jackson. This ultimately leads to a re-examining and reckoning of this fear  that maybe Jackson wasnt the hero he made himself out to be. Maybe he was a werewolf, a zombie  a monster. Us has inadvertently become the first film to reference and provide a commentary  albeit subtle  on Jackson post-Leaving Neverland.

Michael Jackson is probably the patron saint of duality, Peele said in an interview with Mashable. The movie starts in the 80s  the duality with which I experienced him [Jackson] in that time was both as the guy that presented this outward positivity, but also the Thriller video which scared me to death.

The irony and relevance is not lost on me now that the discussion has evolved to one of true horror, Peele added.

Duality is an integral part of Us. The film is centered around the Wilson family  Adelaide (Lupita Nyongo), Gabriel (Winston Duke), Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and Jason (Evan Alex)  who are confronted by a group of doppelgangers known as the Tethered. The Tethered distinguish themselves from their counterparts not only by how they act but what they wear  a red jumpsuit and a solo hand glove. The Tethereds uniform seems to be a subtle nod to both Jacksons Thriller outfit and the sequined white glove he wore (although Jackson first wore the glove on his left hand most pictures tend to show it on his right hand), something Peele spoke to during an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Its no mistake, its no coincidence, that the Tethered are wearing red and have one glove, either, he said. We address a few of the phenomena that were happening at that time. For me, growing up, it was a very confusing time.

The jumpsuits are a very impressionistic kind of realization of [Adelaides childhood memories]also, that particular song and the visuals it brings back, Kym Barrett, Us costume designer, said in a separate interview with Fashionista. The jumpsuits are a visual embodiment of something that is prevalent in everyone, in everything.

The Thriller outfit, as well as the glove, were significant aesthetics for Jackson in the 80s. The latter was first debuted when he reunited with his brothers for NBCs television special, Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever. Initially, Jackson turned down the invitation but at the request of Motown founder Berry Gordy, he agreed to appear in exchange for time for a solo performance. He did Billie Jean and debuted his moonwalk dance during his set, the performance earning him his first Emmy nomination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d17ggav1Lto

The glove appeared throughout other notable moments of Jacksons career, including the video for USA for Africas We Are the World. The song, originally written by Jackson and Lionel Richie, featured 46 vocalists including Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and Tina Turner,. But Jackson stole the show, not only for his solo vocals but his extravagant wardrobe. Theres actually a scene that starts at his feet and ascends to his face, capturing everything from his sequined socks to his glove.

Jacksons We Are the World moment further contributed to his transformation into a God-like figure by his fans. Following his death, BBC News spoke with fans across the world about Jacksons impact. Elias Kifle Maraim Beyene was one of them, speaking about how he and the rest of the residents of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, named a bread they made after the artist.

I wont ever forget Michael Jackson because his contribution to the song We Are the World had a very significant effect on my life, Beyene said. If you speak to anyone who was in Addis Ababa at that time they will all know what Michael Bread is and I know I will remember it for the rest of my life.

That Peele chose these two items and assigned them to the antagonists of Us, provides a commentary that is timely. What Jackson means in 2019 and moving forward is different from what he meant in the 80s.

Michael Jackons Thriller makes a small but significant cameo in #Usmovie so I asked the cast about the first time they heard it, and @Winston_Duke knocked this answer out of the park. Full clip here: https://t.co/dO5fmjBaKT #watchyourself pic.twitter.com/7688Hq7aUW  Jerry L Barrow (@JLBarrow) March 20, 2019

That topic right now after the documentary is socomplicated right now, on how to consume legacy, Winston Duke said in an interview with BET. But I think that follows us into the movie. Because the movie is about what legacy do we leave? And if your legacy could visit you at your door, with your face, are you prepared to see it and deal with the repercussions? So I think Us is speaking to so many things in our society today.

The Tethered Jackson has been around  a lot of us are beginning to see that for the first time. Although in interviews Peele and Duke have been noticeably diplomatic in their responses to Jackson  likely to not deter fans as well as spoil the film  how the former confronts the late pop icon without explicitly condemning him in Us, offers a re-examining of who Jackson was and the complex duality he left behind.Be present in Lok Sabha, RS says BJP in 3 line whip to its MPs

Baijayant Panda to test waters from Kendrapara, this time on a BJP ticket

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Mar 22: For Baijayant Panda the Lok Sabha seat that he would contest from remains constant. Panda had left the BJD in Odisha to join the BJP.

He would contest the election from the Kendrapara seat, which he had won on a BJD ticket in 2014. Panda had vacated the seat before resigning from the BJD. His name was announced in the BJP's first list of 184 candidates on Thursday.

Panda is a four-time Lok Sabha member. He had won the Kenrapara seat in 2009 and 2014. Incidentally, the Kendrapara seat has been a BJD stronghold since 1998.

Panda quit the BJD after a bitter falling out with Odisha Chief Minister, Naveen Patnaik. He had been cozying up to the BJP, which has been looking to make major inroads in the state.

Key take aways from the BJP's first list of candidates for LS polls 2019

Panda after joining the BJP was appointed as the Vice President of the party in the state. Winning Kendrapara would be crucial for the BJP, which currently holds just one seat in the state. Jual Oram of the BJP represents the Sundargarh seat in Odisha.

Panda has been one of the most prominent leaders of the BJD in the state. He has been a parliamentarian since 2000. The BJP hopes to make major inroads in the state with the help of Panda. In 2014, the BJP had won just one of the 21 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

However the party has emerged as a major challenger to the BJD following the local body elections.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 6:26 [IST]BJP yet to name candidate for Pathanamthitta which houses Sabarimala temple

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Mar 22: The BJP in its first list of candidates announced the names of 13 candidates to contest from Kerala. The party however deferred the name of the candidate to contest from the Pathanamthitta seat, which houses the Sabarimala temple.

Pathanamthitta was in the news following the Sabarimala controversy, following a Supreme Court verdict that allowed women of all ages to enter the temple.

The Pathanamthitta seat is currently represented by Anto Anthony of the UDF. He won the elections in 2014 in which the LDF-INF and BJP candidates ended with the second and third positions respectively.

The BJP is hoping to cash in on the strong undercurrent against the LDF candidate Antony. He is not just facing anti-incumbency, but also dissent from his own party as he originally hails from Kottayam.

Full list of BJP candidates for Lok Sabha Elections 2019

A win from Pathanamthitta would signal the view point of political parties on the Sabarimala issue. Pathanamthitta has five assembly constituencies. The constituency has a Hindu population of 55 per cent, followed by the Christians. Pathanamthitta has a Muslim population of only 6 per cent. Both the Congress led UDF and CPM led LDF have always fielded Christians from this constituency.

The BJP would carefully choose its candidate from the Pathanamthitta seat. It is hoping to cash in on the Sabarimala agitation. The party is said to be ironing out differences with the RSS on the candidate who needs to be fielded from here. The RSS is said to be favouring K Surendran, who was jailed and banned from entering the district after he led the Sabarimala agitation.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 6:05 [IST]Jet's revival looks bleak as Anil Agarwal pulls out of race for acquiring cash-strapped airline

Cash-strapped Jet Airways suspends services to 13 international routes till April-end

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Mar 22: Jet Airways, on the verge of going belly-up, has suspended operations on as many as 13 more international routes till end-April, besides scaling down frequencies on seven other overseas routes, mostly from Delhi and Mumbai, according to airline sources.

The routes where services have been temporarily withdrawn include Pune-Singapore (seven a week), which was launched with much fanfare late last December, and Pune-Abu Dhabi (seven flights a week).

Jet Airways has already suspended services on the Mumbai-Manchester route.

Gasping for funds and no bailout on the horizon, the Naresh Goyal-controlled airline has now reduced its operations to one-fourth from over 600 daily flights earlier, with just one-third of its 119 fleet being operational.

Jet Airways pilots write to PM about salary dues, say their stress 'can easily compromise safety'

The airline has discontinued services from Delhi to Abu Dhabi (nine a week), Dammam (14 weekly), Dhaka (11), Hong Kong and Riyadh (seven each a week) up to April 30, said the airline source.

Besides, the airline has also suspended services on the Bangalore-Singapore route, where it flies twice daily, till April 30.

The flights which have been suspended from Mumbai for this period include services to Abu Dhabi (12 weekly), Bahrain (4-7 weekly), and Dammam (14 weekly). These services will remain suspended till April 30, as per the source.

Similarly, flights on the Mumbai-Hong Kong (7 weekly) route will also not be operated between March 23 and April 30, while the Kolkata-Dhaka services have also been suspended till April 30.

In addition to this, services from Delhi and Mumbai to Kathmandu, Bangkok, Doha, Kuwait and Singapore have been also reduced significantly.

However, the airline has not yet informed the exchanges about these reduction and suspension of services.

PTI

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 23:50 [IST]Confirm if Modi exchanged greetings with Imran Khan on Pakistan National Day: Congress to PMO

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Mar 23: The Congress on Friday asked the prime minister's office (PMO) to confirm if Narendra Modi has exchanged greetings with his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan on the eve of their National Day after India boycotted a function at the Pakistan High Commission here.

Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi asked whether Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's claims that Modi extended his greetings to him on Pakistan's National Day was correct.

"I would hope the @PMOIndia clarifies that what Imran Khan has tweeted is the correct version of greetings exchanged or whether if they have been exchanged at all, especially after the function was boycotted in India by the govt. The nation would want to know...," she said on Twitter.

Received greetings from PM Modi on Pakistan National Day: Imran Khan

Imran Khan earlier tweeted, "Received message from PM Modi: "I extend my greetings and best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that people of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive and prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence."

Modi Friday sent a message to Khan, greeting people of the neighbouring country on the eve of its National Day, official sources said here.

The prime minister, in his message, said it was time for the people of the sub-continent to work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive and prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence, they said.

India, earlier in the evening, boycotted a reception at the Pakistan High Commission here to mark Pakistan's National Day, objecting to invites extended to several separatist leaders from Jammu and Kashmir for the event.

The External Affairs Ministry said no Indian representative will attend similar events in Islamabad as well. Over the years, India's representation at the annual event has been at the level of a Union minister.

"India has decided not to send any representative to attend the Pakistan National Day celebrations today. This decision was taken after the Pakistan High Commission decided to invite representatives of the Hurriyat Conference to the reception," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar earlier said.

PTI

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Story first published: Saturday, March 23, 2019, 1:07 [IST]Election expenditure: How much did BJP, Congress, DMK, CPI, TMC, AIADMK receive funds and spent during polls?

Opposition front not possible without Congress: Shiv Sena leader Raut after meeting with Rahul Gandhi

Mamata Banerjee's TMC gives yet another jolt to Congress in Meghalaya; 11 members switch sides

Congress gives ticket to Sanatan sympathiser after opposing outfit

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Mar 22: In a recent list of candidates declared by Congress, the candidature of Navinchandra Bandiwadekar from Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg constituency in Maharashtra has come in for criticism after his photo on the dais of right-wing group Sanatan Sanstha and his participation in the rally organised to support Vaibhav Raut, a go-rakshak from Nallasopara, who was arrested for possessing arms, became public.

What is interesting is that Bandiwadekar's photo had appeared in an article posted by right-wing Hindu organisation Sanatan Sanstha's website.

He was seen attending a programme in September 2018 in support of a Sanatan Sanstha activist Vaibhav Raut, who was arrested in August 2018 for plotting terror attacks in Maharashtra.

Cong announces candidates for Lok Sabha, Assembly polls in Andhra Pradesh

Maharashtra Congress president Ashok Chavan said the party was aware of reports regarding Bandiwadekar. "The Congress is against extremist organisations like Sanatan Sanstha. An appropriate decision will be taken after a detailed inquiry," he said.

Sanatan Sanstha members have been accused of four bombings in Vashi, Thane and Panvel and in Goa. They are allegedly involved in the murders of rationalists and intellectuals.

Raut's home in Nalasopara on the outskirts of Mumbai was raided by the ATS on August last year and a huge cache of explosives and detonators had been recovered. The ATS had even filed a chargesheet in the case in which 12 people were arrested.

In the protests following his arrest, the Congress leader had claimed that Raut was being made a scapegoat by the police that was foisting a false case on him.

In UP, who will be impacted by a solo fight by the Congress

After getting a ticket from Congress, Bandiwadekar now asserts he had never supported Sanatan Sanstha ideology.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra ally NCP has demanded that the Congress candidate is changed, calling the ticket unacceptable.Dharwad building collapse: Death toll rises to 14, owners surrender to cops

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar P

Dharwad, Mar 22: Four owners of the under-construction building that collapsed in Dharwad surrendered to cops on Friday, three days after the tragedy as the death toll rose to 14. Till now more than 60 people have been rescued.

According to reports, one of the building owner Basavaraj blamed an engineer for the tragedy. On Thursday, police arrested the engineer, Vivek Pawar, from a lodge in Kolhapur, Maharashtra.

Deepa Cholan, District Commissioner, said, "Total 14 people have died. Yesterday, we rescued two people. Three more people are trapped in the debris. We have given oxygen and ORS to them. SDRF and NDRF teams are conducting rescue operation."

Karnataka: Villagers drain 36-acre lake after HIV-positive woman ends life

Former CM Jagadish Shettar, who visited the cite, sought Rs 10 lakh compensation to the kin of the deceased in the tragedy. He further asked the government to order a judicial probe into the incident.

Later in the day, CM HD Kumaraswamy visited the spot to take stock of the rescue operations.

CM HD Kumaraswamy said, "The rescue work at Dharwad building collapse site is on. I spoke to the Revenue Minister who is on site and the DC and took stock of the progress in rescue operations. I have told the Chief Secretary to make a detailed inquiry into the accident."

According to reports, most of those trapped were migrant labourers from north India who were engaged in laying tiles.

A case has been filed under section 304 (punishment for culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of the IPC against the owners of the building and a special team will be constituted to investigate the case and arrest the culprits.Money laundering: Jaqueline to appear before ED on Dec 8

ED arrests Zakir Naik's aide in money laundering case

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar P

New Delhi, Mar 22: Enforcement Directorate arrested one Najmudin Sathak on charges of assisting Controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik in money laundering and transfer of funds.

The ED is poised to seize about 14 properties in Jammu and Kashmir belonging to Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist outfit chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed in an attempt to clamp down on terror funding, the Economic Times reported citing people familiar with the development.

The ED has identified properties worth Rs 50.73 crore in Mumbai and Pune belonging to controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik. These assets were allegedly acquired from the proceeds of crime, the agency sources told the publication.

Zakir Naik case: ED attaches assets worth Rs 16.40 cr under PMLA

India has requested the extradition of the preacher from Malaysia , whom it has accused of being involved in hate speech and money-laundering activities.

However, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said Malaysia would not bow to pressure whereas Zakir, who is now a Malaysian permanent resident, claimed that his reputation has been maligned by religious fanatics in India.

Naik's organization, Islamic Research Foundation, has been banned in India. Bangladeshi authorities held him responsible for influencing one of the gunmen who had attacked a bakery and cafe in Dhaka in 2016 that resulted in the death of 29 people.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 14:10 [IST]Haryana: Infant falls into 60-ft borewell, rescue operations underway

India

oi-PTI

Chandigarh, Mar 22: Massive rescue operations continued late into the night on Thursday after an 18-month-old child fell into a 60 feet deep borewell in Haryana's Balsamand village, officials said.

A team of Army experts and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) officials are being assisted by civil and police authorities as the rescue efforts continued for 24 hours after the infant fell into the borewell on Wednesday evening.

The authorities have also started digging a parallel well, about 20 feet away from the borewell, and also plans to dig a tunnel to bring out the child safely, they said.

The child's movements are being monitored by a Night Vision Camera which had been dropped inside the borewell.

During the day, the rescuers tried to pull out the child with the help of a net, but had to shelve the plan after facing some difficulties, officials said.

"The rescue operations are still on. We are hoping to bring out the child safely. NDRF personnel and Army experts are being assisted by local authorities. The child's movements are being monitored and he is safe," Hisar Deputy Superintendent of Police, Joginder Singh said.

According to a local, the child, identified as Nadim, was playing with some friends when he suddenly fell into the borewell. His family members and villagers later informed the police.

The child's father is a labourer. Earthmovers and other equipment have been pressed into service, even as oxygen tubes were dropped to help the child to breathe. Biscuits and juices are being supplied to the child. A medical team has also been deployed at the incident site, they said.

Deputy Commissioner Ashok Kumar Meena said legal action will be taken against the person who dug the borewell without taking permission from the department concerned.

The accident has once again brought to the fore the dangers posed by uncovered borewells, which have turned into death traps for children.

In 2006, a massive operation was launched to rescue 5-year-old Prince, who had fallen into a borewell in a village in Kurukshetra. He was pulled out safely nearly 48 hours later.How Nirav Modi was tracked down and arrested

India

oi-Oneindia Staff

By Anuj Cariappa

New Delhi, Mar 22: Nirav Modi, the main accused in the $2 billion PNB scam case, has been arrested in London and remanded in custody by a court till March 29.

His arrest came days after a London court issued an arrest warrant against him in response to a request by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for his extradition in a money laundering case.

It emerged in court that Nirav Modi was arrested from a Metro Bank branch in London by uniformed officers on Tuesday when he went there to open a new bank account.

A bank clerk alerted Scotland Yard as a result of the "high publicity" surrounding the case and Metropolitan Police officers arrived to execute the arrest. This over-rode a previous arrangement made between Scotland Yard's extradition unit and Nirav Modi's lawyers for him to surrender "by appointment" at a central London police station on Monday, something his legal team blamed on the "nature of publicity" surrounding the case.

To get Nirav-Choksi back, three agencies working in tandem

The location of the arrest indicates that Nirav, wanted in India in connection with the Rs 13,500 crore Punjab National Bank scam case, was arrested from the area where he was reportedly living.

A British daily had recently published a report and video showing Nirav Modi walking on the streets of London and said the fugitive diamantaire was living in a swanky 8 million apartment in the city's West End.

It also emerged in court that Nirav Modi was in possession of at least three passports, all revoked by India.

The court was told that Nirav Modi arrived in London in January last year before any of the allegations emerged and has maintained a very "visible" presence in the country and offered to cooperate with the UK authorities since his arrival.

He is currently employed by Diamond Holdings Ltd in London for a monthly salary of 20,000 pounds and pays his council tax regularly, his lawyers stressed in support of his defence.

Nirav Modi and his uncle, Mehul Choksi, are the main accused in the PNB scam and they both left India before the details of the fraud came to light in January 2018.

Nirav Modi had launched his own eponymous brand in 2010 and he soon opened stores across India, as well as in New York, London and Hong Kong.

His diamond-encrusted designs were worn by noted Hollywood as well as Bollywood stars.

His jewellery shops were raided and his assets frozen after the allegations emerged last year.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 6:22 [IST]No, L K Advani did not says he regretted handing over country to Modi-Shah

It is curtains for L K Advani, who built BJP from scratch

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Mar 22: The electoral journey of L K Advani, the man who built the party came to an end, with the BJP announcing its list of candidates to fight the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

The BJP fielded Amit Shah from Gandhinagar, a seat represented by Advani six times. Following the announcement, the Congress was quick to react. Party spokesperson, Randeep Surjewala said, " first Advani was forcibly sent to the Margdarshak Mandal. Now even his parliamentary seat has been snatched. When Modi does not respect elders, how will he honour the trust of the people."

The BJP in a late night development announced its list of 184 candidates. Prime Minister Narendra Modi would contest from Varanasi, the seat he had won in 2014. However there is no word as yet on whether Modi would contest from a second seat.

Full list of BJP candidates for Lok Sabha Elections 2019

In the 2014 elections, Advani had won the Gandhinagar seat by a huge margin of 4.83 lakh votes. He defeated Kirit Patel of the Congress. However the victory was largely attributed to the Modi wave in 2014.

In 2014 there was speculation that Advani may be shifted to Bhopal, while Shah would be given the Gandhinagar seat. Advani who led the Ramjanmabhoomi movement had put the party in a commendable position. The party it may be recalled had won just two seats in the 1984 elections.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 5:55 [IST]From plotting a hijack to creating the JeM, why Pakistan guards Masood Azhar so much

With a Taliban takeover, what is the JeM demanding in Afghanistan

What does the meeting between Taliban and Jaish-e-Mohammad mean for India

JeM terrorist linked to Pulwama attack mastermind arrested in Delhi

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar P

New Delhi, Mar 22: Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist Sajjad Khan reportedly linked to Pulwama attack mastermind Mudassir has been arrested by Delhi Police Special Cell. He was arrested from near the Red Fort area on Thursday night.

The Pulwama attack mastermind Mudassir had been eliminated earlier this month in the Tral area of South Kashmir. The encounter in Pinglish area of Tral in south Kashmir's Pulwama district lasted past midnight in which Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist Mudasir Ahmed Khan alias 'Mohd Bhai' was among the three militants killed.

Rajnath Singh, Arvind Kejriwal shun Holi celebrations in memory of Pulwama jawans

Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist Sajjad Khan (in grey sweatshirt) who was arrested by Delhi Police Special Cell, earlier today. He was a close associate of Pulwama attack mastermind Mudassir who had been eliminated earlier this month. pic.twitter.com/TCWdYIQGwt  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2019

On 14 February 2019, a convoy of 78 vehicles transporting more than 2,500 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel from Jammu to Srinagar was travelling on National Highway 44. The convoy had left Jammu around 03:30 IST and was carrying a large number of personnel due to the highway having been shut down for two days prior. The convoy was scheduled to reach its destination before sunset.

At Lethpora near Awantipora, around 15:15 IST, a bus carrying security personnel was rammed by a car carrying explosives. It caused a blast which killed 40 CRPF personnel of the 76th Battalion and injured many others.Just a matter of time for 9 day encounter in Rajouri-Poonch jungles to end

Guided by ex-Pak army officials, operating in buddy pairs: Why the Poonch encounter has dragged so much

Tire, track eliminate: Why has the Poonch encounter dragged on for so long

J&K: Terrorist killed in Shopian encounter, gunbattle underway

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Jammu, Mar 22: One terrorist has been killed after a massive gunbattle broke out between terrorists and security forces in South Kashmir's Shopian district on early Friday morning.

The firing is currently underway. It has been reported that at least three terrorists, affiliated to Lashkar-e-Taiba, were trapped in a residential house at Imam Sahab area in Shopian.

This is the third encounter that has taken place in the Valley in the last 24 hours.

Jammu & Kashmir: One hostage rescued safely, efforts on to save another

A joint team of the Jammu and Kashmir Poice, Indian Army and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) are conducting joint search and rescue operations in the area. The police had received a tip-off regarding the presence of terrorists in Shopian.

Earlier on Thursday, two terrorists and a jawan were killed as an encounter broke out between militants and security forces at four different locations in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Jammu and Kashmir Police on Thursday rescued a civilian who was held hostage by the terrorists who were holed up in Hajin area of north Kashmir's Bandipora district.Terrorist who was going to kill shopkeeper in J&K gunned down

Highly radicalised terrorist arrested in Punjab and not surprisingly link goes back to the UK

J&K: Two terrorists, 12-year-old boy killed in Bandipora' Hajin, search operation on

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Jammu, Mar 22: Two terrorists and 12-year-old boy, who was held hostage, was killed in Hajin area of Bandipora district in Jammu and Kashmir after a gunfight took place in the area on Thursday. The terrorists have been identified.

A 12-year-old boy was held hostage by suspected militants inside a house from where they fired at security forces in Bandipora district of Jammu and Kashmir earlier on Thursday, reported Greater Kashmir. Another civilian who was held hostage was rescued by security forces.

Army spokesman Rajesh Kalia said security forces have found the bodies of two terrorists and a 12-year-old boy after an exchange of gunfire.

Jammu & Kashmir: Two terrorists, one hostage killed in encounter in Hajin

Hajin area was once considered a zone "liberated" from the terrorist control in Bandipora.

In another encounter in Baramulla district, one of the two terrorists killed in an encounter on Thursday was a Pakistani national, claimed the police. Both the terrorists were the member of the proscribed terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). The other terrorist has been identified as Aamir Rasool, a resident of Sopore. An encounter broke out on Thursday when a troop of 176 Battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) along with SOG and Rashtriya Rifles (RR) were carrying out a search operation in the vicinity.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 14:28 [IST]Karnataka MLC elections 2021: Result date, candidates, seats & all you need to know about the poll

Karnataka Speaker bizarre response to Cong leader says, 'I don't sleep with men'

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Kolar, Mar 22: Karnataka Assembly Speaker KR Ramesh Kumar on Friday said that he "doesn't sleep with men" after he was asked about senior Congress leader KH Muniyappa's comments over their relationship. The Speaker's comment came after Congress leader KH Muniyappa's statement in February that his relationship with Kumar was akin to "a husband and wife".

"I don't sleep with men. I have a legal wife. So, he (KH Muniyappa) may be interested but I am not", Kumar said while talking to the media in Bengaluru in response to Muniyappa's February 15 statement.

After Congress alleges huge bribery charge, Yeddyurappa says they are frustrated

On February 15, while inaugurating Kanaka Community Hall in Srinivaspur Taluk, Muniyappa had said, "Ramesh Kumar and I are like husband and wife and we don't have any issue."

Karnataka will go to the polls on April 18 and April 23. Fourteen constituencies will be up for grabs in each phase. Counting of votes will take place on May 23.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 18:04 [IST]Be present in Lok Sabha, RS says BJP in 3 line whip to its MPs

Election expenditure: How much did BJP, Congress, DMK, CPI, TMC, AIADMK receive funds and spent during polls?

Key take aways from the BJPs first list of candidates for LS polls 2019

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Mar 22: There are several take aways from the list of candidates announced by the BJP for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

BJP President Amit Shah will make his Lok Sabha debut this year after he repeated veteran L K Advani at the Gandhinagar Parliamentary constituency.

Here are the key take aways from the first list of candidates released by the BJP.

Shah's debut:

Amit Shah who was elected as a Rajya Sabha member in 2017 will fight the polls this year from the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency, a seat represented by L K Advani six times.

Shah who was earlier an MLA in the Gujarat legislative assembly between 1997 to 2017 has played a key role in shaping the BJP's mammoth victory in 2014. He is closely associated with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has held key portfolios including home in the Gujarat government.

Full list of BJP candidates for Lok Sabha Elections 2019

Veterans left out:

The party decided to leave out veterans such as Advani and B C Khanduri. On Thursday, senior leader Kalraj Mishra had said that he is opting out of the race this year. Veteran leader Bhagat Singh Koshyari too had made a similar announcement.

The party is yet to take a call on the fate of Murli Manohar Joshi, who had won from Kanpur in 2014.

Smriti vs Rahul:

This election would also witness a contest between union minister, Smriti Irani and Congress president, Rahul Gandhi at Amethi. Irani would be taking on Rahul for a second time. In the 2014 elections, she lost to Rahul Gandhi by a margin of over a lakh votes.

The contest promises to be an interesting one. Considered a Gandhi bastion, Rahul had won the 2009 polls by a margin of 3.70 lakh votes. However in 2014, the margin came down to 1.07 lakh.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 6:18 [IST]Advani: It was the yatra man who had prepared the pitch on which Modi is batting today

India

oi-Shubham Ghosh

New Delhi, March 22: Thursday, March 21, marked a significant day in the history of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in particular and Indian politics in general. The saffron party came out with their first list of candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha election and party patriarch Lal Krishna Advani was conspicuous by his absence in the list. BJP president and Rajya Sabha MP Amit Shah got the ticket to contest from Gandhinagar, Gujarat, from where Advani had been contesting since 1991 (except in 1996 when he did not contest).

The death of former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in August last year and now, the exclusion from Advani, 91, from the BJP's electoral scheme of things marked the conclusion of an era in the BJP. It was these two towering men who had guided and grown the BJP in Indian politics and took it to power in less than 20 years since its birth in 1980.

It is curtains for L K Advani, who built BJP from scratch

The departure of the two leaders now means the BJP is in the hands of its second-generation leaders even though Advani's presence had reduced to a mere formality over the last five years.

It will be a tad difficult for today's generations to gauge the significance of Advani in the history of the BJP's rise. The saffron party has now ruled India for more than a decade (1996, 1996-98, 1999-2004, 2014 till date) and is well-established as a ruling regime. It has now made its share of contribution to the country's political and economic life and there are scopes to judge its good and bad in comparison with other parties' governments.

The shrewd politician in Advani saw BJP's seats going up from 2 in 1984 to 120 in 1991

When Advani and Vajpayee were working in the early 1980s, nothing of that sort existed. In the 1984 election, the BJP won just two seats in the Lok Sabha. But it was Advani who had studied the situation then and made full use of the loopholes that existed in the more established secular brand of politics then.

Former prime minister Indira Gandhi and then her son Rajiv Gandhi who replaced her after her assassination had understood the significance of Hindutva and tried to make a profit out of it although the legacy of Nehruvian secularism had stopped them from going overboard.

The shrewd politician in Advani never missed the opportunity and launched his hardline Hindutva politics to expose the Congress's 'politics of appeasement' and mobile the majoritarian sentiments. It was the execution of this political mission that saw Advani undertaking yatras - one after another - in various parts of northern India in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The mission was a massive success and catapulted the BJP to a high with 120 MPs in the 1991 election. The BJP also stormed to power in Uttar Pradesh and next year, the Babri Masjid demolition followed. Advani's electoral mission by mobilising the Hindu votes even at the expense of endangering the country's socio-religious fabric was tremendously successful. The BJP was then just five years away from tasting power at the Centre.

Amit Shah to contest Lok Sabha election from LK Advani's Gandhinagar

Today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a pitch more tailor-made for him to bat and score runs, especially when the Opposition is in shambles. He doesn't need to undertake yatras to test the electoral depths and can call shots from the saddle of power through welfare mechanisms. But Advani initially did not have the privilege and it was only his hard work on the ground (and of course, there were his loyalists like Modi) that had created a strong foundation for the BJP to flourish in later years.

Advani's major goof-up came in 2005 when he praised Jinnah

Advani's major error was though when he tried to don the mantle of a moderate Vajpayee in the mid-2000s after the latter retired from active politics. Advani certainly had the ambition to become the prime minister which he thought would be successful only if tried to transform his image into a moderate leader.

He subsequently eulogised Mohammad Ali Jinnah during a trip to Pakistan in 2005 and it did not take long to rattle the hardcore saffronists. That was a point of fall for Advani and though he was the party's face in the 2009 Lok Sabha election which the BJP lost, his position was not the same again.

The BJP needed to rediscover itself before the 2014 Lok Sabha election and it would not have been possible with an ageing Advani. The party itself was also in the next phase of its take-off and needed to present its face friendly for governance and development.

Will L K Advani contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections? Chances are bleak

Modi, who had a decade of experience as the chief minister of a developed state Gujarat, had fitted the narrative best and the party's machinery was also ready to give him a push. Advani had his few loyalists who did not like the idea of promoting Modi but eventually had to surrender as the mood was with the latter.

Advani, sent to the Margdarshak Mandal which is nothing but a glorious retirement, had his quietest stint in the Lok Sabha in the last five years. Time has definitely won the race against the nonagenarian but even on the day when his political journey concluded of sort, it is necessary to take a vow not to forget his significance in Indian politics. He had indeed changed it forever.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 11:40 [IST]Lok Sabha Election 2019: Why Nitish Kumar is the 'X' factor in Bihar

India

oi-Deepika S

Patna, Mar 22: The stage is set for a prestige battle between two opposition alliances in Bihar. Nitish Kumar, who has earned the the sobriquet of 'Chanakya' of Bihar politics now faces the challenge of delivering Bihar to Modi at a time when he is the JD(U) president.

The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) announced the contours of its seat-sharing agreement for the 40 Lok Sabha constituencies in Bihar on Sunday. While the BJP and Nitish's Janata Dal (United) will contest 17 seats each, the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) of Ram Vilas Paswan has six.

Of the state's six seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes or Dalits, the LJP will contest three and the JD(U) two, leaving just one for the BJP, which is largely seen as a party of the upper caste, urban voter.

Lok Sabha elections 2019: Grand alliance seals Bihar seat-sharing deal, RJD to contest on 20

Under Kumar's stewardship, the JD(U) will contest 17 Lok Sabha seats, a number equal to what BJP has kept for itself. The JD(U) had fared miserably in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, winning only two seats compared to BJP's 22, the bargain was no mean achievement, particularly since it required the saffron party to give up some seats it had won.

Moreover, unlike the BJP, which had to give up its claim on at least five of its sitting seats, the JD(U)retained both Nalanda and Purnea, besides securing for itself some prized ones like Munger, compelling the LJP to settle for Nawada.

Nawada was represented in the outgoing Lok Sabha by Union minister Giriraj Singh one of the fiercest critics of Kumar in the BJP and a Modi loyalist since the days when bitter rivalry between the Bihar chief minister and his Gujarat counterpart used to make headlines.

Singh, an influential upper caste Bhumihar leader, is unhappy at the prospect of having to shift to Begusarai despite the sizeable presence of his castemen in the constituency, saying he had developed an "attachment" to Nawada.

The upcoming general elections will also give an opportunity to Kumar to settle scores with friends-turned-foes Upendra Kushwaha of RLSP and HAM's Jitan Ram Manjhi, both of whom had rushed into the BJP's arms after falling out with theJD(U) boss. The two parties have walked out of the NDA and are now part of the grand alliance.

Kushwaha, who heads the RLSP, may seek re-election from Karakat, while HAM president Manjhi is eyeing Gaya. Both these seats have fallen into the JD(U)'s kitty.

Another important seat that has come the JD(U)'s way is Madhepura, offering Kumar a chance to get even with Sharad Yadav, the former president of his party who had fruitlessly dissented when the Bihar chief minister led his party out of the NDA in 2013.

Yadav, who had bitterly criticised Kumar when he realigned with the BJP, later floated the Loktantrik Janata Dal and is part of the grand alliance. He has represented Madhepura seat several times in the past.

But doubts persist over Nitish's electoral standing because of his shifts between NDA and UPA in recent years. If Nitish is able to retain his 15% vote bank, he and BJP will sail through in Bihar. If not, it will be curtains to his career.

OneIndia News (with PTI inputs)Be present in Lok Sabha, RS says BJP in 3 line whip to its MPs

Election expenditure: How much did BJP, Congress, DMK, CPI, TMC, AIADMK receive funds and spent during polls?

Lok Sabha elections 2019: BJP CEC to meet again today, 2nd list of candidates expected

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Mar 22: The BJP's central election committee (CEC), which is scheduled to meet on Friday as part of its deliberations to finalise candidates for the second list for the Lok Sabha polls 2019, is expected to release the second set of nominees after the meeting.

This will be the fourth meeting of the CEC, BJP's highest decision-making body, on the selection of candidates.

Earlier on Thursday, the party had released its first list of 184 candidates. The list was announced by Union health minister JP Nadda.

Key take aways from the BJP's first list of candidates for LS polls 2019

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will contest from Varanasi, while BJP president Amit Shah will contest from Gandhinagar, which is veteran BJP leader LK Advani's seat. Union home minister Rajnath Singh will contest the elections from Lucknow with Nitin Gadkari contesting from Nagpur.

The CEC has already held wide-ranging discussions on the selection of its candidates for Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Chattisgarh and all eight north-eastern states.

On Tuesday, the party had announced that it will drop its all 10 incumbent MPs from Chhattisgarh and replace them with new faces, a decision that comes in the wake of the party's drubbing in the recent assembly elections.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 9:36 [IST]Election expenditure: How much did BJP, Congress, DMK, CPI, TMC, AIADMK receive funds and spent during polls?

Opposition front not possible without Congress: Shiv Sena leader Raut after meeting with Rahul Gandhi

Mamata Banerjee's TMC gives yet another jolt to Congress in Meghalaya; 11 members switch sides

Lok Sabha Elections 2019: Congress likely to focus on 'jobs' to take on Modi

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Mar 22: The Congress' manifesto for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections will sharply focus on jobs, taking on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government over its alleged inability to create a sufficient number of jobs in its five-year term.

Congress has been attacking Narendra Modi government over lack of job creation, saying the three main issues in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls would be jobs, jobs and jobs.

The Congress also wants to commit itself to filling up government vacancies, which in its count "runs into millions of jobs", to offer secure employment and counter the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance's narrative that the unorganised sector and self-employment have experienced healthy job growth, according to the reports.

Cong's press briefing deferred; BJP takes jibe says,'it's better not to spread lies in morning'

The principal Opposition party may also offer a 33% women's quota in public sector jobs to reach out to women voters. Congress may also include the right to healthcare in its manifesto for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

In our manifesto, we are considering a Right to Healthcare Act, where we guarantee certain minimum healthcare to all Indians, increasing our expenditure to about 3 per cent of GDP, and increasing the number of healthcare professionals," Rahul Gandhi had said during an interaction with health professionals in Raipur, Chhattisgarh.

The Congress party is also considering a revamped goods and services tax, or GST, in its manifesto for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The Congress party's GST version 2.0 would correct the major flaws of the current architecture of the tax by making it simpler, rectify the distortion in tax rates, provide for 'manual inputs', consult stakeholders and improve the technology network.

The party is putting the final touches on the manifesto that's expected to be unveiled later this month.

With barely a month ahead of the elections, the job situation is unlikely to improve in the country.

Congress gives ticket to Sanatan sympathiser after opposing outfit

The numbers of unemployment are worrying, the unemployment rate in India rose to 7.2% in February 2019, the highest since September 2016, and up from 5.9% in February 2018, according to data compiled by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).

The figures will be unwelcome news for Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of a general election, but the concerns about weak farm prices and low jobs growth are often brought up as election issues by opposition parties.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 13:49 [IST]In Rohtak, PM warns voters, asks them to take note of Sam Pitroda's 'Hua So Hua' remark

Nirav Modi's arrest is an event: Sam Pitroda

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar P

New Delhi, Mar 22: Congress President Rahul Gandhi's confidant Sam Pitroda on Friday described the arrest of fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi as political 'event'. Sam Pitroda, Indian Overseas Congress Chief , was replying to news agency ANI's question on the arrest of Nirav Modi.

Pitroda said, "All I say is, event based politics doesn't make sense. Nirav Modi is an event. I am talking more about the holistic approach, which is embedded inclusion, which is embedded in what kind of a nation we want to build."

Asked whether PM Modi symbolizes strong Government, he said, " India will have to decide, strong is not necessarily a good thing for democracy. Hitler was also very strong, all dictators are strong, Chinese leader is very strong, is that what India wants?."

PM slams Sam Pitroda, says Rahul's most trusted aide started Pak's National Day celebrations

A little over a year after jeweller Nirav Modi fled India after allegedly defrauding Punjab National Bank of 14,356 crore, the fugitive diamantaire was arrested in London on Tuesday, said British police on Wednesday.

He was later denied bail by the Westminster Magistrates' Court. Nirav Modi was tracked down by reporters of the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper to an 8 million apartment in London's West End earlier this month.

While the arrest, just three weeks ahead of the 17th general elections, hailed as a big victory for India's investigative agencies, it is also something that should come politically handy for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).Year 2021: How many foreign trips did PM Narendra Modi go in this year?

PM slams Sam Pitroda, says Rahul's most trusted aide started Pak's National Day celebrations

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Mar 22: Responding to Congress's Indian overseas chief Sam Pitroda's 26/11 statement, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the Congress-led UPA governments didn't act against Pakistan despite repeated provocations and terror attacks.

Taking to Twitter, Modi tweeted,"Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew - Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!"

He also said,"The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning India's armed forces."

Sam Pitroda questions death toll in Balakot air strike

Sam Pitroda had earlier questioned the death toll in the Balakot airstrike conducted. If they (IAF) killed 300, its ok. All I am saying is can you give me more facts and prove it, Pitroda had said in an interview to ANI.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi hit out at the Congress over controversial comments of Sam Pitroda and said, Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror.

The Prime Minister added that this is a New India. We will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest! Narendra Modi wrote.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 11:46 [IST]Sam Pitroda clarifies his remark on airstrike says,'as a citizen I need to know what had happened'

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Mar 22: A close aide of Rahul Gandhi and Indian Overseas Congress chief, Sam Pitroda, issued a clarification on his interview.

Speaking to ANI, Sam Pitroda, on his earlier remark on airstrike, said.''I just said as a citizen I am entitled to know what happened. I am not talking on behalf of party, just speaking as a citizen. I have right to know, what is wrong in it?.''

''I don't understand what is the controversy here, I am baffled at the response. Shows how people react to trivial matters in India. It is a totally trivial matter. A citizen is just asking a question,'' he added

Sam Pitroda questions death toll in Balakot air strike

On Friday, Sam questioned the death toll in the Balakot airstrike by the Indian Air Force in response to the Pulwama terror attack and said it was wrong to attack Pakistan.

"If they (IAF) killed 300, its ok. I am saying can you give me more facts to prove it," Sam Pitroda told new agency ANI. Sam Pitroda said it will be naive to assume that if some people came here and attacked, every nation is to be blamed.

"Don't know much about attacks. It happens all the time. Attack happened in Mumbai also, we could have then reacted and just sent our planes but that is not right approach. According to me, that's not how you deal with the world," Sam Pitroda added.

On the airstrikes against the Jaish-e-Mohammed camp in Pakistan, Sam Pitroda had said people of India deserved to know the facts of the Indian Air Force operation.

PM slams Sam Pitroda, says Rahul's most trusted aide started Pak's National Day celebrations

Sam Pitroda had said it was not right to "punish" Pakistan because of a few terrorists. "Eight people (26/11 terrorists) come and do something, you don't jump on entire nation (Pakistan). Naive to assume that just because some people came here and attacked, every citizen of that nation is to be blamed. I don't believe in that way," Sam Pitroda told ANI.

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Story first published: Friday, March 22, 2019, 12:11 [IST]In Rohtak, PM warns voters, asks them to take note of Sam Pitroda's 'Hua So Hua' remark

Sam Pitroda questions death toll in Balakot air strike

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar P

New Delhi, Mar 22: Congress President Rahul Gandhi's confidant Sam Pitroda on Friday questioned death toll in Balakot air strike, batted for dialogue with Pakistan.

Sam Pitroda, Indian Overseas Congress Chief , told ANI, "If you say 300 people were killed, we all need to know that ,all Indians need to know that. Then comes the global media which says nobody was killed, I look bad as an Indian citizen."

Citing International media reports, Pitroda asked credibility of the number of casualties shared by the government.

If the Balakot hit is false, why is Pak conducting a select tour for scribes around the facility

He asked, "I would like to know more as I have read in New York Times and other newspapers, what did we really attack, we really killed 300 people?"

Early this month, the Congress hit out at Amit Shah for politicising the air strikes by the Indian Air Force (IAF) in Pakistan's Balakot after the BJP chief said that over 250 terrorists were killed in the operation.

Shah, who was addressing an election rally in Gujarat, said after the February 14 Pulwama attack in which over 40 CRPF men were killed, "everyone thought there could be no surgical strikes". "But under (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi's leadership, the government carried out an air strike and killed more than 250 terrorists," the BJP chief said.

Those seeking proof of air strike 'appeasing' Pakistan: Modi

Neither the government nor the air force has released any official figure on the casualties after the IAF action.

However, former Army chief and Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh said the death toll is not a "confirmed figure" and that the BJP chief meant that these many "might have died" in the air strike.Bihar: Tejashwi Yadav blocks Kanhaiya Kumars grand alliance entry

India

oi-Deepika S

Patna, Mar 22: The Bihar opposition grand alliance which announced its seat sharing formula for all 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state for the upcoming general elections did not back the former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who is a Communist Party of India candidate from Begusarai.

With the Bihar opposition equation virtually shutting its doors on the Left, the future of student union leader, Kanhaiya Kumar is now back on the drawing board.

The CPI was keen to join the Grand Alliance on the condition that it should be given at least one seat, Begusarai, from where Kanhaiya Kumar is its candidate. But with the RJD refusing to play ball, the CPI will now contest alone.

Kumar's CPI is not a part of the grand alliance headed by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) but the united opposition had initially indicated that it would support his candidature from Begusarai, his hometown.

Lok Sabha elections 2019: Grand alliance seals Bihar seat-sharing deal, RJD to contest on 20

According to the reports the Congress was keen to bring the Left parties on board the Mahagathbandhan but the RJD was averse to it.

The constituency, initially meant to be given to Kanhaiya Kumar's CPI, will fall in the RJD's share.

RJD leaders say in private that Tejashwi Yadav "didn't like" Kanhaiya Kumar as he hardly returned calls whenever the RJD leader tried to reach out to him, reports NDTV.

Kanhaiya Kumar may be a first-timer in electoral politics but the 30-year-old Left leader gained significant recognition and following after a prolonged controversy last year over an event in JNU where anti-India slogans were allegedly raised.

However, the CPI has already announced that with or without the Grand Alliance, Kanhaiya will contest from Begusarai.

The 'Mahagathbandhan' on Friday announced that the RJD would contest half of the 40 seats in the state while nine will be fought by the Congress. Former Union minister Upendra Kushwaha's Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) and Mukesh Sahni's Vikasheel Insan Party (VIP) will field their candidates on five and three seats respectively. Former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustan Awam Morcha (HAM) has been given three seats.

Early this month, CPI had said it would accept nothing less than three to four Lok Sabha seats under the Bihar grand alliance seat-sharing formula. Left parties, however, have been ignored by the alliance, with CPI and CPI(M) not featuring in the list altogether and CPIML only getting one seat out of RJD's quota of 20 seats.30 years on, martyred IAF officials to get justice as trial against Yasin Malik is set to begin

From videos to mails, how NIA built a water tight case against Yasin Malik

Name of IAF officer who was killed by Yasin Malik to be added to War Memorial

IAF hero gets justice: Why it is time up for Yasin Malik

First Yasin Malik, now Javed Mir: Our martyred IAF heroes are getting justice at last

Enough grounds to proceed: The crimes of Kashmir separatist Yasin Malik

Yasin Malik led JKLF banned under anti terror law

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Mar 22: The Union Government has banned the Yasin Malik Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front. The outfit led by the Kashmir separatist was banned under the provisions of the anti terror law.

The outfit has been banned for alleged promotion of secessionist activities in Jammu and Kashmir, they said.

They said the organisation has been banned under various provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Its chief Yasin Malik is under arrest and at present lodged in Jammu's Kot Balwal jail.

This is the second organisation in Jammu and Kashmir which has been banned this month. Earlier, the Centre had banned the Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir.Between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, plenty of visitors have wandered into New Orleans throughout its long history, but make no mistake, the equine star to date of the current Fair Grounds Race Course & Slots meet is in the Crescent City by plan.

Last year trainer Mark Casse liked how the track with the long stretch, forgiving surface, and logical prep race series for 3-year-olds paved the way for his outstanding filly Wonder Gadot, who placed in three stakes at Fair Grounds before later running second in the Longines Kentucky Oaks (G1) and then defeating males in the first two legs of the Canadian Triple Crown.

With that good experience fresh in his mind, Fair Grounds made sense for Casse's promising colt for the 2019 classics: War of Will, a son of War Front who last year earned a grade 1 placing on turf before closing out his juvenile season with a five-length romp in a maiden race at Churchill Downs--his first career try on dirt. Both Wonder Gadot and War of Will are owned by Gary Barber.

While Wonder Gadot's biggest successes would follow her time at Fair Grounds, War of Will has thrived in New Orleans, winning the Jan. 19 Lecomte Stakes (G3) by four lengths before taking the Feb. 16 Risen Star Stakes presented by Lamarque Ford (G2) by 2 1/4 lengths--overcoming a start from post 13. The success has moved him to the top of the Road to the Kentucky Derby points list.

Road to the Kentucky Derby Points Leaders

On March 23, War of Will is the 6-5 morning-line favorite in the Twinspires.com Louisiana Derby (G2), the first Road to the Kentucky Derby series race this season to offer 100 points to the winner.

"Gary Barber and I had this conversation after War of Will won at Churchill. He actually came to our training center in Ocala and we talked about which direction we wanted to go," Casse said. "We came really close last year to winning the Kentucky Oaks with Wonder Gadot, and she had all her prepping in New Orleans, and we just think it's a good place. I've got (assistant) David Carroll there, who I have just the utmost respect for. He leads our charges down there and he's got a lot of experience--he's got a lot of Triple Crown experience just himself.

"What you want to do during the wintertime with these Derby horses, you want to get enough racing in them, but you also want to keep them happy and healthy. And in my opinion, New Orleans is the best place to do that."

Road to the Kentucky Derby Points Races

In terms of recent history, Fair Grounds has seen this odd trend where its 3-year-olds fillies have enjoyed success in the Kentucky Oaks while the males have come up just short in the Kentucky Derby.

Last year Monomoy Girl, who won Rachel Alexandra Stakes (G2) at Fair Grounds, became the sixth Kentucky Oaks winner since 2005 to win at least one stakes race at Fair Grounds before their star turn under the Twin Spires. Those winners include Untapable, Summerly, Believe You Can, Proud Spell, and Rachel Alexandra. And that's not counting 2015 Kentucky Oaks winner Lovely Maria, who won an allowance-optional claiming race at Fair Grounds and ran second in the Rachel Alexandra.

Recent top Kentucky Derby finishes off Fair Grounds prep races include Louisiana Derby winner Gun Runner finishing third in 2016. Longshots Commanding Curve in 2014 and Golden Soul in 2013, both finished second in the Louisville classic after finishing third and fourth, respectfully, in the Louisiana Derby. Also in 2013, Louisiana Derby winner Revolutionary finished third in the Louisville classic. Nehro finished second in both the Louisiana Derby and Kentucky Derby in 2011 and Mucho Macho Man placed third in both races that same year. Hard Spun, winner of the 2007 Lecomte, went on to place second in the Derby.

The most recent Louisiana Derby runner to win the Kentucky Derby was Funny Cide in 2003--he finished second in Fair Grounds' biggest Derby prep. The most recent Louisiana Derby winner to win the Louisville classic is Grindstone in 1996. War Emblem, who finished off the board in the 2002 Lecomte and Risen Star, pulled the Kentucky Derby upset.

Should War of Will run well again Saturday, it will be six weeks of preparation for the Kentucky Derby. Casse thinks that times up well for a horse who will have three starts under his belt this season and eight overall.

"The six weeks is not going to be a problem," Casse said. "A big effort hopefully on Saturday and then we get ready for the biggest--we need the biggest effort of his career. But I feel confident in that he'll be ready for it."

This is a column that runs as "The Road" and first appears in BloodHorse Daily.Free Resources

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In addition to your newsletter(s), you will receive email updates and special offers from Oneplace.com.We're sorry that the ministry you were looking for is no longer available on Oneplace.com. However, below are some great ministries that offer related content. Enjoy the inspiration, encouragement, and Biblical challenge from these Oneplace.com ministry partners!Our website uses cookies to improve your experience. Learn moreBailey McCann, Opalesque New York: Are Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) a scam? New research from Daniel Liebau and Patrick Schueffel looks at a group of ICOs from 2016 to determine how many offerings were fraudulent and what investors can do to safeguard their capital. The work was presented at the International Scientific Conference organized by The British Blockchain Association in London. Daniel Liebau is affiliate faculty at Singapore Management University and founder of Lightbulb Capital, a corporate finance boutique focused on FinTech and Blockchain. Patrick Schueffel is an adjunct professor at the Institute of Finance of Fribourg's School of Management in Switzerland. ICOs emerged as a popular fundraising tool when cryptocurrencies were pricing at all-time highs. ICOs work roughly the same way as shares do in an IPO. Project-based digital currency is created to fund a business and investors buy the coins as they would buy shares in an IPO. A key difference, however, is that ICOs are usually offered before a business has been established, whereas IPOs are typically for businesses that have been up and running for some time. The speculative nature of ICOs means that the potential to lose money is very high. In fact, regulators have issued several warnin...................... To view our full article Click hereCell Line Development Services Global Market 2019 Top Key Players  Lonza, MabPlex, Thermo Fisher, Solentim, Sigma-Aldrich and Forecast to 2025

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Global Cell Line Development Services MarketWiseGuyRerports.com Presents Global Cell Line Development Services Market Research Report 2019 New Document to its Studies Database. The Report Contain 99 Pages With Detailed Analysis.DescriptionThe global Cell Line Development Services market is valued at 760 million US$ in 2018 is expected to reach 1260 million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of 6.5% during 2019-2025.This report focuses on Cell Line Development Services volume and value at global level, regional level and company level. From a global perspective, this report represents overall Cell Line Development Services 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:LonzaMabPlexThermo FisherSolentimSigma-AldrichSelexisCorningSartoriusRequest Free Sample Report @Segment by RegionsNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSegment by TypeMedia and ReagentsEquipmentSegment by ApplicationBioproductionRecombinant Protein TherapeuticsTissue Engineering & Regenerative MedicinesDrug DiscoveryToxicity TestingComplete Report Details @Table of Contents -Major Key PointsExecutive Summary1 Cell Line Development Services Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Cell Line Development Services1.2 Cell Line Development Services Segment by Type1.2.1 Global Cell Line Development Services Production Growth Rate Comparison by Type (2014-2025)1.2.2 Media and Reagents1.2.3 Equipment1.3 Cell Line Development Services Segment by Application1.3.1 Cell Line Development Services Consumption Comparison by Application (2014-2025)1.3.2 Bioproduction1.3.3 Recombinant Protein Therapeutics1.3.4 Tissue Engineering & Regenerative Medicines1.3.5 Drug Discovery1.3.6 Toxicity Testing1.4 Global Cell Line Development Services Market by Region1.4.1 Global Cell Line Development Services 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 Cell Line Development Services Market Size1.5.1 Global Cell Line Development Services Revenue (2014-2025)1.5.2 Global Cell Line Development Services Production (2014-2025)..7 Company Profiles and Key Figures in Cell Line Development Services Business7.1 Lonza7.1.1 Lonza Cell Line Development Services Production Sites and Area Served7.1.2 Cell Line Development Services Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.1.3 Lonza Cell Line Development Services Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.1.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.2 MabPlex7.2.1 MabPlex Cell Line Development Services Production Sites and Area Served7.2.2 Cell Line Development Services Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.2.3 MabPlex Cell Line Development Services Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.2.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.3 Thermo Fisher7.3.1 Thermo Fisher Cell Line Development Services Production Sites and Area Served7.3.2 Cell Line Development Services Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.3.3 Thermo Fisher Cell Line Development Services Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.3.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.4 Solentim7.4.1 Solentim Cell Line Development Services Production Sites and Area Served7.4.2 Cell Line Development Services Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.4.3 Solentim Cell Line Development Services Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.4.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.5 Sigma-Aldrich7.5.1 Sigma-Aldrich Cell Line Development Services Production Sites and Area Served7.5.2 Cell Line Development Services Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.5.3 Sigma-Aldrich Cell Line Development Services Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.5.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.6 Selexis7.6.1 Selexis Cell Line Development Services Production Sites and Area Served7.6.2 Cell Line Development Services Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.6.3 Selexis Cell Line Development Services Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.6.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.7 Corning7.7.1 Corning Cell Line Development Services Production Sites and Area Served7.7.2 Cell Line Development Services Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.7.3 Corning Cell Line Development Services Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.7.4 Main Business and Markets Served..CONTINUEDAbout UsWise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, Industry research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available.NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)Agriculture Bactericides Market Analysis, Size, Share, Top Key Players Updates 2018 | BASF SE (Germany), E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (U.S.), Sumitomo Chemical Company, Limited (Japan), The Dow Chemical Company (U.S.)

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Market SynopsisThe global agriculture bactericides market is presumed to expand at 4.7% CAGR during the forecast period (2017-2023) owing to the rising demand for food grains, asserts Market Research Future (MRFR). Agriculture bactericides are crop protectants used by the farmers in the agriculture produce. Bactericides comprise chemical or biological compounds that restrict bacterial infection and are extensively used for crop protection. Copper-based bactericides, amide bactericides, and dithiocarbamate bactericides are some of the commercial chemical agriculture bactericides widely available in the market.Drivers and Constraints Impacting the MarketWith the change in climate, there has been a noticeable increase in the pest life cycle which is considered to be one of the major factors driving the agriculture bactericides market both in developed and developing countries. The increasing population has escalated the demand for crop production. This has resulted in the demand for food security and crop damage caused by the bacteria, thereby propelling the market growth during the assessment period. Moreover, the growing demand for crop protectants from bacterial infection is estimated to foster the market growth at a global level. Also, acceptance of integrated pest management (IPM) by the crop cultivators is further fueling the market growth.FREE SAMPLE COPY OF Agriculture Bactericides Market Research Report- Forecast to 2023"@On the flip side, toxicity caused due to the consumption of agriculture bactericides is estimated to retard the market growth in the coming years. Workers handling such bactericides on a daily basis can suffer acute health problems such as dizziness, abdominal pain, nausea, headaches, vomiting, and eye and skin problems.Global Agriculture Bactericides Market: Segmental AnalysisThe global agriculture bactericides market has been segmented on the basis of application, type, form, and region.By mode of type, the global agriculture bactericides market has been segmented into amide agriculture bactericides, copper-based agriculture bactericides, dithiocarbamate agriculture bactericides, and others. Among these, the copper-based agriculture bactericides segment is likely to dominate the global market closely followed by dithiocarbamate. The growth is attributed to its high use of agricultural crops and fruits and vegetables.By mode of form, the global agriculture bactericides market has been segmented into liquid, powder, and others. Among these, the liquid segment is estimated to dominate the market due to easy use nature.By mode of application, the global agriculture bactericides market has been segmented into cereals & pulses, fruits and vegetables, oilseeds & grains, and others. Among these, the fruits and vegetable segment is presumed to dominate the global market due to growing awareness regarding the health benefits associated with organic fruits and vegetables.Regional InsightsGeographically, the agriculture bactericides market span across regions namely, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and Rest-of-the-World (RoW).Among all the regions, the European region is considered to dominate the global agriculture bactericides market owing to the increasing demand for organic fruits and vegetables from the farmers. Also, Germany and the U.K. accounts for the high use of bactericides for the protection of fruits and vegetables from bacteria due to rising awareness associated with the benefits of using bactericides.The North American region is estimated to exhibit a significant growth owing to the growing consumer awareness and demand for organic fruits, cereals, vegetables, and pulses in countries such as Canada and the U.S.Industry NewsSeptember 19, 2018: It has been proven that copper fungicides can be regularly applied on crops, which is an alternative to the antibiotics, in order to control fungal and bacterial diseases in crops. Use of such fungicides will not pose a risk to the public health in the long term.Access Full Report @Competitive DashboardThe major players operating the global market for agriculture bactericides are Bayer CropScience AG (Germany), E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (U.S.), Sumitomo Chemical Company Limited (Japan), Syngenta AG (Switzerland), Nufarm Limited (Australia), Adama Agricultural Solutions Ltd. (Israel), Nippon Soda Co. Ltd. (Japan), FMC Corporation (U.S.), The Dow Chemical Company (U.S.), BASF SE (Germany), and others.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 Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comGlobal Inflatable Doll Market Raising Trend 2019 - Longgang District, Shenzhen City - toy factory, RealDoll

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Global Inflatable Doll Industry Market Research Report provides reviews of Inflatable Doll market with its types, application, fabricating innovation, industry chain investigation and most recent market development. The report has covered the overall and comprehensive study of the market. It is exhaustive quantitative analyses of the industry and provides important information for making strategies to increase market growth and effectiveness. The report focuses on the present condition of the market advertise with focus on the market.The report gives a summary of the impact of the key drivers, restraints, and popular trends in the market. A valuable source of insightful data included in this report will help players understand business strategists and competitive analysis of the market. They will be able to decide the product launch and asset developments with this study. A comprehensive overview of regional distributions and the overview types of popular products in the industry has also been demonstrated in the report. It has included market status and forecast of global and major regions, with the introduction of vendors, regions, product types and end industries.DOWNLOAD FREE SAMPLE REPORT:Most important types of products covered in this report are: Plastic, Silica gelMost widely used downstream fields of the market covered in this report are: Male, FemaleGeographically, this report is split into some important regions, together with production, consumption, revenue (USD), along with a market share in those regions, by 2013 to 2025, covering North America, Europe, China, Japan, Middle East & Africa, India, South America, OthersKey players in this Inflatable Doll market are: Longgang District, Shenzhen City - toy factory, RealDoll, Ailv, Shenzhen City Health and adult supplies Limited, Oriental Industry, Abyss Creations, Foshan City, a financial Biotechnology Limited, Orient industryReasons For Buying The Global Inflatable Doll Market Research Report:Better extension of trade and auction activities respecting businesses through the delivery of prospective data for the clients.Complete understanding of the global market.Identification of potential suppliers as well as partnerships in the report.The global market research report studies the latest global market trends, up-to-date and thorough competitive analysis, along with various other key features of the worldwide market.The potential future partners, suppliers or affiliates have also skillfully been trained in the report.Furthermore, in the report, the competitive landscape by elaborating on the current mergers and acquisitions (M&A), venture funding, and product developments that took place in the Inflatable Doll market are highlighted. The data has been presented via charts, tables, and graphics in this study, providing a clearer view of the leading applications, end users, and key segments of the market.ACCESS FULL REPORT:This representation makes this report an invaluable resource for industry executives, marketing, consultants analysts, and sales and product managers. An elaborate description of the value chain and its provider analysis is given. An in-depth survey of key players in the market was performed considering the various objectives of an organization such as profiling, the quantity of production, product outline, raw material, and the financial health of the organization.About us -Market Research Place is a leading market intelligence company that sells reports of top publishers in the technology industry.Our extensive research reports cover detailed market assessments that include major technological improvements in the industry. Market Research Place also specializes in analyzing hi-tech systems and current processing systems in its expertise.We have a team of experts that compile precise research reports and actively advise top companies to improve their existing processes. Our experts have extensive experience in the topics that they cover.Market Research Place provides you the full spectrum of services related to market research, and corroborate with the clients to increase the revenue stream, and address process gaps.Contact UsMark StoneSales ManagerOffice-102, Sanskriti AspirationsBaner Road, Pune,MH 411045IndiaPhone: (201) 465-4211Email: sales@marketresearchplace.comWeb:Amoxicillin Market: Competitive Dynamics & Global Outlook 2024 Top Key players like Top Key players like GSK,Novartis,Teva,Inc.

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Market Research Report Store offers a latest published report on Amoxicillin Market Analysis and Forecast 2019-2025 delivering key insights and providing a competitive advantage to clients through a detailed report. The report contains 91 pages which highly exhibit on current market analysis scenario, upcoming as well as future opportunities, revenue growth, pricing and profitability.Click to view the full report TOC, figure and tables:Amoxicillin is an antibiotic often used for the treatment of a number of bacterial infections. It may be used for middle ear infection, strep throat, pneumonia, skin infections, and urinary tract infections among others. It is taken by mouth, or less commonly by injection.The classification of Amoxicillin includes Capsule, Tablet and Other and the proportion of Capsule in 2017 is about 80%, and the proportion is in decreasing trend from 2013 to 2018.Amoxicillin is widely sales through Hospital Pharmacy, Retail Pharmacy and Online Pharmacy. The most proportion of Amoxicillin is sales through Retail Pharmacy, and the consumption proportion is about 62.7% in 2017.For Amoxicillin API market, at present, Asias enterprise technology is developing fast, and the Asia companies mainly supply the domestic market. India and China is the major countries in the world.According to this study, over the next five years the Amoxicillin market will register a 0.6% CAGR in terms of revenue, the global market size will reach US$ 4620 million by 2024, from US$ 4470 million in 2019. In particular, this report presents the global market share (sales and revenue) of key companies in Amoxicillin business, shared in Chapter 3.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversGSKNovartisCentrient PharmaTevaMylanCiplaNCPCUnited LaboratoriesSun PharmaCSPCLKPCHikmaDr. ReddyHPGCAurubindoMeiji HoldingsMarket Segment by Type, coversCapsuleTabletMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoHospital PharmacyRetail PharmacyOnline PharmacyFor More Information On This Report, Please Visit @Related Information:North America Amoxicillin Market Growth 2019-2024United States Amoxicillin Market Growth 2019-2024Asia-Pacific Amoxicillin Market Growth 2019-2024Europe Amoxicillin Market Growth 2019-2024EMEA Amoxicillin Market Growth 2019-2024Global Amoxicillin Market Growth 2019-2024China Amoxicillin Market Growth 2019-2024Customization Service of the Report :Market Research Report Store provides 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 Us:Market Research Report Store (MRRS) is a professional organization related to market research reports in all directions .To provide customers with a variety of market research reports, MRRS cooperates with a large of famous market report publishers all over the world. Owing to our good service and the professional market reports in the wide range, MRRS enjoys a good reputation in the market. In pace with the development of MRRS, more and more customers and market report publishers choose to cooperate with us. As a specialized platform, MRRS upholds the supremacy of customers and aims to provide customers with better service and richer select.Contact USMarket Research Report StoreE-mail: info@marketresearchreportstore.comTel: +86-15521064060 00852-58197708(HK)Add: 17890 Castleton Street Suite 218 City of Industry CA 91748 United StatesWebsite:Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Market: Global Product Intelligence, Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast - 2024

Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Market

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The Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Markets segment market shares in each geographic region are mentioned in the report, along with the historic and forecast growth rates. Each segment represented visually with supporting reasons to justify the growth rates. IGRs report also covers drivers and restraints in the next-generation sequencing (NGS) market.Infinium Global Researchs report covers the annual growth of the Global next-generation sequencing (NGS) market. It also includes chapters on the Global next-generation sequencing (NGS) industry trends, geographic analysis, and competitive landscape.For More Details Get FREE Sample Pages of this Research Report@The report also includes a SWOT analysis to present the indicators of strength, weakness, prospects, and risk of the market until the completion of the projection period in 2024.Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Market: Industry insightNext-generation sequencing is a powerful platform that has enabled the sequencing of thousands of DNA molecules simultaneously. Next-generation sequencing technology is also known as high-throughput sequencing. This high throughput Sequencing is the terms used to describe different modern sequencing technologies including Illumina (Solexa) sequencing, Roche 454 sequencing, Ion torrent: Proton / PGM sequencing, and SOLiD sequencing.Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Market: Drives and RestrainIn the healthcare sectors, the Sequencing of the human microbiome is increasing importance nowadays. This technology links the microbiome to human health, pathogenicity, and antibiotic resistance. Thus, the growing applications of NSG in the healthcare and Molecular Diagnostics sectors are driving the growth of next-generation sequencing market worldwide. In addition, this technology enables the sequencing of DNA and RNA much more quickly and cheaply than the other sequencing such as Sanger sequencing. Accordingly, this factor contributing to the growth of next-generation DNA sequencing market. However, less adoption and awareness of the next-generation sequencing market in the emerging region expected to hamper the growth of this market.Request a Discount on Standard Prices of this Premium Report @Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Market: SegmentationThe global next generation sequencing market is segmented as product & services, technology, application, and end user.In terms of applications, the global Next-generation sequencing market is categorized into diagnostics, biomarkers and cancer, reproductive health, personalized medicine, agriculture and animal research, and others. Among these applications, diagnostics and biomarkers and cancer are holding the significant market share in this market. The prevalence of cancer increasing rapidly. It creates the demand for effective biomarkers in the cancer treatments. The next generation of sequencing plays a vital role in identifying biomarkers capable of predicting treatment outcomes for cancer. Thus, the growing use of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) for treatment-predictive biomarker are driving the growth of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) market.By-product & services the market is divided as consumables, platforms, and services. In consumable, the market is segmented as Sample Preparation Consumables and Other Consumables. The Sample Preparation Consumables contains DNA Fragmentation, End Repair, A-Tailing and Size Selection, Library Preparation & Target Enrichment, and Quality Control. Based on the platform, the market is categorized into HiSeq, MiSeq, Ion Torrent, SOLiD, Pacbio Rs II and Sequel System, and others.Sequencing Services and Data Management Services are the two types of services are provided by the next generation sequencing market. The Sequencing Services segment is further contains RNA Sequencing, Whole Exome Sequencing, Whole Genome Sequencing, Targeted Sequencing, Chip Sequencing, De Novo Sequencing, and Methyl Sequencing. The Data Management Services provides NGS Data Analysis Services, NGS Data Analysis Software & Workbenches, and Management and Cloud Computing Solutions. The growing integration of big data with the next generation sequencing led to the growing demand of this technology in the data management applications is fueling the growth Data Management Services in the next generation sequencing market.Global Next-generation Sequencing (NGS) Market by end users is classified as, Academic & Government Research Institutes, Pharmaceutical Companies, Biotechnology Companies, and Hospitals & Clinics.Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Market: Regional insightGeographically, North America dominates the next generation sequencing market followed by Europe. The high adaption of next-generation sequencing for the molecular diagnosis and personalized medicine drives the growth of North America next generation sequencing market. Furthermore, factors such as the presence of major players, and ongoing technological advancements and favorable government policies are contributing to the growth of this market across the North America region.Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Market: Competitive LandscapeThe major companies in the next generation sequencing market include DNASTAR, Eurofins Genomics, macrogen, PerkinElmer Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Agilent Technologies, Inc., F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, Illumina Inc., Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc., QIAGEN and among others. Additionally, in January 2018, MedGenome has expanded its sequencing capacity at its Foster City, Calif., headquarters laboratory, added HiSeqX and NovaSeq 6000 platforms. That met the increasing demands for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in research and clinical settings. Moreover, the availability of a wide range of sequencing platforms gave MedGenome the flexibility to provide customized services at scale, thousands of whole genomes a month and deliver high-quality data quickly at a competitive price. The NGS lab has also added sample-processing automation from Agilent to support the sequencing capacity.Browse Detailed TOC and Description of this Exclusive Report@Infinium Global Research and Consulting Solutions is started with a single motto of being a business partner of the first choice. We at Infinium work on the strengths of our clients to ensure we help them consolidate their market position. We firmly believe in the fact that if you are able to develop newer opportunities then you find there is no dearth of opportunities for you. With our strategic research approaches and deep dive in the market segments, we try to find out new opportunities that our clients can encash with their existing resources. Our experts with over 100 years of cumulative experience in research offer the best in the industry services to our clients to ensure that they achieve their business goals.Infinium Global ResearchOffice No. 04, 06, Ganadhish Empire,Rahatani Corner, Pune, MH 411027Email: info@infiniumglobalresearch.comWebsite:Halitosis Treatment Market 2019 Expected to Generate Huge Acquisition | Major Vendors  Colgate-Palmolive Company, All USA Partners LLC, Dr. Harold Katz, LLC, Rowpar Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

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A Broad Analysis of the Global Halitosis 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.Halitosis Treatment Market - ScenarioThe global halitosis treatment market is predicted to register 18.58% CAGR during the forecast period (2017-2023). The market is anticipated to garner USD 22,153.4 billion owing to the increasing incidences of periodontal diseases, asserts Market Research Future (MRFR).Halitosis is referred to as a clinical condition which is characterized by an unpleasant odor of the mouth owing to several chronic and periodontal diseases. Halitosis has become one of the major social problems which have affected a large number of the population globally.Competitive DashboardThe noteworthy players operating the global halitosis treatment market are Listerine (U.S), Colgate-Palmolive Company (U.S), All USA Partners LLC (U.S), Dr. Harold Katz LLC (U.S), Rowpar Pharmaceuticals Inc. (U.S), Abbott (U.S), and AstraZeneca (U.S).GET FREE SAMPLE COPY OF REPORT @Global Halitosis Treatment Market - Segmental AnalysisThe global halitosis treatment market has been segmented on the basis of indication, type, drug treatment, and diagnostic test.By mode of type, the global halitosis treatment market has been segmented into pathological halitosis and others.By mode of indication, the global halitosis treatment market has been segmented into liver, respiratory, gastrointestinal, kidney, systemic, and others.By mode of diagnostic test, the global halitosis treatment market has been segmented into gas chromatography, halimeter, -galactosidase activity assay, BANA test, and other tests.By mode of drug treatment, the global halitosis treatment market has been segmented into antiseptic, antacids, ranitidine and other drugs.Drivers and Constraints Impacting the MarketHalitosis is mainly caused due to lack of awareness regarding the diagnosis of the particular disease and also lack of oral hygiene. The global halitosis treatment market is forecasted to demonstrate a stellar growth rate owing to the accelerating geriatric population, availability of a varied range of dental care products in the market, and increasing incidences of periodontal diseases across the world.The market is getting enough tailwinds from quarters such as advancements in healthcare technologies. Also, initiatives by the government along with technological support are some of the other major factors highly contributing to the market growth.Moreover, surgical, endodontic, and pathological factors like a non-vital tooth with fistula which drains into the mouth and exposed tooth pulps, oral cavity pathologies, oral cancer, healing wounds, extractions or prosthetics, and ulcerations are some of the prominent factors influencing the market growth to a great extent.Such factors lead to plaque or food retention area, increasing amount of bacteria, the decay of amino acids, the decrease in saliva flow, and tissue breakdown. Additionally, manufacturers are focused on the approval and development of new products besides collaborations with other industry players, thereby propelling the market growth.On the flip side, lack of awareness among the global population regarding the diagnosis and treatment of halitosis is predicted to slow down the market growth to a large extent.GET REPORT DETAILS WITH TOC @Halitosis Treatment Market - Regional InsightsGeographically, the halitosis market span across regions namely, Europe, America, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa.Among all the regions, the American region is considered to occupy a significant share and is estimated to maintain its dominance in the coming years. The growth is credited to the extensive use of oral care products like mouthwashes, toothpaste, mouth sprays, etc. Also, with the increasing prevalence of gum diseases, the market in this region is presumed to flourish.The European region is anticipated to occupy the second largest position globally owing to the rising awareness associated with halitosis and its available products available for treatment. Additionally, the augmenting demand for oral care products further influences the market growth in this region.The Asia Pacific is predicted to expand at a rapid pace owing to the augmenting prevalence of chronic diseases like respiratory diseases, diabetes, liver or kidney failure. Furthermore, with the growing geriatric population suffering from such chronic diseases also influences the market growth to a great extent in this region.Meanwhile, the Middle East & Africa is presumed to experience a moderate growth rate during the assessment period owing to the poor economic conditions coupled with the lack of awareness regarding oral health.Industry UpdatesSeptember 11, 2017: The Arizona Bioindustry Association has honored the AZBio Fast Lane Award to Rowpar Pharmaceuticals, Inc., at the 2017 AZBio Awards for developing products for people to maintain oral hygiene. The organization is dedicated to offering CloSYS oral health products, which contains Cloralstan. The ingredient attacks microorganisms and destroys pathogens associated with gum diseases and maintains oral hygiene.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.Office No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaReport Explores the Global Tissue Expander Market Size, Demand, Growth, Analysis and Forecast to 2024

Tissue Expander Market

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The Tissue Expander Markets segment market shares in each geographic region are mentioned in the report, along with the historic and forecast growth rates. Each segment represented visually with supporting reasons to justify the growth rates. IGRs report also covers drivers and restraints in the tissue expander market.Infinium Global Researchs report covers the annual growth of the Global tissue expander market. It also includes chapters on the Global tissue expander industry trends, geographic analysis, and competitive landscape.Download Exclusive Sample Copy of Report:The report also includes a SWOT analysis to present the indicators of strength, weakness, prospects, and risk of the market until the completion of the projection period in 2024.Tissue Expander Market: Market InsightTissue expansion is a technique used by plastic and reconstructive surgeons to cause the body to grow additional skin, bone, and other related tissues. The phenomenon of tissue expansion can be observed in nature many times. The process of tissue expansion comprises of silicon balloon insertion under the skin and filling it progressively with CO2 or saline causing the skin to stretch and grow. The technique of tissue expansion has become a major reconstructive therapy for over the past three decades. It has become more prominent particularly in the fields of breast reconstruction, burn surgery and pediatric plastic surgery.Tissue Expander Market: Drivers and RestraintsIncreasing demand from health care sectors, growing awareness related to tissue expansion, technological advancements and rising urbanization are some of the driving forces for the global tissue expanders market. People are more concerned about their appearance and are inclined towards plastic surgeries, this is pushing forward the market. An increasing number of mastectomy procedures is set to propel the market further. Additionally, deformities or severe scars caused by incidents such as accidents and burns require tissue reconstructive surgeries. This results in an increase in the demand for tissue expanders. On the other hand, the high cost of the overall therapy, side effects associated with the therapy, lack of skilled professionals and lack of reimbursement policies in some of the developing nations are likely to hamper the growth of market global tissue expanders market.Enquire here Get Customization & Check Discount for Report @Tissue Expander Market: SegmentationThe global tissue expander market is divided into different segments such as on the basis of applications, and end-user. On the basis of applications, the sub-markets include forehead skin and scalp reconstruction, breast reconstruction, and face and neck reconstruction. On the basis of end-user, the sub-markets include ambulatory surgical centers, hospitals, and cosmetology clinics. Breast reconstruction was the largest segment on the basis of the application. Growing concern regarding the appearance of breasts and an increase in the number of mastectomy surgeries led to a high market share of this segment. Forehead skin and scalp reconstruction are promising segments with high growth rate owing to the growing number of cicatricial alopecia cases. On the basis of end-user, hospitals had the highest market share due to a large number of reconstruction surgeries carried out in hospitals. While cosmetology clinics segment is expected to grow with a higher rate due to increasing preference to specialty clinics for performing reconstruction surgeries.Tissue Expander Market: Regional InsightGeographically, the global tissue expander market is segmented into four regions: North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and RoW. North America is the dominant region in the global tissue expander market. The well-developed healthcare system, adoption of the advanced techniques and proper reimbursement policies are the driving factors for tissue expander market in North America. Additionally, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, a maximum number of reconstructive surgeries were performed in the U.S. Rise in prevalence of breast cancer in the U.S. and Canada has also contributed to the expansion of the market in this region.Tissue Expander Market: Competitive AnalysisSome of the major companies in the global tissue expander market are Polytech Health and Aesthetics, KOKEN CO., LTD., GROUPE SEBBIN SAS, Allergan plc, Mentor Worldwide LLC, GC Aesthetics, Guangzhou Wanhe Plastic Materials Co., Ltd., Sientra, Inc., and PMT Corporation are among others. On 10th March 2018 MENTOR Worldwide LLC, a global leader in breast aesthetics, has introduced a tissue expander with a smooth surface to its line of CPX4 Breast Tissue Expanders in the United States.Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at:Infinium Global Research and Consulting Solutions is started with a single motto of being a business partner of the first choice. We at Infinium work on the strengths of our clients to ensure we help them consolidate their market position. We firmly believe in the fact that if you are able to develop newer opportunities then you find there is no dearth of opportunities for you. With our strategic research approaches and deep dive in the market segments, we try to find out new opportunities that our clients can encash with their existing resources. Our experts with over 100 years of cumulative experience in research offer the best in the industry services to our clients to ensure that they achieve their business goals.Infinium Global ResearchOffice No. 04, 06, Ganadhish Empire,Rahatani Corner, Pune, MH 411027Email: info@infiniumglobalresearch.comWebsite:2019  2023 Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Market Analysis - Research Covers Top Players as Teva Pharmaceuticals, Bayer Healthcare, Biogen Idec, Pfizer Inc., Sanofi Aventis, Merck, Novartis, AbbVie

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Global Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Market report is made by executing an Excellent research process to Gather information of Global Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Market and cover the other information such as Market Growth, Eminent players, chapter-wise Description followed by various user perceptions.Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Market - SynopsisMarket Research Future postulates that the Global Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Market is estimated to demonstrate 3.5% CAGR throughout the forecast period (2017-2023). Factors such as increasing patient pool and screening for better treatment options are likely to favor the market growth worldwide.Multiple sclerosis is referred to as an inflammatory, chronic, and an autoimmune disease which generally affects the central nervous system. It especially affects the communication between the brain and other body parts. Multiple sclerosis is a demyelinating disease in which the insulating covers of the nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain are damaged.Competitive DashboardThe prominent players operating the global multiple sclerosis treatment market are Pfizer Inc. (U.S.), AbbVie (U.S.), Teva Pharmaceuticals (Israel), Merck (U.S.), Bayer Healthcare (Germany), Novartis (Switzerland), Sanofi Aventis (France), and Biogen Idec (U.S.).FREE SAMPLE COPY OF Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Market Research Report - Global Forecast till 2023 @Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Market - Segmental AnalysisThe global multiple sclerosis treatment market has been segmented on the basis of drug type, route of administration, diagnosis, and end-users.By mode of drug type, the global multiple sclerosis treatment market has been segmented into immunosuppressant, immunomodulators, and others.By mode of the route of administration, the global multiple sclerosis treatment market has been segmented into oral, injectable, and others.By mode of diagnosis, the global multiple sclerosis treatment market has been segmented into simple electrical stimulation tests, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, lumbar puncture and others.By mode of end-users, the global multiple sclerosis treatment market has been segmented into clinics, hospitals, and others.Market Potential and PitfallsMultiple sclerosis treatment market is anticipated to expand at a healthy CAGR throughout the forecast period owing to several driving factors. With augmenting patient population across the world and the need for better treatment options and greater screening, the market for multiple sclerosis treatment is estimated to flourish.As the aging population is more susceptible to the disease, the market is flourishing with the increasing geriatric population. Research and development activities are also considered to yield benefits with huge gain for the market.For instance, the introduction of a new drug with partial curing rate is expected to be welcomed by the market with minimum marketing efforts and cost. Such efforts are estimated to contribute to the market growth.Furthermore, with the augmenting incidences of muscle weakness, the market is likely to flourish in the coming years. Additional factor promoting the market growth is the presence of high unmet clinical requirements, especially in the developing economies.Organizations across the globe are spreading awareness related to progressive multiple sclerosis coupled with the symptoms associated with it, which is further estimated to propel the market growth. With reimbursement programs, the penetration of multiple sclerosis drugs is also likely to augment, thereby contributing to the market growth.On the contrary, a significant gap between the early diagnosis and actual initiation of the therapy is likely to remain a major concern impeding the market growth to a great extent. Additionally, lack of cure and effective treatment is considered as one of the major drawbacks of the current treatment scenario. The high cost of the treatment is also presumed to impede the market growth to a large extent.OBTAIN PREMIUM RESEARCH REPORT DETAILS WITH TOC @Detailed Regional InsightsGeographically, the multiple sclerosis treatment market spans across regions namely, America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East & Africa.Among all the regions, America is considered to occupy the largest market share owing to the presence of U.K. in this region. U.S. is estimated to dominate the market due to the increasing R&D activities for better treatment of the disease and extensive development in the medical sector.An increasing number of hospitalization procedures owing to healthcare penetration in Canada and the U.S. are estimated to propel the market growth. Additional factors influencing the market growth are the high concentration of key hospitals and good reimbursement rates.European is presumed to occupy the second largest market share and is likely to retain its dominance over the years. The growth is credited to the augmenting healthcare industry along with healthcare penetration. The region is mainly led by economies like France and Germany, where Germany is considered to be the fastest growing region due to the presence of its large pharmaceutical industry.The Asia Pacific is anticipated to expand at a rapid pace and is presumed to lead the market owing to the large unmet needs coupled with the fast-developing healthcare sector in this region. South East Asian economies like India, China, and Malaysia highly contribute to the market growth. Additionally, penetration of the healthcare sector is likely to fuel the future multiple sclerosis market.Industry UpdatesJanuary 16, 2019: In a clinical trial of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, researchers had found that while most of the patients on standard therapy were showing progression, the vast majority of patients who already underwent the stem cell transplant did not. An experimental treatment which was conducted for multiple sclerosis is now showing promise. A new study had found that a single stem cell transplant delays or stop the symptoms better than some medications.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.Office No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaMill Liner Market | Research Report 2019-2025 | Major Companies,Flsmidth, Weir Group, Rema Tip Top, Multotec

Mill Liner Market

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Crystal Market Research Present Advance research on "Mill Liner Market", approximates that the Mill Liner Industry size is anticipated to flourish at a significant CAGR in the future.Key Growth Factors 2019:In the coming a long time there is an expanding interest for Mill Liner in the areas of North America and Europe that is anticipated to drive the market for further developed Mill Liner. Expanding of Mining fields consumptions, progressively serious challenge, dispatches in presenting new items, retrofitting and redesign of old technologies, expanding usage of Mill Liner will drive development of the market.Major Companies 2019:FlsmidthWeir GroupRema Tip TopMultotecHonyu MaterialFengxingMe ElecmetalTrelleborgMagotteauxBradkenClick to Get sample Copy of this Report:Regional Outlook and Trend Analysis 2019:Key countries, regions, and sub-sectors have been studied for giving improved knowledge of the Industry scope across the globe. The market report classifies the Industry by assessing the manufacturing chain, market manufacturers and their contribution to the industry, dominant policies and revenue structure, and regulatory aspects. The geographical markets of the Mill Liner Market are thoroughly examined by assessing the profits garnered, product pricing, demand, logistics, production capacity, and supply, along with the past performance of the market in the said region.North AmericaU.S.CanadaMexicoEuropeGermanyUKFranceRussiaItalyRest of EuropeAsia-PacificChinaJapanSouth KoreaIndiaSoutheast AsiaRest of Asia-PacificSouth AmericaBrazilArgentinaColumbiaRest of South AmericaMiddle East and AfricaSaudi ArabiaUAEEgyptNigeriaSouth AfricaRest of MEATable of Contents:Chapter 1, Definition, Specifications and Classification of Mill Liner Industry, Applications of Mill Liner Industry, Industry Segment by Regions;Chapter 2, Mill Liner Industry Manufacturing Cost Structure, Raw Material, and Suppliers, Manufacturing Process, Industry Chain Structure;Chapter 3, Technical Data and Mill Liner Industry Manufacturing Plants Analysis, Capacity and Commercial Production Date, Manufacturing Plants Distribution, R&D Status, and Technology Source, Raw Materials Sources Analysis;Chapter 4, Whole Mill Liner industry Analysis, Capacity Analysis (Company Segment), Sales Analysis (Company Segment), Sales Price Analysis (Company Segment);Chapter 5 and 6, Regional Mill Liner Industry Analysis that includes the United States, China, Europe, Japan, Korea & Taiwan, Mill Liner Segment Analysis (by Type);Feel free to get in touch for discounts and customized details:About Crystal Market Research:Crystal Market Research is a U.S. based market research and business intelligence company. Crystal Provide one-stop solution for market research, business intelligence, and consulting services to help clients make more informed decisions. It provides both syndicated as well as customized research studies for its customers spread across the globe. The company offers market intelligence reports across a broad range of industries including healthcare, chemicals & materials, technology, automotive, and energy.Contacts UsJudy | 304 South Jones Blvd, Suite 1896,Las Vegas NV 89107,United StatesPh: +1-888-213-4282Cigar Market- Imperial Tobacco Group, Swedish Match, Swisher, Scandinavian Tobacco Group, Altria, Habanos, Agio Cigars, J. Cortes cigars, China Tobacco, Burger Group

Cigar Market

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The global Cigar market is valued at 16000 million US$ in 2018 and will reach 19400 million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of 2.5% during 2019-2025. The objectives of this study are to define, segment, and project the size of the Cigar market based on company, product type, end user and key regions.The report focuses on the global Cigar market status, future opportunities, growth analysis, key drivers and top players. The study objectives are to present the Cigar development in the United States, Europe and China.REQUEST FOR A FREE COPY OF SAMPLE PDF ATCigar Market provides a detailed market overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications, challenges, competitive scenario and industry chain structure. The report also analyzes the Cigar Market verticals and horizontals, Market Size and CAGR comparison by region. The key players are Imperial Tobacco Group, Swedish Match, Swisher International, Scandinavian Tobacco Group, Altria Group, Habanos, Agio Cigars, J. Cortes cigars, China Tobacco, Burger Group. The market analysis done by Product types like Machine-made Cigars, Handmade Cigars and by Application like Male Smokers, Female Smokers. It also provides analysis by Region such as the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India, Central & South America.THE STUDY OBJECTIVES OF THIS REPORT ARE: To study and analyze the global Cigar market size (value & volume) by the company, key regions, products and end user, breakdown data from 2014 to 2018, and forecast to 2025. To understand the structure of Cigar market by identifying its various sub-segments. To share detailed information about the key factors influencing the growth of the market (growth potential, opportunities, drivers, industry-specific challenges and risks). Focuses on the key global Cigar companies, to define, describe and analyze the sales volume, value, market share, market competition landscape and recent development. To project the value and sales volume of Cigar submarkets, with respect to key regions. To analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the market.MAJOR POINTS FROM TABLE OF CONTENTS1. 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. AppendixFOR MORE QUERIES OR FOR CUSTOM REQUIREMENTS, CONTACT US ATABOUT INFORGROWTH:We are a market-intelligence company formed with the objective of providing clients access to the most relevant and accurate research content for their growth needs. At InForGrowth, we understand Research requirements and help a client in taking informed business-critical decisions. Given the complexities and interdependencies of market-intelligence, there is always more than one source to explore and arrive at the right answer. Through our smart search feature and our reliable & trusted publishing partners, we are paving way for more simplified and relevant research.FOR ALL YOUR RESEARCH NEEDS, REACH OUT TO US AT:Address: 6400 Village Pkwy suite # 104, Dublin, CA 94568, USAContact Name: RohanEmail: sales@inforgrowth.comPhone: +1-909-329-2808UK: +44 (203) 743 1890Agritech Expo Zambia welcomes iDE Zambia in Chisamba in April

'Our SHARED project aims to reduce rural poverty

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The main challenge faced by farmers in the agri sector is limited and sometimes lack of access to finance or financial products that will facilitate the adoption of technologies, and effectively participate in markets. This is according to Sylvester Kalonge, Country Director, iDE Zambia, who have just come on board as a silver sponsor for the upcoming Agritech Expo Zambia, taking place in Chisamba from 11-13 April 2019.iDE Zambia has been working to transform lives of smallholder farmers using market-based approaches, says Mr Kalonge. He adds: to achieve this goal, it is cardinal to develop strategic partnerships with private sector players along the various value chains. Agritech Expo Zambia provides an excellent platform to showcase our strategies, identify potential private sector partners and consolidate relationships with current partners.He continues: we are currently implementing a project known as Smallholder Agricultural Reform through Enterprise Development (SHARED), whose purpose is to reduce rural poverty through the creation of sustainable income and livelihood opportunities. The project, funded by SIDA (Swedish International Development Agency), supports lifting of smallholder farmers out of poverty by shifting to more lucrative agricultural value chains and adopting technical and business practices that support enterprise growth.iDE* Zambia was established in 1997 to connect smallholder farmers to input and output markets as well as train them to see farming as a business. The organisation accomplishes this through its active network of 386 farm business advisors (FBAs), serving more than 90,000 clients across Northwestern, Central, Copperbelt, Lusaka, and Southern province in Zambia.*International Development Enterprises (iDE)To read the full interview with Mr Kalonge, go to the event website.Local + global = Agritech Expo!This year the event at GART is expected to bring more than 20 000 visitors from some 39 countries, over 220 local and international exhibitors, including country pavilions so far from Germany, China, Czech Republic, the European Union, Italy and the UK, with 3500 VIPs and large scale farmers and 150 members of the media. The free AgriTEACH workshop sessions focus on sectors such as crops, finance, irrigation, machinery, equipment and livestock.Agritech Expo Zambia is free to attend for all visitors that pre-register.Multi-award winning Agritech ExpoLast year Agritech Expo Zambia won the AAXO ROAR award for Best Africa Bound Trade & Consumer Exhibition in the 12000+ sqm category at the AAXO ROAR Organiser and Exhibitor Awards in Johannesburg which honour excellence in the exhibition and events industry on the continent. In 2017 the event also won for Best Trade & Consumer Exhibition 12000+ sqm and for Distinction in Social Responsibility.The expo has an outreach programme at the local Golden Valley Basic School, where, with the assistance of numerous event sponsors, it is assisting the school with much needed infrastructure upgrades, equipment supplies and management of the schools farm.Agritech Expo Zambia 2019:Farmers Preview DayThursday 11 April 2019 | 09:00 - 17:00Open to all agricultural professionalsFriday 12 April 2019 | 09:00 - 17:00Saturday 13 April 2019 | 09:00 - 15:00Location: Gart Research Centre, Chisamba, ZambiaAgritech Expo Zambia is owned by the Zambia National Farmers Union (ZNFU) and is organised by Spintelligent, leading Cape Town-based trade exhibition and conference organiser, and the African office of Clarion Events Ltd, based in the UK.Senior communications manager: Annemarie RoodbolMobile: +27 82 562 7844Office: +27 21 700 3558Email: annemarie.roodbol@spintelligent.comWebsite:Postal address: PO Box 105, Steenberg, 7947, South AfricaNew Innovation in Human Machine Interface (HMI) Solutions Market 2019 by Global Companies Abb, Rockwell Automation, Inc, Schneider Electric Se, Siemens Ag and Emerson Electric Co.

Human Machine Interface (HMI) Solutions Market

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The Human Machine Interface (HMI) Solutions market is estimated to be growing with a CAGR of 11.2% till 2023. Rising demand for automation, increasing need for human machine interface and the growing need for efficiency and process monitoring will be the key factors driving the Human Machine Interface (HMI) Solutions market in the future.For Sample Copy of this Report @This report features the market growth analysis and forecasting for the growth and revenue up to 2023 allied with Human Machine Interface (HMI) Solutions market. The market for Human Machine Interface (HMI) Solutions is segmented on the basis of layout type, consumer industry verticals, offerings and regions.The HMI connects an operator to the controller of the industrial system. These system solutions are deployed on the windows based machines communicating with Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and other industrial controllers.The embedded HMI solutions were held at the top spot in terms of market share in 2016 and are expected to hold their position in the forecast period as well. Among the offerings hardware was leading the market in 2016 and is estimated to be the dominion till 2023.The HMI solutions in manufacturing industry have been showing a tremendous hike in past years and a further boost to adoption is projected during the forecast period. North American region is expected to hold to the market till 2023. However, APAC region is anticipated to be showing the fastest pace in terms of adopting to HMI solutions in the forecast period.Inquire more or share questions if any before the purchase on this report @Key Players: Abb Rockwell Automation, Inc Schneider Electric Se Siemens Ag Emerson Electric Co. Honeywell International, Inc General Electric Co. Target Audience: Players in the market Small and Heavy Industries Government Authorities Machine Vendors Aerospace Industry Research & Development Institution Manufacturing Industry Discrete Industry Investors interested in automationKey Benefits of the Report: This report provides information about Human Machine Interface (HMI) Solutions market with its current market trends and future estimation to portray the looming investment receptacles. It comprehends information regarding key drivers, challenges, restraints, and opportunities in the global Human Machine Interface (HMI) Solutions market. Market factor analysis delivers treasured information regarding the potential buyers and suppliers, and understanding the stakeholders involved. This report determines the overall market potential to apprehend the trends to attain a resilient exposure in the market.Get Direct Copy of this Report @Research MethodologyThe market is derived through extensive use of secondary, primary, in-house research followed by expert validation and third party perspective like analyst report of investment banks. The secondary research forms the base of our study where we conducted extensive data mining, referring to verified data sources such as white papers government and regulatory published materials, technical journals, trade magazines, and paid data sources.For forecasting, regional demand & supply factor, investment, market dynamics including technical scenario, consumer behavior, and end use industry trends and dynamics , capacity production, spending were taken into consideration.We have assigned weights to these parameters and quantified their market impacts using the weighted average analysis to derive the expected market growth rate.The market estimates and forecasts have been verified through exhaustive primary research with the Key Industry Participants (KIPs) which typically include: Original Equipment Manufacturer, Component Supplier, Distributors, Government Body & Associations, and Research InstituteAbout UsOrian Research is one of the most comprehensive collections of market intelligence reports on the World Wide Web. Our reports repository boasts of over 500000+ industry and country research reports from over 100 top publishers. We continuously update our repository so as to provide our clients easy access to the world's most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, and products. We also specialize in custom research in situations where our syndicate research offerings do not meet the specific requirements of our esteemed clients.Contact Us:Ruwin MendezVice President  Global Sales & Partner RelationsOrian Research ConsultantsUS: +1 (415) 830-3727 | UK: +44 020 8144-71-27Email: info@orianresearch.comWebsite:Follow Us on LinkedIn:Naloxone Market By Top Key Players Amphastar Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, ADAPT Pharma, Kaleo, Sandoz, Amneal Pharmaceuticals

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Global Naloxone Market to reach USD XXX million by 2025. Global Naloxone Market valued approximately USD XXX million in 2016 is forecasted to grow with a healthy growth rate of more than XX% over the forecast period 2018-2025. The major factors speculated to augment the markets rising availability of naloxone as a generic drug, and death cases from drug overdose increasing with alarmingly escalating rates. Continuous increase in prices of naloxone drug is a major constraint for the growth in market. Escalating engagement of private organizations and government in spreading cognizance regarding the availability of naloxone is a prime opportunity for growth in the market. Naloxone is a generic drug which is used to blocks or reverses the effects of opioid medication, including extreme drowsiness, slowed breathing, or loss of consciousness.Get a Sample Copy of this Report @The regional analysis of Global Naloxone 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 region across the world in terms of market share. Furthermore, owing to countries such as China, India, and Japan, Asia Pacific region is also expected to exhibit higher growth rate / CAGR over the forecast period 2018-2025.The 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.Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @The detailed segments and sub-segment of the market are explained below:By Product:?Spray Forms?Injectable FormsBy Application:?Opioid Overdose?Preventing Opioid Abuse?OthersBy Regions:?North America?Europe?Asia Pacific?Latin America?Rest of the WorldFurthermore, years considered for the study are as follows:Historical year 2015, 2016Base year 2017Forecast period 2018 to 2025The industry is seeming to be fairly competitive. Some of the leading market players include Amphastar Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, ADAPT Pharma, Kaleo, Sandoz, Amneal Pharmaceuticals, West Ward Pharmaceuticals, Mylan, Angkor Data Communication Group Co., Ltd., Cybercomm, Route Mobile Limited, Infobip Ltd., Tyntec, Nexmo, DIMOCO and so on. The fierce competitiveness has made these players spend in product developments to improve the customers requirements.Target Audience of the Naloxone Market Study:Key Consulting Companies & AdvisorsLarge, medium-sized, and small enterprisesVenture capitalistsValue-Added Resellers (VARs)Third-party knowledge providersInvestment bankersInvestorsGet Purchase Discount @About Us:Big Market Research has a range of research reports from various publishers across the world.Our database of reports of various market categories and sub-categories would help to find the exact report you may be looking for.We are instrumental in providing quantitative and qualitative insights on your area of interest by bringing reports from various publishers at one place to save your time and money. A lot of organizations across the world are gaining profits and great benefits from information gained through reports sourced by us.Contact Us:Mr. Abhishek Paliwal5933 NE Win Sivers Drive, #205, Portland,OR 97220 United StatesDirect:+1-971-202-1575Toll Free:+1-800-910-6452email help@bigmarketresearch.comTherapeutic Drug Monitoring Market 2019 Full Market Analysis and Key Players Roche Diagnostics, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Bio Rad Laboratories, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics

Therapeutic Drug Monitoring Market

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CoherentMarketInsights.com Publish a New Market Research Report On  Therapeutic Drug Monitoring Market 2019 Global Analysis By Key Players  Roche Diagnostics, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Bio Rad Laboratories, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, Beckmann Coulter, and Abbott Diagnostics. In 2016, Danaher Corporation, parent company for Beckman Coulter acquired Cepheid at US$ 4 billion to strengthen companys diagnostic portfolio. .Therapeutic drug monitoring is a multidisciplinary practice of measuring drug amount in bloodstream to maintain its effective concentration. It is used to maximize efficacy of drug, avoid toxicity and adverse drug reactions (ADR), facilitate dose adjustment according patient requirement, and to identify therapeutic failure. It is used especially for drugs characterized by narrow therapeutic window, drugs that are highly protein bound and those in which the metabolite might be toxic. Physicians and hospitals use therapeutic drug monitoring to maximize the clinical benefits of the drug by minimizing the toxic side effects thereby improving the quality of life for the patients.North America dominates the global therapeutic drug monitoring marketNorth America holds the dominant position in therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) market, owing to robust health care infrastructure, high awareness for treatment regime and increasing patient awareness regarding adverse drug reaction (ADR). According to 2013 survey by Medical Expenditure Panel published in Scientific American, 1 in 7 American adult consume Anti-Psychotic drug, a class of drugs which requires TDM. Stringent government regulations regarding safe medication practices especially with drugs having narrow therapeutic range would propel growth therapeutic drug monitoring. Moreover, increasing adoption of instruments such as monitors and analytic equipment, reagents, and diagnostics tools for drug monitoring is driving the growth of therapeutic drug monitoring market.However, difficulty in reimbursement bars the widespread usage of TDM, as often the cost associated with TDM is high. Furthermore, insufficient infrastructure and skilled manpower is restraining the growth of the market in emerging economies.Access PDF Template Copy of this Report at:Therapeutic Drug Monitoring Market TaxonomyOn the basis of product type:EquipmentConsumables (Assay kits)On the basis of technology:Enzyme ImmunoassayHPLCLC/MSGC/MSFluorescence Polarization ImmunoassayMass SpectrometryPersonalized medicine is driving the growth of therapeutic drug monitoring market, owing to increasing demand for better treatment outcome with minimum side effects from the medication. For instance, TDM is majorly used for anti-cancer drugs monitoring for which standard guidelines are recommended by many oncology Journal and associations, one of them being the European Journal of Oncology. Moreover, advanced treatment therapies such pharmacogenomics, gene testing, and proteomics is further expected to boost the growth of market. Increasing antimicrobial resistance is one of the key factor driving the growth of TDM market. According to WHO Factsheet 2017, antimicrobial resistance is one of the leading cause of death. For instance, according to WHO factsheet, around 4,80,000 multi-drug resistance TB cases were reported, which is creating an opportunity for physicians to optimize or monitor the drug therapies through TDM.Organ transplant procedures are also propelling the growth of therapeutic drug monitoring market. Immunosuppressant drugs are basic treatment for organ transplant to avoid rejection of transplanted organ by body, which requires TDM to avoid ADR and side effects. Asia Pacific is a promising region for organ transplant due to increased awareness and infrastructure availability. According to Waters Corporation Blog, China witnessed 35% y-o-y increase in organ transplant in the first 4 months of 2017. There is a growing trend of clinical research organizations being shifted to cost effective Asia Pacific region for bioequivalence study of generic drugs on account of low cost of processes in this region. Moreover, advances in the field of biomedical technology such as nano biosensors and implantable devices are expected to boost the growth of therapeutic drug monitoring market. Advancement in tools for TDM such as assay kits, chromatography columns, spectrometry, and alternative matrices such as interstitial fluid provide continuous real time monitoring of the therapeutic drug through Probe Scientifics new MicroEye Technology.Key players in the global therapeutic drug monitoring market include Roche Diagnostics, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Bio Rad Laboratories, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, Beckmann Coulter, and Abbott Diagnostics. In 2016, Danaher Corporation, parent company for Beckman Coulter acquired Cepheid at US$ 4 billion to strengthen companys diagnostic portfolio.Get Customized Report in your Inbox within 24 hours @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Long Term Care Market 2019 will Boom by Key Players Brookdale Senior Living, Sunrise Senior Living, Emeritus , Atria Senior Living, Extendicare, Gentiva Health Services, Senior Care Centres of America, Kindred Healthcare

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Global Long Term Care Market valued approximately USD 810 billion in 2017 is anticipated to grow with a healthy growth rate of more than 6.2% over the forecast period 2018-2025. The Long Term Care Market is continuously growing in the global scenario at significant pace. Long term care (LTC) service contains a variety of services provided by nursing homes, day care centres, home health agencies and from family or friends. Long term care service comprises a broad range of personal care, healthcare and supportive care services. It is required for geriatrics people and adult who are unable to take self-care due to injury, cognitive or mental disability and chronic illness.Request for Free Sample@Long term care service provides support to people in regain quality of life and in improving an optimal level of physical functioning of life. Increasing aging population and rising incidence of chronic diseases, growing consciousness among people regarding the numerous home healthcare facilities and increasing medical coverage for home healthcare are the substantial driving factors of the market across the globe. Moreover, government funding, scarcity of skilled nursing staff, and increased collaborations of private insurers with the government are some factors likely to create lucrative opportunities in the market over the upcoming years. However, high cost associated with long term care and unwillingness of the traditional long term care providers to adopt new software are the factors that limiting the market growth during the forecast period.The regional analysis of Global Long Term Care 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 due to rising ageing population and favorable government support in the region. Further, Europe is estimated to grow at higher rate in the global Long Term Care market over the upcoming years due to increasing infrastructural development in healthcare. Asia-Pacific is also anticipated to exhibit higher growth rate / CAGR over the forecast period 2018-2025 owing to string economic growth and increasing disposable income in the region.Inquire More about Report @The major market player included in this report are: Brookdale Senior Living Sunrise Senior Living Emeritus Atria Senior Living Extendicare Gentiva Health Services Senior Care Centres of America Kindred HealthcareThe 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:Click on the link to Buy Now (Priced at USD 3950)By Type: Home Healthcare Hospice Nursing Care Assisted Ling FacilitiesBy Application: Hospital Nursing Home ClinicBy Regions: North Americao U.S.o Canada Europeo UKo Germany Asia Pacifico Chinao Indiao Japan Latin Americao Brazilo Mexico Rest 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 Long Term Care Market in Market Study: Key Consulting Companies & Advisors Large, medium-sized, and small enterprises Venture capitalists Value-Added Resellers (VARs) Third-party knowledge providers Investment bankers InvestorsAbout Us:Qurate Business Intelligence delivers unique market research solutions to its customers and help them to get equipped with refined information and market insights derived from reports. We are committed to providing best business services and easy processes to get the same. Qurate Business Intelligence considers themselves as strategic partners of their customers and always shows the keen level of interest to deliver quality.Contact Us:Nehal ChinoyRunwal Platinum,Ramnagar Colony, Bavdhan,Pune, Maharashtra, India-411021IN +919881074592info@qurateresearch.com3D Printing in Healthcare Market is Reflecting a luminous Growth at a CAGR of 11.51% till 2025 | by Stratasys Ltd.,3D System Corporation,Aram AB,Materialize NV etc

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This new report on the Global 3D Printing in Healthcare market is committed to fulfilling the requirements of the clients by giving them thorough insights into the market. An exclusive data offered in this report is collected by research and industry experts.The report on 3D Printing in Healthcare Market describes an in-depth study of the market aspects such as the product definition, growth rate and current size of the industry. A broad analysis of the consumer demands, futuristic growth opportunities, and prevailing trends are also drafted in the report.Global 3D Printing in Healthcare Market to reach USD XX billion by 2025.Global 3D Printing in Healthcare Market valued approximately USD 16.82 billion in 2017 is anticipated to grow with a healthy growth rate of more than 11.51% over the forecast period 2018-2025.The 3D Printing in Healthcare Market is continuously growing in the global scenario at a significant pace. 3D printing is a rapidly emerging cost-effective technology with significant potential to transform healthcare delivery and clinical activities. This technology can be used in a range of devices such as prostheses, hearing aids, custom-made knee, and hip implants, dental implants, and surgical instruments. Technological advancements in 3D printing, an increasing trend in customized 3D printing and increasing public-private funding for 3D printing activities are the substantial driving factors of the market across the globe. Moreover, growing demand for organ transplant and reconfiguration of supply chain models of medical device manufacturers are some factors likely to create lucrative opportunities in the market over the upcoming years. 3D printing in healthcare offer various benefits such as it helps the surgeon to select an appropriate sized-devices, it reduces a surgical cost associated with longer surgery, it minimizes the time for treatment of a patient and so on. These benefits are also boosting the demand for 3D printing in healthcare across the world. However, lack availability of skilled professional, high cost associated with 3D printing system in healthcare and stringent regulatory process for the approval of 3D printing medical devices are the restraining factors of the market during the forecast period.Get a PDF sample of this research study atKey players of the Global 3D Printing in Healthcare market are profiled on the basis of various factors, which include recent developments, business strategies, financial strength, weaknesses, and main business. The 3D Printing in Healthcare report offers a special assessment of top strategic moves of leading players such as Stratasys Ltd. 3D System Corporation Aram AB Materialize NV Renishaw PLC Envision TEC GmbH Nano 3D Biosciences Inc. Oxford Performance Materials Organovo Holding Inc. Eos GmbHAccess Full Comprehensive Industry Insights:One of the important factors in the Global 3D Printing in Healthcare Market report is the competitive analysis. The report covers all the key parameters such as product innovation, market strategies of the key players, market share, revenue generation, latest research and development, and market expert views.The 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:By Technology: Electron Beam Melting Laser Beam Melting Droplet Deposition Photo Polymerization3D Printing in Healthcare Market Analysis by Application Tissue Engineering Surgical Implants Healthcare Wearable DevicesThe regional analysis of Global 3D printing in Healthcare 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 due to rising technological advancements, increasing adoption of 3d printing in healthcare and increasing R&D investments in the region. Further, Europe is estimated to grow at a stable rate in the global 3D printing in the Healthcare market over the upcoming years. Also, Asia-Pacific anticipated exhibiting higher growth rate / CAGR over the forecast period 2018-2025 owing to the establishment of new 3D printing research centers in the region.Highlights of TOCExecutive Summary3D Printing in Healthcare Market Definition and Scope3D Printing in Healthcare Market Dynamics3D Printing in Healthcare Market Industry Analysis3D Printing in Healthcare Market, by Type3D Printing in Healthcare Market, by Application3D Printing in Healthcare Market, by Regional AnalysisCompetitive IntelligenceResearch ProcessBuy this research reportTarget Audience of the Global 3D Printing in Healthcare Market in Market Study: Key Consulting Companies & Advisors Large, medium-sized, and small enterprises Venture capitalists Value-Added Resellers (VARs) Third-party knowledge providers Investment bankers InvestorsAbout Ample Market ResearchAmple Market Research provides comprehensive market research services and solutions across various industry verticals and helps businesses perform exceptionally well. Attention to detail, consistency, and quality are elements we focus on. However, our mainstay remains to be knowledge, expertise, and resources to make us industry players.Our end goal is to provide quality market research and consulting services to customers and add maximum value to businesses worldwide. We desire to delivery reports that have the perfect concoction of useful data.Our mission is to capture every aspect of the market and offer businesses a document that makes solid grounds for crucial decision making.Contact UsAmple Market Research & Consulting Private LimitedWilliam JamesMedia & Marketing ManagerAddress: Jamuna Tower, 501, MIDC Road, Miragaon, Mira Road East, Mumbai, Maharashtra 401107Call: +1 (530) 868 6979Email: sales@amplemarketreports.comWebsite:North America UAV Market predicted to grow exponentially by 2025 | Top Key Players: Parrot, 3D Robotics, Yuneec International, Cyberhawk Innovations Ltd., Intel and senseFly

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North America UAV Market analysis based on Product, Technology, Application, Industry Analysis Report, Countries Outlook, Growth Potential, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2018  2024, predicted to cross USD 7 billion by 2024, as per the latest report by Graphical Research.The rise in adoption of smartphones, demand for aerial services, and demand for drone services for commercial applications impacts the market growth. The legalization and adoption of commercial drone in the market by government authorities has brought many new valuable avenues for business and usability in the market. Factors such as regulations regarding the security and privacy, use of satellite imagery hamper the market growth of the drone. Moreover, increased application areas for drones has created lucrative opportunities for players present in the market.Request for a sample copy @The autonomous mode of operation of a civilian UAV drone is estimated to be the fastest growing mode of drone in the market with a CAGR of 23.4% in the forecasted period. This can be attributed to the technological advancement and utilization of drone capabilities, such as, with the use of thermal and hyperspectral sensors in flight to capture and experience immersive view from drones.Leading players are aiming to explore new technologies and applications to meet the growing demands of customers. Collaborations and acquisitions would enable them to enhance their product portfolios and expand into different geographies. Emerging economies would provide opportunity for growth and expansion. Vendors are developing specialized solutions for small and medium-sized businesses to meet their specific business requirements.Browse key industry insights from this report @The usage of drone technology in agricultural practices has been on a significant rise in the civilian UAV market, with the farmers being provided decision making insights through big data analytics. This has helped the farmers in understanding their crops better for enabling maintenance and balance of their crop production, with efficient deployment methods such as, crop spraying, aerial spraying, crop monitoring, soil & field analysis and health assessment.North America commercial drone market consists of both multinational companies with wide product portfolio and regional player or SMBs that offer niche products and services. Some of the major market players are Parrot, 3D Robotics, Yuneec International, Cyberhawk Innovations Ltd., Intel and senseFly.Canada is the fastest growing country in the commercial drone market in the North America region with a CAGR of 27%, due to the governments take on adoption and exploration of commercial drones to cater innovation with technology in unmanned vehicles. It is estimated that the country utilizes about three- fourth of its drones for recreational purposes and the remaining one fourth in for non-recreational purposes.Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @Segments We Cover:North America Commercial Drone Market Growth, By ProductFixed Wing DroneRotary Wing DroneHybrid DroneNorth America Commercial Drone Market Analysis, By TechnologyRemotely Operated DroneSemi-autonomous DroneAutonomous DroneNorth America Commercial Drone Market Statistics, By ApplicationAerial photographyAgricultureEmergency ManagementInspection & MonitoringRemote Sensing & MappingWildlife Research & PreservationThe above information has been provided for the following regions and countries:U.SCanadaRelated Reports:1. Asia Pacific Commercial Drone/Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Market Size By Product (Fixed Wing Drone, Rotary Blade Drone, Hybrid Drone), By Technology (Remotely Operated, Semi-Autonomous, Autonomous), By Application (Aerial Photography, Agriculture, Emergency Management, Inspection & Monitoring, Remote Sensing & Mapping, Wildlife Research & Preservation), Industry Analysis Report, Countries Outlook (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Russia), Growth Potential, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2018  20242. Europe Commercial Drone/Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Market Size By Product (Fixed Wing Drone, Rotary Blade Drone, Hybrid Drone), By Technology (Remotely Operated, Semi-Autonomous, Autonomous), By Application (Aerial Photography, Agriculture, Emergency Management, Inspection & Monitoring, Remote Sensing & Mapping, Wildlife Research & Preservation), Industry Analysis Report, Countries Outlook (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Russia), Growth Potential, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2018  2024About Graphical Research:Graphical Research is a business research firm that provides industry insights, market forecast and strategic inputs through granular research reports and advisory services. We publish targeted research reports with an aim to address varied customer needs, from market penetration and entry strategies to portfolio management and strategic outlook. We understand that business requirements are unique: our syndicate reports are designed to ensure relevance for industry participants across the value chain. We also provide custom reports that are tailored to the exact needs of the customer, with dedicated analyst support across the purchase lifecycle.Contact Us:Parikhit B.Corporate sales,Graphical ResearchEmail: sales@graphicalresearh.comWeb:Seasonings and Spices Market Estimated to Record Highest CAGR by 2017 to 2026| Market Drivers Olam International Limited, Kerry Group Plc., Ajinomoto Co., Ariake Japan Co

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Demand for convenience food products with new flavors is expected to remain high attributed to fast-paced lifestyle of the customers. Surge in demand for the ready-to-use spice mixes has also led the food vendors to launch aromatic tablets and blended spices. Consumption of seasonings such as herbs and spices will continue to remain high to treat disorders and health problems attributed to various antioxidant features. For instance, demand for black pepper continues to remain high for producing medicines to cure initial stages of cancer, bronchitis, and stomach upset.According to Fact.MR, the seasonings and spices market is expected to represent a value of over US$ 34,500 Mn by the end of 2026.Get a FREE Sample of this Report:Organic Food Products to Boost DemandGrowing concerns regarding the health concerns among modern customers has led the manufacturers to increasingly opt for organic seasoning ingredients globally. Increasing awareness regarding various health related benefits of consuming organic products will continue to impact growth of the global seasonings and spices market positively. Moreover, increasing disposable income is further rev up sales of organic food products. However, concerns regarding the adverse effects of artificial flavors and grade-B food has led customers to prefer a comparatively healthier option.Hospitality Industry to Impact Global Market GrowthExpansion of tourism & hospitality sector will continue to expand significantly with development of various tourist destinations. Construction of various hotels and restaurants is further expected to impact growth of the global seasonings and spices market positively. In order to gain a competitive edge, various hoteliers are focusing on capitalizing on the increasing preference for extravagant and innovative food experience. Moreover, increasing preferences of customers and guests has led the hoteliers to modify their delicacies. In addition, as customers are increasingly price-conscious, hoteliers are focusing on developing various alternatives to the offered lodging products.As natural seasoning agents remain central to taste and flavor enhancement, manufacturers are increasingly using salt and pepper to enhance the flavor of food products. In addition, demand for other spices will continue to increase attributed to its flavor enhancing properties to the delicacies. Some of the popular seasonings include Garam masala, Creole, Cajun and Greek seasoning, which is used to enhance the flavor of the food products globally. Bound to these factors, the global seasonings and spices market is expected to witness significant growth during the forecast period.Browse full report about with TOC:Conventional Nature to Represent a Leading SegmentAs preference for spicy food products continue to increase, demand for spices is expected to remain high globally. On the basis of product type, the spices segment is expected to represent the highest revenue growth, accounting for a value of over US$ 6,600 Mn by the end of 2026. On the other hand, the salt substitute segment is expected to register a robust CAGR during the forecast period.Based on nature, the conventional segment is expected to generate significant revenues, recording a value of over US$ 6,500 Mn by the end of 2017. However, the organic nature segment is expected to register a significant CAGR through 2026.By sales channel, the modern trade segment is expected to witness robust revenue growth, recording a value of over US$ 4,400 Mn by the end of 2026. In contrary, the online store sales channel segment is expected to register a healthy CAGR throughout the forecast period.Competition TrackingLeading market players operating in the global seasonings and spices market include Mahashian Di Hatti Private Limited (MDH Spices), McCormick & Company, Incorporated, Olam International Limited, Associated British Foods Plc., Kerry Group Plc., Ajinomoto Co., Inc, Ariake Japan Co., Ltd., SHS Group Limited and Dharampal Satyapal Limited (DS Group).To solve any query, Connect with an Analyst at:About FactMRFactMR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market insights 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 UsFact.MR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@factmr.comWeb:Blog:Read Industry News at -Radiofrequency Ablation Devices Market for Pain Management Insight | Key Players are St. Jude Medical, Inc., Boston Scientific Corporation, and Halyard Health, Inc.

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The second half of the past century has been a relatively peaceful duration for the humanity and populations have prospered across developed and emerging economies. As a result, geriatrics are now constituting for a prominent chunk of the worlds population. And with that  the healthcare industry is flourishing, as geriatrics are prone to several bodily disorders, especially arthritis, chronic low-back pain, and joint pain. The advent of radiofrequency ablation devices has paved a minimally invasive surgical procedure that can adequately serve pain management, and the market for the same is primed to excel in the near future.Read Report Overview:According to the findings of this business intelligence report, the demand in the global radiofrequency ablation devices market for pain management will expand at an impressive CAGR of 12.9% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2024. Revenue-wise, the vendors of pain management market will generate a demand for RF ablation devices worth of US$1,114.5 million by the end of 2024, substantially more than the markets evaluated worth of US$477.3 million as of 2017.Apart from the increasing population of geriatrics and strong prevalence of chronic pain, increased investments by multinational medical device companies to harness the concept of minimally invasive surgeries and recent approvals and launches of technological advanced devices are expected to drive the demand for radiofrequency ablation devices. On the other hand, regulatory hurdles and availability of other low-cost therapeutics for pain management are a few restraints obstructing this market from attaining greater profitability. Nevertheless, the analyst of the report foresees the emerging economies of China, India, and Brazil to open vast new opportunities in the near future.On the basis of product type, the market for RF ablation devices market for pain management has been segmented into RF generators, reusable products including electrodes and probes, and disposable products, which have been further bifurcated into needles, cannulas, and single-use probes and electrodes. As of 2017, the sub-segments of disposable products generated the most prominent chunk of demand, which was worth US$204.5 million. Benefits of disposable cannulas and probes include reduction in sterilization costs. Additionally, connector cables provided for single use probes are long enough to stay out of the sterile field, thus preventing infection.Request for the Report Sample:On the other hand, the RF generators segment is poised to expand at an above-average CAGR of 13.1% during the period of 2017 to 2024. Technological advancement such as cooled radiofrequency technology platforms which allow creation of larger lesions without excessive heating at the electrode fuels the growth of the segment. By the end of 2024, the pain management market is expected to produce a demand for RF generators worth of US$401.1 million.The report has also evaluated the demand potential from the end users: hospitals, specialty clinics, and ambulatory surgical centers, with the former poised to provide for a demand worth of US$538.4 million by 2024, which will represent nearly half of the overall demand.North America is projected to continue to dominate the market, accounting for 38.3% share by 2024. The segment is anticipated to reach value of US$426.4 million by 2024. The U.S. dominated the market in North America due to the existence large population base, higher awareness, significant health care spending in overall national budgets, early availability of advanced technologies, and higher penetration of health care services across the country. Europe, on the other hand, is estimated to offer 33.5% of the overall demand by the end of the aforementioned forecast period.Obtain Report Brochure:St. Jude Medical, Inc., Boston Scientific Corporation, and Halyard Health, Inc. have been identified as the three companies currently dominating the RF ablation devices market for pain management. The report profiles these and several other companies in its featured section on competitive landscape.About UsTransparency Market Research is a global market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. Our experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactTransparency Market Research90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: amanpreet@tmr.comWebsite:Leading report says The Wafer Level Packaging market is valued at $4.7 bn in 2019.

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Visiongain has launched a new packaging report: Global Wafer Level Packaging Market 2019-2029: Forecasts by Packaging Technology (3D TSV WLP, 2.5D TSV WLP, WLCSP, Nano WLP and Others), by Integration Type (Fan-in WLP and Fan-out WLP) and by Industry (Electronics, IT & Telecommunication, Industrial, Automotive, Aerospace & Defence, Healthcare and Others) Plus Profiles of Leading Companies and Regional and Leading National Market Analysis.London, UK, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Visiongain report analyst commented Wafer Level Packaging market is expected to witness a high growth on account of ongoing increased current and emerging applications, increased technological advancement. In addition, the rapidly expanding trend of thin and lightweight mobile devices and Increased penetration of electronic design automation in the automotive industry are main driving forces for the wafer level packaging market during the forecast period. The Wafer Level Packaging market is also driven by key strategies adopted by the key players in this industry such as product enhancement; acquisitions & mergers; agreements & collaborations; and expansion. Product enhancement was the most commonly adopted strategy by the leading players in Wafer Level Packaging market.For free sample pages on this report please click on: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 20 7549 9987Leading companies featured in the report who are manufacturing Wafer Level Packaging include Amkor Technology, Inc, Applied Materials, Inc, ASML Holding N.V., Deca Technologies Inc., Fujitsu Limited, Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Technology Co., Ltd., KLA-Tencor Corporation, Lam Research Corporation, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Rudolph Technologies, Inc., Siliconware Precision Industries Co., Ltd., Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation, Tokyo Electron Limited and Ultratech, IncNotes for EditorsIf 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 20 7549 9987Sara Peerunsara.peerun@visiongain.com+44 20 7549 9987Visiongain is one of the fastest-growing and most innovative independent media companies in Europe. Based in London, UK, Visiongain produces a host of business-to-business reports focusing on the automotive, aviation, chemicals, cyber, defence, energy, food & drink, materials, packaging, pharmaceutical and utilities sectors.Visiongain publishes reports produced by analysts who are qualified experts in their field. Visiongain has firmly established itself as the first port of call for the business professional who needs independent, high-quality, original material to rely and depend on.Suite 143, Airport House Purley Way, Croydon CR0 0XZInterior Design Market 2019 Global Analysis By Key Players  Gensler , Gold Mantis , HOK, HBA, Perkins+Will, Jacobs, Stantec, IA Interior Architects

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WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On  Interior Design Market 2019 Global Analysis By Key Players  Gensler , Gold Mantis , HOK, HBA, Perkins+Will, Jacobs, Stantec, IA Interior Architects.Interior Design Industry 2019Description:-The Interior Design industry has also suffered a certain impact, but still maintained a relatively optimistic growth, the past four years, Interior Design market size to maintain the average annual growth rate of 6.75% from 76670 million $ in 2015 to 93277 million $ in 2018, The analysts believe that in the next few years, Interior Design market size will be further expanded, we expect that by 2023, The market size of the Interior Design will reach 121054 million $.Get a Free Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comThis 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.Besides, the report also covers segment data, including: type segment, industry segment, channel segment etc. cover different segment market size. Also cover different industries clients information, which is very important for the Major Players.Sections:-Section 1: FreeDefinitionSection (2 3): 1200 USDMajor Player DetailGenslerGold MantisHOKHBAPerkins+WIllJacobsStantecIA Interior ArchitectsCallisonNelsonLeo A DalySOMHKSDB & BCannon Design,NBBJPerkins EastmanCCD/ChengChung DesignAECOM TechnologyWilson AssociatesM Moser AssociatesSmithGroupJJRAreen Design Services..Enquiry About Report @Table Of Contents  Major Key PointsSection 1 Interior Design Product DefinitionSection 2 Global Interior Design Market Major Player Share and Market Overview2.1 Global Major Player Interior Design Business Revenue2.2 Global Interior Design Market OverviewSection 3 Major Player Interior Design Business Introduction3.1 Gensler Interior Design Business Introduction3.1.1 Gensler Interior Design Revenue, Growth Rate and Gross profit 2015-20183.1.2 Gensler Interior Design Business Distribution by Region3.1.3 Gensler Interview Record3.1.4 Gensler Interior Design Business Profile3.1.5 Gensler Interior Design Product Specification3.2 Gold Mantis Interior Design Business Introduction3.2.1 Gold Mantis Interior Design Revenue, Growth Rate and Gross profit 2015-20183.2.2 Gold Mantis Interior Design Business Distribution by Region3.2.3 Interview Record3.2.4 Gold Mantis Interior Design Business Overview3.2.5 Gold Mantis Interior Design Product Specification3.3 HOK Interior Design Business Introduction3.3.1 HOK Interior Design Revenue, Growth Rate and Gross profit 2015-20183.3.2 HOK Interior Design Business Distribution by Region3.3.3 Interview Record3.3.4 HOK Interior Design Business Overview3.3.5 HOK Interior Design Product Specification3.4 HBA Interior Design Business Introduction3.5 Perkins+WIll Interior Design Business Introduction3.6 Jacobs Interior Design Business IntroductionSection 4 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Region Level)4.1 North America Country4.1.1 United States Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.1.2 Canada Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.2 South America Country4.2.1 South America Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.3 Asia Country4.3.1 China Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.3.2 Japan Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.3.3 India Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.3.4 Korea Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.4 Europe Country4.4.1 Germany Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.4.2 UK Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.4.3 France Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.4.4 Italy Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.4.5 Europe Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.5 Other Country and Region4.5.1 Middle East Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.5.2 Africa Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.5.3 GCC Interior Design Market Size and Price Analysis 2015-20184.6 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Region Level) Analysis 2015-20184.7 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Region Level) AnalysisSection 5 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Product Type Level)5.1 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Product Type Level) Market Size 2015-20185.2 Different Interior Design Market Segmentation (Product Type Level) Market Size Growth Rate 2015-20185.3 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Product Type Level) AnalysisSection 6 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Industry Level)6.1 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Industry Level) Market Size 2015-20186.2 Different Industry Trend 2015-20186.3 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Industry Level) AnalysisSection 7 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Channel Level)7.1 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Channel Level) Market Size and Share 2015-20187.2 Global Interior Design Market Segmentation (Channel Level) AnalysisContinuedBuy 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.Lambskin Condom Market | CAGR, Top Players, Types, Applications, Regional Analysis 2018-2023 The study report on the Lambskin Condom Market has assessed the historical and current performance of this market, especially highlighting the key trends and growth opportunities. It also gives the SWOT analysis and global revenue and sales 2018-2023.



According to the latest research, the rising demand for this product is driving the Lambskin Condom Market significantly. The expansion in the various related industry is also expected to reflect positively on the sales of Lambskin Condom product over the next few years.



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This report study is on Global and Southeast Asia Lambskin Condom market in detail and presents comprehensive forecasts regarding the markets growth trajectory during the forecast period. The rising disposable income of consumers in emerging economies and the steady technological innovation observed in the Lambskin Condom industry are also anticipated. Moreover, the key drivers supporting and help propelling the Global and Southeast Asia Lambskin Condom market is further mentioned. The use of advanced technological systems requires which are compatible with this market by every parameter are firmly discussed in this report.



Key players have taken on a crucial role in the Lambskin Condom industry in recent years owing to the development of Lambskin Condom market sector. With respect to various parameters such as production volume, revenue, profit margin, export-import figures, and local consumption in different regional Lambskin Condom markets are studied in the report.



The report broadly analyzes the Global and Southeast Asia Lambskin Condom Market on the basis of the type of product and the application. Based on the type of product, the market has been classified different sections, trends, end-users, and technology. The segment which is likely to fuel the demand for Lambskin Condom products is mentioned.



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Permanent link to this press release: Copy Please set a link in the press area of your homepage to this press release on openPR. openPR disclaims liability for any content contained in this release.Carbon Dioxide Market: EOR in Oil and Gas Industries Complementing Sales of Carbon Dioxide || Key Players: Praxair Inc., Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., Gulf Cryo, Abdullah Hashim Industrial & Equipment Co. Ltd

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The purpose of this rich study presented by Fact.MR is to elaborate the various market projections impacting the global Carbon Dioxide Market during the period until 2026. This assessment delivers high-end statistics concerning market size (US$ Mn), Y-o-Y growth and revenue share (US& Mn) linked to different geographies and segmentation types. Readers can acquire precise insights about growth trends along with opportunities that are expected to reshape the overall structure of the Carbon Dioxide Market during the forecast period.Consumption of carbon dioxide witnessed a persistent rise during the historical period 2013-2017, and the status quo is expected to continue during the forecast period 2018-2026. According to Fact.MR, global carbon dioxide consumption is likely to reach nearly 23,000 KT in 2018, up from nearly 21,500 KT in 2017. The study shows that the carbon dioxide market remains moderately consolidated among tier 1 players and top 10 players collectively hold a revenue share of over 60%.Request Free Sample Report Here:Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) in Oil and Gas Industries Complementing Sales of Carbon DioxideAs per a revelation by the American Petroleum Institute, the oil & gas industry has been registering a burgeoning demand for carbon dioxide from last 35 years for additional oil recovery. An analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) conveys that around 137 billion barrels of potential oil resources are recoverable through carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery, with close to 67 billion barrels recoverable at the cost of around US$ 85 per barrel.Market StructureThe carbon dioxide market is segmented on the basis of production, by delivery mode, by end use, and by region. By production, the carbon dioxide market has been segmented into combustion and biological. By delivery mode, the carbon dioxide market has been classified into centralized and onsite. By end use, the carbon dioxide market has been segmented into metal manufacturing and fabrication, food and beverage, pulp and paper, oil and gas, healthcare, chemical, and other industries. The carbon dioxide market has been assessed across key regions of North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific excluding China, China, and MEABrowse Full report with TOC:The competitive landscape in the research study on carbon dioxide market offers detailed information on the key stakeholders having a stronghold in the carbon dioxide market. Various prospects of the key players in the carbon dioxide market, such as product portfolio, technological innovations, key differential strategies, and other financials have been extensively covered. The report on carbon dioxide market features key companies such as Linde Group, Air Liquide, Praxair Inc., Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., Gulf Cryo, Abdullah Hashim Industrial & Equipment Co. Ltd, and many more.About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United Statessales@factmr.comRead Full PR Here:Water Softener Market Trend, Revenue & Regional Analysis 2024 By Top Players - EcoWater Systems LLC, Culligan International, Kinetico Incorporated, Pentair, Morton Salt, Whirlpool Corporation, 3M

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According to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. Water Softener Market is set to surpass USD 10 billion by 2024. Global water softener market share is competitive and moderately consolidated with key industry precipitants includes, Culligan International Company, General Electric Company, Pentair, Whirlpool, Honeywell International and 3M.Increasing consumption of soft water has encouraged sellers to invest intensely in R&D for the product. Companies are spending more on product design, increasing efficiency and reducing environmental impacts.Request for a Sample copy of this Report @UK salt-based water softener market size in 900,000 grain from hotel/restaurants is likely to surpass USD 3 million due to its usage in removing lime scale on toilets, tile and faucets. It eliminates scale causing minerals in water, subsequently resulting in cleaner fittings and tiles, which may propel product demand.Water Softener Market, By Product Salt Based Salt FreeWater Softener Industry, By Application Residentialo Single Familyo Multi Family Commercialo Office Buildingso Hotel/Restaurantso Laundrieso Hospital & Healthcareo Others Industrialo Food Processing unito Textileo Chemicalo Oil & Gaso Refinerieso OthersMake an inquiry for purchasing this report @Intensifying demand for soft water owing to growing industrialization and urbanization may expand water softener market growth by 2024. Growing penetration of multinational brands along with its features including high effectiveness in decreasing formation of scale in boilers, pipes and tanks are likely to further propel product demand. This equipment improves product lifespan of water using appliances by removing salts and minerals, which can damage product quality. Growing customer spending on water treatment equipment supported by increasing contamination issues will propel product demand.Supporting government regulation in Europe and Asia pacific reinforced by R&D activities on water softener manufacturing will promote product demand. Additionally, rising industrial sector and manufacturing industries may fuel water softener demand owing to application of soft water in steam generation, product manufacturing and cleaning.Global salt free water softener market is anticipated to exceed USD 2 billion in projected timeline owing to its extensive consumption in the U.S. There is no electrical valve required in salt-free softener as system operates as a conditioner and do not captures anything, thus eliminating need to purge minerals. Soft water from this system results in less soap consumption and brighter laundry, which is anticipated to stimulate product demand.Browse Complete Report Summary @China water softener demand in 1200,000 grain from laundries units is projected to witness gains of up to 7%. Fabric quality is adversely affected along with high amount of detergent is required when hard water is used thus, softener is needed for both cleaning and washing applications. Softening equipment is used in this industry to maintain quality, easy cleaning of fabrics and also reduces the amount of detergent required, which may boost market growth.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Contact Person: Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone:1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Smoking Tobacco in Germany 2019 | Top Key Players - Imperial, BAT, PMI, Poschl, JTI, HvL, Van Horsen, Santa Fe, Von Eicken, STG, Planta, etc

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"Smoking Tobacco in Germany, 2019", is an analytical report by Publisher that provides extensive and highly detailed current and future market trends in the Danish tobacco market. It covers market size and structure along with per capita and overall consumption. Additionally, it focuses on brand data, retail pricing, prospects, and forecasts for sales and consumption until 2028.Smoking Tobacco in Germany Market research report is being presented with a motive to enrich readers by offering an extensive and explicit analysis of Smoking Tobacco in Germany industry. The report covers each characteristic of the Smoking Tobacco in Germany industry including market growth.Top Key Players:Imperial, BAT, PMI, Poschl, JTI, HvL, Van Horsen, Santa Fe, Von Eicken, STG, Planta.Get Sample Copy of this Report atThe German market for tobacco products is the largest in Western Europe. Total volumes were 108,172 tons in 2018. Smoking tobacco forms the second largest sector of the German tobacco products market with 25.2% of volumes in 2018. Sales were 27,350 tons in 2018 compared with 23,732 tons in 2008.Scope-The German smoking tobacco market is dominated by FCT, which accounted for 86.8% of total consumption in tonnage terms in 2018.-Per capita consumption stabilized over the next couple of years to stand at 313g per person in 2017, however, it has since been forecast to dip to 295g in 2018.-Since the withdrawal of pre-portioned fine cut products following the tax changes at the end of March 2006, the smoking tobacco market has undergone changes.-The German FCT market is led by Reemtsma, the subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco. Reemtsma has led the market since overtaking BAT in 2009, and has demonstrated steady growth since to stand above both BAT and PMI with 19.8% in 2017.Get discount on Purchase report @Reasons to buy-Get a detailed understanding of consumption to align your sales and marketing efforts with the latest trends in the market.-Identify the areas of growth and opportunities, which will aid effective marketing planning.-The differing growth rates in regional product sales drive fundamental shifts in the market.-This report provides detailed, authoritative data on these changes-prime intelligence for marketers.-Understand the market dynamics and essential data to benchmark your position and to identify where to compete in the future.The study objectives of Smoking Tobacco in Germany Market are:To analyze and research the global Smoking Tobacco in Germany status and future forecast involving, production, revenue, consumption, historical and forecast.To present the key Smoking Tobacco in Germany manufacturers, production, revenue, market share, and recent development.To split the breakdown data by regions, type, manufacturers and applications.To analyze the global and key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.Purchase a Copy of Report atAbout UsReportsWeb is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers.The market research industry has changed in last decade. As corporate focus has shifted to niche markets and emerging countries, a number of publishers have stepped in to fulfil these information needs. We have experienced and trained staff that helps you navigate different options and lets you choose best research solution at most effective cost.Contact UsPhone : +1-646-491-9876E-Mail : sales@reportsweb.comThermoform Packaging Market demand is set to expand at a CAGR of 5.9% during the forecast period | Know the top growth drivers

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The global market for thermoform packaging is competitive in nature with a high level of fragmentation and is expected to remain in the similar scenario in the next few years, states a new market research study by Transparency Market Research. The increasing number of applications and the growing focus of the key players on innovations are projected to accelerate the growth of the overall market in the next few years.In addition to this, the rising number of research and development activities is estimated to enhance the market penetration for the market players and further support the growth of the market in the near future.The increasing mergers and acquisitions is further predicted to offer growth opportunities in the near future.Some of the key players operating in the thermoform packaging market across the globe are Bemis Company, Inc., Display Pack Inc., D&W FINE PACK, HUHTAMAKI GROUP, Sonoco Products Company., Anchor Packaging, Inc., Tray-Pak Corporation, Amcor Limited, and PACTIV LLC.As per the market research study by Transparency Market Research, in 2017, the global market for thermoform packaging was worth US$38,603.9 mn and is likely to reach a value of US$57,615.9 mn by the end of 2024. The market is estimated to register a healthy 5.90% CAGR between 2017 and 2024.Preview Report @Asia Pacific to Offer Potential Growth Opportunities for Market PlayersThe global market for thermoform packaging has been categorized on the basis of geography among which, North America is holding a large share of the market and is projected to remain in the leading position in the next few years. The presence of several leading players is estimated to enhance the growth of the market in the near future. On the other hand, Asia Pacific is likely to exhibit a high growth rate in the next few years, thanks to the rising contribution from India, China, and South Korea. In addition to this, the growing demand for thermoform packaging from the food and beverages sector and the rising urban population are further projected to encourage the growth of the market in the near future.The global thermoform packaging market has been categorized on the basis of packaging type into blister, clamshell, skin, cups, and tubs. Among these, the blister segment is expected to lead the global thermoform packaging market with a large share in the next few years. The rising use of this packaging in the pharmaceutical industry is one of the key factors that is estimated to encourage the growth of this segment in the next few years. Furthermore, advancements in the technology is projected to support the growth throughout the forecast period.Request Sample Brochure of this Report @Rising Research and Development Activities to Encourage Market GrowthThe rising demand from the food sector and the increasing use of thermoform packaging from the pharmaceuticals are considered as some of the key factors that are estimated to accelerate the growth of the global thermoform packaging market in the next few years. In addition to this, the reduced packaging waste and the cost-effectiveness are projected to enhance the growth of the overall market in the coming few years.On the flip side, the constraints of thermoform packaging for heavy items and the compliance with the strict regulations are estimated to hamper the growth of the market in the near future. Nonetheless, the rising investments in the research and development activities and the rising opportunities in the developing economies are predicted to generate potential growth opportunities for the market players in the coming few years.This information is based on the findings of a research report published by Transparency Market Research (TMR), titled Thermoform Packaging Market (Packaging  Blister Packaging, Clamshell Packaging, Skin Packaging, Tubs, and Cups; Material  PET, PVC, PP, PE, and PS; Application  Food (Meat Products, Bakery and Confectionary, Dairy, Snacks, and Food Service Products), Beverages, Pharmaceutical, Cosmetics and Personal Care, Industrial Goods, and Electronics)  Global Industry, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017  2024.Get TOC @Key Takeaways:Global thermoform packaging market to register healthy growth rate with rising number of applications in diverse industries.Technological advancements and innovations and rising opportunities in developing economies to encourage growth of the global thermoform packaging market in the near future.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Research Blog:Global Construction and Mining 2019 Market Key Players  Atlas, Caterpillar, CNH, Hitachi, Joy, Komatsu, Liebherr, Terex, Volvo -Analysis And Forecast To 2025

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Construction and Mining Market 2019Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Construction and Mining  Global Market Growth, Opportunities, Analysis Of Top Key Players And Forecast To 2025 To Its Research Database.Description:Construction equipment is used in construction of residential and non-residential buildings, such as roads, tunnels, bridges, and others.Mining equipment is used in underground mining, drilling, and mineral processing, and surface mining. The reduction in manpower and elimination of necessity of explosions and bursting is possible using mining equipment. Technological advancements in construction and mining equipment help business owners to finish projects in stipulated time.The global Construction and Mining 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 Construction and Mining volume and value at global level, regional level and company level. From a global perspective, this report represents overall Construction and Mining 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:AtlasCaterpillarCNHHitachiJoyKomatsuLiebherrTerexVolvoZoomlionRequest Free Sample Report @Segment by RegionsNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSegment by TypeLoadersDozersExcavatorsCrushingPulverizing & Screening EquipmentOthersSegment by ApplicationInfrastructureMineral MiningResidential BuildingMetal MiningOthersEnquiry 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 Construction and Mining Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Construction and Mining1.2 Construction and Mining Segment by Type1.2.1 Global Construction and Mining Production Growth Rate Comparison by Type (2014-2025)1.2.2 Loaders1.2.3 Dozers1.2.4 Excavators1.2.5 Crushing1.2.6 Pulverizing & Screening Equipment1.2.7 Others1.3 Construction and Mining Segment by Application1.3.1 Construction and Mining Consumption Comparison by Application (2014-2025)1.3.2 Infrastructure1.3.3 Mineral Mining1.3.4 Residential Building1.3.5 Metal Mining1.3.6 Others1.4 Global Construction and Mining Market by Region1.4.1 Global Construction and Mining 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 Construction and Mining Market Size1.5.1 Global Construction and Mining Revenue (2014-2025)1.5.2 Global Construction and Mining Production (2014-2025)..7 Company Profiles and Key Figures in Construction and Mining Business7.1 Atlas7.1.1 Atlas Construction and Mining Production Sites and Area Served7.1.2 Construction and Mining Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.1.3 Atlas Construction and Mining Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.1.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.2 Caterpillar7.2.1 Caterpillar Construction and Mining Production Sites and Area Served7.2.2 Construction and Mining Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.2.3 Caterpillar Construction and Mining Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.2.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.3 CNH7.3.1 CNH Construction and Mining Production Sites and Area Served7.3.2 Construction and Mining Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.3.3 CNH Construction and Mining Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.3.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.4 Hitachi7.4.1 Hitachi Construction and Mining Production Sites and Area Served7.4.2 Construction and Mining Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.4.3 Hitachi Construction and Mining Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.4.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.5 Joy7.5.1 Joy Construction and Mining Production Sites and Area Served7.5.2 Construction and Mining Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.5.3 Joy Construction and Mining Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.5.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.6 Komatsu7.6.1 Komatsu Construction and Mining Production Sites and Area Served7.6.2 Construction and Mining Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.6.3 Komatsu Construction and Mining Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.6.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.7 Liebherr7.7.1 Liebherr Construction and Mining Production Sites and Area Served7.7.2 Construction and Mining Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.7.3 Liebherr Construction and Mining Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.7.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.8 Terex7.8.1 Terex Construction and Mining Production Sites and Area Served7.8.2 Construction and Mining Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.8.3 Terex Construction and Mining Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.8.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.9 Volvo7.9.1 Volvo Construction and Mining Production Sites and Area Served7.9.2 Construction and Mining Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.9.3 Volvo Construction and Mining Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.9.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.10 Zoomlion7.10.1 Zoomlion Construction and Mining Production Sites and Area Served7.10.2 Construction and Mining Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.10.3 Zoomlion Construction and Mining Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.10.4 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 Gose Beernning 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New Report: At 8.4% CAGR, Breast Cancer Screening Market Size will reach 2710 Mn USD by 2025

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Breast cancer screening is the medical screening of asymptomatic, apparently healthy women for breast cancer in an attempt to achieve an earlier diagnosis.A number of screening tests have been employed, including clinical and self-breast exams, mammography, genetic screening, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging.GET EXCLUSIVE SAMPLE OF REPORT ON BREAST CANCER SCREENING MARKET HAVING 119 PAGES, PROFILING TOP 09 MARKET PLAYERS IS AVAILABLE ATThe top players cover Hitachi Medical Corporation, Siemen Healthineers, Philips Healthcare and GE Healthcare etc., which are playing important roles in global Breast Cancer Screening market.At present, global economy is fluctuant, and most countries take measures to stimulate the economy, especially in Rest of Asia, Europe, Australia and the resources providing countries, like Russia, Middle East, Brazil etc. In many fields, China is the largest consumer, but in the past several years, China's economic growth slows. The China government is reforming the economic structure, to release energy of economy. USA economy is relatively stable with low-speed-growth, but in future, it also is full of risk. In Southeast Asia, the economy also is fluctuated the economic base is comparatively unsubstantial, due to the exchange fluctuations. In India, although many people look to further increase in India, but the economic aggregate is too low, and the infrastructure is behindhand and inefficient. In a long term, India will keep a stable and low growth in economy, due to its economic structure and bureaucratic system.On the other hand, the political factors, like government succession, security fears, trade dispute, domestic employment, even the regional military crisis, always affect the economic activity, country to country, corporation to country. So, it needs us with deep insight, to analyze the prospect avoid risk, to grasp the opportunity and reduce losses.The global Breast Cancer Screening market is valued at 1430 million US$ in 2018 and will reach 2710 million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of 8.4% during 2019-2025. The objectives of this study are to define, segment, and project the size of the Breast Cancer Screening market based on company, product type, end user and key regions.ORDER A COPY OF BREAST CANCER SCREENING MARKET 2019-2025 REPORT ATThe Breast Cancer Screening market report covers major Manufactures Hologic, GE Healthcare, Siemen Healthineers, Philips Healthcare, Canon Medical, Fujifilm, Metaltronica, Sino Medical-Device, IMS Srl.Initially report provides information about Breast Cancer Screening Market Scenario, Development Prospect, Relevant Policy and Trade Overview to current demand, investment and supply in the market. It also shows future opportunities for the forecast years 2019-2025.Report provides Breast Cancer Screening Market Breakdown Data by its type like Mammography Screening, Breast Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Screening, Breast Ultrasound Screening as well as by Applications such as Hospital, Clinic. Then it gives Breast Cancer Screening Production Breakdown Data by Region United States, Europe, China, Japan, Other Regions.Breast Cancer Screening Consumption Breakdown Data by Region: North America, United States, Canada, Mexico, Asia-Pacific, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Europe, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Russia, Rest of Europe, Central & South America, Brazil, Rest of South America, Middle East & Africa, GCC Countries, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, Rest of Middle East & Africa.INQUIRE FOR DISCOUNT UPTO 50% ON BREAST CANCER SCREENING MARKET 2019-25 REPORT AT:The study objectives are:To study and analyze the global Breast Cancer Screening market size (value & volume) by company, key regions, products and end user, breakdown data from 2014 to 2018, and forecast to 2025.To understand the structure of Breast Cancer Screening market by identifying its various subsegments.To share detailed information about the key factors influencing the growth of the market (growth potential, opportunities, drivers, industry-specific challenges and risks).Focuses on the key global Breast Cancer Screening companies, to define, describe and analyze the sales volume, value, market share, market competition landscape and recent development.To project the value and sales volume of Breast Cancer Screening submarkets, with respect to key regions.To analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the market.Major Points from Table of Contents1 Study Coverage2 Executive Summary3 Breakdown Data by Manufacturers4 Breakdown Data by Type5 Breakdown Data by Application6 North America7 Europe8 Asia Pacific9 Central & South America10 Middle East and Africa11 Company Profiles12 Market Opportunities, Challenges, Risks and Influences Factors Analysis13 Value Chain and Sales Channels Analysis14 Research Findings and ConclusionAnd MoreSUBMIT YOUR DETAILS AND SPECIFIC INTERESTS FOR ALL CUSTOMIZATION NEEDS HEREAbout InForGrowth:We are a market-intelligence company formed with the objective of providing clients access to the most relevant and accurate research content for their growth needs. At InForGrowth, we understand Research requirements and help a client in taking informed business critical decisions. Given the complexities and interdependencies of market-intelligence, there is always more than one source to explore and arrive at the right answer. Through our smart search feature and our reliable & trusted publishing partners, we are paving way for a more simplified and relevant research.For all your Research needs, reach out to us at:Address: 6400 Village Pkwy suite # 104, Dublin, CA 94568, USAContact Person: RohanEmail: sales@inforgrowth.comUS: +1-909-329-2808UK: +44 (203) 743 1890Olive Oil Market Developing Trends, Size, Revenue Analysis and Top Key Companys (Lamasia, Sovena Group, Gallo, Grup Pons, Maeva Group) | Global Business Outlook Till 2023

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BusinessIndustryReports have new report on Global Olive Oil 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 @Olive oil is a viscous liquid that is extracted from the fruit of the olive tree by pressing whole olives. Olive oil has a low smoke point of 240C and hence can be consumed raw. Olive oil consumption is often considered healthy as it is associated with a lower risk of heart disease and certain cancers including colorectal and breast cancer. Olive oil is also a good source of monounsaturated fatty acid and antioxidants such as polyphenols, vitamins E & K, chlorophyll, and carotenoids.One of the primary reasons behind the growing demand and consumption of olive oil is the associated health benefits. Olive oil forms a unique and tasty alternative to conventional edible oils. Besides, its gluten-free nature is an additional value-added advantage over the other cooking oils. Therefore, with such benefits, the market is expected to showcase a positive outlook during the forecast period.Owing to the high rate of production and consumption in these regions, European region is being expected to have higher volume share for global Olive Oil market. On the other hand, North America has been witnessing a steady rise in consumption rate for Olive Oil. As a result, North America has been considered as the emerging market for Olive Oil market.Key Players:1 Lamasia2 Sovena Group3 Gallo4 Grup Pons5 Maeva Group6 Ybarra7 Jaencoop and more..................Purchase this report online with 125 Pages, List of Tables & Figures and in-depth Table of Contents on Global Olive Oil Market Outlook 2019-2023 @The report covers the Segments and sub-segments of the Global Olive Oil Market by:Regions:1 North America Country (United States, Canada)2 South America3 Asia Country (China, Japan, India, Korea)4 Europe Country (Germany, UK, France, Italy)5 Other Country (Middle East, Africa, GCC)Product Types:1 Extra Virgin Olive Oil2 Olive Oil3 Olive Pomace OilIndustry Segmentation:1 Cooking2 Cosmetics3 PharmaceuticalsGrab Your Report at an Impressive Discount @Key questions answered in the report include:1 What are the key factors driving the Olive Oil market?2 What are the key market trends impacting the growth of the global Olive Oil market?3 What are the challenges to Olive Oil market growth?4 Who are the key vendors in the global Olive Oil market?5 What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the global Olive Oil market?6 What are the key outcomes of the five forces analysis of the global Olive Oil market?Table of Content:1 Olive Oil Product Definition2 Global Olive Oil Manufacturer Share and Market Overview3 Manufacturer Olive Oil Business Introduction4 Global Olive Oil Market Segmentation (Region Level)5 Global Olive Oil Market Segmentation (Product Type Level)6 Global Olive Oil Market Segmentation (Industry Level)7 Global Olive Oil Market Segmentation (Channel Level)8 Olive Oil Market Forecast 2019-20239 Olive Oil Segmentation Product Type10 Olive Oil Segmentation Industry11 Olive Oil Cost of Production Analysis12 ConclusionAbout 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E-cigarette Market Outlook with Is Expected To Grow US$ 12100 million Till 2023 | Analysis by Imperial Tobacco, Reynolds American, Japan Tobacco, Altria, VMR Product, Njoy

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E-cigarette Market research report 2019 - 2023 provides the newest industry data and industry future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue growth and profitability.Global E-cigarette Market Synopsis:According to Market Analyst, The Global E-cigarette Market is expected to grow at an impressive Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2019 to 2023.If you want to know more about E-cigarette, Get Sample Copy of Report @The E-cigarette industry has also suffered a certain impact, but still maintained a relatively optimistic growth, the past four years, E-cigarette market size to maintain the average annual growth rate of 0.0669001794563 from 3400.0 million $ in 2014 to 4700.0 million $ in 2018, Market analysts believe that in the next few years, E-cigarette market size will be further expanded, we expect that by 2023, The market size of the E-cigarette will reach 12100.0 million $.Presently, E-cigarette is being recognized as an alternative to conventional cigarettes, as it offers benefits such as zero smoke, no pollution, reduces health-related problems, and can be smoked at public places. According to Market study, The market is expected to gain traction over the forecast period, owing to growing popularity of these products among millennial.Some of the significant factors driving the growth of the Global E-cigarette Market are Increase in awareness about harmful effects of conventional cigarettes, reduced tar, and carbon monoxide inhalation through electronic cigarette, growing affluence, and rise in technological developments by electronic cigarette manufacturers.The global electronic cigarette market is segmented based on product type, flavor, distribution channel, and region. Based on product type, the market is divided into disposable, rechargeable, and modular. Flavor in electronic cigarette includes tobacco, botanical, fruit, sweet, beverage, and others. Based on distribution channel, the market is categorized into specialist e-cig shops, online, supermarkets, tobacconist, and others.Regionally, North America is the highest revenue contributor to the global market, owing to high awareness of electronic cigarettes and health hazards due to tobacco smoking. Consumer perception of electronic cigarette as tobacco smoking cession product drives the market growth in the region.Complete report on E-cigarette Market spread across 125 Pages and No. of Table of contents. Buy Research @The Market is segmented and projected on the basis of major key players:1 Imperial Tobacco2 Reynolds American3 Japan Tobacco4 Altria5 VMR Product6 Njoy7 21st Century8 VaporcorpMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report covers:1 North America Country (United States, Canada)2 South America3 Asia Country (China, Japan, India, Korea)4 Europe Country (Germany, UK, France, Italy)5 Other Country (Middle East, Africa, GCC)Request a Discount on standard prices of this premium report @Key Questions Answered in this Report:1 What is the global market size for E-cigarette market in different countries?2 Which key developments are expected to have a long-term impact on E-cigarette Market?3 What will be the global E-cigarette market size in 2023?4 Who will be the top vendors in E-cigarette market?5 Whats going to be the growth speed?6 Which are the most potential countries and markets?TABLE OF CONTENTS1 E-cigarette Product Definition2 Global E-cigarette Market Manufacturer Share and Market Overview3 Manufacturer E-cigarette Business Introduction4 Global E-cigarette Market Segmentation (Region Level)5 Global E-cigarette Market Segmentation (Product Type Level)6 Global E-cigarette Market Segmentation (Industry Level)7 Global E-cigarette Market Segmentation (Channel Level)8 E-cigarette Market Forecast 2018-20239 E-cigarette Segmentation Product Type10 E-cigarette Segmentation Industry11 E-cigarette Cost of Production Analysis12 ConclusionAbout usBusinessindustryReports.com is digital database of comprehensive market reports for global industries. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined  we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Media ContactBusiness Industry ReportsPune  Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940Pertuzumab Market Pipeline Insight and Therapeutic Assessment Reviewed by 2018-2026 With Major Players Like Halozyme Therapeutics, Inc. and F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.

Pertuzumab

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Pertuzumab is a recombinant monoclonal antibody that acts as an antineoplastic agent, which targets the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 protein known as HER2. The drug blocks signaling pathways that leads to cell growth arrest and apoptosis (cell destruction), thereby inhibiting the proliferation of human tumor cells. Pertuzumab was found to aid in the treatment of HER2 associated breast cancer and was developed by Genentech, Inc., a subsidiary of F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG. It was first approved by U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2012.Ask For Sample Copy of this Business Report @Pertuzumab Market DriversThere are increasing number of clinical trials for use of pertuzumab in combination with other drugs for the treatment of breast cancer . For instance, Helsinki University Central Hospital is undergoing phase III clinical study for adjuvant trastuzumab, pertuzumab, and docetaxel in the treatment of early HER2 positive breast cancer. The study was started in December 2015 and is estimated to complete by June 2023.Furthermore, increasing number of drug approvals are expected to propel growth of the global pertuzumab market. For instance, in December 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (U.S FDA) granted approval to PERJETA, a pertuzumab produced by Genentech, Inc. for its use in combination with trastuzumab and chemotherapy as adjuvant treatment of patients with HER2-positive early breast cancer at high risk of recurrence.Moreover, development of novel anticancer drug delivery technologies is expected to boost growth of the market. For instance, in July 2018, Gentech, Inc., in partnership with Halozyme Therapeutics, Inc., used proprietary ENHANZE drug-delivery technology of Halozyme Therapeutics, Inc., for subcutaneous administration of fixed-dose combination of pertuzumab (PERJETA) and trastuzumab (Herceptin). This study is under clinical phase III trial. ENHANZE technology aids in reducing the need for multiple injections and reduces time required for drug administration.Pertuzumab Market RestraintIncreasing cost of anticancer drugs is expected to be a major factor hampering growth of the market. For instance, in June 2017, The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) denied access to pertuzumab in England, which was available via the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) in Europe. The drug was rejected by SMC as the treatment of HER2 positive breast cancer was not cost effective when pertuzumab was used in combination with trastuzumab and docetaxel.Moreover, according to a study published in the journal Oncology, September 2015, although the use of pertuzumab with docetaxel and trastuzumab as first-line therapy for HER2 positive breast cancer has been shown to yield a substantial survival benefit, the therapy is not cost effective in the U.S. Also, according to the same source, the cost of treating HER2 positive breast cancer with pertuzumab and other drugs is US$ 509,845 and that with only docetaxel and trastuzumab is US$ 135,092.Pertuzumab market  Competitive AnalysisKey players operating in the global pertuzumab market include, Halozyme Therapeutics, Inc. and F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.Request Customization @Pertuzumab Market Regional AnalysisOn the basis of region, the global pertuzumab market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa.North America is expected to hold dominant position in the global pertuzumab market due to increasing prevalence of breast cancer among women in the U.S. For instance, according to American Cancer Society 2017, around 52,710 new cases of invasive breast cancer were diagnosed in 2017 among women in the U.S. and around 40,610 women were expected to die due to breast cancer in the U.S. in same year.Furthermore, Asia Pacific is expected to witness significant growth in the global pertuzumab market, owing to increasing awareness of breast cancer and its management. For instance, in November 2016, India launched National Cancer Screening Program to increase awareness and early detection of breast cancer. This framework aims to offer mechanism for effective screening and management of common cancers.About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +12067016702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comAutomotive Catalytic Converter Market 2019 to Reflect Impressive Growth Rate of 5% by 2023 | Global Key Players - FAURECIA SA, MAGNETI MARELLI S.P.A, TENNECO INC., BASF, amongst others.

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The global automotive catalytic converter market is expected to register a CAGR of around 5%, during the forecast period. Some of the major factors driving the growth of the market are enactment of stringent emission norms, and growing automotive industry in Asia-Pacific region, especially in countries, such as India, China, Thailand, and Japan. However, the growing penetration of electric vehicles is expected to hinder the growth of the market.Detailed Sample Copy of Updated Analysis @Note: If this link doesnt work in Internet Explorer, kindly try copy pasting it in other browsers.Catalytic converters are used to reduce exhaust emissions from ICEs. They convert exhaust emission, such as CO, HC, and NOx into less harmful gases, such as CO2 and N2, and also H2O. Two ways converters were installed in vehicles prior to 1990s but, since they do not reduce nitrogen emissions, three ways converters came into picture. Since then, three ways converters have occupied the highest market share and are expected to continue dominating the industry during the forecast period too.Key Developments in the Market April 2018: Tenneco Inc., an auto parts manufacturer has agreed to acquire Federal-Mogul from Icahn Enterprises L.P. in cash and stock deal valued at USD 5.4 billion September 2017: BASFs Huntsville, Ala., facility produced its 400 millionth catalytic converterMajor Players FAURECIA SA, MAGNETI MARELLI S.P.A, TENNECO INC., BASF, amongst others.Request Discount on this report @Note: If this link doesnt work in Internet Explorer, kindly try copy pasting it in other browsers.Enactment of Stringent Emission NormsThe demand for and adoption of catalytic converters in the automotive industry has been consistently increasing with the growing automotive industry. With the growing environmental and health concerns and, the government across the world are enacting stringent emission norms to control and reduce carbon emissions.In 2013, in the United States, carbon dioxide emissions averaged 369 grams per mile, which were down by 7 grams per mile from the 2012 figure. As per the US EPA, for 2014, 2015, and 2016, adjusted CO2 emission values went down to 369 g/mile, 361 g/mile, and 359 g/mile, respectively. This standard further reduced the emission standard to 352 g/mile (preliminary) for the vehicles for MY 2017.The US EPA and NHTSA are taking initiatives to support the production of environment-friendly vehicles, (from passenger vehicles to commercial vehicles), to ensure improved fuel economy and reduced carbon emissions. Through these initiatives, the government is planning to reduce about 3,100 million metric tons of CO2 emissions and save about 6 billion barrels of oil by 2025.Additionally, the EU has also set emission standards to regulate the CO2 emission levels of passenger cars and commercial vehicles. Transport emissions have increased in recent years and now account for around one quarter of the EUs total GHG emissions. The average carbon emissions, based on laboratory tests, of a new car registered in the EU in 2016 was 118.1 grams per kilometre (g/km), well below the 2015 target of 130 g. As a result, the European Commission, European Parliament, and EU member states are preparing to extend the light-duty vehicles CO2 regulation to 2025u20132030. Consequently, to meet the aforementioned standards, the adoption of catalytic converters is increasing and is expected to witness the same trend during the forecast period.Platinum Accounts for the Largest Market in Material TypeThe PGMs that include platinum, palladium, and rhodium are the most widely used catalysts in automotive catalytic converters. Out of the global platinum demand ~40% of the demand arises from the automotive industry for the usage in the catalytic converter. Owing to its excellent resistance to corrosion even at high temperatures and high catalytic performance, it is being extensively used in the automotive catalytic converters.Enquiry Before Buying @Note: If this link doesnt work in Internet Explorer, kindly try copy pasting it in other browsers.About Market PrognosisWe at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:ProgMark Pvt Ltd,Thane - 421501India.Contact No: +1 973 241 5193Email: sales@marketprognosis.comOrganic Pharmaceutical Excipients Market Growth by Emerging Trends Analysis and Forecasts 2019-2025

Organic Pharmaceutical Excipients Market

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An Exclusive Market Reports Global Organic Pharmaceutical Excipients Market Size Status and Forecast 2025, the report classifies the global Organic Pharmaceutical Excipients Market in a precise manner to offer detailed insights about the aspects responsible for augmenting as well as restraining market.Request Sample Copy Of this Report @Organic Pharmaceutical Excipients 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 Organic Pharmaceutical Excipients Marketglobal 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 Organic Pharmaceutical Excipients Market analysis & forecast 2019- 2025 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.For More Information on This Report, Please Visit @Organic Pharmaceutical Excipients 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:DowdupontRoquetteAshlandBASFKerryEvonik IndustriesCrodaAssociated British FoodsArcher Daniels MidlandLubrizolInnophos HoldingsWacker ChemieProduct Segment Analysis:OleochemicalsCarbohydratesPetrochemicalsProteinOthersApplication Segment Analysis:Oral FormulationsTopical FormulationsParenteral FormulationsOthersRead More details Organic Pharmaceutical Excipients 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 Organic Pharmaceutical Excipients 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 Organic Pharmaceutical Excipients 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:UpMarketResearch provides free customization of reports as per your need. This report can be personalized to meet your requirements. Get in touch with our sales team, who will guarantee you to get a report that suits your necessities.About UpMarketResearch:The UpMarketResearch () is a leading distributor of market research report with more than 800+ global clients. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well- defined  we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Contact Info:Name: Alex MathewsEmail: Alex@upmarketresearch.comOrganization: UpMarketResearchAddress: 500 East E Street, Ontario, CA 91764, United States.Cervical Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics Market to Reflect Steadfast Expansion During 2019  2023 | Top Key Players - Abbott, Advaxis, Bristol-Meyrs Squibb, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Merck, Pfizer

Cervical Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics Market

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Marketprognosis.com Publish a New Market Research Report On Global Cervical Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics Market 2018 - 2023 which contains global key players survey information and forecast to 2023.Overview of the Global Cervical Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics Market:The report spread across 111 pages is an overview of the Global Cervical Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics Market. These report study based on the Cervical Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics Market. It is a complete overview of the market, covering various aspects prevailing market landscape. It accumulates comprehensive information and research methodologies.The Global Cervical Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics Market are expected to register a CAGR of 6.3% during the forecast period, 2018 to 2023. North America dominates the market, due to growing prevalence of cervical cancer diseases and rising awareness regarding cervical cancer in the region.Get a Sample Copy of this Report @The United States assists with coverage and reimbursement on Pap test screening. Federal law has been passed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to mandate the coverage of cervical cancer screening tests. It is also supported by self-insured plans. Medicaid, the most popular government insurance program covers screening for cervical cancers. Medicare, another widely used insurance covers Pap test, pelvic exam, and a clinical breast exam for cervical cancer screening every two years for Medicare beneficiaries. There are also support programs like National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (NBCCEDP), which provides cervical cancer screening to women without health insurance for free or at very little cost. According to the Federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommendations, the US government is trying to include HPV vaccine in the insurance plans and include it as a part of federal Vaccine for Children (VFC) entitlement program. All these governmental initiatives toward cervical cancer prevention have led to the growth of the market.Asia-Pacific is expected to grow tremendously during the forecast period, owing to factors, such as high prevalence of cervical cancer. The high prevalence rate of cervical cancer among the population has attributed to factors, such as less awareness regarding sexual hygiene and precaution. High prevalence of cervical cancer, coupled with a greater government emphasis on screening and improvements in diagnosis of cervical cancer are anticipated to boost the market growth in Asia Pacific.Purchase this report online with 111 Pages, Top Key Players Analysis and List of Tables & Figure @Major Key Players:1 Abbott2 Advaxis, Inc3 Becton, Dickinson and Company4 Bristol-Meyrs Squibb Company5 F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd6 GlaxoSmithKline plc7 Merck & Co., Inc8 Pfizer Inc. and MoreRequest a Discount on standard prices of this premium report @This study answers to the below key questions:1 What will the market size be in 2023 and what will the growth rate be?2 What are the key market trends?3 What is driving this market?4 What are the challenges to market growth?5 Who are the key vendors in this market space?6 What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?7 What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?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 Cervical Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics 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Leading Players of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) Market Outlook to 2025- Nwave Technologies, Sigfox, Semtech, Loriot, Link Labs, Waviot, Ingenu, Actility, Weightless SIG, Senet

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The operations throughout various industries including agriculture, manufacturing, oil & gas among others have lately realized the need to transform their agile back-end infrastructure to efficiently manage and comply with the evolving IoT initiatives and solutions. At present, the majority of the IoT devices are using the already existing network connections such as Zigbee, cellular, Wi-Fi and other proprietary technologies.The global Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) market is expected to grow from US$ 986.0 Mn in 2017 to US$ 28746.5 Mn by 2025 at a CAGR of 53.2% between 2018 and 2025.As the conventional mobile network comprised of functional performances that could not meet the transforming IoT landscape concerning data output, cost efficiencies and coverage areas, the industry players promoted LPWAN. The explosive growth in penetration of IoT devices over the past few years has escalated the demand for LPWAN technology deployments. This is major because these modern technologies were cost-efficient, optimized data transmission, and scalable cellular coverage.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Top Key Players: Nwave Technologies SIGFOX Semtech Corporation LORIOT.IO Link Labs, Inc. Waviot Ingenu Inc. Actility Weightless SIG Senet, Inc.The global Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) market by end-user is fragmented into Smart City, Oil and Gas, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Logistics and Transportation, Agriculture, and Consumer Electronics. The Smart City is the leading the market for Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN). In the Asia Pacific region, China, India, and Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia among others are constantly upgrading their cities with advanced technologies in order to make them more intelligent. Also, the demand for smart water meter is deployment to witness an exponential growth in these smart cities as the smart city initiatives majorly focus on the energy sector.Avail Discount on this Report @Between 2015 and 2016 ERDF, the French electricity distribution company installed 3 Mn smart meters across the country with a count of 35 Mn running smart meters by 2020. In 2018, FACSA partnered with Semtech and IoTens for the deployment of smart water meters to help customers in Castellon to precisely track and regulate their water management. In February 2018, SenRa and Nordic Automation Systems partnered to deliver LPWAN solutions for remote metering and smart street lighting across India. Also, in 2017, China Telecom and China Unicom collaborated with Huawei, along with other technology partners as well as customers, to run street lighting, water metering, or street parking using NB-IoT in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Shandong. Few of them were already deployed on a commercial scale.Reason to Buy:- Save and reduce time carrying out entry-level research by identifying the growth, size, leading players and segments in the global Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) Market- Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies.- The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) Market, thereby allowing players to develop effective long term strategies.- Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets.- Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it.- Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to products, segmentation and industry verticals.For More Information:About Us:The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Automotive and Defense.Contact Us:Company: The Insight PartnersContact: Sameer JoshiPhone: +1-646-491-9876Email: sam@theinsightpartners.comConstruction begins Monday on a long-awaited pedestrian bridge on the Wildwood Trail over West Burnside Street.

Portlands iconic 30-mile-long urban hiking trail draws about 80,000 runners and hikers every year as it stretches through Washington Park and Forest Park, but the crossing at Burnside has long been a concern as it pits hikers with thousands of cars on a dangerous bend in the road.

The Barbara Walker Crossing is the culmination of more than two decades of discussion, hope and planning. The nonprofit Portland Parks Foundation led the fundraising effort, collecting two-thirds of the $3.2 million price tag from more than 900 donors. The city of Portland is contributing $850,000 ($500,000 from the general fund and $350,000 in transportation fees charged to developers for new projects). Metro is also chipping in $200,000 from its 2014 open space bond measure.

City leaders and park officials held a ceremonial groundbreaking Thursday near the site. The bridge is expected to be finished by September.

A portion of Wildwood Trail will be closed throughout the construction.

A map shows the 2019 closure on the Wildwood Trail.

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.Portland police are investigating allegations that a detective used his take-home car extensively while off-duty, putting thousands of extra miles on the vehicle.

Robert Norvell Hollins IIIs alleged extracurricular use of the city-owned, unmarked car was discovered after it had racked up all the extra mileage and needed repairs, according to multiple sources familiar with the inquiry who arent designated to speak publicly about it.

Police Lt. Tina Jones, bureau spokeswoman, declined comment, saying she couldnt discuss a personnel matter.

Hollins, 56, has been reassigned to the bureaus Telephone Reporting Unit while an internal affairs investigation continues.

Hollins retired on Sept. 29, 2017, but was rehired the next day and has continued to work as a detective under the bureaus retire/rehire program. The rehiring runs for up to two years, so Hollins work is set to end in September.

Hollins didnt respond to messages for comment. Officer Daryl Turner, president of the Portland Police Association, also declined comment on the allegations.

The Police Bureau prohibits the personal use of city-owned cars. Officers granted take-home cars may use them to drive to and from work and for other police-related activities, but not for recreation or vacation trips.

The Telephone Reporting Unit, also known as operations support, is the place where officers are usually assigned after being removed from the street while under internal investigation. They take crime complaints by phone or check reports submitted online.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.By CAROLYN HAX (Adapted from a recent online discussion.)

Dear Carolyn: I cant seem to get out of this pit of negativity about myself. I only hear the negatives people say about me; for example, I had a huge presentation at work, got several genuine compliments, and all I heard was one persons very mild criticism that I brushed too close to an issue our office does not discuss/handle. I constantly feel the need to apologize for anything and everything, even if its just that someone got upset at a situation, not at me.

Even when my husband says something just to be ridiculous or silly -- he's a bit of a comedian -- I feel like it was my "fault" and did something wrong, so I'll start apologizing for his silly, made-up situation. He tries to help but refuses to acknowledge that I think I suck at everything and I'm worthless, which can frustrate me -- which frustrates him, which I then apologize for ... and the cycle continues.

He is wonderfully supportive and provides me a lot of help, even when I don't hear him saying it.

What are some strategies, other than "just think positively!" to bring myself out of this pit?

-- Feeling Worthless

Hax: This is a mental health issue and not just another way in the long line of ways you feel youve let yourself down. Truly.

So, I won't offer "strategies" -- because that negative inner voice isn't just the result of a failure to "work on myself" correctly or hard enough.

What you describe is what our brains do to us when they're out of balance and need medical attention. It's no different from the way our backs hurt when we strain them.

So get a full screening, for anxiety and depression to start. Appointments with good mental health providers can be scarce (or a complete nonissue, depending on where you live and who you know, of course), so if you can't connect with someone right away, make an appointment with your general practitioner and say you're struggling with negative thoughts and a sense of worthlessness.

A "huge presentation," by the way, suggests you have an employer of the type that offers an Employee Assistance Program. If so, then that's the fastest path to care.

Dear Carolyn: I have a genderqueer tutor who comes over once a week to teach me American Sign Language. I really like this person. At our first session, they made it clear that they prefer the they or he pronouns and do not use the she pronouns. Pretty straightforward.

However, I am having so much trouble with this. Not in principle, but in practice. My brain is interpreting their features as feminine (they were born female) and when I refer to them with others, I hear "she" popping out occasionally even though I am consciously trying to use "they." I hate that I do this. I know it is incredibly disrespectful. How do I train myself to use the correct pronouns when my subconscious is betraying me?

-- Anonymous

Hax: When you slip, apologize and say you mean no disrespect. Respect, repetition and time are the only training you need.

Email Carolyn at tellme@washpost.com, follow her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/carolyn.hax or chat with her online at 9 a.m. Pacific time each Friday at www.washingtonpost.com.

(c) 2019, Washington Post Writers GroupIts the best of times in comics, a hobby long energized by the colorful audacity of the cover art.

Jenny Frison illustrating Wonder Woman. Josh Middleton drawing Batgirl. Stanley Artgerm Lau illuminating Catwoman and Supergirl. When new issues arrive at the neighborhood comic shop each Wednesday, its an unveiling.

The artwork is striking  refreshing takes on the industrys enduring personalities  and some of the most memorable portraits are drawn by Natali Sanders, who takes pride in the strength and grace she brings to female characters.

Sanders, 36, is elegantly reserved, unpretentious, and largely self-taught. From the very beginning, I remember sitting at church, my mother handing me this packet of colored paper, she said on the eve of Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle. She said, Just draw. Keep yourself occupied. I liked creating things with my hands.

Natali Sanders' Gamora cover for "Guardians of the Galaxy"

While she received significant encouragement in high school, she lasted but one semester at Mesa Community College in Arizona: It was Art 101. I was so bored. She was talking about shapes. Im done.

All the while, Natali and her sister were hanging out at Atomic Comics in Mesa, and in 2008, they scored four badges to Comic-Con International in San Diego.

My husband brought pictures of my stuff on his phone, Sanders says. He was showing them to artists, and they said, You need to be doing this. Throughout the entire convention they were saying that.

So I said, I think Ill start drawing again.

Natali Sanders' cover for the Harley Quinn special.

Sanders quit her job as a receptionist at a printing company, launched her own company  Dark Silver Studio  and slowly began putting her paintings on line.

Her timing was good. The industry had recovered from the speculator bust of the late 1990s, when Marvel declared bankruptcy and hundreds of comic shops shut down.

And variant covers  the foil-sheathed, poly-bagged, over-hyped, glow-in-the-dark gimmicks that were so instrumental in the collapse of the collectors market  were slowly making a comeback.

This time, however, Marvel, DC and other publishers were taking advantage of the mediums popular artists. They offered alternative covers by artists like Adam Hughes, J. Scott Campbell and Gabriele DellOtto, trusting their ardent fans would buy the covers even if they didnt read the books.

And the publishers would eventually allow artists to sell limited editions of the comics featuring their work at on-line specialty stores or the artists own websites.

Sanders' classic take on X-23, Laura Kinney

Sanders art eventually caught the eye of Curtis Cecil at Comic Market Street and Kris Tabar at KRS Comics. They commissioned her to draw covers featuring Gamora from Guardians of the Galaxy, Laura Kinney (X-23), and Catwoman Selina Kyle in the vaunted Batman #50 wedding issue.

Those images landed with quite the splash.

Whenever we come out with a book with a Natali cover, people buy it for the art, Cecil says. Its to the point where the stories dont matter. Natali brings realism to characters who have always been drawn as cartoons.

Whats more, Saunders has a realistic sense of wardrobe and proportion that is a stretch for many male cartoonists:

Ive heard a lot of fans say how classy I draw women. I dont overdo it. Thats part of LDS (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) and our belief in being modest. I dont want to offend a mother and her children walking by. I dont want to offend my parents with what Im doing. I dont want to offend myself, as in, Would I be wearing that?

I remember talking to one of the guys at Image about Vampirella. He said he was sick and tired of artists seeing her as a sex symbol, rather than the strong woman that she is. I got the same comments from Hasbro, appreciating the way I drew Dawn, from G.I. Joe. Shes young, a teenager, and I did not want to sexualize her.

Natali Sanders' original art for "Salem's Daughter: The Haunting."

In the comic industrys evolving landscape, much of Sanders best artwork never reaches the shelves of comic shops like Cosmic Monkey on Northeast Sandy or Excalibur on Southeast Hawthorne. DC will print at least 33 different covers for next weeks 1000th issue of Detective Comics, and Sanders take is only available on-line.

She would love steady work as the cover artist for a monthly book featuring Wonder Woman, Black Widow or Daenerys Targaryen. While she waits for that opportunity, she remains totally engaged with her studio, her five-year-old, her own fantasy series (a work in progress), and the convention circuit.

Im okay; Im a pretty patient person. It takes me two weeks just to paint something, Sanders says. In this industry, its not easy to get where you want to go. Its time and sacrifice. You just have to take a ride, and enjoy the ride.

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.comMIAMI (AP)  Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship.

They pay anywhere from $20,000 to sometimes more than $50,000 to brokers who arrange their travel documents, accommodations and hospital stays, often in Florida.

While the cost is high, their children will be rewarded with opportunities and travel advantages not available to their Russian countrymen. The parents themselves may benefit someday as well.

And the decidedly un-Russian climate in South Florida and the posh treatment they receive in the maternity wards  unlike dismal clinics back home  can ease the financial sting and make the practice seem more like an extended vacation.

The Russians are part of a wave of "birth tourists" that includes sizable numbers of women from China and Nigeria.

President Donald Trump has spoken out against the provision in the U.S. Constitution that allows "birthright citizenship" and has vowed to end it, although legal experts are divided on whether he can actually do that.

Although there have been scattered cases of authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies for visa fraud or tax evasion, coming to the U.S. to give birth is fundamentally legal. Russians interviewed by The Associated Press said they were honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even showed signed contracts with doctors and hospitals.

There are no figures on how many foreign women travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter immigration laws, estimated that in 2012, about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the U.S., then left the country.

The Russian contingent is clearly large. Anton Yachmenev of the Miami Care company that arranges such trips, told the AP that about 150 Russian families a year use his service, and that there are about 30 such companies just in the area.

South Florida is popular among Russians not only for its tropical weather but also because of the large Russian-speaking population. Sunny Isles Beach, a city just north of Miami, is even nicknamed "Little Moscow."

"With $30,000, we would not be able to buy an apartment for our child or do anything, really. But we could give her freedom. That's actually really cool," said Olga Zemlyanaya, who gave birth to a daughter in December and was staying in South Florida until her child got a U.S. passport.

An American passport confers many advantages. Once the child turns 21, he or she can apply for "green card" immigration status for the parents.

A U.S. passport also gives the holder more travel opportunities than a Russian one; Americans can make short-term trips to more than 180 countries without a visa, while Russians can go visa-free only to about 80.

In this photo taken on Jan. 24, 2019, Denis Wolok, the father of 1-month-old Eva's father, shows the child's U.S. passport during an interview with The Associated Press in Hollywood, Fla. (AP Photo/Iuliia Stashevska)AP

Traveling to the U.S. on a Russian passport often requires a laborious interview process for a visa. Just getting an appointment for the interview can take months.

Some Russians fear that travel opportunities could diminish as tensions grow between Moscow and the West, or that Russia might even revert to stricter Soviet-era rules for leaving the country.

"Seeing the conflict growing makes people want to take precautions because the country might well close its borders. And if that happens, one would at least have a passport of a different country and be able to leave," said Ilya Zhegulev, a journalist for the Latvia-based Russian website Meduza that is sharply critical of the Kremlin.

Last year, Zhegulev sold two cars to finance a trip to California for him and his wife so she could give birth to their son.

Trump denounced birthright citizenship before the U.S. midterm election, amid ramped up rhetoric on his hard-line immigration policies. The president generally focuses his ire on the U.S.-Mexico border. But last fall he mentioned he was considering executive action to revoke citizenship for babies born to non-U.S. citizens on American soil. No executive action has been taken.

The American Civil Liberties Union, other legal groups and even former House Speaker Paul Ryan, typically a supporter of Trump's proposals, said the practice couldn't be ended with an order.

But others, like the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, said the practice is harmful.

"We should definitely do everything we can to end it, because it makes a mockery of citizenship," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an outspoken Russian lawmaker, said the country can't forbid women from giving birth abroad, and many of them also travel to Germany and Israel.

"Trump is doing everything right, because this law is used as a ploy. People who have nothing to do with the U.S. use it to become citizens," Zhirinovsky said.

Floridians have shown no problem with the influx of expectant mothers from Russia.

Yachmenev, the agency manager, says he believes it's good for the state because it brings in sizable revenue.

Svetlana Mokerova and her husband went all out, renting an apartment with a sweeping view. She relished the tropical vibe, filling her Instagram account with selfies backed by palm trees and ocean vistas.

"We did not have a very clear understanding about all the benefits" of a U.S. passport, she said.

"We just knew that it was something awesome," added Mokerova, who gave birth to a daughter after she was interviewed.

Zemlyanaya said that even her two nights in the hospital were a treat, like "a stay in a good hotel."

In contrast to the few amenities of a Russian clinic, she said she was impressed when an American nurse gave her choices from a menu for her meals.

"And then when she said they had chocolate cake for dessert, I realized I was in paradise," Zemlyanaya added.

She even enjoyed how nurses referred to patients as "mommies," as opposed to "rozhenitsa," or "birth-giver"  the "unpleasant words they use in Russian birth clinics."

Zemlyanaya said she was able to work remotely during her stay via the internet, as were the husbands of other women, keeping their income flowing. Yachmenev said his agency doesn't allow any of the costs to be paid by insurance.

Most of the families his agency serves have monthly incomes of about 300,000 rubles ($4,500)  middling by U.S. standards but nearly 10 times the average Russian salary.

Yachmenev said he expects that birth tourism among Russians will only grow.

Business declined in 2015 when the ruble lost about half its value, but now we are coming back to the good numbers of 2013-14, he said.Public school campuses in Charlottesville, Virginia, will be shuttered Friday for a second straight day - and more than 4,300 students will be kept out of classrooms - after a threat of racial violence surfaced online.

In a message to families, Rosa Atkins, superintendent of Charlottesville City Schools, said an investigation involving state and federal authorities remains active, necessitating the unusual step of keeping schools closed.

"We would like to acknowledge and condemn the fact that this threat was racially charged. We do not tolerate hate or racism," Atkins said.

"The entire staff and School Board stand in solidarity with our students of color - and with people who have been singled out for reasons such as religion or ethnicity or sexual identity in other vile threats made across the country or around the world. We are in this together, and a threat against one is a threat against all."

Police said in a statement that the online threat was directed at Charlottesville High School.

Authorities declined to further describe the threat, but images circulating on Reddit and other social media sites referred to a post on 4chan, an anonymous online messaging board. The post included a racist meme, used slurs for blacks and Latinos, and threatened to attack students of color at Charlottesville High.

Charlottesville police spokesman Tyler Hawn said the decision to close an entire school system was done as a precaution.

Police told school board members about the threat Wednesday afternoon, said Jennifer McKeever, the board's chairwoman. She said the school system decided to close the city's nine schools out of an "abundance of caution" to allow law enforcement to investigate.

"We just didn't have any additional information, and it was clear that we were not going to get any additional information," she said. "As laypeople, we could not determine the credibility of the threat."

The threat was another jolt to a community still strained by the deadly Unite the Right rally in August 2017 that turned Charlottesville into the site of America's largest white-supremacy gathering in decades.

This week's online episode did not surprise members of Charlottesville High's Black Student Union, who say it is symptomatic of persistent issues in Charlottesville schools, including excessive police presence in schools and a lack of black students in advanced classes.

"We're still allowing this kind of racism in our school," said Althea Laughon-Worrell, an 18-year-old who attends Charlottesville High School. "It's making it seem like it's OK for whoever posted that to say that, to feel that way. . . . It is because of racism, and because we haven't dealt with this, that this person decided to post this."

Zyahna Bryant, president of the Black Student Union, has called on the community to reckon with white supremacy in the aftermath of the 2017 rally and confront gentrification and the paucity of affordable housing in the city.

Bryant, 18, wants the latest episode to encourage community members to grapple with racial inequities in the school system.

"There needs to be a real conversation about how students of color are being supported," Bryant said. "It is dangerous to continue to categorize racism as just person-to-person experiences without calling attention to the systems that work to uphold and enforce racist policies."

The Charlottesville episode stoked further scrutiny of the way social media is used to perpetuate hateful rhetoric and violence, drawing parallels to the use of social media to broadcast a massacre at mosques in New Zealand last week.

Doron Ezickson, a regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement that the Charlottesville threat offered further evidence that social media is partly responsible for elevating extremist ideas.

It was, Ezickson said, another "frightening development for a city that is still healing from the traumatic and lingering experience" of the rally that brought hundreds of white supremacists into the town of 50,000 residents.

Margaret Matthews, a Charlottesville resident who has grandchildren in city schools, said the rally emboldened white supremacists and its fallout continues to disrupt the city.

After the school system announced it would close Thursday, Matthews said parents began asking themselves: What do we tell our kids?Special counsel Robert Mueller has submitted a confidential report to Attorney General WilliamBarr, marking the end of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump, a Justice Department spokeswoman said. The submission of Muellers report ends his closely watched inquiry - a case that has engulfed the Trump administration since its inception, leading to guilty pleas from former advisers to the president and criminal charges against more than 30 people. A senior Justice Department official said the special counsel has not recommended any further indictments.

The Justice Department notified Congress late Friday that it had received Mueller's report but did not describe its contents. Barr is expected to summarize the findings for lawmakers in coming days.

In a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, Barr wrote that Mueller has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters. Read the full letter here.

Barr wrote that Mueller submitted a report to him explaining his prosecution decisions. The attorney general told lawmakers he was "reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend."

The attorney general wrote he would consult with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Mueller "to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Department's long-standing practices and policies."

Barr said there were no instances in the course of the investigation in which any of Muellers decisions were vetoed by his superiors at the Justice Department. I remain committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review, Barr wrote.

The submission of Mueller's report marks the culmination of his closely held inquiry, a case that has engulfed the Trump administration since its inception and led to multiple guilty pleas from former advisers to the president. With the closing of his investigation, Congress and the newly empowered Democratic House majority will soon assess his findings - and determine what steps to take next.

Well before its completion, Mueller's report was a hotly debated issue. Lawmakers sought to wrest guarantees from the Justice Department that the special counsel would give a complete public accounting of what he found in the two-year inquiry.

According to Justice Department regulations, the special counsel's report should explain Mueller's decisions - who was charged, who was investigated but not charged, and why.

Mueller's work has consumed Washington and at times the country, as the special counsel and his team investigated whether any Trump associates conspired with Russian officials to interfere in the election.

It is unclear how much of what Mueller found will be disclosed in Barr's summary for Congress. Congressional Democrats, anticipating an incomplete accounting, have already sent extensive requests to the Justice Department for documents that would spell out what Mueller discovered.

Mueller's work has led to criminal charges against 34 people, including six former Trump associates and advisers.

Five people close to the president have pleaded guilty: Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates; former national security adviser Michael Flynn; former personal attorney Michael Cohen; and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.

A sixth, Trump's longtime friend Roger Stone, was indicted in January and accused of lying to Congress. He has pleaded not guilty.

More than two dozen of the people charged by Mueller are Russians, and because the United States does not have an extradition treaty with Russia, they are unlikely ever to see the inside of a U.S. courtroom.

None of the Americans charged by Mueller is accused of conspiring with Russia to interfere in the election - the central question of Mueller's work. Instead, they pleaded guilty to various crimes including lying to the FBI.

The special counsel's investigation was launched May 17, 2017, in a moment of crisis for the FBI, the Justice Department and the country.

Days earlier, President Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey. The purported reason was Comey's handling of the 2016 investigation of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, but Trump said in an interview with NBC News shortly after the firing that he was thinking about the Russia inquiry when he decided to remove Comey.

Because FBI directors are appointed to 10-year terms to ensure their political independence, the Comey firing rattled Washington. It set off alarms in the Justice Department and in Congress, where lawmakers feared the president was determined to end the Russia investigation before it was completed.

After then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Rosenstein chose Mueller as special counsel in part to quell the burgeoning political crisis.

Mueller, a Vietnam War veteran, prosecutor and former FBI director, was highly regarded. Politicians on both sides of the aisle - as well as federal law enforcement and intelligence veterans - had long admired and trusted Mueller, a Republican.

The special counsel's takeover of the Russia investigation left many of the president's biggest critics more confident that Trump would not be able to stop the inquiry before Mueller obtained answers.

While it had been publicly known since the summer of 2016 that the FBI was investigating Russian attempts to interfere with the presidential campaign, officials had largely kept quiet that there was also an investigation, starting that July, to see if Trump campaign advisers might be conspiring with the Russians.

After Trump won the election, that investigation exploded into public view.

By late 2016 and early 2017, the FBI was investigating whether anyone close to Trump had helped Russia in those efforts, even as Trump was sworn into office and began filling senior government positions.

Just days into the new administration, FBI agents interviewed Flynn at the White House, questioning him about his conversations during the transition with Sergey Kislyak, then Russia's ambassador to the United States. Flynn would be forced out of the job a month later amid accusations he had misled senior administration officials about those conversations.

The Mueller investigation pursued a number of investigative tracks, including whether the president's behavior leading up to and after the firing of Comey amounted to an attempt to obstruct justice.

Throughout 2017, Mueller's team, working out of an office building in Washington, pursued Manafort over his finances. That case also was inherited from work done previously by the Justice Department and the FBI, but under Mueller it gained new life. In October 2017, Manafort and Gates, his right-hand man, were charged with a host of financial crimes.

Two months later, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Republican political opposition to his work also grew, encouraged in part by the president's repeated declarations that the investigation was a "witch hunt."

Within a day of Flynn's plea, The Washington Post reported that the former lead FBI agent on Mueller's team, Peter Strzok, had been removed from that position over anti-Trump text messages he had exchanged with a senior FBI lawyer, Lisa Page. Both had worked on the Clinton investigation, and their texts to each other during the campaign revealed disdain for Trump.

The texts, Justice Department officials insisted, had not compromised the Russia investigation, but they fueled a political counterattack by Republicans loyal to the president who charged the FBI's handling of the Clinton and Trump matters showed the agency's leadership was letting a political agenda influence the inquiry.

While those fights raged on, Mueller said virtually nothing. In part because of this silence, political factions tended to say almost anything they wanted about his work. Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus called it a money-wasting farce; Democrats touted every new investigative step as further evidence that the probe was so serious that Trump's days as president could be numbered.

As the investigation pushed into its second year, it took direct aim at Moscow. In February 2018, 13 Russians were charged as part of an online "troll farm" accused of sowing political division and distrust among Americans via social media. Five months later, Mueller's office indicted a dozen Russian military intelligence officials, saying they conspired to hack into Democrats' computer accounts and publicize the stolen files.

Last year saw Mueller's time and energy focused on the question of obstruction. Whether Trump or his senior advisers had sought to stop or cripple the Russia inquiry was a key reason that Mueller's job as special counsel existed in the first place. Mueller questioned those closest to Trump about the president's private statements concerning the inquiry, about his tweets attacking law enforcement officials, and about internal White House documents that might shed light on his behavior.

Proving a suspect's intent is an important element of any obstruction case, and there was one witness Mueller was never able to get in a room: Trump. After negotiating for months, the president's lawyers agreed to submit written answers to questions from the special counsel. Ultimately, Mueller and the Justice Department did not serve the president with a subpoena, which could have led to a fight at the Supreme Court.

In August, Mueller's team won a conviction of Manafort in a Virginia courthouse at the same time Cohen, Trump's former lawyer and self-described fixer, was pleading guilty as part of a deal with federal prosecutors in New York. Cohen would ultimately plead guilty twice, and at his sentencing, he angrily blamed Trump for his downfall.

In January, Mueller's team accused Stone of obstructing the special counsel's efforts and lying to Congress about his efforts in 2016 to learn when potentially damaging emails from Clinton's presidential campaign would be released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

Muellers final public indictment was emblematic of much of his investigation - a person close to the president had been arrested and charged with crimes, but not for conspiring with the Kremlin.A judge Friday found two prominent members of Portlands African American community, Charles McGee and Aubre Lamont Dickson, not guilty of sexually assaulting a woman nearly seven years ago in McGees Southeast Portland home.

As Multnomah County Circuit Judge David Rees read the verdict, relatives and supporters of the two men broke out in tears of joy and relief. Someone yelled out Justice! At that, the woman -- Erica Naito-Campbell -- abruptly left the courtroom.

Among those in attendance were the defendants wives and Naito-Campbells mother and brother, who hung his head and sobbed.

I find that I cannot conclude to a moral certainty that the defendants are guilty of the crimes they are charged with," the judge said. He added that this has been a difficult and stressful trial for all participants.

Moments later outside the courthouse, McGee hugged supporters, then reflected on the past year.

Im in love with my family, and Im in love with my wife. And I apologize to my community, McGee said. "I feel like I let a lot of people down. And I am sad for that. And I have a lifetime to make it up to them. But right now, Im focused on my family.

Dickson and his attorneys offered no comment.

A few hours later, Naito-Campbell released a statement: "I told the truth, and that truth exists outside the bounds of a courtroom. It exists for those other women who could not come forward publicly. And it exists in the hearts of all survivors who suffer a system that is designed to deny their humanity and their truth.

Naito-Campbells personal attorney, Steve English, added: " I commend her for her bravery."

The benches in the courtroom had been packed as the seven-day trial delved into the private lives of the well-known Portland families and elicited attacks from defense lawyers about the motives of Naito-Campbell and the reporter for Willamette Week who first published her account last year.

The defense said the case reeked of power and privilege  with Naito-Campbells mother meeting with Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw the day after the story ran in February 2018, according to one of the defense attorneys. A grand jury indictment against McGee and Dickson came three months later.

McGee, 33, was CEO of the nonprofit Black Parent Initiative and running to become a Multnomah County commissioner at the time the story came out. Dickson, 44, was chairman of the Oregon Housing Stability Council and a vice president at KeyBank.

Naito-Campbell, the granddaughter of Portland real estate developer Bill Naito, said she came forward after years of silence because shed learned McGee was running for office and felt it was her duty to stop him as he tried to rise to a public position.

The men had faced a minimum 8  years in prison if found guilty of charges that included first-degree unlawful sexual penetration. But even with an acquittal, their defense attorneys said McGee and Dickson have paid a heavy price: Both men lost their jobs, have endured public scrutiny and have spent thousands of dollars to defend themselves.

The men and Naito-Campbell had met for drinks at the University Club, a private social organization, before heading to a strip club and then McGees house on May 10, 2012.

Naito-Campbell testified that McGee pushed her into his childs high chair and onto the kitchen floor, where he pulled off her underpants, forced oral sex on her and then tried to rape her. She said she was able to stop him by clamping her hand over her vagina.

She said Dickson later forced his fingers into her vagina and also tried to rape her, but she was able to clamp her hand down again. McGee tried to pull her hand off, she said, but wasnt successful.

Naito-Campbell said she told the men no over and over.

McGee and Dicksons defense lawyers painted Naito-Campbell as a liar. But prosecutors said Naito-Campbell had been consistent since Day One that shed been sexually assaulted.

This case is about two men not taking no for an answer, about two men seeing a woman smaller than them, more vulnerable than them, and taking what they wanted from her, Deputy District Attorney Amanda Nadell said in her closing arguments.

Neither man testified. Their attorneys presented no defense witnesses, but instead tried to undermine the testimony of the prosecutions witnesses, including Naito-Campbell, during cross-examination. The defense attorneys seemed to acknowledge that the men engaged in some sort of sexual encounter, but never explicitly said so.

In court papers filed before trial, prosecutors said McGee admitted in a recorded police interview that he masturbated in a corner because he was aroused while watching Dickson have sex with Naito-Campbell. McGees recorded statement wasnt aired during trial after Dicksons attorney argued that Dickson should be granted a separate trial if the prosecution presented McGees account of what he saw.

Although McGee originally denied to Willamette Week that the night in question happened, he later admitted in the recorded police interview and before the grand jury that he lied to the publication, according to court papers. His attorney at the time, Edie Rogoway, said McGee was desperate for his wife not to find out.

Naito-Campbell testified that she did talk to the men that night about her interest in someday having a threesome, but never told McGee and Dickson she wanted one with them. She said she had zero sexual interest in them.

During trial, prosecutors pointed to a key piece of evidence that they said proved something bad happened that night. About a month later, Dickson sent Naito-Campbell an email saying he wanted to make things right between us and I havent been the same since that night.

Defense attorneys contended Naito-Campbell made up her story of sexual assault because she drank too much that evening. When she later sobered up, she regretted engaging in consensual sexual acts with the men, the attorneys said.

They also said Naito-Campbell never amounted to much after getting degrees from Reed College and Lewis & Clark Law School and sought to launch her writing career and capitalize on the #MeToo movement by publishing a book about that night.

They claimed Willamette Week reporter Nigel Jaquiss helped form Naito-Campbells narrative because he was eager to publish a splashy story. According to emails acquired by the defense, Jaquiss told Naito-Campbell that he was looking forward to seeing McGee and Dickson in orange jumpsuits, the defense attorneys said. After the story published, Jaquiss also offered to call the head of the district attorneys sex crimes unit to jumpstart a prosecution and reassured Naito-Campbell by emailing her You won, the attorneys said.

After the verdict, Willamette Weeks news editor, Aaron Mesh, said in a statement: We are very proud of the reporting Nigel Jaquiss did.

During trial, Stephen Houze, Dicksons attorney, urged the judge not to be swayed by Naito-Campbells emotional displays.

She may have thought, I can just say these things to the prosecutors and the police and Willamette Week, Houze told the judge. Im Erica Naito-Campbell and people will just believe me. And I can cry on command and they will believe me.

Christine Mascal, McGees attorney, told the judge that Naito-Campbell showed the men she was interested in sex by talking about how a threesome was on her bucket list, drinking with them, going to a strip club with them and finally heading to McGees house with them when his wife wasnt home.

They didnt get her there to commit crimes of sexual assault, Mascal said. They were there to continue the party.

Mascal continued: When she decided the party was over, guess what? It just stopped. ... They realized she wasnt into it, and it stopped.

After the judge announced his ruling, the Multnomah County District Attorneys Office said it disagreed with the verdict and was very disappointed.

But we respect and trust the criminal justice process afforded to everyone. We continue to believe the victim in this case who courageously came forward to report what happened to her, the office said in a statement. Our unwavering commitment of supporting and advocating for survivors of sexual assault remains rooted in our core values. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with all survivors of sexual assault.

-- Aimee Green

agreen@oregonian.com

o_aimee

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.By Joseph I. Lieberman, Opinion

Lieberman represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate from 1989 to 2013.

On one of the first foreign trips I took with John McCain, he handed me his comb and asked me to straighten out his hair. He could not raise his arms above his shoulders to comb his own hair, a lifelong consequence  and not the only one  of the abuse he suffered during his more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison.

Years later, I traveled to Hanoi with McCain and visited that prison, which is now a museum. A group of Vietnamese high school students came through and when they recognized him, they began chanting his name, cheering, clapping and asking for pictures and autographs. McCain had become a hero to the Vietnamese people because he had sponsored the legislation that normalized U.S. relations with Vietnam, the country that had treated him so inhumanely.

Somehow, he had found it within his soul to put the past behind him and lead the way forward in U.S.-Vietnam relations because that was in the best interests of the United States. McCain was a passionate person, and he had a temper, but he rarely stayed angry at anyone. He liked people generally, but I also think he concluded that it wasnt worth staying angry, particularly at those you needed to work with to get things done. He was always looking forward, not backward.

That is a powerful example for all of us, including President Trump, who has continued to attack McCain seven months after his death.

McCains life on Earth has ended. His legacy as a great American patriot, hero and exemplary public servant is beyond revision. The person who suffers most from the strange, posthumous attacks by the president is the president himself. Respectfully, the president should let McCain rest in peace and give his family the peace they deserve during this difficult time after his death.

The two main grievances Trump seems to have against McCain are not well-founded. If he were alive now, he would probably not answer the president. But I feel a responsibility as his friend to do so.

First, when McCain turned a controversial dossier involving Trump over to the FBI in 2016, it was exactly what he should have done, what I would have done and what every senator I served with did in similar circumstances. Serious allegations were made in that file, so McCain turned it over to the FBI to investigate. Giving the file to anyone else or throwing it away would have been a dereliction of duty and improper in our rule-of-law country.

Second, I know the president and many other Republicans were angry that McCain came back to Washington in July 2017 after his first operation to remove cancer from his brain and surprised everyone by voting against the repeal of Obamacare. But I can tell you, because I talked to him about it, that he didnt vote that way to spite Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) or anyone else. People who heard his speech on the Senate floor that day or have read it since know that McCain cast that vote not against repeal of Obamacare but against the partisanship that had taken over the Senate and made it into a feckless, gridlocked, divided place.

After his brain cancer diagnosis, McCain understood he might not have long to live and that the vote might have been one of the last, best times he would have to make the points he needed to make. So he made them  and he did so brilliantly. As he said in his speech in the Senate: Our deliberations . . . are more partisan, more tribal more of the time than any other time I remember. . . . Weve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle.

He continued: The Obama administration and congressional Democrats shouldnt have forced through Congress without any opposition support a social and economic change as massive as Obamacare. And we shouldnt do the same with ours. . . . What have we to lose by trying to work together to find those solutions? Were not getting much done apart. . . . The times when I was involved even in a modest way with working out a bipartisan response to a national problem or threat are the proudest moments of my career, and by far the most satisfying.

That is the lesson Trump and every member of Congress should take away from McCains acts and words in the U.S. Senate on that long day in July 2017. Trump, because he is president, has the greatest capacity to move our government in the direction McCain appealed for that day and that most Americans clearly want.

I pray Trump will follow McCains advice and give Democrats in Congress an opportunity to work with him to solve some of our most pressing national problems and threats. And I also pray Democrats respond to Trump in good faith and with the national interest as their guiding light, which it consistently was for McCain.A man and woman were arrested Thursday after police say they robbed a bank at gunpoint in unincorporated Tillamook County and eventually got into a shootout with law enforcement.

Matthew G. Buswell, 36, from the Keizer/Salem area, was lodged in the Tillamook County Jail on the following charges: First-degree robbery, felon in possession of a firearm, two counts of unlawful use of a firearm, first-degree theft, three counts of menacing and tampering with evidence.

Cassandra Maughan, age 34, from Keizer. Maughan was lodged at the Tillamook County Jail on one count of conspiracy to commit robbery.

The robbery was reported at a U.S. Bank in Cloverdale around 11:30 a.m. The alleged suspects were driving away by the time officers arrived, state police said. Cloverdale is about 6 miles east of Pacific City.

Police chased the suspects to a Forest Service road, where they are accused of hitting a state police car. At some point, at least one of the fleeing people and at least one officer opened fire on each other.

State police havent yet described how the shootout ended. The agency said the Tillamook County Sheriffs Office is leading an investigation of the incident.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 |@EvertonBailey

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.Authorities have been unable to identify a man who died amid a shootout with southern Oregon law enforcement officers because his body was badly burned in an ensuing car fire, according to a report.

KVAL, a Eugene television station, reports that the Douglas County coroner thinks the man died before the car burned. A grand jury ruled this week that authorities were justified in engaging in the March 9 shootout.

The suspects car can be seen smoking in video footage of the shootout, which came after authorities responded to a call about a possible stolen vehicle and gave chase.

WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE

KVAL reports a passenger was in the car at the beginning of the chase but that the passenger got out of the car at one point.

The pursuit ended in a field, and police said the driver opened fire on authorities.

Police reported feeling cornered after being shot at multiple times, according to KVAL. The news station reports an officer went for a straight shot and reported the suspects car caught fire shortly thereafter.

Multiple law enforcement officers fired their weapons in the return volley of gunfire, Roseburg police said.

None of the law enforcement officers who responded were injured.

-- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.Mt. Hood Meadows announced on Friday plans to build a new $15 million, 23,500 square-foot lodge on the southeast flank of Oregons largest peak.

The new lodge, dubbed Sahale, will be adjacent to Meadows South Lodge in the resorts existing base area. Its Meadows first major commercial improvement since the resorts South Lodge expansion in 1999, according to the resort.

The building will house Meadows learning and rental centers, as well as a new restaurant and bar. Its targeted to open during Christmastime 2020.

The expansion will help alleviate congestion at the resort, which is bustling on peak winter and spring weekends. The new building and a redesign of existing space will increase lodge seating by 60 percent, according to the resort.

That addresses one of the main complaints guests have - finding seating for dining on busy days in over-crowded lodges, Meadows said on its website.

Meadows will also add 250 new parking spaces for the 2019-20 season  a welcome development for a resort prone to running out of available parking spaces on its busiest days.

The new spaces will be on the north side of the access road to Meadows Hood River Meadows Lot. Theyre part of an overflow lot that will eventually be home to the resorts Nordic operation and have the capacity to hold 1,000 cars.

Meadows said its also offering 1,250 Sahale Gold Memberships  or five-year, all-access passes  to raise the money necessary to break ground on the new lodge this summer.

The new passes, which offer more perks than existing ones, will be sold April 1 to May 31. Pricing will be announced April 1.

-- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.Updated at 7:53 p.m.

Portland police announced Thursday evening that officers have arrested a man suspected of sexually assaulting a 6-year-old boy in a Pioneer Place Mall bathroom.

Dontai D. Howe, 30, was arrested in Northeast Portland due to tips from the public, and he will be booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center on suspicion of first-degree sexual abuse and first-degree sodomy, police said. The Police Bureau released a photo of the man earlier Thursday, seeking the publics help to identify him for arrest.

The alleged assault occurred Sunday around 3:20 p.m. Police havent released any more information, including where in the mall the incident occurred.

Police said Howe admitted to sexually abusing the boy while being interviewed by detectives.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 |@EvertonBailey

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.The Department of Veterans Affairs recently announced the appointment of Dr. Barbara Bates as the new Medical Center Director of the Aleda E. Lutz VA Medical Center in Saginaw.

"We are excited to appoint Dr. Bates as the official Medical Center Director of the Aleda E. Lutz VA in Saginaw," said Denise Deitzen, Acting Veterans Integrated Service Network 10 director. "Dr. Bates has an outstanding track record of more than 25 years of dedicated leadership and innovation in serving our nation's heroes."

Bates first joined the VA Medical Center in Saginaw as chief of staff in December 2015, where she also served as acting Medical Center director from May-August of 2016 and again from July 2018 to present. She has played an instrumental role in expanding Saginaw's education mission from one to four specialties and optimizing physician staffing in both inpatient and urgent care, the VA stated.

Bates first joined the VA as a staff physiatrist at the VAMC in Albany, New York in July 1993. She has proven herself over the past 25 years with increasing levels of responsibility, including associate chief of staff for quality management, chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation, and national deputy director of physical medicine and rehabilitation at VA Central Office.

Bates is the co-author of more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications, and the recipient of the 2008 National Institute of Health Director's Award, the 2008 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine's Elizabeth and Sidney Licht Excellence in Scientific Writing Award, and the 2014 Foundation for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Best Original Research Award.

The Aleda E. Lutz VAMC in Saginaw operates an 81-bed skilled nursing and rehabilitation Community Living Center, with an additional eight-bed acute medicine and telemetry wing. It provides care to more than 36,700 Veterans in a 35-county geographic area, from mid-Michigan to the Mackinac Bridge. Veterans also receive care at one of nine VA Community Based Outpatient Clinics located throughout Michigan.

More information about this VA can be found at www.saginaw.va.gov.Delta College has moved from the traditional per credit hour structure to a new model that has gained favor for the billing of students for classes. The college's Board of Trustees has established the school's 2019-2020 tuition rates which include a $3 increase, from $112 to $115, for in-district students. In doing so, the Board agreed to begin charging students by contact hours rather than credit hours.

"All courses will be charged by the number of contact hours with an instructor," explained Sarah DuFresne, vice president of finance. "Instruction time, whether it's online, face-to-face lecture, labs or clinical lessons, will be charged at the same tuition rate."

The contact hour model is used by the majority of Michigan's 28 community colleges. At Delta, students had been charged tuition based on the number of credits they were taking. If the course involved additional instruction or contact hours, an "excess contact fee" at 80 percent of the current tuition rate was assessed.

"This was very confusing to students," DuFresne said. "Now, the billing will be simplified and all courses will be charged based on the number of contact (instruction) hours."

The newly approved tuition and fee rates also include a $1 increase, from $19 to $20, in the college's technology fee. This means in-district students will pay 2.99 percent more than during the 2018-2019 academic year. The college also standardized its dual enrollment tuition rate so that all high school students enrolled in Delta courses will be charged the same tuition rate no matter where they live.

"These changes simplify our pricing structure and billing statements for students," DuFresne said. "Plus, we've set rates earlier than in past years so that students can make financial decisions knowing exactly how much Delta will cost."

Delta leaders characterize a $3 tuition hike as modest. Its signature affordability selling point remains in play, officials said.

"As this area's top community college, we work hard to keep costs down," said Diane Middleton, board chair. "Delta ranks as the 12th most affordable in total cost of attendance among Michigan's 28 community colleges."

DuFresne said, "Delta prides itself on being an exceptional value for students. The tuition increased by only $3 for Bay, Midland and Saginaw County students and $5 for Michigan students. There will be a $1 increase in the technology fee but all others will be unchanged."

The new tuition and fee rates along with charging by contact hours are expected to generate an additional $1.6 million, but will be offset by declining enrollment, DuFresne said.

"These changes will affect students differently, depending on their program of study," she said of the new contact hour billing model. "Some will see a slight increase, others will see no change. There has been no increase in the number of contact hours of our courses."As his wife and daughter escorted him into the building located at 200 East Main St., Dennis Webster had no idea he was walking into an impromptu ceremony honoring both his and his late father's military service.

Though they knew he does not like surprises, wife Hazel Webster and daughter Kimberly Webster had organized a private ceremony in the office of U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, during which the congressman would present Webster with military honors for his service in the Vietnam War, as well as the service of his late father, David Webster.

"I was surprised for sure, and I do appreciate it," Webster said. "It means a lot to me."

The small ceremony, which Hazel Webster had been working to put together for two years, was the first time Webster has been honored for his service. He said it feels "humbling."

Moolenaar presented Webster with the National Defense Service Medal, the Sharpshooter Badge with Rifle bar and the Vietnam Veteran Lapel pin.

"I really believe this is important, because our country needs to honor this kind of service, and for the next generation to see that we continue to honor those who have selflessly acted on behalf of our country," Moolenaar said

Webster served in the U.S. Army from July 1966 until June 1968, serving during the early years of the Vietnam War. His unit was sent to West Germany directly out of boot camp.

"They had three lines and they told us to pick a line -- one line went to Germany, one went to Vietnam and one went to Korea," Webster recalls.

A close friend of Webster's was sent to Vietnam, and was killed in action within a few weeks of arrival.

Webster has since worked in manufacturing at General Motors, Bay City Chevrolet and Saginaw Steering (now Nexteer Automotive), marrying Hazel in 1969 and fathering three children. The couple will celebrate 50 years together in June.

On behalf of his late father, Moolenaar also presented Webster with the American Campaign Medal, Asiatic Pacific Campaign Medal with one Bronze Service Star, the World War II Victory Medal and the U.S. Navy Discharge Medal.

Born in 1927 to Floyd and Ethel Webster, of Midland, David Webster joined the U.S. Navy when he was 17 years old, serving during the final year of WWII. As a seaman, David Webster worked on tugboats, barges, rescue boats, repair ships and freighters.

"He was versatile and proficient onboard any ship or boat the Navy asked him to be on," Moolenaar said.

David Webster was discharged from the Navy in June 1946, after which he married Leona Webster, his wife of 42 years before his death. David Webster would go on to reenlist, this time in the U.S. Army, in September 1948, serving as a corporal until 1950.

Moolenaar ended the ceremony with a simple message to Webster: "Welcome home," something that many veterans of the Vietnam War did not hear when they came back from the war.The Tri Cities Welcome Refugee Group (TCWRG) is hosting an event this weekend to raise awareness of the need for assisting child refugees, including fostering.

At the height of the Syrian Refugee Crisis in 2016, a member of Chapel Lane Presbyterian Church in Midland, Johanna Joswiak, wanted to take action.

"I felt compelled to do something about it," Joswiak said, "something concrete, and for refugees."

Joswiak then talked with her pastor, the Rev. Rhonda Myers

"She felt called, too," Joswiak said.

Joswiak's goal was to bring a refugee family from Syria with the support of the community. Some 50 people attended a presentation at Chapel Lane, including professionals in education, medicine, and mental health who wanted to volunteer their expertise. People were eager to help.

"Sometimes all you have to do is ask," Joswiak said.

TCWRG also raised some $30,000 and $10,000 in pledges. The group also has support from a congregation in Bay City and the Muslim community in Saginaw.

Everything was falling into place until President Donald Trump's travel ban on Muslim-majority countries. TCWRG decided to expand its focus to include all refugees, but hope they can serve Syrian refugees in the future.

Joswiak knew that families fostering refugees would need resources, so she sought out an agency to help.

Many organizations can only serve individuals within a specific radius. Then Samaritas, an 85-year-old nonprofit that has been serving refugees since the refugee crisis following the Vietnam War, said it could help children in the Great Lakes Bay Region.

Michelle Haskell is Samaritas' Outreach Team Lead for Refugee Youth Services, overseeing community outreach, foster family recruitment, and mentor/tutor programming.

Samaritas' mission is "serving people as an expression of the love of Christ."

At the event, Haskell will provide information on the crisis, Samaritas' role, and how to help.

The goal of the Samaritas Refugee Youth Services program is similar to domestic foster care except for family unification.

"You can't send youth back to a war zone," Haskell said. She said parents want their children safe.

Samaritas serves individuals seeking asylum and applying for legal refugee status. The program also teaches youths skills such as cooking, financial literacy, and riding the bus.

Haskell will also address demographics.

"We don't see youth from Syria," she said. Their largest demographic is from Central America. Demographics also include the Lost Boys of Sudan and Burmese youth. Samaritas also serves refugees waiting to be relocated to the U.S. from countries including Eritrea, Congo and Myanmar.

Counter to what many people picture, they receive referrals typically for older youth, 10 to 17 years old.

Haskell also will address what's happening in countries to make people flee, resettlement, funding issues, and how to get involved.

Haskell loves what she does.

"I never have an existential crisis. I always know that I'm doing something of value," she said.

Also presenting will be Rieek, a refugee from South Sudan and a Saginaw Valley State University student, who will share his story of making his way to the United States as a young person after fleeing war and a stay at a refugee camp in Kenya.

Recently, Rieek received legal asylum in the United States.

The event will provide information on fostering, tutoring, mentoring, volunteering and refugee issues.

Joswiak wants attendees to know that if they foster a refugee, the community is behind them.

"We're going to support them however we can," Joswiak said.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held at Creative 360, 1517 Bayliss St., Midland, from 2-4 p.m. Sunday.Bujumbura, Burundi (PANA) - Minister of the Environment Deo Guide Rurema said here Thursday forest species in protected water sources, lowlands and marshes would be banned to reduce the risk of drying upBamako, Mali (PANA) - The Vice President of China's National Heavy Duty Truck Group (SINOTRUK), Liu Wei, announced on Thursday that his company will build a truck assembly plant, manufacturing civil and military trucks in Mali, PANA learned from official sources in BamakoBamako, Mali (PANA) - Mali's Council of Ministers on Thursday adopted a draft decree approving the construction of a 50 MW solar photovoltaic power plant in Sikasso, in the south of the country, PANA has learnt from an official sourceMarrakesh, Morocco (PANA)  The West Africa regional office of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) will on Sunday hold in Marrakesh a conference on problems of sustainable development and security in the Sahel region, official sources said on FridayPort Louis, Mauritius (PANA)  A 60-year-old male Togolese, arrested on Tuesday after officers of the Mauritius Revenue Authority (MRA) suspected him to be carrying drugs, had swallowed 64 pellets suspected to be heroin, PANA learnt Friday from official sources in the Mauritian capitalVideos

Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos.Cooperation on gas forwarding projects and Brexit dominated Friday's talks between Hungarian and Polish Presidents Janos Ader and Andrzej Duda on the sidelines of the Polish-Hungarian Friendship Days event in Kielce, southeastern Poland.

Duda told a press conference after the talks that he and Ader had discussed their countries' cooperation in the Visegrad Group (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland) and partnership on gas infrastructure construction within the Three Seas format, the expansion of the Via Carpathia trans-national motorway network from Lithuania to Greece, and the approaching Three Seas summit in Slovenia.

The Three Seas initiative groups the countries lying between the Adriatic, Black and Baltic seas.



Duda added that his talks with Ader also covered the May European Parliamentary elections, NATO and EU affairs, Brexit, and trans-Atlantic ties.

The Friday-launched Polish-Hungarian Friendship Days will continue until Sunday. (PAP)

mb/ejI had a realization, recently. Despite having become what an average person would likely refer to as an expert about brown liquor in the last five to 10 years, it struck me just how little I really knew about barrels themselves. Coupled with my increasing interest in scotch-style, malt whiskies, I began to seek out more information about the subtleties of how different kinds of barrels affect different kinds of spirits, when used in a variety of ways. And in the course of absorbing this new information, I came across something interesting: The art of barrel rejuvenation.

Suffice to say, the life of an oak barrel can be a long, fascinating thing. Although a barrel may very well be used just once, such as maturing an American bourbon or California cabernet before its recycled, others live on in secondary uses. The American craft beer industry obviously uses plenty of bourbon barrels, and has dipped a toe into every other dimension of barrel-aging as well. And the Scottish whisky industry could hardly exist at all, without the American whiskey industry to provide it with a steady supply of used barrels. But its a mistake to think that barrels can be used only twice. Or even thrice! The limits of a single barrel havent even been fully explored yettheres a possibility they could be in constant use for 100 years or more.

Allow me to explain how this is possible. But first, a little info on the wonder that is a whiskey barrel.

Given the fact that the world is home to more than 60,000 species of tree, it is rather incredible to think that only oak wood is used in the construction of bourbon and scotch whisky barrels. There are several specific varieties of oak used for barrelsnamely, American white oak (Quercus alba), French oak (Quercus robur, Quercus petraea), and to a far lesser extent Mongolian/Japanese oak (Quercus mongolica), but thanks to well-defined laws of what constitutes bourbon or scotch, no non-oak wood is used. Note, this does not apply to whiskeys hailing from regions such as Ireland, Canada and Japan, where woods such as maple, hickory or chestnut can also be used, although oak is still the vast majority.

Why oak? Well, these types of wood are uniquely suited to being made into barrels, in a variety of ways. Oak possesses the desired blend of malleability and toughness, to be bent into barrel staves. Properly stored, it can last many decades. And perhaps most importantly, oak is porous to exactly the right degree for aging spiritsit allows some air to be forced in and out of the wood grain as it breathes, which helps draw the liquid inside into the wood, where it extracts flavor and color. At the same time, oak forms enough of a protective barrier to not allow the spirit inside to become unpleasantly oxidized over the course of years. Without oak, we wouldnt have modern bourbon or scotch as we know it.

But with that said, not all whiskey is entering into the same types of barrels. Heres a brief breakdown of what kinds of oak barrels tend to be used in various industries:

Wine barrels: Oaken wine barrels come in a variety of sizes, but the primary thing that separates them from whiskey barrels is the degree to which their interiors have been exposed to heat. Rather than the charred interiors of a barrel intended for bourbon, oak barrels intended for wine are typically merely toasted, which is a lesser degree of heating that doesnt result in the blackened, peeling appearance of a bourbon barrel interior. Toasting leaves more of the oaky flavors of the barrel intact, contributing a less intense profile of vanillans and caramel that are more desirable in whiskey.

Bourbon barrels: The U.S. definition of bourbon requires spirits labeled as bourbon to be aged in newly charred oak, although distilleries are free to choose from a variety of barrel sizes and char levels delivered by their cooperageswhich is the industry term for the manufacturers of barrels. Most bourbon tends to find itself in barrels with the most popular #3 or #4 levels of char, but others do exist. The same is true for American rye whiskey as well. The majority of these barrels are the standardized, 53 gallon sizewhich means theyre significantly more than twice the size of the 15.5 gallon half-barrel beer kegs you partied with in college. Yes, the inconsistency in the term barrels across industries can be confusing.

Scotch barrels/casks: The vast majority of whisky in Scotland is aged not in newly charred oak barrels, but oak barrels previously used to mature American bourbon or other spirits such as sherry, port or wine. Most commonly, this involves the shipping of newly emptied bourbon barrels to Scotland, where theyre filled with newly distilled malt and grain whiskies. After aging in the American ex-bourbon barrels, they may be finished in other barrels (such as port or sherry, seeking specific flavors) before blending. It is commonly believed that used barrels contribute a subtlety that works well with the scotch malt whisky flavor profile, but experiments into using freshly charred oak are increasingly common in Scotland, if often viewed with an air of mistrust.

Now then. Lets talk about how long a single barrel can survive.

In the American whiskey industry, a handful of barrels are commonly blended together to achieve a consistent profile in popular, leading bourbon brands, but the scotch whisky industry takes the concept of blending to far more complicated and esoteric levels. Whereas all the liquid in American bourbons are by necessity coming out of newly charred barrels, regardless of age, in scotch things arent nearly so simple. Even in a classic Scottish single malt, some of the malt whiskies may be coming out of first-fill bourbon barrelswhich is to say, barrels that have been filled for the first time since arriving from the U.S.A.while others are coming from barrels that have been filled two or three times since their arrival. Unsurprisingly, each time these barrels are filled, they contribute a milder impression of oak and char. This is exactly what is desireda blend of malt whiskies with taste profiles of differing intensity, combined to make a harmonious whole. Finding that balance is the entire point of the blenders art.

But even after a barrel has been filled two or three times, its life doesnt necessarily have to end. A process commonly referred to as rejuvenation also exists, and is employed when it is judged that a barrel has finally been scrubbed of all the flavor it has left to impart. In this process, the very top layer of the interior of the barrelthe part in deepest contact with an aging spiritis delicately scraped or chiseled away, whereupon the barrel can then be toasted or charred all over again. In doing so, the barrel still retains some degree of the character it had as an ex-bourbon or sherry cask, but is refreshed in terms of the flavor and color it can impart to a newly aging spirit. In effect, this can give a 20, 30 or 40-year-old oak barrel a new lease on life. Curious about the finer details of this process, I contacted Scotlands Speyside Cooperage, which supplies barrels to many of the major Speyside scotch distilleries.

[The process] will certainly remove part of the past contents, but this will not make the cask a virgin oak barrel, said cooperage manager Malcolm Munro. There will still be some of its past within the fibres of the wood.

Its this interplay between newly toasted flavors and the barrels previous contents that makes rejuvenation such an interesting tool in the cooper/distillers arsenal. Moreover, it represents a way to conserve barrels in a time when more food and drink industries than ever want to get their hands on freshly dumped casks of bourbon.

Munro has been working his job at the cooperage for more than 30 years, and in the process has unsurprisingly seen just about everything that can be done with an oak barrel. He raises an interesting point: Rejuvenation isnt a process that can only be done once. In fact, its still not known exactly how many times a barrel could theoretically be rejuvenated. But if its done every 30 years, by the end of its third go-round, that barrel could very well end up pushing 100. And as cooperages become increasingly cognizant of the need to conserve good oak in a growing whisky market, perhaps well actually see a 100-year-old oak barrel someday. According to Munro, it all just depends on the physical integrity of any cask, how long it lasts. If theyre made well, theres no reason why one couldnt reach the century mark.

Does this mean that someday, the life expectancy of an oak barrel could bypass the life expectancy of an adult male? Well, if we keep drinking plenty of whiskey, its entirely possible.

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident brown liquor geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more drink writing.Buttigieg (orig. Maltese) is pronounced Boot-edge-edge, as Democratic presidential longshot Mayor Pete Buttigieg himself wrote on a Medium blog two years ago. His husband Chasten added on Twitter, Buddha-judge, Boot-a-judge, or Boo-tuh-judge. Before long, it may be important to know how to say his name.

Buttigieg, 37son of a Maltese immigrant and multi-generational Hoosieris a Harvard grad, Rhodes scholar, and Afghanistan War vet from Indiana who is married to a man. In 2011, at age 29 he took 74% of the vote in the mayoral election of South Bend, INpop. 102,245making him the youngest-ever mayor of a town of more than 100,000 people. Hes held the job ever since, with the exception of a 2014 hiatus to serve a tour in Afghanistan as a lieutenant intelligence officer in the Navy reserve. Buttigieg speaks speaks Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Dari, and French, and after reading the novel Naive. Super by Erlend Loe taught himself Norwegian so he could translate more of the authors workthen attended a Norwegian church in nearby Chicago to stay in practice.

The clean-shaven, outspoken liberal is also a guitarist and concert pianist who has sat in with the South Bend Symphony as well as Ben Folds. He and his husband, Chasten, have two rescue dogs, including a one-eyed mutt named Truman with his own Instagram account. A member, as is this author, of the Oregon Trail generation, Buttigieg will, if elected in 2020, become the youngest and first openly gay president in U.S. history.

To be sure, given Buttigiegs youth (and, sadly, perhaps also his sexual orientation) he isat least from this vantageperhaps the longest of long shots. But he has a lot going for him, not least of which is his demonstrated appeal to conservatives in his home rust-belt state. He trades heavily on this, and smartly so: It sets him apart from many pack leaders, and when you combine that appeal with his unique identity as an openly gay man it might even convince you that what we now see as impossiblea semblance of cross-party unity in the middle of a pool poisoned by the right-wings bad-faith identitarian politicsisnt a lost cause.

Thanks in part to a breakout performance at a CNN Town Hall, during which longtime Obama strategist David Axelrod tweeted Buttigieg was crisp, thoughtful and relatable and would be a little less of a longshot tomorrow, the candidate took in more than $600,000 from more than 22,200 donors within 24 hours of that event. His letter of support to the South Bend Muslim community in the wake of the Christchurch white nationalist terrorist attackwhich went viralButtigieg has seen his profile and polls rise over the last week, ticking up to 3% in the most recent Emerson Poll. Major media outlets have published profiles of and interviews with him, most recently including the Washington Post and Esquire.

In certain waysyouth, style, and tonehe calls to mind on-screen media darlings like Barack Obama and Beto ORourke. Buttigieg speaks in paragraphs, an authoritative, professorial style thatI know full-well this sounds fawning, but I mean it earnestlyoften borders on the poetic, even and especially when discussing policy details. And like Obamabut unlike ORourkeButtigieg has an uncommon talent for maintaining an off-the-cuff, from-the-heart tone when hes actually repeating the same sophisticated and well-tested talking points almost verbatim. Further, Mayor Peteas his South Bend constituents call him to save time and frustrationdisciplines his demonstrable passion with a commitment to inclusive rhetoric, from which he never really departs (with reasonable exceptions for extremes such as Donald Trump and white nationalism). In todays political culture, thats a remarkable feat, andas reflected in BuzzFeed News on-the-ground reporting from ORourke appearances in Iowait offers voters a reprisal from the daily toxicity that for many Americans who arent absorbed with politics (or dont simply have the time for it) supersedes the policy wonkery that the self-appointed left-wing literati place above all.

Speaking of

On the issues

Buttigieg has two Achilles heels: youth and extraordinarily limited political experience. But for Beto skeptics nonetheless moved by the oratory and aspirations towards a semblance of unity, Mayor Pete also checks the policy and substance boxes. Hes worth a good-faith hearing out.

In fact, the bona fide intellectualButtigieg wrote his Harvard thesis on the influence of puritanism in U.S. foreign policy as portrayed in Graham Greenes The Quiet American, and as a Rhodes scholar earned a first-class honors degree in politics, economics, and philosophy from Oxford Universitycan hang with any candidate in the field. Buttigieg wont pass the progressive purity testhes accurately said the term has lost its meaningbut he makes his liberal politics clear.

Medicare for All: In his words, Yes. But unlike others in the field Buttigieg is also quickand smartto add that any politician who allows that phrase escape their lips ought to have some accountability for how were going to get there. Buttigiegs plan to get there? A pathway I would call Medicare for All Who Want It. The idea is you make some flavor of Medicare for All available on the exchanges as a kind of public option, let people buy in, and if people like me are rightthat this is not only going to be more widespread coverage but also better and more cost-effectivethat there will be a very natural pathway toward single-payer. In other words, phase out private insuranceexactly what Bernie Sanders M4A legislation proposes. (Also worth noting: Every Western nation progressives cite as a model for socialized medicine includes, at the least, a private option.)

Adding seats to the Supreme Court. Yes. But only if its part of a structure that depoliticizes the Supreme Court. Buttigiegs plan to reform the nakedly political nature of our highest court resembles the Federal Reserve Board structure: A Court of 15 Justices, five selected by Democrats, five by Republicans, and the other five chosen by the Justices themselves.

The electoral college. Its gotta go. We need a national popular vote. It would be reassuring from the perspective of believing that were a democracy. But I also think it would be highly encouraging of voter participation on the national level.

Reparations for slavery. Depending how you define it, kind of a no. In his words: I havent seen a proposal for cash transfer that people would be able to come together around and view as fair. But I absolutely believe we need to have some sort of accounting for the persistent racial inequities today, that are there by design because of past and present racism. That means our policies and our policy interventions from everything from criminal justice to housing need to be designed so theyre targeting those areas in our economy and our society with racial inequities driven largely by slaverybut again: not just something out of the past, but something reinforced by present racial attitudes, where those are most persistent.

The Green New Deal. Its the concept that we have a national emergency commensurate with a depression or a war in rising to meet that challenge, theres a ton of economic opportunity Also, the Green New Deal today is a set of goals, not a fully articulated plan. Which is fine But fundamentally I think its a sound framework, and it creates the right sense of urgency in that we can kind of luxuriate in a debate over what the right gear might be to do carbon targets, but scientifically the right time to do it was yesterday.

Socialism vs. Capitalism. Buttigieg sidesteps this false choice: Like Elizabeth Warren, he believes in capitalism as long as theres a strong rule of law around it. Hes said that the biggest problem with capitalism is the way it has become intertwined with power the growth of business is eroding our democracy. Capitalism without democracy is Russia. Buttigieg is conscious of his youth in this regard, and points out were dealing with a whole [older] generation that was really shaped by a Cold War environment where socialism was treated as the same thing as communism. And the opposite of that was democracy and capitalism. So to be for socialism was to be for communism and against democracy and capitalism. Now you see how these things are really shaking loose from each other in a lot of ways. Theyve become unbundled. The big question is what you prioritize, and I prioritize democracy. People are trying to make sense of the distance between socialism in Canada, say, and Denmark versus Venezuela. And the answer is democracy.

Economic anxiety and the rise of white nationalism. This is perhaps where Buttigieg is at his most eloquent, turning a venomously and now murderously divisive issue into an opportunity for growth. The Posts Greg Sargent tweeted of his interview with Buttigieg that he talks about race and the economy in a way that gets beyond the tedious LOL but economic anxiety versus not everyone in Trump country is racist debate. In his recent Morning Joe interview, Buttigieg connected white nationalism to the rise of AI and automation to national service, the military, marriage, and career-hopping in 90 seconds.

In that Post interview he said, I dont want this to slide into the idea that some of these racist behaviors can be excused because they can be connected to economic issues. But I do think its easier to fall into these forms of extremism when you dont know where your place is Theres this very basic human desire for belonging that historically has often been supplied by the workplace. Its been based on the presumption of a lifelong relationship with a single employer. This isnt just a blue-collar phenomenon. Weve come to be pretty reliant on the way that your workplace explains who you are. Thats breaking down. That doesnt have to be a soul-crushing thing, provided that there are alternate sources for community, identity, and purpose. In South Bend, we focus a lot on enlisting people in the project of the city itself The sense of belonging can be very powerful, and were very fragile without it. Its not accidental that some areas that have seen the most disruption in our social and economic life are those that are most likely to produce a lot of domestic extremists.

The Middle East. A two-state solution. When you actually go to the Middle East, the Navy intelligence officer told Esquire, you come away with more questions than answers. On one hand, [you really marvel] at the achievements that have taken place in Israeli society. And on the other hand, seeing the extent to which no one can explain how you can have a democracy and a Jewish state at the same time unless theres a two-state solution.

National security and the War on Terror. Though Buttigiegs views here might rankle isolationists on the left, this is also his strongest suit, rhetorically. Superficially trim and clean-shavenand openly gayhe tends to surprise conservative interlocutors who try to pin him on gun rights and national security policy only to remember he served real time in the military. He believes all Democrats should pledge not to go into war without congressional authorization. In his words: I guess the way Id put it is that anything we do should be, one, grounded in core American interests. Two, vetted against American values. And three, consulted on with American allies whenever we responsibly can do that. Another way to put it simply is the bar ought to be higher I think we had to act after 9/11 and so the authorization for use of military force in Afghanistan made sense, to a point. I think the open-ended commitment did not. Obviously I believe the Iraq War was a colossal mistake and Im very concerned now to saber-rattling around Venezuela.

Buttigieg has also pointed out that kids turning eighteen today were born after 9/11, the casus belli for the War on Terror and subsequent controversial and absurdly outdated AUMF. As for acknowledging Obamas imperialistic abuse of the AUMF, he says, I dont know that theres much to be gained in relitigating that. Its certainly the case that Obama did many things that just followed from the approach of presidents beforeI dont know if you ever want to tie your hands completely. But I think weve all learned the cost of Congress abdicating its responsibility. Probably the single biggest thing in foreign policy and security the next president has to do is clarify what the standard will be for the commitment of U.S. troops. Its frighteningly vague right now.

Higher education. College is supposed to be the gateway to the middle class for a lot of Americans, Buttigieg says. Its almost become a marker of whatever class you already come from, when you look at the disparities of who can get in and who completes college and who could afford it. Buttigieg supports expanding the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, allowing college grads to exchange public service for government loan forgiveness. This would, he says, introduce a social norm that anybody would put in a year after high school with some kind of service. We would fuse those with a with a major break on college costs, tuition or debt.

Immigration. Buttigieg is staunchly pro-immigrant. He wants to roll back Trumps policies and raise immigration caps across the board, but he also manages somehow to embrace possibilities for reconciling that position with the right wings obsessive and baseless xenophobia: You might have followed this widely publicized case involving a small-business owner from Granger, the next community over, very conservative. This guy was an important part of the community, undocumented, went in for an annual ICE visit and didnt come back out.

The fiercely protective response came mostly from white members of the community who were conservative and largely voted for Trump, but did not view what he was talking about as going against somebody like Roberto, who they loved.

Yes, you have a lot of people in my part of the country who feel were spending too many resources on immigrants, even though thats inaccurate and immigration subsidizes us. But it doesnt necessarily apply to people you actually know and meet and see.

On his youth and the prospect of generational change. One of his Achilles heels. When asked on Morning Joe, You have 30 seconds to introduce yourself, whats the message of your campaign? Buttigieg replied, the reality is: When you take one look at me, my face is my message. A lot of this is simply the idea that we need generational change, that we need more voices stepping up from a generation that has so much at stake in the decisions that are being made right now And look, lets be very clear: Youll see older candidates voting for younger candidates, younger candidates voting for older candidates. And thats finethats good. He observed that when he first ran for mayor at age 29 he could only afford to do one attribute poll, which he said found the older the voter was, the more likely they were to say me being 29 was a positive. He says his age was actually a strategic motivator behind his decision to run: Its why I often talk about how the world is going to look in 2054, when I get to the current age of the current president. Its to remind us that this isnt just about one election. This is about an era. The decisions that are being made in our politics right now will decide how the next 20, 30 or 40 years will go.

LGBT issues. He married a dude. But obviously thats not an explanation in itself. Members of the LGBT community have expressed a desire for Buttigieg to be more comfortable advocating for their issueswhich are clearly near his heartbut the same people also understand the political complexity he faces as a gay man, and because he hasnt exactly been silent on the issueheres an interview in Out Magazine in which he explains why he believes America is ready for a gay presidentmany in that community trust hell deliver.

And Buttigieg does indeed find himself in a tricky spot, and so far hes placed his other demographic definers above this one in his rhetoric. In one way, ignoring the elephant in the room is a subversive message itself: This shouldnt matter today; many other identity disparities are more politically significant, components such as generational, class, and racial divides. (This, for better or worse, echoes Obamas cautious approach to discussing race.)

Truth is, Buttitgieg sexual orientation probably wont matter much to most Americans. Still, it seems hes feeling it out: Continue on the subversive high-road for a while and in the near term risk upsetting LGBT Americans who want him to more publicly own his identity and use his platform to advocate for them; or speak up forcefully now, call attention to his identity, and risk kick-starting what will unfortunately but inevitably be ugly, ugly backlash from the right. If he hangs in the race, he wont be able to ignore it foreverthe only question is when he turns that corner.

Which brings us to what might be the best way to frame the Buttigieg doctrine: Unite at all costs. Obviously this could break either way. In his Esquire interview, when asked, Is there anything that is considered right now a progressive idea and that the Democrats are associated with that you wish the Democrats would ditch? Buttigieg replied, I think a lot of it is tonal. You just gotta make sure that even as we demonstrate we can fight those in power right nowstand up to them and reject everything thats wrong and correct everything thats falsebut we dont have to be a*****es about it.Desperate for capital, Japan Display is looking to an investor group, led by China Silkroad Investment Capital, for a bailout, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. The deal would give the Chinese group a near-majority stake in exchange for an investment of $500 million to $700 million, the sources said. The group plans to build an OLED panel plant in China using Japan Displays technology, according to those two sources.

The downfall of Japan Display has always been a mystery. Why did Apple push Japan Display for a new plant to keep up with LCD iPhone demand and help with an investment in the plant, only to turn around and announce that the iPhone X would use OLED leaving Japan Display flatfooted.

It's as if Apple gave them the noose to hang themselves with. LG Display is another Apple partner that got shafted with the surprise shift to OLED for iPhones.

Why didn't Apple give their long time display suppliers enough time to bring in OLED machinery and remain their suppliers? On paper it looks as though Apple didn't blink in hurting, severly hurting two key suppliers. What was the rush to OLED all about?

What was stranger, perhaps, is that not only did two faithful suppliers get absolutely crushed by Apple's shift to OLED without a timely heads-up but that Apple chose their long time enemy Samsung to be their exclusive OLED supplier. A copycat company that dragged out Apple's patent infringement case out for a decade.

A new report by Reuters today will walk you through Japan Display's ongoing nightmare that seems to never end after Apple pulled the rug from under their feet knowing full well that Japan display was building a useless plant they didn't need and for the wrong technology. Check out the full report here.

About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Those using abusive language or negative behavior will result in being blacklisted on Disqus.Today the U.S. Patent Office published a patent application from Microsoft about a next-gen Head Mounted Displays (HMD) device that goes far beyond their current HMD device known as HoloLens.

Microsoft notes in their filing that there's been a surge in interest in virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and augmented reality (AR) devices. Many of these devices make use of user-worn headsets that are able to project images onto a user's eyes to create two-dimensional or three-dimensional images displayed to a user.

Often, these headsets are bulky and cumbersome to wear. This can be caused in some devices due to the inefficient nature of projectors and optical devices in the headsets. In particular, the inefficiencies of projectors and waveguides results in the need to use higher power for transmission and the corresponding need to have bulky cooling systems to dissipate excess generated heat.

Additionally, in some devices even the weight of the projectors and waveguides create a significant amount of bulk and weight. This can make such headsets difficult to wear and use for long periods of time.

Further, such devices often have a limited field of view. For example, some current VR, MR, and AR devices have a field of view somewhere between 30 and 40.degree. In a recent Samsung HMD patent filing, they were shooting for a field of view in the 200 degree range. In Microsoft's latest published patent filing they note that with their new design, the field of view can be "practically unlimited"

Movement based Display Device

Microsoft's patent FIG. 1 below illustrates a "movement based display device"; FIG. 2B illustrates additional details of a movable member, light emitter array and lens array of a movement based display device.

For more about Microsoft's next-gen Head Mounted Display device, check out our full report on our Patently Mobile IP blog here.Patna: Arjit Shashwat Choubey, son of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Union Minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey, surrendered before Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) Rakesh Dubey on Saturday night. He had been wanted by the Bhagalpur police in a case involving communal unrest in Nathnagar during the Ramanavami procession a few days ago,

Choubey's surrender came after a court turned down his and eight others' anticipatory bail on Saturday.

The son of the Union Minister, shortly after arriving in Patna on Saturday, went straight to the Hanuman Temple outside Patna Junction where he offered prayer to Lord Hanuman in the presence of dozens of his followers who rented the hall with the chant of 'Jai Shri Ram'.

Choubey then arrived at the office of ASP Rakesh Dubey where he surrendered himself while maintaining he was the victim of a conspiracy hatched by Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leaders who, he said, were the ones who created communal disturbance in Nathnagar.

"I had neither run away nor have I committed any crime. If chanting 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' and 'Jai Shri Ram' is a crime in this country and so is singing Vande Mataram then yes, I am guilty as charged," he said adding the real culprits were roaming free while he was being made the scapegoat in the Nathnagar incident.Patna: As promised, the Grand Alliance in Bihar led by Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), a day after Holi, announced its formula for seat sharing for the Lok Sabha elections that involves a host of small and large parties including the RJD, Congress, Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM), Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP), Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP), and CPI-ML.

At a joint press conference in Patna, RJD state president Ram Chandra Purvey, in the presence of other Mahagathbandhan leaders, announced nine seats for Congress (against its demand for at least 12 seats) along with one seat for it for Rajya Sabha; five for Upendra Kushwahas RLSP, three seats each to Jitan Ram Manjhis HAM and Mukesh Sahni VIP.

While RJD has kept the remaining of the 20 seats for itself, it will, in actuality, contest on only 17 seats giving up two seats for Sharad Yadavs fledgling Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) that will be merged with RJD in the coming days; and one seat for a CPI-ML candidate who would also contest on an RJD ticket.

Besides Purvey, other people present at the Friday press conference included RJD spokesperson Manoj Jha, Congress state president Madan Mohan Jha, and HAM and RLSP representatives.

For the two by-elections in Bihar, RJD will be fielding its candidate Mohammed Firoz Hussain from Dehri and HAM candidate Dhirendra Kumar Singh from Nawada.

Unhappy with the seat-sharing formula, a handful of Congress leaders at Sadaqat Ashram in Patna raised anti-RJD slogans for marginalizing a senior partner like Congress while placating new entrants in the Grand Alliance like HAM and RLSP.

Meanwhile, in a clear slap to Jan Adhikar Party (JAP) leader and sitting MP from Madhepura Pappu Yadav, the RJD made it amply clear that it does not want to do anything with the former party leader who was very critical of both Tejaswi and Tej Pratap Yadav while still being in the RJD. His criticism to the two natural heirs of Lalu Prasad Yadav and Rabri Devi led to his expulsion from the party forcing him to form his own outfit now known as JAP.

Earlier this week, Pappu Yadav lamented his exclusion from the Grand Alliance saying he was at a loss as to what crime he had committed that made the RJD to ignore him.

I share the same goal as other Mahagathbandhan leaders to rid the nation from the misrule of Narendra Modi so it is very hard for me to understand why I am being treated as a pariah, he had said.Sheetz convenience stores are about to go on a major hiring binge.

As TribLive in Pittsburgh reports, the Altoona-based company has a goal of hiring more than 2,500 employees, including more than 1,100 in Pennsylvania.

And they arent messing around.

Sheetz has announced open interviews for the full- and part-time positions to be held from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, March 27 at all of the companys 589 locations in six states, which also includes Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, West Virginia and North Carolina.

During the open interviews, prospective employees can learn about Sheetzs commitment to offering employees sustainable careers built on an inspiring culture, community engagement and disrupting the convenience category as we know it, the company said in a news release.

(Story continues below)

NOW HIRING! Sheetz will hold open interviews at all of its 589 locations next week. https://t.co/mnoMzH0mqs  KDKA (@KDKA) March 21, 2019

The company, which started in 1952 with a single store and now has some 19,000 employees, says its pay and benefits package includes medical and dental insurance, a 401(k) retirement plan, college tuition reimbursement, a stock ownership plan, quarterly bonuses and vacation time.

Anyone interested in applying is asked to visit jobs.sheetz.com to learn more.You may have heard a little something about a lottery drawing coming up, where a winner would walk away with a hefty chunk of change. If you can refer to $625 million dollars as a chunk of change, that is.

Thats how much money is up for grabs at the next Powerball drawing. Thats up from the $550 million promised by the previous drawing done on March 20, as there was no one who managed to come up with the five jackpot numbers.

What is Powerball?

Powerball is a lottery drawing held across 44 different states, including Pennsylvania, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

How do I play?

Tickets are $2, and players select five numbers from one to 69, as well as one Powerball number from one to 26. Numbers can be selected by each individual player, or given out randomly when you buy a ticket.

Matching all six numbers is what would get you the jackpot prize, but other prizes are also given out for matching at least a few of the numbers.

There is also a Power Play number drawn, which multiplies the non-jackpot prizes. Participating in the Power Play option costs an additional $1 when a ticket is purchased.

Take a look at this explainer video below from the Pennsylvania Lottery:

Where can I buy a ticket?

You can find Powerball tickets for sale at numerous gas stations, grocery stores and similar businesses. The Pennsylvania Lottery website has a search function by ZIP code, which you can find here.

Where can I watch the drawings?

The next drawing will be done the evening of Saturday, March 22 at 10:59 p.m. Easter Standard Time. The Pennsylvania Lottery website has this list of viewing options provided, with different TV stations listed depending on which region of the state youre in.

What are the odds that Ill win the jackpot if I buy a ticket?

Terrible!

According to the Pennsylvania Lottery website, your odds of winning are 1 in 292,201,338.

Its hard to express how unlikely that is without giving some far-fetched counter-examples. For instance: you are far more likely to be struck by an asteroid, win an Oscar, become President of the United States, have a baby born with teeth, date a supermodel, or find a pearl in an oyster than you are to win the Powerball jackpot.

That said, best of luck to anyone who plays! And if you do end up winning: is there any chance I could borrow a few bucks?Bob Quarteroni is staring at the most terrifying sight of his life: He has ALS, a fatal disease with no cure.

ALS gradually paralyzes a person until they suffocate. It can render someone unable to move or speak, yet fully conscious. Its moving especially fast for Quarteroni. He had mild left arm weakness in November. In March he couldnt open a sugar packet.

Quarteroni wants no part of end stage ALS. He knows it will kill him. His best hope, he said, is to escape the worst of the suffering.

Quarteroni, who writes a regular column for PennLive/The Patriot-News, wants an escape route. But as he tried to map a course, he quickly discovered its a complicated, controversial and difficult one.

Euthanasia. Assisted-dying. Physician-assisted suicide.

The first refers to a doctor causing the death of a patient who faces a hopeless medical situation. The others refer to the patient doing it with help from a doctor. But theyre pretty much the same, and Americans overwhelmingly believe they should be legal.

Gallup began polling Americans on the subject in 1947. Back then, fewer than 40 percent of Americans supported legally and painlessly ending a terminally ill patients life.

By 2018, Gallup found that 72 percent of Americans believe a doctor should be able to do so for a willing patient.

Support falls to 65 percent when people are asked about doctor-assisted suicide. Gallup speculates the difference might stem from the inclusion of the word suicide.

Despite the strong public support  more than half the states considered legalizing doctor-assisted suicide in 2017  its not widely available.

Legalizing euthanasia was first proposed, unsuccessfully, in 1906 in Ohio. In 1994, Oregon voters by a slim margin approved the Death With Dignity Act, making it legal for a doctor to write a prescription to painlessly end someones life. The act took effect in 1997.

Since then, five more states, Colorado, Vermont, Washington, California and Hawaii, and Washington, D.C., have legalized it. The most recent is Hawaii, where medically-assisted suicide became legal on Jan. 1.

Pennsylvania has never seriously considered it, at least not in recent history. G. Terry Madonna, the Franklin and Marshall College political expert and public opinion pollster, said hes never heard any major discussion in Pennsylvania. It has never risen to the level his organization asked about it in a poll.

It was recently legalized in Canada, and was legalized before that in countries including Switzerland, where it has been legal since 1918, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Still, its not something easily obtained via medical tourism: In states where its legal, and in Canada, its only available to residents, meaning people cant travel there to die.

As Quarteroni has learned, its legally available to non-residents of Switzerland, although travel costs and logistical factors make it far from easy.

Places which have legalized it take the same basic approach: A doctor prescribes a drug that can painlessly cause death. The patient takes it.

Before that, the laws generally require two doctors to verify the patient is terminally ill, of competent mind, and making a decision reflecting his or her own wishes. Patients are generally required to make multiple requests, with a mandatory waiting period between requests.

In 2017, more than 13,000 people died by way of euthanasia or assisted suicide in the places where one or both is legal, according to a recent article in The Lancet, a British medical journal. In Oregon, nearly 2,000 people have received prescriptions since assisted-suicide became legal in 1997, and 1,275 have ingested the drugs and died, according to CNN.

Vermont reported 52 such deaths over about four years. Washington reported 1,401 people receiving prescriptions, and 1,364 resulting deaths between 2009 and 2017. Hawaii estimates 40-70 people will request a medical-aided death this year.

Barriers can linger after its legalized. As of shortly after Hawaiis law took effect this year, some pharmacies were saying they wouldnt fill prescriptions, and some prominent hospitals were saying they wouldnt allow patients to take life-ending medication on their campuses.

Support for euthanasia is highest among Democrats, 80 percent. Among Independents, 73 support it, as do 62 percent of Republicans, according to the Gallup poll conducted last May. Men favor it more than women, 79 percent to 65 percent.

Opposition is highest among people who go to church every week, with 60 percent against it.

Some have attributed the steady rise in support, in part, to baby boomers seeing terminally parents endure extended suffering and poor quality of life, sometimes kept alive via expensive medical and other care.

This is likely causing some to decide they wouldnt want such a life, and favor the option of a controlled end as opposed to prolonged, indefinite suffering.

Yet that scenario also gives rise to the most negative possibilities: that medically frail or otherwise vulnerable people could be pushed to suicide against their will or best interests, possibly by people who consider them a burden or financial drain, or who would gain financially.

Moreover, the American Medical Association, the largest group representing doctors, has long been against euthanasia and assisted-suicide. It says doctor-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physicians role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and pose serious societal risks. Instead, the doctor must aggressively respond to the need of patients at the end of life.

Pro-life organizations are another opponent. One, Americans United for Life, recently told Congress assisted suicide goes against the prevailing consensus in our nation that the government has a duty to protect life, places already-vulnerable people at greater risk, and fails to protect the integrity and ethics of the medical profession.

The strongest arguments in favor have long come from people such as Quarteroni, who have shared hard details of a dismal diagnosis, their pain, and their anguish at understanding a healthy, pain free existence is no longer possible.

He writes: Looking into the ravening eyes of the great dog death over and over and over and over is a terror behind words, a putrid, bleak knowing, an abomination.

He notes that if his dog or cat faced such bleak prognosis, the ordeal would quickly, painlessly and legally end with help from a caring, responsible professional.

He has decided his best avenue, if he can make it, is to journey to Switzerland, where assorted organizations exist to help people such as him.

He has received an email outlining what will take place his final threes days, including his death in an apartment maintained by the organization which will facilitate his death.

A doctor will visit on the first day and a different doctor will visit on the second. On the third day, several friends or family members can be present. He must have someone who can ID his body afterward.

Someone with the foundation will attach an IV bag, which at first will contain only saline water. After having practiced how to open the valve of the perfusion, we will put the medication into the bag and when you are ready to die, you may open the perfusion yourself, the emailed instructions read.

In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that committing suicide is not a liberty protected by the Constitution, and states can outlaw it. The majority opinion said, Throughout the nation, Americans are engaged in an earnest and profound debate about the morality, legality and practicality of physician-assisted suicide. Our holding permits this debate to continue, as it should in a democratic society.

Read Bob Quarteronis battle with ALS:

March 5, 2019: I am dying. I have ALS.

March 22, 2019: My body is collapsing around me

Note: this article was revised to state that G. Terry Madonna works at Franklin and Marshall College; the affiliation in an early version was incorrect.A citizens group that accused a legislative auditing panel with violating the states open meetings, or Sunshine, law has withdrawn its lawsuit after acknowledging a typographical error was to blame.

RocktheCapital, a citizens watchdog group, filed the lawsuit in Commonwealth Court in February asking the court to fine the Legislative Audit Advisory Commission for violating the law that requires public agencies to deliberate and conduct official action on agency business in public meetings.

In its lawsuit, it claimed the eight-member commission, chaired by Rep. Mark Keller, R-Perry County, met in private to accept the audit that reviewed legislative spending for the 2017-18 fiscal year. The basis for that claim was the date on a news release handed out at the commissions Dec. 27 public meeting when a vote was taken to accept the audit. The news release stated the panel accepted the audit on six days earlier.

Keller told a RocktheCapital representative immediately after the meeting the news release was prepared in advance and had the wrong date. RocktheCapital, however, chose to file a lawsuit to challenge that.

The disheartening thing to me is it questioned my integrity, Keller said. Look, I try to do everything the way its supposed to be done and for him to file this with the court and  then withdraw it because he now agrees. What changed in the fact he was told that day right after the meeting it was typographical error?

RocktheCapitals Eric Epstein said the commission should consider the lawsuit a warning shot to show his group is serious about the need for more transparency at its meetings typically held only once a year. He regularly faults the commission for not allowing public comments during its meetings and as a result, disrupts the meetings by interjecting his comments during the panels discussions.

Keller said he changed the commissions rules to allow Epstein to submit written comments submitted before the meeting as a concession and includes them as part of the meetings record. But Epstein is not satisfied with that and continues to press for a pubic comment period during the meeting.

The commission hired an outside law firm to defend itself, which Keller said cost money beyond the time spent by in-house lawyers to prep that firm for handling the case. He was unable to provide the amount that was spent on the outside law firm at this time.

Hes always been an advocate for we need to save taxpayer dollars, Keller said. Well, what just happened there with that?

About that, Epstein said citizens have a right to hold the Legislature accountable.

Nobodys calling into question anybodys integrity, he said. We are questioning a process that doesnt allow the taxpayers to discuss how their money is being spent.About two years ago, a central Pennsylvania man died of a fatal overdose. On Thursday, the reported head of the drug trafficking organization that sold the deadly substance was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison.

Antoine Jamel Henderson, 35, of Hagerstown, Maryland, was sentenced by a federal judge on Thursday, according to a release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Following the 14 years imprisonment, Henderson will be on five years of probation, according to the release.

Henderson was convicted of conspiring to distribute 40 or more grams of fentanyl, according to the release. In all, Henderson and others distributed at least 280 grams of fentanyl in the area of Washington County, Maryland, which borders south central Pennsylvania.

Through his plea agreement, Henderson admitted that the Drug Trafficking Organization he supervised sold fentanyl that caused fatal and non-fatal overdoses, the DOJ said. Among these overdoses were two Franklin County men.

Marc Brumbaugh, 27, died of an overdose in April 2017. Nathan Bolden, 31, died of an overdose in August 2017. Both men were from Waynesboro.

U.S. Attorney Robert K Hur, whose office prosecuted the case, said because Hendersons sentence is in federal prison, there is no possibility of early parole.

Drug traffickers are on notice that dealing in fentanyl increases their odds of federal prosecution and federal prison, Hur said in the release.

According to the plea agreement, Henderson distributed the drugs from 2017 through January 2018, alongside others including co-defendant Kamalah Cordell.

Investigators conducted at least six controlled buys between August and September 2017, where either fentanyl or crack cocaine were purchased, officials said. According to the plea agreement, the controlled purchases were supposed to be of heroin, but lab testing showed the substances bought were fentanyl, not heroin.

A search warrant was executed on Jan. 17, 2018, at two locations and three vehicles involved in Hendersons organization, according to the release. At Hendersons stash house, agents recovered 80.22 grams of fentanyl from the bottom compartment of a soda vending machine in the garage.

Hurs office said as little as 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be a lethal dose.

Investigators also found 9 mm ammunition, a drug press, digital scales, drug packaging equipment, plastic bags containing fentanyl residue, cellular phones and other drug paraphernalia, according to the release.

At a second residence, more cell phones, a currency counter, jewelry and a garage opener for the stash house were recovered.

On a cellphone seized from Hendersons properties, agents found iPhone notes tracking law enforcement surveillance, the release states.

Hur recognized Franklin County District Attorney Matt Fogal, the Waynesboro Police Department, the Franklin County Drug Task Force, the Franklin County Coroners Office, the Washington County Special Response Team and the Maryland Natural Resources Police for their assistance in the investigation. Hur also thanked Washington County Narcotics Task Force led by the Washington County Sheriff Douglas Mullendore.

Fogal recently released a grand jury report that include a summary of the investigation into Brumbaugh and Boldens deaths. As a part of that investigation, officials were able to connect the drugs consumed in both overdoses to Henderson.

Other people were charged separately at the county level, without the grand jury, in connection with theses cases.

Law Enforcement in Franklin County, PA is very grateful to the outside agencies for working together in pursuit of justice for our lost victims," Fogal said in the release. "While much of our law enforcement time is now spent assisting those who suffer from the disease of addiction, those who solely profit from and prey upon our suffering victims are uniquely villainous.Eight juveniles were in a school van that was hit by another vehicle Thursday morning, resulting in one girl suffering serious injuries, police said.

State police said a school van was stopped at the intersection of Hades Church Road and Clay Hill Road in Antrim Township around 8:18 a.m., when a Toyota Carolla drove up.

The Carolla, driven by an 18-year-old Fayetteville man, did not come to a full stop at the stop sign, but the school van had already started driving into the intersection.

The Carolla hit the school van and continued moving south, left the road and came to an uncontrolled rest facing mostly south. The Carolla was disabled by the crash.

The school van was hit at the left passenger side, causing it to spin about 90 degrees before sliding until it hit a utility pole in the middle of the right passenger side. The school van was also disabled in the crash.

One 10-year-old girl suffered serious injuries in the crash and was taken to Meritus Medical Center in Hagerstown, Maryland. From there, the girl was transported by ambulance to Hershey Medical Center for additional treatment.

Police said no one else involved in the crash was injured.

Police do not list any charges for the driver in the crash.Jailed former state Attorney General Kathleen Kane was disbarred by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday, four months after the same court sanctioned her imprisonment.

Kane, 52, of Clarks Summit, is serving a 10- to 23-month sentence on her 2016 conviction by a Montgomery County jury on charges that she leaked grand jury information and lied about doing so.

The Democrat started serving her jail term this past November after the Supreme Court refused to hear her appeal in the case.

The courts one-paragraph disbarment order states that Kanes law license will be voided effective April 21. It describes the action as a disbarment on consent, meaning Kane submitted a resignation of her law license.LEWISBURG  The Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary has been a high-security facility since it opened in 1932.

But the Big House, as it is known, in the next year or two will be transitioned into a medium-security prison.

The mission change will best serve the Northeast region and provide relief to other medium-security institutions nationwide, a Bureau of Prison release states.

None of the nearly 500 employees will lose their jobs, Pennsylvania Sens. Robert Casey and Pat Toomey said they were told.

They and former Rep. Thomas A. Marino (R-Lycoming) last June had urged the BOP to do everything possible to preserve staff jobs at USP Lewisburg or offer suitable alternatives for employment.

In addition to the inmate security level change, Lewisburg will house the Communication Management Units (CMU) now at prisons in Marion, Illinois, and Terre Haute, Indiana.

Telephone use and written correspondence of inmates assigned those units along with visits are monitored completely.

A potential third CMU unit may be added at Lewisburg or elsewhere to provide additional capacity and security, if necessary, the BOP says.

The mission change for Lewisburg will occur when the Special Management Unit (SMU) is moved to a newer high-security prison in Thomson, Illinois.

That is expected to take place next year, said Shawn Barlett, executive assistant to the Lewisburg warden.

SMU inmates are considered the worst of the worst because they have caused problems in other prisons. They are locked in their cells 23 hours a day and their recreation time is permitted onlyin cages.

There are several pending federal lawsuits alleging mistreatment and torture of SMU inmates.

One of the allegations is that Lewisburg forces inmates to take hostile cellmates by punishing them with tight hard restraints for extended periods if they refuse.

Lewisburg currently has 1,297 inmates, with 861 behind the wall and the rest in a camp.In its life span, the fridge had been through a fire and a flood, but from far away it didn't look so bad. Just a small black box, lying in the middle of a wet and muddy Nebraska field.

It struck Gayland Stouffer as unusual. Stouffer wondered how it got there, as he later told the Lincoln Journal Star. Days prior, the field had been underwater, drowning in the unprecedented floodwaters unleashed on Platte River valley last week. Stouffer and his friend, Kyle Simpson, had been trudging along through the muck and the standing water in their boots and waders Sunday, walking a mile back to their car after a long day spent clearing debris and mud from Simpson's property along the river.

Stouffer was tired but curious. He plodded over to the small black box and untangled it from a web of thorny brush. And then he realized, yelling out to Simpson, "Hey, it's a refrigerator!" the Omaha World-Herald reported.

There was more: "And it's full of beer!"

And yet, even more: "It's ice cold!"

Simpson thought it was too good to be true. How many times had they wished for an ice cold beer as they slogged through the mud all day?

"Yeah, right," Simpson yelled back.

But then he saw it too: the three fully stocked shelves of Busch Light and Bud Light. It was "a magic fridge!," waiting for them like "a gift from the heavens" or a "pot of gold," said fellow Nebraskans, who saw photos of the discovery in a viral Facebook post.

The spontaneous discovery was a moment of levity amid the devastation that has roiled the region following a treacherous "bomb cyclone" that dumped snow, ice and then relentless floods on communities all across the Midwest. The historic storm has caused at least four deaths, killed livestock, destroyed farms and livelihoods and inundated entire communities with icy, murky waters that have only just began receding, leaving farmers and property owners to assess the wreckage. In Nebraska, the state's emergency agency estimated the floodwaters have left behind $1.3 billion in damages.

And so as Stouffer and Simpson sipped the cold beer from the homeless fridge Sunday, Simpson told the World-Herald, "We thought about the poor guy who lost it, and hoped he was okay."

For those of you that don't know, our state of #Nebraska is going through record flooding. Sometimes though, the world sends you a break. These guys went to their #DuckCamp and found a fully-stocked #BeerFridge. #NebraskaStrong #Flood2019 pic.twitter.com/t8FvdqVQ3g  Fat Boy Wild Game (@gameseasonings) March 19, 2019

Some who saw the viral photos of Stouffer and Simpson had the same thought. "Did u lose a fridge?" some asked, tagging their friends whose beer of choice was Busch Light.

It was shared so many times until, finally, it caught the attention of the Healy family.

Right away, Brian Healy told The Washington Post on Wednesday night, the fridge looked familiar. The ratio of Busch to Bud was just right. His dad was the Bud Light drinker, the "oddball" of the family, while everyone else stuck to Busch Light.

And then, there were the scorched edges, the real giveaway. The mini fridge, Healy said, had survived a fire that burned down his parents' house in 2007. The fridge smelled like smoke, and so his parents hauled it off to the family's summer cabin along the river.

The cabin, Healy said, was destroyed in the flood.

"We lost our cabin," Healy's Aunt Judy, who owns the cabin along with her husband and Healy's parents, commented on the Facebook photo. "Where did you find the fridge?"

It was four miles down river from their cabin, in Linwood, Nebraska, Healy soon learned. The family knew it had to be theirs.

On Tuesday, Healy received a call from Simpson, who had gotten his number from a mutual friend. Simpson asked to make sure everything was okay. His family was safe, Healy said, and so were their homes - everything but the cabin. And the fridge.

Simpson said he hoped Healy didn't mind - they had drank a couple of beers.

"He said, 'Well, when my road's repaired, I'll drop off your fridge,' " Healy said.

Healy and his Aunt Judy told The Washington Post said they were delighted that their castaway appliance had brought some laughs amid so much devastation. But they hoped the humor wouldn't overshadow the dire needs facing their neighbors.

They knew people who had lost everything, they said. On farms, some cows were going hungry, Healy said, because all their feed was flooded, jeopardizing numerous farmers' livelihoods. As The Post reported Wednesday, the $1.3 billion in damage includes an estimated $400 million in dead livestock, $440 million in lost grain and $439 million in damaged infrastructure.

We just lost a refrigerator and a cabin, Judy Healy said. People need to help the families who are suffering.If convicted killer Gregory Thomas was hoping to have a romantic reunion with his multiple wives, he can forget it.

A Commonwealth Court dashed his hopes in a ruling issued Friday.

In an opinion by Judge P. Kevin Brobson, the court rejected Thomas argument that the state Department of Corrections total ban on conjugal visits for inmates doesnt violate Thomas constitutional rights.

This is a battle that Thomas, who since 1990 has been serving a life sentence for a murder in Philadelphia, has been waging for years. Commonwealth Court gave him a glimmer of hope in 2014 when it refused to dismiss his case at first blush and allowed him more time to argue it out.

Ultimately, however, the court decided safety concerns outweigh the needs of Thomas, or any other state prisoner, for sex with a spouse or significant other.

Thomas, now 60, claims he has a right and a sexual and religious need as a Muslim to have conjugal relations with the women he claims are his wives. Corrections officials countered that they arent sure Thomas is legally married to anyone.

Brobson backed the departments contention that denying conjugal visits is necessary to maintain security in its prisons, especially since one of the participants in the visit would be a known criminal, and often a violent one.

Barring such trysts also thwarts the spread of disease, corrections officials contended, and reduces the ability of outsiders to pass contraband to inmates. Crowding in the prisons also leaves little space for inmates and their significant others to get it on, prison administrators said.

In Thomas case, they added, allowing conjugal visits would allow him to commit the crime of bigamy, provided he could prove he really is married to several women simultaneously.

DOC cannot abate crime and ensure the health and safety of inmates by permitting conjugal visits, even in a restricted manner, Brobson wrote. Any conceivable restriction, due to the inherent private nature of a conjugal visit, would still result in health and safety concerns.

Thomas had no luck on one of his other complaints, either. Brobson rejected his contention that he should be allowed to possess prayer oil. Thomas claims he needs to use the oil for each of his five daily prayers.

Under prison policy, staffers put small amounts of oil on Muslim inmates who attend Jumuah. Prisoners arent allowed to possess any oil because it is flammable and can be used to mask the scent of illegal drugs, jail officials contend.

Due to the fact that prayer oil is available for his use, Thomas has not suffered a substantial burden on the exercise of his religion, Brobson concluded.

Commonwealth Court did give Thomas a chance to further hash out another of his complaints, however. That is his contention that the prison phone policy is over-reaching.

The policy prohibits a phone number from appearing on more than one inmates list of permitted phone contacts. Corrections officials claim that prevents inmates from coordinating crimes by contacting mutual friends. Thomas claims the restrictions violate his right to free speech.

Brobson found the arguments on that must be addressed further before his court can issue a ruling.A fair number of misconceptions regarding the construction of Harrisburgs new federal courthouse are being spread and adopted as if they were true, said U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, R-Dauphin County.

Among them is the misconception that no local companies have been awarded contracts to help build the $200 million federal courthouse slated for Sixth and Reily streets in Harrisburg, he said.

Central Pennsylvania leaders met Wednesday in Perrys office with the general contractor on the courthouse project, Pittsburgh-based Mascaro Construction, and representatives of the General Services Administration to get answers to questions about the use of local labor on the three-year construction project.

Weekly Jericho Marches at the courthouse site have been organized by leaders of the Greater Harrisburg Branch of the NAACP and The Rev. Earl Harris, president of the citys Interdenominational Ministers Conference, to call for local labor  and specifically minority- and women-owned businesses  to be used on the construction.

Harrisburg City Council President Wanda Williams and Councilman David Madsen said they were at the table to discuss the absolute outrage reverberating throughout Harrisburg over the lack of local entities not being able to participate in the development of the new federal courthouse.

After the meeting, they issued a statement calling it a first step to make sure contractors from Harrisburg, Dauphin County, and nearby Cumberland and York counties have every opportunity to be considered for the contracts that have yet to be awarded.

Those concerns should be taken seriously, Perry said. He noted, however, that some Harrisburg contractors are working on the project with an expectation more are to be hired. He said roughly 12 percent of the contracts for the project remain to be awarded, and the discussion Wednesday focused on how to ensure local companies and minority- and women-owned businesses could compete for those contracts.

In an earlier interview Michael Mascaro, executive vice president of Mascaro Construction, said the company has been taken aback by the criticism from the Jericho Marchers.

13 'Jericho March' against economic injustice held at new federal courthouse site in Harrisburg

Were not doing anything differently than weve done with any other federal or state job, he said.

He said most of the hiring of workers for the project really hasnt happened yet.

I think were all in agreement that we need to be focusing on what we can focus on, Perry said. What is done is done. They are literally moving dirt and doing foundation work now.

False rumors have been circulated declaring that industries and businesses in Dauphin County werent allowed to be part of the bidding process, Perry said.

Everybody was allowed to bid, Perry said. From my perspective, its more of a miscommunication problem than anything."

One contract was awarded to Harnden Construction Services, a Harrisburg-based excavating and site work company. Owner Chuck Harden said his firm was one of three from which Mascaro solicited bids. He said he has full-time superintendents and heavy equipment operators working on the courthouse project, and he will be hiring additional people for that job.

In addition to Williams and Madsen, the meeting included Dauphin County commissioners Mike Pries and George Hartwick, State Sen. John DiSanto, Larissa Baily from U.S. Sen. Pat Toomeys office, Sandra Garcia of U.S. Sen. Bob Caseys office, and U.S. Sen. Bob Caseys state director Erin Wilson.

State Rep. Patty Kim attempted to make the meeting but was unable to attend. Mayor Eric Papenfuse did not attend.

"This was a good faith effort on everybodys part to make sure we do better in the future, Perry said.

Everybody needs the General Services Administration to push better communication earlier on in economy-boosting projects like the courthouse, Perry said. Funding for the federal courthouse, which has been in the making for over a decade, was approved by Congress in March 2017.

The GSAs job is to make sure taxpayers dollars are spent wisely, Perry said. The contractors job is to stay on schedule, but oftentimes, what is left out is that relationship-building scenario. Relationship-building isnt enumerated in contract documents. The contractor wants to get the project done on time, thats what they are focused on. They arent thinking that the next step is community engagement because its not part of the contract."

There is an unwritten contract, Perry acknowledged, for folks who are depending on their vocation as a contractor.

Its important for us to be mindful, Perry said. "It makes it a better project all around when theres community engagement.Well-oiled machine: Eta Nu's Dress for Chill program continues to provide warmth, smiles

Thanks to the Boyne Eta Nu Charities' "Dress for Chill" program, a total of 187 Boyne City students will be dressed warmly this winter season.UK-Deployed B-52s Fly Missions Across Europe



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The Wolf and the Watchman

By Niklas Natt och Dag

Atria. 373 pp. $27

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand

Its early to be pegging the years best books, but this is sure to be one of them. A longtime cultural columnist and blogger for Swedish magazines, Natt och Dag brings a reporters eye for detail to this feverishly dark historical thriller, first of a trilogy and published in more than 30 countries. Even readers inured to grim depictions of Sweden in the work of writers like Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson may be taken aback by Natt och Dags 1793 Stockholm, a hellish place that seems mired in the Middle Ages despite the gradual encroachment of Enlightenment ideas.

The watchman of the title, Mickel Cardell, is one of a ragtag crew employed by the citys police force to arrest vagrants, prostitutes, orphans, and others who struggle to survive in Stockholms cesspit streets. A veteran who lost his left arm during Swedens ill-fated war with Russia, Cardell works at a beer cellar, where he keeps order with a carved wooden prosthetic  a formidable weapon for dealing with truculent customers. Very early one morning, hes awakened from a drunken stupor by two children who have found a body in a nearby lake thats little more than an open sewer.

The waves lap against the shore, churning up a pale yellow froth. Something rotten  a dark lump  is floating a few meters out. Cardells first thought is that it cannot possibly be a human being.

But it is, or was, a human being, horrifically mutilated. The corpse is brought to the attention of Cecil Winge, a young lawyer turned investigator who works with Stockholms police chief, Johan Gustaf Norlin. Set during a period of political and social unrest, with rumors of the French Revolution muttered in the alleys, corruption is rampant among the Stockholm police. In the shadows of this chaos, Norlin and Winge, two righteous men, know their days with the force are numbered. In the last stages of consumption, with only weeks to live, Winge has nothing to lose by joining forces with Cardell to uncover the identity of the unknown man, whom they name Karl Johan, and his murderer.

"So this man has had his arms and legs shorn away in turn," Winge calmly observes to Cardell, before noting even more disturbing details.

Even more nightmarish are the descriptions of everyday life in a society where numbing poverty is ubiquitous. The Wolf and the Watchman is exceedingly grim and often grisly, but, in the elegant translation by Ebba Segerberg, its never lurid. Natt och Dag has spoken of his admiration for Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose. Like Ecos novel, The Wolf and the Watchman is a cerebral, immersive page-turner whose detective is a rationalist trapped in a world ruled by fear, superstition, and men whose humanity has been debased and erased as surely as Karl Johans.

Natt och Dag takes some narrative risks. Divided into four parts, the book focuses on Winge and Cardells investigation in its first and final sections, with Winge himself growing sicker and more corpse-like every day. The middle two sections jump back to the previous spring and summer: Each follows a different character whose connections to victim and killer are only gradually and chillingly revealed. Its a strategy with an impressive payoff, as scenes that initially seemed to serve as stylistic or historical flourishes instead prove crucial to the plot, fitting together as precisely as the gears of the pocket watch Winge obsessively takes apart and puts back together.

The last 50 pages provide plenty of twists to satisfy thrill-starved readers, but its the final haunting sentence that raises gooseflesh and leaves one reaching to turn up the light.

Elizabeth Hands novel Curious Toys will be published in the fall. She wrote this review for the Washington Post.Bangkok Wakes to Rain

By Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Riverhead Books. 360 pp. $27

Reviewed by Colette Bancroft

Sometimes a novel draws us in because it strikes a chord from our own experience, because we identify with its characters or have lived in its setting and feel at home in its story. Other novels do the opposite, transporting us to a place or time wholly unfamiliar and for that reason fascinating. Bangkok Wakes to Rain, the stunning debut novel by Pitchaya Sudbanthad, was, for me, the latter kind of book, one that creates a world so rich and alive I wanted to swim in it.

Its a book filled with water, thanks to Bangkoks climate and geography and, perhaps, its coming fate. The novels structure could be modeled on a watershed, separate streams of story feeding into one another until they become a river that flows across more than a century and the lives of many characters.

Sudbanthad was born in Thailand and raised in Saudi Arabia and the United States. Now a New York resident, he brings a cosmopolitan perspective and a natives deep affection to his portrait of Bangkok and its people. Much of the books power lies in its language and imagery, on full display in its lovely first paragraph:

Always, she arrives near evening. The last few children in blue-and-white uniforms have finished their after-school work and are plodding along in small gangs or, like her, alone. They dont take notice of her; they have screens in their hands, shoves and teasing to repay, snacks bagged in newsprint to grease up their fingers. In their trail sparrows tussle over fallen fried crumbs and biscuit sticks trampled to powder by little shoes. 

The novel at first seems like a collection of linked short stories, with characters who appear to be connected only by the city. Many of them live, in various eras, in a house built more than a century ago as a merchants mansion. As the novel moves into the present and then several decades into the future, the site will be overtaken by a condominium building that preserves the houses facade in its lobby, an architectural ghost of the past in a modern metropolis.

Bangkok Wakes to Rain is itself a sort of house of ghosts and those haunted by them, in a cycle of vivid life and aching loss. Sudbanthad writes, "The forgotten return again and again, as new names and faces, and again this city makes new ghosts." If any one story dominates the book, its that of a woman named Nee. We meet her in the early 1970s, a time of political upheaval under the rule of a brutal dictator. Then a young nursing student, she falls in love with another student, Siripohng.

In one of the books most moving chapters, the arc of their courtship shimmers to life and ends in tragedy. When the military attacks hundreds of thousands of demonstrating students with bombs and gunfire, Nee survives by plunging into Chao Phraya, the river that runs through Bangkok. She will surface in many other chapters, her life taking surprising turns.

Some of the novels characters are Westerners who come to Thailand for what they think will be only a little while. The chapters that stretch farthest back in history concern Phineas Stevens, an American doctor who comes to what was then Siam in the late 1900s to work at a mission hospital and is overwhelmed by the heathen city.

Among the most affecting chapters are those about an American jazz pianist, Clyde Alston. He first appears when hes hired to perform a sort of musical exorcism of the mansion. Hes told that a medium counts twenty or so spirits in the pillar. They visit me in my dreams, and Im tired of it. A woman my age needs her sound sleep. Clyde wishes he could exorcise his own ghost, a beloved he lost touch with years ago: The most deafening thing hes ever heard is the silence between two people.

Near the novels end, Sudbanthad moves several decades into the future. A preservationist named Woon works in a building that floats ten kilometers west of his neighborhood, anchored to a network of piers in the newly formed sea. His work is the rescue of artifacts from places now submerged by rising oceans, everything from stone lions and golden Buddhas to letters from the dead to the long forgotten. Each one is blipped by technology that preserves its three-dimensional image so it will live on digitally even if the object is destroyed.

Such "capture" is also used on a much larger scale. Woons mother, in her 70s and in failing health, uses the technology to visit a relative, both of them transported to the condominium built around the old house. Its re-created for them in every detail  right down to one of its ghosts  out of the technologically harvested memories of countless other inhabitants.

Like the technology Sudbanthad imagines, this novel beautifully brings a place and its people alive.

This review originally appeared in the Tampa Bay Times .The Story of Greece and Rome

By Tony Spawforth

Yale University Press. 392 pp. $30

Reviewed by John Timpane

From time to time, people ask me, Whats a good history of Greece and Rome I can read? From now on, I think Ill recommend this one, a readable tour for all readers.

In The Story of Greece and Rome, onetime professor of ancient history Tony Spawforth has given us a sweeping, beautifully written story covering eight and a half millennia, from the first traces of Neolithic life in what we now call Greece to the fadeaway of Rome in the late 400s A.D. We get the well-known stops on this tour  the Minoans, the Mycenaeans who displaced them, the Dark Age, the Iliad and Odyssey, then the rise of the classical Greece that began Western civilization (or so we like to think, as Spawforth points out). Then Rome, from village alliance to world empire, meeting along the way Julius Caesar, Augustus, Cicero, Virgil, Nero, and a cavalcade of generals, warmongers, thugs, and, crucially, historians.

Spawforth brings the archaeological record alive. An Etruscan helmet signals one of the moments when the candlelight of Etruscan power began to flicker, marking both a high point and the decline to come. He takes us with him into the field of discovery with excitement-unto-reverence:

Once I came face to face not quite with Alexander the Great, but with what may be his oldest ancient likeness. I had received permission to mount wooden scaffolding in front of Tomb II at Vergina in northern Greece.  For me this was a moment of great privilege: few people before or since have been this close. 

With Spawford as our guide, we grasp a world less of myths and superheroes than of people who really lived.

Also great, we get constant glimpses of the importance of women in the archaic and ancient worlds. Cleopatra, sure, but we meet many others, including Axiothea, a student of Plato who disguised herself as a man. With characteristic wit, Spawforth comments, the fact that Axiothea  felt obliged to cross-dress suggests strong social disapproval for Greek females spending time in the company of unrelated men.

He can be very droll, much in the classical sense. As you might expect a classicist to do, he takes aim at 300, the popular 2006 film about the war between the Greeks and the Persians. Why? Because that flick was, as some think, a lurid, racist comic book hash? No: Because the filmmakers unfairly portrayed King Xerxes as beardless: It denies modern beard-lovers some particularly splendid precursors. Xerxes and other kings of his dynasty sported strikingly long, luxuriant and well-groomed beards in Persian art.

With the swords but minus the sorcery, he writes, the upheavals in the world following Alexanders death would not seem alien to fans of Game of Thrones  such a graceful way to begin a discussion of one of the most confusing stretches of Greek history ever. He praises a peculiar bust of the jowly warlord Pompey the Great for its enviously full head of hair and "the artfully rendered quiff of lustrous locks, poking fun at the warlords self-regard.

This story has surprises. One is the Lefkandi building on the island of Euboea, a rare glimpse into the Dark Age world of the Greeks as of 1000 B.C. Spawforth makes sure to quote a couple of lines from a Sappho poem only recently put together, reminding us that new things are being discovered all the time. I didnt know Cleopatra was in Rome when Julius Caesar was murdered. And the Antikythera mechanism, a kind of astrological calculating machine, has only recently been comprehensively understood, revealing Greek technology as farther along than many supposed. (Please, objectors, dont write in. I know folks are arguing about it. Peace and honor to you all.)

And it has tantalizing mysteries and controversies. If the Minoans were so flourishingly successful, who the heck were they, what language did they speak, and how come they have no art about kings or wars? How much of Homer should we take as accurate? Granting there was a Trojan war of some sort, why? How big a deal was it really? Priam and Paris appear to be real people, but what about the head guy, Agamemnon, called king of all the Greeks, when we can find no evidence there was such a king? Who were the Trojans? What about those Etruscans? And exactly what role did Christianity play in hastening Romes exit?

What a story, one worth reading. Spawforth makes the case for its lasting value: These are things which suspend despair about the shortcomings of human nature. They bring joy, and hope.Parents who aren't anti-vaxxers but spread out their children's vaccines at a more gradual pace than doctors recommend. Pediatricians warn that could leave small children vulnerable to disease. Read more

GoFundMe has joined a growing list of social media companies cracking down on anti-vaccination propaganda to help stop the spread of misinformation.

The increased effort from tech giants, such as Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube, comes amid a relentless anti-vaccine movement, talk about "chickenpox parties" and concerns over measles outbreaks across the country. It also comes as the American Medical Association, the nation's most prominent doctors' organization, has urged social media platforms to ensure users have access to accurate information on vaccines.

Amazon confirmed this week that it, too, had taken action, pulling books from its online marketplace that tout bogus information about autism and vaccines.

Then came Instagram's announcement.

And now GoFundMe is doing the same.

GoFundMe spokesman Bobby Whithorne said in a statement to the Daily Beast that "Campaigns raising money to promote misinformation about vaccines violate GoFundMe's terms of service and will be removed from the platform." He said the company is "conducting a thorough review and will remove any campaigns currently on the platform."

But Whithorne told the news site that those crowdfunding campaigns are "extremely rare" and that, so far, the company has found fewer than 10 to remove.

Experts say companies, especially social media platforms, are being tasked with new and challenging responsibilities as they learn to navigate the line between doing business and playing the role of censor in an age when misleading claims about health and science can have a profound impact on public health. At the same time, some anti-vaccination advocates suggest the crackdowns violate First Amendment rights, limit alternative views and give Big Pharma an upper hand. (Larry Cook, a prominent advocate, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post about the changes.)

Nevertheless, Facebook has announced it is banning certain content and ads containing misinformation about vaccines, Pinterest said it is blocking "polluted" search terms, memes and pins prompting anti-vaccine propaganda and YouTube said it is banning anti-vaccination channels from running online advertisements, according to news reports. Instagram told the Hill this week that it plans to begin blocking hashtags connected to "known health-related misinformation including #vaccinescauseautism, #vaccinesarepoison, and #vaccinescauseids."

Last week, James Madara, executive vice president and chief executive of the AMA, sent a letter to the top executives at Amazon, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube, asking them for help.

Madara said doctors "are troubled by reports of anti-vaccine related messages and advertisements targeting parents searching for vaccine information on your platforms."

"As physicians, we are concerned that the proliferation of this type of health-related misinformation will undermine sound science, further decrease vaccinations, and persuade people to make medical decisions that could spark the spread of easily preventable diseases," he wrote. "With public health on the line and with social media serving as a leading source of information for the American people, we urge you to do your part to ensure that users have access to scientifically valid information on vaccinations, so they can make informed decisions about their families' health."

"We also urge you to make public your plans to ensure that users have access to accurate, timely, scientifically sound information on vaccines," Madara said in the letter.

The anti-vaccine movement has been sustained, in part, from fraudulent research from 1998 that purported to show a link between autism and a preservative used in vaccines - despite the fact that it has been discredited and despite the fact that numerous other studies have provided conclusive evidence that vaccinations do not cause autism.

The controversial debate has found center stage on popular social media platforms, where anti-vaxxers have been spreading misinformation, and health-care professionals have been coming under fire for trying to combat it.

The Washington Post's Lena H. Sun reported earlier this week that "pediatricians and other practitioners are increasingly coming under digital attack from a global movement that spreads misinformation about vaccines."

She added:

"Online attacks against people who speak out in favor of vaccines have become increasingly common, clinicians and vaccine advocates say. Social media websites are the primary platform for the anti-vaccination movement's misleading claims. Although anti-vaccine activists are a small minority, on social media they may appear to be the majority."

Art Caplan, a bioethics professor and head of the division of medical ethics at New York University School of Medicine, previously said that these companies cannot allow themselves to be "vehicles for misinformation contagion."

You can certainly post things that oppose vaccination - individuals can speak their minds. But when you have websites that are presenting false information, debunked information or, similarly, books that tout phony cures, I think there is a role for somebody in censorship, said Caplan, who co-authored a 2017 paper on The overlooked dangers of anti-vaccination groups social media presence. Caplan said it is important for companies to exclude such misinformation because the power of social media, particularly in the vaccine space, is so strong that its leading to fear of vaccines, which is leading to epidemics, which is putting people at risk.Hemp growing in a field. Canopy Growth, the Canadian cannabis behemoth, announced it bought AgriNextUSA of Reading Pa. with an eye to building Hemp Industrial Parks across the U.S. (Dreamstime/TNS) Read more

Canopy Growth Corp., the Canadian cannabis behemoth, is acquiring AgriNextUSA of Reading with an eye on building its hemp business in the United States.

AgriNextUSA has been headed by Geoff Whaling, an evangelist for hemp and its many applications. Whaling said Canopys chairman, Bruce Linton, called him right after President Donald Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill that legalized hemp and asked, When are we growing hemp?

Whaling would not say how much Canopy was paying for AgriNextUSA.

The self-styled Hemporer of America sees hemp becoming a multi-billion dollar industry. Analysts for investment bankers Cowen & Co. predict that U.S. revenues for just one range of hemp products  manufactured with the extract cannabidiol or CBD  could be worth $16 billion annually by 2025.

Whaling will serve as a strategic adviser to Canopy. He has been friends with the companys principals since the Ontario-based corporation was a tiny outfit with 20 people. Canopy now employs thousands in a dozen countries, and is the largest cannabis and hemp company with a market capitalization of $15.7 billion.

Whaling, president of the National Hemp Association and Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council, said his first project with Canopy will be to get a hemp industrial park running near Binghamton, N.Y.

We expect to hire a few hundred people, he said. This is moving very, very quickly. Planting of this years hemp crop could begin in less than seven weeks.

We want to rekindle this once-great American industry, Whaling said. Right now theres no infrastructure or supply chain to support it. No equipment or facilities.

The remedy to that, he said, is a series of hemp industrial parks across the country, complete with textile mills and CBD extraction facilities. He hopes to plant a park in Pennsylvania, because this was once the epicenter for hemp in America.

Ross Duffield, former manager of the Rodale Institutes experimental farm near Kutztown, Pa., was hired by Canopy to become its national cultivation manager, Whaling said.

Hemp can be used to manufacture a wide array of items. In addition to extracted CBD, hemps fibers can be fashioned into textiles and advanced building materials. Its seeds are a high-protein resource for a variety of foods and oils.

Whaling said he would reach out to farmers within a 50-mile radius of Binghamton to encourage them to grow the crop. That might not be a hard sell. According to Cowen, corn and soybeans generate a few hundred dollars per acre, but the gross returns per acre for CBD hemp go up to $36,000.Paramour at the Wayne Hotel will bow out June 23 after seven years as restaurateur Marty Grims and his Fearless Restaurants move in to open Rosalie, an Italian restaurant, later this summer.

Fearless, whose holdings include the White Dog Cafes, Autograph Brasserie, and Louie Louie (with a fourth White Dog teed up for Glen Mills later this year), described the cuisine in a statement as "Italian soul food ... deeply rooted in tradition, heritage and technique, adapted to the local landscape with a gentle-contemporary approach.

Rosalie is named for Grims mother, whose family emigrated from Italy.

Executive chef Merick Devine, now chef at White Dogs Wayne location, spent 6 years as chef de cuisine at Frasca, in Boulder, Colo., a James Beard Award finalist for outstanding restaurant. Acting general manager will be Ettore Cerase, most recently a VP with Davios and previously with Philadelphias Four Seasons Hotel.Jamee Cook, shown here in Washington last year, had breast implants that ruptured and which she believes caused her medical problems. She is an invited speaker at FDA hearings Monday. Read more

Can breast implants trigger chronic illness and even cause cancer?

That question has plagued silicone gel-filled implants almost from their introduction in the 1960s, so there may be a sense of here-we-go-again when advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration revisit the debate during hearings Monday and Tuesday.

But this time around, women who testify that their implants made them sick cant be discounted as anecdotal cases, or overwrought, or motivated by a class-action lawsuit.

International health authorities now recognize that implants with roughened surfaces  both gel-filled and saline-filled  can cause a very rare lymphoma, a type of immune-system cancer. Since the FDA first issued a warning in 2011, nearly 700 cases and 17 deaths have been tallied worldwide. Three months ago, Allergan took its leading brands of textured implants off the market in Europe after French regulators announced they had suspended their approval.

There is also mounting scientific evidence linking silicone gel implants to autoimmune disorders and vaguer debilitating symptoms such as fatigue, pain, and thinking problems  just as legions of women have contended since the 1990s, when the FDA initially held hearings.

The FDA panel is slated to hear from two scientists at the forefront of research into the lymphoma and "breast implant illness: Jan Willem Cohen Tervaert, an immunologist from the University of Alberta in Canada, and Mark Clemens, a plastic surgeon at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The scientific literature at the end of the last century was heavily sponsored by industry, Cohen Tervaert said in an interview. Now, serious researchers are showing a different view.

It remains to be seen whether the two-day meeting will have any impact on FDA regulation, or on the unrelenting demand for implants. Each year, about 300,000 U.S. women enlarge their breasts, and 100,000 cancer patients reconstruct their breasts, using the prosthetics.

But as more and more women come to regret their decision, they are using social media to organize and push for major changes. Terri McGregor, 54 , of North Bay, Ontario  who cofounded a Facebook group devoted to implant lymphoma after she almost died of it in 2015  helped lobby the FDA for more than a year to hold the meeting. The activists want textured implants removed from the market. And they want a more rigorous informed-consent process because their experience suggests surgeons often omit or downplay risks with women considering implants.

We believe no woman is ever going to say, I choose the implants with the risk of cancer,  McGregor said. Were saying that when someone is determining the risk assessment for us, instead of giving us the information we need, that is not acceptable.

Why the question is still open

Silicone gel-filled implants came on the market in 1962, before the FDA had authority to regulate them.

By 1992, with more and more women blaming gel implants for serious but enigmatic health problems including autoimmune diseases, then-FDA Commissioner David Kessler banned gel-filled implants except for use in approved studies. The ban alarmed women and set off a deluge of product-liability lawsuits that ultimately bankrupted Dow Corning Corp., a major implant maker, and led to a multibillion mass tort settlement.

Then, as now, the regulation of implants involved public opinion, the law, politics, and commercial interests, as well as scientific evidence. But back then, the science was lacking because implants had come to market without clinical testing. When Kessler asked manufacturers for data showing the devices were safe, they couldnt provide it.

Today, a large body of studies has measured the rates of common implant problems, including rupture, deflation, breast hardening, and infection.

The question of breast implant illness, however, remains open because existing studies are too limited or flawed to settle the matter. The public generally thinks implants have been exonerated because the FDA, implant makers, and plastic surgeons frame the lack of conclusive evidence as reassuring.

The thing is, no one has ever followed enough women for enough years to tease out the risks of rare autoimmune diseases such as scleroderma  and besides, many women suffer a constellation of symptoms with no neat diagnosis.

Jamee Cook, 41, had to quit her job as a paramedic because of migraines, memory problems, fatigue, fevers, enlarged lymph nodes, and more. The removal of her implants in 2015 dramatically improved her health  and turned her into an activist. She is an invited speaker Monday morning.

I keep hearing that the 1990s was money-driven, said Cook, who lives near Dallas. Were speaking out now because were sick, not to get money.

On its website, the FDA acknowledges the conundrum of rare and ill-defined illness: In order to rule out these and other complications, studies would need to be larger and longer than those conducted so far.

To address this need, the FDA directed Allergan and Mentor Worldwide to undertake large, decade-long studies beginning in 2006 when the agency lifted its 14-year-old ban and allowed gel implants back on the market.

But after reaching enrollment goals, the companies studies fell apart. Within several years, more than half the participants were lost to follow-up. The FDA responded by allowing much smaller studies to suffice. Still, deficiencies persist. Just this week, the agency sent warning letters regarding inadequate enrollment and follow-up rates to Mentor, a part of Johnson & Johnson, and Sientra, which first got conditional approval to market in the U.S. in 2012.

The FDA could withdraw approval of an implant for noncompliance with its orders, but it never has.

During Mondays meeting, the FDA panel will get updates from the companies on the post-approval studies.

An allergy to implants

Limited though the industry studies are, Clemens, at MD Anderson, led an analysis of Mentor and Allergan data on more than 90,000 women that found gel implants are associated with slightly higher rates of Sjogrens syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, and scleroderma  all autoimmune disorders  as well as melanoma, the most serious type of skin cancer. The researchers stressed this does not prove implants are causing disease.

The FDA promptly issued a press release disputing the findings, published in September in the Annals of Surgery.

One criticism of Clemens analysis was that some of the diseases were reported directly by women, not necessarily diagnosed by doctors.

Cohen Tervaert and colleagues sidestepped that weakness by analyzing an Israeli health-care database containing doctors diagnoses. Compared to 98,600 women without implants, 24,600 women with gel-filled devices had higher rates of autoimmune and rheumatic diseases, notably Sjogrens syndrome, systemic sclerosis, and an inflammatory disease called sarcoidosis, according to the paper published last year in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Cohen Tervaert has also done lab-based studies in his native Holland, where he worked until last year, to unravel how the immune system may go awry in some women with implants. Basically, he theorizes that the implant acts as a sort of allergen, triggering a chronic inflammatory process. The resulting illness can range from fatigue, dry eyes, and body aches  all the way to the lymphoma.

Technically called breast implant-associated anaplastic large-cell lymphoma, it is usually diagnosed because of sudden swelling around the implant. It is curable if treated promptly with surgery to remove the implant and surrounding scar capsule. But McGregor, the Canadian patient activist, had no swelling. By the time she felt lumps in an armpit, her disease had spread to lymph nodes there and to her bowel.

In response to research by Cohen Tervaerts team, Hollands national health-care system now pays for implant removal in women diagnosed with implant disease. Doctors are also supposed to advise women with a history of allergies or autoimmune disorders not to get implants.

In the U.S., where insurers rarely cover the explant" surgery  the cost of which starts at $5,000  more than 6,000 women have sought advice over the past four years from the National Center for Health Research, said Diana Zuckerman, president of the health policy think tank.

Often, they get so sick that they cant work anymore, said Zuckerman, who will present data from 400 explant patients at Mondays meeting. Sometimes even their relationships or marriages fall apart, so they really have no money. Weve managed to help 20 percent get surgeries.Kate (left) and Tess Donlevie open a mystery envelope from a travel agent that specializes in mystery trips. The mother and daughter opened their surprise travel itinerary at the Philadelphia International Airport. Read more

Kate Donlevie and her daughter Tess struggled to open the large red envelope that would announce their weekend travel destination. Instructed not to open it until they were in Philadelphia International Airports Terminal F, they were anxious with anticipation.

Savannah! they announced at the same time.

Kate had been there briefly before and was excited to be going back. It was just an overnight when I was taking one of my daughters back to college and it was almost 100 degrees, said Kate, 59, from Ocean City. I always said I wanted to go back when it was more decent weather.

They had only planned the Magical Mystery Tours trip about two weeks earlier. I thought a mystery trip sounded fun, Kate said. I hate planning. After filling out an extensive questionnaire, the tour company did all the legwork.

Ive never done anything like this, added Tess, 23, from Northern Liberties. Im a nervous traveler, so why not throw myself completely out of my comfort zone.

Surprise trips are about adventure while leaving the time-consuming and stressful planning behind. If there isnt a natural planner in your circle of friends, lots of companies will do the work for you. Clients get a thorough questionnaire to narrow down their likes and dislikes, where theyve traveled previously and details including whether they like to wake up and get going or linger through a leisurely breakfast. Is their ideal afternoon spent poolside or hiking? Questions cover hobbies, food preferences, distance they are willing to travel, and vital statistics including passport number.

And interest in these types of trips is growing. Ten years ago everybody thought, I have the internet, I can plan a trip, whereas now, they think There are a million options on the internet and its hard to plan a trip,' said Denise Chaykun Weaver, president of Magical Mystery Tours in Drexel Hill.

Pinterest saw a 192 percent growth in pins for surprise trips year-over-year from January through September 2018, said Larkin Brown, Pinterest user researcher and in-house stylist. Its about putting your own spin on a vacation, elevating the everyday, she said. What we see in our pins is that its mostly about that process and how to go about it in a way that will make people excited and not anxious, more than about any particular destination.

Kelley Gorman, 29, is a planner but instead of going with a company like Magical Mystery Tours, she offered to organize the trip herself when her group of five friends decided to go on vacation last November. Each agreed on a $1,300 budget to cover all expenses for their four-day getaway.

It started out as a joke but my friends trusted in me to plan an awesome trip for them, recalled Gorman, from Society Hill, who let one friend help with the planning. She kept the destination mum for the rest until the last second. A week prior to leaving, I sent them all a packing list of what to bring, including a few items to throw them off, like a snow hat and aqua shoes.

She even had them meet at the wrong airport terminal. We didnt want them to connect the dots of the flights at the terminal, she said. They played a guessing game at the airport to reveal the destination  Sausalito, Calif. The surprise element made it that much more fun.

Trip highlights included a beautiful Airbnb overlooking San Francisco, hikes through Muir Woods and Hawk Hill, exploring Sausalito and hitting great bars and restaurants.

It was a really memorable and great trip, said Gorman, who would happily do it again.

If you go in with the right attitude, its a good surprise, said Chaykun Weaver. She started planning covert getaways in 2010. The anticipation is often as fun as the trip itself, she said. About a week before your trip, youll get the weather forecast at your destination, what to pack for your trip and when and where youll need to be. Travelers get an envelope with their travel documents and itinerary several days before leaving, but are urged not to open it until the last minute.

Magical Mystery Tours started serendipitously when Weaver offered to plan a trip for a friend in 2010, and now has five employees and an expected revenue of $1 million in 2019, up from about $300,000 three years ago. Weaver thinks the recent surge comes from exposure of mystery trips through media, social media, and word of mouth.

Customized vacations start at $900 for a weekend getaway for one, to tens of thousands for luxury group excursions. The tour company takes $300 for planning, commissions from hotels, and additional fees to set up excursions.

The trip Justin Shaffer planned to celebrate his 10th anniversary with his wife, Amanda, last March was a double surprise. Knowing that their vacation preferences dont always align, he gave Magical Mystery Tours a budget and a list of things the couple both enjoyed, but didnt tell Amanda.

Not only could somebody plan it for me, but it was also a surprise and I had no hand in the mix because I didnt even know where we were going, said Justin, 33.

They ended up in St. Lucia, staying at Crystals, tree top villas in a mango tree grove  not your typical beach resort where a lot of people would flock, said Amanda, 33. The couple loved the trip and the process, and cant wait to do it again.

Surprise Me! Trips, based in Austin, Texas, launched in early 2017, with 18 trips the first year. Last year, they booked close to 50, mostly millennials and Gen Xers. A lot of millennials were going with groups of friends, though there were some couples and bucket listers, said Judi Johnson, partner in Surprise Me! Trips, where packages start at $600 per person for two people for a weekend escape. More Gen Xers were doing anniversaries and birthdays, mother/adult child trips, road trips and multigenerational cruises.

Tina Barkers of Birmingham, Ala., discovered the City of Brotherly Love on her Pack Up + Go Surprise trip in October 2018. An avid traveler, she wanted to celebrate her friend Philip Gentrys 49th birthday, but decided to leave the planning hassles to someone else.

When I finally released the power and let someone else plan the trip, I welcomed it because they had everything so well planned, said Barkers, 51. It took the headache away from talking to folks, being on the internet  all that extra work. You didnt have to do anything but prepare to go.

Their $650 per person three-day package included their flights, Sonesta Hotel stay, restaurants and all the highlights  the Rocky statue, a run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, visits to the Liberty Bell and Reading Terminal Market, a carriage ride and more.

You have to be open minded to do something like this because you have no control until you actually get there, she said.FILE - This Sept. 12, 2018, file photo shows former President Jimmy Carter answering questions from students during his annual town hall with Emory University in Atlanta. (Curtis Compton / Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP) Read more

Jimmy Carter  the 39th president of the United States  has recently celebrated multiple record-breaking milestones: The 40th anniversary of his inauguration was in 2017, and he joined George H.W. Bush as the only other president to reach 94 in October.

On Friday, at the age of 94 years and 172 days, Carter will also become the longest-living president in U.S. history.

Born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Ga., the typically cheery and humble former Navy lieutenant has had a life of service. Before taking office as president, he served as a state senator in Georgia and as governor.

His presidency  remembered for the Camp David accords, the Iran hostage crisis, and creation of the Departments of Energy and Education  flamed out during the election of 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated him.

After leaving the White House in 1981, Carter, then 56, and his wife, Rosalynn, returned to their hometown in southern Georgia.

Carter remains engaged in the causes and activities that matter most, according to the Carter Center's director of communications, Deanna Congileo: He participates in the Carter Center programs in global peace and health and annual Habitat for Humanity builds, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, for work during and after his time in office. Carter also continues to teach Sunday school lessons and courses at Emory University.

Both President and Mrs. Carter are determined to use their influence for as long as they can to make the world a better place. Their tireless resolve and heart have helped to improve life for millions of the worlds poorest people, Congileo wrote in an email to the Washington Post.

In 2015, Carter announced doctors had discovered a form of melanoma that spread to his brain.

"I just thought I had a few weeks left, but I was surprisingly at ease," Carter said at a news conference that August. "I've had an exciting and adventurous and gratifying existence."

He received his first radiation treatment at 90 years old. Four months later, he was  remarkably  cancer free.Antoine Ketler, center, and his father, Supreme Life, right, appear in court at the Burlington County Courthouse in Mt. Holly, NJ on March 13, 2019. They were tried for murder and attempted murder for a fight after the Philadelphia Eagles' 2018 Super Bowl victory. Read more

A South Jersey man was acquitted of murder but convicted of passion provocation manslaughter Friday in the stabbing death of a man moments after the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

A jury in Mount Holly handed down the verdict against Supreme Life, 57, of Lumberton, after about six hours of deliberation. The jury also found Life guilty of attempted murder for stabbing a second man in the abdomen when a street fight broke out in Lifes neighborhood on Coriander Drive during the celebration of the Eagles victory over the New England Patriots.

Life, whose name was Charles Hoskins before he changed it for religious and personal reasons, could face more than 20 years in prison when he is sentenced in May by Superior Court Judge Charles Delehey in Mount Holly.

During the trial, Life testified that the fight began when his son was overheard making an insulting remark about the Eagles. Life, a former landscaper and Army veteran, said he ribbed his son, Antoine Ketler, 33, a Dallas Cowboys fan, about the Eagles win, and Ketler replied, F the Eagles."

Ketler was also charged in the incident. But the jury acquitted him of attempted murder after his lawyer, Anthony Aldorasi, argued that Ketler did not have a knife and only participated in the fistfight.

Life had testified that he was just trying to help his son and said that he stabbed Moriah Walker, 26, of Brooklyn, N.Y., in self-defense. Walker died from a wound to the heart at Cooper University Hospital in Camden after the attack. He also had a stab wound to the chest, a leg, and an arm.

Life also stabbed Walkers friend, Raheem Williams, 23, of Queens, New York City, during the fracas. Life testified that he used a pocket knife with a four-inch blade during the attack.

The two New York men were driving by, heard the remark, and attacked Ketler, Life said, in response to questions posed by his defense attorney, Michael Riley.

Assistant Burlington County Prosecutor Robert VanGilst said the victims were leaving a Super Bowl party in the neighborhood.

Life and Ketler had been held in the Burlington County Jail since the incident. Ketler was released Friday.The dome of the Pennsylvania Capitol is visible in Harrisburg, Pa., Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2019. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Read more

HARRISBURG  Pennsylvania Senate officials fired a longtime security officer on Friday, six months after she filed a lawsuit claiming they tolerate a culture of sexual harassment inside the Capitol.

Senate officials said they have a lengthy record of policy violations to support the firing of Sue Salov, who worked for the chamber for more than 25 years.

She was terminated because over the course of the last 12 to 18 months, her conduct has been quite problematic in the Senate, said Drew Crompton, the Senates top attorney.

Crompton said Senate officials have a binder full of documents showing that Salov violated Senate rules or policy. He would not detail the violations or provide copies of the documents, citing Senate rules pertaining to personnel matters and Salovs pending lawsuit.

Salov declined comment. Her attorney, Wayne Ely, said he disputes portions of the Senates account.

I really dont want to litigate this case in the press, Ely said, but I take issue with the Senates position, and I believe its unwise for them to be discussing Ms. Salov in a public forum. Beyond that, I would say, Watch the case for further developments.

The Senates handling of Salovs case has raised questions about how the chamber treats people who bring sexual harassment claims. Its also likely to add more drama to her civil case.

Jennifer Storm, the states victim advocate, said that it is difficult to analyze the case without seeing Salovs full record, but that her firing feels retaliatory. It sends a chilling message that if you come forward, you will lose your job, Storm said.

Crompton denied that assessment.

We would never retaliate against an individual who files a harassment claim, he said. We dont do it. We dont even entertain the idea.

He described the matter as a very difficult case and said the Senate tried to reach a settlement with Salov, whose yearly salary was about $65,000, but the sides were not able to agree. At some point, the Senate offered her a different position, which she declined.

Salov alleges Senate officials began retaliating against her after she complained in late 2017 that her then-supervisor, Justin Ferrante, who served as the Senates director of security, had sexually harassed her.

In court records and other documents, Salov contends that Ferrante texted her inappropriate graphics and cartoons and a picture of male genitalia.

Ferrante has also been accused of harassing another former Senate employee, Keah Tingler, who worked as a receptionist in the security office. In her own federal discrimination lawsuit, Tingler alleges that Ferrante on multiple occasions sent her photos of feces during work hours.

Ferrante resigned amid an investigation into the claims. In court documents, he has denied the allegations.

The Senate also denied wrongdoing and quietly agreed to pay Ferrantes legal bills.Devon Cade draws for ballot position out of the coffee can in Room 676 of City Hall, in Philadelphia, Wednesday, March 20, 2019. Read more

Devon Cade, a Philadelphia City Council candidate, collapsed Friday morning at the Board of Elections just before a judge was to hear legal challenges he filed against 30 competitors for an at-large seat.

Cade was talking with attorneys for the candidates he challenged when he went down an dsprawled on the tile floor of a makeshift courtroom. He was muttering and sweating while staff and other people there to hear challenges to nomination petitions called for help and tried to comfort him.

Paramedics lifted Cade, 34, onto a stretcher and rolled him out of the courtroom, heading toward Hahnemann University Hospital.

Common Pleas Court Judge Stella Tsai postponed until Monday hearings for the challenges filed by Cade, who is representing himself. His condition could not immediately be determined.

Cade, who ran unsuccessfully for state representative in 2006, has claimed he used artificial intelligence software to scan and detect forgeries among thousands of signatures filed by candidates on petitions. He had demanded a $1 million bond for anyone who wanted to inspect his equipment.

In other challenges, former Philadelphia Traffic Court Judge Willie Singletary represented himself in a challenge to his eligibility to seek a Council at-large seat. Singletary served 20 months in federal prison after being convicted of two counts of lying to FBI agents in a corruption probe.

Article 2, Section 7 of the Pennsylvania Constitution says people convicted of embezzlement of public moneys, bribery, perjury or other infamous crimes are ineligible to hold any office of trust or profit in the state.

Singletary based his defense on an interpretation of the constitution that he could be prevented from taking a seat on Council if he wins election but is not prohibited from seeking that post.

Whos to say that, if I won, I wont get a pardon? Singletary asked Tsai, who did not immediately rule on the case. He later declined to say if he has sought a pardon from President Donald Trump.

Attorney Kevin Greenberg, who filed the challenge, cited previous court decisions to support his claim and decried the absolute disregard for the constitution by Mr. Singletary.

Singletary bristled when Greenberg noted that he had been disciplined by state authorities after he resigned from office, before his conviction, amid a controversy because he took a photograph of his penis with his phone and showed it to a Traffic Court employee.

Singletary said Greenberg was trying to muddy the waters. Greenberg said the state discipline raised questions about Singletarys credibility.

In other cases, a challenge filed by Democrat Sheila Armstrong in City Councils 5th District against Council President Darrell L. Clarke had been withdrawn by her attorney, Sam Stretton, because it was not served by the deadline at the Board of Elections. Armstrong on Friday asked Judge Abbe Fletman to reinstate her challenge. A hearing on a challenge against Armstrongs candidacy started Friday but was not expected to conclude until at least next week.

In Councils 10th District, Democrat Taras Smerechanskyy withdrew from the primary and a challenge to his candidacy was dropped. A challenge to Judy Moore, another Democrat in that race, was withdrawn.A Philadelphia man was found guilty at trial in federal court of illegal possession of a gun by a convicted felon, U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain said Thursday.

James Hill was charged with illegal possession after he was caught July 8 last year by Philadelphia police officers with a 9mm Sig Sauer pistol with 14 rounds in the magazine, McSwain said.

The case was part of the federal Project Safe Neighborhoods, which targets violent criminals.Workers review video monitoring from around the city at a Homeland Security-financed center in South Philadelphia. Read more

Two years ago, when then-Philadelphia homicide detective Philip Nordo was accused of making secret cash payments to an imprisoned informer, Police Commissioner Richard Ross faced a dilemma: what to do with the officer while the investigation played out.

His solution: assign him to a surveillance camera monitoring unit which happens to sit squarely in the midst of a highly sensitive, federally funded, Homeland Security intelligence-sharing center.

The location seems to have become the departments holding place of choice for officers on restricted duty, having been deemed, at least temporarily, unfit for street duty because of pending criminal charges or a checkered past.

There now, for instance, is James Pitts, a former homicide detective who has been accused of forcibly coercing false confessions from multiple defendants.

Ross says assignment to the camera unit affords a low-risk way to get work from accused officers still on the payroll. Critics, however, contend the practice is a possible security risk, given the units proximity to scores of local and federal agents handling sensitive investigative information. The department typically has not notified its partners when transferring compromised officers to the facility.

This is the last place you should put an officer who has been credibly accused of lying or tampering with evidence or abusing peoples rights, said Mary Catherine Roper, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. I would rather have them do nothing.

Ross, in an email, defended the practice as an efficient use of the officers, who, he said, work under stringent supervision, and have no access to data or information systems.

This has been a practice since 2012, he wrote. Since that time, to our knowledge, there have been no issues regarding officers accessing sensitive information, or utilizing the cameras for dubious purposes.

Still, the practice of assigning officers under a cloud of suspicion to the center troubled University of Nebraska Omaha criminal justice professor Samuel Walker.

Their integrity is suspect, said Walker, adding they need to be put in places where they can do the least possible harm.

He noted that many departments detail such officers to the records room.

Records is good. Dealing with file folders is good, he said, but the camera-monitoring room is a terrible thing to do.

Michael Chitwood Jr. is a former Philadelphia police officer who now serves as sheriff of Volusia County, Fla., which includes Daytona Beach. Chitwood, whose namesake father is Upper Darbys police chief, said finding an appropriate assignment for an officer accused of wrongdoing is not an easy problem. It gets to the heart of the criminal justice system.

Chitwoods advice for police commanders is to assign such officers as far away as you can from any sensitive units. "Ive paid them to stay home, he said.

It is a perennial issue in Philadelphia where a strong police union makes it difficult to dismiss officers, even those with records checkered enough to leave them unwanted as witnesses in criminal cases.

It was revealed last year that the District Attorneys Office maintained a list of officers seen as too compromised by past misconduct to be used as witnesses in trials. There were 66 officers on the list at the time. Nordo was on the list before he was ultimately fired in September 2017. He was charged last month with sexually assaulting witnesses in cases he was handling.

In a brief interview at his home four days before his arrest, Nordo confirmed that he had been posted at the intelligence facility a little while. He then closed the door on this reporter.

Over the years, the department has assigned accused officers to the impound lot, a check-in room for officers testifying in court, and an office answering calls about minor traffic accidents.

According to Ross, the Real Time Camera Center, which monitors surveillance cameras throughout the city, was added to the list seven years ago.

The center is set in a corner of a vast, open, warehouse-like space in South Philadelphia that houses the larger Delaware Valley Intelligence Center (DVIC).

The DVIC is a collaboration among local and federal law enforcement agencies in Philadelphia and 11 surrounding counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. It is one of 79 so-called fusion centers in the United States and U.S. territories created in concert with the Department of Homeland Security. Seen as an intelligence-sharing operation, DVIC allows Philadelphia police and other local departments to interact with analysts from an array of federal agencies, including Homeland Security, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and U.S. Coast Guard.

The Philadelphia Police Department deploys 135 staffers to the intelligence center, which is located in the 2800 block of South 20th Street. The Delaware County District Attorneys Office, the ATF, the FBI, and Homeland Security each provide one full-time analyst. The federal government annually contributes $2.5 million in funding; Philadelphia ponies up almost another $1 million for maintenance and other expenses.

Philadelphia Chief Inspector Daniel MacDonald, who oversees the DVIC, said a goal of the intelligence center is to build relationships between the various agencies represented.

The first time we work together shouldnt be when theres a crisis, MacDonald said.

Real Time Crime Center, where officers on restricted duty work, includes a glass-enclosed section that houses camera monitors. Up to a dozen officers, not all on restricted duty, can work there. Others in the unit sit at a bank of computers nearby, close to some of the city and federal analysts stationed in the intelligence center.

In addition to monitoring the cameras, officers on restricted duty staff the entrance to the facility, checking staff credentials and escorting visitors into the DVIC.

During a visit this month to the camera center by an Inquirer reporter and photographer, there were two restricted duty officers working in the enclosed area. They were being managed by two supervisors  a sergeant and lieutenant. MacDonald said he made sure there was overkill with supervision for the restricted-duty officers.

Officers on restricted duty have limited computer access to police intelligence. For instance, they do not have access to tracing tools for cell phones, license plates readers, and a variety of other sophisticated tracking software.

For all of that, the department has typically not notified other DVIC agencies when it places compromised officers in the camera unit.

SEPTA Police Chief Thomas J. Nestel 3rd, for instance, learned of the assignments only when asked about them by a reporter. He said he was surprised that problematic officers would be sent to the site and stressed that he assigned only his best analysts to work at the intelligence center. He stopped short, however, of criticizing Ross.

Mike Sena, president of the National Fusion Center Association, said that although there is no requirement for police to tell law enforcement partners about the backgrounds of officers they send to fusion centers, I certainly hope they would.

Ross said his department was not obligated to notify other agencies of the specifics of its staffing but would most certainly discuss the issue with any agency that was partner with the city at the DVIC.

Ross, in his email, indicated he understood the criticism of his decision to place officers on restricted duty in the DVIC, and remained open to reconsidering it.

We are aware of the perception that this practice may create, he wrote, and as is the case with all of our policies and procedures, we will continue to evaluate the effectiveness and propriety of our current method of operation.President Donald Trump speaks at Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima, Ohio on Wednesday, in a speech which included an attack on the late Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.). Read more

WASHINGTON  As they consider their options in the 2020 presidential primary, some Democrats are calling for expansive proposals to improve health care, fight climate change, and control college costs.

But many say their top priority is something simpler: normalcy.

'Mentally rational human being with empathy would be a good start, Jean Morrow, 73, said in State College, Pa., this week as she waited for a campaign appearance by Democratic candidate Beto ORourke. Somebody who feels good enough about him or herself that he or she is prepared to really care about what happens to the country.

Ally Towery, a 20-year-old Pennsylvania State University junior at the same event, said: At this point, I just want someone whos going to be a nice person.

Similar comments come up routinely in conversations at Democratic campaign events, where party loyalists say they cant imagine another four years of President Donald Trumps rage-fueled Twitter stream, attacks on enemies and democratic institutions, and routine disregard for facts.

Im just looking for somebody that has dignity and morals and values. Somebody that will not be an embarrassment to us on the world stage, said Evelyn Ripley, a 65-year-old retiree from DuBois, Pa., who also saw ORourke at Penn State.

So while factions of the party argue over whether they should push bold liberal proposals or try more centrist approaches, the president may be a unifying factor. Numerous polls show that the majority of Democrats see beating Trump as more important than any specific policies.

I want someone that can win," Ripley said.

One day later, concerns about Trumps behavior and tone flared again as the president used an official speech to degrade the late Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war who died less than seven months ago and was widely hailed as a national hero.

I wasnt a fan of John McCain, Trump said Wednesday during a visit to a tank factory in Lima, Ohio, on a trip intended to promote jobs and the economy. He said McCain didnt get the job done for our great vets.

Trump also spent time this week attacking George Conway, husband of one of his closest advisers, Kellyanne Conway, after George Conway questioned Trumps mental health. A total loser! the president tweeted.

A CNN poll released this week found that 60 percent of adults were not proud to have Trump as president. Eleven percent said personal attributes would be the most important issue to them in the 2020 race. Only immigration and the economy were cited more often as respondents top concerns. Among the key traits cited were honesty; integrity; and being a uniter, not a divider.

Those issues come up regularly with Democrats.

Mike Tickal, a Mason City, Iowa, comic book and hobby-store owner, said it was refreshing when he heard from New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, one of the Democrats many presidential candidates, during a meet-and-greet there in early February.

Why? To stand here and hear a speech of educated intelligence rather than the reactive ignorance weve been listening to, said Tickal.

Some Democrats raise concern that Trump has emboldened racists.

When President Obama was our president, there were racists that kept it under cover, said Beverly Diane Frierson, an executive committee member of South Carolinas Richland County Democratic Party. When Trump became president, it became almost en vogue to allow it to come to the surface.

Democratic candidates have responded with promises to return civility and grace to public life. We have to have presidents that are about healing and bringing people together, Booker said at one South Carolina campaign stop.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) has pledged to always speak with decency and moral clarity and treat all people with dignity and respect.

But Democrats also made character a central issue in 2016  and still couldnt beat Trump.

Even as some Republicans have cringed at Trumps words, most have stuck with him as he has delivered tax cuts, presided over a thriving economy, and put a conservative imprint on the judicial system. Some see Trump as a welcome break from scripted politicians. Others dislike his attitude but cheer his results.

Ill take Donald Trumps pro-freedom, pro-growth, pro-jobs agenda over what Democrats are dishing out every day, said Val DiGiorgio, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, arguing that Trumps tweets are less worrying than a socialist agenda and that even his most controversial comments send a positive signal to supporters.

Every time Trump shows himself to be a fighter, and says something even impolitic, theyre going to cling to him, he said, because they see a president standing up for them.

Indeed, the CNN poll found that 84 percent of Republicans are proud to have Trump as president, and among all adults, 71 percent had a positive view of the economy. The president, meanwhile, has branded Democrats as the radical party as major candidates embrace ideas such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

After losing in 2016, some Democrats argued they cant focus solely on the presidents behavior  they have to offer policies that appeal to some voters who swung to Trump.

People do want to see decency in politics, and when they see something as abhorrent as the attacks on John McCain, I think that turns off a lot of people," said David Pepper, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. But, he added, "the person whos working two jobs and trying to raise kids on too little money, they want to hear about how youre going to make their life better.

Elections often produce a backlash to the personality in the Oval Office, said John Lapp, a Democratic media strategist. Trump came after the measured Barack Obama. Democrats can now offer their own contrast, he said, but if you exclusively focus on what a horrible person Donald Trump is, thats not enough.

He said the argument should be: There is a horrible person in the White House, and hes not fighting for you.A view of the Supreme Court in Washington, Friday, March 15, 2019. Adding Supreme Court justices to secure a liberal majority is just one of the extreme measures Democrats are considering to swing authority back into their hands, writes Marc Thiessen. Read more

Who is the biggest threat to our constitutional order? It is not President Trump.

Ever since Trump took office, Democrats have been telling us he is an authoritarian who threatens our system of government. Well, today it is Democrats who are declaring war on the Constitution. Leading Democrats are promising that, if elected in 2020, they will abolish the electoral college and might also pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices  allowing them to marginalize Americans who do not support their increasingly radical agenda and impose it on an unwilling nation.

The purpose of the electoral college is to protect us from what James Madison called the "tyranny of the majority." Each state gets to cast electoral votes equal to the combined number of its U.S. representatives (determined by population) and its senators (two regardless of population). The goal was to make sure even the smallest states have a say in electing the president and prevent those with large, big-city populations from dictating to the less populous rural ones.

No wonder Democrats dont like it. Today, they have become the party of big-city elites, while their support is declining in less populous states of Middle America. Just look at a county-by-county map of the 2016 election  you can actually drive from coast to coast without driving through a single county that voted for Hillary Clinton. Clinton lost in 2016 because millions of once-reliable Democratic working-class voters in the American heartland switched their allegiance to Trump.

Thanks to the electoral college, Democrats have no choice but to try to win at least some of those voters back if they want to win the presidency. But if we got rid of the electoral college, Democrats could write off voters in flyover country and focus on turning out large numbers of their supporters in big cities and populous liberal states such as New York and California. Unburdened by the need to moderate their platform to appeal to centrist voters, they would be free to pursue full socialism without constraint. If voters in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania oppose spending tens of trillions on a Green New Deal and a government takeover of the health-care, energy and transportation sectors of the economy, tough luck.

The electoral college protects us from this kind of unconstrained radicalism, by forcing the political parties to broaden their appeal  which is precisely why more and more Democrats want to get rid of it. Fortunately, the framers of the Constitution required supermajorities for amendments  another wise protection against the tyranny of the majority.

But Democrats would have no such obstacles in dealing with another impediment to their radical agenda: the Supreme Court. Thanks to Trumps electoral college victory, Republicans have been able confirm two Supreme Court justices and secure a conservative majority. Democrats have no one but themselves to blame for their judicial predicament. They were the ones who announced that they would not confirm a Supreme Court justice during George W. Bushs final year in office, setting the precedent for Republicans to block President Barack Obamas nomination of Merrick Garland. And they were the ones who eliminated the filibuster for federal circuit courts judges  setting the precedent for Republicans to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court justices.

Democrats have miscalculated at every turn, and now their solution is to break precedent yet again  by packing the Supreme Court. There have been nine justices on the Supreme Court for the past 150 years. No matter, Democratic candidates including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Pete Buttigieg, and Beto ORourke have all said that, as president, they would consider adding justices to the Supreme Court to secure a left-wing majority. The last president who tried this, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was stopped only because members of his own party rebelled. The Senate Judiciary Committee, then controlled by the Democrats, correctly declared his plan an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country.

It seems unlikely a Democratic president would face such a rebellion today. But unless Democrats win not only the presidency but also a 60-vote Senate majority, they would have to eliminate another minority protection  the legislative filibuster  to pass a court-packing bill. I suspect they would not hesitate to do so.

Taken together, the Democrats are proposing what amounts to a systemic assault on the foundations of our federal system. Democrats are freely pursuing a tyranny of the majority. We'll see how it plays in Middle America. But if they do, then spare us the overwrought complaints about Trump. You can't defend the Constitution while trying to tear it up at the same time.

Marc Thiessen writes a twice-weekly column for the Washington Post on foreign and domestic policy. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. @marcthiessenIts hard to escape news headlines and social media feeds touting how the U.S. economy is humming along for many Americans. Yet, inclusive business practices  a significant driver of growth and innovation  often are overlooked as an important contributor to equitable economic growth, or theyre turned into empty talking points.

There are many ways to bring inclusion to life within an organization  including the makeup of the workforce, which is what typically leaps to peoples minds. The workforce is an extremely important piece of the puzzle, but so many other pieces also drive an inclusive culture. While companies may face challenges on the journey toward true inclusion, there are tried and true approaches with proven impact.

Talking about diversity can be uncomfortable for some people, and making a genuine commitment to it is not easy. Many companies talk the talk on the values of diversity and inclusion, but reduce them to a numbers game. While it is important to hold ourselves accountable through measurement, solely focusing on metrics negates the importance of creating an inclusive environment  one where all people feel valued and respected, have access to the same opportunities, and are comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work every day.

Some companies claim they simply cannot find good candidates from underrepresented backgrounds or develop strong relationships with minority-owned business partners. The reality is, theyre either not looking, or theyre not making the effort across different levels of their processes and culture.

When our team started its supplier diversity program, we established a comprehensive strategy to find qualified women-, LBGTQ-, and minority-owned businesses to compete for projects by leveraging partnerships with organizations, such as the Billion Dollar Roundtable, the National Minority Supplier Development Council, the Womens Business Enterprise National Council, and local Chambers of Commerce. Across the company, we work with thousands of diverse suppliers, including more than 100 here in the Philadelphia region, that have contributed unique perspectives and services, ultimately benefiting consumers.

For many of these businesses, our program created a more level playing field and a chance to compete with larger vendors. Often times, these companies prove to be more agile, innovative, and creative than others  all they needed was the chance to get a foot in the door.

Since 2011, Comcast has spent more than $18 billion with diverse suppliers, including more than $4 billion directly in 2018 alone. In addition, since launching our subcontracting program in 2012, our major suppliers have reported more than $2 billion in contracts with diverse subcontractors, including more than $500 million last year alone. Our concerted effort in this area has led to a more than threefold increase in the amount spent with diverse suppliers at Comcast NBCUniversal in the last seven years.

We also have found it to be crucial that diversity and inclusion are endorsed at our companys highest level, by our executive leadership, and built into our business model to drive growth. One highly visible example of this is our programming, ensuring our talent, both on-air and behind-the-camera, reflects the communities we serve. It results in successful shows like This Is Us, which features a diverse cast, crew, and writers room.

Ultimately, theres no one magical way to build a diverse and inclusive company, but a great starting point is sharing best practices. This is why its critical for employers  and diversity thought leaders  to participate in events that discuss those practices and offer solutions for a variety of workplace environments. Comcast is proud to sponsor and participate in efforts to grow our culture of diversity and inclusion, including the Diversity & Inclusion Conference being held in Philadelphia March 25 and 26. The conference will bring together leaders in corporate settings, as well as nonprofits and local government, to discuss ways in which we can develop lasting diversity and inclusion initiatives.

We try to be leaders and innovators in diversity and inclusion, and were always looking for ways to improve and learn from others. Thats why attending the conference is one small, but significant, step toward coming together to make sure all voices can be heard and valued, and our businesses can flourish.

Ajamu Johnson is vice president of Procurement at Comcast and board member of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau.Philadelphia has long been one of my favorite cities. Having grown up in New Jersey and gone to college at Rutgers, Ive been visiting, and tracking, the city since the mid-1970s. I saw it in perhaps its most hard-pressed days and cheered on the stunning revival of its downtown area over the past decade or so. Ive been visiting even more now, as the inaugural Philadelphia Fellow sponsored by Drexel University, Thomas Jefferson University, and the University City Science Center, where I have been working with local stakeholders and academics to benchmark where the city stands on key metrics and to develop strategies for the future.

Not too long ago, after a long day of meetings with folks across the city, I retired to one of Phillys great restaurant spots, Vernick Food & Drink right off Rittenhouse Square, to get some dinner and a glass of wine. Sitting at the bar by myself, I noticed that I was surrounded by much younger patrons than I typically see when I am out at night in New York, or Los Angeles or Toronto. When the bartender came to take my order, I wanted to ask him why. (If theres anything Ive learned in more than three decades studying urban development, theres no better way to take the pulse of a city than to ask a bartender, waitstaff, cabbie, or ride-share driver.) This is amazing, I said, there are so more young people here than I see when Im out with my wife in New York City. He replied in the oh-so-cool bartender way: Bro, thats easy. Its affordable; you can still actually afford to live here.

Perhaps it was, but it is getting less and less so every day. Housing costs are increasing across the region, especially in the popular central city neighborhoods that talented young creatives have flocked to. While the median list price for the Philadelphia metro remains a fairly reasonable $182,000, according to Trulia, a quick look at the map of real estate prices in the areas surrounding Vernick, in zip code 19103, shows rates many times higher than that. In the blocks just across Walnut Street, median list prices are nearly $600,000, and closer to Rittenhouse Square the median is well over $700,000. I saw several places approaching seven figures. Its not New York or San Francisco prices yet. But its getting there.

For the past couple of decades, Philadelphia was the affordable alternative to those two places as well as Boston and D.C. on the Eastern seaboard. That helped make the city a mecca for young people and the creative class of technologists, innovators, professionals, managers, artists, and designers. In the years spanning 2006 and 2012, Philadelphia had the greatest proportional increase in millennials of any major city, with the population of 20- to 34-year-olds increasing by about 100,000 residents, a rate of more than 6 percent per year. The regions world class colleges and universities are huge magnets for talented young people: All told, the metro is home to more than 340,000 college students, making it the fifth-largest college town in the nation. And through the work of groups like Campus Philly and other local organizations, more and more of those graduates have chosen to stay in the region.

The city has also attracted creatives from across the country. A decade or so ago, few would have mentioned Philadelphia as one of the nations and worlds leading entrepreneurial ecosystems. But, today, the region ranks in the top dozen in the United States and among the top 25 in the world for venture capital start-up companies, hauling in nearly a billion dollars a year in venture capital investment, similar to Washington, D.C., Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Toronto.

But now the citys revival may be reaching a tipping point. Philadelphia appears to be on the edge of what I have dubbed the New Urban Crisis. If its old urban crisis of the 1970s and 1980s was one of economic decline and dysfunction, its New Urban Crisis is a crisis of success, manifested in accelerated gentrification, rising housing costs, and growing inequality and social division. Philadelphias New Urban Crisis is not as extreme as that of New York or San Francisco or L.A.  not yet. But the region ranks eighth on my New Urban Crisis Index, a composite measure of inequality, economic segregation, and housing affordability. And it has the third-highest level of income inequality in the nation among large cities, on par with that of Bolivia and Honduras.

This New Urban Crisis is already damaging the citys much ballyhooed ability to attract the young talent that drove its revival in the first place. The metros rate of millennial population growth cratered to less than 4 percent per year from 2010 to 2015, dropping to number 80 of the nations large metro areas (a different ranking put us at number one for millennial growth 2006 to 2014).

Philadelphias challenge is to stop this New Urban Crisis in its tracks before it gets any worse, and create a more widely shared prosperity by and for the citys residents. That means working with local government, universities, anchor institutions, and other civic organizations to address affordable housing, access to quality education for all Philadelphians, infrastructure, and economic mobility, among many other issues. Not only the well-being of its residents, but the citys continued ability to grow and prosper, is at stake.

Richard Florida is the inaugural Philadelphia Fellow, a yearlong appointment to explore urban issues such as building inclusive economic growth and renewing infrastructure. He is University Professor at University of Torontos School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, and Distinguished Fellow at NYU. The author of the best-selling The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis, he is a Senior Editor with the Atlantic and cofounder of CityLab.

Floridas first keynote as the inaugural Philadelphia Fellow, The Case for Inclusive Prosperity in Philadelphia, is March 26th from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Thomas Jefferson University, Dorrance H. Hamilton Building, 1001 Locust St., Philadelphia, Pa., 19107. RSVP here. Reception to follow.Donald Trump wanted to give Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu a boost in hotly contested Israeli elections set for April 9.

So on Thursday the president reversed decades of U.S. policy, by tweet of course: He posted that the United States should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a rocky plateau that Israel seized from Syria during the 1967 ArabIsraeli war.

This was a purely political gesture to solve a problem that didnt exist. There was no pressure on Israel from any quarter to return the Golan to Syria, a country wrecked by civil war and penetrated by Iran. Nor will U.S. recognition of Jerusalems 1981 annexation of the Golan make Israel any safer.

On the contrary, Trumps political boon for Bibi will prompt unnecessary new threats to the Jewish state.

To understand why, a little background on the Golan is helpful. Driving along the western edge of the heights one can look directly down on towns and villages of northern Israel, practically into the windows of some residential homes; Syrian artillery regularly shelled Israel from the heights between 1948 and 1967.

Since 1974, U.N. observers have patrolled an armistice line on the heights between Israel and Syria. In 1999-2000, Israel offered to return most of the Golan. But peace talks foundered because Syria wanted every inch back.

 READ MORE: A Syrian Kurdish leader explains why sudden U.S. troop withdrawal could bring slaughter and ISIS return | Trudy Rubin

On my most recent trip to the Golan, 15 months ago, it was apparent why Israel could never return the entire territory in the foreseeable future. Driving along the Israeli side of the armistice line, one could see smoke rising in the distance. The same Iranian-backed militias that helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assad essentially win the civil war were trying to seize turf along the Syrian side of the armistice line. Pro-Iranian Hezbollah fighters were joining that fight, arriving in Syria from Lebanon, just to the north of the Golan. Syrian civilians were crossing daily into Israel for medical treatment.

Yet  let me emphasize again  there was no pressure on Israel to return the Golan, not from Syria, not from Arab states, not from the international community. Indeed, life on the Israeli side of the Golan was, and still is, relatively prosperous and peaceful. Israeli troops, and Israeli planes had the area under control.

At least 20,000 Israelis have moved to the Golan, many in prosperous agricultural settlements, featuring apple orchards and high end wineries (including Pelter, which sells to acclaimed Israeli restaurant Zahav in Philadelphia). The bulk of the Syrian population on the Golan are Druze, a small religious sect that was able to reconnect with many of their brethren who live in northern Israel. With heavy investment, the Druze capital Majdal Shams was booming with restaurants and cafes, and young women shop in western-style dress.

I was told by then Majdal Shams mayor Dolan Abu Saleh that, since the Syrian civil war, Druze had change their attitude toward Assad, perceiving him as a puppet of Iran and Russia. They were not eager, he said, to return to Syrian control and Russian hegemony  or to a simmering civil war.

But very few were willing to take Israeli citizenship (as Saleh had done), because of the negative impact that would have for their Druze relatives on the Syrian side of the border.

 READ MORE: Why cant the Trump administration produce an Iran strategy that works? | Trudy Rubin

So to summarize: before Trumps tweet on the Golan, the internal situation in that region was stable. Assad had no chance to get the heights back, nor were Sunni Arab states raising the issue. Moreover, Russia, in understandings worked out with Israel, had pressed Iran to keep its proxies far back from the armistice line. The Russians, who control much of Syrian air space, were also letting Israel bomb many Iranian military targets in Syria.

All good for Israel.

U.S. recognition of Israels annexation of Golan would upset this positive scenario on several fronts.

First, by formally recognizing Israeli annexation, Trump would raise the issue of Israeli violations of international law. Most of the world protested Russias annexation of Crimea, a part of Ukraine, so how to avoid chastising Israel for annexing land that is a sovereign part of Syria. Nobody was raising the issue before Trumps tweet, but now Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia may see an opening (or feel the need) to challenge Israel.

The Syrian Druze on the Golan, caught in between, may be forced to protest.

All for no practical Israeli gains.

Equally adverse, a U.S. nod to Israels annexation of the Golan has already emboldened Israeli right wing parties that want Jerusalem to formally annex much or all of the West Bank. Knesset (parliament) speaker Yuli Edelstein told a huge crowd in Tel Aviv last week that U.S. shift on Golan was a first step toward U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty there.

Down this annexation path lies a one-state solution to the Palestinian problem in which Israel winds up ruling permanently over a majority of disenfranchised Arabs. Forget about any Trump-led peace deal of the century. This is the road to a form of apartheid.

Trumps tweet indicates this would cause him no heartburn. His only goal is to help reelect his scandal-plagued counterpart in Israel. Or perhaps to please his evangelical supporters.

Apres tweet, le deluge, in Israel and elsewhere.Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has inherited a list from his predecessor that names 66 police with troubling records or pending criminal cases against them. Read more

By the police account, it was a simple arrest.

Philadelphia Police Officer Brian Waters and his partner, William J. Farrell 3rd, stopped the driver of a Lexus CS-400 for failing to signal a turn. When the two officers approached the car, Farrell testified in court, they saw a stash of dope and a handgun inside.

But at least one key element of Farrell's testimony wasn't true. Waters was not there. He was in court.

"This kind of testimony happens all too frequently," defense lawyer David M. Walker said, referring to demonstrably false statements by police on the witness stand.

Walker, who represented the suspect in the 2013 case, dug up the court attendance logs to prove the falsehood. His sleuthing persuaded prosecutors to drop the charges against his client  and the Police Department to suspend Waters and Farrell, who both claimed on arrest forms that Waters took part in the bust.

Such lists, which are used in Seattle and a few other cities, are intended to warn prosecutors of police who might prove problematic as witnesses because of a history of false testimony or have legal troubles that court rules require be shared with defense attorneys.

The Philadelphia list divided the officers into three categories. The most serious group was made up of 29 whose misconduct was so serious as to bar them from testifying in court. Five other officers had disciplinary records or drunken-driving histories that needed to be disclosed to the defense bar if they were to be called to testify. Prosecutors said the remaining 32  including Waters and Farrell  had troubled records but should face no restrictions in court.

The former aides who drew up the list saw it as an in-house reference sheet for frontline prosecutors to consult as they went over lists of potential police witnesses for cases. It ultimately was seen as a tool to eliminate testimony from officers who might lie on the witness stand.

The Philadelphia Defender Association and other critics are raising questions about the roster, and the seemingly inconsistent criteria for putting officers on it.

For instance, while the prosecutors put no restrictions on Waters and Farrell, other officers caught in falsehoods were banned from testifying.

Another area of confusion was the treatment of police violence. One officer, Robert Esack, who broke the facial bones of a suspect he pummeled, was barred from testifying. Another officer, Jose Cartagena, who was said to have done virtually the same thing, was permitted to testify.

Then too, the list seemed to offer only a partial look at the misconduct. Notably, the list failed to mention several citizen complaints and lawsuits against Waters' alleging improper arrests and abuse. The city settled those suits for $175,000.

Then there was the list's very limited scope. From a pool of 6,300 serving police and a larger number of retirees, prosecutors would bar testimony from just the 29.

This reflected in part the narrow time frame used to select names. The roster only included officers found guilty of wrongdoing by the Police Board of Inquiry dating back to mid-2016.

But also at work was something far more systemic  the rarity with which police in Philadelphia are sanctioned for misconduct.

Consider: Of nearly 1,100 citizen complaints alleging police violence from 2010 through 2014, a department study found Internal Affairs investigators in the Police Department saw merit in only 44 cases.

David Rudovsky, a Philadelphia defense lawyer who specializes in cases involving alleged police misconduct, said it was important to know the criteria used to categorize officers on the list  and even more essential, to determine why that criteria was not consistently applied.

The list, Rudovsky said, made "very haphazard distinctions between officers."

In an interview last week, Krasner, the new district attorney, likened the list to a stunt to "make you look like you're doing something." It had too few officers and relied too much on often lenient Internal Affairs investigations, he said.

A more rigorously vetted roster will be ready by May, he said.

"These are really serious attacks on the integrity of the court system," he said, referring to police who lie on the witness stand.

Biased, drunk, untruthful

The current list was compiled by top aides to Williams. They include Kathleen Martin, who became acting district attorney after Williams' indictment (and subsequent conviction) on corruption charges; John Delaney, deputy district attorney in charge of the Trial Division; and Angel Flores, then chief of the Juvenile Division and the only one of the group still working at the District Attorney's Office.

None would comment. People familiar with creation of the list and companion protocol said it was viewed as a "work in progress" meant to address a significant criminal justice issue  police lying in court to bolster cases.

The prosecutors saw themselves as balancing competing priorities as they built the list, sources said. They wanted to keep biased, violent, or habitually untruthful officers off the witness stand, while not losing the testimony of officers who might have blemished records but no pattern of serious misconduct.

For instance, officers with drunken-driving arrests were put on the list, but generally not banned from testifying, the sources said. The thought was that driving drunk was not an indicator of someone's inherent truthfulness, but still a crime serious enough to alert defense lawyers.

As for cases of domestic violence, officers generally could still be witnesses provided prosecutors concluded the violence was a one-time event.

In one case on the list, prosecutors noted that one officer had "assaulted his girlfriend by grabbing her neck, choking her and biting her left hand." Still, they saw no need to keep him from the witness stand  or even to tell defense lawyers about his violent behavior  because, the list said, there was "no pattern" of domestic wrongdoing.

In all, at least five officers on the list were found guilty by the police disciplinary panel of assaulting girlfriends or wives. Only one was barred from testifying.

Carol Tracy, director of the city's Women's Law Project, said the policy protected abusers. "One certainly wouldn't want them to be witnesses in domestic-violence cases," Tracy said.

Stop hitting him

In a motion filed in court last week, the Defender Association demanded more information about the Williams-era list and particularly about one officer on it: Brian Waters. "Officer Waters seems to have a troubling history of flouting and even breaking the law," the public defenders wrote.

Waters spoke briefly with a reporter last week but declined to talk on the record.

In that court pleading, the public defenders explored Waters' work history, including his time as Farrell's partner.

Farrell, 44, joined the department in 2000. He served in the Highway Patrol unit for a least seven years. Farrell could not be reached for comment and did not respond to a letter left at his home.

Waters, 34, became an officer in 2007. He is the son of former Philadelphia police commander and judge Joseph C. Waters Jr., who was imprisoned three years ago for trying to fix a case.

Waters worked first in a North Philadelphia district and later in the Highway Patrol unit. More recently, he has been assigned to the Seventh Police District in Northeast Philadelphia, where he was honored last year after making eight arrests in 12 days.

In 2014, a 25-year-old Kensington man sued Waters and officers, alleging they had brutally beaten him. The man contended that Waters drove his patrol vehicle into him, hit him at least seven times in the head with a heavy-duty flashlight, and then planted drugs on him. The man had a broken cheekbone and needed nine stitches to his face. The city spent $125,000 to settle the suit.

A judge also threw out the arrest, ruling that Waters had no legal grounds to stop the man in the first place.

In all, records show, eight witnesses told Internal Affairs investigators that Waters drove his car into the man. "They were kicking him while he was on the ground and then the police car came and they ran him over," one neighbor told Internal Affairs.

Said another neighbor: "We were hollering to stop hitting him. They were Tasing him. His whole face was gushing blood and they threw him in the wagon like he was a piece of meat. He just kept screaming, 'Please stop beating me.' "

Internal Affairs ruled that Waters had "physically abused" the man by striking him with his vehicle.

Waters acknowledged repeatedly hitting the man with his flashlight, saying he did so to stop the man from attacking another officer. Internal Affairs didn't fault him for the blows, but sanctioned him for using a heavier and longer flashlight than permitted by regulations.

In 2015, Waters, Farrell, and two other officers were sued for allegedly chasing down a 19-year-old man on a dirt bike and beating him. Internal Affairs rejected the man's contentions after an investigation, but the city paid $27,500 to settle the suit.

The same year, Waters was sued again, this time by a man who said that Waters and another officer publicly stripped him and conducted an anal search, a violation of department policy. Waters and the officer denied the claim. The city paid about $22,000 to resolve this suit.

Waters has had trouble off the job as well. In 2015, he pleaded guilty to drunken driving after rear-ending a car on Frankford Avenue. He lost his license for a year.

None of the civil cases or Waters' DUI was mentioned in the district attorney's list. That document cites only the abortive 2013 drug and gun bust that led to Walker and Farrell each pleading guilty to conduct unbecoming an officer.

In that case, Farrell testified under oath that he was driving a squad car with Waters as a passenger when they stopped Louis Rios, 30, on Fifth Street in North Philadelphia. The officers seized 63 packets of cocaine and a .380-caliber, Kel-Tech handgun.

But attendance records showed that on the day of the arrest Waters had clocked in at the Criminal Justice Center in Center City.

A False Police Report Philadelphia Police Officer William Farrell arrested a man around 1 p.m. on May 10, 2013, after spotting drugs and a handgun in the car. At 4:15 p.m., he and his partner, Officer Brian Waters, signed police paperwork declaring they made the arrest jointly.

A lawyer for the suspect later determined Waters had instead been in court at the time, and prosecutors tossed out the case. Waters and Farrell later pleaded guilty to conduct unbecoming an officer. Farrell was suspended for 10 days, Waters for five. Philadelphia Police Department JARED WHALEN / Staff Artist

Confronted by the discrepancy, both officers told Internal Affairs that they had gotten confused because they had made so many arrests together. If so, their confusion came on quickly. Less than four hours after Rios was charged, Farrell and Waters each signed official arrest sheets claiming they both took part in the arrest.

Investigators asked the pair whether they had rigged the paperwork so Waters would get "overtime pay in the future by going to court." Both denied that.

Internal Affairs investigators concluded the misstatements were not deliberate but still cited the pair for filing a false report. In the end, the officers pleaded guilty to the Police Board of Inquiry to charges of conduct unbecoming an officer. Waters was suspended for five days, Farrell for 10.

Despite it all, prosecutors decided the misstatements were not significant enough to bar the two officers from testifying about future arrests. Prosecutors said their false claims were "not material" to the case against Rios, the alleged drug dealer.

The DA's Office took a different view in court. After Rios' defense lawyer confronted them over the officers' false reports, prosecutors dropped all charges.

Staff writers Dylan Purcell and Michele Tranquilli contributed to this article.Joint-fundraising committees have sent millions of dollars to congressional candidates in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, including (from left): Mikie Sherrill, U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, Tom Malinowski, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, and Chrissy Houlahan. Read more

A political fund-raising strategy that critics say increases mega-donors' influence, strengthens parties' power, and skirts contribution limits  one calls it "legalized money-laundering"  is on the rise in the Philadelphia region.

Nationwide, groups known as joint-fund-raising committees have raised more money this year than in any previous midterm election cycle.

These committees allow donors to give money to multiple candidates, groups, and parties at once, essentially bundling what would normally be multiple small donations into one large sum. A 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling removed previous caps on how much total political money a donor could give each year, paving the way for larger checks than ever before.

In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, current congressional candidates have received nearly $5 million through the committees since 2017.

With joint-fund-raising committees, big donors can legally cut checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars and more, even though federal campaign finance laws limit donors to $2,700 per candidate and $10,000 per state party.

"The reason we have those contribution limits in place is because of corruption," said Brendan Fischer, federal reform director at good-government group Campaign Legal Center. "A candidate is going to owe a massive debt of gratitude to a donor who writes a generous check to a campaign  and a joint-fund-raising committee allows a candidate and a donor to bypass those limits."

Joint-fund-raising committees have exploded in growth thanks to the 2014 Supreme Court decision. Before then, the committees allowed candidates and political parties to do as their name implies: raise money together and then split the proceeds. But they could grow only so large, because donors could contribute only $123,200 in total to all candidates and political parties every two years under the law.

In McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court struck down those contribution limits  donors now can give to as many candidates as they want, without an overall cap. That enabled joint-fund-raising committees to become larger than ever before, in some cases bringing together dozens of candidates and parties.

For instance, individuals can give up to $2,700 to a candidate per election. If a joint-fund-raising committee features 10 candidates, donors can give it $27,000. Or if it has 100, it can collect $270,000 from each donor.

One of the better-known joint-fund-raising committees to emerge in the wake of the Supreme Court decision was the Hillary Victory Fund, which raised nearly $530 million and split the money between the Hillary Clinton campaign, Democratic National Committee, and dozens of state parties.

Campaign finance experts and good-government groups said that joint-fund-raising committees encourage a mega-donor environment where a small handful of the wealthiest contributors give massive amounts to the parties and campaigns, ingratiating themselves with policymakers at the highest levels.

Writing one massive check is more powerful than making scattered, smaller donations that add up to the same amount, said Daniel Weiner, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University who focuses on money in politics. The recipients know that their money is coming from a much larger donation, and that increases the power of those funds.

"It's a convenient way to signal that you're not just your average wealthy contributor, you're actually someone they actually need to pay attention to," Weiner said.

Some of the big donors to joint-fund-raising committees in the 2017-18 election cycle include Cynthia Simon Skjodt and Deborah Simon, heirs to a major commercial real estate company, who contributed more than $3.2 million to the Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund. On the GOP side, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and Robert McNair, owner of the Houston Texans of the NFL, and his wife, Janice, both gave more than $370,000 to the pro-GOP group Protect the House.

Parties and campaigns defend joint-fund-raising committees, arguing that they are efficient and allow candidates up and down the ticket to support each other.

"It is incredibly important for the candidates to help build the party in so much as they are part of our overall mission and reliant on the critical role we play in every election from deploying field staff, sharing information, and providing support," said Jason Gottesman, the spokesman for Pennsylvania's Republican Party.

Nationally, nearly $340 million has been given to the committees this midterm cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That's roughly the same total these committees raised in the previous three midterm election seasons, 2006, 2010 and 2014  and 2018 isn't even over yet.

Most local congressional candidates don't receive any money through them, but they can be a significant funding source for those who do: U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.), and first-time House contender Chrissy Houlahan, a Pennsylvania Democrat, got more than 10 percent of their campaign funding from joint-fund-raising committees as of June 30, the latest date that the information was available. U.S. Sen. Bob Casey has received more money through joint-fund-raising committees than any other local candidate: more than $1.26 million of $14.7 million as of June 30.

Political observers said joint-fundraising committees have become an important tool for building parties' infrastructure during campaigns, especially once the Supreme Court cleared the way for massive amounts to be donated at once.

In cases where a joint-fundraising committee is run by or strongly affiliated with one particular politician, it can also be used to grow that politicians' clout, Weiner said. Distributing large sums to other elected officials is a sure way to earn loyalty.

When Casey raises money for the joint-fundraising committee known as the Keystone Victory Fund, it supports him, a PAC he controls, and the Pennsylvania Democrats together. "It's helping the whole state," Casey said.

"While these are, of course, important races, there are just as important elections taking place at the state level where the state committee plays an integral role," said Brandon Cwalina, press secretary for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.

Experts warned of returning to a past era of big party bosses in backrooms with too much power: "I'm not sure now there's a ton of a functional difference between what's going on now and what was going on then," Weiner said.

In 2016, the first presidential campaign since the McCutcheon decision, political parties took advantage of a legal loophole that allows them to transfer unlimited amounts of money among national and state parties.

Even though an individual donor is capped in how much she can donate to each national and state party, money received by the state parties in the 2016 campaign was then funneled right back to the national parties. This became an issue when state parties were accused of using this method to channel $84 million to the Clinton campaign.

"So in effect, the combination of McCutcheon and joint fundraising if not eliminated, then substantially reduced limitations to political party contributions," Weiner said. In some cases, he said, it's had the effect of turning "many of the state parties to little more than bank accounts used to funnel cash to the national parties."

That doesn't appear to be happening very much outside of presidential elections, the experts said  at least not yet. That could change in the future, even this campaign season as the election heats up.

Some experts, including Weiner and Fischer, said limiting the amount of money that state and national parties can give each other would help prevent joint-fund-raising committees from being used for what Fischer has called "a form of legalized money laundering." Weiner also proposes limiting the number of candidates, PACs, and parties that can join together.

Otherwise, Fischer said, the political system will continue to tilt "toward the handful of individuals who have the resources to write six-figure checks."New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez in June. A new poll found that the Democrat is leading Republican Bob Hugin by 9 percentage points among likely voters. Read more

A Democratic senator who survived a federal bribery trial. Two Republican congressmen currently under federal indictment, one for alleged campaign-finance violations, the other accused of insider trading.

In addition to carrying ethical baggage, the candidates have something else in common: They're leading in the polls in their reelection campaigns.

At a time when surveys show that support or opposition to President Trump is a top factor in voters' electoral calculus, many voters in states or districts that are traditionally noncompetitive appear willing to overlook ethical shortcomings to send a bigger message in next month's midterm elections.

"It's so hyperpartisan right now, divided along lines where Trump is the main factor, that almost anything else that happens doesn't really matter," said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

The latest sign: A Monmouth poll released Thursday shows Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) leading Republican Bob Hugin by 9 percentage points among likely voters.

The state's senior senator is hardly popular  just 28 percent view him favorably, compared with 45 percent who view him unfavorably. But in casting their Senate vote, a majority of voters say their view of Trump is more important than their view of Menendez, whose bribery trial ended in a hung jury last year. Prosecutors later dropped the charges, but the Senate Ethics Committee "severely admonished" Menendez for his conduct.

>> VOTERS GUIDE: View candidates in the 2018 midterm election based on your address, or browse all the action in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware

That might not matter in a state that hasn't elected a Republican to the Senate in 46 years, and where 55 percent of likely voters disapprove of the president's job performance. What's more, Monmouth found, 64 percent said they felt that "whatever Menendez did" was "about the same as what most other politicians do."

The story is similar in California's reliably Republican 50th District, where indicted Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter is leading Democrat Ammar Campa-Najjar in the polls. Trump carried the district by 15 points in 2016.

Prosecutors in August accused Hunter and his wife of using campaign funds to pay for luxury vacations and other personal expenses. They have pleaded not guilty.

Just a slight plurality of voters (35 percent) view him favorably, according to a September Monmouth poll, suggesting he could be vulnerable. But 52 percent of voters in the district approve of Trump, and 64 percent of potential voters identified by Monmouth say it is "very important" for them to "cast a vote for Congress that" reflects their views of Trump. Monmouth found that Hunter had a 15-point lead among likely voters, although other polls show a tighter race.

Indeed, 1 in 10 voters in the Monmouth survey believe Hunter is or could be guilty but plan to vote for him anyway.

Then there's New York Rep. Chris Collins, a Republican indicted in August on insider-trading charges.

>> SIGN UP: Get daily text messages on key issues leading up to the election

Collins briefly suspended his campaign but pleaded not guilty and decided to stay on the ballot. A near-majority of voters (49 percent) view him unfavorably, according to an Oct. 16 Siena College poll. But in a district where Trump enjoys strong approval ratings (56 to 38 percent), Collins is still leading Democrat Nate McMurray by three points, the survey found.

"Will voters show their loyalty to the president and their party inclinations by reelecting Collins?" Siena College pollster Steven Greenberg asked this week. "Or will they spurn the indicted pol and vote for Democrat McMurray despite their yearning for the House to remain in Republican control?"

These candidates almost certainly would face tougher prospects in swing districts or states. But even in blue New Jersey, a letter of "severe admonishment" handed down by the Senate Ethics Committee was enough to end Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli's 2002 reelection campaign. He dropped out of a tight race.

Of course, Trump has encouraged his supporters to view the charges against Republicans with suspicion, and critics have ripped the president for attempting to politicize the Justice Department.

When a prankster pretending to be Menendez somehow got Trump on the phone in June, the president reportedly congratulated the senator for beating the bribery charges.Devon Cade (right) draws for ballot position out of a coffee can held by Kevin Kelly, acting supervisor of slections, in City Hall on Wednesday. Read more

Devon Cade says he doesnt understand why so many of the politicians who gathered in a City Hall courtroom Wednesday were so angry at him. Wait 'til he meets their lawyers on Friday.

Cade, a Democratic candidate for City Council at large, on Tuesday filed legal challenges against 30 of the 33 other Democrats running at large in the May 21 primary.

Three Common Pleas Court judges will start hearings for those and other cases Friday. Some may take weeks. Some may feel the swift kick of justice.

Cade, who used to work for the Department of Licenses and Inspections and now lists his occupation as philanthropist, claims he used artificial intelligence software to analyze handwriting on nomination petitions to detect forgeries.

That formed the basis of his unusual mega-challenge, 30 identical legal documents, filed against everyone in the primary except Councilwoman Helen Gym and candidates Sherrie Cohen and Wayne Allen.

All the candidates gathered Wednesday to draw ballot positions. Cade pulled the 24th spot.

People were very, very upset with me, he said later. But I dont understand why. I didnt file the paperwork to file their candidacy.

Cade on Thursday posted a Facebook video defending his challenges, declaring, I dont think anyone can refudiate intelligence software. If that rings a bell, its because former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was so roundly mocked for using refudiate in 2010 that the Oxford American Dictionary made it the word of the year.

Cade also sent an email Thursday announcing that his artificial intelligence equipment will be available for inspection in court but that due to the sensitivity of the software no person(s) will be allowed to physically touch the software/hardware without a one million dollar insurance bond.

Charles Gibbs, who represents three candidates Cade challenged, said: "A close examination of Mr. Cades challenges reveals that he is only destined to waste peoples time. There are a lot of words to describe him that arent fit to print.

Veteran election lawyer Adam Bonin added: Ive read Toynbee Tiles embedded in the streets which make more sense than this complaint.

Its all fun and games until a judge decides to hold someone accountable. There is precedent for hitting a challenger with hefty financial sanctions if the legal case is too flimsy. Cade said he was not worried.

One of the at-large candidates Cade challenged, David Conroy, dropped out Wednesday. But Conroy said that had nothing to do with Cades challenge. Conroy is a candidate for Municipal Court and pulled the first ballot position this week for that post.

Domb TV is back on the air

City Councilman Allan Domb, an at-large Democrat seeking a second term, appears to be inching closer toward triggering the millionaires provision in the citys campaign finance law. Domb spent $36,776 to air campaign commercials on broadcast and cable television this week, plus $9,585 on radio ads.

As we told you two weeks ago, Domb sunk $275,000 into television commercials for the first week of this month. Thats remarkably heavy advertising spending this early in a Council race.

Domb told us this week that hes still not sure if he will trigger the provision, which doubles the contribution limits for all at-large candidates from $3,000 to $6,000 from individuals and $11,900 to $23,800 from political action committees if one candidate invests $250,000 or more of personal money in a campaign.

Domb, a millionaire real estate broker, spent just under $1 million of his own money to win his first run for Council in 2015.

Nick Miccarelli has a new job, and not everyone is happy about that

Former State Rep. Nick Miccarelli, who last made news when sexual harassment allegations sank his political career, has a new job.

Miccarelli was appointed this week to head Community Transit, a nonprofit that mostly shuttles seniors around Delaware County. He got the job after the board interviewed him along with five or six candidates, Chairman Nate Much told the Delaware County Daily Times.

He brings a fresh perspective, and we felt comfortable he was going to do the job. Thats all there is to it, Much said in an interview with that newspaper.

Miccarelli told Clout hes looking forward to doing the job, but declined to say how much it pays.

Miccarelli was accused by two former girlfriends of physical or sexual abuse. One of the women, State Rep. Tarah Toohil, said he kicked her and threatened to kill himself and her with a gun when they dated in 2012. The second woman, a GOP political consultant, said Miccarelli sexually assaulted her after their relationship ended in 2014.

Miccarelli denies the allegations and was never charged, but an internal state House investigation found the claims to be credible, prompting the House to impose restrictions on him, and Gov. Tom Wolf and GOP House leaders to call for his resignation.

Members of the social justice group Indivisible Swarthmore protested the appointment Wednesday at the County Council meeting. Delaware County has a $5.7 million contract with Community Transit, good through July.

Rachel Pastan, a member of the group, urged the council to not renew the contract as long as Miccarelli was executive director. She called the job an appalling political appointment.

Given his history of making women feel unsafe, Mr. Miccarelli seems like a singularly inappropriate choice for this job, Pastan said in a statement.WASHINGTON - Republican leaders gasped again this week at President Donald Trump's conduct, expressing horror at his scathing criticism of John McCain, the late Arizona senator and former GOP presidential nominee.

But to many Trump allies  and to Trump himself  it all makes perfect sense.

Inside the powerful and populist wing of the party that is most loyal to Trump, McCain is not a revered war hero but a useful foil  encapsulating everything his core voters have come to loathe about establishment Republicans, from their support for the Iraq War to their opposition to Trumps nativist agenda to their esteem for the Justice Department as it oversees the ongoing Russia investigation.

By attacking McCain, Trump allies said Thursday, the president is stoking his supporters' rawest emotions and suspicions about the GOP's political elite.

"You're talking about a group of people who have felt powerless and voiceless for many years, until President Trump came along, and they're going to be loyal to him. It's part of the fabric of their life," said Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel, a Republican who has run Trump-style insurgent campaigns in his state. "To those people, McCain was the embodiment of a lifetime career politician."

Mike Shields, a Republican consultant who has worked with Trump's political team, said Trump is tapping into how "a significant number of voters in this country have seen politicians that lie to them, make promises, are disingenuous, who are basically not themselves. They aren't real. When the president does things like this, he is real. There's a currency for that."

And there is an audience. On social media, Fox News and other conservative-leaning platforms, Trump's searing critiques of the late senator are acceptable to many rank-and-rile Republicans.

"There is a reason for those nasty remarks. There is a history between those two men," Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs, who is friendly with Trump, said on his Thursday evening broadcast. He called critics of Trump over the McCain controversy "asinine."

McCain wanted to "stick it to the president" by voting against a GOP health care overhaul in 2017, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., one of Trump's allies on Capitol Hill, told Fox News this week. "It's reasonable for the president to be very frustrated and let down by that."

When Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son, knocked Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., on Twitter, he called him "Schmuck Schumer" for defending McCain and full of "crap" for being outraged, and drew more than 30,000 social media "likes" in the process.

There was no coordinated strategy among Senate Republicans this week to respond to Trump's continued attacks on their deceased colleague, senior aides said. The smattering of GOP senators who felt compelled to push back against Trump - whether on Twitter, in town halls or in radio interviews - have done so on their own.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is up for re-election next year, called McCain "a rare patriot and genuine American hero in the Senate" amid Trump's attacks Wednesday, but he did not mention Trump in his statement.

Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., who was appointed to the seat held by McCain, spoke privately to Trump on Wednesday to convey her sentiments about McCain, although a spokeswoman said McSally did not request anything from Trump, including stopping the attacks.

"There is a lot of disrespect going on out there all the way around," McSally told reporters in Arizona on Thursday. "I did talk to the president yesterday. I wanted to make sure he understood how I felt about Senator McCain and how Arizona felt about Senator John McCain, and he heard me."

Antonia Ferrier, a former senior McConnell aide, said that in today's GOP, McConnell and others like him find it difficult with Trump to "smack his wrist."

"There is no recourse because what kind of punishment can you do when a person is fundamentally a boxer?" Ferrier said. Republican leaders, she added, feel like "they've been down this path with the president before. He's not changing his mind."

Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly assured his aides that McCain is not popular with his supporters and that the fallout is negligible, according to a senior Trump administration official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Several Trump and GOP officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said Trump's animus is fueled by his own seething anger more than anything and by his long-held belief that McCain and his allies in the party have worked to undermine his presidency from the start.

"I'm not a fan," Trump reiterated on Thursday in an interview with Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo, listing his grievances. "What he did to the Republican Party and to the nation, and to sick people that could have had great health care, was not good."

Tim O'Brien, a Trump biographer, said Trump's dislike of McCain also likely stems from the two men's contrasting experiences during the Vietnam War, when McCain was captured and held prisoner for more than five years, while Trump received five draft deferments.

Some Trump advisers this week said the mere mention of McCain in the news can instantly bring about a grim atmosphere in the West Wing as Trump grouses about the coverage of the late senator. McCain's funeral in September prompted a particularly dark mood, they recalled, and Trump was irate about former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's praise for McCain at the time.

Shields said Trump knows exactly what he's doing as he vents about perceived past slights from McCain.

"He knows he's going to offend people on TV. His supporters want those people to be offended. They elected him because he thought they were going to make them all really angry," Shields said, adding that he nonetheless would urge Trump to "drop" the McCain attacks and move on.

Ahead of the 2020 campaign season, Trump is "reaching for feelings out in the country about McCain that are much deeper," said veteran Republican strategist Ed Rollins.

"Trump knows there are a lot more anti-McCain people than pro-McCain people in the party, despite the Washington establishment looking back fondly," said Rollins, the chairman of the pro-Trump Great America super PAC. "He's turning to them and showing his solidarity with them, reminding them that he's an outsider who was able to win the White House."

Still, some of Trump's biggest supporters are increasingly uncomfortable with Trump's attacks and dismiss talk of political strategy, while acknowledging that Trump may pay little cost with his base.

"When Trump has a grudge, he just pounds away, whether it's smart or dumb, wise or foolish," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, said. "This is who he is, this is how he operates. "This isn't a strategy, but his behavior - and it's a waste of time to be fighting with McCain when you have all of these opportunities to pick fights with Democrats. It doesn't make sense at all."

"I do not appreciate his tweets," Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said Thursday at a town hall event. "John McCain is a dear friend of mine. So, no, I don't agree with President Trump, and he does need to stop."

In the wake of Trump's latest remarks, Senate Democrats are renewing their effort to rename the Russell Senate Office Building after McCain, with Schumer announcing that he will reintroduce a measure to make that change in the coming days.

Other attempts to honor McCain appear to have gone dormant. McConnell announced shortly after McCain's death that he would bring together a bipartisan group to brainstorm ways to commemorate McCain after some Republican senators objected to renaming the building named for former senator Richard Russell, D-Ga. But no public announcement has since been made regarding such a group. Instead, McConnell has been talking with McCain's family about other ways to memorialize him, according to two people familiar with the discussions, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

A Fox News poll conducted a week before McCain died in August 2018 showed him popular nationally, with 52 percent of registered voters viewing him favorably, while 37 percent were unfavorable. That figure was down from a peak of 64 percent popularity in 2009, months after being defeated by President Obama.

Among Republican voters, however, McCain's popularity suffered following his criticism of Trump and he was much more popular among Democrats at the time of his death. The Fox poll found 60 percent of Democratic voters had a favorable view of McCain, compared with 41 percent of Republicans. Four years prior, a CNN-ORC poll showed that 58 percent of Republicans saw McCain favorably.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.  McCains close friend and a vocal Trump ally - has been thrust into the center of the debate.

"I don't know why he continues to do it. I have no idea. I don't think it's particularly helpful. I am trying to be helpful to him where I can," Graham said in an interview. "I've told him repeatedly what I think about Senator McCain."

Graham declined to comment further.

The Washington Posts Scott Clement contributed to this report.WASHINGTON - Democrats are scrambling to reinforce their party's support for the U.S.-Israel relationship as accusations of anti-Semitism roil the party and President Donald Trump upends decades of bipartisan consensus by endorsing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing priorities.

Two Jewish House Democrats introduced a resolution Thursday that condemns a boycott movement against Israel and reaffirms support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a move to counter the perception that the party is fractured in its support of Israel. The legislation, however, was overshadowed by Trumps endorsement of permanent Israeli control over the disputed Golan Heights  a pronouncement hailed by Netanyahu, who is seeking re-election next month.

Longtime Democratic supporters of close U.S.-Israel ties have been forced to regroup after freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., suggested Israel's supporters are motivated by political donations and have "allegiance" to a foreign country, sparking a messy public reckoning over anti-Semitism. Democratic presidential candidates, meanwhile, have shown a new willingness to challenge Israeli government policy under Netanyahu.

Few Democratic leaders believe the party is in danger of seeing a mass defection of Jewish voters, but many say they need to redouble their efforts to police anti-Semitic rhetoric and prevent further erosion of support for Israel. Jewish voters typically favor Democrats over Republicans by a remarkably consistent ratio of 2 to 1 or more, according to exit polling dating to 1980.

"What I'm hearing from the community is, 'Do we have a problem?' " said Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a moderate Jewish Democrat. "My answer to that is: There are a few individuals who are on the fringes, but that's not where the party is, and we need to reinforce that message and ensure this never becomes a partisan issue."

That mission is set to play out next week as thousands of politically active Jewish Americans and allies gather at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference. The headliners include top-ranking Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, all considered stalwart supporters of Israel.

They will be tasked with countering a narrative of polarization and division that has been developing since at least 2015, when Netanyahu openly challenged President Barack Obama over his decision to pursue nuclear rapprochement with Iran. That narrative only accelerated with Trump's election and close embrace of Netanyahu and his priorities - canceling the Iran nuclear deal, moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and, in a tweet Thursday, endorsing Israel's sovereignty in the Golan.

But the frenzy over Omar's comments has emboldened Republicans who argue that they are the more ardent supporters of Israel and Jewish interests - even as a new Gallup poll found that only 16 percent of Jewish Americans identified as Republicans last year.

Trump this month called the Democratic Party "anti-Israel" and "anti-Jewish" after House leaders broadened a resolution responding to Omar by condemning all forms of hatred. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the House Republican Conference chairwoman, in a fundraising message accused Democrats of "enabling anti-Semitism." And GOP campaign committees are targeting Democratic incumbents who have shied away from directly rebuking Omar.

According to lawmakers and congressional aides, as well as activists and strategists, Democratic leaders and others in the party are planning to push back on the narrative at the AIPAC conference, where Netanyahu also is slated to be in attendance. Some will emphasize the importance of keeping the U.S.-Israel relationship bipartisan. Others will argue that the more significant threat is anti-Semitism on the political right. And some will directly challenge the rhetoric that landed Omar and her defenders in a political firestorm.

"There are thousands of people who will be coming to Washington this week who are Democrats and Republicans who care deeply about the U.S.-Israel relationship and understand that it can't be used as a political wedge issue - and that applies on both sides," said Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., who delivered an impassioned floor speech on the dangers of anti-Semitism during the Omar imbroglio this month. "I think what the community wants is clear assurance that attacks on the Jewish community won't be tolerated and can never be normalized."

Part of that effort is the new resolution sponsored by Reps. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Bradley Schneider, D-Ill., which strongly rejects the global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or BDS. That movement aims to apply economic pressure to compel Israel to change its policy toward the Palestinians; its critics say the changes BDS supporters want would effectively end Israel's identity as a Jewish homeland.

AIPAC supports the resolution, according to an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the group's strategy.

While the majority of Democrats are opposed or at least silent on the movement, two freshmen House members - Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., who is of Palestinian descent - have made statements of support. And many more Democrats have pushed back on legislative efforts to rebuke the movement, saying they infringe on free speech.

Tlaib's office said in a statement Thursday that she would oppose the resolution "because it is aimed at suppressing free speech and moves us no closer to peace and understanding."

"The economic boycott of Israel or any other government based on violations of human rights is about highlighting the injustices that need to stop," Tlaib's spokesman Denzel McCampbell said.

Twenty-three Senate Democrats opposed a separate bill last month that would allow state and local governments to cut off contracts with companies that embrace BDS.

Democratic leaders are intent on sending a straightforward message of support at AIPAC as they share a stage with Netanyahu and Trump administration officials eager to tout their close bond.

The task for Democrats, said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, is that "support for Israel needs to be defined as support for Israel, not support for Bibi Netanyahu," he said, using a common nickname for the Israeli leader.

Hoyer, long one of the most fervent Democratic supporters of Israel, plans to speak Sunday about the shared democratic values of the two countries and the need to counter threats from Iran - standard fare for the annual conference. But, according to an aide familiar with his planned remarks, he also will rebut the notion that Israel's American supporters have a "dual loyalty" - the anti-Semitic trope at the center of the recent accusations against Omar.

"He will argue there should be no confusion about Americans who support Israel - they do so out of patriotism for the United States and its ideals," said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the speech.

Pelosi and Schumer have spoken out about GOP efforts to create a partisan breach on Israel, and both have pointed to Trump as a culprit in rising anti-Semitism.

Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said that her "strong message of support for the vital U.S.-Israel relationship will speak for itself" and that "politicians who seek to weaponize this relationship and turn it into a wedge issue are no friends of Israel."

After Trump called Democrats anti-Jewish, Schumer pointed to Trump's equivocal response to the 2017 white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and said he was "only interested in playing the politics of division."

"Mr. President," he added, "you have redefined chutzpah."

Not appearing at AIPAC - at least at official events - are any 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, with some openly announcing that they are skipping the event amid pressure from left-wing activists.

The liberal group MoveOn Political Action urged White House hopefuls to skip the conference, citing the group's opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and its close embrace of Netanyahu.

An aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., cited concerns "about the platform AIPAC is providing for leaders who have expressed bigotry and oppose a two-state solution." Sanders, who is of Jewish descent, has been among the prominent Democrats most critical of the Netanyahu government, and he offered some support of Omar amid the firestorm this month.

"She has been critical of the Israeli government, and I think that that is a fair criticism," he said of Omar in an interview with WMUR in New Hampshire. "I have been very critical of the Israeli government in terms of their treatment of Palestinians."

Both Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., another liberal presidential hopeful, skipped Netanyahu's 2015 speech to Congress. And when the Senate voted last month on the anti-BDS measure, nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates voted against it, citing free speech concerns. The one exception was Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

"The task for presidential candidates used to be convincing the electorate of their bona fides in being aligned with the Israeli government," said Ben Rhodes, a former senior foreign policy aide to Obama. "I think now it's incumbent on Democrats to articulate how they can both be supportive of Israel, in terms of its survival and its security, but also critical of this Israeli government."

That emerging reality is making some traditional Israel supporters inside the Democratic Party nervous. This year Mark Mellman, a prominent Democratic pollster and strategist, launched a new group, Democratic Majority for Israel, aimed at shoring up support as a new generation of liberals express fresh doubts about Israel under a right-wing government.

Mellman said "the overwhelming majority" of Democrats are pro-Israel, "and we want to keep it that way." The GOP pressure campaign highlighting Israel's Democratic critics, he said, had little chance of success.

Weve got a few who are problematic from a pro-Israel point of view, Mellman said. Thats a few too many, as far as Im concerned, on the one hand. On the other hand, its not a bad score. So I dont think its a particularly precarious moment.Rudy Giuliani said he and President Trump spoke Friday morning to discuss their strategy about how to deal with the special counsel's findings. Read more

Rudy Giuliani, one of President Donald Trump's lead attorneys dealing with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe, said Friday that, like many Americans, he's in a holding pattern, with no inside information about when Mueller will issue his report to the Justice Department.

"It's like waiting for a baby," Giuliani said in a phone interview as he tracked news coverage from his hotel in Washington, D.C. "Or, maybe, it's more like waiting for a jury. You make your case, then you have to wait days for that verdict."

Giuliani added, "If the report is good" - and finds no wrongdoing by the president - "I'll give out cigars."

Giuliani said he and Trump spoke Friday morning, before the president headed out for a weekend at his Mar-a-Lago Club, to discuss their strategy about how to deal with the special counsel's findings.

"It was nothing new," Giuliani said, briefly describing the conversation. "He has become sort of tired of it, and his view is that it's going to happen one day, and we'll be ready."

As he departed the White House for Florida on Friday, Trump told reporters, "I have no idea about the Mueller report."

"Well, we're going to see what happens," he said. "It's going to be very interesting, but we'll see what happens. There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. Everybody knows it. It's all a big hoax. I call it the witch hunt."

Mueller, who has kept his investigation very closely held, has not said when he will file his confidential report on the findings of a nearly two-year inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.

But there have been several public signs that the probe is winding down - and heightened speculation that Mueller could transmit his final report to Attorney General William Barr any day.

Members of Mueller's team have been leaving for other posts in recent weeks. And no one has been charged by the special counsel since longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone was indicted in January for allegedly lying to Congress.

Giuliani insisted that he has received no messages or even private signals that Mueller's work is done - "Zero," he said.

"We just don't know, and they haven't told us anything," he said.

Giuliani said he and other Trump lawyers began to assume weeks ago that Mueller could be nearing the end because Mueller's lawyers stopped engaging them further about the president's written answers to a list of questions from the special counsel.

"The last exchange was pretty mild, and that's after having heated debates a long time ago," he said. "Frankly, we thought it could be done four or five weeks ago. I'm not sure about the reason for the delay."

In preparation for Mueller's report, Giuliani said Trump's legal team wrote a "counter report," with various sections designed to challenge possible assertions by Mueller.

"I'm not sure we'll have to use it," Giuliani said. "We don't know how detailed their report will be."

Giuliani continued, "If they report with facts, we'll say something right away and write something over the weekend. If there are no facts, I'm not sure we'll put out a report. If it's a statement from Barr saying he simply received it, I don't think we'll say anything."

If Mueller gives his report to Barr on Friday, Giuliani said he plans to stay in Washington to do some Sunday television interviews, rather than travel to see Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Lawmakers, meanwhile, have been taking steps to urge the Justice Department to make Mueller's findings public, although it is unclear whether and to what extent that will happen. The House last week voted overwhelmingly to urge the Justice Department to publicly release Mueller's entire report, with 420 Democrats and Republicans supporting the measure and not a single person voting no.

The special-counsel regulations do not require Barr to release Mueller's report, and in most circumstances, the Justice Department does not make public information about those it investigates and does not charge. But the political pressure on the attorney general is expected to be enormous, and legal analysts say the Justice Department might be hard-pressed to resist lawmakers' demands for transparency.

Barr has vowed to be as open as possible while also noting that department policies generally do not support his telling all.

On Wednesday, Trump said he does not mind if Mueller's report is made public.

"I don't mind," the president told reporters outside the White House before departing for a trip to Lima, Ohio. "I mean, frankly, I told the House, 'If you want, let them see it.' "

---

The Washington Posts John Wagner and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.WASHINGTON (AP)  President Donald Trump is offering a distorted account of John McCain's actions in the Russia investigation and trying to blame the media for making him talk about the late senator, despite plain-as-day evidence that he's assailing McCain without any prodding.

On a recent tear against McCain, Trump also claimed credit for steps aimed at improving health care for veterans and denigrated the senator's record on the issue. "McCain didn't get the job done for our great vets," Trump said. "I got it done."

In reality, McCain got it done. That is why the law expanding private-sector care for veterans is named, in part, after the Arizona senator, Vietnam War naval aviator and tortured prisoner of war who died in August of brain cancer.

A look at some of Trump's statements:

TRUMP, asked why he is criticizing a dead senator who can't defend himself: "When they ask me the question, I answer the question. But you people bring it up. I don't bring it up."  Fox Business Network interview, to be broadcast Friday on "Mornings with Maria."

THE FACTS: This is false. Trump has been assailing McCain without any prompting by the media. He tweeted Sunday about "last in his class" McCain (who wasn't last in his class), after a tweet Saturday about "stains" on the late senator's record.

And after extended opening remarks in a speech at a Lima, Ohio, Army tank factory on Wednesday, Trump abruptly segued by telling his audience: "A lot of people are asking, because they love me, and they ask me about a man named John McCain." He went on to devote nearly 800 words to criticisms of McCain.

Trump further claimed in the Fox Business interview "that when I went out yesterday to the scrum, they asked me the question," and that's the only reason he discussed his feelings about McCain. But at that scrum  a gathering of reporters who asked him questions as he was leaving for Ohio  the president didn't answer any questions about McCain, if any were asked in the din. A day earlier, at the start of Trump's meeting with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a reporter asked about his anti-McCain tweets.

___

TRUMP: "John McCain received a fake and phony dossier. Did you hear about the dossier? It was paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton. Right? And John McCain got it. He got it. And what did he do? He didn't call me. He turned it over to the FBI, hoping to put me in jeopardy."  remarks Wednesday at the Lima, Ohio, tank factory.

TRUMP: "So it was indeed (just proven in court papers) 'last in his class' (Annapolis) John McCain that sent the Fake Dossier to the FBI and Media hoping to have it printed BEFORE the Election. He & the Dems, working together, failed (as usual)."  tweet Sunday.

THE FACTS: Trump's chronology is incorrect. McCain did not present then-FBI Director James Comey with a copy of the memos compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele until December 2016, according to a deposition from a McCain associate, David Kramer. FBI officials had access to Steele's research on Trump before the election, as they referenced it as part of an application for a secret search warrant of Trump associate Carter Page.

Trump often claims falsely that special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe is based on the dossier. That probe is examining Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign. The FBI's investigation actually began months before it received the dossier of anti-Trump research financed by the Democratic Party and Clinton's campaign. The FBI probe's origins were based on other evidence  not the existence of the dossier.

There is no evidence that McCain provided the dossier to the news media.

And while McCain famously racked up demerits and earned poor grades at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, he ultimately graduated fifth from the bottom of his 1958 class, not last.

___

TRUMP: "The vets were on my side because I got the job done. I got Choice, and I got accountability. ... For many decades, they couldn't get it done. It was never done. I got it. Five months ago, I got it done. Choice."  remarks in Ohio.

THE FACTS: What Trump got done was an expansion of the program achieved by McCain and Sen. Bernie Sanders, most prominent among the lawmakers who advanced the legislation signed by Obama.

McCain was a co-sponsor of the 2014 legislation to overhaul the Department of Veterans Affairs following a scandal at VA's medical center in Phoenix, where some veterans died while waiting months for appointments for medical care. He was a key negotiator for the legislation establishing the Veterans Choice program, working with Sanders, the co-author of the bill. Sanders was then chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.

McCain didn't rest after the law was enacted. He fought to expand the program and achieved that, too, in his last months.

Congress approved the expansion in May and Trump signed the legislation in June. It's named after three veterans who served in Congress.

One of them is McCain.

It's called the John S. McCain III, Daniel K. Akaka, and Samuel R. Johnson VA Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks Act of 2018.

___

TRUMP: "Instead of waiting in line for two days, two weeks, two months, people waiting on line  they're not very sick, by the time they see a doctor, they are terminally ill  we give them Choice. If you have to wait for any extended period of time, you go outside, you go to a local doctor, we pay the bill, you get yourself better, go home to your family  and we got it passed. We got it done."  remarks in Ohio.

THE FACTS: As he does routinely, Trump exaggerated what's been accomplished with his expansion.

Veterans still must wait for weeks before they can get private care outside the VA system.

The program currently allows veterans to see doctors outside VA if they must wait more than 30 days for an appointment or drive more than 40 miles (65 kilometers) to a VA facility. Under new rules to take effect in June, veterans are to have that option for a private doctor if their VA wait is only 20 days (28 for specialty care) or their drive is only 30 minutes.

But the expanded Choice eligibility may do little to provide immediate help. That's because veterans often must wait even longer for an appointment in the private sector. Last year, then-Secretary David Shulkin said VA care is "often 40 percent better in terms of wait times" compared with the private sector. In 2018, 34 percent of all VA appointments were with outside physicians, down from 36 percent in 2017.

The VA also must resolve long-term financing because of congressional budget caps after the White House opposed new money to pay for the program. As a result, lawmakers could be forced later this year to limit the program or slash core VA or other domestic programs.

Also key to the program's success is an overhaul of VA's electronic medical records to allow seamless sharing of medical records with private physicians, a process expected to take up to 10 years. VA Secretary Robert Wilkie has said full implementation of the expanded Choice program is "years" away.

___

Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck

EDITORS NOTE _ A look at the veracity of claims by political figuresMoney floods New Jersey when its election season.

With power to be had in Trenton, candidates, political parties, and advocacy groups spend large amounts to win votes and influence policy agendas.

And where a lot of that money comes from is a mystery.

Some advocacy groups do not have to identify their donors. Its known as dark money, and has amounted to tens of millions of dollars in recent election years, with these groups outspending traditional political parties and their affiliates.

That could change soon. A version of a bill that would shed some light on large donors has passed Senate and Assembly committees, and Gov. Phil Murphy supports the idea in principle.

It allows us to truly, truly understand who is trying to influence the decision makers and influence voters, said State Sen. Troy Singleton (D., Burlington), the bills primary sponsor.

But critics, including the ACLU of New Jersey, say it would be a threat to free speech because it would apply not only to election-related activities but also to the ACLU and other advocacy groups on policymaking. Potential donors might be dissuaded from giving to causes they support if they will be publicly identified.

In a time like today, when things are as polarized as they are, and organizations like the ACLU, like LGBT rights groups, like abortion rights groups, or on either side of those debates, are so controversial, we want to make sure they can do their work without fear, said state ACLU head Amol Sinha.

What dark money is

Traditionally, groups that seek to influence elections  campaigns, political parties, PACs  are subject to strict regulations.

At federal and state levels, they regularly file statements detailing contributions and money theyve spent.

But some independent organizations  including 501(c)4 social welfare nonprofits, and 501(c)6 nonprofits such as chambers of commerce  dont have to because theyre not primarily engaged in political work.

When these groups run negative political advertising, viewers have no idea who is behind the message, said Abby K. Wood, a professor of law, political science, and public policy at the University of Southern California.

Dark money also raises the possibility of pay-to-play donations and other unseemly attempts at influencing politics, said Jeffrey M. Brindle, executive director of the Election Law Enforcement Commission, the states campaign finance regulatory body.

Dark money in New Jersey

Independent spending increased from $39.1 million in the 2013 state legislative and gubernatorial elections to $49.7 million in 2017, well outpacing the growth in spending by state and county political parties, which increased from $28.2 million to $33.9 million.

In recent years, Brindle said, dark money is dwarfing the spending by political parties, which has actually declined at the same time these groups have increased their spending and their clout in the elections.

A 2018 report from ELEC found the top 25 special interest groups spent $74 million in 2017, of which $41.5 million came from independent spending.

What the bill does

The bill would require that quarterly campaign finance reports be filed by 527, 501(c)4, and 501(c)6 groups that spend more than $3,000 in one year on trying to influence elections, ballot questions, legislation, or government regulations.

They would identify expenses of more than $3,000 and donations exceeding $10,000. Donors giving more than $10,000 would be identified by name, address, occupation, and employer.

The bill also would explicitly include internet and digital advertisements and would bar foreign entities from creating independent expenditure committees.

Its unclear how many donors would be identified under the $10,000 limit.

The types of donors who are likely to give in excess of $10,000, if they dont want to have their name and address included in a report, usually theyre sophisticated enough to still find a way to make the donation but it wont be attributable to them, said Austin Graham, a Campaign Legal Center expert focusing on state and local campaign finance and electoral systems.

Singleton said the $10,000 bar was meant to lessen the burden of the new law on some smaller groups that try to influence policy and not elections.

Electioneering vs. advocacy: The free-speech challenge

Campaign finance laws requiring disclosure of electioneering groups have been a trend in recent years, Graham said, but usually focus on electoral campaigns.

Requiring disclosure from groups trying to affect legislation is less common.

From a public-interest standpoint, all this stuff is important because it does serve to give information to the voters and the public at large about the sources behind this political messaging, Graham said, whether its related to candidates or its related to legislation or regulations.

The ACLUs Sinha agreed more transparency is needed in election-related activities but said the bill goes too far beyond that.

Were talking about people who will ultimately be governing us. We should know where their motivations are and we should know where their funding comes from, he said. When it comes to issue-advocacy organizations that have nothing to do with elections for the most part, that are working on issues based on their mission statements, I think the same logic doesnt necessarily apply.

The ACLU has donors, Sinha said, who would face controversy with their employers or their families or some other way if it was out there that they gave to the ACLU.

Wood, the USC professor, said research is mixed on what effect disclosure has on speech.

The chilling is not obvious and, in my research, seems to be negligible at best, she said. That cost is so small that almost any benefit of disclosures going to outweigh it.

New Jersey may soon find out for itself.

Although Murphys office declined, as a matter of policy, to comment on the legislation itself, a spokesperson said the governor supports donor disclosure for 501(c)4 groups. Sweeney, the Senate president, backs the proposal.

The Senate version of the bill passed, 31-0, last month, and it was approved last week by the Assembly Appropriations Committee, though with amendments that will require another full Senate vote in addition to an Assembly vote.MEDIA  Several county residents Wednesday asked Delaware County Council to end their contract with Community Transit after its hiring of Nick Miccarelli as executive director.

I demand that our county council exercise its rights to limit the disbursement of money to an organization that has chosen such leadership, Catherine Coll of Lansdowne said. Find an alternate provider for the services provided by Community Transit and exercise the right to demand accountability on behalf of all residents of Delco.

Miccarelli, a former Republican representative of the 162nd state House District, began his new role Monday at the Eddystone-based private, non-profit transportation company that provides 2,167 trips every weekday to county residents. Miccarelli, of Ridley Park, takes over for Thomas Giancristoforo Jr., who died in December following a long illness.

Delaware County has a $5.7 million contract with the agency to provide transportation to medical assistance clients for its Medical Assistance Transportation Program requirements.

At issue for the residents at the county council meeting was Miccarellis past.

Miccarelli had handily defeated opponents in five races before announcing he would not seek a sixth term and left the state Capital as an elected representative for the last time Nov. 30. Democrat Dave Delloso of Ridley won the seat in an open race against Republican Mary Hopper and began his term in January.

Factoring largely in Miccarellis retirement were accusations of physical and sexual abuse leveled by two former girlfriends in a confidential complaint filed with House leadership. Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo announced in December that the complainant alleging sexual assault was withdrawing from the case and his office would not be pressing charges.

Miccarelli always denied the accusations.

I find it appalling that this job seems to have been treated as a political appointment, providing a soft landing for a GOP member who has been credibly accused of stalking, sexual assault and threatening his former girlfriend with a gun, Rachel Pastan of Indivisible Swarthmore said.

Another resident, Marguerite Wilson of Drexel Hill, pointed to a bow and said Miccarellis appointment was a gift to the Democratic Party.

Community Transit officials said their hiring choice was justified.

We had a thorough process to hire a new executive director, Community Transit Board Chairman Nathan Much said, adding that a subcommittee evaluated many resumes and interviewed six candidates. The recommendation to the board of Community Transit by the subcommittee was that Nick Miccarelli had the best credentials. He had a fresh perspective  We liked his leadership and his accountability. He served the community for many years. We felt that he had an understanding of what the community could use.

Much said the board unanimously approved Miccarellis hiring.

There is no political agenda, the chairman said. It strictly is an appointment for the betterment of Community Transit. We want to make sure that the handicapped and the elderly and the sick are taken care of in the best way possible. He was hired because he had the best interview, the best credentials and we felt as a board that he would do the best job. There was no politics involved.

Miccarelli himself said he was considering his options to respond to the statements made about him.

I unfortunately was not present at todays council meeting, he said in a statement. However, I have since been told by several individuals who were in attendance that shameful and false claims were made about me by certain individuals. I am presently investigating the truthfulness of what I have been told, but, if true, I will at a minimum demand an apology from the person or persons making the untrue claims and consider my other options to prevent the repeat of such despicable conduct.

At the council meeting, Councilman Brian Zidek explained that county officials dont have the ability to dictate who Community Transit hires.

What we do have control over is whether or not the county would contract with such an organization, he said.

In line with that, Councilman Kevin Madden asked what it would take to have alternatives to consider prior to the Community Transit contract expiring at the end of June.

My request, he said to county Executive Director Marianne Grace, (is to) look at what the time frame would be if we were to make a transition either to providing these services as the MAPT internally or if we were to contract to someone else.The Ehline is the faster rolling, more tightly spaced tread of the two tires.

Tire Details

The Honcho is the more aggressive of the two tires and is available in slightly larger widths.

Ride Impressions

Jumping into an already saturated tire market full of reliable options is a tricky leap, and Teravail have made that jump. After riding their XC tires, I'd say that they've successfully landed and are onto something good. If the more aggressive tires Teravail produce in the future complement what they already have with the Ehline and Honcho, Teravail will be a strong contender in the running for reliable and good feeling rubber.  Daniel Sapp

Teravail, distributor QBP's house brand, announced today that they are expanding their line of mountain bike tires with two new options, the Ehline and Honcho. We've had the tires for a little while now and have been putting in the miles to see where they work best and how durable they are.Both of the tubeless ready 60tpi tires are available in 27.5" and 29" versions as well as both 'light and supple' and 'durable' casings. The tires are more geared towards XC and trail riding than full on heavy duty all-mountain activities. While the name Ehline may seem best suited for a bike park tire, and Honcho seems like something built to slam into aggressive terrain, the tires are simply named after popular trails in the Midwest.Historically, Teravail's tire options have been more geared towards mountain bike touring and all-road riding, and were available in mainly in wider widths, from 2.8"- 4.0". The Ehline and Honcho mark a pretty big departure from the previous designs, and according to the team at Teravail, these are just the start of what we're going to see in the future - there are likely going to be some aggressive trail tires on the way.Prices are $70 USD for the light and supple construction, and $75 for the durable casing. The weight for the 29 X 2.4" LS Honcho with tan sidewalls is a claimed 866 grams, while the 29 x 2.3" LS Ehline with tan sidewalls is 794 grams. The weights for all tires in the lineup can be seen here The Ehline is the faster rolling, more tightly spaced tread pattern of the two tires. Its ideal terrain is hardpack trail. The tread pattern is made to allow the tire to roll quickly while still having stout corner knobs. It's made in both a 2.3" and 2.5" width, with the tires being designed around a 24mm and 29mm internal rim width, respectively. Both casings are available in the black sidewall, while the tan sidewall is available in light and supple only.The Honcho is the slightly more aggressive sibling to the Ehline. The knobs offer some extra bite and are made to work well in loose, rocky, and rooty terrain. The tread pattern is a little more open than the Ehline and the knobs are larger. The tire is available in a 2.4" and 2.6" version with those also designed around a minimum inner rim width of 24mm and 29mm as well. Both casings are available in the black sidewall and again, the tan sidewall option is only light and supple.I've had several of the tires for a few months now and have managed to put the miles in on them in a variety of terrain. They are set up on a Specialized Epic EVO Expert and Reynolds carbon wheels.The first test of any tire is how easy it is to set up tubeless. Fortunately, I had zero issues, even using a low volume pump to get these tires on the rims. After inflating the first set-up I tested (a 2.4" Honcho on the front and a 2.3" Ehline on the rear - both with light and supple tan sidewall casings) one evening several months ago, I managed to get one ride in, hung my bike on the wall, and then it snowed.I didn't ride for nearly a month, and to my surprise, I came back and the tires were still well inflated. There had been a slight amount of leakage, but far less than any other bike I had sitting around.I rolled out for my second ride in the wet, and went searching for the limits of these very much XC-oriented tires. The light and supple casing is exactly what it says it is, light and supple. The tires do best in the terrain they are advertised for, especially the Ehline. When I got into wet and snaky slick rocks and roots, the tires got a bit slippery. With the sidewalls being supple, they do need a decent amount of pressure, more than you're going to run in a heavier sidewall tire, in order to stand up. Dropping pressure to try and ride in sloppy and slick conditions helped with traction, but I lost a lot of the sidewall support, and the tires wanted to roll a bit in the corners. Limitation found, but let's be real, that was outside of what the tire is designed for. With the tougher casing, I had much more success in these conditions, and didn't experience the loss of support. The difference is pretty drastic.With conditions getting better as time went on, I was able to get out on some more hardpack singletrack, just what these tires - especially the light and supple edition - were designed for. I kept the set up of the Honcho up front and the Ehline in the back, and ran 25-26 psi in the front tire and 27-29 psi in the rear tire. On hardpack dry trails, the tires performed flawlessly. They stayed predictable, and transitioning from the center to the side knobs in turns was smooth and confidence inspiring. There are few things more deflating than a torn sidewall, and after a few hundred miles on both casings, the tires I've been testing are still rolling with no issues.Jacopo Larcher frees his mega trad climb at Cadarese

22.03.2019 by by Planetmountain

At Cadarese, Italy, Jacopo Larcher has made the first ascent of his huge trad project, defining the pitch as 'the most difficult thing Ive ever climbed'.

A few hours ago South Tyrolean climber Jacopo Larcher freed his mega trad project at Cadarese in Northern Italy. Currently no name or grade has been put forward, but chances are it is one of the hardest trad climbs out there, not only in Italy.

Larcher eyed the line during his first visit to Caderese 6 years ago, when Riky Federer showed him this beautiful overhanging arete. "I immediately cleaned the rock and that same evening I rappelled down the line to try the moves. Thats when my odyssey began" Larcher just told planetmountain.com.

The climb is about 25m high and after a first section in the region of 7a+ "with some touch and go climbing, not protected particularly well, where you best avoid falling", there are two crux sections: the first breaches the roof, the second leads past a rounded crimp over the bulge. A delicate rockover then leads to the finishing crack.

Whenever he travelled to Cadarese Larcher tried the route but he only started working the line intensely three years ago, after sending La Rambla at Siurana in Spain and Gondo Crack at Cippo in Switzerland. It became so much of an obsession that Larcher often travelled to Cadda on his own to try the moves.

"At first I didn't understand anything, it just seemed impossible, then as time went by I managed to unravel the moves. Now I know them so well that Im hard pressed to give the route a grade. The only thing I know is that its the most difficult thing Ive ever climbed. Both in sport climbing and in trad climbing. Ive never tried anything as hard as this before." An interesting detail: prior to his free ascent, the 29-year-old had never managed to link all the moves without falling on toprope.

Larcher dedicates the climb to Peter Mair, a mountain guide from Sexten who perished in the mountains in 2016. "He means a lot to me, he taught me so much and played an important role in my growth, as a person and as a climber. A bit like this route really."



Links: jacopo-larcher.com, FB Jacopo Larcher, La Sportiva, The North Face





Andrey Lukyanov Leads EPT National Sochi After Day 1A and 1B

March 22, 2019 Lisa Yiasemides Will Shillibier

The PokerStars EPT National in Sochi got underway with a bang, Day 1A and Day 1B on the same day. Here's a look at who did well, and who might need to give it another try on today's Day 1C. As always, live updates can be found in the EPT Sochi live reporting section of PokerNews.

Day 1A Attracts 249 Players, Lukyanov Leads

Day 1a of the EPT Sochi National attracted a total of 249 players, all entering for RUB 77,000 ($1,204). With the goal of playing down to fifteen percent of the field, that mark was reached shortly after 1 a.m. local time leaving 37 players to advance to Day 2.

Leading the way is Andrey Lukyanov (lead photo) with well over 500,000 in chips. He was responsible for the elimination of Indian Aditya Sushant earlier in the day and kicked on late to move up the chip counts where he remained until the end of play.

Other big stacks include Valery Yantsevich (401,000), Komil Ruzaev (391,000), and Tomas Macnamara (386,000), the latter responsible for the final elimination of the day.

Artur Martirosyan (308,000) and Bohdan Cherba (306,000) are the only two other players who eclipsed the 300,000-mark after just over seventeen levels of play.

As to be expected for the start of the festival, plenty of familiar faces were present in the field including Vadzim Lipauka, Anatoliy Zyrin, Kyril Radzivonau, and defending champion Matous Houzvicek.

Houzvicek would chip up early, but was eliminated after dinner and was seen shortly after that in the Day 1b field.

The chip lead had jumped from player to player, with Gor Kazaryan, Zyrin, and Evgenii Tsoi all holding it for brief periods before it settled on Lukyanov.

The final elimination of the day was a quiet one, and it came in the first hand of hand-for-hand play. Anton Mazurin was forced all in from the big blind, and all Tomas Macnamara had to do was outkick the Russian to send Mazurin to the rail.

The 37 players surviving Day 1A all earned themselves a day off - should they wish - and will return at noon on Saturday for Day 2 of the EPT National.

Top 5 Chip Counts Day 1A

Position Player Country Chip Count 1 Andrey Lukyanov Russia 544,000 2 Valery Yantsevich Belarus 401,000 3 Komil Ruzaev Russia 391,000 4 Tomas Macnamara United Kingdom 386,000 5 Artur Martirosyan Russia 308,000

Day 1B Sees 89 Register, Chernokoz and Peretz Finish Up Top

It all changed at the top in a thrilling end to Day 1B of the National at Casino Sochi. Yaniv Peretz busted Giorgiy Skhulukhiya in the final hand of the night with king-ten of diamonds versus ace-queen of hearts to earn a spot at the top of the counts, alongside Andrey Chernokoz. Chernokoz was leading in chips until he lost a hand with pocket-jacks against Vladislav Naumov's pocket-kings just a few hands from the end. Both players will return for Day 2 on Saturday with 311,500 chips in play.

The second of three flights in the RUB 77,000 EPT Sochi National attracted 84 players total. Day 1B had 30-minute levels, unlike the other two starting days, which have 40 minutes on the clock. Over almost eighteen levels, the field was whittled down to the top fifteen percent, meaning thirteen survived to Day 2. They are all guaranteed a min-cash for doing so.

Andrey Chernokoz (in white)

Joining them on Saturday are Marat Achilov (309,500), who finished less than a whisker behind Chernokoz and Peretz. Aleksandr Denisov (287,000) finished in fourth, making his stack late in the day. He won some chips from Dmitry Yurasov shortly before the whistle blew. Yurasov had been one of the top stacks for most of the day but finished with 175,500. With so much experience under his belt, it would be foolish not to consider him a contender all the same.

There were also several big names that failed to bag chips. Reigning National Champion Matous Houzvicek, reigning Main Event Champion Arsenii Karmatckii, Vitaliy Avanesyan, Anton Yakuba, Ezequiel Waigel, Mikhail Kovalyuk, Anastasiya Denisova, and Viktor Shegay were just some of the familiar faces who fell before the last.

It isn't all over for any of them unless they wish, as there is still unlimited re-entries in Day 1C that will begin at noon today.

The 13 surviving players will return at 12 p.m. on Saturday for Day 2 of the EPT National, where blinds levels will increase to 60 minutes.4

Top 5 Chip Counts Day 1B

Position Player Country Chip Count 1 Andrey Chernokoz Russia 311,500 2 Yaniv Peretz Latvia 311,500 3 Marat Achilov Russia 309,500 4 Aleksandr Denisov Russia 287,000 5 Mikhail Khabarov Russia 201,500

PokerNews will be the players all the way, providing live updates throughout the rest of the tournament and for the duration of the festival. Check out all the PokerStars EPT Sochi live updates.

PokerStars EPT Sochi poker room

The Stars Group owns a majority shareholding in iBus Media.2k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Dan Rather had a message for Donald Trump and every single American watching. Rather said that no president is more powerful than the entire country, as he pointed out that the people are moving in the opposite direction away from this president.

Video:

Rather said on MSNBCs All In with Chris Hayes, One other point that I cant leave without saying. There was talk, there always is talk well, president trump sets the tone and how influential he is. No president is more powerful than the country as a whole and the country as a whole particularly the young people in the country are moving in the opposite direction from Donald Trump on race as well as some other things. But most importantly on race.

The reason why Trump has been and always likely will be an unpopular president is that he does not reflect the direction of a majority of the country. Popular presidents reflect the sentiment of their times. Presidents who are a reaction to change and progress, like Trump, are temporary walls that incapable of holding back the inevitable tide of change. People of all ages are moving against Trump, and the people are stronger than any one president.

This inertia is why Democrats stand a good chance of at least winning back the House in November because Donald Trump doesnt represent who the majority of America is, and most importantly where it wants to go. It is important to remind people that all presidents are temporary. The only thing certain about every single president is that at some point they will leave office and be replaced by someone else.

Dan Rather was referring to the collective mass of power that guides our country. Popular presidents ride atop this wave, while those who try to push against it end up condemned to the dustbin of presidential history.

Rathers words were a warning, but they were also a fact that no president is more powerful than the country, because the country has the power to rid itself of any president.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.4.8k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Just when you think Donald Trumps cabinet members couldnt be more shameless in their public admiration of their boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo opened his mouth on Thursday.

During an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Pompeo called it possible that Trump was sent by God to save the Jewish people.

Video:

Could it be that President Trump right now has been raised for such a time as this  just like #QueenEsther  to help save the #Jewish people from the Iranian #menace?

Listen to U.S. Department of State Secretary Pompeo in an exclusive interview with CBN News. #Purim pic.twitter.com/DyeKdCWbaI  Jerusalem Dateline (@JlemDateline) March 21, 2019

When he was asked if Trump is Esther, who convinced the king of Persia not to slaughter the Jewish people, Pompeo responded, As a Christian, I certainly believe thats possible.

He added, I am confident that the Lord is at work here.

There is nothing Christian about Donald Trump

Set aside the cringe-worthy love affair that Trumps cabinet members pretend to have for their boss when theyre in a public setting. Thats a whole separate (and disturbing) matter.

When examined on the merits, there is nothing Christian about this president.

As I wrote last month after Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested that it was divine intervention that put Trump in the White House, there is no version of God  regardless of the religion  that would approve of the person Donald Trump has been, not just during his presidency but throughout his life.



This is a man who repeatedly screwed employees and skirted tax laws throughout his career in business. He is on tape boasting about his ability to sexually assault women. More than a dozen women have come forward to accuse him of doing just that.



During the 2016 presidential campaign, he violated campaign finance laws to pay off a pornstar he slept with while his wife was at home caring for their new son.

Through it all, he has been a serial liar, con artist and racist  spreading his amoral slime as far and wide as he possibly could.

There is a lot that can be said of Donald Trump, but in no version of reality should his name be in the same sentence as the word savior.

Follow Sean Colarossi on Facebook and Twitter1.3k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Donald Trumps reelection campaign has now shifted $1.3 million of campaign funds into his businesses, according to a new report from Forbes.

The analysis shows that the president, despite bragging about using his own money during his 2016 primary campaign, hasnt contributed a dime of his own cash.

Instead, Forbes finds that Trump is essentially profiting from his reelection campaign.

More from the eye-opening report:

Donald Trump has charged his own reelection campaign $1.3 million for rent, food, lodging and other expenses since taking office, according to a Forbes analysis of the latest campaign filings. And although outsiders have contributed more than $50 million to the campaign, the billionaire president hasnt handed over any of his own cash. The net effect: $1.3 million of donor money has turned into $1.3 million of Trump money. In December, Forbes reported on the first $1.1 million that President Trump moved from his campaign into his business. Since then, his campaign filed additional documentation showing that it spent another $180,000 at Trump-owned properties in the final three months of 2018. None of this seemed likely when Donald Trump first got into politics. I dont need anybodys money, he announced on the day he launched his 2016 campaign, standing inside the marble atrium at Trump Tower. Im using my own money. Im not using the lobbyists. Im not using donors. I dont care. Im really rich.

Trump is profiting from the presidency

The fact that Trump is already profiting from his reelection bid more than a year before the 2020 election would be stunning if it wasnt so predictable.

After all, Trump may now be pulling in money from his campaign, but he and his business have been profiting from the presidency over the past two years, too.

Whether its the tens of thousands of dollars Mar-a-Lago receives from the Secret Service, the money he pockets from lobbyists and GOP aides staying at his D.C. hotel or the $1.5 million his RNC paid to his properties during the 2018 campaign, Trump has been raking it in since he took office.

Trump may have been bragging in recent days about donating his salary to the Department of Homeland Security, but his repeated use of the federal government and his presidential campaign as a piggy bank has more than made up for it.

Follow Sean Colarossi on Facebook and Twitter4.2k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Even though he was safely inside of the Fox bubble on Thursday, Donald Trump managed to further demonstrate that his mental state is as unstable as its ever been.

During an interview on Fox Business Network, the president told host Maria Bartiromo that he doesnt talk about John McCain  after he lobbed more attacks at the late senator and war hero.

No, I dont talk about it, the unhinged president said, moments after he slammed McCains connection to the Russia dossier and his vote against the repeal of Obamacare.

Video:

This Trump-Maria Bartiromo exchange on McCain is wild. He calls McCain horrible. BARTIROMO: But Mr. President, hes dead, he cant punch back. I know you punch back

TURMP: No.

BARTIROMO: but hes dead.

TRUMP: I dont talk about it. People ask me the question. pic.twitter.com/bgdS3sD0el  Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 21, 2019

The stunning exchange:

TRUMP: If you realize about three days ago it came out that his main person gave to the FBI the fake news dossier. It was a fake, it was a fraud, it was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. They gave it to John McCain, who gave it to the FBI for very evil purposes. Thats not good. And the other thing, he voted against repeal and replace. Now, hes been campaign for years for repeal and replace. Im not a fan. After all of this time, think of this, repeal and replace. We would have had great health care.  BARTIROMO: But Mr. President, hes dead, he cant punch back. I know you punch back, but hes dead. TRUMP: No, I dont talk about it. People ask me the question. I didnt bring this up. You just brought it up. You asked the question. BARTIROMO: Well, you talked about it this week. TRUMP: You asked me the question. When I went out yesterday to the scrum, they asked me the question. When they ask me the question, I answer the question. But you people bring it up. I dont bring it up. Im not a fan. He was horrible  what he did with repeal and replace. It was  what he did to the Republican Party and to the nation and to sick people that could have had great health care was not good. So Im not a fan of John McCain and thats fine.

Trump has been attacking McCain for a week

Despite Trumps effort to blame the press for his attacks on John McCain  no surprise there  the president kicked off this days-long assault on the late senator last weekend in a tweet that was unprompted by the media.

He has since ramped up his attacks on the late senator, even stooping beneath the ground on Wednesday to whine that he was never thanked for approving McCains funeral service.

Ultimately, the most recent McCain attacks Trump spewed on Thursday dont just demonstrate that he is a vile human being. They also confirm what we have been seeing in plain sight for two years: Donald Trump is unwell and should be nowhere near the Oval Office.

Follow Sean Colarossi on Facebook and Twitter573 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

WASHINGTON (Reuters)  The White House rejected a request by congressional Democrats that it provide information about President Donald Trumps communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin, House Democratic leaders said on Thursday, suggesting they would take further action.

U.S. Representatives Adam Schiff, Eliot Engel and Elijah Cummings, the chairmen of the House of Representatives Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, respectively, said in a statement the rejection was part of a troubling pattern by the White House.

Our Committees are in receipt of the White House Counsels letter, which continues a troubling pattern by the Trump Administration of rejecting legitimate and necessary congressional oversight with no regard for precedent or the constitution, the chairmen said.

We will be consulting on appropriate next steps, they added.

The White House sent its denial in a letter to Congress, according to reports by The Hill newspaper and CNN.

Cummings, Engel and Schiff had asked the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in early March for documents and interviews about Trumps conversations with Putin.

The lawmakers expressed concern about media reports that Trump seized notes on at least one meeting with the Russian leader and tried to destroy records about those talks.

In his response, White House counsel Pat Cipollone said a presidents communications with foreign leaders were confidential and protected by executive privilege.

The president must be free to engage in discussions with foreign leaders without fear that those communications will be disclosed and used as fodder for partisan political purposes, Cipollone wrote in the letter to the committee chairmen, according to The Hill.

The request for information about communications with Putin followed the House Judiciary Committees demand for documents from a whos who of Trumps circle, targeting 81 people, government agencies and other groups in an investigation of possible obstruction of justice or abuse of power.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Makini Brice; Editing by Bill Trott and Peter Cooney)907 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Over the past week Donald Trump has been lambasted for emboldening white nationalism after a white nationalist killed 50 Muslims at two New Zealand mosques.

When a reporter asked the president whether he sees today that white nationalism is a rising threat around the world? Trump responded, I dont really.

There have been other incidents of racist violence inspired by Trump, including:

The August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA,

The October 2018, shooting when a gunman killed 11 people worshiping at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA.

There is also new evidence that hate groups are on the rise during Trumps presidency, even though they were in decline under Barack Obama.

Of course Trump has always rejected any charges that hes to blame for violence. He tweeted on Monday:

The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one. So Ridiculous!

The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one. So Ridiculous!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2019

A new study, however, shows that Trumps speeches and tweets actually do result in violent behavior among his followers.

Trumps violent rhetoric has a measurable link to hate crime and extremist activity

The new study examined whether there was a correlation between the counties that hosted one of Trumps 275 presidential campaign rallies in 2016 and increased incidents of hate crimes in subsequent months.

The study found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally.

The study concluded:

It is hard to discount a Trump effect when a considerable number of these reported hate crimes reference Trump.

According to the FBIs Universal Crime report in 2017, reported hate crimes increased 17 percent over 2016.

Recent research also shows that reading or hearing Trumps statements of bias against particular groups makes people more likely to write offensive things about the groups he targets.

Trump Has Emboldened White Nationalism and Racist Violence

There is no question that many politicians and commentators have accused Donald Trump of emboldening white nationalists and their racist behavior. Even white nationalist leaders agree with this, including Richard Spencer and David Duke who supported Trumps candidacy.

So really, very few people, except the president himself, are denying Trumps influence among these groups. And the New Zealand shooter even referred to Trump as a renewed symbol of white identity.

Democrats Will Do What Trump Refuses to Do

On Monday we reported that the House Judiciary Committee will be holding a hearing on the rise of white nationalism in the coming weeks. This means that Democrats will investigate the violence that Trump refuses to condemn.

As Jason Easley wrote:

Trump is afraid of alienating white nationalists because they are some of his biggest supporters. Trump uses the language and buzz words of white nationalism when talking about immigrants and immigration.

Donald Trump views denouncing racism, bigotry, and white nationalism as bad politics, which is why it is vital that House Democrats stand up to this rising threat that is being inspired by the man in the Oval Office.

White nationalism and racial violence are big deals that Donald Trump has denied. We now must call upon and encourage House Democrats to follow up on their investigations of Trumps impact on racial violence, and we must let the American people know the truth: that their president is encouraging the kinds of divisions and conflicts that are tearing our nation apart.509 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) called Trumps claim that Democrats are anti-Jewish disgusting, and said that the president lies on an hourly basis.

Murphy said in response to Trumps renewed claims that Democrats are anti-Jewish, It is really disgusting. Really disgusting. And he lies on an hourly basis. That is probably one of the worst lies there is. Whats worse is that Republicans are so jubilant about trying to use the issue to separate Republicans and Democrats. When I came to Congress we all stood together. We worked through these issues so that in the end we passed legislation that Republicans and Democrats could support. Now Republicans, led by the president, just want to try to use Israel as just another political issue, unlike any other that we fight over in Washington. That is really bad for the security of Israel and the long term relationship of the United States. It is not even worth dignifying this claim that Democrats are anti-Jewish with a response But the rest of it, it is just politicizing this issue and making Israel less safe.

Video:

"It is really disgusting. Really disgusting. And he lies on an hourly basis. That is probably one of the worst lies there is." -Sen Chris Murphy (D-CT) are Trump's lie that Democrats are anti-Jewish. https://t.co/byyOMoJY11 pic.twitter.com/LnyWRlRu1c  Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) March 22, 2019

71% of Jewish voters voted for Hillary Clinton

The smear that Democrats are anti-Jewish that Trump is obsessed with spreading doesnt make sense on many levels, but perhaps the most mindboggling is the fact that Jewish voters dont like Trump.

71% of Jewish voters supported Hillary Clinton in 2016:

JEWS DISAGREE: While TRUMP claims that @TheDemocrats are "anti-Jewish," American Jewish voters have continued to overwhelmingly vote Democrat, including in 2016, when 71% voted for @HillaryClinton vs 24% for @realDonaldTrump. https://t.co/aFGKCSwMbY https://t.co/Z6XEzzXUMj pic.twitter.com/dw5pKi7Ohe  Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) March 22, 2019

Why Trump is claiming that Democrats are anti-Jewish/h2>

Donald Trump understands that he cant beat a united Democratic Party, so the White House is trying to dive Democrats on every issue. Plus, Trump sees look strong on Netanyahu as good politics that will help him with his base. As with everything involving Trump, the thinking is simple. Trump is looking to split his opposition because a united county will make him a one-term president.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

Follow Jason Easley on Facebook1.3k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather has denounced Fox News as state-run media according to a new article in The Daily Beast.

In the article Rather refused to say that Trump had done a worse job than George W. Bush, indicating that it was a tough call.

Im going to duck that question  and Ill tell you straight-up, Im ducking it  because I really havent thought of it in those terms, Rather said, adding:

I do agree that with the George W. Bush presidency, No. 1, going into Iraq was a strategic mistake of historic proportions, and that combined with the economic crash, those two things happening under his watch, drag heavily down his standing.

But the reason Im taking a pass on the question is because were not finished with the Trump presidency.

George W. Bush had two terms, and there were things you could point to  attacking AIDS in Africa, for example  that were good. President Trump has just passed two years of his first term, so we need to see the Trump years, however short or long they turn out to be, in their totality.

Fox New Has Become State-run Media

Fox News helped Bushs reputation among conservatives during his presidency, and supported him even as his approval rating plummeted among a majority of American voters. And now, Rather said, Fox News has gotten even more partisan and misleading during the Trump years.

Its a fact: This is the closest we have come to having state-run media, Rather said. If someone wants to argue, Well, its not state-run media  which it virtually is  its certainly the closest weve ever come in this country to having a state-run media, a straight-up propaganda outlet.

He said even though Fox did employ a few quality journalists, such as Chris Wallace, their opinion programs have served as vehicles for Trumps propaganda. Especially egregious in terms of blindly supporting Trump and repeating his lies are Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, and Tucker Carlson.

If you look at it on the whole, Rather said, particularly their primetime programming, you have the beginnings of a state-run media. I think its beyond that. By any objective analysis, this is by far the closest weve come to Radio Moscow.

Dan Rather is Correct: Fox News Is a Propaganda Channel for Trump

As Donald Trump tells more lies every day, he is backed up by Fox News and his obsequious anchors who spread his falsehoods and misinformation.

If we are to lose our democracy and become an autocratic state it will be due to the corrosive influence of media outlets such as Fox that are no better than Radio Moscow.

Donald Trump aspires to be a dictator like Vladimir Putin who has stolen his countrys assets for his personal enrichment.

Donald Trump presents a clear and present danger to American democracy, and so does his state-run media outlet, Fox News.698 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Reports from Capitol Hill this morning indicate that House Democrats will be aggressively seeking Donald Trumps business tax returns along with his personal returns.

Democratic lawmakers expect these business returns to uncover what they believe are the presidents extensive conflicts of interest, including possible dealings with Russia.

They also believe the business filings will disclose suspicious ties to other foreign individuals and entities including receipts and disbursements of money which will need further investigation.

The returns also may help them analyze potentially illegal efforts to avoid paying taxes by not just the president but also his company and potentially members of his board of directors, including his children.

Looking for what they believe will be a treasure trove of information which is not publicly available, House Democrats are reportedly now preparing requests for both the presidents personal and business tax filings.

That will open a new and very complex front in the increasing number of investigations into the president. His financial disclosures already reveal over 500 partnerships and other types of business entities, each of which would likely have its own tax returns.

Democrats will also demand returns from Trumps trusts, one of which was used to reimburse Michael Cohen for hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, according to a check he showed lawmakers during his congressional testimony.

Reportedly Democrats will also try to analyze tax returns from the recently dissolved Trump Foundation as well as from First Lady Melania Trump.

House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA), has the power to seize Trumps returns under a 100 year-old statute. And he is now being pressured by his colleagues to issue requests for all of the returns that might show Trumps potential malfeasance and conflicts of interest.

The American People Have a Right to Know What Is In Trumps Tax Returns

Never before in the modern era has a president refused to disclose his tax returns. And never before has there been a president where the need to see his tax returns was greater.

For decades Donald Trump has been involved with foreign interests, and there is evidence that he has received hundreds of millions  and possibly billions  of dollars from foreign individuals, companies and governments. These include Russia, Saudi Arabia, and possibly other countries.

The American people have a right to know what foreign financial entanglements exist that might create conflicts. We have a right to know if foreigners are exerting undue control over the presidents decision making. We have a right to know if Donald Trump is working for the best interests of the United States or for foreign countries.

And we have a right to know if Donald Trump is a traitor to his country.2.1k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Jared Kushner was hammered today on Morning Joe for using his personal phone to conduct foreign affairs, which may have compromised the national security of the United States.

On the show a former FBI agent explained how easily the White House adviser and presidential son-in-law could be hacked by Russia and other hostile foreign nations.

The attorney for Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump have admitted that the Washington power couple used personal email accounts to conduct government business. They have also acknowledged that Kushner used the Facebook-owned encryption application WhatsApp to communicate with Saudi Arabias crown prince and other foreign nationals.

Yesterday we reported that House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) is looking into whether Jared Kushner leaked classified information to foreign leaders through WhatsApp.

Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough pointed out how bad Kushners actions were compared to Donald Trumps opponent in the 2016 election, saying:

Lets go back to Hillary Clinton. What did we talk about, what did the New York Times talk about, what did the Washington Post talk about for a year and a half during the campaign? The fact that Hillary Clinton wouldnt step up to the plate and explain how she communicated as secretary of state with foreign leaders using this home-brewed server.

Scarborough then explained that Kushner would undoubtedly have been very aware of the problem with his actions because Clintons emails were a major theme in President Donald Trumps 2016 campaign.

And, he said, that makes this situation much, much worse.

The big question was, was there malice of forethought, was she doing it specifically to hide communications from Americans to get around the regulations, to get around the laws, that the FBI were investigating? Scarborough said, before adding:

We dont have those questions here. Jared Kushner knew what had happened to Hillary Clinton. There was clearly malice of forethought. He was clearly intentionally hiding communications between himself and the murderer who now runs Saudi Arabia.

If the FBI launched an investigation against Hillary Clinton, why in the hell would they not be launching an investigation in this case against Jared Kushner for doing something far worse?

Former FBI agent Clint Watts, a cybersecurity expert, added that Kushners communications were highly vulnerable to hackers  and he suggested they had probably been intercepted by foreign intelligence operatives.

Its totally irresponsible, Watts said, adding:

I think for U.S. government, if you work in the intelligence agencies of the FBI or if youre a diplomat, you have to ask yourself why does Erdogan or MBS or Putin or Kim Jong-un all know more about what the White House is saying than I do?

We are blinded to the communications, but we have people running around with iPhones just firing off messages. Its completely irresponsible.

This cannot be secured by sending through WhatsApp, a Facebook company, which came out yesterday  maybe we left everyones passwords out on the internet, Watts added. This is ridiculous. It breaks security protocols and its vulnerable. Foreign dictators, authoritarians, know more about the communications in the White House than we do in our own country.

Jared Kushner is a Threat to National Security

Clint Watts is right that Kushners actions are irresponsible, and that he should be investigated by the FBI. He also should not have a national security clearance.

Jared Kushner actions, in using an unsecured app that eliminates his messages, were criminal. But its not the first time he has taken steps to weaken national security by keeping his government communications secret.

After the 2016 election, Kushner tried to set up a secret back-channel with the Kremlin so American intelligence agencies wouldnt know what he was doing.

Steps should be taken immediately to investigate Jared Kushner for violations of federal law, and also to remove him from his position in the U.S. government.

CLICK HERE to watch the discussion about Jared Kushner on MSNBC2.9k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

After Special Counsel Robert Mueller released his Trump Russia report on Friday, Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D-CA) released a statement insisting that AG Barr must testify before Congress.

We need total transparency here. The Department of Justice launched the Special Counsel investigation to get to the bottom of foreign interference in the 2016 election and any other illegal actions. A declassified report must be made public immediately and Attorney General Barr must publicly testify under oath about the investigation and its findings, and provide all underlying materials to the appropriate Congressional committees.

This is about securing American democracy and protecting voters confidence in our elections and our system of government, the California Democrat wrote in a statement sent to PoliticusUSA.

Harris, as a former prosecutor, knows very well how this report could be buried and why it must not.

Harris angling to put Barr in a situation where he cant lie about the report. Its very clear from the 5 Attorney Generals (including acting AGs) President Trump has gone through that he was looking for a specific kind of person to do a specific task.

Acting AG Sally Yates, acting AG Dana Boente, Jeff Session, Acting AG Matthew Whitaker, and now Barr. Coinciding with hiring Barr, Trump took to Twitter to direct his new AG, with more than a dozen tweets complaining about the Russia investigation.

That is how Trump does business. Michael Cohen has testified to this fact. Trump doesnt order one to do his (illegal) bidding; he simply complains endlessly and repeats his alternative reality enough times that those who work for him know what they are supposed to do.

And in Trumps mind, Barr works for him. Even though in reality, Barr works for this country and all of you.965 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer released a joint statement warning President Trumps handpicked Attorney General that he must make Special Counsel Robert Muellers report public.

Now that Special Counsel Mueller has submitted his report to the Attorney General, it is imperative for Mr. Barr to make the full report public and provide its underlying documentation and findings to Congress. Attorney General Barr must not give President Trump, his lawyers or his staff any sneak preview of Special Counsel Muellers findings or evidence, and the White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public.

The Special Counsels investigation focused on questions that go to the integrity of our democracy itself: whether foreign powers corruptly interfered in our elections, and whether unlawful means were used to hinder that investigation. The American people have a right to the truth. The watchword is transparency.

Trump handpicked AG Barr for just this moment.

Mueller does not complain of interference from Barr as of yet, but of course Barr wasnt hired to interfere in the report. Trump has used other methods and fired other people for refusing to do so.

Barr was picked to bury this report.

And so Democrats are coming out both barrels to insist it be made public, as it should be. Muellers report is a matter of national security and our countrys sovereignty.

If Donald Trump conspired with Russia, of course he did so publicly but I mean in a legally actionable way, we all need to know about it.3.3k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said that there is a strong possibility that Trumps family could be indicted by other entities based on the work of Mueller.

Sen. Blumenthal said on MSNBCs The Beat with Ari Melber, I think there is a strong possibility of additional indictments including President Trumps family. Maybe not by the Department of Justice, but by other offices. I know you want to stick to the Mueller report. But the Mueller report cannot be viewed in isolation any more than an investigation even though it may end cannot lead to additional investigative leads and actions, so I think theres a high probability of additional indictments.

Video:

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said that there is a strong possibility that Trumps family could be indicted by other entities based on the work of Mueller. https://t.co/Y7wj2xK0Dt pic.twitter.com/5eg59DJxRY  PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) March 22, 2019

Mueller is done, but the investigation will live on.

Robert Mueller had a very narrow investigative scope, but as we have seen with Michael Cohen, Muellers investigation has opened up lines of investigation for other bodies. The odds that the Trump kids skate away from these criminal probes unscathed are lessening by the day. The Mueller investigation was never the biggest fear of the White House.

The White House is scared of the Southern District of New York, and the end of Muellers investigation has done nothing to lessen the Trump familys legal jeopardy.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

Follow Jason Easley on Facebook11.3k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Trump is refusing a request for all documents related to his communications with Putin, but he thinks that Democrats are laughing at him behind his back.

Donald Trump refuses to release his communications with Putin

Trump said, Just a continuation of the same witch hunt. They know it. And behind closed doors, they laugh at it. Its just a continuation of the same nonsense. Everybody  they ought to go to work, get infrastructure done, and get a lot of other things done instead of wasting everybodys time.

Video:

Trump thinks that Democrats are laughing at him behind his back, "Just a continuation of the same witch hunt. They know it. And behind closed doors, they laugh at it." https://t.co/6RTc8QvKI8 pic.twitter.com/h2iEzfcPN4  PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) March 22, 2019

The document request was made by House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) who said, Congress has a constitutional duty to conduct oversight over the Department and the White House to determine, among other things, the impact of those communications on U.S. foreign policy, whether federal officials, including President Trump, have acted in the national interest, and whether the applicable laws, regulations, and agency procedures with respect to diplomatic communications with President Putin and other foreign leaders have been complied with and remain sufficient.

If Trump is innocent, why is he hiding his conversations with Putin?

If Trump is correct, and these investigations are a waste of time, why is he hiding his conversations with Putin from his own government? The fastest way to make these investigations go away is to turn over all of the documents. Trumps conversations with Putin clearly arent innocent. The president has refused to allow other US officials and translators into his meetings with the Russian leader.

Trump sounds guilty when he refuses to release documents. Democrats arent wasting time doing their job by conducting oversight. It is the president who is stalling for time and hoping that he can put Democrats off until after the 2020 election.

House Democrats arent going anywhere, and they will eventually find what Trump is hiding.

Democrats arent laughing at Trump. They are investigating him

It is ironic that the biggest con man ever to occupy the Oval Office thinks that Democrats are laughing at him. What Trump doesnt see is that Democrats are laughing at him. Republicans are laughing at him. Independents are laughing at him. The entire country outside of the thirty plus percent who support him is laughing at Trump.

Trump wishes that this all was a joke, but it is very real.

Democrats arent laughing, They are investigating and that is why Trump is so scared.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

Follow Jason Easley on Facebook739 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

By Joseph Ax

(Reuters)  A Wisconsin judge on Thursday blocked legislation passed by Republican lawmakers during a December lame-duck session intended to curb the powers of newly elected Democratic Governor Tony Evers, calling the measures unconstitutionally approved.

The governor immediately moved to withdraw Wisconsin from a multistate lawsuit that seeks to overturn the Obamacare healthcare law, the signature domestic achievement of former Democratic President Barack Obama and a longtime target of Republicans, including President Donald Trump.

One of the statutes passed in December prevented Evers from pulling out of the lawsuit absent legislative approval, until Thursdays decision set the law aside.

Democrats had criticized the legislation as a last-minute power grab. Republican lawmakers in North Carolina and Michigan pursued similar lame-duck moves after Democratic victories in November.

The legislature overplayed its hand by using an unlawful process to accumulate more power for itself and override the will of the people, Evers said in a statement.

Wisconsin Republican legislative leaders vowed to appeal the ruling from Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess, who issued a temporary injunction stopping the laws from taking effect.

For decades the legislature has used extraordinary sessions that have been widely supported by members of both parties, Robin Vos, the state Assembly speaker, and Scott Fitzgerald, the state Senate majority leader, said in a joint statement.

Todays ruling only creates chaos and will surely raise questions about items passed during previous extraordinary sessions, including stronger laws against child sexual predators and drunk drivers, the statement added.

In his decision, Niess said the legislatures use of an extraordinary session was not explicitly permitted under the state constitution.

The bottom line in this case is that the legislature did not lawfully meet during its December 2018 extraordinary session,' he wrote.

Lawyers for the legislature had argued that an injunction would cause disruption by making thousands of statutes vulnerable to legal challenges, but Niess rejected that claim.

Is there anything more destructive to Wisconsins constitutional democracy than for courts to abdicate their constitutional responsibilities by knowingly enforcing unconstitutional, and therefore, non-existent laws? he concluded.

The ruling came as part of a lawsuit filed by several left-leaning groups.

Several other lawsuits have been filed challenging the lame-duck legislation. In January, a federal judge in Wisconsin blocked a Republican-backed law that would limit early voting across the state to two weeks.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Peter Cooney)On March 20, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko did an interview with the U.S. publication The Hill, during which he claimed, among other things, that when he first met U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, she gave him a list of people who should not be prosecuted by his office. According to The Hill, Lutsenko said that he replied by telling the ambassador: My response of that is it is inadmissible. Nobody in this country, neither our president nor our parliament nor our ambassador, will stop me from prosecuting whether there is a crime. Lutsenko did not name anyone from this alleged list.

It is important to note that The Hills translation of Lutsenkos claim contains a critical mistake. In the video interview, Lutsenko says that the ambassador voiced (Ukrainian: oholosyla) to him a list of people not to prosecute, but the translator says gave me a list. The latter wording implies that Lutsenko actually received a physical list, something which could be produced as evidence. In fact, Lutsenko was saying that he received a verbal list, and he presented no evidence for this.

Lutsenko did provide to a U.S. publication a 2016 letter from a U.S. diplomat that he claimed supported an accusation that the U.S. Embassy was interfering in prosecution, from which his claim arises  saying the list included U.S. resistance to his investigation at the time.

We get into that more in the context section of the article. But we find nothing in the letter verifies interference although it clearly demonstrates vigorous U.S. objections.

Given strong denials form the State Department and a former diplomat that we recount below, and that there is no verifiable information from Lutsenko, the dispute comes down to what might or might not have been communicated privately. At this time, Polygraph.info must decide the claim is unclear.

The US State Department Response

The State Department has denied Lutsenkos accusations, calling them an outright fabrication.

Ambassador Yovanovitch represents the President of the United States here in Ukraine, and America stands behind her and her statements, a State Department spokesperson told VOA following in inquiry by the VOA Ukrainian Service.

The allegations by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General are not true, and are intended to tarnish the reputation of Ambassador Yovanovitch.Such allegations only serve the corrupt, said the State Department.

VOAs Russian service also asked John Herbst, a retired U.S. diplomat who served as ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006, his opinion of the claim.

Its very strange, he said. You saw the strong State Department denial. The U.S. government would not send such instructions to our embassy in Kyiv. Masha Yovanovitch is a great professional; she would not deliver such a message. So I think this is just not true.

The Kyiv Post noted in its coverage of the subject that Lutsenkos accusations came weeks after Ambassador Yovanovitch made a public statement in which she said that Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky should be dismissed from his position. Anti-corruption activists had been pushing for his dismissal ever since recordings emerged in which he allegedly gave information to suspects about their cases, and pressured judges and prosecutors to dismiss charges against them.

Lutsenkos statement provoked a strong reaction from some of Ukraines anti-corruption activist community. Ukraines Anti-Corruption Action Center accused Lutsenko of sparking a war with the diplomatic system of a key ally in Ukraines war with Russia. Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of the center, wrote on her own Facebook page that Lutsenkos comments were a shot in the foot- not his own but the countrys.

The Context

The Hills John Solomon, who conducted the interview, wrote in a separate article published on Wednesday (March 20) that Lutsenko accused the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv in 2016 of interfering in his ability to prosecute corruption cases, saying the U.S. ambassador gave him a list of defendants that he would not be allowed to pursue and then refused to cooperate in an early investigation into the alleged misappropriation of U.S. aid in Ukraine.

Solomon also wrote that Lutsenko had provided him with a letter from the embassy, supporting part of his story by showing that a U.S. official did in fact ask him to stand down on the misappropriation-of-funds case.

In that letter, U.S. Embassy official George Kent wrote: We are gravely concerned about this investigation for which we see no basis. He also wrote that the investigation into the actions of the Anti-Corruption Action Center  a Ukrainian NGO  based on the assistance they have received from us, is similarly misplaced.

Kent also wrote that the investigation appears to us to be an attempt to intimidate those in the Prosecutor Generals office most committed to combating corruption, as well as nongovernmental partners and outspoken anti-corruption activists.

Our Verdict

While the verdict of unclear is all we can manage now, this story has created quite a stir inside Ukraine and it is possible more information will emerge that will prompt a change.

For example, on Thursday Ukrainian Pravda reported that parliamentarian Mustafa Nayyem announced that he would like to know whether Lutsenko or the government has taken any action in response to the "list of untouchables," and why, if the list does exist, Lutsenko withheld his knowledge of it until now.









Charleston, SC (29403)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this evening will give way to occasional showers overnight. Low around 55F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will give way to occasional showers overnight. Low around 55F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%.South Africa: 93% of South Africans have access to water services

Ninety three percent of the South African population has access to water supply services and 76% of the population have access to basic sanitation services.

This is according to Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) Chief Engineer-Water Services and Local Water Management, Mark Bannister, who presented a progress report on the challenges and achievements of South Africa meeting the Sustainable Development Goals 6 (SDG) in Tshwane on Friday.

SDGs are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. SDG 6 is aimed at ensuring availability and sustainability management of water and sanitation for all by 2030.

Global SDG 6 targets are being localised and adapted to the context of South Africa.

South Africa, besides other international participants have been given the authority on how to incorporate SDG 6 targets into national planning processes, policies and strategies, and set their own SDG 6 indicators, taking into account local circumstances.

South Africa is performing well in SDG 6 and has been internationally acknowledged for the progress made in developing the structure of execution and planning foundations to achieve the 2030 Goals, Bannister said.

Achieving SDG 6 is essential for progress on all other 16 SDGs and for ensuring that no one is left behind.

Sustainable management of water and sanitation underpins wider efforts to end poverty, advance sustainable development and sustain peace and stability, Bannister said.

He said serious data challenges need to be overcome through synchronised data gathering and storage systems including regular monitoring by relevant stakeholders.

This must include effective data management systems that allow us to monitor, evaluate, measure the performance of SDG 6 towards the 2030 Goal, he said.

Among the successes of the country are the launch of the National Wetland Monitoring Programme which provides information on the extent of wetlands, threats to wetlands, change in the present ecological state and ecosystem services provided by wetlands.

Bannister said monitoring the change in the spatial extent of freshwater ecosystems is currently happening every five years.

There is lack of capacity and financial resources from DWS to conduct frequent monitoring. Water Administration System has been unrolled in 71 irrigation schemes. DWS can now monitor state of water losses on conveyance systems, he said.

A total of 8.6% of water savings have been achieved in 8 large water supply systems.

Water and Sanitation Minister Gugile Nkwinti called for an infrastructure construction programme that will address informal settlements along rivers and streams.

He has asked officials from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and his department to find natural resources for water in the countrys rural areas.

The Minister on Friday launched the Development Cooperation Partners Platform and Photo shoot.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2019-03-22. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.A s members of the Luther College Symphony Orchestra, seven young musicians from our region had the privilege of participating in a month-long residency in Vienna, Austria, in January and February.

The study and experience, led by Dr. Daniel Baldwin, Luther College music professor and orchestra director, provided the student musicians with exposure to historic concert halls, trips to music museums, and a visit to the birthplace of Mozart. The local symphony students included Alec Anderson, Nathaniel Eck, Erin Haefner, Spencer Ketterling, Noel Krotzer, Brenna Sherman, and Siri St. Louis.

Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, has a long history and national reputation for its music programs, with over 800 students participating.

Additionally, the college encourages students to study abroad. The "City of Music" program was the perfect convergence of music and global awareness. While learning history and spending time in a European community, the students were also able to share their gift of music.

Some of the students connected through orchestra, while others knew one another before enrolling at Luther. Brenna and Alec attended Lourdes High School together and Siri and Spencer grew up attending church together in Rochester. However, the consensus was that traveling together as an orchestra definitely bonded all of them and created stronger friendships.

For some students, this was a first opportunity to travel abroad. Others, even with international travel experience, found the music residency in Austria to be like no other trip. Between sightseeing, a visit to a geothermal spa, and attending a Viennese ball, the orchestra students also spent time rehearsing for their performances.

The travel abroad program provided them with the opportunity to perform in European concert halls, beginning at the Slovak National Theatrein Bratislava, Slovakia, followed by a performance at the Kultur Kongress Zentrum Eisenstadt Groer Saalin Eisenstadt, Austria, and culminating with their final performance at the Wien Musikverein, home of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

The orchestra students all agreed that performing in the world-renowned "Golden Hall" in Vienna was the highlight of the trip. Siri, a first-year student and percussionist, said, "I found Dr. Baldwins speech to us beforehand to be inspirational."

Alec, a junior who plays the English horn, said, "My personal favorite was performing in the famous Golden Hall in Vienna. I had several very prominent solos in our performance and it was both exhilarating and intimidating to perform on the worlds most prestigious stage.

"I will never forget that night. I remember very clearly the perfect sound that came from the hall, everything perfectly clear to the ear," Alec said. "That night I added just another little pause for effect in one of my solos just to revel in the reverb of the hall. It was exquisite."

Spencer, a first-year bassoonist, said, "Performing at the Musikverein was simply an amazing experience. We were playing Gershwins An American in Paris, when I really thought about how lucky I was to be there, performing in the same space as the world-famous Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra."

"I really enjoyed seeing how passionate and respectful the audiences were towards music. It was wonderful to be in a community where music is really loved, appreciated, and respected," said Erin, a junior flautist.I used to have a running conversation with an older, white, male column-writing colleague about how your skin tone impacts your credibility.

He used to stroll over to my desk in the newsroom, practically get on bended knee, and ask for the hand of my immigration issue du jour.

I dont want to poach in your pond, Esther, hed always say.

My response never changed: If I write about immigrant rights, Im a biased activist with unchecked self-interest because of my ethnicity. If you write about it, youre an informed and impartial advocate for an important and growing segment of the community. You practically need to write about this more than I do.

And so it went whenever news broke about a Hispanic worker getting hurt in an unsafe workplace, immigration legislation moving forward or generalized xenophobia rearing its ugly head. It wasnt perfect, but it was a complementary relationship.

These sorts of cross-collaborations are thornier today amid questions of who can speak for whom, and who should shut up and let others have their chance to talk. After all, theres no shortage of black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian experts in their field who have been ignored or simply discounted when pointing out the ways in which the United States has nurtured racism, white supremacy and power imbalances.

But, realistically, when white males make bold claims, people listen. So we can embrace their voices in the hopes of getting people to pay attention to critical issues they might otherwise ignore.

For example, one recent book that can help shed light on a key political moment for all of us is the book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, by author Jason Stanley. He makes the case for truth as the bedrock of freedom and details how propaganda and rhetoric enflame the move toward fascism.

In an interview earlier this month, he explained to me why, contrary to popular perception on the left, we cant quite use the f-word with our president.

I dont think Trump is ruling as a fascist, Stanley said. But classic fascists like Hitler and Mussolini campaigned against globalists seeking to destroy the nation and reminded us about past greatness that involved eliminating rampant crime and the threat of liberal conspiracies designed to bring leftist immigrants into the country.

It sounds awfully familiar as, simultaneously, far-right nationalism flowers in places like Russia, Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and the United States.

Stanley, however, marks a clear distinction between fascist tactics that are used as a mechanism to grab power and an explicitly fascist state ruled by a truly authoritarian leader. And he does it while standing apart from other philosophers  and other commentators whose parents fled Europe as refugees  in his acknowledgment of how racism and inequality fuel political divisions.

Where I agree with the lefts critique of Trump is that weve always had this kind of propaganda  in Mein Kampf, Hitler praises the 1924 U.S. immigration act and praises white supremacy, said Stanley, who is a philosophy professor at Yale. But my work differs from that of others because I focus on how the present is not actually a break from the past. Russian propaganda exploits already existing inequalities and exacerbates them with the goal of showing that democracy is fake and that ethnic groups can do nothing more than fight each other.

Stanley told me his book is radically different from other end-of-democracy books because it forces us to look at race relations and look at persistent achievement and wage gaps between blacks and whites and see that our present is a continuity of our past, not a break from it.

My book is based on African-American history, on Hitlers American model, on the impact of mass incarcerations of black people, on the super predator criminal justice theory that laid the groundwork for Trump, Stanley said.

Whether we like it or not, the history of marginalized groups in the United States is a topic few white people seek out on their own. And Stanleys chilling book does a great job of getting to the heart of why truth is the critical prerequisite for both equality and liberty.

If Stanley can help spoon-feed his insights to the very people already invested in seeking justice for everyone impacted by President Trumps misguided, ill-informed and frankly ignorant policy declarations, then so be it.

Maybe Stanleys work can be a jumping-off point for critical discussions about race, ethnicity, male privilege and white privilege that rule the current political moment  especially among the portion of the population that thinks these baked-in power imbalances dont really exist.

Wouldnt such dialogues be a refreshing alternative to simply blaming all of our political polarization and the death of truth and facts on the reliable and supposedly race-blind excuse of white economic anxiety?

Esther Cepedas email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2019, Washington Post Writers GroupBeing a prosecutor has long been a steppingstone for lawyers who aspire to higher office. But this might not be true anymore for Democrats.

The problem is that Democrats have become ambivalent about law enforcement, and hostile towards the police. This puts Democratic prosecutors in a bind. They risk the early derailment of their career if they are ambivalent about law enforcement and hostile towards the police. Just ask Baltimores Marilyn Mosby. But they now risk incurring the ire of the partys base if they take the side of law enforcement and the police.

Thus, former prosecutor Kamala Harris is under attack for being tougher on crime and criminals than the prevailing left-liberal orthodoxy dictates. She stands accused of being a regressive prosecutor.

And now, the same charge has been leveled at Amy Klobuchar. From the Washington Post:

Christopher Burns, a 44-year-old black man, was unarmed and at home in Minneapolis with his fiancee and three young children when the police arrived in response to a domestic violence call. The officers put him in a chokehold, and he died on the scene, according to the medical examiner. The 2002 incident marked the third killing of a black person by the citys police department that year, prompting local activists to stage rallies and demand that the two officers involved in Burnss death face charges. The focus of the communitys anger was Amy Klobuchar, the up-and-coming attorney of Hennepin County, who had declined to prosecute police accused of using excessive force against black suspects. WE MUST NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS! one activist group wrote in a newsletter. Many people are watching to see if she will really fight for justice in this case. Klobuchar, then 42, declined to bring charges against the officers, and a grand jury she convened did not indict them.

Nothing in the Posts account shows that the officers deserved to be indicted. The fact that Burns was unarmed doesnt demonstrate this, and his race certainly doesnt.

But facts dont matter. Viewed from a distance of 17 years, its clear that Klobuchar was on the wrong side of identity politics and the wrong side of Black Lives Matter, a movement that did not then exist. In short, she was regressive:

As chief prosecutor for Minnesotas most populous county from 1999 to 2007, Klobuchar declined to bring charges in more than two dozen cases where people were killed in encounters with police. At the same time, she aggressively prosecuted smaller offenses such as vandalism and routinely sought longer-than-recommended sentences, including for minors. Such prosecutions, done with the aim of curbing more serious crimes, have had mixed results and been criticized for their disproportionate effect on poor and minority communities.

Its quite possible that Klobuchar has ready responses to these criticisms. The Post provides no evidence of police wrongdoing in any of the encounters in which people were killed. And its not Klobuchars fault if members of the poor and minority community committed a disproportionate number of vandalism crimes.

But Klobuchar cant make these defenses without running afoul of current Democratic orthodoxy. So, instead she counters that the prison incarceration rate for African Americans in the county declined during her tenure.

But this wont satisfy the base any more than it satisfies the Post. It sniffs that experts said [the decline in the black incarceration] did little to ameliorate a dramatic disparity between black and white prison rates.

Blacks could have ameliorated the disparity by obeying the law to the same degree as whites. But Klobuchar cant say that.

I admit to feeling a little bit sorry for the Minnesota Senator. How could she know in 2002 that the Democrats would do such an about-face on law and order. Bill Clinton had brought Democrats out of the wilderness by taking crime seriously.

Moreover, as the Post eventually gets around to noting, when Klobuchar took office, the Twin Cities were recovering from a long wave of violent crime and many communities were demanding help. Minneapolis had earned the nickname Murderapolis in 1995, according to the Post.

Thus, Klobuchar used Clintons eminently reasonable and highly successful playbook. So did Joe Biden when, in the 1990s, he helped lead the charge for tougher sentencing of criminals.

Kamala Harris is a somewhat different case. She became a prosecutor later than Klobuchar did and served as one through 2016. I imagine there was less pressure on her than on Klobuchar to crack down on crime.

Even so, most, if not all, of Harris offenses against the new orthodoxy occurred pre-Ferguson, before it had fully carried the day. Therefore, even Harris has been blindsided to some degree.

Now she, Klobuchar, and Biden must make amends. They must move hard left on crime. The pander-fest will be something to behold.When freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar came out with smears whose anti-Semitic nature couldnt be denied, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer responded rapidly, with unequivocal denunciation. But when Pelosi tried to steer a resolution condemning anti-Semitism through the House, her partys young radicals, who rightly view themselves as representative of the Democrats base, rebelled. Omar and her fellow progressives won the day, and Pelosi replaced her anti-Semitism resolution with one so anodyne that Omar happily voted for it.

Yesterday, the arch-leftist group MoveOn denounced the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has until now enjoyed broad bipartisan support, and urged Democratic presidential candidates to boycott AIPACs upcoming conference. Ilya Sheyman, Executive Director of MoveOn.org Political Action, tweeted:

You cannot be a progressive and support AIPAC because of the policies that theyve supported. https://t.co/S6ZG0TtcNB via @nbcnews @moveon  Ilya Sheyman (@iSheyman) March 21, 2019



Democratic presidential candidates see which way their party is going. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto ORourke, Pete Buttigieg, and Julian Castro have all announced that they are boycotting AIPAC. So far, no prominent Democratic contender has said he intends to attend. The AIPAC boycott is obviously related to Ilhan Omars claim that American support for Israel is all about the Benjamins, followed by AIPAC! Its Omars party now.

Just a few years ago, the idea of the Democrats turning anti-Israel en masse would have been unthinkable. It would have been especially unthinkable if the phenomenon bore the taint of anti-Semitism that it has been lent by Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and others. Meanwhile, President Trump tweeted today that the U.S. should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights:

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019



You dont need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.Stanley Kurtz has devoted a vast amount of time and energy to the fight for freedom of expression on college campuses. I cant think of anyone better qualified than Stanley to comment on President Trumps executive order on the subject.

Stanley strongly supports the order. He considers it an inflection point in a decades-long struggle over the direction of the American academy and indeed a game-changer.

Stanley makes short work of the hack liberal talking-point on Trumps order that it merely reaffirms existing law, and is thus little more than a meaningless sop to his base. He responds:

This critique entirely misses the point. Public universities are indeed obligated to uphold the First Amendment. The problem is that they regularly ignore that charge and promulgate unconstitutional speech codes, speech zones, and bias-reporting systems anyway. Theres a cottage industry in lawsuits against public universities that violate the First Amendment, as well as against private colleges that flout their own stated free-speech principles. Plaintiffs usually win once they muster the time, money, and courage to sue, but universities quickly find roundabout ways to reinstitute the offending policies, beginning the cycle again. If colleges face a loss of federal funds, however, they just might give up on evading the First Amendment.

Its easy to understand why liberals want to dismiss the order as a mere restatement of what colleges are already obligated to do. Lame as this talking point is, it beats arguing against free speech on campus.

Therein lies the beauty of Trumps order. As Stanley says, it only asks colleges to do what they are already legally obligated to do; who can quarrel with that?

Its true that private colleges may be more reluctant to promise to uphold free expression if they know they can lose funding for failing to follow through. To this objection, Stanley replies:

[I]ts likely that those schools never seriously meant their acceptance of the Chicago statement [a free speech on campus pledge] to begin with. Private colleges that refuse to endorse free speech will expose themselves to public criticism, and rightly so. The result will be greater transparency at private colleges, entirely justified embarrassment, and pressure for real change, as opposed to window-dressing.

For Stanley, the bottom line is that Trumps order will shift the balance of forces on campus.

Universities will now have to take loss of federal funding into account when creating speech codes, so-called free speech zones, or bias-reporting systems, or handling visiting speakers. Its true that the new order might be enforced either lightly or assertively, and we dont yet know how that will play out. Yet the very existence of the order sets up a dynamic that will make it harder for colleges to stifle free speech, and tougher for regulators to ignore it when they do. . . . The administration will either actively enforce the new rule, or be publicly attacked by its base for refusing to do so in the face of obvious violations. In many  perhaps most  cases, university offices of legal counsel will remove unconstitutional policies well before regulators even act.

The order also makes sense politically. As Stanley explains:

Conditioning federal funding on the maintenance of campus free speech will instantly take its place in the litany of policies for which Trump is praised and thanked by his base. Its tough to overestimate how concerned conservatives have become in the past few years over political bias, shout-downs, intimidation, bogus accusations of bigotry, and pervasive self-censorship in the academy. More important, these concerns are shared by swing voters and moderate Democrats, too.

Thus, the order puts Democrats in a box. They can take the side of free expression or they can appease their authoritarian lefty base.

These days, I almost always expect the worst from Democrats. I expect it in this case, too.The Global Business Process Management Market Report includes a comprehensive analysis of the present market. The report starts with the basic Global Business Process Management Market overview and then goes into each and every detail.

Business Process Management Market

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Business Process Management is a discipline of operation management that is dedicated towards improving corporate performance by maintaining, managing, and optimizing companys business processes. It involves activities including design, automation, modeling, control, execution, measurement, process optimization, and others to support enterprise goals. The Business Process Management Market involves study of software and services used to achieve aforementioned activities with high efficiency and output. Improvements in operational efficiency or improvements in productivity can produce better managed processes that complete faster, and at lower cost.The global Business Process Management Market is grow at a CAGR of +6% during the Forecast period 2019-2025.This market breakdown into various global regions such as North America, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, Europe and Africa based on various business parameters such as Business Process Management Market. Top manufacturers are also examined in those global regions to understand the global market investment. The data which has been examined by considering both established key players as well as upcoming entrants in the market.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Top Key Vendors in Market:Workflow, IBM, Adobe, Microsoft, Fujitsu, Red Hat, Tibco Software, SAP, NEC, Oracle, AgilePoint, BonitaSoft, EMC, Fiorano, Active Endpoints, Kofax, LexMark, OpenText, ProcessMaker Inc.Business Process Management can help improve efficiency by providing tools, like process simulation, to analyze the processes at the design level so as to eliminate bottlenecks and expensive paths in the process. Sophisticated tools have been used to implement BPM to automate processes and improve visibility. Process automation has been one of the primary components for the adoption of Business Process Management Market suites. It enables in the automation of processes, increasing the amount of work output, and reducing the cost borne by the company for labor-intensive processes.Factors such as risks and scientific headway are also emphasized in the report. With the development of technologies, organizations are able to generate growth prospects in the Business Process Management market. In addition to this, the mutable rules and protocols of the government of many nations are prophesied to impede the growth of the global market. However, changing strategies and new product developments are predicted to contribute towards the growth which is revealed in the report.Ask for discount@Market by Type:- Automation- Process Modelling- Content & Document Management- Monitoring & OptimizationMarket by Application:- IT & Telecom- Manufacturing- Healthcare- Government & DefenseReasons to Purchase this Report:-Growing need for efficiency act as a driver to the market scenario-Analyzing various perspectives of the market with the help of Porters five forces analysis-The type of deployment that is expected to dominate the market is analyzed in detail-The regions which are expected to witness the fastest growth during the forecast period are analyzed.-Identify the latest developments, market shares, and strategies employed by the major market playersFor more Information @About Research N Reports:Research N Reports is a new age market research firm where we focus on providing information that can be effectively applied. Where counting on a legitimate board company for your selections will become critical. Research N Reports specializes in enterprise evaluation, marketplace forecasts and as a result getting great reports overlaying all verticals, whether be it gaining angle on modern market situations or being in advance inside the cut throat Global opposition.The report aims to offer readers with ample competitive advantage and cues on market entry barriers, based on which aspiring market entrants as well as established players can drive profitable investment discretion. To aid readers understanding the report is systematically classified

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Automotive industry has rightly emerged as one of the fastest growing market, more emphatically across developing economies. The trend is far from being a passing fad and is likely to favor accessories realm as well, such as automotive chrome accessories market. Echoing superlative aesthetic needs, automotive chrome accessories are likely to witness ample developments and design trends. Backed by ongoing rise in customization and soaring preferences for premium and luxury cars, global automotive chrome accessories market is poised to witness surged innovations and demand traction. Inclination towards superlative performance has also maneuvered ample scope in design engineering, thereby aiding onward momentum.Get Free Sample Report Here:Owing to breakthrough possibilities in car ownership across emerging economies in Asiatic countries, the automotive chrome accessories market is witnessing superlative advances, augmenting fierce competition. The competitive landscape is highly dissimilar with several counterfeit entities diluting product portfolio with cheaper alternatives. This is likely to significantly cut short growth course. Additionally, stringent laws restricting exterior alterations are also accounted to slay growth considerably.Besides aesthetic appeal, car chromes are also amply adopted to render superlative abrasion and weather resistance. Additionally, superlative distribution network comprising the aftermarket is slated to harbor maximum opportunities. The trend is expected to be supplemented by burgeoning scope in online sales channels. Growing number of online buyers is estimated to keep the automotive chrome accessories aftermarket agile in forthcoming years. Amongst major regional hubs, Europe is expected to sustain its reigning precedence, backed by enormous design innovations as well as prospects for online retail.Browse Full Report with ToC Here:Automotive Chrome Accessories Market: OverviewThe automotive chrome accessories market has been analyzed in detail to offer definitive forecast insights on the market for the period 2017-22. This report is an exhaustive compilation of a detailed overview of automotive chrome accessories market and analyzes the market in terms of market dynamics, macro and micro-economic determinants that shape market growth, also shedding light on other relevant factors that direct future prospects of the market trajectory.The report aims to offer readers with ample competitive advantage and cues on market entry barriers, based on which aspiring market entrants as well as established players can drive profitable investment discretion. To aid readers understanding the report is systematically classified into detailed chapters. In its trailing sections the report also includes a detailed chapter on segmental analysis of automotive chrome accessories market to offer veritable insights on segments historical and future growth estimations. Further in the course of the report readers are also enlightened about regional assessment of pivotal factors.Detailed overview of automotive chrome accessories market spectrum presented in the report banks upon a robust research methodology comprising primary and secondary researches that divulge relevant and timely market intelligence figures.Automotive Chrome Accessories Market: Competition LandscapeThis section of the report offers a detailed section on key contributors in automotive chrome accessories market. A dashboard view of each of the mentioned profiles complete with detailed insights on their respective SWOT analysis along with detailed assessment of their product portfolio, market contribution, as well as recent developments have been slated to aid readers understanding about the competition spectrum.The report allows readers to maneuver competitive and tactical business strategies based on aforementioned insights and ensure sustained revenue pools in automotive chrome accessories market.Have Any Query?? Ask Our Industry ExpertPR-Inside.com: 2019-03-22 04:33:22

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Facial injectable aid in rejuvenating facial skin by reducing or eliminating wrinkles, raising scar depressions, and enhancing lips. Facial injectable are products that include collagen fillers, hyaluronic acid fillers, and synthetic fillers such as calcium hydroxyl apatite. The use of injectable products such as hyaluronic acid increases skin hydration, improves skin, and protects from UV damage and has relatively low side effects.Facial injectable, also called dermal fillers, are generally the products that aid in facial transformation. In general, the facial injectable products are widely used to extravagance the early signs of age and wrinkles thereby increasing the visual appearance and the beauty. In addition, changing insight of beauty is demanding the increased use of dermal fillers and other facial injectable all over the world.The global market for facial injectable is expected to reach USD 9.04 billion by the end of the forecasted period and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.2%The global facial injectable market is driven by increasing demand to look young and beautiful. The target age group for the facile injectable products are primarily women age between 35 to 60 years. Nonetheless, both women and men are using facial injectable products to achieve and maintain the young look.Request For Report Sample: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upsample/120124779/Facial-Injectable-Market The regions covered in the report are North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World (ROW). The Americas is set to be the leading region for the facial injectable market growth followed by Europe. Asia Pacific and ROW are set to be the emerging regions. Brazil is set to be the most attractive destination, and in Latin America, the popularity and the usage of facial injectable are expected to increase in the coming years.Request Report For Toc: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/TOC/120124779/Facial-Injectable-Market The report is segmented in various types such as based on product type, applications, end users and region. There are two types of facial Injectable which are majorly used in the facial Injectable market. Two types of facial Injectable are dermal fillers and botulinum toxin. Dermal fillers are injected with small gauge injectors into deep dermal area to fill the space and also to induce the body production of collagen. Dermal fillers may be of Hyaluronic acid based, Calcium Hydroxyapatite based, Poly-Lactic acid based, collagen based or Polymethylmethacrylate-based (non-absorbable). Botulinum toxin is a single chain of about 150KD and then is cleaved to form a dichain molecule with a disulphide bridge. Some of the key commercially available botulinum toxin brands include Dysport, Xeomin, Meditoxin, Botulax and Nabota. There are various applications of facial Injectable including aesthetic restoration, dentistry and reconstructive surgery.Some of the prominent key players in the market includes Allergan plc, Galderma S.A., Merz Pharma Gmbh & Co. KGaA, Merck & Co. Inc., Ipsen S.A., and other predominate & niche players. Nestle skin health, Sinclair pharma, zimmer Biomet, Allergan, Anika therapeutics Inc., Merz Pharma, Ipsen, Teoxane laboratories, Prollelium Medical Technologies Inc., Suneva Medical Inc. and othersReport Analysis: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upcomming/120124779/Facial-Injectable-MarketIntranet is a restricted and private communications network hosted online. Each intranet is generally accessible through a specific group like a team member. Employee intranets exist to provide employees with a centralized location or to collaborate on other tasks, to work together, to share, interact, to train, and to receive employees.

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This research report on Employee Intranet Software provides detailed analysis on the main growth prospects and challenges in the market. This research study is expected to guide the new and existing key players in the market in making current business decisions in order to sustain in the rigid competition of the global Employee Intranet Software market. The report sheds light on the main product portfolios, geographical segments, key applications, and the competitive landscape of the global Employee Intranet Software market that have been mentioned in the study.Get Sample Copy of this Report@: https://www.qyreports.com/request-sample?report-id=106377 Some of the Key Players of this Market are OnSemble, Jostle, Simpplr, ThoughtFarmer, Speakap, Communifire, Jive-n, tibbr, Bonzai, Twine, Hub Intranet, Noodle, and others.This report includes massive data relating to the product or technological developments observed in the market, complete with an analysis of the impact of these advancements on the markets future development. Global Employee Intranet Software market has been carried out. This report analysis will help organizations understand the major threat and opportunities that vendors have to deal in the market. Moreover, the report presents a 360-degree overview and SWOT analysis of the competitive.Major Factors: Global Employee Intranet Software Market Overview Economic Impact on Market Market Competition Global Employee Intranet Software Market Analysis by Application Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders Global Market Effect, Factors, Analysis Global Market ForecastGet Discount on this premium Report@: https://www.qyreports.com/ask-for-discount?report-id=106377 The competitive landscape of the Employee Intranet Software market has been inspected on the basis of market share research of key players. Detailed market data about these features is likely to help vendors take strategic conclusions that can reinforce their positions in the market and lead to more effective and larger stake in the global market. Estimating and cost teardown analysis for products and service offerings of competitors has also been undertaken for the study.The research report also mentions the innovations, new developments, marketing strategies, branding techniques, and products of the key participants present in the global Employee Intranet Software market. In this reports for the future. The reports offer the opportunities and restraint that may hit in the future for the market players. Through this report, consumers can easily get the notion for their growth of global Employee Intranet Software products in the market.Global Employee Intranet Software Market segmentation:By Type:Cloud BasedWeb BasedBy Application:Large EnterprisesSMEsFor more information @: https://qyreports.com/enquiry-before-buying?report-id=106377 What the research report offers:1. Market definition of the global Employee Intranet Software market along with the analysis of different influencing factors like drivers, restraints, and opportunities.2. Extensive research on the competitive landscape of global Employee Intranet Software market.3. Identification and analysis of micro and macro factors that are and will effect on the growth of the market.4. A comprehensive list of key market players operating in the global Employee Intranet Software market.5. Analysis of the different market segments such as type, size, applications, and end-users.6. It offers a descriptive analysis of demand-supply chaining in the global Employee Intranet Software market.7. Statistical analysis of some significant economics facts8. Figures, charts, graphs, pictures to describe the market clearly.PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-22 17:43:43

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The global gamma knife market secured US$ 172 Mn in 2015, and is expected to grow at more than 9% CAGR through 2025, accounting for over US$ 400 Mn in terms of revenues. Strong growth is expected in regions such as India, South Korea, the U.S., Japan, EU5 and China. Varian and Elekta medical systems are likely to retain their dominance in developed economies, whereas Huiheng Medical, Inc. based at China will consolidate its position in Asia Pacific. Currently, North America, the biggest market for the gamma knife is likely to demote to second position due to robust acceptance of the gamma knife equipment in Asia Pacific.Report For Sample with Table of Contents@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/sample/110114974/Gamma-Knife-Market Drivers and Trends of MarketInclination towards non-invasive treatments have positively impacted adoption of radiation therapy, with Gamma Knife, LINAC and Cyber Knife gaining traction in healthcare sector. Positive perception toward gamma knife, rising preference for minimally-invasive surgeries and huge success rate are among the key factors anticipated to propel adoption of gamma knife treatment over the forecast period. Medical tourism, emphasis on R&D and increasing expenditure per capita on healthcare are some other factors anticipated to support growth of the market in long run. Improvements in technology that makes gamma knife more effective and safer are also expected to expand its adoption among end-users throughout the forecast period. Yet, high cost continues to be main challenge for widespread adoption and is likely to limit its adoption in developing economies.Brain Metastasis to Remain Largest Disease Indication SegmentGamma knife treatment is applicable to treat various disease indications, including trigeminal neuralgia, cancer, brain metastasis, and AVM. Among these, application of gamma knife for remedying brain metastasis is likely to account for significant percentage of total market revenues, trailed by cancer and trigeminal neuralgia. Brain metastasis is likely to remain largest disease indication segment for gamma knife market over the forecast period.Request For Report Discount@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/discount/110114974/Gamma-Knife-Market Asia Pacific Gamma Knife Market to Expand at Significant CAGRAsia Pacific is likely to pip both Europe and North America to emerge as the largest market for gamma knife by 2025-end. Increasing adoption of gamma knife equipment in India, South Korea, Japan, and China will support expansion of the gamma knife market in Asia Pacific. The gamma knife market in Asia Pacific is estimated to expand at CAGR of more than 10% throughout the forecast period. APEJ will emerge as more lucrative region than Europe and North America however, collectively secure nearly two-fourth revenue share of the global gamma knife market by the end of 2025.Prominent Market Players Strategies to Maintain Market PositionHuiheng Medical, Inc., Elekta, and Varian Medical Systems are prominent gamma knife equipment manufacturers. These players are likely to maintain their position in the market through continuous innovative product development and stepping in into new marketsReport Analysis@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/rd/110114974/Gamma-Knife-MarketResearch Report Insights

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The market for acetic anhydride is expanding on account of the increased requirement for cigarette filter drag in rising economies, predominantly in the BRIC nations. The growing smokers in these nations as a result of the expansion of the market since cellulose acetate flake come about as the foremost raw material for manufacturing cigarette filter drag is prepared by utilizing acetic anhydride. In addition, acetate cellulose is utilized in making acetate textile fibers that fuel the requirement for acetic anhydride.As cellulose acetate is chiefly utilized in the cigarette, acetic anhydride is in addition utilized in flavor as well as fragrances in addition to dyes market. Moreover, acetic anhydride could be utilized in resins & polymers, artificial sweeteners, explosives, agrochemicals, textiles, pharmaceuticals, pesticides along with coating materials market. Acetic anhydride is in addition utilized to produce TAED (tetraacetylethylenediamine) that could be utilized in the form of a bleach activator in the market for laundry detergents and cleaning industry. On the other hand, going down consumption of acetic anhydride in cellulose acetate for household consumption could have the foremost effect on the overall market.Request For Report Sample with Table of Contents@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upsample/120124793/Acetic-Anhydride-Market On the basis of demand, North America regional market has gained market attractiveness in the worldwide market for acidic anhydride. Among which, the U.S. had the biggest requirement for acidic anhydride on account of vast need from the market for cellulose acetate. On the other hand, the market for acidic anhydride is going down in the North America market over the years to come. The acidic anhydride market was fundamentally expansive in Europe and the trend is likely to proceed because of the developing requirement for cellulose acetate and TAED in the area.The Asia Pacific is foreseen to be the quickest developing business sector for acidic anhydride throughout the following couple of years. There is a vast requirement for acetic anhydride from nations, for instance, Japan, India in addition to China. China and Japan are widely held acetic anhydride users in the Asia Pacific region. Expansion of industries such as pharmaceuticals, polymer, and textile in India is believed to offer better prospects for the India market for acetic anhydride. The Europe market for acetic anhydride is determined by expanding demand for the laundry market of TAED in addition to cellulose acetate for cigarette market. France, the U.K, Germany and Italy are the main customer of acetic anhydride in the European market. The requirement is constant in Rest of the World for the worldwide market for acidic anhydride over the years to come.Request For Report Discount@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/updiscount/120124793/Acetic-Anhydride-Market The decrease in the use of acidic anhydride in domestic utilization of stringent environmental regulations and cellulose acetate have appeared to limit the worldwide acidic anhydride market. In addition, the costs of acidic anhydride have demonstrated a remarkable development as a result of instability in the cost of methanol, which is a noteworthy crude material for the manufacturing of acidic acid. This has made it troublesome for makers to keep up profit margins.The foremost market players foraying in the worldwide market for acidic anhydride, have taken the form of an entry barrier for new market players, as a result of technical proficiency as well as feasibility concerns. The looking for novel applications in addition to the growth of manufacturing facilities is considered to be the foremost strategy for the market players for the growth of the market. A few of the topmost makers in the worldwide market for acidic anhydride include BP Chemicals, Celanese Corporation, BASF SE, Eastman Chemical Company, DuPont, Sasol Limited, SABIC, and PetroChina Ltd. amid others.Report Analysis@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upcomming/120124793/Acetic-Anhydride-MarketPR-Inside.com: 2019-03-22 17:54:21

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The latter appears to secure inferiority due to large area for surface impact, designing flaws and lack of provision for security updates, while evaluating security properties of mechanical and electronic locks. Future prospects of global market for mechanical locks has been assessed in the report published by Research Report Insights. According to the report, approximately US$ 7.15 Bn worth of mechanical locks are estimated to be sold across the world by the end of 2022. The global mechanical locks market is estimated to exhibit a moderate CAGR over the forecast period.Report For Sample with Table of Contents@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/sample/110114979/Mechanical-Locks-Market Factors Influencing Growth of the MarketThe demand for mechanical locks is likely to witness steadfast expansion, in the view of developing technologies in the domain of physical securities. Adoption of high-tech guarding, biometric access platforms and smart locks continues to remain sough-after in the market, decreasing the uptake of mechanical locks among consumers, concurrently. Mechanical locks are witnessing decline in terms of gaining mass consumer appeal that continues to opt for adamantine security products, even as a retail commodity.Interconnected locks are likely to remain sought-after in the market, according to a report. Interconnected locks are estimated to secure nearly US$ 1.9 Bn in terms of revenues by the end of assessment period, despite the moderate expansion of the total mechanical locks. Interconnected locks will gain traction in securing apartments, buildings, military housing and rest of the residential facilities. The interconnected locks are likely to remain sough-after owing to their precise lever action and compatibility to handicapped requirements.Ease of manufacturing and construction of interconnected locks is likely to lead manufacturers in rising production of these locks.Highlights from the ReportThe tubular locks are expected to be top selling product in the market, reflecting steady CAGR during the assessment period.Stainless steel, by material type is likely to remain forefront in the mechanical locks market, securing over US$ 2.4 Bn by the end of 2022.Grade level 2 mechanical locks will create an incremental opportunity of nearly US$ 600 Mn during the forecast period.Request For Report Discount@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/discount/110114979/Mechanical-Locks-Market External facility security segment, by application type is expected to be most lucrative segment in the market, revenues from which will hold approximately one-fifth value share of the overall market.North America will remain most attractive region in mechanical locks market throughout the assessment period.Asia-Pacific excluding Japan region is estimated to contribute significantly in generation of revenues by the sales of mechanical locks globally.Competitive LandscapeSome prominent market players are expected to focus on cost-effectiveness in manufacturing mechanical locks by obtaining better quality raw materials through large supply chain. ECO Schulte GMBH & Co. KG, Serrature Meroni Spa, Dom Ronis, Allegion Plc, Picard-Serrures, Winkhaus Austria Gmbh, Dormakaba Holdings AG, Yale Security Inc., The Eastern Company, and ASSA ABLOY AB (key subsidiary - Mul-T-Locks) are some leading market players in the competitive landscape of the market throughout the assessment period.Report Analysis@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/rd/110114979/Mechanical-Locks-MarketPR-Inside.com: 2019-03-22 14:21:31

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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 22, 2019 / PowerBand Solutions Inc. (TSXV: PBX) (OTCQB: PWWBF) (Frankfurt: 1ZVA) ("PowerBand", "PBX" or the "Company"), announces that it has received conditional approval from the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSXV") for an extension of the deadline and revised terms of its previously announced non-brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") (see news release dated February 5, 2019). The Private Placement is being repriced in order to more accurately reflect the recent market price of the Company's common shares. The Company intends to issue on a non-brokered Private Placement basis up to 30,000,000 common shares of the Company at a price of $0.10 per share for gross proceeds of up to $3,000,000. The Private Placement is expected to close on or before April 21, 2019.The gross proceeds of the Private Placement will be used to fund the Company's continued U.S. expansion, software development, business development, administration and for general working capital purposes.Finder's fees may be payable in accordance with the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange ("the "Exchange"). All securities issued in connection with the private placement are subject to a 4-month hold period in Canada.Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.About PowerBand Solutions Inc.PowerBand Solutions Inc. is a technology provider listed on the TSX Venture Exchange that is developing solutions for automotive and other industries that drive efficiency and transparency in the marketplace. PowerBand has developed and commercialized a leading-edge online auction platform that increases revenues and profit margins for its automotive dealership, Original Equipment Manufacturer, commercial fleet and rental company customers. PowerBand's remarketing platform, the PowerBand Exchange, incorporates the industry's latest auction technologies, inventory management, market intelligence, and appraisal processes.For further information, please contact:Carolyn Capaccio, Jody Burfening, LHA Investor Relations1-212-838-3777ccapaccio@ lhai.com Richard Goldman, VP Corporate DevelopmentP: 1-866-768-7653rgoldman@ powerbandsolutions.com FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTSThis news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the Company and other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as "will", "may", "should", "anticipate", "expects" and similar expressions. All statements other than statements of historical fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding future plans and objectives of the Company, are forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. As a result, we cannot guarantee that any forward-looking statement will materialize and the reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated.Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as at the date of this news release, and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or to revise any of the included forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by Canadian securities law.Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.SOURCE: PowerBand Solutions Inc.PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-22 12:15:03

Furthering Pan-African Open Collaboration & Action in FinTech on 1 April 2019

The Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub to Host Their First FinTech Event of 2019 in Mauritius

Riddhi Mossae

Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub

+230 5788 3068

media@mauritiusfintech.org

www.mauritiusfintech.org

After a successful soft launch and rapid growth in Mauritian, African and international members over the last four months, the Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub will host their first official event of 2019 on 1 April 2019 in Port Louis at the Caudan Arts Centre.

The event will be a jam-packed one-day seminar/networking opportunity split into two parts; Mauritius-focus in the morning and Africa-focus in the afternoon. The topics covered will include blockchain, FinTech regulation, capacity development, investment as well as innovation and incubation, with the overarching theme being the promotion and importance of driving collaboration & action/outcomes within pan-African FinTech ecosystems. Talks will be delivered by key players in the Mauritian and international FinTech and regulatory environment with first-hand experience in the industry.

Open collaboration is a vital ingredient in building a borderless ecosystem which will help create FinTech solutions that will drive positive change, thus the theme of the event: Building the Pan-African Fintech Ecosystem Through Open Collaboration & Action. says Lynet Kiioh, Head of Ecosystem at the The Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub about the 1 April event. We want this FinTech event to set the tone for how we mean to move forward for the rest of 2019.

The African FinTech space is poised for immense growth with digital wallets, alternative point of sales, internet banking and mobile insurance solving genuine human problems in a market where traditional financial solutions have extremely low penetration. Only 20% of people on the continent have a bank account in a traditional sense, yet 52% of the worlds mobile transactions take place to and from Africa. A receptive African market for FinTech solutions exists and it is the job of FinTech ecosystems, such as the Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub to help facilitate open collaboration between governments, regulators, entrepreneurs, tech businesses, FSPs and corporate entities. All this, with the aim of enabling human lives to be better through FinTech technologies and innovation.

The Mauritius Africa FinTech Hubs purpose is to create an ecosystem that transcends pan-African borders. Essentially they will act as a gateway to and from Africa for businesses who want to create positive growth through tech disruption. Businesses do not have to be based in Mauritius, or even Africa, to be part of the Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub. As long as they are interested in being one of the frontrunners in African FinTech innovation, they will benefit by becoming a member.

The event aligns with our philosophy of open collaboration and making things happen, says Michal Szymanski, CEO of the Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub. "Making things happen for Mauritius, making things happen for Africa and serving the pan-African Fintech ecosystem, is our purpose. Were here to enable a FinTech ecosystem that connects and unites in spite of borders and regulations to provide solutions and opportunities that uplift.

About Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub: The Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub is based in Port Louis, Mauritius. It is a not-for-profit organisation that exists to propel Mauritius into becoming one of the the next global FinTech hubs, focused on Africa. They bring together regulators, corporates, small businesses, academia and other stakeholder to engage in the FinTech space to empower African FinTech into the future.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005

Join the Mauritius Africa FinTech Hub for expert talks on collaboration & action in the Pan-African FinTech ecosystem at the the Caudan Art Centre in Port Louis, Mauritius on 1 April 2019.The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) refineries rehabilitation programme is to commence with the 210,000 barrels per day capacity Port Harcourt Refinery complex.

This is coming after several proposals by the corporation to boost the refining capacities of the four local refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna and cut down on the countrys fuel imports failed to materialise.

In 2017, the NNPC inaugurated eight committees mandated to return the four refineries to their nameplate capacities by 2019.

NNPCs spokesperson, Ndu Ughamadu said the action was sequel to a presidential directive to develop ways to increase local fuel production and cut down on imports.

Last year, another plan that was to involve the rehabilitation of the refineries by their original builders also failed.

The NNPC Group Managing Director, Maikanti Baru, said discussions were held with Kellog, Brown & Root to work with the Nigerian Engineering and Technical Company (NETCO) to conduct a detailed scoping on the refineries in Port Harcourt and Warri Refinery to determine what needed to be done in each.

Mr Baru said on completion of the technical assessment and costing, the NNPC would approach the original designers and builders of the refineries to supervise the reconstruction work.

While JGC Corporation of Japan and Saipem were to rehabilitate the Port Harcourt Refinery, the GMD said Tecnimont and Snamprogetti would handle the Warri Refinery, and Chiyoda Corporation and Saipem would reconstruct the Kaduna Refinery.

After a series of discussions with the contractors in London on the various financing options, Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, said in December last year the NNPC Board was unable to proceed any further on the arrangement.

The commencement of the rehabilitation of the Port Harcourt refineries was part of the alternative arrangements on the issue to achieve local sufficiency in refined petroleum products supply.

First phase

NNPC spokesperson, Ndu Ughamadu said the formal commencement of rehabilitation of the 210,000 barrels per day capacity Port Harcourt Refinery complex was the first phase of the programme.

Port Harcourt Refinery comprises the 60,000 barrels per day old Refinery built in 1965 and the 150,000 barrels per day new Refinery, commissioned in 1989.

Mr Ughamadu said in a statement on Thursday the commencement of the rehabilitation is coming more than 19 years after the last turn around maintenance (TAM) was carried out in the plant.

The rehabilitation programme was kickedoff by Mr Baru after an official meeting in the premises of the refinery in Port Harcourt.

Handlers

The project would be handled by Milan-based Maire Tecnimont S.P.A, in collaboration with its Nigerian affiliate, Tecnimont Nigeria.

Mr Ughamadu said Maire Tecnimont S.P.A, which has interests in international engineering and construction, technology and licensing, and energy business development is listed on the Milan Stock Exchange.

The Tecnimont Group has operations in 40 different countries, with about 50 operative companies and a workforce of about 5,500 employees.

Mr Ughamadu quoted Mr Baru as saying at the end of the first phase, the refinery complex should be able to attain 60 per cent capacity utilistion.

Besides, the spokesperson said the NNPC was engaging Eni/NAOC as Technical Advisor to support the rehabilitation of the PHRC.

NNPC/PHRC would also leverage on extensive refinery supply chain network and warehouses to procure critical materials for the rehabilitation programme.

The rehabilitation contract, which would run for six months, would involve detailed integrity checks and equipment inspection of the Port Harcourt Refinery complex from the end of the month.

Second phase

The integrity test will be followed by the second phase of the rehabilitation project, which will entail a comprehensive revamping of the complex to restore it to a minimum of 90 per cent capacity utilisation.

Subject to the successful completion of the integrity checks, Phase 2 of the project would be executed on an Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) basis by Tecnimont in collaboration with the original builders of the plant, JGC of Japan.

Speaking on behalf of the contractors, Chief Officer, Upstream, Eni, Antonio Vella, said all the companies involved would deploy all available modern resources to ensure effective upgrade of the plant.

Mr Vella said with the commitment of all parties, it was certain NNPC would be able to celebrate the revamp of the PHRC that would lead to its full capacity utilisation on schedule and in full safety.

Branch Chairman of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association (PENGASSAN) workers unions, Odor Ayiri, and Dibiah Joseph, Chairman of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), jointly pledged the support of workers to ensuring a smooth turnaround of the facility.

The rehabilitation of the Port Harcourt Refinery Complex will be followed with Warri and Kaduna Refineries using the same methodology.The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has invited tenders from prospective traders in Nigerias crude and importers of petroleum products under its 2019-2020 fuel supply programme.

An invitation to tender published on the corporations website says the NNPC intends to engage only qualified and credible companies in its direct sale of crude oil and direct purchase of petroleum product (DSDP) to ensure sustained supply of petroleum products in the country.

The NNPC said the invitation to tenders was in line with its policy and procedures enshrined in its enabling Act (LFN Cap.320) and in compliance with the Public Procurement Act 2007.

In January 2018, bids were received from about 254 indigenous and foreign companies that showed interest in a similar exercise.

In May 2018, the list of 50 international and indigenous companies believed to have been awarded the contracts by the NNPC was published in the media.

Murky 2018 process

But, the NNPC spokesperson, Ndu Ughamadu, promptly dismissed the list as fake. Mr Ughamadu, who described the list in circulation as not official, asked PREMIUM TIMES then to wait for the authentic list when selection process would be completed.

Since then, on more than three occasions this newspaper has requested from the NNPC for the official list of the beneficiaries from the contract awards without any positive response.

Last month, the General Manager, Crude Oil Marketing Department of the NNPC, Melee Kyari, said the official list has not been made public because some Nigerians were using it to blackmail government by reading political motives to every name.

But, civil society groups have always criticised NNPCs refusal to make the list available to the public.

The Lead Director, Centre for Social Justice (CENSOJ), Eze Onyekpere, said NNPCs refusal to upload in its website all information relating to the contract award process, from invitation to tender to the final list of companies awarded the contracts was a discredit to the corporations claim to transparency and accountability.

The NNPC must always walk its talk, by ensuring all aspects of its operations, particularly as they relate to contract awards, are transparently handled, Mr Onyekpere said.

2019/2020 Guidelines

Regardless, the NNPC has released fresh guidelines for prospective bidders under the 2019/2020 contract term scheduled to last for one year. Previous contracts usually last for two years.

According to the NNPCs invitation to tender published in its website, tenders must be from interested and credible companies with minimum turnover of $500 million (or the Naira equivalent) and net worth of $250 million (or the Naira equivalent) for the year 2017 or 2018 financial year.

The three categories of operators include established international crude oil end users who own a refinery with the capacity to process Nigerian crude oil grades.

Also, the company must have a Nigerian affiliate or in partnership with a subsidiary with experience in downstream oil and gas business, particularly petroleum products trading.

The guidelines stipulates that the affiliate companies must have a minimum turnover of $65 million (or the Naira equivalent), with a net worth of $32.5 million (or the Naira Equivalent).

Besides, the NNPC said those in the second category must be established and globally recognised large volume petroleum product trading company with a Nigerian affiliate or subsidiary experienced in downstream oil and gas business, particularly petroleum products trading.

The NNPC said all affiliates or subsidiaries must be legal entities which directly or indirectly owns and controls at least 50 per cent of the issued shares or voting rights in the company.

The other category consists of indigenous companies engaged in Nigerian oil and gas downstream activities with expertise in trading in petroleum products, with minimum turnover of $400 million (or the Naira equivalent) and net worth of $200 million (or the Naira Equivalent).

Shortlisting

To qualify for shortlisting, the NNPC said interested bidders must submit evidence of registration, including certificate of incorporation by Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) (for Nigerian companies), or similar agencies (for foreign companies).

Other documentations include certified true copies of Memorandum and Articles of Association of the company indicating ownership structure of company, name(s) of directors, major shareholders and percentage shareholding.

Also, the companys profile must show full details of its demonstrable capabilities; three years company tax clearance certificate (2016, 2017 and 2018 for Nigerian companies), or similar tax certification documents for foreign companies, or evidence of exemption from the respective authorities.

The companies are equally expected to present their current Pension Clearance Certificate as evidence of compliance with Pension Reform Act 2004; evidence of compliance with the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) Act 2010 and Industrial Training Fund (ITF) Amendment Act 2011 as well as registration on the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPPs) National Data Base of Federal Contractors, Consultants and Service Providers (NDCCSPs).

Apart from certification from the Department of Petroleum Resources, (DPR), prospective bidders must show evidence of compliance with the Nigerian Content Act in the areas of patronage of Nigerian shipping companies, insurance and legal services as well as banking and financial services.

Those awarded the contract at the end of the exercise would be expected to utilise crude oil supplied by the NNPC every month to produce and deliver petroleum products of Nigerian standard specification on delivered at designated place (DAP) basis.

The petroleum products to be delivered shall be equivalent in value to the crude oil received from NNPC subject to the general terms and conditions as would be advised to successful companies subsequently via term sheet (TS), the NNPC guidelines noted..The Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, has urged Nigerians to utilise technology and social media revolution to create new businesses and contribute to national growth.

Mr Shittu gave the advice on Thursday at Nigerias first edition of the Glocalisation and Branding Summit in Abuja.

The event was organised by a global Public Relations firm, Vivacity PR, to help SME brands expand to global markets by focusing more on creating compelling content, using local creativity and personal branding.

Mr Shittu said the revolution is giving rise to new ways of creating and enhancing services.

The minister said many important techno-political and socio-economic questions are accessing the global markets, using local creativity and personal branding centres on the prevalent connectivity.

He described the theme of the event, Accessing Global Markets Using Local Creativity and Personal Branding, as apt, coming at a time when we are intensifying our efforts at economic developing our local contents and brands.

The present drive of President Buhari-led government to restructure and rebuild the pillars on which stable political institutions can give birth to sustainable socio-economic growth and change, has to be simultaneously complimented with an aggressive drive towards diversification of the economy from dependency on oil and focus on putting Made in Nigeria goods, services and products on the global market place, he said.

The Special Adviser on New Media to the Minister, Oluwakemi Areola, in her remarks at the event, said a lot of businesses are working in silos in Nigeria. She said they can do better if they network and co-promote themselves.

Nigerian SMEs can export their services and product to the world only if they will make effective use of their smartphones and social media correctly, Ms Areola said.

Everyone looking for a visa out of the country while you can work here and earn foreign currency.

She said she decided to bring the stakeholders together at the event because a lot of people complain about registering their businesses, tax, postal services.

In his remark, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on ICT, Lanre Osibona, advised Nigerians to stop amplifying the negative on social media. He said Nigerians need to move away from consumers on social media to become creators on digital space.

Tola Johnson, the Special Assistant to the Vice President on MSMEs, said the government will work with registered business owners and help them access loans through the SMSE clinics.

The event had in attendance representatives of organisations like the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST) and the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC).

PR and media consultancy experts were also at the event. They include Charles OTudor, Adeola Ademokoya, Goke Dokun, Abuyere Elvis and Efosa Onyezebe.The National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has renewed the operational licence of GOTV for another period of three years.

The Director-General of the commission, Modibbo Kawu, disclosed this on Friday.

Mr Kawu told a news conference at the commissions headquarters in Abuja that the renewal was a reversal to its earlier plan to withhold the licence due in June.

We took the decision not to renew the licence, because the new architecture of Nigerian Broadcasting in the digital era, separates the roles of the content provider from that of the signal distributors.

This is according to the government white paper on the transition from Analogue to Digital Broadcasting.

But following the intervention of the Office of the National Security Adviser, the decision was reviewed.

We held the definitive meeting under the auspices of the National Security Adviser, Gen. Babagana Monguno, during which we were able to resolve the main obstacles.

NBC resolved that GOTV would have its licence renewed for a period of three years but with certain provisos, he said.

Mr Kawu said the provisos included the separation of Content Provider from Signal Distributor which was non-negotiable, and GOTV would in the near future no longer combine the two functions.

According to him, in the next three years GOTV will be expected to begin discussions with any of the two licensed signal distributors: Integrated Television Services (ITS) and Pinnacle Communications Limited, on the preferred platform to carry its contents.

These resolutions came on the back of often, difficult days of negotiations, that involved several stakeholders, Mr Kawu said.

Mr Kawu explained that the resolution of the issue with GOTV recognised the role of investors in the broadcasting and other sectors of the Nigerian economy.

He, however, reminded all licensees of their professional and ethical responsibilities, in the 18 states of Nigeria, where supplementary elections would hold on Saturday.

He said the commission had enforced a regime of strict monitoring of the broadcasting environment.

He warned that whichever broadcaster flouts the Nigeria Broadcasting Code, the Electoral Act and other extant laws and regulations in respect of coverage of the elections would be sanctioned.

I want to also inform that there are significant steps that we are taking on the Digital Switchover track.

The Information Services on our Set Top Boxes (STBs) are now being used by the Nigeria Police Force from post security-related information to homes where we have installed 650, 000 of these boxes.

We are looking at extending same services to the government agencies like: Federal Road Safety Corps; the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps; the Nigerian Armed Forces; National Committee Against AIDS (NACA), and so on, he said.

(NAN)The U.S. on Friday said it was imposing sanctions on 14 people and 17 entities connected to Irans Organisation of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND).

SPND is a body the U.S. said had played a central role in Irans past nuclear weapons effort.

Among those designated for sanctions was the Shahid Karimi group, which works on missile and explosive-related projects for the SPND, and four associated individuals, the U.S. Treasury Department said in a Statement.

The U.S. government is taking decisive action against actors at all levels in connection with Irans Organisation of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND), who have supported the Iranian regimes defence sector, Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said.

The U.S. will continue applying maximum pressure to the Iranian regime, using all economic tools to prevent Iran from developing weapons of mass destruction.

Anyone considering dealing with the Iranian defence industry in general, and SPND in particular, risks professional, personal, and financial isolation.

It said the steps targeted current SPND subordinate groups, supporters, front companies, and associated officials.

The move freezes any U.S. assets of those targeted and bans U.S. dealings with them.

Todays action serves as a warning to individuals and entities considering dealing with the Iranian regimes defence sector in general, and SPND in particular.

Engaging in sanctionable activity with designated Iranian persons, you risk professional, personal, and financial isolation, the Treasury statement said.

On Thursday, Irans Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Tehran was determined to boost its defence capabilities in spite mounting pressure from the U.S. and its allies to curb its ballistic missile programme.

We need to take Iran to a point that enemy understands that they cannot threaten Iran  Americas sanctions will make Iran self-sufficient, Khamenei said in a speech broadcast live on state TV.

President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. last May from a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six major powers, saying it gave too much away to Iran, and reimposed far-reaching U.S. sanctions.

The U.S. sanctions aim to force Iran to accept tougher restrictions on its nuclear work and drop its ballistic missile programme.

Mr Khamenei said the European signatories of the deal had failed to maintain Irans interests.

They have stabbed Iran in the back  The Western countries have proved they cannot be trusted, he said in the speech in Mashhad.

The other signatories to the nuclear deal  Germany, France, Britain, the EU, Russia and China  have remained committed to the agreement and have been trying to salvage the pact by a mechanism to circumvent Trumps sanctions.

Iran says its missile programme is purely defensive and has rejected the curbs on it demanded by the U.S.

Tehran says it has missiles with a range of up to 2,000 km (1,250 miles), which puts Israel and U.S. military bases in the region within reach.

(Reuters/NAN)A petition calling for the British government to revoke Article 50, which governs Britains withdrawal from the EU, reached three million signatures on Friday, parliaments official petitions committee said.

The official website crashed on Thursday morning as the petition gained the highest-ever volume of sign-ups, the committee.

Many celebrities and lawmakers tweeted support for the petition, one of the most popular ever submitted to parliaments website.

Scotlands First Minister Nicola Sturgeon wrote: An issue as big and important as Brexit should not come down to petitions  that said, if you are frustrated that the (prime minister) is just not listening, you can sign here.

Downing Street suggested that Prime Minister Theresa May is likely to ignore the petition, saying she will not countenance revoking Article 50.

Andrea Leadsom, Mays leader in parliament, told lawmakers on Thursday that should the petition reach more than 17.4 million signatures, there would be a very clear case for taking action.

Leadsom was referring to the 17.4 million votes, or 52 per cent, for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.

Colin Talbot, a professor of government at Manchester University, said the Twitter-led surge in support for the petition was quite extraordinary.

It clearly shows the increasing power of social media and of course it will be a massive morale boost to Remainers of all stripes, Talbot wrote in a blog post.

There is no corresponding mobilisation on the Leave side, he added.

MPs will notice, Talbot said. The petition allows them to see what the response is in their areas. They know that this level of activity about anything is significant.

More than 17 million Britons voted in favour of leaving the EU in a 2016 referendum while 16 million voted to remain, with May serving notice of the UKs intent to leave under Article 50 of the EUs Lisbon Treaty the following year.

The Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU petition on the parliament website had attracted signatures backed by support on social media, although the site appeared to be regularly crashing due to the large numbers trying to sign.

The government repeatedly claims exiting the EU is the will of the people.

We need to put a stop to this claim by proving the strength of public support now, for remaining in the EU, the petition said.

Parliament must consider holding a debate on all petitions that gain more than 100,000 signatures.

Supporters wrote on Twitter that the petition showed the strength of feeling against Mays strategy while backers of Brexit said it needed to attract more signatures than the 17.4 million people, who voted to leave the EU three years ago before anyone should take any notice.

More than 1.8 million people signed a petition calling for U.S. President Donald Trump to be prevented from making a state visit to Britain, leading to a debate in parliament in 2017.

More than four million people signed another petition in 2016 which called for another EU referendum in the event that neither the remaining or leave camps achieved 60 per cent of the vote.

Mrs May has asked European Council President Donald Tusk to delay Brexit from March 29 until the end of June.

According to her, she is preparing for a third vote in the British parliament on the exit deal she arduously negotiated with the EU.

(dpa/NAN)The Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) has demanded the prosecution of police officers involved in the attack on a Ghanaian journalist, Malik Sullemana, on March 14.

The CPJ made the call in a statement on Thursday by its Africa Program Coordinator, Angela Quintal, which was published by the committee on Thursday.

The CPJ described as unwarranted the assault on the journalists and cited a similar attack by police officers in the country, March last year. The CPJ described the attacks as evidences of hostility by police officers against journalists.

Authorities in Ghana should hold to account the police officers responsible for beating journalist Malik Sullemana, ensure a thorough investigation into their actions, and protect the safety of the press during interactions with police, the CPJ said.

There is absolutely no reason for police in Ghana to have assaulted journalist Malik Sullemana, and those involved should be held accountable. This attack, and at least one other like it, indicate that some police officers in Ghana not only disregard journalist safety but are actively hostile and violent to the media, which is unacceptable, it added.

The CPJ said Mr Sullemana, an investigative journalist and court reporter with the Ghanaian Times newspaper informed it of his altercation with police officers in the morning of March 14.

According to the committee, Mr Sullemana said he was beaten by the police officers before his arrest, following a traffic incident.

He was then taken to the station amidst threats by the police officers. It added added that the officers again tortured the Ghanaian reporter at the station after his arrival there.

Violent attack

Narrating the accounts of the incident by Mr Sullemana and two other journalists, Salifu Rahman and Raissa Ebu who were all involved in the traffic incident, the CPJ said the journalists were hit by a police officer who drove off, after the incident.

Following a decision of the reporters to confront the officer, an argument ensued which was taken on camera by Mr Sullemana. The development reportedly resulted in a violent attack on Mr Sullemana by other police officers who arrived the scene of the incident.

The CPJ noted a statement by the Ghanaian police on March 20, which indicated the suspension of the three affected officers.

According to the statement posted on the website of the Ghanaian Police Service, @GhPoliceService and signed by David Eklu, an assistant police commissioner, the countrys Inspector General of Police has ordered an investigation into the matter, which should be completed in one week.

The CPJ said it had further discussions with Mr Eklu on the matter and the police officer assured it of a special investigation into the matter.The failure and incapability of the Nigerian government to investigate and punish both state and non-state actors accused of human rights violations in the country has led to the entrenchment of abuses such as torture, illegal detention, human trafficking and sexual exploitations, the United States Department of State, 2018 Human Rights Practices report on Nigeria has observed.

The report which captured several instances of human rights violation excoriated the Nigerian government for the political will to identify and prosecute perpetrators of rights abuses despite passing laws and other legislation to check these violations.

The government took steps to investigate alleged abuses but fewer steps to prosecute officials who committed violations, whether in the security forces or elsewhere in the government. Impunity remained widespread at all levels of government, the report stated.

There were several reports the government or its agents committed arbitrary and unlawful killings. The national police, army, and other security services used lethal and excessive force to disperse protesters and apprehend criminals and suspects and committed other extrajudicial killings. Authorities generally did not hold police, military, or other security force personnel accountable for the use of excessive or deadly force or for the deaths of persons in custody. State and federal panels of inquiry investigating suspicious deaths generally did not make their findings public, the report added.

The report cited an investigative panel set up by then acting president, Yemi Osinbajo, in August 2017, to review the compliance of the armed forces with human rights obligations and rules of engagement. It stated that even though the panel submitted its findings in February 2018, the government did not publish the report of the panel nor prosecute those that might have been indicted.

Another example of government-backed impunity highlighted by the report is the Borno State government financed militia popularly known as Civilian JTF. The militia, which works closely with the military to prevent Boko Haram attacks on civilian populations, was accused of human rights abuses such as the use of child soldiers but the government took few steps to investigate or punish CJTF members who committed human rights abuses, the report noted.

Redundant Legislations

The report observed that impunity festers not because of lack of appropriate laws to prosecute perpetrators but in most cases, the laws are rendered redundant for lack of a political will to use it.

The constitution and law prohibit torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. In December 2017, the president signed the Anti-Torture Act, which defines and specifically criminalizes torture. The Act prescribes offences and penalties for any person, including law enforcement officers, who commits torture or aids, abets, or by act or omission is an accessory to torture. It also provides a basis for victims of torture to seek civil damages. The Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA), passed in 2015, prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of arrestees; however, it fails to prescribe penalties for violators.

Torture (NCAT). Lack of legal and operational independence and lack of funding, Torture (NCAT). Lack of legal and operational independence and lack of funding, however, prevented NCAT from carrying out its work effectively. It stated.

For instance, the report observed that the Anti-Torture Act prohibits the use of evidence and confession obtained via torture, yet personnel of the Special Anti-robbery Squad (SARS) often used torture to extract confessions later used to try suspects.

In 2016, AI reported police officers in the SARS regularly tortured detainees in custody as a means of extracting confessions and bribes. In response to AIsfindings, the inspector general of police reportedly admonished SARS commanders and announced broad reforms to correct SARS units failures to follow due process and their use of excessive force. Allegations of widespread abuse by SARS officers, however, continued throughout the year.

In late 2017 citizens began a social media campaign (#EndSARS) to document physical abuse and extortion by SARS officers and demand SARS units be disbanded. In December 2017 the inspector general of police announced plans to reorganize SARS units, but complaints of abuse continued. Several SARS officers were dismissed from the force and, in some instances, prosecuted, and the National Police Force (NPF) sought technical assistance for investigations of SARS officers.

The vast majority of misconduct cases, however, went uninvestigated and unpunished. In August then-acting President Yemi Osinbajo ordered the inspector general of police to overhaul the management and activities of SARS, and ordered the NHRC to set up a Special Panel with public hearings on SARS abuses. The panels work was ongoing at the end of the year and it had not yet issued a report.

The report also blamed the government for failing to prosecute members of the military who were indicted in the December 2015 siege of the Shia group, the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) and other extrajudicial practices like torture, illegal detention, and attack of people for their sexual orientations.

Military and police reportedly used a range of torture methods including beatings while bound, rape and other forms of sexual violence. According to reports, security services committed rape and other forms of violence against women and girls, often with impunity.

As of December the government had not held any responsible officials to account for reported incidents of torture in detention facilities in the Northeast, including Giwa Barracks, the report stated.The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has alleged that there was a clandestine security meeting by the presidency with certain top officials of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and security agencies to hijack the upcoming supplementary elections.

The party made this known in a press conference by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, on Thursday at the party secretariat.

INEC later confirmed that the meeting held but said it was a routine one and the PDP had nothing to be worried about.

In his briefing, Mr Ologbondiyan stated that his party is already leading and coasting to inevitable victory in all the affected states and nothing can alter this reality.

INEC had declared elections in six states inconclusive following cancellation of results in some polling units in the states.

The commission subsequently fixed March 23 for supplementary elections in the states: Adamawa, Benue, Sokoto, Plateau, Kano and Bauchi.

However, the election in Adamawa was postponed indefinitely following a court order.

Before the elections were declared inconclusive, the PDP was leading in five of the states while the APC was leading in Plateau.

The opposition party now claims there is a security plot to stop its impending victory.

The PDP has full information on every move by the APC to manipulate the electoral process as not all Nigerians in their government subscribe to their cruelty, resort to violence as well as suppression of votes, Mr Ologbondiyan said.

Our party is informed of how a top Army officer, at the meeting, directed the INEC Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, not to ever declare Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike as winner of the Rivers Governorship election, even when it is clear to all that he won the election.

We also have details how a top military officer, who is from Bauchi State, at the meeting directed INEC Chairman not to declare our victorious Bauchi state governorship candidate, Sen. Bala Mohammed, as the winner the Bauchi state governorship election.

The PDP is also privy to how a Director of one of our security agencies, who was at the meeting, undertook to use his agency to deliver Kano State to the APC.

Mr Ologbondiyan alleged that the security meeting has directed the deployment of 30 State Security Service (SSS) personnel and 300 mobile policemen to each of the states where supplementary elections have been scheduled with a standing instruction to take over the respective states and make effort to ambush the process.

In spite of all, the PDP wants the Buhari Presidency and the APC to come to terms with the fact that their conspiracies will be of no avail as our candidates are marching to unassailable victory with the people.

The opposition party said Nigerians would not hesitate to treat individuals in military uniform, who illegally involve in the supplementary election, as fake soldiers.

After all, the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai, has declared that uniformed personnel, who helped APC to rig presidential election, were fake.

It is imperative to state that under President Muhammadu Buharis administration, elections have been turned into warfare against the people but Nigerians will never allow a situation where states are forcefully taken over like spoils of war.

It is also highly provocative that the INEC Chairman, Prof. Yakubu, is now taking orders from the military to cancel elections and alter results for the APC, instead of asserting the independence and impartiality of INEC under our laws.

Such annexation of the Prof. Yakubu-led INEC by the Buhari Presidency is the only reason the governorship elections in Bauchi, Plateau, Kano, Sokoto, Adamawa, Benue and Rivers states, which were won by the PDP are declared inconclusive.

It is obvious that the elections were stalled in these states just because the PDP was in the lead. If the APC had been in the lead as in Ogun, INEC would not have batted an eyelid before pronouncing the results in favour of APC.

Mr Ologbondiyan said he wants the APC, INEC and their compromised security officials to be informed that the states, where supplementary elections have been scheduled, are home to the PDP and that their votes can never be stolen.

The PDP cautions INEC to note that the people already know the number of voters with Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) in these states and will never accept any padding of the voter register to favour the APC.

INEC Speaks

Presidential spokespersons, Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu, did not respond to calls and text messages sent to their lines.

However, Chief Press Secretary to the INEC Chairman, Rotimi Oyekanmi dismissed the allegations, saying the meeting was regular.

There was no such thing as clandestine security meeting. He said.

The INEC Chairman and Commisssion members met with representatives of the security agencies under the aegis of the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee On Election Security (ICCES) last Thursday at the office of the National Security Adviser (NSA).

There is nothing unusual about this and it is not the first time. The ICCES meeting takes place quarterly or as the need arises.

He said while the meeting usually holds at the INEC headquarters with the NSA, Inspector General of Police and other security chiefs attending, it can also hold at the NSAs office or any other venue mutually agreed upon.

The main topic was how to secure the environment in all locations where the upcoming supplementary elections will hold. The PDP need not entertain any fear. There was no secret deal or hatched plan to hijack the elections at the meeting.A group of unidentified bandits attacked a mining site on Wednesday in Anka Local Government Area of Zamfara State, killing one of the six mobile policemen on guard and abducting the others.

Speaking to journalists on phone, one of the eye witnesses to the attack, Salisu Lawali, said the bandits invaded the site situated in Sunke village after sporadic gun shots, disarmed the policemen, killing one of them in the process.

He explained that the gunmen abducted the policemen to an unknown destination and released them the following day without their guns.

Mr Lawali said: I dont think there was any negotiation, because the abducted policemen just returned to the site unhurt, the only thing missing were their guns which they said were in the custody of their abductors.

Confirming the incident, the Chairman of Anka Local Government Area, Mustapha Gado, said the policemen were deployed to man the site.

He said that the abductees were released after some hours.

The Divisional Police officer of the local government told me that the officers were released but their rifles were still in the custody of the bandits.

We have earlier ordered for the closure of all the goldmines, but the foreign expatriates can still be found because their machineries are stationed at the sites.

We consulted the relevant authorities on the need to close down the sites and we got approval, we served them with quit notice but those operating the sites sourced for security operatives to man the sites for them, he added.

Meanwhile, the police command in the state could not be reached for comments on the matter. (NAN)The Osun State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal sitting in Abuja on Friday held that the petition of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and its candidate, Isiaka Adeleke, challenging the victory of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Governor Gboyega Oyetola has merit.

A three-member panel of the tribunal held that the petition has merit and accordingly dismissed the objections filed by Governor Oyetola, APC and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Mr Adeleke and the PDP in their different petitions had urged the tribunal to declare that he scored the highest lawful votes in the election and should be declared as the winner.

However, Mr Oyetola, APC and INEC filed their notices of preliminary objection against the petition on the grounds that the petition is incompetent. They said the court lacked jurisdiction to entertain the petition.

Delivering the lead ruling of the three-member tribunal, the chairman, Ibrahim Sirajo, held that the objections were misconceived and struck them out.

The tribunal also faulted INEC handling of the relevant documents.

The tribunal said that the CTC should and must be exact replicas of the EC8A pink copies. The discrepancies must, therefore, be explained and justified by the 1st respondent: INEC.

In this instant, INEC failed to explain nor justify the alterations and failed to call any witnesses to justify the alterations.

It held further that the attempt to explain the alterations on the basis of mere correction of errors is not acceptable and the fact that the said errors were consistently made in the disputed areas means it was a deliberate action taken.

However, the court is yet to deliver its judgment on the main suit of who the true winner of the election is. The judgement on the main suit will be delivered later on Friday.The Election Petitions Tribunal set up for the 2018 governorship election in Osun State has declared Ademola Adeleke winner of the election.

The three-member panel said during its ruling in Abuja Friday afternoon that the rerun election that held on September 27, 2018, was illegal.

The tribunal, therefore, deducted the votes scored by the APC candidate Gboyega Oyetola at the rerun after declaring the rerun illegal.

The tribunal said Mr Adeleke won the election at the first ballot on September 22 and the rerun that INEC devised to reach a final conclusion a week later was illegal.

The declaration of Oyetola is null and void, the tribunal ruled in a majority decision with one member dissenting.

The petitioner (Mr Adeleke) having fulfilled the constitutional requirements and scored the majority lawful vote is declared winner and returned as governor.

The rerun in the seven cancelled units are hereby declared null and void and of no electoral effect.

The tribunal ordered the withdrawal of the certificate of return issued to Mr Oyetola and ordered that a new certificate of return be issued to Mr Adeleke.

History

PREMIUM TIMES reported how in the first ballot in the Osun governorship election, the PDP candidate won majority votes of 254,698 votes while Mr 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.

At the end of the supplementary election, the PDPs initial victory had been upturned and Mr 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.

However, with the cancellation of the rerun election by the tribunal, the initial result was recognised thus leading the tribunal to declare Mr Adeleke the winner.

What Next

Going by precedence, however, Mr Oyetola and the APC are expected to appeal the ruling at the Court of Appeal. Mr Adeleke may also appeal parts of the judgement he is not comfortable with.

While the appeals go on, Mr Oyetola will continue in office as Osun governor.

He is expected to remain in office, irrespective of the ruling of the appeal court, until the Supreme Court decides on the matter.

Read our earlier story below.

=====================================

BREAKING

The Election Petitions Tribunal set up for the 2018 governorship election in Osun State has declared Ademola Adeleke winner of the election.

The three-man panel said during its ruling in Abuja Friday afternoon that the rerun election that held on September 27 was illegal.

The tribunal therefore deducted the votes scored by the APC candidate Gboyega Oyetola at the rerun after declaring the rerun illegal.

The tribunal said Mr Adeleke won the election at the first ballot on September 22, and the rerun that INEC devised to reach a final conclusion a week later was illegal.

The ruling could affect several results from the 2019 elections, where INEC had declared results in several states inconclusive and ordered rerun.

The reruns would hold on Saturday.

Details shortly.The Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, says the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Atiku Abubakar, is day-dreaming for claiming he won in Kaduna State in the last presidential election.

Mr El-Rufai said the former vice president lost Kaduna and will always lose Kaduna.

He will lose Kaduna 10 more times because he has never won Kaduna in any presidential elections, he said.

Mr El-Rufai stated this in a brief interview with journalists after a meeting Friday with President Muhammadu Buhari in Aso Rock.

The governor was asked to react to a claim by Mr Abubakar that he won the presidential elections, particularly in Kaduna.

Backstory

The PDP and its presidential candidate in a petition filed on Monday said it won the February 23 election with about 1.6 million votes to defeat President Muhammadu Buhari.

The party claimed that the computer server of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) revealed this.

PREMIUM TIMES reported that Mr Abubakar also claimed he won in four of the states  Gombe, Niger, Kogi, and Kaduna  that INEC declared were won by President Buhari.

A Joke

Well, I heard about that. Initially, I thought it was a joke and when I checked I saw clearly that he said he won Kaduna. It must be in his dreams, the Kaduna governor who was reelected in the governorship elections said.

Let me say this without any fear of contradiction, since President Buhari started contesting for the presidency since 2003, he has never lost Kaduna. So, PDP has never won elections in Kaduna from 2003, even with a sitting governor in 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015.

It has never happened. I dont know what will happen that Atiku will win Kaduna in this elections this time. He lost Kaduna, he lost very badly, even though about 100,000 votes he claimed to have got were added because elections were conducted without card reader in some parts of the state, thats how he even got up to the 400,000.

The governor explained that such results can only emanate from Atikus server.

I dont know about INEC server, we dont know how they had access to it, they will tell us during the tribunal proceedings what is this server and how they got access to it and how they got their numbers.

You do not go to court in an election petition by quoting INEC server or any other server. Anyone can create a server, I can go and buy it, it is a piece of equipment and call it INEC server. But that does not mean that it amounts to anything, we are guided by the electoral act and the evidence act and other enabling legislation and he has to prove his case.

Mr El-Rufai further explained his reasons for visiting the president. He also debunked speculations that he was involved in an accident.

I came to see Mr. President after my re-election as governor because immediately after the election I took a break. I came back to report to him that I was not involved in an accident, Im alive, I am not in coma and also to discuss other issues related to my state.

There was a rumor a few days ago that Mr El-Rufai sustained injuries from a road mishap. The governor described such rumors as false.

I was never involved in an accident, I was not near any accident, in fact at the time I was supposed to be involved in an accident, I was in an aircraft going to another country.

But somebody sat and concocted this story and we are trying to trace who started it. Because, criminal proceedings can be initiated against the person.

Sometimes it is very difficult to know who started it but we are on it. My advice is that we should rely on reliable news medium, not just any platform or any blog. Unless we hear something from a very reliable news medium, we should be reluctant to begin sharing it as if it is true.Nigerian entertainer, Charly Boy, has publicly stated that he received at least N100 million from the Buhari campaign as payment for a politically-charged music video he recorded, driving yet another wedge between himself and other members of OurMumuDonDo who have recently excoriated him as a betrayal.

The 67-year-old said Festus Keyamo, a spokesperson for the Buhari campaign, met him privately weeks before the presidential elections, and both discussed license over a music video which Charly Boy had recorded to castigate Atiku Abubakar as an unscrupulous politician who should not be trusted with power.

The entertainer, whose real name is Charles Oputa, also rehashed Mr Abubakars alleged crimes in the United States in the video uploaded on YouTube January 25.

The politician has long maintained he was not wanted in the U.S., and his supporters touted his first visit to America in 12 years in January as the strongest repudiation to the allegations.

Charly Boy said Mr Keyamo, a senior lawyer, actually visited him to discuss the arrest of Deji Adeyanju, a senior member of OurMumuDonDo who was spending weeks in a Kano prison for alleged murder, only to then hear a new song that I was working onwhere I was dissing Atiku, Charly Boy said.

I do not care. But if you want to use my work, you pay for it, Charly Boy recalled telling Mr Keyamo. Of course, he paid for it. And they paid heavy.

The statement was extracted from a video of Charly Boys interview with online-based Roots TV that was widely shared on social media on Friday.

Charly Boys comments struck members of the community organising movement as insensitive and provocative, and they have moved swiftly to ease him out as chairman of the group.

The video surfaced barely a day after an audio leaked online in which Charly Boy was heard seemingly admitting to have received money from Mr Keyamo. The audio was recorded by Mr Adeyanju, but the activist said he did not leak it, even though he had shared with a few persons over the past week.

Mr Adeyanju renounced membership of OurMumuDonDo on March 13, alleging gross misconduct, including a breach of trust, against Charly Boy.

Mr Adeyanju was particularly incensed by Charly Boys affair with the Buhari campaign because he believed the administration was behind his ongoing trial for a murder case that had been dispensed 10 years ago.

The police arrested Mr Adeyanju on December 13, locking him in Kano Central Prison on a controversial magisterial order. He was freed on bail on March 1, after the presidential election had been concluded. The activist strongly believed the police kept him in jail over fears his activism could cost President Muhammadu Buhari at the ballot box.

Initial response to both Mr Adeyanjus public denunciation of a movement with which he had been prominently identified in recent years and the leaked audio was for the warring parties to immediately reconcile for the sake of their civic group.

As of the time the audio leaked online Wednesday night, the specific amount Charly Boy allegedly received from Mr Keyamo was left to speculation.

But with Charly Boy himself now admitting that the amount was in nine figures, sources within OurMumuDonDo said they expected the controversy to worsen.

Already, Adebayo Raphael, a key official and facilitator of OurMumuDonDo, said in a statement to PREMIUM TIMES Friday night that Charly Boy has been asked to proceed on suspension pending investigation of the controversies.

Deji Adeyanju (Photo Credit: Politics Nigeria)

The statement accused Charly Boy of not only impugning the credibility of the OurMumuDonDo Movement but also the myriads of conscientious and genuine activists, rights groups and civil society groups in Nigeria.

Charly Boy was asked to immediately recuse himself as chairman of the group due to his amoral and illicit dealings, failure of which shall leave us with no other option but to ask members of the public to cease any further dealing and interface with you, amongst other lawful steps to force compliance.

The group was founded to agitate for a better Nigeria in which citizens can boast of equal dignity. It has held several protests, some of which drew police crackdown.

The group was largely deemed coordinated and united, until an undisclosed but huge financial grant was released to the members by a foreign non-governmental organisation. The money was to bolster civic engagement by the group, but crisis broke out following allegations that Charly Boy was not accountable or transparent in the management of the fund.

Mr Adeyanju had reportedly complained about Charly Boys handling of the fund prior to his arrest and extended detention in Kano. This was later cited as the primary reason why Charly Boy did not openly agitate for Mr Adeyanjus release, and reportedly missed all the protests held by members of the group and other activists to free Mr Adeyanju.

Charly Boy has maintained no wrongdoing in the controversy, and threatened to release details that would indict Mr Adeyanju. Mr Keyamo told PREMIUM TIMES on Thursday he met with Charly Boy, but said everything that transpired between them was private and in furtherance of their relationship of over 25 years.The Nigeria Customs Service, Seme Command, has released a suspected car smuggler using a diplomatic plate number and 2015 fake National Youth Service Corps identification card as a ploy to beat customs officers.

Abdul Umar was arrested on Tuesday along the Seme border while trying to smuggle into the country one Renault Megane with duty paid value of N522,970.47

Saidu Abdullahi, the commands spokesperson, told PREMIUM TIMES the suspect was granted administrative bail on Thursday but investigations are continuing.

He was released yesterday (Thursday) while we are still investigating to unravel the real owner the smuggled car is, said Mr Abdullahi.

While speaking to journalists on Wednesday, Mr Umar had said the owner of the vehicle had come to meet the customs authorities. But Mr Abdullahi said nobody had come forward yet.

If anybody had come with necessary documents, then the matter would have been resolved. But as I speak with you, we have not seen anybody.

At the time of his arrest, Mr Umar, an indigene of Kaduna State, was said to be working with some influential Nigerians, adding that he had the mobile number of the Inspector General of Police.

Mohammed Uba, Seme Area Controller of Customs, said when he was arrested, the suspect had a letter containing numbers which stated, call these numbers, otherwise call the IG.

When we discovered this, we alerted the enforcement unit for investigation.

In the nutshell, ID card, telephone numbers and calling embassy is not part of Customs clearing process. Smugglers can use a lot of modalities to make sure they commit these atrocities.

While questioning with the suspect, he denied having the police IGs number or working for any influential Nigerian.

I am a corper of 2015 batch but have not collected my NYSC certificate, said Mr Umar.

I have problem with NYSC that is why have not submit my ID card in order to collect the certificate. I didnt say I know the IG. I only assisted the owner of the car to pass through the border.

The owner of the car is around. I dont know anything about the numbers and diplomatic plate number on the card.

While speaking with journalists on Wednesday, Mr Mohammed said his officers within two months had seized 21 exotic cars along border ways, adding that they had contravened importation procedures.

Similarly, the intensified operation of the enforcement unit has drastically reduced smuggling activities to the barest minimum, he said.

So far, we have seized 4,745 bags of 50kg foreign rice which is equivalent to over eight trailer trucks of rice worth N85,504,000; 27 jerry cans of vegetable oil of 25litres each, 34 bags of sugar.

Among the seized items were 68 parcels of Tramadol, 10 parcels of Cannabis, 19 boxes of frozen seafood, 24 cartons of Maggi seasoning.

The Command has so far generated the sum of N260,684,226.91, Mr Mohammed said.The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said governors-elect in states where elections have been concluded will get their certificates of return from Wednesday 27 March to Friday 29 March.

INECs national commissioner and chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, said this on Thursday in Abuja at a press briefing.

The certificates will be presented by supervising national commissioners of the respective states, he said.

They will be assisted by Resident Electoral Commissioners and legal officers of the commission.

Certificates of Return in respect of Governors-elect shall be presented by supervising National Commissioners of the respective states between Wednesday 27th and Friday 29th March 2019, he said.

Of the 29 states where governorship elections held, only 22 will receive their certificates having successfully concluded their elections.

In Rivers State, election was suspended and in six states, namely, Bauchi, Adamawa, Benue, Plateau, Sokoto and Kano, elections were declared inconclusive.

This was due to violence, manipulation and insufficient margin of lead.

Mr Okoye said the precise date for the presentation in each state will be made known by the respective RECs after consultation with their supervising national commissioners.The Nigerian Union of Journalist on Friday said the threat made by the chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, Danladi Umar, against journalists was vague and empty.

The union said Mr Umar has no powers to imprison journalists carrying out their official assignment.

The reaction came a day after Mr Umar threatened to imprison journalists who do not accurately report the ongoing trial of the suspended Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen.

In a reaction to what he described as some newspapers distortion and misrepresentation of Mondays court proceedings, Mr Umar said any journalist who commits such infraction again might have to remain in prison until his retirement in 28 years time.

According to Mr Umar, Henceforth, any journalist carrying concocted or discredited statement which is not adduced before this tribunal, I will not hesitate to bring the full weight of the law heavily on the person.

The journalist will languish there (prison) and may remain there until I retire  that is about 28 years from now. The person will be summarily sent to prison because that is contempt. It does not matter whether the contempt is committed in facie curiae (before the court) or ex facie curiae (outside the court), he said.

In his reaction, the chairman of NUJ, Abuja chapter, Emmanuel Ogbeche, dismissed the CCT chairmans threat and asked journalists to continue to discharge their duties without fear or favour.

It is unfortunate, what is ascribed to the CCT Chairman, Danladi Umar. I do not think any journalists is misrepresenting the proceedings of the court as alleged by Justice Umar, Mr Ogbeche said.

He lacks the powers to send any journalist to prison for carrying out their constitutional duties to the nation. Just as the judge is carrying out his official duties, journalists are also constitutionally empowered to report what is going on in the court rooms, he said.

Mr Ogbeche warned judges not to attempt to make journalists scapegoats in the show of power between the executive and judiciary.

He said the union will mobilise its members and the international groups to resist any attempt to intimidate or trample upon the rights of media practitioners.

We will mobilise and resist all attempts to intimidate journalists. They will not be made scapegoats in the political and judicial drama in Nigeria, Mr Ogbeche said.The Nigerian government, on Thursday, closed its case against the suspended Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen.

Mr Onnoghen is facing trial on false asset charges brought against him by the Code of Conduct Bureau.

He was suspended by the president, Muhammadu Buhari, on January 25 following the allegations.

The prosecution presented three witnesses before closing its case against the suspended judge.

Witness 1

The first persecution witness, James Akpala, an investigative officer with the bureau, told the court, during the CCB received the petition against Mr Onnoghen from a petitioner, Denis Aghanya, on January 9.

Mr Akpala, whose testimony was given on March 18, said he was asked to investigate the content of the petition from Mr Aghanya, a member of the All Progressives Congress, on January 10.

With Mr Akpala in the witness box, the lead prosecution lawyer, Aliu Umar, admitted six documents said to have been investigated by the first prosecution witness.

The documents included Mr Aghanyas petition, which gave rise to the six count charge against Mr Onnoghen, and two of Mr Onnoghens asset declaration forms, which were both filed by Mr Onnoghen in December, 2016.

The other documents admitted were Mr Onnoghens Supreme Court identity card, his traveling passport and a Standard Chartered Bank document which all made up Mr Onnoghens account opening package.

Also admitted in evidence was Mr Onnoghens handwritten statement taken by a team of investigators at his office on January 11.

According to the witness, one of the declaration forms submitted by Mr Onnoghen had two bank accounts while the other had seven bank accounts.

He said the bank accounts included two Union Bank details and five others with Standard Chartered Bank.

In its account of the proceedings for that day, the Punch Newspaper said Mr Akpala was asked during cross examination to read out the dates written on the charge sheet earlier submitted at the tribunal.

The information read out by Mr Akpala proved a point made by the defence that the charge sheet was prepared before the investigation team visited Mr Onnoghen at his office.

That submission was not objected by the prosecution.

Asked whether the charge sheet was filed within 24 hours of commencement of investigation, Mr Akpala responded in the affirmative.

Mr Akpala declined comments when asked to speak on the reason the bank statements shown to Mr Onnoghen by the CCB was addressed to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, (EFCC).

Witness 2

During his testimony, the second witness, Awwal Yakassai, also a staff of the bureau, testified that the asset declaration forms submitted by Mr Onnoghen were yet to be verified by the Code of Conduct Bureau.

Mr Yakassai was presented before the tribunal on March 21.

He reiterated a point made by Mr Akpala that the forms were both submitted the same day by Mr Onnoghen, and also confirmed that the forms were the basis upon which the charges against the suspended Chief Justice were filed.

Mr Yakassai was the CCB officer who collected the forms when they were filed by Mr Onnoghen in December 2016.

During cross examination, Mr Yakassai was shown the portion of the forms expected to have been signed as a measure of verification by the CCT. The portion shown to Mr Yakassai were confirmed blank by the witness.

Mr Yakassai also admitted, when confronted with a submission by the defence, that the content of the petition written against Mr Onnoghen was a practical duplication of the details entered by Mr Onnoghen in his asset declaration forms.

Witness 3

In her testimony, the third prosecution witness, Ifeoma Okagbue, a staff of the Standard Chartered bank who was also presented on Thursday told the tribunal that Mr Onnoghen did not have as much as $1million or 1 million in all the bank accounts, a denial of a major plank upon which the charges against him were built.

Ms Akagbue, who told the tribunal that she started to manage Mr Onnoghens account in 2015, added that all five accounts mentioned in the charges had the Bank Verification Numbers.

The witness also told the tribunal that the various accounts were domiciliary, not foreign.

With the closing of case by the prosecution, Mr Onnoghens team of lawyers informed the court of their desire to file a no-case submission during the next adjourned date.

The defence lawyers led by Adegboga Awomolo also asked the court for copies of the previous proceedings.

The case was then adjourned till March 29.The Kogi State government says it will immortalise the late Nigerian-born Canadian professor, Pius Akinsanmi, by making all his books available in its school libraries.

The state Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Rosemary Osikoya, disclosed this during a ceremony organised in honour of the deceased in Abuja.

She said his death came at a time when the state ministry was reaching out to Kogi scholars like Mr Adesanmi, who could help put the educational standard of the state on a high pedestal.

The commissioner said Mr Adesanmi represented what Kogi indigenes are known for as very talented people, adding that the scholar exemplified all the virtues you would like to see in Nigeria.

She, however, said that the idea of naming the state library after him had not been muted. She said such a proposition would be encouraged and supported.

Also, Moses Babatunde, the traditional ruler of Isanlu where Mr Adesanmi hailed from, promised to organise an annual lecture in his honour.

We will bring everybody from all walks of life to the lecture and that will encourage our youths to be able to write about the society and how the country can develop from where it is, he said.

According to him, we are going to immortalise Adesanmi, he will be remembered in the community that generations to come will be asking: who is Pius Akinsanmi?

The monarch said he would discuss with his traditional council to see if the secondary school he finished from could be named after him.

He, however, added that if such a proposal was not possible, the community would build an institution to be named after him.

He lauded the impact made by the deceased in the community, especially at the secondary school he attended and by contributing to the development of Isanlu.

According to him, Mr Adesanmi touched so many lives and was always consistent with the truth, sometimes you like him and sometimes you may not like him for the truth, but he will always tell the truth.

Mr Adesanmi died on March 10 aboard the ill-fated Ethiopian Airline, flight 302 which took off from Addis Ababa and was headed to Nairobi but crashed about six minutes after take-off.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that journalists, friends and others gathered to eulogise the virtue of the deceased with each paying glowing tribute to the late scholar.(NAN)A northern group of elders has urged Borno South senator, Ali Ndume, to contest for the office of the Senate President.

The Concerned Citizens of Borno, which comprises elders from the state, in a statement on Friday said Mr Ndume possesses all the qualities and requirements to hold the office.

The current Senate President, Bukola Saraki, is expected to vacate the seat at the end of the 8th assembly having lost his reelection bid in the just concluded general elections.

There have been speculations as regards who the next occupant of the seat will be as well as who President Muhammadu Buhari will support.

Although the president cannot singlehandedly determine who emerges as the Senate president, he can, however, influence his party which usually zones such plum positions.

The party currently has over 60 senators-elect, a clear majority.

In a statement signed by 45 members, the group explained that the 9th National Assembly has a critical role to play if the government is to actualise all its developmental projects.

It is in this regard that we the Concerned Citizens of Borno are coming forward to urge Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume to contest for the office of the President of the Senate in the 9th National Assembly.

We are convinced that Senator Ndume possesses all the qualities and requirements to hold the office of the Senate President being a loyal party man and a ranking Senator.

Senator Ndume emerged as the Senate Leader in 2015 and was removed in a controversial circumstance in January 2017 ostensibly for his defence of party policies and for being a loyalist to the government.

His stint as a lawmaker in both chambers of the National Assembly from 2003 to date are there to speak for themselves, where he stood firm in the cause of his people and contributed immensely in debates and passages of people-oriented bills and motions, the statement noted.

They further said their plea for Mr Ndume to seek for the office is premised on the fact that the North-east geo-political zone where he hails from gave the president the second highest votes cast.

Season of Calls

This group is one among many who have called on several lawmakers to contest for the position.

Earlier, a political pressure group, the National Interest Progressive Forum (NIPF) appealed to the leadership of the APC to support the candidacy of Ahmed Lawan, the senator representing Yobe North as the president of the 9th Senate.

The group said the call became imperative as the APC needs to ensure a stable 9th National Assembly (NASS) to achieve the objectives contained in the partys Next Level agenda.

Also, leaders of the APC in the South-south have demanded the position of the Senate President as they said the zone deserved the position.

The leaders said the leadership of the party in the zone has done extreme hard work towards stabilising the polity to ensure that business thrives in the region, and also informing the youth that development can only thrive in an atmosphere of peace.A Federal High Court in Jos has struck out 19 out of the 21 charges preferred against former Gombe State governor, Danjuma Goje, and three others. The charges border on alleged misappropriation of funds, money laundering and diversion of N6.6 billion belonging to the state.

The former governor and the three others were in 2011 alleged to have committed the offences between 2007 to 2011.

Charged alongside Mr Goje were a former Executive Chairman of Gombe State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Aliyu El-Nafaty, a food supplier to the state government, Sabo Tumu, and an auctioneer, S.M Dokoro.

The Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC), which is the prosecutor, alleged that Mr Goje misappropriated a N5 billion loan from Access Bank approved by the state House of Assembly for infrastructure development in the state.

Mr Goje was also accused of diverting another N1.4 billion for a contract for the supply of dictionaries to primary and junior secondary schools in the state through the SUBEB.

Delivering the judgement, Justice Babatunde Quadri said the evidence presented before the court and the prosecution witnesses did not link Mr Goje to misappropriation of funds or money laundering.

Charge 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 19 and 21 which bordered on diversion, laundering and misappropriation were not proven by the prosecutor. We look at the ingredients of the offences, the judge said.

The court, therefore, discharged Mr Goje and the three other defendants.

Justice Quadri also said the evidence before the court did not prove that Mr Goje laundered, diverted, misappropriated or awarded a N1.6 billion contract for the supply of dictionaries through SUBEB without due process.

The judge, however, ordered Mr Goje to defend himself on why he ordered the third defendant to auction 50 Toyota vehicles belonging to the state government.

The judge adjourned the case to May 8 for the continuation of hearing on the remaining two charges.The National Tuberculosis and Leprosy Control Programme in Kwara State will on Sunday March, 24, embark on active case search of tuberculosis victims in three local government areas of the state.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the three local government areas include Kaiama, Baruteen and Pategi, all in the Kwara North Senatorial district of the state.

The State Programme Officer of the Agency, Mohammed Rasheed, disclosed this on Friday to journalists in Ilorin.

Mr Rasheed said the agency would create health awareness in the three local government areas due to the trans-border transmission of tuberculosis in these border communities.

He said that this was to commemorate the World Tuberculosis Day observed on March 24 each year, adding that it was designed to build public awareness about the global epidemic of tuberculosis and efforts to eliminate the disease.

According to him, the symptoms of tuberculosis are weight loss, fever, loss of appetite, chest pain and unresolved cough, among others, for more than two weeks.

Mr Rasheed described tuberculosis as an airborne communicable disease and warned people to stay away from people suffering from the disease.

He also urged the victims to visit both private and public hospitals for the treatment of the disease free of charge.

Mr Rasheed said that the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis in the state and Nigeria was free, saying that the disease was not hereditary, but could be transmitted through inhalation.

Earlier, Oluwatosin Fakayode, the Director, Public Health and Disease Control in Kwara Ministry of Health, said that Nigeria had high prevalence of the disease, ranking fourth in the world and second in Africa.

He said that tuberculosis was prevalent in Kwara North, adding that an estimated 708 persons were diagnosed of tuberculosis in the state in 2018.

(NAN)The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says it has received assurances from the security agencies that there would not be a repeat of violence in the Saturdays supplementary elections in Sokoto State.

INEC had declared the March 9 governorship and state parliamentary elections inconclusive in Sokoto State and five others, including Plateau, Benue, Kano, Bauchi and Adamawa, based on the principle of margin of lead.

That declaration prompted supplementary elections in the areas where voting was cancelled or did not hold across the affected states.

In Sokoto, there will be supplementary governorship election in 125 polling units across 22 local government areas. The election involves 75,043 registered voters but eligibility, according to INEC rules, is limited to those who hold Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) among them.

The voting had been cancelled in the affected polling units in the first poll of March due to violence, the spokesperson for INEC in Sokoto State, Mohammed Musa, told PREMIUM TIMES on Friday.

However, he said: The security agencies are ready. They have assured the violence will not be repeated tomorrow.

Tambuwal leading

Already, the Peoples Democratic Partys candidate, Governor Aminu Tambuwal is leading from the first poll, with 489.558 votes ahead of Ahmad Aliyu of the All Progressives Congress 486,145 votes. Mr Aliyu was Mr Tambuwals deputy.

The margin of lead between the two is 3,413, less than 75,403, the number of cancelled votes. This was the reason the INEC declared the election inconclusive and announced a supplementary poll slated for tomorrow.

The supplementary elections also affect two state constituencies, namely Goronyo and Kebbe.

Mr Musa, the spokesperson for INEC, said materials for the polls had been deployed to the LGAs since yesterday and would today be moved to the RACs.The Edo State Police Command says it has arrested 81 suspects in connection with cult activities in the last 40 days.

The command also recovered 138 cartridges and ammunition, three cutlasses, one battle axe, one Pump Action, four single-barrel guns, three cut-to-size guns and eight pistols during the operation.

The State Commissioner of Police, Mohammed DanMallam, disclosed this at a news conference on Friday in Benin City, the state capital.

Mr DanMallam said the suspects were among 120 suspects arrested during the period.

The commissioner said out of the figure, 25 were arrested for alleged robbery, three for murder, eight for kidnapping, one for rape and the other two for other sundry offences.

He appealed to the public to avail the command with useful information to check crime in the state.

(NAN)A Federal High Court sitting in Owerri on Friday struck out a suit restraining the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) from issuing certificate of return to Imo State governor elect, Emeka Ihedioha.

The court also ruled that post-election matters belonged to the election tribunals.

The candidate of the Action Alliance (AA) in the March 9 governorship election, Uche Nwosu had gone to court to get an order restraining the court from issuing a certificate of return to Mr Ihedioha, who was the flag bearer of the PDP in the election.

Mr Nwosu had argued that Mr Ihedioha did not meet the required 25 per cent of the votes in 18 out of the 27 LGs in Imo.

Striking the matter out, Justice Tijjani Ringim held that post election matters are to be handled by the election tribunal.

Mr Ringim said the quest for justice must be in line with the constitution. Post-election matters belong to election tribunal .

News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the INEC had on March 11 declared Mr Ihedioha winner of the election.

Mr Ihedioha had polled a total 273,404 votes to defeat Mr Nwosu who came second with 190,364 votes.

(NAN)Atiku Abubakar has hailed the Nigerian judiciary as coming through yet again for the yearnings of the commoners, saying Fridays decision by the Osun State governorship election petitions tribunal should be seen as phenomenal and a crucial blow to manipulation of elections in Nigeria.

The presidential candidate of PDP at the 2019 elections applauded the judiciary as truly the defender of Nigerias democracy, according to a statement by his spokesperson Paul Ibe.

The three-man judicial panel sitting in Abuja on Friday afternoon declared Ademola Adeleke of the PDP winner of the September 2018 governorship election, saying a rerun exercise that the Independent National Electoral Commission oversaw was controversial and illegal.

More details of the two-one split decision were still coming in. The tribunal chairman was the dissenting voice, dismissing the PDPs petition.

Mr Abubakar swiftly joined a flurry of congratulations directed at Mr Adeleke, noting that the restoration of the stolen mandate of the senator showed that indeed the judiciary is the last refuge of the common man and that in truth, those who were aggrieved and resolved to maintain the peace, have been vindicated.

Mr Abubakar congratulated Mr Adeleke, the PDP and men and women of goodwill in Osun State, who did not waver in their commitment to retrieve the stolen mandate.

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy has come for the people of Osun, he said.

The PDP presidential candidate commended the courage of the judiciary and its resilience even in the face of strenuous efforts by the Buhari administration to undermine and intimidate it.

According to the former Vice President, the decision of the judiciary on the Osun governorship election is phenomenal in view of the culture of inconclusive elections by INEC in this season.

The judgment has rekindled hope and confidence that those whose mandate had been tampered with or denied can look forward to justice being done to them.

He urged the judiciary to remain steadfast as the eyes of all Nigerians and indeed the whole world are on them to help ensure that democracy in Nigeria is put on a solid foundation.

Mr Abubakar has challenged the outcome of the 2019 presidential election that returned President Muhammadu Buhari for a second time. He asks the the tribunal to either declare him winner of the election or cancel the election and order a fresh poll.The Osun State Government has reacted to the victory of the opposition governorship candidate at the election tribunal.

PREMIUM TIMES earlier reported how the Election Petitions Tribunal set up for the 2018 governorship election declared Ademola Adeleke of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) winner of the election.

The three-man panel said during its ruling in Abuja Friday afternoon that the rerun election that held on September 27 that year was illegal.

The tribunal then deducted the votes scored by the declared winner, the All Progressive Congress candidate, Gboyega Oyetola, at the rerun.

The tribunal said Mr Adeleke won the election at the first ballot on September 22, and the rerun that INEC devised to reach a final conclusion a week later was illegal.

Mr Oyetola was sworn in as governor after the election and is still in office.

In a statement signed by the Secretary to the State Government of Osun (SSG), Wole Oyebamiji, on Friday evening, the government said it remains committed to the legal battle.

The Government of the State of Osun wishes to appreciate the teeming support of the majority of the people in all things essential for mutual progress.

As it is, the administration of His Excellency, Mr Adegboyega Oyetola, Governor, State of Osun wishes to assure the people that the judgment of the Election Tribunal has been put on appeal.

This is to further assure all the residents of the state of adequate security of lives and properties, as the government of the state is still the only legitimate government having the authority to govern the state.

We assure all our people that justice will prevail at last, and the law enforcement agencies have been instructed to maintain law and order across the State.

We, therefore, urge all the residents of the state to go about their lawful duties without any hindrance, Mr Oyebamiji said.

Based on Nigerian laws, Mr Oyetola will remain in office, despite the tribunal ruling, until all options of appeal are exhausted which is often after the ruling of the Supreme Court.For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest warscreating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire.

Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III.





to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever.





Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation.





View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union.

Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years. It fully reveals the elite's program to dominate the earth and carry out the wicked plan in all of human history.

Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words.



Other products being exhibited will include the; innovative AngioVue OCT-A and iScan OCT devices from Optovue; CenterVue DRS retinal camera and Eidon AF wide-field confocal scanner.

Haag-Streit Academy will be holding three exciting on-stand CET workshops during the show. Attendees are eligible to receive two CET points for each session. Topics include; 'Wide-field, Confocal Multimodal Fundus Imaging', 'Binocular Vision' and a 'Slit Lamp Masterclass'.

'Wide-field, Confocal Multimodal Fundus Imaging' will be held on Saturday 30 th March between 10am and 11am and Monday 1 st April between 12pm and 1pm . Hosted by Grant Duncan , HS-UK Clinical Training Manager, the session will cover the definition and advantages of confocal imaging, wide-field imaging and the key clinical applications. Each delegate who attends the session will receive a FREE copy of CenterVue's ' Clinical Atlas' . The ' Clinical Atlas' is a 96 page hardcover book featuring a series of interesting clinical cases, collected by retina specialists, that show examples of the Eidon's superior imaging capabilities.

will be held on Saturday 30 March and Monday 1 April . Hosted by , HS-UK Clinical Training Manager, the session will cover the definition and advantages of confocal imaging, wide-field imaging and the key clinical applications. Each delegate who attends the session will receive a . The ' is a 96 page hardcover book featuring a series of interesting clinical cases, collected by retina specialists, that show examples of the Eidon's superior imaging capabilities. 'Binocular Vision' will be run between 2pm and 3pm on Saturday 30 th March and between 10am and 11am on Sunday 31 st March. Hosted by Sam Laidlaw , HS-UK Product Manager, the session will include understanding common binocular vision conditions and a discussion about practical clinical techniques.

will be run 30 March and 31 March. Hosted by , HS-UK Product Manager, the session will include understanding common binocular vision conditions and a discussion about practical clinical techniques. The 'Slit Lamp Masterclass' will take place between 2pm and 3pm on Sunday 31st March and between 10am and 11am on Monday 1st April. It is a demonstration workshop which will be facilitated by experienced Optometrist, Kirit Patel , Radlett Opticians, and will cover effective examination of the patient and illumination & magnification techniques.

HS-UK sister company IPRO will also be exhibiting on stand F50 and their staff will be on-hand to discuss their innovative practice management software, PASKAL 3D.

Sharon Mills, HS-UK Marketing Manager, said, "Once again, we have a dedicated education 'hub' on the HS-UK stand at Optrafair, and we would welcome delegates to join us for some very exciting CET-accredited sessions. Our workshops will provide an excellent opportunity to learn from product experts and gain some valuable hands-on experience. In addition, HS-UK's gold-standard optometry equipment will also be available on the stand throughout the show."

To register for any of the CET sessions, please visit https://optrafair-2019.reg.buzz/.

For further information on the CET sessions, please contact Haag-Streit Academy on 01279 881923, or email academy@haag-streit-uk.com.

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/839839/HS_UK_Optrafair.jpg

Related Links

http://www.haagstreituk.com/



SOURCE Haag-Streit UKMILWAUKEE, March 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Access HealthNet, a Milwaukee-based startup and direct contracting solution for self-funded employers announced a partnership with Charlotte-based Direct Primary Care (DPC) technology platform company, Beacon HealthCare Benefits.

"Providing the DPC community with as many strategic and competitive tools for surviving in the free-market healthcare ecosystem is close to our mission at Access HealthNet," said Eric Haberichter, co-founder and CEO at Access HealthNet. "We're looking forward to offering our direct contracting platform to all of the Beacon DPCs and helping lower the cost of healthcare for employers."

DPC practices, similar to concierge medicine practices that were previously reserved for the privileged, offer one-on-one primary care with independent physicians. The challenges in this new model of primary care medicine is aggregating data and vendors in one place.

Beacon HealthCare Benefits, an innovative proprietary cloud-based platform, seamlessly connects independent primary care physicians and self-funded employers through a technology solution called Beacon Health Connect.

"Beacon's 'Connect' merges people and technology to offer direct primary care that fits into a membership model," said Eirc Kirsch, Beacon HealthCare Benefits founder and CEO. "AHN's bundled services are the perfect complement and provides our members with better services at lower prices. We expect to see dramatic savings for employers on ancillary services like imaging and lab."

Beacon Health Connect serves as an interoperability engine that connects contracted DPCs and their channel partners to brokers and other healthcare distributors. The platform allows the combining of records and consolidation of billing, helping self-funded employers realize the savings and improved care with DPC partnerships.

Access HealthNet's direct contracting platform will serve as an additional tool to bring savings and value to the Beacon Health Connect program with 20-30% total savings on common procedures.

ABOUT ACCESS HEALTHNET: Access HealthNet increases access and affordability in health care through an e-commerce healthcare marketplace that connects value-based providers offering flat-rates and bundles, with self-funded, full-pay entities. http://accesshealthnet.com

ABOUT BEACON HEALTHCARE BENEFITS: Beacon HealthCare Benefits was founded in 2018 by a team of healthcare industry insiders looking to create a more direct connection between independent direct primary care doctors and patients of self-funded employers. https://beaconhealthcarebenefits.com

SOURCE Access HealthNet

Related Links

https://accesshealthnet.com/

NEW YORK, March 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- American Jewish Committee (AJC) praised the United Kingdom decision to vote against all resolutions under the United Nations Human Rights Council's notorious agenda item 7, which deals exclusively with Israel.

"Britain's decision, the first European country to take this principled step, is itself a condemnation of the ingrained bias against Israel at the UN Human Rights Council," said AJC CEO David Harris. "As U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley pointed out last year, 'no other country  not Iran, not Syria, not North Korea  has an agenda item devoted solely to it. Agenda Item 7 is not directed at anything Israel does. It is directed at the very existence of Israel.'"

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, explaining his country's decision in an op-ed in the JC, the leading British Jewish newspaper, wrote that "it is an unhelpful illusion to suppose that Israel's conduct deserves special scrutiny" as is done in this "dedicated place on the HRC agenda, known as Item 7."

"Two years ago, the United Kingdom said that unless the situation changed, we would vote against all texts proposed under Item 7," Hunt wrote in the JC. "Sadly, our concerns have not been heeded. So I have decided that we will do exactly what we said: Britain will now oppose every Item 7 resolution."

The Human Rights Council has issued far more condemnations of Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, than of any of the other 192 UN member states. AJC has long advocated for Council members to abolish agenda Item 7.

Harris encouraged all countries serving on the Human Rights Council to "end the routine, baseless condemnations of Israel and to vote against all resolutions listed under agenda item 7, while also being alert to any attempt to shift the same biased resolutions to other agenda items and seek to pass them by avoiding #7."

AJC has been involved with the UN since the founding conference, in San Francisco, in 1945. Historians credit AJC leaders with having successfully advocated for the inclusion of human rights protections in the UN Charter.

AJC President Judge Joseph M. "Proskauer made the most eloquent and convincing argument that I have ever listened to in my life," said Columbia University Professor James T. Shotwell, who was at the UN founding conference. Following the AJC presentation to the American delegation, "Secretary of State Stettinius instantly promised that he would do all he could to have the human rights clauses inserted in the charter" and they then "got into the charter in the fullest possible way."

SOURCE American Jewish Committee

Related Links

http://www.ajc.org

ARLINGTON, Va., March 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Diabetes Association (ADA) strongly supports the re-introduction of legislation to expand access to Diabetes Self-Management Training (DSMT) for Medicare beneficiaries. The ADA thanks House Diabetes Caucus Co-Chairs Congressman Tom Reed (R-NY) and Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-CO), and Vice Chairs Congresswoman Suzan DelBene (D-WA), Congresswoman Susan Brooks (R-IN), Congressman Raul Ruiz (D-CA), and Congressman Mike Kelly (R-PA) for their leadership in introducing the Expanding Access to Diabetes Self-Management Training Act in the U.S. House of Representatives.

DSMT is an evidence-based program that teaches people living with diabetes how to cope with and manage their diabetes. The program teaches people how to reduce their risk for complications by monitoring their blood sugar, taking appropriate medication, healthy eating, and being active. DSMT has been covered under Medicare for more than 15 years. However, only five percent of Medicare beneficiaries with newly diagnosed diabetes use DSMT services. The Expanding Access to DSMT Act would strengthen this program for people with diabetes who are on Medicare.

"Diabetes Self-Management Training (DSMT) is proven to provide positive results for people living with diabetes," said LaShawn McIver, MD, MPH, ADA's Senior Vice President of Government Affairs & Advocacy. "Unfortunately, it has been under-utilized for people with diabetes enrolled in Medicare. The ADA strongly supports efforts in Congress to strengthen DSMT and we applaud Congresswoman DeGette and Congressman Reed for introducing this legislation in the House. We look forward to working with them to advance this bill."

About the American Diabetes Association

Approximately every 21 seconds, someone in the United States is diagnosed with diabetes. Nearly half of the American adult population has diabetes or prediabetes, and more than 30 million adults and children are living with the disease. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) is the nation's leading voluntary health organization on a mission to prevent and cure diabetes, as well as improve the lives of all people affected by the disease. For nearly 80 years, the ADA has driven discovery by funding research to treat, manage and prevent all types of diabetes, while working relentlessly for a cure. Magnifying the urgency of this epidemic, the ADA works to safeguard policies and programs that protect people with the illness, those at risk of developing diabetes and the health care professionals who serve them by initiating programs, advocacy and education efforts that can lead to improved health outcomes and quality of life. To learn more or to get involved, call 1-800-DIABETES (1-800-342-2383) or visit us at diabetes.org. Information is available in English and Spanish. Join the conversation with us on Facebook (American Diabetes Association), Twitter (@AmDiabetesAssn) and Instagram (@AmDiabetesAssn).

SOURCE American Diabetes Association

Related Links

http://www.diabetes.org

NEW YORK and TOKYO, March 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Fir Tree Partners ("Fir Tree") today filed a change report to its previously filed 'Large Shareholding' report at the Kanto Local Finance Bureau in Japan, disclosing an increase of its beneficial ownership in Kyushu Railway Company ("JR Kyushu" or "the Company") (TSE ticker 9142) to 6.1% through common stock.



On March 19th, JR Kyushu announced its new 2019-2021 Medium-Term Business Plan (found here). Fir Tree is encouraged by some aspects of the Plan, including:



A robust maintenance capital plan to ensure the continued safety of railway passengers; A reasonable growth strategy, balancing the needs of the railway system with real estate development projects; An increased dividend payout ratio and mention of an ability to repurchase shares; A focus on improved governance, including consideration of a stock compensation plan for executive officers and the appointment of outside directors; Use of low-cost debt to fund growth capital expenditures.

Aaron Stern, Managing Director and Partner at Fir Tree, said:

"We appreciate the thoughtful capital plan, which balances the safety and sustainability of the railway with growth in the real estate segment. We also applaud management for taking some positive steps in governance, including increasing the dividend payout and considering a stock compensation program.

However, we are concerned by the lack of a concrete, significant share repurchase program, which would have corrected the inefficient capital structure and suboptimal return on equity. The 5% decline in share price after the release of the Plan reflects shareholder dissatisfaction. We believe in JR Kyushu management and trust their operational knowledge, but now is the time to address shareholder issues with more detail and action."

Fir Tree believes JR Kyushu should commit to a capital structure and act on the governance concepts discussed in the Plan, including implementing a large share repurchase program, introducing a stock compensation plan for executive officers and adding several independent industry experts to its Board of Directors.



By specifying a target capital structure which incorporates the 100 billion yen bond shelf-registration1 made by the Company in January, as well as a detailed share repurchase program, JR Kyushu can accurately identify its cost of capital and profitability targets for investors, as recommended in the Corporate Governance Code.2

Fir Tree will continue to engage in positive dialogue with the Company and intends to make shareholder proposals at the upcoming Annual General Meeting.

About Fir Tree Partners

Fir Tree Partners, founded in 1994 and located in New York City (HQ) and Miami, is a value-oriented investment manager that invests on behalf of endowments, charitable and philanthropic foundations, pension funds and other institutional and private investors. The firm has successfully applied its opportunistic approach across a wide array of asset classes, industries and geographies, including in Japan where it has been actively investing for nearly a decade. Fir Tree Partners has adopted Japan's Stewardship Code.

1. Source: Company EDINET Filing reported on 2019.01.15

2. Source: Japan's Corporate Governance Code, Principle 5.2 "Establishing and Disclosing Business Strategies and Business Plans"

For more information contact:

Japanese Media:

Dan Underwood / Brendan Jennings

Ashton Consulting

+81 3 5425-7220

[email protected]

U.S. Media:

Sloane & Company

Dan Zacchei / Joe Germani

(212) 486-9500

[email protected] / [email protected]

SOURCE Fir Tree PartnersPASADENA, Texas, March 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- After more than 18 years of service with Nissan Chemical America Corporation (NCA), Robert Griffith, Vice President of NCA's Pasadena plant is retiring on March 31, 2019. Since 2001, Bob has played a critical role in the development and success of Nissan's chemical manufacturing capabilities in South Texas. His many significant accomplishments include oversight of three major expansions of the plant, construction of a new laboratory, and the startup of various new product lines.

After graduating from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, with a degree in Chemistry, Bob went on to hold a variety of positions at companies specializing in biotechnology and chemicals. He spent several years as Vice President and General Manager of the GNI Group before joining NCA. While at NCA, the business benefited immensely from Bob's ability to identify and meet the needs of the marketplaceleading to increased growth and profitability.

Bob's gift for interpersonal relationships made him a favorite among colleagues, vendors, and customers alike. "I've known Bob for 40 years and I could not have a closer friend. He is a gracious leader, incredible mentor, and someone who has been dedicated to his employees as an advocate and promoter," says Larry Birdsell, Trecora Chemical Custom Processing Business Director. Bob knew how to get along with everyone, which made him an effective leader. "I've always been impressed with Bob's ability to lead an organization diligently while maintaining the respect of everyone in the company," adds Trent Staggers, President of Mission Chemical.

"Everyone at NCA will miss him and his inspiring leadership. We wish him the best of luck in his new endeavors," says NCA President William L. Smith.

About Nissan Chemical America Corporation (NCA)

Nissan Chemical America Corporation is a division of Nissan Chemical Corporation founded in 1887 as the first chemical fertilizer manufacturer in Japan. A forerunner in chemical innovations for more than 130 years, Nissan Chemical currently manufactures products for the chemical, agrochemical, and pharmaceutical industries and is a market leader in the production of nanomaterials for the automotive, coatings, electronics, and oil and gas recovery industries.

Nissan Chemical America Corporation Press Contact:

Rick Moir, President/CEO | Paper & String, Inc.

tel 541.773.8011 | wireless 541.601.8747

[email protected] | www.paperandstring.com

SOURCE Nissan Chemical America CorporationRICHMOND, Va., March 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Markel Corporation (NYSE: MKL) announced today that it released its 2018 annual report.

One of the highlights of the annual report is the letter to shareholders. An excerpt from the letter is shared below.

"As we noted last year, we define a great company as one with a win/win/win structure. Our customers win as we serve them with products and services that make their lives better. Our associates win because we enjoy our jobs, and through them provide the means to serve our families, our colleagues, our customers, our communities, and ourselves. Our shareholders win because by doing these things in positive and sustainable ways, we create financial value which shows up in the increasing value of Markel over time."

The annual report is available on Markel's home page at markelcorp.com and the investor relations page at markelcorp.com/investor-relations.

Markel's annual shareholders meeting will be held on May 13, 2019, in Richmond, Virginia.

About Markel Corporation

Markel Corporation is a diverse financial holding company serving a variety of niche markets. The Company's principal business markets and underwrites specialty insurance products. In each of the Company's businesses, it seeks to provide quality products and excellent customer service so that it can be a market leader. The financial goals of the Company are to earn consistent underwriting and operating profits and superior investment returns to build shareholder value. Visit Markel Corporation on the web at markelcorp.com.

SOURCE Markel Corporation

Related Links

http://www.markelcorp.com

PHOENIX, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Western Way, in partnership with the Yuma County Chamber of Commerce released, "The Economic Benefits of Arizona Rural Renewable Energy Facilities." The economic impact study, conducted by Development Research Partners, found that 34 rural renewable projects constructed in Arizona from 2001 to 2017 resulted in significant economic benefits to rural Arizona, including:

$9.4 billion contributed to the Arizona economy;

contributed to the economy; 17,971 Arizona jobs;

jobs; $1.2 billion in wages paid to Arizona employees; and

in wages paid to employees; and $16.7 million in state and local tax revenues benefiting Arizona .

The study also found that rural renewable facilities continue to contribute to the Arizona economy after construction is complete. Annually these projects contribute an estimated $63 million and sustain over 700 jobs with combined wages of over $33 million. The facilities also contribute nearly $1 million in annual property tax revenue benefiting Arizona schools.

"Rural Arizona has some of the best solar resources in the country and this report shows in great detail how the industry is benefiting our state with increased jobs and economic opportunities," said Jaime Molera, Arizona Director of The Western Way. "Over the last decade, market forces drove technological improvements leading to drops in the prices of utility scale solar which are cost competitive for utilities and can save rate payers money. More investment in utility scale renewables will grow Arizona's rural economy."

The study also tested the economic and fiscal benefits of adding new solar and battery storage facilities in Arizona. The model test case was a new 100MW-solar PV facility with a 30MW battery storage component in Yuma County. The report showed the project would result in a total economic output of $9.1 million for construction and $1.3 million direct and indirect benefits annually.

Jaime Molera and John Karakoulakis of The Western Way, and David Hansen, Senior Economist at Development Research Partners, the firm that conducted the study, are available for interviews from March 25 to March 26. Please contact Ana Carolina Pereira at [email protected] or 480-751-5569.

About The Western Way

The Western Way is reclaiming conservative-based leadership on environmental and conservation challenges facing our country by driving efficient, market-based solutions that support our economy and enhance our environment.

SOURCE The Western WayLONDON, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Avon Products, Inc. (NYSE: AVP), a globally recognised leader in direct selling of beauty products, has joined the new British Beauty Council, established to represent the voices, opinions and needs of the beauty industry.

As a key player in this exciting new venture, Avon will use its 130-year heritage in breakthrough innovation and insight from its millions-strong global network of women to help open up growth and excellence in the beauty sector. As part of its 'Open Up' strategy, Avon is embracing new partnerships to transform its brand, reach new consumers and create more opportunities for beauty entrepreneurs to earn, learn and succeed on their own terms.

The British Beauty Council has been set up to recognise and promote the huge contribution that beauty makes to the UK economy and to build beauty as a career choice, as well as extending into developing excellence in areas such as formulation, manufacturing, supply, and packaging. There are strong synergies with Avon's mission to enable its millions of Representatives worldwide to become successful beauty entrepreneurs  whether on a full or part-time basis.

Avon was also attracted to the partnership by the British Beauty Council's pledge to support inclusivity  to celebrate diversity and the interests of the entire industry, regardless of age, ability, gender, race, religion or culture. This aligns perfectly with Avon's own longstanding commitment to democratise beauty, by delivering high-quality beauty products at accessible prices and through championing every kind of beauty.

Louise Scott, Chief Scientific Officer at Avon, is the business's representative on the British Beauty Council board. She said: "It is estimated that the British beauty industry is worth more than 20 billion*. As one of the longest-standing beauty businesses in the world, Avon is delighted to be a founding patron of an organisation that will champion the power of beauty to create opportunities and contribute to the economy and society. We believe whole-heartedly in the British Beauty Council's mission to ensure that beauty is to be recognised and supported as a world leading industry."

Millie Kendal MBE, CEO of the British Beauty Council added: "I am delighted to have an iconic brand like Avon support the British Beauty Council as a founding patron. The promotion of female entrepreneurs via the cosmetics industry is an important and relevant  not to mention valuable  asset. Avon has long been a leader in supporting women in business and has a huge amount to bring to the table as it moves forward through significant transformation  exactly the kind of partner we need to elevate the reputation of the beauty industry."

Find out more about the British Beauty Council at www.britishbeautycouncil.com.

*source: Raconteur

About Avon Products Inc.

For 130 years Avon has stood for women: providing innovative, quality beauty products which are primarily sold to women, through women. Millions of independent sales Representatives across the world sell iconic Avon brands such as Avon Color and ANEW through their social networks, building their own beauty businesses on a full- or part-time basis. Avon supports women's empowerment, entrepreneurship and well-being and has donated over $1billion to women's causes through Avon and the Avon Foundation. Learn more about Avon and its products at www.avonworldwide.com. #Stand4Her

Forward-Looking Statements

This material contains "forward-looking statements" that are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements relating to the Company's involvement in the British Beauty Council. Because forward-looking statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties, actual future results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the possibility of business disruption, competitive uncertainties, and general economic and business conditions in Avon's markets as well as the other risks detailed in Avon's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Avon undertakes no obligation to update any statements in this material after it is posted to the Investor Relations section of our website.

SOURCE Avon Products, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.avonworldwide.com

"Marine life is heavily affected by plastic waste and refusing the single-use plastic straw is one way each of us can take action," said Jacob Briars, global advocacy director for Bacardi. "With billions of emojis being used globally each day, we want to help drive a cultural change where our online world promotes a plastic-free, marine-friendly straw, or strawless options for drinks, just as we at Bacardi continue to do so IRL."

Bacardi and Lonely Whale were eager to help Sydney shed light on the threat of plastic straw pollution, showing how one man's straw is another turtle's backyard trash. To ensure all of her friends on land could understand her turtle talk, Sydney worked with Bacardi and Lonely Whale to enlist comedian and activist Daniel Franzese to deliver her message.

"I was honored when Sydney first floated her anti-emoji straw campaign by me, mainly because I shared the same salty feelings about single-use plastic straws," said Daniel Franzese. "I challenge not only Unicode, but everyone to join and pledge so we can ensure a bright future for Sydney and all her marine life friends."

To give avid supporters an alternative emoji solution, Bacardi and Lonely Whale have released a collection of Giphy stickers inspired by the campaign. Bacardi and Lonely Whale hope that by removing plastic straws from digital usage, they too can shift cultural norms around drinking with single-use plastic straws altogether.

"Many have made a commitment to eliminate single-use plastic straws yet the emojis we use in social media haven't kept up with our commitment to an ocean free from plastic. What better way to delete the notion of using single-use plastic straws than by taking it out of the icons more than 90 percent of the world's online population uses every day to communicate?" said Dune Ives, executive director of Lonely Whale. "We hope that as we urge Unicode against including digital straws, consumers will sign #TheFutureDoesntSuck pledge to help us remove real plastic straws."

Since joining forces in 2018, Bacardi Limited and Lonely Whale have collaborated to spread the message of reducing the use of single-use plastic straws through brand activations, influencer events, social media and more. Together, they've recruited customers to join the pledge through campaigns in the United States, UK, China and New Zealand. Bacardi also committed to a full review of its supply chain to eliminate the use of plastic where possible while developing recyclable and biodegradable alternatives. Both Bacardi and Lonely Whale are supportive of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, comprised of goals and targets set to stimulate action in areas of critical importance for both humanity and the planet.

To join this global campaign, visit www.thefuturedoesntsuck.org. There, individuals can declare their pledge to ensuring #TheFutureDoesntSuck by committing to go plastic-straw free and recruit restaurants, hotels, bars and other venues to do the same. Establishments can register their commitment and challenge others to take the pledge so that together we can all ensure #TheFutureDoesntSuck.

About Bacardi Limited

Bacardi Limited, the largest privately held spirits company in the world, produces and markets internationally recognized spirits and wines. The Bacardi brand portfolio comprises more than 200 brands and labels, including BACARDI rum, GREY GOOSE vodka, PATRON tequila, DEWAR'S Blended Scotch whisky, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE gin, MARTINI vermouth and sparkling wines, CAZADORES 100% blue agave tequila, and other leading and emerging brands including WILLIAM LAWSON'S Scotch whisky, ST-GERMAIN elderflower liqueur, and ERISTOFF vodka.

Founded more than 157 years ago, in Santiago de Cuba on February 4, 1862, family-owned Bacardi currently employs nearly 7,000, operates more than 20 production facilities, including bottling, distilling and manufacturing sites in 11 countries, and sells its brands in more than 170 countries. Bacardi Limited refers to the Bacardi group of companies, including Bacardi International Limited. Visit www.bacardilimited.com or follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

About Lonely Whale

Lonely Whale is an award-winning incubator for courageous ideas that drive impactful market-based change on behalf of our ocean. Founded in December 2015 by Adrian Grenier and Lucy Sumner, Lonely Whale is inspired by the power of community to create the change needed to ensure a healthy planet. Lonely Whale is working towards a new era of radical collaboration, together facilitating the creation of innovative ideas that push the boundary on current trends in technology, media and advocacy that positively impact the health of our ocean. The organization spearheaded the global Strawless Ocean movement, which permanently removes single-use plastic straws from establishments and markets, and NextWave Plastics, the first global network of ocean-bound plastics supply chains. Lonely Whale's work has been recognized by Fast Company's World Changing Ideas and Most Innovative Companies, the Shorty Awards, the ADDY Awards, the SEAL Awards, the P4G 2018 Circular Economy Award sponsored by the Danish Government, the HALO Awards, and more. Lonely Whale is a proud supporter of the UN Environment's #CleanSeas campaign. To learn more and support, visit www.lonelywhale.org or follow @LonelyWhale.

Enjoy Responsibly.

2018 BACARDI

BACARDI, THE BAT DEVICE & OTHER MARKS RELATED TO PRODUCTS IN THIS NEWS RELEASE ARE TRADEMARKS OF BACARDI & COMPANY LIMITED OR OF OTHER SUBSIDIARIES OF BACARDI LIMITED

SOURCE Bacardi Limited

Related Links

http://www.thefuturedoesntsuck.org

To produce the list for 2019, Forbes partnered with Statista, a market research company, to produce the annual ranking of America's best management consulting firms. After surveying 7,500 partners and executives of management consultancies, as well as 1,000 senior company leaders, whom worked with these firms over the last four years. The firms were divided into 16 sectors, from aerospace to data analytics and big data to supply chain management to finance.

"CGN Global is honored to make the 2019 Forbes Best Management Consulting Firm list, selected based on client feedback, three years in a row!" said CGN Global CEO, Harsh Koppula. "We are extremely thankful to our clients for recognizing the value of our services. We also thank our CGN Global team for providing the best solutions services to our clients and their passion for delivering the unexpected."

Review the Forbes article here.

Review the list here.

About CGN Global

CGN Global is a Chicago-based firm with offices in Mexico, the UK, France, Turkey, India, and China, providing supply chain, digital, strategy and transformation consulting services to Fortune 500 companies.

CONTACT

Aashish Patel, CPSM, PMP,

SME, Senior Marketing & Business Development Manager,

CGN Global

M: (847) 809 - 6363

[email protected]

SOURCE CGN Global

Related Links

https://www.cgnglobal.com

LUBBOCK, Texas, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- CieloGov, a Cielo Global Holdings company, recently acquired Alytica LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based aerospace and defense consulting firm specializing in emerging global business opportunities. As part of the acquisition, Alytica founder and CEO, Marvin Schroeder, was named President of CieloGov, bringing nearly two decades of international and domestic federal defense and technology contracting expertise. Schroeder has prior experience as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at DynCorp International and Northrop Grumman's Director of Business Development for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he focused on cyber security, sensor integration, C4ISR modernization and Aircraft MRO.

"We are thrilled to have someone of this merit join the CGH portfolio of companies to lead the growth of CieloGov. Marvin brings a track record of growth and expertise to CieloGov. His government sector knowledge and relationships will be invaluable as we expand our footprint in the government sector," said BJ Carter, CEO, CieloGov.

"Not only will this acquisition help CieloGov access giants in the defense, intelligence, and government services industry, it will also help bring much-needed innovation and technology to these spheres, which I am very excited about," Schroeder stated.

About CieloGov

CieloGov provides a full range of services designed to help potential government clients meet their mission-critical requirements in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. The CieloGov team has experience with a wide variety of program management disciplines and is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned (SDVOSB) organization. Services offered include cyber security, cloud integration, IOT integration, IT services and software development. www.cielogov.com

About Cielo Global Holdings

Cielo Global Holdings (CGH) specializes in managing and investing in disruptive technology companies delivering solutions through our CGH portfolio companies - CieloIT, CieloPay, CieloGov and CieloAlliance. www.cgholdings.com

Contact: Briana Vela

Marketing Manager

[email protected]

(806) 410-1304 ext. 134

4747 S. Loop 289, Suite 210

Lubbock, TX 79424

SOURCE Cielo Global Holdings

Related Links

http://www.cgholdings.com

WADSWORTH, Ohio, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cornwell Quality Tools was recently ranked in Entrepreneur magazine's Fastest-Growing Franchises list. This highly competitive list recognizes the 150 companies with the greatest franchise unit growth in North America, based on data submitted for Entrepreneur's Franchise 500 ranking. Thanks to its exceptional growth, Cornwell Quality Tools was ranked #67.

"This is an exciting time to join the Cornwell family," said Bob Studenic, Cornwell Quality Tools President and CEO. "We've been growing steadily and firing on all cylinders the past several years. We have a strong business model that supports and backs the dealers. It shows in how we treat and care for dealers. This has brought a lot of attention to Cornwell Quality Tools and has sparked a significant amount of interest about the company from potential franchise owners," said Studenic.

"Franchising trends are always changing, and our ranking of the fastest-growing franchises offers crisp insight into what's hot right now," says Jason Feifer, Entrepreneur's editor in chief. "And through this list, we're also able to see the strategies that help newer brands ramp up quickly and that enable older ones to maintain their momentum."

Entrepreneur's 2019 Fastest-Growing Franchises ranking is based on each company's net franchise-unit growth in the U.S. and Canada from July 31, 2017, to July 31, 2018, with ties broken based on percentage growth. Cornwell Quality Tools position on the ranking demonstrates the brand's rising popularity with both franchisees and customers.

To view Cornwell Quality Tools ranking, visit https://www.entrepreneur.com/franchises/fastestgrowing. Results can also be seen in the March issue of Entrepreneur, available now on newsstands.

About Cornwell Quality Tools: Headquartered in Wadsworth, Ohio, Cornwell Quality Tools is the oldest mobile tool company with a market presence since 1919. A family and employee-owned company, Cornwell is committed to the pride that accompanies the sale of quality materials. With the use of high-grade alloy steel, combined with modern heat-treating methods, Cornwell has continued to produce the finest tools in the world, that have truly been "The Choice of Professionals" for 100 years. Products are sold via 650+ mobile tool dealers across the country. Cornwell has two state-of-the-art distribution centers located in Clearfield, Utah and Wadsworth, Ohio, along with three manufacturing facilities located in Albion, Pennsylvania (Forging Operation), Mogadore, Ohio (Hand Tool Manufacturing), and Van Wert, Ohio (Tool Storage Manufacturing). For more information, please visit www.cornwelltools.com. Or for Franchise information http://franchise.cornwelltools.com. Follow us on social media: Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/CornwellQualityTools or Twitter @CornwellTools.

Contact: Anne Elshaw

Publications Manager, Cornwell Quality Tools

1-800-321-8356

[email protected]

Related Images

image1.jpg

SOURCE Cornwell Quality Tools

Related Links

http://www.cornwelltools.com

"Culligan Cares is proud to support the mission of World Concern and provide funding for its clean water projects in Laos," said Robert Boerner, Culligan of San Antonio and Culligan Cares Committee Chairman. "Findings show that villages with access to clean water have better holistic success because access affects everything from nutrition and safety, to education, health and child protection."

From now through 2021, Culligan Cares' support of the clean water projects in Laos will allow World Concern to identify and address the greatest, immediate water-related needs in the Soukhouma cluster: for example, rainwater catchment, storage tanks, wells or water filters. It will also allow the organization to improve the Soukhouma cluster's sanitation through latrine development and to educate families on how to keep themselves and their communities healthy and safe with good hygiene, safe food preparation and trash disposal. These activities will help prevent the spread of disease, improve overall health and help make a long-lasting and far-reaching positive impact on the local economy, providing jobs and creating more vibrant village communities in the Soukhouma cluster.

"We are thrilled to partner with Culligan Cares on this exciting project that will bring practical, life-saving help to those lacking access to life-saving clean water," said Leslie Nordyke, Senior Director of Operations for World Concern. "Clean water, sanitation and hygiene for the people in the Soukhouma cluster means lives will be saved."

To learn more about Culligan Care's support of World Concern or its other charitable projects, visit www.culligancares.org.

About Culligan Cares

Established in 2005 as a partnership between Culligan International and Culligan dealers across North American, Culligan Cares supports individuals, families and communities in need of clean, safe water around the world. From providing water filters to the community of Flint, Michigan, to supplying bottled water to victims of floods and hurricanes, Culligan Cares remains committed to the cause of clean drinking water.

About Culligan International

Founded in 1936 by Emmett Culligan, Culligan International is a world leader in delivering water solutions that will improve the lives of their customers. The company offers some of the most technologically advanced, state-of-the-art water filtration products. Culligan's products include water softeners, drinking water systems, whole-house systems and solutions for business. Culligan's network of franchise dealers is the largest in the world, with over 800 dealers in 90 countries. Many Culligan dealers have valuable equity in their communities as multigenerational family owners of their franchises. For more information visit: www.culligan.com.

About World Concern

World Concern is a Christian global relief and development organization. With our supporters, our faith compels us to extend lifesaving help and opportunity to people facing the most profound human challenges of extreme poverty. At World Concern, the solutions we offer, the work we do, creates lasting, sustainable change. Lasting change that provides lasting hope. Our areas of expertise include disaster response, clean water, education, food security, child protection, microfinance and health

Media Inquiries

Sandy Sapp Cheryl Georgas Culligan International L.C. Williams & Associates [email protected] [email protected] 847.430.1423 312.565.4614

SOURCE Culligan International

Related Links

https://www.culligan.com

SAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Three founding partners, Digital Surgery Ltd., Verb Surgical and Taylor Wessing LLP, host the first-ever FT Digital Surgery Summit, where a high-level cross-section of stakeholders converged to adopt a digital vision for the future of surgery. Attendees have dubbed the event "the Davos of Surgery."

Today in San Francisco, more than 160 attendees and 23 speakers attended the inaugural FT Digital Surgery Summit, including leaders from global medical device companies, tech start-ups, philanthropic organizations, investors, surgical departments, and health systems. As the first-ever high-level gathering of its kind, the Summit defined a bold, digital vision for the future of surgery and marked a seismic shift for the field.

The day featured keynotes and panel discussions from some of the most preeminent thought leaders in the field. Speakers included Colonel (Dr) Jerome Buller, Commander, US Army Institute of Surgical Research; Joe Lonsdale, Founding Partner, 8VC; Prof Carla Pugh, Professor of General Surgery, Stanford School of Medicine; Dr Daniel Kraft, Faculty Chair for Medicine, Singularity University and Founder and Chair, Exponential Medicine; Prof Dan Stoyanov, Professor of Robot Vision, UCL and CSO, Digital Surgery Ltd.; Dr Allan Kirk, Chair, Department of Surgery, Duke University School of Medicine; Patrick Combes, Worldwide Technical Leader, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services; Prof Jaap Bonjer, Chair and Professor of Surgery, Amsterdam University Medical Centre and CEO, Amsterdam Skills Centre for Health Sciences; Cheri Reynolds, Director of Program Development and Global Health, Assist International; Prof Ken Goldberg, William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering, University of California, Berkeley; and many more.

"We're fortunate to have brought together such a diverse group of decision-makers, surgeons and healthcare leaders, researchers, engineers, technologists and investors to share their perspectives," said Dr Jean Nehme, CEO, Digital Surgery Ltd. "From the amazing breadth of attendees and speakers, it's safe to say, we are reaching an inflection point," Nehme further added. "I think the group in attendance today, with their mix of backgrounds and viewpoints, is instigating a step change in surgical care. I can see that there is a very real movement towards the digitization of surgery."

Audience members, including senior leaders from surgical robotics and medical device companies such as Medtronic, Stryker, Intuitive Surgical, Verb, and Auris, engaged with the content and speakers throughout the day via Twitter and in-person questions. Elite global investors were also in attendance, including Fosun International, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, D1 Capital, Mubadala, and many more.

Jun Hou, Managing Director of Fosun International, said "This is the first conference of its kind that I have been to, which is solely devoted to surgery. Attendees had a chance to ask some burning questions that they have never been able to ask their peers in a very intimate setting."

Kevin Vigilante, Chief Medical Officer, Booz Allen Hamilton, said "(Digital surgery) is the third inflection point in surgery, the first inflection was sepsis, the second was anaesthesia, harnessing the power of data will be third inflection point."

Prof Jaap Bonjer, Chair and Professor of Surgery, Amsterdam University Medical Centre and CEO, Amsterdam Skills Centre for Health Sciences, said "The conference has been excellent. It has been a fantastic interface between surgeons, industry and the financial sector."

Michael Yip, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego, said "Wonderful collection of experts in robotics, automation and clinical practice."

About surgery and digital surgery

Every year in the United States (US), more than 60 million surgical procedures are performed, of which 20 million are invasive.1 This means, more than 100 procedures are performed every minute. In the US alone, the surgical market is estimated to be 1 trillion USD.2

However, on the global scale, demand outstrips supply. It is estimated that 5 billion people lack access to safe and timely surgery. Every year, 18.6 million people die due to lack of access to surgical care.3

Digital surgery, the next frontier of surgery, is defined as the convergence of surgical technology, real-time data and intelligence. Following previous waves of disruption, which saw the transition from open to laparoscopic surgery, and from laparoscopic surgery to robotic surgery, the digital paradigm in surgery is bringing unprecedented changes to the century-old field. Up to now, continuous improvements in surgical tools have allowed for technically improved procedures  smaller incisions, translating to reduced patient recovery times; better access to deep and angled spaces within the body; more precise maneuvers; and 3D visualization. The power of linked data and advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are beginning to make a real impact in the way surgeries are performed, reducing well-documented variability in surgical process and outcomes.

Companies, investors, surgeons and health systems are racing to accelerate the digitization of surgery in order to dramatically improve patient outcomes whilst reducing cost and inefficiencies; improve patient access; reduce inequities between populations; improve quality; and deliver more personalized surgical care. With increased funding pressures across global health systems and the introduction of value-based care in some markets, stakeholders across the public and private sectors view digital surgery as the next apex in surgery.

About the Summit

The FT Digital Surgery Summit included 23 speakers across a mix of keynotes and panel discussions. The second Summit will take place in 2020 in New York.

Sessions and panel discussions included:

Driving Innovation: From Military Research to Civilian Medical Practice - Colonel (Dr) Jerome Buller , Commander, US Army Institute of Surgical Research

Colonel (Dr) , Commander, Defining Digital Surgery in the Context of Value-Based Care - Heather Lyu , General Surgery Resident, Brigham and Women's Hospital; Ozanan Meireles, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School ; Jean Nehme , CEO and Co-founder, Digital Surgery Ltd; Dinesh Vyas , Chair, Department of Surgery, College of Medicine, California Northstate University

- , General Surgery Resident, Ozanan Meireles, Assistant Professor of Surgery, , CEO and Co-founder, , Chair, Department of Surgery, College of Medicine, Investment Opportunities in the Future of Health IT - Joe Lonsdale , Founding Partner, 8VC

, Founding Partner, Automating the Metrics of Surgical Expertise: What do Surgeons Really Need?  Carla Pugh , Professor of General Surgery, Stanford School of Medicine

, Professor of General Surgery, The Future of Health and Medicine: Where can Technology Take us? - Daniel Kraft , Faculty Chair for Medicine, Singularity University and Founder and Chair, Exponential Medicine

- , Faculty Chair for Medicine, and Founder and Chair, The Next Generation of Surgical Tools, Instruments and Materials - Luke Hares , Technology Director, CMR Surgical; Pablo E. Garcia Kilroy , Vice President, Applied Research and Technology, Verb Surgical; Richard Leparmentier, VP Engineering, Auris Health; Dan Stoyanov, Professor of Robot Vision, UCL & CSO, Digital Surgery Ltd

, Technology Director, , Vice President, Applied Research and Technology, Richard Leparmentier, VP Engineering, Dan Stoyanov, Professor of Robot Vision, UCL & CSO, Preparing for the Future of Surgery  Allan Kirk, Chair, Department of Surgery, Duke University School of Medicine

 Allan Kirk, Chair, Department of Surgery, Artificial Intelligence - Rachael Callcut , Associate Professor of Surgery, University of California San Francisco; Patrick Combes , Worldwide Technical Leader, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services; Euan Thomson , Global Head of R&D, Digital Technology and Advanced Innovation, Johnson & Johnson; Michael Yip , Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego

- , Associate Professor of Surgery, , Worldwide Technical Leader, Healthcare and Life Sciences, , Global Head of R&D, Digital Technology and Advanced Innovation, , Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Ways of Learning - A Digital Surgical Curriculum - Jaap Bonjer , Chair and Professor of Surgery, Amsterdam University Medical Centre and CEO, Amsterdam Skills Centre for Health Sciences

, Chair and Professor of Surgery, and CEO, Panel: Bringing it Back to the Patient - Monika Hagen , Consultant Surgeon and Lecturer, University Hospital Geneva; Daniel Buchbinder , Chief, Maxilofacial Surgery, Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York ; Cheri Reynolds , Director of Program Development and Global Health, Assist International; Tim Worden , Partner, Life Sciences, Taylor Wessing

, Consultant Surgeon and Lecturer, , Chief, Maxilofacial Surgery, Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, , Director of Program Development and Global Health, , Partner, Life Sciences, The Next Generation of Robots in the Operating Room  Ken Goldberg , William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering, University of California, Berkeley

About Digital Surgery Ltd.

Digital Surgery, founded by surgeons for surgeons and healthcare professionals, believes safe surgical care should be accessible for all. Co-founders Dr Jean Nehme and Dr Andre Chow set out to shape the future of surgery by building a digital ecosystem that sits at the intersection of surgical expertise and technology. The company is based in London with teams around the world. For more information, please visit: http://www.digitalsurgery.com .

References:

1. Total surgical volume derived from summation of ambulatory surgical and inpatient surgical volume. Ambulatory surgical volume derived from: Hall, M.J. et al., Ambulatory Surgery Data From Hospitals and Ambulatory Surgery Centers: United States, 2010. National Health Statistics Reports 2017. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr102.pd; Inpatient surgical volume derived from: Intuitive Surgical, Q4 2018 Investor Presentation. Retrieved from: https://isrg.gcs-web.com/static-files/8afb7980-4820-41ff-bfa4-b3f82ce4111a. Retrieved on 20 Nov 2018.

2. Munoz, E. et al., National and Surgical Health Care Expenditures, 20052025. Ann Surg 2010;251:195200.

3. World Bank. Global Surgery 2030, Report Overview. Retrieved from http://www.lancetglobalsurgery.org/. 15 October 2018

SOURCE Digital Surgery

Related Links

http://www.digitalsurgery.com/

HANOVER, Md., March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Entegra Systems Inc., a leading provider of advanced technology, integration, and analytic solutions and services, announced today it was awarded a $50M+ prime contract from the Department of Defense (DoD). The company will provide advanced hardware and software engineering services throughout the base period and four option years.

"Entegra Systems and its partner companies proposed a fantastic low-risk, cost-effective solution to provide the deep technical expertise necessary to fulfill the government's requirements," said Barb Langhans, senior vice president of business development for Entegra Systems.

"We're honored to be selected by the government to perform this mission-critical, highly technical work. The award of such a technically-advanced contract to a small business is a victory for all small businesses," said Dean Johnson, CEO of Entegra Systems.

All work on this contract will be performed in and around the Hanover, Maryland area.

About Entegra Systems

Entegra Systems Inc., based in Hanover, Maryland, is an innovative provider of mission critical solutions and services to U.S. Government Defense and Intelligence customers. Entegra develops integrated solutions for Enhanced Situational Awareness, Operational Planning, Intelligence and Geospatial Analysis, and Cyber and Intelligence Operations. Entegra Systems provides a variety of technical services, including Customer Needs Analysis, Solution Architecture definition, Systems Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Software Development, Product Integration, Ontology and Data Modeling and Specialized Training services. Entegra is also a leading provider of defense, intelligence, and cyber mission services, including SIGINT Development and Analysis, SIGINT Collection, Mission and Collection Management, Intelligence Analysis, Tactical and End-product Reporting, HUMINT Targeting, Operations Planning, and Support, and Social Media Research.

For more information about Entegra Systems, please visit https://www.entegrasystems.com

 2019 Entegra Systems Inc. All rights reserved.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Lisa Brusio Coster, M.A.

Coster Communications, Ltd.

410.442.3734

[email protected]

Barb Langhans

Entegra Systems Inc.

240.463.7346

[email protected]

SOURCE Entegra Systems Inc.

Related Links

https://www.entegrasystems.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- On Thursday, March 21, 2019, Equitas Health joined Equality Ohio and Ohio Business Competesa nonpartisan coalition of more than 600 Ohio businesses committed to achieving statewide nondiscrimination policiesfor a press conference about the achieving an important mark of progress for LGBTQ Ohioans.

The Ohio Fairness Act, which Sen. Nickie Antonio reintroduced a few weeks ago with bipartisan support, would provide LGBTQ Ohioans with critical legal protections at the state level. Bill Hardy, Equitas Health President and CEO, released a staff statement on why this bill is so crucial, seen below.

"At Equitas Health, we believe that no one should be fired, evicted, or denied public accommodations because of who they are. Put simply, discrimination does not belong in our laws, but Ohio unfortunately remains one of 29 states to exclude members of the LGBTQ community from its nondiscrimination law. Equitas Health is working to change that as a proud member of Ohio Business Competesa nonpartisan coalition of more than 600 Ohio businesses committed to achieving statewide nondiscrimination policiesand as an organization that serves the LGBTQ community on a daily basis.

On the local level, there are more than twenty Ohio cities and one county (Cuyahoga) that have inclusive nondiscrimination ordinances. And a couple of months ago, Governor DeWine issued an Executive Order that maintained nondiscrimination legal protections for LGBTQ state employees. These are incredibly important strides in progress, but they are not enough.

LGBTQ Ohioans still face incredible discrimination, particularly in some of the most important areas of people's lives: at their jobs, in their homes, and in spaces otherwise open to the public. The Ohio Fairness Act (Senate Bill 11) would prohibit this sort of discrimination against all members of the LGBTQ communitya type of legal protection that does not currently exist at the state level.

The passage of this bill is imperative to help ensure that all Ohioans, including members of the LGBTQ community, live their lives free from discrimination in these important spaces. We urge Governor DeWine to publicly commit to signing Senate Bill 11 and to encourage the Ohio legislature to take action in getting this important legislation passed.

Equitas Health will continue to work with policymakers at the state, local, and federal level and with our partners like Equality Ohio and the Ohio Business Competes coalition to ensure that Ohio is a more equitable place for everyone who calls this great state home."

ABOUT EQUITAS HEALTH:

Established in 1984, Equitas Health (formerly AIDS Resource Center Ohio), is a regional not-for-profit community-based healthcare system and federally qualified community health center look-alike. Its expanded mission has made it one of the nation's largest HIV/AIDS, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) healthcare organizations. With 17 offices in 11 cities, it serves more than 67,000 individuals in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia each year through its diverse healthcare and social service delivery system focused around: primary and specialized medical care, community pharmacy, dental, behavioral health, HIV/STI prevention, advocacy, and community health initiatives. In 2019, the Buckeye Regional Anti-Violence Organization (BRAVO) became a part of Equitas Health.

The Equitas Health Pharmacy & Prizm magazine operate as social enterprises for Equitas Health; 100% of profits are reinvested back into the organization's programs and services.

For more information, visit www.equitashealth.com or find them on Facebook or Twitter.

CONTACT:

Laura Mesones, 614-987-5239

[email protected]

SOURCE Equitas Health

Related Links

https://www.equitashealth.com

NEW YORK, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- FinancialBuzz.com, a respected source in the financial news media space located on Wall Street, today announces an exclusive video interview with Chief Operating Officer, Camilo Villalba of Blueberries Medical Corp. (CSE: BBM) (OTC: BBRRF) (FRA: 10A) live on Wall Street.

Mr. Villalba shares with us his background, information on the benefits that Latin America provides for companies in the cannabis industry, and details on various company goals.

Additionally, Mr. Villalba offers his perspective on the position of building growth and company expansion across Latin America and other regions.

Camilio Villalba is a Bilingual professional in Finance and Foreign Trade with a Master's degree in Business Administration (MBA), specializing in Oil and Gas Industry Management. His knowledge and experience in Oil & Gas project evaluations, financial planning, budgeting and reporting have prepared him to transition into the cannabis industry and become Blueberries Medical Corp.'s Chief Operating Officer.

According to data compiled by Prohibition Partners, the Latin America cannabis legal sales were estimated at USD 125 Million in 2018 and are expected to reach USD 12.7 Billion by 2028. Medical cannabis is expected to account for more than two-thirds of the legal cannabis industry in the region, delivering an estimated USD 8.5 Billion throughout the forecast period. Countries such as Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia have all passed favorable medical cannabis laws. Meanwhile, Uruguay has legalized cannabis for both recreational and medical use. Now, Mexico's newly elected President is considering nationwide legalization of cannabis as well.

Watch the full HD Video Interview now to learn more about the buzz surrounding Blueberries Medical Corp. (CSE: BBM) (OTC: BBRRF) (FRA: 10A)

Click Here for full HD video interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUGpLFOCtAc

About Blueberries Medical Corp. (www.blueberriesmed.com)

Blueberries is a Colombia-based licensed producer of naturally grown premium quality cannabis with its primary operations ideally located in the Bogota Savannah of central Colombia. Led by a specialized team with proprietary expertise in agriculture, genetics, extraction, medicine, pharmacology and marketing, Blueberries is fully licensed for the cultivation, production, domestic distribution, and international export of CBD and THC-based medical cannabis. Blueberries' combination of leading scientific expertise, agricultural advantages and distribution arrangements has positioned the Company to become a leading international supplier of naturally grown, processed, and standardized medicinal-grade cannabis oil extracts and related products.

About Financial Buzz Media

Located on Wall Street in the heart of New York City's financial district, FinancialBuzz.com, a leading financial news informational web portal designed to provide the latest trends in Market News, Investing News, Personal Finance, Politics, in-depth broadcasts on Stock News, Market Analysis and Company Interviews. A pioneer in the financially driven digital space, video production and integration of social media, FinancialBuzz.com creates 100% unique original content. FinancialBuzz.com also provides financial news wire services, dissemination, branding, marketing and advertising for companies directly or third parties for corporate news and original content creation through our unique media platform that includes Newswire Delivery, Digital Advertising, Social Media Relations, Video Production, Broadcasting, and Financial Publications.

For "The Latest Buzz in Financial News" every day, please visit: http://www.FinancialBuzz.com.

Please Sign up Now at http://www.FinancialBuzz.com to receive alerts on trending financial news from all these companies. "The Latest Buzz in Financial News"

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Please Note: FinancialBuzz.com is not a financial advisory or advisor, investment advisor or broker-dealer and do not undertake any activities that would require such registration. The information provided on http://www.FinancialBuzz.com (the 'Site') is either original financial news or paid advertisements provided [exclusively] by our affiliates (sponsored content), FinancialBuzz.com, a financial news media and marketing firm enters into media buys or service agreements with the companies which are the subject to the articles posted on the Site or other editorials for advertising such companies. We are not an independent news media provider and therefore do not represent or warrant that the information posted on the Site is accurate, unbiased or complete. FinancialBuzz.com receives fees for producing and presenting high quality and sophisticated content on FinancialBuzz.com along with other financial news PR media services. FinancialBuzz.com does not offer any personal opinions, recommendations or bias commentary as we purely incorporate public market information along with financial and corporate news straight from the company. FinancialBuzz.com only aggregates or regurgitates financial or corporate news through our unique financial newswire and media platform. For Blueberries Medical Corp., financial and corporate news dissemination, filming, editing and video production, FinancialBuzz.com has been compensated ten thousand dollars by the company. Our fees may be either a flat cash sum or negotiated number of securities of the companies featured on this editorial or site, or a combination thereof. The securities are commonly paid in segments, of which a portion is received upon engagement and the balance is paid on or near the conclusion of the engagement. FinancialBuzz.com will always disclose any compensation in securities or cash payments for financial news dissemination and PR advertising. FinancialBuzz.com does not undertake to update any of the information on the editorial or Site or continue to post information about any companies the information contained herein is not intended to be used as the basis for investment decisions and should not be considered as investment advice or a recommendation. The information contained herein is not an offer or solicitation to buy, hold or sell any security. FinancialBuzz.com, members and affiliates are not responsible for any gains or losses that result from the opinions expressed on this editorial or Site, company profiles, quotations or in other materials or presentations that it publishes electronically or in print. Investors accept full responsibility for any and all of their investment decisions based on their own independent research and evaluation of their own investment goals, risk tolerance, and financial condition. FinancialBuzz.com. By accessing this editorial and website and any pages thereof, you agree to be bound by the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, as may be amended from time to time. None of the content issued by FinancialBuzz.com constitutes a recommendation for any investor to purchase, hold or sell any particular security, pursue a particular investment strategy or that any security is suitable for any investor. This publication is provided by FinancialBuzz.com. Each investor is solely responsible for determining whether a particular security or investment strategy is suitable based on their objectives, other securities holdings, financial situation needs, and tax status. You agree to consult with your investment advisor, tax and legal consultant before making any investment decisions. We make no representations as to the completeness, accuracy or timeless of the material provided. All materials are subject to change without notice. Information is obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but its accuracy and completeness are not guaranteed. For our full disclaimer, disclosure and Terms of Use, please visit: http://www.financialbuzz.com.

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WASHINGTON, March 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- FlyersRights.org has filed a notice of appeal against the Department of Transportation (DOT) in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals over its refusal to regulate international change fees. Flyers Rights Education Fund v. U.S. Department of Transportation (CADC).

When Congress deregulated airline prices, routes, and schedules in 1978, Congress preserved the DOT's responsibility to ensure that international prices and fees remained "reasonable." This little known provision of U.S. law means that the FAA should strike down any change fees that are unreasonable and have no relation to cost. See 49 U.S.C.  41501, DOT-OST-2015-0031 at regulations.gov.

Passengers are helpless when it comes these exorbitant change fees that can range up to $500 or more. Domestic consolidation and international alliances in the airline industry have combined to give passengers fewer options when travelling. As airline profits soar, the airlines continue to increase change fees by hundreds of dollars while publicly declaring that these fees are a major profit generator.

In 2015, FlyersRights.org filed a rulemaking petition demanding that the DOT enforce the Reasonableness Law for change fees on international flights. On February 1, 2019, the DOT denied this petition. In refusing to regulate despite the Reasonableness Law, the DOT said it relied on "market forces" to handle all air travel pricing and policy. See DOT-OST-2015-0031-0035. FlyersRights.org is represented in the court appeal by Joseph Sandler, Esq. of Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock PC, Washington, D.C.

Paul Hudson, President of FlyersRights.org, reflected on the past few years, "The DOT has demonstrated a tremendous ability to allow the airlines and airplane manufacturers to dictate enforcement policies. The DOT has ignored the law by failing to guarantee that international change fees are reasonable and related to cost. At a time when flights are routinely filled to capacity, airlines extort passengers into paying hundreds of dollars to change flights so that the airline can go back and sell the same ticket, usually at a higher price. The airlines reach into passengers' checkbooks because the DOT refuses to follow the law."

FlyersRights.org most recently took the FAA to federal court over the denial of its 2015 seat size rulemaking petition. The seat litigation has increased scrutiny on the FAA's relationship with Boeing and other airplane manufacturers, has led to Congressional mandates to establish seat size standards and to review certification procedures, and has prompted a DOT Inspector General Investigation into the FAA's oversight of emergency evacuation testing and certification.

Paul Hudson, member of the FAA Aviation Rulemaking Advisory Committee since 1993, noted, "The DOT and FAA keep proving, time and time again, that they will allow Boeing and the airlines to dictate policy both in the safety and consumer protection realms. From ignoring concerns over the Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 787 Dreamliner, to rubber stamping manufacturers' emergency evacuation testing, to decreasing enforcement of consumer protections to historical lows, the DOT has surrendered its duty to ensure safe air travel and reasonable protections for passengers."

SOURCE FlyersRights.orgModular water systems and strategic financial plans hold the key to leaving no one behind

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The basic human right of accessing safe and sanitary water is the key to sustainable development. It determines livability, growth of industries, and human well-being, all of which are vital for the vibrant growth of society. Unfortunately, many marginalized groups, such as women, children, refugees, indigenous peoples and many others face various grounds for discrimination that result in challenges when it comes to retrieving safe or potable water. For World Water Day 2019, Frost & Sullivan sheds light on areas of innovation that have the potential to improve conventional systems and aid in efforts to leave no one behind on the worldwide journey to obtain water for everyone.

If you are interested in more or would like to speak to our experts, please email me ([email protected]).

According to World Bank, with roughly 663 million people lacking access to drinking water and 2.4 billion people worldwide still lacking access to sanitation, water security is still considered to be one of the biggest global risks.

In addition, this year's World Water Day campaign notes that while many marginalized peoples are in need of accessible and reliable water resources, they commonly face additional interrelated challenges, such as population growth, climate change, and conflict, that compound this problem; a multifaceted solution is required for a truly sustainable future of water access and security.

"Potable water resources are easily disrupted or contaminated as a result of changing environmental conditions and human interference. The traditional model in delivery of drinking water and wastewater services is centralized, leaving little redundancy in place should one component in service delivery be shut down or impaired," said Seth Cutler, Principal Consultant at Frost & Sullivan. "Because of this, locations that are prone to disruption or without water services should think about new models for delivery that increase resilience."

To combat these disadvantages, Frost & Sullivan has outlined techniques and technologies that can play a significant role in making sure those in need of safe water around the globe have the necessary tools for access:

Decentralized water supply: Unlike centralized water systems, decentralized water and wastewater systems provide a sustainable and localized option for water supply that comes with a small footprint and quick installation allowing for a plug and play model needed in many rural areas and places facing environmental degradation. With major shifts in regulatory policies already underway, adoption of decentralized systems is expected to rise in developing countries .

Unlike centralized water systems, decentralized water and wastewater systems provide a sustainable and localized option for water supply that comes with a small footprint and quick installation allowing for a plug and play model needed in many rural areas and places facing environmental degradation. With major shifts in regulatory policies already underway, . Residential drinking water treatment systems: Growing urbanization and increasing concern of drinking water quality and associated health issues from questionable water supply has boosted the adoption of residential water treatment systems. Technological advances that can focus on niche purification requirements, such as differing needs in developed and developing countries, and the ease in installation, coupled with its compact size and relatively cheaper price, are key decision-making factors when identifying the right system.

Growing urbanization and increasing concern of drinking water quality and associated health issues from questionable water supply has boosted the adoption of residential water treatment systems. Technological advances that can focus on niche purification requirements, such as differing needs in developed and developing countries, and the ease in installation, coupled with its compact size and relatively cheaper price, are key decision-making factors when identifying the right system. New financing models: Investment vehicles, such as public-private partnerships (PPP), have the ability to connect investors, especially local financing, to develop water services in underserved areas while offering greater confidence in stable returns moving forward. The water sector can be averse to private ownership, but PPP offers a greater level of public ownership and accountability that can help bridge these concerns.

"It is often difficult to change the conventional way of thinking and action. However, in many instances, it is this mindset that has failed marginalized groups when it comes to equitable access to safe and reliable water services. To ensure an inclusive future for water, new delivery and management methods need to be adopted to provide a greater level of resiliency," stated Cutler. "These efforts combine highly localized quick-fixes, such as residential treatment solutions, to high-redundancy systems through decentralization, and new methods of generating capital investment and accountability through PPP efforts. While a great deal of effort is needed to reach 100% coverage in water services, the solutions are very much within society's toolbox."

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion

Contact:

Jaylon Brinkley

Frost & Sullivan

+1 (210) 247 2481

[email protected]

SOURCE Frost & Sullivan

Related Links

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DUBLIN, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Hydrocolloids Market - Raw Materials, Products and Applications" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Cellulose-based based hydrocolloids is the largest market among all hydrocolloid raw materials which is estimated at 795k metric tons in 2018 while Seaweed-derived hydrocolloids market is projected to witness the fastest growth during the analysis period 2018-2024.

Growth in the global hydrocolloids demand is mainly anticipated to driven by increasing demand from food & beverages and oil & gas sectors. Food additives are becoming a necessary part of food and beverages industry and natural clean label food additives such as hydrocolloids penetration is on the rise. The hydrocolloids industry is forecast to receive an impetus from this booming demand.



Increasing health consciousness and changing eating habits of consumers, especially in developing regions, are also the driving factors for hydrocolloids growth in the food and beverage sector. Increasing oil drilling activities in the United States and Canada, and continued usage of hydrocolloids in Middle Eastern oil producing nations is driving the demand for hydrocolloids such as guar gum, xanthan gum and carboxymethyl cellulose.



Food & Beverages form the largest application for Hydrocolloids on a global basis in terms of value, the market for which is estimated at US$5.4 billion (43.7% share) in 2018 and is projected to reach US$7.1 billion by 2024 to reflect the fastest 2018-2024 CAGR of 4.9%. in terms of volume, the global market for Hydrocolloids is estimated at 2.2 million metric tons in 2018.



Research Findings & Coverage

Global market for Hydrocolloids is analyzed in this report with respect to Raw Material Source, product types and end-use applications

The study exclusively analyzes the market size for hydrocolloid raw material source by product type and end-use application globally and in all major regions. The report also analyzes the market for hydrocolloids by raw material source, product type and application in each major country across the globe

Demand for Hydrocolloids in Food & Beverages Being Driven by Clean Label and Non-GMO Trends

Hydrocolloids Offer Potential for Making Edible Coatings and Films

Growth in Low-pH Dairy Beverages to Drive Pectin Demand

Restrained Demand for Select Hydrocolloids Due to Tighter Raw Material Supply in the Offing

Key business trends focusing on product innovations/developments, M&As, JVs and other recent industry developments

Major companies profiled - 245

The industry guide includes the contact details for 500 companies

The report also provides the listing of the companies engaged in research & development, manufacturing and supply of hydrocolloids. The global list of companies covers addresses, contact numbers and the website addresses of 500 companies.



KEY MARKET TRENDS



Demand for Hydrocolloids in Food & Beverages Being Driven by Clean Label and Non-GMO Trends

Hydrocolloids Offer Potential for Making Edible Coatings and Films

Growth in Low-pH Dairy Beverages to Drive Pectin Demand

Mixed Opportunities for Seaweed Hydrocolloids

Restrained Demand for Select Hydrocolloids Due to Tighter Raw Material Supply in the Offing

Demand for Hydrocolloids Propelled by Trends in Fat and Sugar Reduction

Xanthan Gum's Potential in the Oil & Gas Sector on an Upswing

Gelatin's Application in Food & Beverages being Hindered by Alternatives

Capsule Production with Plant-Derived HPMC Gaining Ground

Demand for Hydrocolloids to be Bolstered by Firm Growth in Oil Drilling Activities

KEY GLOBAL PLAYERS

Accel Carrageenan Corporation ( Philippines )

) Algaia S.A. (France)

Alland& Robert (France)

Andi-Johnson Group ( China )

) Archer-Daniels-Midland Company ( United States )

) Asahi Kasei Corporation ( Japan )

) Ashland Global Holdings Inc. ( United States )

) Cargill, Inc. ( United States )

) CAROB S.A. ( Spain )

) Compania Espanola de Algas Marinas, S.A. (CEAMSA) ( Spain )

) CP Kelco U.S., Inc. ( United States )

) DSM Hydrocolloids ( China )

) DuPont Nutrition & Health ( Denmark )

) Fufeng Group Limited ( China )

) GelatinesWeishardt S.A. (France)

GELITA AG ( Germany )

( ) GELNEX ( Brazil )

) Gelymar S.A. ( Chile )

) Hebei Xinhe Biochemical Co., Ltd ( China )

) Herbstreith& Fox KG ( Germany )

) Hindustan Gum & Chemicals Ltd. ( India )

) Hispanagar, S.A. ( Spain )

) Industrias Roko, S.A. ( Spain )

) Jai Bharat Gum & Chemicals Ltd ( India )

) Jellice Corporation ( Japan )

) Jungbunzlauer Suisse AG ( Switzerland )

) KIMICA Corporation ( Japan )

) Lamberti SpA ( Italy )

) Marcel Trading Corporation ( Philippines )

) MeiHua Holdings Group Co., Ltd ( China )

) MSC Co., Ltd. ( South Korea )

) Nexira SAS (France)

Nitta Gelatin Inc. ( Japan )

) Nouryon ( Netherlands )

) PB Leiner ( Belgium )

) QuimicaAmtex S.A. (Columbia)

Rousselot BV (Darling Ingredients) ( Netherlands )

) Shandong Head Co., Ltd. ( China )

) Shandong Jiejing Group Corporation ( China )

) Shanghai Brilliant Gum Co., Ltd. (BLG) ( China )

) Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd. ( Japan )

) Silvateam S.p.A. ( Italy )

) Solvay SA ( Belgium )

) Sterling Gelatin ( India )

) The Dow Chemical Company ( United States )

) TIC Gums, Inc. ( United States )

) Vikas WSP Limited ( India )

) W Hydrocolloids, Inc. (RICO Carrageenan) ( Philippines )

) Yantai Sheli Hydrocolloids Co., Ltd. ( China )

) Zhenpai Hydrocolloids Co., Ltd. ( China )

) Zibo Zhongxuan Biochemical Co., Ltd. (Deosen Biochemical Co., Ltd.) ( China )

KEY BUSINESS AND PRODUCT TRENDS

Ingredion Adds Single Hydrocolloids to Reinforce its Portfolio

Cambrian Solutions, CEAMSA's Exclusive Distributor of Hydrocolloids in Canada

DSM to Purchase an Additional 46% Stake in Andre Pectin

Cornelius Selected as Distributor of Algaia's Alginate Portfolio in the UK and Ireland

CP Kelco's Carboxymethyl Cellulose Plant for Sale in China

Launch of New Brand Identities for DSM's Gellan Gum and Xanthan Gum

Algaia and Gelymar Form New Long-term Commercial and Development Pact

Solvay's Hydrocolloid Product Line Acquired by PMC Group International

CP Kelco's GENU Pectin Products Receive Non-GMO Project Verification

Accent Microcell Private Limited is EXCiPACT Certified

Expansion of Dow's Methyl Cellulose Capacity in Germany

Ashland Increases its Hydroxyethylcellulose Production Capacity

AIDP, Distributor Partner in North America for Gelymar's Carrageenan Products

for Gelymar's Carrageenan Products CP Kelco to Expand Danish Pectin Plant's Production Capacity by 15%

Distribution Partners Selected by Cargill for Sustainable Growth of its Food Ingredients and Applications Business in North America

Ceamsa and Palmer Holland Inks Hydrocolloids Distribution Deal

CP Kelco Launches Label-Friendly GENU Explorer Pectin ND-200 for Neutral Desserts

NOP Organic Certification for Java Biocolloid's Seaweed GracilariaVerrucosa Extracts

PB Leiner is the New Company Brand Name of PB Gelatins/PB Leiner

Joint Venture Formed by Alland& Robert and Sayaji for Spray Dried Acacia Gum Production

Nouryon is the New Name for AkzoNobel Specialty Chemicals

Frutarom Acquired by IFF

CP Kelco's 30 CEKOL Cellulose Gum products Verified by Non-GMO Project

Naturex SA is Acquired by Swiss based Givaudan Group

ISC Gums chose HORN as Specialty Distributor of Gum Acacia in the Western US

Jellice Pioneer Expands the Most Modern Gelatin Factory in Europe

DuPont Danisco Lactogel FC 5200 Recognized by Fi South America Innovation Awards

New Non-GMO Project Verified Hydrocolloids added to TIC Gums' Ingredients

Range of Carrageenans and Blends for Cosmetic Applications Introduced by Algaia

ADM Opens New Technical Innovation Centre, Regional Office in Shanghai

Herbstreith& Fox Develops LM Pectins for Organic Applications

Silvateam Selects Brenntag as its Pectin Distribution Partner in North America

Cargill Plans to Construct $150 million HM Pectin Plant in Brazil

HM Pectin Plant in DSM Hydrocolloids Opens DSM Zhongken Biotechnology to Broaden Biogum Innovation Capability

AkzoNobel and Renmatix Partner to Create a New Form of Crystalline Cellulose

Cargill Partners with BioHope and Sanrise China for the Cosmetics Ingredients Distribution in China

Cargill Expands its Seabrid Portfolio of Carrageenans for Creamy Dairy Desserts

TIC Gums to Introduce Simplistica line of ingredient systems at IFT 2018

Mitsubishi Corporation Consolidates its Life Sciences Business

Rousselot to Display Clean Label Gelatin Solutions at IFT 2018 in Chicago

TICOrganic Tara Gum HV added to hydrocolloids portfolio of TIC Gums

Majority of Jungbunzlauer Products Obtains Non-GMO Project Verification

Marcel Trading Corporation Acquired CP Kelco's Philippines Carrageenan Plant

DuPont Nutrition & Health Divests Alginates Business to JRS Group

Quick Shell37 Allows for a Fast Use of Sugar Layers in Making Pan Coated Products

Rousselot Launches X-Pure Medical Grade Gelatin Range for In-Body Usage

Majority of Jungbunzlauer Products Received Non-GMO Project Verification

Algaia and Arles Agroalimentaire Inks Distribution Pact for Alginates in France

CP Kelco's Xanthan Gum Products Receives Non-GMO Project Verification

CP Kelco to Enter Indonesian Distribution Partnership with Azelis

TIC Gums Offers US-Produced GuarNT USA for Pet Food and Treat Applications

for Pet Food and Treat Applications Non-GMO Project Verification for CP Kelco's Four New KELCOGEL Gellan Gum Products

PT. Azelis Indonesia Distribusi Selected as CP Kelco's Exclusive Distributor in Indonesia

Ukraine based T.B.Fruit Constructs Pectin Production Line

based T.B.Fruit Constructs Pectin Production Line DRG Gelatin, Nitta Gelatin's New Pharmaceutical Gelatin

DuPont Nutrition & Health Launches Pectin for Reduced Sugar Fruit Spreads

Unipex to Distribute Algaia's Hydrocolloids for Personal Care Markets

Algaia Introduces Satialgine DVA Alginate for Low-Fat Desserts

Java Biocolloid Establishes an Operative Branch in Trieste

United States to Import Gum Arabic Directly from Sudan

to Import Gum Arabic Directly from DSM and Haixing to Acquire Inner Mongolia Rainbow Biotechnology

DowDuPont Completes FMC Corporation's Health & Nutrition Business Acquisition

Shin-Etsu Chemical Invests to Strengthen its Cellulose Derivatives Business

Gelnex to Build New Gelatin Production Unit in Brazil

AkzoNobel Increases EHEC Cellulosic Ethers Production

SE Tylose Starts New Technical Centre at the Science Park II in Singapore

Launch of TIC Gums' New Hydrocolloid Solutions at SupplySide West 2017

Successful Completion of the Merger between Dow and DuPont

Gelymar Moves its Headquarters to Santiago

Launch of Syndeo Range of Hydrocolloids

Algia Expands in North America with a Distribution Pact with AIDP Inc.

with a Distribution Pact with AIDP Inc. Cargill Introduced New Seabrid Carrageenans for Gelled Dairy Desserts

First Acquisition of Roquette in the Pharmaceutical Excipients Market

GELITA's $22-Million Project Received Official Go-Ahead from Woodbury County Board of Supervisors

Project Received Official Go-Ahead from Woodbury County Board of Supervisors CP Kelco's KELCOGEL Gellan Gum Production Capacity Increased to Meet the Growing Market Demand

Ingredion Acquires TIC Gums

Cargill's Alginates Business is Acquired by Algaia

GELITA to Construct Ultra-Modern Facilities in Eberbach

Inauguration of Ashland's New Pharmaceutical Excipient Manufacturing Unit in China

New Pharmaceutical Excipient Manufacturing Unit in Introduction of DuPont's New Range of GRINDSTED JU Systems for the South Asia Market

W Hydrocolloids Acquired Kerry Group's Seaweed Processing Facility in Philippines

Launch of Ticaloid Ultrasmooth NGMO Original by TIC Gums

Nexira Becomes an Independent Company

Vegan Xanthan Gum Grades Introduced by Jungbunzlauer

Eviagenics is now Algaia

Samsung Group's Chemical Businesses Acquired by Lotte Chemical Group

Addition of Gellan Gum to TIC Gums' Portfolio of Hydrocolloids

Magnus Union Plans to Built Pectin Production Plant in Belgorod, Russia

CP Kelco to Increase Pectin Production Capacity in Europe

Asahi Kasei and SPI Pharma Form Pharmaceutical Additives Reciprocal Sales Pact

CP Kelco Aims to Construct a New Production Plant in North America for Gellan Gum and Specialty Xanthan Gum

for Gellan Gum and Specialty Xanthan Gum Nexira'sFibregum Acacia Fiber and Instantgum Acacia Gum Ingredients Verified by the Non-GMO Project

Cargill Acquires FMC's Pectin Operations

CP Kelco to Expand Distribution Partnership with L.V. Lomas into the United States

CP Kelco Expands Specialty Biogums Production Capacity

Certified Organic Tara Gum Products Offered by Exandal

TIC Gums Launches Pretested Apple Pectin

CP Kelco Plans to Build New Citrus Peel Plant in Latin America

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/d7j4m3/global?w=5



Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.

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DUBLIN, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Industrial Chocolate Market - Global Outlook and Forecast 2019-2024" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global industrial chocolate market is estimated to ship over 9500 thousand tons by 2024, growing at aCAGR more than3% during 2018-2024.



India and Mexico have good economic climate and condition, a youthful population, and a growing number of chocoholics thereby, encouraging vendors to invest in these regions in the global market. The shift in trend of nutraceutical to health and wellness is leading to a more holistic approach of introducing these ancient ingredients as superfoods in the market.



The global industrial chocolate market is driven by vendors investing in high-growth countries such as Mexico and India. Ethnic flavor combinations, smaller portions, stronger health claims, increased transparency, and personalization will contribute to the growing revenues in the global market. The market research report provides in-depth market analysis and segmental analysis of the global industrial chocolate market by products, application, market entity, type, and geography.



The report considers the present scenario of the global industrial chocolate market and its market dynamics for the period 20192024. It covers a detailed overview of several market growth enablers, restraints, and trends. The study covers both the demand and supply side of the market. It also profiles and analyzes leading companies and several other prominent companies operating in the market.



Industrial Chocolate Market - Dynamics



Chocolate is at the helm of that intersection, and those in the food industry are blurring the line between the two given that it is indulgent while also having some health benefits, thanks to the cocoa bean with its flavanols and natural antioxidant properties. Industrial chocolate products are specifically being developed to improve the nutrition label on the whole, such as added protein, low sugar, and added fibers, etc., which can lend more benefits to various snacks such as cookies, while providing a tasteful experience.



As chocolates are foreign goods for several countries across the globe and they witness decline occasionally, otherwise too, scrambling American and European giants have for a while now depended on developing chocolates that are based on values and holidays to gain market share. For instance, Easter is a huge selling opportunity in Brazil, with more than 100 million Easter eggs consumed in a year and its only growing. In Canada, chocolates witness a 6% growth in sales around Christmas/Hanukkah. Holiday-themed chocolate launches have been dominated by the US and Germany in the last year or two.



From chunky chocolates that give more bite to combinations such as crunchy additions in a soft filling are breaking new ground and taking textures to the next level. The reason for this invasion is that curious consumers want more than just one thing inside their chocolate - they want double or triple of it. Consumers have slowed down their eating experiences for better wellbeing, thereby looking for foodstuff and confectionery that are more complex to keep them hooked. Therefore, Barry Callebaut has introduced a sensory language and a tasting ritual for chocolates. Products that have an extra crunch or offer an aerated and fizzy sensation filling are particularly popular.



Key Topics Covered:



1 Research Methodology



2 Research Objectives



3 Research Process



4 Scope & Coverage

4.1 Market Definition

4.2 Base Year

4.3 Scope of the study

4.4 Market Segments



5 Report Assumptions & Caveats

5.1 Key Caveats

5.2 Currency Conversion

5.3 Market Derivation



6 Market at a Glance



7 Introduction

7.1 Overview

7.2 The State Of The Global Economy

7.3 Factors Influencing Chocolate Consumption

7.3.1 Global Sugar Consumption

7.3.2 Disposable Incomes

7.4 Cocoa Production and Consumption: An Overview

7.4.1 Consumer Profiles

7.5 Industrial Chocolate Value chain



8 Market Dynamics

8.1 Market Growth Enablers

8.1.1 Permissible Indulgences Going Strong

8.1.2 Evolution of the Role of Chocolate

8.1.3 A Less but Better Attitude

8.1.4 Cultural and Seasonal Adaptations Influence Uptake

8.2 Market Growth Restraints

8.2.1 Volatility in Cocoa Prices

8.2.2 Sugar Consumption Down in Mature Economies

8.2.3 An Impending Chocolate Shortage

8.2.4 Boutique Chocolatiers move the Needle

8.3 Market Opportunities and Trends

8.3.1 Stepping-up Sustainability

8.3.2 Focus on Texture for Multisensory Experiences

8.3.3 Getting Creative with Ruby

8.3.5 Cleaner Label Commitments



9 Global Industrial Chocolate Market

9.1 Market Size & Forecast

9.2 Five Forces Analysis



10 By Application

10.1 Market snapshot & Growth Engine

10.2 Market Overview

10.3 Market by Bakery

10.4 Dairy

10.5 Cereals

10.6 Others



11 By Products

11.1 Market snapshot & Growth Engine

11.2 Market Overview

11.3 Cocoa Butter

11.4 Cocoa Liquor

11.5 Cocoa Powder



12 By Type

12.1 Market snapshot & Growth Engine

12.2 Market Overview

12.3 Chocolate Confectionery

12.4 Cocoa and other chocolate products



13 By Market Entity

13.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

13.2 Market Overview

13.3 Open Industrial Chocolate Market

13.4 Integrated Industrial Chocolate Market



14 By Geography



15 Europe

15.1 Market Size & Forecast

15.2 Key Countries

15.2.1 UK: Market Size & Forecast

15.2.2 France: Market Size & Forecast

15.2.3 Germany: Market Size & Forecast



16 North America

16.1 Market Size & Forecast

16.2 Key Countries

16.2.1 US: Market Size & Forecast

16.2.2 Canada: Market Size & Forecast



17 APAC

17.1 Market Size & Forecast

17.2 Key Countries

17.2.1 Japan: Market Size & Forecast

17.2.2 China: Market Size & Forecast

17.2.3 Australia: Market Size & Forecast

17.2.4 India: Market Size & Forecast



18 Rest Of World

18.1 Market Size & Forecast

18.2 Key Countries

18.2.1 Brazil: Market Size & Forecast

18.2.2 South Africa: Market Size & Forecast

18.2.3 UAE: Market Size & Forecast



19 Competitive Landscape

19.1 Competition Overview



20 Market Vendor Analysis

20.1 Market Ranking Analysis



21 Key Company Profiles

21.1 Barry Callebaut Group

21.2 Cargill

21.3 Fuji Oil

21.4 Cmoi



22 Other Prominent Vendors

22.1 Aalst Chocolate

22.2 Baronie

22.3 Chocoley

22.4 Clasen Quality Chocolate

22.5 Ferrero

22.6 Guittard

22.7 IRCA

22.8 Mars

22.9 Nestle

22.10 Olam International

22.11 Puratos

22.12 Santa Barbara Chocolate

22.13 Sephra

22.14 The Hershey Company

22.15 Unigr

22.16 Valrhona



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/prv62j/global_industrial?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

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ORION TOWNSHIP, Mich., March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- General Motors is investing $300 million in its Orion Township, Michigan, assembly plant to produce a new Chevrolet electric vehicle that will bring 400 new jobs to the Orion plant. Today's announcement is part of GM's new commitment to invest a total of $1.8 billion in its United States manufacturing operations, creating 700 new jobs and supporting 28,000 jobs across six states.

The new Chevrolet electric vehicle is in addition to the existing Chevrolet Bolt EV, further advancing GM's commitment to an all-electric future. It will be designed and engineered off an advanced version of the current award-winning Bolt EV architecture. Additional product information and timing for the new Chevrolet EV will be released closer to production.

The 400 additional jobs are incremental to numbers associated with GM's transformation announcement last fall. The new Chevrolet EV is in addition to the company's earlier announcement that Cadillac will be the first brand to get vehicles off a future EV platform.

"We are excited to bring these jobs and this investment to the U.S.," said GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra during an announcement at the plant with employees, elected officials and community leaders. "This new Chevrolet electric vehicle is another positive step toward our commitment to an all-electric future. GM will continue to invest in our U.S. operations where we see opportunities for growth."

The new electric vehicle had been slated for production outside of the U.S. The decision to bring it to Orion was based on many factors, including:

The Orion plant currently builds the Bolt EV, and the new Chevrolet EV will be based off an advanced version of the same vehicle architecture.

plant currently builds the Bolt EV, and the new Chevrolet EV will be based off an advanced version of the same vehicle architecture. Moving production to a U.S. manufacturing plant supports the rules of origin provisions in the proposed United States , Mexico and Canada Agreement.

In addition to the job growth at the Orion plant, GM has job opportunities at several other U.S. manufacturing plants for virtually all U.S. hourly employees impacted by the recent announcement of unallocated plants. Other GM manufacturing plants adding jobs include Flint, Michigan; Spring Hill, Tennessee; Bowling Green, Kentucky; Arlington, Texas; and Toledo, Ohio.

For the 2,800 impacted U.S. hourly employees at GM's unallocated plants, GM has confirmed it has 2,700 openings across its U.S. manufacturing plants. To date, 1,100 employees have been placed at other GM plants, with several hundred more in the process of being placed in new jobs. In addition, 1,200 of these employees are retirement eligible.

In Michigan, in addition to the jobs and investment coming to the Orion plant, GM is in the process of adding 1,000 jobs at the Flint Truck Assembly Plant, recently announced new investments at the Lansing Delta Township Assembly Plant and Romulus Propulsion Plant and this week revealed the all-new Cadillac CT5 to be produced at the Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant.

Orion Assembly currently builds the Chevrolet Bolt EV, Chevrolet Sonic and the Cruise AV test vehicles. The plant currently employs about 880 hourly and 130 salaried employees. Including the new investment, GM has invested nearly $1 billion at Orion Assembly since 2009.

GM to Invest $1.8 billion in U.S. Operations

With the $300 million investment at Orion for the future Chevrolet EV, GM also announced a total investment of $1.8 billion across its U.S. manufacturing operations, adding 700 new jobs and supporting 28,000 jobs across six states. This investment commitment includes the recently announced investments at its facilities in Spring Hill, Tennessee; Lansing Delta Township, Michigan; and Romulus, Michigan. Additional facilities receiving investments will be announced later. GM has invested more than $22 billion in its U.S. manufacturing operations since 2009.

General Motors (NYSE: GM) is committed to delivering safer, better and more sustainable ways for people to get around. General Motors, its subsidiaries and its joint venture entities sell vehicles under the Cadillac, Chevrolet, Baojun, Buick, GMC, Holden, Jiefang and Wuling brands. More information on the company and its subsidiaries, including OnStar, a global leader in vehicle safety and security services, Maven, its personal mobility brand, and Cruise, its autonomous vehicle ride-sharing company, can be found at http://www.gm.com.

SOURCE General Motors

Related Links

http://media.gm.com

LONDON, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- CleanEquity No. 12, hosted by Innovator Capital, the London based investment bank and the Monaco Economic Board, closed on Friday 15th March with its award ceremony and a speech by His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco, the event co-founder, who presented the awards.

This was preceded by a signing, in the presence of His Serene Highness, of an agreement with the Investment Association of China ("IAC") to support the Nobel Sustainability Trust's new award for sustainability; and to support Innovator Capital's Sustainable Finance & Investment Corporation ("SFIC") initiative, with a US$1 billion contribution to sustainable technology innovation, in equal tranches over 3 to 5 years.

CleanEquity showcased 26 companies and His Serene Highness conferred with the judges, who selected three winners of the CleanEquity Awards for Excellence:

eggXYt (IL), for Research; addressing one of the egg industry's most pressing challenges, the culling and destruction of 7 billion male chicks each year; eggXYt's technology meets the needs of today's ethical consumer and dramatically improves the sustainability of egg production.

BL!XT (SE), for Development; it is the first and only to develop miniature, solid state circuit breakers, which, as part of electrical systems, are able to control and manage devices. BL!XT breakers show huge energy saving potential.

SUN Mobility (IN), for Commercialisation; creating smart batteries and enabling them to be swapped in minutes at interchange stations, focusing on 2-wheelers, 3-wheelers and buses, this 'pay-as-you-go' model, will enable the price of EVs to match their ICE equivalents.

The runners up, respectively, were Breathe Applied Sciences (IN), Taronis Technologies (US) and Edenworks (US).

The awards were sculptures created by emerging French artist, Samuel de Gunzburg, who lives and works in London.

His Serene Highness thanked China for "this wonderful commitment" and thanked Mr. Zhu Huiye, saying, "An incredible result and wonderful way forward and so I thank you very, very much for these announcements and the signing of this document here this evening." His Serene Highness congratulated also the award winners and runners up.

Mungo Park, Chairman of Innovator Capital and co-founder of CleanEquity, said:

"We thank His Serene Highness for His continued support. Your help, Monseigneur, has been and continues to be invaluable. We thank Mr. Zhu Huiye of IAC, Wang Qian and her team at EU Sino in Beijing, for all their help and hard work on today's achievements. We look forwards to accelerating innovation with you.

"A big thank you also to Ban Ki-moon. His opening speech will serve as guidance to us all on how to match and scale innovation with SDGs and NDCs.

"Lastly but by no means least, we thank Fondation Prince Albert II, APCO Worldwide, Cision, Covington & Burling, Cranfield, Hobbs & Towne, Monaco Economic Board, Parkview International and Reliance Industries."

Contact:

Conor Barrett

Innovator Capital

[email protected]

About Innovator Capital

Innovator Capital ("ICL") is a London based, specialist investment bank, regulated by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority. Established in 2003, by its Chairman Mungo Park, ICL's focus is on innovation of sustainable technology and life sciences. It provides strategic, commercial, intellectual property and capital markets advice, transaction arranging and M&A services to universities and companies, regardless of country of origin.

ICL sources over 600 new technologies every year and hosts its annual conference, CleanEquity, to showcase those that are best in class. CleanEquity was conceived of by His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco and Mungo Park, an investment banker with 40 years of experience in emerging technology. The Nobel Sustainability Trust is advised by Innovator Capital.

SOURCE Innovator Capital

Related Links

http://www.innovator-capital.com

STOCKHOLM, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The press conference held in connection with the publication of SCA's interim report for the first quarter of 2019 will also be available via webcast or by phone.

The interim report will be published on April 26, 2019, at approximately 08:00 CET. The subsequent press conference will be held at 10:00 CET at Kreugersalen, Tandstickspalatset, Vastra Tradgardsgatan 15 in Stockholm, Sweden.

At the press conference, President and CEO Ulf Larsson and CFO Toby Lawton will present and answer questions regarding the report.

Press conference:

Date: Friday, April 26, 2019

Time: 10:00 CET

Venue: Kreugersalen, Tandstickspalatset, Vastra Tradgardsgatan 15 in Stockholm, Sweden.

The press conference will also be webcast live at www.sca.com. It is also possible to participate in the press conference by telephone:

Sweden: +46 (0) 8 5069 2180 United Kingdom: +44 (0) 2071 928000 USA: +1 631 510 7495

Call in good time before the conference starts. Provide the code "SCA" or the conference ID 8184739.

For further information, please contact:

Bjorn Lyngfelt,

SVP Communications,

tel. +46 70 626 82 23

Andreas Ewertz,

Investor Relations Director,

tel + 46 72 211 57 97

The core of SCA's business is the forest, Europe's largest private forest holding. Around this unique resource, we have built a well-developed value chain based on renewable raw material from our own and others' forests. We offer paper for packaging and print, pulp, wood products, renewable energy, services for forest owners and efficient transport solutions. 2018 the forest products company SCA had approximately 4,000 employees and sales amounted to approximately SEK 18.8bn (EUR 1.8 bn). SCA was founded in 1929 and has its headquarters in Sundsvall, Sweden. For more information, visit www.sca.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/sca/r/invitation-to-sca-s-q1-2019-press-conference,c2769082

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/600/2769082/1011786.pdf Press release (PDF)

SOURCE SCA

Related Links

http://www.sca.com

WASHINGTON, March 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- iPinYou, China's leading programmatic platform, recently partnered with Weibo to integrate their Chinese consumer data and media inventory into iPinYou's programmatic platform. This integration helps international brands navigate and decipher China's complex media landscape and maximize advertising efficiency. Grace Huang, founder and CEO of iPinYou, stated, "iPinYou values highly the integration with Weibo DMP. The platform, with its social-oriented and information-hosting nature, allows iPinYou to offer clients more integrated advertising solution to boost marketing efficiency."

Social media in China is evolving rapidly with a different landscape than in western societies. Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT) dominate nearly every aspect of the Chinese internet, with core businesses ranging from web search to social media. The digital media oligopoly of BAT underlies a unique consumer journey in China, which demands more sophisticated media buying solutions for international brands.

Social media has unique advantages that can help brands engage new audiences. Chinese internet users are highly connected and engaged in virtual social communities and iPinYou partnered with Weibo to help brands connect with these audiences. Their data management platform (DMP) allows advertisers to further target audiences based on users' social media behavior including account-based engagement, brand followers, and hashtags. Ads run on the platform are posted in unique formats, such as their 9 square ads, and are embedded with deep-links to bring customers back to the company's app.

Retargeting prospected new audiences is crucial for advertisers to boost marketing efficiency and generate a positive ROI. iPinYou helped one international e-commerce client retarget shoppers to bring them back to its mobile app to complete purchases.The campaign generated 3.5 times more return on ad spend compared to traditional portal remarketing campaigns. iPinYou worked with advertisers to better identify the valuable signals of consumer interest and intent through API integration or third-party tracking which enables mobile app activity post-backing and also provides data insights to clients. This type of integrated data and media solution helps brands to connect with and convert precise audiences across multiple channels and helps marketers to achieve their marketing goals.

Leveraging iPinYou's holistic programmatic platform and integrated social media capabilities, marketers can successfully maximize the return on their advertising dollars and increase overall marketing efficiency.

For more information, please contact iPinYou at [email protected]

SOURCE iPinYou

Related Links

http://www.ipinyou.com.cn/?defaultLocale=en

Greatly increased energy density

Much higher degree of safety due to unique separator

Allows for a very high depth of discharge

Faster charge rates

Enables the use of non-flammable electrolytes

Greatly extended life cycle

Much lower volume and weight - novel integration schemes possible

Low losses within a wide ambient temperature range

LAVLE's world-class team has been working on the packaging formats and management solution for the past 9 months. The company plans to release the commercial version of the SEB ESS within 12 months. The team is utilizing the company's Marine Electric Propulsion Simulation (MEPS) Laboratory located in Newport News, Virginia to prototype, test and characterize the performance of this ESS. The company has engaged DNV-GL to start initial evaluation of the cells and application.

Currently, SEB cells are being supplied from the 3DOM plant in Japan and then packaged in Anacortes, WA. LAVLE with 3DOM is in the process of selecting a larger manufacturing site in order to satisfy the company's long-term vision to produce and package the separator and SEB cells within the USA.

LAVLE is a joint venture company that combines advanced energy storage technologies from the Japanese company 3DOM that has state-of-the-art technology of battery cells with the best-in-class marine engineering, design, and systems integration services of Ockerman Automation to provide products and services to the defense, oil and gas, renewable energy, and marine transportation markets.

CONTACT: [email protected]

SOURCE LAVLE

Related Links

http://lavle.com/

Sharing the same view, Mr. Roger Berkowitz, CEO of Legal Sea Foods, and Dr. Sujint Thammasart, COO (Aquaculture Business Unit) of CP Foods, said it is a proud moment for both companies to jointly introduce premium quality seafood, under the Legal Sea Foods brand, to North American consumers. Within the partnership, CP Foods will produce numerous fresh frozen and high quality items with shrimp sourced from its biosecure aquaculture farms. The products were distributed under the Legal Sea Foods brand, and launched at the Seafood Expo North America and Seafood Processing North America or Boston Seafood Show 2019, the largest Seafood exposition in North America, during March 17 - 19, 2019. It is the main venue where thousands of buyers and suppliers from around the world attend the three-day exposition to meet, network and do business. Attending buyers represent importers, exporters, wholesalers, restaurants, supermarkets, hotels, and other retail and foodservice companies. Both companies share similar values in delivering the freshest and highest quality seafoods from responsible supply chains. "Legal Sea Foods has a long history of serving premium seafood to its more than 7 million restaurant customers annually, a success which is rooted in our fundamental belief in food safety and quality," said Mr. Berkowitz. "All of our shrimp are raised in closed system, environment-friendly farms and are fed with feed utilizing fishmeal certified by the Global Standard for Responsible Supply (IFFO RS). Our shrimp feed, seeds, farms and processing plants are recognized as best-in-class within the aquaculture industry, while Legal Sea Foods is the number one seafood brand in America. This makes for a very synergistic partnership," said Mr.Thammasart.

About Legal Sea Foods

Established in 1950, Legal Sea Foods is an upscale American restaurant chain. The current company headquarters is located in Boston. The group operates 37 restaurants, serving over 7 million customers annually. In addition to running a retail products division, Legal Sea Foods also operates an online fish market and ships fresh fish across the United States.



The company implements the highest standards for quality, sanitation and safety at every step -- from purchase, to processing, to shipping and finally, to preparation in the restaurants.



About CP Foods

Charoen Pokphand Foods PCL (CP Foods) is a global and integrated agro-industrial and food company, delivering high-quality products from operations situated in 17 countries, with 4 billion consumers combined.



The company operates its business on the principle of "Corporate Social Responsibility Towards Sustainability" under 3 pillars - Food Security, Self-Sufficient Society and Balance of Nature," which supports the UN Global Compact principles and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).



CP Foods is a leading shrimp farmer, processor and exporter, utilizing modern technologies throughout its operations. It offers fresh seafood products from a responsible supply chain, certified by international organizations.



The company is also a proud member of global organizations, such as the UN Global Compact, SEABOS, GSSI, and Seafood Task Force, driving sustainable and positive changes across the world.



As a result of its sustainability initiatives, the company is currently listed in a number of notable indices, such as the DJSI Emerging Markets, the FTSE4Good Emerging Index, and the Stock Exchange of Thailand's SET 50.



For more information, please contact:

Charoen Pokphand Foods PCL (CP Foods)

Tel. +66-2766-7343-5, +662-631-0641, +662-638-2713

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Charoen Pokphand Foods PCL (CPF)VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc. (CSE: LDS), (OTCQX: LDSYF), (Frankfurt: LD6, WKN: A14XHT) ("LDS" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that its wholly-owned subsidiary, CSPA Group, Inc. ("CSPA"), will have a product promotion booth at the High Times Dope Cup held in Adelanto on March 23-24, 2019.

The debut of the First Annual California High Times Dope Cup is expected to have upwards of 12,000 attendees, a social media audience of hundreds of thousands, and a stellar lineup of musical acts. More information can be found at https://cannabiscup.com/events.

CSPA's representatives will be at the event to educate prospective customers and promote the Reveur and CannaStripsTM product lines. Informational pamphlets and onsite purchase information will also be available.

Casey Fenwick, President of LDS, stated, "The timing of this local venue is extremely well-aligned with our current production runs of CannaStripsTM. We are excited to present both our product lines and to be able to connect with our current and prospective clients in the relaxed and casual atmosphere this unique cannabis event is promising to be. As an added bonus, we will be giving out some of our promotional merchandise including Reveur and CannaStripsTM t-shirts and CannaStripsTM hoodies."

The Company will continue to update the market on all of the results of the event and developments related to the growth and expansion of the CSPA Group, Inc.

About CSPA Group, Inc.

CSPA Group, Inc. is located in Adelanto, California and is a City-permitted and State-licensed manufacturer and distributor/transporter in the California cannabis industry. Manufacturing extracted oils and distillates, producing CannaStripsTM under a license agreement with Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc., a British Columbia company.

About Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc.

Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc. is a technology company that licenses its technology to a state-of-the-art production and packaging facility located in Southern California. The Company's technology produces infused strips (similar to breath strips) that are not only a safer, healthier option to other forms of delivery but also superior bioavailability of cannabis constituents. Some strips will also include supplemental co-active ingredients such as nutraceuticals, vitamins and peptides. The technology provides a new way to accurately meter the dosage and assure the purity of selected product. From start to finish, the production process, based on the Company's technology, tests for quality and composition of all the ingredients used in each and every strip which results in a delivery system that is safe, consistent and effective.

Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc.

Brad Eckenweiler

CEO & Director

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

[email protected]

Cautionary Disclaimer Statement:

The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release.

Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. The Company cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to the Company's limited operating history and the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations. In addition, marijuana remains a Schedule I drug under the United States Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Although Congress has prohibited the US Justice Department from spending federal funds to interfere with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws, this prohibition must be renewed each year to remain in effect. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.

SOURCE Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc.

Related Links

http://www.lifestyledeliverysystem.com

"The utility of IoT- and bio- technologies put into livestock business has been well developing in Taiwan. We strongly believe Taiwan will play an important role to raise stakeholders' awareness of technology adoption within Asia-Pacific regions," remarked Sabine Liu, General Manager of UBM Taiwan.

Livestock Taiwan Expo & Forum is the largest livestock trade fair launched in Taiwan. UBM has foreseen the sprung-up business opportunities for automation manufacturing companies would attract industrial players' enthusiastic participation. This year, UBM targets 350 participated exhibitors to provide diverse husbandry farming technologies and solutions.

"The more consumers concern about food safety, the more husbandry farmers would be urged to improve their farming equipment," said Wang Chien-Pei, Secretary General of Taiwan Poultry Association. He continued, "We're glad to have Livestock Taiwan held in Taipei. It's a business hub and friendly city to attract international elites and enterprises. None of industrial player would ever miss this comprehensive B2B trading platform."

There are 4 thematic areas planned at the show, in which they are 'Breeding and Genetics,' 'Circular Economy,' 'Nutrition and Healthcare' and 'Smart Farming Equipment'. The participated exhibitors include SKOV A/S, Big Dutchman, Kutlusan, Nabel, Kolowa Ventilation, Easy Fone Enterprise, Major Science, Life Rainbow Biotech, BSF Agritech, San Heh Pharmaceutical, and more. A total of 1,600 square meters had been reserved.

Launched concurrently with Aquaculture Taiwan and Asia Agri-Tech, the 3rd edition of Livestock Taiwan Expo & Forum contains a series of forums, technical seminars and business match making programmes within three-day exhibition. For more exhibitor information, please contact Ms. Sophia Lu (TEL: +886-2-2738-3898).

About UBM Asia

Asia Agri-Tech Expo & Forum 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.

About news release, please contact Ms. Joy Chou For exhibitor inquiry, please contact Ms. Sophia Lu UBM Asia Ltd., Taiwan Branch TEL: +886-2-2738-3898 FAX: +886-2-2738-4886 Email: [email protected] Website: www.aquaculturetaiwan.com www.livestocktaiwan.com

SOURCE UBM Asia Ltd., Taiwan Branch

Related Links

http://www.ubm.com/asia

SAN DIEGO, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Medical Marijuana, Inc. (OTC: MJNA), the first-ever publicly traded cannabis company in the United States, announced today that the company is celebrating its 10-year anniversary tomorrow, March 23, 2019.

"It's been an incredible experience to be a part of the cannabis and hemp cannabidiol (CBD) industries over the past decade," said Medical Marijuana, Inc. CEO Dr. Titus. "The cannabis industry has come a long way over the past ten years - when we started Medical Marijuana, Inc., only six states allowed medical use of cannabis and zero had recreational use laws. Today, 33 states now have medical cannabis laws,10 allow recreational use and, as the New York Times mentions, 'CBD is Everywhere'."

According to Statista, retail sales of cannabis in the U.S. were only $400 million in 2014 and in 2019 sales are predicted to reach nearly $7 billion. Reports released last year by analysts Cowen & Co. estimate that the cannabis industry could generate $75 billion in sales by 2030.

Titus continued, "Over the past years, we have experienced exponential growth and we remain optimistic that we will continue to see great progress in sales, research and product development over the next 10 years and beyond. Additionally, we hope to continue to lead the industry in its international expansion thanks to the key additions to our management personnel including COO Blake Schroeder, International Vice President Alex Grapov, Vice President of subsidiary HempMeds Brasil Caroline Heinz and President of subsidiary HempMeds Mexico Raul Elizalde."

The company has achieved many milestones over the past 10 years, including bringing the first CBD products to market, delivering the first cannabis products across state lines and international borders with brands such as Dixie Botanicals and HempMeds, developing the first direct-marketing cannabis company in the U.S. called Kannaway, becoming the first company to have CBD products listed in the Prescribers' Digital Reference and obtaining one of the first Certification Seals from the U.S. Hemp Authority.

"These past 10 years haven't been easy but we've made it our mission to develop the most robust and transparent manufacturing processes possible and provide consumers with the highest quality products on the market," said Medical Marijuana, Inc. COO Blake Schroeder. "We are now proud to offer products ranging from CBD topicals and beauty products to CBD oil tinctures, vape oils, capsules and pet products. We look forward to launching many new products in years to come to meet the needs of our customers."

Internationally, the company has achieved many firsts as well. Medical Marijuana, Inc. was the first company to sell its CBD products legally in Mexico, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, spoke with the World Health Organization at its Expert Committee on Drug Dependence Meeting about the safety and efficacy of CBD, and launched its subsidiary Kannaway throughout Europe. The company also became the first company to offer government-subsidized cannabis-based products in Brazil and Mexico.

To learn more and to view anniversary celebration discounts on Medical Marijuana, Inc.'s most popular CBD products, please visit https://shop.medicalmarijuanainc.com/. For every purchase made on March 23, Medical Marijuana, Inc. will donate $10 to its charitable partner ECHO Connection.

Also, visit Medical Marijuana, Inc. on Facebook tomorrow for a special message from Medical Marijuana, Inc. CEO Dr. Stuart Titus.

About Medical Marijuana, Inc.

We are a company of firsts. Our mission is to be the premier cannabis and hemp industry innovators, leveraging our team of professionals to source, evaluate and purchase value-added companies and products, while allowing them to keep their integrity and entrepreneurial spirit. We strive to create awareness within our industry, develop environmentally-friendly, economically sustainable businesses, while increasing shareholder value. For details on Medical Marijuana, Inc.'s portfolio and investment companies, visit www.medicalmarijuanainc.com .

To see Medical Marijuana, Inc.'s corporate video, click here.

FORWARD-LOOKING DISCLAIMER

This press release may contain certain forward-looking statements and information, as defined within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and is subject to the Safe Harbor created by those sections. This material contains statements about expected future events and/or financial results that are forward-looking in nature and subject to risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements by definition involve risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Medical Marijuana, Inc. to be materially different from the statements made herein.

FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION (FDA) DISCLOSURE

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA and are not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any disease.

LEGAL DISCLOSURE

Medical Marijuana, Inc. does not sell or distribute any products that are in violation of the United States Controlled Substances Act (US.CSA). These companies do grow, sell, and distribute hemp-based products and are involved with the federally legal distribution of medical marijuana-based products within certain international markets. Cannabidiol is a natural constituent of hemp oil.

CONTACT:

Public Relations Contact:

Andrew Hard

Chief Executive Officer, CMW Media

P. 858-264-6600

[email protected]

www.cmwmedia.com

SOURCE Medical Marijuana, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.medicalmarijuanainc.com

For organisations who want to be in control of every aspect of their business, Meronimi makes it possible for them to access a huge and evolving body of information to discover supplier innovations, protect their business from supplier risk, make well-informed supplier decisions, and engage with like-minded customers.

Adding Meronimi to Proxima Group brings real time technology enabled insight, complementing the knowledge and experience gained from supporting the world's leading organisations in executing improved procurement performance. Proxima is committing significant investment to further build and accelerate the development of the Meronimi platform.

Jonathan Cooper-Bagnall  Founder and CEO of Meronimi  "I am delighted to continue the development of Meronimi as part of Proxima Group. We now have the opportunity to grow faster, with ready access to deep procurement expertise which will help us to enhance the platform and our insights. We started this journey to transform the way procurement functions access and utilise real time supplier insights, and this is a big step in helping to realise that goal."

Gareth Evans  CEO of Proxima Group  "I have watched the development of Meronimi over the past two years and been very excited by its innovative service lines and thinking. With companies and governments spending enormous amounts of money with suppliers, it's critical that the available social media and news insight, which is constantly being created and updated by customers, employees, journalists, and industry commentators, is made available to empower the procurement profession. We look forward to leading the procurement market in this increasingly important domain."

About Meronimi  Founded in 2016, Meronimi has enjoyed rapid growth. It provides supplier social media monitoring and reporting focussed on suppliers. Its serves clients in financial services, healthcare, technology, government and outsourcing. It provides deep insights into supplier behaviours, activities and up to the minute news. In addition, it has a pipeline of new service lines aimed at further empowering world class management of suppliers.

About Proxima  Proxima is the US/UK market leading advisory firm servicing large organisations wishing to maximise the financial and operational performance of their supplier base. Proxima, a privately held company founded some 20 years ago, has in recent years enjoyed rapid growth in the US which now accounts for over half of revenues. In the UK Proxima serves blue chip clients thorough its Government and Private Sector divisions.

SOURCE Proxima Group

Related Links

http://www.proximagroup.com

BURLINGTON, Mass., March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- As millions all over the world celebrate World Down Syndrome Day on March 21, two non-profit organizations are taking it one step further. LuMind Research Down Syndrome Foundation (LuMind RDS) and the International Down Syndrome Community (IDSC) announced today that they have combined operations, effectively merging the two organizations, to reach more families with combined services of support, education and accelerating research and medical treatments for people with Down syndrome.

"We are thrilled to share the news on a day when the world is focused on amplifying awareness and opportunities for those with Down syndrome," said Hampus Hillerstrom, President/CEO of what is now LuMind IDSC Foundation. "This combination brings together the largest social media voice in the Down syndrome community with the leading organization supporting translational research for Down syndrome. Together, our combined resources can significantly empower families and create more opportunities for improved health and independence for all people with Down syndrome."

For the last 15 years, LuMind RDS has granted $20 million to fill a funding gap for Down syndrome research, identifying several therapeutic targets to improve health and cognition. Most recently, LuMind RDS launched the first clinical trial network  DS-CTN  to accelerate the development of treatment options for Alzheimer's onset, sleep apnea and other prevalent conditions for people with Down syndrome. Since 2008, IDSC has provided online peer-to-peer support and caregiver resources to an international Facebook community of more than 250,000 members as well as provided recreational family events in the United States and Canada for more than 5,000 members.

According to Hillerstrom, both organizations were working diligently to meet emerging needs of the Down syndrome community. LuMind RDS was striving to reach families who were unaware of the significant research progress that needs their support to be translated to medicines and interventions. IDSC was tackling a growing interest for quality research and medical care content and education for their followers. Realizing the similarity in their goals, they began collaborating in 2018 on a survey initiative to identify the informational needs and priorities of families with loved ones who have Down syndrome. In February 2019 they partnered to launch a Facebook support group  IDSC LuMind Research and Medical Care Group  with exclusive webinars led by researchers, curated medical articles and Q&As with clinicians.

"Rapid growth of the group membership confirmed the importance of meeting this need within the community. It was clear that we could have a bigger impact as one organization," said Beth Sullivan, Senior Director of Community Engagement, and former Chairman of IDSC. "We can't wait to hit the ground running and begin our combined work to empower and connect families, increase research awareness and accelerate research that will ultimately benefit all of our families." The combined organization will continue to provide informational support and engagement opportunities to meet the needs of all individuals with Down syndrome and their families.

The merger combines the talented teams and volunteer leadership of both organizations. Hampus Hillerstrom leads LuMind IDSC as President and CEO. Beth Sullivan is the Senior Director of Community Engagement and Michelle Slape is the Director of Great Wolf Lodge Events and Special Projects. In addition, IDSC Board members and volunteers Linda Nargi, Maria Dellapina and Jennifer Smolka join the LuMind IDSC Board of Directors.

LuMind IDSC is grateful to the management teams, boards and volunteers for their leadership and support in making this combination a reality, as well as the significant pro-bono contributions from the law firm Goodwin Procter to execute the transaction. For more information about the merger, please visit www.LuMindRDS.org/LuMindIDSC and contact LuMind IDSC at [email protected] to get involved.

About LuMind IDSC:

The LuMind IDSC Foundation envisions a world where every person with Down syndrome thrives with improved health, independence, and opportunities to reach his or her fullest potential.

LuMind IDSC will accelerate research to increase availability of therapeutic, diagnostic, and medical care options and will empower families through education, connections, and support.

Media contact/scheduling interviews:

Marly Chevrette | Mobile/Text: 781-825-1303 | Email: [email protected]

SOURCE LuMind IDSC FoundationWith a mission to amplify awareness of Comic-Con's Los Angeles area-based sister show WonderCon that embraces all aspects of comics, movies, TV, animation, and more, Comic-Con tasked OUTFRONT Studios with creating a campaign that would entice people to take notice. The cinematic and heartfelt creative features fans of all backgrounds and ages honoring their favorite fictional heroes and villains along with the tagline, "Do you. With us.," to highlight WonderCon's long history of being a fan-centric show that highlights all aspects of comics and related popular art.

"From our first meeting, it was clear the OUTFRONT team not only understood our mission but also the special relationship we have with the tens of thousands of fans that visit WonderCon each year," said David Glanzer, Chief Communications and Strategy Officer for Comic-Con and WonderCon. OUTFRONT Studios delivered a campaign that was both creative and inclusive and one that we're very happy to feature in our promotions for WonderCon Anaheim 2019."

In addition to displaying the campaign across OUTFRONT Media's digital and static out-of-home assets around Los Angeles and Orange County, the campaign was also adapted to run online and in-print.

"Our team was ecstatic to work with Comic-Con to make a statement with engaging, eye-catching creative and inspire those who come across the ads to become their favorite characters at WonderCon," said Mike Moss, LA Senior Art Director at OUTFRONT Studios. "From start to finish, Comic-Con was a true partner that supported our ideas and ambition with open minds and honest feedback. We look forward to working with Comic-Con on more larger-than-life and entertaining campaigns in the future."

With its bolstered team of expert creatives and thought-starters, OUTFRONT Studios produces original creative and delivers groundbreaking campaigns that are impactful and engaging. To find out more about OUTFRONT Studios, visit OUTFRONT Studios .

About OUTFRONT Media Inc.

OUTFRONT leverages the power of technology, location and creativity to connect brands with consumers outside of their homes through one of the largest and most diverse sets of billboard, transit, and mobile assets in North America. Through its ON Smart Media platform, OUTFRONT is implementing digital technology that will fundamentally change the ways advertisers engage audiences on-the-go.

SOURCE OUTFRONT Media Inc.

Related Links

http://www.outfrontmedia.com

BEIJING, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Phoenix New Media Limited ("Phoenix New Media", "ifeng" or the "Company") (NYSE: FENG), a leading new media company in China, today announced that it has entered into a share purchase agreement (the "SPA") with Run Liang Tai Management Limited ("Run Liang Tai") to sell 32% of the total outstanding shares of Particle Inc. ("Particle") to Run Liang Tai and its designated entities (the "Proposed Buyers") for a total consideration of US$448 million in cash (the "Proposed Transactions"). Particle owns Yidian Zixun ("Yidian"), a rapidly-growing personalized news and lifestyle information application in China that allows users to efficiently define and explore individualized content over mobile devices. The Company currently owns approximately 37.63% of the total outstanding shares of Particle on an as-if converted basis and is expected to own approximately 5.63% if the Proposed Transactions are completed.

As previously announced by the Company, the Company entered into a binding letter of intent (the "LOI") for the Proposed Transactions on February 23, 2019. The Proposed Buyers have paid cash deposit of US$100 million to the Company, and the Company and the Proposed Buyers entered into the SPA on March 22, 2019, the deadline set forth in the LOI.

Completion of the Proposed Transactions, however, are still subject to certain closing conditions (the "Closing Conditions"), including but not limited to approvals by the board of directors and shareholders of the Company's parent company, Phoenix Media Investment (Holdings) Limited (including any related necessary approval by The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited), as well as approvals, consents and waivers, as applicable, of other shareholders of Particle. There is no assurance that the Proposed Transactions will ever be closed.

As previously announced by the Company, the Company may be required to return the US$100 million of deposit to the Proposed Buyers together with interests, and may be required to pay liquidated damages, if the Proposed Transactions fail to close for certain reasons. While the SPA includes substantially the same terms as set forth in the LOI, the Company also agreed in the SPA that it will (i) pay liquidated damages of US$40 million and otherwise fully compensate the Proposed Buyers if the Company materially breaches its representations, warranties and obligations under the SPA, and (ii) pay to the Proposed Buyers additional compensation calculated at an annual rate of 6% for the period in which the Company has held the US$100 million of deposit if the Proposed Transactions fail to close before July 22, 2019 or within such longer period as agreed by the parties due to failure to obtain approvals by the board of directors and shareholders of Phoenix Media Investment (Holdings) Limited for the Proposed Transactions.

"We are moving one more step closer towards realizing the return on our investment in Yidian,"said Mr. Shuang Liu, Chief Executive Officer of iFeng. "We believe that selling partial ownership of Yidian to a strategic buyer will help maximize Yidian's growth potential as well as fuel our own growth in the long-run."

About Phoenix New Media Limited

Phoenix New Media Limited (NYSE: FENG) is a leading new media company providing premium content on an integrated platform across Internet, mobile and TV channels in China. Having originated from a leading global Chinese language TV network based in Hong Kong, Phoenix TV, the Company enables consumers to access professional news and other quality information and share user-generated content on the Internet and through their mobile devices. Phoenix New Media's platform includes its ifeng.com channel, consisting of its ifeng.com website and web-based game platform, its video channel, comprised of its dedicated video vertical and mobile video services, and its mobile channel, including its mobile Internet website, mobile applications and mobile value-added services.

Safe Harbor Statement

This announcement contains forward-looking statements. These statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "anticipates," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates" and similar statements. Among other things, the business outlook and quotations from management in this announcement, as well as Phoenix New Media's strategic and operational plans, contain forward-looking statements. Phoenix New Media may also make written or oral forward-looking statements in its periodic reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") on Forms 20-F and 6-K, in its annual report to shareholders, in press releases and other written materials and in oral statements made by its officers, directors or employees to third parties. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about Phoenix New Media's beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement, including but not limited to the following: the Company's goals and strategies; the Company's future business development, financial condition and results of operations; the expected growth of the online and mobile advertising, online video and mobile paid service markets in China; the Company's reliance on online advertising and MVAS for the majority of its total revenues; the Company's expectations regarding demand for and market acceptance of its services; the Company's expectations regarding the retention and strengthening of its relationships with advertisers, partners and customers; fluctuations in the Company's quarterly operating results; the Company's plans to enhance its user experience, infrastructure and service offerings; the Company's reliance on mobile operators in China to provide most of its MVAS; changes by mobile operators in China to their policies for MVAS; competition in its industry in China; and relevant government policies and regulations relating to the Company. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in the Company's filings with the SEC, including its registration statement on Form F-1, as amended, and its annual report on Form 20-F. All information provided in this press release is as of the date of this press release, and Phoenix New Media does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law.

For investor and media inquiries please contact:

Phoenix New Media Limited

Qing Liu

Email: [email protected]

ICR, Inc.

Jack Wang

Tel: +1 (646) 405-4883

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Phoenix New Media LimitedThough panel discussions concerned largely the British market, several speakers highlighted that dealing with plastic sustainability in the wider context was the way forward. Sian Sutherland, co-founder of campaign group A Plastic Planet , made a striking remark regarding the importance of focusing on the entire lifecycle of a plastic product: "If it's never being recycled, it's all single-use plastic." Joe Franses, Sustainability Vice President at Coca-Cola European Partners, agreed that refillable packaging and deposit return schemes could be a medium-term solution, advising businesses to "make it easy for consumers" to participate. The small Caribbean island of Dominica was mentioned during the summit in terms of implementing more green initiatives than larger economies, such as its recent single-use plastic ban and sustainability ethos reflected in its key economic sectors.

The acting High Commissioner of Dominica to the UK, Janet Charles, attended the event and explained during an interview for Truly Belong magazine why Dominica was able to implement green initiatives faster than the vast majority of the world. As regards the comprehensive plastic ban that came into force on January 1st this year in Dominica, she noted that the government and the population did not encounter any difficulties. "There were public awareness programmes and training () and the government did a fantastic job of taking the steps to enforce the ban," she clarifies. "In Dominica, we have been recycling since I remember myself () It is for our future." Quoting the eminent pledge made by Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit for Dominica to become "the world's first climate resilient nation", Mrs Charles concluded that Dominica contributes among the least to climate change, despite it being "at the frontline and [feeling] the effects of climate change" first-hand.

Besides the plastic ban, Dominica is hailed for its thriving ecotourism industry; building new, hurricane-proof public housing; and working towards providing its entire population with clean energy by investing in a geothermal plant. All of these green initiatives are sponsored either partly or fully by the country's Citizenship by Investment Programme, considered the most reputable in the world, according to Financial Times experts. Dominica carefully selects foreign investors it wishes to join them as economic citizens, who then make a financial contribution to the Economic Diversification Fund or an investment in pre-approved real estate that supports the tourist sector. The latter includes eco-luxury villas and environmentally conscious hotels such as Secret Bay, Jungle Bay, Marriot's Anichi Resort, Kempinski's Cabrits Resort, Hilton's Tranquility Beach and others.

[email protected]

SOURCE CS Global PartnersSAN DIEGO, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Two San Diego Personal Injury Attorneys from The McClellan Law Firm  Craig R. McClellan and Conor J. Hulburt  have been recognized in the latest edition of Super Lawyers Magazine. An achievement which speaks to the respect and esteem attorneys have cultivated among their colleagues, selection to Super Lawyers listings, including its hallmark Super Lawyers list and its Super Lawyers list of Rising Stars, is considered one of the legal industry's most sought-after distinctions.

Craig and Conor were included in the 2019 Super Lawyers list and the 2019 Super Lawyers list of Rising Stars, respectively. In addition to having both been included in previous years' listings, Attorney Craig McClellan earned further distinction among the region's most respected trial lawyers with his selection to the 2019 Top 10 San Diego Supers Lawyers and 2019 Top 50 San Diego Super Lawyers listings.

Published annually as a means to recognize the nation's top legal practitioners, the final Super Lawyers list and the Super Lawyers list of Rising Starts, which is reserved for attorneys in practice for 10 years or less or who are 40-years-old or younger, is an honor which is earned by attorneys who exemplify the highest standards of professional and ethical conduct.

Because the Super Lawyers patented selection process also relies on independent research, third party peer reviews, and meticulous evaluations of more than a dozen criteria of success, attorneys named to the final lists are held in high regard by their peers and fellow practitioners for verifiable and objective reasons, and are among just the top 5% of practicing lawyers in their respective fields to earn such recognition.

Craig R. McClellan  Craig R. McClellan , Founding Partner of The McClellan Law Firm, has been recognized by Super Lawyers every year since 2007. Over his 30+ years in practice, Craig has become one of San Diego's most recognizable trial lawyers, and has secured over 125 verdicts and settlements in excess of one million dollars each in a range of complex cases involving personal injury, product liability, and business litigation, many of which involved some of the country's largest and most powerful corporations and insurance companies. In addition to his continued inclusion in Super Lawyers magazine, Craig has also been recognized by numerous other publications and professional associations, including recognition as one of the Best Attorneys in the Los Angeles Area by The Los Angeles Times , Best Lawyers' Lawyer of the Year in Personal Injury and Product Liability Litigation, and the Inner Circle of Advocates, an invite-only association comprised of the nation's Top 100 plaintiff's attorneys.

 , Founding Partner of The McClellan Law Firm, has been recognized by every year since 2007. Over his 30+ years in practice, Craig has become one of most recognizable trial lawyers, and has secured over 125 verdicts and settlements in excess of each in a range of complex cases involving personal injury, product liability, and business litigation, many of which involved some of the country's largest and most powerful corporations and insurance companies. In addition to his continued inclusion in magazine, Craig has also been recognized by numerous other publications and professional associations, including recognition as one of the Best Attorneys in the by The , Best Lawyers' Lawyer of the Year in Personal Injury and Product Liability Litigation, and the Inner Circle of Advocates, an invite-only association comprised of the nation's Top 100 plaintiff's attorneys. Conor J. Hulburt  Attorney Conor J. Hulburt earned his third selection to the Super Lawyers list of Rising Stars in 2019. As an Attorney at The McClellan Law Firm, Conor has focused his practice on serious personal injury, wrongful death, product liability, insurance bad faith, and unlawful business practices, representing the injured and the wronged in challenging claims. Recognized for his work in personal injury by the San Diego Business Journal's "Best of the Bar," Conor currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Consumer Attorneys of San Diego as well as the Board of Directors of the Association of Business Trial Lawyers, and is the founder of SDCBA WetSuits, a legal association of surfing lawyers.

The McClellan Law Firm has established a reputation as one of Southern California's leading personal injury, product liability, and business litigation law firms. Founded in 1987 by Craig R. McClellan, the first and only lawyer in San Diego admitted to the exclusive Inner Circle of Advocates and the first attorney to litigate a Ford Explorer rollover personal injury case with all digitally introduced documentary evidence, the firm has been on the forefront of litigating complex and high stakes cases for decades. That includes cases involving catastrophic injuries and wrongful death caused by the negligent acts of others, claims arising from defective and unsafe consumer products and vehicles, and a range of complex business torts, insurance claims, contractual breaches, and matters of professional negligence.

More about The McClellan Law Firm and its award-winning team can be found at www.mcclellanlaw.com.

SOURCE The McClellan Law Firm

Related Links

http://www.mcclellanlaw.com

BOCA RATON, Fla., March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty, LLC is pleased to announce the acquisition of Kaercher Campbell & Associates Insurance Brokerage, headquartered in Culver City, California.

Kaercher Campbell & Associates has been serving the state of California for decades. They are built on the principles of providing superior customer service with quality insurance solutions to their customers. Dedicated to getting the best insurance products and services available, they have grown to be one of California's leading independent insurance agencies. They offer personal and commercial insurance, from auto and life insurance to retirement plans and disability. KC&A excels in customer care with the ability to find the right plan for every need. This acquisition will strengthen Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty's foothold in Southern California. Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty proudly serves their Southern Californian clients out of offices in Chatsworth, Westwood and Newport Beach.

Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty, Inc. continues to target high-quality independent agencies for geographic expansion and continued growth throughout the United States. With the addition of Kaercher Campbell & Associates Insurance Brokerage, Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty, Inc. will continue to reach new and current clients by helping them protect their most important valuables with not only the right insurance but with the right service for each client.

SHP&C offers:

All Personal Insurance lines

Private Client

Umbrella Coverage

Commercial, Trucking, Marine Insurance

Payroll

Employee Benefits

Human Capital Management

Professional Liability Insurance

Medical & Malpractice

Marshal Seeman, President of Seeman Holtz Property and Casualty, stated, "We were happy to work with Penny and her team to get this deal through quickly and efficiently. We are proud to bring in their high-quality staff and client relationships." Eric Holtz, Executive Vice President, added, "One of our core strategic visions is to establish a strong presence in a community and continue to build. Our So Cal presence is one of the strongest in the country. KC&A is a perfect addition to our family"

About Our Company:

The Seeman Holtz family of companies provides comprehensive risk management, financial and insurance advice to clients across the country.

Contact: Eric Holtz

Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty

844.255.6639

[email protected]

SOURCE Seeman Holtz Property & Casualty, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.seemanholtzpc.com

DUBLIN, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Data Center Construction Market in Southeast Asia - Industry Outlook and Forecast 2019-2024" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Southeast Asia data center construction market is expected to reach values of approximately $2 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of around 7% during 2018-2024. The research report also offers market size in square ft area and power capacity in megawatts (MW) across geographies.



The investment support from REITs will enable growth of infrastructure by local vendors and incentives from the government will be highly beneficial for continuous investment from both local and global data center developers in the Southeast Asian market. The Southeast Asia data center construction market is driven by increasing deployments across emerging regions such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.



The adoption of water-based cooling systems and rack size of over 45U will lead to innovations in the Southeast Asia data center construction market. The market research report provides in-depth market analysis and segmental analysis of the Southeast Asia data center construction market by product, distribution channel, material, and geography.



The report considers the present scenario of the Southeast Asia data center construction market and its market dynamics for the period 2019 2024. It covers a detailed overview of various Southeast Asia data center construction market growth enablers, restraints, and trends.



The study includes both the demand and supply sides of the Southeast Asia data center construction market. It also profiles and analyzes the leading infrastructure vendors, construction companies, and data center vendors along with other prominent Southeast Asia data center construction market participants.



Market Dynamics



Digitalization of business operation is driving the demand for cloud-based service adoption in the Southeast Asia. Governments in Southeast Asia is investment millions of dollars to improve their digital economy.



Among the countries, Singapore is the only mature cloud market in Southeast Asia. Most of the organizations in Southeast Asia and other APAC countries operates through the cloud platforms hosted in the Singapore data centers. This is because that market has physical presence of major cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, and IBM.



With data center in Singapore, cloud providers can provide services to their customers across the APAC region. The majority of the investment in Southeast Asia is brought in by demand for technologies such as cloud-based computing and supported by government across various countries to grow their digital economy. The governments across all the Southeast Asian countries have created anentity to aid in the growth of digital economy that includes increasing network capacity, aiding business to adopt technology and encourage global data center investment into the country.



In Southeast Asia, Singapore is investing significantly in connected reality. In the Southeast Asia region, the construction of data centers is experiencing significant growth. However, these data centers are mostly confined to major metro cities. In the Southeast Asia region, most data centers operate in major metros cities such as Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, Hanoi.



There are also multiple facilities or disaster recovery space operated across the countries. Most of these facilities comprise of small area and low power capacity. These cities are also experiencing a high amount of investment in recent times, and more data centers are planned for 2019 and 2020.



Market Segmentation



This market research report includes a detailed segmentation of the market by electrical infrastructure, mechanical infrastructure, tier standards, general construction, and country. The Southeast Asia data center construction market by electrical infrastructure is classified into UPS systems, generators, transfer switches & switchgear, rack PDU, and other electrical infrastructure. Generators dominated the total market share in 2018, growing at a CAGR of more than 7% during the forecast period.



The increasing adoption of generators by facilities operators is primarily to make sure that they operate at 100% availability irrespective of the change in incoming power from utility grids in the market. Flywheel-based UPS systems and lithium-ion UPS systems are gaining immense traction across several countries in the Southeast market. Switchgearcomprises a combination of switches, fuses, and circuit breakers to protect and isolate electrical infrastructure in the facilities in the market.



The mechanical infrastructure in the Southeast Asia data center construction market is categorized into cooling systems, racks, and other infrastructure. Racks are the fastest growing segment in the market, at a CAGR of over 9% during the forecast period. The installation of racks as pre-assembled infrastructure along with rack PDUs, rack-level UPS, and IT infrastructure is fueling the growth of this segment in the global market.



Free-cooling is not facilitated in this region and operators are looking for efficient solutions to reduce their CAPEX and OPEX, conserve data center space, and reduce power supply to cooling units in the market. The use of liquid-based cooling technique installations will boost the demand for other mechanical infrastructure in the Southeast Asia data center construction market.



The Southeast Asia data center construction market by building development is segmented into building development, installations and commissioning services, building designs, physical security, and DCIM. Building development segment occupied the majority of the total market share in 2018, growing at a CAGR of more than 5% during the forecast period.



Building development primarily focuses on site selection, preparation, and area construction and concrete-based data center building with windows in the market. Physical security systems that comprise sensors integrated with the existing DCIM solutions for real-time remote monitoring benefits will revolutionize the market. DCIM solutions offer features to control power consumption, improve efficiency, and increase operational capabilities in the Southeast Asia data center construction market.



The standard tier segment in the Southeast Asia data center construction market is divided into Tier I &II, Tier III, and Tier IV. Tier IV facilities are the fastest growing segment in the Southeast market, at a CAGR of approximately 20% during the forecast period. The increasing number of hyperscale developers such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google investing in Tier IV facilities is fueling the growth of this segment in the market.



In the SEA region, several under-developed projects fall under the Tier III category. Most of the new data centers are being designed as per Tier III standards with a minimum of N+1 redundancy, which can be reconfigured with up to 2N+1 redundancy as and when the demand arises. Such deployments will boost investments in the Southeast Asia data center construction market.



Country Analysis



The Southeast Asia data center construction market by country is segmented into Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and other countries. Singapore dominated the majority of market share in 2018, growing at a CAGR of over 4% during the forecast period.



The increasing investments by Equinix, Singtel, ST Telemedia, Global Switch, Digital Realty, Keppel Data Centres, NTT Communications, 1-Net, Kingsland Data Center, NTT Communications, and Starhub is augmenting the growth of Singapore in the Southeast market.



Malaysia has over 30 data center colocation facilities, and the count is growing with the addition of around five data center projects every year in the market. TCC Technology, NTT Communications, KIRZ, Servenet Solution, True IDC, and SUPERNAP (Switch) Thailand are investors across Thailand and fueling the growth of the Southeast Asia data center construction market.



Key Vendor Analysis



The Southeast Asia data center construction market is prompting providers to improve the efficiency of the solution to attract the maximum number of consumers. Partnerships with local providers and modular datacenter offerings will enhance revenues for the vendors operating in the market.



The need for local service providers in installation, commissioning, and maintenance services will create job opportunities in the market. The increasing focus on innovations and pricing will boost the intensity of the competition level in the Southeast Asia data center construction market.



The major vendors in the Southeast Asia market are:



Infrastructure Providers



ABB

Schneider Electric

Vertiv

Caterpillar

Cummins

Delta Group

Eaton

Euro-Diesel

Fuji Electric

HPE

Hitachi Hi-Rel Power Electronics

Hitec Power Protection

Huawei

KOHLER Group

Legrand Group

Mitsubishi Electric

MTU ONSITE ENERGY (Rolls-Royce Power Systems AG)

Piller Systems

Rittal

Construction Companies



Arup

AWP Architects

CSF Group

DSCo Group

Fortis Construction

Faithful+Gould

Flex Enclosure

Kienta Engineering Construction

M+W Group (Excyte)

NTTFACILITIES Group

PM Group

Powerware Systems (PWS)

Sato Kogyo

Data Center Investors



AIMS Data Centre

Biznet Data Center

CMC Telecom

Colt DCS

DCI Indonesia

Digital Realty

Equinix

Global Switch

GRAHA TEKNOLOGI NUSANTARA (GTN)

Indosat Ooredoo (Lintasarta)

Internet Thailand Public Company Limited (INET)

Keppel DC

Kepstar Data Center Management

NTT Communications

Philippine Long-Distance Telephone ALPHA (PLDT ALPHA)

PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia

Singtel

ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC)

TCC Technology

True Internet Data Center (True IDC)

VADS Berhad

VNTT

XL Axiata

Key market insights include:



1. The analysis of Southeast Asia data center construction market provides market size and growth rate for the forecast period 2019-2024.

2. It offers comprehensive insights on current industry trends, trend forecast, and growth drivers about the Southeast Asia data center construction market.

3. The report provides the latest analysis of market share, growth drivers, challenges, and investment opportunities.

4. It offers a complete overview of market segments and the regional outlook of Southeast Asia data center construction market.

5. The report offers a detailed overview of the vendor landscape, competitive analysis, and critical market strategies to gain competitive advantage.



Topics Covered



1 Research Methodology



2 Research Objectives



3 Research Process



4 Report Coverage

4.1 Market Definition

4.2 Base Year

4.3 Scope of Study

4.3.1 Market Segmentation by Infrastructure

4.3.2 Market Segmentation by Electrical Infrastructure

4.3.3 Market Segmentation by Mechanical Infrastructure

4.3.4 Market Segmentation by Cooling Systems

4.3.5 Market Segmentation by Cooling Technique

4.3.6 Market Segmentation by General Construction

4.3.7 Market Segmentation by Tier Standards

4.3.8 Market Segmentation by Geography



5 Report Assumptions & Caveats

5.1 Key Caveats

5.2 Currency Conversion

5.3 Market Derivation



6 Market at a Glance



7 Introduction

7.1 Impact of Internet Penetration in Southeast Asia

7.2 Data Center Site Selection Criteria



8 Market Dynamics

8.1 Market Growth Enablers

8.1.1 Increased adoption of cloud-based services

8.1.2 Migration from in-house infrastructure to colocation & managed services

8.1.3 Growing awareness among government bodies to improve digital economy

8.1.4 Increase in rack power density and adoption of efficient infrastructure

8.1.5 YOY Impact of Market Growth Enablers

8.1.6 YOY Impact of Market Growth Enablers on Countries

8.2 Market Growth Restraints

8.2.1 Location constraints for data center construction

8.2.2 Budget constraints limiting operations of efficient data centers

8.2.3 Operational constraints due to power outages and fluctuations

8.2.4 Data center design constraints

8.2.5 YOY Impact of Market Growth Restraints

8.2.6 YOY Impact of Market Growth Restraints on Regions

8.3 Market Opportunities & Trends

8.3.1 Increased adoption of prefabricated data center solutions

8.3.2 Increasing investment in fiber connectivity

8.3.3 Hyperscale data centers promote renewable energy adoption

8.3.4 Big data and IoT demand to increase edge data center development

8.3.5 Emergence of lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells

8.3.6 YOY Impact of Market Opportunities & Trends

8.3.7 YOY Impact of Market Opportunities & Trends on Regions



9 Data Center Construction Market in SEA

9.1 Market Overview

9.2 Market Size & Forecast

9.3 Porter's Five Forces Analysis



10 Market by Infrastructure Type

10.1 Market Overview

10.2 Electrical Infrastructure

10.3 General Construction

10.4 Mechanical Infrastructure



11 Electrical Infrastructure

11.1 Generators

11.2 UPS SYSTEMS

11.3 Transfer Switches & Switchgears

11.4 Rack Power Distribution Units

11.5 Other Electrical Infrastructure



12 Mechanical Infrastructure

12.1 Cooling Systems

12.2 Racks

12.3 Other mechanical Infrastructure



13 Cooling Systems

13.1 CRAC and CRAH Units

13.2 Chiller Units

13.3 Cooling Towers & Dry Coolers

13.4 Other Cooling Units



14 Cooling Technique

14.1 Liquid-Based Cooling Techniques

14.2 Air-Based Cooling Techniques



15 General Construction

15.1 Building Development

15.2 Installation & commissioning Services

15.3 Building Design

15.4 Physical Security

15.5 DCIM



16 Tier Standards

16.1 Overview of Tier Standards

16.2 Tier I & II

16.3 Tier III

16.4 Tier IV



17 By Geography



18 Singapore



19 Malaysia



20 Thailand



21 Indonesia



22 Other Countries



23 Competitive Scenario

23.1 Electrical Infrastructure

23.2 Mechanical Infrastructure

23.3 General Construction



24 Prominent Infrastructure Providers

24.1 ABB

24.1.1 Overview

24.1.2 Product offerings

24.2 Schneider Electric

24.3 Vertiv

24.4 Caterpillar

24.5 Cummins

24.6 Delta Group

24.7 Eaton

24.8 Euro-Diesel

24.9 Fuji Electric

24.10 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

24.11 Hitachi Hi-Rel Power Electronics

24.12 Hitec Power Protection

24.13 Huawei

24.14 KOHLER Group

24.15 Legrand Group

24.16 Mitsubishi Electric

24.17 MTU ONSITE ENERGY (Rolls-Royce Power Systems AG)

24.18 Pillar Systems

24.19 Rittal



25 Prominent Construction Companies

25.1 Arup

25.1.1 Overview

25.1.2 Service offerings

25.2 AWP Architects

25.3 CSF Group

25.4 DSCO Group

25.5 Fortis Construction

25.6 Faithful+Gould

25.7 Flex Enclosure

25.8 Kienta Engineering Construction

25.9 M+W Group (Excyte)

25.10 NTT Facilities Group

25.11 PM Group

25.12 Powerware Systems (PWS)

25.13 Sato Kogyo



26 Data Center Investors

26.1 AIMS Data Centre

26.1.1 Overview

26.1.2 Service Offerings

26.2 Biznet Data Center

26.3 CMC Telecom

26.4 Colt Data Centre Services (Colt DCS)

26.5 DCI Indonesia

26.6 Digital Realty

26.7 Equinix

26.8 Global Switch

26.9 Graha Teknologi Nusantara (GTN)

26.10 Indosat Ooredoo (Lintasarta)

26.11 Internet Thailand Public Company Limited (INET)

26.12 Kepple DC

26.13 Kepstar Data Centre Management

26.14 NTT Communications

26.15 Philippine Long Distance Telephone ALPHA (PLDT ALPHA)

26.16 PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia

26.17 Singtel

26.18 ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC)

26.19 TCC Technology

26.20 True Internet Data Center (True IDC)

26.21 VADS BERHAD

26.22 VNTT

26.23 XL Axiata



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/mnts44/southeast_asias?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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CAMDEN, N.J., March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Subaru of America, Inc. today announced the winner of its 2019 American National Technician Competition (ANTC), a biennial event featuring Subaru technicians from across the country testing technical knowledge, skill and on-the-job excellence in a combination of written, diagnostic and hands-on challenges. David Jodat from Subaru City of Milwaukee in Milwaukee, WI was awarded top honors in this year's competition and will receive an all-expenses paid trip to compete in the Subaru World Technical Competition in Japan.

"This is the seventh year we've brought together the premiere technicians from Subaru retailers across the country to recognize the service excellence that exists in our retailer network," said Thomas J. Doll, President and Chief Executive Officer, Subaru of America. "While we are extremely proud of all our participants, we are excited to name David the worthy winner of a very competitive event, and we look forward to having him represent the U.S. at the international final in Japan."

This year, fourteen Zone Champions from across the country participated in the competition held at the Subaru National Service Training Center at the automaker's new U.S. headquarters in Camden, NJ. This year's ANTC event was comprised of four events, one hour each, scored on accuracy, speed, and service quality. The first event was the written test which incorporated the use of a service manual to answer questions. The three hands-on events were on-car drivability diagnostics, on-car body electrical diagnostics, and mechanical-precision measurements.

The winner, David Jodat, is a Senior Master Technician at Subaru City of Milwaukee in Milwaukee, WI and has been a technician for over eighteen years. As both a Zone Champion (Minneapolis) and first place winner, Jodat received a cash prize of $2,000, a crystal trophy and an all-expenses paid trip to Japan to compete in the Subaru World Technical Competition this November representing the U.S.

From the remaining Zone Champions, second place honors went to Thomas Vigeant of Saint Johnsbury Subaru in Saint Johnsbury, VT, receiving a $1,500 total prize, while Todd Rodman of Webster Groves Subaru in Webster Groves, MO was awarded third place, receiving a $1,000 total prize. The full list of Zone Champions and runners up is below (in alphabetical order).

Brian Barnard  Michael Hohl Subaru , Carson City, NV

 , Pat Bonner  Lancaster County Motors Subaru, Lancaster, PA

 Lancaster County Motors Subaru, Sean Ernest  Annapolis Subaru, Annapolis, MD

 Annapolis Subaru, Leo Gilmore  Ruge's Subaru, Rhinebeck, NY

 Ruge's Subaru, Daryl Henzlik  Subaru Sherman Oaks , Van Nuys, CA

 , Brad Julitz  Prestige Subaru, Asheville, NC

 Prestige Subaru, Micah McCurdy  Austin Subaru, Austin, TX

 Austin Subaru, Kjell McDaniel  McCurley Integrity Subaru, Pasco, WA

 McCurley Integrity Subaru, Russell Stevens  Dreyer & Reinbold Subaru, Greenwood, IN

 Dreyer & Reinbold Subaru, Eric Taffs  Placer Subaru, Helena, MT

 Placer Subaru, Tim Whalen  Cannon Subaru, Lakeland, FL

About Subaru of America, Inc.

Subaru of America, Inc. (SOA) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Subaru Corporation of Japan. Headquartered at a zero-landfill office in Camden, N.J., the company markets and distributes Subaru vehicles, parts and accessories through a network of more than 630 retailers across the United States. All Subaru products are manufactured in zero-landfill production plants and Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc. is the only U.S. automobile production plant to be designated a backyard wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation. SOA is guided by the Subaru Love Promise, which is the company's vision to show love and respect to everyone, and to support its communities and customers nationwide. Over the past 20 years, SOA has donated more than $120 million to causes the Subaru family cares about, and its employees have logged more than 40,000 volunteer hours. As a company, Subaru believes it is important to do its part in making a positive impact in the world because it is the right thing to do.

For additional information visit media.subaru.com. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Diane Anton

Subaru of America, Inc.

856-488-5093

[email protected]

Dominick Infante

Subaru of America, Inc.

856-488-8615

[email protected]

SOURCE Subaru of America, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.subaru.com

SACRAMENTO, Calif., March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SunPower by Hooked on Solar, a Northern California region based solar installer, has received the SunPower "Residential Regional Dealer of the Year" award for its outstanding performance as a SunPower dealer in 2018.

SunPower by Hooked on Solar

"Earning SunPower's 2018 'Residential Regional Dealer of the Year' award for our success delivering the world's highest efficiency solar systems and superior customer experience to homeowners is an achievement we are very proud of at SunPower by Hooked on Solar said Chad Fralick, CEO of SunPower by Hooked on Solar. "Our nine-year Partnership with SunPower, one of the world's most innovative and sustainable energy companies, has allowed us to offer our customers reliable solar energy and significant electricity savings over the life of their systems."

The "Residential Regional Dealer of the Year" award honors SunPower residential dealers in select regions of the United States that consistently put customers first, while demonstrating exceptional industry knowledge, experience and leadership.

"SunPower's reputable national dealer network is strengthened by regional solar companies like SunPower by Hooked on Solar, selected for their quality craftsmanship, industry expertise and customer service," said Norm Taffe, SunPower Executive Vice President, Residential Solar. "We congratulate Hooked on Solar for an extraordinary performance in 2018 as a residential dealer, delivering the value of SunPower solar to homeowners throughout Northern California."

Last year, Hooked on Solar installed over 800 residential SunPower solar systems and was voted Best of the Best by the communities they serve. "In 2019, we are continuing to make investments in expanding our presence and service area deeper into the San Francisco Bay Area, which will give us a greater opportunity to help hundreds more homeowners and businesses each year experience the many benefits of switching to solar power for their energy needs," added Don Crevoiserat, Vice President of Sales & Business Development.

For more information on SunPower by Hooked on Solar, call 855.466.5332 or visit sunpowerca.com

About SunPower by Hooked on Solar

After more than 40 years in residential homebuilding and commercial construction, Chad and Ed Fralick, a father and son team, decided to specialize in the solar business full time in 2009. Ten years and thousands of installs later, SunPower by Hooked on Solar has grown to be the largest family owned solar company in Northern California.

With three Solar Design Centers open to the public, we provide a unique hands on educational experience to our customers. Our team of experienced Solar Consultants are dedicated to guiding our customers through the educational and decision-making process to decide if solar is right for them.

As a SunPower Master Dealer holding both Class B general and C-46 Solar contractors licensing, you can rest assured that you're partnering with the right solar expert to support you over the long-term. For more information, visit SunPowerca.com

Media Contact:

[Rebekah Armstrong, 925.718.7782 and [email protected]]

Related Images

sunpower-by-hooked-on-solar.png

SunPower by Hooked on Solar Honored with "Residential Regional Dealer of the Year" Award

Related Links

Contact Hooked on Solar

SOURCE SunPower by Hooked on Solar

Related Links

http://www.sunpowerca.com

LANCASTER, Calif., March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- If you've ever had to replace a credit card because of a data breach from a retailer, or received notice from a healthcare provider that your personal information may have been compromised, you have a taste of the damage hackers can do. But have you thought about what a network attack could do to our government, our communications systems or homeland security?

At Learn4Life, a dropout recovery program for at-risk high school students, network security is a popular career pathway that introduces students to the fundamentals of computer networking, cyber security and applied cryptography.

Cyber threat is a big issue for any size business in every industry, and at every level of government. With the projection of electronic devices growing from 28 million in 2017 to 56 million in 2022, the potential for cyberattacks and data breaches is an escalating concern.

Another serious concern is the shortage of skilled network security specialists. Could former at-risk students and dropouts help fill that gap?

At Learn4Life, a dropout recovery program for at-risk high school students, network security is a popular career pathway that introduces students to the fundamentals of computer networking, cyber security and applied cryptography.

Most students were behind in school and some had dropped out, but now they're close to graduating and will have industry-accepted certifications that can lead to a well-paying job while they continue their education. "This is especially amazing for our at-risk students, many of whom come to us with little computer knowledge because their families don't always have home computers or internet access," Natalie Cozby, CTE specialist at Learn4Life, explained. "So they are our super-achievers who will be graduating soon and on their way to an exciting career."

Students learn things they likely wouldn't learn in a traditional high school  such as how to identify and describe networking hardware, an introduction to IP routing concepts and protocols, network device security concepts, IP switching concepts and network troubleshooting.

Learn4Life students again competed in the U.S. Air Force Association's annual CyberPatriot competition, this time ranking in the top six percent of the 4,300+ teams nationwide. They spent two months in rounds of competition that challenged them with tasks to uncover vulnerabilities within operating systems while maintaining critical services.

About Learn4Life

Learn4Life is a network of like-minded nonprofits that are all focused on helping at-risk students turn their lives around by earning a high school diploma and job skills training. Through our one-on-one attention and personalized learning infused with trauma-informed practices and community partners, we help students prepare for a future beyond high school. Learn4Life serves more than 40,000 students across California. For more information, please visit http://www.learn4life.org/.

Media Contact:

Ann Abajian, Learn4Life, (844) 515-8186

[email protected]

SOURCE Learn4Life

Related Links

http://www.learnfourlife.org

Bremont's well-respected heritage and reputation within the military, specifically with the British military, made the British watchmaker the natural partner of choice for the MoD. Bremont has created numerous special-order projects at the request of personnel from all branches of the British armed forces and is widely recognised throughout for its discretion, its patriotism and its reputation for supplying products that are fit for purpose.

"It is difficult to think of a more significant recognition that has been received by Bremont in the 12 years since we sold our first watch," said Nick English, who co-founded the brand in 2002 with his brother, Giles.

"The fact that so many British military personnel from across the three forces have chosen to privately buy bespoke Bremont watches as a means of demonstrating their pride for the regiments, squadrons and ships companies in which they serve has long been extremely humbling to us and we are, of course, immensely honoured to now be an official partner of Her Majesty's Armed Forces."

Bremont ambassador Brian Wood MC comments, "A medal glitters, but it also casts a shadow. My story is a journey through adversity, I'm proud to have served my country and to have earned the Military Cross for my actions in Iraq. I've been tested beyond battle and now I'm proud to be partnering with Bremont, to be testing their watches beyond endurance. I know just how proud Nick and Giles English are of their military work to date and I can't think of a more fitting watch company for the Ministry of Defence than Bremont who are at the heart of bringing back watchmaking to the UK. Being 'Tested Beyond Endurance' couldn't be a more apt strapline for both military personnel and undoubtedly for this watch collection too."

To launch the new partnership, Bremont has developed the Armed Forces Collection which comprises three new MoD-inspired chronometer-rated timepieces. Whilst there will be a different design dedicated to each of the military branches, all will feature the collective historic and Heraldic Badges of the three services clearly stamped on the case- backs. As with all Bremont watches, these will be produced at the company's headquarters in Henley-on-Thames, UK.

The Armed Forces Collection draws inspiration from the original 'Dirty Dozen' watches, a series of timepieces commissioned for the British Army during WW2 when Britain's Ministry of Defence needed watches to issue to military personnel. Very strict performance specifications, for the time, were set which included waterproofing, regulation to chronometer specification, luminous markings on the dial and a robust case construction. In homage to these criteria Bremont has designed three stylish and sturdy timepieces that reflect the needs of Her Majesty's Armed Forces today. Taking design cues from the original 1940s models, produced by various brands around at that time, Bremont has developed a new, more traditional two-piece case with a screw-in, stamped case back.

The Bremont Broadsword is a contemporary take on the three handed 'Dirty Dozen' watch design which houses the chronometer rated BE-95-2AV movement inside its two-piece 40mm hardened steel case as well as a sub-seconds hand at 6 o'clock. Multiple layers of luminous paint on the hands and dial complete the original specification for the British Army.

The Bremont Arrow is a 42mm cased mono-pusher chronograph. The pusher at 2 o'clock on the two-piece hardened steel case will start, stop and reset the stopwatch on the chronometer rated BE-51AE movement. The Arrow plays on the same British military DNA as the Broadsword but is aimed at the airman with its chronograph functionality, a necessity for any timed mission. The sub-dial at 9 o'clock is a running seconds, and the chronograph has elapsed minutes on the 3 o'clock counter. Engineered with the utmost integrity, the Arrow is steadfastly accurate, durable and legible.

The final model in the new range is the Argonaut, a name inspired by Greek mythology and synonymous with Navy history having appeared on Commissioned ships for nearly 250 years. This exciting new 42mm hardened steel-cased military dive watch, houses a three-handed chronometer rated BE-92AV movement. The internal rotating bezel is operated by a crown at 4 o'clock, and readability on both the hands and dial have been crucial in the design process. With minutes being so critical in the marine environment, the highly legible orange minute hand can be seen very clearly and is filled with custom green Super-LumiNova.

The Bremont Armed Forces Collection aims to appeal to both military personnel and civilians alike, delivering a range that combines the need for performance and reliability.

A Captain Royal Navy said, "As a Royal Naval Officer, I am pleased that the wider community can share with us the pride and passion and that is the ethos of the Royal Navy. We too have been tried and tested and never found wanting. Always there, always ready and ever vigilant in protecting our Nation's interests."

A Colonel British Army said, "The Army's relentless drive for innovation is encapsulated by our exceptional soldiers who are always at the cutting edge of military performance. Bremont shares this drive for innovation exemplified by these new, British mechanical timepieces showcasing how Bremont too strives to be at the cutting edge of British engineering."

A Group Captain Royal Air Force said, "21st Century airpower relies on dedicated people, cutting edge technology and, of course, precise timekeeping. The Bremont Arrow encapsulates that spirit of the skies and new horizons."

About Ministry of Defence

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is the British government department responsible for implementing the defence policy set by Her Majesty's Government for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It consists of the Royal Navy, British Army and Royal Air Force.

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ministry-of-defence

About Bremont

Bremont is an award-winning British luxury watch brand, manufacturing mechanical watches in Henley-on-Thames, England. Bremont is making considerable investment with its UK watch making and manufacturing and at the end of 2014 launched a new Parts Manufacturing Facility which saw the firm starting to produce its own case and movement components. Co-founded by brothers Nick & Giles English in 2002, Bremont has made a substantial impact on the watch making industry in a very short period of time. The brand remains true to its original principles of: aviation and military, British engineering and adventure. As well as manufacturing watches for some of the most exclusive military squadrons around the world, Bremont continues to play an influential role in revitalising the British watch industry, the birthplace of numerous timekeeping innovations still used today. The brand is now in the top handful of chronometer producers in the world.

http://www.bremont.com

For further press information, images or to arrange interviews please contact Natalie Keigher [email protected], Telephone +44-0845-0940-690

SOURCE BremontXiomara Oviedo was born in Managua, Nicaragua; and for twenty years she has lived in Texas, is married and has three children. She is a doctor with a specialization in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and she also has a Ministerial Doctorate in Theology, from International Vision of the University of Florida. She currently works with the pastoral team of the Townwood Christian Church in Houston, Texas, actively serving in the Ministry of Internal Health as part of the preparation for the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. She is an avid reader of the word of God, preacher and woman of faith.

The author provides us with a space of peace and understanding on how the presence of God helps and guides in every moment of a human being's daily life, then the author explains how she came to concretize this work: "When waking up in a beautiful morning, a fragment of writing came to my mind, which speaks about the greatness of God's love for us. With the help of the Bible I found the passage, and being in the presence of the Lord and meditating on his word, I began to write that day and then daily the different pages of this book, "In His Presence: Revelations of the Love of God." Here you will find different biblical verses, commented as reflections, whose practical application is strongly supported according to what God reveals to us in his word.

In a simple way and based on what the Bible says, different issues concerning the daily life of men, women, youth, adults and children are addressed. Topics such as gratitude, the need to forgive, the instruction of children since childhood, physical and integral healing, walking in holiness and obedience to God, faith and trust in God, the greatness and faithfulness of our God, the infinite greatness of his love, fear, anxiety; and many others, all focused from the perspective of his word."

This work is directed to those who are far from the ways of the Lord, either because they have distanced themselves from them, or because they have never walked in them; but also to those who, knowing him, have more and more hunger for him and long to be guided by his word.

Published by Page Publishing, the work of Xiomara Oviedo, "In His Presence: Revelations of the Love of God," is a work of spiritual help and renewal that results from the application of the teachings from the Bible to the life of the human being.

For readers who wish to live a renewing experience, they can do so, through reading this wonderful book of inspirational devotions, and can purchase "In His Presence: Revelations of God's Love", in any book store, or in the online stores of Apple iTunes, 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 world's 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 www.pagepublishing.com.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/840062/Page_Publishing_Xiomara_Oviedo.jpg

SOURCE Page Publishing

Related Links

https://www.pagepublishing.com

The Standard Profil Group manufactures sealing profiles for global automotive brands in seven countries on 12 production plants. The company, operating in China since 2011, recently invested in the city of Jingzhou for its new plant with an investment of EUR 6 million. The Standard Profil Jingzhou Plant was commissioned with a ceremony attended by Guangzhong He, Secretary of Municipal Party Committee, Zhiqing Zhong , Municipal Executive Deputy Mayor, Sabri Tunc Angl , Consul General of Turkey, Sezgin Taskn , Beijing Commercial Counsellor of Turkey and Turhan Semizer, the Standard Profil Group CEO . The plant will function as the lead plant for operations in China.

The plant, occupying 66,000 square meters in a strategic area will manufacture 2 million sealing systems annually for Geely, Volvo, Audi, SGM, Renault, Saleen and other automotive giants. The Group will be employing 300 employees till the end of 2019.

At the opening ceremony of The Standard Profil Jingzhou Plant, CEO Turhan Semizer said: "We are proud of our new investment in a strategic region of China. Starting off as a local provider 42 years ago, we are now a global brand; number three in Europe and number six in the world. China is a key market for us and with this EUR 6 million investment in Jingzhou we will be closer to our customers. Considering our booked business with the customers, we expect to reach 600 colleagues in the following two years. By focusing on continuous improvement and high quality, we will have a stronger position in the Chinese market and Asia-Pacific region thanks to the new Jingzhou Plant."

About Standard Profil:

Standard Profil operates under Standard Profil Otomotiv San. ve Tic. A.S. established in 1977. The company manufactures sealing components for the global automotive markets. Headquartered in Istanbul, the company has three plants in Duzce and Manisa. The company operates also in Spain, Morocco, China, South Africa, Bulgaria and Mexico.

SOURCE The Standard Profil GroupWASHINGTON, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The president of the Border Trade Alliance says a move by a small group of Florida tomato growers to end a long-standing agreement governing the importation of Mexican tomatoes would harm consumers and threaten retaliation by Mexico that would damage U.S. agricultural exports.

"The increased protection Florida is pursuing would involve placing high duties on Mexican produce, leading to increased prices, less variety for U.S. consumers, and a distribution monopoly for a few Florida growers, who ironically buy and repack Mexican tomatoes themselves," said BTA President Britton Clarke in an op-ed in the Rio Grande Guardian.

"What's worse, this move threatens the USMCA, the successor agreement to NAFTA, which is facing ratification problems in all three NAFTA countries. More ominously, it invites retaliation from Mexico against successful U.S. agricultural exports such as corn, wheat, soybeans, pears, apples and pork. In other words, a few companies in Florida will, if successful, turn a "win-win" in trilateral trade into a total loss."

The Border Trade Alliance is a grassroots non-profit organization that serves as a forum for participants to address key issues affecting trade, travel and security in North America.

The full text of Ms. Clarke's op-ed:

Whatever its shortcomings, one thing is clear about the North American Free Trade Agreement: It has been an unquestionable success for farmers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

NAFTA has been a boon for states like Texas, California and Arizona, where tens of thousands of jobs are directly linked to selling, distributing, warehousing, and transporting Mexican produce throughout the country. It has served as an even bigger job creator for corn growers in Iowa and Nebraska, pork producers in Minnesota and South Dakota, wheat farmers in North Dakota and Kansas, apple and pear growers in Washington and soybean farmers in Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, Kansas and, again, Iowa and Nebraska.

American farmers have succeeded largely because of the quality of American grains and fruit. Likewise, produce from Mexico, which has much better growing conditions for products such as tomatoes and peppers, has been embraced just as readily by U.S. retailers and consumers as American corn and wheat has by Mexicans.

Recently, however, cross-border trade in agriculture has been put at needless risk by an issue that could turn a win-win situation into a trade war threatening farmers on both sides of the border. At the urging of a small group of tomato growers from Florida the U.S. Commerce Department has preliminarily withdrawn from a 22-year-old Tomato Suspension Agreement that has permitted imports of Mexico's superior vine-ripe tomatoes while maintaining a minimum U.S. price for that produce. That agreement has worked well and was updated only six years ago. It has also averted a trade war over a longstanding U.S.-Mexico trade issue.

The increased protection Florida is pursuing would involve placing high duties on Mexican produce, leading to increased prices, less variety for U.S. consumers, and a distribution monopoly for a few Florida growers, who ironically buy and repack Mexican tomatoes themselves. What's worse, this move threatens the USMCA, the successor agreement to NAFTA, which is facing ratification problems in all three NAFTA countries. More ominously, it invites retaliation from Mexico against successful U.S. agricultural exports such as corn, wheat, soybeans, pears, apples and pork. In other words, a few companies in Florida will, if successful, turn a "win-win" in trilateral trade into a total loss.

NAFTA has been a compelling success story for U.S. agricultural producers. U.S. exports of agricultural products to Mexico totaled $19 billion in 2017, making it our third largest agricultural export market. Leading domestic exports include corn ($2.7 billion), soybeans ($1.6 billion), pork & pork products ($1.5 billion), dairy products ($1.3 billion), and beef & beef products ($979 million). Iowa's number one export market is Canada, and number two is Mexico. Mexico is Kansas' number one export market; it is number two for Ohio; number two for South Dakota; number two for Minnesota and so on.

U.S. agricultural interests spoke with one voice during the USMCA negotiations, telling the Trump Administration to first and foremost do no harm to their NAFTA exports and emphasizing the importance of the Mexican and Canadian markets. It is not difficult to figure out what will happen if the United States tries to turn the flow of agricultural products into a one-way street.

Mexico's produce industry supports almost 1.5 million jobs, directly and indirectly. In a letter hand delivered to U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on March 15, Mexico's Minister of Economy Graciela Marquez warned of the impact the loss of those jobs could have on pressing bilateral trade issues. "Given the importance of reciprocal trade between our countries and the future implementation of the USMCA, the termination of the Tomato Suspension Agreement would not only be unfortunate but harmful," she wrote. "[Almost] 400,000 agricultural [workers] and one million additional jobs in related industries in Mexico would be at risk. These jobs are as important to Mexico as the export jobs in the corn, pork, wheat, apples, beef, and soybeans industries, among many others, are to the United States."

It is clear that Mexico will not sit by while a small group of Florida farmers tries to eliminate their Mexican competition. Retaliation against U.S. agriculture is likely, and that does not benefit anybody.

SOURCE Border Trade AllianceCaracas, March 22 : The Venezuelan government has accused the detained chief of staff of self-proclaimed interim head of state Juan Guaido of leading a terrorist cell.

Interior Minister Nestor Reverol made his remarks on Thursday after Roberto Marrero was arrested earlier in the day at his home in Caracas, reports Efe news.

In a message aired by state television, Reverol said Marrero was directly responsible for organizing criminal groups.

He added that a cache of "war weapons", as well as "cash in foreign currencies", were seized at Marrero's residence during the early Thursday raid.

Reverol said intelligence services had "once again dismantled a terrorist cell that was planning to carry out a series of targeted attacks and to that end had hired Colombian and Central American mercenaries".

Meanwhile, embattled President Nicolas Maduro said on Thursday that he would not hesitate to arrest members of "terrorist groups".

"I want it to be clear that the Bolivarian and revolutionary Venezuelan government will not hesitate to combat terrorist groups, to put them in jail. What they're doing is not politics, it's simply terrorism," said Maduro.

Venezuela was hit this month by a nearly week-long nationwide blackout that the government says was the result of opposition "sabotage".

Guaido, who is the speaker of Venezuela's opposition-led National Assembly and has been recognised as the oil-rich nation's legitimate leader by the US and around 50 other countries, has described the detention of his senior aide as a "kidnapping", adding that he will not make any changes to his schedule due to the development.

The opposition leader was referring to plans to drum up support in different states for a massive nationwide march in Caracas. However, the date is yet to be finalised.

The US denounced the action targeting Guaido's inner circle.

"The US condemns raids by Maduro's security services and detention of Roberto Marrero, Chief of Staff to Interim President @jguaido. We call for his immediate release. We will hold accountable those involved," US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a tweet.New Delhi, March 22 : The BJP on Friday accused the Congress of attempting to "separate terror from Pakistan" and said that while on one hand it blamed the Narendra Modi government for the air strikes in Pakistan, on the other, it was handing out a clean chit to Islamabad.

"Shame on Congress. Top Congress leader and Rahul Gandhi's chief advisor Sam Pitroda, on one hand, handing out clean chit to Pakistan, while on the other blames Modi government and India for the air strikes. Astonishing attempt by the Congress to separate terror from Pakistan," Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Sambit Patra tweeted.

Earlier, referring to the February 14 Pulwama terror attack, Pitroda had said that such incidents "happen all the time" and that the United Progressive Alliance government could have also reacted by sending planes across the border after the 2008 Mumbai terror attack but "that is not the right approach" to deal with the world.

He said one can't jump on the entire nation (Pakistan) if a few terrorists "come and do something" in India, and that it was naive to blame every citizen of that nation because of some people.Jakarta, March 22 : Garuda Indonesia, the country's flag carrier, announced on Friday that it's cancelling an order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 passenger jets after two planes of the same model crashed in a span of five months.

"Our passengers have lost confidence to fly with the Max 8," Garuda spokesperson Ikhsan Rosan told CNN.

The Indonesian carrier had ordered 50 of the planes and has already received one of them, according to Rosan.

It has sent a letter to Boeing saying that it no longer wants to receive the remaining jets on order, he said.

It's the latest blow to Boeing over the 737 Max, its bestselling passenger jet.

The planes have been grounded worldwide over safety concerns following the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed 189 people onboard and also a second crash that took place last October involving a Lion Air flight that plunged into the Java Sea, killing 157 persons.

Boeing representatives are planning to visit Jakarta on March 28 to discuss the request with the airline, Rosan told CNN.

A Boeing spokesperson said the company doesn't comment on "customer discussions".

The two incidents have also led to the US Department of Transportation to ask for an audit of the Federal Aviation Administration's approval of Boeing's 737 Max 8 planes, while the FBI has reportedly joined in a criminal investigation of the certification process for the jets.San Francisco, March 22 : Microsoft is rolling out its Windows Defender anti-virus software to Apple's operating system MacOS, with full virus and threat protection along with the usual ability to perform quick or full scans.

Defender is currently built into Windows 10, offering anti-virus protection by default.

While in the process of creating a dedicated Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Mac, the software giant has renamed its Windows Defender ATP to Microsoft Defender ATP, the company informed via a blog-post on Thursday.

"We've been working closely with industry partners to enable Windows Defender ATP customers to protect their non-Windows devices while keeping a centralised experience," Eric Avena, Senior Content Developer, Microsoft wrote in the blog-post.

For businesses, a limited preview would be available for trying out the anti-virus protection in environments that have both Windows PCs and Macs.

"Now we are going a step further by adding our own solution to the options, starting with a limited preview today," Avena said.

To keep the client up to date on MacOS, the software giant is using its AutoUpdate software, available on devices running MacOS Mojave, MacOS High Sierra, or MacOS Sierra, The Verge reported.

As ATP is limited to businesses, it remains unclear if Microsoft is also planning to bring a consumer version of Microsoft Defender to the Mac.New Delhi, March 22 : In a sharp attack, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday accused the opposition of insulting defence forces and being the "natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners" of the country's armed forces.

His statement came in response to Congress President Rahul Gandhi's chief advisor Sam Pitroda's remarks referring to the February 14 Pulwama terror attack that such incidents "happen all the time" and that the UPA government also could have send planes across the border after the 2008 Mumbai terror attack but "that is not the right approach" to deal with the world.

"Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew -- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India -- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest," Modi said in a tweet.

"The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning India's armed forces. Shame!" he added.

On Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav's statement that the Pulwama attack was a conspiracy to win votes and would be investigated after a new government takes over, Modi said: "This reprehensible statement by a senior leader like Ram Gopal ji insults all those who have given their lives in protecting Kashmir. It humiliates the families of our martyrs.

"Opposition is the natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners of our armed forces."

He accused the opposition of insulting the forces time and again.

Earlier, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Sambit Patra accused the Congress of attempting to "separate terror from Pakistan".

"Shame on Congress. Top Congress leader and Rahul Gandhi's chief advisor Sam Pitroda, on one hand, handing out clean chit to Pakistan, while on the other blames Modi government and India for the air strikes. Astonishing attempt by the Congress to separate terror from Pakistan," Patra said in a tweet.Seoul, March 22 : South Korea has proposed holding military talks with North Korea to implement a bilateral accord signed in 2018, but there has been no reply from Pyongyang yet, an official said here on Friday.

"Recently, (we) suggested South-North military talks and are currently waiting for a response," Yonhap News Agency quoted a South Korean Defence Ministry official as saying.

Last week, Defence Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo reported to South Korean President Moon Jae-in that the military plans to have concrete talks with North Korea to follow up on the Comprehensive Military Agreement that was aimed at easing tensions and building mutual trust.

The September 19, 2018, agreement was signed by defence chiefs of the two Koreas during the third summit between Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang.

The Koreas implemented some of the deals in 2018, including the trial pullout of frontline guard posts, disarmament of the Joint Security Area of Panmunjom and a joint survey of waterways in the Han River estuary.New Delhi, March 22 : Want to create your own music? Try Google's first ever Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered Doodle, dedicated to celebrate the birth anniversary of renowned German musician and composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach, who lived during the Baroque period of the 18th century, produced hundreds of compositions including cantatas, concertos, suites and chorales.

The Doodle, developed in partnership with Magenta and PAIR teams at Google, is an interactive experience where the composer is playing an organ in celebration of his March 21, 1685, birthday under the old Julian calendar, encouraging musicians to compose their own two-measure melody.

With the press of a button, the Doodle uses Machine Learning (ML) to harmonise the custom melody into Bach's signature music style.

With the interactive Doodle, one "can create own melody, and through the magic of ML, the Doodle will harmonise your melody in Bach's style", Lauren Hannah-Murphy, Programme Manager at Google AI said in a statement on Friday.

"You can also explore inside the Doodle to see how the model Bach-ifys familiar tunes, or how your new collaboration might sound in a more modern rock style," Hannah-Murphy added.

To create the AI-powered Doodle, the teams first build a ML model called Coconet and then customised it to match Bach's musical style.

Coconet can be used in a wide range of musical tasks-such as harmonising melodies, creating smooth transitions between disconnected fragments of music and composing from scratch.

The team then trained Coconet on 306 of Bach's chorale harmonisations. His chorales always have four voices: each carries their own melodic line, creating a rich harmonic progression when played together.

Further, to ensure that people around the world could use the Doodle, the teams used PAIR's TensorFlow.js, which allows ML to happen entirely within an internet browser.

The ML model can also be worked on Google's new Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), for cases where someone's computer or device might not support TensorFlow.js.

"The Doodle is the first one ever to use TPUs in this way," Hannah-Murphy said.Bengaluru, March 22 : The death toll in the building collapse in Karnataka's Dharwad on Tuesday rose to 14, whereas 60 people have been rescued so far, officials said on Friday.

A man was rescued on Friday morning after being trapped for nearly 60 hours.

"A total of 14 people have died. Two people were rescued on Thursday," Dharwad Deputy Commissioner M. Deepa told the media at the accident site, about 400 km northwest of here.

Three people were still suspected to be trapped in the debris, Assistant Commissioner of Police A.S. Bhoomareddy said.

"Oxygen and oral rehydration solutions were given to those still trapped," Bhoomareddy told IANS from Dharwad.

Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy announced Rs 2 lakh compensation to the kin of the deceased.

All four owners of the building under construction surrendered before the police on Thursday night after a case was registered against them. The building's engineer was also taken into police custody.

A magisterial inquiry, to be headed by a Deputy Commissioner, was ordered into the accident.

Personnel from the National Disaster Response Force, the State Disaster Response Force and fire and emergency services are conducting the rescue work.Beijing, March 22 : The death toll from a blast that ripped through a chemical plant in China's Jiangsu province has increased to 47, with 90 others seriously injured, authorities said on Friday.

The blast took place at 2.48 p.m. on Thursday following a fire that broke out in the plant located in an industrial park in Xiangshui county, Yancheng city, reports Xinhua news agency.

According to the authorities, the explosion has affected 16 surrounding businesses.

The fire was put out early Friday morning.

Meawnhile, President Xi Jinping said all-out efforts must be made to search for the people trapped in the plant.

Xi also ordered a probe into the cause of the accident as early as possible.

China's earthquake administration reported a tremor equivalent to 2.2-magnitude at the time of the blast.

The last big accident in China was the August 2015 Tianjin explosion, which killed more than 160 people and injured nearly 1,000.Lucknow, March 22 : Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Friday told the Modi government not to pretend to be the Indian Army and said that governments which say they can't be questioned are dangerous.

"The sacrifices of our armed forces should never be questioned. To ask questions to politicians in a democracy is our fundamental right. This government needs to stop pretending to be the Indian Army," the former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister tweeted.

"Politicians who say they cannot be questioned are dangerous," he tweeted.

His remarks came soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused the opposition of insulting the defence forces and being the "natural habitat of terror apologists" and questioning the armed forces.

Modi's statement came in response to Congress President Rahul Gandhi's chief advisor Sam Pitroda's remarks that incidents like the Pulwama terror attack "happen all the time" and that the United Progressive Alliance government also could have sent planes across the border after the 2008 Mumbai terror attack but "that is not the right approach".

"Loyal courtier of Congress' royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew -- Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India -- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest," Modi tweeted.New Delhi, March 22 : It's been described as "an episode without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British empire. Not surprisingly, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 13, 1919, spawned a wealth of outporuing from Indian writers and poets that author-critic-literary historian Rakshanda Jalil has painstakingly brought together in a seminal volume that will be an eye-opener for the present generation for the lows to which a ruler can stoop.

"While a grat deal of scholarly work has been done on Jalianwala Bagh, it's reflection in Indian literature in the different bhashas and also in English has been overlooked.

"I was curious to see how an incident that stirred the conscience of millions, one that had far-reaching implications for the national freedom struggle, that made British colonial interests in India morally untenable, found its way through pen and paper to reach the nooks and cranies of popular imagination filtered through the mind of the creative writer," Jalil writes in the extensive introduction to "Jallainwala Bagh - Literary Responses in Prose and Poetry" (Niyogi Books/pp 227).

The book, she says, subjective as all such collections are by their very nature, "makes no pretence at being either exhaustive ot definite; it's only claim is to open a window into the world of possibilities that literature offers to reflect, interpret and occasionally analyse events of momentous historical import. At best, the prose and poetry included in this selection offers ways of 'seeing' history," Jalil says.

As is Jalil's wont, she is being much too modest. Where else, in one volume, will you come across the works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Mulk Raj Anand, Bhisham Sahani, Stanley Wolpert, Saojini Naidu, Muhammad Iqbal and Josh Mahilabadi, to name just a few of those featured.

What clearly comes out is the pain and anguish the Jallianwala Bagh massacre caused them and the burden of living under a brutal colonial ruler for whom justice and mercy didn't exist. And yet, the fire of freedom didn't die - indeed it was only reinforced.

Sample this from "Inquilab" by Abbas, about two friends, Anwar and Ratan, caught in the malestorm of the massacre: "A child was trying to wake up his mother who would be asleep forever; a boy of Anwar's own age lay flat and lifeless. Everywhere there was blood. Anwar's head reeled, his bowels contracted within him, he wanted to vomit but could not. He laid his head on the ground and saw the sky revolving and the stars dancing, a dance of death, and the crooked palm tree was dancing too. But before he yielded to unconsciousness, Anwar saw a glimpse of Ratan's face. It bore nor trace of sorrow or grief but a far-way look, he was biting his lip to choke his sobs, and his eyes were ablaze with the cold fury of revenge."

Then, there's "Panjab 1919" by Sarojini Naidu: "How shall our love console thee, or assuage/Thy helpless woe; how shall our grief requite/The hearts that scourge thee and the hands that smite/Thy beauty with their rods of bitter rage?

Lo! Let our sorrows be they battle-gage/To wreck the terror of the tyrant's might/Who mocks with ribald wrath they tragic plight/And stains with shame they radiant heritage!

O beautiful! O broken and betrayed!/O mournful queen!/O martyred Draupadi!/Endure thou still, unconquered, undismayed!/The sacred rivers of thy stricken blood/Shall prove the five-fold stream of Freedom's flood/To guard the watch-towers of our Liberty."

Jalil's work will ensure that the flame that Jallianwalla Bagh lit will never be ensured.

(Vishnu Makhijani can be reached at vishnu.makhijani@ians.in)San Francisco, March 22 : Russian hackers are targeting European government systems ahead of the EU parliament election in May, according to cybersecurity company FireEye.

In their attempt to gather government information, two state-sponsored hacking groups - APT28, also known as Fancy Bear, and Sandworm -- have been sending out phishing emails to officials, Engadget reported on Thursday, citing research from FireEye.

"The groups could be trying to gain access to the targeted networks in order to gather information that will allow Russia to make more informed political decisions, or it could be gearing up to leak data that would be damaging for a particular political party or candidate ahead of the European elections," FireEye's Senior Manager of Cyberespionage Analysis, Benjamin Read, said in a statement.

The Milpitas, California-headquartered firm said the campaigns by the two Russian groups are ongoing, but the firm did not say whether any sensitive data had been linked.

Microsoft last month warned that it detected recent activity targeting democratic institutions in Europe.

The software giant claimed to have recently detected 104 targeted accounts belonging to organisations, including the German Council on Foreign Relations, The Aspen Institutes in Europe and The German Marshall Fund.

It is believed that many of these attacks originated from a Russian hacking group.Mumbai, March 22 : NDA ally and Union Minister for Social Welfare Ramdas Athawale senses an opportunity to wrest the Mumbai North-East Lok Sabha seat in the ongoing tussle between Maharashtra's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena coalition over the constituency, party sources indicated on Friday.

Due to huge differences with the Shiv Sena, the BJP has so far not announced the candidature for Mumbai North-East - currently represented by Kirit Somaiya - though it retained and declared the names of Poonam Mahajan (Mumbai North-Central) and Gopal Shetty (Mumbai North).

The Sena has made it clear that if Somaiya is nominated, it would not only campaign for his defeat but this could also hamper its statewide alliance with the BJP.

The cat-fight between the two allies is considered 'fortuitous' by Athawale, who has been clamouring for at least two seats for his Republican Party of India-A.

He has been lobbying hard for getting at least one seat in Mumbai and another elsewhere in the state from the BJP-Sena's quotas, but both have rejected his demands.

"While Shiv Sena feels the RPI should contest Mumbai North-East, the BJP wants to give us Mumbai South-Central seat," Athawale claimed last fortnight, on the seats held by BJP and Sena, respectively.

However, both parties are reluctant to give up their seats in the country's commercial capital represented by Poonam Mahajan (BJP) and Rahul Shewale (Sena), or elsewhere in the state to the RPI-A in the high-stakes elections.

A senior RPI leader pointed out how Athawale enjoys a great rapport with both Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Shiv Sena President Uddhav Thackeray and allotting the seats to the RPI-A could a win-win situation for all sides.

"If the BJP re-nominates Somaiya, it could be in danger of losing that seat as Sena will work against him. Athawale can be a formidable candidate as both parties will work with RPI-A and the huge Dalit population in that constituency will help," a party leader explained, requesting anonymity.

It maybe recalled that prior to the alliance, Somaiya had been a bitter critic of the Sena and once even threatened to throw its top leadership in jail if voted back to power.

The Sena hit back by opposing Somaiya's nomination and warned of heavy costs to the BJP, including losing the seat and even the alliance.

In this scenario, another senior aide said that Athawale could be an effective counter to the Prakash Ambedkar's Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh and AIMIM's Owaisi brothers which will contest elections for all 48 seats in the state under the banner of the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA).

The major opponent in Mumbai North-East will be former MP Sanjay D. Patil of the Nationalist Congress Party, which has only one seat in Mumbai, with the remaining five going to the Congress quota.

Patil could have an edge with campaign support from Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which is not contesting the Lok Sabha polls this time.

Maharashtra, which has 48 Lok Sabha constituencies, the second-highest in the country after Uttar Pradesh's 80 seats, was unilaterally carved out by the BJP-Sena last month, leaving all other smaller allies fuming.

The leaders of five parties small in the Maharashtra NDA even held a 'mini-conclave' and unanimously demanded an adequate number of seats for both the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.

After blowing hot and cold for over a year, the BJP-Sena last month entered into a pre-poll alliance in the presence of Thackeray and BJP President Amit Shah.

They will fight the parliamentary elections in the 25:23 ratio and contest the assembly elections later this year on a 50:50 basis, after seat allotments to the smaller alliance partners.

(Quaid Najmi can be contacted at q.najmi@ians.in)Agartala/Aizawl, March 22 : The Election Commission will set up 15 special polling stations at Kanhmun village along the Mizoram-Tripura border to help tribal refugees living in relief camps in Tripura exercise their franchise for the lone Lok Sabha seat in Mizoram, officials said on Friday.

The tribal refugees, however, have yet to decide whether they would go to Kanhmun village to cast their votes.

There are around 12,000 eligible voters, from among the 35,000 tribal immigrants from Mizoram, sheltered in northern Tripura's seven relief camps in Kanchanpur and Panisagar sub-divisions for the past 22 years after they fled from Mizoram in the wake of communal tensions.

"Like last year's Assembly elections, the Election Commission has decided to set up 15 special polling stations at Kanhmun village to facilitate voting by the tribal refugees during the Lok Sabha polls in Mizoram," Kanchanpur Sub-Divisional Magistrate Abeda Nanda Baidya told IANS on the phone.

He said: "The North Tripura district administration would arrange vehicles and security to help these tribals to cast their votes in these 15 special polling stations on April 11."

Meanwhile, the NGO Coordination Committee, a conglomerate of major civil society and student organisations, had earlier threatened to agitate if special arrangements were made for the tribal refugee voters to cast their votes in the special polling stations, instead of the normal polling stations in different districts of Mizoram.

A delegation of the Mizoram Bru Displaced People's Forum (MBDPF), the refugees' apex body, would meet the Election Commission in Delhi next week demanding setting up of polling stations inside the seven relief camps "It would be very difficult for the aged, ailing and pregnant women to travel on an average of 35 km to Kanhmun village to cast votes. A three member MBDPF delegation would meet the Election Commission early next week to persuade the commission to accept our demands," Bruno Msha, General Secretary of MBDPF, told IANS.

Mizoram Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Ashish Kundra said in Aizawl that as per the Election Commission's directives, 15 polling stations - nine for Mamit district and three each for Kolasib and Lunglei districts - would be set up at the Mizoram-Tripura border village.

Kundra said that he is in close touch with the Tripura CEO regarding the logistical support to the refugee voters. He said that he will send a team to Tripura to discuss the arrangements.

Meanwhile, following an agreement signed in Delhi in July 2018, foodgrain and other relief supplies to the Reang tribal immigrants was to be stopped from October 1, 2018, to compel the tribal refugees to return to their respective villages in Mizoram.

However, following an appeal by the refugees, the supply was extended twice by the Union Home Ministry first till March 31 and then again till September 30.

"A Home Ministry letter to the Chief Secretaries of Tripura and Mizoram said that the refugees have to be repatriated by September 30. Free rations and other facilities will be stopped then," an official of Tripura's Revenue and Relief department said.Mumbai, March 22 : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday arrested jeweller Abdul Kadir Najmudin Sathak here for assisting fugitive controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik by transferring funds of dubious origins from the UAE to him.

The agency said the funds were used to facilitate production of videos meant to spread communal hatred and radicalize a particular community.

Sathak was director of Global Broadcasting Corp FZE LLC, which owned the Peace TV channel which broadcast the "communal and inflammatory" speeches of televangelist Naik from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the Middle East and Africa, an ED statement said.

"Investigation revealed that Global Broadcasting Corp was controlled by Naik through Sathak who was his trusted aide."

The ED in December 2016 registered a criminal case against Naik and his Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) under money laundering laws after taking cognisance of a similar FIR lodged by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act against them in November 2016.

Naik, who has got permanent resident status in Malaysia, came on the security agencies' radar after some terrorists, allegedly involved in the attack on a cafe in Dhaka in July 2016, claimed they were inspired by his speeches.

On November 17, 2016, India declared Naik's Mumbai-based NGO IRF an unlawful association under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.Damascus, March 22 : The Syrian government on Friday slammed US President Donald Trump's remarks about accepting Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, a part of Syria that has been under Israeli military occupation since the Six-Day War of 1967.

The Foreign Ministry described Trump's statement on Thursday as reckless, saying that this kind of act has shown the absolute support of the United States for Israeli aggression, reports Efe news.

"It has become perfectly clear to the international community that the US, with its irrational policies governed by a hegemonic and arrogant mentality, has become the main factor in aggravating situations on the international level and threatening international peace and stability," a Ministry source said in a statement.

It also highlighted the violation of the UN Security Council Resolution 497 of 1981, adopted unanimously by all members including the US, which rejects the decision of Israel to effectively occupy the Golan Heights.

"The announcements of the US President and his administration about the Syrian-occupied Golan will never change the fact that the Golan was and will always be Arab and Syrian.

"Syrian people are more determined to liberate this precious part of the Syrian nation by all possible means and return it to its homeland," the statement added.

On Thursday, Trump said in a tweet: "After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

The tweet comes ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the US where he is slated to meet Trump on March 25.

Netanyahu, campaigning ahead of Israel's April 9 general elections, was quick to respond to Trump's comment.

"At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump!" Netanyahu tweeted.

The Golan Heights is a region located about 60 km south-west of the Syrian capital Damascus, and covers about 1,200 sq km.

Israel seized most of the Golan from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Middle East war, and thwarted a Syrian attempt to retake the region during the 1973 war.

The two countries agreed a disengagement plan the following year that involved the creation of a 70 km-long demilitarised zone patrolled by a UN observer force. But they remained technically in a state of war.

In its latest annual report on human rights around the world, the US State Department departed from its previous practice by referring to the Golan Heights as "Israeli-controlled" rather than "Israeli-occupied".

Most of the 26,000 members of the Druze religious community in the Golan Heights have refused assimilation into the Israeli state and nearly all of them boycotted Israel's first-ever attempt to hold municipal elections there last October.Kolkata, March 22 : A group of BJP activists on Friday protested against the nomination of Nisith Pramanik, who recently switched to the saffron party from the Trinamool Congress, as a candidate from Coochbehar constituency in West Bengal.

They vandalised furniture, ransacked the party office in Coochbehar, and heckled district chief Malati Rava on Thursday night, alleging that she took a bribe from Pramanik.

"We do not want any turncoat to be selected from Coochbehar. The party did not consider leaders who have been fighting against Trinamool for years. We are disappointed," a worker said.

Refuting all the allegations against her, Rava said the central leadership had nominated Pramanik and the district leaders had "no say" in it.

"We, from the district, have not recommended him... They (BJP workers) are unhappy and expressed their dissatisfaction. It is a natural phenomenon in a political party and everything would be sorted out," she told IANS over phone.

Taking strong exception to the protest, state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Dilip Ghosh said those not willing to accept the central leadership's decision may leave the party.

"We have gained in strength in West Bengal over the past two-three years... As a cadre-based and disciplined party, we have to accept the decision. Those who are opposing it can leave us," he added.

According to party sources, Dipak Barman, a long time party worker, may fight from the seat as an Independent candidate.

Rava, however, ruled out any such possibility.Istanbul, March 22 : The Foreign Ministers of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member states met here on Friday on how to respond to hate speeches and violence against Muslims.

The meeting was called by Turkey in the wake of the March 15 mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 50 people, reports Xinhua news agency.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu described the gathering as a sign showing the Islamic world was not deaf in the face of the attacks Muslims were facing different parts of the world.

"Against racism, intolerance, exclusion and violence, today we will strengthen our solidarity with them," Cavusoglu said, stressing that taking effective measures against Islamophobia and the problems it creates was "a must".

The Minister urged the administrators, decision-makers and politicians in places where Muslims live to take practical steps against rising violence.

Yousef Al-Othaimeen, the OIC Secretary-General, also called for the world to take actions against hatred and intolerance toward Muslims, saying "terror has no language, religion or race".

Besides the Foreign Ministers, representatives from international organisations, including the UN, European Union and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, attended the meet Turkey, the host of the meeting, currently holds the rotating OIC presidency.Tirupati, March 22 : Elections in Tirupati always evoke keen interest among political parties in Andhra Pradesh as the leaders feel privileged to represent the constituency for its religious significance.

Both the Tirupati Lok Sabha and Assembly constituencies are considered prestigious. There is always higher demand for Assembly tickets due to the sentiments attached to the temple town.

Politicians consider election from Tirupati as God-given gift as it is the abode of Lord Venkateswara temple, said to be the richest in the world.

In the elections scheduled on April 11, Tirupati Assembly seat will be witnessing a keen contest between two former chairmen of Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD), the powerful body which manages the affairs of the famous temple.

Actor Pawan Kalyan's Jana Sena Party has fielded Chadalawada Krishnamurthy, who will lock horns with another former TTD chairman, B. Karnunakar Reddy, of the YSR Congress Party. Both are former MLAs from Tirupati.

They faced each other in an election in the past but this is the first time that they are clashing as former heads of TTD and is said to be the first such contest.

Krishnamurthy, who joined Jana Sena six months ago after quitting Telugu Desam Party (TDP), thanked Pawan Kalyan for choosing him to contest. "It is a gift given by the God to serve the people,a said Krishnamurthy, who was earlier elected as TDP MLA from Tirupati in 1999.

Krishnamurthy was among those injured when Maoists made a bid on the life of then Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu at Alipiri in Tirupati After bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh and TDP forming the first government in the residuary state, Naidu had made Krishnamurthy TTD chairman in 2015. He held the post till last year.

Despite leaving the TDP, Krishnamurthy said he would remain indebted to Naidu for giving him the enviable post of TTD chairman.

This time, Tirupati is expected to witness a multi-cornered contest as the ruling TDP has re-nominated outgoing MLA M. Suguna. She was elected in 2015 by-election caused by the death of her husband M. Venkatramna.

By again fielding Suguna, TDP has done away with its tradition of never fielding an outgoing MLA in Tirupati.

It was in 2006 that the then Congress government made Karunakar Reddy the chairman of TTD and he held the post for two years.

Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi, who had floated Praja Rajyam Party (PRP), was elected from Tirupati in 2009. He defeated his nearest rival Karunakar Reddy, who was then with the Congress, by over 15,000 votes.

Chiranjeevi's elevation to the Rajya Sabha after he merged PRP with the Congress necessitated a by-elections in 2012. Karunakar Reddy, who had switched loyalty to YSR Congress, was elected, defeating nearest rival Venkatramna of Congress by nearly 18,000 votes. TDP's Krishnamurthy had finished third.

In 2014, Venkatramna contested as TDP candidate and trounced Karunakar Reddy of YSR Congress by a massive majority of over 41,000 votes.

(Mohammed Shafeeq can be contacted at m.shafeeq)Seoul, March 22 : North Korea on Friday withdrew from a joint liaison office near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with South Korea, which was opened amid a warming of ties last year to facilitate talks with Seoul.

South Korea's Unification Ministry announced the move, saying the decision had been taken by the North on "instructions from the superior authority", CNN reported.

In its communication with the South, Pyongyang said it would not mind Seoul's representatives "remaining in the office," which is based in Kaesong, a part of North Korea near the de-facto border between the two countries.

Pyongyang said it would notify Seoul regarding "further practical matters in the future".

In response to the development, the Unification Ministry said South Korea regrets the decision, and urged the North to return soon and continue the work being done at the liaison office towards a full peace settlement.

The liaison office, which was established after North's Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met at the DMZ for a historic summit last year, had allowed officials from North and South Korea to communicate on a regular basis for the first time since the Korean War.

The staff constitutes of equal number from each side.

North Korea is yet to issue any direct public statement on the decision to withdraw.

The move comes after the US on Thursday slapped two Chinese firms with sanctions for doing business with Pyongyang, the first action taken by Washington since the second summit between Kim and President Donald Trump in Hanoi last month ended without an agreement.Kolkata, March 22 : The virtual collapse of seat adjustment talks between the Left Front and Congress ahead of the 2019 polls in Bengal may give an unprecedented advantage to the BJP in 12 to 14 Lok Sabha seats as it would amass a large chunk of the anti-incumbency votes in the state, a political analyst says - adding that the Left and the Congress might even end up empty handed.

"It is possible that the left and Congress will not get a single seat this year. The left may still hold its relevance with the help of its powerful mass organisations but the Congress will get wiped out from Bengal for this mistake. It is possible that their tally in 2021 state assembly polls will come down to five seats," Udayan Bandyopadhyay, an associate professor at the Bangabasi College, told IANS.

The prospects of any seat adjustment between the two forces seems almost nil, unless Congress president Rahul Ganhi during his visit to the state on Saturday forces a miraculous rethink among his party's state leadership.

As things stand now, allegations and counter-allegations are flying thick and fast from both sides, even as the first date of polling in the state is hardly 20 days away.

The talks had been bumping from one pothole to another since the outset. First, the Congress refused to let go Raiganj and Murshidabad, the only two seats won by the LF five years back.

After the Congress, which had four seats in the outgoing house, came around, following Gandhi's intervention, intense bargaining started over specific seats like Basirhat and Purulia, while LF constituents like AIFB, RSP and CPI adopted a rigid stance on releasing seats to the Congress from their quotas.

Things took a turn for the worst when the LF came up with a list of 25 candidates, that included the name of a renowned physician Rezaul Karim, the convenor of the state Congress medical cell.

Taking umbrage, the state Congress held an emergency meeting, informed the party high command of the situation, declared the talks had failed and that it would contest all the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

Since then there has been some drama bordering on the burlesque and farcial.

The LF came up with its second candidates list, leaving out the four seats won by Congress in the last general elections. The state Congress leadership rejected the "gesture', reiterating it would filed candidates in all the seats.

However, in a curious turn of events, the Congress decided to leave five seats for the Left as it announced candidates for 11 seats, but refused to withdraw its candidates from Raiganj and Murshidabad.

LF leaders lost no time in pointing out that the Congress had a vote share of a mere two to five per cent in the five seats. The combine put up candidates in two of the four seats the Congress won the last time.

According to political analyst Udayan Bandyopadhyay, the LF and Congress' failure to untie the seat sharing knot will practically diminish their chances of winning more than one Lok Sabha seat from the state while giving the BJP an edge in a "neck to neck battle" with the ruling Trinamool Congress in a number of seats, especially in north Bengal.

"If the left-Congress alliance collapses, it would be advantageous to the BJP. They would get the advantage in at least 12-14 seats in Bengal because a large chunk of the anti-incumbency votes against the ruling Trinamool Congress could go to them," Bandyopadhyay told IANS.

"These votes in a number of north Bengal districts could have gone to the Left-Congress. But now activists would be somewhat frustrated at the failure of the talks and and end up voting for the BJP," he explained.

Noting that the anti-incumbency vote share has always been higher in Bengal, he pointed out the erstwhile LF government could come back to power by obtaining over 50 per cent votes only twice in their reign of 34 years while the Trinamoool Congress has never achieved that feat since coming to power nearly eight years back.

"Trinamool Congress will get between 40-45 percent votes in Bengal while the Left and Congress will not get more than 15 percent votes if they contest separately. So, if the BJP gets the rest of the vote share, there will be neck to neck battle with the Trinamool Congress in at least 12 to 15 seats in Bengal," he said.

CPI-M state secretariat member and LF legislature party leader Sujan Chakraborty said the Left's idea of seat adjustment with the Congress emerged from the idea of consolidating the anti-BJP, anti-Trinamool votes in the state "The precondition was that there is no mutual contest in six seats," Chakraborty told IANS.

"Our attempt was very sincere. We have not yet fielded candidates in those four seats. They also should not have fielded candidates in the two seats won by us. I believe, our sincere attempt should not be viewed as a weakness of the left but as a sense of responsibility, accountability towards the people of the Left. But they are missing the point," he said.

Accepting that the delay in announcing candidates due to the confusion over seat adjustment has "somewhat affected" the Congress campaign in Bengal, state vice president Om Prakash Misra said: "There is a need to reconsider the entire approach. We have also decided not to field candidates in five seats as a reciprocal gesture. The Left-Congress eat sharing unity was a political necessity. It is unfortunate that the negotiations did not reach a satisfactory conclusion," he said.

He, however, refused to comment on whether collapse of the seat adjustment effort would benefit Trinamool Congress or the BJP, stating it is for the people of the state to decide.

(Milinda Ghosh Roy can be contacted at milinda.r@ians.in)

Latest updates on Gandhi Jayanti 2019New Delhi, March 22 : The Delhi High Court has asked EaseMyTrip (EMT) to file a response to a MakeMyTrip (MMT) plea alleging that EaseMyTrip has bought ad-word from Google for a keyword 'makemytrip' on its search engine.

Justice Manmohan sought a response from EaseMyTrip. EMT has been accused of trademark violation.

MMT has accused EaseMyTrip of bidding for "makemytrip" ad-word with Google to come on top of search results.

The court has listed the matter for further hearing on May 8.

"The parties shall file all original documents in support of their respective claims along with their respective pleadings," the court had said in its March 6 order.

"In case parties are placing reliance on a document which is not in their power and possession, its detail and source shall be mentioned in the list of reliance which shall be also filed with the pleadings," the court said.

MakeMyTrip in its plea said that in September 2018 the company noticed that EaseMyTrip website was appearing in the sponsored links section of the search engine, when a search was conducted for the mark "makemytrip".

The company further added that MMT has issued notice to EaseMyTrip but till date no response had been received and EaseMyTrip continued to illegally bid for the MMT mark.

MMT said that EaseMyTrip has been engaged in illegal activities with mala fide intent of diverting business from the MakeMyTrip's website to EaseMyTrip by riding on the reputation and goodwill associated with MakeMyTrip.Shillong, March 22 : Sitting Congress MP Vincent H. Pala on Friday filed his nomination papers for the Shillong parliamentary constituency, seeking a third straight term in the Lok Sabha.

Meghalaya has two Lok Sabha constituencies -- Shillong and Tura -- that will go to the polls on April 11.

Pala, 51, who was a Union Minister in the Congress-led UPA government, asserted that his party would return to the power.

"There is no doubt that the Congress will return to power as the BJP has lost control in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Chhattisgarh and even in southern states. Its (BJP) allies are also running away from the party," he said.

"There will be no way that the BJP will retain power except if they plant a bomb in jungle or kill some people or raise some other issue to win the election. But even that will not help them to translate the situation into votes," Pala said.

The engineer-turned-politician was confident that voters of Shillong will elect him for the third straight term as he ensured development in the region.

"I don't want to blow my own trumpet but I have brought development to the state in terms of roads, infrastructure and the Shillong airport besides other developmental activities in various sectors," Pala said.

If elected to the Lok Sabha, the Congress candidate said he would focus on education including skill development to create job avenues, besides further improving the physical and digital connectivity.

The total number of candidates who have filed their nomination for the Shillong seat has reached four including Khun HynAiewtrep National Awakening Movement's T.H.S. Bonney and United Democratic Party's Jemino Mawthoh. Kennedy Khyriem filed his nomination papers as a standby candidate of Pala.Patna, March 22 : The Grand Alliance on Friday announced a seat sharing pact in Bihar under which the RJD will contest 20 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats and the Congress 9 while smaller parties will be in contention in the remaining constituencies.

The announcement was made at a press conference here.

According to the agreement, the RLSP will put up candidates in 5 seats, HAM and VIP in 3 each and the RJD will give one seat out of its quota to the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (CPI-ML).

No seats were given to the CPI and CPI-M, making it clear that former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, who is contesting from Begusarai, will not be supported by the Grand Alliance.

The four constituencies going to polls in the first phase will see the HAM contesting on Gaya and Aurangabad, the RJD on Nawada and the RLSP on Jamui, RJD state President Ramchandra Purbe told the media.

HAM chief and former Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi will contest from Gaya (reserved) and Upendra Prasad from Aurangabad.

The RJD has fielded Vibha Devi from Nawada and the RLSP Bhudeo Choudhary from Jamui.

In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA won 31 seats, out of which the BJP alone bagged 22. The JD-U contested alone then and won only Purnea and Nawada seats.

The RJD won 4 seats, the Congress 2 and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) 1. But NCP's Tariq Anwar has rejoined the Congress.Chennai, March 22 : The BJP, fighting the Lok Sabha elections in Tamil Nadu in alliance with the ruling AIADMK, is supremely sure that Union Minister Pon Radhakrishnan will be re-elected from Kanniyakumari.

Radhakrishnan was one of only two non-AIADMK candidates to get elected to the Lok Sabha from the state in 2014 when the AIADMK, then led by Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa, won a whopping 37 of the 39 seats.

"Pon Radhakrishnan has earned a good name in the constituency. He has also brought various projects for Kanniyakumari constituency," the Bharatiya Janata Party's state OBC Morcha chief S.K. Kharventhan told IANS.

The BJP is contesting five Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu as part of the AIADMK-led alliance.

The party on Thursday decided to field Pon Radhakrishnan from Kanniyakumari, state unit President Tamilisai Soundararajan from Thoothukkudi, National Secretary H. Raja from Sivaganga, C.P. Radhakrishnan from Coimbatore and Nainar Nagendran from Ramanathapuram.

BJP leaders said their focus will be on highlighting the Modi government's achievements.

Kharventhan is confident that the BJP would also bag the Coimbatore seat as C.P. Radhakrishnan had been elected twice from the constituency in the past and lost in 2014 with a margin of about 42,000 votes.

However, government employees and teachers who are said to be angry with the AIADMK government may turn against the BJP, party leaders admit. Similarly, the minorities may vote against the BJP candidates too.

Opposing C.P. Radhakrishnan in Coimbatore will be CPI-M's P.R. Natarajan, who polled 2.91 per cent of the votes in 2014 but is now part of the DMK-led alliance.Thiruvananthapuram, March 22 : Kerala's Director General of Police Jacob Thomas, currently in suspension since December 2017, has put in his papers so as to to contest the Lok Sabha elections.

Thomas had another 18 months to go for retirement. The resignation has been forwarded to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's office and to the Centre.

According to Sabu M. Jacob, Managing Director of Anna-Kitex group of companies, based near here, who spearheads the Twenty20 Kizhakkambalam, a corporate social responsibility initiative of the Rs 1,500 crore Anna-Kitex, told IANS that Thomas will contest under the Twenty 20 banner from Chalakudy in Thrissur district .

Nineteen members of Twenty20 contested the Kizhakkambalam Panchayat elections in 2015 as independents, where the company is based, and 17 of them won.

Thomas was once the reputed blue-eyed boy of Vijayan. But he was suspended in 2017 on charges of violating the All India Service Rules.

Thomas is expected to announce his candidature on Sunday.Chennai, March 22 : The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday searched the premises of Tamil Nadu Waqf Board (TNWB) Chairman and AIADMK MP Anwhar Raajhaa, an official said.

The CBI also searched the Madurai premises of Jamal Mohideen, the then Secretary (in-charge) and Correspondent of Madurai M.S.S. Wakf Board College.

The search operations were carried out in Raajhaa's premises in Chennai and Ramanathapuram.

The CBI raids were carried out in connection with an alleged recruitment scam. The CBI had registered a case on the orders of the Madras High Court.New Delhi, March 22 : Lenders of cash-strapped Jet Airways are in the process of securing "substantial stake" in the ailing airline to try and revive it to a manageable state before selling it to new promoters, a senior Finance Ministry source said on Friday.

"Only after securing substantial stake in the airline, the lenders are planning to sell Jet Airways, and the existing promoters need to exit before new buyers can be roped in", he said.

After defaulting on interest payments and delaying salaries to pilots, with Jet Airways now flying just about a third of its fleet following the recent grounding of many aircraft, the full service carrier is currently in a near standstill situation.

"The lenders will take over the airline for the time being and try to give some comfort in terms of paying the salaries, and no new promoters are likely to come in for 2-3 months. Jet promoters need to exit before new promoters are roped in and need a clen deal to sell Jet Airways", the source said.

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. In case the airline collapses, 23,500 jobs could be at stake.

Jet Airways is headed by Naresh Goyal, who currently holds 51 per cent stake, while Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways has another 24 per-cent.

There are reports of Etihad reaching out to state-run State Bank of India (SBI) to purchase its 24 per cent stake in the airline.

SBI is the lead lender of the consortium of bankers which have lent to Jet Airways.

The Jet Airways pilots' union had, on Tuesday, threatened to stop flying from April 1 if their salaries are not paid by March 31.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has said only 41 aircraft of Jet Airways were currently available for operation and there may be "further attrition" of flights "in coming weeks". 41 aircraft is just one-third of Jet's fleet of 119 planes.

The urgency to resolve the Jet issue became clear last week when the Prime Minister's Office signalled its direct involvement after Principal Secretary Nripendra Mishra along with SBI chairman Rajnish Kumar and Avilation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to work out a revival plan.

Mishra's involvement in discussions to revive an airline is to be seen in the context of a poll year where the government would not want job losses and airfare hikes, as well as losses to for state-run lenders trying hard to recover their bad loans Queried by reporters if there is a new promoter in the offing for Jet Airways, the SBI Chairman had said: "No possibility is ruled out".

(Anjana Das can be reached at anjana.d@ians.in)Agartala, March 22 : The candidates of Tripura's ruling BJP and its junior ally IPFT filed their nomination papers on Friday to contest each other in the Lok Sabha polls.

The Bharatiya Janata Party termed the IPFT's (Indigenous People's Front of Tripura) move as violation of "raj dharma" and "coalition etiquette".

After filing nomination by IPFT's Sukhla Charan Noatia, party chief Narendra Chandra Debbarma said: "To raise the statehood demand in Parliament, we are contesting the Lok Sabha polls."

Organising a big procession, Tripura Pradesh General Secretary Pratima Bhowmik submitted her candidature for the Tripura West Lok Sabha constituency.

Tripura Chief Minister and BJP's Tripura Pradesh President Biplab Kumar Deb, Deputy Chief Minister Jishnu Dev Varma, their ministerial colleagues and senior leaders led the rally before submission of the nomination by the 50-year-old woman saffron party leader.

Before the BJP, IPFT nominee Sukhla Charan Noatia submitted his nomination papers in the same constituency after holding a similar procession, which was led by party President and Revenue Minister Narendra Chandra Debbarma and General Secretary and Forest Minister Mever Kumar Jamatia.

According to the respective party sources, BJP's nominee Rebati Tripura and IPFT candidate Narendra Chandra Debbarma would submit their nomination papers for the Tripura East Lok Sabha seat on Monday.

The BJP has made a series of appeals to its junior ally to withdraw their candidates, but the IPFT leadership, who had earlier demanded to the dominant partner to leave the Tripura East seat to the tribal based party, remained firm about contesting the elections.

The Tripura East seat is reserved for the tribals.

The BJP's Chief spokesman Ashok Sinha while talking to the media, said that the IPFT has violated and dishonoured "raj dharma" (duty of governance) and "coalition etiquette".

Tripura Chief Minister also urged the IPFT to uphold the "raj dharma".

"The IPFT announced candidates without discussing the issue with us," Deb told the media.

BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav, Deputy Chief Minister Jishnu Dev Varma and Education and Law Minister Ratan Lal Nath held separate meetings with the IPFT leaders here last week, but the seat sharing hurdles remained unresolved as both sides are firm about fielding their candidates in the two Lok Sabha seats.

In last year's February 18 politically significant Assembly polls, the BJP and IPFT together won 44 seats in the 60 member Assembly with the dominant party alone bagging 36 seats.

The IPFT has two ministers in the nine member BJP-IPFT ministry.

Polling for Tripura West will be held in the first phase on April 11 and Tripura East in the second phase on April 18. Votes will be counted on May 23.Jakarta, March 22 : Garuda Indonesia, the country's flag carrier, announced on Friday that it's cancelling an order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 passenger jets after two planes of the same model crashed in a span of five months.

"Our passengers have lost confidence to fly with the Max 8," Garuda spokesperson Ikhsan Rosan told CNN.

The Indonesian carrier had ordered 50 of the planes and has already received one of them, according to Ropore's Warpora area, two militants were killed in the same site of an encounter on Thursday where two policemen were injured.

The police said the gunfight in Bandipora has ended but the two others were still going on.

All educational institutions in Sopore were closed and mobile Internet services suspended as a precautionary measure.

On Thursday, three militants were killed while seven security men and three civilians injured in three different gun battles in the Kashmir Valley.Shimla, March 22 : In a clear signal from the BJP's first list of candidates, party's veterans from Himachal Pradesh - among them Shanta Kumar, 84, a member of the outgoing house - may not be fielded for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections owing to the party's age bar.

Sources in the party said the high command is also keen to replace Shimla's (reserved) second consecutive term MP Virender Kashyap.

The hill state has four Lok Sabha seats and all are represented by the BJP.

A closed-door meeting was held between state Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur and Kumar in New Delhi last week for finalising candidates, including the latter's replacement.

"The party doesn't want to annoy its senior leader Shanta Kumar. So the high command has asked Jai Ram Thakur to hold talks with him to look for his prospective replacement," a senior party leader told IANS.

Kumar, a Brahmin who is widely respected in state's Kangra district, has been saying he may stay away from electoral politics this time and has left the final decision to the party high command.

Hamirpur's three-time MP Anurag Thakur, who is facing anti-incumbency, and Mandi first-time MP Ram Swaroop Sharma, who is known for his proximity to Chief Minister Thakur, may be retained this time, a senior leader said.

The BJP had initially decided to field its sitting MPs from all the four seats.

The BJP had created history in 2014 Lok Sabha elections by sweeping all four seats.

The party, which is also at the state's helm, wants a repeat of the 2014 performance under the (Prime Minister) Narendra Modi factor.New Delhi, March 22 : The Indian government on Friday outlawed the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) led by Muhammad Yasin Malik, alleging it was responsible for promoting terrorism and secessionism in the state.

Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba said that in pursuit of its strong action against terrorism, the government had declared the JKLF (Yasin faction), which supposedly advocates independence for Jammu and Kashmir, an unlawful association under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

Malik is presently detained in Kot Balwal Jail in Jammu.

The JKLF has spearheaded the "separatist ideology in the (Kashmir) Valley and has been at the forefront of separatist activities and violence since 1988", Gauba told the media here.

"Yasin Malik was the mastermind behind the purging of Kashmiri Pundits from the Kashmir Valley and is responsible for their genocide," a Home Ministry notification said.

The JKLF was also blamed for the murder of four Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel and the abduction of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed who later became the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir.

"The organisation, along side, is also responsible for illegal funnelling of funds for fomenting terrorism. JKFL is actively involved in raising of funds and its distribution to Hurriyat cadres and stone-pelters to fuel unrest in the Kashmir Valley as well as for subversive activities," the notification said.

The official said that JKLF cadres posed "a serious threat to the security of the country and are prejudicial to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of India.

"The organisation has been actively and continuously encouraging feeling of enmity and hatred against the lawfully established government" and promoting armed rebellion.

Noting that the Jammu and Kashmir Police had filed 37 FIRs against the JKLF and the NIA had also registered a case, "it is evident that the JKLF continued to be actively engaged in supporting and inciting secessionism and terrorism including terror financing".

The JKLF is the second group to be banned in recent times in the Kashmir Valley after the Jamaat-e-Islami (J&k), which the government said was responsible for the formation of Hizbul Mujahideen, "the biggest terror organisation active in Jammu and Kashmir".

The Jamaat-e-Islami (J&K) was accused of providing all kinds of support to Hizbul Mujahideen in terms of recruits, funding, shelter and logistics.

The notification, however, made it clear that the Jamaat-e-Islami (J&K) is separate from the larger and pan-India Jamaat-e-Islami Hind.Mumbai, March 22 : Veteran lyricist Javed Akhtar on Friday denied writing songs for Omung Kumar B directorial film "PM Narendra Modi".

Akhtar took to Twitter and expressed shock to see his name in the credits of the film's trailer.

"I am shocked to find my name on the poster of this film. Have not written any songs for it," Akhtar tweeted along with the snapshot of the trailer's video in which his name was mentioned among several other artistes in the lyrics category.

The trailer of "PM Narendra Modi" -- based on the life of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi -- was launched on Thursday.

The film will showcase the journey of Modi from his humble beginnings to his years as the Gujarat Chief Minister, to the landmark win in the 2014 general elections, and finally becoming the PM.

Actor Vivek Anand Oberoi is essaying the role of Modi in the biopic, which is scheduled to release on April 5.

Produced by Suresh Oberoi, Anand Pandit and Sandip Ssingh, "PM Narendra Modi" also features Darshan Kumaar, Boman Irani, Zarina Wahab and Barkha Bisht Sengupta in pivotal roles.Kohima, March 22 : Sitting Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP) MP, Tokheho Yepthomi and Congress candidate K.L. Chishi on Friday filed their nominations for the lone Lok Sabha seat.

The ruling People's Democratic Alliance (PDA) headed by Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio that comprises the NDPP, Bharatiya Janata Party, Janata Dal (United) and an Independent member, will support Yepthomi.

In 2018, Yepthomi, 66, won the by-election to the lone Lok Sabha seat in Nagaland defeating opposition Naga People's Front candidate C. Apok Jamir by a margin of 1,73,746 votes.

The by-poll was necessitated after Rio quit the Lok Sabha and successfully contested the elections to the Nagaland Assembly.

The Congress has sought the support of the opposition Naga People's Front (NPF) to support Chishi, who had served as Nagaland Chief Minister in 1990 for 28 days.

Leader of Opposition and NPF leader, T.R. Zeilang said: "Both the Congress and the NPP have sought NPF's support but the party is yet to decide."

Chishi, 75, had quit the Bharatiya Janata Party earlier this month over the BJP-led NDA government's failure to solve the protracted Naga insurgency, unemployment and lack of development in Nagaland.Kolkata, March 22 : Union minister Babul Supriyo has replied to the show cause notice slapped on him by the Election Commission for releasing the BJP's campaign song without obtaining permission from it, an official said on Friday.

Additional Chief Electoral Officer Sanjay Basu said: "We have received a reply from him and it is under consideration."

The Election Commission on Tuesday had slapped a show cause notice on Supriyo for not seeking permission before releasing a video of his Bharatiya Janata Party's campaign song for Bengal on the social media.

Basu also said an amount of over Rs 70.31 lakh has been seized by the police and the EC from various parts of the state since the announcement of the elections.Patna/Kathmandu, March 22 : More than any other factor in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region (HKH), rapid and often haphazard economic development and population growth, coupled with climate change, threaten the concept of Water Security For All.

This also threatens to push the region - specifically the most needy and vulnerable among its inhabitants - into a vicious cycle of droughts and floods, of water that is unfit to drink and a range of environmental hazards, experts have said in a study.

"Good water governance, politically and culturally tailored to the local, national, and regional contexts, is needed to ensure water security in the HKH. Unequal power dynamics, centralised decision making and inadequate opportunities for local communities to influence their water-security decisions despite the presence of local institutions are among the leading causes of poor water governance in the HKH. These are all taking place under constantly changing conditions in an ecologically fragile landscape with dispersed settlements" Aditi Mukherji, Fan Zhang and Christopher Scott said.

They are the authors of the Water chapter of the HKH Assessment by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

"Decision-making must account for prevailing approaches to water governance in the region, characterized by hybrid formal-informal regimes with a prevalence of informal institutions at the local level and formal state institutions at national and regional levels. While the absence of institutions working on transboundary water resources in the region does present opportunities for HKH-wide cooperation, it is important to note that the risks of water-related conflict are high" Mukherji, a Consultant with the Colombo-based International Water Management Institute, said.

Fan Zhang of the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Sciences and Christopher Scott of the Tuscan-based University of Arizona, said more attention needs to be paid to HKH-specific conditions. Participatory and cooperative decision making, evidence-based policies, transparent programme implementation, accountability at all levels and transboundary and regional cooperation are essential to ensuring water security in the region.

According to them, the mountains of the HKH, commonly referred to as the "water towers of Asia, provide two billion people across the continent a vital lifeline - water for food, energy, and ecosystem services. The HKH mountains are the source of 10 major Asian rivers, which provide water and support food and energy production and a range of other ecosystem services in the continent. The principal sources of water in the region are precipitation, glacial melt, snow melt, runoff, river discharge, springs and groundwater.

The experts have made an urgent call to the region's governments and societies for action.

"To counter the formidable and immediate threats to water security posed by human drivers and climate change, equitable, productive, and sustainable water use should be promoted through decentralized decision making, effective management of urban pollution, improved infrastructure planning, and enhanced regional cooperation," they said.

Ensuring regional and local water security requires proactive HKH-wide cooperation, specifically in open data sharing among scientists and governments; conflict management via regional platforms; and investment of public- and private-sector funds for generating and exchanging knowledge, enhancing public awareness, and stimulating action,they said.

They have suggested trade-offs between upstream and downstream water uses; between rural and urban areas; and among irrigation, energy, industrial, and other sectors must be carefully managed to enhance water security.

Water security, as outlined in the HKH Assessment, is "the capacity of HKH populations to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for resilient societies and ecosystems, to ensure protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and to adapt to uncertain global change - in a regional climate of peace and political stability".New Delhi, March 22 : Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist Sajjad Khan, said to be a close associate of Pulwama suicide attack mastermind Mudassir Ahmed Khan, was arrested near the Red Fort while disguised as a shawl trader, police said on Friday.

Following a tip off, Khan was caught on Thursday night, the officer said, adding that he was in close contact with Ahmed Khan, who was eliminated by the Indian Army earlier this month.

A Delhi court on Friday sent Khan to NIA custody till March 29.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) said they needed to unearth the conspiracy behind the February 14 attack in Pulwama that killed 40 CRPF troopers.

During the in-chamber proceedings, Additional Sessions Judge Rakesh Syal allowed the NIA to quiz the 27-year-old Khan.

The NIA questioned Khan for half hour in the court and then sought his custodial interrogation.

Khan's defence counsel M.S. Khan opposed the plea but following the court's order Delhi Police handed over his custody to the NIA.

The Special Cell of Delhi Police got a tip last week that Sajjid Khan was hiding in Delhi before the Pulwama attack.

He had selected specific targets and was in the process of recruiting Muslim youths of Uttar Pradesh to establish sleeper cells, Deputy Commissioner of Police P.S. Kushwah told IANS.

"He was planning to give them weapons training. He was also raising funds and collecting weapons," he added.

Sajjid and his two siblings were initially engaged in stone pelting incidents in the Kashmir Valley. His brother Ishfaq was arrested in February 2015 under the Public Safety Act for stone pelting, the officer said.New Delhi, March 22 : The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has said that the diary pages from what has come to be known as the Yeddy diaries -- because of the alleged link with former Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa -- and the loose papers given to the team that raided Congress leader D.K. Shivakumar's premises in 2017 could not pass the forensic test as they were "not original".

The CBDT's statement came with a clarification after a media report titled 'The Yeddy Diaries' published by news magazine 'The Caravan' alleged that Yeddyurappa paid Rs 1,800 crore to some top BJP leaders -- including veterans L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley and Nitin Gadkari. The rebuttal, which comprised statements made by Shivakumar and Yeddyurappa on documents seized from the Congress leader during IT searches, was extraordinary for its length and the details it contained.

Shivakumar had told the investigators that this was a copy of a diary, written by Yeddyurappa, and the payments paid on behalf of the leader (Yeddyurappa) to legislators, and received from various leaders, MLAs, ministers when they were in power, said CBDT about the statement.

Shivakumar further said, in his statement to the Income-Tax authorities, that the handwriting in the loose sheets could be of Yeddyurappa on the basis of comparison between various documents written by him (B.S. Yeddyurappa) and the handwriting in the loose sheets.

The department said that a search action under Section 132 of the Income-tax Act, 1961 was carried out on Shivakumar and group of cases on August 2, 2017 by the Income Tax Investigation Directorate of Karnataka and Goa. A large evidence of incriminating material against Shivakumar and his company was found.

"During the search, some loose papers were given to the raiding party. This was a xerox copy of Karnataka Legislative Assembly, Legislator's Diary pages of 2009 with details of numerical entries against some individuals. The original of these documents was never given," a CBDT statement said.

The statement made no reference to the amounts allegedly paid to the politicians that were highlighted in 'The Caravan' report.

On being asked as to how he got possession of the said loose sheets, the statement said: "Sh DK Shivakumar stated that, being a politician, he procures information about other parties, leaders and members and as the said loose sheets contain political information, he cannot disclose the source of information.

"Further, he also stated that he keeps getting such information from the general public."

Shivakumar, the statement said, also stated that he did not know the time period in which the said transactions had taken place and that he did not have the originals of the said loose sheets.

In response to the question why the said matter was not brought to the notice of ACB (Anti Corruption Branch) or Lokayukta of Karnataka, Shivakumar told the Income-Tax authorities that as "he did not know about the genuineness of the said loose sheets", said the statement, adding he did not inform the same to enforcement agencies.

"The seized material and the statements of Shivakumar were confronted with Mr B.S. Yeddyurappa on November 25, 2017. Mr B.S. Yeddyurappa stated that he was not in the habit of writing a dairy and that the loose sheets in question were not in his handwriting. He denied his handwriting and signatures on the loose sheets," said the statement.

Also, as the handwriting did not belong to Yeddyurappa, he told officials that he cannot have any knowledge about the contents of the loose sheets.

Yeddyurappa further stated that contents of the loose sheets were false and fabricated and his name has been used to malign his political career, said the CBDT statement.

The leader also provided a sample of his handwriting in order to verify the genuineness of the said loose sheets. Further, he also stated that the fabricated loose sheets were politically motivated with an intention to tarnish his political image.

The CBDT said that on April 18, 2018, an enquiry was made to the Director, Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), Directorate of Forensics Science Services, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, Amberpet Post, Ramanthapur, Hyderabad, Telangana whether the signatures could be verified.

"In response, CFSL, Hyderabad replied on April 24, 2018 that the examination of handwriting and signatures is carried out in the said laboratory and that all the disputed documents are to be sent in original. No originals were given by D. K. Shivakumar.

"It is clear that for a forensic analysis of the disputed writings to establish its evidentiary value, originals of the same are required. All efforts have been made by the Income Tax Office concerned to procure the originals of the disputed writings. However, the details about the place and custody of the original writings and, if the original writings exist, are not available.

"The same loose sheets prima facie appear to be of a doubtful nature and were given by the person who was being raided for tax violations," said the statement.Chanchol : , March 22 (IANS) Congress President Rahul Gandhi is likely to give a big push to his party's Lok Sabha campaign when he addresses his first-ever public rally in this small census town of Malda district in West Bengal on Saturday.

He is expected to up his ante against the "corruption and misgovernance" of the Narendra Modi regime at the Centre and speak about the necessity of a Congress-led government in the country, party sources said.

Gandhi, who is coming to Bengal for the first time in 2019, will address what the party expects to be a large gathering at Kolom Bagan ground. The area comes under Malda North Lok Sabha constituency, a traditional Congress bastion.

He is expected to reach the rally ground at around 3 p.m.

All the senior Congress leaders, including the party's state president Somen Mitra and former state chief Adhir Chowdhury are expected to be present.

"In the run up to the Lok Sabha elections, the entire focus of Congress and Gandhi has been on urging people to fight against the incompetence, corruption and misgovernance of the Narendra Modi regime.

"So the prime focus of the Congress president's address tomorrow (Saturday) would be on the need and necessity of a Congress-led alternative government at the Centre," state Congress vice president Om Prakash Misra told IANS.

"As Malda is a long standing Congress bastion, it would be natural for him to focus on the strength of Congress ideology and the need to further bolster it in view of the challenges to the idea of India and challenges to the constitutional democracy of the country," he said.

The Congress has fielded party MLA Isha Khan Chowdhury from the Malda North Lok Sabha seat, against cousin and sitting MP Mausam Benazir Noor, who defected to the Trinamool Congress in February.

Referring to Noor's decision to desert the party, Misra said, "In the context to the place he (Gandhi) is visiting tomorrow, we expect the party president to also talk about principled politics which the Congress champions while the Trinamool Congress is just doing the opposite."

Another state Congress leader said Gandhi will also talk about the condition of healthcare, joblessness, migration of students due to lack of opportunities and labour problems under the Mamata Banerjee regime in West Bengal.

He said the last minute preparations for the rally are in full swing.

"The activists and people across Malda are very excited as Rahul Gandhi is coming to Chanchal for the first time. We are expecting a massive turnout," he said.

"Initially the administration was not cooperating with us in terms of giving permission for the rally ground or usage of loud speakers. However, there is no hindrance since the Election Commission gave its nod. All our state leaders are expected to be present," he added.

Latest updates on Howdy Modi HoustonMumbai, March 22 : One of the key accused in the PNB fraud case, Mehul Choksi, on Friday moved a fresh application in a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court in Mumbai seeking cancellation of a non-bailable warrant against him.

His application came three days after his nephew Nirav Modi, another key accused in the Rs 13,500-crore Punjab National Bank loan default case, was arrested in London.

In his application, Choksi, who had fled India in January 2018 months before the scam surfaced, has cited ailment and risk to his life. Choksi's lawyer Sanjay Abbot in the application said the jeweller has a long history of heart ailments and a blood clot in the brain.

He also mentioned in the application about Choksi's apprehension over his safety.

On May 22, 2018, after taking cognisance of the second chargesheet filed in the PNB case by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the special court had issued the non-bailable warrant against Choksi, owner of Gitanjali Group.

His move comes two days after the investigation agencies said that Choksi's extradition process has begun in Antigua where he has taken citizenship.

The court has adjourned the matter for April 9 for arguments.

Choksi's counsel submitted his detailed medical history citing his ailments constraining him from travelling and hence leading to his inability to return to India.

His counsel also placed 38 documents on record, including a latest prescriptions in which doctors recommend that Choksi should remain under continuous medical supervision in Antigua and should avoid travelling as his medical condition may deteriorate.

Choksi, along with his nephew and diamantaire Nirav Modi are accused of colluding with bankers to secure credit from overseas banks using fraudulent guarantees. Both have denied the allegations and have moved abroad.

Nirav Modi was taken into custody in London on March 19.

However, Choksi had secured a passport from Antigua and Barbuda, where wealthy foreigners can become citizens in exchange for investing in the country. He was granted citizenship on January 15, 2018.

He then deposited his cancelled Indian Passport No. Z3396732 and a mandatory fee of $177 for other formalities.New Delhi, March 22 : Former Karnataka Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa made payouts of Rs 1,800 crore to senior leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), judges and lawyers, claimed The Caravan in its report on Friday, further adding that the government did not act, though being aware of the matter since 2017.

The report, which later in the day drew an unusually long response from the Central Board of Direct Taxes, said, according to documents accessed by it, "the income-tax department is in possession of copies of diary entries in the handwriting of the prominent BJP leader and the former chief minister of Karnataka, BS Yeddyurappa that note payoffs amounting to over Rs1,800 crore to the BJP's national leaders, its central committee, and judges and advocates."

The report claimed, "Yeddyurappa recorded these alleged payouts in a Karnataka state assembly legislator's 2009 diary, in Kannada, in his own hand."

Yeddyurappa was chief minister in Karnataka from May 2008 to July 2011. The report is in some ways a reminder to the Jain Hawala diaries that had named senior BJP leader L.K. Advani. After his name figured in the Jain hawala scam, Advani quit as MP, deciding not to contest an election till his name had been cleared.

"The copies of the diary pages note that Yeddyurappa paid the BJP Central Committee Rs 1,000 crore; that he paid the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and the Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari Rs 150 crore each; that he gave the home minister Rajnath Singh Rs 100 crore; and that he paid the BJP stalwart LK Advani and the senior party leader Murli Manohar Joshi Rs 50 crore each," reads the report.

"Besides this, the entry notes, Yeddyurappa paid Rs 10 crore for "Gadkari's son's marriage." The diary entries also state that Yeddyurappa paid Rs 250 crore to "judges" and Rs 50 crore to "Advocates (fee paid for cases)," but does not mention any names."

The entries regarding payments to the BJP leaders, judges and advocates were written against rows dated 17 January 2009, while the entry regarding the BJP central committee was written against rows dated 18 January 2009, said the report, adding it was unclear whether the entries were made on these dates or written in the diary on a later date. The Caravan says that each copy of the pages accessed by it had Yeddyurappa's signature.

The report said that the IT department and the BJP government at the centre have been sitting on copies of Yeddyurappa's diary entries since August 2017. It said a senior IT official took the copies to Jaitley, along with an unsigned cover note.

In a section marked 'From Yeddyurappa to IT Department, via DK Shivakumar', the report said that the "senior IT official attached two documents, to confirm that the signature and the handwriting is Yeddyurappa's."

One of these was a letter that Yeddyurappa had written in January 2017 to Sushil Chandra, who headed the CBDT at the time, urging him to take action against Shivakumar for his alleged irregularities and corruption. The other document was Yeddyurappa's election affidavit filed ahead of the 2013 Karnataka assembly polls.

"The senior IT official asked in the note whether further investigation by the Enforcement Directorate-India's top law-enforcement agency for financial and economic crimes-was viable. But Jaitley, who is named in the entries as having allegedly received Rs 150 crore from Yeddyurappa, chose not to act on the income-tax official's note," reads the report.

"Jaitley was incharge of the Karnataka BJP between 2004 and 2013, and oversaw the party's state unit during the elections held in this period."

The diary entries also include amounts allegedly paid to state legislators in Karnataka, many of whom were instrumental in helping Yeddyurappa secure the Chief Minister's seat in 2008, as per the news report.

Another entry, which is signed by Yeddyurappa, reads, "Gali Janardhana Reddy is the key person to make me CM."

"The next line reads: 'Details of persons for whom, money is given by Janardhan Reddy.' The entry notes payments amounting to Rs 150 crore allegedly given to eight leaders."

"The entry, in Yeddyurappa's hand, noted that Reddy made the alleged payments to the politicians," The Caravan report says about the very well-connected politician, who controlled the Bellary iron ore mines and is famed for his extravagant lifestyle.

The diary entries also include a list of 26 people, under "Money received/ paid to me," with amounts ranging from Rs 5 crore to Rs 500 crore.

"The entries note that the donors gave Yeddyurappa Rs 2,690 crore. Among others, the entry names former state cabinet ministers from the BJP, such as Basavraj Bommai, Aravind Limbavali and Murugesh Nirani; the BJP leader K Subramanya Naidu; and BJP MLAs such as J Krishna Palemar, CC Patil, and Laxman Savadi, all three of whom were once caught watching pornographic clips during assembly proceedings," as per the report.

The Prerana Trust, which is managed by Yeddyurappa's family, is listed as having paid Rs 500 crore.

The Caravan said the diary entries were made during a turf war between senior BJP leaders in the state and Yeddyurappa when he had broken away from the BJP and formed the Karnataka Janata APaksha, according to a noting by the senior IT official.

"The senior official wrote that the IT department "protected the interests of the BJP leaders. Since this matter is connected to the BJP leaders of Karnataka and also in Delhi, no further investigation has been done to date," it said.Mumbai, March 22 : Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) on Friday denied any suggestion that it ever sidestepped US sanctions in supplying products to Venezuela.

RIL's denial comes after a report said that the company has sidestepped US sanctions on Venezuela by selling fuel from India and Europe to the South American country.

According to the company, since the imposition of US sanctions, RIL has been in continuous communication with the US Department of State regarding its activities in Venezuela.

"Reliance has been transparent with US authorities and also has provided detailed feedback to the US Department of State as they were formulating and adjusting US policy regarding product shipments to Venezuela," the company said in a statement on Friday.

"Reliance not only has complied with US sanctions laws, but also has done its best to adjust its dealings with Venezuela on a voluntary basis to reflect the ongoing changes in US policy. Reliance stopped shipments of diluent naphtha to Venezuela, and has reduced its purchases of Venezuelan crude oil to well below its contracted levels."

In addition, the company clarified that its few transportation fuel shipments to Venezuela, treated as offsets for crude oil receipts, were committed and in-transit when there were no specific restrictions to such transactions and they were all fuels refined in India.

"Reliance will continue its transactions in full compliance of prevailing sanctions," the company added.New Delhi, March 22 : The number of men employed in the country has fallen down by nearly two crore in the five years between 2011-12 and 2017-18, as per the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) report which was recently buried by the government.

A review of the NSSO's Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2017-18 report, which is yet to made public, shows only 28.6 crore men were employed in the country during 2017-18 as against 30.4 crore men employed five years ago in 2011-12.

The decrease in India's male workforce has happened for the first time since 1993-94 when 21.9 crore men were employed. This had grown to 30.4 crore in 2011-12 before falling to 28.6 crore in 2017-18, as per the PLFS report conducted between July 2017 and June 2018.

The report had also put the unemployment rate for male in urban and rural segments at 7.1 per cent and 5.8 per cent, respectively.

The report, which was approved by the National Statistical Commission (NSC) in December 2018, was withheld by the government leading to two members of the NSC, including Acting Chairman P.C. Mohanan, quitting the Commission this January.

Further, the NSSO's PLFS report also showed a major decline in casual farm labour. More than three crore casual labourers in rural India lost their jobs between the five year period - 2011-12 and 2017-18. Most of them worked on the farms.

While the number of rural casual labourers was 10.9 crore in 2011-12, it fell down to 7.7 crore in 2017-18, a fall of 3.2 crore or nearly 30 per cent.

Also, the share of rural households with major income from casual labour in farming declined from 36 million families to 21 million families during the five-year period. The shrinkage in casual farm labour workforce since 2011-12 was more than 40 per cent.

The rural casual labour category comprising both farm and non-farm segments registered an overall slide of 7.3 per cent in male and 3.3 per cent in female employment.

While the government maintains that there has been no political influence on these and other government data, 108 economists from around the world last week condemned the Modi government for revising and hiding data that show the government in poor light.

Clearing the government's stand, Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg, in an interview to a private TV channel, said revisions to economic statistics are a fact and the revisions themselves are based on facts.

"It might not appear to be meeting people'' expectations, for some. But the revision is based on real data.""

Referring to the downward revision in the current financial year's GDP data, he said, "It's not that any revision that has been done has positive messages all over."

Garg said outside investors have higher degree of confidence in India's performance and that the long term story of India is steady and intact.Dhaka, March 22 : Holi, the Hindu spring festival also known as the "festival of colours", was celebrated on Friday for the second consecutive day by the Hindu community in the Bangladesh capital with traditional and religious fervour.

The festival brought hundreds of Hindus to their temples in the old part of Dhaka, Efe news reported.

On Thursday, they were seen getting drenched in colour, singing and dancing together.

The Hindu community here believes that the Holi festival brings a message of unity and friendship and bridges the communal divide.

Revellers sprayed coloured powder and water on each other and danced and distributed sweets during the celebrations that signals the end of winter and arrival of spring.New Delhi, March 22 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday greeted his Pakistan counterpart Imran Khan on his country's national day, Khan claimed in a tweet.

"Received message from PM Modi: 'I extend my greetings and best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan.

"It is time that people of sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive and prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence," Khan quoted Modi as saying.

Modi's greetings come at a time when the Centre has boycotted Pakistan National Day celebrations at its High Commission in New Delhi.Bengaluru, March 22 : BJP's Karnataka unit president B.S. Yeddyurappa on Friday refuted the charge that he had paid crores of rupees to BJPs national leaders. But his critics remain unconvinced, playing back the episode around eight years ago when Yeddyurappa had to resign as Chief Minister after the states anti-corruption watchdog Lokayukta (ombudsman) indicted him in the multi-crore mining scam that rocked the state from 2002 to 2010.

"Congress leaders have planted this story in the media to gain political mileage and carry malicious campaign in the coming (general) elections," said an unfazed 76-year-old Yeddyurappa in a statement here.

The news magazine (The Caravan) reported that Yeddyurappa had allegedly paid Rs 1,800 crore to BJP's leaders, based on diary entries purportedly in his handwriting that note payoffs to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, the BJP stalwart L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi among others.

"The charge about the alleged payment of crores of rupees has already been inquired into by the IT department officials who found that the documents (diary entries) were fake and signatures forged," said Yeddyurappa.

The magazine report alleged payouts were recorded by Yeddyurappa in a state assembly legislator's 2009 diary, in Kannada, in his own hand when he was the chief minister of the southern state.

Yeddyurappa was the BJP's first Chief Minister in Karnataka from May 30, 2008 to July 31, 2011. The party's then high command directed him to resign after the state's Lokayukta indicted him in the multi-crore mining scam that rocked the state from 2002 to 2010.

Then Lokayukta (Justice N. Santosh Hegde) had recommended the prosecution of Yeddyurappa as a public servant under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1961 for his direct involvement in the mining scam as the mining department came under him."

The watchdog report also found that Yeddyurappa's family members, including two sons benefiting from the mining scam. Investigations by a five-member ombudsman's team found that a leading mining firm - South West Mining Company, owned by the Mumbai-based Jindal Group donating Rs 10 crore to an education trust - Prerana Trust, floated by Yeddyurappa's family.

"The donation was made by the company by borrowing funds from others for being benefited in illegally mining rich iron ore and exporting the material."

The family members were also found guilty of selling one acre of land near Bengaluru to the mining firm for Rs 20 crore, when the state-run guidance value was Rs 1 crore.

The report found that the exchequer of the central and state governments had lost Rs 16,085 crore from 2006 to 2010 due to illegal mining and export of iron ore from the state's ports on the west coast in the form of royalty, central excise duty, value added tax and other levies.

The report has found massive illegalities and irregularities committed by Yeddyurappa, four of his then cabinet colleagues and others, including a former Rajya Sabha member and state assembly legislator of the BJP from Bellary district, about 300km from Bengaluru.

The four state cabinet ministers were then revenue minister G. Karunakara Reddy, infrastructure development & tourism minister G. Janardhana Reddy, health minister B. Sriramulu and housing minister V. Somanna.

The powerful Reddy brothers, including lawmaker G. Somashekara Reddy hail from the rich iron ore district of Bellary.

Yeddyurappa was also arrested and jailed on October 15, 2011 in graft cases related to land scam, but was released after three weeks on November 8, 2011 on bail from the Karnataka High Court.

The cases against Yeddyurappa were filed by two Bengaluru-based advocates Sirajin Basha and K.N. Balaraj in January 2011 alleging corrupting and illegal land deals by him and his family members.New Delhi, March 22 : Hurriyat Conference leader Syed Ali Geelani, who advocates Jammu and Kashmir's merger with Pakistan, has been penalised Rs 14.40 lakh under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) for illegally possessing foreign exchange of US$ 10,000 and Indian currency worth Rs 10 lakh, the Enforcement Directorate said on Friday.

Geelani had been fined following confiscation of the unaccounted foreign exchange from his premises in Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday, the agency said.

"The adjudication proceeding in case of Syed Ali Shah Geelani for the offence of illegally possessing foreign exchange was completed on March 20 by levying a penalty of Rs 14.40 lakh on him along with confiscation of foreign exchange of US$ 10,000," said an ED statement.

The ED took over the case following an Income Tax Department's complaint against Geelani. The Income tax Department had recovered and seized US$ 10,000 and Rs 10 lakh from the ground floor of the residence of Hurriyat leader Geelani at Hyderpora in Srinagar on June 9, 2002.

Jawahira, wife of Geelani, was examined by the officials after the search, in which she gave some explanations about the seized Indian currency, but could not explain about the seized foreign currency.

Also, the ED statement said, Geelani did not tender any explanation or evidence regarding lawful acquisition, holding, ownership or possession of said seized cash US$ 10,000 and Rs 10 lakh except for the verbal denial submitted by him during the investigation.

On the basis of investigation under FEMA, 1999, a complaint on June 6, 2017 was filed by the ED. Accordingly, a show-cause notice was issued to Geelani.

This case has now been adjudicated by the ED on Wednesday, said the agency.

The ED said it will also impose a penalty and confiscate the illegal acquisition of foreign exchange recovered from another separatist leader Yasin Malik, former Chairman of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). The adjudication proceedings against Malik are in progress.New Delhi/Mumbai, March 22 : Jet Airways has suspended 12 international flights even as it grapples with a reduced fleet strength, industry insiders said on Friday.

Sources said the airline has suspended operations to Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Dammam, Singapore, Manchester and Dhaka, among others, till April 30.

However, one service has been cancelled due to Pakistan airspace closure and not due to fleet truncation.

"Apart from suspensions, the airline has also reduced frequencies on some of the international routes. These suspensions and reduction in freqiuncies can be attributed to the fact that its fleet size has been trnucated," sources said.

On March 19, aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), said that Jet Airways has only 41 aircraft in its fleet for operations out of around 120 planes and that there may be further attrition in the fleet size and flights ahead.

As per industry estimates, Jet has total debt of Rs 8,000 crore in addition to payables such as vendors' dues worth Rs 15,000 crore.

The airline has also lost ground in terms of market shares, even as its pilots and crew are said to be approaching other airlines for employment.New Delhi, March 23 : The Kigali Global Dialogue (KGD) will take place at the Marriott Hotel in Kigali, Rwanda, from July 3 to 5.

The event will be hosted by the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), in partnership with the Rwanda Convention Bureau, Republic of Rwanda.

The two-day KGD will serve as an annual Rwanda-based platform where established and emerging actors will convene to discuss global conversation on contemporary issues of development and growth.

The discussions will focus on climate change and sustainability, technological transformation of society and public health and human capital, while situating gender equality at their core.

"Indeed, Africa will be a crucible where new and equitable social contracts and development paradigms will be discovered and shared with all," said ORF President Samir Saran.

"The opportunity to engage in these critical conversations in Kigali with leaders and thinkers from around the world is invaluable to the global effort. We are delighted to partner with the Rwanda Convention Bureau to create an arena that catalyses new thinking and supports collective action," he added.Washington, March 23 : US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said it is "possible" that President Donald Trump was sent by God to save Israel from Iran.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network during a high-profile trip to Israel, he said it was his faith that made him believe that.

He also praised US efforts to "make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains", the BBC reported.

The comments came on a Jewish holiday celebrating rescue from genocide.

The holiday, Purim, commemorates the biblical rescue of the Jewish people by Queen Esther from the Persians, as the interviewer noted to Pompeo.

He was asked if "President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from an Iranian menace".

"As a Christian, I certainly believe that's possible," said Pompeo, a former Kansas senator and CIA director.

"I am confident that the Lord is at work here," he added.

Pompeo came under fire during his tour of the Middle East for holding a conference call and only inviting "faith-based" members of the media to join.London, March 23 : Actress Diane Kruger, who has played the role of a spy in "The Operative", says she had a dream of playing female James Bond in films.

In an interview to The I Paper, Kruger spoke about her upcoming film and her dream of being the first woman to portray 007 - who is currently played by Daniel Craig, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

She said: "I always thought it must be so cool to be James Bond. But the realities of being a spy are closer to what we did. It's cool, but I don't dream about it anymore."

"The Operative" follows a rogue spy from Israel's feared national intelligence force Mossad, who vanishes while attending her father's funeral.

Kruger also insisted that away from the cameras she is a very "introverted" person and it is her acting career that has forced her to be more "outgoing" to her benefit.

"I'm very introverted, in my real life, to a fault. I think I can appear cold or standoffish. I really have to force myself to be outgoing. Acting has, for me, been the opportunity to identity with someone else, be someone else," she added.Washington, March 23 : US President Donald Trump says he has ordered the withdrawal of recently imposed sanctions against North Korea.

In a tweet on Friday, Trump referred to "additional large-scale sanctions" by the US Treasury that had been added to already existing restrictions.

It was not immediately clear which measures he was referring to, the BBC reported.

However on Thursday, the US Treasury blacklisted two China-based shipping companies for reportedly violating sanctions against North Korea.

US National Security Adviser John Bolton described the treasury sanctions at the time as "important".

In a tweet, he wrote that "the maritime industry must do more to stop North Korea's illicit shipping practices".

The US Treasury said it had acted because the companies had helped North Korea to evade international and US sanctions by engaging in ship-to-ship transfers with North Korean tankers or exporting North Korean coal.

Just hours after the announcement, North Korea withdrew from the inter-Korean liaison office. It is not known if the two events are connected.

The liaison office, located in the North Korean border city of Kaesong, had allowed officials from North and South Korea to communicate on a regular basis for the first time since the Korean War.

The North Korean pullout followed a failed summit between President Trump and North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, Vietnam, last month.

In a tweet on Friday, Trump wrote: "It was announced today by the US Treasury that additional large-scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea.

"I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!"

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders did not elaborate on which sanctions were being referred to by the president.

However, she added: "President Trump likes Chairman Kim [Jong-un] and he doesn't think these sanctions will be necessary."

North Korea has been the subject of a series of US and international sanctions over Pyongyang's development of nuclear weapons and missile tests.London, March 23 : Actress Zendaya says her Spring 2019 TommyXZendaya collection was created to make "every woman feel confident".

In an interview to Marie Claire magazine, Zendaya explained that her fashion clothing - which is available from size 4 to 24 and features silhouettes and rainbow stripes, was for all the women in her family to enjoy, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

She said: "For me, it was about finding something that resonates with my fashion soul, which is this era (the 70's), a period I've always been obsessed with.

"That (A curve size range) was super important. If all the women in my family can't enjoy it, what's the point? It's about diversity and inclusion. I want every woman to feel confident , like they can go out and get something for themselves."Washington, March 23 : US special counsel Robert Mueller has submitted a confidential report to Attorney General William Barr, marking the end of his nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, media reported.

The Justice Department notified Congress late Friday that it had received Mueller's report but did not describe its contents, according to The Washington Post.

No details of Mueller's findings have been released. It is not clear how soon they will be made public, reports Xinhua news agency.

Barr reportedly said he could brief Congress as early as this weekend about the findings.

The Mueller-led inquiry focused on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow during the 2016 presidential election and whether the president obstructed justice.David M. Lang, MD, FAAAAI 'I am humbled and grateful for the opportunity to serve as AAAAI President,' said Dr. Lang. 'During my term, I plan to focus on a set of initiatives that revolve around the topics of quality, education, and technologic innovation.'

The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI) is pleased to introduce its 2019-2020 President, David M. Lang, MD, FAAAAI.

Dr. Lang was installed February 25 during the AAAAI Business Meeting at the 2019 AAAAI Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California. The AAAAI is the largest professional membership organization for allergist/immunologists, other medical specialists, allied health and related healthcare professionalsall with a special interest in the research and treatment of allergic and immunologic diseases, including asthma.

I am humbled and grateful for the opportunity to serve as AAAAI President, said Dr. Lang. During my term, I plan to focus on a set of initiatives that revolve around the topics of quality, education, and technologic innovation.

Dr. Lang serves as Chairman of the Department of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Co-Director of the Asthma Center, and Director of the Allergy/Immunology Fellowship Training Program in the Respiratory Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. He also teaches evidence based medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine.

He has carried out a number of research projects, including studies of the epidemiology of urban asthma, drug allergy, anaphylaxis, and chronic urticaria. He has been active in national and regional medical organizations, and has published more than 100 articles in the medical literature. He was a member of the Joint Task Force on Practice Parameters for the specialty of allergy and immunology from 2001 to 2018, and also served as Co-Chair. He previously completed a 4-year term on the Board of Directors of the AAAAI. He has been active in the National Quality Forum, serving as Chair of the National Quality Forum Pulmonary and Critical Care Standing Committee, as a member of the National Quality Partners Antibiotic Stewardship Action Team, and currently as a member of the Primary Care and Chronic Illness Committee.

Dr. Lang has been selected annually as a Top Doc in allergy/immunology by Cleveland Magazine and as one of the Best Doctors in America for more than a decade. He currently serves as Deputy Editor for the Journal of Asthma, and is on the Editorial Board of Allergy and Asthma Proceedings; he previously served as Associate Editor and Section Editor of the Annals of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology. Lang received the Hahnemann University Hospital Leadership Award in 1996, and was the recipient of the Pharmacia Allergy Research Foundation Award at the International College of Allergology and Clinical Immunology meeting in Stockholm in 1994.

Dr. Lang received his medical degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and completed residency training in internal medicine at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. He also served an additional year as chief medical resident, prior to pursuing subspecialty training in allergy and clinical immunology at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California.

He is board-certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine, the National Board of Medical Examiners, and the American Board of Allergy and Immunology, for which he completed voluntary re-certification in 2005 and 2015.

His medical career has been supported by his wife, Marjory, and two children, Madelyn and Jonathan. He appreciates the support from his family, friends and colleagues, and is grateful for opportunities to contribute to the field of allergy and immunology.

The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI) represents allergists, asthma specialists, clinical immunologists, allied health professionals and others with a special interest in the research and treatment of allergic and immunologic diseases. Established in 1943, the AAAAI has over 7,000 members in the United States, Canada and 72 other countries. The AAAAIs Find an Allergist/Immunologist service is a trusted resource to help you find a specialist close to home.

###Vehicle shoppers interested in a new 2019 Toyota car, crossover, van or truck can find pricing incentives now through April 1 on select models at Ackerman Toyota.

St. Louis-area residents looking to purchase a new 2019 Toyota may receive significant incentives now through April 1 on select inventory at Ackerman Toyota. The dealership is offering cash back incentives of up to $2,500 and up to zero percent financing on select 2019 car, crossover, truck and van models. Customers must finance their new purchase or lease through Toyota Financial Services to qualify. Other exclusions may apply.

Customers interested in a compact model may be most interested in the 2019 Toyota Camry, 2019 Toyota Corolla or 2019 Toyota C-HR. All three models currently have incentives including $500 cash back or zero percent financing for 60 months for 2019 Camry L models, $1,250 cash back or 0% financing for 72 months for 2019 Corolla LE models and $1,000 cash back or 1.9-percent financing for 60 months on 2019 C-HR LE models.

Those looking for larger transportation can also find savings on select SUV, truck and van models. Current incentives include $1,500 cash back or zero percent financing for 60 months on 2019 Highlander LE Plus V6 AWD models, $2,000 cash back or 0.9-percent financing for 60 months on 2019 Tundra SR5 4x4 Double Cab models and $2,500 cash back on 2019 Sienna LE models.

For more information on the new 2019 Toyota inventory or sales events at Ackerman Toyota, vehicle shoppers can visit the dealerships website at http://www.ackermantoyota.com For a more personal interaction, interested parties can also visit the dealership in person at 2020 Hampton Ave., St. Louis, MO 63139 or contact a representative by phone at 314-351-3000.I am excited to have the opportunity to discuss how the self-directed IRA industry has embraced financial technology, particularly in the cryptocurrency spac

Adam Bergman, IRA Financial Group & IRA Financial Trust Company President attended the Retirement Industry Trust Association (RITA) Conference in Washington DC from March 24-27, 2019 at the Willard International. The RITA conference titled, Advance Your Knowledge of Self-Directed IRAs, spotlighted the emerging industry of self-directed IRAs.

Adam Bergman, a leading voice in the self-directed IRA industry and author of seven books on the self-directed retirement industry is also President of the IRA Financial Trust Company. Mr. Bergman will be speaking on the rise of fintech and cryptocurrencies in the self-directed retirement industry. I am excited to have the opportunity to discuss how the self-directed IRA industry has embraced financial technology, particularly in the cryptocurrency space, stated Adam Bergman.

The conference is intended to bring together trust companies, banks, third-party administrators, regulatory and compliance experts, and tax attorneys. It is the only place for the self-directed IRA industry to hear critical updates from important regulators and get the latest legislative information from the IRS, SEC, FINRA, and other key regulator bodies, stated Mr. Bergman.

RITA is a national trade association comprised of trust companies, banks, and third-party administrators that administer self-directed retirement plans holding alternative assets.

According to Mr. Bergman, the self-directed IRA industry has seen significant growth over the last several years as more and more investors are looking to diversify their retirement portfolios by investing in alternative assets, such as real estate and investment funds. The RITA conference helps bring together and educate the self-directed IRA industry so that we can all better serve and assist our clients.

The IRA Financial Trust Company, a self-directed IRA custodian, was founded by Adam Bergman. Mr. Bergman is a leading expert on the taxation of retirement funds and has authored multiples articles on how to use a self-directed IRA.. In addition, Mr. Bergman has written seven books the topic of self-directed retirement plans, including, How to Use retirement Funds to Purchase Cryptocurrencies,  The Checkbook IRA, Going Solo, Turning Retirement Funds into Start-Up Dreams, Solo 401(k) Plan in a Nutshell, Self-Directed IRA in a Nutshell, and in God We Trust in Roth We Prosper.

To learn more about the IRA Financial Trust Company please visit our website at http://www.irafinancialtrust.com or call 800-472-1043.Akins Ford now offers a diverse all-new 2019 Ford Ranger inventory to drivers in the Atlanta area.

After an eight-year absence, the Ford Ranger is back for 2019 with a model thats more capable, efficient and well-equipped than ever before. Drivers in the Atlanta area pining for the return of the Ranger can now find an extensive selection of the all-new 2019 model at Akins Ford.

Georgias No. 1 volume Ford dealer, Akins Ford currently hosts an inventory of more than 20 new 2019 Ford Ranger models.

The all-new Ranger comes equipped with a 270-horsepower, 2.3-liter EcoBoost engine, delivering a best-in-class 310 pound-feet of torque. The pickup also scores a class-leading gas-powered estimated fuel-economy rating of 21 mpg in the city and 26 mpg on the highway when paired with the standard 10-speed SelectShift automatic transmission and two-wheel drive.

The Ranger features tops off its competitive package with best-in-class maximum 7,500-pound tow and 1,860-pound payload ratings when properly equipped.

The 2019 Ranger lineup features three trim levels  XL, XLT and Lariat  available in a 2-door SuperCab or 4-door SuperCrew Cab configuration. The SuperCab and SuperCrew Cab pair with a six-foot standard bed and a five-foot short bed, respectively.

The 2019 Ford Ranger is well-suited for off-road endeavors with available technologies designed to overcome unforgiving terrain. The available Trail Control system manages throttle and braking at individual wheels to maintain a constant speed while traversing rough landscapes. Also available, the Terrain Management System offers drivers four selectable drive modes: Grass, Gravel/Snow, Mud/Ruts and Sand.

Drivers in the Atlanta area interested in the all-new 2019 Ford Ranger can learn more about the midsize pickup or schedule a test drive online at http://www.akinsford.com/. Interested parties can also speak to an Akins Ford sales representative via phone by calling 770-867-9136 or in person by visiting the dealership at 220 West May St., Winder, GA.Our platform has served several leading app developers throughout Europe for years, but by opening an office in the UK we will be in an even better position to bring our industry-leading expertise and consulting services to developers throughout the region.

Bidalgo (http://www.bidalgo.com), a leading provider of ad automation software and services for app marketers, announced today that after years of supporting leading UK marketers from its headquarters in Israel, it has expanded to London to help app marketers in the region achieve growth quickly, easily and profitably.

The London office will be managed by Oliver Gold, who was recently hired as Bidalgos UK Country Manager. With 16 years of experience in digital media, Mr. Gold will oversee all UK operations for the company, including the development of strategic business relationships with marketers and channel partners. Before joining Bidalgo, Oliver was UK Managing Director at mobile adtech company YOC, and he held several leadership positions at companies including Microsoft, Daily Mail Group and Adform.

European app marketers are extremely savvy, but they need a partner who can provide AI technology to help them optimize every aspect of their campaigns in order to reach their user acquisition and ROI goals, said Maya Vered, Vice President of Sales & Growth, EMEA at Bidalgo. Our platform has served several leading app developers throughout Europe for years, but by opening an office in the UK we will be in an even better position to bring our industry-leading expertise and consulting services to developers throughout the region.

To celebrate the offices grand opening, Bidalgo is hosting a special event called Mobile Underground, bringing together leading executives from top app developers and platform companies for an evening of lively networking and industry education. Taking place at 4:30 pm on March 28th at The Hoxton in London, the evening will feature top-tier sessions and speakers including:



The Route to Successful UA, featuring Riccardo Bianchetta, Head of Online Marketing at Bending Spoons; Jonathan Winters, Head of User Acquisition at Miniclip; and Tatyana Bogatyreva, Director of User Acquisition at Gram Games

Platform Power Hour, featuring Emily Langston, Partner Solutions, Northern Europe at Facebook; Fintan Gillespie, Head of Client Partnerships at Snapchat; and Avishai Linde, Senior Business Development Manager at Google

Mind the Gap: Notes from the Underground, featuring Maya Vered, Vice President, EMEA at Bidalgo.

To register for the event, visit https://mobileunderground.splashthat.com/

Bidalgo has a deserved reputation as the leading mobile marketing platform for user acquisition, said Oliver Gold, UK Country Manager at Bidalgo. I am excited to head up UK business operations and am looking forward to building out a best in class team. Bidalgo has seen incredible success across EMEA, and the launch of our new Western European hub creates a fabulous opportunity for continued growth and diversification into new markets and sectors. I am very much looking forward to driving this forward.

With offices in Tel Aviv, San Francisco, Seoul and now London, Bidalgo is the leading mobile marketing platform to help marketers grow their apps through campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Google, Apple Search Ads, Snapchat and other platforms. The companys SaaS platform offers the mobile industrys only end-to-end suite of automated media buying services, from uploading ads and optimizing their creative to real-time bid management, budget allocation and more. Meanwhile, the companys team of performance marketers, creative designers, media buyers and account managers offer professional consulting services to help clients get the most from their campaigns.

About Bidalgo

Bidalgo is the leading provider of ad automation solutions to help app marketers achieve unparalleled growth quickly, easily and profitably. The companys SaaS platform offers the mobile industrys only end-to-end suite of Artificially Intelligent media buying services, from uploading ads and optimizing their performance to handling real-time bid management, budget allocation and more. As an official marketing partner of Facebook, Instagram, Google, Apple Search Ads, Snapchat and More, Bidalgo manages more than $700 million in annual ad spend for clients in gaming, consumer, delivery apps, streaming and other verticals. Bidalgos AI algorithm is backed by an experienced team of performance marketers, creative designers, media buyers and account managers dedicated to each client. Founded in 2010, Bidalgo has offices in San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Seoul and London. For more information visit: http://www.bidalgo.com

Company Contact:

Ran Milo

Bidalgo

(415) 838-4675

ran (at) bidalgo (dot) com

Media Contact:

Matt McAllister

Fluid PR & Communications

(510) 229-9707

matt (at) fluidprgroup (dot) comBoone and Crockett Club Straight Rye Whiskey

Boone and Crockett Whiskies, named in honor of the iconic hunter-conservationist organization itself, is now available for distribution across the states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The brand is continuing to expand its reach across the nation to bring a taste of tradition to hunters across the country.

The handcrafted, 86-proof Rye Whiskey blends tastes of caramel, wild berries, and sweet corn and finishes with that signature Smokey Camp Fire Finish for a superb velvety texture and a brilliantly balanced palate.

The 86-proof Straight Bourbon is expertly distilled and aged for two years in charred oak barrels, offers a rich flavor with notes of smooth marzipan and tea nose balanced with spice and vanilla oak, and ending with a Smokey Camp Fire Finish.

Boone and Crocketts 80-proof American Blended Whiskey combines a knowledge of great bourbon and tradition to create an easy sipping whiskey featuring tastes of buttery pecans, dried fruit, and sweet jams, wrapped up with notes of peppercorn and the Smokey Camp Fire Finish.

These whiskies were created to honor the legacy of wildlife stewardship and conservation efforts upheld by the American outdoorsman each and every day.

The handcrafted line of whiskies are sure to make the namesakes of the club, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, proud and are now available to outdoor lovers across all three states.

In partnership with Stone Road Media, Boone and Crockett Whiskey will also be aiding each store in sell-through by way of marketing initiatives.

Please contact your local distributor today to get a taste of Boone and Crockett Whiskey!

New York Distributors:

Lake Beverage Corp. - (585) 427-0090

Eagle Beverage Company- (315) 343-5221

Seneca Beverage- (607) 535-5400

Rocco J Testani Inc- (607) 722-6476

Try-It- (716) 651-3551

Sanzo & Sons- (585) 343-0468

New Jersey Distributors:

Quality Food Products Inc.- (732) 721-1256

Connecticut Distributors:

Brescome Barton- (203) 239-4901Spencer Lewis Marketing Group We really see and believe in the value of this service for our clients, so we expanded our staff to enable us to provide a real expertise with this service.

The Spencer Lewis Marketing Group, a full service Ad Agency, based in Rancho Cucamonga, California, recently announced the launch of their Google My Business Optimization (GMB) service.

The service is an add-on to the companys Local SEO service and designed for physical brick and mortar locations that may need the GMB Optimization in order to increase their local visibility.

We really see and believe in the value of this service for our clients, so we expanded our staff to enable us to provide a real expertise with this service. says Spencer Lewis President and founder Shawn Glaspell.

The GMB Optimization service includes claiming the local business (if needed), geotagging and uploading images regularly and weekly posting to the GMB account listing. The service also provides support and training for staff of clients to fully leverage the results.

Our clients have enough on their plate worrying about Local SEO (Organic), PPC and other marketing initiatives without having to work on their GMB profile also. added Glaspell.

The service also includes adding products or services to the clients GMB listing, creation and publishing of the Google website associated with the profile and adding all pertinent content to the clients GMB listing.

Weve already had a great response... says Glaspell, ...in terms of getting results for our clients and also interest in the product. The agency has seen upticks in visits to websites, views of uploaded photos, phone calls and online requests for directions for their clients.

Google My Business is crucial for local businesses. Spencer Lewis Account Manager Martin Walker explains. Its just another important piece of the puzzle when it comes to online visibility, ranking and physical traffic to a brick and mortar location.

Google My Business used to be called Google Places, and before that Google Maps and currently show only 3 businesses in online search results in Google. Getting a business listed in the top 3, AKA the 3 Pack can increase traffic and revenue for any small business.

About Spencer Lewis

Spencer Lewis is a boutique Ad Agency based in Rancho Cucamonga, Ca. specializing in graphic communications and digital marketing. For more information please visit: https://spencerlewis.com

The Chris Auffenberg Ford Lincoln team recognized 30 years of achievements in the Washington, MO community with a commemorative video.

Earlier this month, the Chris Auffenberg Ford Lincoln dealership celebrated 30 years of business in the Washington, MO community. Chris Auffenberg Ford Lincoln is one of seven dealerships operated by the Chris Auffenberg dealership group in the Missouri and Illinois region. To highlight the milestone, the team created a celebratory video to recognize achievements like the dealerships work with local first responders, a Drive 4 Ur School program and multiple Presidents awards for quality customer service.

Chris Auffenberg Ford Lincoln has many partnerships with the local community including a Drive 4 Ur School program that has helped raise over $120,000 for local Washington schools. The dealership is also proud to support local first responders by servicing their fleet of vehicles. A strong commitment to service has always been part of the dealerships mission and has been highlighted by seven Ford Lincoln Presidents Award victories.

With new cars, crossovers, SUVs and trucks from the Ford and Lincoln lineups plus a large fleet of used options from various brands, vehicle shoppers are sure to find something that fits their needs. Though select sedans and hatchbacks are available, the Ford and Lincoln brands specialize in truck models like the popular Ford F-150 pickup and crossover models like the Ford Edge, Ford Escape, Lincoln MKC and Lincoln Navigator. Visit the dealerships online inventory page to see which models are currently in stock.

For more information on the Chris Auffenberg family of dealerships throughout Missouri and Illinois, visit the dealership groups website at http://www.chrisauffenberg.com or connect with a dealership representative by phone at 314-966-1000.There seems to be a common misconception that industry-specific analysis functions are only available in a CAD system.

Project managers and sales representatives in the tool making, casting, mold/die and plastic injection industry routinely respond to requests from customers inquiring about the cost of producing a specific part. The part must be inspected and analyzed to draw these conclusions and supply an answer. What is the most efficient software tool for this purpose? KISTERS 3DViewStation provides an easy-to-use, affordable visualization and inspection application that assists users, enterprise-wide in this process.

The typical, basic functionalities needed to support the inspection and analysis processes are: the loading of native CAD files, volume calculations, measurements, dimensions, sectioning, and annotations. In addition, companies often need the ability to isolate and inspect parts in order to perform a more advanced analysis. With 3DViewStation, the result of this work can be organized into views and easily saved for later retrieval.

There seems to be a common misconception that industry-specific analysis functions are only available in a CAD system. However, 3DViewStation, a fast and extremely easy-to-use software product, provides these functions at a much lower price point, said Tammy Pleasent, KISTERS North America Sales Manager. One typical industry-specific required functionality is: draft angle analysis, which assists in the identification of undercuts. In addition, we have recently added a splitting function that helps determine the complexity of the required tool in order to unmold the produced part. This can be combined with draft angle analysis, providing your business a multitude of tools to assist throughout the entire molding process.

Complementary functions for this process are our real time wall thickness measurement, projected area calculation and analysis of the complete part, which shows its results by color coding the object and supplying an easy-to-decipher color key, She added. These advanced functions are available in our Desktop version and WebViewer product; therefore, you can access these tools in both a stand-alone or integrated environment on any leading system (such as an: ERP, MES or PLM system) by leveraging our high level APIs.

Known for its modern user-interface, high performance viewing, advanced analysis and integration capabilities into leading systems, 3DViewStation ships with current and mature importers for a broad range of 3D and 2D formats including i.e. Catia, NX, Creo, SolidWorks, SolidEdge, Inventor, JT, 3D-PDF, STEP, DWG, DXF, DWF, MS Office and many more.

The latest developments of 3DViewStation can be reviewed in more detail at: https://www.3dviewstation.com/blog.html

According to Pleasent, KISTERS 3DViewStation is continuously enhanced in response to customer needs and requirements. It is available as Desktop, ActiveX, VR-Edition and HTML5 WebViewer product-versions. All product flavors are intended to be used together with a PLM, ERP or other management system product configuration or service and spare part applications, providing all necessary APIs. For cloud, portal and web-solutions, there is an HTML5-based WebViewer solution available, which does not require client installation. All file formats can be used in combination with the intelligent navigation and hyperlinking features to address the needs of complex integration scenarios.

About the company

25 years success in the market with superior visualization solutions from desktop to mobile has proven KISTERS to be one of the top players in the visualization industry. Clients ranging from small firms to well-known multinationals, 3DViewStation's easy-to-use interface is suitable for all user groups and 100% customizable to each individuals specific requirements. More than 3,000 customers and over 200,000 installations worldwide. In addition, KISTERS offers expert advice and support in concept development based on client requirements.Welcome To Misery: a rip-roaring account that contains the authors life of harrows and pains that brought fulfillment and success. Welcome To Misery is the creation of published author, Dr. Charles J. Williams, Sr., an ordained minister serving as presiding bishop of the Western Assembly Disciples of Christ Churches.

Dr. Williams, Sr. shares, It may appear preposterous for anyone to welcome someone to misery, but there are two sides to every life situation. There is a positive side and there is a negative side. In this book, it is the authors effort to prove to the reader that the negative side is the greatest contributor to successful human development.

This book reveals a true story about a Negro man who grew up during the era wherein Jim Crow and segregation were the law of the land in the south. It had to be the divine intervention of God that enabled the author to maintain a sound mind and a positive attitude. In each experience of misery, there was always the belief that something good will happen eventually, if the author chose to endure with an attitude of optimism.

It is also his belief that even though some persons have been taught or scripted to be unkind, if kindness from the victim is reciprocated to them, in most instances, those persons will experience a change in attitudes.

In reference to the author, he is a living proof that even if a person has experienced a life of poverty and misery, it can be overcome if one can maintain a positive and congenial attitude. Dr. Charles J. Williams, Sr. is an ordained minister who presently serves as presiding bishop of the 145 years old Western Assembly Disciples of Christ Churches founded in 1872, located in the southern part of Johnston County, three miles north of Newton Grove, North Carolina. This church organization is an affiliate of the Christian Church Disciples of Christ which is located in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Dr. Charles J. Williams, Sr.s new book recounts poignant circumstances that reflect humanitys capacity for glory through the trial of fire that tests conviction and patience.

This book is also an actual proof of Gods grandness and benevolence that paves the way for people to attain true purposefulness in life.

View a synopsis of Welcome To Misery on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase Welcome To Misery at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Welcome To Misery, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.We are excited to be able to directly impact New Yorks capital city with trusted financial forensics services that address key financial issues our clients face.

Lowers Forensics International (LFI), a leading financial forensics firm, is expanding its global footprint to include the opening of a new office in Albany, New York. The LFI team is trusted by leading insurance companies and organizations worldwide to provide expertise in financial forensics, litigation support, insurance claims accounting, and financial investigation services. The company is a division of Lowers Risk Group, one of the fastest-growing, privately held companies in America based on Inc. 5000 Magazine rankings.

The Albany office will be led by LFI Vice President, Jennifer Isaacs, whose expertise includes the quantification of economic damages related to lost profits, no-fault lost wages, substitute wage assessments, business interruption, extra expenses, and fraud investigation.

We are excited to be able to directly impact New Yorks capital city with trusted financial forensics services that address key financial issues our clients face, says Isaacs. The LFI team here in Albany is supported by a global team with expertise across nearly every major industry and backed by a risk management enterprise that can extend our value deep into the places that most impact people, brands, and profits, she continues.

A native of New York, Jennifer holds several national and State of New York forensic investigation certifications, including credentials as a Certified Fraud Examiner and a Certified Valuation Analyst. She has specific experience providing forensic accounting services for financial motive, such as investigations of employee theft, and has extensive knowledge in analyzing bank statements and financial records, tracing the flow of funds, inventory theft, and numerous other cases involving potential fraud. Isaacs routinely provides litigation support services to clients and provides lost profits and business interruption training to several insurance companies. She has also directed valuation studies for private enterprises, professional licenses, advanced academic degrees, and professional practices.

To reach Jennifer Isaacs at the Albany office call (518) 690-5811 or (833) 456-9377 or visit lowersforensics.com.

About Lowers Forensics International, LLC

Lowers Forensics International offers expertise in insurance claims accounting, litigation support, investigative services, and expert testimony to support organizations worldwide. The company maintains offices across the globe to serve the needs of insurance companies, attorneys, and private and public entities when it comes to transforming complex financial information into clear evidence.

For more information about Lowers Forensics International, visit lowersforensics.com.

About Lowers Risk Group

Lowers Risk Group provides comprehensive enterprise risk management solutions to organizations operating in high-risk, highly-regulated environments and organizations that value risk mitigation. The companys human capital and specialized industry enterprise risk management solutions protect people, brands, and profits from avoidable loss and harm. With Lowers Risk Group, clients can expect a strategic, focused approach to risk assessment, compliance, and mitigation to help drive your organization forward with confidence.

For more information on Lowers Risk Group, visit lowersriskgroup.com.

Media Contact

Michael Gaul

Lowers Risk Group

(540) 338-7151

mgaul@lowersriskgroup.comThe Ghan is Australia's ultimate outback rail trip. This magnificent package also includes transfers, two nights in Darwin, an overnight Kakadu excursion, and one night in Adelaide. At its centre is the 3-night Ghan Expedition.

As summer temperatures ease off in Australias red centre, Goway is inviting Globetrotters to take the ultimate Outback train trip at an unbeatable price. Passengers who book Goways 8-day Ghan Expedition, an iconic luxury rail journey from Darwin to Adelaide by March 31, 2019 will save $1,130 per couple on departures throughout mid-2019.

This magnificent package also includes transfers, two nights in Darwin, an overnight Kakadu excursion, and one night in Adelaide. At its centre is the 3-night Ghan Expedition All Inclusive Rail Journey, including gold service accommodation, all meals, beverages, and off-train excursions. These include a visit to Alice Springs, the unofficial capital of Australias outback, and Coober Pedy, an opal mining town famous for its underground structures including a Serbian Orthodox Church. Passengers may opt to upgrade their journey with a helicopter ride over the MacDonnell Ranges, or even a scenic flight over Uluru and Kata Tjuta.

Passengers must book by March 31, 2019 to be eligible for this offer, available on Ghan departures between May 1 and August 31, 2019. Goway can also design a personalised itinerary for guests wishing to extend their Australia vacation.

Since 1970, Goway has been providing unforgettable travel experiences to Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Central & South America, Idyllic Island destinations and Europe. Today Goway is recognized as one of North America's leading travel companies for individuals, families and groups to select exotic destinations around the globe. Goway has offices in Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Manila, and Sydney, Australia.

For reservations and information, visit http://www.goway.com, or call 1-800-387-8850.The national securities law firm, Levin Law, P.A. (Levin Law) (http://www.levinlawpa.com) announced today that it is continuing its investigation regarding the due diligence and sales practices of securities brokerage firms who offered, recommended, or sold GPB Capital Holdings (GPB or GPB Capital) funds and other private placement securities. Levin Law has already been contacted by multiple GPB investors who believe that they have suffered losses from their GPB investments.

According to public filings, there were brokerage firms around the country who sold, or who disclosed that they might be selling GPB Capital-issued funds. If you invested in a GPB fund through any brokerage firm, you may be able to pursue claims against that securities broker-dealer in a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) arbitration. In addition to others, the following firms were disclosed in public filings as being authorized to sell GPB funds: Aegis Capital, Arete Wealth Management, Ascendant Alternative, Geneos Wealth, Money Concepts, Hightower Securities, and Royal Alliance. For a complete list, please visit, levinlawpa.com/gpb-capital/.

There have been multiple publicly filed lawsuits and regulatory matters alleging that GPB has been engaged in wrongdoing. In one instance, former GPB operating partner, Patrick Dibre alleged that losses occasioned by GPB were in fact caused by a very complicated and manipulative Ponzi scheme.

In addition, InvestmentNews reported that the FBI is investigating GPB Capital Holdings. That visit occurred only months after both the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and FINRA launched probes into the firm, which claims to have raised $1.8B from accredited, high net worth investors. In September, the State of Massachusetts announced that it was investigating 63 stock brokerage firms for selling GPB Capital Holdings-issued private placements. In November, GPB Capital announced that its auditor, Crowe LLP, had stepped down from that role over what the private placement firms CEO David Gentile said where perceived risks that it felt were outside internal risk tolerance parameters.

If you have information about the sales practices of any brokerage firm who recommended or sold GPB funds or believe that you have suffered losses in GPB funds, please contact Levin Law managing partner, Brian Levin, at 305-402-9050, brian(at)levinlawpa.com, or visit Levin Laws website, http://www.levinlawpa.com. More information about Levin Laws investigation of GPB can be found at https://www.levinlawpa.com/levin-law-investigating-brokerage-firms-that-recommended-gpb-capital-holdings-to-customers/.

Contact:

Levin Law, P.A.

Brian Levin, Esq.

305-402-9050

brian(at)levinlawpa.com

http://www.levinlawpa.comImpact Pediatric Health is in its fifth year at SXSW. We were blown away by the level of talent and incredible innovation showcased at this years Impact Pediatric Health pitch competition, said Dr. Chester Koh

Impact Pediatric Health, a one-of-a-kind pitch competition held annually at SXSW dedicated to showcasing and supporting the best pediatric healthcare innovations, announced the recipients of four $25,000 grants in the Pediatric Device category during their fifth annual event on Friday, March 9, 2019.

From the 50 pediatric device applications submitted, the Southwest National Pediatric Device Consortium (SWPDC) provided the funding to four pediatric device innovators to accelerate devices designed to improve the safety and delivery of pediatric care.

The companies receiving $25,000 in direct device funding include:



Smileyscope, Cambridge, MA, transforms scary pediatric procedures with virtual reality @smileyscope

Bardy Diagnostics, Seattle, WA, digital health and remote cardiac patient monitoring innovation @bardydx

Prapela, Boston, MA, helps newborns breathe, relax and sleep with SVS  a breakthrough technology @Prapelainfo

PolyVascular, Houston, TX, created pediatric polymeric transcatheter pulmonary valves @PolyVascular

We were blown away by the level of talent and incredible innovation showcased at this years Impact Pediatric Health pitch competition, said Dr. Chester Koh, Executive Director of SWPDC, pediatric urologist at Texas Childrens Hospital and professor of urology at Baylor College of Medicine. At Impact Pediatric Health and SWPDC, we are always looking for the next cutting-edge breakthrough in the world of medical devices, and we are excited to stand beside these four companies and help accelerate the next generation of medical device companies impacting our youngest of patients.

In addition to the Pediatric Devices category, the tech start-up applicants competed in the Digital Health and the Health Disparities and Equity categories.

Sound Scouts, a start-up out of Sydney, Australia providing accessible hearing checks for school-aged children, claimed the award in the Digital Health category, while PolyVascular of Houston, Texas also received the Health Disparities and Equity award in addition to the $25,000 in funding.

Winners across each category and all participants benefited from the invaluable feedback from a host of industry experts serving as judges at the event, as well as from the sponsoring childrens hospitals.

Created by seven leading U.S. Childrens Hospitals including Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta, Boston Childrens Hospital, Cincinnati Childrens Hospital, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, Seattle Childrens Hospital, Stanford Childrens Health and Texas Childrens Hospital, Impact Pediatric Healths 2019 pitch competition was hosted by event emcee, Lisa Suennen, Managing Director of Manatt Health.

The event featured judges representing each of the seven host childrens hospitals as well as Molly McCarthy MBA, RN-BC, National Director, US Provider Industry and Chief Nursing Officer at Microsoft; Bonnie Clipper, VP, Practice and Innovation, American Nurses Association; Peggy Maguire, President, Cambia Health Foundation, Andrew El Bardissi, Principal, Deerfield Management, and Stacy Feld, Vice President, Consumer Venture Investments & External Innovation, Johnson & Johnson.

Additional finalists included the following: InfraScan, Gravitas Medical, Vifant, LLC, BabyNoggin, KinChip Systems, Better Living Technologies, and Elemeno Health.

Southwest National Pediatric Device Consortium (SWPDC) is a multi-institutional consortium that includes clinical, scientific, business, financial, regulatory, reimbursement, engineering, intellectual property, and academic partners in the Houston / Southwest U.S. region. The consortium received a five-year, $6.75 million FDA P50 Pediatric Device Consortia (PDC) grant to support innovation, mentoring, and collaborations amongst pediatric clinicians and surgeons, engineers, industry, and other partners for pediatric device development. For more information, visit http://swpdc.org

To learn more about Impact Pediatric Health, visit https://impactpediatric.health and follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/pediatricpitch/.

Impact Pediatric Health:

Now in its fifth year, Impact Pediatric Health hosts a one-of-a-kind pitch competition held annually at SXSW dedicated to showcasing and supporting the best pediatric healthcare innovations. Seven of the largest and top-ranked (according to US News and World Report) childrens hospitals in the U.S. came together to create Impact Pediatric Health. These leading hospitals collaborate to help next generation pediatric healthcare companies accelerate their businesses. For more information see https://impactpediatric.health

"Inventus Power supports the continued development of new safety technologies at the cell, battery pack and device level and we believe that the BIG consortiums mission of zero lithium-ion battery-related safety events can be realized. - Chris Turner, Inventus Power CTO

Inventus Power, a global designer and manufacturer of battery packs, chargers and power supplies for the commercial, industrial, consumer, medical and military markets, today announced that it has joined the Soteria Battery Innovation Group (BIG.)

Soteria BIG is a consortium of companies representing the ecosystem of developers and users of energy storage technology for a wide range of markets. Soterias separator and current collector technology, which helps to prevent an internal cell short circuit from escalating into thermal runaway, is just one example of new safety technology that the consortium would like to promote to the market.

As the energy density of lithium-ion batteries has increased, there has also been an increase in companies and industries that are adopting li-ion battery technology. Along with this increase in adoption rate, there have been seemingly daily announcements of safety incidents concerning li-ion batteries across various markets/applications, Chris Turner, CTO of Inventus Power. As the global leader in advanced battery systems, we have a long-standing history of developing safe, high-quality and reliable power solutions for wide range of markets. Inventus Power supports the continued development of new safety technologies at the cell, battery pack and device level and we believe that the BIG consortiums mission of zero lithium-ion battery-related safety events can be realized.

Inventus brings significant expertise to help our other consortium members integrate the Soteria architecture into battery packs adapted to specific applications and markets. We look forward to working closely together to optimize safety, weight and cost improvements for its customers and our consortium members benefits, said Brian Morin, CEO of Soteria BIG.

Both Inventus Power and Soteria Battery Innovation Group will exhibit at the International Battery Seminar in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida on March 25th through the 28th. Soteria is also having its second member meeting on March 25th where Mr. Turner will join representatives from NASA, Mercedes-Benz, NIO and Motorola Solutions on an end-user panel discussion of the technology.

About Inventus Power:

Inventus Power, founded in 1960, is the leading provider of advanced battery systems for global OEMs. We specialize in the design and manufacture of battery packs, chargers, and power supplies across a broad range of portable, motive & stationary applications.

With multi-country locations across four continents and manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, China, & Malaysia, we are strategically positioned to support the needs of global brands.

From design & engineering to performance testing & mass production, Inventus Power provides accelerated end-to-end solutions. Our broad market/application expertise, technology agnostic approach, global footprint, and vertical integration allow us to deliver safe, reliable & innovative power solutions at an exceptional speed to market.

For more information about Inventus Power, please visit http://www.inventuspower.com and follow @inventuspower.Sheba and Sunnybrook are two hospitals where groundbreaking research is being done on a daily basis, and by combining the power of the two institutions, we can make great strides in heart care.

Canadian Friends of Sheba Medical Center recently gathered doctors from Sheba Medical Center, Tel HaShomer and Canadas Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre to discuss the important connection between the two preeminent facilities and their shared goal in improving heart health.

Sheba Medical Center, Tel HaShomer is the largest and most comprehensive hospital in the Middle East and The Sunnybrook Health Science Centre is a world leader in health sciences. In 2017, the two hospitals formed a robust partnership, with five areas of collaboration, including fellowships, joint research and innovation projects, to combine forces in the battle against heart disease.

The celebratory breakfast marked the achievements made through their joint efforts and highlighted ways in which the hospitals could maximize impact, including taking advantage of Shebas state-of-the-art simulation education program and its position as an innovator in medical technology.

Speaking at the breakfast were Shebas Dr. Ehud Regev, a visiting interventional cardiology fellow who has been in Canada since the summer of 2018, and Chief of Sunnybrooks Schulich Heart Centre Dr. Bradley Strauss, who provided guests with an update on the latest developments stemming from the collaboration.

Sheba and Sunnybrook are two hospitals where groundbreaking research is being done on a daily basis, and by combining the power of the two institutions, we can make great strides in heart care, stated Dr. Regev. Through this cooperation, we will accelerate the pace of innovation faster than ever before.

About Sheba Medical Center, Tel HaShomer

Born together with Israel in 1948, Sheba Medical Center, Tel HaShomer is the largest and most comprehensive medical center in the Middle East. Sheba is the only medical center in Israel that combines an acute care hospital and a rehabilitation hospital on one campus, and it is at the forefront of medical treatments, patient care, research and education. As a university teaching hospital affiliated with the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel-Aviv University, it welcomes people from all over the world indiscriminately. To learn more, visit: eng.sheba.co.il.

The EHS Daily Advisor Safety Standout Awards recognize companies and safety professionals who excel in making their workplaces safe. We are proud to announce our latest round of award winners.

These awards are sponsored by SafeStart, a global safety company focused on human error prevention training to reduce injuries 24/7, and will be presented to the winners at the 6th Annual Safety Summit in Austin, Texas, April 8-10, 2019.

Best Overall Safety Program Award: The Great Lakes Construction Co.

The Great Lakes Construction Co. is one of Ohios premier Heavy Civil construction firms. Great Lakes believes safety takes the highest priority and as a result, takes a proactive approach in providing a safe work environment. The bottom line for Great Lakes is preventing accidents and injuries.

BLRs Lifetime Achievement in Safety Award: William Hocevar CSP, CIH

William Hocevar is a certified safety professional and certified industrial hygienist with 20 years of experience in safety. During his time at The Great Lakes Construction Co. (he is currently the Director of Risk and Compliance), Bill has spoken at the national level for various organizations, has been named Safety Professional of the Year, led his company to be named Americas Safest Company, and been named The Best in the Nation for Safety Programs and Implementation.

Innovations in Safety Training Award: Northwell Health

Northwell Health is New York States largest health care provider and private employer, with 23 hospitals and 700 outpatient facilities. Northwell Healths Workforce Safety team stresses safety and advocacy as the cornerstones of their foundation. The first, and perhaps most important value that Northwell Healths Workforce Safety team brings to employees is the focus on efforts to ensure a safe environment for their customers/patients, visitors, and employees.

Young Safety Professional Excellence Award: Melanie Mayer, CSP

Melanie Mayer is Quality and Compliance Manager at Haws Corporation, where she is an innovative and forward-thinking individual who has cultivated a strong safety culture. With an extensive background in environmental health, she has succeeded at developing and executing effective safety and compliance procedures in her four-year tenure.

Join the Safety Standout Award Winners at the 6th Annual Safety Summit

Theres still time to register for Safety Summit 2019, the nations leading workplace safety and OSHA compliance event, to help us celebrate the accomplishments of these organizations and professionals in person. In addition to our awards ceremony, there will be a wide variety of educational sessions, speakers, and events tailored to assisting your development as an EHS professional. Seats are filling up fast, so save yours today!

Next Round of Safety Standout Awards Opening Soon

Stay tuned for the next round of Safety Standout Awards that focus on safety culture:



Best Safety Committee

Best Overall Safety Culture

Moving Beyond Compliance Award

Exceptional Progress Award

New applications will be posted here shortly: http://safetyawards.blr.com.

About BLR  a Simplify Compliance brand

BLR (Business & Legal Resources) helps U.S. businesses simplify compliance with state and federal legal requirements. In-house experts and an exclusive attorney network provide comprehensive, reliable, state-specific information for businesses in all 50 states. Award-winning products and solutionsincluding training programs, events, online solution suites, reports, and subscription servicesgive businesses of all sizes and industries the best tools available at affordable prices. For more information on its offerings, visit https://www.BLR.com.

About Simplify Compliance

Simplify Compliance helps its customers learn, comply, and succeed by providing mission-critical regulatory and business information, analysis, and tools. Formed by Leeds Equity Partners in 2016, Simplify Compliance serves a range of industries, including financial services, healthcare, human capital management, and telecommunications. Simplify Compliance provides time-saving products and solutions that help U.S.-based businesses and their employees monitor compliance, optimize financial performance, and create and implement best practices. For more information, visit http://www.SimplifyCompliance.com.Our party has actually became a staple in HD events, and we are very excited to have another chance to connect with our clients and show our appreciation for their business!" Lacy Price, Director of Marketing for CM Hospitality Carpets

Five leading hospitality manufacturers are partnering to host a special after party this year at HD in Las Vegas. CM Hospitality Carpets, Hallmark Lighting, HF Collection, Innovations Wallcovering and Silhouette Outdoor Furniture have rented the Eye Candy Sound Lounge at Mandalay Bay on the first day of the HD Expo on Wednesday, May 15th.

"We are expecting this to be very well attended because of the convenient location." says Lacy Price, Director of Marketing for CM Hospitality Carpets. "This is my 6th consecutive year being involved in planning this event. Our party has actually became a staple in HD events, and we are very excited to have another chance to connect with our clients and show our appreciation for their business!" says Price.

Eye Candy Sound Lounge, the event's venue, is conveniently located centrally in the casino at Mandalay Bay where the HD Expo will be held May 15-17, 2019 in Las Vegas, NV. Eye Candy Sound Lounge features multiple bar areas and a fluorescent lit dance floor and comfy lounge area for guests to rest their feet from walking all day at the show.

Guests will enjoy a drink at an open bar, appetizers, swag bags, live DJ, and a chance at cash door prizes. Invitations will go out in April to key decision makers in the hospitality industry through each of the manufacturers' sales forces.Marco Ehrhardt constantly challenges himself and the global EPG team to provide smarter logistics solutions and explore key insights to discover how EPG can harness disruption to drive new value for its customers.

Ehrhardt Partner Group (EPG), a leading global provider of supply chain execution and voice software solutions, today announced that Marco Ehrhardt, its president and CEO, has been named among Food Logistics 2019 Food Logistics Champions: Rock Stars of the Supply Chain.

Food Logistics Champions: Rock Stars of the Supply Chain recognizes influential supply chain professionals whose achievements, hard work, and vision have shaped and attained milestones in safety, efficiency, productivity and innovation through the global food supply chain. From early pioneers and entrepreneurs to non-conformist thinkers and executive standouts, the distinction honors leaders and their contributions to the industry.

Marco Ehrhardt constantly challenges himself and the global EPG team to provide smarter logistics solutions and explore key insights to discover how EPG can harness disruption to drive new value for its customers, said Scott Deutsch, President, EPG Americas. A key driver to innovation is understanding how the customer can fully realize value from their technology investment to positively impact their bottom line and enhance their customer relationship engagement. Marcos vast expertise helps EPG unlock hidden productivity enhancements and the ability to rapidly test possible technology alternatives for rapid customer value creation.

Our 2019 Food Logistics Champions: Rock Stars of the Supply Chain reflect the expanding diversity that is emerging in our industry, both in terms of demographics and talent, said Lara L. Sowinski, Editor, Food Logistics. The combination of experience and wisdom complemented with a new generation of professionals is resulting in a food and beverage supply chain that is in sync with consumers demands while simultaneously adept and staying ahead of the logistical requirements.

Marco Ehrhardt joined Ehrhardt + Partner Group (EPG) in 1997 and has served as CEO & President since 2003. Marcos leadership has enabled EPG to become one of the worlds largest independent, privately-held supply chain execution software solution providers. EPG provides solutions that meet the most unique, complex functional requirements for more than 1,000 active global customers in industries including 3PL, Aerospace, Consumer Products, Food & Beverage, Food Service, Pharmaceutical, Retail, and Wholesale Distribution. EPG has a growing team of more than 500 dedicated logistics professionals who are at the forefront of industry trends, including cloud automation and ecommerce fulfillment enablement, and are continually developing cutting-edge solutions that improve supply chain execution effectiveness.

As a sought-after supply chain execution strategy expert, Marco has provided insight and thought leadership to businesses, enabling them to compete more effectively in the complex automated and manual world of logistics center distribution. In 2012, he led EPGs efforts to launch its own active 3PL logistics center, strengthening his, and EPGs, position as a supply chain authority. In 2018, Marcos vision and supply chain industry expertise was a key driver in establishing a partnership with Nasser Bin Khaled International, a subsidiary of Nasser Bin Khaled and Sons. The result is the realization of a $500m state-of-the-art, fully automated mega logistics park project which will fulfill the requirements and growing logistics needs of Qatar.

I am very honored to be named to Food Logistics 2019 Rock Stars of the Supply Chain. Marco states. EPG is dedicated to providing solutions that exceed expectation and are always on the edge of technology. EPG embraces solving challenges in the supply chain and providing the best solutions in the industry. Receiving recognition for our efforts from Food Logistics is truly appreciated.

About Food Logistics

Food Logistics is published by AC Business Media, a business-to-business media company that provides targeted content and comprehensive, integrated advertising and promotion opportunities for some of the worlds most recognized B2B brands. Its diverse portfolio serves the construction, logistics, supply chain and other industries with print, digital and custom products, events and social media.

About Ehrhardt Partner Group

Ehrhardt Partner Group (EPG) is the leading provider of comprehensive supply chain execution and voice software solutions for smarter connected logistics. EPGs highly configurable and scalable logistics solution, LFS, delivers Tier I functionality inclusive of: warehouse management, warehouse control and automation, resource management, transportation management, advanced business intelligence analytics and its industry leading iBrowser ensures ongoing support for all major browsers, delivering flexibility and platform independence. Our Lydia Voice solution offers unparalleled voice recognition with its deep neural network technology and eliminates the need for voice template training, while interfacing with a multitude of WMS and ERP solutions. EPG is the only company to offer a lifetime WMS integration guarantee to voice customers. To learn more, visit http://www.epg.com.Michele Dowling, an award-winning poet who has published many collaborations and won accolades such as Outstanding Achievement in Poetry in 2014, has completed her book Billabong Wisdom: a poignant story following the lives of eight native Australian animals and the impact of human activity on their lives and habitats.

Michele shares, Billabong Wisdom is a unique story because it is told to readers by a group of native Australian animal friends. It covers the white Two Legs disregard and destruction of our natural world and how, through love and indigenous spiritual beliefs, we can restore order and balance.

Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, Michele Dowlings book is an educational and entertaining work with an important message of conservation for readers of all ages.

Readers who wish to experience this engaging work can purchase Billabong Wisdom 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.

Today, for many clergy, the question is not IF we will be called to serve in the midst of physical, emotional and spiritual violence, but rather WHEN such a call might come. - Rev. Matthew Crebbin, Newtown Congregational Church.

On April 9, ODYSSEY IMPACT has launched a new multimedia resource to ensure that no faith leader faces the hardships and challenges of ministry without support. Mass violence and communal tragedy has become a reality in our society, even in regions considered among the safest, such as New Zealand and Newtown, CT. Ministry in the wake of shared trauma is becoming a regular requirement for ministers. HEALING THE HEALERS is a new series comprised of five 15-minute documentaries that are intimate conversations between faith leaders whove experienced mass trauma events in their communities and congregations.

Rev. Matt Crebbin, whose life was forever changed on December 14, 2012, leads the conversations. That fateful day, a young man took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which is located just two miles from Newtown Congregational Church, where Crebbin serves as Senior Pastor.

Newtown is a small, close knit community, so Crebbin and the other local faith leaders had to immediately react, managing media and ministering to their entire community  including victims, emergency workers, families, their own congregations, and their own families.

Crebbin is still processing the effects of that trauma on his personal life. As Crebbin says, Its like learning to dance again, only with a limp.

For the past two years, Crebbin has explored the question who heals the healers? When mass trauma strikes, faith leaders are called to guide, heal and sustain their communities. But how can those who are looked to for answers find the mental, emotional, and spiritual help they may need after an act of sharing an extreme experience such as violence or a natural disaster?

The series is a journey, following Crebbin as he explores the long-term effects of this type of trauma on faith leaders, and a mission to help educate and prepare them to serve when a future trauma lands in their community.. He seeks to recognize the isolation often felt by faith leaders who face unique stresses in the aftermath of these events.

HEALING THE HEALERS covers key themes of self-care, self-awareness, pastoral roles, impact on the families of faith leaders, living with continual community trauma, re-traumatization from other mass violence, questions of faith in light of evil, creating trauma-informed ministries, and lessons learned after 6 years of what he calls new wisdom.

In the project, Crebbin is joined by other faith leaders, including: Rev. Dr. Kate Wiebe, Executive Director of the Institute for Collective Trauma and Growth; Rev. Kathleen E. Adams-Shepherd, previous rector at Trinity Episcopal Church in Newtown; Rev. Henry Brown, the leader of Mothers United Against Violence; Rev. Melvyn Kawakami, retired Senior Pastor at Newtown United Methodist Church; Monsignor Basil OSullivan, former chaplain at Dunblane Primary School, site of a mass shooting that killed 16 children and their teacher; Rabbi Shaul Marshall Praver, a first responder at Sandy Hook Elementary; Pastor Samuel Saylor, Sr., Senior Pastor of Gardner Memorial AME Zion Church in Springfield, MA and National Vice President of the National Gun Victims Action Council; and Cantor Michael Shochet, former Police Officer who became ordained and now serves as a Senior Clergy of Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, VA.

Far too often faith leaders suffer in silence after mass tragedies in their communities. They are under incredible stress and grief themselves, yet often lack resources to get the same level of support that they give others, shares Nick Stuart, President and CEO of Odyssey Impact and Transform Films. We hope that HEALING THE HEALERS will open up a discussion about how ministers can receive the support they may need, in an honest, safe, and restorative environment.

Healing the Healers looks at the ongoing experiences not just in the first year after collective loss - but in the subsequent years, the year two, year five, and so forth and how the impacts of collective loss changes who you are as a person and who you are in your profession, shares Rev. Dr. Kate Wiebe, who serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Collective Trauma and Growth.

Stuart continues, At Odyssey Impact, we are passionate about sharing powerful stories of social justice and creating activism through compelling community-based documentaries and discussions. We know that social change is possible when we can raise awareness, change attitudes, and begin meaningful conversations. The faith community is uniquely poised to use these stories to bring a spirit of healing, support, understanding, and lasting change in their individual communities.

Focused on encouraging a dialogue and sparking positive change, Odyssey Impact has developed numerous resources and discussion guides to accompany this series, which are available for download to help facilitate events by local grassroots organizations. A community toolkit, surveys, and local organizing tools are additional components provided to assist with educational and community outreach for Healing The Healers and for the ongoing Womens Rights #metoo movement addressed by THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLOR which inspires hope through the story of Recy Taylor and Rosa Parks. For information, go to http://www.odyssey-impact.org.

COMMUNITY OUTREACH: To host a screening or download resources and discussion guides to engage in community and educational outreach, go to https://www.odyssey-impact.org/healing-the-healers.

About ODYSSEY IMPACT

ODYSSEY IMPACT, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, believes that powerful documentaries with messages of social justice can motivate meaningful social change by raising awareness, changing attitudes and inspiring people of all faiths and good will to engage their communities on issues important in their lives and in society as a whole. The organization is dedicated to strategically building and executing social impact campaigns around documentaries, including those created by its affiliated production company TRANSFORM FILMS INC., via mobilizing faith leaders, individuals, and communities around issues such as poverty, mass incarceration, gun violence, intolerance, racial justice, hate crimes, and gender violence. More info at http://www.Odyssey-Impact.org.

About TRANSFORM FILMS

TRANSFORM FILMS INC. is a wholly-owned subsidiary and affiliated production company of Odyssey Networks, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that believes powerful documentaries with messages of social justice can motivate meaningful social change by raising awareness, changing attitudes and inspiring people of all faiths and good will to engage their communities on issues important in their lives and in society as a whole. Transform Films, Inc. have produced films such as NEWTOWN; MILWAUKEE 53206; THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLOR, and LESSONS FROM A SCHOOL SHOOTING: NOTES FROM DUNBLANE that have garnered critical acclaim at film festivals and have aired on broadcast outlets such as PBS Independent Lens, America Reframed, STARZ Channel and Netflix. Recent accolades include the 2018 Peabody Award, the 2018 Tribeca Film Festivals Best Documentary Short, the 2018 UNAFF Grand Jury Award for Best Short Documentary, and the 2017 Venice International Film Festival Human Rights Award. More info at http://www.TransformFilmsInc.com.According to Travel Agent Central, 2018 had a record number of Millennials traveling for their Spring Break. And 2019 is expected to be on pace to exceed that number, especially considering record snowfall in ski resorts and a relatively mild winter in beach destinations. (Source: https://www.travelagentcentral.com/running-your-business/stats-53-millennials-to-take-spring-break-vacation)

All of this Spring Break travel means a hotels supplies will be used at an incredible rate, said Mark Zisek, Front Desk Supplys Director of Commercial Operations. We want to help our clients ensure they dont run out of any vital supplies over this busy period. We are offering $75 off any new product order with us of $500 or more.

High Occupancy hotels often find their key card inventories drained due to lost keys and must be replaced. Often these, as well as, pens, notepads and other stationery are taken hoome by the guest . In room signs also get more wear and tear. The following are some of Front Desk Supplys top Spring Break products:

1. Key Cards

They offer:

Magnetic Stripe Key Cards

Magnetic Stripe cards in 3 all types of coercivity (low, medium and high). Front Desk Supply customizes millions of these keys each year with unique branding and photos.

RFID Key Cards

Front Desk Supply offers generic or custom designed RFID keys compatible with all major access control systems. These keys just need a wave in front of the door to open and are very guest friendly.

Other Cards (Pool & Towel Cards, Meeting and Conference Cards)

Front Desk Supply also offers plastic towel cards for you to keep track of an important investment, as well as custom cards for our hotels conference and banquet facilities.

2. Key Card Holders

Key card sleeves and key card folders, not only help protect a guests key card, they provide an excellent opportunity to extend a hotels brand and to make an impact upon their guests. Front Desk Supply focuses on making high quality products with a memorable design so guests always have access to important hotel information.

Key Card Folders

Front Desk Supply customizes 1 and 2 pocket style key card folders in several sizes to compliment any hotels branding.

Key Sleeves

Front Desk Supply offers economical and high-end key sleeves for RFID and Magnetic stripe keycards.

3. Stationery, business cards and notepads

They have the ability to coordinate a hotel brands consistency across a wide variety of media, including: Hotel Stationery, envelopes, notepads, business cards and even social media cards. And ALL of this at an affordable price.

4. Pens

Front Desk Supply understands the deliberations that go into re-ordering pens and can help client Hotels with the process. Whether theyre interested in an economical Stick Pen, an affordable Retractable Pen or a premium Metallic Pen, Front Desk Supply has the expertise to fulfill an order at a VERY affordable price.

Types of Pens Front Desk Supply Offers

Stick Pens (Economical)

Retractable Click Pens and twist pens (Mid-Price)

Metallic Pens (High-End)

5. Valet and Luggage Tags

Front Desk Supply offers luggage tags, valet tags and parking permits at extremely competitive prices when compared to other providers.

6. Do Not Disturb and Other Signs

Front Desk offers a variety of signs, including: Do Not Disturb, water conservation, Room Service menus and table toppers and tents.

7. Postcards, Rack Cards and Notepads

Post Cards

Postcards areamong the oldest of travel marketing and to this day remain a viable investment for hotels. Front Desk can help you with the design of your hotels postcard.

Rack Cards

Rack Cards are a great way to convey essential Hotel information to guests and are also a great way for a hotel to promote itself at trade shows.

Notepads

Notepads with your hotels branding can serve as a timely reminder of their stay and are a great way to ensure repeat bookings. We offer a variety of shapes, sizes and page counts to meet our customers needs.

This is a great time to stock up for Spring Break and beyond!, Zisek added. To take advantage of this offer, give us a call today and one of our experienced representatives will walk you through our easy end to end process of placing your order.

Why Front Desk Supply?

Front Desk Supply is invested in becoming a preferred partner with hotels for many years to come, working together to offer a unique brand for the hotel that guests will remember Front Desk Supply graphic artists are free of charge, and Front Desk supply has competitive pricing and short lead times.

About Front Desk Supply

Front Desk Supply has over 50 years of Sales, Marketing and Advertising, and Operations experience, along with the wealth of experience that comes from producing millions of products for thousands of hotels in the hospitality industry.

Their experience includes a wealth of customer relationship experience, including large and small companies in diverse industries. This experience gets ingrained in all employees to put the customer first and do their best to understand each unique situation. Front Desk Supply excels when being able to provide multiple products  it makes for a one stop shopping experience for customers and ensures messaging flows consistently across products. They do our best to make recommendations that make good business sense.

Front Desk Supply: Making hotels more profitable and their guests stays more memorable.Project Boon Partners with Inland Valley Recovery Services (IVRS) To Boost Community Outreach

The spring season is upon us, and that means that local non-profit Project Boon (http://www.projectboon.org) is once again teaming up with San Bernardino's Inland Valley Recovery Services (http://www.inlandvalleyrecovery.org) to host their third annual free Easter event. For the third straight year, Project Boon will support the existing event, helping IVRS expand their reach to underserved communities and those in recovery, by hosting holiday meals, health services, The Easter Bunny and baskets.

In 2015, when IVRS was running their holiday events on their own, they were able to serve 300 of the San Bernardino area's most needy individuals. With Project Boon's assistance and resources, that number jumped to serving 500-700 residents. This year, both IVRS and Project Boon are expecting even more attendees at the Easter event, being held on April 17, 2019 from 12-4pm at the IVRS San Bernardino facility, 939 N. D St. San Bernardino, CA. In addition to serving up hot meals and a family-like environment to those who might not otherwise have them, the IVRS Easter event will provide:



Health and resource vendors

A clothing closet for men, women and children

Games and crafts for kids

Raffle prizes

A visit from The Easter Bunny

Easter baskets, bikes and toys

Additionally, IVRS and Project Boon have arranged for free OmniTrans passes, San Bernardino County's Public Transit System, so that all interested attendees have a way of making it to and from the event. Interested attendees who need OmniTrans passes can contact IVRS to arrange to receive these passes.

Committed to helping those in need, especially people who are trying to better themselves or others, Project Boon's partnership with IVRS is its effort to make a difference in the Inland Empire community.

For additional commentary from Project Boon or to schedule an interview with Chris Suchanek, please contact Vanessa Pelaez at (951) 305-3038 or email at v.pelaez (at) firm-media (dot) com.Bio Logic Aqua Research Founder Sharon Kleyne

International Water Day is March 22nd and Water Life Science lifestyle leader and dry eye expert Sharon Kleyne has declared a celebration of rediscovering the algorithm harmony in the water breath of life in the cosmos. For centuries, people around the globe have practiced Tai Chi, Qigong and Yoga to harmonize the breath of life with the algorithm rhythmical breathing of the universe and planet earth.

The universe functions well because it has a natural rhythm, a breath of life, says Dry Eye Solution creator Kleyne. Earth has a natural rhythm, too, that is in harmony with the rhythm of the universe. Thats why its important for humans to control emotions and maintain harmony with the planet and the universe. Water Life Science researcher Kleyne teaches that when human emotions spiral out of control, people lose their rhythm and that contributes to the planet falling out of rhythm with the universe. This in turn leads to excessive body water evaporation and a spike in maladies such as dry eye, melanoma, cataracts and blindness, among many others.

The rhythm of humans and planet earth even affects climate change, or rather our attitudes about it. Climate change is natural, says Water Life Science and dry eye researcher Kleyne, and has been going on as long as the universe has been in existence. It will go on to the end of time. Kleyne asserts that when people become too emotional, they misinterpret climate science and misunderstand the natural inevitability of climate change.

Water Life Science explorer Kleyne argues that people would be wiser to discover and maintain healthy rhythm with less emotion. This healthier rhythm is at the heart of her Water Life Science lifestyle, which promotes unemotional balanced rhythm and an emphasis on understanding water as the core ingredient of life. We need to be much better educated about water as the breath and secret of all life, says Dry Eye Solution pioneer Kleyne. Without pure water there would be no atmosphere to breathe, no lakes, rivers, creeks, ponds or waterfalls to gaze at and navigate, no reservoirs, no aquifers, no oceans.

Without pure water, there would also be an overwhelming epidemic of dry eye disease. Fortunately, Water Life Science educator Kleyne has an answer. Her Natures Tears EyeMist is the only Dry Eye Solution on the planet that includes 100 percent Trade Secret tissue culture grade water for dry eye with no chemicals or additives. Natures Tears EyeMist embodies and symbolizes the rhythm of the universe, the rhythm of a balanced earth.

A great way to celebrate International Water Day would be to supplement and replenish your dry eyes with Natures Tears EyeMist, says Water Life Science visionary Kleyne. Water Life Science lifestyle crusader Kleyne, also host of the internationally syndicated talk radio weekly program The Sharon Kleyne Hour Water Life Science/Natures Pharma, The Power of Water & Your Health sponsored by Natures Tears EyeMist on VoiceAmerica produced by Rose Hong, founder/director of Global Dragon TV in Washington, D.C., shares that Natures Tears EyeMist is available at Amazon.com or Walgreens.

Kleyne has also created an educational animated film, Dry Eye Animation of the Tear Film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0gOr8TB45U) that demonstrates an effective Dry Eye Solution in harmony with the rhythm of earth and the universeand just in time for International Water Day!SightMD (or the Company), a leading multi-specialty ophthalmology platform and a portfolio company of Chicago Pacific Founders, today announced a strategic partnership with Peconic Ophthalmology (Peconic). The partnership adds one physician and two locations in Riverhead and Southampton to SightMDs team of over 50 physicians and 28 convenient locations in New York.

Peconic is one of the Suffolk Countys preeminent providers of comprehensive ophthalmic care, including cataract and corneal surgery, glaucoma services, and treatment for conditions affecting the retina. Peconics founding physician, Louis Pizzarello, M.D., is a Suffolk County native who has practiced ophthalmology in the East End of Long Island for over 40 years. Dr. Pizzarello is the author of over 30 scientific papers on a wide range of vision-related topics, was recently named a Top Doctor by Castle Connolly for 2019, and served as President of the Medical Staff of Southampton Hospital. Dr. Pizzarello has received awards from the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, Helen Keller International, Southampton College, and the American Academy of Ophthalmology. He is also a Professor of Ophthalmology and Health Management at Columbia University.

Were excited to add Dr. Pizzarello and his team to the SightMD family, said Jeffrey Martin, M.D., a Founder of SightMD. Dr. Pizzarellos clinical excellence and patient-first approach to ophthalmic care align well with SightMDs mission and track record. John Passarelli, a Founder of SightMD, added, Providers like Dr. Pizzarello are why SightMD is the leading provider of comprehensive ophthalmic services in Suffolk County. We look forward to supporting Dr. Pizzarello and his team with our full-service management services organization to drive the highest-quality care to patients, referral sources and payers in the community.

Dr. Pizzarello remarked, there was not a shortage of options when I was evaluating the future of my practice. SightMD differentiated itself with its collaborative approach to partnership, suite of industry-leading management services, and talented group of like-minded physicians who deliver clinically-excellent care. I could not be more excited to join the SightMD family.

Peconic Ophthalmology represents the fourth practice to join SightMD since the Company partnered with Chicago Pacific Founders in September 2018.

About SightMD

SightMD is a rapidly-growing integrated ophthalmic provider group, offering patients access to over 50 ophthalmic surgeons and specialists through the convenience of 28 locations spanning the east end of Long Island to Manhattan. SightMDs track record of providing clinically-excellent care spans over 50 years, and its services include laser cataract surgery and lens implantation, glaucoma management, retinal disorder treatment, corneal services, neuro-ophthalmology, LASIK laser vision correction, oculoplastic surgery, pediatric ophthalmology, and audiology. SightMD provides its physicians with world-class management services, including a 24/7 call center, billing, credentialing, human resources and other services, enabling them to continue delivering best-in-class care to patients in SightMDs community. SightMD is backed by Chicago Pacific Founders, a leading middle market private equity firm which focuses exclusively on partnerships with growing companies in the healthcare services sector. For more information about SightMD, please visit http://www.sightmd.com

Simplifying Clinical Trials Data Management Techsol enables Siriraj Hospital to leverage Oracle's EDC solution to optimize its Clinical Data Management process for Phase I to Phase IV clinical trials.

Siriraj Clinical Research Center (SiCRC) provides biomedical and clinical research-related services to all research units within the Faculty of Medicine at Siriraj Hospital and for various other government and private organizations.

With the objective of increasing its operational efficiency, clinical trial data quality and overall regulatory compliance Siriraj Hospital had reached out to Techsol for selecting and implementing an advanced EDC cloud solution which facilitates faster clinical study setup to support online data capture with electronic case report forms and allows source data verification with online query management for all its Phase 1 to Phase 4 clinical studies.

After a rigorous competency assessment, Siriraj Hospital had selected the Oracle Health Sciences EDC solution as recommended by Techsol for managing all its clinical study data. The Clinical Research Center will begin to use Oracles EDC solution for clinical trial study setup, electronic case report form design, study data capture, electronic data validation, query management and medical coding activities.

As a leading hospital in Bangkok, we wanted Techsol to get us the best in class EDC solution available on the market for our Clinical Research Center. We selected Oracle Health Sciences EDC solution because we believe it clearly stands out from its competitors with outstanding functionality, low total cost of ownership and it fits our business requirements. We would also like to thank Dr. Rungroj Krittayaphong, President of National Clinical Research Center and Dr. Pongsakorn Tantilipihorn, Vice President of National Clinical Research Center for their support in this project, said Dr.Suvimol Niyomnaitham, Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital.

With the implementation of Oracles EDC solution by Techsol, Siriraj Hospital will be able to digitize manual clinical data management processes. Principal Investigators can easily enter clinical trial data online and Sirirajs research team can plan and perform electronic source data verification and query management more efficiently than before. The time to study database lock will be reduced with faster query resolution and overall regulatory compliance of Siriraj Hospitals Clinical Research Center will be enhanced as the Oracle Health Sciences solution is compliant with FDAs 21 CFR Part 11 regulations.

We are very proud to have Siriraj Hospital as our first client in Thailand and our team is looking forward to work with their Clinical Data Management team as an extended technology partner with the implementation of Oracles EDC solution. said Satya S. Sagi, Founder and CEO, Techsol Corporation.

The Clinical Research Center at Siriraj Hospital will definitely see a significant increase in data quality and process efficiency to support their growing number of global clinical studies, said Sriram Varma, Vice President of Service Operations, Techsol Corporation.

It is our relentless objective to help our customers and partners drive more efficiencies in clinical R&D to bring more therapies to market faster. We are pleased to see that Siriraj Hospital has made the decision to leverage Oracles EDC solution to optimize its clinical data management operations with the support of our Oracle Gold Partner, Techsol Corporation, said Drew Zwiebel, global vice president alliances and channels, Oracle Health Sciences.

About Techsol Corporation

Techsol Corporation specializes in offering cloud-based information technology services and innovative software solutions to global pharmaceutical, life sciences, and healthcare companies. Founded in 2010, we are a market leader in providing highly configurable process-oriented technology solutions for digitally transforming pharmaceutical business operations across medical affairs, clinical development, drug safety and medical information management. Our domain-specific business solutions are focused on establishing cross-platform integrations, business process automation, facilitating stakeholder collaboration, risk-based validation, and providing operational insights with advanced data analytics. With our domain expertise, we collaborate with clients to understand business challenges and resolve them with lean and congruent business solutions to scale-up quality, speed, operational efficiency and regulatory compliance.

As a trusted technology partner, we have strategic alliances with industry leaders like Oracle to provide value-based consulting services for solutions implementation, risk-based systems validation, cross-platform integration, business data reporting and advanced data analytics.

About Siriraj Hospital and Siriraj Clinical Research Center

Siriraj Hospital is the oldest and largest hospital in Thailand, located in Bangkok on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River, opposite Thammasat University's Tha Phrachan campus. It is the primary teaching hospital of the Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital, Mahidol University, Thailand. With a capacity of more than 2,000 beds and more than one million outpatient visits per year, Siriraj is one of the largest and busiest medical centers in Southeast Asia. The Siriraj Clinical Research Center (SiCRC) is capable to provide biomedical and clinical research-related services to investigators in Thailand and international organizations.

Siriraj Clinical Research Center was established in 2003 to support and promote clinical research related activities, especially commercial research and medical therapeutics development during phase 1 and 2 clinical trials. Core services provided by the Clinical Research Center are the bioequivalence studies on generic formulation of drugs and all clinical researches from phase 1 to 4. These services are provided by staff members who have been GCP-trained and have clinical research skills and experience.

About Oracle Health Sciences

Oracle Health Sciences helps healthcare & life sciences organizations discover & develop innovative products & services to prevent & cure illness & enhance quality of life. Oracle offers a complete set of clinical and safety solutions that support critical processes throughout the clinical development lifecyclefrom study design and startup to conduct, close-out, and post-marketing.

Reflecting Oracle's ongoing industry commitment, Oracle Health Sciences is uniquely positioned with the products, vision, resources, and industry expertise to fulfill existing and emerging needs in an environment characterized by the expansion of clinical trials and increased linkages across life sciences and healthcare.

KEY CONTACT

Praveen Khare

Associate Director  Client Partner | Techsol Corporation

E: praveen.khare@techsolcorp.com | M: +91 9619313209Cory Benoit

Spring-Green Lawn Care, provider of residential and commercial lawn fertilization and weed control is proud to announce its newest franchise owner, Cory Benoit of Saline, Michigan.

Benoit, a seasoned green industry expert, started mowing lawns at the age of 19 and by the time he was 25 years old he began his own business, Evergreen Maintenance. By adding Spring-Green, he will now be able to offer his customers lawn care services along with maintenance, snow removal, and more. Benoit has always considered himself an entrepreneur, but when his family began to grow and three boys were added to the Benoit family, he decided to diversify. Diversifying gives me added security. Ive learned not to have all my eggs in one basket, as separating them allows me to look at the end result, said Benoit.

A main factor in Benoits decision of owning and operating a Spring-Green Lawn Care business was the fact that it is a family owned business that has been operating for over 40 years. When he was conducting his initial search on franchise opportunities, he felt that Spring-Green would be able to provide him with what he was looking for, I have experienced many growing pains with my first business. With Spring-Green being in business for over 40 years, it provides an additional level of knowledge. Benoit also stated that having a good reputation was a major driving factor in joining Spring-Green. A good reputation, a clear path of direction, and support throughout all the process has been amazing, said Benoit.

We want our customers to know that they are not just a number to us, instead they are people who we will be sure to take care of. By choosing Spring-Green, you are choosing higher quality, guaranteed satisfaction, and a responsible company to take care of your yard, said Benoit.

Corys midwestern values make him a perfect addition to the Spring-Green family, said James Young, president of Spring-Green Lawn Care. We are excited to have Cory join Spring-Green and continue our Michigan expansion. We look forward to helping him achieve his goals and dreams.

About Spring-Green Lawn Care

Founded in 1977, Plainfield, Illinois-based Spring-Green Lawn Care has been delivering lawn and tree care services nationwide for over 42 years. Its service is centered on the beautification of residential and commercial customers in middle-class and affluent neighborhoods and communities. Spring-Green is an attractive opportunity for entrepreneurs and existing green industry business owners who want to align themselves with a business model that has proven economic resilience, healthy profit margins, industry leading business and marketing intelligence, recurring revenue, and retirement and succession planning. For more information, visit http://www.springgreenfranchise.com.I made the decision to join SWDS because their quality programs, products and personnel will provide my company and dealer clients more opportunity for growth, said Brian OConnor, President of JET.

SWDS (SouthWest Dealer Services), a leading full-service provider of Finance & Insurance (F&I), Anti-Theft programs and related training services to U.S. automobile dealerships, has acquired JET Management (JET), a consultative firm specializing in F&I programs based in Lakewood, IL.

The acquisition supports SWDSs overall U.S. growth strategy into existing and new markets and brings additional scale, resources, and a broader solutions portfolio to automobile dealers and their customers. This builds upon the firms impact in the automotive-service vertical market, which also includes mitigating risks and providing dealer clients industry-specific customized Property & Casualty (P&C) insurance products, loss-control solutions, Personal Lines and Employee Benefit plans.

I made the decision to join SWDS because their quality programs, products and personnel will provide my company and dealer clients more opportunity for growth, said Brian OConnor, President of JET.

JETs reputation of long-term partnerships in the Illinois and Midwest market is a natural fit. The companies expect to realize significant synergy which will further solidify SWDSs ability to provide outstanding support for an expanding platform of dealer clients.

The acquisition allows us to expand our national footprint in conjunction with, and complimentary of the auto industrys consolidation amongst auto dealers. JETs high touch service and products fit seamlessly into the SWDS philosophy of being intensely focused on driving value for our dealers, said Larry Pomarico, Executive Vice President of Sales, SWDS.

SWDS has 370 employees across 18 states supporting more than 1,100 dealer clients. The acquisition of JET is immediately accretive to SWDS existing portfolio of companies. There will be no personnel changes as a result of the merger. Financial terms of these transactions have not been disclosed.

About SWDS

SWDS is a leading independent full-service provider of finance and insurance (F&I) products and services to automotive dealers in the United States. SWDS also offers a full suite of property and casualty (P&C) services and products through its wholly-owned subsidiary Dealer Protection Group (DPG) The company has nine regional offices across the U.S. in Arizona, California (4), Colorado, Illinois, Kansas and Washington. Founded in 1987, SWDS focuses on providing dealers with one efficient source for products and services, offering vehicle service contracts, auto security products, guaranteed asset protection (GAP) programs, other ancillary F&I products. The firm is headquartered in Irvine, CA. For more information on SWDS, please visit: http://www.swds.net

About JET Management

JET Management located in Lakewood, IL is a privately held company that provides dealership consultation and training services. As a Finance & Insurance (F&I) agency, the business focuses primarily in providing F&I products including: Vehicle Service Contracts, GAP Insurance, Sealants and other ancillary products for dealerships.The sessions will provide the most timely and relevant information on topics from how government regulations affect future vehicle design to how technology development in safety and emissions effects regulations and policy making.

The final technical program is set for SAE Internationals 2019 Government/Industry Meeting, which will be held April 3-5, 2019, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C.

The sessions will provide the most timely and relevant information on topics from how government regulations affect future vehicle design to how technology development in safety and emissions effects regulations and policy making. The sessions will include key players driving automotive advancements, fuel technologies, and pending legislation.

In addition, a joint luncheon panel will be held on Wednesday, April 3 at Noon. Communicating the Benefits of Advanced Technologies to New Vehicle Buyers will discuss the perception and communication challenges faced by dealerships and manufacturers when they try to communicate the benefits of today's rapidly evolving technologies (electric drive, safety, autonomy, etc.) to customers. Investigate buyer perspectives, solutions to increase consumer awareness and more.

Keynote speakers for the SAE Government/Industry Meeting will include:



Wednesday, April 3  Lawrence D. Burns, PhD, business advisor and author of Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car and How it Will Reshape Our World

Thursday, April 4  Amy Walter, national editor of the non-partisan Cook Political Report and a frequent on-air analyst.

Friday, April 5  Heidi King, Deputy Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

SAE Internationals Government/Industry Meeting unites government policy and regulatory makers with auto industry representatives to discuss the effect of government action and regulations for safety, emission control, and energy conservation on future vehicle design.

CLICK HERE to register for the SAE International 2019 Government/Industry Meeting.

Employees of the U.S. government receive complimentary registration to the event.

To request media credentials, email pr(at)sae.org or call 1-724-772-8522.

Government/Industry Meeting registrants will receive complimentary access to the Washington Auto Show. Designated one of the nations top-five auto shows.

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 each year, 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 Parker Avery Group, an Atlanta based boutique retail consulting and strategy firm, is pleased to announce the addition of two retail veterans to the firm, Sarah Booth and Maurizio Scrofani.

Sarah comes to Parker Avery with strong experience in general retail and wholesale, with a focus in marketing. Sarah is an agile and solution-oriented advisor with over 25 years of leadership experience in developing and leading transformational programs for several global retailers across marketing, store operations, and merchandising disciplines, covering B2B and B2C channels. She has held key roles with such brands as ASICS, Hot Topic/Torrid, IKEA USA, Incipio Group, Jockey International, and Oakley. Sarah has also worked in a consulting capacity with IBM Global Services, spanning a variety of retail segments, functional areas, and services. Sarah is a graduate of the University of Illinois and lives in Southern California.

Maurizio is a senior leader with deep expertise in logistics, distribution, transportation, and general supply chain management. Maurizio previously held executive roles with Cargonet, Delonghi, Delta Childrens Products, Grupo Alto, Macys, and Toys R Us. He has served as an adjunct professor at the William Paterson University of New Jersey and has published several articles in leading industry outlets, including the National Retail Federation (NRF) and the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), among others. He also has a strong focus on people developmentwhich is portrayed in his book, The Chess Game Played Behind the Boardroom Doors. Maurizio is based in Riverdale, New Jersey.

We are excited about the addition of both Sarah and Maurizio to our team, says Parker Averys President & Managing Partner, Clay Parnell. Their unique experiences and accomplishments will provide the firm even more breadth and depth of capability in the areas of merchandising and supply chain and will allow us to expand our service offerings to increase the value we bring to our retail clients.

About The Parker Avery Group

The Parker Avery Group is a boutique strategy and management consulting firm. The firms professionals serve as trusted advisors to leading retail and apparel brands. Parker Avery combines solid retail industry experience with proven consulting methodology to deliver measurable results. They specialize in merchandising, supply chain and the omnichannel business model, integrating customer insights and the digital retail experience with strategy and operational improvements. The Parker Avery Group helps clients develop enhanced business strategies, design improved processes and execute global business models. To learn more about their clients success stories, please visit Parker Avery Insights at parkeravery.com/insights.html.the spr agency, an award-winning social media and public relations agency in Scottsdale, has been named No. 1 Best Workplace Culture: Advertising/Marketing Agency in 2019 by Ranking Arizona. Were honored to be recognized once again by Ranking Arizona. Our goal as an agency is to always continue to improve and to deliver the best possible advocacy for our clients. Recognition like this is proof that were on the right track.

the spr agency, an award-winning social media and public relations agency in Scottsdale, has been named No. 1 Best Workplace Culture: Advertising/Marketing Agency in 2019 by Ranking Arizona.

The agency was previously named Ranking Arizonas No. 1 PR Agency for 2017.

The digital marketing agency, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2018, also ranked in the Top 5 for Public Relations, SEO/Social Media Marketing and Advertising Agencies.

Were honored to be recognized once again by Ranking Arizona, said Al Stevens, president of the spr agency. Our goal as an agency is to always continue to improve and to deliver the best possible advocacy for our clients. Recognition like this is proof that were on the right track.

The 2019 Ranking Arizona honors are the latest awards for the agency, which was listed as one of Phoenixs top 25 social media firms and public relations firms by the Phoenix Business Journal this year.

The companys roster of clients has included national homebuilders, premier master-planned communities, electronics manufacturers, restaurants, interior design firms and healthcare companies.

For more information about the spr agency, please visit https://thespragency.com/ or call (480) 648-1770.

About the spr agency

Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, the spr agency provides full-service business marketing, public relations, digital marketing and social media services to a host of successful companies throughout the United States. Currently, the company works with clients in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. In 2019, the spr agency was named No. 1 Best Workplace Culture: Advertising/Marketing Agency by Ranking Arizona. The agency was also named Ranking Arizonas No. 1 Public Relations Agency in 2017. For more information about the spr agency, please visit https://thespragency.com/."uBiome has made the impossible, possible. With their state-of-the-art technology, students and academic staffs of the Department of Medical Laboratory Science lept into the air with joy. - Dr. Anukam, PhD

uBiome has awarded microbiome research support in study design, planning, sample collection, and analysis to a team of researchers at Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Anambra State, Nigeria led by Dr. Kingsley C. Anukam, PhD, and supported by Dr. Nneka R. Agbokoba, PhD, of the Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences and Deputy Provost, College of Health Sciences. The study hopes to determine urinary tract microbiome compositions of culture-positive urine and culture-negative urine and evaluate whether oral consumption of probiotics designed for the prevention of urinary tract infections (UTIs) could be found in voided clean-catch midstream urine.

UTI is one of the most common conditions in clinical practice in the developing world, yet urine samples for culture procedures designed to detect fast-growing aerobic organisms may not detect other slow-growing anaerobic/fastidious bacteria. This may lead to clinicians diagnosing UTIs based solely on symptoms and prescribing unwarranted antibiotics. Researchers hope this study will improve our understanding of the diversity of bacteria that colonize the urinary tract in health and diseased conditions.

Data collected from the study will include urine microbiome composition from uBiomes patented kits, the presence of nitrite, leucocytes, and bacteria in the clean-catch midstream urine, and type of clinically-tested probiotic (in warm dairy or water) given to study participants.

This is an exciting study which may contribute to a better understanding of the urinary tract microbiome and potentially improve the current treatment of UTIs, Dr. Jessica Richman, PhD, co-founder and CEO of uBiome, said. We look forward to supporting Nnamdi Azikiwe University with this study.

Dr. Anukam is a visiting researcher at the Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences at Nnamdi Azikiwe University where he supervises postgraduate students working in the area of the human microbiome and probiotics. He is also the Research Coordinator at Saint Josephs Health Care London in Ontario and the Research Unit Leader of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS). He was previously a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences at the University of Benin in Nigeria. Dr. Anukam has over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications and four refereed book chapters, and he is the editor of more than 30 journals.

About the grant, Dr. Anukam said, uBiome has made the impossible, possible. With their state-of-the-art technology, students and academic staffs of the Department of Medical Laboratory Science lept into the air with joy. uBiome has uplifted the standard of their research projects, which can compete with the rest of the international academic community as Nigeria has a track record of not providing funds for academic research. We look forward to receiving more assistance from uBiome in our future grant applications.

The grant was made possible through uBiomes Microbiome Grant Initiative. The Microbiome Grant Initiative has awarded millions of dollars in research support to hundreds of investigators around the world at renowned academic institutions and not-for-profit research organizations, including Harvard University, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California, San Francisco, Oxford University, and the University of Sydney. Awards include patented microbiome sequencing kits, as well as research support in study design, planning, sample collection, and analysis. To learn more about our award process or to submit a grant proposal, visit http://www.ubiome.com/microbiome-grant-initiative/.

_____

About uBiome

Founded in 2012, uBiome is the leader in microbial genomics. The Companys mission is to advance the science of the microbiome and make it useful to people. uBiome combines its patented proprietary precision sequencing with machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop wellness products, clinical tests, and therapeutic targets. uBiome has filed for over 250 patents on its technology, which includes sample preparation, computational analysis, molecular techniques, as well as diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

uBiomes commercial products include SmartGut, the worlds first sequencing-based clinical microbiome test, which identifies microbes in the gut for patients with chronic gut conditions such as IBD, IBS, Crohns Disease, and ulcerative colitis; SmartJane, the first sequencing-based womens health screening test, which genotypes all 19 clinically relevant strains of HPV, identifies four common STDs, and surveys more than 20 vaginal microbes associated with bacterial vaginosis and other conditions; and Explorer, a health and wellness product to understand the role that food and lifestyle can play in wellness.

uBiomes platform has been used by hundreds of thousands of consumers, patients, and doctors and more than 200 research institutions around the world, including the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Harvard University, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California, San Francisco, Oxford University, and the University of Sydney.

Since its launch, the company has received widespread recognition including CNN 10: Startups to Watch, the IVY Technology Award, CNN Future 30, and was named one of Fast Companys Most Innovative Companies in Healthcare in 2016 and in Data Science in 2018, as well as a Technology Pioneer from the World Economic Forum in 2018. For more information, visit http://www.uBiome.com.Written by ACM

*Strasbourg/CoE/Angelo Marcopolo/- Experienced CoE's Director for Information Society and Fight against Crime, Jan Kleijssen, from the Netherlands, Speaking to "Eurofora" on the occasion of a 2 Days Conference on Medias and Pluralism, particularly in the Modern Digital landscape, organized by the CoE together with "Reporters without Borders' NGO for Press Freedom, observed that the Legal Protection of Journalists would have to be Extended also to certain New Media Actors, (as the CoE has already started to officialy acknowledge : See Infra), in order to become able to succesfuly Face the Challenges for Pluralist Democracy Nowadays.

-------------------------

- My main "Message" to this 2019 Conference is that, while, "Still, the Old Challenges on Regulators, to ensure Medias Ownership's Transparency, and about Finances, on Concentration, etc, they stay", nevertheless, "there are also New Challenges, with the Digital Media Platforms", Kleijssen told "Eurofora" from the outset.

- Particularly "when they are acting whether with Less and less Human Editing, but More and more Automated Editing, (i.e. Artificial Intelligence), because there is a lot of Algorithms in it, a lot of Processes in it, (mainly on Web News Distributed via Artificial Intelligence : "that's an Issue"). => "So, it's important to make sure that Regulators (i.e. States, European/International Organisations, etc) can face these Challenges too".

+ And, "f course, a Challenge that underlies it all, at the Moment, is also about the Physical Safety of Journalists", as it's noted in "the (CoE's) Secretary General's (Thornbjoirn Jagland's) Latest Report (2018), with very Worrying Results of the Surveys carried out in Europe", which show how Many Journalists" faced such serious problems, he reminded.

- "F.ex., Everybody knows the case of Daphne Caruana Galicia in Malta, (a brutal Murder, where investigations still Delay in lots of things), followed by another one in Slovakia, (with investigation apparently Advancing much faster), as very High-Profile cases (of Killings of Journalists), where, what happened is, of course, Absolutely UnAcceptable", Kleijssen denounced.



+ "But, in addition to that, there is a Lot of "Low Intensity" Intimidation, Harassment, etc., of Journalists. And this is something on which we (CoE+) have to be Alert too, for Medias' Pluralism, as it's part of it", Jan Kleijssen concluded, as far as the 2019 "Cornerstones" are concerned.

----------------------

- In relation to that, "Eurofora" Questioned the CoE's Director for Information Society, about the Controversial Views of "Some (who) Persist to abuse of an Old kind of "Fiscal" Definition of Journalism, claiming that it would Merely mean ...+51% of Revenues paid by any Media Business, regardless of the Content of the Work provided. Thus, f.ex., even a lazy and passive, simple Radio-TV Presenter might have much More Rights and Protection, than a Creative Writer who Risks even his/her LIfe to Investigate "Hot" Issues, Help Discover all the Truth, and reveal to the People the full Findings, when he believes that they affect the General Interest in our Society, as we denounced.

- "No !", reacted Kleijssen. In fact, "there are Texts of CoE's Committee of Ministers which have already said that the Definition of "Medias", and their (Legal) Protection, should be "Extended".

- This includes, f.ex., also certain Bloggers, and Other New Media Actors, who Publish News Regularly, and, may be More Read than Traditional Newspapers, also, sometimes highly Succesfully".

- He said that in Reply to "Eurofora"'s reminder of the case of Daphne Caruana-Galicia, brutaly Murdered in Malta, who had been Hindered, by a Chief Editor, to Publish Critical News in her Traditional "Weekly" Newspaper, (as her Family had revealed to "Eurofora"), and was obliged to create a WebNews Site where she Published Alone, Dangerously Exposed, (See, among others, also: http://www.eurofora.net/newsflashes/news/webjournalistmurder.html, http://www.eurofora.net/newsflashes/news/euparliamentpresidentoncoeandjournalistmurder.html, http://www.eurofora.net/newsflashes/news/daphnewebjournalistmurderenquiry.html, http://www.eurofora.net/newsflashes/news/daphnepressfreedomandcorruption.html, http://www.eurofora.net/newsflashes/news/rsfleaderondaphnemurderandjournalism.html, http://www.eurofora.net/newsflashes/news/eucoenewsondaphnemurder.html, etc).

- Concerning Daphne's Husband's recent Denonciation, at another event, previously in Strasbourg, that "the (official) Investigation its Stuck !" (See: ..., etc), Freedom of Speech NGO "Reporters wihout Borders"' International Director, Dr. Michael Rediske, replied to an "Eurofora" Question with a Bitter Denonciation of the fact that "those who have the means to act, do Not want to do so ! But, unfortunately, we can't send them to the Haye International Criminal Court"...

---------------------------



+ Such a Topic (as Journalists' Protection Status being Extended also to New Medias Actors at the Web), "might also be discussed", during this Conference, later Today, and/or in various other Events on Medias' "Pluralism", where "there will be a lot of Angles", Kleijssen guessed.

-------------------------------

>>> In this regard, 2 landmark CoE's Books, about "Journalism at RISK : Threats, Challenges and Perspectives", and "Journalists under PRESSURE : Unwarranted Interference, Fear and Self-Censorship in Europe", Published on 2015 and 2016, respectively, had been rightfully Chosen by the PanEuropean Organisation for Human Rights, Democracy and Rule of Law of Strasbourg, in order to be Displayed on the spot and Offered to the Participants in this Conference.

+ Between them, had Also been Published a Relevant "Eurofora"s Article, with an Interview of the New Secretary General of the European Federation of Journalists, Ricardo Gutierrez, and the mention made by a representative of CoE's Committee of Ministers, during an International Conference on "Freedom of Expression", to certain Important Decisions taken by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, precisely on that Question of "Journalist"s Definition, (Comp. Supra) :

(1) In the First CoE's Book "Journalists at Risk", 2015), Aidan White (Long Time former Secretary General of the Internationonal/European Federation of Journalists, and Nowadays of the "Journalists' Ethical Network", in an Exceptionaly Long Article, basically Urges to Extend most of Traditional Journalists' Legal Protection also to some "Other Actors" of Medias in our Digital Society, on the Condition that they will Accept to Practice the main Principles of Press Deontology, (See: http://www.eurofora.net/newsflashes/news/iachrcoebookandefjsgonjournalismdefinition.html . An Idea that "Eurofora" had Initially suggested to White as Early as since 2009-2010 : See http://www.eurofora.net/newsflashes/news/digitalpress.html, http://www.eurofora.net/brief/brief/webmedia.html , etc).

(2) In the relevant "Eurofora"s Article" (November 2015 : http://www.eurofora.net/newsflashes/news/iachrcoebookandefjsgonjournalismdefinition.html), we refer to 2 Decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (cited by a CoE's CM Representative : Comp. Supra), which stressed mainly that : "Journalism canNot be equated to a Profession", i.e. Not "Only through those who are Enrolled in a certain Professional "Colegio" (Corporation)", "because", in fact, "Journalism is the Primary and Principal Manifestation of Freedom of Expression of Thought, .... which is an Inherent Right" of a Person, "and has a Double Dimension : Individual and Collective", including Both "the Right of an Individual to Express himself Freely, AND that of Society as a whole to Receive Information", so that any "Violation" of that, Threatens also "to Deprive Society of possible Sources of Information", affecting "a CornerStone upon which the very Existence of a Democratic Society rests", since "it's Indispensable for the Formation of Public Opinion", and "a Condition sine qua non for the Development of Political Parties, Trade Unions", etc., and "the Means that Enable the Community, when Exercising its Options, to be Sufficiently Informed", given the Fact that "a Society that is Not Well Informed, is Not a Society that is Truly Free". + That's why, the very "concept of Public Order in a Democratic Society, requires the Guarantee of the Widest possible Circulation of News, Ideas and Opinions, as well as the Widest Access to Information by Society as a Whole", and "is not conceivable without Free Debate, and the possibility for Dissenting Voices to be Heard".

<< => In consequence, "Journalism is the Primary and Principal Manifestation of Freedom of Expression", and "the Thing that Journalists do, involves, precisely, the Seeking, Receiving and Imparting of Information", since "the PRACTICE OF JOURNALISM ...Requires a Person to ENGAGE (Him/Herself) in Activities that define or embrace the Freedom of Expression", so that "the Professional Journalist is not, nor can he be, anything else, but Someone who has Decided to Exercice Freedom of Expression in a Continuous, Regular" way. As for "the Circumstance, Whether, or Not, that Right is Exercised as a Paid Profession, canNot be deemed Legitimate in Determining whether (a) Restriction" might be acceptable, since "that's Not a good enough Reason to Deprive Society of possible Sources of Information". "Unlike Journalism", "the practice of Law or Medicine, that is to say, the Things that Lawyers or Physicians do, is Not an Activity Specifically Guaranteed by the Convention" on Human Rights, and, therefore, it could be Restricted, for "Reasons ... that May... Justify Compulsory Licencing of Other Professions", but canNot be invoked in the case of Journalism, because .... this could Violate the Basic Principles of a Democratic Public Order", (Comp. Supra), IACHR Distinguished.>>

(3) Shortly Afterwards,the Second CoE's Book, cited above, ("Journalists under Pressure": 2016), clearly Adopts a Similar "Definition" : "Journalist = A Person who is Regularly Engaged in Collecting or Disseminating Information to the Public, with a Journalistic (Public Interest) Purpose". (P. 11).

+ "Definition of Key Terms : ... Journalist = ... The Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers, in 2000, Defined a Journalist as "any ...Person who is Regularly (Or professionally) Engaged in the Collection and Dissemination of Information to the Public, via Any Means of Mass Communication". (Appendix to Recommendation No. R (2000) 7..." + "Recommendation CM/Rec (2011) 7, on a New Notion of Media, Recognized that the New Media, Created by both Technological and Social Change, has seen the Entry into scene of a New Breed of Reporters : Bloggers, Citizen Journalists, and Others, who Create user-generated Content. The Adoption of this New Notion of Media, Necessitates the Recognition that "the Scope of Media Actors has Enlarged, as a result of New forms of Media in the Digital Age". CoE 2014". (P. 24).

-------------------------------------------------

Meanwhile, CoE's 2019 Conference on Medias and Pluralism Today, (Comp. Supra), advanced by stressing the Growing Importance of New, Digital Medias, Both in Quantitative and Qualitative terms, i.e. as being also, potentially More Efficient than Traditional Newspapers, particularly in Stimulating Pluralist public Debates in Nowadays Democratic Societies, i.e. to meet the main Purpose of Journalists' Freedom of Expression (Comp. Supra):

- "Often, Web Medias Bypass Traditional Medias", observed, f.ex., Nouri Lazmi, President of Tunisia's Independent High Authority for AudioVisual Communication.

- Already, "for Young People aged 16 - 24 y.o.", the "Web has become the 1st main Source of News", noted Maria Donde, "Ofcom"s Expert for International Content Policy, (even if Radio-TV still remains "the Most viewed", according to a recent Poll on "Web Medias' Consumption", at least in the UK).

+ Moreover, their "Real Consumption is "Under-Reported", Donde found. Perhaps, it's also because "Most On-Line News" are read through "Smart-Phones", and "when Passively Strolling".

------------------------------------

- But they are bringing Both "Good and Bad Journalism", or "Risks of Fake News", Lazmi warned.

+ Most of such Medias use to "Behave as Political Opponents in an Arena", with "Strong Political polarisation". On the Contrary, "Neutral Medias are Marginalized", f.ex. in Libya, etc., regretted Professor Carola Richter, from Berlin's Freie University.

- The "Bad" aspects are the Excessive Role of "Interest Groups", and the InSufficient dimension of "Deliberation" and/or "Consent-Building" functions, he Criticized.

=> But the "Good" aspects, are that Web Medias "Allow People to Speak out", with a "Diversity of Perspectives in Public space", Professor Richter stressed.

+ This Importance of this Key point was particularly underlined by Tarlach McGonagle, Senior Researcher/Lecturer at the Information Law Institute of Amsterdam University, "as part of a Wider Participation in Public Debate".

- Indeed, ECHR has already underlined (f.ex. since "2010") "States' Obligation" to support structural "Pluralism", for which "States must be Guarantors", he observed.

>>> And, those New, Web Medias, precisely, help boost a kind of "ReConfiguration of Public Debate".

- This is achieved now Both with Traditional "Journalists", but "also with Oher Actors" at the Web, such as various "Bloggers", "Corporations", etc., he reminded, on this Focal point, (Comp. Supra).

- Indeed, a "Pluralist" debate for Democracy, notoriously is the main Ideological Legitimation and the Political "Raison d'etre" of "Freedom of Expression", on which is Based ECHR's overall "System for Protection of Authors", (as McGonagle noted)

=> I.e., Nowadays, including that necessary "Extension" of Traditional Journalists' Legal Status, also to certain "Other Media Actors", (as CoE's Director for Information Society and Fight against Crime, Jan Kleijssen, has just Highlighted, in Reply to a relevant "Eurofora"s Question : Comp. Supra).

- In fact, "Europe seems to be in Transition" nowadays, concluded CoE's specialized Head of Information Society Department, Patrick Penninck, towards the End of the "Medias and Pluralism Regulation" Debate, (astonishingly using an Expression that French former EU Parliament's President, the famous Simone Veil, had previously used with "Eurofora" in Sorbonne, Paris, almost a Decade earlier, concerning the different, but also Topical Issue of Popular Participation to EU Elections, (See: ...).

(../..)

----------------------------



Wily Global Inc. (WILY) a leading marketing technology provider of cloud-based, data-driven engagement and incentive solutions, today announced that Christine Ortiz has joined the company as Senior Account Director. Ortiz's strong leadership in sales and technology roles and deep corporate and agency industry experience make her the ideal candidate for the role as WILY expands its footprint and market focus to propel its service offerings. Ortiz will be responsible for managing key agency accounts and brand portfolios including Royal Bank, Honda, adidas, and Petro-Canada. Ortiz will be integral to enhancing enterprise customer relationships, advising on WILYs catalog of integrated digital solutions, and driving increased loyalty through consumer engagement for these clients.

Ortiz joins Wily Global from Mosaic Sales Solutions headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. Mosaic is the largest experiential marketing and sales company in North America, delivering consumer experiences in-store, online and in the community. Ortizs background includes digital strategy and execution for many Fortune 500 brands in retail, finance, consumer electronics, and CPG. Ortiz's former role as Technology Strategist, Digital for North America, involved providing technology-driven marketing solutions that leveraged In-Field Technology and software services to enhance consumer engagement at experiential activations and in-store.

"As we continue to scale WILY across North America, we are pleased to welcome Christine to the team. Her extensive experience in bringing technology solutions to market will be important in driving growth," said Mike Mulligan, Co-Founder, CSO at Wily Global. "In addition, her demonstrated ability to provide superior customer service will serve us well to further engage clients and accelerate demand for our SPRY platform."

Ortiz's 12+ years of technology and marketing experience, also include past roles in business development, and supportive technology solutions for major brands like Simpson Telecom, Ceridian Canada, and others.

"I have spent my career at the edge of marketing and innovation  helping bring disruptive technology to market in consumer environments, said Christine Ortiz. "Wily Global is doing just that as they are at the intersection of data, marketing, and technology. What drew me to WILY was its ability for building solutions on top of its SPRY platform that resonate with consumers while making the lives of its clients easier. I am excited and honored to become part of the senior leadership team, advising and supporting to help propel the company to a new level of growth and expansion."

This strategic hire comes on the heels of significant momentum for Wily Global. Recent milestones include notable new customer acquisition in North America, expansion of Canadian operations, and strategic partnerships.

About Wily Global Inc.

Wily Global Inc. (WILY) is a leader in marketing technology solutions that are powering the data-driven economy. WILYs proprietary SPRY platform enables brands and agencies to acquire and activate data while engaging and incentivizing consumers along the path to purchase. WILY is governed by a group of senior marketing and technology experts dedicated to enhancing customer experiences while driving growth. WILY provides solutions for several of the worlds most trusted brands. For more information, please visit https://www.wilyglobal.comSmart Packaging Solutions (SPS) Dominique Charrie, Marketing Director, ID products, SPS says: Were proud to see our technology recognized by so many governments, card issuers and manufacturers. Our eBoost inductive coupling technology brings huge advantages of flexibility, reliability and logistics for all in the ID segment.

Smart Packaging Solutions (SPS) technology, eBoost inductive coupling, is now widely accepted as demonstrated by its large number of references on the market. These references prove that SPS eBoost inductive coupling represents the best option for all types of cards, regardless whether they are contactless, hybrid or dual interface. Also, SPS eBoost inductive coupling makes card manufacturers inherit its intrinsic advantages when it comes to the choice of card body as the process is compatible with all materials used for ID documents: PET, PVC and Polycarbonate. Thanks to the versatility of the technology, issuers have been relying on SPS eBoost inductive coupling to issue all types of cards: identity cards (compliant or not with IAS standards), driving licenses, agent cards, residence permits and also cards combining multiple functions such as ID and payment.

With SPS eBoost inductive coupling, card manufacturers use a single technology to satisfy all customer needs. This way manufacturing equipment is better utilized reducing investment amortization cycles and leading to a more profitable activity.

Also, ID projects often vary, either between the launch of the project and its actual execution or even during the project life cycle. Thanks to the use of a single technology able to support all communication standards and all plastic supports, card manufacturers are able to adapt easily to all project evolutions, without any need for additional investment.

The fact that the same manufacturing equipment and the same process are used for all types of cards simplifies logistics. Card vendors enjoy simpler supply chains as they deal with less numerous subcontractors; this reduces their lead times, makes them more flexible, leading to more agility in delivering requested products on the market.

The advantages of SPS eBoost inductive coupling technology are recognized by multiple projects worldwide:



In America, Mexico, the local card manufacturer has decided to use SPS eBoost inductive coupling technology to deliver State Government smart drivers licenses, made on composite material PET/PVC, with dual interface technology. Thanks to the efficiency of SPS process, the manufacturer needed less than two months from the initial requests to producing the first driving licenses,

In Africa, the Ghana Cards, smart multi-application ID cards, which are issued to Nationals and all legally resident foreigners in Ghana, are based on SPS eBoost for dual interface cards. In addition to being based on SPS eBoost inductive coupling technology, they make use of SPS security options, such as CAI, or Customized Antenna Image that consists in including aluminum etched distinctive signs in the antenna, and CMI, Customized Module Image that allows having a specific image engraved on the micromodule.

In Asia, the Maldives, the government had decided to issue dual interface cards combining an identity travel document complying with the ICAO data standards with a MasterCard biometric debit card issued by the Bank of Maldives. These polycarbonate cards use SPS eBoost inductive coupling technology which enabled the card manufacturer to streamline the manufacturing process and deliver these complex cards in due time,

In Europe, France, the government agent cards, for the Police and Gendarmerie forces, are based on SPS eBoost inductive coupling technology that allows to combine a variety of applications on hybrid cards: these polycarbonate cards provide physical access control thanks to their contactless chip and logical access control, authentication and signature using the contact chip.

Dominique Charrie, Marketing Director, ID products, at SPS says: Were proud to see our technology recognized by so many governments, card issuers and card manufacturers. This demonstrates that our eBoost inductive coupling technology brings unprecedented advantages in terms of flexibility, reliability and logistics gains for all players in the ID market segment.

Smart Packaging Solutions & IN Groupe will be exhibiting on booth D7 at High Security Printing EMEA, a major trade show taking place in Malta on March 25-27, 2019.

About SPS

With the SPS brand, IN Groupe opens its secure components technology to all card and document manufacturers. SPS (Smart Packaging Solutions) is specialized in the design, manufacturing and sale of contactless solutions dedicated to ID cards, e-passport and dual interface banking cards. Headquartered in Rousset, France, with a subsidiary in Singapore, SPS employs 140 people. The company specializes in contactless and dual-interface products, with a recognized micro packaging expertise. SPS has filed over 120 patents supporting its exclusive technologies. More information at http://www.s-p-s.com

SPS is part of the IN Groupe.

A partner of the French government for close to 500 years, IN Groupe offers identity solutions and secure digital services, at the leading edge of technology and integrating electronics and biometrics.

From components to services and from documents to interoperable systems, IN Groupe is a global specialist in identity and secure digital services. The institution plays a daily role in facilitating everyone's life: helping states exercise their sovereignty, citizens protect their identity and businesses preserve their integrity.

Whatever the issue, IN Groupe, a company for digital sovereignty, contributes to asserting a fundamental right for everyone: the right to be you.

Based in Paris, the IN Groupe has two production centers and employs more than 1000 employees, of which over a third is dedicated to technology development.

Follow us on: http://www.ingroupe.comJulie Orringer is in her apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, when we talk about her extraordinary second novel. The Flight Portfolio (Knopf, May) was conceived while Orringer was researching her previous novel, 2010s critically acclaimed The Invisible Bridge, at Pariss Bibliotheque de lArsenal. I was reading a paper from Nov. 8, 1938, when I came across an article about the man who became the first person to be deported from France under the surrender-on-demand clause of the Franco-German armistice. When I searched online for surrender on demand, up came a 1945 memoir published under that title by a man named Varian Fry.

Fry, Orringer discovered, went to Occupied France in 1940 to try to save 200 writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. Working through an American organization called the Emergency Rescue Committee, he managed to extract more than 2,000 refugeesamong them Andre Breton, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernstthrough an ostensibly legal relief process. In fact, his operation often used forged papers and clandestine escape routes, earning suspicion from French authorities and resistance from the still-isolationist American government.

Orringer hoped at first to incorporate Frys story into The Invisible Bridge. As she learned more about Fry, she realized that this material deserved a novel of its own.

Though Orringer was familiar with the eras history from her work on The Invisible Bridge, which begins in 1937, understanding the complexities of Frys story required extensive study. She moved to Park Slope in 2008 for a research fellowship at the New York Public Librarys Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, where she had a year to use the librarys vast resources for her project. The move proved fortuitous in another way: Columbia University holds 27 boxes of archival material documenting Frys work in France.

After that, Orringer accepted a one-year fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Mass., which offered research assistance as well as convenient access to recently unsealed papers from Frys undergraduate years at Harvard. I spent hours in the Cambridge and Columbia archives reading everything from Varians Harvard grade reports to accounts of what he did each week in Marseille, she recalls. The Invisible Bridge used elements of my familys past as the starting point for an invented story, so I didnt have to deal with the constraints of a historical figures well-documented personal experience. Writing about Varian Fry, I felt like I had to understand the historical record fully before I could craft a narrative in the apertures between the facts.

Eventually, Orringer says, she found that there was no end to the information she could have gathered. Returning to Brooklyn from Cambridge, she tried to come to terms with the trove of material she had amassed. I realized that if I tried to include everything Id learned, there was no way I was ever going to finish the book, she notes. At that point, what I needed was a kind of inner quietan openness from which my own narrative could emerge.

Orringer spent five days a week working at the Brooklyn Writers Space and says that at some point she started leaving her voluminous files at home in favor of a single book: Surrender on Demand, the Varian Fry memoir that inspired the novel. I began thinking about how Fry had represented his own experience, how he teased out what was important to him. Exploring that structure helped me peel back the story I wanted to tell.

Eliminating secondary figures, relationships, and incidents, Orringer gradually found the novels heart, which she describes as Frys unbearable moral conundrum. The need that faced him in Marseille was exponentially greater than the stringent limits of his budget, mandate, and time frameoriginally a month, though he stayed in France for a year.

Frys situationtrying to decide which human lives to save based on assessments of refugees artistic or intellectual valuewas morally impossible, Orringer says. In the novel, I wanted to add a personal element to complicate that calculus still further. What if someone for whom Fry cared deeply needed help? How would he balance that imperative with the needs of others, of people with more legitimate claims to his attention and resources?

The result of these questions is the fictional Elliot Schiffman Grant, a former Harvard classmate with whom Orringers Fry shares an intense mutual attraction. Writing in the 1940s, the real Fry didnt acknowledge the homosexual liaisons documented in later sources. As Orringer explains, Frys sexuality resists easy categorizationhe was married twice and had two childrenbut we know he had relationships with other men. I gradually came to understand that Frys awareness of his own difference, as well as his need to hide that difference from the eyes of the world, sensitized him to the plight of others who were persecuted and forced to live in fear.

In Orringers novel, Grant vanished from Frys life 12 years before they meet in Marseille. There, Grant asks Fry to help get his lover, a German-born Jew, and his lovers son to safety in America. Fry, struggling with his reawakened desire for Grant and the unfinished emotional business between them, feels unable to say no. I imagined Grant as someone with many reasons to hide parts of his own story, Orringer says. Yet hes relatively open about his relationship with his lover Gregor Katznelson, which calls Frys decision to hide his sexuality into question. Theyre characters who challenge each other in a variety of ways, and who I hope have a powerful effect on each other by the storys end.

Throughout the novel, Fry experiences the conflict that relief workers feel between saving others lives and fully living their own. An intellectually serious man given to rigorous thought, Fry lived with the knowledge that his decisions would save lives or cost them. Though Grants reappearance complicates Frys life, it also balances the darker elements of his story.

Grants capacity for playfulness, as well as his sexual allure, encourage Fry to be physically present in ways he couldnt have justified otherwise, Orringer tells me. A number of the artists and writers whom the Emergency Rescue Committee attempts to save make vivid appearances in the novel, heightening the sense that its characters are living in two distinct realities at once.

While working on The Invisible Bridge, I thought a lot about what allows us to survive in extremis, Orringer says. The artists in The Flight Portfolio use play and humor to keep themselves alive. The horror theyve experienced emerges in their work, but they find moments of respite through parties, art exhibitions, and surrealist games.

Orringer initially expected the novel to be significantly shorter than The Invisible Bridge, in part because it focuses on a single viewpoint and year. Ultimately, her attempt to do justice to her own invented story as well as to the feeling of life in 1940 France, the periods intricate politics, and the logistical complexity of what Fry was trying to accomplish necessitated a longer book. As she generated pages and had two children, Americas dramatic political shift gave the novel an unexpected topicality.

I dont want to suggest that immigration was entirely uncomplicated during the Obama era, Orringer says. But there was a sense of openness and inclusion, an appreciation of America as a country of immigrants. I couldnt have conceived, when I began this novel, how drastically that would change.

Today, Orringer is glad that the novel illuminates some of the dangers of our historical moment, among them isolationism and xenophobia. As I was coming of age as a writer, the prevailing ethos was to avoid letting ones work be clouded by political issues or social commentary, she says. But as someone who grew up in America because my family was lucky enough to make it here safely, immigration policy has always held a personal urgency for me. And now weve arrived at a political moment when its impossible for writers not to engage larger social issues. If were not doing that, were neglecting one of the greatest powers of art.

Suzanne Fox is a writer, speaker, and freelance editor in North Carolina.In this months roundup of the best-reviewed BookLife titles, we highlight a historical romance, a medical thriller, a historical novel, a guide to monastic spiritual practices, and more.

 The Monk Within by Beverly Lanzetta

Synopsis: Lanzetta delivers a stimulating and encouraging vision for new monastic movements in this fine book.

PWs Takeaway: Written in an engaging tone and sprinkled with relatable parables, Lanzettas book will be indispensable for readers interested in monastic spiritual practices.

Comparable Title: Yogi Camerons The Yogi Code

Sample Line: I imagine that for many of youas it was for methe call to be a monk, to seek silence and solitude, was in your heart from early childhood.

Read the review.

 Comes the Winter by Samantha St. Claire

Synopsis: Lena and Evan are both grieving when they meet in 1886 Sawtooth City, Idaho, in this pitch-perfect historical.

PWs Takeaway: Rich descriptions and entertaining... This cozy tale will surely delight historical romance fans.

Comparable Title: Rosanne Bittners Capture My Heart

Sample Line: The wagon lurched sideways as the sour-faced, bewhiskered driver hit yet another deep rut along the narrow mountain road.

Read the review.

 The Private Life of Jane Maxwell by Jenn Gott

Synopsis: The origin story of comics writer turned superhero Jane Maxwell.

PWs Takeaway: Fans of superhero stories are sure to be entertained.

Comparable Title: Perry Moores Hero

Read the review.

Not Quite Dead by Dawn Harris Sherling

Synopsis: A first-year intern must investigate the circumstances surrounding her boyfriends admission to the ICU.

PWs Takeaway: Sherlings attention to detail makes suspension of disbelief easy.

Comparable Title: Robin Cooks Charlatans

Read the review.

355 by Kit Sergeant

Synopsis: Sergeants enthralling series launch highlights the emotional turmoil of American patriots and British loyalists.

PWs Takeaway: Sergeants riveting narrative will entice history buffs and lay readers alike.

Comparable Title: Mary Calvis Dear George, Dear Mary

Read the review.Marcus Emerson recently set out on a national book tour to launch his new middle grade adventure Ben Braver and the Incredible Exploding Kid (Roaring Brook), sequel to last years The Super Life of Ben Braver. Over the course of the tour, Emerson presented to approximately 2,200 kids. The celebration kicked off on February 28 in McAllen, Tex., where Marcus spent two days visiting schools. On March 7, Emerson wrapped up with three school events in collaboration with Andersons Bookshop in Naperville, Ill. Weve gathered a selection of highlights from the tour, which included readings, signings, drawing demos, and more.

Getting ready to jam with students in McAllen as part of the Reading Rockstars program.

Emerson gave out copies of his new book to McAllen students.

A drawing demo at Sinclair Elementary in Houston.

Signing books at Sinclair Elementary.

The author appeared before a full house at Brazos Bookstore in Houston.

Ray K Daily Elementary in Houston welcomed back the author, who had visited for the launch of his series opener.

Longwood Elementary School in Naperville, Ill., celebrated Ben Braver with themed water bottles.

Emerson signed the wall at Blue Baboon Bookstore in Wichita.

Showing off the cover of Ben Braver and the Incredible Exploding Kid at Earhart Elementary School in Wichita.The Book Industry Charitable Foundations roots go back to 1996, when Borders Group employees and executives set up the Borders Group Foundation to aid booksellers who had run into financial trouble. The foundation was funded by contributions from executives, employee payroll contributions, and donations from publishers and vendors. When Borders closed in 2011, the organization, which was then an LLC, decided it would use the accumulated funds to continue its work of providing a safety net for booksellers.

We wanted to use the money in the foundation to leave a positive legacy for Borders and expand our efforts across the country, said Pam French, who started at the foundation in 2009 and is now its executive director. So on Jan. 1, 2012, BGF officially changed its name to Binc and became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with two objectives, French said: to see whether a charitable organization was something the book industry needed or wanted, while also looking to establish the credibility that Binc could deliver on its mission.

Bincs initial industry survey quickly showed there was a need, French said, but she moved cautiously in the organizations first few years, canvassing the industry about the best way for Binc to help booksellers while looking to develop ways it could become a sustainable operation. Now Binc is on firm footing with three full-time employees, two part-timers, and an operating budget of $800,000 per year. It counts among its donors eight of the 10 largest trade publishers, and Kathy Bartson, director of development, noted that the five largest publishers plus Ingram contribute about 18% of its funding. Other key contributors are booksellers, authors, and distributors. In addition, to help raise funds, Ann Patchett and James Patterson are Binc ambassadors.

The program has close ties with the American Booksellers Association and regional bookselling associations, which, French said, have been instrumental in raising Bincs profile among booksellers. French noted that in addition to raising funds, one of Bincs objectives remains making more booksellers aware of its services. The foundation offers a range of programs, but its core program gives financial assistance to booksellers who have faced unexpected setbacks, including serious medical expenses, disruption of business, disability, and death in the family.

In 2018, Binc issued 73 grants worth $155,735 to assist 140 booksellers. Binc also helps bookstores that run into problems. As part of that mission, earlier this month Binc announced that its bookstore disaster relief program, which had been in a pilot phase in 2017 and 2018, has been established as a regular Binc offering. Over the two years of the pilot, Binc provided a total of $76,000 in assistance to 11 bookstores that were recovering from hurricanes, wildfires, and floods.

Binc also offers two forms of scholarships. The foundation provides scholarships to dependents of booksellers to attend college and also awards professional scholarships that allow booksellers to attend a range of industry events. Among the scholarships Binc offers are two to attend ABAs Winter Institute, as well as scholarships to each of the fall regional shows. In addition, through a grant from Macmillan, Binc sends a bookseller from an underrepresented minority to each of the fall regionals as part of Macmillans diversity program. (French said that though most publishers donate money to be used for any purpose, some target specific initiatives.)

In addition to Macmillans diversity program, beginning on March 1, Binc began administering a new program with funds provided by Penguin Random House. Indies with Impact will award grants to two bookstores that work in tandem with a community nonprofit or organization of their choice for a program that strengthens and encourages a passion for reading. Interested booksellers must apply by May 1, and Binc will award the same grant again at the same time next year. A total of $3,000 will be awarded over two years.

Bartson said publishers, booksellers, and authors who contribute to the foundation have become more creative in finding ways to raise funds. Last year, for the first time, Binc became involved with Humble Bundle, the promotional site that allows consumers to pay what they wish for bundles of DRM-free e-books, with publishers giving some of the proceeds to charity. Three publishersChronicle, John Wiley, and Skyhorsedesignated Binc as their charity of choice in 2018. In all, the Humble Bundle campaign raised more than $100,000. Bartson said Binc is in talks with publishers to do another Humble Bundle offering this year.

A popular way that booksellers raise funds is to designate particular weekends when a percentage of purchases will be donated to Binc. And at the regionals, silent auctions are often used to generate donations.

ABA CEO Oren Teicher is a big fan of Binc and its mission. In a relatively short time, Binc has become an indispensable lifeline for booksellers all across the country, he said. From the very first time when we met with Pam and her teamas they were morphing from an entity created to help employees of Bordersit was clear that they were committed to developing the means to help any bookseller in need, which is exactly what theyve done. ABA has been proud to partner with Binc, and we look forward to continuing to support their work.

Since its inception in 1996, Binc has helped more than 7,400 booksellers and awarded $6.6 million in assistance and scholarships. But even as independent bookselling has been growing, the need for help still exists. Bincs 2019 budget called for a 13% increase in financial assistance grants, but Bartson said requests are trending higher than expected, adding, Our work to stay on track with our plan to become fully sustainable is critical.Library supporters, its time to kick it into gear again, as FY2020 federal library funding is on the line. In an advocacy alert this week, ALA officials urged library supporters to contact their representatives in the House and ask them to sign this year's "Dear Appropriator" letter in support of federal library funding. The letter is now circulating in the House, and a March 28 deadline for reps to sign is fast approaching.

We are counting on ALA adovcates to let your representative know how important libraries are to their constituents, the alert states, while conceding that Trumps proposal to kill library funding feels like deja vu.

As we reported last week, the Trump administration has again proposed the permanent elimination of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and with it virtually all federal library funding. Its the third straight year Trump has proposed cutting the agency, along with a host of valuable education programs, and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.

The details of the proposed cuts, meanwhile, were released this week. Speaking of deja vu, the FY2020 budget uses the same language theyve used in previous years to justify the cuts: it is unlikely the elimination of IMLS would result in the closure of a significant number of libraries and museums.

But this too should feel like deja vu: library funding has actually increased each of the last two years, despite Trumps proposals to eliminate it, thanks to the good work of library supporters. So, if you havent yet contacted your local rep, why not do it today?

By the way, you can check if your local representative has signed via the ALAs appropriations letter tracker.

Reserve Reading

PW Library columnist Sari Feldman made it official this week: she'll be retiring from the Cuyahoga County Public Library in August, after 16 years on the job. Cleveland.com has a great Q&A with Sari this week, well worth checking out. I won't list Sari's many accomplishments here (I'd run out of space!). But I'm happy to amplify what Sari mentions in the the above-referenced article: she will continue as a columnist for PW. Congratulations, Sari, on this next chapter! And, you have a deadline coming up. Just saying...

Speaking of rock stars, The New York Times has a piece on the New York Public Librarys new archive dedicated to Lou Reed.

Also from The New York Times European regulators have fined Google $1.7 billion for violating antitrust rules by "imposing unfair terms on companies that used Googles search bar on their websites."

One of the country's top media scholars, Siva Vaidhyanathan (who is frequently cited in this column) is now a regular columnist for The Guardian. Vaidhynathan has written books about Google, and Facebook in recent years. His first column for the Guardian appeared this week, discussing why Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal is a "privacy Chernobyl."

Meanwhile, in the "defend free speech" category, Vox reports on Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA), who this week filed a defamation suit against Twitter for being, well, Twitter. He also sued Republican strategist Liz Mair. The cases are surely losers as long as the U.S. has a First Amendment. But, as Vox explains, the suits are clearly part of a larger messaging battle. "Many people on the right believe that social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are biased against conservatives and should be regulated by the government into being fairer."

Via The Washington Post, Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law a set of bills that will punish the distribution of information that exhibits blatant disrespect for the society, government, official government symbols, constitution or governmental bodies of Russia. Perhaps this is more what Devin Nunes has in mind?

And, the Nunes suit comes a week after a federal court dismissed a wide-ranging $1 billion suit against Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Apple, alleging that the tech giants conspired to suppress conservative speech, via TechDirt.

Not coincidentally, President Trump this week signed an executive order supposedly protecting free speech on campus. From The Atlantic: "Thursdays executive order instructs 12 federal agencies to ensure that the universities receiving research grants 'promote free inquiry.' What this means in practical terms was left unspecified."

Some fascinating copyright news this week: Via Eriq Gardner at The Hollywood Reporter, a federal judge has found that ComicMix's awesome, crowdsourced mash-up between Star Trek and Dr. Seuss's Oh, the Places You'll Go! not only is protected by fair use, but is "highly creative." It's the second victory in court for ComicMix, whose parody, Oh the Places You'll Boldly Go! also defeated a trademark suit brought by Dr. Seuss Enterprises last year.

Meanwhile, a major vote looms next week in the European Parliament on a controversial, sweeping copyright reform bill. Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, one of the legislation's most vocal critics, rallies opponents to pressure their MEPs to vote no. A public protest is scheduled for March 23, and will be worth watching. The battle is eerily reminiscent of the SOPA/PIPA battle in the U.S. in 2011 and 2012, with tech companies and the public lining up against the bill, and publishers and news organizations supporting it. Via The News Media Coalition, more than 240 media groups have signed a letter of support. The Association of American Publishers also supports the bill.

Via Gothamist, comes this look at how copyright claims can go absurdly overboard. A new art structure in New York dubbed the Vessel debuted recently. And upon entering the structure, a posted Terms & Conditions clause grants the Vessel a license "to use your content however they see fit in perpetuity."

ALA this week announced today that it has opened (well, reopened) its search for a permanent executive director, via corporate executive search firm Isaacson, Miller.

In addition, ALA announced that the 2019 ALA elections are underway. According to a release, between March 11 and March 13, ALA sent e-mails to voters, providing them with their unique passcodes and information about how to vote online. The polls will close on Wednesday, April 3 at 11:59 p.m.

Are you an ALA member not sure who to vote for? Here's Library Journal's Q&A with the ALA presidential candidates, Julius C. Jefferson Jr., section head of the Library of Congresss Congressional Research Service, and Lance Werner is executive director of Kent District Library, Comstock Park, Mich.

The local Centre Daily Times (Penn.) has a piece this week on how patrons can borrow digital books and audiobooks from their public library, and how expensive the service is. "For example, Brady Clemens, district library consultant for Schlow, said the newest John Grisham book could cost $16 for print but $55 to license digitally. 'Its huge. Its a big difference. And were not just going to buy one copy of the John Grisham book, Burchill said. 'Weve got to buy multiple licenses. We could spend $200 (on one book).'"

Open Educational Resources have become a hot trend in the education space. And this week, the University of Kansas Libraries, in collaboration with the Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright, announced the launch of a program called Textbook Heroes,which will spotlight "KU faculty, staff, instructors and students who advocate for textbook affordability."

Washington D.C. is s city of monuments, but this week, The Washingtonian reports that "new public libraries are some of the best buildings in D.C."Participation in traditional religions in America continues to decline, but eternal questions dont go away. Many of those who now call themselves spiritual but not religious are searching for ways to make sense of the world and their place in it, to find community and compassion, and to be inspired. Authors are tackling those questions from multiple angles and offering readers ways to feed that hunger.

Religions most important function may be to provide a framework for finding meaning and purpose in life. But if not through a religion, how does one find such answers? Fourteen philosophers explore that question in How to Live a Good Life: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy (Vintage Original, Jan. 2020), edited by Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary, and Daniel Kaufman. The essayists go beyond theory, offering personal accounts of how practicing philosophies such as pragmatism, existentialism, and Confucianism has given them alternatives to institutional religions.

The editors write, Despite the sometimes sharp differences among the religions and philosophies of life... there seem to be universal principles that were as valid two millennia ago as they are today: the need for meaning and a sense of agency, compassion for others and the notion that cooperation and prosociality are the best ways to insure human flourishing, regardless of ones metaphysical views.

Pigliucci is a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York and author of How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life; Cleary is a philosopher who teaches at Columbia, Barnard, the City University of New York, and the New York Public Library and is the author of Existentialism and Romantic Love; and Kaufman is a professor of philosophy at Missouri State University.

For centuries, religions have dominated as the way to make sense of the origin of the cosmos and human life. But, as philosophy professor Michael Ruse writes in A Meaning to Life (Oxford Univ., Apr.), the advent of the theory of evolution set in motion a decline in religious faith and sent some people looking to science for answers. Scientists, however, have thus far failed to resolve the mysteries of human existence. Are we not in the same place with respect to our worries about meaning and what we might call the ultimate questions? Ruse asks in the book. If we think about it, if we use our reason, then we have no answers. Ruse teaches at Florida State University and is the author of The Problem of War.

A simpler philosophy rooted in Okinawa also addresses the need for meaning. How to Ikigai: Lessons for Finding Happiness and Living Your Lifes Purpose (Mango, out now) is Tim Tamashiros introduction to the concept of ikigai, which he defines as the reason you get out of bed.... Its what you do every day, thats meaningful to you and to others. Tamashiros ikigai is to delight; for others it might be to serve, to nourish, to create. He tells readers that by discovering their ikigai and living it, their gifts become an offering to the world.

But philosophy is not enough for the dozen scholars who contribute essays to Faith and Reason: Philosophers Explain Their Turn to Catholicism (Ignatius, Apr.), edited by Brian Besong and Jonathan Fuqua, with a foreword by Francis Beckwith. Philosophy professors Edward Feser, Peter Kreeft, Candace Vogler, and others tell why they embraced Catholicism as a superior source of wisdom. The editors write, [The] conventional wisdom is that beliefs arising from faith are by their very nature contrary to the deliverances of reason. But for... Catholic academics, like the contributors to this volume, who have both a deep faith and a sophisticated mastery of philosophy, thats not at all how they understand the relationship between faith and reason. They see them as complementary, that we can know some things by both faith and reason, some things only by reason, and some things only by faith.

In Defense of Jesus

Franciscan priest Richard Rohr offers not substitutes for Christianity but fresh ways of looking at it. In The Universal Christ (Crown, out now), he examines anew the meaning of Jesuss life and teachings, writing that too often our understandings of him and his earthly ministry have been shaped by culture, religious conflicts, and the human ego. Rohrauthor of The Divine Dancewrites that unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society. He continues, In fact fast-food religion and the so-called prosperity gospel are some of the very best ways to actually avoid Godwhile talking about religion almost nonstop.

Robin Meyers also wants to show Christians they can rescue their faith from the rigid morals and doctrines that have turned so many off. In Falling Off the Ceiling (Crown, Jan. 2020), Meyers writes that the image of a vengeful God who demands obedience and metes out rewards and punishment has driven many Christians out of the church. He encourages readers to move from a harsh theology to one that emphasizes love and activism. Meyersauthor of Saving Jesus from the Churchis a Christian minister, peace activist, and professor of social justice.

Biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine encourages readers to reconsider their abandonment of Jesus and the church in Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians (HarperOne, Nov.). Levine argues that Jesuss historical and cultural influence make him relevant for the faithful and for nonbelievers alike. Jesuss life and teachings, she writes, are important for everyoneeven those who reject religionbecause they hold valuable insights for today.

Levine writes, I am not a Christian, in any sense of the term.... yet I have most of my life, since the age of seven, been asking questions about [Jesus], reading about him, seeing the movies and attending the plays, looking at artistic representations and listening to music about his passion.... Jesus the speaker of Jewish wisdom has taught me much, and continues to teach me, about priorities and principals, about how to live, and how to love.

Levine is a professor of New Testament and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the author of The Misunderstood Jew.

Mind-body-spirit publisher Inner Traditions offers a different lens for viewing Jesus. A Theology of Love: Reimagining Christianity Through a Course in Miracles by Richard Smoley (Nov.) draws not only on the Bible but also on Buddhism, gnosticism, Hinduism, and esoteric and mystical teachings, such as A Course in Miracles and the Sefer Yetzirah, the oldest known kabbalistic text. Smoley is also the author of Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition and How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying About God and the Bible.

The Riches of Religion

Why Christianity? Why the church? Those are the questions Mark R. Kowaleski tries to answer in Traveling Home: Tracking Your Way Through the Spiritual Wilderness (Church, Aug.). Addressing Americans who are ambivalent about the value of the faith, Kowaleski makes the case for Christianity as the way to answer ultimate questions, writing, Beyond the way we orient ourselves in place and history we also need to understand our place in the bigger picture of the cosmos.... Where did we come from? Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there a bigger purpose for my life? Is there some thing or someone who brought this all into being? For Kowaleskidean and rector at St. Johns Cathedral in Los AngelesChristianity provides the answers.

Many Christians have been turned off by the institutional church but still want to do good in the world. Bartender turned comedian turned pastor Jerry Herships offers ideas that dont necessarily include church membership in Rogue Saints: Spirituality for Good-Hearted Heathens (Westminster, out now). He leads After Hours Denver, a group of drug addicts and other misfits in the traditional church who meet in bars and pubs to talk about God while making sandwiches for the homeless.

Hershipsauthor of Last Call: From Serving Drinks to Serving Jesuswrites, I want this book to alleviate guilt, create joy, and give people permission to find God in new and different ways, even if that means sleeping in on Sundays.... Religion can give us a framework, but I dont think its necessarily a house everybody wants (or frankly, needs) to live in. Community and a connection to something higher can take a lot of forms.

Mary Jo Sharp offers a similar message in Why I Still Believe: A Former Atheists Reckoning with the Bad Reputation Christians Give a Good God (Zondervan, Nov.), arguing for a Christian community that is inclusive and focused on love and service instead of judgment and exclusion.

How did the world become so hostile toward religion? That question prompted Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter Timothy Egan to embark on A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith (Viking, Oct.). Egan recounts his thousand-mile walk along an ancient pilgrimage route, with stops at shrines, churches, and monasteries that were significant in the early history of Christianity. His destination is St. Peters Square, where he hopes to meet the pope who is leading a besieged church of 1.3 billion Roman Catholics and seeking to preserve the Catholic church for the future.

Egan, a columnist for the New York Times, is the author most recently of The Immortal Irishman. He won the National Book Award for his book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time.

Finally, a rabbi offers a corrective to ideas about what Judaism is and what it requires in Mensch Marks: Life Lessons of a Human Rabbi (HCI, Apr.). Joshua Hammerman, rabbi of Temple Beth El in Stamford, Conn., and a journalist, writes, So many Jews say to me, Rabbi, I feel like I am a good person, even though Im not a good Jew. Since when must the two be mutually exclusive? Jewish ritual is vacuous if it does not lead to ethical ends. Judaism, which should instinctively be linked to kindness, modesty and honesty, too often is associated with ritual correctness, ethnic tribalism and an unyielding ethic of holier-than-thou. He says that being a menscha loving human beingtranscends any other accomplishment.

Finding Religion in Unexpected Places...and Books: Among the array of choices for the spiritually adventurous readers are some innovative paths that may or may not involve UFOs.Among the array of choices for the spiritually adventurous are some innovative paths. Belief in extraterrestrial life has become a new form of religion, D.W. Pasulka writes in American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford Univ., out now). Popular television programs like Ancient Aliens provide viewers with interpretive strategies that encourage them to view religious visions of the past through the lens of the modern UFO narrative, turning medieval angels into aliens, for example. What was once a belief localized within small pockets or groups of believers under the umbrella term UFO religions is now a widespread worldview that is supercharged by the digital infrastructure that spreads messages and beliefs virally. 

Today this level of belief rivals faith in the traditional God and has moved beyond the fringe to be embraced by scientists, professionals, and tech entrepreneurs, Pasulka argues, noting, The creation of a belief system is now much easier to accomplish than it was two thousand years ago, when people didnt possess smartphones and were not exposed to the ubiquitous screens of a culture that now teach us how to see, what to see, and how to interpret what we see.

Pasulka is a history and religion consultant for movies and television shows, including The Conjuring and The Conjuring II; a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington; and chair of the schools department of philosophy and religion.

Spiritual Rebel: A Positively Addictive Guide to Finding Deeper Perspective and Higher Purpose (Monkfish, June) describes other new religions that sprang from the movies. Author Sarah Bowen writes about the estimated 250,000 people worldwide who have embraced the Force of Star Wars as their higher power and identify religiously as Jedi. The 2017 documentary American Jedi introduced the concept widely in the U.S. and showed how these beliefs have taken root. She also writes about the Church of the Latter-Day Dude, a self-described open-source religion that claims 450,000 Dude-ist priests worldwide. The Dude De Ching, based on the wisdom of Lao Tzu, includes quotes from the movie The Big Lebowski.

These are evidence, Bowen writes, that, as religious affiliation has declined, our definition of religion is expanding. She adds, Were redefining what sacred, spiritual, and religious mean for us. Many Americans now draw on a variety of belief systems to form what Bowen calls a God-optional faith. Her first book was Void If Detached: Seeking Modern Spirituality Through My Fathers Old Sermons.

Movements are another place people go to find purpose and inspiration. Burning Manthe annual event in the California desert that has been described as an experiment in community and arthas spawned, if not a philosophy and practice, a worldview and movement. In The Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach Us About Building Better Communities (North Atlantic, June), Caveat Magister (the pen name of Benjamin Wachs) writes that the movement that has grown up around Burning Man is hard to define: For the first 18 years of its existence, Burning Man didnt even have an official statement of what it was or how it worked. They didnt think they needed one, and to no small extent they were still figuring it out themselves. Forget a blueprint; they didnt even have an explanation.

Magister calls Burning Man simply a place for like-minded people to come together to experience their shared values. Burning Man is often mistaken for a utopian movement, he writes, but Burning Man doesnt believe in the perfectibility of life or of governing systems. He adds, It works as well as it does largely because it has abandoned the notion of being a utopia and has instead focused on other aspects of the human experience.

Today, affiliated groups hold events all around the world, including Israels Mid-Burn, South Africas AfrikaBurn, and Austins Flipside. In response to the need for a coherent way to tell others about it, founder Larry Harvey wrote 10 Principles of Burning Man, the tenets of which include radical inclusion, self-reliance, self-expression, rejection of commercialism, communal effort, and immediate experiencesa recipe that might appeal to the spiritually rebellious.

Return to the main featureIn The Trial of Lizzie Borden, Cara Robertson provides the definitive account of one of Americas most notorious and enduring murder mysteries. Here, Robertson lays out the particulars of the crime and addresses the central question of Lizzie Borden's guilt.

On June 21, 1893, the diminutive courthouse in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a pocket edition of the State Capitol in Boston, was the scene of an outsize drama. An elegantly attired 32-year-old womanher hat alone a model for theatergoersstood with perfect self-possession in the dock as a jury of 12 somber men entered the courtroom to pronounce her fate. Her name was Lizzie Borden.

On the morning of August 4, 1892, the prosperous mill town of Fall River, Massachusetts, was the site of a grisly double murder. Andrew Borden, a prominent local businessman, and his second wife, Abby, were found hacked to death in their home near the city center. It seemed to be the work of a madman. The details were gruesome: First, Abby had been felled by 19 blows in an upstairs guest room and, about an hour and a half later, Andrew received 10 blows as he lay sleeping on the sitting room sofa. His face resembled raw meat, yet, according to one of the first people on the scene, the house itself was in apple pie order.

Two key facts seemed to rule out a murderous stranger. First, the front door and basement door were locked. The only apparent entry point was a side door that was typically latched. Second, even if an assassin had found his way inside, the interval between the murders seemed odd. Would he have lingered in the house after dispatching Abby Borden for over an an hour and half until Andrew returned home? It was a narrow home, physically as well as psychologically, without hallways to provide privacy or places for an assassin to hide from any other occupants of the house.

Three other people were known to be in the house that morning. Andrew Bordens brother-in-law John Morse spent the night in the upstairs guest room, but he was known to have departed shortly after breakfast, almost an hour before Abby died. Bridget Sullivan, the Bordens Irish housemaid, had been spotted washing windows outside. That left Lizzie, Andrews younger daughter. She gave shifting accounts of her whereabouts during the critical period. She said she had been downstairs, ironing handkerchiefs, when Abby was killed, yet had not heard a sound. But, according to Bridget, she had been descending the stairs, virtually at eye level with her stepmothers corpse in the upstairs guest room, when her father returned around 10:45am. After greeting her father, Lizzie said she had resumed ironing but, again, suspended her work, walking outside to the barn in search of a sinker (a weight for a fishing line) or a piece of lead to fix a screen. There, she tarried, enjoying a few pears picked from the backyard trees. Stranger still, upon discovering her fathers body, she had not looked for her stepmother, claiming that Abby had received a note and gone out. (The note was never found.) Later, after the doctor who examined her fathers body left to send a telegram to Lizzies older sister Emma, who was out of town, she volunteered that she had heard Abby come in, spurring the belated discovery of Abbys body upstairs.

Further investigation disclosed a motive. The Borden household was the site of a cold war between the generations. Andrew Borden was a rich man who could claim descent from one of the founding families of Fall River. But he was known to be a miser, eschewing life in the elite residential district known as the Hill, and more interested, as a contemporary journalist put it, in piling up dollars than in spending his fortune. Lizzie and Emma resented their fathers straitened manner of living and were outraged when he bought a house, in his wifes name, for Abbys half-sister. What he did for her, they thought, he could do for his own blood. He gave his daughters a comparable property, but it did not heal the rift. Lizzie and Emma conducted their lives as separately as was possible in the small house, receiving their visitors upstairs and avoiding meals with their father and stepmother. In contrast to her demure older sister, Lizzie was famously forthright and openly disdainful of her stepmother. Shortly after the bodies were discovered, Lizzie tartly corrected the police officer interviewing her, stating of Abby, she is not my mother.

Other evidence linking Lizzie to the crime emerged. Three men in a local drugstore identified her as the woman who tried to buy prussic acid, a deadly poison sold only upon a doctors prescription, the day before the murders. Poison was a womans weapon and Lizzies inability to procure it seemed to explain why a well-bred young woman would pick up a mans weapon and commit the murders in such a bloody fashion. The lack of blood on Lizzie Borden or any of her clothes seemed an insoluble conundrum until her friend Alice Russell came forward to testify that Lizzie had burned a dress the Sunday after the murders, a dress Lizzie said had been stained with paint.

Given the circumstantial evidence, it looked dark for Lizzie Borden. Borden family counselor Andrew Jennings put his clients considerable inheritance to work in hiring two noted trial lawyers, Boston attorney Melvin Adams and the former Governor of Massachusetts, George Robinson. They questioned whether a woman could physically have committed such brutal murders and summoned witnesses who had seen strange men in the vicinity. Through clever cross examination, they emphasized missteps in the police investigation to suggest an orchestrated conspiracy to pin the murders on their client. (The police witnesses contradicted each other about the possible murder weapon, a handleless hatchet head found in the basement.) Their greatest success, however, was in keeping the best evidence of Lizzies guilt away from the jury: they won rulings excluding her inquest statement, which memorialized her shifting stories and provided ample evidence of the household discord, and her attempts to buy poison the day before the murders, evidence of murderous intent that would have punctured the defense contention that Lizzie was an innocent bystander, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lizzie Borden herself presented the best possible argument for her own defense. Active in good works, especially in her church, Lizzie ticked all the boxes of respectable middle-class femininity. Though some saw something sinister in her self-possessiona hostile newspaper referred to her as the sphinx of coolnessmost journalists considered her controlled demeanor a sign of lady-like bearing, an inborn dignity that all but proved her innocence. Comparing the two women known to be in the house at the time of the murders, Lizzies lawyer Andrew Jennings asked, which is the natural party to be suspected? The stranger, he might as well have said the immigrant, or the youngest daughter? At his words, Lizzie wept as she had done at other moments of pathos; she hid her face beneath her fan during some of the prosecutions most gruesome medical testimony; and she fainted when the victims skulls were produced in court. All of this counted in her favor. The defense asked the jury if it could believe that such a woman could have killed her father. Deprived of its best evidence of premeditation, the prosecution could only argue that she had been magically transformed into a murderess, evoking Dr. Jekylls metamorphosis into the evil Mr. Hyde.

After an unusually long trial lasting two weeks, the jurors found they were unanimous on their first ballot, but they withheld their verdict of not guilty for another hour and a half to appear reasonably deliberative. Was this an example of reasonable doubt? Or was it an unreasonable certainty that a woman like Lizzie Borden simply could not have committed the murders.Just over a decade ago, a heavily tattooed Swedish computer hacker with a traumatic past and a big European following burst onto the American thriller scene. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has since sold more than six million print copies in the U.S., per NPD BookScan, and launched a global franchise that, to date, includes three novels by series originator Stieg Larsson and two more by David Lagercrantz. Knopf will publish The Girl Who Lived Twice, Lagercrantzs third installment in the Millennium series, at the end of August.

Larssons success sent U.S. publishers searching for more books about especially bleak crimes committed under the winter-dark skies of the brooding north. The resulting boom in Nordic crime fiction expanded the readerships of authors including Karin Fossum and Jo Nesb, who were bestsellers in Europe a decade before Larsson. Over time, it also spawned a sameness, some editors say, with many books featuring a middle-aged man with an uneasy family life as the central investigator.

As a result, where just a few years ago publishers were racing to get more Nordic crime authors signed and translated, the challenge now is finding fresh voices who are upending the genres conventions.

We started signing fewer of these books because you started seeing cookie cutter characters stuck into different Scandinavian countries, says Daniela Rapp, senior editor at St. Martins. All of us got very tired of those things. Its been a deliberate effort to acquire stories that are disrupting that model.

That effort has yielded a wave of books that include the forthcoming The Truth Behind the Lie (Minotaur, Sept.) by Sara Lovestam, translated from the Swedish by Laura A. Wideburg. In it, Pernilla, whose child has been kidnapped, responds to an ad offering the services of a private investigator to those who, for whatever reason, cant contact the police. That PI is Kouplan, an undocumented Iranian refugee who dwells in Stockholms shadows, awaiting the opportunity to apply for asylum.

The vulnerable underbelly of the social welfare state is an undercurrent that runs through much of the Nordic noir genre, but in this book, says Sara Karrholm, an associate professor of literary and publishing studies at Swedens Lund University, its a defining element of protagonist Kouplans character. Many people are trying to do something new with the genre, says Karrholm, whose research includes the history of Swedish crime literature with a focus on gender. In Sweden, its become more and more difficult to stand out. Its a dilemmahow to break the model and still have a good story.

As Nordic crime fiction continues to evolve, we look at new and established authors who are pushing the genres narrative and geographic boundaries.

True North

The terms Nordic noir and Scandi noir are often used interchangeably, but the more expansive Nordic acknowledges the Icelandic and Finnish authors who are putting their own twists on the genre.

In May, St. Martins imprint Minotaur will release The Island by Ragnar Jonasson, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, which is the masterly sequel, PWs starred review said, to his 2018 series launch, The Darkness. Det. Insp. Hulda Hermannsdottir is facing mandatory retirement age and is frustrated that her male superiors havent promoted her into their leadership ranks. She elects to pursue one last casea weekend getaway turned deadlyand struggles to keep her boss from wresting control of her investigation.

After a wave of male inspectors, Rapp says, we need to hear from more women as protagonists.

In February, Minotaur published The Reckoning by Icelandic crime maven Yrsa Sigurdardottir. Second in a trilogy, it features a demoted detective and a child psychologist who crackle with sexual tension while investigating the appearance of body parts around Reykjavik. PW called it must-reading for fans of Nordic crime fiction.

Sigurdardottir has become such an important figure in Icelandic crime fiction that shes referred to by first name only in a brief, sly appearance in Lilja Sigurdardottirs forthcoming Trap (Orenda, Apr.), translated by Quentin Bates. Fans of Nordic noir will find plenty to like, PWs review said, in this edgy sequel to the 2018 series launch, Snare, the authors first title to be translated into English.

As Trap begins, protagonist Sonja has run off to Florida with her young son to escape her ex-husband, who had forced her into the drug trade. Meanwhile, her lover, Agla, awaits sentencing for her role in the 2008 banking crash but is more worried about the repercussions of a debt owed to characters more menacing than financial regulators. The women return to their illegal ways to pull off one last job that, if successful, will set them both free.

This is more of a modern thriller rather than a police procedural, says Karen Sullivan, publisher and founder of Orenda. There are no detectives chasing down murderers. Instead, she says, the series revolves around damaged characters whose crimes are rooted in issues that have only come to the fore in Iceland in recent years. Palomar Pictures has acquired film rights for the series.

Orenda is also publishing Palm Beach, Finland (Apr.) by Antti Tuomainen, translated from the Finnish by David Hackston, which PWs review called an inspired meld of crime and dark comedy. The proprietor of a pastel-colored beach club hires a pair of hapless goons to make life difficult for the owner of a property he covets. The thugs accidentally end up killing someone, and theyre not even sure who it is. The National Central Police send their best private investigator to figure it all out.

Obviously, theres a familiarity with the genre, Sullivan says of the context for Orendas forthcoming titles. Everyone knows what to expect, so Sigurdardottir and Tuomainen feel they can play with its tropes.

Other Voices, Other Crimes

Out of the dozen-plus works of Nordic crime fiction discussed in this piece, several, including Trap and the Millennium books, have queer main characters. Martin Holmens Slugger (Pushkin, July), translated by Annie Prime, concludes his Stockholm Trilogy, set in the 1930s and centered on Harry Kvist, a boxer turned debt collector who is bisexual. In the final installment, Kvist is newly released from prison and drawn back into violence when his friend and former lover, Pastor Gabrielsson, is found nailed to the floor of his church, next to a Star of David painted using his blood. Kvist pummels his way through Stockholms gritty underworld as he homes in on a plot that reaches to Nazi Germany.

I dont consider myself a writer of LGBTQ novels, Holmen says. I write noir fiction with an antihero protagonist who happens to be gay. He sees his tough-guy character as a provocation to the way gay men are often portrayed in literature, and also as a way to stand out. Ever since the Millennium series, its getting hard to find a niche of your own, he notes. "I found mine, and a story that had not yet been toldthe conditions of working class gay men in the past.

The central relationship in Joakim Zanders trilogy-ending The Friend (Harper, July), translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, was originally intended to be a heterosexual love affair. But in the final version, Jacob Seger, who has just landed his first job in diplomacy in Lebanon, falls in love with a man named Yassim, who claims to be a war photographer while intelligence officials say he is a terrorist.

When Zander traveled to Beirut for research, a local friend, who is gay, showed him around. Zanders exposure to Beiruts gay scene prompted the author to incorporate its complexities into his narrative as a way of heightening the tension. I think that progressive Scandinavian culture allows writers the choice of a wide spectrum of protagonists to choose from without the decision in itself being necessarily political, he says. Rather, its based on the needs of the story.

Home and Away

Other authors, too, are pushing geographic boundaries, acknowledging increasing global influences on Scandinavian life, or reaching beyond procedurals into legal and psychological thrillers.

In the next novel from crime writing duo Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, Three Hours (Quercus, Sept.), translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, 73 refugees are found dead in a shipping container in Stockholm. The discovery kicks off a plot that takes Det. Insp. Ewert Grens to Niger, while Swedish undercover operative Piet Hoffman is running out of time to extricate himself from a West African trafficking ring.

Jonas Bonniers The Helicopter Heist (Other Press, May), translated from the Swedish by Alice Menzies, fictionalizes a real-life crime in which four men, three of whom arrived in Sweden as youths fleeing wars, plotted to steal a helicopter and $6.5 million. Netflix acquired the film rights in 2016, with Jake Gyllenhaal attached to star and produce.

Other Press is also publishing Beyond All Reasonable Doubt (June) by Malin Persson Giolito, whose 2017 English-language debut, Quicksand, won several awards in Europe; PWs review called it haunting and immersive. In her new book, translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles, a lawyer fights to exonerate a man believed to be one of societys most ruthless criminals. The case against him was deeply flawed, but the more she learns about him the more difficult her job becomes.

Another legal drama is at the center of A Nearly Normal Family (Celadon, July), the first novel to be published in the U.S. by M.T. Edvardsson; Rachel Willson-Broyles translated from the Swedish. Eighteen-year-old Stella, the cosseted only child of an upper-middle-class family, is accused of murdering a man nearly twice her age. The story is narrated by the accused and each of her parents, one a pastor and the other a lawyer.

Despite the books Swedish locale, Celadon isnt promoting the title as a Nordic thriller. It could be set anywhere, says Deb Futter, senior v-p and copublisher at Celadon, who signed Edvardsson to a two-book deal. To me, it transcends the Nordic setting. Family has sold in 31 territories including the U.S.

Familial bonds take a menacing turn in Alex Dahls The Heart Keeper (Berkley, July), her follow-up to The Boy at the Door, which PW called a heartrending first novel in a starred review. When Alisons five-year-old daughter, Amalie, drowns, her heart is donated to Kaia, a seven-year-old who has been ill since birth. Soon after the transplant, Kaia begins waking up throughout the night, screaming that she cant breathe, and adopts mannerisms that puzzle her mother, Iselin. Alison discovers who received her daughters organs and ingratiates herself into the lives of Kaia and her unsuspecting mother.

Staying Power

Even before Stieg Larsson was published in his native Sweden, Karin Fossums work was already sitting comfortably in American bookstores. HMH released Dont Look Back in 2004 on the strength of Fossums growing popularity outside her native Norway, says Nicole Angeloro, an editor at HMH. In August, the publisher will release The Whisperer, translated by Kari Dickson, the 13th installment in Fossums Inspector Sejer series.

For much of the book, Sejer sits at his desk listening to a woman describe how her life unraveled after the arrival of a threatening letter. A death has occurred, but its not clear whether Ragna Riegel, the quiet, lonely woman confined to a Norwegian jail, is the perpetrator or a victim of a crime.

Sejer isnt a traditional detective putting clues together, Angeloro says. He doesnt have the murder board; there arent the bread crumbs you may expect. Hes the connective tissue of the series, but the stories dont revolve around him. Fossum has always put the victims and perpetrators at the center of each story, meaning any book in the series can be read as a standalone, she says.

The forthcoming book offers the same deliberate probing of the human psyche that Fossums readers have become accustomed to. In a series, you are, at some point, publishing to the devotees, Angeloro says.

In the wake of the smash success of the Millennium series, publishers and culture watchers casting about for the next Stieg Larsson would sometimes alight on Jo Nesb, a Scandinavian man writing about a troubled detectivenever mind that, like Fossums Inspector Sejer, Nesbs Harry Hole preceded Larssons work by nearly a decade in his native Norway.

Following 2017s The Thirst, which PWs starred review called exceptional, the police detective remains an angry alcoholic in The Knife (Knopf, July). His life takes a nightmarish turn when he wakes up one morning after a drunken blackout to find someone elses blood on his hands.

Fossum and Nesbs protagonistsboth Scandinavian male detectives of a certain agehave demonstrated a longevity that defies the ongoing search for whats new and next. Ultimately, as publishers of Nordic crime fiction seek out new characters brought to life by different voices, one constant will remain, Rapp at St. Martins says: The actual storyit still has to be a great story.

Jasmina Kelemen is a former Bloomberg News editor who now writes from Houston and Caracas about books, food, and travel.

Below, more on the subject of mysteries and thrillers

Justice for All: New Mysteries & Thrillers 2019

Art Imitates Life: New Mysteries & Thrillers 2019TOGO: Construction of a 760 km railway from the capital Lome to Cinkasse on the border with Burkina Faso is included in a national development plan unveiled by the government of Togo. It is envisaged that the line could eventually run to Ouagadougou.The FCC regulatory authority in the US has issued an order making changes to key technical requirements for the use of TV white spaces (TVWS).





The FCC has set aside TVWS channels for unlicensed use in every market across the country, with the goal of addressing the digital divide in the US. Approximately 34 million Americans currently lack basic broadband access, according to the FCCand the majority of them  about 24 million  live in rural areas that simply do not have infrastructure in place to enable it.To address the gap, strategies for making inexpensive unlicensed spectrum available to ISPs have been a cornerstone of the FCCs plan to bridge the digital divide. Its an opportunity that Microsoft, Google and others are eyeing with interest.TVWS can be used to provide broadband in much the same way that a conventional Wi-Fi connection signal does. But while a strong Wi-Fi signal is typically very expensive and only covers a radius of up to 300 meters, TVWS can cover anywhere between 750 meters and nine miles. As TechNet noted in its letter to the FCC, these low-frequency signals are also capable of traversing the physical barriers and long distances that make internet access for rural communities such a challenge.Theres just one issue: interference. Broadcasters are concerned that having broadband activities operating so close to their critical airwaves could jeopardise signal quality and delivery.The FCC previously ruled that the 600 MHz duplex gap between 652-663 MHz and Channel 37 would be not be sold to wireless carriers and would be available on an unlicensed basis  an effort that the recent TV spectrum incentive auction carried through on. All TVWS devices will be subject to approval by the FCC laboratory. There are also TVWS databases that regulate available signals to make sure they dont overlap with other occupants of the spectrum.However, the National Association of Broadcasters has consistently said that these efforts dont guarantee clear channels for TV stations.The FCCs new order requires that white spaces devices include internal geo-location capability, both for outdoor and indoor use, and that the devices automatically provide coordinates to the database that is meant to map out the TV frequencies to avoid.NAB appreciates the FCCs decision to strengthen its white spaces rules, NAB said in a statement. Requiring automatic geo-location in white spaces devices will help increase accuracy and protect television viewers from harmful interference.IT giant Microsoft backed the FCC's approach. A Microsoft spokesperson told Rapid TV News: Today, the NAB submitted a letter to the FCC, urging them to consider a further notice on several key TV white spaces issues. We appreciate the discussions and collaboration with NAB over the past months that have led to this point, and echo their call to the FCC to move forward with key TV white spaces issues to close the broadband gap.For Life follows the story of Victoria Woll (Tone Mostraum, Eyewitness, ZombieLars) a hardened investigator, across two different timelines: in the present, where its her job to solve cases and put criminals behind bars, and in the future, where she is in prison. Every episode will feature a present-day, exciting standalone case as its main story, along with new pieces to the continuing puzzle that is Victoria and why she is fighting for her freedom a few years down the line.Norways first police procedural, the 8 x 60 series was created and written by International Emmy Award-winning Gjermund S. Eriksen (Mammon, Aber Bergen) and co-written by Helena Nielsen (Lilyhammer, Aber Bergen, Black Widows). It is produced by Monster, Norways largest production company, for NRK. Along with DRG, the Norwegian Film Institute has also invested in the series.There are many brilliant Scandie Noir shows in the market, including Gjermund S. Eriksens previous series Mammon, but we want to show that Nordic high production values and clever storylines dont always have to be dark, gloomy and founded in fear and anxiety, said producer Hakon Briseid. For Life will also have joy, humour, warmth and hope  adding new layers of contrast to the episodic crime universe. In this way, we hope what we are terming a Happy Noir approach can build a more complete emotional experience for viewers.Dave Clarke, DRGs EVP of content was responsible for obtaining the rights. He added:  Monster and NRK have an enviable track record for producing entertaining and gripping drama so this refreshingly different police procedural...was immediately something in which DRG wanted to invest. Strong Scandinavian scripted titles have worked well for us in the international marketplace, and we are confident that by having a different style of Nordic drama on offer, this series will attract early interest as we take it out for pre-sale at MIPTV this year.The agreements include a worldwide licence deal for two documentaries from TI Productions, which creates factual, fact-ent and documentary programming for UK and international broadcasters. The production company is a subsidiary of TI Media, which owns more than 40 of the UKs best-loved media brands, including Country Life, NME and Wallpaper*.Inside Britains Black Market (1 x 30 mins), produced by TI for BBC Three, digs deep into the black market that operates on both on the UKs streets and online, exposing the criminals who are flooding the country with fake clothes and pills. Also produced by TI for BBC Three is Inside the Real Saudi Arabia: Why I Had to Leave (1 x 45 mins), which follows Saudi-born UK fashion stylist Basma Khalifa on an exploratory trip to Saudi Arabia (pictured), a country she has not visited since her parents moved to the UK when she was three. The purpose of Khalifas visit to see whether she could return permanently to her native country.In a second representation deal, Scorpion has picked up Britain: A Year of Hate Crime (1 x 45), produced by Century Films for Channel 4. The documentary charts the rise in hate crimes against Muslims across the UK in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing. Taking viewers to the frontline of racial hatred, the film blends poignant testimonies from Muslim community leaders with the intense reality of a country responding to a terror attack.A final deal with independent Dutch producer and director Tim van den Hoff sees the 54-minute HD documentary Monumental Crossroads: The Fight for Southern Heritage join Scorpions catalogue of current-affairs programming . It looks at the growing trend throughout the southern states of the US to remove confederate monuments, sparking a rancorous debate about whats worth remembering and whats best forgotten.Everyone knows that distribution is hard graft and the only thing that sets you apart from your many, many competitors is the quality and distinctiveness of your shows, said Scorpion TV founder David Cornwall. The world is going through strange times and these brilliant, insightful, uncomfortable docs are the result of some of the most informed and creative minds in television attempting to make sense of it.American-made fighter jets, once facing extinction, have seen a resurgence in sales, thanks largely to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Add to that Middle Eastern nations arming for potential war with Iran and there may be more than $80 billion in new or potential sales for F-15s, F-16s, and F/A-18s worldwide.

Trump's Pentagon budgets over the past two years have enabled the U.S. Navy to keep buying new F/A-18 Super Hornets. His fiscal 2020 budget plan calls for purchasing even more of those warplanes, plus a new variant of the F-15 for the Air Force, which has not purchased Eagles since 2001. Meanwhile, eastern European nations spooked by Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea are looking at the affordable F-16.Momentum is building among deputies in the Iraqi parliament to oust U.S. troops entirely from the countryan outcome that would leave Iraq's political future in the hands of neighboring Iran and leave its citizens more vulnerable to the Islamic State.

Today, the United States fields an estimated 5,200 troops in Iraq. They are there as part of a security agreement with the Iraqi government to advise, assist, and support that country's troops in the fight against the Islamic State. But the Iraqi parliament is expected to vote soon on draft laws calling for a full withdrawal. For now, things don't look good for the troops.In the last several years, the Russian military has drastically increased its battle readiness in apparent preparation for a possible major conflict with an opposing massive ground force (see EDM, September 29, 2016; December 6, 2017; January 15, 2019). The massive buildup was first publicly reported in September 2016 by first deputy defense minister and chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov. He discussed the issue in a briefing to Russian journalists following the conclusion of the Kavkaz 2016 military exercise which was centered on Crimea and the Black Sea region. Kavkaz 2016 has since been overlapped by even larger Russian war games, but in 2016 they were the biggest such maneuvers since the 1980s. In 2016, Gerasimov told journalists that front-line combat unitsso-called battalion tactical groups (BTG)will be primarily manned by contract soldiers to increase their battle readiness and will be supported by new special logistical field units. According to Gerasimov, at the time of the Kavkaz 2016 exercise, the Russian Land Forces together with the Airborne Troops (Vozdushno-Desantnye VoyskaVDV) had 66 standing BTGs. These units are reinforced battalions with additional armor (tanks), heavy guns, other artillery and multiple-rocket launch systems (MRLS), anti-aircraft capabilities, sapper or pioneer detachments, and other auxiliaries that may be added in accordance with possible specific missions. A typical Russian BTG is 800900 men strong. The BTG as a basic fighting unit appeared within the Russian military organization during the Chechen wars. Because a BTG is reinforced with armor, firepower and added capabilities, it can be deployed in battle separately or easily merged with other BTGs to form flexible task forces. In September 2016, Gerasimov disclosed plans to double the number of standing BTGs to 125 by 2018 (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, September 15, 2016).

In September 2018, while promoting the massive Vostok 2018 war games, Gerasimov proudly announced, There are 126 permanently battle-ready BTGs in the army and the VDV, manned by contract soldiers, with two or three BTGs in each regiment or brigade (Mil.ru, September 6, 2018). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in contrast, has deployed four multinational BTG-type units across the Baltic republics and in Poland to deter the Russian military.

Most recently, in March 2019, Russias minister of defense, Army General Sergei Shoigu, addressed a meeting of the Duma (lower chamber of parliament) defense committee to tout the major achievements of his (and Gerasimovs) tenure leading the military establishment since November 2012. Inter alia, Shoigu boasted about the establishment of 136 permanently battle-ready BTGs. The defense minister added that almost all Russian army commanders down to the regimental level have battle experience. Shoigu did not elaborate whether these Russian military commanders had acquired their battle experience during tours of service in Syria, where Russia has been officially engaged since September 2015, or if this battle experience also included unofficial deployments in the Donbas warzone, in eastern Ukraine (Redstar.ru, March 13, 2019).

Shoigu told the Duma defense committee about the deployment, since 2012, of 109 new Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), 108 new submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM), over a thousand new and modernized aircraft, thousands of tanks and other armor, ten brigades of new Iskander missiles and lots of other weapons, including reconnaissance drones (Redstar.ru, March 13). Accumulated stockpiles of military hardware were a typical feature of the Soviet military during the Cold War, but the battle readiness of the old Red Army did not match its size or the vast financial expenditures on its development and upkeep. The Soviet army was not designed to go to war without the mass mobilization of tens of millions of reservist soldiers and officers. The acute deficit of standing battle-ready forces was a major handicap that undermined Soviet war efforts during the Afghan conflict, from 1979 to 1989; and the Russian military inherited the same problem during the Chechen wars (19941996, 19992000). The present Russian military seems to have learned the lesson and is now earnestly preparing to fight a major ground war using standing armed forces, without the need for a massive mobilization of reservists. Of course, forming and maintaining 136 standing BTGs is costly and makes military sense only if a major armed encounter of continental proportions seems imminent and could begin without much prior notice or mobilization.

Both Moscow and Washington have announced the suspension of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which may officially be scrapped in August, after the mandatory six-month waiting period passes. Both sides have accused the other of violating the terms of the INF, and both have rejected the others denunciations. The only arms control treaty still standing between a potentially unlimited and highly dangerous Russian-U.S. arms race is the 2010 New START nuclear arms limitation treaty, which is itself scheduled to expire in February 2021. New START may be prolonged once, for five years, by mutual agreement, thus avoiding the cumbersome process of ratification in the U.S. Senate. But the U.S. State Department has said the Donald Trump administration has not yet decided whether it will seek to prolong this treaty. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in turn, has demanded that both sides must begin negotiations; and more importantly, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused the Pentagon of cheating in the implementation of nuclear arms cuts proscribed by New START, insisting that these alleged transgressions must be rectified before any prolongation may be agreed (Kommersant, March 21). Moscows demand makes the prolongation of New START highly unlikely, as accusations fly in both directions and tensions between Russia and the U.S. continue to rise.

As the nuclear arms control regime continues to erode, raw Cold Warera nuclear deterrence may again come to dominate the U.S.-Russian security relationship. And yet, nuclear deterrence does not require 136 standing BTGs, only the deployment of additional ICBMs, long-range cruise missiles and other similar weapons. A vast standing army deployed by one side threatens to trigger a serious conventional confrontation. The CEO of the Ukrainian natural gas monopoly Naftogaz, Andrei Kobolev, recently announced that Russian Gazprom is sending out notices to its European customers that it will fully terminate gas transit trough the Ukrainian pipeline system as of January 1, 2020. This could be a prelude to war, Kobolev warned (Rambler.ru, March 20). A major escalation of the conflict in Ukraineif it indeed happensmay in turn trigger direct clashes or skirmishes between Russian and Western militaries, if the present policy of brinksmanship spirals out of control.

Dr. Pavel E. Felgenhauer is a Moscow-based defense analyst and columnist for Novaya Gazeta as well as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Jamestown Foundation. He served as senior research officer in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, from where he received his Ph.D. Dr. Felgenhauer has published widely on Russian foreign and defense policies, military doctrine, arms trade and the military-industrial complex.

This article appeared originally at The Jamestown Foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor.If someone had suggested a decade ago that countries around the world could obtain large amounts of natural gas from the United States, the idea would have been dismissed as fantasy.

Back at the turn of the century, American natural gas fields were thought to be depleted, and energy investors were pouring billions of dollars into hugely expensive terminals to import natural gas, not export it.

Today, we have seen a remarkable change. Due to the shale revolution, the United States is the worlds top producer of natural gas, and the U.S. is well on its way to becoming the largest exporter before 2025, a hopelessly unrealistic quest only a decade ago. By the end of this year, several new export terminals now under construction are expected to enter service, increasing U.S. export capacity of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to 9.6 billion cubic feet per day, nearly triple the amount of natural gas currently being exported.

That shows how far LNG has come in redefining itself as an energy game changer, allowing the United States to deliver impressive political and economic benefits to European countries that have been able to reduce their reliance on Russian gas. For former Soviet bloc countries seeking to get out from under Vladimir Putins thumb, LNG transported from the U.S. has gone a long way toward establishing independence of action and flexibility, because it has provided an assured supply of natural gas.

Natural gas is a desirable fuel because it is more plentiful than oil and burns more cleanly, reducing pollution. China and India, two countries with serious environmental problems, are competing for U.S. shipments of LNG.

U.S. natural gas exports via pipeline to Mexico are increasing as well. In the past five years, cross-border pipeline capacity has nearly tripled to a level far greater than current LNG export capacity.

Theres a huge appetite for U.S. natural gas both at home and abroad, thanks to soaring gas production from the nations shale fields. But there may be an oversupply of gas, resulting in too much being exported.

Rising exports could harm U.S. electricity consumers if growing demand for natural gas pushes up prices in regions of the country  from California to Florida to New England -- that have become heavily dependent on gas for power production. Already, low natural gas prices along with hefty subsidies and state mandates for renewable sources of power have pushed baseload coal and nuclear power plants into early retirement.

In some markets, such as New England, the well-balanced mix of fuel sources that was a strength of the grid just a few years ago is now gone. Diversification has been replaced by a worrying over-reliance on natural gas. Should natural gas prices increase in the future, there might be no nuclear and coal plants to shield consumers.

The loss of balance is infecting other electricity markets as well. In New York, the state is pushing a rule that would effectively eliminate coal from the grid by 2020.

New York may have only two coal plants remaining, but the threat of the rule has sent electricity futures soaring. The price of power for 2021 has jumped more than 30 percent since the beginning of May.

Senior executives from four major utilities recently wrote PJM, the nations largest grid operator serving 65 million consumers in 13 states and the District of Columbia, begging for market reform to better value fuel diversity and existing coal and nuclear plants. Their concerns have been heard but theres been no action.

For too many policymakers, concerns about a loss of fuel diversity are easily brushed aside by an unshakable faith in low natural gas prices and the benefits from LNG exports.

But consumers could be left out to dry  in large part because were stuck with an old, inflexible electricity system even as the government provides lavish support for natural gas production and LNG exports.

Gerard Scimeca is Vice President of CASE, Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a free-market oriented consumer advocacy organization.America is under siege. Our Country is fighting a new opium war that is destroying our economy, challenging the security of our borders, straining our local governments, creating financial burdens on the states and eroding the moral fabric of our country. The weapon our enemies have chosen is synthetic non-prescription opioids (SNPO). Use of these drugs is escalating and the increase in overdose deaths is staggering.

America is losing this new opium war and is struggling to deal with a nationwide public health emergency. But this does not have to be the case. Congress has demonstrated interest in the opioid epidemic but has overlooked the crucial role that SNPOs have played in intensifying the crisis. Hearings should be convened at once to gain needed information on five key parts of this problem and to explore solutions.

First, China is aggressively pursuing a nationalist agenda and is using SNPOs in their efforts to displace the U.S. as the worlds greatest economic power. Some issue experts believe that this attack is fueled by the countrys anger dating all the way back to the Opium Wars of the 19th century. Fentanyl and its variants most often originate in China and are ravaging America, drugging our citizens and destroying their ability to work, and weakening our economy. China has outlawed SNPOs for its own citizens but primarily leaves exports unregulated, feeding Americas insatiable appetite for drugs.

Second, Mexican drug cartels have embraced SNPOs and are using their established distribution networks in the US to supply these illicit drugs directly to local communities.

The demand for fentanyl is soaring because users are seeking more intense highs. China continues to crank out new synthetic opioids that are more addictive and deadly while Mexican cartels lace a users drug of choice, such as heroin, cocaine, or marijuana with these new synthetics. Another danger is emerging for users who purchase prescription drugs illegally off the street. Dealers are acquiring equipment that dye and stamp pills containing synthetic opioids to resemble prescription medicines, but in reality are deadly combinations of heroin, fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.

Third, illicit drugs from China and Mexico are pouring into the US because our borders are not secure. SNPOs originate in China and enter the US through the postal service, package delivery services or are smuggled over the borders by Mexican drug cartels or through Canada. It is cheaper to make than heroin and cocaine and easier to smuggle into the country given its high potency.

Fentanyl is highly addictive and so potent that even a very small amount  about 2 milligrams or a dose that is equivalent to about 4 grains of salt  can be deadly. Drug busts of fentanyl usually produce amounts that could wipe out entire cities, or even states. The newest synthetic opioid, carfentanil, is even more dangerous; just a single grain could prove fatal. Even deadlier synthetic opioid variant drugs are likely to follow.

Fourth, state and local governments are overwhelmed. The United States has only about 4.4% of the worlds population yet consumes over 30% of the worlds opioid supply. Unfortunately, laws enacted by many states to limit pain medication prescriptions have done little to stem the flow of overdose deaths. As the number of opioid prescriptions decreased by 22.2% from 2013-2017 many chronic pain patients and individuals suffering from addiction turned to the streets for opioids. The result has been a spike in fatalities due to SNPO usage, and over 63,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016 alone.

The states are not prepared for the next generation of synthetic drugs. I experienced this first hand while serving as Secretary of the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services. In the summer of 2016, several states were dealing with deaths due to carfentanil. During this crisis it became apparent that needed federal resources and information to assist state officials were scattered and disjointed.

Fifth, Congress is not taking drug addiction seriously and like most Americans, has become complacent about drug use and abuse. Many of the top 2020 contenders in the Democratic Party have made light of drug use and are actively supporting nationwide marijuana legalization. In 2016, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that over 10.6% of Americans 12 or older had used an illicit drug in the past month exacting more than $740 billion annually in costs related to crime, lost work productivity and health care. The US leads the world in illegal drug use and until this is taken seriously, nothing will change.

America can win this opium war but we must address the lack of border security that exerts tremendous strain on our government entities and is destroying our economy and the lives of our citizens. Congress has attempted to deal with this crisis by merely throwing billions of dollars at prevention and treatment but must address the five root causes of the problem to truly end our opioid epidemic.

Vickie Yates Brown Glisson is the former Kentucky Secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services and a nationally recognized health lawyer.A growing number of people have no home to call their own. As home prices rise in cities from coast to coast  in massive metros like Los Angeles to New York and once-affordable cities in the Midwest like Boise and Grand Rapids  young couples are downsizing the American dream. Among advocates and policymakers, theres a growing consensus that housing ought to come first in the fight to end homelessness, but Americas stock of affordable housing is dwindling, and many homeless people are left aging and catching Medieval diseases on our city streets. It might seem surprising, but technologies like 3D-printing could be a solution keeping Americans off city streets, and solving the affordable housing crisis. But government regulations are getting in the way.

Right now, there simply isnt enough affordable housing in America for those demanding it. A recently released a report from the nonprofit Up For Growth on housing underproduction found that, between 2000 and 2015, the U.S. produced 7.3 million fewer homes than it needed to keep up with population growth and consumer demand. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that there were only 62 affordable rental homes for every 100 very low-income households, and a meager 38 affordable homes for every 100 households with extremely low incomes. Whether you need an affordable home or rental, theres a shortage in the supply.

3D-printing has the potential to meet the demand. One company, ICON, is using trailblazing 3D printing technology to provide cost-effective, beautiful, and safe homes  homes that cost under $10,000 and can be constructed in under 24 hours. The ICON model showcased at the 2018 South By Southwest festival is 650 square feet and consists of a living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and shaded porch that combine to offer consumers chic digs. And, at 650 square feet, these houses reduce Americans carbon footprints.

ICON is one of many companies attempting to deploy 3D-printing in solving the affordable housing crisis and fighting homelessness. Yet these companies confront a persistent and pernicious obstacle in zoning laws. In Austin, Texas, housing industry expert Eldon Rude noted the challenge ICON faces in obtaining the necessary zoning and entitlements to build these [3D-printed] homes. S-Squared 3D Printers in Patchogue, New York, werent even able to test-print an entire home due to zoning and building requirements in the village. While American policymakers and zoning administrators quibble about whether or not 3D-printed 650 square foot homes should be allowed in their communities, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is planning a 3D-printed skyscraper. Countries like the UAE will happily take the lead in developing this technology if America does not.

To be clear, regulation of some kind is obviously necessary, but it must be reduced and simplified. For example, scholars at libertarian think tank the Mercatus Center argue that a key to economic revival in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is a citywide policy of permissionless innovation, or a regulatory openness to novel business models and technologies. Communities both large and small should reassess their zoning rules, land-use regulations, and permitting requirements with the aim of encouraging innovative construction methods and housing ventures rather barring them.

3D printing has the potential to increase the number of affordable houses in America, and quickly, too. Permitting businesses to experiment with new, affordable construction methods and housing ventures will result in more affordable homes and more housed Americans. This is not the kind of grand plan we are prone to seek in politics, but it is a strong step toward increasing Americans access to affordable housing. If Americans are serious about curbing the affordable housing crisis, they should lobby their local governments to simplify and revise their zoning laws to allow for 3D-printing in construction. The millions of Americans looking for affordable, dignified homes cannot wait any longer.

Jacob Bruggeman is a Young Voices contributor and a Joanna Jackson Goldman Scholar at Miami University, where he studies history and political science. He is also the Associate Editor of the Cleveland Review of Books and Editor-in-Chief of The New Herald.Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale

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Search Real EstateReality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source!Christina El Moussa is going to be a mother of three.

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The 35-year-old "Flip or Flop" star announced in an Instagram post Friday she's expecting a baby with her husband, British television host Ant Anstead.

El Moussa shared a photo of herself embracing Anstead and holding up a sonogram.

El Moussa is parent to daughter Taylor and son Brayden with ex-husband Tarek El Moussa, while Anstead is dad to daughter Amelie and son Archie.

"@ant_anstead and I are so excited to announce #babyanstead coming this September!! The kids are all so excited to meet their new sibling #5 #Gonnaneedabiggercar," El Moussa captioned the post.

Anstead, the host of "For the Love of Cars" and "Wheeler Dealers," also shared the news on his own account.

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"And then...... there were FIVE!!! (Well .... four and a half! Will be Five in September)!!" the star wrote.

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Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source!

El Moussa and Anstead married at their home in Newport Beach, Calif., in December. The couple said in an interview with People in January they purposely kept their engagement and nuptials quiet.

"We had an engagement, we just didn't tell anyone," Anstead shared.

"It's different for us now. We didn't want all the fuss. Just a quiet wedding without all the drama and paparazzi," El Moussa explained.

El Moussa split from Tarek, her "Flip or Flop" co-star, in December 2016.

The pair continue to star on the HGTV series but have both landed their own shows since their divorce.,



We're sorry, this article is not currently availablePeter Munson stepped foot in Athens on March 22, 251 miles and 17 days into his walk across the country, with the goal to raise money for charities aimed at helping children both in the U.S. and around the world.In recent months, conversations about the removal of confederate monuments and the push to create more high-paying jobs for the black community have come to the forefront of conversation among black activists.'People who have unaccounted money often park it in unregulated deposit schemes.'

'Curbing illegal deposit-raising activity will also carry forward the government's drive against black money.'

Sanjay Kumar Singh reports.

In the past, scams like Rose Valley and Saradha deprived thousands of investors of their hard-earned money.

To curb the menace of illegal deposit raising, the government introduced the Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes Bill in Parliament in July 2018.

The Bill was subsequently referred to the Standing Committee on Finance.

Recently, it was passed by the Lok Sabha, but could not be passed in the Rajya Sabha.

On the Cabinet's request, the President has promulgated the Bill as an ordinance.

Unregulated entities can't raise deposits:

At present, nine regulators monitor various deposit-taking schemes in India.

The Reserve Bank of India, for instance, regulates non-banking financial companies, the Securities and Exchange Board of India oversees mutual funds, state and Union territory governments regulate chit funds, and so on.

According to this ordinance, all deposit-taking schemes will have to be registered with the relevant regulator.

Any deposit-raising scheme, which is not registered with one of the regulators listed therein, will be deemed as unregulated.

"The crux of this ordinance is that no unregulated entity will be allowed to collect deposits," says Shruti Rajan, partner, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas.

This new law provides for the appointment of a Competent Authority.

If the police receives information about illegal deposit-raising activity, it will report it to the Competent Authority.

The latter will have the power to provisionally attach the property of the deposit taker, and also the deposits received.

Furthermore, this ordinance provides for the setting up of Designated Courts.

After provisionally attaching the deposit taker's assets, the Competent Authority will go to the Designated Court to make the provisional attachment absolute, and to obtain its permission to sell the assets.

The Competent Authority will also return money to depositors under the instructions of the Designated Court.

All these activities will be carried out in a time-bound manner.

Power to act immediately:

Earlier, the concerned authorities had to initiate enquiries, carry out investigations, and go through an elaborate process.

All this allowed time to illegal deposit collectors to siphon away the money they had raised.

Now, the Competent Authority will be able to act against illegal deposit takers the moment it receives information.

It will be able to ask for reasons, get statements of account, and then proceed to pass attachment orders so that no further funds are raised.

Experts believe this ordinance will be instrumental in curbing black money.

"People who have unaccounted money often park it in unregulated deposit schemes. Curbing illegal deposit-raising activity will also carry forward the government's drive against black money," says Abhishek A Rastogi, partner, Khaitan & Co.

The new law also requires the central government to designate an authority that will create an online central database of entities permitted to collect deposits.

"This will make it easier for depositors to check whether the scheme they intend to invest in is a registered one," says Mumbai-based financial planner Arnav Pandya.

"At present, the process of verifying is difficult as only knowledgeable people know where to look for this information."Muslims need to get out of their Isolation Syndrome, argues Mohammad Sajjad.

Kindly note that the image has been published only ]for representational purposes. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters

I was recently in Patna for the launch of a book, Remembering Muslim Makers of Modern Bihar.

It tells the stories of dozens of Muslim leaders from Bihar who participated in the freedom struggle, and also played a role in various capacities after Independence, with some of them working towards modern education.

The hall was unusually packed to its capacity. Around 300 copies of the book were sold on the day, which is again quite unusually high.

Quite a lot of incumbent and former Muslim legislators had turned up among the audience, besides the educated middle classes, retired bureaucrats, judges and other professionals from the city and its vicinity.

A large number of them was Muslim, though it was not a Muslim-exclusive gathering.

The obvious question, why were only Muslim-makers being remembered and not others, was, of course, discussed. The answer to this was: Only Muslims are threatened to be thrown out of their homeland; Muslims cannot do a Bharat Bandh in protest against being lynched.

This is quite unlike the Dalits who suffer greater persecution. This is also unlike the tribes who are forcefully dispossessed of their traditional rights on lands and forests with the State handing over all these resources to big corporates with bigger capital.

Yes, the magnitude and intensity of the persecution suffered by the tribes and Dalits are much more. Yet, unlike Muslims, they are not suspected on the issue of patriotism. Their legislative and bureaucratic presence is also ensured through reservations.

The panellists also touched upon the points of Muslim conservatism and communalism which have contributed to the rise of majoritarianism, and lashed out at the Ulema who mislead the community to perpetuate misogyny and refuse to address the issues of caste-based oppression. Rather, they keep the community mired in the morass of sub-sectarian (maslaki) rivalries.

This is quite unlike Maulana Sajjad (1880-1940) of the Imarat-e-Shariah, Patna, who spoke of confining religious processions within private spheres as a solution to 'religious strife'.

His political outfit, the Muslim Independent Party, was fiercely anti-colonial; it talked of agrarian reforms and universal education. It formed a ministry in Bihar (April-July 1937) led by Mohammed Yunus (1884-1952) and actually worked towards these goals. It also chastised the Muslim League's politics of communal-territorial separatism.

Another leader of the Imarat-e-Shariah, Usman Ghani (1896-1977), joined the Socialist movement in the 1970s and worked towards secularising the political outlook of Muslims.

The panellists subjected the political leadership of Muslims to criticism for helping their respective political parties to gain and retain power, rather than to negotiate for the concrete empowerment of Muslim communities.

The two shades of Muslim leaderships have hitherto been asking only for religio-cultural and emotive issues, such as the Muslim Personal Law, in the name of which they mobilise thousands and lakhs on the streets. Just as they did on April 15, 2018, in Patna!

But a mobilisation of similar scale is just unthinkable on any concrete, substantive issues of bread, butter, education, healthcare, employment and security of lives and properties.

Before the demolition of the Babri Masjid (December 6, 1992), such discussions were almost impossible in a Muslim gathering. In this respect, at least, things seem to have certainly changed for the better now, though only to an extent.

Afterwards came the phase of near-deification of the likes of Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mayawati. Not many Muslims of UP and Bihar were prepared to concede the deficit of such forces in governance and development.

Both the Congress and such forces, in their governance practices and populism, reduced and brutalised the meanings of secularism.

Undue and outrageous favours to Muslim misogynists, conservatives and reactionaries came to be paraded as secularism, thereby discrediting the very idea of Indian secularism.

Some such mullahs, in alliance with some modern educated, clean-shaven, suit-clad conservatives and communal reactionaries, were elevated to become legislators. That all these have contributed to the rise of today's majoritarianism is being realised by the common Muslims only now.

The good thing about these sordid developments is that now a Muslim gathering is extremely receptive about an informed criticism of the Muslim leadership so far, most of who have been foisted from above rather than coming from grass-root struggles.

In the face of majoritarianism, anti-Muslim persecution, State failure in preventing and controlling communal violence, and failure in penalising the culprits of such violence, in the past they would look up either to the Socialist and Left forces, or to the well-meaning leaders within the Congress, as their electoral alternative.

Just as in Garam Hawa (1974), the story of a Muslim businessman's family and his struggles for their rights in the post-Partition era, where the protagonist (played by Balraj Sahni), having undergone all kinds of persecution, trials and tribulations, eventually jumps into a public procession carrying a red flag.

Post-2014, things have changed quite rapidly and dramatically. Earlier, the parties in power were apologetic about their (wilful or not?) failures. Now, they are seen as extending all kinds of support to the cow militia who lynch and videograph it for larger circulation.

Despite such evidence, the perpetrators will neither be charged with the archaic law of sedition, nor with the National Security Act. Far from it, they are felicitated by ministers.

As against it, others would be booked under these harsher penal codes on false, baseless and flimsiest of grounds.

The panellists in Patna also talked of how the 'secular' regional parties have used Muslims as their 'coolie'.

In the initial decades, the Muslim votes placed the upper caste elite of the Congress in power. Later, the regional forces of the Left and Socialists (Lohia-JP), particularly since the 1990s, enjoyed the fruits of power.

Post-Mandal, when the upper castes became much more insecure in terms of perpetuating their dominance and hegemony, they have now switched over to the BJP, which may or may not bring back their old hegemony as the post-Mandal reality of the backwards's rise to power are irreversible.

However, the BJP makes them feel a certain sense of security in cultural terms.

This politics of providing a symbolism or semblance of cultural security to the conservative-reactionary Hindus makes the BJP resort to historical revenge by attempting to: a. Liquidate Indo-Islamic heritage like re-naming the cities identified with medieval rulers bearing Muslim names; b. Issue an ordinance to criminalise instant triple talaq; and c. Make cow-related announcements, etc.

The panellists were trying to make the Muslim audiences realise how they have been rendered electorally irrelevant and politically untouchable post-2014. So much so that even the RJD's Tejaswi Yadav took more than three weeks to even tweet about Zainul Haque Ansari who was lynched in Sitamarhi on October 19-20, 2018.

And to think that in the RJD's famous M-Y formula, the Muslims comprises almost 17% whereas the Yadavas comprise 12%.

The Muslim communities need to be made aware of the fact that aspiring to have proportionate representation inside the legislature is quite legitimate and desirable, but simultaneously they should also realise that mere religious/caste identity of the legislature may not ensure everything.

Take the Uttar Pradesh assembly, 2012 to 2017. As many as 70-odd, out of a total strength of 403, were Muslims. They, however, remained mute on the wilful communalisation of western UP leading to the communal violence of Muzaffarnagar-Shamli in 2013.

Firebrand Muslim politician Azam Khan, despite being the minister in-charge of Muzaffarnagar affairs, aligned with, or remained silent on, this. They also remained as good as absent on the issue of rehabilitating the displaced victims. They were of no help in the delivery of criminal justice.

Muslims need to ask and enquire about the legislative performances of the legislators.

Even in the present era of extreme under-representation of Muslims, Azam Khan, his son, and his wife, are all legislators. The rise of majoritarianism could not affect their prospects as adversely as to other members of the community.

Common Muslims therefore need to know that many of those sent to the Rajya Sabha, in the name of their identity -- Muslims -- have been of hardly any use to the community and nation in the legislative arena. Such firebrand exclusionists among the Muslim politicians need to be exposed and isolated.

The Patna audience, on the day, was largely in agreement of the diagnosis. We, the panellists thought we made our points well.

But that was not to be.

I was particularly struck by the queries of some attendees after the event concluded and we were leaving the venue.

The question was: What is the way out for Muslims now? This was why they had come to the event, they told us!

This issue is, of course, dealt with in the introductory essay of the volume which was released on the day. But the queries of the audiences left me thinking on the question.

We should not have missed out on that.

As common Muslims are now becoming receptive about their: a. Retrogressive, erring, deceptive and misleading leadership; b. Woeful mis-prioritisation of issues and demands from the State; c. Too much insistence on, and mobilisation for, religio-cultural issues; d. Misogyny and, e. Denial about practising caste-based oppression, it is high time to convert the situation of crisis into an opportunity -- an opportunity to bring the community on the path of progressive, rational, pluralist and inclusive outlook.

We need to convince them that the way out, as narrated in the introductory chapter of the book, is as follows:

To join civil society initiatives towards, awareness about, and implementation of, existing government schemes of welfare and empowerment. Muslim communities, as citizens, need to join the movements of social audit, gender justice, environment, right to education, health, and civic amenities, rather than confining their agitations and mobilisation merely to emotive, identitarian, exclusionary and divisive issues.

In short, they need to get out of the Isolation Syndrome.

They also need to launch a movement to streamline and democratise the management of Waqf assets, with utmost transparency and accountability, which could provide a promising resource and financial base towards actualising such goals.

Another challenge before the Muslim leadership is to launch a movement for modern education, skill development, sub-regional (locality and town specific), and sector-specific economic planning to inculcate entrepreneurship among the artisan/occupational castes.

These communities should be extended financial and other help in advancing their manufacturing and trades.

Muslims of southern and western India have done so in some pockets, with encouraging outcomes. They have formed educational trusts and quality educational institutions.

These measures would possibly help in strengthening the inclusive-pluralist, secular democracy of India.

These could be the ways of marginalising the majoritarian, divisive, forces.

We can at least try out such measures, if only to rescue the Republic.

Given the newfound and welcome receptivity of common Muslims now, a leadership in this direction is eagerly awaited.

Mohammad Sajjad is a Professor at Centre of Advanced Study in History, Aligarh Muslim University.'Going from 5% to 8%, 10, 15% of the votes is not going to translate into seats -- so what's the point of going it alone in UP?'

IMAGE: Priyanka Gandhi, Congress general secretary for Eastern Uttar Pradesh, undertook a three day boat yatra from Prayagraj to Varanasi this week to garner support for the Congress which only has 2 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in UP. The seats are held by her mother Sonia Gandhi and brother Rahul. Pawan Kumar/Reuters

Since his arrival in India in 2005, Gilles Verniers -- assistant professor of political science at Ashoka University and co-director of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data -- has been a keen observer, researcher and writer on Indian politics.

His research interests include state politics, especially Uttar Pradesh.

Two of his recent publications explore studies in Indian politics and the transformation of the Samajwadi Party.

"The Congress can either concentrate on its revival in UP or it adopts a strategy to defeat the BJP by not getting in the way of the other parties who stand a better chance of winning. The Congress is trying to do both, but it probably is going to get neither," Dr Verniers tells Rediff.com's Archana Masih in the first part of an interview on electoral politics in UP, which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha.

During her boat yatra, Priyanka Gandhi went to temples, met students, spoke to people on the riverbank -- what difference do you think she is making on the ground in UP?

First, we have to question the assumption that individual leaders can have a large mobilisation, especially parties that suffer from a deteriorated organisation.

Behind that image, leaders need to have an organisation that is at work.

The question is not the personal appeal of Priyanka Gandhi, but what is the organisational backbone behind her campaign.

In the case of the Congress that is really under question.

If she wants to boost the chances of the party in places where she is campaigning, she will have to revive the organisation on the ground for which her presence is necessary.

That poses another question: Whether you contest elections to build party capacity or should you build capacity first in order to be competitive in an election?

Here, the Congress has put the cart before the horse.

She has campaigned in past elections, but is playing an active role this time around. Will that boost the Congress's prospects?

In UP, she is already a familiar face. She was part of previous campaignsm maybe in a less prominent role.

She has been caretaker of the family's constituencies for a long time. Her face was on the billboards of the party's communication.

What has really changed is one announcement made in Delhi that sort of formalised that she is in politics, but in reality she already was.

She was involved in the campaign before and the party fared badly, so why should there necessarily be a strong effect now?

IMAGE: Priyanka interacts with a young girl during her campaign in Prayagraj. Photograph: PTI Photo

People draw comparisions to the resemblance between Indira Gandhi and Priyanka. Do you see any resemblance?

There is a resemblance, but what I am more interested to see if there is a resemblance in the style of politics.

Whether she will reproduce her grandmother's style of doing politics -- centralised and authoritarian.

Though I understand that there is a nostalgia about a centralised, authoritative, figure in the Congress party, but does India need an alternative authoritarian figure at the moment?

The Congress is playing on her image which is only a perceptional image, the reality is that we really don't know Ms Priyanka Gandhi very well.

People endow her with qualities she has not had the opportunity to actually display. A lot of the image built around her also stems from the fact that unlike her brother she remains shrouded in mystery.

She never had the front stage exposure and because she is shrouded in mystery people endow her with all sorts of qualities she has not yet had opportunity to demonstrate or prove.

Uma Bharti referred to her as Mrs Robert Vadra and the enforcement directorate has requested for Robert's custodial interrogation even though his bail has been extended till March 25.

Will her husband's image pull her campaign down, if not now, but in time to come?

There is no doubt that he remains a liability, even though he is formally not a member (of the Congress party). He embodies a lot of what is wrong with the Congress party.

At the same time, it is perfectly distasteful to subsume a woman politician to be an extension of her husband. It is fundamentally unfair and discourteous and actually sad when it comes from another woman politician.

The Congress base in UP is very low, its organisation is weak like you pointed out.

Is there more hype than substance in the way the party is projecting Priyanka in its campaign in the most politically important state?

They have nothing else to show for the party in that particular state. She will get them publicity and send out a positive message.

It gives her an opportunity to express positive ideas, but publicity may not necessarily translate into votes.

To be competitive in an election you need more than leadership and publicity space -- you need resources, organisation and people to make significant donations to parties.

You need cold calculations about who stands a better chance of winning.

It is very clear in UP, the Congress is going to be a very distant third.

The Congress party can either concentrate on its revival, organisation building -- basically try to raise its position a little bit in UP -- or it adopts a strategy to defeat the BJP by not getting in the way of the other parties or candidates who stand a better chance of winning.

The Congress is trying to do both, but it probably is going to get neither.

Going from 5% to 8%, 10, 15% of the votes in UP is not going to translate into seats -- so what's the point?

Even if Mrs Priyanka Gandhi has a boosting effect on the Congress, it won't help the Congress go beyond expected results.

She can have a mobilisation effect, but the question is to what end?

A combined BSP-SP-Congress alliance had the potential of reducing the BJP's seats by 50 -- what do you see as the reason for the Congress inability to strike alliances. The BJP is always beating them in this game.

Quite frankly, it is a mystery because it makes no tactical, strategic, sense to go alone in UP.

My sense is that the Congress is too concerned with maximising its gains at the cost of making concessions and leaving space for other parties to maximise chances of defeating the BJP.

Once again, it is going to undermine its other objective of defeating the BJP.

The good results they have scored in recent state elections has given them the illusion that they are on the path to revival.

They do not understand that to maximise gains, you have to accept concessions, make a few losses and basically share political space.

By going alone they basically are sabotaging their own campaign.

Akhilesh Yadav has said the Congress should learn to respect other parties.

It also is sending out the wrong signals if the Congress hopes to be the centre of a future coalition.

Why would anyone want to work with a party which refuses to even discuss pre-poll alliances seriously?'EVMs are absolutely credible, they are robust.'

'It's only a calculator with certain instructions. And the sim card inside an EVM is burnt and cannot be reprogrammed.'

'Besides, the machines are circulated among various states. No machine is allowed to remain in one state after an election.'

'By far, it is one of the finest innovations India should be proud of.'

IMAGE: Election Commission staff prepare the VVPAT machines and EVMs ahead of the Lok Sabha election in Ahmedabad, March 6, 2019. Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters

Taruvai Subayya Krishnamurthy served as Chief Election Commissioner of India from February 2004 to May 2005, and it was under him that the 2004 Lok Sabha election was held.

The EVMs were introduced for the first time in the 2004 general election.

"The first past post the system is a colonial legacy. It was all right at the time of Independence when a majority of the voters were uneducated and didn't know to exercise any complicated system of voting. Now that we have had elections for the last more than seven decades, we can go for some changes," the former CEC tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier .

Recently you said it was time we looked at the first past the post system we follow. Why do you feel so?

This system has been in use from the beginning of our Constitution with some changes introduced through the Supreme Court judgment.

In July 2004, when I was the Chief Election Commissioner, I wrote a letter to the then prime minister listing about 24 recommendations which could bring about some improvement in the quality of our democracy.

What were these recommendations?

The major one was that there should be a separate law for political parties.

For example, if a person stands in more than one constituency and resigns from one of them, s/he has to put up the expenditure for the by-election in that constituency.

Then, once a chargesheet is filed against a person in a criminal court, s/he should be barred from contesting elections.

I had also suggested NOTA, which fortunately came into existence.

Unfortunately, many of the changes which we had asked for did not get implemented.

What do you think needs to be changed urgently?

The most urgent change that is needed in the electoral system in the present situation is the first past the post system, which exists right now, should be changed.

In this first past the post system, people with even 20% to 25% votes get elected. As a result, you see many small parties thriving because of their dominance in a particular area. And, it doesn't contribute to the national outlook.

What is happening today is, even national parties seem to be having more local interest than national interests.

The first past post the system is a colonial legacy. It was all right at the time of Independence when a majority of the voters were uneducated and didn't know to exercise any complicated system of voting.

Now that we have had elections for the last more than seven decades, we can go for some changes.

What kind of change should we have instead of first past the post system?

There are plenty of changes, like proportional representation or a mixed system of partly proportional representation and partly the present system.

But the easiest for our country's need is that there has to a minimum of 33 and 1/3rd percent votes polled for a winner to be declared.

What if the person who got the maximum number of votes does not poll this 33 and 1/3rd per cent votes?

We have to go for a repoll.

Today, they are putting up candidates who has the winnability of 20% to 25%. But once you insist on 33 and 1/3rd%, they will have candidates accordingly. If not, there will be a repoll.

The present system has not worked to have a national outlook among political parties.

After 5 or 10 years, we should hike the minimum votes needed to 50%. This can be done gradually.

There are many countries in the world that has a minimum of 50% for declaring a winner.

You spoke of a separate law for political parties. What does it mean?

There is a separate law for political parties in many countries. Unfortunately, in India, we don't have one.

For example, like when a political party is formed, under what conditions it should be formed, how the parties should keep their accounts or when there is a dispute, what are the principles to be followed. Now, we are carrying on on the basis of some rulings of the Supreme Court.

Also, what should be mentioned in the manifesto. The Supreme Court has given a judgment that broad guidelines can be given by the Election Commission.

In my opinion, the manifesto should only speak of public goods and not freebies or private goods or sectional goods for the people.

You can talk of building dams or roads, but not about giving laptops or grinders. You are actually bribing them by giving such freebies.

In fact, the Supreme Court took it up, but left the decision to the Election Commission. On the other hand, the court had specified what all things can be mentioned in the manifesto and what should not be.

What can be done so that there is transparency in political funding?

Yes, the third most important thing is political funding which also should come as part of the law.

At the moment donations can be given and they have introduced electoral bonds which they claim as more transparent. But these bonds are not transparent at all; it is more opaque.

Only the donor and the donee know who gives the donation, and not the public. What is more important is the public should know.

It also encourages an obnoxious nexus between the political parties and the corporates.

If you really want to clean up the system, you have to have a national election fund. Whoever wants to give donations, should give to the fund.

You can give 100% tax exemption to the donation so that you can build a corpus. Anybody can give any amount.

In the US, every candidate collects funds for their campaign...

But that is done transparently. They collect funds by holding meetings and they give an account of how much was collected. There is no such thing in India.

Here, anonymous donations are given.

The law says anybody can anonymously donate up to Rs 2,000 which was Rs 20,000 earlier. They seem to think that is an improvement, but what happens is, they split donations to Rs 2,000 and below as anonymous donations.

Can't the Election Commission do anything about it?

The EC has the authority to question. All that it can do is to pass it on to income tax authorities.

When the law says a party can collect anonymous donation of Rs 2,000, the IT department also cannot call it illegal.

We need to have a law that can snap the nexus between the corporates and the political parties.

The end result today is, the policies of the government are influenced by the donors directly and indirectly.

So, the best thing is to have a national election fund. The Tatas started a corpus fund like this, but it didn't work very well.

Is not a national fund more of a utopian idea?

I don't think so. Now, we provide the facilities from the government, like sharing the telephone, television, voters list, etc. So, there shouldn't be any difficulty in sharing the funds.

In my opinion, if you really want to improve the quality of elections and democracy in this country, you have to have a national election fund.

Funds should not be given directly to the parties.

In 1997, when there was a Constitutional crisis because of a weak coalition government at the Centre, I had interviewed former President R Venkataraman.

He said we had to have an electoral system which should eliminate the party that polled the least in the elections, and we should go on eliminating parties till we had a two-party system at the national level.

What is your opinion on this?

It is a sign of a mature democracy when the parliamentary elections have two parties and the state elections have more parties. But how do you achieve this? It is not easy.

I have also mentioned in my book that there can be a pre-poll alliance with a single poll symbol which should remain so till the tenure of Parliament is over.

No party in the alliance should be allowed to cross over till the term is over. They can resign, but not cross over.

Maybe you can have such two alliances and no party can contest elections unless they are part of the national alliances which they have to continue in till the term is over.

This, I feel is a good idea but I am not sure whether we can achieve it now.

What R Venkataraman said was that it may take several elections of eliminating small parties to achieve the two-party system

It requires a lot of political maturity among the political parties. Unfortunately, what I see is, the standards are deteriorating and not improving.

Has any party mentioned electoral reforms in its manifesto? None.

If they are a little more accountable and mature with larger national interests, they should think of electoral reforms too. But none of them are talking about it.

Do you think they are scared of transparency resulting from electoral reforms?

I will not say they are scared. Obviously, they have reservations about short-term effects. They may boomerang against them initially, but in the long term, it will be in the interests of good democracy.

But nobody wants to think of the long-term benefits.

Are EVMs not a major reform that has happened to a country with so many people? But instead we see political parties finding fault with the EVMs when they lose the elections.

Although I introduced it for the first time in the 2004 parliamentary elections, I would say it was an excellent reform we had brought about. Earlier, in some by-elections, we had used it, but it was in the 2004 parliamentary elections that it was used in a big way.

It was a matter of national pride that Indian engineers made it. It is not a very expensive instrument either.

In my opinion, EVMs are absolutely credible. They are robust. It is only a calculator with certain instructions. And the sim card inside an EVM is burnt and cannot be reprogrammed.

Besides, the machines are circulated among various states. No machine is allowed to remain in one state after an election.

The names in the machine are arranged in alphabetical order of the name of the candidate and not according to any party.

There is no possibility of any EVM being misused. Machines don't lie.

Most importantly, it saves 200,000 to 300,000 rolls of paper. Also, there is no invalid vote in an EVM.

Before we introduced the machine, there were plenty of bogus votes polled in each election.

By far, it is one of the finest innovations India should be proud of.

This time, we are going to have a 7-phase election that extends for a month. Why do we have such a long election process?

Is it because we have almost 900 million registered voters in the country, which is more than the population of Europe or Africa?

Yes, the main reason is we have a huge voting population.

The second reason is, every state has its own peculiarities.

Yes, it is preferable to have a one day or two-phase election. As of now, it is not possible.

If you take states like Maharashtra or Andhra or Chhattisgarh, there are places you cannot even reach by road.

We reach some polling stations by camels, elephants, helicopters and sometimes, the polling agents walk for two days to reach a polling station.

In the Himalayas, we have polling stations for even one person.

So, it is a very challenging exercise to conduct elections in India.

Is it the huge number of people the most challenging aspect of Indian elections?

Yes. In addition to that, violence, hatred, money power and muscle power complicate the elections.

In Bihar, we used to get complaints that Dalits who had to cross through the non-Dalit areas to vote, were not allowed to vote.

And, most of the states do not believe in their own state police as they are all biased.

Even a ruling party of a state had asked us to bring in central paramilitary forces.

Unfortunately, none of the states has had any reforms in the police force.

In one state, the superintendent of police addressed a rally of the chief minister.

In another state, the wife of the DGP contested the election on the ruling party's ticket.

The kind of violence associated with elections has come down a lot in the recent times. So also booth capturing.

Is it because the Indian electorate is maturing or is it because the Election Commission is more vigilant?

It must be both. We have to give credit to the voters and also the arrangements made by the Election Commission so that violence is not allowed.

Yes, militancy in Kashmir has disrupted elections. I have found that it is easier to conduct elections in Kashmir than in Maoist affected areas.

Voters are happy that they have NOTA as a weapon to use against politicians. If NOTA gets more votes than the winner, what will happen?

As of now, the law does not allow NOTA votes to be counted beyond the winner's votes. So it has no value from the point of view of declaring a winner.

Let us assume the difference between the winner and the loser is about 5,000 votes and NOTA got 5,005 votes, we should recognise the NOTA votes and have a re-poll.

Political parties get the message then that voters don't like their candidates.

When the number of NOTA votes increases, some countries have the legislative authority to have a repoll and the same candidates should not contest the elections. In India, we have not started following this.

Before T N Seshan took charge as the CEC, people did not even know the power the Election Commission had. Do you feel if the Election Commission was able to do so many reforms, it is because of Seshan?

I always say, if you were to write the history of the Election Commission, it will be divided into pre-Seshan and post-Seshan.

Seshan did bring about a lot of changes and made people know that Election Commission was an independent Constitutional authority. The credit goes to him.

India is the largest democracy in the world. But how mature is our democracy compared to other countries?

I wish I could answer this question easily. In my book, I have mentioned that there should be an international standard for determining the quality of democracy with index for minimum democracy and maximum democracy.

We have some very many good features, but we cannot claim ourselves to be a mature or responsible democracy. We have a lot of improvements to make.

Is lack of education the reason for lack of maturity?

Maybe to some extent. I will not say it is entirely due to lack of education. It is also because of lack of character among our leaders.

If you can have more leaders like Manohar Parrikar, we can be a lot better. He never made a fuss about anything. I have seen him standing in queues without anyone noticing him. Do you think we will have politicians like him? I am not sure about it.

Vivekananda said if India can have 100 good youths, they can change the country.

If we can have 100 politicians like Manohar Parrikar, the country will change.

Maybe we are evolving, but we are taking too much time in evolving. So, future generations are going to pay a price.

If we want our democracy to be safe, reforms should be expedited.

If one political party can say it will take electoral reforms as one of the things to do in the first 100 days of the government, I will appreciate the gesture.

Former CEC T S Krishnamurthy's photograph: Sreeram Selvaraj for Rediff.comAfter the dissolution of the Janata Party government in 1977, the erstwhile Bharatiya Jana Sangh re-emerged as the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1980 under the moderate leadership of A B Vajpayee.

However, it fared badly in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections that followed, winning just two seats, with the Congress party bagging a stupendous 402 seats in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination.

Lal Krishna Advani took centrestage in the party after this, becoming its president in 1986.Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Sajjad Khan, a close aide of Pulwama attack mastermind Mudasir Khan was arrested by the police New Delhi, officials said on Friday.

They said Sajjad Ahmed Khan, 27, a resident of Pulwama is also suspected to be involved in the conspiracy of Pulwama attacks.

Sajjad, who was arrested near the Lajpat Rai market late on Thursday night is believed to have been in regular touch with the terror strike mastermind before and after the attack, police said.

On Mudasir's instructions, Sajjad had moved to Delhi and lived here under the guise of a shawl vendor to establish a sleeper cell of JeM.

Mudasir was killed in an exchange of fire with security forces in Jammu and Kashmir recently.

On the day of Pulwama attack, Mudasir contacted Sajjad on whatsapp and informed him about the attack on Central Reserve Police Force convoy.

Mudasir sent him Sajjad a video of Adil Dar -- the fidayeen who carried out the attack and later deleted it from his phone, Pramod Singh Kushwah, Deputy Commisisoner of Police (Special Cell) said.

"He was tasked by Mudasir to establish a sleeper cell here. He was specially sent here to carry out reconnaissance of important targets and to set up a hideout in Delhi," Kushwah said.

He was also tasked with radicalising and recruiting Muslim youth from Uttar Pradesh and other states, provide them weapons training, explosives and field craft, raising funds and collecting weapons, Kushwah added.

Mudasir instructed Sajjad to spot young Kashmiri youths for fidayeen attacks. Sajjad then motivated and recruited Bilal, a resident of Gadpora in Jammu and Kashmir and Tanveer, a resident of Midura in Tral, he said.

The National Investigation Agency had recently registered a case in which Sajjad along with Mudasir Khan was named as accused.

Sajjad's two brothers were slain JeM terrorists, Kushwah said.

The three brothers were initially engaged in stone pelting. In February 2015, Sajjad's brother Ishfaq was arrested under Public Safety Act (PSA) for stone pelting and remained in Srinagar jail for about nine months, he said.

In Srinagar jail, Ishfaq came in contact with JeM terrorist Noor Mohammad Tantarey.

In 2017, Tantarey died in an exchange of fire with security forces in Jammu and Kashmir, the officer said.

After his release from the jail, Ishfaq initially worked as an over ground worker for JeM and later turned into an active JeM terrorist.

He remained active for about 18 months but died in an exchange of fire with security forces on April 25, 2018 in Lam in Tral, Pulwama along with two Pakistan terrorists, the officer said.

After his death, Mudasir Khan used to frequently visit his residence in Pulwama and motivated Showkat and Sajjad Ahmad Khan to join the JeM.

By the end of June 2018, Showkat also joined the JeM, he added.

"Showkat also subsequently died in an exchange of fire with the security forces in September 2018 in Chan in Tral, Pulwama along with Usman Haider, the nephew of Maulana Masood Azhar and son of terrorist Ibrahim Azhar - younger brother of terrorist Masood Azhar and mastermind of IC-814 hijacking to Kandahar", the DCP said.

After the death of Showkat, Mudassir started visiting the residence of Sajjad more frequently and motivated Sajjad to work as JeM Cadre.

Sajjad initially provided information about movement of convoys and cordon and search operations carried by Army, the officer added.Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and current PM Benjamin Netanyahu believe that blockchain is a potentially a game-changing technology. They expect it to disrupt big sectors of the economy  healthcare, banking, insurance, and cybersecurity among them.

Under their leadership, several government departments and agencies in Israel have taken steps to invest in blockchain technology where applicable, by funding blockchain startups. They have also been forging ties in emerging blockchain economies such as China, Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, and the Marshall Island.

Among the government agencies involved in Israels promotion and oversight of cryptocurrencies are:

Central bank of Israel

Israel Tax Authority

Ministry of Finance

Israel Securities Authority

Capital Market Authority

These agencies are coordinating regulation of cryptocurrencies, in part by monitoring developments in Israel and abroad. The primary goal is to find a path whereby blockchain contributes to the countrys financial markets and their stability, and make policy and regulatory recommendations about adapting Israels government infrastructure to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

The Israeli Supreme Court last year helped clear the way forward. In a case of first impression, it ruled that most banks cannot limit or restrict the accounts of companies associated with the cryptocurrency/blockchain industry. The Israeli Supreme Court also rejected the appeal of a law banning binary options.

The Israel Securities Authority (ISA) published its final report on cryptocurrency regulations on March 7, designed both to develop the crypto sector and protect the rights of investors. The new regulations impose disclosure requirements for crypto offerings that qualify as securities and call for the establishment of regulatory sandbox and the creation of a special platform to trade cryptocurrencies under enhanced regulation.

The ISA also implemented a blockchain based messaging system between itself and the other departments under its umbrella to address cybersecurity concerns.

Still, there are risks to Israels strategy. Warren Buffett has famously warned that the sole way most Bitcoin users will realize value from their holdings is by attracting charlatans through new entrants into the market.

Perhaps proving Buffetts point, last May Israeli prosecutors in the cybercrime division of the state attorneys office in Hebron filed the countrys first indictment against a cryptocurrency money launderer who laundered $8.7 million in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and DogeCoins over the course of ten years.

The indictment included a confession by the space-age cryptocurrency money launderer, who admitted: We are thieves. Anywhere we can take money, we will, no matter where from  Israel, the United States, even the moon.

____

Selva Ozelli, Esq., CPA is an international tax attorney and CPA who frequently writes about tax, legal and accounting issues for Tax Notes, Bloomberg BNA, other publications and the OECD.The RJD will give one seat to the CPI-ML from its quota and former JD-U president Sharad Yadav will contest on RJD symbol.

M I Khan reports from Patna.

Ending days of speculation, the opposition Grand Alliance in Bihar on Friday announced its seat-sharing formula for the Lok Sabha elections.

According to this formula, the Rashtriya Janata Dal will contest 20 seats, the Congress nine seats, the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party five seats, former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha three seats and Vikasheel Insaan Party will contest three seats.

The RJD will give one seat to the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist from its own quota, while former Janata Dal-United president Sharad Yadav will contest on the RJD symbol.

The 'mahagathbandhan' will not support the former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who is a Communist Party of India candidate from Begusarai.

However, the Grand Alliance announced candidates for only four of the 40 Lok Sabha seats which are going to polls in the first of the seven phases. The rest of the 36 candidates will be announced later.

The announcement was made during a joint press conference at Patna's Maurya Hotel.

The CPI was keen to join the Grand Alliance on the condition that it should be given at least one seat, Begusarai, from where Kanhaiya Kumar is its candidate.

But with the RJD refusing to play ball, the CPI will now contest alone.

The CPI has already announced that with or without the Grand Alliance, Kanhaiya will contest from Begusarai.

RJD state president Ramchandra Purbe announced candidates for four Lok Sabha seats going to polls in the first phase.

Two of the four seats -- Gaya and Aurangabad -- will be contested by HAM, while the Nawada seat will be contested by the RJD and Jamui seat will be contested by the RLSP.

Purbe said Manjhi will be the Grand Alliance candidate from Gaya, a reserved parliamentary constituency.

The RJD will field Vibha Devi from Nawada, the HAM will field Upendra Prasad from Aurangabad and the RLSP will field Bhudeo Choudhary from Jamui.

Purbe said the RJD will give one seat to the CPI-ML from its quota of 20 seats.

The Grand Alliance has not given any seat to other left parties.

In the last Lok Sabha polls, Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance won 31 seats. The BJP alone won 22 seats, the Lok Janshakti Party six seats and the RLSP three seats.

This time, the RLSP is not a part of the NDA.

In 2014, the JD-U was not part of the NDA and contested alone, winning only two seats.

The RJD then won four seats and the Congress two. Nationalist Congress Party's Tariq Anwar, who won one seat, has since left the party to join the Congress.IMAGE: Security personnel outside High Commission of Pakistan in New Delhi. Photograph: Arun Sharma/PTI Photo

Pakistan and India need to consolidate the process of de-escalation and stabilise the ties against further shocks, Pakistani envoy Sohail Mahmood said on Friday, hoping that the 'long winter' in bilateral relations would come to an early end.

In an address at a reception in New Delhi on the eve of Pakistan's National Day, he said both the countries should act with 'wisdom' to normalise ties, asserting that 'coercive measures' have not worked in the past and will not work in the future.

The envoy said a key takeaway from recent developments was that a lack of engagement creates 'dangerous vacuum and serious risks' for relations between the two neighbours, adding Pakistan has 'turned a corner' in its fight against the scourge of terrorism.

Mahmood said diplomacy and dialogue remained indispensable for enhancing mutual understanding, mutual concerns, and resolving long-standing disputes, including Jammu and Kashmir.

"As we limp back from the brink, we must make sure that we act with wisdom to find a way forward -- for our countries, and for our peoples," he said.

He said the release of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, return of the two High Commissioners to their respective missions, and bilateral meetings on the Kartarpur Corridor 'are steps in a positive direction'.

"There is, however, still the need to reassure concerned citizens in both countries, to consolidate the process of de-escalation, and to stabilise the ties against further shocks," he added.

The Pakistan envoy said his government is taking steps against terror groups, adding, "There is a real transformation underway in Pakistan."

"We do hope the long winter in India-Pakistan relations would come to an early end," he said.

"The founding fathers of Pakistan and India had envisaged amicable relations between the two countries.

"However, the relationship has remained challenged, for most part of our history as free nations. In particular, the two countries passed through a very difficult time recently," he said.

A relationship based on sovereign equality, mutual respect and mutual interest is the best guarantee for a peaceful and prosperous future, the envoy said.

People of goodwill must continue to work for a new spring in the relationship -- one that enables the two countries' teeming youth to fulfil their aspirations, and the two nations to achieve their optimal potential, Mahmood said.

"South Asia, our common home, must march forward with stable peace, equal security and shared prosperity. We must remember that, ultimately, hope always triumphs over fear," he said.

Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after Indian Air Force fighter jets bombed terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed's training camp near Balakot deep inside Pakistan on February 26.

Pakistan retaliated by attempting to target Indian military installations the next day. However, the Indian Air Force thwarted their plans.

India boycotts Pak National Day event over invitation to Hurriyat leaders

Meanwhile, India boycotted the reception at the Pakistan High Commission, objecting to invites extended to several separatist leaders from Jammu and Kashmir for the event.

The External Affairs Ministry said no Indian representative will attend similar events in Islamabad as well.

Over the years, India's representation at the annual event has been at the level of a Union minister.

"India has decided not to send any representative to attend the Pakistan National Day celebrations today.

"This decision was taken after the Pakistan High Commission decided to invite representatives of the Hurriyat Conference to the reception," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar earlier said.

Pakistani officials said no prominent Hurriyat Conference leader attended the reception.

Meanwhile, Delhi Police detained Kashmiri human rights activist Mohammed Ahsan Untoo outside the Pakistan High Commission when he was coming for the reception.

Pakistan Day is celebrated to mark the Lahore Resolution on March 23 each year.

At a media briefing, Kumar also said that India is very clear that any attempt by the Pakistani High Commission or Pakistani leadership to engage with the Hurriyat Conference will not be taken lightly.

India has been strongly opposed to Pakistan engaging with separatists leaders of Jammu and Kashmir.

"Our High Commission in Islamabad will also not be attending the reception there," Kumar said, replying to a question.

Sources said last week India conveyed to the Pakistan High Commission that it will not send any representative to the reception if Hurriyat leaders are invited to it.

They said India is boycotting the events for extending invitation to Hurriyat leaders and not because of any other issue.

Last year, the reception at the Pakistan embassy was attended by Union Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Gajendra Singh Shekhawat.

Some low-ranking leaders from a number of separatist outfits from Kashmir also attended the reception.A throwback picture of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal celebrating Holi when he was a student at IIT Kharagpur is going viral on Twitter.

IMAGE: The image was shared by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's IIT-Kharagpur batchmate Rajeev Saraf. Photograph: @saraf007/Twitter

The image, circa 1986, was shared by his batchmate Rajeev Saraf, who is now an entrepreneur.

The photograph, a vintage, slightly sepia-toned one, shows a bunch of boys playing Holi. All the boys have colour in their hair and are seen dancing on a street even as one of them uses an empty bucket to thrash out a drum beat.

The mystery as to which one of the boys in the photograph is the Delhi CM was solved only after a journalist asked the Delhi chief minister to identify himself in the photograph.

Kejriwal responded with a simple The one in front wid brown trousers...Darryl D'Monte mentored more journalists than any other editor of his generation.

Some of the biggest bylines owe their beginnings in our glorious profession to this wonderful human being.

Nikhil Lakshman salutes his mentor.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

"Do you know how to type?" Darryl D'Monte asked after he had quizzed me about my knowledge of the world.

Filled with the persistent-as-acne arrogance of one's early twenties, I declared, "As Auden said, 'Men like the sight of their own handwriting as much as they enjoy the smell of their own farts'."

In a look that I came to know so well and love, Darryl's mouth curled in a wry half smile, he blinked, as he asked again, "But can you type?"

Like his first cousin Dom Moraes, I said, I could type with two fingers, not wanting to bore him how my parents -- anxious about my future -- had goaded me to enroll in a shorthand/typewriting class, only for me to bail out two days later.

"I hope you know journalists are poorly paid," he mentioned at some later point in the conversation.

I nodded.

We had grown up in the late 1970s on stories about both Ram Nath Goenka's courage, standing up to Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, and his ahem... thrifty nature.

"Your salary will be 450 rupees," Darryl said.

I gulped, nodded, and agreed to begin work at the Indian Express the following Monday.

On the No 5 bus ride home, doubts assailed me. 450 bucks for 12 months?? That would be 40 odd bucks a month! Gosh! RNG was really tight fisted!

I consulted my dad who kept an eye on my finances till his death in October 2017. Though he was perturbed by my inability to locate full time employment, my father conceded that 40 rupees a month didn't merit my accepting the Express job.

I called Darryl the next day, mumbled some excuse involving parental ambition as my reason for turning down his offer.

Four months passed.

A friend from college -- now a well-known magazine editor and publisher -- met Darryl for a job at the Express.

The subject of remuneration surfaced at some point in the conversation.

450 rupees was mentioned.

"A year?" my friend asked.

"What?" Darryl exclaimed. "A month!!"

Oh, my friend muttered, adding that a friend had thought Rs 450 was for a year.

I was at the British Council library, then down the road from Express Towers, when my friend rushed in.

After first equating my intelligence with genitalia, he said Darryl wanted me to meet him.

"Journalists are supposed to check and recheck what they are told," Darryl admonished me, asking me to join the Express the next day.

When I heard about Darryl's shocking death last Sunday, as I mourned his passage into the ages, I wondered what my life and career would have been had he not been in it. But for his early faith in my ability, his unwavering kindness, his caring mentorship, I would likely not be where I am today.

No editor of that era would have made that call to summon me after my silly mistake. They would have sniggered at my erroneous assumption and written me off.

Darryl was different.

IMAGE: Darryl, centre, receives the Greenaccord International Media Award on behalf of Down to Earth magazine in Naples, November 9, 2013. Photograph: Kind courtesy Greenaccord Press Office

When I first met him, Darryl was just 35, a boy wonder who had made his mark editing the Sunday Review, The Times of India's magazine section, from where Mr Goenka plucked him to edit the Indian Express's Bombay edition.

He was remarkably unpretentious (unlike two of his editor contemporaries who I had encounterd earlier) despite being born to wealth (his family, we whispered, had once owned large swathes of the city's affluent suburb of Bandra) and despite his Cambridge education. He didn't want us to call him 'Mr D'Monte' or 'Sir'. It was always 'Darryl'.

Darryl believed in young people. He was an astute judge of journalistic talent. And he gave you every opportunity to bloom and make a mark, no matter how raw you were.

I was one of the many young people he hired in 1980, many of who are star bylines today. We were a gung-ho lot, fired by our passion for journalism, ever willing to work beyond our shifts, always ready to beat the pavements in search of a story.

At the newsdesk to which I was assigned, I edited reports assigned by the chief sub-editor who sat at the head of an Arthurian desk as the hard copy came off the tickers -- remember this was 1980/1981 and computers in newsrooms were still 8 to 10 years away.

Our edited stories were sent to the compositor who composed each report painstakingly on hot metal, then sent a print to the proof readers who scrutinised each report for grammatical or spelling mistakes. After the proof reader's okay, the hot metal report was ready to be put onto a page, the position of which was decided by the chief sub.

Usually, trainees -- for that was what we were -- ascended the pecking order in newsrooms at a glacial pace. In other newsrooms in the city, trainees would be at the distant margins of any daily news operation. Not at Darryl's Express.

We were expected to literally get our hands dirty. Within weeks of joining the newspaper, we were assigned the tough night shift where the next day's newspaper was planned and cast in iron so to speak. We began making pages for the 'dak' and 'mofussil' editions of the newspaper, dispatched to Poona and other towns in Maharashtra (it all seems so anachronistic now with each of those towns having their own editions).

My colleagues and I itched to do stories. And we bustled in and out of Darryl's spartan office several times a week, pitching our story ideas. Darryl was not one for hierarchy. Unlike other editors on the floor, he liked to interact with trainees, listening to their ideas, no matter how bizarre or idiotic they were.

I was checking the ticker one December afternoon when I discovered that John Lennon had been murdered. Arun Katiyar -- then a co-trainee, now a venerable voice in journalism -- and I rushed to Darryl's office to alert him.

He gave us carte blanche to plan the coverage (I was then just a month old at the Express), a decision that went badly with a chief sub who believed that any event Western in origin was his domain. Said gent made me weep after my work on Lennon's death appeared in print, but that humiliation was quickly erased by Darryl's wah-wahs for what Arun and I had pulled off.

Some four months after we were hired, mandarins in the Express management decided that Darryl's recruits needed to be assessed, checked if they were worthy of belonging to such a hallowed institution.

Darryl was not one to hire people on the basis of their academic credentials (some of us trainees had dropped out of college without a degree, other like me had barely made it past graduation). What mattered to him was our news instincts, our journalistic zeal, our nose for a story.

Arun Shourie and Saeed Naqvi, who then ran the northern and southern sultanates in RNG's empire, would interview each one of us if we passed an editing test, this after we had been editing stories for the newspaper and making pages for weeks, providing the deputy news editor and chief subs with our inputs for the front and inside pages.

Darryl called me to his office. "Don't try to be oversmart when Arun and Saeed speak to you," he advised me, adding, "and for god's sake, don't try that Auden line on them!"

I don't recall what Dr Shourie and Mr Naqvi spoke to me about, but I came away with the impression that they don't quite like each other.

The belated interviews were an indication that RNG was displeased with 'Monty', as he once memorably referred to Darryl in a conversation with Dom Moraes. Old timers in the newsroom felt insecure with the brisk changes Darryl ushered into the newsgathering and presentation process.

Around this time, Russi Karanjia announced he would publish The Daily, a tabloid morning newspaper. The Times and the Express declined to publish The Daily's launch ads.

Darryl decided that the appearance of the first newspaper in Bombay in 28 years was a news event and issued instructions to publish a report in the Express. The news editor and his subordinates were aghast. In the Express Towers penthouse, RNG's abode, where Jayaprakash Narayan had spent many days after the Emergency, the mood was rumoured to be apopletic.

Darryl was transferred to the Ahmedabad edition a couple of days after the report on The Daily appeared in the Express. Clearly as punishment for breaking the city's publishers's code of silence about a rival.

He preferred to resign. With Darryl's exit, the magic of our tenure at the Express evaporated. The last straw for me was censure for attending a farewell in Darryl's honour.

IMAGE: Darryl at the Greenaccord Forum in Naples, November 9, 2013. Photograph: Kind courtesy Greenaccord Press Office

The perpetual motion machine that is the news cycle, I am sorry to say, kept me away from being in regular touch with Darryl. Whenever we met -- once on the Carter Road promenade on December 26, 2006, close to where he lived with his dear wife Zarine and son Samir ("What are you doing here?" he exclaimed) -- it was as if we were still in the Express newsroom back in '80/'81.

It gave me the greatest pleasure to publish Darryl's columns during the early years at Rediff.com, which you can read here and his subsequent dispatches from Cancun and Paris, some of which you can read here, here and here.

He was clearly the dean of environmental journalism in India, someone who had seen the dangerous signs from our contempt for our surroundings long, long, before it became almost fashionable to do so.

I wish I had known he was ill. I will never now have the opportunity to thank him for the many lessons he taught me at the onset of my career -- the value of integrity, the need for rigorous journalistic standards, the steadfast adherence to truthful journalism, giving one's colleagues every opportunity to shine.

I worked with Darryl for only about five months, but the impact he left on me will last a lifetime.

Darryl mentored more journalists than any other editor of his generation. Some of the biggest bylines owe their beginnings in our glorious (yes, it remains glorious despite the invasion of the truth snatchers) profession to this wonderful human being.

From every journalist he groomed, Thank You.Nitin A Gokhale, Co-founder, BharatShakti.in and long-time Rediff.com contributor, remembers a most unusual politician.

Photograph: Reuters

Our first conversation began with a misunderstanding.

In January 2015, I was in Baroda when an 'unknown' number flashed on my mobile.

Thinking it was a friend from abroad whose number normally doesn't show up, I greeted him exuberantly expecting a similar response.

Instead, the voice on the other end said, 'This is Manohar.'

Puzzled, I rather curtly replied: 'Who Manohar?' 'Parrikar,' the caller added.

The penny dropped.

It was India's Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar.

He had personally called. From his own mobile. No PA, no exchange, nobody holding the line.

He had simply dialed directly.

'I want to meet you,' he said in a matter of fact tone after I had apologised for being slightly rude in my initial reaction.

'Don't say sorry. We have never spoken before and my number doesn't flash. How would you know who is calling,' Parrikar pointed out and immediately put me at ease.

I told him I was away and would return to Delhi in the next couple of days.

'Done. Let's have lunch on Sunday. I am staying in Kota House. Please come there around 1230,' Parrikar told me.

My next question was, 'Who should I be in touch with?' 'No one. You call me. Please note my number.'

And just like that, my short but memorable association with Manohar Parrikar begun.

I was puzzled and to be honest, also flattered that India's defence minister wanted to meet me.

I was intrigued because at that point in time, I was at a loose end having left NDTV in December 2014.

I was not an important editor or an influential journalist, yet he wanted to meet me.

'What could he possibly want from me?' I kept thinking over the next two days since Parrikar had not mentioned any agenda or subject for our meeting.

Hours before going to Kota House (the naval facility where he was staying since a Lutyen zone bungalow was yet to be allotted to Parrikar), I banged out a one-page suggestion sheet in bullet points, highlighting what I thought were key issues in the ministry of defence (MoD).

At Kota House, I was ushered in straight into his suite.

A smiling Parrikar, dressed as usual in his trademark open bush shirt and trousers, instantly put me at ease.

I had heard many good things about his simplicity, his open approach.

In fact, my friend Tejas Mehta, who was then the Mumbai bureau chief at NDTV, had specifically asked me to meet Parrikar in November 2014 when he took over at defence minister, mentioning that he was very approachable.

However, I had no real reason to meet the new defence minster since I was quitting full-time journalism around the same time.

All this came back to my mind in a flash as we sat down.

After a moment of awkward silence on my part, I tentatively offered him the one-page sheet I had typed out.

After spending two-three minutes reading it, Parrikar said, 'Good suggestions. And I am already working on some of them.'

'But tell me, why does the MoD function on a principle of mistrust?' Taken aback at the rather direct remark, I asked asked him to elaborate.

'In these two-three months that I have been here, the most striking aspect I noticed is the all-pervasive atmosphere of suspicion. Everyone is looking over his or her own shoulders. There is very little coordination; the overwhelming tendency is to first say no to everything,' a visibly agitated Parrikar explained.

I was astonished at how quickly a newcomer like him (no previous experience at the Centre) had gauged the work culture in South Block.

'It has been like this for decades,' I concurred.

What can be done to improve the system?' was Parrikar's next question.

'Well, there are no ready made solutions,' I added.

'There has to be a solution! I think the key is in getting everyone to sit down and evolve a fresh approach.'

'I will call you again to discuss something that I have in mind,' he said, 'but let's not keep the fish waiting, gesturing towards the dining table.

That's where I first got a glimpse of his legendary love for fish.

As we finished lunch, another point I noted was the ease with which he interacted with his personal staff.

Upendra Joshi and Mayuresh Khanvate were among the two most trusted of his personal staff.

They also ate with us, sitting at the same dining table.

Later I knew why. When he trusted a person, he trusted him or her fully. No half measures.

As weeks went by, we met more frequently -- always at his initiative -- since I had insisted that I will meet him only when he wanted.

Gradually, his calls started coming daily.

He was hungry for new information, fresh insights.

I provided whatever I could with my limited knowledge.

One day, Parrikar said he wanted to revise the Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP).

'Give me some names of experts who can revise, rewrite and simplify the procedures,' he told me.

So I suggested half a dozen names.

He chose four of them for the committee that eventually wrote the DPP 2016.

It had many revolutionary ideas and Parrikar's stamp was very clearly visible.

He overcame stiff opposition from within to introduce a new category for procurement in the MoD called IDDM -- Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured -- products giving them top priority in acquisition.

I dare say that the improved transparency in the MoD and the willingness of top officials to meet and explore collaborations is the lasting legacy Parrikar has left behind at South Block.

As months went by, he started calling me home at 10, Akbar Road.

Sometime early morning at 7, many a times after 10 pm, after he had finished with his official work.

At night, he would inevitably share a beer (Bira had become his favourite) and ruminate, bounce off ideas and sometimes express his frustration about the obstacles he faced in the system.

So much so that even when I went off to Honolulu for the 40-day Advanced Security Cooperation Course at the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in September-October 2015, he would occasionally call from his staff's Whatsapp number just to chat.

By the middle of 2015, he had understood what could work in the murky world of defence, and what could not.

However, he was never comfortable in Delhi's culture of sycophancy.

His bungalow was open to everyone, but fixers and influencers.

So I had to be doubly careful since word had spread about my unrestricted access to India's defence minister.

I must have blocked at least 14 or 15 numbers in the period that Parrikar was in Delhi because people of dubious credentials wanted to use my closeness to him.

I would inevitably tell him about who I had blocked.

He would smile and say, 'Good!'

In November 2015, I launched BharatShakti.in.

I wanted to begin with a detailed interview with India's defence minister.

But somehow, he couldn't find time to sit for an hour or more.

When I started breathing down his neck as the deadline neared, he said come to Goa.

'We will fly back together. That way we will get two uninterrupted hours.'

So one fine day, we boarded his official Embraer from Dabolim airport.

For the next two hours, I recorded a freewheeling chat with him.

The result: His most detailed interview ever, which was also published on Rediff.com.

In fact, it was so detailed that most of what he said translated into policy one by one as months went by.

The most astonishing aspect of that two-hour plane journey from Goa to Delhi was the fact that he never referred to a single piece of paper.

Everything was at his fingertips.

His phenomenal memory and eye for detail was clearly evident during that interaction.

IMAGE: Nitin A Gokhale with Manohar Parrikar. Photograph: Kind courtesy Nitin A Gokhale IMAGE:

Parrikar was also a voracious reader.

One day -- I think after he returned from his maiden trip to the US -- he handed to me a book and said, 'read this if you haven't.'

It was titled Victory on the Potomac by a Pentagon insider detailing the battles that were won and lost in the American political arena before the Goldwater-Nichols Act was promulgated.

'Give me your opinion on what could we borrow from here for India,' he told me, signalling the intent for creating jointness and integration of the three services.

On another day, he fished out Robert Greene's 33 Strategies of War and revealed, 'It is useful for me to follow some of the tips in this book for my own journey in politics. You should also read it.'

Both those books are still with me.

In fact, the day he vacated his bungalow, he carted all his books to Goa Sadan and three weeks later asked me to pick and choose what I wanted to take home.

I brought home about 60, 65 books.

Now they will remind me of him, each time I pick up any one of them to read or refer to.

I was always curious about his journey from IIT Bombay to politics.

He narrated a very revealing anecdote about how it all began, but suffice it to say once he decided to take the plunge, he was a natural.

Parrikar knew how to extract the best out of a diverse set of people.

He was loved, respected and followed blindly by Goans for over two decades.

He had his faults, of course.

For one, he hated to decentralise or delegate.

Calling him a control freak would be an exaggeration, but because he was a perfectionist, Parrikar preferred to do most of the work himself.

He also, therefore, did not or could not groom a second rung political leadership in Goa.

He could also be very acerbic when he wanted.

Parrikar carried the zeal that had made him such an adored leader in his own state to Delhi, but the workload at the MoD was enormous.

So he would invariably wake up at 4 am and not sleep until 11 pm.

The punishing routine and the fact that he worked all seven days a week (five days in Delhi and two days in Goa), took its toll.

He was practically running the MoD and the state of Goa simultaneously.

When in Delhi, he would miss the informal Goan way of life.

He had to behave formally as defence minister most of the time.

But when Parrikar felt he had to unwind, he would suddenly call and ask if I was in Delhi and free.

If I said yes, he would ask me to request my wife to cook simple, home- made fish curry and rice and tell me to keep a couple of bottles of beer in the refrigerator before he arrived.

For the next 90 minutes or so, India's defence minister used to regale us with anecdotes from his personal life in his typical witty style, forgetting all the burden that he carried on his shoulders.

We in the family too developed such a close bond with him that none of us felt he was an outsider.

For us, it became an accepted fact that Parrikar would drop in at home without much notice.

Now, looking back, we have suddenly realised that we don't even have a single photo with him in our house although I have many snaps with him at public functions.

As I write this, my eyes well up and thousands of memories come flooding back.

I am an emotional jumble at the moment, but even when I look back after some months, I am sure I will feel the same way about Parrikar -- Bhai to everyone in Goa, but like an elder brother to me in the two years that I got to know him so closely in Delhi.

To say we will miss him is to state the obvious, but for me the bigger loss is for India as a nation.

You went too soon, Manohar Parrikar.

Travel well, my friend.

You will remain an inspiration for life.

The biggest lesson I draw from your life is to remain humble, no matter what heights you reach.LAKEVILLE Charlene Fitzgerald has joined Salisbury Bank and Trust Company as vice president, customer support and electronic services manager.

We are very excited to have Charlene join our team, said Betsy Summerville, Executive Vice President, Chief Retail and Loan Operations Officer, in a statement. Charlene brings to her position significant industry knowledge and management experience which are valuable assets to further enhance our Customer Support Department.

Fitzgerald has 40 years of experience in banking, to include Branch Manager and Customer Service Manager, and most recently was the vice president, call center manager at Farmington Bank. She lives in Harwinton.

Hartshorns named Salvation Army divisional leaders

CONNECTICUT & RHODE ISLAND - The Salvation Army recently welcomed its new divisional leaders, Majors Gregory and Joyce Hartshorn, to the Southern New England Division, serving Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Greg Hartshorn has served as second in command in the cities of Hartford, Cleveland, Ohio, and most recently in Boston, MA. Joyce Hartshorn has served alongside him, fulfilling many leadership roles in each of these communities since 2010.

During their first 23 years with The Salvation Army, from 1986- 2010, the Hartshorns fulfilled pastoral and administrative roles in Willimantic and Waterbury, Lexington, KY, Niagara Falls, NY and Manchester, NH. They say they are grateful to return to Connecticut, where they began their ministry and where their three children were born; Valerie (and Jim), Hillary (and T.J.) and Zachary, all live and work in the Northeast.

Greg Hartshorn spent his early years before a call to ministry as a small business owner in Manchester N.H. Joyce Hartshorn has a degree in Sociology, from Kings College in Briarcliff Manor, NY and served at the local Salvation Army as caseworker when she met Greg.

American Family Care earns accreditation

TORRINGTON  American Family Care (AFC) locations in Danbury, West Hartford, New Britain, Vernon and Torrington have achieved Accreditation through the Urgent Care Association, the highest level of distinction for urgent care centers in the nation. AFCs urgent care facilities met the stringent UCA criteria and established standards for quality of patient care, safety, and scope of services provided, including x-ray and laboratory services, according to a statement.

Independently owned and operated by Connecticut native Tom Kelly for several years, the following AFC locations have once again earned the coveted honor: West Hartford, Vernon, New Britain, Danbury and Torrington.

Were excited to continue fulfilling our mission of making quality health care accessible and economical to residents across Connecticut, said Kelly. Our patient-centric approach combines stellar customer service with high-level care, which is a rare hospitality mindset in a medical facility.

The accreditation is valid for 36 months and then must be renewed to maintain the designation. With this accreditation, AFC demonstrates its commitment to providing patients with exceptional care. AFC has just opened a new urgent care location in Torrington.

To learn more, visit www.afcurgentcare.com.

Oncologist joins Hartford HealthCare

MANCHESTER - Dr. Jessica Clement has joined the team of the Hartford HealthCare Cancer Institute as a medical oncologist. She will see patients at the new Hartford HealthCare location in Manchester starting March 25.

Dr. Clements arrival is timed with the opening of a three-story medical facility in Manchester as part of the Cancer Institutes plan to bring advanced oncology care close to home for people east of the Hartford region. The facility features a bright, airy infusion center, a rooftop patio for patients and families, a dedicated pharmacy and space for a variety of oncology specialists like Dr. Clement to see patients.

She will join other medical oncologists in Manchester. Also seeing patients there is Dr. Patricia DeFusco, the system-wide director of the Cancer Institutes Breast Program, and Dr. Heather King, director of Breast Services in the Hartford region.

Dr. Clement has worked in Central Connecticut since 2010 at UConn Health. She is a graduate of Union College where she earned a bachelors degree in biology magna cum laude, and then earned a medical degree from the Medical College of Virginia/Virginia Commonwealth University. She completed an internship and residency in medicine through Harvard Medical School at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where she was chief medical resident the final year. She also completed a clinical and research fellowship in hematology-oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess.

Dr. Clement is a prolific and enthusiastic researcher, having authored numerous articles in professional journals on the efficacy of various treatments for prostate, bladder and esophageal cancers, as well as the safe delivery of intra-cerebral spinal fluid chemotherapy and the impact of a pharmacist-led chemotherapy monitoring program for some prostate cancer patients. She has presented around the country on such topics as immune checkpoint inhibitors in genitourinary malignancies and the evolving treatment paradigm for oligometastatic prostate cancer patients.

Board-certified in internal medicine with subspecialty certification in hematology and medical oncology, Dr. Clements current research interests include immunotherapy in bladder cancer and researching other novel therapies. Her efforts as a clinician and researcher have earned her national attention. In 2017, she was named a fellow of the Association of American Medical Colleges Leadership Education and Development Certificate Program in the Northeast Group on Educational Affairs Cohort, and garnered Top Doc recognition from Connecticut Magazine for oncology/hematology.

Dr. Clement will be accepting patients at 376 Tolland Turnpike, Suite 201, Manchester. Appointments can be made by calling 860-533-5830. Learn more at www.hartfordhealthcare.orgNEWTOWN  The conspiracy extremist accused of crossing the line by defaming grieving Sandy Hook families will find out Friday whether he has crossed the line with a judge.

Alex Jones, the frontman of the Texas-based internet show InfoWars, faces sanctions in state Superior Court in Waterbury for delays in turning over his business documents to Sandy Hook families suing him for defamation.

Judge Barbara Bellis already warned Jones earlier this month that if he didnt honor a March 20 deadline to turn over marketing and business records to the Sandy Hook families, the judge could refuse to consider a motion by Jones to throw out the defamation suit.

Jones missed the March 20 deadline.

Now the families are urging the judge to deny Jones motion to dismiss.

At this point the court must conclude that the Jones defendants have willfully disobeyed the courts discovery orders, write attorneys representing an FBI agent and seven families who lost loved ones in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. They have offered shifting rationales for their delay in production, misrepresented the status of compliance and refused to comply even after this court warned that non-compliance could result in sanctions.

Jones attorney, New Haven-based Norman Pattis, did not return messages at his office Thursday seeking a comment.

Pattis filed a response with the judge Thursday that argued for more time, saying an employee of Jones has spent many days searching through a database of 9.3 million emails to locate items responsive to the discovery requests.

Pattis also argued against the most severe sanction  the judge denying Jones request to dismiss the suit.

The claims raised by the (families) represent a clear and present danger to the nations long history of tolerance and respect for diverse voices, Pattis wrote. The (families) seek to trample the First Amendments guarantee of freedom of expression, to hold it, in effect, to the standards demanded by sympathetic censors.

The defamation case  and a similar case brought against Jones in Texas by parents of two other victims of the Sandy Hook shooting  is shaping the national debate between free speech advocates who say extremist expression is protected under the First Amendment, and civil justice advocates who say there is a price to pay for recklessly abusing the truth.

The families argue that Jones business has profited by calling the worst crime in modern Connecticut history staged, synthetic, manufactured, a giant hoax and completely fake with actors, with inside job written all over it.

Jones has argued in court papers that he no longer believes the shooting of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook School was a hoax  and that he has a right to be wrong.

Jones has also asked the judge to rule quickly to dismiss the families claim under a statute that tries to weed out frivolous defamation lawsuits.

Leslie Levin, a law professor at UConn, says the statute Jones is invoking is designed to stop lawsuits that are most often brought by corporations against everyday people, to silence their criticism.

[The] statutes were meant to protect individuals from this type of abusive litigation, Levin said. Ironically, in the Jones case, it is media figures and corporations that are trying to use (it) against individuals.

The judge could refuse to entertain Jones motion for a quick ruling as a result of his delays.

A legal observer said it wouldnt be a surprise to see the judge do so.

She certainly has the power to do it, said David Schulz, a senior research scholar at Yale Law Schools Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic.

Pattis argued that Jones is shielded by journalistic privilege.

(F)ree speech is always tested in the crucible of unpopular, even sometimes irresponsible speech, Pattis wrote to the judge on Thursday. These values ought not to be sacrificed for the sake of the tender sensibilities of the politically correct.

rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342Almost six months ago, Patrick J. Dunn, executive director of the New Haven Pride Center, got a call from a 16-year-old who had just come out as gay to his family.

The young man said his parents response was to inform him that while he was allowed to come home to sleep, he wasnt allowed to eat at home anymore and could never be in the house when anyone else was awake.

Sixteen  he called the center looking for food because he had been sleeping on the street for two days,  Dunn said. This is a reality of our state.

Dunn recounted the young mans story as part of his testimony Thursday before the legislatures Human Services Committee on a bill establishing a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Health and Human Services Network. The purpose of the network is to make recommendations to the state about how to work toward a safer and healthier environment for the LGBTQ community.

The bill also calls for a $250,000 appropriation to analyze the health and humans services needs of the LGBTQ population.

We suffer from parents who disown their children, Dunn told lawmakers. We like to pretend that doesnt happen because we are a forward-thinking state but there are a lot of youths (whose)parents have abandoned them, which then eliminates them from health care, eliminates them from access to so many resources.

Dunn said that while he was able to help the 16-year-old, in other parts of the state, such as the Northeast corner, there is no community center that would provide that kind of assistance.

We dont know how often this happens and we dont know how many kids do this and then maybe engage in sex work and find someone that takes care of them, Dunn said, adding that this means they arent traditionally homeless and dont get counted as such.

Rep. Jeff Currey, D-East Hartford, said the intent of the bill is to make sure we have all the right folks around the table in an ongoing conversation  to help identify where in the state we have pockets of need and to be able to fill that pocket with either an existing program or come up with something new, but working in tandem with the Department of Health. Its a collaborative relationship.

Currey, who introduced the bill, along with Rep. Raghib Allie-Brennan, D-Bethel, said the $250,000 would serve as seed money to help gather data for securing grants from the private sector. The network would consist of representatives from more than a dozen health and human service nonprofit agencies as well as some state agencies.

New York and California have similar networks, Currey said, but Connecticut would be the first state to put it into legislation.

Those testifying painted a grim picture of the many health and human services needs of the LGBTQ community and the difficulty of finding such help in certain regions of the state.

Conor Pfeifer, a development officer with the Triangle Community Center in Norwalk, which offers case management, training and counseling, said that LGBTQ youth account for 23 percent of the homeless youth population in Connecticut, even though the community represents only about 4 percent of the states population.

In addition, he said, 22 percent of the states LGBTQ residents report not having an adequate supply of food and 15 percent of all hate crimes in the state victimized LGBTQ people. He also said the LGBTQ community struggles with mental health issues at a higher rate than the general population.

It is a challenge, too, to find a care provider in the medical field who will understand your identity and lived experience if you are LGBTQ, he said.

Pfeifer said his agency helps people with diverse sets of needs, from finding housing for a person who had spent years living in a car to helping transgender people in Bridgeport who are fighting job and housing discrimination.

We need your help now (in) getting access to housing, nutritional assistance, finding good services, Pfeifer said, and building trust between us and local government.

Annastasia Martineau, a junior at the University of Connecticut, said that as an LGBTQ youth who grew up in the northeast corner of the state, I can tell you that the need for better data on our communities, representation in public policy, and connectivity to the rest of the state is central to ensuring a safer and healthier environment.

Dunns testimony seemed to especially trouble lawmakers when he said, Most LGBTQ people spend the first 10, 12, 15, 20 years of their life debating if their parents are going to ever love them if they ever say who they are and that takes a huge emotional toll, which is why we see such high suicide rates.

He said that about one in two transgender youth will attempt suicide, while one in five gay men will do so, and one in three lesbians will.

Youre describing a tremendous lethality risk for this population that we are only beginning to address, Rep. Anne Hughes, D-Easton, said to Dunn. Do you think establishing this health and human services network will make an impact on that appalling statistic?

Dunn said he thought it would help because without data to back up funding proposals, centers like his own cannot qualify for grants.

Rep. Catherine Abercrombie, co-chairperson of the Human Services Committee and a Democrat from Meriden, responded to Dunn saying, As a mom, I cant imagine what these young people go through with not being accepted by their parents. Thats the saddest thing any parent can do

Sen. Marilyn Moore, the other co-chairperson of the committee, said it took her daughter until she was 19-years-old to tell her that she was gay.

She thought I was going to be devastated, Moore said, and I said while Im not even surprised, I dont know why it took you so long tell me. So I understand why we need better data  I dont think this is a liberal issue. I think this is a human issue.

Hughes said later that she supports the proposal. Weve disinvested in this community and the impact is obvious in the risk that they were describing and the rates of suicide and homelessness. Its about time we invested. Their basic safety is at risk.TORRINGTON - Rista Malanca has been named the citys new Director of Economic Development.

She is filling the position vacated by Erin Wilson, who left the job in February for a post in Hartford.

Malanca, a resident of Winchester, brings a background in city planning and trail development. She is a graduate of UCONN Torrington where she earned a bachelors degree in Corporate and Small Business Organizational Studies. Malanca has also received her certificate from the American Institute of Certified Planners. She previously served as the citys Zoning and Wetlands Enforcement Officer.

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Rista to this position. Over the past five years, Rista has served the city of Torrington in our land use offices, said Mayor Elinor Carbone in a statement.

Rista has been instrumental in pursuing grants, helping to establish our priorities in becoming a walkable, livable community and guiding local businesses through the regulatory processes required to build our business base. Her background in municipal government, trail and transit development and planning make her an ideal choice for this role, the mayor said.

Rista brings a depth of knowledge and experience to the table that I know will serve the city well in the years to come. As we continue to position ourselves as the urban center of Litchfield County, Economic Development is a high priority for the city of Torrington. I look forward to working closely with Rista to guarantee that our focus is on growing our business opportunities and the community assets that our residents, business owners and visitors deserve.

I am very excited to start this new position as the citys Economic Development Director, Malanca said. Over the past 5 years Torrington has been moving forward in such a positive direction. I am proud to be part of this movement.

I look forward to taking a more active role in supporting our existing local businesses, attracting new businesses and continuing to develop a community that provides a welcoming environment and attractive place for people to live, work and play, she said.TORRINGTON  Torrington, CT Get your space reserved for summer camp now! The place to be in Litchfield County this summer is Camp MOE -- no ordinary place. The camp includes a swimming pond, water trampoline, miles of marked trails and abundant wildlife. This year, new additions include bocce courts, a climbing wall, and a zip line, which stretches from one side of the pond to the other. Gaga pits, boating, swimming, archery, rocketry, Lego workshops, and a variety of activities keep everyone engaged and challenged. Over the past two years, Camp MOE has expanded the waterfront, installed new docks, and remodeled the lodge.

According to the long-time camp director, Katherine Marchand-Beyer, Camp MOE is a place where kids can explore and thrive in a diverse community. No cell phones, lap tops or television intrude on the full camp experience at Camp MOE. Though the schedule is planned for maximum benefit, a portion of the day allows for the campers to choose different activities that they want to try. There is opportunity for self-direction every day, so kids can think for themselves, noted Katherine.

Hundreds of children flock to Camp MOE each summer season for the traditional camp activities. Originally, Camp MOE was focused on programming for kids with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Today, the camp is fully integrated and all inclusive.

The Camp MOE fee includes free lunch, as well as transportation to and from Winsted, Torrington, Litchfield, and Harwinton. Extended Day options are available for families who need early morning or late afternoon hours. The camp program is for boys and girls aged 5-15.

Open House takes place May 11, 2019 from 1-4 p.m. at 1145 Brandy Hill Road, Torrington. Enrollment is now open and online registration may be completed at www.campmoe.org. For more information visit the website or call 860-618-2800.

The Arc of Litchfield County (LARC) is a nonprofit agency in Northwest Connecticut founded by families in 1964 to support loved ones with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Guided by a vision of Community for All, LARC promotes individual empowerment, choice, respect, and dignity. On a daily basis, LARC serves 220 individuals with disabilities throughout Northwest Connecticut. Services include residential group homes, in-home supports, transportation, day and employment programs. LARCs Social Enrichment program provides critical respite and recreational opportunities, including group outings, social gatherings, and Special Olympics.

Chamber launches Small Busines Council

(Torrington, Connecticut) - Northwest Connecticuts Chamber of Commerce recently announced the launch of their newest peer group, the Small Business Council.

The Small Business Council has been established for the small business owner/manager  the decision makers  to discuss challenges, share solutions and work as a back-office consortium. Many small business owners have issues that they stumble upon throughout their workday that they may not have experience with - but another small business owner does. The council is a resource for the owners and managers so they can keep their businesses running smoothly.

The idea of the Small Business Council came from Northwest Connecticut Chamber member Erick Royer, founder of Stepcraft, Inc. Stepcraft is a manufacturer and on-line retailer of desktop multi-function CNC systems. Ericks role in the company covers leadership, designing, marketing, sales, human resources, office administration, customer service and more. Each day, he encounters a question in an area that he does not consider his expertise. He asked the Chamber to consider putting a group of small business owners/managers in a room together to share knowledge and experience and brainstorm ideas and solutions to problems.

The goal is to bring together leaders of companies with 10 employees or less to discuss challenges, share solutions and work together, said JoAnn Ryan, President & CEO of the Chamber. We are grateful to Erick for bringing us this excellent idea and know it will be a welcome resource for business owners and managers to help their business thrive.

The kickoff meeting of the NW CT Chamber Small Business Council will be held on Tuesdayis required for participation in the Small Business Council. Reservations for the meeting can be made at http://www.nwctchamberofcommerce.org/calendar, or by calling the office at 860-482-6586.

The Chamber of Commerce of Northwest Connecticut, Inc. is the oldest business organization in the Northwest Corner. Incorporated in 1901, the Chamber is a 501(c)6 non-profit organization funded by the membership investment of its 750 members and affiliates as well as its programs and initiatives. The mission of the Chamber is to promote economic growth while enhancing the quality of life in Northwest Connecticut.

Parade marshal nominations wanted

TORRINGTON  The Torrington Veterans Memorial Committee is seeking Nominations for Honorary Parade Marshals for this years Memorial Day Parade & Ceremony.

Nominees must be residents of Torrington, and be willing and able to accept the honor, participate in the parade, and be recognized during the ceremony at Coe Memorial Park following the parade. Posthumous nominations also accepted with family member(s) agreeing to participate.

Send the nominees name, address, telephone #, and email (if available) along with their branch of service, rank, and the years they served, a brief reason for your nomination, your name and telephone#. Nominees must be able to provide proof of their honorable discharge (form DD-214).

Send to the information via snail mail to: Torrington Veterans Memorial Committee, Attn: Honorary Marshal 2019, 140 Main St, Torrington, CT 06790, or email vetactcom@yahoo.com with the Subject: Honorary Marshal 2019

Also, if chosen the Honorary Marshal, or someone of their choosing, must provide a short biography of their public, military, and family life for publication in the Memorial Day Ceremony program booklet.

Deadline for nominations is April 12.Bitmo, a San Diego, CA-based mobile gifting and payment platform, raised over $3m in seed funding.

Backers included Jeff Haux, Everplus Capital, Longboard Capital Advisors, and several Southern California-based family fund offices.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate growth of its consumer platform, expand its retailer-focused enterprise products, and build out marketing, sales, product, finance and engineering departments, as well as expanding its office in Carlsbad, CA.

Founded in 2017 by Michael Smallwood, CEO and founder, Bitmo is a mobile platform that allows consumers to gift securely right from their mobile wallet. Unlike plastic gift cards, it allows users the ability to split and exchange card value from one store to another for free.

The solution also provides retailers a unique way to directly engage with customers on their platform of choice. For retailers, Bitmo uses intelligent data to connect the right customer to the right store while driving measurable revenue for 130 nationwide brands already integrated on the platform including Nike, Nordstrom, Old Navy, Regal Cinemas, Macys, Sephora, Petco, GameStop, Panera Bread, Yard House, and The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf.

FinSMEs

21/03/2019The internet has transformed the business world in the past couple of decades, impacting on a range of issues, including how companies communicate with consumers and the way that the latter pays for goods and services.

However, one particularly notable area where the internets presence has been felt is in how many entrepreneurs use it get their ideas off the ground in the first place. Once upon a time, asking strangers to back a project you believe in may have seemed bizarre, but now this has become commonplace thanks to the seemingly unstoppable trend of crowdfunding.

A major funding option

According to figures from Statista, it is believed that a total of $5.5 billion was raised through crowdfunding worldwide in 2017. Furthermore, a study released by Ernst & Young at the end of last year revealed that it trailed behind only venture capital in terms of the sources of funding being considered by UK entrepreneurs. For further context, this put it ahead of bank financing, invoice finance, and initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a strategy that they may employ.

The concept has even gone on to emerge in more unexpected areas, such as being used to try and keep famous music venues open and even to generate prize money in gaming.

In terms of the latter, the prestigious Dota 2 event in eSports, known as The International, always boasts prize money crowdfunded by fans, and in 2018, the pool reached a total of more than $25 million. On a smaller scale, online casinos like Paddy Power offer promotions such as the Jackpot King jackpot  a communal prize pool that builds up in value and is awarded to someone playing one of the selected online slot games.

Recent developments

While crowdfunding has become a hugely popular concept across the globe, several recent developments have underlined how the idea has really taken hold across the UK.

A great example came at the end of the last year in the form of Monzo, the challenger bank that was found to be the UKs best in a survey by Which?. The company launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise 20 million in December and reached the target in just over two days thanks to the input of more than 36,000 people.

Even more recently, the UK became home to what is thought to be the worlds fastest funded restaurant project when chef Gary Usher announced his hopes to raise 100,000 to support the opening of his Manchester restaurant Kala. Incredibly, he raised the funding on Kickstarter in just 11 hours.

Finally, another UK bank to turn to the concept is NatWest, which has teamed up with Crowdfunder to create the Back Her Business initiative. The programme has been developed specifically to boost the number of women taking the leap and starting their own businesses.

A game-changer

All of the examples above undoubtedly highlight how crowdfunding has emerged to be a genuine game-changer for businesses in recent times.

While established methods of funding continue to play a key role in the fortunes of many ventures, it is clear that entrepreneurs and other organisations are discovering the benefits that this new approach could offer.UPDATED 1:15 P.M. EDT on 2019-03-22



A massive explosion at a chemical plant in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu has left dozens dead and hundreds injured, amid criticism of the government's failure to implement safety and environmental standards.



Official media put the death toll at 62 on Friday, with more than 600 injuries reported, as rescue teams converged on the Tianjiayi Chemical Plant near Jiangsu's Yancheng city.



"It was so sudden; we had no warning at all," one injured survivor told RFA on Friday. "We were at home relaxing, and then the building just collapsed, and we were all trapped inside."



A local resident surnamed Huang told RFA that the blast had caused widespread damage to homes in the vicinity of the plant.



"It frightened us to death, like a bomb going off," Huang said. "Once the bang had gone, the fireball came. Local residents' windows were broken across a radius of several kilometers."



"It destroyed the doors of the Chenjiagang police station and a nearby bus stop," he said.



An employee who answered the phone at the Yancheng municipal government offices on Friday declined to give details.



"Rescue efforts are ongoing, but if you want to know more, you should contact the propaganda department," the employee said.



However, propaganda officials have been telling journalists only to publish pre-approved copy from Xinhua News Agency, according to an RFA reporter at the scene.



Officials also used drone interference technology to disrupt drones launched over the site by journalists, while the families of victims were being moved to different cities and counties in a bid to isolate them and control the flow of information.



Test data issued by the Jiangsu provincial environmental protection bureau on Friday showed excessive nitrogen oxide 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) downwind of the site, with dichloroethane and methylene chloride over permitted limits in nearby drainage water. Toluene levels were within permitted limits, the bureau said.



No plans to evacuate



A local journalist surnamed Wu said there seemed to be no plans to evacuate the general population.



"They definitely won't be evacuating because there are so many people," Wu said. "That could cause chaos."



"One of the biggest problems is the high concentration of chemical factories [around this area.]," he said. "They have pretty much polluted all of the groundwater, surface water, air and soil all around."



He said the results from the environmental protection bureau shouldn't be trusted.



"I saw those so-called results ... but I have nothing to say about such shamelessness," Wu said.



However, social media posts and articles relating to widespread pollution in and around Jiangsu's Xiangshui county were found to have been deleted in an online search on Friday.



An environmental activist surnamed Zhao said that environmental monitoring figures are treated as a state secret by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.



"It is necessary to have environmental protection bureaus or NGOs to do the environmental monitoring, but I dont know what kind of information they will release," she said. "Because this sort of thing is very sensitive in China right now."



"When I met with an NGO, they told me that we can monitor some things, but that the information couldn't be published," she said.



Media reports highlighted a previous explosion at a chemical plant in Xiangshui 12 years ago, after which local officials placed journalists under surveillance, house arrest and attempted to frame them for bribery and prostitution in a bid to limit reporting of the incident.



A university lecturer surnamed Zhao from Xiangshui county said the pattern of covering up after a disaster is essentially the same today.



"There is always this same logic around a disaster," Zhao said. "Local governments approach these things according to a fixed pattern."



He said environmental groups had warned that the concentration of chemical factories around Xiangshui county was a disaster waiting to happen several years ago, but that the government had no intention of dealing with the issue.



Official coverage



The explosion in a Tianjiayi chemical storage tank at 2:48 p.m. on Thursday sent a huge fireball into the sky and measured 2.2 degrees on seismological instruments, state media reported. Sixteen neighboring factories in the chemical industrial park also caught fire.



"All open flames on site have how been extinguished and the air pollutant index is within guidelines," state news agency Xinhua reported.



President Xi Jinping, who is currently on a state visit to Italy, called for a full investigation into "hidden dangers" at similar sites, it said.



Authorities in Jiangsu have detained the general manager and major shareholders of the company pending an investigation.



"I got out. The firefighters rescued me," one survivor told state-run media. "I am slightly injured, a bit bruised."



The National Health and Family Planning Commission has sent teams intensive care, burns, trauma surgery, neurosurgery and psychological intervention experts to aid rescue efforts, it said.



"On-site rescue, treatment of those injured and other work are being carried out in an orderly manner," it said.



A resident of Jiangsu's Nantong city surnamed Lu said medical personnel had also been sent from his city to help.



"Everyone is watching this [and wondering] why there was such a big, fatal accident?" Lu said. "It is really scary. If we need to donate blood or donate money, we will all do that."



According to a cached copy of its website, Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical is engaged in the production, study and research of m-phenylenediamine and p-phenylenediamine products used in dyes and pigments including hair-dye. The website was unavailable on Friday.



State media reports said police have detained Tianjiayi's general manager Zhang Qinyue and majority shareholder Ni Chengliang for questioning.



Nantong resident Lu said he expected that someone in government would be held accountable.



"But will that replace so many lives? No," he said. "We need to stop this at the source. It is too late if we only talk about who is to blame after each accident."



Reported by Wen Yuqing, Wong Siu-san and Tam Siu-yin for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Gao Feng for the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.Authorities in southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan have once more postponed the trial of four people who have been held in pretrial detention for three years for selling liquor with references to the 1989 Tiananmen massacre on the label.



Teahouse proprietor Fu Hailu was taken away by police in the provincial capital Chengdu in , after he and three others marketed the alcohol, which bore the words ", 1989" and a cartoon of a man in front of an advancing column of tanks on the label. The label also says "Never forget, never give up."



According to another slogan on the bottle, the baijiu spirit had "matured for 27 years," the length of time since People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops put an end to weeks of student protests on Tiananmen Square, using tanks and machine guns on largely unarmed civilians.



Fu and fellow-defendants Luo Fuyu, Zhang Juanyong and Chen Bing were to have stood trial for "incitement to subvert state power" on , but the trial has been postponed yet again, RFA has learned.



Fu's wife Liu Tianyan said she was informed of the decision by a government attorney appointed to defend her husband, but had yet to receive any official notification from the authorities.



"I really don't know, but I get the feeling they are backsliding, saying there'll be a trial, then not holding one," Liu said. "The lawyer also told me that they have no obligation to inform me of the details of any future trial."



"I am really worried, because I don't know what's going on," she said. "I don't even know if the relatives will be allowed to attend any trial."



Ran Tong, an attorney previously appointed to defend Fu by his family, declined to comment on the case when contacted by RFA on .



"I want to emphasize that we are under very strict orders from the department of justice right now," Ran said. "All I can say, from a humanitarian point of view, is that defendants ... shouldn't be cut off from their families."



Calls to the Chengdu Intermediate People's Court, where the trial was to have been held, went unconnected during office hours on .



China's Supreme People's Court is now permitted by an amendment to criminal procedure law to extend pretrial periods in certain cases, which lawyers say interfere with the right to a legal defense.



All four defendants are being held in the Chengdu Detention Center.



Media reports at the time said the drink had been designed for private circulation among groups of friends on social media, rather than for public sale.



China regularly implements nationwide security measures aimed at preventing any public memorials linked to the crackdown, which was styled a "counterrevolutionary rebellion" by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.



Reported by Wen Yuqing for the Cantonese Service, and by Gao Feng for the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Nine universities with impeccable links to the ruling Chinese Communist Party have formed a new league to nurture the next generation of elite 'red' talent, state media reported.



Initiated by the Beijing Institute of Technology, the Yanhe Alliance has been joined by Renmin University, the Agricultural University of China and the Beijing Foreign Studies University, which trains people for careers in diplomacy.



The Central Conservatory of Music, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Central Academy of Drama, Central University for Nationalities and Yan'an University have joined the league, which references the Yan'an period of Chinese communism (1936-1949), when the party set up nine universities and training institutions for the next generation of Chinese officials and leaders.



Those nine institutions spread the sparks of revolution across the whole country, starting a prairie fire," the Beijing Institute of Technology said in a statement published on Sina.com's education channel.



"Today, we come together once more to form a community to keep the spirit of Yan'an and the flame of communism alive, and to train the next generation," it said.



But commentators said the universities are more likely to be cashing in on the power of Yan'an in Communist Party mythology.



"They want to perpetuate this red DNA," independent scholar Zha Jianguo said. "Everything in mainland China is being partified now, including the education system."



"These nine institutions are likely just the start," he said. "This partification is aimed at freedom of education; it will set limits and forbidden areas to free thought among students."



Zha said the only task of a higher education institution should be to educate people.



"Higher education colleges should have freedom of thought, in all areas," he said. "The people they train should also be capable of thinking freely, and being creative."



"But this partification process will restrict and imprison that process on a massive scale," he said. "It will also affect China's ability to nurture talent and to modernize."



'Red DNA'



The "red DNA" metaphor is described by Baidu's encyclopedia as the "heritage of revolutionary spirit, with red symbolizing light and cohesive strength."



"The concept of "red DNA" is the spiritual core of Chinese communism," it said.



Independent Chengdu writer Tan Zuoren said he thought the report was a joke, at first.



"I actually thought this was a spoof," Tan said. "But now I believe it exists."



"It makes me think of Tan Lifu and Yu Luoke [whose speech] indicated the start and the end of the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976]."



"This is distorted and ugly behavior on the part of these people, who are driven by the desire for power," Tan said of the Yanhe League.



Tan Lifu's 1966 couplet espoused the genetic theory of revolutionary pedigree, claiming that "If the father was a hero, the son will be too. If the father is a reactionary bastard, then so is the son."



Yu Luoke was executed on March 5, 1970 for speaking out against the family inheritance of revolutionary credentials that condemned anyone related to a "class enemy" to the same status, regardless of their actions.



Since taking office in 2012, Xi Jinping has tightened ideological controls over all aspects of society, including universities, colleges, and schools.



His approach stems from a 2013 article titled "Improving Ideological and Political Work Among Young Teachers in Colleges and Universities," and from Xi's reiteration of the "Seven Taboos": topics that mustn't be discussed in public by servants of the state, including teachers.



The seven banned topics are: universal values of human rights and democratic, constitutional government; press freedom; civil society; citizens' rights; the historical mistakes of the Chinese Communist Party; the financial and political elite; and judicial independence.



Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.North Korean authorities on March 15 arrested the commander of one of the countrys border defense regiments, who is alleged to have embezzled funds earned in a state-sanctioned car smuggling scheme.

Sources say the arrest seems out of place, as smuggling is rampant along the border with China, and carried out by or with the connivance of state agencies.

Residents find it odd for authorities of North Korea, which rejects the international trade sanctions that the smuggling is trying to evade, to be suddenly concerned about the smuggling trade, leading some to believe that is the result of political tension, while others believe it is a simple cash grab.

The commander of the border defense regiment from the Hyesan area was arrested by the defense security command [on the 15th]. He has continually been involved in car smuggling, and [the authorities] didnt seem to care. But then suddenly a crackdown has begun, said a source from Yanggang province to RFAs Korean Service on March 16.

Many people have doubts about the reasons for the [sudden] crackdown, said the source.

The source explained that Hyesan, situated on the southernmost point of Yanggang provinces border with China, has been a traditional hotbed for the smuggling business, where authorities either look the other way, or even assist smuggling operations.

People here say that Hyesan is the best smuggling route in the whole country, so thats why there are so many smugglers bringing goods through from China, the source said.

Border guards in Hyesan are tight with state-run agencies and they aid smugglers, said the source.

The source revealed that in many cases the authorities are themselves smugglers.

The state-run trade agencies are all involved with smuggling themselves, and its really just another way of conducting trade for the nation in a way that allows them to avoid U.N. sanctions, the source added.

The sanctions, aimed at depriving North Korea of resources that could be channeled into its nuclear program, prohibit U.N. member nations from exporting certain goods into North Korea.

Its very strange that the commander was arrested on suspicion of embezzling money they earned from car smuggling, said the source, adding, [He] has been involved with smuggling for more than a year, so getting him for embezzlement is very unusual.

Its not yet known how much hes [accused] of embezzling. He is being questioned by the Defense Security Command so [the details of] his crime will be disclosed in five or six days, the source said.

They didnt take any action for his involvement in smuggling activities until now, but suddenly he got caught up in the crackdown. People think it is because they just wanted to seize the money he had, said the source.

Charging the commander with embezzlement rather than smuggling itself might seem counterintuitive, but with the state itself involved in smuggling, to charge the commander with conspiring with the state to smuggle also would necessitate an admission that the state is involved in illegal activities.

A second source, also from Yanggang province said, The military security made a big issue out of his smuggling activities and his engagement in collusion with the state-run trade agency, so tensions are high among trade workers in the border area.

Most of the national smuggling trade, so far, has been carried out by Hyesan border guards as if it were a normal trade activity. Its not a secret, the source said.

However, as people are suddenly hearing the news of the arrest, many are wondering if the authorities plan to forbid smuggling altogether or if this is a bid to resume only legal trade with China, the source said.

Residents in the Hyesan area who have been making their livings through small-scale smuggling operations are starting to feel uneasy. Smuggling is their livelihood and they are worried if it is [going to become] completely controlled (by the authorities), the source said.

Reported by Jieun Kim for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.Vietnamese authorities violated criminal procedure laws when they detained a local blogger for Radio Free Asia, Truong Duy Nhat, who disappeared in Bangkok in late January amid suspicions he was abducted by Vietnamese agents and was revealed this week to be in a Hanoi jail, experts said on Friday.

Canada-based Thuc Doan Truong, the blogger's daughter, told RFA's Vietnamese service that her mother was informed by prison authorities that Nhat was arrested on Jan. 28 and thrown into a jail in central Hanoi district on the same day.

Rights activists had suspected that Nhat was detained by Thai authorities on the outskirts of Bangkok and handed to Vietnamese agents on Jan. 26 after he had fled to Thailand to seek political asylum with a U.N. refugee agency.

Truongs account is the first confirmation that Nhat, a weekly contributor to the Vietnamese service of RFA, a U.S. funded broadcaster, has been taken to Vietnam after being last seen in Thailand.

He last communicated with Washington-based RFA editors on Jan. 24 and vanished at a shopping mall on the outskirts of Bangkok after going to the Bangkok office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Jan 25.

Nhats convoluted route to his Hanoi cell involved violation of Vietnams criminal laws, said legal affairs blogger Pham Le Vuong Cac.

According to Vietnams law on criminal procedure, within 24 hours of an arrest, authorities must inform the family, he told RFA.

The law helps to prevent arrests that are made in secret to avoid situations where detainees may be tortured or dont have access to lawyers. According to reports, Nhat was arrested in Thailand and then transferred to Vietnam, added Pham.

This case is sensitive for the government. If Vietnam has to make clear about Truong Duy Nhat, this may affect their reputation and the legitimacy of the government, he said.

Vietnamese authorities, he said, are in the process of covering up sources about how he was arrested in Thailand and then brought back to Vietnam. They need more time to handle this case in the media, added Pham.

Others noted that Vietnam had posted a warrant for Trinh Xuan Thanh, the former head of PetroVietnam Construction, whom Hanoi agents are believed to have abducted from Berlin in July 2017. Taken home by force to face charges of mismanagement and embezzlement, Thanh, who had been seeking asylum in Germany, was sentenced to two terms of life in prison in January 2018.

According to what I read in the media, I didnt see any warrant notice for Truong Duy Nhat, said blogger and activist Nguyen Ngoc Gia, who formerly wrote for RFA.

Laywer Dang Dinh Manh told RFA that in principle, they have to inform the family of the arrest. If the arrest has anything to do with serious effects in society or national security, they also need to announce this on newspapers.

Truong, the bloggers daughter, told RFA that her family never received any official notice from the government about the arrest.

Earlier this week she told RFA by telephone that prison authorities told my mom that my father was arrested on January 28 and admitted to the detention center on the same day.

Cao Thi Xuan Phuong, Nhat's wife and Truong's mother, went to jail to visit her husband on Wednesday but prison authorities refused to allow her to meet with him, saying investigations were not completed yet, according to Truong.

His disappearance had sent a chill through the Vietnamese refugee community in Thailand, which had ordered an investigation into the issue.

Rights groups condemned the abduction and demanded explanations from Hanoi and Bangkok.

Reports that Nhat is now in a Hanoi prison are extremely worrying, and we are calling on the Vietnamese authorities to confirm whether he is in their custody and disclose his whereabouts at once, said Joanne Mariner, Amnesty Internationals senior crisis adviser.

The Vietnamese and Thai authorities need to come clean about why and how Nhat returned to Viet Nam so soon after he applied for asylum in Bangkok, she said in a statement.

The authoritarian Vietnamese government of Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc is at present holding more than 200 political prisoners, including rights advocates and bloggers deemed threats to national security, according to Nguyen Kim Binh of the California-based Vietnam Human Rights Network.

Reported by RFA's Vietnamese Service. Translated by Viet Ha. Written in English by Paul Eckert.KYIV -- As the Ukrainian presidential election nears, the world's leading industrialized nations have some strong words for Ukraine's top cop amid recent far-right violence in Kyiv and other cities.



G7 ambassadors are urging Arsen Avakov, the interior minister, to act against violent political extremist groups who might threaten to disrupt the upcoming vote and usurp the role of the Ukrainian National Police and to consider outlawing them down the road.



They are both tricky requests, considering Avakov's personal ties to those same groups and authorities' approval for one of them to monitor the election.



But the ambassadors are being more cautious when it comes to concerns over perceived dirty politicking among Ukraine's 39 presidential hopefuls, reportedly rebuffing a U.S. proposal to raise that issue in writing due to a lack of consensus on how to do so without providing campaign ammunition to specific candidates.

The abortive appeal emerged after RFE/RL obtained copies of two letters prepared by the G7 Ambassadors' Support Group for Ukraine -- one sent privately and the other drafted but watered down before being shared publicly. RFE/RL also spoke to three Western diplomats with knowledge of those texts and the related discussions.

The ambassadors' group comprises envoys from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.



'They Intimidate Citizens, Damage Ukraine's Reputation'

In the letter that was addressed to Avakov on March 15, French Ambassador Isabelle Dumont wrote on behalf of her fellow ambassadors that "the G7 group is concerned by extreme political movements in Ukraine, whose violent actions are worrying in themselves."

"They intimidate Ukrainian citizens, attempt to usurp the role of the National Police in safeguarding elections, and damage the Ukrainian government's national and international reputation," Dumont continued, in a thinly veiled reference to the National Corps and National Militia, the far-right Azov group's political and vigilante wings, respectively.



The letter, in English and Ukrainian, was delivered to Avakov's ministry the same day, according to a Western diplomat. Interior Ministry spokesman Artem Shevchenko confirmed to RFE/RL that Avakov had received it.



That correspondence was followed by a visit from U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who on March 22 met with Avakov in person to discuss his ministry's "important role and responsibility to counter threats and prevent acts of violence by extremist groups," according to a tweet from the U.S. Embassy.

Shevchenko described that meeting as "great, as usual," and friendly.



'Nationalist Hate Groups'

The National Corps and National Militia were products of the Azov Battalion, a volunteer military regiment formed in the early days of the conflict against Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine that began in 2014. The battalion has been accused by international human rights groups of "war crimes" on the battlefield and has since been brought under the control of the National Guard, which is overseen by Avakov.



Members of the National Corps and National Militia have been blamed for multiple violent attacks on minorities in Ukraine, particularly Roma and LGBTI persons, in the past year.

The U.S. State Department described those far-right entities as "nationalist hate groups" in its Ukraine country report on Human Rights for 2018 released on March 13.

While polls suggest they enjoy very little political support, the National Corps and National Militia have grown in size and influence. According to some observers, they have seemingly carried out their attacks with impunity thanks to their close relationship with Avakov.



Avakov this week acknowledged a relationship with the groups' leadership but said he did not support their ideology or activities.



Avakov, who has been called Ukraine's second-most-influential authority figure behind longtime ally President Petro Poroshenko, has survived several changes of government. Since 2014, he and Poroshenko have coexisted thanks to an uneasy alliance that now appears to have unraveled.



On March 9, the National Corps and National Militia clashed with police outside the presidential administration in Kyiv and later in Cherkasy, where Poroshenko was campaigning. At least 15 police officers were wounded.



Some Ukrainian commentators have accused Avakov of using his control over the police and extremists to sow discord ahead of the vote, which could frame Poroshenko as being weak on security. His ministry has denied such accusations.



"The violent incidents of March 9 were a reminder that, just a few weeks ahead of the elections, one crucial challenge is to prevent an escalation of tensions," Dumont wrote in the letter to Avakov. "We have noted with concern that the very same groups involved in the violent incidents have registered as election observers and publicly threatened to use violence should they consider that election fraud is occurring."



Indeed, Ukraine's Central Election Commission has approved the National Militia to monitor the polling. Soon after that announcement, the group's spokesman warned that "if law enforcers turn a blind eye to outright violations and don't want to document them," then they plan to follow the lead of a group leader who said they would "punch someone in the face in the name of justice...without hesitation."



The Central Election Commission asked the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) to probe the group's intentions after the comments but said it did not have the power to strip the National Militia of its monitoring status.

I think dirty politicking and fraud could put at risk Western support for Ukraine."

Dumont also wrote to Avakov that "any act of violence or intimidation should not remain unpunished and should be duly prosecuted to the full extent of the law."



"In due course, outlawing extremist groups could be usefully envisaged," she added, "but in the meantime, we would ask you to be clear with those groups that they must act within the law and desist from intimidation of candidates and law enforcement bodies."



Responding to RFE/RL's request for comment, Denys Lenets, deputy director of the Department of International Cooperation and European Integration at the Interior Ministry, spoke for Avakov in saying that "the minister's position on extreme political movements in Ukraine remains tough and uncontested."



He said that the leadership of the extremist groups had been warned that any "aggressive attempts geared to interfere [with] the fair election process...will bear the respective consequences."



"Red lines were defined -- no intimidation, no aggression, no violence, or other endeavors of forced influence on elections," he said.



'Democracy 101'



The tone of the letter to Avakov, however, is much sterner than that of an informal one sent to the 39 presidential candidates this week and published on the Twitter account of the G7 ambassadors' group.

"G7 Ambassadors support Ukraine's chosen democratic path," that letter began, continuing, "We are encouraged that the 2019 Presidential Elections will be genuinely competitive and that Ukrainian citizens have the opportunity of choice."



In a cautious response to recent reports of election violations, it continued: "We share the desire of ordinary Ukrainians, that the upcoming elections should be free, fair, transparent, peaceful, and reflect the will of the Ukrainian electorate."

But a first draft of that letter obtained by RFE/RL and dated March 20 that Western diplomats said was authored by the U.S. Embassy suggested that any actions counter to the principles of democracy and free elections would constitute a violation of the public's trust, and more.



"We are troubled by reports of vote buying, potential intimidation of civil society and nonparty-affiliated electoral observers, interference in the work of independent journalists, threats of use of violence, and other methods to unjustly sway the electorate in a variety of directions," read the bluntly worded, one-page draft letter.



Campaigning has been particularly vicious in the run-up to the March 31 election, according to Volodymyr Fesenko, who heads the Kyiv-based Penta Center for Political Studies.



Incumbent Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko -- who are running virtually neck-and-neck in polls behind comedian and political outsider Volodymyr Zelenskiy -- have accused each other of vote-buying schemes and more.



"The current election campaign has an increased level of scandal and conflict" compared to elections in 2010 and 2014, Fesenko said.ASTANA/ALMATY -- Police in the Kazakh capital, Astana, and in the cities of Almaty and Shymkent have detained dozens of people who protested the government's move to rename the Central Asian nation's capital after former President Nursultan Nazarbaev, just days after his surprise resignation.

The arrests took place on March 22 during celebrations of the Norouz holiday.

In Astana, police officers scuffled with several people who were holding a protest poster and then detained them and took them away.

Current Time correspondent Svetlana Glushkova was detained while covering the protest. She was held for three hours, then set free and immediately rearrested for five more hours before being released again. Current Time is a Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

Meanwhile, a group of young men and women wearing traditional Norouz costumes surrounded RFE/RL correspondents in Astana, preventing them from covering the arrests, blocking the lenses of the journalists' cameras, and shouting: "It is Norouz! Report about us!"

They also tried to cover an RFE/RL's correspondent's camera with a newspaper, not allowing him to film the detentions.

In Almaty, some young people also tried to prevent RFE/RL correspondents from covering the arrests of protesters.

Earlier, on March 21, police in Astana detained about 20 people who protested against a proposal to rename Astana as Nur-Sultan to honor Nazarbaev.

Nazarbaev abruptly announced his resignation on March 19 after ruling the country for nearly 30 years.

However, he remains chairman for life of Kazakhstan's Security Council and chairman of the ruling Nur-Otan party.

The outgoing upper house chairman, Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, was sworn in as interim president of the Central Asian country on March 20. He is to remain in office until an election that is due to be held in April 2020.

During the ceremony at a joint session of the parliament's chambers, Toqaev proposed that Kazakhstans capital, Astana, be renamed Nursultan -- a request that was swiftly approved by parliament.

On March 21, the presidential press service clarified that the capital's new name will have a different spelling -- Nur-Sultan.

Toqaev also called for major streets in all towns and cities across Kazakhstan to be named after the 78-year-old Nazarbaev.

The March 22 rallies were organized online by the leader of the banned Kazakhstan's Democratic Choice (DVK) movement, Mukhtar Ablyazov, a vocal critic of Nazarbaev and his government, who lives in self-imposed exile in France.No media source currently available

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Dozens of people were detained in a second day of protests at plans to rename the capital after President Nursultan Nazarbaev.iPipeline, an Exton, PA-based provider of cloud-based software solutions for the financial services industry, acquired Bluesun, a Burlington, Ontario, Canada-based provider of software solutions to the life insurance and financial services industry.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

The acquisition aims to expand iPipelines client base to include nearly 70% of all Canadian life insurers and agencies.

Founded in 2001 by Simon Tomlinson, Chief Executive Officer, Bluesun designs software products to automate core business processes for MGAs, national accounts, mutual fund dealers, banks and insurance companies. Today, the firm has over 30 clients in Canada and the US and handles almost 70% of all Canadian life insurance business in the independent channel.

Led by Tim Wallace, CEO, iPipeline is a provider of cloud-based software solutions for the life insurance and financial services industry. Through its end-to-end platform, the company accelerates and simplifies sales, compliance, operations and support. It provides process automation and integration between every participant in our ecosystem including carriers, agents, general agencies, advisors, broker-dealers, RIAs, banks, securities/mutual fund firms, and their consumers on a global basis. The innovative solutions include pre-sales support, new business and underwriting, policy administration, point-of-sale execution of applications, post-sale support, data analysis, reporting, user-driven configuration, consumer delivery and self-service, and agency and firm management.

iPipelines platform is used by more than 130 carriers, 1,300 distributors and financial institutions, and their agents and licensed advisors in a cloud-based environment. With headquarters in Exton, Pennsylvania, iPipeline has locations in Bromley (UK), Burlington (Canada), Cheltenham (UK), Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, Huntersville, Ontario (CA), Philadelphia, Pleasanton, and Salt Lake City.

FinSMEs

22/03/2019NATO's operation in Afghanistan says two U.S. military personnel have been killed while conducting an operation.



In a statement on March 22, the Resolute Support mission gave no further details and withheld the names of those killed.

"In accordance with U.S. Department of Defense policy, the name of the service members killed in action are being withheld until 24 hours after notification of next of kin is complete," NATO said.



Violence has persisted in Afghanistan even as Taliban militants have held negotiations with U.S. officials about a peace settlement.



The latest talks wrapped up earlier this month with both sides citing progress, but no agreement.



The Resolute Support mission includes 17,000 troops, with about half of them from the United States.

The deaths come a day after at least six people were killed by blasts in an Islamic State-claimed attack during Norouz celebrations in a Shi'ite neighborhood of the capital,Kabul.



The number of American casualties has fallen dramatically since the end of 2014 when Afghan forces took over from U.S.-led NATO combat troops to secure the country.



The latest deaths bring the number of U.S. military personnel deaths in Afghanistan to at least four this year, and a total of at least 65 U.S. military deaths since January 2015, according to U.S. government and NATO reports.



The conflict has taken a much larger toll on Afghan security forces and civilians.



Fighting continues across Afghanistan more than a week after the latest round of negotiations between the United States and the Taliban ended in Qatar, as Washington seeks an end to the nearly 18-year war.



The Afghan government has complained it is being left out of the talks, because of the Taliban's refusal to negotiate with what they consider "a U.S. puppet."

With reporting by AP, Reuters, AFP, and dpa



Double-click/tap, drag, or use the slider below each image to fade between then and now.

Hans Hildenbrand/Alamy

The city of Prizren, in Kosovo, photographed in 1922.

Kosovo is a Jamaica-sized country in the heart of the Balkans that has long been riven by ethnic, religious, and linguistic rivalries.

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Serbian policemen watch ethnic Albanians during a protest in Pec, now Peje, in 1998.

By the mid-20th century, Kosovo was an autonomous region of mostly Albanian-speaking Muslims, a minority in the rest of Yugoslavia. But tensions rose between ethnic Albanians calling for more political representation within Yugoslavia and Kosovo's ethnic Serbs, who feared increasing marginalization on what they saw as sacred Serbian land.

AP

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic bows to the Serbian flag during a ceremony at Belgrade's Monument To The Unknown Soldier in 1996.

After Serbian socialist Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in the 1980s, he tossed gunpowder on the smoldering fire of nationalism. In 1989, he met with Serbs inside Kosovo who complained of oppression from the Albanian majority. Outside the meeting, violence broke out between Serbs and ethnic Albanian police. Milosevic then marched outside and promised the angry crowd that "no one will beat you again." He then imposed direct control over Kosovo and installed Serb police in the region.

Joel Robine/AFP

KLA fighters guarding a railway in the village of Terde, west of Pristina.

In 1991, after years of more measured resistance to conditions imposed by Belgrade, ethnic Albanians inside Kosovo formed a network of militants called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) who sought to join Kosovo with a "greater Albania."

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Serb police run into position after gunfire rang out near their checkpoint in the village of Kriljevo in 1998.

In the summer of 1998, KLA fighters killed dozens of Serb police and civilians. Yugoslav-backed authorities responded by rolling on villages with armored vehicles and driving ethnic Albanians from their homes and setting houses ablaze.

Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

A line of coffins draped in the Albanian flag streams through a crowd of more than 10,000 mourners in Racak.

In January 1999, after KLA fighters killed four Serbs in an attack on a police post, Yugoslav government forces cordoned off the nearby village of Racak. When international observers were able to enter, they found the aftermath of a massacre: 45 ethnic Albanian civilians dead, including women and a child.

Joel Robine/AFP

Kosovar Albanians cross the border into Albania in early 1999.

As media attention focused on the spiraling violence and streams of refugees, pressure mounted for international intervention. NATO then bypassed the United Nations to authorize air strikes unless Milosevic agreed to get "Serbs out, peacekeepers in, refugees back [to Kosovo]." Milosevic refused the terms, and on March 24, 1999, NATO planes heavy with missiles took off from an Italian air base and banked toward rump Yugoslavia.

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

A man leads his daughter away from destroyed buildings after NATO air strikes hammered the center of Pristina, the Kosovo capital.

The first missiles smashed into infrastructure linked to the Milosevic government.

Sergey Velichkina/TASS

Belgrades Usce Tower, home of the Communist headquarters, ablaze after it was hit with multiple missiles on April 21. The building was later rebuilt with a 36-meter extension.

Air strikes were predicted to bring Milosevic to the negotiating table within a few days, but an outraged public rallied behind Milosevic. Simultaneously, the conflict in Kosovo ramped up as Serb security forces moved through Kosovar villages on a spree of ethnic cleansing.

Radu Sigheti/Reuters

Yugoslav soldiers look at the wreckage of a bridge hit by 10 NATO missiles in the village of Murino, in what is now Montenegro. Six locals, including three children, were killed during the attack.

Sergey Velichkin/TASS

The main bridge over the Danube in the city of Novi Sad, in what is now Serbia, lies broken after NATO bombardment in April 1999.

Darki Dozet

People crossing the Danube in Novi Sad after three of the citys bridges were destroyed by NATO missiles.

As civilian casualties mounted and the violence in Kosovo raged on, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told U.S. President Bill Clinton that NATO was "losing the propaganda battle...big-time."

Emil Vas/Reuters

The smoldering wreckage of a passenger train after being hit by two missiles launched from a NATO F-15. According to NATO, the jet had been targeting the bridge but both missiles struck the train. At least 20 commuters were killed.

Emil Vas/Reuters

The aftermath of a missile strike that gutted the government-run studios of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in Belgrade. Sixteen people died amid the rubble.

Finally, in June 1999, after some 500 civilians had been killed in air strikes, Milosevic agreed to allow international troops into Kosovo.

Ami Vitale/Getty Images

U.S. troops receive a rapturous welcome as they roll into the Kosovar town of Gjilan.

As the peacekeepers and Albanian refugees moved into the region, Serb police and civilians frequently moved out.

Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP

Young Kosovar Albanians make obscene gestures at a busload of Serb police as they are bused out of the Kosovo region.

Djordje Kojadinovic/AFP

A scene from in front of the Serbian parliament during the Bulldozer Revolution that led to Milosevic standing down.

In October 2000, with UN indictments for war crimes and crimes against humanity already issued for his actions in Kosovo, Slobodan Milosevic was toppled amid violent demonstrations. Soon afterward, he was extradited to The Hague, where he died in 2006 while still on trial.

Jack Guez/AFP

Ethnic Albanians (foreground) and Serbs in a face-off across the river that bisects the ethnically divided city of Mitrovice in February 2000. Today the town remains roughly half Albanian and half Serb.

In 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Its sovereignty has been recognized by 110 countries, while 77 other states have opposed the declaration. Around 4,000 NATO troops are still in Kosovo.Late last year, RFE/RL met Shehla who lives in a village near Peshawar in northern Pakistan. She dressed as a man so she could work on local building sites to pay the rent. Now, thanks to donations from RFE/RL's audience, she's set up a business selling women's clothing door-to-door.A prominent Pakistani religious scholar has survived an assassination attempt that killed two guards and critically injured another cleric in the southern city of Karachi, police said.



The attack came as the cleric and former Shari'a judge of the country's Supreme Court, Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, was heading to a mosque to lead Friday prayers.



The city's police chief, Amir Shaikh, called the attack a conspiracy to sabotage peace in Karachi and the country.



Usmani and his fellow cleric, Maulana Amir Shahab, were traveling in two cars, when at least four gunmen on two motorcycles opened fire and fled, police said.

Shahab sustained multiple bullet wounds in the head and chest and has been placed on a ventilator after being transported to a hospital, medical officials said.



Prime Minister Imran Khan issued a "strongly worded condemnation" of the incident, a statement by Khan's office said.

With reporting by Reuters and dawn.comTwelve-year-old Tasya wrote to Vladimir Putin in December, asking the president to help her overworked mother. After RFE/RL reported on her story, strangers sent money and gifts to the family. And that is when Tasya's mother says their real problems began.KOMSOMOLSK-NA-AMURE, Russia -- Yulia Tsvetkova thought she was doing something useful when she launched a hashtag campaign last summer with the slogan "A woman is not a doll" (#__).

"This project is aimed at reminding us that women are living beings and that our bodies are not ideal and are subject to changes," she wrote at the time. "Women are not dolls. And that is wonderful."



She illustrated her campaign with six hand-drawn images with texts like "Real women have body hair, and that is normal" or "Real women menstruate, and that is normal."

But on March 21, the 25-year-old artist and activist in the Far Eastern city of Komsomolsk-na-Amure was summoned by police for questioning.



"As I understood it, they are gathering information," Tsvetkova told RFE/RL. "It is a new complaint and a new case. They threatened me with prosecution, but for now they aren't saying any more."

The problem, she said, is that police received an anonymous complaint that the images were pornographic and that Tsvetkova is "corrupting children" by posting them online and in the Merak children's theater that she operates.



"Do you see any pornography here?" she wrote in a post on the VK social-media site on March 22 in which she described her interrogation and reposted the images in question.



"I propose adding to the hastag Feminism Is Not Extremism (#) a new one -- Body-Positive Is Not Extremism (#)," she wrote. "Because if they have already started coming after images of real women, then we cannot be silent. But be careful when you are drawing body-positive sketches. I didn't think they could find anything provocative in this -- but it turns out that they can if they really want to. Be careful!"



The body-positive pornography accusation is not Tsvetkova's first run-in with the law this month. On March 14, she was questioned for three hours by the local office of the Interior Ministry's anti-extremism center about a youth theater festival that she was organizing. Her interrogation came a couple of days after police appeared at a festival rehearsal and questioned the children performing in it.



The planned festival featured productions on themes including nonviolence and anti-bullying, but police were focused on one called Pink And Blue, a performance about gender stereotypes.



"It is about pressure, about little boys and girls," Tsvetkova said of the show. "It is about the fact that one's personality is more important than stereotypes."



The name of the performance, she said, was the brainchild of an 11-year-old actor in the troupe.



In Russian slang, however, "pink" and "blue" can be used to refer to lesbians and gay men.

Officials accused Tsvetkova of illegally trying to hold a gay-pride event under the guise of a youth theater festival.



"The administration accuses me of bringing depravity from Europe because I lived there," Tsvetkova told RFE/RL. "And that is an argument they are using to shut the festival down. It really is the Stone Age."



One 15-year-old actor told RFE/RL that he felt "defenseless and stupid" during his questioning.



"They kept asking the same things: 'Did you ever discuss LGBT issues?'" he said, referring to the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people. "'Did Yulia tell you about that? Did you learn about gays from her?' I told them that anything I know about that I learned from the Internet, the media, my friends, and that it never came up in the theater. But they kept asking me over and over."

The festival, scheduled for March 16-17, was canceled on March 15 when the owner of the venue pulled the plug. Tsvetkova said he was pressured by the administration -- an accusation that municipal spokesman Ivan Lavrentyev denied.



"The man doesn't work in any structure connected with the city, so how could we pressure him?" Lavrentyev told RFE/RL. "As far as I know, no one from the administration of the city was involved in this. We heard that [festival organizers] have problems with law enforcement. We know that. But that is not our job."



The festival was scheduled to be held in February, but the owner of the original venue also got cold feet and organizers were forced to relocate the event to another location on the outskirts of the city.The White House has rejected a request from three congressional committees seeking information on private conversations between President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last summer.



White House counsel Pat Cipollone sent a letter to the Democratic chairmen of the three committees in the House of Representatives on March 21.



The president "must be free to engage in discussions with foreign leaders without fear that those communications will be disclosed," Cipollone said.



In a letter earlier this month, three committees asked for details on Trump and Putin's conversations in person and by phone.



They also asked for documents related to the conversations and whether Trump tried to conceal any evidence of them. And they asked for an interview with the interpreter who was present at the meeting.



Since Democrats won control of the House in November elections they have become increasingly assertive in investigating the Trump White House.



At the July Helsinki meeting, Trump stunned many Republican and Democratic congressional lawmakers when he contradicted the findings of the U.S. intelligence community about Russia's reported meddling in U.S. political affairs.



In a later post to Twitter, he also called the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller a "rigged witch hunt."

Based on reporting by AP

U.S. President Donald Trump has said that all Islamic State (IS)-held territory in Syria has been eliminated, even as reports of continued fighting came from the battlefield of Baghouz.

Trump said on March 22 that "it's about time" that IS no longer controlled territory in the region, and he showed a before-and-after map to reporters to demonstrate the extent of jihadist losses during his presidency.

Earlier, Trump's spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, said that "the territorial caliphate has been eliminated in Syria." Asked by reporters if IS had lost 100 percent of its territory, Sanders replied, "Yes."

However, a spokesman for the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said that despite the White House's assurances, clashes were ongoing.

"Heavy fighting continues around mount Baghouz right now to finish off whatever remains of [Islamic State]," Mustafa Bali, head of the SDF media office, said on Twitter on March 22.

A U.S.-led coalition has helped the SDF drive IS from swathes of northeastern Syria and down the Euphrates Valley since 2015 with air strikes and special forces assistance.

SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel said earlier on March 22 that there were still IS fighters and women and children hiding in caves near Baghouz.

The complete fall of Baghouz would mark the demise of the IS group's self-declared caliphate, which at its height stretched across large parts of Syria and Iraq.

Meanwhile, Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar Jaafari said that IS was not yet finished in Syria. He said it was the Syrian government backed by Russia and Iran that was genuinely battling it, not the United States.

Some IS fighters remain holed up in the central Syrian desert, an area entirely surrounded by the Syrian Army.

Based on reporting by AP, AFP, and ReutersEuropean Council President Donald Tusk has said the EU is holding its line on the Golan Heights despite U.S. President Donald Trump's statement that Israeli sovereignty over the territory should be recognized by Washington.

"The EU's position is well-known and has not changed," Tusk told a news conference on March 22 when asked to comment on Trump's remarks. The European Union does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the area, which it captured from Syria in 1967.

Turkey, Iran, and Syria have condemned Trump's statement, while Russia voiced hope Trump's comment will remain "just a call."

Trump said it was time that the United States "fully" recognized Israel's sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in 1967.



The Golan Heights is of "critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and regional stability," Trump tweeted on March 21.



Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on March 22 that Trump's move had brought the region to the edge of a new crisis. "We cannot allow the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights," Erdogan told a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.



Syria's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by state news agency SANA that Damascus "condemns in the strongest terms the irresponsible statements of [Trump] regarding the occupied Syrian Golan."



Trump's remark "affirms the blind bias of the United States to the Zionist occupation entity and its unlimited support for aggressive behavior," SANA added.



Syria and Israel have fought several direct and proxy wars over the past decades and have never made a peace deal.



Iran, one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's main military backers, condemned Trump's remark as dangerous.

"Trump's personal and ill-considered decision is dangerous and will only lead to further crises in the Middle East," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said on March 22.

The Kremlin voiced hope that Trump's statement would not be enacted. "It is just a call for now. Let's hope it will remain a call," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call.



Israel captured the 1,800-square-kilometer Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War.

In 1981, Israel extended its laws to the region, effectively annexing it, in a move that has not been recognized by the international community.

Based on reporting by AP and ReutersThe United States has hit Tehran with new sanctions, targeting 31 Iranian scientists, technicians, and companies it says have been involved in the country's nuclear and missile research and development programs.

In a statement on March 22, the U.S. State Department said the 14 individuals and 17 entities targeted were affiliated with Iran's Organization for Defense Innovation and Research.

It said the group, known by its Persian acronym SPND, was "established by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head of the regime's past nuclear weapons program."

President Donald Trump's administration "continues to hold the Iranian regime accountable for activities that threaten the region's stability and harm the Iranian people. This includes ensuring that Iran never develops a nuclear weapon," the statement said.

The U.S. Treasury Department said that among those targeted was the Shahid Karimi group, which it said works on missile and explosive-related projects for the SPND, and four associated individuals.

The government "is taking decisive action against actors at all levels in connection with [the SPND] who have supported the Iranian regime's defense sector," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.

"Anyone considering dealing with the Iranian defense industry in general, and SPND in particular, risks professional, personal, and financial isolation," he said.

The Treasury Department said the sanctions -- which freeze any U.S. assets of those named and bans U.S. dealings with them -- target current SPND subordinate groups, supporters, front companies, and associated officials.

The announcement of new sanctions came as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Beirut warning Lebanese officials to curb the influence of the Iran-backed Hizballah movement.

Pompeo said that Hizballah is a terrorist organization and should not be allowed to set policies or wield power despite its presence in Lebanon's parliament and government.

On March 21, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Tehran intended to boost its defense capabilities despite pressure from the United States and its allies to restrict the country's ballistic-missile program.

The United States has urged the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran over its recent ballistic-missile test and the launches of two satellites, saying they violated Security Council resolutions.

On March 7, acting U.S. Ambassador to the UN Jonathan Cohen condemned what he called "Iran's destabilizing activities" in a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Cohen called on Tehran "to cease immediately all activities related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons."

The U.S. envoy's statement cited a 2015 UN resolution that "called upon" Iran to refrain for up to eight years from tests of ballistic missiles designed to deliver nuclear weapons.

The United States has reimposed sanctions on Iran after withdrawing from a landmark 2015 agreement under which Tehran agreed to restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Trump said that Tehran was not living up to the "spirit" of the accord because of its support of militants in the region and for continuing to test nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

Tehran has denied it supports terrorist activity and says its missile and nuclear programs are strictly for civilian purposes.

With reporting by Reuters and APNFP, an insurance broker and consultant, acquired BD Capital Partners, LLC, a Mason, Ohio-based insurance broker that offers property and casualty solutions to clients across the Midwest.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

The acquisition expands NFPs property and casualty capabilities and presence in the Midwest.

BD Capital serves as an advisor in designing personalized insurance solutions to meet clients needs. Former principals Brian Young and Dave Hollenbaugh will join NFP as senior vice presidents, reporting to Mike Schneider, president of NFPs Central region.

NFP is a insurance broker and consultant that provides employee benefits, property and casualty, retirement and individual solutions through licensed subsidiaries and affiliates. Its expertise is matched by commitment to each clients goals and is enhanced by investments in innovative technologies in the insurance brokerage and consulting space.

The group has more than 4,700 employees and global capabilities.

FinSMEs

21/03/2019Rent the Runway, Inc., a NYC-based clothing rental company for women, raised $125m in funding.

The round was co-led by Franklin Templeton Investments and Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Hamilton Lane Advisors, on behalf of New York State Common Retirement Fund, and existing investors.

J.P. Morgan acted as the sole placement agent on the deal.

This funding round brought total equity raised to approximately $337m since inception and valued Rent the Runway at $1 billion.

The company intends to use the funds to scale its subscription business and proprietary reverse logistics technology.

Founded in 2009 by Jennifer Hyman, CEO, Rent the Runway enables women to rent clothing via a subscription platform. The company carries apparel, accessories and home decor from over 600 designer partners, has built in-house proprietary technology and a reverse logistics operation.

It has five retail stores, 11 million community members and employs nearly 1,800 people.

FinSMEs

21/03/2019Restricted beach access a problem around Mexico

Cancun, Q.R.  Officials with the government of Mexico say people cannot continue to confuse a concession with privatization, preventing free beach access to the public.

Dr. Simon Levy-Dabbah, Subsecretario of Planeacion y Politica Turistica del Gobierno de Mexico says one cannot continue to confuse a concession with the right to prevent the passage of citizens to privatize public access to beaches.

Mexicos tourism policy will be in accordance with what the law says, he confirmed.

In many areas around the state of Quintana Roo, beach access points in Playa del Carmen, Tulum, Xcacel, Xcacelito and Chemuyil are only some of the places where businesses with concessions have attempted to make their beach private by either preventing access, or preventing the public from walking on the beach, which is a federal zone.

Levy-Dabbah said that no national beach will restrict the way to what is owned by all Mexicans.

Dr. Simon Levy-Dabbah

Restricted beach access is an issue in other areas of the country including Manzanillo. Levy-Dabbah said that public access for pedestrians to Las Brisas Beach in the tourist city of Manzanillo, was closed several years ago.

Three months ago, this access was made, but we will work with the municipal president of Manzanillo, Griselda Martinez and the Manzanillo API to reopen the initial access, he said.

No beach in Mexico will restrict the way to what is owned by all Mexicans. Free public beach access. The beaches of Mexico belong to everyone, he stressed.Skymind, a San Francisco, CA-based open-core data science company, secured $11.5m in Series A financing.

The round was led by TransLink Capital, with participation from ServiceNow, Sumitomos Presidio Ventures, UpHonest Capital, and DCode with GovTech Fund and early investors Y Combinator, Tencent, Mandra Capital, Hemi Ventures, and GMO Ventures. As part of the new financing, Toshiya Otani, co-founder and managing director of TransLink Capital, will join the Skymind board of directors.

The company, which has raised $17.9m in funding, intends to use the funds to accelerate customer acquisition, building out its sales teams in North America and Asia.

Led by Chris Nicholson, founding CEO, Skymind is an enterprise AI company offering an open-core machine-learning platform, commercial support and training for implementing AI solutions. Its technology enables enterprises to build high-performance, predictive AI stacks. Specifically, the Skymind Intelligence Layer (SKIL) brings machine learning to a companys big data stack and computing resources, whether that data and computing power is on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment or on edge devices like mobile phones, drones, autonomous vehicles and healthcare sensors. Its Eclipse Deeplearning4j is a widely used AI framework for Java and Scala, and serves as a bridge between the Python data science community and big data tools like Spark and Kafka.

Skymind currently has more than 40 employees and more than 20 enterprise customers, including Softbank and France Telecoms Orange.

FinSMEs

22/03/2019Global technology company SoftBank Group Corp. has launched the SoftBank Innovation Fund, the technology fund focused exclusively on the Latin American market.

The company has also created the SoftBank Latin America Local Hub, a new operating group that will partner with SoftBank portfolio companies helping them enter Latin America, navigate the local markets and broaden their geographic reach in the region.

The SoftBank Innovation Fund will invest throughout Latin America, including in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. Industries of particular focus for the Fund in the region include:

 e-commerce,

 digital financial services,

 healthcare,

 mobility and insurance,

 among others.

Marcelo Claure will serve as Chief Executive Officer of SoftBank Latin America, responsible for overseeing the new fund, its investments and operations. Mr. Claure will also continue to serve in his current roles as Chief Operating Officer of SoftBank Group Corp., Chief Executive Officer of SoftBank Group International and Executive Chairman of Sprint Corporation.

SBG has committed an initial $2 billion to the SoftBank Innovation Fund and will serve as the General Partner. No decision has been made as to the location of the SoftBank Innovation Funds headquarters.

The rapid economic development of the Latin American market, coupled with the fact that it represents 10% of the worlds population and 8% of the worlds GDP (two times the GDP of India and half that of China), present significant growth opportunities for rapid technology deployment at scale and disruptive innovation. Examples include:

Rapidly Growing Middle Class : Since 2000, over 50 million people in the region have entered the middle class, generating increased disposable income.

: Since 2000, over 50 million people in the region have entered the middle class, generating increased disposable income. Internet and Smartphone Penetration : A drastic increase in Internet and smartphone penetration has led to a digitization of daily life; Latin Americas more than 375 million Internet and 250 million smartphone users outpaces the United States.

: A drastic increase in Internet and smartphone penetration has led to a digitization of daily life; Latin Americas more than 375 million Internet and 250 million smartphone users outpaces the United States. Consumer Behavior : A major shift in consumer behavior to a focus on online shopping; retail e-commerce sales have grown from $29.8 billion in 2015 to $54.0 billion in 2018.

: A major shift in consumer behavior to a focus on online shopping; retail e-commerce sales have grown from $29.8 billion in 2015 to $54.0 billion in 2018. Digitalization of Financial Services : Banking activities are increasingly being handled online, but approximately 70% (400 million people) of Latin Americans remain unbanked or underbanked.

: Banking activities are increasingly being handled online, but approximately 70% (400 million people) of Latin Americans remain unbanked or underbanked. Transportation Infrastructure : The region suffers from severely underdeveloped public transport; from 1992 through 2010, the region invested only 0.5% of GDP in transportation, compared to the global average of 1.6%.

Dense Urban Areas: The region is highly urbanized, with 79% of the population living in urban areas, compared to 48% in China and 29% in India.

: The region suffers from severely underdeveloped public transport; from 1992 through 2010, the region invested only 0.5% of GDP in transportation, compared to the global average of 1.6%. Dense Urban Areas: The region is highly urbanized, with 79% of the population living in urban areas, compared to 48% in China and 29% in India. Healthcare Solutions: Services are fragmented and incidences of non-communicable diseases are expected to rise; new cases of cancer per year and the number of people suffering from diabetes are expected to grow by 66% and 60%, respectively, from 2012 to 2030.

SBG believes these factors contribute to the creation of an attractive market for emerging technology companies and entrepreneurs, and the need for patient capital to support them on their journeys.

The SoftBank Group is comprised of the holding company SoftBank Group Corp. (TOKYO: 9984) and its global portfolio of companies, which includes advanced telecommunications, Internet services, AI, smart robotics, IoT and clean energy technology providers. In September 2016, Arm Limited, the worlds leading semiconductor IP company, joined the SoftBank Group. SoftBank Group Corp. is invested in the SoftBank Vision Fund, which plans to invest up to $100 billion in the global businesses and technologies that will enable the next stage of the Information Revolution.

FinSMEs

22/03/2019Grace Wilson (second right) with SAS: Who Dares Wins contestants, from left, Mark Peart, Rick Stevens and Esmee Gummer.

EXPERIENCED hikers and novices alike came together for a walk in the Peaks aimed at promoting mental health, wellbeing and fitness.

Rotherhams Mark Peart, winner of Channel 4s SAS: Who Dares Wins, was among 88 walkers who embarked on an eight-mile hike amid wet and windy conditions.

The walk, which took in Kinder Scout and Jacobs Ladder, was devised by Rotherham travel blogger and businesswoman Grace Wilson (31), with help from Sheffield-based adventurer and photographer Pete Crossland.

Grace runs travel brand Yugen Explore from her home on Thackeray Avenue, Rawmarsh, and organised the walk to promote the benefits of being outdoors.

She said: Yugen Explore is all about inspiring people to go on adventures, whether close to home or the other side of the world.

We want everyone to experience what we have and enjoy life by making the most of our beautiful planet.

This year, I want to get as many people as possible outdoors and make the most of our beautiful landscapes.

I know how important it is for mental health, wellbeing and general fitness and how that it can be difficult to find people to go hiking with, so I want to bring together people that have a love of the outdoors.

Grace won support from mapping firm Ordnance Survey, which promoted the hike as part of its #getoutside campaign.

I was amazed at the turnout, especially as the weather forecast wasnt good, said Grace.

However, these total strangers that met through social media all joined together on a hiking adventure.

We had people come from as far north as Inverness in Scotland and as far south as Kent.

Grace won backing from friend Mark, an advocate for mental health.

Fellow SAS contestants Esmee Gummer and Rick Stevens also joined the walk.

Grace said: We had everyone from experienced adventurers, to my sister who is a complete hiking novice.

The feedback has been amazing and everyone that came loved it. The weather only added to the sense of adventure.

Some said joining the group was totally out of their comfort zone but they were so glad they did it and cant wait for the next one.

Grace is planning another hike in the Lake District in June. Details can be found on the Yugen Explore Facebook page.Asaduddin Owaisi

Hyderabad, Mar 22: The government should appeal against Swami Aseemanand's acquittal in the Samjhauta blast case if Prime Minister Narendra Modi was really the "chowkidar" of the country, AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi has said. Attacking Modi's "main bhi chowkidar" (I too a watchman) campaign, Owaisi at an election rally late last night said, "What kind of a chowkidar are you? 25 Indians are also among the dead in that (Samjhauta blast). Bomb blast is a terrorist offence.

How are you a chowkidar?" A special court in Haryana's Panchkula Wednesday acquitted Aseemanand and three others in the Samjhauta Express blast case which had left 68 people, mostly Pakistanis, dead in 2007. "If Modi was really a 'chowkidar' he should immediately announce that the government would appeal against the court verdict," Owaisi said. The blast in the India-Pakistan train took place near Panipat in Haryana on February 18, 2007, when it was on its way to Attari in Amritsar, the last station on the Indian side.

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"What kind of a chowkidar are you? Why are you afraid of Aseemanand? Why this love? came to know that Aseemanand was associated with RSS at one point of time," the Hyderabad lawmaker said. Referring to the attacks in Pulwama, Uri and the Air Force base in Pathankot, Owaisi sought to know what kind of "chowkidar" was Modi. "This country does not need a chowkidar. This country needs an honest prime minister," Owaisi, who is seeking reelection from the Hyderabad Lok Sabha seat, said.

Swami Aseemanand

"The country needs a person who understands the Constitution, whose spirit is secularism, justice, fraternity and liberty," he added. Owaisi reiterated that China blocking a UN resolution to designate Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as global terrorist was a failure of the NDA government's "jhoola (swing) diplomacy". He was referring to Chinese president Xi Jinping and Modi sitting in a swing during their visit to Ahmedabad.

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He slammed BJP chief Amit Shah and some Union ministers for allegedly giving different figures on the number of dead in the Balakot air strikes. Accusing RSS of seeking to weaken the country's composite culture, he said the Hyderabad parliament seat "fights to shatter that". Owaisi said he knew Modi spent 25-30 years of his life in the RSS. "The books written by RSS veterans indicate that they were against the composite culture of the country," he claimed.

"In his first speech, Narendra Modi stood up and said in Parliament that we got authority after 1,200 years of slavery. "An MP was sitting next to me, may be from the Congress, he asked me Owaisi saab, what is this 1,200 years. I said he (Modi) was referring to the time when Muslims were rulers of Delhi. The prime minister said that (period) was also a phase of slavery," he said. Owaisi asked if the period when Taj Mahal and the Red Fort were built was also a phase of slavery.India boycotts Pak Day event

New Delhi, Mar 22: The government Friday decided to boycott the Pakistan National Day event to be held at its high commission here as Kashmiri separatist leaders were also invited, an official said. Indian government officials will stay away from the reception scheduled on the eve of Pakistan National Day, which is celebrated on March 23, the official said.

Pakistan National Day

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"The government of India has decided not to send any official representative to the Pakistan National Day event at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi," the official said. The decision has been taken because Pakistan has decided to invite separatist leaders from Jammu and Kashmir to the event, the official added.Pak Prime Minister Imran Khan

Islamabad, Mar 22: There was no room for "jihadi outfits and jihadi culture" in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan has said amidst intense global pressure on his government to rein in the terrorist outfits operating from its soil after the Pulwama attack. Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district in February 14.

India launched a counter-terror operation in Balakot. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured its pilot, who was handed over to India on March 1. Talking to editors and senior journalists here, Khan said that India's NDA government wants to win the general election based on its politics of hatred against Pakistan, The Express Tribune reported.

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He warned that the security risk at the Line of Control (LoC) persists until elections are held in India and asked the nation to be prepared at all times. The armed forces of the country are ever ready and would give a befitting response in case of any military aggression, the prime minister said. Khan said that all the political parties have agreed to the National Action Plan and by now the militant groups have been proscribed.

PM Imran says no room for 'jihadi outfits and culture'

Further action was being taken against them as his government could not allow any such activity on the soil of Pakistan. Tracing the history of jihadi outfits and "jihadi culture", he said "these groups have existed since the days of the US-led Afghan war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and have operated from here for decades", Dawn news reported. He said that there was no room now for any such group in the country, as Pakistan would like the world to believe that it was not only a peace-loving country but it was sincere in eradicating this culture of "jihadism" and terrorism through short-term and long-term policies.

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Khan said that India was trying to push Pakistan in the blacklist of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and if that happened, the country would be facing a lot of economic problems. The international terror financing watchdog FATF last month decided to continue the 'Grey' listing of Pakistan for its failure to stop funding of terrorist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamat-ud-Dawa.

The political parties have agreed to the National Action Plan

In June 2018, Pakistan was placed in the 'Grey' list and given a 27-point action plan by the FATF. This Plan was reviewed as the last Plenary in October 2018 and for the second time in this week-long meeting. Speaking about the law and order situation in the country, Khan said that banned organisations should have been eliminated a long time ago, but it was his government which was taking action against them.

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He said that the government was spending huge amount of money to bring them into the mainstream. The US has warned Pakistan that another terror attack on India will prove to be "extremely problematic" as it asked Islamabad to take more "concrete and sustained" actions to rein in terror groups including the JeM and the LeT.So often, we talk about people moving to Luxembourg and discovering the many delights of living in a smaller country. But what about those who do leave? Do you end up pining for anything?

Speaking from personal experience, moving away from the country you grew up can sometimes be a relieving experience, but also give you pangs of homesickness. Whilst I definitely needed a change of scenery after spending my first 20 years in Luxembourg, there are things I look back and miss. These can range from the smallest, most innocuous things to aspects that are emblematic of the Grand Duchy at large.

1. Good bread and pastries. This is obviously a byproduct of moving to the United Kingdom, but I miss being able to have good bread as a given in supermarkets, rather than plastic-packaged bread that never goes mouldy (what is in those things ?!) As an aside, I miss Boxemannchen, sweet pretzels, and more.

1.1. As a specific subsection, Luxembourgish eclairs filled with custard. Whipped cream does not make a sufficient substitute.

Don't they make you salivate?!

2. The peace and quiet of Findel airport. Hear me out here - as someone who travels to and from the Grand Duchy a lot, no airport is quite like Luxembourg's airport. It's small, you get through security quickly, and best of all - nobody gets all in your space. Having flown from Luxembourg to connect at Heathrow for five hours, the only place I've found where you don't have people all up in your space at Heathrow are the loos.

3. The National Day/Grand Duke's birthday* celebrations. Whilst I am not the most patriotic of individuals, I do really enjoy the celebrations on the eve of National Day, 22 June. Whether you brave the masses and go into Luxembourg City or stick to your local municipal celebrations, I've found this to be one of the highlights of living in Luxembourg. Whilst fireworks are dropping in popularity, the festive atmosphere is one that is well worth soaking in, alongside the traditional parade.

* I personally dislike referring to this as the Grand Duke's birthday on the technicality that it is an official birthday and not Grand Duke Henri's actual birthday.

 kewl/ Pixabay

4. On the note of summer, Steinsel strawberries - the best strawberries you'll find. I came back from university one June with a friend and while we were in the area, we bought a punnet of strawberries as I had proclaimed they were the best. She agreed.

5. Being able to go into Luxembourg City and see at least one person you know. For some more introverted/socially awkward people, this can actually be a nightmare. Granted, I can sometimes not be in a social mood and don't want to see people, but upon reflection, sometimes it is nicer to always recognise someone when you're out and about.

6. Pizza. I know this is an incredibly food-centric article, but hey, Luxembourg's pizzas are wonderful? Due to the large Italian community that has established itself in Luxembourg, there is a wealth of pizzerias. And the pizzas are divine, thin-crusted, and not greasy. This is difficult to find in the UK and in France, for example. As my Italian best friend has ranted to me, French pizzerias put emmental on their pizzas - which is a massive no-no. Mozzarella is the only cheese appropriate for a pizza base.

7. Cheap public transport: this will become moot (or even better) once public transport is made free in 2020, but the cost of public transport in Luxembourg has always been incredibly reasonable. This is something anyone who has used the UK's railways can attest to - 4 and you can travel through the whole country for that day, if you so desired. As a teenager, having a Jumbo card was also incredibly useful. In the municipality I lived in, you would get 25 subsidised. Before the Jumbo card rose to 75, you could have unlimited travel for 25 a year.

8. A good old fest. Apple fest, strawberry fest, potato fest,... Luxembourgers love celebrating their produce and I sometimes fondly miss those small town festivals. Granted, I have mixed feelings about being awoken by the Hammelsmarsch... but you can definitely say it's a uniquely Luxembourgish experience! And if we're being honest, I'd rather hear that than the sound of bagpipes waking me up.

9. The markets. I love Luxembourg's Christmas markets, which seem more authentic than British ones. Granted, my fondness comes from having grown up going to the Christmas markets, but I also think the Christmas markets in Luxembourg manage to bustling without completely overwhelming. After all, they're no fun when they're too busy. The Octave market is equally enjoyable, even with the lack of mulled wine about!

10. The possibilities you have. Granted, if you desperately want a big city experience, then you can get a train to Paris or Brussels, but everything else seems to be really close by. You want to wander around the forests? Done. You want to go to a lake? Done. You want to explore the vineyards along the banks of the Moselle? Done. You want to go to Germany/France/Belgium? Also easily done. An old castle? Not only done, but several to choose from! Okay, there may not be a beach in close proximity, but there are plenty of options if you want to immerse yourself in nature and have a change of scenery. You can even go explore Luxembourg's many film locations.

Vianden Castle. /  YvonneH/ Pixabay

This is by no means an exclusive list and I'm sure I will think of more. People who have moved away from Luxembourg, please let us know what you miss in the Facebook comments!

--

Nathalie Lodhi is an editor and translator for RTL Today, who now lives in Edinburgh.Prime minister Xavier Bettel discusses the uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the UK's Brexit negotiations.

Update:

22.03.2019The financial market is currently easier to reach than ever before. The only thing that financial experts or hobby traders have to do is create a user account with an online broker.

This gives you access to numerous financial products, trading opportunities, tips and tricks as well as technical analysis tools. The easy accessibility of the market as well as the good prospects for profits have led to more and more people registering with an online broker. The great demand has, of course, led to a large supply of suppliers in the meantime. It is not unusual for a newcomer to the market not to be sure which broker is safe and reputable. For this reason, the following article explains the most important characteristics of a high-quality provider and the most important facts about trading on the financial market.

Protection through state regulation

The most important feature when searching for an online broker is the license. This is the indicator for payment. As a customer you can be sure that the online broker as well as his offer is secure. They are permanently inspected by various state authorities and receive a license for their services. This is not unique or life-long, but can also be withdrawn under circumstances. So if you see a valid license on the website of an online broker, you can be sure that it is up to date. The licence granted by a regulatory authority certifies the seriousness and trustworthiness of the company in terms of its offer, services, data and, of course, financial resources.

The quality seals for a safe and good offer

A further quality feature, which exists for the security of the offer and for the customer, are the test seals and certificates. These come from different public and private instances. Similar to a seal of quality on a product in a supermarket, the certificates issued by an online broker provide information about the range and other services offered by the platform. For example, certificates are issued for good customer support, a wide range of financial products or if the information provided on the site is particularly extensive. The certificates received are usually displayed together with the licenses directly on the start page, so that visitors can be sure at first glance that they have found a good and reputable provider. Actually a matter of course, since that is the sign of quality.

These signs can be seen as a warm sign

Some of the online brokers advertise with people in chic vehicles, under palm trees or in large homes. Of course, it is not impossible to get rich with trading on the financial market, but it is a long and complex undertaking with many hurdles and obstacles. Therefore, promises of large profits without risk are to be seen as a warning sign, since earning money on the financial market is not easy, of course. If a vendor does not display warnings or notices on the platform, an important component for a good relationship between the customer and the vendor is missing  trust. Other signs are huge bonus payments of 500 euros and more or even generous bonuses. Even the big online brokers dont have the money to give it away. This is usually a lure method to then expose the customer to further rip-offs later on. An example of this is blocking the user account without warning or justification. This usually happens when a trader is successful in the market and regularly makes big profits. Thus the money made goes into the pockets of the providers and not into the bank account of the trader who had earned the money. More information about fraud on the Internet, what signs and dangers there are and how to protect yourself against unsafe providers can be found on Asktraders.

The provision of information

Trading and participation in the financial market is risky. However, with the right information and tools, it is possible to minimise the risk. The financial products are traded differently. For example, by buying a share you can invest the money over the long term, sell it again after an increase in value or bet on price developments. In order to be able to estimate in which direction the price will go and whether the investment of a share purchase is worthwhile, one must be informed about the market and its influences. This includes dealing with political, economic and social issues and being able to evaluate them. A good broker provides the most important information on his own platform. A major advantage of this is that the news and topic blogs are accompanied by further assessments from experienced brokers as to how these developments will be reflected in the financial market.

Tools for successful trading

In addition to the news provided, there are further tips and tricks for successful trading available on the platform of a reputable online broker. These mostly come from experienced traders who describe their first experiences on the market, how they made mistakes, what they learned and how to proceed in order to act successfully in the long run. This also includes explanations of the technical analysis tools. Each tool analyses the market and the chart in different ways and gives hints on the price development by the result. Thus it is possible to have the market analysed by technical aids and to further minimize the risk. However, one must be able to interpret the results correctly. A good online broker will explain in detail how to use and interpret the analysis tools.

Finding the right broker

In order to make the search for a reputable provider easier and faster, it is advisable to search for online brokers on comparison sites. The above link, for example, lists the major brokers with the most important information. Ideally, only providers with a valid license and certificates can be found there. This means that the most important safety criterion has already been met. In addition, there is a detailed test report for each individual provider in which the quality of the offer, the security of the platform, the mass of information and the provision of analysis tools are individually evaluated and explained. One characteristic to be taken into account when making your selection is the demo account. With this you can trade all financial products and use analysis tools, but with this account you only trade with virtual money. Thus, the risk factor can be reduced to zero and you can gain initial experience without risking losses.

Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading.MOREAU, N.Y.  A New York State parole absconder was charged during a traffic stop on Route 9 in the Town of Moreau with drug related felonies and for lying about his identity.

On March 19, troopers from the Wilton Barracks conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle in the Town of Moreau. After interviewing the female driver and male passenger, a vehicle search was conducted and a crack pipe was located. Both parties were arrested and transported for processing.

Wendy Hines, 46, of Hudson, was processed and released on an appearance ticket. The male passenger, who identified himself as Lindsay Clanton, complained of a medical issue and was transported to a local hospital.

While at the hospital, it was discovered the male had secreted an unknown substance in his mouth, which was recovered by police, and later tested positive for crack cocaine.

It was also discovered the males real identity was Antonio Fisher and that he was wanted by New York State Parole as a parole absconder. His address was undetermined.

Fisher was charged with felony tampering with physical evidence, a felony, criminal possession of a controlled substance (cocaine), criminal possession of a controlled substance (paraphernalia), both misdemeanors, and criminal impersonation for lying about his identity to police.

Fisher was arraigned and remanded to Saratoga County Jail without bail due to his prior felony convictions.1-2 punch

Nursing professor combines treatment, prevention in breast cancer research

In the fight against breast cancer, there are two distinct lines of research: treatment and prevention. Tisha Felder, an assistant professor and researcher in the College of Nursing and Cancer Prevention and Control Program in the Arnold School of Public Health, finds herself at the crossroads of those two lines.

One line of her research focuses on helping breast cancer survivors stay healthy by continuing hormone therapy after their traditional treatment of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Another line looks at encouraging breastfeeding among new mothers to help reduce their risk of getting breast cancer.

In both lines, Felder, a native of Easley, S.C., is always looking at the racial divide, which in the U.S. means that African-American women are less likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer but more likely to die from it.

Dr. Felders blend of sociology, social work and public health training give her a unique perspective in our field of nursing science, says Sue Heiney, the Dunn-Shealy Nursing Professor at the University of South Carolina.

Those first couple of weeks, new moms are very isolated. Thats why we are hoping this support group approach will help encourage them to keep breastfeeding. Tisha Felder, nursing, public health

Felder is the first researcher in the College of Nursing to receive a Mentored Research Scientist Development Award from the National Cancer Institute. She is developing an intervention program in which nurses play a key role in educating and supporting women in their hormonal therapy.

The implications from Dr. Felders research has the potential to impact both the science and practice of nursing, Heiney says.

Felder says statistics show that adherence to hormonal therapy greatly improves the survival for breast cancer survivors, but those numbers also show that women of color have a lower adherence to the therapy.

I am very excited about being able to make an impact there, says Felder, adding that her work in the area of health disparities began after she watched a friends mother die of breast cancer. I felt a calling to do something about these disparities.

She also feels compelled to work on the prevention end, which includes trying to increase the number of African-American women who breastfeed their children, something she had to work on as a young mother herself.

Doing this research, I realize there was so much information that even I didnt know as a new mother, Felder says. New mothers might start out breastfeeding, but they dont always continue. The benefit really comes in after about six months.

Felder is working on a study to provide new mothers with a five-week intervention that includes use of mobile technology and social support to educate and encourage them to start and continue breastfeeding for the first six months.

The participants can talk to each other and learn from each other to increase their knowledge and confidence about breastfeeding, she says.

But that intervention has to start before the baby comes.

Moms in our previous study shared that they didnt really hear much about breastfeeding from their doctor during pregnancy, she says. But you cannot wait until your child is born to decide to breastfeed.

Many issues that can affect new moms, particularly African-American women, are the economic reality of having to work and frequently being the single head of the household. Felder says breastfeeding likelihood also decreases with subsequent children, while the cancer prevention benefits remain.

Those first couple of weeks, new moms are very isolated, Felder says. Thats why we are hoping this support group approach will help encourage them to keep breastfeeding.

Share this Story! Let friends in your social network know what you are reading aboutAn international research team, including a member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, investigated the role of "big gods" in the rise of complex large-scale societies. Big gods are defined as moralizing deities who punish ethical transgressions. Contrary to prevailing theories, the team found that beliefs in big gods are a consequence, not a cause, of the evolution of complex societies. The results are published in the current issue of the journal Nature.

For their statistical analyses the researchers used the Seshat: Global History Databank, the most comprehensive, and constantly growing collection of historical and prehistorical data. Currently Seshat contains about 300,000 records on social complexity, religion, and other characteristics of 500 past societies, spanning 10,000 years of human history.

"It has been a debate for centuries why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals," says Seshat director and co-author Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Factors such as agriculture, warfare, or religion have been proposed as main driving forces.

One prominent theory, the big or moralizing gods hypothesis, assumes that religious beliefs were key. According to this theory people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe in gods who will punish them if they don't. "To our surprise, our data strongly contradict this hypothesis," says lead author Harvey Whitehouse. "In almost every world region for which we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity." Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods who cared about human morality.

Such rituals create a collective identity and feelings of belonging that act as social glue, making people to behave more cooperatively. "Our results suggest that collective identities are more important to facilitate cooperation in societies than religious beliefs," says Harvey Whitehouse.

Big data: a new approach to social theories

Until recently it has been impossible to distinguish between cause and effect in social theories and history, as standardized quantitative data from throughout world history were missing. To address this problem, data and social scientist Peter Turchin, together with Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter Francois from the University of Oxford, founded Seshat in 2011. The multidisciplinary project integrates the expertise of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, social scientists as well as data scientists into a state-of-the-art, open-access database. Dozens of experts throughout the world helped to assemble detailed data on social complexity and religious beliefs and practices from hundreds of independent political units ("polities"), beginning with Neolithic Anatolians (today Turkey) in 9600 BCE.

The complexity of a society can be estimated by social characteristics such as population, territory, and sophistication of government institutions and information systems. Religious data include the presence of beliefs in supernatural enforcement of reciprocity, fairness, and loyalty, and the frequency and standardization of religious rituals.

"Seshat allows researchers to analyze hundreds of variables relating to social complexity, religion, warfare, agriculture and other features of human culture and society that vary over time and space," explains Pieter Francois. "Now that the database is ready for analysis, we are poised to test a long list of theories about human history." This includes competing theories of how and why humans evolved to cooperate in large-scale societies of millions and more people.

"Seshat is an unprecedented collaboration between anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and evolutionary scientists," says Patrick Savage, corresponding author of the article. "It shows how big data can revolutionize the study of human history."Seychelles warblers live and breed in family groups on the tiny island of Cousin. In each group, a dominant female and male reproduce. When helpers assist the with incubation and feeding of chicks, the dominant female breeders age more slowly and live longer, a study by biologists from the University of Groningen and colleagues from the Universities of East Anglia, Leeds, Sheffield, and Wageningen shows. The results, which are published in the journal Nature Communications on 21 March, indicate how cooperative breeding -- which also occurs in other species, including humans -- can increase life span.

The Seychelles warbler lives on Cousin Island in the Indian Ocean, measuring just 500 by 700 meters. Some fifty years ago, only a handful of birds survived. However, conservation efforts have led to a spectacular increase in the population, and new populations have been established by translocating birds to four other islands nearby. 'There are about one hundred breeding territories on Cousin, each with a dominant male and female and a number of subordinates, which are often the offspring of the dominant pair', explains University of Groningen biologist Martijn Hammers, lead author of the study.

Survival

Inside the groups, some -- often female -- subordinates may help the dominant female with the demanding tasks of incubation and raising chicks. 'Not all dominant females get help', explains Hammers. That is why the Seychelles warbler is well suited to investigate the effect of having helpers on aging in dominant breeders.

Ever since the 1990s, the Seychelles warblers on Cousin Island have been fitted with colored rings, so scientists are able to follow them over time. Hammers and his colleagues used data on survival and breeding success collected over fifteen years. In addition, they measured the shortening of telomeres, which can be used as a marker of condition and aging. Telomeres are repetitive DNA sequences at the end of chromosomes, which shorten in response to stress. Telomere shortening is a sign of biological aging, and in the Seychelles warbler, telomere length predicts survival.

Positive feedback

'Our analysis showed that in dominant females who get help from subordinates, the shortening of the telomeres is slower than in birds who do not get help. Also, for the older dominant females, this help results in much better survival.' Dominant males do not appear to benefit as much from having helpers, probably because they invest much less energy in breeding.

Hammers and his colleagues also discovered a positive feedback system: 'Birds who get more help age more slowly and live longer. But older birds also tend to be more social and recruit more helpers.' The helping subordinates are often daughters of the dominant female. In helping their mother, they raise siblings with whom they share genes.

Humans

The study shows how cooperative breeding could increase an individual's lifespan. 'Of course, the effects we have measured were within one generation, not between generations.' Nevertheless, it supports a long-held hypothesis that cooperative breeding -- which also is the norm in humans -- can reduce the cost of raising young and may slow down the negative effects of aging. 'It provides an explanation for why more social species tend to have longer lifespans', Hammers concludes.Research led by the University of Birmingham has found that increased levels of hormones including testosterone could cause a brain condition that can lead to blindness in women.

Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension -- also known as IIH -- is caused by high pressure in the brain with consequences from blindness to incapacitating daily long-term headaches. IIH was originally identified over 100 years ago yet the cause of the condition has remained unknown although there has been much speculation about why more than 95 per cent of total incidence is in women with obesity.

Once regarded as rare, incidence of IIH is now rising dramatically in line with the global rise in obesity and there has been a 150 per cent rise in incidence in last 10 years. Currently there are very limited treatment options.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham carried out research, funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), the Medical Research Council UK, and Wellcome Trust and published today in JCI Insight, exploring the role of hormones known as androgens in the way IIH develops.

The researchers examined the levels of androgens in blood and urine, as well as in brain fluid known as cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), in 55 women with IIH aged 18 to 45. They then compared the results with the levels observed in women with obesity of the same age and body mass index (BMI), as well as a cohort of women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

PCOS is a common condition and is classically associated with increased levels of specific types of androgens, which can cause excess hair and irregular periods.

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The researchers found that IIH patients had a very different profile of raised levels of androgens compared to women of a similar age with obesity and women with PCOS. Most notable were the high levels of the androgen 'testosterone' found in the blood in IIH women. Crucially, levels of androgens were uniquely increased in the brain fluid (CSF) of women with IIH. When the researchers, analysed human choroidal plexus tissue, which is the site in the brain where CSF is produced, they confirmed that androgens could increase the rate of CSF secretion, a potential driver for increased brain pressure.

Corresponding and senior author Dr Alex Sinclair, NIHR Clinician Scientist at the University of Birmingham, said: "For over 100 years the cause of IIH has been unknown.

"These findings mark a key step forward; for the first time we have found a pattern of androgen dysregulation that is unique to IIH and potentially a driver of abnormal brain pressure in people with the condition.

"Taken together this provides the first evidence that IIH may be a manifestation of female androgen excess."

Lead author Dr Michael O'Reilly, Hoffenberg Clinician Scientist in Endocrinology and Human Metabolism at the University of Birmingham, said: "These findings, for the first time, implicate androgens as a potential cause of IIH."

Professor Wiebke Arlt, Director of the University of Birmingham's Institute of Metabolism and Systems Research, added: "These findings mark a significant step forward in a previously poorly understood disabling condition.

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"Understanding the cause of a disease is a vital step to ultimately refine treatments which improved patient care and outcomes."

Michelle Williamson, Chair of the patient charity IIHUK, added: "The recent patient and doctor research Priority Setting Partnership identified that uncovering the cause of IIH was the number one priority for IIH. We are delighted by this discovery. It is vital for the patients to see that progress is being made."

This latest study comes after experts led by the University of Birmingham recently produced the first internationally collaborative guidelines aimed at improving the treatment and diagnosis of IIH.

Created by a group of specialists in neurology, neurosurgery, neuro-radiology, ophthalmology and neuroradiology, who have had expertise in managing IIH, the team envisage that the new guidelines, published last October in Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, will step change the treatment of the condition.Remote communities in the Peruvian Andes, as well as communities downstream, depend on the water from melting glaciers and mountain ecosystems to provide them with food and power, and to support industry.

But climate change is increasingly putting that in jeopardy, posing a serious threat to future water resources and having potentially severe implications for the vulnerable populations living in river basins fed by the glaciers.

Now a major research project is looking to establish the precise effects future changes in the glacial system might pose, and how agencies and the communities themselves can work together to mitigate the potential effects of changing water quantity and quality as the glacier retreat.

The project is being led by the University of Plymouth and the Geophysical Institute of Peru, and draws together glaciologists, hydrologists, geographers, environmental and social scientists.

It is being funded in the UK through the Newton Fund, awarded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), while the Peru researchers are supported by CONCYTEC, the National Council of Science, Technology and Technological Innovation.

The key objectives of research include:

Identifying the dynamic role of glacial melt in the basin water budget, building upon existing glacier and hydrological monitoring networks in the Cordillera Blanca and remote sensing data;

Developing a conceptual model determining the links between upstream pressures and downstream responses through identification of sources of water, sediment and contaminants from both glacier and non-glacier-fed areas;

Evaluating the downstream impact of variability in water and sediment supply on contaminant levels and environmental quality;

Establishing local capacities to mitigate supply challenges through co-design of a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) model, designing a response to a long-term trend of decreased water availability and increased (competing) demands on resources.

The research will build on research projects led by the University examining the effects of climate and social change on communities in East Africa and Chile.

Dr Caroline Clason, Lecturer in Physical Geography, is Plymouth's Principal Investigator on the new project, working alongside Professor of Catchment Science Will Blake and Professor of Geoscience Communication Iain Stewart. The research also involves Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the Westcountry Rivers Trust.

Dr Clason said: "The glaciers of the Andes are crucial for these communities. For example, in the Ancash region of Peru, glacial melt provides up to 67 per cent of the dry season water supply going up to 91 per cent during extreme drought. The rapid retreat of glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca has already had notable impact on that supply, posing challenges for downstream agriculture, industry and hydropower generation not just through a reduction in water but also an increase in sediment and contaminants transported downstream during wet season floods. Fully understanding these challenges, and working with local people and agencies to find ways to overcome them, is essential."

Dr Sergio Morera, of the Geophysical Institute of Peru, added: "Although the Santa basin is the most studied catchment system in Peru, the outputs of scientific studies emerging in the region have not yet translated into development and improvement of management and adaption policies. Our own studies have shown that the Santa catchment has the highest erosion and sediment transport rates along the Pacific coast, reflecting the susceptible geology and intense mining activity, but to date there has been no policy response. Our strategy will try to promote a real change in policy through a combination of stakeholder engagement, training and knowledge exchange activities. These are integrated with our research programme, permitting research output and impact to develop iteratively in parallel."In an article published in Lancet Planetary Health, a team from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) and the Ifakara Health Institute (IHI), provides evidence that even window screens with no insecticide suppressed mosquito populations and dramatically reduced malaria prevalence in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam.

Led by LSTM's Dr Gerry Killeen, the study team has also worked with local and national government partners for over a decade to develop practical affordable implementation systems for community-based application of environmentally-friendly biological insecticides that selectively kill mosquito larvae in puddles, drains, river fringes, ponds and other sundry stagnant water bodies.

Dr Prosper Chaki, who co-led the study, said "We are pleased that our efforts over all these years have culminated in government-funded scale up of larviciding, first across all of Dar es Salaam, and then to all major urban centres in Tanzania. Also, our government has invested domestic treasury funding into construction of a manufacturing plant for biological control products in Kibaha, just outside the city, which is now fully operational." However, previous external analyses of the first large-scale pilot in Dar es Salaam indicated that larviciding only reduced malaria prevalence by 21%. Furthermore, this previous analysis provided no explanation for the much larger reductions of malaria prevelance that occurred over the study period, which steadily declined from >28% in 2004 to <2% by 2008.

The LSTM and IHI team therefore re-assessed these epidemiological data to see how much of this remarkable 97% drop in malaria prevalence could be attributed to other factors. Only the coverage of complete window screening consistently increased to levels high enough to have any meaningful impact. While only 40% of houses had complete window screening at the start of the study in 2004, coverage had more than doubled to 86% by 2008. This surprisingly rapid scale up of window screening coverage was unplanned and spontaneous, implemented by households at their own expense, using flexible plastic screening which they found easy to install. This steady rise in window-screening coverage was statistically associated with a 92% reduction of malaria prevalence amongst residents, accounting for most of the spectacular overall decline in malaria prevalence. Mosquito biting rates were also reduced by as much as 92%, and impact was greatest for the most efficient malaria vector species that depend heavily on human blood. "People who live with mosquitoes protect themselves by taking advantage of any products they can access and afford." said Dr Nicodem Govella, a co-author of the study, who continues "Here is an encouraging example from the citizens of Dar es Salaam, who spent millions of dollars of their own money to protect their houses and families, but also protected their neighbours by making life tougher for mosquitoes."

In addition to revealing the remarkable contribution of window screens to this near-collapse of malaria transmission, this re-analysis also yielded a more encouraging estimate for the impact of regular larvicide application. Larviciding halved malaria prevalence by reducing malaria vector abundance, consistent with subsequent evaluations of scale up across the remainder of the city.

In addition to demonstrating that mosquito-proofed window screening may have far greater impacts upon malaria than previously thought, these observations also challenge the view that it is too expensive and impractical for widespread use in poor countries.

"While Dar es Salaam is a big city, we think our observations also have important implications for rural Africa," said Dr Gerry Killeen. "Historically, most rural African houses have been made with mud and sticks for the walls and grass thatch for the roofs. Mosquitoes readily entered through the eave gaps between the wall and roof, which were left open for ventilation because these simple house designs lacked windows. However, Africa is changing faster than ever before, and that picture is rapidly becoming outdated across much of the continent. Houses ventilated by windows and built with bricks, timber and iron sheets are increasingly common even in rural Africa. The people who live with mosquitoes and malaria invest as much as they can in better houses, which are easier to protect with readily-available netting materials." "This study shows how the relatively simple intervention of installing window screens was taken up beyond a research study setting and led to a remarkable reduction in malaria infections in the wider community.

These findings demonstrate that it can take more than a decade for research to have a real impact on the communities that need it most," says Branwen Hennig, Senior Portfolio Lead at the Wellcome Trust one of the major sponsors for the study. The authors also note that ongoing housing improvements across rural Africa are closely associated with declining malaria burden and that even bigger reductions may be possible if they could be treated with insecticides.

Funding for this study was kindly provided by the United States Agency for International Development, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust (Fellowship award to GFK), and Valent BioSciences LLC.African-Americans with severe depression are more likely to be misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia, according to a new Rutgers study.

The study, which appeared online prior to being published in the February 2019 issue of the journal Psychiatric Services, examined the medical records of 1,657 people at a community behavioral health clinic that included screening for major depression as part of its assessment for schizophrenia in new patients.

"By definition, schizophrenia is a diagnosis of exclusion: Clinicians must rule out other potential causes of symptoms, including mood disorders, before the diagnosis of schizophrenia is given," said Michael Gara, a professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a faculty member at Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care. "However, there has been a tendency for clinicians to overemphasize the relevance of psychotic symptoms and overlook symptoms of major depression in African-Americans compared with other racial or ethnic groups. No studies show that African-Americans with schizophrenia are more likely to also have major depression."

The study, which looked at 599 blacks and 1,058 non-Latino whites, found that clinicians failed to effectively weigh mood symptoms when diagnosing schizophrenia among African-Americans, suggesting that racial bias, whether conscious or subconscious, is one factor in the diagnosis of schizophrenia in this population.

Other factors include genetics, poverty and discrimination, as well as symptoms caused by infections and malnutrition early in life. "Individuals from a racial minority group also might feel hopelessness or mistrust when being assessed by someone from a racial majority group, which could affect how they act and how the clinician interprets symptoms," Gara said.

The findings suggest that clinicians put more emphasis on psychotic than depressive symptoms in African-Americans, which skews diagnoses toward schizophrenia even when these patients show similar depressive and manic symptoms as white patients.

"Inaccurate diagnosis can have serious consequences," Gara said. "Mood disorder treatments differ from those for schizophrenia, and the prognosis for these conditions is typically more positive than for schizophrenia. These patients who may have major depression with psychotic features or bipolar disorder and who are misdiagnosed with schizophrenia do not receive the optimal treatment, putting them at risk for the worsening of the underlying disease process or for suicide. Also, the side effects of medication taken for schizophrenia, such as diabetes and weight gain, can be serious."

The researchers recommend that screening for major depression be required when assessing black patients for schizophrenia.

The study supports extensive previous research done by co-author Stephen Strakowski of Dell Medical School on how overemphasis of psychotic symptoms in African-Americans can contribute to misdiagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

Additional Rutgers authors included Shula Minsky, Steven Silverstein and Theresa Miskimen.In research that casts cells as curators of their own history, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists have discovered that adult tissues retain a memory, inscribed on their DNA, of the embryonic cells from which they arose. The discovery led to one even more intriguing -- that the memory is fully retrievable: under certain conditions, cells can play the story of their development in reverse to switch on genes that were active in the fetal state.

The findings, published online today by the journal Molecular Cell, overturn the prevailing scientific assumption that adult tissues bear little trace of their embryonic origins. The discovery is especially relevant to the field of regenerative medicine, because it suggests that cells from patients may be coaxed into an earlier stage of development and then allowed to mature into adult tissues that can be used to replace diseased or failing organs. It also holds promise for cancer research, particularly on the ability of cancer cells to activate long-unused genes to help them spread throughout the body.

"We discovered that adult cells maintain a catalog of all of the genes in use early in development -- a record of the stage in which organs and tissues are formed within the embryo," says the senior author of the new study, Ramesh Shivdasani, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. "Beyond the sheer existence of this archive, we were surprised to find that it doesn't remain permanently locked away but can be accessed by cells under certain conditions. The implications of this discovery for how we think about cells' capabilities, and for the future treatment of degenerative and other diseases, are potentially profound."

The "embryonic memory" discovered by Shivdasani and his colleagues takes the form of molecules called methyl groups that bind to and detach from the DNA within cells. The placement of these methyl groups -- which portion of DNA they bind to, and in what numbers -- determines which genes are active and which are not. The arrangement of methyl groups in a given section of DNA is known as its methylation pattern.

In the new study, researchers focused on the methylation pattern of regions of DNA known as enhancers. Enhancers can be thought of as keys for switching genes on and off. To activate a gene, DNA forms a loop that brings an enhancer close to the coding portion of the gene -- the section that contains the blueprint for making a protein. Then, along with other regions of DNA and specialized proteins, the genetic code embedded in DNA is converted into RNA.

Over the course of embryonic and fetal development, as cells evolve to take on the specific characteristics of the hundreds of types of adult tissues, cells "are constantly making choices about what kind of cell they will become," Shivdasani explains. "This process, known as cell differentiation, involves cells flipping different genes on and off using different enhancers." At each stage of development, particular sets of enhancers become active, much as individual sections of an orchestra play during different portions of a symphony.

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By the time a child is fully formed, the set of active enhancers remains largely unchanged for the remainder of life (although the liver, for example, becomes larger as a child grows, its identity as a liver is consistent). For the most part, enhancers that were used early in development but are now idle "look like they've been shut down," Shivdasani says. "They don't seem to have the features of activity."

One of the distinguishing features of enhancers is that certain sections of them -- where the C molecule of the genetic code is followed by the G molecule -- are largely shorn of methyl groups, a state known as hypomethylation. This is true even of enhancers that have been shut down after their role in embryonic development ended. Scientists didn't know, however, how extensively cells preserve this memory of their earliest incarnations, and whether these memories can be accessed.

The results of the new study were illuminating on both counts. In intestinal cells from adult mice, Shivdasani and his colleagues found a nearly complete archive of enhancers that were active in the formative stages of intestinal development. Moreover, they found that in the absence of a protein called Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2), most of these mothballed enhancers returned to activity within two weeks' time. (PRC2 is one of the major proteins used by cells to turn off specific genes.)

"We showed that adult cells not only retain a memory of the embryonic and fetal period but also that, under certain circumstances, this memory can be recovered," Shivdasani remarks. "The archive is stored safely and can be recalled with remarkable specificity and accuracy."

At this point, researchers can only speculate about why adult cells preserve these molecular memories. One possibility is that they're simply relics of an earlier stage of cells' lineage -- fossils of their course of development. Another is that cells may need to summon these memories -- to bring them to life, in effect -- in order to generate fresh tissue to repair damage. "If the body needs to regenerate tissue that is damaged, it may be necessary for cells within that tissue to replay what happened in the embryo," Shivdasani states.

The findings may open a new chapter in regenerative medicine, as scientists explore whether cell memory can be harnessed to generate replacement tissue for organs that are damaged or diseased, the study authors say. Since such tissue would be derived from patients' own cells, there would be no risk of rejection by the immune system.

The discovery may also hold promise for cancer treatment. It's thought that one of the ways cancer cells gain the ability to leave the original tumor and metastasize is by switching on genes that were active during fetal development but later became dormant. Knowing that cells keep a record of their once-active enhancers may suggest new targets for therapies aimed at halting or preventing metastasis in patients.

The lead author of the study is Unmesh Jadhav, PhD, of Dana-Farber, Brigham and Women's, and Harvard Medical School. Co-authors are Huafeng Xie, PhD, of Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School; Nicholas K. O'Neill, Zachary Herbert, MS, and Shariq Madha, of Dana-Farber; Alessia Cavazza, PhD, and Kushal K. Banerjee, of Dana-Farber, Brigham and Women's, and Harvard Medical School; Veronica Saenz-Vash and Huili Zhai, PhD, of Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research; and Stuart Orkin, MD, of Dana-Farber, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants R01DK081113, R01DK082889, U01DK103152, F32DK103453, K01DK113067, and P50CA127003); the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute-Novartis Drug Discovery Program; a fellowship from the Italian American Cancer Foundation; and gifts from the Lind family.Recent studies have suggested a potential barrier to making CRISPR gene-editing treatments a viable option for inherited blood-related disorders such as sickle cell anemia, thalassemia, and primary immunodeficiency syndromes. Stem cells may respond to having their genes edited by shutting down -- and trying to get around this roadblock could increase the risk of cancer.

Now, a study from researchers in Italy has suggested that there could be a way to bypass these complications. The team found that using more-precise gene-editing technology that induces fewer breaks in DNA may keep stem cells' natural damage-response pathways under control. The findings are published March 21 in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

"Genome editing is a very powerful strategy for precise genetic engineering of stem cells, but it requires a complex procedure," says co-senior author Pietro Genovese, a scientist at the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan. "Despite its tremendous therapeutic potential and the continuous advances in perfecting gene-editing platforms, the functional consequences of the editing process have yet to be fully elucidated."

One of the barriers to successful genome editing turns out to be p53, a protein that's often called "the guardian of the genome" due to its role in conserving the stability of DNA and preventing mutations. When CRISPR edits genes, it cuts both strands of DNA at particular locations. But these double-strand breaks can signal to p53 that something is wrong. The protein then kicks into action and prevents the cells from proliferating. This is the opposite of what's desired when cells are being used as a potential therapy. Yet permanently shutting down p53 to prevent this defense mechanism can lead to the formation of tumors; defective p53 has been implicated in about half of all cancers.

The team in Milan found a way around this unwanted consequence. Gene editing uses nucleases as "genetic scissors" to induce DNA breaks, followed by an adeno-associated viral vector that delivers the corrective sequence. But when these scissors are not specific enough, they may cut DNA in many additional places. The investigators used a combination of highly specific nucleases and vectors to introduce only the desired break in the DNA of hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs).

"We showed that the impact of gene editing on HSPCs highly depends on the precision of the designer nuclease used," says Luigi Naldini, another study co-senior author and director of the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy. "If the nucleases are not highly specific, and thus cut the DNA not only at the intended target but also at a few additional off-target sites, we do see robust and prolonged p53 response leading to detrimental effects up to irreversible cell arrest.

"On the other hand," he adds, "if the nuclease is highly specific -- and we use highly purified reagents and optimized protocols -- we only see a transient effect on cell proliferation. This appears to be fully reversible and compatible with maintenance of the important biological properties of the hematopoietic stem cells."

"Earlier studies pointed to the theoretical risk of selecting for p53-inactivating mutations upon editing, thus highlighting a possible tumorigenic risk associated with gene-editing procedures in a way that could jeopardize its therapeutic potential," says Raffaella Di Micco, the study's third co-senior author, who heads a lab at the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy. "Our work shows that HSPCs tolerate one or a few DNA breaks well, with only transient p53 activation and a limited impact on their functionality (mainly manifesting of delayed proliferation). This cellular response is slightly more prolonged when highly specific 'genetic scissors' are used in combination with adeno-associated viral vectors delivering the corrective DNA sequence. However, if we transiently inactivate the p53 response during gene editing we may counteract this effect and improve the yield of edited cells, without indication of increased mutations or genome instability."

"The other major challenge of gene editing in HSPCs has been the relatively low efficiency of homologous recombination in HSPCs, which is required for introducing the corrective sequence delivered by the repair template," Naldini concludes. "This hurdle has now been substantially alleviated by new techniques described in our and other recent papers."

The researchers say this work provides molecular evidence for the feasibility and efficacy of genetic engineering in HSPCs. This gives them confidence that the technology will be successfully translated to human trials.

This work was supported by grants from Telethon, the Italian Ministry of Health, and the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Long- Term/Cross-Disciplinary Fellowship. It was also supported by an ATIP-Avenir program (Inserm/CNRS, France), the French Cancer Research Association (ARC foundation, France), a Pilot and Seed Grant from Ospedale San Raffaele, and a FIRC-AIRC fellowship for Italy.

Luigi Naldini has received funding from Editas Medicine for a collaborative gene editing project distinct from the work reported here. He is also member of the scientific advisory board of Sangamo Therapeutics. Luigi Naldini and Pietro Genovese are inventors on patents concerning application of gene editing in HSPC gene therapy owned and managed by the San Raffaele Scientific Institute and the Telethon Foundation, including a patent application on the use of p53 inhibitor in gene editing recently filed by several of the authors on this study.The increase in cesarean sections is on the verge of a global epidemic. Though the World Health Organization recommends an optimal C-section rate of 10-15 percent, the United States' C-section rate is more than 30 percent.

In many Latin American countries, the procedure is sky rocketing, reaching more than 50 percent in some.

While C-sections are lifesaving in some cases, they are increasing beyond recommended rates with harmful consequences for children's health.

Cesarean delivered children tend to be susceptible to infections, obesity, asthma and allergies. This occurs in part because many mothers are unable to successfully breastfeed them after a C-section.

However, recent research shows that this may be culturally mediated. In some parts of the world, mothers are able to breastfeed successfully after C-section deliveries, and this practice may reduce their negative child health effects.

Amanda Veile, an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, and her team report that indigenous mothers in farming communities in Yucatan, Mexico, breastfeed for about 1.5 months longer following cesarean deliveries than they do following vaginal deliveries. Veile believes this is possible because the mothers live in an exceptionally supportive breastfeeding environment.

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"Moms living in this Mexican community don't have to hide in a bathroom to feed their child when they are in public," says Veile, a biological anthropologist who specializes in infant and child development. "Here, it is a cultural norm to breastfeed anytime, anywhere, and to sustain breastfeeding for longer than two years. And we think that prolonged breastfeeding offers protective benefits that reduces some of the health problems we often see in children delivered by C-section."

Veile's research appears in the American Journal of Human Biology's special issue on the evolutionary and biocultural causes and consequences of rising cesarean delivery rates. Veile and collaborator Karen Rosenberg, a professor from the University of Delaware, are the guest editors for the special issue. It features 10 research articles written by anthropologists, biologists and healthcare practitioners, which are available open access through spring 2019.

In Veile's study, she and her team compared breastfeeding durations and childhood infection rates based on how the child was born to Yucatec Maya farmers. Following 88 children from birth until age 5, the results show that those children born via C-sections were breastfed for about 2.7 years, whereas vaginally delivered children were breastfed for just over 2.5 years. There was no difference in infection rates between the two groups of children.

"What a powerful message supporting breastfeeding," Veile says. "We need to continue studying this issue, but it seems that these mothers, perhaps subconsciously, increased their breastfeeding efforts post-cesarean."

Veile says that Yucatec Maya women do experience post-cesarean challenges in the hospital environment, such as prolonged separation from their infants, latching issues and delayed milk let-down reflex. Still mothers overcome these challenges through determination, consumption of special foods, and the use of herbs and compresses. They also receive emotional support and breastfeeding advice from their family and friends.

"Now that C-sections are becoming more universal, it is important to understand more about the consequences for children's health in a variety of settings," Veile said. "This includes very rural communities worldwide that are transitioning to increased health care access, while simultaneously experiencing poor community sanitation and the double burden of malnutrition."

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Purdue Research Foundation and Dartmouth College. Veile collaborated with Sydney M. Tuller, graduate student in Purdue's Department of Anthropology; Amy A. Faria, graduate student in Purdue's Department of Consumer Science; Sydney Rivera, medical student at the Indiana University School of Medicine; and Karen L. Kramer, professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

Other research by Veile examined childhood growth patterns and environmental health issues in indigenous children as related to C-sections. Veile is the director of the Laboratory for Behavior, Ontogeny and Reproduction (LABOR), which studies maternal reproductive biology and the immuno-nutritional development of infants and children. In addition to Mexico, she has conducted research in Bolivia, Venezuela and Peru.New research explains how the shapes of neurons can be classified using mathematical methods from the field of algebraic topology. Neuroscientists can now start building a formal catalogue for all the types of cells in the brain. Onto this catalogue of cells, they can systematically map the function and role in disease of each type of neuron in the brain.

"For nearly 100 years, scientists have been trying to name cells. They have been describing them in the same way that Darwin described animals and trees. Now the Blue Brain Project has developed a mathematical algorithm to objectively classify the shapes of the neurons in the brain," explains Professor Henry Markram, Blue Brain's Founder and Director. "This will allow the development of a standardized taxonomy [classification of cells into distinct groups] of all cells in the brain, which will help researchers compare their data in a more reliable manner."

The team, with lead scientist Lida Kanari, have developed an algorithm to distinguish the different shapes of the most common type of neuron in the neocortex -- the pyramidal cells. Pyramidal cells are distinctively tree-like cells that make up 80% of the neurons in the neocortex and, like antennas, collect information from other neurons in the brain. Basically, they are the redwoods of the forests of trees in the brain. They are excitatory, sending waves of electrical activity through the network, as we perceive, act, and feel.

The father of modern neuroscience, Ramon y Cajal, first drew pyramidal cells over 100 years ago, by looking at them under a microscope. Yet, up until now, scientists have not reached a consensus on the types of pyramidal neurons. Anatomists have been assigning names and debating the different types for the past century, while neuroscience has been unable to tell for sure which types of neurons are subjectively characterized. Even for visibly distinguishable neurons, there is no common ground to consistently define morphological types.

Seventeen types of pyramidal cells

The study from Blue Brain proves for the first time that objective classification of these pyramidal cells is possible, by applying tools from algebraic topology, the branch of mathematics that studies the shape, connectivity, and the emergence of global structure from local constraints.

Blue Brain has pioneered the use of algebraic topology to tackle a wide range of neuroscience problems, and with this study has once again demonstrated its effectiveness. In collaboration with Professors Kathryn Hess at EPFL and Ran Levi from the University of Aberdeen, Blue Brain developed an algorithm, which they then used to objectively classify seventeen types of pyramidal cells in the rat somatosensory cortex. The topological classification does not require expert input, and is proven to be robust.

The structure of most neurons resembles a complex tree, with multiple branches connecting to other neurons and communicating via electrical signals. If we keep the longest (persistent) components of the neuron structure and decompose the smaller branches, we can transform its tree-like structure into a barcode -- a mathematical object that can be used as input for any machine-learning algorithm that will classify the neurons into distinct groups.

"Species" of brain cells

Any neuron classification process is plagued by this question: are two cells that look different just part of a continuum of gradually changing differences (like different "strains" of a species, e.g. different types of dogs) or are they really different "species" of neurons (e.g. dogs, cats, elephants, etc.)? In other words, are they discrete or continuous morphological variations of each other? This can be answered by using the new topological classification and grouping the different "species" of brain cells, each with its own characteristic "strains."

"The Blue Brain Project is digitally reconstructing and simulating the brain, and this research provides one of the solid foundations needed to put all the types of neurons together," explains Kanari. "By removing the ambiguity of cell types, the process of identifying the morphological type of new cells will become fully automated."

This breakthrough can benefit the entire neuroscience community, as it will provide a more sophisticated understanding of cell taxonomy, and a reliable comparative method. The objective definition of morphological types is an essential first step towards a better understanding of the brain's basic building blocks: how their structure is related to their function, and how local properties of neurons are connected to their long-range projections. This method provides a universal descriptor of trees, meaning that it can be used for the consistent description of all cell types in the brain, including neurons of all brain regions and glia cells.Superbugs, also known as Gram-negative bacteria, are causing a global health crisis. Each year in the United States, at least two million people contract an antibiotic-resistant infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Of those, 23,000 people die.

One way to stymie this crisis is to avoid contraction. But no one goes looking for bacterial infections. So, while health care professionals and food industries work to constrict the spread of E. coli, staph, and the deadly C. difficile infections, researchers are looking for new ways to skirt the impressive Gram-negative defense system.

Daniel Kahne, the Higgins Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and his lab are dedicated to determining how Gram-negative bacteria work. In the last decade, he and his team discovered an integral machine that builds each bacterium's powerful protection, an outer membrane constructed with a beefy molecule called lipopolysaccharide (LPS).

"Because there are no antibiotics for some Gram-negative infections, learning how the outer membrane is assembled and how to interfere with assembly has major medical implications," Kahne says.

Construction isn't simple. The bulky LPS is made inside the bacteria's cytoplasm, which is separated from the outer membrane by two additional barriers. Within the cytoplasm, the molecule ATP provides enough energy to produce the LPS building blocks and move them around the cell, like microscopic construction workers. But these workers (ATP) cannot cross the membrane barriers to transport LPS to the outer membrane work site.

Graduate student Tristan Owens decided to solve this mystery. In 2013, after spending a year teaching in Qatar, Owens returned to the United States to join the Kahne lab. That Fall, he told Kahne he planned to figure out how LPS gets to the outer membrane, a problem that scientists have been working on since the early 1970s. "As advisors often do, I assured him this would be possible," says Kahne.

To tackle the mystery, Owens would have to answer two major questions. First, if those tiny construction workers cannot follow LPS through the bacterial membranes, what pushes the molecule where it needs to go? He and the Kahne lab already discovered that a protein bridge guides the LPS across. But, without any energy to push the building blocks through, they should just fall back into the cytoplasm like so many apples thrown into the air.

For the second question, Owens would have to determine how LPS gets onto the protein bridge in the first place: How does the bacterial machinery distinguish LPS from the other molecules floating around in the cytoplasm?

"It was estimated in the 1970s that it would be necessary to move about three million LPS molecules every five minutes per cell to make the outer membrane," Kahne says. The bacterial machines had to be efficient. Now, six years and a dissertation later, Owens can explain how they run their well-organized operation.

In a paper published in Nature, first author Owens identifies two crystal structures responsible for extracting LPS from the cytoplasm and moving the molecule onto the protein bridge. Previous research proposed that LPS gets to the bridge via multiple pathways, but Owens' work determined that ATP shuttles the molecule along just one path.

Owens also discovered how the LPS continues to move through the bridge without help from the ATP construction workers. Like a Pez machine, the protein bridge opens and closes gates that keep the LPS moving up toward the outer membrane. "The gate provides an explanation for unidirectional transport," Kahne says, "because gate closure prevents backflow."

The more scientists know about how Gram-negative bacteria build their outer membrane, the closer they get to dismantling their powerful defenses. Now, with this decades-old mystery solved, researchers can start to develop new drugs that slow the bacteria's efficiency, hobble their machinery, and make them vulnerable to our antibiotics once again.Infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria are a global public health threat causing serious illness and even death. Strains of the bacterium Enterococcus faecium (E. faecium) are generally harmless in healthy people, but can be pathogenic in immunocompromised or severely ill patients. E. faecium strains from hospital environments have acquired resistance to commonly used antibiotics, including those used to treat serious infections, making these infections especially challenging to treat.

In a study published today in Genome Research, researchers conducted a survey of 20 municipal wastewater plants in England, and isolated drug-resistant E. faecium from all sites in both untreated and treated wastewater plants except three, which use ultraviolet light disinfection. Importantly, drug-resistant E. faecium counts were significantly higher in untreated wastewater from plants that were direct recipients of hospital sewage. A genomic comparison of E. faecium isolates from wastewater and bloodstream isolates of infected patients revealed two major lineages, with ampicillin-resistant bacteria in clade A1 and A2 and vancomycin-resistant bacteria exclusive to clade A1. Further genetic analysis revealed the presence of shared antibiotic, metal, and biocide resistance genes in clade A1 isolates from bloodstream, hospital sewage, and municipal wastewater.

This study demonstrates close genetic relatedness of drug-resistant E. faecium isolates released into the environment with those that cause serious human disease. Further research is needed to determine the public health implications of exposure to healthcare- and waste-associated pathogens. Terminal ultraviolet light disinfection of wastewater is one solution that would reduce environmental contamination with drug-resistant bacteria.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge, Public Health England, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, University of Oslo, and Mahidol University contributed to this work. The study was funded by grants from the Health Innovation Challenge Fund, Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellowship, Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Postdoctoral Fellowship, and European Research Council.In what is believed to be a first-of-its-kind systematic look at pregnancy frequency and outcomes among imprisoned U.S. women, researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine say almost 1,400 pregnant women were admitted to 22 U.S. state and all federal prisons in a recent year. They also found that most of the prison pregnancies -- over 90 percent -- ended in live births with no maternal deaths.

Historically, say the researchers, these numbers have not been tracked by U.S. federal agencies or state prison systems, yet most of the women in American prisons are of reproductive age. And although this particular study didn't address how pregnancy care was provided, the researchers say gathering diverse, nationally representative data such as this is a much-needed first step toward developing consistent guidelines for tracking the numbers and improving maternity care in the U.S. prison system.

"Currently, there are no mandatory standards for prenatal and pregnancy care for women in prisons," says Carolyn Sufrin, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study, an assistant professor in gynecology and obstetrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author of Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars. "This study gives us insight into the actual numbers, which will help us better understand the scope of care needed by pregnant people behind bars. Having this information could also help inform policies to consider alternatives to incarceration for pregnant people."

The findings of the new study, conducted by the researchers in collaboration with prison officials who reported information on a monthly basis for one year, were published online March 21 in the American Journal of Public Health.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), there were more than 110,000 women in federal and state prisons in the United States at year-end 2016, with 75 percent of these women being 18-44 years old. A 2004 BJS survey found that 3 percent of women in federal prisons and 4 percent of women in state prisons reported they were pregnant at intake. Until this new study, this BJS survey from 15 years ago, which only accounted for self-reported pregnancies, was the only data on pregnancy prevalence in prisons.

Other and more current national health statistics databases exclude data from prisons, further contributing to the lack of maternal health and birth information about imprisoned populations.

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To help close the information gap, the Johns Hopkins researchers gathered data on pregnant women in 22 state systems and all federal prisons, and tracked pregnancy outcomes over a period of 12 months from 2016-2017.

They did so by first contacting the prisons' custody and health care administrators via email or phone with an invitation to participate in the study. For federal prisons, approval of participation was granted by the acting director of the U.S. Department of Justice and administrators at the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The states' departments of corrections' policies allowed for participation of state prisons.

The researchers then arranged for a designated "site reporter" in each prison to use a survey form to track outcomes on a monthly basis among the pregnant patients in their prisons, reporting data on miscarriages, live births, stillbirths, maternal deaths, preterm births and abortions. Site reporters could be wardens, prison research coordinators, women's programming coordinators, medical directors or other health care personnel. At the end of each month during the survey year, site reporters sent their findings to the Johns Hopkins researchers using a secure, web-based program, Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap).

In a bid to keep the data-gathering as accurate as possible, the Johns Hopkins researchers interviewed nearly half of the site reporters (43 percent) midway through the study to better understand how they tracked the data and to ensure accuracy. Data were also reviewed by research staff monthly to assess and correct inaccuracies. All data errors were corrected by site reporters during the study period.

From the data reported from each site, researchers determined that 1,396 already-pregnant women were admitted to the 22 state and all federal prisons in the study over the 12-month study period. These prisons house 57 percent of imprisoned women in the United States. For this study, no specific demographic information, such as race or age, was collected.

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Of the pregnancies that ended while women were in custody, 753 resulted in live births. Six percent of the live births were preterm, and 30 percent were delivered by cesarean section, but these numbers varied greatly by state. The national statistic for preterm births and C-section deliveries in the general population are 10 percent and 31.9 percent, respectively.

Forty-six of the pregnancies ended in miscarriages, 11 ended in abortions, four ended in stillbirth and three newborns died. None of the mothers died. In the United States, there are more than 700 maternal deaths each year.

"We can't know for sure that these numbers come from the same women who were admitted who also had pregnancies that ended in prison," says Sufrin. "They could have gotten released."

The researchers said differences such as pre-incarceration health conditions, access to prenatal care, food, shelter and access to illegal drugs could account for the level of preterm birth rates in specific prisons that were higher or lower than the national average. In 2016, the national average for preterm births was 9.85 percent. The average for prisons in the study was 6 percent.

Access to and quality of reproductive health care varies from prison to prison, the researchers note, so the findings cannot be generalized to states that did not participate in the study. The researchers also recorded large variations in pregnancy outcomes by state.

For example, in Kansas, Vermont and Arizona, 20 or more percent of pregnancies ended in miscarriage. Additionally, Texas and Ohio had months with more than 50 pregnant women present in their prisons, while Maine and Rhode Island had some months with zero pregnant inmates.

Sufrin says that the state-by-state differences could be attributed to state sentencing laws, prison health care policies, access to public reproductive health care or other factors not measured in this study.

"We were very surprised by how willing and eager the prisons were to participate and to have better data to work with," says Sufrin. "With the collective help of the prisons, our research team was able to take the initial steps to gather more systematic and standardized information."

She added: "We know there are pregnant people in prison, and until now, it wasn't clear whether or not people wanted to pay attention to this particular population or do the adequate research needed to advance the quality of reproductive health care in prisons."

The researchers cautioned that the study had several limitations: It didn't assess how far along in pregnancy the women were at intake, the size of the prisons, the pregnancy testing policies of the prisons, the type of hospital in which imprisoned women deliver and the variability in prison living conditions. All of those factors may or may not have contributed to variations in outcomes.

They also weren't able to collect pregnancy statistics from the other 28 state prison systems, including three large systems that declined participation (California, Florida and New York).

In future studies, the researchers hope to collect more information on the individual experiences of the women by interviewing, collecting demographic data and assessing the quality of their maternity care.

"Our hope is for these findings to be used to advance national standards of care for imprisoned pregnant women," says Sufrin, "and to support those who advocate for policies and laws that guarantee acceptable and safe pregnancy care and childbirth, that consider alternatives to incarceration for pregnant people, uphold reproductive justice, and encourage more attention to the reproductive health needs of marginalized women and their families."

Sufrin has been researching reproductive health care in jails and prisons since 2005, and the pregnancy care of incarcerated women specifically, since 2009. She is also the author of Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars.There is an effective formula for unlocking employees' creative potential, according to new research from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin and the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Employers should incentivize workers to produce an abundance of ideas -- even mediocre ones -- and then have them step away from the project for an "incubation period."

The researchers found that people who were rewarded simply for churning out ideas, whether good or bad, ultimately ended up producing more creative ideas than people who did not receive pay incentives or those whose pay incentives were based on the quality of their ideas instead of the quantity. All the study participants stepped away from the initial task for a time and returned to it later.

"Creativity is not instantaneous, but if incentives promote enough ideas as seeds for thought, creativity eventually emerges," said Steven Kachelmeier, the Randal B. McDonald Chair in Accounting at Texas McCombs and co-author of the study in the Accounting Review.

It has been well established in the academic literature that creative performance is enhanced by an incubation period, but this research looked at a new question: What happens when you add incentives for idea generation to the equation?

Kachelmeier and his co-authors, Laura Wang (McCombs BBA/MPA '05, Ph.D. '14) and Michael Williamson, of the University of Illinois, conducted two experiments. In the first, they asked study participants to create rebus puzzles -- riddles where words, phrases or sayings are represented using a combination of images and letters.

Some participants were offered pay based on the number of ideas they generated, some only for ideas that met a standard for creativity, and others a fixed wage of $25, regardless of the quantity or quality of their puzzle ideas.

Initially, none of the incentivized groups outperformed the fixed-wage group in measures of creativity, as judged by an independent panel. Creativity incentives, it would seem, do not work instantly. But in a subsequent return to the creativity task 10 days later, those who had originally been paid to come up with as many ideas as they could had "a distinct creativity advantage," outperforming the other groups in both the quantity and quality of ideas, Kachelmeier said.

Having an incubation period after participants put their minds to work was key to their success, the researchers said. Combining mass idea generation with a rest period results in much more creative productivity than when either of the two strategies is used in isolation.

How much time is needed? That's the question the researchers tackled in a second experiment, paying half the participants a fixed amount and half for the number of ideas they produced. As before, the pay-for-quantity participants yielded more, but not better, initial ideas than the fixed-pay group.

But after researchers led participants on a quiet, 20-minute walk around campus, the pay-for-quantity group once again produced more and better puzzles.

"You need to rest, take a break and detach yourself -- even if that detachment is just 20 minutes," Kachelmeier said. "The recipe for creativity is try -- and get frustrated because it's not going to happen. Relax, sit back, and then it happens."It is known that gas giants around other stars are often located very near their sun. According to accepted theory, these gas planets were formed far away and subsequently migrated to an orbit closer to the star.

Now researchers from Lund University and other institutions have used advanced computer simulations to learn more about Jupiter's journey through our own solar system approximately 4.5 billion years ago. At that time, Jupiter was quite recently formed, as were the other planets in the solar system. The planets were gradually built up by cosmic dust, which circled around our young sun in a disk of gas and particles. Jupiter was no larger than our own planet.

The results show that Jupiter was formed four times further from the sun than its current position would indicate.

"This is the first time we have proof that Jupiter was formed a long way from the sun and then migrated to its current orbit. We found evidence of the migration in the Trojan asteroids orbiting close to Jupiter," explains Simona Pirani, doctoral student in astronomy at Lund University, and the lead author of the study.

These Trojan asteroids consist of two groups of thousands of asteroids that reside at the same distance from the Sun as Jupiter, but orbiting in front of and behind Jupiter, respectively. There are approximately 50 per cent more Trojans in front of Jupiter than behind it. It is this asymmetry that became the key to the researchers' understanding of Jupiter's migration.

"The asymmetry has always been a mystery in the solar system," says Anders Johansen, professor of astronomy at Lund University.

Indeed, the research community had previously been unable to explain why the two asteroid groups do not contain the same number of asteroids. However, Simona Pirani and Anders Johansen, together with other colleagues, have now identified the reason by recreating the course of events of Jupiter's formation and how the planet gradually drew in its Trojan asteroids.

Thanks to extensive computer simulations, the researchers have calculated that the current asymmetry could only have occurred if Jupiter was formed four times further out in the solar system and subsequently migrated to its current position. During its journey towards the sun, Jupiter's own gravity then drew in more Trojans in front of it than behind it.

According to the calculations, Jupiter's migration went on for around 700,000 years, in a period approximately 2-3 million years after the celestial body started its life as an ice asteroid far from the sun. The journey inwards in the solar system followed a spiralling course in which Jupiter continued to circle around the sun, albeit in an increasingly tight path. The reason behind the actual migration relates to gravitational forces from the surrounding gases in the solar system.

The simulations show that the Trojan asteroids were drawn in when Jupiter was a young planet with no gas atmosphere, which means that these asteroids most probably consist of building blocks similar to those that formed Jupiter's core. In 2021, NASA's space probe Lucy will be launched into orbit around six of Jupiter's Trojan asteroids to study them.

"We can learn a lot about Jupiter's core and formation from studying the Trojans," says Anders Johansen.

The authors of the study also suggest that the gas giant Saturn and the ice giants Uranus and Neptune could have migrated in a similar way.The Italian Crested Newt -- Triturus carnifex -- eats anything and everything it can overpower. Earthworms, mosquito larvae and water fleas are on its menu, but also snails, small fish and even its own offspring. A research team led by Dr Egon Heiss of Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (Germany) has studied the newt's chewing behaviour and has made an astounding discovery.

Triturus carnifex is an amphibian of the order Caudata and is a true salamander. "According to the textbooks, amphibians swallow their prey whole, but we have been able to refute this," says Heiss. Together with doctoral student Daniel Schwarz and Dr Nicolai Konow of the University of Massachusetts, Heiss has succeeded in proving that the crested newts do actually chew their prey, but in a way that is different from that of most other land-based vertebrates. The researchers have now presented their findings in the specialist publication Journal of Experimental Biology.

Palatal teeth kill prey

"This newt uses what are called its palatal teeth to kill its prey and also to break it up," explains Heiss. This means that the jaw teeth are mainly used to catch or hold the prey. With the help of the tongue, the prey is then rubbed rhythmically against the palate. The palate is equipped with very sharp teeth, around 0.5 to one millimetre long, which are constantly replaced by new teeth. These teeth can, for example, tear open the extremely tough cuticula of fly maggots. "This kills the prey and, at the same time, helps the digestive secretions to take effect," says Heiss. For the newt, this is also a form of life insurance: some insect larvae have such a strong bite that they would be able to bore through the predator's body. The first impetus for the surprising research result came on a research visit to Antwerp (Belgium), when Nicolai Konow and Egon Heiss observed a newt feeding. The biologists were intrigued by the amphibian's head, jaw and tongue movements after it had seized its prey. "The newt actually appeared to be chewing," says Heiss. The researchers were able to obtain a clear idea of what was happening with the help of the X-ray video unit at the Institute of Zoology and Evolutionary Research of the University of Jena.

Salamanders chew like primeval land-based vertebrates

The newt's chewing behaviour prompts the question of how it can be explained in the context of evolution. "We can assume that real palatal teeth were present in early land vertebrates, and we suspect that the 'tongue against palate' chewing mechanism, as seen in newts, is something that goes back to the early days of land-based vertebrates," says Heiss. Very similar chewing mechanisms can indeed be found in ancient mammals such as the echidna and the duckbilled platypus, but also in the manatee. Although in these animals the palatal teeth have been replaced by rough keratin structures, the creatures still rub their food against the palate.

The tongue originated when vertebrates came onto land

From the point of view of evolution, the move from water to land brought about change in animals' chewing apparatus. A key role is played by the tongue, which only developed after vertebrates left the water. It is crucial for enabling chewing, as it moves food to the right place in the mouth. "With fish, the water current helps to do this," explains Heiss. A similar change occurs in amphibian larvae; during metamorphosis, the gills of amphibians transform into a tongue when the larvae leave the water.

The findings now presented are the first results from the research project 'Form, Function and Evolution of Food Manipulation in Urodela', which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and was launched at the beginning of 2017. The project runs until the end of 2019 and maybe during that time, Triturus carnifex will be persuaded to reveal more secrets.There is a wide variety of animals living on the Arctic seabed. Attached to rocks, they feed by removing nutrients from the water using filters or tentacles. But it can take decades for these colonies to become established, and they probably don't achieve their natural diversity until much later. These are the findings of a unique 18-year study by researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), which has now been published in the scientific journal Limnology and Oceanography.

Some sponge species stand on rocks like Roman vases, while the tentacles of feather stars (comatulida) and sea lilies sway elegantly in the currents. When remotely operated underwater vehicles travel around the bed of the Arctic deep sea, their cameras regularly capture images of these sedentary creatures. One of the most important habitats for these organisms is the so-called "dropstones" -- rocks and boulders that are incorporated into glaciers on land and then transported out to sea. Once the ice melts, the rocks sink to the seabed, where they provide precisely the hard substrate that many of these species require.

But how long does it take before the first settlers in the Arctic deep sea take advantage of this? And how does the community develop further? "Until now we knew next to nothing about this," explains Michael Klages from the AWI. A few studies have investigated these questions in the Antarctic, but they focused on the shallow sea areas, where the conditions are different.

Now, there are new findings from the deep-sea observatory HAUSGARTEN, located in the Fram Strait between Svalbard and Greenland, where the AWI conducts various long-term ecological studies. In July 1999, Michael Klages and his colleagues from the AWI's deep-sea research group placed a heavy metal frame on the seabed at a depth of 2,500 metres. So-called settlement panels made of clinker bricks, Plexiglas and wood were attached to the frame to offer possible substrates for sedentary deep-sea inhabitants. Then it was a case of waiting to see what happened.

In 2003 and 2011, the team sent a remotely operated underwater vehicle to the construction, and in late August 2017 the frame was finally brought back to the surface. The first author of the recent publication, Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser, who now works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US state of Massachusetts, had the task of carefully examining the settlement panels. This involved counting, collecting and taxonomically classifying the individual organisms.

"In this investigation we saw that colonisation of such habitats in the Arctic deep sea occurs extremely slowly," summarises Michael Klages. After four years, only single-celled organisms belonging to the foraminifera were found on the panels, and after twelve years the polyp Halisiphonia arctica was the only multicellular animal present. Even after 18 years, there were only 13 species of multicellular invertebrates.

However, despite the low diversity, the researchers haven't concluded that natural solid substrates are not an important habitat -- on the contrary: "Without them, a number of sedentary animals wouldn't exist in the Arctic deep sea," stresses Michael Klages. But the waste products of civilisation that are now ubiquitous in the oceans don't appear to be a good substitute -- despite the fact that the AWI team have seen a sea lily growing on a plastic bottle in one of the pictures taken by the remotely operated underwater vehicle. "That's what gave us the idea of using Plexiglas in our experiment," the researcher explains. "We wanted to see whether it could be colonised just as well as a near-natural substrate." Apparently that's not the case. At least, after 18 years significantly fewer animals were found on the plastic than on the clinker bricks. But the latter couldn't compete with a nearby rocky reef, where 65 different invertebrates were identified. It is possible that even almost two decades isn't long enough for the panels to achieve their theoretical species diversity. The rocky reef mentioned is considerably older in comparison, and so has had more time to attract a wider range of inhabitants.

The findings provide important insights into the sensitivity of deep-sea ecosystems. "If disturbances there destroy the sedentary inhabitants of the seabed, it can take decades for the colonies to recover," says Michael Klages. In the Arctic, such disturbances could occur as a result of fishing, or drilling for oil and gas. However, much more far-reaching consequences are to be expected, e.g. in the depths of the Pacific, where large-scale manganese nodule mining is planned.Three San Francisco supervisors have vowed to shut down juvenile hall, an extraordinary move  prompted by a Chronicle investigation  that would end the jailing of youths in the city.

Hillary Ronen, Shamann Walton and Matt Haney are drafting legislation that would close the facility, which has 150 beds but typically has fewer than 50 youths held inside, by the end of 2021.

The supervisors action follows an investigation published online by The Chronicle Thursday that documented a dramatic drop in serious youth crime that has left the states juvenile halls nearly empty. The report also shows that spending on juvenile halls and camps remains astonishingly high.

The annual cost of locking up a child in San Francisco has nearly doubled since 2011, reaching $266,000 last year. In other counties, including Santa Clara and Alameda, the annual cost of detaining a youth was roughly $500,000.

The San Francisco Probation Department directed $11.9 million to juvenile hall last year, an amount that has remained relatively flat since 2011, even though the average daily population has been cut in half.

The Chronicle plans to publish its full series of stories, titled Vanishing Violence, in print editions on Sunday and Monday.

If the supervisors succeed, San Francisco would become the only urban area in California without a juvenile hall.

Were done with jailing kids, said Ronen, who was briefed on The Chronicles findings. We have a date; its going to be shut down. Theres no wiggle room.

The supervisors plan to introduce the legislation in early April and hope to see a final vote in June. The measure would launch a task force to figure out how to shut down the facility and create secure and supportive settings for young people accused of crimes, including the most serious or violent offenses.

The task force would look at innovative programs like the Missouri model, which includes small, community-based facilities that are more like dorms than detention centers.

We want opportunities and alternatives that are actually going to make sure our young folks have opportunity for rehabilitation, Walton said.

With youth crime at historic lows, now is the time to act, Ronen said.

Last year, in 39 of the 43 California counties that have juvenile halls, the facilities were less than half full in 2018, The Chronicle found, and at least seven counties were operating at or below 25 percent of capacity. In San Francisco, 47 boys and girls were held in the countys juvenile hall on average, leaving it almost 70 percent empty.

Yet relatively few of those detained needed a restrictive setting, Ronen said. Of the 40 youths in custody in December, nearly a third were there for misdemeanor offenses. About 90 percent were diagnosed with mental health issues, according to an analysis by San Franciscos Youth Law Center.

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Shutting down juvenile hall aligns with a growing body of research that shows that any time in incarceration is bad for youths, said Meredith Desautels, a Youth Law Center staff attorney.

It would provide the shock to the system that we need to change our thinking about how to approach youth who have gotten into trouble, she said. As long as the physical building is there, it will be an easy or default response, and we want to change the default.

Its unclear what kind of opposition the measure could face on the Board of Supervisors or in the community.

Allen Nance, San Franciscos juvenile probation chief, said he welcomes the opportunity to work with supervisors on the issue, but believes its critical to have a secure setting to hold a youths who are a danger to themselves or others.

I cannot imagine how we would keep the community safe or these youth safe if we dont have a juvenile hall facility, he said.

Some juvenile offenders are low-risk, and others present a high criminogenic risk, he said. There will always be youths who require a restrictive environment for some portion of time, Nance said. To ignore that reality would be unfortunate and unwise, he added.

The Chronicle reached out to Mayor London Breeds office for comment late Thursday, but a spokesperson said that due to her schedule, she could not respond.

Juvenile justice reformers and other elected officials, however, were eager to support the closure of the youth detention center housing unit that opened in 2006 after the county tore down the old facility.

I think the days of big juvenile halls have come and gone, said San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon, adding that ideally a facility would hold no more than 15 youths. Were spending a ton of money right now on a system that doesnt work very well.

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.

Those whove been there agreed.

Jessica Nowlan grew up on the streets of the Tenderloin and landed in juvenile hall for the first time for shoplifting at age 13, the first of 17 stints in the facility.

She recounted the day a guard opened her cell door to tell her that her sister had died, then closed it, the lock clicking as Nowlan processed the death alone in a tiny cement room. It was only when she landed at the Young Womens Freedom Center, a San Francisco community organization, looking for a job that she found a way to turn her life around.

This was the first place that told me, Youre not a bad person, and you are powerful, and your voice matters, and youre amazing, she said. Thats what changed the trajectory of my life. It wasnt in juvenile hall.

Locking kids up doesnt create safer communities, she said.

I think Im excited and hopeful about the kind of world were trying to create and the kind of San Francisco were trying to create, said Nowlan, 40, now the executive director of the center.

Walton said he, too, has firsthand experience.

I can tell you that there was nothing rehabilitative about my juvenile hall experience, he said. I was in a room by myself, on a concrete slab with a mat, shoes outside.

Walton spent time in detention as a youth for auto theft, drug offenses and armed robbery. His mother had to see him chained to other youths, walking in forced silence, as he made an appearance in court, he said.

San Francisco has an opportunity to dream big and reimagine something for children other than cement cells and orange jumpsuits, Ronen said.

We dont have to find new funding, she said. We can just divert funding were using irresponsibly toward responsible uses.

Jill Tucker and Joaquin Palomino are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com, jpalomino@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker, @joaquinpalominoGolden Gate Bridge officials voted Friday to raise tolls to $9.75 over the next four years, a plan that coasted along for months with little fanfare or hand-wringing.

The rate proposal drew overwhelming approval from the board, with only one director, San Francisco Supervisor Vallie Brown, dissenting in the 15-1 vote. It will boost tolls by 35 cents a year for FasTrak users  from $7 to $7.35 in July, inching to $8.75 by July 2023. People paying by invoice, who are now charged $8 for every crossing, will pay $9.75 in 2023. One-time payments, also currently $8, will jump to $9.

Bridge district General Manager Denis Mulligan marveled at commuters acceptance of the toll hikes, which will generate $100 million by the end of 2023  enough to beef up ferry service while filling a $75 million budget deficit. Without the increase, officials would have had to make cuts to popular bus and boat lines.

Were not getting a lot of pushback, Mulligan said at a recent meeting with The Chronicles editorial board.

Maybe motorists who crawl across the regal orange span each day have grown more complacent. Or maybe theyre tired of soul-numbing congestion in a region thats added 722,000 jobs in the past decade.

Whatever the case, commuters seem resigned to paying more at bridge toll plazas. Last year, voters passed Regional Measure 3, which will gradually raise tolls by $3 on seven state-owned bridges. And while some drivers grumble, many apparently view the new Golden Gate rates as a necessary trade-off.

We try to get people off our bridge by offering them a first-class bus or boat ride, Mulligan said, touting amenities on the bus system that the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District oversees. Each vehicle has high-backed upholstered seats, overhead lights, air conditioning, Wi-Fi and extra leg room, he said.

District officials want to add parking and eventually purchase another boat for the Larkspur Ferry Terminal, where ridership has grown 26 percent in the last decade. Those expansions are critical but costly, as are capital projects to sustain the aging Art Deco span. Bridge tolls account for three quarters of the districts operating costs.

You never want to ask one half of a question, you want to link the two, Mulligan said. If you say, Hey, everyone, do you want more ferry service? Then everyone says yes. But what were saying is, Do you want more transit service ... and are you willing to invest in it? Thats really the question.

Not everyone is pleased about the increase. Several dozen people submitted negative comments during the three-month public outreach period, which included open houses in San Francisco, San Rafael and Petaluma, a virtual open house on Facebook Live, and a public hearing in San Rafael.

But compared with previous years, the response has been subdued  Mulligan recalled an angry mob of 200 people who packed a meeting for a proposed toll increase 15 years ago.

Though this years critics are fewer in number, or at least less visible, theyre no less passionate.

Among them is Sarah Chamieh, an intensive-care unit nurse at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She pays $105 a month in tolls to commute from Mill Valley to the hospital near Lands End in San Francisco. With the rate hike, her costs will eventually rise to $150 a month.

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.

That becomes a percentage of my salary and obviously would force me to find a new job and add to the staffing and retention difficulties of the VA, she wrote in an email.

How is the already extravagant toll not enough? Chamieh said. There must be another way.

Of the 60 or so comments sent to the board during the outreach period, 40 derided the toll increase and nine supported it. Another nine offered their own plan, and two people opined on an unrelated issue.

The higher-toll champions include Marty Brenneis of San Rafael.

Expenses are going up and the funds have to come from somewhere, he wrote. Why not the people who use the bridge?

He added: I wonder how much the nattering nabobs against the increase would squeal if instead the revenue came from higher taxes.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswanSACRAMENTO  With the start of the next wildfire season getting closer each day, Californias utility sector is racing to upgrade its technological capabilities. The goal: making power lines less likely to cause more disasters.

Utilities are looking to artificial intelligence, expanding the use of fire-watching cameras, and improving their ability to monitor for extremely dry and windy weather conditions. Theyre also trying to learn from the power companies and experts who are already ahead of the curve  but with climate change, it may not be enough to stem the fiery tide.

Those were among the key themes that emerged as hundreds of utility representatives, academics, tech experts and others converged at California State University Sacramento on Wednesday and Thursday for the first wildfire technology summit convened by the California Public Utilities Commission.

While the worst recent wildfires have been blamed on San Franciscos Pacific Gas and Electric Co., some of the most prominent voices at the conference came from Southern California.

San Diego Gas & Electric underwent a major push to enhance its technology and wildfire prevention efforts after a series of major wildfires in 2007, Caroline Winn, the utilitys chief operating officer, said in a speech Wednesday. The fires, she said, were a game changer for the company.

It wasnt easy to be the first California utility to take drastic steps such as intentionally turning off power lines when weather conditions threaten to spark wildfires, Winn said.

We were making decisions at a time when people thought that we were wrong, she said. We knew deep down that we owe it to our customers, we owe it to our families, and we owe it to our communities to do whats right and be a safe operator of the power grid.  We took that tragedy, and we turned it into action.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

Winn said her company plans to strategically bury more power lines underground in high-risk fire areas and use an algorithm that can detect a fault on a line and turn it off before it hits the ground. The utility also plans to use artificial intelligence to marshal tens of millions of data points that help it respond to risky fire conditions, she said.

One of the steps the San Diego utility has taken in recent years is using a network of high-definition, pan-tilt-zoom cameras that watch for new fires and help first responders react appropriately when they occur.

The camera program, which originated in the Lake Tahoe area, is now a critical tool in the response to wildland blazes around San Diego, said Graham Kent, the director of the University of Nevada Renos Nevada Seismological Laboratory. Kents lab runs the camera program, called AlertWildfire, in partnership with other universities.

Its kind of like a ballet, Kent said at the conference. And what San Diego County has learned how to do is do that dance better than anybody.

After the devastating October 2017 wildfires that tore through Wine Country and other Northern California regions, North Bay officials followed San Diegos lead and began building a fire network of their own. They started installing the cameras last year and now have a network of 16 in the greater North Bay area, some of which were funded by PG&E.

PG&E, which filed for bankruptcy in January because of its looming liability from 2017 and 2018 wildfires, views the cameras as an important part of its fire prevention strategy in the future.

The company intends to install 600 cameras throughout its 70,000-square-mile service area by 2022. A PG&E spokesman said the company will soon have 30 fire-watching cameras in the area it serves, which spans from Eureka to Bakersfield.

PG&E is also planning to put about 1,300 new weather stations in place by 2022 and has 215 of them up and running now.

Sumeet Singh, the vice president in charge of PG&Es community wildfire safety program, said on a panel Thursday that further technological advancements are needed as California utilities try to lessen the fire risk caused by their equipment in a changing climate.

Singh said some of that work will require utilities to share more data with each other, a step they have historically been reluctant to take. He said the companies should look to the nuclear power sector, which he held up as a model for assessing risks in its equipment.

They didnt get there overnight, Singh said. One of the ways they got there was by sharing the data, methodology, and doing it for the collective good of a safer industry. Thats really the opportunity we have.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

Technological improvements are badly needed because California regulators are already doing everything they can think of to prevent power lines from starting fires, said Elizaveta Malashenko, deputy executive director of safety and enforcement policy for the utilities commission.

As the last two years have shown, its just not enough, Malashenko said at the conference Thursday. Were getting to this point where we as humans just cannot process the amount of information necessary to get us to the next stage of knowing what to do and how to address it.

Utilities nationwide are also employing more conventional means to make their equipment safer and more resilient. Florida Power & Light is spending $100 million over the next three years to put more of its power lines underground, according to Manuel Miranda, the utilitys senior vice president of power delivery.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

We know it works during hurricanes, and I imagine it works really well here during the fires  or not causing fires, Miranda said at the conference.

At the same time, utilities must also develop more of an ability to predict and get ahead of failures before they occur, he said.

Adding to the urgency is the fact that experts say climate change is expected to increase the severity of droughts and elongate Californias natural fire season even further, thereby worsening wildland infernos no matter what.

Even if we do all the good work that were trying to do to arrest climate change in parts of the world, were still going to have this kind of activity, said Thom Porter, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. And the likelihood that 2018 is the worst fire season in recorded history in California  its likely that thats going to change, too.

J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorrisAs California wrestles with determining whos a gig worker and whos an employee, with big implications for benefits and taxes, researchers at UC Berkeley have delved into three industries with a high share of workers classified as independent contractors: trucking, construction and janitorial services.

A new report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center examines demographics and wages, as well as employers classification practices, with an eye to the impact that changing workers status might have. Independent contractors  the status most gig workers have  dont get benefits and must pay their own employment taxes, among other differences.

These industries that are some of the worst offenders in California (for misclassification) have a disproportionate share of workers of color, immigrants and low-wage workers, said Sarah Thomason, a research and policy associate at the Labor Center who co-authored the report. These workers are in vulnerable positions and being exploited.

Contracted janitors, for instance, make a median hourly wage of $12.22, and are 80.9 percent Latino and 3.7 percent black. Almost half live in households defined as low income (below 200 percent of the federal poverty line). The report estimated that 19 percent of California janitors are independent contractors, without suggesting how many are misclassified.

Among truck drivers, the median hourly wage was higher at $19.70 but drivers have high expenses, with many having to purchase a truck and pay for fuel, insurance, maintenance and repair. About 60 percent were Latino and 6 percent were black. About a fifth live in low-income households.

The report quoted a National Employment Law Project report that about four-fifths of drivers at ports are classified as independent contractors, with the majority misclassified.

For construction workers, median hourly pay is $14.98 with 73.2 percent being Latino and 2.3 percent black. About 40 percent live in low-income households.

Many gig workers, whether in new occupations such as ride-hail driver, or traditional ones such as janitor or truck driver, could soon become employees in California after a groundbreaking state Supreme Court ruling last year. The Dynamex case implemented a simple criteria called the ABC test under which someone is an employee if a company controls what they do; if their work is linked to a companys primary business; and if they do not have an independent business performing that work.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, is sponsoring a labor-backed bill that would codify that test. But numerous companies have lined up against it, saying it would undermine the flexibility that both they and gig workers value.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

A separate case based on different criteria was decided in the U.S. Supreme Court this week. The high court declined to hear an appeal by the California Trucking Association, leaving intact a decision that could result in widespread reclassification of state truck drivers as employees.

If the ABC criteria becomes more widely applied, definitely misclassification would not happen as frequently, Thomason said.

Gig workers lack a whole list of protections afforded employees, including minimum wage, overtime, paid breaks, family and medical leave, paid sick leave, unemployment insurance and workers compensation. Those costs would add about 41 percent on top of the cost of wages, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics studies.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaidCalifornias efforts to prevent another year of catastrophic wildfire took a step forward Friday when Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a rare statewide emergency, clearing the path for dozens of forest-thinning projects aimed at reducing fire danger.

The declaration suspends permitting and regulatory requirements that might otherwise stand in the way of fuel-reduction work in 35 high-hazard areas. California fire officials have said widespread clearing of trees and brush is needed quickly at the sites to make sure overcrowded forests dont explode into flames and burn more homes and communities.

Since taking office in January, Newsom has sought to make fire prevention a top priority in the wake of Butte Countys Camp Fire. The November blaze killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 19,000 buildings. The governor has proposed a number of tactics but is putting the 35 forestry projects at the forefront with the unusual step of removing red tape.

Some of these projects quite literally, not figuratively, could take two years to get done but we can get them done in the next two months, Newsom said Friday after signing the emergency declaration. The fire season is right around the corner, and we cannot once again be (caught) flat-footed.

The governors office estimates that more than 200 communities will benefit from the work. The projects range from creating an 11-mile-long fuel break in Orinda and Lafayette, to 467 acres of forest thinning along Kings Mountain Road in Woodside, to vegetation clearing on 6,843 acres in Big Sur. In all, the work will cover 94,000 acres statewide.

The effort will be funded with $30 million allotted in this years state budget for forestry work. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, has already beefed up its efforts by hiring six crews solely for fuel reduction work. The governor recently called up about 100 California National Guard service members to help out as well.

While many praised Newsoms directive, critics in the science community questioned whether the thinning projects are worth the expense.

Some worried that the work is akin to logging and that clearing too many trees will undermine the goal of fire protection by hastening the growth of smaller, more flammable vegetation. Even in cases where fuel reduction might slow the spread of a fire, knowing where to do the work  that is, where a fire will burn  is next to impossible, they say.

We share the governors urgency to act on wildfire but we think hes taking the wrong approach, said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Wolf is among many who are also concerned about doing away with environmental reviews under the emergency declaration. She said such evaluations can help determine whether the projects are worthwhile.

Theyre taking a Trump-like approach, focusing on logging and rolling back critical environmental protections, she said.

Californias fire-prone forests caught Trumps eye after the Camp Fire. He has since called for the large-scale clearing of trees and blamed state regulation for hampering safety efforts, even though most of the states forests are federally managed. Hes threatened to withhold disaster aid if the situation doesnt improve.

Newsoms emergency declaration suspends Californias Public Resources Code requirements for the thinning projects and allows the state to contract for outside help without competitive bidding. Under the directive, Cal Fire officials will be able to shortcut typical procedures and simply seek an OK for their work from the state agency regulating the activity  for example, the California Environmental Protection Agency.

The governor signed Fridays order in Lake County, an area that in recent years has seen several big blazes, including the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire. Many there applauded Newsoms action.

We are looking to the governors office to really help us, said Lake County Supervisor Moke Simon, who represents the communities of Cobb and Middletown, both hit hard by the Valley Fire in 2015.

Fire Tracker Follow wildfires across the state Latest updates on wildfires burning across Northern and Southern California

Speaking at the Middletown Library, Newsom said the 35 priority forestry projects were part of a broader suite of fire-prevention strategies. The governor and Cal Fire officials acknowledged that thinning is no cure-all, but its a start in addressing 15 million acres of California forest that are in bad health because of drought, insect infestation and a history of poor wildland management practices.

Newsom said the state also will be working on retrofitting buildings to make them more fire-resistant and clearing vegetation immediately around homes  approaches recommended by many who question the thinning projects.

In addition, the governor announced Friday the start of a campaign to ensure that residents of small communities are familiar with their local emergency plans.

Lastly, Newsom introduced a program that will seek technological and scientific input from the private sector on ways to improve fire safety. Cal Fire Director Thom Porter called it a way to work with innovators and think outside the box.

This century, only two other statewide emergencies have been issued. Gov. Jerry Brown declared one during the drought in 2014 and another in reaction to the resulting tree die-off in 2015.

Newsoms declaration follows Californias biggest fire year in modern times. More than 1.8 million acres burned statewide in 2018.

2017 was the worst fire season in California history until 2018, Newsom said. We cannot allow 2019 to maintain that status. We gotta do more. We gotta do better.

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexanderA transgender man is suing St. Joseph Health of Northern California, alleging that he was refused care at the Roman Catholic health systems hospital in Eureka because of his gender identity.

In the lawsuit filed in Humboldt County Superior Court on Thursday, Oliver Knight says he was told just minutes before his scheduled hysterectomy that the hospital would not allow the procedure to happen. He says hospital staff told him that the surgery was called off because he was transgender.

Knight was able to reschedule the hysterectomy  a procedure in which the uterus and cervix are removed  four days later at a hospital a half-hours drive away that was not part of the St. Joseph network. But the initial denial caused him severe anxiety and emotional turmoil, Knights attorneys say.

When we think about hospitals, they provide care, and you believe you will be taken care of in a certain way by the medical professionals that work there. Theres something so disorienting and upsetting when thats ripped away from you, said Elizabeth Gill, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which along with Oakland law firm Rukin, Hyland & Riggin filed the lawsuit on behalf of Knight.

The lawsuit claims that St. Joseph was in violation of state law that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity. It asks for unspecific damages. Knight declined to comment on his case.

In a statement, St. Joseph Health officials said they had not yet reviewed the lawsuit, but (we) take these allegations very seriously. We are committing our full attention to investigating this matter.

At St. Joseph Health, we believe health care is a basic human right and that every individual seeking care should always be treated with compassion and respect, the statement said.

St. Joseph Health is a nonprofit organization that runs five hospitals in Northern California, including medical centers in Petaluma, Napa and Santa Rosa. It is owned by Providence St. Joseph Health Network, which operates 51 hospitals nationwide.

Knights is the second lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of a transgender man who was denied a hysterectomy. The first case, involving a man in Sacramento who sued the Catholic Church-affiliated Dignity Health, was filed two years ago. Dignity Health won that case and it is being appealed. Similar lawsuits have been filed in other parts of the country.

Knight went to St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka for his scheduled hysterectomy on Aug. 30, 2017. He had started identifying as a man four years earlier, and had already started hormone replacement therapy and undergone a double mastectomy.

The hysterectomy was deemed medically necessary by his doctor as treatment for gender dysphoria, a condition in which a persons gender identity doesnt match with the sex and gender he was assigned at birth. People experiencing gender dysphoria can suffer depression, anxiety and other mental health complications.

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In his lawsuit, Knight says that before the surgery he was repeatedly mis-gendered by hospital staff and forced to wear a pink hospital gown  not the blue one hed requested  because he was getting a female procedure. He was told by his doctor, who is not named in the lawsuit, that the surgery had been canceled only after going through several hours of pre-operative preparations.

Knight said in the lawsuit that he later learned the surgery had been called off after an ethics assessment had been done by a hospital reverend with no medical training.

St. Joseph Health has stated in the past that it does not perform hysterectomies unless theyre medically necessary because they cause sterilization, which the Catholic Church deems morally wrong. And the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which develops policy for Catholic health care providers, has stated that medical interventions, including hysterectomies, that are part of gender transition are not medically necessary.

As the ACLU, we of course believe freedom of religion is an important right, Gill said. But religious liberty is the right to exercise your beliefs, not impose them on others, and particularly in a way that causes harm.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.comA San Francisco federal judge on Friday questioned a Trump administration policy requiring asylum seekers to return to Mexico while their cases are considered in the United States, a program enacted earlier this year that was almost immediately challenged in court by immigrant rights groups.

Several advocacy organizations and asylum seekers are seeking a preliminary injunction to block the policy, and attorneys on both sides presented arguments to U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg on Friday morning. Seeborg did not make a decision on the injunction.

The policy isolates asylum seekers from their attorneys and other resources in the U.S. and puts them at risk of persecution in Mexico, where an overwhelming wave of Central American migrants has caused tensions in impoverished and violent border towns, say attorneys opposing the Trump program.

In court on Friday, an attorney for the Trump administration said the policy, implemented at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in January, is meant to deter baseless asylum claims that have overloaded the countrys immigration system and crack down on immigrants who miss court dates or disappear before a judge rules on their case.

But Seeborg, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, questioned why immigrants asking for protection in the U.S. were being sent back to Mexico  a place where they could also fear persecution  and wondered how forcing an asylum seeker to leave the country differed from deportation.

The same thing is happening to these people, for good or for bad. Youre going to a country that isnt your original country but its a country where you have legitimate concerns, Seeborg said. Thats what Im trying to understand. What is the logic?

Department of Justice attorney Scott Stewart argued asylum seekers  of whom the vast majority are from Central America  arent in danger in Mexico because neighboring countries have a snugger relationship with one another. He also said only half of the individual plaintiffs in the lawsuit have made claims that they feared for their lives.

The government in December announced the Migrant Protection Protocols, calling the policy a historic measure to control illegal entries at the border.

Aliens trying to game the system to get into our country illegally will no longer be able to disappear into the United States, said Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

Under the program, immigrants who attempt to cross the border illegally, including those who claim asylum, are given a notice to appear in immigration court and returned to Mexico until their hearing date.

Immigrants whose asylum claims are found valid by an immigration judge will be allowed to remain in the U.S. after their hearing. Those without valid claims will be deported to their home countries.

Previously, immigrants who petitioned for asylum at the Mexico border were generally released into the U.S. as their immigration proceedings were under way  a process some critics dubbed catch-and-release.

President Trump has long criticized U.S. asylum policy, saying it creates a system for immigrants with no threat of persecution to remain in the country illegally without repercussion.

But by returning asylum seekers to Mexico, the government is placing them in life or death situations, according to critics.

This is a big deal, sending people back to a place where they could be tortured or prosecuted, said Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the ACLUs Immigrants Rights Project, who argued the plaintiffs case Friday. Theres plenty of evidence that its dangerous there. Its dangerous for migrants.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of 11 individual asylum seekers and several organizational plaintiffs, including the Innovation Law Lab, the Central American Resource Center of Northern California, Centro Legal de la Raza, the University of San Francisco School of Law Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic, Al Otro Lado, and the Tahirih Justice Center.

Leaders with the organizations say the policy has significantly compromised their resources because their attorneys are forced to fly to Tijuana to meet with clients.

This is a humanitarian crisis, said Morgan Weibel, executive director of the Tahirih Justice Centers San Francisco office. The national nonprofit assists people who have fled violence in their home countries. It is sadly and unfortunately one that our government has wholly created through policies like this.

The San Francisco office has only three attorneys, according to Weibel. When were talking about resources and being able to divert them, if we have one of the three attorneys down in Mexico, thats incredibly draining on the resources that we have here, Weibel said.

The Department of Homeland Security did not comment on the case Friday, instead pointing to previous statements made about the policy.

Misguided court decisions and outdated laws have made it easier for illegal aliens to enter and remain in the U.S. if they are adults who arrive with children, unaccompanied alien children, or individuals who fraudulently claim asylum, said the DHS in an online statement.

The lawsuit alleges the policy violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the U.S.s duty under international human rights law not to return people to dangerous conditions.

Tatiana Sanchez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tatiana.sanchez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TatianaYSanchezSan Francisco Mayor London Breed has created a panel of officials, criminal justice experts and advocates to examine the countys juvenile justice system, including how to best use its nearly vacant juvenile hall, and make recommendations for potential reforms.

The announcement follows a Chronicle report published online Thursday that documented a sharp drop in serious youth crimes that has contributed to reduced populations in juvenile halls across the state. The report found that spending on juvenile halls and camps is as high in some counties as $500,000 a year per youth.

The annual cost of locking up a child in San Francisco has nearly doubled since 2011, reaching $266,000 last year. Similar trends have occurred across California, where almost every juvenile hall is operating at or below 50 percent capacity.

The Chronicle plans to publish its full series of stories, titled Vanishing Violence, in print editions on Sunday and Monday.

In response to The Chronicle report, San Francisco supervisors Hillary Ronen, Shamann Walton and Matt Haney announced they are drafting legislation to shut down the countys 150-bed facility by 2021. The measure would establish a task force to figure out how to close the facility and create secure and supportive settings for young people accused of crimes, including the most serious or violent offenses.

Mayor Breeds proposal suggests conducting a thorough review with juvenile justice leaders before committing to any major changes.

While we have had success in greatly reducing the number of incarcerated youth in San Francisco, we need to take the next step and reimagine what our system will be in the future, Breed said in a statement. While there has been talk of shutting down our juvenile hall, it is important that before we make any decisions we look at the juvenile justice system as a whole.

The panel will include several criminal justice representatives, including Juvenile Probation Chief Allen Nance, as well as youth advocates, community-based service providers and young people with firsthand experience in the juvenile justice system. The panel will begin meeting in April.

Among the panels goals will be to reduce the number of young people detained in San Franciscos juvenile hall, and to make recommendations on how to best use the citys existing facilities, including the Log Cabin Ranch, which was recently shuttered, and the juvenile hall, which is about 70 percent empty on an average day.

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Supervisor Ronen said she plans to move forward with her proposal to close San Franciscos juvenile hall, citing evidence that many youth are detained unnecessarily, and stark racial disparities in who is locked up.

Youth advocates have found that last December, roughly one-third of the wards in San Franciscos juvenile hall were held on misdemeanor offenses, and half of the children were there while awaiting a court-ordered placement. Black youth also made up more than half of the people booked into juvenile hall last year, even though theyre just 5 percent of San Franciscos under-18 population, Ronen said.

My worry is if theres not a commitment to shutting down juvenile hall, then its going to be a lot of talk without a lot of action, Ronen said. Weve talked about the problem for a long time, we know the system is broken, and now is the time to start making commitments and taking actions toward change, starting with shutting down juvenile hall and designing and creating a truly rehabilitative model.

Joaquin Palomino is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jpalomino@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoaquinPalominoWASHINGTON  The long-awaited special counsel report is complete, 675 days after Robert Mueller was named to oversee the investigation into Russias election interference, whether any Trump associates coordinated with that plot and whether President Donald Trump tried to obstruct justice. Attorney General William Barr has the document. But it has yet to be made public, and the path to its potential release  or the release of the facts it contains  is complicated.

Will the report be made public?

That remains to be seen. Some information is expected to come out because Barr has to update Congress, but that does not mean the entire report will be public.

Barr must notify the leaders of Congress judiciary committees that the special counsel investigation is completed and explain whether he or his predecessors overseeing it opposed any significant step that Mueller sought to take, according to the regulation he was appointed under.

The regulation set no time frame or deadline for when Barr must tell Congress.

Nor was Barr required to tell lawmakers more than those basic facts. He would be operating within the regulation if he were to give Congress a bare-bones notification that Mueller had concluded his work.

According to the Justice Departments explanation of the regulation, published in the Federal Register in 1999, Barr has to determine whether releasing the report, or portions of it, is in the publics interest. Barr has said repeatedly that he would release as much as he could from the report within the parameters of the special counsel regulations.

First, Barr and his aides will have to review the report to determine whether any information is classified or otherwise sensitive, or protected by privacy laws or executive privilege, which can be invoked for sensitive law enforcement materials.

The back and forth on what information Congress can and cannot have will most likely have to be resolved by a court.

Will Congress be fine with a bare-bones report?

No.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has already called for the entire report, without redactions, to be provided to lawmakers.

Regulations governing special counsel Muellers investigation do not prohibit Attorney General Barr from disclosing Muellers final report and investigative materials to Congress, Feinstein said in February.

And the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the report to be made public  a largely symbolic move to publicly pressure Barr to release it.

Democrats in the House have also made the case that seeing the report in its entirety is critical to their ability to conduct oversight and determine whether to move forward with impeachment proceedings.

Congress could be the only institution currently situated to act on evidence of the presidents misconduct, the chairmen of several House committees wrote in a Feb. 22 letter to Barr.

Further, they wrote, Congress should decide what should be redacted in the report.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has said that she does not support impeaching Trump without support from Republican lawmakers because it is too divisive for the country. Barring new shocking revelations about Trump, Democrats would prefer to beat Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

What if the administration refuses requests from Congress?

Lawmakers have a few options to try to make public details of the investigation, though some could involve years of litigation.

They can start issuing subpoenas to Barr, who can ignore them or refuse them. They can also subpoena Muellers testimony. The Justice Department is likely to resist those demands.

If that happens, lawmakers could hold them in contempt and ask the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to prosecute. Lawmakers could also sue to try to force the Trump administration to hand over the requested material. Such litigation could go on for years.

The White House could also try to negotiate with Congress, such as making some witnesses available, but not all, said Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University Law School. The White House is also likely to challenge some requests and assert that the requested information is available to lawmakers through other means.

Lawmakers can also use their bully pulpits to publicly pressure Barr for more information and tie up the Justice Department in hearings and subpoena fights that last for the rest of Trumps time in office.

Will Trump see the Mueller report?

That is not clear.

Trump is Barrs boss, and there is nothing to stop Barr from immediately sharing the report with the White House, Pildes said. But doing so would violate the Justice Departments long-standing independence from the White House, said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor who ran the departments Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush administration.

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.

And if the Mueller report includes grand jury testimony, which is protected under federal law, the number of people permitted to see the report shrinks significantly. Trump, as president, would be permitted to see it in certain circumstances.

For example, according to a 1993 opinion by the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel, grand-jury information may be disclosed to the president if it relates to his role in helping the department decide how to enforce the law, or if it relates to a national security threat.

In another Justice Department legal opinion, written in 2000, the president may have access to grand jury material if it is used as part of his consideration for a pardon. There has been a great deal of discussion about whether Trump would give presidential pardons to his former aides who have been charged in Muellers investigation, such as Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman who was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison in two cases.

What if Trump reads the report and tweets inaccuracies about it?

Even if Mueller and Barr know that what Trump is saying publicly is not true, there is no apparent legal duty for the Justice Department to correct the president.

Will the report be the final word on collusion?

Unlikely.

First, collusion has no legal definition, though it has become a term of art as a shorthand reference to the Russia investigation. A key question in the special counsel investigation concerns whether Trump or his campaign was coordinating with Russia to try to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. If Muellers investigation ends without charging Trump or his aides with conspiracy, some may interpret that to be a no collusion finding.

Trump consistently cites government officials and the lack of collusion charges as evidence that there was never collusion between his campaign and Russia.

This article originally appeared in The New York TimesGollum or Smeagol, who will have the upper hand in the upcoming stealth-action adventure? Coming to PC and consoles in 2022But the 48 people hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Thursday was down 12 from the 60 that were hospitalized last week.Americas gun rights absolutists have hit on a chilling new tactic to fight back against states that pass new gun restrictions: persuade rural counties and local sheriffs not to enforce them.

Vigilante justice is a bizarre posture for people who plead incessantly for law-abiding gun owners. But this is a national campaign thats spreading like wildfire, wherever state legislatures have had the gall to pass even incremental new restrictions.

In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a new law March 8 to close the gun show loophole and require background checks in private gun sales. Today, more than two-thirds of that states counties have declared the law is unconstitutional and vowed to ignore it.

If I see problems with these particular pieces of legislation and they become law, I dont have to use that law, Tony Mace, sheriff of Cibola County and head of the New Mexico Sheriffs Association, said recently.

A similar rebellion is brewing in Washington state, where voters approved a ballot measure in November that imposes new requirements for buying semiautomatic weapons. This was democracy in action, a law approved by a majority of the states voters, but at least a dozen sheriffs in rural counties say they wont enforce it.

In Nevada, which suffered the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history less than two years ago, rural counties are rebelling against a new state law that expands background checks. Earlier this month, my own countys commission, which represents part of the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, unanimously voted to discourage the sheriff from enforcing the law. It also threatened to withhold funding if the sheriff doesnt do as they say.

One of the saddest cases is in Colorado, where the Legislature is considering a red flag law that would allow family members to ask a judge to take firearms from a relative they think is a threat. The Deputy Zackari Parrish III Violence Prevention Act was named after a deputy sheriff who was killed by a heavily armed man with severe mental health issues. The bill would hardly be a license to grab guns: Judges would still have to decide whether there was solid evidence of danger to the individuals or others.

But in the past month alone, more than two dozen county commissions in Colorado have declared that they wont enforce it  including in Douglas County, where the deputy sheriff was killed and where the sheriff, Tony Spurlock, strongly supports the bill. Spurlock called the countys vote craziness.

To be clear, these resolutions are probably absurd from a legal standpoint. Some see them as nothing more than symbolic protests, a cheap way of pandering to the gun crowd.

I disagree. This trend should be deeply troubling to anyone who cares about good government and the rule of law.

In effect, local sheriffs are being told to practice a form of mob justice and to take the law into their own hands. Thats a dangerous road to go down, because it corrodes the credibility of the justice system. If politicians tell citizens they can ignore state law on mandatory background checks, then they are implicitly encouraging them to ignore lots of other laws they may not like.

Gun people like to say theyre just emulating sanctuary cities that refuse to help federal immigration agencies round up undocumented immigrants. Thats a false analogy. Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, and local sheriffs and police departments arent obligated to devote their own resources to do the federal governments job  especially if it undermines cooperation in investigating other crimes.

Gun rights advocates insist they are standing up for their constitutional right to keep and bear arms, and that virtually any new restrictions are illegal.

Thats possible, but doubtful. More than 20 states require tough mandatory background checks, for example, and those laws havent been declared unconstitutional.

Even if there are Second Amendment issues, we have a simple, time-tested and legal solution: challenge the laws in court. The National Rifle Association sues cities and states all the time, and sometimes it wins.

No one can deny that the United States has an epic problem with gun violence, and its been brutally hard to pass even incremental efforts to keep guns out of the wrong hands. The last thing we need now is to have gun owners shooting down the law.

Edmund L. Andrews is a former reporter for the New York Times who now lives in Zephyr Cove, Nev. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.San Francisco has a decidedly selective way of policing healthy living. It curbs smoking by banning it nearly everywhere. Yet it still allows tobacco and marijuana sales, gives away syringes to addicts and wants to open drug-injection facilities. City politicians go after Big Soda with glee, but mostly stay out of the way of the more powerful alcohol lobby.

Some of those seeming contradictions make practical sense. Others do not.

This latest one is flat-out ludicrous: Embarrassed that the No. 1 vaping company is prospering on port property, city leaders are in a legal fury. The city attorney and a member of the Board of Supervisors have proposed to bar e-cigarette firms from renting city property and, more sweepingly, block the sale of e-cigarettes in the city.

The stated rationale, of course, is a concern for public health. After all, vaping companies prey on a young audience with candy-flavored offerings and a hip, streamlined device. For other users, e-cigarettes are sold as a pathway from the chemical harms of tobacco, though the danger of nicotine addiction remains.

E-cigs are no fad, with the big tobacco company Altria in December buying a 35 percent share of Juul, based on Pier 70, giving the company a value of $38 billion. This city, an ostensible temple of clean living, is home to the leading edge firm in the vaping game  and yet the proposed measures cant chase it out of town as long as its lease runs.

That annoying reality no doubt is stoking the latest legislation. But the crusade needs a reality check. Its not as if reasonable steps are not being taken to study vaping and restrict its appeal to youth. The city cracked down on flavored e-cigarettes through a ballot measure last year. The federal Food and Drug Administration is entering the picture with its own limitations aimed at curbing sales.

Vaping is a tempting public villain. Manufacturers should be treated with skepticism about claims that vaping is a benign habit. What vaping doesnt deserve is a dose of shortsighted demonizing that does little to change the bigger picture of tobacco abuse and other health dangers the city is loath to confront.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera isnt buying that version. Thats all bull, he told us. He wants to suspend e-cigarette sales immediately. Young vapers can pull end runs around city rules, and assurances from e-cigarette firms about controlled access are worthless, he contends. Also, the FDA has let vaping firms market their products without testing and then given those companies a long deadline to conform. Thats why hes demanding a sales suspension.

But he and Supervisor Shamann Walton, who is sponsoring the crackdown, are sidestepping the larger issue: smoking itself. Cigarette sales are still legal. Roll your own unfiltered joint, smoke a cigar, light a pipe or fire up a cigarette. You can do it all in San Francisco, now and in the future if the featured proposals are enacted. Vaping is only one corner of a vast, dirty habit.

Theres no love here for e-cigarettes. Inhaling potential toxins in any form is a clear health danger. But this crusade offers no cure beyond symbolism. Juul wont be ousted from its perch on Pier 70. If it left, it could continue its work in another city. Tobacco and marijuana will remain on the shelves.

This plan is excessive, unworkable and more about safe politics than public health.

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.Barring a bombshell in Special Counsel Robert Muellers just-delivered report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, impeaching President Trump should be off the table, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said Friday.

I dont see whats good in putting the country through a racking impeachment if its not going to be a success, Schiff, head of the House Intelligence Committee, told The Chronicle editorial board shortly before Mueller delivered his report to Attorney General William Barr. There was no immediate indication of what Mueller had concluded, but published reports quoted unidentified Justice Department officials as saying the special counsel was not recommending additional indictments.

Impeachment is a simple matter of numbers and partisanship, Schiff added: While there may be sufficient evidence coming out of Muellers investigation and elsewhere to show that Trump is not fit to be president, thats not enough.

I dont think what weve seen yet would persuade this Congress or the Republicans in this Congress, the Burbank congressman said. The threshold of evidence the special counsel would have to produce would have to be very high to meet this.

Support for impeachment among leading Democrats has been slipping, especially since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in an interview last week that she opposed it because it divides the country and because Trump is just not worth it.

Although the San Francisco Democrats stance drew pushback from Democrats such as Tom Steyer, a leading party fundraiser who has spent millions organizing an impeachment effort, and freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who told supporters in January that were going to impeach the mother, public sentiment has been trending against impeachment.

A CNN poll released this week found support for impeachment among Democrats had dropped from 80 to 68 percent since December, with the national number for all adults falling from 43 to 36 percent.

While Democrats are overwhelmingly opposed to Trump, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, which mark the traditional start of the 2020 election season, are less than a year away. That gives opponents only a short wait before they can work to oust the president in the traditional way, at the ballot box.

Schiff, a former federal prosecutor elected to Congress in 2000, said theres a huge difference between what seems obvious to partisans and what can be proved in court  or a congressional impeachment case.

It was not my policy or the policy of the Department of Justice I worked for to indict someone just because they deserved it, he said.

Also, Schiff said, given Republicans control of the Senate and Trumps control of Republicans, its unlikely there would be GOP support for ousting Trump regardless of whats in Muellers report.

Trump is a terrible negotiator, I think hes a terrible leader, but hes a good marketer and relentlessly on message, Schiff said. Thats had the effect of shaping the perception of Bob Muellers work.

That partisan polarization could make it virtually impossible for the report to change peoples minds, he said.

It would have to be something quite breathtaking to move the needle in terms of public perception, Schiff said.

Schiff downplayed expectations of what was likely to come out of the investigation into Russian election interference and the possibility that members of Trumps campaign staff and political appointees were aware of it or abetted it.

People expecting Mueller to produce a voluminous, highly opinionated report like the one independent counsel Kenneth Starr put together on then-President Bill Clinton in 1998 are likely to be disappointed, Schiff said.

I expect a matter-of-fact report from the special counsel, he said. The attorney general then seems likely to write a Cliffs Notes version and release it to Congress.

That wouldnt be nearly enough for House Democrats, who have concerns that extend well beyond what has been asked of Mueller.

If the report doesnt include any indictments or accuse the president or his aides of colluding with the Russians, that might mean (Mueller) has not found evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of criminal conspiracy, Schiff said. His job is to decide who should be prosecuted. It is still the responsibility of the Congress to tell the public what we do know, whether it rises to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt or not.

That means Congress needs all the information from the report, including the underlying evidence behind the conclusions, Schiff said. Barr told congressional leaders Friday that he would release as much of the report as he could, consistent with the law and Justice Department practice.

If the attorney general wont provide the full report, Schiff said, we can subpoena the report, we can subpoena Bob Mueller or take it to court.

That fight could be only days away.

In a joint statement Friday, Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York called for Barr to make the full report public and provide its underlying documentation and findings to Congress, all without giving Trump, his attorneys or his staff any sneak preview of Special Counsel Mueller's findings or evidence.

Rudy Guiliani, an attorney for Trump, suggested in January that the presidents team should be allowed to correct Muellers report before it is released to Congress  although he told the Hill on Friday that the presidents lawyers have not made any demand for a special preview of the report.

Theres little doubt the president will attack whatever the House Democrats decide to do. On Friday, Trump told reporters at Andrews Air Force Base that the congressional investigations are just the continuation of the same witch hunt. They know it. Behind closed doors, they laugh at it. They ought to go to work and get something constructive done.

As far as the president is concerned, Schiff said, any oversight is too much oversight.

Schiffs fellow Californian and Intelligence Committee member Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin, is among the Democrats working on legislation that would extend the statute of limitations for crimes committed by presidents. Schiff agrees that the chief executive should be able to be charged once his term ends.

I certainly agree that no president should be able to evade justice by outlasting the statute of limitations, Schiff said on The Chronicles Its All Political podcast. Who would have thought it would be necessary to pass such a law? But it very well may be. We are going to have to legislate all kinds of norms that we never thought would be necessary.

San Francisco Chronicle Senior Political Writer Joe Garofoli contributed to this report.

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuthNapa Valley suit revives conflicts over vineyard A new lawsuit against Constellation Brands revives the age-old conflicts of Napa Valleys most hotly contested vineyard.

Napa Valley suit revives conflicts over vineyard A new lawsuit against Constellation Brands revives the age-old conflicts of Napa Valleys most hotly contested vineyard.

No other vineyard raises the sorts of existential questions that the To Kalon Vineyard does. For decades, the most hallowed farmland in Napa Valley has been at the center of trademark disputes, legal battles and public-relations wars as its various stakeholders have struggled to determine what constitutes the true To Kalon  and who should be entitled to use its name on a wine bottle.

A new lawsuit, filed March 18 in U.S. District Court, revives these old conflicts. The Vineyard House, a wine brand founded in 2005 by Jeremy Nickel (the son of Far Niente Winery founder Gil Nickel), is suing Constellation Brands for cancellation of trademarks and unfair business practices, among other allegations.

Constellation, a global corporation whose revenue exceeded $7.5 billion last year, is the parent company of Robert Mondavi Winery, which owns 450 acres of the To Kalon Vineyard. Mondavi has held the trademark for To Kalon since 1988 and To Kalon Vineyard since 1994. Constellation said Nickels claims are without merit.

According to the lawsuit, Nickel wants Constellations trademarks revoked and would like to be able to use the To Kalon name on his own wines.

Graeme MacDonald's historical memorabilia of To Kalon laid across the table at his family's old caretaker's cottage in Oakville, Calif. Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Graeme MacDonald's historical memorabilia of To Kalon laid across the table at his family's old caretaker's cottage in Oakville, Calif. Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Photo: Mason Trinca / Special To The Chronicle 2017 Photo: Mason Trinca / Special To The Chronicle 2017 Image 1 of / 2 Caption Close New To Kalon lawsuit asks familiar question: Is this Napa Valley vineyard too important to be trademarked? 1 / 2 Back to Gallery

The Vineyard Houses position is that anyone who is producing grapes from the original Crabb estate, the original To Kalon property, ought to be able to call it To Kalon, says Larry Kamer, a spokesman for the Vineyard House.

He is referring to H.W. Crabb, who planted and named the To Kalon Vineyard in the 1860s and under whose ownership the vineyard rose to national fame. Today, six  now, with Nickel, seven  entities, including Opus One, MacDonald, Beckstoffer and UC Davis, claim to own portions of Crabbs original To Kalon property. But only Constellation, through its ownership of Mondavi and the trademarks, has the legal right to use the name.

To Kalon is a specific vineyard; its a specific place, Kamer says, and they (Constellation) are treating it as a brand. The concern is that thats misleading and deceptive.

That argument will sound familiar to those that have followed the To Kalon saga. Grape grower Andy Beckstoffer, who owns 89 acres of To Kalon, made similar claims in a 2002 lawsuit against Constellation: that To Kalon is a place, in the same way that Oakville or California is a place, and therefore should not be allowed to be trademarked for marketing purposes.

But does Nickel actually own legitimate To Kalon Vineyard land? That appears to be up for debate. Nickel owns 17 acres of land in the hillsides, between Robert Mondavi Winery and Harlan Estate, which were owned by H.W. Crabb at the time of his death, the claim states. (Nickel is not an owner at Far Niente or Nickel & Nickel, the two wineries his family founded.)

So Nickels parcel was part of Crabbs land holdings, though it is not contiguous with the rest of the To Kalon Vineyard. Did Crabb plant vines on those 17 acres?

We just dont know, Kamer says. Nickel does not have records indicating when the parcel was planted.

A recently released Historic American Landscapes Survey report, led by To Kalon parcel owner Graeme MacDonald, suggests that Nickels parcel did not have vines during Crabbs lifetime. Crabbs probate specifies that this parcel was used for timber production and not planted to grapevines, the report reads.

Jeremys suit is a little different from ours, Beckstoffer says. We say that To Kalon is land owned and planted by Crabb.

When reached for comment, Constellation provided a statement about the lawsuit: These allegations are without merit. Constellation Brands is committed to operating with the highest degree of ethics and integrity and in full accordance with all applicable laws and regulations, as we have for more than 70 years.

For someone who is clamoring for trademark cancellations, Nickel seems to be pretty trademark-happy himself. Last year, he obtained 24 trademarks that include the phrase To Kalon, including To-Kalon Estate, To Kalon Valley and H.W. Crabbs To-Kalon Valley Vineyard. Some of these trademarks were registered by the Vineyard House, and some by To Kalon Stock Farm, an equestrian center in Florida that Nickel owns.

When asked to square those new To Kalon trademarks with the request to cancel Constellations To Kalon trademarks, Kamer said that the Vineyard House is certainly not asking to exclude other people from the use of the name To Kalon. In other words, unlike Constellation, it would not enforce its trademarks against those who have a real claim to To Kalon land.

Constellation attempted to register three new trademarks in 2017, including To Kalon Wine Company and To Kalon Vineyard Company, as part of a new wine brand it planned to launch. But it quickly abandoned the trademark applications, apparently wishing to avoid another legal confrontation with Beckstoffer. However, in 2018, Constellation successfully registered the trademarks The Miracle of To Kalon and To Kalon 1886.

All this trademark minutia can get dry, even to a wine fanatic. But the To Kalon controversy raises essential questions for the future of Napa Valley wine.

Beckstoffer and Constellation settled their lawsuits out of court nearly 20 years ago. That gave Beckstoffer a special exception to be able to use the To Kalon name, but it left the larger issues conspicuously unresolved.

This time, if Nickel does not settle with Constellation and the lawsuit proceeds in court, which Kamer says is his intention, maybe we will finally get some answers.

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicles wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermobJust after midnight on Feb. 22, 1901, the passenger steamship City of Rio de Janeiro was anchored in a heavy fog outside the Golden Gate. Sailing into the bay with zero visibility was a perilous undertaking, so the captain was waiting for the fog to lift.

The 345-foot ship had left Hong Kong more than a month before and was already three days behind schedule because of mechanical problems along the way. Now, just four miles from home, it was being delayed yet again.

The steamers captain, William Ward, had told a passenger earlier that evening, The Rio had better be late than on the rocks. If we attempt to enter the harbor in this fog, we will be sure to go onto the rocks.

But Ward was under pressure to get his ship into port. The City of Rio de Janeiro was carrying an important passenger: Rounseville Wildman, the U.S. consul general in Hong Kong, traveling with his wife, Letitia, and their two young children. The night before, during dinner at the captains table, Wildman and his wife had both complained that the delay had already inconvenienced them.

The man actually in charge of guiding the ship into the harbor was pilot Frederick Jordan, who had come aboard the afternoon before. Jordan had 12 years of experience without a mishap. But as Robert B. Belyk notes in Great Shipwrecks of the Pacific Coast, Jordan and his fellow San Francisco pilots were inclined to underestimate the dangers of their job. The thought of a warm meal at home and the comfort of their own bed was a strong inducement to risk the fog.

At 4 a.m., the fog lifted slightly. Jordan gave orders to heave anchors. But the fog thickened again, and Jordan reversed his orders. He then left the bridge, probably to confer with Ward, who was in bed. When he returned, he ordered the anchors raised and the engines started. The captain appeared a few minutes later in his nightclothes.

At this moment, either Ward or Jordan could have taken a crucial precaution: They could have ordered depth soundings, which would have informed them if the ship was entering dangerously shallow waters. But taking soundings was time consuming and would have further delayed the voyage. Neither man ordered soundings taken.

The ship moved forward at half-speed on a 6-knot ebb tide, into the enveloping mist and toward the jagged rocks off Fort Point.

At 5:30 a.m., lookout Frederick Lindstrom suddenly saw a white-and-red light looming directly ahead. I felt my heart stand still, he recalled. I knew what was coming.

Moments later, the City of Rio de Janeiro smashed into the reef. The impact ripped a huge gash in its bottom, and seawater poured in. The ship had only two watertight bulkheads, so the below-decks stern section rapidly filled with water.

Yet the vessel remained upright, balanced precariously on the ledge it had struck. There was little panic among the 210 passengers and crew. In fact, many did not think they were in any danger at all.

The crew was ordered to launch the lifeboats. But in contrast to the officers, nearly the entire 84-member crew was Chinese. Few spoke English, and the process was chaotic  only three of the 11 lifeboats ended up being lowered into the water.

Three minutes after the ship ran aground, the electrical lights below the deck went out. For the steerage passengers, many of whom were Chinese, this created additional confusion. Some never made it to the deck.

After about 20 minutes, Consul Wildman was in a lifeboat, waiting for his wife, who was descending a rope ladder. Pilot Jordan was behind her, holding the couples 9-year-old son. The Wildmans 2-year-old daughter was on the deck, waiting to descend.

Suddenly the ship gave a violent lurch, slipped off the shelf of rock, slid into the deep water and keeled over. That moment spelled doom for more than half the passengers and crew.

San Francisco Maritime

When the ship pitched, Letitia Wildman and her son were hurled off the rope ladder to their deaths. An instant later, the ships rear mast crashed through the lifeboat where Wildman had been waiting for his family, ripping it in half. The impact was so great, observers thought the boat had exploded.

Trivia time The previous trivia question: What San Francisco street runs the longest distance without being intersected? Answer: Either the Upper Great Highway - an expressway that is uninterrupted for almost 2 miles, but some don't count as a street - or States Street below Corona Heights, which is uninterrupted for almost half a mile. This week's trivia question: Who was the "Walking Peanut"? Editor's note Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya's Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub's OurSF. See More Collapse

Those aboard the lifeboat who were not killed outright were thrown into the icy water. I think I shall always hear the shouts of those drowning people in my ears, a survivor recalled.

Within moments, the City of Rio de Janeiro was gone. Gone as well were 128 souls, including the entire Wildman family, 37 of the 46 steerage passengers and Capt. Ward. It was the deadliest shipwreck ever to take place in or near San Francisco Bay.

Most of the 82 survivors, including pilot Jordan, were rescued by Italian fishermen from North Beach, who were the first to arrive on the scene.

Courts later found that both Ward and Jordan had been grossly negligent in trying to enter the Golden Gate in the fog.

Although the ship sank near shore, all efforts to find it failed. The fate of the wreck of the City of Rio de Janeiro remained one of the Bay Areas great maritime mysteries until 2014, when a submersible discovered the ship half a mile offshore in 287 feet of water. After 113 years, the last chapter of the worst maritime disaster ever to take place in San Francisco waters had finally been closed.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco, awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicles archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.comCalifornia Gov. Gavin Newsom revealed new details of his plans to charge water customers in the state a new tax to fund safe drinking water for disadvantaged communities.

He announced Wednesday his plans to charge water customers an extra amount ranging from 95 cents to $10 a month  money that, combined with fees on animal farmers, dairies and fertilizer sellers, he projects would raise $140 million a year that could be put toward testing wells, aiding public water systems and treating contaminated water. The amount paid would depend on the size of one's water meter.

Newsom called the drinking water situation faced by some of the state's low-income communities "a moral disgrace and a medical emergency."

ALSO: Newsom calls SF-to-LA high speed rail unrealistic

But some observers say that with limited appetite for more taxes, the plan faces an uphill battle in the state Legislature, where tax and fee increases must be approved by two-thirds of lawmakers, some of whom are wary after a vote to approve the gas tax led to the recall of a Democratic senator last year.

Democrats from agricultural districts may be hesitant to support the tax. One such senator, Anna Caballero, has introduced a competing proposal that would create a trust fund for water improvements using money from the state's existing surplus.

On social media, some were incensed at Newsom's proposal.

"We are being taxed to death," wrote Twitter user @dcibbott.

"This $120 water tax on top of the highest gas tax, vehicle registration fees, and one of the highest state income taxes. No! Work with what you have already," wrote Pamela Adger on Twitter. "Then start undoing all those tax breaks for corporations. Maybe Nestle can pay for the cleanup."

Newsom first floated the idea of the water tax back in January when he introduced his 2019-20 budget.

He called for establishing a "safe and affordable drinking water fund" to "enable the State Water Resources Control Board to assist communities, particularly disadvantaged communities, in paying for the short-term and long-term costs of obtaining access to safe and affordable drinking water."

Six million Californians rely on water providers that have violated state standards at some point in the past six years, a McClatchy investigation found in 2018. According to the report, the majority of Californians that lack safe drinking water live in the southern San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert.

MORE: Newsom shares his side of his phone call with President Trump

Former Gov. Jerry Brown attempted a similar proposal last year, but it died in the Legislature. Under Brown's plan, residents would have been taxed a more modest sum than under the Newsom plan  95 cents a month.

Earlier this year, Newsom took his Cabinet on a trip to the Central Valley to hear from residents who lack clean drinking water.

"We met with residents who cannot drink or bathe with the water in their homes, while paying more for it than those in Beverly Hills," Newsom tweeted.

Central Valley residents who support the tax echoed those themes at Wednesday's press conference.

"We are the poorest families," said Lucy Hernandez, a resident of Tulare County, "and we are willing to pay the tax because we spend a lot more money than the tax buying water bottles for our families."

The AP and SFGATE staff writer Eric Ting contributed to this report.Michael Macor/The Chronicle

The Fruitvale BART station was closed for over an hour on Friday afternoon after a person was stabbed, reopening shortly before 5 p.m., according to the transit agency. The stabbing suspect was still at large when the station reopened, officials said.

Partial train service was restored in the Dublin and Warn Springs direction, BART announced at 4:54 p.m.This article, The majority of scooters in LA are going to share your location with the city, originally appeared on CNET.com.

Los Angeles is pumping the brakes on scooter companies that won't tell it what part of the city you're wheeling around.

Last September, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation said it would require all scooter companies to provide location data on the vehicles to help with city planning purposes. The data is collected by GPS on the scooters.



"Route information is provided to the city after the trip has completed and within 24 hours and it doesn't include the name, age, gender, address of the user," the agency said in a statement. "LADOT is asking companies to provide the start trip and end trip of every vehicle as trips start and as trips end to make sure scooters are being parked legally and within the terms of the permit."

The requirement raised privacy concerns because sensitive data would be handled by the city government. The government partners with data aggregators, like Remix, to analyze that information. Privacy advocacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Technology and Democracy, have publicly spoken out about these data requests.



"We at Remix are excited to help LA and many other cities use data to make better decisions and empower micromobility programs to be successful in the context of the larger transportation ecosystem," Tiffany Chu, Remix's co-founder, said in a statement.

It still isn't clear how long LADOT retains the location data, and there aren't public details on what aggregators can do with that information. What is clear: Companies that don't share the data won't be allowed to put as many scooters on the streets as those that do.

More for you Lime gets hope for future scooter bids in SF

Companies that declined to provide the data were given a 30-day provisional permit to operate in LA, which were handed out last week, while those that agreed to hand over anonymized location data received permits for a full year, Motherboard reported.

LADOT is limiting more than the length of the permits given to companies concerned about privacy issues. It's also limiting the size of their fleets. The city is allowing Lyft, Uber and other companies that hesitate to share the data to operate only 3,000 scooters. Companies that offer the location data, like Lime and Spin, can grow to fleets with 10,500 scooters over the next year.

That means LA residents will be more than three times as likely to ride a scooter providing the city government with location data, which critics say raises privacy concerns.

"LADOT is punishing businesses for standing up for the rights of customers while companies neglecting their responsibility to consumer privacy are being rewarded with exclusive financial opportunities," an Uber spokesperson said in a statement.

Spin said that cities need data to make streets safer but raised concerns that its agreement with LADOT could have privacy issues.



"We are alarmed when cities force operators to share sensitive location data with third-party for-profit data firms, without stipulating that the firms do not use that data to meet private business goals," a Spin spokesperson said. "Going forward, we encourage LADOT to re-evaluate their third-party contracts to include strong safeguards for rider privacy."



Despite the disagreement, Spin said it still intends to provide its data to the city government.

Lyft and Lime didn't respond to a request for comment.

An LADOT spokesperson said Uber, Lyft and other companies can still apply for the full year's permit, which would grant them the same limits as rival scooter companies. All companies offering scooters must comply with the one-year permit requirements by April 15, the spokesperson said.

It's unclear what Uber and Lyft will do after the deadline. An Uber spokesperson said the company would comply if LADOT had detailed, public plans on how it will protect that data from misuse.

Location data is sensitive information, even if it's anonymized. A New York Times investigation found that people could still be identified through anonymized data by simply tracing specific commutes an individual would take.

For example, it would be relatively easy to associate an individual to location data if it constantly showed someone at his or her home address.

LADOT's plan to collect location data will likely expand beyond scooters. The agency hopes to collect location data on ride shares too.

Uber has its own history of sidestepping city regulations. Two years ago the company used a tool called Greyball to thwart authorities looking for cars being driven for the company.

While California has the toughest data privacy law in the US, the legislation doesn't apply to government agencies such as LADOT. The agency, in turn, gives that data to Remix, a private company, for analysis, creating another privacy concern.



Remix said it's "contractually obligated not to share that data" but didn't provide details of its contract with LADOT.



Originally published March 21, 2:03 p.m. PT.

Updates, 4:28 p.m.: Includes response from Spin; March 22: Adds response from Remix.

Correction, March 21, 4:28 p.m.: Clarifies what kind of data LADOT is requesting from scooter companies."Us" is a jumble of ideas, and they aren't clear ideas. People will see in it what they like, and they will give it an intellectual coherence it doesn't possess. But, really, the thing to like best about "Us" is its messiness. Writer-director Jordan Peele throws a lot at his audience in this one, perhaps as a way of concealing his film's true meaning from himself.

This is a more-serious work than his previous film, "Get Out," and it's a surprising departure. "Get Out," though enjoyable, was almost too obvious in its intention, too transparent in its thinking. "Us" is wonderfully confused, a horror film that taps into unconscious terrors, within the audience and probably within the filmmaker, as well.

Lupita Nyong'o  she's terrific in this  plays an upper-middle class wife and mother who, as a young girl, had something very weird happen to her. Inside a haunted house along the Santa Cruz boardwalk, she ran into her doppelganger. Instead of dismissing the incident as a hallucination or a mirror effect, she still thinks about it 30 years later. All the same, when her husband (Winston Duke) insists on taking the whole family for a long Santa Cruz weekend, she goes along with it, despite misgivings.

Peele takes his time in these early scenes. He rolls it out slowly, introducing the couple's bickering friends, Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker). Kitty reveals that, like John at the bar in the old Billy Joel song, she believes she could have been a movie star. It takes a special kind of an actress who can say that and seem completely ridiculous, without us remembering, until later, that it's an actual movie star saying the line.

And then the long night begins. Adelaide (Nyong'o) tells her husband that her uneasiness has become unbearable, that they and their two kids need to pack up and leave immediately. But it's too late. The doppelgangers are standing outside the house  one for father, one for mother, one for sister, one for brother.

A word about the doppelgangers. They're not monsters. They're human. They live underground, and they're described as shadow people. The implication is that everyone has one. And these shadow people are not nice. They're feral. They're wild, animalistic, irrational. And their voices are terrifying. Nyong'o and Peele come up with a voice for Adelaide's doppelganger; a heaving, scraping, breathless sound that chills the blood.

As for what happens next, that's best left discovered in the watching. But just knowing this much, it's clear that Peele has hit on something that has wide metaphorical application. Some will insist on seeing "Us" as a movie about the American underclass. Peele probably wants people to think that, because at one point, Adelaide's doppelganger says, "We are America."

But that's Peele playing to the crowd, trying to give critics and audiences a hook, some notion that there's a higher social purpose behind the proceedings. But if you think it through, that interpretation doesn't make complete sense. It's good as an allusion, as an echo of a thought, but only that. Obviously, not every successful person has an unsuccessful doppelganger living in torment. Even if you take that to mean that every successful person has someone similar living in misery, that has no impact even as metaphor.

More Information *** Review "Us" Rated: R for violence/terror, and language Length: 116 minutes **** Excellent *** Good ** Fair * Poor See More Collapse

The doppelganger idea can also be looked it in psychiatric terms, that the doppelganger is the id, the wild, suppressed part of the self that lives underground, unseen. And again, that's a nice idea to have floating around the movie, but it doesn't quite line up allegorically, because the id is an unconscious motivator of human behavior, not something completely separate from the self.

Adelaide is Peele's main character, the one that expresses his viewpoint and that, for all intents and purposes, is him within the story. And so, at one point, he has Adelaide go underground, into the tunnels. He has her, in a sense, penetrate the unconscious world, which is depicted as unreal, a pristine and barren place populated by fat and contented rabbits. It's a brilliant sequence, in which she ultimately must do battle with herself.

So, "Us" is not about America, though it is, a little; and it's not about the unconscious, though it's slightly that, too. What it's really about is a newly and phenomenally successful artist contemplating his own American story. It's about the guilt that comes with success, as well as the horror that it might have gone another way and the fear that it could still go away.

Last time, Peele made a movie about the country. This time he made a movie about himself, and it's even better.Despite a widely-publicized announcement that he was retiring from touring, rocker Paul Simon will head back to San Francisco this August to headline a special set at this year's Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival.

Simon will close out the festival on Sunday, Aug. 11, and will donate the proceeds from his performance to a "local environmental non-profit organization," according to event organizers.

RELATED: Outside Lands' early Eager Beaver tickets to go on sale this week

"It's an honor to join the long line of musicians who've given (Golden Gate Park) its sanctified musical heritage," Simon said in a press release. "I'm equally pleased to be playing in San Francisco with its well-deserved reputation for being in the forefront of environmental issues. I'm grateful for the opportunity to be of service to this vital cause."

As the Chronicle notes, it's unusual for Outside Lands to announce one of its headliners ahead of the general lineup release; in fact, it's the first time in their 12-year history that they've done so. (The rest of the lineup drops on Tuesday, March 26.)

The fest appears to be making an exception to their standard operating procedure this year in an effort to explain why Simon is returning to the stage since his farewell tour: to promote sustainability.

RELATED: The coolest, craziest fashion from Outside Lands

Every year, Outside Lands makes an obvious effort to promote composting and minimizing total waste, aligning with Simon's green objectives. In 2018, the festival noted a 92 percent waste diversion rate and also did away with plastic straws while bringing in more reusable containers.

Although early-sale Eager Beaver tickets for the festival weekend have already sold out, general sale tickets will go on sale soon.

Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival takes place at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on August 9-11, 2019.

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira.

Brett Coomer / Associated Press

HOUSTON  Authorities on Thursday ordered people to stay indoors for several hours after high levels of benzene were detected in the air near a petrochemical storage facility outside of Houston where a fire sent a black pillar of smoke into the air for days.

Firefighters on Wednesday extinguished the blaze at the Intercontinental Terminals Company in Deer Park, which started Sunday and destroyed several large tanks that contained gasoline and chemicals used in nail polish remover, glues and paint thinner. They continued to spray foam on the site Thursday to try to prevent flare-ups.WASHINGTON  President Trump on Friday intensified his attacks on special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation in his latest effort to undermine the findings in Muellers highly anticipated report, saying people will not stand for it.

The probe is widely expected to end in the coming weeks, but Trump was focused on its beginnings rather than its conclusion, complaining about Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosensteins appointment of Mueller in May 2017. Rosenstein appointed the special counsel after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

I have a deputy, appoints a man to write a report on me, to make a determination on my presidency, Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network. People will not stand for it.

Trump bemoaned that the special counsel was best friend to Comey, who succeeded Mueller as FBI director. Theres no evidence the two are close friends.

Mueller was appointed following the recusal two months earlier of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. That action entangled Rosenstein, whose memo castigating Comey was cited by the White House as justification for his firing. In addition, Rosenstein didnt appoint Mueller to write a report  thats simply the ordinary course of action laid out in the special counsel regulations.

Guessing when Muellers report will be turned over to the Department of Justice has become a popular Washington parlor game, though the special counsel has not officially indicated that his probe is in its final stages. Justice Department regulations require only that Mueller give the attorney general a confidential report that explains the decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions. That could be as simple as a bullet point list or as fulsome as a report running hundreds of pages.

Attorney General William Barr is required only to say the investigation has concluded and describe or explain any times when he or Rosenstein decided an action Mueller proposed was so inappropriate or unwarranted that it should not be pursued. After Mueller turns in his report, Barr has said he will draft a second one for congressional and public consumption.

Even if Muellers final report does not implicate the president in criminal conduct, the investigation was far from fruitless. His team brought charges against 34 people, including six Trump associates, and three companies. His prosecutors revealed a sweeping criminal effort by Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and showed that people connected to the Trump campaign were eager to exploit emails stolen from Democrats.

Jonathan Lemire is an Associated Press writer.San Francisco Mayor London Breed has created a panel of officials, criminal justice experts and advocates to examine the countys juvenile justice system, including how to best use its nearly vacant juvenile hall, and make recommendations for potential reforms.

The announcement follows a Chronicle report published online Thursday that documented a sharp drop in serious youth crimes that has contributed to reduced populations in juvenile halls across the state. The report found that spending on juvenile halls and camps is as high in some counties as $500,000 a year per youth.

The annual cost of locking up a child in San Francisco has nearly doubled since 2011, reaching $266,000 last year. Similar trends have occurred across California, where almost every juvenile hall is operating at or below 50 percent capacity.

The Chronicle plans to publish its full series of stories, titled Vanishing Violence, in print editions on Sunday and Monday.

In response to The Chronicle report, San Francisco supervisors Hillary Ronen, Shamann Walton and Matt Haney announced they are drafting legislation to shut down the countys 150-bed facility by 2021. The measure would establish a task force to figure out how to close the facility and create secure and supportive settings for young people accused of crimes, including the most serious or violent offenses.

Mayor Breeds proposal suggests conducting a thorough review with juvenile justice leaders before committing to any major changes.

While we have had success in greatly reducing the number of incarcerated youth in San Francisco, we need to take the next step and reimagine what our system will be in the future, Breed said in a statement. While there has been talk of shutting down our juvenile hall, it is important that before we make any decisions we look at the juvenile justice system as a whole.

The panel will include several criminal justice representatives, including Juvenile Probation Chief Allen Nance, as well as youth advocates, community-based service providers and young people with firsthand experience in the juvenile justice system. The panel will begin meeting in April.

Among the panels goals will be to reduce the number of young people detained in San Franciscos juvenile hall, and to make recommendations on how to best use the citys existing facilities, including the Log Cabin Ranch, which was recently shuttered, and the juvenile hall, which is about 70 percent empty on an average day.

Supervisor Ronen said she plans to move forward with her proposal to close San Franciscos juvenile hall, citing evidence that many youth are detained unnecessarily, and stark racial disparities in who is locked up.

Youth advocates have found that last December, roughly one-third of the wards in San Franciscos juvenile hall were held on misdemeanor offenses, and half of the children were there while awaiting a court-ordered placement. Black youth also made up more than half of the people booked into juvenile hall last year, even though theyre just 5 percent of San Franciscos under-18 population, Ronen said.

My worry is if theres not a commitment to shutting down juvenile hall, then its going to be a lot of talk without a lot of action, Ronen said. Weve talked about the problem for a long time, we know the system is broken, and now is the time to start making commitments and taking actions toward change, starting with shutting down juvenile hall and designing and creating a truly rehabilitative model.

Joaquin Palomino is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jpalomino@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoaquinPalominoWASHINGTON  The long-awaited special counsel report is complete, 675 days after Robert Mueller was named to oversee the investigation into Russias election interference, whether any Trump associates coordinated with that plot and whether President Donald Trump tried to obstruct justice. Attorney General William Barr has the document. But it has yet to be made public, and the path to its potential release  or the release of the facts it contains  is complicated.

Will the report be made public?

That remains to be seen. Some information is expected to come out because Barr has to update Congress, but that does not mean the entire report will be public.

Barr must notify the leaders of Congress judiciary committees that the special counsel investigation is completed and explain whether he or his predecessors overseeing it opposed any significant step that Mueller sought to take, according to the regulation he was appointed under.

The regulation set no time frame or deadline for when Barr must tell Congress.

Nor was Barr required to tell lawmakers more than those basic facts. He would be operating within the regulation if he were to give Congress a bare-bones notification that Mueller had concluded his work.

According to the Justice Departments explanation of the regulation, published in the Federal Register in 1999, Barr has to determine whether releasing the report, or portions of it, is in the publics interest. Barr has said repeatedly that he would release as much as he could from the report within the parameters of the special counsel regulations.

First, Barr and his aides will have to review the report to determine whether any information is classified or otherwise sensitive, or protected by privacy laws or executive privilege, which can be invoked for sensitive law enforcement materials.

The back and forth on what information Congress can and cannot have will most likely have to be resolved by a court.

Will Congress be fine with a bare-bones report?

No.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has already called for the entire report, without redactions, to be provided to lawmakers.

Regulations governing special counsel Muellers investigation do not prohibit Attorney General Barr from disclosing Muellers final report and investigative materials to Congress, Feinstein said in February.

And the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the report to be made public  a largely symbolic move to publicly pressure Barr to release it.

Democrats in the House have also made the case that seeing the report in its entirety is critical to their ability to conduct oversight and determine whether to move forward with impeachment proceedings.

Congress could be the only institution currently situated to act on evidence of the presidents misconduct, the chairmen of several House committees wrote in a Feb. 22 letter to Barr.

Further, they wrote, Congress should decide what should be redacted in the report.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has said that she does not support impeaching Trump without support from Republican lawmakers because it is too divisive for the country. Barring new shocking revelations about Trump, Democrats would prefer to beat Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

What if the administration refuses requests from Congress?

Lawmakers have a few options to try to make public details of the investigation, though some could involve years of litigation.

They can start issuing subpoenas to Barr, who can ignore them or refuse them. They can also subpoena Muellers testimony. The Justice Department is likely to resist those demands.

If that happens, lawmakers could hold them in contempt and ask the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to prosecute. Lawmakers could also sue to try to force the Trump administration to hand over the requested material. Such litigation could go on for years.

The White House could also try to negotiate with Congress, such as making some witnesses available, but not all, said Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University Law School. The White House is also likely to challenge some requests and assert that the requested information is available to lawmakers through other means.

Lawmakers can also use their bully pulpits to publicly pressure Barr for more information and tie up the Justice Department in hearings and subpoena fights that last for the rest of Trumps time in office.

Will Trump see the Mueller report?

That is not clear.

Trump is Barrs boss, and there is nothing to stop Barr from immediately sharing the report with the White House, Pildes said. But doing so would violate the Justice Departments long-standing independence from the White House, said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor who ran the departments Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush administration.

And if the Mueller report includes grand jury testimony, which is protected under federal law, the number of people permitted to see the report shrinks significantly. Trump, as president, would be permitted to see it in certain circumstances.

For example, according to a 1993 opinion by the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel, grand-jury information may be disclosed to the president if it relates to his role in helping the department decide how to enforce the law, or if it relates to a national security threat.

In another Justice Department legal opinion, written in 2000, the president may have access to grand jury material if it is used as part of his consideration for a pardon. There has been a great deal of discussion about whether Trump would give presidential pardons to his former aides who have been charged in Muellers investigation, such as Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman who was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison in two cases.

What if Trump reads the report and tweets inaccuracies about it?

Even if Mueller and Barr know that what Trump is saying publicly is not true, there is no apparent legal duty for the Justice Department to correct the president.

Will the report be the final word on collusion?

Unlikely.

First, collusion has no legal definition, though it has become a term of art as a shorthand reference to the Russia investigation. A key question in the special counsel investigation concerns whether Trump or his campaign was coordinating with Russia to try to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. If Muellers investigation ends without charging Trump or his aides with conspiracy, some may interpret that to be a no collusion finding.

Trump consistently cites government officials and the lack of collusion charges as evidence that there was never collusion between his campaign and Russia.

This article originally appeared in The New York TimesSanta Clara County officials are shifting their position on contacting federal authorities about inmates convicted of violent crimes after an apparent undocumented felon was arrested in connection with the brutal killing of a South San Jose woman in late February.



Current county policy prevents jail officials from contacting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials if an inmate has been placed under a detainer request, which asks that inmates be held longer until federal authorities take them into custody. State law has ruled this process unconstitutional, and detainers are not considered as legal warrants.



The new proposal from Supervisor Dave Cortese would instead allow local law enforcement to notify ICE if an inmate is about to be released, and push for ICE to obtain warrants in all cases. It would then review state law and determine a legal process for transferring inmates.



ICE already has access to local arrest data, according to the county, but contacting them directly would make it their responsibility to respond in a timely fashion and take individuals into custody. Data from San Mateo County shows that of almost 300 detainer requests issued by ICE in 2018 - all without warrants - agents only responded to pick up inmates fewer than 40 times.



Cortese said the county has expeditiously turned over inmates in three recent cases when ICE obtained warrants, but ICE must improve its track record of responsiveness.



"Ambiguity is not a friend, and it doesn't help anyone in the system to do law enforcement the way they like," Cortese said of the county's current no-contact policy during a news conference Thursday.



The move comes after the killing of 59-year-old Bambi Larson on Feb. 28, and the arrest of 24-year-old Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza in connection with her slaying. Police revealed in the following days that Arevalo Carranza had been deported once, arrested numerous times in connection with misdemeanors and violent felonies and released from county jail twice without ICE being notified.



Arevalo Carranza was charged with homicide in Santa Clara County court last week and may face a life sentence in prison if convicted.



The announcement set off a furious debate over sanctuary county policy and blame in Larson's death, with the San Jose mayor, police chief, county sheriff, and district attorney banding together to push the county for an improved notification process.



Cortese said his proposal in no way implies the county is responsible for all facets of a "broken immigration system," but rather shows its willingness to collaborate with local agencies.



He added that he's spoken with some immigrant advocacy groups about the proposal, and he shares their concerns of creating an unwelcoming atmosphere for law-abiding residents, but described the county as "progressive" and said it was one of the first to push back against unconstitutional ICE policies.



"We are proud of the fact that we've created a safe environment for immigrants," Cortese said. "We don't want to be deporting a hardworking breadwinner ... and end up breaking up a family. On the other hand, we can't have MS-13 gang members bailing themselves out of jail."



He referred to the federal government's immigration enforcement approach as "oppressive," and said the county must re-engage ICE to abide by a system of warrants, like every other federal agency.



Cortese's proposal asks that changes be implemented in a month to two months, and also requests a "deep analysis" of the county's probation system in response to Arevalo Carranza having been on parole with apparent mental health problems.



The Board of Supervisors will discuss the proposal at its Tuesday meeting.





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.OAKLAND (BCN)



The lawyer for Ghost Ship warehouse creative director Max Harris filed a motion this week asking to delay the trial of Harris and warehouse master tenant Derick Almena by six months because of newly discovered evidence.



Almena, 48, and Harris, 29, are charged with 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the fire during a music party that killed 36 people at the warehouse at 1309 31st Ave. on Dec. 2, 2016.



Last Sept. 7, Alameda County Superior Court Judge James Cramer scheduled the long-awaited trial of Almena and Harris to begin on April 2.



At a recent hearing, Judge Trina Thompson, who was later appointed to handle the case, indicated that she expects the trial to be lengthy, as she talked to the attorneys in the case about their availability the last week of August.



But Harris' attorney Max Briggs wrote in a motion he filed on Tuesday that he wants to delay the trial for 180 days so he has time to investigate what he said are "recently discovered facts which considerably impact defense strategy."



Briggs said, "The first issue cannot be discussed publicly or shared in detail with the public or prosecution as it would impede Mr. Harris' defense, involve improper disclosure of defense work product and could interfere with my investigation if specifics were reported in the media."



Although the attorneys in the case were told to keep their calendars clear for the trial of Almena and Harris, Briggs said another reason he wants the trial to be delayed is that he's scheduled to begin a trial on what he said is a "life case" in San Mateo County next Monday, a misdemeanor trial in San Joaquin County on April 19 and a death penalty trial in Fresno County on April 29.



Briggs said he's also scheduled to begin the retrial of another life case in Mendocino County on April 29.



"Without a 180-dsy continuance Mr. Harris will be deprived of reasonably effective assistance of counsel and will not receive his Sixth Amendment right to counsel," he wrote.



On Friday, Thompson will hold a hearing on Briggs' motion to delay the trial as well as a defense motion to dismiss the charges against Almena and Harris on the grounds that potentially exonerating evidence was destroyed, lost or altered under the watch of prosecutors.



Thompson previously said she expected the hearing on that issue alone would take a full day.



Almena's lawyer Tony Serra filed a motion last week asking that prosecutors be prohibited from making references to negative information about Almena, such as his use of drugs, including methamphetamines, that his children were temporarily placed with Alameda County Child Protective Services and that he has a misdemeanor conviction for receiving stolen property.



Serra said he also wants prosecutors barred from mentioning that Almena "pretended, as a joke, that he was Hitler and Harris was his Jewish slave."



In addition, Serra wrote that he wants to bar "any reference to the warehouse or Ghost Ship that calls it a fire trap or synonym or any opinion or conclusion regarding the unsafety of the premises."



Serra said introducing such information would "create substantial danger of undue prejudice, of confusing the issues, or of misleading the jury."





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 (BCN



A Russian-born Estonian citizen has been extradited to face charges in federal court in San Francisco of illegally buying specialized microelectronic components and smuggling them to Russia.



Valery Kosmachov, 66, a Russian native who became a naturalized Estonian citizen, was indicted under seal by a federal grand jury in San Francisco on Sept. 21, 2017.



He was arrested in Tallinn, Estonia, one year later and was extradited to the United States on March 14.



The indictment, unsealed Wednesday, alleges that some of the smuggled chips and other components had potential military as well as civilian uses.



Kosmachov and a co-defendant named in the indictment, Russian citizen Sergey Vetrov, 66, are accused of using two Estonian companies they owned as fronts to export the components between 2012 and 2014 by representing that the end users were in Estonia. They allegedly then smuggled the items to Russia.



Vetrov has not been apprehended, according to U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman Abraham Simmons. The U.S. and Russia do not have an extradition agreement.



Kosmachov pleaded not guilty to the charges before a federal magistrate in San Francisco on March 15. At another court appearance on Wednesday, he waived a detention hearing and agreed to remain in custody for the time being.



Kosmachov's next appearance is before U.S. District Judge William Orrick on March 28.



Kosmachov and Vetrov are each accused of 52 counts of conspiracy, money laundering and violation of the federal International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which forbids the unlicensed export of items of potential military use.



The charges include conspiracy to export unlicensed electronic components to Russia; 12 counts of exporting unlicensed items; 21 counts of smuggling items by means of false paperwork; conspiracy to launder money; and 17 counts of laundering money by transferring funds from an Estonian bank to U.S. banks to pay for the exports.



The charges each carry possible maximum sentences of 10 to 20 years in prison if the defendants are convicted.



The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, enacted by Congress in 1977, authorizes presidents to declare a national emergency to regulate international commerce when there is an unusual or extraordinary threat to the nation's security, foreign policy or economy.



Since 2001, according to the indictment, U.S. presidents have used that authority to order continuous one-year extensions of the Export Administration Act, which expired in 2001 and which restricted the unlicensed export of items with potential military use.









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.A Florida man pleaded guilty in federal court in New York Thursday to mailing 16 homemade explosive devices to 13 prominent critics of President Donald Trump in October.



Californians to whom the mailings were addressed by Cesar Sayoc, 57, included Democratic U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, philanthropist Thomas Steyer and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles.



None of the small pipe bombs exploded and some were intercepted by the FBI or U.S. Postal Service workers before they reached the recipients.



Other intended recipients included former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, actor Robert De Niro and the CNN news network.



Sayoc pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff of the Manhattan-based Southern District of New York to a total of 65 counts related to the 16 mailings. He will be sentenced by Rakoff on Sept. 12.



The 65 charges include four sets of 16 counts tied to the 16 mailings. Those charges are 16 counts each of using weapons of mass destruction, interstate transport of explosive devices, conveying a threat through interstate commerce and illegally mailing explosives with the intent to kill or injure another person.



The 65th count is using an explosive to commit a felony. The charges were contained in a document known as superseding information that replaces a 30-count grand jury indictment filed in November.



The charges of using weapons of mass destruction each carry a potential life sentence and the other convictions have maximum potential sentences of five to 20 years in prison.



Two packages containing the devices were mailed to Steyer in San Francisco and intercepted at a U.S. mail processing facility in Burlingame. A device sent to Harris's Sacramento office was intercepted at a postal facility in Sacramento.



Two packages were addressed to Waters in Sacramento and Los Angeles.



Sayoc was arrested on Oct. 26 in Plantation, Fla., near his white van, whose windows were covered with images critical of CNN, according to the FBI. He was identified in part through a fingerprint found inside one of the packages addressed to Waters.



FBI Agent David Brown said in an affidavit filed the day of the arrest that the packages typically contained about six inches of PVC pipe, a small clock, a battery, wiring and material that could be exploded through heat, shock or friction.



The devices were mailed in bubble-wrap-lined manila envelopes giving a return address of U.S. Rep. and former Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of South Florida.



U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman of Manhattan said in a statement, "For five days in October 2018, Cesar Sayoc rained terror across the country, sending high-ranking officials and former elected leaders explosive packages through the mail. Thankfully no one was hurt by these dangerous devices."





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.Two historical West Coast ships will return to Redwood City Friday, the nonprofit behind the ships said.



Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Chieftain will arrive Friday at the Redwood City Municipal Marina at 451 Seaport Court and tours will be given from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.



A $5 donation is suggested. Nonprofit Grays Harbor Historical Seaport, which is behind the two vessels, offers educational programs, sailing trips and tours on the vessels.







A man's body was found Thursday morning in San Jose's Coyote Creek Lake, police said.



Officers responded at 11:56 a.m. to the lake near Monterey and Metcalf roads after police were called by the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office.



Police said a hiker discovered the body and told an area maintenance who called law enforcement.



Police said no indication exists that the man was slain.







The lawyer for Ghost Ship warehouse creative director Max Harris filed a motion this week asking to delay the trial of Harris and warehouse master tenant Derick Almena by six months because of newly discovered evidence.



Almena, 48, and Harris, 29, are charged with 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the fire during a music party that killed 36 people at the warehouse at 1309 31st Ave. on Dec. 2, 2016.



Last Sept. 7, Alameda County Superior Court Judge James Cramer scheduled the long-awaited trial of Almena and Harris to begin on April 2.



At a recent hearing, Judge Trina Thompson, who was later appointed to handle the case, indicated that she expects the trial to be lengthy, as she talked to the attorneys in the case about their availability the last week of August.



But Harris' attorney Max Briggs wrote in a motion he filed on Tuesday that he wants to delay the trial for 180 days so he has time to investigate what he said are "recently discovered facts which considerably impact defense strategy."







A Florida man pleaded guilty in federal court in New York Thursday to mailing 16 homemade explosive devices to 13 prominent critics of President Donald Trump in October.



Californians to whom the mailings were addressed by Cesar Sayoc, 57, included Democratic U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, philanthropist Thomas Steyer and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles.



None of the small pipe bombs exploded and some were intercepted by the FBI or U.S. Postal Service workers before they reached the recipients.



Other intended recipients included former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, actor Robert De Niro and the CNN news network.



Sayoc pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff of the Manhattan-based Southern District of New York to a total of 65 counts related to the 16 mailings. He will be sentenced by Rakoff on Sept. 12.



The 65 charges include four sets of 16 counts tied to the 16 mailings. Those charges are 16 counts each of using weapons of mass destruction, interstate transport of explosive devices, conveying a threat through interstate commerce and illegally mailing explosives with the intent to kill or injure another person.







Maria Vides, who allegedly shot her husband Paul Shatswell after a dispute Saturday morning in Pittsburg, has been accused of murder with special enhancements for causing brain injury and using a firearm, according to Contra Costa County prosecutors.



Shatswell was taken to a hospital and placed on life support after emergency crews responded to Barrie Drive on March 16.



Vides was arrested and booked into jail for her alleged role in the shooting and charged in a criminal complaint filed Wednesday.



Shatswell is principal of the Pittsburgh Unified School District's adult education program. He's also a father of eight, and a former reserve deputy with the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office. An update on the victim's medical status was not immediately available, but as of Sunday he was listed in critical condition.



School district officials said on social media Sunday morning that Shatswell has had a wide impact on the Pittsburg community, and they would have many memories of his love of music, family, friendship, Pittsburg and education.







President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday protecting freedom of speech on college campuses but University of California President Janet Napolitano said it's "unnecessary."



The order directs agencies that make federal grants to ensure that colleges are complying with the law and their own policies to promote free inquiry and debate but it doesn't tie student-aid money to compliance.



Trump criticized the University of California at Berkeley recently when conservative activist Hayden Williams was punched in the face while recruiting for his organization at a table in the university's Sproul Plaza.



Neither Williams nor the man who was arrested and charged with attacking him are UC Berkeley students.



Napolitano said in a statement, "Like many higher education institutions across the country, the University of California is ground zero for robust exchanges of ideas and differing viewpoints."







Santa Clara County officials are shifting their position on contacting federal authorities about inmates convicted of violent crimes after an apparent undocumented felon was arrested in connection with the brutal killing of a South San Jose woman in late February.



Current county policy prevents jail officials from contacting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials if an inmate has been placed under a detainer request, which asks that inmates be held longer until federal authorities take them into custody. State law has ruled this process unconstitutional, and detainers are not considered as legal warrants.



The new proposal from Supervisor Dave Cortese would instead allow local law enforcement to notify ICE if an inmate is about to be released, and push for ICE to obtain warrants in all cases. It would then review state law and determine a legal process for transferring inmates.



ICE already has access to local arrest data, according to the county, but contacting them directly would make it their responsibility to respond in a timely fashion and take individuals into custody. Data from San Mateo County shows that of almost 300 detainer requests issued by ICE in 2018 - all without warrants - agents only responded to pick up inmates fewer than 40 times.



Cortese said the county has expeditiously turned over inmates in three recent cases when ICE obtained warrants, but ICE must improve its track record of responsiveness.







Sonoma County sheriff's deputies arrested three Santa Rosa men late Wednesday night on suspicion of robbing a man at knifepoint south of Santa Rosa.



The male victim told the deputies that he was robbed around 10:15 p.m. on Moorland Avenue and West Robles Avenue, the sheriff's office said. The victim said four suspects, one armed with a knife, got out of a car, took his backpack, cellphone and other belongings.



A deputy found the car 20 minutes later in the parking lot of a gas station on McMinn Avenue near Sebastopol Road and called for a Santa Rosa police officer. There were three adults and a juvenile in the vehicle, the sheriff's office said.



Juan Jose Bernabe-Vega, 20, Daniel Avalos-Arreguin, 18, and Christian Hernandez Gonzales, 18, all of Santa Rosa, were arrested on suspicion of armed robbery and conspiracy and booked in the Sonoma County Jail. The juvenile was released to his parents.



Bernabe-Vega and Hernandez Gonzalez are known gang members, and the robbery of a random victim is believed to be gang-related, according to the sheriff's office.



Deputies found the victim's belongings, except his cellphone, in the suspects' vehicle, sheriff's officials said.







Friday will be partly cloudy with a chance of rain in the morning and a chance of rain in the afternoon. Highs will be in the upper 50s. South winds will be 10 to 20 mph.



Friday night will be breezy with showers possible in the evening. Lows will be near 50 degrees. South winds will be 20 to 30 mph before switching to west winds of 10 to 20 mph after midnight.



Saturday will be partly cloudy with highs in the upper 50s. Northwest winds will be 5 to 15 mph before becoming west winds in the afternoon.

















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.REDWOOD CITY (BCN)



Two historical West Coast ships will return to Redwood City Friday, the nonprofit behind the ships said.



Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Chieftain will arrive Friday at the Redwood City Municipal Marina at 451 Seaport Court, and tours will be given from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.



A $5 donation is suggested. Nonprofit Grays Harbor Historical Seaport, which is behind the two vessels, offers educational programs, sailing trips and tours on the vessels.



The two ships will be in Redwood City for tours on Friday, next weekend and the following weekend. Sailing trips are being offered Saturday and the next two weekends as well.





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 JOSE (BCN)



A man with duel United States and Swiss citizen ship has been convicted of wire and commodities fraud in connection with a fraudulent gold and diamond export scheme, United States Attorney David Anderson announced Tuesday.



Prosecutors said Fritz Kramer, 70, fraudulently solicited funds from investors from December of 2008 and July of 2016 by stating he was a gold and diamond exporter. He was convicted of 11 counts of wire fraud and one count of commodities fraud.



He told victims their money was being invested in an export project in which he would purchase gold and diamonds from the Democratic Republic of Congo and have the commodities exported to Europe, Asia and the United States.



Prosecutors said Kramer falsely promised investors they would receive up to 10 times the amount of money they invested, and that they could earn profits in as little as one month.



Kramer was able to convince more than three dozen victims to send money totaling millions of dollars to entities supposedly operating the fake export project.



Kramer was indicted in 2018.



He is scheduled for sentencing on July 15 and faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000, plus restitution, for each count of wire fraud and up to 25 years in prison and a fine of $250,000, plus restitution, for the commodities fraud count.









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.SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)



Police in South San Francisco are warning residents to be on the lookout for a phone scam in which the call shows up as coming from the police department's phone number.



The call uses the spoofed South San Francisco Police Department phone number (650) 877-8900 when it shows up on the victim's caller ID.



Spoofing is when a caller deliberately falsifies the information transmitted to a caller ID to disguise the caller's identity.



Police said the scam involves someone claiming the victim is under investigation, has an outstanding warrant or is subject to arrest for various reasons including having bad credit or an outstanding parking ticket.



The scammer will try to threaten the victim with arrest unless the victim pays fees via MoneyGram or prepaid gift cards.



The police department wants to remind residents it does not call private citizens requesting money.



Anyone who receives one of these calls is encouraged to end the call immediately.



Victims of the scam who suffer a monetary loss are asked to report the incident to police.





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.Sonoma County sheriff's deputies arrested three Santa Rosa men late Wednesday night on suspicion of robbing a man at knifepoint south of Santa Rosa.



The male victim told the deputies that he was robbed around 10:15 p.m. on Moorland Avenue and West Robles Avenue, the sheriff's office said. The victim said four suspects, one armed with a knife, got out of a car, took his backpack, cellphone and other belongings.



A deputy found the car 20 minutes later in the parking lot of a gas station on McMinn Avenue near Sebastopol Road and called for a Santa Rosa police officer. There were three adults and a juvenile in the vehicle, the sheriff's office said.



Juan Jose Bernabe-Vega, 20, Daniel Avalos-Arreguin, 18, and Christian Hernandez Gonzales, 18, all of Santa Rosa, were arrested on suspicion of armed robbery and conspiracy and booked in the Sonoma County Jail. The juvenile was released to his parents.



Bernabe-Vega and Hernandez Gonzalez are known gang members, and the robbery of a random victim is believed to be gang-related, according to the sheriff's office.



Deputies found the victim's belongings, except his cellphone, in the suspects' vehicle, sheriff's officials said.





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.BERKELEY (BCN)



Police are investigating a reported strong-armed robbery that occurred Thursday on the University of California at Berkeley campus.



On Thursday at 7:06 p.m., two men approached the victim as he was sitting in the north courtyard area of the University Health Services medical clinic at 2222 Bancroft Way.



Police said one suspect attempted to grab the victim's backpack, and a struggle ensued.



The suspect punched the victim in the face several times, and the victim let go of the backpack.



The other man then grabbed the backpack and fled the area.



Police said the victim was still in possession of his laptop, and there was no property of value in the backpack.



The backpack was later located in a parking lot.



The victim sought his own medical treatment for his injuries.



Police searched the area for the suspects, but they were not located.





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.President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday protecting freedom of speech on college campuses but University of California President Janet Napolitano said it's "unnecessary."



The order directs agencies that make federal grants to ensure that colleges are complying with the law and their own policies to promote free inquiry and debate but it doesn't tie student-aid money to compliance.



Trump criticized the University of California at Berkeley recently when conservative activist Hayden Williams was punched in the face while recruiting for his organization at a table in the university's Sproul Plaza.



Neither Williams nor the man who was arrested and charged with attacking him are UC Berkeley students.



Napolitano said in a statement, "Like many higher education institutions across the country, the University of California is ground zero for robust exchanges of ideas and differing viewpoints."



Napolitano said, "UC's policies already align with applicable laws protecting free speech, a fundamental tenet of our democracy and the guiding principle of academic rigor. We have established a national free speech center to explore the evolving dynamics of the First Amendment on campuses."



She said, "The university has spent significant resources on security and logistical support to facilitate the expression of diverse speakers and opinions. A simple visit to any of our campuses would underscore the superfluous nature of this executive order."



Napolitano added, "We do not need the federal government to mandate what already exists: our longstanding, unequivocal support for freedom of expression. That tradition is alive and thriving on all of our campuses."



She said, "This executive order will only muddle policies surrounding free speech, while doing nothing to further the aim of the First Amendment."





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.BERKELEY (BCN)



A University of California, Berkeley student was robbed at gunpoint this week, campus police said.



The student was walking with a friend on Shattuck Avenue near Addison Street about 2:30 a.m. Monday, when they were approached by two male suspects, UC police said.



One of the suspects brandished a handgun and they demanded a backpack and shoulder bag from the victim, according to police.



The suspects took the two items and fled westbound on Addison Street. Police have not released any information on any arrests in the case.





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.The driver accused of crashing into a Lyft car and killing its passenger is out on bond, records show.

Erik De Leon, 21, is facing two felony charges relating to the deadly March 1 crash, which left 40-year-old passenger Billy Satterfield dead and the driver, 29-year-old Ezatullah Safi, in critical condition.

De Leon told Houston police officers on scene that he had downed several tequila shots at a bar before allegedly T-boning the car near the intersection of Galveston Road and Pineloch Drive.

De Leon was hospitalized for some time after the crash and was never booked in jail, according to the Houston Police Department. Instead, he was released Wednesday from the hospital on a total $32,500 bond amount.

He is barred from driving and must submit monthly urinalyses. He is allowed to travel in Nueces and San Patricia counties, which is where he lives, according to court records.

He had a reported blood-alcohol content of .210 at the time of the crash, prosecutors said, which is more than twice the legal limit of .08.

While the suspect initially told Houston police officers he was at a bar called Bombshells before the crash, Sean Teare, head of the Harris County District Attorney's Office Vehicular Crimes Division, said his office confirmed De Leon never set foot in the nearby Bombshells or Studio 80, a rebranded bar that locals call Bombshells.

Company officials also confirmed that information, saying they worked closely with investigators.

"We extend our deepest condolences to the victims of this tragic incident," the company said in a press release.

However, Teare said prosecutors believe they know of two bars where De Leon was drinking immediately before the crash and are working to determine whether bartenders and employees followed proper procedures.

De Leon is facing up to 20 years in prison, if convicted.

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Special counsel Robert Mueller looks to be a "weekend warrior." On Friday, he delivered the findings of his nearly two-year investigation into President Donald Trump and Russia to Attorney General William Barr.

Details of Mueller's findings have not been released.

The news ignited the denizens of social media, who responded with thoughtful commentary, less thoughtful commentary, and fresh memes. The internet, unlike a special counsel investigation, moves fast.

FULL STORY: Mueller delivers report to AG

Some of the latter included Mueller as Obama-on-a-boat, Mueller as Beyonce in "Lemonade" (changed to "Kremlinade") and Mueller as romance novel protagonist. To each their own.

It wasn't all fun and games. This being America, both sides of the political spectrum took to Twitter to speculate about the contents of the report and, most importantly, to decry one another's idiocy. Lots of "impeachment pending!" posts from the left, and plenty of "nothingburgers!" from the right.

ALSO READ: Key questions answered about the report

Many disparaged Mueller's decision to submit the bombshell on a Friday night, disrupting Happy Hours everywhere as well as other "festivities."

"Mueller is such a drama queen, trying to steal the glory of national puppy day for himself," tweeted @morninggloria.

It's a lot to digest, so SFGATE sorted through some of the thousands of tweets. The highlights are in the above gallery.

Read Michelle Robertson's latest stories and send her news tips at mrobertson@sfgate.com.

Start receiving breaking news emails on wildfires, civil emergencies, riots, national breaking news, Amber Alerts, weather emergencies, and other critical events with the SFGATE breaking news email. Click here to make sure you get the news.A midcentury modern Manhattan town house with a storied past has finally sold for $18 million. The four-story, steel-and-glass building built in 1966 is rumored to have been purchased by the legendary fashion designer Tom Ford.

While the buyers identity is shielded through a limited liability corporation, the sale is generating buzz on the web that the buyer could very well be the man with the luxury brand. Sales agents for the property declined to comment on the buyer.

We can't verify the rumor, but lets take a look at some of the clues. And appreciate the real estate.

Halston lived here

The Upper East Side town house with a fashion legacy and modern design would hold out some allure for a person of Ford's sensibilities. Paul Rudolph, former dean of the Yale School of Architecture, designed the abode. While he wasn't the first owner, Halston owned the town home from 1974 to 1990. Halston's party pad was a coveted invite for the Studio 54 crowd, who hung out at the club and then retired to the fashion designer's home.

Halston's former town home was party central. realtor.com

These fashionable digs have been host to the likes of Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, and Liza Minelli. Minelli was reportedly a frequent guest, thanks to a fourth-floor suite that includes a bar, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and access to the 1,600-square-foot terrace. This is the house that captured the Zeitgeist of the '70s, the Engel & Volkers agents noted in a promotional video.

And, while other Manhattan neighborhoods may be considered more hip for a high-end designer, Ford was known to stay at the same room at the Carlyle Hotel, an Upper East Side landmark, when he came to the city. And he once told New York Magazine, I looove the Upper East Side. Its so perfect here.

The one-of-a-kind design could be a draw

The home's clean lines and sleek style were perfect for Halston, known for his minimalist designs. The fashion icon sold the home in 1990, and the luxury property has been on the market since 2011, waiting for the right buyer.

The focal point of the 7,500-square-foot layout is the grand living space. The light-filled room features soaring 32-foot-high ceilings and skylights that look out to a three-story bamboo greenhouse.

The 25-foot-wide home features a three-story greenhouse. realtor.com

The open stairs and interior balconies, along with a lofted mezzanine space, allowed guests to gaze down at the people partying below.

The double-height master suite is original to the home, and the built-ins are all Paul Rudolph designs, notes the listing agent, Howard Morrel. Its meant to be an experiential sculpture, an art piece, Morrel says.

The space is also practical, offering an elevator for those who cant stomach those steep stairs.

There are a total of four beds and 5.5 baths, two other living spaces, and two kitchens. The dark glass on the exterior provides privacy from the street and offers a secluded retreat inside.

While the property has a retro look to it, it could be ripe for a makeover. "If [Ford] is the purchaser, he can reimagine how this property should look today as Tom Fords property, while remaining the iconic Halston property it will always be," says luxury real estate broker Dolly Lenz. "Designers are all about inspiration."

We have hints suggesting who the homeowner could be

While the buyers identity remains hidden, there are breadcrumbs that are causing the speculation. The limited liability company behind the purchase is linked to the Hollywood business manager Chuck Shapiro. He reportedly represents the designer, among many other A-listers, including Shailene Woodley, Metallica, and Richard Gere.

We know what you're thinking: It could be any number of celebs. But as sharp-eyed WWD notes, "While Shapiro has a number of celebrity clients, it is also the same address as the LLC that Ford used to buy late heiress Betsy Bloomingdales Los Angeles home."

In addition, Fords newest gig as head of the New York-based Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), could require the designer to spend more time in the Big Apple.

Sleek kitchen realtor.com

Master suite realtor.com

Ford owns unique homes

If the 57-year-old is the buyer, it wouldnt be the first one-of-a-kind property hes purchased.

The Texan owns a ranch in New Mexico that hes placed on the market for $75 million. The spread includes an Old West town built for a movie set, over 20,000 acres, and a main house designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando.

In addition, the film director reportedly scooped up a Los Angeles estate for $50 million in 2016.

The post Did Tom Ford Buy Halston's Legendary Upper East Side Town House? appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.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."If they bloom, they will come.

California poppies are exploding in the Gavilan Hills flanking the eastern boundary of Lake Elsinore, inspiring thousands to descend on the region an hour's drive east of Los Angeles.

In recent days, traffic along Interstate 15, which passes through the Riverside County town, has often come to a standstill with people wanting to photograph the eye-popping floral display (see photos above).

"We've had a huge influx of people," says Jonathan Reinig, the natural resources manager for Riverside County Parks. "There's traffic everyday from it. The county says it's their most accident-y time of year."

Reinig adds, "I think social media has played a huge role" in drawing the crowds, and indeed photos of the Lake Elsinore poppies are all over Instagram and Twitter.

MORE: California's weird winter weather means wildflower season will be a big surprise

Rain is a key ingredient in the recipe for spectacular wildflower displays. Amid a winter marked by strong storms, botanists predicted wildflowers would pop up across the state, especially in Southern California because the desert landscape has fewer invasive plants and grasses that push out wildflowers.

Lake Elsinore is the first place to see a so-called "superbloom," a colloquial term describing wildflower spectacles that exceed a typical season.

The bloom started the last week of February and now the hillsides are carpeted in velvety orange.

"The color is super vibrant," says Reinig "You fee like you need to shade your eyes from it."

Photos of the display are flooding social media, and Reinig says the county has posted signage encouraging shutterbugs to tread lightly around the flowers.

"People love to get out there and get their Instagram photos," he says. "They'll plop themselves in the middle and trample the flowers. People need to stay on the path."

Reinig says the region last saw a superbloom in 2017 after a wet winter, and before that it had been four to five years before the flowers grew in abundance.

Usually a display lasts about a month, but he says the length of this year's bloom is uncertain with more storms in the forecast.

"We keep getting drenching downpours," he says. "I'm not sure how that impacts the flowers."Burning Man is not a festival, its organizers say, but the proliferating posts from the playa by Instagram influencers advertising products and showing off luxury amenities might suggest otherwise.

It's the topic of a new post from Burning Man nonprofit CEO Marian Goodell on the Burning Man blog. In it, Goodell details an academic symposium she attended in November in Switzerland, during which she listened to a presenter share dozens of reviews from participants at the annual Black Rock event.

One particular review, from a 70-year-old artist, stuck with her. This man was disenchanted by those he called discriminatory "gatekeepers," who only sought to include "hot girls" and other young people as part of their camps and art cars.

"That just broke my heart," Goodell wrote. "How did we get here? Who thinks saying this is okay on or off the playa? This isn't Burning Man."

RELATED: These photographers want you to see what Burning Man 2018 was really like

Last year, Goodell goes on to explain, she commissioned her communications team to put together a report compiling "examples of commodification and exploitation of Black Rock City and Burning Man culture." She had been prepared for unsavory results; her team had observed trends suggesting commercialism was indeed imbuing the culture of Burning Man. But it "stunned" her when the report came back 55 pages long.

One catalyst of the culture change she identifies in the post is the "increase of participants (both new and experienced) who don't seem invested in co-creating Black Rock City, and are attending as consumers."

The practice of convenient consumerism, she explains, is discordant with the pillars of Burning Man. Luxury camps and all-inclusive packages obfuscate the event's whole point of self-reliance. Posting #sponcon (sponsored content on social media) from the desert contradicts the decommodification principle. But still, every year, the richest and most influential show up in increasing numbers.

RELATED: Burning Man has been ruined. But it was doomed from the beginning.

There are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who hire people to build them air-conditioned yurts. There are private companies hiring cooks and assistants known as "Sherpas." There's a history of planes dropping off the wealthiest event-goers, right in the desert. Famously, in 2017, Google employees FedExed themselves lobster right to the playa.

This is not what Goodell wants for Burning Man.

"Black Rock City requires significant investments of time, energy, and resourcefulness," she writes. "Part of what makes Burning Man unique and powerful is that everyone has to work hard to be there. Planning, securing a ticket, packing, building, organizing, contributing, and engaging are part of the journey everyone should experience."

Read the post in full here.

This year's Burning Man takes place from Aug. 25 to Sept. 2.

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira.

A number of changes to future Burning Man events are being recommended by the Bureau of Land Management, and it seems many of the suggestions aren't sitting well with the Burning Man staff, who are calling the new measures "unreasonable."

A 372-page draft version of the annual Environmental Impact Statement was released last week by BLM. The Burning Man staff took to its website Wednesday to call attention to various points in the document, which the staff felt would "negatively change" Burning Man and substantially raise ticket costs.

"Our initial assessment of the Draft EIS determined many of the measures recommended by BLM are unreasonable," the staff wrote in a blog post on its site. "Some are in direct conflict with our community's core principles and would forever negatively change the fabric of the Burning Man event."

BURNING MAN 2018: Police report 44 arrests, 1 death, armed car jacking and plane crash

Among the contested changes suggested by BLM in the draft report, according to the Burning Man website, were:

 Federal oversight over certain parts of Burning Man's operations

 10 miles of either plastic or cement barriers around the perimeter fence

 Dumpsters within the city and along Gate Road for the 80,000 participants

 BLM-approved private security funded by Burning Man who would be screening for weapons and drugs for anyone entering Black Rock City.

One suggestion, labelled as "brazen" in the Burning Man staff statement, was that the group would pay for the maintenance of County Road 34, which takes participants to the entrance.

"We know of no other instance in the United States where a private entity is required by the federal government to pay for maintenance of a public county road that is also used year-round by residents, tourists, and businesses," the Burning Man group said in its statement.

"In addition, Nevada and Washoe County include a gas tax allocated in part for road repair (which participants have contributed to for 29 years) and Burning Man Project is already working closely in collaboration with Washoe County to find a more permanent solution for CR34."

Burning Man is not without its issues, as setting up a temporary city for 70,000 comes with its own set of headaches. Among the issues that the suggested changes seem to be addressing are arrests (most having to do with drug possession and trafficking of drugs), ongoing trash issues on the playa and in nearby towns following the event, and security.

Burning Man organizers estimated the additions to the Burning Man event would cost nearly $10 million a year and that the cost of tickets could be raised as a result. "BLM would benefit financially from these increased expenses," the group wrote, pointing out that BLM takes a percentage of Burning Man's gross revenue already  which the Reno Gazette-Journal noted was a 3-percent use fee.

Further, the Burning Man organizers already compensate for labor and operations performed by BLM staff, a cost recovery fee that the Gazette-Journal reported reached $2.5 million in 2017.

When reached for comment by SFGATE, Burning Man organizers said they did not have any further statements to add beyond its post on the topic.

HISTORY LESSON: Burning Man has been ruined. But it was doomed from the beginning.

Further complicating matters is the fact that organizers are seeking a 10-year permit with BLM to continue to hold the event at Black Rock Desert, which has been "home" to Burners for 27 years. The environmental impact statement was done in part to look at the potential outcome if the event grows to hold up to 100,000 people, versus its current attendee numbers of 70,000, or not holding the event at all.

The field manager for the Bureau of Land Management's Black Rock Field Office said its suggestions are "attempts at trying to solve problems" in comments to the Gazette-Journal, emphasizing that the report is not yet finalized. Public comment on the environmental impact statement is currently open until April 29 via BLM's website and two public meetings scheduled for April 8 in Reno and April 9 in Lovelock.

Read Dianne de Guzman's latest stories and send her news tips at ddeguzman@sfgate.com.

Start receiving breaking news emails on wildfires, civil emergencies, riots, national breaking news, Amber Alerts, weather emergencies, and other critical events with the SFGATE breaking news email. Click here to make sure you get the news.Temperatures across Northern California towns could dramatically heat up in the future, so much so that their climate may become more similar to towns south of the border, according to one university study.

The University of Maryland released an interactive map that shows how the climate across US cities will look by 2080, and the future climates of Vallejo, Vacaville and Sacramento were all compared to Mexican towns that include Loreto, Guadalupe Victoria and Tijuana, respectively.

Once a city is searched for in the interactive, a visual line connects it to another city in the globe. Think of it as city A and city B, where city Bs current climate could reflect what city As climate could be in just 60 years.

The idea is to translate global forecasts into something that's less remote, less abstract, that's more psychologically local and relevant, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science ecologist Matt Fitzpatrick told Wired.

To make their point clearer, the interactive also included how many degrees hotter city A could get.

More for you All the Bay Area sites that could be flooded by rising sea levels

For Vallejo, that means much hotter. It was compared to Loreto, Mexico; during the summer, it could become 8.5 degrees warmer and 1505.3 percent wetter in Vallejo as is the case for Loreto, Mexico now.

For most NorCal cities on the map though, their future climate mostly connected to cities in Southern California. San Francisco, for example, was linked to Palos Verdes Estates.

This all depends if current gas emission levels remain constant for the cities noted on the map, based on the data.

For their methodology, the university found present-day locations that have a climate most similar to that expected by in 2080 for the 540 cities listed. They used 12 different measures to describe climate, including minimum and maximum temperatures and total precipitation for all seasons.

They also considered two emission scenarios, where one assumes a continuation of high current emissions and the other that assumes emissions peak and then drop by mid-century.

Click on the slideshow above to see how climate in NorCal cities could change by 2080.

--

Follow Susana Guerrero on Twitter and email her at Susana.Guerrero@sfgate.com

Start receiving breaking news emails on wildfires, civil emergencies, riots, national breaking news, Amber Alerts, weather emergencies, and other critical events with the SFGATE breaking news email. Click here to make sure you get the news.If you're planning to travel through the northern Sierra Nevada mountain range this weekend, you'll want to plan carefully as a mixed bag of weather is in store for the region.

An approaching weak storm is set to deliver the first flurries of snow beginning at 4 p.m., with snowfall increasing steadily into the night and Saturday morning.CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand  New Zealanders observed the Muslim call to prayer Friday in reflecting on the moment one week ago when 50 worshipers at two Christchurch mosques were slain  an act that an imam told the crowd of thousands had left the country broken-hearted but not broken.

In a day without precedent, people across New Zealand listened to the call to prayer on live broadcasts while thousands, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, gathered in leafy Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor mosque, where 42 people died. New Zealand mourns with you. We are one, Ardern said.

The call to prayer was observed at 1:30 p.m. and followed by two minutes of silence. Hundreds of Muslim men at the park sat in socks or bare feet. One man in the front row was in a Christchurch Hospital wheelchair.

The Al Noor mosques imam, Gamal Fouda, thanked New Zealanders for their support.

This terrorist sought to tear our nation apart with an evil ideology. ... But, instead, we have shown that New Zealand is unbreakable, the imam said.

We are broken-hearted but we are not broken. We are alive. We are together. We are determined to not let anyone divide us, he added, as the crowd the city estimated at 20,000 people erupted with applause.

Later in the day, a mass funeral was held to bury 26 of the victims at a cemetery where more than a dozen already have been laid to rest.

Family members took turns passing around shovels and wheelbarrows to bury their loved ones. Fridays burials included the youngest victim, 3-year-old Mucaad Ibrahim.

Christchurch native Fahim Imam, 33, returned to the city for Fridays service. He moved away three years ago and now lives in Auckland, New Zealands largest city.

Its just amazing to see how the country and the community have come together  blows my mind, actually, Imam said before the event.

When he got off the plane Friday morning, he saw someone holding a sign that said jenaza, denoting Muslim funeral prayer. He said others were offering free rides to and from the prayer service.

The moment I landed in Christchurch, I could feel the love here. Ive never felt more proud to be a Muslim, or a Kiwi for that matter. It makes me really happy to be able to say that Im a New Zealander, Imam said.

Nick Perry and Juliet Williams are Associated Press writers.BEIJING  A massive explosion at a chemical plant in eastern China with a long record of safety violations has killed at least 47 people and injured hundreds of others, 90 of them seriously.

Thursdays blast in an industrial park in the city of Yancheng, north of Shanghai, was one of Chinas worst industrial accidents in recent years. State-run television showed crushed cars, blown-out windows and workers leaving the factory with bloodied heads.

Schools were closed and nearly 1,000 residents were moved to safety as a precaution against leaks and additional explosions, the city government said in a statement posted to its microblog.

The blast created a crater, and more than 900 firefighters were deployed to extinguish the fire that burned into the night.

Windows in buildings as far as 4 miles away were blown out by the force of the blast, which caused a magnitude 2.2 seismic shock.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, on a state visit to Italy, demanded all-out efforts to find and rescue victims, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Relief work must be well done to maintain social stability. Meanwhile, environmental monitoring and early warning should be strengthened to prevent environmental pollution as well as secondary disasters, it quoted Xi as saying.

Xi said local officials need to learn the lessons of a recent series of industrial accidents to save lives and property, signaling a likely crackdown on safety violations at a time when many Chinese companies are being hit by a downturn in sales that is squeezing profit margins.

China experiences frequent industrial accidents despite orders from the central government to improve safety at factories, power plants and mines.

Christopher Bodeen is an Associated Press writer.BEIRA, Mozambique  With the flooding easing in parts of cyclone-stricken Mozambique on Friday, fears are rising that the waters could yield up many more bodies. The confirmed number of people killed in Mozambique and neighboring Zimbabwe and Malawi climbed past 600.

Eight days after Cyclone Idai struck southeast Africas Indian Ocean coast, touching off some of the worst flooding in decades, the homeless, hungry and injured slowly made their way from devastated inland areas to the port city of Beira, which was heavily damaged itself but has emerged as the nerve center for rescue efforts.

Some were wounded. Some were bleeding, said Julia Castigo, a Beira resident. Some had feet white like flour for being in the water for so long.

Aid workers are seeing many children who have been separated from their parents in the chaos or orphaned.

Elhadj As Sy, secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said the relief efforts so far are nowhere near the scale and magnitude of the problem, and the humanitarian needs are likely to grow in the coming weeks and months.

We should brace ourselves, he said.

Helicopters set off into the rain for another day of efforts to find people clinging to rooftops and trees.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed for stepped-up support for victims of Idai, saying the United Nations and its humanitarian partners are scaling up the response but far greater international support is needed.

The U.N. chief said in a statement that with crops destroyed in the breadbasket of Mozambique more people are at risk of food insecurity in all three countries.

With water and sanitation systems largely destroyed, waterborne diseases are also a growing concern.

The situation is simply horrendous. There is no other way to describe it, said As Sy.

Cara Anna and Farai Mutsaka are Associated Press writers.BEIRUT  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday called on the Lebanese people to stand up to Hezbollahs criminality, terror and threats, and claimed U.S. sanctions on Iran and its Lebanese Shiite ally were working and that more pressure on them was forthcoming.

His comments in Beirut were in strong contrast to those of his host, Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, who minutes earlier  while standing next to Pompeo  insisted that Hezbollah is a Lebanese group that is not a terrorist organization and was elected by the people.

Pompeo, however, warned that the Lebanese people face a choice: Bravely move forward or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future.

He added that the U.S. would continue using all peaceful means to curb Hezbollah and Irans influence.

Pompeo highlighted U.S. concerns about Hezbollahs destabilizing activities in Lebanon and the region in talks his with Lebanese leaders, amid strong regional condemnation of President Trumps declaration that its time the U.S. recognized Israels sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The abrupt pronouncement on the Golan Heights clouded Pompeos visit during which he met with top officials, including some who are aligned with the Iran-and Syria-allied militant Hezbollah.

The visit is the last leg of a Mideast tour that took Pompeo to Kuwait and Israel, where he lauded warm ties with Israel, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on at least three separate occasions and promised to step up pressure on Iran.

From Israel, Pompeos plane traveled through Cypriot airspace, as Lebanon, which is technically in a state of war with Israel, bans direct flights from Israel.

Once on the ground, Pompeo was taken to the Interior Ministry for a brief meeting with Raya El-Hassan, who was named earlier this year as the Arab worlds first female minister in charge of security.

Pompeo also met with Lebanons powerful Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, before heading for a working lunch with Prime Minister Saad Hariri followed by a meeting with President Michel Aoun. The State Departments deputy spokesman, Robert Palladino, said Pompeo highlighted in the meetings U.S. concerns about Hezbollahs destabilizing activities in Lebanon and the region as well as the need to maintain calm along the border between Lebanon and Israel.

Zeina Karam and Matthew Lee are Associated Press writers.WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.  All remaining territory has been wrested from the Islamic State in Syria, President Trump announced Friday, though officials said sporadic fighting continued on the ground between coalition forces and the groups holdouts.

The complete fall of the last Islamic State stronghold in Baghouz, in eastern Syria, would mark the end of the Islamic States self-declared caliphate, which at its height stretched across large parts of Syria and Iraq. Controlling territory gave the group room to launch attacks around the world.WASHINGTON  President Trump undercut his own Treasury Department on Friday by announcing that he was rolling back North Korea sanctions that it imposed just a day ago.

The move, announced on Twitter, was a remarkable display of dissension within the Trump administration and showed how actively the White House is intervening in policies that are traditionally handled by career officials in the Treasury and State Departments. Trump appeared to confuse the day that the North Korea sanctions were announced, saying that it occurred Friday rather than Thursday.Public Sector Banks (PSBs) may raise capital themselves to meet regulatory and growth capital needs because there is unlikely to be any fresh bank recapitalisation till the next government takes over in June, official sources said on Friday.

Finance Ministry sources here also said the government has kept around Rs 5,000 crore as buffer for any last-minute contingency, for possible infusion into the merged entity of Bank of Baroda, Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank.

In January, the government got Parliament nod for an additional Rs 41,000 crore to recapitalise public sector banks, over and above the already budgeted Rs 65,000 crore taking the total recapitalisation package for the current financial year to Rs 1,06,000 crore.

The government has not provided money towards banks' capital infusion in the 2019-20 interim Budget.

The sources said banks might need funds to support credit growth and they may have to raise capital from the market or wait for the full Budget in July.

In February, the government approved Rs 48,239 crore recapitalisation bonds for 12 PSBs.

The latest recap bonds broadly fall into four categories -- better-performing banks under the RBI's Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) framework to deal with bad loans, non-PCA banks that are close to going under PCA, banks that have exited PCA, and PCA banks that need to meet minimum regulatory capital norms.

The task now involves equipping better-performing banks to help them come out of the PCA framework threshold. Allahabad Bank, Corporation Bank have already come out of the PCA.

The non-PCA banks close to the threshold are Punjab National Bank, Union Bank, Syndicate Bank and Andhra Bank

Banks that have exited PCA, but need to be helped to remain above the PCA triggers, are Bank of India and Bank of Maharashtra.

Central Bank, United Bank, UCO Bank and Indian Overseas Bank are the PCA banks requiring help to meet minimum regulatory capital norms.

With the February round, the government has so far pumped Rs 1.90 lakh crore into PSBs since it announced the recapitalisation plan in October 2017.

If capital is required between now and June, there is always the route of seeking Election Commission approval for it, the sources added.

Read More News:

Microsoft releases refreshed 'Skype for Web' on Chrome, Edge browsers

Medtech firm wins Qualcomm challenge for start-upsIn their single biggest investment ever, Hyundai Motor Co and its affiliate Kia Motors Corp on Tuesday announced an investment of Rs 2,068 crore ($300 million) in India's leading ride-hailing cab aggregator Ola.

The agreement will see the three companies collaborate on building India-specific electric vehicles and infrastructure and developing unique fleet and mobility solutions, Hyundai said.

"This partnership will also significantly benefit driver-partners on our platform, as we collaborate with Hyundai to build vehicles and solutions that enable sustainable earnings for millions of them, in the time to come," said Bhavish Aggarwal, Co-founder and CEO of Ola.

Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors will invest $240 million and $60 million respectively in Ola.

As part of the strategic collaboration, the companies have agreed to co-create solutions to operate and manage fleet vehicles, marking the Hyundai Motor Group's first foray into the industry, as they expand operations from automobile manufacturing and sales to total fleet solutions.

The partnership will offer Ola drivers various financial services, including lease and instalment payments, while vehicle maintenance and repair services are expected to enhance customer satisfaction, Hyundai said.

Hyundai, Kia and Ola also agreed to coordinate efforts to develop cars and specifications that reflect the needs of the ride hailing market.

Ola earlier this month raised Rs 400 crore from its early investors, including Tiger Global and Matrix India, to fund its electric mobility business.

The nine-year-old firm had set up in 2018 Ola Electric Mobility Ltd to use battery-run cabs as a pilot project at Nagpur in Maharashtra.

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. -- A Staten Island woman who served as the treasurer of a charity that supports families of police officers killed in the line of duty stole more than $400,000 from the organization to fund a lavish lifestyle that included pricey tickets to see Barbra Streisand in concert, authorities allege.

Lorraine Shanley, 68, of West Brighton, stole the money during a seven-year period, between 2010 and 2017, during which time the charity raised about $1.9 million in donations, according to the criminal complaint and a press release issued by the U.S. Attorneys Office, Southern District.

Almost all of the donations came from current NYPD employees, officials said.

While authorities declined to identify the charity, the Advance has confirmed it is Survivors of the Shield.

She was an authorized signatory on the charitys credit card and bank account, which she used for her own personal purposes, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office release.

On many of the checks she wrote for unauthorized purposes, Shanley forged the signature of another authorized signatory, the complaint alleges.

Shanley allegedly used the money to pay $29,000 for her grandchilds private school tuition; a total of $63,000 in legal fees for her sons criminal charges; $32,000 for her personal dental expenses; and more than $8,000 for event tickets, including $1,400 for tickets to see the Streisand show.

Lorraine Shanley allegedly capitalized on tragedy and monetized peoples generosity, said U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman. As alleged, Shanley stole over 20 percent of the donations to a charity whose sole mission is to help the families of NYPD officers killed in the line of duty.

A new volunteer at the charity accidentally found out about the fraudulent transactions while reviewing tax returns and records, officials said.

We are deeply saddened that the arrested betrayed the trust placed in [her] by this organization and so many others, said Kathleen Vigiano, president of Survivors of the Shield. Representatives of Survivors of the Shield contacted the U.S. Department of Justice after potential financial improprieties were uncovered.

Survivors of the Shield was founded in 1989 and continues to lend support and assistance to the families of police officers who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the performance of their duty, she said.

Over the years, Shanley has posted several pictures on Twitter of herself posing with high-ranking NYPD officials, as well as pictures of some of her family members who are also police officers.

Shanleys husband, Thomas, died of a heart attack while on duty in 1986, according to Advance archives and media reports.

She has been advocating for families of police officers killed in the line of duty on Staten Island since as far back as 1998, those archives indicate.

Among the officers she helped raise funds for were Police Officer Matthew Dziergowski, who was killed on the morning of Feb. 14, 1999, after a driver crashed into his car while he was diverting traffic from an accident on the West Shore Expressway.

Shanley was expected to appear in federal court Thursday and is charged with bank fraud and aggravated identity theft.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Countless puppies and kittens are up for adoption this weekend.

The dedicated volunteer animal rescue groups listed below have dozens of animals in their care just waiting for forever families like you to rescue them.

But its not all about cute pups and kitties: There are senior and disabled pets who really need your love and attention, too.

Upcoming pet events are listed below. Click through the photos above to meet the adorable dogs and cats up for adoption at events in and around the borough this weekend.

MARCH 23

 ACC of NYC, located at 3139 Veterans Road West. Adoption hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

 Louies Legacy will be at PetSmart, 1520 Forest Ave., from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

 Mama Chris Animal Rescue. Adoptable pets can be viewed from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the new Petco in Bricktown Commons, 165 Bricktown Way, Suite 1C, across from Michaels and Ulta.

 P.L.U.T.O. will be at the new Petco in Bricktown Commons, 165 Bricktown Way, Suite 1C, across from Michaels and Ulta, from noon to 3 p.m. with adoptable pets.

 SICAW will be at Petsmart Adoption Center, 1520 Forest Ave., with cats from 2 to 5 p.m.

MARCH 24

 ACC of NYC, located at 3139 Veterans Road West. Adoption hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

 Happy Homes Animal Rescues adoptable cats and kittens can be seen at Petsmart, 1525 Forest Ave., from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

 Louies Legacy will at PetSmart, 1525 Forest Ave., from noon to 3 p.m.

 Mama Chris Animal Rescue. Adoptable pets can be viewed from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Petco in Bricktown Commons, 165 Bricktown Way, Suite 1C, across from Michaels and Ulta.

 SICAW will be at the Petco in Bricktown Commons, 165 Bricktown Way, Suite 1C, across from Michaels and Ulta, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

MARCH 28

Happy Homes Animal Rescue Dining to Donate event: Present the flyer in the above gallery to Applebees Grill and Bar, Bricktown Commons, 115 Bricktown Way, for a filling and fulfilling meal with 20 percent of your bill donated to Happy Homes Animal Rescue.

APRIL 6

A Neighborhood Cats TNR (Trap-Neuter-Return) Workshop will take place at the St. George Library Center, 5 Central Ave., from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Please plan on arriving 10 to 15 minutes prior to the start time. Advance registration is required. Visit neighborhoodcats.org/tnr-in-nyc/workshops to register. Note: Use of library space for this program does not indicate endorsement by the New York Public Library.

MAY 5

Walk with your best furry friend during the Gateway Rotary Club Foundations fourth annual dog walk in memory of New Dorp resident SSG. Michael Ollis, who sacrificed his life in Afghanistan.

The half-mile or one-mile leashed-dog walk starts at 9:30 a.m. in Wolfes Pond Park, 420 Cornelia Ave.

It will benefit Americas VetDogs, a not-for-profit that provides guide and service dogs to disabled veterans at no cost, as well as other Staten Island charities.

Fun dog contests will follow the walk.

The online early discounted registration is $15 for one dog and $25 for two dogs. Race-day registration starts at 8 a.m. and the fee is $20 for one dog and $30 for two dogs. Theres a limit of two dogs per walker/handler and all dogs should be well-behaved, sociable and non-aggressive. Per city Parks Department, leashes that are no longer than six feet and non-retractable are required. For more info, visit www.eventbrite.com/d/ny--new-york/dog-events/.

MAY 19

Would you like to see hometown heroes, police officers, firefighters, active/retired military and other community leaders escort adorable, adoptable rescue dogs down a 25-foot runway in the hopes of landing them a forever home?

Then join Mr. Bones & Co. at its seventh annual Rescue the Runway event in the famed beer hall, Bergn, 899 Bergen St., Brooklyn. VIP doors open at 1:30 p.m. with general admission at 2 p.m.

This unique, interactive animal welfare event benefits One Lucky Pup rescue rehabilitation and adoption program, as well as Brooklyn Badass Animal Rescue, Rebound Hounds and one more organization to be announced.

Guests will enjoy a premium bar, tasting selections from three resident food vendors, VIP runway show seating, a large silent auction, fun raffles, prize wheel, a pit bull kissing booth and more.

The event ends at 5 p.m. For additional information or to purchase tickets, visit mrbonesandco.org.

JUNE 1 and 2

Mark your calendars for the World Dog Expo. This dog-friendly event will take place from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. June 1 and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. June 2 in the Meadowlands Exposition Center, 355 Plaza Drive, Secaucus, N.J. Admission varies; tickets start at $15.

This weekend event will celebrate dogs everywhere in a large-scale, cutting-edge multimedia format. With multiple stages attendees will enjoy events such as dock diving, disc dog, lure coursing, weight pulling and schutzhund to name a few.

The World Dog Experience will provide opportunities for dogs and their owner to participate together in sports, education, training and other bonding experiences. Also, the show will work to promote dog rescue, fostering and adoption.

The main attraction of World Dog Expo will be the notable trade show event, featuring a huge array of dog-centered products. Attendees will be able to find the newest and best products for their canine companions. Participating vendors will benefit from the unprecedented exposure created for the event. For more info, visit worldexpo.dog.

HOW TO CONTACT LOCAL RESCUE GROUPS

Animal Care Centers of NYC; 212-788-4000, nycacc.org ; located at 3139 Veterans Road West. Adoption hours: Monday-Friday, noon to 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

furfriendsinneed.com. Fur Friends in Need, New Jersey-based group with Staten Island members and adoption events on the Island; 732-829-1426, imavegge@aol.com

happyhomesinc.org. Happy Homes Animal Rescue, New Jersey-based group with Staten Island adoption events; 914-393-8292, elaine@ happyhomesinc.org, tinad225@gmail.com;

louieslegacy.org. Louies Legacy; 646-397-LLAR (5527), newyork@louieslegacy.org

mamachrisrescue.org. Mama Chris Animal Rescue Inc.; 347-983-2240, mamachrisrescue@gmail.com

nybullycrew.org. New York Bully Crew; 844-633-NYBC (6922), nybcapp@gmail.com,

plutorescue.org. P.L.U.T.O. Rescue of Staten Island; 718-227-0553, plutorescue@aol.com

Staten Island Council for Animal Welfare (SICAW); 718-948-5623, sicaw.petfinder.com

Staten Island Hope Animal Rescue; info@statenislandhoperescue.org statenislandhopeanimalrescue.org , 800-477-9168.

victory4thevoicelessanimalrescue.com. Victory for the Voiceless Animal Rescue; 718-442-1625, AdoptVictory4theVoiceless@gmail.com

PET STORES RELOCATED

1. Petco is at Bricktown Commons, 165 Bricktown Way, Suite 1C (across from Michaels and Ulta). It was previously located at 2752 Veterans Road West.

2. PetSmart is at 1525 Forest Ave. It was previously located at 1520 Forest Ave.

PET POISON HELPLINES

If you think your pet may have ingested a potentially poisonous substance, contact the Pet Poison hotline at 855-764-7661 or petpoisonhelpline.com, or contact the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center at 888-426-4435 or aspca.org.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The suspect accused of killing mob boss Francesco (Franky Boy) Cali will be brought back to Staten Island for his arraignment on Monday and law enforcement is taking precautions.

Mafia experts bracing for potential retaliation from the Gambino family have referred to Anthony Comello, 24, of Eltingville as a dead man walking and a marked man since Calis assassination, warning that his life and his familys safety could be at risk.

But now that Comello is expected to come back to Staten Island for the first time since the brazen killing, the stakes could be even higher.

I am confident that the NYPD and the NYC Department of Corrections will do everything possible to ensure Anthonys safety as well as his familys, Comellos lawyer Robert Gottlieb told the Advance on Friday.

Comello is under protective custody, the lawyer said.

Police cars have been seen parked out his familys home in Eltingville all week.

It is not clear what specific measures will be taken during the transport from New Jersey to Staten Island, but the Department of Correction is making safety its main priority.

The safety and well-being of people in custody remains our highest priority, said Jason Kersten, the agencys press secretary. We review each case on an individual basis and take all necessary precautions.

Comello was arrested last Saturday in New Jersey and waived extradition during a hearing at the Ocean County Superior Court on Monday.

While sitting in court, Comello showed reporters the words MAGA forever and united we stand he had written on his hands.

He is accused of shooting Cali multiple times in front of his home in Hilltop Terrace on March 13 after he briefly talked to him.

Detectives have found no known link between Comello and organized crime at this time, law enforcement sources said.

The motive for the shooting remains uncertain, and authorities have considered multiple theories, including he is a mob-obsessed conspiracy theorist or had hoped to date one of Calis relatives, sources said.

The way Comello allegedly killed Cali  gunned down right outside the home where he lived with his family  would have violated strict rules of respect set down by the Sicilian faction now in charge of the Gambino family, said Selwyn Raab, author of Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of Americas Most Powerful Mafia Empires.

For them, its the ultimate insult, said Selwyn Raab. It cant be excused just because hes a screwball. ... Hell be a marked man the rest of his life.

Hes a dead man walking, a law enforcement source who is an expert in organized crime told the Advance this week. He doesnt have much longer on this planet. The concern now is for his family because they live on Staten Island.

-- Associated Press material was used in this report.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A former Santander Bank teller, accused of pocketing about $13,000 from more than a dozen customers accounts, could avoid prison under a plea agreement.

Danny Lazkani pleaded guilty Thursday in state Supreme Court, St. George, to first-degree scheme to defraud, a felony, and petit larceny, a misdemeanor, to resolve all charges against him.

Lazkani, 28, of Dongan Hills, was busted on Jan. 29.

A criminal complaint said he used 13 customers personal information to withdraw a total of $13,100 from their accounts at the Santander branch at 800 Forest Ave. in West Brighton.

The scheme took place between Sept. 8 and Nov. 20 of last year, according to statements made in court.

The defendant withdrew $1,000 on 12 instances, $900 once and $200 another time, said the complaint. One victim was allegedly targeted twice.

A Santander spokeswoman previously told the Advance the incident was isolated, and Lazkani is no longer with the bank.

Protecting our customers accounts is a top priority, and we have reimbursed affected customers," the spokeswoman said in a statement to the Advance. "We are working with the authorities on this investigation.

The bespectacled defendant made no statement in court Thursday beyond admitting guilt and responding to Justice Alexander Jeongs procedural questions.

Lazkani will be placed on interim-supervision probation for a year.

If he complies with its terms, the felony plea will be vacated, and hell be sentenced to two years probation on the misdemeanor conviction.

Should he not adhere to his probation requirements, the felony conviction will stand and Lazkani could face a sentence of up to 16 months to four years in prison.

All victims were reimbursed in full prior to Mr. Lazkanis arrest, and the charges were resolved in court to everyones mutual satisfaction, said defense lawyer Vincent Romano.

The case was adjourned to May 7.

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Reilly is prosecuting the case.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  A Clifton felon who was allegedly speeding, drunk and high when he mowed down a pedestrian with his car in Stapleton last Fathers Day pleaded guilty Thursday to manslaughter.

Police said John Rudder was driving a 2015 Nissan Altima northbound, toward St. George, on Tompkins Avenue at about 4:40 a.m. on June 17, 2018, when the vehicle crossed the double yellow lines and entered the southbound lane.

The car plowed into David Bloomer, 32, a Stapleton resident, who was crossing Tompkins, police said.

The force of the impact propelled the victim into the air and through the windshield of a parked car on Tompkins, said prosecutors. Thats where police found him.

Bloomer was pronounced dead on the scene.

Prosecutors said Rudder, 26, attempted to drive off, but a patrol car in the area stopped him.

Matthew Zuntag, Rudders original lawyer, had disputed that account, contending the defendant stopped about 50 feet beyond the crash point.

A criminal complaint said Rudders eyes were watery, his speech was slurred, he appeared lethargic and smelled of alcohol.

Rudder told cops he had three drinks before getting behind the wheel, and implored them to "Go, get the man," the complaint said.

A Breathalyzer test measured Rudders blood alcohol content at .11 percent, said the complaint.

The legal threshold to be charged in New York with driving while intoxicated is .08 percent.

However, Zuntag had contended a Breathlyzer reading recorded Rudders blood alcohol content at .03 percent, well below intoxication.

Prosecutors said that reading was taken six hours after the incident.

Prosecutors also said Rudder had cocaine in his system, and cops found cocaine and prescription medicine in the vehicle.

The defendant was indicted on charges including second-degree manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, vehicular assault, leaving an incident scene and driving while intoxicated.

The bespectacled, bearded defendant pleaded guilty in state Supreme Court, St. George, to second-degree manslaughter, the top count against him.

In doing so, he admitted to recklessly causing Bloomers death.

Rudder admitted he hit the victim while speeding in the opposite lane of traffic on Tompkins while intoxicated and while impaired by alcohol and cocaine.

Rudder said nothing else beyond responding to a series of procedural questions by Justice Alexander Jeong.

The defendant will be sentenced April 15 as a second-felony offender to five to 10 years in prison.

He has a prior third-degree burglary conviction for which he was sentenced to five years probation on June 15, 2018  just two days before the deadly crash.

Mr. Rudder has accepted responsibility for his actions, said John M. Murphy III, his current lawyer. This is an extremely sad situation. Mr. Rudder never wanted anybody to get hurt and is dealing with the consequences of his dependency issues.

Assistant District Attorneys Frank Prospero and Mark Palladino are prosecuting the case.

Rudder is the second defendant in two days to plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter stemming from a fatal pedestrian strike on Staten Island.

On Wednesday, Stapleton resident Marques Rios, 41, admitted to recklessly causing the death of Heriberta Ramirez, 42, on June 29 of last year.

Rios, who was speeding, crossed the double-yellow lines on Bay Street near Grant Street in Stapleton, mounted the center divider and slammed into Ramirez, who was standing in the designated pedestrian area in the median waiting to cross the street.

He will be sentenced to 30 to 90 months behind bars.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- American Eagle Outfitters and Guess are among the retailers hiring for positions at the St. George-based Empire Outlets, which will have a phased opening between April and the summer.

While company representatives didnt return Advance queries for store opening dates, both retailers have jobs posted in their company websites.

American Eagle Outfitters is hiring for sales associate, merchandise manager, store manager and selling manager positions. Guess Factory Store is hiring for sales associate, co-manager positions, according to its website.

Located adjacent to the St. George ferry terminal, Empire Outlets will feature more than 100 designer retailers and a 1,250-space parking garage.

GRAND OPENING APRIL 18

The majority of the public spaces at New York Citys first outlet mall will open on April 18, Joseph Ferrara, principal in BFC Partners, developers of Empire Outlets, told the Advance last month.

There will be access throughout the site and down to the esplanade and into the ferry terminal, he said, noting the grand staircase leading to the ferry terminal will be open in April.

In addition, the vast majority of parking will be open in April, said a spokesman for the outlets. The shopping center includes 780 spots that are reserved for commuter parking, said Ferrara.

FIRST RETAILERS TO OPEN

While Empire Outlets has yet to announce the names of the retailers that will open in its early phases, Columbia Sportswear is gearing up for an April opening, said a spokesman for the company.

A spokesman for Columbia told the Advance the new outlet store will have a team of 20 staff members, and is slated to open in mid-April. Currently, Columbia has job listings for store manager, interim store manager, freight supervisor and part-time stock associate.

In addition, Three outlet stores under the Gap brand are slated to open by the end of April and employ between 155 to 175 employees at three stores, according to a Gap Inc. spokeswoman.

Gap listings include those for sales associate, loss prevention agent, stock associate, visual merchandizing specialist, brand associate, assistant manager, operations specialist and loyalty specialist.

True Religion is also hiring. Jobs listed on its website include those for sales associate and assistant store manager. The designer is known for its high-end denim, streetwear-inspired sportswear, and accessories for men, women and kids.

The new Cotton On outlet -- offering womens wear, menswear and accessories -- promises to bring casual Australian style to the five boroughs. Positions being advertised on the companys website for Empire Outlets include: sales associate, store manager, assistant store manager and key holder.

Francescas -- a trendy clothing and accessory shop -- is seeking to hire a sales associate, store manager, assistant store manager and key holder.

FOOD COMPONENT

In addition to some food concepts opening in April, there will be " a robust food truck presence" until the MRKTPL -- a 12,723-square-foot artisanal food hall with a 3,000-square-foot outdoor dining space -- opens in the summer, said Travis Noyes, Empire Outlets senior vice president, marketing.

MORE STORIES ABOUT EMPIRE OUTLETS OPENING

FOLLOW TRACEY PORPORA ON FACEBOOK and TWITTER[The SILive.com mobile app connects you with our top headlines, and push notifications for cant-miss stories. Heres how to get it.]

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- After getting home at 6 a.m. from her overnight shift, Lisa Fernandez just wants to get some shut eye.

Except every time she closes her eyes, she hears a chorus of gobbles.

Theyre on my roof, on my lawn, in my backyard  they scratched up a brand new car when they jumped down from the trees, Fernandez said.

Fernandez has lived on the 300 block of Burgher Avenue in Dongan Hills in the same house since her childhood. The turkey problem has only become worse throughout the years.

She said shes afraid to let her dog go outside, afraid of what he might track in the house if he steps in turkey feces.

Something has to be done already, she said.

Advance reader Flori Regina Silvestro also submitted a question to #fyiSi about the turkey problem.

What is being done about those disgusting turkeys? Silvestro asked.

FUNDING FOR TURKEY REMOVAL IN LIMBO

In June 2018, Mid-Island Councilman and Minority Leader Steven Matteo announced the allocated of $100,000 in discretionary City Council funding in the Fiscal Year 2019 budget, of which $50,000 came from City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, for the capture and relocation of the birds.

Were nearly in the fourth month of the year and the turkeys are still causing havoc across the East Shore, scaring pedestrians and creating hazardous driving conditions.

Wheres the money?

Matteo said its on the way and hes just as anxious as the community to get the removal started.

While we earmarked the funds at last years budget adoption, the process of getting the funds to the applicant has been complicated by various issues. My office, the applicant, and the agencies are actively trying to resolve, Matteo said.

I am absolutely committed to this program and working diligently with all involved to fix these problems so And-Hof can finally begin the removal and relocation of these turkeys, he said.

Kurt Andernatch, founder and president of the And-Hof Sanctuary in the Catskills, said hes hopeful that it wont take much longer for the funding to come through.

AGGRESSIVE MOTHER BIRD, DEAD TURKEYS, TRAFFIC PROBLEMS FOR EAST SHORE

In May 2018, Richard Gambardella was afraid to enter or exit his home after a protective mother bird laid 18 eggs behind a bush next to the front door of his Dongan Hills home on Liberty Avenue.

The eggs and mother bird were successfully removed by Andernatch and a group of volunteers a week later.

In November, two turkeys were found dead on the sidewalk near Staten Island University Hospital (SIUH). For years, turkeys have been causing traffic holdups on Mason and Seaview avenues, Capodanno Boulevard, Laconia Avenue and surrounding blocks.

Motorists often get stuck, or are forced to swerve around, a flock in the middle of busy streets, as the fowl take their time crossing the street in a line or chasing each other in circles.

Pedestrians going for a walk cross the street out of fear of being attacked and residents have to make sure the coast is clear before opening their front doors.

TURKEY REMOVAL BEGAN IN 2014

More than 150 turkeys were removed and relocated to the And-Hof Sanctuary in 2014 after a deal between the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Staten Island University Hospital (SIUH), which also has been affected by the nuisance turkeys.

The turkeys were removed until funding ran out, leaving turkeys behind that continues to mate and cause the population to boom once again.

Andernatch said: The money will enable us to establish additional species specific habitats and facilitate professional animal caregiving in our ongoing effort to give many more Staten Island turkeys a carefree forever home at our sanctuary.

#FYISI ASK US ANYTHING

When #fyiSI launched in October, the Advance received dozens of questions from readers about all things Staten Island.

Now, were ready to start providing answers and are asking you again to ask us anything, Staten Island -- and we mean anything.

Through #fyiSI, Im going to answer all of your burning questions  with the occasional help of my coworkers  about the borough with 479,458 residents that we all call home.

Some of the questions weve received so far include:

How can we ask for a stop sign to be added?

What happened to my favorite restaurant?

Is that a mobile speed camera?

Why is the Department of Transportation doing construction on my block?

Now, Im ready to tackle them all and Im looking for more questions. Whatever it is, Ill answer it.

You might be wondering how #fyiSI differs from the average story you already read in the Staten Island Advance or on SILive.com.

Were not stepping away from the traditional news article, but instead adding social media elements like Facebook live, Instagram stories, Twitter polls, and other multimedia to help us reach you.

Well also do a lot of reporting on site.

Questions should include your name, neighborhood of residence and contact information, and can be emailed to fyi@siadvance.com or kdalton@siadvance.com.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Top Island law-enforcement officials vowed to vigorously pursue allegations of hate-crimes on Staten Island when they spoke at the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center in Tompkinsville.

Top Island brass for the NYPD, Richmond County District Attorneys Office and FBI joined local politicians and leaders of many faiths at a breakfast at the center. The gathering promoted the annual Staten Island Community Days, where houses of worship host service events in the month of April.

Many of the speakers referenced the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., promoting love and harmony for all regardless of racial, ethnic, religious and economic differences as evidenced at the gathering and throughout the world.

Some speakers mentioned the disturbing uptick in hate-crimes in America and other countries, especially the recent massacre at a mosque in New Zealand.

District Attorney Michael E. McMahon promised that his office will focus with a laser on any case" where someone commits a crime because of hate.

We will not plead out any of those cases. We will prosecute them to the max to let people know that hate will not be tolerated here in our community of Staten Island.

But we cant succeed by just prosecuting crimes once they are committed," McMahon said, adding that the goal is prevention of all types of crimes.

Echoing McMahons comments, NYPD Assistant Chief Kenneth Corey decried all the hate we see in the world and its a terrible thing and hate has consequences.

Referencing King, the borough commander said that people fail to get along because they fear each other and they fear each other because they dont know each other and they dont know each other because theyve not communicated with each other.

Corey stressed the need for unity in dealing with crime.

Weve seen neighborhood policing now start to take root and weve seen how when we all work together, we can solve problems in our community," Corey said.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Skywatchers in parts of the United States, including New York, may be able to see the northern lights this weekend.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Associations Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has issued a G2 (moderate) geomagnetic storm alert for Saturday.

The range and intensity of the northern lights, which are typically only visible in areas of high latitudes (like the North Pole), have increased this week because the sun set off an explosion. The blast caused a large cloud of charged particles -- a coronal mass ejection -- that will hit the Earths magnetic field as part of the storm.

The northern lights appear when the charged particles from the sun strike atoms and molecules in the Earths atmosphere, exciting those atoms, causing them to light up, according to EarthSky.com.

Some adventurers travel far and wide to view the northern lights, commonly seen in the northern countries of Iceland, Alaska and Canada. View the video above to see the northern lights in action.

However, the SWPC states that this weekend the northern lights, also known as the aurora borealis, may be seen as low as New York to Wisconsin to Washington state.

In order to get a good look at the phenomenon, skies need to be clear -- so check the weather before heading out Saturday night. Also -- youll want to head outside the city as far as possible, in order to get away from the light pollution.

A G2 (Moderate) geomagnetic storm watch is in effect for the 23 March, 2019 UTC-day due to anticipated CME arrival. The CME was associated with a C4 flare on 20 March, 2019 at 1118 UTC (0718 EDT). Continue to monitor our SWPC webpage for additional updates. pic.twitter.com/tjZIGFiLSz  NOAA Space Weather (@NWSSWPC) March 20, 2019

.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Two Brooklyn men will spend some time behind bars for their roles in an armed mugging last year near the Clifton train station.

Dimitre Thomas, 24, and Taiheen Shuler, 18, were among four males who accosted the 25-year-old victim at around 11:40 p.m. on April 2 at Norwood Avenue and Bay Street, said a criminal complaint.

The victim was walking home from the train station, said court papers.

One of the suspects showed the man what appeared to be a gun and put it to the back of his head, while another held a knife to the victims chest, according to the complaint and court records.

"Give me all your s--t or we're going to shoot you," the complaint quotes one suspect as saying.

The thieves snatched the victim's cell phone, his wallet containing a debit card, and a book bag, said the complaint.

Shuler pleaded guilty Tuesday in state Supreme Court, St. George, to first-degree robbery, while Thomas admitted guilt to attempted first-degree robbery.

In exchange, Shuler will be sentenced April 11 to 16 months to four years behind bars. He will be sentenced as a youthful offender, meaning the conviction wont go on his record and his court file will be sealed.

Thomas will be sentenced April 4 to 42 months in prison and 30 months post-release supervision.

The cases against the two other defendants are pending.

Thomas Reilly is Shulers lawyer.

Attorney Eugene Lamb represents Thomas.

Assistant District Attorney Travis Atkinson is prosecuting the case.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The NYPD crossing guard who, in a bizarre scheme, tried to frame a former Castleton Corners chiropractor by sending racists letters to third parties, has been sentenced to two years probation.

Jennifer Becker, 46, was arrested in November 2017 when authorities traced the screeds to her.

A probe revealed the defendant tried to implicate Dr. Danielle Serini by sending the hateful notes, some of which contained a photo of Becker's mixed-race son, as part of an ongoing feud, law enforcement sources said.

Becker intended the letters, of which there were at least a dozen, be traced back to Serini, officials said.

The defendant sent the notes to police officers and a reporter with the Staten Island Advance who had covered the chiropractor's original arrest in June 2016 on charges of harassment and stalking.

Serini was accused of spitting at Becker, calling her a derogatory term and flipping her the middle finger in a series of incidents at Victory Boulevard and Slosson Avenue. Becker assisted children from PS 29 and St. Teresa School who cross at the busy intersection.

Becker, a Castleton Corners resident, ultimately obtained an order of protection against Serini.

The charges were ramped up after Serini was accused of tossing a lollipop at Becker, repeatedly giving her the middle finger and sticking her tongue out at the crossing guard.

A few weeks later, the doctor was accused of penning a series of ugly and threatening letters.

A flier the Advance received contained a photo of Becker's son, a racial slur and an unidentified phone number.

"BLACK LIVES DON'T MATTER," the flyer read. "KILL THIS N----- PIECE BY PIECE AND FEED IT TO THE NYPD."

Another vicious hate-filled letter sent to the 120th Precinct stationhouse made references to the Ku Klux Klan and depicted images of an African-American child with a razor blade digitally inserted in his head and another photo of the child hanging from a noose, authorities said.

"I HATE BLACKS ALMOST AS MUCH AS THEY HATE ME," the letter says, according to the complaint.

Becker, police allege, also sent a vile letter to another crossing guard she perceived to be Muslim. The note threatened the woman's safety and partly read, "TRUMP BETTER DEPORT YOUR STUPID A-- FOR TAKING OUR AMERICAN MONEY," said the complaint.

Another letter, addressed to an officer at the 120th Precinct, also allegedly threatened Beckers son.

My next opportunity will be getting rid of you and that ugly a-- n----- child of the crossing guard,'' the letter read, according to a criminal complaint. "Keep thinking hes safe in school. But when the opportunity hits, it will be bang, bang.

After the plot was revealed, prosecutors dropped the charges against Serini, who had closed her thriving practice due to the negative publicity the case generated.

In August of last year, Becker pleaded guilty in the Mental Health part of state Supreme Court, St. George, to a felony count of tampering with physical evidence. The charge accused her of producing false evidence.

She also pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of filing a false report.

Defendants in Mental Health Court are typically diverted into treatment programs and earn non-jail sentences of probation or a conditional discharge if they complete treatment. They potentially face jail time if they don't finish the program.

At her sentencing on Wednesday, Beckers felony plea was dismissed, and she was sentenced to two years probation on the misdemeanor conviction, online state court records show.

A five-year order of protection was issued in Serinis favor.

Police said Becker has been suspended with pay.

Mark Geisser, Beckers lawyer, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Last month, Serini sued the city, Becker, another crossing guard, three cops and a detective alleging they maliciously accused her of targeting Becker.

The suit is pending in Brooklyn federal court.OCEAN COUNTY, N.J. -- This aint a selfie, man.

A pair of New Jersey Little League board members have been charged with theft after authorities say they stole $118,000 in league funds.

According to our sister site, NJ.com, authorities began investigating former league president Anthony Del Vecchio, 63, and former treasurer John Lehmann, 55, both of Jackson, N.J., in December 2017 after receiving an anonymous letter detailing alleged thefts from the league.

Both Del Vecchio and Lehmann were each charged with second-degree theft and conspiracy to commit theft in February 2018, reported NJ.com. They were indicted this month on charges of theft by unlawful taking in excess of $75,000.

On top of it all, Lehmann flashed a big grin in his mugshot.

Defense attorneys for both of the accused men say their clients are looking to seek a resolution to the issue, according to the report.To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account.

We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription.

A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much!Deutsche Bank paid its management board members their first bonuses in four years in 2018, with Christian Sewing's 7 million euro ($11.1 million) total package making him one of the best paid chief executives in European banking.

Christian Sewing, chief executive officer of Deutsche Bank. Credit:Bloomberg

Deutsche Bank's politically sensitive pay disclosures, which were revealed in its annual report on Friday, come as it contemplates a merger with Commerzbank, which unions fear could lead to up to 30,000 job cuts.

Sewing, who became CEO in April last year, led Deutsche Bank to its first profit in four years and is heading the talks with Commerzbank. He earned 2.9 million euros for 2017.

His 2018 pay was higher than that of CEOs at several other major European investment banks, including HSBC's John Flint and Barclays boss Jes Staley.Spooked by a couple of minor accidents and by cars looming close behind as she cycled her way around town, Sydney's Scarlet Gray dreamed up a clever alert system for bike riders.

Her invention, the Car Sensing Safety Light, detects approaching vehicles, flashing more quickly and sounding a warning as they get closer. Scarlet's device won first prize in the 2018 Young Scientist Awards, Innovations and Engineering Design category, for years 9-10. The awards are run by the Science Teachers' Association of NSW (STANSW), which sees entries from primary and secondary students across the state.

Olga Medvedieva (left) and Josafina Paddison invented a device for biological specimens.

Scarlet's project was also a semi-finalist in the BHP Foundation Science and Engineering awards. A student at SCEGGS, Darlinghurst, the light is Scarlet's first invention and she's keen to try more. "I've always been a hands-on person and I used to tinker at things with my Dad when I was younger," she says.

She has since enrolled in HSC Extension Science, is keen to pursue a science career, hopes to work in the space industry and says she'd like to be an astronaut.Bryan Adams 

Shine a Light Tour, Rod Laver Arena, March 21

There was a moment of confusion after Bryan Adams played Summer of '69 at Rod Laver Arena on Thursday. Presuming he'd saved his most enduring hit for the end, several dozen people made a dash for the exits, hoping to avoid the queues in the car park.

Why do we do this?

I can't recall the last major concert that didn't involve a stampede during the encore. Before Adams returned to the stage, the bloke next to me fled as though the stadium were on fire. Afterwards, I saw him trapped behind a recalcitrant boom gate, giving a passable imitation of a man in an electric chair.Sociologists and psychologists, meanwhile, talk more soberly about a cultural conditioning that goes beyond a husband and wife squabble. Loading In fact, in addition to still doing the bulk of the actual housework, women carry the "mental load" in the home, which is a phrase making the rounds in feminist blogs, which is the continuous cycle of thinking, planning and organising domestic life. While the rest of the family seems oblivious, the woman also handles the thoughts, if not the actions, of endless chores, one begetting the other, a phenomenon masterfully depicted by the French cartoonist Emma. Her gone-viral comic, You Should've Asked, shows a woman clearing the table but then while she's putting stuff away, she sees a dirty towel, which she takes to the laundry basket, which is full, so she starts a load of laundry, which leads her to the kitchen to see the veggies that need putting away, and while she's putting away the veggies, she realises she's out of mustard and needs to add that to the shopping list.

When she is exhausted, her partner says, "You should have asked for help," when what she really wants is a partner who knows how to help without putting the onus on her to also now delegate. Which is work, too. Clearly, woman-as-household-manager (nagger) is a socialised condition, one perpetuated by June Cleaver, and disected in 1963 when feminist writer Betty Friedan released The Feminine Mystique, informing women they were capable of more than housework. Women have been raised to see a sparkling house as a sign of our self-worth. There came a shift in household-chore distribution when women entered the work force en masse in the late 20th century. Yet, according to the US Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, whether we work outside the home or not, US women are still doing more than four hours of house- and child-care work per day, compared to men's contribution of two hours. Last year, the University of Melbourne and Melbourne Institutes longitudinal HILDA survey found women perform an average of seven hours more housework each week than men. Even in households where women are the sole earner, they still perform 48.5 per cent of the housework.

Meanwhile, the bigger story, of everybody in the house expecting the woman to be the leader, is as alive as the dust bunnies I wish didn't live under my bed. Loading This includes we women ourselves, who have been raised to see a sparkling house as a sign of our self-worth, writes women's leadership expert Tiffany Dufu in her self-help book Drop the Ball: Expect Less from Yourself and Flourish in Work & Life. If the mental workload problem is going to change, in fact, guess what, we have to let some things go, even as other family members do more stepping up. As I watched my son apply elbow grease to the real grease on the stove the other night, meanwhile, it occurred to me that maybe this will be the generation of men and women that gets it.It's a true tale of brutal crime to make you shiver, even today nearly 200 years later.

On September 13, 1842, one Henry Dunkley was hacked to death with an axe by his servant in a cottage in Gunning, north of Canberra.

Canberra filmmaker Sebastian Chan. Credit:Karleen Minney

The man who beheaded his master then took to bed with the newly bereaved wife and the two enjoyed sex and alcohol until officers of the law disturbed their bliss.

The widow, Lucretia, and her lover, Martin Beech, were eventually hanged. The court decided they were both equally steeped in blood.Another top Canberra Hospital executive has quit capping off 12 months of high level churn in the department.

The resignation of Canberra Health Services' chief operating officer Chris Bone was announced on Friday in a staff-wide email.

Deputy director general at Canberra Hospital Chris Bone, pictured last year. Credit:Doug Dingwall

He was previously deputy director general of clinical services at ACT Health before a restructure.

The announcement came at the end of an email detailing a number of new executive appointments within Canberra Health Services, which oversees Canberra Hospital.Another Canberra artist, Sacha Pola, was recently awarded the $50,000 acquisitive Muswellbrook Art Prize for his work Having Reached Utopia, It Was Then Time. Previous winners include the late Canberra artist, Richard Larter.

The winners of the Megalo 2019 International Print Prize Exhibition have been announced. The $10,000 first prize went to Dianne Fogwell (Australia) for her linocut and perforated artist book Pollen Musica Continuum - infinite (2018). Second prize ($5000) went to Karol Pomykala (Poland) for his linocut One Direction 2 (2018). Surya Bajracharya (Australia ) won the Eridas Estate Acquisitive Prize ($2500) for his combined lithograph and monotype Everybodys Talkin (2018) and Mehdi Darvishi (Iran) won the Megalo People's Choice Award ($1000) for his tryptych mezzotint work The Extended Night (2017). The Megalo 2019 International Print Prize exhibition is showing at Megalo Gallery until April 6. megalo.org.

Singing group

Parkinsons ACT (PACT), with local musician Chrissie Shaw, are launching a new singing group for people in the ACT living with Parkinsons Disease, their carers and supporters. The first session is on Monday April 1 from 10am to noon in Room 14, Ainslie Arts Centre, Elouera Street, Braddon. $10 per session. If you have a carer, please bring them along. No charge for carers. Contact Chrissie Shaw: mobile 0407 079 748 or email: chrissieshaw@apex.net.au

Pilgrimage: Hurley in the Middle East

Frank Hurley, Study of a local tribesman, Middle East, between 1939 and 1945 (detail).

This exhibition at the National Library of Australia explores a previously unexamined body of work from Frank Hurley. He was one of the official AIF (Australian Imperial Force) photographers in both world wars. During World War II he travelled around the Middle East and North Africa. His official mission was to document Australian service members during the desert campaign, but he also photographed the the local cultures, architecture and landscape. The exhibition draws on the library's holdings of Hurley material and features photographs, diaries, writings, passports and other travel paraphernalia. It's free and open until August 25. nla.gov.auWe were one of the most influential bodies last year in getting the kids off Nauru. That course of action makes me incredibly proud." Dr Di Dio was born in Queensland, growing up as a son of two Italian migrants on a banana farm. The family moved back to Sicily, Italy, when he was very young, before returning to Australia when he was 11. He credits growing up in small country towns in Italy and Australia for his passion for general practice.

My only exposure to medicine was the local GP who was and still is an unbelievably strong presence in the community, Dr Di Dio says. He and his family have lived in Canberra for about 15 years,. It is the city his wife grew up in, and they jointly run a practice in Yarralumla. Dr Di Dio has been president of the ACT branch of the association since May but had little time to settle into the new role as 2018 was one of the most tumultuous years in ACTs public health system in recent memory. The government came under intense pressure over mismanagement and bullying allegations within the health system as well as its ongoing poor performance against key performance indicators. The association in September made the decision to come out and call for a royal commission type inquiry into ACTs health system, in effect supporting the Oppositions ongoing calls for the same type of inquiry.

Eventually, the government decided to settle on an independent review of ACTs public health system, which lacked the powers and protections of a board of inquiry. That was an extremely stressful and painful but it had to be done, he says. What I'm most proud of is connecting together the three disparate medical associations - [Visiting Medical Officers Association], and the AMA have over the years intersected at times and had some mutual respect but I think were working much more closely than we did before. I'm also very proud weve had a very deep review into ACT Health, I feel that review to a significant extent occurred because of combined pressure from us. The outcomes from that review are a big challenge from that as well.

We want to be a part of a process that ensures accountability we have a really good relationship with government and with the opposition who we respect and we hope they will listen to us when we hold them accountable to the recommendation in their review." He says Health Minister Meegan Fitzharris must take the lead in making sure the people within ACT Health that have shown poor behaviour for years are held accountable. "In a sense, by opting for the independent review process the minister has made herself responsible for addressing these issues," he says. "While doing this raises significant challenges, in our view it needs to be done." Dr Di Dio is a fierce advocate for GPs and believes they often get an unfair rap by the media, politicians and the community more broadly.

GPs and private practitioners who work in the ACT, they deserve a huge pat on the back, he says. We are one of the very few states or territories with an under supply of GPs." He said most GPs in Canberra bulk billed many patients simply because they cared for people. They are working unbelievably long hours and all they get is criticised and picked on because they charge more than the bulk billing rate, or the waiting list is so long," he says. If we bulk billed all our patients we would be getting negative income.Cyclone Trevor has intensified to category three and is picking up speed as it barrels towards the Northern Territory coast, where more than 2000 people evacuated from its path face an anxious wait.

The Bureau of Meteorology warned the massive storm is likely to become a category four tropical cyclone pushing gale-force winds, rain and tidal surges 300 kilometres out from its core, late on Friday.

NASA satellite photo showing twin cyclone systems over northern Australia on Friday morning. Credit:NASA

Dangerous waves, tides and flooding will precede the destructive core which is expected to have wind gusts of up to 275 km/h when it smashes into the mainland between Groote Eylant and the NT-Queensland border on Saturday.

Anxious residents worried about their homes and pets were evacuated by road and on Australia Defence Force cargo planes from Borroloola, Numbulwar, Groote Eylandt and other indigenous communities.From increased security to the tentative taking off of shoes outside the Lakemba mosque, the call to prayer among Sydney's Islamic faithful on Friday had a nervous edge to it.

In light of last Fridays massacre in Christchurch when a lone gunman allegedly burst into two mosques on a murderous rampage during the Muslim holy hour, the tone at Australias largest mosque in Lakemba was at first one of anxious anticipation.

The Haka was performed at the Lakemba Mosque after Friday prayers. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

As the rendition of the Koran was broadcast, and hundreds had streamed into the white-bricked building, it was clear authorities had nothing to fear.

By the time the local Punchbowl boys had performed the New Zealand haka and a hymn after two minutes silence, the mood had become one of respectful coming together. There were so many people the crowd spilt onto the street and across the road.A Mosman swimming school that allowed a teacher to keep his job following complaints of "inappropriate holds" nine months before he was arrested on child sex charges will change its child safety policy.

Kyle Daniels, 20, is facing 31 charges of child sexual abuse relating to eight girls under the age of 10 whom he was teaching to swim.

Kyle Daniels is facing 31 charges, which he intends to fight. Credit:ninevms

The South African-born swimming teacher and Sydney University sports science student was arrested at his parents' Balgowlah home last week, and was on Wednesday granted bail by Manly Local Court ahead of his trial.

Mr Daniels' barrister said his client strongly denies the charges.Queenslanders will not know whether or not a Fast Train concept in south-east Queensland is viable until after the 2019 federal election.

A business case for a Gold Coast version of a Fast Train concept was revealed on Friday, plus very general plans to extend the heavy rail line to the Gold Coast Airport at Coolangatta.

The federal government has pledged to create a fast rail link between Melbourne and Geelong.

On the Sunshine Coast, however, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had announced money in January 2018 for a business case for Fast Train concept to the Sunshine Coast, from Nambour to Brisbane.

I am expecting the business case to come back in July, Sunshine Coast federal MP Ted OBrien said on Friday. From there it goes to Infrastructure Australia.A severe storm is predicted to bring damaging winds and hail to inland south-east Queensland on Friday afternoon.

The Bureau of Meteorology has issued a severe thunderstorm warning on Friday after storms were detected on the weather radar near Marburg, Lowood and Hatton Vale at 5pm.

Thunderstorms are predicted to hit south-east Queensland this evening. Credit:Felicity Caldwell

The storms are forecast to affect Boonah, the area south of Esk and the D'Aguilar Ranges by 5.35pm and Esk, the area between Boonah and Beaudesert and Somerset Dam by 6.05 pm.

Parts of Ipswich, Somerset, Lockyer Valley, Brisbane City and Moreton Bay council areas could be affected as the storms track northward.Over the last 10 years, it received more government research funding than any other cancer, and three times what lymphoma received. Why? It is pretty obvious, says Associate Professor Rachael Morton, director of health economics at the University of Sydney. Its about children. "And its a very tangible story, it pulls at the heart strings. Data compiled by The Age shows some cancers get a lot more funding than others.

And that disparity leads to real inequality in how patients are treated and how much research is done to find new cures. Breast cancer and prostate cancer patients receive dedicated nurses, as part of programs paid for by charities and the federal government. Charities for other cancers say they cannot dream of being able to afford a similar service. If you dont have one of the two cancers that have a nurse, thats where the feeling of being diagnosed with the wrong cancer is stark  they dont have the support services there when they need it most, says Julien Wiggins, Bowel Cancer Australias CEO. Were all taxpayers at the end of the day. When you see millions going to one or two cancers, thats when I think the inequities and disparities become obvious.

Bowel cancer is the 6th-leading cause of death in Australia. Lung cancer is number 5 on that list. Between 2009 and 2018, bowel cancer research received about $139 million in National Health and Medical Research Council funding, according to data compiled for The Age. Lung cancer received only about $69 million. Breast cancer  number 15 on the list - received $227 million. Prostate cancer, number 12, received $107 million. That funding has helped breast cancer's five-year survival rate grow from around 70 per cent two decades ago to around 90 per cent today. Lung cancer's survival rate is around 17 per cent.

Stephanie Bansemer-Brown was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2012. During treatment, she had an ileostomy bag, forcing her to radically change the way she lived and ate. There was no one there, I did not have that support. Others who have breast or prostate cancer, there are nurses. There arent any bowel care nurses, she says. Im no less entitled to support than anyone else. All cancers deserve equal care and support. I feel like I got the wrong cancer in terms of support. Stephanie Bansemer-Brown Credit:Simon Schluter Then there is the private funding. An analysis of the data shows the breast, prostate and leukaemia foundations have been manifestly more successful at winning dollars than other charities.

The National Breast Cancer Foundation  with its iconic pink ribbon - raised $22.5 million in donations in 2018; the McGrath Foundation raised another $12.5 million. Prime Minister Scott Morrison attended the Pink Test in January and wrote a check for $27 million to support more breast cancer nurses. Lymphoma Australia raises just $400,000 a year, says CEO Sharon Winton. If we went to every pink ribbon sponsor, and asked them to become a lime ribbon sponsor (the colour for lymphoma), the pink will still get it, she says. Were trying to raise money for lymphoma nurses. But well never be able to do the McGrath model.

Kirsten Pilatti, CEO of Breast Cancer Network Australia  revenue $8.6 million in 2017  hopes the success of breast cancer charities can be a model for others to follow. Think about the field of women on the MCG (a joint AFL-Network fundraiser). At that point, no charities were doing anything with the AFL. Now, they all are." Rather than adjust inequalities in cancer funding, she said charities' goal should be to grow the funding pie for everyone. The causes of the funding disparities are complex. Breast cancer has a 91 per cent five-year survival rate, very good compared to other cancers. This means many women who have it are still well enough to campaign for more funding, says Professor Morton.

Women with breast cancer may be well, they may be affluent, they tend to be organised. People with lung cancer tend to be older, less affluent, and quite sick. Breast and prostate cancers are also the most commonly diagnosed cancers in Australia. But there is also the fact the public consider some cancers to be bad luck, and others to be someones fault  especially lung cancer. People always feel they can say something, says Ms Davies of her lung cancer diagnosis. My family are really quite sensitive to it  they hate that its the first thing out of peoples mouths, trying to assign the blame for having such a serious illness on people, like it could have been prevented.Emma Yee is determined to raise the Peter Rowland brand, once the most prestigious and sought after catering company in Australia, from the ashes.

It has been a tumultuous few years for the catering empire that crumbled in 2017 because of unmanageable debts and declining sales.

Emma Yee is determined to build the brand back up. Credit:Joe Armao

The 81-year-old patriarch, Peter Rowland, sold his $8.6 million Toorak mansion to pay creditors, wound his business up and morphed into the Peter Rowland Group after getting financial backing from Melbourne billionaire Mohan Du.

Mr Du paid $3.6 million for the business in 2017 and took on the wound-up companys $7 million debt to trade creditors, including suppliers, according to Australian Securities and Investments Commission documents.Police are searching for a man who allegedly indecently exposed himself outside the Windsor Hotel in South Perth last Friday night.

A police spokeswoman said the incident occurred on March 15.

Police would like to speak to this man about an indecent exposure incident in South Perth last weekend. Credit:WA Police

"Around 9pm the man was seen outside a hotel on Mill Point Road, exposing himself," she said.

"Police wish to identify the man in the photo who may be able to assist with their inquiries."Jacinda Ardern set the moral tone in the New Zealand Parliament this week when she told her country, and more pointedly the alleged killer, that his desire for notoriety will be met with refusal. She will not use his name. But should we?

Jacinda Ardern has given a masterclass in leadership in the wake of the Christchurch shooting. Credit:The Press

With so much to report, with the sheer volume of news in this tragic story of 50 immediate deaths and so many other lives destroyed, it can be difficult for the media to follow Arderns lead.

But we argue - as do 150 researchers of mass shootings and others signed up to the No Notoriety Group - the name of the accused shooter can almost always be written out. We know that providing the minute details of him and his life right now is not as central to the reporting of this story as many journalists might think.

Research shows that media coverage has become a key tool for extremists who want to use violence as a way of marketing their perverse ideologies. And, frankly, news organisations which give shooters notoriety will encourage and enable others, its as simple and terrible as that.China's state-run broadcaster CCTV 4 aired a laudatory piece on the Liberal candidate for Kogarah, 26-year-old Scott Yung, in the dying days of the NSW election as the candidate posted endorsements from big-name Chinese celebrities.

The story, which ran on Tuesday, recounts how Mr Yung got into politics after acting as a translator for John Howard when the former prime minister visited Kogarah five years ago.

The state-owned broadcaster CCTV 4 told Scott Yung's story on Tuesday. Credit:CCTV 4

"Since this incident, Scott Yung became invested in the development of the local Chinese communities," the CCTV anchor said. "Recently, he decided to run for office in the south Sydney electorate of Kogarah. If he succeeds, this 26-year-old will become Australias youngest state representative."

The CCTV story, which did not urge viewers to vote for Mr Yung, concluded with the candidate's hope for more opportunities for Chinese-Australians to participate in politics.Loading Yet in 2015, most of that swing came back Labors way. The Coalition lost 15 seats  14 to Labor, one to the Greens  and its two-party vote dropped to 54.3 per cent. It still had 54 seats to Labors 34. While this gave Labor a chance to win in 2019, no one believed it would. But then the Coalition decided to ban greyhound racing and merge local councils. A run of by-elections saw it suffer humiliating losses in two safe seats, and narrow escapes in two others. Mike Baird resigned, and Gladys Berejiklian became the states second female premier. The governments lead in the polls all but vanished. Then Malcolm Turnbull was dumped as Prime Minister, and Michael Daley replaced Luke Foley as Labor leader. And the polls swung marginally Labors way. Who will win? Will it be a hung Parliament? Lets look at five clues.

Loading 1. The polls The polls up to last weekend pointed to a very close contest. The statewide polls, averaged out, implied a 5 per cent swing to Labor. The seat-by-seat polls have averaged a 6 per cent swing. But only six Coalition seats are within reach of a 5 per cent swing. Swings are never uniform, but if Labor wins six seats from the Coalition, that would give us 46 Coalition MPs, 40 Labor, three Greens, one Shooter and three independents. Itd be anyones guess who formed government. Polling individual seats is unreliable, but for what its worth, the six seat polls published by You Gov in the Daily Telegraph on average show a 6 per cent swing to Labor. That matters, because the Coalition has 13 more seats within range of a 10 per cent swing  and who wins most of them will win government.

The message from the polls up to last weekend was: close result, probable hung Parliament, no clear winner. But remember: in Victoria in November the polls overstated the Coalition vote after preferences by a massive 4 per cent. 2. The punters What about the punters? Surely some of them have inside knowledge of whats happening on the ground, and can guide us on the outcome in specific seats? Sadly, no. Australian punters are prone to backing sitting members, and Coalition candidates. In Victoria, three bookies I tracked in the final days had Labor at average odds of 4.25/1 to win Bayswater, 5.50 to win Mount Waverley, at 8/1 to win Box Hill and in Ringwood and at double figures in Hawthorn and Nepean. Yet Labor won all six seats.

Every betting website now has the Coalition odds-on to win. On average, they imply that Labor has only a one in three chance of forming government, and the Coalition two in three. They still expect a hung Parliament, but even that is sliding to a 50/50 chance. Illustration: Jim Pavlidis Credit: Its still close. In individual seat betting, Sportsbets odds early on Friday gave the Coalition just 47 of the 93 seats, to Labors 39. Labor would gain just five seats  Coogee (2.9 per cent swing needed), East Hills (0.4), Lismore (0.2, assuming Labor beats the Greens into third place), Tweed (3.2) and Upper Hunter (2.9). The Shooters would take Barwon from the Coalition, which would however reclaim Ballina (3.1) from the Greens. Thats tight. One way or another, there will be some sorry punters on Saturday night. 3. The byelections

Loading Byelections often go against governments  but not like they have under this government. Since 2016 the Coalition has faced six byelections in what had been very safe seats, mostly in the bush. It lost Orange to the Shooters and Wagga Wagga to an independent, a local doctor. It nearly lost Murray to the Shooters, and North Shore to an independent. In all the byelections it contested, the average swing against it was 16.6 per cent. In contests with Labor alone, the swing was 12.6 per cent. These are not ordinary anti-government swings. They imply that a government is on the ropes. If it wins today, that would be some rebound. 4. The shadow of the Federal government Victorian Liberals say the partys support at state level dived 3 per cent when federal MPs dumped Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister, and never recovered. Quarterly data from Newspoll suggests federal coalition support has plummeted even more in NSW than in Victoria.

Loading An unpopular federal government is lead in the saddlebags of state colleagues. As a young reporter I covered the 1975 South Australian election when the popular Don Dunstan was almost swept from office by voters busting to throw out the Whitlam government. Morrison is not as unpopular as Whitlam became, and in NSW both parties are targeting state issues, but this will have an impact. 5. History is against the Coalition It is now almost 40 years since a Coalition state government has won a third term in office  in Western Australia in 1980. Since then, seven Coalition state government have sought a third term, but every one of them lost the election. They were:Australia's most prominent right-wing extremist is vying for election to NSW Parliament, campaigning for an "ideological revolution" in the seat of Cootamundra in the state's west.

Dr Jim Saleam, a former neo-Nazi and convicted criminal, has targeted an electorate more than 350 kilometres away from his Tempe home in Sydney. He is a member of the far-right Australia First Party but is running as an independent.

Far right activist Dr Jim Saleam is contesting the NSW election. Credit:Facebook

One of the electorate's largest towns is Young, the so-called "cherry capital" of Australia and home to a substantial Muslim population.

Saturday's vote will coincide with an open day at the local mosque, which has received an outpouring of support from locals following the Christchurch terror attack.Loading Six of the governments 10 most marginal seats are in the regions, five of them held by the National Party. Even the giant western NSW electorate of Barwon, which the Nationals hold with a margin of 12.9 per cent, is under serious threat from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party. The past two elections have seen unusually large statewide swings. In 2011 the Liberals and Nationals crushed the ALP with an extraordinary 16.5 per cent swing in two-party preferred terms after voters deserted the 16-year-old, scandal-tainted Labor government. Four years later the Coalition was returned to office but that success masked another large shift in the two-party preferred result  a swing of 9.9 per cent back to Labor. This time a uniform, statewide swing of just 3.2 per cent against the Liberals and Nationals would be enough to deprive the government of its majority. But the complicated nature of local contests, especially in some bush seats, means any statewide voting trend might not be fully reflected in the final result.

If the vote is as close as opinion polls suggest, the final numbers in the lower house of the NSW Parliament might not be known for days. And the exact make-up in the Parliaments upper house may be unclear for several weeks. The Coalition battles for its majority If the Liberals and Nationals win the election it will be the first time in almost half a century that voters have given a conservative government in NSW a third term. Opposition Leader Michael Daley gets a hug from swinging voter Louise Hollier of St Clair. Credit:James Alcock But the Coalition, especially the Nationals, have this week been studiously managing expectations to avoid damaging protest votes. They are sticking to the line that it is "too close to call".

A senior Liberal says it will be a "coin toss" in several critical Sydney seats including Penrith and East Hills, while the regional seat of Goulburn is also lineball. "I can honestly say I am not sure which way they will go, obviously I am confident we have done enough to hold them, but they are so tight," the Liberal says. "The fact we are so competitive in East Hills is actually a phenomenal effort from Gladys because that's a Labor seat that we won from Labor in 2011. It's not about us possibly losing East Hills but the fact we are still so close shows the work she has done in that seat." Loading The source says Coogee is one seat that has probably swung too far from their reach. "Sadly, I think we have slipped too far behind in Coogee to come back." One of the big unknowns is how much voter anger with the Morrison federal government will damage the prospects for the Liberals and Nationals at the state level. The NSW election campaign has often been overshadowed by national political controversies reminding voters of recent infighting and leadership turmoil within the federal Coalition.

"It is just too close to call, and it is hard to know the impact of the feds on us, but I will say that if we win the election, it won't be because of them but in spite of them," the source says. "Obviously I think we deserve to win but I if I had to say, I suspect it will be a minority government." For the Nationals, the most at-risk seats are Barwon and Lismore, although Tweed and Murray are on their watchlist. A senior Nationals' source says: "We were happy in Murray and Barwon but Labor have stuffed up so much that the Shooters have got ahead of them [in both seats]. Lismore and Barwon are their biggest worries but "Tweed and Murray are now on [our] watch, but more Murray". Another Nationals' strategist says the party is ahead in Murray, but "we are heading in the wrong direction". "Expectation is critical right now. We need people to be careful with their votes. If they think we will win they could put them elsewhere and a handful of those could change results," the strategist says.

Loading "It's all within the margin for error but I think we just get over in Tweed and Lismore. Ballina and Barwon is anyone's guess. University of Sydney political scientist Dr Stewart Jackson says this election is a major test for the Nationals. If they can fight off everybody and hold their seats its going to a backstop for Berejiklian, he said. But if they cant do that the government is in serious trouble and so are the Nationals as a party for that matter. Labor eyes country seats Labors pathway to success runs through the regions. It has high hopes for three coastal electorates in the far north  Lismore, Tweed and Ballina  and is optimistic other regional electorates could swing its way, including Upper Hunter and Goulburn.

We just have not had an election with this many regional seats in play compared to city seats, says one Labor strategist. The party is also confident of bagging a few Sydney seats, especially Coogee and East Hills. But it is difficult to see the ALP picking up the 13 seats it needs for an outright majority in the 93 seat NSW Parliament. A uniform statewide swing of about 4 per cent - as suggested by recent opinion polls  would see the ALP pick up less than half that number. If Labor is to govern in its own right it will have to win a swag of Coalition seats on margins between 6 per cent and 9 per cent such as Penrith, Oatley, Holsworthy, Heathcote and Bega. Labor leader Michael Daley. Labors pathway to success runs through the regions. Credit:James Alcock

Jackson says Labor leader Michael Daley must get swings in all the right places if that is to happen. Thats a very tall order, he says. A poor finish to the campaign by Daley may have tarnished Labors prospects. He was dogged this week by comments he made about Asian students "taking jobs" in Sydney. Daley also stumbled badly during a live leaders debate when he struggled to outline the cost of some of his signature policies. But the size of the crossbench in the NSW Parliament - and the prospect it will grow in number after the election  might make it possible for Daley to form a minority government. This election is right on the line, says the Labor strategist. And us forming government is definitely possible.

Loading A hung Parliament? Berejiklian has refused to discuss the prospect of a hung Parliament in the closing weeks of the election campaign, branding it a hypothetical. But those wagering on the result are less guarded  the odds quoted on betting markets rate a hung Parliament as a more likely outcome than a majority of any colour. If the punters are right, whoever forms government will need the support of small parties or independents to survive. Should there be a hung Parliament the three sitting independents - Alex Greenwich (Sydney), Greg Piper (Lake Macquarie) and Joe McGirr (Wagga Wagga)  may become kingmakers, assuming they are all re-elected. However, there are huge demographic, economic and political differences between the electorates that trio represent.It was the South Australians who gave us the little pencils, the ones you'll use in the voting booth today. It was the 1860s and the system of pen-and-inkwell was creating queues at the polling station. Some genius in Adelaide thought: "Let's use pencils" and so it was.

This delicious detail is from Judith Brett's new history of Australian voting  "From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage". It's a book that reminds us how proud we should be on election day: if not of the result, at least of the way it's conducted.

The cardboard voting stall is an Australian invention. Credit:Adam McLean

Like many features of Australian voting, the tiny pencils were later taken up around the world. So impressive was our system  secret voting, smoothly conducted  it became known internationally as "the Australian ballot". It's still much copied.

One of the delights of history is to discover the starting point of things that remain part of our lives. An example: the cardboard stall in which you'll record today's vote.For months, Ive had a dream. It comes to me when Im sandwiched at the back of an ACTION bus on my way into The Canberra Times Assembly office of a morning.

I close my eyes, and instead of meandering through the rat-runs of the inner north or trundling in traffic, Im gliding down Northbourne Avenue, past all the clogged cars, straight into the centre of the city.

Which is why Friday was my best commute into work yet. After suffering through years of detours and road closures, watching the trees get chopped down and replanted, the rails go in and the wires go up, I finally got to take the light rail into the city.

I live well over a kilometre away from light rail so I really didnt see myself ditching the bus that stops right out the front of my house in favour of the tram too often, despite my daydreams.Yates, who is a former head of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, is already in full campaign mode. He says the majority of Liberal voters he meets are not happy about the party's record on climate change and the influence of the hard right of the party. The independent candidate dismisses Frydenberg's record as a moderate who spearheaded the now-dumped National Energy Guarantee last year: "I'd argue he's had all the opportunity to stand up." According to Yates, Kooyong is "completely in play".

This week, Frydenberg posted a video to his social media accounts. Set to a stirring soundtrack, it is filled with local people singing his praises. Along with Elwood, there is a pharmacist, mental health worker, cafe and supermarket owners and groups that represent stroke patients, breast cancer sufferers and children with autism. There are kids at childcare, a netball player and a guide dog. There is even a group of nuns.

Josh Frydenberg hands out flyers to voters outside a polling station in 2016. Credit:Josh Frydenberg/Facebook

"Josh is our hero, absolute hero," one woman says, while a local drycleaner wonders whether Frydenberg is the only cabinet minister to pick up and drop off his own shirts.

While there is an obvious self-promotion aspect to the film, the fact that so many people would appear on his behalf also points to his strong local links. He is known as one of the hardest workers - and networkers - within the government. This extends to the effort he makes in his electorate, which he has never regarded as "safe". This means there is no standing start ahead of the 2019 campaign and the unexpected entrants into the race. And yet, the fact that he made such a comprehensive video also suggests there is a level of concern. So too the Treasurer's requests to colleagues on Tuesday to retweet it.While Mr Morrison bravely condemned right-wing extremism after the Christchurch mosque attack last week, he and his party have for too long failed to speak out with sufficient force against racism in their ranks. That failure was still on display in Mr Morrison's evasive performance during the interview.

Even accepting all that, if that was his purpose, he and his party over the past eight years have done a poor job of achieving their goal.

Let us accept that, as he told Waleed Aly's The Project on Channel 10 , he raised the issue of Islamophobia only to advocate for a strategy of defusing tension rather than exploiting it.

Let us give Prime Minister Scott Morrison the benefit of the doubt about his version of the meeting of the shadow cabinet in January 2011 on the rise of anti-Islamic sentiment in the community.

Mr Morrison has been central to that political debate because he made his political reputation in 2010 as immigration spokesman calling for the turning back of boats and offshore detention. Stopping the 1200 deaths at sea was not racist policy but in exploiting it as an issue Mr Morrison fomented a climate of fear that went well beyond humanitarian concern. He warned that asylum seekers could bring tuberculosis and syphilis here and when up to 48 asylum seekers drowned off Christmas Island in December 2010, he complained their relatives were flown to Canberra to attend the funeral. That was the context of the 2011 shadow cabinet meeting.

While the party agreed then to keep its non-discriminatory immigration policy, Coalition MPs have continued to nourish hostile and insensitive stereotypes about Muslims that would be seen as clearly racist if directed at Jewish or Indigenous people. It was usually a subtle dog whistle to right-wing nativists which could be denied if called out by the other side.

Liberal MP George Christensen spoke at white extremist rallies; former prime minister Tony Abbott denied Islamophobia had ever killed anyone; Nationals leader Michael McCormack warned of "spivs, rapists and murderers" on Nauru and Manus; Immigration Minister Peter Dutton described Lebanese migration in the 1980s as a mistake. There was the episode where Liberal MPs congratulated Senator Fraser Anning after his speech calling for a "final solution". The senator, by the way, said the use of that phrase was innocent.

Mr Morrison's decision to do the interview on Channel 10 suggests he is worried that since Christchurch this sort of talk has become a liability. Yet he failed to show he is ready to confront the issue head on.

Mr Morrison deflected criticism of his own role by saying that he had worked behind the scenes to bring Islamic and non-Islamic people together at surf clubs and the like. We give him the benefit of any doubt that at a personal level he feels no prejudice against Islam.Serious doubts over the adequacy of the AFPs subsequent investigation have since emerged, with no federal police agents, unsworn staff or contract winners questioned. Instead, a paperwork audit of the contracts was done. The Age and Herald can also reveal that Australian agencies have experienced similar problems when providing payments to PNG to shore-up the revival of the Lombrum naval base to curb Chinas regional influence. The flow of money from Australia has created a culture of expectation among some senior PNG politicians and officials. PNG government representatives also began to make demands in high-level meetings in Canberra for Home Affairs to order its Australian-owned and operated contractors to hire PNG companies on lucrative sub-contracts. While Australian government agencies and departments refer to PNG as a difficult environment to operate in, an internal 2018 AFP report seen by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald is more direct and describes PNG as having significant corruption issues.

Australias offshore detention policy, supported by both Labor and Coalition federal governments since its operational revival in 2013, has cost more than $5 billion. Huge contracts have been awarded to companies in cloudy circumstances. These are often then split into sub-contracts involving politically-connected PNG-based interests. Delta compound at the Manus Island centre. Credit:AAP This flow of money, according to several well-placed sources working for Home Affairs and the PNG government, has created a culture of expectation among some senior PNG politicians and officials. With offshore detention and now the Lombrum base on the agenda there is an attitude in some senior levels in PNG that they have Australia over a barrel, said one Australian contractor with long experience in PNG.

The Age and Sydney Morning Herald last week revealed emails from within PNGs biggest bank where a senior manager wrote that he believed his client, a PNG landowner company called NKW Holdings, was inflating its invoices to the Australian government under an $82 million contract awarded by Home Affairs. Loading The AFP spent almost $50 million and had dozens of officers based in PNG as part of Australias commitment to help the country safely host last years APEC summit. At least four former PNG-based federal police officers were concerned about procurement practices and alleged conflicts of interest involving millions of dollars worth of contracts. The Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity assessed information about the AFPs PNG procurement arrangements and deemed that two corruption issues were identified.

It then referred the matter back to the AFP for investigation and an unsworn staff member began a paperwork audit of relevant PNG contracts. Loading This process found that the signatures of senior officials whose approval was required to award a $1 million building contract to Red Sea Housing Services  which had already won several federal police-funded tenders in PNG without competition - were copied and pasted in breach of procurement rules. A handful of contracts had also not been registered on the AFPs procurement database as required. Several AFP officers formerly based in PNG are understood to be deeply disappointed with the way the federal police investigated their allegations. Among the allegations was the claim that direct approaches had been made to Saudi-owned building firm Red Sea Housing Services for the purchase of jet skis and provision of dogs for the PNG police.

No interviews were done with AFP officers or winning contractors and alleged conflicts of interest and a drinking club culture involving senior federal police based in PNG was also not investigated. The overall finding of the paperwork audit was that nearly all the AFPs PNG contracts were being documented properly and meeting procurement criteria. It did note that the AFP mission in PNG was extensively using exemptions in procurement rules to engage suppliers directly. Processes in Mission need to be looked at to ensure the justification for the items/services being procured are robust, justified and are the best use of Commonwealth resources, the investigation report concluded. An AFP spokesman confirmed complaints were raised and an investigation followed. But he was not able to discuss the nature of the investigation or its findings. Lengthy written complaints by several former PNG-based AFP agents detail a broader story about the workplace culture of the federal police mission in Port Moresby and its effect on procurement practices.

The complaints raise questions about the process that led to a $1.1 million contract to provide bomb detection dogs and training to the PNG police force being awarded to a company part-owned by a former senior New South Wales policeman. At least three former PNG-based AFP agents raised concerns about the canine contract, including the apparent loss of documentation authorising a direct approach to Queensland Police about its dogs and a subsequent directive to invite Dog Force Group Pty Ltd to tender for provision of dogs to PNG police. Dog Force Group is part owned by former senior NSW policeman, who used to work with at least one of the AFP's PNG-based officer. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Dog Force Group nor doubts about its ability to carry out the contract. However, there were contrasting opinions about whether Dog Force Group or a competing company were best qualified to fulfil the needs of the contract. A decision by an unsworn AFP coordinator in PNG to overrule the position of the forces maritime advisers to buy six jet skis at the cost of $100,000 at extremely short notice was also raised in the whistleblower complaint.NSW police have charged one of Australia's most prominent far-right extremists with allegedly making repeated and explicit violent threats against a Melbourne journalist and lawyer.

Nathan Sykes, a prolific online troll and a lieutenant of Australias most prominent white supremacist Jim Saleam, has been charged with multiple offences, including using a carriage service to menace and to issue threats to do serious harm.

Alleged neo-Nazi troll Nathan Sykes after his arrest in Sydney. Credit:SMH

He was released on bail on Friday afternoon under very strict conditions, including that he cannot travel to Victoria or contact the journalist he allegedly threatened, Luke McMahon.

The decision to arrest and charge Mr Sykes was made by senior NSW police just hours after The Age and Sydney Morning Herald revealed how officers had shelved an investigation into the threats.Fast rail to Geelong. It sounds like an exciting infrastructure announcement from Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

It's not. Its precisely the sort of breathtakingly cynical political manoeuvre that voters are now so exhausted by. Do they really think we are this stupid?

The federal government has pledged to create a fast rail link between Melbourne and Geelong. Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui

For decades, more talented political operators than Morrison have dodged and weaved their way past elections while voters blood boils over not enough being done on transport. It has meant that announcements about multi-billion-dollar infrastructure promises simply wont wash anymore.

And thats just the cynicism thats set in among voters over the inertia  quite aside from the pork-barrelling nature of announcing projects not rated urgent priorities by the national infrastructure agency.Beijing: A long-term coal supply deal between China and the United States wouldnt represent good commercial value compared to China buying Australian coal, a US energy security expert says.

Donald Trumps trade negotiators travel to Beijing next Thursday to try to close a deal to end a damaging trade war with China, and billions of dollars in special energy and agricultural supply contracts are on the table.

Australian coal has faced long delays unloading at Chinese ports since January, with Chinese customs stepping up environmental and quality checks. Chinese traders have reported only Australian and Mongolian coal appear to be impacted.

China has reportedly slowed down imports of Australian coal through Dalian port. Credit:Phil Hearne

It is entirely possible that what we are seeing in the Australian coal delay is due to China's managed trade as China is still a managed economy, says Jane Nakano, a senior fellow in the energy and national security program at Washingtons Center for Strategic and International Studies.Chinese police have shot dead a man after he ploughed his car into pedestrians, killing six people, state television reported.

The man had intentionally driven into the people but the report did not elaborate on the motive behind the early morning incident in Zaoyang city in the central province of Hubei.

Seven people were injured and were in hospital, state television added. It gave no other details.

There have been several similar incidents in China in recent years.

Last September, at least 11 people were killed when a car drove onto a crowded square in southern China and the driver attacked people with a knife and spade seeking "revenge" on society for previous criminal convictions.Australia may be forced to choose sides between its biggest security partner and its second-largest export, education, as a "new Cold War" pits China against the United States, according a Japanese security expert.

Professor Yasuhiro Matsuda believes restrictions on Chinese students studying certain subjects in Western universities, beginning in the US, is a possible result of the shifting international order.

A new Cold War: Professor Yasuhiro Matsuda speaking at the Monash University Law Chambers. Credit:Joe Armao

"The US will want allies to choose sides," Professor Matsuda said, adding that it was possible Japan would one day add restrictions on what Chinese students can study.

The tussle between China and the US over Huawei is just the start of "a very long-lasting rivalry" that amounts to a "new Cold War", Matsuda said on a recent visit to Australia.Washington: The United States has imposed sanctions on two Chinese shipping companies it says helped North Korea evade sanctions over its nuclear weapons program, the first such steps since a US-North Korean summit collapsed last month.

The US Treasury Department also issued an updated advisory that listed 67 vessels that it said had engaged in illicit transfers of refined petroleum with North Korean tankers or were believed to have exported North Korean coal.

The department identified the newly sanctioned firms as Dalian Haibo International Freight Co Ltd and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding, which it said had helped North Korea evade US and international sanctions.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump, in happier times. Credit:AP

Reuters was unable to locate contact details for either company to seek comment.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 21, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Robert Chase, Chief Financial Officer of MediaValet Inc. (the Issuer), filed an early warning report dated March 20, 2019 (the Early Warning Report) advising of his holdings in the Issuer. The common shares of the Issuer are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the trading symbol MVP.



On March 20, 2019 Mr. Chase acquired beneficial ownership and control of an aggregate of 500 debenture units of the Issuer (the Debenture Units) through the facilities of the TSX Venture Exchange at a price of $1,000 per Debenture Unit. If converted into common shares of the Issuer, the Debenture Units represent 7.16% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Issuer. Following this acquisition, Mr. Chase beneficially owns and controls an aggregate of 29,010,167 common shares representing approximately 12.56% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Issuer and 600,000 common share purchase options (the Options). Upon conversion of the Debenture Units and Options, an additional 20,600,000 common shares would be issued to Mr. Chase representing in aggregate with shares already held, approximately 19.73% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Issuer. Mr. Chase may acquire further securities of the Issuer in the future.

This press release is issued pursuant to early warning requirements of National Instrument 62-104 and National Instrument 62-103, which also requires a report to be filed with regulatory authorities in each of the jurisdictions containing additional information with respect to the foregoing matters (the Early Warning Report). A copy of the Early Warning Report will appear with the Issuers documents on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com.

Robert Chase

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 release.

Contact:

Robert Chase

(604) 688-2321

New York: A Florida man pleaded guilty on Thursday, local time, to sending pipe bombs to CNN and prominent critics of President Donald Trump in a wave of attacks that harmed no one but spread fear of political violence across the United States for days leading up to the midterm elections.

Cesar Sayoc, 57, shackled at the ankles, briefly sobbed as he entered the plea before a New York federal judge.

In this file courtroom sketch, Cesar Sayoc raises his arm to swear to the truth of his statement of need for assigned counsel, during his presentment in Manhattan Federal Court in New York. Credit:AP

"I'm extremely sorry," he said, speaking so softly that sometimes he was told to repeat himself. Though he said he never meant for the devices to explode, he conceded he knew they could.

He could get life in prison at sentencing on September 12 on 65 counts, including 16 counts of using a weapon of mass destruction and mailing explosives with intent to kill. In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors dropped a charge that carried a mandatory life sentence.Mueller's decision to issue a final report indicates that he chose not to indict other major figures in his investigation, including members of Trump's family and the president. However, if he secured any indictments under seal, they could be handed off to other elements of the Justice Department, such as a US attorney's office. Mueller's report could be politically disastrous for Trump if the special counsel says he uncovered evidence that would justify a congressional move to impeach the president - and it's sure to be claimed as vindication by the president if he doesn't. Even so, Trump isn't necessarily in the clear. He also faces continuing risk from other investigations, with federal prosecutors in New York looking into his company, presidential campaign and inaugural committee. Mueller has been sharing some matters and handing off others to US attorney's offices in Manhattan; Alexandria, Virginia; and Washington, as well as the Justice Department's national security division, giving cases that touch on his personal and business affairs a longer lease on life. Nor is it certain that others close to the president - including Donald Trump Jr., who met with a Russian lawyer after being promised dirt on Clinton - are out of jeopardy. Other prosecutors may well be pursuing investigations related to them.

Barr's Decision During Barr's confirmation hearing in February, he said Mueller's report would be confidential while "the report that goes public would be a report by the attorney general." He suggested that he might exclude criticism of Trump as inappropriate for any such public report because Justice Department guidelines argue against indicting a sitting president. US Attorney-General William Barr has suggested that he might exclude criticism of Trump as inappropriate for a public report. Credit:AP "If you're not going to indict someone, then you don't stand up there and unload negative information about the person," he said.

The Justice Department probably won't want to release the names of people that Mueller investigated but didn't charge. Material related to ongoing law enforcement operations, grand jury proceedings or classified intelligence programs is also expected to be withheld from the public. Ultimately, the Supreme Court may decide the fate of Mueller's findings. Trump and his lawyers have indicated they want the opportunity to issue a rebuttal on anything damaging to the president and to assert executive privilege over any disclosures of his actions during the presidential transition and the presidency. Loading But congressional Democrats - who now control the House - say they want broad disclosure of Mueller's investigative work, citing the earlier success of Republicans in pressuring the Justice Department to release details they said showed anti-Trump bias in the FBI. They have talked of issuing subpoenas to force disclosure and even public testimony by Mueller. "We're going to insist on the underlying evidence," Representative Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in February on ABC's This Week.

"If you take the position that the president cannot be indicted, and the only remedy for improper, illegal or other conduct is impeachment, then you cannot withhold that information from Congress, or essentially the president has immunity," he said. Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he, too, wants Mueller's report made public. "Let it come out," he said. "Let people see it." Collusion, Obstruction Mueller, a former FBI director, was appointed in May 2017 to conduct one of the most consequential investigations in US history.

Beyond Russia's election meddling - which US intelligence agencies found was aimed at hurting Clinton and ultimately at helping Trump win - Mueller has been probing possible collusion in the operation and whether Trump sought to obstruct justice. In particular, Mueller investigated Trump's efforts to get then-FBI Director James Comey to drop an investigation into his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Mueller also investigated whether Trump's decision to fire Comey in May 2017 constituted obstruction of justice. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel days after Comey's firing. While Trump has often tweeted that "NO COLLUSION!" with Russia has been found, Mueller's inquiry has resulted in indictments of figures including the president's longtime adviser Roger Stone. Roger Stone, former campaign adviser for President Donald Trump. Credit:AP

Mueller indicted and convicted Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, for a series of financial crimes, and Manafort has been sentenced to 7 years in prison. He also secured guilty pleas and cooperation agreements from Flynn and Trump's deputy campaign chairman Richard Gates and he worked with federal prosecutors in New York who secured a deal with former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen. Mueller's investigation cost about $US25 million ($35 million) from his appointment in May 2017 through September 2018, according to the latest figures, provided by the Justice Department in December. It's been a fast-paced project compared to other major investigations of sitting presidents. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr spent four years investigating President Bill Clinton before releasing his 1998 report on the Monica Lewinsky affair, which spun out of a probe into an Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater. The length and cost of that inquiry - and Starr's public release of a report with sexually explicit details about Clinton's relations with Lewinsky, an intern - contributed to Congress letting the law authorising independent counsels expire. Mueller was named under a less expansive Justice Department regulation providing for special counsels.Karvelas was impressed Morrison had highlighted the ideological nature of the attack. His response was altogether different from Trump's insistence, following the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, that there "were very fine people on both sides" of the protest. She was instantly hit by a deluge of criticism. "It was just one tweet about a press conference, not a dissertation about everything the Prime Minister has said about Muslims in his career. Yet it became this pile on," Karvelas says. "People were accusing me of excusing his alleged past Islamophobia. A former ABC employee told me I should get out of journalism." Ian Mannix, the former manager of ABC local radio Victoria, tweeted: "She fails to put it in context the years of hatred and racism against other people. If you cant get this right, get out of the media."

Karvelas' conclusion: "We have lost the ability to be civil." Craig Emerson, a senior cabinet minister in the Rudd-Gillard years, also praised Morrison's response - as well as the statements by Jacinda Ardern and Bill Shorten. At an intensely upsetting and anxious moment for the Muslim community, Emerson believed all three leaders provided the strength and reassurance the moment demanded. "I was just giving credit where it was due," he says. "I copped an avalanche of criticism." The fact Emerson himself had taken a strong stand against white supremacy didn't matter. (Emerson quit as a Sky News commentator last year when the network hosted a soft interview with far-right leader Blair Cottrell.)

Like Karvelas, Emerson isn't precious and doesn't want pity. He doesn't even believe tribalism is inherently wrong or dangerous - political parties, after all, are tribes and so are our favourite sporting teams. What concerns him is "mindless tribalism", the notion that you should never break with orthodoxy or give credit to a political opponent. "This was just one isolated incident, but I do think it shows how hyper-partisan and tribal we have become," Karvelas says. "I think most people, who are busy getting on with their lives, still value civility. But there is a noisy minority that floods the internet and skews the debate." A similar point was made by Morrison in a speech this week when he said he was worried Australians are demonstrating "less understanding and grace towards others that we do not even know, making the worst possible assumptions about them and their motives, simply because we disagree with them".

"If we allow a culture of 'us and them', of tribalism, to take hold ... we will lose what makes diversity work in Australia," he said. The extreme responses following Christchurch were not limited to anonymous trolls with a handful of followers. Twitter, all too often, rewards the snarky putdown, the dogmatic over-reach, the bad-faith misinterpretation of someone's argument. Empathy won't get you much traction, and neither will nuance. Only hours after the attack, former independent MP Tony Windsor said Morrison's "dog-whistling" had "borne fruit ... not here but on a softer target". Marcia Langton, the chairwoman of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, went further, saying the Prime Minister and most of his government were "complicit in mass murder".

Across the Atlantic, it wasn't only Trump, who famously called for a complete and total ban on Muslims entering the US, facing similar claims. At a vigil in New York, Chelsea Clinton was confronted by activists who said she had helped cause the massacre. "The 49 people died because of the rhetoric you put out there," one protester told her. How so? Clinton had recently criticised Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar for remarks that she, and many others, believe perpetuated anti-Semitic tropes. Meanwhile, Osman Faruqi, an ABC editor and former Greens staffer, was targeted for tweeting that Christchurch was "one of the worst massacres ever to occur in the west, and one of the worst massacres targeting a minority group since WW2". Among those criticising him were prominent News Corporation columnists such as Rita Panahi.

This came just weeks after the ABC aired a radio documentary detailing how Faruqi had been trolled relentlessly by right-wing Twitter users and had his phone number published online. Faruqi has now deactivated his Twitter account. Each social media platform incentivises certain behaviours, often those we would not want to encourage. Selfies tend to receive more love on Instagram than any other posts. YouTube's algorithms have pushed users towards increasingly extreme content: you start on a straightforward documentary about September 11 and, a few videos later, you're mired in conspiracy theories. Twitter, all too often, rewards the snarky putdown, the dogmatic over-reach, the bad-faith misinterpretation of someone's argument. Empathy won't get you much traction, and neither will nuance.

It's common to see Twitter users delight in seeing others get "ratioed" - that is, when someone's post attracts more negative comments than it does likes or retweets. The desire for outrage can lead people to attack those who, in fact, they agree with. Journalist Annabel Crabb experienced this when Twitter users mistakenly believed she had criticised the 16-year-old who threw an egg at Fraser Anning. Twitter is the natural home of "cancel culture", which describes the modern trend to try to extinguish people or cultural products we disagree with. It's not only notorious sexual abusers such as Michael Jackson or Harvey Weinstein who get caught in the net. Last month, US author Kosoko Jackson, who is black and gay, withdrew his forthcoming novel, A Place for Wolves, from publication.

Before his book had even hit shelves, Jackson had attracted a backlash for making two non-Muslim Americans the main characters in a story about the Kosovo War. New York Times columnist Jennifer Senior argued that Jackson's book "should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance. The mob got to it first." After the Christchurch attacks, comedian Adam Hills was pilloried when he tweeted that he was "not OK" with Anning being egged as it would embolden his supporters. One user's succinct response: "Adam Hills is cancelled." It's all too easy for members of the mainstream media to focus solely on social media's role promoting division. We know that the stories that perform best online are often those that confirm readers' prejudices rather than challenge them. In an age of fierce competition for reader attention, it's tempting to inflame rather than inform.Christchurch: A New Zealand MP and former police minister has told the National Rifle Association to "bugger off" out of the nation's affairs as it prepares to introduce sweeping gun law reforms.

National Party MP Judith Collins said that when she sought to introduce gun law reforms during her two stints as police minister, she was inundated by lobbying from a small, vocal and passionate group of lobbyists from New Zealands gun industry.

A policeman stands guard at the Al Noor Mosque ahead of a national call to prayer. Credit:Jason South

She told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that these lobbyists typically directed massive amounts of material that appeared to be sourced directly from the US National Rifle Association to her office and those of other MPs.

"They talked about how we were trying to take away their Second Amendment rights to own guns. We dont have a right to bear arms. To own a gun in New Zealand is absolutely a privilege and not a right," she said.Christchurch: People across New Zealand are observing the Muslim call to prayer as the nation reflects on the moment one week ago when 50 people were slaughtered at two mosques.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and thousands of others congregated in leafy Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch to observe the call to prayer early Friday afternoon.

Muslims pray in the park opposite the Al Noor mosque, ahead of two minutes of silence that was to be recognised across New Zealand. Credit:SNPA

Thousands more were listening in on the radio or watching on television as the event was broadcast live. The prayer was followed by two minutes of silence.

Australian boxer Anthony Mundine greeted community leaders outside the Al Noor mosque earlier in the day after visiting in hospital some of the 50 people injured in the March 15 attack."I think Tarrant chose to turn himself into a meme," said Teodor Mitew, a senior lecturer in digital studies at the University of Wollongong, referring to the spread and adaptation of his images. Dr Mitew said memetic warfare was emerging online where large numbers of often anonymous people with unclear intentions create hyper-sardonic, but also dangerous, content. A man wearing face paint to resemble Pepe the Frog ahead of a rally for President-elect Donald Trump in 2016. Credit:The New York Times The tools for meme generation have been radically democratised, he said. Anyone, with MS Paint only, is able to create their own propaganda messages. While users of message boards are anonymous, they are assumed to be predominantly young white men. Australian content such as the ocker Aussie shitposter character collides with international hate symbols such as the cartoon toad Groyper to create memes with multiple references and targets.

The far-right groups have an arsenal of narratives, said University of Western Sydney researcher Kevin Dunn, co-author of a 10-year review of cyber racism in Australia. Loading Professor Dunn and his colleagues found that extremists use clever rhetoric to cast racism as a supposedly natural response to what they portray as inevitable conflict between racial groups. Using disturbingly creative techniques, they also appeal to younger converts using gaming platforms, and they rely heavily on humour. An international team of researchers last year published a paper analysing extremist content across 160 million images from 2.6 billion posts on social media.

Polarised communities within 4chan and Reddit have been working hard to create new memes and make them go viral, aiming to increase the visibility of their ideasa phenomenon known as attention hacking, the studys authors found. Loading An anti-Semitic meme - an ugly caricature of a supposedly Jewish man rubbing his hands together - was the third most popular meme on 4chans politically incorrect forum /pol/. A version of Pepe the Frog, an innocent cartoon character before it was turned into a hate symbol by the far-right, was the second most popular. Memes about US President Donald Trump abound but his supporters are routinely pilloried by the far-right as cuckservatives: conservatives whose political agendas have been cuckolded by tamer elements.

The president is disdainfully associated with boomer politics - not limited to the baby boomer generation but referring generally to older, more neo-conservative views. In Australia, One Nations Pauline Hanson has been labelled a "boomer" in contrast to her disowned senator Fraser Anning, who linked the Christchurch attacks to fears of Muslim immigration. Senator Fraser Anning. Credit:AAP Posters deemed too extreme for 4chan, referred to as "edgelords", have migrated to its barely-regulated off-shoot 8chan. An 8Chan forum devoted to Tarrant this week had the sub-heading: when they start praying, i start spraying.

Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: The sites founder, Mr Brennan, has regrets about the forum he left in December, especially after seeing the reaction to the Christchurch massacre. It was very difficult in the days that followed to know that I had created that site, he told the Wall Street Journal. I have no desire to ever be involved in the image-board world again. A lot of these sites cause more misery than anything else. 8chan is meant to have one global rule: do not post anything illegal. But laws against hate speech and racial discrimination in countries around the world would render reams of 8chan content illegal.PHILIPSBURG:--- Rotary clubs in our zone 34 were asked to engage in a hunger project and Rise Against Hunger in or around Valentines day in their communities. Each Club was asked to decide for itself how it wanted to participate. It could be something as simple as donating money to an established hunger program, to organizing a full-fledged meal event as a club service project.

Rise Against Hunger is first and foremost an effort to put food on an empty plate, to fill an empty stomach, to bring a ray of hope to the hungry. It is also a chance for Rotary to show thousands of communities throughout our Zone what Rotarians can do when we are inspired to Rise Against Hunger.

The members of The Rotary Club of St. Maarten-Mid Isle donated their fines collected in February to this project. The club decided to give breakfast and lunch to children in the community.

Mid Isle purchased from the Happy Bookers fundraising Breakfast event, breakfast for the children at Player Development. The breakfast consisted of fruit, salad, johnny cakes, fish cakes, and eggs. The Happy Bookers also sent brownie cupcakes for the children to enjoy. The Happy Bookers were fundraising to support the libraries on both sides of the island that were damaged by Hurricane Irma.

In partnership with Pineapple Pete, Mid Isle planned a lunch at Pineapple for the children from the I Can Foundation Home. The children enjoyed a special menu which included ice cream. They also enjoyed doing coloring and activity worksheet while waiting for lunch. A big thank you goes out to Pineapple Pete for sponsoring the lunch.

Due to the lunch being sponsored the remaining funds were used to purchase food items for the Community Outreach Mentorship and Empowerment Centre (COME). After the passing of Hurricane Irma, the COME Center embarked on a project to provide a hot breakfast and lunch for those persons in our community who were in need of a hot meal on a daily basis. They currently feed approximately 75 per day.

The Rotary Club of St. Maarten-Mid Isle meets Tuesdays at 7 pm 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 facebook page Rotary Club of St. Maarten-Mid Isle.PHILIPSBURG:--- For years the quality of the Sint Maarten prison cells has been up for discussion. One of the locations that was heavily criticized is the Philipsburg Police Station cells. One of the sources that pointed out the shortcomings of the facility is the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT). They came out with a report in which they made several recommendations.

Today we are happy to report that over 70% of the recommendations have been followed and concluded with success. The cells have all been deep cleaned and painted. All floors have been renovated and the lights have been replaced and adjusted to meet international standards. The airing space has also been cleaned and painted. All the work was done by detainees who, under strict supervisor, came in daily from the Point Blanche location.

Minster De Weever thanked the project team and all those who assisted. A lot has been accomplished within a short time period despite our financial challenges. This type of work is very time consuming, and we are aiming to do all repairs in such a manner that we meet Human Rights standards as well, said Minister De Weever.

The facility contains 9 cells. It also includes space to air and a meeting room where the detainees can meet with their representation.NetDragon Showcased Online Education Platform Edmodo at \The Fourth US-China Smart Education Conference\

HONG KONG, Mar 21, 2019  (ACN Newswire)  NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited (\NetDragon\ or \the Company\; Hong Kong Stock Code: 777), a global leader in building online communities, is pleased to announce that \The Fourth US-China Smart Education Conference\ was successfully held at the University of North Texas on 18 March 2019. It was co-hosted by Beijing Normal University, University of North Texas and National Engineering Laboratory for Cyberlearning and Intelligent Technology, and co-organized by Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University and the College of Information of University of North Texas. In attendance were experts and scholars from the Ministry of Education of China, United States Department of Education, all levels of educational administration, eminent colleges and universities and research institutions, as well as senior executives and representatives of well-known information technology companies in China and the United States. As a partner of National Engineering Laboratory for Cyberlearning and Intelligent Technology and Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University, NetDragon has participated in this conference for four consecutive years. In the conference this year, NetDragon presented its global online education platform, Edmodo, which demonstrates NetDragon\-\-s experiences and achievements in digital education in the past years, as well as bringing new practices and ideas to the development of the industry.

Since the successful hosting of \The First US-China Smart Education Conference\ in 2016, the latest achievements and development trends in the field of smart education have become a key topic of focus of the conference. Conference organizers are committed to building an academic platform that connects China and the United States and integrates global smart education resources. The conference focused on eight major topics, including science education, educational robots, artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed realities in learning, and learning through gamification. In the conference, an academic report titled \Transforming Education through Intelligent Technology: A comparison report of China and U.S.\ was released and a smart education exhibition experiential event was hosted.

The exhibition booth of Edmodo, the global online education platform of NetDragon, attracted a number of guests. Being one of the largest and most active global learning community platforms, Edmodo provides K-12 schools with a collaborative communication platform for teachers, students, administrators and parents. It allows users to share resources, and distribute quizzes and assignments. Currently, Edmodo has more than 100 million registered users covering more than 400,000 schools in more than 190 countries.

Dr. Xiong Li, Associate Director of National Engineering Laboratory for Cyberlearning and Intelligent Technology and CEO of NetDragon, said, \NetDragon combines the online education platform Edmodo with its content, technologies and teaching tools to support various scenarios during the teaching process, including interactive lesson preparation and teaching, student collaboration, assignment check, communication between students, parents and teachers, as well as a full range of functions such as educational content stores and resource sharing.\

Dr. Xiong Li commented, \In recent years, NetDragon has continued to increase its strategic investments in the education industry, execute global deployment and integrate the best resources around the world, with an aim to provide the best one-stop digital education solution and a new teaching experience to educators and learners. NetDragon\-\-s ultimate goal is to create a \-\-life-long learning community for the world\-\-. Since entering the education industry, NetDragon has devoted itself into building a solid foundation. Every step that NetDragon has taken is very practical, and every new initiative and movement that NetDragon has implemented is serving our ultimate goal.\

After years of expansion into overseas markets, NetDragon has achieved outstanding performance. For example, in Moscow, the Company provided the latest interactive learning technology to more than 7,600 smart classrooms in 2017, and then to another 13,000 classrooms in March 2018. In addition, NetDragon continued to expand into new markets across emerging countries, including Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya and Malaysia in 2018. To date, education business of NetDragon has expanded to more than 190 countries around the world, benefiting more than 100 million users and covering more than 1.3 million classrooms.

About NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited

NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited (HKSE: 0777) is a global leader in building internet communities. Established in 1999, NetDragon is a vertically integrated, cutting-edge R&D powerhouse with a highly successful track record which includes the development of flagship MMORPGs including Eudemons Online, Heroes Evolved (formerly known as Calibur of Spirit) and Conquer Online. The company also established China\-\-s number one online gaming portal, 17173.com, and China\-\-s most influential smartphone app store platform, 91 Wireless, which was sold to Baidu in 2013 in what was at the time the largest Internet M&A transaction in China. Being China\-\-s pioneer in overseas expansion, NetDragon also directly operates a number of game titles in over 10 languages internationally since 2003. In recent years, NetDragon has emerged as a major player in the global online and mobile learning space as it works to leverage its mobile Internet technologies and operational know-how to develop a game-changing learning ecosystem. For more information, please visit www.netdragon.com.

For investor enquiries, please contact:

NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited

Ms. Maggie Zhou

Senior Director of Investor Relations

Tel.: +852 2850 7266 / +86 591 8754 3120

Email: maggie@nd.com.cn

Website: ir.netdragon.comDublin, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "State of College Course Materials 2017-2018" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The College Course Materials Market Trends & Forecast annual report provides an overview of the changing market for instructional resources in higher education in the U.S.



This new edition continues that tradition in two parts. The first part, State of College Course Materials 2017-2018, is now available and focuses on two main areas: the current market landscape and the competitive environment for publishers and distributors of instructional resources for college programs.



In State of College Course Materials 2017-2018, examines the changing dynamics of the higher education market that impact the industry and how the industry is responding, focusing on the time period of 2017 and the first half of 2018.



Topics covered in this report include:

Student enrollment by institutional type, 2016

Continued decline of the for-profit career-college market segment and initial steps the industry is taking toward a revival

Growth in appeal of distance learning for college students

State fiscal support for higher education in fiscal 2018 and how state support has continued to be tepid

Solidification of federal student aid and expanding access through fiscal 2019

Course materials sales by segments (all new course materials, print textbooks, etextbooks and digital media, used textbooks and total market) for 2016 and 2017 with 2018 projections

Changing balance of print and digital media

Impact of open educational resources (OER) on publishers and distributors

Powerful relevance of textbook rental programs and inclusive access on the shifting balance in distribution of course materials as publishers try to gain more control of the process

Competitive analysis of four leading course materials providers

Growth of publisher ecommerce channels

The second half of the report - College Course Materials Trends & Outlook 2019-2021 - to be published at the end of 2018 - will update trends building steam in 2018 that are likely to persist into the next several years. The report also will provide the outlook for the higher education publishing industry and sales segment projections through 2021.

Key Topics Covered:



Methodology

Executive Summary

Introduction

Market Size & Structure

Institution Types and Numbers

For-Profit/Nonprofit Split among Private Institutions

Two-Year vs. Four-Year

Where Students Are Enrolled

Almost 80% of Students Attend Public Institutions

Enrollment Grows at Four-Year Institutions

Full-Time vs. Part-Time

Student Demographics

For-Profits Work on Improving Their Position

The Appeal of Distance Education

Degrees of Choice

Spring Term 2018

Policy & Funding

Introduction

Costs of Attending College in 2017-2018

Table Undergraduate Tuition and Fees, 2017-2018 vs. 2016-2017

Federal Education Budget Passes

$4.9M for Open Educational Resources

Regulation Reform Is Slow to Take Effect

Slowing State Support for Higher Education

Free-Tuition Programs Continue to Spread

Course Materials

Introduction

Student Spending on Course Materials Continues to Decline

Health Predominates in Spending on Course Materials

Stability Returns to Publishers in 2017

Segmenting Industry Sales

The Resilience of New Print Textbooks

Demand continues for Digital Media

Publishers Adjust to Changing Landscape

New Options Hit Pearson

Rental Preference and Digital Hit Cengage Revenue

New Copyrights Help Mitigate at McGraw-Hill Education

Wiley Continues to Invest in Education

Increasing Digital Metrics

More Digital Progress in H1 2018

OER Continues to Make Headway in College Market

Cengage Launches OpenNow

Macmillan Launches OER Course Service

Carnegie Learning Partners with OpenStax in Developmental Math

OpenStax Continues OER Growth

Distribution

Competitive Campus Store Landscape

Follett Is Largest Campus Bookstore Operator

Barnes & Noble Moves into Student Services

Amazon Tempers Move on Campus

Shifting Campus Store Landscape

Ed Map Provides a Cautionary Tale

Publishers Assert More Control of Sales & Distribution

Publishers Enter the Textbook Rental Market

Publishers Grow eCommerce

Publishers Expand Inclusive Access

Cengage Unlimited Goes Live

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/v5jvdn/united_states?w=12





Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.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.London, UK, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A typical nuclear power plant has an average life of 30-35 years and is licensed to operate up to 35 years. If licenses are not renewed, the nuclear plant will go through a decommissioning process which involves the disposal of radioactive wastes and dismantling of nuclear reactors. Nuclear power plant decommissioning has become a profitable business, and a majority of companies have started offering nuclear-decommissioning services. High capital costs associated with the development of traditional nuclear plants is a potential driver for small modular reactors.

Small modular nuclear reactors are one of the potential sources of CO 2 -free district heat production. In the last few years, small modular reactor (SMR) projects have been making substantial progress, with two reactors currently under construction: the CAREM-25 (a prototype) in Argentina and the KLT-40S in the Russian Federation. Interest in SMRs is being driven by a desire to reduce the total capital costs of nuclear power plants and to provide power to small grid systems, leading to more designs reaching advanced stages of development.

For free sample pages on this report please click on:

https://www.visiongain.com/report/small-modular-nuclear-reactor-market-report-2019-2029/

The Visiongain report analyst commented Small Modular Nuclear Reactor (SMR) market is expected to witness a high growth on owing to low investments costs when compared to traditional nuclear power plants. SMRs are low-mid capital-intensive nuclear power plants, and hence, numerous companies are offering equipment and solutions related to the development/deployment of SMRs.

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 20 7549 9987

Leading companies featured in the report who are developing small modular nuclear reactors include: Bechtel Corporation, BWX Technologies Inc., General Atomics, General Electric Hitachi Nuclear Energy, Holtec International, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), Rolls Royce Plc, Terrestrial Energy Inc., and Toshiba International Corporation.From midnorthern latitudes on spring evenings, the Big Dipper, Bootes, and Virgo can be found high in the sky from the northeast to southeast. Follow the red arrows from the Dipper's handle to arc to Arcturus and the kite-shape of Bootes, and then proceed to speed to Spica in Virgo.

Arcturus is a red giant star in the Northern Hemisphere of Earth's sky and the brightest star in the constellation Bootes (the herdsman). Arcturus is also among the brightest stars that can be seen from Earth. Astronomers say Arcturus will end up as a white dwarf at the end of its life.

The light of Arcturus is so bright that the star was used to help open the Chicago World's Fair in 1933.

Locating Arcturus

The easiest way to spot Arcturus is by following the curve of the "handle" of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major). A simple way to remember how to find the star is to recall the famous phrase "Follow the arc to Arcturus and then speed on to Spica." The latter part of that phrase refers to the bright star Spica, which is actually a binary star.

Arcturus's location is:

Right ascension: 14 hours, 15 minutes, 39.7 seconds

Declination: +19 degrees, 10 minutes, 57 seconds

Chicago World's Fair

Organizers for the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 were searching for a memorable way to open their exhibit. The previous world's fair in the city had occurred 40 years earlier, in 1893. Because at the time, Arcturus was believed to be about 40 light-years away from Earth, the fair's organizers hit upon the idea of using the star's light as a part of the new exhibition and as a way to commemorate the previous Chicago World's Fair.

At 9:15 p.m. Central Time on May 27, 1933, telescopes focused the star's light on several photoelectric cells. The electric current from the star-powered photo cells was used to flip a switch that turned on the floodlights at the exhibition grounds.

Years later, measurements refined the distance to Arcturus as 37 light-years away from Earth. So, the light that was used at the Chicago's World Fair actually began its journey to Earth in 1896, not in 1893.

Modern understanding of Arcturus

Today, astronomers know that Arcturus packs a lot of punch despite being only about 1.5 times the mass of the sun. To the naked eye, Arcturus appears to shine about 113 times more brightly than the sun, according to Jim Kaler, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Arcturus, however, has a lower temperature than the sun, which means that a lot of the red giant star's energy is radiated as heat. Once this is accounted for, Arcturus actually releases 215 times more heat than Earth's sun. Arcturus has an apparent magnitude of -0.04 and an absolute magnitude of 0.2. (The brighter the star, the lower its apparent and absolute magnitudes .) The star is in the latter stages of its life. Considered a red giant, Arcturus has stopped fusing hydrogen in its core, as the sun does, and astronomers believe it is now starting to fuse heavier elements such as carbon. [The Brightest Stars in the Sky: A Starry Countdown]

"Such stars are not expected to have magnetic activity like the sun, but very weak X-ray emission suggests that Arcturus, indeed, is magnetically active and has a hard-to-observe 'buried corona,'" wrote Kaler, referring to the shining shell of a star that is most easily visible when the star's main body is eclipsed.

Once Arcturus exhausts its helium supply, its outer layers will likely bleed off, leaving behind a white dwarf remnant.

Justin Ng of Singapore captured this composite image of the Milky Way and a lunar halo over Mersing, Malaysia. Planet Venus appears to the bottom right of the image with planet Saturn near the top of the moon. The fourth brightest star in the night sky, Arcturus, is seen near the top right corner of the photo. The image was released Aug. 14, 2013. (Image credit: Justin Ng

Arcturus in fiction

No planets have been found surrounding this star, although science fiction has explored that subject. One early example is David Lindsay's book "A Voyage to Arcturus" (Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1920). The book's protagonist travels to Tormance, a fictional planet that orbits Arcturus.

Arcturus  either the star or a fictional planet with the same name  has also appeared in many other science fiction series, including Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" book series, the "Doctor Who" and "Star Trek" television series, and the movie "Aliens." In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" universe, a famous phrase goes, "However fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of an Arcturan megacamel."

Additional resources:The documentary " 14 Minutes From Earth ," which just premiered on Netflix, shows the secrecy behind, and the excitement following, the highest free-fall jump ever.

The 2016 film follows the adventures of Google executive Alan Eustace in his quest to make the highest-ever skydive  and to do so without benefit of a rocket or even a protective ascent capsule, such as the one used by previous record-holder Felix Baumgartner .

The then 57-year-old Eustace flew a helium-filled balloon more than 25 miles (40 kilometers) above New Mexico on Oct. 24, 2014, before releasing a cord and falling solo toward Earth. As the documentary shows, making the jump was a difficult decision for Eustace. He had the chance to make history, but his wife and others in his life were not fully on board with the idea.

Related: Record-Breaking Supersonic Skydive from 'Near-Space' in Photos

It was also a crazy journey for Jerry Kolber, who directed and wrote "14 Minutes From Earth" with Adam "Tex" Davis, Trey Nelson and Erich Sturm. At the time, Kolber recalled in an interview with Space.com, he was a producer and writer for the National Geographic show "Brain Games." He'd be working on set in New York when a call would come from Eustace's people that a practice jump was coming up.

Alan Eustace during a stratospheric skydive. The 2016 documentary "14 Minutes from Earth," which just became available on Netflix, documents Eustace's record-setting 2014 jump. (Image credit: Paragon Space Development Corporation)

Since Kolber was filming under a non-disclosure agreement, this meant repeated, sudden and mysterious disappearances from his responsibilities in New York to fly west and drive several hours to a remote area of Colorado, New Mexico or other location, he said.

The joke around the office was that he had to be working on an alien documentary, especially with the New Mexico link, Kolber said. (Roswell, New Mexico, is famous for a 1947 incident that some people believe involved the crash of an alien vessel. In reality, the debris on the ground came from a balloon that was monitoring the atmosphere for signs of Soviet nuclear tests, experts say.)

Kolber's response to colleagues at the time? "I can neither confirm nor deny I'm making a documentary about aliens."

Biosphere

Kolber's desire to do a space-related documentary dates back to the early 2000s, when he got in touch with Jane Poynter , a participant in the Biosphere 2 mission. Biosphere 2 was an Arizona experiment meant to demonstrate how humans could live in a closed system, with plants supplying food and oxygen, for example.

It didn't go very well, at least as far as that main mission goal was concerned.. Two experiments  from 1991 to 1993, and from March to September 1994  faced problems such as plants and animals dying, as well as interpersonal issues within the group.

While Poynter wrote a book about the Biosphere 2 experience, she discouraged Kolber from doing a documentary, saying that some of the participants weren't on speaking terms and others saw it as "water under the bridge," he said.

But Poynter believed in Kolber's work in general, because she was a big fan of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," a 2003-2007 television series that Kolber helped produce, in which gay men tried to help straight men gain confidence through makeovers.

Poynter is also a co-founder of Paragon Space Development, which creates life-support systems for extreme environments. She and Kolber became friends, and eventually, he got a mysterious phone call saying that Eustace wanted to speak with him about a Paragon project. He had to sign a non-disclosure agreement even before he got on the phone.

The two ended up speaking for hours, Kolber said. Kolber was so fascinated by the project that he spent the next several years tracking Eustace's journey. As for his favorite part of the documentary, he says it's the first parachute jump.

"It is an absolute nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat adrenaline scene in the context of great engineering," Kolber said.

"14 Minutes From Earth" is available on Netflix in the United States and Canada. Check with your local Netflix to see if it is available in your country.NEW YORK  It's no secret that NASA's Apollo missions were risky. Political pressures pushed the hardworking teams at NASA further and faster than what seemed possible.

From the seamstresses in Dover, Delaware, to the engineers and, of course, the astronauts themselves  everyone at NASA had their sights set firmly on the moon. But, while everyone worked to prepare for every possible malfunction or error with the Apollo missions, getting to the moon still presented these astronauts with strange, unusual (and sometimes life-threatening) surprises.

In what may have been the largest gathering of Apollo astronauts in one place this year, a group of the intrepid explorers gathered here for the 115th Explorers Club Annual Dinner on March 16 to receive medals of exploration and look back on their epic missions. The varied group included the likes of Walt Cunningham (Apollo 7); Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9); Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins (Apollo 11); Fred Haise (Apollo 13); Al Worden (Apollo 15); Charlie Duke (Apollo 16); and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17).

Related: NASA's 17 Apollo Missions in Pictures

An estimated 1,700 Explorers Club members and others gathered to hear the Apollo astronauts speak at the dinner. But before the celebrations commenced, Duke, Worden, Cunningham, Schweickart, Aldrin and Collins gathered before a crowd of 800 guests for a panel moderated by private astronaut Richard Garriott that discussed some of the most hair-raising moments of the Apollo program.

Those brave little white mice

Apollo astronauts pose for a portrait at the 2019 Explorers Club Annual Dinner in New York City on March 16, 2019. They are from left to right: Charlie Duke (Apollo 16), Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11), Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7), Al Worden (Apollo 15), Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9), Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17), Michael Collins (Apollo 11) and Fred Haise (Apollo 13). (Image credit: Felix Kunze/ FelixKunze.com

Collins, the apparent comedian of Apollo 11, shared the expected but unnerving reality of having to stay in quarantine after coming back from space.

"What I was worried about was the white mice, 'cause when we came back from the moon, we were gonna be in quarantine for a couple weeks with a whole colony of white mice. And if one of those poor little things didn't do too well, we were in deep trouble  we might have brought back some pathogen," he said. This is just one of the many dangers of spaceflight that aren't as obvious as "what if the rocket blows up."

Worden shared a story about the potentially life-threatening situation that his Apollo 15 colleagues, astronauts Jim Irwin and Dave Scott, faced on the moon. Worden remained in lunar orbit in the mission's command module.

"We had a little bit of a problem with Dave Scott and Jim Irwin on the surface,"Worden said. "They had gotten dehydrated, I think that was the big problem. And they were having some heart problems. The big question, and Jim was the worst: Do we expose him to a vacuum in a pressure suit while he's having a little bit of a heart problem? And the answer came back: Yeah, do it." Luckily, Scott and Irwin survived the mission, which included the first-ever deep-space spacewalk (performed by Worden) in spaceflight history.

Related: How Apollo 13's Dangerous Survival Mission Worked (Infographic)

Off-roading in the moon

Duke shared the thrilling but dangerous time he had navigating on Apollo 16's lunar rover.

"The lunar rover only weighed 80 pounds up on the moon, so we got in and strapped in and off we went," Duke said. But, being only 80 pounds, driving the dune buggy-like vehicle around on the moon wasn't like driving around on Earth.

"I felt the ride was real sporty, it bounced a lot. Sometimes both front wheels were off the surface. It was real squirrely. The back end is like driving on ice and breaking loose occasionally," Duke said, adding that because of this, it was sometimes difficult to see exactly where you were about to go  which is pretty scary when you think about all of the craters and canyons on the lunar surface. "But, it was a lot of fun."

Apollo astronauts met in a panel discussion at the Marriott Marquis for the Explorers Club Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing. Present are (from left to right): Charles Duke (Apollo 16), Al Worden (Apollo 15), Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11) Michael Collins (Apollo 11), Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9) and Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7). Private astronaut Richard Garriot (far right) moderated the panel. (Image credit: Marc Bryan-Brown/The Explorers Club)

Collins and Aldrin shared some of the most harrowing moments of the Apollo program. As Collins describes, while he was in orbit as Armstrongand Aldrin landed on the lunar surface, he had to be ready for any possible scenario.

"I had, on a string around my neck, an 8 by 12 loose-leaf notebook with 18 pages in it. The 18 pages were the various rendezvous possibilities, should things go slightly awry on the moon," Collins said. But, while the crew was prepared for difficult situations, if Armstrong and Aldrin were not able to get off the surface of the moon, there was no way for Collins to save them.

"If they couldn't get off, they were dead men, and I was getting home by myself," he said, adding with a laugh that "I kinda got used to 'em  I preferred the white mice, to tell you the truth."

And, as Aldrin went on to describe, the pair were actually very close to being stranded on the moon.

"We almost did not get off," Aldrin said. Aldrin said that when he and Armstrong went to sleep on the moon, Aldrin "called dibs" on the floor of the craft because it was the only flat surface available. That's when he saw it.

"I laid down on the floor with my head to the right, which is the co-pilot's side, and I'm looking around at the dust that came in, and there's this little black object. Didn't look like it belonged there. Looked a little closer  this was a circuit breaker that was broken," Aldrin said. Then, "I looked at the row of circuit breakers, and it says, 'engine arm.'"

This specific circuit breaker, it just so happened, was essential to getting Neil and Buzz back off the moon.

"You get ready to land, you push that thing in  you get on the surface of the moon, you pull that out. If you wanna come home, you gotta push that thing in again, but it's broken off," Aldrin said, adding that "we didn't know what the hell we could possibly do."

So, of course, he contacted Mission Control back on Earth for help. While Aldrin and Armstrong tried to sleep, their team back home worked toward a solution. But, when they woke up, they were hit with the news that the only real shot they'd have to fix the issue and get the craft off the surface was to try and push it hours before liftoff without the button. Thankfully, after ruling out sticking in their fingers or using metal, ballpoint pens and potentially getting electrocuted, Buzz found his felt-tip pen.

Thankfully, this felt-tip pen did the trick and they left the lunar surface, but "we were coming pretty close to not being able to come home," Aldrin said.

Spaceflight has always been risky, and it will always carry risk. These are just a small handful of the countless stories of death-defying moments in space that these and other astronauts have faced.English French

QUEBEC CITY, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Davie Shipbuilding welcomes the decision of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Transportation Minister Garneau to build three new ferries for Eastern Canada, as announced in the Federal Budget 2019.

The three routes operating in Quebec, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia serve a vital role in connecting people, goods and services between the provinces.



The commitment by the government to build these new ferries is a great step in the right direction, applauded James Davies, president of Davie Shipbuilding.



We thank the Prime Minister for his commitment to build three new ships. Not only will it provide Davie - the largest, highest capacity and most experienced shipyard in Canada  the chance to recall many of the 1300 skilled shipbuilders who have been on temporary layoff it will also be a major step in developing an exportable line of products for the booming international passenger vessel construction market. It is very good news for Davie workers, their families and our 996 suppliers throughout Canada who, I am sure, will all be celebrating today.



We thank the Mayor of Levis, the Mayor of Quebec, the National Assembly of Quebec, Premier Legault, Quebecs 24 senators, Minister Duclos, MP Lightbound, as well as the CSN for standing together and supporting the important role Davie will continue to play in renewing the federal fleet, not just for ferries, but also for the Canadian Coast Guard and the Royal Canadian Navy.



Source : Chantier Davie Canada Inc.



NOTE TO EDITORS:

About Davie



Davie and Federal Fleet Services are part of the Inocea group. While Davie focuses on shipbuilding, Federal Fleet concentrates on obtaining contracts and on vessel rental. Davie is Canadas largest and most experienced shipyard. It is also the highest capacity shipyard in Canada, with 50% of the countrys total capacity. Over the last six years, Davie generated more than 2.7 G$ in economic impact in Canada and employed, up until recently, directly and indirectly, over 3 000 Canadians, including 1 400 at the Levis shipyard, in the province of Quebec. For over a century, Davie has been in charge of the construction and the repair of each major vessel class. Today, Davie is a leader in the icebreaking, LNG and dynamic positioning technology fields, as well as in naval and other crucial shipbuilding domains. Davie is an ISO 9001:2015 (quality assurance) and ISO 14001:2015 (environmental management) certified company. The first replenishment ship built by Davie, the Asterix, was the first naval vessel to join the ranks of Green Marine, the most important environmental certification voluntary program for North Americas marine industry.

Frederik Boisvert

Vice President, Public Affairs

Chantier Davie

Cell phone: +1-418-455-2759

frederik.boisvert@davie.ca

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/58ba967d-d695-4be6-8211-c6b3df9e6776

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/d6442462-5af2-47ec-9382-a12bfcaf69e4Boeing has delayed the first spaceflight of its CST-100 Starliner crew capsule  an uncrewed test mission to the International Space Station (ISS)  from next month until August at the earliest, according to Reuters.

The target date for Starliner's first crewed ISS flight has also been pushed back, from August until November, Reuters reported Wednesday (March 20), citing unnamed industry sources. One of these sources said that technical issues weren't the sole factor; scheduling issues at Starliner's launch site, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, also contributed.

Spokespersons for Boeing and NASA declined to comment, but the NASA official said an updated launch schedule will be published next week, Reuters reported.

Boeing is developing Starliner to carry astronauts to and from the ISS, under a $4.2 billion contract the aerospace giant signed with NASA in 2014. SpaceX holds a similar commercial-crew deal, valued at $2.6 billion, to get that company's Crew Dragon capsule up and running.

Crew Dragon already has one spaceflight under its belt: Earlier this month, the SpaceX capsule aced a six-day, uncrewed demonstration mission to the ISS known as Demo-1 . SpaceX plans to conduct an in-flight test of Crew Dragon's emergency-escape system soon; if all goes well with that uncrewed launch, Crew Dragon could carry two NASA astronauts to the ISS on the Demo-2 demonstration flight as early as July .

Contracted, operational missions carrying four astronauts will commence sometime after that.

NASA signed the commercial-crew deals with Boeing and SpaceX to bring orbital human spaceflight back to U.S. soil. The nation has been without this capability since July 2011, when NASA retired its space shuttle fleet after 30 years of service.

Ever since then, NASA has depended on Russian Soyuz rockets and spacecraft to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the ISS. A seat aboard the three-person Soyuz spacecraft currently costs about $80 million.Two astronauts will venture outside the International Space Station today (March 22) to replace old batteries on the station's solar arrays. This will be the first of three spacewalks scheduled to take place over the next three weeks, and you can watch them all live online!

Today, NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nick Hague  both first-time spacewalkers  will begin the spacewalk trifecta with a planned 6.5-hour excursion outside the orbiting laboratory. They will exit the Quest airlock at 8:05 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), and you can watch it live here on Space.com . NASA's webcast will begin at 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 GMT).

One week from now, McClain will head out for her second spacewalk together with NASA astronaut Christina Koch. That will be the first all-female spacewalk in history. During these first two spacewalks, astronauts will continue ongoing work to upgrade the space station's power system by replacing old nickel-hydrogen batteries with new and improved lithium-ion batteries. These upgrades began in 2017 , when NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet swapped out the first set of batteries in a pair of back-to-back spacewalks.

Spacewalk Photos: International Space Station Gets a Power Upgrade

Twelve of the old nickel-hydrogen batteries will be replaced with six larger lithium-ion batteries, each about the size of a miniature refrigerator. Located in the power channels for the space station's solar arrays, these batteries store power generated by the solar panels and help to power the station when it's orbiting on the dark, nighttime side of Earth. Much like the battery in your cellphone, aging batteries on the space station start to hold less charge.

The current set of batteries has been at the station for nearly 12 years, and the new batteries are expected to last until the end of the space station's lifetime, Kenneth Todd, NASA's space station program manager, said during a briefing on Tuesday (March 19). NASA is currently planning on ending its space station operations in 2024, although members of Congress are fighting to have it extended to 2030 . "The new lithium batteries are certified for 10 years, but expected to last around 20 years," NASA spokesperson Kelly Humphries told Space.com in an email.

NASA astronauts Anne McClain, Christina Koch and Nick Hague prepare their EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit) suits for a series of spacewalks set to take place on March 22, March 29 and April 8. (Image credit: NASA)

On April 8, the third and final spacewalk in this series will feature an all-male spacewalking team working on something entirely different. Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques, also a first-time spacewalker, will join Hague on a mission to route a redundant power supply to Canadarm2, a 58-foot (18 meters) robotic arm used to grapple visiting spacecraft. To do this, the astronauts will lay out a set of jumper cables in between the Unity module and the Starboard-0 (S0) truss, a segment located "at the midpoint of the stations backbone," NASA officials said in a statement .SpaceX's first tests of its prototype Starship may start soon  and you can watch them live online, courtesy of a South Texas surf school.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed on Twitter that tests of the Starship Hopper, which uses a single one of the company's Raptor engines, could begin as early as this week, and members of Boca Chica Village, near the SpaceX testing site east of Brownsville, Texas, also got notifications warning of potential tests this week. Eddie Trevino, a judge in Cameron County, told the Brownsville Herald yesterday (March 21) that SpaceX performed several fueling tests.

A livestreamed video of the test site, with the Starship Hopper in view, is currently available on Spadre.com, the website for a surf school on South Padre Island across from the test facility. The cameras are about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from SpaceX's facility.

Related: SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Mars Rocket in Pictures

According to Texas Public Radio, South Padre Surf Company began its livestream in late January. This test will likely not show much; the spacecraft remains tethered to the ground and will only barely lift off, Musk has said on Twitter.

After these static-fire tests it will be time for suborbital tests, Gene Gore, owner and operator of South Padre Surf Company told Texas Public Radio. "That's when things are gonna get really interesting," he said.Set spoilers to stun

Last week, we looked at a couple of the fan theories that we agreed with, at least in part, regarding the identity of the Red Angel  and this week, we found out if we were right. But we'll come to that later on. Given that this week's episode is titled "The Red Angel," there was a pretty good chance we'd learn something significant about this mysterious entity.

In an episode that's heavy with emotional performances, you'll find yourself reaching for the tissue box basically from the very beginning. We begin with the funeral of Lt. Cmdr. Airiam (Hannah Cheesman) taking place in the shuttle bay with the whole crew gathered. It's well-handled and many of the senior officers share kind, thoughtful words. However, we suspect they didn't go to all this trouble after Lt. Connolly (Sean Connolly Affleck) unceremoniously slammed into an asteroid in the season premiere . Perhaps he just wasn't very popular.

Related: The Evolution of 'Star Trek' (Infographic)

A funeral for Airiam. (Image credit: Michael Gibson/CBS)

A big focus of this episode is the attempt to reconcile the relationship between Cmdr. Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Lt. Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif), and it begins immediately after the funeral. A large focus of this subplot is that Tyler did not send the unauthorized, encrypted subspace transmissions he was accused of sending; that was Airiam, acting under the influence of malicious code sent to the Discovery computer by the modified probe/squiddie in " Light and Shadows " (S02, E07).

There's some nice dialogue between Burnham and Tyler throughout the episode, as she feels guilty for having blamed him. But she still struggles to let him back into her life, because she feels he's abandoned his morals to work for Section 31.

Adm. Cornwell (Jayne Brook), Capt. Pike (Anson Mount), Cmdr. Saru (Doug Jones), Lt. Spock (Ethan Peck) and Burnham review everything they know regarding recent events. The artificial intelligence is from the future; it infected Airiam and forced her to copy some of the data transferred over from the dying Sphere so Control could evolve. However, this was prevented and Discovery destroyed the former prison and HQ of Section 31 following the events of last week's episode.

Cornwell asks a very pertinent question: "How could a Section 31 program designed to eliminate threats become the threat?"

To which Spock replies, "Time travel. The one variable we cannot possibly predict is the future. And clearly that AI is built on technology that we have no understanding of."

Of course, even though Airiam is dead and the Section 31 HQ and Control were destroyed, that doesn't mean that remnants of the AI aren't lying dormant somewhere undetected.

At this point Ensign Tilly (Mary Wiseman) bursts in and plays the clown yet again. Tilly explains that she discovered a hidden file, before Airiam's memory was deleted, that contained details of Project Daedalus and a bio-neural signature of the Red Angel.

"Michael  it's you," she says. And the opening credits roll.

Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) confirms that the bio-neural signature matches Burnham's, and Pike asks what everyone is thinking: Will Burnham wake up one day, discover time travel and take it upon herself to save the galaxy? Spock remarks, "That supposition does fit her emotional profile rather precisely, particularly her drive to take responsibility for situations often beyond her control."

Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) tells Burnham that there's information Section 31 is holding back. (Image credit: Michael Gibson/CBS)

A Section 31 vessel brings Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) and Capt. Leland (Alan Van Sprang) to the Discovery, where we learn that Project Daedalus was a concept being developed by Section 31, naturally. Apparently, 20 years ago, the Federation learned that the Klingons were researching time travel, which would've meant, if they succeeded, they could effectively delete the human race from existence. Consequently, a temporal arms race began, and to gain an advantage, the Federation conceived the Daedalus Project. Yes, the Red Angel is of Federation origin.

Section 31 thought Klingon spies had destroyed the suit. But once it started appearing along with the red burst signals a short while before the events of this episode, Starfleets black ops division began working on a way to capture it and the individual using it. And so a plan is hatched.

Down in engineering, Lt. Stamets (Anthony Rapp) works with Georgiou and Tilly to disable the Red Angel's graviton emitter beam using the phase discriminators, or something, thus preventing it from escaping back through its time wormhole once it's captured.

And then there's this really weird scene in which Culber enters and Georgiou attempts to make Stamets feel uncomfortable. She describes how, where she comes from  the mirror universe  both he and Culber are "pansexual" and she had relations with them on many occasions. You can see what they're trying to do with Georgiou: to establish her as someone deliciously wicked and further flesh out her character as a temptress who walks a fine line between good and evil  especially since she's supposed to be getting her own spinoff series . But this scene feels out of place and jarring, with unconvincing dialogue.

Georgiou makes Stamets (Anthony Rapp) very uncomfortable. (Image credit: Michael Gibson/CBS)

The crew determines that their Angel-catching plan is going to require massive amounts of energy. But thankfully, one of the Daedalus Project test sites on Essof IV has the materials needed to construct a plasma reactor that will do the job.

Burnham confronts Leland about the information he's not volunteering, and credit to him, he tells her about her parents' death. We'd been led to believe that he was in some way responsible, and either this scene needs to be rewritten, or it should be stated that he's at least not directly responsible. Turns out that Burnham's mother and father actually worked on Project Daedalus. The Klingons attacked the installation and they were, apparently, killed. Leland says it was because he was young, inexperienced and hadn't taken enough precautions. Well, Burnham started a war.

A lot of characters in "Star Trek: Discovery" seem to suffer from unnecessary guilt complexes and blame themselves for all manner of things, some of which, as Spock said earlier, are situations simply beyond their control. Leland's redundant remorse is overshadowed, though, by two epic right hooks that Burnham unleashes on him, leading to a very bloody nose.

If the writers are going to make Leland responsible for this monumental event in Burnham's life, they should make him completely responsible. Create a story where he made a conscious decision that he knew could have resulted in their deaths. This feels like the writers wanted Burnham, and the audience, to be able to blame Leland, but not too much, because that might make him too evil.

Another puzzling element in the episode is that the crew are attempting to catch someone theyve learned is a future version of someone participating in the plan. Wouldnt they guess that the Red Angel, as future Burnham, might know about this plan to capture her and try to avoid it? Surely, this is a pertinent issue that anyone who passed The Trouble With Time Travel 101 at Starfleet Academy would have picked up on? No  guess not.

Related: How Time Travel Works in Science Fiction (Infographic)

Burnham confronts Tyler and blames him for not telling her about her parents' death, even though he didn't actually know.

In an interesting scene that had considerable potential, Culber goes to speak with Cornwell in her quarters, since she used to be a therapist. Despite an awkward initial exchange, this could've offered some new insight into both of their characters. We get a few minutes of deeply personal dialogue, but it still feels like an opportunity was missed.

Burnham continues to struggle with the news of how her parents died, and Spock makes an effort to talk to her; they share a nice exchange in the Discovery's gym, where she's is continuing to vent her frustration on a punching bag.

After their discussion, it occurs to Burnham that the Red Angel has appeared when her life was in danger, so it stands to reason that they should place her in a life-threatening situation to lure the Red Angel into their trap. Since the Discovery was already on its way to Essof IV, they decide to set the trap there.

Burnham will be seated, strapped to a chair in the center of a chamber with life support disengaged, and the poisonous atmosphere of the planet will be allowed to fill the room. She will be surrounded by the phase discriminators, electromagnetic pulse generators and everything required to snare the Red Angel and hold her in place. Naturally, no one is particularly happy about this potentially hazardous plan, least of all Pike and Tyler.

Tyler (Shazad Latif) and Burnham embrace before the attempt to capture the Red Angel. (Image credit: Michael Gibson/CBS)

The drama for this climactic third-act finale is steadily built and nicely paced and features the best scene in this episode, where Burnham and Tyler have an emotional exchange in his quarters. The dialogue is well-written and well-acted, and it shows that they both still have feelings for each other, regardless of everything that's happened. You'll be reaching for the tissues again.

Everything is set. Spock, Stamets, Culber and Georgiou are behind a protective window in a room adjacent to the chamber, monitoring Burnham's life signs. Pike, Tilly and everyone on the Discovery are also monitoring every variable, including tachyon particle levels that might indicate the arrival of the Red Angel. Aboard the Section 31 ship, Leland is keeping a watchful eye on power levels. Burnham is strapped in, the air is sucked out of the room, and the poisonous atmosphere replaces it.

Dr. Culber (Wilson Cruz) and Stamets monitor the trap set for the Red Angel. (Image credit: Michael Gibson/CBS)

Everyone watching cringes as Burnham screams in agony, and it is remarkably well-acted. Her skin begins to boil off from her face as every onlooker struggles to overcome their own instinctive urges to save her instead of allowing this questionable plan of action to continue. Her vital signs steadily fall with no sign yet of the Red Angel, and Culber expresses concerns. Even Georgiou thinks it has gone on long enough, as Burnham spasms in her chair.

Georgiou watches Burnham. (Image credit: Michael Gibson/CBS)

Spock, however, focuses on the logical side of this sacrifice: Burnham's life in exchange for potentially the life of every single sentient life-form in the galaxy. He draws his phaser and prevents anyone from entering the chamber. Burnham flatlines  just as Tilly picks up a massive spike in tachyon particles. The Red Angel has arrived.

Spock watches Burnham. (Image credit: Michael Gibson/CBS)

In a swirl of light, the mysterious, winged figure focuses a beam of energy at Burnham's chest while the phase discriminators and electromagnetic pulse generators do their work, preventing the Red Angel from disappearing back through her time wormhole.

But more power is needed, so Leland must authorize an override of the safety protocols onboard the Section 31 ship. Growing impatient, he seems to lean in for some sort of retina-scan security clearance and makes an under-his-breath remark about the power increase not being that hard to do, when he suddenly gets stabbed in the eye with a long needle that shoots out from the retina-scan device as the computer simultaneously repeats his flippant remark in an eerie, electronic voice. He's left lying, barely conscious, on the metal floor. Poor Leland has had a rough day at the office.

Meanwhile, the Red Angel struggles at first within the trap and then finally concedes, having been successfully confined. Life support returns to the chamber, and Burnham appears to be alright. Everyone looks on with baited breath, unsure of what to expect, barely believing that they have finally captured this elusive time traveler.

A figure falls to its knees from the exosuit and pauses momentarily, before looking up and making eye contact with the still-strapped-in Burnham.

Burnham, still visibly in pain from the ordeal, looks down. Her eyes widen; her bottom lip quivers. Barely able to get her breath, she gasps, "Mom?!"

We'll hazard a guess that the AI from the future has successfully infiltrated the Section 31 computer system, since having a long, sharp, metal needle suddenly puncture your caruncle is probably not part of a normal security-clearance procedure. And as for Mrs. Burnham in the Red Angel suit, we said this might be the case.

So, here are a few thoughts as to how the next part of the plot might unfold. Cast your mind back to events in the excellent "Short Trek" episode " Calypso "; in the 33rd century, Craft (Aldis Hodge) is unconscious in a V'draysh escape pod and rescued by the Discovery, which has been placed and deliberately left for a thousand years in an ion storm. That storm isolated Discovery from any outside communications or computer uploads; in short, it couldn't be infected by any malicious code and would therefore be safe from the AI.

Has the Red Angel successfully prevented the war with the AI or, like in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," just delayed it?

Think back to the best episode so far in this season of "Star Trek: Discovery"  " Eden " (S02, E02). That group of people were rescued by the Red Angel and placed on a world many light-years away from Earth. Is this planet the homeworld of Craft? In that episode, the inhabitants refer to the planet as Terralysium, but we learn that Craft is from Alcor IV. Perhaps it was renamed once the population learned more about the planetary system their world was in.

The writer of "Calypso," Michael Chabon, confirmed on Instagram that "V'draysh" is a syncope of "Federation"  a version of the word with some sounds omitted. This admission, and the fact that we learn that the V'draysh valued relics from the "Long Ago," an era of pre-warp Earth, suggests that this is what has become of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets a millennium after the events of "Star Trek: Discovery."

We've mentioned before the theories of YouTube user Ketwolski , and we're inclined to agree with many of them. It's entirely possible, given how "Star Trek" showrunner Alex Kurtzman's mind seems to work, that the villager Jacob (Andrew Moodie) whom Pike befriended in "Eden" is a distant relative of Craft.

It's also possible that in this timeline, the Federation goes to war with the AI, much like the plot of the novel "Star Trek: Section 31  Control," by David Mack. What's left of the Federation becomes the V'draysh, fighting to regain control of the galaxy they once governed. But the Discovery remains as an undamaged, unaffected buried treasure of sorts, with preserved data from when the Federation was still a force of good.

In addition, Sonequa Martin-Green gushed to the gathered crowd at New York Comic Con last year that her husband, Kenric Green, was going to appear in this season of "Star Trek: Discovery." What's most notable is not that he hasn't shown up so far, but that "Star Trek: Discovery" is not listed among his acting credentials on IMDb yet, a typical move done so as not to reveal any potential spoilers.

So, there could be three concurrent timelines in effect in "Trek" lore. First, there's the Prime timeline, which includes everything from every TV series except "Star Trek: Discovery." Then, there's the Kelvin timeline, which is everything that J.J. Abrams kindly brought to the franchise. And now, there's potentially the Burnham timeline, which is everything that happened from the moment her life was saved as a small girl on Vulcan  where, in the Prime timeline, she died.

This would explain, among many other things, why Spock never mentioned his sister before and why the spore drive was never seen. It means that CBS could theoretically remake every single series of "Star Trek"  with the exception of "Enterprise"  because, going forward, we're now in the Burnham timeline and they'd all be slightly different. From a merchandising perspective alone, a visual reboot like this equals big bucks.

And herein lies the problem. You now need an honors degree in "Star Trek" history just to understand the significance of events. Even the more hardcore "Trek" fans are getting a little fed up, so it's a little bewildering that the franchise expects more-casual fans to stay engaged. As a stand-alone, science-fiction drama that anyone can enjoy, "Star Trek: Discovery" has lost the plot a bit. To fully understand the implications of events you don't just have to watch earlier seasons of the same show  you have to watch entire seasons of completely different shows, as well.

Finally, in this episode, we get a weird, but not unwelcome throwback to Season 1. We see that Lt. Nilsson returns to the bridge to take Airiam's old position as ops officer just before Burnham transports down to the surface of Essof IV. We first saw Nilsson in the Season 2 premiere , and she's played by Sara Mitich, who played Airiam throughout Season 1, before Cheesman took over for Season 2. Mitich is listed on IMDb as appearing in the next three episodes at least, so we'll have to wait and see if she returns for Season 3.

Casting-wise, we also know that neither Pike nor Number One (Rebecca Romijn) will be returning to "Star Trek: Discovery" after this season. According to Deadline , the two actors only ever had one-year contracts with the show. In all honesty, we suspected this was going to happen, as Kurtzman has maintained throughout the show's development that the focus of "Discovery" was Burnham.

The first season of "Star Trek: Discovery" is available to stream in its entirety on CBS All Access in the U.S. and Netflix in the U.K. "Star Trek: Discovery" Season 1 is available now on Blu-ray.



The second season of "Star Trek: Discovery" consists of 14 episodes with no midseason break. It airs on Thursdays on CBS All Access in the U.S. and on the Space TV channel in Canada; the rest of the world can see the show on Netflix on Fridays.



(from left to right: Denny Love, Jay Lee, Landry Bender, Sofia Vassilieva, Uriah Shelton, Jordan Connor)





Hulu's upcoming (8-episode) limited series, Looking For Alaska , announces additional series regulars: Denny Love (Empire), Jay Lee (American Vandal, Colony), Landry Bender (Fuller House, Best Friends Whenever), Sofia Vassilieva (Black Lightning, Supergirl, Medium), Uriah Shelton (Girl Meets World, 13 Reasons Why, The Glades) and Jordan Connor (Riverdale). They join previously announced series regulars, Kristine Froseth and Charlie Plummer. The series comes from Paramount Television and Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage's Fake Empire.The series is based on the John Green novel of the same name. It is told through the eyes of teenager Miles "Pudge" Halter ( Charlie Plummer ), as he enrolls in boarding school to try to gain a deeper perspective on life. He falls in love with a girl, Alaska Young ( Kristine Froseth ), and after her unexpected death, he and his close friends attempt to uncover the truth behind her death and make sense of it.Savage and Schwartz will serve as executive producers, alongside Jessica Tuchinsky, Mark Waters, Green and Marty Bowen and Isaac Klausner of Temple Hill. Fake Empire exec Lis Rowinski will co-executive produce. Sarah Adina Smith ("Hanna" and "Legion") will direct the pilot.Denny Love as 'The Colonel' - short (and very smart) muscular tank of a young man. The Colonel (his real name is Chip Martin) is a scholarship student and under orders from his mother to get a good enough education. He's an enemy of the lacrosse jocks (aka "The Weekday Warriors"), and regards Alaska, Miles, and Takumi as his friends. He's insanely loyal to his friends.Jay Lee as 'Takumi' - A member of "The Colonel's" group of outcasts, he's famous for knowing all the gossip and effortlessly bounces back between the two groups of friends but is ever loyal to The Colonel and Alaska.Landry Bender as 'Sara' - The Colonel's girlfriend, she is also short and angry - but her rage is only directed at The Colonel because he manages to do something that pisses her off pretty much every time they interact. She and The Colonel are one of those bickering couples, who spend their lives hollering at each other.Sofia Vassilieva as 'Lara' - A cute, shy and sweet girl from Romania, who develops a crush on Miles.Uriah Shelton as 'Longwell' - A handsome, rich and entitled jock (aka a "Weekday Warrior" douchebag) at the school. A rich kid, he despises The Colonel and all of his non-jock friends, making their lives as miserable as possible.Jordan Connor as 'Kevin' - Longwell's acolyte (and not so bright friend), Kevin is another "Weekday Warrior" lacrosse bro. He follows Longwell's lead in everything and blames The Colonel when a member of their clique gets expelled.Bir Lehlu (SADR Liberated Territories), March 14, 2019 (SPS) - the President of the Republic, Brahim Gali, conveyed Tuesday his condolences to HE, Mr. Brahim Boubacar Keita, President of the Republic of Mali following the military victims of the terrorist attack on Diouram military base

The Saharawi leader conveyed in the name of the People and the Government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and in his own, his sincere and deep condolences and his total solidarity with the Malian Government and people.

"The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which feels and shares the pain of the Malian brothers, condemns with the greatest strength this despicable attack and joins the efforts of their country to wage an implacable struggle against these cowardly attacks that threaten peace and international security ", says the Saharawi Head of State to the Malian president.

POLISARIOs SG also sent a message of solidarity to the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern for terrorist attack last Friday at two mosques in the city of Christchurch with a balance of 50 fatalities.SPS

125/090/TRASTAMFORD  Packed in a Washington Boulevard mosque, more than 300 gathered Friday to hear a call to prayer and together reflect on last Fridays terror.

The prayer hall wasnt busy last Friday, said Imam Nour Aldean. Only half the number of normal worshipers attended, with many afraid to go, he said. It was just hours after the slaughter of 50 Muslims during prayer at mosques half a world away.

The blood of these people wasnt lost in vain, Aldean said. Their blood actually waters the seeds of hope.

That hope, he said, was that all can learn to live together in peace. Before him Friday afternoon was a fine example.

In the crowd sat rabbis and priests, the gray-bearded and young, with little in common beyond a lack of shoes. And that was just the men. Hundreds of women from many backgrounds prayed just up the stairs.

The Islamic Cultural Center of NY-Stamford in downtown became a rallying place Friday for residents hoping to show support for the citys Muslim residents after the attacks in New Zealand that killed 50. Prayers facing Mecca came first as congregants intermingled with an outpouring of support that made the large prayer hall feel small.

Residents of many faiths shuffled on the green-patterned carpet to form parallel lines of prayer before a rally outside with the mayor.

It was good to see the support, said Sufian Hakeem, who has attended Friday prayers there for the last eight years.

The rally, too, proved well attended with hundreds huddled in the March chill to hear pastors, rabbis and politicians denounce the hate that prompted the New Zealand killings and called for residents to live in peace.

You are welcome in this city, said Mayor David Martin. We will do everything in our power to not only protect you, but to show we are all part of one community.

The killings and the divisions that likely fueled them have become sadly common, said Rabbi Jay TelRav of North Stamfords Temple Sinai.

I hate that it was so recently that so many of you came to pray with us after the attack in Pittsburg, TelRav said. But we saw you.

Aldean and other mosque officials thanked the group  which included several city Representatives  for showing in force, and welcomed residents to ask questions and attend services.

A poor understanding of the religion and tying all Muslims to extremists and terrorists only fuels Islamophobia, Aldean said.

Terrorists are terrorists because they are bad people, not because they are Muslim, not because they are Jewish  because they are bad people, he said. God did not command us to kill each other ... God commanded us to love each other.

barry.lytton@stamfordadvocate.com; 203-964-2263; @bglyttonA recent report showing the state grew far fewer jobs in 2018 than originally anticipated is only the tip of a more dangerous economic iceberg, one key Connecticut economist warns.

The revised data from the Department of Labor is the latest link in a chain that demonstrates job growth  according to one metric  is slowing to its lowest level in nearly a decade, according to Don Klepper-Smith, chief economist with DataCore Partners.

If the job numbers are the canary in the coal mine, said Klepper-Smith, who was the states chief economic adviser in the late 2000s under Gov. M. Jodi Rell, then you have a clear deceleration in the Connecticut economy.

Economists and labor officials routinely compare employment levels at key points in time  such as jobs filled now versus jobs filled last March.

But while these points provide insight, they also have limitations. For example, a year-over-year comparison focusing on December could be skewed by new trends in temporary, retail staff to help with the holiday shopping rush.

By calculating average annual job growth  taking into account the year-over-year job gains recorded for each month  a pattern becomes clear, Klepper-Smith said.

Connecticut has followed a steady progression of lessening growth as it has climbed out of the last recession.

In other words, average annual growth in 2012 was good, but not as good as average growth in 2011.

The only exception to this downward trend came in 2015, when job gains ticked upward modestly.

At first, it appeared Connecticut had bucked this trend again in 2018.

But the Labor Department reported earlier this month that the 19,900 jobs Connecticut appeared to have gained between December 2018 and December 2017 was only about half of that total.

Once that downward adjustment was applied to the annual average for 2018, Connecticuts job growth rate was just 0.1 percent, Klepper-Smith said.

Connecticut is the only New England state that has not recovered all of the jobs it lost during the 2008-2010 recession. The latest numbers show it has regained 81 percent of the 120,000 positions lost during that time.

Former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy often noted Connecticut was focused on shrinking its public employment during this recovery, and that the private-sector here has fully recovered.

But some other states have regained enough private-sector jobs to both offset any losses in this area and in the public sector.

At its current job growth pace, Connecticut likely wont have regained all jobs lost until mid-2020, Klepper-Smith said. But theres a 70 percent chance  he added  that Connecticut will be in recession by the end of 2020.

Peter Gioia, economic adviser to the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, said obviously the economy is slowing, but added he doesnt believe its at risk of slipping into recession in the next two years.

The national economy still is projecting 2 percent growth and the price of oil is dirt-cheap, he said.

But Gioia added the slipping job growth trend is a concern, particularly as retailers and other companies use technology to replace low-skilled workers. As wages go up, it will only price some people out of the market, he said.

Still, what happens if the recession arrives before a full job recovery arrives in Connecticut.

There are cracks in our economic foundation that have not been fully acknowledged, Klepper-Smith said, adding that they will be exposed.

One of those cracks, according to University of Connecticut Professor Fred Carstensen, is the lack of income recovery.

In other words, even when we are gaining jobs, we havent always been gaining income, Carstensen said. Job creation isnt the same as economic growth.

Economists look not just at jobs, but where they are located.

State income tax receipts fell from almost 3.9 percent of household earnings in 2012 to 3.6 percent in 2014, the last year for which data is available.

How did that happen? Much of that decline, according to Carstensen, involves Connecticuts struggle to regain financial services sector jobs lost in the last recession. Some of those displaced Connecticut residents found new jobs  in New York and New Jersey.

Equally important, he said, weve been losing high quality jobs throughout this recovery. Jobs that paid $80,000 to $90,000 are being replaced by those that pay $55,000.

Carstensen, Klepper-Smith and others also noted there are signs that Americans again are failing to prepare for the next economic downturn.

State Comptroller Kevin P. Lembo used his last state budget projection to also cite a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That report noted that household debt, nationally, has grown for 18 consecutive months. As of December 31, Americans owed a record-setting $13.54 trillion on mortgages, auto loans, student loans, credit cards and other debt.

This trend is starting to resemble a debt problem that existed prior to the last recession, Lembo said.

We know what followed, he said, and we know that we want to be careful about the ability of Connecticut households being capable of surviving another recession.Icelandic English

Skeljungur hf.s Annual General Meeting will be held on Tuesday 26 March 2019 at 16:00 pm at Hotel Hilton Reykjavik Nordica, Suurlandsbraut 2, 108 Reykjavik, Iceland meeting room D.



The deadline for declaring candidacy for the Board of Directors and the Nomination Committee of Skeljungur has passed.

The following are the candidates for the Board of Directors of Skeljungur:

Ata Maria Brentsen

Baldur Mar Helgason

Birna Osk Einarsdottir

Jens Meinhard Rasmussen

Kjartan Orn Sigursson

Kristjan Geir Gunnarsson

For further information on each candidate, please find a short bio attached and in the Nomination Committees report on Skeljungurs website: https://www.skeljungur.is/annualgeneralmeeting2019 .

According to the Articles of Association of the Company the Board of Directors shall be comprised of five members and the ratio of each gender within the Board shall be no less than 40%.

The Board of the Company received a rightful claim for a multiplication election from shareholders that control more than 1/10 of the share capital, cf. Article 63(7) of Act No 2/1995 on Public Limited Companies. A multiplication election will therefore be applied for the election of members of the Board of Directors at the meeting.

A multiplication election is carried out as follows: There shall be an election between individuals. The weight of each vote shall be multiplied by the number of Directors to be elected and each shareholder may divide his voting power, thus computed, in any proportion he chooses himself on to as many persons as are to be elected or fewer. In case a ballot ticket does not indicate the division of votes between those for whom these are cast, they shall be divided equally.

The following are candidates for the Nomination Committee:

Katrin S. Oladottir

Sigurur Kari Arnason

According to the code of conduct for Skeljungurs Nomination Committee two committee members shall be elected by the shareholders meeting and the new Board shall elect one of their own following the shareholders meeting. Consequently, Katrin and Sigurur, will be elected to the Board without a ballot at the meeting. Further information on the candidates is attached.

All documents for the AGM can be found on the companys website: https://www.skeljungur.is/annualgeneralmeeting2019

For further information: Groa Bjorg Baldvinsdottir, Compliance Officer, compliance@skeljungur.is , tel: 444-3000 / 840-3040

* * *

Skeljungur is an energy company which sells products and services in Iceland, the Faroe Islands and in the N-Atlantic. Skeljungurs main activities are import, storage, sales and distribution of fuel and fuel related products. The Company operates 76 gas stations and 6 oil depots in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. In addition, the Company operates convenience stores and provides services and sells oils for house heating in the Faroe Islands and sells fertilizer and other chemical products in Iceland. The Companys customer base spans from individuals to institutions and companies in the fishing industry, agriculture, transport and contractors. Skeljungur owns the brand names Skeljungur, Orkan and OrkanX in Iceland and Magn in the Faroe Islands. Skeljungurs goal is to fulfil the energy needs of individuals and companies in an effcient and safe way, in harmony with the environment.

www.skeljungur.is

Please find us on Linkedin .





AttachmentMr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court, the student attorneys said as they approached the bench of nine student Supreme Court justices.

A mock Supreme Court trial was held Monday, Feb. 25, as part of an AP/ECE Government and Politics class at the Academy of Information Technology and Engineering. The case at hand, Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association, revolved around the constitutionality of a 40-foot monument honoring veterans.

The petitioner team  seniors Alexa Ross, Patrick Fleisher, and Adam Mohsin  faced respondents Nicholas Chuckas, Julia Kempton, and Michael Rotante, all seniors, before a crowd of teachers, parents, and students who watched silently as the students made their arguments.

Each team of attorneys had 30 minutes to present their case but were constantly interrupted by questions from the justices. Within the first minute of the petitioners speech, senior Mary Ostaszewski, representing Justice Elena Kagan, questioned, What is your standing on the Lemon Test? Do you need to prove all three prongs to win?

Many of the student justices found it hard to interrupt the attorneys.

Interrupting the attorneys was difficult because cutting people off is usually considered rude, said Tessa Kurtz, a senior who imitated Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But in order to play the part correctly I had to go against the manners I had been taught.

Preparing for the case took a lot of effort for both the lawyers and the justices. The lawyers had to know the case inside out in order to keep up with the bombardment of questions from the justices. Both teams had written a case, but they didnt end up speaking in the order they had planned, and had to be flexible with their time, because the justices dictated the topic of conversation.

The student justices had the added burden of researching the justice they were playing. They had to learn the justices mannerisms and judicial philosophies to accurately portray them and make a decision on their behalf. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas rarely ever speaks in court, so when portrayed by senior Jack Foster, he acted similarly, only asking one question.

Students in the class who were not attorneys or justices took on the role of news media. Those students sent out a press release, invited officials via email, and recorded the proceedings (a link of the full audio recording can be found on AITEs Facebook page). Two student artists also drew detailed images of the court, just as it is done in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Students found the mock trial to be a hands-on, interactive way to learn about the judicial system. Examining the case through the eyes of an attorney, justice, or news media member proved to be a valuable experience, as it encouraged students to go above and beyond to learn about not only the case but also the American justice system. Claude Morest, the AP Government teacher, said of the proceeding, The students never cease to amaze me in their ability to conduct themselves at a level comparable to the actual Supreme Court.

The student panel of judges made their 6-3 decision in favor of the petitioners in an in-class conference on the Tuesday following the trial. The class now anxiously awaits the decision of the real Supreme Court, which is estimated to be released in June.

Donia Elmansy and Alexa Ross are seniors at the Academy of Information Technology and Engineering.Whether youre working from home, your favorite coffee shop, or in a bustling office, distractions have become a familiar fixture of the modern workplace. In some cases, specifically for creative tasks, distractions can be a good thing. That may sound counterintuitive but distractions can help us get out of a rut known as cognitive fixation. We also have an internal urge to be distracted.

However, considering that we get interrupted every 11 minutes and it takes 25 minutes for our brains to refocus on the original task -- workplace distractions should be avoided as much as possible.

According to a survey conducted by Udemy, workplace distractions negatively impact performance, productivity, and potential. Whats more, to compensate for these interruptions, people work faster. A UC Irvine study shows that this increases stress and frustration. And, even a brief interruption doubles an employees error rate.

In short, constant distractions dont just affect the bottom line. They can also be detrimental to an individual's health.

How can you address these workplace distractions before they become an issue?

You need to start by identifying whats exactly distracting your team. Knowing what the distraction is and how it is happening can help you make a plan to squash these interruptions. Here are 12 of the most common disturbances that you should address in your workplace -- ASAP.

1. Smartphones

No surprise here. After all, the average person in the U.S. views their phone 52 times a day. And, its easy to understand why. Were bombarded throughout the day with emails, texts, social media notifications, and phone calls. Additionally, we use our phones to jot down reminders, view our calendars, listen to a podcast, or go shopping. No wonder were addicted.

Overcoming your reliance on your smartphone is no easy task, but its not impossible. The tried and true methods are to put your phone on airplane mode or use the phone's do not disturb function. This action can be done on both Android or iPhone. You can also place your phone in another room or leave it in a desk drawer, bag or purse.

Scheduling specific times throughout the day also helps cut down on "during work-hours usage." For example, I turn my phone on silent when I need to focus solely on my work. Usually, this takes around two hours. After Ive completed my work, I check my phone to make sure I havent missed anything important. To ensure that I dont get too consumed, I only give myself 10 minutes of phone-time before diving back into work.

Related: 10 Powerful Ways to Master Self-Discipline

2. Emails

We send out a lot of emails. How many? Well, in 2017 a staggering 269 billion emails were sent daily worldwide. That email figure is expected to jump to around 333 billion in 2019.

Like your smartphone, theres also the temptation to stop what youre doing and check your inbox as soon as a new message arrives. Unfortunately, if you did this all day, how could you possibly get any work done?

The easiest solution is to turn off your email notifications on your phone. You should also close any apps or web browsers containing your email. I also use an app like SaneBox to manage my inbox because it filters out the messages that arent important.

The most important thing to remember is if theres an emergency, you arent just going to be notified via email. People will call you or knock on your door. Everything else can wait until you have the scheduled time to go through your inbox.

3. Background noise

Take a moment and really listen to all of the noise going on in an office. People are talking, machines running, phones ringing, and doors opening/closing. Thats not even getting into the annoyances like coughing, loud snacking, or music playing.

Background noise is inevitable. If it becomes too distracting, you should invest in noise-canceling headphones or relocating to a quieter area when you need to give a task 100 percent of your attention. Ive also found that apps like Noisli can drown-out background noise, while also improving my focus.

4. People interruptions

Like background noise, interruptions from employees, customers, suppliers, and family are unavoidable. Engineers on Quora identified, shoulder tapping," as one of their most common distractions.

One way around this is keeping your office door closed when you dont want to be disturbed. For good measure, place a "do not disturb" sign on the door. If you work in an open office space, send signals like wearing headphones and being honest. If someone has a direct and work-related question, give them the answer and move on.

Another tactic is to plan for these interpretations. For example, you could block out in your calendar a period where you're available for pop-ins. I also add some buffer time between tasks and meetings. This way if someone comes to me with a question its not going to throw my entire schedule out-of-whack.

5. Clutter

While in small doses a little clutter can encourage a creative mind, the fact is that a messy workplace affects your ability to focus and process information. Confusion and disorder are essentially a to-do-list that reminds you of everything that needs to be done. As such, it pulls you away from being present. Over time, this makes you more anxious and stressed.

The fix? Keep your workspace clean and organized. Toss out the items you no longer need. Place paperwork in the appropriate files. Ideally, you should put as much paperwork on the cloud as possible to reduce the number of filing cabinets. Make sure that all of your office supplies have a home and are returned at the end of the day.

Even if you dont do this daily, you should at least clean your workspace every week. For example, on a Friday afternoon is perfect. Youve probably already mentally clocked-out for the week, so this is a soft task that can be done quickly.

Related: Your Office Isn't Big Enough for Clutter and Productivity

6. Multi-tasking

Im sure weve all been guilty of juggling too many tasks at once. Youre a successful entrepreneur -- why cant you juggle multiple responsibilities at once? The truth is that our brains are not capable of focusing on more than one thing at a time.

Multitasking doesnt save time or make you more productive. It actually slows you down. "Switching from task to task, you think you're actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you're actually not, "neuroscientist Earl Miller told NPR. "You're not paying attention to one or two things simultaneously, but switching between them very rapidly."

Additionally, when you multitask you make more mistakes, reduce creative thinking, and are potentially damaging your brain. Multi-tasking was one of the more difficult bad habits I had to overcome. There are still times when I find myself doing more than one thing at once. Ive been able to change this habit by creating blocks of time for specific tasks into my calendar app.

For example, I set aside a couple of hours to write this article. During this timeframe, my phone was off, and the office door closed. When my mind began to wonder, I would stand-up and walk around the office for a couple of minutes to clear my head. Sounds simple, but this habit is not easy to break. Leaving my desk for a few minutes encouraged me to only focus on composing this piece instead of doing five other things at the same time. Only then did I jumped into my next priority.

7. Co-workers

Conversing with your employees, colleagues, and business partners are all essential for building a friendly and collaborative company culture. However, spending too much talking about Game of Thrones or gossiping isnt just a major distraction. Hearsay, itself, can also create a toxic workplace.

As a leader, you just can not allow gossip in the workplace. It needs to be addressed and handled immediately -- even if its something dire like letting an employee go. As for friendly chit-chat, you need to set boundaries.

If someone engages you in a conversation, and youre busy, politely tell them that you currently dont have time to talk, but you can catch-up with during lunch. And, as mentioned above, you can also send-out signals without saying anything by wearing headphones when you dont want to be disturbed.

8. Micro-management

Although you should know whats going on with your business, being a helicopter boss isnt just a distraction for your team. They also find it frustrating, unnerving and anxiety-producing.

Instead of encouraging ownership and letting your team do what you hired them to do if youre continually interrupting them by obsessing over every detail. Just imagine that youre in the model of a project and your boss barges in pointing out everything that you did incorrectly. How productive do you think youll be? Disruptions stifle creativity, self-growth, and destroys the trust between you and your employees.

Giving-up some control is never easy for entrepreneurs. But, you need to let your team do their thing. If you are not a micro-manager, it doesnt mean thoroughly checking out. It means keeping tabs on everyone and guiding them without interfering with their work throughout the day.

9. Hunger

Its almost impossible to focus when your stomach is growling. Unfortunately, we satisfy this craving with junk food because its quick and readily available.

It takes a lot of willpower to avoid the vending machine or call-in a pizza delivery. But, you need healthier options that will eliminate your hunger while keeping you focused and energized.

Stack your office with healthier snack options. For instance, I always have almonds nearby. Whenever I feel famished, I just snack on a handful of almonds. Ive also started looking into options like Snacknation who will deliver healthy snacks to the office.

10. Needlessly strict policies.

When it comes to culture, a lot of employers like to enforce a set of policies to encourage employees to arrive on time, wrote Andre Lovie in a previous Entrepreneur article. Punctuality is obviously important to consider in order to run a successful organization.

However, overly strict policies can be more stress-inducing. If employees are worried and hurry during their traffic-heavy commute, theyre starting off the day on a bad foot, continued Lovie. This can hurt overall employee morale, especially for those who travel long distances five days a week. They may be showing up to work already drained and frustrated, as a result.

If youre in a leadership position, Lovie suggests that you, focus more on building a culture that celebrates employees who are productive and A players. Strong message employers can send is that punctuality is important, but whats more important is performance.

Also, you could offer employees a flex schedule where they can arrive at work later in the morning to avoid the hectic commute. Another option would be allowing them to work remotely occasionally. If youre an employee, you could ask your boss if any of these are possible resolutions to your hectic commute.

11. Meetings

Meetings are notorious for being unproductive and distracting time-suckers. Time is lost because people are pulled away from their work and then forced to sit in a meeting for an hour -- even though they dont have to be in attendance.

Before scheduling a meeting, think long and hard if its necessary. In most cases, you may be able to skip the meeting and communicate with your team via email, Slack, or a project management tool like Trello. If a meeting is needed, only invite critical stakeholders, create an agenda, and keep it as short as possible.

Another option is to set aside one day per week when meetings are not scheduled, such as the famous No Meeting Wednesday. Having a day with no meetings each week allows everyone to work on their most important tasks without being interrupted.

Related: Starting With an Agenda Is How You Have Effective Meetings in a Crazy Busy World

12. Decision fatigue

As explained in a New York Times article, No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you cant decide decision without paying a biological price. Whats the price? Usually, this is being unable to focus or take action. Just think about how well you can concentrate on a task when youre mentally exhausted?

The possible fix is to reduce the number of decisions that you make daily. Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg did this by wearing the same outfits every day. Others have found success by prepping their meals for the week, delegating tedious responsibilities, and automating specific tasks like canned email responses and scheduling appointments.

Related:

How to Stop Your Mind from Wandering

To Find Solutions, Try Unfocusing. Here's How.

Create a More Focused Workplace with These 10 Amazing Presidents Day Weekend Deals



Copyright 2020 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reservedWhat was supposed to be a relaxing beachside overnight layover for three flight attendants turned into a nightmare after two JetBlue pilots reportedly drugged the women, with one of the pilots reportedly sexually assaulting two of them.

Two of those women filed a lawsuit in New York federal court this week, detailing what happened after their plane landed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on May 9, The Washington Post reported.

The women, identified as Jane Doe No. 1 and Jane Doe No. 2, said two JetBlue pilots they met on the beach, Eric Johnson and Dan Watson, gave the three of them a drug-laced beer, according to reports.

"After that point, the rest of the night became a blur for Doe # 1, Doe # 2 and the other crew member," according to the lawsuit, USA Today reported.

Johnson is accused of raping Jane Doe No. 1 and the other crew member in the same hotel bed, according to reports. The third crew member is not involved in the lawsuit.

Jane Doe No. 1 said in the lawsuit that she was aware of what was happening, but could not react in any way. She remembers bits and pieces of the assault, including Johnson reportedly saying, Thank you for making my fantasy come true, USA Today reported.

Watson, while accused of the drugging, left the scene after he was scratched.

Jane Doe No. 2 said she believed she would have also been sexually assaulted if she had not vomited during the encounter.

The pilots were not suspended, Abraham Z. Melamed, an attorney for the two women, told The Washington Post. They were not put on any sort of leave. They continued to work and continue to work to this day without any ramifications.

One of the women still has to work with one of the men, Melamed said.

JetBlue said in a statement that it takes allegations of violent or inappropriate behavior very seriously and investigates such claims thoroughly, according to reports.President Donald Trump tweeted Friday that he has reversed his administration's decision to slap new sanctions on North Korea, with his press secretary explaining that he "likes" leader Kim Jong Un and doesn't think the sanctions are necessary.

It's unclear, however, which sanctions the president was referring to in his tweet, which took Treasury officials by surprise.

"It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea," Trump wrote from his private club in Palm Beach.

"I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!"

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about what sanctions Trump was referring to. No new action against North Korea was announced by the Treasury Department on Friday, though Trump this week did threaten that new ones could be added.

On Thursday, his administration did sanction two Chinese shipping companies suspected of helping North Korea evade sanctions  the first targeted actions taken against Pyongyang since Trump and Kim met in Hanoi, Vietnam, last month for negotiations about North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

The summit ended without a deal.

Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, had described that step as "important" action, tweeting, "The maritime industry must do more to stop North Korea's illicit shipping practices."

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement Friday that Trump "likes Chairman Kim and he doesn't think these sanctions will be necessary."

The White House had said Thursday's sanctions were evidence the U.S. was maintaining pressure on North Korea in an effort to coax its leader to give up his nuclear weapons program.

The Treasury Department sanctioned Dalian Haibo International Freight Co. Ltd. and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co. Ltd. for using deceptive methods to circumvent international and U.S. sanctions and the U.S. commitment to implementing existing U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Calls to the two companies rang without response Friday or were answered by people who immediately hung up the phone.

The Treasury Department, in coordination with the State Department and the U.S. Coast Guard, also updated a North Korea shipping advisory, adding dozens of vessels thought to be doing ship-to-ship transfers with North Korean tankers or exported North Korean coal in violation of sanctions.

Two senior administration officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. policy on North Korea, said that illegal ship-to-ship transfers that violate U.S. and international sanctions have increased and that not all countries, including China, are implementing the restrictions. They said the deceptive practices include disabling or manipulating ship identification systems, repainting the names on vessels and falsifying cargo documents.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement that fully implementing the U.N. resolutions is key to getting Kim to give up his nuclear weapons program. "Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk," Mnuchin said.A family is mourning the loss of their beloved dog who gave his life to protect them when a man opened fire at their house.

The Martinez family was hosting a birthday party when a man arrived with a gun and shots were fired.

"This is not something we would ever think was going to happen," Martinez said.

Texas police said the person believed to be responsible, Javian Castaneda, isnt a stranger to the family. In fact, Castaneda is friends with their children.

After a recent burglary, Laura Martinez said they suspected one of their childrens friends was involved. Martinez told authorities they went to discuss the situation with Castanedas parents. When they arrived, the parents were gone. Laura Martinez said she left a note asking them to call her.

Police said Castaneda then showed up at the Martinezs house with a gun and started an argument that led to gunfire.

Laura Martinez and her two children were left injured including the familys dog, Zero, who reportedly jumped on the suspect repeatedly as he fired the weapon.

"I went to go turn to run and I just feel instant pressure in my lower back. Put my hand back there and I realize there was blood all over my hands," Martinezs daughter, Valori Pace said.

According to the family, Zero first bit the suspect after he fired shots. The suspect then shot the dog who fell back for a moment before jumping on the suspect again, who fired three shots at the dog leaving him fatally injured.

The family has a memorial where they can visit Zero, Click2Houston reported.

"I honestly believe if Zero had not kept jumping on him, he wouldve been able to get shots higher than our legs," Martinez said.

Authorities are still searching for Castaneda for questioning.English French

TORONTO, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Investment Funds Institute of Canada (IFIC) today announced investment fund net sales and net assets for February 2019.



Mutual fund assets totalled $1.51 trillion at the end of February 2019. Assets increased by $33.4 billion or 2.3% compared to January 2019. Mutual funds recorded net sales of $4.1 billion in February 2019.

ETF assets totalled $169.0 billion at the end of February 2019. Assets increased by $4.9 billion or 3.0% compared to January 2019. ETFs recorded net sales of $1.3 billion in February 2019.

Mutual Fund Net Sales/Net Redemptions ($ Millions) *

Asset Class Feb. 2019 Jan. 2019 Feb. 2018 YTD 2019 YTD 2018 Long-term Funds Balanced 1,645 (1,692 ) 4,538 (47 ) 6,980 Equity 54 584 1,400 637 2,864 Bond 1,919 1,180 152 3,099 1,242 Specialty 442 356 276 799 511 Total Long-term Funds 4,060 427 6,366 4,488 11,597 Total Money Market Funds 65 (480 ) 632 (415 ) 327 Total 4,126 (53 ) 6,998 4,073 11,924

Mutual Fund Net Assets ($ Billions) *

Asset Class Feb. 2019 Jan. 2019 Feb. 2018 Dec. 2018 Long-term Funds Balanced 773.3 759.0 768.5 737.1 Equity 500.3 485.0 486.7 460.0 Bond 186.6 183.6 187.1 180.2 Specialty 19.3 18.6 14.8 18.3 Total Long-term Funds 1,479.5 1,446.1 1,457.0 1,395.6 Total Money Market Funds 27.0 26.9 24.7 27.5 Total 1,506.4 1,473.0 1,481.7 1,423.1

* Please see below for important information regarding this data.

ETF Net Sales/Net Redemptions ($ Millions) *

Asset Class Feb. 2019 Jan. 2019 Feb. 2018 YTD 2019 YTD 2018 Long-term Funds Balanced 174 136 125 309 140 Equity 555 301 2,176 856 3,398 Bond 480 386 112 866 977 Specialty 118 34 (31 ) 151 (180 ) Total Long-term Funds 1,326 856 2,383 2,182 4,336 Total Money Market Funds (14 ) 47 38 33 147 Total 1,312 903 2,420 2,215 4,482

ETF Net Assets ($ Billions) *

Asset Class Feb. 2019 Jan. 2019 Feb. 2018 Dec. 2018 Long-term Funds Balanced 3.1 2.9 1.7 2.6 Equity 107.7 103.9 96.4 97.5 Bond 53.7 53.1 49.1 52.2 Specialty 2.6 2.4 2.5 2.3 Total Long-term Funds 167.1 162.2 149.7 154.7 Total Money Market Funds 1.9 1.9 0.9 1.9 Total 169.0 164.2 150.5 156.6

* Please see below for important information regarding this data.

IFIC ETF data is complemented with data from Morningstar Canada, Inc.

IFIC makes every effort to verify the accuracy, currency and completeness of the information; however, IFIC does not guarantee, warrant, represent or undertake that the information provided is correct, accurate or current.

* Important Information Regarding Investment Fund Data:

Mutual fund data is adjusted to remove double counting arising from mutual funds that invest in other mutual funds. ETF data is not adjusted to remove double counting arising from ETFs that invest in other ETFs. The Balanced Funds category includes funds that invest directly in a mix of stocks and bonds or obtain exposure through investing in other funds. Mutual fund data reflects the investment activity of Canadian retail investors. ETF data reflects the investment activity of Canadian retail and institutional investors.

About IFIC

The Investment Funds Institute of Canada is the voice of Canadas investment funds industry. IFIC brings together 150 organizations, including fund managers, distributors and industry service organizations, to foster a strong, stable investment sector where investors can realize their financial goals. By connecting Canadas savers to Canadas economy, our industry contributes significantly to Canadian economic growth and job creation. To learn more about IFIC, please visit www.ific.ca .

For more information please contact:



Lisa Hall

Senior Manager, Communications and Public Affairs

lhall@ific.ca

416-309-2317T he Groucho Club. Famed the world over as the Soho haunt of A-listers: actors, musicians, agents and corporate lawyers. Huh?

Yes, you read that right. When Steve Cooke, global boss of Slaughter & May invites me for a chat, it isnt to a corner office high up a glass City tower, or even the pinstriped RAC on Pall Mall. No, for Cooke, meet me at my club means the Groucho.

For a man whose firm counts a third of the FTSE-100 Index as a client, and has worked on several of the most high profile corporate investigations and deals in recent years (SFO v Rolls-Royce, Ocado and Marks & Spencer), this is hardly what youd expect.

Theres a lot you wouldnt expect of Cooke. Im here, for example, because hes written an autobiography*. Unusual enough for a corporate lawyer schooled in the arts of keeping ones counsel. And the reason hes deemed himself worthy of such prose? His teenage years as a coulda-been-a-contender popstar.

Cookes post-punk band, the Stereotypes, made it to daytime Radio 1 via the DJs John Peel and David Kid Jensen, but split, with no record deal, in 1980 while he was still at Oxford.

So its not for the Stereotypes that Cooke is a deserving member of the Groucho. Hes there because while not running the citys most blueblooded law firm, he has a secret life making music for television and film documentaries. Rather successfully.

Every other Sunday evening he and an old college friend get together at Cookes home in Little Venice and record. Theyve done scores for Bafta and Emmy award winners and had their music mentioned in Bafta dispatches, even doing the music for the last David Attenborough film, the Queens Green Planet. In short, theyre pretty darn good.

Its a lot of fun. Weve been doing it for decades now so its just part of my life: Sunday night is recording night, he grins.

TV music has also helped secure him a romantic partner. His girlfriend is the undercover documentary maker Kate Blewett.

As if thats not surprising enough, his musical co-performer is none other than Russell Taylor  one half of the Alex cartoon scribes Peattie and Taylor.

Slaughters clients can breathe easy. While Cooke says he gives the odd idea for a strip, Taylor says thats rare: We both have fairly high profile jobs in the City but in all these years, we only ever talk about music, really.

The books a cheery romp from wet childhood holidays in Wales to his first round of law firm interviews in a cheap Mister Byrite suit.

Its as much soundtrack as biography, referencing songs from The Clash to Prince as a Nick Hornby-like technique to keep the reader on track with the progressing dateline.

For anyone who grew up in the London burbs in the sixties and seventies, itll have you pining for those days when your dads hi-fi was a slab of furniture the size of a Triumph Herald.

Its full of photos of Cooke, but given it ends in 1980, I didnt instantly recognise the 60-year-old in the clubs airy upstairs restaurant when I arrived. Then, sitting near a Cabinet minister huddled in the corner with a famous political journalist, I spot him.

The hair is still floppy, but expensively quaffed. Hes slim in a well cut suit and has one of those faces that improve with age.

In the book, he has something of the baby-faced Tory boy about him, even when leaping around the stage brandishing his Les Paul. Now, though, good cheekbones combine with eyes that drop, Brando-like, at the outsides. Its his fathers look. Pictures of Cooke Pere in tux or World War II uniform show a spit for the dashing villain played by Billy Zane in Titanic.

Childhood for Cooke was in Hornchurch, Essex, where he inexcusably supported Spurs in a land of West Ham Claret and Blue. That despite his adored mothers loathing for captain Danny Blanchflower (not the eccentric City economist).

No Essex in his voice now, though. Its pure BBC, perhaps with a touch of the Smashy and Nicey DJ about it. What little music there was in the house was terrible: I lived in a 1960s that sounded like it had been curated by Val Doonican, he says. We didnt have The Beatles playing, we had Lennon and McCartney played by Alan Haven on the organ, he grimaces. It was horrible but you got to know the tunes.

Eventually, he got to hear The Clash and his world changed. Amazing band, he says. saw them three times in 78 and theyre still my three favourite gigs of all time.

Having got close, but not that close, to a proper record deal, he decided to put his law degree to good use. To his amazement, Slaughter & May picked him up after a good cop-bad cop interview where the bad cop  Michael Pescod  went on to be his boss, mentor and eventually a best friend. Maybe because I had watched too much of the Sweeney, I preferred the bad cop, he recalls.

After doing the rounds trialling property law, litigation, and then corporate and mergers and acquisitions, he fell for the charms of the latter. For the money, I presume? No, were a partnership, so that didnt factor in. I liked the excitement of it. It was a bit seat-of-the-pants. Complicated. Intellectually challenging. You never knew what was going to happen next.

Is there any crossover between his musical side and the law? He hesitates, dubiously, then: Probably one of the reasons we get so much work in music is that Im incredibly organised and never miss deadline. There are plenty of musicians out there who will send off that blank tape and then call in: Did you get it? Oh, its blank. Really? OK give me a couple more weeks.

Cookes dialogue constantly switches in and out of such imagined conversations for comic effect, a tic he shares identically with Taylor. In fact, but for Taylors less organised thoughts, you imagine they must be like an old married couple.

There are other musical crossovers with work, he says, particularly in the role that very senior legal advisers take on. In law your core skill is to be logical but also at the higher end of lawyering, being creative is very underrated, I guess. Coming up with new ways of doing things, to find a solution nobody else has thought of. I guess thats similar to creating a new piece of music in a way.

Hes self-effacing in a very English way, underplaying how hard he must have worked at Oxford, or how stressful and driven he must be to run 1300 of the worlds top lawyers.

Its an Englishness that I imagine goes down well in Slaughters, that most blue-blooded of firms.

For all the constant jokes, hes also studiedly discreet, resolutely cutting dead any attempts to discuss clients: on, or off the record. Thats extremely annoying if youre a journalist.

Perhaps its because Slaughters has trained him, when it comes to long-term issues such as reputation, to be risk averse. Slaughter is the only major firm which is still a general partnership; that old school structure wherein all assets, profits and  crucially  liabilities are shared equally among the partners. One of us screws up, and we all go down.

Is that why you dont see so many dodgy Russian oligarchs on the books as some firms we could mention? We are very conservative. We play a very long game and ask what would one of our more mainstream clients think about us taking on that client. That is quite a good test, really.

The legal world is abuzz with law firms raising capital on the stock market or merging. Every week seems to bring a new flotation, with partners declaring they need to float to have more financial firepower, buy up smaller rivals and give sub-partner level staff shares in the business.

Cooke is far from convinced. Law is not a massively capital intensive business. We have debt, but not a huge amount. Whats the real reason for these IPOs? To crystallise the goodwill of the partnership for the benefit of one generation of partners. Youre turning what is going to be an income stream for years into one payment. Theres an obvious temptation for existing partners to doing that, but

He trails off dismissively. It doesnt sound like Slaughters is going that way any time soon.

Rumour has it that Wall Street investors have been trying to create a sort of fund-of-fund of law firms. In return for, say 10% of your firms earnings, you get to share the profits from a large group of top tier firms. I pose the idea to Cooke, but he shakes his head: Interesting to hear, but not for us, he says.

For 130 years, Slaughter and May has always been a partnership, has never bought another firm and only ever hired one partner from outside the firm. Maybe well hire another in 130 years, Cooke grins.

Its an odd contradiction, from anarchic popster to the City. There was one guy who tried it the other way, and he was a regular visitor to the Tory flat below his in Cookes final year: Guy Hands. Hands made a fortune in finance before his love of music got the better of him and he bought EMI. Even Hands admits the spectacular failure left him looking a chump.

No such slips for Cooke, so far.

He clearly loves his work, having the ear of the countrys top chief executives and chairmen.

And though boardroom life may be a far cry from the rock star world hed dreamt of at 18, the Stereotypes most successful track still resonates. Its title: Calling all the shots.J ust before a person drowns, their life flashes before their eyes. We only know that because of the reports of those rescued from the water before they die.

Something similar has happened to Britain in the past 48 hours  and we would do well to remember what we saw.

On Wednesday night, Theresa May went on television, attacked her own MPs and set us on a course to crash out of the European Union next week. She did so without the counsel of her Cabinet or her Chief Whip, who said he found the statement appalling.

It will go down as one of the most bizarre prime ministerial moments in our history. It had an instant effect.

Suddenly, all the fog of the past three years cleared and Britain was confronted with reality: this law-abiding nation was about to tear up the economic and security relationships with its nearest neighbours in an unparalleled act of international vandalism.

The command centre in the nuclear bunker under Whitehall was activated. The CBI and the TUC united to declare a national emergency.

Then, last night, the EU threw us a lifeline , and gave us until April 12 to reconsider our future.

You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief across the nation this morning. Britain had been saved from disaster, for a short while at least.

Revoking Article 50

What did we learn during this 48 hours near-death experience, so that we can avoid a fatal outcome?

First, there is no majority for Theresa Mays Brexit. The hardliners of the ERG now know how close they are to the no-deal Brexit that has become their new fetish. They have looked into Mrs Mays eyes and believe she would join them in the car as they drive it off the cliff  as the Evening Standard feared that she would.

The DUP did not waver in its opposition to her deal  nor did dozens of Labour MPs flock to support it. The numbers are simply not there to pass the deal.

Second, moderate Conservatives have learned in the past 48 hours that Mrs May cannot be trusted. Thats the polite way to put it  in private, some now openly call her a liar.

All the assurances that she gave her colleagues were breached with that eccentric televised address.

Yesterday she tried to repair the damage with what amounted to an embarrassing apology to Parliament. But it wont work, and they wont make the mistake of believing her word again.

As a result, active preparations are under way again to seize control of the parliamentary timetable, provide for the indicative votes and secure a legislative lock around the outcome.

The final lesson from the past 48 hours is the hardest of all for many to come to terms with.

Yes, Brexit has been delayed from March 29  as the Evening Standard newspaper was the first to predict at the start of the year. But that delay was entirely in the gift of the EU. Common sense prevailed in the European Council, as we also predicted it would.

While the extension is to April 12, the EU has effectively set the hard stop at May 22.

It is now clear that any delay beyond that would have to be a long one, and the EU would need to see concrete evidence that Britain was undertaking a fundamental rethink.

Thats not going to happen while Mrs May is in Number 10, and time is running out to replace her via either a Tory leadership contest or a general election.

Thats the Catch-22: the EU needs the UK to rethink to grant a delay, and the UK needs a delay for a rethink.

This week we saw where this inexorably leads: revocation of Article 50. It is the one instrument entirely in Britains hands, can be activated quickly and by a simple majority in Parliament.

Thats why almost three million citizens rushed to sign the online petition in favour in the past two days. Revoke is the new woke.

Supporting it is a huge step for all the politicians who said the referendum result must be honoured, and a second vote was a precondition for overturning it.

But the past 48 hours have brought before us the question we may all soon face: leave the European Union without a deal, or revoke Article 50 and cancel Brexit.M onday sees the airing on Sky Atlantic of the documentary charting the rise and fall of the American female tech billionaire Elizabeth Holmes. Like many, I have been transfixed by this tale of greed and avarice in Silicon Valley. On the back of her unicorn biotech company, Theranos, Holmes raised 400 million before The Wall Street Journal revealed her blood-testing machines were a dupe in 2015. Her technology rested precisely on nada. And no one over 10 years had seen it.

Once the pin-up for female tech billionaires, feted the world over by media barons and presidents, and on every cover of every magazine, from Forbes to Fortune, Holmess slide into ignominy will go down in the history books. Im as drawn to her as Killing Eves murderous Villanelle, simultaneously repulsed by those buggy eyes that hid the 31-year-old Stanford dropouts treachery, and wrongly, horribly fascinated by her gobsmacking audacity.

Think of the psychopathic levels of discipline it must have required never to let the mask slip? To go in for raise after raise off those venture capitalists, strutting every stage, swanning through every TV appearance, when she knew there was nothing beneath. Even now she continues to protest her innocence. I wonder if she slept. Did she pace the house at night, awoken by the horror of her lies? Did she practise endlessly in the mirror, did she throw up secretly in the loo when the duplicity got too much? Or like Villanelle, is she still all icy cool?

Holmes adopted every Silicon Valley stereotype in the book, not just the way she dressed and spoke but how she manufactured the hype behind her brand story. On top, she cleverly adopted just the right level of traditional male characteristics to make her investors feel safe, while equally sidetracking them with her youth and femininity. Copying the uniform of Steve Jobs was a clever trick, with her insistence on black turtlenecks. As was only pulling in male confidantes and supporters. Scores of men were conned, showing up the fragility of the testosterone-fuelled ecosystem in San Francisco.

But our preoccupation with her is, of course, dangerous. We will watch the documentary, read the book, listen to the podcast (and, in two years time, see Jennifer Lawrence in the movie).

In the meantime, change is still slow. Men still dominate Silicon Valley; big money will charge bloodthirstily after those tech unicorns, dazzled by the promise of a Brobdingnagian win, while serious checks and balances will be ignored. Its going on as we speak: Google was fined another 1.2 billion this week by the EU for breaking anti-trust laws, its market abuse of rivals going back 10 years.

"Well watch the documentary, read the book, listen to the podcast. In the meantime, little will radically change"

Meanwhile, Revolut, one of Britains best-known financial tech companies which raised 250 million this time last year, came under fire for potentially failing to prevent money-laundering through its systems.

Wired magazine recently revealed claims that staff at Revolut were mistreated to fuel its growth. CFO Peter OHiggins resigned and Nik Storonsky, the founder and CEO of Revolut, continues to deny every allegation.

Ive got Peoples March placard anxiety

Its the Peoples March tomorrow and Ive just about managed to rouse the family to join me. Im not missing it for anything. My 14-year-old son has said he will come but only if he and his friends dont have to be near me. My husband is looking grumpy but has acquiesced and my younger son hasnt been told yet (Ill resort to sweets and other bribery on the day).

But this corralling of the troops matched with a hefty workload has meant I havent had a nanosecond to consider my banner. And now Ive got banner anxiety. Im with EU is all Ive got so far  this is hardly going to garner headlines or impress my fellow Remainers.

My favourites on the last march included: Ikea has got better cabinets; My mother-in-law lives in Spain. Please dont make them send her back here and The only single market I want to leave is Tinder.

One protestor fashioned a brilliant copy of Banksys shredded painting in a frame, just with a Vote Leave Take Back Control poster.

Blame it on the pink pussy hats on the inaugural march against Trump. It set a high bar. Our purpose has never been more urgent and humour is a powerful tool. Even if I fail to come up with the goods by tomorrow, thank God I have trust in all of you.

*The supermodel Nathan Westling announced this week that he is transgender. Im happy. I cant even imagine going back to how I was before because its just darkness, he movingly told CNN.

Westling began his modelling career in 2013 as Natalie Westling, the skaters mane of red hair garnering fans, debuting on the Marc Jacobs runway and becoming a Prada and Chanel favourite.I t is a tight timetable. We remain in peril but there is now a means of rescue. As the Brexit storm rages, wreaking havoc on all in its path, it is hard to stay calm and to exercise judgment with maturity. But this is what Parliament and the European Union must do.

The way through to more tranquil waters requires decision makers to step back and think clearly without anger, ego or anxiety.

The Europeans now insist that any extension other than a purely technical one must be based on the Prime Minister presenting a plan by April 12, so that the next months are not like the last. The interests of Britain are the same. The British people want closure and an end to the agony.

The route is to do what up to now Parliament has not had the opportunity to: debate properly the genuine Brexit options and decide on one; or decide on one but put the final say with the people. But we must move fast.

Theresa Mays deal is still a bad one. Under it, the Irish question is a mess and the future relationship with the EU is a mystery. This is not a good basis on which to leave the EU and it is a direct breach of the promise  frequently repeated  that we would know the future relationship before we left the existing one.

Tony Blair / Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

The reason May has opted for this blind Brexit is that the Cabinet are profoundly divided on the future.

So she has feared to clarify the true Brexit options because it would expose the fundamental divisions in the Conservative Party.

The result has been the exposure of those divisions anyway, the breakdown of Cabinet Government, and the consequent turmoil.

That strategy has failed. This weekend she should take time out and realise that even now she can lead the country out of the impasse if she understands that she cant decide the outcome; rather, she should facilitate it.

We have literally wasted almost three years on a futile search for a Brexit solution. We have chased the Holy Grail Brexit, the one which will unite the nation. It will never be found.

From the start, the future relationship with Europe has been less about negotiation than a choice. The European Commission set out the choice. We can do Brexit and stay close to the European trading system  in other words, stay in the single market and/or customs union  or we can do the hard version of Brexit and come out of that system.

The problem with the first is that we become a rule-taker  which is pointless; and with the second we disrupt commercial, investment and trading relations we have built up over 45 years  which is painful. That is the Brexit dilemma.

The first means a future relationship like Norway has with the EU; the other like the one Canada has. There are variants on the two. But, essentially, that is the choice. Once you make the choice, the subsequent negotiation is relatively easy.

We should have made this choice in principle, written it into the political declaration that goes alongside the withdrawal agreement, and then negotiated the detail in the transition period lasting up to the end of 2020.

Instead, we tried to insist that we could negotiate the benefits of access enjoyed inside the single market, with the freedom to make our own rules outside it. And then, with the Eurosceptic press whipping the Brexiteers on, the Prime Minister played along with the absurd notion that only the malevolence of the Europeans stood in the way of the negotiations success. The Prime Minister should change course, set out a plan for decision by Parliament, and navigate the divisions in the Conservative Party by accepting them and allowing a free vote on the options, guiding people through the pros and cons of each.

"Do what Parliament has not had the opportunity to: debate properly the genuine options and decide on one"

The question is: must we decide which of the options we want by April 12, or is it enough that we have a plan for decision? Europe has effectively left that to us, though of course any further extension requires their agreement. Considering which option we want for longer than three weeks is far better. But we could put the options to the vote within that time and come back to Europe with a firm conclusion.

Of course the issue of the European elections are a challenge. But if were obliged to be part of them, then we have them. It will be an interesting dry run of public opinion, for sure.

The case for a fresh referendum gets stronger by the day. It is not undemocratic to say that before we take a decision of this magnitude  and after all this mess  we should have the right to think again. We should go back to the people. Are they really going to riot because we are asking them if what they thought then they still think now?

But to be clear: the hyperbolic reaction to the idea of a new vote is less to do with fear of what it will do to democracy than fear of the result democracy might yield.

This weekend a huge rally will take place in London in support of a Peoples Vote. It will be a reminder to all MPs that the Brexiteers are not the only section of opinion that matters.W e WRITE in response to your article [I can see the case for rebuilding Whipps Cross, says minister, March 23] about the redevelopment of Whipps Cross Hospital in east London.

Waltham Forest Save our NHS, the local health campaign group, has grave concerns that the proposed new hospital may not be fit for purpose because of funding constraints imposed by the Government.

In the initial plan submitted we could have 83 fewer beds than we do now. Despite it being recognised that in 15 years time the population growth in north-east London will be equivalent to a new borough.

Barts Health NHS Trust has already had the plan knocked back and has been told to find ways to reduce costs and increase the income it raises from the land.

With the squeeze on funding, NHS trusts expected to sell off their land and pressure to build new housing, we are concerned that the land sale at Whipps Cross will be to the detriment of the new hospital. Especially as the plan submitted refers to Barts Trust being: in need of cash in the short term from land receipts.

There is a real risk that a hospital that cannot cater for thousands more residents will mean even greater delays at A&E, longer waits for treatment and inadequate healthcare for people in Waltham Forest and Redbridge.

Mary Burnett and Norma Dudley

Waltham Forest Save our NHS

EDITOR'S REPLY

Dear Mary and Norma

Whipps Cross hospital is lucky to be held to account by such enthusiastic campaigners, as is its parent trust, Barts Health. Most campaigners have been around far longer than the hospital managers and want what is best for the East End and beyond.

The reality, though, is that much of the Whipps Cross site is in dire need of renovation. It is a tragedy that so much of it has been left to go to ruin.

Yes, the populations of Waltham Forest and Redbridge are growing, and ageing. It is not uncommon for Whipps Cross A&E to be full of patients in their 90s (while the new paediatric A&E has sick toddlers).

The answer cannot be to treat growing numbers of patients in expensive acute hospital beds. The solution must surely involve the trust funding a modern hospital by cashing in on this land for housing (while retaining freehold rights, and thus a long-term income stream).

Barts Healths chief, Alwen Williams, understands this. Health Secretary Matt Hancock appears to too. Its time for action and hard cash. Community support could help overcome this considerable challenge.

Ross Lydall, Health Editor

Politicians need to sell pros of Europe

How could we end up with such an incompetent Prime Minister? Easy. Shes part of a factional party that has six different propositions to leave Europe and she has developed no route to unity. And she never will. No one has thought through the history of why Europe is hated by so many in Britain or done something about it over 46 years of EU membership.

A reminder: 48 per cent wanted to stay in Europe, despite such a lack of participation by MPs in European government and institutions. Perhaps our politicians should ask themselves why so many wanted to stay in the EU, particularly an incoherent, strategy-deficient PM.

British politicians need to take up the European challenge, get involved and sell the positive case for Europe to UK residents. Can it be done? Of course, but it requires intelligent politicians with purpose and strategy. I have written to my Conservative MP along these lines but only had the standard electronic reply.

Hugh Bunce

Galleries should not refuse cash

I was planning to visit the Diane Arbus exhibition at the Hayward Gallery  until a friend told me it does not accept cash between 10am and 5pm. It is outrageous for a public gallery in the centre of London to refuse cash. Not everyone has credit cards, and not everyone wants to use them for small purchases. Not everyone will use debit cards  and certainly not contactless cards.

As part of the South Bank complex  which was originally at least partly funded by public money  the Hayward has a duty to serve all of society, not just some of it.

Marcia MacLeod

Choice: the issue on assisted dying

Far from being a settled issue  as is the global warming debate  the Royal College of Physicians efforts to obtain and act on a democratic mandate of its membership on assisted dying has stirred up a hornets nest among religious bodies.When it comes to handbags, the royals tend to have their own specific brand loyalties.

So when we noticed there was a brand emerging with cross-royal appeal, we were mighty intrigued.

DeMellier, the brainchild of London-based, Barcelona-born Mireia Llusia-Lindh, has recently been seen on the arms of both the Duchess of Sussex and the Duchess of Cornwall.

Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall carries DeMellier on a visit to the Jewish Care's Brenner Centre in Stepney, East London, January 2019 / Getty Images

In fact, Camilla paid a visit to the Jewish Cares Brenner Centre in January seemingly carrying the exact same bottle green Mini Venice toast bag that Meghan had carried on a Royal visit to Cardiff the same time last year.

Meghan carries DeMellier in Cardiff, January 2018 / Getty Images

And theyre not the only royals who have been seduced by DeMelliers mid-priced, practical designs. The brand, which has also been worn by the likes of Beyonce, Emily Blunt and Lily Collins, is also a firm favourite with Pippa Middleton and Princess Beatrice.

While the four royals no doubt appreciate the understated and elegant designs of the bags, well bet its the brand's philanthropic credentials that made it such a hit.

DeMellier

When Harvard-educated Llusia-Lindh decided to launch DeMellier in 2010, she wanted to do something that empowered women on both sides of the company, and so for every bag sold, DeMellier funds a set of lifesaving vaccines aimed to save the life of an orphan in need in collaboration with SOS Childrens Villages, a permanent charity initiative that, as a mother of three, is very close to Mireias heart.

Pippa Middleton carrying DeMellier's Luxembourg bag / Rex Features

We caught up with Mireia to hear a bit more about Meghans new favourite brand...

What sets your brand apart?

I started DeMellier with the vision of doing things differently, to create handbags that would make women feel empowered, that were beautifully designed and of the highest quality, but also made with integrity whilst finding a way to give back to those less fortunate. These five values remain our core values today. All our handbags are designed by women for women and are handcrafted in the south of Spain by local artisans using the finest Italian and Spanish leathers. And for every bag purchased we fund a set of lifesaving vaccines and treatments aimed to save the life of a child in need through A Bag, A Life, our permanent charity initiative in collaboration with SOS Childrens Villages.

DeMellier

How have the royals raised the profile of your brand?

The British Royal family does the most amazing work to support emerging British brands are the best possible ambassadors given the quality of their work and their global reach. We have been very fortunate that different members have chosen to wear some of our bags, helping raise the awareness of our brand in different countries. Something for which we will always be grateful.

Has there been a breakthrough moment for the brand?

I managed the business on the side while having three small kids, and three years ago after my little one turned one I wanted to focus a bit more time on the business to take it to the next level and entered the British Luxury Association Awards for emerging brands and we won. That was a turning point for us that has taken us to where we are today.

DeMellier

Did Meghan approach you? Or did she buy it herself?

It was completely organic, we didnt gift and she didnt approach us. One day we saw in the news she was wearing one of our bags and we later found out that she had bought it from our website a few days before. I guess its the moment of luck that comes after you have put years of hard work and tried to do things right.

What does the future hold for the brand?

Our goal is to stay true to our values and grow in a sustainable way, reaching those women wherever they are who share our vision and want to be part of our journey, via our website, our chosen retail partners and our own stores in the future.Flip flops have been a fashion faux-pas for the best part of a decade.

But, last year, there was a hint of a comeback when the holiday-perfect sandal was spotted on the feet of several street style stars during Copenhagen Fashion Week.

While fashion insiders debated about whether the rubber soled shoe deserved a place in our wardrobe, designers were busy putting a modern twist on the silhouette, taking inspiration from the '90s to create heeled flip flops.

From trendsetting Yeezy to Instagrammable Staud, the retro design has got some pretty powerful sartorial backers.

Yeezy

Kanye West's brand, Yeezy, has been responsible for its fair share of bizarre shoe trends: from clear plastic stilettoes to too-small slides. So, it comes as no surprise that the label was one of the first adopters of the heeled flip flop.

Ultimate influencer Kim Kardashian was first seen in the shoe back in March 2018. Since then, Yeezy has given the shoe a variety of fabric finishes from season 7's fleeced thong sandals to the current season 8 PVC straps.

Get The Look

Season 8 thong sandals | 866 by Yeezy | Shop them here

Staud

Instagram favourite Staud recently released a shoe collection chock-full of heeled flip flops. Of the four styles available, the mule is the one to go for. Complete with a knotted thong toe and sculptural heel, the Keith sandals are available in statement blue suede, or a stylish croc embossed finish in black, brown and cream.

Get The Look

Keith Croc-Effect Leather Mules | 245 by Staud | Shop them here

Simon Miller

Adding a patent shine to the sandal is Simon Miller, who has created two 'Beep' designs.

Sticking mostly to the classic flip flop silhouette, the US shoe label has added a contrasting modern sculptural 45mm acrylic heel. The glossy patent-leather design comes in black or statement toffee with purple accents.

Get The Look

Deep Patent Leather Sandals | 350 by Simon Miller | Shop them here

Zara

Zara has dived feet first into the world of heeled flip flops with two versions of the shoe. Take your pick from a gladiator-inspired black sandal with wrap around straps and transparent heels; or an unmissable neon yellow pair.

With prices starting at 29.99, they're the perfect style solution for those who just want to dip their toes into the trend.

Get The LookReview at a glance









T his documentary was nominated for an Oscar this year. It should have won.

Chinese-American Bing Liu grew up near Chicago in the financially depressed (and deeply racist) city of Rockford. As a teen he was obsessed with skateboarding and in his 20s decided to immortalise the scene, homing in on charmer Zack Mulligan and the goofily shy Keire Johnson. But this isnt a film about skateboarding. Bing gets his subjects to say stuff that Zack, in particular, may come to regret.

All three men have a need for speed, and shots of Keire and Zack whooshing through the streets are effortlessly romantic. Its when Zack and his girlfriend Nina start to have relationship problems that Minding the Gap offers its first ugly jolt. Nina is the mother of Zacks baby boy and, according to him, is prone to bursts of hysteria. He and a pal giggle as they discuss Ninas mood swings (in a phone video we hear her screaming her head off). Later, while Zacks in the loo, Bing talks to Nina. Lets just say shes got the scars to prove things are more complicated than they seem.

This is a movie about what people are prepared to swallow when theyre thirsty for love. The lies are fascinating (Zack tells us, chirpily, that hes drinking less right before getting hammered). And none of the tears feel rehearsed. Bings self-effacing mother is the kind of character you rarely see in movies or read about in books. You could say that what all the interviewees have in common is experience of domestic abuse. It would be truer to say that they all trust Bing.

This is his first film. Lets hope its not his last.RALEIGH, N.C., March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A $500,000 grant in support of Lead for North Carolina, a new pilot developed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Government, was announced today by the member-funded SECU Foundation and the university. Representatives from State Employees Credit Union and SECU Foundation joined UNC School of Government faculty and staff on campus for the formal announcement and check presentation made by SECU Foundation Board Chair Bob Brinson. The grant will assist with first-year funding for 20 college graduates to participate in the cohort program, which is designed to recruit young leaders in the state and provide them with training and placement in a two-year paid local government fellowship.



The UNC School of Government is the largest university-based local government training, advisory, and research organization in the United States. Its non-partisan, policy-neutral work helps public officials and citizens understand and improve state and local government. The definitive goal of Lead for North Carolina is to improve the quality of life in underserved communities, cultivate the next generation of public service leaders, diversify government, and help bridge the public sector recruiting gap for government/public service organizations. Participating Lead for North Carolina SECU Fellows will be placed in small towns and counties across the state where community challenges and the need for young talent are the greatest.

As strong supporters of education, we are proud to partner with the UNC School of Government for our first venture in education funding for college graduates, commented Mr. Brinson. This is an incredible opportunity for North Carolinas young adult leaders interested in exploring public service careers to learn more about the inner workings of local government and the communities they serve. The Foundations grant is an investment in the future of our state, one that we hope will provide significant and long-term dividends for our state and citizens.

SECU Foundations investment in Lead for North Carolina will help attract young people to local government as a career and encourage college graduates to work in their hometowns or in distressed communities, said Mike Smith, dean of the UNC School of Government. Public officials have told us they need to expand their workforce, and Im thrilled that SECU Foundation has chosen to invest in North Carolina communities by entrusting us with training, placing, and mentoring these fellows.

With a focus in Tier 1 counties, this is a valuable initiative to benefit future leaders in our state, added SECU Foundation Executive Director Jama Campbell. The Lead for North Carolina fellowship complements another Foundation project, the SECU Public Fellows Internship program, which ties into the same theme of connecting bright young talent with opportunities in rural communities. We are excited to help the UNC School of Government get their new program off the ground!

About SECU and the SECU Foundation

A not-for-profit financial cooperative owned by its members, SECU has been providing employees of the State of North Carolina and their families with consumer financial services for over 81 years. The Credit Union also offers a diversified line of financial advisory services including retirement and education planning, tax preparation, insurance, trust and estate planning services, and investments through its partners and affiliated entities. SECU serves over 2.3 million members through 265 branch offices, nearly 1,100 ATMs, 24/7 Member Services via phone and a website, www.ncsecu.org. The SECU Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization funded by the contributions of SECU members, promotes local community development in North Carolina primarily through high impact projects in the areas of housing, education, healthcare and human services. Since 2004, SECU Foundation has made a collective financial commitment of more than $154 million for initiatives to benefit North Carolinians statewide.

Contact: Jama Campbell, Executive Director

Office: 919-839-5562 | secufoundation@ncsecu.org

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9dcea87e-fb91-4a09-b88e-0b44764e868eReview at a glance









T here's a moment in this visually stylish Rudolph Nureyev biopic when one of the characters says that great artists know how to tell a story. Agreed. What a shame the movie often feels more like an MA thesis.

Ralph Fienness third try at directing is based on a script by David Hare. There are three timelines. We criss-cross between the dancers impoverished rural childhood, his student days in Leningrad and a life-changing trip to Paris with the Kirov Ballet in 1961.

As a young man, Nureyev (Oleg Ivenko) is shown to be insecure about his peasant roots. Hes also a bold autodidact: an enemy of parochialism, totalitarianism and sexual repression (he likes men).

Ivenko is a brilliant dancer, a decent actor and has a fetching face, but thats not enough. Nureyevs talent and beauty were out of this world. Fiennes gives a hypnotic performance as Nureyevs favourite teacher, Alexander Pushkin. The latter is a beatific patriot who does nothing to stop his sex-starved wife from seducing Nureyev. Is this because hed love to be in her shoes? Pushkins eyes are so sad, anything seems possible.

Ballet biopic: Oleg Ivenko plays Rudolf Nureyev in this drama about the dancers life

While in Leningrad, Nureyev hangs out with a gay lover, Teja (Louis Hofmann). When Teja walks around the room naked the mood is what you might call kitchen-sinky. The film seems determined to show intercourse in the Soviet Union as functional.Princess Eugenie has given birth to a baby boy at the Portland Hospital in central London.

It's same private hospital Meghan Markle and Prince Harry chose to welcome baby Archie, forgoing the royal tradition of using the Lindo Wing at St Mary's, where a night's stay is estimated to cost around 6,000 ($8,000) for a higher end birthing suite.

But the Lindo Wing is actually relatively modest compared to other places most moneyed people go when it's time to push.

From Michelin-starred meals to destination births, here's how the 0.1% give birth around the world.

Their hospitals stock Dom Perignon and serve patients lobsters and oysters

USA TODAY Sports

One of the most expensive hospitals in the world - let alone in the UK - to give birth in is London's private maternity hospital The Portland. Favoured by the likes of the Duchess of York, Victoria Beckham, Middle Eastern royals, Meghan Markle, and now Princess Eugenie, the hospital goes above and beyond to cater to their guests.

In a 2016 BBC documentary about the hospital, it was revealed that patients of The Portland could expect to be served lobsters and oysters - as well as crack open a bottle of champagne from their collection once their newborn arrived. The Portlands hotel services manager Paul Tuley said, We have a fantastic champagne selection too. Not every hospital stocks Dom Perignon.

Naturally, a visit to The Portland doesn't come cheap, with the BBC estimating that a stay could come to 29,000 ($39,500) - a number which could easily climb for those looking to really splash out. In fact, chief executive Janene Madden (who also gave birth there) told The Daily Mail she had seen someone spend over half a million [pounds] - over $658,500.

Michelin-starred eating plans

During pregnancy, mothers are keen to ensure their growing baby gets all the nutrients it needs - as well as sustenance for themselves after labour. In the case of Clinique des Grangettes, a luxury private hospital based in Geneva, this includes going one step further. Chef Alain Jennings, who earned Hotel Metropole in Paris its Michelin star, is the mastermind behind its dishes which are made from fresh products, which are of the highest quality and give most restaurants a run for their money.

Jennings told us: Everything is made in-house, absolutely everything! Even the dough for our pastries. We buy chickens from Bresse and fish from the lake. Today, for instance, I am preparing filet de perches, and they come from the lake. And we do manage to prepare a great number of menus."

He added: "I would even venture to say that our variety is even greater than in a restaurant. Every day, the patients have a choice between two different menus at lunch and supper. In one week that makes 28 different dishes. Even the vegetables are always different. That is a real challenge. Especially in winter.

Giving birth at Clinique des Grangettes isnt for those on a budget, as it can cost as much as $2,140 a night. The maternity wards, which were renovated in 2016, look more like hotel rooms with double beds and a terrace to sit out on. They also offer massages, mani-pedis and facials which can be booked to your room.

$5,100 a night deluxe hospital suites

Getty Images

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has long been a favourite of the Beverly Hills elite and while anybody can give birth there, not everybody can afford to stay in its deluxe hospital suite. The suite, which is more like a luxury home with two or three bedrooms and two bathrooms, is said to cost between $3,600 and $5,100 a night according to CNN Money.

According to CNN patients get a personal doula, three meals a day for two people, a hotel-style bathrobe and access to in-room pampering sessions, which come at an additional cost.

Stars that have been known to give birth there include Kim Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, Victoria Beckham and Kate Hudson (to name just a few.)

Destination births

Getty Images

Youve heard of destination weddings, but how about a destination birth?

When Angelina Jolie gave birth to her twins in 2008, she travelled out to the French Riviera to do it. Jolie and then husband Brad Pitt welcomed their twins Knox and Vivienne into the world at the Lenval Hospital in Nice, where an entire floor was reportedly sealed off for the couple.

The hospital also told The Telegraph that the windows in Jolie's hospital suite were (understandably) specially treated so that it was "totally impossible" for cameras to see into her room.

According to The Daily Mail, the Jolie-Pitt clan reportedly set up camp in the home of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen; a mansion which features 12 bedrooms, two helipads and a view of the Mediterranean.

VIP arrivals by helicopter

Getty Images

When Jolie and Pitt had their twins, they apparently chose not to risk the traffic and took to the skies instead. Reuters reported that Jolie arrived at the hospital by helicopter - and not just any helicopter. The Daily Mail claimed they had had hopped into a gold-painted helicopter owned by Paul Allen, whose home they were staying in, and allegedly had an army-trained pilot on 24-hour standby.

The outlet also claimed that Angelina travelled with two trained nurses, a midwife and her own gynaecologist.

Sold! Million dollar first baby photos

Getty Images

Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves all reportedly made upwards of $3 million for rights to their newborns pictures.

CNN reported that McConaughey and his wife model Camila Alves sold photos of their son Levi Alves for $3 million to OK! Magazine, with the proceeds benefiting their children-focused charity J.K. Livin Foundation. Jennifer Lopez doubled that figure when her photos of her twins Maximilian and Emme Muniz reportedly sold to People for $6 million.

Getty Images

However, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have reportedly made $23.6 million altogether selling first look photos of their children: Shiloh, Knox, Vivienne and Pax (who was adopted). The photos of their daughter Shiloh were reportedly sold to People for $4.1 million and Hello! for $3.5 million, Pax again to People for $2 million and then the most expensive reported baby pictures sold to date of their twins Knox and Vivienne which sold for $14 million to both Hello! And People.

The proceeds are said to have gone to various charities, including the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.

Luxury $1 million post-baby getaway vehicles

Getty Images

Beyonce and Jay-Z's car collection includes the $1 million vintage Rolls Royce Jay-Z gifted to Beyonce for her birthday and the $2 million Bugatti she gave him for his 41st birthday.

But on the day Blue Ivy was born the Carters chose to reportedly shell out $1 million on a custom Mercedes-Benz Sprinter Limousine to bring their first child home from the swish Lennox Hill Hospital.

Splash News/Senzati

The Daily Mail claimed that the Carters custom ride featured its own bathroom, which comes with a full on shower, sink and toilet, as well as a $150,000 sound system and WiFi.

Beyonce also reportedly requested cream and chestnut "hand stitched Italian leather seats". Depending on the configuration of the car, it can seat up to ten passengers - a necessity now that the Carters have added the twins Rumi and Sir to their clan.

Prada baby bags

SplashNews.com

In preparation for the new arrival, many people invest in a heavy-duty baby bag to carry around all the essentials. And like all other baby related paraphernalia these days, designer options abound. Jessica Alba was spotted carrying a $649 Jamah The Nanny Bag and Kourtney Kardashian toting around a nylon Prada diaper bag.I t's finally happening: Andre Aciman is releasing the sequel to Call Me By Your Name and it's hitting our shelves this autumn

Entitled, Find Me, the new novel will focus on Elio's father. Publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux revealed all the details in a statement.

"In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elios father Samuel, now divorced, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train leads to a relationship that changes Samis life definitively. Elio soon moves to Paris where he too has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a professor in northern New England with sons who are nearly grown, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return visit to Europe."

Timothee Chalamet stars in the film adaptation of Call Me By Your Name (Warner/Sony ) / Warner/Sony

Pressure for a sequel came after the huge success of Luca Guadagnino's Oscar winning adaptation of the book starring Timothee Chalamet as Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver.



Luckily, author Aciman revealed he was just as game for a sequel as his fans were. In a recent interview with Vulture, the author said: "The world of Call Me By Your Name never left me. Though I created the characters and was the author of their lives, what I never expected was that theyd end up teaching me things about intimacy and about love that I didnt quite think I knew until Id put them down on paper. The film made me realise that I wanted to be back with them and watch them over the years."

The novel will be released in the US on October 29, though UK fans will have to wait a little longer as a final drop is still TBC.

The movie sequel was confirmed by director Guadagnino last March. Speaking to USA Today the director divulged: Its gonna be a new movie, a different tone. Youre gonna see a lot of the East Coast of America theyre gonna go around the world.

The 47-year-old also confirmed that Chalamet and Hammer will reprise their roles in the currently unnamed follow up.A despicable robber left a taxi driver genuinely scared for his life after threatening him with a knife and demanded money but was unaware that the incident was caught on camera.

Ross Dawson took the 61-year-old drivers wallet and drivers ID during the terrifying attack in Romford in 2017.

Dashcam footage shows him demanding the driver turn off his engine before threatening him, saying turn your car off, cause Ill stick this in your neck.

Dawson, 32, told the man to empty your whole night's takings out now, even asking for small change, before fleeing on July 15.

Ross Dawson, 32, committed a series of robberies in Romford / Metropolitan Police

He was jailed for 35 years for a string of offences targeting young women and a woman aged 84 at Snaresbrook Crown Court on Friday.

Dawson was wanted on a recall to prison when the first robbery took place on July 4, also involving a cab driver.

Scotland Yard said he got into a car with a woman who he claimed was his pregnant wife, and asked the driver to stop because she felt sick.

He then demanded money from the driver before punching him in the face, holding a knife to his throat and trying to take his car key, Met Police said.

The "despicable" robber has been jailed for 35 years / Metropolitan Police

In the third robbery on July 22, an 84-year-old woman was in her car outside her home in Romford when Dawson approached her, the court was told.

He spun a similar story about a sick pregnant wife, asking for a lift to the hospital, which the pensioner agreed to, police said.

He then made the elderly woman stop before pushing her out of the car and fleeing. This incident was also caught on camera.

On August 3, he held a 30-year-old woman at knife point on her doorstep and demanded her valuables, Met Police said.

In one robbery he targeted an 84-year-old woman / Metropolitan Police

Police said he put her in a headlock, squeezing her neck until she blacked out, leaving her fearing for her life and screaming for help in the street.

Assistant Detective Sergeant Billy Baxter said: This is a despicable individual and whose violent crimes is some of the worst I have ever investigated.A man from Florida has pleaded guilty to sending pipe bombs to prominent critics of President Donald Trump in a wave of attacks that spread fear of political violence across the US.

Former stripper Cesar Sayoc, 57, sobbed as he entered the plea in New York.

Im extremely sorry, he said, adding that he never intended for the devices to explode. No one was harmed by the pipe bombs, some of which were sent to Bill and Hillary Clinton and CNN.

Sayoc could get life in prison when he is sentenced on September 12 on 65 counts, including using weapons of mass destruction and sending explosives with intent to kill.

Cesar Sayoc, 57, is shown in this courtroom sketch / REUTERS

Sayoc was accused of sending rudimentary bombs - none of which detonated - to 16 targets, including former Vice President Joe Biden, Bill and Hilary Clinton, several members of Congress, former President Barack Obama and actor Robert De Niro.

Devices were also mailed to CNN offices in New York and Atlanta.

The bombs began turning up weeks before the hotly contested midterms, contributing to an already tense political environment.

Sayoc was arrested in late October at a Florida auto parts store. He had been living in a van covered with Trump stickers and images of Trump opponents with crosshairs over their faces.

Cesar Sayoc enters his plea before US District Judge Jed Rakoff / REUTERS

On Thursday, he told the judge that he made objects designed to look like pipe bombs and filled them with explosive powder from fireworks.

The first of the bombs was discovered on October 22 in a mailbox at an estate in New York City's northern suburbs owned by the billionaire George Soros, a liberal political activist.

A device addressed to the Clintons was discovered the following day, followed a day later bombs found at the homes or offices of prominent Democrats.

Others targeted included California Senator Kamala Harris and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.A man has been arrested after five mosques in Birmingham were vandalised.

Another man was detained by members of the public on Friday but later released, police said.

Windows were smashed with a sledgehammer at mosques across the city, with six windows smashed at one Islamic Centre alone.

A probe involving counter-terrorism officers was launched on Thursday after the attacks, which came just a week after 50 Muslims were shot in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Police have now arrested a 34-year-old man from Perry Barr, and a 38-year-old man from Yardley.

A West Midlands Police statement said: Two Birmingham men have been arrested this afternoon after five mosques had their windows smashed yesterday morning.

A 34-year-old Perry Barr man handed himself into a Birmingham police station and was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage.

A 38-year-old Yardley man was also arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage this afternoon after being detained by members of the community. Both remain in custody this evening.

The investigation continues by West Midlands Police supported by West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit.

Boarded up windows at one of the mosques / PA

This is a significant step forward in our enquiries however the investigation continues into the motive for the incidents.

We are working extremely closely with mosques and local communities around the West Midlands and this will continue.

It remains incredibly important that we unite together against those who seek to create discord, uncertainty and fear.

The Yardley man, 38, was later released without charge and will face no further action.

A spokesman for the Witton Road Islamic Centre in Aston told the BBC that CCTV had captured a man smashing windows at around 1.30am.

"The whole of the front windows, about six, were smashed," he said.A London teacher named as one of the top 50 in her profession in the world said more needs to be done to show girls that science is for them.

Emma Russo, a science teacher at all-girls South Hampstead High School, was among three Britons selected in the longlist for this years Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize.

Ms Russo was praised for her efforts to encourage more girls to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

She was also lauded for her teaching techniques, which include using virtual reality headsets in lessons and setting up Skype calls with global scientists.

The 29-year-old runs Girls In Physics, an event held every term at Highgate School, where girls from across London meet women working in physics and engineering. Only 10 per cent of engineers in the UK are women, according to the Womens Engineering Society.

Ms Russo told the Standard that discussing gender parity would have a big impact. She added: Girls achieve highly, and are interested in the subjects, but often do not think it is their arena. So exposing them to people who look like them, and sound like them, and come from the same background in STEM careers has a big impact.

The winner of the award, who will be announced on Sunday at the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai, will receive a $1 million cash reward.T he air close to one of Londons busiest roads is so polluted with potentially dangerous particles that it has already breached annual legal limits less than three months into the year.

A monitoring station next to the six-lane Vauxhall Gyratory has recorded 36 days when concentrations of PM10 particles exceeded 50 micrograms per cubic metre. The legal limit under European and UK law is 35 days a year.

The monitoring station is also close to several major construction sites in Vauxhall and Nine Elms that are thought to have contributed to the high levels of dirt and dust.

City Hall said the breach is the first in London this year. Environmental campaigners said it was exceptionally bad news and highlighted a hidden form of pollution that is often overshadowed by media coverage of the nitrogen gases linked to diesel engines.

Cleaner buses have reduced levels of nitrogen dioxide in some parts of London, such as Putney High Street where legal limits were once broken in the first few days of each year, but particulate pollution is proving harder to bring under control.

Long-term exposure to PM10 particles has been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular disease and is thought to be particularly harmful to the elderly, children and people with pre-existing lung or heart conditions.

The breach was recorded by the London Air monitoring network run by researchers at Kings College London. Gary Fuller, senior air pollution scientist in the team, said: The fact that this event has happened so early in the year is a good indication that a lot more attention needs to be given to this form of pollution.T he governor of Londons highest-security prison is drawing up a weekly list of its top 10 most violent inmates in a bid to reduce gang conflict and other clashes within the jail.

Rob Davis, who is in charge of Belmarsh prison in south London, is distributing the list to his staff so that they can target the prisoners with monitoring and assistance.

Methods include providing psychological help and listening to any complaints about prison life, as well as confronting the inmates directly to question why they are being violent.

The prison holds offenders from 126 different London gangs, as well as terrorists and organised crime convicts. A prisons watchdog previously described it as under-prepared to deal with the dramatic increase of gang-affiliated offenders held in its cells.

Mr Davis said the prison is still suffering daily violence, but his methods are helping. Other improvements include the recruitment of an extra 120 guards and investment in mobile phone-jamming equipment, anti-drug scanners and body-worn cameras for staff.

Mr Davis told the Evening Standard: Rehabilitation is key. We have violent incidents every day, but we have good intelligence and are trying to move people around so they dont meet, he said. We also target the top 10 every week by publishing a list of the 10 people who have been involved in the most acts of violence.

We let them know that we are going to be picking up on what they are doing, and asking them why they are being violent. We talk to them and try to find ways to help them. It might be getting a psychologist to talk to them or dealing with a mental health problem.

Its not always easy, but it can work. Our top 10 changes regularly because of our success.

Mr Davis said that lists of other nominals who had frequent cell visits from other inmates and corruptors were also being drawn up.

He added that force was sometimes necessary to suppress violence but that the aim was to rely instead on inter-personal skills and staff developing friendly relationships with prisoners as a way of reducing conflict.

We have got to get their trust. If a prisoner puts in a complaint, we dont fob them off, we listen to them, he said. We treat people the same whatever they are in for. We are not here to punish people; we are here to rehabilitate.

He also praised Justice Secretary David Gauke and prisons minister Rory Stewart for pushing for investment and promoting an emphasis on rehabilitation.

Belmarsh opened in 1991 and contains a prison within a prison high-security unit that holds some of the countrys most dangerous inmates. It has an official capacity of 910 inmates.A bout 200 London faith leaders have been given security advice on how to protect mosques from New Zealand-style extremist attacks.

Met police officers and security experts addressed a City Hall conference last night amid concerns about an urgent need for enhanced vigilance, with six weeks until Ramadan.

The conference was organised by Mayor Sadiq Khan to provide reassurance in the wake of last Fridays attacks in Christchurch that killed 50. Enhanced police patrols around places of worship were launched earlier this week. There has also been a series of attacks on mosques in Birmingham.

Mr Khan said there was a growing threat from the far-Right that was not simply a passing trend or confined to a few deranged individuals. Mosque security specialists, Faith Associates, highlighted measures that could mitigate terror and hate attacks.

Chief Inspector Nick Stanley outlined the threat, while Superintendent Waheed Khan and Detective Inspector Kamal Patel talked about hate crime.

Speaking ahead of the conference, the Mayor said: Understandably, many Muslims in London and across the world are not only mourning the victims but also worried what this means for their own safety.

I want to reassure our Muslim community at this time. Experts including the Met police will provide advice to London mosque leaders in how to build secure capacity, share best practice and improve safety and security. Home Secretary Sajid Javid has announced a doubling of the annual places of worship security fund to 1.6 million to reassure anxious faith groups, adding: Our focus will be on helping those vulnerable to hate-fuelled attacks.

Today Mr Khan urged Mr Javid to release the cash immediately to enable mosques to prepare for the Islamic holy month, which starts on May 5. He said it was crucial to have a simple process that delivers resources swiftly to where they are most needed.

The 1.6 million will be available from next month. A further 5 million will be available over three years for security training.GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Meritage Hospitality Group Inc. (OTCQX: MHGU), one of the nations premier restaurant operators, today reported that it is appointing BDO USA, LLP (BDO) as its new independent certified public accounting firm.



Tracey A. Smith, VP/CFO, stated: "The Company acknowledges the services provided by Plante & Moran, LLP over the past 13 years. We welcome the opportunity to work with BDO going forward."

The former auditor's report on the Company's financial statements for fiscal years ended December 30, 2018 and December 31, 2017 did not contain an adverse opinion or a disclaimer of opinion, nor was it qualified or modified as to uncertainty, audit scope or accounting principles.

The decision to change independent auditors was recommended and approved by the audit committee of the board of directors of Meritage.

During the Company's two most recent fiscal years and the period subsequent to December 30, 2018, there were (i) no disagreements with the former auditors on any matter of accounting principles or practices, financial statement disclosure, or auditing scope or procedures, which disagreements, if not resolved to the satisfaction of the former auditors would have caused the former auditors to make reference to the subject matter of the disagreements in connection with its reports, and (ii) no reportable events of the type listed in Item 304(a)(1)(v) of SEC Regulation S-K or National Instrument 51-102.

Meritage Hospitality Group is one of the nations premier restaurant operators, with 319 restaurants in operation located in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Meritage is headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, operating with a workforce of approximately 10,000 employees. The Company has approximately 6.2 million (basic) common shares outstanding. The Companys public filings can be viewed at www.otcmarkets.com , under the stock symbol MHGU, or the Companys website www.meritagehospitality.com .

SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT

Certain information in this new release, particularly information regarding future economic performance and finances, and plans, expectations and objectives of management, constitutes forward-looking statements. Factors set forth in our Safe Harbor Statement, in addition to other possible factors not listed, could affect the Companys actual results and cause such results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements. Please review the Companys Safe Harbor Statement at http://www.meritagehospitality.com.

CONTACT:

Tracey A.Smith, VP/CFO

Meritage Hospitality Group Inc.

(616) 776-2600T wo men who were electrocuted and died on a railway in east London were likely on top of a moving freight train wagon before they died, police have said.

British Transport Police have confirmed a 27-year-old man from Clerkenwell and a 25-year-old man from Aberystwyth died after suffering serious electrical burns between Hackney Wick and Stratford early Thursday morning.

Police said it is likely the two men came in contact with overhead power lines while they were on top of the train.

The two locations were on the same stretch of track on the Overground line between the two stops, close to the London Stadium

The incident occurred on train tracks in east London. (Alamy ) / Alamy

Detective Sergeant David Taylor from British Transport Police, said: The initial evidence that weve been able to gather suggests that both men were on top of a moving freight train wagon, when they came into contact with the overhead power lines.

Our investigation will continue to examine how and why they came to be on top of this train although there is nothing to indicate that graffiti was involved.

Police said they are now satisfied they know their identities and their families have been informed.C abinet minister Amber Rudd has penned a letter about the continued closure of Hastings Pier which appears to be a thinly-veiled assault on Theresa May's Brexit strategy.

After the scheduled Brexit date of March 29 was delayed amid continued government chaos, Hastings and Rye MP Ms Rudd shared a letter to constituents packed with apparent Brexit analogies.

The work and pensions secretary said: "Like you, I am incredibly disappointed that Hastings Pier would not be open for the end of March as originally planned.

"I understand the extended closure comes as a result of fresh structural damage. Further repairs are now, as I understand, being conducted.

"Nonetheless, those assurances must be backed up with actions.

"I urge the owner of Hastings Pier to conduct these repairs as a priority so that the pier may open as soon as possible. Our town cannot keep experiencing delay after delay."

Hastings Pier won't be reopening at the end of March 'as originally planned' / Gareth Fuller/PA

Ms Rudd, who was reappointed to the Cabinet by Mrs May in November, added: "There must also be much improved communication with the Hastings community from the owner."

HuffPost political editor Paul Waugh said Ms Rudd had "won Brexit subtweet of the year", while her Twitter followers lined up to congratulate the Remain-backing MP on her prose.

Amber Rudd pictured leaving Parliament on Wednesday / Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

Natasha Michaels said: "Hilarious. Well done Amber." David Price went even further, saying: "You deserve a pierage for that Ms Rudd. Most amusing."T heresa May has urged MPs to agree on a Brexit deal after EU leaders allowed the UK to delay the process.

Britain has been offered a plan which would move its departure from March 29 until May 22, provided MPs approve the Prime Minister's withdrawal agreement next week.

If the deal is rejected in its third "meaningful vote" in the Commons, the UK would be given until April 12 to come to the European Council with its proposals for the way forward.

Addressing the EU's decision on Thursday night, Mrs May told a conference: "What the decision today underlines is the importance of the House of Commons passing a Brexit deal next week so that we can bring an end to the uncertainty and leave in a smooth and orderly manner.

Brexit delay: Theresa May speaks during a media conference at the EU summit in Brussels / AP

"Tomorrow morning I will be returning to the UK and working hard to build support for getting the deal through."

Mrs May added: "I know MPs on all sides of the debate have passionate views and I respect those different positions.

European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker hold a joint news conference during an EU leaders summit / REUTERS

"Last night I expressed my frustrations and I know that MPs are frustrated too - they have difficult jobs to do.

"I hope we can all agree that we are now at the moment of decision and I will make every effort to make sure we can leave with a deal and move our country forward."

Prime Minister will not revoke Article 50, despite petition

Speaking at a conference following Thursday's summit, European Council President Donald Tusk said that the response to Britain's request for an extension to the Article 50 withdrawal process was agreed "unanimously".

Under pressure: Theresa May / PA

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said: "Since the day of the referendum the position of the 27 members of the European Commission has been united and unequivocal.

"We have worked tirelessly to negotiate the Withdrawal Agreement. We have done everything we could to get it over the finishing line.

"We were asked for clarifications in December, we gave it to them. We were asked for assurances in January, we gave it to them.

Brexit delay confirmed: European Council President Donald Tusk speaks during a conference at an EU summit in Brussels / AP

"I was asked for further reassurances last Monday in Strasbourg, notably with regard to the backstop, I gave it to them.

"So I have to welcome that today, the 27 leaders endorsed the legally binding clarifications and assurances that Prime Minister May and I agreed in Strasbourg.

"This closes and completes the full package. There is no more that we can have."

Theresa May greets Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, at a summit in Brussels on Thursday / EPA

The chances of Mrs Mays deal being backed by Parliament have become increasingly unlikely after she angered MPs by blaming them for doing everything possible to avoid making a choice on Brexit in a public address on Wednesday night.

Mrs May had earlier made the case for a June 30 extension to the Article 30 withdrawal process in a 90-minute presentation to the leaders of the other EU states.

The Prime Minister was pressed on what she will do if MPs reject her deal for a third time - having voted it down by a margin of 230 in January and 149 last week - but did not commit herself to a Plan B.Friday March 22

Theresa May cuts short her attendance at the European Council summit in Brussels to return to the UK and embark on a drive to win over at least 75 MPs to her Brexit plan.

Saturday March 23

Large crowds of opponents of Brexit are expected to throng the streets of London for a Put It To The People march demanding a second referendum.

Monday March 25

Parliament debates an amendable Government motion on the Brexit deal, which gives MPs a chance to put their favoured outcomes to a vote. Mrs May could table secondary legislation which must go through the Commons and Lords by Friday to remove the date of March 29 from Brexit legislation.

Mrs May's effective deputy David Lidington has promised to introduce a process for MPs to debate potential Brexit outcomes over the following two weeks.

Tuesday March 26

Possible date for the third "meaningful vote" - known in Westminster as MV3 - on Mrs May's Withdrawal Agreement. Downing Street says that no date has yet been fixed for the vote, which must come by the end of the week.

Wednesday March 27

MPs led by Sir Oliver Letwin hope to seize control of parliamentary time to force votes on Brexit options.

Friday March 29

No longer Brexit day. Leave-backing walkers who have taken part in the Brexit Betrayal march from Sunderland are due to arrive in London.

April 11

Final date for the UK to take steps to enable European Parliament elections to take place.

April 12

If Mrs May has failed to secure Commons support for her Withdrawal Agreement, this is the final day on which the UK can set out its next steps to the European Council, if it wishes to be granted a longer extension. If it does not do so, the UK would leave the EU without a deal.

May 22

If the Commons has approved Mrs May's deal, the UK formally leaves the European Union on this date with a Withdrawal Agreement, entering a transition period during which it will continue to observe EU laws but have no representation in EU institutions.

May 23 to 26

European Parliament elections take place across the EU, with or without the UK.

July 1

The first session of the new European Parliament, whose first task is to confirm a new commission and president.

December 31, 2020

If the UK has left with a deal, this will be the end of the transition period. London and Brussels have both said they hope to have an agreement on future trade and security relations completed by this point.T heresa May missed an opportunity to fix her Brexit deal and unite Parliament behind her plans in her recent trip to Brussels, according to the DUP's deputy leader.

Nigel Dodds delivered a fresh blow to the PM as he indicated his party will not be swayed to back her Withdrawal Agreement.

He said: "The Prime Minister missed an opportunity at the EU Council to put forward proposals which could have improved the prospects of an acceptable Withdrawal Agreement and help unite the country."

In regards to the agreement he said "nothing has changed", calling this "failure" from Mrs May "inexcusable".

Nigel Dodds has hit out at Mrs May's actions in Brussels / REUTERS

He said: "That failure is all the more disappointing and inexcusable given the clear divisions and arguments which became evident amongst EU member states when faced with outcomes they don't like."

"Nothing has changed as far as the Withdrawal Agreement is concerned. We will not accept any deal which poses a long-term risk to the constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom."

His comments come after the EU agreed to a short extension to Article 50 to at least temporarily avert a no-deal Brexit on March 29.

Pressure: Theresa May in Downing Street today after being driven back from RAF Northolt in the early hours following the summit / REUTERS

Mrs May left the British residence in Brussels to return to the UK on Friday morning to try and persuade MPs to back her deal.

This followed EU leaders accusing her of not having an adequate plan in place if MPs reject her deal once again.

A compromise 'flextension period' was agreed to delay Brexit until May 22 should her deal be passed by Parliament, though a change of the mood in the Commons does not appear to have happened and a date for a third vote has not been set.

European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker hold a joint news conference during an EU leaders summit / REUTERS

If MPs reject the deal for a third time the UK will have until April 12 to set out its next steps, with the EU pushing for further clarity from the Government and Parliament.

A longer extension will only be on offer if Britain takes part in European Parliament elections in May, which has been described as a "farce" and is not something the Government wants to allow.

Nigel Evans, the pro-Brexit executive secretary of the 1922 Committee, said Mrs May had made a "big error" in agreeing to a delay, adding pointedly she needed to consider what would be her legacy if she failed to deliver Brexit.

"It has become a bit of a farce," he told BBC News.

German chancellor Angela Merkel has welcomed the decision to extend Article 50 / Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters

EU leaders have said that the delay though agreed is only short and Britain needs to tell the bloc what it wants as soon as possible.

Asked if the decision to delay Brexit had allowed Mrs May to "kick the can further down the road", European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said: "The road the can has in perspective is a very short one."

German chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the decision on a Brexit delay but reiterated that time was of the essence.

The German chancellor told a press conference at the end of the Brussels summit: "We have for the time being prevented a no-deal Brexit for the 29th.

"But these are very short periods of time, so Britain will have to make clear yet again which path it wishes to pursue.

"With the debate we had yesterday night, we proved yet again that what we have done for the past two years will continue to apply, because as 27 member states, we work together and act together."

At the end of a two-day summit in Brussels, European Council president Donald Tusk said that "the fate of Brexit is in the hands of our British friends."T heresa May has indicated that she may not bring her Brexit deal back to the Commons for a vote next week if there is not enough support for it.

In a letter to MPs, she said: "If it appears that there is not sufficient support to bring the deal back next week, or the House rejects it again, we can ask for another extension before 12 April."

She then laid out the Commons' four choices and reiterated that revoking Article 50 would "betray the result of the referendum."

The letter came just days ahead of a possible third vote on Mrs May's withdrawal agreement, which had been predicted to fail.

Pressure: Theresa May in Downing Street today after being driven back from RAF Northolt in the early hours following the summit / REUTERS

Mrs May wrote: "The Council's decisions mean we have a clear choice: 1. We can revoke Article 50 - but that would be to betray the result of the referendum.

"2. We can leave with no deal on 12 April - but the House has previously said this is not something it will support.

"3. If it appears that there is not sufficient support to bring the deal back next week, or the House rejects it again, we can ask for another extension before 12 April - but that will involve holding European Parliament elections.

"4. If it appears that there is sufficient support and the Speaker permits it, we can bring the deal back next week and if it is approved we can leave on 22 May."

Mrs May also offered to hold talks on Brexit with any MPs who would like them, as she thanked those who have supported her deal in previous votes.

Theresa May walks away after holding her midnight press conference / AFP/Getty Images

The PM said: "Finally I want to say something about my statement on Wednesday night, which a number of colleagues have raised concerns about.

"I expressed my frustration with our failure to take a decision, but I know that many of you are frustrated too.

"You have a difficult job to do and it was not my intention to make it any more difficult. People on all sides of the debate hold passionate views and I respect those differences.

"I would like to thank all of those colleagues that have supported the deal so far and also those that have taken the time to meet me to discuss their concerns.

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

"I hope we can all agree that we are now at the moment of decision. If you would like to speak to me over the coming days as Parliament prepares to take momentous decisions, please contact my office."

The letter came on the eve of a People's Vote march which was expected to attract hundreds of thousands of people to central London.

It also followed a move by ministers to try to head off an attempt by MPs to seize control of Commons business in a bid to secure a "softer" Brexit.

A cross-party group of pro-EU MPs claimed they had the numbers to force a series of "indicative votes" on alternatives to Mrs May's Brexit deal.

However, Business Secretary Greg Clark said the Government was prepared to enable Parliament to express a view on the various options if Mrs May's deal is rejected by the Commons for a third time next week.

Defeat for the Government on Monday on the amendment - tabled by former ministers Sir Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve and Labour MP Hilary Benn - would be a further humiliation for Mrs May.

Demonstrators with banners during the People's Vote march last year / EPA

The Prime Minister was already facing a furious backlash from Tory Brexiteers after she agreed a delay to Brexit with EU leaders in Brussels despite having repeatedly promised Britain would leave on March 29.

If the amendment is passed, it would pave the way for a series of "indicative votes" in the House on Wednesday, effectively taking control of the Brexit process out of the hands of the Government.

Sir Oliver said: "We believe that we have the numbers to pass the amendment on Monday and thereby guarantee indicative votes on Wednesday."

May's de facto deputy David Lidington speaking in the House of Commons / PA

However Mr Clark pointed to a commitment by David Lidington, Mrs May's de facto deputy, to "facilitate" Parliament in expressing its view if she loses the third "meaningful vote" on her deal.

"The Government will provide that so there is no reason why the Government should be forced to do something which it is committed to do anyway," he told the BBC.

Theresa May greets Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, at a summit in Brussels on Thursday / EPA

Asked if that meant Mrs May would give MPs indicative votes on the way forward, he said: "Yes."

The prospect however infuriated Brexiteers who fear it could see the Commons pivot towards a "softer" Norway-style deal.

Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the European Research Group, tweeted: "National humiliation is imminent through these 'indicative votes'."

In a further setback for the Prime Minister, the DUP - whose support will be crucial if the Government is to win the vote on her deal - indicated they would not support her.

Deputy leader Nigel Dodds said she had failed to secure any change to the Northern Ireland backstop - which the the party bitterly opposes - at the summit in Brussels.

"Nothing has changed as far as the Withdrawal Agreement is concerned. We will not accept any deal which poses a long-term risk to the constitutional and economic integrity of the United Kingdom," he said.

Mrs May returned to London with her party in disarray and MPs openly speculating that she will be forced to quit.

Under the plan set out at the EU summit, leaders agreed to extend Brexit to May 22 if Mrs May can finally get MPs to back her deal in a third Commons "meaningful" vote.

However, if she fails the UK will have to set out an alternative way forward by April 12, which could mean a much longer delay - with the UK required to hold elections to the European Parliament - or leaving without a deal at all.

Following defeats by 230 votes in January and 149 votes last week, both pro-EU MPs and Brexiteers warned that she was heading for another heavy reverse.

Former education secretary Nicky Morgan said "there is no doubt" Conservative MPs had made clear they wanted her to go.

"If the third meaningful vote isn't approved, I think that makes her position very difficult," she said.

Nigel Evans, the pro-Brexit executive secretary of the backbench 1922 Committee, said "a lot of people think it is not going to be long now before she does leave Downing Street".

Backbencher Steve Double said the next week would be a "defining moment" for her premiership and urged her to consider her position."I think it is quite clear that she is not leading her party. She is isolated, sadly, from a majority of the parliamentary party now," he said.

"We need to find a way forward and I think that requires new leadership."

However Tory grandee Ken Clarke warned that a Conservative leadership contest at such a crucial moment would be highly damaging.

"The world would finally decide that the British and their political system had gone mad if we all broke off to have six weeks of a bloody leadership campaign," he told BBC Radio 4's The World At One.

Earlier, aides confirmed Thursday's agreement meant a no-deal Brexit was no longer a possibility on March 29, but stressed that it remained on the table if MPs have not approved the Withdrawal Agreement by April 12.

The format increases pressure on Leave-backing MPs to row in behind Mrs May's deal, for fear that if it falls, the UK could find itself electing new MEPs and remaining for months or years within the EU.

Downing Street was unable to say on which day the Government would seek to bring back the Withdrawal Agreement for a third "meaningful vote" - known in Westminster as MV3.D onald Tusk has reignited his previous verbal attack on Brexit leaders, saying there was a lot of space in hell for those who promoted the UK-EU split without a plan.

The European Council presidents remarks came after seven hours of negotiations on Thursday over whether to grant Britain an extension to Article 50.

Mr Tusk was asked about comments he made last month in which he said he had been "wondering what the special place in hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan with how to carry it out safely".

After announcing that the UK politicians would have more time to agree on a withdrawal plan, he was quizzed about whether this "special place" should be extended to MPs who may vote against the a deal put to the Commons next week.

"According to our pope, hell is still empty. It means there is a lot of space," he replied.

EU agrees to delay Brexit if UK Parliament approve a deal

He was speaking alongside European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker after plans to push back Britain's departure from the European Union were approved.

Closing the conference in which they confirmed the delay, Mr Juncker told those gathered: "Don't go to hell!"

Britain has been offered a plan which would move its departure from March 29 until May 22, provided MPs approve the Prime Minister's withdrawal agreement next week.

If the deal is rejected in its third "meaningful vote" in the Commons, the UK would be given until April 12 to come to the European Council with its proposals for the way forward.I llusionist Uri Geller has vowed to stop the Brexit process telepathically.

In an open letter to Theresa May, the Israeli-British TV personality said he will not allow her to lead Britain out of the European Union.

He said he felt "psychically and very strongly" that most Britons were anti-Brexit.

He wrote: "I love you very much but I will not allow you to lead Britain into Brexit.

"As much as I admire you, I will stop you telepathically from doing this - and believe me I am capable of executing it.

"Before I take this drastic course of action, I appeal to you to stop the process immediately while you still have a chance."

Mr Geller, who is currently in Israel, used to live in Sonning, which lies in the Prime Minister's Maidenhead constituency.

Uri Geller has written an open letter to Theresa May. / AFP/Getty Images

In his letter, he said he had known the now-PM for 21 years and that she had visited his home.

He added: "Three years before you became Prime Minister, I predicted your victory when I showed you Winston Churchill's spoon on my Cadillac, which I asked you to touch."

He also claimed he is using the power of his mind to ensure that "Jeremy Corbyn never gets the keys to Number 10 Downing Street".

"I will ensure that they bend out of all proportion to ensure that he never takes up residence there," he wrote.

Geller rose to prominence in the 1970s with an act based around his apparent psychic powers and telepathy skills, which were even tested by the CIA.

He is perhaps best known for his trademark spoon-bending trick.T heresa May today faced multiple calls to resign from Tory Right-wingers amid signs her days as Prime Minister are numbered.

Steve Double called for new leadership and Michael Fabricant demanded: We need a Churchill, not a Chamberlain. MP Andrea Jenkyns tweeted: The Cabinet and Chief Whip need to tell her to resign.

The Prime Minister left the EU summit in Brussels early this morning to return to No 10 to launch a desperate attempt to patch up relations with her MPs and ministers at the end of a week of contradictions and misjudgments.

Chief Whip Julian Smith was seen going into No 10 this morning as it was revealed he branded as appalling her TV statement on Wednesday night attacking Parliament and blamed it for wrecking delicate negotiations that might have persuaded dozens of Labour MPs to back her deal.

Theresa May leaves Brussels / PA

Perhaps a fatal misstep was to raise hopes among the European Research Group of Tory Brexiteers that she would support no deal, only to do a U-turn in the early hours by saying she would let MPs decide how to proceed if her deal falls.

Eurosceptic MP Marcus Fysh said: Its time for the Cabinet to ask her to think about whether she is the right person for this job. Her stance suggests she is not standing up for Britain in these negotiations.

In key developments:

Downing Street was unable to say when the third meaningful vote on Mrs Mays deal would take place, although the Mrs Mays allies were hoping to put it to MPs next week. Ministers said privately the deal is doomed.

Senior MPs in the cross-party group that aims to take control of the Brexit process and identify a Plan B are going to meet chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier in Brussels on Monday, the Evening Standard has learned. They will tell him that the Commons is now ready and able to deliver a stable Brexit plan independently of Mrs May.

Ministers won a fight by making Mrs May allow a free vote in indicative votes on alternative plans. It was announced by Brexit Minister Kwasi Kwarteng. MPs now plan a unique multiple choice vote next Wednesday.

Two Labour sources have told the Standard that 50 of Jeremy Corbyns MPs were willing to break ranks to prevent no deal by passing Mrs Mays withdrawal plan, only to walk away when they saw her TV address. Chief Whip Mr Smith is said to have complained angrily of Mrs May: She just wont listen to us.

Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers, was bombarded with messages from MPs calling for her to go. It was reported that he warned Mrs May on Monday that pressure was building for her to set a date to stand down.

Theresa May was dubbed 'evasive' by EU leaders over her Brexit strategy / PA

Sir Oliver Letwin, architect of the cross-party bid to seize the Commons agenda and pass a better Brexit plan, went into the Cabinet Office this afternoon for talks with David Lidington, Mrs Mays de facto deputy.

Responding to the fury about Mrs Mays TV broadcast, Business Secretary Greg Clark admitted it was a mistake.

He told the BBC: It clearly was not a great success. I dont think it was helpful in resolving the matter. But none of us is infallible. Prime Ministers sometimes dont get the tone quite right.

In a sign of the concern sweeping Westminster about the Prime Ministers recent judgments, former attorney general Dominic Grieve appealed to the Cabinet to intervene to ensure she does not try to crash Britain out of the EU next Friday.

He told the Standard: Senior ministers need to show some appreciation of the magnitude of this crisis. We are within seven days of crashing out of the European Union without a deal, which many of them have stated would be a catastrophe. What steps are open to prevent this and what are they going to do about it?

Former Tory minister Nick Boles said Mrs May should consider deploying Mr Lidington to oversee indicative votes. If the PM finds it difficult to work constructively with MPs on alternative deals, Mr Lidington is someone whom everyone trusts and respects, he said.

Yesterday EU leaders rejected Mrs Mays plea for a three-month postponement of Brexit and instructed her she could have until May 22 if her deal passes, but only until April 12 if she is defeated a third time.

Pressure: Theresa May in Downing Street today after being driven back from RAF Northolt in the early hours following the summit / REUTERS

After Mrs May spoke to leaders, French President Emmanuel Macron was said to have turned to the other leaders and said that before hearing her pitch he thought the chances of her getting the deal through parliament next week were only 10 per cent. After listening to her, I now think five per cent, said Mr Macron, according to Politico. Donald Tusk, the European Council President, grimaced and said it sounded too optimistic.

This morning Belgiums Prime Minister Charles Michel said: This is perhaps the last chance for Britain to say what it wants for the future.

At a press conference after midnight, Mrs May tried to mend fences with MPs upset by her TV broadcast on Wednesday. Last night I expressed my frustration, she said. I know that MPs are frustrated too. They have difficult jobs to do.M Ps have devised a unique way of voting at Westminster in a bid to identify a Plan B for Brexit.

Mrs Mays de facto deputy, David Lidington, is being seen as a trusted compere for the exercise which has been designed to cut through the squabbling and rivalry between backers of different ideas.

Under the plan MPs will stage a multiple choice exam on Wednesday evening by adapting deferred divisions, which use paper forms rather than have MPs squeeze through the division lobbies.

The new plans - which could include softer Brexits like a Norway deal, leaving on no-deal terms and scrapping Brexit - would be proposed in motions and selected by the Speaker if they commanded cross-party backing.

Sir Oliver Letwin is spearheading the exercise that will see MPs carry out a 'multiple choice exam' / Getty Images

Crucially, the paper voting would allow votes on all the motions to be counted simultaneously, thus preventing MPs from using the last man standing strategy to try to knockout rival ideas and force their backers to rally round lone plan.

Oliver Letwin, the architect of the plan, told the Standard: The hope is that people will vote for what they can tolerate, and not just their own favourite scheme. The important thing is for the House to discover where there is a plan that can attract a majority behind it.

Mr Letwin, who backs a close trading relationship dubbed Common Market 2.0, said: I dont think there is a runaway favourite. Therefore the question is whether something can get across the line. I think the most likely thing to receive a majority is a Norway-plus arrangement, but its by no means a slam-dunk.English French

MONTREAL, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gildan Activewear Inc. (GIL: TSX and NYSE) announced that Rhodri J. Harries, Executive Vice-President, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer will participate in an interactive discussion at the CIBC 22nd Annual Retail & Consumer Conference held in Toronto, Ontario, on Wednesday, March 27th, 2019. The presentation time has been changed to 9:15 AM ET from the previously announced time of 1:45 PM ET. The live audio webcast of the interactive discussion can be accessed at http://www.gildancorp.com/events and will be available for 30 days subsequent to the conference at the same link.



About Gildan

Gildan is a leading manufacturer of everyday basic apparel which markets its products in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, under a diversified portfolio of Company-owned brands, including Gildan, American Apparel, Comfort Colors, Gildan Hammer, Gold Toe, Anvil, Alstyle, Secret, Silks, Kushyfoot, Secret Silky, Therapy Plus, Peds and MediPeds, and under the Under Armour brand through a sock licensing agreement providing exclusive distribution rights in the United States and Canada. Our product offering includes activewear, underwear, socks, hosiery, and legwear products sold to a broad range of customers, including wholesale distributors, screenprinters or embellishers, as well as to retailers that sell to consumers through their physical stores and/or e-commerce platforms. In addition, we sell directly to consumers through our own direct-to-consumer platforms.

Gildan owns and operates vertically integrated, large-scale manufacturing facilities which are primarily located in Central America, the Caribbean Basin, North America, and Bangladesh. With over 50,000 employees worldwide Gildan operates with a strong commitment to industry-leading labour and environmental practices throughout its supply chain in accordance with its comprehensive Genuine Responsibility program embedded in the Company's long-term business strategy. More information about the Company and its corporate citizenship practices and initiatives can be found at www.gildancorp.com and www.genuineresponsibility.com , respectively.A petition calling for Brexit to be scrapped has amassed more than 3.6 million signatures, with numbers soaring in the highest sign-up rate on record.

When questioned in Brussels on whether she thought the public's view had shifted towards revoking Article 50, Theresa May said she will not countenance revoking Article 50.

The online petition website has crashed several time as the call for Article 50 to be revoked before the UK leaves the EU gathered momentum.

Shortly before 9am today the petition had hit 2.6m. At 11.55am it had reached 2,971,394 and after 1pm it had exceeded the three million mark.

However, the Prime Minister ruled out halting the Brexit process, saying: I do not believe that we should be revoking Article 50.

She told reporters in Brussels on Thursday: If you look back to what happened in the referendum, we saw the biggest democratic exercise in our history.

The Prime Minister said "its our duty as a Government and as a Parliament to deliver on that vote. / AFP/Getty Images

And there was a clear result that we should leave the European Union.

We said heres the vote, what is your decision, and we will deliver on it.

And I believe its our duty as a Government and as a Parliament to deliver on that vote.

The petition on the Parliament website quickly gained support in the wake of the Prime Ministers speech on Wednesday night and Revoke Article 50 began trending on Twitter - with the backing of dozens of high-profile remain celebrities.

Petition calling for Theresa May to cancel Brexit reaches three million signatures

The Petitions Committee said nearly 2,000 signatures were coming in every minute during lunchtime on Thursday with the website crashing from unprecedented numbers of visits.

When asked for Theresa May's view on the petition, a No 10 spokeswoman said Mrs May worried failing to deliver Brexit would cause "potentially irreparable damage to public trust".

She said: "The Prime Minister has long been clear that failing to deliver on the referendum result would be a failure of our democracy and something she couldn't countenance.

"The Prime Minister has said many times she will not countenance revoking Article 50."

In her Downing Street statement, Mrs May blamed MPs for failing to implement the result of the 2016 EU referendum and told frustrated voters: "I am on your side."

In her Downing Street Statement Theresa May blamed MPs for failing to deliver on referendum result. / Toby Melville/Reuters

The petition is the third most popular to be submitted to the Parliament website, surpassing the 100,000-signature threshold needed for it to be debated in Parliament.

A 2016 petition calling for a second EU referendum should the winning vote and turnout not reach a certain threshold has received the most signatories to date, at almost 4.2 million.

By contrast, the most popular pro-Brexit petition on the Parliament website, which calls on the Government to "leave the EU without a deal in March 2019", had received almost 375,000 signatories by Thursday afternoon.

Data from the petitions website shows 1,261,360 signatories claim to be from the UK, followed by 10,560 from France, 5,950 from Spain and 4,660 from Germany.

The constituencies with the highest number of sign-ups are Bristol West, Hornsey and Wood Green in London and Brighton Pavilion.

Celebrities and MPs have tweeted their support for Parliament to revoke the Treaty of Lisbon clause that deals with leaving the EU.

Hugh Grant is among the famous figures urging their followers to sign the petition. / Dave Benett/Getty Images for Lac

Famous figures including actors Hugh Grant and Jennifer Saunders, TV presenter and author Caitlin Moran, physicist Brian Cox and former Labour press chief Alastair Campbell all urged their followers on social media to sign the petition.

Alongside the link, Grant wrote: "I've signed. And it looks like every sane person in the country is signing too. National emergency."

A House of Commons spokesman said: "We know that the petitions website has been experiencing problems due to the number of people using the site.

"This is a mixture of people signing petitions and refreshing the site to see changes to the number of signatures.

"The majority of people are now able to use the website and we and the Government Digital Service are working to fix any outstanding problems as soon as possible."P rimary school pupils are spouting far-Right racist views in a sign of the growing extremist threat in Britain, the head of the Governments counter-extremism commission warned today.

Sara Khan said children were echoing the hateful ideas of their parents and that similar indoctrination was also taking place in Islamist households.

She added that the trend was posing a significant challenge for society and suggested that the family courts  which have already taken children into care to protect them from Islamists at home  should be more alert to the problem of young people being brainwashed by far-Right parents.

Her comments came in an interview with the Evening Standard in which Ms Khan also warned that the country is living in an era of extremism that is threatening democracy.

She said the threat was being fuelled by a new breed of slick, professionalised, intellectualised extremists who were using social media and other methods to spread their toxic ideas.

The threats posed by the far-Right, Islamists, anti-Semites and hard-Left radicalisers were all growing as a result, with a major whole-society push back needed in response.

The warning from Ms Khan, who met security minister Ben Wallace this week to discuss the far-Right threat, comes in the wake of the New Zealand mosques massacre and a spate of foiled terror plots here.

There have also been a number of hate crime incidents including a suspected far-Right stabbing in Stanwell, near Heathrow, and Islamophobic abuse directed at the Finsbury Park imam Mohammed Mahmoud as he returned home from an inclusion event on Monday.

Ms Khan, who has run the Governments Commission on Countering Extremism since it was set up last year, said she had been shocked to hear about Mr Mahmoud being abused by a bus passenger and then spat at by a cyclist.

Her starkest warning, however, was on the growing far-Right threat and evidence of children being indoctrinated by their parents.

Ive come across teachers and youth workers telling me how young primary age children are spouting far-Right, racist, xenophobic points of view, coming from their parents, she said. I hear it from the other side, from people providing support to head teachers dealing with parents with Islamist extreme views. I dont think people fully appreciate the scale of that.

She added: Early intervention is so critical when it comes to preventing extremism. Ive seen first hand that if you deal with people showing the early signs, it is much easier than when they become hardened.

I wonder if theres enough being looked into with far-Right extremism and whether we are recognising the fact that there will be some children in our country who are without a doubt being radicalised by their parents and whether the family courts are taking the same level of interest in recognising that.

On the wider extremism threat in Britain, Ms Khan said: We are living in an era of extremism. From what Im seeing of it on the far-Right, with Islamist extremism, they are both on the rise. There are also the hard-Left, were also looking at that, and speaking to Sikhs and other faith groups concerned about rising extremism in their community.

Ive been going up and down the country and to lots of parts of London and Im shocked at the experiences people are telling me about extremism at a local level and the harm its having to individuals, to particular groups, to local economies, businesses, community cohesion, to our wider democracy. Ms Khan said her commission would publish a snapshot assessment of the state of extremism later this year and was also commissioning research papers into the problem as part of its work to find solutions.

She added that more help was needed for those trying to stand up to extremism. They are not getting the support they need, Ms Khan said. They are being targeted by extremists, they lack funding and resources. That upsets me.R aheem Sterling paid touching tribute during England's match against Czech Republic on Friday to a Crystal Palace youth player who died from leukaemia.

Damary Dawkins, 13, a member of Crystal Palaces elite development squad, was diagnosed with very rare acute lymphoblastic leukaemia aged nine.

Damary died on Sunday after relapsing twice following a transplant.

Raheem Sterling's touching tribute at the Euro 2020 qualifier / REUTERS

After Sterling's second goal in the Euro 2020 qualifying campaign on Friday he celebrated by lifting up his shirt, showing a shirt underneath that featured a picture of himself with Damary.

Asked about the tribute after the match, Sterling said: "Damary was a kid that I was trying to help. We thought we found a donor and sadly it didn't match.

"I thought that I would do something for his family to have a smile about really."

Star supporter: Raheem Sterling visiting Damary Dawkins / Graham Chadwick/Daily Mail" Wellbeing dogs in schools are helping make a difference to stressful classroom environments, education secretary Damian Hinds said.

Speaking at a wellbeing conference in Westminster Abbey, Mr Hinds said that dogs can be "really uplifting", particularly for children with different ways of expressing themselves.

The education secretary spoke in support of the University of Buckingham's vice-chancellor, Sir Anthony Seldon, who suggested every school in the UK should have a dog.

Sir Anthony said a school dog is a powerfully cost-effective way of helping children feel more secure at schools.

Dogs can be a "powerfully cost-effective way of helping children feel more secure at schools. / AFP/Getty Images

The quickest and biggest hit that we can make to improve mental health in our schools and to make them feel safe for children, is to have at least one dog in every single school in the country.

Because children can relate to animals when they are hurt and anxious and sad in a way that they cant always with human beings.

The evidence is very clear that it works and every single school, primary, secondary, special  should have dogs," he added.

Its hard to think of an easier, quicker benefit.

The University of Buckinghams Ultimate Wellbeing in Education Conference held at Westminster Abby on Thursday examined how to respond to the stresses and anxieties facing young people.

Mr Hinds told the conference that the relentless presence of social media made growing up more pressurised as teenagers compare their own experiences with perfect lives on social media.

Damian Hinds praised the Evening Standard for its long-standing campaign to raise awareness of FGM / Stefan Rousseau/PA

He said that his visits to schools showed how wellbeing dogs were becoming more common in the classroom.

This is one of those things that wasnt around when I was at school.

I hadnt really realised the incidence of it until I was education secretary.

First I was a bit surprised, but actually its a great thing.

For the kids, it can be really uplifting, particularly those that have different ways of expressing themselves and coming out of themselves, and the dog or the pets can really help.T he Irish justice minister said police are investigating a link between a suspicious package found at a post depot in Ireland, and the four parcel bombs detected in London and Glasgow earlier this month.

Staff working in the An Post sorting office in Limerick were evacuated following the discovery of a suspicious package around 6am on Friday.

An army bomb squad was deployed to the scene and gardai are now investigating the post stamp similarities to the previously uncovered letter bombs.

A group calling itself the IRA claimed responsibility for four devices that were sent to the UK in earlier in March, adding that a fifth parcel had not yet been found.

IEDs found at London transport hubs 1 /11 IEDs found at London transport hubs Police officers, including one wearing a forensic suit, in a cordoned off area at Waterloo station REUTERS A police officer stands guard outside the cordon at Waterloo AFP/Getty Images Police officers investigate after an explosive device was sent to Waterloo station REUTERS Police officers secure the scene where an IED was found near Waterloo station REUTERS Police officers, including one wearing a forensic suit, in a cordoned off area at Waterloo station REUTERS Police officers secure a cordoned off area at Waterloo station REUTERS A British Transport Police vehicle at Waterloo station PA A British Transport Police vehicle at Waterloo PA Police at Waterloo after three explosive devices were found by police at three different locations across London EPA Police at Waterloo after three explosive devices were found by police at three different locations across London EPA Police at Waterloo after three explosive devices were found by police at three different locations across London EPA

Parcels were found at office blocks new Heathrow Airport and London City Airport, as well as Waterloo station and Glasgow University. No one was injured.

Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said: This is a despicable act. The sending of incendiary devices like this is totally unacceptable.

"I hope the people responsible are brought to justice.

Asked whether there were similarities between the parcels, Mr Flanagan told RTE: I understand that to be the case with particular reference to the postage stamp that was used.

Scotland Yard said officers were working with the authorities in Ireland.

Earlier this month, Scotland Yard said a media outlet in Northern Ireland received the claim of responsibility by a recognised IRA code word.

Met Police also said those claiming responsibility indicated five explosive devices were sent - though only four had been recovered at that point.

eputy Assistant Commissioner Dean Haydon, the Met's Senior National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing said: "Whilst it is still early, from the images we've seen and from speaking to our counterparts in the Republic of Ireland, it appears that the package found in Limerick is linked to those sent to London and Glasgow on 5 and 6 March.

"One line of enquiry is that the package found today in Limerick was returned there having never reached the intended recipient in London.

We will continue to work closely with our counterparts at both An Garda Siochana and Police Scotland to identify those responsible for sending these packages and enquiries are very much ongoing.

"We are also aware that a claim of responsibility made on 11 March referenced there being a fifth package. Whilst that remains a line of enquiry, we continue to keep an open mind on who may be responsible and any potential motivation.

I must also stress that we continue to urge the public to remain vigilant for any suspicious packages and to report anything suspicious to police.



Justice minister Charlie Flanagan told RTE that a potential link is being investigated. / PA

Terror detectives from the Met are continuing to investigate the three packages received in London, while Police Scotland is leading the probe into the device at Glasgow University.

No arrests have been made.

The An Post building was evacuated in Limerick before the Explosives Ordnance Disposal team attended the scene.A uschwitz-Birkenau Museum has urged "disrespectful" visitors to stop photographing each other balancing on the railway line outside the historic Holocaust site.

In a social media post, the museum addressed the growing number of people posing on the tracks, where prisoners arrived at the concentration camp by train from 1940 to 1945.

The Museum tweeted: When you come to Auschwitz Museum, remember you are at the site where over 1 million people were killed. Respect their memory.

There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam than the site which symbolizes deportation of hundreds of thousands to their deaths."

The post was illustrated with four photographs of tourists standing on the railway line at the Auschwitz Memorial.

Of the estimated 1.3 million people sent to the camp in Poland, at least 1.1 million died as part of the Nazi regime's "final solution" policy during the Second World War.

Twitter users have flooded the post, which has racked up 40, 000 likes, with messages of support for the museum.

One commenter called Francesca said: This is a very necessary post, our picture-taking habits are completely out of control.

I may be visiting in summer, I will make sure I am aware of your photography policy.

However, some defended the photo takers with one twitter user writing: different people deal with uncomfortable emotions in different ways  such as laughing at a funeral. Instead of critizing  educate.

One respondent said: Let people smile. Remembrance does not mean being solemn all the time.

The museum hit back at this comment saying: Smiling is human. There are also human stories from #Auschwitz that can make people smile.

You do not have to be solemn and stern all the time," they saidA black man was handcuffed and held at gunpoint by police as he moved into his own house

Karle Robinson, 61, accused police of racially profiling him as he was detained on suspicion of burglary while moving a TV into his new home in Kansas.

He believes police were "motivated by his race" rather than any other factor which might may have raised suspicions for the officers.

Mr Robinson arrived at his home in Tonganoxie shortly after midnight on August 19 and made numerous trips in and out of the house carrying items from a removals van.

At around 2.30 am as he carried in his TV he was approached by an officer who pulled into the driveway who drew his gun and told Robinson to put down the item.

Karle Robinson says he does not think the incident would have happened if he were white / Tammy Ljungblad/The Kansas City Star via AP

He told Mr Robinson there had been "a lot of break-ins" in the area. He put him in handcuffs.

Mr Robinson showed paperwork to prove it was his home and was later uncuffed, with the officers saying they hoped he understood their actions, which they blamed on crime in the vicinity of his home.

The Kansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has now asked state officials to investigate the situation.

Lauren Bonds, legal director of the ACLU of Kansas, said in a statement: "Mr Robinson believes his detention was motivated by his race rather than a reasonable suspicion that he was committing a burglary.

"It also appears that the Chief of Police prevented Mr Robinson from filing a credible, legitimate complaint and that is not in compliance with reporting and intake standards. He must not interfere with citizens registering complaints."

The group has asked the Kansas Attorney General to investigate the matter.

Tonganoxie's police chief, Greg Lawson, said the force will cooperate with any investigation but said the force believes there are "multiple accusations that are inaccurate" in the ACLU statement.

Mr Robinson, a Marine veteran who is retired and volunteers as a radio DJ at a Kansas City radio station said: "I'd like to see those cops and that chief lose their jobs because this was uncalled for - this is strictly racial profiling."T he Duchess of Cornwall was charmed by a little girl who put on an impromptu royal command performance as the royal tour of the Caribbean reached St Kitts and Nevis.

Three-year-old Ava Lupinacci curtsied and presented Camilla with a posy of flowers, before dancing and twirling.

Avas display came as the duchess visited the Hermitage Plantation House on Nevis, which is said to be the oldest wooden structure in the Caribbean. At the estate, which is thought to date from about 1670, Camilla was offered rum punch, replying: I couldnt say no.

Richard Lupinacci, who runs the plantation, said the recipe was hundreds of years old and was made from one of sour, two sweet, three strong and four weak  its a cure-all.

Prince Charles greets Children in Brimstone Hill Fort, St Kitts / Getty Images

After taking a sip, the duchess said: Thats delicious and packs a punch  its really alcoholic.

Meanwhile the Prince of Wales also got into the Caribbean spirit when he tried his hand at some West Indies folk drumming. He joined the Combined Schools Masquerade group on Nevis, before admitting I need a bit more practice.

Camilla, The Duchess of Cornwall trys Caribbean rum 1 /8 Camilla, The Duchess of Cornwall trys Caribbean rum The Duchess of Cornwall drinks some passion fruit rum Arthur Edwards/The Sun/PA The Duchess of Cornwall drinks some passion fruit rum PA The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall are visiting a number countries as part of their Caribbean Tour. Getty Images Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall is greeted by a local as she visits Kingstown Market. Getty Images Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall attend a reception with Governor-General Sir Frederick Ballantyne and Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves REUTERS Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, exchange gifts with the Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves REUTERS

But Colin Stapleton, who leads the group, said of the princes playing: It was nice  he could have a place with us, with a bit more practice.

He was at the official residence of St Kitts and Neviss deputy governor general Hyleta Liburd, with his wife, and met prominent locals. While there Charles chatted to a group of returnees, Caribbean people who have returned home after living in the UK. He joked with Violet Kelsey, 77, originally from Nevis, who returned home with her English-born husband John in 2004.

Charles was also introduced to a group of Nevis schoolgirls from a sixth form college who had just won an international debating award. One young fan very eager to meet the prince was Junior Persaud, who was celebrating his ninth birthday. Aides noticed his birthday badge and nudged the prince in his direction.

Today is a down day for the royal couple during the 12-day visit. At the weekend they visit Grenada  the last of the Realms in the region  before heading to Cuba and the Cayman Islands.A

t least 44 people have been killed and another 90 were seriously injured in an explosion at a chemical plant in China.W omen in New Zealand have been wearing headscarves to show their solidarity with the Muslim community in the wake of deadly mosque attacks in the country.

The moving tributes come after 50 people were killed in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch last Friday and as thousands joined Friday prayers and a two-minute silence today.

Using the hashtags #headscarfforharmony and #ScarvesInSolidarity on Twitter, women shared photographs of themselves wearing the scarves.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern led an estimated 5,000 people standing silently on Friday at Hagley Park in front of the Al Noor mosque, where most of the victims died.

"New Zealand mourns with you. We are one," she said in a short speech which was followed by two minutes of silence.

Robyn Molony, 65, was with a group of friend wearing headscarves at Hagley Park, where they walked daily.

We are wearing headscarves showing our support, love and solidarity, and hope that by everybody doing this it will demonstrate to Muslim women that they are one with us," she said.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern greets members of the Muslim community as she attends islamic prayers in Hagley Park / Getty Images

Images of a grieving Mrs Ardern wearing a black headscarf as she visited families of the victims a day after the attacks were broadcast around the world.

Muslims account for just over 1 percent of New Zealand's population, most of whom were born overseas.

"We're not moving on. This grieving is going to take a long time," said 52-year-old Christchurch resident Bell Sibly, who wore a headscarf to show her support.

"But what he's done, he was hoping to divide us, and instead, he's brought us all together in one big hug."

Residents of Christchurch are still recovering from a devastating earthquake that hit in 2011, killing 185 and injured thousands.

Jacinda Ardern attends the Friday prayers at Hagley Park / REUTERS

"Since the earthquakes, weve gone through a lot as a city and were a lot more caring and looking out for one another, said James Sheehan, 62.

Female police at the park also wore headscarfs, with a red rose on their body suit.

In a powerful speech that lasted about 20 minutes, Imam Gamal said through its love and compassion, New Zealand is unbreakable. He thanked Ms Ardern for her compassion.

"It has been a lesson for world leaders," the Imam said of the Prime Minister. "Thank you for holding our families close and honouring us with a simple scarf," he added.

He said Islamophobia dehumanises Muslims, and called on the world to end hate speech and the politics of fear.

People attend the Friday prayers at Hagley Park outside Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch / REUTERS

"Last week's event is proof and evidence to entire world that terrorism has no colour, race or religion. The rise of white supremacy is a great global threat to humanity and this must end now," he said.

Thousands of people also gathered at other mosques in Auckland and other cities for Friday prayers, with many non-Muslims wearing headscarves.

A #headscarfforharmony movement was trending on Twitter.

Journalists covering the event also wore headscarves for their live broadcasts.

Eleanor Ainge Roy, a Guardian reporter in New Zealand who attended the prayers in Hagley Park, wrote on Twitter: Friday prayers are now underway in Hagley Park, attended by thousands.TORONTO, March 22, 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 third facility under its previously-announced subscription agreement with Alpha Blue and has 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O ne of the children caught up in a horrific attack on a school bus in Milan has been hailed a hero by his classmates for saving everyone on board.

Ramy Shehata, 13, hid his phone when the alleged hijacker was confiscating them from other students on the bus, which was set alight with 51 children on board.

The youngster, whose family are from Egypt, made a call to his father while pretending to pray in Arabic, Italian media reported. The police were then phoned.

After officers arrived, the suspect allegedly doused the vehicle with an inflammable liquid and reportedly shouted: Nobody gets off here alive.

Forensic police and firefighters work by the wreckage of the school bus / AFP/Getty Images

The bus, which had been travelling from the city of Cremona in Lombardy, went up in flames but the police managed to get all passengers off.

Ramy's father, who immigrated in 2001, told Ansa news agency that his son was born in Italy in 2005 but was never issued official citizenship documentation.

"My son did his duty, it would be nice if he got Italian citizenship now," he told Ansa. "We would love to stay in this country. When I met him yesterday I hugged him hard."

Ramy Shehata, centre, a middle school student who called his father and told him to alert police amid the alleged hijacking / EPA

The leader of Italy's 5-Star Movement called for the teenager to be awarded speedy citizenship after his classmates hailed him as a hero for his move to alert police.

Ramy "put his life at risk to save that of his classmates," Luigi Di Maio said on Facebook, adding that he would ask Italy's premier to confer citizenship for special merit.

Law enforcement officers stopped the bus that had travelled 25 miles from the province of Cremona to Milan, freeing the 51 middle school students and their chaperones as the driver set the bus on fire. No one was seriously injured.

Ansa reported that the Interior Ministry was speeding up the citizenship request for the boy while looking to revoke the citizenship of the alleged bus driver, Ousseynou Sy, a 47-year-old Senegalese immigrant who became an Italian citizen in 2004.

Sy was being held on suspicion of kidnapping, intending to commit a massacre, arson, resisting law enforcement with an aggravating circumstance of terrorism.

Prosecutors said there were no indications that Sy was radicalised or had ties to Islamic terrorists, but said he claimed the kidnapping was to draw attention to migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea.P riyanka Chopra has dismissed claims of a rift between herself and her close friend the Duchess of Sussex.

The actress, 36, said the rumours were simply not true during an interview on Thursdays Watch What Happens Live.

It had been claimed that Chopra skipped Meghans baby shower in New York last month because the Duchess of Sussex, 37, had not attended her wedding to Nick Jonas in India last year.

But Chopra laughed off the claims when a fan called into the show and asked: Are the rumours true that you were upset that Meghan Markle skipped your wedding to Nick Jonas?

Meghan in New York for her baby shower last month / Reuters

Host Andy Cohen then pressed Chopra and asked if she had not attended the Duchess of Sussexs baby shower because she was annoyed with her.

Chopra laughed and replied: Oh my god, no its not true.

Priyanka Chopra and husband Nick Jonas / Getty Images

The actress was busy attending meetings for a book she is writing when Meghan held her baby shower in New York. Amal Clooney and Serena Williams were among the guests.R obert Mueller has submitted a report on his long-awaited two year Trump-Russia investigation to the US Attorney General.

The Justice Department said Mr Mueller delivered his final report on Friday to Attorney General William Barr, who is reviewing it.

The attorney general will now have to decide how much of the report to make public.

It is not yet known if Mr Mueller found criminal conduct by Trump or his campaign, beyond the charges already brought against several aides.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller / AFP/Getty Images

Mr Mueller, a former FBI director, had been examining since 2017 whether Trump's campaign conspired with Moscow to try to influence the election and whether the Republican president later unlawfully tried to obstruct his investigation.

Trump has denied collusion and obstruction. Russia has denied election interference.

In a letter to lawmakers, Mr Barr said Mr Mueller had concluded the probe, that he is reviewing the report and will be consulting the deputy attorney general and Mueller to determine what information from it can be released to Congress.

Mr Barr told lawmakers he may be able to provide information to Congress on the report's findings as soon as this weekend, but offered no details of Mr Mueller's findings.

Mr Mueller's investigation has taken almost two years / AP

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said: "The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course. The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsel's report.

Mr Trump previously called the investigation a witch hunt and accused Mr Mueller of conflicts of interest.

The investigation has already ensnared key figures including Trumps former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and national security adviser Michael Flynn, who have either been convicted of or pleaded guilty to charges brought by Mr Mueller.

Mueller has brought charges against 34 people, including Russian intelligence officers, and three Russian companies, including one described as a "troll farm."

The inquiry was set up to answer the following questions:

Did Mr Trump's campaign collude with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 presidential election in favour of the celebrity businessman?

Did Mr Trump take steps later, including by firing his FBI director, to obstruct the probe?

T he US Secretary of State has agreed it is possible God sent Donald Trump to protect Israel from Iran.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network during a high-profile trip to Israel, Mike Pompeo said it was his faith that made him believe the US President had been "raised" to help save Israel.

He was asked: "could it be that President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?"

Mr Pompeo replied: "As a Christian, I certainly believe that's possible.

He added: "I am confident that the Lord is at work here.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. / EPA

During his tour of the Middle East, Mr Pompeo has come under fire for only inviting faith-based members of the media to join.

Mr Pompeo also praised US efforts to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains.

His comments came on a Jewish holiday, Purim, that commemorates the biblical rescue of the Jewish people by Queen Esther from the Persians.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu / EPA

Israel applied its administration and law to Golan in 1981, an act that was not recognised by other governments.

During Mr Pompeo's tour, he visited the Western Wall with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing re-election next month.B ritain today rejected Donald Trumps call to fully recognise Israels sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

With one tweet, the president tore up decades of US policy on the sensitive Middle East issue. In London, a Foreign Office spokesman said: The UK views the Golan Heights as territory occupied by Israel. This has not changed.

Mr Trump made the comments in a tweet last night, when he said the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967 before unilaterally annexing the area in 1981, were of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and regional stability.

Until now the US had followed the United Nations stance that it could not recognise Israels annexation because the land was seized by an act of war. Israels premier Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Mr Trump in a phone call, telling him youve made history. The US move, which could also boost Mr Netanyahus re-election hopes ahead of next months ballot, sparked a major row with key players in the region. Syria accused Mr Trump of showing blind bias towards Israel.

A foreign ministry official added that the irresponsible comments threatened international peace and security, adding that the country was now determined to recover the occupied territory through all available means.

Russia and Iran, military allies of Damascus, condemned the shift towards recognition, with Russia claiming it would be a violation of UN resolutions. Turkey, a US-allied state, also criticised the move, saying that the unfortunate declaration had brought the Middle East to the brink of a new crisis.J ack Tweed looked close to tears as he visited the grave of his late wife Jade Goody on the 10th anniversary of her death.

Tweed, who married Goody a month before she died from cervical cancer, laid flowers at her headstone, hours after revealing he has struggled to move on.

Goody was buried at St Thomas Church in Upshire Essex after losing her battle with the disease on March 22, 2009.

Tweed crouched next to her grave on Friday as he positioned a bouquet of flowers among a row of potted plants and toy windmills.

Heartbreaking: Jack Tweed visited his late wife's grave / Matt Sprake / SplashNews.com

A message on her tombstone reads: In everlasting memory of Jade Cersia Lorraine Goody; 5 June 1981  22 March 2009; A mother, wife, daughter, granddaughter.

Tweed opened up about his relationship with Goody during an appearance on Good Morning Britain on Friday, telling hosts Kate Garraway and Ben Shephard that he has never felt the way he did about Goody with anyone else.

I did try and move on but I think I rushed into it trying to find a replacement, he said. It didnt seem to work, it wasnt the right thing to do.

Tragedy: Jade Goody with her sons Freddie and Boddy / Claire Greenway/Getty Images

That same feeling I had for Jade, I cant really feel that for anyone else. I dont think its the right thing to do, its not fair on the other person.

Tweed was joined by Goodys mother Jackie who insisted her daughter would have wanted him to be happy and have someone.

Jack Tweed says he can't move on after Jade Goodys death

She would like you to have children and be with someone, she said. He could have been with [another] woman the day she died, she didnt care, she would like him to be happy and have a life.

Goody was told she had cancer in 2008 during a stint on Big Boss  Indias version of Big Brother.J ack Tweed paid an emotional tribute to Jade Goody as he marked the 10th anniversary of her death.

Goody died on March 22, 2009 following a battle with cervical cancer and exactly one month after tying the knot with Tweed.

Tweed said he has struggled to move on in the decade since her death, saying he hasnt been able to feel what he did for Goody with anyone else.

I did try and move on but I think I rushed into it trying to find a replacement, he said on Good Morning Britain. It didnt seem to work, it wasnt the right thing to do. That same feeling I had for Jade, I cant really feel that for anyone else. I dont think its the right thing to do, its not fair on the other person.

Heartbreak: Jade Goody and Jack Tweedy pictured in 2006 / Gareth Cattermole/Getty

Tweed was joined by Goodys mother Jackie who insisted her daughter would have wanted him to be happy and have someone.

She would like you to have children and be with someone, she said. He could have been with [another] woman the day she died, she didnt care, she would like him to be happy and have a life.

Tweed said it was impossible to feel down around Goody who continued to smile right up to the end.

Remembering Jade Goody ten years on from her death

Everytime I picture Jade, I just picture her laughing, he said. All she ever done was laugh. Even right up to the end. Every single day, she would laugh. Such a happy, positive person she was, you could never ever be down or depressed when you were with her... impossible.

Tweed said he has had contact with Goodys sons Bobby, 15, and Freddie, 14, who she shared with Jeff Brazier.

Mother's love: Jade Goody with her sons Freddie and Bobby / Claire Greenway/Getty Images

The teenagers recently organised a quiz night to raise money for Marie Curie and Great Ormond Street Hospital to mark 10 years since they lost their mother.

Brazier tweeted: Staggeringly, its been 10 years since my children have had to do without the most important person in their life.

To their absolute credit, they want to mark the occasion remembering their Mum by raising money for charity at their private quiz night amongst family and friends.

He praised the teens for their bravery in daring to remember joyfully, and said that they had created an evening that their Mum would have loved to have been at the heart of.TORONTO, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- dynaCERT Inc. (TSX VENTURE: DYA) (OTCQB: DYFSF) (FRA: DMJ) ("dynaCERT" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has won first prize along with its dealer, H2 Tek at the 2019 Mining Cleantech Challenge in Colorado.



First place winner dynaCERT Inc./H2 Tek took home the $5,000 prize at the March 21, 2019, Mining Cleantech Challenge in Denver. Their technology was chosen by mining executives and investors in the industry as the best among a competitive field of 12 total companies representing the U.S., Canada and Israel. An international team of judges reviewed and voted on the winners.

dynaCERTs HydraGEN Technology turns distilled water into H2 and O2 gases on-demand and introduces these gases directly to diesel engines air intakes. Our technology, HydraGEN, said H2 Tek Vice President of Sales and Marketing, David Van Klaveren, can actually improve significantly those carbon emissions, reduce them, and along the way pay for the capital cost of all this through fuel efficiency savings.

We cant ignore the fact that clean technology is an important part of our responsibility as participants and members of this industry, the mining industry, continued Van Klaveren. I think its remarkable that an association considers this a priority: bringing together companies that have innovation for an extremely important cause.

Exequiel Rolon from sponsor company Fresnillo, one of the founding sponsors, agreed, saying, Its my third year and its been very surprising to see all the startup companies that come up with very innovative ideas that are actually very beneficial for the mining companies.

I think the mining industry as a whole can benefit from these efforts, said Rolon. One of our commitments is to foster and collaborate with entrepreneurs that are developing these kinds of technologies.

While the global mining industry navigates an evolving market, certain producers are integrating innovative technology and alternative, less polluting energy sources into mining operations. Incorporating clean energy practices into the industry is a challenge that we see our sponsoring companies tackling head-on, said Shelly Curtiss, Executive Director of Colorado Cleantech Industries Association, which hosts the Mining Cleantech Challenge.

Rolon concluded, Somehow this event is unique in the world and provides value that is very complicated to find.

Supporters of the day-long program included Newmont Mining, Fresnillo, as well as Jolimont Global, Ausenco, Resource Capital Funds, Consulate General of Canada in Denver, Colorado School of Mines, Rocky Mountain Institute and the Mountain Studies Institute.

Jim Payne, President & CEO of dynaCERT, commented, I congratulate H2 Tek for their commitment and efforts for introducing dynaCERT to the mining industry. This award again demonstrates the positive reception that we are receiving from all over the world and we welcome this one as it relates to another very important industry. On behalf of dynaCERT and H2 Tek, I thank the Mining Cleantech Challenge organizers and participants for honouring us in this most important endeavor to finding a Solution for Pollution.

About dynaCERT Inc.

dynaCERT Inc. manufactures, distributes, and installs Carbon Emission Reduction Technology for use with internal combustion engines. As part of the growing global hydrogen economy, our patent-pending technology creates hydrogen and oxygen on-demand through electrolysis and supplies these through the air intake to enhance combustion, resulting in lower carbon emissions and greater fuel efficiency. Our technology is designed for use with all types and sizes of diesel engines used in on-road vehicles, reefer trailers, off-road construction, power generation, mining and forestry equipment, marine vessels and railroad locomotives. Website: www. dynaCERT .com

READER ADVISORY

Except for statements of historical fact, this news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. In particular, forward-looking information in this press release includes, but is not limited to the potential expansion into new markets, industries and segments, such as diesel- powered use of any the dynaCERT products and sales. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. We cannot guarantee future results, performance of achievements. Consequently, there is no representation that the actual results achieved will be the same, in whole or in part, as those set out in the forward-looking information.

Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward- looking information. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: uncertainty as to whether our strategies and business plans will yield the expected benefits; availability and cost of capital; the ability to identify and develop and achieve commercial success for new products and technologies; the level of expenditures necessary to maintain and improve the quality of products and services; changes in technology and changes in laws and regulations; the uncertainty of the emerging hydrogen economy; including the hydrogen economy moving at a pace not anticipated; our ability to secure and maintain strategic relationships and distribution agreements; and the other risk factors disclosed under our profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com . Readers are cautioned that this list of risk factors should not be construed as exhaustive.

The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. We undertake no duty to update any of the forward-looking information to conform such information to actual results or to changes in our expectations except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information.

Neither 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 the release.

On Behalf of the Board

Murray James Payne, CEO

For more information, please contact:

Jim Payne, CEO & President

dynaCERT Inc.

#101  501 Alliance Avenue Toronto, Ontario M6N 2J1

(416) 766-9691 x 2

jpayne@dynaCERT.com

Investor Relations

dynaCERT Inc.

Nancy Massicotte

(416) 766-9691 x 1

ir@ dynaCERT .com



LOS ANGELES, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP (GPM) announces an investigation on behalf of Domino's Pizza, Inc. investors (Domino's or the Company) (NYSE: DPZ) concerning the Company and its officers possible violations of federal securities laws.



If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate.

If you wish to learn more about this action, or if you have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Lesley Portnoy, Esquire, at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, or by email to shareholders@glancylaw.com , or visit our website at www.glancylaw.com .

On February 19, 2019, the franchisee community website Blue MauMau reported that "[a] corporate insider has filed a well-documented whistleblower report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Domino's Pizza, its top-level officers, and various staff members." Specifically, Blue MauMau reported that "[t]he crux of the whistleblower report details how Domino's allegedly forced and orchestrated an unapproved advertising and promotion increase to franchisees in order to pay a $1.85 billion Securitization Transaction (March 25, 2007) with a new partially funded $1.67 billion Securitization (March 15, 2012) debt owed to Securitization entities" and "contends that in return, Domino's Pizza's CEO, board members, officers, and employees 'could enjoy higher stock prices and dividends through share repurchases and dividend payouts.'" On this news, shares of Domino's fell sharply over the next two trading sessions, thereby injuring investors.

If you purchased Domino's 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 Lesley Portnoy, of GPM, 1925 Century Park East, Suite 2100, Los Angeles, CA 90067 at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9244, or visit our website at www.glancylaw.com . If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number, and the number of shares purchased.

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules.

Contacts

Glancy Prongay and Murray LLP, Los Angeles

Lesley Portnoy, 310-201-9150 or 888-773-9224

www.glancylaw.com

shareholders@glancylaw.com



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Digital subscriptions do not include home delivery of the Tracy Press. To receive the paper at home, sign up for Premium Membership.Blog Archive Apr 2010 (22) May 2010 (25) Jun 2010 (8) Jul 2010 (12) Aug 2010 (18) Sep 2010 (19) Oct 2010 (29) Nov 2010 (30) Dec 2010 (18) Jan 2011 (13) Feb 2011 (21) Mar 2011 (23) Apr 2011 (19) May 2011 (31) Jun 2011 (36) Jul 2011 (46) Aug 2011 (26) Sep 2011 (12) Oct 2011 (15) Nov 2011 (17) Dec 2011 (7) Jan 2012 (18) Feb 2012 (4) Mar 2012 (12) Apr 2012 (18) May 2012 (10) Jun 2012 (21) Jul 2012 (8) Aug 2012 (15) Sep 2012 (7) Oct 2012 (17) Nov 2012 (20) Dec 2012 (10) Jan 2013 (58) Feb 2013 (59) Mar 2013 (60) Apr 2013 (98) May 2013 (135) Jun 2013 (204) Jul 2013 (293) Aug 2013 (351) Sep 2013 (363) Oct 2013 (348) Nov 2013 (374) Dec 2013 (442) Jan 2014 (547) Feb 2014 (476) Mar 2014 (526) Apr 2014 (527) May 2014 (469) Jun 2014 (408) Jul 2014 (472) Aug 2014 (522) Sep 2014 (443) Oct 2014 (472) Nov 2014 (497) Dec 2014 (536) Jan 2015 (539) Feb 2015 (520) Mar 2015 (582) Apr 2015 (658) May 2015 (679) Jun 2015 (673) Jul 2015 (728) Aug 2015 (803) Sep 2015 (923) Oct 2015 (924) Nov 2015 (802) Dec 2015 (791) Jan 2016 (782) Feb 2016 (835) Mar 2016 (929) Apr 2016 (866) May 2016 (947) Jun 2016 (1044) Jul 2016 (882) Aug 2016 (1035) Sep 2016 (967) Oct 2016 (918) Nov 2016 (854) Dec 2016 (885) Jan 2017 (879) Feb 2017 (777) Mar 2017 (896) Apr 2017 (872) May 2017 (850) Jun 2017 (851) Jul 2017 (971) Aug 2017 (1040) Sep 2017 (998) Oct 2017 (1144) Nov 2017 (1046) Dec 2017 (838) Jan 2018 (873) Feb 2018 (769) Mar 2018 (885) Apr 2018 (809) May 2018 (827) Jun 2018 (820) Jul 2018 (840) Aug 2018 (854) Sep 2018 (844) Oct 2018 (851) Nov 2018 (870) Dec 2018 (912) Jan 2019 (919) Feb 2019 (827) Mar 2019 (957) Apr 2019 (913) May 2019 (1007) Jun 2019 (935) Jul 2019 (950) Aug 2019 (936) Sep 2019 (910) Oct 2019 (920) Nov 2019 (874) Dec 2019 (908) Jan 2020 (941) Feb 2020 (849) Mar 2020 (898) Apr 2020 (848) May 2020 (822) Jun 2020 (789) Jul 2020 (819) Aug 2020 (858) Sep 2020 (841) Oct 2020 (873) Nov 2020 (812) Dec 2020 (780) Jan 2021 (765) Feb 2021 (716) Mar 2021 (819) Apr 2021 (805) May 2021 (815) Jun 2021 (824) Jul 2021 (830) Aug 2021 (832) Sep 2021 (791) Oct 2021 (754) Nov 2021 (683) Dec 2021 (243)A total of 13 loans worth about 1 million euro were granted by the end of February 2019 through the European Investment Fund (EIF), informs a press release of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MADR), submitted to AGERPRES on Friday.

According to the quoted source, MADR and EIF signed the "Financing Agreement for the Implementation of the Financial Instrument" in November 2017, and in 2018 the Fund finalized the process of selection of the financial intermediaries and concluded Operating Agreements with five banks: the Romanian Commercial Bank, Libra Internet Bank, ProCredit Bank, Raiffeisen Bank and UniCredit Bank.

The banks selected under the financial instrument granted the first loans, while being permanently involved in training the personnel and adjusting the internal procedures to the investment priorities established by the National Rural Development Program (PNDR).On 21 March 2019, a working meeting was held between representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture and the European Investment Fund, under the coordination of Secretary of State Teodora Gabriela Gheniu. The meeting aimed at assessing the stage and the progress made in implementing the risk-sharing loan financed from the National Rural Development Program.During the talks, the EIF representatives noted that the financial institutions in the market received with interest this lending facility addressed to farmers and businesses in rural areas.In their turn, the MADR representatives expressed their willingness to work with EIF representatives and those of the selected financial institutions to facilitate the potential beneficiaries' access to the loan products co-financed from the EAFRD - the European Agricultural Fund for Rural DevelopmentNot everybody benefits from the sustained economic growth of Romania and poverty among children and in the rural environment increased significantly, European Commissioner for Regional Policy Corina Cretu stated on Friday within the presentation conference of the Country Report for Romania, published by the European Commission on 27 February.

"There are four points in the country report that concern me. Firstly, poverty remains an important problem for Romania and regional inequalities increase. Although there is a sustained economic growth and new jobs are created, it is obvious that not everybody benefits from these results. Poverty among children and in the rural environment has increased significantly, which particularly concerns us," Cretu stated.

She added that, in the European Commission's view, no region or person should be left behind, especially children."Secondly, development is hampered by the lack of administrative capacity. As the report shows, bureaucracy, responsibilities and fragmented resources impede the efficiency of public administrations and jeopardizes investment. For the 2021-2027 period, we proposed 80 simplification measures for accessing European funds. The reform of the public administration is a topic we have talked about and which, in our opinion, could progress more quickly," the European official said.Thirdly, investments are needed in education, healthcare, social inclusion, transport, energy and environment infrastructure, she continued."Investments in these areas would strengthen Romania's growth potential and improve the standard of living. The citizens also feel and understand these things," according to the European Commissioner.Fourthly, regions and local particularities matter."Cohesion and competitiveness cannot be achieved by implementing a single recipe. Everyone should improve their weaknesses. We need differentiated investments at regional level and adapted, flexible policies to meet the local needs and challenges," Cretu stated.Romania will associate with the Italian firearms producer Beretta in view of manufacturing, at the Mechanic Plant in Plopeni of Prahova County, two types of weapons, Economy Minister Nicolae Badalau announced on Thursday.

According to him, the Romanian state and the Italian company will establish a new company, in which the Romanian side will own 80 percent of the shares.

"We have to switch from 7.62 with the Romanian Army (...) to NATO caliber and these weapons that the Romanian Army tested with the special troops in Targu Mures, where a report was drafted and the people there stated that this type of weapons ARX 160 is the type that the Romanian Army would like to include in its endowment. Based on that, we discussed with them and made a contract. We will make an association. The Plant will be built in Plopeni, with the Romanian side owning 80 percent," Badalau stated at B1 TV private broadcaster.The Economy Minister mentioned that two types of assault rifles will be manufactured in Plopeni, including the ARX 160 rifle, which will be capitalised both on the domestic and foreign market."We have the foreign market and we have our first beneficiary, the Romanian Army, which should switch from that Kalashnikov of the '60s, because we are sending them in theaters of war with Kalashnikovs. We have to provide, as suppliers, as producers, we must provide the best armament to the Romanian Army," Badalau added.He also mentioned that "the defence industry benefits in 2019 from an execution budget that is ten times higher than last years' execution budget."The Economy Minister also stated that his objective is to re-start the national defence industry, taking into account that the the EU level, 70 percent of the armament production is used in the producing countries, while in Romania, the Army benefits from less than 10 percent of weapons produced internally.Description

GIS  22 March, 2019: A Braille library which is a first-of-its kind in Mauritius and dedicated to visually impaired students was launched, yesterday, at the Lois Lagesse Trust Fund (LLTF) in Beau-Bassin. The Minister of Education and Human Resources, Tertiary Education and Scientific Research, Mrs Leela Devi Dookun-Luchoomun, the Minister of Tourism, Mr Anil Gayan, and the Minister of Social Security, National Solidarity, and Environment and Sustainable Development, Mr Etienne Sinatambou, were present on this occasion.

In her address, Minister Dookun-Luchoomun, highlighted that the setting up of the Braille library is in line with Governments vision to foster inclusion in various fields especially in that of education. An equitable education system, she emphasised, is pre-requisite for the integration of children having diverse physical, social and economic conditions. On this score, she underlined that each and every child regardless of their disabilities should have equal access to knowledge and information.

A series of measures, the Minister recalled, have been implemented in a bid to support the educational growth of children with disabilities. These include the setting up of the Special Education Needs Authority providing for a new institutional framework to encourage their holistic development; the provision of five scholarships to children with disabilities wishing to pursue tertiary education; and investing in the training of educators in the field of special needs. As from this year, she pointed out, the Mauritius Institute of Education will start publishing manuals and books used at primary level in Braille version.

With regard to the LLTF, Mrs Dookun-Luchoomun indicated that the activities, programmes and actions undertaken by the institution complement the objectives of the Government which is to support the positive overall development of children with disabilities and to valorise their contribution to the socioeconomic progress of Mauritius.

For his part, Minister Gayan underscored that education is central to the life of an individual in the community and it provides opportunities for personal, social, and academic growth and development thereby setting the stage for later life experiences. He also highlighted the role of the LLTF in encouraging children with disabilities to perform well academically and to enhance their holistic development by urging their skills and talents.

Minister Sinatambou recalled that the LLTF was set up in 1983 with the objective of providing education, training and employment to blind and visually impaired persons. He observed that the institution has made tremendous progress over the years and has ensured quality education for children with disabilities at pre-primary, primary, secondary and tertiary levels. He further pointed out the need for more transcribers to write-up books in Braille versions adding that these children should not be deprived of the access to knowledge and information.AGERPRES special correspondent Florentina Peia reports: President Klaus Iohannis on Friday said that there is "a real chance" for an orderly exit of the UK from the European Union, underscoring that the first concern is represented by the Romanian citizens living in the kingdom according to Agerpres.

"I believe we stand a real chance (...) of achieving an orderly exit of the UK. However it may be, the Romanian citizens are the first concern that we have. In the alternative of concluding the agreement, their rights are very, very well ensured, but we have also carried out several talks on a bilateral level. I myself have repeatedly talked with Mrs. Prime Minister May to be certain that even in the case of a no deal we'll reach, on a bilateral level, an understanding that is very good for our citizens and for the British citizens, on the other side. We fare well in this matter. The best option is concluding an agreement," Iohannis said, before the second working session of the European Council.

He appreciated that an understanding was reached on Thursday evening regarding the Brexit postponement."It is very well that last night we reached a common understanding, an understanding with two alternatives. In case the UK accepts the agreement, it is extended, to give them the possibility to complete the legislation, in case it is not voted, then the extension term is only 12 April. An understanding that was immediately accepted by the British side and we believe it is an understanding giving us, the 27, a certainty that things will go further, and also giving a real chance to the UK to make a final decision," the head of state saidPresident Klaus Iohannis attended, Thursday through Friday, the European Council meeting in Brussels, context in which he underlined the very important results achieved so far by the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU.

Read also: Romania's livestock exports, down 11.4pct in 2018

"The President of Romania, as the representative of the Member State holding the Presidency of the Council of the EU, had a presentation on the progress made in implementing the strategic objectives formulated at the European Council in December 2018, as well as on the topics of discussion within the current meeting of the European council. President Klaus Iohannis highlighted the very important results achieved so far by Romania's presidency of the EU Council, materialized by the conclusion of a large number of files. These results are all the more important as the acts adopted have a high degree of complexity and a special impact on European citizens in areas such as social and labor rights, the digital single market, transport, energy and infrastructure, environment protection, the internal security of the European Union, the Banking Union and the Union of Capital Markets," the Presidential Administration shows in a press release sent to AGERPRES.

President Iohannis also pointed out the efforts Romania, as Presidency of the EU Council, has so far made in the direction of achieving a deeper and fairer Single Market, which have resulted in notable progress on a series of legislative proposals with a major impact on the advancement of the European agenda in the field. In this context, President Iohannis reminded that deepening and strengthening the Single Market should be based on preserving its four fundamental freedoms and avoiding the introduction of new barriers or measures that could affect its integrity. He also welcomed the invitation to the European Commission to present a long-term industrial strategy, highlighting the importance of European industry and its role in the competitiveness of the Union's economy.

Klaus Iohannis also referred to the efforts made by the Romanian Presidency of the EU Council to promote key areas of digital technology such as artificial intelligence, cyber security, advanced digital skills and optimal use of the digital capability and interoperability, and brought to mind the conclusions of the Council regarding the Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence "Made in Europe", proposed by the Romanian Presidency of the EU Council and recently adopted by the Council of the European Union.

The President welcomed the conclusions of the European Council and recalled that Romania, as the rotating presidency of the EU Council, made important steps towards meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement, both by finalizing relevant legislative dossiers and by organizing extensive debates in the prospect of shaping the EU's long-term strategy in the field of combating climate change. He mentioned that the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU has promoted measures to combat disinformation since the beginning of its term, especially with a view to ensuring a free and fair European election process in the context of the forthcoming elections to the European Parliament.

In the context of the five-year anniversary of the illegal annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol by the Russian Federation, Klaus Iohannis reiterated "Romania's commitment and support to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders," the Presidential Administration shows.

AGERPRES .The exports of live animals of Romania decreased by 11.4pct in 2018, totaling 375.8 million euro, according to data centralized by the National Institute of Statistics.

Read also: Banks grant 1mln euro funds to Romanian farmers, through European Investment Fund

About half of the exports of live animals last year (173.9 million euro) went to countries in the European Union. The highest export figures were recorded in relation to Hungary (50.2 million euro), Croatia (45 million euro), Italy (29 million euro) and Greece (28.7 million euro).

As regards livestock imports, these increased by 1.2pct to 181.2 million euro, all coming from EU countries. The largest imports came from Hungary (65.3 million euro), Germany (38.3 million euro) and the Czech Republic (13.6 million euro).

Thus, last year Romania recorded a surplus of 194.6 million lei in international trade in live animals.

AGERPRES .Negotiations to extend Barcelona's contract to host the Spanish grand prix have begun.

Spanish media, including EFE news agency, say F1 chief executive Chase Carey met with circuit officials at the Catalonia parliament on Thursday.

In a statement, the Circuit de Catalunya said the meeting "showed the will" of the region to keep hosting formula one beyond 2019.

(GMM)A Russian racing driver says it is possible Daniil Kvyat will return to Red Bull Racing.

Former Red Bull Racing driver Kvyat's F1 career seemed over at the end of 2017, where after a complex run of difficult form he was dropped from the junior team Toro Rosso.

But Mikhail Aleshin, a former Indycar and now Le Mans driver, says it is now possible Kvyat will return to Red Bull.

"It was very good to see Kvyat showing his character and not letting Pierre Gasly go past in Melbourne," he told Russia's Sportbox.

"It is hard to know why Gasly drove so inexpressively, but if Kvyat continues in the same spirit, we can all have hope that Daniil could move to the stronger team.

"I understand that such thoughts may be premature, but for us this situation is, of course, positive," Aleshin added.

(GMM)North Point InsideOut has released their new single "Anchor of Peace." The song is already having a powerful impact at Christian radio.

North Point InsideOut is a division of North Point Ministries. In 2010, North Point Ministries launched North Point Music to bring local worship leaders, musicians and songwriters together to inspire a generation and influence the church. The Alpharetta, Georgia-based record label and music publishing company has a strong foundation from which to pursue its mission. Led by best-selling author, communicator and pastor Andy Stanley, North Point Ministries was founded in 1995 with the vision of creating churches that unchurched people love to attend. Today, NPM consists of six churches in the Atlanta area and a network of 25 churches around the globe that collectively serve nearly 70,000 people weekly. The ministry's broadcast television show, Your Move, airing after Saturday Night Live (SNL), reaches over 1 million viewers every week in 22 markets. Continued updates on North Point Ministries are available at www.northpoint.org.

Listen on Spotify at http://npinsideout.lnk.to/anchor

FOLLOW North Point InsideOut Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/npinsideout...

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/npinsideoutband

Twitter: https://twitter.com/npinsideoutband

YouTube/VEVO: https://www.youtube.com/user/NPInside...

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4EOKp...

Tags : north point insideout North Point InsideOut anchor of peace North Point InsideOut news North Point InsideOut new albumThis week the people of Crimea celebrated the fifth anniversary of joining the Russian Federation. People across Russia shared their joy. Centuries of common culture and history made the reunification more like a homecoming. Crimeas important role in defeating Nazi Germanys genocidal assault on Mother Russia eight decades ago gives it a cherished place in Russias modern history.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and several dignitaries were in attendance of the ceremonies held on the Black Sea peninsula. Two power stations were opened underlining the energy independence of Crimea and its future integral development with Russia.

Earlier this year saw the opening of a 19-kilometer road and rail bridge  the longest in Europe  across the Kerch Strait from Russias mainland to Crimea at a cost of nearly $4 billion.

While Russian people celebrated the landmark event this week, there was a strange absence of news on the topic in Western media outlets. There was not even much air given to pejorative Western claims against Russia for annexing Crimea. Yet such claims have animated official Western concerns over the past five years. Perhaps negative Western media coverage this week would have appeared bizarre and untenable  given that most of the Crimean population were rejoicing the anniversary. Better to just ignore it then, for the Western media that is.

The United States and European Union governments did, however, introduce new sanctions against Russia to coincide with the anniversary. Nevertheless, those new sanctions seem hollow and lacking in conviction.

Western policy has made itself a hostage of its own irrational position over Crimea. Washington and its European allies insist that Russia annexed the peninsula and that Moscow must return the territory to Ukraine. The Western powers have implemented five years of ongoing economic sanctions against Russia and have plunged relations with Moscow back into the permafrost of the erstwhile Cold War years.

But the Western rational is bereft of historical or factual appreciation. It is in denial that Crimeas relations with Russia long predate its relationship to the state of Ukraine. Crimea, which was handed over to Kievs administrative control by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 for political reasons, only ended up in Ukraine as an accident of the Soviet Unions later dissolution.

The people of Crimea are ethnically Russian and Russian-language speakers. Back in March 2014, they also held a constitutionally organized referendum on the question of joining the Russian Federation. The referendum was passed with an overwhelming majority. Russian troops were present because of a long-held arrangement allowing Moscow to station forces there. There was nothing illegal or malicious about Russian military presence in Crimea at the time of the referendum, as Western media imply.

Western governments and media rarely if ever acknowledge that background history or facts. They also completely ignore another crucial factor  that a month before Crimeas referendum, Ukraine was violently taken over by an illegal coup detat. That coup  glossed over in the Western media as a pro-democracy movement  overthrew an elected government in Kiev and ushered in a regime packed with Neo-Nazi followers of Stepan Bandera and his World War II collaborators with the Third Reich. Today, the Kiev regime is riven with corruption, gross human rights abuses and paramilitaries glorifying Nazism.

Given that horrific context of turmoil in early 2014, the people of Crimea had every right to repudiate the monstrous events in Kiev  events that the US and European Union were directly responsible in fomenting.

This is why Russia will never relinquish Crimea. The cultural bonds and comradeship are too strong. The peninsula is also a strategically vital location for Black Sea security and protection of Russias southern flank. One shudders to think if it had somehow come under the control of the NATO-backed, anti-Russian Kiev regime.

Western demands on Russia over Crimea are futile. Washington and its European allies have chosen to go down a path to nowhere over their spurious and duplicitous position. It is not Russia that has created the conflict over Ukraine, it is the Western powers through their unconscionable meddling. Yet, they seek to address their problem-making by continually sanctioning Russia. Dont the Europeans in particular realize that they are only shooting themselves in the feet? The sanctions they have implemented are inflicting much greater damage on their own industries, exporters and farmers than they are on Russias. Indeed, all signs are that Russias economy has become more independent and strong as a result of Western sanctions.

Western powers need to come to their senses and drop their self-defeating charade over Crimea. They need to look in the mirror and realize that they have directly caused much of the conflict and corruption in todays Ukraine. Russia cant solve their own problems.

Heres another reason why Western powers dont have a leg to stand on over Ukraine. It is their rank hypocrisy and utter unscrupulousness.

This week, the Trump administration announced that it was going to fully recognize Israels annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights. The US move is a blatant violation of international law and Syrian sovereignty. Unlike claims about Crimea, Washingtons complicity over Golan is a real, unabashed annexation, as testified by UN resolutions and international law. Presumably, the European allies will meekly acquiesce to the broad-daylight theft of Syrias land, as they do with so much else their American taskmaster does.

Washington and European vassals have no authority to castigate Russia over Crimea or Ukraine more widely. They have no historical intelligence, no facts and no integrity. And, in light of the unfolding Golan scandal, they have no moral authority either.

Crimea was a landmark event. Yes, it pivoted Western relations with Russia into a fraught condition. But, more significantly, the event has manifested a point of principle on which Russia is not backing down from. Crimea, Syria, Venezuela are proof of Russias international principled policy. The Western powers are the ones in disrepute. And they use sanctions to give themselves a veneer of righteousness.At a high-level meeting in Rome this week, it seems that Russia reiterated a grave warning to the US  Moscow will not tolerate American military intervention to topple the Venezuelan government with whom it is allied.

Meanwhile, back in Washington DC, President Donald Trump was again bragging that the military option was still on the table, in his press conference with Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro. Trump is bluffing or not yet up to speed with being apprised of Russias red line.

The meeting in the Italian capital between US special envoy on Venezuelan affairs Elliot Abrams and Russias deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov had an air of urgency in its arrangement. The US State Department announced the tete-a-tete only three days beforehand. The two officials also reportedly held their two-hour discussions in a Rome hotel, a venue indicating ad hoc arrangement.

Abrams is no ordinary diplomat. He is a regime-change specialist with a criminal record for sponsoring terrorist operations, specifically the infamous Iran-Contra affair to destabilize Nicaragua during the 1980s. His appointment by President Trump to the Venezuela file only underscores the serious intent in Washington for regime change in Caracas. Whether it gets away with that intent is another matter.

Moscows interlocutor, Sergei Ryabkov, is known to not mince his words, having earlier castigated Washington for seeking global military domination. He calls a spade a spade, and presumably a criminal a criminal.

The encounter in Rome this week was described as frank and serious  which is diplomatic code for a blazing exchange. The timing comes at a high-stakes moment, after Venezuela having been thrown into chaos last week from civilian power blackouts that many observers, including the Kremlin, blame on American cyber sabotage. The power grid outage followed a failed attempt by Washington to stage a provocation with the Venezuelan military over humanitarian aid deliveries last month from neighboring Colombia.

The fact that Washingtons efforts to overthrow the elected President Nicolas Maduro have so far floundered, might suggest that the Americans are intensifying their campaign to destabilize the country, with the objective of installing US-backed opposition figure Juan Guaido. He declared himself acting president in January with Washingtons imprimatur.

Given that the nationwide power blackouts seem to have failed in fomenting a revolt by the civilian population or the military against Maduro, the next option tempting Washington could be the military one.

It seems significant that Washington has recently evacuated its last remaining diplomats from the South American country. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo commented on the evacuation by saying that having US personnel on the ground was limiting Washingtons scope for action. Also, American Airlines reportedly cancelled all its services to Venezuela in the past week. Again, suggesting that the US was considering a military intervention, either directly with its troops or covertly by weaponizing local proxies. The latter certainly falls under Abrams purview.

After the Rome meeting, Ryabkov said bluntly: We assume that Washington treats our priorities seriously, our approach and warnings.

One of those warnings delivered by Ryabkov is understood to have been that no American military intervention in Venezuela will be tolerated by Moscow.

For his part, Abrams sounded as if he had emerged from the meeting after having been given a severe reprimand. No, we did not come to a meeting of minds, but I think the talks were positive in the sense that both sides emerged with a better understanding of the others views, he told reporters.

A better understanding of the others views, means that the American side was given a red line to back off.

The arrogance of the Americans is staggering. Abrams seems, according to US reporting, to have flown to Rome with the expectation of working out with Ryabkov a transition or compromise on who gets the title of president of Venezuela.

Thats what he no doubt meant when he said after the meeting there was not a meeting of minds, but rather he got a better understanding of Russias position.

Washingtons gambit is a replay of Syria. During the eight-year war in that country, the US continually proffered the demand of a political transition which at the end would see President Bashar al Assad standing down. By contrast, Russias unflinching position on Syria has always been that its not up to any external power to decide Syrias politics. It is a sovereign matter for the Syrian people to determine independently.

Nearly three years after Russia intervened militarily in Syria to salvage the Arab country from a US-backed covert war for regime change, the American side has manifestly given up on its erstwhile imperious demands for political transition. The principle of Syrian sovereignty has prevailed, in large part because of Russias trenchant defense of its Arab ally.

Likewise, Washington, in its incorrigible arrogance, is getting another lesson from Russia  this time in its own presumed back yard of Latin America.

Its not a question of Russia being inveigled by Washingtons regime-change schemers about who should be president of Venezuela and how we can manage a transition. Moscow has reiterated countless times that the legitimate president of Venezuela is Nicolas Maduro whom the people voted for last year by an overwhelming majority in a free and fair election  albeit boycotted by the US-orchestrated opposition.

The framework Washington is attempting to set up of choosing between their desired interim president and incumbent Maduro is an entirely spurious one. It is not even worthy to be discussed because it is a gross violation of Venezuelas sovereignty. Who is Washington to even dare try to impose its false choice?

On Venezuela, Russia is having to remind the criminal American rulers  again  about international law and respect for national sovereignty, as Moscow earlier did with regard to Syria.

And in case Washington gets into a huff and tries the military option, Moscow this week told regime-change henchman Abrams that thats a red line. If Washington has any sense of rationale left, it will know from its Syria fiasco that Russia has Venezuelas back covered.

Political force is out. Military force is out. Respect international law and Venezuelas sovereignty. Thats Russias eminently reasonable ultimatum to Washington.

Now, the desperate Americans could still try more sabotage, cyber or financial. But their options are limited, contrary to what Trump thinks.

How the days of American imperialist swagger are numbered. There was a time when it could rampage all over Latin America. Not any more, evidently. Thanks in part to Russias global standing and military power.Russia has finally completed development of the naval version of its Pantsir-S1 mobile anti-aircraft system. The naval version is called Pantsir-ME and first revealed during an early 2019 trade show. Development of the naval version was originally announced in 2013 with deliveries scheduled for 2015. The 2013 announcement also mentioned a major upgrade to Pantsir (land and naval versions) by 2016. That upgrade was mainly about electronics and software and would expand the number of targets Pantsir could handle to anti-ship missiles and surface targets.

There was a general slowdown in Russian weapons development after 2013 as the price of oil plummeted and economic sanctions were imposed in 2014 in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which was halted by an unexpectedly stiff Ukrainian resistance creating a stalemate that continues to the present). Russia sent troops to Syria and by 2016 the original vehicle-mounted version of Pantsir had gained a lot of combat experience, which led to more modifications of the system to increase effectiveness. Meanwhile, the sanctions hurt the Russian economy and the continued low oil prices made the worse. The defense budget suffered severe cuts, especially for systems in development. Weapons developers also suffered personnel problems as thousands of Russian scientists and engineers emigrated.

In some respects, Pantsir ME benefitted from the delays because the basic Pantsir design became more reliable and effective as a result of the combat experience and more time to implement changes. Pantsir ME differs from the vehicle version by replacing the two lower missiles canisters with two 30mm six-barrel autocannon of the type long used (like the American Phalanx) to defend against anti-ship missiles at close (under 3,000 meters) range. The basic turret type design, with four twin-missile canisters and radar. One less visible addition to the Pantsir-ME is that the turret apparatus below deck includes 32 more missile canisters for quick reloading. A third change is that the command post (where the system operators sit) can be located anywhere on the ship. Pantsir-ME is also connected with the ship fire control system although it can be placed on automatic is there is a threat of anti-ship missile attacks.

The turret weighs eight tons and is designed for use on ships larger than 400 tons displacement. The turret is of more rugged construction to handle salt water (which is corrosive) and the stress of operating at sea. The current versions of the Pantsir missiles have a max range of 20 kilometers and Pantsir-ME is built to provide better and more compact anti-missile and anti-aircraft protection for smaller warships by replacing separate anti-missile and anti-air systems. Pantsir-ME suits post-2014 Russian warship construction plans (mainly patrol ships, corvettes and frigates) and is expected to gain export sales because of the combat experience of the basic Pantsir system.

The original Pantsir-S1 is a further development of the Cold War era 2K22 (SA-19) and entered service in 2008. The SA-19 was mounted on a tracked armored vehicle and was developed in the 1970s, to replace mobile 23mm autocannon anti-aircraft systems. Pantsir-S1 uses the latest computer and missile technology and fixes many of the performance and reliability problems the SA-19 suffered from and is mounted in a wheeled vehicle (usually a heavy truck).

Each Pantsir-S1 vehicle carries radar, two single barrel 30mm autocannon, twelve Tunguska missiles (in six twin canisters), and has a crew of three. The 90 kg (198 pound) missiles have a 20 kilometer range, the radar a 30 kilometer range. The missile can hit targets at up to 8,400 meters (26,000 feet). The 30mm cannon is effective up to 3,200 meters (10,000 feet). The type of vehicle varies, but the most common one carrying all this is the KamAZ-6560, a 37 ton 8x8 truck that can carry up to 20 tons.

Each Pantsir-S1 vehicle costs about $15 million. As soon as Pantsir-S1 appeared it was obvious that a naval version would be ideal for smaller warships and integrated into the central fire control system. The naval version was always seen as a turret mounted version of the missile launchers and 30mm guns. The ship version was expected to be capable of receiving targeting data from the ships radar and ME can do that but it depends more on the radar mounted between the missile canisters. Another change in the ME version was that the two 30mm autocannon were no longer mounted between the missile canisters but replaced with a larger six barrel autocannon and replaced the two lower missile canisters. Each of these autocannon has 300 rounds of ammo, which is good for a 5-10 bursts of fire.

The army version of Pantsir-S1 is organized into batteries, with each such unit consisting of sixPantsir-S1 vehicles, three ammo resupply vehicles, four maintenance and spare parts vehicles, and a mobile trainer (containing a computerized Pantsir-S1 simulator to help maintain operator skills). The ship version would have ammo resupply handled by the ship ammo storage system which, like most ship-mounted guns, consists of a certain number of ready (for quick use) rounds beneath the turret and more ammo in the ship ammo storage area. The naval versing assigns maintenance tasks sailors responsible for weapons and electronics. The simulator would become part of the ships weapons simulation/trainer system, something that is becoming common for most navies.Road works in Bethlehem that are currently taking place along State Highway 2, are ahead of schedule.

NZTA Bay of Plenty System Manager Rob Campbell, says the project is going well with very few complications so far.

Based on current progress we should finish inside the six week window that has been allowed for this work.

The expected completion date is currently April 15  1 week earlier  but this is weather dependent.

We would like to thank motorists for their patience and cooperation during this time.

There are events taking place this weekend, therefore event closures and parking restrictions will be in place:

Event closures and parking restrictions:

TSB Surf Life Saving Nationals 2019

21 - 24 March 2019



There will be traffic management and parking restrictions in place on Marine Parade and Adams Avenue during the following times:

5am Wednesday, March 20 to 8pm Thursday, March 21

5am Sunday, March 24 to 8pm Monday, March 25

Food for Thought: A Rescued Food Festival

23 March 2019



There will be a partial closure in place at the Hamilton Street car park from 12pm Friday, 22 March to 7pm Saturday, 23 March.



Mobility access to the car park will be maintained at all times.

Tunes in Tye Park

23 March 2019



On Saturday, 23 March between 11am and 7pm, there will be traffic management in place to support safe event operations, including some parking restrictions in Forrester Drive from Rangataua Street.

Road closures:

Cruise ships

To help manage extra activity whenever a cruise ship arrives at the port, a section of Salisbury Avenue and The Mall will be turned into a one-way traffic lane. The one-way section will start at Victoria Road and end at Prince Avenue. Each closure will be closely monitored and will probably last a few hours.

Hamilton Street and Harington Street road closure:

Hamilton Street and Harington Street are closed to through traffic outside the Harington Street car park building construction site. Access to and from Harrington House basement parking and the Library car park will be from Willow Street only. Access to and from Quest Apartments and the Citizens Advice Bureau will only be from Durham Street. Pedestrian access on the library side of Hamilton Street will be maintained at all times. The closure will be in place for about 12 months. Be aware of a significant increase in truck movements out of Hamilton Street.

Spring Street road closure:

There is no through access along the section of Spring Street, from Grey Street to Durham Street, for the next two months. Access to the basement car park and other properties in this section of Spring Street will be from Grey Street only. There is no access for the next month from Cameron Road to Durham Street along Spring Street, as cobblestone work is completed. Access to properties in this block of Spring Street, is from Cameron Road only.

Traffic report:

City centre:

Dive Crescent: the storage sheds on Dive Crescent have been demolished to make way for a temporary car parking area. The site fencing will remain in place until the work is complete. Work is due for completion mid-2019.

Seventeenth Avenue: earthworks are underway at the bottom of Seventeenth Avenue. No road closures are in place, however the berms will be closed to car parking.

Durham Street: from Spring Street to Elizabeth Street is closed to traffic nightly, from 7pm to 6am. Traffic through the Spring Street intersection is being diverted on to the completed section of pavement work. There is no access on to Spring Street. During the day, Durham Street remains one-way from Spring Street to Elizabeth Street. Best access to Durham Street is from Wharf Street. Access from Elizabeth Street into Durham Street is closed until further notice. Access to the car park building is from the Spring Street end of Durham Street only.

Durham Lane: pavement construction work is nearing completion from the Bongard Centre to Cameron Road. Limited access to private car parking is available. The access from the University of Waikato to Cameron Road is closed for three weeks, to allow for construction works. There will be no through traffic route available.

Beyond the city centre:

Pyes Pa Road: tree felling work is planned on land bordering Pyes Pa Road, State Highway 36, at 2.2km south of Oropi Gorge Road intersection. The work will take place on Wednesday 27 and Thursday 28 March, managed with a stop/go.

Maunganui Road: work has commenced on Maunganui Road between Hull Road and Hinau Street. The safety improvements being made include central median islands, roundabouts, a shared footpath/cycleway next to Blake Park, landscaping and improved street lighting. Temporary traffic management will be in place. Motorists should expect delays and if possible use an alternative route or adjust travel times.

Domain Road: reconstruction works commence on Domain Road with the installation of culverts at the Wairakei Stream. Between Gravatt Road and Papamoa Beach Road, existing utility services will be relocated and upgraded. Temporary traffic management will be in place and at times diversions will be required. Motorists should expect delays and if possible use an alternative route or adjust travel times.

Roundabout at Waihi Road/Otumoetai Road/Cambridge Road: safety improvements at this intersection are underway. Weather permitting, works are expected to take six weeks. Please drive carefully through the site.

Windermere Drive/Lagoon Place: safety improvements installing a new roundabout at the intersection continue. Works are due for completion by the end of March.

McFetridge Lane: work upgrading the road has begun. The work is expected to be complete by mid July.

Kennedy Road: a new stormwater treatment pond is being constructed. The construction site is off the road, but the shoulder will remain closed. Please drive carefully through the area. Works are expected to continue through to mid 2019.

Matapihi: the laying of new wastewater pipelines in road reserve in Matapihi, Puwhariki, Waikari, Hungahungatoroa, Matapihi Station and Waikari Roads is in progress. Please drive carefully through the area.

Pyes Pa Road (between Aquinas College and Kennedy Road): construction of a shared pathway, a pedestrian island, a water main, a stormwater main, Joyce Road intersection upgrade, and street lights continue. Please drive carefully through the area, there are temporary speed limits in place. The works are expected to be completed in May.

Mortlake Heights extension: this section of the new loop road and Taumata School is open. Heavy truck activity will continue while completing a new stormwater pond and subdivision development. Please drive carefully through the area, especially during school hours.

Oropi Road (between Phillips Drive and Pukemapu Road): roading improvements continue. Please drive carefully through the works area, a 30kph speed restriction is in place. Weather permitting, works are due for completion this month.

SH36 pedestrian overbridge: works continue near the Takitimu Drive/Taurikura Drive roundabout. Please drive carefully through this area as it is under traffic management control with temporary speed limits.Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology students are participating in a rescued food cook-off today.

The cook off is part of the Food For Thought event, a rescued food festival at Our Place Tauranga.

Renowned chef Peter Blakeway is leading the cook-off, and he says it gives students a great opportunity to interact and work closely with respected chefs in the industry.

This event is all about the students.

Theyre ready for this  to organise, set up the kitchen, cook and plan the menu alongside six of the best chefs in the Bay. They will need to communicate and work alongside experienced head chefs on the day of the event and this will be a great way to showcase the skills that theyve been honing for the past two years.

Im really excited and proud of my bunch. The group that wins not only would have sold the most food to raise money for charity but will also have bragging rights!

Not only is the event a great chance to show off their skills, it is serving as an assessment which will count towards their final mark.

This is an opportunity for us to get the industry to understand what were doing and the quality of students that come through our culinary course.

From an industry point of view, they do understand that these students come out being equipped with the right kind of skills that will make them employable and part of that process is putting them out there doing events like this as part of their assessment.

Industry is not only looking for graduates with just hard skills and knowledge, but also soft skills - communication, speed, teamwork, ability to work under pressure and accuracy. Doing a real-life charity event projects present real pressure and all those skills mentioned will show on that day, says Peter.

Toi Ohomai Culinary Arts student Catherine Papesch is the head chef for the event, and she is pleased with her appointment.

I love the challenge because its for a good cause. I love helping families, helping kids for schools, etc. Food rescue is a brilliant idea!

Im really excited and I think it could be good for my career, especially getting to work alongside top head chefs from the Bay and Good Neighbour.

As well as being a tutor at Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology, Peter has published a cookbook, and he is New Zealands only brand ambassador for Everdure barbeque by Heston Blumenthal.

Being in Blumenthals team means that I am connected to his team all over the world in Australia, UK and the US  all of which are highly beneficial to students making industry connections worldwide.

We [tutors] spend every available opportunity to spend as much time in industry as possible so that we are up to date with the current skills and knowledge to help prepare our students for the industry.

We also work on building mentor-mentee relationships with students that doesnt stop when they walk out of the class as graduates, but is ongoing right to getting them into their next job. I still talk to one of my first head-chefs from nearly 30 years ago!Good Morning SunLive readers and welcome back to the start of your weekend.

I hope you have all had an enjoyable week and have an amazing weekend.

Looking at the weather for the Bay of Plenty today, it is mostly cloudy with a few showers about.

There are also some northeast breezes about as well.

Your high will be 22 degrees with an overnight low of 17 degrees.

If you are looking for something to get you out and about, there are plenty of things on today to keep yourself or your family entertained.

The Food For Thought festival is kicking off today and is a celebration of rescued food and the community.

To read more about the festival, click here:

The festival kicks off at 10am at Our Place, entry is a gold coin donation and all food available to purchase is $5.

The Colour Splash is also on today.

This is being held at Coronation Park in Mount Maunganui and is a day of colourful fun and freedom for the whole family.

Known as the festival of colours, it is a joyous annual event during which people dance and frolic, play, chase and colour each other with dry powder.

Make sure you wear old garments or clothes that you dont mind becoming coloured, as some of the dye might not fully wash out. White garments bear the most dramatic and brilliant effect.

To read more about the festival, click here:

The Tauranga Multicultural Festival is on today, after being postponed last weekend.

Involving more than 200 performers from across 20 different ethnic groups resident in Tauranga and the Western Bay of Plenty, this event will enthrall families with authentic foods and entertainment.

Our city, as across New Zealand, is diverse and it makes our communities stronger. There is no place for hate in any city in New Zealand. Lets embrace and strength the diversity, says Multicultural Tauranga.

As an organisation, we responded to last weeks tragedy by postponing the event. The Multicultural Festival 2019 will now be held on the 23rd March at the Historic Village from 10am. Everyone is invited to come to celebrate the diversity of Tauranga.

Now in its 20th year, the day is naturally becoming an iconic annual event on the Tauranga calendar. It attracts anywhere up to 5000 participants and visitors, with many travelling from beyond the Western Bay of Plenty to participate and enjoy.

Uzabus have also announced that there will be free buses running from the Tauranga City Centre to the Historic Village, where the festival is taking place.

The festival is running from 10am to 4pm. Entry is $5. Children under 12 are free.

For more information about the festival, read here:

To find out what else is happening around the Bay today, check out the Whats On listings below:

Saturday 23 March:

Her Colours Art Exhibition

Beautiful artworks by Tamzin Blair that celebrates femininity & the artists identity. Unique multi-layers works. The Art Lounge NZ Gallery at Willow Street. 11am-4pm Tue-Sat

Art In The Park

Original art for sale. Weather permitting. Coronation Park, Mt Maunganui 9-4pm. Tauranga Society of Artists

Bay Network Singles Club

50plus. Make new friends. Barbeques, outings, dining out & pot-lucks. Ph Jonathan 572 2091 or Maureen 021 112 3307

Colour Splash Fun Times

Joyous free-entry festival of vibrant colours, well-being & togetherness. A fun chase with dye powders for the whole family! Coronation Park Mt Maunganui 12pm.

Come Dancing With Us

Tauranga Scottish Society sequence dancing. 7-10pm, Greerton Hall. $7 entry. Covers raffles & supper. All welcome. Ph 572 5938

Greerton Hall Market

Last Saturday of month. 8am-12pm. Stalls inside/outside. Discounts for charity groups. Refreshments available. Phone/txt for site. Tricia 07 543 1487 or 027 908 2952, www facebook.com/greertonhallmarket

Jam Session/Open Mic

3rd Saturday of every month at Mount RSA. All genres welcome. Backing band available. Keith Dickson 021 170 239

Jigsaw Puzzle Library

10am-12 noon. Choose from of 300 puzzles. Hire $1 per 1000+ puzzle, 50c under 1000. Cnr Highmore Tce & Brookfield Tce. Ph 576 0698

LOL Laughter Wellness

Laugh your way to wellness. To learn how, come & join us at Arataki Community Centre, Zambuk Way, Mt Maunganui. 11-11:45am. Ph Trish 022 036 6768

Multicultural Mandarin Classes

Monday conversational all levels Mandarin classes 6pm-7pm. Saturday academic classes 10am-12pm. Registration required to enquiries@trmc.co.nz

Otumoetai Tennis Club

Adult Tennis. Start time 1:30pm Bellevue Park Windsor Road (adjacent to swimming pool complex). New players & visitors welcome. Ph Fred 544 5088

Pottery Gallery

Bethlehem Pottery Gallery is open 10am-2pm Tues,Thurs & Sat. Come along & purchase locally made pottery.

Sabbath Worship Services (Hairini)

Experience Gods Love worshipping at 10:30am Saturdays at Baden Powell Centre Harrisfield Dr, Hairini. Ph David at Church of Gods Love 7th day 020 4128 3124. www.churchofgodslove.com

Sunshine Sequence Dance Group

Come & enjoy tea dance, Sat Mar 30, Baptist Church Hall, 13th Avenue. 5-9pm. $5pp. BYO food, plates, cutlery, non alcoholic drinks. Jan 544 4379

Taoist Tai Chi

Beginners Tai Chi classes Mon-Sat, 15 Koromiko St, Tauranga. Also KatiKati, Mount, Papamoa & Te Puke. For times visit www.taoist.org or ph 578 9116

Tauranga Social Dance Club

First Saturday monthly at the Baptist Hall, Cameron Rd/13th Ave. Old & modern sequence dances, supper & raffles. 7pm. $7 entry. Ph Faye 543 3280

Tauranga Synchronised Swimming Club

Have a go at synchro! Beginners train Saturday mornings at Baywave. Supportive & friendly environment. First lesson free. Ph Jo 027 543 1697, www.taurangasynchro.co.nz.

Te Puke Toy Library

New opening hours Wed-Sat 10am-1pm Thurs 3:30-5:30pm during Terms 1 and 4. 7 Stock Road Playgroup Friday 10am-12pm. Come on down & join to hire toys & have some fun.

The Sociables

Females & males in the 30s/40s/50s age group that meet up to participate in local activities & events, bushwalks & dining out. Ph 022 012 0376Stanley Raddatz passed away Tuesday, March 19, 2019 at his home in Lorenzo, NE.

There will be a visitation with family present at the Gehrig-Stitt Chapel on Monday, March 25, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00. Graveside services will take place at Greenwood Cemetery at 2:00 p.m. Memorials may be made to: Night of HOPE Walk for Cancer; Rural Fire Department District #1; or Vets Honor Flight. You may view Stanley's Book of Memories, leave condolences, photos and stories at www.gehrigstittchapel.com. Gehrig-Stitt Chapel & Cremation Service, LLC is in charge of Stanley's care and funeral arrang...Nearly 100 million viewers tuned in to watch Super Bowl LIII or, in many cases, to watch what are commonly thought of as some of the years best commercials. Companies such as Anheuser-Busch InBev spent as much as $5 million for 30-second spots to convey information, or as MillerCoors alleges in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Wisconsin Thursday, disinformation.

At issue: MillerCoors alleges that the other beer giant's ads regarding the use of corn syrup are misleading (the Super Bowl ad claimed that Bud Light has "100 percent less corn syrup than Coors Light"). The suit accuses Anheuser-Busch of false advertising and federal trademark dilution. MillerCoors seeks an injunction to stop Bud Light from continuing the ad campaign and is asking for a trial by jury and for the defendant to pay its legal fees.

MillerCoors claims corn syrup is no longer in Coors Lite and Miller Lite beer after the brewing process.

So, it's there at the beginning of brewing but gone by the end?

Consumers are unsure. Google "Is there corn syrup" and it autofills with in Bud Light, in Miller Lite, in Busch Light and in Coors Light.

Mike Harting, chief executive of 3 Daughters Brewing in Florida, explains why the specific sugar in the beer-making process doesn't matter much.

"When you ferment and make alcohol you need a sugar source and historically those sources are local or regional. Sake is made from rice for a reason. You can use wheat, corn, sugar cane, rice. In the U.S. it's traditional to use wheat products to give a bolder flavor and more of a body. The issue with using all barley or wheat is that they have a higher caloric content; corn or rice is used for light beer because they are lighter and, frankly, cheaper."

In the end, it's moot. "The yeast eats most of it."

Harting's craft brewery is launching an all-corn beer on Friday, a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to what has come to be called "corngate."

Corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup have become nutritional boogeymen in recent years.

Bonnie Liebman, nutrition director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, thinks this is largely an issue of labeling and psychology.

"How did high-fructose corn syrup become demonized? My sense is companies started saying on food labels, 'no high fructose corn syrup,' in the way you can say 'gluten free' and people then think gluten is bad. Corn syrup is no worse for you than table sugar or any other kind of sweetener."

Ordinary table sugar consists of a molecule of fructose linked to a molecule of glucose, half and half. Corn syrup is straight glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is made by converting some of the glucose in corn syrup to fructose. Liebman says HFCS may have become associated with ill health because it's the sweetener frequently used in soft drinks. That's because it's cheap and plentiful. But it's no worse for you than things that sound healthy, like brown rice syrup.

There's evidence that sugary drinks lead to weight gain and are linked to a higher risk of diabetes and heart disease. But, Liebman says, these light beers have, at most, one gram of sugar. Chump change in the scheme of things.

According to MillerCoors, Anheuser-Busch's Super Bowl and subsequent ads about corn syrup were about negative marketing. They released a statement on Thursday that said, in part, "Anheuser-Busch has admitted that its campaign was designed to mislead the public. Anheuser-Busch is fearmongering over a common beer ingredient it uses in many of its own beers, as a fermentation aid that is not even present in the final product. This deliberate deception is bad for the entire beer category. We are showing the world the truth."

In a February interview with Food & Wine, Andy Goeler, Bud Light's vice president of marketing, was asked, "Doesn't the fact that there's more Google searches for (corn syrup) now prove that people didn't quite know what it was and that they need to look it up after the fact?" To which he responded, "Yeah, and I think that's awesome."

Anheuser-Busch operates 12 breweries in the United States and makes dozens of different beers, malt beverages and more at its plant near Baldwinsville.

Gemma Hart, Anheuser-Busch's vice president of communications, released a brand statement about the suit standing by the advertisement's assertion.

"The recent Bud Light campaign is truthful and intended to point out a key difference from Miller Lite and Coors Light. Those beers are brewed with corn syrup; Bud Light is not. These are facts. MillerCoors has admitted to using corn syrup on its website, in social media, in a full-page ad thanking Bud Light following the Super Bowl, and even in the lawsuit itself."

Obfuscation and confusing claims about competing brands is nothing new, and it seems to be on the rise. Two weeks ago, Clif Bar ran a full-page print ad in The New York Times, an open letter to Daniel Lubetzky, the founder and CEO of KIND, challenging his company to switch to organic ingredients.

Lubetzky, in a recent phone conversation with The Washington Post, said about the scuffle, "We focus on providing people nutritionally whole foods, that's what we think is best for people's health. Clif Bar is 30 percent sugar and uses some organic ingredients."

Lubetzky has fired back by asking the FDA to update the nutrient content claim regulation to add disqualification thresholds so that empty calorie products with high amounts of negative nutrients (like sugar) can no longer make nutrient content claims.

This bar fight underscores how nutrition information can be weaponized. The irony is that alcoholic beverages arent required to list nutritional information. Its only when you make specific claims - low calorie, low fat - that nutrition labels are required. In this beer battle, all the warriors are lite-weights.CLAY, NY - Megan Winkler said she was fast asleep in bed when she heard fire trucks outside her Pine Tree Apartments building in Clay around 8 a.m. today.

"I just rolled over in bed, and almost didnt leave because no one yelled fire,'' Winkler said. But then I got up and went outside and saw all this smoke just pouring out the windows.

No one was injured in the morning fire at the Pine Tree Apartments Building E, 1136 Vine Street in Clay. Firefighters responded to the fire at 8:03 a.m.

Everyone evacuated the building, fire officials said. The fire caused authorities to close down Vine Street for awhile.

Firefighters respond to a fire at Pine Tree Apartments at 1136 Vine St. in Clay early Friday. (Photo by Elizabeth Doran)

Heavy smoke was pouring out of the windows when firefighters arrived, said Craig Balcer, a Moyers Corners Battalion Chief. A sparking electrical outlet was reported at the time of call, he said.

Winkler, whose apartment is on the bottom floor, said her smoke alarm didnt go off, but her friends in other apartments did hear their smoke alarms activate.

The smoke was coming from a second-floor apartment, but then spread up to the third floor. An apartment on each floor was heavily damaged, he said.

About four cats and a rabbit were rescued, Balcer said. He said he didnt believe any dogs were involved.

Firefighters used ladders to reach some of the apartments.

The fire was put out before 9 a.m. but all the residents of the building are displaced and are being assisted by the Red Cross, fire officials said. The building cant be occupied at this time.

Numerous fire departments responded, including Moyers Corners, Cicero, East Syracuse and others.SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- A man was stabbed to death late Thursday night after a car crash and a fight in Syracuse, according to the Syracuse Police Department.

The man, Shaladik Hadid, 39, died shortly after he was stabbed in the chest on the citys South Side, police said Friday in a news release.

Officers discovered the deadly stabbing after responding to a crash at 11:30 p.m. Thursday at Midland Avenue and Furman Street.

A caller told dispatchers there was a crash and two people were fighting, police said.

Hadid was stabbed in the chest during the fight, police said. He was rushed by American Medical Response ambulance to Upstate University Hospital, where he died a short time later.

Two vehicles were involved in the crash, Syracuse Police Detective George Hack said this morning.

Hadid and the suspect were in separate cars before the accident, he said, and got into a fight after the crash.

The circumstances which led up to the fight are being investigated now, Hack said.

The suspect -- an unknown man -- ran away from Midland Avenue before police arrived, police said. A more detailed description of the suspect was not available, police said.

The homicide investigation is very active and ongoing, Hack said.

Police asked anyone with information about the deadly stabbing to call (315) 442-5222, submit tips anonymously through the Syracuse PD app or call the homicide tip line at (315) 442-5223.The votes are in, and the baby Asian elephant born at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo on Jan. 15 has a name: Ajay  pronounced Ah-JAI  a Sanskrit word meaning Invincible.

Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon came to the zoo today to announce the winning name, which was submitted by Heather House of Hastings.

We had over 8,400 votes cast, and Ajay received almost 37 percent of the vote, County Executive McMahon said. Thank you to the more than 3,000 people who submitted names and everyone who voted.

The calf represents another great success for the zoos Asian Elephant program, which is one of only 30 facilities that care for Asian elephants and only 11 able to breed this critically endangered species.

Our zoo is doing a fantastic job with endangered animals, and I am thankful to the elephant staff for all the dedication and care it took to bring this baby elephant into the world, McMahon said.

Zoo Director Ted Fox said a name that means Invincible is fitting because the calf has a feisty, winning personality and it is the most precocious baby elephant the zoos elephant care team has ever seen.

He said Ajay began exploring his surroundings and leaving his mothers side within hours of his birth, and using his trunk to pick up objects within weeks  something his older brother, Batu, took months to attempt.

This little one is super curious and unafraid to try new things, Fox said. He started walking away from his mother the day he was born and she has been chasing him ever since.

The new baby is the offspring of female Asian elephant Mali, 22, and bull elephant Doc, 21. Their first calf, Ajays big brother Batu, will turn 4 on May 12, Mothers Day.

Ajay is not yet on public view. He will be introduced into Asian Elephant Preserve once an expansion of the habitat is completed in late May. The zoo will continue to post updates on its social media.

The Rosamond Gifford Zoo is among 233 zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos & Aquarium (AZA), which requires the highest standards of animal care, wildlife conservation and guest education. AZA also oversees Species Survival Plans to maintain and increase the populations of endangered species. Ajays birth is part of the AZAs SSP for Asian elephants.SYRACUSE, N.Y.  Two Onondaga County officials would get 30 percent pay raises as part of a plan to restaff the county medical examiners office which has no doctors to perform autopsies.

The county executives office wants to increase annual pay for the vacant chief medical examiners position from $190,000 to $250,000. Dr. Indu Gupta, the countys health commissioner who oversees the MEs office, also would get a 30 percent pay hike under the proposal. Shes paid the same amount as the medical examiner.

The increase, which would make the ME and Gupta the countys highest paid employees, must be approved by county lawmakers. The earliest they can vote on the proposal is April 2. The proposal will be discussed 9 a.m. Tuesday at meeting of the Legislatures Ways and Means Committee.

At least one legislator is questioning whether the health commissioner should also get a hefty pay raise.

The county abruptly fired Dr. Robert Stoppacher, its former medical examiner, early this year without explanation. That left the office with only one forensic pathologist on staff who recently left. Since 2014 the office had been staffed by the chief medical examiner and anywhere from one to three pathologists.

The MEs office contracts with New York City pathologists to perform autopsies here. The county is spending about $111,000 a month on contract pathologists and is on track to spend nearly $1.4 million this year if it does not fill the vacancies.

The pay hike is necessary because of a severe national shortage of forensic pathologists, county officials say. There are about 500 practicing forensic pathologists in the US, which needs twice that many, according to the National Association of Medical Examiners. That group told the county its forensic pathologist salary levels are too low to fill the vacancies in the MEs office.

Its a buyers market out there and we need to move quickly, said David Knapp, the county Legislatures chairman.

The MEs office performed 876 autopsies last year. It also does autopsies for Madison, Jefferson, Oneida, Oswego and Cayuga counties. In addition to doing autopsies, forensic pathologists are often called upon to testify in court proceedings.

Robert Durr, the countys attorney, recently told members of the Legislatures Health Committee that contract pathologists are reluctant to testify in court, a function normally handled by a chief medical examiner. The MEs office is in danger of losing some contracts with surrounding counties and its national accreditation if it doesnt address the staffing problem, Durr said.

In addition to increasing the chief medical examiners pay, the proposal calls for the creation of a new deputy medical examiners position that pays $230,000. It also would increase by 20 percent the pay of two pathologist positions to $190,000 each.

The proposed 30 percent raise for Gupta would take effect Jan. 1. Her base salary was $187,865 in 2018. It would jump to $250,000 under the proposal. Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatricks base salary last year was $197,000, the highest in the county.

The higher salary and fringe benefit costs for the MEs office staff would be less than what the county is spending on contract pathologists, according to the health department.

Ann Rooney, deputy county executive, told Legislators the health commissioners salary should be the same as the medical examiners because the health department oversees the MEs office. She said it would be difficult to recruit a new health commissioner if the salary for that position is not on par with the medical examiners.

The Legislatures Health Committee tabled a motion to approve the proposal at a meeting March 14. Legislator Tim Burtis, health committee chair, said the committee wants to know how much other medical examiners make in places like Erie and Monroe counties.

Burtis said he has some qualms about giving the health commissioner such a big increase. If the county wants to raise her salary it should do so through the normal budget process that begins in October, he said.WASHINGTON --- President Donald Trump on Thursday stood next to a Syracuse University student in the White House as he ripped colleges and universities that he accused of suppressing free speech on campus.

Justine Murray, an SU sophomore, was among 10 college students invited to join Trump on stage in the East Room of the White House as he signed an executive order that threatens to withhold federal research grants from schools that dont support free speech.

If a college or university does not allow you to speak, we will not give them money, Trump told an audience that included more than 100 college students from 28 states. Its very simple.

Among the invited guests in the audience was Tyler Toomey, a junior at SUNY Oswego, whose conservative student organization received death threats after setting up a table on campus in support of Trumps border wall.

The president asked four of the students on stage to share stories in which they said their speech was suppressed on campus. One student said she was stopped from handing out Valentines Day cards with religious messages on campus after she was accused of soliciting.

Murray, standing to the left of Trump on stage, was not asked to share her story.

SU officials confirmed Thursday that she attempted to set up a conservative student group on campus, Young Americans for Freedom. An application was denied by a student review board because it was missing required information, including a contract with an adviser.

Murray was not available for an interview with reporters after Trump signed the order. She stood next to the president as he signed the order, which could place $35 billion in federal research grants from 12 agencies under greater scrutiny.

Toomey, the SUNY Oswego student, sat in the audience to the left of Trump, four rows from the front of the room.

Toomey said White House officials didnt tell him why he received the invite. But he suspects its because the college supported free speech for members of his organization, the Young Americans for Freedom Club. The club set up a table in a campus building in February, supporting Trumps border wall.

I would like to think I was invited because the SUNY Oswego administration did a good job and is an example of what colleges should do, Toomey said in an interview. They may not support our message, but they supported our right to speech.

Toomey said some SUNY Oswego students are afraid to join the club because of online death threats. The university investigated and found none of the threats originated from its students.

For conservative students, a lot of them dont want to join our college clubs because theyre fearful of the hostile reaction we sometimes receive, Toomey said.

Before the White House event, Murray from SU posted on her Facebook page, I am deeply honored to join the president tomorrow in defending free speech on Americas college campuses, where I have personally battled an insidious movement to silence mainstream students who disagree with the conformist political dogma spewed by an increasingly intolerant faculty and their fawning pupils.

SU Chancellor Kent Syverud said in a statement to Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard that the university takes seriously its free speech responsibilities on campus.

I strongly believe that our nations college campuses need to be places where the First Amendment is respected, and where the full diversity of political views can be civilly discussed, Syverud said. He added the university will do more to promote all viewpoints.

I cant imagine academic freedom or the genuine search for truth thriving here without free speech, Syverud said, and for that reason Syracuse University will continue to vigorously protect freedom of expression on behalf of all members of our campus community.

Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at SUs Newhouse School of Public Communications, said one big question surrounds Trumps order: Whose free speech is he trying to protect?

If this sort of order facilitates free speech on both sides of the political spectrum, then thats laudable, Gutterman said. But it looks like this is designed to protect free speech from conservative groups that are facing hostility on college campuses these days.

Trumps order also requires federal agencies to seek more information from schools about student debt and earnings of their graduates. The schools would have to provide the data for each program of study.

An administration official told reporters Thursday that colleges should be transparent about the average earnings and loan repayment rates of former students who received federal student aid. The information could be used by prospective student to compare schools and programs before enrolling.

Trumps focus on student debt comes at the same time he has proposed a 10 percent cut in funding (about $7.1 billion) for the Department of Education in his 2020 budget and cracked down on debt forgiveness programs.

The president said he wants to eliminate federal subsidies for student debt under an Obama-era program that stopped interest from accruing on loans for those in school or who have an economic hardship.

Trump also wants to cut down on the number of student debt repayment plans that cap monthly bills as a percentage of income. Under his proposal, payments would be limited to 12.5 percent of a borrowers discretionary income, up from 10 percent.

Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751DEWITT, N.Y. - Deanna Torrens moved into her grandfathers house after living and teaching for some time in Baltimore. There was a shooting at her school, close to Torrens and her students in her time there. In the wake of that event, she decided to move to up to Central New York at 6368 East Seneca Turnpike in Jamesville.

I love Baltimore, but my grandfathers house was just sitting there and I knew they werent ready to sell it just yet, said Torrens. I asked my dad if I could move up to Syracuse and live in the house.

Before Torrens grandfather had passed, her brother bought four acres of the previously existing 8-acre lot and was commuting from Chittenango building a house on the lot on nights and weekends. The siblings decided to both live in their grandfathers home while the house was being built next door.

That brother got married and his wife moved in, and Torrens older brother moved in with his wife and baby while their house was being finished in LaFayette. Then, Torrens got married and her husband, John, moved in. For a brief period of time, there was a full house.

We had six working adults in the home sharing one shower, said Torrens. The house needed a lot of work and once the siblings moved into their respective homes, Torrens and her husband decided to make some major changes.

The home was gutted down to the studs and everything in the house was replaced including the plumbing and the wiring.

We kept the footprint of home except for the kitchen. We moved that out to over the garage so the kitchen is very big. Its my favorite room of the house, said Torrens.

The kitchen is a cherished spot as all of the cabinetry has been hand-crafted by Torrens dad.

He is a veterinarian by trade, but hes also a great wood craftsman. He cut the trees down, let them dry for a year and a half, planed them and he built all the kitchen cabinets. He did all the woodwork in the kitchen, the cubbies, the vanities in the bathroom, and the mantle on the fireplace. When I am in my kitchen, I feel like its a hug from my dad. It was his love-letter to me, said Torrens.

The kitchen is the room Torrens will miss the most in this move.

In renovating the house, Torrens made sure to include radiant heat in the floor and they took out the wood fireplace in the living room and replaced it with a gas insert. A second fireplace was added in the kitchen which Torrens said makes it even more cozy.

To add an additional bathroom, Torrens took out on bedroom and added in a master bath.

Outdoors, traces of her grandfather can still be seen. He was the supervisor at the quarry in Jamesville and a geologist. There are lots of stone walls and rocks around the in-ground pool that he brought to the property.

The backyard is huge and goes up a hill. Torrens said that people are surprised once they get behind the house and see the lower field and the great sledding hill', saying Whoa! I didnt know you had all this back here.

Its kind of a hidden gem, said Torrens.

Torrens describes this house as a labor of love and thinks the quality craftsmanship and large cozy kitchen really make this home stand out.

The neighborhood is quiet and private. Torrens loves how close it is to amenities and the downtown area, but also appreciates that the neighborhood is less developed than some areas.

When youre out back, you almost feel like youre in the country. When the trees are full, you can hardly see the other homes around you, said Torrens.

Torrens and her husband have recently moved to Los Angeles for a new job opportunity.

There will be an open house on March 24 from 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m.

THE DETAILS

Address: 6368 East Seneca Turnpike, Jamesville, N.Y. 13078

Price: $329,900

Size: 3,200 square feet

Acreage: 3.6 acres

Monthly Mortgage: $1,839 (based on this weeks national average rate of 4.31 percent, according to Freddie Mac, for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with a 20 percent down payment. Fees and points not included.)

Total taxes: $9,143 (Based on assessed value of $234,900)

Built: 2005

School District: Jamesville-DeWitt

Kitchen: The kitchen has handmade cabinetry, a window seat, granite counters, double ovens and a warming drawer. There is also a breakfast bar, sitting area, fireplace, and desk in this room.

Bedrooms: This home has three bedrooms, all on the second floor, including the master suite. The master bedroom includes a walk-in closet and large master bath. There is a makeshift bedroom in the finished basement for guests.

Bathrooms: There are two full bathrooms and one half bath in this home. The bathrooms have handmade vanities and the master bathroom includes both a stand-alone shower and tub. There is a half bathroom on the main floor.

Living areas: This home has a living room with fireplace and window seat, a mud room, first floor laundry, dining room, and a finished basement.

Outdoors: The home has 3.6 acres of land with both a field and hillside. There is a back deck, partially fenced in yard, an in-ground pool, and attached two-car garage.

Agent: Gloria Barbano Weyl

GRG Gloria Realty Group

Address: 5912 N Burdick St., East Syracuse, N.Y. 13057

Phone: 315-415-1146

Email: gloriarealtygroup@gmail.com

To nominate a listing for House of the Week, send an email to home@syracuse.comNew York  A New York City police sergeant who owns a for-hire vehicle company allegedly used his badge to bully a Taxi and Limousine Commission supervisor.

The sergeant, Howard Roth, has been fined $6,000 in connection with the incident, according to the New York Daily News.

Roth had received a waiver in 2017 that allowed him to work part time as a driver and owner of the car service on the condition he wouldn't use his position as a police officer for any kind of advantage, according to the New York Daily News. But when he went to renew his license with the commission, he pulled his badge when an agent told him he could only make the payment online.

Im NYPD, Roth said, according to the Daily News, citing a report of the incident from the citys Conflicts of Interest Board. I should not have to follow protocols.

The agent again denied Roth's request, but he continued to try to use his position to his advantage. He eventually stormed off, saying there was no respect from the commission, according to the News.

He also threatened to take official action against commission employees, the News said.

Roths attorney said his client disputes the allegations, but agrees with the outcome of the disposition and paid his fine, according to The Associated Press.

Roth has been with the citys police department since 2010, according to the Daily News.

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-282-8598In brief: Instead of hassling with he chaos of events like E3 and GDC, Sony has announced it will be initiating a Nintendo Direct-like way of announcing new games and updates. It will be called State of Play and the first episode will be streamed live this Monday.

Sony revealed on Friday that it would be hosting a State of Play livestream next week. The show will have trailers, gameplay footage, and announcements for upcoming titles.

Sid Shuman, Sonys director of social media, did not reveal any hints on what games to expect, but if I had to guess I would say news on The Last of Us Part II, Ghost of Tsushima, and Death Stranding is likely. Of course, it is bound to have some surprises in there as well.

We already reported that Sony would be skipping E3 this year. At the time it was vague as to its reasons other than saying it wanted to try other avenues of communication.

We are exploring new and familiar ways to engage our community in 2019 and cant wait to share our plans with you, the company had said in a statement.

The State of Play looks to be those plans.

The livestream will take place on Monday, March 25 at 2:00pm on Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Alternatively, you can just come back to this article and watch it right here (above). If you miss it, Sony will post the VOD edition shortly after the broadcast concludes.

Interestingly, this Mondays show will only be the first of several.

And this is just the beginning! said Shuman. State of Play will return throughout the year with more updates and announcements.

Well have to see where Sonys new communication strategy goes. Skipping major gaming events like E3 in favor of sporadic announcements throughout the year could go either way for the console giant.

In a way, I like the idea as long as it does State of Play events on a regular schedule. Sony should give players something to look forward to rather than leaving them guessing when the next one will be. Well see what Sony has to say on Monday.A San Francisco jury rules that Bayer's Roundup weed herbicide is a major factor leading to a California man's cancer diagnosis.

On March 19, the six-person jury determined that Roundup's maker, Monsanto, contributed to Edwin Hardeman's non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Hardeman, 70, is the second plaintiff to charge a case against the company.

In August 2018, another plaintiff with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma was awarded with $289 million worth of damages, but the court eventually reduced it to $78 million. Monsanto has since appealed on the case.

Hardeman joins 11,200 other lawsuits to go against Roundup and its manufacturer in the United States.

Weed Killer, Cancer Maker

Roundup contains an active ingredient called glyphosate, which according to Monsanto is generally safe based on related studies. Government regulators have rejected the notion that glyphosate causes cancer.

In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a part of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as a "probable human carcinogen."

Hardeman started using Roundup in the 1980s until 2012 to treat poison oaks and weeds. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2015. He refused to comment outside court, but his attorneys said he is pleased with the jury's finding.

"Now we can focus on the evidence that Monsanto has not taken a responsible, objective approach to the safety of Roundup," said Aimee Wagstaff and Jennifer Moore, who are both Hardeman's legal counsels.

Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in June 2018, said they were disappointed by the jury's decision and emphasized that glyphosate does not cause cancer.

Cover-Up Stories

In 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted an internal investigation on an alleged collusion between a high-ranking EPA official and Monsanto. The allegations were that Jess Rowland, the former EPA pesticide division manager, bragged about killing an investigation on Monsanto's herbicide ingredient.

"When it comes to safety assessments, no other pesticide has been more extensively tested than glyphosate," Monsanto said in a statement. "In evaluations spanning four decades, the overwhelming conclusion of experts worldwide, including the EPA, has been that glyphosate can be used safely according to label instructions."

Rowland quit his position shortly after his report on glyphosate was leaked to the press.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Kaspersky Lab has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple after being told that its parental control app violated App Store policies.

In an article on Kaspersky's blog, the company said Apple only objected to its Safe Kids app after the iPhone maker launched Screen Time for iOS 12. The new feature allegedly had similar functions to Kaspersky's parental control program.

The cybersecurity firm later filed a complaint against Apple with the Federal Antimonopoly Service in Russia after the iPhone maker banned Kaspersky's app.

"Our claim pertains to Apple's policy on apps distributed through the App Store," Kaspersky wrote. "Despite a long history of working successfully with Apple, we believe that this is a necessary step."

Kaspersky's Safe Kids Vs. Apple's Screen Time

Kaspersky found out about the supposed issue with its Safe Kids app after Apple contacted the company, claiming that the program did not meet the App Store's guidelines on hosted apps.

The cybersecurity firm said it never had any problems with Apple before pertaining to the parental control app. Safe Kids had met all necessary requirements and had been hosted in the digital distribution platform for nearly three years.

Apple said Safe Kids' use of configuration profiles was in violation of App Store policies. It ordered Kaspersky to remove the feature from the app, so that it could pass the iPhone maker's review and be published in the store.

However, Kaspersky said it would mean taking out two key functions from Safe Kids. These are the app control and Safari browser blocking features of the program. The company said both are essential parts of Safe Kids.

App control allows parents to determine which apps their children cannot run based on the age restrictions of the App Store.

Meanwhile, the Safari browser blocking feature hides away all web browsers on devices, so that kids can only open pages seen in Safe Kids' built-in secure browser. This helps protect them from potentially unsafe content on the web.

If Kaspersky removes the two features from its parental control app, the company said it will disappoint customers, who expect their children to be kept safe while they use their iPhones and iPads that have Safe Kids installed.

"We believe it is essential that all of our customers, whether they are young or old, are completely safe and get exactly what they expect," the company said.

Kaspersky believes Apple's policy toward the Safe Kids app, as well as toward other parental control app developers, notably came after the iPhone maker announced the iOS 12's Screen Time feature.

Screen Time lets users monitor just how much time they spend on websites or apps. It also has time restrictions to help control the use of these programs. The new iOS feature is basically Apple's version of a parental control app, according to Kaspersky.

The cybersecurity firm alleged that Apple is using its position as owner and supervisor of the App Store to dictate terms to other developers and prevent them from operating on equal terms. Because of this, app makers may lose their customers, ultimately affecting their bottomline.

Kaspersky said users will also suffer from Apple's restrictive since they will miss out on critical security features that were supposed to be included with parental control apps. The market for such programs will end up being monopolized and will then stagnate as a result.

Apple Vs. App Developers

Kaspersky's complaint is just the latest in a long line of legal disputes thrown at Apple for its alleged unfair treatment of app developers.

Last week, Spotify filed a similar suit against the iPhone maker regarding its so-called Apple tax. The music streaming service claimed that Apple's collection of 30 percent on any App Store transaction gives its own Apple Music service an unfair advantage over competitors.

Apple responded by stating its 30 percent tax goes down to 15 percent after the first year of subscription. The company also asserted that the App Store's ecosystem is actually beneficial even to other services such as Spotify.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.More Americans are voicing their support for the legalization of marijuana for medical and recreational use, according to a recent survey.

The 2018 General Social Survey revealed that 61 percent of respondents said that marijuana use should be legalized. The support for the legalization of marijuana has increased from 57 percent in 2016.

The survey also revealed that 31 percent believes that the substance should not be legalized, down from 38 percent in 2016.

Growing Support For The Legalization Of Marijuana

The GSS has been gauging the public's opinion about marijuana use since 1973 when only 19 percent of the population agrees to legalize the substance. However, there has been growing support and acceptance for marijuana in the United States and around the world in recent years.

The survey also found that for the first time, the majority of Republicans support the legalization of marijuana in the country. In 2016, only 45 percent were in favor of it. Last year, it increased to 54 percent.

Democrats, however, have been backing the legalization of marijuana since 2014. Two years ago, 65 percent agreed that marijuana should be made legal for medical and recreational use. In 2018, more Democrats were in support even for the legalization of marijuana. It was backed by 76 percent of Democrats in the new survey.

The support for the legalization of marijuana has also been up across all age groups, especially among younger adults. The majority of Americans (72 percent) from ages 18 to 34 endorse the legalization of marijuana in 2018.

Changing Opinions On Marijuana Use

"Our time has come," stated Justin Strekal of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "Never in modern history has there existed greater public support for ending the nation's nearly century-long experiment with marijuana prohibition."

A total of 10 states across the country have legalized marijuana for recreational use. Meanwhile, medical use of the substance has been approved in 34 states, including Florida.

Two years after the public voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that will allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes, Governor Ron DeSantis signed the legislation legalizing the substance.

However, the government still classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug, lumping it alongside heroin and cocaine. Advocates hope that the growing support of the public would force the government to reconsider its scheduling.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Elephants may seem like quiet animals, but apparently, they can get more violent because of tourists. In a new study, researchers discover that these big mammals get increasingly scared by the presence of people in the wildlife.

While rising tourism opportunities in the safari bring more income to the land, it also entails more reason for animals to experience increased stress, guarding behavior, and aggression. Studies on the impacts of tourism and animal-human interaction in the safari are rare. This new research is said to be the first to tackle the effects of tourism in African elephants' behavior. Part of the study's goals is to investigate on the direction of animal group movement in connection with tourists viewing them.

Investigating Elephants During Tourist Excursions

For 15 months, the researchers document the relationship of elephants' behaviors and the total number of tourists in Madikwe Game Reserve, which is managed by state, private, and community sectors. The reserve, which is 680 km2, has about 1,348 elephants, making it one of the places in South Africa, with the most elephants in terms of density.

Private vehicles are not allowed in the reserve. Tourists use game drive vehicles, which are big, open vehicles that can accommodate up to 10 people, plus one spotter in the front. The reserve only allows a maximum of three such vehicles in one elephant site.

The team collected data from April 18, 2016 to June 28, 2017. They were able to generate about 14 observations per month. All in all, the team was able to conduct about 156 observations. The samples were obtained by driving random routes around the reserve, and coordinating with tour guides about the presence of elephants.

For the behavior investigation, the researchers were able to identify 26 individuals, of which 14 are males and 12 are females. When an elephant was spotted, the researchers made sure to keep a distance of 30 meters from the closest elephant. If the distance was less than 30 meters, the investigator would gently reverse the vehicle and drive back before turning the engine off. If the elephant moved alongside the vehicle without exhibiting signs of distress, such as "ears out" and vigilance, the investigator continued to followed at a distance before turning the engine off.

More Safari Tourists Mean More Violent Elephants

Results show that the presence of game drive vehicles and tourism pressure impact the behavior of African elephants in the study location. The researchers find that elephants move away from tourists with the presence of more game drive vehicles. The elephants are also more likely to demonstrate aggression toward their fellow elephants if the number of tourists in the site is high.

"Studies highlight the contribution that behavioural indicators of welfare can make to the management and success of wild populations," the researchers write. Their study demonstrates that even with regulated viewing policies in place, tourism results in behavior changes among elephants. The observed changes are limited, possibly due to the animals' ability to move away from stressors, suggesting that with conscientious supervision, wildlife tourism can be done in a way that animal welfare is top priority. Such idea gives hope that wildlife tourism can actually be done as a conservation strategy.

Isabelle Szott, study lead author from UK's Liverpool John Moores University says tourists who like to view animals in their natural habitat should know about the possible bad impacts of their activity. She adds that studies should look into the gold standard practices that can help lessen such negative effects on the animals.

The study is published in the Journal of Zoology.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.A legislation will require the Department of Defense to provide more fertility treatments to wounded, ill, and injured service members with infertility related to military service.

Health Services For Women Veterans And Families

The Women Veterans and Families Health Services Act of 2019 (S. 319) filed by Senator Patty Murray aims to expand the fertility options available to service members through the current DoD program. It will also give more access to fertility treatments for spouses and allow the Veterans Affairs to cover the cost of adoption services for veterans with injury-related infertility.

If passed, the legislation would provide options to service members to freeze their eggs and sperm before military deployment. The specimens would be stored up to a year after leaving military service, and the DoD will shoulder the cost for the storage and procedures.

A policy related to the automatic retrieval of eggs or sperm from troops whose fertility or lives are at risk due to wound or illness will also be put up.

"When we ask men and women to serve our country, we make a promise to them to care for them when they return, no matter what. This legislation is just one way Congress can follow through," Murray said in her introduction of the proposed bill.

Infertility In The Service

A 2018 report revealed that one in every three current and former service women surveyed said that they've had infertility problems.

This was based on a survey led by advocacy group Service Women's Action Network or SWAN involving 799 females in active duty, guard and reserve, and retirees and veterans.

This rate of 30 percent infertility among women in service is higher than the Centers for Disease Control report of 12 percent infertility among civilian women aged 15 to 44 who experience difficulty in getting pregnant or carrying a pregnancy to a full term.

Majority of the women who responded to the SWAN survey stated that their infertility is service-related.

Murray's bill also aims to expand health services to women service members and veterans.

Expensive Fertility Treatments

The cost of fertility treatments is steep. A single IVF cycle can go as high as $12,000 to $20,000, including the cost of medications, medical appointments, and laboratory work. Private clinics can charge up to more than $30,000.

The DoD program covers fertility services, including diagnostic services, hormone treatments, erectile dysfunction care, and surgeries for infertility.

It also provides advanced fertility treatments, including IVF cycles for service members and their families, but the waiting time can take up to a year. IVF at military facilities has an average cost of $5,000 per cycle. Free IVF treatments are only for service members with urogenital trauma and infertility related to cancer treatments.

There are currently six military hospitals in Maryland, Hawaii, North Carolina, Washington, and Texas offering IVF treatments.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke reveals that she suffered two brain aneurysms while filming the HBO series in 2011 and 2013.

Her essay, which she wrote for The New Yorker, gave a detailed account of her journey of battling for her life.

Emilia Clarke Survives 2 Brain Aneurysms

Clarke, 32, shared that she was first diagnosed with a fatal type of stroke called subarachnoid hemorrhage. About one-third of the patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage die almost instantly.

The doctors had to perform endovascular coiling to seal off the aneurysm. Although the procedure was minimally invasive, Clarke said she suffered problems with vision, severe pain, and memory loss.

On the second aneurysm, doctors had to open Clarke's skull to remove the growth in her brain that had doubled in size. Chances of survival were slim if the doctors did not operate.

She also suffered from constant anxiety and panic attacks about whether her concentration, memory, and peripheral vision would still go back to normal.

"I emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head. Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium," Clarke wrote.

Brain Aneurysm Silent But Deadly

A brain aneurysm is a balloon or a bulge in the blood vessel that could rupture or remain dormant for years. When an aneurysm leaks or ruptured, it could lead to a fatal hemorrhagic stroke.

"When an aneurysm has bled, that means the wall of the aneurysm stretched so much that it broke. The blood inside the blood vessels then escapes from the aneurysm and spreads out over the brain's surface," said Dr. Judy Huang, Vice Chair of Neurosurgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

In the United States, about 6 million people have an unruptured brain aneurysm. Approximately 30,000 people will suffer from a ruptured aneurysm each year, according to the Brain Aneurysm Foundation. Women are more likely to have brain aneurysms than men.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Purchases made via links on our site may earn us an affiliate commissionA jury Thursday convicted a Baton Rouge man in what a prosecutor called the "execution"-style slaying of a 29-year-old man on La Annie Drive in 2014.

Demond Bessie, 28, faces a mandatory term of life in prison for second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of Elbert Bertran Marshall when state District Judge Lou Daniel sentences him March 28.

Steaphon Harris, 29, who prosecutors said ordered the killing, pleaded guilty in 2017 to manslaughter in exchange for a 33-year prison sentence. He had been charged with second-degree murder.

Baton Rouge man pleads guilty to manslaughter in fatal 2014 shooting, gets 33 years in prison One of two men accused in the 2014 shooting death of a 29-year-old man on La Annie Drive pleaded guilty Monday to manslaughter and was sentenc

Bessie was the accused triggerman in the slaying of Marshall, who was shot four times while walking to his car in a parking lot on La Annie Drive on May 1, 2014.

Bessie also was booked that year in the July 9, 2014, shooting death of 29-year-old Major Brown, but he was never formally charged in that case.

East Baton Rouge Parish Assistant District Attorney Morgan Johnson argued to the jury Thursday that Harris coordinated with Bessie to "execute" Marshall.

"This was a planned execution," she said.

+4 Man jailed in May killing now also accused in July slaying More than a month after Major Brown, 29, was gunned down in his front lawn after answering a knock at the door, his mother, Alma Brown, locks 

Harris' cellphone showed he was in constant back-and-forth contact with Bessie  referred to in texts between the two men as "mond"  until about 30 minutes before the 2 a.m. killing, Johnson said. She said Harris was with Marshall at the murder scene.

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In a 1:23 a.m. text that the prosecutor showed the jury, "mond" asked Harris, "What y'all in?" Harris replied two minutes later, "Lil hatch back new car ... it's pulled straight back." At 1:26 a.m., "mond" texts, "I'm bout to leave my phone so tell me where exactly." Harris answered at 1:29 a.m., "second driveway La Anna." Harris sends a final text two minutes later saying, "Hurry up cuz I think we bout to go."

Johnson said Bessie "stalked" and "ambushed" Marshall, a father of two daughters.

Bessie's attorney, Gail Ray, argued that authorities had no gun, DNA or fingerprints linking him to the killing.

"This is a case built entirely on circumstantial evidence," she said. "It's not enough evidence."

Harris, who was called by the prosecution to testify at the trial Wednesday, denied that Bessie was involved in the slaying.

"How can you have proof beyond a reasonable doubt when their witness says it was not him?" Ray asked the jury rhetorically.

Johnson said Harris lied in an attempt to cover up for his friend and to save his own skin in prison by not being labeled a snitch.

"He did lie yesterday," the prosecutor acknowledged to the jury. "He had nothing to lose by lying."

The jury of seven women and 5 men deliberated for an hour.Art Schultz attended a funeral for an old friend Thursday evening and stopped at McDonald's to pick up a fish sandwich for his wife before returning to their Zachary home. When he arrived, he found his wife tied up in the living room and suffering from head injuries.

Frances Jane Schultz, 73, was pronounced dead on the scene after emergency crews arrived around 8:20 p.m. in the 24000 block of Brian Road. Preliminary autopsy results released Friday by East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner Dr. Beau Clark revealed that the woman died from multiple gunshot wounds.

Authorities have released few details on the homicide, but East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux told reporters Thursday night that investigators believe it started as a home invasion. The front door into the Schultz' home showed signs of forced entry with the glass apparently kicked out.

No suspects have been identified.

Art Schultz, 76, spoke to The Advocate on Friday morning and said he saw some signs of disturbance inside the house as well, which led him to suspect the attackers were searching for something. He said he found his wife tied up in their living room.

The two had been married for 54 years and had lived at their home in Zachary for more than four decades. The house sits on several acres where Schultz operates a commercial hay farm and keeps two horses.

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He said he's worried about the business now because he and his wife have always run it together. The couple also raised a son who now lives in Texas.

They met in college at McNeese State University in Lake Charles and later moved to Zachary to start their business.

+2 Sheriff: Zachary-area man reports returning home to find wife beaten to death A man returned to his Zachary-area home Thursday night and discovered his wife beaten inside, according to the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff

Schultz said his wife was originally from Eunice and loved living in the country. She would zip around the back roads on her bicycle, he said.

"She was giving, caring and a very pretty lady," he said. "A good country girl who would do anything for anybody.  We spent our lives together."

Frances Schultz had asked her husband for a fish sandwich, fries and a Coke from McDonald's on Thursday night, which he bought on his way home from the funeral. He said he tried calling her a few times while driving home, receiving no answer. But he said he wasn't worried because he had never before felt unsafe in their rural community.Louisiana leaders have roundly condemned comments that an Iowa congressman made this week portraying Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans as people who only sought government help, compared to Iowans who take care of each other."

Heres what FEMA tells me: We go to a place like New Orleans and everybodys looking around saying, whos gonna help me, whos gonna help me? controversial U.S. Rep. Steve King said during a town hall meeting in Charter Oak, Iowa on Thursday. Theyre just always gratified when they come and see how Iowans take care of each other. Its a point of pride that spreads across the country.

King, a Republican who was stripped of his Congressional committee assignments in January after questioning why "white supremacist" and other racist language is deemed offensive, has faced consistent backlash over his extreme views on race and immigration. He did not explicitly mention race in the town hall exchange, but Kings district in Iowa is about 95 percent white. About 67 percent of the population of the city of New Orleans was black when Katrina hit, and black people were disproportionately impacted by the storm.

U.S. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, the No. 2 ranking Republican in the House who also represents a suburban New Orleans district, swiftly condemned King's remarks.

"His comments about Katrina victims are absurd and offensive, and are a complete contradiction to the strength and resilience the people of New Orleans demonstrated to the entire nation in the wake of the total devastation they experienced," said Scalise, who earlier this year helped lead the charge to remove King from his committee assignments.

U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond, a New Orleans Democrat who has been a vocal critic of King in the past, called his latest remarks about Katrina unsettling and said they are consistent with his extreme views on race.

"When people show you who they are, believe them," Richmond tweeted. "Steve King is a white supremacist, and I wont stand for it."

At the town hall, which King livestreamed on Facebook, King said he made four trips to New Orleans in the wake of the catastrophic and deadly 2005 hurricane.

He used the anecdote to explain why hes proud that Iowa, which is currently experiencing massive flooding, has a better reputation.

Describing his conversation with the unnamed FEMA official, King said: We go to a place like Iowa, and we go, we go see, knock on the door at, say, Ill make up a name, Johns place, and say, John, you got water in your basement, we can write you a check, we can help you. And John will say, Well, wait a minute, let me get my boots. Its Joe that needs help. Lets go down to his place and help him.

Kings office didnt respond to The Advocates request for comment on the response in Louisiana. King, who has regularly voted against disaster relief money, was one of 11 House members who voted against the nearly $52 billion post-Katrina aid package a month after the storm hit in 2005.

The scoop on state politics in your inbox Get the Louisiana politics insider details once a week from us. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up

Few people have died in the recent Iowa floods to date. More than 500 people died in New Orleans during Katrina after the levees failed and most of the city flooded.

Louisiana Democratic Party Chairwoman Karen Carter Peterson, a state senator and New Orleans native, said Kings was employing a racist dog whistle in front of a majority white audience.

Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana leaving 1,800 dead with tens of thousands more homeless and impoverished. He has no right to comment on what our people have been through or continue to spread these falsities," she said. "His dog whistle comments today are a further display of his racist, white supremacist beliefs and call on prejudiced, hate-filled stereotypes that he has no problem displaying. There is no place for this sort of hateful rhetoric in our government and we need our leaders to show that they will not tolerate it.

Our Views: As Iowa Rep. Steve King shames Katrina victims, he's a disaster all on his own Our hearts go out to the good people of Iowa who are suffering from historic flooding thats ravaged thousands of homes and businesses in the 

Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who is running for re-election this year, called King's remarks "disgusting and disheartening."

"When communities are affected by disasters, we come together to help each other, not tear each other down," he said.

Edwards two Republican opponents in this falls race  U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham of rural northeast Louisiana and Baton Rouge businessman Eddie Rispone  also took King to task for the comments.

"Louisianians have faced our fair share of adversity, and Im always amazed at how quickly we rally from across the state to help one another when disaster strikes," Abraham said. "Anyone who would say otherwise doesnt know the real Louisiana. I wholeheartedly reject the comments that disparaged our state and her people during one of the most difficult times in Louisianas history. We experience hardship together, and we rebuild together because there are no more resilient people in this country than Louisianians."

Rispone cited the now nationally-recognized Cajun Navy as an example of why Kings comments are untrue.

"Rep. Kings portrayal of New Orleans and the victims of Katrina is illogical and offensive," he said. "Louisianans are well-known for their compassion and cooperation when confronted with disaster. Perhaps King missed President Trumps praise of the Cajun Navy during the 2018 State of the Union.

Trump has repeatedly praised the Cajun Navy, a loosely-organized band of Louisiana residents and boaters who voluntarily assist with rescues during natural disasters.One issue that conservatives, liberals, and moderates all agree on is that fewer abortions is a good thing. And so observers across the politiI have a modest proposal regarding President Donald Trump's innovative idea to send migrants to live in sanctuary cities in the United States.Three white hearses, carrying Billy Ernest and his children Summer Ernest, 20, and Tanner Ernest, 17, to their final resting places, come down Edgewood Drive, leaving Abundant Life Church and traveling to Evergreen Memorial Park & Mausoleum in Denham Springs, Saturday, Feb. 9, 2019, after funeral services for the three, who were among the five that Dakota Theriot, 21, has confessed to killing recently.Police escort men 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.Our hearts go out to the good people of Iowa who are suffering from historic flooding thats ravaged thousands of homes and businesses in the Midwest.

We in Louisiana know all too well what that kind of suffering is like. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the Great Flood of 2016, among other calamities, taught us valuable lessons about whats important in a crisis.

Given the scale of their loss and the long road of recovery that lies ahead for them, Iowans shouldnt have to put up with the furor caused by yet another inflammatory comment from their tone-deaf congressman, Republican Steve King.

King, who lost his committee assignments earlier this year for questioning why white supremacist and other racist language is offensive, used an appearance before his constituents this week to insult Katrinas Louisiana victims.

Heres what FEMA tells me: We go to a place like New Orleans and everybodys looking around saying, whos gonna help me, whos gonna help me?, King told listeners. Theyre just always gratified when they come and see how Iowans take care of each other. Its a point of pride that spreads across the country.

Of course, King didnt identify the FEMA bureaucrat, so who knows if the story is true. King left no doubt that the sentiments of the vicious anecdote were his own, which only shows that despite his visits to Louisiana after Katrina, he didnt learn very much about the states resilience.

Has King never heard of the Cajun Navy, the band of boat-owning volunteers who sprung into action as New Orleans flooded, saving legions of Louisiana storm victims from oblivion? Did King ever know, or has he forgotten, the valor of doctors and nurses who improvised their way through days of deprivation to keep their patients alive? Is he unaware of the stubborn resolve of residents who began rebuilding their homes before federal financial help ever came through?

We have every confidence that in this time of profound loss, the people of Iowa are finding the strength theyll need to prevail. Theyll have cause to summon that strength in the days  and perhaps years  ahead, after the public spotlight has moved on, but the real and enduring work of recovery remains.

Its a hardship we in Louisiana wouldnt wish on anyone. Take it from us: Recovering from a natural disaster is demanding enough. Iowans should think about whether they can continue to afford the political disaster that Steve King has become.New Orleans voters overwhelmingly rejected a new tax to pay for services for senior citizens Saturday in an election that doubled as a test ofTHUMBS UP

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy

spoke truth in a Senate hearing last week after one of his Republican colleagues, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, cast doubt on mandatory vaccinations, saying I still dont favor giving up liberty for a false sense of security. Cassidy, a physician, strenuously objected, saying, If you are such a believer in liberty that you do not wish to be vaccinated, there should be a consequence, and that is you cannot infect other people. Opting out of vaccinations has resulted this year in a resurgence of measles  a preventable disease once virtually eradicated in the United States, due to vaccines.

THUMBS UP

The Galatoires Foundation

raised $148,000 for local charities at its annual Mardi Gras table auction, during which diners can bid on coveted Friday lunch tables during the final weekend of Carnival. This years recipients are the New Orleans Police & Justice Foundation and VIA Link, a crisis intervention program. The auction has raised more than $1.2 million since it began in 2006. (Disclosure: Galatoires is owned by Gambit owner John Georges.)

Throw Me Somethin': Galatoire's auction puts $148,000 on the table for charities On March 1, those who take part in the 13th annual Galatoires Foundation Mardi Gras Auction will sit down to enjoy their winnings with a firs

THUMBS DOWN DOWN DOWN

Truth in Politics,

a Super PAC funded by Baton Rouge businessman and GOP donor Lane Grigsby and former Louisiana Association of Business and Industry president Daniel Juneau, was recently forced to take down radio advertisements condemning Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards. The ads falsely claimed Edwards refused to fund early childhood education  not a dime. The Edwards campaign pointed out that each of the governors budgets since he took office included millions for early childhood education. Attack ads are one thing; outright lies are another.The Property Industry Foundations 2019 Charity Yachting Regatta, sponsored by Colliers International, rode a wave of industry support on Sydney Harbour on Friday, March 15, raising about $430,000 to contribute to the homes it is building for homeless young people. Over 1300 people participated with 85 boats taking to the water.

Kate Mills, chief executive of PIF, said the regatta was the foundations biggest event and each year boosts the capacity of the organisation to reduce youth homelessness.

The Property Industry Foundation's annual Charity Sailing Challenge. Credit:Steb Fisher

"Our core goal is to build 125 bedrooms by 2021 and funds raised at this years event will be a massive boost to that goal," Ms Mills said.

The Bob Ell Cup was won by KPMG sailing on Maserati, and the Shemara Cup was won by Avid Property Group sailing on Sydney.Registered clubs have lost a bid to cut weekend penalty rates for up to 42,000 workers by moving them onto the hospitality award.

The Fair Work Commission on Friday rejected the Clubs Australia application to roll the registered and licensed clubs award into the hospitality industry award, saying it could not "identify any particular benefit".

Clubs Australia has lost a bid in the Fair Work Commission to reduce weekend penalty rates. Credit:Virginia Star

Chris Mossman, executive director of Clubs Australia Industrial said the decision meant that small, struggling bowling clubs and RSLs in regional communities "will be forced to pay their staff higher penalty rates than Sydneys Star Casino".

"Clubs Australia Industrial (CAI) is surprised by the Fair Work Commissions decision to reject an application to allow clubs to roll into the hospitality award," he said.Judging by the headlines, youd think Michelle Wolf is an assassin. In 2018, according to some outlets, Wolf burned, bashed and eventually destroyed Donald Trump. This is news to her: the last time she checked, he remained in power. She doubts any humorist can topple a world leader and, despite media pitting her against the President, she rarely mentions him on stage.

You can stand up and say, Trump is bad! and everyone claps, which is what a lot of [other comics] are doing right now, Wolf says, ahead of her first Australian performance next week. But youre not doing anything; you didnt make a joke and no one laughed. They just clapped their hands together  which is what you do when a toddler does a dance.

Michelle Wolf debuts at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival this year. Credit:Craig Blankenhorn

Last April, Wolf drew international coverage of her comedic roast at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Republicans, Democrats and media all copped a bollocking.Tracey Moffatt, Vigil 2017, digital video. When looking at Body Remembers, with Moffatt's disparate references in mind, we might catch hints of some of these influences at work. Comprised of very large sepia-tinted photographs, the Body Remembers series shows a woman (or her shadow) as she moves around a ruined building in a flat, sparsely vegetated landscape. We might immediately perceive this as the outback  wherever that may be in either our imaginations or the real world  and we might think of Giorgio De Chirico's shadows, of silence, the "ruin in art", or the backs of women's necks (for we never see the woman's face). Who is she? As with Moffatt herself, who rarely gives interviews, we only get glimpses of this elusive woman, who wears Victorian-era earrings and a maid's outfit, and who is clearly of another time. In each image, we see her in the distance, from behind, or gazing away from us. As Tarrawarra director Victoria Lynn says, this emphasises one of the central themes of the photos: the collision of looking and being looked at. Tracey Moffatt, Vigil 2017, digital video. "It is as if the woman portrayed is returning to the place where she used to be a servant, returning to that place of servitude, remembering the trauma," Lynn says. "She is looking and gazing in various directions away from the camera but she is also aware that we are looking at her. This sequence of looking and being looked at also happens in the video Vigil. It is in that space, between looking and being looked at, that Moffatt begins her cinematic imaginings and stories."

Lynn says that while these are stills, they have the feeling of cinematic narratives. "They are stories rooted in Aboriginal experience and history, but also much more universal than that: and that is part of Tracey Moffatt's broad appeal." Tracey Moffatt, Vigil 2017, digital video. It is in that space, between looking and being looked at, that Moffatt begins her cinematic imaginings and stories. Victoria Lynn Vigil consists of moving images set side-by-side. On the left, clips show various Hollywood stars (Cary Grant or Elizabeth Taylor, for example) looking out of the frame with various expressions of horror, shock or melancholy. On the right-hand side  towards which the stars' gazes are directed  we see images of news footage of asylum seekers drowning when their boat was wrecked off Christmas Island in 2010. As Lynn observes, this classic "shot/reverse-shot" scenario is highly effective in making us conscious of the act of looking at but not acting on a situation  in this case a very real life situation. In the catalogue for Moffatt's My Horizon show at Venice, film writer Adrian Martin observes that in Vigil, Moffatt proposes a strong, blatantly political drama by invoking the real sinking of an asylum-seeker boat, "its symbolic scope widening to reference many such refugee situations around the world" in recent years.

Tracey Moffatt's Vigil juxtaposes Hollywood images with news footage of asylum seekers. Credit:Kate Ballis "As often in Moffatt's art, the pitch is deliberately, defiantly melodramatic," Martin says. This imaginary scene conjured by cross-cutting provoked Martin to explore the idea of the "window"  something that is designed to both protect us in our homes and allow us to observe the world outside. "The window, finally, protects us from nothing  the tragedies of the world will seep into our consciousness, whether we want them to or not," he says. "They let us project ourselves into a larger space, to dream [just like the movie or the television screen], but at the same time they allow us to shut ourselves in, to avoid or erase the terror of a nearby reality." Rick Amor, Morning in the Outlying Districts, 2003. Bouncing off Moffatt's two works, Tarrawarra curator Anthony Fitzpatrick has put together another exhibition called Thought Patterns, the title referencing her mind-map diagram. In another room, young Indigenous artist Katie West, a Yindjibarndi woman, has made a multi-sensory installation Clearing, referencing plants from the local region and, like Moffatt's work, embedded in what we see around us.

Fitzpatrick says Thought Patterns takes work from Tarrawarra's permanent collection and connects it with Moffatt's imagery and ideas in sometimes subtle and curious ways. There are, for example, works by William Delafield Cook and Rick Amor that hold something of Moffatt's sense of landscape and her interest in ruined buildings as theatres for imagined characters. William Delafield Cook, A Haystack, 1978. Cook's A Haystack (1978) displays his meticulous process of applying paint to canvas to render incredibly realistic images. "The landscape appears frozen in time through that attendant massing of detail, that really arrests your gaze in the way he distils an image, its form and presence," Fitzpatrick says. "But when you look closely to see how precisely each stalk of hay and blade of grass has been rendered, it really transfixes the scene. He positions these bales of hay on the horizon line, with the same sense of grandeur as a classical Greek temple. For me, it resonated with those photos in Tracey Moffatt's series, when she pans back from the ruined building and you see how strong that ruin is in the landscape." Likewise, Rick Amor's moody and atmospheric Morning in the Outlying Districts (2003), juxtaposes historic buildings with architectural remains, with a remnant of a classical sculpture nestled in one edifice. Referencing the decline of civilisation and a sense of decay, it conjures thoughts about the passing of time and the vanity of human desires. This interplay of memory, time and the classical also relates strongly to Moffatt's work, Fitzpatrick says. When looking at Moffatt's work, Fitzpatrick was struck by her reference to De Chirico and "afternoon shadows": while there is no De Chirico in the Tarrawarra collection, there are some Charles Blackman works well-known for their surreal landscapes filled with ominous shadows and elusive figures. In this case, Hawthorn Schoolgirl (c1953) shows a figure in a desolate city.A Sydney man has been diagnosed with HIV despite taking a "game-changing" pre-exposure prophylaxis medication known as PrEP.

Steven Spencer, 27, tested positive for HIV in December, despite using PrEP "on demand" before and after sexual encounters in line with the advice of doctors.

Steven Spencer contracted HIV despite being on PrEP for years. Credit:Greg Chilton

"I was in complete shock, as were my doctors," Mr Spencer said, knowing the chances were extremely rare.Australia is entering a new political era. Unless conservatives and genuine liberals make persuasive counter-arguments, we could be in the midst of a fundamental realignment in the Australian cultural landscape that entrenches progressive shibboleths for a generation.

Its a far cry from the Howard years (1996-2007). In those days, it was those on the ideological left who were in a despondent mood, because conservatives increasingly represented the political mainstream.

Beyond the white picket fence ... the Australian political landscape has shifted to the left. Credit:Jessica Shapiro

For a man routinely described as lacking charisma, John Howard managed to hit just the right tone. He showed that integration was the key to social cohesion. Citizenship tests were born. The republic was passe.

Ably supported by Philip Ruddock, Howard showed that controlled border protection benefits nobody more than the immigrants who come here fairly and legally. As a result, it helped damp down the fires of racism and xenophobia. (Just look at Europe today.)The debates about hate speech that erupted from almost the moment the Christchurch mosque shootings made their sickening appearance in our newsfeed are small-town bickering when seen against the killers globalist swagger. However healthy the soul-searching about whether we must own him, whether the ambient racism thats been part of Australian politics since Tampa played a part in the making of this alleged murderer, the evidence suggests it has little to do with reality.

Brenton Tarrants infamous 74-page manifesto makes no mention of Sky News or Pauline Hanson or Andrew Bolts memorable column about a tidal wave of migrants because from what we know, since the death of his father in 2010, the terrorist from Grafton NSW set off on a seven-year world tour. During the past four years, say Australian authorities, he seldom visited here.

This is one theme thats been preying on my mind since the live-streamed massacre shocked a world that might have thought itself beyond shock: how much the perpetrator and his victims upend common assumptions about the sort of people at home in the world and with hybrid identities; and the sort of people expected to have a strong allegiance to nationhood. The shooter Tarrant is as rootless, as detached from home and country, as his victims, migrants and refugees, seemed grounded in New Zealand.

Weve become accustomed to phrases such as ethno-nationalist and nativist, but it strikes me this killer comes from beyond these conventional designations and is nothing if not worldly in his hate-filled delusions: The origins of my language is European, my culture is European, my identity is European, he proclaimed in his meme-laden screed. Hed pass for a Remainer, but for the racialist punchline, and most importantly, my blood is European.A forensic dig at the former home of Roxlyn Bowie, a NSW mother who went missing more than three decades ago, has unearthed items which could be relevant to the case.

Ms Bowie was last seen leaving her home in Walgett, in the state's north, about 6pm on June 5, 1982.

Her husband John denied having any further information about her whereabouts.

Earlier this week, detectives carried out forensic tests at a home in Walgett - including luminol, a chemical used to detect blood.The electorate seems sceptical. Berejiklian is lashing generational volumes of money at problems all over the state. The unemployment rate recently hit a 40-year-low of 3.9 per cent. The states economy is regularly rated the healthiest in the country. And yet the polls have been running at 50:50. Something is not sticking.

One explanation is that politics in NSW is fracturing along similar lines to those worldwide; same-old governments no longer cut it. This is a sign that voters are drifting away from the centrist political narrative that the Coalition and Labor both occupy, says Andy Marks, the assistant vice-chancellor for strategy and policy at Western Sydney University. The unemployment rate might be low but people arent feeling it. After years of low wage growth, the public is demanding more. For Marks, further evidence of this fracturing lies in the likely significance of the minor parties to whatever government is formed after this weekend.

A second explanation is that Berejiklians pivot from the Baird template has just come too late. As her government has discovered, it takes a long time for a decision to build or invest in something to translate into actual activity and results.

A third explanation might be, simply, that people do not buy she is a leader who listens. The stadium controversy is instructive. When pressed on why her government is spending more than $2 billion on stadiums in Sydney, Berejiklian can fairly point to the tens of billions shes spending elsewhere. She has less convincingly started to add that NSW can have it all. Yet we all instinctively know that one cant have it all. We all face moments that test the ordering of our priorities and values. And who does Berejiklian listen to when it comes to the crunch? In the case of the stadiums, she sided with those establishment voices who declared their ground would be a safety hazard unless it was immediately replaced.

Similarly, when Sydneys powerful boofhead lobby insisted the economy would sink without marketing material for a recently conceived horse race being emblazoned on the Opera House sails, to whom did Berejiklian defer? The public servant with the responsibility to protect the integrity of the building, and who had well-articulated policies for knocking back the race? No. Berejiklian (with the agreement of former Labor leader Luke Foley) handed the sails to the bovver boys.While Mr Morrison bravely condemned right-wing extremism after the Christchurch mosque attack last week, he and his party have for too long failed to speak out with sufficient force against racism in their ranks. That failure was still on display in Mr Morrisons evasive performance during the interview.

Even accepting all that, if that was his purpose, he and his party over the past eight years have done a poor job of achieving their goal.

Let us give Prime Minister Scott Morrison the benefit of the doubt about his version of the meeting of the shadow cabinet in January 2011 on the rise of anti-Islamic sentiment in the community. Let us accept that, as he told Waleed Aly on Channel 10s The Project , he raised the issue of Islamophobia only to advocate for a strategy of defusing tension rather than exploiting it.

Scott Morrison must be judged on what he has said and done in public. Credit:Andrew Taylor

Mr Morrison has been central to that political debate because he made his political reputation in 2010 as immigration spokesman calling for the turning back of boats and offshore detention. Stopping the 1200 deaths at sea should undoubtedly be commended. But Mr Morrison also fomented a climate of fear that went well beyond humanitarian concern. He warned that asylum seekers could bring tuberculosis and syphilis here, and when up to 48 asylum seekers drowned off Christmas Island in December 2010, he complained that their relatives had been flown to Canberra to attend the funerals. That was the context of the 2011 shadow cabinet meeting.

While the party agreed then to keep its non-discriminatory immigration policy, Coalition MPs have continued to nourish hostile and insensitive stereotypes about Muslims that would be seen as clearly racist if directed at Jewish or Indigenous people. It was usually a subtle dog whistle to right-wing nativists that could be denied if called out by the other side.

Liberal National MP George Christensen spoke at white extremist rallies; former prime minister Tony Abbott denied Islamophobia had ever killed anyone; Nationals leader Michael McCormack warned of spivs, rapists and murders on Nauru and Manus; Immigration Minister Peter Dutton described Lebanese migration in the 1980s as a mistake. There was the episode where some Liberal MPs congratulated Senator Fraser Anning after his speech calling for a final solution. The senator, by the way, said the use of that phrase was innocent.

Mr Morrisons decision to do the interview on Channel 10 suggests he is worried that since Christchurch this sort of talk has become a liability. Yet he failed to show he is ready to confront the issue head-on.She says she did this in the past, and only under strict supervision, without guests present. She says she had permission, at the time, from the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning to do this. One night, in 2014, Jilly caught her foot in a doorway and ripped a nail on the foot. She went into my room and climbed on my bed, and she was sulking big time. She was hurt. She thought Id hurt her and I said its not me, Jilly. I slept with her that night and put a heater in my room. Ms Lowing says she didnt feel scared. She just wanted attention because she hurt herself. Theyre like kids. Three years ago, Ms Lowing watched as the two babies of her freshwater crocodiles, female Johnie and male Fovian, hatched on her bed. Named Fovian Junior and Johnie Junior, they were given away to other reptile enthusiasts.

Two of Ms Lowing's crocs take a dip. Credit:Eddie Jim But Ms Lowing does not recommend crocodiles as a pets. They are a specialist animal. Ive seen so many people in Victoria  without any education or any experience or research  just go and get one, and most of them die. Youve got to be passionate. She says she has been nipped on her hands and legs but reckons it's always for good reason, for example, to say get off me when shes stepped on them. She says you must always respect them. With Jilly, youve got to be aware that if she even nipped me it could be quite dangerous. I grew up with horses and you never walk behind a horse. Its just common sense. Ms Lowing says her house, including chained and locked doors and security cameras, could not get any more secure.

Im one of the only homes in Rockbank that hasnt been broken into, she jokes. DELWP has refused to renew her commercial licence, under which she is able to keep wildlife and give reptile demonstrations at schools, parties and public events. Ms Lowing and Jilly Credit:Eddie Jim But Ms Lowing is going to fight, via a VCAT conference on May 13, to get her licence back and to keep ownership of freshie crocs Johnie and Fovian, who live in the locked lounge of the house with their own pool and fireplace. Each is 1.5 metres long. It's also a fight to keep her three carpet pythons, two turtles, two blue tongue lizards, two stumpy tailed lizards and one goanna, who also live at her house.

A DELWP spokesperson said that the department is supporting the cancellation of her demonstrators licence, but would not explain why, before the VCAT conference. Ms Lowing had feared that if she lost at VCAT, and the authorities seized Jilly, they would euthanise her. That influenced her decision to drive Jilly to Darwin, although it requires getting wildlife transport licences in three jurisdictions she will traverse. There will be no roadside walks en route for Jilly, but she will lie in a well ventilated crate in a transit van, and Ms Lowing will sit close by, uttering soothing words through the vent holes to the 12-year-old croc, who she loves like her own child. Thats why shes in a van and not the back of a truck.

Ms Lowing has several pets Credit:Eddie Jim Jilly will be introduced to other crocs in the Northern Territory, but Ms Lowing worries how Jilly will cope without her. They bond with their owners and they will fret, and they can die. Ms Lowing grew to love reptiles while growing up on a farm near Deniliquin, in southern NSW, and her mother encouraged it. She owned her first snake, a carpet python, at age 10. She got her first crocodiles - a saltwater and a freshwater - as a young nurse living in the Melbourne suburb of Reservoir and has kept crocs, on and off, for 40 years. Her dream was to own a wildlife park, but she never had the funds.

Her fascination with crocs has remained. Theyre so prehistoric and intelligent. They understand you."

She says they respond to commands. Years ago, when Jilly would sun herself outdoors, and the day cooled, Ms Lowing would say, Jilly, its time to go to bed, and Jilly would retreat into her warm bungalow. Ms Lowing says crocodiles have their own personalities. As a male, Fovian is antsy and you have to watch him, because youll be walking past and hell have a go but if you yell at him hell stop. A hatching at Ms Lowing's Rockbank home. Johnie, the female freshie, is blase, although she would perhaps not be nice to one ex-partner of Ms Lowings, who used to tease Johnie.A young mother accused of filming herself sexually abusing her six-month-old daughter has been granted bail despite police fears she could go online and delete crucial evidence.

The 18-year-old, who cannot be named, was this week charged with child exploitation offences after federal and state police rescued the baby girl from a property in Melbourne's northern suburbs.

The baby is now in the care of her father.

Police allege that between November 18 and December 2 last year the mother sexually assaulted and performed a sex act on her daughter and transmitted videos of the acts to a man in the United Kingdom.

The mother, who was 17 at the time, is charged with sexual penetration of a child under 12, sexual assault of a child, producing and transmitting child pornography with a carriage service.The head of Victoria Police's human source unit will be the first witness to front the royal commission into the management of controversial former barrister turned police informer Nicola Gobbo next week.

The first batch of public hearings into the scandal around the woman who was known as Informer 3838 and Lawyer X will begin at 10am on Wednesday at the Fair Work Commission in Melbourne's CBD and end on Friday. They will be streamed live on the royal commission's website.

Nicola Gobbo outside the Supreme Court in 2004 before applying for bail for her client Tony Mokbel. Credit:Vince Caligiuri

The first witness to be called will be Assistant Commissioner Neil Paterson, the head of the force's intelligence and covert support, who has oversight of the current human source unit.

Audio recordings featuring conversations between Ms Gobbo and her police handlers will form a crucial part of evidence at the commission and may expose high-ranking officers to intense scrutiny.Two animal activists who broke into a Pinjarra piggery and live-streamed the animals inside last month have been fined in a Mandurah court.

James Darren Warden, 25, appeared in Mandurah Magistrates Court on Friday, charged with two counts of trespassing and possession of a controlled weapon.

James Darren Warden (right) was fined a for trespassing and being in possession of pepper spray. Credit:Carla Hildebrandt

He pleaded guilty to all charges, which stemmed from separate incidents.

Police prosecutor Nev Palmer said one incident took place at a feed lot on a Mundijong farm on February 6.RTHK: North Korea pulls staff from liaison office

Pyongyang has withdrawn its staff from a North-South Korea liaison office, according to Seoul, weeks after the summit between presidents Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump ended without agreement.

The office in the North city of Kaesong opened in September as the two Koreas forged closer ties, but the South's vice unification minister Chun Hae-sung Pyongyang had "notified the South they are pulling out of the liaison office".

The decision had been taken "in accordance with an order from an upper command", he said, adding: "They said they didn't care whether we stayed at the liaison office or not."

The South's President Moon Jae-in was instrumental in brokering talks between the nuclear-armed, sanctions-hit North and Washington, Seoul's key security ally.

Moon has long backed engagement with the North to bring it to the negotiating table, and has been pushing the carrot of inter-Korean development projects, among them the restarting of an industrial zone also in Kaesong and lucrative cross-border tourist visits by Southerners to the North's picturesque Mount Kumgang.

But the sanctions currently in place effectively block their resumption, while a preliminary study for a plan to renovate the North's decrepit rail system was repeatedly delayed.

Questions were even raised over whether supplies provided to set up the liaison office were a sanctions violation. (AFP)

This story has been published on: 2019-03-22. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.Milo Yiannopoulos and his touring manager attempted to use their network of powerful conservatives including Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones to lobby the Morrison government to overturn a decision to deny the notorious political commentator a visa.

The concerted effort to influence Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and others in the government allegedly included Liberal National MP George Christensen and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

The revelations are contained in an explosive transcript of WhatsApp messages Mr Yiannopoulos intends to file today as part of a court action taken by celebrity agent Max Markson against former tour promoter Damien Costas.

Controversial political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos (L) poses for a photo with radio broadcaster Alan Jones. Credit:2GB

Mr Yiannopoulos has earned notoriety for anti-Semitic trolling, Islamophobic rhetoric and controversial remarks about relationships between younger boys and older men.This week, it mattered, and he looked much diminished on the national and international stage as he struggled to represent the feelings of most Australians about the appalling tragedy in New Zealand. Morrison was, of course, not in a beauty contest with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Nor was it a zero-sum game. But Ardern's leadership, confidence and humility could not have better illustrated Morrison's embarrassing failure to rise to the task of leading the nation. In another context, the cynic, or the partisan, might have at least been able to take a malicious pleasure from the way he was undercutting and undermining his own claim to his position. In truth, however, he was diminishing and undermining Australia, and most of its decent citizens, with every pompous word. His want of feel for the task at hand was a natural consequence of his own role, and the role of senior ministers in his government, in dividing the nation around Islam, in race-baiting in elections such as the last Victorian election  strongly repudiated by voters  and in painting boat people on Nauru or Manus as rapists, murderers and terrorists. One cannot unite and embrace while simultaneously demonising and disgracing. Morrison himself has been flinging the mud for so long that he cannot say his hands are clean. Nor does that judgment, or opinion, depend on leaks of what Morrison is said to have said at a meeting seven years ago, though his claim that he said the opposite of what unnamed colleagues told several journalists is hardly convincing. One cannot unite and embrace while simultaneously demonising and disgracing. No one could accuse him of wanting or inciting the massacre in New Zealand, but he and his side in politics must take their share of responsibility for creating the atmosphere that made it possible. His claim that he was in fact a leader in promoting religious tolerance and acceptance of Muslim settlers would be risible if it were not, on his record, so contemptible. Nor can his predecessors  Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott and even Howard  escape their share of the blame. Generally, Turnbull did not stray too far from his decency gene, but he sat comfortably by, even occasionally throwing a stick into the fire, as Peter Dutton, The Australian and Murdoch tabloids tried to whip up a moral and physical panic about African gangs in Melbourne.

One might, however, say of all three that each has been capable of saying gracious and unifying things at moments of local, national and international tragedy, as often as not without the help of a speechwriter. Morrison simply seems to lack an instinct for the unifying, the appropriate and the empathetic. On recent occasions (including Julie Bishop's retirement), Bill Shorten crafted a better, more thoughtful and kinder speech, with an insight or a phrase likely to endure. Like Kevin Rudd, Morrison has a cack ear for an Australian phrase, and the only one he will have as a legacy  the so-called "Canberra bubble"  serves primarily as a vehicle to refuse to answer inconvenient, but perfectly reasonable, questions. Loading It's an interesting comparison, because Shorten, like Morrison, also has authenticity problems with the electorate. By now, his victory at the coming election seems almost inevitable. Yet it seems plain that this is not so much voters embracing Labor or its leaders as in rejecting the Coalition. The Coalition has tried to run a scare campaign around Shortern's Shorten and the idea that he has some diabolical hidden agenda. That seems to have failed, so far. Yet even as continuing disunity, signs of arrogance, loss of inspiration and the consequences of policy failures  particularly on climate change, water and the environment  plague Morrison's government, the evidence suggests voters have not warmed to Shorten. Nonetheless, he has led a remarkably united team, which is promoting policies and agendas rather than seeking to make itself a small target. Shorten gives a better stump speech, either in Parliament or from the back of a truck, than a formal one, but has already acquired some of the gravitas, detachment and fire he will need if he is to establish himself as prime minister. He will not arrive, like Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke or Rudd, as an exceptional messiah leading his troops out of the wilderness, based on his own personal appeal to voters. The risk that poses is that a Shorten government, dominated by the same style of management as the Morrison (Turnbull or Abbott) government, will succumb to many of the same problems, not least in winning and holding voters' respect and trust. Sooner or later, the government itself will trip up  as likely as not because of some event out of its control. Sooner or later  probably sooner  most ministers will make mistakes calling into question their judgment, honesty or competence. Initially, perhaps, a defeated and dispirited opposition will be unable to capitalise. But a ministry that becomes arrogant, comfortable in power, or inclined, as someone once called it, to treat government as though the party held it on freehold not leasehold, will again show the sort of bluster, deception and obfuscation that we now see. Such bluster is usually obvious. Weary voters will begin to think the new lot are taking them for granted, they will stop listening to the spin and the explanations, and, no doubt, politicians' reputation will fall even further, if that is possible.

I've always thought the key to getting out of the bind in which successive federal governments have found themselves is to loosen some of the discipline; admit or concede that there are differences of opinion and emphasis within the ministry about appropriate policies and programs. Sometimes even admit that cabinet canvassed alternatives  the broad scope of which is disclosed  before settling on one, to which, after extensive discussion, the whole ministry was now committed. Loading Governments have increasingly tried to control the flow of ideas, and the communication of policies, or potential policies, to voters. They do this even as they proclaim that they lead open, accountable and transparent administrations. Such is the pressure of the discipline that any leak, particularly from within government, is automatically proof of major disunity, any deviation from the standard script in explaining or defending policy is proclaimed as a split. It doesn't need to be like this, even in a Westminster system of collective responsibility of ministers. In countries such as Britain, Canada and New Zealand, there is a more relaxed approach to the policymaking process, with ministers willing to admit that a policy did not fall from heaven as self-evidently the only thing to do. Ministers can sometimes admit mistakes  even volunteer them before being caught out, without a major scandal looming and without suggestions of a cover-up. A focus on better policy and better administration must admit the notion of learning from mistakes, and the dangers of refusing to admit them, or to make changes, lest one become vulnerable to criticism. In the early 1980s, the Hawke government was elected, inter alia, with a mandate to challenge the building of hydroelectric dams on the Gordon River in Tasmania. The then attorney-general, Gareth Evans, ordered the air force to fly an F-111 reconnaissance mission over the Gordon and Franklin rivers for photos it could use in the High Court case. The Tasmanian government responded as if there had been an armed invasion of the state, and attacked Evans (now nicknamed Biggles).A group of prominent Australians has united in calling for a stop to the national war memorial's planned expansion, saying the $498 million project is unjustified.

Novelists Tom Keneally and Richard Flanagan, author and speechwriter Don Watson, Australia's first female premier Carmen Lawrence, historians and a group of ex-senior public servants and diplomats are among 83 signatories to an open letter saying the money could be better spent.

An artist's impression of the planned $498.7 million redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial.

Among the opponents are 24 Australians awarded the highest national honours, former Australian War Memorial director Brendon Kelson, former deputy director Michael McKernan, and five of its ex-staff. Leading architects and journalists joined them in opposing the overhaul.

Historians Mark McKenna, Stuart Macintyre, Marilyn Lake, Carolyn Holbrook and Henry Reynolds, and former Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs, are among those who signed the letter.The weight and hopes of the Coalition government are sitting on the shoulders of Josh Frydenberg.

In 10 days the Treasurer will stand in the House of Representatives to deliver his first budget that will double as the government's re-election agenda.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will deliver the budget on April 2. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

It's only three years ago since Scott Morrison was in exactly the same position. The Coalition was expecting a budget boost that would woo voters and give Malcolm Turnbull command of the House and Senate in a double dissolution election.

"This cannot be just another budget, because these are extraordinary times," Morrison declared to the Parliament.Plans for "fast rail" between Melbourne and Geelong will cost up to three times the $4 billion price tag put on the project by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the Victorian government says.

The Prime Minister has pledged to build a high-speed rail line where trains would travel up to 200km/h and slash the travel time between Geelong and Southern Cross Station to 32 minutes.

The federal government has pledged to create a fast rail link between Melbourne and Geelong Credit:Joe Armao

It would take about 10 years to build, with construction to begin in two years and the state government expected to pitch in $2 billion.

"As our population grows, fast rail networks are crucial to easing the congestion pressures in our cities and shaping Australias future," Mr Morrison said.The dwindling female labour participation rate could have far-reaching implications for India's economic development and the progress of women's rights in the often deeply conservative country. "When nearly fifty per cent of the labour force is unable to live up to its potential, India is foregoing significant growth, investment, and productivity gains," said Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia programme at the Carnegie Endowment. "The social costs, while less tangible, are nevertheless acute," Vaishnav added, noting research suggests women's economic empowerment reduces inequality and ensures women have a greater voice in society. A woman walks past graffiti in Kolkata for the Communist Party of India-Marxist. India's general elections will be held in seven phases from April 11 to May 19. Credit:AP Measuring the problem is tricky, and Modi's government has delayed the release of controversial jobs data.

But the official report, leaked to local newspaper Business Standard in February, shows the female labour participation rate was merely 23.3 per cent in 2017-2018  down about 8 percentage points from 2011-2012. Private estimates are gloomier. CMIE puts the figure at just 10.7 per cent between May and August 2018. The loss of jobs to machines is a global issue, but Indian women have a more limited range of alternative work than their male counterparts. And in family-focused India, women across economic lines often quit work after getting married or having children. A customer sits in front of a cut-out of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a store selling election merchandise at the Sadar Bazaar market in New Delhi. Credit:Bloomberg Also, as some families' earnings rise, more women can afford to become caregivers.

Still, when compared to nations with similar income levels, India's female labour participation rate is "a distinct outlier", according to Vaishnav. Loading Economists say Modi's two signature economic policies  a ban on high-value banknotes in 2016 and the implementation of a national sales tax rate (GST) in 2017  have hurt women more than men because they are more likely to be employed in vulnerable, informal workplaces. Demonetisation thrust the informal, cash-based economy into turmoil. A year later, many small businesses went under, unable to deal with GST's complexities or rate increases. "If there are fewer jobs available, who will move out? The women will move out, because they get lower wages. The men will go compete for the few jobs," said CMIE's CEO Mahesh Vyas.

In Dharavi, a Mumbai slum that is one of Asia's largest, 33-year-old Farzana Begum has struggled to provide for her five children since the workshop she stitched buttons for shut shop in the wake of GST. Informal housing stands in the Dharavi slum area of Mumbai. Credit:Bloomberg "I have stopped all extra spending on clothes and good food," said Begum. "If you ask anyone in Dharavi, everyone has seen a fall in income, lost their jobs or seen factories close after GST." Her dismay was echoed on the other side of the country, in a village near the eastern city of Kolkata, where Nuren Nesa's earnings from embroidering saris fell from 700 rupees a week to 300 after demonetisation. Following GST, work ground to a halt and her embroidery machine is gathering dust. "Modi's note ban and GST measures have destroyed our source of income," said Nesa, 41, who withdrew her son from university because tuition fees grew out of reach.

A worker uses a sewing machine while manufacturing a wallet at a leather workshop in Dharavi. Credit:Bloomberg "I will vote for the leader who will help us out with proper work and income," she added. As the battle for women's votes heats up, Modi has pointed to programmes to provide toilets and subsidised cooking gas cylinders as evidence his administration cares for women. This month, the main opposition party, Congress, vowed to reserve a third of federal government jobs for women if elected. Some business owners say they receive few applications from women. "We do not find too many women in the segment we service, even though we would like to hire more women because they are more sincere, there is less attrition and they can multi-task," said Vineet Pandey, who owns Mumbai-based housekeeping firms Kaarya Facilities & Services and Hecqo.com.

Indian women sometimes do not take jobs far from home due to fears for their safety. A woman works in a field of crops in Pune. Credit:Alamy Call centres or factories run by multinationals often attract women workers by providing transport after late shifts, but working at many other jobs entails commutes on packed trains and buses through India's teeming and cities. One businessman, who employees roughly 1000 men at his chemical factory in southern India, says hiring women would mean providing separate bathrooms and transport at night. He argues bypassing men would also stoke tensions in India, where economic transformations and an influx of technology are testing the social fabric.London: Police officers and counterterrorism officials in Britain were investigating attacks on five mosques on Thursday, including one in which a man took a sledgehammer to smash the windows of a house of worship in Birmingham, England.

After authorities received reports overnight of the sledgehammer attack in north Birmingham, a similar episode was reported nearby, according to the West Midlands Police. Officers discovered damage to two other sites and received a further report later on Thursday morning, all from places of worship within a few miles of each other and in an area with a large Muslim community.

The mosque on Birchfield Road, Birmingham, central England, with its windows apparently smashed with a sledgehammer. Credit:AP

"The motive behind the attacks, which are being treated as linked, is yet to be established, but West Midlands Police and the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit are investigating," the statement said.

Birmingham is one of Britain's largest cities and home to one of its biggest Muslim communities: more than one in five people there declare Islam as their religion.Loading One: Persistence isnt a virtue in itself. If I turned a corner and ran headfirst into a brick wall I shouldnt win praise for saying "well, Ill just duck my head and run faster next time". Two: Look at what she has actually done, which is not very good. Three: Look at what shes threatening to do next, which is not very good. In the last week, May did what she had flatly denied 108 times to the UK parliament she would do: seek to delay Brexit.

Even if you consider this the best result in the circumstances, that doesnt change the political point: if you insist youre not going to do something for a very long time then do it, why should anyone believe your claims about what youll do next? You may never bluff again, and even if you dont, or weren't the first time, people will suspect you do and did. May fell into the utterly foreseeable hole she had dug for herself. Then on Wednesday night, after deciding on a delay, May addressed the nation from Number 10 and blamed it on MPs "playing political games" and holding "arcane procedural rows". "Im with you," she told voters. Politicians who pretend not to be politicians are everywhere these days, but for a countrys elected leader to pretend she isnt one is next-level bullshit. May played a lead role in the Commons farce. Just a week before, she voted against her own motion to reject a no deal Brexit after it was amended in a way that amounted to nothing of any consequence, to make a political point that was lost anyway in the chaos. The next day she voted for the delay she had vowed wouldnt happen.

Loading And Mays criticism went down a treat with her parliamentary colleagues, who all believe theyre personally doing a terrific job (narrators voice: they arent) and its just the other MPs letting the country down. Sure, May was annoyed by the Commons hopeless paralysis and inability to vote for anything that would bring substantial progress on Brexit. Who wouldnt be? But why hold a press conference to say that, and pretty much only that, precisely when she most needs to get more MPs on side in order to get the Brexit she presumably still wants? One Cabinet minister reportedly called it "the most inept performance of a Downing Street of all time". Then there was Mays work in Brussels on Thursday, as she tried to persuade EU leaders to agree to delay Brexit. Reports from inside the room included her being "evasive, had no plan and even seemed confused", and one EU prime minister said "the only thing that came through with clarity was her lack of a plan". In the end they literally wrote one for her.

So shes not been great recently. British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker during a round table meeting at an EU summit in Brussels on Thursday. Credit:AP Before that, she was also not great. When the divorce deal she did with the EU was obviously going to be rejected by the Commons in December, she put off the vote. When it was eventually voted on and lost, badly, she brought it back for another vote with a handful of legal footnotes, and it was unsurprisingly voted down again. The identical deal will likely be voted down again next week. And all the time the country got closer to a no-deal Brexit. May is not the only person in this game whose idea of compromise is to insist the other person give in, but its a hell of a game to play for someone whose job is to have the countrys best interests at heart. A no-deal Brexit is predicted to be a Global Financial Crisis-level blow to the economy with the loss of thousands of jobs. May has given no reason to believe she doubts this, and yet she has insisted it is the only alternative she will accept to ratifying her deal. And she is going to keep pressing her opponents up against this dilemma until something cracks.

Even if this cliff-edge brinkmanship works, and hardcore Brexiters or the DUP or Labour fold, it was a hell of a risk to play with a lot of peoples livelihoods and the countrys future. Nevertheless, May kept doggedly maneuvering towards a binary choice between her deal or no deal, with the real and rising chance it might be the latter. Consensus, to her, means consent. Which is a fine political tactic from a position of power, not so much for a PM of a minority government pushing a policy that polls show the country hates. Contrast the other EU national leaders in Brussels on Thursday: 27 very different leaders in personality and politics, who began the evening in what sounds like serious disagreement on a Brexit delay then reached unanimity on a new common ground a few hours later, after a nice meal of duckling a l'Orange. Is there a way May could achieve this in the UK? She has barely even tried to find out. There have been repeated attempts to try to set up a process by which the Commons can hold a series of indicative votes to determine the sort of Brexit it would be prepared to compromise on.

Loading There has also been, reportedly, a compromise offered by the opposition in which it would vote her deal through on the condition the public get a final say. There has been an attempt to soften the deal into a Brexit that the EU would likely accept: remaining within its customs union. May rejected all these, because of what she claims was the motivation of the majority in the 2016 Brexit vote, which she insists is a matter of fact rather than just her opinion (in the last few days she has finally accepted the need for indicative votes, but has not yet committed to be bound by them). There have been a few token meetings with opposition party leaders and Tory opponents, but they came out reporting May just used them to rehearse arguments she had made already in public.

Why is/was she so intransigent? Its hardly that shes so enamoured with her own deal; shes talked it down herself, calling it a compromise and the best available in the circumstances. The real reason is probably that, unless it was in absolute extremis (and possibly even then), even entertaining the chance of a soft Brexit or a revocation of Brexit could tear Mays party apart and possibly end her premiership. So instead she pressed the country to the brink of a no-deal Brexit, because apparently the risk of ructions in the Conservative Party is much worse than the risk of screwing the country. Deliberately or, to be generous, in effect she put her political interest above that of the country. Not what youd hope from a leader in a big crisis. And is she even good at being a partisan party leader? Not according to former Conservative MP, now Times columnist Matthew Parris:

Loading "Time and again my informants  MPs, former MPs, civil servants, special advisers  tell me, eyes flashing, that  [May is] not normal. Shes extraordinary. Extraordinarily uncommunicative; extraordinarily rude in the way she blanks people, ideas and arguments. "Theresa May, they tell me (in a couple of cases actually shouting) is the Death Star of modern British politics.  a political black hole." None of this is to say Jeremy Corbyn and Labour have helped in any way. Thats the topic for another rant. But theyre the opposition. Brexit is not their project and theres no reason why they should help May commit the country to self-harm. Finally, this whole situation could probably have been avoided if it werent for May's colossal mistake two years ago.Sao Paulo: Former Brazilian president Michel Temer was arrested on Thursday, less than three months after he left office, as part of a sweeping corruption investigation that has brought down dozens of Brazil's top politicians.

Brazil's then-President Michel Temer in 2018. Credit:AP

Prosecutors say Temer led a sophisticated organised-crime ring that received $470 million in bribes.

Temer, 78, was charged with corruption and money laundering and stands accused of running a scheme that accepted bribes in return for lucrative government contracts involving a Brazilian power plant, prosecutors said.

Some of the money was allegedly paid through a $US400,000 ($563,000) renovation of his daughter's apartment, they said.Are you a current print subscriber to Columbia Gorge News? If so, you qualify for free access to all content on columbiagorgenews.com. Simply verify with your subscriber id to receive free access. Your subscriber id may be found on your bill or mailing label.Defendants, from (L), Jany Leveille, Lucas Morton, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj and Subbannah Wahhaj entering district court in Taos, N.M. On Aug. 13, 2018. (Roberto E. Rosales/The Albuquerque Journal via AP)

5 Compound Suspects Plead Not Guilty to Terror Charges

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.Five people arrested at a ramshackle New Mexico compound where one of the suspects sons was found dead pleaded not guilty on March 21, to federal terrorism-related charges and other counts.

The two men and three women have been charged with conspiring to support planned attacks on U.S. law enforcement officers, military members and government employees while living on the outskirts of Amalia, just south of the Colorado border.

They have been in federal custody since last August on firearms charges that accuse them of conspiring to provide weapons and ammunition to Jany Leveille, one of the five and a leader of the group who is from Haiti and had been living in the country illegally.

The group had traveled in late 2017 from Georgia to New Mexico, where they built their compound in an area dotted with some of the regions signature earthship self-built homes.

Billy Blackburn, an attorney for Subhanah Wahhaj, and other defense attorneys said their clients are innocent of the charges.

The groups makeshift settlement had consisted of a camping trailer wedged into the desert and surrounded by stacked tires before authorities raided it and found 11 hungry children, guns and ammunition, a firing range. They also found the remains of 3-year-old Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, who had suffered from severe medical disabilities that caused seizures.

Happening Today: All 5 Taos County compound suspects are expected to go before a federal judge. Here is more information on the charges they now face: https://t.co/dJjGwzdFeb #NewMexico #TaosCompound pic.twitter.com/JxeayxG421  KOB 4 (@KOB4) March 21, 2019

The boy had been reported missing in Georgia in late 2017 and died at the compound after he was denied medication because Leveille believed it suppressed Muslim beliefs, authorities said.

She and the boys father, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, had held hours-long prayer rituals over the boy in the days leading to his death.

The results of an autopsy for the boy are still pending.

Others charged in the case include two sisters and a brother-in-law of Wahhaj. All, except Wahhaj, are charged in the kidnapping of his son.

Federal statutes generally only allow for charging parents with abducting their own children in international cases.

Authorities also have accused Wahhaj and others of transporting weapons across state lines, and training children at a firing range on the property to carry out shootings and other attacks that never occurred.

By Mary HudetzA construction crew installs new sections of the U.S.-Mexico border barrier replacing smaller fences as seen from Tijuana, Mexico, on Jan. 11, 2019. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Alabama Bill Would Allow Tax Refunds to Fund Border Wall

MONTGOMERYAlabamians would be able to donate part of their state income tax refunds to help build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, according to a bill the state Senate advanced Thursday, March 21.

Senators voted 23-6 Thursday to approve the bill that would allow residents to check a box on their state income tax form and donate to We Build The Wall Inc., a nonprofit started by a veteran. According to the groups website, the organization is focused on privately building portions of a border wall with Mexico.

I think its a way for Alabamians to say to the president and to the nation that we think strong border security is important. We want to promote that. We want Washington to build that wall, said Republican Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh, who sponsored the proposal and is considering a run for U.S. Senate in 2020.

President Donald Trump last month controversially declared a national emergency in the hopes of steering $3.6 billion more to border barriers than lawmakers have approved.

The Alabama Senate voted along party lines Thursday. The bill now moves to the Alabama House of Representatives.

Sen. Bobby Singleton, a Democrat, called the proposal a Republican feel-good bill.

What about the Northern border? More people are crossing over the Northern border but you dont want to pay them any attention, Singleton said.

Alabama currently allows people to donate to about 20 groups and programs, such as cancer research and an organ donation awareness program, on their tax forms. The border wall organization would join those groups if the bill wins final passage.

Poll: National Emergency for Border Wall

Likely voters who support President Donald Trump welcomed the government shutdown and national emergency to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The presidents strongest supporters  favor the declaration of a presidential national emergency if necessary to get the job done, said Rasmussen Reports this week.

Rasmussen, the polling agency favored by President Trump, said it found that voters dont think Democrats will ever okay funding for President Trumps border wall.

Meanwhile, 42 percent of likely voters favor the declaration of a national emergency to fund the border wall if Congress fails to pass a spending measure for it, the pollster said, adding that its up about 3 percentage points from a month ago.

Rasmussen polled 1,000 likely voters on Feb. 11 and Feb. 12, days before Trump declared a national emergency to fund the wall.

Meanwhile, on Feb. 15, Rasmussen found that 50 percent of likely U.S. voters approve of President Trumps job performance, while 49 percent disapprove.

The pollster noted that on Feb. 15, 2011, during President Obamas first term, 48 percent of voters approved of the job the former president was doing.

Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis, said Rasmussen.

The Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips contributed to this report.San Diego Border Patrol agent Tekae Michael at the eastern end of the U.S.-Mexico border barrier in Otay Mesa, San Diego, on July 12, 2017. The section of border wall was first constructed in 1991 to prevent vehicles from illegal crossings. (Joshua Philipp/The Epoch Times)

Alabama Bill Would Allow Taxpayers to Donate Portion of Tax Refund to Border Wall

Alabama residents are one step closer to being allowed to donate some of their state tax refunds toward the construction of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

A bill introduced by Rep. Del Marsh (R-Anniston) passed in the Alabama Senate by a vote of 23-7 on March 21, and has headed to the states House of Representatives.

I thank the Senate for their support on this matter and I look forward to working with the House to give Alabamians a voice and are able to express their desire to support President Trump and stronger border security, March said in a statement, reported the Yellow Hammer.

This bill is about sending a message to Washington that Alabamians support strong border security measures. https://t.co/vdMpz6J2MQ  Del Marsh (@SenatorDelMarsh) March 20, 2019

The bill (pdf) allows taxpayers to voluntarily give a part of their refund to We Build the Wall, Inc., a nonprofit that aims to raise money for the construction of the wall. People are already able to donate a portion of their refund to areas like the Childrens Trust Fund, Alabama Breast and Cervical Cancer Research Program, and Foster Care Trust Fund.

Senate Democrats attempted to block the bill by organizing a filibuster that started on March 20. When they tried to delay the bill again the next day, Republicans successfully adopted a cloture petition to end the filibuster, reported the news website.

Marsh said, People I talk to across Alabama are sick and tired of politicians in Washington D.C. talking and nothing being done about the crisis on our borders. This bill is about sending a message to Washington that we support President Trump and his mission to secure our southern border.

This bill simply allows citizens, if they choose, to send a message that they want to see our borders secured by sending a portion of their tax refund to donate to build the wall, he added.

Funds for Wall

The construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was one of President Donald Trumps key promises in his 2016 election campaign. On Feb. 15, he declared a national emergency in relation to the ongoing crisis at the southern border, citing the influx of illegal aliens, drugs, and guns into the country.

Trump had previously promised to use his legal national emergency powers if Congress failed to appropriate $5.7 billion for border wall construction as requested by the Department of Homeland Security.

The president received criticism for using his national emergency powers, with opponents saying that he overstepped his power. This has led to multiple lawsuits commenced by nonprofit organizations, including radical leftist groups around the country.

As I predicted, 16 states, led mostly by Open Border Democrats and the Radical Left, have filed a lawsuit in, of course, the 9th Circuit! California, the state that has wasted billions of dollars on their out of control Fast Train, with no hope of completion, seems in charge!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 19, 2019

However, Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow from the Heritage Foundation, wrote on Feb. 25, that Trump acted only after Congress refused to fulfill its duty to protect the country and provide the resources necessary to secure the border.

Anyone who believes this isnt a genuine crisis is ignoring reality. It approaches what many consider an unchecked invasion: thousands of illegal aliens, dangerous criminals, drug smugglers, and sex traffickers crossing the border every day, Spakovsky wrote in his article.

On March 14, the Senate voted 59-41 on a resolution to terminate Trumps emergency declaration, where 12 Republicans joined all of the Democrats to pass the measure. The same resolution was already passed in the House on Feb. 26.

Trump subsequently issued the first veto of his presidency on March 15, to override the congressional resolution. He called the resolution reckless, adding that, Today I am vetoing this resolution. Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution and I have the duty to veto it.

People hate the word invasion, but thats what it is, Trump said, adding that there is nowhere left to hold all of the people that were capturing.

This week, border patrol released 250 migrants and are expected to release hundreds more because of an influx of Central American families causing overcrowding in immigration facilities, reported Los Angeles Times.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen warned lawmakers earlier this month that illegal immigration is simply spiraling out of control and threatening public safety and national security.

In February, we saw a 30 percent jump over the previous month, with agents apprehending or encountering nearly 75,000 aliens, Nielsen told the House Committee on Homeland Security. This is an 80 percent increase over the same time last year. And I can report today that CBP is forecasting the problem will get even worse this spring as the weather warms up.

The Epoch Times reporter Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.An Amp sits on the dashboard of a Lyft driver's car in a file photograph. (Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for Lyft)

At IPO Road Show, Lyft Executives Look to Lower Insurance Costs

BOSTONLyft Inc. executives are focused on cutting insurance costs and will phase in self-driving vehicles on simple routes first, they said at a roadshow for investors ahead of the ride-hailing companys initial public offering set for next week.

Reducing insurance costs is the number one initiative, said Chief Financial Officer Brian Roberts at a luncheon at a Boston hotel on March 20 for investors considering whether to buy into the closely watched IPO.

Roberts and Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer did not directly address questions from the audience during the hour-long event about when the company might become profitable, citing ongoing investments to build out technology and car-servicing centers.

Lyft reported a net loss of $911 million on revenue of $2.16 billion in 2018, according to its preliminary prospectus.

One audience member asked: The obvious question is, what revenue do you have to have to get to break even? Zimmer said that Its not necessarily just a question of scale. Its about beating down those operating costs.

For instance, Green said the company might look to lower insurance costs by optimizing routes for safety rather than speed.

The leaders also said the company will stay focused on transportation services, unlike rival Uber Technologies Inc. that has expanded into markets like trucking and food delivery.

Uber is also expected to go public soon, with both companies benefiting from the rapid adoption of their services that have already upended the taxi industry.

But some investors have also expressed concerns the ride-hailing industry could itself be disrupted by the rise of autonomous vehicles.

Zimmer said the arrival of such self-driving cars will be gradual over the next 10 years, much as wireless telephone networks have been upgraded. He said Lyft will initially roll out autonomous vehicles on simpler routes that would not stress their systems.

He cited examples such as routes where speeds are below 35 miles per hour, U.S. routes without left-hand turns or tunnels, and during good weather.

In interviews after the event, several investors expressed a range of reactions to the presentation, on condition they not be named per the policies of their firms. Two said they would be more likely to seek to buy into the IPO, which is oversubscribed, although one said: Its hard to understand how they differentiate from Uber.

A third investor echoed the sentiment and noted that many drivers serve both companies.

By Ross KerberAustralian David Russell Levick Jailed in US for Sales to Iran

Australian businessman David Russell Levick has been sentenced to two years prison in the United States for exporting electronics and aircraft parts to Iran.

Levick, 57, of Sydney, entered guilty pleas in the District Court in Washington D.C. on Thursday, March 21, for violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which criminalises transactions with Iranian entities without a license from the U.S. Department of Treasury.

Levick was the general manager of Thornleigh-based ICM Components when he solicited purchase orders and goods from a representative of a trading company in Iran.

This representative, referenced in court documents as Iranian A, also operated and controlled companies in Malaysia that acted as intermediaries for the Iranian company.

The activity took place in 2007 and 2008 and Levick was indicted in February 2012.

He has been in custody since being extradited to the U.S. in December last year.

In addition to the prison term, Levick must pay a forfeiture amount of $199,227, which represents the total value of the goods involved in illegal transactions.A aerial view of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain marine terminal, in Burnaby, B.C., is shown on May 29, 2018. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press)

BC Legislation Only Applies to Trans Mountain, Pipeline Proponent Argues

VANCOUVEREnvironmental legislation proposed by British Columbia is specifically targeting the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and would significantly impact it, the projects proponent and the Alberta government argued on March 21.

The B.C. Court of Appeal is hearing a reference case that asks whether the government can amend its Environmental Management Act to create a permitting system for companies that increase the amount of heavy oil theyre transporting through the province.

B.C. has argued the amendments are not intended to block the project, but rather to protect the environment from spills and require companies to pay for damages. However, a lawyer for Trans Mountain ULC said B.C.s motive is to obstruct the expansion.

Trans Mountain will be directly and significantly impacted by the proposed legislation. Indeed, we say it is the target of the proposed legislation, Maureen Killoran told a panel of five judges.

Killoran said Trans Mountain, which has operated since 1953 and runs from the Edmonton area to Metro Vancouver, is the only pipeline that transports liquid petroleum to the West Coast and the only pipeline to which the legislation would apply.

The proposed law presented more risk than privatesector proponent Kinder Morgan was willing to accept, prompting it to sell the pipeline to Canada for $4.5 billion last year, she said.

Since the plan to triple the pipelines capacity was first proposed in 2013, it has been through the largest review in the National Energy Boards history, a number of court challenges and faced protesters and blockades, Killoran said.

The energy board ruled the expansion is in the public interest because the country cannot get all its available energy resources to Pacific markets, she said.

The government of Canada opposes B.C.s proposed permitting system because it says Ottawanot provinceshas exclusive jurisdiction over interprovincial infrastructure.

The new rules would allow a provincial public servant with expertise in pollution management to apply conditions to permits, which B.C. says would be intended to address concerns posed by a companys proposed activities.

Peter Gall, representing the government of Alberta, said the permitting scheme is a vague, amorphous process that gives wideranging discretionary powers to a government official to do whatever he or she thinks is necessary to protect the environment.

We accept that the province genuinely wants to protect the environment, he said. The problem is  the province believes that the best, indeed the only way to protect the environment is to stop the project.

Justice Harvey Groberman questioned why Gall would raise the motives of the legislation, given the argument that it interferes with federal jurisdiction should suffice.

Gall said the court should not ignore the reality of the situationthat the B.C. government is committed to stopping the project.

While in opposition, Premier John Horgan said he would use every tool in the toolbox to stop the expansion. The court has heard that after his minority NDP government took power in 2017, it received legal advice that it could not block the project.

Gall quoted Environment Minister George Heyman as saying that the government could not delay or obstruct the project through anything other than evenhanded consideration of permit applications.

The government of Saskatchewan, the Lax Kwalaams Indian Band and the Beecher Bay, Songhees and TSouke First Nations also delivered arguments opposing B.C.s proposed rules on Thursday.

Thomson Irvine, a lawyer for Saskatchewan, said the federal environmental assessment process is rigorous and Trans Mountain has already had to jump through many hoops.

If at the end of the day, they get that certificate and the provincial law says, Oh no, were going to put restrictions on what you can carry or how much you can carry, that frustrates the entire purpose of the federal statute, he said.

Lax Kwalaams lawyer Christopher Harvey said the band on B.C.s north coast is facing dismal economic prospects and has developed a pipeline proposal that would bring oil from Alberta to a marine terminal on its territory or to a refinery in Alaska.

The proposed legislation threatens to kill that proposal, Harvey said.

The band objects to its needs, aspirations, rights and options in its traditional territory being thwarted by legislation, such as the amendments, without any band input.

The cities of Vancouver and Burnaby, environmental group Ecojustice and the Heiltsuk Nation and the Council of the Haida Nation have delivered arguments in support of B.C.s proposed rules.Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke arrives at a meet and greet at Tuckerman Brewing in Conway, N.H., on March 20, 2019. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

Beto ORourkes We Do Not Need Any Walls Claim at Odds With Frontliners

Obama's Border Patrol Chief says there's "absolutely a national emergency" at the border

Democratic presidential contender Beto ORourke has criticized President Donald Trumps plan to expand barriers along the southern border.

We do not need any walls, $30 billion dollars, 2,000 miles long, 30 feet high, he said during a campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on March 21.

He decried that the barrier would have to be built on U.S. land, at times forcibly bought out through the eminent domain and not directly on the borderline, which for a long stretch follows the middle of the Rio Grande river. All to solve a problem that we do not have, he said.

But those working on the front line with U.S. Border Patrol dont share ORourkes view and has been calling for more barriers.

How Much Wall

Expanding existing barriers, many of which are obsolete and ineffective, to span nearly the entire stretch of the 2000-mile border would cost some $21.6 billion, based on a Department of Homeland Security internal report obtained by Reuters in February 2017.

Yet, Trump has, since his campaign days, advocated a border wall that doesnt have to cover the entire border.

Some areas are already secured with physical barriers. In other areas, the terrain is too difficult for people to cross, Trump stated in his 2015 book Crippled America.

On Dec. 25, 2018, Trump indicated that he would consider the wall complete at the length of 500-550 miles, likely referring to the areas that would require new construction.

A 2017 plan by Customs and Border Protection officials called for 722 miles of a wall at an $18 billion price tag, which appears to be mirrored in a to-be-released Trumps budget for fiscal year 2020, according to officials familiar with the request.

The Trump administration has so far replaced more than 22 miles of old fencing. About 100 miles of fences and levee walls are under construction or near the beginning of construction. Further, roughly 55 miles of new fencing is included in the 2019 budget.

There is already 654 miles of barriers along the border but 280 miles of it consists of a barrier for vehicles that is easily crossed by pedestrians. Other parts of the existing barrier are old landing mat fences only about 10-12 feet high and easy to climb.

Breaking Point

ORourkes assertion that we do not have a problem at the border clashes with reports from his border hometown of El Paso. There, a massive influx of illegal border crossers is pushing the Border Patrol very close to a breaking point, Ramiro Cordero, Border Patrol Special Operations supervisor in the El Paso Sector, said on March 20.

The El Paso Sector covers some 270 border miles in westernmost Texas and New Mexico where illegal crosser apprehensions increased nearly six-fold in the first five months of fiscal 2019starting in Octoberfrom the same period a year earlier.

Most of the crossers90 percentwere caught in the El Paso Metropolitan Area centered in Texass 16th congressional district, which ORourke represented for three terms starting 2013 before his failed challenge to the junior Texas Senator Ted Cruz in 2018.

Emergency Declaration

Trump declared a national emergency in relation to the crisis on the southwest border on Feb. 15, citing the influx of illegal aliens as well as drugs, guns, and human trafficking across the border.

The declaration had enabled the transfer of $3.6 billion from the military construction budget toward wall construction. The president also ordered the shifting of an additional $3.1 billion, which did not require declaring a national emergency.

Together with the 2019 budget allocation, Trump should have enough to build about 324 miles of new fencing.

The Defense Department has identified $12.8 billion in funds from projects that can be reallocated to the construction of the border barrier.

A Democrat-backed resolution to annul Trumps declaration passed Congress on March 14 due to votes of 12 Republican Senators but Trump vetoed it. Sixteen states then filed a lawsuit against Trump and his administration over the declaration.

Democrats have been downplaying the seriousness of the border situation and criticized Trump for using emergency powers to circumvent Congresss power of the purse.

Yet, Trump appears to have border security professionals on his side.

Apart from a number of current border security officials, a former Border Patrol chief in the Obama administration, who was fired by the Trump administration in 2017, told national television on March 21 that there is absolutely a national emergency at the border.

ORourke didnt respond to a request for comment.

Reuters contributed to this report.FILE PHOTO: Ethiopian Red Cross workers carry a body bag with the remains of Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash victims at the scene of a plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

Boeing, FAA Officials Called to Testify in US Senate on 737 MAX Plane Crashes

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia/JAKARTA, Indonesia/WASHINGTONBoeing Co. faced growing pressure in Washington on March 20 as U.S. lawmakers called for executives to testify about two crashed 737 MAX jets while the worlds biggest planemaker worked on returning the grounded fleet to the skies.

The Senate hearing, at an unspecified date, would be the first time that a U.S. congressional committee has called Boeing executives to appear for questioning about 737 MAX passenger plane crashes in October in Indonesia and March 10 in Ethiopia.

On March 27, the same panel, the Senate Commerce subcommittee on aviation and space, also will question U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials. They will likely be asked why the regulator agreed to certify the MAX planes in March 2017 without requiring extensive additional training.

Meanwhile, the FAA on March 20 sent a notification to global aviation authorities saying the installation of Boeings new automatic flight software in the grounded jets and related training was a priority for the agency.

The Ethiopian Airlines crash has shaken the global aviation industry and cast a shadow over the flagship Boeing model intended to be a standard for decades to come, given parallels with the Lion Air calamity off Jakarta in October. The two crashes killed 346 people in all.

Boeing was sued on March 20 in federal court in Chicago by the estate of one of the Lion Air crash victims in which the plaintiffs referred to the Ethiopian crash to support a wrongful death claim against the company. A Boeing spokesman said the company does not respond to or comment on, questions concerning legal matters.

Also on March 20, the Seattle Times reported the Federal Bureau of Investigation was joining the investigation into the MAXs certification. An FBI spokeswoman in Seattle would neither confirm nor deny that it was a part of any investigation.

Criminal prosecutors at the U.S. Justice Department, who are also investigating the FAAs oversight of Boeing, have issued multiple subpoenas to Boeing in an effort to find out more about how the MAX was certified and marketed, CNN reported late on March 20, citing sources briefed on the matter.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon Inspector General said it would investigate a complaint that Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, violated ethical rules by allegedly promoting Boeing while in office.

Software Upgrade

Chicago-headquartered Boeing has promised a swift update of software, but regulators in Europe and Canada are shifting away from previous reliance on FAA vetting, saying they will now seek their own guarantees of the MAX planes safety.

Aviation experts suspect an automated system, meant to stop stalling by dipping the nose, may be involved in both cases, with pilots struggling to override it as their jets plunged downwards.

But they stress neither investigation is complete and crew actions and training will also be closely scrutinized.

As Ethiopian investigators pored over black box data from their crash, sources with knowledge of the doomed Lion Air cockpit voice recorder revealed how pilots searched a manual to figure out why they were hurtling down to sea.

Investigators examining the Indonesian crash want to know how a computer ordered the plane to dive in response to data from a faulty sensor and whether pilots had enough training to respond appropriately.

Boeing has said there was a documented procedure to handle the problem.

A different crew on the same plane the previous evening had the same situation but solved it after running through three checklists, though they did not pass on that information to the doomed Indonesian crew, a preliminary report in November said.

Regulators want to be absolutely sure of Boeings new automated control system, known as MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), and that pilots are fully prepared to handle it. MCAS is meant to prevent a loss of lift which can cause an aerodynamic stall and send the plane downwards in an uncontrolled way.

Facing high-profile scrutiny, Boeing reshuffled executives in its commercial airplanes unit to focus on its response.

The FAA said its robust processes and full collaboration with the aviation community were key to safety worldwide.

As with the Indonesia flight, the Ethiopian crew radioed about control problems shortly after take-off and sought to turn back, struggling to get their plane on track before it hit a field. Ethiopias civil aviation head Wosenyeleh Hunegnaw said he expected a report on the investigation within 30 days.

For now, more than 350 MAX aircraft are grounded, and deliveries of nearly 5,000 moreworth more than $500 billionare on hold.

Development of the 737 MAX began in 2011 after the launch by its main rival of the Airbus A320neo. The MAX entered service in 2017.

While some airlines are worried about the impact on profits, they have been able to keep services going, swapping MAX planes for others, or using partner carriers.

By Maggie Fick, Cindy Silviana & David ShepardsonBrazilian Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo said Wednesday that concern exists about the presence of terrorist elements in Venezuela that, he said, could represent a threat to the security of the country and the region.

Up until recently, it had not been admitted that there was terrorism in South America and today it is known via intelligence (departments) ... that that is a threat for Venezuela, Araujo said at a press conference in Brasilia after returning from an official trip to the United States.

Araujo denied that the issue had been discussed during the meeting on Tuesday between Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his US counterpart, Donald Trump , in Washington, but he emphasized that the existence of terrorist organizations should be monitored.

However, the foreign minister, who accompanied Bolsonaro on his first official trip abroad since taking office, guaranteed that the US and his country share the same view about how to deal with the crisis affecting Venezuela.

It was extremely clear that we completely agree on the unacceptable nature of what is happening in Venezuela in terms of human tragedy, said Araujo, who lambasted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro , calling his government a dictatorial regime.

Although there is a conviction that it is necessary to act, the foreign minister did not provide any details of what was discussed at the Trump-Bolsonaro meeting regarding what measures could be taken.

He did say, however, that Brazil and the US are working together ... toward the same objective, although not necessarily in the same way.

Araujo said that while the US has the ability to act via economic sanctions, Brazil is taking the diplomatic and political route.

Almost two months after the president of Venezuelas opposition-controlled Parliament, Juan Guaido, proclaimed himself Venezuelas interim president, garnering the recognition of more than 50 nations around the world, Venezuelas armed forces (FANB) continue to be the focus of everyones attention.

With no sign of internal divisions - at least in public - the FANB is at the center of all calculations in Venezuela, with the opposition trusting that the calls to the military to withdraw its support from Maduro will at some point cause them to split with the regime, while the Chavistas see the FANBs public stance in support of Maduro as a stabilizing factor amid the Venezuelan crisis.

Hundreds of troops have deserted from the FANB since Guaido proclaimed himself interim president on Jan. 23. Most, if not all, of these former FANB soldiers are currently in exile in Colombia.

In February, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez said that more than 100 troops had been expelled from the FANB and demoted for having deserted and crossing the border into Colombia.

On Tuesday, Venezuelas Official Gazette reported that 27 officers and non-commissioned FANB officers had been demoted and expelled from the ranks.

The Venezuelan Medical Federation on Wednesday said that the Maduro government is maintaining an ongoing attack against medical personnel who are demanding medicines and healthcare materials for public hospitals, which have been severely affected by the crisis.

The attack is continuing on the order given from the highest levels of government against Venezuelan physicians, said the president of the Federation, Douglas Leon, at a press conference at which he also condemned the firing of some of his colleagues.

For the past five years, at least, Venezuela has had a scarcity of medications and healthcare materials that unions critical of the government estimate at between 80-90 percent.

Health care workers have also complained that hospitals are experiencing infrastructure problems, damaged equipment and cutoffs of water and electricity.

According to the latest National Hospital Survey published by the organizations Physicians for Health, between Nov. 19, 2018, and Feb. 9, 2019, 79 people died at Venezuelan hospitals during power blackouts.

Meanwhile, in Geneva, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, asked the Maduro government to guarantee that experts from her office who are currently in that country be given access to the places and people they request and that no reprisals be taken against the people they speak with.

The technical mission is in Venezuela to study the possibility of a trip to the country by Bachelet, given that the Maduro government had extended to her an invitation but the UN wants to ensure that she will have free access to opposition figures and dissidents if she travels there.

In Caracas on Wednesday, the Maduro government accused Trump and Bolsonaro of being apologists for war after rejecting the remarks the two leaders made about Venezuela during their White House meeting on Tuesday.

It is grotesque to see two heads of states with high international responsibilities being apologists for war ... in flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that the two presidents remarks were dangerous.

Without doubt, both presidents reflect the most reactionary ideas for the peoples of the region as well as for world peace and security, the ministry said.

During his meeting with Bolsonaro on Tuesday at the White House, Trump said that all options are on the table regarding Venezuela, presumably including military intervention.Former Brazil's President Michel Temer (L) and former Minister of the General Secretary of the Presidency of Brazil, Wellington Moreira Franco in Brasilia, Brazil, on July 11, 2017. (Adriano Machado/Reuters)

Brazils Ex-President Temer Jailed, Accused of Heading Criminal Organization

SAO PAULO/BRASILIABrazils former President Michel Temer was arrested on March 21 in Operation Radioactivity, a probe of alleged graft in the construction of a nuclear power plant, threatening to delay debate over the governments ambitious fiscal reforms.

Temer was president from 2016 to 2018, taking office after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, who he served under as vice president for six years. His lawyer confirmed he was arrested in Sao Paulo, and his legal team has lodged an appeal for Temer to be freed.

Prosecutors alleged that Temer was the leader of a criminal organization that took in 1.8 billion reais ($472 million) in bribes or pending future kickbacks as part of numerous schemes, including one related to the Angra nuclear power plant complex on the Rio de Janeiro coast and other state firms. The former presidents Brazil Democratic Movement party long held sway over key appointments in Brazils largely state-run energy sector, including nuclear power plants.

Brazils former President Michel Temer (3rd L) is seen at the Federal Police headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil March 21, 2019. (Ricardo Moraes/Reuters)

Federal police also arrested Temers former minister and confidant Wellington Moreira Franco, who is married to the mother-in-law of Rodrigo Maia, the speaker of the lower house of Congress and a leading proponent of pension reform.

Temer and Moreira Franco have repeatedly denied previous accusations of wrongdoing. Maia was not immediately available for comment.

Asked about the arrest during a trip to Chile, President Jair Bolsonaro said everyone must respond for their actions and that Temers fate was the result of traditional corrupt political practices that he has vowed to end.

Brazils sweeping Car Wash probe has uncovered what U.S. prosecutors called the worlds largest graft scheme, starting with political bribery involving oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, also known as Petrobras, and spreading to other sectors and public works.

Over 150 powerful politicians and businessmen have been convicted in relation to the investigation since 2014, which has reshaped the countrys political and business landscapes.

Temer is the second former president to be arrested in the anti-corruption push. Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is in jail serving over 12 years for a corruption conviction.

Voters anger over long-running graft fueled the ascent of Bolsonaro, a conservative politician who served 30 years as a fringe lawmaker but rose to power on the back of pledges to end graft in Brasilia.

Nuclear Complex

A convoy of police cars, transporting Brazils former president Michel Temer drives at International Airport Galeao in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 21, 2019. (Lucas Landau/Reuters)

Work on Angra 3, the third nuclear power plant planned in Brazils Angra complex, has advanced haltingly since 1984 and has long been on the radar of graft investigators. The complex is run by Eletronuclear, a unit of state power holding company Centrais Eletricas Brasileiras SA, or Eletrobras.

Shares of Eletrobras, which has been the focus of shifting privatization plans in recent years, fell nearly 3 percent on Thursday.

In 2016, Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva, the former chief executive of state nuclear power company Eletronuclear, was sentenced to 43 years in prison on a corruption conviction.

Silva colluded with executives at Brazilian engineering firms Andrade Gutierrez and Engevix to receive kickbacks in return for overbilling on the Angra 3 construction, court records show.

Temer, who left office with an approval rating of 7 percent, had not been formally cited in the case.

But federal investigators alleged on Thursday he took at least 1 million reais in bribes in 2014 in relation to a contract at the nuclear complex won by Engevix and the Brazilian subsidiary of the Finnish firm AF Consult LTD.

AF Consult did not respond to requests for comment. Engevix said it had no comment.

Brazils former president Michel Temer (L) is seen at Guarulhos airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil March 21, 2019. (Amanda Perobelli/Reuters)

Prosecutors told a news conference that Temer, who was a federal lawmaker for more than 15 years before becoming vice president, had been a part of schemes diverting public funds since the 1980s.

The criminal group that was arrested today  has been in operation for more than 40 years, federal prosecutor Fabiana Schneider said.

The group included a counterintelligence arm that tried to thwart any criminal charges by monitoring investigations and the prosecutors themselves, feeding false documents to authorities to mislead them, the prosecutors said.

A federal judge in Rio de Janeiro granted an arrest warrant for Temer that prosecutors requested on preventative grounds, citing an ongoing payment scheme.

Temer was hit with separate corruption charges during his presidency that was blocked by allies in the lower house of Congress, which must authorize charges against a sitting president.

Temer, 78, previously led the MDB, a regionally fragmented party with no consistent ideology that for two decades held the most seats in Congress, making it a major power broker.

The son of Lebanese immigrants who arrived in Brazil in 1925, Temer was the youngest of eight children and began his political career in the 1960s as an aide in Sao Paulo states education secretariat.

The governor at the time, Ademar de Barros, one of the first politicians to inspire the popular Brazilian saying about their leaders: He steals, but he gets things done.

By Brad Brooks and Anthony BoadleA can of Ozi Air containing what is touted to be fresh Outback Australian air (L) and a person walking through thick smog in Asia on March 13, 2019. (Courtesy of Ozi Air)

Businessman Hopes to Tap Into Chinese Market Selling Fresh Air in a Bottle

Heavy pollution in China is forcing shoppers to buy bottled air from Australia to improve their wellbeing and reduce the chance of premature death from air pollution.

In January, Chinas official air quality was 35 micrograms per cubic metre, 2.5 times higher than the World Health Organisations recommended annual average of 10 micrograms per cubic metre according to Reuters.

Each year, 7 million people die prematurely across the world from air pollution, the United Nations Environment Programme said, and about 4 million of these deaths occur in the Asia-Pacific region.

Adelaide-based Ozi Air announced that it has received about 50 pre-orders for pressured cans of what it advertises to be outback air, which sell for A$23.99 ($17) each, or a bulk pack of 12 cans for A$179.99 ($128).

Yes, really. He has bottled air and will sell it direct to China.

Ozi Air is an innovative product that is uniquely Australian that gives Chinese the opportunity to enjoy the benefit of pure fresh clean air.https://t.co/RTit75lnv6  Ruralweekly (@Ruralweekly) March 21, 2019

Buyers simply attach a face mask at the top of the metal can and the contents can deliver between 140 and 160 breathsabout nine to 10 minutes of breathing relief.

Founder Joe Duchiera, 36, confirmed that the air is collected from a secret location in South Australia that is off the beaten track and closed to the public.

Its a bit of a secret, we remotely go out bush, he told News Limited. We have air quality measuring devices we use to test the air and make sure we get the purest air we can.

Duchieras product had not publicly launched at the time of publication but he is so confident there was a market for bottled air in China that he has already invested hundreds of thousands of his own money into the business.

South Australian Joe Duchiera is about to release his product, Ozi Air, to customers from China. The 36-year-old has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money into his business dream of selling pure South Australian outback air in a can >> https://t.co/JLUJRp6ClZ  The Weekly Times (@theweeklytimes) March 20, 2019

He claims the can and mask are both made from recyclable materials and it is a completely Australian-owned and made product.

So far there has been interest from customers based in China, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Brand incubation company Reach China helped Duchiera find the international buyers.

The $24 cans claim to improve fitness, reduce anxiety and assist in learning. https://t.co/ptqP2qUDDr  Nine.com.au (@Ninecomau) March 21, 2019

Reach China expects the product to sell well if targeted towards female millennial shoppers who are visiting Australia from China.

It will also serve as a unique souvenir for Chinese visiting Australiathey will be able to buy pure fresh Australian air and take it home to China as a wonderful memento of Australia, Reach China CEO Dr. Mathew McDougall told News Limited. It will bring relief to Chinese dealing with pollution.

Ozi Air of #Adelaide to sell pure air from our outback to Chinahttps://t.co/jVNN8nNbjx  Advertiser Business (@AdvertiserBiz) March 20, 2019

Other companies have started bottling air for sale including Sydney-based Green & Clean, which collects air from well-known tourist destinations like Sydneys Bondi Beach and the Blue Mountains.

Green & Clean is also targeting foreign tourists visiting Australia.

Where you have a market is the souvenirs market  people can take something home, Green & Clean Co-founder Theo Ruygrok said.

Duchiera claims his product is regularly tested to ensure it complies with Australia/New Zealand diving standards, rules that govern the quality of bottled air for human consumption, such as oxygen for scuba diving.

Once we get the air, we then send it off for independent laboratory testing, he said.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) cautions patients against relying on any product that has no supporting scientific medical evidence, according to News Limited. RACGP President Dr. Harry Nespolon said people considering the likely benefits of such a product should be aware they are using it at their own risk.

Duchiera defends Ozi Air by saying it was never designed to replace medical aids or prescriptions. He said it could help people in heavily polluted countries like China.Canada Should Use the New Magnitsky Act to Target Chinas Human Rights Violators

The Western world likes to profess that it will never again allow draconian regimes to get away with egregious abuses of minority populations  that is, unless China is the perpetrator.

The Chinese regime has adopted an oppressive campaign to extinguish the religious and ethnic identity of the Uyghur people, a Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region of China. There is well-documented evidence that Chinese authorities are committing gross human right violations to this group.

In fact, factors such as the massive state-sponsored migration of Han Chinese, forced assimilation of the Uyghur population, and systematic economic and social inequalities between Han Chinese and Uyghurs have led to tensions in the resource-rich region.

Beijing has exaggerated the nature of these tensions, framing them as a threat to domestic security in Xinjiang. Admittedly, a number of small terrorist groups have committed violent attacks in the region and beyond, such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, for example. For China, however, the threat is not rooted solely in these small groupsthe perceived threat is the overall Uyghur culture and their religion in general.

Chinese authorities accuse Uyghur Muslims of being separatists and terrorists who are seeking to establish an independent state of their own. Over the few several years in particular, the Peoples Republic has used these sorts of self-made accusations as a means to further their oppressive program in Xinjiang.

Since the hardline party leader, Chen Quanguo, has been transferred from Tibet to Xinjiang in 2016, the Uyghurs have found themselves at the centre of a high-tech security storm. Indeed, Beijings response in the region has been heavy-handed, with unprecedented crackdowns that have turned the Uyghur Muslims life into a real-life dystopia.

New methods of surveillance have been increasingly evident in Xinjiang, ranging from Iris scanners, WIFI-sniffers, facial recognition software, bio-metric data, and more. Such measures could very well be used elsewhere in China, especially given its plans to construct a social credit system by 2020 to monitor and shape each citizens behaviour.

In the name of combating religious extremism, more than a million Uyghurs have been detained in internment camps where they are forced to undertake re-education and indoctrination. Those who are considered to have problematic ideas are forced to renounce their religion, chant communist slogans, and propagate a communist identity.

The Turkic-speaking minority is not allowed to practice their rituals. Offering prayers, religious education, and fasting is highly restricted or completely banned. Keeping a beard, which can be both a religious practice for Muslims and a personal choice, is also forbidden by the communist regime.

In one case, a family of four, including two children, were taken to a political education camp in western Xinjiang simply for traveling to Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca that is a necessary duty for all Muslims that have the means.

Uyghurs are also subject to strict ethnic profiling in their travels at thousands of pedestrian and vehicle checkpoints while Han Chinese are often waved through. The list of measures goes on.

Owing to Chinas economic advantages, most countries have turned a blind eye to Beijings massive state repression of Uyghur Muslims. Notably, while often showing a deep concern for the plight of Muslims in Kashmir and Palestine, many Muslim-majority countries have been largely silent concerning the fate of their co-religionists in China.

Canada has often been conspicuously silent when it comes to human rights abuses in China. Yet, when it came to the plight of Muslims in Xinjiang, it is notable that Canada was one of the few countries to openly criticize Chinas treatment of its Uyghur minorityeven taking the lead in a letter initiative among allied countries to criticize Beijing.

But more must be done to fight against Chinas brutal and oppressive campaign against the Uyghurs. One possibility is using Canadas Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Actalso known as the Sergei Magnitsky Lawa legal measure that sanctions foreign individuals involved in human rights crimes.

Ottawa has already used this legislation to sanction officials from Venezuela, South Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. In the face of such an unrelenting repressive campaign, the government should consider applying such targeted sanctions against Chinese officials involved in the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. U.S. lawmakers are currently exploring the possibility of applying such measures in the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act.

By applying targeted sanctions against Chinese officials, Canada would send a powerful message to Beijing that it stands firmly for human rights and democratic values. It would also send an equally important message that Canadian diplomacy is neither suppressed nor hamstrung by Chinas unlawful detention of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. This crude attempt at hostage diplomacy, now more than 100 days long, should not stop us from standing up for human rights in China.

Irfan Yar is a counterterrorism and foreign affairs analyst, and currently a research intern at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.China, Burma Failing to Stop Bride Trafficking

BANGKOKAuthorities in China and Burma are failing to stop the brutal trafficking of young women, often teenagers, from the conflict-ridden Kachin region for sexual slavery, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

The report released on March 21 says women are often tricked into traveling to China in search of work or kidnapped and held against their will to be sold as brides for Chinese men. Most of those taken hostage by Chinese families are locked up and raped, it says. Those who do escape are often obliged to leave children fathered by Chinese men behind.

The report urges authorities to do more to raise awareness about the risks of trafficking, provide more support for victims who return home, and to prosecute those guilty of crimes against them.

The 226 known cases of such trafficking in 2017 were only a fraction of the total number, since many victims are afraid or ashamed to come forward, especially given the lack of support from law enforcement or welfare services, the report says.

Human Rights Watchs research suggests the number of women and girls being trafficked is substantial and possibly growing, it said.

The group interviewed 37 survivors of such crimes for the report. It said the women were sold to Chinese families for the equivalent of $3,000-$13,000 each. Twelve of those interviewed were under 18 when they were trafficked. The youngest was 14. It said 22 of them were held for a year or longer.

Often, the women are drugged and taken captive, left at the mercy of families with whom they can barely communicate.

Most were locked in a room and raped repeatedly as the families that bought them wanted them to become pregnant, said Heather Barr, author of the report and a co-director for womens rights at Human Rights Watch.

The traffickers are able to lure women with false promises of jobs because of the lack of good options for making a living in camps for displaced people in northern Burmas Kachin state.

As of September, there were about 100,000 people displaced inside Kachin, where the Kachin Independence Army, like other ethnic minority armed groups, has been fighting for greater autonomy for decades. Thousands of women and children have also fled their homes in neighboring Shan state, some across the border into China.

The porous border between southern Chinas Yunnan Province and northern Kachin facilitates such trafficking, and the relative shortage of marriageable women, thanks to Chinese traditions favoring male heirs over girls has left many families in China desperate for brides.

Although Chinese authorities have been battling trafficking inside China as well, the families who buy the women are almost never prosecuted, the report says.

Some foreign brides from neighboring countries go voluntarily.

But for many, the experience is harrowing. One interviewee, Ja Htoi Tsawm, was kidnapped while doing farm work in China to support her family and held captive for two years. While she was away, her in-laws sold her house and put one of her children in an orphanage. Another of her four children died.

The report said that Burmese police and other authorities refused interviews by Human Rights Watch although the Ministry of Social Welfare did provide some data. Burmas anti-trafficking police said they handled 130 cases of trafficking, 96 of which involved women, in January-July 2018, the report said.

Of 820 successful prosecutions for trafficking in 2008-2013, 534 cases involved forced marriages and an even larger share were with China. The trafficking networks span China.

Chinese authorities did not respond to requests for comment, it said.

The persisting conflict in areas of Burma has left millions of women and children vulnerable to great risk. U.N. investigators reported last fall on a fact-finding mission that found violence by the Burmese military in Kachin, Shan and the western state of Rakhine. It cited allegations of crimes by the military and other security forces including murder, torture, pillaging, execution without due process, rape, sexual slavery and hostage taking.

Members of the Kachin Womens Association, a group affiliated with the Kachin Independence Organization that helps victims, were quoted as saying that at times they lack the money to help provide and top up SIM cards needed to keep in contact with the women still stuck in China.

By Elaine KurtenbachA canola crop in full bloom near Fort Macleod, Alberta. The Canola Council of Canada says Chinese importers are currently unwilling to purchase Canadian canola seed. (Reuters/Todd Korol)

China Stops Buying Canadian Canola as Tensions Escalate

Canola company says it was 'directly targeted' by China

TORONTOThe Chinese regime has increased its trade restrictions on buying canola from one company to all Canadian exporters amid increasing diplomatic tensions between the two countries since Canada arrested an executive of Chinese telecom giant Huawei late last year.

The Canola Council of Canada (CCC) says Chinese importers are currently unwilling to purchase any Canadian canola seed.

Were disappointed that differing viewpoints cannot be resolved quickly, CCC President Jim Everson said in a statement. Under the circumstances, Canadian canola seed exporters who normally ship to China have no alternative but to supply customers in other countries who value high-quality Canadian canola.

The move escalates a trade dispute between Canada and China, which revoked the sales permit of major Canadian canola supplier Richardson International earlier this month, preventing the Winnipeg-based company from exporting canola seeds to China. Chinese officials said they revoked the companys registration over concerns of harmful organisms in its canola imports, an allegation that Richardson denied.

Federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said during a talk at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce on March 12 that scientists have found no such evidence. We have returned to our samples, she said. We have double-checked the analysis. We still havent found any kind of pest.

Richardson has been directly targeted, the companys vice-president, Jean-Marc Ruest, told CBC News. We think this is part of a larger Canada-China issue, and we hope it gets resolved expeditiously.

Relations between Canada and China have been tense since December 2018, when Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese telecom company Huawei, at the request of U.S. authorities. Meng, who also sits on Huaweis board, currently faces extradition proceedings in Canada.

U.S. prosecutors have accused Meng and Huawei of violating sanctions against Iran, saying Meng had a direct role in misleading U.S. banks into clearing certain cash transactions under question. Meng has been charged with bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud. She denies the allegations.

Two Canadians in China, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, were detained by the regime shortly after Mengs arrest, in a move widely believed to be retaliatory in nature in the hopes of pressuring Ottawa for Mengs release. On March 4, the day after Canada said it would proceed with extradition proceedings against the Huawei executive, the regime accused the two men of working together to steal Chinese state secrets.

Canada has formally demanded China release the two Canadians.

The restriction against Richardson is also seen as Beijing putting increasing pressure on Canada, in seeking to gain Mengs release. At the time, Chinas customs agency also said imports of canola would undergo more thorough inspections in China.

Beijing is the worlds largest canola importer, and approximately 40 percent of canola and canola product exports from Canada go to China. After wheat and barley, canola is Canadas third largest grain export, and exports to China were worth C$2.7 billion ($2 billion) in 2018. When Richardson had its license revoked, the CCC said at the time that it would hurt the industry.

Canola seeds can be crushed to produce canola oil, which is used in food and cooking as well as non-edible uses. Once the oil has been extracted, the leftover seed, known as canola meal, is often used as a food supplement for many animals as well as a fertilizer. According to Manitoba Canola Growers, the name canola comes from Can as in Canada and ola as in oil.

Until the recent trade disruptions, Chinese demand for canola was very strong, CCC said. While the industry group had hoped to resolve concerns over Canadian canola, it said current discussions indicate an immediate resolution is unlikely.

Canadian ministers and government officials have responded quickly to Chinese concerns. However, technical discussions are unlikely to lead to an immediate resolution, said Everson. We urge the Government of Canada to continue to intensify efforts to resolve the situation.The Cable News Network (CNN) logo at the top of CNN's offices on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, Calif., on Jan. 24, 2000. (David McNew/Newsmakers)

CNN Acknowledges Getting Sued for $275 Million by Covington Student

CNN delayed telling its viewers it was getting sued for $275 million for more than a week, the Media Research Center (MRC) reported on March 20.

The defamation suit was filed on March 12 by lawyers of Nick Sandmann, a student at Covington Catholic High School.

However, in the following days, the news outlet appears to have only mentioned the suit against CNN on its website once, halfway down a March 12 newsletter published by CNN Business the day after the lawsuit was filed.

On March 21, the day after the MRC report, CNN published an article acknowledging the lawsuit.

Between January 19 and January 25, 2019, CNN brought down the full force of its corporate power, influence, and wealth on Nicholas by falsely attacking, vilifying, and bullying him despite the fact that he was a minor child, the suit states.

Finally a news story on #CNN worth reading.

CNN served with Sandmann lawsuithttps://t.co/58jFyXBr14  kimberly hardy (@HardyKimberly) March 21, 2019

Covington Incident

The lawsuit stems from a Jan. 18 incident that took place after the March for Life anti-abortion event in Washington. Sandmann and other students from the religious private school in Kentucky were waiting for their bus near the Lincoln Memorial when they were approached by several Native American activists.

The encounter was extensively covered by media using short video clips that made it appear as though the students were chanting and cheering in mockery of one of the Native American activists, 64-year-old Nathan Phillips.

CNN was one of those media groups, allegedly using titles such as Teens Taunt Native American Elder and Teens Harass Native American War Veteran.

Longer video footage of the incident showed the students began to cheer and chant their school chant to drown out offensive remarks hurled their way by a small group of Black Hebrew Israelites nearby. Some of the students were wearing hats with President Donald Trumps campaign slogan Make America Great Againa fact capitalized upon by various media.

#NickSandmann and his family filed a $275 million lawsuit against @CNN, accusing them of failing to uphold and abide by well-established journalistic standards and ethics by conveying false & heinous accusations of racist conduct. #CovingtonLawsuit https://t.co/T8bwcoo9Dd  The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) March 13, 2019

While Phillips told media outlets that the students had surrounded and harassed him, the footage showed it was he who approached them, inserted himself into their crowd, and, for several minutes, banged his drum within inches of the face of Sandmann, who responded by standing silently with a smile.

Extensive Coverage

The suit alleges that CNN defamed Sandmann in at least four television broadcasts, nine online articles, and four tweets.

Contrary to its Facts First public relations ploy, CNN ignored the facts and put its anti-Trump agenda first in waging a 7-day media campaign of false, vicious attacks against Nicholas, the suit stated.

WATCH: Nick Sandmanns Lawyers Release Video Blasting CNN, Washington Post https://t.co/wpdLmEYcVl  The Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) March 14, 2019

MRC noted that CNN didnt delay its news coverage when Sandmann filed suit against The Washington Post on Feb. 19, claiming $250 million in damages.

On February 20, the network ran three separate news briefs on its early morning shows covering that filing, the media watchdog stated. In one such report, Early Start fill-in co-host Boris Sanchez noted that the viral video of the teen had initially touched off accusations that Sandmann was a bigotconveniently failing to mention that his network was also a prominent voice in the chorus of such accusations.

The network ran 43 minutes of coverage on the Covington incident over the first two days, MRC reported.

A statement by CNN, quoted in its March 21 article, said the network is reviewing the lawsuit, adding that CNN reported on a newsworthy event and public discussion about it, taking care to report on additional facts as they developed and to share the perspectives of eyewitnesses and other participants and stakeholders as they came forward.

Both CNN and MRC didnt respond to requests for additional comment.

NBC, HBO, and The Associated Press may be next in line to be sued for their reporting and commentary on Sandmann, one of his lawyers Todd McMurtry told Fox News on March 13.A panel discussion at the World Council of Churches Consultation on Racism at Notting Hill Ecumenical Centre in London on May 21, 1969. (LR) Michael Ramsey, the archbishop of Canterbury, Merlyn Rees, Mark Bonham Carter, and Father Trevor Huddleston. (Ron Case/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Communisms Internationalism

History can explain a lot about international politics. The United States was founded by colonists striving for independence. Wanting freedom from England and prepared to go it on their own, they reluctantly agreed to unite for purposes of defense and trade.

The system they created established the federal government as one of limited authority. Most powers remained with the people and the local (or state) governments.

These early Americans created an economic system based on free trade and fair agreement between competent adults. Innovation, hard work, and the development of new ideas were encouraged and rewarded. Inventors, artists, authors, and merchants who provided a desired service or product usually found people who were happy to compensate them, sometimes richly.

Communism, on the other hand, was founded on class struggle. Proletarian wage-earners saw their opposition not in geographic divisions but in class distinctions. The bourgeoisie, it was said, was oppressing the working class by keeping wages as low as possible. Workers of the world were called upon to unite in a common struggle against the capitalists, wherever they were found.

While capitalism rewards individuals who come up with new ideas, the communist/collective model holds that the central authority already has the best ideas and they just need to be implemented. In fact, communism needs all members of society (or at least the overwhelming majority of them) to go along with central planning. It doesnt work well if there are holdouts.

That helps explain communisms inevitable tendency toward totalitarianism. The natural capitalist inclination, on the other hand, is away from command and control, toward liberty.

A capitalist is only minimally affected by communist practices that take place in nations other than his or her own. Communism elsewhere may limit trade opportunities, but it doesnt fundamentally affect the economic system of the capitalist nation. A communist society, in contrast, is affected significantly by free markets that exist outside of its system. Those markets reflect the true value of goods and services, add to the potential of black markets inside communist-ruled countries, and tempt people to look outside of and beyond the controlled communist system.

Thus, communists have a natural desire to spread their doctrine beyond their borders and to shut down free markets.

The Bolshevik Party embraced internationalism as soon as it seized power in the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union was presented as a homeland of communism from which revolution would be spread around the globe. Accordingly, Soviet authorities fostered international ties with communist and left-wing parties and governments, but they did more than that. They established new or infiltrated existing international organizations for the purpose of spreading their philosophy.

During its heyday, the KGB set up numerous agencies that pretended to be independent, international entities. In reality, of course, they were fronts for spreading communist propaganda. Some of these false fronts included the World Peace Council (with branches in 112 countries), the World Federation of Trade Unions (with branches in 90 countries), the Womens International Democratic Federation (with branches in 129 countries), the International Union of Students (with branches in 152 countries), and the World Federation of Democratic Youth (with branches in 210 countries).

One of the most important such groups, the World Council of Churches (WCC), was infiltrated and controlled by Russian intelligence as early as 1961. The Mitrokhin Archive, a voluminous collection of foreign intelligence documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1992, provides the identities and Soviet intelligence code names of many Russian Orthodox priests dispatched to the WCC for the purpose of influencing politics and policies. In 1972, Soviet intelligence even managed to have their agent, Metropolitan Nikodim (code name Adamant), elected as WCC president.

In 1985, the WCC elected its first general secretary who was an open and avowed Marxist: Emilio Castro. He had been exiled from Uruguay because of his political extremism, but he directed the WCC for seven years. During that time, Castro promoted KGB-authorized liberation theology, which encouraged followers to support Marxist dictators such as Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Manuel Zelaya, and Daniel Ortega as they transformed their countries into KGB-style police dictatorships. A 1989 KGB document boasted, Now, the agenda of the WCC is also our agenda.

Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, most of the international institutions built by the Kremlin survived and continued carrying out the same anti-U.S. messages that they always had. The World Peace Council, for instance, moved to Athens from Helsinki, but it was still headed by a KGB-selected chairman, Romesh Chandra, who, in the 1970s, required all WPC national branches to initiate demonstrations against the Vietnam War. According to its charter, the WPC has now broadened into a worldwide mass movement tasked with supporting those people and liberation movements fighting against imperialism.

The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), the second-largest of KGB-crafted international institutions, also survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its still headquartered in Prague and still uses anti-American rhetoric from the Cold War. It calls itself the militant voice of 95 million workers in 130 countries. This past November, responding to President Donald Trumps concern about the caravan of migrants approaching the southern U.S. border, the WFTU posted on its website a press release for the autorization [sic] of the USA government to shoot a caravan of immigrants at the borders.

The release said, These xenophobic and reactionary decisions of the USA bourgeois government cultivate the racism and hatred, hiding the true reasons of the migration; in other words, they do not say anything about the looting of the North American monopolies and the multinationals for the expropriation of the resources of Latin America  You get the point.

Another KGB-cultivated group, the Womens International Democratic Federation (WIDF), was founded in Paris in 1945, but was soon banned by French authorities and made to relocate to East Berlin, where it was supported by the communist regime. It adopted a new charter in 1995, demanding that the women of the world fight the globalization of the so-called market economies, which are a root cause of the increasing feminization of poverty everywhere.

Last year, the organizations vice president, Skevi Koukouma, addressed an anti-imperialist mobilization outside of the U.S. Embassy, saluting on behalf of the WIDF everyone all over the world demonstrating against the new attacks carried out by the U.S. and its allies against Syria.

While these groups hide their true ties to Moscow, they continually advance ideas and programs that support the Kremlins causes. They are all excellent outlets for continuing communist disinformation. Perhaps modern communisms biggest payoff, however, is from the World Council of Churches.

In 2009, Metropolitan Kiril (code name Mikhaylov), who had been an influential representative to the WCC and a member of its Central Committee, was elected patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. In addition to his roles with the WCC, records seem to establish that he had also been an active KGB officer. Little that he has done since his ascension as patriarch causes one to question that conclusion.

Kiril and other leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church openly supported Vladimir Putin during his presidential election campaign in 2012. Protesting that support is what led to the infamous arrest of members of the band Pussy Riot. For his part, Kiril described Putins election as a miracle of God. Presumably referring to the band, and he criticized those who were demonstrating for democratic reform, saying they were emitting ear-piercing shrieks.

Today, Putin casts himself as the savior of Christian values in Russia. Hes not, of course, unless those values include the assassination of political opponents (like Boris Nemtsov), the murder of critics (such as defector Alexander Litvinenko and journalist Anna Politkovskaya), and labeling the collapse of a murderous tyranny as the worst geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.

Putin, however, has been successful in convincing many people of this sham, due to his cult of personality in Russia, Metropolitan Kiril, the WCC, and mainly the Kremlin/communist experts who long ago figured out how to misuse international organizations for political purposes.

Ronald J. Rychlak is the Jamie L. Whitten chair in law and government at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of several books, including Hitler, the War, and the Pope, Disinformation (co-authored with Ion Mihai Pacepa), and The Persecution and Genocide of Christians in the Middle East (co-edited with Jane Adolphe).

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.A fire broke out aboard the Grande America on March 10, 2019. (France's Marine Nationale)

Container Ship Carrying 2,000 Cars Sinks, Oil Spill Heads Toward France

A container ship carrying 2,000 cars, including dozens of Porsches, sank off the coast of France.

All 27 crew members were rescued by British officials, and French authorities were deployed to clean up an oil spill due to the accident, the Daily Mail reported.

The ship ran aground about 150 miles southwest of Brest, France, the Mail reported.

Anyone want to go diving?   Daily Mail  2019320

Meanwhile, Porsche confirmed that 37 models were lost, including some of its 911 GT2 RS models. The GT2 RS model is worth nearly $300,000.

The Italian-flagged container ship, Grande America, was en route to Brazil before it caught fire and went down.

According to Carscoops, which broke the news of the fire, Porsche said it will reproduce the limited edition 911 GT2 RS models after the loss. The firm only built around 1,000 of them.

Luxury Audi and Porsche cars worth millions lost at sea when cargo ship capsizes https://t.co/RAuwsRZ1jT  Goodbuy Grundig (@josebaboo) March 21, 2019

Audi also confirmed the ship was carrying a number of A3, A5, Q7, RS4, and RS5 models.

Porsche sent a letter to a customer regarding the accident.

We are sorry to inform you that, due to a fire, a Grimaldi group ship, that was transporting your vehicle, sank on March 12, 2019. And for that reason, your GT2 RS can not be delivered, according to a translation of the letter obtained by Carscoops.

#Porsche Will Build More GT2 RS Models After Ship Wreck. The stricken cargo vessel was carrying hundreds of cars, among them some very valuable 911s. #coupe #sportscar Read: https://t.co/VUXs6b7r7v pic.twitter.com/63mHaLkTLi  CarBuzz (@CarBuzzcom) March 19, 2019

As you may know, Porsche ended the 911 GT2 RS production on February 2019 and under normal circumstances, it wouldnt be possible to give you another car, the letter stated

But, due to the nature of the situation, and considering that youre a loyal and highly valuable customer for our brand, Porsche has decided to resume the GT2 RS production in Germany, and your vehicle will be produced in April, with delivery scheduled for June, according to the letter.

It follows up by saying that the customer should contact their local Porsche Center for more details.

Oil Spill

According to the Environment News Service, oil leaking from the container ship is forecast to reach French shores this week.

The Grimaldi Group said in a statement to the news outlet: The fire was caused by some cargo loaded on board the vessel and the firefighting operation by the crew had to be discontinued when the ship had to be abandoned in order to avoid any risk for the crews safety.

A 6-mile long by 0.6-mile wide oil spill is now moving to the coastline, threatening La Rochelle, Biarritz, and Vendee, the report noted.

Overall, the ship was carrying 2,200 tonnes of heavy fuel and 365 containers, it reported.

The sunken ship is located at a depth of 15,000 feet, Grimaldi said, according to the Environment News Service.

Should officials declare it an environmental hazard, it would be the worlds deepest shipwreck removal operation.Lion Air and Garuda Indonesia planes at the Sukarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang, Indonesia, on Nov. 27, 2018. (Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images)

Deadly Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 Crash Prevented a Day Earlier, Investigation Finds

A pilot who was not rostered to work is being called a hero for saving a brand-new Lion Air jet from a devastating crash just one day before the same aircraft fatally crashed into the Java Sea in October last year.

The extra pilot had been traveling in the cockpit jumpseat on an Oct. 27 flight from Bali to Jakarta when he noticed the crew of the Boeing 737 Max 8 was struggling to take control of the aircraft.

In flight, the jet showed unusual variations in altitude and airspeed within the first several minutes of taking off. Some included an 875 foot (267 meter) drop in the space of 27 seconds when the plane would typically be ascending before it stabilized and continued to Jakarta.

While the jetliner was in a nose dive, the extra pilot realized that the problem was with the flight-control system and instructed the crew how to disable it to stabalize the aircraft, two people familiar with Indonesias investigation told Bloomberg.

BREAKING: An off-duty pilot who happened to be riding in the cockpit saved a diving Boeing 737 Max 8. The next day, the same Lion Air jet crashed into the Java Sea, killing all 189 aboard https://t.co/HQ8R8EhAWO pic.twitter.com/iI3ot0tyhR  Bloomberg (@business) March 19, 2019

The solution was to temporarily cut power to the motor, causing the planes nose to descend. This is part of a checklist that all pilots are required to memorize, according to Bloomberg.

The next Lion Air crew was not so fortunate and crashed the same plane into the Java Sea on Oct. 28, 2018, killing all 189 people on board.

Revealed: Lion Air jet that crashed killing 189 people also went into a nosedive just a DAY earlier https://t.co/iaSD1BssJ7  Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) March 20, 2019

U.S. officials investigating the Lion Air crash are trying to determine whether the planes anti-stall system was involved in the crash, following the more recent Ethiopian Airlines jet crash that killed 157 people on March 10.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Justice Department and the inspector general Michael Horowitz said on March 18 that they can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any such inquiries.

A federal grand jury in Washington has sent a subpoena to someone involved in the planes development, seeking emails, messages, and other communications, according to the Associated Press.

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in an open letter dated March 18 to airlines, passengers, and the aviation community that the manufacturer is taking actions to ensure its 737 Max jets are safe.

This includes releasing a software update and offering additional pilot training for the 737 Max to address concerns in the aftermath of the Lion Air crash, he said.

Boeing has developed a software patch and pilot training program to address issues with the Boeing 737 Max identified in the October Lion Air crash, the FAA says https://t.co/6XtRQCXTFj pic.twitter.com/LsQEVTxUpu  CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) March 20, 2019

However, the U.S. company would not respond to questions about the subpoena.

Boeing does not respond to or comment on questions concerning legal matters, whether internal, litigation, or governmental inquiries, Boeing spokesman Charles Bickers said in an email to AP.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates aircraft makers like Boeing, also would not comment.

An Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee report previously blamed the planes multiple failures on previous flights on improper repairs.

All the data and information that we have on the flight and the aircraft have been submitted to the Indonesian NTSC, Lion Air spokesman Danang Prihantoro told Bloomberg.

The French civil aviation investigation bureau Bureau dEnquetes et dAnalyses pour la Securite de lAviation Civile (BEA) said on March 18 that black box data from the Ethiopian Airlines flight showed clear similarities to the Lion Air crash.

Ethiopian Airlines black box reveals clear similarities to the 2018 Lion Air crash involving the same model of plane. https://t.co/8VLE3GBSZv  Twitter Moments (@TwitterMoments) March 17, 2019

Ethiopian authorities have asked BEA for help in downloading and interpreting data from the black boxes because Ethiopia lacks the necessary technology and know-how.

FAA previously said that satellite-based tracking data showed the movements of the Ethiopian Airlines flight prior to it crashing were similar to those of the doomed Lion Air plane. In both incidents, the planes flew with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Shortly after their takeoffs, both crews had tried to return to the airports before they crashed.

FAA announced on March 13 that the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 737 Max 9 models would be temporarily grounded in the United States as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the [Ethiopia crash] site.

American Airlines pilot Dennis Tajer confirmed that Boeing held talks with airlines on March 14 but had neither invited pilots at American nor Southwest, the two U.S. carriers that use the same version of the Max that crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia, AP reported.

Airline officials confirmed that Boeing intends to offer pilots about a 15-minute iPad course to train them on the new flight-control software on Max jets that is suspected of playing a role in the crashes, Tajer told AP.Cosplayers dress as Snow White (L) and Cinderella at the super comic convention in London, United Kingdom, on August 26, 2017. (Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images)

Disney Princess in Costume Wanted for $52,000 Nanny Job

A wealthy family is keen to hear from applicants who fancy themselves to be a closet Cinderella to apply for a part-time nanny position.

The part-time role based in Brookmans Park, southeast England is promising an annual remuneration of 40,000 British pounds (US$52,800) plus paid sick leave, public holidays, and 25 days of vacation leave.

Family seeks Disney-obsessed nanny to dress like Princesses for $52,000 a year https://t.co/soEQ5udOex pic.twitter.com/lJC94g4sOA  Inside the Magic (@InsideTheMagic) March 21, 2019

You can now get paid 40k to be a Disney Princess nanny  dressing up everyday and singinghttps://t.co/tAMdojy31G pic.twitter.com/ojFWbTvW85  Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) March 20, 2019

The parents say the only catch is the nanny must dress-up as a different Disney princess character each month. The cost of the costume hire is covered.

CALLING ALL DISNEY PRINCESS LOVERS : A family is looking to pay $53,000 for a part-time nanny who will dress up like a Disney princess for their daughters every day. https://t.co/tStzGggsOO pic.twitter.com/6thJIPAHXd  FOX 11 Los Angeles (@FOXLA) March 20, 2019

According to the job ad on childcare.co.uk, the role also involves teaching their twin girls the values of determination, compassion, fearlessness, and ambition from strong and relatable female role models such as Cinderella, Belle, Princess Tiana, and Princess Anna.

Like most 5-year-olds, our girls are obsessed with Disney and we feel this would be the best way to communicate some important values, the employers said.

Applicants must be able to commit to the chosen character, create a fun atmosphere, and not be afraid to discipline the twins when they are naughty or act up.

They can be little terrors at times, the parents said. The right person will have a real creative flare as well as a passion for all things Disney, and will be able to share that love of those characters with our girls.

Other duties include cooking dinner, driving the girls home from school four days a week, putting them to bed, and arranging Disney-related activities like arts and crafts, baking, and singing. It is unclear whether the nanny has to wear the costume while driving to-and-from the school.

New job alert: Disney princess nanny. Must be able to commit to character. Salary is $53,000. https://t.co/r7msY5UTl8  USA TODAY (@USATODAY) March 21, 2019

The work hours are flexible and may require additional hours, depending on the parents work schedule.

Candidates must be looking for a long-term job as we want to keep the successful nanny in the girls lives for the foreseeable future, the employers said.

Would you apply for this job?! https://t.co/eV9T1Cicp0  102.7 KIIS-FM (@1027KIISFM) March 21, 2019

Requirements include having a clean driving license, first aid training, and at least two years experience as a nanny or similar role.

We think a trial shift would work best, so we can see how you interact with our girls and allow us to formally meet before hiring, the parents said.

We know this isnt exactly a normal job offer but we think its a great opportunity for someone to get really creative and add a little magic to our girls lives, the employers added. So, if there are any Disney-mad nannies out there whod be able to help us out, please get in touch.

A U.K. family wants their nanny to pretend to be a Disney princess at all times, and we have questions https://t.co/YbYs8ENChx pic.twitter.com/mtOlkMEovh  HelloGiggles (@hellogiggles) March 21, 2019Former President Michel Temer was arrested Thursday by Brazils Federal Police on charges arising from the massive corruption probe known as Lava Jato (Car Wash).

Temer was taken into custody at his home in Sao Paulo and is expected to be brought to Rio de Janeiro later Thursday to give a statement before Federal Judge Marcelo Bretas, who ordered the politician be arrested and held without bail.

The former head of state will probably be locked up at Federal Police regional headquarters in Rio, where other Lava Jato prisoners are being held.

Bretas also ordered the arrest of Wellington Moreira Franco, who was Temers chief of staff.

During Temers tenure as president, from August 2016 to Jan. 1 of this year, federal prosecutors twice requested the initiation of corruption trials against him before the Supreme Court, but Congress refused to authorize the lifting of his immunity.

Temers immunity ended when he left office, opening the door to criminal prosecution and he faces potential charges in 10 separate cases.

Lava Jato, which was initially focused on a massive bribes-for-inflated-contracts scandal centered on state oil company Petrobras, metastasized into an investigation of corruption in all corners of Brazilian public life.

The case that prompted Temers arrest is over alleged kickbacks to his MDB party by firms that received contracts from state nuclear power company Eletronuclear.

The suspicious contracts were signed in 2016 when Temer was already governing Brazil.

The complaint was made by the owner of the company Engevix, Jose Antunes Sobrinho, who agreed to collaborate with the courts and provide information about his accomplices in different corruption cases in exchange for a sentence reduction.

He said that he paid bribes at the request of reserve army Col. Joao Baptista Filma Filho, a close friend of Temer who is currently serving a prison sentence, to get one of the contracts in building the Angra 3 nuclear power plant.

According to Sobrinho, the payment of illegal commissions to favor MDB was known to both Temer and Franco.

Temer is the second head of state to be arrested in Brazil for cases linked to Lava Jato after Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva , who governed from 2003-2011 and began serving 12 years in prison for corruption in April 2018.Explosion at Chinese Chemical Plant Kills 47, Injures 640

SHANGHAIAn explosion at a pesticide plant in eastern China has killed 47 people and injured more than 600, state media said on March 22, the latest casualties in a series of industrial accidents that has angered the public.

The blast occurred on Thursday at the Chenjiagang Industrial Park in the city of Yancheng, in Jiangsu Province, and the fire was finally brought under control at 3.00 a.m. on Friday, state television said.

Survivors were taken to 16 hospitals with 640 people being treated for injuries. Thirty-two of them were critically injured, it said.

The fire at a plant owned by the Tianjiayi Chemical Company spread to neighboring factories. Children at a kindergarten in the vicinity were also injured in the blast, media reported.

The cause of the explosion was under investigation.

Public anger over safety standards has grown in China over industrial accidents ranging from mining disasters to factory fires that have marred three decades of swift economic growth.

The Chinese regime has pledged to improve safety in factories, though explosions and other incidents are still commonplace.

In November, two people were killed and 24 others injured in an explosion at a machinery plant in the northern Chinese province of Jilin. And in the city of Ningbo, two people were killed in a factory explosion.

In August, five people were killed in an explosion at an aluminum plant in the eastern city of Jiangsu.

In July, 19 people died in a blast at a chemical plant in the southwestern province of Sichuan.

By David Stanway. The Epoch Times contributed to this report.Father Charged in 1-Month-Old Sons Death Admits to Throwing Him on the Ground

A New York father who has been charged in connection with the death of his newborn son told investigators that he got angry and threw him on the ground, according to court documents.

Christian Rodriguez, 24, has been accused of assaulting his one-month-old son Aiden Rodriguez, which resulted in several fractures to the infants skull.

Rodriguez was arraigned on March 20 on charges of assault causing injury through risk of death, reckless assault of a child involving a brain injury, assault causing injury to a person less than 11 years old, and assault causing injury to a person less than 7 years old, reported Fox 8.

Dad charged in death of baby son slammed him to ground for crying: court docs https://t.co/HORwSKctHs pic.twitter.com/9eiNaWdmlk  New York Post (@nypost) March 20, 2019

Prosecutor Astrid Borgstedt told the New York Post that depending on the autopsy results, which are still pending, she would consider homicide charges before a grand jury.

According to the criminal complaint, Rodriguez told investigators that he was at the babys great-grandmothers apartment at 10 p.m. on March 18, when the infant started acting fussy.

When Rodriguez got home, which was a few buildings away from the great-grandmothers home, he told police that he bumped his sons head against the door. He said, He only hit his head one time, according to the complaint.

He later changed his story allegedly telling police that he accidentally bashed the babys head against the door frame, the complaint said. The baby then started crying and wouldnt stop.

The father told police he became angry when the baby wouldn't stop crying."I threw Aiden to the ground face first,"  Fox 8 News  2019321

I got angry and threw Aiden to the ground face first, he allegedly admitted. I got frustrated and threw him to the ground.

When Aiden arrived at Lincoln hospital that evening, he had no pulse and was not breathing. The CAT scan found that he suffered from several fractures in his skull, multiple brain bleeds, bruising to both sides of his head and a 3-millimeter midline shift of the childs brain, reported the news website.

According to the Medical Examiners Office, Aidens cause of death was ruled a homicide caused by abusive head trauma, reported Fox 8.

Christian Rodriguez, a 24-year-old father-of-four, was arraigned in Bronx Criminal Court this afternoon on charges of  Brooklynn's Angels  2019321

Borgstedt said Rodriguez has a history of child abuse. In 2015, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for another child who suffered two black eyes at three months old, reported NY Daily News. Police were called to a hospital where they found an infant girl with bruising around her face and nose.

Rodriguez told police, I was holding the baby and I was getting frustrated and I dropped her, according to court documents.

He hurled the baby to the floor in a fit of rage. https://bit.ly/2Cxq1AMAn early look at Thursday's front page  New York Daily News  2019320

Aidens great-grandmother, 58-year-old Maritiza Quinones, told the newspaper that the family was heartbroken over Aidens death.

Aiden was a happy, smiling baby, Quinones said. He was just starting to babble. Its too sad. We have broken hearts.

She added that she hopes Rodriguez gets at least 100 years. He murdered the baby, an innocent baby. We welcomed him into our family and he killed Aiden.

The 24-year-old is currently being held on $250,000 bail.FDA Approves Drug for Treating Postpartum Depression

TRENTON, N.J.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the first drug specifically developed for severe depression after childbirth.

The agency on March 19 approved Sage Therapeutics Zulresso, an IV drug given over 2  days.

Sage said Zulresso will cost $34,000 without insurance, plus costs for staying in a hospital or infusion center. Whether the treatment gets covered by insurance is determined by each insurance company, which also sets the out-of-pocket costs, depending on the plan.

In a company-funded study of new mothers with moderate or severe postpartum depression, half the women given Zulresso had depression end within 2  days, about double the rate of those in a comparison group given dummy treatments.

The FDA has approved a drug to treat postpartum depression for the first time  but its going to cost $34,000 pic.twitter.com/3ez2RhWA1d  NowThis (@nowthisnews) March 21, 2019

Postpartum depression affects about 400,000 American women a year. It often ends on its own within a couple of weeks, but it can continue for months or even years. It can be treated with antidepressants, which can take six to eight weeks to work and dont help everyone, or with counseling.

Postpartum depression is a serious condition that, when severe, can be life-threatening, Dr. Tiffany Farchione of FDAs Division of Psychiatry Products said in a statement. Women may experience thoughts about harming themselves or harming their child,

Zulressos active ingredient, brexanolone, mimics a derivative of the naturally occurring hormone progesterone, levels of which can plunge after childbirth. The infusion helps restore normal levels and emotions, according to Sage Chief Executive Dr. Jeff Jonas.

The drugs most common side effects were sleepiness, dizziness, and headaches. A few women had more-serious problems, such as fainting and loss of consciousness.

The FDA approves the first drug specifically for the treatment of postpartum depression, a mental illness that impacts 1 in 9 new mothers https://t.co/NhV9sjdt7i pic.twitter.com/HGUikY5Jix  CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) March 19, 2019

Because those risks could result in injury, the FDA said it is restricting Zulressos use to certified health care facilities where patients can be closely monitored throughout the infusion.

Zulresso appears safe for breastfeeding, said Dr. Kimberly Yonkers, a psychiatrist specializing in postpartum depression who heads Yale Medical Schools Center for Wellbeing of Women and Mothers.

She expects the drug will be used to treat serious cases and patients not helped by antidepressants.

Its going to depend on patient willingness to go into an infusion center and insurers being willing to pay for this, Yonkers added.

Sage plans to begin selling the drug in late June.

Its developing a second, similar treatment in pill form, and Marinus Pharmaceuticals is testing both a pill and IV therapy.

Post-Partum Depression

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) says post-partum depression is a mood disorder that can affect a mother after childbirth and can interfere with a mothers ability to take care of her and her family.

Women with alcohol and drug abuse problems are more likely to experience post-partum depression, according to NIHM.

The focus of a lot of media attention on post-partum depression increased after a Texas mother, Andrea Yates, drowned her five children in a bathtub in 2001, according to Psychology Today.

Having grown up expecting motherhood to be one of the best times of life, many women suffer alone, feeling miserable but unaware that postpartum mood disorders have a name, Karen Kleiman, M.S.W., founder and director of the Postpartum Stress Center in Philadelphia told the Psychology Today.

The largest online screening study on postpartum depression for American women was published in JAMA Psychiatry. It says one out of seven women in the United States experience post-partum depression in the first year after giving birth.

The Epoch Times reporter Venus Upadhayaya contributed to this report.Five Democrat Presidential Candidates Commit to Rejoin Iran Nuclear Deal, Report Says

Five Democrats running for the presidency said they would rejoin the Iran nuclear deal if elected, a Middle-eastern online newspaper found. Meanwhile, the Trump administration announced sanctions against 31 Iranian individuals and entities and two State Department officials said Iran is taking steps to restart its nuclear weapons program.

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) declared theyd rejoin the Iran deal if Iran abides by it and so did two less-known candidates: Mayor of Miramar, Florida, Wayne Messam and writer and charity activist Marianne Williamson, reported Al-Monitor on March 19.

Most other Democrat candidates didnt respond to the papers inquiry regarding the Obama-era deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). President Donald Trump quit the deal in 2018.

The National Security Action group led by former officials of the Obama administration, has spread a draft memo to all Democrat candidates asking them to rejoin the JCPOA, Al-Monitor reported, without citing a source.

While we wont speak to private conversations, the message we have been sending is clear and simple, Ned Price, the groups policy director, told the paper. If Iran remains in compliance, the next administration should rejoin the Iran deal and use principled diplomacy to negotiate a follow-on agreement to keep the Iranian nuclear program in a box for the long term.

Harris would rejoin the Iran deal if the US could verify Iran is not cheating and is complying with the deal, her spokesman said. She believes we must engage in tough, forceful diplomacy to combat Irans destabilizing behavior in the region.

A Warren spokesperson voiced a similar sentiment, saying that as long as Iran continues to abide by the terms of the deal, she would return to it as president in order to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Sanderss aide said he would rejoin the JCPOA and would also be prepared to talk to Iran on a range of other issues.

Rejoining the JCPOA would mean meeting the United States commitments under the agreement, and that includes sanctions relief, the aide said.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, also a candidate, wouldnt say one way or the other.

My concern right now, my focus, is the denuclearization of Iran, he said. We need to be focused on best strategies to get us there. 2021 is a long time from now, and Im focused on the steps we have to do right now.

Trumps Withdrawal

Trump announced the United States withdrawal from the deal in May 2018 and ordered the reimposing of sanctions on Iran.

The deal was signed in 2015 by the Obama administration along with Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. It required Iran to delay its capacity to build a nuclear weapon until 2026 in exchange for sanctions relief.

Trump had long criticized the deal for asking too little of the Islamic regime, such as not addressing its ballistic missile program, its financing of terrorists, and more. Evidence has also emerged that Iran negotiated the deal in bad faith.

In April 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented what he said were Iranian documents obtained by Israeli intelligence that proved Irans development of nuclear weapons before the 2015 deal, while the regime claimed its nuclear program didnt seek to build arms.

Moreover, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Irans atomic agency, said on Jan. 22 that the regime secretly bought components for its heavy water reactor near Arak, a critical component in the production of weapons-grade plutonium, even though the nuclear deal required the regime to disable it.

Obama promoted the deal as the best option, painting a picture of an Iran rejoining the community of nations.

Instead, Iran announced in 2017 an intent to boost its military spending by 150 percent in five years. In recent months, it has tested a cruise missile, unveiled a cruise missile-armed submarine, boasted its capability to quickly restart uranium enrichment, and twice attempted to launch satellites, which use technology similar to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Both attempts failed.

Road to Nukes

On March 22, the State Department and the Treasury put sanctions on 14 individuals and 17 entities in connection with Irans Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND), a think tank under the regimes Defense Department.

U.S. government sanctions organizations and individuals in connection with an Iranian defense entity linked to Irans previous nuclear weapons effort https://t.co/87gAl0978a  Treasury Department (@USTreasury) March 22, 2019

SPND has provided support to designated Iranian defense entities and [its] key personnel played a central role in the Iranian regimes past nuclear weapons effort, the Treasury stated in a release.

The sanctions target SPND subordinate groups, supporters, front companies, and associated officials.

SPNDs continued existence highlights the problem of Irans ongoing preparation to reconstitute its whole weapons program, if it chooses to, said Christopher Ford, assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation.

They are doing everything they can to keep in existence a virtual turnkey capability to get back into the weaponization businessat a moments notice, he told The Wall Street Journal.

They continue to operate in ways that mean the intellectual wealth of that program continues to be able to function, said Sigal Mandelker, Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

The officials stopped short of saying Iran has actually restarted its nuclear weapons program.

CIA Director Gina Haspel testified to Congress on Jan. 29 that Iran is still technically in compliance with the nuclear deal, but the Iranians are considering taking steps that would lessen their adherence to the JCPOA as they seek to pressure the Europeans to come through with the investment and trade benefits that Iran hoped to gain from the deal.

The United Kingdom, France, and Germany continue to voice their commitment to the deal and even directed their companies to defy the U.S. sanctions. Yet most major European companies have pulled out of Iran in fear of getting penalized by the United States, said Ziad Abdelnour, CEO of the New York-based private equity firm Blackhawk Partners, in a March 1 Epoch Times op-ed.

The Trump administrations effectiveness in diminishing Irans oil exports and cutting off its access to the global financial system has far exceeded the expectations of most pundits, Abdelnour said.Lisa Shackleford hugs her pet dogs Izzy (L) and Bella as she wades through flood waters to safety while the Northeast Cape Fear River breaks its banks in the aftermath Hurricane Florence in Burgaw, North Carolina, U.S., September 17, 2018. (Reuters/Jonathan Drake)

Florida Bill Would Make It Illegal To Leave Dogs Tethered in a Hurricane

Owners who leave their dogs tied up during a hurricane could face a year in jail or a $5,000 fine under new legislation making its way through the Florida senate.

The bill, which considers tethering dogs during a storm to be an act of animal crueltyand a first class misdemeanorwould become law in the summer, if it passes.

Sponsor Joe Gruters, R-Sarasota, said the proposal (Senate Bill 1738), is trying to resolve the kinds of problems they saw during hurricanes Matthew, Irma and Michael.

Weve seen these three hurricanes and seen numerous dogs left tethered to different things, Gruters said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. We want to give dogs a fighting chance.

Under the proposal, which has already cleared the Senate Agriculture Committee, the owners would be punished if they were given notice of a weather event but use a chain, rope, tether, leash, cable, or other device that attaches a dog to a stationary object or trolley system.

The bill is currently under review by the state senate and if passed will take effect on July 1, 2019, in time for next years hurricane season.

After hurricane Irma, stories of dozens of dogs left tethered and abandoned across the state left many people outraged, with authorities in some areas unable to prosecute under current legislation.

In some Florida counties, such as Palm Beach County, however, it is already a crime to tether animals during extreme whether or to leave them tethered without an owner present.

Woman Rescues Animals From Hurricane Florence

But while some owners left their pets behind, other kind-hearted animal lovers went out of their way to rescue animals left to fend for themselves in the flooding and winds.

In October last year, a woman who traveled to Wilmington, North Carolina, to save her car from Hurricane Florences fury decided to turn her drive back into an animal rescue mission.

According to Liz Jones, founder of the Sanctuary at Haafsville in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania, not long before Hurricane Florence made landfall near Wilmington and began its onslaught, an unnamed woman flew in to pick up her car before the anticipated flood.

But instead of driving back empty, the woman stopped off at an animal shelter and carried out a load of animals that might otherwise have been euthanized.

She thought why should I drive north with an empty vehicle  so she stopped at the Humane Society and said who can I save, said Jones.

Wilmington was one of the first areas hit as storm-driven floodwaters surged inland and screaming winds lashed everything in sight.

The Pennsylvania sanctuary also welcomed eight dogs and close to a dozen cats last night after a ten-hour trek from a North Carolina shelter.

A lot of the shelters are in flood zones, so if they were faced if they didnt get them out, they may have had to make the hard choice to euthanize them, Jones said.

Jones said she had heard multiple reports of animals being left stranded as their owners fled.

I was just on the phone with a woman who is setting up a 3,000 square foot rescue area for animals. She said its just chaos. Animals are just being left on the side of the road, said Jones.

Tom Ozimek contributed to this articlePeople protest outside the office of China's top anti-graft agency complaining they were tricked by Fanya Metals Exchange. Chinese investors who claim to have lost money on risky investments mounted a rare protest in Beijing on Sept. 22, 2015. (Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images)

Founder of Chinas Fanya Metals Exchange Sentenced to 18 Years for Corruption

BEIJING/SHANGHAIA Chinese court on March 22 fined the firm behind the now-defunct Fanya Nonferrous Metals Exchange 1 billion yuan ($149.04 million) for illegal fundraising and handed its founder a lengthy prison term, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The Kunming Intermediate Peoples Court sentenced Shan Jiuliang, who founded and ran the minor metals bourse, to 18 years in prison for crimes including embezzlement, according to a Xinhua report carried on the courts website.

Shan, whose company was said to have caused investors huge economic losses, was also fined 500,000 yuan and had 50 million yuan of his personal property confiscated, the report added.

Fanya was launched in 2011 in Kunming, in southwest Chinas Yunnan Province, with the aim of raising the prices of minor metals like bismuth by building up stockpiles using money borrowed from thousands of individual investors.

But the exchange froze transactions and members accounts in 2015 after experiencing liquidity problems and was later taken over by government investigators.

The same Kunming court had in January attempted to raise funds to pay off investors owed nearly 40 billion yuan by auctioning off the bourses inventories of indium, a silvery metal used in flat-panel screens and semi-conductors, on Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao.

The sale ultimately attracted no bids.

Asked on Friday if the courts decision was good news, one former Fanya investor said it had fallen short of the investors expectations. Where is the money? The key question is not addressed in the sentence, he said.

Besides Shan, 20 other defendants are facing criminal charges for Fanya-related crimes, Xinhua said. These include Yang Guohong, the former vice president of the exchange, who is accused of illegally appropriating property by abusing his position.

Reuters was not immediately able to reach Shan, Yang or their representatives for comment.

By Tom Daly & David StanwayA Sentinelle soldier patrols in front of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France on Nov. 1, 2017. (Christian Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images)

French Soldiers to Be Mobilized on Margin of Next Yellow Vest Protest

Soldiers will be deployed in Paris for the next edition of yellow vest protests on Saturday, March 23, a government spokesman announced this week.

The soldiers, part of the Operation Sentinelle, have been used since 2015 to counter Islamist attacks in the country.

The announcement of the reinforced mobilisation by the government on Wednesday has triggered criticism from human rights defenders and a part of the political opposition.

After the ransacking of the Champs Elysees last Saturday, March 16, by violent protesters, the French government presented the measure as a substitution effort aimed at freeing policemen and gendarmes for anti-rioting missions.

The military will ensure the protection of sensitive sites such as the Louvre Museum and the French presidential palace, but wont be close to the demonstrations, military authorities said.

But Paris military governor Bruno Leray said soldiers could, in theory, be led to firing live ammunition if necessary.

Sentinelle soldiers shot an assailant at the Louvre Museum in February 2017 after they were attacked while on patrol.

The French government rejected critics by saying that soldiers would not be in the vicinity of the protests and in contact with protesters.

By Lucien LibertGreen Is the New Red

In the 1970s, a friend of mine, Mike, was an avid striped bass fisherman on the New Hampshire coast. He was drawn into a local environmental group, the Clamshell Alliance, after being told that warm water from local nuclear power plants would harm the striped bass fishery.

Mike was trained to sneak into the local power plant to spray-paint environmental slogans on the walls. There were whisperings that some more-seasoned activists might be preparing to commit more serious acts of sabotage.

At a Clamshell meeting one night, Mike raised an awkward question about the environmental value of a proposed tactic. He was pulled aside by a group leader to be set straight. Dont you understand? said the leader. Understand what? said Mike.

We dont give a [expletive] about the environment. Were here to bring down American capitalism, the leader replied.

In 1976, a letter appeared in the New Zealand Trotskyist newspaper Socialist Action, submitted by conservative labor leader Patrick Neary, in opposition to nuclear weapons and supporting nuclear fusion power. Socialist Action editor Keith Locke replied: Capitalism cannot be trusted with nuclear power  socialism  would step up nuclear power research in order to make it safe.

Locke made little comment about the disastrous Chernobyl meltdown a decade later that blanketed much of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in nuclear radiation.

Locke, who was raised by Stalinist parents, would also support Pol Pots conquest of Cambodia in 1978, and the brutal Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the following year. This didnt prevent him from serving several terms in the New Zealand Parliament for the Green Party. Lockes Green Party parliamentary colleagues included Sue Bradford, formerly of the pro-China Workers Communist League, and Russel Norman, who started in politics in Australia with the pro-Cuba Socialist Workers Party and now heads Greenpeace New Zealand.

Several other New Zealand Green Party leaders, including former co-leader Metiria Turei, have ties to Cuban Ambassador to New Zealand Maria del Carmen Herrera Caseiro.

Across the Tasman Sea, in Australia, the situation is similar.

On Easter 1994, New Zealand Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons spoke at an International Green Left Conference in Sydney on women in politics.

Her co-panelists were Dulce Maria Pereira (Workers Party of Brazil), Luciana Castellina (a member of the European Parliament and directorate member of the Italian Party of Communist Refoundation), and Christabel Chamarette, (Australian Greens senator from Western Australia).

Australian Greens Sen. Lee Rhiannon was raised in a Stalinist family and joined the pro-Soviet Socialist Party of Australia (SPA) at its founding conference, which followed its split from the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). She served on the SPA central committees youth subcommittee and developed close relations with Soviet, Czechoslovak, and East German communist youth groups. In 1977, Rhiannon led a SPA delegation to Moscow at the invitation of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnevs hardline regime.

At an October 2000 seminar commemorating the CPAs founding, Rhiannon reportedly argued that a broad-based left movement is being built already and that the Greens is closest to the best of the CPAs politics and methods. In May 2010, she addressed the Australian Left Renewal Conference, lamenting her job in keeping the Greens on a left-wing trajectory.

The challenge to keep the Greens Left is huge and Im convinced social movements are the key to that. This is the way to keep the pressure on left parliamentarians so that they work to advance the social objectives of our movement, not just their partys political interests, she stated, according to Australian magazine The Monthly.

The CPA collapsed in 1994 in order to set up the Sydney-based SEARCH Foundation, which, in turn, has close ties to the Australian Greens.

The Green movement has, at times, been accused of acting as an agent of economic warfare for foreign powers.

In June 2018, Republican leaders of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee launched a probe into what they described as potential undue influence by the government of China over a leading U.S.-based environmental group.

Their target, the 1.3-million-member Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), has sued the Trump administration repeatedly over its efforts to roll back harmful environmental regulations and has worked in China for many years to promote clean energy and a retreat from reliance on fossil fuels.

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), the committee chairman, and Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), chairman of its oversight and investigations subcommittee, requested that the NRDC turn over documentation of any payments it has received from Chinese officials. They also asked for documentation of NRDCs registration as a foreign agent, or an explanation of why the environmental group should not be registered as required by law for those who lobby on behalf of a foreign government.

In their letter, the congressmen wrote: The Committee is concerned about the NRDCs role in aiding Chinas perception management efforts with respect to pollution control and its international standing on environmental issues in ways that may be detrimental to the United States.  The NRDCs relationship with China has many of the criteria identified by U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement as putting an entity at risk of being influenced or coerced by foreign interests.

NDRC president Rhea Suh had visited China in 2016 and stated: What I saw on my trip  was a reminder that China is doing a lot to address its problems at home and to help fight climate changestarting with the wind turbines I saw from my train window as I traveled from Shanghai to Beijing.

China still accounts for 27 percent of the global carbon footprint. Add to the that U.S. shareanother 15.5 percentand the two countries together produce about 43 percent of all global carbon pollution.

Thats why fixing this problem starts with our countries, the United States and China. And its one more reason Im so proud of the work NRDC has done in China since first starting our clean energy efforts there 20 years ago.

Suh was President Barack Obamas assistant secretary for policy management and budget in the Department of the Interior. She is also a 2007 graduate of the Oakland, California-based Rockwood Leadership Institute, a school for radical community organizers that is closely affiliated with the pro-China communist group Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO).

Rockwood has graduated hundreds of environmental activists, including the leadership of most major U.S. green organizations. Among them are Collin OMara, president and chief executive officer of the National Wildlife Federation; Peggy Clark, managing director of Aspen Global Health and Development at The Aspen Institute; and Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.

Almost all U.S. environmental leaders can be connected to Marxist groups of one stripe or another.

If pro-China environmental groups can weaken the U.S. economy with over-regulation and the elimination of cheap fossil fuels, China will soon have an economic (and military) advantage over its No. 1 competitor: the United States.

Vladimir Putins Russia is playing a similar game in using environmental groups to shut down fracking in Europe and the United States. Fracking is a drilling technology that has unleashed huge amounts of underground oil and natural gas that conventional drilling couldnt reach. Russia wants to stop fracking to keep Eastern Europe dependent on Russian energy and to weaken the U.S. economy and its military preparedness.

According to Jacob Grandstaff of the Capital Research Center, Russia has successfully stopped fracking efforts in Eastern Europe through phony environmentalist and media campaigns, and is now attempting to disrupt the surge in American natural gas production that is quickly bringing the U.S. into energy independence, and creating threatening unwanted competition for the Russian energy in Europe.

Intelligence services have discovered that Russia is heavily invested in anti-fracking campaigns in Europe and North America. According to the National Review, In 2015 alone, the intelligence community found that RT, Russias state-run media outlet, produced over 60 anti-fracking stories.

In July 2017, Republican Reps. Lamar Smith and Randy Weber, both of Texas, wrote a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin demanding that he investigate the company Klein Ltd., which was reportedly funneling millions of dollars to the Sea Change Foundationa 501(c)(3) organizationwhich passes money along to anti-fracking campaigns organized by the Sierra Club and similar groups.

This scheme may violate federal law and certainly distorts the U.S. energy market, Smith said, according to the Capital Research Center.

The U.S. environmental movement is going into overdrive right now pushing the Green New Deal (GND) made famous by socialist freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The left wants to set up a congressional select committee to counter climate change.

So far, backed by 45 Democratic Representatives, GND goals include halving the U.S. military budget and the complete elimination of fossil fuels by 2030.

The proposed congressional select committee would have authority to develop a detailed national, industrial, economic mobilization plan to make the U.S. economy greenhouse gas emissions neutral.

The Select Committees detailed national plan would also have the goal to promote economic and environmental justice and equality. The draft specifically mentions spending $1 trillion over 10 years, in addition to extensive taxes and regulations to steer the economy and society as the 15 committee members see fit, Robert P. Murphy, a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, wrote.

Steering the economy by committee and economic and environmental justice and equality are socialism by another name. Its also a recipe for a complete economic meltdown. Wouldnt Russia and China relish that prospect?

The GND is being heavily promoted by all of the countrys major green groups, with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the pro-China Communist Party USA (CPUSA) motto People and nature before profits.

The concept itself came out of the Sunrise Movement, which, in turn, arose out the Student Power Network, and similar fronts for DSA and the pro-China FRSO.

While there are a few legitimate environmental organizations out there, the bulk are more interested in destroying Western capitalism than in preserving our natural world.

The Green movement is really a red movement. Our environment can best be preserved and enhanced by better protection of property rights in a free-market economy. Private individualsnot socialist governmentsare the best stewards of the environment. China and the old Soviet bloc proved that point once and for all.

Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.This July 17, 2018 copy photo shows an 1850 Daguerreotype of Renty, a South Carolina slave who Tamara Lanier, of Norwich, Conn., said is her family's patriarch. (Courtesy of Harvard University/The Norwich Bulletin via AP)

Harvard Sued for Shamelessly Exploiting Early Photos of Slaves

A woman has filed a lawsuit against Harvard University for shamelessly making a profit from photos of two 19th-century slaves, despite requests to give the images to her, an alleged descendant of the slaves.

Tamara Lanier sued the institution Wednesday, March 20, for wrongful seizure, possession and expropriation of photographs she claims include two of her ancestorsher great-great-great-grandfather Renty and his daughter Delia.

Slavery was abolished 156 years ago, but Renty and Delia remain enslaved in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the complaint states. Their images, like their bodies before, remain subject to control and appropriation by the powerful, and their familial identities are denied to them.

The suit demands Harvard hand over the photos to her, acknowledge her ancestry, and pay an unspecified sum in damages.

Laniers complaint alleges Harvard is still deriving the indirect profits of slavery.

The claim is simple, Josh Koskoff, one of Laniers attorneys, told The Washington Post. You took something. It doesnt belong to you. It belongs to me. And I want it back.

In No Position to Comment

The legal action stems from a series of photos taken in 1850 for a study conducted by a Swiss-born natural scientist Louis Agassiz, who was a proponent of polygenismthe theory that racial groups dont share a common origin.

While Agassiz, a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, claimed to oppose slavery, his work has been accused of various forms of racial bias.

The university has so far declined to comment, with the Associated Press citing the Ivy League institution as saying that it had not yet been served, and with that is in no position to comment on this complaint.

The lawsuit claims Harvard exploited the image of Renty during a 2017 conference and under other circumstances, while charging a hefty licensing fee for anyone else wishing to reproduce the images.

Lanier demanded Harvard admit it played a role in the humiliation of Renty and Delia and that the institution was complicit in perpetuating and justifying the institution of slavery.

She argues shes the rightful owner of the photos as Rentys next of kin, while claiming that neither Harvard nor Agassiz could legally own the photos because they never received the subjects consent.

Renty is 169 years a slave by our calculation, civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, one of Laniers lawyers, told the Associated Press in an interview. How long will it be before Harvard finally frees Renty?

Crump said the case would allow Harvard to remove the stain from its legacy and show it has the courage to finally atone for slavery.

Papa Renty

The suit says Lanier has verified her genealogical ties to Renty, whom she calls Papa Renty.

A spokesperson for the Peabody Museum, where the pictures are kept, was quoted in 2014 as saying Lanier had not provided proof of the family link.

Shes given us nothing that directly connects her ancestor to the person in our photograph, said Pamela Gerardi, the museums director of external relations, according to the Norwich Bulletin. Gerardi said that there were 91 slaves named Renty living in South Carolina at the time.

She claims she has more evidence, Gerardi said, but we havent seen it.

The lawsuit also notes that Lanier also previously wrote to former Harvard President Drew Faust asking for a formal review of my documentation to reaffirm that Renty and Delia Taylor are indeed my ancestors.

Faust allegedly wrote that the Peabody Museum was involved in projects regarding those daguerreotypes and that Peabody employees have agreed to be in touch with you if they discover any new information, the lawsuit states.

The suit says no-one ever got in touch with Lanier, prompting her to conduct her own research purporting to confirm her status as a lineal descendant of Renty.

The lawsuit includes a description of Laniers claimed connection to the man in the photograph via Rentys grandson, who was named Renty Taylor Thompson after being transferred from South Carolina to Mongomery, Ala.

The suit alleges that by contesting Ms. Laniers claim of lineage, Harvard is shamelessly capitalizing on the intentional damage done to black Americans genealogy by a centurys worth of policies that forcibly separated families, erased slaves family names, withheld birth and death records, and criminalized literacy.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.A Huawei logo is pictured at the headquarters of the Chinese telecommunications equipment and smartphone maker in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China on March 6, 2019. (Yuyang Wang/Reuters)

Huawei Says No Law Requires Installation of Backdoors, But Other Laws Worry Western Governments

The chief executive officer of embattled Chinese tech giant Huawei has been doing the media rounds recently in attempts to assuage concerns that the companys technology can be used by Beijing for spying.

In interviews with Western media outlets the companys founder Ren Zhengfei has repeatedly denied that the Chinese regime could have backdoor access to the Huaweis technology to spy on people overseas. He told CBS News on Feb. 19 that there is no such law in China that mandates any company to install the backdoor.

While there is no Chinese law that compels a company in China to install backdoors, there are several widely-termed security-related laws that of concern to Western governments and experts.

It is public record that under Chinese cybersecurity law, Chinese companies like Huawei are required to provide, essentially, access upon demand with little to no process to challenge that, FBI Director Christopher Wray said at a press conference announcing U.S. indictments against Huawei on Jan. 28.

National Security Law

In 2015, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) created a national security law that allowed it to selectively ban foreign imports to the benefit of its own companies. Bundled into that law was a requirement that all key network infrastructure and information systems held to Chinese law need to be secure and controllable.

The U.S.China Economic and Security Review Commission released a report at the time, noting the new rule would require any company operating in China to turn over to the government its computer code and encryption keys, as well as to provide a backdoor entry into commercial computer networks.

National Intelligence Law

In 2017 the regime passed the National Intelligence Law, which requires all Chinese citizens and entities to supply intelligence information if requested.

Article 7 states that Chinese organizations and citizens shall, in accordance with the law, support, cooperate with, and collaborate in national intelligence work. It adds that the state will protect individuals and organizations that assist in such intelligence efforts.

Article 14 states: The state intelligence department has the right to ask any (Chinese) government, organization, and citizen to supply the necessary support, assistance, and cooperation.

Counter-Espionage Law

Chinas 2014 Counter-Espionage Law also requires relevant organizations and individuals to truthfully provide information to security agencies during counterintelligence investigations. The provision adds that the organization or individual must not refuse such a request from a security agency.

Implementing regulations released in 2017 clarified that any individual or organization that refuses to offer information will be deemed to be obstructing a counter-espionage work, and subject to criminal investigation.

Anti-Terrorism Law

Chinas Anti-Terrorism Law, enacted in December 2015, explicitly requires telecommunication companies to assist authorities in counter-terrorism operations.

Article 18 of the law compels telecommunications operators and internet service providers to provide technical support and assistance to security agencies, such as providing technical interfaces and decryption.

No Rule of Law

These laws have concerned governments and experts because they highlight the regimes control over telecom companies, even without mandating firms to install backdoors.

Chinese telecom operators and Chinese equipment companies must provide unfettered access to their networks and equipment to the state security services without prior notification for intercept, James Mulvenon, Chinese cyber expert and general manager at SOS International, told a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing in March 2018.

In a November report, The Australian news outlet cited secret Australian intelligence reports that confirmed Huawei had turned over passwords and access details to Chinas intelligence services to allow them access to a foreign network, although not an Australian one, a source said.

Beijing-based lawyer and rights activist Teng Biao told sister media NTD in March that the Chinese regime could force companies to hand over private data even if these laws were not in place.

This is because China is not ruled by law, it is ruled by the CCP. The CCP has a say in everything, Teng said.

He cited the case of U.S. internet company Yahoo who in 2007 admitted that it had provided email records of dissidents to Chinese authorities. Two of those dissidents were later detained and given 10-year prison sentences. The company said it had no choice but to cooperate with authorities.

Even Yahoo, an American company, did not dare to reject the request from the Chinese government, let alone Chinese companies, Teng said.The man representing Venezuelan self-proclaimed acting president Juan Guaido in the United States is urging Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to convince his European Union partners to impose tougher sanctions on incumbent Nicolas Maduro .

It seems to me, (that) what Maduros government has to understand is that the pressure is just beginning and it is the moment to increase it, Carlos Vecchio said in an interview with EFE.

The EU should take steps to ensure that Maduros allies cannot use European financial institutions to hide the money they are stealing from oil-rich Venezuela, Vecchio said.

Spain, he said, should lead that effort because the Iberian nation has traditionally served as a link between Latin America and Europe, which gives Madrid moral authority to argue for a more punitive stance toward Maduro by the EU, 24 of whose 28 member-states have recognized Guaido.

My appeal is to Pedro Sanchez for him, as the head of government in Spain ... to push inside the framework of the EU for the sanctions that cut off the Maduro regime and which will force him to find a way out of the crisis, Vecchio said.

Sanchez formally recognized Guaido as Venezuelas acting president on Feb. 4 and advocated the scheduling of competitive free and fair elections as soon as possible.

At the same time, Spain has taken part in the International Contact Group for Venezuela, an EU-led initiative comprising Latin American and European countries with a mission to help create the conditions for a political process that would lead to free and fair presidential elections.

Asked about that EU bid to resolve the crisis, Vecchio was dismissive.

My message to the contact group is that there is not much to discuss, only when Maduro leaves power, Guaidos envoy said.

Even so, Vecchio thinks that Spain can play an important role by providing a haven for Venezuelan officials who want to abandon the Maduro administration, a possibility discussed by the Spanish and US governments.

I believe that the regime is collapsing, everyone knows that Maduro is the past. Maduro is not going anywhere and many people are negotiating secretly because they know he is going to fall at any moment and everyone is trying to save himself, Vecchio said.

A top official of Guaidos Popular Will party, Vecchio has been living in self-imposed exile in Florida for more than four years. He fled Venezuela to avoid arrest on charges of fomenting violent protests in 2014.

The US government has accredited Vecchio as Venezuelas diplomatic representative.A Boeing 737 aircraft during the manufacturing process at the Boeing factory in Renton, Wash., on May 19, 2015. The company is Americas biggest manufacturing exporter. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Indonesian Airline Cancels Boeing Order, Citing Passenger Fear

JAKARTA/OSLOIndonesian airline Garuda plans to cancel a $6 billion order for Boeing 737 MAX jets, it said on Friday, saying some passengers would be frightened to board the plane after two fatal crashes, although analysts said the deal had long been in doubt.

The news came as another 737 MAX customer, Norwegian Air, played down the significance of a move by Boeing to make a previously optional cockpit warning light compulsory.

Norwegian said that, according to Boeing, the warning light would not have been able to prevent erroneous signals that Lion Air pilots received before their new 737 MAX plane crashed off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people.

Indonesias national carrier Garuda is the first airline to publicly announce plans to scrap an order since the worlds entire fleet of 737 MAX planes was grounded last week, following an Ethiopian Airlines crash that left 157 people dead.

Many passengers told us they were afraid to get on a MAX 8, Garuda CEO Ari Askhara told Reuters on Friday.

However, the airline had been reconsidering its order for 49 of the narrowbody jets prior to the Ethiopian crash, including potentially swapping some for widebody Boeing models.

Southeast Asia faces a glut of narrowbody aircraft like the 737 MAX and rival Airbus A320neo at a time of slowing global economic growth and high fuel costs.

They have been re-looking at their fleet plan anyway so this is an opportunity to make some changes that otherwise may be difficult to do, CAPA Center for Aviation Chief Analyst Brendan Sobie said.

Indonesias Lion Air has also said it might cancel 737 MAX aircraft, though industry sources say it is also struggling to absorb the number of planes on order.

Both crashes are still being investigated. But regulators have noted some similarities between the two, and attention has focused on whether pilots had the correct information about the angle of attack at which the wing slices through the air.

No direct link has been proven between the accidents.

Retrofits

Boeing now plans to make compulsory a light to alert pilots when sensor readings of the angle of attack do not match  meaning at least one must be wrong -, according to two officials briefed on the matter.

Investigators suspect a faulty angle-of-attack reading led the doomed Lion Air jets computer to believe it had stalled, prompting the planes anti-stall system, called MCAS, repeatedly to push the planes nose down.

The Lion Airplane did not have the warning light installed because it was not compulsory. Ethiopian Airlines did not immediately comment on whether its crashed plane had the alert.

But the Ethiopian carrier, whose reputation along with Boeings is at stake, issued a statement on Friday emphasizing the modernity of its safety and training systems, with more than $500 million invested in infrastructure in the past five years.

The Ethiopian crash has set off one of the widest inquiries in aviation history and cast a shadow over the Boeing 737 MAX model intended to be a standard for decades.

Boeing did not comment on the plan to make the safety feature standard, but separately said it was moving quickly to make software changes and expected the upgrade to be approved by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in coming weeks.

Chicago-based Boeing will also retrofit older planes with the cockpit warning light, the officials told Reuters.

Experts said it could take weeks or months to be done, and for regulators to review and approve the changes. Regulators in Europe and Canada have said they will conduct their own reviews of any new systems.

Norwegian said its 18 737 MAX jets did not have the cockpit warning light, but it would follow any recommendations made by Boeing and aviation regulations. The airline said last week it would seek compensation from Boeing for the cost of grounding its 737 MAX planes, which makes up 11 percent of its fleet.

Since the Ethiopian crash, Boeing shares have fallen 12 percent and $28 billion has been wiped off its market value.

Pressure has mounted on the company from U.S. legislators, who are also expected to question the FAA. The company faces a criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department as well.

Several lawsuits have already been filed on behalf of victims of the Lion Air crash referring to the Ethiopian accident. Boeing declined to comment on the lawsuits.

By Cindy Silviana and Terje SolsvikFirefighters and police officers stand by the gutted remains of a bus in San Donato Milanese, near Milan, Italy, on March 21, 2019. (Daniele Bennati/ANSA via AP)

Italian Citizenship Urgent for Boy Whose SOS Call Saved Lives

MILAN, Italy The leader of Italys 5-Star Movement called Thursday, March 21 to award speedy citizenship to a 13-year-old Egyptian boy hailed as a hero for being the first to alert police that he and scores of his middle school classmates had been abducted by their bus driver.

Ramy Shehata put his life at risk to save that of his classmates, Luigi Di Maio said on Facebook, adding that he would ask Italys premier to confer citizenship for special merit.

The boys father, who immigrated in 2001, launched the appeal for Ramy, who was born in Italy. The 13-year-old is credited with helping save his classmates by calling authorities on a phone that was concealed after the driver ordered their devices collected and tied up their gym teachers.

Law enforcement officers on Wednesday stopped the bus that had traveled 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the province of Cremona to Milan, freeing the 51 middle school students and their chaperones as the driver set the bus on fire. No one was seriously injured.

The news agency ANSA reported that the Interior Ministry was speeding the citizenship request for the boy, while looking to revoke the citizenship of the bus driver, Ousseynou Sy, a 47-year-old Senegalese immigrant who became an Italian citizen in 2004.

Sy was being held on suspicion of kidnapping, intending to commit a massacre, arson, resisting law enforcement with an aggravating circumstance of terrorism because the event caused panic. Prosecutors said there were no indications that Sy was radicalized or had ties to Islamic terrorists, but that he claimed the kidnapping was to draw attention to migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea.

One chaperones said the driver first tied the two male gym teachers to the door, then ordered her to bind the hands of the children, keep them quiet and collect their phones. Tiziana Magarini told Sky TG24 that he brandished a knife and a gun. SKY reported that a knife was found in the charred remains of the bus but not the gun, raising the possibility that it had been a toy.

Sys lawyer, Davide Lacchetti, told ANSA that his client never had a gun.

Fortunately, with some looks, I made some of the children in the back understand to keep their phones, Magarini said. And I turned mine on without being seen, putting through a call so colleagues could hear what was going on onboard the bus.

The driver made periodic stops, ordering her to spray paint the windows to obscure the view inside and to spread gasoline around the interior of the bus. She said he brandished a gas stove lighter.

Magarini said the driver appeared lucid throughout the ordeal, but that he became agitated when the bus was flanked by police on the outskirts of Milan.

We saw the first cars arrive ahead, on the sides and behind. He started to ram into them, and he hit an officer on foot. I heard a blast of glass from the back, and in two seconds there was a formidable team that in no time pulled everyone out, Magarini said.

By Colleen BarryThe body of a Kittitas County Sheriff's deputy is draped with a U.S. flag as it is carried out of Kittitas Valley Healthcare Hospital in the early morning hours of March 20, 2019, in Ellensburg, Wash. (Ted S. Warren/AP Photo)

Man Who Killed Deputy Was in US Illegally

The federal government said the man who killed a sheriffs deputy and wounded a police officer in a central Washington state shootout was in the United States illegally.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said on March 21 that the suspect, 29-year-old Juan Manuel Flores Del Toro, who also died as a result of the shootout, was a citizen of Mexico.

The agency said he entered the U.S. in 2014 at Laredo, Texas, on a temporary agricultural worker visa, and it has no record of Flores Del Toro leaving the country or extending his visa.

Police have said he lived in Ellensburg, Washington.

Illegal murders Sheriff's Deputy and wounds police officer in Washington!  Gateway Pundit  2019321

Sheriffs deputy Ryan Thompson was killed and Kittitas police officer Benito Chavez was shot in the leg in the gunfight Tuesday night near Ellensburg.

Deputy Ryan Thompson, your life mattered.  Blue Lives Matter  2019320

The events unfolded when the two officers tried to stop the suspects vehicle after authorities received a complaint about the motorists driving, said Ellensburg Police Chief Ken Wade.

Flores Del Toro was chased by police until he stopped the car near the town of Kittitas. He got out and exchanged gunfire with the sheriffs deputy and the police officer, Wade said.

It was reported as a road-rage type event, with erratic driving on the part of the suspect, said Wade, whose office is investigating the incident.

Deputy Ryan Thompson, 42, was killed and officer Benito Chavez, 22, was shot in the leg, suffering a shattered femur. He was hospitalized Thursday in satisfactory condition.

The suspect died at a hospital. Authorities did not provide information about how many times he was shot and Wade said he did not know how many shots were fired overall by the officers and the suspect.

Thompson had been a law enforcement officer for years, joined the sheriffs department in 2013 and is survived by his wife and three children, said Kittitas County Sheriff Gene Dana.

Our community has a very heavy heart today, Dana told reporters. This officer was a great officer.

It was the first fatal shooting of a law enforcement officer in the rural county in 92 years, he said.

The Clarkstown Police Department sends our condolences to the family of Deputy Sheriff Ryan Thompson and the men and  Clarkstown Police Department  2019321

Wade said authorities have no other information besides the road rage incident for what might have prompted the suspect to flee and exchange gunfire with the officers.

KHQLOCALNEWS: RT patrickerickson: Extremely emotional moments as the body of Kittitas Deputy Ryan Thompson is escorted by a long line of law enforcement here to a funeral home in Ellensburg. KHQLocalNews pic.twitter.com/dcGckjrTP7  590 KQNT (@590KQNT) March 21, 2019

Nicholas K. Geranios contributed to this report.An ultrasound image of a baby in the 18th week of pregnancy. ("Baby McBride Ultrasound 17 Weeks 6 Days (3)" by Nogwater/Flickr[CC BY-SA-2.0 (ept.ms/2utDIe9)])

Mississippi Governor Signs Bill That Bans Abortions After Unborn Babys Heartbeat Detected

Mississippi Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, signed a bill on March 21 that bans abortions in the state after a fetal heartbeat is detected.

That typically takes place around six weeks after conception.

The law is one of the strictest in the nation and has Mississippi joining an increasing number of states considering similar restrictions on abortion.

Lawmakers in Georgia, South Carolina, and Ohio are among the states mulling the passage of heartbeat bills.

Bryant signed the bill, Senate Bill 2116 (pdf), into law with a host of supporters gathered around him. This is a very important day in the history of Mississippi, Lt. Gov. Reeves told reporters after the bills passage. There was a lot of pressure from a lot of groups from primarily outside our state on these members of the legislature, but every one of them stood strong.

Lt. Governor @tatereeves speaks on the passage of SB 2116, thanking members of the House and Senate for making sure it got passed. #msleg pic.twitter.com/GP88NJLNWS  Yall Politics (@MSyallpolitics) March 21, 2019

He said the goal is to make Mississippi the safest place in America for an unborn child.

Unlike some heartbeat bills, the law does not include exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

But it does contain exceptions if a doctor says continuing a pregnancy would endanger a womans life or one of her major bodily functions.

No person shall knowingly perform an abortion on a pregnant woman with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of the unborn human individual that the pregnant woman is carrying and whose fetal heartbeat has been detected, lawmakers wrote in the legislation.

Any person who performs a medical procedure [after the heartbeat is detected]  shall declare in writing, under penalty of perjury, that the medical procedure was necessary, to the best of that persons reasonable medical judgment, to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman, the bill stated.

Any physician that violates the new law faces license revocation or disciplinary action.

Its set to take effect on July 1.

A 3D ultrasound showing a baby inside the womb. (Fotopress/Getty Images)

Judge Blocks Kentucky Law

A federal judge blocked a Kentucky law shortly after it was signed into law that would have stopped women from getting abortions on the basis of sex, race, or disability of the unborn baby.

House Bill 5 was passed by the state Senate 32-4 earlier in March after the House passed it 67-25 in late February. It was signed by Gov. Matt Bevin on March 19.

U.S. District Judge David Hale ordered Kentucky not to enforce the law on March 20.

The order came five days after Hale blocked Kentucky from instituting another law it passed, Senate Bill 9 that would have banned abortion once a fetal heartbeat was detected, which is typically about six weeks after conception.

Hales orders were reported by the Louisville Courier-Journal. They were not made public and it wasnt clear on what basis he blocked the laws from taking effect.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed challenges to both laws, asking Hale to block them until he decided whether or not they are constitutional. The group claimed that women have a right to have an abortion and that the bills infringed upon that right.

Republican Governor Matt Bevin of Kentucky speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, on Feb. 23, 2017. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

In a response filed in the U.S. District Court in Lousiville on Tuesday published by WYMT, Bevins office said that HB 5 bans eugenics-based abortions.

Imagine that a woman in Kentucky wants an abortion merely because she wants a girl rather than a boy. Or imagine that the woman wants an abortion because she does not want her child to be a certain race or nationality. Or imagine that the woman wants an abortion because her unborn child has a nonlethal disability like Down syndrome. Until now, abortions like these have been legal in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, wrote Adam Meier, secretary of Health and Family Services in Kentucky, in the filing.

EMW [Womens Surgical Center in Louisville] and its abortionists have responded with a novel claim: Women have a constitutional right to undergo race-based abortions, gender-based abortions, and disability-based abortions. In (the) plaintiffs view, somewhere in the Fourteenth Amendments penumbra lies secret protection of eugenics, Meier added.

IEscort volunteers line up outside the EMW Womens Surgical Center in Louisville, Ky, on July 17, 2017. (Dylan Lovan/AP Photo)

Eugenics is the practice of attempting to improve the human population by blocking the births of people considered to be inferior, including, historically, certain races.

Republican Rep. Melinda Gibbons Prunty, the bills lead sponsor, said after the state House passed the bill that abortions in such cases are reminiscent of the social evil of eugenics, the Courier-Journal reported.

In its filing, the ACLU wrote: Plaintiffs will prevail on their claim that the Bans are unconstitutional under 46 years of Supreme Court precedent, beginning with Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), which unequivocally holds that the State may not ban abortion before the point of fetal viability, regardless of the womans reason for her decision.

From NTD NewsPeople on a boat float down floodwaters that cover Washington Street, in Hamburg, Iowa, on March 20, 2019. (Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald via AP)

Missouri Governor Declares State of Emergency Amid Flooding

KANSAS CITY, Mo.Missouri Gov. Mike Parson declared a state of emergency on March 21 following flooding that left several people stranded and continues to cause damage and strain levees in several Midwest states.

Parsons action will allow state agencies to work directly with local officials responding to flooding. Parson, along with the states Emergency Management Agency director and other officials, plans to meet with local leaders and survey damage March 21.

The rising floodwaters are affecting more Missouri communities and farms, closing more roads and threatening levees, water treatment plants, and other critical infrastructure, Parson said in a statement. We will continue to work closely with our local partners to assess needs and provide resources to help as Missourians continue this flood fight and as we work to assist one another.

The Missouri River has swelled following heavy rains and snowmelt earlier this month. The flooding has claimed three lives, damaged thousands of homes and busted about 20 levees in Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri.

President Donald Trump on March 21 also approved Nebraskas request for federal disaster assistance, which provides federal aid to supplement state, local and tribal recovery efforts. It also opens the door to grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses and other programs to help affected residents.

Missouris emergency declaration comes after state water patrol troopers worked into the night March 20, pulling four people from homes and three others from a boat that ran out of gas around the small town of Craig. People stacked sandbags at a nearby water treatment plant in Forest City on March 21, while another levee breach across the river from Atchison, Kansas, threatened two towns where most residents had already left.

The flooding in Craig began after yet another levee breach, and several homes were inundated with water. A local ethanol plant was also shut down amid the flooding.

Scientists say climate change is responsible for more intense and more frequent extreme weather such as storms, floods, droughts, and fires, but without extensive study, they cannot directly link a single weather event to the changing climate.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said water was also flowing over several other levees, including one near Missouris Bean Lake.

Deb Hooper, who lives near the lake, told KMBC-TV that she has been packing for a week and even removed the water heater, but she hopes to hold out.

Last night, they came and told us it was, like, 2 inches (5 centimeters) below the levee, she said, adding that she was warned to leave but declined. Im, like, No, there aint no water yet.'

In southwest Iowa, barriers protecting about 2,300 people and thousands of acres of farmland simply werent high enough to withstand the river, said Pat Sheldon, president of the Benton-Washington Levee District.

Sheldon told television station KNCY on March 20 that the river levee performed brilliantly for what it was designed to do, but it just sent more water at us than we had height. He said it took $150 million to repair his districts levees after flooding in 2011, but he estimates it could cost $500 million to do so after this years disaster.

In Missouri, the river was expected to crest on March 15 in St. Joseph at the third-highest flood level on record. Water was filling a casino parking lot in the city, though only about half a dozen homes in the city arent protected by a federal levee. Military planes were evacuated last week from nearby Rosecrans Air National Guard base.

The flooding has also taken a heavy toll on agriculture, inundating tens of thousands of acres, threatening stockpiled grain and killing livestock.

Nebraskas governor said his state has suffered nearly $1.4 billion in estimated losses and damage, including $840 million in crop and cattle losses.

Members of the Nebraska Army National Guard used a helicopter March 20 to drop 10 round hay bales to stranded cattle in various spots near Richland, which is about 80 miles west of Omaha.

Gov. Pete Ricketts also estimated that more than 2,000 homes and 341 businesses have been damaged or destroyed in Nebraska alone.

By Heather HollingsworthMom Defends Unconventional, Disney-Inspired Name Choice for Daughter

A mother is defending giving her daughter an unconventional name sourced from Disney.

However, she didnt name her child after a popular Disney princess like Belle, Jasmine, Ariel, Merida, etc.

Instead, Jade Jeanes and her husband, Joshua, named their daughter Disney itself.

According to Fox News, she was going to name her girl Belle from Beauty and the Beast but wanted something even more unique.

'By the time she goes to school with other children her age, her name will just blend in'  Daily Mail  2019321

Disney is quite a personality. Her name suits her and her personality loads, Jeanes, of England, was quoted by Fox as saying. Its no ones business what we decided to call her, and I think thats the way our generation is going to be, honest.

Jeanes said after giving birth to Disney in November 2018, she joined Facebook groups for parenting.

A parent asked others to share the name of their child on a Facebook group, Mums The Word, and Jeanes posted her daughters name. She then received dozens of nasty comments.

Its just a name. There are ordinary names that people give that I dont like, but I dont tell them that they shouldnt give those names, she said.

It was more of a fun post that I assumed people would be okay with. In the end, people just either hate it or love it.

Jeanes said that the negative feedback wont prevent her and her husband from considering another unusual name.

I dont think Ive come across any names from video games that were too out there,' Jeanes said. Id love a son called Sonic.

In the comments section on one website about the name choice, some people said naming her daughter Disney was tantamount to child abuse. This is a form of child abuse, no doubt. How long will the poor baby suffer until she can change the name? wrote one person.

But she also received support for her daughters name.

A very cute name to match a very cute baby!! Its a shame that people have mocked this mother! People suck!! another wrote.

On Thursday, Jeanes said she received an unreal amount of support, adding that trolls can go away.

She added, Ive seen comments saying shes an it shes not an it, shes a baby and a human.

A Girl Named Abcde

Several months ago, a 5-year-old girls name was mocked by a Southwest Airlines employee, forcing the airline to issue an apology.

Name shaming? This Texas woman claims a @SouthwestAir agent made fun of her 5-year-old daughters name as they were preparing to board their flight at @JohnWayneAir in Orange County. Her daughters name is Abcde (pronounced Ab-city). @ABC7 pic.twitter.com/iHpBPoakYI  Veronica Miracle (@ABC7Veronica) November 28, 2018

Traci Redford said an agent at Californias John Wayne Airport mocked the name as they were boarding. Her daughters name is Abcde Redford, reported KABC.

Abcde is pronounced like ab-city, and due to the girls epilepsy, she and her mother always pre-board the plane.

The Redfords were flying back to El Paso, Texas, when the agent alleged laughed and took a photo of the girls boarding pass and posted it on social media, she said.

"Mom, why is she laughing at my name?'  Daily Mail  20181129

While I was sitting there, she took a picture of my boarding pass and chose to post it on social media, mocking my daughter, Redford told the news outlet. It was actually brought to my attention by somebody who had seen it on Facebook and reported it to Southwest Airlines. And after two weeks of doing a formal complaint, Southwest hadnt done anything.The scene of a road accident in which a semi carrying nearly 3000 piglets was overturned near milepost 127, about 2miles west of Casey, Illinois, on March 22, 2019. (Illinois State Police District 12 Effingham)

Nearly 3,000 Piglets On the Loose After Crash on Illinois Highway

Around 3,000 piglets were involved in a highway crash when a semi overturned on an Illinois highway, causing the animals to either get loose or need rescuing from the damaged trailer.

The Illinois State Police warned drivers to use caution after the little pigs got loose on eastbound I-70 near mile marker 127 in Effingham, Illinois, on the morning of Friday, March 22.

Officials said in a statement that a crash involving an overturned livestock hauler caused the animals to scatter along the road, resulting in potentially hazardous conditions for drivers.

I-70 travelers between Casey and Greenup use caution, the Illinois State Police said.

Troopers are on scene assisting with corralling the livestock, they added.

*I-70 travelers between Casey and Greenup use caution* Due to a traffic crash, nearly 3000 piglets are loose near milepost 127 (2 miles west of Casey). pic.twitter.com/s7zaJlF9oj  WCIA3 News (@WCIA3) March 22, 2019

Aerial cameras captured footage of crews rounding up the escaped piglets and removing ones that were trapped in the truck.

Footage from the air of the piglet rescue was published by KMOV4.

No injuries were reported to either the driver or the animals.

Woman Holds Pet Slumber Parties at Animal Shelter

An Arizona woman is sacrificing her comfort by having Saturday night sleepovers at an animal rescue shelter, in the hopes that it will get the animals adopted faster.

The Epoch Times reported that Melissa Gable, PR Manager for Foothills Animal Rescue on Scottsdale, near Phoenix, has been spending her Saturdays sleeping at the shelter and posting videos of the experience on the YouTube channel: Shelter Pet Slumber Party.

My hope is that, eventually, people will start watching them and seeing the videos and sharing them and come and adopt the dogs, she said.

Gable said the videos might show people how the cat or dog might act in a home environment, and how they might be used to sleeping on a bed with a person or in close contact with another animal. Each pet has a different preference and personality.

Its something that I really enjoy. A lot of people have kind of said Im crazy for doing that  but as soon as I got here and saw the animals, then I wouldnt want to be anywhere else but here.

Foothill Animal Rescue was started in 1995 in Cave Creek, and it now has two locations in Scottsdale. After the opening of the second location, an adoption center, the organization said the number of pet lives that were saved increased by 66 percent.

According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), around 6.5 million pets enter animal shelters in the United States every year, while about 1.5 million shelter animals are euthanized.

With additional reporting by Epoch Times staff writer Sarah Le.The Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, appear in the sky over Bifrost, Western Iceland, on March 1, 2017. (Rene Rossignaud/AP)

NOAA Issues Moderate Geomagnetic Storm Watch for the Weekend

New York and Chicago residents could see the Northern Lights, or the aurora borealis, over the weekend due to a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun, according to U.S. weather officials.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) posted a map on March 20, saying that a G2 (Moderate) geomagnetic storm watch is in effect for the 23 March, 2019  due to anticipated CME arrival.

The agency said that an asymmetric halo CME was observed, and it appears to be partially directed at the Earth.

According to the map, the most likely area of an aurora event is between the green line and the yellow line, which appears to encompass parts of New York, northern Illinois (including Chicago), Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington state, Iowa, Michigan, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.

The very northern parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Indiana might see the Northern Lights.

An asymmetric halo CME was observed in SOHO/LASCO coronagraph imagery and initial analysis of the CME in both LASCO and STEREO-A coronagraph imagery shows an Earth-directed component is likely, the NOAA added.

Direct Hit! Both #NOAA & #NASA prediction models agree we have an Earth-directed #solarstorm that will impact around 12pm March 23! This one is dense & strong so it could pack a decent punch! Expect #hamradio & #GPS disruptions on Earths nightside, plus #aurora to mid-latitudes! pic.twitter.com/H3carfQR5m  Dr. Tamitha Skov (@TamithaSkov) March 21, 2019

The NOAA further explained: The largest storms that result from these conditions are associated with solar coronal mass ejections where a billion tons or so of plasma from the sun, with its embedded magnetic field, arrives at Earth. CMEs typically take several days to arrive at Earth, but have been observed, for some of the most intense storms, to arrive in as short as 18 hours.

According to CNET, the suns solar flare caused some disruptions for radio operators in Africa and Europe. Its being followed by a CME, which is a massive cloud of charged particles emitted during a flare.

NASA said there is a difference between a solar flare and CME.

There are many kinds of eruptions on the sun. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections both involve gigantic explosions of energy, but are otherwise quite different. The two phenomena do sometimes occur at the same timeindeed the strongest flares are almost always correlated with coronal mass ejectionsbut they emit different things, they look and travel differently, and they have different effects near planets, NASA explained in 2014.

One of the worst solar storms ever recorded was the 1859 Carrington Event, which is said to have created an aurora around the world and caused telegraph wires to erupt into flames, CNET reported. If the same event were to happen today, it could produce disastrous results.

If one wants to witness the Aurora Borealis, travel far away from cities as the light pollution interferes with ones ability to see the night sky.

The Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) and Aurora Australis (Southern Lights) are the result of electrons colliding with the upper reaches of Earths atmosphere. (Protons cause faint and diffuse aurora, usually not easily visible to the human eye), according to NOAAs website.

The aurora typically forms some 50 miles to 300 miles above the Earths surface, according to NOAA.

Every year, tens of thousands of tourists travel to Norway, Iceland, Alaska, Canada, and other northern areas to see the Aurora Borealis.

But, when space weather activity increases and more frequent and larger storms and substorms occur, the aurora extends equatorward, said NOAA. During large solar events, thats when Aurora Borealis can be observed in much of the United States, Europe, and Asia.

During very large events, the aurora can be observed even farther from the poles  Of course, to observe the aurora, the skies must be clear and free of clouds. It must also be dark so during the summer months at auroral latitudes, the midnight sun prevents auroral observations, the agency says.Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) arrives to hear Michael Cohen, attorney for President Trump, testify before the House Oversight and Reform Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington on February 27, 2019. (JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

Ocasio-Cortez Appears to Support Gun Ban, Confiscating Firearms

Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) appeared to call for the banning of all military-style semi-automatic firearms on March 21, after she praised New Zealands brand new gun control measures, including asking citizens to hand over their weapons, to be eventually destroyed.

Ocasio-Cortez suggested that gun control measures in New Zealand should be implemented in the United States.

This is what leadership looks like, Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter, referring to a video of liberal New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announcing the new laws.

Sandy Hook happened 6 years ago and we cant even get the Senate to hold a vote on universal background checks w/ #HR8. Christchurch happened, and within days New Zealand acted to get weapons of war out of the consumer market.

Sandy Hook happened 6 years ago and we cant even get the Senate to hold a vote on universal background checks w/ #HR8. Christchurch happened, and within days New Zealand acted to get weapons of war out of the consumer market. This is what leadership looks like  https://t.co/TcdR63anBt  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 21, 2019

Ardern, in her speech, specifically called for the confiscation of firearms from law-abiding New Zealand citizens. According to the New Zealand Police, the new order will bring two additional groups of semi-automatic firearms within the definition of a Military Style semi-automatic (MSSA) firearm, as of March 21.

These include semi-automatic firearms capable of being used in combination with a detachable magazine (other than one designed to hold 0.22-inch or less rimfire cartridges) that can hold more than 5 cartridges; and a semi-automatic firearm that is a shotgun and is capable of being used in combination with a detachable magazine which can hold more than 5 cartridges.

Arden ordered all citizens with these weapons to fill out a form on the police departments website.

In the next 48 hours, a form will be available on this site that we are asking these gun owners to complete, identifying what banned guns they hold, Arden said. The police will then arrange for these weapons to be handed over, and eventually destroyed.

In a separate post on Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez directly called for a number of gun control measures.

You know, instead of training children, teachers, houses of faith, & concertgoers to prep for being shot, we could just: Pass Universal Background checks (#HR8!), Disarm domestic abusers, Mandate safe storage, Ban bump stocks, semiautos, & high cap mags designed to kill people, she wrote on March 21.

You know, instead of training children, teachers, houses of faith, & concertgoers to prep for being shot, we could just: -Pass Universal Background checks (#HR8!)

-Disarm domestic abusers

-Mandate safe storage

-Ban bump stocks, semiautos, & high cap mags designed to kill people https://t.co/5SaLxEfYBT  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 22, 2019

The congresswomans call to Mandate safe storagemeaning storing a disassembled gun and with a trigger lockhas been ruled unconstitutional by the Heller decision. In its landmark 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling, the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment guarantees an individuals right to bear arms for self-defense in the home. In 2010, the court said that ruling applied nationwide.

Those with violent criminal records are already blocked from owning and possessing firearms.

Bump stocksan attachment used to make semi-automatic rifles fire rapidly like an automatic riflewill also become illegal in the United States next week, Fox News reported. After the Las Vegas massacre in October of 2017, President Donald Trump expanded the regulatory definition of machinegun to include bump-stocks, subjecting them to the restrictions imposed by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968.

Denigrating Prayers

Last week Ocasio-Cortez questioned the thoughts and prayers commonly used to offer comfort to victims of terrorism in her response to New Zealands mass shooting where 49 people were killed.

Video footage widely circulated on social media, apparently taken by the gunman and livestreamed as the attack unfolded, showed him driving to a mosque, entering it, and shooting randomly at people inside. 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?

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) using the phrase to deflect conversation from policy change. She also clarified that it was not a jab at 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.

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 Twitter.Ocasio-Cortez Blasts Fox News for Getting Her Name Wrong, But Theres a Problem

Freshman Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y) laid into Fox News in a series of Twitter messages on March 20, criticizing the channels opinion hosts for not using her full name, but evidence surfaced later to challenge her claims.

Ocasio-Cortez accused Fox News opinion hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson of referring to her only as Cortez instead of Ocasio-Cortez and suggested that the hosts are intentionally stereotyping her.

By the way: Fox News likes to say my name (incorrectly) as Cortez, which I can only imagine is [because] that sounds more stereotypically Hispanic + probably incites more anxiety for them, Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. Pro Tip: My last name is not Cortez, just as theirs isnt Ingra or Carl or Hann.

My last name is Ocasio-Cortez. Full stop. Thats my name. No, you cant say Cortez. Ive never used that in my life. Cortez is referring to someone else. Even if theyre trying to be rude + wrong, my dads last name was Ocasio anyway. (His name was hyphenated too, though.)  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 21, 2019

My last name is Ocasio-Cortez. Full stop. Thats my name. No, you cant say Cortez. Ive never used that in my life. Cortez is referring to someone else. Even if theyre trying to be rude + wrong, my dads last name was Ocasio anyway. His name was hyphenated too, though, the freshman congresswoman added.

For the curious, in Latinx culture children take *both* their parents names, Ocasio-Cortez continued. Its not a progressive, new thing. Its just how some names work. PR hyphenates, others mark differently. Your last name = the families that came together to make you. AOC is also fine though :), she finished.

Ocasio-Cortezs accusations appear to be wholly unfounded, according to a review of Fox News footage conducted by Grabien Media. Ocasio-Cortez was mentioned 188 times on The Ingraham Angle and Hannity but the hosts referred to her correctly each time.

The only reference to Ocasio-Cortez as Cortez was made by a guest on the March 14 Ingraham Angle, according to Tom Elliot, the founder of Grabien Media. The host herself never got the name wrong. In one episode of Hannity, Ocasio-Cortez was mentioned 20 times, but Hannity said her name correctly each time.

Unless [Ocasio-Cortez] has something to back up this claim, it would seem she owes apologies to Hannity and Ingraham. Randomly accusing people of prejudice is indecent, [especially] when it will inevitably be used for more boycott fodder, Elliott wrote on Twitter on March 20.

The only person Ive noticed who obsesses over [Ocasio-Cortez] being Hispanic is [Ocasio-Cortez] herself, Eliott added. Its a constant topic. Conservative media generally focus on her overzealous Green New Deal, her sketchy campaign finance issues, and her frequent hypocrisy.

Ocasio-Cortez scored a surprise election victory by unseating a long-term incumbent Democratic lawmaker in New York in the midterm election last year. Her victory drew the attention of the media, which she has managed to maintain with radical socialist ideas such as the so-called Green New Deal and taxing the wealthy at a 70 percent rate.

The media spotlight gave Ocasio-Cortez a nearly unprecedented rate of name recognition for a freshman lawmaker, with only 29 percent of Americans saying they didnt recognize her name in a February survey by Gallup.

But the name recognition came at a price. Ocasio-Cortezs unfavorable rating grew by 15 points since her primary victory last year to February this year. According to Gallup, 41 percent of Americans surveyed had an unfavorable view of Ocasio-Cortez in February.

Ocasio-Cortez introduced the socialist Green New Deal resolution in Congress last month. The Green New Deal would nationalize the energy industry in the United States, handing the government complete control over how the nation produces and consumes energy. The Democratic Socialists of America and Communist Party USA are backing the Green New Deal.The Independent Investor: Will Pot Stocks Go Up in Smoke?

Today, medical marijuana is legal in 33 states, while recreational marijuana is legal in 10 states, plus the District of Columbia. Although there has been progress, little of the recent enthusiasm and hype over pot stocks will come to naught unless the federal government does a major about face and legalizes the substance. What are the chances of that?

Billions of dollars' worth of investment, stock market gains, and federal, state, and local taxes are at stake. Predicting the outcome of such a change in federal legislation is, for now, like betting all your chips on red or black in a roulette game. Nonetheless, a growing number of retail investors want to "get in" on pot stocks.

The calls and emails I get today are reminiscent of two years ago. Back then it was all about Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency. As Bitcoin climbed (from a few hundred dollars to $20,000), the interest and demand to "get in" was almost hysterical. As you might imagine, most of those calls were made as Bitcoin hit new highs.

Fast-forward to today and, while no one has called about a cryptocurrency in over a year with Bitcoin now around $4,000, pot stocks are all the rage. And like Bitcoin, few callers know anything about the marijuana industry.

"What do I need to know?" said one client (an ancient hippie like me). "You put it your mouth, inhale, and bingo. You are high."

But smoking it is a lot different than investing in it.

There is now a bewildering array of investment vehicles (and more coming every day) that confronts the up-and-coming pot investor. There are over 80 exchange-listed pot stocks. Most are Canadian companies (where all pot is legal), which have a listing here in the U.S. Since the federal government still deems marijuana illegal, most big major stock exchanges won't touch them. In addition, there are well over 200 over-the-counter (OTC) securities that trade outside of the big exchanges. The question you should ask is which of those stocks will be a winner and how do I avoid the losers?

The short answer is you need to do your homework. Most investors I talk to are woefully uninformed when it comes to understanding this sector. They fail to realize that most (if not all) companies who engage in this business make no money at all. Part of the reason for this is their inability to borrow or obtain any kind of credit from the U.S. banking system. Until the federal government legalizes marijuana, it is a purely cash business.

To compound the problem, few investors do little more than read market research reports that project global spending on legal cannabis will grow by 230 percent and reach $32 billion by next year. Of that amount, $23 billion is expected to come from U.S. sales. But that forecast assumes that more states will legalize the drug this year and next. That's a big "if."

Clearly, there is a bull case for the pot industry. Readers may be aware that over 200 million Americans reside in those states that have already legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use. And over 2/3rds of Americans support its legalization, according to Gallup polls.

What investors ignore is that the medical market for cannabis and the recreational market are vastly different animals. To muddy the waters further, there is the hemp industry. Hemp is another form of the versatile cannabis plant that has been used in textile production, foods and other home products for decades. There is also a growing use of cannabidiol or CBD. CBD is a non-psychoactive cannabis compound that is being infused in products as diverse as skin care, coffee and even dog biscuits. Titus, our 9-year-old chocolate Lab, who suffers from arthritis, for example, is now munching on CBD cookies several times a week. Over 40 states have already passed some kind of CBD legislation.

Each sub-sector of this marijuana industry has a different profile, profitability, and future. But in the rush to make money, these realities are all but by neophyte speculators. Does that mean that pot stocks will go the way of Bitcoin in a year or two?

Some will, and some won't. Like all fledgling industries with promise, there will be some companies that make it and a whole lot that won't. Next week we will discuss what kind of companies and what trends to look for in the months and years ahead.Austin Shuffield has been arrested and charged with multiple offenses following an incident caught on camera in which a woman was punched multiple times in Deep Ellum, Tx., on March 21, 2019. (Dallas County Sheriff's Department)

Parking Lot Attack Caught on Camera, Texas Man Arrested and Charged

Dallas Police have arrested a man suspected of punching a woman multiple times in a Deep Ellum parking lot in a brutal assault caught on camera.

Austin Shuffield, a 30-year-old bartender, faces charges of aggravated assault causing bodily injury, interference with an emergency call, and public intoxication following the violent incident on Wednesday, March 20, according to WFAA.

Footage of the altercation was recorded by witnesses and shows a manwho at one point pulls out a handgunwind up and deliver five blows to a womans head area.

All I could do was try and protect myself, said victim LDaijohnique Lee, reported WFAA. He literally sat there and beat me like a man.

The guy in the picture is Austin Shuffield, he viciously assaulted this young lady while also brandishing a gun!! #womanbeater pic.twitter.com/bbluad3KuD  Addie Bishop (@bishop_addie) March 22, 2019

A Parking Lot Altercation

According to the arrest warrant cited by WFAA, police were called at about 4:26 a.m. Wednesday to a disturbance, where they encountered a 24-year-old woman who said she had been assaulted.

Lee told WFAA she had been out in Deep Ellum with friends when she made the mistake of driving the wrong way down a street and blocking a parking lot exit.

I knew I was on a one-way street but I was stopping literally at the corner to let my friend out, she told the news outlet, adding that she was dropping off friends at a hostel.

The woman told the police that a man, alleged to be Shuffield, confronted her about blocking the parking lot exit, according to an arrest warrant seen by CBS DFW.

After she moved her vehicle into the lot, she said the same man approached her car and tried to get a picture of her license plate, the arrest warrant said. She told police she warned the man to get back or else she would mace him.

The video shows the man pull out a gun during the confrontation, though he never points it at the woman nor visibly threatens her with it.

I got scared, I was like you have a gun? The first thing I thought to do was call the police, she told WFAA.

The arrest warrant states that Lee told the police that when she went to call 911, the man slapped the phone out of her hand and kicked it away from her.

The video footage then shows the woman slap the man in the face. At this point, the man can be seen in the video slugging Lee five times in the area of the head and torso.

He charged at me, and he just kept hitting me, and I was like ok, ok, ok, Lee said.

A voice in the video can be heard saying Youre in deep trouble, bro.

This is Austin Shuffield of Dallas, Texas in this video brutally beating on a black women, she was trying to call the police but this THUG decides to knock the phone out of her hand and beats her pic.twitter.com/CErTGSTqrA  James Andre Jefferson Jr. (@JamesJeffersonJ) March 22, 2019

Hey chill, bro, thats a female! another calls out.

Lee told CBS11 over the phone Thursday night that she was heading to the hospital for treatment of what she believed could be a ruptured eardrum.

WFAA reported she had sustained minor injuries to the left side of her face. No further information was available on Lees condition.

Shuffield was arrested on the scene. He was booked into the Dallas County Jail and is being held on a $1,500 bond, according to NBC.

According to the arrest warrant, police found a .45 caliber Glock and knife inside Shuffields vehicle.

Swift Reaction

As news of the incident broke, Shuffield was swiftly fired from his job.

Braxton Martin, owner of the High and Tight Barbershop and Speakeasy where Shuffield worked as a bartender, told CBS that by Thursday afternoon, Shuffield was no longer employed there.

From the video itself, it shows an aggravated assault to our eyes. That is something needs to be dealt with quickly and swiftly and thats what were trying to do and make sure its handled properly, said Martin.

Watching that video literally makes me cry, Lee told WFAA. It didnt even have to go that far, I just keep thinking why? It wasnt that serious of a situation.Police Arrest 16 and Seize $35M Worth of Pot in Atlanta Grow Houses

Marijuana worth $35 million has been seized across three Atlanta counties following a five-month long investigation that led to the arrest of 16 people, authorities announced Wednesday.

Police raided five large grow houses in Gwinnett, Henry and Clayton counties on March 14, each with an average of 340 to 1,500 marijuana plants.

$35M worth of pot, other illegal drugs found in elaborate grow houses, police say: https://t.co/QRXzDppHNR @wsbtv pic.twitter.com/hGTLaDayFQ  Linda Stouffer (@LindaWSB) March 21, 2019

Police recovered 3,174 marijuana plants altogether, along with THC candies, THC oil, cocaine, illegal mushrooms, 22 firearms, around $676,500 in cash, and six vehicles, the press release said. THC, also known as Tetrahydrocannabinol, is the chemical responsible for many of the psychological effects of marijuana.

Police estimate the total street value of the seized drugs is around $35 million.

Over $35 million in drugs were seized from several grow houses. Open images for more information. pic.twitter.com/3yPEL80yfu  Gwinnett Police Dept (@GwinnettPd) March 20, 2019

To those passing by, no one would have suspected that these five marijuana grow houses were harboring criminal activity, police said.

The grow homes, the largest of which was 8,500 square-feet in Norcross, had sophisticated equipment to manufacture high-grade marijuana, authorities said.

Authorities uncovered two large drug trafficking organizations that embedded themselves into the community, Gwinnett County police said in a press release.

The 16 suspects are aged between 26 and 54 and are members of large-scale organization that operates in the southeast region of the U.S., police said.

The following people were charged in reference to a significant drug investigation spanning the past 5 months. pic.twitter.com/zgn0oeQCnL  Gwinnett Police Dept (@GwinnettPd) March 20, 2019

The detectives learned that the operation was tied to a larger international organization serving not only Gwinnett County and the metro-Atlanta area but also the southeast United States, the press release continued.

Dacula, Jonesboro, Locust Grove and Lawrenceville were named by Gwinnett County police as the locations of the other grow homes searched.

Major Cleo Atwater, commander of the Narcotics Unit, said, The detectives assigned to the Narcotics Unit truly committed themselves to this criminal investigation. Because of their hard work, a significant amount of drugs will be kept out of our neighborhoods and schools. pic.twitter.com/51JDUEYAt8  Gwinnett Police Dept (@GwinnettPd) March 20, 2019

Major Cleo Atwater, commander of the Narcotics Unit, said, The detectives assigned to the Narcotics Unit truly committed themselves to this criminal investigation. Because of their hard work, a significant amount of drugs will be kept out of our neighborhoods and schools, Gwinnett Police Department tweeted.

The work of the detectives in this case is a shining example of the dedication our officers have to serving the community, Police Chief Butch Ayers, 35, added.

Chief Butch Ayers said, The work of the detectives in this case is a shining example of the dedication our officers have to serving the community. pic.twitter.com/n8HSZcDoJv  Gwinnett Police Dept (@GwinnettPd) March 20, 2019

As the investigation is still ongoing, more arrests could be made, local media reported.

This is still very active. We are still following up on leads to see where where our next seizure, our next information that we get, Corporal Michele Pihera, of the Gwinnett County Police Department told WSB-TV Atlanta.

It is illegal to grow, buy, sell or smuggle medical or recreational marijuana in Georgia, Fox News reported.

The news comes as Federal agents seized $450 kilos of cocaine with an estimated street value of $12 million at the Port of Philadelphia on Tuesday morning.

The cocaine, valued at $27,000 per kilo, was seized on board the Desiree and later taken for processing at a warehouse by agents, ABC7 Chicago reported.

The drugs bust was the second largest at the Port of Philadelphia this month.Care-carrying medical marijuana patients sample the brownies at Los Angeles' first-ever cannabis farmer's market at the West Coast Collective medical marijuana dispensary, on the fourth of July, or Independence Day, in Los Angeles, Calif. on July 4, 2014. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

Police Investigating After Pot Laced Brownies Served at Lunch for Seniors

A monthly community lunch for a group of Ontario seniors took a strange turn this week after many attendees got sick from consuming cannabis-laced brownies, provincial police said March 21.

Const. Miles Loach said the seniors began seeking medical help within less than an hour of eating chocolate brownies served as a dessert option at the catered gathering at the community centre in Whitestone, Ont., about half an hour east of Parry Sound, Ont.

There was 10 that went to our health centre because of the symptoms of being high, Loach said in a telephone interview. They did tests on them and found that it was marijuana that they were high on.

Loach said police received a call shortly before 6 p.m. on Tuesday after the flurry of arrivals at the local health centre.

He said one by one, lunch attendees reported feeling symptoms ranging from dry mouth to dizziness to disorientation. A few even reported nausea and vomiting, Loach said.

Puzzled by the spike in people reporting similar symptoms, Loach said investigators began asking questions about the days activities. It wasnt long before a pattern emerged.

We got a hold of everybody who was at the meeting and the only people that had these symptoms were the ones that ate the chocolate  brownies, he said.

Loach said the dessert was one of the offerings served at the gathering, which typically functions as a social opportunity for the communitys elderly residents.

He said police are now actively investigating to see how the cannabis-laced brownies made their way on to the menu.

Loach said that if anyone at the catering company or beyond is determined to have spiked the brownies on purpose, they could find themselves facing a charge of administering a noxious substance.

He said no such determination has yet been made, however, and the investigation remains open.

None of the seniors appeared to recognize the symptoms of cannabis at the time, Loach said. Nor did they suffer any lasting effects of their unexpected high, he said.

Thank goodness nobody was injured, he said. Because if somebody had been allergic or got in their vehicle and drove and had an accident and killed somebody or whatever, then wed be facing a whole different set of charges.

High-Potency Cannabis Linked to Psychosis: Research

Fortunately for the elderly, they did not break out in a psychotic episode, but their chances of doing so would double if they were to wonder the foggy streets of Amsterdam.

According to research, if high-potency cannabis mysteriously disappeared from Amsterdams smoke-filled coffee shops and streets, the number of psychotic episodes in the city would be cut in half.

Thats the conclusion of researchers who examined the link between cannabis use and psychosis, drawing on data from 11 European cities.

The research, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, showed that daily cannabis use, especially of high potency cannabis, is strongly linked to the risk of developing psychosis.

Psychosis is a medical condition characterized by hallucinations and delusionsdistinct from hearing voices, paranoia, or mind-altering effect of being high on drugs.

Observational studies and biological evidence support a causal link between cannabis use and psychosis, said a statement from Kings College London. But until now, it has been unclear whether, at a population level, patterns of cannabis use influence rates of psychosis.

The link was particularly marked in the cities of London and Amsterdam, where skunk is smoked at much higher levels than other European cities.

Using records, the researchers identified all individuals in the cities who had their first psychotic episode over a five-year period, including information about their history of cannabis use.

They categorized their cannabis use into two categories by looking at levels of delta-6-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Anything over 10 percent was high-potency.

They compared the 901 people with a first episode of psychosis with 1,237 healthy controls to be able to adjust for other risk factors.

Once adjusted for other factors, the authors found that across the 11 European sites, people who used cannabis on a daily basis were three times more likely to have a diagnosis of first episode psychosis, compared with people who had never used cannabis, said the KCL statement. This increased to five times more likely for daily use of high potency cannabis.

Lead author Dr. Marta Di Forti said in a statement, Our findings are consistent with previous studies showing that the use of cannabis with a high concentration of THC has more harmful effects on mental health than the use of weaker forms

In Amsterdam, those who reported using high-potency cannabis on a daily basis were nine times more likely to develop psychosis, compared with those who didnt use marijuana.

Risk to Young People

In London, a third of psychosis cases are the result of smoking skunk, according to the study. In Amsterdam, it is half.

Cannabis with a THC content of 14 percent or higher makes up 94 percent of the drug sold on the streets of London.

Weve got a problem with potency, Nick Hickmott from the British drug and alcohol charity Addaction told the BBC. People who regularly take lots of high strength cannabis are at risk of potentially serious harm. It can be particularly harmful for younger, developing brains.

Last year a California study found that the impact of cannabis use on skills, memory, and behavior is worse than alcohol.

The research also suggests cannabis works as a gateway drug by reducing the mental capacity to control the impulses associated with addictive behavior.

Three thousand and eight hundred adolescents were tracked from the age of around 13 over a period of four years.

The researchers, from the University of Montreal, are urging teenagers to delay their use of cannabis, saying it affects important cognitive functions.

A statistical link was already established between drug use and impaired cognition in teenagers. However, previous studies had not been able to establish that cannabis use was causing the drop in cognition.

Dr. Patricia Conrod, from the Department of Psychiatry at Universite de Montreal, said, Our study is unique in that it followed a large sample of high school students from seventh to 10th grade using cognitive and substance-use measures.

Using this big-data approach, we were able to model the complex nature of the relationship between these sets of variables.

The researchers looked at year-to-year changes in substance use and cognitive development in recall memory, perceptual reasoning, inhibition, and working memory.

The Epoch Times reporter Simon Veazey contributed to this articleIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) welcomes US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to his residence in Jerusalem on March 21, 2019. (Jim Young/AFP/Getty Images)

Pompeo Suggests God May Have Sent Trump to Protect Israel

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested in an interview on March 21 that its very possible God sent President Donald Trump to protect and defend Israel from the Iranian regime.

In an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) during his trip in Israel, Pompeo was asked whether the president has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace while on the topic of the Islamic regimes aggression in the Middle East. Queen Esther is a biblical heroine who rescued the Jewish people from genocide.

U.S. Secretary of State @SecPompeo and Israeli PM @netanyahu visit the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, March 21 2019. The two officials were joined by @USAmbIsrael Friedman Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz & Western Wall Heritage Foundation Director Mordechai Eliav pic.twitter.com/zpvk10nfHb  USEmbassyJerusalem (@usembassyjlm) March 21, 2019

An excellent meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The alliance between our two countries is stronger than ever. Israel and the United States are working in close coordination to roll back Iranian aggression in the region and around the world. pic.twitter.com/7lAOhhvSAb  Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) March 20, 2019

Pompeo replied, as a Christian, I certainly believe thats possible. He added that to see the remarkable history of the faith in this place and the work that our administrations done to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state remains. I am confident that the Lord is at work here.

The U.S. secretary of state is currently on a tour of the Middle East. He visited Kuwait prior to Israel before heading to Lebanon on March 22.

To be there with the Israeli prime minister and ambassador from the United States to Israel was really an important moment, Pompeo said, reported CBN. It was special for me as a Christian. It was special I think to show the commitment the United States has to this democracy, this Jewish nation of Israel.

EXCLUSIVE: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tells CBN News he believes President Donald Trump is being used by God to help defend the Jewish state of Israel.  CBN News  2019321

On March 21, the president announced that it was time to back Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights that Israel seized from Syria in 1967.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability! Trump said on Twitter.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

The United States recognition of the disputed area would mark a shift in policy a week before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Washington to meet with Trump and address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

In response, Netanyahu thanked Trump on Twitter for his comments: At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump!

At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump! @realDonaldTrump  Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) March 21, 2019

God Wanted Donald Trump to Become President

In another CBN interview in January, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said she believed God wanted Donald Trump to become president.

Speaking to David Brody and Jennifer Wishon of CBN, she explained: I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times and I think that He wanted Donald Trump to become president.

Thats why hes there, and I think he has done a tremendous job in supporting a lot of the things that people of faith really care about.

The Epoch Times reporter Michael Wing and Reuters contributed to this report.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister at his residence in Jerusalem on March 21, 2019. (Amir Cohen/AFP/Getty Images)

Pompeo Warns Israel That Chinese Investment Into Country Could Hinder US Cooperation

While in Israel on a two-day visit, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that the security risks of Chinas continued investments in Israel could compromise future intelligence-sharing and other cooperation between the United States and its Middle Eastern ally.

Pompeo made the comments during a March 21 interview with local Israeli broadcaster Channel 13.

We want to make sure every country is wide-eyed and awake with regard to the policy threats posed by China, he said, according to Times of Israel. America will have to make decisions too. If certain systems go in certain places, then Americas efforts to work alongside you will be more difficult, and in some places we wont be able to do so.

Intelligence sharing might have to be reduced, co-location of security facilities might have to be reduced, we want to make sure countries understand this and know the risks, he added.

The comments came on the heels of a new report on Israel-China relations published that same day by U.S. policy think tank RAND, which outlined security concerns and espionage risks associated with Chinas ambitions to acquire high-tech through investments in Israeli tech firms. The Chinese regime also seeks to take advantage of Israels strategic geographic location to invest in infrastructure projects that benefit Chinas tradewith insufficient returns for Israel and possibly putting the United States at risk, according to the report.

US Alarm

These concerns are not new. Last November, the Hudson Institute published an analysis concluding that Beijing was investing heavily in Israels artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge tech sectors so that any military applications could be used to serve the Chinese military. Building such commercial ties, according to the Institute, would also help China bulk up its geopolitical influence in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, during a January visit to Israel, John Bolton, national security adviser to President Donald Trump, raised to the Israeli prime minister U.S. concerns about the countrys willingness to work with Chinese telecoms firms in sensitive tech sectors.

For example, Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has an research and development center in Israel, and in December 2016, acquired HexaTier, an Israeli cybersecurity startup.

Pompeos comments were the first indication that U.S. authorities would take direct action in Israel in the wake of Chinas maneuvers.

The State Secretary mentioned Huawei specifically in his March 21 comments, explaining that the firm poses a real risk to the people of Israel due to the risk of the Chinese regime conducting espionage through its technology.

Another project highlighted by think tanks and U.S. officials alike is Chinas successful bid to operate a private port at Haifa, a commercial hub that is also home to an Israeli naval base.

The base regularly hosts joint U.S.-Israel navy drills and visits by U.S. vessels.

Gary Roughead, a retired U.S. admiral, told Newsweek in a Sept. 14 interview, about the security implications: The Chinese port operators will be able to monitor closely U.S. ship movements, be aware of maintenance activity, and could have access to equipment moving to and from repair sites, and interact freely with our crews over protracted periods.

Growing Relations

The Epoch Times previous reporting examined the uptick in Chinese investment in Israel, which has focused on scoring military technology-related deals and funneling money into tech sectors that the Chinese regime wants to aggressively develop for its domestic industries.

According to a report released by the Tel Aviv-based research firm IVC Research Center, Chinas investments in the countrys tech startups reached $325 million during the first three quarters of 2018, a 37 percent rise from the year prior.

Meanwhile, annual trade between the two nations has now surpassed $11 billion, 200 times larger than the annual figure back in 1992, according to data from Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Local Actions

Different voices within Israeli government and society are taking notice.

The government said it would open an interagency review into the Haifa deal, while local newspaper Haartez reported in December 2018 that legislation to set up a government committee that would screen foreign investment for national security risks has moved forward.

The countrys National Security Council also has plans to draft a special report on the national defense implications of foreign investments, as well as China and Russias cyber espionage efforts, according to a Feb. 25 report by local media Maariv.

Meanwhile, multiple newspaper editorials have since highlighted the issue of Chinas courtship of Israel.

Its a story of influence, China buys more and more infrastructure, and thus bases its position in the battle for supremacy between it and the United States, an official told local media People & Computers in a March 4 editorial.

Haartez predicted in a March 5 analysis that when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the United States later this month, he will likely seek to assure Trump that an investment-vetting mechanism will get approved and established in Israel.

Frank Fang contributed to this report.Read Attorney General Barrs Letter Regarding Mueller Report

Attorney General Bill Barr issued a letter regarding the completion of special counsel Robert Muellers final report about alleged Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election.

Barr now has the option regarding how to disclose Muellers report to the public.

In the letter, he announced Mueller submitted his report to the Department of Justice on March 22.

The attorney generals letter reads as follows:

Dear Chairman Graham, Chairman Nadler, Ranking Member Feinstein, and Ranking Member Collins:

I write to notify you pursuant to 28 C.F.R. 600.9(a)(3) that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters. In addition to this notification, the Special Counsel regulations require that I provide you with a description and explanation of instances (if any) in which the Attorney General or acting Attorney General concluded that a proposed action by a Special Counsel was so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued. 28 C.F.R. 600.9(a)(3).

There were no such instances during the Special Counsels investigation.

The Special Counsel has submitted to me today a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions he has reached, as required by 28 C.F.R. 600.8(c). I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsels principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.

Separately, I intend to consult with Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Special Counsel Mueller to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Departments long-standing practices and policies. I remain committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review.

Finally, the Special Counsel regulations provide that the Attorney General may determine that public release of this notification would be in the public interest. 28 C.F.R. 600.9 (c). I have so determined, and I will disclose this letter to the public after delivering it to you.

Sincerely,

William P. Barr

Attorney GeneralRwanda Plans to Collect DNA From 12 Million Citizens in Worlds First Nationwide Database

Rwanda is planning to create a country-wide DNA database that will collect samples from all 12 million of its citizens, in what will make it the first of its kind in the world.

The proposal was announced by Rwandas Minister for Justice and Attorney General Johnston Busingye who said the move is a bid to tackle crimes such as murder, defilement, and rape in the country, the Independent reported.

So the @RwandaGov through @Rwanda_Justice is proposing a DNA database for all citizens. It is a costly investment. It could cost more than Rwf1 trillion. Similarly, there is a debate around privacy  how to handle DNA data, sharing it, retaining it, etc. Should this happen?  Julius Bizimungu (@Julio_Bizimungu) March 20, 2019

We have come a long way in science and I want to assure you that the ultimate goal is to have all the necessary equipment and technical knowhow to provide accurate information about who is responsible for the crime, Busingye said, while speaking at Justice Week in Kigali, the countrys capital, on Monday, March 18.

Today,as part of #JusticeWeek19,the Minister of State in @Rwanda_Justice Hon @EvodeU,the Deputy DG of @nrs_rwanda ACP @GilbertGumira visited Nyagatare Juvenile Prison & delivered the message about emerging crimes(drug dealing, Corruption,etc.)to children under improsonment there. pic.twitter.com/o0Kvfpzlsb  NATIONAL REHABILITATION SERVICE (@nrs_rwanda) March 20, 2019

Authorities have justified the plans by saying the database could speed up the process in identifying criminals.

The Secretary General of the Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB), Jeannot Ruhunga, explained that testing the DNA of a number of suspects can avoid or delay criminal investigations, Rwandan daily The New Times reported.

We think we have the technical basis now to launch into the development of a DNA database. That said, it is, first of all, a legal process.

We will examine global best practice on the issue, propose appropriate law, and implement accordingly, Busingye added.

While Busingye didnt state when the proposal could be given the go-ahead, he added that it still needs to secure funding and go through parliament, according to The New Times.

Closing the #INTERPOL African Regional Conference, #Rwandas Minister of Justice and Attorney General Johnston Busingye said the search for common ground in fighting transnational organized crime is todays most important global policing concern. pic.twitter.com/R1djEwso7M  INTERPOL (@INTERPOL_HQ) February 7, 2019

Rwanda is currently ranked as the second safest place in Africa, according to a 2018 Global Law and Order report, which states that 83 percent of residents in Rwanda feel safe walking alone at night.

In response to the report, Busingye said he wants Rwanda to rank first in the world, The New Times reports.

We aim for the best situation for anybody on our territory. It is the assessment of these situations that find us where we are. Our ultimate target is to be number one to Rwandans and Rwandan residents.

We are going for the top, we are not going to relax or become complacent. The most important part is to ensure that everyone on our territory finds peace and safety in our security, be it in the rule of law and in our security organs, he said.

The Government is considering creating a database for DNA and biometric data for all Rwandans. The database will facilitate pinning criminals, especially in rape, defilement and murder cases.https://t.co/SGI87LyoF0 pic.twitter.com/8yNnWAYPK2  The New Times (Rwanda) (@NewTimesRwanda) March 20, 2019

Meanwhile, human rights campaigners have voiced concerns that the plans could violate international human rights laws if the DNA data were to be misused by the government.

Alexandrine Pirlot de Corbion, Global South Programme Lead with London-based charity Privacy International, told the Independent the DNA database could be at risk of being misused in the future.

Around the world, we have seen instances where large sets of data have been misused for repressionallowing authorities to identify and profile groups in society that a government might want to locate, she explained.

Rwanda is not the first nation to implement a large-scale database of its residents DNA.

China is using DNA technology supplied by the U.S. to track Uighurs, the Muslim minority in Xinjiang. pic.twitter.com/aWrty6gbOS  AJ+ (@ajplus) March 12, 2019

Alarming reports from Chinas northwestern region Xinjiang have detailed the Chinese Communist Partys forced mass-collection of blood and saliva samples from the regions predominantly Uyghur population.

From 2016 to 2017, up to 36 million had DNA samples collected as part of a program called Physicals for All, The New York Times reported.A salmonella scare which sparked a widespread national recall of eggs is an isolated outbreak according to an industry group which insists the majority of products are still safe to eat.

Theres been a nationwide egg recall over a potential salmonella contamination in Victoria. Bridgewater Poultry sells products to @Woolworths and independent grocers in NSW as well as @Coles in other parts of the country. #EggRecall #7News pic.twitter.com/f5sn7Pf4kG  7 News Sydney (@7NewsSydney) March 21, 2019

 Food recall  Bridgewater Poultry is recalling various barn laid eggs and cage free eggs in ACT, NSW, Vic., Tas., and SA. The recall is due to potential Salmonella Enteriditis contamination https://t.co/XoaQSF8D1a #FoodRecallAu #FSANZ #FoodRecall #SalmonellaSE pic.twitter.com/NYVDl3a8C9  FoodStandardsAusNZ (@FSANZnews) March 20, 2019

A day after Australian health authorities issued a warning for some eggs produced by Victorias Bridgewater Poultry, Egg Farmers of Australia on March 22 moved to reassure consumers.

Spokesman John Coward said from time-to-time salmonella may be present in eggs given all warm-blooded animals can carry the bacteria in their intestines.

Bit of a concern that they are reporting that we have Salmonella Enteritidis in Australia. I would want this checked. SE is a different beast for the poultry industry and would make it mandatory for refrigeration etc despite this, we could improve our egg monitoring. pic.twitter.com/SMz1rlVudp  Kathryn Wilks (@kmwilks) March 21, 2019

If varying strains of salmonella are present, in this case we have quite a nasty one, then the chance of it getting through a very small percentage and contaminating some eggs is there and thats what happened, he said on ABC radio on Friday.

We are seeing an isolated outbreak. But there was an outbreak in NSW late last year.

Some egg brands have been recalled across Victoria, NSW, Tasmania and South Australia after positive tests from the Bridgewater farm and numerous cases of salmonella enteritidis.

Symptoms include fever, headache, diarrhoea, abdominal pain and nausea, and usually start six to 72 hours after eating the contaminated food and can last up to a week.

It is like an exotic pest, its the cane toad of salmonella, Victorias Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said on Thursday.

The companys free-range and barn-laid eggs are packaged as Woolworths brand, Victorian Fresh, and Loddon Valley, with best-before dates ranging from March 20 to April 29.

The eggs should be destroyed.

An exotic strain of salmonella has prompted a recall of some egg brands across four states and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of hens. #9Newshttps://t.co/OarqxM6ute  Nine News Sydney (@9NewsSyd) March 21, 2019

An investigation is underway to reveal links between the Victorian and NSW outbreaks and quarantine measures are in place at the Bridgewater farm where thousands of infected hens are expected to be destroyed.The Supreme Court Building is seen on in Washington on Dec. 24, 2018. (Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images)

Socialists Plan to Pack Supreme Court

Commentary

Socialists are plotting to pack the U.S. Supreme Court, with a goal to destroy the first non-leftist majority for 70 years.

Currently, the U.S. Supreme Court consists of four leftist justices, three constitutionalists, and two right-leaning moderates. Socialists are terrified that if Ruth Bader Ginsbergor another leftist justiceretires or dies before President Donald Trump leaves office, he or she may be replaced by another constitutionalist with potentially dire consequences for their radical agenda.

Socialist achievements, such as affirmative action, hate speech legislation, gun control measures, and restrictions on religious liberties, could all be overturned by a constitutionalist majority in the Supreme Court.

So, the socialists have hatched a plan.

A new group has been formed called Pack the Courts that aims to pressure the next Democratic president to expand the Supreme Court beyond its current nine justices. If the next president can expand the court to 11 or 13 justices, adding all leftists, they can then outvote the constitutionalist minority and the socialist agenda will be back on track.

According to Alex Thompson of Politico:

[Pack the Courts] has raised more than $500,000 to jump-start its effort and has partnered with Demand Justice, a progressive group founded in 2018 that is trying to match Republicans organizing efforts around the judiciary.

At Demand Justice, we strongly believe that reforming the courtespecially by expanding itis the cornerstone for re-building American democracy, said Brian Fallon, director of Demand Justice and a former Hillary Clinton press secretary. The Kavanaugh court is a partisan operation, and democracy simply cannot function when stolen courts operate as political shills. We are thrilled to work in coalition with the team at Pack the Courts to undo the politicization of the judiciary.

Pack the Courts is led by two highly influential activists: Executive Director Aaron Belkin, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, and Sean McElwee, the organizations director of research and polling.

Belkin, who also heads the Palm Center, a think tank based at the University of CaliforniaSanta Barbara, designed and implemented much of the campaign responsible for helping end the militarys Dont ask, dont tell policy in 2011.

According to Belkins website, Harvard law professor Janet Halley said of Belkin, Probably no single person deserves more credit for the repeal of Dont ask, dont tell. Additionally, Obama-era Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Anthony Kurta credited Belkins Palm Center as one of the organizations most responsible for helping the military lift its ban on transgender personnel.

Tom Ammiano, government relations adviser at the Palm Center, also deserves a little credit for the centers successes. Ammiano has served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the San Francisco School Board, and in the California Assembly. In the 1990s, Ammiano worked closely with the San Francisco Communist Party and also with the Party spin-off Committees of Correspondence. In December 1993, Ammiano appeared on the bill of the local annual socialist fundraising event, the Bolshevik Cafe.

New York-based McElwee is an out and proud socialist. He is credited for popularizing the Abolish ICE slogan picked up by many leading Democrats last year. He convenes a weekly socialist happy hour in New York, where presidential candidates mingle with radical activists. McElwee is intensely partisan and brutally ideological.

He recently wrote in a tweet:

There was a recent study that suggested Republicans were so effective at murdering poor people through policy that it meaningfully affected election outcomes. Thats the level of raw political brutality the GOP operates on. The sooner progressives internalize this, the better.  [expletive] your enemies, help your friends. thats the sum of politics. there is nothing else.

McElwee is very close to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and their famous congresswoman, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.). Through his company, Data for Progress, McElwee had substantial input into Ocasio-Cortezs Green New Deal, the unabashedly socialist plan for a government takeover of, well, just about everything.

Buoyed by Ocasio-Cortezs shock defeat of Democrat incumbent Joe Crowley, McElwee listed vulnerable moderate Democrats who could be challenged in 2020, including Kathleen Rice of Long Island, Jim Cooper of Nashville, and Dutch Ruppersberger of Baltimore.

Pack the Courts has retained Means of Production, a digital marketing firm, to produce its online content. The company became famous producing ads for Ocasio-Cortezs campaign. All three Means of Production foundersNaomi Burton, Natasha Fernandez-Silber, and Nick Hayesare Detroit DSA members, and most of their clients are DSA activists or supporters.

Well-known comedian, social commentator, and TV host W. Kamau Bell is on Pack the Courts advisory board. Until recently, Bell served on the advisory board of Bay Area nonprofit Race Forward, alongside Richard Healey of the DSA, Freedom Road Socialist Organization affiliate Scot Nakagawa, and Andy Shallal of the ultra-left Institute for Policy Studies.

Pack the Courts is clearly a socialist organization. Its leaders have proven organizational and fund-raising abilities. They are closely aligned to the countrys largest Marxist group, the 55,000-strong DSA, which has several allies in Congress.

Precedent

There is a precedent for Pack the Courts plan. In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, frustrated by a noncompliant Supreme Court, tried a similar plan to push through his leftist legislative agenda.

According to the History Channels website This Day in History:

On February 5, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt announces a controversial plan to expand the Supreme Court to as many as 15 judges, allegedly to make it more efficient. Critics immediately charged that Roosevelt was trying to pack the court and thus neutralize Supreme Court justices hostile to his New Deal.  Flushed with his landslide reelection in 1936, President Roosevelt issued a proposal in February 1937 to provide retirement at full pay for all members of the court over 70. If a justice refused to retire, an assistant with full voting rights was to be appointed, thus ensuring Roosevelt a liberal majority. Most Republicans and many Democrats in Congress opposed the so-called court-packing plan.

After two justices moved to the left, Roosevelts plan became redundant and failed in the U.S. Senate by 70 votes to 22. Not long after, Roosevelt was able to nominate his own Supreme Court justice, and by 1942, seven of the nine justices were Roosevelt appointees.

Those Roosevelt appointees were the beginning of a near-permanent leftist Supreme Court majority, which has been steadily eroding the United States constitutional liberties ever since.

Now, after 70 years of leftist majorities, the Supreme Court has started to move back in a more constitutional directionwhich is why socialists want to resurrect Roosevelts recipe for judicial tyranny.

We cant hope that any Democratic senators would oppose their president over such a plan. It would almost certainly succeed if the Democrats take the White House and the Senate in 2020.

Liberty in America teeters on the edge of a very high cliff. We must do everything we can to claw our freedoms back to safer ground.

Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.An internet server at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, China, on Nov. 19, 2014. (Johannes EIsele/AFP/Getty Images)

Supermicro Backup Server Used by Hillary Clinton Highlights Security Risks of China Supply Chain

A little-noticed detail in the FBIs investigation files related to former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clintons email servers has highlighted the security risks inherent in todays tech supply chain.

Clintons use of private email servers during her 20092013 tenure raised the question of whether classified information was improperly stored or transmitted.

President Donald Trump has previously suggested on Twitter that Clintons emails were accessed by China. Several media also have cited anonymous sources that have said China had access to her emails.

But the brand of the particular server Clinton used to back up her emails became a telling detail after Bloombergs explosive report published in October 2018 revealed that a malicious microchip was allegedly planted by Chinese spies into server motherboards manufactured in China.

In 2013, after Clinton left office, the IT service provider Clinton contracted to manage the email server, Platte River Networks (PRN), moved the server to a data center in Secaucus, New Jersey, called Equinix. There, PRN staff set up a backup system using Datto, a U.S. data backup company. Dattos backup server took multiple snapshots a day of the main email server which were then deleted every 60 days.

That Datto server was in turn manufactured by Supermicro, according to FBI files.

Supermicro is the tech company at the center of Bloombergs story.

Twitter user @Joestradamus91 was among the first to notice and publicize this detail.

Citing anonymous U.S. officials and tech company insiders, the Bloomberg report claimed that a Chinese military unit designed malicious microchips with backdoor access, and was able to secretly implant them at Chinese factories that supplied Supermicro with motherboards. Those compromised motherboards were then built into servers assembled at Supermicro.

The U.S.-based company, founded by a Taiwanese businessman in 1993, is a popular vendor of choice among tech companies. It designs servers according to clients specifications, often offered at much cheaper prices than its competitors, according to Gary Miliefsky, a top cybersecurity expert and CEO of Cyber Defense Media Group. Most of Supermicros components are made in China.

Though Supermicro and its two clients mentioned in the Bloomberg articleApple and Amazonhave all denied the allegations, cyber experts believe such attacks are plausible but difficult to trace and attribute to a culprit.

Yossi Appleboum, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Sepio Systems and a former Israeli intelligence officer, said in a previous interview with the Israeli edition of The Epoch Times that he had seen such hardware implants before, including in computer keyboards and printers.

In most cases, hardware manufacturers leave hardware connectors open on the motherboard, which enable access either to the processors or internet connections. This situation is like paradise to the attackers, Appleboum said.

In response to the Bloomberg report, Apple wrote a letter to Congress that said it hasnt detected outbound traffic that could suggest malware or malicious activity.

But Miliefsky noted that seemingly benign traffic could be exploited. A hypothetical example: Traffic could be going to a website that sells Apple products, but that IP address could have been set up by an attacker to transfer data to China.

Another example of a hard-to-detect attack is if it were designed to be triggered at a specific time in the future.

Datto has had security flaws before, such as in November 2017 when it detected vulnerabilities that allowed remote access to data, though the company said at the time that no client device was reported to have been affected.

Datto did not respond to a request for comment.

It isnt known whether or not Clintons Supermicro-manufactured Datto server had vulnerabilities that could have been exploited by Chinese entities; Supermicro didnt respond to a request for comment. But Miliefsky said there is an inherent risk with using Chinese-manufactured products.

Most hardware built in China now have a zero-day vulnerability, Miliefsky said in a phone interview, referring to an existing flaw that could be exploited by attackers without the developers knowledge. By the time the developer notices the attack, the attackers have already done the damage.

If theres malicious hardware, it can take down an F-15 [stealth fighter jet] if they have a backdoor, Miliefsky said.

Given the Chinese regimes prolific cyberattacks, the fact that so much of todays tech hardware is manufactured and developed in China is a major concern, Appleboum said.

Miliefsky said that to ensure the safety of data, U.S. businesses and consumers should audit where critical tech components are made and what is in their codes.

Supply chain management is one of the biggest topics in cybersecurity right now, he said.Reilly Pleads Guilty to Misleading Detectives In Ringer Murder Case

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  An Easthampton woman pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to state police detectives in a murder investigation.

Laura Reilly, 44, pleaded guilty to two counts of misleading police and was sentenced by Judge John A. Agostini in Berkshire Superior Court to two to four years at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Cedar Junction. The charges relate to the investigation into the alleged homicide of Joanne Ringer of Clarksburg in 2017.

"The judge agreed this was an egregious example of misleading police," District Attorney Andrea Harrington said in a statement on Friday. "We sought incarceration because Laura Reilly's lies not only stymied police in apprehending a murder suspect, they also had a devastating and lasting effect on Joanne Ringer's family and friends."

Ringer was reported missing in March 2017. Police identified Ringer's husband, Charles Reidy as a suspect, believing he had killed her. Police found Ringer's car abandoned in Easthampton a few days after she had been reported missing.

Reilly, an ex-girlfriend of Reidy, lied to police about being in contact with Reidy in the days surrounding Ringer's disappearance. Police later determined those statements were misleading and "wasted important time in the state police investigation," according to the district attorney's office.

In April, Reidy committed suicide. Ringer's body was not found until February 2018 in Hatfield. An autopsy could not confirm the cause of death because more than a year had passed since she went missing.

"If Laura Reilly told the truth about driving Reidy home on the day he reported Ringer missing and spending time with him the day after, police could have questioned Reidy about the killing prior to him committing suicide," Harrington said. "I offer my condolences to Ms. Ringer's loved ones, and we hope that this plea and sentence gives them some measure of comfort."

The district attorney's office recommended three to four years in prison. First Assistant District Attorney Karen Bell argued the case, calling Reidy's misleading statements "specific, intentional, purposeful, and calculated."

"The defendant's conduct and lies were specific, intentional, purposeful and calculated," Bell said in a statement. "At the time that the defendant spoke to the police, she was fully aware of the nature of the investigation. Intentionally misleading the police cuts at the core of our criminal justice system and threatens public safety."

Agostini concurred with the district attorney's office.

"The public was really the victim in this case," Agostini said, referencing the long search for Ringer and the extensive news coverage it produced. "It was not just police that were misled. It was all of us."Victoria Seltzer, 11, writes a passage on a cross setup in a makeshift memorial in front of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in memory of the 17 people that were killed on February 14, in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 21, 2018. Police arrested 19-year-old former student Nikolas Cruz for killing 17 people at the high school. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images,)

Sydney Aiello, Survivor of Parkland Mass Shooting, Takes Her Own Life, Parents Say

A student who survived the Parkland shooting in Florida has killed herself, according to reports on March 22.

Sydney Aiello, who graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and who was from Coconut Creek, took her own life last weekend, reported CBS Miami.

Her mother, Cara, said the 19-year-old was a vibrant teenager who focused on getting good grades, but added that she carried around the horrific memories of the Parkland shooting that left 17 people dead in February 2019.

The young woman was recently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to her mother, who said she was having difficulty attending college classes because she had a fear of being in a classroom.

Beautiful Sydney with such a bright future was taken from us way too soon. My friends sister and someone dear to Meadow. Any help for the family to cover funeral expenses would be appreciated. Please RT and donate! https://t.co/3eg2Su4Jbv  Hunter Pollack (@PollackHunter) March 21, 2019

Cara said before she took her own life, she had never asked anyone else for help.

Now, the grieving mother said she hopes that her daughters suicide can serve as a reminder to others that they can get the help that they need, according to CBS Miami.

It breaks my heart that weve lost yet another student from Stoneman Douglas, Ryan Petty, who is the father of Parkland shooting victim Alaina Perry, told the CBS affiliate.

My advice to parents is to ask questions, dont wait, he added, saying he is concerned that other survivors of the mass shooting might take their own lives in the wake of the tragedy.

A little more than a year after this photo was taken, both are gone. In February, Meadow was killed in the Parkland shooting. This week, Sydney took her own life. Please consider donating to her family to help cover some of the funeral costs. https://t.co/qxeUeFLhx1 pic.twitter.com/xSnMPAU0bD  Kenneth Preston (@kennethrpreston) March 21, 2019

Meadow Pollack, a victim in the shooting, was a close friend of Sydneys

Meadows father, Andrew Pollack, told the Miami Herald that his heart goes out to those poor, poor parents, referring to Sydneys parents.

Its terrible what happened. Meadow and Sydney were friends for a long, long time, Pollack continued. Killing yourself is not the answer.

He continued: If anyone feels like that they have no one that can understand their pain, if theres any student out there thats having a hard time, please reach out to me on Twitter. I understand you. You arent alone.

A GoFundMe page was set up to help Sydneys family to pay for her funeral.

Sydney spent 19 years writing her story as a beloved daughter, sister and friend to many, the GoFundMe says.

It adds: She lit up every room she entered. She filled her days cheerleading, doing yoga, and brightening up the days of others. Sydney aspired to work in the medical field helping others in need. On March 17th, 2019 Sydney became the guardian angel to many. It was a privilege to have you in our lives. Sydney, we will miss you and always love you. May you find peace in His arms.

Suicide Hotlines

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.

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Ten Men Detained Near Frankfurt on Suspicion of Islamist Attack Plot

BERLINTen men were detained in raids around Frankfurt on Friday, March 22, on suspicion of planning an Islamist attack using a vehicle and guns with the goal of killing as many people as possible, prosecutors said.

Several of the suspects, aged 20 to 42, were German citizens, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors office said, without naming the other nationalities.

They are believed to have agreed to carry out an Islamist, terrorist attack using a vehicle and guns that would kill as many non-believers as possible, the statement from the Frankfurt prosecutors said.

To prepare the attack, they had already made contact with different arms dealers, rented a large vehicle and collected financial assets to use for the purchase of guns and the execution of the planned murders, they added.

The main suspects were a 21-year old man from Offenbach, a city near Frankfurt, and two 31-year brothers from Wiesbaden, all of whom were associated with the Islamist Salafist community in the area, prosecutors said.

Another man was also detained, prosecutors said, without giving further details. There was no immediate statement from any lawyers for the detained men.

Authorities seized 20,000 euros in cash, several knives, small amounts of drugs and numerous documents and electronic devices, during raids carried out by 200 police forces and other law enforcement experts, the prosecutors said.

Turkeys President Broadcasts Footage of Terrorist Attacks As Social Media Giants Under Pressure to Remove It

As global pressure is mounting for social media giants to remove footage of the New Zealand Christchurch mosque attacks from their platforms, Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan used part of the footage as an election campaign prop in his rallies to secure votes for local elections this month.

Erdogan screened partially blurry footage of the shootings with the caption, A terrorist who is the enemy of Islam and the Turks, during a number of election campaign events over the weekend, the Financial Times reported.

Turkish President Erdogan is using a montage of New Zealand massacre to motivate pious voters before local electionhttps://t.co/pZkpSCS2Wb  Bloomberg (@business) March 17, 2019

The 17-minute footage of the fatal mosque shootings was first live-streamed by the accused gunman on Facebook, and the social media tech giantalong with Twitter and Googles YouTubeis struggling to spot new uploads despite enforcing a ban on the clip, reports The Guardian.

The calls follow Facebook admitting to removing 1.5 million videos around the world in the first 24 hours following the massacre which claimed the lives of 50.

In the first 24 hours we removed 1.5 million videos of the attack globally, of which over 1.2 million were blocked at upload  Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) March 17, 2019

In the first 24 hours we removed 1.5 million videos of the attack globally, of which over 1.2 million were blocked at upload  , Facebook Newsroom wrote on Twitter on March 16.

But Facebook failed to remove one version of the footage monitored by the Guardian for over six hours, while other versions on YouTube were left live for at least three hours.

The governments of New Zealand, Britain, and Australia have urged the tech giants to do more to halt the spreading of offensive material and terrorist content online.

Speaking to the Daily Express, UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid said social media platforms must do more to tackle offensive content or face legal ramifications, saying they had a responsibility not to do the terrorists work for them.

International media sites such as the Mirror, MailOnline, and the Sun have also been met with intense scrutiny over their decision publish parts of the footage.

MailOnline published a story which included an 18-second clip of the attack in al-Noor mosque in Christchurch on autoplay, with part of the clip featuring on the sites homepage. The media site also uploaded an alleged 74-page manifesto from the suspected gunman.

For a brief period this morning the Mirror website ran some edited footage filmed by the gunman in Christchurch. We should not have carried this. It is not in line with our policy relating to terrorist propaganda videos  Lloyd Embley (@Mirror_Editor) March 15, 2019

Both the footage and the manifesto were removed after the site received barrage of complaints, while The Mirror also removed its edited footage filmed in the Christchurch mosque, the Guardian reported.

Reporting by Andrea Shalal

The Epoch Times Reporter Isabel Van Brugen contributed to this report.Chinese leader Xi Jinping, left, and Prime Minister Li Keqiang applaud 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. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The Chinese Threat Grows

Commentary

Let me share with you the two most important insights about China that I have gained over the decades.

1) I was blessed to have a professor, mentor, and friend, now long deceased, who taught me valuable life lessons. He was one of the brightest people I have ever known, having taught both physics and three modern languages at the college level. He was also schooled in practical skills, having built his familys housea house in which I was privileged to be a guest resident during my senior year. Jean, the son of missionary parents, had been raised in China long before World War II and the subsequent rise of Mao Zedong.

When this man retired from teaching in the mid-1980s, I suggested that he write some articles about China for the newspaper I was writing for at the time. He humbly declined, telling me that he felt he didnt understand the Chinese sufficiently to write about them, since he had lived there only 18 years. That such a brilliant man would say that made a huge impact on me. It was a lesson both in humility and in conveying to me the complexities involved in truly understanding China and the Chinese.

2) In 198081, while I was earning my masters degree in economics, my landlord, Paul, was a retired Presbyterian missionary. He had spent 35 years in East Asia. Thirty of those years were in China, including a couple of years in a communist prison where he and his cellmates were habitually mistreated and tortured.

Those of you of a certain age may recall that, in 1980, one of the major stories in the world was Japans rapid, seemingly unstoppable economic growth. One evening, the reverend and I had a serious conversation about the direction of the world. He surprised me when he confidently stated, Its not Japan that America needs to worry about, but China. That may not sound particularly insightful now, but you have to remember that in 1980, the average per capita GDP in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) was only a couple hundred dollars per year.

Paul told me that the Chinese were immensely practical peoplefar more than the Japanese; that the Chinese would jettison the impractical, unviable ideology of orthodox Marxism; and that inevitably, they would adopt economic policies that would lead to tremendous economic progress. The good reverend nailed that prediction.

China Threat

During the 1980s, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, China changed its policies and became the fastest-growing major economy in the world. It also emerged as an aggressive player in the global geopolitical arena. By the late 1990s (if not earlier), some U.S. leaders began to recognize China as a potential threat and enemy. In response to Chinas emergence, a congressional committee published a report in 1999 documenting some of Chinas hostile tacticsthe Cox Report.

Its formal title was Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the Peoples Republic of China, and its findings were unanimously endorsed by the bipartisan committee.

In the foreword to the Cox Report, former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger stated, Communist Chinas long march against the United States is as tenacious as it is diversefrom campaign contributions used to buy influence in the White House, to purchasing an interest in American corporations, to high-tech spying, as well as stealing or buying our technology, opposing and blocking our foreign policy actions, and trying to displace American influence in Asia and the Pacific region.

The Cox Report is now 20 years old. What has changed over the past two decades? Nothingin terms of the general direction and tenor of Chinas policies. Rather than abating or subsiding, the threat has grown.

Consider the following:

Industrial espionage by Chinese actors and agents is rampant. The Epoch Times published a disturbing special report on Dec. 13, 2018, outlining Huaweis key role in implementing the sinister agenda of the Chinese communist regime.

A friend of mine here in Pennsylvania, who runs a small engineering firm, told me that a Chinese customer bought just one unit of a specialized product, reverse-engineered it, and has been selling pirated copies without paying a penny of royalties ever since.

The U.S. Navy currently describes itself and its private-sector partners as under cyber siege by Chinese hackers, and that the hacking appears to be preparation for great power conflict.

In the diplomatic area, just recently there have been reports of two sinister official actions taken by the Chinese regime. One is that China has blocked the U.N. Security Council from designating Masood Azhar as a terrorist.

Azhar is the founder of the terrorist group that claimed responsibility for the February ambush that killed at least 40 Indian soldiers in Kashmir. U.N. sanctions would subject Azhar to a travel ban and restrict his ability to move money around to commit more mayhem. That hardly seems like an unreasonable request for any peace-loving regime to support, but China remains unmoved. Instead of supporting this reasonable request to help protect innocent lives, the Chinese regime has adopted the pernicious policy of running interference for Azhar and the Pakistani government that allows Azhar and his band of terrorists to use Pakistan as its base of operations.

The other recent example of the Chinese regimes ruthless cold-heartedness is its March vote to torpedo a U.N. resolution that denounces Venezuelas fraud-riddled 2018 presidential election and calls for both a new election and humanitarian aid to the grievously suffering Venezuelan people. Utterly devoid of human compassion, the regime has sided with the brutes who are tyrannizing and devastating millions of their own citizens.

Sadly, Chinas contempt for the well-being of other peoples and territories goes back decades. Just ask the Tibetans, the Mongolians, and today, the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang Province. The Uyghurs are being treated like cattle. The Chinese communist regime, dispensing with due process of law, has taken a million or more Uyghurs from their homes and placed them in re-education programs. Now, the government is razing entire Uyghur neighborhoods in its campaign to annihilate their culture.

A new Cold War has already started. One difference from the previous Cold War is that China is in a much stronger economic position to project power than the economically feeble Soviet Union ever was. With its One Belt, One Road initiative and Made in China 2025 master plan, the Chinese communist regime is bent on world domination.

One can only hopenot only for our own sake, but for the sake of people around the worldthat Democratic and Republican leaders can set aside partisanship enough to forge a tough, united, long-term strategy to counter Chinas aggressive ambitions.

Mark Hendrickson is an adjunct professor of economics and sociology at Grove City College. He is the author of several books, including The Big Picture: The Science, Politics, and Economics of Climate Change.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.The War Against the Family

You may have heard that the ongoing war against the traditional family is a communist plot. Dont laugh. The family has been a primary target of socialist revolutionaries for well over 160 years.

In fact, the ongoing breakdown of the family coincides with the continued advance of socialism. The left has worked steadily to normalize divorce, abortion, and sexual perversion. To understand the lefts role in the breakdown of the family, however, it is first necessary to understand what the left is.

Setting aside the variable meanings of words like socialism, communism, and Marxism, a common set of ideas are found in all three. These ideas may be summarized in five parts, as follows: (1) that mans salvation may be achieved through political activism or a revolution, (2) which establishes peace by making all countries into one country (internationalism), (3) which is hostile to private ownership of the means of production (anti-capitalism), (4) which emancipates women from motherhood (feminism), (5) and which brings universal prosperity through universal cooperation and harmony.

What we have, in the ideas of socialism, communism, and Marxism, is the appearance of a new faith. It is a faith in which the Marxist-Leninists (i.e., communists) see themselves as the leading edge or vanguard. Such was the conceit of the Soviet state, and it remains the conceit of the Chinese Communist Party today. It is impossible to properly understand this new faith without understanding the clandestine work of the communist countries and their special services. According to intensive investigations carried out by congressional committees in the 1950s, the Soviet Union was the coordinating center for a global communist conspiracy that involved the infiltration and subversion of many nations, including the United States.

This subversion was not halted in the 1950s; according to many sourcessuch as Pete Earleys Comrade Jit continues today, despite the fall of the Soviet Union.

In discussing the war against the family, we must first show that communism, as the vanguard of the leftist faith, is much more than a conspiracy or a web of subversion. If we look carefully, we can see that civilization has been gradually passing from a belief in spiritual salvation to a belief in political salvation (through political activism). This passage from spiritual faith to political faith began during the Industrial Revolution. As might be expected, scientific and technological achievements led many people to materialism (the belief that nothing exists except matter). In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a materialist theory of mans origin by means of natural selection. With the acceptance of Darwins theory of evolution, humanity suffered a setback: If man is an evolutionary accident, then what possible meaning could life hold? How does man retain his dignity?

This is where Marxism comes into the picture. How does an aspiring acolyte of the new faith lay the foundations for heaven on earth? After all, man must now look to himself for salvation. From the Prison Notebooks of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, we learn that the potential for socialist consciousness will ultimately depend on the denial of common sense and human nature. Gramsci is not alone in this proposition. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said that communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it, therefore, acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.

According to Marxism, sexual morality is a weapon of the exploiting classes. Thus, sexual immorality is a weapon of class struggle. To break the back of capitalism, Marxism approves the doctrine of free love. It is no wonder, then, that the communist bloc (with the help of leftist allies in the West) promoted the breakdown of sexual norms in the 1960s. By dismissing sexual morality as the tool of an oppressive, male-dominated, racist society, the communists were striking a blow against traditional culture, social order, and religion.

Communist agents of influence have undermined the idea that men should be breadwinners and women should be homemakers. The validity of distinctive male and female roles has been denounced as harmful to women. According to the founder of modern feminism, Betty Friedan, the housewife lives in a comfortable concentration camp. Friedan explained, The women who adjust as housewives, who grow up wanting to be just a housewife, are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.

Where did Friedan get this outlandish idea? She was secretly a communist who had done extensive propaganda work for the Party, as David Horowitz explained in his 1999 Salon article Betty Friedans Secret Communist Past.

In the early days of Marxism, Engels wrote a book titled The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In this book, he advocated the abolition of the family and promoted collective child-rearing. Books of this kind, in the 19th century, made no impression on the public. It was only in the 20th century, after disparaging the role of the housewife, that the communists decisively undermined the family. This opened the door to no-fault divorcea law that was first tried in the Soviet Union. It turned marriage into an unenforceable contract. Motherhood was decisively undermined. Then came the legalization of abortion. A regime of infanticide was established, compromising millions of women.

There followed, in the wake of this, a series of astonishing developments: (1) a pornography epidemic, (2) the legalization of gay marriage, and (3) sex education for younger and younger children. What could be more demoralizing? Who would dare to resist, given the rising hedonistic imperative?

According to Marx in Vol. 3 of Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, destroying the family would lead to the destruction of Christianity. The secret of the Holy Family is the earthly family, noted Marx. To make the former disappear, the latter must be destroyed, in theory and in practice.

The German sociologist Gabriele Kuby observed that all sexual revolutionaries in the twentieth century have their spiritual roots in Marxism, according to her The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.

The revolutionary notion, as Kuby explains, holds that vice as a form of social control is virtually invincible. In other words, when the individual gives up sexual self-restraint, he engenders a rising totalitarian power. To understand how this power works, Kuby lists those who stand to benefit from the familys decline: (1) anyone wishing to make humanity into rootless fodder for the sake of global ambition, (2) anyone who wants the West to sink into a demographic winter, and (3) anyone who wants to eliminate Christianity.

The more we examine the war against the family, the more we discover the hidden hand of the communist vanguard. If a power is able to discredit motherhood and delegitimize masculine authority, how can that power be opposed?

The denial of sex differences, the legalization of same-sex marriage, gender reassignment for children, the disparagement of motherhood, the demonization of masculinityare ideas favored by the new religion of the left. All the philosophers, statesmen, and saints of past centuriespagan and Christianwould have condemned these ideas as lunacy. But here we are, in the 21st century, watching the lunacy unfold.

The final battle in the culture war is not far off. We do not know what the outcome will be. It is safe to say that life will eventually return to normal. It is a question of how much death and suffering will take place in the meantime.

J.R. Nyquist has been a columnist for WorldNetDaily, SierraTimes, and Financial Sense Online. He is the author of Origins of the Fourth World War and The Fool and His Enemy and co-author of The New Tactics of Global War.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.An AI cancer detection microscope by Google is seen during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 (WAIC 2018) in Shanghai, China on Sept. 18, 2018. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Top US General to Meet With Google on China Security Worries

WASHINGTONThe top U.S. military officer will meet with Google representatives next week amid growing concerns that American companies doing business in China are helping its military gain ground on the United States.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on March 20 that efforts like Googles artificial intelligence venture in China allow the Chinese military to access and take advantage of U.S.-developed technology.

This is not about me and Google, Dunford told an audience at the Atlantic Council. This is about us looking at the second and third order of effects of our business ventures in China, Chinese form of government, and the impact its going to have on the United States ability to maintain a competitive military advantage.

Google says its AI activities in China are focused on education, research on natural language understanding and market algorithms, and development of globally available tools.

In a statement last week, Google said it is not working with the Chinese military. And the company said that it continues to work with the U.S. government, including the Defense Department, in many areas, including cybersecurity, recruiting and healthcare.

Dunfords comments reflect widespread U.S. government worries that any information or data an American company has or uses as it does business in China is automatically available to the Chinese regime and its military.

U.S. companies in China are required to have a cell of the communist party present, said Dunford, adding, that will lead to that intellectual property from that company finding its way to the Chinese military.

Last week he and acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan expressed similar concerns 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, Dunford said during the hearing. And frankly, indirect may be not a full characterization of the way it really is. Its more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military.

Shanahan also noted that Google is stepping away from some Pentagon contracts.

Internal protests by workers at Google led the tech company to say last year that it is dropping out of Project Maven, which uses algorithms to interpret drone video images from conflict zones. Employees had complained that Google was helping with technology that could improve lethal targeting.

Shanahan told senators that $5 trillion of Chinas economy is state-owned enterprises, so the technology that is developed in the civilian world transfers to the military world. Its a direct pipeline. Not only is there a transfer, theres also systemic theft of U.S. technology that also facilitates even faster development of emerging technology.

As a result, Shanahan said the U.S. military needs to continue to invest in artificial intelligence, adding that funding would double in the proposed 2020 budget.

The Joint Staff did not release details on the timing of Dunfords meeting next week or who would be attending from Google.North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump talk in the garden of the Metropole hotel during the second North Korea-U.S. summit in Hanoi, Vietnam on Feb. 28, 2019. (Leah Millis/Reuters)

US Targets Chinese Firms for Helping North Korea Dodge Sanctions

WASHINGTONThe Trump administration on March 21 sanctioned two Chinese shipping companies suspected of helping North Korea evade sanctionsthe first targeted actions taken against Pyongyang since its nuclear negotiations with the United States in Hanoi last month ended without agreement.

The maritime industry must do more to stop North Koreas illicit shipping practices, Trumps national security adviser John Bolton tweeted. Everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Koreas sanctions evasion.

The White House says the sanctions are evidence that the United States is maintaining pressure on North Korea in an effort to coax its leader, Kim Jong Un, to give up his nuclear weapons program.

The Treasury Department sanctioned Dalian Haibo International Freight Co. Ltd. and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co. Ltd. for using deceptive methods to circumvent international and U.S. sanctions and the U.S. commitment to implementing existing U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Calls to the two companies rang without response on Friday or were answered by people who immediately hung up the phone.

Treasury, in coordination with the State Department and the U.S. Coast Guard, also updated a North Korea shipping advisory, adding dozens of vessels thought to be doing ship-to-ship transfers with North Korean tankers or exported North Korean coal in violation of sanctions.

Two senior administration officials, who briefed reporters only on condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. policy on North Korea, said illegal ship-to-ship transfers that violate U.S. and international sanctions have increased and not all countries, including China, are implementing the restrictions. They said the deceptive practices include disabling or manipulating ship identification systems, repainting the names on vessels and falsifying cargo documents.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement that fully implementing the U.N. resolutions is key to getting Kim to give up his nuclear weapons program. Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk, Mnuchin said.A China Coast Guard ship (L) blocks the way of a Vietnam Coast Guard ship near to the site of a Chinese drilling oil rig (R, background) being installed in the disputed waters in the South China Sea off Vietnam's central coast on May 14, 2014. (Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP/Getty Images)

Vietnam Protests to China Over South China Sea Boat Sinking

HANOIVietnam has lodged an official protest with China following the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat which was being chased by a Chinese maritime surveillance vessel in the disputed South China Sea, Vietnam said late on March 21.

Vietnam and China have for years long been embroiled in a dispute over the potentially energy-rich stretch of waters, called the East Sea by Vietnam.

The fishing vessel was moored near Da Loi island in the Paracel archipelago on March 6 when a China Maritime Surveillance Vessel chased it and fired water cannon at it, Vietnams foreign ministry said in a statement.

The boat sank after hitting rocks while it was being chased. All five fishermen on board were rescued by another Vietnamese fishing boat, the ministry said.

A Vietnamese rescue agency said earlier that the Chinese vessel rammed the fishing boat.

The Chinese vessel committed an act that violated Vietnams sovereignty over the Hoang Sa archipelago, threatened the lives and damaged the properties and the legitimate interests of Vietnamese fishermen, the ministry said in the statement, referring to the Paracel islands by their Vietnamese name.

Vietnam had lodged a protest with Chinas embassy in Hanoi and demanded that China deal strictly with its Maritime Surveillance agency to prevent similar incidents and to compensate fairly the fishermen for their losses.

In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the Paracel Islands were Chinas and Vietnam must immediately stop illegal fishing activities in the vicinity.

China claims 90 percent of the South China Sea, where it has steadily expanded military and other installations on artificial islands and reefs, unnerving the region and angering Washington.

In addition to Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have claims to parts of the sea.

The Chinese regime is concerned that the Southeast Asian countries, such as India, Vietnam, and Taiwan, will join the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy to contain Chinas growing influence.

The Indo-Pacific Strategy is a $113 million initiative for new technology, energy, and infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific region and the economic pillar for the Trump administration. The South China Sea region is the core area of the Indo-Pacific Strategy, and Vietnam is located at strategic position.

The Chinese regime has frequently lambasted the United States and its allies for freedom of navigation naval operations near to Chinese-occupied islands. It has urged Washington to stop sending warships and military planes close to the islands that Beijing claims.

Meanwhile, Washington has continually asserted that the naval operations are allowed under international law to preserve its access to the South China Sea, and urged China to halt its militarization.

Separately, the Vietnamese government on Friday denounced Taiwans military drills on and around Itu Aba, an island in the South China Sea, that Vietnam calls Ba Binh.

Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said the drills were a serious violation of Vietnams sovereignty over the (Spratly) archipelago, threatening peace, stability, and maritime safety and security, stressing and complicating the situation in the East Sea.

Vietnam resolutely opposes (the drills) and demands that Taiwan not repeat similar actions, Hang said in a statement on the government website.

By Khanh Vu. The Epoch Times contributed to this report.The mall was closed on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Questions Abound As Berkshire Mall Closes Again



A sign on the door on Thursday reads that the mall is 'closed for the day' so it seems management intends to open on Friday. UPDATE: Friday, March 22, 2019 at 1:30 p.m. The mall remains closed. Regal Cinema and Target are still open. LANESBOROUGH, Mass.  The Berkshire Mall mysteriously closed for two days, one week after a judge ordered the sheriff's office to seize close to $300,000 in assets to pay off a court settlement.

Mall management has been unavailable over the last two days. The mall was closed on Wednesday afternoon. The entrance door was open providing access to the separate Regal Cinemas, but tables and a security fence blocked access to the rest of the mall. Target also remained open.

On Thursday, the doors were locked with a handwritten sign reading "the mall is closed for the day." No reason was given for why the mall closed and attempts to reach officials were unsuccessful.

The rumors have ranged from not having electricity, which has twice before caused the mall to close, to the loss of water. Neither reason could be confirmed. Attempts to call a few existing stores in the building went unanswered.

However, something else may be brewing. Just last week Judge John Agostini signed off on a writ of execution calling on the sheriff's cffice to collect $298,146.92 from Berkshire Mall Realty Holding.

The district, which is a taxing entity of the various mall condominiums to pay for the Connector Road, took Berkshire Mall Realty Holding, which is owned by Kohan Retail Investment Group, to court over unpaid bills. The district was seeking $276,859 plus interest from the property

In February, Agostini had ruled in the district's favor.

The Baker Hill Road District had taken a new tactic to secure back taxes from the Berkshire Mall. That judgment hadn't been paid, apparently, and in early March, the district filed for an execution to force payment. The order issued on March 13 demanded payment of $298,146.92, which is the original judgment plus interest.

Multiple attempts to discuss the case with Baker Hill Road District's attorney over the last week or so were unsuccessful and court documents reveal little about the method of execution.

The trend for Kohan Retail Investment Group, both locally and nationally, is that it falls behind in taxes and bills and then pays enough back taxes to keep its shopping malls operating. At the same time, the company continues to purchase properties. On March 12, news organizations in Maine reported Kohan had purchased a mall there for $4.65 million.

Meanwhile, the Berkshire Mall continues to lose tenants. Recently the Berkshire Mall Emporium, an antiques and gift shop, closed in the former J.C. Penney area after less than a year and DJ's Gifts temporarily closed for the summer. Those were coupled with the loss of Victoria's Secret and Master Cuts. Most of the large national chain retail stores that had been in the mall like Victoria's Secret and Penney's have been closing stores throughout the country  a trend that has often been called a "retail apocalypse."

A handful of businesses do remain in the Lanesborough shopping center alongside the anchors of Regal Cinemas and Target, both of which own their own spaces. The businesses that are there tend to be smaller, more locally-based businesses, many of which have reported positive relationships with mall management.

But more stores have been moving out than in. In the last three years, tenant after tenant had left, following the closure of anchors Best Buy, Macy's, Sears and J.C. Penney. At some point, the existing businesses were all moved toward the end of the food court and a large portion of the building has been closed off to the public.BRUSSELS - NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday that alliance members increased defense spending in 2018 for the fourth year in a row, highlighting a slow turnaround amid White House criticism that allies are overly reliant on U.S. military power.

The modest increases were unlikely to ease President Donald Trump's complaints that Europe and Canada are not doing enough in their own defense. Just seven of NATO's 29 members met their spending pledges in 2018. Germany, one of Trump's favorite punching bags, did not budge on its figures. The U.S. military continued to be the juggernaut of the alliance, comprising 69 percent of overall defense spending even though the U.S. economy forms less than half of the club's economic might.

Still, Stoltenberg sought to shine a positive light on 2018's results, highlighting the spending increases. Latvia, Lithuania and Poland all joined Trump's gold-star spending club by meeting NATO targets. Romania is expected to do so this year.

"At a time when some are questioning the strength of the transatlantic bond, we are actually doing more together in more ways and in more places than ever before," Stoltenberg said.

Trump has hammered NATO allies for their lagging spending, recently raising in private conversations an idea to charge countries for the cost of U.S. troop deployment on their soil, plus 50 percent. His "cost plus 50" plan - which acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan ruled out Thursday - could have been explosive if formally proposed.

Stoltenberg, who is eager to avoid direct confrontation with Trump, said there had been no such discussion in NATO. But he noted that U.S. troops were stationed in Europe not only to defend Europeans but also to help project U.S. military power onto Africa and the Middle East.

"The U.S. presence in Europe is important for NATO, but it is also important for the United States," he said. "It is part of our shared security, of our collective defense."

Even if the U.S. president appears to harbor deep doubts about the value of the alliance, his own Cabinet officials and U.S. lawmakers have tried to reassure allies that NATO retains bipartisan support in Washington. Earlier this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., issued a rare invitation to Stoltenberg to address a joint session of Congress when he is Washington next month to celebrate NATO's 70th anniversary. Stoltenberg has accepted the invitation - and now has to figure out what to say so that he angers neither Trump nor Trump's opponents.

The birthday party will be attended by foreign ministers, not leaders - a choice that officials on both sides opted for to avoid giving Trump new opportunities to throw grenades. NATO leaders will meet instead in London in December.

Spending by non-U.S. NATO members started to rise in 2014, before Trump's denunciations of the alliance sent European officials grabbing for their blood pressure pills. Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014 shook many European nations out of years of post-Cold War complacency. President Barack Obama also criticized allies for low defense spending, although not with the same edge as his successor.

But for all the focus on the bottom line, the overall non-U.S. defense spending among NATO allies has increased since 2014 only by $14.6 billion a year, or about 5 percent. Setting aside the United States, NATO members spent about 1.48 percent of their annual economic output on defense in 2018, far short of the 2 percent target they said in 2014 they would try to meet within a decade. Only 16 countries have come up with plans to get there in time, despite the U.S. demands. Overall, spending levels rose only modestly in 2018.

And Germany - Europe's richest country - did little to tamp down Trump's criticisms. Although it increased its defense spending by 3.6 percent in 2018 compared with the previous year, its economy grew at the same time, so its overall spending remained stuck at 1.23 percent of annual economic output.

Stoltenberg has forged a friendly relationship with Trump despite the turbulent conditions, carefully framing the numbers to massage Oval Office egos. The NATO secretary general now touts the extra money spent since 2016, ignoring the increases before Trump, a shift that his advisers say is all about making the U.S. president happy.

When the two leaders met at a NATO summit in July, Stoltenberg boasted about the recent increases.

"Why was that last year?" Trump asked.

"Because of your leadership, because of your carried message," Stoltenberg replied.

Trump joked that reporters "won't write that, but that's OK."A New Haven man is among 29 people charged with federal narcotics offenses related to the distribution of heroin, cocaine and crack cocaine in and around Waterbury, according to federal authorities.

The 29 people were charged as a DEA task force investigation dismantled a Waterbury drug ring, federal authorities said in a release.

The release said that, as alleged in court documents and statements made in court, the arrests stem from a joint investigation headed by the DEA New Haven Task Force and the Waterbury and Naugatuck Police Departments. The investigation, which began last year and has included the use of court-authorized wiretaps, physical surveillance and controlled purchases of narcotics, revealed that Keith Jordan, also known as Knowledge, received large quantities of heroin and cocaine from various suppliers and sold the drugs to street-level distributors in and around Waterbury.

On March 13, 2019, a grand jury in Hartford returned an indictment charging the 29 people, including Jermaine Foster, 48, of New Haven, with conspiracy to distribute, and to possess with intent to distribute, various quantities of heroin, cocaine and cocaine base, or crack cocaine:

Keith Jordan, a.k.a.  Knowledge, 50; Katina Reed, a.k.a. Tina, 46;, Domingo Alves, a.k.a. Mingo, 49; Carlos Morais, a.k.a. Los, 35, Jean Carlos Fabal-gonzalez, 24; Damon Davis, 24, (currently in state custody); David Flaherty, 48; Vina Frazier, 35; Bienvenido Gonzalez, a.k.a. Toto, 41; Jose Gonzalez, 30; Omar Hernandez, 39; Jordan Jamison, 23; Francisco Lopez, 32; Lliver Abreu-baez, a.k.a. Domi and Papi, 27; Junio Acevedo, 34; Michael Altieri, 28; Lance Baptiste, 40; Timothy Booker, a.k.a. Book, 60; all of Waterbury; and Sunji Cramer, 39, of Meriden; Larry Hall, a.k.a. Chuito and Bobo, 48, of Naugatuck; Rosemary Colon, 35, of Naugatuck; James Tyrone Hayes, a.k.a. Ty, 49, of Newburgh, N.Y.; and Nazariel Gonzalez, 39, of West Hartford

Twenty-three defendants were arrested yesterday, and one was arrested this morning. One defendant has been in state custody. Four defendants are currently being sought, according to the release by John H. Durham, U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, Brian D. Boyle, Special Agent in Charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration for New England, Waterbury Police Chief Fernando C. Spagnolo and Naugatuck Police Chief Steven Hunt .

In association with the arrests, law enforcement officers seized approximately 3,000 bags of heroin, 400 grams of cocaine, 350 grams of fentanyl/heroin mixed, 400 grams of heroin, 10 grams of crack, 20 pounds of marijuana, fentanyl patches, a one-kilogram press, four handguns, approximately $120,000 in cash and four vehicles.

The indictment alleges that, between approximately February 2018 and March 2019, each defendant conspired to distribute various narcotics, the relase said. If convicted of this charge, based on the type and quantity of narcotics involved, Keith Jordan, Reed, Alves, Cramer, Hall, Bienvenido Gonzalez and Abreu-Baez face a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment of 10 years and a maximum term of imprisonment of life; Morais, Fabal-Gonzalez, Acevedo, Altieri, Booker, Campbell, Colon, Davis, Flaherty, Frazier, Foster, Nazariel Gonzalez, Hayes, Hernandez, and Lopez face a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment of five years and a maximum term of imprisonment of 40 years, and Baptiste, Jose Gonzalez, and Jamison face a maximum term of imprisonment of 20 years.

The indictment also charges Keith Jordan, Alves, Hayes and Jamison with one or more counts of possession and/or distribution of heroin.

It is alleged that members of this drug trafficking organization distributed significant quantities of heroin and cocaine in and around Waterbury, said Durham, in the release. The opioid epidemic, which in large part has led to the deaths of far too many people from heroin and fentanyl overdoes, continues to destroy lives across our state. The United States Attorneyas Office is committed to doggedly prosecuting those who choose to profit from this deadly trade. We thank the DEA Task Force members, including the Waterbury and Naugatuck Police Departments, for their outstanding work in this investigation. Their efforts literally have saved lives.

The 23 individuals who were arrested Wednesday appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judges Robert M. Spector and Sarah A. L. Merriam in New Haven. Nineteen of the 23 are currently detained, the release said.

The investigation is being conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration New Haven Task Force, Waterbury Police Department and Naugatuck Police Department, with the critical assistance of the U.S. Secret Service, New York Field Office. The DEA New Haven Task Force includes participants from the U.S. Marshals Service, Internal Revenue Service a Criminal Investigation Division, and the New Haven, Hamden, West Haven, North Haven, Branford, Ansonia, Meriden, Derby, Middletown, Naugatuck and Waterbury Police Departments.Authorities say a medical worker at a north Scottsdale pain treatment center has been accused of sexual assault.

Scottsdale police say 38-year-old Xavier Uziel Perez was arrested Wednesday without incident.

Police say officers responded to Integrated Pain Consultants about a reported sexual assault in June 2018.

They say a 48-year-old woman reported she had been under sedation for back pain treatment.

As the woman began to regain consciousness in recovery, she believed she had been sexually assaulted by the medical worker in the recovery room.

"She realized that something wasn't right, that she was being sexually assaulted. Obviously, when you're coming out of sedation, you're foggy, so we were trying to put that together, but she just knew something wasn't right," Officer Kevin Watts, with the Scottsdale Police Department, told AZ Family.

Police said DNA evidence linked Perez to the crime and that he admitted to the sexual assault.

Perez reportedly worked as a transporter and was taking the patient to a recovery room when the assault happened.

"It is concerning and it is alarming because it is a position of trust," Watts said. "When you're sedated and coming out of sedation, you're obviously in a vulnerable spot and you trust those who are taking care of you."

Detectives now are investigating to determine if there are any other victims.An overflow crowd in the Selectmen's Meeting Room attends Thursday's hearing of the Zoning Board of Appeals.

Williamstown ZBA Continues Hearing on Pot Plantation

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.  The Zoning Board of Appeals on Thursday decided to continue to April its hearing on a request for a special permit to establish a marijuana production facility on Blair Road.

Massflora, a subsidiary of Colorado-based Euflora Cannabis Dispensaries, has requested permission for a 5-acre outdoor plantation and 7,000-square-foot building.

After more than two hours that included nuanced discussions of the town's bylaws by attorneys for and against the application, emotional appeals about the impact on area youth from smells to be generated by the proposed facility, expressions of concern about the impact on local property values and suggestions that the site will lead to an increase in crime, the board voted 5-0 to take no action until at least next month.

The ZBA also asked the applicant to address several specific issues when the board resumes its deliberations.

"Screening, elevations, smell and traffic," ZBA Chairman Andrew Hoar summed up the requests toward the close of the more than three-hour meeting.

The applicant claims that the proposed facility and its employees would lead to a less than 10 percent increase in traffic in the neighborhood. But several residents told the ZBA that estimate is low-balling the impact and called for a formal traffic study.

Attorney Donald Dubendorf, who represents Massflora, told the board that it will present additional data a the next meeting.

The screening issue centers on the 8-foot security fence mandated by the commonwealth's Cannabis Control Commission for the outdoor plantation. Dubendorf and other representatives of the applicant said they were open to a condition on the special permit requiring vegetative screening.

The ZBA is used to setting such requirements. Odor screening is uncharted territory for the panel.

Each of the nine residents who spoke against the applicant (none spoke in favor) referenced the potential for negative impacts from smells generated by the cannabis plants, which will be started inside the 7,000-foot facility and transplanted to the field in June to mature until they are harvested in October.

Odor pollution is documented in media reports from California, Oregon and Colorado that residents presented to the board. And one resident, who identified himself as a physician, suggested there are serious health risks from allergies, particularly to those who have asthma, from living in proximity to pot plantations.

"I have a suggestion of how you can allay our concerns about smell," Blair Road resident Jamie Barstow said. "We'd like you to instruct the applicant to bring a mature plant of the size and strain that they propose to grow  and have them cut it up here, in this room."

A couple of the members of the board appeared to like the idea.

"I don't know what a budding marijuana plant smells like," ZBA member Keith Davis said. "I'm trying to evaluate something I have no background in. I like the idea someone had suggested about exposing the audience to what this smells like."

Hoar noted the only person in the room who knows what a cannabis farm smells like is the applicant's employee, who attended Thursday's hearing.

"But I don't know that this board at this point has the background or ability to judge that from a description," he said.

"And I don't know if even smelling one plant lets you know what 5 acres smells like," ZBA member Ryan Neathawk added.

Hoar asked point blank if the applicant could provide a plant, and Dubendorf responded that he would like some time to try to develop a plan to "give this board the experience of the odor."

"It's not only the single plant versus how many plants," Dubendorf continued. "It's also the ambient conditions. Inside a plant smells different from outside."For the Intelligencer

SPRINGFIELD  Members of the Illinois General Assembly, hosted by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, attended a Womens History Month rally Thursday morning at the Capitol to honor the work of women leaders across the state.

Dr. Alicia Alexander, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville was one of the honorees.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Fachrizal Afandi and Muhammad Asad (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019

Arifi Saiman from the Foreign Ministry wrote in this newspaper on Feb. 18 that Islam Nusantara (Islam of the Archipelago), the concept coined by the countrys largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), in its 2015 national congress, could become a valuable tool for citizen diplomacy to promote peace and to counter religious extremism and radicalism. Promoting Islam Nusantara abroad, Arifi argues, would elevate the role of Indonesia as the most populous Muslim-majority country to contribute to world peace and world order.

We agree: The NU diaspora, specifically the members actively involved in special chapters of the NU (PCINU), could become the agents to popularize Islam in their surroundings. With its core value of adaptability to local cultures and wisdom, Islam Nusantara may be well received by the non-Muslim world.

The rise of Islamophobia and right-wing politicians, such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Jean Marie Le Pen in France and President Donald Trump of the United States, shows the urgent need for a more adaptive and more tolerant method to introduce Islam to the Western world, amid the expressions and actions of extremism in the name of Islam.

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Linkedin Ulta Levenia and Alban Sciascia (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019

In an isolated village in Sibolga, North Sumatra, early on March 13, a woman named Solimah decided to blow herself up with her infant after hours of negotiation with the police.

The negotiations were deadlocked although Husain  also known as Abu Hamzah, Solimahs husband  was trying to persuade his wife, who was determined to conduct the suicide bombing, to surrender peacefully.

A day after, following Husains interrogation, counterterrorism force Densus 88 arrested several suspects in the province in a case related to a terrorist network. One was a woman believed to be Husains second wife and accomplice in his bombings plan.

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Linkedin Katell Abiven (Agence France-Presse) Havana, Cuba  Fri, March 22, 2019 22:07 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee83536b0 2 Lifestyle Cuba,motorcycle,tourism,transport,leisure,Russia,sidecars Free

Cuba's love affair with 1950s-era American cars is still intact, but the communist-run island also has a lingering attachment to a stalwart of Soviet-era leftovers, the motorcycle sidecar.

Ranging from rusting relics to the pampered and the pristine, hundreds of old motorcycle sidecars rattle through the streets of Havana.

The retro appeal gets a lot of attention from tourists "but here it's common, normal," says Enrique Oropesa Valdez.

Valdez should know. The 59-year old makes a living as an instructor teaching people how to handle the sidecar in Havana's traffic, where riders seem able to squeeze the machines through the narrowest of gaps.

And they've built up an intense loyalty among the mend-and-make do Cubans.

"They're very practical," according to Alejandro Prohenza Hernandez, a restaurateur who says his pampered red 30-year-old Jawa 350 is like a second child.

Cheaper and more practical than the gas-guzzling, shark-finned US behemoths, the bikes are used for anything from the family runabout to trucking goods and workers' materials.

"A lot of foreigners really like to take photos of it," says Hernandez. "I don't know, I think they see it as something from another time."

Read also: Cuba taps into high-end luxury tourist market

Different world

Cuba lags several decades behind the rest of the world due to a crippling US embargo, so the makers' badges on the ubiquitous sidecars speak of a bygone world.

Names like Jawa from the former Czechoslovakia and MZ from the former East Germany, as well as antiquated Russian Urals, Dniepers and Jupiters.

Havana's military acquired them from big brother Moscow at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s and 70s, for use by state factories and farms. Over the years, they gradually filtered down to the general public.

That's how Jose Antonio Ceoane Nunez, 46, found his bright red Jupiter 3.

"When the Cuban government bought sidecars from the Russians in 1981, it was for state-owned companies," he told AFP.

Later, the companies "sold them on to the most deserving employees," he said. His father, who worked for a state body, passed the bike on to him.

"Even if the sidecar gets old. I'll never sell it because it's what I use to move around. It's my means of transport in Cuba, and there aren't many other options," said Nunez.

Valdez himself has a cherished green 1977 Ural.

"I like it a lot, firstly because it's the means of transport for my family, and secondly because it's a source of income."

And it costs less than a car, still out of reach of many Cubans.

Settled on the island with his Cuban wife, 38-year-old Frenchman Philippe Ruiz didn't realize at first how ubiquitous the motorcycle sidecar was.

"When I began to be interested, I suddenly realized that I was seeing 50 to 100 a day!"

Renovating a house at the time, he saw that many sidecars were being used to transport building equipment.

Through an advert on the internet, he bought a blue 1979 Ural a few months ago for 6,500 euros.

"It's a year older than me and in worse shape," he said. "Soon he had to strip the bike down and "start repairing everything."

With few spare parts available in Cuba, "people have to bring them in from abroad," which slows down repairs.

But he has no regrets. An experienced motorcyclist, he's discovered a whole new side to his passion by riding the Russian machine.

"It's very funny, it's a big change from the bike because we cannot turn the same way, we can't lean, so you have to relearn everything but it's nice."

"It's especially nice with the family because you can put a child in the sidecar, my wife behind, and suitcases," he said.

In future he hopes to take advantage of the interest in the old bikes to rent it out.

"I think it will be a bit of a change from all the convertibles here."US Officially Recognizes Israeli Control over Golan

Stand for Israel | March 25, 2019

Before flying back to Israel to deal with the rocket attack that struck the Sharon region and the heightened tensions that have gripped the Holy Land, PM Netanyahu paid a visit to the White House on Monday for a monumental event. The Jerusalem Posts Herb Keinon tells us that Trump at last officially signed a declaration recognizing Israels sovereignty over the Goland Heights:

U.S. President Donald Trump signed a decree on Monday saying the United States recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, territory that Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.

Earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the White House at noon Monday for his meeting with US President Donald Trump in the shadows of Hamas missile attack on Central Israel.

Following the meeting Netanyahu is scheduled to fly directly back to Israel forgoing the rest of his planned schedule, which included a speech to AIPAC tomorrow, a meeting with Congressional leaders and a dinner meeting with President Trump.

Netanyahu is expected to speak with Trump about the attack and Israels responseShare this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Hanoi, Vietnam  Sat, March 23, 2019 03:08 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8356678 2 Environment turtle,Vietnam,history,culture,tourism,Hanoi Free

A sacred giant turtle that died in Hanoi's storied Hoan Kiem lake has been given a new lease on life by city authorities who have embalmed the beloved creature for posterity -- and tourist visits.

Hanoians were shocked by the death of the critically endangered Swinhoe softshell turtle in 2016, believing its passing was a sign of ominous times ahead.

The reptile is believed to be the last in a long line of large turtles in the city's central Hoan Kiem lake, revered as symbols of Vietnam's independence struggle according to mythical lore passed down for generations.

Nicknamed "Cu Rua" which means "great grandparent turtle", it was thought to be between 80 and 100 years old when it died.

Visitors welcomed the turtle's resurrection at the popular Ngoc Son temple on Hoan Kiem lake, where the 170-kilogram creature was put on display last week, sitting atop a red carpet in a glass case with an ornately carved wooden frame.

"It's great to see it here. Everyone can admire it now, a symbol of Hanoi," tourist Tran Thi Anh told AFP Thursday.

The enormous creature sits near another which was similarly embalmed and encased in glass in 1968.

They are not the only preserved heroes in Vietnam: the country's revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh is on display at a sprawling concrete and grass Ba Dinh square in the city's French Quarter.

Read also: Entrusting fate of turtles to millennials

And in a unique take on the encasing custom, a restaurant owner who served Hanoi's famous pork noodles to the late chef Anthony Bourdain and former US president Barack Obama has preserved their dining table in a glass box.

The turtles on display at Hoan Kiem lake -- which means "Lake of the Restored Sword" in Vietnamese -- are believed to be the protectors of an ancient sword in the green-tinged waters.

According to popular legend, former emperor Le Loi was given the weapon in the 15th century by the lake's Golden Turtle God, which he used to fight off Chinese invaders before returning it to Hoan Kiem.

There are believed to be just four surviving Swinhoe turtles left in the world -- two in a Chinese zoo and two others in Vietnam, according to the Asian Turtles Program.

Superstition is ubiquitous in Vietnam, and any sightings of the giant turtles are deemed auspicious.

The same holds true today for other turtle species living in the lake.

"I just saw some smaller turtles coming to the surface of the lake... it seems good luck to see them, don't you think?" said visitor Nguyen Tri Ton, laughing.

"It's good they embalmed Mr Turtles here to keep them alive for all the people of Vietnam," he added.

Local officials initially tried to suppress news of Cu Rua's death in 2016, fearing it would be seen as bad luck ahead of a party congress to choose the country's top leaders.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (Reuters) London, United Kingdom  Sat, March 23, 2019 05:02 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8356ed5 2 Art & Culture Ethiopia,London,Britain,Museum,National-Army-Museum Free

A London museum has handed back locks of hair cut from the corpse of an Ethiopian emperor during a British invasion 150 years ago, after a campaign by activists seeking the return of hundreds of pieces of colonial plunder.

Ethiopians, many dressed in the national colors of red, gold and green, cheered as staff at the National Army Museum handed over the remains in a black leather box to Ethiopia's minister of culture, tourism and sport on Wednesday.

Hirut Kassaw will take the hair back to Ethiopia at the weekend where it will eventually be buried at the grave of Emperor Tewodros II at at monastery in northern Ethiopia, an embassy official said.

She thanked the museum for its "brave and principled" decision to hand over the hair, but called on it and other British institutions to return other items taken during the Victorian-era expedition.

"For Ethiopians, these are not simply artifacts or treasures but constitute a fundamental part of the existential fabric of Ethiopia and its people," she said.

There was no immediate response to her request or statement on the return from the museum.

Successive emperors, governments and then activists have called for Britain to hand back crowns, religious regalia and illuminated manuscripts taken after the fight - in campaigns paralleled by Greece's demands for its Parthenon sculptures, and Nigeria's for the Benin Bronzes.

Read also: British museum to return royal hair seized in Ethiopia 150 years ago

The emperor claimed a bloodline dating back to the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

Britain invaded his territory of then Abyssinia in 1867 to rescue a group of European missionaries, adventurers and officials - including the British consul - imprisoned by Tewodros after a series of diplomatic gaffes.

They reached his mountain fortress of Magdala in April 1868, defeated his troops and freed the prisoners. The emperor shot himself as the invaders stormed his last stronghold.

Journalists on the campaign described how soldiers descended on the emperor's body and tore off strips of his clothing as souvenirs. The museum's records suggest the hair was taken from Magdala by an artist on the British force.

Institutions including the British Museum have resisted repatriation campaigns citing legislation preventing them from breaking up collections and arguing that they can preserve items and present them to an international audience.

Campaigners have argued that a special case should be made for human remains.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Yopi Ilhamsyah (The Jakarta Post) Bogor  Fri, March 22, 2019 17:48 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee834be8e 3 Environment heavy-rains,flood,climate-change,disaster-mitigation,natural-disaster,weather,#ClimateChange,environment Free

Heavy rains in March have resulted in floods across the country. The Kompas newspaper in its March 8 edition reported that, according to the National Authority for Disaster Management (BNPB), there were 15 affected districts in East Java alone, with Madiun being the worst-hit.

BNPB spokesperson Sutopo Purwo Nugroho and National Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics (BMKG) head of meteorology Mulyono R. Prabowo explained that the high intensity of rainfall was due to the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO).

What, in fact, is the MJO, what distinguishes it from La-Nina and how can we get an early warning?

Indonesia lies within the intertropical convergence zone and borders on two vast oceans on its western and eastern sides, the Indian and the Pacific Ocean. This position results in a typical maritime climate. Surplus short-wave solar radiation in the equatorial ocean region may result in strong evaporation throughout the year. Humidity as a result of water vapor condensation is also higher, which is why the region tends to be cloudy at most times, leading to high rainfall variability. On the other hand, convective clouds driven by different diurnal heating over land and over sea may produce severe thunderstorms and even the formation of squall lines in many areas of Indonesia.

Meanwhile, as a result of the changing climate, the sea surface temperature is rising. Warmer sea temperature in the equatorial ocean region may intensify bands of convective clouds, which then create heavy rainfall, hail and surface wind gusts as well as twisters in the Indonesian region. Besides, the increase of sea surface temperature strongly influences climate variability in the region, i.e. the occurrence of El-Nino or La- Nina in the Pacific as well as Dipole Mode in the Indian Ocean, where such anomalies are projected to become more frequent in the future. Those climate phenomenons can be recognized by distinctive clouds pattern.

El-Nino and La-Nina are associated with the cooling and warming of sea surface temperature. Both are monitored based on sea surface temperature changes in the Pacific.

As the temperature drops, the rate of evaporation falls too, causing humidity to decrease. Consequently, convective clouds diminish, the sky is blue, the rain is gone and a longer dry season follows as a result of the delay of the onset. This results in what we know as El-Nino.

On the contrary, with La-Nina, strong condensation occurs as sea surface temperature increases. Following the abundance of humidity, large amounts of latent heat released contribute to the development of strong convective clouds. Torrential rain then falls in most parts of Indonesia, floods and landslide ensue.

In the meantime, a sister climate anomaly of El-Nino and La-Nina emerges in the Indian Ocean, namely Dipole Mode. If sea surface temperature anomalies in the western tropical Indian Ocean are higher, a so-called positive Dipole Mode, it will cause rainfall to decrease to below the normal level in Indonesia, leading to severe drought. In contrast, a negative Dipole Mode will see Indonesia suffer from intense rainfall above normal. El-Nino and La-Nina as well as Dipole Mode are categorized as nonseasonal climate factors. They have a return period of two to five years. Yet, such interannual events, particularly El-Nino and La-Nina, are well-known factors in the rainfall variability in Indonesia. For instance, El-Nino in 1997-1998 and 2015 and La-Nina in 2007 and 2016 were responsible for drought and floods in Indonesia.

Another factor that involves variations of climate over tropical regions is the Madden-Julian oscillation. It is considered as west-east circulation, originating from the Indian Ocean and vanishing in the western Pacific. The MJO is a convergent system that has an oscillation period of 30-60 days. It is identified as massive cumulonimbus clouds that occur during the transition period from March to May. Strong solar radiation quickly heats up the ocean, causing higher temperature at the surface. As stated above, this fuels on the growth of deep convective clouds, and pressure gradient causes the towering clouds accompanied by intense rainfall to move eastward across Indonesia. Above normal rainfall is recorded as it the resulting weather passes. If the environmental conditions are bad, it subsequently causes floods. The situation becomes worse when the MJO and La-Nina signals appear simultaneously.

The MJO is monitored with the MJO index, which is accessible online through the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. In March 2019, an MJO signal was detected to propagate above Indonesia and its surrounding area. High strength is indicated when the signal is outside of the centered circle. A strong signal has been observed to appear as intense rainfall occurs over Java. The whole Indonesian region is prone to the MJO, but due to southern cyclonic rotation, humid air is particularly attracted to the region of Java.

Rather than La Nina, the MJO may turn into a major climate threat, since it occurs intraseasonally. The MJO could occur more frequently amid climate change. As weather is a natural phenomenon, impact-based warning could be based on predicted monitoring. It could be both climate and floods forecasting.

The simplest way to do that is by measuring the rainfall accumulation. Floods are detected as rainfall exceeds its average climatological condition (at least 30 years of observation). The BMKG classifies climate conditions by degree, such as below normal, normal and above normal. A climate condition is considered normal if it ranges between 85 percent and 115 percent of the average. It is considered below and above normal if it is lower or higher than 85 percent or 115 percent of the average, respectively.

With the support of the data, we can easily perform a simple calculation to predict the climate outlook in the future. In addition, many free-to-access extreme climate indices have been developed by the World Meteorological Organization. These could be tools to assess flood risks.

Weather modification through cloud seeding definitely requires large expenses, while the probability of success is small. Building public awareness of environmental care is essential. The protection of watershed areas, the preservation of forest and catchment areas, a green policy, the management of drainage system as well as the reduction of polymer waste are necessary.

In addition, disasters in Indonesia can become worse as a result of mismanagement; a classic problem in the country.

Above all, tropical regions, including Indonesia, without doubt can be regarded as giant weather engines. Not only do they produce rainfall clouds that brings life and hope to the region, they also control the Earth's climate system, bringing life to the globe. We can be grateful for this. (wng)

***

The writer is a Ph.D student in applied climatology at the Graduate School of the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB University).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Michael Holden (Reuters) London, United Kingdom  Fri, March 22, 2019 18:09 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee834c3e7 2 People Prince-Harry,Meghan-and-Harry,Meghan-Markle,Duchess-of-Sussex,royal-baby,Britain,royals Free

Wearing his army fatigues while on tour in Afghanistan in 2013 thousands of miles from home, Britain's Prince Harry cut a relaxed figure as he told journalists: "I am one of the guys, I don't get treated any differently."

Now with the birth of his first child expected next month, Queen Elizabeth's grandson and his wife Meghan will have to decide how "normal" a life they want the future seventh-in-line to the British crown to have.

"I don't think there's been a member of the royal family that hasn't said they want their children to have a normal upbringing," Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty Magazine told Reuters.

"Even the queen said she wanted her children to have as normal an upbringing as possible. But with the media attention it's actually not possible to have a totally normal upbringing."

Harry is all too familiar with the attention that comes with being a British royal.

The disintegration of the marriage of his parents - heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles and his late first wife Diana - was played out in the public glare and his mother was killed in a Paris car crash in 1997 as the limousine carrying her and her lover Dodi al-Fayed crashed as it fled chasing paparazzi.

In the last two years, Harry has spoken openly of his mental anguish at the loss of his mother when he was just 12 and how in the years that followed he struggled with his royal status.

"I didn't want to be in the position I was in, but I eventually pulled my head out of the sand, started listening to people and decided to use my role for good," he said in a 2017 interview with Newsweek.

"Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or queen? I dont think so, but we will carry out our duties at the right time."

Diana had been keen that her two sons should be brought up away from the stuffy confines of royal palaces and their traditions. She took them on trips to the cinema, to McDonald's, and to a theme park.

Read also: Baby Diana? Or little Arthur? Bets on for royal baby name

"Thank goodness Im not completely cut off from reality. I am determined to have a relatively normal life, and if I am lucky enough to have children, they can have one too," said Harry.

But how realistic is Harry's wish? Polls suggest he is one of the most popular British royals, vying with the 92-year-old queen and his elder brother William for top spot, and his marriage to a glamorous Hollywood actress has only increased the media and public fascination.

"I can't see this child being raised in any other way than pretty traditionally and with a great dollop of privilege," said Robert Jobson, author of Prince Charles at 70: Our Future King.

Meghan, whose rift with members of her own family has provided great fodder for tabloids, giving her a clear insight into the baggage that being a royal brings, has not made any public statement about the possible upbringing for the baby.

But, speeches made by Harry since the pregnancy was announced have hinted how they do not want their child not be valued on their royal background.

"You don't judge someone based on how they look, where they're from, or how they identify," Harry told 12,000 students at London's Wembley Arena in March.

As well as his own upbringing, Harry and Meghan can look to the experiences of other royals. William has fiercely sought to defend the privacy of his children, George, Charlotte and Louis and so far the media have generally abided by requests to leave them alone.

"In reality, they can do normal within the royal confines," said Claudia Joseph, author of How to Dress Like A Princess.

"We've seen that William and Kate have brought up George, Charlotte and Louis out of the public eye and both William and Harry were left alone to a certain extent until they left university." Royal author Jobson said whatever Harry and Meghan's aims, it will be almost impossible for their child to completely escape his or her background.

"I believe this child probably won't have to serve as a member of the royal family but will certainly be a celebrity for a very, very long time."Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019 13:37 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8344459 1 Entertainment super-junior,tvxq,Korea,korea-boyband,#KPop,kpop,Yogyakarta,#Yogyakarta Free

South Korean boybands TVXQ and Super Junior were seen at Merapi Coffee, Sleman regency, Yogyakarta, on Thursday.

The coffee shop posted on its Instagram account that the venue was used to film a reality show.

According to kompas.com TVXQ and Super Junior are in Indonesia to film a show titled Analogue Trip and content for their YouTube channels.

Read also: Rossa, Super Junior to collaborate for new single

Tourism Ministry spokesperson Guntur Sakti said in a statement that TVXQ and Super Junior would visit around 10 destinations in Yogyakarta, including Borobudur temple, Prambanan temple, Taman Sari Water Castle, Kalisuci cave, Sultan Palace (also known as Kraton Ngayogyakarta), Malioboro and more.

However, he could not reveal the schedule to the public.

We know these two K-Pop boybands have a huge fan base in Indonesia. We were worried they would not be able to take pictures and videos if [fans went to the location], said Guntur. (jes/wng)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019 06:56 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8331f7e 1 City theft,school,fund Free

A head teacher who had just received Rp 111 million (US$7,655) in school operational funds (BOS) in Bekasi, West Java, lost the entire sum to a thief who had apparently targeted her car.

Rita Yulia Ramdani, the headmaster of Harapan Baru III elementary school, said the incident occurred at around 11.30 a.m. on March 18, after she took the money from Bank Jawa Barat (BJB) on Jl. Juanda.

While driving to the school with the money, on Jl. Muchtar Tabrani, Rita noticed that her car tire was flat.

"I decided to go to the nearest tire repair workshop, around 300 meters from where I noticed the tire was flat," Rita explained, as reported by wartakota.tribunnews.com.

She got out of the car to ask the tire repairmen about the problem when someone alerted her to the fact that her bag, containing the money, had just been snatched from the car.

She immediately reported the theft to the North Bekasi Police, and the Bekasi Education Agency.

The police are investigating the case. (sau)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019 08:03 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee83325de 1 City North-Jakarta,mangrove,growth Free

North Jakarta has seen the growth of 32,000 trees since they were planted 10 years ago at the Ecomarine Mangrove Forest.

The trees were planted on 1.8 hectares of land that was initially barren before it was converted into a forest on the edge of the Kali Adem Estuary in Muara Angke.

From 2008 until now, 32,000 mangrove trees have grown here, said Muara Angke Mangrove Community head Muhammad Said as quoted by tempo.co on Wednesday.

The mangrove trees include the pidada (Sonneratia), api-api (Avicennia), nipa palm (Nypa fruticans), and red mangrove (Rhizophora), Said explained.

The trees were planted to recover the mangrove forest ecosystem along Jakarta's northern coast, which is threatened by land conversion.

There were mangroves, but in the 1990s they were wiped out due to the impact of development. In 2008, we established a mangrove community and started mangrove planting for the sake of caring for society and the environment, he said.

In 2008, the community planted 100 mangrove seeds at the Kali Adem Estuary, which was once filled with plastic waste.

This estuary is the end-point of 12 rivers in Jakarta. Garbage was piled up. We had to dig deeper into the land so that the mangrove roots could grow well, he said.

Said also said the mangrove forest benefited the surrounding environment.

Strong winds often enter houses, but now the wind is blocked by the mangrove trees. The trees' roots have also absorbed the high tide, he said.

The trees have also benefited those who live nearby, as their fruits are used for fruit essence, dodol (traditional sticky candy) and jam.

Visitors can enter the forest for free. (sau)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019 09:09 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee833687c 1 City alms,digital,North-Jakarta,mosque Free

The North Jakarta municipality plans to develop a digital alms system at mosques and mushola (prayer rooms) within the city's offices to help Muslims meet their religious obligations.

North Jakarta administration and public welfare assistant Wawan Budi said his side had disseminated the information to civil servants working at the city's offices.

The system will be launched in collaboration with city-owned Bank DKI Syariah.

"In this digital era, the utilization of cash has been reduced. So, it would help people to give to charity," Wawan said on Thursday, kompas.com reported.

Before being applied to all the mosques and mushola in the municipality's offices, the system will be applied in Babussalam Mosque first, which is located inside the North Jakarta mayor's office.

Bank DKI Syariah's representative from the Kelapa Gading chapter, Andry Pramuria, said the digital alms would be included in the mobile wallet app JakOne Mobile.

"Later, we will attach a QR code to each mosque, so that the money will be transferred directly to the respective mosque and mushola's bank accounts."

Wawan added that expansion to the mosques and mushola in public areas could follow if implementation in the city's offices was deemed successful. (sau)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019 13:15 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8342f19 1 City Tangerang,industry,groundwater,contamination Free

Seventy percent of 5,018 industries in Tangerang regency, Banten, use groundwater, posing a threat to clean water resources, an environmental agency has said.

The impact is significant, said Tangerang Environment Agency head of pollution control and environmental damage Budi Khumaedi on Thursday as quoted by tempo.co.

The excessive use of groundwater for industrial purposes, he said, had caused numerous wells to be contaminated with iron and seawater.

Groundwater from wells is no longer safe to consume, he said, highlighting Sepatan as one of several districts that was suffering from contamination.

The Banten provincial administration, not Tangerang regency, has the authority to create a regulation that sets limits on the use of groundwater for industrial purposes.

Hence, Budi said, the Tangerang administration could only urge that business owners stop exploiting groundwater and switch to using water from pipelines managed by PDAM Tirta Kertas Raharja and PT Aetra Air Tangerang.

PT Aetra Air Tangerang commercial and operational director Okta Ismojo said the company, in processing water that was distributed to customers, had a layered filtering process that removed any unwanted materials.

In Tangerang regency, Okta added, the number of industrial sites that used groundwater was significantly more than those that used tap water services.

If these factories keep exploiting groundwater excessively without proper infiltration wells, groundwater will soon dry out, he said. (vla)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Raad al-Jammas (Agence France-Presse) Mosul, Iraq  Fri, March 22, 2019 22:30 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee835410f 2 World #Iraq,#accident,ferry-accident,capsize,death-toll,mosul Free

The capsizing of a Tigris River ferry packed with families celebrating Kurdish New Year in Mosul left at least 100 people dead, mostly women and children, the Iraqi interior ministry said on Friday, as grief and anger swept the city.

Residents of Iraq's second city, scarred by years of jihadist rule, demanded justice as Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi decreed three days of national mourning following Thursday's accident.

Mosulites had resumed the annual festivities this year for the first time since Iraqi forces ousted the Islamic State group following years of brutal jihadist rule.

But the celebrations turned to tragedy when the overcrowded vessel ran into trouble as it headed to a popular picnic site across the River Tigris.

Mosul security officials blamed the accident on high water levels and overcrowding on the boat.

Hundreds of relatives of victims and residents gathered Friday at the scene of the accident, where prayers were held for the dead.

Many said the disaster could have been avoided, and chanted "corruption is killing us!"

"We want those responsible to be brought to justice," said Mohammed Adel, 27, whose father was among those who died.

He accused officials of failing to enforce safety standards.

Abu Salem, who lost his wife and two children in the accident which also coincided with Mother's Day in Iraq, pinned blame for the tragedy on profit motives and the corruption that is endemic in Iraq.

The managers of the picnic site were "criminals... I want them to pay up and I won't leave here until they do", the 50-year Iraqi said.

Hundreds of demonstrators later gathered at the city's amusement park to stage an impromptu protest against "the thieves" running the city.

Reflecting the popular mood, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, in his Friday sermon accused "the authorities in charge of supervision of not doing their job".

Transparency International ranks Iraq in 12th place in its list of the world's most corrupt countries.

'Investigation must produce results'

Video footage from cameras at the picnic site, posted online, showed a severely overcrowded vessel beginning to list as water comes aboard.

As it capsizes completely, it traps dozens of people under its hull.

Authorities had warned people to be cautious after several days of heavy rains led to water being released through the Mosul dam, causing the river to rise.

Videos showed a fast-flowing, bloated river and dozens of people floating in the water or trying to swim around the partly submerged boat.

Abdel Mahdi said the justice system "must do its job and the investigation must produce results on the reasons for this shipwreck".

He and President Barham Saleh visited the site of the accident as the search continued for bodies, some of which were carried far downstream by the strong current.

While war and jihadist attacks have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Iraq in recent years, such accidents are relatively rare.

But corruption and the dismal state of public services in Iraq were triggers for widespread protests last year.

IS turned Mosul into its de facto capital after sweeping across much of the country's north in 2014.

The city spent three years under the group's iron-fisted rule until it was recaptured by Iraqi troops backed by a US-led coalition in 2017.

Survivors of Thursday's disaster were treated in hospitals heavily damaged by the months-long military campaign against the jihadists.

A mortuary was receiving bodies wrapped in white shrouds, many bearing the names of women.

A forensics official said many had yet to be identified.

Iraq's justice ministry said it had ordered the arrest of nine ferry company officials and banned the owners of the vessel and the picnic site from leaving the country.

Officials implicated in various scandals have fled Iraq in recent years.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Rachmadea Aisyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019

Female leaders of Indonesias state and private sectors are striving to achieve gender equality in the workplace, something they acknowledge as having long been overlooked in the formal work environment.

They explained their efforts during a joint event titled Ring the Bell for Gender Equality initiated by UN Women, UN Global Compact, UN Sustainable Stock Exchange and several other partners.

As the presence of women in the workplace increases, stakeholders need to ensure their rights and safety so that their contribution can be translated into a larger contribution to economic growth, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said.

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019 12:28 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee833d691 1 National EU-palm-oil-regulation,Indonesia,EU-Indonesia,European-Union Free

In response to Jakartas objection to a European Union bill that would cap the use of palm-oil-based biofuels in the region, the bloc explained that the regulation was not meant to target specific biofuels or feedstocks, but was based on deforestation data from 2008 to 2015 that showed large a proportion of the deforestation was associated with palm oil.

The EU said that the bill was supported by a report based on the best available scientific data from 2008 to 2015, which showed that palm oil has been associated with the highest level of deforestation with 45 percent of the expansion of oil palm plantations taking place in high carbon stock areas.

Indeed, the productivity factor of palm oil is higher than other crops but the factor used in the formula to determine [indirect land use change or ILUC] is calculated based on the energy-content-of-traded-products of different annual crops such as soy, rape seed and sunflower compared to palm oil, the EU Embassy in Jakarta said in a press statement.

The reference period starts in 2008 because the year is the cut-off date contained in the EU sustainability criteria for biofuels and 2015 provides the latest availability of consistent data.

The bloc also said that palm oil that is certified as low ILUC-risk can continue to benefit from incentives. Exemptions are also applied for those companies that plant on unused lands and plantations managed by small-hold farmers, considering the large number of smallholders involved in oil palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Indonesia has threatened to boycott products from the bloc after the issuance of a European Commission Regulation that singles out palm oil as a commodity that should be capped immediately because of its large contribution to deforestation.

The regulation allows soybeans, sugarcane , sunflower and other types of vegetable oils despite other reports that show that they also cause deforestation. In a report issued by the European Commission in 2013, which is entitled The Impact of EU Consumption on Deforestation, the commission suggests that food crops contributed directly or indirectly to deforestation, including soybeans (19 percent), maize (11 percent) and oil palm (8 percent).

The bloc has also refused to take into account the major reforms Indonesia undertook after it faced one of the worst fires in the countrys history in 2015.

According to the data from the Environment and Forestry Ministry, the country experienced a decline of deforestation in 2017 when it only lost 480,000 hectares of forest -- relatively less than in previous years. The decrease was believed to allow Indonesia to avoid releasing about 4.8 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Read also: Declining deforestation in Indonesia: Anomaly or sustainable trend?

The European Parliament and the European Council are to scrutinize the new regulation in the next two months and if there are no objections raised during this period, the regulation would be passed into law.

The bloc said the latest data from Indonesia would be assessed during a reassessment period in 2021.

The European Commission will reassess the data and, if appropriate, the methodology in 2021 and will carry out a revision of the delegated regulation in 2023. At that moment, any efforts undertaken by Indonesia [such as a revamped ISPO, the moratorium, the one-map policy, or the recently adopted national action plan] will be taken into account, it said.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Ivany Atina Arbi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019

The Indonesian Zero Waste Alliance has urged the government to tighten its regulations on importing plastic waste following Chinas recent move to restrict waste imports into that country.

For decades from 1988 to 2016, China absorbed 45.1 percent of global waste. The alliance has warned that Indonesia could potentially accept the waste now rejected by China, if the government does not implement and enforce strict regulations against imported plastic waste.

Based on Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data, Indonesia imported 283,152 tons of plastic waste in 2018, up by 141 percent from the previous year. The Chinese ban on imports of 24 types of waste material came into effect in February 2018.

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Linkedin Theresia Sufa (The Jakarta Post) Bogor  Fri, March 22, 2019 14:40 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8346509 1 City bogor,beautification,kampung,4D Free

People living in a kampung on Kepatihan lane in Kebun Kelapa subdistrict, Central Bogor, have gone the extra mile to beautify their area with a 4D concept.

The initiator, Sugiarno, said the 4D theme was aimed at distinguishing the kampung from other beautified and colorful kampungs. While decorations in 3D kampungs consist mostly of just paintings, the ones in their kampung can be used as photo props.

Sugiarno and the others made several sections using various cities and countries as the sub-theme, such as London and Japan.

In the London section, there is a picture of a palace guard wearing his foot guard uniform  black bearskin cap, scarlet tunic and dark blue trousers.

They are currently making an American section, using Hollywood to represent the theme.

For the American section, well focus on making the landscape of Hollywood along with its Walk of Fame. We will also decorate houses here with iconic Hollywood things, he added, noting that there would also be Korea and Egypt themes.

Neighborhood unit (RT) 04 head Manaf said residents decided to revamp their kampung with a 4D theme as they wished for it to become among the citys tourist destinations.

We hope tourists will visit our kampung for sightseeing and to take pictures. We will offer food, many of our residents are good cooks, Manaf said. (vla)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019 13:05 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8341f51 4 Business PLN,Java-Bali-electricity-system,additional-supply,2019,2020 Free

State-owned electricity company PLN will operate three steam-fueled power plants (PLTU) late this year and early next year that will produce 1,000 megawatts (MW) each and will be used as an additional supply for the Java-Bali electricity system (PJB), according to PJB operational director Sugiyanto.

The three power plants are PLTU Java 7 Unit 1 in Bojonegara, Banten and PLTU Cilacap Expansion 2 in Central Jakarta, the commercial operations of which will begin October, as well as PLTU Java 7 Unit 2, which will be operated in early, 2020, he said as quoted by kontan.co.id on Friday.

With the operation of the two power plants, the Java-Bali electricity system will get additional supply of 2,000 MW from PLTU Cilacap Expansion 2 and PLTU Java 7 Unit 1 in late 2019, as well as 1,000 MW electricity from PLTU Java 7, Unit 2 in early 2020, he said.

With the operation of three power plants, the capacity of the Java-Bali electricity system will increase from 11,000 MW to 14,000 MW in early 2020.

He said the Java-Bali electricity system would also get an additional supply from other smaller power plants this year, including PLTU Lontar Unit 4, Banten 315 MW, Block 2 PLTG Grati, East Java 160 MW, and Steam Turbine PLTGU Tanjung Priok Blok M, Jakarta 200 MW.

This will help strengthen electricity supply in the Java-Bali interconnection. [] the margin reserve will increase to 30 percent, Sugiyarto said.

He added that East Java was rich in power resources and that it supplied 2,000 MW to Central Java, West Java and 500 MW electricity to Bali.(bbn)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22 2019

Indonesian Farmers Association (HKTI) chairman Moeldoko, also the presidential chief of staff, has declared that the HKTI, touted as the largest in the country, would support President Joko Jokowi Widodo in his reelection bid this year.

With our political rights, we therefore declare our full support for President Jokowi to continue improving the welfare of Indonesian farmers, Moeldoko said at the State Palace in Jakarta on Tuesday, when Jokowi welcomed hundreds of HKTI representatives to open the associations national coordination meeting (Rakornas).

Moeldoko cited the incumbents agrarian reforms as the grounds for the HKTIs support, claiming that land redistribution, village funds and infrastructure development, among other programs, had helped improve farmers welfare and enhance food security in the country.

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22, 2019 13:39 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8344d1d 1 National #Indonesia,#GraftCase,PPPChairmanRomahurmuziy,arrest,bribery-case,popularity,social-media Free

Almost a week after being declared a bribery suspect, Muhammad "Romy" Romahurmuziy said on Friday the case had nothing to do with the United Development Party (PPP), the party he had been leading for years prior to his arrest, but was pursued because of his popularity on social media.

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) officially named Romy, an ally of President Joko Jokowi Widodo  who is seeking a second term in office  a suspect in a bribery case involving the Religious Affairs Ministry on Saturday after the antigraft body arrested him in Surabaya, East Java the day before.

The KPK also named two other officials suspects of graft.

This is my personal case. It has nothing to do with the PPP, he told reporters at the KPKs headquarters before entering the building prior to his first interrogation as a suspect.

Romy said that the PPP would not give him legal assistance concerning his case because he is no longer the leader of the Islamist party.

On Monday, the antigraft body investigators seized money from the office of Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin during a raid connected to the bribery case.

Rommy said that he was aware of the raid, but did not know whether the money was involved in his case.

The KPK named me as their most wanted target and later arrested me because, as among other party leaders, I had the greatest number of followers on social media, he said.

As for his first interrogation as a suspect, he said that he would be very cooperative with the KPK to widen their perspective on the case.

He was scheduled to be interrogated on Thursday, but he postponed the event because of health reasons.

KPK spokesman Febri Diansyah said Rohamurmuziy told him he was not in sick in the detention center before being taken to the KPKs building for the interrogation as scheduled.

The suspect said he had difficulty sleeping for several days. The doctor has given him medicine for his complaint, he said. (das)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 22 2019

Members of the Tanker Drivers Union (SPAMT) claim they were only trying to get the attention of President Joko Jokowi Widodo when they drove two trucks carrying biodiesel from North Jakarta toward the nearby Presidential Palace earlier this week.

The trucks, which were each loaded with 35,000 liters of biodiesel, were the property of state energy holding company PT Pertamina. The truckers union has been protesting to demand clarity from PT Pertamina Patra Niagas management about their employment status. The protest has been under way for a long time with little progress and the President had promised to help solve the problem after thousands of workers were fired. However, the union has claimed that nothing has been done.

They tried to draw attention [to their plight], but they did it the wrong way, North Jakarta Police chief Sr. Comr. Budhi Hendri Susianto said as quoted by kompas.com. The police have detained 10 protesters, accusing them of hijacking the trucks.

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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Denpasar  Fri, March 22, 2019 19:27 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee834f3cc 2 National #Indonesia,#Russia,Russian,shot-death,robbery,bali Free

Bali police have shot dead a Russian man after a violent robbery at a money exchange office, officials said Friday, with two more accomplices arrested and several others on the run.



The killing happened Tuesday on the Indonesian holiday island after police responded to calls about a robbery and confronted the armed trio, officials said.



Three men, including the man who was later killed, broke into a currency exchange office and beat several employees inside, knocking them unconscious.



When they woke up, they were tied with their mouths taped, police said, adding that the employees eventually freed themselves and called the authorities.



The police managed to locate the suspects who had fled, but when they wanted to arrest the men one of the suspects wanted to attack the officers.



"Our unarmed officer tried to fight back, but because the situation was very dangerous to our members, another officer who was armed took strict measures against the suspect... he then died," Denpasar police chief Ruddi Setiawan told reporters.



The Russian embassy confirmed one of its citizens was shot dead in Bali.



"During a fight with police who were trying to arrest them, one Russian citizen was shot dead," it said on its Facebook account.

"Two others -- one Ukrainian and one Russian -- were detained."



The arrested Russian was also wounded, the embassy said, adding that four others linked to the crime are still on the run, but "their nationality is unclear".



The embassy said the gang was suspected of robbing another money changer in December and, separately, stealing weapons. It did not elaborate.



Nearly $70,000 in Indonesian rupiah and US currency were reportedly stolen, according to police, who named the dead man as 45-year-old Alexei Korotkikh.



Foreigners are often arrested for drugs offences in Bali, which attracts millions of visitors to its palm-fringed beaches every year.

But arrests for violent crime are more rare.



In January, Bali police apprehended four Bulgarians accused of skimming bank card data at several ATM machines in the capital Denpasar.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Dubai, United Arab Emirates  Fri, March 22 2019

Shining award: Bali has been named Favorite Adventure Destination by the prestigious Conde Nast Traveler Middle East magazine. (Courtesy of Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia for Dubai)

Bali has been named the Favorite Adventure Destination, beating Dubai and New Zealand for 2018/2019 by Conde Nast Traveler Middle East magazine. The winners were selected based on a six-month voting process by Middle Eastern readers and travelers.

In late February, the magazine hosted the Awards Night for the best global tourism business players at the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel in Dubai. The event had 26 award categories, including favorite destinations, international hotels, Middle East hotels, airlines and travel agencies.

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Linkedin Catherine Triomphe (Agence France-Presse) New York, United States  Fri, March 22, 2019 08:48 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8334392 2 World #USA,#politics,Donald-Trump,supporter,guilty,bomb,threat,Democrat Free

A supporter of President Donald Trump pleaded guilty on Thursday to mailing crude bombs to prominent Democrats including former president Barack Obama and former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Cesar Sayoc, 57, who was arrested in Florida in October, pleaded guilty to 65 counts and could face life imprisonment at his sentencing in September.

Appearing in court in a blue prison jumpsuit, and with his hair pulled into a gray ponytail, he apologized for his actions during an appearance in a US District Court in New York.

Reading a statement prepared with his lawyers, he admitted he fashioned the homemade devices from materials including plastic piping, a digital alarm clock with electric wiring attached, fireworks and glass fragments.

"I know these actions were wrong and I am sorry," he told the court, in a barely audible, choked voice.

The slew of charges relates to 16 package bombs Sayoc sent from a Florida post office to leading Democrats as well as the Manhattan offices of CNN.

Besides Obama and Clinton, those targeted included billionaire George Soros, former president Bill Clinton, former vice president Joe Biden, actor Robert De Niro and several Democratic lawmakers, including 2020 presidential hopefuls Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.

None of the packages exploded and most did not come anywhere near their intended recipients.

"Our democracy will simply not survive if our political discourse includes sending bombs to those we disagree with," said General John C. Demers, Assistant Attorney for the National Security Division, following the hearing.

"I applaud the efforts of so many in our law enforcement community whose alertness and tirelessness led to the prompt arrest of the defendant."

Sayoc had initially been charged with 30 counts, already putting him at risk of life in prison. His guilty plea does not guarantee a more lenient sentence -- but Judge Jed Rakoff stressed he did not have to hand down a life sentence in September.

A former strip club manager and bodybuilder and martial arts practitioner, Sayoc was an ardent supporter of Trump, who has rejected accusations that his rhetoric fuels extremism.

Sayoc, who lived in a white truck plastered with pro-Trump and anti-Democrat stickers, was arrested in Florida five days after the first device was discovered in Soros's upstate New York mailbox.

The episode heightened political tensions in the lead-up to the November 6 US midterm elections, which saw Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives while Republicans retained control of the Senate.

Police found Sayoc's fingerprints and DNA on the packages.

Sayoc has a criminal record dating back to 1991, peppered with convictions for theft, fraud, violence and a threat to blow up his electric utility company.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Vela Andapita and Sausan Atika (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, March 23 2019

A new chapter of Indonesias transportation will begin on Sunday with the inauguration of the highly anticipated MRT. But just two days before the launch not everything seems to be in place to support the service.

President Joko Jokowi Widodo is scheduled to officially launch the countrys first ever subway on Sunday morning. But it will only start its commercial operation a week later on April 1, as there are still a number of unresolved issues

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Linkedin News Desk (Reuters) Yangon, Myanmar  Fri, March 22, 2019 20:28 995 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee83516a0 2 SE Asia #Myanmar,#Rakhine,Myanmar,army,rebels,battles,killing Free

Six villagers were killed and five injured in Myanmar's Rakhine state amid clashes between government troops and ethnic Rakhine rebels, a lawmaker and residents said on Friday, hours after peace talks failed to resolve an escalating crisis.

Clashes took place in Buthidaung township in the northern part of Rakhine late on Thursday shortly after rebels from the Arakan Army, battling for greater autonomy for the region, met representatives of the military in the capital, Naypyitaw.

Rakhine State came to global attention after the Myanmar army drove about 730,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims across the border into Bangladesh late in 2017, but ethnic Rakhine are largely Buddhist, like the majority of Myanmars people.

Photographs taken by a Rakhine lawmaker and obtained by Reuters show the blood-smeared bodies of four people, including a young boy and a middle-aged woman, lying in a dusty pit.

"They are civilians who were hiding in a bomb shelter," said Maung Thar Phyu, a civil society activist in the area. "It is terrible."

Military spokesman Brigadier-General Zaw Min Tun told Reuters by telephone there had been a battle to the south of Say Taung village at around 9 p.m.

He said the rebel Arakan Army had initiated the clashes and the incident would be investigated further.

An Arakan Army spokesman did not immediately respond to telephone calls from Reuters to seek comment.

The Rakhine MP who traveled to the area on Friday said residents told him soldiers had surrounded the village late on Thursday and bombarded it with heavy weapons.

"We brought five bodies...to Buthidaung town now," said Maung Kyaw Zan, an MP for the area. Six people were injured, with one dying later in hospital, he said, adding that all the other villagers had fled.

About 7,500 displaced people are scattered across 29 sites in Rakhine, the Myanmar office of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.

For weeks, most humanitarian agencies have been blocked from delivering aid to vast areas across the state's north.

"It is estimated that at least 95,000 people ... have been affected by access restrictions in the five townships of Kyauktaw, Ponnagyun, Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Rathedaung," the U.N. agency said.

Peace talks between the government and the Arakan Army rebels concluded on Thursday without significant agreement, though they signed a pact to continue talks.

Myanmar governments have battled various ethnic minority insurgent groups since soon after independence from Britain in 1948, though some have struck ceasefire deals.13 hours ago

3 Dependable Dow Stocks to Buy in December

Dow Jones Stocks Can Offer Dependable Long-Term Returns Adding components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average to your investing strategy certainly comes with its fair share of positives. Since the companies that make up this widely-recognized stock market index are some of the worlds best businesses, investors know they are getting quality by focusing on the Dow.

Read ArticleSpy photos obtained this week reveal what appears to be a MINI Clubman-based hybrid out testing, but already there are questions as to its legitimacy. MINI has yet to reveal any plans for a hybrid model - and of all things, green technology is not a subject that MINI or its BMW parent has ever been coy about.

Speaking with press earlier this year, MINI USA's vice president of marketing, Jim McDowell said that while the MINI E electric car has proven to be a "great experiment" for the company, customers shouldn't get their hopes up on a hybrid.

Whether McDowell was speaking in an official capacity, ruling hybrid models out for the German-owned British brand, is another matter.

Whatever the case may be, the question remains: what is MINI testing if not a hybrid model? The body is that of a Clubman S, albeit on lower suspension. Behind the JCW-like front bumper sits an intercooler, and oddly-flared side skirts stand out on both sides of the car.

If the Hybrid Drive stickers are nothing more than a ploy to throw the media off the trail, the spied Clubman could potentially be a test mule for a future MINI or BMW model, unrelated to the Clubman itself - perhaps the upcoming MINI Coupe and Roadster models.President Trump made a rare appearance at a church last Sunday. Its a safe bet the sermon was not based on Proverbs 15:1  A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. If it was, it didnt appear to have much effect.

Before and after church, the president engaged in a tweet storm that insulted several people, including the late Sen. John McCain. Mr. Trump accuses McCain of being complicit in the leak of the Steele Dossier, a private intelligence report compiled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele for the political research firm Fusion GPS, which, among other things, alleges that in Moscow Donald Trump booked the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and, while in the company of prostitutes, defiled the bed.

According to Newsweek, major parts of the dossier have been verified by subsequent investigations into Russian election meddling. Trumps behavior at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, however, remains unverified.

The president referred to McCain as last in his class at Annapolis. This was too much for McCains daughter, Meghan, who said on The View, that the president is leading a pathetic life, adding, He spends his weekend obsessing over great men, because he knows it, and I know it, and all of you know it, he will never be a great man.

This is the problem with insults and anger. They invite similar responses. Nothing is affected by harshness, except a general degrading of the office and of the people who shoot rhetorical arrows at others. Are such things a cause of our deep decline into the cesspool of decadence, or are they a reflection of much of the countrys mood? I fear it is the latter, but good examples can set a higher tone. It is why we instruct our children not to call other people names. Dont we? If we do, why do so many tolerate it with Trump?

Among the many problems with the presidents behavior is that it is unnecessary. It is also offensive. It is unnecessary because he is keeping most of his promises, including the naming of constitutionalists to the courts and presiding over a roaring economy that has lifted many boats previously thought to have sunk forever. According to a new CNN poll, seven out of 10 respondents say the economy is in good shape, a prerequisite for any president seeking re-election.

One can favor the policies of the president while criticizing his behavior. Uncouth is one word that comes to mind. It was used in an email to me by a prominent conservative talk show host (not Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, in case you are wondering), who is also tired of the presidents insults. Uncouth is defined as lacking good manners, refinement, or grace. Does this not accurately describe this president?

He threatens to sue Saturday Night Live for Alec Baldwins satirical portrayal of him. He should go on the show, as Sarah Palin did, and demonstrate he can take it as well as dish it out. It might boost his likability.

Kindness, grace and humility go a long way and accomplish more than perpetual anger and demeaning people with whom one disagrees. The president should try it, not in a manipulative way, but seriously.

My grandmother  and I suspect many other grandmothers  used to remind me of an old saying: you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. It means you can accomplish more with being polite and kind than with vitriol and hate.

Perhaps at church Sunday there was a Bible in the pew. The president should have opened it to Ephesians 4:32: Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Try it, Mr. President. It works. This advice is offered by one who wishes you success.

This year marks Cal Thomas 35th year as a syndicated columnist. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.High Phuket voter turnout expected for national election

PHUKET: Nearly 300,000 people will be on the move in Phuket this Sunday (Mar 24) as they head to polling stations set up across the island to cast their votes in the national election.

politics

By Waranya Prompinpiras

Friday 22 March 2019, 05:10PM

A man casts his vote at the advance voting held in Phuket last Sunday (Mar 17). Photo: Tanyaluk Sakoot

A total of 366 polling stations will be set up throughout the province to make voting more convenient, and likely reduce traffic congestion in key voting areas, explained Nutthawat Wongitsaraphap, Director of the Phuket office of the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT).

Of the 294,296 eligible voters in Phuket, 144,721 are registered to vote for any of the 28 candidates contesting Phuket Constituency 1, which comprises Muang District, including Rassada, but excluding Koh Kaew and Rawai.

The remaining 149,575 are registered to cast their votes at any of 192 polling stations for any of the 31 candidates contesting Phuket Constituency 2, which comprises the remaining areas of Thalang and Kathu Districts, but also includes Koh Kaew, Rawai and Karon.

We will have 172 polling stations set up in Phuket Constituency 1 and 192 stations set up in Phuket Constituency 2, Mr Nutthawat explained.

This should be enough. We have set the polling stations out to accommodate about 1,000 voters at each one, he said.

VOTER TURNOUT

Although voter turnout at the advance voting held nationwide last Sunday (Mar 17) averaged 86.98%, even reaching 90% in some places, voter turnout this Sunday is expected to be about 80%, Mr Nutthawat said.

This is the general estimate for the whole country as given by the Office of the Election Commission of Thailand in Bangkok, he explained.

Mr Nutthawat declined to give his own estimate of what the voter turnout in Phuket is likely to be. Of note, voting is compulsory by law in Thailand, and voter turnout in national elections over the past two decades has grown to reach over the 80% mark.

Turnout this weekend is expected to be high. The advance voting last weekend saw Phuket have the highest number of people registering to cast their votes early among all 14 provinces in Southern Thailand.

A total of 49,017 people living and working on the island registered to cast their votes for candidates in their home provinces elsewhere, with 40,855 actually turning out to cast their ballots  a turnout of 83.35%.

Only 286 Phuket residents registered to cast their votes early, with 265 upholding that promise  a turnout of 92.66%.

THE COUNT

Polling stations will open be from 8am to 5pm.

After the polling stations close at 5pm, the head of each polling station will count the ballots on site and report the results through the rapid report app developed by the ECT, Mr Nutthawat said.

The app is safe and secure, he assured.

Using the app will allow for local, regional and national counting centres to be updated simultaneously as quickly as possible, he added.

Then ballot papers from each polling station will be sent to district counting headquarters, Mr Nutthawat explained.

The ballots for Phuket Constituency 1 will be announced at Saphan Hin, while the ballots for Phuket Constituency 2 will be announced at Thalang Pranangsang School.

The unofficial count for Phuket will be announced at each district headquarters as the counts come in on Sunday night, Mr Nutthawat said.

Outside votes will be counted separately, and the ECT in Bangkok will announce national election results on Monday morning, he concluded.TCEB launches new online MICE Intelligence & Resource Centre

BANGKOK: The Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureaus (TCEB) MICE Intelligence & Innovation Department (TCEB M2I) has launched the new MICE Intelligence & Resource Centre, which is accessible to suppliers, organisers and all players involved in the MICE industry.

tourismeconomics

By The Phuket News

Friday 22 March 2019, 12:45PM

The MICE Intelligence & Resource Centre is available at the TCEBs website, www.businesseventsthailand.com.

Jaruwan Suwannasat, Director of TCEB M2I, said, The MICE Intelligence & Resource Centre reflects Thailands move forward to providing MICE operators with actionable and insightful information they can use to devise concrete business plans.

TCEB has adopted MICE Intelligence and Data Analytics to respond to the changes taking place in the MICE industry, and with the MICE Intelligence & Resource Centre the bureau will be working closely with operators to elevate the MICE sector in a sustainable and evenly distributed manner.

The MICE Intelligence & Resource Centre also reflects the role TCEB has taken on as a Thought Leader under its new Thailand Redefine Your Business Events branding, in which it seeks to help drive change and new ideas for the industry, Ms Jaruwan explained.

The MICE Intelligence & Resource Centre is aimed at supporting all target groups  entrepreneurs, businessmen, students and the public  to jointly foster MICE business through the power of data and to create sustainable economic growth. The initiative is part of a six-part strategy under Thailands three-year MICE Intelligence & Innovation Strategic Plan (2019-2021).

In developing the new centre, TCEB M2I worked closely with leading global partners including the World Bank, Pacific Asia Travel Association, Frost & Sullivan  a business consulting firm involved in market research and analysis, and media intelligence firm Meltwater Singapore.

Through the MICE Intelligence & Resource Centre, MICE professionals from across the industry can access:

 MICE Insights: the in-depth analysis on business trends and new opportunities, to help gain a sustainable competitive advantage.

 Industry Coverage: the latest insights and trends on Thailands 10 S-Curve industries - which include Future Automotive, Smart Device, Health Tourism, Biotechnology, Food Processing, Robotics, Aviation & Logistics, Biofuel & Biochemical, Digital, and Integrated Medical Service - to help explore emerging opportunities in the global and domestic MICE landscape and to embrace and drive changes in the digitalisation era.

 The Publications Centre: the TCEB e-Library platform with its growing number of publications on the MICE industry for viewing or download, and with customised search functions in such categories as Business, Economics, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Sustainability and Technology.

 MICE Business Tools: Event management and planning software that combines pre- and post-event solutions to meet the demand of changing markets. A portfolio of MICE business tools and apps are available to foster engagement between event organizers and event attendees. These include event analytics, business matching, survey and event registration and payment tools.

There centre also features a self-assessment tool that allows an event organiser to diagnose their event organising potential and management readiness, a financial performance analysis tool to measure event profit and ROI, and a break-even analysis tool to calculate cost and revenue targets needed to cover the organisation and holding of an event.Watertown Lakers' varsity girls, boys hockey teams each win Friday games

The Watertown Lakers overcame a 3-0 deficit after the first period to defeat the Huron All-Stars 7-4 in a South Dakota Amateur Hockey Association varsity girls game Friday night in the Maas Ice Arena.New Delhi, Mar 22 (IBNS): The ships of the first training squadron of the Indian Navy (Sujata, Sarathi and Shardul) are currently undertaking humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations at Port Beira in Mozambique since Mar 18.

The ships were diverted from sea post Cyclone 'IDAI' hit the coast of Mozambique on Mar 15 causing large scale destruction and loss of lives.

Since arrival at Port Beira, the ships have rescued more than 150 survivors from Buzi area near Port Beira, which is cut off from the mainland.

In addition, two medical camps have been set up at Port Beira and Gaura-Gaurathe Island. Medical assistance has been provided to over 800 affected people from the local population.

The Chetak helicopter of Indian Navy has undertaken a number of sorties in difficult conditions for evacuation of local personnel in coordination with local authorities and the UN Mission.

The helicopter also undertook evacuation of three pregnant ladies, dropping off relief material (food and water) including 500 Kgs provided by World Food Programme.

INS Shardul transferred 10 tonnes of fresh water to a water bowser on jetty using submersible pumps. About 2 tonnes of drinking water was also provided by INS Sujata in jerry cans to the Port authorities for relief camps.

Community services are being undertaken by the ship's crew at devastated locations like schools, churches, hospitals, orphanages in coordination with the local government officials.

The ships have set up a community kitchen kept open 24x7 for all local populace including the workers at the port. A total of about 450 people have been provided hot meals.

In addition, Media Personnel from BBC, TVM Mozambique and OXFDM visited onboard our ships for witnessing the relief work being undertaken.

The media team also visited the medical camp site at the port and were briefed about the various medical aid being provided by the ships.

The HADR operations are ongoing and the ships of the First Training Squadron of the Indian Navy remain committed to provide all assistance to the local population till their stay in Mozambique.Ozzy Osbourne is back to his normal "complaining" and "miserable" self, and that's great news according to his family.

Last month, Ozzy was forced to cancel shows in New Zealand, Australia and Europe after he was hospitalised with a severe respiratory infection. His wife Sharon Osbourne would later reveal that Ozzy had developed pneumonia.

But in a new interview with Access, Sharron and her son Jack gave an update on the rock legend's health and things are looking up. Jack said:

Well, if this gauges where he's at, he's complaining a lot and he's back to his normal routine. So everything's A-okay there.

Sharron said: "That's always a good sign, when he complains and he's miserable. Then you know it's good." And Jack added: "It's when he's happy and skipping around. You're, like, 'There's something really wrong here. Call the doctor.'"



That's the way Ozzy! Here's hoping you contunue to improve and can make it back to New Zealand soon.

You can watch the full interview bellow:JAKARTA, INDONESIAIndonesias national airline Garuda Indonesia is moving to cancel an order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 jets following the deadly crashes involving two of the aircraft, a spokesman for the company said Friday.

The decision comes less than two weeks after an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed en route to Nairobi from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. A flight of Lion Air, a low-cost Indonesian airline, crashed in October shortly after takeoff from Jakarta, killing all 189 passengers and crew.

Both crashes involved the 737 Max 8 model and have brought intense scrutiny to U.S.-based Boeing, which marketed the 737 Max 8 as a fuel-efficient jet of the future, as well as to the Federal Aviation Administration. Garuda Indonesias cancellation is believed to be the first scrapping of an order for the plane in reaction to the crashes.

Ikhsan Rosan, a spokesman for Garuda Indonesia, told The Washington Post the decision to cancel the order was because of consumers low confidence in the airplanes following the crashes. The multibillion-dollar order was first announced in October 2014.

Rosan said airline officials told Boeing of the decision by letter and were scheduled to meet with representatives from Boeing to discuss the matter on March 28. A Boeing spokesman said the company does not comment on discussions with customers.

Read more:

Indonesia safety board denies leaking Lion Air probe details

Air Canada, WestJet purchased safety option reportedly missing on crashed planes

Boeing Defends 737 MAX Design Process, Expects Software Fix in Weeks

The discussion wont be easy, he said. Garuda Indonesia ordered 50 of the aircraft, Rosan said, and one has been delivered but was grounded after the Ethiopian Airlines crash earlier this month. Garuda Indonesia has a fleet size of 144 aircraft, according to the companys website. An additional 58 aircraft are operated by its low-cost carrier, Citilink.

Authorities investigating the October crash of Lion Air flight 610 say erroneous sensor data triggered an automated anti-stall feature, known as the MCAS, in the new Max planes. The glitch kept pushing the planes nose down, ultimately causing it to plunge into the Java Sea, investigators found. Divers scoured the waters off the Jakarta coast for the planes two black boxes. The voice recorder was recovered in January.

The Ethiopian Airlines crash appeared to share similarities with the Lion Air case, including an erratic up-and-down flight path, and the pilot reporting flight control problems shortly before crashing, authorities said. Investigators in France and Ethiopia then said information from the Ethiopian flight data recorder showed clear similarities with the Lion Air flight.

All Max 8 aircraft have since been grounded, pending the investigation.

On Thursday, investigators in Jakarta confirmed that a third pilot was aboard the same Lion Air plane during a flight on Oct. 28, a day before it crashed. During that flight, the plane experienced similar issues with the MCAS system, but that pilot reportedly disconnected the system.

The issues experienced during the Oct. 28 flight were part of a string of problems with the plane starting Oct. 26, including the four flights before the one that crashed, according to the preliminary report on incident.

While the Indonesian flights safety record was initially scrutinized in the immediate aftermath of the Lion Air crash, focus has now shifted to Boeing and the FAA. The U.S. Transportation Departments Office of Inspector General and Justice Department are looking into the Boeing 737 Max.

Boeing is also facing a growing number of lawsuits over the crashes. Two lawsuits were filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in addition to multiple lawsuits filed last year.

The lawsuits brought Wednesday allege that the two-month-old aircraft crashed because, among other things, Boeing defectively designed a new flight control system for the Boeing 737 Max 8 that automatically and erroneously pushes the aircrafts nose down, and because Boeing failed to warn of the defect.

Attorney Steve Marks, who is representing the families of 20 Lion Air crash victims, said relatives of people who died were pressured by airline employees to sign agreements shortly after the disaster. The agreements stipulated a payment of 1.3 billion rupiah ($123,170) and barred family members from suing the airline.

A spokesman for Lion Air did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the agreements.

Read more about:Any entity created on this planet comes into the world with a star chart, dominated by a sun sign, reflecting the motion of the spheres above at its moment of birth.

Facebook, for instance, is an Aquarius, while Google, Snap and Netflix are all Virgos. Microsoft and Twitter  both Aries. Amazon? Classic Cancer.

Sanctuary, a digital astrology startup backed by $1.5 million in venture capital, made the considered decision to launch on Wednesday  the dawn of the new astrological year, when Pisces gives way to Aries in the astral cycle.

And with private equity veterans, celebrity astrologers and one of Snapchats earliest employees on board, its investors foresee fortunes.

Theres always been money to be made in cosmic guidance. The ancient king Croesus, whos credited with inventing minted money itself, gave a 500-pound lump of gold to the oracle at Delphi as tribute for good forecasts. Tycho Brahe, the Renaissance scientist whose observations of the stars laid the groundwork for Galileos breakthroughs, made his living as a royal astrologer.

More recently, the phone psychic network behind Miss Cleo raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in the 90s, and was fined by the Federal Trade Commission for unfair business practices. Astrology.com recently told Digiday its revenues are in the low eight figures and growing, based mostly on ad revenue.

In 2018, Americans spent $2.2 billion on mystical services, according to research firm IBISWorld. And the internet, especially social media, is awash in astrology. Influencers pose with crystals, memes about Mercury in retrograde (a supposedly inauspicious time of tumult) ripple across Instagram, and horoscopes have re-emerged as a mainstay of womens sites like the Cut, Bustle and Broadly.

Astrology has been around for a very long time, and it really adapts to the vernacular that people are speaking, said Aliza Kelly, Sanctuarys astrologer-in-residence and a horoscope writer for Cosmopolitan magazine.

Today, the language is technology and memes and connectivity.

The business models adapt too. Kelly leverages her media success and Instagram following to sell 60-minute phone readings for $149 a pop and is booked solid through early May.

Steph Koyfman, an astrologer who runs the website the Daily Hunch as a side job (her main gig is at language-learning startup Babbel), said the demand for an astrologers interpretive skills has stayed strong since she launched the site in 2015.

In response to the stream of private messages from followers who had urgent questions to ask, Koyfman said she updated her list of services at the beginning of the year: Im offering a $10 Google cant help me reading, if you just want to get a really short answer.

The IBISWorld report found that the market was split among more than 88,000 separate businesses, most of which are run by solo practitioners like Kelly and Koyfman (and most of whom are women).

The team behind Sanctuary is betting on the idea that they can become a central platform to unify this fragmented market and cater to those customers willing to pay for instant astrological gratification.

Investors get really excited about the size of the addressable market, the growth potential, the fact that its so fragmented, and that theres no established or well-known brand, said Ross Clark, Sanctuarys chief executive.

The app itself is built around the experience of texting: After users download Sanctuary and enter their exact time and place of birth, they get access to the kind of free astrological content common across the web a daily horoscope, and some background information on the more esoteric corners of the star chart, delivered in a chatty back-and-forth format.

The business model hinges upon a monthly subscription fee. For $19.99, users can chat with a live astrologer once a month for a 15-minute birth chart reading, during which they can ask for specific insights into their lives based on their star charts.

Right now, the company has 30 astrologers lined up for readings, who work as independent contractors, and a small back-office staff of five.

Even though customers arent guaranteed to speak to the same astrologer each time, the beta phase of Sanctuary convinced Clark that a strong corporate brand can make up for any decrease in personal affinity.

Like many who seek guidance from the cosmos, Sanctuary took some time to find its true path. It began as a project within the incubator of Lorne Michaels Broadway Video Ventures.

David Birnbaum, then the operations president, had taken a look at the online astrology market at the turn of the century when he was working in private equity with Apax Partners.

Back then, we actually looked at rolling up a bunch of astrology sites these companies were very antiquated, very web 1.0, mostly marketplaces to connect consumers to shady-looking people, Birnbaum said. But I realized it was a massive market, and these companies were making fortunes.

Ross Clark joined as a chief executive and started playing around with business models. They tried out paid star chart readings on Facebook messenger and saw demand keep ticking up.

Sixty per cent of users came back at least once per week, Clark said. I was sort of blown away when I saw those results.

Their seed round brought in money from the private equity firm Greycroft and Shari Redstones personal venture outfit, Advancit Capital, and brought Kelly on board for astrological expertise.

And Chloe Drimal, who was Snapchats 14th employee and has gone on to start a company called Yoni Circle, which creates guided meditation-like experiences for women in Los Angeles, came on as the companys West Coast adviser.

Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel recruited Drimal right out of college after she wrote an article praising the nascent disappearing message app for a Yale University newspaper. After a stint leading the companys corporate group therapy program, known as Council, Drimal ran Snaps ambitious Our Story product, which stitched together user videos from around the world into travel guides and breaking news reports.

I was the girl at Snapchat that had sage on her desk and crystals, Drimal said.

She sees Sanctuary as a way to democratize the desire to trade cash for cosmic reassurance.

I met this one woman when I was 11 years old who told me I was a Sagittarius, Drimal said. I researched everything, I wanted to understand it, and I found an astrologer  it cost $100, $125, and that is on the lower end. I had to save up.

When asked whether they believe in the product theyre pushing, the entrepreneurs behind the company describe astrology as more of a spark for self-reflection, or social connection, than a manifestation of cosmic destiny.

I believe in anything that provides people with meaning and optimism in their daily lives, Birnbaum said. For me, it might be going to my therapist on a weekly basis, which I do, for others its talking to astrologers.

That said, Im an Aquarius, so Im always skeptical.EDMONTONGraham Louden, a 60-year-old gay man in Calgary, remembers vividly the pain his community felt at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when some partners were barred from visiting their dying loved ones in hospital due to not having spousal rights.

I lived through that, Louden said. There are no gay men my age. We died.

These painful memories were dredged up for many in Alberta on Thursday, with the NDP releasing a video that resurrects United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenneys past of working to overturn spousal rights for gay couples in San Francisco decades ago.

While the emotional video is a political attack against Kenney, it has drawn strong, if sometimes divided, reactions from the provinces LGBTQ community. Some say it sheds a light on Kenneys past that has had a lasting, negative impact on the community, and called for real reconciliation from the UCP leader. But conservative LGBTQ folks say Kenneys track record with the community has improved, and the past should remain in the past.

Titled Jason Kenneys Real Record, the video was screened to members of the LGBTQ community on Thursday afternoon in both Edmonton and Calgary. It tells the story of a San Francisco man identified as Gary Solak, who lost his partner, James Ross, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

The overturning of a law that extended spousal rights to same-sex couples at the time meant that Solak, who still lives in San Francisco, had no access to the home he shared with his partner after his death to retrieve personal items, according to the video. Kenney lobbied for the overturn of those rights during his time as a university student in San Francisco.

The video was funded by the Alberta NDP campaign, and was filmed within the last month. The decisions that politicians make have lasting impacts, Sarah Hoffman, outgoing deputy premier, said when introducing the video, which the party has dubbed as a short documentary.

At a rally earlier on Thursday in Calgary, Kenney responded to the controversy surrounding his previous political activism against same-sex rights and said his views have evolved since he was a university student.

Its true that back when these were matters of political contention, that I supported the traditional definition of marriage, as did virtually every political party and political leader in every country in the democratic West, Kenney said. Its also true that social, political and legal consensus on that question has changed dramatically, and I accept that.

Among those struck by the video was Michael Phair, a well-known gay rights activist and former Edmonton city councillor, who was invited to one of the screenings on Thursday. Phair also served as the first openly gay politician in Alberta.

Unfortunately for me, it brings back very difficult memories, Phair, who lived in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic, said. Everyone died in those days.

Phair added he believes Kenneys actions from decades ago still hold weight in the upcoming provincial election. I think that pain and the way that people were treated ... that is something that doesnt go away without a whole lot of reconciliation work, and some direct response of coming to terms with what you did at that time, he said.

Those comments were echoed by Louden, who said he is yet to see a sincere apology from Kenney on his past actions toward the LGBTQ community. He needs to be really, really clear; specifically, intentionally and explicitly state his support for the (LGBTQ) community, Louden said. Thats the minimum that I would accept from him.

Louden said he has voted conservative in the past, but has become more left-leaning over the years. He will not be voting for the UCP in the April 16 election, he said, largely due to Kenneys history with the LGBTQ community.

He seemed so damned proud of it, Louden said of Kenneys role in overturning spousal rights for LGBTQ people. That really infuriates me.

But for Harrison Fleming, a communications adviser for the UCP caucus and a member of LGBTTory, a group representing LGBTQ conservatives, Kenneys past actions are not reflective of the politician he is today.

What happened 30 years ago, I mean, thats quite frankly 30 years ago when probably more than half of Canada was opposed to gay marriage, Fleming said. He added Kenneys track record since then, especially as federal immigration minister, proves that his views have changed. He particularly cites Kenneys efforts to protect LGBTQ Iranians by granting them refugee status in Canada.

Society has moved forward  Conservatives as a whole have moved forward, Fleming said.

Fleming added that while LGBTQ issues are important for members of the community, its patronizing to assume some will vote solely on social issues, and that LGBTQ people care just as much about issues relating to the economic welfare of the province. Theres no one person who clearly identifies the experience that (LGBTQ) people have, Fleming said.

The political divide between members of the LGBTQ community comes up frequently in conversation within the personal circles of both Louder and Mark Chiang, an LGBTQ minister at Edmontons St. Andrews Presbyterian Church. But Chiang said his passion about social issues affecting his community is now at the forefront after viewing the Alberta NDPs video on Kenneys history.

I do have some gay friends who would be more economically conservative, and we play this balance of how important are the social issues, Chiang said. This video reminded me that, for me, the social issues outweigh the economic ones.

Chiang added that in light of the video, he hopes to see a thorough response from Kenney on his past actions against same-sex rights. Its his chance to tell that story, he said.

With files from Brennan Doherty and Amy Tucker, Star Calgary

Nadine Yousif is a reporter/photographer for Star Edmonton. Follow her on twitter: @nadineyousif_

Read more about:HALIFAX  A provincial announcement of more than $2.5-million for specialized care equipment was met with mixed reaction by critics whod hoped for more long-term care beds.

The Liberal government said the funding will help staff in long-term care homes prevent and manage pressure injuries, also known as bedsores. A new agreement with the Canadian Red Cross will give long-term care facilities quicker and easier access to equipment like special air mattresses and pressure redistribution cushions.

During the announcement at the Red Cross building in Dartmouth on Thursday, Health Minister Randy Delorey said $1.68-million of that money will allow facilities to get the equipment on site, instead of waiting for it to be shipped from the Red Cross.

In addition, the province will invest $880,000 to purchase 209 new ceiling lifts to enable long-term care staff to safely move residents around.

We do need to start somewhere and this is, we felt, the best way to be efficient, Delorey said. The Red Cross does have a long history of managingwithin our long-term care facilities with various equipment like wheelchairs and other types of equipment for residents.

But the Nova Scotia Government & General Employees Union (NSGEU), which represents many of the provinces nurses and health care workers, accused the government of misplaced priorities and hypocrisy in its funding announcements, according to a media release from president Jason MacLean.

Read more:

How two Halifax 20-somethings are making Nova Scotia seniors wishes come true

Powerful seniors groups lobby for emotion-focused care in nursing homes

Opinion | Using boomers short-term could help gap in Nova Scotia labour shortage

Just yesterday, this government announced $8.5-million to renovate a ferry terminal in another country, MacLean said, referring to the controversial move to fund Bar Harbor, Maine renovations announced on Wednesday.

Today, Minister Delorey dug up a meagre $2.5-million for our struggling long-term care sector. This shows just how tone deaf our government is. They expect Nova Scotians to just be grateful for the crumbs that they are willing to throw at our health care crisis.

And Gary Burrill, leader of the provinces NDP, said the core need is for new facilities to be brought forward post-double-haste.

He was also concerned that, despite a well-articulated need for more staff in nursing homes to position residents to help prevent pressure injuries, there was no funding for any people in Thursdays announcement.

Having said that, of course when there is new equipment, superior equipment made available to long-term care facilities that dont have it today, obviously thats an improvement, he said following the announcement.

Chris Baert-Wilson, the Red Cross provincial director for operations in Nova Scotia, described the funding as an add-on to an existing program.

The piece that this money will allow us to do is to do a bulk purchase and drop deliver to all of the long-term care facilities across Nova Scotia, she said. And that will allow those facilities to have stock in hand and in house in order to swap it out and get it underneath the residents in their beds when they need it ... and not wait or have a delay in delivery.

Besides ensuring delivery, the Red Cross will make sure long-term care staff know how to use it the equipment and will also service and maintain it. She hopes the bulk of the specialized equipment will be ready in June.

Red Cross spokesperson Dan Bedell said staff were confirming prices on various models, and determined theyll be able to purchase about 500 specialized mattresses and 100 pressure cushions with the money.

Josie Ryan, executive director for long-term care at the Northwood facility in Halifax, said facilities can sometimes wait four to six weeks to get specialized mattresses.

Depending on the resident, that could result in deterioration of their condition, despite frequently turning and repositioning. She said the mattresses make a huge difference.

(Its) doing prevention rather than after the factSo now well be able to get a mattress prior to anything happening, Ryan said.

In a media release, Progressive Conservative MLA Chris dEntremont commended the courage of the families of Chrissy Dunnington and John Ferguson for bringing the issue to the forefront.

These families made the difficult decision to go public after their loved ones died from complications from pressure sores, dEntremont said. I hope the Dunningtons and Silversteins find some peace today knowing that their efforts will help others.

The PC caucus welcomed the funding, since providing patients who have pressure wounds with specialized air mattresses was one of the measures included in a bill introduced by health care critic Karla MacFarlane more than six months ago.

Along with Thursdays funding, Delorey announced the province will make more information about the long-term care sector available to the public online. This includes quarterly data related to the Protection for Persons in Care Act, which is now available.

Inspectors have also started using an electronic licensing and inspection program. The first of those reports is expected to be posted online by the end of May 2019. Quarterly data related to pressure injuries will also be available online starting July 2019.

Yvette dEntremont is a Halifax-based reporter focusing on health. Follow her on Twitter: @ydentremont

Read more about:VANCOUVERAn agreement has been reached between the federal, provincial and two First Nations to offer temporary protection to the central caribou population in British Columbia while a long-term plan is developed.

The agreement between B.C., Ottawa, the West Moberly and Saulteau First Nations is one of two agreements announced Thursday.

Doug Donaldson, B.C.s minister of forests, lands, natural resource operations and rural development, said the agreements include tangible measures that are rooted in the best available science and traditional knowledge.

The measures include additional protected area, establishment of a recovery committee with representatives from the federal and provincial governments as well as First Nations, recreational management, predator control and reduction of disturbances.

Donaldson said some local industries might be impacted and the governments will work to ensure that the effects are limited.

The B.C. government is seeking consultation and feedback until the end of April on the two draft caribou recovery agreements.

The agreements minimize the risk of a federal emergency order, which could see caribou habitat being closed off, resulting in billions of dollars in economic losses and affecting jobs, the province said in a technical briefing.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said the federal government is working with British Columbia and First Nations to ensure that the southern mountain caribou, a species at risk that is facing imminent threat, gets the help it needs while also providing appropriate support to local communities and workers in B.C.

The West Moberly and Saulteau First Nations welcomed the agreement.

Chief Ken Cameron of the Saulteau First Nations said it was a powerful moment in history and a turning point for B.C. and Canada and First Nations.

Chief Roland Willson of the West Moberly First Nations said the caribou recovery program has shown that combining science with Indigenous traditional knowledge can stop extinctions and by providing habitat protection, caribou populations can be brought back and given a chance to thrive again.

The central caribou population has declined from approximately 800 animals in the early 2000s to about 220 animals, the provincial government said.

Tim Burkhart, B.C. program manager of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, said the agreement that includes the First Nations is a step forward.

The other agreement between the federal and provincial government is less developed, he added.

Its lacking in concrete actions. Its more about setting out the planning they are going to do and engagement with communities in order to recover caribou, he said.

Theres some bit and pieces in there of meaningful action like funding for maternal pens but very little in the way of concrete action on the ground.

The caribou recovery process has been ongoing for decades, Burkhart said, adding that while the governments were negotiating these agreements two herds have died out.

So while theyre talking and negotiating, caribou are disappearing.

A lot of caribou habitat has been logged and lost, which has driven down their numbers, he said.

Read more about:PORT AUX BASQUES, N.L.The Canadian Coast Guard is monitoring a tanker carrying eight million litres of refined petroleum and additional fuel that lost steering off the southwest coast of Newfoundland on Thursday morning.

The Jana Desgagnes sustained damage to its rudder southwest of Port aux Basques while en route to Montreal. The coast guard said in a statement Friday that no pollution has been released and the vessel and its 17 crew are not in immediate danger.

Coast guard ice breakers arrived on the scene Thursday night and have remained in the area since then.

The vessel was about 27 kilometres from Cape Ray, N.L., as of Friday afternoon and is being watched by coast guard and environmental response specialists.

Ice conditions have slowed the recovery process but a commercial tugboat is en route and officials say the plan is to tow the vessel to port in Sydney, N.S.

Read more about:Three Toronto men are facing charges after police found a loaded handgun inside a baby crib.

Police said in a press release Friday that they had launched an investigation into three men earlier this year and executed a search warrant at a home on Empringham Dr., near Sewells Rd. in the Sheppard-Morningside area.

Inside, they discovered a loaded .45-calibre Colt 1911 handgun inside a baby crib. Police said that, at the time of the search warrant, several children were inside the home.

Deputy chief James Ramer posted a photo on Twitter of the handgun in a crib next to a stuffed bunny and clothes.

Three suspects were arrested and charged: Trayvon Palmer, 19, Kacey Downer, 22, and Jordan Marcelle, 25. Each man was charged with one count of unauthorized possession of a prohibited firearm, possession of a prohibited or restricted firearm, knowingly not holding a licence and registration certificate and possession of a loaded prohibited firearm.

Palmer and Marcelle are both facing additional charges of one count of possession of firearm contrary to prohibition order.

Palmer is scheduled to appear in court on March 25. Marcelle and Downer are scheduled to appear in court on March 28.

Anyone with additional information is asked to contact police at 416-808-4200 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 416-222-TIPS (8477).The 19-year-old woman accused of recklessly tossing a chair from a downtown Toronto condo balcony feels remorse for the incident, her lawyer said after a brief court appearance.

Marcella Zoia, who sparked outrage in the case, did not appear in court Friday.

She is facing charges of mischief endangering life, mischief involving damage to property and common nuisance for allegedly tossing a chair from an upper-floor balcony toward the busy Gardiner Expressway, hundreds of feet below.

Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse at Old City Hall, lawyer Gregory Leslie said his client regrets the incident, which he said has created problems between her and her mother.

She wishes that this never happened, he said. Its been a hard lesson that shes learned.

Leslie also said Zoia has since been expelled from her school, although he declined to elaborate on that point  except to say he believes she was wrongly expelled.

He has previously said Zoia was studying dental hygiene.

Zoia turned herself in to police on Feb. 13, days after video of the chair-throwing incident circulated online early last month.

She was released on a $2,000 bail.

The chair landed on a sidewalk outside the condominium tower near Harbour and York Sts. No one was injured.

Leslie said he hopes to avoid a trial, adding he hopes Zoias case can be resolved in the next three or four months.

After briefly deleting her Instagram account following the incident, Zoia has since returned to social media. Her account had fewer than 6,000 followers before she was identified as the alleged chair-thrower  as of Friday afternoon, it had more than 14,000.

Her case is scheduled to return to court April 26.

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19-year-old who allegedly threw chair off downtown highrise was under peer pressure, defence lawyer says

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Residents of condo tower where woman threw chair off balcony say short-term rentals are not a problemNew Delhi, Mar 22 (IBNS/UNI): Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan today said his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi had extended his wishes on the occasion of Pakistan's National Day.

Pakistan Day is celebrated to mark the Lahore Resolution on March 23 each year.

Received msg from PM Modi: "I extend my greetings & best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that ppl of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive & prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence"  Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) March 22, 2019

"Received msg from PM Modi: 'I extend my greetings & best wishes to the people of Pakistan on the National Day of Pakistan. It is time that ppl of Sub-continent work together for a democratic, peaceful, progressive & prosperous region, in an atmosphere free of terror and violence'," Imran Khan wrote on Twitter.

"I welcome PM Modi's message to our people. As we celebrate Pakistan Day I believe it is time to begin a comprehensive dialogue with India to address & resolve all issues, esp the central issue of Kashmir, & forge a new relationship based on peace & prosperity for all our people," Khan added.

I welcome PM Modi's message to our people. As we celebrate Pakistan Day I believe it is time to begin a comprehensive dialogue with India to address & resolve all issues, esp the central issue of Kashmir, & forge a new relationship based on peace & prosperity for all our people.  Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) March 22, 2019

However, earlier in the day, India's external affairs ministry said in a statement that the Indian government had decided not to send its representative at the Pakistan's National day celebrations.

Opposition Congress has sought a clarification from Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Pakistani Prime Minister's tweet.

Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi said: ''...would hope the @PMOIndia clarifies that what Imran Khan has tweeted is the correct version of greetings exchanged or whether if they have been exchanged at all, especially after the function was boycotted in India by the govt. The nation would want to know...''The Federal Court has struck down one of the last remaining planks of a controversial revamp of the refugee asylum system introduced with great fanfare by the Harper government as a way to root out what it called bogus claims.

On Wednesday, Justice Keith Boswell declared it is unconstitutional for Ottawa to treat refugees from so-called safe countries differently from other refugees when it comes to being assessed to determine if deporting them would put them in danger.

The ruling followed two previous court decisions that saw some of the other key elements of reforms enacted by the then-Conservative government knocked down and dismantled.

The system they created is a total failure, a flop, said veteran refugee lawyer Lorne Waldman, who was not involved in the court challenge. It was ill-conceived, ill-thought out. The Conservative government created a system that didnt work. They trumpeted the reform as a 21st Century system, but it turned out to be the opposite.

In 2012, Stephen Harpers Conservatives introduced a series of changes targeting refugee claimants from designated safe countries, subjecting them to different treatment. These refugees were rushed through the asylum process, had restricted access to appeals and health coverage, and faced quick deportation. The goal, the government said, was to prevent fraud and maintain the integrity of its border.

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Critics note that people from so-called safe countries can still face persecution at home due to sexual orientation, ethnicity and religion.

The safe country list initially included 23 countries and has since been expanded to 42, including the United States, Czech Republic, Hungary and Mexico.

Different parts of the reforms have been successfully challenged in court over the years. The Federal Court has previously ruled that all failed refugee claimants should be granted access to appeal and the government was ordered to restore health-care coverage for all refugees.

The remaining Harper reforms still in place for safe-country refugee claimants include a 180-day waiting period for work permits. Refugees from other countries, meanwhile, can work immediately. Claimants from safe countries are given an asylum hearing within 45 days, versus 60 days for others. The work permit wait is now being challenged in court. The refugee board has also said it is no longer following the quick timelines for hearings.

In the latest decision, Boswell declared it unconstitutional for Ottawa to impose a 36-month bar on risk assessments for those from the safe countries as opposed to just a one-year bar for anyone else who has exhausted all available avenues to delay deportation.

The court challenge was initiated by five failed asylum seekers, all citizens of Hungary and of Roma descent. They all made a claim in 2011, alleging fear of persecution in Hungary based on their ethnicity, and in one case, the fear of gender-based violence.

Since Hungary was deemed a safe country, they faced a three-year delay in getting a risk assessment after their asylum requests were rejected. They claimed the rule breached the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

With the passage of time, each of the litigants has jumped the 36-month bar, and lawyers for the government had asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit because the cases were now moot. They also argued that the group only represented Roma from Hungary and was not representative of everyone from the designated countries

The court disagreed.

It involves an important constitutional issue, there is a fulsome record, and there is a strong public interest in finding not only an answer to the question of whether the three-year (risk assessment) bar violates the Charter, but also in not allowing a potentially unconstitutional provision to persist, Boswell wrote.

The court heard from witnesses for the litigants that Canada had a history of excluding certain groups from immigration by vesting wide discretion in officials to establish geographical tiers of preferred immigrants and that the safe-country regime had a negative effect on groups such as Roma refugees in their ability to seek protection in Canada.

I think every person has a right to be treated the same, in the same situation. For me to fight this, right away I said yes. Even though I might not be impacted by the law changing, I wanted to be here, because I thought this is wrong, said Richard Sebok, one of the five Roma litigants.

Why am I being treated differently than others? It was like I was back in Hungary, being treated differently by the government. In Hungary I was treated differently because I am Roma, and here I was treated differently because I am Hungarian. And I know that is wrong. We all come from different countries to get protection. And I did not want anyone else to be treated like I was.

The litigants also challenged the way countries are being classified as safe or not.

Statistics on outcomes in refugee determinations from a given country can vary substantially over time, due to changing country condition evidence and random factors, Osgoode Hall law school professor Sean Rehaag said in an affidavit. A country may be safe for many claimants but unsafe for subsets of claimants.

The federal government argued the asylum reforms were necessary because the refugee board was strained in 2012 with a backlog of over 60,000 unheard claims and there was about a 19-month waiting time for an asylum decision. Currently, the board has 74,645 outstanding claims with wait times for a hearing hovering at around two years.

Teny Dikranian, a former asylum policy manager at the immigration department, told the court it would take an average of four and a half years to remove a failed refugee in 2012 because there were multiple layers of recourse available to claimants and no limits on the number of applications for failed refugees to delay their deportation.

Making the system timelier was necessary to address the growing backlog, to deter non-genuine claims, and to provide for timelier protection to those who need it, Dikranian was quoted as saying in the court decision.

Boswell said it was not necessary to impose a restriction on risk assessments based on country of origin.

Timely access to (the assessment) is a significant benefit for failed refugee claimants and delaying this access to some claimants based on their country of origin impairs their right to equality, Boswell wrote in a 105-page ruling.

Nationals targeted for the delay  suffer the effects of discrimination for the period of the delay, he explained. This is an inequality that is disproportionate and overbroad.

Lawyers for the litigants, all of whom are still in Canada, welcome the decision.

You cannot tar an entire group of people based on nationality, said Anthony Navaneelan, one of six lawyers representing the five refugee claimants in this court case. This is textbook discrimination.

Canada is currently dealing with an influx of so-called irregular migrants from multiple countries crossing illegally from the United States, which is deemed a safe country. These asylum seekers are being dealt with according to their nationality, and not by their last place of residence.

The public safety minister has until April 19 to file an appeal.The driver responsible for the death of Stuart Ellis in a collision has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Justice Joseph Kenkel handed out the sentence Thursday to Tyler Nielson, 21, for criminal negligence causing death.

Ellis was a married father of one and had another child on the way when he died.

In a courtroom full of Elliss supporters, including his wife Justine, Nielsen fought through tears while apologizing to the family.

I cant imagine the pain and suffering I have brought into your lives, he said. Im so sorry. The worst part of this whole accident is that I took a father away from his children. I will never be able to forget that. I am ready to accept the courts punishment.

The five-year sentence was difficult to swallow for Justine Ellis, who has been vocal about the need for harsher sentences in cases such as this.

Our system is horrible, she said afterward. There is no justice in our system.

While Nielsen was taken away in handcuffs, Ellis said she goes home to the same reality.

Im still going to have no husband, she said.

Justine Elliss father is York Region police Supt. Graeme Turl and her mother is Kerry Turl, a former OPP breathalyzer technician. They both said things need to change.

He wont serve five years, we know that, Graeme Turl said, adding nothing will change in the fight against impaired driving until the penalties fit the crimes.

The Crown had asked for a sentence between six to eight years, while Nielsens lawyer asked for five years.

During the hearing, Nielsens lawyer touched on the extensive mental health issues his client had from a young age.

Nielson was in out of hospital after multiple suicide attempts in recent years. In each case, his lawyer said he was released quickly, with little treatment. A doctor who assessed Nielsens lengthy medical record diagnosed him with a chronic anxiety disorder and depression.

In an agreed statement of facts, the court heard that on Nov. 12, 2017, Nielsen  who was charged with impaired driving and convicted of careless driving just months prior  was dumped by his girlfriend in Durham Region.

After ingesting marijuana, alcohol, lorazepam and temazepam, Nielsen, who was staying at his mother-in-laws in Whitby, stole his father-in-laws black Honda Accord. As part of his probation, he was not allowed to drive or possess nonmedically prescribed drugs.

Despite this, in the early hours of Nov. 13, 2017, Nielsen drove to East Gwillimbury.

As he headed north on Hwy. 48 and mounted a crest, unable to see what was on the other side, the cars internal recording system, which topped out at 200 km/h, recorded the vehicle travelling at that speed.

However, a collision reconstruction specialist estimated the vehicle was travelling 227 km/h. Nielsen was driving in the wrong lane, into oncoming traffic.

Coming from the other direction, near Davis Dr., was Elliss vehicle, travelling at 90 km/h. Just prior to the two vehicles colliding, Nielsen turned his vehicle slightly to the right.

The impact resulted in Elliss death on the scene. Nielsen was badly hurt at the time, but appeared in good physical health in the courthouse.

After the crash, he was recorded as having 44 mg of alcohol per 100 mL of blood. It is estimated that at the time of the crash, he had between 45 and 99 mg of alcohol per 100 mL of blood.

His blood also contained traces of marijuana, lorazepam and temazepam, the latter of which is meant to help the user fall asleep.

If the crash had of occurred following the legalization of marijuana, the level of cannabis in Nielsens system would have been five times the legal limit.

In her victim impact statement to the court in January, Justine Ellis said her son Grayson, 2, now has separation anxiety around her, considering his father left that day, never to return.

My family is in shambles, she said. I would not wish the pain and heartache myself and my family have had to endure on my worst enemy, not even on Mr. Nielsen and his family.

She said it was up to Kenkel to change the image she said Canadas justice system currently has of being weak on impaired drivers.

Please Your Honour, help me to ensure that Stuarts life was not taken in complete vain, she said, looking at Kenkel. Your Honour, this change can start with you, today.The Toronto Transit Commission is taking buses out of service on Friday that may have electrical issues to conduct full inspections, according to the agency.

In a statement posted on Twitter, TTC spokesperson Stuart Green said the transit agency learned of potential concerns with the power steering units in hybrid buses manufactured by Nova Bus. It made the decision after seeing media reports about several public transit agencies in Quebec that pulled the buses made by Nova Bus due to similar issues, Green told the Star.

Green said in the statement that the buses may have issues with moisture getting trapped in the electrical connection of the power steering unit in hybrid buses manufactured by Nova. That moisture can lead to corrosion.

Of the 2,000 buses in the TTCs fleet, 116 are the hybrid Nova Bus models delivered in 2018 and 2019, Green said, adding that 65 were out serving bus routes on Friday.

Read more: Canadian cities missing the bus on electric transit, report finds

The TTC inspected 40 of these buses and found that nothing would compromise performance or safety, according to the statement.

Still, the TTC is taking the buses off the roads.

While theres no indication that our fleet is impacted, the TTC is taking the precautionary measure of pulling those buses that were in service today to conduct full inspections, Green said in the statement.

The inspection is expected to be completed over the weekend and buses will be put back in service if they are operating properly.

The TTC said that service will not be impacted as it is making other buses available.CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALANDAt 1:30 on Friday afternoon, Muslims in Christchurch began their weekly prayers. A week earlier, these same prayers were interrupted by a gunman who burst into the Al Noor Mosque and killed 42 people, then drove across town to kill eight more at another mosque.

But this week, the Muslim population was joined by tens of thousands of other New Zealanders, who stood behind the rows of worshippers. They listened as the call to prayer rang out across Hagley Park, opposite the Al Noor Mosque, and across the country on national television and radio broadcasts.

Then the country fell silent for two minutes to remember the unspeakable tragedy that occurred here, shaking New Zealands belief that it was an isolated utopia at the bottom of the world.

Many women  including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, television newsreaders, nurses, students and police officers  donned head scarves in solidarity with Muslim women, some of whom had said they were scared to go out with such a recognizable symbol of their faith. They could be seen on the streets of Christchurch throughout the day, not just during the remembrance.

In brief remarks before the silence in Hagley Park, Ardern cited the prophet Muhammad as saying that the believers, in their mutual kindness, compassion and sympathy are just like one body.

When any part of the body suffers, the whole body feels pain, she said. New Zealand mourns with you. We are one.

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NZ says mosque gunman faces life prison in isolation

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It was the first terrorist attack of this kind in New Zealand and the worst mass shooting the country has ever seen.

Fifty people were killed in the Friday attacks, the work of a lone gunman who distributed a manifesto full of anti-immigrant rhetoric and then live-streamed the shootings. The 28-year-old Australian is now in custody.

In an open air ceremony in front of about 20,000 people, imams who had been in the Al Noor Mosque during the attack  including one who was featured on the front page of the local paper, covered in blood, the day after the attack  led the prayers.

We are broken-hearted, but we are not broken. We are alive, we are together, we are determined to not let anyone divide us, Imam Gamal Fouda told the crowd gathered in Christchurch.

To the families of the victims, your loved ones did not die in vain, he continued. Their blood has watered the seeds of hope. Through them the world see the beauty of Islam and the beauty of our unity.

The local paper, The Press, ran the words Salam, peace in English and Arabic on a front page that was blank except for the names of the 50 who died.

I think its beautiful, said Mohammad Fahmi, a 29-year-old doctor from Malaysia who moved to New Zealand a decade ago to study medicine. As a Muslim myself, it really helps to know that the rest of New Zealand is with us. Its especially beautiful to see all these New Zealand women wearing hijab, he said after the prayers in Hagley Park.

Authorities had been hoping to have the mosques ready to open in time for prayers on Friday. Instead, they will be handed back to the communities on Saturday.

Karen Shepard, a Christchurch woman, said she wore a crimson head scarf to the park to show her support and solidarity with the Muslim women. I am so sorry that this happened and I will do everything in my power to stop anything like this ever happening again, she said.

In the capital of Wellington, hundreds of people formed a human chain around the Kilbirnie mosque as a sign of their protection for the Muslim community.

In the northern city of Tauranga, the mosque was overflowing, leading some worshippers to lay their prayer mats outside in the sun.

There were similar scenes at mosques in Auckland, New Zealands largest city, and thousands were expected at a vigil Friday night. Some Muslims were supplying head scarves and helping women who wanted to wear them put them on.

Separately, after the prayers in Christchurch, families gathered as a line of 27 hearses brought 27 bodies to a cemetery here to finally lay the victims to rest.

Many families expressed frustration at the length of time it took authorities to release the bodies, meaning they could not be buried within the 24 hours usually required by Islam.

The first of the 27 to be buried Friday was Naeem Rashid, who was hailed as a hero for trying to tackle the gunman at the Al Noor Mosque. He died in the process.

Rashid, 50, was a teacher in Christchurch who moved here from Pakistan a decade ago. His eldest son Talha, 21, was also killed at the mosque. A group of mourners, some of them dressed in Pakistani shalwar kameez, performed a Maori haka in front of their open caskets, draped in both New Zealand and Pakistani flags, before they were buried.

With Fridays funerals, all the victims of the shootings have now been laid to rest. Forty-one were buried in Christchurchs Memorial Park Cemetery, while the others were buried elsewhere in New Zealand or repatriated to their home countries.

The New Zealand government has covered the costs of the funerals.

Muslims comprise about 1 per cent of New Zealands 4.8-million-strong population. In the wake of the attacks, many New Zealanders have acted to show solidarity with this community.

But not everyone is impressed with the embrace of Muslim traditions.

One Muslim woman, writing anonymously on the Stuff website, said the head scarf movement was nothing but cheap tokenism. Its a gimmick and pretty distasteful. All Muslims in New Zealand appreciate the sentiment, and the aroma we have received has been phenomenal since the terrorist attack last week, but support does not have to look like this, she wrote, using the Maori word for love.

But conservative columnists in New Zealand were silent Friday, with several taking anti-Muslim or anti-immigration remarks from their websites or Twitter pages. The right-leaning National Party even took down a petition against the U.N. Global Migration Compact, which it had criticized as requiring New Zealand to cede its sovereignty over immigration policy.

But overseas commentators were more blunt. Tarek Fatah, a columnist at the Toronto Sun, asked Ardern on Twitter to spare a moment and reflect on the damage you are doing to the struggle of Muslim women in Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Europe & several other countries where the Hijab is symbol of Islamic patriarchy.

A total of 27 people remain in hospital following the attacks, including a four-year-old girl who was shot three times.BOGOTA - When the Trump administration paved the way for Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to name a new board to run the U.S. affiliate of Venezuelas state oil company, it was a rare glimmer of hope for the American families of six oil executives jailed for over a year without a trial in the politically turbulent South American nation.

But a month later, the families complain they are being left to fend for themselves as much as ever by the mens employer, Houston-based Citgo, which until the takeover had been the U.S. subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil giant known as PDVSA.

Citgo, the eighth largest refiner in the U.S. and Venezuelas biggest foreign asset, has emerged as a major prize in the battle for power in Venezuela between President Nicolas Maduro and Guaido, who heads the opposition-controlled National Assembly and is recognized by the U.S. and about 50 other governments as the countrys legitimate leader. The families insist their loved ones are collateral damage in that high-stakes fight first imprisoned on trumped-up charges by Maduros government and now overlooked by a U.S. administration hell-bent on regime change while Citgo is hounded by creditors and battered by U.S. sanctions on PDVSA.

Their travail began the weekend before Thanksgiving in 2017, when the six executives got a call from the head of PDVSA summoning them to Caracas for a last-minute budget meeting. Once there, armed and masked security agents burst into a conference room and arrested them on embezzlement charges stemming from a never-executed proposal to refinance some $4 billion in Citgo bonds by offering a 50 per cent stake in the company as collateral. Maduro himself accused them of treason, though they have not been charged with that crime.

The families of the Citgo 6  five of them American citizens and all with deep roots in Texas and Louisiana  complain the men are being held in inhumane conditions, sharing overcrowded basement cells in a military counterintelligence prison and suffering severe weight loss in a country plagued by food shortages. Even worse, their case shows no sign of advancing. A preliminary hearing was postponed Friday by Judge Rosvelin Gil for the 14th time, with little apparent reason.

Citgo, when under Maduros control, provided almost no support to the jailed executives or their families despite an indemnity agreement that obligates it to act on the mens behalf. In the months following their arrest the company even terminated their pay although they were never fired.

Now, the families feel snubbed by Maduros opponents as well.

Several emails and an upbeat letter sent Feb. 26 by certified mail to new Citgo chairwoman Luisa Palacios requesting a meeting to discuss the companys plans to facilitate the executives release and mitigate the economic hardships the families have endured went unanswered, the families say. Other efforts to contact Citgo board members have also failed, including calls to vice-president Rick Esser, the sole holdover from the previous board and someone the families say is intimately familiar with their plight.

I feel like theyre making a complete fool of me, said Maria Elena Cardenas, who has had to apply for food stamps to pay for mounting medical bills after the jailing of her husband, Gustavo Cardenas, who had been working as Citgos head of public relations. Its almost inhuman not to even acknowledge receipt.

Citgo did not reply to a request for comment.

The families did meet briefly in Houston last week with Guaido ally Carlos Vecchio, who is recognized as Venezuelas ambassador by President Donald Trumps administration.

Our actions have always been guided by the goal of freeing political prisoners and denouncing torture and mistreatment, said Vecchio, who fled Venezuela to escape what were widely seen as made-up charges of inciting violence during 2014 anti-government protests. If theres one party in Venezuela that has suffered first hand human rights abuses its us.

Still, Guaido himself hasnt directly commented on the case, even when pressed by Fox Business Networks Trish Regan in two interviews last month.

Much to the families frustration, the Trump administration has taken a hushed approach that contrasts with the very public diplomatic push that secured the release last year of Joshua Holt, a Utah man who was held for more than two years in a Caracas jail on weapons charges that were also seen as bogus. Maduros decision to break off diplomatic relations with the U.S. and the departure this month of the last American diplomats in Caracas is likely to make it even harder to get the men freed or win them access to medical care.

The State Department said it continues to closely monitor the case and work through third countries to ensure the welfare of Americans while they remain in jail.

Cardenas believes that Guaido, like others, has been misled into believing the jailed executives were complicit in widespread corruption by government insiders that gutted Venezuelas oil industry under Maduro. But most of the families had lived in the U.S. for years, some even before the start of Hugo Chavezs socialist revolution two decades ago, and occupied midlevel jobs removed from the high finance positions where the crimes allegedly took place.

Meanwhile, Cardenas is getting desperate. With mounting medical bills for her 18-year-old son, who suffers from a rare metabolic disease that has stunted his growth, she is looking to sell the home outside Houston where she raised three children. Without her husbands paycheque, she has to send via courier at great cost the food her husband is fed in jail_an expense that she said Citgo at a minimum should be able to pick up for the anguished families.

I know Citgo might not be able to win their release but at least they could come out and say we know theyre innocent, she said of Citgos new board. Instead theyve left us on the streets. The only thing Citgo cares about is covering its legal back.

___

Joshua Goodman on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/APjoshgoodmanBrazil President Jair Bolsonaros honeymoon appears to be coming to an abrupt end as his approval ratings plummet and lawmakers rebel against his legislative agenda just a few months into his government.

Lower house president, Rodrigo Maia, will no longer negotiate on behalf of the governments pension reform in Congress, according to the leader of his political party, potentially dealing a major blow to Bolsonaros legislative agenda.

DEM leader Elmar Nascimento said in an interview that lawmakers patience was wearing thin with the government and that Maia would step back from his role as a liaison between the executive and the legislature. The atmosphere in the lower house is terrible, he said. Maia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bolsonaros administration relies heavily on Maia, Brazils most powerful lawmaker, to push its agenda through Congress. Without him, key legislation, such as a major overhaul of the countrys social security system, may struggle to make much headway in a fragmented legislature of more than 20 parties.

Maias irritation stems from attacks on social media by Justice Minister Sergio Moro and one of the presidents sons, who implied he is stalling on the delivery of anti-corruption laws. Even before the latest incident, progress of the governments pension reform bill had stalled, amid widespread anger from lawmakers at the generous treatment offered to military personnel.

Read more:

Trump buddies up with Bolsonaro, the Trump of the Tropics

Brazils Bolsonaro under fire for misleading tweet on media

Brazil president says military should have benefits reduced

A powerful cross-party bloc has also signalled it may reject a plan touted by the president to exempt U.S. citizens and some others from visa requirements, a move announced with great fanfare during Bolsonaros recent trip to Washington D.C. The president is currently in Chile and has not commented on the latest developments.

Bolsonaro won the presidency with pledges to combat crime and revive the economy while doing away with old style closed-doors political decisions. Since then, hes shown little sign of building the support needed to pass key legislation. Complicating matters further is a potential fallout with Maia, Brazils most powerful lawmaker and a fervent defender of a pension reform thats deemed essential by investors to narrow a gaping budget deficit.

The strategy of harassing Maia used by the presidents supporters is not intelligent, federal deputy Domingos Neto said in reference to social media remarks against Maia. Everyone knows that hes the biggest supporter of pension reform, and hes being attacked. Its unbelievable.

It is not the first time infighting within the Bolsonaro administration has gone public. This time, the war of words fuelled a new round of Brazilian market angst, with the benchmark stock exchange tumbling 2 per cent and the real plunging the most among all major currencies on Friday, even after Maia said he will never stop defending pension reform.

A poll published on Wednesday also showed Bolsonaros personal approval rating had dropped by 16 percentage points since January.

According to local media, Maia became incensed by remarks from Carlos Bolsonaro, who posted Why is the lower house president so on edge? via social media on Thursday. Earlier that day, former president Michel Temer and ex-minister Wellington Moreira Franco, Maias father-in-law, had both been detained on corruption charges.

Markets fell as investors perceived Temers arrest as a distraction from efforts to push the pension overhaul, which needs backing from three-fifths of both the lower house and Senate to pass. By Friday, it seemed increasingly likely that the government will have trouble approving even less contentious legislation.

The opposition PSOL party introduced a proposal to overturn Bolsonaros plans to remove tourist visa requirements for citizens from several countries. Calls to maintain those requirements grew amid backlash to Carlos Bolsonaros comments, and the PSOL proposal now has the backing of government allies such as the PP, according to the partys lower house leader, Arthur Lira.

Throughout Thursday, representatives of some of the countrys biggest political parties advised Maia to no longer act as chief negotiator on the proposal.

We asked Rodrigo to retain his institutional role, said Lira. Its the government thats responsible for facilitating pension reform and getting the needed votes.

Read more about:MANAGUA, Nicaragua - Nicaraguas opposition signed a timetable Friday for reaching agreements to free a total of 802 people considered political prisoners but the releases didnt start.

The Civic Alliance group said the lists of prisoners it has still have to be collated with those compiled by the government and the InterAmerican Human Rights Commission.

Opposition negotiator Mario Arana said he had hoped the government would release a first group of inmates over the weekend or early next week, but the government of President Daniel Ortega refused to commit to that. About 640 are in prison, and 162 are under a form of house arrest.

Azahalea Solis, one of the main leaders of the Alliance and a negotiator in talks with the government aimed at resolving a political standoff, said in an interview that the 162 released from prison and placed under house arrest since February could be granted more definitive freedom under a proposed deal.

She said that under such a deal, all 802 people detained since protests erupted last April would have unrestricted freedom and see their charges and trials annulled.

Security forces and armed, pro-government civilian groups killed hundreds in their crack down on demonstrators who sought Ortegas exit from office last year, according to independent monitors.

This week, as negotiations that began Feb. 27 were on hold over the issue of jailed government opponents, Ortegas government agreed to release them all within 90 days, prompting opposition negotiators to return to the table. In the past, authorities have repeatedly characterized anti-government demonstrators as terrorists and coup-plotters.

Speaking Thursday night at a political event, the president told supporters in an apparent allusion to the negotiations that we do not all think alike, but despite our ideological and differences, we must unite around a sacred goal, which is peace.

Solis told the AP that the 90-day window for releases is a maximum and could end up being shorter.

Still, she cautioned that it will be a slow and complex process because it entails documenting a long list of individual cases, including prisoners who have not been prosecuted, others facing trial and some who have already been convicted.

Solis said the Civic Alliance has demanded that police stop detaining government opponents, because otherwise the list of prisoners will keep growing.

May all of them go free and clean, without a criminal record, because all the arrests were illegal and due process was violated, Solis said.

The opposition is also seeking guarantees for the safe return of some 52,000 people who have fled the country, and asking that government opponents be able to secure jobs, return to university and get medical care.

Solis said the Alliance will also demand discussion of disarming the pro-government paramilitary groups that attacked protesters, often visibly in co-ordination with security forces.

The opposition is continuing to seek an early date for elections currently scheduled for 2021.

Our demand remains the same, Solis said, free, early and monitored elections.

At least 325 people were killed in last years violence, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The government puts the figure at 198, and other human rights groups say it tops 500.

The Organization of American States and the Roman Catholic Church are observing the negotiations.HONG KONG - Thailands exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra wont know until Sunday whether people in his homeland are still fans of his politics, but he was happy as he hosted a wedding reception in Hong Kong for his youngest daughter.

Though ostensibly a family affair with a raft of VIP guests, the timing of Friday ceremony two days ahead of Thailands first general election since a 2014 military coup seemed to carry an implicit message to Thaksins countrymen: Dont forget me and my political allies when you go out to vote.

Thai Princess Ubolratana Mahidol, who made an abortive attempt last month to be a prime ministerial candidate for a political party allied to Thaksin, was a special guest. Although Thaksin was ousted by a 2006 military coup, the Pheu Thai party of his loyalists is expected to capture the most seats in Sundays polls, though forming a government will prove much more difficult.

Thaksin has not been back to Thailand since 2008, when he fled the country to avoid serving a prison term for a conflict-of-interest conviction he insists was politically motivated. Thailands conservative establishment hates him because of his authoritarian tendencies and the electoral strength he drew from the countrys poor and rural majority with his populist programs.

Thaksin was not able to attend the actual marriage ceremony in Thailand last Sunday of his youngest daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, with Pidok Sooksawas, a pilot at a commercial airline. He beamed in through a video link, however, a method he frequently used to talk to his followers in the early years of his exile.

Also absent at the nuptials in Bangkok but present in Hong Kong was Thaksins sister, former Prime Minster Yingluck Shinawatra, whose government was toppled in the 2014 coup and who also fled into exile ahead of an expected prison sentence.

A video posted on Instagram by a guest at Fridays reception showed the bride, evidently referring to her father, telling guests: You know the reason why I  we  have this wedding this far away from our hometown. Its because home is where your heart is, and my heart is right here.

Reporters hovering outside the entrance to Hong Kongs Rosewood Hotel were able to shout a few questions to Thaksin as he escorted guests inside but received only brief answers. He said he was very happy in English, and when asked in Thai how he felt about the elections, he replied, I dont know yet.

However, in a video shown on the website of Thailands Matichon newspaper group, Thaksin did talk briefly about politics in remarks to the crowd at the reception.

The wedding reception had long been planned for March 22, but the election had been provisionally scheduled for Feb. 24. Had the election taken place before the reception, he said, the room would not have been big enough to hold all the well-wishers and guests because the parties loyal to Thaksin will win for sure.

Thailand has been taking away rights, lacking opportunities, for five years, he said. Now Thailand is longing for the election. It is time for the Thai people who have been wanting to see freedom, wanting to see the economy prosperous again, wanting to see confidence from investors.

Thaksin beamed as he walked the princess into the luxury hotel, which overlooks Victoria Harbor.

Ubolratana caused an uproar when the pro-Thaksin Thai Raksa Chart Party registered her as its nominee for prime minister in an unprecedented move for a member of the royal family, which by tradition is supposed to stay out of politics. The move was seen as a clever ploy by Thaksins political machine to immunize itself against charges that it opposed the monarchy, an allegation that conservative Thais had hurled at the ambitious businessman-politician.

The move turned into a disaster for Thai Raksa Chart when only hours later, Ubolratanas younger brother, King Maha Vajiralongkorn, declared that the nomination was inappropriate and unconstitutional. In short order, the state Election Commission rejected the nomination, and a court dissolved the party and imposed a 10-year ban on political activity by its executive board.

Disbanding Thai Raksa Chart was a bow to Thaksins political allies because it was hoped the party would add parliamentary seats to the total accrued by the flagship Pheu Thai party. The junta that took over Thailand had already rewritten the constitution and electoral rules with an eye toward limiting the power of large political parties and increasing the chances of a weak coalition government.

Members of the disbanded party, along with other allies of Thaksin, attended Fridays wedding reception.

Thaksin made a fortune in the telecommunications sector before going into politics, and even though Thai authorities seized a big chunk of his wealth, he remains a globe-trotting businessman based in Dubai, though the extent and details of his holdings are unclear. He is a former owner of the Manchester City soccer club in Englands Premier League.

___

Preeyapa T. Khunsong in Bangkok contributed to this report.NEW DELHI - India on Friday banned a pro-independence group in its portion of Kashmir as part of a crackdown on separatist organizations.

A government statement said it declared Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front an unlawful association as it tries to curb the activities of secessionist organizations posing a threat to the countrys unity and integrity.

The groups leader, Yasin Malik, was arrested recently in a counteroffensive against dissent following a Feb. 14 suicide attack that killed 40 Indian soldiers in Kashmir. Over a thousand people have been arrested since then.

The government accused the group of raising money and distributing it to separatists to fuel unrest and subversive activities in the Kashmir Valley. The group didnt immediately offer a statement.

It was one of the pioneers of armed struggle in Kashmir and was banned in 1990. The ban wasnt extended after the group declared a unilateral cease-fire in 1994. Since then, it has challenged Indias sovereignty in Kashmir politically.

In February, the Indian government declared another anti-India group, the Jamaat-e-Islami, an unlawful association. It said the group has been providing recruits, funding, shelter and logistics to a Pakistan-backed rebel organization, Hizbul Mujahideen.

Insurgent groups have been fighting for Kashmirs independence from India or its merger with Pakistan since 1989.

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since they won independence from British colonialists in 1947. Both countries claim the region in its entirety and have fought two wars over its control.

India accuses Pakistan of arming and training the insurgents, a charge that Islamabad denies. Pakistan says it provides only diplomatic and moral support to the rebels fighting Indian rule.

Tensions escalated last month after India launched an airstrike inside Pakistan, targeting militants blamed for the Feb. 14 suicide bombing on Indian paramilitary soldiers in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Pakistan retaliated by shooting down two Indian planes and capturing a pilot, who was later returned to India. India says it lost one plane.

International pressure has helped prevent the situation from worsening between the two countries.KABUL - A twin bombing at a public ceremony in southern Afghanistan on Saturday killed at least four people, including a provincial official, and wounded more than 30, officials said.

Omar Zwak, spokesman for the governor of Helmand province, said the bombings targeted a celebration of Farmers Day in a sports stadium in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.

Mohammad Khan Nasrat, the economic director of Helmand, was among those killed in the attack, the government said in a statement.

Zwak said 31 other people were wounded in the blasts, including provincial council members and provincial security officials, but he said none were in critical condition.

The Taliban, who effectively control half the country, including large parts of Helmand province, claimed the attack. The insurgents have kept up their daily attacks on Afghan security forces and government targets even as they have held several rounds of talks with the United States in recent months aimed at ending the 17-year war.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, gunmen shot and killed Obaidullah Barekzai, a former lawmaker, in the southern Kandahar province, according to the provincial police chief. Gen. Tadeen Khan said the gunmen opened fire on Barekzais vehicle on Saturday in Kandahar city. No one immediately claimed the attack.

In the northern Kunduz province, dozens of people protested against a military operation while carrying the remains of their loved ones. Photos from the protest showed what appeared to be the bodies of 12 people, including five or six small children.

Police spokesman Inamuddin Rahmani said there were operations in three different areas in Kunduz over the last three days that killed scores of insurgents.

We are investigating if any civilians were killed or wounded, he said.

On Friday, two American service members were killed during an operation in Kunduz province. The Taliban said Friday they were engaged in heavy fighting with Afghan and U.S. forces in Kunduz.Washington, Mar 21 (Sputnik/UNI) An Australian man has been sentenced to two years in prison for illegally exporting electronics to Iran without a license, the US Justice Department said in a press release on Thursday.

"An Australian man was sentenced today to 24 months in prison on four counts of violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which criminalizes knowing transactions with Iranian entities without a license from the US Department of Treasury," the release said.

David Levick, 57, of Australia, pleaded guilty to charges on February 1 in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the release said. In addition to his prison term, he must also pay a fine of $199,227.

Levick was the general manager of ICM Components, Inc. in Australia, where he solicited purchase orders and business for goods from a representative of a trading company in Iran, the release said.

Levick placed orders with US companies on behalf of the Iranian representative for items such as aircraft parts that the Iranian individual could not have obtained from the United States without permission from the US government, the release said.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand - The Latest on the mosque attacks in New Zealand (all times local):

7:45 a.m.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has gone to the first mosque built in New York City to urge people to reaffirm the sanctity of all places of worship a week after a gunman killed 50 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand.

The U.N. chief announced that he was asking the head of the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations to develop an action plan so all U.N. bodies can help safeguard religious sites.

Guterres addressed a Friday prayer service at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. He told reporters outside that hate speech is spreading like wildfire.

The secretary-general warned that social media is being exploited as a platform for bigotry and that many political movements are admitting their neo-Nazi affiliation or using the symbols.

He calls it a spreading cancer and says it is our duty to find the cure.

___

10 p.m.

Malaysias prime minister says Muslim countries need to look for new ways to reduce the atmosphere of hatred and anger toward Muslims that prompted the deadly attack on mosques in New Zealand.

Mahathir Mohamad, a prominent Muslim statesman, says he discussed ways to improve the perception of Muslims around the world in talks Friday in Pakistan with Prime Minister Imran Khan.

He says Muslims need to learn how to respond to the hatred directed at them, and warned that taking revenge and killing invites the same reaction. He didnt specify any alternatives, but his comments suggested more tolerance, patience and dialogue.

Mahathir arrived in Pakistan on Thursday for a three-day visit.

___

5 p.m.

Thousands of people have gathered for a mass funeral to bury 26 of the victims of the mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The funeral is taking place at a Muslim cemetery where more than a dozen of the 50 killed last week already have been laid to rest.

Family members took turns passing around shovels and wheelbarrows to bury their loved ones.

The burials come hours after thousands gathered in a Christchurch park for Friday prayers, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Fridays burials also include the youngest victim of the attacks, 3-year-old Mucaad Ibrahim.

___

3 p.m.

An Australian national security official says security agencies are increasing their scrutiny and pressure on white supremacists after the New Zealand mosque attack.

Home Affairs Department chief executive Mike Pezzullo told a Senate committee on Friday that Australian agencies were working to assist the New Zealand investigation into the Australian man arrested in the killings of 50 worshippers in two Christchurch mosques last week.

Brenton Tarrant espoused white-supremacist views in a manifesto describing his plans for the attack, and racist imagery was seen in his livestreamed footage.

Pezzullo said the Home Affairs Department stood resolutely against white supremacy and he addressed its adherents in saying, The scrutiny and pressure that you are under will only intensify.

___

1:30 p.m.

People across New Zealand are observing the Muslim call to prayer as the nation reflects on the moment one week ago when 50 people were slaughtered at two mosques.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and thousands of others congregated in leafy Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch to observe the call to prayer early Friday afternoon.

Thousands more were listening in on the radio or watching on television as the event was broadcast live. The prayer was followed by two minutes of silence.

The observance comes the day after the government announced a ban on military-style semi-automatic firearms and high-capacity magazines like the weapons that were used in last Fridays attacks.ATHENS, Greece - Assailants suspected of belonging to a left-wing militant group threw a hand grenade at the Russian Consulate in Athens on Friday, causing minor damage and no injuries, Greek authorities said.

Police sent a bomb disposal team to the consulate after cameras showed two people on a motorbike throwing a small object in the early hours of the morning at the fence beside the consulates security guard post, reportedly causing minor damage. No security guard was at the post at the time.

Police cordoned off the area around the consulate, located in a suburb north of the city centre. Greeces counter-terrorism police were investigating the attack.

The foreign ministry issued a statement condemning the attack, which it said would not affect the traditional and inherently long-term friendly relations ... with Russia. it said a thorough investigation would be carried out to catch the perpetrators.

Authorities were examining a motorbike found partially burned in a central Athens neighbourhood.

Greece has a long history of small groups that periodically attack symbols of state authority, wealth or foreign diplomacy. They usually plant small explosive devices that dont cause injuries.

Police officials, speaking on condition of anonymity as the investigation was ongoing, said they suspect the attack was carried out by a leftist militant group called the Popular Fighters Group, which had claimed responsibility for a bombing against the offices of a television station and newspaper in December.

Authorities were also investigating whether other active militant groups might have been behind Fridays attack.

The Popular Fighters Group, known by its Greek acronym OLA, is considered responsible for several bombings and shootings since it first appeared in 2003, when it fired shots at the offices of Greeces conservative New Democracy party.

It has also carried out shootings against the residence of the German ambassador in Athens, fired a rocket against the offices of a car dealership and planted bombs outside the offices of Greeces federation of enterprises, a bank and a courthouse.

None of its attacks have caused any injuries.BRUSSELS - European Union leaders worried about Chinas growing power are devising plans to counter the ambitions of a country they describe as a systemic rival.

The European Council will discuss on Friday a 10-point strategy set out by the European Commission before an EU-China summit next month.

The EU wants to fully address the distortive effects of foreign state ownership and achieve a more balanced and reciprocal economic relationship.

China is the EUs second-biggest trading partner behind the U.S. while China is the EUs second largest partner. The trade in goods between the two is worth around 1.1 billion a day, but the balance is largely in Chinas favour.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is currently in Italy and will travel to France next week as part of a European tour.GENEVA - U.N.-mediated talks aimed at resolving a decades-old standoff over Western Sahara failed to make headway on the key issue about how to provide for self-determination for the mineral-rich territory that is partially controlled by Morocco.

Former German President Horst Koehler, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres personal envoy for Western Sahara, said his aim during the two days of talks in Geneva that ended Friday was to consolidate the positive dynamic created in a first, groundbreaking meeting in December. He said he planned to host another meeting, but did not specify when.

Speaking to reporters, Koehler cautioned that many positions are still fundamentally diverging and that nobody should expect a quick outcome.

The meeting brought together envoys from neighbouring countries Algeria, Mauritania and Morocco, plus the Polisario Front independence movement. Last year, the U.N. Security Council called for accelerated efforts to reach a solution to a 43-year dispute over the territory.

Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita reiterated the North African kingdoms position that neither the word referendum nor independence should be used in any steps toward self-determination that the parties noted as an ambition of U.N. Security Council resolution 2440 of last year.

Morocco annexed the former Spanish colony in 1975 and fought the Polisario Front until the United Nations brokered a cease-fire in 1991 and set up a peacekeeping mission to monitor it.

Morocco has proposed wide-ranging autonomy for Western Sahara. But the Polisario Front insists the local population, which it estimates at 350,000 to 500,000, has the right to a referendum on the territorys future that was called for in the cease-fire but has never taken place.

We must not relent in our search for a compromise, Koehler said.BEIRUT - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday called on the Lebanese people to stand up to Hezbollahs criminality, terror and threats, and claimed U.S. sanctions on Iran and its Lebanese Shiite ally were working and that more pressure on them was forthcoming.

His comments in Beirut were in strong contrast to those of his host, Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil who minutes earlier, while standing next to Pompeo, insisted that Hezbollah is a Lebanese group that is not a terrorist organization and was elected by the people.

Pompeo, however, warned that the Lebanese people face a choice: Bravely move forward or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future.

He added that the U.S. would continue using all peaceful means to curb Hezbollah and Irans influence.

Pompeo highlighted U.S. concerns about Hezbollahs destabilizing activities in Lebanon and the region in talks his with Lebanese leaders, amid strong regional condemnation of President Donald Trumps declaration that its time the U.S. recognized Israels sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The abrupt pronouncement on the Golan Heights clouded Pompeos visit during which he met with top officials, including some who are aligned with the Iran- and Syria-allied militant Hezbollah.

The visit is the last leg of a Mideast tour that took Pompeo to Kuwait and Israel, where he lauded warm ties with Israel, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on at least three separate occasions and promised to step up pressure on Iran.

From Israel, Pompeos plane travelled through Cypriot airspace, as Lebanon, which is technically in a state of war with Israel, bans direct flights from Israel.

Once on the ground, Pompeo was taken to the Interior Ministry for a brief meeting with Raya El-Hassan, who was named earlier this year as the Arab worlds first female minister in charge of security.

Pompeo also met with Lebanons powerful Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, before heading for a working lunch with Prime Minister Saad Hariri followed by a meeting with President Michel Aoun. The State Departments deputy spokesman, Robert Palladino, said Pompeo highlighted in the meetings U.S. concerns about Hezbollahs destabilizing activities in Lebanon and the region as well as the need to maintain calm along the border between Lebanon and Israel.

In his Lebanon visit, Pompeo had hoped to step up pressure on the Shiite Hezbollah group, but he faces resistance even from Americas local allies, who fear that pushing too hard could trigger a backlash and endanger the tiny countrys fragile peace. Hezbollah wields more power than ever in parliament and the government.

Aouns office said the president told Pompeo that the countrys priority is to preserve national unity and peace adding that Hezbollah is a Lebanese party that has a popular base representing one of the main (religious) sects in the country.

Pompeo later met with Bassil, the foreign minister. He, as well as Aoun and Berri, are close Hezbollah allies, while Hariri is a close Western ally who has been reluctant to confront Hezbollah.

How does stockpiling tens of thousands of missiles in Lebanon territory for use against Israel make this country stronger? asked Pompeo, referring to Hezbollahs arsenal that the group boasts can strike any part of Israel.

Hezbollah and its illegitimate militia put the entire country on the front lines of Irans misguided proxy campaign, Pompeo added.

He said that Washington would continue to use all peaceful means possible to pressure Hezbollah, an apparent reference to the sanctions that the U.S. has imposed over the years and are drying up the militant groups finances. Pompeo referred to comments made by Hezbollahs leader earlier this month in which he urged supporters to donate money to the group.

Hezbollahs Al-Manar TV aired the comments made by Bassil live, but cut back to normal programming once Pompeo began reading his statement.

President Aoun, speaking to Russian journalists ahead of a visit to Moscow later this month, said that the sanctions imposed on Hezbollah, Iran and Syria are negatively impacting the already fragile Lebanese economy.

The negative effect of the sanctions on Hezbollah is hitting all Lebanese people as well as Lebanese banks, he said in remarks released later on Friday.

Earlier this week, Pompeo had said well spend a lot of time talking with the Lebanese government about how we can help them disconnect from the threat that Iran and Hezbollah present.

Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. You ask how tough I am going to be? It is a terrorist organization. Period. Full stop, Pompeo said in Jerusalem on Thursday.

Pompeos visit to Lebanon came as the Trump administration hit Iran with new sanctions on Friday.

The Treasury Department said the sanctions target 31 Iranian scientists, technicians and companies affiliated with Irans Organization for Defence Innovation and Research, which had been at the forefront of the countrys former nuclear weapons program. Officials said those targeted continue to work in Irans defence sector and form a core of experts who could reconstitute that program. Fourteen people, including the head of the organization and 17 subsidiary operations are covered by the sanctions.

The sanctions freeze any assets that those targeted may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar Americans from any transactions with them.

Trumps statement about the Golan Heights on Thursday is a major shift in American policy. For some time, the administration has been considering recognizing Israels sovereignty over the strategic highlands, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967. In a tweet that appeared to catch many by surprise, Trump said the time had come for the United States to take the step.

The U.S. will be the first country to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, which the rest of the international community regards as territory occupied by Israel whose status should be determined by negotiations between Israel and Syria.

Syria, Iran and Turkey on Friday strongly denounced Trumps statement.

___

Lee reported from Jerusalem.BEIRUT - One of Lebanons leading politicians, Walid Joumblatt, is mourning the death of his long time dog, Oscar.

Joumblatt on Friday announced the death of Oscar, seen by his side more often than not, in a tweet: Good bye best friend, good bye most valuable comrade. Good bye my beloved Oscar.

Joumblatt, a maverick politician and leader of the Druze community, made the announcement shortly before meeting U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the U.S. ambassadors residence near Beirut.

Over the past years, Oscar, a Shar Pei, often accompanied Joumblatt even when he met with dignitaries, whether in his Beirut home or mountain palace in Mukhtara village.

In a 2014 interview with the daily An-Nahar, Joumblatt had said that he and then 10-year-old Oscar were getting old together.DAMASCUS, Syria - From Syria to Turkey and beyond, President Donald Trumps abrupt declaration that Washington will recognize Israels sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights drew strong condemnation on Friday.

The Syrian government called it irresponsible and a threat to international peace and stability, while Irans foreign ministry said it plunges the region into a new crisis.

The Foreign Ministry in Damascus said Trumps statement confirms the blind bias of the United States to the Zionist entity, referring to Israel, and added that it wont change the fact that the Golan was and will remain Arab and Syrian.

The ministry also said Damascus is now more intent on liberating the Golan, using every possible means.

Trumps announcement the day before was a major shift in American policy and gives Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a political boost a month before what is expected to be a close election.

The administration has been considering recognizing Israels sovereignty over the strategic highlands, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967, for some time and Netanyahu had pressed the matter with visiting U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week.

Israel unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. The U.N. Security Council resolution 497, issued after the annexation, refers to Israel as the occupying power and says Israels attempt to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect.

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said the United Nations had no comment on Trumps tweet.

But if youre asking what the U.N. policy on the Golan Heights is, its very clear, he said. Its the policy reflected in the resolutions of the Security Council and the relevant resolutions as well of the General Assembly.

Damascus also said Trumps statement clearly shows the U.S. disdain to the international legitimacy and violates its resolutions, especially Security Council resolution 497 while also threatening international peace and stability.

Syrias Foreign Ministry later announced that a letter was sent to the presidents of the U.N. Security Council and United Nations over Trumps irresponsible and dangerous statements over the Golan. The statement urged the U.N. secretary-general to confirm the organizations stance regarding Israeli occupation of the Golan.

In a Friday tweet, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif took aim at the U.S., saying that if it believes that persistently violating intl law, bullying sovereign nations & milking its clients projects strength. It does not. Its recklessness just displays panic of an empire in decline.

Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit also criticized the American stance, saying it comes outside the international legitimacy and no country, no matter how important it is, can make such a decision.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Trumps unfortunate declaration has brought the region to the brink of a new crisis and new tensions.

We will never allow the legitimization of the occupation of the Golan Heights, Erdogan added.

Egypt also issued a statement, saying the Golan is occupied Arab territory and calling for respect for international resolutions.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Trumps comments can destabilize the already fragile situation in the Middle East.

The very idea is not helping the goals of the Middle East settlement, quite the other way round, he said. Right now, its merely a declaration. Lets hope it will stay this way.

In Germany, government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said there was no change to Berlins position on the Golan Heights, pointing to the 1981 U.N. resolution. She said Germany opposes unilateral steps, but is well aware of the territorys significance to Israel.

A peace settlement would have to take account of Israels very justified security interests and of course stop once and for all the potential dangers to Israel from the Golan Heights, Demmer said. But for the present, the tensions that already exist should not be deepened.

The U.S. will be the first country to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, which the rest of the international community regards as territory occupied by Israel whose status should be determined by negotiations between Israel and Syria. Attempts to bring Israel and Syria to the table have failed.

It was not immediately clear how a U.N. peacekeeping force that is in place in the Golan might be affected by the U.S. move. That forces mandate expires at the end of June.

There had been signals that a U.S. decision was coming. Last week, in its annual human rights report, the State Department dropped the phrase Israeli-occupied from the Golan Heights section, instead calling it Israeli-controlled.

___

Associated Press writers Maggie Michael in Cairo; Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey; Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow, Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran; Geir Moulson in Berlin and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed to this report.LAS VEGAS - Democratic presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand pitched her ideas Thursday to improve the asylum process while touring a law clinic at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that helps immigrants with legal matters.

The senator from New York kicked off her first presidential campaign trip to Nevada by meeting with immigration law students. The 2020 White House hopeful took notes while the students described the cases theyve worked on and the problems theyve encountered in the U.S. legal system as they try to help immigrants, including unaccompanied minors.

Gillibrand, who has stressed her role as a mother on the campaign trail, spoke to the students while she picked up and examined several small pieces of canvass with painted handprints of those unaccompanied children whose cases were handled by the clinic.

The Democrat said shes working on legislation that would guarantee asylum seekers a lawyer, create a system for Americans to foster immigrant children and break out immigration judges from under the U.S. Department of Justice so they can be independent.

We want unbiased judges that are appointed for life so they can do the right thing, not the political thing, she told reporters.

Immigration reform is a prime issue in Nevada, which has a sizeable population of immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission and 13,000 young immigrants seeking protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

I think this is a huge issue for all of America, Gillibrand said. I think we have a crisis at the border that has been literally manufactured by President Trump, entirely creating a humanitarian crisis of separating families.

She met Thursday afternoon with former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and spoke to voters at a downtown Las Vegas bar Thursday night.ATLANTA - Vice-President Mike Pences visit Thursday to Atlanta included a stop at the Immigration and Customs Enforcements field office and a conversation about the broader mission of border security.

He also blasted Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms over her decision last year to bar the city jail from holding federal immigration detainees and thanked the men and women who work for ICE.

Pence highlighted some of the ICE arrests made in the area, including one Wednesday night in Riverdale, Georgia, news outlets reported.

Atlanta and Georgia are safer today because of the outstanding work of the men and women of ICE in Georgia, Pence said.

The visit also comes amid President Donald Trumps declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border in an attempt to get more than $8 billion for a border wall  a move Congress tried to block last week. Trump has vetoed Congress move.

After Bottoms terminated the citys relationship with ICE, the federal agency entered into an agreement with a private facility in Clayton County to house detainees. There are three other detention centres in Georgia, hours away from Atlanta, in Lumpkin, Ocilla and Folkston.

It is amazing to think the mayor actually said  in her words  she would not be complicit in an immigration policy that intentionally inflicts misery, said Pence, flanked by Gov. Brian Kemp, U.S. Sen. David Perdue and U.S. Rep. Doug Collins.

I would say to the mayor that criminal illegal immigrants  gang members on our streets  are what inflict misery. The flow of illegal drugs like cocaine and meth and fentanyl inflict misery and wreck our families and communities. Human trafficking inflicts misery.

The mayor has said her move was prompted by the Trump administrations zero-tolerance immigration policy on the southwest border, which led to the separation of many immigrant families last year.

If there are politicians whose family values include ripping children from their parents arms, she said in a statement Thursday, I fundamentally disagree and believe my decision to end that agreement fully reflects my values.

Pence took aim at Bottoms on his way to a campaign fundraiser for Perdue, who is up for re-election next year. Among Perdues possible Democratic challengers is Stacey Abrams, a former Georgia House minority leader who narrowly lost the race for governor against Kemp last year. After Bottoms signed her executive order last year, a spokeswoman for Abrams commended the mayors efforts to combat the impact of the administrations cruel and inhumane family separation policy. Anyone who stands against keeping families together lacks any kind of moral compass.

Pence also sought to link what is happening on the southwest border, including the flow of illegal drugs and human trafficking, to Atlanta.

I dont have to tell any of the ICE agents gathered here that we have a crisis on our southern border, he said. That crisis on our southern border is driving drugs and crime and human trafficking here in the streets of Atlanta.

Walls work and we are going to build that wall, Pence said. We are going to secure our border, and we are going to continue to support the men and women of ICE here in Georgia and all across the country.HOUSTON - The efforts to clean up a Texas industrial plant that burned for several days this week were hamstrung Friday by a briefly reignited fire and a breach that led to chemicals spilling into the nearby Houston Ship Channel.

The Texas attorney general also filed a lawsuit against Intercontinental Terminals Company, which operates the petrochemical tank farm east of Houston. Attorney General Ken Paxton said Texas had to hold the company accountable for the damage it has done to our environment.

ITC has a history of environmental violations, and this latest incident is especially disturbing and frightening, Paxton said in a statement. No company can be allowed to disrupt lives and put public health and safety at risk.

An ITC spokeswoman said the company would not comment on pending litigation.

While the new fire was extinguished about an hour after it began Friday afternoon, the spillage of chemicals led the U.S. Coast Guard to close part of the ship channel, a critical commercial waterway that connects oil refineries between the Port of Houston and the Gulf of Mexico.

Among the chemicals released into the air this week were benzene, which evaporates quickly and can cause drowsiness, dizziness, rapid heartbeat, and headaches, with worse symptoms at higher levels of exposure.

Crews on Friday continued to drain an estimated 20,000 barrels of chemicals from a tank damaged in the fire that began Sunday and was initially put out on Wednesday . A foam layer was reapplied to keep the chemicals contained.

But a dike wall partially breached shortly before 12:30 p.m., company spokesman Dale Samuelsen said, leading to the spill of possibly hazardous chemicals.

The Coast Guard eventually closed the ship channel in the nearby area to prevent the spread of what a spokesman said was a mix of chemicals, foam, and soot from the fire.

Just before 4 p.m., another fire broke out, emitting more large plumes of black smoke. Samuelsen said the fire was extinguished by 5 p.m., though some smoke was still visible shortly afterward.

After the dike breach, the company asked neighbouring industrial sites and the nearby San Jacinto Texas State Historic Site to shelter in place. Authorities did not extend that order to residents. People living near the plant in Deer Park were told Thursday to remain indoors after air monitors detected elevated levels of benzene. That order was lifted later Thursday.

Adam Adams of the Environmental Protection Agency said air tests by the EPA and the company had not shown any positive results for high levels of benzene. One positive test after 4 a.m. from a sensor operated by Harris County was verified to be a false alarm, a county spokeswoman said.

The Harris County fire marshals office said it continued to investigate the origin and cause of the fire with the help of federal authorities.

This incident has captured the attention of the nation and beyond, with many questions being asked why and how this incident occurred, Harris County Fire Marshal Laurie L. Christensen said in a statement.Image: The White House Twitter page

Washington, Mar 21 (Sputnik/UNI) The United States designated two Chinese-based shipping companies for violating North Korea sanctions, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement on Thursday.

Dalian Haibo International Freight and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding have been designated for North Korea sanctions violations, the statement said.

Todays action highlights the deceptive methods that the North Korean regime uses to circumvent international and US sanctions, as well as the US Governments commitment to implement existing UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, the statement said.



The Treasury Department explained in its release that Dalian Haibo violated US sanctions by providing goods and services to North Korea's Paeksol Trading company, while Liaoning Danxing used deceptive shipping practices that enabled North Korean procurement officials based in Europe to operate and purchase goods.



The Treasury Department also updated its February 23, 2018 shipping advisory with new information about what it calls are North Korea's deceptive shipping practices and risk mitigation measures.



The advisory detailed some of North Korea's deceptive shipping practices, including disabling or manipulating automated identification systems; physically altering vessels; conducting ship-to-ship transfers; and falsifying cargo documentation.



Individuals and entities violating the US sanctions will face a monetary penalty of up to $295,411 or twice the value of the underlying transaction, whichever is greater, as well as criminal prosecution, the release said.NEW YORK - Federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against a former suburban New York police officer charged in the kidnapping and killing of four men in 2016.

The decision, announced in court this week, marks the second capital prosecution announced by the Southern District of New York in the past six months and comes as federal prosecutors around the country are seeking the death penalty more frequently.

The former Briarcliff Manor police officer, Nicholas Tartaglione, is charged in what authorities described as the gangland-style killings of four men from Middletown, New York, who disappeared during a cocaine-related dispute at a bar in nearby Chester.

Prosecutors say their bodies were found buried on an Otisville property linked to Tartaglione. Authorities have said that one of the men appeared to be involved in a drug conspiracy but that some of the victims were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Prosecutors are expected to outline their reasons for seeking capital punishment against Tartaglione in a court filing in the coming days. A spokesman for the U.S. attorneys office confirmed the decision, which had been several months in the making.

Tartagliones defence attorney, Bruce Barket, said he was extraordinarily disappointed in the governments decision. The capital case, he said, could cost taxpayers millions and millions of dollars and is not appropriate, given the uncertainty of the evidence.

In the best light for the government, its unclear who did what to whom, Barket told The Associated Press, adding his client maintains his innocence. You run the real possibility of executing somebody here for crimes that other people committed.

New York state no longer has the death penalty, but Tartaglione is eligible for the punishment because he was charged with the killings in federal court.

The U.S. Justice Department has sought the death penalty in more and more cases under President Donald Trump, an avid supporter of capital punishment, after a near moratorium on such prosecutions in President Barack Obamas last term.

In September, federal prosecutors in New York announced they would seek the death penalty against a man charged with using a truck to kill eight people on a New York City bike path.ATLANTA - When the top lieutenant to a presidential contender phoned Georgia Democratic Party chairwoman Nikema Williams recently to ask for a one-on-one meeting, Williams declined.

Im sorry, but I talk to candidates; I dont talk to surrogates, she said, recalling the conversation in an interview.

Williams got what she wanted. By her count, shes had conversations with at least nine Democrats seeking the partys 2020 presidential nomination, and she expects the number to climb.

That kind of attention is a testament to the growing influence that Georgia and the rest of the South has in presidential politics, beyond the first-in-the-South primary state of South Carolina.

It starts with the hundreds of delegates at stake  about a third of whats required to win the nomination  in primaries that will quickly play out from Virginia to Texas in the weeks after the traditional early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina being the process. And with a significant black population and diversifying metro areas in many Southern states, the region is testing ground for candidates to demonstrate whether they can build the type of diverse coalition any Democratic nominee would need to defeat President Donald Trump.

Were going to be right in the thick of it, Williams said.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California will be in Atlanta this weekend and has raised money from friends in the city since she first sought local office. Several candidates have been in Louisiana for recent national political conferences and to Selma, Alabama, for a commemoration of the 1965 voting rights march. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts took a multiday swing through Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama this week following a trip to Georgia in February.

Meanwhile, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota have ventured to Plains, Georgia, to sit down with Jimmy Carter, the 94-year-old former president whod been all but forgotten in Democratic politics. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has campaigned for political allies in Alabama and Mississippi since his last presidential run in 2016, and hes expected to return.

The South is still mostly Republican-controlled, with Democrats in the governors mansion of just three states: Virginia, North Carolina and Louisiana. Democrats Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum grabbed the national spotlight but came up short last fall in their bids to win governors races in Georgia and Florida, respectively. And a rejection this week of a proposed tax hike to extend mass transit into suburban Atlanta was another reminder of the hurdles still facing progressives in the region.

Southern Democrats welcome the interactions with presidential candidates and say theyve earned it based on previous cycles: Barack Obamas early delegate lead in 2008 and Hillary Clintons eventual winning margin in 2016 were built from wins across the region. But now, Southerners are seeing the candidates earlier in the process.

Warrens visit shows that she cares about all Americans and not just those whose vote matters in the Electoral College, said Valerie Latawiec, a 52-year-old Alabamian who was one of about 500 people who attended the senators rally in Birmingham, Alabama.

The trend highlights African-Americans influence in Democratic politics, with black voters likely being a majority of primary voters in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and large portions in Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

The primary already includes two black candidates  Harris and Booker  and could feature a third if Abrams decides to get in the race. And all the candidates, regardless of race, are working to tie their discussions of many issues, from reparations for the descendants of African slaves and criminal justice overhaul to environmental justice and health care access, to the black community.

But Bobby Moak, the chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party, also emphasized that the regions makeup, even in heavily Republican states like his, gives candidates a chance to craft appeals that cross racial, ethnic and philosophical lines.

Its important for them to hear us and for us to hear them, Moak said.

Certainly, there are strategic complexities for candidates to weigh as they decide where to spend their time.

California has as many delegates at stake as Georgia, Florida and Virginia combined. And with early voting and Harris enjoying a possible home-state advantage, some candidates may decide to spend more time there.

Sanders, for instance, kicks off a series of California rallies this weekend and considers the state vital to his prospects.

For now, Georgia may be the biggest Southern counter to California. It offers more than 100 delegates, a diverse electorate and the deep donor pool of metro Atlanta. Texas and Virginia also are wellsprings of money and votes. But Texas has two local candidates: Julian Castro, a Cabinet member in the Obama administration, and Beto ORourke, a former congressman.

Im telling them all to come, says state Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa, but if theyre still in the race (on the March 3rd Super Tuesday), I think Beto and Julian will dominate Texas.

Virginia could add its own local favourite, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, but more importantly, the state is still reeling after its Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, admitted wearing blackface as a young man and after sexual assault allegations against Democratic Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who denies wrongdoing.

Nearly all the 2020 contenders  including McAuliffe  have called on Northam and Fairfax to step down, but state party chairwoman Susan Swecker said that shouldnt stop them from coming to the state.

Ignore Virginia Democrats at your peril, she said, noting that the state has become part of Democrats presumed path to 270 electoral votes.

And if they cant handle questions about controversial topics, Swecker added, then they shouldnt be our nominee.

___

Associated Press reporter Elana Schor contributed to this report from Birmingham, Ala.

___

Follow Barrow on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAPABBEVILLE, Ga. - A Georgia man was sentenced to 25 years in prison Friday for helping burn the body of a slain teacher whose grim end in a rural pecan orchard remained a mystery for more than a decade.

A judge in Wilcox County ordered the maximum possible punishment for 34-year-old Bo Dukes the day after a jury convicted him of concealing the 2005 death of Tara Grinstead. Before the sentence was read, Dukes offered a tearful apology to Grinsteads family.

Im truly sorry. Your long suffering has been unimaginable, Dukes said in court, turning from the judge to address the dead womans family. My actions were cowardly, callous, and cruel. I was more interested in self-pity and self-preservation than doing the right thing for Tara and for you.

A high school teacher and former beauty queen, Grinstead was 30 when she vanished from her home in nearby Ocilla in October 2005.

A billboard bearing her photo and the phone number of a tip line loomed for years in the area as Grinsteads family held out hope she might be found alive. No answers came until February 2017 when authorities arrested Dukes and a friend accused of being Grinsteads killer.

For over 11 years, he watched all of us who loved her suffer unimaginable pain and heartache as we frantically searched for her, Connie Grinstead, the slain womans stepmother, told the judge Friday.

She asked for Dukes to receive the maximum penalty, saying: He did nothing. He just went on living his life.

Superior Court Judge Robert Chasteen Jr. granted that request as he sentenced Dukes to 25 years imprisonment for concealing a death, hindering the apprehension of a criminal and two counts of lying to police.

Defence attorney John Fox asked for a 12-year sentence for Dukes, news outlets reported. The charges all stemmed from a June 2016 interview with a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent in which Dukes denied having told an Army buddy a decade earlier that he helped dispose of Grinsteads body.

Dukes confessed a few months later in February 2017. He told the GBI his best friend had broken into Grinsteads home and strangled her in bed, then used Dukes truck to take the body to a pecan orchard owned by Dukes uncle. Dukes said he helped his friend move Grinsteads body deeper into the woods, where they spent two days burning it until only ash and small bone fragments remained.

Dukes friend with a similar last name, Ryan Duke, is scheduled to stand trial April 1 for Grinsteads murder in nearby Irwin County, where she lived. Authorities say Duke also confessed, saying he broke into Grinsteads home to steal money for drugs, and they found DNA from both Duke and the slain woman on a latex glove found in her yard.

Dukes defence attorneys have said he gave a false confession under the influence of drugs. The say in court filings that Duke was home asleep when Grinstead was killed.

Though Dukes has been sentenced as an accomplice, his legal troubles arent over. He still faces charges in Ben Hill County, where Grinsteads body was burned. And earlier this year, police charged Dukes with sexually assaulting two women at gunpoint on New Years Day while he was free on bond.ATLANTA - Amid protests and a heavy police presence, the Georgia Senate on Friday passed a bill banning almost all abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected.

The bill, backed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, passed on a 34-18 party-line vote and would be one of the nations strictest anti-abortion measures if it becomes law and is not blocked in court battles. It will now go back to the House to approve Senate changes, where its expected to pass again.

Women in Georgia can currently seek an abortion during the first 20 weeks of a pregnancy. A heartbeat can be detected in an embryo as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know theyre pregnant.

Georgia lawmakers and GOP-led legislatures in several other states have pushed anti-abortion measures in hopes of getting a case before the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. The push comes amid rising optimism among conservatives that the restrictions might prevail in the reconfigured high court that includes President Donald Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Andrea Young, the executive director of the ACLU of Georgia, said in an interview Friday that the group would challenge the heartbeat abortion ban in court if its signed into law.

Young called the legislation clearly unconstitutional and said that it flies in the face of 50 years of legal precedent.

Several Republican senators, most of them men, spoke in favour of the bill, while several Democratic senators, most of them women, argued against it.

Many Republican lawmakers in favour of the legislation outlined their position in religious terms.

There are many scriptures that make it clear to me that God knew us and had a plan for us when we were still in our mothers womb, said Republican Sen. Greg Kirk. The word abortion is not going to be found in the Bible.

Democratic Sen. Valencia Seay took issue with that line of reasoning, saying lawmakers were letting their personal religious beliefs dictate everyone elses ability to have a choice.

Republican Sen. Greg Dolezal, speaking in favour of the legislation, said that every life is a miracle.

I dont know how many of us are in this room right now, probably 200, but I am looking at 200 miracles, Dolezal said. He then began to look around the chamber. Senator, you are a miracle. Senator, you are a miracle, then up to the balcony, Sir, youre a miracle. Maam, youre a miracle.

Democratic Sen. Jen Jordan, questioned whether the standard being contemplated by the legislation was actually a human heartbeat.

Every physician has said that the fetal cardiac activity present early in pregnancies is not a beating heart, and no matter how many times you say it, no matter what you call this bill, it does not make it so, she said.

A large group of women at the Georgia Capitol protested the bill dressed as characters from The Handmaids Tale, which depicts a dystopian future where women are controlled by the government and forced to breed. The activists in red cloaks and white bonnets have been an almost daily presence ever since the House passed the measure earlier this month.

A smaller contingent of anti-abortion advocates held signs and urged lawmakers to pass the bill.

Debate took place amid heavy security. Over two dozen Georgia State Patrol cars flanked the Capitol building and as many troopers stood watch inside.

During public testimony last week, several physicians and physician groups came out against the bill, saying it contained medical inaccuracies and would worsen health care for women in Georgia, a state that already has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country.

Two influential groups, the Medical Association of Georgia and the Georgia Academy of Family Physicians, sent letters to lawmakers opposing the legislation.

GOP lawmakers in Tennessee, Florida, South Carolina and Ohio are pursuing similar legislation, while Republican governors in Mississippi and Kentucky have recently signed heartbeat abortion bans.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant on Thursday signed a heartbeat abortion ban, despite a federal judges ruling last year that struck down a less-restrictive law limiting abortions there.

Kentuckys law was temporarily blocked by a federal judge shortly after Republican Gov. Matt Bevin signed it on March 14, in response to a challenge by the ACLU.

A state judge found Iowas heartbeat abortion ban to be unconstitutional in January.

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.

If signed, the law would take effect January 1, 2020.

Gov. Kemp said in a statement Friday that he looked forward to working with the House to ensure this legislations final passage in the coming days.ORION TOWNSHIP, Mich. - Less than a week after a series of critical tweets from the president over an Ohio plant closure, General Motors is announcing plans to add 400 jobs and build a new electric vehicle at a factory north of Detroit.

The company says it will spend $300 million at its plant in Orion Township, Michigan, to manufacture a Chevrolet vehicle based on the battery-powered Bolt.

GM wouldnt say when the new workers will start or when the new vehicle will go on sale, nor would it say if the workers will be new hires or come from a pool of laid-off workers from the planned closings of four U.S. factories by January.

The company also announced plans Friday to spend about another $1.4 billion at U.S. factories with 300 more jobs but did not release a time frame or details.

The moves come after last weekends string of venomous tweets by President Donald Trump condemning GM for shutting its small-car factory in Lordstown, Ohio, east of Cleveland. During the weekend, Trump demanded that GM reopen the plant or sell it, criticized the local union leader and expressed frustration with CEO Mary Barra.

GM spokesman Dan Flores said the investment has been in the works for weeks. Indeed, GM has said it planned to build more vehicles off the underpinnings of the Bolt, which can go an estimated 238 miles on a single electric charge. The company has promised to introduce 20 new all-electric vehicles globally by 2023.

This April 26, 2017 file photo shows a Chevrolet sign at a Chevrolet dealership in Richmond, Va. Less than a week after a series of critical tweets from President Donald Trump over an Ohio plant closure, General Motors is announcing plans to add 400 jobs and build a new electric vehicle at a Michigan factory. The company said Friday, March 22, 2019, it will spend $300 million in Orion Township to build a Chevrolet vehicle based on the battery-powered Bolt.

















In November, GM announced plans to shut the four U.S. factories and one in Canada. About 3,300 workers in the U.S. would lose their jobs, as well as 2,600 in Canada. Another 8,000 white-collar workers were targeted for layoff. The company said the moves are necessary to stay financially healthy as GM faces large capital expenditures to shift to electric and autonomous vehicles.

Plants slated for closure include Lordstown; Detroit-Hamtramck, Michigan; Warren, Michigan; White Marsh, Maryland, near Baltimore and Oshawa, Ontario near Toronto. The factories largely make cars or components for them, and cars arent selling well these days with a dramatic consumer shift to trucks and SUVs. With the closures, GM is cancelling multiple car models due to slumping sales, including the Chevrolet Volt plug-in gas-electric hybrid.

GM has said it can place about 2,700 of the laid-off U.S. workers at other factories, but its unclear how many will uproot and take those positions. More than 1,100 have already transferred, and others are retiring.

Right now, were focused on the people of Lordstown, making sure they have opportunities because we do have jobs, Barra told reporters following Fridays announcement. We want every single person in Lordstown to stay within the GM family, and thats what were working on.

The United Auto Workers has sued GM over the closings, which still must be negotiated with the union.

I will not spoil a great occasion here today. But there is hardship amongst four of our locations. And weve made it clear that we disagree with that, UAW Vice-President Terry Dittes said.

Trumps latest GM tweet on Monday said GM should: Close a plant in China or Mexico, where you invested so heavily pre-Trump, and Bring jobs home!

I understand a lot of the angst that people are feeling, and I feel it, too, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Friday. And I want to make sure that GM knows that their investment here in Michigan is encouraged and welcomed and appreciated. And were going to keep doing that.

Ohio and the area around the Lordstown plant are important to Trumps 2020 re-election bid. The state helped push him to victory in 2016, and Trump has focused on Lordstown, seldom mentioning the other U.S. factories that GM is slated to close.

General Motors is committed to supporting U.S. manufacturing, including the great states of Ohio and Michigan, said Barra, who maintains that she sees no further layoffs or plant closures through the end of 2020.

___

Krisher reported from Detroit.Jimmy Carter  the 39th president of the United States  has recently celebrated multiple record-breaking milestones: The 40th anniversary of his inauguration was in 2017, and in October, he joined George H.W. Bush as the only other president to reach 94.

On Friday, at the age of 94 years and 172 days, Carter reached a new milestone, becoming the longest-living president in U.S. history.

He did so despite thinking he was on the verge of death just a few years earlier, after doctors discovered that cancer had spread to his brain.

True to form for the low-key former chief executive, however, there are no special celebrations planned, his spokeswoman said.

Born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, the typically cheery and humble former Navy lieutenant has had a life of service. Before taking office as president, he served as a state senator in Georgia and as governor.

His presidency  remembered for the Camp David Accords, the Iran hostage crisis and creation of the departments of Energy and Education  flamed out during the election of 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated him.

After leaving the White House in 1981, Carter, then 56, and his wife, Rosalynn, returned to their hometown in southern Georgia. Yet another distinction: Carter has been an ex-president longer than anybody in American history.

Read more:

Jimmy Carters new milestone: Longest-lived US president

Jimmy Carter gets new titleoldest living former president

He remains engaged in the causes and activities that matter most, according to the Carter Centers director of communications, Deanna Congileo: He participates in Carter Center programs in global peace and health and annual Habitat for Humanity builds, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, for work during and after his time in office. Carter also continues to teach Sunday school lessons and courses at Emory University.

Both President and Mrs. Carter are determined to use their influence for as long as they can to make the world a better place. Their tireless resolve and heart have helped to improve life for millions of the worlds poorest people, Congileo wrote in an email to The Post.

In 2015, Carter announced doctors had discovered a form of melanoma that spread to his brain.

I just thought I had a few weeks left, but I was surprisingly at ease, Carter said at a news conference that August. Ive had an exciting and adventurous and gratifying existence.

He received his first radiation treatment at 90 years old. Four months later, he was  remarkably  cancer free.

Bush, the 41st president, died on Nov. 30. Carter attended the funeral service in Washington, along with President Trump and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and, of course, Bushs son, George W.

Carter says he takes pride in having always told the truth. He also says he is proud that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., comported themselves with dignity, talked about issues that matter and presented a vision for our nation, during the 2016 presidential election. Still, thinking back on more than 40 years, Carter told The Post in August that he regrets not doing more to unify the Democratic Party.

His 2016 message to the younger generation of voters was: Stay engaged. Stay involved. And be sure to vote.

Read more about:WASHINGTON - A look at the key players entangled in special counsel Robert Muellers Russia probe.

PAUL MANAFORT

The former chairman of Trumps campaign has been convicted in Washington and Virginia of crimes related to years of Ukrainian political consulting work, including allegations he concealed his foreign government work from the United States and failed to pay taxes on it. Though the charges dont directly touch Trump, hes nonetheless remained a figure of considerable intrigue and enjoys the continued sympathy of the president, who has left open the door for a pardon. He is now serving a more than seven-year prison sentence.

MICHAEL FLYNN

Trumps former national security adviser pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI just days after Trump took office by telling agents that he had never discussed sanctions with the then Russian ambassador to the United States. The White House said Flynn had misled administration officials, including Vice-President Mike Pence, about the conversation and ousted him weeks later. Hes since become a vital co-operator for Mueller.

MICHAEL COHEN

Trumps longtime lawyer and fixer is at the centre of not only Muellers investigation but also a separate, and rapidly mushrooming, investigation into hush-money payments. In Muellers investigation, Cohen has admitted lying to Congress about a proposed real estate development in Moscow. He told lawmakers the negotiations were done in January 2016 when in fact they stretched deep into the campaign. He also pleaded guilty in New York to campaign finance violations stemming from the payments, with prosecutors saying last week that he acted in co-ordination and at the direction of Individual 1  or Trump.

GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS

The former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser served a 14-day prison sentence after admitting lying to the FBI about a 2016 conversation with a Maltese professor who told him that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of stolen emails. Information about Papadopoulos contacts during the campaign started the FBIs Russia investigation.

RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE

Twelve Russian military intelligence officers were charged in July with hacking into email accounts of Clintons presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and then facilitating the release of tens of thousands of private communications. It remains perhaps the most direct example of what intelligence officials say was a broad conspiracy by the Kremlin to meddle in the 2016 election on Trumps behalf.

RUSSIAN ONLINE TROLLS

A separate indictment charges 13 Russians with funding a covert social media propaganda campaign to sow discord among Americans in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Prosecutors say the scheme was run by a Russia-based troll farm that used bogus social media postings and advertisements fraudulently purchased in the name of Americans to try to influence the race.

ROGER STONE

A longtime Trump confidant, and self-proclaimed dirty trickster of Republican politics, Stone is charged with witness tampering and lying to Congress about his efforts to gain advance knowledge of WikiLeaks plans to release damaging information on Clinton during 2016. Though a Stone tweet from 2016  Trust me, it will soon the Podestas time in the barrel  appeared to presage the disclosure of hacked emails, Stone has said he had no inside knowledge about the content, source or timing of WikiLeaks disclosure. He has also pleaded not guilty to the federal charges brought by Mueller.

JULIAN ASSANGE

The WikiLeaks founder, under Justice Department scrutiny for years for the groups role in publishing government secrets, has been an important figure in the Mueller investigation as investigators examine how WikiLeaks obtained emails stolen from Clintons campaign and Democratic groups. Prosecutors have also investigated whether any Americans were involved in co-ordinating that effort. Separately, prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia inadvertently disclosed the existence of a sealed criminal complaint against the WikiLeaks founder, though no details have been publicly announced.

DONALD TRUMP JR.

The presidents eldest son has attracted scrutiny for his role in arranging a Trump Tower meeting in June 2016  also attended by Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner  at which he expected to receive damaging information on Clinton. He has said the meeting was a waste of time because he didnt receive anything interesting from the attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Both he and his father have suggested that anyone in that position would have taken such a meeting in hopes of getting dirt on a political opponent.

The meeting has been of interest to investigators, who have called multiple participants before the grand jury.

___

Read APs coverage of the Russia probe: https://apnews.com/TrumpInvestigationsWASHINGTON - Republican Steve King says he was told that victims of Hurricane Katrina only asked for help, unlike people in his home state of Iowa, who take care of each other.

The Iowa congressman on Thursday told a town hall meeting in Charter Oak he visited New Orleans multiple times after the deadly 2005 storm.

Referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he said: Heres what FEMA tells me: We go to a place like New Orleans and everybodys looking around saying, Whos gonna help me, whos gonna help me? When FEMA responds to problems in Iowa, theyre just always gratified when they come and see how Iowans take care of each other.

New Orleans is mostly black. The storm crossed the tip of Florida and then swept into the Gulf of Mexico and over Louisiana and Mississippi, causing more than 1,800 deaths and an estimated $108 billion in damage. It was the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, according to the National Hurricane Center, with most of the fatalities occurring in Louisiana after levees failed and 80 per cent of the city was flooded.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said Friday that recent flooding in the state has caused an estimated $1.6 billion in damage. Reynolds sent a letter asking President Donald Trump to quickly issue a disaster declaration for 57 counties in Iowa that have been severely impacted by flooding.

House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, who was born in New Orleans, responded to King in a statement saying, His comments about Katrina victims are absurd and offensive, and are a complete contradiction to the strength and resilience the people of New Orleans demonstrated to the entire nation in the wake of the total devastation they experienced. Scalises district includes part of the city.

It was the latest slap from House Republican leaders to King. Earlier this year, they punished him for comments about race, most recently stripping King of his committee assignments.

___

Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana contributed.MIAMI - Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship.

They pay anywhere from $20,000 to sometimes more than $50,000 to brokers who arrange their travel documents, accommodations and hospital stays, often in Florida.

While the cost is high, their children will be rewarded with opportunities and travel advantages not available to their Russian countrymen. The parents themselves may benefit someday as well.

And the decidedly un-Russian climate in South Florida and the posh treatment they receive in the maternity wards  unlike dismal clinics back home  can ease the financial sting and make the practice seem more like an extended vacation.

The Russians are part of a wave of birth tourists that includes sizable numbers of women from China and Nigeria.

President Donald Trump has spoken out against the provision in the U.S. Constitution that allows birthright citizenship and has vowed to end it, although legal experts are divided on whether he can actually do that.

Although there have been scattered cases of authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies for visa fraud or tax evasion, coming to the U.S. to give birth is fundamentally legal. Russians interviewed by The Associated Press said they were honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even showed signed contracts with doctors and hospitals.

There are no figures on how many foreign women travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter immigration laws, estimated that in 2012, about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the U.S., then left the country.

The Russian contingent is clearly large. Anton Yachmenev of the Miami Care company that arranges such trips, told the AP that about 150 Russian families a year use his service, and that there are about 30 such companies just in the area.

South Florida is popular among Russians not only for its tropical weather but also because of the large Russian-speaking population. Sunny Isles Beach, a city just north of Miami, is even nicknamed Little Moscow.

With $30,000, we would not be able to buy an apartment for our child or do anything, really. But we could give her freedom. Thats actually really cool, said Olga Zemlyanaya, who gave birth to a daughter in December and was staying in South Florida until her child got a U.S. passport.

An American passport confers many advantages. Once the child turns 21, he or she can apply for green card immigration status for the parents.

A U.S. passport also gives the holder more travel opportunities than a Russian one; Americans can make short-term trips to more than 180 countries without a visa, while Russians can go visa-free only to about 80.

Travelling to the U.S. on a Russian passport often requires a laborious interview process for a visa. Just getting an appointment for the interview can take months.

Some Russians fear that travel opportunities could diminish as tensions grow between Moscow and the West, or that Russia might even revert to stricter Soviet-era rules for leaving the country.

Seeing the conflict growing makes people want to take precautions because the country might well close its borders. And if that happens, one would at least have a passport of a different country and be able to leave, said Ilya Zhegulev, a journalist for the Latvia-based Russian website Meduza that is sharply critical of the Kremlin.

Last year, Zhegulev sold two cars to finance a trip to California for him and his wife so she could give birth to their son.

Trump denounced birthright citizenship before the U.S. midterm election, amid ramped up rhetoric on his hard-line immigration policies. The president generally focuses his ire on the U.S.-Mexico border. But last fall he mentioned he was considering executive action to revoke citizenship for babies born to non-U.S. citizens on American soil. No executive action has been taken.

The American Civil Liberties Union, other legal groups and even former House Speaker Paul Ryan, typically a supporter of Trumps proposals, said the practice couldnt be ended with an order.

But others, like the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, said the practice is harmful.

We should definitely do everything we can to end it, because it makes a mockery of citizenship, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an outspoken Russian lawmaker, said the country cant forbid women from giving birth abroad, and many of them also travel to Germany and Israel.

Trump is doing everything right, because this law is used as a ploy. People who have nothing to do with the U.S. use it to become citizens, Zhirinovsky said.

Floridians have shown no problem with the influx of expectant mothers from Russia.

Yachmenev, the agency manager, says he believes its good for the state because it brings in sizable revenue.

Svetlana Mokerova and her husband went all out, renting an apartment with a sweeping view. She relished the tropical vibe, filling her Instagram account with selfies backed by palm trees and ocean vistas.

We did not have a very clear understanding about all the benefits of a U.S. passport, she said.

We just knew that it was something awesome, added Mokerova, who gave birth to a daughter after she was interviewed.

Zemlyanaya said that even her two nights in the hospital were a treat, like a stay in a good hotel.

In contrast to the few amenities of a Russian clinic, she said she was impressed when an American nurse gave her choices from a menu for her meals.

And then when she said they had chocolate cake for dessert, I realized I was in paradise, Zemlyanaya added.

She even enjoyed how nurses referred to patients as mommies, as opposed to rozhenitsa, or birth-giver  the unpleasant words they use in Russian birth clinics.

Zemlyanaya said she was able to work remotely during her stay via the internet, as were the husbands of other women, keeping their income flowing. Yachmenev said his agency doesnt allow any of the costs to be paid by insurance.

Most of the families his agency serves have monthly incomes of about 300,000 rubles ($4,500)  middling by U.S. standards but nearly 10 times the average Russian salary.

Yachmenev said he expects that birth tourism among Russians will only grow.

Business declined in 2015 when the ruble lost about half its value, but now we are coming back to the good numbers of 2013-14, he said.

___

Associated Press writers Curt Anderson in Miami and Varya Kudryavtseva in Moscow contributed to this report.MIAMISydney Aiello, a 19-year-old Parkland shooting survivor, killed herself Sunday, according to family and friends.

The news made its way across social media Friday after Aiellos parents told Miami Herald news partner CBS 4 that her daughter took her own life because of survivors guilt.

Aiellos funeral took place Friday, her parents said. Their daughter was a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who was on campus Feb. 14, 2018, the day an armed gunman killed 17 people.

One of those victims was her close friend, Meadow Pollack.

Meadows father, Andrew Pollack, told the Herald his heart goes out to those poor, poor parents.

Its terrible what happened. Meadow and Sydney were friends for a long, long time, Pollack said, pivoting his comments to students. Killing yourself is not the answer.

Read more:

Parkland shooting victims are remembered in silence

Tributes, activism and safety drills mark a year since Parkland massacre

Parkland shooting stirs 3 siblings to lives of activism

He continued: If anyone feels like that they have no one that can understand their pain, if theres any student out there thats having a hard time, please reach out to me on Twitter. I understand you. You arent alone.

In a GoFundMe fundraiser, Aiello was described as someone who filled her days cheerleading, doing yoga, and brightening up the days of others.

Sydney spent 19 years writing her story as a beloved daughter, sister and friend to many, her family wrote. She lit up every room she entered. Sydney aspired to work in the medical field helping others in need.Benjamin Netanyahu Twitter page

Washington, Mar 22 (Sputnik/UNI) US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo while accompanied by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a historic visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

The development marked the first time that a sitting US secretary of state has visited the western wall in an official capacity while accompanied by a senior Israeli official, the Times of Israel reported, which could be seen as implicit recognition by Washington of Israeli sovereignty over the contested Jewish holy site, and thereby a shift in American policy.



"This was incredibly special," Pompeo told the Christian Broadcasting Network (CDN) after the visit on Thursday. "To be there with the Israeli prime minister was really an important moment. It was special for me as a Christian. It was special I think to show the commitment the United States has to this democracy, this Jewish nation of Israel."



Pompeos visit comes a year after the Trump administration moved the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.



Earlier in the day, President Donald Trump sent a Twitter message saying that 52 years after the Israeli Army conquered the Golan Heights from Syria it was time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the area.PAW PAW, Mich. - A man arrested in a southwestern Michigan cold case slaying was not charged in the years after the killing despite alleged confessions to police.

Michael Leon Curry was charged Monday in Van Buren County with murder in the 1986 strangulation of 59-year-old Wilda Wilkinson in her Bangor home.

WOOD-TV reports that a state police investigator testified earlier this month that in the late 1980s, Curry told police about his involvement in Wilkinsons death and that an anonymous letter sent to police in 1989 provided details about the slaying and had Currys fingerprints on it.

Retired Bangor police Det, Tim Wydick tells the television station that after the slaying it was believed Curry was trying to get attention.

Wydick says the case went to prosecutors at the time, but no warrant ever was issued.

The prosecutors office declined to comment Friday on the case. The Associated Press was unable to reach Currys lawyer for comment.

Curry, now 51, was living in California when he was arrested last week.

___

Information from: WOOD-TV, http://www.woodtv.comALBANY, N.Y. - The arrest of a New York man on charges of harassing a Jewish co-worker at a health food store is the latest in a rising number of anti-Semitic episodes reported in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday.

The Democrat joined state police Superintendent Keith Corlett for the announcement of the arrest of William Sullivan, 21, of Saugerties, on a misdemeanour count of aggravated harassment.

Police said the conflict occurred March 11 at Mothers Earths Storehouse in Ulster, outside Kingston, 50 miles (80 kilometres) south of Albany. The female employee was in the produce cooler with another co-worker when Sullivan appeared in the doorway, shut off the lights and told her, Youre in the gas chamber now, and then insulted her Jewish faith with an expletive, troopers said.

Corlett said the woman told her managers about the encounter and later reported it to police, who havent released the womans name.

The stores owner, Kevin Schneider, told the Daily Freeman of Kingston that Sullivan was fired and that the woman has quit. Schneider, who also owns stores in nearby Saugerties and Poughkeepsie, didnt return a call seeking details.

The 40-year-old company posted a statement on Facebook apologizing for the immense upset to the community.

The situation has been handled and the employee is no longer employed by us, the statement said. We have never, nor will we ever tolerate hate.

Troopers said Sullivan was issued an appearance ticket and released. He is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday. It was unclear whether Sullivan has a lawyer who could comment.

While its unusual for the governor to participate in news conferences announcing a misdemeanour arrest, Cuomos office said he made the trip to Kingston to bring attention to the rise in anti-Semitic episodes in the state this year. Cuomo called the latest sad, disturbing and frightening.

What makes it worse, frankly, is that this is not an isolated situation, he said. We have been seeing a growing number of anti-Semitic activity.

Cuomo said there have been about 10 such instances since early January, including separate attacks on three Orthodox Jewish men in Brooklyn and the defacement of public spaces in New York City and on Long Island with swastikas.

The governor also mentioned the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October that left 11 Jewish worshippers dead and last weeks massacre of 50 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand as examples of a virus of hate that is spreading across the globe.

This is something that everyone must be concerned about, said Cuomo, a Roman Catholic who noted that his two brothers-in-law are Jewish.

___

This story has been corrected to change the day to Friday instead of Thursday, and to correct that the Pittsburgh shooting was at a synagogue, not a mosque.NEW YORK - The prosecutor who led a New York probe of President Donald Trumps former personal attorney for the last year is stepping down.

Robert Khuzami, 62, who presided over the case that led to guilty pleas by attorney Michael Cohen, will leave his post April 12. Cohen has since been disbarred.

A release from U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said Khuzami will return to his Washington D.C. home after commuting to New York while serving the last 15 months as deputy U.S. attorney.

Berman called Khuzami an extraordinary and brilliant lawyer.

While his desire to continue to serve remains strong, he understandably has decided to return home to his family, Berman said.

Khuzami was put in charge of the Cohen prosecution when Berman was recused for reasons that were never disclosed.

Those reasons were likely narrow since Berman is heading various other investigations related to the president, including probes of possible illegal contributions from foreigners to presidential inaugural events and actions taken by National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc. for its role in pre-2016 election payments to two women to stay silent about alleged affairs with Trump.

Khuzami worked in the Manhattan federal prosecutors office in the 1990s, when he was among prosecutors who won a conviction and life sentence against a blind Egyptian sheik in a terrorism case that included a plot to blow up five New York City targets, including the United Nations.

Khuzami also served for four years as head of the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission when Barack Obama was president.

Khuzami will be replaced by Audrey Strauss, who has served as Bermans senior counsel since February 2018. She was a prosecutor in the office from 1976 to 1983 and served with Berman on the staff for the Independent Counsel for the Iran Contra matter during the 1980s.

Cohen is scheduled to report to prison in May after pleading guilty to violating campaign finance laws, lying to Congress and other crimes.LOS ANGELES - By the time Californias presidential primary election arrived in 2016, Bernie Sanders was a beaten man. This time around, everything has changed.

The senator from Vermont was an insurgent outsider three years ago in a head-to-head race against Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state whose grip on the Democratic nomination was effectively unshakeable by the time Californias primary was held in June that year.

When Sanders heads to San Diego on Friday for the first of three California campaign rallies, the self-described democratic socialist will be asking for votes in a Democratic contest in which hes a top-shelf candidate . Hell be campaigning in a state that could be pivotal to choosing the Democratic nominee. And unlike the states end-of-the-line primary in 2016, California is voting near the front of the pack this time in March 2020 with hundreds of delegates at stake.

Sanders attracted a throng of cheering supporters to an outdoor rally Friday in San Diego, where he promised to win California in 2020 and railed against President Donald Trumps leadership.

He said Trump wants to divide the nation by skin colour, gender, sexual orientation and nationality, but his administration would do exactly the opposite.

He also previewed his approach Wednesday when he spoke to striking workers in Los Angeles. He touched on familiar themes, decrying a war being waged against the working people and Californias notoriously expensive housing costs and rents.

The stage is set for a Sanders win in 2020, predicted striking worker Ben Evans, 45, a Democrat who attended the rally Wednesday where Sanders he spoke to striking workers in Los Angeles. Everyone who paid attention last time is not going to forget.

In his second White House run, Sanders is jostling for position as the roster of Democratic candidates continues to grow  former U.S. Rep. Beto ORourke of Texas entered the race last week, and former Vice-President Joe Biden has been hinting at a possible run.

Sanders remains popular with his liberal base, but he faces a new set of challenges in California in 2020  among them, hes competing on the home turf of rival Democrat Kamala Harris, Californias junior senator. Shes the former state attorney general and has won statewide races in California three times.

But home-state connections dont always equate with success in California. Bill Clinton, for instance, defeated former California Gov. Jerry Brown in the states 1992 presidential primary, on his way to winning the White House.

Michael Ceraso, who did a stint leading Sanders 2016 campaign in the state, said the senator will need to do a better job connecting his big ideas for change with the concerns of local voters, especially minorities.

Hes going to need to break the narrative that he cant connect with communities of colour, Ceraso said.

Unlike 2016, voters in the Golden State are familiar with Sanders  he grabbed 46 per cent of the tally against the far-better-known Clinton. Since his first run for the White House, some of his signature proposals have been embraced by the partys mainstream, including Medicare for All and decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level, issues that are popular in strongly Democratic California.

And he has an established donor base and a devoted volunteer corps.

In 2016, Sanders came here and spent quite a bit of money and did better than anyone thought he was going to do, said veteran Democratic consultant Bill Carrick, who is based in Los Angeles.

He came out of it with a lot of assets that hes going to bring to this campaign, Carrick added.

Among his challenges, Sanders will need to perform strongly in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and other Democratic strongholds, where Clinton bested him in 2016 and where Harris has done well in her state campaigns.

Thats especially important in a Democratic presidential contest because the maze of rules that divvy up California delegates rewards candidates who do well in strongly Democratic areas.

With a dozen candidates in the race and many sharing similar views, it has not been established if Sanders can generate the foot-stomping enthusiasm witnessed in his 2016 run, when he was a first-time presidential candidate running against an establishment favourite.

Ben Tulchin, Sanders San Francisco-based pollster, said the senator is well-positioned to compete in California, and possibly win it.

Sanders is a strong draw with younger voters, and millennials now make up the largest age group among registered voters in California. However, younger voters also tend to be unreliable on Election Day.

Sanders has another edge, Tulchin said. A string of recent polls has found that Sanders is favoured at this point by Hispanics, who make up an increasingly influential slice of the California electorate.

Sanderss strength with Latino voters has major implications in states with large Hispanic populations, including California, Tulchin concluded in a recent memo.

But hell also need to do well with independents, who make up about 1 in 4 voters in the state and can participate in Californias Democratic presidential primaries.

At the rally, striking worker Stephanie Aguirre, 26, of Los Angeles, said she voted for Sanders in 2016 and was leaning his way again. The clinical social worker said the broader acceptance of his platform, once seen as rooted on the political fringe, boded well for his candidacy.

For those who didnt vote for him last time, I just hope that people will have a change of heart, she said.

___

Associated Press videographer Krysta Fauria contributed to this report.JACKSON, Miss. - Two of the Mississippi teenagers who helped rescue a toddler as her mothers sport utility vehicle was sinking in a creek say they are glad a judge has dropped charges against the woman, whose other two children drowned as the unattended vehicle slipped underwater.

Bobby Johnson, who is fire chief in the small town of Leland where the children died March 9, also says he agrees with Washington County Justice Court Judge Laverne Simpsons decision to drop charges against Jenea Monique Payne, 25. She was initially charged with negligent homicide and child neglect after investigators said she left her three children alone in her sport utility vehicle while she went into a grocery store.

A candlelight memorial service is set for Friday evening in Leland, and funerals are Saturday for Paynes sons, 1-year-old Rasheed Johnson and 4-year-old Steve Smith.

I think they should have showed some mercy from the beginning because that woman lost two of her kids. She has to live with that for the rest of her life, so she needs some mercy, 17-year-old Jacob Humphrey, who worked with three other teenagers to rescue 2-year-old Raelynn Johnson.

The four young men  18-year-old C.J. Holland, Jacob Humphrey and his twin brother Seth Humphrey, and 15-year-old Austin McNemar  spoke to The Associated Press on Thursday at the Mississippi Capitol.

The four are students at Riverside High School in the small community of Avon. March 9 was the final Saturday of spring break in the rural Mississippi Delta, and heavy rains had been pounding the flatlands. The four were hanging out in Leland, where the fire chief is the twins stepfather.

McNemar said he and his friends had just finished eating when they saw the vehicle roll into swollen Deer Creek. Seth Humphrey ran for help and Holland jumped from a small bridge onto the SUV and started kicking the windows to try to break them. A law enforcement officer threw a glass-breaking tool toward Holland, but the tool fell short, and McNemar said he and Jacob Humphrey jumped into the cold water to retrieve it.

McNemar said Jacob Humphrey used the tool to break a window, and Holland reached in and pulled out the little girl. Holland said hes not a strong swimmer and was tired.

He had to hold me up, Holland said, pointing toward Jacob Humphrey.

The teens got Raelynn safely out of the creek.

Thats when we found out there was more in the car but we couldnt see them, McNemar said.

Mississippi lawmakers honoured the teens Thursday, giving them standing ovations in the House and Senate. Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves called them true Mississippi heroes. Democratic Rep. John Hines of Greenville presented them with certificates of appreciation, and several lawmakers posed for pictures with them.

Gentlemen, if theres anything I can ever do for any of you, please do not hesitate to call me, Hines told the teenagers.

Simpson dismissed the charges against Payne after a hearing Tuesday. Holland, Jacob Humphrey, and Johnson said they agree with Simpsons decision. Prosecutors could still seek to indict Payne. Washington County District Attorney Dewayne Richardson previously said he was waiting for a report from Leland police before deciding what to do.

Donald Coleman, the principal of Riverside High School, accompanied the four teens and other students to the Capitol. Coleman said hes watching the four young men, in case they need counselling.

I think its a great, humanitarian, heroic thing they did on that day to save the life of someone else  someone they didnt know, Coleman said. We always talk about being bold for the things that are right in our community and neighbourhood. ... And that day, they didnt think about it. They just jumped out in that Deer Creek.

____

Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter at http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus .WASHINGTON - The Latest on special counsel Robert Muellers investigation (all times local):

10:45 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has closed his long and contentious Russia investigation with no new charges, ending the probe that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trumps presidency but launching a fresh wave of political battles.

The reports details remain a mystery, accessible to only a handful of Justice Department officials while Attorney General William Barr prepares to release the principal conclusions soon.

The Justice Department said the report was delivered by a security officer Friday afternoon to the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and then it went to Barr. Word of the delivery triggered reactions across Washington, including Democrats demands that it be quickly released to the public and Republicans contentions that it ended two years of wasted time and money.

__

7:20 p.m.

The Democratic chairs of six House committees are demanding that the Justice Department release without delay the full report it has received from special counsel Robert Mueller. They say they expect Attorney General William Barr also to turn over all evidence Mueller has uncovered.

The Democrats say since the Justice Department asserts a sitting president cant be indicted, Barrs failure to release evidence of criminal or other misconduct by President Donald Trump would raise serious questions about whether the Department of Justice policy is being used as a pretext for a coverup of misconduct.

The six chairs are Jerrold Nadler of Judiciary and Eliot Engel of Foreign Affairs; Elijah Cummings of Oversight and Reform; Adam Schiff of the Intelligence Committee, Maxine Waters of Financial Services and the Ways and Means Committees Richard Neal.

___

6:40 p.m.

President Donald Trumps lawyers want an early look at special counsel Robert Muellers findings before they are made public.

Thats according to Rudy Giuliani, Trumps attorney. He says Trumps legal team hasnt received any assurances that theyll get the early look they want, though.

Mueller notified Attorney General William Barr on Friday that he had concluded his probe of Russian election interference and any possible co-ordination with Donald Trumps campaign.

Now, Barr will review the findings and determine how much to make public.

___

6:38 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller will be concluding his government service in the coming days.

Thats according to special counsel spokesman Peter Carr.

Carr says in a statement that a small number of the offices staff will remain to assist in closing the operations of the office. He did not provide a specific timeline for when that might occur. As of Friday, 11 prosecutors were still employed by the special counsels office.

The statement comes just hours after Mueller turned in his confidential report closing his probe of Russian election interference and possible co-ordination with Donald Trumps campaign.

___

6:35 p.m.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff says his panel will issue subpoenas if special counsel Robert Muellers report  and its underlying evidence  are not released to Congress for further review.

The California Democrat said on CNN that Congress needs to know and so does the country.

He said hes willing to subpoena Mueller as well as Attorney General William Barr, if needed, to push for disclosure.

House Democrats now see the Mueller investigation as a starting point for their own probes of President Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mueller delivered his final report to Barr on Friday.

___

6:15 p.m.

One top Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, says the findings of the special counsels Russia investigation must be made public to end the speculation and innuendo that hangs over President Donald Trumps administration.

The former Judiciary Committee chairman says while its clear the Russians tried to meddle in our democratic processes, he still hasnt seen any evidence of collusion.

Grassley says Attorney General William Barr Attorney General must provide the findings from special counsel Robert Muellers report to Congress and the American people to finally put an end to the speculation and innuendo that has loomed over this administration since its earliest days.

___

5:58 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is not recommending any further indictments in the Russia investigation.

Thats according to a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person wasnt authorized to speak publicly about the confidential recommendation.

Mueller notified Attorney General William Barr on Friday that he had concluded his probe of Russian election interference and any possible co-ordination with Donald Trumps campaign.

By Eric Tucker

___

5:57 p.m.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham expects that he and the panels top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, will be briefed in the coming days about special counsel Robert Muellers report.

The South Carolina Republican says he was notified by the Justice Department that Muellers report has been turned over and that Attorney General William Barr will pursue as much transparency as possible.

Graham says he expects to be more thoroughly briefed. He says he believed it was important for Mueller to do his job without interference, and that has been accomplished.

___

5:55 p.m.

Attorney General William Barr says the Justice Department did not block special counsel Robert Mueller from taking any action during his Russia investigation.

Barr is required to disclose to Congress any instance in which he or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided an action Mueller proposed should not be pursued.

Barr said in his letter to members of Congress on Friday that there were no such instances during the Special Counsels investigation.

The attorney general notified four key lawmakers that he may update them over the weekend.

___

5:50 p.m.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he welcomes news that special counsel Robert Mueller has completed his investigation into Russias efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections.

McConnell says he and other Republicans have long believed that Russia poses a significant threat to American interests, adding that he hopes Muellers report will help inform and improve our efforts to protect our democracy.

The Kentucky Republican says he hopes that Attorney General William Barr, who received Muellers report on Friday, will provide as much information as possible on the findings, with as much openness and transparency as possible.

Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said he expects the Justice Department to release the report to the committee without delay and to the maximum extent permitted by law.

___

5:40 p.m.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer say its imperative to make the full report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller public.

The top congressional Democrats say, The American people have a right to the truth.

In a joint statement, they say Attorney Gneral William Barr must not give President Donald Trump his lawyers or staff any sneak preview of the findings or evidence.

The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public, they say.

__

5:39 p.m.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee says Congress should receive the full report from special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation.

New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler says in a statement that We look forward to getting the full Mueller report and related materials. He adds that transparency and the public interest demand nothing less because the public needs to have faith in the rule of law.

Attorney General William Barr wrote in a letter to Nadler and other committee chairmen that Mueller had finished his investigation and delivered his report to Barr. The attorney general said he would update Congress as soon as this weekend, but it wasnt clear now much of the report would be shared with lawmakers or with the public.

__

5:38 p.m.

Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that Attorney General William Barr make Robert Muellers report on Russia public.

Minutes after Barr notified members of Congress Friday that Mueller had delivered his report, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tweeted that the attorney general should release the Mueller report to the American public. Now.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted that the report should be made public immediately.

The Trump administrations handling of Muellers report foretells big fights to come, from the presidential campaign trail to, in all likelihood, the federal courts.

__

5:25 p.m.

President Donald Trumps lawyers say they are pleased that special counsel Robert Mueller has delivered his report on the Russia investigation.

Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow issued their joint statement within minutes of Attorney General William Barrs letter to key members of Congress confirming the delivery and suggesting he could update lawmakers as soon as this weekend.

They say: Were pleased that the Office of Special Counsel has delivered its report to the Attorney General pursuant to the regulations. Attorney General Barr will determine the appropriate next steps.

Muellers report, still confidential, sets the stage for big public fights to come, including in all likelihood, in federal court. Its not clear how much of the report will become public or provided to Congress.

__

5:20 p.m.

Responding to the release of special counsel Robert Muellers report, the White House says the next steps are up to Attorney General (William) Barr.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says we look forward to the process taking its course.

She adds, The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsels report.

For 22 months, Mueller has probed allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and other potential misdeeds by those in President Donald Trumps orbit.

Barr has said he will provide updates on Muellers still-confidential findings to Congress as soon as this weekend.

__

5:15 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Muellers report concluding the Russia investigation was delivered by a security officer early Friday afternoon to the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Thats according to Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec. It was then delivered within minutes to Attorney General William Barr.

The White House was notified around 4:35-4:40 p.m. that the Justice Department had received the report.

The letter was scheduled to be delivered at 5 p.m. to staff members on Capitol Hill.

Rosenstein was expected to call Mueller on Friday to thank him for his work in the last two years.

__

5:07 p.m.

Attorney General William Barr says he could update Congress as early as this weekend about special counsel Robert Muellers findings in the Russia investigation.

The Justice Department confirmed late Friday that Barr received Muellers final report. The report concludes Muellers nearly two-year-long investigation of Russian election interference and possible co-ordination with President Donald Trumps campaign.

__

5:03 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation into Russian election interference and possible co-ordination with associates of President Donald Trump.

The Justice Department says Mueller delivered his final report Friday to Attorney General William Barr, who is reviewing it.

Muellers report, still confidential, sets the stage for big public fights to come. The next steps are up to Trumps attorney general, to Congress and, in all likelihood, federal courts.

Its not clear how much of the report will become public or provided to Congress. Barr has said he will write his own report summarizing Muellers findings.

The nearly two-year probe has shadowed Trumps presidency and resulted in felony charges against 34 people including six people who served on Trumps campaign.HOUSTON - The Latest on a flight attendant detained by U.S. immigration authorities (all times local):

9:15 p.m.

A flight attendant just released from the custody of U.S. immigration authorities after more than a month of detention says her release feels incredible.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it released Selene Saavedra Roman on Friday evening from a Conroe, Texas, detention centre.

In a statement issued through a spokesman, Saavedra Roman said that when she left the detention centre, I cried and hugged my husband and never wanted to let go.

She expressed gratitude for those who argued for her release, saying it fills my heart.

Romans attorney, Belinda Martinez Arroyo, said Mesa Airlines had mistakenly reassured the enrollee in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that she could work a flight to Mexico, but Saavedra Roman was detained Feb. 12 upon her return to Houston.

___

6:30 p.m.

A flight attendant detained by U.S. immigration authorities as she was returning from an international work assignment has been freed from custody.

Selene Saavedra Romans husband, David Watkins of College Station, Texas, told KBTX-TV of Bryan and College Station that his wife was freed from detention in Conroe, Texas, early Friday afternoon.

Messages from The Associated Press to Romans attorney, Belinda Martinez Arroyo, were not immediately returned.

Earlier Friday, Arroyo had told reporters that Roman, who is 28, told her husband that she would be released shortly after Arroyo, Mesa Airlines and the Association of Flight Attendants publicly called for her freedom.

___

1:05 p.m.

The lawyer for a flight attendant detained by U.S. immigration authorities on her way back from an international work assignment says her client has said she is being released.

Attorney Belinda Arroyo says 28-year-old Selene Saavedra Roman called her husband Friday from a Texas immigration detention facility and said she would be getting out. It was not immediately clear when.

The call came shortly after Arroyo, Mesa Airlines and the Association of Flight Attendants publicly called for her release.

A message sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not immediately returned.

Arroyo said the airline had mistakenly reassured the enrollee in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that she could work a flight to Mexico, but Saavedra Roman was detained Feb. 12 upon her return to Houston.

___

12:12 p.m.

A flight attendant who travelled to Mexico for work through a program for immigrants brought to the U.S. as children has been detained.

Attorney Belinda Arroyo said Friday that 28-year-old Selene Saavedra Roman raised concerns about whether she could work an international flight due to her immigration status.

Arroyo says Mesa Airlines mistakenly reassured the enrollee in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

U.S. authorities stopped Saavedra Roman on her return to Houston.

Mesa Airlines apologized and joined the Association of Flight Attendants in asking for her release.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement says Saavedra Roman didnt have a valid document to enter the country.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says on its website that those who travel outside the country without permission are no longer covered by the program.PITTSBURGH - The Latest on the homicide trial of a white Pennsylvania police officer in the shooting of an unarmed black 17-year-old (all times local):

10:30 p.m.

The district attorney in Pittsburgh says he disagrees with a jurys decision to acquit a former police officer in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager as he ran from a car involved just minutes earlier in a drive-by shooting.

But Stephen Zappala Jr. says it is the people of Pennsylvania who decide guilt in criminal cases, and they have spoken.

A jury deliberated fewer than four hours Friday before clearing ex-East Pittsburgh Officer Michael Rosfeld of homicide in the shooting of Antwon Rose II last year.

Rosfelds lawyer called him a good man. During the trial he said the officer feared for his life and had to make a split-second decision.

Zappala said that in the interest of justice, hell continue to bring charges where charges are appropriate.

__

9:45 p.m.

The family of a black teenager who was shot in the back and killed by a white police officer outside Pittsburgh remained stoic after the man was acquitted.

Antwon Rose IIs sister had tears streaming down her face after the jury cleared former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld of a homicide charge late Friday. Her mother urged her not to cry.

The jury deliberated fewer than four hours before reaching its verdict. There were tears and gasps from black people gathered in an overflow courtroom, and several broke out in song: Antwon Rose was a freedom fighter, and he taught us how to fight.

Rosfelds wife burst out sobbing as the verdict was announced. She and Rosfeld were hustled out of the courtroom by deputies.

Rosfelds attorney, Patrick Thomassey, told reporters that Rosfeld is a good man.

___

9:25 p.m.

A jury has acquitted a white former police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager outside Pittsburgh.

Former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld was charged with homicide for killing 17-year-old Antwon Rose II last June. Rose was riding in an unlicensed taxi that was involved in a drive-by shooting. Rosfeld pulled the car over and shot Rose in the back, arm and side of the face as the teen ran away.

Rosfeld testified that he thought Rose or another passenger in the car had a gun pointed at him.

The jury saw video of the fatal confrontation. The verdict came Friday after fewer than four hours of deliberations.

The shooting triggered protests in the Pittsburgh area last year.

___

8:25 p.m.

The jury has reached a verdict in the homicide trial of a white former police officer charged with shooting an unarmed black teenager as he fled a high-stakes traffic stop outside Pittsburgh.

Former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld fired on 17-year-old Antwon Rose II last summer in a killing that sparked weeks of unrest.

Jurors informed the court Friday night they have reached a verdict. They can convict Rosfeld of murder or manslaughter, or return an acquittal.

The ex-cop shot Rose in the back, arm and side of the face after pulling over an unlicensed taxi that had been used in a drive-by shooting. Rosfeld ordered the driver to the ground, but Rose and another passenger got out and began running away. Rosfeld says he thought one of the suspects was pointing a gun at him.

___

5:10 p.m.

A jury has started deliberating in the homicide trial of a white former police officer charged with killing an unarmed black teenager outside Pittsburgh last summer.

Jurors got the case Friday afternoon.

A prosecutor says former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld acted as judge, jury and executioner when he killed 17-year-old Antwon Rose II. Assistant District Attorney Jonathan Fodi tells jurors that Rose didnt deserve to die.

Defence attorney Patrick Thomassey says that Rosfeld was justified in shooting the fleeing teenager because the officer believed he was in danger.

Rosfeld shot Rose in the back, arm and side of the face as he ran from a traffic stop. Rose had been riding in a car that Rosfeld pulled over because he correctly suspected it was involved in a drive-by shooting.

___

4:10 p.m.

Closing arguments have been delivered in the homicide trial of a white former police officer charged with killing an unarmed black teenager outside Pittsburgh last summer.

A prosecutor says former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld acted as judge, jury and executioner when he killed 17-year-old Antwon Rose II. Assistant District Attorney Jonathan Fodi said Friday that Rose didnt deserve to die.

Defence attorney Patrick Thomassey said in his closing argument that Rosfeld was justified in shooting the fleeing teenager because the officer believed he was in danger.

Rosfeld shot Rose in the back, arm and side of the face as he ran from a traffic stop. Rose had been riding in a car that Rosfeld pulled over because he correctly suspected it was involved in a drive-by shooting.

The jury is expected to begin deliberating Friday.

___

1:20 p.m.

An attorney for the family of Antwon Rose II says a jury should conclude that the unarmed black teenager was murdered by a white police officer last summer.

S. Lee Merritt spoke to The Associated Press on Friday as closing arguments were getting underway in the homicide trial of former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld.

Rosfeld shot Rose in the back, arm and side of the face as the 17-year-old ran away from a traffic stop. Rose had been riding in a car that Rosfeld pulled over because he correctly suspected it was involved in a drive-by shooting.

Rosfeld told jurors that he thought Rose or another fleeing suspect had pointed a gun at him. Neither teen had a weapon on him at the time.

Merritt says its pretty obvious Rose was not a threat to Rosfeld.

___

11:30 a.m.

The defence has rested its case in the homicide trial of a white police officer charged with shooting and killing an unarmed black teenager near Pittsburgh.

Former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld is charged with gunning down 17-year-old Antwon Rose II last summer.

Rosfelds lawyer rested Friday.

Rosfeld testified that he thought Rose had a gun. The defence also called a use-of-force expert who says Rosfeld did nothing wrong.

The jury will hear closing arguments Friday afternoon and then begin deliberating.

Rose was riding in a car that had been involved in a drive-by shooting. Rosfeld pulled the car over and shot Rose in the back as he fled.

One juror, a white woman, was dismissed from the panel Friday and replaced with a white man.

___

10 a.m.

A judge has lifted a gag order in the trial of a white police officer charged in the on-duty shooting of an unarmed black teenager near Pittsburgh.

Judge Alexander Bicket lifted the gag order he imposed on parties in the case Friday at the request of the defence. Defence attorney Patrick Thomassey says while he and prosecutors have abided by the judges order, the attorney for Antwon Rose IIs family has made comments to the media.

Bicket made his ruling Friday morning.

Former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld is on trial for homicide after gunning down the 17-year-old Rose last summer. Rose was riding in a car that had been involved in a drive-by shooting. Rosfeld shot him in the back as he fled.

Rosfeld says he thought Rose or another passenger had a gun.

___

1 a.m.

An expert in police use of force says a former officer did everything by the book in a fatal encounter with an unarmed black teenager outside Pittsburgh last summer.

Retired Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Clifford W. Jobe Jr. testified for the defence at the homicide trial of former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld, whos charged with gunning down 17-year-old Antwon Rose II.

Rosfeld fired three bullets into Rose after pulling over an unlicensed taxi that had been used in a drive-by shooting. Rose, a passenger in the car, was shot in the back as he fled.

Jobe told jurors Thursday that Rosfeld followed proper procedure. Prosecutors say Rosfeld gave inconsistent statements about the shooting, including whether he thought Rose had a gun.

The trial resumes Friday with Jobe back on the stand for cross-examination.NEW YORK - U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres went to the first mosque built in New York City on Friday to show solidarity with the Muslim community, urging people everywhere to reaffirm the sanctity of all places of worship and the safety of all worshippers.

Speaking a week after the terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand that killed 50 people, Guterres warned again that around the world, we have seen ever-rising anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Semitism, hate speech and bigotry.

We need to act against extremism in all its forms  whether it targets mosques, synagogues, churches or anywhere else, he added.

Guterres first spoke at Friday prayers in the mosque at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York and then addressed the media at its school. He was surrounded there by the imam and more than a dozen U.N. ambassadors from Muslim and non-Muslim countries including New Zealand and Australia, where the white supremacist who gunned down victims at the mosques was born.

In remarks at the prayer service, Guterres recalled that a worshipper who saw a stranger walk into one of the Christchurch mosques said Hello, brother, not knowing he was a terrorist.

This is the spirit deeply embedded in Islam, a religion I so much respect  the face of love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy and grace, the U.N. chief said.

But Guterres warned in his remarks afterward that hate speech is spreading like wildfire, that social media is being exploited as a platform for bigotry, and many political movements are either openly admitting their neo-Nazi affiliation, or lip syncing their words, and cutting and pasting the symbols and images.

That cancer is spreading, the secretary-general said. It is our duty to find the cure.

Guterres announced that he was asking Miguel Moratinos, head of the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, to develop an action plan to ensure that all U.N. bodies are fully engaged in support of safeguarding religious sites.

He said governments, faith-based organizations, religious leaders and others should be involved in discussing actions that can prevent attacks and guarantee the sanctity of religious sites.

The reason is clear: Mosques and all places of prayer and contemplation should be safe havens, not sites of terror, Guterres said.Are journalists the best friends of terrorists? Is terrorism, primarily, a media act?

Is there a newsroom anywhere in the world now that does not have to think through these questions, to determine its proper role and responsibilities in communicating to its readers about deadly incidents  the most recent being last weeks attacks on two mosques in New Zealand that took the lives of 50 people?

Much research tells us of the inextricable link between terrorism and journalism.

Terrorism is above all a media act. Without publicity there would be no point for the terrorist, Charlie Beckett, media professor of the London School of Economics, wrote this week in a Medium article entitled Lessons for Journalists from the New Zealand terror attacks.

Beckett is a worldwide expert on media and terrorism, author of a 2016 report called Fanning the Flames: Reporting Terror in a Network World. There, he cites the work of American terrorism historian Walter Laqueur, who, in 1999  well before the emergence of social media platforms that now amplify terrorism in terrifying ways  wrote: It has been said that journalists are terrorists best friends, because they are willing to give terrorist operations maximum exposure.

Becketts 2016 report advises that newsrooms and journalists think carefully about what we publish about terrorists and acts of terrorism  what we choose to amplify and provide with the oxygen of publicity.

But, clearly, he says, journalists are obligated to report on and seek to explain terrorism.

Terrorism is vital news: a dramatic, important story that the public needs to know about and understand, Beckett states. The fact that news media gives publicity to the killer is a problem that cannot be completely resolved.

However, we can think more about how to cover terrorism in a manner that reduces the propaganda effect for the terrorist, he says. Beckett and others who have studied media and terrorism advise that news media organizations need to have detailed guidelines on all aspects of terrorism coverage in place well before we are caught in the deadline decisions of covering breaking news violence linked to terrorism.

The Star currently does not have such detailed guidelines communicated widely to the newsroom. Sadly, given events in the world at large and within our own community, I think the time has come to do this.

Certainly, Star Editor Irene Gentle has given considerable thought to these issues in recent months following last Aprils van rampage in Toronto that killed 10 people and the mass shooting on the Danforth that killed two young women and wounded 13 other people.

In any such incidents the Star and other media increasingly face calls not to name the killers or show their faces. That is not an option for the Star, says Gentle. I agree.

We name. We look for photographs of them and we publish photographs of them, Gentle said in a guidance note to the Stars digital team this week. Information is our work. Our job is to help reveal, explain and understand. Understanding something or someone requires shining a light on who and what they are.

But, Gentle, says, naming is not the same as glorifying. The killers name and face need not be the focus of coverage, or appear on Page 1. Telling the stories of the victims, heroes and acts of kindness matters more.

Our job is to help filter, validate or curate the torrent to be responsible, fair and accurate, she says. We cant change something by hiding a crucial part of it, but we can ensure a balance or focus in other areas.

What is responsible reporting on terrorism within the Star? Every incident brings its own questions and need for extensive newsroom discussion in making critical judgment calls. But generally, if there is a video of people being killed  as was the case in New Zealand  the Star does not publish or link to it, Gentle said.

If there is a killer manifesto, senior management must be involved in any discussion about giving the killers views greater oxygen. There should always be a reason to publish  do we know what the reason is, she says.

In any incidents of terrorism and violent extremism, journalism has an obligation to report verified information in the public interest. It is a grim fact that newsrooms need to establish best practices for reporting on both global terror and terrorism in our own communities.In second grade, Mariama Shaheed had a very special teacher that saw something in her.

I was not very good at school, but she always treated me well and encouraged me, she said. That left an impression on me.

Shaheed took that positive experience with her throughout her school-age years, and when she got to Butler University her decision to work in education was solidified.

I was sitting in this hot classroom with no air conditioner as a student teacher and it just hit me, she recalled. I just knew teaching was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

After graduating from Butler in 1998, Shaheed took a teaching position in Pike Township, which is where she student taught throughout college. She spent 17 years in the school district and during her tenure there she served as a teacher, assistant principal and principal. She said it wasnt easy at first.

I left the classroom kicking and screaming, Shaheed said. My first couple years as an assistant principal, I cried because I missed the kids so much.

Then, in 2002, a Spanish-speaking student enrolled at Snacks Crossing Elementary, where she was the principal at the time.

I took Spanish in high school and college, but here I was not even able to string together a sentence in the language.

So, she went to Mexico for six weeks for a truly immersive experience. She stayed with a Spanish-speaking family and during her time there only communicated in Spanish, no matter how much she butchered the language. She came back to the states being able to speak it and has only gotten better since.

My Latino families were like finally, someone understands, and my Black families saw that a bilingual curriculum was something that was possible for their children, she said.

From there, she spent two years in a fellowship with The Mind Trust. During this time, she was able to put together what a bilingual curriculum would look like and the resources it would take.

On Aug. 1, 2016 Global Prep Academy opened its doors within IPS Riverside 44 School. Global Prep Academy is a Charter Innovation School, which means 80 percent of students within the building also live within the schools zip code. The remaining 20 percent come from all over the state through a lottery program.

The schools bilingual curriculum serves students in grades Pre-K through eighth grade. Students are taught the typical subjects (math, language arts, history, etc.) in both English and Spanish equally. So, 50 percent of the day they learn in English and 50 percent of the day they learn in Spanish. Although there are other schools around the city that teach bilingual curriculum, Global Prep offers this curriculum to students free of charge. Which was really important to Shaheed.

I always feel so prideful when I see little Black kids that look like me speaking a different language, she said, beaming with pride.

The school has been open for three years now. Shaheed credits teachers, administrators and parents for the schools success so far. Bonnie Kulenkamp, director of Exceptional Learners at Global Prep, has been working alongside Shaheed since her days at Snacks Crossing and always knew shed do something remarkable within education.

I thought that she was impressive in the way she spoke about her vision and how much she cared for the school, Kulenkamp recalled of their time in Pike Township together. [Global prep] is really teacher driven. Mariama is not afraid to roll up her sleeves and do the hard work, shes passionate about staying in the classroom. Usually, you see principals staying in their office and only coming around when the superintendent is around, but shes always in the classroom she knows our students families and is always looking to improve students and her teachers.If youre a fan of evidence-based policy in government, you might want to move out of Ontario. If youre a fan of populist sound bites about pulling oneself up by ones bootstraps just like grandpa did in the good old days, by all means, stay put.

Better yet, put those boots up on the table, crack open a dollar beer, and listen with delight to a recording of Ontario Education Minister Lisa Thompson explaining the benefits of bigger class sizes on CBCs Metro Morning this week.

Thompson was on the show Wednesday discussing the Provincial Conservatives recent announcement about plans to increase the average high school class size from 22 students to 28, likely over the next few years.

When news broke of these changes, many of us wondered about the reason behind them. Is there a new study out indicating that, contrary to popular belief, bigger class sizes are better for student learning?

After all, some research suggests class size isnt as important a factor in the quality of education as many of us think it is, nor is it a panacea for poor test scores and low student engagement. But has there been an academic breakthrough recently proving that there are major benefits to really big classes  that in fact, they are better than small ones?

No.

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But this doesnt appear to concern Lisa Thompson, who has her own reason for putting more bums in the seats of Ontario classrooms. On Wednesday, she told the CBCs Matt Galloway:

When students are currently preparing to go off to post-secondary education, were hearing from professors and employers alike that theyre lacking coping skills and theyre lacking resiliency. By increasing class sizes in high school, were preparing them for the reality of post-secondary as well as the world of work.

Says who exactly? Apparently Thompson heard this loud and clear in a consultation with the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, from people whose names and credentials she did not provide.

This does not sound like policy by research. It sounds like policy by anecdote. It sounds like Thompson went for lunch with a few business men, one of whom (likely a guy whose kids attended private schools and whose experience with public education is limited to voting Conservative in a school gym) blurted out over frites something to the effect of Im telling you Lisa, the kids coming out of school today are soft. No resiliency. No backbone. We had one intern with us a few months ago. The guy couldnt cut it. In my day  And voila, a plan for education reform was born.

OK, Im being facetious. But how else can a person be in the face of this government?

Im not an academic but I tried my best to find evidence linking larger class sizes to resilience among young people and I failed.

Heres what I did find out. Kids and teens who are resilient typically benefit from a dedicated support network. They are not overlooked.

From Harvard Universitys Center on the Developing Child: The single most common factor for children who develop resilience is at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver, or other adult.

Another good example of this type of relationship: a teacher with the time and energy for every student in their charge.

A bad example: a teacher with neither.

Clearly Thompsons understanding of resilience is flawed. But even within the confines of her own flawed logic, shes illogical.

After all, if she truly believes kids are coddled in smaller classes, why not increase class sizes to 60 or a hundred students for maximum hardiness under pressure? If care and attention produce weak adults, why not reintroduce the strap into classrooms? Ontario students shouldnt just visit Black Creek Pioneer Village on a field trip. They should live it.

OK, Im being facetious again. I dont seriously believe a big class is tantamount to child abuse. But the notion that it promotes resilience is also far-fetched.

I would know. Ive been in several very large classes throughout my education. And I loved them. I loved them not because they helped me develop coping skills but because they were a godsend to those of us who a) liked to talk at the back and b) liked to go to the bathroom for extremely long stretches without our absence being noticed (or better yet, go to the bathroom and never return). A big class is an excellent way to tune out. This is something research does in fact indicate.

In 2003, Jeremy Finn, a professor of educational psychology with extensive knowledge on this topic, published a paper suggesting that when class size is reduced, student engagement improves.

In 2014 he told the Seattle Times, In a big class, everybody in the back of the room is talking and giggling  But in a small class, the first thing a teacher says is Lets all bring our chairs around me here in a circle.  

If you think the former scenario beats the latter youre either deluded or you have an ulterior motive. When it comes to Thompson, its likely she has an ulterior motive. She wants to cut costs and shell do it at the expense of education. She doesnt seem to care what the research says.

Obviously she cant admit this, but at the very least, it would be great if moving forward she spared us her inane theory about how students are better served when they are underserved. Theyre not.Was the massacre of at least 50 Muslims as they prayed at two mosques in Christchurch, N.Z., last Friday strictly a random act of a deranged lone wolf?

No.

Was the murder solely the work, as the president of the United States described it, of a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess?

No.

Was it an act of violence, however deplorable, that revealed little of where this chaotic 21stcentury is heading?

No.

No, no, no. A thousand times no.

Beyond the grief so painfully evident in New Zealand, the empty platitudes so easily expressed by our politicians and a breathless 24/7 news culture so determined to distract rather than to inform, we need to keep our eye on the ball.

The events of recent days have revealed to us that there is a genuine global crisis involving increasingly violent white nationalists.

Read more:

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In the words of the Anti-Defamation League, the shootings in New Zealand are the latest indication that violent white supremacists pose an international terrorist threat  (who) can inspire others like never before. In their crosshairs are Muslims, above all, but also Jews and other minorities.

And ominously, this has been a crisis largely allowed to fester in full view. A toxic mix of indifference, complacency and complicity by governments and police have provided the spark.

In response to the New Zealand killings, Donald Trump denied that white nationalism was a rising threat, claiming that its a small group of people.

In truth, it has actually been Trumps policies and rhetoric that have emboldened the white supremacist movement. Does it surprise any of us that the alleged New Zealand shooter described the current U.S. president as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.

Furthermore, Trump, of course, had his facts wrong denying the rise of white nationalism.

In the United States, white supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since 9/11 in 2001 than any other category of domestic terrorist. The Anti-Defamation League has reported that 71 per cent of extremist-related deaths since 2008 were committed by members of the far right or white supremacist movements  compared with only 26 per cent for Islamic extremists.

Although U.S. studies indicate there has been a gradual decline of left-wing violence in the past decade, violence by white supremacists and other far-right groups rose during Barack Obamas presidency, and has surged since Trump took office.

There have been several reasons for this surge. They include growing public fears about the increase in immigrants and the far-rights sophisticated use of social media to inspire each other.

But they also have been given virtual free rein to operate with very limited police oversight.

In fact, their threat has been largely ignored by political and police authorities in the U.S. and Europe. Instead, the obsession since 9/11 has been to demonize Muslims and to place the counterterrorism spotlight overwhelmingly on extreme Islamist groups.

Significantly, this has not been due to mere oversight on the part of public authorities. In many cases, it has been wilful.

Since the election of Trump, there has been an effort to go easy on right-wing extremism. Several of the key research, security and advocacy programs undertaken by the Obama administration to counter white nationalism were cancelled shortly after Trump took office.

This should be no surprise since Trump has trafficked for years in rhetoric that incites hate and violence. After all, he began his presidential run by accusing Obama of being a secret Muslim and has peddled anti-Muslim lies throughout his presidency.

And, invariably, he echoes similar language to that used by white nationalists.

On the same day that the New Zealand killer used the term invaders to describe his Muslim victims, Trump used a White House speech to accuse so-called illegal aliens at the U.S./Mexico border of mounting an invasion of America.

The horror of the New Zealand killings certainly had a global impact, and much of that was due to the eloquence and steely determination of the countrys prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.

Embracing the countrys Muslim and immigrant communities, her message was unequivocal: Many of those affected will be members of our migrant communities  New Zealand is their home  they are us.

Although her approach to the tragedy was in stark contrast to Trumps, Ardern was careful in her remarks about the U.S. president.

Asked what she told Trump when he called to offer condolences, she replied: He asked what support the U.S. could provide. My message was sympathy and love for all Muslim communities.

Whether or not the scourge of white nationalism is ultimately defeated may very well depend on whose voice  Trumps or Arderns  endures.

Tony Burman, formerly head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, is a freelance contributor for the Star. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: , formerly head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, is a freelance contributor for the Star. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyBurman

Read more about:The ethics report that cleared Doug Ford of breaching integrity laws in the hiring of Ron Taverner as Ontario Provincial Police commissioner is negligently bad because it ignores the fact that the premier earlier offered his friend another patronage job, charges Democracy Watch.

In a scorching criticism of integrity commissioner J. David Wakes 101-page probe of the Taverner appointment, the Ottawa-based non-partisan government accountability organization said the watchdogs probe fell short.

Wakes ruling on the Ford governments attempted appointment of Fords close friend Ron Taverner as OPP commissioner is one of the most negligently bad reports by a Canadian ethics commissioner that I have seen in the past 25 years, Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch and an adjunct professor of law and politics at the University of Ottawa, said Friday.

Ford offered another government job to Taverner, and Fords senior staff person tried to influence the OPP appointment process to favour Taverner and Ford is responsible for his staffs actions, and Ford also participated in the cabinet meeting that approved Taverners appointment, said Conacher.

Those are all clear violations of the provincial ethics law that commissioner Wake negligently ignored. For these reasons, Democracy Watch will consult with lawyers concerning filing a court challenge of commissioners Wakes ruling, he said.

On Wednesday, Wake found Ford did not breach the law himself, though the independent ethics watchdog revealed a flawed and troubling hiring process guided by the premiers office to ensure the preferred candidate was hired.

Read more:

Ethics watchdog says Doug Ford did not breach law in Ron Taverner hiring

Report proves Ron Taverner hiring was rigged, says lawyer for fired OPP deputy commissioner

Deputy OPP commissioner Brad Blair, who blew the whistle on Premier Doug Fords push for a customized van, has been fired

After public outcry  and legal action by former deputy OPP commissioner Brad Blair, who was fired after exposing the Tories attempt to get a police van with $50,000 of customized upgrades for Fords use  Taverner, 72, withdrew his name from consideration for the post on March 6.

York Regional Police deputy Chief Thomas Carrique, 51, was appointed the new commissioner last week.

Democracy Watch expressed concern that Wakes report did not censure Ford for personally promising to hire Taverner as the $270,000-a-year president of community outreach at the Ontario Cannabis Store, the governments new recreational marijuana retailer.

That appointment did not go ahead after Taverner said he was getting cold feet about leaving policing after 51 years on the beat.

As a result, the OPP commissioners position was seen as a consolation prize.

Premier Ford tried to hand a government job to his friend Ron Taverner, which clearly would be improper and also would further Mr. Taverners private interests, said Democracy Watch, noting that is a violation of the Members Integrity Act.

As well, Wakes report found Fords chief of staff, Dean French, repeatedly intervened in the hiring of Taverner to tilt things in his favour.

Under the fundamental principle of ministerial responsibility, Premier Ford is responsible and accountable for the actions of his staff, and therefore these actions violated ... the act, the advocacy group said.

Sections 2 and 4 of the provincial Members Integrity Act prohibit provincial politicians from participating in or trying to influence any decision that could further their own interests or improperly further another persons interests.

Speaking to reporters in Ottawa, Ford backed French, praising him as instrumental on helping us change the province and create growth and prosperity.

I have one of the greatest chiefs of staff anyone could ever ask for. I have all the confidence in the world in my chief of staff, the premier said.

Wakes office, meanwhile, said it had no comment on Democracy Watchs criticism.

For his part, Blair, a runner-up to Taverner in the job search, is considering a wrongful dismissal suit against the province.

His court battle to force the Ontario ombudsman to investigate the Taverner hiring led to the disclosure that the premiers office tried to get a customized OPP van with a powered reclining leather sofa, 32-inch TV with Blu-ray DVD player, and a mini-fridge for Fords use.

In the wake of that suit, the 32-year veteran, who was briefly interim commissioner of the OPP, was fired by the Tory government.

Featured stories:

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Robert Benzie is the Stars Queens Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie

Read more about:Premier Doug Ford is warning teachers unions against taking any action to protest his governments move to increase class sizes to save money.

If the head of the unions want to hurt the children of this province by doing walkouts and everything else, Id think twice if I were them, Ford said Friday in Ottawa where he was touting the provinces $1.2 billion investment in a local light rail transit project.

You know I think the world of teachers but I might differentiate between labour and labour leadership, public and private sector unions, the premier said.

I love the front-line teachers and we may not see eye to eye with the head of the unions because all they want to do is collect their union dues and start pocketing (them) into their pockets, he said.

Fords comments came after the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation said a high school with 800 students would lose 11 teachers  from 46 to 35  due to changes introduced by his government.

OSSTF president Harvey Bischof said thats the toll from increasing the average secondary school class size from 22 student to 28 over the next four years and it could trigger disruption this fall with teacher contracts expiring at the end of August.

Read more:

High school teachers union warns of labour disruption in fall over class-size changes

Opinion | Emma Teitel: Bigger class sizes dont promote resiliency. They just make it easier to skip class

Larger high school classes build teen resiliency, Education Minister says

Thats because OSSTF members will not concede to bigger classes in their local collective agreements.

In total, the union expects to lose 5,700 teachers in English-language public high schools alone.

Bischof said manufacturing a division between union leaders and members is an old, tired tactic by right-wing premiers.

We represent the membership. We are an extremely democratic organization, he said, noting members voted to re-elect him just a couple of weeks ago.

The premiers expressed interest in front-line teachers is rather undermined by the fact that hes trying to remove 25 per cent of teachers. It sounds like rank hypocrisy.

As for Fords suggestion union dues may be misspent, Bischof said the OSSTFs budget is extremely transparently accounted for and such unfounded accusations by a premier are beneath the dignity of his office.

Across all school boards, about 10,000 teaching positions are expected to be eliminated, as classes in Grades 4 to 8 grow by an average of one student, and an average of six in high school.

The Progressive Conservative government has said class caps in kindergarten and the primary grades will remain.

Education Minister Lisa Thompson has said the larger class sizes will prepare students for the real world.

Were hearing from professors and employers alike that they are lacking coping skills and they are lacking resiliency, Thompson told CBC Radios Metro Morning host Matt Galloway on Wednesday.

Her comments provoked an outcry, but Ford urged teachers to see the big picture.

I worry about the front-line teachers. I worry about the students. I worry about the 50 per cent of our Grade 6 students that are failing math. Im worried about one-third of our teachers that cant even pass the same math test the Grade 6 students are failing, he said.

The premier, elected last June on a promise of making $6 billion in cuts to the $150 billion budget, noted that Finance Minister Vic Fedeli spending plan on April 11 will be more moderate than his critics fear.

Were going to be responsible. We arent going to go in there and hack and slash. Were going to make sure we do it responsibly, he said.

Robert Benzie is the Stars Queens Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie

Read more about:BlackRock Inc. funds are wading into the fast-growing cannabis industry as institutional investors grapple with betting on weed.

Five actively managed BlackRock funds have become the largest institutional investor in Curaleaf Holdings Inc., the dispensary operator that announced plans Wednesday to sell its hemp-derived products in more than 800 CVS Health Corp. stores. With a market cap of about $2.3 billion, Curaleaf is the third-most valuable U.S. cannabis firm and has risen 45 percent this year through Wednesday. It runs 42 dispensaries in 12 states.

While BlackRock's Curaleaf stake is worth just $11 million, it makes the firm an early mover in a sector struggling to win institutional investment. Even though marijuana is legal in Canada, the federal prohibition on pot in the U.S. has created hurdles for domestic cannabis companies and the firms that seek to invest in them.

The U.S. classifies marijuana as an illicit substance, even though it's legal for recreational use in 10 states. That's made many banks and institutional investors steer clear of pot in the U.S., even as sales of legal weed last year surged north of $10 billion.

"Most institutional investors and banks have stayed on the sidelines for investing in cannabis businesses that touch the plant," said John Brecker, a partner at Altitude Investment Management, a New York-based cannabis venture fund.

Of BlackRock's five funds that report holding Curaleaf stock, the $878 million BlackRock Resources & Commodities Strategy Trust owns the most shares, according to SEC filings. It held about 1.1 million shares as of Dec. 31, according to the fund's 2018 annual report.

Curaleaf comprised 0.6 percent of the fund's net assets at year-end, the annual report shows. The fund invests in companies that work in natural resources and commodities, mostly in the mining and energy industries. Its top holdings are fertilizer maker Nutrien Ltd. and energy producers Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Total SA. The fund is managed by Alastair Bishop, Kyle McClements, Christopher Accettella and Tom Holl.

Farrell Denby, a spokesman for BlackRock, declined to comment.

Curaleaf shares surged as much as 19 percent on the heels of the CVS deal. They advanced to C$10.70 at 11:20 a.m. in trading in Toronto on Thursday.

While Curaleaf has been a high-flying stock this year, the Wakefield, Massachusetts-based company's shares are down from when it went public through a reverse merger last October. The stock is listed on an alternative exchange based in Toronto, called the Canadian Securities Exchange.

Curaleaf currently operates dispensaries in states including New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts. The company has also been expanding through acquisitions, pushing into Nevada and California with recent deals valued at roughly $100 million.

Some U.S. investors looking for ways to put money into the pot industry have gravitated to companies that don't deal directly with growing, distributing or processing the marijuana plant, which may make it be easier for compliance teams at large money managers to stomach.

While Canadian marijuana companies have enjoyed more complete access to capital markets, the prospect that the U.S. ban could be lifted may give large asset managers and public companies reason to move further into the industry.

Several Democratic presidential candidates favor legislation that could open the banking system to cannabis. Earlier this year New Jersey Senator Cory Booker reintroduced the Marijuana Justice Act, to remove the drug from the federal list of controlled substances. Fellow 2020 Democratic hopefuls, including senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, sponsored it.

---

Bloomberg's Doug Alexander contributed to this report.As the pilots of the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia fought to control their planes, they lacked two notable safety features in their cockpits.

One reason: Boeing charged extra for them.

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane's operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia's Lion Air, have opted not to buy them  and regulators don't require them.

Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

It is not yet known what caused the crashes of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10 and Lion Air Flight 610 five months earlier, both after erratic takeoffs. But investigators are looking at whether a new software system added to avoid stalls in Boeing's 737 Max series may have been partly to blame. Faulty data from sensors on the Lion Air plane may have caused the system, known as MCAS, to malfunction, authorities investigating that crash suspect.

Federal prosecutors are investigating the development of the Boeing 737 Max jet, according to a person briefed on the matter. As part of the federal investigation, the FBI is also supporting the Department of Transportation's inspector general in its inquiry, said another person with knowledge of the matter.

The Justice Department said that it does not confirm or deny the existence of any investigations. Boeing declined to comment on the inquiry.

The jet's software system takes readings from one of two vanelike devices called angle of attack sensors that determine how much the plane's nose is pointing up or down relative to oncoming air. When MCAS detects that the plane is pointing up at a dangerous angle, it can automatically push down the nose of the plane in an effort to prevent the plane from stalling.

Boeing's optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. Boeing started moving on the software fix and the equipment change before the crash in Ethiopia.

The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy. Neither feature was mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration. All 737 Max jets have been grounded.

"They're critical, and cost almost nothing for the airlines to install," said Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at the aviation consultancy Leeham. "Boeing charges for them because it can. But they're vital for safety."

Earlier this week, Dennis A. Muilenburg, Boeing's chief executive, said the company was working to make the 737 Max safer.

"As part of our standard practice following any accident, we examine our aircraft design and operation, and when appropriate, institute product updates to further improve safety," he said in a statement.

Add-on features can be big moneymakers for plane manufacturers.Acclaimed British directors Mike Leigh and Peter Kosminsky have praised WitchHunt.

Leigh said it exposes with chilling accuracy the terrifying threat that now confronts democracy.

Kosminsky said it packs a powerful punch and is telling a story we just arent hearing at the moment.

Last month, left-wing member of Parliament Chris Williamson was suspended as a Labour Party member  after a long campaign by Israel lobby groups against him.

Williamson had booked a room in Parliament on behalf of the group Jewish Voice for Labour so that WitchHunt could be screened.

But it was canceled after the Labour leadership came under severe pressure by right-wing and pro-Israel Labour MPs.

Unless Williamsons Labour suspension is reversed before the next election, the move will make it hard for him to return as an MP.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter

Manufactured outrage

A source in Parliament told The Electronic Intifada that the ringleader of much of the outrage against Williamson was Ruth Smeeth.

Smeeth is a former professional Israel lobbyist who, since becoming an MP, has continued to receive donations from prominent Israel lobby funders.

A few days before his suspension Smeeth announced to a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party that a room had been booked to show the film.

This caused the sound of 250 voices doing a sharp intake of breath, according to our source.

Smeeth told the gathered MPs that she didnt know whod booked the room, but threatened that, I can assure you that I will find out.

According to our source in Parliament, Smeeths announcement to the Parliamentary Labour Party resulted in howls of outrage, including Shame!, Disgraceful! and, sarcastically, Well done Chris!

None of these MPs had even seen the film, as it had not been released at the time.

Their outrage was down to the central role in the film played by Jackie Walker.

Far-right alliance

Walker is a Black and Jewish anti-racist activist.

Her opposition to Zionism, Israels state-sanctioned ideology, plays a key role in the film, as does her likely expulsion by Labour later this month.

But WitchHunt takes a far wider view than Walkers case alone.

It puts the entire, years-long, manufactured Labour anti-Semitism crisis campaign into its correct global context.

As the films narrator argues in its conclusion, the fact that far-right European governments and parties today are growing ever closer to Israel shows a convergence of fascist and neo-Nazi groups with hardline Zionists.

As a worrying UK example of this, the film cites anti-Muslim fascist leader Tommy Robinsons recent trip to Israel and funding by anti-Palestinian groups.

This natural alliance may now be part of a more coordinated common cause of the far-right and Zionism around the world, the films narrator argues.

Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist and associate editor with The Electronic Intifada. He lives in London. Biography here.

This article was originally published by " The Electronic Intifada -

Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here

==See Also==

Are You Racist? | George Galloway | Oxford Union

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Thank you for your support.General Motors Co. committed to investing $1.8 billion at plants in six states and to creating 700 new jobs, as the largest U.S. automaker looks to ward off months of criticism by President Donald Trump.

The bulk of the new jobs will go to a factory in Michigan where GM plans to add production of another fully electric vehicle. The carmaker will spend $300 million and add 400 workers at the plant in Orion Township, north of Detroit, where the Chevrolet EV will be built alongside the Bolt model. Factories in states including Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas will also boost their workforce.

"This is an industry that is under just dramatic transformation," Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. "So we're taking the steps and being responsible to make sure that we can continue to grow in these areas, and continue to have a strong U.S. manufacturing base that creates a lot of good paying jobs."

The moves may help assuage Trump, who's attacked GM over its decisions announced in November to idle an Ohio plant and four other underutilized factories in the U.S. and Canada. As part of a broader restructuring that's also affecting salaried employees, the company is cutting or displacing upwards of 14,000 jobs.

"No one wants Trump tweeting negatively about them, but General Motors has demonstrated that it is going to run its business," said Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst at car-shopping researcher AutoTrader. "This is a significant investment in GM's electrification future."

Barra addressed Trump's barbs about GM ending production in Lordstown, Ohio, by talking about how many people continue to work for the company outside of that plant.

"We still have 4,000 jobs and 4,000 employees in four additional Ohio plants," Barra told reporters. "We spend more than $6 billion in Ohio every year. GM is committed to supporting manufacturing, including in Michigan and Ohio."

The United Auto Workers won't be pacified easily. Terry Dittes, the vice president who oversees the union's GM department, said he will still fight to save factories in Ohio, Michigan and Maryland that face uncertain futures due to a lack of future product to build.

"There is hardship among four of our locations and we've made it clear that we disagree with that," Dittes said when he took the podium after Barra spoke. "These four plants will not be forgotten."

Dittes said that even the sedan plant in Detroit-Hamtramck that GM has committed to keep open only until the end of 2019 has a shaky future. The challenge for the UAW is that even if the automaker closes all four of the plants that have no product allocated for the future, several other plants aren't busy enough right now to warrant adding more workers.

"We're still waiting to see what's going to happen with other GM plants, like Detroit-Hamtramck," AutoTrader's Krebs said. "There are still some plants that are underutilized. What will they do with those?"Doing Justice

A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law

By Preet Bharara

Knopf. 345 pp. $27.95

---

Preet Bharara first became well-known for his efforts to curb Wall Street corruption as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. But it was only after he forced President Trump to fire him that he became a rock star. He was dismissed in March 2017 when he refused to provide his resignation, following an about-face by a new administration that had previously asked him to stay on as U.S. attorney.

Later, in the first episode of his popular podcast, "Stay Tuned With Preet," he reflected on Trump's apparent efforts to cozy up to him through repeated phone calls - something that, given the norms of Justice Department independence meant to shield prosecutors from political interference, Bharara had never experienced.

In his new book, "Doing Justice," Bharara does not write explicitly about his conversations with Trump. But the president's shadow hangs over the book, even when Bharara declines to use his name. "It was all a giant, gold-plated charade," Bharara writes of one fraud defendant - a sentence that can't help but conjure up visions of Trump Tower. A chapter on "Snitches" functions, at times explicitly, as a rebuttal to Trump's complaints about the recent testimony of his former lawyer Michael Cohen, now cooperating with both special counsel Robert Mueller and Bharara's old office. A chapter decrying brutality in interrogation is an odd fit, except in the context of Trump's well-documented distaste for the rights of criminal suspects.

Bharara positions "Doing Justice" as a treatise on "the rule of law and faith in the rule of law" at a time when both are under threat. The contrast with Trump, and his contempt for the rule of law, is inevitable. Beyond simply rebutting the president, though, Bharara seeks to present the justice system Trump disdains as a source of inspiration for a healthier politics. His reflection on the role of the justice system in America is an effort both to make the inner workings of that system accessible to people unfamiliar with what criminal justice looks like from the perspective of law enforcement, and to suggest how people might apply ideals and habits honed in the courtroom to the patterns of everyday life.

Listeners of Bharara's podcast will be familiar with the book's tone: thoughtful, sincere, and not above a coy jab or a showman's wisecrack. Like the podcast, "Doing Justice" takes questions about the mechanics of criminal justice as an opportunity to dig deeper into moral and political inquiries. The book is structured as a series of meditations on the different stages of a criminal investigation: "Inquiry," "Accusation," "Judgment" and "Punishment"-a conceit that could easily read as affected but that Bharara manages to pull off. He explores the various aspects of a prosecutor's work through anecdotes from his time in the Southern District of New York and the careers of his colleagues there, from lighthearted (is it really worth prosecuting someone who sucks a subway token out of the slot with his or her mouth?) to deadly serious. Bharara's tenure as U.S. attorney is primarily remembered for his work prosecuting insider trading and financial fraud, about which he writes at length and with pride. But he also returns again and again to the brutal conditions at the New York City jail on Rikers Island, about which his office released a damning report in 2014: "What may be needed" for the jail, he writes, "is to burn it to the ground and start over."

The Southern District of New York has a reputation for thinking highly of itself, which Bharara cheerfully acknowledges and does nothing to dispel. (At one point he describes it as "the premier public law office in the country, if not the world.") Despite what detractors might call arrogance, though, one of Bharara's main themes is the fallibility of human judgment. The justice system, as he describes it, rests on discretion, but the nature of the world is such that some discretion will be abused, and even good-faith attempts to do the right thing will sometimes end poorly. "Every element of the law is dependent on the fateful choices of unpredictable and imperfect human beings," he writes, "from the cops to the lawyers to the judges to the cooperators. It is the human factor that makes the attempt to deliver justice uncertain."

Bharara emphasizes this in part by describing the nerves he felt while serving as U.S. attorney, humanizing the people who serve in a role of incredible power. More memorable, though, are his accounts of mistakes or close calls - or, more troubling still, cases in which there genuinely seems to be no right answer. Bharara is insistent that "the criminal justice system in any society necessarily implies a moral code," and the length at which he dwells on the gaps and imperfections in the law suggests that to morally conduct the work of law enforcement also requires officials to always keep those imperfections in mind.

There is an echo of James Comey's recent book "A Higher Loyalty" here: The impossibility of perfect judgment, even in good faith, seems to weigh on both Comey and Bharara. Like Comey, Bharara feels compelled to defend an aspect of his record that may be less than appealing to federal law enforcement's new fans to the left of center. In Comey's case, it was his decision to speak publicly about the status of the Hillary Clinton email investigation in July and October 2016; in Bharara's case, it is his office's decision not to prosecute the big banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Here, perhaps unavoidably, Bharara comes off as defensive - "neither I nor anyone I know was too afraid to prosecute rich men in suits," he protests - and readers who begin the chapter disagreeing with his approach probably will not walk away with their minds changed.

Bharara wrote "Doing Justice" in part to "help people make sense of what has been happening in America," he writes in the preface. Nowhere is this clearer than in his description of the criminal trial as a counterintuitive model for how to "search for truth and justice in our society as well": Trials, he argues, "are object lessons in persuasion, truth, and even civility." Unlike the president, "neither side is permitted to lie or misrepresent, to suggest truth isn't truth." In preparing to try a case, a prosecutor must take the time to understand the world from the perspective of the defense and the jury. "Failure to listen" to a witness or opposing counsel, Bharara writes, "is fatal and can do more than just embarrass you in federal court."

In a seemingly a strange concession for a book that holds out the law as an animating vision of democratic life, Bharara acknowledges: "The law is not perfect." But his point is that the system rests in the goodness of the people who run it, even though they're fallible. At a time when the president routinely attacks the Justice Department as an organ of the malignant "deep state," "Doing Justice" does its best to communicate what Bharara sees as the fundamental good faith of many law enforcement officials. The real interest and innovation of the book, though, is in Bharara's effort to offer that model of engagement with the world as a political theory for his fellow citizens. In a cynical time, there's something to be said for that kind of sincerity.

---

Quinta Jurecic is the managing editor of Lawfare, an online publication on national security and law.Baby of the Family

By Maura Roosevelt

Dutton. 464 pp. $28

---

Among the gifts you might inherit as a late-generation member of an American dynasty - besides a nifty trust fund, of course - is a truckload of daddy (and granddaddy) issues. How to live up to the lore of your family's greatness, your titanic last name, without unraveling a time or two? The three main characters of "Baby of the Family," Maura Roosevelt's sprawling debut novel, spend their lives burdened by the grand, impossible privilege of being Whitbys, a once-imposing clan of shipping and real estate magnates (akin to the real-life Astors). Following the death of Roger Whitby, Jr. - who spent his life squandering the family's money and prestige - Nick, Brooke and Shelley, offspring from three of his four failed marriages, inherit his fear of leading disappointing lives. But only Nick, Roger's adopted son, makes out with anything tangible: Roger's will left everything to him, including the homes where Brooke and Shelley live...as if he hadn't given his affection-starved kids enough reasons to resent him.

Roosevelt is herself part of a great American family - she's the great-granddaughter of Franklin and Eleanor. But the dysfunction at the core of "Baby of the Family" is mostly fictional. Although her grandfather, James Roosevelt (a war hero and congressman who worked in FDR's White House), was married four times, he sired a decidedly more harmonious bunch. Unlike the novel's characters, Roosevelt says, "My dad's half siblings seem to all be at peace with each other and with my grandfather. So, I think it's really just me who's watching them to see if there's any kind of discord. There hasn't been so far. But there's not a lot of writers in my family. I'm one of the only ones who's kind of looking around."

Roosevelt talked to The Washington Post about the complicated family she created - and the formidable one she comes from.

(BEG BOLD)In the novel, the Whitby kids lament being asked, after introducing themselves: "So ... are you related?" I imagine that was somewhat of an inside joke. Have there been any notable moments when you had to answer that question?(END BOLD)

There isn't any particular time that stands out, but there were some moments in school, growing up, where teachers would talk to me about things my family had done that were sort of - unnerving. My fourth-grade teacher - we were learning about Eleanor Roosevelt, and she said to the class, "You know, Eleanor Roosevelt was considered to be a very homely child." And not five, ten minutes later, she said, "You know, Eleanor Roosevelt is Maura's great grandmother, and Maura actually looks a lot like her." I was like: You know, I'm 10? I can put that together!

(BEG BOLD)Were you devastated? Or maybe just proud to be associated with her?(END BOLD)

Oh, no. I was devastated. I probably went home and whined or cried to my parents, and they were like, "Suck it up!" My parents did a really good job of talking about our family, and they're very nice and down-to-earth. But they're also of the mind of: "This is not a problem for you. It is unacceptable for you to ever think it's a problem."

(BEG BOLD)So, everything was always copacetic among your dad and his six half- and step-siblings?(END BOLD)

Well, actually, this is an element I put in the book: My dad's older siblings [from James Roosevelt's first marriage] - he didn't find out about them until he was 10 years old. Right before his parents got divorced, he found a present under the Christmas tree that said, "To Dad. Love, Kate and Sara." He picked up the present and said, "Um, Dad? Who's Kate and Sara?"

(BEG BOLD)How did that play out?(END BOLD)

I think they just - it was the '50s, so the way my dad tells the story is that his parents just explained it in a very matter-of-fact kind of '50s manner, where it seemed like they had just forgotten to tell him. They were just like, "Oh! yeah."

(BEG BOLD)Nick Whitby, the "baby of the family," is 21 and disgusted by a "demonic capitalist system." At the start of the novel, he's running from the law after a political-activism stunt goes haywire. Being from a family known for progressive politics, do you have any activist history of your own?(END BOLD)

I've actually been arrested twice. The first time I was 18 years old, and I meant to get arrested. It was during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and I was protesting ICE detentions. The second time, I was a senior at Harvard, and the FBI director, Robert Mueller, was speaking at the school. The FBI was trying eco-activists as terrorists - actually, that's another small element I borrowed for the book - and we thought it was atrocious. So we decided to go to Robert Mueller's speech and heckle him - like, stand up and scream like utter lunatics. We thought we were going to just get kicked out of the lecture hall. Instead, the Harvard police arrested us and turned us over to the Cambridge police. I called my parents - they live in Cambridge, so they were just down the street - and heard my mom yell upstairs, "Jim, Maura got arrested again!" I'm definitely in favor of political protests and activism, but I don't think I would do that kind of thing again.

(BEG BOLD)Roger Whitby marries, as his fourth wife, his youngest child's teacher - as did James. Were you faithful to that story or create your own version?(END BOLD)

I completely made up all the details. I haven't heard about that particular courtship or how the marriage happened. It was probably less sensational than [the novel's version]. But one interesting thing that happened: My grandfather was in the Marines and had a dagger from World War II hanging above his mantelpiece. When he told his third wife he wanted a divorce - we're not sure if that next relationship [with their son's teacher] had started yet or not - she took the dagger off the mantelpiece and stabbed him.

(BEG BOLD)I jotted that down - it's on Wikipedia - with the intention of asking if it's actually true.(END BOLD)

It's true. And actually, we don't have many family heirlooms, but my cousin Nick is in possession of that dagger.

(BEG BOLD)You say you're not sure if James had already started his next relationship, but considering his wife was driven to stabbing him, it's safe to say probably?(END BOLD)

Yeah. That's what it seems like, honestly. You know, my grandfather's brother, and I think his sister also, had multiple divorces. So he wasn't the only one of his family or his generation. They were kind of all doing that.

(BEG BOLD)In the novel, Brooke deals with her burden of being a Whitby by actively breaking from what was expected of her: She gets a "middle-class" job as a nurse; breaks up with a wealthy boyfriend, whose baby she's actually carrying; and falls in love with a woman. Eleanor Roosevelt famously flipped the script of what was expected of a woman in her position and era - and had a rumored affair with a woman, journalist Lorena Hickok. Was Brooke, perhaps, an homage to your great grandmother?(END BOLD)

That's interesting. I really was not thinking of Eleanor's supposed relationship with a woman - which, you know, some members of my family are doubtful of the truth of that. I would be happy with it either way, but that is sort of a contentious thing within my family.

(BEG BOLD)Yes, it's never been confirmed, yet it's been sensationalized. Two separate books ran with the topic just last year. I imagine that's frustrating.(END BOLD)

Yeah, I think so. She had a lot of close female friends, and the way she wrote to them and talked to them was in this, like, Victorian way. They would say, "I love you, dear," that kind of thing. So I do think some of it has been sort of overblown. But that particular relationship, you know - who knows?

(BEG BOLD)One character is writing a book about "America when there was a ruling class" - focusing on industry titans and their New York City homes. Were you at all inspired by old family homes, like FDR's Hyde Park estate or the Roosevelt House in Manhattan, where Franklin and Eleanor spent their early married years?(END BOLD)

Actually, right as I was beginning to write this book, I went to the birthplace of Teddy Roosevelt, which is in Manhattan. My dad and I were just in the neighborhood killing time. I was really inspired by that house and some of the furnishings and the way they preserved it. And a funny thing happened, which happens to us sometimes. At the end of the tour, we said: "Oh, you know, we're actually Roosevelts on the other side. We're FDR's grandson and great-granddaughter." And the person giving the tour thought we were lying! They were like, "Uh-huh. Okay."

---

Rachel Rosenblit is a freelance writer and editor in New York.Spies of No Country

Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel

By Matti Friedman

Algonquin. 248 pp. $26.95

---

Shortly after the creation of Israel in May 1948, a small band of Jewish spies set up shop in Beirut - literally a kiosk - as part of the country's first intelligence station in an Arab nation. To Lebanese citizens, the men inside the refreshment stand by the Three Moons elementary school couldn't have looked suspicious. Every morning, they hawked pencils, candy and sandwiches. Equally as crucial, if not more so, the Jewish shopkeepers/spies looked and sounded just like their customers, many of whom were connected to the government or the army. These Jews hailed from the Arab world - Syria or Yemen - and, as Israeli agents, had studied the Islamic and Christian worlds so they could blend in, obtain intelligence and relay it back to headquarters.

"The spies were not ... navigating candlesticks and crystal at dinner parties, or insinuating themselves into the corridors of power," writes Matti Friedman in his new book, "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel.""Their position was like that of Russian agents tasked with gleaning intelligence not from Capitol Hill or Wall Street but from the sidewalk outside a public school in Queens."

But the spies hated labeling themselves with such a sinister term. They preferred the Hebrew word "mista'arvim," which, translated into English, means: "ones who become like Arabs."

Like most anything written about Israel and Palestine, "Spies of No Country" will either repel or attract you, depending on your political perspective. If you're pro-Israel, Friedman's book offers a cast of humble, hardworking and brave characters who overcame prejudices in their old and new homelands for the greater cause of Judaism. But if you think of Israel less as a victim and more of a victimizer, then Friedman's book might feel like hagiography, yet another work that idealizes the history of the Israeli military and intelligence apparatus.

It's also impossible to read "Spies of No Country" without taking into account the background of its author. Friedman, a former Associated Press journalist who lives in Jerusalem, caused a dustup five years ago when he publicly blamed the "global mania about Israeli actions" on the media, including his former employer, needling the press for its aggressive coverage of the Israeli military and for portraying Palestinians as "passive victims." (Friedman's articles caused such an uproar that the AP issued a lengthy statement blasting his arguments for their "distortions, half-truths and inaccuracies.")

But in his newest book, Friedman, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, focuses just as much on Israel's earliest conflicts with Muslims as on Israel's problems with itself. "Spies of No Country" is the story of four men who fled their Arab homelands to join a new country whose Jews initially hailed mostly from Europe and, more often than not, looked down on Jews from the Islamic world. Friedman's four spies are Gamliel Cohen and Isaac Shoshan, both born in Syria; Havakuk Cohen, from Yemen; and Yakuba Cohen, a native of British Palestine. (The Cohens aren't related.)

Yes, we learn about the quartet's daring exploits, such as the time Shoshan and others in the Jewish military tried assassinating a popular sheikh in the port city of Haifa, or another time when some of them helped a fifth comrade, Eliyahu Rika, blow up a 443-foot yacht that once belonged to Adolf Hitler off Beirut in late 1948. But, admirably, Friedman seems to be telling this story for larger purposes. He wants to shine a light on a band of Arab-born operatives often overlooked in the stories of Israel's founding as a Holocaust refuge led by Europeans in the Zionist movement.

More broadly, though, Friedman also wants to help Westerners understand that Israel's demographics have massively shifted over time. He writes that about half of the Jewish population has "roots in the Islamic world." In his telling, Israel's early leaders didn't see or appreciate the rising tide of men like the spies featured in this tale.

Although many may not realize it, Jews had lived for centuries, and quite peacefully, in the Islamic world, from North Africa to Iraq. But when Israel was established, Jews in those countries were threatened, their bank assets frozen or, worse, their lives taken. So they fled en masse to Israel, often, as Friedman notes, with the help of "covert immigration agents" shepherding them onto ships or planes. In the Israeli immigration camps, the sounds of Arabic drowned out the Yiddish of other Jews. The Arab Jews helped build the country and now significantly influence Israeli culture. Mainstream musicians in Israel, Friedman points out, "are now singing in Arabic, Persian and Ladino."

The Jews who founded Israel tend to be mythologized as those who hailed from Europe and worked as pioneers on kibbutzes. As Friedman tells it, the country's earliest founders largely ignored or dismissed contributions from Jews of the Arab world. "People trying to forge a Jewish state in the Middle East should have seen that Jews from the Middle East could be helpful," he writes. "The newcomers might have been invited to serve as equal partners in the creation of this new society, but they weren't. Instead, they were condescended to, and pushed to the fringes. It was one of the state's worst errors, one for which we're still paying."

One of the more odious examples Friedman found was an April 1949 article in the Daily Haaretz newspaper, which dispatched a reporter to a camp housing Arabic-speaking Jews from North Africa. The journalist, Aryeh Gelblum, wrote that the newcomers had "savage primitive instincts" and an "inability to comprehend anything intellectual ... an even lower level than that of the former Palestinian Arabs."

The book is most engaging when Friedman sticks with one character, in one timeline and in one scene. But often, "Spies of No Country" veers from one timeline to the next and from one spy to the next, and it's hard to keep track of who's doing what and when, especially because each of the four spies has aliases that Friedman also uses. Halfway through the book, I tore out an early page listing their real and fake names and mug shots and tacked it to a wall as a much-needed reference. (In this way, I felt a bit like a spy myself.) Friedman relies mostly on interviews he conducted with one of the spies, Shoshan, who is still alive; for the other three, who passed away, Friedman has to resort to oral histories they supplied or military archives.

Despite those obstacles, Friedman's book was still illuminating. When I was done, I couldn't stop thinking about the men inside the Beirut kiosk, selling candy and pencils to schoolchildren while secretly listening to a transistor radio tucked in the back, trying to pick up news from home.

Friedman's main character, Shoshan, described the set-up in a way that feels like a metaphor for the double lives of spies and of Arab Jews: "The inside of the store is strategic for us because from the outside you can't see what's going on inside, and in the middle is a partition of cupboards behind which it is possible to organize and hide many things without being seen."

---

Ian Shapira is a Washington Post reporter who often writes about the intelligence and military communities.Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., may have struggled at first to find an apartment in Washington, but she's been living rent-free inside the heads of Fox News commentators ever since.

Ocasio-Cortez's early career rise as a leading Democratic Party figure means she is seemingly everywhere lately, or at least wherever Time magazine is sold. But she has also bedeviled Republicans who have fixated on her, often becoming a stand-in target for criticizing liberal policies.

And that means plenty of mentions from Fox News hosts and guests, "Late Night" host Seth Meyers suggested Thursday.

"I mean, it's weird. Like, why are so many grown men just obsessed with this 29-year-old?" Ocasio-Cortez asked the NBC show host. "No, but I think it's really funny, and the conspiracy theories are great."

One theory floated by Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee: Ocasio-Cortez is a brainwashed agent sent to bring down the country from the inside.

The former Arkansas governor was asked by "Fox and Friends" co-host Brian Kilmeade if Ocasio-Cortez's rise and her level of preparedness was the result of "forces" at work.

"Well, there very well could be. I know there has been some allegations she that was almost like the Manchurian Candidate, recruited, prepared," Huckabee said Thursday. "You know, I don't know. But the point is that she got her voters out."

Ocasio-Cortez took the moment to suggest paying her staff a wage of at least $52,000 has second-order effects.

"I'm not a Manchurian Candidate, but I do have amazing staff, and in no part thanks to the fact that we pay a living wage in our office," she said.

"So far two of my staffers have been able to quit their second jobs in restaurants and be fully present at work. And so I hope it's a lesson to the folks on the other side of the aisle that if you pay your staff, you'll be prepared."

A Fox News spokesperson declined to provide comment on Ocasio-Cortez's suggestion that the network has fixated on her to an unusual degree.

There is some evidence that her name has circulated on Fox News more than other cable networks.

In a daily average last month, she has been talked about on Fox News 4  times as much as on MSNBC and nine times as much as on CNN, The Washington Post's Philip Bump noted.

Conservative media coverage has resulted in "side effects of this Fox News lunacy," Ocasio-Cortez said. She told Meyers a lawmaker asked her if she was paid $10 million by Netflix after it acquired rights for a documentary that involves her.

"I'm like, 'No,' " she said. " 'What else do you not know! This is concerning!'" It is not clear if a Fox News segment ever raised the issue of her being paid for the rights, which has been debunked.

But it's not only men on Fox News who have zeroed on Ocasio-Cortez. On Tuesday, host Laura Ingraham ridiculed Ocasio-Cortez for the accent she uses to pronounce her own name.

That prompted conservative lawyer Joe diGenova to lay on a thickly exaggerated accent.

"She does the Latina thing where she does her, you know, 'Anastasio Ocasio-Cortez," he said, appearing to deliberately mispronounce her name.

Perhaps that moment led other Fox News hosts to get her name right. She was discussed Friday, as she often is, on "Fox and Friends."

Co-host Steve Doocy paused for a moment to think about it. "Alex-an-dria Oca-sio-Cor-tez," he said.WASHINGTON - Among the gripping moments in the National Gallery of Art's exhilarating Tintoretto exhibition is a small detail that seems to project beyond the limits of a painting on canvas. It is an alliance of hand and foot, the left hand of the Virgin Mary, which brushes against the right foot of the dead Jesus, who has just been taken from the cross. Both figures suggest the waxen chill of death - the literal death of Jesus on the cross and the emotional death of his mother, who has collapsed unconscious under the weight of her son's body.

Perhaps they touch accidentally, and perhaps that accidental communion of hand and foot that connects mother to son is a comment on the closely packed construction of the painting, which is somewhat unusual for Tintoretto, an artist who often gives his figures a lot of room, as though they inhabit their own psychological and narrative space. Perhaps it points beyond the physicality of life, to a bond between these two figures that transcends their mortal existence. Or perhaps it is a symbolic touch, a subordination of mother to her divine son, reiterating the characteristic humility one sees in Mary in paintings of the Annunciation, when she learns she will bear the son of God. Or maybe it is just the opposite, a symbol of Mary's extraordinary status within Catholic tradition, a sign of her particular intimacy with Jesus, as though she unconsciously reaches out to wiggle the little piggies of her dead boy's foot.

Whatever it means, it has impact. A critic writing a century ago spoke of the "suddenness" in Tintoretto's art, and that word fits this detail - and many, many others - perfectly. Tintoretto, the most ambitious and often the most compelling Venetian painter of the second half of the 16th century, worked fast and took chances, and there was a sense of urgency in his life that is everywhere present in his art, as well. He emerged in Venice first in the shadow of Titian, who considered him an upstart and a threat and worked to thwart his rise. Tintoretto may have set himself this motto, which defined the ideals he spent a lifetime pursuing: "The draftsmanship of Michelangelo and the coloring of Titian."

If the young artist did indeed adopt this dictum, then he was self-consciously proposing a career that would redeem Venetian painting of its supposed deficit: a lack of rigor in the design and construction of images that was all too often hidden by a sumptuous, painterly overlay. He would absorb the lessons of Michelangelo, who died in Rome about the same time that Tintoretto painted his image of Mary and Jesus taken from the cross, and fuse them with the brilliance and sumptuousness for which Titian was renowned.

It's a good story, but Tintoretto ended up doing something else: He became simply Tintoretto, deeply original, often sublimely weird and one of the most imaginative painters of the Renaissance. The National Gallery exhibition, "Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice," surveys the painter on the 500th anniversary of his birth (circa 1518 or 1519), and for many visitors, it will probably be a revelation.

The vast majority of Tintoretto's greatest work can be seen only in Venice, where he often painted on an enormous scale, filling churches and civic institutions with giant images that have a cinematic flair, so large that the eye must scan through them, picking up small narratives and isolated events within their larger construction. He specialized in what might be called "talkers" today: paintings that were meant to be a bit flashy and shocking.

Unfortunately, most of those works can't travel, so visitors to the National Gallery will have to imagine the impact of essential early works, such as Tintoretto's 1548 "Miracle of the Slave," in which St. Mark flies into the picture from on high to save a naked Christian slave, prostrate on the ground in a dramatically foreshortened position. The huge 1565 "The Crucifixion" that he created for a confraternity, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which bustles with detail and incident, isn't leaving Venice, either. And one wishes it had been possible to include the room-size horizontal painting "Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples," held by the Prado (which made it to Madrid but would be a formidable thing to crate and move, even today). The Prado painting is one of the strangest things in any museum, anywhere - an elongated image meant to be seen from one side (when it was installed in a church) that pushes Jesus off to one edge, and disperses the individual figures throughout an open, architectural space, as though they are actors focusing on their lines in the moment just before the director calls, "Action!"

But the paintings that have come to the National Gallery (supplemented by an extensive exhibition of prints and drawings) are more than enough to demonstrate Tintoretto's brilliance. Even in his day, he was admired and admonished for creating works that felt "unfinished" to some critics. He had a keen sense of what kinds of marks would read on a large canvas, often seen from a distance, and he had a marvelous sense of economy when it came to what was necessary and sufficient to tell a story. His 1567 "The Madonna of the Treasurers" is a group portrait of Venetian dignitaries in sumptuous red robes, mixed up with the Virgin, the baby Jesus and a twisting figure of St. Sebastian that recalls Michelangelo's agonized musculature. In it, one admires not just the positioning of three groups of figures (all seemingly in the same space, but each arranged hierarchically by religious and civic importance), but also how quickly and impressionistically Tintoretto painted the fur lining of the treasurers' red gowns and the feathery, white lines streaked over red that suggest the glistening texture of their crimson fabric.

In other works, a splash of white on dark paint leaves the impression of glinting metal, while lace, seen up close, dissolves into pure abstraction. In one of Tintoretto's many fine portraits, the dark background behind the figure invades the cheeks of the man's face, rendering them gaunt, and him ancient.

Tintoretto himself is curiously absent. We can sense his flair for bawdy humor in the early bedroom farce "Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan," in which the older figure of Vulcan inspects his unfaithful wife's thighs while Mars, hiding beneath a bed, tries to quiet an obstreperous dog. His intuitive mastery of and games with perspective are evident throughout, in his drawings and in works meant to be seen affixed to ceilings or placed high above doors. His range of reference, both to the works of other artists, including Titian and Michelangelo, and to classical myth, is also astonishing. But the character of Tintoretto himself, a man whose powerful personality was likened to the pungent flavor of a peppercorn, isn't obvious, even in the two exceptional self-portraits that serve as bookends to the show.

We know the facts, well enough: That he was the son of a fabric dyer, that he may have briefly worked in Titian's shop (and may have been quickly dismissed from it), that he probably learned his craft painting quickly on furniture (a fine panel from a wooden chest is on view), that he probably learned to paint fast and big working on early fresco projects, and that he was not the sort of artist to say no to a commission, or to let a coveted job project fall into his competitors' hands. He raised his children to be painters, and there are works on view in both the painting and drawing exhibitions that show his son Domenico to be a competent if not always inspired artist. And he worked passionately throughout his life and into his final years, including (with Domenico) on an awe-inspiring image of Paradise that is more than 72 feet wide (mounted in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, and represented in this exhibition by a smaller modello borrowed from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid).

But the suddenness of Tintoretto overwhelms any scattered intuitions derived from the facts of his life. He seems, at times, like a composer born a generation later, Gesualdo, who squeezed harmonic agonies into the neat confines of the madrigal, or perhaps the playwrights Euripides and Marlow, who unleashed human psychology without concern for the dignity or even coherence of their own works.

But return to that hand brushing the foot in his "Deposition." This is pure suddenness, but also sweet and tender. It is breathtaking and reassuring, leaving little doubt that no matter how brilliant Tintoretto was, there was more than just brilliance in his vision. He left the world talkers, and keepers.

---

"Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice"

Through July 7 at the National Gallery of Art. nga.gov.EDWARDSVILLE  Madison County Auditor Rick Faccin said he would refuse to provide access to detailed financial reports, despite the approval of a resolution from the County Board.

In sometimes very heated arguments during both an Executive Committee meeting and the full County Board meeting following, Faccin and Trustee Kurt Prenzler on several occasions were yelling at one another, Prenzler several times ruled Faccin out of order, and at one point Prenzler brought up former Treasurer Fred Bathon, who went to prison for rigging delinquent tax auctions.

Faccin cited an ongoing investigation of the administration by the Illinois Attorney Generals Office, saying he would revisit his decision to withhold the information once the investigation concludes.

The issue revolves around an ongoing feud between Faccin and the administration  most often County Administrator Doug Hulme  over access to detailed financial records. Most of the sometimes heated debates occurred during Finance and Government Operations Committee meetings.

Hulme has argued that the administration needs to have at least some of the detailed information in order to prepare budgets and have a clear picture of the countys financial shape.

Faccin argued that because of the nature of the investigation, which he said revolves around improper access and use of computer data, the administration cant be trusted.

Part of the issue is that some of the more detailed information includes personal information about employees that could create legal difficulties if the information was mishandled.

The investigation revolves around work by the Madison County Public Corruption Task Force, formed at the request of Madison County States Attorney Tom Gibbons.

On Jan. 10, 2018 law enforcement officers executed search warrants on the County Board office, leaving with computers and other items.

The officers targeted the Madison County Board Office, specifically the office of Madison County Administrator Doug Hulme; the office of Public Relations and Communications Manager Cynthia Ellis; and the county IT Department.

In late January the county FOIA officer was called before a grand jury and some records were subpoenaed, and a later search warrant was served on that office.

In September a judge from the Second Judicial Circuit in Mount Vernon ordered the investigation be turned over to the Illinois Attorney Generals Office. In January a spokesperson for the office said the investigation was ongoing.

The discussion began in the Executive Committee meeting, where several board members said they had been under the impression that the issue had been at least partially worked out and the administration had read-only access to information.

Faccin was blunt in his refusal.

Youre not getting access until this is resolved, he said. It is very much ongoing, I know that for a fact.

Prenzler noted that much of the financial information is available to the public through the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, while several board members said they were tired of the delays.

Youre going to force us to spend more money to get a court order, said Member Mick Madison, R-Bethalto.

The debate became heated, and at one point Prenzler said Bathons illegal tax sales had gone on under Faccins nose for years.

Faccin quickly replied If you knew what you were talking about, which you dont. before being cut off by Prenzler for being out of order.

That occurred numerous times at both meetings.

The resolution authorizing the administrations access to the information was approved, with Michael Doc Holiday, D- Alton, and Gussie Glasper, D-Madison, voting no.

At the full board meeting, debate on the subject began when Board Member Mike Parkinson, D-Granite City, asked for Faccin to speak.

You can pass a resolution if you want, Im not going to abide by it, Faccin said, adding again that he would reexamine the issue when the investigation was complete.

Several questions were referred to Gibbons, specifically whether parts of the data could be released.

He said scrubbing the data to remove personal information would be an extraordinary task.

My legal concern is that the county will be subject to a class-action lawsuit, he said.

He also noted the resolution could be interpreted in a way that would create a massive civil rights violation, and the board has no way to enforce the resolution.

The resolution was then approved 13-12, with four members absent.

Reach reporter Scott Cousins at 618-208-6447.When politics turns ugly - as it has been the case in Brexit Britain for some time now - divisions reach deep into society. Relatives no longer speak to each other, friendships end, and in some cases anger turns into violent extremism. Politicians aren't immune to the fallout, either.

In almost all European nations where political tensions have erupted in recent years, legislators or ministers have become targets as some members of the public have sought to assign blame.

Lawmakers with French President Emmanuel Macron's Republic on the Move party warned of a surge in death threats amid the rise of the yellow-vest movement earlier this year. On Wednesday, similar concerns reached the British Parliament, where Lindsay Hoyle, deputy speaker in the House of Commons, urged members to be more vigilant in public as tensions over Brexit mount.

According to an email leaked to news site Politics Home and the BBC, Hoyle wrote to members of Parliament: "We can also take simple steps to improve our personal safety by travelling home from the House by taxi or with colleagues in the coming days. The Serjeant at Arms has made provision for black cabs to collect from within the estate."

"I have never felt this level of tension during my time in the House and I am aware that other colleagues feel the same," Hoyle wrote.

The email was sent out the same day that British Prime Minister Theresa May blamed Parliament for the deadlocked Brexit situation. Addressing voters, May said on Wednesday: "You're tired of the infighting, you're tired of the political games and the arcane procedural rows, tired of MPs talking about nothing else but Brexit."

May's comments drew angry responses from members of Parliament, who are expected to vote next week for a third time on the prime minister's deal to leave the European Union.

In a remarkable response, the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, told MPs: "None of you is a traitor. All of you are doing your best."

"I believe passionately in the institution of Parliament, in the rights of members of this house, and in their commitment to their duty. . . . The sole duty of every member of Parliament is to do what he or she thinks is right," Bercow said.

Bercow's rejection of the prime minister's accusations bore some similarities to the fallout from an infamous November 2016 Daily Mail headline, which called three high court judges "enemies of the people." The judges had ruled that the government needed Parliament to trigger Britain's exit from the European Union. Critics of the Daily Mail headline feared that the rhetoric, which was also used by the Nazis, could expose the judges to attacks and harassment.

This week's blame game in London, amid heightened concerns over lawmakers' safety, once again reflected deeper questions over how populist rhetoric, policies and headlines have created a more toxic political environment. More moderate politicians and analysts have largely blamed the divisions on right-wing parties such as the U.K. Independence Party, France's National Rally (previously known as National Front) and Germany's Alternative for Germany (AfD).

But those parties have similarly faced the fallout of the more heated political landscape they helped create. In January, a regional AfD leader was assaulted in the city of Bremen in what authorities called a "politically motivated" attack. Chancellor Angela Merkel and members of all parties condemned the attack, which left AfD politician Frank Magnitz with serious injuries.

"Today is a dark day for democracy in Germany," the far-right AfD said in a subsequent statement.

While right-wing populists and more moderate members of Parliament may agree that violence should be condemned in all cases, finding common ground on a solution has appeared more difficult.

In response to recent attacks and threats, MPs across the political spectrum have urged more restraint. But public disagreement and blaming others are inherent to any political system, and especially so in Britain, which has long prided itself on parliamentary discourse that may appear harsh to some but that has also put the government under greater scrutiny.

With public discourse unlikely to change, the focus is increasingly turning toward law enforcement. When a team of researchers with the North and West London Forensic Services examined threats against British politicians in 2015, it concluded that MPs and their staffers often failed to flag threats or harassment incidents that may potentially pose serious risks.

"Intrusive behaviours towards MPs," the researchers wrote, could help detect "lone actors who frequently exhibit 'warning behaviours' in the form of intrusive/aggressive behaviours before they carry out a definitive act."

Flagging those incidents earlier and more frequently could help to single out individuals who may be prone to turning to violence, the report argued.

That warning came too late for British MP Jo Cox, who was shot and stabbed by a right-wing extremist in June 2016 as she was on her way to meet constituents days before the Brexit referendum. After Cox died at the scene of the attack, all sides halted their Brexit campaigns almost immediately. One week later, Britain voted to leave the European Union, paving the way for one of the most politically divisive projects in contemporary European history.Exposure of Another Pro-War Lie Doesnt Make Media More Skeptical of Pro-War Claims

By Janine Jackson

March 21, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - Listeners will likely know by now, that the late February story, complete with vivid video footage, about the forces of elected Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro burning trucks that were trying to bring the besieged country food and medicine was false. Weeks later, the New York Times (3/10/19) reported that the humanitarian trucks were not set on fire by Maduros forces, but instead by anti-Maduro protestors who threw a Molotov cocktail. The Times outlined how the fake story took root, passing from US officials to media that simply reported their claims as fact with no investigationand does any of this sound familiar?

Folks like CNNs Marshall Cohen noted the Times debunking as if it were just an interesting developmenta classic example of how misinformation spreads, Cohen said in a tweet. Except, as The Intercepts Glenn Greenwald pointed out (3/10/19), it was Cohens own network, CNN, that led the way in spreading the lie around the world.

And not simply by parroting official claims. On February 24, the network told viewers that a CNN team saw incendiary devices from police on the Venezuelan side of the border ignite the trucks. It was then we got to Mike Pence claiming that the tyrant Maduro danced as his henchmenburned food and medicine; Marco Rubios comment that each of the trucks burned by Maduro carried 20 tons of food and medicine. This is a crime and if international law means anything, he must pay a high price for this; Mike Pompeos fist-shaking, What kind of a sick tyrant stops food from getting to hungry people?

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It isnt merely that corporate media will never, in a million years, go back to each of these people and demand to know why they wont insist on the same sort of response, now that it appears it was Maduros opponents who were to blame. Its more that the very news dissemination process here superficially being indicted will not itself be reconsidered.

After all, this false story arrived embedded within another false story: that the Venezuelan government is blocking needed humanitarian aid to the country. The Venezuelan government has and does allow aid into their countryfrom countries that are not actively and vituperatively threatening to overthrow the elected president with an external coup. Groups from the Red Cross to the UN have challenged the USs earnest claims of humanitarian concern. NPR (2/16/19) acknowledged that US moves are not simply humanitarian, but also designed to foment regime change in Venezuelawhich is why much of the international aid community wants nothing to do with it.

That, plus the evidence that it was in fact opposition protesters that burned the trucks, would suggest a real flipping of the current script, and with it some consideration of how that script got written in the first place. But, as happened with those raising questions about evidence of Saddam Husseins possession of weapons of mass destructionor the Cuban airfield in Grenada, or Iraqis throwing babies out of incubators, or North Vietnam firing on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkinthe outlets that vigorously pushed the false story will not extend any new skepticism toward the official sources that sold it to them. Nor will they offer any new respector platformto the people (like Max Blumenthal, like Boots Riley) who questioned the claimnot weeks later, but in real time.

Those official sources will still be central and those asking questions will still be marginal. Those who cannot believe that the US government is working, with corporate media support, to set up a false storyline to push the public to support another war on another country might at this point ask themselves: If they were doing that, how would that look different than what were seeing now?

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Peace and joyBefore 10 a.m. on another cold Thursday, Monica Diaz stirred in her tent, filled with dread. It had been two weeks since the last cleanup, and city workers would again be here soon, with their dumpster truck and police cars, to clear out the encampment. Every morning was awful, but these were the worst of all, when Monica, who'd otherwise be resting before work, was forced to confront publicly what she did her best to hide: that she's homeless. That she lives in a tent. That she just turned 40, and that this is somehow her life.

"You ready?" Monica asked her husband, after a sleepless night at the base of Union Station, near CNN's Washington bureau, where the noise never stopped and they'd huddled together with their dog, Sassy, against the cold.

"Somewhat," said Pete Etheridge, 31, sighing.

They looked around their tent, which not only held the sum total of their world but also reflected a way of life that has, over the past decade, fundamentally changed the face of American homelessness. As housing costs climb ever higher in booming urban areas, the significant growth in tent encampments nationwide has become one of the most visible signs of the nation's failure to alleviate widening inequality. In Orange County, California, more than 700 people were cleared out of a tent city along the Santa Ana River last year after thousands signed a petition and Anaheim declared a state of emergency. Seattle, meanwhile, has allowed some tent cities to operate as de facto communities - long-term, regulated, even with phone numbers and addresses. And in Washington, the number of encampment cleanups has surged, according to city data, rising from 29 in 2015 to 100 in 2018.

Monica, a stout, wavy-haired woman now living in her seventh tent after cleanup crews tossed the others, looked down the busy street and tried to gird herself for the indignities to come. She needed to place her clothing and blankets into black trash bags, take down the blue and gray nylon tent and wheel everything out of eyesight in a shopping cart. Then she would watch as workers wiped away any trace of her from First Street Northeast, wheel it all back, pitch her tent again, take an ibuprofen p.m. and then sleep it all away until it was time to go to the fast-food restaurant for work.

"We got to take it all the way down there," she said, pointing toward the next street. Pete looked over everything that needed packing and was quietly shaking his head when a man in a brown coat approached. He'd come to cover the cleanup for Street Sense, a publication about homelessness, but now told them that the move had been canceled. The city was worried about hypothermia. Monica and Pete wouldn't have to dismantle their lives - at least not today.

"It's canceled?" Monica said, putting a hand over her mouth and closing her eyes. "Oh my God! We were just about to move all of our stuff!"

She hugged the man, and then Pete, the two of them overcome with such sudden relief that they began to cry.

"I love you, baby," he said, pressing his face to hers.

"We're going to make it," she said, reaching up to wipe the tears away from his face.

Behind them was a sign screwed to a metal post. It showed the date of the next cleanup.

Feb. 28, it now said. Ten a.m. Two weeks from today.

- - -

Life in the tent: Everything looks blue. "Our efficiency on First" they jokingly call it, imagining a different existence. On one side is the "wardrobe closet," where they store the clothing the church people gave them. In the middle is the "bedroom," where they've laid down blankets and sleeping bags. Off to the other side are the "kitchen" and "bathroom," where they put the groceries and toiletries that Monica can manage to buy with the biweekly pay from her job.

That was where she had to go one afternoon soon after a cleanup. Just past 3 p.m., she unzipped the tent and awkwardly stepped out into the brightness of day. Eyes puffy, hair ruffled, exhausted, she pulled up the hood of her coat. Pete secured the tent with a padlock, leaving Sassy behind in a cocoon of blankets, and the two of them walked toward Union Station, which, for scores of homeless people like them, functions as the epicenter of daily life. It is where they can use a restroom, buy a cheap meal at the Bojangles' or McDonald's, get warm. Here, there's a largely invisible, parallel reality apart from the thousands of people whooshing through the station each day, catching trains, clutching coffee, going about the business of making it in a city powered by ambition.

Some of those people are Monica's customers, and rather than risk seeing them while she was so disheveled, she walked in through a service entrance, hood pulled down low. She passed the spot where the trucks drop off their cargo and where the restaurants throw away their waste, considering again the same question: How did it come to this?

She knew that she'd made some mistakes. Some bills went unpaid and debts had accumulated while she tried - unsuccessfully - to get a college degree at Towson University, ruining her credit. Then four years ago, she was charged with distribution of a controlled substance, a case that was dropped. But this? Not that long ago, she'd had a house, a car and a job - one with benefits and potential for promotion to management, at the Price Rite supermarket in District Heights, Maryland. And then Pete - the quiet, big-hearted man who got her phone number seven years ago, after they bumped into each other several times on the streets of Washington, their hometown. He told her they kept running into each other for a reason, and soon he was coming over to her house and that was that. Home for him was now with her.

The first place they shared was a one-bedroom apartment in Temple Hills, Maryland. Rent had been an easy $900, which they managed with their pay from her job at Price Rite and his job stocking groceries overnight at a Giant. Monica cooked them Dominican and Guatemalan food most nights, recipes she learned from her mother and grandparents, all of whom had long since died. By May 2016, they'd gotten engaged, with Monica posting a picture on Facebook of the silver rings they bought for each other. But while their world was solidifying inside the apartment, it was fraying outside.

Lynnhill Condominiums, where they lived, a massive building filled with mostly low-income tenants, was buckling beneath the weight of housing code violations. In October 2016, the power was cut because of unpaid utility bills, and some residents started leaving. But not Monica and Pete. "I'm basically living paycheck to paycheck," Monica told a television reporter, looking then like a different person - earrings in, hair brushed, glasses on. "I have nowhere to go." Less than a year later, the Prince George's County Fire Department condemned the building. "For your safety, you are being ordered to evacuate," a police offer said into a loudspeaker in the parking lot. But to where? "What did we do to deserve this?" Monica asked in another television interview, frantic. "We paid rent. We worked hard, you understand? So why would you do this to us?"

Two years later now, long after they'd wound up on the streets and the condemned building had been sold to a real estate company, Monica and Pete walked up to the Union Station bus terminal. Nearby was a family bathroom. It was where Monica liked to go before work. There, she could lock the door, have a moment of privacy, breathe deeply and make herself clean again. But today the bathroom was under construction and closed. She sighed irritably.

She knew how important it was not to look homeless. After Lynnhill was shuttered, and she was living on the streets for the first time, she held onto her Price Rite job for months. But her appearance deteriorated from sleep deprivation and infrequent showering, and she was fired for poor hygiene. Unwilling to let that happen again, she walked downstairs to the women's restroom below. It was as chaotic as she'd feared - tourists, commuters and homeless women, everyone jostling, waiting for a turn at the mirror. Finally, it was hers.

Ten minutes later, she came out. Her hood was off. Her hair was up. White earrings shined from each lobe. Lip gloss sparkled.

Pete smiled.

"That Mulan look," he said of her hair now pulled back in a bun, before they walked up to the H Street trolley, where she'd catch a ride to work. He stood by her, trying to cheer her up, telling her how nice she looked.

But she only glared at him.

"This is not me, babe," she snapped, then caught herself, expression softening. "I'm just frustrated," she said. "I don't look the way I want to look. You keep telling me I'm pretty, but I don't feel pretty."

Not wanting to talk about it anymore, she turned away from him and waited for the trolley to arrive, eyes searching the distance.

- - -

Days later, it began to snow early one morning, thick globs of it, and nearly everything closed along First Street. Pete was beginning to worry. He hadn't seen Monica for hours, not since she'd walked to Union Station to use the restroom after waking up. He well understood how homelessness can destroy a person - he'd been on and off the streets since he was 13 - and could see the corrosion in Monica. Lately, she'd been disappearing for hours and talking about having "crazy thoughts." What if she needed him now, and he wasn't there? He had to find her.

"You seen my wife?" he asked one homeless man near the entrance of Union Station. The man shook his head. He kept on, searching for her in the food court, then on the ground level, going past where the fancy creams and chocolates and juices are sold, then to the McDonald's, whose seats usually were filled with the homeless. Nothing.

This is not what he'd promised Monica. During their first night of homelessness inside a bus shelter near a hotel they could no longer afford, he'd told her, "We're going to be okay," and had meant it. Soon they moved to Washington, where Mayor Muriel Bowser had made addressing the city's homeless crisis one of her key issues. Maybe there, in the city where they'd once lived, they could get help. But they quickly learned, after seeking help from the city, that they were never the right type of homeless. They had a dog and weren't willing to leave Sassy behind, so the shelters, almost all of which were gender-specific, weren't an option. They also didn't have children, for whom there are more city resources. Neither had addiction or mental health issues, diminishing their chances of getting housing, because, in the difficult calculations service providers must make, other people always needed help more. "A perfect storm of bad factors," Ann Marie Staudenmaier, a housing lawyer with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, called their situation. "In the grand scheme of things, they're just not a priority."

Pete now stopped another homeless man near a Pret a Manger. "You seen my girly?" he asked.

One bench to another, this park to the next, he and Monica had slept wherever seemed safe in those first few months, until a woman from a church gave them a tent. It was everything. Finally there was somewhere to store the things that made them feel less homeless - a chain with a gold cross, a pair of Converse shoes that Pete, who loved fashion, had adored. There was a sense of privacy. But then a city cleanup crew came through while they were out, and they returned to find that their tent and all of their things were gone. All around them were other homeless people who'd undergone or would soon undergo the same sudden deprivation. "Crushed" is how one homeless man, Montrel Williams, said he felt after a recent cleanup stripped him of all he had. "They're taking what little we got."

To the city, the biweekly sweeps ensure that public places are safe and clean. But to housing lawyers, advocates and the homeless, they're dehumanizing exercises that do little to redress homelessness and leave the people experiencing it worse off, materially and psychologically. Last year, the Washington law firm Covington & Burling filed a class-action lawsuit against the city, alleging it had destroyed unattended property during the cleanups and violated constitutional rights. The suit remains pending.

Pete didn't know which discarded tent had stored Monica's Maryland driver's license, but the loss had severed her last connection to her old life. Afterward, the only full-time job she could get paid under the table and less than half of minimum wage, with overnight hours. He'd tried to help, getting some work on construction sites, but they never seemed to get closer to their goal. They needed $2,000, he figured, to pay the first month's rent and security deposit for an apartment to get off the streets. But now the problem was even more urgent: He couldn't find Monica.

"Where did she go?" he asked aloud as he walked. "Where did she go?"

Then: There, at the bottom of the steps, near the Metro entrance inside Union Station, he glimpsed Monica on her phone, which she charged at the train station and could use only while connected to WiFi. She was laughing, smiling bigger than he'd seen in a long time. Whom was she talking to?

"We got to have a girls' night out," she said into the phone. "We're going to get pretty. I'm going to do your nails, and you're going to do mine. We're going to do our hair."

It was her half sister, Selena, 12, living in New York with their father, a man Monica barely knew. Monica was asking to come visit for the weekend, to get out of the cold.

"Maybe sometime this weekend, if Daddy's not too busy, because Daddy's working two jobs," she said into the phone. "I'm going to try to make it out there. You, me and Sassy, okay? I love you. I miss you so much. Tell Daddy, okay? Because I love you guys so much."

She hung up, crying now, knowing she wouldn't make it to New York, that she didn't have the money for a bus ticket.

"You okay, babe?" Pete asked.

"I'm at my breaking point," she said. Payday was still three days away, she told him, and another cleanup was just after that, and she'd just had to panhandle for money to buy food. Panhandle, she said again, hating the sound of the word. "I'm so at my breaking point, I don't know what to do."

So she did the only thing she could, walking slowly with Pete through the snow back to the tent, then laid down atop the concrete, curling up next to her waiting dog to try to rest before her next shift.

- - -

Not too long ago, Monica had worked at the cash register, chatting with customers as she rang up orders of chicken and fries. It was what she loved most about the job, getting to know the usuals, soaking in how they looked at her - as an equal, not as someone to hurry past on the sidewalk. But these days, Monica had come to trust herself less with that responsibility. A construction project was tearing up the street in front of their tent, and she felt herself fracturing. So she asked to be moved to the kitchen, where she worked late on Feb. 27, the night before the cleanup.

Head down, she breaded and fried the chicken, talking to no one. She knew her co-workers didn't understand what had been going on with her lately, why she'd become so withdrawn.

"Why are you so tired?" several of them had asked.

She wanted to be honest. But fearful that she'd lose her job if she told the truth - that a homeless person was handling food - she lied. It was her younger sister, Selena, she'd say. She was having problems with school, and Monica had to get up early to take her to class. That story seemed to satisfy them, but more and more she could feel the two worlds she'd always kept meticulously separate - the working one and the homeless one - beginning to converge. She worried one night that she'd yell at a customer over nothing and get fired. And then she'd be left not with two worlds, but one, the wrong one.

It took all of her effort not to think about that possibility, not to think about the dumpster truck coming the next morning, to keep her focus on her job. Bread the chicken. Prep the fish. Cut the chocolate cake. Stir the collard greens. Box the pastries. Prepare everything for the morning, when the restaurant would no longer cater to the drunks after the bars closed, but to the breakfast crowd.

Then it was past 3 a.m., and she was leaving. She walked outside and saw Pete, waiting for her with Sassy. She petted Sassy and gave Pete a kiss, and together they all walked back to First Street, seeing the parked Bobcats looming just outside their tent, waiting for morning. They entered the tent and zipped it.

Five hours later, they unzipped it. Monica emerged to see their encampment in upheaval. The man who'd lived beside them for months, who was drunk more often than not, was gone, to who knew where. A woman across the street, who raved at all hours about a Clinton conspiracy and yelled racist things at passerby, had pulled everything out of her tent, which she was taking down. The sidewalks were full: federal workers hustling into the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newscasters heading into the CNN offices, Howard University students who'd come to witness the cleanup.

It was 38 degrees outside. As Sassy quivered, Monica piled everything they had into black trash bags, then handed them to Pete. Wordlessly, he placed them into a shopping cart, one after another, until a woman came up to him just after 9:30 and said something softly. He turned back to the tent, where Monica was packing.

"It's off," he said of the cleanup. Another hypothermia warning.

Inside the tent, she erupted.

"Why do they keep doing this to us?" she said. "This is so frustrating!"

"Come on," he said, trying to soothe her. "It's cold."

But she couldn't stop, not now. Even if she suddenly was the person she'd never wanted to be - homeless, shouting in the streets. Workers in suits streamed past, ignoring the uncomfortable scene. Pete stood there, powerless to hold her together.

"I'm so sick and tired of these people treating us like we're idiots!" she said. "I'm tired of being like this. . . . This day has been on my mind for the longest time. I've been looking at that sign, the 28th!"

Down she spiraled.

"I'm dying out here!" she said to no one. "I'm dying out here! Please, I need help!"

"Monica!" Pete finally shouted. "Calm your voice down!"

Now she was addressing the people on the streets.

"Acknowledge us!" she said. "We're human beings! Please, just acknowledge us!"

But people kept passing and, defeated, Monica and Pete slowly began taking the bags out of the shopping cart to reassemble their home. The wardrobe over here. The bedroom over there. Outside, another business day in professional Washington was underway and, inside, all Monica wanted to do was sleep.

Nearby, the sign showing the next cleanup changed.

March 14, it now said. Ten a.m. Two weeks from today.Jimmy Carter - the 39th president of the United States - has recently celebrated multiple record-breaking milestones: The 40th anniversary of his inauguration was in 2017, and in October, he joined George H.W. Bush as the only other president to reach 94.

On Friday, at the age of 94 years and 172 days, Carter reached a new milestone, becoming the longest-living president in U.S. history.

He did so despite thinking he was on the verge of death just a few years earlier, after doctors discovered that cancer had spread to his brain.

True to form for the low-key former chief executive, however, "there are no special celebrations planned," his spokeswoman said.

Born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, the typically cheery and humble former Navy lieutenant has had a life of service. Before taking office as president, he served as a state senator in Georgia and as governor.

His presidency - remembered for the Camp David accords, the Iran hostage crisis and creation of the Departments of Energy and Education - flamed out during the election of 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated him.

After leaving the White House in 1981, Carter, then 56, and his wife, Rosalynn, returned to their hometown in southern Georgia. Yet another distinction: Carter has been an ex-president longer than anybody in American history.

He remains engaged in the causes and activities that matter most, according to the Carter Center's director of communications, Deanna Congileo: He participates in Carter Center programs in global peace and health and annual Habitat for Humanity builds, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, for work during and after his time in office. Carter also continues to teach Sunday school lessons and courses at Emory University.

"Both President and Mrs. Carter are determined to use their influence for as long as they can to make the world a better place. Their tireless resolve and heart have helped to improve life for millions of the world's poorest people," Congileo wrote in an email to The Post.

In 2015, Carter announced doctors had discovered a form of melanoma that spread to his brain.

"I just thought I had a few weeks left, but I was surprisingly at ease," Carter said at a news conference that August. "I've had an exciting and adventurous and gratifying existence."

He received his first radiation treatment at 90 years old. Four months later, he was - remarkably - cancer free.

Bush, the 41st president, died on Nov. 30. Carter attended the funeral service in Washington, along with President Trump and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and, of course, Bush's son, George W.

Carter says he takes pride in having "always told the truth." He also says he is proud that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., "comported themselves with dignity, talked about issues that matter and presented a vision for our nation," during the 2016 presidential election. Still, thinking back on more than 40 years, Carter told The Post in August that he "regrets not doing more to unify the Democratic Party."

His 2016 message to the younger generation of voters was: "Stay engaged. Stay involved. And be sure to vote."No longer a fringe candidate or an outsider, Bernie Sanders will be under pressure to score decisive victories in early contests for the Democratic nomination or risk seeing his 2020 candidacy deflate.

Sanders' challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016 gives the 78-year-old independent senator from Vermont higher name recognition than other declared 2020 candidates, and that's made him the early front-runner in the primary campaign.

But he still has to prove he has overcome his previous shortcomings -- primarily an inability to win over significant numbers of the women and minority voters that are a key part of the party's base. And rather than being the one candidate chasing the prohibitive favorite, Sanders in 2020 will face a bigger, younger and more diverse crowd of competitors, many with similar platforms.

He also might have to compete with the expected candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden, who has wide name recognition and broad support among Democrats.

"They lived through a two-person race and did really well," in 2016, said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who isn't currently affiliated with any campaign. "Well guess what? You're in a totally different animal now."

Sanders lost to Clinton in 2016 in Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina and California, while winning the New Hampshire primary next door to his home state. As the insurgent candidate, Sanders could absorb the losses and credibly fight on. A poor showing by a candidate who's now at the top of polls could be devastating.

Sanders has campaigned in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada since announcing his candidacy last month, and he will spend this weekend in California, where early voting starts the same day as the Iowa caucus next February.

The campaign raised $10 million in its first week and has at least 70 paid staff members, including some on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire. On Tuesday the campaign announced a slew of hires for his national organization, making his staff more diverse and female than it was for his 2016 run.

Laying the groundwork in early states and hiring a more diverse staff are moves aimed at addressing weaknesses that contributed to his 2016 losses, particularly with black voters, according to Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser for the Sanders campaign.

"As the spring unfolds, I think you'll see clusters of events that speak both to policy issues and also to other important issues of the campaign like electability," Weaver said.

The campaign's first test will be in the Iowa caucuses, where in 2016 Sanders came away with only four fewer delegates than Clinton out of a total of 1,681. He called the loss a "virtual tie."

"He has to do very well in Iowa, there's no doubt about that, given how well he did last time," Weaver said.

Troy Price, the Iowa Democratic Party chairman and a member of Clinton's 2016 campaign staff in the state, said her advantage was that she built a "massive organizing effort" on the ground earlier than her opponents.

"That's how you win a state like Iowa," Price said. "And it's true of all of these four early states, but especially in a place like Iowa where our caucus process, you have to build infrastructure in 1,679 precincts across the state."

In New Hampshire, Weaver said Sanders won't do as well as he did in 2016, when he won 60 percent of the vote in his first primary victory. The crowd of 2020 candidates will splinter the vote, and Weaver noted that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, like Sanders, has the advantage of being from a nearby state. Former Texas Representative Beto O'Rourke this week is making campaign stops in all 10 counties in the state.

In Nevada and South Carolina, Sanders lacked the deep and long established relationships that Clinton had in 2016. Although Sanders lost Nevada by only five percentage points, he fell behind Clinton in South Carolina by nearly 50.

"She had a better assembled team in Nevada," said Megan Jones, a Nevada-based Democrat who worked on former Senate Leader Harry Reid's political operation. "There was a lot of deep support for her in this state."

Jaime Harrison, who led the South Carolina Democratic Party in 2016 and is now a DNC associate chair, said that flipping Clinton supporters in 2016 was "a tough hill to climb" for Sanders, but now he's "a known commodity" across the country.

"Now he has to go and take the support that he has and use that as the base and build upon that support," Harrison said.

Early campaigning suggests that California Senator Kamala Harris and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker are planning to be competitive in South Carolina, focusing their initial energy on southern states.

Harris brought on Clinton's 2016 South Carolina political director Jalisa Washington-Price to lead her campaign in the state, while Booker hired former aides of South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn, a member of House leadership. Sanders is preparing to announce South Carolina and Nevada hires "soon," according to Weaver.

The Sanders campaign has also worked to push back on the perception that he didn't appeal to minority voters in 2016. He launched his campaign this year with a rally in Chicago focused on his personal history and work in the civil rights movement, though subsequent rallies returned to his usual stump speech on economic issues.

"He will continue to talk about his record and his personal history, where it's starting in the civil rights movement, supporting Jesse Jackson for president in the '80s, his work against mass incarceration in the '90s," Weaver said.

Sanders is capping off the first stage of his campaign launch this weekend with a tour of San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Harris will have a home-state advantage.

In 2016, California's primary fell on June 7, at a point when Sanders' campaign was financially depleted and Clinton had all but clinched the nomination. Sanders laid off hundreds of paid staffers in April 2016 and directed his remaining resources to holding rallies across California, where he won 46 percent of the vote to Clinton's 53 percent. This time Sanders plans to invest "tens and tens of millions of dollars" in paid media in the state, Weaver said.

"California's gonna turn out to be a pivotal state in this process," Weaver said.Jacksonville Police

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Devin, A. Vannuys-Clark, 18, 2876 Corner Road was booked into the Morgan County jail at 3:05 a.m. Thursday on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol, failure to reduce speed and improper lane use.

 A 17-year-old boy was arrested at 2:43 p.m. Thursday on a charge of battery after police say he pushed a younger child on a school bus.

BURGLARIES, THEFTS

 A folding sign was taken from a business in the 1900 block of West Morton Avenue, according to a report filed at 9:14 a.m. Thursday.



Cass County

Sheriff

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Bryan W. Pena, 18, of 146 Division St., Chandlerville, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 2:11 a.m. Thursday on charges of criminal damage to property, disorderly conduct and possession of liquor by a minor.



Greene County

Sheriff

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Toriano A. Rice Jr., 28, of Belleville was booked into the Greene County Jail at 12:30 a.m. Saturday on charges of driving while license is suspended, having a defective exhaust system and operation of an uninsured motor vehicle.

 Chelsea J. Lesniewski, 21, of Albany was booked into the Greene County Jail at 12:50 a.m. Sunday on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting and obstructing a peace officer.

Carrollton Police

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Wyatt T. Richey, 22, of Greenfield was booked into the Greene County Jail 8:50 p.m. Saturday on charges of driving under the influence and improper passing.

Greenfield Police

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Brandi R. Fisher, 45, of Carrollton was booked into the Greene County Jail at 6 p.m. March 15 on a retail theft charge.

Roodhouse Police

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Steven E. Neff, 50, of Murrayville was booked into the Greene County Jail at 10:30 p.m. Saturday on a charge of driving while license is suspended.

 Patricia L. Atwood, 50, of White Hall was booked into the Greene County Jail at 1:40 p.m. Monday on a possession of methamphetamine charge.

White Hall Police

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Herbert D. Bowens, 44, of St. Louis was booked into the Greene County Jail at 8:45 p.m. Sunday on a Missouri warrant accusing him of violating parole.

Compiled by Nick Draper, David C.L. Bauer and Rosalind EssigThis day in history:

1739  Nadir Shah occupies Delhi in India and sacks the city, stealing the jewels of the Peacock Throne.

1765  The British Parliament passes the Stamp Act that introduces a tax to be levied directly on its American colonies.

1784  The Emerald Buddha is moved with great ceremony to its current location in Wat Phra Kaew, Thailand.

1829  In the London Protocol, the three protecting powers (United Kingdom, France and Russia) establish the borders of Greece.

1849  The Austrians defeat the Piedmontese at the Battle of Novara.

1871  In North Carolina, William Woods Holden becomes the first governor of a U.S. state to be removed from office by impeachment.

1872  Illinois becomes the first state to require sexual equality in employment

1873  A law is approved by the Spanish National Assembly in Puerto Rico to abolish slavery.

1894  The first playoff game for the Stanley Cup starts.

1906  The first England vs France rugby union match is played at Parc des Princes in Paris

1912 The State of Bihar, India was formed out of the State of Bengal.

1916  The last Emperor of China, Yuan Shikai, abdicates the throne and the Republic of China is restored.

1920  Azeri and Turkish army soldiers with participation of Kurdish gangs attacked the Armenian inhabitants of Shushi (Nagorno Karabakh).

1939  World War II: Germany takes Memel from Lithuania.

1942  World War II: In the Mediterranean Sea, the Royal Navy confronts Italys Regia Marina in the Second Battle of Sirte.

1943  World War II: the entire population of Khatyn in Belarus is burnt alive by German occupation forces.

1945  The Arab League is founded when a charter is adopted in Cairo, Egypt.

1954  Closed since 1939, the London bullion market reopens.

1960  Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes receive the first patent for a laser

1963  The Beatles  first album, Please Please Me, is released in the United Kingdom.

1972  The United States Congress sends the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification.

1972  In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the United States Supreme Court decides that unmarried persons have the right to possess contraceptives.

1975  A fire at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant in Decatur, Alabama causes a dangerous reduction in cooling water levels.

1978  Karl Wallenda of The Flying Wallendas dies after falling off a tight-rope between two hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

1982  NASAs Space Shuttle Columbia, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center on its third mission, STS-3.

1984  Teachers at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California are charged with satanic ritual abuse of the children in the school. The charges are later dropped as completely unfounded.

1989  Clint Malarchuk of the Buffalo Sabres suffers a near-fatal injury when another players skate accidentally slits his throat.

1992  USAir Flight 405 crashes shortly after takeoff from New York Citys LaGuardia Airport, leading to a number of studies into the effect that ice has on aircraft.

1992  Fall of communism in Albania: The Democratic Party of Albania wins a decisive majority in the parliamentary election.

1993  The Intel Corporation ships the first Pentium chips (80586), featuring a 60 MHz clock speed, 100+ MIPS, and a 64 bit data path.

1995  Cosmonaut Valeriy Polyakov returns to earth after setting a record of 438 days in space.

1997  Tara Lipinski, age 14 years and 10 months, becomes the youngest champion womens World Figure Skating Champion.

1997  The Comet Hale-Bopp has its closest approach to Earth.

2004  Ahmed Yassin, co-founder and leader of the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group Hamas, two bodyguards, and nine civilian bystanders are killed in the Gaza Strip when hit by Israeli Air Force AH-64 Apache fired Hellfire missiles.

2006  Three Christian Peacemaker Team hostages are freed by British forces in Baghdad after 118 days of captivity and the murder of their colleague, American Tom Fox.

2013  At least 37 people are killed and 200 are injured after a fire destroys a camp containing Burmese refugees near Ban Mae, Thailand.

2014  At least 35 people die in Balochistan, Pakistan, in a collision between a petrol tanker and two buses.

2014  Forty-three people are killed in a mudflow near Oso, Washington.

2014  Turtle Canyon is opened in Newport, Kentucky.ALTON  Today two city blocks in downtown Alton will be transformed to demonstrate how two-way bicycle traffic would function.

Southern Illinois University Edwardvilles Successful Communities Collaborative (SSCC) is hosting the pop-up event on East Broadway in collaboration with Altons proposed Pedestrian and Bicycle Plan, according to Connie Frey Spurlock, PhD, SSCC faculty director and associate professor in the Department of Sociology.YOU are why I am hopeful: Tulsi Gabbard

Video and Transcript

March 21, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - Its tough sometimes when we see what is happening in our country. There are a lot of challenges that were facing and its heartbreaking to see in so many different ways how we are being torn apart as people, how our country is being divided, how that vision that our founders had for us as a country, as a united country with a government of, by and for the people has been lost. Its heartbreaking to see how people are suffering.

Our family, our friends, our neighbors are dealing with things that we shouldnt have to be dealing with in this country. Were in a place where we have a government that is not of the people, by the people and for the people, but rather a government that is controlled and influenced by self serving politicians, greedy corporations and those special interests who can afford to buy their seat at the table as laws are being made.

Who pays the price? We do. Who suffers as a result? We do. Who is left behind? We are.

The place that we are in as a country right now, is exactly counter to the vision that our founders had for this great country: where we have leaders elected by the people, who are of the people and for the people and whose sole interest and focus is on serving the interests of the people of this country, putting the well-being of our people, our planet, and our future at the forefront of those decisions that are being made. Instead, what we see is whats happening in Washington where we have people who live in a bubble that is so disconnected from the reality that we are living in our lives across this country. And this corruption of spirit thats casting a dark shadow over us is what we must defeat. Theres only one way to do that. And to me, this is why were gathered here today because we care. We care for each other. We care for our country, we care for our planet and our future. We want to do something about it, right?

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YOU are why I am hopeful because gathering together in this spirit of  what we in Hawaii call Aloha  is truly the answer of how we overcome the challenges that we face. Now, a lot of people know Aloha is a word that means hello or goodbye, right? Because this is how we greet each other in Hawaii. But theres a reason why we start our conversations and our gatherings with this word Aloha because there is so much power in what it actually means. When we greet each other with Aloha and we gather in the spirit of Aloha, what were really saying is I love you, I care for you, I respect you, and I recognize that we are all brothers and sisters, were all children of God regardless of where we come from or the color of our skin, who we love, how much money we make or dont make, what kind of education we have.

All of those things that are so often used to divide us, whether its by politicians or corporations or people in positions of power who pit one group of us against the other for their own gain, who tear us apart, raising fear and suspicions and fomenting bigotry between us for their own gain, without any care for the, the pain and the harm and the impact that it has on all of us. This Aloha spirit is what has the power to defeat that darkness with love and care for each other and that love for our country. It is this spirit of Aloha that unites us, that reminds us and inspires us about how we can build that path forward, that path that leads to a future that is bright, that is peaceful, that is prosperous, that provides that opportunity and justice and equality for every single one of us.

So we look throughout history, especially during those darkest moments and we see how we have found our way through. It has always been when we, the people, stand up and stand together, when we speak as one for what is right and what is just and for each other. And it is this time that we are in now that calls upon us to once again rise up and stand together knowing that when we do that, when we stand together, motivated by this care for each other, this love for our country, there is no obstacle that we cannot overcome.

The obstacles seem great and this is why sometimes its easy to feel disheartened and frustrated and to say how do we move forward? How can we ever overcome? Just a couple of weekends ago in the days leading up to the anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, I had a chance to go and walk on a civil rights pilgrimage led by congressman John Lewis, who was one of the youngest leaders of the civil rights movement at that time. And it was an incredible experience to hear directly from him as we walked through those steps where he and Dr. King and so many others were beaten and bloodied. They were called every name in the book. They were threatened, their very lives on the line as they worked for justice. They worked for equality. They worked for the right to vote to make sure that their voices were heard and it was heart wrenching to hear from him about what they went through. It was inspiring because of how they responded to that hatred and that darkness, how they responded to that physical violence that they endured, they did not respond to that hate with hate. As Dr. King said, they knew that darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.

Their example and those wise words are what inspires us today. They show how we can bring about the real change that we need to see. How we can pass legislation like Medicare For All to make sure every single person has health-care.

How we can bring about real criminal justice reform.

How we can pass legislation that Ive introduced to end the federal prohibition on marijuana. That will have an incredible impact on this country. In the press conference that we held as we were introducing this legislation, which is the only bipartisan piece of legislation to end the federal prohibition on marijuana in Congress, we had a few people there who shared their stories. We had small business owners and people who were working on providing medical marijuana to those who need it. We had researchers who are gathering evidence and data to say this is important to help impact peoples lives. We had people who are helping those who are fighting opioid addiction. Were seeing every day how in places where medical marijuana is legal, opioid addiction is dropping, opioid related deaths are decreasing, and people who are going through very difficult problems are finally finding help.

We also had a guy named Harry from Virginia who was there who shared his own story about how when he was in college about 10 years ago, studying computer science, furthering himself and seeking better opportunities. He was convicted of marijuana possession and thrown into prison for 10 years: two mandatory minimum sentences of five years each. This was for marijuana possession. He talked about how his cellmate was convicted of murder and he got out of prison before Harry did.

The injustice that exists within our country because of the failed war on drugs and our broken criminal justice system has to end. We cannot have another generation of people whose lives are ruined in this failed war on drugs.

You know, there are a lot of different issues that we need to address. Ive mentioned a few of them. Dealing with the climate crisis that were facing in this country and in the world is an urgent one that we all must stand up to demand real change to address. Weve been talking about this issue for a while. Weve been talking about how our policies and and the way that we live has a negative impact on our environment. But we have not yet seen that kind of bold action and recognition from our leaders. That has to change. We also have to recognize how important it is that even as we take aggressive action to address this climate crisis in this country, that alone will not be enough. This is a problem that is facing our planet. It is facing every country in this world and in order to tackle it, it will require us to build relationships based on cooperation, not conflict with other countries in the world and work together to address this crisis.

Things like re-entering the Paris accords is a necessary and important step, but that alone will not be enough.

Retracting from the world and treating other countries in this zero sum mentality where youre either with us or against us, with this approach of conflict rather than cooperation must end.

I want to close by talking about an issue that is central to all of these others that are pressing and urgent and impact our everyday lives and that is the issue of the cost of war. I am a major in the army national guard, serving now for almost 15 years, deployed twice to the Middle East where I served in a medical unit on that first deployment to Iraq in 2005. I saw firsthand every day the high human cost of war and who pays the price. I saw it in friends of mine who were killed in combat, who never made that trip home with us. I see it in my brothers and sisters, our veterans who continue to pay the price after coming home, dealing with wounds both visible and invisible, the lack of quality care and benefits provided to them to help them when they come home. The price for these wars that people dont often recognize is the one that every single one of us pays. The fact that we are spending trillions of dollars on wasteful regime change wars and this new cold war between the United States and nuclear armed countries like Russia and China. Tensions continue to increase and a nuclear arms race has been been kicked off by actions like the one President Trump took recently by withdrawing from this historic INF treaty negotiated between Reagan and Gorbachev.

These actions have put us as a country and the world in a position where we are at a greater risk of nuclear catastrophe than ever before in history. Now, whats interesting is that, as I share this information and talk about these issues with leaders in Washington, they say Really? Really? More than the Cuban missile crisis? More than the Cold War with the Soviet Union? . Yes, the answer is yes. This is the reality of the existential threat were facing today. And it should alarm every one of us here that leaders in Washington are either not paying attention, they dont know, or they dont care. This should alarm every one of us because that means not only are we not addressing this threat, but the actions that leaders in Washington are taking are actually making it worse.

I want to get to why this issue is important to every one of us. We in Hawaii had a huge wake-up call about a year ago when there was a text alert that went out to over a million phones all across our state that said, Missile incoming. Seek shelter immediately. This is not a drill. I want to let that sink in for a second. We all have phones in our pockets. Imagine that on a Saturday morning like today, people in Hawaii, were just waking up, maybe thinking about going to the beach or going to hang out with friends , when this message came across their phones. Think about what you would do and how you would feel, who you would think about, where you would go if you got that message. As were sitting here today, think about knowing there are just minutes to live.

It was terrifying.

People thought Where can I take my family? Where can I find shelter? Where can we be safe? A father was trying to figure out which of his children he would spend the last minutes of his life with. Another father lowered his little girl down a manhole thinking that may be the only place where she could be safe.

That alert turned out to be false, but the reason why we reacted the way that we did is because this threat is real. And its important for us to recognize this. Not because we should sit here and be afraid and think were doomed, but because we have to recognize the power lies in our hands to make sure this is not our future.

Because it doesnt have to be this way. We have the power and we must take action to change direction, to bend this arc away from war and towards peace, to make sure that our foreign policy is one that actually serves the interests of our people, that secures our country and moves us closer to peace rather than nuclear catastrophe and war.

This is why Im running for president. Because none of you should have to go through what we went through in Hawaii. No family in this country should have to go through what our families went through in Hawaii. Not a single person in this country should have to live at any point in the day thinking about what would I do if I got that message?

We must change our foreign policy, the way we are relating to different countries and build those relationships based on cooperation, not conflict and work towards this future where we are getting rid of nuclear weapons rather than building more of them.

To build this future we need to take those trillions of dollars being spent on wasteful regime change wars and a nuclear arms race. We need to take those dollars and bring them to serve the needs of people here at home, to make sure that we have health-care for everyone, to make sure our kids have a great education and a great future, to invest in a green, renewable energy based economy that serves us today and for generations to come, to make sure that we are investing in the right kind of infrastructure and sustainable agriculture.

There are so many things that we need to do right now to invest in a bright future for every single American. In order to do that, we have to change the course we are on. We need to take those dollars wasted on regime change wars and a nuclear arms race in a new cold war. We need to place our priorities put those dollars where they need to be, which is right here on our people, on our families and on our future.

To do that requires strong leadership, leadership and all of us standing together, standing up against those in the military industrial complex and those who benefit and continue to push for these regime change wars and this nuclear arms race. The only thing that will overcome those powerful forces that have ruled over both parties in Washington for far too long are us. We, the people are the only ones who have the power to make this change.

No one else is going to do it for us,

We cannot forget or underestimate the power that we have in our own hands and we cannot take lightly the threats that we face in the urgent need for us to stand up, speak out, and make sure that our voices are heard now. Not tomorrow, not next year, not in five years or 10 years. Now our future is in our hands. I ask for your support.

I ask you to stand with me so that together we can take on those challenge and shape a bright future for every single one of us.

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Peace and joyDear Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman and other rich parents who got their children into selective colleges with bribes:

Let me explain something to you. I went to Harvard, which accepts only 5 percent of applicants. I confess that when I opened the acceptance letter, I thought great wealth and power would soon be mine. So why have I spent my life being ordered around by people who attended less-selective schools?

I'm not complaining. I love my work. But I have always wondered why smart people like you assume getting into an Ivy League school, or its equivalent, guarantees success.

What about the giants of film and business who didn't go to selective universities? I will cite the acceptance rate reported by U.S. News & World Report for each college I mention.

Steven Spielberg attended California State University at Long Beach (29 percent of applicants accepted).

Warren Buffett graduated from the University of Nebraska (64 percent). In addition to Buffett, the other CEOs of the top five companies on the 2018 Fortune 500 list went to these schools: University of Arkansas (66 percent), Texas A&M University (70 percent), Auburn University (84 percent) and Illinois State University (89 percent). The evening news anchors at ABC, CBS and NBC attended Ithaca College (71 percent), Syracuse University (47 percent) and California State University at Sacramento (68 percent).

Permit me to get personal. Here are the colleges of The Washington Post managing editors, deputy managing editors and local editor, who have the power to fire me: University of Maryland at College Park (44 percent), Northwestern University (9 percent), Brown University (9 percent), Kalamazoo College (73 percent), University of Colorado at Boulder (80 percent) and Pomona College in California (8 percent).

There are a few grads from ultra-selective schools in that group, but they all answer to executive editor Martin Baron. He was played by Liev Schreiber (Hampshire College in Massachusetts, 64 percent) in the Oscar-winning best picture "Spotlight," about his leadership of the Boston Globe. Baron graduated from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania (25 percent).

Don't forget Frederick J. Ryan Jr., The Post's publisher and chief executive (University of Southern California, 16 percent). Many of you paid big money to get your kids illegally into his alma mater, but it is not as selective as other schools in the scandal, such as Stanford University (5 percent) and Yale University (7 percent).

I realize The Post's owner, Amazon founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, went to Princeton University (6 percent). But the Ivy League had little to teach him about how to become the world's richest person. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, almost as wealthy, realized that early and dropped out of Harvard after two years.

Do your homework. Ultra-selective-college diplomas don't correlate with better pay. Researchers Stacy Berg Dale and Alan B. Krueger looked at 30 schools, the most selective being Yale and Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. They found that students who were admitted to the most-selective schools but who decided to attend less-selective colleges did not sacrifice anything in future pay: They wound up 20 years later earning as much as peers who went to selective schools. The scholars concluded that monetary success was the result of character traits such as persistence and warmth acquired long before we go to college.

The exception, they said: low-income students, who on average were better paid if they attended a more-selective school. The data also indicate women made more if they went to more-selective schools because they were less likely to marry and put their careers on hold for child-rearing.

There are ways for desperate parents like you to get your kids into selective colleges without risking indictment. They could enroll at less-selective colleges, do well and transfer to an Ivy after a year or two. That path was taken by the two most recent U.S. presidents, and me.

The presidents of the past two decades have all been Ivy League alums. But those brand-name diplomas do not guarantee success in office. Ronald Reagan was preceded by U.S. Naval Academy (8 percent) graduate Jimmy Carter and succeeded by Yale graduate George H.W. Bush. Reagan attended Eureka College in Illinois (62 percent), yet historians rank him ninth among all presidents, while Bush is 20th and Carter 26th.

Change is possible. The Post's 2020 Power Rankings for Democrats seeking their party's presidential nomination show Joe Biden (University of Delaware, 60 percent) and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Howard University, 41 percent) ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.

Think about the powerful people you know. I'll bet most of them did not attend colleges that are nearly impossible to get into. If you had encouraged kindness, humor and hard work in your children, they would have done fine. And you would have had to spend much less money on lawyers.

Sincerely, Jay Mathews.BREAKING: Trump says time for US to recognize Israeli sovereignty over Golan

By MEMO

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday it was time to back Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights that Israel seized from Syria in 1967, providing a boost to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the middle of his re-election campaign, Reuters reports.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israels Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

Trump said on Twitter.

The recognition of the disputed area, seized by Israel in the Middle East war of 1967, would mark a major shift in US policy a week before Netanyahu arrives in Washington to meet with Trump and address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

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It was the most overt move made yet by Trump to help Netanyahu, who faces an April 9 election. Trump remains popular in Israel, and his advisers have been developing a Middle East peace proposal for release sometime after the Israeli elections.

Netanyahu has been pressing for the United States to recognize its claim to sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He thanked Trump for the gesture.

The prime minister had been expected to raise the issue with Trump during his visit to Washington next week, an Israeli official said.

At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Thank you President Trump! @realDonaldTrump, Netanyahu wrote in a tweet.

Israels annexation of much of the Golan was not endorsed internationally. Netanyahu raised the possibility of US recognition in his first White House meeting with Trump in February 2017.

Netanyahu had tried to take White House national security adviser John Bolton to see the region during a January visit, but bad weather forced cancellation of the trip.

The Golan announcement could help Trump improve his standing in Americas pro-Israel camp, especially among his base of evangelical Christians, just ahead of next weeks annual convention in Washington of AIPAC, the nations most influential pro-Israel lobbying group.

This article was originally published by " MEMO " -

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==See Also==

U.S. Shouldnt Endorse Israels Annexation of Golan: Theres no justification for a move that encourages military land grabs.

Ambassador Ala underlines need for uncovering Israeli violations in the occupied Arab lands

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Peace and joyThe Education Coordinator will report to theHead of Programs and be part of the program team at Uganda country office. Willbe responsible for leading and supporting the development of teacher trainingand key tools for use by and with school staff to drive a greater consistencyand quality of teaching and learning. The role will also involve coordinatingeducation programs across the three regions which drive the quality and equityof our schools. The role will work closely with Head of Quality Assurance,Regional teams and UK Education Technical Team. This is an outstandingopportunity for an exceptional educationist with a strong understanding of bestpractice teacher and school leader development and proven track record insuccessfully driving network or school level consistency, teacher andleadership development.The Programme Specialist  CSD Coordinationwill support the Child Survival and Development section with the planning,implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the Reproductive, MaternalNewborn, Child and Adolescence Health (RMNCH), Water, Sanitation and Hygiene(WASH), HIV/AIDS, and Nutrition activities in the central zone districts. thepurpose of the job is to ensure that Uganda Country Office (UCO) investments inthe region are in line with the district-led systems strengthening approachdeveloped by UCO; that activities are well coordinated and coherent, based onuse of evidence and support cross-sectoral programming in the focus districts.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Half of Britain's households said they expect to be more sustainable in the next year as a direct result of the energy crisis, new research has revealed. Some 47 per cent said cutting down the amount of energy they use at home is a priority, according to data from comparison website Energy Helpline. The energy crisis has been caused by soaring wholesale costs and has resulted in a large number of suppliers going under, and prices rising for households across the country. Some respondents wanted to take more expensive measures, however, with 18 per cent saying they wanted to source their own energy at home, for example by installing solar panels.Maduro: US Withholding $5bn of Medical Supplies in Criminal Measure





Maduros accusations came at a government re-launch of the pharmaceutical sector.





By Paul Dobson

March 21, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - The US government is withholding US $5 billion which was meant for the purchase of medicines and raw materials used in medical production, President Nicolas Maduro claimed Wednesday.

Speaking from Miranda State, Maduro denounced that US authorities have kidnapped US $5 billion [in] one of the most criminal, brutal, fascist economic measures which has been seen in the economic history of the world. Trump is the person responsible, he added.

US and European governments have been working on freezing Venezuelan assets in recent months, including CITGO, the US-based subsidiary of state oil firm PDVSA, as well as US $1.2 billion worth of gold held in the Bank of England. According to Washington, these assets are being held to finance a future government led by self-declared Interim President Juan Guaido and to avoid alleged corruption on the part of the current government. US Vice President Mike Pence recently urged other countries to apply similar measures against Venezuelan assets.

The asset freezes have come alongside sanctions, with an oil embargo imposed in late January and sanctions against the mining sector announced earlier this week.

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Maduros accusations coincided with a visit by a delegation from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The delegation is in Venezuela doing preliminary investigative work and meeting with pro- and anti-government actors in preparation for a possible future visit by UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet.

While conclusions have yet to be announced, Bachelet did state this week that US-led financial measures, including the withholding of assets and sanctions contribute to the worsening of the economic situation [in Venezuela] and will impact on human rights and wellbeing of the people.

Bachelet also expressed her great concern for the magnitude and gravity of the repercussions of the actual crisis on human rights, which also constitutes a dynamic factor in regional destabilization and underlined the deteriorating condition of the health system. In addition to condemning US-led sanctions, Bachelet also took aim at the Maduro government, criticizing what she termed legal irregularities in the detention of citizens by certain branches of the state security forces.

On Thursday, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva also approved a resolution presented by the Non-Aligned Movement regarding the negative impact of sanctions on Venezuelan human rights.

Pharmaceutical sector re-launched

Speaking from the Jipana automatised medical supply warehouse, Maduro announced the revamping of the public-sector pharmaceutical industry as the government looks to overcome severe shortages in the countrys medical sector. Maduro had previously identified the pharmaceutical industry as playing a key role in any solution to the current economic crisis.

Jipana is the largest of five warehouses built with Chinese assistance that help supply the Barrio Adentro health program, public hospitals, dental clinics and pharmacies. The other four are located in Barinas, Lara, Aragua and Anzoategui States.

As part of his plans to stimulate the industry, Maduro announced the creation of a public-private workgroup which will look to fix consumer prices and cost structures, as well as iron out distributive and productive bottlenecks in the sector, hinting at the expansion of a subsidy program based on the Homeland Card program for those who need it.

Likewise, the president once again urged the Venezuelan pharmaceutical industry to work towards replacing imports with nationally produced goods. Venezuelas medical industry is heavily dependent on imports, especially of raw materials and active principles used in medicine production. Access to the global financial system has been hindered by US-led sanctions limiting the countrys ability to pay for imported medicine and exasperating pre-existing shortages in the industry.

In this context, Maduro highlighted international support and trade deals in supplying Venezuelan hospitals and pharmacies, particularly from Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Belarus, as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The Venezuelan leader told the nation that various tonnes of medicine to supply the public sector medical network are due to arrive next week from Russia as part of the new bilateral agreements. In late February, 7.5 tonnes of medicine arrived from Moscow with the support of the WHO and the Pan-American Health Organisation, while weeks before over 900 tonnes of medicine from Cuba and China also arrived at Venezuelan ports.

Russian authorities have continued to back the elected Venezuelan government despite mounting pressure from Washington for Moscow to recognise Guaido. Both countries held talks centered on Venezuela this week in Rome, but no concrete agreements were reached.

"No, we did not come to a meeting of minds," U.S. special representative Elliot Abrams told reporters. Who gets the title of president" in Venezuela is still a point of contention between the countries, he added. Russian spokespersons agreed that the meeting had been unsuccessful, telling press, We failed to narrow positions.

This article was originally published by " Venezuelanalysis " -

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Peace and joyJaguar Land Rover has won what has been described as a 'significant' case in the Chinese courts against a company that produced a copy of one of its models.

The British firm said the Beijing Chaoyang District Court had decreed that the Range Rover Evoque had five unique features copied in a model called the Landwind X7, built by the Jiangling Motor Corporation.

Since the rise of the Chinese vehicle-making industry after the turn of the century, the nation's home brands have been accused of creating copycat vehicles that are almost like-for-like duplicates of popular models sold in Europe.

However, local law has traditionally protected these Chinese brands in legal disputes - until now.

 Slide me  Spot the difference: On the left is the Landwind X7 and on the right the previous-generation Range Rover Evoque. The latter has just won a legal case against the Chinese brand for copying its design

In previous copyright cases against Chinese brands, courts have backed home manufacturers and claimed their designs are different enough to legally pass as their own models.

This has made it increasingly difficult for mainstream makers of the original models to win legal cases and put a stop to the practice.

This week's ruling could set a new precedent for European makers after the court ruled in favour of Jaguar Land Rover following a three-year-long legal tussle.

JLR argued that the X7 was too similar to its own Evoque - a claim that's difficult to refute when you compare the vehicles side by side.

However, there is one huge difference - the price.

While the Evoque retails for around 40,000 in China, its doppelganger has been on sale since 2015 for half as much - around 14,000.

As a result of the verdict, all sales, manufacturing and marketing of the Landwind vehicle are to cease immediately and JLR must also be financially compensated.

This week's ruling could set a new precedent for European makers after the court ruled in favour of Jaguar Land Rover following a three-year-long legal tussle. Beijing Chaoyang District Court had decreed that the Range Rover Evoque had five unique features copied. We could argue there are more than five

 Slide me  With the two vehicles side-by-side, it's easy to see why Land Rover won the case. However, until now, major manufacturers have lost legal cases as courts have tend to rule in favour of the Chinese copycat firms

Keith Benjamin, Jaguar Land Rover's global head of legal, said: 'We welcome this decision of the Beijing court, which further strengthens our confidence in investing in China and in the fairness of intellectual property adjudication in the Chinese courts.

'This ruling is a clear sign of the law being implemented appropriately to protect consumers and uphold their rights so that they are not confused or misled, whilst protecting business investment in design and innovation.'

JLR said it was the first case of its kind to support a foreign company in the car industry.

When the car maker first launched the legal cases against the Chinese company, boss Ralf Speth had claimed that JLR and other car manufacturers were 'powerless' to stop these firms from ripping off their vehicle designs.

 Slide me  In previous copyright cases against Chinese brands, courts have backed home manufacturers and claimed their designs are different enough to legally pass as their own models. This latest result could set a precedent for other car makers to take the fight to copycat vehicle makers in Asia

Victory: All sales, manufacturing and marketing of the Landwind vehicle are to cease immediately and JLR must also be financially compensated

'China, from my point of view has enough creativity and engineering power to do something on their own and doesn't have to fall back to the time when copying was of interest,' Speth told Autocar India in an interview in 2016.

'We cant do anything. I hope the Chinese customer at the end of the day sees the difference and selects the real product and not a copied one.

'We hope they generate a self-regulation process so that they can get rid of this kind of copy-paste way of working.'

The latest generation of the Range Rover Evoque was launched last November. You can read our first drive report on the vehicle here.The world's big gold mining firms have already had a busy year.

Things kicked off with a bang when, on 2019's first day of trading, Barrick Gold completed its 4.6billion takeover of FTSE 100-listed rival Randgold Resources, capping off one of the industry's biggest ever mergers.

Randgold shares delisted in London on the same day  leaving small British investors without a blue-chip gold miner to buy into and no other clear successor for retail portfolios.

Gold equities, according to Duncan MacInnes of investment manager Ruffer, are 'cheap' and 'unloved'.

But rising gold prices and better cost controls are making the sector more appealing again.

So in the absence of Randgold from the LSE, where should shareholders turn now?

There is, unfortunately, little solace to be had from higher-profile mid-cap gold miners.

Finncap's deputy head of corporate finance for mining, Christopher Raggett, said: 'There is simply no mid-tier producer in whom London investors can confidently put their money.'

Egypt-focused miner Centamin expects gold output to increase by between 4 per cent and 10 per cent this year  but its recent track record is far from unblemished.

The company lowered its gold production guidance three times in 2018 and undershot analysts' forecasts for 2019 output with revised guidance.

And costs are also rising more quickly than analysts had thought as the firm battles operational and geological issues at its Sukari mine in Egypt. Tanzania-focused Acacia Mining (majority-owned by Barrick) has had a torrid time after being slapped with an eye-wateringly large 144 billion tax bill by the Tanzanian government in 2017, which has also banned Acacia from exporting gold concentrate and even arrested some of the company's staff.

Peel Hunt analysts believe it is undervalued despite being a risky purchase, giving it an 'Add' rating partly on the grounds that it predicts Barrick and the Tanzanian government will come to a resolution this year.

But given Centamin's operational disappointments and the dispute overhang with Acacia, they believe Latin America-focused Hochschild Mining might be safer in the near-term. The Barrick-Randgold merger also prompted speculation that some of the mid-market companies would bulk out as the combined company sold smaller assets.

Watch closely: Egypt-focused miner Centamin expects gold output to increase by between 4 per cent and 10 per cent this year  but its recent track record is far from unblemished

Finncap's Raggett believes it is more likely that smaller producers seeking to build scale will be looking for mergers and acquisitions.

Cheerleaders of West African gold producer Avesoro Resources say it is in prime position to become one of the main beneficiaries of this trend.

Shares in AIM-quoted Avesoro could be about to boom, with the company expected to reveal in the second quarter that the mineral reserves at its Burkina Faso asset are much more extensive than previously thought.

But Avesoro is also not in a rush to pay down debt, with AJ Bell's investment director Russ Mould saying it remains a 'highly risky play'.

However, SP Angel's research director John Meyer is sceptical that this trend will actually play out at all in the near future. 'Bankers, brokers and advisers love the idea of a wave of acquisitions in the gold sector. The truth is these are rare events,' he says.

'The big miners might offer some peripheral mining assets but there are unlikely to be any bargains on offer till the market forces the company to unwind more debt.'

So if the bigger-name, mid-cap miners are generally a risky bunch at present, is this the moment to jump on the small-cap bandwagon and try to suss out the next dynamite exploration company?

Another West Africa-focused gold miner, Hummingbird Resources, and Scotgold, a company developing a gold mine in Scotland, both have their enthusiasts.

But local production disruptions in Mali ward some analysts off Hummingbird and the potential for environmental opposition for Scotgold's mine  targeted to be built in a national park  also provide a compelling counter-balance.

Investec Global Gold Fund manager George Cheveley warns: 'Single asset and/or country risk can undermine investments in small companies even though the management team may be very credible.'

At least for now, it would seem there is no successor to Randgold's blue-chip throne and an element of calculated risk with all the other firms on offer.

The old adage might be to 'buy gold' in times of market turmoil.

The advice with gold companies is probably best described as: proceed with caution.What is it?

It is the option in Baillie Gifford's impressive stable of Japanese equity funds that focuses on smaller companies. It has a portfolio of between 40 and 75 shares. Shin Nippon means New Japan.

What does the manager invest in?

The manager, Praveen Kumar, principally invests in small Japanese companies which he believes to have above-average prospects. Industrial and information technology stocks account for about half of the fund's assets. Top holdings include Asahi Intecc, Bengo4 and Outsourcing.

What do the experts like?

Japan's large corporate names are well covered by analysts, but when you move down the scale to smaller firms there is limited research. This is an opportunity for Baillie Gifford to find hidden gems overlooked by the market.

Any downsides?

Tom Stevenson, investment director at Fidelity Personal Investing, warns Japan is exposed to slowing growth in China and trade tensions with the US.

This is a high-octane investment with potentially high rewards but also more risks than a fund focused on bigger, more stable companies.A top executive at ailing Deutsche Bank is being paid an extra 214,000 a month for overseeing the lender's Brexit plans.

Garth Ritchie, head of investment banking at the German firm, was paid a total of 7.4million in 2018  up from 2.8million for the previous year.

The bonanza came as board members were given bonuses for the first time in four years, even though profits dropped by more than half to 454million last year.

Sign of the times: The bonanza came as board members were given bonuses for the first time in four years

Ritchie, a 50-year-old South African, is due to get the extra monthly payments until November 2020, by which point he will have earned 7.7million under the scheme.

He was paid even more than Deutsche's chief executive Christian Sewing last year  who trousered 6million, up from 2.4million.A blockbuster High Court trial will next week pit 'the UK's Bill Gates' against one of America's technology titans.

In one of the biggest fraud claims involving a British businessman, Mike Lynch is accused of cooking the books at his former software firm Autonomy before it was sold to HP for 8.5billion eight years ago.

HP later wrote off most of the company's value and brought a 3.8billion damages claim against Lynch. The US giant alleges that he and other executives deliberately inflated the firm's value.

Fight: Mike Lynch is accused of cooking the books at his former software firm Autonomy before it was sold to HP

It will claim this even led Lynch to jet out to Rome to try and win business from the Vatican Library.

A deal to digitise the 15th-century library  which houses more than 2m books and manuscripts  was booked in Autonomy's sales figures even though the project never materialised.

The legal battle has left Lynch fighting for his reputation and estimated 469m fortune.

He has quit a series of directorships at tech start-ups backed by his investment fund, as well as a prestigious post advising Prime Minister Theresa May, so he can focus on his court clashes.

Adding to the pressure are separate criminal charges in the US over the alleged Autonomy fraud, which could see him jailed for 20 years if he is found guilty.

Sushovan Hussain, his former finance chief, was found guilty of similar charges last year.

Lynch, who could be extradited to America, strongly denies the allegations against him and says they stem from different accounting practices on each side of the Atlantic. He has also accused HP of using him as a scapegoat for their disastrous mismanagement of Autonomy after they bought it and has brought a counter-claim against the company.

HP was rife with 'political infighting' after the Autonomy deal, his defence documents claim.

Proceedings are due to start on Monday after years of manoeuvring by both sides. Lawyers from City firm Travers Smith are representing HP, with Magic Circle firm Clifford Chance brought in to defend Lynch. The trial is expected to last as long as nine months because of the complex and technical evidence involved.

HP accuses Lynch, Hussain and other executives of artificially inflating Autonomy's quarterly revenue figures to make the company appear more valuable.

Examples such as the Vatican project saw Autonomy book sales from deals with third-party resellers before it had received any money, it will argue.

However, Lynch has insisted the company's auditor, Deloitte, never raised issues with his company's financial reporting and that he relied on its expertise.

Deloitte is being investigated by the Financial Reporting Council over the affair. Deloitte declined to comment yesterday. HP Enterprises, which was spun off from HP, has brought the case to court. It declined to comment.

A spokesman for Lynch said: 'Mike Lynch is pleased to finally have the opportunity to respond in court to HP's accusations.'I have four current accounts; two with TSB, a Bank of Scotland Vantage account and a Santander 123 account, and a couple of Halifax credit cards for foreign cash withdrawals and 0 per cent purchases.

I've previously stayed away from apps that would group your accounts together as I didn't trust them to be secure.

A couple of my banks are now promoting open banking, and it is FCA approved and regulated, so should I give it a shot?

Open banking can allow users to view all their bank accounts on one screen and offers other quirkier features, but has been undermined since its inception by concerns over user's data

George Nixon, of This is Money, replies: The so-called 'quiet revolution' had its advent 14 months ago, a government-backed initiative requiring banks to share financial data with other banks and authorised start-ups, provided you've consented.

It was designed to encourage greater competition and innovation in the banking sector, forcing banks and other providers to make a standard set of 'APIs' available to regulated third parties.

These application programming interfaces are effectively a set of codes that allow different and separate technology platforms to talk to each other.

For example American Express could talk to Santander, and determine whether you qualify for an Amex card based on your income and outgoings in your Santander current account.

However, its attempts to cut through into the public consciousness could also be labelled as quiet, with just one in four people having heard of it, and one in five of those understanding what it entailed, according to a survey of 2,000 people by Splendid Unlimited.

But those efforts may be boosted by the fact that the big high street banks are increasingly jumping on the bandwagon.

We revealed last month that Lloyds Banking Group was bringing in open banking functionality that would allow Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers to view accounts they held with six other rivals on its mobile app.

Lloyds now offers open banking through its app allowing customers to view accounts

Lloyds became the third major name in the UK banking industry to allow customers to view their accounts in one place after HSBC and Barclays.

Imran Gulamhuseinwala, trustee of the Open Banking Implementation Entity, which is overseeing the rollout, told the Financial Times he expected such aggregator apps to 'become a basic hygiene factor for competing in retail banking' this year.

HSBC's Connected Money app, which launched last May, allows users to see accounts, including current accounts, mortgages loans and credit cards, with 21 different providers, while Barclays offers 11.

Likely under pressure from other start-up money management apps, Connected Money also includes features allowing you to keep track of your spending across different categories and that tell you how much you'll have to spend after your outlay on bills.

Lloyds and Barclays meanwhile appear to be far simpler aggregator apps.

Given you've got credit cards with Halifax and a Vantage account with Bank of Scotland, you'd be able to use Lloyds' open banking functionality to view your different accounts and credit cards in one place through Halifax or Bank of Scotland's apps.

You could add your Santander 123 account too, but unfortunately your two TSB accounts cannot be added to Lloyds yet.

Lloyds' offer is very much at the most basic level of what you can do with open banking, and while it's certainly time-saving to view everything in one place and to be able to make payments without a bank card on hand, you cannot do much managing. Other alternatives do exist however.

One example that would allow you to sync all of the cards and accounts you've listed is Yolt.

It is one of a number of third-party apps launched that use open banking, and it is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority due to being part of Dutch Bank ING.

Third-party open banking apps often go further than banks in terms of the features they offer. Yolt, owned by Dutch bank ING, is beta testing a feature that would let you make payments

Yolt would allow you to see your current accounts and credit cards in one place like Lloyds, HSBC or Barclays, but it also allows you to set budgets across different categories and track your spending, and set savings targets.

It is also in the process of rolling out a couple of niftier features. Yolt Pay, currently in beta, will allow you to move money from one supported account within the app to another, and will redirect you to your bank to authenticate the payment.

It will also allow you to pay recipients from a supported current account, and the beta is currently supported by Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, Halifax, RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank.

Another third-party app, Bean, has been praised for scraping users' data to find old subscriptions they no longer use

This month Yolt also announced a partnership with comparison site MoneySuperMarket, allowing users to use the site to switch energy bills within its app.

Other apps like Money Dashboard and Moneybox create realistic savings targets, invest spare change and also help you avoid being overcharged on bills.

Bean, another third-party app, has also been praised by users for helping them find old direct debits they were still paying and allowing them to cancel them, saving money.

These are obviously just a few apps, but they are indicative of some of the features that can be enabled through open banking that go beyond simply looking at all your accounts in one place.

You can check if the app you want to download uses open banking by going on openbanking.org.uk, and check that you're dealing with a genuine company at register.fca.org.uk.

What about my data?

As well as some of the features offered by open banking you also asked about what the banks will do with your data:

Will the bank I register my other accounts with use the information they receive? My bank has access to a credit reference agency info but not my credit balances or spending.

On a possible negative, could the info from other banks be used for affordability checks for future credit card, loan applications or mortgages? Or, alternatively, will banks start to offer products to try and out sell their competitors and gain more of my business?

Staying safe online Comparison site Finder's Jon Ostler shares three tips you should make sure of when considering any personal finance app: 1. Make sure the company is authorised by a European financial regulator. Ideally, this would be with the Financial Conduct Authority, which regulates financial services firms and financial markets in the UK, with the aim of ensuring that companies don't mislead their customers and have appropriate data security measures in place. 2. Some personal finance apps have not yet moved to open banking and might be using an approach called 'screen scraping'. This requires you to personally hand over your log-in details to them, and the banks do not approve of this as it leaves your information more vulnerable to hackers. With Open Banking, this is not the case as you simply give the personal finance app permission via your online banking. You can check if the app you want to download uses open banking by going on openbanking.org.uk 3. A lot of personal finance apps don't hold your money, but some do. If your money is being held by a company, check if it is protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. The FSCS is a fund set up by the UK government to protect people's money. If a company protected by FSCS goes bust, it means you're covered for up to 85,000.

Concerns about data misuse are not unique to open banking, as anyone who's paid attention to Facebook over the last 18 months can attest, but it is certainly the biggest angst potential users of the service have about it.

Moneycomms' Andrew Hagger told the FT in January that the rollout has been 'overshadowed by fears over privacy and security of personal data', while a few months before the rules came in roughly seven in 10 people told an Accenture survey that they didn't want to share their personal financial data with third-party providers.

More recently, according to that Splendid survey mentioned earlier the top response when those surveyed were asked to describe open banking in their own words was 'banks sharing your information'.

It's not surprising people are concerned, as after all your financial information is amongst the most sensitive data anyone can hold, and entrusting it to third parties could at first glance seem risky.

To answer these questions This is Money reached out to two high street banks who have rolled out open banking, as well as to Jon Ostler, chief executive of personal finance comparison site Finder.

Jon said: 'Open Banking works by allowing third party companies to access customer data that is usually held by the big banks. The main reason for this is to promote competition, as it gives these companies an opportunity to offer a range of innovative products.

'The idea is that this gives consumers more choice, control and help them save money. You will need to allow the sharing of your information for the apps to work properly but as long as the company you choose is FCA authorised, this isn't something to worry about.'

Lloyds Banking Group told This is Money: 'Data and payment details are transferred between us and the other website/app using a protected connection.

'If you want to stop sharing anything, you can cancel it through Internet Banking, or there may also be the option to cancel via the other website/app directly.

'All companies involved in Open Banking need to be registered with the FCA or another European regulator.'

With regards to your question about banks using your data to offer products, while that might seem disconcerting, it's sort of one of the key points of open banking.

'Personal finance apps are likely to use information from your accounts to present relevant offers based on your financial profile', says Jon.

Barclays told This is Money: 'By giving permission for an Open Banking provider to access your data, you could gain access a variety of new products and services that will help you manage your money including more personalised rewards offers, or rates on credit applications, like credit cards, loans and mortgages.'

Jon adds that a number of financial institutions are already using open banking for affordability checks and to find out your creditworthiness.

For example, CreditKudos uses your financial data to assess financial behaviour and work out whether you are eligible for a range of financial services.

Peer-to-peer lender Zopa meanwhile has used the new rules to speed up loan applications, and can verify your income automatically through data made available through open banking.

'This isn't dissimilar to traditional banks', says Jon, 'and it can actually help consumers, as those with poor credit ratings can get access to better financial products by proving that they're managing their money responsibly.'

However, if this still makes you feel queasy, remember that it is all consensual.

Companies, whether banks or third-party apps and websites, must tell you what they plan to do with your data, and you can access the data held about you, withdraw your consent and have your data deleted at your discretion.

Barclays said: 'If you share your data using Open Banking, the provider you are sharing it with must make very clear how that data may be used, both now and in the future.

'You can then choose if you do want to share your data, or not. Equally, if you have shared your data with someone and change your mind, you can take away the permission instantly, at any time.'

When asked about safety, Lloyds added: 'Open Banking uses a secure connection to share data and payment information.

'There are also industry safeguards in place to make sure that customers are protected, and it is the customer's choice whether they wish to share their data or make a payment.

'Our customers' payments are protected in the same way as with Internet Banking and we will fully investigate claims on a case by case basis, working with customers to understand the details surrounding an issue and how we can support them.'

'Overall', says Jon, 'the innovative features and services being offered by personal finance apps are benefitting UK consumers.

'The traditional banks have had to up their game when it comes to apps, customer service, and are even offering big cash incentives for switching.

'Not all apps are the finished article yet though, so make sure you do some research before you open new accounts or download personal finance apps.'You may want to start a business by jumping on the vegan bandwagon or launching a new clothing range.

But how can you be certain about what would still be fashionable by the time you launch your start-up? Because as a saying goes 'once you react to a trend, it's already too late'.

While it may sound more like science fiction than fact, analytics firm Nextatlas claims that its artificial intelligence platform can predict whether we'll still be enjoying vegan sausages or wearing shirts similar to the Duchess of Cambridge's pussybow blouse in a year or two's time.

Science Fiction: The ability for AI to see in the future is the focus of Hollywood movie Minority Report, based on the Philip K Dick novel

But the ability to 'see into the future' comes with a hefty price tag - especially if you want access to all the benefits the platform has to offer, which would set you back 21,000 a year.

This is Money visited its Marylebone office to get an insight into the company.

Nextatlas describes itself as an 'AI-powered trend fore-sighting platform' which analyses the data of industry specic innovators and early adopters across multiple social-web sources in order to predict trends before they happen  much like the psychic technology used in the 2002 film Minority Report.

Mario Coletti, managing director, explains it in simpler terms: 'Instead of desk research we thought of listening to social media and to people who can give us insight into the future and key emerging trends.'

For the pleasure of being able to 'listen' to trend-setting innovators, Nextatlas has developed various pricing models, which are tailored according to the customers it caters to (see below):

Nextatlas offers various pricing plans for its clients to be able to use its service to spot future trends

Its annual rates include the corporate plan starts from 25,000 (21,385), while its advanced plan costs 12,200 (10,437) and its starter plan will set you back 6,100 (5,218).

For those who can't afford or commit to an annual package, it does offer a monthly subscription for students at 299 (256) and businesses at 599 (512).

The corporate plan offers the most benefits with users being able to gain historical insights as far as the platform will let them while the advanced plan only allows you to look back over the last 12 months and the starter plan only offers insights from the last six months.

The corporate plan's search functionality is also more advanced with users being able to search by category, keywords and get in-depth analysis while the starter plan only allows users to search based on categories.

There's a saying that once you react to a trend it's already too late - but would you pay over 20k to gain an insight into future trends?

Nextatlas is set to launch a new version of the platform at the beginning of April.

It was established in 2012 by two brothers, Allesio Morena and Luca Morena. It's headquartered in Turin, Italy. In 2018 it officially started a UK operation after gaining traction.

Coletti says: 'The first big change is giving information that is more relevant to you. It gives you the opportunity to tailor the quantity or volume of info you are getting. The search engine is better and more extensive.'

Mario Coletti, managing director of Nextatlas, says the platform will soon launch a new version which will create reports that are more tailored

Coletti divides consumers into several categories, namely: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.

Innovators are described as people that come up with the ideas or highlight emerging trends in markets  so this would be the likes of tech billionaire and engineer Elon Musk or the late business magnate Steve Jobs.

The early adopters are the group of people that would be willing to test or buy the latest tech  they don't need much convincing and are the ones that will typically queue for the latest Apple gadgets as they're launched.

Coletti adds: 'The early majority are purchasers that follow shortly after and buy online. The late majority will buy a one year old model and laggards are still using old phones.'

But it's the people in the first two categories that the AI platform 'listens' to. Coletti explains: 'Our platform looks for innovators and early adopters.

'We scout social media sites such Instagram, Twitter, Reddit as well as industry blogs.

Will Falafel become a fad? Nextatlas can help you to research trends on virtually anything from clothing, food to hair products

'AI is the engine behind it all and it and can scout millions of sources of data that is basically impossible by you or me to do.

'The AI is able to analyse what is trending and through applying filters and algorithms it picks up data that is relevant. There are three elements of recognition: consistency, frequency and popularity.'

Coletti says its vital innovators and early adopters talk about their subject but the technology must also specifically identify those that do so with frequency that have followers are providing constant feedback and responses in order for it to be valid for the Nextatlas customer.

He explains: 'We watch the sentiment and what they are saying and whether it is appealing to the early adopters and the early majority as well.'

He says the technology has benefited and helped with a number of corporate strategies and product innovations, including Heineken, Nestle, Yamamay and Lavazza.

Nestle, for example, hired Nextatlas to identify which types of flavoured water to sell in the UK and Europe, while Italian coffee manufacturer Lavazza sought help from Nextatlas to further its understanding of the various ways in which people consume coffee and how it correlates to their lifestyle.

Nextatlas is not the only organisation that claims to be able to provide future insight and a glimpse into emerging trends.

But Coletti claims that what sets Nextatlas apart from other trend monitoring companies is the fact that their reports aren't static.

'Our platform allows you to download the report and then download it again in 6-12 months time and see how it's moving, provided if you have a yearly subscription.'

With a 20,000 price tag, the platform's offerings puts it out of reach of most people and small businesses.

But Coletti points to the company's monthly rates as a cost saver. 'You could buy your monthly license twice a year to see how things progress and can do your monitoring that way and keep the price down.'The following companies are subsidiares of UnitedHealth Group: 1031387 B.C. Unlimited Liability Company, 1070715 B.C. Unlimited Liability Company, 1st Avenue Pharmacy Inc., 310 Canyon Medical, 310 Canyon Medical LLC, 4C MSO LLC, 4C Medical Group PLC, 5995 Minnetonka LLC, ABCO International Holdings LLC, ACN Group IPA of New York, ACN Group IPA of New York Inc., ACN Group of California, ACN Group of California Inc., AHJV, AHJV MSO, AHN Accontable Care Organization LLC, AHN Central Services LLC, AHN Target Holdings LLC, AMIL International, AMIL International S.a.r.l., APS  Assistencia Personalizada a Saude Ltda., ARC Infusion, ASC Holdings of New Jersey LLC, ASC Network LLC, ASI Global, ASI Global LLC, Access Administrators Inc., Access HealthSource Administrators Inc., Access HealthSource Inc., Access I.V., Administradora Clinica La Colina S.A.S., Administradora Country S.A., Administradora Medica Centromed S.A., Advanced Care, Advanced Care Pharmacy, Advanced Pharma Inc., Advanced Surgery Center of Clifton LLC, Advanced Surgical Hospital LLC, Advantage Care Network Inc., Advocate Condell Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Advocate Sherman Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Advocate Southwest Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Advocate-SCA Partners LLC, Alere Health, Alere Health Improvement Company, Alere Healthcare of Illinois, Alere Wellbeing, Alere Wellology, Alere of New York, Aliansalud Entidad Promotora de Salud S.A., All Savers Insurance Company, All Savers Life Insurance Company of California, Alliance Surgical Center LLC, Aloha Surgical Center LLC, Ambient Healthcare, Ambient Healthcare Inc., Ambient Healthcare of Central Florida, Ambient Healthcare of Georgia, Ambient Healthcare of Northeast Florida, Ambient Healthcare of S. Florida, Ambient Healthcare of West Florida, Ambient Holdings, Ambient Holdings Inc., Ambient Nursing Services, AmeriChoice, AmeriChoice Corporation, AmeriChoice Health Services, AmeriChoice of Connecticut, AmeriChoice of New Jersey, AmeriChoice of New Jersey Inc., American Health Network of Indiana Care Organization LLC, American Health Network of Indiana II LLC, American Health Network of Indiana LLC, American Health Network of Ohio Care Organization LLC, American Health Network of Ohio II LLC, American Health Network of Ohio LLC, Amico Saude Ltda., Amil, Amil Assistencia Medica Internacional S.A., Amil Lifesciences Participacoes Ltda., Antelope Valley Surgery Center L.P., Analisis Clinicos ML S.A.C., Apothecary Holdings Inc., Apothecary Shop of Phoenix Inc., AppleCare Medical Management, AppleCare Medical Management LLC, Aquitania Chilean Holding SpA, Arise Physician Group, Arizona Physicians IPA, Arizona Physicians IPA Inc., AssuranceRx, AssuranceRx LLC, Athens ASC Holdings LLC, Audax Health Solutions, Audax Health Solutions LLC, Austin Center for Outpatient Surgery L.P., Avella Patient Access Program Inc., Avella Specialty Pharmacy, Avella of Austin Inc., Avella of Columbus Inc., Avella of Deer Valley Inc., Avella of Denver Inc., Avella of Gilbert Inc., Avella of Las Vegas II Inc., Avella of Orlando Inc., Avella of Phoenix III Inc., Avella of Sacramento Inc., Avella of Scottsdale Inc., Avella of St. Louis Inc., Avella of Tampa LLC, Avella of Tucson II Inc., Avella of Tucson Inc., Aveta Arizona, Aveta Health Solutions Inc., Aveta Inc., Aveta Kansas City, Aveta Tennessee, AxelaCare Health Solutions, AxelaCare Intermediate Holdings, AxelaCare Intermediate Holdings LLC, AxelaCare LLC, B.R.A.S.S. Partnership in Commendam, Banmedica Colombia SpA, Banmedica Internacional SpA, Banmedica S.A., Beach Surgical Holdings III LLC, Behavioral Healthcare Options, Behavioral Healthcare Options Inc., Belleville Surgical Center Ltd. an Illinois Limited Partnership, Benefit Administration for the Self Employed L.L.C., Benefitter Insurance Solutions Inc., Birmingham Outpatient Surgical Center LLC, Blackstone Valley Surgicare GP LLC, Blue Ridge GP LLC, Bordeaux (Barbados) Holdings I SRL, Bordeaux (Barbados) Holdings II SRL, Bordeaux (Barbados) Holdings III SRL, Bordeaux Holding SpA, Bordeaux International Holdings Inc., Bordeaux UK Holdings I Limited, Bordeaux UK Holdings II Limited, Bordeaux UK Holdings III Limited, Bosque Medical Center Ltda., Brandon Ambulatory Surgery Center LC, BriovaRx, BriovaRx, BriovaRx Infusion Services, BriovaRx Infusion Services 102 LLC, BriovaRx Infusion Services 200 Inc., BriovaRx Infusion Services 204 Inc., BriovaRx Infusion Services 209 Inc., BriovaRx Infusion Services 305 LLC, BriovaRx Infusion Services 402 LLC, BriovaRx Infusion Services Inc., BriovaRx Specialty LLC, BriovaRx of California, BriovaRx of California Inc., BriovaRx of Florida, BriovaRx of Florida Inc., BriovaRx of Georgia, BriovaRx of Georgia LLC, BriovaRx of Hawaii, BriovaRx of Indiana, BriovaRx of Louisiana, BriovaRx of Louisiana L.L.C., BriovaRx of Maine, BriovaRx of Maine Inc., BriovaRx of Massachusetts, BriovaRx of Massachusetts LLC, BriovaRx of Nevada, BriovaRx of New York, BriovaRx of New York Inc., BriovaRx of Texas, BriovaRx of Texas Inc., CDC Holdings Colombia S.A.S., CLISA  Clinica de Santo Antonio S.A., CMO  Centro Medico de Oftalmologia S/S Ltda., CMS  Central de Manipulacao e Servicos Farmaceuticos S.A., CNIC Health Solutions Inc., COI Participacoes S.A., COI  Clinicas Oncologicas Integradas S.A., Cabin Enterprises LLC, Cabin Holdings LLC, California MedTrans Network IPA LLC, California MedTrans Network MSO LLC, California Medical Group Insurance Company Risk Retention Group, Camp Hill-SCA Centers LLC, Capital City Medical Group L.L.C., Cardio Management, Cardio Management Inc., Care Improvement Plus Group Management, Care Improvement Plus Group Management LLC, Care Improvement Plus South Central Insurance Company, Care Improvement Plus Wisconsin Insurance Company, Care Improvement Plus of Texas Insurance Company, Casa de Saude Santa Therezinha Ltda., Casa de Saude Santa Therezinha S.A., Castle Rock SurgiCenter LLC, Catalyst360, Catalyst360 LLC, Catamaran Finance (Ireland) Unlimited Company, Catamaran Health Solutions, Catamaran Holdings I, Catamaran IPA III, Catamaran Mail, Catamaran PBM of Illinois II, Catamaran PBM of Puerto Rico, Catamaran PD of Pennsylvania, Catamaran PD of Puerto Rico, Catamaran Rebate Management, Catamaran S.a.r.l., Catamaran Senior Services, Catamaran of Pennsylvania, Cedar Park Surgery Center LLC, Cemed Care - Empressa de Atendimento Clinico Geral Ltda., Cemed Care  Empresa de Atendimento Clinico Geral Ltda., Central Indiana Care Organization LLC, Central Ohio Care Organization LLC, Central de Compras SpA, CentriHealth Corporation, CentriHealth UK Limited, CentrifyHealth LLC, Centro Medico Hospitalar Pitangueiras Ltda., Centro Medico Odontologico Americano S.A.C., Centro Medico PJ Ltda., Centro de Entrenamiento en Reanimacion y Prevencion Limitada (CERP), Centro de Servicios Compartidos Banmedica S.A., Centromed Quilpue S.A., Centros Medicos y Dentales Multimed Ltda., Centurion Casualty Company, Channel Islands Surgicenter L.P., Channel Islands Surgicenter Properties LLC, Charleston Surgery Properties LLC, Charlotte-SC LLC, Childrens Surgery Center LLC, ChinaGate (Hong Kong) Limited, ChinaGate Company Limited, Citrus Regional Surgery Center L.P., Clinica Oftalmologica Danilo de Castro Sociedade Simples, Clinical Partners of Colorado Springs LLC, Clinica Alameda S.A., Clinica Bio Bio S.A., Clinica Ciudad del Mar S.A., Clinica Davila y Servicios Medicos S.A., Clinica Medico Cirurgica de Santa Tecla S.A., Clinica San Borja (La Esperanza del Peru S.A.), Clinica San Felipe S.A., Clinica Santa Maria S.A., Clinica Sanchez Ferrer S.A., Clinica Vespucio S.A., Clinica del Country S.A., Coachella Valley Physicians of PrimeCare, Coachella Valley Physicians of PrimeCare Inc., Coalition For Advanced Pharmacy Services, Coalition for Advanced Pharmacy Services Inc., Coastal Physicians Management Inc., Collaborative Care Holdings, Collaborative Care Holdings LLC, Collaborative Care Services, Collaborative Care Services Inc., Collaborative Care Solutions, Collaborative Realty, Collaborative Realty LLC, Colmedica Medicina Prepagada, Colonial Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Colorado Innovative Physician Solutions Inc., Colorado Springs Surgery Center Ltd., Comfort Care Transportation, Comfort Care Transportation LLC, Commonwealth Administrators, Connecticut Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Connecticut Surgery Properties LLC, Connecticut Surgical Center LLC, Connextions, Connextions HCI, Constructora e Inmobiliaria Magapoq S.A., Consumer Wellness Solutions Inc., Country Scan Ltda., Crescent Drug Corp., Cypress Care, Cypress Care Inc., DBP Services of New York IPA, DBP Services of New York IPA Inc., DTC Surgery Center LLC, DWIC of Tampa Bay, DWIC of Tampa Bay Inc., DaVita Magan Management Inc., Danbury Surgical Center L.P., Day-Op Surgery Consulting Company, Day-Op Surgery Consulting Company LLC, Definity Health, Dental Benefit Providers, Dental Benefit Providers Inc., Dental Benefit Providers of California, Dental Benefit Providers of California Inc., Dental Benefit Providers of Illinois, Dental Benefit Providers of Illinois Inc., Derry Surgical Center LLC, Diagnostico Ecotomografico Centromed Ltda., Diasnostico por Imagenes Centromed Ltda., Dilab Medicina Nuclear Ltda., Diplomat Pharmacy, Distance Learning Network, Distance Learning Network Inc., Doctor + S.A.C., Dry Creek Surgery Center LLC, Dublin Surgery Center LLC, Duncan Printing Services, Duncan Printing Services LLC, E Street Endoscopy LLC, ELG FZE, EP Campus I, EP Campus I LLC, East Brunswick Surgery Center LLC, Electronic Network Systems, Electronic Network Systems Inc., Elual Participacoes S.A., Empire Physician Management Company, Empire Physician Management Company LLC, Employers Health Choice PPO Inc., Empremedica S. A., Endoscopy Center Affiliates Inc., Enterprise Life Insurance Company, Equian, Equian LLC, Equian Parent Corp., Esho  Empresa de Servicos Hospitalares S.A., Etho  Empresa de Tecnologia Hospitalar Ltda., Evercare Collaborative Solutions, Evercare Collaborative Solutions Inc., Everett MSO Inc., Excellion Servicos Biomedicos Ltda., Excellion Servicos Biomedicos S.A., Excelsior Insurance Brokerage Inc., Executive Health Resources, Executive Health Resources Inc., Executive Surgery Center LLC, Eye Clinic Oftalmologia Clinico Cirurgica e Diagnostico Ltda., FMG Holdings, FMG Holdings LLC, FOR HEALTH OF ARIZONA, Family Health Care Services, Family Home Hospice, Family Home Hospice Inc., First Rx Specialty & Mail Services, Florida MedTrans Network LLC, Florida MedTrans Network MSO LLC, For Health, For Health Inc., For Health of Arizona Inc., Fortified Provider Network Inc., Fortify Technologies Asia LLC, Fortify Technologies LLC, Foundation Financial Services Inc., Franklin Surgical Center LLC, Freedom Life Insurance Company of America, Freeway Surgicenter of Houston LLC, Frontier MEDEX Limited, Frontier Medex Tanzania Limited, FrontierMEDEX, FrontierMEDEX (RMS), FrontierMEDEX (RMS) Inc., FrontierMEDEX Government Services, FrontierMEDEX Government Services LLC, FrontierMEDEX Inc., FrontierMEDEX Kenya Limited, FrontierMEDEX US, FrontierMEDEX US Inc., Fundacion Banmedica, GRANTS PASS SURGERY CENTER LLC, Gadsden Surgery Center LLC, Gadsden Surgery Center Ltd., Gainesville Surgery Center L.P., Gainesville Surgery Properties LLC, Genoa, Genoa Healthcare Inc., Genoa Healthcare LLC, Genoa QoL Wholesale LLC, Genoa Technology (Canada) Inc., Genoa Technology Inc., Genoa Telepsychiatry Inc., Genoa of Arkansas LLC, Glenwood Surgical Center L.P., Glenwood-SC Inc., Golden Outlook, Golden Outlook Inc., Golden Rule Financial Corporation, Golden Rule Insurance Company, Golden Triangle Surgicenter L.P., Grapevine Finance LLC, Greater Hartford ASC LLC, Grove Place Surgery Center L.L.C., Guardian Health Systems Limited Partnership, H&W Indemnity (SPC), H&W Indemnity (SPC) Ltd., H.I. Investments Holding Company LLC, HCP ACO California LLC, HCP ACO Nevada LLC, HCentive Technology India Private Limited, HMI NewCo LLC, Harken Health Insurance Company, Hayes-Strub LLC, Health Business Systems, Health Care-ONE Insurance Agency Inc., Health Inventures Employment Solutions LLC, Health Inventures LLC, Health Net Insurance of New York, Health Net Services (Bermuda) Ltd., Health Plan of Nevada, Health Plan of Nevada Inc., Health Technology Analysts Pty Limited, HealthAllies, HealthAllies Inc., HealthCare Partners ASC-LB LLC, HealthCare Partners Management Services California LLC, HealthCare Partners RE LLC, HealthFirst IPA Inc., HealthMarkets Group Inc., HealthMarkets Inc., HealthMarkets Insurance Agency Inc., HealthMarkets LLC, HealthMarkets NewCo Inc., HealthMarkets Services Inc., HealthSCOPE Holdings Inc., HealthScope Benefits Inc., Healthcare Partners Plan of Nevada Inc., Healthcare Solutions Inc., Heartland Heart and Vascular LLC, Help S.A., Help Service S.A., Highlands Ranch Healthcare, Highlands Ranch Healthcare LLC, Home Care I.V. of Bend, Home Infusion With Heart, Home Medical S.A., Hospice Inspiris Holdings, Hospice Inspiris Holdings Inc., Hospitais Associados de Pernambuco Ltda., Hospital Alvorada de Taguatinga Ltda., Hospital Ana Costa S.A., Hospital Maternidade Promater Ltda., Hospital Samaritano de Sao Paulo Ltda., Hospital Santa Helena S.A., Hospital de Clinicas de Jacarepagua Ltda., Humedica, Humedica Inc., Hygeia Corporation, Hygeia Corporation (Canada), Hygeia Corporation (DE), Hygeia Corporation (Ontario), INOV8 Surgical at Memorial City LLC, INSPIRIS of New York IPA, INSPIRIS of New York Management, INSPIRIS of New York Management Inc., INSPIRIS of Texas Physician Group, IRX Financing I LLC, Illinois Independent Care Network, Imed Star  Servicos de Desempenho Organizacional Ltda., Impel Consulting Experts, Impel Consulting Experts L.L.C., Impel Management Services L.L.C., Indian River Surgery Center Ltd., Indian River Surgery Properties LLC, Indiana Care Organization LLC, Infusource, Ingram & Associates, Ingram & Associates LLC, Inmobiliaria Apoquindo 3001 S.A., Inmobiliaria Apoquindo 3600 Ltda., Inmobiliaria Apoquindo S.A., Inmobiliaria Clinica Santa Maria S.A., Inmobiliaria Vinamed Ltda., Inmobiliaria e Inversiones Alameda S.A., Inspiris, Inspiris Inc., Inspiris Services Company, Inspiris of Tennessee, Instituto do Radium de Cammpinas Ltda, International Psychological Services Pty Limited, Inversiones Clinicas Santa Maria S.A., Isapre Banmedica S.A., Isapre Vida Tres S.A., Johnston Surgicare L.P., Joliet Surgery Center Limited Partnership, LHI, Laboratorio ROE S.A., Laboratorios Medicos Amed Quilpue S.A., LifePrint Health, LifePrint Health Inc., LifeStyles Marketing Group Inc., LifeWell Ltd. Co., Lifeprint Accountable Care Organization, Lifeprint Accountable Care Organization LLC, Lifeprint East, Lifeprint East Inc., Logistics Health Inc., Lotten-Eyes Oftalmologia Clinica e Cirurgica Ltda., Louisville S.C. Ltd., Louisville-SC Properties Inc., Loyola Ambulatory Surgery Center at Oakbrook Inc., Lusiadas - Parcerias Cascais S.A., Lusiadas A.C.E., Lusiadas S.A., Lusiadas SGPS S.A., MAMSI Insurance Resources, MAMSI Life and Health Insurance Company, MD Ops, MD Ops Inc., MD-Individual Practice Association, MD-Individual Practice Association Inc., ME AHS UC LLC, MEDEX Insurance Services, MEDEX Insurance Services Inc., MGH/SCA LLC, MHC Real Estate Holdings, MHC Real Estate Holdings LLC, MIAMI SURGERY CENTER LLC, MSLA Management LLC, MXMD Centros De Cancer, Mamoeco  Mamografia e Ecografia Centro de Diagnostico, Managed Physical Network, Managed Physical Network Inc., March Holdings, March Holdings Inc., March Vision Care, March Vision Care Inc., Marin Surgery Holdings Inc., Maryland Ambulatory Centers, Maryland-SCA Centers LLC, Massachusetts Assurance Company Ltd. PIC, Massachusetts Avenue Surgery Center LLC, Mat-Rx Development, Mat-Rx Fort Worth GP, MedExpress Development, MedExpress Development LLC, MedExpress Urgent Care Alabama LLC, MedExpress Urgent Care Inc. - Ohio, MedExpress Urgent Care Maine Inc., MedExpress Urgent Care New Hampshire Inc., MedExpress Urgent Care of Boynton Beach, MedExpress Urgent Care of Boynton Beach LLC, MedSynergies, MedSynergies LLC, MedSynergies North Texas, Medalliance Net Ltda, Medalliance Net Ltda., Medica Health Plans of Florida, Medica Health Plans of Florida Inc., Medica HealthCare Plans, Medica HealthCare Plans Inc., Medical Clinic of North Texas PLLC, Medical Hilfe S.A., Medical Preparatory School of Allied Health, Medical Support Los Angeles Inc., Medical Surgical Centers of America Inc., Medical Transportation Services, Medical Transportation Services LLC, Medication Management Systems Inc., Melbourne Surgery Center LLC, Memorial City Holdings LLC, Memorial City Partners LLC, Memphis-SC LLC, Memphis-SP LLC, Mesquite Liberty LLC, Metro I Stone Management, Metropolitan Medical Partners LLC, Metropolitan Medical Transportation IPA LLC, Mid Atlantic Medical Services, Mid-West National Life Insurance Company of Tennessee, Midwest Center for Day Surgery LLC, Mile High SurgiCenter LLC, Mississippi Surgery Holdings LLC, Mississippi Surgical Center Limited Partnership, Mobile Medical Professionals, Modern Medical Inc., Monarch Management Services, Monarch Management Services Inc., Montgomery Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Mountain View Medical Group LLC, Mt. Pleasant Surgery Center L.P., Multiangio Ltda., Muskogee Surgical Investors LLC, Mustang Razorback Holdings, Mustang Razorback Holdings Inc., My Wellness Solutions LLC, NAMM Holdings, NAMM Holdings Inc., NSC Fayetteville LLC, NSC Greensboro LLC, NSC Lancaster LLC, NSC Seattle Inc., NSC Upland LLC, Nashville-SCA Surgery Centers Inc., National Foundation Life Insurance Company, National MedTrans LLC, National Pacific Dental, National Pacific Dental Inc., National Surgery Centers LLC, Neighborhood Health Partnership, Neighborhood Health Partnership Inc., Netwerkes, Netwerkes LLC, Nevada Medical Services LLC, Nevada Pacific Dental, New Orleans Regional Physician Hospital Organization L.L.C., New West Physicians Inc., Newton Holdings LLC, North American Medical Management - Illinois, North American Medical Management California, North American Medical Management California Inc., North Puget Sound Center for Sleep Disorders LLC, North Puget Sound Oncology Equipment Leasing Company LLC, Northern Nevada Health Network, Northern Nevada Health Network Inc., Northern Rockies Surgicenter Inc., Northwest Surgicare LLC, Northwest Surgicare Ltd., Nutritional/Parenteral Home Care, Nutritional/Parenteral Home Care of Huntsville, OC Cardiology Practice Partners LLC, OSB  Tecnologia e Servicos de Suporte Ltda., Omesa S.A., OmniClaim LLC, Oncocare S.A.C., OneNet PPO, OneNet PPO LLC, Optimum Choice, Optimum Choice Inc., Optum, Optum Bank, Optum Bank Inc., Optum Biometrics, Optum Biometrics Inc., Optum Care Inc., Optum Care Services Company, Optum Clinical Services, Optum Clinics Holdings, Optum Clinics Holdings Inc., Optum Clinics Intermediate Holdings, Optum Clinics Intermediate Holdings Inc., Optum Digital Health Holdings LLC, Optum Finance (Ireland) Unlimited Company, Optum Global Finance (Ireland) Unlimited Company, Optum Global Solutions (India) Private Limited, Optum Global Solutions (Philippines), Optum Global Solutions (Philippines) Inc., Optum Global Solutions International B.V., Optum Government Solutions, Optum Government Solutions Inc., Optum Growth Partners LLC, Optum Health & Technology (Australia) Pty Ltd, Optum Health & Technology (Hong Kong) Limited, Optum Health & Technology (India) Private Limited, Optum Health & Technology (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Optum Health & Technology (UK) Limited, Optum Health & Technology (US), Optum Health & Technology (US) LLC, Optum Health & Technology FZ-LLC, Optum Health & Technology Holdings (US), Optum Health & Technology Holdings (US) Inc., Optum Health & Technology Servicos do Brasil Ltda., Optum Health Services (Canada) Ltd., Optum Health Solutions (Australia) Pty Ltd, Optum Health Solutions (UK) Limited, Optum Health and Technology FZ-LLC, Optum Healthcare of Illinois, Optum Healthcare of Illinois Inc., Optum Hospice Pharmacy Services, Optum Hospice Pharmacy Services LLC, Optum Inc., Optum Infusion Services 100 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 101 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 103 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 201 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 202 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 203 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 205 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 206 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 207 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 208 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 301 LP, Optum Infusion Services 302 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 308 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 401 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 403 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 404 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 501 Inc., Optum Insurance of Ohio, Optum Insurance of Ohio Inc., Optum Labs, Optum Labs Dimensions, Optum Labs Dimensions Inc., Optum Labs Inc., Optum Labs International (UK) Ltd., Optum Life Sciences (Canada) Inc., Optum Management Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Optum Management Consulting (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Optum Networks of New Jersey Inc., Optum Nevada Accountable Care Organization LLC, Optum Operations (Ireland) Unlimited Company, Optum Palliative and Hospice Care, Optum Palliative and Hospice Care Inc., Optum Palliative and Hospice Care of Pennsylvania, Optum Palliative and Hospice Care of Pennsylvania Inc., Optum Palliative and Hospice Care of Texas, Optum Palliative and Hospice Care of Texas Inc., Optum Perks LLC, Optum Pharmacy 701 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 702 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 703 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 705 LLC, Optum Public Sector Solutions, Optum Public Sector Solutions Inc., Optum Rocket, Optum Rocket Inc., Optum Senior Services LLC, Optum Services, Optum Services (Ireland) Limited, Optum Services (Puerto Rico) LLC, Optum Services Inc., Optum Solutions UK Holdings Limited, Optum Solutions do Brasil  Tecnologia e Servicos de Suporte Ltda., Optum Technology, Optum Technology LLC, Optum UK Solutions Group Limited, Optum Women's and Children's Health, Optum Women's and Children's Health LLC, Optum of New York Inc., Optum360, Optum360 LLC, Optum360 Services, Optum360 Services Inc., Optum360 Solutions LLC, OptumCare ACO Florida LLC, OptumCare ACO Holdings LLC, OptumCare ACO New Mexico LLC, OptumCare Clinical Trials LLC, OptumCare Colorado ASC LLC, OptumCare Colorado LLC, OptumCare Colorado Springs LLC, OptumCare Endoscopy Center New Mexico LLC, OptumCare Florida CI LLC, OptumCare Florida LLC, OptumCare Health Plan of California Inc., OptumCare Holdings Colorado LLC, OptumCare Holdings LLC, OptumCare Holdings New Mexico LLC, OptumCare Management LLC, OptumCare New Mexico LLC, OptumCare New York IPA Inc., OptumCare South Florida LLC, OptumHealth Care Solutions, OptumHealth Care Solutions LLC, OptumHealth Financial Services, OptumHealth Financial Services Inc., OptumHealth Holdings, OptumHealth Holdings LLC, OptumHealth International B.V., OptumInsight, OptumInsight Holdings, OptumInsight Holdings LLC, OptumInsight Inc., OptumInsight India Private Limited, OptumInsight Life Sciences, OptumInsight Life Sciences Inc., OptumRx, OptumRx Administrative Services, OptumRx Administrative Services LLC, OptumRx Discount Card Services, OptumRx Discount Card Services LLC, OptumRx Group Holdings, OptumRx Group Holdings Inc., OptumRx Health Solutions LLC, OptumRx Holdings, OptumRx Holdings I LLC, OptumRx Holdings LLC, OptumRx Home Delivery of Illinois, OptumRx Home Delivery of Ohio, OptumRx Home Delivery of Ohio LLC, OptumRx IPA III Inc., OptumRx Inc., OptumRx NY IPA, OptumRx NY IPA Inc., OptumRx PBM of Illinois, OptumRx PBM of Illinois Inc., OptumRx PBM of Maryland, OptumRx PBM of Maryland LLC, OptumRx PBM of Pennsylvania, OptumRx PBM of Pennsylvania LLC, OptumRx PBM of Puerto Rico LLC, OptumRx PBM of Wisconsin, OptumRx PBM of Wisconsin LLC, OptumRx PD of Maryland, OptumRx PD of Pennsylvania LLC, OptumRx Pharmacy, OptumRx Pharmacy Inc., OptumRx Pharmacy of Nevada, OptumRx Pharmacy of Nevada Inc., OptumRx of Pennsylvania LLC, OptumServe Technology Services Inc., Orlando Center for Outpatient Surgery L.P., OrthoNet Holdings, OrthoNet Holdings Inc., OrthoNet LLC, OrthoNet New York IPA, OrthoNet New York IPA Inc., OrthoNet Services, OrthoNet Services Inc., OrthoNet West, OrthoNet West Inc., OrthoNet of the Mid-Atlantic, OrthoNet of the South, OrthoNet of the South Inc., Ovations, Ovations Inc., Oxford Benefit Management, Oxford Benefit Management Inc., Oxford Health Insurance, Oxford Health Insurance Inc., Oxford Health Plans (CT), Oxford Health Plans (CT) Inc., Oxford Health Plans (NJ), Oxford Health Plans (NJ) Inc., Oxford Health Plans (NY), Oxford Health Plans (NY) Inc., Oxford Health Plans LLC, P2 Lower Acquisition, P2P Link LLC, PCCCV, PCCCV Inc., PCN DE Corp., PHC Subsidiary Holdings, PHC Subsidiary Holdings LLC, PHYS Holding Corp., PHYSICIANS DAY SURGERY CENTER LLC, PMI Acquisition, PMI Acquisition LLC, PMSI, PMSI Holdco II, PMSI Holdings, PMSI Holdings LLC, PMSI LLC, PMSI Settlement Solutions, PMSI Settlement Solutions LLC, POMCO Inc., POMCO Network Inc., PPH Holdings LLC, PacifiCare Health Systems, PacifiCare Life Assurance Company, PacifiCare Life and Health Insurance Company, PacifiCare of Arizona, PacifiCare of Arizona Inc., PacifiCare of Colorado, PacifiCare of Colorado Inc., PacifiCare of Nevada, PacifiCare of Nevada Inc., Pacific Casualty Company Inc., Pacifico S.A. Entidad Prestadora de Salud, Paoli Ambulatory Surgery Center, Paoli Surgery Center L.P., Parkway Surgery Center LLC, Pasteur Plaza Surgery Center GP Inc., PatientsLikeMe, PatientsLikeMe LLC, Patrimonio Autonomo Nueva Clinica - PANC., Payment Resolution Services, Payment Resolution Services LLC, Peoples Health, Peoples Health Inc., Pharmaceutical Care Network, Pharmacy Review Services, Pharmacy Software Holdco Inc., PhyServe Holdings, Physician Alliance of the Rockies LLC, Physician Care Partners, Physicians Health Choice of Texas, Physicians Health Choice of Texas LLC, Physicians Health Plan of Maryland, Physicians Health Plan of Maryland Inc., Physicians Plaza Holdings LLC, Plano de Saude Ana Costa Ltda., Plus One Health Management Puerto Rico, Plus One Health Management Puerto Rico Inc., Plus One Holdings, Plus One Holdings Inc., Polar II Fundo de Investimento em Participacoes, Polar II Fundo de Investimento em Participacoes Multiestrategia, Polo Holdco, Polo Holdco LLC, Pomerado Outpatient Surgical Center Inc., Pomerado Outpatient Surgical Center L.P., Precision Dialing Services Inc., Preferred Care Partners, Preferred Care Partners Holding, Preferred Care Partners Holding Corp., Preferred Care Partners Inc., Preferred Care Partners Medical Group, Preferred Care Partners Medical Group Inc., Premier Choice ACO, Premier Choice ACO Inc., Premier Surgery Center of Louisville L.P., Prime Health, Prime Health Inc., PrimeCare Medical Network, PrimeCare Medical Network Inc., PrimeCare of Citrus Valley, PrimeCare of Citrus Valley Inc., PrimeCare of Corona, PrimeCare of Corona Inc., PrimeCare of Hemet Valley, PrimeCare of Hemet Valley Inc., PrimeCare of Inland Valley, PrimeCare of Inland Valley Inc., PrimeCare of Moreno Valley, PrimeCare of Moreno Valley Inc., PrimeCare of Redlands, PrimeCare of Redlands Inc., PrimeCare of Riverside, PrimeCare of Riverside Inc., PrimeCare of San Bernardino, PrimeCare of San Bernardino Inc., PrimeCare of Sun City, PrimeCare of Sun City Inc., PrimeCare of Temecula, PrimeCare of Temecula Inc., ProHEALTH Fitness of Lake Success, ProHEALTH Fitness of Lake Success LLC, ProHEALTH Medical Management LLC, ProHealth Medical Management, ProHealth Physicians, ProHealth Physicians ACO, ProHealth Physicians ACO LLC, ProHealth Physicians Inc., ProHealth Proton Center Management, ProHealth Proton Center Management LLC, Procura Management, Procura Management Inc., Progressive Enterprises Holdings, Progressive Enterprises Holdings Inc., Progressive Medical, Progressive Medical LLC, Progressive Solutions, Promotora Country S.A., Pronetics Health Care Group, Pronounced Health Solutions Inc., Prosemedic S.A.C., Prospero Management Services LLC, Pueblo-SCA Surgery Center LLC, Pulse Platform LLC, QoL Acquisition Holdings Corp., Quality Software Services, QuarterMaster Newco LLC, R&H Family Fitness Unlimited LLC, Rally Health, Rally Health Inc., Real Appeal Inc., Recaudacion y Cobranzas Honodav Ltda., Redlands Ambulatory Surgery Center, Redlands-SCA Surgery Centers Inc., Reliant MSO LLC, Research Surgical Center LLC, River Valley ASC LLC, Riverside Electronic Healthcare Resources Inc., Riverside Medical Management, Riverside Medical Management LLC, Riverside Surgical Center of Meadowlands LLC, Riverside Surgical Center of Newark LLC, Rocky Mountain Health Maintenance Organization Incorporated, Rocky Mountain HealthCare Options Inc., SC Affiliates LLC, SCA Alaska Surgery Center inc., SCA Athens LLC, SCA Austin Holdings LLC, SCA BOSC Holdings LLC, SCA California Surgical Holdings LLC, SCA Capital LLC, SCA Cedar Park Holdings LLC, SCA Clifton LLC, SCA Danbury Surgical Center LLC, SCA Development LLC, SCA EHSC Holdings LLC, SCA EWASC Holdings LLC, SCA Hays Holdings LLC, SCA Heartland Holdings LLC, SCA HoldCo Inc., SCA Holding Company Inc., SCA Holdings Inc., SCA IEC Holdings LLC, SCA Indiana Holdings LLC, SCA Nashville ASC LLC, SCA Pacific Holdings Inc., SCA Pennsylvania Holdings LLC, SCA Premier Surgery Center of Louisville LLC, SCA ROCS Holdings LLC, SCA Rockledge JV LLC, SCA SSC Holdings LLC, SCA SSSC Holdings LLC, SCA Sage Medical LLC, SCA Sage Medical MSO LLC, SCA Southwestern PA LLC, SCA Specialists of Florida LLC, SCA Stonegate Holdings LLC, SCA Surgery Center of Cullman LLC, SCA Surgery Holdings LLC, SCA Surgery Partners LLC, SCA Surgicare of Laguna Hills LLC, SCA Teammate Support Network, SCA eCode Solutions Private Limited, SCA of Clarksville Inc., SCA-Albuquerque Surgery Properties Inc., SCA-Alliance LLC, SCA-Anne Arundel LLC, SCA-Applecare Partners LLC, SCA-Bethesda LLC, SCA-Blue Ridge LLC, SCA-Bonita Springs LLC, SCA-Brandon LLC, SCA-Castle Rock LLC, SCA-Central Florida LLC, SCA-Charleston LLC, SCA-Chatham LLC, SCA-Chevy Chase LLC, SCA-Citrus Inc., SCA-Colorado Springs LLC, SCA-Connecticut Partners LLC, SCA-DRY CREEK LLC, SCA-Davenport LLC, SCA-Denver LLC, SCA-Denver Physicians Holdings LLC, SCA-Derry LLC, SCA-Doral LLC, SCA-Downey LLC, SCA-Dublin LLC, SCA-Encinitas Inc., SCA-Eugene Inc., SCA-First Coast LLC, SCA-Florence LLC, SCA-Fort Collins Inc., SCA-Fort Walton Inc., SCA-Franklin LLC, SCA-Frederick LLC, SCA-Freeway Holdings LLC, SCA-Ft. Myers LLC, SCA-GRANTS PASS LLC, SCA-Gainesville LLC, SCA-Gladiolus LLC, SCA-Grove Place LLC, SCA-Hagerstown LLC, SCA-Hamden LLC, SCA-Hilton Head LLC, SCA-Honolulu LLC, SCA-Houston Executive LLC, SCA-IT Holdings LLC, SCA-Illinois LLC, SCA-JPM Holdings LLC, SCA-Kissing Camels Holdings LLC, SCA-MC VBP Inc., SCA-Main Street LLC, SCA-Marina del Rey LLC, SCA-Mecklenburg Development Corp., SCA-Memorial City LLC, SCA-Merritt LLC, SCA-Midlands LLC, SCA-Midway Management LLC, SCA-Mobile LLC, SCA-Mokena LLC, SCA-Mokena Properties LLC, SCA-Morris County LLC, SCA-Mt. Pleasant LLC, SCA-ND VBP Inc., SCA-Naperville LLC, SCA-Naples LLC, SCA-New Jersey LLC, SCA-Newport Beach LLC, SCA-Northeast Georgia Health LLC, SCA-PORTLAND LLC, SCA-Palm Beach LLC, SCA-Palm Beach MSO Holdings LLC, SCA-Paoli LLC, SCA-Phoenix LLC, SCA-Pocono LLC, SCA-Practice Partners Holdings LLC, SCA-River Valley LLC, SCA-Riverside LLC, SCA-Riverside Partners LLC, SCA-Rockville LLC, SCA-Sacred Heart Holdings LLC, SCA-San Diego Inc., SCA-San Luis Obispo LLC, SCA-Sand Lake LLC, SCA-Santa Rosa Inc., SCA-Shelby Development Corp., SCA-Somerset LLC, SCA-South Jersey LLC, SCA-Sparta LLC, SCA-Spartanburg Holdings LLC, SCA-St. Louis LLC, SCA-St. Lucie LLC, SCA-SurgiCare LLC, SCA-Swiftpath LLC, SCA-VERTA LLC, SCA-Wake Forest LLC, SCA-Western Connecticut LLC, SCA-Westover Hills LLC, SCA-Wilmington LLC, SCA-Wilson LLC, SCA-Winchester LLC, SCA-Winter Park Inc., SCA-Woodlands Holdings LLC, SCAI Holdings LLC, SCP Specialty Infusion, SCP Specialty Infusion LLC, SHC Atlanta LLC, SHC Austin Inc., SHC Hawthorn Inc., SHC Melbourne Inc., SPINETRACK 20/20 Inc., SRPS LLC, SXC Comet, Sacred Heart ASC LLC, Saden S.A., Salem Surgery Center LLC, Salveo Specialty Pharmacy, Salveo Specialty Pharmacy Inc., Sand Lake SurgiCenter LLC, Santa Cruz Endoscopy Center LLC, Santa Helena Assistencia Medica S.A., Santos Administracao e Participacoes S.A., Savvysherpa Administrative Services LLC, Savvysherpa Asia Inc., Savvysherpa LLC, Scanner Centromed S.A., ScripNet, ScriptSwitch Limited, Seisa Servicos Integrados de Saude Ltda., Senate Street Surgery Center LLC, Senior Benefits L.L.C., Senior Care Partners, Serquinox Holdings LLC, Serquinox LLC, Servicios Integrados de Salud Ltda., Servicios Medicos Amed Quilpue S.A., Servicios Medicos Bio Bio Limitada, Servicios Medicos Ciudad del Mar Ltda., Servicios Medicos Santa Maria Limitada, Servicios Medicos Vespucio Ltda., Servicios de Entrenamiento en Competencias Clinicas Ltda., SharedClarity LLC, Shelby Surgery Properties Inc., Sierra Health Services, 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Fourteen countries have already confirmed their places at the 2019 tournament and they are; Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Madagascar, Morocco, Mali, Algeria, Tunisia, Nigeria, Egypt, Uganda, Mauritania, Guinea and Ivory Coast.

The 2019 AFCON tournament will be the first to host 24 teams from 16. The competition will be held from 21st June to 19th July in Egypt.

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The group stage draw will be held on 12th April in Cairo, Egypt.

The permutations in each of the qualification pools are assessed below by SuperSport.com

GROUP A

Senegal and Madagascar have already sealed their qualification ahead of their meeting in the final round of matches in Dakar on March 23.

Madagascar can finish top of the pool with a win, or a score draw that includes six goals or more.

It is a first ever qualification for Madagascar for the continental finals.

Sudan and Equatorial Guinea are the other teams in the pool and meet in their last game in Omdurman.

GROUP B

Morocco have already qualified as they travel to already eliminated Malawi in their last game, needing a draw to seal top spot.

Cameroon need just a draw at home to Comoros to seal their passage, but a surprise defeat would see them eliminated on the head-to-head rule.

GROUP C

Mali have already sealed their qualification and take on South Sudan at home, with the minnow side yet to pick up a point in the qualifiers.

Burundi host Gabon needing just a draw to seal their passage, but a win for Gabon would see them advance. The teams played to a 1-1 draw in Libreville earlier in the competition.

GROUP D

Algeria have already sealed their qualification but it is all to play for among the other three teams. And it is pretty complicated.

Gambia make the journey to North Africa knowing a win could see them advance, but may still not be enough, while a point is not good enough.

If Gambia win and Togo beat Benin in Cotonou in the other fixture, then Togo will advance on the head-to-head rule.

If Gambia win and Togo and Benin draw, then Gambia will advance past Benin on the head-to-head rule.

If Benin win they will join Algeria at the final come what may.

If Benin and Togo draw, and Gambia fail to beat Algeria, then Benin will advance.

GROUP E

Nigeria have already qualified ahead of their hosting of minnows Seychelles on Friday.

South Africa must avoid defeat to Libya in neutral Sfax, Tunisia in order to advance to the finals.

GROUP F

Both Kenya and Ghana have already qualified for the finals from a pool that was reduced to three teams after Sierra Leone were suspended by Fifa.

The two sides will meet for top spot in the pool in Accra, with Kenya needing just a draw to hold on.

GROUP G

All four teams can still qualify from the pool in a winner-takes-all scenario.

Zimbabwe need just a point at home to Congo on Sunday to secure their place.

If Congo win they will qualify, jumping above Zimbabwe on the head-to-head rule.

If Liberia get a point in the DR Congo, they will qualify, through one of two scenarios. Either Congo have not beaten Zimbabwe, or, if Congo do win, it will create a mini-group of three teams (Zimbabwe, Congo, Liberia) all on eight points. It will then come down to head-to-head between the three teams and Liberia and Congo will advance.

DR Congo must beat Liberia to make the finals in Egypt.

GROUP H

Guinea and the Ivory Coast have already qualified for the finals.

Ivory Coast host Rwanda on Saturday, while Guinea travel to the Central African Republic.

GROUP I

Mauritania have already sealed an historic first qualification, while the only side eliminated in the pool is Botswana.

Angola need a win in Botswana to make sure of their passage.

If Angola draw, they must hope that Burkina Faso dont beat Mauritania at home. If they do, it will leave both sides on 10 points and the Burkinabe will advance on the better head-to-head record.

Burkina Faso must win to stand a chance of progressing.

GROUP J

Tunisia and hosts Egypt have already sealed their qualification. Egypt had booked their passage to the tournament before they were named as hosts, replacing Cameroon.

Niger and eSwatini are the other two teams in the pool. Niger host Egypt and eSwatini travel to Tunisia.

GROUP K

The 2012 Nations Cup winners Zambia are the only side eliminated from this pool so far.

A win or a draw for Guinea-Bissau at home to Mozambique will see them advance to the finals.

A win for Mozambique will ensure their passage, while a draw will not be enough, even if Zambia beat Namibia to leave them level on eight points with the Brave Warriors. Namibia have the better head-to-head record over the Mozambicans.

If Mozambique and Zambia win, then Guinea-Bissau will edge Namibia for second spot in the pool on the head-to-head rule.

GROUP L

Uganda have already sealed their passage to the finals, but it is all to play for between Lesotho, Tanzania and Cape Verde Islands.

A win for Lesotho in the Cape Verde will see them advance to the finals, even if Tanzania also beat Uganda as the Likuena have the better head-to-head record between the two.

Essentially, Tanzania, who host Uganda, must better the result of Lesotho to seal a place in Egypt.

Cape Verde must beat Lesotho and then hope Uganda get at least a point in Tanzania to book their passage.

If both games end in a draw then Uganda and Lesotho will advance.By Chris Hedges

March 21, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - The U.S. government, determined to extradite and try Julian Assange for espionage, must find a way to separate what Assange and WikiLeaks did in publishing classified material leaked to them by Chelsea Manning from what The New York Times and The Washington Post did in publishing the same material. There is no federal law that prohibits the press from publishing government secrets. It is a crime, however, to steal them. The long persecution of Manning, who on March 8 was sent back to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury, is about this issue.

If Manning, a former Army private, admits she was instructed by WikiLeaks and Assange in how to obtain and pass on the leaked material, which exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the publisher could be tried for the theft of classified documents. The prosecution of government whistleblowers was accelerated during the Obama administration, which under the Espionage Act charged eight people with leaking to the mediaThomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden. By the time Donald Trump took office, the vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the government had been severed.

Manning, who worked as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2009, provided WikiLeaks with over 500,000 documents copied from military and government archives, including the Collateral Murder video footage of an Army helicopter gunning down a group of unarmed civilians that included two Reuters journalists. She was arrested in 2010 and found guilty in 2013.

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The campaign to criminalize whistleblowing has, by default, left the exposure of government lies, fraud and crimes to those who have the skills or access, as Manning and Edward Snowden did, needed to hack into or otherwise obtain government electronic documents. This is why hackers, and those who publish their material such as Assange and WikiLeaks, are being relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate state is to shroud in total secrecy the inner workings of power, especially those activities that violate the law. Movement toward this goal is very far advanced. The failure of news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post to vigorously defend Manning and Assange will soon come back to haunt them. The corporate state hardly intends to stop with Manning and Assange. The target is the press itself.

If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose, I wrote after I and Cornel West attended Mannings sentencing in 2013 at Fort Meade, Md. He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworths cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032 violent deaths in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the Collateral Murder video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.

Manning has always insisted her leak of the classified documents and videos was prompted solely by her own conscience. She has refused to implicate Assange and WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, although President Barack Obama in 2010 commuted her 35-year sentence after she served seven years, she was jailed again for refusing to answer questions before a secret grand jury investigating Assange and WikiLeaks. While incarcerated previously, Manning endured long periods in solitary confinement and torture. She twice attempted to commit suicide in prison. She knows from painful experience the myriad ways the system can break you psychologically and physically. And yet she has steadfastly refused to give false testimony in court on behalf of the government. Her moral probity and courage are perhaps the last thin line of defense for WikiLeaks and its publisher, whose health is deteriorating in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up since 2012.

Manningwho was known as Bradley Manning in the Armyhas undergone gender reassignment surgery and needs frequent medical monitoring. Judge Claude M. Hilton, however, dismissed a request by her lawyers for house arrest. Manning was granted immunity by prosecutors of the Eastern District of Virginia, and because she had immunity she was unable to invoke the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination or to have her attorney present. The judge found her in contempt of court and sent her to a federal facility in Alexandria, Va. Hilton, who has long been a handmaiden of the military and intelligence organs, has vowed to hold her there until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury is disbanded, which could mean 18 months or longer behind bars. Manning said any questioning of her by the grand jury is a violation of First, Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights. She said she will not cooperate with the grand jury.

All of the substantive questions pertained to my disclosures of information to the public in 2010answers I provided in extensive testimony, during my court-martial in 2013, she said on March 7, the day before she was jailed.

I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury, she said later in a statement issued from jail. Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand jury system.

The grand jurys questions pertained to disclosures from nine years ago and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics case, in which I testified for almost a full day about these events, she went on. I stand by my previous public testimony.

Manning reiterated that she will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.

The New York Times, Britains The Guardian, Spains El Pais, Frances Le Monde and Germanys Der Spiegel all published the WikiLeaks files provided by Manning. How could they not? WikiLeaks had shamed them into doing their jobs. But once they took the incendiary material from Manning and Assange, these organizations callously abandoned them. No doubt they assume that by joining the lynch mob organized against the two they will be spared. They must not read history. What is taking place is a series of incremental steps designed to strangle the press and cement into place an American version of Chinas totalitarian capitalism. President Trump has often proclaimed his deep animus for news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, referring to them as the enemy of the people. Any legal tools given to the administration to shut down these news outlets, or at least hollow them of content, will be used eagerly by the president.

The prosecutions of government whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of the communications of Americans and the persecution of Manning and Assange are parts of an interconnected process of preventing any of us from peering at the machinery of state. The resulting secrecy is vital for totalitarian systems. The global elites, their ruling ideology of neoliberalism exposed as a con, have had enough of us examining and questioning their abuses, pillage and crimes.

The national security state can try to reduce our activity, Assange told me during one of our meetings at the embassy in London. It can close the neck a little tighter. But there are three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it, so you know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage people from engaging in this behavior. But the opposite is also true. When that behavior is successful it is an example. It encourages others. This is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.

The medium-term perspective is very good, he said. The education of young people takes place on the internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means that these organizations will see their capacity to control information diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.

The long term is not so sanguine. Assange, along with three co-authorsJacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn and Jeremie Zimmermannwrote a book titled Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. It warns that we are galloping into a new transnational dystopia. The internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to create a Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control will merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.

All communications will be surveilled, permanently recorded, permanently tracked, each individual in all their interactions permanently identified as that individual to this new Establishment, from birth to death, Assange says in the book. I think that can only produce a very controlling atmosphere.

How can a normal person be free within that system? he asks. [He or she] simply cannot, its impossible.

It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, the authors argue, and only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite can we expose the abuses of power. But ultimately, they say, as the tools of the state become more sophisticated, even these mechanisms of opposition will be difficult and perhaps impossible to use.

The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, Assange writes, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.

That is where we are headed. A few resist. Assange and Manning are two. Those who stand by passively as they are persecuted will be next.

Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. https://www.truthdig.com/author/chris_hedges/

This article was originally published by " truthdig " -Vermilion Energy Inc., together with its subsidiaries, engages in the acquisition, exploration, development, and production of petroleum and natural gas in North America, Europe, and Australia. It owns 81% working interest in 642,300 net acres of developed land and 87% working interest in 376,700 net acres of undeveloped land, and 613 net producing natural gas wells and 3,034 net producing oil wells in Canada; and 96% working interest in 248,900 net acres of developed land and 91% working interest in 222,100 net acres of undeveloped land in the Aquitaine and Paris Basins, and 325 net producing oil wells and 3.0 net producing gas wells in France. The company also owns 49% working interest in 930,000 net acres of land and 51 net producing natural gas wells in the Netherlands; and 36,900 net developed acres and 965,900 net undeveloped acres of land, and 61 net producing oil wells and 8 net producing natural gas wells in Germany. In addition, it owns offshore Corrib natural gas field located to the northwest coast of Ireland; and 100% working interest in the Wandoo offshore oil field and related production assets that covers 59,600 acres located on Western Australia's northwest shelf. Further, the company holds 138,000 net acres of land in the Powder River basin, and 136.6 net producing oil wells in the United States; and 951,200 net acres of land in Hungary, 244,900 net acres of land in Slovakia, and 2.4 million net acres of land in Croatia. Vermilion Energy Inc. was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

Read MoreUS to ICC  We Will Break Your Legs

By Andre Vltchek

March 21, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - Well, not exactly like that, but in a way, yes. Now, finally, the gloves are off. The US is openly threatening the historically timid ICC (International Criminal Court) and its judges. And unexpectedly, the ICC is hitting back. It refuses to shut up, to kneel, and to beg for mercy.

Suddenly, even the Western mass media outlets cannot conceal the aggressive mafia-style outbursts of the US government officials. On March 15, Reuters reported:

The United States will withdraw or deny visas to any International Criminal Court personnel investigating possible war crimes by U.S. forces or allies in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday. The court, which sits in The Hague, responded that it was an independent and impartial institution and would continue to do its work undeterred by Washingtons actions. The Trump administration threatened in September to ban ICC judges and prosecutors from entering the United States and sanction funds they have there if the court launched a probe of war crimes in Afghanistan. Washington took the first step on Friday with Pompeos announcement. Im announcing a policy of U.S. visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of U.S. personnel, Pompeo told a news conference in Washington. These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis, without allies consent.

And so it goes Mike Pompeos arrogant facial expression appeared above countless reports and it said it all: the world has to listen to the US dictates, or else!

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Naturally, there is logic(even if twisted) behind the US threats. This is an extremely dangerous slope!

No country in the post WWII era has committed so many crimes against humanity, and supported so many genocides, as the United States of America. And in summary, no other part of the world has murdered more people on our planet, than Europe. And most North Americans are descendants of the Europeans. The foreign policy of the US is directly derived from colonialist policies of the former European powers. Therefore, crimes against humanity committed by the West have never stopped; never stopped for centuries.

This simple fact had been hushed up: never really openly discussed by the mass media outlets, in classrooms, or in the courts of law.

If the ICC begins and is allowed to investigate crimes against humanity committed by the West, the entire twisted concept of the US and Europe being pioneers of freedom and democracy could easily and quickly collapse.

Even criticism by Washington, Paris or London of countries such as Venezuela, China or Russia, for their human rights violations, would become absurd and grotesque. Entire concept of regime change could clearly be exposed for what it always really was  lawless gangsterism.

The US rulers are well aware of the fact that this is extremely bad timing for the Empire to allow challenges from some at least marginally independent international bodies.

They try to break all dissent. Like when in 2018, the US and its close ally Israel left the at least partially rebellious intellectual body of the UN  UNESCO.

The West is clearly losing the ideological war, and it is panicking. And the more it panics, the more aggressive it gets.

One country after another is being defined as undemocratic and designated for regime change. The methods are different. There are soft coups which have succeeded in overthrowing left-leaning governments in Argentina and later in Brazil. And there are hard methods used by the Empire in and against Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, big parts of Africa, Nicaragua and North Korea.

The West openly supports genocides in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in West Papua occupied and plundered by Indonesia, in Indian occupied Kashmir, as well as the apartheid perpetrated by Israel.

The ICC is now concentrating on the crimes against humanity committed by the United States in Afghanistan, where at least 100,000 died as a result of the near two decades of NATO occupation. These crimes are real and undisputable. I have been working in Afghanistan, and could testify that the West (and particularly the US and UK) brought this proud country into a despicable state.

But Afghanistan could be just the beginning; a proverbial Pandora box could open from there.

Most likely, if they take place, the trials against the U.S. and its crimes, would not right away preventthe terror the West is spreading all around the world. But they would open discussion, at least in the countries that have been victims of terrible injustice. Such trials would also help to realign the world: definitely towards Russia and China, and back towards socialism in Latin America and most likely in Africa and parts of Asia.

Pompeos speech was so extreme that it could be easily defined as counter-productive for the Empire.

Even the mainstream Western press had to react. Even the Western human rights organizations felt obliged to protest.

On March 15, AP published an unprecedented report:

Human Rights Watch called it a thuggish attempt to penalize 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.

A great part of the world is already horrified by the latest attacks of the West against Venezuela, and by attempts to push countries like China, Russia and North Korea towards military conflict.

Such a barefaced shove for impunity will not go well in many parts of the world.

It was always understood that the West has been forcing the planet to accept its exceptionalism. But it was understood only or predominantly by a well-informed minority of the people.

The latest headlines will be reaching the masses, on all continents.

Mr. Pompeo made one huge tactical mistake. He touched the big topic that was always supposed to be understood but unpronounced. Now it is out in the open.

The next step could bethe acknowledgment that international law does not apply to the West.

Once this undisputable fact is pronounced, what may follow could be an outrage, and finally, refusal to accept the status quo, at least by several countries, and by billions of people worldwide.

It appears that the Empire has gone one step too far. As a result, paradoxically, its impunity could be really in jeopardy.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism , a revolutionary novel Aurora and a bestselling work of political non-fiction:  Exposing Lies Of The Empire . View his other books here . Watch Rwanda Gambit , his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky On Western Terrorism . Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter .

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Peace and joyNew Zealand Mosque Massacre: White Supremacy and Western Wars

By James Petras

March 22, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - The mass murder and wounding of 97 Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand (NZ) which took place on Friday, March 15, 2019, has profound political, ideological and psychological roots.

First and most important, Western countries led by the Anglo-American world has been at war killing and uprooting millions of Muslims with impunity over the past thirty years. Leading media pundits, political spokespeople and ideologues have identified Muslims as a global terror threat and the targets of a war against terror. On the very day of the NZ massacre, Israel launched large-scale air attacks on one hundred targets in Gaza. Israel has killed several hundred and wounded over twenty thousand unarmed Palestinians in less than two years. The Israeli massacres take place on Friday the Muslim Sabbath.

Islamophobia is a mass ongoing phenomenon which far exceeds other hate crimes throughout the west and permeate Judeo-Christian cultural- political institutions. Western and Israeli political leaders have imposed extremely restrictive immigration policies  in some countries a complete ban on Muslim immigrants. Israeli goes a step further by uprooting and expelling long-standing Islamic residents. Clearly the NZ murderer followed the Western/Israeli practice.

Secondly, in recent years, violent fascist and white supremacy thugs have been tolerated by all the Western regimes and are free to propagate violent anti-Muslim words and deeds. Most of the anti-Muslim massacres were announced in advance on the so-called social media such as Twitter, which reaches millions of followers.

Thirdly, while the local and federal police collect data and spy on Muslims and law-abiding citizens, they apparently fail to include self-identified murderous anti-Muslim advocates.

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Such as the case in the recent New Zealand mass murderer, Brenton Tarrant

The police and NZ Security Intelligence Services did not keep files and surveillance on Tarrant, despite his open embrace of violent white supremacy and leading supremacists including the Norwegian Anders Brevet

murderer of over 70 children-campers.

Tarrant published a 74 page anti-Muslim manifesto easily available to anyone with a comput

er  even a dumb cop let along the entire New Zealand security forces. Tarrant planned the attack months in advance, yet he was not on any watch list.

Tarrant had no trouble getting a gun license and buying a dozen high-powered weapons, including the material for improvised explosive devices (IED), which the police later discovered attached to a vehicle.

Why were the Police Late

The Al Noor Mosque which suffered the greatest number killed and wounded was in downtown Christchurch less than 5 minutes from the police headquarters  yet the police took over 36 minutes to respond. The white supremacist was allowed time to murder and maim; to leave the mosque and return to his car; reload and re-enter the mosque; empty his ammo on the Muslims worshipping- using a civilian version of a M16; drive off to the Linwood Islamic Center and slaughter and maim several more Muslim worshipers, before the police finally appeared on the scene and apprehended him.

The mayor praised the police! One might suspect the authorities were in connivance!

What accounts for the total absence or failure of the political authorities and security forces: the lack of prior investigation; the delays at the time of the crimes; and the lack of any self-criticism?

The Rise of the Anti-Immigrant anti-Muslim Far Right

The Brenton Tarrants are proliferating around the world and not because they are mentally disturbed or self-induced psycho paths. They are less products of white supremacy ideology and more likely products of the Western and Israeli wars against Muslims  their leaders provide the rationale, their methods (weapons) and claims of immunity.

Western regimes keep files on environmentalist and anti-war protestors but not on anti-Muslim supremacists, openly preparing war against invading Muslim immigrants  fleeing US and EU wars against the Middle East.

The police take a half-minute to respond to the shooting of a police officer. They do not allow police killers to shoot, re-arm, shoot and move on to another police target.

I do not believe the delays are local police negligence.

The massacre was a result of the fact that the victims were Muslims, in a mosque. The tears and wreaths, the prayers and flags after the fact do not and will not change the murder of Muslim people.

Educational campaigns to counter Islamophobia may help, if and only if effective state action is directed against the Western and Israeli wars against Islamic countries and people.

Only when Western elected officials end imposing special restrictions against so-called invading Muslims, will White supremacists and their ideological offspring cease recruiting followers among otherwise normal citizens.

Massacres at mosques and crimes against individual Muslims will cease to occur when imperialist states and their rulers stop invading, occupying and uprooting Islamic countries and people.

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York.

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Peace and joyBy Finian Cunningham

March 22, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - This is going to get very ugly. Germany is openly defying US President Trump's demands to spend more on its NATO budget. Already the American ambassador to the country is crying foul, prompting German calls for his expulsion.



Of all the countries in the European Union, it is Germany that's been mostly on the receiving end of Trump's wrath since he entered the White House. In two years, the bilateral relation between Washington and Berlin has plummeted under the weight of Trump's withering verbal attacks.



The American president has assailed Germany for unfair trading practices over its lucrative auto exports; and he has virtually accused Berlin of treason in its dealings with Russia for natural gas supply, threatening to slap economic sanctions on German firms over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project under the Baltic Sea.



Germany has vehemently rejected Trump's accusations, saying its auto industry is a big investor in creating American jobs, and that its energy policies are a sovereign matter based on objective market principles.

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But above all his complaints, Trump has continually rebuked Germany for not spending enough on NATO commitments, sniping that the country is freeloading on American military protection. At a NATO summit last year, Trump hectored German Chancellor Angela Merkel to raise her country's annual military budget to the designated NATO target of 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

For many years, especially after the end of the Cold War, German military spending has lagged at around 1 per cent of GDP. Trump contends that, as Europe's largest national economy, Berlin should at least double its defence budget.

Latest figures, however, show that German military spending is nowhere near reaching the 2 per cent target that Trump has been fulminating about. Indeed, the trend appears to be one of declining expenditure by Berlin on military, not increasing.

That caused earlier this week US ambassador Richard Grenell to decry Germany's "failure" to live up to its NATO commitments.

Grenell is something of a Trump cypher. It is not the first time the envoy has harangued Germany in terms that his boss in the White House could have almost written for him. Grenell has been slamming Berlin over the Nord Stream 2 gas project with Russia and in its dealings with Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.

His condemnations this week regarding Germany's military budget have again sparked furore among the country's politicians and media, eliciting further public calls for the envoy to be expelled owing to his alleged gross interference in Berlin's internal affairs. "An ambassador is not supposed to act like the spokesman of an occupying power," said Wolfgang Kubicki, the deputy leader of the Free Democrat Party.

The New York Times this week reported "the timing couldn't be worse" for US-German relations. Next month marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NATO alliance. A major celebration is due to take place in Washington DC for the occasion. The atmosphere will be severely chilled by Germany's truculent defiance of Trump to boost its commitment to NATO.

Out of some 30 members in the US-led NATO bloc, only seven countries have managed to raise their military budgets to the 2 per cent of GDP target that Trump has clamoured for. That target figure predates Trump's presidency. But since the end of the Cold War, many European members of NATO have reduced military spending. Trump has made it an obsessive issue and has even threatened to pull the US out of NATO if European members don't pull their financial weight.

Germany and others should call Trump's bluff and say, "go ahead!"  pull your troops, missiles and warplanes out of Europe. US forces in Europe have never been about "protection" and have always been about "projection" of American hegemonic power over European vassals, in particular, to prevent a normal and natural relationship with Russia progressing.

The American obsession with military spending needs to be vigorously challenged. What is this pathological addiction for? It is of course about milking the civilian economy to fatten the profits of giant military companies. It's a racket that requires the poisoning of international relations with Russia and China, among others, in order to sustain the charade of syphoning off public money.

The greatest security threat to Western societies is the massive growth of poverty, deprivation and inequality, according to a new OECD report. The whole scaremongering about Russia and other "foreign enemies" is a risible ruse for the obscene misuse of public money by a military-industrial complex that is a colossal parasite on society. A laughable contradiction is that Trump is supposed to be a "Russian puppet", according to his domestic political enemies, and yet he is pushing the anti-Russia pretext on behalf of the military-industrial complex more than any president.

Germany and most NATO members are just right to ignore Trump's dictate about dubious defence spending. The money would be much better invested in productive and genuinely beneficial social development.

One senses a showdown looming between Washington and Berlin. Germany has for too long been allowing itself to be kicked around by an American "occupying power". Under Trump, the insulting humiliation has only become more acute. How long can Berlin tolerate this abusive taskmaster? Especially when there is growing opposition in the German and wider European public despising the American overlord and its dictates.

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Masters graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.

This article was originally published by " Sputnik " -

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German Defense Spending Is Falling Even Shorter. The U.S. Isnt Happy.

Germany: US ambassador Richard Grenell should be expelled, says FDP deputy leader: US Ambassador Richard Grenell is acting like "a high commissioner of an occupying power," the deputy leader of the Free Democrats (FDP) has said.

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Peace and joyNORRISTOWN  A Philadelphia man exhibited no remorse for what prosecutors called the gunshot execution of another man in Cheltenham and a judge sentenced him to more than three decades in prison.

Antonio Trappy Lindsay, 26, of the 200 block of East Shedaker Street, showed no emotion and did not address the victims grieving relatives as he was sentenced in Montgomery County Court on Friday to 31-to-62-years in prison in connection with the Jan. 30, 2018, shooting death of Joseph John Kohler III, of Johnstown, whose body was found on the sprawling Cheltenham property known as the Elkins Estate, or the Dominican Retreat House, off Ashbourne Road.

There is no evidence of remorse on the defendants part in this killing, county Judge Richard P. Haaz said as he imposed the sentence, adding Lindsay left Kohler, 34, to die in the dark, alone, in an unfamiliar place.

During a non-jury trial in December, Haaz convicted Lindsay of charges of third-degree murder, possessing an instrument of crime and person not to possess a firearm in connection with the murder. With his verdict, Haaz essentially determined Lindsay committed a killing with malice.

The judge rejected the prosecutions theory that the killing was intentional, acquitting Lindsay of a more serious first-degree murder charge that could have carried a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

The judges sentence included consecutive prison terms for each charge and which was sought by county Assistant District Attorney Kelly Lloyd. The sentence included the maximum term of 20-to-40-years for third-degree murder.

This defendant willingly chose to take someone elses life, argued Lloyd, who characterized the slaying as an execution and one of revenge. He brought the victim to Cheltenham and he executed him. He shot the victim once in the neck and once in the abdomen. This is the most heinous of crimes.

During the trial, Lloyd maintained Lindsay lured Kohler to the Cheltenham location to seek revenge because he blamed Kohler for his arrest during a traffic stop three days earlier on drug charges in Philadelphia. Lloyd alleged Lindsay killed Kohler because he blamed Kohler for police seizing Lindsays 445 packets of suspected heroin, which had a street value of more than $4,000.

Thats what he thought Joseph Kohlers life was worth, which goes to the egregiousness of what he did. It was more so he had to show people he was boss, that you dont cross him and when you do this is what happens, Lloyd said.

Lloyd and co-prosecutor Erika Wevodau alleged after he was released on bail on the drug charges on Nov. 29, Lindsay implemented his plan to kill Kohler.

Kohlers mother, Marybeth, sobbed as she described her loss, her grief palpable in the courtroom.

Theres no words to explain it. Im not the same person anymore. This feeling is never going to go away. Sometimes I just spend the day being numb. I loved him so much, Marybeth Kohler wept.

The victims sister, Heather, described her brother as so full of life, so funny.

I miss the brightness he brought to our family, Heather Kohler testified.

Lindsay did not testify during the trial. His lawyer, Richard Giuliani, argued at trial that prosecutors did not present sufficient evidence to prove Lindsay was the shooter.

On Friday, Giuliani asked the judge not to impose consecutive prison terms against Lindsay.

This is not an individual who should be given statutory maximums and consecutive sentences, argued Giuliani, who asked the judge to give Lindsay hope of being released one day and a chance to show he can be a productive citizen.

At trial, prosecutors played a recorded prison phone call during which Lindsay laughed about trying to destroy evidence and about running from U.S. Marshals who were tracking him on the murder charge.

It demonstrated his callous disregard for everything, the seriousness of what he had done, the taking of someone elses life, and for the entire judicial process, Lloyd said.

An investigation began about 8:45 a.m. Jan. 30, when Cheltenham police responded to the property in the 1700 block of Ashbourne Road for a report of an unresponsive person. Previous testimony revealed the caretaker for the property called 911 after discovering Kohlers body during a routine morning walk of the grounds.

When police arrived at the scene, they found Kohler dead of an apparent gunshot wound to the upper chest, according to the criminal complaint filed by county Detective John Wittenberger and Cheltenham Detective Matthew Gonglik.

Investigators recovered two fired Winchester .40-caliber cartridge casings at the scene but no gun was recovered.

Kohler, who was identified by his fingerprints, had been shot in the neck, and a second bullet went through his arm and into his upper torso, according to previous testimony.

According to the criminal complaint and the detectives accounts, Kohler left Johnstown Jan. 26 and drove to Philadelphia in a vehicle owned by his mother, who last spoke with him Jan. 28.

During the evening hours of Jan. 27, Kohler was stopped in the vehicle by Philadelphia police in the 5000 block of Germantown Avenue. Lindsay, Kohlers purported drug dealer and one of three male passengers, was arrested during the traffic stop and charged with possession of 445 packets of suspected heroin.

Testimony revealed Lindsay was released from custody on bail on Nov. 29.

One witness recalled later overhearing Lindsay and another man discussing Kohler getting pulled over and causing Lindsay to get arrested, according to the criminal complaint.

Witnesses reported that in the early morning hours of Jan. 30 Kohler got in the backseat of his vehicle with two other people, with Lindsay driving and another male in the passenger seat, according to court documents.

At one point, Lindsay asked Kohler if he wanted cocaine and he stopped the vehicle and the two of them exited and returned shortly without any drugs. Lindsay then drove to the Elkins Estate in Cheltenham and asked Kohler, Hey Joe, you ready? to which Kohler asked if they were getting out there and the two exited the vehicle and walked up a hill out of view, according to the criminal complaint.

A witness who was in the vehicle reported hearing gunshots and ducked down, as he was concerned he was being shot at, according to the arrest affidavit. The witness reported that Lindsay returned to the vehicle alone and allegedly told the others, you (racial epithet) better not say (expletive), according to court papers.

Court documents indicate detectives conducted cellphone analysis and used an investigating grand jury to assist in the investigation.NORRISTOWN  A Norristown man is headed to prison after police and a Pennsylvania parole agent observed him illegally possessing a firearm in the borough.

Joseph Wilson, 37, of the 100 block of Selma Street, was sentenced in Montgomery County Court to 3-to-6-years in a state correctional facility after he pleaded guilty to a felony charge of person not to possess a firearm in connection with a February 2017 incident in the borough.

The sentence was imposed by Judge William R. Carpenter, who accepted a plea agreement in the case. Carpenter said the pink and chrome 9mm handgun that Wilson possessed will be forfeited to the county detective bureau.

The case was prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney Laura Bradbury. Wilson was represented by defense lawyer Keith Harbison.

An investigation began about 12:30 p.m. Feb. 16, 2017, when a borough police officer and a state parole agent were on patrol in the 600 block of West Marshall Street and observed Wilson, a state parolee to whom the state agent wanted to talk. The officer and state agent exited the patrol car to attempt to speak with Wilson, according to the criminal complaint.

Wilson turned around and began walking away from authorities and then ran north on George Street, according to the arrest affidavit. Wilson ignored commands to halt and the police officer and state agent pursued him on foot as he entered a breeze way on West Marshall Street, according to the criminal complaint.

While in the breeze way Wilson brandished a chrome and pink firearm in his right hand and continued to flee, not turning around, Norristown Police Officer Shalako Drabinsky alleged in the arrest affidavit.

Authorities drew their firearms and Wilson did not comply with orders to stop, Drabinsky alleged.

(The parole agent) stated he believed that Wilson had thrown the firearm but did not see where it went, Drabinsky alleged.

Eventually, authorities forced Wilson to the ground with the use of a Taser.

Other officers responded and the immediate area was searched for the firearm that Wilson had discarded, Drabinsky alleged, adding the 9mm firearm was found on the roof of a home in the 600 block of West Marshall Street. The firearm was recovered with a full magazine of silver Luger 9mm ball ammunition and also had one in the chamber.

Due to prior convictions, Wilson was a person not to possess a firearm and did not have a concealed carry permit for the firearm, Drabinsky alleged.

Other charges of resisting arrest, firearms not to be carried without a license, prohibited offensive weapons and recklessly endangering other persons were dismissed against Wilson as part of the plea agreement.SCHENECTADY  Lilia "Lillian" Papa, daughter of the couple who founded Perreca's Bakery in Schenectady 1914, died Wednesday at the Ballston Lake home of her daughter, Maria.

The matriarch of the Jay Street mainstay famed for its coal-fired, brick-oven Italian bread was 93.

Born Lilia Perreca to Salvatore and Carmella DeRosa Perreca, Papa started working in her parents' bakery at age nine. According to a 1989 story by the Times Union's Vinod Chhabra, she was running the cash register when she met the late Dominick Papa, "a bread-line regular" and her future husband. He went on to run the bakery for 30 years with his brother, Robert.

Although the bakery was eventually run by her children, Maria and Tony, the family matriarch remained a visible presence within its walls.

"She grew up upstairs from the bakery, worked in the bakery and met my dad in the bakery," Tony told the Times Union on Friday. "They built a house in Ballston Lake, but she still continued to drive down every single day. She never missed a day."

Customers recalled her presence fondly.

"Lillian liked to spend time at the counter," said Joan Dembinski, 81, a lifelong customer and pastry chef. "Everybody knew her. She was customer relations, sine qua non, outstanding and personable."

It was Perreca's bread that first hooked Dembinski, and countless others over the years.

Describing it, Chhabra wrote: "It's peasant bread with a one-quarter-inch crust; bread you can smell and taste and twist and chew. And chew. It's good enough for Meryl Streep who, it is said, discovered a loaf of Perreca's when she was upstate filming 'Ironweed' and volunteered she had never tasted bread so good. Good enough for Jack Nicholson, whose freezer at his Hollywood home is loaded with it. Good enough to be routinely flown to Perreca's junkies in West Germany, California, Hawaii."

Dembinski had her first taste in 1959, when she drove her mother in her brand-new DeSoto out to Schenectady to try the bakery everybody kept talking about. Six decades later, she's still eating it, and even ships loaves down to friends on Staten Island.

"Lillian took time with everybody," Dembinski said, noting that she never put on airs as the bakery's fame grew.

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"This is what makes Perreca's Perreca's. Because every time you walk in, you're greeted politely," she said. "The line can go out the door and down the block, but everybody received the same service  gracious and efficient."

In her obituary on Legacy.com, Lillian Papa is described as a charitable community member. A devout Catholic who worshiped for almost 70 years at Our Lady of Grace Church in Ballston Lake, Papa donated each day's surplus of bread and tomato pie  the bakery's other famous item  to the needy.

"Her three big things were  believe in God, family comes first, and work hard," Tony said. "Those were the most important things in her life."

In addition to her children, Papa is survived by two sisters and three grandchildren.

Services are scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Saturday in St. Anthony's Church, Seward Place, Schenectady, with burial to follow at St. John the Baptist Cemetery on Brandywine Avenue.The cost of owning a car continues to climb.

Vehicle insurance rates for Capital Region drivers increased 6.5 percent over the last year, or about $80 on average. The average annual premium for the area in 2018 was $1,306, according to The Zebra, an insurance search engine and car insurance comparison marketplace.

New York State has the 10th-most expensive auto insurance rate in the nation, with a statewide annual average rate of $1,688  though that's inflated by the New York City car insurance rate of $2,392, according to the State of Auto Insurance report published by The Zebra.

The U.S. national annual average rate has increased 23 percent since 2011, and was $1,470 in 2018.

The Zebra's report included data from 97 Capital Region towns, and 113 zip codes. Over the last five years, car insurance rates have steadily increased. Costs in the area have risen 22 percent since 2014, when the average premium was $1,069 for the year.

But those rates can fluctuate up or down in any given year, and large increases are tied to "major loss events" like a heavy blizzard or hail storm, which cause insurance companies to pay out more money in claims, according to Alyssa Connolly, director of market insights with The Zebra.

"It's really a broad speculation of 'is this is going to continue to happen,'" Connolly said of the rate increases in recent years. "(Car insurance rates) may level out, may level down, just depending on if people are filing claims, how much money the insurance industry is paying out for their claims."

Within the Capital Region, residents in Clifton Park pay on average $1,180 a year for car insurance, the lowest annual rate in the area. Car owners in Waterford, Round Lake and Corinth all pay just shy of $1,200 annually in car insurance.

But the places with the highest annual rates are all outlying areas situated west of Albany. They include rural towns like Summit, Gilbao and Middleburgh, where car insurance premiums are well over $1,400. In Jefferson, residents pay $1,460 per year on average, the most in the region.

Typically, the areas with the highest rates are urban settings where things like car theft are more likely than in rural areas.

Connolly said the rural towns west of the Capital Region could be seeing higher insurance costs because of more extreme weather than in the immediate metropolitan area. And even a larger population of deer in those places might contribute to a higher costs of insurance.

"(Deer) have the potential to cause a collision, a lot of property damage and injury," she said. "It's certainly something the insurance industry is monitoring, because these deer can cause a lot of damage and high claims pay-outs."

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One other factor contributing to higher costs of auto insurance, Connolly said, is the proliferation of smart phones, and the subsequent increase of distracted drivers.

In 2014, the penalty for getting caught texting and driving would drive your insurance premium up just over 1 percent. But by 2018, that penalty would have boosted your premium by 20 percent  or over $250  which you'll likely be stuck paying for three years after receiving the ticket, Connolly said.

"One of the trends that is shifting the industry is human behavior and are people more distracted behind the wheel. We know that there's visual, cognitive and physical impairment when using your phone behind the wheel," Connolly said. "If you get a ticket for texting and driving, that is going on your record and your insurance company can raise your rates."

Other findings in the report showed the Subaru Outlook, Chevrolet Colorado and Ford Escape were the least expensive vehicles to insure.

And among different car makers, Volvo is the least expensive brand to insure, while Mitsubishi is the priciest, according to the report.

In some states, factors like your credit score, occupation and level of education can impact what you're paying for car insurance. New York regulators have pushed for an end to discounts dependent on educational attainment or occupational status.

But one of the easiest ways to pay less? Get married. According to the report, married couples pay on average $90 less on car insurance yearly than single car owners.A lovely Dutch Colonial in East Greenbush is House of the Week. A vestibule opens into an entry foyer with a handsome set of stairs straight ahead, an eat-in kitchen to the right and a sitting room to the left. There are three bedrooms upstairs, along with a full bathroom and a half-bath off the kitchen. The basement is partially finished and has Bilco doors.

Highlights include a gas fireplace, arts and crafts-style details, a mudroom off the kitchen and a deck off the back of the house leading to a tiered patio. There's an oversized, detached garage with work space and a portion of the backyard is fenced. The house was built in 1928 and is 1,800 square feet. Gas heat, East Greenbush schools.Nigerians have expressed their disappointment at federal government after it closed its case against Walter Onnoghen, suspended chief justice of Nigeria (CJN).

On Thursday at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), governments counsel, Aliyu Umar, revealed that they have closed their case after calling just three witnesses to the stand out of the six initially listed.

I have called three witnesses. If the defence needs them, I can call the other three, he said.

Responding, Adeboyega Awomolo, counsel to Onnoghen, rejected the offer.

I dont want them, I dont want them, he said.

Awomolo then informed the tribunal that they intend to file a no-case submission but they would need time to write an address.

We intend to take advantage of section 303 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015 on no-case submission, he said.

See reactions

Reading the news today about the embattled CJN, I really feel broken. I feel like crying. May you never be set up for national embarrassment.

May we never be in a situation that even friends become skeptical of what to believe. So after now, what next?

#Onnoghen  Oga_eMarketer (@Akan_Udom) March 21, 2019

The moment a bank official of Standard chattered disclosed in court the amount of money onnoghen has in his bank accounts, the government immediately closed d case knowing the corruption charges they had against him was false. This whole charade was a witch-hunt, smh#Onnoghen  Kindly Follow Back (@Naijadailyfeedx) March 21, 2019

Lawyers both old/young who never waited for evidence to be presented but jumped into conclusion alongside the Justices of Court of Public opinion, relying on illegally cooked up figures; check yourselves in a mirror with your wig and gown and ask if you deserve it. #onnoghen  Femi Ola-Olu (@Femiolaolu1) March 21, 2019

On #Onnoghen: I am short of words, but posterity will judge all the players involved, direct or indirectly, emergency analysts, pretentious & mischievous threaders and all defenders of foolery.

This too shall not be forgotten.  Gbemi Dennis (@GbemiDennis) March 21, 2019

https://twitter.com/OgoMkpuma/status/1108789494302552066?s=19

So in real sense the FG had no case against #Onnoghen. It was only a calculated attempt to embarrass and cow the CJN into doing their biddings. For those of you that justified the actions of Buhari and FG, i hope you can see how stupid y'all were.  Okey (@Okeydegeneral) March 21, 2019

The #Onnoghen case (FG has rested its case), lays bare the dangers, and madness, of media trials. But then, these people don't care. Their (short term) goal has been achieved. We'll be left to pick the pieces up of the desecration of our third arm of government eventually.  Chxta (@Chxta) March 21, 2019

Let it be remembered that the tyrant, in bid to amass totalitarian powers, brought up spurious charges against the heads of the other 2 independent arms of government and some foolish Nigerians supported evil against #Onnoghen and Saraki pic.twitter.com/Tnyv0nfx9x  Cupid (@eyenobong26) March 21, 2019Architects draw themselves new digs

The architecture, engineering and planning firm Bergmann celebrated the grand opening of its new Albany offices Thursday. The company moved to 2 Winners Circle from Madison Avenue Extension. The new office was designed by Bergmann professionals, who incorporated a number of environmentally sustainable features into the space. The Bergmann team includes more than 400 professional and technical staff in the Northeast, Midwest and Atlantic regions. The company has been delivering projects in the region for more than 13 years and in February extended a long-running contract with the state Office of General Services. Past projects include design services for the roof replacement and exterior stair rehabilitation at the historic Empire State Plaza and the OGS Capital Milestones Child Care Center, where Bergmann provided architectural and structural engineering services in partnership with Spring Line Design.

Saratoga Springs church near window restoration goal

Last year, the congregation of the First Baptist Church on Washington Street in Saratoga Springs, started raising money to restore five of the 17 stained glass windows in the house of worship, each chosen because they were most in need of attention. The church was founded in 1793 and is the oldest congregation in the city. The windows were installed in 1906. With help from the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation and a matching grant from the Sacred Sites program of the state Landmarks Conservancy, the group raised $23,000. A $25,000 grant from the Alfred Z. Solomon Charitable Trust put them at $48,000.

"The generous donations from the community and the Trust are enabling us to preserve the beauty and historical significance of the church, and just as importantly, to keep our doors open to serve the spiritual and missional needs of the community," said Pastor George Stefani.

The money will cover the restoration and protection of the Good Shepherd and two Lady in Aid windows on the primary facade as well as two windows in the sanctuary. All five windows will receive new vented glass protection. The work will be done by Queensbury-based craftsman Guy Savio of All in Glass Studios Too. He is donating a portion of his services.

The church is also home to the congregation of Terra Nova. To donate to the cause and help the church raise the remaining $2,000, call the preservation foundation at 518-587-5030 or online atsaratogaspringspreservation.org and cite FBC in the donation note. For more information about the church and to schedule a tour, call 518-584-6301.

Architects institute announces awards

The American Institute of Architects Eastern NY held its annual design awards event Wednesday, honoring its members. JMZ Architects and Planners of Glens Falls won two awards both in the institutional category, for the Student Success Center at SUNY Genesee Community College in Batavia; and Adirondack Hall at the SUNY Adirondack campus in Queensbury.

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EYP Architecture & Engineering in Albany won three awards in the same category. The honors were for the Zero Energy Nanotechnology building, part of the SUNY Polytechnic Institute; the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway; and the as yet unbuilt alumni quad at the University at Albany.

Honors in the institutional category also went to CSArch in Albany for the New Media Center in the Coxsackie-Athens school district, and in the interiors category, architecture+ of Troy was recognized for renovations to the Milne Library at SUNY Oneonta.

In the residential category, Blazer and Tuck Architecture of Saratoga Springs won three awards. The first was for The News Apartments in Troy, an adaptive reuse of the former headquarters of the Troy Record newspaper. A single family home on Loughberry Lake in Saratoga Springs was also recognized, as well as a camp Balzer and Tuck designed on Fourth Lake in the Adirondacks.

lhornbeck@timesunion.com  518-454-5352  @leighhornbeckChristian Petzold's "Transit" takes a huge risk and mostly pulls it off. A German, and one of today's premier European filmmakers, Petzold gambles on a simple but radical alteration of his source material that's certain to infuriate some viewers.

That source is an acclaimed 1944 modernist novel, "Transit Visa" by Anna Seghers, a German Jew and communist who in 1940 fled Paris after the Nazi occupation. It's a story about the crushing imperative to flee from murderous ideologies and the mixture of desperation and tedium suffered by those thwarted in the attempt.

Like the novel, Petzold's film takes place in Paris and Marseilles as the Germans are spreading terror through France. But "Transit" doesn't take place 80 years ago  it's set in something that looks more like the present, a present where shrieking police sirens are a constant and house-to-house searches take place to find and eradicate enemies of the state.

A young German man, Georg (a riveting Franz Rogowski), is focused on getting out of Paris one step ahead of the invading Germans, having already experienced their brutality. He is persuaded to accompany a famous communist writer, carrying his latest manuscript, to Marseilles, where the author will meet up with his wife and flee to Mexico. The writer never even makes it to Marseilles.

Mistaken for the writer, Georg realizes that an impersonation might be his ticket out of France. Of course, complications arise. He encounters the writer's wife (Paula Beer), who had told her husband she was leaving him. She has taken up with a doctor (Godehard Giese), who is almost wounded by his love for her. Georg falls for her himself, which raises more difficulties.

There are ample opportunities for self-sacrifice, and betrayals as well. Characters collapse in the face of fear, or collaborate. Our hero needs to flee but can't or won't, and time is growing short as the Germans close in.

"Transit" aims to invoke dread and a suffocating atmosphere. It trusts viewers to make connections. Overall, the filmmaking is exceptional. Still, I have qualms about the director's choice to use occasional voice-over narration, and there's a digression involving Georg's relationship with a lonely Arab boy and his deaf-mute mother that seems unnecessary.

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But Petzold, whose "Barbara" (2012) won the best director award at the Berlin Film Festival, has no difficulty creating a sense of existential woe. "Transit" has a hint of science fiction, and more than a hint of Kafka. And despite the story's link to World War II, it's clear that Petzold wants it to resonate with today's immigration problems.

It's a demanding film but gives a lot in return.BALLSTON LAKE  Three adults and three children were displaced from their home Thursday night after a fire broke out at a house on Carlyle Court, according to the Red Cross, which provided aid at the scene.

The Round Lake Fire Department was dispatched to the fire at 8:31 p.m., and found flames coming out of a kitchen window when it arrived, according to a post on the department's Facebook page.ALBANY  The FBI's investigation of Cohoes Mayor Shawn M. Morse has focused on a large amount of cash that the mayor was allegedly carrying on the night the city hosted a Christmas party for its government employees and other guests in December 2017.

People interviewed by the FBI during the investigation, which stretches back at least two years, said the probe also has examined the mayor's dealings with developers, including when he was chairman of the Albany County Legislature, and also a series of large campaign donations Morse had received from Council 82, a law enforcement labor union based in Albany.

Ralph V. Signoracci, the mayor's longtime campaign treasurer, was questioned by FBI agents and federal prosecutors about the deposit of a "large sum of money" that Morse allegedly made around the time the 2017 Christmas party took place, according to two people with knowledge of the federal investigation but not authorized to comment publicly on the case.

Signoracci, 44, told federal authorities that he was not aware of any large withdrawals of campaign funds that month, and that he had no knowledge of where the money may have come from, the two people said. Signoracci and his attorney, James E. Long, both declined comment for this story.

Morse, 51, did not respond to a request for comment. His attorney, William J. Dreyer, also declined to comment.

Michael Durocher, the comptroller for the city of Cohoes, said the annual Christmas party for city employees and their guests is paid from a "celebration fund" that's part of the city's budget. The party used to be held in City Hall and cost several hundred dollars, but Morse, after being elected mayor in 2015, moved the event to an outside venue.

The annual event usually costs between $2,500 and $2,800, according to Durocher. People who have attended the event said that it's not unusual for developers or business owners to be invited. It has been held at Smith's restaurant on Remsen Street for the past two years.

Morse was arrested Feb. 28 on a federal indictment that charges him with conspiring with Signoracci to siphon thousands of dollars in political donations for his personal expenditures, including vacations, restaurant outings and home repairs. Signoracci pleaded guilty to a felony wire fraud charge in U.S. District Court on March 7.

None of the cash withdrawals from campaign accounts  which ranged from $500 to $5,000  took place in December 2017. The lone $5,000 withdrawal from one of Morse's campaign accounts was made in August 2015, a few days before Morse went on vacation in Wildwood, N.J. During the vacation, according to prosecutors, Morse spent the funds at "hotels, restaurants and retailers."

According to the indictment filed against Morse, the only improper withdrawal of campaign funds around the time of the December 2017 Christmas party took place in January 2018. Signoracci allegedly cashed a $1,500 check from the Friends of Shawn Morse political account and gave the money to the mayor that month.

The seven-count felony indictment charges Morse with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Morse has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to stand trial on April 29. He is also charged with one count of lying to FBI agents when they questioned him last September about the campaign cash withdrawals.

The FBI's probe of the mayor's December 2017 banking deposit  which is not part of the pending indictment  coincides with a detailed account that Brenda Morse, the mayor's estranged wife, provided last year to investigators with both the Albany County sheriff's department and the district attorney's office, when they were investigating her allegations of domestic abuse by her husband.

According to two sources familiar with that investigation, Brenda Morse told investigators that the mayor was carrying a very large amount of cash  she estimated thousands of dollars  when he came home that night from the city's Christmas party. She told the investigators that she had removed a small amount of cash from the roll after her husband fell asleep.

At the time of that incident, the couple's marriage was starting to break apart and Brenda Morse had no source of income. A month earlier, she had called 911 and told a dispatcher that her husband had grabbed her throat and thrown her to the ground during an argument at their Grandview Avenue residence.

Brenda Morse later filed for divorce, but subsequently withdrew the court filing. She has retracted her allegations of physical abuse more than once, most recently in an email attributed to her that was sent to the mayor's attorney in late January.

Morse has denied he choked his wife and has not been charged in that or other alleged domestic violence incidents. The State Police had also probed allegations made by Morse's 16-year-old daughter that he physically abused her, including choking her and punching her in the head.

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Colonie police recently said they had closed their investigation into a complaint by Morse's wife that he had grabbed her arm and spit on her during a dispute at a Wolf Road restaurant last year. Colonie police said they could not sustain the allegations and discovered "inconsistencies" in her account.

It's unclear whether local investigators shared with the FBI Brenda Morse's account of finding a large amount of cash in her husband's clothing.

A person interviewed by the FBI, who spoke to the Times Union on the condition of anonymity, said the agents also have asked questions about Morse's dealings with Joseph R. Nicolla of Columbia Development, a politically connected developer who last year had his criminal charges in an unrelated bid-rigging case dropped by the state attorney general's office.

The attorney general's scuttled case against Nicolla was related to his firm's work for SUNY Polytechnic Institute, and had no apparent connections to Morse or Albany County government.

In 2012, Morse was chairman of the county Legislature when the county took steps to purchase a Family Court building in Albany that it had been renting from Columbia Development for seven years. The county had spent more than $15 million in rent on the building before agreeing to buy it that year for $22.5 million in a deal that county Comptroller Michael Conners later characterized as a "sweetheart gift" for the developer.

The federal probe also examined Morse's time and attendance after he was hired in February 2018 as a part-time security officer at the Glenmont Job Corps, a federally subsidized job-training facility, according to two people briefed on the investigation.

In August, investigators with the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Inspector General visited the Glenmont facility, where they reviewed documentation and interviewed the former security manager, Patrick Thomas, who no longer works there. They were probing whether Morse was paid for working when he was not at the facility, according to one of the people with knowledge of the investigation. No charges are pending related to that portion of the investigation.

A few months ago, FBI agents took records from Council 82's headquarters on Colvin Avenue, according to a person associated with that organization who was interviewed by the FBI. The labor union was the primary contributor to a political fund known as The Chairman's PAC, which Morse had set up when he was chairman of the Albany County Legislature.

Council 82 had donated more than $22,000 of the $33,000 that had been in the PAC at one point. In 2014, the Times Union reported that Morse's Chairman's PAC received a $10,000 donation from Council 82 around the time Morse, as chairman of the Legislature, had pushed a measure granting exemptions to dozens of Albany County employees who had lived outside the county in violation of a long-standing residency requirement.

At the time, Morse denied the donation from Council 82 was connected to the passage of that legislation.

The PAC was established in order for Morse to raise political donations to support the campaigns of legislative candidates who supported him. But authorities said he donated less than $1,400 to other campaigns. Federal prosecutors allege Morse illegally used a majority of the money in The Chairman's PAC to support his mayoral campaign  more than $13,000  and also for personal expenses.MINEVILLE  Former Essex County District Attorney Julie Garcia, the first woman to ever serve there in that capacity, will run for State Supreme Court Justice, 4th Judicial District.

The Albany Law School graduate and Democrat is running in order to serve all people "with competence and integrity."

"I am committed to justice for all, and my career exemplifies that," Garcia said. "My experiences as a district attorney and a practicing attorney have provided me with the legal expertise needed for this position. I have earned a reputation as an ethical, ardent advocate of the law."

Garcia, whose grandfather is an immigrant from Spain, was born in Ticonderoga and attended Moriah Central School. She worked her way through college, graduating from Siena College cum laude in 1995 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Social Work.

"Growing up in upstate New York taught me many valuable lessons," Garcia said. "I learned to be resourceful, to work hard and to respect others. I was surrounded by people who were honest, ethical, hardworking and determined to survive."

She attended Albany Law School, where she worked in the Domestic Violence Clinic. She was admitted to the New York State Bar in 2000. She worked in the Domestic Violence Unit of the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office and ran her own law office before being elected Essex County District Attorney.

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For more than 20 years, Garcia has handled cases in federal, supreme, county and local courts, representing clients throughout the 4th Judicial District.

"As District Attorney, I did my job without fear or favor," she said. "I am grateful to my community and my country for the opportunities I have had, which will enable me to serve honorably on New York's Supreme Court."

She serves on the boards of the Legal Aid Society of Northeastern New York and AdkAction, and is a commissioner on the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics. She served on the Siena College Social Work Advisory Board and the Albany Law School Board of Trustees. She lives in Warrensburg and is a sole practitioner with offices in Essex and Warren Counties.

Saratoga County Republicans Michael Cuevas, Dianne Freestone and James Walsh are also seeking the judgeships for the district, which encompasses Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Hamilton, Montgomery, St. Lawrence, Saratoga, Schenectady, Warren and Washington counties.ALBANY  Two former General Electric employees have been charged with stealing trade secrets from the company's Schenectady operations, according to federal prosecutors.

An indictment unsealed Friday in federal court in Albany charges Jean Patrice Delia of Montreal and Miguel Sernas of Mexico City of conspiring to steal thousands of electronic files belonging to GE, including proprietary tools developed to calibrate GE-manufactured turbines used in power plants around the world.

Delia was employed by GE Power in Schenectady. (The indictment refers to the division as GE Energy.) He and Sernas, operating as ThermoGen Power Services, used the stolen materials to compete against GE, the indictment alleges. Sernas had also previously worked for GE.

Delia, 43, joined GE in November 2001 as a power plant performance specialist. Delia established ThermoGen in Canada in June 2008, according to the indictment. He left GE in March 2012 to become ThermoGen's director of operations two months later, according to his LinkedIn profile.

While still at GE, Delia took a two-year sabbatical, during which he, Sernas "and others" drew up a business plan for ThermoGen, according to the indictment.

Delia had worked as an engineer in GE's Performance Testing Group, with access to tools that were used to calibrate turbines to operate at "optimal efficiency," according to the indictment. He is accused of transferring these confidential tools and files to ThermoGen, and targeting GE customers.

In one instance, the indictment says, Delia shared a confidential GE pricing document with Sernas, telling him, "I'm comfortable with the estimate of $25k-30k. our competition would be around 44K for this type of test ... "

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ThermoGen's projects included power plants in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Pakistan and Indonesia, according to its website. No one answered the phone late Friday afternoon at its Montreal office.

In a statement, GE said it aggressively protects and defends its intellectual property "and have strict processes in place for identifying these issues and partnering with law enforcement. Strong IP protection is crucial to our ability to succeed over the long term."

While Delia was arraigned Friday before United States Magistrate Judge Christian F. Hummel, Sernas, 40, was arraigned in January.

The charge filed against Delia and Sernas carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000, and a term of supervised release of up to 3 years.Washington

The chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee revealed information Thursday that he said showed Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner used private email accounts and a publicly available messaging service for official White House business in a way that possibly violated federal records laws.

A lawyer for Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump's daughter, and Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, told the committee late last year that in addition to a private email account, Kushner uses an unofficial encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, for official White House business, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the committee's chair, revealed. That business includes foreign contacts, the lawyer, Abbe Lowell, told the committee.

Cummings said Lowell also told the committee that Ivanka Trump did not preserve some emails sent to her private account if she did not reply to them.

Democrats have barely been able to contain their frustration at what they see as a dark irony in the findings. Donald Trump made Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state a central line of attack in his 2016 campaign for president. Even after the FBI declined to charge Clinton for her practices and handling of classified information, Republicans in Congress have continued to pick away at the case.

Lowell could not say if Kushner had communicated classified information on the messaging service, WhatsApp, telling lawmakers that was "above my pay grade." He argued that because Kushner took screenshots of the communications and sent them to his official White House account or the National Security Council, his client was not in violation of federal records laws.

In a letter disclosing the information Thursday, Cummings said the finding added urgency to his investigation of possible violations of the Presidential Records Act by members of the Trump administration. He accused the White House of stonewalling his committee on information it had requested months ago, when Republicans still controlled the House.

"The White House's failure to provide documents and information is obstructing the committee's investigation into allegations of violations of federal records laws by White House officials," Cummings wrote. He said he would "be forced to consider alternative means to obtain compliance" if documents he requested about White House communications and record keeping were not shared with the committee, an indication he could subpoena them.

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Steven Groves, a White House lawyer, said the White House would review Cummings' letter and "provide a reasonable response in due course."

The Committee first began scrutinizing the use of private communications services at the White House in 2017 amid media reports Kushner had used a private email account for government business and then that Ivanka Trump had done the same.

CNN reported in October Kushner had communicated with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia using WhatsApp. Lowell confirmed details of Kushner's private messaging usage during a December meeting with Cummings and the committee's then chair, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. Asked if Kushner had been cleared to use the messaging app to communicate with foreign leaders, Lowell recommended lawmakers ask the National Security Council and the White House, Cummings said.

Cummings said after speaking to Lowell, he believed Ivanka Trump could also potentially be in violation of the Presidential Records Act because of her use of a private email account. He said Lowell had told the committee Trump forwards work-related emails received on her personal account to an official government account only if she responds to the email.

Cummings wrote Thursday that he had also obtained documents apparently showing that K.T. McFarland had used a personal AOL account for official business while she served as deputy national security adviser and that Steve Bannon had done the same while a White House adviser.New York State Police

MILTON - A 35-year-old man was arrested Wednesday after sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl who he met on Tinder, State Police said.

Francis Turzyn, of Syracuse, was charged with sexual abuse, assault, criminal possession of a weapon, endangering the welfare of a child and trespassing, State Police said.RAVENA  Students were sent home for the day following a gas leak at the Ravena-Coeymans-Selkirk High School Friday morning, officials said.

Some students complained of nausea and headaches but no one was transported to the hospital, Jason Hauke, the Coeymans assistant fire chief, said.The Federal Government, on Thursday, closed its case against the suspended Chief Justice of Nigeria, CJN, Justice Walter Onnoghen, after it produced only three witnesses that testified before the Code of Conduct Tribunal, CCT. The Suspended Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Justice Walter Samuel Nkanu Onnoghen Though FG initially expressed its intention to produce a total of six witnesses to substantiate all the allegations it levelled against the embattled CJN, however, shortly after the third witness was discharged, the prosecution counsel told the tribunal that it would be unnecessary to call further witnesses. The prosecution counsel, Mr. Aliyu Umar, SAN, told the tribunal that the defendant was at liberty to summon any of the listed but uncalled witnesses to testify on his behalf if he so wished. He was immediately overruled by the CCT Chairman, Mr. Danladi Umar, even as Onnoghens lawyer, Chief Adegboyega Awomolo, SAN, rejected the offer presented to him.

If it feels that it is satisfied with the evidence of the three witnesses, then so be it, the CCT Chairman held. Thereafter, Awomolo told the tribunal that the CJN would in line with section 303 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, ACJA, 2015, enter a no case submission with respect to all the allegations the FG levelled against him. Awomolo therefore, applied for the record of proceedings of the tribunal to enable his client to file the necessary processes. The case was subsequently adjourned till next week Friday for hearing of the no-case application by the embattled CJN, as well as for adoption of the final written addresses. Earlier in the proceeding, the third prosecution witness, PW-3, Mr. Ifeoma Okagbue, a staff of Standard Chartered Bank in Abuja, told the tribunal that it was not true that the defendant possessed either $1million or 1million in any of the five bank accounts that necessitated the charge. Okagbue who told the tribunal that she started managing Onnoghens bank accounts since 2015, gave a load down of both the opening and closing balance of all the accounts from January 2018 to January 2019. She said the accounts were all linked to one Bank Verification Code, BVN, adding that the bank had upon securing an approval from the defendant, diverted funds from the accounts into various profit yielding projects,. The PW-3 told the tribunal that profits that accused the investments were credited back into the accounts. While two of the accounts are in Naira, the three others were Pounds Sterling, Euro and Dollar accounts. The witness told the tribunal that all the accounts were domiciliary, and were opened and managed at the branch of the bank in Wuse 2, Abuja. Before Mrs. Okagbue mounted the witness box, the PW-2, who is a retired Director at the Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, Mr. Awal Yakassai, told the Mr. Umar led three-man panel that contrary to what was alleged in the media, he said the suspended CJN owned only five houses. He said it was not true that CCB investigators linked the ownership of 55 houses to the defendant. The witness made the disclosure after he was shown copies of Justice Onnoghens asset declaration forms, which the Federal Government tendered in evidence before the CCT. The embattled CJN was said to have submitted the forms marked as Exhibit 2 and 3, to the CCB in 2014 and 2016. Answering questions under cross-examination, the PW-2, told the tribunal that he served at the CCB for 29 years before he retired in April 2018. He admitted that the CCB was yet to verify Justice Onnoghens assets with a view to finding out if he made false declarations of his assets Aside allegation that he failed to declare his assets as prescribed by the law, FG had charge marked CCT/ABJ/01/19, FG, alleged that Onnoghen operated five foreign bank accounts, contrary to section 15(2) of Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act. FG had insisted that it was the CCB that satified Onnoghens trial based on certain deficit that were discovered in his asset declaration forms provided.

Source: Vanguard NigeriaWashington

President Donald Trump declared Thursday that the United States should recognize Israel's authority over the long disputed Golan Heights, delivering a valuable election-eve gift to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but jettisoning decades of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Trump's announcement, in a Twitter post, came after pressure from Netanyahu, a close political ally who is fighting for his survival in the election scheduled April 9, and has invoked his friendship with the American president as a prime argument for staying in office.

But Trump's move, while popular in Israel and among some lawmakers in Congress, is likely to be condemned almost everywhere else. The United Nations has rejected Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights since 1967, when Israeli troops seized the 400 square miles from Syria during the Arab-Israeli war.

It could undermine Trump's long anticipated peace proposal for Israel and the Palestinians. The White House has been enlisting support for the plan among Arab leaders who now face the prospect of acquiescing in the loss of land they had long claimed as Arab.

As a practical matter, Trump's announcement changes little. There is no negotiation underway on the status of the Golan Heights, nor any expectation that Israel is going to withdraw from it.

But as a symbolic step, the decision is momentous  underlining Trump's willingness to flout diplomatic orthodoxy and shake up a debate over the Middle East.

"I've been thinking about doing that for a long time," Trump said to Fox Business Network in an interview scheduled to air Friday. "Every president has said 'do that,'" he said, "I'm the one that gets it done."

Trump brushed aside suggestions that he was trying to help Netanyahu in the election, professing to be only vaguely aware of the Israeli leader's political challenges.

Yet unlike the president's earlier decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which was mandated by Congress and fulfilled a promise he made during the 2016 presidential campaign this latest move was both a first for an American president and almost purely a gesture to Netanyahu.

The Israeli leader welcomed it as such during a meeting in Jerusalem with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

"President Trump has just made history," said a beaming Netanyahu. "He did it again."

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Praising Trump for moving the embassy and for withdrawing the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu stridently opposed, the prime minister said, "The message that President Trump has given the world is that America stands by Israel."

Netanyahu called it "a miracle of Purim," referring to an ancient Jewish holiday being celebrated this week.

Palestinian officials, who have been alienated from the Trump administration since it moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, predicted that the latest move would ignite a new wave of violence in the region.

"What shall tomorrow bring?" Saeb Erekat, a veteran Palestinian Authority peace negotiator, said in a tweet. "Certain destabilisation and bloodshed in our region."

The announcement was the latest in a series of steps that have radically reshaped the U.S. role in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The president cast his decision as being of "critical and strategic importance to the state of Israel."

Other administration officials and defenders of the policy, including Republican senators, said that Israel's control of the Golan Heights was critical, with Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militants threatening it from inside war-torn Syria.Washington

The White House on Thursday rejected a Democratic request for information on private conversations between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, including an interview with an interpreter who sat in on their one-on-one meeting in Helsinki last summer.

In a letter earlier this month, the House intelligence, foreign affairs and oversight committees asked for the substance of Trump and Putin's conversations in person and by phone. They also asked for any documents related to the conversations, information on whether the talks had any impact on U.S. foreign policy, and information on whether Trump tried to conceal any evidence of them.

On Thursday, White House counsel Pat Cipollone sent a letter to the Democratic chairmen of the three committees rebuffing all those requests.

"The president must be free to engage in discussions with foreign leaders without fear that those communications will be disclosed and used as fodder for partisan political purposes," Cipollone wrote, adding, "No foreign leader would engage in private conversations with the president, or the president's senior advisors, if such conversations were subject to public disclosure (or disclosure to committees of Congress)."

Citing Supreme Court precedent, Cipollone wrote that "the conduct of foreign affairs is a matter that the Constitution assigns exclusively to the President."

The three House chairmen responded Thursday with a statement saying Cipollone's letter "continues a troubling pattern by the Trump Administration of rejecting legitimate and necessary congressional oversight with no regard for precedent or the constitution."

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The March 4 letters to the White House  signed by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel and House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings  requested interviews with "linguists, translators or interpreters" who in any way listened to Trump and Putin's conversations. The two leaders met privately in Helsinki in July for more than two hours with only interpreters present, and the White House has not said what they discussed.

Multiple Democratic-led committees are battling with the White House over documents as they launch broad new investigations of Trump and his personal and political dealings. On Tuesday, Cummings accused the White House of perpetrating "an unprecedented level of stonewalling, delay and obstruction" in response to congressional requests for documents and witnesses.

Cummings wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that he has sent 12 letters to the White House on a range of topics ranging from security clearances to the use of taxpayer funds for lavish private aircraft. Since then, he wrote, the Trump administration has "not turned over a single piece of paper to our committee or made a single official available for testimony."Washington

America is waiting for special counsel Robert Mueller's report. But anyone looking for a grand narrative on President Donald Trump, Russian election interference and all the juicy details uncovered over the past 22 months could end up disappointed.

The exact timing of Mueller's endgame is unclear. Attorney General William Barr, who oversees the investigation, has said he wants to release as much information as he can about the inquiry into possible coordination between Trump associates and Russia's efforts to sway the 2016 election. But during his confirmation hearing last month, Barr said he will decide what the public sees, and that any report will be in his words, not Mueller's.

Some key questions:

What happens when the investigation ends: Mueller will have to turn in a report of some kind when he's done. It could be bare-bones.

Justice Department regulations require only that Mueller give the attorney general a confidential report that explains the decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions. That could be as simple as a bullet point list or as fulsome as a report running hundreds of pages.

Mueller has given no guidance on what or when it will be, but signs a conclusion is coming soon have mounted.

Matthew Whitaker, acting attorney general before Barr was confirmed, said in January the investigation is nearly done. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller, has been preparing to leave his post soon. The number of prosecutors working for Mueller has dwindled, and his team has not had meaningful dialogue with Trump's lawyers in months.

Mueller also hasn't filed any new cases in two months.

What does Barr say he'll do: Barr said he envisions two reports, only one for congressional and public consumption.

Barr has noted that department protocol says internal memos explaining charging decisions should not be released.

During his confirmation hearing, Barr said he will draft, after Mueller turns in his report, a second one for the chairman and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees. But the regulations provide little guidance for what such a report would say.

The attorney general is required only to say the investigation has concluded and describe or explain any times when he or Rosenstein decided an action Mueller proposed "was so inappropriate or unwarranted" that it should not be pursued.

What will Trump do: Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has said the president's legal team wants to review any report before it's released. Giuliani also raised the prospect that Trump lawyers could try to invoke executive privilege to prevent the disclosure of any confidential conversation the president had with his aides.

It's not clear whether the president's lawyers will get an advance look at Mueller's conclusions since Mueller reports to the Justice Department.

When Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Barr whether Trump and his lawyers would be able to correct the report before its release, Barr replied: "That will not happen."

Will there be a final news conference: It seems unlikely, especially if prosecutors plan to discuss people they never charged.

"If you're not going to indict someone, you don't stand up there and unload negative information about the person," Barr said.

Sign up for The Knick  Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter.

There have been times when the department has elaborated on decisions not to pursue criminal charges. Also, there is some precedent for special counsels appointed by the Justice Department to hold news conferences.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel who investigated the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame and who was granted even broader authority than Mueller, held a 2005 news conference when he charged I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Can Congress subpoena Mueller and his report: Sure.

House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York has raised the prospect of subpoenaing the report and calling Mueller before Congress to ask him about his findings. So has Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Democrats also want all of Mueller's underlying evidence, including interview transcripts and documents.

Many Republicans have argued that the full report should be released. And the House voted 420-0 this month for a resolution calling for any final report to be made public. Still, many allies of the president have stopped short of saying it should be subpoenaed.

Trump, as the leader of the executive branch, could direct the Justice Department to defy the subpoena, setting the stage for a court fight.

Will Trump be able to see the report: It is unclear whether Trump will ask to see the report and under what circumstances he or his attorneys might be able to view it, especially because the document is meant to be confidential for Justice Department leadership.

Barr said at his confirmation hearing that he would not permit White House interference in the investigation. But he also has voiced an expansive view of executive power in which the president functions as the country's chief law enforcement officer and has wide latitude in giving directives to the FBI and Justice Department.

Democrats could seize on any disclosure to the president to argue that the report isn't confidential and should be immediately provided to them as well.[March 22, 2019] EverCompliant Invited to Present at FATF/ MONEYVAL Joint Experts' Meeting and Terrorist Financing Prosecution Workshop

NEW YORK, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- EverCompliant, the payments industry leader in AML (Anti-Money Laundering) & KYC (Know Your Customer) specializing in business cyber intelligence, announced today that the company has been invited to present in front of the 2019 FATF/ MONEYVAL Joint Experts' Meeting (JEM) and Terrorist Financing Prosecution Workshop. The meeting will take place Sunday, March 24, 2019, in Tel Aviv, and will be hosted by the Israel Money Laundering and Terror Financing Prohibition Authority (IMPA). The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), is an intergovernmental organization founded in 1989 on the initiative of the G7 to enforce policies against money laundering and advance global efforts against terror activities. After years of advancing and improving its counter-terrorism efforts, Israel not only joined the FATF in December 2018, but is one of the leading countries at the forefront in the fight against money laundering and terror financing. This workshop with FinTech/FinSec firms and the public sector will be held as part of the 2019 FATF MONEYVAL Joint Experts' Meeting (JEM) & the US Presidency Initiative on Prosecutors and Judges (TF prosecution Workshop) and will focus on the use of advanced technologies to identify and analyze money-laundering and terrorist-financing risks.



"We are thrilled to have been chosen to participate in this important workshop given by FATF," said Ron Teicher, CEO of EverCompliant. "We welcome the opportunity to take part in a much needed conversation as cyber criminals become even more advanced in how they take advantage of the online financial market. EverCompliant understands the risks that the digital era poses to the payments industry and provides solutions utilizing advanced technologies, including AI and Machine Learning, to uncover current gaps and weaknesses in the online financial market, ensuring organizations can expose the complex network of online connections where potential risks can hide. About EverCompliant

EverCompliant is a global cyber intelligence leader specializing in the payments industry with a focus on risk and compliance. Our proprietary AI technology empowers our customers to make informed, risk-based decisions that contribute to a safer business ecosystem. We operate globally, trusted by large-scale financial institutions and payment service providers. Our headquarters is based in New York City with offices in San Francisco, Shanghai and Tel Aviv. Media Contact Rachel Glaser

GK for EverCompliant

+972-54-250-9439

[email protected] View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/evercompliant-invited-to-present-at-fatf-moneyval-joint-experts-meeting-and-terrorist-financing-prosecution-workshop-300817114.html SOURCE EverCompliant

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 21, 2019] INVESTOR ALERT: Law Offices of Howard G. Smith Announces Investigation on Behalf of Avon Products, Inc. Investors (AVP)

Law Offices of Howard G. Smith announces an investigation on behalf of Avon Products, Inc. ("Avon" or the "Company") (NYSE: AVP) investors concerning the Company and its officers' possible violations of federal securities laws. On August 3, 2017, Avon issued a press release announcing its second quarter 2017 financial results and held a conference call to discuss the results. The Company reported a net loss of $0.12 per share and a 3% decline in active representatives. Avon also reported that Brazil revenue was "down 2% in constant dollars, primarily driven by a decrease in Active Representatives." On the call, Avon' Chief Financial Officer acknowledged that, despite Avon's earlier representations, the remedial actions in Brazil (i.e., stricter credit terms applied to recruiting new representatives) were negatively impacting active representatives and revenue in Brazil. On this news, shares of Avon fell $0.36, or 10.71%, to close at $3.00 per share on August 3, 2017, thereby injuring investors.



If you purchased Avon 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 [email protected], 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.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190321005800/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State has slammed the conduct of the Commissioner of Police in the state, Wakali for his conduct during the March 9 State election.

Ganduje described the conduct of Wakali as an unprofessional one and it didnt befit a Commissioner of Police.

Wakali arrested the Deputy-Governor, Nasiru Gawuma and commissioner for local government in Sule Garo, Nassarawa local government allegedly trying to disrupt collation of results.

Ganduje said in an interview with BBC I didnt know him before now but the way he does his job is questionable. He has taken and favoured a particular political side, which is uncalled for and translates to mishandling his job[March 21, 2019] MBT MAY 20th DEADLINE REMINDER: Rosen Law Firm Reminds Investors of Mobile TeleSystems PJSC of Important Deadline in Securities Class Action Lawsuit Filed by the Firm - MBT

Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of the securities of Mobile TeleSystems (News - Alert) PJSC (NYSE:MBT) from March 19, 2014 through March 7, 2019, inclusive (the "Class Period") of the important May 20, 2019 lead plaintiff deadline in the action. The lawsuit seeks to recover damages for Mobile TeleSystems investors under the federal securities laws. To join the Mobile TeleSystems class action, go to https://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-1531.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. or Zachary Halper, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action. NO CLASS HAS YET BEEN CERTIFIED IN THE ABOVE ACTION. UNTIL A CLASS IS CERTIFIED, YOU ARE NOT REPRESENTED BY COUNSEL UNLESS YOU RETAIN ONE. YOU MAY RETAIN COUNSEL OF YOUR CHOICE. YOU MAY ALSO REMAIN AN ABSENT CLASS MEMBER AND DO NOTHING AT THIS POINT. AN INVESTOR'S ABILITY TO SHARE IN ANY POTENTIAL FUTURE RECOVERY IS NOT DEPENDENT UPON SERVING AS LEAD PLAINTIFF. According to the lawsuit, defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Mobile TeleSystems and its subsidiary were involved in a scheme to pay $420 million in bribes in Uzbekistan; (2) consequently, MobileTeleSystems knew or should have known it would be forced to pay substantial fines to the U.S. government after disclosing in 2014 that the U.S. Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission were investigating its Uzbekistan operations; (3) Mobile TeleSystems' level of cooperation with the U.S. government and remediation was lacking; (4) due to the aforementioned misconduct, Mobile TeleSystems would be forced to pay approximately $850 million in criminal penalties to the U.S. government; and (5) as a result, defendants' public statements were materially false and/or misleading at all relevant times.



A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than May 20, 2019. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. If you wish to join the litigation, go to https://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-register-1531.html or to discuss your rights or interests regarding this class action, please contact Phillip Kim or Zachary Halper of Rosen Law Firm toll free at 866-767-3653 or via email at [email protected] or [email protected]. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn (News - Alert): https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm or on Twitter (News - Alert): https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook (News - Alert): https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm.

Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 3 each year since 2013. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190321005786/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 21, 2019] MORI TRUST CO., LTD.: Acquisition of Real Estate Properties in the Silicon Valley Area of the U.S.

This is an announcement that on March 11, 2019, Mori Trust Co., Ltd. (Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President: Miwako Date) completed the acquisition of office building properties located in the city of San Jose, California, in the Silicon Valley area of the U.S., through its U.S. subsidiary MORI America LLC. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190321005801/en/ Exterior view (Photo: Business Wire) As one of the key strategies of our "Advance 2027" medium and long-term vision, our company is aiming to build a stable portfolio amidst the economic changes occurring around the world today, and has raised the goal of "investment in overseas real estate" with a scale of up to 200 billion yen. The newly-acquired properties are located in the northern part of San Jose city, considered to be a central city in the Silicon Valley region where numerous IT-related companies have gathered together to make it a source of tremendous global innovation. The properties are surrounded by many world-leading global companies, and the area in which they are located is expected to undergo even further development in the future under San Jose city's master plan for urban development* and its policy to encourage even greater accumulation of high-tech corporations. The properties consist of 3 office buildings (and 1 parking garage) which have obtained Gold certification under the LEED international environmental performance evaluation system for buildings, demonstrating that they are structures with outstanding environmental characteristics. They are located within an integrated-development zone which also offers the high convenience of nearby commercial facilities and hotels. All 3 of the properties are currently at full occupancy and are intended to be operated over the long term as stable real estate assets. By actively deploying overseas real estate investments while proceeding with domestic investments in various business areas, the Mori Trust Group will work to bring about further progress in the globalization of its businesses, and domestic business innovations which apply the information and networks it has obtained through its overseas operations.

* San Jose city "North San Jose Area Development Policy", "Envision San Jose 2040 General Plan" 1. Acquired Properties

Overview of Properties

- Property Name

a. 110 Holger Way

b. 120 Holger Way

c. 130 Holger Way

- Property Address

a. 110 Holger Way, San Jose, CA (News - Alert)

b. 120 Holger Way, San Jose, CA

c. 130 Holger Way, San Jose, CA

- Site Area

Approx. 9.7 acres

- Leasable Building Area

a. 140,043 sq. ft.

b. 227,583 sq. ft.

c. 236,040 sq. ft.

Total: 603,666 sq. ft.

- No. of Floors

a. 4 floors above ground

b. 7 floors above ground

c. 7 floors above ground

- Property Type

Offices, parking garage (1,687 spaces)

- Construction Type

Steel-Frame

- Year Build

2010 2. Overview of Local Subsidiary

(1) Company Name: MORI America LLC

(2) Member: Mori Trust Co., Ltd.

(3) Registered Office Address: 251 Little Falls Drive, Wilmington, DE 19808 U.S.A.

(4) Date of Establishment: November , 2016





About Mori Trust Co., Ltd.

The Mori Trust Group is a corporation with a business history spanning more than 60 years, starting with the Mori Group founded by Taikichiro Mori. Akira Mori, the current Chairman (CEO) and third son of the Group's founder, formed the Mori Trust Group which is now one of Japan's leading developers, deploying businesses with a focus on real estate, hotel management, and investment operations. In June 2016, Miwako Date, the granddaughter of Taikichiro Mori and daughter of Akira Mori, became successor of the business as its current President (CEO), formulating the "Advance 2027" medium and long-term vision and developing a diverse range of businesses. Real estate business Our Group is one of Japan's leading real estate business operators, owning or leasing 93 facilities (offices, hotels, residences, commercial facilities) in prime areas across Japan focusing on central Tokyo, with a total floor area of roughly 1.56 million m2 (as of the end of December 2018). In the United States, we acquired 2 office buildings located in the Back Bay district, a prime area in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, in 2017, and are involved in their leasing businesses. The projects our Group is currently engaged in include the "Tokyo World Gate", a 38-floor facility with a floor area of roughly 200,000 m2 under construction in the Toranomon area, which is undergoing multiple plans for large-scale development as a hub for business interaction in central Tokyo. Scheduled for completion in March 2020, this facility will combine offices, the "EDITION" luxury lifestyle hotel, luxury condominiums equipped with hotel services, and lifestyle concierge functions oriented toward foreigners. In addition, we are planning to develop large-scale composite facilities in the Akasaka and Shinagawa areas of central Tokyo. Hotel & resort business Our Group owns and operates a total of 23 hotel and resort facilities across the country, with roughly 3,500 rooms (as of the end of December 2018). Our Group is well known as a business operator that took on a leading role in attracting international hotel brands to Japan. Most recently, in December 2018 we opened "Iraph SUI, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Miyako Okinawa" on Irabu Island in the Miyako Islands of Okinawa Prefecture. We are the largest Marriott Group hotel owner in Japan, owning, managing, and operating 15 hotels bearing the Marriott International brand, including existing, rebranded, and newly-developed hotels. As examples of the hotel projects currently in progress by our Group, we are planning to open 2 locations of the Marriott International luxury lifestyle hotel brand "EDITION" in Toranomon and Ginza through collaboration between world-famous hotelier Ian Schrager and world-famous architect Kengo Kuma, and are also proceeding with plans together with Hilton Grand Vacations and Hilton for time-share resorts on Sesoko Island in Okinawa. We are additionally planning 19 new projects focused on areas representative of Japan, including Hokkaido, Nara, Nagasaki, and Okinawa. Investment business Our Group is known as a company contributing to the establishment of REIT markets in Japan, and has listed both diversified REIT and hotel-specialized REIT on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Since October 2017, we have also been striving to create new businesses through open innovation by setting an investment framework with a total of 20 billion yen, and have initiated a "new innovation investment strategy". With "Re-Tech" which is related to real estate, and "Hospi-Tech" which is related to tourism and hotels, as our prioritized investment destinations, we are promoting the creation of new businesses through CVC activities for direct investment, as well as activities such as investing in M&A and venture capital. Business performance The business performance of our Group in the fiscal year ended March 2018 was as follows: operating revenue of 161.9 billion yen, operating profits of 31.9 billion yen, and net income attributable to owners of parent of 30.2 billion yen. The entire current value of real estate owned by our Group is 1.7 trillion yen, with a capital-to-asset ratio of 36.8% as of March 2018. The forecasts for our business performance in the fiscal year ending March 2019 are: operating revenue of 174 billion yen, operating profits of 34 billion yen, and net income attributable to owners of parent of 40 billion yen. Furthermore, Mori Trust Holdings, a holding company for our Group, obtained a long-term issuer rating of "AA-" from the Japan Credit Rating Agency in January 2018. Medium- and Long-Term Vision "Advance 2027" Following current President Miwako Date assuming the position of president, the Group announced a medium-and long-term vision, which emphasizes that the Group is prepared to make investments on the order of 800 billion yen in real properties and projects at home and overseas by 2027 while retaining its current level of owned capital rate, which is high by the standards of Japanese developers. Biography: Miwako Date Mori Trust Co., Ltd.: President and CEO

Mori Trust Hotels & Resorts Co., Ltd.: President and CEO

Mampei Hotel Co., Ltd.: Chair and CEO

Keidanren, Japan Business Federation: Permanent Secretary

Japan Hotel Association: Director / Chair of the Committee to stimulate Inbound Tourism

Japan Association of Corporate Executives: Secretary and other roles After graduating from Keio University's graduate school, Date joined a major consulting firm. In 1998, she joined the Mori Trust Co., Ltd., and in June 2016, became the President and CEO of the Mori Trust Co. Her father is Akira Mori, current Chairman and CEO. While overseeing a number of large-scale real estate development projects in central Tokyo, Miwako Date steered the hotels & resorts business into bringing in a number of international hotels including: CONRAD TOKYO; Shangri-La Hotel Tokyo; Tokyo Marriott Hotel; Suiran, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Kyoto; The Westin Sendai; Courtyard by Marriott Tokyo Station; and Courtyard by Marriott Shin-Osaka Station. download URL

http://www.mori-trust.co.jp/pressrelease/image.html View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190321005801/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] dynaCERT Continues to Strengthen its Advisory Board

TORONTO, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- dynaCERT Inc. (TSX VENTURE: DYA) (OTCQB: DYFSF) (FRA: DMJ) ("dynaCERT" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has appointed Mr. John OBireck to its Advisory Board.

Mr. OBireck is an engineer and business builder with both private and public company experience in the environmental sector. He is currently President and Chief Technology Officer of Sparta Group (TSX.V:SAY), a company whose mission is finding customer value from waste energy sources, through the proper application of technology and very often transforming seemingly useless waste streams into new useable forms of energy. He previously served as Vice President at a number of industrial control engineering firms and guided several companies from inception, including Hy-Drive Technologies Ltd.



Mr. OBireck has an engineering degree from Ryerson University and currently is on the board of Ethema Health Corporation and Newport Environmental Technologies Ltd.



Mr. OBireck states, During my years at Hy-Drive, I spent many hundreds of hours working specifically with hydrogen enhanced combustion, especially as it related to compression ignition engines. We not only had to figure out how it worked but also why it worked. And the bottom line is that without question, hydrogen most definitely can increase the operational efficiency of diesel engines and also generate a significant reduction in emissions. I look forward to engaging with dynaCERT to deliver a technology whose time has come. Mr. Jim Payne, CEO of dynaCERT commented, With Johns years of experience and his commitment in the on-demand hydrogen market we share a common goal in the development and commercialization of technologies to create a more sustainable world. I look forward to the addition of his knowledge of the hydrogen field gained at Hy-Drive to assist in the globalization of our HydraGEN products. Hannover Messe Trade Show dynaCERT is exhibiting at the world's largest meeting of the Technology Industry at the 2019 HANNOVER MESSE in Germany from April 1st to 5th. This years fair will have 6,500 exhibitors showcasing their technologies and core areas of industry  from research and development, industrial automation, IT, industrial supply, production technologies and services to energy and mobility technologies to moe than 220,000 attendees.



Enrico Schlaepfer, Vice President of Global Sales at dynaCERT states, It is an honor and great pleasure for us, as an internationally growing company, to present our HydraGEN Technology at the request of hannoverimpuls gmbh (Hanover Business Development Corporation) in their booth (Hall 16, Stand H03). This year will be dynaCERTs first as an exhibitor and significant as we are now fully engaged in the worldwide hydrogen marketplace. READER ADVISORY

Except for statements of historical fact, this news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. In particular, forward-looking information in this press release includes, but is not limited to the potential expansion into new markets, industries and segments, such as diesel-powered use of any the dynaCERT products and sales. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. We cannot guarantee future results, performance of achievements. Consequently, there is no representation that the actual results achieved will be the same, in whole or in part, as those set out in the forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking information. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: uncertainty as to whether our strategies and business plans will yield the expected benefits; availability and cost of capital; the ability to identify and develop and achieve commercial success for new products and technologies; the level of expenditures necessary to maintain and improve the quality of products and services; changes in technology and changes in laws and regulations; the uncertainty of the emerging hydrogen economy; including the hydrogen economy moving at a pace not anticipated; our ability to secure and maintain strategic relationships and distribution agreements; and the other risk factors disclosed under our profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com . Readers are cautioned that this list of risk factors should not be construed as exhaustive. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. We undertake no duty to update any of the forward-looking information to conform such information to actual results or to changes in our expectations except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Neither 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 the release. On Behalf of the Board Murray James Payne, CEO For more information, please contact: Jim Payne, CEO & President

dynaCERT Inc.

#101  501 Alliance Avenue

Toronto, Ontario M6N 2J1

(416) 766-9691 x 2

[email protected]dynaCERT.com Investor Relations

dynaCERT Inc.

Nancy Massicotte

(416) 766-9691 x 1

[email protected] dynaCERT .com

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] Skymind Secures $11.5 Million in Series A Funding to Bring AI to the Enterprise

Skymind, the leading open-core data science company, has secured $11.5 million dollars in Series A financing. TransLink Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that helps entrepreneurs develop customer connections and partnerships in Asia, led the round with participation from ServiceNow (News - Alert), Sumitomo's Presidio Ventures, UpHonest Capital, and DCode with GovTech Fund. Early investors Y Combinator, Tencent, Mandra Capital, Hemi Ventures, and GMO Ventures, also joined the round. To date, Skymind has raised $17.9 million in funding. Skymind's technology enables enterprises to build high-performance, predictive AI stacks. Specifically, the Skymind Intelligence Layer (SKIL) brings machine learning to a company's big data stack and computing resources, whether that data and computing power is on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment or on edge devices like mobile phones, drones, autonomous vehicles and healthcare sensors. "AI and machine learning are no longer on the enterprise wish list, they are a 'must have' as successful companies embrace the automation, predictive analytics and efficiency that AI provides," said Chris Nicholson, Skymind's founding CEO. "From the beginning, we have focused on creating an AI framework that will sustain companies for years to come, covering everything from data pipelines to algorithm trainig to model lifecycle management. Today's financing is a validation of our approach and technology."



Skymind will use its Series A funds to fuel customer acquisition, building out its sales teams in North America and Asia. Skymind currently has more than 40 employees and more than 20 enterprise customers, including Softbank (News - Alert) and France Telecom's Orange. As part of the new financing, Toshiya Otani, co-founder and managing director of TransLink Capital, will join the Skymind board of directors. "AI is an $11 billion-dollar market set to double in a few years, and Skymind, as one of the original leaders in open-source AI technology, is well positioned to capture a significant share of the market, particularly as more and more enterprises seek to integrate AI into their core business," said Toshiya Otani, co-founder and managing director, TransLink Capital. "We have confirmed that there is a significant market opportunity in Asia for Skymind's technology."

With state-of-the-art language models and natural-language processing pipelines, Skymind helps enterprise create more intelligent products as well as automate business processes. "Applying machine learning and AI to IT operations can help IT teams scale to meet the digital needs of their business," said Pat Casey, ServiceNow's Senior Vice President of Platform. "We've leveraged Skymind's technology in our Now Platform Madrid Release to power deep learning solutions across digital workflows. We look forward to our continued work with Skymind as we find new ways to incorporate AI technologies in our platform to drive great customer experiences." Skymind's platform is designed to help companies train machine learning models on a cluster and deploy them anywhere, notably on edge devices. "We see a lot of potential in bringing machine learning to mobile and other edge devices," said Ted Tatsumi, president and CEO of Sumitomo's Presidio Ventures (News - Alert). "The same is true for machine learning applications in the enterprise, and for businesses that seek to bring AI out into the real world." Prior to launching SKIL, Skymind created the most widely used open-source AI tool for the Java programming language, Eclipse Deeplearning4j, and is one of the largest contributors to the popular Python deep learning framework, Keras. About Skymind Skymind is an enterprise AI company offering an open-core machine-learning platform, commercial support and training for implementing state-of-the-art AI solutions. Headquartered in San Francisco, Skymind serves dozens of Fortune 500 companies that use its software to turn their big data stacks into AI stacks. Skymind's Eclipse Deeplearning4j is the most widely used AI framework for Java and Scala, and serves as a bridge between the Python data science community and big data tools like Spark and Kafka. About TransLink Capital TransLink Capital invests in early stage U.S.-based technology startups that can benefit from the firm's long-standing relationships with leading Asian corporates in technology, Internet, electronic manufacturing, telecommunications and auto space in Greater China, Japan, and South Korea. TransLink's primary focus is on Series A investing and selectively invests in seed and later-stage companies. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005063/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] Cape Cove Financial Management Recruits Two More Industry Leaders as it Rapidly Expands Across Canada

As Cape Cove Financial Management solidifies its position as one of the premiere Exempt Market Dealers in Canada it is proud to announce the addition of two more team members to its Western Canada Team. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005242/en/ Larisa Wells and Rick Couronne at their office in Calgary (Photo: Business Wire) Rick Couronne is joining Cape Cove in the role of Vice President of Business Development of Western Canada. During his tenure in the public markets, Couronne has raised well in excess of $100 million. Couronne brings three decades of experience to Cape Cove in the financial markets and has worked in both the private and public markets. Prior to joining Cape Cove, Couronne has held various senior executive positions including President and CEO of another Exempt Market Dealer. His experience includes Head rader at a Canadian branch of a major Wall Street Investment Brokerage firm, where he traded stocks, bonds and commodities. He was also a VP of Syndication, Stock Broker and VP of Trading and Sales Manager for a Toronto-based Boutique Brokerage firm. Couronne's expertise in Global Networking and Strategic Alliances provides him with a well-rounded perspective of the investment industry.



We are also thrilled to welcome Dr. Larisa Wells as Vice President. Wells has her PhD in Mathematical Economics and has worked closely with a vast network of business and portfolio managers to identify unique opportunities and investment strategies to empower investors in this lucrative and rapidly growing private and alternative space. Wells focuses on business owners and medical professionals who are looking to manage their wealth through tax efficient investments that are designed to provide a compliment to the public markets and in many cases, provide a cash-flow with an upside potential. Both Wells and Couronne, in addition to their executive roles will also continue as dealing representatives in the exempt market.

Cape Cove CEO, Robert Audet, says, "Cape Cove is delighted to be attracting top talent from across Canada. We are now bringing to our team two individuals with exceptional talent. This follows last week's announcement of a Canadian leader in Exempt Markets, Marvin Nickel, coming to Cape Cove. As we are growing so quickly, we are delighted to be gaining the attention of the country's best. They understand we're creating something different, a client-centred approach, where values speak volumes." About Cape Cove Coming from the foreign exchange market, Cape Cove is an emerging portfolio management firm that has been offering traditional and alternative investment solutions since 2016. Cape Cove continues to expand its services with the addition of a highly experienced and seasoned team of exempt market and mutual fund dealing representatives to compliment its team of advising representatives from the Portfolio Management division. These complimentary divisions create a unique and dynamic firm whose multi-disciplinary culture makes it possible to provide added value to its clients. Team members firmly believe that their vast expertise maximizes the opportunities for success while reducing the volatility and risk in clients' portfolios. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005242/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] UnitedHealthcare Launches National Vision Laboratory Network Relationship with Essilor Labs

UnitedHealthcare, a UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) company, has launched a national vision laboratory network to better serve eye care professionals and meet the needs of more than 19 million vision plan participants. The laboratory network has launched in collaboration with Essilor, which operates the largest optical lab network in the country. The expanded laboratory options are now serving UnitedHealthcare's eye care provider network, which includes independent optometrists and ophthalmologists. The laboratory network expansion was announced this week by John Ryan, general manager of UnitedHealthcare Vision, at the Vision Monday Global Leadership Summit in New York. "Expanding the UnitedHealthcare Vision laboratory network is an important part of our strategy to help eye care professionals provide our millions of vision plan participants access to quality eye care and affordable, stylish eyewear," said Ryan. "This expansion gives eye care providers more choice and flexibility, hile consumers benefit from access to the full range of eyewear technology and future product innovations."



UnitedHealthcare Vision is one of the nation's leading vision plans, ranking highest in customer satisfaction according to a recent J.D. Power report.* About UnitedHealthcare

UnitedHealthcare is dedicated to helping people live healthier lives and making the health system work better for everyone by simplifying the health care experience, meeting consumer health and wellness needs, and sustaining trusted relationships with care providers. In the United States, UnitedHealthcare offers the full spectrum of health benefit programs for individuals, employers, and Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, and contracts directly with more than 1.2 million physicians and care professionals, and 6,500 hospitals and other care facilities nationwide. The company also provides health benefits and delivers care to people through owned and operated health care facilities in South America. UnitedHealthcare is one of the businesses of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), a diversified health care company. For more information, visit UnitedHealthcare at www.uhc.com or follow @UHC on Twitter (News - Alert).

*UnitedHealthcare Vision has ranked highest in customer satisfaction five of the last six years, including tied for first place in the 2018 J.D. Power Vision Plan Satisfaction Report SM. Click here to subscribe to Mobile Alerts for UnitedHealth Group. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005042/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] East Coast Ski Areas Sweep 2019 Best In Snow Awards, Powered By Liftopia

SAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Liftopia, the largest online and mobile marketplace for lift tickets and mountain activities, unveiled the winners in the third annual Best in Snow Awards. The awards recognize the top ski areas across North America to bring uber-local, relevant and must-know intel to skiers and boarders of all levels and ages. For the first time, ski resorts in the Northeast took the top three spots in the 2019 Overall Best in Snow category. Resorts in other U.S and Canadian regions took top honors in seven categories including Top 10 Best in Snow, Beginner Friendly, Most Challenging, Family Friendly, Best Snow Consistency & Quality, Least Crowded and Best Value. Full results can be found at bestinsnow.liftopia.com . The Best in Snow Awards, Powered By Liftopia, is the first and only list that ranks the best ski areas based on feedback from thousands of skiers and snowboarders, combined with Liftopia's proprietary dataset, to uncover the true top ski areas in the Northeast, West Coast, High West, Southeast and Midwest. Via online surveys, consumers and Liftopia customers identified these categories as the most meaningful and useful when choosing where to ski or snowboard, regardless of ski area size. Combining fan feedback with Liftopia's data levels the playing field between big and small resorts. The top three winners of 2019 Overall Best in Snow  Magic Mountain (Vt.), Titus Mountain (N.Y.) and Mad River Glen (Vt.)  are all located in the Northeast. More highlights and survey quotes: Additional Overall Best in Snow in North America winners are Mad River Glen (keeping its #3 spot); Alta, Utah (#4); Powder Mountain, Utah (#5); Grand Targhee, Wyo. (#6); Snowbird, Utah (#7); Jackson Hole, Wyo. (#8); Jay Peak, Vt . (#9); and Big Sky, Mont. (#10)

in winners are Mad River Glen (keeping its #3 spot); (#4); Powder Mountain, (#5); Grand Targhee, Wyo. (#6); (#7); (#8); . (#9); and (#10) Magic Mountain took first place in five categories, retaining its top position as Overall Best in Snow in North America for the third year and also came in first in Best Value , Most Challenging Northeast and North America , with customers saying it's an "awesome community" boasting "uncrowded slopes," "great vibe," sought-after advanced terrain "because of the leave it natural policy" and "no lost kids because all trails lead to the lodge"

in for the third year and also came in first in , and , with customers saying it's an "awesome community" boasting "uncrowded slopes," "great vibe," sought-after advanced terrain "because of the leave it natural policy" and "no lost kids because all trails lead to the lodge" Titus Mountain made its debut on the Overall Best in Snow list at #2, and took Top Three in 11 national and regional (Northeast) categories for Beginner-Friendly , Family Friendly, Most Challenging, Least Crowded and Best Value. Voters consistently applaud "great grooming" and "always chairs availabe," "perfect slope for beginners" and "over-the-top family friendly" atmosphere

made its debut on the list at #2, and took Top Three in 11 national and regional (Northeast) categories for , and Voters consistently applaud "great grooming" and "always chairs availabe," "perfect slope for beginners" and "over-the-top family friendly" atmosphere Big Sky scored within the top ten in every category, placing ten times across Overall Best in Snow and regional lists



Best in Snow by Region awards go to Magic Mountain for Northeast; Bryce Resort in Virginia , which makes its debut on the Southeast list; Alta for High West (retaining its #1 spot); Yosemite Ski & Snowboard Area in California for West Coast (which also kept the #1 spot for Least Crowded West Coast); and Treetops Resort in Michigan for Midwest (its first Best in Snow by Region win). Top ten winners in each of the seven categories are ranked by region, with select winners including:

Best Snow Consistency and Quality : Magic Mountain won for Northeast; Mission Ridge (Wash.) for West Coast; Eagle Point ( Utah ) for High West; Canaan Valley (W.V.) for Southeast and Buck Hill (Minn.) for Midwest

: Magic Mountain won for Northeast; Mission Ridge (Wash.) for West Coast; Eagle Point ( ) for High West; Canaan Valley (W.V.) for Southeast and (Minn.) for Midwest Most Challenging : Bald Mountain ( Idaho ) took the top spot for the first time in High West

: Bald Mountain ( ) took the top spot for the first time in High West Beginner Friendly : Eagle Point ( Utah ) won High West, Canaan Valley (W.V.) won Southeast, Boyne Highlands (Mich.) jumped from #10 to #1 and Diamond Peak (Nev.) took top place for West Coast

: Eagle Point ( ) won High West, Canaan Valley (W.V.) won Southeast, Boyne Highlands (Mich.) jumped from #10 to #1 and (Nev.) took top place for West Coast Most Family Friendly : Bryce Resort (Va.) won its first #1 and Yosemite Ski & Snowboard Area retained first place

: Bryce Resort (Va.) won its first #1 and Yosemite Ski & Snowboard Area retained first place Yosemite Ski & Snowboard Area swept four categories at #1 for Best in Snow West Coast, Family Friendly , Least Crowded and Best Value

West Coast, , and Least Crowded: Winners include Snow Ridge (N.Y.) for Northeast, Soldier Mountain ( Idaho ) for High West, Canaan Valley for Southeast and Dagmar Resort ( Ontario, Canada ) for Midwest "We built Liftopia on a passion for growing an amazing industry, and the Best in Snow Awards were created to help skiers and riders easily discover their next favorite mountain, based on factors that matter most to them," said Evan Reece, co-founder and CEO of Liftopia. He added, "For the third year, Liftopia's Best in Snow Awards is the only ranking that levels the playing field between big and small resorts to uncover the top mountains that skiers and riders are most passionate about based on a variety of factors, from snowfall, snow quality and terrain to crowds, ambiance and variety of options for any ski enthusiast. We are excited for the ski resorts that made the list this year, and thrilled for our customers as they find new mountains to explore." Methodology

To compile the 2019 Best In Snow Awards, Powered by Liftopia, some 8,000 consumers were surveyed to measure their enthusiasm on specific aspects of their favorite resorts such as challenging terrain, crowds, family friendliness, snow consistency and overall quality. The responses were weighted with a proprietary algorithm based on Liftopia's exclusive dataset. The complete Best in Snow Awards list, including winning ski areas in each category across North America and detailed methodology can be found at bestinsnow.liftopia.com . About Liftopia

Liftopia operates the largest online and mobile marketplace and resort technology platform serving the ski and activity industry. Skiers and snowboarders can purchase lift tickets, equipment rentals, meal vouchers and more from over 250 ski areas in North America and Europe on Liftopia.com and via the Liftopia mobile app, with savings often more than 50% off window rates when purchased in advance. In 2019, Liftopia Experiences launched as hosted ski and snowboard trips in 26 markets across North America, making it easy and affordable to access the mountains. Founded in 2005, Liftopia is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by leading institutional and angel investors. Visit the Liftopia blog or follow along on Facebook , Instagram , and Twitter . Media contact: Jennifer Maguire, [email protected] View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/east-coast-ski-areas-sweep-2019-best-in-snow-awards-powered-by-liftopia-300817123.html SOURCE Liftopia

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] Call for Speakers Open for 2019 Retail Cyber Intelligence Summit

The Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC) today announced that the call for speakers is now open for its Retail Cyber Intelligence Summit taking place September 24-25, 2019 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Denver, Colorado. This unique event is tailored for strategic leaders and cybersecurity practitioners from both physical and online retailers, gaming properties, grocers, hotels, restaurants, consumer product manufacturers and cybersecurity industry partners. The conference offers the opportunity to exchange ideas among peers through collaborative discussions and practical cybersecurity talks. This year's conference theme is "Protect as One." Interested speakers are invited to propose a sesion that covers a wide range of subject matter, including best practice discussions, current threats or cybersecurity challenges, game-changing technologies, or other top of mind issues for cybersecurity professionals.



Suggested topics include: Building a Threat Intelligence Program

Incident Response Planning

Orchestration and Automation

The Intersection of Fraud and Security

Risk Management on a global scale

Spotlight on a trending or emerging threat to retail

Diversity and inclusion in cybersecurity

Insider Threats to security and data protection

Phishing and business email compromise

Patch management and third-party security The Call for Speakers submission form can be found here. The early submission deadline is March 26, 2019. All submissions must be in by April 26, 2019. Selected speakers will be notified by the end of May.

About RH-ISAC

Formed in 2014 as the Retail Cyber Intelligence Sharing Center, the Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC) operates as the trusted community for sharing sector-specific cyber security information and intelligence. The RH-ISAC connects information security teams at the strategic, operational and tactical levels to work together on issues and challenges, to share practices and insights, and to benchmark among each other - all with the goal of building better security for the retail and hospitality industries through collaboration. RH-ISAC currently serves retail, hotels, restaurants, gaming and other consumer-facing entities. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005370/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] Dahua Technology USA Celebrates Five Years in North America

Dahua Technology, a leading video surveillance solutions provider, is celebrating its fifth year of local operation in the North American market. Established in Irvine in 2014, the North America office has grown from one employee - President and CEO of Dahua Technology USA, Tim Wang - to more than 100 employees in the span of five years. Today, the Dahua Technology USA team includes sales representatives and technical consultants spread throughout every region of the United States and Canada. The company attributes its success, in part, to its commitment to empowering its customers. As such, "Empowering through Technology" is Dahua Technology's theme at this year's ISC West show, April 10-12, in Las Vegas. "Dahua Technology empowers our dealers and integrators to stay at the top of their field by providing the latest security solutions to their end-users," Tim Shen, Director of Marketing at Dahua Technology USA, explained. "In addition, the resources we make available to our dealers ensure that they are up-to-speed on their knowledge of our technology and fully trained on the products." These resources include Learn Dahua, an online platform available to Dahua Technology USA's registered dealer partners, which offers video tutorials and courses on Dahua technology. Dealer partners also benefit from monthly webinars. The DahuaWiki (www.dahuawiki.com) is an extensive public resource that includes side-by-side product comparisons, manuals, how-tos, live camera demos, software, and firmware. It has received seven million hits since its launch, and currently averages approximately 16,000 hits a day.



Dahua Technology's advanced technology is the fruit of more than 50% of the research and development engineers at company headquarters. Dahua Technology is known for its proprietary video compression codec, Smart H.265+, as well as its cutting-edge Starlight technology. Dahua Technology was the first company to introduce penta-brid technology in its digital video recorders, allowing the five most common transmission formats to integrate into one system. The latest offerings include the new Multi-Flex panoramic camera, Night Color technology for detailed, full-color images in near-complete darkness, and Extended Power over Ethernet (ePoE) technology, which is compatible with both coaxial and IP cabling. All of these products and more will be on display at booth 14039 at ISC West. "Dahua Technology's forward-thinking approach keeps us at the leading edge of video surveillance technology, which in turn allows our dealers to sell and install our products with confidence," said Wayne Hurd, VP of Sales at Dahua Technology USA. "Our technology is constantly evolving to meet current and future needs, giving dealers and end-users peace of mind that they've selected the most advanced security solution on the market."

About Dahua Technology USA Dahua Technology USA Inc. is a subsidiary of Dahua Technology, the world's second-largest manufacture of video surveillance equipment by market share, according to a 2018 IHS (News - Alert) report. Dahua Technology USA brings high-value, total security solutions to the North American market by focusing on integrity and personal relationships to enhance the customer experience. Dahua Technology's surveillance solutions, from award-winning cameras to video management software, deliver unparalleled quality, reliability, and stability, providing sales and support throughout the U.S. and Canada. The North American region is led by Tim Wang, President and CEO, and several industry experienced executives. For more information, please visit: us.dahuasecurity.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005453/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] Pinterest Files Registration Statement with SEC for Proposed Initial Public Offering

SAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Pinterest, Inc. ("Pinterest") today announced that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") relating to a proposed initial public offering of shares of its Class A common stock. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Allen & Company LLC will serve as lead joint book-running managers for the offering. BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital Inc., Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. and RBC Capital Markets, LLC will also act as book-running managers for the offering. Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, UBS Securities LLC and Wells Fargo Securities, LLC will serve as co-managers for the offering. The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the preliminary prospectus relating to the offering, when available, may be obtained from Goldman Sachs & Co. LC, Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, telephone: 1-866-471-2526 or by emailing [email protected]; J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, phone: 866-803-9204, email: [email protected]; or Allen & Company, Prospectus Department, 711 Fifth Avenue, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10022, email: [email protected]



A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC, but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. Contacts:

[email protected]

[email protected]

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pinterest-files-registration-statement-with-sec-for-proposed-initial-public-offering-300817263.html SOURCE Pinterest

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]Vanguard

Acting Inspector General of Police, IGP, Mr Mohammed, Adamu has directed the Zonal Assistant Inspectors General of Police and their respective Commissioners of Police in states where supplementary elections are taking place to ensure that adequate mechanisms are in place towards ensuring a safe and secure environment for the conduct of the elections.

Thisday

The trial of the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen, appears to be reaching an anti-climax with key prosecution witnesses testimony contradicting claims that the embattled number one judicial officer might have corruptly amassed wealth way out of his income.

The Sun

The wave of building collapse has cost Nigeria so much in assets and human capital. Although, it may not be difficult to quantify properties, human lives cannot be quantified and each time a building collapses, lives and properties go with it. This has had far-reaching effect on the psyche of those affected because since live has no duplicate, once it is lost, it is lost forever.

Daily Times

In a brazen show of arrogance, abuse of power and disrespect for the rights of others to practice their professions, the Chairman of the Code of Conduct of Tribunal, Justice Danladi Umar, on Thursday, threatened to imprison any journalist who misrepresents the ongoing proceedings on the suspended Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Walter Onnoghen

Leadership

About 196 students have lost their properties to fire outbreak at two different secondary schools within the week in Jigawa State

Daily Trust

Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State has said he will include the two defeated APC gubernatorial candidates, Usani Usani and Senator John Owan-Enoh as well as that of SDP, Barrister Eyo Ekpo, in his cabinet.

The Nation

CRITICS of TraderMoni  a social investment programme of the Federal Government  got a reply yesterday to their claim that the scheme was introduced to buy votes during the general elections.[March 22, 2019] Citi to Delist from Mexican Stock Exchange and Cross-List on the International Quotation System of the Mexican Stock Exchange

The Board of Directors of Citigroup Inc. ("Citigroup") has resolved to: (i) apply for the voluntary deregistration of Citigroup's common stock from the Mexican Securities Registry maintained by the Mexican Banking and Securities Commission ("CNBV"), (ii) delist such common stock from the Mexican Stock Exchange ("MSE") and (iii) simultaneously cross-list such common stock on the International Quotation System ("SIC") of the MSE. The cross-listing on the SIC will allow Mexican investors to continue trading Citigroup's common stock. Delisting from the MSE is expected to come into effect 20 business days after the CNBV approves Citigroup's deregistration application. The delisting of Citigroup's common stock from the MSE and its simultaneous cross-listing on the SIC will not affect Citigroup's businesses in the country. Mexico remains an important market for Citigroup, which is committed to further strengthening its capabilities to better serve its corporate and institutional clients in Mexico. Citi Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 counries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.



Additional information may be found at www.citigroup.com | Twitter (News - Alert): @Citi | YouTube: www.youtube.com/citi| Blog: http://blog.citigroup.com | Facebook (News - Alert): www.facebook.com/citi | LinkedIn (News - Alert):www.linkedin.com/company/citi

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005456/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP Announces Investigation on Behalf of Swedbank AB Investors (SWDBY)

Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP ("GPM") announces an investigation on behalf of Swedbank AB ("Swedbank" or the "Company") (OTC: SWDBY) investors concerning the Company and its officers' possible violations of federal securities laws. If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate. If you wish to learn more about this action, or if you have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Lesley Portnoy, Esquire, at 31-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, or by email to [email protected], or visit our website at www.glancylaw.com.



On or around February 20, 2019, a Swedish TV program alleged that at least 40 billion Swedish crowns ($4.25 billion) had moved between Swedbank and Danske accounts between 2007 and 2015, and Estonian prosecutors confirmed that they were "checking out the claims as part of [their] Danske investigation." On this news, Swedbank's ADRs fell $3.09, or nearly 14%, to close at $19.57 on February 20, 2019, thereby injuring investors. If you purchased Swedbank 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 Lesley Portnoy, of GPM, 1925 Century Park East, Suite 2100, Los Angeles, CA (News - Alert) 90067 at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, or visit our website at www.glancylaw.com. If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number, and the number of shares purchased.

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005461/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP Announces Investigation on Behalf of Avon Products, Inc. Investors (AVP)

Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP ("GPM") announces an investigation on behalf of Avon Products, Inc. ("Avon" or the "Company") (NYSE: AVP) investors concerning the Company and its officers' possible violations of federal securities laws. If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate. If you wish to learn more about this action, or if you have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Lesley Portnoy, Esquire, at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, or by email to [email protected], or visit our website at www.glancylaw.com.



On August 3, 2017, Avon issued a press release announcing its second quarter 2017 financial results and held a conference call to discuss the results. The Company reported a net loss of $0.12 per share and a 3% decline in active representatives. Avon also reported that Brazil revenue was "down 2% in constant dollars, primarily driven by a decrease in Active Representatives." On the call, Avon's Chief Financial Officer acknowledged that, despite Avon's earlier representations, the remedial actions in Brazil (i.e., stricter credit terms applied to recruiting new representatives) were negatively impacting active representatives and revenue in Brazil. On this news, shares of Avon fell $0.36, or 10.71%, to close at $3.00 per share on August 3, 2017, thereby injuring investors.

If you purchased Avon 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 Lesley Portnoy, of GPM, 1925 Century Park East, Suite 2100, Los Angeles, CA (News - Alert) 90067 at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, or visit our website at www.glancylaw.com. If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number, and the number of shares purchased. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190322005467/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] United States Marketing Analytics Market 2019-2024: Increasing Need to Utilize Marketing Budgets for an Effective ROI & Adoption of Cloud Technology and Big Data

DUBLIN, March 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "United States Marketing Analytics Market - Growth, Trends, Forecast (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The US marketing analytics market was valued at USD 847.81 million and is anticipated to register a CAGR of 12.9% over the forecast period (2019-2024). The benefits of analytics have become highly obvious for companies, as the competition for the retention of customers has become a necessity for the businesses. Companies these days use multiple channels to keep the customers informed and connected with them. Analytics solution allows them to keep track of the impact of the actions taken. This has resulted in the integration of these solutions with the existing ERP solution, which is beneficial in using the generated and available data. Increasing need to utilize marketing budgets for an effective ROI is estimated to boost the market over the forecast period. Furthermore, the adoption of cloud technology and Big Data is also increasing the growth of the US marketing analytics market. Over the course of 2017, technology giants, like Google, Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle added more data sources to their ever-growing marketing capabilities. This particular trend is expected to continue, as businesses of all sizes work to lessen the complexity of data collection, cleansing, and usage across their organizations. Scope of the Report Marketing analytics software aid a company in tracking the data pertaining to traffic, leads, and sales. Implementation of marketing analytics helps the person of interest to compare between various mediums of operation, such as social media vs. blogging vs. email marketing. These analytics also aid in diagnosing the difficulties faced in a particular channel, and the tactical steps that need to be taken to improve the background. Key Market Trends E-mail Marketing Segment to Hold Major Market Share over the Forecast Period E-mail marketing is one of the primary channels of marketing for most US businesses in their overall marketing strategy. Considering the number of e-mail users, about 233 million in the United States (as of 2017), the marketers find great opportunities to reach out to customers. E-mail marketing is considered the third-most influential source of information for B2B customers after collegue recommendations and industry thought leaders (or influencers). While large businesses are using email marketing for increasing their brand loyalty, and are usually sales focused, small businesses are focusing on increasing their brand reach across the region.



Furthermore, the marketing analytics software enables businesses to create a customer segment based on different metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates. This is to personalize their marketing approach and also to evaluate their ROI, relative to the other forms of marketing, like display ads and search engine marketing. According to Constant Contact Inc., a New York-based marketing company, e-mail marketing is the most popular form of marketing among the 1,005 US small business owners they surveyed. Among which, around 42% are using e-mail marketing for new potential customers and drive brand awareness.

Competitive Landscape The US marketing analytics market is highly competitive and consists of several major players. In terms of market share, few of the major players currently dominate the market. These major players with a prominent share in the market are focusing on expanding their customer base across foreign countries. In July 2017, Teradata announced the acquisition of StackIQ, a prominent developer of cloud analytics software, which has managed the deployment of cloud and analytics software at millions of servers in data centers around the world. The acquisition is expected to strengthen the R&D capabilities of the company. Furthermore, in Jun 2018, Microsoft signed a MoU with New Sales Wales to trial a major data science project based on procurement analytics. Key Topics Covered: 1 Introduction 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Market Dynamics

















4.1 Market Overview

4.2 Industry Attractiveness Porter's Five Forces Analysis

4.3 Industry Value Chain Analysis

4.4 Introduction to Market Drivers and Restraints

4.5 Market Drivers

4.5.1 Increase in Social Media Channels

4.5.2 Increasing Need to Utilize Marketing Budgets for an Effective ROI

4.5.3 Adoption of Cloud Technology and Big Data

4.6 Market Restraints

4.6.1 High Cost of Implementation and System Integration Issues for Marketing Analytics Software

4.6.2 Availability of Many Free Open Source Software

4.7 Technology Snapshot 5 Market Segmentation





5.1 By Deployment

5.1.1 Cloud

5.1.2 On-premise

5.2 By Application

5.2.1 Online Marketing

5.2.2 E-mail Marketing

5.2.3 Content Marketing

5.2.4 Social Media Marketing

5.2.5 Other Applications

5.3 By End User

5.3.1 Retail

5.3.2 BFSI

5.3.3 Education

5.3.4 Healthcare

5.3.5 Manufacturing

5.3.6 Travel and Hospitality

5.3.7 Other End Users 6 Competitive Landscape





6.1 Company Profiles

6.1.1 IBM Corporation

6.1.2 Microsoft Corporation

6.1.3 Oracle Corporation

6.1.4 Salesforce.Com Inc.

6.1.5 Accenture PLC

6.1.6 Adobe Systems Incorporated

6.1.7 SAS Institute Inc.

6.1.8 Teradata Corporation

6.1.9 Neustar, Inc.

6.1.10 Pegasystems Inc.

6.1.11 Tableau Software

6.1.12 Google LLC 7 Investment Analysis 8 Market Opportunities and Future Trends











For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/hk72rt/united_states?w=5



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[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2019] dynaCERT and H2 Tek Nab Top Prize at the 2019 Mining Cleantech Challenge

TORONTO, March 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- dynaCERT Inc. (TSX VENTURE: DYA) (OTCQB: DYFSF) (FRA: DMJ) ("dynaCERT" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has won first prize along with its dealer, H2 Tek at the 2019 Mining Cleantech Challenge in Colorado.

First place winner dynaCERT Inc./H2 Tek took home the $5,000 prize at the March 21, 2019, Mining Cleantech Challenge in Denver. Their technology was chosen by mining executives and investors in the industry as the best among a competitive field of 12 total companies representing the U.S., Canada and Israel. An international team of judges reviewed and voted on the winners. dynaCERTs HydraGEN Technology turns distilled water into H2 and O2 gases on-demand and introduces these gases directly to diesel engines air intakes. Our technology, HydraGEN, said H2 Tek Vice President of Sales and Marketing, David Van Klaveren, can actually improve significantly those carbon emissions, reduce them, and along the way pay for the capital cost of all this through fuel efficiency savings. We cant ignore the fact that clean technology is an important part of our responsibility as participants and members of this industry, the mining industry, continued Van Klaveren. I think its remarkable that an association considers this a priority: bringing together companies that have innovation for an extremely important cause. Exequiel Rolon from sponsor company Fresnillo, one of the founding sponsors, agreed, saying, Its my third year and its been very surprising to see all the startup companies that come up with very innovative ideas that are actually very beneficial for the mining companies. I think the mining industry as a whole can benefit from these efforts, said Rolon. One of our commitments is to foster and collaborate with entrepreneurs that are developing these kinds of technologies. While the global mining industry navigates an evolving market, certain producers are integrating innovative technology and alternative, less polluting energy sources into mining operations. Incorporating clean energy practices into the industry is a challenge that we see our sponsoring companies tackling head-on, said Shelly Curtiss, Executive Director of Colorado Cleantech Industries Association, which hosts the Mining Cleantech Challenge. Rolon concluded, Somehow this event is unique in the world and provides value that is very complicated to find. Supporters of the day-long program included Newmont Mining, Fresnillo, as well as Jolimont Global, Ausenco, Resource Capital Funds, Consulate General of Canada in Denver, Colorado School of Mines, Rocky Mountain Institute and the Mountain Studies Institute. im Payne, President & CEO of dynaCERT, commented, I congratulate H2 Tek for their commitment and efforts for introducing dynaCERT to the mining industry. This award again demonstrates the positive reception that we are receiving from all over the world and we welcome this one as it relates to another very important industry. On behalf of dynaCERT and H2 Tek, I thank the Mining Cleantech Challenge organizers and participants for honouring us in this most important endeavor to finding a Solution for Pollution.



About dynaCERT Inc.

dynaCERT Inc. manufactures, distributes, and installs Carbon Emission Reduction Technology for use with internal combustion engines. As part of the growing global hydrogen economy, our patent-pending technology creates hydrogen and oxygen on-demand through electrolysis and supplies these through the air intake to enhance combustion, resulting in lower carbon emissions and greater fuel efficiency. Our technology is designed for use with all types and sizes of diesel engines used in on-road vehicles, reefer trailers, off-road construction, power generation, mining and forestry equipment, marine vessels and railroad locomotives. Website: www. dynaCERT .com READER ADVISORY

Except for statements of historical fact, this news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. In particular, forward-looking information in this press release includes, but is not limited to the potential expansion into new markets, industries and segments, such as diesel- powered use of any the dynaCERT products and sales. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. We cannot guarantee future results, performance of achievements. Consequently, there is no representation that the actual results achieved will be the same, in whole or in part, as those set out in the forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward- looking information. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: uncertainty as to whether our strategies and business plans will yield the expected benefits; availability and cost of capital; the ability to identify and develop and achieve commercial success for new products and technologies; the level of expenditures necessary to maintain and improve the quality of products and services; changes in technology and changes in laws and regulations; the uncertainty of the emerging hydrogen economy; including the hydrogen economy moving at a pace not anticipated; our ability to secure and maintain strategic relationships and distribution agreements; and the other risk factors disclosed under our profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com . Readers are cautioned that this list of risk factors should not be construed as exhaustive. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. We undertake no duty to update any of the forward-looking information to conform such information to actual results or to changes in our expectations except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Neither 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 the release. On Behalf of the Board

Murray James Payne, CEO For more information, please contact: Jim Payne, CEO & President

dynaCERT Inc.

#101  501 Alliance Avenue Toronto, Ontario M6N 2J1

(416) 766-9691 x 2

[email protected]dynaCERT.com Investor Relations

dynaCERT Inc.

Nancy Massicotte

(416) 766-9691 x 1

[email protected] dynaCERT .com



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Kansas celebrates one of Earth's most important resources One of the most fundamental resources in the state, and in the world, was celebrated at the Statehouse Thursday. Gov. Laura Kelly signed a proclamation declaring Friday as Kansas Water Day. Lawmakers and others learned about water resources and management throughout the state.

Apropos for all of the local flooding but not another drop to drink amid the longterm decline of the. Still, a sign that Democratic Party leadership is far more concerned with the environmental fate of the planet than their Republican colleagues. Read more:The Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) have stirred the reactions of Nigerians on Social media, after it asked President Muhammadu Buhari to appoint Muslim ministers from five south-west states in his  next level cabinet.

This was made known in a statement by Ishaq Akintola, MURICs director, because despite the fact that Muslims are in the majority in the region, they have always been shortchanged politically Muslim ministers in all the states where the governors are Christians (Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Ondo and Ekiti), should be appointed.

See statement below

We received the worst treatment under former President Goodluck Jonathan. He appointed six ministers from the sub-region but, to our dismay, all of them were Christians. We complained about this gross injustice but he ignored us for three good years (2011 to 2014).

A delegation of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) led by the Sultan of Sokoto met him in Aso Rock and presented this lopsidedness among other grudges. This was on Wednesday 26th March, 2014. To our surprise, Jonathan retorted by asking us why the northern states have not been sponsoring Christians in the North on pilgrimage.

That was the kind of leader Jonathan was. We complained to him about the marginalization of a Muslim majority in the South West and he challenged us with the issue of Christian minorities in the North. That was how he exposed himself as a president whose interest lay in waging a crusade against Muslims. He reluctantly appointed two Muslims some months later. Wailers accusing President Buhari of lopsided appointments may take this as food for thought.

MURIC is neither being selfish nor sentimental. Natural justice demands equitable representation if we are all part of the Nigerian project. By the time newly elected governors are sworn in on May 29, 2019, the South West will be having five Christian governors and only one Muslim governor. This leaves Muslims at a disadvantage in a sub-region where they are the majority.

Unfortunately the situation was not redressed by the current administration. Of the six ministers appointed by Buhari, only two (Babatunde Raji Fashola and Adebayo Shittu) are Muslims. The remaining four are Christians. The only difference is that Buhari was not pressurized by the Muslims before he gave them two ministers. Neither were all his ministers from the area Christians like Jonathan did. Buhari gave the Muslims two slots and gave Christians four. Jonathan gave the Christians six and left the Muslims to whistle for their dinner.

We are therefore demanding Muslim ministers in all the states where the governors are Christians (Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Ondo and Ekiti). This request should be considered against the backdrop of the gross marginalisation which Yoruba Muslims have faced in the past.

As we take a break, we appeal to the presidency to consider the need to urgently address the injustice done to Muslims in the South West where they are the majority. They have always been politically marginalized despite having qualified personnel. Unfortunately Buharis regime has also inadvertently shortchanged them. In the name of justice, fairness and equity, therefore, we demand Muslim ministers in the five South West states where the governors will be Christians come May 29, 2019.

See reactions what Nigerians on Twitter are saying

@Victorokuta wrote:

Weve misplaced priorities all in the name of religion and ethnicity, let Baba Buhari appoint traditionalist or atheist has his minister in as much he will perform excellently as expected.

Faruk Jaji wrote:

Ehehn, Muric is a Joke Walahi. Appointment now should be made on basis of religion not competency anymore. Five christian governors should equal five muslim ministers. Who cares if all the ministers are christians or muslims. Let this country move forward. Period.

But l know if it is the way Muric is boldly talking in Nigeria. If it is Christians talking like that, would have been called to be arrested that he want to divide Nigeria, like everyone have been withnessin.  Ayo (@MAMA_RICHIE) March 22, 2019

https://twitter.com/Horlarhwumii/status/1109026152969056256?s=19KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The Kansas City Fire Department battled a large house fire near 59th and Wabash around 2:30 Friday morning. The fire quickly spread to nearby homes, damaging three houses in total. Two of the houses are total losses. They were occupied, but no one was inside when the fire took place.Optimus Ride, an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) spin-off developing self-driving vehicle technology, has announced plans to deploy its autonomous vehicles at three sites in New York, Virginia and California.

Optimus Ride will be deploying its self-driving systems at: the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City, a 300-acre modern industrial park with over 400 manufacturing businesses and 9,000 people working on site; a new US$1.4bn mixed-use development in Reston, Virginia, operated by Brookfield Properties; and Paradise Valley Estates, a private 80-acre, non-profit Life Plan Community located in Fairfield, California.

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Optimus Ride will provide residents and workers at all three sites with access to efficient and convenient self-driving mobility within defined, geofenced areas. With these new programs, Optimus Ride will be operating automated deployments in four US states.

Due to launch in the second quarter of 2019, the companys deployment at the Brooklyn Navy Yard will be the first commercial self-driving vehicle program in the state of New York. Optimus Ride will operate self-driving vehicles on the Brooklyn Navy Yards private roads, providing a loop shuttle service to connect NYC Ferry passengers to Flushing Avenue outside the Yards perimeter.

Paradise Valley Estates will welcome the Optimus Ride vehicle system onto its private, gated community this summer. During the initial phase of the program, the primary service will be to provide prospective residents with self-driving tours of the community. Additionally, residents will be able to access the vehicle through its reservation and on-demand ride services to travel to-and-from their friends homes, as well as travel to the community/health center, and access outdoor activities within the property.

Beginning in June, Optimus Ride will provide tenants at buildings currently on the Halley Rise site with access to efficient self-driving mobility completely contained within the development site of new housing, local retail, modern offices, public green spaces, and year-round cultural activities. Residents will be able to use Optimus Rides reservation system and on-demand ride services.

During the initial phase, a total of three self-driving vehicles will remain completely within the development site and transport tenants from their office buildings to parking lots at the site. An operations team on site will actively monitor the fleet service, as well as provide maintenance, cleaning, charging and updating of the vehicles.

Working with leading developments and communities like Halley Rise, Paradise Valley Estates and the Brooklyn Navy Yard enables us to further our mission to transform mobility, said Dr Ryan Chin, CEO and co-founder of Optimus Ride.

Were pleased to be the first company to launch a self-driving vehicle program in the state of New York and, having now announced three deployments in the first quarter of 2019, are well positioned as the leader in self-driving systems for geofenced areas.

We are committed to the goals of Vision Zero, a multinational road traffic safety initiative that aims to achieve a road network with no fatalities or serious injuries involving road traffic, and all our vehicles are programmed to adhere to Vision Zero speeds.Book Royal Cliffs Eggciting Easter Wonderland Family Party before slot runs out!



(TRAVPR.COM) THAILAND - March 21st, 2019 - Pattaya, Thailand  Hop on over and join Royal Cliffs Funtasea Easter Wonderland to celebrate an unforgettable Easter with the entire family on Sunday, 21 April 2019 at Panorama - Dramatic Atmosphere! With fun and unique games, exciting lucky draw and special treats lined up for the whole family, dont miss this memorable afternoon of non-stop family fun! Every game has a winner and every winner gets a prize. All kids will get a chance to enjoy exciting activities, decorate colorful Easter eggs and bunny cookies or take part in an exciting Easter egg hunt.

The party is from 2:00  5:00 pm. Admission fee is only THB 500 per person for hotel guests and THB 550 per person for all outside guests. Other delightful perks include a mini Easter snack buffet, enjoyable arts and crafts, fun face-painting, and lots of fun Easter games. Get ready for a truly eggciting Easter Sunday. Reserve your place now!

For more information or to reserve a place for the party, please contact Ms. Cherry at (+66) 38-250-421 Ext. 2064

Royal Cliff Hotels Group successfully hosts popular family-friendly events that have become part of Pattayas most anticipated events every year. We offer family-friendly accommodations along with on-site amenities that keep both parents and kids happy and entertained at all times. Funtasea  Kids World and The Verge - Games, Pool and Karaoke offer productive and fun activities for families to enjoy. Fantastic Kids Party Packages promise non-stop fun and games for everyone! For more information, kindly contact Funtasea  Kids World at (+66) 38-250-421 Ext. 2064

The Royal Cliff Hotels Group operates 4 award-winning hotels providing tourists from home and abroad with the ultimate experience. Book your stay directly with Royal Cliff and get the best price guaranteed along with value-added optional extras that will enhance your hotel experience by contacting Reservations at (+66) 38 250 421 ext. 2732

###Spend your precious summer holiday doing something memorable as a family this year.



(TRAVPR.COM) UK - March 22nd, 2019 - Activities Abroad - a family travel specialist that offers an array of active holidays  has action-packed itineraries worldwide, including Croatia, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, Borneo, the Azores and Montenegro.

Croatian Island Adventure

Explore hidden coves and rocky reefs as part of a flexible itinerary, which includes sea-kayaking across turquoise waters, hiking for treasure along picturesque trails and biking through sleepy villages. Stay at a beautiful beachside guesthouse in the quaint seaside village of Sipanska Luka, on the island of Sipan in the Elaphiti archipelago. Take a short ferry ride to the historic city of Dubrovnik for a day, wandering around the picturesque city walls and cobbled streets, before exploring the plethora of shops, cafes and ice cream parlours.

Dominic, aged 8, who explored Croatia with his parents and sister last year, said:

I would recommend this holiday to anyone that likes sunshine, yummy food and a bit of a challenge. I would really like to go to Croatia again because the views everywhere you stood were amazing!

The seven-night Croatia  An Island Adventure holiday is priced from 875 pp (two sharing), including international flights (London), transfers, seven nights B&B, one lunch and six dinners. Activities priced at 45 per person per activity. Departs 25 May; 6, 20 and 27 July; and 10, 17 and 24 August 2019. Suitable for six years and above.

Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands

Despite being one of South Americas smallest countries, Ecuador is a remarkable land of contrasts for adventurous families to explore. Discover the fascinating landscape while mountain biking down volcanoes, exploring lush cloud forests, horseback riding through Cotopaxi National Park and white water rafting through the Amazon rainforest. On the Galapagos Islands, snorkelling, hiking and mountain biking activities are specially designed for families to uncover the islands extraordinary land and marine wildlife.

Rebecca, aged 16, who travelled with her family last year, said:

The amount of activities that were crammed into the two weeks was amazing and we even got plenty of spare time to explore the sights and go shopping. The wildlife was incredible, from iguanas walking across the road to large turtles on the sides of the paths. All the guides were incredibly knowledgeable and helped us learn about the culture and wildlife. I would 100% recommend it, I had the time of my life.

The 14-night Exploring Ecuador and the Galapagos holiday is priced from 5,595 per adult / 5,465 per child aged 8-12 (based on two sharing), including internal flights and transfers, 14 nights B&B, 11 lunches and dinners and guided activities. International flights extra. Departs 13 July; 3 and 10 August 2019. Suitable for children aged eight years and above.

Lava lands and dolphin swimming in the Azores

Based in the city of Ponta Delgada on Sao Miguel Island in the Azores, this varied family adventure holiday includes kayaking and mountain biking at the Sete Cidades Lake, lagoon snorkelling, hot spring bathing, whale watching, canyoning, swimming with dolphins in their natural ocean habitat and exploring the mysterious Gruta do Carvao, the islands longest lava tunnel. The accommodation at Sao Miguel Park features indoor and outdoor pools, plus spa facilities, perfect for relaxing after a days adventure.

Lorraine, who travelled with her family last summer, said:

My daughters have already asked to go back; which is testament to their enjoyment; and ours. We will definitely look to book another holiday with Activities Abroad as it was so fun filled and hassle free; just what every parent needs! Our group and guides were also a fantastic bunch of people making it a perfect recipe for success.

The seven-night Azores  Lava Lands and Swimming with Dolphins holiday is priced from 1,485 per adult/ 1,325 per child aged 13-18/ 1,075 per child aged 8-12 (based on a family of four sharing), including international flights (Gatwick), transfers, seven nights B&B, five lunches, two dinners and guided activities. Departs April, May, July, August and October 2019. Suitable for ages eight and above.

Montenegro Active Fjord and Mountain Adventure

Travel along cobbled streets once walked by the ancient Romans and swim in waters once sailed by pirates in the town of Kotor, on Montenegros Adriatic coast. The countrys vast mountain landscapes make an awe-inspiring backdrop for activities including snorkelling, swimming, kayaking and a high ropes course. Spend two nights in the mountain town of abljak to explore untouched nature in Durmitor National Park, rafting through the Tara Canyon and orienteering around spectacular mountain lakes.

Jennifer, who travelled with her young family said:

We had a fabulous holiday thank you! We would also like to pass on our thanks to the local guides who were very knowledgeable and reliable.

The seven-night Montenegro Active Fjord and Mountain holiday is priced from 1,315 per adult/ 1,275 per child aged 8-16 (based on a family of four sharing), including international flights (London), transfers, seven nights B&B, two lunches, five dinners and guided activities. Departs 25 July and 8 August 2019. Suitable for ages eight and above.

The Best of Borneo

Staying at a five-star, beachside resort in Kota Kinabalu, take a boat ride around tropical islands, snorkel along coral reefs and fly along the largest inter-island zipwire in the world. Spend the remaining nights at nature lodges surrounded by dense rainforest, with day trips allowing for face-to-face encounters with endangered species including proboscis monkeys, sun bears and orangutans, plus a visit to the Gomantong Caves, a nesting ground for swifts and 27 species of bat.

Graham, who travelled with his family last year, said:

A truly wonderful holiday which I would recommend to anyone. It was a particular pleasure to engage in the activities with a couple of other like-minded families.

The 11-night Best of Borneo holiday is priced from 2,675 pp (two sharing), including transfers, 11 nights B&B, eight lunches, one dinner and guided activities. Internal and international flights extra. Departs 3 and 10 August 2019. Suitable for ages 10 and above.

To speak to a Family Travel Expert for more information, or to book a summer family holiday, contact Activities Abroadon 01670 789 991 (www.activitiesabroad.com).

N.B. Younger children may be able to join the holiday but may not be able to participate in all the activities.

ENDS/

Note to editors:

Brexit guarantee: Activities Abroad can confirm that regardless of the outcome of Brexit, the cost of your holiday will remain the same.For further details visit https://www.activitiesabroad.com/our-brexit-guarantee

Part of The Artisan Travel Company, award-winning Activities Abroad specialises in family travel and experiences for all the family to enjoy together. It is a sister company to small group and tailormade experts Artisan Travel and Northern Lights specialists The Aurora Zone.

Press: For press enquiries or high resolution photography, please contact Julia Farish or Kate Chapman at Travel PR on 020 8891 4440 or email j.farish@travelpr.co.uk or k.chapman@travelpr.co.uk.

###It's like a giant fifty-thousand buck Roomba.

Walking through Toronto's Eaton Centre after class recently, I was confronted with a robot, methodically cleaning the floor. Or I should say, I confronted it, to see what it would do; it politely stopped and just waited until I moved.

After tweeting about it, journalist John Barber pointed me to an article published in Forbes that morning about Avidbots. The robot is made in Kitchener, Ontario, and is named Neo in homage to another famous robotic Canadian, Keanu Reeves, who played Neo in the Matrix. Amy Feldman describes How Two Young Immigrant Entrepreneurs Created Oven-Sized Roombas To Chase A $5B Opportunity  robot cleaners.

Neo at the Eaton Centre/ Lloyd Alter/CC BY 2.0

The two young co-founders of Avidbots, Faizan Sheikh and Pablo Molina, both 31, met at the University of Waterloo. Feldman writes:

After college, they wanted to start a robotics company, but Sheikh needed to get a job because of his obligations, as the eldest son, to help support his family financially. He moved to Ottawa to work as a software engineer at Bridgewater Systems (subsequently acquired by Amdocs). Molina moved there as well to work on a lunar rover project funded by the Canadian space agency, and subsequently enrolled in graduate school at Ottawas Carlton University. One day Pablo came to me, and he said, Faizan, with all the advances that are happening in robotics research, I think now is the time for something to be commercialized, for something to take off, and lets work on it together, Sheikh recalls.



They originally wanted to build a snow-shovelling robot, which would be very useful in Canada, but it's seasonal work. So they switched to indoor cleaning. Five years later, they have robots cleaning floors in 14 countries. GDI, the company that owns the robot shown here, says it frees workers from doing basic things like pushing a floor scrubber to concentrate on more complex tasks. They also note that it is hard to find people willing to do this all day.

Neo at the Eaton Centre/ Lloyd Alter/CC BY 2.0

It was interesting to watch Neo in action. It was heading straight toward this woman coming down the stairs and, when she got to the bottom one, stopped and didn't know what to do. Neo backed up, turned left, and moved out of her way. She smiled and continued. Let's hope that they are always so polite and accommodating.

Here on TreeHugger, we are often skeptical of high-tech robotic technologies, from self-driving cars to 3D-printed houses. On the other hand, we have a dishwasher in our kitchen because some tasks are boring and repetitive and machines can do it better. Scrubbing floors may just be the start. Feldman concludes with a quote: By putting robots into the real world, we are changing the perception around robots, Sheikh says. That lends itself to really cool possibilities.

Just two 31-year-old Pakistani and Ecuadorian immigrants starting their own little business, working away, scrubbing floors.The folks at Life Without Plastic argue that these stretchy, rubbery bags are not as green as they seem.

If you spend any time perusing zero waste lifestyle blogs and social media feeds, you've likely seen silicone bags suggested as an alternative to disposable Ziplocs and plastic food storage containers. They're becoming quite popular, perhaps due to how photogenic they are, available in an array of colors and just transparent enough to reveal what's inside.

At first glance they're an ideal solution, offering all the benefits that plastic bags do  lightweight, flexible, stretchy, washable, waterproof. Some advocates argue silicone is more like rubber than plastic and that because it's derived from sand, it's a natural product.

The Pushback Against Silicone

The experts at Life Without Plastic disagree. Silicone, they explain, is "something of a hybrid between a synthetic rubber and a synthetic plastic polymer," which means it's still a plastic, no matter how it's spun. While it does contain silica, which is derived from sand, it also contains synthetic and chemical additives that come from fossil fuels.

An article on the Life Without Plastic website (excerpted from their excellent book) explains that silicone is widely accepted as safe by organizations such as Health Canada and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but there haven't really been many in-depth or subsequent studies into its long-term effects. LWP's founders have done their own research and have found reasons to indicate that "we should begin to be cautious about silicone."

They cite studies showing that silicones are not completely inert, that they do leach synthetic chemicals at low levels, particularly if the food they contain is high in fat; and that siloxanes (the backbone chemical structure of silicones) are endocrine and fertility disruptors, as well as potentially carcinogenic.

"One study tested the release of siloxanes from silicone nipples and bakeware into milk, baby formula and a simulant solution of alcohol and water. Nothing was released into the milk or formula after six hours, but after 72 hours in the alcohol solution several siloxanes were detected."

Silicone also has a very low recyclability rate. It is usually turned into industrial lubricant oil when disposed of.

Be Cautious About Silicone Use

If we're truly striving for zero waste, plastic-free living, then we should use alternatives to silicone bags  and plenty of these exist. Glass jars, stainless steel containers, and cloth bags can all do the job, without any of the associated production, use, and disposal concerns that accompany silicones.

Silicones do play a useful role as seals or gaskets in many reusable containers, but these do not generally come into contact with the food and are a tolerable use of the product.Treehugger and our third-party partners use cookies and process personal data like unique identifiers based on your consent to store and/or access information on a device, display personalized ads and for content measurement, audience insight, and product development. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Treehugger.com, including your right to object where legitimate interest is used, click below. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. List of Partners (vendors)This tasteful van home features a comfortable interior, and includes a removable bed to allow for transporting larger cargo.

People do van conversions for a wide range of reasons: some want to travel full-time as outdoor enthusiasts or photographers, or while working on their own businesses; for others, it facilitates touring around as authors or chefs.

For Wendy and Larry, converting a van into a stealthy home-on-wheels meant that they could escape the harsh Michigan winters. The couple recently completed their conversion with the help of van-home builder Ross Lukeman of Alternative Homes (previously), which we can see here in this short video tour:

The couple's home has been built out of an extended-length 2011 Freightliner Sprinter van, which they have appropriately named "Morty" (it used to be a casket salesman's vehicle). Inside, there's plenty of headroom and legroom, as the couple aimed for an open-plan layout that emphasizes enough space to move around, while concentrating storage, sitting, sleeping and other functions to the sides and rear.

The pair endeavoured to create an interior that feels "European" -- thanks to the minimalistic surfaces of wood and fabric, and unfussy custom cabinetry fronted with IKEA doors. The kitchen has a truck fridge, a small sink with a telescoping faucet, and lots of space to prepare food. More appliances, like the microwave, are hidden behind a sliding tambour door under the bed.

Alternative Homes/Video screen capture

 Alternative Homes

Alternative Homes/Video screen capture

Alternative Homes/Video screen capture

We like the upholstered bench that can turn into a single-bed (Larry likes to nap on this), but which also functions as a dining area with the convenient RV-style swivel table. Underneath the bench is an emergency portable toilet, and it's also where the diesel heating system is hidden.

Alternative Homes/Video screen capture

Alternative Homes/Video screen capture

The back of the van features a huge "garage" of sorts, with a bed resting on top of a steel-strut platform. One highlight of the design is that the bed and struts are removable, in order to allow for transport of larger cargo -- such as equipment for Larry's band.

Alternative Homes/Video screen capture

Of course, a lot of the technical elements (such as the electrical system) require much forethought in a van conversion, and it seems that this conversion has organized it pretty well. Plenty of intriguing design ideas here; to see more, visit Alternative Homes.For three days this summer, a local host could show you why their country consistently ranks among the happiest in the world.

For the past two years, Finland has been named the happiest country in the world. Its citizens are relaxed and cheerful, enjoying life in a progressive, technologically advanced society, without becoming overly stressed. The Finns themselves attribute this to their connection with nature and their instinct to go outside whenever anxiety rears its ugly head: "When others go to therapy, Finns put on a pair of rubber boots and head to the woods."

Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Well, I have some exciting news. You, too, could learn how to live like this, taught firsthand by Finnish 'happiness guides.'

How Can You Learn the Secrets of Finnish Happiness?

A curious project called Rent A Finn, organized by Visit Finland, will send a select number of guests to live in Finnish households for three days this summer, during which they will experience life as the Finns do  and hopefully find their inner calm. All travel and accommodation costs are covered, but you must be willing to be filmed throughout the experience.

As a guest, you will experience "anything from visiting a national park to spending a weekend fishing at a real summer cottage, berry picking in the wilderness, enjoying a proper Finnish sauna  basically all the things that we Finns love to do in nature and what makes Finland the happiest country in the world."

Hosts include Esko, mayor of a small town near the Arctic Circle in Lapland, who will take you boating and teach you to play molkky, a Finnish throwing game. If you stay with Hanna, an IT professional, you'll travel to her grandmother's lakeside home outside Helsinki, where you'll pick blueberries, eat traditional pastries, and hang out in the sauna. Linda and Niko live on Uto, Finland's southernmost island in the Baltic Sea with a population around 40. They'll take you sailing through the archipelago, show you the lighthouse, and camp out on an islet.

How Do You Become One of the Lucky Few?

Now is the time to apply by filling out an online application form and filming a 3-minute video describing yourself, your connection to nature, and why you want to visit Finland. Submit, breathe deeply, and wait with your fingers crossed. I know what I'll be doing this weekend...HAMILTON  Is Phil Angarone Sr. endorsing Republican Mayor Kelly Yaedes 2019 re-election campaign?

Team Yaede says Angarone is on board, but the former Mercer County GOP heavyweight told The Trentonian he had not spoken with the mayor in a long time and suggested her campaign never approached him for an endorsement.

I am a Florida resident. I am not in New Jersey anymore, Angarone said Thursday in an interview. I am not involved. I cant vote for the mayor.

Angarone, a former Mercer County Republican chairman and deputy chief of staff to former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, is listed as a Yaede campaign supporter on an evolving 2019 endorsement list, but he seemed to disapprove of his inclusion on that list when The Trentonian interviewed him Thursday.

I am too old to be involved in anything, he said. Ill be 77 pretty soon.

Angarone is the father of Phil Angarone Jr., who was sentenced to one year of probation in September 2017 for pleading guilty to third-degree tampering with public records and fourth-degree illegal campaign contributions in a pay-to-play scandal as a former marketing director of Birdsall Services Group.

I know Fred Yaede very well, the elder Angarone said, referring to the mayors father. I havent talked to the mayor in a long time because I havent seen her.

Yaedes campaign team talked with Angarone after The Trentonian interviewed him Thursday, according to the mayor.

He said you caught him in the middle of moving and was confused, Yaede said of Angarone. He absolutely agreed to be on the list.

Hamilton Business Administrator Dave Kenny said he spoke with Angarone about four months ago and secured his Team Yaede endorsement at that time.

I talked to Phil probably four months ago and he said, No problem, put me down,' Kenny said Thursday night in an interview. I think he got confused and didnt remember.

With Yaede facing a primary challenge from Republican mayoral candidate David Henderson, it is of strategic importance for her to try to secure as many endorsements as she can.

Primary elections are generally low-turnout affairs. Yaede received 707 votes out of 714 votes cast in the June 2015 Republican primary, facing no competition at that time. Although Yaede ran unopposed for the 2015 GOP nomination, seven of the votes cast went to a personal choice.

Henderson often gets well over 1,000 people to watch his Facebook livestream videos of rowdy Hamilton Council meetings.

In addition to Phil Angarone Sr., the growing list of influential pro-Yaede supporters includes former Hamilton Mayor Jack Rafferty, former State Sen. Peter Inverso, former Mercer County Executive Bob Prunetti, former State Sen. and town councilman Tom Goodwin and former Assemblyman Paul Kramer, among other Republicans of local significance.

We have all worked very hard on that list, Hamilton GOP Chairman Dennis Pone said Thursday. The names were all confirmed by our team collectively.

The endorsement list, as displayed Thursday on a blogger site, has new names added to it from the original list that was unveiled earlier this month. Hamilton Township employee Kyle Battaglia, a Republican, was originally listed but is not on the current list.

Pone said Battaglia had originally agreed to be included on the list but that he is not aware of why Battaglia may have asked to be removed from the list.

Also on the list is Steve Cook, executive director of The Arc Mercer. He was in attendance when Yaede formally announced her run for a second four-year term last week.

Cook did not respond to a message seeking comment about whether he is, in fact, endorsing the Republican mayor, who is facing a primary challenge from Henderson, a leader of the alt-GOP group Republicans for a Better Hamilton.

Ray Lally, former Hamilton Township Republican Committee chairman, is also on the pro-Yaede endorsement list. He resigned from that post last summer and was eventually succeeded by Jeff Plunkett and then Pone, the current chairman who formerly served on Hamilton Council.

Henderson said he had heard through the grapevine that Lally asked the Yaede campaign to strike his name from the endorsement list because he apparently never agreed to be on it. The Trentonian repeatedly attempted to reach Lally to confirm as much but he did not respond to messages left on his cell phone Thursday.

I think its a sham, Henderson said. Most of the people on the list, from what I understand, their names were just put on the list. They were never asked nor agreed. I think its another in a long list of lies. She had to make up a list.

The top players in Team Yaede, however, insist the list only includes the names of people who have agreed to be included on it.

Yaede in a March 16 Facebook post celebrated the endorsement list, saying she was deeply honored to have received the endorsement of these esteemed leaders.Ugandan citizens have pointed out poverty and corruption as the most serious problems facing the country today, according to a brief report released in Kampala on Thursday by the civil society organisation Taweza.

Titled More food, less money: Ugandans experiences and opinions on poverty and livelihoods, the brief is based on data from Sauti za Wananchi, Africas first nationally representative high-frequency mobile phone survey. The data was collected from 1,905 respondents across Uganda in November 2018.

According to the findings, nationally, the proportion of citizens naming poverty as the most serious issue has doubled from 14 percent in 2017 to 29 percent in 2018. Similarly, corruption is the second named problem with 13 per cent in 2018 compared to nine per cent in 2017.

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Lack of employment comes third named by twice as many people in 2018 (12 per cent)] as in 2017 (6 percent).

Addressing journalists of the research findings, Ms Marie Nanyanzi, a programme officer at Sauti za Wananchi at Twaweza said in general fewer citizens are concerned about public services, like health, education and water and at household level, half of Ugandans are concerned about the gap between the rich and poor.

Almost three out of four citizens are unhappy with the countrys economic direction (72 per cent). Many are also unhappy about employment (67 percent) as well as the state of corruption [70 per cent], she said.

The data in this brief tell the story of economic hardship for an expanding majority of Ugandan citizens. Although they are slightly more satisfied with the countrys economic direction as compared to 2017, many households still do not have enough income to meet their daily expenses. Poverty in their most serious challenge and in some households it has cost lives. These voices are an important alarm bell for the government to heed, so as to minimize further suffering.

The report recognises notable decline in food stress at the household level in 2018;citizens are less likely to report not eating for a whole day (37 per cent compared to 49 percent in 2017) and running out of food because of lack of money (69 per cent compared to 53 per cent in 2017).

However, more rural and poor Ugandans suffer from food stress than their wealthier and urban compatriots. Even so, one out of four wealthier Ugandans (25 percent)went without eating for a day in the past three months.

Mr Ramathan Ggobi, a policy analyst and political economist said poverty in Uganda has been on a rise overtime and on a national level it increased from 19.7 per cent in the financial year 2012/13 to 21.4 per cent in 2016/17.

He said if government is to overcome the biting poverty among its people, it should invest in agriculture heavily since 69 per cent of the population depends on it.

Agriculture is a priority in words not action yet majority of Ugandans depend on it, said Ggobi.

On the other hand, Mr Mondo Kyateka, Ag Commissioner Youth and Child Affairs at the Ministry of Gender expressed disappointment over the rising poverty levels in the country despite governments unending intervention to save the situation.

Am a bit annoyed by the findings, we have put in place a number of multi poverty elimination programmes like Youth Livelihood Programme (YLP), Uganda Women Entrepreneurship Programme (UWEP)but the insolvency just continues to shoot up, he said.

He added: We must abandon the entitlement syndrome that it should be government to elevate people from poverty. As Ugandans we should have our priorities right, we should priorities education, farming, financial literacy among others with that we shall yield good results.Next week on Monday, Apple will be holding Its Show Time event at the Steve Jobs Theather in Apple Park. This will be Apples first event with the focus squarely on services. This means, there are not going to be any new hardware product announcements from Apple at the event. Instead, Apple will be talking about its upcoming video streaming and Apple News Magazines subscription services.

Apple has already gotten all the hardware product announcements out of the way by announcing them this week. The company announced one new hardware product every day of the week, starting from the new iPad Air and iPad mini 5 to the AirPods (2nd generation).

If you are out of the loop of recent Apple news and are wondering what Apple will announce at its Show Time event on Monday, read our roundup below.

Video Streaming Service

Apple is taking on the big boys with its upcoming video streaming service. The company is launching a streaming service similar to Netflix, HBO Go, and others. Apple is primarily a tech company but with iPhone sales slowing down, it is looking to expand to other avenues.

Apples video streaming service ambitions are not to be taken lightly. The company has invested billions of dollars in producing original content for its showing and has hired top Hollywood stars and directors including Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and J J Abrams. The Its Show Time event from Apple will also be attended by many high-profile Hollywood celebrities.

Despite the best efforts of Apples production team, when the companys video streaming service launches, it will not go live with any of its original content. So, to still attract customers, Apple is partnering with third-party media houses like HBO and Starz to get content from them on its streaming service. It is unclear which production houses are onboard as of now, though Netflix has confirmed that it wont be a part of Apples streaming efforts. This makes sense since Netflix will be competing with Apples video streaming service and while the former does not have as much money as Apple, it has been producing some solid content over the last few years which have even bagged prestigious Emmy awards.

To ensure that content from its streaming service can be easily viewed by users on any screen they like, Apple has expanded AirPlay 2 support to third-party TVs. At CES 2019, Samsung, LG, Vizio, and other TV makers announced AirPlay 2 support for their TVs. However, that still does not cover all the users  especially ones with older TVs  so it remains to be seen how Apple plans to overcome this problem. On Mac, Apple will likely point users to a website or use iTunes for streaming purposes, while iPhone and iPad users will likely rely on an updated Apple TV app for streaming content.

There are no rumors yet as to how much Apple wants to charge for its streaming service. It is possible that we will see Apple offer an Apple Music/video subscription bundle for a slightly lower price to attract existing Apple Music subscribers.

Apple News Magazines

Apple is also expected to unveil its all-you-can-eat magazines and newspaper subscription service at the Show Time event dubbed Apple News Magazines. The premise is simple. Users will pay a monthly fee  rumored to be $9.99/month  to gain access to hundreds of magazines and newspapers. Apple acquired Texture, an app with similar functionality last year, and it is building on that acquisition to bring this service.

Apple News is already incredibly popular in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other regions where it is available, so a magazine subscription service from Apple definitely has a high chance of meeting with success. However, Apple itself is creating an issue by keeping a 50 percent cut from the subscriptions for itself. This has led to a lot of publishers from backing out from the service, especially those which already offer their own subscription service.

As for others who have signed up, they are doing so in hopes that with Apples reach and marketing prowess, they will able to generate more revenue overall which would be enough to offset Apples 50 percent share. While WSJ is reported to have signed up for the service, the Washington Post is not keen on signing up for the service due to Apples terms and conditions.

What are your expectations from Apples Show Time event? Are you looking forward to the companys video streaming service? Or do you already subscribe to too many video streaming services and are considering giving Apples service a pass?Vox.com will be a part of Apples upcoming magazines and news subscription service. As per Bloombergs report, Apple has inked a deal with Vox for its upcoming subscription service due to be unveiled next week.

Vox.com is a part of Vox Media which owns other popular online properties like The Verge, Recode, and SB Nation, the deal inked by Apple is only for Vox.

The site is owned by Vox Media Inc., which also publishes the Verge, SBNation and Eater, though its other properties wont be part of the service initially, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the accord hasnt been announced.

While Vox does not offer any subscription service of its own at this point, its CEO Jim Bankoff had revealed at SXSW this month that they would be adding a subscription option with different tiers later this year.

Apple will be unveiling its Apple News Magazines subscription service at Its Show Time event next week. The service is expected to cost $10/month and offer subscribers access to a bunch of newspapers and magazines. So far, Apple is reported to have signed up The Wall Street Journal for the service along with other popular publications, though the Washington Post and The New York Times have declined to be a part of the service.

Are you looking forward to Apples magazine subscription service? How much are you willing to pay for it on a monthly basis? Drop a comment and let us know!

[Via Bloombergmonicakchauhan@gmail.com

Tribune News Service

Hisar, March 22

The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), district authorities and the Army on Friday evening successfully rescued the one-year-old boy who had fallen into a borewell at Balsamand village of this district on Wednesday.

A team of doctors present on the spot examined the child, Nadeem Khan, and also provided pre-hospital treatment. Later, he was shifted to hospital for advance medical care. The condition of the child is stable.

Earlier, the team dug a 2x2 tunnel connecting the borewell.

The officials had provided oxygen and food items in the borehole. There was no information about the condition of the child since Thursday evening.

Two teams of the NDRF had been called in on Wednesday night for rescuing the kid. Earlier, a night-vision camera was dropped in the borehole to keep a constant watch on the child who took a sound sleep.

The rescue team had on Thursday tried to pull the child with the help of a net. Though the child was trapped in the net, he got stuck after coming out to 4-5 feet and the rescue team had to abort the plan.

Around 30 personnel of the NDRF and an equal number of personnel of the Army and the local authorities were involved in the operation.

Nadeem was playing in the fields when he slipped into the borehole at about 5 pm on Wednesday. A farmer had dug the borehole about two weeks ago to install a tubewell.

The accident has again brought to the fore the dangers posed by uncovered borewells, which have turned death traps for children. In 2006, a massive operation was launched to rescue five-year-old Prince, who had fallen into a borewell in a village in Kurukshetra. He was pulled out safely nearly 48 hours later.monicakchauhan@gmail.com

Jammu, March 22

National Conference president Farooq Abdullah on Friday led the campaigning of joint Congress-NC candidates and said the alliance was aimed to keep India secular and "save" it from divisive politics.

Vikramaditya Singh, grandson of erstwhile Sadr-e-Riyast senior Congress leader Karan Singh, and former minister Raman Bhalla, who is a joint candidate of the Congress and its alliance partner NC, from Udhampur and Jammu Lok Sabha seats respectively.

"We have given this sacrifice for one aim - to keep India a secular country and also keep India strong. There is no other goal (in entering into an alliance with the Congress)," Abdullah told reporters here while kickstarting campaigning of the joint candidates.

"To bring country out of this quagmire, we have come together. We ensure you (Congress) our full support," he said.

Abdullah said the NC has come out to save this country from divisive politics.

"We have come out to save this country from forces (who are dividing the country on the basis of religion) and not to save this state only," he said.

Farooq said we have to live in this country and strengthen it and its secular ethos which was preached by Mahatma Gandhi.

He asked the Congress candidates to keep an eye on forces about malpractice. Vikramaditya, while speaking on the occasion, said they will fight at the grass-roots level together to ensure their victory. PTIrchopra@tribunemail.com

Srinagar, March 22

Jammu and Kashmir authorities have placed senior separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq under house arrest here on Friday.

The development comes ahead of post-Friday prayers protests called by separatists against the custodial death of Rizwan Asad Pandit, a 28-year-old private schoolteacher, on Monday.

On Thursday, National Conference leaders Ali Muhammad Sagar, Nasir Sogami and others carried out a protest march from the Nawa-e-Subha party headquarters here demanding stern action against those responsible for Pandits death.

According to the police, Pandit was arrested last week in connection with a militancy-related case. IANSshriaya.dutt@tribuneindia.com

Tribune Web Desk

Chandigarh, March 22

Bollywood actor Salman Khan is going all out for the promotions of his latest film Notebook. With this project, Salman has welcomed two new newbies in Bollywood Industry: Zaheer Iqbal and Pranutan Bahl.

The 53-year-old, who will next be seen in Bharat, has lent his voice for a romantic song, "Main Taare for the film 'Notebook'.

During the promotional event, Salman was questioned how about his upcoming love story; in which two people fall in love without meeting each other and how it can happen with todays generation, where it is all about meeting people through dating apps.

He added that he doesnt have any of those dating apps on his phone.

Salman revealed several things. But, the most interesting thing was when he said he finds it very amusing that actress Priyanka Chopra launched a dating app post her marriage to Nick Jonas.

When Salman was asked about his views on Priyanka launching a dating app in India, Salman, jokingly replied that why does Priyanka need an app now considering she recently got married to Nick Jonas.

Salman and Priyanka were supposed to work opposite each other in Bharat, but due to person reasons Priyanka left the project and Katrina Kaif was replaced.

After Priyanka exited Bharat, Salman's statements indicated that Priyanka had hit a nerve. Salman said: "Whatever may be the reason - be it marriage or picture or her not being willing to work in India or with me, it's her reason and we are really supportive about her doing good work. If she does not want to work with Salman Khan, it's okay; she's working with a big hero in Hollywood".

In order to work with Salman, Kaif even walked out of her dance flick opposite Varun Dhawan. Bharat directed by Ali Abbas Zafar will hit the theatres on Eid 2019.rchopra@tribunemail.com

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 22

The government on Friday boycotted Pakistans National Day celebrations both here and in Islamabad to protest the Pakistan High Commissions invite to Jammu and Kashmir separatist leaders for the event.

There has been no change in Pakistans ways, said Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Ravish Kumar while confirming Indias decision not to send any representative.

India is also miffed at Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi dialling up Hurriyat leaders last month ahead of an event organised in London to mark Islamabads support to the violence in Kashmir.

This is the first time New Delhi is boycotting the neighbouring countrys national day instead of the earlier trend of lodging a protest while sending an official representative for the event.

In the last three years, India has been represented at the Pakistan High Commission event by junior ministers such as Gen VK Singh, MJ Akbar and Gajendra Singh Shekhawat.

On March 23, the Muslim League had passed the Lahore resolution in 1940 calling for the formation of Pakistan and on the same day in 1956, Pakistan adopted its first constitution.rchopra@tribunemail.com

United Nations, March 22

Going beyond their call of duty, Indian peacekeepers serving with the UN missions in Lebanon and South Sudan have earned appreciation for undertaking activities to benefit local communities, including raising awareness about breast cancer and teaching farmers methods of goat-rearing.

Indian peacekeepers serving with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) organised a training session with the aim of raising awareness about preventing breast cancer among the women of Shaba in south-eastern Lebanon earlier this week, a report from the mission said.

The training session, conducted in coordination with local authorities and the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), offered an opportunity for the local women to discuss issues about breast cancer with UNIFILs female peacekeepers with expertise on the subject.

UNIFIL doctors focused the session, attended by 35 women, on the prevention and early detection of breast cancer.

Since there are no female doctor posted with the Indian Battalion, resources from other UNIFIL battalions operating in the Missions eastern sector were pooled in to conduct the training, the report said.

Indian peacekeepers deployed with the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) spoke to farmers in the Upper Nile area about new methods to generate income through goat-rearing, with the aim of helping the local communities improve their methods of livelihood.

I have lost many goats, particularly small kids, in the recent past. After undergoing this training workshop, I understand what mistakes Ive been making, James Nyawanya, one of the participants in an interactive teaching session with Indian peacekeepers, was quoted as saying in a news report by the mission.

The incidences of increased disease and death among goats in surrounding areas have led us to organise this workshop for livestock farmers, to enable them to provide special care for newly born kids, said veterinary officer Lieutenant Colonel Sengar.

The peacekeepers also provided a reference handbook on Goat Farming and Management, specifically tailored to the needs of local communities in South Sudan.

State governor James Tor Munybuony appreciated the missions efforts, encouraging all the participants to imbibe new aspects of goat farming and use the knowledge to improve their livestock management and create new income-generating opportunities.

Participants were trained on nutritional and health management, housing, effective first aid, vaccination and deworming, breed improvement and value addition of milk.

In South Sudans Jonglei region, Indian peacekeepers are providing critical veterinary know-how that is helping the local community save cows and livelihoods.

An UNMISS news article said the UN Indian veterinary team worked with the locals six days a week throughout the year. Last year, they treated more than 22,000 animals.

Daniel Deng, an animal health officer in Bor town, said the veterinary know-how of the Indian peacekeepers was leading to immense benefits to the local community.

The biggest help they give us is the training of animal health workers, who learn how to identify and treat diseases, Deng said.

Last year, they did a lot of tick control and treatment which helped control east coast fever, which normally kills a lot of livestock every year. This time, the veterinary team saved most of our dear animals, Deng said.

Colonel SE Thomas from the Indian peacekeeping contingent was cited in the article as saying that preventive measures and timely treatment had reduced deaths to just a handful, expressing hope and belief that their work could keep previously mass-killing diseases at bay.

Separately, as part of activities marking the month of the woman, the Indian battalion deployed with the UN Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the DR Congo (MONUSCO) distributed household solar lamps to women in Mashango, a remote village in North Kivu where there is no electricity.

India is among the largest troop contributing countries to UN peacekeeping missions deployed in about nine peacekeeping missions. The highest number of personnel is deployed with the UN Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). PTImonicakchauhan@gmail.com

Lucknow, March 22

Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati on Friday taunted the BJP's 'Main Bhi Chowkidar' campaign, two days after she accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of changing his profile from 'Chaiwala' to 'Chowkidar' only to get votes in the Lok Sabha polls.

In a series of tweets in Hindi, Mayawati said that ever since the campaign was launched, people like Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath were in a fix on whether they should remain people's representatives or become 'chowkidars'.

The four-time Chief Minister also warned the Bharatiya Janata Party leaders and workers to refrain from doing anything that was untoward and against the law and order.

In another tweet, she said that it was worrying that the union government was not allowing the release of data pertaining to poor employment, growing joblessness, increasing poverty, distress among farmers and labourers, just for the sake of losing votes and safeguarding their image.

"Does the country need such a 'chowkidaar'?" she asked.

Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, Modi last week tweeted a video with the hashtag '#MainBhiChowkidar' (I am also a watchman) and changed his Twitter handle to Chowkidar Narendra Modi.

BJP leaders are free to do whatever they want & amuse themselves as they wish but in the process they should not insult country & denigrate constitutional post in any way. Let DM, CM & PM remain as per the provision of the constitution. They can do chowkidari after losing polls.  Mayawati (@Mayawati) March 22, 2019

The Prime Minister also called all those fighting corruption and social evils 'watchmen' and asked them to participate in the campaign for a better India. IANSrchopra@tribunemail.com

Hyderabad, March 22

A six-year-old girl was found dead near a railway track here in a suspected case of rape and murder, police said on Friday.

The girl was reported missing by her parents on Thursday and her body was found near the railway track during a search by the police.

It appears that she was raped and killed, a police official said.

Some suspects were being questioned in connection with the case, he added.

The girls parents lodged a complaint with the police in Alwal locality on Thursday afternoon that she was missing. PTIrchopra@tribunemail.com

New Delhi, March 22

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday led a fresh BJP offensive on rival parties over the Pulwama terror attack and the subsequent IAF strike inside Pakistan, terming the Opposition the natural habitat of terror apologists and accusing them of insulting armed forces.

Using the hashtag Janta Maaf Nahi Karegi (people will not forgive) in a tweet, Modi targeted Sam Pitroda, who looks after Congresss overseas affairs, for reportedly saying that post the Mumbai terror attacks, India could have responded with air strikes, but according to me thats not how you deal with world.

Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knew--Congress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India--we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest, Modi said.

Opposition insults our forces time and again. I appeal to my fellow Indians--question Opposition leaders on their statements. Tell them--130 crore Indians will not forgive or forget the Opposition for their antics. India stands firmly with our forces, he added, using the hashtag.

BJP president Amit Shah also took to Twitter to hit out at the opposition, saying, while their heart beats for terrorists, ours beats for the Tiranga (the national flag).

Difference between Opposition and BJP is clear. They suspect our army, we are proud of our army. Their heart beats for terrorists, ours beats for the Tiranga.

This election, through the power of your vote, do a surgical strike on the Congress culture, Shah tweeted.

Pitroda has also reportedly said that he wanted to know more about the Balakot air attack and the number of terrorists killed in it.

Senior BJP leader and Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley slammed Pitroda for his remarks, saying such statements would be a hit on Pakistani news channels.

He thinks what we did (Balakot air strike) was wrong. No other country has said that it was wrong. Even the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has not said such a thing. This is only the opinion of Pakistan. It is unfortunate that such people are role models for a political party, the Finance Minister said at a BJP press conference.

Earlier, in his tweets, Modi also slammed Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav, who alleged the Pulwama attack was a conspiracy to garner votes.

This was a conspiracy...But, when there will be a change of government, investigations will be done and prominent people will come under the scanner, who had pushed our youth to death to garner votes, he had alleged on Thursday speaking at a programme at Saifai.

Modi termed the statement reprehensible.

Opposition is the natural habitat of terror apologists and questioners of our armed forces. This reprehensible statement by a senior leader like Ram Gopal ji insults all those who have given their lives in protecting Kashmir. It humiliates the families of our martyrs, he said.

The PM in his tweets tagged the reported statements of Yadav and Pitroda.

Meanwhile, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Friday said sacrifices of the armed forces should never be questioned, but advised the government to stop pretending to be the Indian Army.

He said that in a democracy it was the fundamental right of politicians to ask questions. PTIIn February 2019, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabias Crown Prince and Deputy Commander of the Supreme Forces Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS as he is popularly known, traveled to three Asian capitals: Islamabad, New Delhi, and Beijing. Two more capitals had featured on his itinerary initially  Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur  but were later removed. In each of the three capitals that he visited, the Crown Prince signed deals worth billions of dollars.





In Pakistan, he oversaw the signing of deals worth up to USD 20 billion worth of Saudi investments in the Pakistani economy. This also included USD 8 billion for the funding of an oil refinery in the Pakistani city of Gwadar where China is developing a deep sea warm water port as part of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is an important project of Chinas Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Earlier too, soon after Imran Khan took over as prime minister in Pakistan following general elections in July 2018, he visited the Kingdom  his first state visit abroad as prime minister  and then soon after again to participate in the Riyadh investment summit. The two sides inked a deal for a USD 6 billion aid package from the kingdom to Pakistan.





The promise of USD 20 billion worth of investment has come as a shot into the flailing Pakistani economy. Khan himself had minced no words that Pakistan needed funds; he had inherited a Pakistan whose external debt had ballooned to USD 91.9 billion and was set to rapidly increase. He had been negotiating for an IMF loan which carried with it many riders. The deal with the Saudis has allowed Pakistan to walk away from the IMF negotiations, as also to ride over a deficit caused by US President Donald Trumps refusal to release about USD 300 million in aid to Pakistan because of its covert support to the Taleban, wreaking havoc in Afghanistan. In turn, the deal paves the way for Pakistans subservience in military matters to the Saudis, patching up the rift caused by Pakistans refusal to join the Saudi coalitions war in Yemen in 2015.





In India, the Crown Prince oversaw the signing of five agreements, including investments into Indias National Infrastructure Investment Fund (NIIF), a sovereign fund created to finance much needed infrastructure projects in India, with a promise of investments up to USD 100 billion. Saudi Aramco is also interested in the setting up of an oil refinery in Indias Ratnagiri region in the west of the country. Further, the visit of the Crown Prince in India saw the establishment of the Strategic Partnership Council, meant to cover critical issues of mutual interest, which includes investment, energy security, infrastructure and defense where several MoUs are expected to be signed.





In their joint statement, India and Saudi Arabia called on all states to reject the use of terrorism against other countries; dismantle terrorism infrastructures where they happen to exist and to cut off any kind of support and financing to the terrorists perpetrating terrorism from all territories against other states; and bring perpetrators of acts of terrorism to justice.





Beijing was the final stop of the Crown Prince on his Asia tour. China is the Kingdoms largest crude importer, and the Crown Princes visit came when Chinese oil imports from Saudi Arabia are expected to rise to 1.67 million barrels a day in 2019 and China is initiating the launch of the petro-yuan, that is, pricing of oil in yuans, even as it has been raising its profile the Middle East. In Beijing, the Crown Prince called China an important strategic partner and oversaw the finalizing of a USD 10 billion Saudi Aramco deal for establishing a refinery and complex in Chinas Panjin region. Thirty-five other agreements for economic cooperation were signed between the two sides, Saudi state news agency SPA announced. While Saudi Arabia is also interested in joining Chinas ambitious BRI, what was particularly interesting for observers was the announcement made by the Saudi Foreign Ministry that the kingdom will be implementing Chinese language programs in schools across the kingdom  signaling its long term interest in developing relations with China.





The Saudi princes visit came at a pivotal time for the region, with many different currents streaming across the region.





In the shifting geo-political and geo-strategic alignments and realignments in the region, one thing is certain  Middle Eastern monarchies will increasingly be looking to deepen ties with Asia.





First, India-Pakistan tensions had ratcheted up very quickly in the wake of the Pulwama terror attack in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in which 42 personnel of the Indian para-military force the Central Reserved Police Force (or CRPF) perished. The Pakistan based Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist organization claimed responsibility. India blamed Pakistan for the attack, alleging that Pakistan was either not willing or was unable to take action against terror groups operating on its soil and for giving such groups sanctuary. In an election year, such a massive attack was bad optics for the Narendra Modi government. Further, with the mediocre performance of the Indian economy, the government needed some diplomatic and economic props which the Crown Princes visit promised. Equally important was the fact that with its economic largesse towards Pakistan, Saudi Arabia seemed to be perfectly poised for exerting pressure on Pakistan to rein in the terror groups operating on its soil.





Next, both Pakistan and China have been facing a downslide in their relations with the US, as has the Crown Prince. Pakistan has been blamed for not doing enough to rein in the Taliban who continue to wreak havoc against Afghan armed forces and civilians, and USD 300 million in aid money has been withheld from the cash-strapped South Asian country by the US. The US has further pressured the International Monetary Fund to attach stringent conditions to badly needed loans that Khans government has been trying to negotiate with the financial institution. On the other hand, China has been embroiled in an escalating trade war with the US, and is also haunted by the spectre of expanding US influence in the newly coined Indo Pacific.





And finally, as the Saudi-Iran rivalry plays out in the Middle East, China, India, and Pakistan are carefully nurturing their relations with Iran.





Hence, though the reasons were varied, for all three Asian nations, the Crown Princes visit carried enormous significance  in the anticipated investments and, for China and India in particular, in boosting their energy security, in which the Crown Prince did not fail them.





On his part, Mohammed bin Salman has been having his share of differences with the US. Beginning with his clean-up act of holding a number of Saudi princes and industrialists under house arrest on charges of corruption to the more recent gruesome murder of Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by Saudi intelligence, the Crown Prince came under pressure from the US and other Western powers to have his powers in the kingdom curtailed. Most western countries, for instance, either boycotted or sent a low profile representation to the princes much touted Davos in the Desert economic summit in 2018. By contrast, Prime Minister Imran Khan himself graced the occasion in person, while India and China both participated in the summit. Hence for Mohammed bin Salman, as US-Saudi relations appear increasingly strained, shoring up support in the worlds economically fastest growing region was just a matter of course.





Economically too, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been looking towards the non-Western economies to invest in, in anticipation of the post-oil future. The investments in refineries in Gwadar, Ratnagiri and Panjin reflect the trend, as they also seek to hedge, if not wean away, the Asian powers from Iranian influence.





Having ambitiously embarked on charting a new course for the kingdom with his Vision 2030, the Crown Prince is also eager to make his mark on international affairs. With the Saudi-led coalitions war in Yemen entering a stalemate, the India-Pakistan crisis presented the perfect opportunity for Mohamed bin Salman to demonstrate his statesmanship, through joint statements and by dispatching his minister of state for foreign affairs Adil al Jubeir to Islamabad and New Delhi on follow-up visits. In Islamabad, he called himself Pakistans ambassador in the Kingdom; in Delhi he became Prime Minister Narendra Modis younger brother.





Similarly, counter-terrorism played a big role in the Crown Princes tour. In Delhi, he agreed to deepen cooperation with India in counter-terrorism, and both sided agreed to constitute a Comprehensive Security Dialogue at the level of National Security Advisors and set up a Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism. In Beijing, as reported by Xinhua, the Crown Prince said that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia respected and supported Chinas rights to take counter-terrorism and de-extremism measures to safeguard national security. Notable in this was the total absence of any reference to Chinas alleged mistreatment of its Uighur Muslim minority  an issue that Muslim powers like Turkey as well as many Western countries had been raising frequently.



What Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmans visit therefore demonstrated was an inevitable re-orientation, no puns intended, of Saudi foreign and economic policy. In the shifting geo-political and geo-strategic alignments and realignments in the region, one thing is certain  Middle Eastern monarchies will increasingly be looking to deepen ties with Asia.











rchopra@tribunemail.com

New Delhi, March 22

Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday hit out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing him of not thinking about the welfare of watchmen behind whom you are hiding.

In a Facebook post, Gandhi tagged a media report about 10,000 watchmen protesting against poor wages.

At least, think about those behind whom you are hiding, Gandhi said in the post, targeting the Prime Minister who has launched a campaign Main bhi chowkidar (I too am a watchman).

The media report stated that 10,000 chowkidars in Jharkhand rued unpaid salaries.

Gandhi has been targeting the PM accusing him of theft in the Rafale deal and has used the slogan Chowkidar chor hai (watchman is thief) to target him. PTIpardeepdhull@gmail.com

New Delhi, March 22

The Congress on Friday said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP should stop using an "individuals personal opinion to spread venom, in an apparent reference to comments by Sam Pitroda on Balakot air strike which have triggered a political row.

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said his party has unequivocally said the Pulwama terror attack was a grave national security failure of the Modi government.

Balakot air strike was a shining example of the valour of the Indian Air Force and Pakistans terror outfits like JeM and LeT and others will never succeed in their evil design, he said.

Modiji and BJP should stop using an individuals personal opinion to spread venom! Instead of hiding behind the sacrifice of our armed forces, PM must answer to Nation onjobs crisis, agrarian distress, demonetisation & GST disasters & economic downturn, Surjewala tweeted.

Prime Minister Modi, using the hashtag Janta maaf nahi karegi (people will not forgive) in a tweet, attacked Indian Overseas Congress chief Pitroda for reportedly saying Eight people(26/11 terrorists) come and do something, you dont jump on entire nation(Pakistan). Naive to assume that just because some people came here &attacked, every citizen of that nation is to be blamed. I dont believe in that way.

Tagging a news report carrying Pitrodas remarks, Modi said, The most trusted advisor and guide of the Congress President has kick-started the Pakistan National Day celebrations on behalf of the Congress, ironically by demeaning Indias armed forces. Shame!

Loyal courtier of Congress royal dynasty admits what the nation already knewCongress was unwilling to respond to forces of terror. This is a New India- we will answer terrorists in a language they understand and with interest!.

Several BJP leaders, including BJP chief Amit Shah, slammed Pitroda for his remarks.

Amid the controversy, Pitroda on Friday asked the government to come out with more facts on the Balakot air strikes, and said that he was baffled by Modis reaction to his question which he was entitled to ask.

Surjewala too slammed Modid remarks and alleged that the Prime Minister was busy shooting films in Corbett Park and giving a speech as nation mourned Pulwama martyrs.

The Modi government was clueless as RDX, MI carbines and rocket launchers were smuggled in to be used in Pulwama, the Congress chief spokesperson said.

The BJP government released Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar and other terrorists, he said. PTIuttara@tribuneindia.com

Yash Goyal

Our Correspondent

Jaipur, March 22

A tribal woman was killed in a fatal assault and acid attack in her own yard in a Rajasthan village, police said on Friday.

The attack occurred on Wednesday, a day before the Hindu festival of Holi. The victim, a 45-year-old woman, was out in her yard early on Wednesday morning to milk a cow when she was brutally beaten up in Banswara district's Jolana village. Her assailants smeared her with acid colours, burning the upper part of her body.

She died of her injuries at the Banswara District Hospital, SHO Arthuna Police Station Gahari Lal told The Tribune on Thursday.

An FIR registered by her husband names four people, all living in her neighbourhood.

SHO Lal said there were burn marks on her face, upper portion of her chest and hands. A packet some deadly chemical found nearby leads police to believe that her assailants forced her to have some.

Her family was in the house when she was attacked. Although police are still investigating the case, initial probe shows it could be a land dispute.

Police have booked four people for murder and have detained two, the SHO said.

The victim was cremated after an autopsy on Friday.rchopra@tribunemail.com

Beijing, March 22

A man rammed his car into a crowd in Chinas central Hubei province, killing six people and injuring seven others before being shot dead by the police on Friday.

The incident took place at around 6 am (local time) in Zaoyang city, state-run CGTN reported.

The driver had been shot dead by the police, it said.

A total of seven people, including the perpetrator, had been killed in the incident, it said.

The seven injured had been hospitalised, the report said.

Incidents of random attacks on civilians by disgruntled persons have become common in China in recent years.

Last September, three people were killed and 43 others injured when a man drove his SUV into a crowd and later went on a stabbing spree in Chinas Hunan province.

Some peoples carrying knives targeted primary schools and mall to vent out their anger. PTIrchopra@tribunemail.com

Islamabad, March 22

There was no room for jihadi outfits and jihadi culture in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan has said amidst intense global pressure on his government to rein in the terrorist outfits operating from its soil after the Pulwama attack.

Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama district in February 14.

India launched a counter-terror operation in Balakot. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured its pilot, who was handed over to India on March 1.

Talking to editors and senior journalists here, Khan said Indias NDA government wanted to win the general election based on its politics of hatred against Pakistan, The Express Tribune reported.

He warned that the security risk at the Line of Control (LoC) persisted until elections were held in India and asked the nation to be prepared at all times.

The armed forces of the country are ever ready and would give a befitting response in case of any military aggression, the Prime Minister said.

Khan said all political parties had agreed to the National Action Plan and by now the militant groups had been proscribed. Further action was being taken against them as his government could not allow any such activity on the soil of Pakistan.

Tracing the history of jihadi outfits and jihadi culture, he said, These groups have existed since the days of the US-led Afghan war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and have operated from here for decades, Dawn news reported.

He said there was no room now for any such group in the country, as Pakistan would like the world to believe that it was not only a peace-loving country but it was sincere in eradicating this culture of jihadism and terrorism through short-term and long-term policies.

Khan said India was trying to push Pakistan in the blacklist of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and if that happened the country would face a lot of economic problems.

The international terror financing watchdog FATF last month decided to continue the Grey listing of Pakistan for its failure to stop funding of terrorist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamat-ud-Dawa.

In June 2018, Pakistan was placed in the Grey list and given a 27-point action plan by the FATF. This Plan was reviewed as the last Plenary in October 2018 and for the second time in this week-long meeting.

Speaking about the law and order situation in the country, Khan said banned organisations should have been eliminated a long time ago, but it was his government which was taking action against them.

He said the government was spending huge amount of money to bring them into the mainstream.

The US has warned Pakistan that another terror attack on India will prove to be extremely problematic as it asked Islamabad to take more concrete and sustained actions to rein in terror groups, including the JeM and the LeT. PTIpardeepdhull@gmail.com

London, March 22

The UK has secured a short delay to the March 29 Brexit deadline after the European Union (EU) leaders reluctantly agreed to offer embattled Prime Minister Theresa May time until May 22 to get the divorce deal through another House of Commons vote next week.

If the agreement, already defeated twice over the controversial Irish backstop clause, fails to clear the UK Parliament for a third time, the EU has set April 12 as the deadline for Britain to make up its mind on the next move.

While the EUs latest offer reduces the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit by the March 29 deadline, the UK could still leave without a deal if Prime Minister May fails to get the backing for her deal from MPs by April 12.

The UK government will still have a choice of a deal, no-deal, a long extension or revoking Article 50, said Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, soon after EU leaders agreed to Mays plea for a short extension to the Brexit deadline at an ongoing council meeting in Brussels.

April 12 is a key date in terms of the UK wondering whether to hold European Parliament elections. If it has not decided to do so by then the option of a long extension will immediately become impossible, said Tusk, on behalf of all EU member-countries.

If Mays deal fails to clear the Parliament hurdle yet again next week, the UK would be expected to table its no-deal plans for crashing out of the 28-member economic bloc by April 12 or accept a longer extension to the Article 50 mechanism and contest the European Parliament elections scheduled for May 23.

I hope that we can all agree we are now at the moment of decision. And I will make every effort to ensure that we are able to leave with a deal and move our country forward, May said, adding that Britains MPs now had a clear choice.

She, however, did not repeat her vehement opposition to the prospect of a longer extension to Article 50, which is likely to come with many strings attached from Brussels.

In return for even more time for Brexit, should Britain go down that route, the EU will demand that the UK holds a general election or a second referendum. A longer extension on offer is believed to run until December 31 this year or beyond.

The BBC quoting Downing Street sources said that an agreement with the EU to extend the Brexit deadline would be a piece of international law and would take precedence even if Parliament rejected it. PTIWatson Duke has been given three months to relinquish his position as president of the Public Services Association (PSA).

This is according to Tobago House of Assembly (THA) Chief Secretary Farley Augustine, who also said yesterday, for the first time in the history of the THA, the position Duke holds as Deputy Chief Secretary will be a titular one.Everyone is born free and equal in dignity and rights. However, racism, discrimination and intolerance are still very present in all societies.

We in T&T must stand up for our rights, and the rights of others.

Equality, injustice and freedom empower us all, and prevent violence and sustain peace.Federal Board of Revenue FBR Islamabad Consultant Jobs 2019

Latest Federal Board of Revenue FBR Management Posts Islamabad 2021 Federal Board of Revenue FBR Islamabad, Government of Pakistan are requires applications from experienced and motivated individuals for the posts of Change Management Specialist.

How to Apply on Federal Board of Revenue FBR Job Advertisement

Apply as per details in job advertisement. In some cases, you may apply online at vacancies after registering at https://www.jobz.pk online.

Note: Beware of Fraudulent Recruiting Activities. If an employer asks to pay money for any purpose, do not pay at all and report us at contact us form. Apply as per instuctions & dates mentioned in official job ad. Govt jobs may not be applied online here. Human typing error is possible. Error & omissions excepted.The following is a release by the Elections and Boundaries Commission on the recount requestHi, my name is Scott C. Waring and I wrote a few books and am currently a ESL School Owner in Taiwan. I have had my own UFO sighting up close and personal, but that's how it works right? A non believer becomes a believer when they experience their first sighting. You witnessed it, your perceptual field changes, so now you need to share it.





I created this site to help the UFO community get a little bit organized. I noticed that there was a lot of chaos when searching for UFO sighting reports, so I hope this site helps. I wanted to support those eyewitnesses who have tried to tell others about what they have seen, yet were laughed at by even closest of friends.





More and more each day the governments of the world leak bits and pieces of UFO information to the public. They have a trickle down theory in hopes of slowly getting citizens use to the idea that we are not alone in universe and never have been. The truth is being leaked drop by drop until one day we look around and find ourselves neck high in it.





The discovery of alien species in existence is the most monumental scientific event in human history, suppression of that information is a crime against humanity.





About me:

I live in Taiwan. I OWN MY OWN ENGLISH SCHOOL, AND ONCE HAD 5 SCHOOLS.

Am Former USAF at SAC base (flight line).

Age: 42

Educ: BA in Elem ed. Masters in Counseling ed.





I had two UFO sightings, (30+bus size orbs) in military and in 2012 personally saw the UFO over Taipei 101 building on New Years Day (and recored it).Members of the United States Congress during their visit to Kyiv expressed support for U.S. business in Ukraine and discussed reforms.

"During a meeting with U.S. business representatives, members of Congress expressed support for U.S. business in Ukraine, heard about Ukraines progress in enacting economic reforms, and discussed additional reforms still needed for Ukraine to attract international investment," the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine informed on Twitter.

Today, members of Congress paid their respects to the Heavenly Hundred.

On Wednesday, March 20, three U.S. senators and two U.S. Congress members arrived in Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian high-ranking officials and discuss the U.S.-Ukraine partnership. Senator Mike Crapo, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, heads this high-power delegation. Other participants include Senator John Barrasso, Senator John Kennedy, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz and Congressman Russ Fulcher.

ishIn 2018, the trade turnover between Hungary and Ukraine totaled EUR 4 billion, being larger than the same indicator of Hungary-Russia economic cooperation.

"Ukraine is our largest neighbor. Despite the cool relations between the two countries, our trade with Ukraine totaled EUR 4 billion in 2018. It was greater than with Russia. Besides the controversial moments, there are a lot of positive things. It is a good start, we should continue to work," Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Hungary to Ukraine Istvan Ijgyarto said in an interview with the Focus magazine.

He also recalled that Hungary was implementing two large infrastructure projects connected with Ukraine. The first one is the repair of the highway around Berehove and on the stretch up to Mukachevo [in Zakarpattia region]. The second project is the construction of autobahn from the Hungarian side, which will soon approach the border with Ukraine as the last two dozen kilometers are to be constructed.

In addition, the diplomat informed, the negotiations are underway to build a bridge over the Tysa river at the checkpoint.

"Obviously, the Chop bridge cannot cope with the flow of traffic. If more cargoes are transported, and we hope that not only regional but also the state economic relations will be developed, the second bridge will be indispensable," Ijgyarto said.

olA working group has been set up in Luhansk region to coordinate the construction of the renewable energy facilities.

Deputy Chairman of the Luhansk Regional State Administration Yuri Klymenko made a corresponding statement, the press service of the Administration reports.

"The project, which will be implemented in Luhansk region with the support of Canadians, has a strategic importance for our region. Due to the Russian military aggression and the military operation, we are separated from the united energy system of Ukraine. Therefore, it is very important for us to implement the energy sector project," Yuri Klymenko said during a meeting with the Canadian delegation.

In turn, Senior Partner of the Capital Hill Group David Angus and director of the Lugansk Solar Canada Ink. company Desmond Burk expressed the hope that the project implementation would contribute to the economic development of Luhansk region.

Desmond Burk said he had recently met with the Canadian Minister of International Trade Diversification, who was also interested in the launch of construction of the renewable energy facilities in Luhansk region.

So, from now on, the priority measures will be identified for the prompt and effective implementation of the project. In particular, the working meetings will take place at the Luhansk Regional Development Agency and the Rubizhne town council, on the territory of which the construction of the facilities is planned.

olPresident Petro Poroshenko has appointed Oleksandr Balanutsa as Ukrainian ambassador to Kuwait.

This is stated in the presidential decree No. 84 of March 21.

"To appoint Oleksandr Balanutsa as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to the State of Kuwait," the decree says.

ishTina Stavrinaki with RVRN members during a press conference in Athens in April 2016 presenting the 2015 RVRN annual report.  UNHCR/Yorgos Kyvernitis

We observe today the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, in memory of dozens killed on 21 March 1960 after police opened fire at a peaceful demonstration in Sharpeville, South Africa, against the apartheid pass laws. On the occasion, we spoke to Tina Stavrinaki, Assistant Coordinator of the Racist Violence Recording Network in Greece. Tina Stavrinaki is a lawyer who specialised in International Human Rights Law and helped set up the network in 2011. She has been the Assistant Coordinator of the network since 2015.

RVRN is an umbrella network of 46 civil society organizations coordinated by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the Greek National Commission for Human Rights[1]. The participating organizations provide medical, social and legal services to victims of racist violence or victims of other hate  or bias- motivated violent attacks, or have been established by the groups which are usually targeted by racist violence themselves.

The Racist Violence Recording Network, RVRN, came to be in 2011 on the initiative of the Greek National Commission for Human Rights and UNHCR Greece. What do you think are RVRNs greatest achievements since then?

Based on a reliable methodology of recording hate crime incidents, RVRN has published seven annual reports, providing the fullest assessment of hate crime quality trends in Greece. The eighth report for 2018 will be released soon. Our findings contribute to making hate crimes visible and promote legislation which combats hate crimes in practice. RVRN identifies and advocates to address gaps in access to justice for victims of hate crimes. For example, when in the past unregistered asylum seekers or undocumented migrants filed a complaint or reported a hate crime, they ran the risk of detention and deportation due to lack of residence status. Following strong advocacy by RVRN, this gap was addressed through guarantees for the protection of victims and essential witnesses, so their detention and deportation decisions are suspended. A special regime is in place for during the trial. Building bridges between police, judicial authorities and victims has been our continuous objective. For this purpose, RVRN maintains close cooperation with the police and prosecutors and shares information on support services provided by the RVRN members. This practice has been quite successful, as victims are supported by NGOs and some practical gaps of support provided by the authorities, such as the lack of psychological support, are mitigated. The RVRN is recognised by the EU and OSCE as a good practice and has been invited on several occasions to share key elements of its successful coalition practices. Institutional recognition of its effectiveness has been reflected in the composition of the National Council Against Racism and Intolerance, under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice, in which two representatives of the RVRN participate. Last but not least, through its composition and rules of operation, the RVRN reflects the inclusive, tolerant and mutually empowering society we all fight for.

What are the major findings of RVRN reports over the years? What are the main trends identified about racist violence in Greece?

During the years 2011-2013, the main trend was violent attacks by extremist groups, motorcycle or foot patrols, dressed in black, acting as self-proclaimed vigilante groups. These groups attacked refugees and migrants in the streets, squares or public transportation stops. The RVRN has recorded a significant decrease of these attacks following the assassination of Pavlos Fyssas [Greek anti-fascist rapper] in September 2013 and the subsequent prosecution of members of Golden Dawn.

However, violence by racist extremist groups has not been eliminated. Older and newly-formed organised criminal groups assume responsibility for racist attacks against refugees, migrants and LGBTI organisations, as well as against their defenders. The poor living conditions for refugees and migrants on the islands have contributed to the rise of xenophobic rhetoric in the local communities, with extreme manifestations in certain situations. However, local communities dont seem to approve or follow those who trigger tensions and incite acts of violence.

Special reference should be made to incidents perpetrated by employers against refugees and migrants. In these cases, the victims suffer extreme labour exploitation, are deprived from basic means of subsistence, receive death threats and are subjected to physical violence when they ask for their pay.

We have also recorded many assaults against LGBTI persons, which include verbal abuse and personal injuries and come in patterns of every possible variation. LGBTI persons, including refugee LGBTI persons, often suffer repeated assaults in their own homes, by their own family or people, while they are also targeted in their neighbourhoods.

Mitigating and countering rising nationalist populism and extreme supremacist ideologies is the theme for this years International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. How worried are you about the spreading of such phenomena in Greece and in Europe and their impact on refugees and migrants?

Political discourse and global polarization with regard to the reception of refugees and migrants have a direct impact on the rise of xenophobia and violence. The RVRN data for 2018 confirm our concern for a broader acceptance of racist violence by the society. Approaching the European Parliament election in May the more the agenda is set by nationalist populist parties, the more far-right, neo-Nazi and extreme nationalist groups are strengthened everywhere in Europe. We know that these groups build alliances amongst themselves and try to spread their hateful ideologies around the world. Social media are used to mainstream messages of intolerance and oversimplify complex issues related to the protection of refugees and migrants. It is clear that we must increase our vigilance and prepare adequate responses to combat racism and violence against refugees, migrants and their defenders.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?

The position of the RVRN Assistant Coordinator is an exciting job with many rewarding aspects. I have the unique opportunity to work closely with all the communities and to learn from my committed and courageous colleagues how to translate theoretical human rights obligations into concrete measures. RVRN has played an important role in empowering groups in Greece that have been targeted due to national or ethnic origin or on other grounds. It is an honour to represent them and to convey the victims messages to the authorities and the society at large. This feeling helps me cope with the cruelty and ugliness of racist violence.

[1]RVRN Membership during 2018: Aitima, Solidarity Now, Antigone -Information and Documentation Centre, University of Aegean Anti-Racist Observatory, Arsis, Doctors of the World (MdM), Amnesty International, Network for Childrens Rights, Network for Social Support of Refugees and Immigrants, Pleiades  Hellenic Action for Human Rights, Hellenic League for Human Rights, Hellenic Red Cross, Greek Council for Refugees, Greek Forum of Migrants, Greek Forum of Refugees, Human Rights Commission of the Bar Association of Rhodes, Positive Voice, Medical Intervention, Caritas Athens, Caritas Hellas, DIOTIMA  Centre for Research on Womens Issues, Center for Life, Babel Day Centre, Center of Life, Centre for the Support of Repatriated and Migrants  Ecumenical Refugee Program, Network for the Support of Refugee and Migrant Rights (Patras), World Without War and Violence, LATHRA?  Solidarity Committee for Chios refugees, METAction, Rainbow Families, Group of Lawyers for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants, Group of Lawyers for the Support of Refugee and Migrant Rights (Thessaloniki), Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, Association of Afghans United In Greece, Association of Social Workers of Greece, Greek Transgender Support Association, Lighthouse of the world, Forum of Migrants in Crete, Refugee Support Aegean, Act Up Hellas, ASANTE, Colour Youth  LGBTQ Youth Community of Athens, Generation 2.0 RED, HIAS Greece, HumanRights360, Melissa Network, PRAKSIS. The Greek Ombudsman and the Migrants Integration Council of the Municipality of Athens act as observers to the Network.

Share on Facebook Share on TwitterAccording to the amendments to the Charter, the head and members of the board will now be elected without the submission of the supervisory board.

The United States is concerned about the consequences of changes to NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine's charter.

"We are closely reviewing the unexpected changes to Naftogaz Ukraine's charter and are concerned about the potential consequences of these changes," the Embassy of the United States of America in Ukraine wrote on Twitter on March 22, 2019.

As UNIAN reported earlier, on March 20, the Cabinet of Ministers announced it had amended the Charter of NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine regarding the procedure for appointing the head and members of the company's board (the decree of March 6).

Read alsoUkraine gov't to extend contract with Naftogaz CEO Kobolyev for another year

According to the amendments to the Charter, the head and members of the board will now be elected without the submission of the supervisory board.

UNIAN memo. NJSC Naftogaz of Ukraine is the largest state-run vertically integrated oil and gas holding whose subsidiaries account for about 90% of oil and gas production in Ukraine. Naftogaz develops oil and gas fields, produces crude oil and natural gas. Its core business is also transportation and trade in fuel through its own network of filling stations.The spokeswoman noted that it was a shame to hear from President Zeman a message regarding decentralization in Ukraine, because this reform had already been recognized by the European Union as one of the most successful ones implemented by Kyiv.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine has responded to the recent statement by President of the Czech Republic Milos Zeman proposing that Ukraine amend its Constitution, calling such statements "broadcasting Russian propaganda."

The spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, Kateryna Zelenko noted that Zeman "just answered the question, not having better alternatives," Obozrevatel reports.

"The Czech President simply repeated what he had already voiced earlier. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry took this statement into account. We are well aware of Mr. Zemans views. It's a shame he still fails to understand that it's Russian aggression, not civil war, that has been ongoing for the fifth year already in the east of Ukraine, where our patriots die almost every day, and many of them are Russian speakers who defend not only our state, but also Europe and its values. Such statements by the Czech president seem to be broadcasting narratives of Russian propaganda," Zelenko said.

Read alsoCzech intel reveals Russian hackers using IT company front: media

The spokesperson noted that it was a shame to hear from Zeman a message regarding decentralization in Ukraine because this reform has already been recognized by the European Union as one of the most successful ones implemented by Kyiv.

Milos Zeman did not notice that decentralization is one of the priorities of the president and government of Ukraine. Today it is being successfully implemented throughout the country, except for the occupied Ukrainian territories. It is this reform that is recognized by the EU as one of the most successful ones in Ukraine, the spokesperson said.

The Foreign Ministry clarified that the official position of the Czech government, in contrast to the actions of President Zeman, remains friendly to Ukraine. Zelenko recalled this year's visit of the Czech Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek to Mariupol.

"The Czech government has consistently supported us in our fight against the aggressor. You also know that Petricek visited Mariupol at the beginning of this year. In addition, the Czech Republic is very active in extending sanctions against Russia. We will continue our cooperation to counter Russian aggression," she said.

Earlier, Czech President Milos Zeman recommended that Ukraine leadership decentralize power.

It all comes down to the need to change the Ukrainian Constitution, specifically in terms of decentralization of power, he said. He added that the Minsk agreements, which "no one observes," can stop the war in Ukraine.Yovanovitch noted the important role and responsibility of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov to counter such threats.

United States Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch has stressed the need to prevent violence by extremist groups during the upcoming presidential elections, the first round of which is scheduled to be held March 31.

Ambassador Yovanovitch on Thursday met with Interior Minister Arsen Avakov to discuss "the importance of free and fair elections," the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine wrote on Twitter.

Read alsoInterior Ministry denies connection with National Corps Party

The envoy also "noted the Interior Ministrys important role and responsibility to counter threats and prevent acts of violence by extremist groups."

In turn, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, also via Twitter, stated that he had discussed with Ambassador Yovanovitch pressing issues of ensuring fair and transparent elections, security, and preventing provocations at polling stations during the vote.Lawyers will appeal the verdict.

Ukrainian political prisoner Pavlo Hryb might not make it through his prison term in Russia, his distressed father Ihor Hryb has told UNIAN.

The lawyers will appeal the verdict against Ukrainian political prisoner Pavlo Hryb and will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), he said.

"Of course, there will be an appeal. There will be an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights  all legal mechanisms will be involved," Ihor Hryb, Pavlo's father, told UNIAN.

"The court approved what the prosecutor asked for," he said.

According to the father, such a decision was expected.

Read alsoFM Klimkin calls on international community to exert pressure on Russia to release Hryb

"We did not expect any humane decisions, I mean some kind of acquittal. Such a sentence was quite predictable," he said.

"The only hope is that he will be swapped because he will not survive in prison. When Pavlo was tried, he had a severe fever. He was not only rejected medical assistance in the courtroom, they even failed to check his body temperature. The court called an ambulance to all recent hearings. What can we talk about here?" he said.

"Where have you seen any humane actions on the part of the Russian Federation? For example, I have analyzed this, I don't remember any such occasions. I would like to believe... But there is a sentence handed down," Pavlo's father said.

As UNIAN reported earlier, the North Caucasian district military court on Friday sentenced Ukrainian political prisoner Pavlo Hryb to six years in a penal colony for "promoting terrorism."NABU noted that over the four years of its work, the Bureau had repeatedly proved that it was an apolitical law enforcement agency that prosecutes senior officials.

The National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) denies allegations of the attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election in 2016.

"The statement of the prosecutor general of Ukraine, who publicly suggests that the National Anti-corruption Bureau could have influenced the election of the president of the United States, is false and an absurd attempt to discredit an independent anti-corruption body," NABU said in a statement.

NABU noted that over the four years of its work, the Bureau had repeatedly proved that it was an apolitical law enforcement agency that prosecutes senior officials.

"It was with the advent of NABU that Ukraine, for the first time since it gained independence, witnessed arrests of top officials, who were previously considered 'inviolable.' But even in such circumstances, it is difficult to imagine a situation where the newly created law enforcement body in the country that had just undergone the revolution could influence the elections in the United States. The competence of NABU is the exposure and prosecution of Ukrainian top officials. Therefore, NABU detectives did not collect or transfer any evidence of the unlawful activities of U.S. political consultant Paul Manafort, since this is beyond the competence of the agency," reads the report.

Read alsoSenior Ukrainian official says he's opened probe into U.S. election interference  media

The Bureau says Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko is well aware of this fact, since all the investigation materials of the "black ledgers" of the Party of Regions (except for the episode regarding the actions of the former chairman of the Central Election Commission of Ukraine where the investigation of was stopped by SAPO prosecutors) were transferred in June 2017 to the PGO's Department of Special Investigations for further investigation.

"NABU published information mentioning the presence of the name of Paul Manafort among others in the so-called 'black ledgers' in response to numerous requests from the Ukrainian and foreign media in order to avoid distortion and speculation," NABU said.

The Bureau emphasizes the U.S. government and the U.S. embassy in Ukraine have always supported Ukraine and NABU as an institution since its creation in 2015. "On the part of our international partners, who were side-by-side with the Bureau in the most difficult times, a lot was done to fight corruption in Ukraine. NABU appreciates this high level of trust and thanks all international partners for their support," the agency added.Poroshenko separately noted the recent raid against the Russia-controlled psy-ops group code name "Sapphire."

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said the SBU Security Service of Ukraine in 2018 blocked the activities of several networks created by the Russian military intelligence.

"Last year, the agency prevented the activities of several agent networks created by the Russian military intelligence. Over 150 members of the 'DPR'/'LPR' terrorist organizations have been identified, members of more than a third of them have been detained," he said during celebrations in Kyiv on the occasion of the 27th anniversary of the creation of the SBU Security Service of Ukraine, an UNIAN correspondent reports.

Read alsoRussian intelligence plotted terror attack in Kharkiv subway ahead of elections  SBU

According to Poroshenko, thanks to the brilliant special operations of Ukraine's counterintelligence, two so-called "ministers" of the "DPR" terrorist group were exfiltrated to the Ukrainian-controlled territory in August and September of last year, and recently, the former head of the militant tank unit.

"Now they all cooperate with the investigation, give evidence about the direct involvement of the Russian Federation in the occupation of part of Donbas, in the theft of state property, the destruction of infrastructure and economic complex of the region and other crimes against the state and public security of Ukraine," he added.

Poroshenko separately noted the recent raid against the Russia-controlled psy-ops group code name "Sapphire."Poroshenko says Kyiv's relations with Washington have never been so efficient and meaningful as today.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko says Ukraine highly appreciates the relationship of strategic partnership with the United States and U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch enjoys his full support.

"I'd like to emphasize that our partners  the United States, the European Union, NATO  are ready to support and support us both in reforming the defense and security sector and reforming the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine]. I'd like emphasize that Ukraine highly appreciates the relationship of strategic partnership with the U.S. on the basis of clear bipartisan support. Our relations with Washington have never been so efficient and meaningful as today," Poroshenko said at an official event on the SBU's 27th anniversary in Kyiv on Friday, March 22.

"In this context, I would like to mention the important role of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in promoting Ukraine-U.S. relations. And I emphasize that she, as representative of the United States and U.S. President Donald Trump, a great friend of Ukraine and a great friend of mine, enjoys my full support," he said.

Read alsoSenior Ukrainian official says he's opened probe into U.S. election interference  media

As was reported, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko earlier told Hill.TV's John Solomon in an interview that aired Wednesday that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch gave him a do not prosecute list during their first meeting. "Unfortunately, from the first meeting with the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, [Yovanovitch] gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute," Lutsenko, who took his post in 2016, told Hill.TV last week. "My response of that is it is inadmissible. Nobody in this country, neither our president nor our parliament nor our ambassador, will stop me from prosecuting whether there is a crime," he continued.

The U.S. Department of State called Lutsenko's claim of receiving a do not prosecute list, "an outright fabrication."Ukraine established the Main Directorate of Military Counterintelligence and separate units for counteraction to Russian special services in Crimea, detection of sabotage and reconnaissance groups and intelligence agencies.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko says Ukraine needs a powerful and dynamic Security Service operating under the highest standards of the EU and NATO.

"Of course, the Security Service should continue to make progress on the path of the reforms. Ukraine needs a powerful, dynamic and flexible Security Service that operates according to the highest standards and principles of the EU and NATO," Poroshenko said at official events on the 27th anniversary of the establishment of the Security Service of Ukraine, the presidential press service said.

According to him, the Service must be completely independent from politics and have clearly defined and purposeful functions  counterintelligence, fight against terrorism and protection of state secrets, protection against challenges and threats, including in the economy of the state.

The president added that the Security Service should become a civilian structure, just as in Europe and the United States. "It will make it stronger, more flexible, capable of confronting threats originating from the Russian Federation," he said.

"The modernized civilian Security Service with human rights observance, parliamentary oversight, as stated in the National Security Law, will enhance confidence and effective cooperation with our Euro-Atlantic security and intelligence partners," he said.

"We have done a tremendous job to make the Service capable of carrying out the most difficult tasks," the president stated.

Read alsoSBU blocks several Russian intelligence networks in 2018  Poroshenko

He noted that in 2014, when the annexation of Crimea, the penetration of sabotage groups in Donbas, direct military intervention started, there was no time for thinking, preparation and elaboration of the options. "We knew one thing  the very existence of the state of Ukraine was under the threat. And the revival of the Security Service had to be done directly in the course of its active struggle with the special services of the Russian Federation, which have already acted in a strict military regime," Poroshenko said.

"The people of Ukraine should know the truth about the distance that the Service has covered over the last five years," he said.

According to him, Ukraine established the Main Directorate of Military Counterintelligence and separate units for counteraction to Russian special services in Crimea, detection of sabotage and reconnaissance groups and intelligence agencies. The number of personnel of counterintelligence units in the border regions and the south of the country has been increased.

"As part of the glorious 'Alpha' of the Security Service, the management of conducting special operations to detect and stop the activities of paramilitary and armed groups, terrorist and reconnaissance and sabotage groups emerged. A special unit has been formed to decipher and process data from UAVs and geographic information systems," he said.

"A lot has been done. But I deliberately stopped at the radical changes that the Service has carried out promptly, without suspending the struggle on the battlefield and in the rear. I say this for those skeptics who unreasonably blame us for the lack of transformations in the special services," he added.A local resident had been recruited for $15,000. He has been detained.

The Security Service of Ukraine says it prevented a terror attack at the Industrialna subway station in Kharkiv, the agency's press service says.

The special operation was carried out under the procedural guidance of the prosecutors office in Kharkiv region.

SBU operatives revealed that the Russian special services had recruited a local resident to organize and carry out the terror attack at one of the city subway stations.

According to the curators' idea, the explosion was supposed to lead to numerous casualties and destabilization of the social and political situation in the country on the eve of the presidential elections.

Read alsoCocaine seized from vessel at Yuzhny seaport worth over $51 mln (Photo)

As part of criminal proceedings, opened under Part 2 of Art. 15, Art. 258 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, operatives of the Security Service of Ukraine have documented that the representatives of the special services of the Russian Federation handed over an explosive device with a capacity of 600 grams of TNT, set to be activated by a telephone call.

Russians also instructed the perpetrator on how to execute the attack and paid him a $15,000 reward.

The Security Service of Ukraine has established that the Russian agent had already purchased nails, screws, and bolts to fill an explosive device in order to enhance its destructive effect and increase the number of casualties.

Read alsoSBU exposes psy-ops group working for Russia's GRU

The SBU assured that during the special operation, no risk to the life and health of citizens was allowed.

As part of the pre-trial investigation, SBU operatives in advance removed the explosive device from the cache, and replaced it with a decoy.

The attacker was detained under Art. 208 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine.

The pretrial investigation continues.That's despite their mandate granting full access across the warzone.

Ukraine's envoy to the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) at the Minsk talks on Donbas Yevgenij Marchuk says Russia-led forces have never allowed the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine to patrol the zone that is supposed to be weapon-free.

"A document was signed back in 2014 that envisaged the creation of a zone free of heavy weapons, which starts from the Azov Sea coast and stretches up north, somewhere around 100 km, a vast territory," Marchuk said at a meeting of the Minsk platform's informal deputy group, an UNIAN correspondent reports.

Read alsoOSCE spots Grad projectiles in residential areas of Ilovaisk

He stressed until today "access of the OSCE SMM patrols was never allowed to this gigantic territory, which should be free from heavy weapons."

Marchuk added the task of the observers was to monitor whether the obligations of the parties to the conflict were being fulfilled.

He stressed that, according to the mandate of the OSCE SMM, mission patrols should have access to the entire territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders, i.e. also to occupied Crimea.Such a disclosure could have a detrimental impact on the ability of Trump or future presidents to conduct foreign relations, the administration says.

The White House is rejecting a sweeping request from House Democrats for documents and interviews related to President Trumps communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In a letter obtained by The Hill, the White House asserts that the presidents diplomatic communications are confidential and protected by executive privilege and describes the requests as beyond Congresss legitimate realm of inquiry, according to The Hill.

It also argues that such a disclosure could have a detrimental impact on the ability of Trump or future presidents to conduct foreign relations.

The President must be free to engage in discussions with foreign leaders without fear that those communications will be disclosed and used as fodder for partisan political purposes. And foreign leaders must be assured of this as well, Cipollone writes in the letter sent Thursday to House committee chairmen Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.).

Chairs of the Intelligence, Oversight and Reform and Foreign Affairs committees sent letters to the White House and State Department in early March seeking a slew of documents and transcribed interviews with executive branch staff related to a burgeoning investigation into Trumps communications with Putin.

Read alsoReuters: Trump says he does not mind if public sees Mueller's Russia probe report

The request is one of several that the White House is contending with as House Democrats move forward with a series of probes into Trump, his administration and business dealings.

Trump came under intense criticism from both parties following his meeting with Putin in Helsinki, when he appeared to cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence communitys assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election during a press conference alongside the Russian president. Trump later walked back his remarks, saying he accepts the intelligence communitys findings.

Democrats have since sought to compel the administration to share more information about the private meeting between Trump and Putin in Helsinki.

Last July, Republicans blocked an effort to subpoena the American translator present for the Helsinki meeting to testify before Congress in a closed session. At the time, former officials from Democratic and Republican administrations argued that subpoenaing the interpreter would set a dangerous precedent.

Democrats renewed scrutiny of Trumps communications with Putin comes as special counsel Robert Mueller is believed to be wrapping up his investigation into Russia's election interference and links between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Trump has consistently denied that his campaign colluded with Moscow to meddle in the election, branding the investigation a witch hunt. He has also accused Democrats investigating his administration as engaging in presidential harassment.The weapon is slated to join the Kremlin's arsenal as early as 2020.

Nearly 20 Russian missiles that the U.S. is currently unable to defend against were recently moved to a military testing site, signaling another milestone for the Kremlin's hypersonic weapons program, according to people who have direct knowledge of American intelligence reports.

"This shows they have the ambition to develop these weapons and that they have prioritized this particular program. The Russians have basically determined that they are comfortable with the design and will now focus on fine-tuning the weapon through testing," one person, who spoke to CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said.

The air-to-ground hypersonic missile dubbed "Kinzhal," which means "dagger" in Russian, has been tested at least three times. In July, the Kremlin successfully tested the weapon against a target nearly 500 miles away. What's more, in another U.S. intelligence report, according to a source, the hypersonic missile was mounted and launched 12 times from a Russian MiG-31 fighter jet. Additionally, work is underway to mount the weapon on a strategic bomber.

Read alsoRussia names potential targets of Zircon missiles in U.S. territory

The weapon is slated to join the Kremlin's arsenal as early as 2020.

The latest revelations come a little more than a year after Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled the Kinzhal system alongside five other advanced weapons.

Of the six weapons Putin unveiled in March, CNBC has learned that two of them will be ready for war by 2020, according to sources with direct knowledge of U.S. intelligence reports.

As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said Ukraine is not bound by any restrictions regarding the missile range after Russia's withdrawal from the INF Treaty.Congress and the newly empowered Democratic House majority will soon assess Mueller's findings  and determine what steps to take next.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has submitted a confidential report to Attorney General William P. Barr, marking the end of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump, a Justice Department spokeswoman said.

The Justice Department notified Congress late Friday that it had received Mueller's report but did not describe its contents. Barr is expected to summarize the findings for lawmakers in coming days, The Washington Post reported.

In less than two years, Mueller's investigation has led to criminal charges against more than 30 individuals. A senior Justice Department official said the special counsel has not recommended any further indictments.

Read alsoWhite House rejects Dem request for documents on Trump-Putin communications

In a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, Barr wrote that Mueller "has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters."

The submission of Mueller's report marks the culmination of his closely held inquiry, a case that has engulfed the Trump administration since its inception and led to multiple guilty pleas from former advisers to the president. With the closing of his investigation, Congress and the newly empowered Democratic House majority will soon assess his findings  and determine what steps to take next.Joint Statement by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair Countries

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International Court of Justice will deliver its decision on the request for provisional measures in the case of ARMENIA v AZERBAIJAN

Statement of the Foreign Ministry of Armenia

OPEC Fund Partners Ameriabank to Address Problems and Help to Improve the Life of People in Armenia. T. Alnassar.

Generation A: Edition 14. Exclusive Chance to Begin Your Professional Career with Ameriabank

Katna Armenian cheeses enter the market: the new project of Galaxy Group of Companies

US$30m OPEC Fund loan to Ameriabank to promote sustainable energy and support small businesses in Armenia

Black Friday at ucom: up to 70% discount for smart home devices, gadgets and smartphones

116 million AMD assistance to minors with disabilities in Shirak Province from Mikayel Vardanyan

Discussion on the topic IT infrastructure as the basis of the digital economy with the participation of the heads of telecommunication companies in Armenia

Statement nn the ongoing Aggression by Azerbaijan against the Republic of Armenia

"We condemn any attempts at borderisation, as observed since the incursion of Azerbaijani troops into Armenian territory on 12 May" Joint statement

The United States is deeply concerned about reports of intensive fighting today between Armenia and Azerbaijan.ANTONY J. BLINKEN

Statement of the MFA of Armenia

Ookla has awarded Ucom with The fastest fixedline network in Armenia award

UCOM keeps on supporting the 42 YEREVAN programming school

Google Ad

Recognizing the One-Year Anniversary of the Ceasefire Declaration Between Armenia and Azerbaijan

They should not be positioned near civilian communities neither in Armenia nor in Artsakh

Humanitarian and human rights protection needed following the 2020 outbreak of hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh

Galaxy Group of Companies expands its activities in Belarus: a new TIME and Pandora store launched

I think its a good moment to invest in Armenia. Head of Markets at Symbiotics Vincent Lehner

Ameriabank has Raised USD 17.5M Tier 2 Capital

UNIGHT TO UNITE. UCOM CELEBRATED ITS REBIRTH

Ameriabank and HSBC Armenia to provide their customers access to each others ATMs without additional fees

Ameriabank. 62.5% Growth in Taxes YOY

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans have provided 300 million AMD to overcome the infertility in Armenia

UCOM has officially launched the sale of IPHONE 13

Six servicemen were wounded by the attack of the Azerbaijani armed forces in Artsakh, two of them in critical condition

S&P Improved the Outlook on Ameriabank to PositiveAs part of its "Year of Tolerance" initiatives, UAE has honoured 1,000 mothers and widows of martyrs in the liberated areas of Yemen

HODEIDAH, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 22nd Mar, 2019) As part of its "Year of Tolerance" initiatives, UAE has honoured 1,000 mothers and widows of martyrs in the liberated areas of Yemen.

Mohammed Al Junaibi, Director of Humanitarian Affairs at the Emirates Red Crescent, ERC, and Hashim Al Azazi, Under-Secretary of the Hodeidah Governorate, distributed gifts to the mothers and widows of the martyrs.

Al Junaibi said the move is part of the UAE's efforts to ease the suffering and to improve living standards of Yemeni women. It is also a token of appreciation to Yemeni mothers and their role in raising future generations.The Iranian Foreign Ministry condemns US President Donald Trump's recent statement on the necessity to fully recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights and warns that such decision could bring about a new wave of conflicts int he Middle East, the ministry's spokesman, Bahram Qassemi, said Friday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 22nd March, 2019) The Iranian Foreign Ministry condemns US President Donald Trump's recent statement on the necessity to fully recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights and warns that such decision could bring about a new wave of conflicts int he middle East, the ministry's spokesman, Bahram Qassemi, said Friday.

"The Zionist regime is occupational and has no sovereignty over any Arab or Islamic territories," Qassemi said.

"Iran will closely follow all further changes and adopt a corresponding political line in consultations with the Syrian government and other states," the spokesman said, adding that US and Israel's actions on the Golan Heights could bring about "a new wave of conflicts."Barcelona, Spain (UroToday.com) Renal tumor biopsy (RTB) for RCC, especially for small renal masses, is recommended by international guidelines if the RTB pathology will change treatment management  either favoring surveillance or ablative therapy. Yet, its usage remains relatively low and uptake is sporadic. Its accuracy is reported to be quite high in more recent series but can be very institutional dependent. More important, with regards to focal ablative therapy, RTB can either be done at a separate setting from the actual treatment or at the time of treatment itself.In this study, authors complete a local multi-institutional retrospective assessment of their RTB biopsy diagnostic accuracy, correlated to when the biopsy is done relative to tumor ablation. They only looked at patients with cT1 tumor who went on to receive cryotherapy, radiofrequency ablation, or microwave ablation between 2007 and 2017. All biopsies were performed under CT, MRI or US guidance.An important limitation is that they only looked at patients who underwent tumor ablation  so patients who had a pre-procedure biopsy, but didnt end up getting ablation were not included (either due to more radical therapy or no therapy).They identified a total of 641 patients with a median tumor size of 2.9 cm. The majority (69%) had RTB performed at the time of ablation, and 10% of patients had no ablation at all.When looking at the pathologic outcomes of the biopsy, they limited it to patients who only had a pre-op or peri-op biopsy (excluding patients with no biopsy or biopsy at both settings).Peri-op biopsies captured significantly more benign masses and less malignancy. However, the sample size is quite small, so differences may not be captured well. Grossly, peri-op biopsy results in high detection of benign pathology and non-diagnostic biopsy  likely due to the limitation previously discussed.Based on these results, the authors suggest that peri-op biopsy may lead to overtreatment of benign masses, and as a result, the authors suggest that pre-op biopsy should be favored  in order to make a decision regarding need to treat.Presented by: C.V. Widdershoven, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Department of Urology, Amsterdam, The NetherlandsWritten by: Thenappan Chandrasekar, MD (Clinical Instructor, Thomas Jefferson University) (twitter: @tchandra_uromd, @TjuUrology) at the 34th European Association of Urology (EAU 2019) #EAU19 conference in Barcelona, Spain, March 15-19, 2019.A girl stops to look as a man walks past carrying luggage on his head after Cyclone Idai in Buzi district outside Beira

In a message of solidarity released Friday, SIGNIS, the World Catholic Association for Communication has expressed solidarity with the people of southern Africa in particular victims of Cyclone Idai which devastated Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

Africa Service, Vatican News  Vatican City

Hope that homes, communities, Churches will be rebuilt

In her message to presidents of episcopal conferences of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, SIGNIS President, Mrs Helen Osman, sought to encourage Church leaders of these communities facing an enormously difficult moment in their lives.

The members of SIGNIS, the World Catholic Association for Communication, offer our solidarity with your people in this difficult moment. As Catholic communicators, we know genuine, compassionate communication can comfort and encourage those who suffer such devastation. We support your efforts to provide a message of hope to your faithful. Together with you, they will rebuild their homes, their communities, their Church, said Mrs Osman in her message.

The SIGNIS President further adds that SIGNIS members the world over embrace families who have lost loved ones and hold, in prayer, all those attempting to aid and comfort them, including first responders, aid agencies and civil authorities.

We pray for the recovery of your region

Along with our members from the African continent, including our Vice-President Father Paul Samasumo from Zambia, we pray for the recovery of your region and the lives of its people. We commit ourselves to use the media to call people of good will to stand with you as you work to meet the urgent needs of your people, Mrs Osman said.

According to a Friday Associated Press report, as flood waters began to recede in parts of Mozambique, fears have risen that the death toll could soar as bodies are revealed. The number of deaths could be beyond the 1,000 predicted by the country's president earlier this week, said Elhadj As Sy, the secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

A grim voyage towards the devastated city of Beira

In addition to worries about the number of dead, As Sy told AP that the humanitarian needs are great.

"They are nowhere near the scale and magnitude of the problem," As Sy said. "And I fear we will be seeing more in the weeks and months ahead, and we should brace ourselves."

Thousands of people were making a grim voyage toward the city of Beira, which although 90 per cent destroyed has become a centre for frantic rescue efforts throughout the region.

For those who reach Beira with their few remaining possessions, life is grim. Waterborne diseases are a growing concern as water and sanitation systems were largely destroyed.

The situation is horrendous

"The situation is simply horrendous, there is no other way to describe it," As Sy said after touring transit camps for the growing number of displaced. "Three thousand people who are living in a school that has 15 classrooms and six, only six, toilets. You can imagine how much we are sitting on a water and sanitation ticking bomb."

What moved him the most was the number of children without their parents, separated in the chaos or newly orphaned.

The survivors from inland Mozambique arrived by the boatload, some 50 at a time, mostly children, witnesses said.

"Some were wounded. Some were bleeding. Some had feet white like flour for being in the water for so long," said Julia

Residents of Beira muttered "Meu Dio!" ("My God") in Portuguese) as they went about the city and came across new scenes of destruction.

In Zimbabwe missing schoolchildren and headmasters

Zimbabwe was also affected by the cyclone and as roads began to clear and some basic communications were set up, a fuller picture of the extent of the damage there is beginning to emerge. The victims are diverse: a mother buried in the same grave with her child, headmasters missing together with dozens of school students, illegal gold and diamond miners swept away by raging rivers and police officers washed away with their prisoners.

The Ministry of Information said 30 pupils, two headmasters and a teacher are missing. Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa said Thursday that officers and prisoners were washed away.A monetary contribution has been sent on behalf of Pope Francis to the people of southeast Africa suffering the devastating effects of Cyclone Idai.

By Robin Gomes

The Popes closeness and solidarity for the people of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, devastated by Cyclone Idai, has taken a concrete form.

The Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development announced on Friday that the Pontiff has decided to send an initial contribution of 150 thousand to the 3 countries to help in the first phase of the emergency.

The Pope's initiative came not long after his appeal during his General Audience on Wednesday, in which he urged for prayers and support for the victims of the disaster.

The intense tropical cyclone made landfall on 15 March near Beira, Mozambique, and moved inland causing widespread damage and severe flooding in Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.

Described by the United Nations as one of the worst weather-related disasters ever to hit the southern hemisphere, Idai has killed 242 people in Mozambique, 259 in Zimbabwe and 56 in Malawi, and numbers are expected to rise. Nearly two million people have been affected.

The Vatican Dicastery said the Popes contribution to the relief efforts is intended to be an immediate expression of the Holy Father's feeling of spiritual closeness and paternal encouragement towards the people and territories affected.

The sum, to be distributed equally among the countries through their respective Apostolic nunciatures, will benefit areas most affected by the disaster and will be used in relief works and assistance to people and territories.

This is part of the overall fund that is being raised throughout the Catholic Church involving various bishops conferences and numerous charitable organizations.

The UNs World Food Programme estimates 1.7 million people in Mozambique will eventually need help as a result of the disaster.



With waters receding and water and sanitation systems largely destroyed, the spectre of waterborne diseases looms large on the horizon.Pope Francis on March 22 met a delegation of parliamentarians from the Czech Republic and Slovakia on the occasion of the 1150th death anniversary of St. Cyril.

By Robin Gomes

Pope Francis on Friday wished that the evangelizing mission of Sts. Cyril and Methodious continue to be a model of inculturation for the Czech Republic and Slovakia in building a society based on mutual acceptance, solidarity, encounter and openness to others.

As representatives of the people in the institutions, you are called to rediscover the intrinsic link between the Gospel and your cultural identity, re-evaluating your Christian roots in order to build a society in which mutual acceptance and mutual solidarity can take place, the Pope told a delegation of parliamentarians from the Czech and the Slovak Republics who met him in the Vatican on the occasion of the 1150th death anniversary of St. Cyril.

Evangelization

Known as the Apostles of the Slavs, Sts. Cyril and Methodius, the 9 th century evangelizers from Thessalonica, preached Christianity to the Slavic people in their own language. St. Cyril died in 869 in Moravia, part of what is now the Czech Republic.

The Holy Father recalled that the two Thessalonian brothers translated the Bible into the old Slavic language, brought the so-called Slavic alphabet and through the biblical-Christian message helped create a legal state in and around the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The Pope noted that St. Cyril was able to build relationships of knowledge and cordiality among peoples, becoming a link between different cultures and ecclesial traditions.

Model of inculturation

The vast work of evangelization, carried out with apostolic zeal by Saint Cyril and his holy brother in your lands, is a model of inculturation still valid in its essential elements, the Pope said. Rather than weakening what is authentic in different local cultures, the Pope said, the Gospel helps individuals and communities to recognize and realize the good, the truth and the beauty.

He said St. Cyril was able to build relationships of knowledge and cordiality among peoples, becoming a link between different cultures and ecclesial traditions.

Building bridges

The Pope hoped that the significant spiritual and cultural heritage of Sts. Cyril and Methodious will arouse in Czech and Slovak citizens the desire for encounter and openness to others.

He said, It is a matter of knowing how to live together in diversity, through dialogue, sharing, building bridges and breaking down the barriers of distrust and prejudice.

With these attitudes, he said, we become witnesses of solidarity and builders of peace.

The Holy Father wished that through their important public function, the Czech and Slovak parliamentarians become protagonists of fraternity, clear and irreproachable promoters of the common good, in order to offer hope to those who elected them.A Representative Office (RO) offers a low-cost entry for companies seeking to gain a better understanding of the Vietnamese market. As such, this option is among the most common for first-time entrants to the Vietnamese market and often precedes a larger presence within the country.

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What do you need to get a license?

Pre-licensing checklist for setting up a RO:

File an application for setting up a RO with company chop or seal; Appointment letter of Chief of RO with identification documents and company seal; Power of attorney in favor of consultant to submit the application dossier; Certificate of Incorporation for the Company and/or Business Registration Certificate of the Company; Audited financial report of the company for the latest fiscal year; Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) of leasing office or leasing contract; Documents providing legal rights of landlord regarding the right of leasing office.

For steps 1 to 6, the foreign entity would require one notarized and consularized copy of each document and a translated copy in Vietnamese by a Vietnamese competent authority.

A signed leasing contract is also required before registering a RO in Vietnam.

What do you need to do after you get the license?

Post-licensing checklist for setup a RO:

Make a seal for the RO; License on the establishment of RO

Passport of Chief of RO if foreigner or passport/ID card if Chief is Vietnamese Register a Tax code for RO; Declaration to register a tax code

Power of attorney

Certificate of seal registration

Certificate of RO in Vietnam Open a bank account of RO; License on the establishment of RO

Certificate of seal registration

Certificate of tax code registration

Letter of authorization appointing the authorized signatories of the bank accounts Announcement of the establishment of RO of Company.

For steps 8 to 10, notarized and translated documents will be required to complete the process.

How long does it take to set up an RO?

ROs can be set up in between six to eight weeks. We recommend hiring a professional service to deal with the myriad of laws and procedures.

Given the absence of in-country revenue and associated licensing requirements, the setup process for this option does not entail as many bureaucratic procedures as others.

An RO license is valid for five years but can be extended for another five years.

What comes next?

Hiring, tax, and reporting.

There is no cap on the number of local and expatriate employees that a representative office can hire as long as their employment is properly documented.

All expatriate hires including the chief representative are required to have a work permit. ROs can hire staff directly or use the assistance of recruiting agencies.

An RO is not subject to Vietnamese corporate income tax (CIT). However, it is responsible for declaring its employees personal income tax (PIT).

In order to determine payable tax, ROs have to undertake a tax audit that checks all revenues and expenses during the tax term to establish grounds for declaring and paying tax.

The RO also has to send reports of its activities of the previous year to the Department of Industry and Trade before January 30 of each year.

Tax risks if RO viewed as Permanent Establishment

As discussed earlier, an RO is only permitted to do market research activities and act as a liaison office for its parent company. It cannot engage in commercial activities or support the parent company with its commercial activities in Vietnam.

A Permanent Establishment (PE) is defined as per local laws as well as the double tax avoidance (DTA) agreement between Vietnam and other countries. Generally, the PE definition under a DTA takes precedence over domestic regulations.

If a foreign business wants to convert the RO into a PE but has been carrying out activities as per local laws, it could activate a licensing risk. Therefore, foreign businesses should ensure that their RO performs activities as per the DTA guidelines. In addition, if the RO performs activities that are outside its scope, it may be subject to additional tax in Vietnam.

To avoid any licensing or tax risks in case the RO is treated as a PE, businesses are advised to refrain from getting their ROs involved in buying and selling activities between two parties or any other activities generating revenue.

Foreign investors looking to establish a presence in Vietnam should use the services of registered local advisors who can ensure their set up process is accurate while complying with the relevant DTAs and local regulations.

Note: This article was first published in April 2015 and has been updated to include the latest developments.Rudolph Valentino and his wife Natacha Rambova in the early 1920s

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova, 1921

Rudolph Valentino, Natacha Rambova and two dogs, 1922

Rudy and Natacha on the deck of the RMS Olympic prior to Natacha's departure for Europe in 1922

Rudy and Natacha with her mother Winifred Kimball and step-father Richard Hudnut, on the deck of the RMS Olympic prior to Natacha's departure for Europe in 1922

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova at their Mexicali Wedding, 1922

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova during their Mineralava Dance Tour in 1923

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova during their Mineralava Dance Tour in 1923

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova during their Mineralava Dance Tour in 1923

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova photographed around 1923

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova photographed circa 1923

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova, circa 1923

Rudolph Valentino with Natacha Rambova and their dogs, taken shortly after their marriage at their Whitley Heights home, 1923

Rudy and Natacha at the Croydon Aviation Field (Boarding a flight to Paris-Le Bourget), London, August 1923

Rudy and Natacha at the Croydon Aviation Field (Boarding a flight to Paris-Le Bourget), London, August 1923

Rudy and Natacha at the Croydon Aviation Field (Boarding a flight to Paris-Le Bourget), London, August 1923

Rudy and Natacha in 1923, during their Mineralava Dance Tour

Rudy and Natacha in 1923, during their Mineralava Dance Tour

Rudy and Natacha in 1923, during their Mineralava Dance Tour

Rudy and Natacha with their puppy aboard the RMS Aquitania in 1923

Natacha Rambova and Rudolph Valentino, circa 1924

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova photographed at home in Hollywood Hills, circa 1924

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova, 1924

Rudolph Valentino and wife Natacha Rambova at their home in Hollywood Hills, circa 1924

Rudolph Valentino and wife Natacha Rambova at their home in Hollywood Hills, circa 1924

Rudolph Valentino and wife Natacha Rambova, circa 1924

Rudy and Natacha with Nita Naldi aboard the S.S. Leviathan on November 10, 1924

Rudy and Natacha with Nita Naldi aboard the S.S. Leviathan on November 10, 1924

Rudy and Natacha with Nita Naldi aboard the S.S. Leviathan on November 10, 1924

Rudolph Valentino and wife Natacha Rambova leave LA by train, 1925

Rudolph Valentino and wife Natacha Rambova leave LA by train, 1925

Rudy and Natacha at the Ambassador Hotel in June 1925

In 1919, just before the rise of his career, Italian actor Rudolph Valentino impulsively married actress Jean Acker. Acker became involved with Valentino in part to remove herself from the lesbian love triangle, quickly regretted the marriage, and locked Valentino out of their room on their wedding night. The couple separated soon after, and the marriage was never consummated. The couple remained legally married until 1921, when Acker sued Valentino for divorce, citing desertion.In 1921, Valentino first met Natacha Rambova - an American silent film costume and set designer, art director, and protegee of Nazimova - on the set of. The two worked together on the Nazimova production of, by which time they were romantically involved. They married on March 14, 1923 at the Lake County Court House in Crown Point, Indiana.Many of Valentino's friends disliked Rambova and found her controlling. During his relationship with her, he lost many friends and business associates. Towards the end of their marriage, Rambova was banned from his sets by contract. Valentino and Rambova divorced in 1925. The end of the marriage was bitter, with Valentino bequeathing Rambova one dollar in his will.Valentino died in 1926 at the age of 31 because of Peritonitis. Considered as an early pop icon, and a sex symbol of the 1920s, who was known in Hollywood as the "Latin lover" or simply as "Valentino". His premature death caused mass hysteria among his fans and further propelled his status as a cultural film icon.From the time he died in 1926 until the 1960s, Valentino's sexuality was not generally questioned in print. At least four books, including the notoriously libelous, suggested that he may have been gay despite his marriage to Rambova. For some, the marriages to Acker and Rambova, as well as the relationship with Pola Negri, add to the suspicion that Valentino was gay and that these were "lavender marriages."Here below is a beautiful colorized photo collection of Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova during their short marriage.AkzoNobel steps towards solutions for heritage preservation in Vietnam

On March 21, AkzoNobel - the leading company in paints and coatings in the world, and also the manufacturer of Dulux Professional paint organised international seminar Urban Heritage Preservation  A Key to Sustainable Development in cooperation with Architecture magazine of the Vietnam Association of Architects.

The event aims at creating a forum for experts and architects to gather to share experiences of protecting heritages in the world and in Vietnam. In the seminar, AkzoNobel offered a number of innovative paints and coatings products as effective solutions towards helping preserve the original beauty of historical heritages across nation. The event attracted more than 200 developers and professionals in the field.

Since 2016, Dulux Professional has introduced a range of about 70 products and services in the catalogue for projects in Vietnam market. Over the years, the innovation platforms for the product range have been developed which will offer better resource and energy efficiency, longer durability and even higher safety to users.

Pamela Phua, general director of AkzoNobel Paints Vietnam said, Heritages are precious assets of any nation. They are not only historical and cutural symbols of the country but also hooks to attract tourists, contributing to local economic growth. By protecting those symbolic structures, we can inherit and continue to save the countrys cuture for future generation as well as create a great momentum for the development of tourism and economy.

As a leading global paints and coatings company, AkzoNobel calls on its expertise and products to protect, restore and add colour to the built environment. By collaborating with many different parties including international institutional partners as well as local government authorities, AkzoNobel is committed to hugely supporting the revitalisation of Vietnamese historical heritages nationwide, she added.

Pamela Phua, general director of AkzoNobel Paints Vietnam

AkzoNobels products are already protecting numerous famous heritages such as Rijksmuseum (Netherlands), Van Gogh museum (Netherlands), Burkill Hall (Singapore), Malacca (Malaysia)

Luigi Croce, chairman of the Venice Architects Association, shared his own experiences through heritage preservation case studies in Italy. He said, Heritage preservation is more than just keep history alive, it revitalises local economy and builds that sense of belonging, pride and identity to the country. In Italy, we have gained various successes in preserving symbolic structures by reusing and adapting them to the modern necessities. With experiences earned from those projects, I hope to accompany Vietnam developers and business sector to build a proper master plan for Vietnam heritages in the new wave of development.

Pham Tuan Long, Deputy Chairman of the Hoan Kiem Peoples Committee said, Heritage preservation is meaningful not only to cultural and economic growth but also to identity of a nation. Its glad to see enterprises like AkzoNobel are collaborating with developers to work on this with innovative technologies in preserving and reconstructing those structures. I hope that the collaboration will continue in long term and strongly believe that it will foster Vietnam heritage preservation in the near future, bringing more values to the community.

Dulux Professional also sponsors for a series of events on urban heritage preservation held by SCE Project Asia and IUAV including the event Cities of the Future & Heritage Preservation of representatives from Vietnamese and Italian institutional, academic and professional world. Those events combined with the seminar once again affirms Dulux Professionals effort in pursuing sustainable development and its acts on that core value.

Not only being applied advanced technologies to Do more with less, Dulux Professional from AkzoNobel also pioneers in promoting green architecture in urban areas.

In Vietnam, AkzoNobel promotes this trend by introducing and providing Dulux Professional comprehensive solutions for project customers; holding the Smart City - Sustainable City Seminar in 2018 in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City; sponsoring for Sustainable Real Estate Development Conference; sponsoring for Association of Vietnamese architects in Singapore Green Building Week.

AkzoNobel has a passion for paint. It is considered an expert in the proud craft of making paints and coatings, setting the standard in colour and protection since 1792. Its world class portfolio of brands  including Dulux, International, Sikkens and Interpon  is trusted by customers around the globe.

Headquartered in the Netherlands, the company active in over 150 countries and employ around 35,000 talented people who are passionate about delivering the high-performance products and services our customers expect. Dulux Professional is the leading brand of paints for project market of AkzoNobel.Tourism officials from Vietnam and India attend a tourism promotion event in HCM City yesterday. Visit Incredible India in 2019 invited Vietnamese to experience Indian culture, cuisine, nature, and religious places. - VNS Photo Thu Hang

The event, titled Visit Incredible India in 2019, invited Vietnamese to experience Indian culture, cuisine, bountiful nature, and religious places.

K Srikar Reddy, the Indian consul general in the city, said: Leaders of both countries have focused on strong tourism co-operation and people-to-people relations as a key element of our Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

Indias Minister for Tourism K. J. Alphons attended the Seventh Meeting of Tourism Ministers of ASEAN and India held in Ha Long City this January.

At the meeting, the ministers designated 2019 as the ASEAN-India Tourism Co-operation Year, and looked forward to enhancing co-operation with a view to increasing two-way tourism and promoting greater people-to-people exchanges between ASEAN and India.

Last year more than 31,400 Vietnamese visited India, a 32 per cent rise from 2017.

Though the number of visitors for tourism purpose between both countries has seen considerable increase in recent years, it is still well below potential, Consul General Reddy said.

More than 23.9 million Indian tourists travelled abroad in 2017 and around two million visited ASEAN member countries.

According to the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), there will be 50 million outbound Indian tourists by 2020.

An Euromonitor report put the number of Vietnamese travelling abroad at 7.5 million in 2017.

This significant number of outbound tourists from both India and Vietnam is an indicator of the untapped market, he added.

Nguyen Thi Anh Hoa, deputy director of the HCM City Tourism Department, said India was the 11th largest tourism source market for the city.

Last year some 103,000 came, an 80 per cent increase from 2017 and accounting for 50 per cent of all Indian visitors to Vietnam.

India is one of the favourite destinations for Vietnamese going on pilgrimage and medical tours.

Sudeshna Ramkumar, assistant director, Indian Tourism Office in Singapore, said Indias Buddhist heritage is of great interest to followers of Buddhism all over the world.

India is also the land of yoga and ayurveda and a sought-after destination for wellness and healthcare travel, she said.

Vietnamese tourists are increasingly using the e-visa facility to travel to India, and this would ensure the momentum is sustained, she added.The Italian driver of Senegalese origin on Wednesday hijacked the bus taking the 12-13 year olds from a gym to school in Crema, east of Milan. (Photo: AFP/Flavio LO SCALZO)

The Italian driver of Senegalese origin on Wednesday hijacked the bus as it was taking the 12-13 year-olds from a gym to school in Crema, east of Milan.

The incident prompted Italy's populist government to demand that the driver lose his Italian citizenship.

Armed with two petrol canisters and a cigarette lighter, Ousseynou Sy threatened the youngsters, took their telephones and told the adults to tie them up with electric cable.

"He blocked all the doors with chains," teaching assistant Tiziana Magarini told AFP.

"He showed me a knife and told me to tie up all the children."

The 40-minute ordeal, during which the bus also slammed into a car, was brought to an end when police managed to smash windows open and get those onboard out just as the driver set fire to the vehicle.

A dozen children and two adults were taken to hospital for smoke and fume inhalation, according to emergency services.

"It's crazy, absurd, it's unacceptable. Someone has to pay, and dearly," said Filippo Razzini, the father of a pupil at the school in the small town of Crema who was not on the bus.

"It's good to go back to school today because unfortunately these things are today a reality. But if it were up to me I'd be out there waiting for this guy somewhere," he told AFP.

The driver's lawyer said his client had wanted to "draw attention to the consequences of (Italy's) migration policies".

Italy has clamped down on immigration under far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, demanding it close its ports to charity vessels rescuing migrants who are trying to cross the Mediterranean.

Salvini said Sy should have his nationality, granted in 2004 after his marriage to an Italian, revoked.

"We shall do all we can to ensure this nefarious person is stripped of his Italian nationality," said Salvini.

Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio of the League's governing partner, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, agreed.

"I think it is a duty to withdraw immediately the citizenship of this criminal," said Di Maio.

Sy could lose his citizenship if convicted of a terror attack under a tough security decree introduced last year.

Salvini meanwhile indicated that a Moroccan-born and an Egyptian-born boy on the bus who alerted police could receive speedy naturalisation.

Salvini's far-right League party is riding high in the polls in part because of its tough anti-migrant stance.

'LONE WOLF'

The Milan police anti-terrorism unit has been charged with investigating the hostage-taking, during which Sy reportedly told students: "No one is getting out of here alive."

The incident has shaken Crema's community.

"My daughter was in shock yesterday, she said 'Mummy, I could have been there too'," parent Luisa Ginelli told AFP on Thursday.

The driver had no links with Islamic terrorism and "acted as a lone wolf", Alberto Nobili, head of counter-terrorism at the Milan public prosecutor's office, told a press conference.

Nobili said on Thursday that Sy had planned the hijack over several days and "wanted the whole world talking about his story".

He posted a video on YouTube to explain his actions and call on relatives and friends in Crema and Senegal to take action, saying: "Africa - arise."

Sy got his Italian nationality and job in 2004 and managed to keep subsequent convictions for drink driving and sexual assault of a minor secret from his employer, the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported.

A neighbour told La Stampa newspaper that he was known as "Paolo".

"That's what we called him because his name was too complicated. I saw him go out every morning, he drove a bus. A quiet man but solitary," she said.

Colleagues told Italian media that Sy's separation from his Italian wife, with whom he has two teenage children, was "when his problems started."General Consul of Japan in HCM City Junichi Kawaue (R) and Director of the Vietnam Assistance of the Handicapped Bui Van Toan sign a contract to build a rehabilitation faculty in Binh Phuoc province on March 20. (Photo: VNA)

The projects, worth more than 483,270 USD, will be launched in the provinces of Binh Phuoc, Kien Giang, Long An and Bac Lieu in the south and Dak Lak and Dak Nong provinces in the Central Highlands.

They are to build rehabilitation faculty and provide medical equipment, medical waste treatment system and laboratory equipment for the provinces, along with building schools and working facilities for the blind.

Projects to supply clean water and build five classrooms for elementary students are also included in the assistance.

According to the Japanese office, the projects will be promptly implemented to help local children and people access modern healthcare conditions, clean water, education and waste treatment towards environmentally protection, as well as support sight-impaired people.

General Consul of Japan in HCM City Junichi Kawaue said that the non-refundable aid aims to ensure basic demand of the beneficiaries, especially those residing in remote and mountainous areas.

Since 1995, non-refundable assistance of the Japanese Government totalling over 15.51 million USD has provided support for 194 local-level projects across 26 provinces and cities of Vietnam, including those in education, healthcare, agriculture and rural infrastructure.Cristiano Ronaldo has returned training with European champions Portugal. (Photo: AFP/PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA)

Most of the matches take place in the United States but organisers are planning to play Juventus' elsewhere amid Ronaldo's legal case, eliminating the risk of the Portuguese star being detained by authorities in the US as part of their investigations, the newspaper reported.

Juventus have confirmed their participation in the event with the official programme to be unveiled on March 27.

Juventus' games will "mostly likely be in China and Singapore", where they will be joined by Premier League teams Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, the New York Times said.

Ronaldo, 34, has denied allegations made by former model Kathryn Mayorga that he sexually assaulted her in Las Vegas in 2009.

Las Vegas police asked Ronaldo to submit a DNA sample in January as part of their investigation into rape allegations made against him.

Contacted by AFP, a spokeswoman for Juventus said that "going east to Asia was normal after spending recent preseasons in the United States".

Juventus signed the five-time Ballon d'Or winner for 100 million euros ($117 million) last summer from Real Madrid and pay him a 31-million-euro annual salary.

The team are on track for an eighth consecutive Italian league title, while his hat-trick against Atletico Madrid sent them through to the Champions League quarter-finals.

Ronaldo, meanwhile, rejoined his Portugal team-mates this week ahead of Euro 2020 qualifying, as they begin their title defence, following a nine-month absence from the national team.The list is growing of Vietnamese buyers taking over hotel and resort chains at popular destinations, Photo: Le Toan

When it comes to mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between Vietnamese companies and world-renowned hotel operators, the home side tends to be the seller. The upscale hotel segment in the country is dominated by hotel chains from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea or Japan, eager to expand their Vietnamese business by scooping up properties from domestic companies. For now, at least two-thirds of the 35 five-star hotels in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are run by international brands.

However, in recent months, the market has been witnessing a reversal of the trend. Earlier this month, Hanoi Tourism Development JSC, rumoured to be a member of Vietnams BRG Group, bought 75 per cent of TPC Nghi Tam Village from Malaysias Berjaya Group. Nghi Tam Village runs the five-star Intercontinental Hanoi Westlake hotel, located near the citys popular tourist attractions. It is estimated that Hanoi Tourism Development paid $46.9 million in the transaction. Seller Berjaya, previously in the headlines over delayed plans in Vietnam, also sold off its financial centre and university township projects in Ho Chi Minh City to domestic investors.

A representative from Hanoi Tourism Development said that the company chose to take over Intercontinental Hanoi Westlake because hotels are a low-risk business with low depreciation rates of assets. We can also create a steady cash flow thanks to business activities, said the representative.

Other hotel and resort chains have also been taken over by Vietnamese buyers, including Thien Minh Group and Victoria Hotel & Resorts, or Bong Sen Corporation and Daewoo Hanoi Hotel. Hilton Hanoi, another five-star hotel, is also under the management of BRG Group.

When asked by VIR about the rising power of Vietnamese buyers in the hotel segment, Nguyen Cong Ai, partner at KPMG Vietnam, said, Domestic investors have shown their financial capacity and long-term vision via recent M&As. The buyers have both an understanding of international markets and in-depth experience of Vietnams culture and consumers.

M&A opportunities are set to become even more plentiful for domestic investors, who are eyeing upscale hotels in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, according to Savills Vietnam. Both cities are rising as the regions top destinations for business and leisure travellers, with double-digit growth every year. Five-star hotels are investor favourites thanks to their promise of a stable cash flow and lower risks than other property segments.

The bulk of earnings at five-star hotels in Vietnam come from business travellers, who have a sizeable budget for accommodation and related services.

Businesspeople may also frequently visit Vietnams two largest cities for work, making them repeated patrons of these hotels. Investors are further interested in M&As because empty land plots in central locations are few and far between, prompting hoteliers to buy existing projects instead.

Le Duy Binh, managing director at consulting firm Economica Vietnam, welcomed the emerging trend. Vietnam should have its own deep-pocketed investors that can compete against overseas buyers. Fair and transparent competition between Vietnamese and other investors is always good for the market, said Binh.

Economist Ngo Tri Long suggested that patriotism is also a factor, especially crucial as Vietnam becomes host of more international events thanks to good publicity from hosting the recent summit between the US and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, and APEC 2017.

Vietnamese hotel chains will support important events like these, not just for business, but also for their patriotic spirit, said Long.The design of Long Thanh international airport (Soirce: ACV)

Speaking at a meeting on March 21 to review the progress of the project, Minister The said that the ministry will coordinate with the Committee for the Management of State Capital at Enterprises to finalise plans towards mobilising capital for the project.

The plan is expected to be approved in October this year by the Government after being discussed at the National Assembly. After that, it must have a main investor to conduct biding, designing, capital mobilising activities for the implementation of the project, he said.

Currently, the Airports Cooperation of Vietnam is in charge of the feasibility study of the project. The task is scheduled for completion in this October.

At the meeting, Minister The lauded the progress in the projects ground clearance, asking Dong Nai province, in which the airport is located, to distribute parts of compensations within this year.

Long Thanh International Airport has a total area of more than 5,580 ha, spreading across six communes in Long Thanh District, the southern province of Dong Nai. It is set to have a total investment of 336.63 trillion VND (14.8 billion USD), with construction divided into three phases.

In the first phase, a runway and a passenger terminal, along with other supporting works, will be built to serve some 25 million passengers and 1.2 million tonnes of cargo each year. This phase is hoped to be finished by 2025.

In the second phase, an additional runway and passenger terminal will be constructed to serve 50 million passengers and 1.5 million tonnes of cargo per year.

Following the third phase, the airport will be able serve 100 million passengers and 5 million tonnes of cargo annually.On the Ha Noi Stock Exchange, the HNX-Index lost 0.07 per cent to end at 107.74 points.-Photo ndh.vn

The benchmark VN-Index on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange moved up 0.32 per cent to close at 984.96 points.

More than 106.5 million shares were exchanged on the southern bourse, worth VND2.35 trillion (US$100.4 million).

The blue-chip VN30 Index rose 0.17 per cent to 909.45 points.

Fourteen of the 30 largest stocks by market capitalisation ended in positive territory, while 13 decreased.

Large-cap stocks such as Bank for Investment and Development (BID), Saigon Securities Incorporation (SSI), Vinhomes (VHM), Vingroup (VIC) and Vincom Retail (VRE) all increased.

SSI increased by 1.3 per cent to VND27,650. The firm recently signed an unsecured loan contract worth US$55 million with a financial institution group, led by Taiwans SinoPac Bank.

This is the first time a Vietnamese securities company has been granted such large-scale credit in this form.

Media conglomerate Yeah1 Group (YEG) hit the daily limit rise of 7 per cent for the second session after 12 straight slumping sessions.

On the Ha Noi Stock Exchange, the HNX-Index lost 0.07 per cent to end at 107.74 points.

Nearly 25.2 million shares were traded on the northern bourse, worth VND315 billion.

The afternoon trading session starts at 1pm.What are the drivers behind the growing number of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in Vietnam?

While the number of M&A deals tend to ebb and flow, which is usual for any market, the overall trend increase in Vietnam is likely due to several factors, including regulatory changes and market confidence. The Vietnamese government has in the past few years taken action to show that the country is open for business.

For example, Vietnam ratified the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which came into effect in January 2019. The CPTPP comes with lowered tariffs for imports and exports of a number of goods, which will likely create business incentives for companies to grow their business here.

Regulations like Decree No.09/2018/ND-CP passed in 2018 ease some of the requirements for overseas traders. Under this, administrative requirements are reduced and traders are now allowed to import and distribute certain products without obtaining a separate business licence.

The government continues its divestment agenda, in particular with draft regulations purporting to remove the 49 per cent foreign ownership cap on public companies. However, it remains to be seen whether this will be at the headline-grabbing scale of Sabeco and Thai Beverages deal.

Vietnams growing middle-class and their demand for quality goods and services also drives demand for consumer products, especially where it relates to health and wellbeing. This can range from supplements and organic food products to gym memberships. This is reflected in recent deals involving Vietnams leading food brands and health and lifestyle sectors.

Aspirations for better housing or the convenience of condo living also create demand and investment opportunities in the real estate sector.

Furthermore, the recent increase of new feed-in-tariffs with Decision No.39/2018/QD-TTg, from 7.8 to 8.5 US cents per kilowatt-hour for onshore wind power projects and 9.8 US cents per kWh for offshore wind power projects has a positive impact on the industry, as previous tariffs were not commercially attractive for investors.

All of the above reasons will likely make overseas investors more compelled to place funds in the Vietnamese market, resulting in a growing number of foreign-invested projects and M&A deals.

Vietnam is seeing rising foreign investment, mainly through M&As. Does this indicate that foreign indirect investment will surpass foreign direct investment (FDI)?

Its difficult to say for sure. FDI also trends upwards over the years, and it remains to be seen whether investment by way of M&A will overtake that of FDI. Having said that, given that Vietnam is still a developing market it is likely that investment inflows by way of FDI will remain strong, especially if the government makes the investment process more transparent and expedient.

Do you foresee an increase in quality and quantity of M&A deals here?

Over time, we see investors being savvier and studied in their investments and deals in Vietnam. Whilst the country is generally interesting because it is a growth market that shows significant potential, there are also pitfalls to navigate. This could be whether certain sectors, especially in digital economy, are open for foreign investment or not, to whether the business is duly managed in compliance with relevant laws, to the reputation and credibility of founders. We expect a trend of well-informed investors to continue.

What are the expectations of overseas financiers for the Vietnamese M&A market?

FDI into Vietnam rose by 9.8 per cent from a year earlier to $2.58 billion in the first two months of 2019, suggesting that there is increased confidence.

We have seen and can expect an increase in foreign investment into equitised state-owned enterprises (SOEs) due to the continued initiatives to relax foreign ownership limitations, which has been integrated into the governments desire to divest its ownership in big players in the consumer goods market. SOEs aside, we also expect to see leading local food and beverage companies, like Masan, continue to attract overseas funds.

The real estate sector is also expected to see further growth. Ho Chi Minh City has seen many real estate foreign-invested projects, like Lotte Groups $855 million eco-smart city project in Thu Thiem New Urban Area, and the $1.2 billion Empire City project created by a joint venture between Tien Phuoc, Keppel Land, and Gaw Capital.

We expect growth in the tech space, particularly in fintech. A number of South Koreas leading corporations such as Samsung, LG, Lotte, Hyosung, and Doosan choose Vietnam as a destination for investment. Samsung has, for example, increased investment from $670 million in 2008 to over $17.3 billion last year in Vietnam.

With the CPTPP already in effect and the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement expected to be ratified, we anticipate increased interest and confidence from those looking to pour money into Vietnam, which will likely help boost investment and M&A deal numbers in the coming years.As Thailand heads to the ballot box for the first time since the military took over in a coup five years ago, observers and analysts have said that Cambodia should pay close attention to its neighbors strategic and political development.

But analysts who spoke to VOA Khmer this week said the outcome was unlikely to have a significant impact on Cambodia-Thailand relations as Cambodia had shown previously that it could adapt to changes in the Thai ruling elite.

Ngoun Kimly, a senior lecturer of international studies at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, said the stable relations between the two countries since the military took over Thailand in 2014 was a marked improvement from the hostile relations the two countries had toward each other over the previous decade.

"Recent political history has shown that political elites in both countries have manipulated nationalist sentiments related to territorial sovereignty and cultural heritage sites to advance their political agenda especially when they faced a severe legitimacy deficit," Kimly wrote in an email.

"However, if the current trend of the relations is to continue, the ruling elites in both countries share common political and economic interests in maintaining a stable relationship," the Canberra-based analyst added.

The Cambodian government faces the threat of possible trade sanctions from the European Union and the United States, which have already placed limited sanctions on Prime Minister Hun Sens government over its widespread crackdown on the opposition and civil society.

More than 40 political parties will take part in the Thai election on Sunday.

The chief coup-maker, junta Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-Cha, said he intends to retain power and has overseen the drafting of a new constitution and new election law. He was appointed as the prime ministerial candidate for the Palang Pracharat Party.

Meanwhile, the pro-Thaksin Shinawatra and new anti-junta political camps, such as a newly-established party, Future Forward, want to win to curb the power of the military in political life.

The new law aims to diminish the support of the pro-Thaksin parties. It requires a joint election of 500 elected members of the lower house and another 250 members of the upper house who are appointed by the military government.

Due to the domestic politics of these two countries, some sensitive issues such as the territorial claim over the Preah Vihear temple zone and the overlapping maritime territories are unlikely to happen sometime soon," Kimly said.

Because of the nature of the current political contexts in both countries, both governments will likely set aside sensitive issues like overlapping territorial claims. They prioritize the regimes stability over anything else, he added.

Prime Minister Hun Sen was a long-time supporter of Thaksin amid the armed confrontation over the Preah Vihear temple zone from 2008 to 2011.

In 2009, Hun Sen made Thaksin one of his economic advisers, prompting anger from the Thai government.

The bilateral ties between the two countries improved between 2011 and 2014 while Thailand was under the administration of Yingluck Shinawatra of the Pheu Thai Party, Thaksins sister.

The military takeover in 2014 led to the expulsion of about 250,000 undocumented Cambodian migrant workers from Thailand.

It is estimated that there are about 1 million Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand, mostly working in the construction, manufacturing, services and fishery industries.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Thailand's Chulalongkorn University, told VOA Khmer that expulsion of Cambodian workers sent a clear message to the Cambodia prime minister and his government that Cambodia should not interfere in domestic Thai politics.

"For prime minister Hun Sen, I think he got a message and the signal from the Thai military government that he should not be interfering or meddling in Thai internal affairs. So I think that message has been received," Thitinan said in a phone interview.

According to analysts, the relations between Hun Sens government and Prayuths have since stabilized.

Bangkok, a stopover for Cambodians fleeing conflict in the past, has cooperated with Cambodia in recent years to deport citizens wanted by the Phnom Penh

Thitinan said the new Thai government, regardless of whether they come from conservative military camp or pro-Thaksin camp, will seek to maintain strong relations with Cambodia.

"I think if the other side, the pro-Thaksin camp or the anti-junta more correctly anti-military camps- comprising the Thaksin-aligned parties, but also other parties if they happen to somehow win, relations with Cambodia will also be more or less on the same trajectory," he said.

"So I think either side winning, the relations should be on course, on course, stable. I dont think that a new Thai government will take a different approach to Cambodia. They might have a different approach toward bigger powers like China, the United States, but I think for the immediate next-door neighbors, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, things should be more or less continuous."

Sek Sophal, a researcher at the Ritsumeikan Center for Asia and Pacific Studies in Japan, said Thailand-Cambodia stability over the past five years was seen as a necessity on Thailand's side to restore internal order and build their power base.

"If we take a look at the geopolitical map, Cambodia is a small country next to Thailand, which is a big country. So the political development in Thailand will more or less have a direct or indirect impact on Cambodia," Sophal said during a recent interview on the Hello VOA talk show.

"For the time being, if we take a look at the military groups when they come to power, the relations between the two countries tends to be very stable. But it is uncertain. Previously, due to their political agenda to maintain internal stability, the junta didnt cause any conflict with their neighbors. But now if the junta government is legitimately elected to be the leader of the country, it is hard for us to predict [the outcome]," he added.

However, relations between Phnom Penh and Bangkok were tested in early 2019 when the Hong-Kong-based South China Morning Post published an exclusive news report alleging Yingluck had used a Cambodian passport to flee arrest in 2017.

Two days later, Hun Sen ordered officials to withdraw Cambodian passports from foreign consultants to the government. This act was seen by the Thai juntas foreign minister, Don Pramudvinai, as a sign that Cambodia continued to value the close relationship with its neighbor.

Jakrapob Penkair, a close aide to Thaksin living overseas, told VOA Khmer that the friendship between the former Thai prime minister and Hun Sen dated back to 2003 when the two leaders negotiated an easing of tensions after riots in Phnom Penh that led to the burning of the Thai embassy.

For now, Thaksin and Hun Sen still maintain a good private relationship though it has been shaky from time to time, said Jakrapob, who served as the spokesman of Thaksin Shinawatra's administration in prior to the 2006 coup.

As far as I know, they still contact each other as friends," Jakrapob said.

But Prime Minister Thaksin knows that he is not in charge of Thailand, he would not put Prime Minister Hun Sen into difficulty.

You would rarely see him [visiting] Cambodia. He travels around the world but rarely to Cambodia because he knows that would give Prime Minister Hun Sen and Cambodia a difficult time.In the past two years, British Prime Minister Theresa May has insisted repeatedly that Britain will exit the European Union on schedule on March 29  she has said so 108 times from the dispatch box in the House of Commons.

But on Thursday, the embattled leader, whose days in office appear to be numbered, was forced to appeal to her fellow EU national leaders for a three-month postponement, throwing into deeper confusion a Brexit process that has pushed Britain into a constitutional crisis, dividing the country.

May's face-to-face request at a summit in Brussels clearly strained the patience of the EU's other 27 national leaders, who are close to a breaking point. They fear Britain's tangled exit will never get resolved. During the summit, the Luxembourg prime minister told reporters: "We are not in a souk and we are not going to bargain for the next five years."

French President Emmanuel Macron was especially reluctant about granting an extension, questioning why Britain should have more time to get its house in order, and skeptical whether it ever would.

"We are heading towards no deal," he said as the leaders gathered.

His foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, told the French National Assembly on the eve of a two-day EU summit in Brussels this week that France would oppose a lengthy Brexit postponement. He said Paris would only support a short extension, one giving the British parliament sufficient time to approve a contentious withdrawal agreement May and the EU agreed to in November  but one that British lawmakers have overwhelmingly rejected twice.

Without that approval, "the central scenario is a no-deal exit  we are ready for it," the foreign minister said.

Charles Grant, director of the research group Center for European Reform, says Macron worries most about the possible "spoiling" impact Britain may have on European Parliament elections this May, if Britain participates as a result of any lengthy Brexit delay. He "fears the UK will 'pollute' EU politics if the Brits hang around for a prolonged period," Grant tweeted.

After more than two years of haggling with Britain over a transition deal, and amid accusations of British cherry-picking, some of the bloc's national governments weren't that far behind the French in toying with the idea of saying enough is enough, EU officials told VOA.

Short reprieve possible

Led by Germany, prudence overcame exasperation, and French resistance, on Thursday.

No EU country wants to be blamed for Britain crashing out of the bloc without a deal. Such a chaotic departure would undermine EU principles of fraternity and would not only deeply harm Britain economically but also several near European neighbors, including France and Ireland, EU leaders fear.

Initially, the EU 27 planned to agree to a shorter delay than May requested and one conditional on British lawmakers approving the transition deal, which is deeply unpopular with both hardline Brexiters in May's ruling Conservative party and pro-EU lawmakers across the British political spectrum.

But they pulled back, fearing they might push Britain into crashing out without a deal, as much by accident as design. They also concluded, EU sources say, that May would fail a third time to get backing for her deal next week from the British parliament. They wanted to avoid having to hold an emergency Brexit summit next week to consider what to do again, enduring yet more cliff-edge drama.

Instead, after running hours past the time allocated to consider the British request, leaving the world's media kicking their heels waiting for a decision, the EU 27 came up with what has been dubbed a "flextension" in a bid to seize more control of the process.

Britain now has a short reprieve until May 22, if the British parliament ratifies May's deal next week. If it doesn't, then Britain has until April 12 to announce it will take part in European elections and would then be accorded an extension until the end of 2019.

If it has not agreed to participate in the elections, then there can be no long extension. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, said the EU decided on the two options in a "positive spirit."

Britain's next move

What Britain does now remains unclear and the drama will shift from Brussels back to London and a deadlocked British House of Commons. There are few signs that parliament will change its mind and approve the negotiated transition deal, one which Brexiters' fear could lock Britain into a semi-permanent customs union with the bloc. Pro-EU lawmakers worry it doesn't tie Britain closely enough to the EU.

Prime Minister May hasn't helped the prospect of the deal being endorsed, say critics, who accuse her of brinkmanship, daring British lawmakers to reject her agreement and court the dangers of a no-deal Brexit.

On Wednesday, she made a short, defiant statement from Downing Street, one that scorned British lawmakers and deflected blame for the crisis on parliament, in an apparent bid to turn voters' anger on to MPs. "You are tired of the infighting; you're tired of the political games and the arcane procedural rows, tired of MPs talking about nothing else but Brexit," she told the British public in the televised address.

The statement angered many lawmakers, who dubbed it toxic and complained it was inflammatory at such a fevered time as this to describe the impasse as a matter of parliament versus the public.

"If you are trying to persuade MPs, you don't help yourself by lambasting them," said Conservative lawmaker Mark Francois, a hardline Brexiter. He says if May brings back her deal to parliament, she "will get the same answer."

Phillip Lee, a pro-EU Conservative, accused May of stoking unrest by casting lawmakers as "enemies of the people." Some lawmakers said they feel in physical danger, after receiving death threats following May's statement.

"It is out of order. Lawmakers do their best for constituents and it is fundamentally wrong to undermine parliament," he warned.

Some EU diplomats warned a no-deal British exit is still a possibility. Some are putting hope in the British parliament seizing control of the Brexit process from May and crafting a softer Brexit, even to revoke Britain's application to leave the EU. That hope has been prompted by more than two million people signing a petition this week for Brexit to be abandoned.British Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday began the mammoth struggle of persuading a deeply divided parliament to back her Brexit deal after an EU summit granted her more time but little to help change minds at home.

After a bruising day in Brussels, May secured a two-week reprieve to try to get the deal she negotiated in November through parliament at a third attempt or face a potentially chaotic departure from the European Union as soon as April 12.

EU leaders were clear that it was now up to the British parliament to decide the fate of Brexit  to leave with a deal in a couple of months, depart without an agreement, come up with a new plan or possibly remain in the bloc.

While the Brexit deadline may have moved from March 29, however, parliament shows no sign of budging.

In fact, incensed by comments from May on Wednesday night that pinned the blame for the Brexit chaos on them, many British lawmakers have now hardened their resistance to the deal she is due to bring back before them next week. In an appeal to lawmakers, May said in Brussels: "Last night I expressed my frustration. I know that MPs [members of parliament] are frustrated too. They have difficult jobs to do. I hope we can all agree, we are now at the moment of decision."

She needs to change the minds of 75 more lawmakers to get her deal through after it was overwhelmingly rejected twice before. In a letter to British lawmakers on Friday, May hinted she might not hold a third vote on the deal at all if it was clear it would not be passed.

"If it appears there is not sufficient support to bring the deal back next week, or the House rejects it again, we can ask for another extension before April 12," she wrote in the letter published on Twitter by a BBC reporter.

While EU leaders were keen to heap pressure on the British parliament, some  with the notable exception of France  suggested Britain could still win more time to prepare for a no-deal Brexit if lawmakers fail to approve the divorce deal by April 12.

'Hope dies last'

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar summed up the mood in Brussels when he spoke of overwhelming Brexit fatigue.

European Council President Donald Tusk said: "The fate of Brexit is in the hands of our British friends. We are, as the EU, prepared for the worst but hope for the best. As you know, hope dies last."

French President Emmanuel Macron took a potshot at Brexit advocates. "Brexiteer leaders told people leaving would be easy. Bravo."

Leaders doubted whether May could get her deal through parliament, which like the country itself is deeply split over how, or even if, Britain should leave the EU after a 2016 referendum when 52 percent backed Brexit against 48 percent.

One senior EU official said a no-deal Brexit was more likely. "We are in general well prepared. But we can use these few weeks to prepare more for the rather likely no deal scenario," the official said on condition of anonymity.

New votes

Parliament will start next week with another vote on Brexit, which business minister Greg Clark said would open the way "for parliament to express a majority of what it would approve."

Those May must win over  euroskeptic lawmakers in her Conservative Party and the DUP, the Northern Irish party that props up her minority government, plus wavering members of the opposition Labor Party  did not seem to be softening.

The DUP's Nigel Dodds said May had missed an opportunity to put forward proposals to EU leaders to improve the prospects of an acceptable deal, describing it as a "disappointing and inexcusable" failure.

Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said it was time for parliament to take over Brexit and for lawmakers to make their own decisions about Britain's future.

His deputy Tom Watson said he was prepared to back May's deal, however  but only if she agreed to holding a second referendum, something she has repeatedly ruled out.

With parliament deadlocked, the lack of certainty is encouraging some Britons to try to influence politicians.

Hundreds of thousands are expected to march through central London on Saturday calling for a second Brexit referendum, while an online petition demanding May revoke the EU leave notice and stop Brexit has got more than 3.5 million signatures.

Seven hours of summit brainstorming Thursday kept a host of options open for the EU leaders, who say they regret Britain's decision to leave but are eager to move on from what they increasingly see as a distraction.

Now a May 22 departure date will apply if parliament rallies behind the British prime minister next week. If it does not, Britain will have until April 12 to offer a new plan or decide to leave the European Union without a treaty.

In the case of a longer extension, the main idea is for one year, EU officials said. That would give Britain time to hold an election, and possibly a second referendum, and avoid an even longer delay that would complicate negotiations for a new long-term EU budget.Michael R. Wessel is a commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. government organization that investigates the national security implications of trade and economic relationship between the U.S. and China.

He recently discussed with VOA his concerns about Chinas race to 5G, the next generation of wireless connectivity being built worldwide. With a 5G network, users will be able to send and receive more data in less time, which could have implications for self-driving cars, smart cities and other technologies.



Q: How much does it matter which country is first to fully functioning 5G?



Wessel: It does matter. First mover advantage is crucial in any new technology, but it is particularly important in 5G because it is foundational for cutting-edge innovation and applications including smart cities, network manufacturing, and integrated warfighting capability.

When standards are created, controlled, and sold by other countries, there is enhanced pressure on the U.S. to adopt those standards, which would have significant economic and national security costs.

For example, U.S. 4G leadership contributed to around $125 billion in U.S. company revenue from abroad and more than $40 billion in U.S. application and content developer revenue, and created 2.1 million new jobs from 2011-2014. And, from a national security perspective, the "control" of technologies raises unacceptable risks.

Q: How far ahead is Huawei or China on 5G?



Wessel: China's leadership in 5G depends on how we define competition. Some U.S. companies are already offering 5G devices and are running pilot projects in select cities, so they have beat China to the punch. However, Chinese investment into 5G is vast.



As of early February 2019, Huawei owned 1,529 "standard-essential" 5G patents, the most of any company, according to data-analytics firm IPlytics. By comparison, Qualcomm, a U.S. company, owned 787 standard-essential patents. All Chinese companies together own 36 percent of all 5G standard-essential patents, while U.S. companies (Intel and Qualcomm) own 14 percent.



In terms of 5G network build out, China is also racing ahead: China Tower, a monopoly created by the Chinese government to build the country's 5G infrastructure, said it would likely cover the country by 2023. One estimate said China Tower built more sites in 3 months than U.S. did in 3 years. In the United States, the process is likely to take much longer, with each company handling its own networks, and will need to negotiate with local governments for tower locations.

Q: The U.S. is urging its allies to not work with Huawei in building their 5G networks out of concern that the Chinese technology giant could give the Chinese government access to the new network for spying. Some countries such as Germany say they wont rule out working with Huawei. Why is this a problem for the U.S.?

Wessel: We tend to focus on the economic cost and not consider the national security cost of something as significant as a nationwide 5G network rollout.

Huawei products, services and activities have already raised significant concerns and our allies have to consider how much more investment they are willing to make into their technology.

No amount of risk mitigation or false attempts at transparency are adequate. The problem is Germany and other allies have already incorporated some Huawei equipment into their tech infrastructure. Much like a virus, our allies can choose to inoculate themselves against this danger now, or run the risk of painful and costly treatment later. Unfortunately, this is a great risk to intelligence-sharing among allies and partners.Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte signed up his country Saturday to China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an ambitious trillion-dollar transcontinental trade and infrastructure project. The memorandum signing in Rome was the centerpiece of Chinese President Xi Jinping's three-stop visit to Europe and it will make Italy the first G-7 nation to participate in China's so-called New Silk Road.

Italy's endorsement of the BRI, which spans Eurasia as well as the Middle East and parts of Africa, has prompted the disquiet not only of the United States, but also of European Union leaders, who have voiced concern about Beijing's growing political clout in Europe and its use of commerce as a tool of statecraft. The U.S. has been critical of the trillion-dollar project and warned about the risks of "debt-trap diplomacy." Members of the EU are worried the plan could add to fissures in an already strained coalition.

They aren't alone in worrying about what the longer-term consequences on Italy might be if signing up for BRI moves from symbolism into full participation. Matteo Salvini, head of the populist Lega party, which represents one-half of Italy's coalition government, is indicating his opposition by staying away from the signing ceremony and won't be present at a scheduled gala dinner afterward.

Salvini, an ideological bedfellow of Donald Trump and friend of the U.S. president's former adviser, Steve Bannon, frets the BRI risks turning Italy into a Chinese colony and will saddle it with more debt. He also has publicly indicated his security concerns about allowing the Chinese control of critical infrastructure, including major ports.

"Before allowing someone to invest in the ports of Trieste or Genoa, I would think about it not once but a hundred times," Salvini said earlier this month.

Some Italian officials in the economy and finance ministry have also offered behind-the-scenes warnings. They argue that while engaging with Beijing in this manner may help boost Italian exports to China, a prospect highlighted by Xi in marketing BRI, it will likely result in a bigger boost for cheap Chinese exports to Italy.

Such a scenario, they caution, could have a ruinous impact on domestic Italian producers and workers.

"If trade does take off significantly, it might be a matter of short-term gain, but long-term pain," one official told VOA.

Despite the warnings, as well as U.S. and EU disapproval of Italy's BRI endorsement, Conte and Luigi Di Maio, leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which makes up half of the country's populist coalition government, says Chinese investment could kick-start Italy's sputtering economy.

Several of the EU's smaller cash-strapped nations have also signed up in the past two years to China's BRI, hoping that by doing so their economies will be boosted.

Italy slipped into recession last year and its debt levels are among the highest in Europe. The populist coalition government came to power in June 2018 with high-spending plans, promising expensive pension reforms and a living wage for all Italians.

Italian ministers favoring BRI accuse other large EU countries, including France, which is critical of the BRI, of hypocrisy, saying they conduct multi-million-dollar deals anyway with China albeit outside the framework of the New Silk Road initiative.

"The way we see it, it is an opportunity for our companies to take the opportunity of China's growing importance in the world," Italy's under secretary of state for trade and investment, Michele Geraci, told foreign reporters.

But some Italian officials worry that view might be short-sighted.

They say while the BRI may offer Italy new funding sources  the country is still lagging well behind the foreign investment levels it enjoyed before the 2008 global financial crash  it could trigger a significant wave of Chinese imports, which would have long-term detrimental consequences for Italian industry, employment and politics.

The officials in the country's finance ministry, who declined to be identified for this article, have been scrutinizing recent academic studies on the impact of Chinese imports on local labor markets. A series of studies, including those by economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, suggests that Western countries and regions exposed to rising Chinese import competition see a major jump in unemployment, lower labor force participation and lower wages. Unskilled and manual workers are especially adversely affected.

The impacts "are most visible in the local labor markets in which the industries exposed to foreign competition are concentrated. Adjustment in local labor markets is remarkably slow, with wages and labor force participation rates remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated for at least a full decade after the China trade shock commences. Exposed workers experience greater job churning and reduced lifetime income," noted Autor, Dorn and Hanson in a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, an influential U.S.-based nonprofit.

Other recent academic studies have noted that the regions of the U.S. and Europe most impacted by trade with China are the ones which in recent elections and plebiscites have backed populist candidates and nationalist causes like Brexit, support fueled by anger at the effects of globalization. Brexit is Britain's decision to leave the European Union.

"Ironically, looking to Beijing for an economic boost and to alleviate economic deprivation could well hurt the workers and businesses who backed populists in the first place and who the populists want to help  Salvini gets that, but the rest of the coalition doesn't," observed an Italian official.The top U.S. military officer has called out U.S. technology giant Google for its artificial intelligence venture in China, saying it creates a challenge in maintaining a U.S. military advantage over the Chinese.

Google has said it will not renew a Pentagon contract involving the use of artificial intelligence to analyze drone video but continues to develop artificial intelligence in China.

That venture for artificial intelligence in China  indirectly benefits the Chinese military and creates a challenge for us in maintaining a competitive advantage, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday.

Dunford, Google execs to meet

China is a competitor to the United States. The Trump administration even revamped the militarys National Defense Strategy last year to make maintaining a military advantage over China and Russia its top priority.

Dunford said Thursday that the Chinese typically require companies doing business in China to have members of the ruling Communist party in that company, a requirement he says will allow the Chinese military access to the companies intellectual property.

It is a distinction without a difference between the Chinese Communist Party, the government and the Chinese military, Dunford said.

The top general plans to meet with Google representatives next week to discuss his concerns.

Google responds

A Google representative told VOA the company is committed to continuing to partner with the U.S. government, including the military, both on specific projects and on broader policy around AI that are consistent with Googles principles.

The representative added that Google deeply respects the U.S. military and is working with them to solve problems in areas such as cybersecurity, logistics, transportation and planning.

Dunford warned that Googles venture in China will ultimately allow China to take advantage of U.S.-developed technology and help an authoritarian government assert control over its people.

We ought not to think that its just about business when we do business in China, he said.The European Union is reportedly contemplating designating the leader of Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) a terrorist.

The EU's decision comes nearly a week after a push by France and India to declare JeM leader Masood Azhar a terrorist and freeze his assets.



JeM is already a U.S.- and U.N.-designated terror group.



Focus on Kashmir

Azhar is an Islamist extremist who wants to end Indian control of a portion of the disputed Kashmir area and merge it with Pakistan. He was born in 1968 in Pakistan's Punjab province in a Deobandi (Sunni sect) Muslim family.



He reportedly received his early education in Bahawalpur, Punjab, and later enrolled in Jamia-ul-Uloom, an Islamic seminary in Karachi, where he became a teacher.

Azhar founded Jaish-e-Mohammad in 2000 and maintained his affiliation with several terror groups, including al-Qaida, Hurkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) and Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA), all U.S.-designated terror groups.

JeM is believed to be based in the Peshawar region of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir.



Azhar received his militant training in Afghanistan in the 1980s and fought Soviet troops there.

Spurred by jihad decree



Azhar reportedly traveled to Afghanistan in 1988 with his brother, Ibrahim Azhar, who according to analysts played a key role in shaping Masood's religious ideology.

"Azhar himself mentioned in one of the articles that his inclination towards jihad started when Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, head of the Karachi Jamia-ul-Uloom at that time, issued an Islamic decree for students to go and participate in Afghan jihad," Mujahid Hussain, an author and expert on terror outfits, told VOA.

It was during his time in Afghanistan that Azhar developed a relationship with al-Qaida and its leadership, and later worked closely with the terror group.



Azhar traveled to several countries, including Britain, Saudi Arabia, Zambia, India and Bangladesh, to raise funds and recruit youth toward jihad.



He has written over 20 books on Islamic history and the importance of jihad.

Location a mystery

Azhar's current whereabouts are unknown. Some experts in Pakistan believe he is living in Bahawalpur, a city in southern Punjab.



"I personally know many people who have met Azhar in Bahawalpur. Azhar reportedly goes to the mosques, gives sermons and greets people. And he continues to write for JeM's magazine," Hussain said.

On Feb. 5, when various religious parties throughout Pakistan marked Kashmir Day, an audio clip of Azhar was played during a JeM rally in Karachi. In the audio, Azhar invited people toward jihad.

"Stay determined," he said. "And instead of going one by one, if you all go out there together as a group, India won't be able to stand us for even one month."

VOA Urdu's Sarah Hassan contributed to this report.Recent Western-imposed sanctions targeting Russia  spawned by a naval attack on Ukrainian soldiers on the Sea of Azov late last year  are too little, too late, say former top U.S. emissaries to the region.

The United States, in coordination with Canada and the European Union, leveled the sanctions on more than a dozen Russian officials and businesses earlier in March, citing Moscow's "continued aggression in Ukraine."

On Nov. 25, 2018, Russian Coast Guard vessels rammed and then seized a trio of Ukrainian naval vessels as they moved across international waters of the Black Sea en route from one Ukrainian port to another. The two dozen Ukrainian sailors aboard those ships have since been jailed in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo prison.

"Where were we in March, April, May, June of 2018?" said former U.S. Ambassador Victoria Nuland of the timing of the latest sanctions. Nuland spoke in Washington at a recent roundtable event, titled, "Crimea after Five Years of Russian Occupation."

Nuland was one of several former top State Department officials on hand at the roundtable jointly sponsored by U.S. Institute of Peace, the Ukrainian embassy and the Atlantic Council. Nuland, a former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, echoed criticism by retired U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, who was also in attendance.



"I know where George was [at that time]," she added, referring to George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who was also at the discussion. "But I don't know where the rest of the administration and the rest of Europe were as the harassment of Ukrainian shipping was beginning, as the first efforts to gain control of that [maritime] territory were beginning.

"As has already been said, perhaps we didn't want to see, so we waited until the crisis emerged. And even after the crisis, where were we in trying to increase our presence in the Black Sea?" Nuland said. "We're only just getting there now. Where were we in terms of supporting Ukrainian naval capacity? Where were we in terms of a fast, ready-sanctions reaction?"

Six Russian officials, six defense firms, and two energy and construction firms were targeted with U.S. sanctions, either over the seizure of Ukrainian vessels in the Kerch Strait, or for their activities in Russian-annexed Crimea or separatist eastern Ukraine, according to a U.S. Treasury statement.

'Late and weak'

Although current and former diplomats all expressed support for the latest sanctions, Herbst said they were still not enough.

"Western sanctions were late and weak," Herbst later told VOA's Ukrainian service. "If they'd been late and strong, I'd be celebrating, but they were weak. They sanctioned low-level officials and some Russian maritime-related firms. That's it. They should have done something like sanction some high officials or family members of high officials, and they should have taken a major step like going after Gazprombank, which would've had a real impact on the Russian economy. That would tell [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, 'Don't escalate again, or you're going to get stung.'"

Senior Atlantic Council Fellow Anders Aslund largely echoed that sentiment in a Kyiv Post opinion piece.

Support for Western response

Deputy Assistant Secretary Kent, head of the European and Eurasian Affairs directorate, pushed back on the criticism, pointing out that the U.S. did respond to the Sea of Azov events in real time.

"I think we made our response clear, both in immediately calling Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo and calling President [Petro] Poroshenko the next day  as well as in our public comments condemning the attack and calling for the immediate release of both the ships and the sailors and personnel," Kent told VOA.

"And if you recall, while there was a scheduled meeting later that week in Buenos Aires at the G-20, the U.S. and President [Donald] Trump canceled that meeting precisely because of the Russians' refusal to release both the ships and the personnel who were  in violation of international law  seized and then detained," he added. The G-20 group is made up of 20 of the world's biggest economies.

Kent said the Trump administration is actively working to change the Kremlin's "cost calculus" for aggression on foreign soil and on international waters.

Controversial referendum

In March 2014, Russia annexed Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula in violation of the norms and standards of the international order. The Kremlin denies this charge, claiming that residents of Crimea voted in a referendum to secede from Ukraine.

The majority of the international community has not recognized the validity of the referendum.

Russia's modernization efforts in the region include construction of a 19-kilometer (11.8-mile) bridge which opened last year across the Kerch Strait that links the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The $3.6 billion project gave Crimea a land link to Russia. Previously, a ferry crossing that was often interrupted by gales served as the only connection.The early risers who managed to get to the front of the line on this dark and unseasonably cold Sunday morning in southern Georgia are the lucky ones. They will have the opportunity to warm up while sitting in the sanctuary of Maranatha Baptist Church on the outskirts of the town of Plains.

This is the church where former President Jimmy Carter has been praying and teaching for decades, and he attracts the faithful and the curious from down the street and around the world.

Those who arrived late will have to take a seat in the churchs overflow room and watch the mornings main attraction from a live video feed.

While those in the sanctuary wait a few hours once theyre in  and get a healthy dose of advance preparation with strict rules explained by church officials in the meantime  they are about to participate in a unique opportunity. And if the rules are followed, will get to have a picture that will forever commemorate the occasion.

Familiar ritual

Good morning everybody! Carter calls out as he takes his place behind the church podium. Clearly, its been a long morning for some in the congregation who dont respond with quite the enthusiasm hes expecting.

I said good morning everybody! This time a bit louder, and this time with the crowd in unison, cheerfully responding.

It is a familiar ritual for Carter, or Mr. Jimmy, to those who belong to his church and those who know him well, who has led religious lessons in some form or another since he was 18 years old. Now at 94, instead of weekly sessions each Sunday he is home in Plains, he teaches from the podium at church about twice a month. And, instead of standing for the entire 45-minute lesson, he sits on a custom built, hydraulically operated chair that elevates him above the crowd so everyone can see.

After a few minutes spent learning the names of the hometowns and countries of the hundreds of visitors packed into Maranatha Baptist Church this particular week, Carter gets down to the business of spreading the word of God, reciting and exploring passages from the Bible to both believers and non-believers alike, while connecting them to experiences in his own long and interesting life.

Historic milestone

While his week in Plains began like many others since leaving the White House in 1981, it ends with the 39th president reaching a historic milestone in American history. On March 22, 2019, Carter became the longest living former U.S. president, surpassing President George H.W. Bush who reached the age of 94 years and 171 days before his death Nov. 30, 2018.

Now in the record books, Carter is on a short list of nonagenarian former presidents that includes founding father John Adams, who died on July 4, 1826, the exact date of the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence from British rule. Adams was 90 years and 247 days old, an age not surpassed until Ronald Reagan broke the record in 2002.

For all of the historic overtones, it is a milestone many thought the one-time peanut farmer from Georgia would not live to see.

In an emotional and heartfelt press conference Aug. 20, 2015, Carter told the world he had cancer  melanoma  that had spread to his brain and liver.

Im perfectly at ease with whatever comes, he told assembled media at the Carter Center in Atlanta, a week after surgery to remove tumors from his liver. Im ready for anything and looking forward to a new adventure.

That adventure included an aggressive treatment plan of targeted radiation and immunotherapy. Four months later, Carter surprised visitors to his weekly Sunday School lesson in Plains with news that it appeared his cancer was gone.

My most recent MRI brain scan did not reveal any signs of the original cancer spots nor any new ones, Carter said in a separate announcement released through the Carter Center in December 2015.

WATCH: The Legacy of Jimmy Carter: The Preacher from Plains

One more wish

Today, Carter continues the longest post-White House career of any former president, a record set in 2012 surpassing Herbert Hoover.

Carter, who turns 95 in October, and his wife, Rosalynn, who turns 92 in August, continue to participate in their well-known, annual weeklong Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project with Habitat for Humanity, building houses around the world for those in need, most recently in South Bend, Indiana.

And Politico.com reports the former president who negotiated the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel has told Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, that he is willing to travel to North Korea to speak with Kim Jong Un and restart stalled efforts at nuclear talks.

Even so, both Carter and his wife have scaled back their once routinely busy schedules traveling the world waging peace, building hope, and fighting disease supporting various initiatives with their global nonprofit Carter Center.

But there is still one more milestone the former president wishes to reach.

I would like to see Guinea worm completely eradicated before I die, he explained during his 2015 press conference.

Eradication of the parasite, which grows in the human body and creates intense pain when it emerges, has been a signature project of the Carter Centers health programs since the 1980s, when there were more than 3 million cases of infection in 21 countries in Africa and Asia.

In January, the Carter Center reported there are now less than 30 cases in three countries.France on Thursday called for Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh to be released and warned Tehran that its adherence to a nuclear accord does not give it a blank cheque on human rights.

"We will do all we can to secure the release of Mrs. Sotoudeh," French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told the upper chamber Senate.

"She was condemned under astonishing conditions," for "defending the rights of women, in particular those who contest the obligation to wear the Islamic veil," he added.

Sotoudeh's husband, Reza Khandan, told AFP on Sunday that his wife had been sentenced to a total of 33 years in prison over a case with seven charges, but she is to only serve the longest sentence, 12 years imposed on Sunday for "encouraging corruption and debauchery".

She has also been convicted of espionage.

Sotoudeh has also been sentenced to a total of 148 lashes for appearing in court without the hijab Islamic head covering and for another offense.

According to Khandan, Sotoudeh has refrained from choosing a lawyer as attorneys on her previous cases have faced prosecution for representing her.

"We have been making considerable efforts in recent months to preserve the (Iranian) nuclear accord, despite America's withdrawal," said Le Drian.

"We are doing so because we respect our signature, but Iran must also respect its obligations in particular those international agreements relating to civil and political rights," he added.

Last month the UN atomic watchdog said that Iran has been adhering to its deal with world powers on limiting its nuclear program, as diplomatic wrangling continues over the future of the accord.

The latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Iran was still complying with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with global powers under which Tehran drastically scaled back its nuclear programin return for sanctions relief.

Last week, European nations rejected a call from US Vice President Mike Pence to follow the US lead in withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal.

Le Drian said Thursday: "Our wish to preserve the Vienna accord does not grant carte-blanche to Iran and certainly not in the matter of human rights."

Before her arrest, Sotoudeh, 55, had taken on the cases of several women arrested for appearing in public without headscarves in protest at the mandatory dress code in force in Iran.

Sotoudeh won the European Parliament's prestigious Sakharov Prize in 2012 for her work on high-profile cases, including those of convicts on death row for offenses committed as minors.

She spent three years in prison after representing dissidents arrested during mass protests in 2009 against the disputed re-election of ultra-conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.European allies of the outspoken Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have taken the rare step of suspending his Fidesz party from their center-right alliance in Brussels, citing concerns over the rule of law and attacks on European Union officials. However, the European Peoples Party (EPP) stopped short of expelling the party.

Fidesz campaign slogans for the upcoming European Parliament elections feature personal attacks on the head of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the U.S.-based financier George Soros. Prime Minister Orban accuses them of conspiring to force Hungary to accept mass migration.

His spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told VOA in a recent interview that the suspension will not change the governments course.

If its about the fundamental issues, that is migration, the defense of European Christian values, we are not ready to compromise, Kovacs said.

Democracy at risk

It is the fundamental issues of democracy that Hungarys Western allies accuse the government of putting at risk.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Budapest last month and pledged to increase American engagement in the region. Before his meeting with Orban, he held talks with several non-governmental organizations, among them the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union. The groups Stefania Kapronczay was at the meeting.

It was very important both symbolically, and it was a message about democracy, she told VOA.

The U.S. State Department pledged support for Hungarian NGOs and free media, though no further details have been released. Kovacs says the government is unimpressed.

We dont believe that we shall be giving lectures and tell other people actually and other countries how to behave. And thats what we expect from our allies. NGOs are not entitled to participate in political decision-making. That has never been an assignment for them. And there is no democratic mandate behind it.

Changing EU

Such a position is part of the governments attempt to stifle criticism and shut down debate, Kapronczay argues.

The Hungarian government systematically demolishes the rule of law, independent institutions. And the system of checks and balances where government power can be controlled is basically nonexistent in the country. Basically, anyone who dissents or who dares to criticize the government faces stigmatization through the media and press statements from government officials.

The Fidesz partys suspension from the EPP will weaken its hand in Brussels. However, the Orban government believes things will change after the May elections.

We all know, everyone knows in the European political sphere, that the political arithmetic in Europe is going to change, Kovacs said.

That could see Hungary team up with like-minded far right parties in countries like Italy, Poland and France, a move that would reshape the power dynamics of Brussels.Thousands of people gathered Friday for a mass funeral in a cemetery in New Zealand where 26 of the 50 victims of a mass shooting in a mosque last Friday were buried. The youngest victim buried was 3 years old.

Earlier, at an outdoor service across from the mosque where the fatal attack happened in Christchurch, Imam Gamil Fouda addressed a crowd of thousands, telling them that We are broken-hearted, but we are not broken.

He told the crowd hate will be undone and love will redeem us.

The imam thanked the neighbors who opened their doors to save us from the killer and those who pulled over their cars to help us.

Fouda also acknowledged New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for Holding our families close and honoring us with a simple scarf. He said the prime ministers leadership was a lesson for the world.

Women around New Zealand wore headscarves Friday to show their support and respect for the Muslim community.

Reuters reports that female police officers at the outdoor service also donned headscarves and wore a red rose on their uniforms.

Before the imam spoke, there was a public call to prayer at the park that was broadcast on radio and television across the country.

Two minutes of silence followed the call to prayer in remembrance of those who died in the mosque.

Ardern said after the call to prayer: New Zealand mourns with you, we are one.

Ardern has been swift in her reaction to the bloody attack on the mosque.

Weapons ban

She imposed an immediate ban on all military-style semi-automatic and automatic assault rifles.

The ban, which the prime minister announced Thursday in Wellington, includes high-capacity magazines, which can hold multiple rounds of ammunition, and accessories that can convert ordinary rifles into fast-acting assault rifles. Ardern said she imposed the sales ban to prevent stockpiling and that a complete ban on the weapons would be implemented after new laws take effect.

Ardern also announced a large-scale buyback scheme to encourage owners of such weapons to surrender them to authorities. She said the government could spend up to $140 million to buy back guns from owners who turn them in. The military and police would be exempt, as would pest control businesses. New Zealand police said on their website a transitional period would allow people to turn in their guns without penalty.

Parliament is expected to approve the proposed laws when it reconvenes in mid-April.

Authorities have charged 28-year-old Australian Brenton Harrison Tarrant with murder in connection with the March 15 attacks on the al-Noor and Linwood mosques. The self-proclaimed white nationalist did not enter a plea in his initial court appearance the day after the attack. His next court appearance is April 5.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 buries its dead

Funerals began this week for the 50 people killed in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. While the city had planned a memorial and vigil Thursday, residents found their own ways to grieve at pop-up monuments near the mosques and in parks throughout the city. Ethiopian Abdulkadir Ababora was sitting in the front row of one of the mosques when the gunman opened fire. He survived by hiding under a bookshelf and pretending he was dead. "I didn't think it was real," he told VOA.

Keeping Muslims safe

The attacks in New Zealand are adding new purpose to a newly formed Muslim neighborhood patrol in Brooklyn, New York. The rollout of the volunteer-led civilian patrol, Muslim Community Patrol & Services (MCPS), coincided with the attacks. MCPS is aimed at protecting members of two Brooklyn communities "from escalating quality-of-life nuisance crimes." Organizers Mohammad Khan and Imam Nazrul Islam were returning from a leadership dinner when they heard about New Zealand. "We stopped our car, we parked, and we were just in tears," Khan said. "Me and the imam  we were just devastated."

Border death

Deaths at the U.S. southern border are rare, but this week a Mexican man died while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. After a medical examination, he was taken to the hospital with "flu-like symptoms, liver failure and renal failure." He died the next day. Last month, a 45-year-old Mexican man died at a hospital in McAllen, Texas.

Most dangerous migrant route

Latin America has displaced the Mediterranean Sea as the world's deadliest route for migrants. The International Organization for Migration spokesman, Joel Millman, says 79 deaths have been reported along this route since Feb. 1. He says this is nearly three times higher than the numbers reported in the Mediterranean.Indonesias national carrier Garuda has told Boeing it will cancel a multibillion-dollar order for 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 jets after two fatal crashes involving the plane, in what is thought to be the first formal cancellation for the model.

We have sent a letter to Boeing requesting that the order be canceled, Garuda spokesman Ikhsan Rosan said.

The reason is that Garuda passengers in Indonesia have lost trust and no longer have the confidence in the plane, he said.

The spokesman told AFP that Boeing officials will visit Indonesia next week to discuss Garudas plans to call off the order.

Garuda had received one of the planes, he said, part of a 50-aircraft order worth $4.9 billion at list prices when it was announced in 2014.

Garuda is also talking to Boeing about whether to return the plane it has received, the spokesman told AFP.

The carrier had so far paid Boeing about $26 million, while the companys director told Indonesian media outlet Detik that it would consider switching to a new version of the single-aisle jet.

In principle, its not that we want to replace Boeing, but maybe we will replace (these planes) with another model, Garuda Indonesia director I Gusti Ngurah Askhara Danadiputra told Detik.

Will Lion Air follow?

Shukor Yusof, head of Malaysia-based aviation consultancy Endau Analytics, said Garudas announcement appeared to mark the first formal plans by a carrier to cancel an order for the 737 MAX 8.

It will probably not be the last. There is a risk that Garudas rival Lion Air, which also has many 737 MAX 8 orders, might make the same decision, he said.

That is a risk. This has been made public by the Lion Air CEO. He stated publicly that he is considering a cancellation.

He added that it was difficult to predict whether more major carriers would follow suit.

There are many unanswered questions and each airline has specific needs, Yusof said. Each airline needs to deliberate how they want to strategize their fleet management.

Delivery postponed

This month, Lion Air said it was postponing delivery of four of the jets after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board.

Budget carrier Lion, Southeast Asias biggest airline by fleet size and a major Boeing customer, said the planes had been on order for delivery this year, but the company was re-evaluating the situation.

Lion Air operates 10 Max 8 jets, part of a then-record $22 billion order from Boeing made in 2011.

The airlines are the only two that use the Max 8 in Indonesia.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday he would sue two of his main political rivals for libel, claiming that they labelled him a traitor over a graft scandal involving a German submarine deal.

In a video published on his Facebook page, Netanyahu said he instructed his attorneys to take legal action against former armed forces chief Benny Gantz and ex-defense minister Moshe "Bogie" Yaalon.

Both are from the centrist Blue and White party which is seeking to unseat the veteran prime minister in an April 9 election. Opinion polls put Netanyahus right-wing Likud and Gantzs new party neck-and-neck.

In the video, Netanyahu said that through their "labeling of me as a traitor" Gantz, Yaalon and their party colleague Yair Lapid  who cannot be sued because he is a legislator  had committed "a blood libel that must not be ignored.

Netanyahu's lawyer and other suspects have been the focus of a long-running police investigation into the sale of German submarines to Israel, amid concerns about a conflict of interest.

Netanyahu was questioned by police in the investigation but investigators said last year that the prime minister was not a suspect. He issued the video in apparent response to comments Yaalon made on Israel Radio about the submarines case two days ago.

Gantz, who has promised to pursue clean government, has sought to undermine Netanyahu by focusing public attention on the state's decision not to deem the prime minister a suspect in the submarine case.

In a video statement in response, Lapid said Netanyahu's video was full of lies and that neither he nor his colleagues had called the prime minister a traitor. He said he was willing to forgo his parliamentary immunity to prove it, adding: "Sue me."

Officials in the Blue and White party said Gantz was unavailable for comment on Friday because he was on his way to the United States. Asked about Yaalon's response, the party referred to Lapid's video statement.

Iran hacking allegation

For his part, Netanyahu has put Iran's alleged hacking of Gantz's cellphone at the forefront of his election campaign, repeating in his video on Friday  without presenting any evidence  an allegation that it contained information Tehran could use to blackmail the former general.

Iran has denied targeting Gantz. Gantz has said he had been informed by Israel's domestic security service of a breach but there was no sensitive information on the device.

Last month Israeli Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit said he intends to indict Netanyahu in three cases on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, pending the outcome of a pre-trial hearing that will take place after the election.

Netanyahu denies all wrongdoing, and has consistently accused his opponents of carrying out a politically motivated "witch-hunt.

The prime minister's broadside against his strongest election opponents came a day after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his support for Israel's claim of sovereignty over the Golan Heights, in what was widely seen in Israel as a boost for Netanyahu.

The prime minister will fly to Washington next week to meet Trump at the White House and address the pro-Israeli lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. Gantz is also due to address AIPAC.Americas top marine warned that deployments to the U.S.-Mexico border and President Donald Trumps plan for a wall pose an unacceptable risk to the force, according to documents revealed Thursday by The Los Angeles Times.

In memos addressed to acting Pentagon chief Patrick Shanahan and Navy secretary Richard Spencer, General Robert Neller wrote that he had been forced to cancel or reduce exercises in five countries.

Marines will miss exercises in Indonesia, Scotland and Mongolia, and their participation in joint exercises in Australia and South Korea will be reduced, Neller said in the documents dated March 18 and 19.

A Marine Corps spokesman confirmed the validity of the documents published by the LA Times.

Neller said Trumps emergency declaration to secure $6.7 billion from the Pentagons 2019 budget for his wall meant the corps could not afford to rebuild hurricane-hit bases in North Carolina and Georgia.

The hurricane season is only three months away ... and we have Marines, Sailors, and civilians working in compromised structures, Neller wrote.

While (financial year 2019) was supposed to be a good year given an on-time enacted budget and topline, those positive attributes are now overcome by the negative factors ... imposing unacceptable risk to Marine Corps combat readiness and solvency, he added.

Shanahan has not yet released the funds claimed by the president.

Monetarily, recovery for those areas affected by the hurricanes is by far the most significant budgetary pressure listed in the memo, said Marines spokesman Captain Joseph Butterfield.Americans were forced to wait a bit longer for news about special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into foreign meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

Mueller delivered the confidential report on his probe Friday to Attorney General William Barr, who then told congressional leaders by letter that I may be in a position to advise you of the special counsels principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.

But Barr spent Saturday reviewing the report, and as of midafternoon, according to a Justice Department spokesman, his summary for Congress was not expected for at least another day.

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said the White House had not received and had not been briefed on the report. Echoing comments of the night before from White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, he said the next steps in the investigation were up to Barr.

Key questions

The central questions that Mueller, a former FBI director, set out to answer: Did Donald Trump or his aides collude with the Russians to undermine Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 with embarrassing emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton's campaign chairman? Or was the president-to-be merely the fortunate beneficiary of Russia's malicious tactics? And did Trump attempt to torpedo the subsequent investigation to protect himself and his political advisers and aides?

The probe has led to the indictments of 37 individuals and entities, mostly Russian operatives who remain at large. Seven people, including five former Trump associates, have pleaded guilty and five have been sentenced to prison.



Among high-profile cases, former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI about conversations with the Russian ambassador, and Paul Manafort, the president's former campaign chairman, was recently sentenced for a host of crimes.



Ahead of the report's delivery, speculation was rife that the special counsel would bring additional indictments, but there was no additional legal action before the report was released to the Justice Department.



With the report's delivery, the Mueller investigation is effectively over, but not the president's legal troubles. In recent months, Mueller has farmed out parts of his investigation to U.S. attorney's offices, including the Southern District of New York, where prosecutors have opened separate investigations into the Trump Organization and other Trump entities.

WATCH: After Months of Anticipation, Mueller Probe Concludes

Where the case stands



Whether Mueller's report will lead to vindication for the president, his impeachment, or some sort of messy, in-between alternative is unknowable for now.



By law, Barr decides what parts  if any  of the document to disclose to Congress and the public.



Trump has repeatedly called the special counsel investigation a "witch hunt" and insists there is no evidence of his collusion with the Russians. While the president has said "I don't mind" if the report is made public, there is likely to be considerable legal wrangling between the White House, the Justice Department, Trump's personal lawyer and Congress before portions or all of the report are released.



Justice Department regulations require Mueller to submit a "confidential report" of his findings to the attorney general, and the attorney general to "notify" Congress about it. There are no requirements for Mueller to make his findings public.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, told House Democrats that the full report must be released to Congress.

The California Democrat sent a letter to colleagues ahead of an ``emergency'' call with all rank-and-file lawmakers Saturday to discuss where Democrats ``go from here'' in their oversight of the White House.

She further said she would reject a classified briefing because members of Congress must be allowed to discuss it publicly. The bottom line, she said on the call is that the American people "deserve the truth"

Wherever the report takes the United States as a country, understanding where it began and the route it followed will be every bit as important as recognizing the final destination.

The beginning



The special counsel investigation began on May 17, 2017, with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein's announcement that he had appointed Mueller to take over an ongoing FBI investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russian election interference.



At the time, Rosenstein stressed that the appointment should not be seen as confirmation that there had actually been any illegal coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, and said that transferring day-to-day control of the investigation to Mueller was meant to assure the public that the inquiry was free of political bias.



Mueller was not starting from scratch. The investigation he inherited had begun nearly a year before, on July 31, 2016, after the FBI learned of possible collusion between a Trump campaign adviser and Russia.



'Dirt' on Clinton



The tip that initially led investigators to open the case came from Australia's top diplomat in the United Kingdom, who had encountered Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos at a bar in London months earlier.



The diplomat revealed Papadopoulos, while drinking, said he had reason to believe Russian officials were in possession of "dirt" that could damage the candidacy of Clinton, the former secretary of state and front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.



On July 22, 2016, when the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks published about 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, the Australian government reached out to the FBI and took the highly unusual step of allowing the official who encountered Papadopoulos  High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Alexander Downer  to be interviewed by investigators.

U.S. intelligence officials were already convinced that Russia was behind the DNC hacking and other efforts to influence the presidential election. But the Downer interview added a new and possibly explosive angle.

The diplomat presented the FBI with credible evidence that a Trump campaign official had specific information about Russian interference in the U.S. elections months before that interference was made public. That forced the agency to open an urgent counterintelligence investigation examining whether the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia.



An investigation in the public eye



By September 2016, intelligence officials had briefed members of Congress on Russian election interference, but it wasn't until after Nov. 8, when Trump unexpectedly captured the Oval Office, that some of the most important details about Russian intentions became public.



By that time, further leaks of emails stolen from the account of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and posted online by WikiLeaks reinforced suspicions that the hacking efforts weren't just meant to sow chaos by Russian President Vladimir Putin's government but were aimed at aiding the Trump campaign. The intelligence community confirmed as much in a closed-door meeting with select lawmakers in November, and would make that conclusion public in early January 2017.



Meanwhile, FBI investigators working on the probe were monitoring a large number of interactions between members of the Trump transition team and Russian officials.

Within a few weeks of Trump's inauguration, those interactions would cost a prominent member of the Trump administration his job. National security adviser Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, was forced to resign after it was revealed he had lied to the FBI about his communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.



Flynn's fate led, albeit indirectly, to the Russia investigation being handed over to Mueller in spring 2017.



Trump's choice for attorney general, former Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, recused himself from supervising the Russian investigation because he had served as a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, which posed a conflict of interest. That decision angered Trump, and left the Justice Department's second-in-command, Rosenstein, in charge of the investigation. FBI Director James Comey disclosed the existence of the investigation during a testimony before Congress in March.



In private meetings with Comey, Trump demanded "loyalty" from the career law enforcement officer, and pressed him to drop the investigation into Flynn, Comey later testified. Comey refused the president's request.



By May, Trump fired Comey, saying later in a TV interview that he did so largely because of the Russia investigation, to which he strongly objected.



To insulate the investigation from political interference, Rosenstein on May 17 appointed Mueller as special counsel for the Russia investigation.



In his letter appointing Mueller, Rosenstein authorized the special counsel to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation."



Mueller's mandate was later expanded to include whether Trump had obstructed justice.



Following Comey's firing, Andrew McCabe, then the bureau's acting director, quietly ordered two separate investigations to examine whether Trump had obstructed justice and whether he was acting as an agent of Russia.

Stream of indictments, guilty pleas



In the months after Mueller took over, the public began to see the fruits of an investigation that had, at that point, been ongoing for nearly a year.



In July, Papadopoulos was arrested and charged with lying to the FBI. He later pleaded guilty and received a two-week prison sentence.



In October, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, were both indicted on conspiracy and money laundering charges dating back to work they had done for Russian-supported politicians in Ukraine years earlier.



The indictments had nothing to do with the Trump campaign specifically, but were widely seen as providing prosecutors with leverage over Manafort and Gates, who would likely have been privy to any collusion that might have occurred during the election.



The next month, Flynn entered a guilty plea to a charge of lying to the FBI, and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in multiple investigations.



In February 2018, Mueller's office unsealed an indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies, charging them with conspiracy to interfere with U.S. elections. Months later, 12 other Russians were indicted and charged with hacking the email system of the Democratic National Committee and others.



The following months marked a series of major events in the investigation.



In late February, Gates pleaded guilty and promised to assist in further investigations. In April, FBI agents raided the home and office of Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen.



In June, Mueller expanded the charges against Manafort to include witness tampering and obstruction of justice, and also named suspected Russian intelligence officer and Manafort business partner Konstantin Kilimnik in an indictment.



By August, Manafort was convicted in the first of two trials for his illicit business practices, and Cohen pleaded guilty of campaign finance violations  implicating Trump in at least one crime  in a case handed off by Mueller to the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Notably, though, neither of the convictions touched on Russian election interference.



Manafort later pleaded guilty of additional crimes and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for leniency. He would lose that consideration after Mueller and a federal judge determined that he had continued lying to investigators after striking his plea deal.

Cohen pleaded guilty to a further charge of lying to Congress and was sentenced to three years in prison.



An agreement and another arrest



After more than a year of sparring over whether Trump would consent to be interviewed by the special counsel's office, an agreement was reached in late November 2018 in which the president instead submitted written answers to a series of questions from investigators.



In January 2019, Trump associate Roger Stone was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and one count of witness tampering. Investigators had been interested in his potential communication with Russian hackers and their associates during the 2016 election.



'Racist, cheat, con man'



During three days of testimony on Capitol Hill in late February, Cohen lashed out at Trump, his former boss.



During his opening statement to lawmakers, Cohen called Trump, among other things, a "racist," "cheat" and "con man." He also produced documentary evidence that allegedly proved the president's participation in a criminal conspiracy to conceal illicit campaign contributions in the form of payment of hush money to prevent adult-film star Stormy Daniels from going public with her allegation that she and Trump had a sexual liaison years earlier.



Cohen also said, "Questions have been raised about whether I know of direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. I do not. I want to be clear."



He did say, though, that he had "suspicions" about connections between the Trump family and Russians who worked to influence the election.

Changing cast members



Today, as the investigation concludes, it is operating under the direction of a different set of presidential appointees.



Trump's frustration with Sessions finally boiled over in late 2018, resulting in Sessions' forced resignation. He was replaced on a temporary basis by his chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker. After a delay, Trump appointed William Barr to fill the role.



Barr, in his confirmation hearing, told senators he would commit to allowing the Mueller probe to run its course. He was less forthcoming when asked to guarantee that the results would be made public.



"My goal will be to provide as much transparency as I can consistent with the law," he said.

Masood Farivar contributed to this report. Some information for this report came from Associated Press.North Korean has withdrawn its liaison office with South Korea.

The North notified the South of the abrupt move Friday at the two Koreas' weekly meeting at their joint offices in the Northern city of Kaesong.

South Korea Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sun told Reuters the North said the move was on "instructions from a higher level."

South Korea said in a statement that the North's decision to withdraw from the office was "regrettable," but said the South would continue to work at the offices.

The news of the withdrawal follows last month's collapsed meeting in Vietnam between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump.

The two leaders squabbled over the U.S. sanctions on North Korea because of the North's nuclear program.

The liaison office opened last September as part of a series of steps aimed at reconciliation between the two nations.The Pakistan military said in a statement on Thursday that it had rescued four Iranian soldiers being held captive by a militant group in the country's restive southwest.

The rescue took place in Chaghi district of Balochistan province, near the Afghan border, the statement said.

"Terrorists of a proscribed organization were reported to have entered Pakistan from Afghanistan side along with abducted Iranian soldiers," it said.

"After exchange of fire, four Iranian soldiers (were) recovered," it continued.

The statement said the soldiers were being handed over to Iranian authorities, though it did not say when. It also did not say what date the rescue took place, or name the group holding the soldiers.

Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi expressed Tehran's gratefulness for the rescue of the soldiers in an official statement issued on Thursday.

"We express our thankfulness and appreciation to the Pakistan government and army for the successful operation that freed these brave border guards," said the statement, published on the official website of Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Ghasemi further expressed hope that the remaining border guards will be freed and returned to Iran as soon as possible.

The incident comes months after the Sunni jihadist group Jaish al-Adl abducted 12 Iranian security personnel in October last year near the border.

Five of them were later released and handed back to Iran by Islamabad.

Relations between Pakistan and Iran recently suffered another blow after Tehran said a Pakistani suicide bomber was behind a February 13 attack that killed 27 Revolutionary Guards in its volatile southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan.

Jaish al-Adl, which Tehran says operates mostly out of bases in Pakistan, claimed responsibility for the blast.U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has said the United States "will not tolerate" the continued detention of Roberto Marrero, chief of staff of Venezuela opposition leader Juan Guaido.

Marrero was arrested Thursday during a pre-dawn raid on his home. Venezuelan Interior Minister Nestor Reverol explained the arrest, saying a "large number of weapons" were found in Marrero's house.

Pence made the statement in an op-ed piece for the Miami Herald Friday. He warned that the United States would not tolerate Marrero's detention or intimidation of the Guaido government, which the U.S. recognizes as the legitimate government of Venezuela.

Pence also called out Cuba, Russia, and China for supporting the administration of embattled president Nicolas Maduro and profiting from it.

He said Cuba is allowing its military and intelligence services to train, support, and equip Venezuela's secret police; Russia vetoed a resolution at the United Nations calling for unfettered aid to Venezuela; and China is refusing to grant a visa to economist Ricardo Hausmann to attend the Inter-American Development Bank's annual meeting, which it is hosting.

Pence called Maduro a "corrupt dictator" and said those nations are holding Venezuela back in its "steady march towards freedom."

"Nicolas Maduro must go," he said.

Guaido, head of the National Assembly, has declared himself interim president after disputed elections. The United States and about 50 other countries have recognized him as Venezuela's legitimate leader. But Maduro has vowed to remain, leaving the two men in a struggle for power.

U.S. citizens detained

Also Friday, the State Department issued a statement of concern for "all U.S. persons" detained in Venezuela. Prison officials reportedly are preventing lawyers and families of detained Americans from seeing or bringing food to the detainees.

Six U.S. citizens, executives of the oil company Citgo, have been in jail since November 2017 for alleged money laundering and embezzlement.

The two U.S. senators from Texas, home to five of the six detainees, say the six are being held in deteriorating conditions. The legislators also say Venezuelan authorities have denied the detainees a trial and contact with the State Department.

Citgo is a U.S.-based refinery and gasoline marketer primarily owned by Venezuela's state-run oil company, PDVSA.

President Donald Trump has said all options are on the table for Venezuela, but he has not said under what circumstances he might consider using U.S. military force.

A collapse in world energy prices, corruption and failed socialist policies have destroyed oil-rich Venezuela's economy.

Food and medicine are scarce, and more than 3 million Venezuelans have fled the country.Taiwan, faced with an increase in military spending by its main rival China, is seeking a range of new, advanced weapons systems from the United States, officials in Taipei confirmed this week.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said Tuesday in Taipei that her government had made a formal request to the United States for advanced fighter jets. Local media say she wants 66 American-made F-16 Viper fighter jets, an upgrade over Taiwans existing F-16 fleet. A defense ministry spokesperson reached Wednesday did not rule out that possibility.

Taiwans armed forces rank 22nd in the world. China ranks much higher, behind only the United States and Russia, and outspends Taiwan on weaponry. This year Beijing announced a 7.5 percent defense budget increase, compared with Taipeis 5.6 percent hike this year. And with Chinese threats to reunify with the self-ruled island, by force if necessary, regional analysts say Taiwan is keen to boost its military preparedness, with U.S. help, to counter any threat from the mainland.

I think its trying to emphasize that Taiwan is a very close U.S. ally and also sending a political message that we are urgently in need of U.S. support, said Andrew Yang, secretary-general of the think tank Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies in Taiwan.

Chinas modernization

Chinas Peoples Liberation Army is restructuring and advancing technologically, the U.S. defense department said in its annual report to Congress last year. Its eyeing Taiwan in particular, the report says.

To restructure the armed forces, China has shifted personnel away from the army to its navy and air force to win any local wars characterized by real-time, data-networked command and control, and precision strike, the Pentagon report says. To modernize, China is shifting toward outer space technology and cyber capabilities, the report says.

Because for the past few years Chinas investment in defense has been extremely fast, that has caused this severe imbalance. Taiwan basically must arm and defend itself, so we hope that in terms of defense we can achieve a sense of balance and develop what we need to develop, Taiwan ruling party legislator Lee Chun-yi said. For the current arms sale request, he said, thats our initial motivation.

Defense analysts have said Taiwan would best resist China through asymmetrical warfare, meaning effective resistance of an enemy with targeted firepower rather than overwhelming force.

Informal U.S. alliance

U.S. officials will evaluate the purchase request for 120 working days, Taiwan defense ministry spokesman Chen Chung-chi said. They would decide, he said, what exact kinds of aircraft and other weapons systems, such as radars, Taiwan should buy. An arms package would probably include training for Taiwans armed forces, Chen said.

Defense officials in Washington declined to comment on the latest request.

Although China bristles whenever the U.S. government announces arms sales to Taiwan, Washington cites a 40-year-old congressional act that allows it to defend the island. The United States sees Taiwan as one of several democratic friends in the Western Pacific, valuable as China becomes more powerful militarily and economically.

President Donald Trumps administration has particularly favored Taiwan as it pressures China over trade issues. The administration agreed to sell Taiwan $1.42 billion in advanced arms in mid-2017. In October last year, the U.S. Congress approved a $330 million sale of spare parts for military aircraft and other weaponry.

Existing Taiwanese air force jets, including older F-16s, Mirage 2000s and domestically produced fighters, are aging after 20 years of use, Chen said. To keep up with Chinas ceaseless military research and development as well as frequent exercises off the coast, Taiwan needs better planes, Chen said.

We hope this purchase of advanced fighters will let us improve our air defense safety. Chinas military power after all is always growing, so we need to have some defensive capability, Chen said. This is an extremely important key to maintaining peace in the region.Robert Khuzami, the federal prosecutor who oversaw the case against President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, will step down from his role as top deputy in the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, the office announced Friday.

Khuzami assumed oversight of the case against Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, lying to Congress and other federal crimes, after U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman recused himself from the case.

Audrey Strauss will take over from Khuzami as Deputy U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the office said.

Strauss previously served as senior counsel to the U.S. Attorney.

She will be replaced by Craig Stewart, who is leaving his role as a partner at the law firm of Arnold & Porter, the office said.

"Rob Khuzami is an extraordinary and brilliant lawyer who has upheld the ideals of integrity and professionalism that characterize the work of this office," Berman said in a statement, adding that Khuzami has been commuting weekly from Washington since his appointment in January 2018. "While his desire to continue to serve remains strong, he understandably has decided to return home to his family."

Khuzami did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Relief supplies are arriving for thousands of people in southern Malawis Cyclone Idai-affected flood areas, where at least 56 people have been killed.



Many villages remain cut-off by massive rains that hit Mozambiques coast earlier this month, swamping huge areas of the country and neighboring Malawi and Zimbabwe, killing hundreds. The United Nations says about 1,200 Mozambicans fled across the border to evacuation camps in Malawi, where relief supplies are under strain.

Malawis Department of Disaster Management and Preparedness says nearly a million people in half the countrys districts have been impacted by Cyclone Idai.



Half of them are children.



The situation in the camps is quite bad," said

Andrew Brown, Chief of Communications in Malawi for the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. "Actually, right now I am in Bangula Admarc camp in Nsanje (district). And there is over 4,000 people here. And there is 3,400 Malawians and actually 1,200 Mozambicans who have crossed the river. Resources are stretched.

UNICEF partners - including Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, United Purpose, and World Vision - are helping deliver relief supplies.



Brown says these include oral re-hydration solution, antibiotics, and insecticide-treated bed nets.



We are also providing water buckets making sure they have access to clean water," he said. "Making sure that children are screened for malnutrition and are treated. We are training and providing temporary teachers to help with increased number of children. And we are creating child friendly spaces and we have recreation kits so that the kids living in these very crowded camps actually have somewhere safe to play.

UNICEF last week made an urgent appeal for $8 million in funding to meet the immediate and medium-term needs of women and children in flood-affected areas.



Authorities say some areas of Malawi, like Nyachikadza and East Bank, are inaccessible due to cut-off roads and washed-away bridges.



District Commissioner for Nsanje Reinghard Chavula says getting aid to those in need is a challenge.



We had a help of a helicopter and we were able to send the food through the helicopter but still what we need are the roads to be maintained otherwise we cant have the helicopter all the time," Chavula said.



Despite the relief efforts, Chavula says thousands in Malawi are still in dire need of shelter, food and medical assistance.



Malawi President Peter Mutharika declared 14 affected districts disaster areas and appealed for help.



Aside from aid groups and the U.N., countries offering assistance include Britain, China, Tanzania, and the United States.Kristin Crump and her two kids put damp cloths over their mouths Thursday for the short walk from their suburban Houston front door to their car, defying an order to remain inside because of dangerous fumes coming from burned-out petrochemical tanks a couple of miles away.

For the second time in three days, they were heading to a relative's house, worried about what they've been breathing since a massive fire broke out Sunday at the Intercontinental Terminals Company in Deer Park and not believing officials' assurances that they were safe.

"I do not fully trust what they say,'' said Crump, whose husband later met up with her and the kids, who are 6 and 13 years old. "I do believe what is in the air is very harmful and it can have long-term effects such as cancer and things like that later down the line. I don't think it's worth risking that for me or my kids to stay there and breathe in this stuff.''

Authorities lifted Thursday's order to remain indoors after several hours, saying tests showed the elevated levels of benzene in the air had cleared. But that was little solace to residents who watched for three days as a giant plume of black smoke billowed from the plant, leading authorities to close neighborhoods and cancel classes at area schools.

"It's pretty harrowing,'' said Jeff Fountain, a chemist who lives with his wife and three children about four miles (6.4 kilometers) from the plant.

"I work with benzene ... science has told us that it's a well-known carcinogen,'' he said Thursday, adding, "The plume is gone, but the benzene in the air is lingering.''

On Wednesday, when authorities said they had finally extinguished the blaze, Deer Park resident Terri Garcia expressed her own concerns.

"Everything has been wrapped up in this nice perfect bow in saying that there were no problems,'' she said. "Every air quality was perfect. Every wind was perfect blowing it away. And if everything was so perfect, why did it happen?''

No cause disclosed

Several government agencies will continue to monitor the air around the plant, where the tanks that caught fire contained components of gasoline and materials used in nail polish remover, glues and paint thinner. ITC said 11 of the 15 storage tanks in the area where the fire occurred were damaged.

Authorities haven't revealed the cause of the blaze. They said Wednesday that the benzene levels near the facility didn't pose a health concern, but they issued the shelter-in-place order early Thursday due to "reports of benzene or other volatile organic compounds'' in Deer Park, which is about 15 miles (24 kilometers) southeast of Houston.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who is the county's top administrator, said at a news conference that light winds had helped keep the vapors from spreading more broadly.

Dr. Umair Shah, who heads the county health agency, said there was only a minimal public health risk, but he cautioned that the elderly, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups should take precautions.

"The most important thing is that the levels that have been detected are still not high enough for the level of concern that people may be having,'' he said.

Intercontinental Terminals Co. spokeswoman Alice Richardson said Thursday company officials believe winds shifted foam that had been sprayed over one of the tanks which burned in the fire, allowing benzene vapors to escape.

Late Thursday, officials with the nearby Deer Park and La Porte public school systems announced that all classes Friday were canceled for fear of a recurrence of Thursday's shelter-in-place alert.

A unified command has been set up to coordinate the efforts of Deer Park city and Harris County workers, along with those of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Coast Guard. They are evaluating the environmental aftereffects on waterways surrounding ITC of the fire and efforts to extinguish it. The EPA and the TCEQ said Wednesday that they were waiting for test results of water samples to determine any potential impacts from the foam used to fight the fire on Tucker Bayou, Buffalo Bayou and the Houston Ship Channel.

The Texas National Guard's 6th civil support team was assisting at the scene Thursday. The team of about a dozen was helping to contain hazardous materials and provide other assistance to local emergency responders.

Reported symptoms

Environmental groups said people who live near the facility have experienced various symptoms, including headaches, nausea and nose bleeds. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, long-term exposure to the highly flammable chemical causes harmful effects on the blood, including bone marrow.

Crump said her family left town on Tuesday because her kids were complaining of headaches. They returned Wednesday, only to leave again Thursday.

The EPA conducted air quality tests throughout the Houston area, both on the ground and from a small airplane, and "measured no levels of hazardous concentrations,'' EPA official Adam Adams said Wednesday, hours before officials imposed the shelter-in-place order early Thursday.

At a news conference later Thursday, Adams said the EPA continued performing air monitoring with the small airplane along with a specially equipped bus that was driving throughout the Deer Park area.

Bryan Parras, an organizer in Houston with the Sierra Club, said his environmental group had concerns not just about the air quality, but about the potential impacts to the environment and the fishing industry if chemicals from the storage facility or firefighting foam get into the Houston Ship Channel, which leads to the Gulf of Mexico.

"This issue isn't over just because the fire is out. We want systems in place that will protect our communities,'' Parras said Wednesday.Twenty-six-year-old Precious, as she has asked us to call her to protect her identity, is 16 weeks pregnant. And so is her best friend, also by Precious boyfriend. That event turned her life upside down and brought her to the difficult decision to seek an abortion.

She lives in South Africa, where abortion is legal without justification and available through a nurse through 12 weeks of pregnancy, and legal up to 20 weeks, when done by a doctor and with justification.

But when she tried to get an abortion in her home city of Johannesburg, she ran into problems.

When I went to register my name, I simply said, I want to do abortion, and then they said, No, she told VOA.

And there were two nurses there, and the older one said, Oh, thank God, Im not trained for this, whilst the other one said, no, you have to do back to your place and do it there. Then we had a disagreement there, as, like, Im being against God and more stuff like that.

Hers is a common experience, and its what reproductive health advocates say drives 10,000 South African women to seek illegal, backstreet abortions every year.

The nations health department estimated that as many as 25 percent of maternal deaths from septic miscarriages were the result of such illegal abortions. More than half of all abortions in South Africa are unlicensed, despite the fact that half of all government hospitals offer the service for free.

Precious, who says she fears being judged by her neighbors, chose instead to travel to the dusty mining town of Rustenburg, where aid agency Doctors Without Borders has set up a free abortion clinic.

She said she was sure of her decision.

I want this thing to be done as quickly as  because I cant, I cant take it anymore, she said, her voice soft and wavering. Because what Im thinking is what happened. I cant think of, like, of positive things. I think, if this thing failed, then what will I do? Should I end my life?

'We give women a choice'

Whitney Chinogwenya, head of marketing at South Africas best-known private abortion provider, Marie Stopes, says their clinics address a real need. The company recently launched a campaign to try to reduce the stigma around abortion care.

When a woman wants to terminate a pregnancy, theyre going to terminate the pregnancy, Chinogwenya told VOA from the organizations office in downtown Johannesburg. It doesnt matter what methods they use, it doesnt matter whether its legal, its illegal or its safe  theyre going to find a way to terminate the pregnancy.

"So whats so great about South Africa and it being legal here is that theres a safe place where you can get the procedure, where its not going to harm your body, where its not going to cause serious complications. And the most important thing is that we give women a choice.

Another problem, she said, is that few women know that abortion is legal, and think backstreet providers  who advertise openly, but who are not licensed  are their only option.

Medical experts told VOA harrowing tales of the practices performed by such providers. Many dont perform ultrasounds, dont attempt to determine how far along the pregnancy is, dont follow up after the procedure, give the wrong medication, give incorrect medical advice, or administer dangerous chemicals such as bleach and drain cleaner to desperate patients.

One particularly egregious provider, Chinogwenya told VOA, even tried to sexually assault a woman in his care.

'Somebody has to do it'

Nurse Kgaladi Mphahlele, who heads the Doctors Without Borders project in Rustenburg, says demand for the clinic's services is high. He estimates he performs as many as 100 first-trimester abortions each month, and says he sees women from as far away as Botswana, where abortion is illegal.

His patients, he said, range in age from teenagers to 50-year-olds. He began his career delivering babies, but switched course, and says hes proud of his decision.

I look back, why did I get myself into this profession? he said, adding that his friends and family were initially worried, but have since become supportive of his choice.

I said, I want to be a health care provider because I want to help the people.' And then, you see a gap, and this is part of health care service, and if no one is doing it, somebody has to do it. And I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy working with people.

At the clinic in Rustenburg, nurse Christa Tsomele has been performing abortions for a decade, and says she is proud of her work. She says she thinks some of her colleagues are contributing to the stigma of abortion -- and worse.

If you cant help a patient as a nurse, just refer the client to the relevant place so that the patient must get help, she said. Dont just tell her, no, I cant do that, or I cant help you, and leave the patient stranded. That is why they end up going to the bogus [provider]. Because when you leave her stranded, now she decides to go out to the street, that is where she is going to die.

Its that, she says, that keeps her going, through the judgment, through the tears, through the difficult stories she hears day in and day out. Because, she says, whether people agree with her work or not, shes saving womens lives, and following the law.World leaders are criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement that the United States will recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Syria's foreign ministry said Friday Trump's announcement is "irresponsible" and does not change "the fact that the Golan was and will remain Arab and Syrian." A foreign ministry source told Syria's official news agency SANA the announcement "clearly reflects the United States' contempt for international legitimacy and its flagrant violation of U.S. law."

The Golan Heights were captured by Israel in 1967's Six-Day War and have been controlled by Israel since then.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Trump's announcement has brought the region "to the brink of a new crisis and new tensions."

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul that Israel's "systematic attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque for years" is proof Israel has no respect for beliefs and holy places or tolerance for living together." Cavusoglu added that "U.S. President Donald Trump's unacceptable comments on the Golan Heights feed this warped mentality."

Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit also criticized the announcement, saying, "No country, no matter how important it is, can make such a decision."

The Gulf Cooperation Council, a group of six Arab monarchies, said Trump's statement "will not change the reality that ... the Arab Golan Heights is Syrian land occupied by Israel by military force" and undermines "the chances of achieving a just and comprehensive peace."

Egypt's foreign ministry denounced Trump's statement, citing U.N. Security Council resolution 497, which rejects Israel's annexation of the territory. The ministry emphasized that global leaders "should respect the resolutions of international legitimacy and the United Nations Charter in respect of the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force."

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif predicted, "The personal decisions of Trump ... will lead to crisis in the region."

The European Union emphasized it does not recognize Israel's sovereignty over the disputed area. "The position of the EU has not changed," an EU spokeswoman told Reuters.

Russia expressed hope that Trump's call for recognition of Israel's sovereignty would not be enacted. "It is just a call for now," said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Trump made the announcement Thursday via Twitter, maintaining the Golan Heights "is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!"

Pompeo Western Wall visit



Trump's statement came while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Jerusalem, the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to visit the contested Western Wall in the holy city of Jerusalem accompanied by an Israeli leader.

The visit possibly signaled tacit U.S. recognition of Israeli control of the Jewish holy site, but it was quickly followed by Trump's specific announcement on the Golan Heights.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Iran of attempting to launch attacks on Israel from the Golan Heights, saying, "I think for this reason and many more, it is time that the international community recognizes Israel's stay on the Golan, and the fact that the Golan will always remain part of the State of Israel."

The Israeli leader praised Trump's decision shortly after the president's announcement.

"President Trump has just made history," Netanyahu said after calling the U.S. leader. "The message President Trump has given the world is that the United States stands by Israel. We are deeply grateful for the U.S. support."

Last week, the U.S. State Department, in its annual human rights report, dropped the phrase "Israeli-occupied" from the Golan Heights section, instead calling it "Israeli-controlled." Pompeo told reporters the change in terminology was not accidental but rather a reflection of the reality on the ground that the Jewish state controlled the territory.

In his visit to Jerusalem, Pompeo reaffirmed the long-standing U.S. friendship and support for Israel.



The Golan Heights is about 1,800 square kilometers on the northeastern edge of Israel along its border with Syria, with about two-thirds of it controlled by Israel and the remainder under contested Syrian control. There have been numerous battles over the land during the eight-year Syrian Civil War.

Israel formally annexed the territory in 1981. But the international community has not recognized that annexation and considers the Golan Heights to be occupied territory.

Amid the regional uproar, Pompeo also met with Lebanon's interior minister on the last leg of a Mideast tour that took him to Israel and Kuwait. The U.S. State Department said the two men "discussed the regional and internal challenges facing Lebanon and how the United States can help support the Interior Ministry's efforts to maintain safety and stability inside Lebanon."

Trump is meeting with Netanyahu in Washington next week. Netanyahu's government is headed to a tough April 9 re-election contest as the prime minister is embroiled in a corruption investigation and faces allegations of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Netanyahu has called the case against him a political "witch hunt."

In comments to reporters en route to the Middle East, Pompeo dismissed the suggestion that his meeting with Netanyahu could be seen as the United States intruding in the Israeli election in support of the prime minister.Members of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile are calling international attention to the case of long-imprisoned 57-year-old dissident Lodoe Gyamtso, who with a new sentence announced by Tibetan exiles stands to become the longest-serving political prisoner since the Chinese takeover of Tibet in 1951.



Lodoe Gyamtso, also known as Sogkhar Lodoe Gyamtso, had already served a total of 23 years in prison for two previous convictions before receiving the latest 18-year sentence following his arrest while protesting in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa last year. His wife, Gakyi, was sentenced to two years, according to Tibetan exile groups.



If Gyamtso's latest sentence is officially confirmed and he serves the full length, he will have served a total of 41 years in prison, making him not only the longest-serving known Tibetan political prisoner, but the longest-serving political prisoner anywhere, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.



News of the sentence was published Wednesday on the website of the Tibetan government-in-exile, know as the Central Tibetan Administration. Some members of the Tibetan parliament called during a session in Dharamsala on Tuesday for exile Tibetan communities to prioritize Gyamtso's case and bring it to the international stage.

Revered figure



"He is someone local people praise as a hero and all Tibetans have a great reverence for him," said MP Atrug Tseten, speaking in Tibetan at the parliament session. "He is someone who has staged many protests, and the Chinese have arrested him twice before. He went all the way to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and declared that he was going to carry out his world peace campaign for the rest of his life."



Gyamtso completed his first 21-year sentence in 2013 and was released from Drapchi Prison in Lhasa. Two years later, he was arrested again after protesting a Chinese government order requiring Tibetans to wear tiger and leopard skins during an official military ceremony in Nagchu prefecture. The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, had urged a halt to the wearing of wild animal skins years earlier.



The dissident, a native of Sog County, Nagchu prefecture, served two years in prison on that conviction, according to Ngawang Tharpa, a fellow Sog County native and member of the Tibetan exile parliament.



Shortly before his Potala Palace protest last year, Gyamtso posted a video message on social media in which he declared he was launching a "World Peace Movement."

"Hundreds of our heroes, including martyr Thubten Ngundrup, have self-immolated for the world peace," he said, wearing a white robe, or chupa, intended to symbolize innocence. "I, too, for over 20 years made effort for the world peace.  Today on Jan. 28, 2018, I am going to start [again] my world peace movement."

'Secretly' sentenced



Later that day, Gyamtso publicly protested Chinese rule of Tibet in front of the Potola Palace, the former seat of the Tibetan government and the Winter Palace of the Dalai Lamas. Human rights groups reported him missing from that day, but later said that he had been taken to Sog County Prison.



The Center for Tibetan Democracy and Human Rights, a Dharamsala-based human rights group, reported March 15 that Gyamtso and his wife Gakyi had been "secretly" sentenced. Three members of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile said that extreme security restrictions in Sog County and the surrounding regions of Amdo Ngapa and Dra-Sog-Dri-sum made it very difficult to get detailed information.



These regions "are the most restricted areas [in Tibet]," said Lobsang Dragpa, a Tibetan exile MP. "The entire regions of Tibet's Three Cholkhas [provinces] are under restriction and particularly these [two] regions are especially under heavy restriction."



Gyamtso was initially detained on a homicide charge after he killed a man named Gayu in what he claimed was self-defense. While in prison in 1995, Gyamtso led a prison protest against Chinese rule over Tibet in notorious Drapchi Prison. According to Free Tibet, a London-based Tibetan advocate group, he distributed 300 handwritten letters and shouted pro-Tibet slogans.



As a result, he faced torture and was sentenced for execution, according to exile groups. After U.N. intervention on his behalf, the death sentence was commuted to 18 years.



VOA has reached out to the Chinese Embassy in Washington for a comment but did not get a response.A prominent Islamic scholar in Pakistan survived an assassination attempt Friday that killed his two security guards and critically injured two other people, police said.

Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani and his fellow cleric, Maulana Aamir Shahab, were traveling in two cars in the southern city of Karachi when unknown gunmen on motorbikes ambushed them and opened fire, senior police official Amir Farooqi told reporters. The assailants managed to flee, he said.

Farooqi added that Usmani's wife also was traveling with him in the car, but both escaped uninjured.

In Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, incidents of political, ethnic, militant and criminal violence routinely occur.

A spokesperson at one of the city's main hospitals described Shahab's condition as critical, saying he received "multiple bullet wounds in the head and chest and has been placed on a ventilator."

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan strongly condemned the attack.

"Scholars such as Mufti Usmani are assets to the country and the Islamic world," a statement quoted Khan as saying. He instructed provincial authorities to bring the attackers to justice and enhance security of religions scholars.

Usmani, a former Supreme Court judge, is currently the head of Pakistan's largest religious seminary of the Deobandi sect in Karachi.Native American leaders are banding together to pressure U.S. officials to ban oil and gas exploration around a sacred tribal site that features massive stone structures and other remnants of an ancient civilization but are facing the Trump administrations pro-drilling stance.

Creating a formal buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park has been a long-running issue, but tribes are pushing for further protections as U.S. officials revamp the management plan for the area surrounding the world heritage site as well as large portions of northwestern New Mexico and southern Colorado.

Federal officials repeatedly have denied drilling leases within a 10-mile (16-kilometer) radius of the park as tribes, environmentalists and archaeologists have raised concerns about the potential effects on culturally significant sites like ceremonial structures called kivas outside Chacos boundaries.

A thousand years ago, the site was a ceremonial and economic hub for the Pueblo people, historians say.

Solidarity among tribes

Tribes gathered Thursday at Acoma Pueblo, a Native American community about 60 miles (97 kilometers) west of Albuquerque, amid an All Pueblo Council of Governors meeting to reaffirm support for protecting the land.

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez, head of the largest American Indian reservation, sat among pueblo governors and said its only right that they support each other, just as their ancestors did.

Navajo culture and tradition dictate respect for our relatives who have come before us, he said. As Native people, we are connected to the land, and it is important to preserve the dwellings and the belongings of the ancient ones.

The tribes want specific language in a U.S. Bureau of Land Management plan that would prevent drilling near the park, instead of protesting four times a year when the energy industry requests lease sales on certain parcels.

Pueblo council Chairman E. Paul Torres said the threat to Chaco, which he called the heart of pueblo culture, is financially driven.



On our side, it has nothing to do with money, said Torres, who also is the Isleta Pueblo governor. It has to do with where we come from. These sites, to us, are living sites because the spirits are still there.

Communicating the importance of the sites to non-Native people is challenging because the stories are sacred knowledge not shared outside tribal communities, said Phoebe Suina, who is Cochiti and San Felipe.

She thinks about her young children who have visited Chaco Canyon and of future generations, mindful of the legacy she would leave if she didnt work to protect the larger landscape.

Were put in that role as living beings of our ancestors, she said. We have this time, this life, what are we going to do with it? At least we are trying.

Aggressive public land development

President Donald Trumps administration has pushed aggressively to open more public lands to energy development. It also went against the wishes of tribes and others by scaling back two national monuments in Utah that protected tribal artifacts and other sensitive land.

Lawmakers and tribal leaders said at a congressional committee hearing this month that a 2017 Trump administration review of lands protected nationwide by past presidents didnt take tribal interests into account despite some of the lands being sacred to them.

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said Thursday that legislation will be reintroduced soon in Congress to safeguard the land around Chaco Canyon. He said he would not trust the Trump administration to include protections in the federal plan for the area.

Lets not leave Chaco to the whims of one administration or another, he said. We have a sense that this place is incredibly important and deserves protection.

New Mexico State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard said an executive order from her office is expected next month that would make state land around Chaco off-limits to any new oil, gas and mineral leases. Most of the land surrounding the park is federal and tribal land.

Accessible only by dirt roads, Chaco takes effort to reach, and supporters say they want to protect the sense of remoteness that comes with making the journey, along with the ancient features that remain.

Acoma Pueblo Gov. Brian Vallo sees Chaco in the way his pueblo is set up, with homes, ceremonial structures, ladders and lookout points in much of the same places. Growing up, he said he heard the migration story of the Acoma people who were at Chaco Canyon before settling in the present-day location.

To me, it was the center of where the intelligence of our ancestors evolved, he said. It was the place where we observed solar and lunar cycles, all of that was tested at Chaco.President Donald Trump on Friday said he was ordering the withdrawal of recently announced North Korea-related sanctions imposed by the U.S.

Treasury Department.



"It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large-scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea," Trump said on Twitter. "I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!"



It was not immediately clear what sanctions Trump was referring to. There were no new U.S. sanctions on North Korea announced on Friday, but on Thursday the United States blacklisted two Chinese shipping companies that it said had helped North Korea evade sanctions over its nuclear weapons program.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders did not specify which sanctions Trump was referring to, but said: "President Trump likes Chairman Kim [Jong Un] and he doesn't think these sanctions will be necessary."



The sanctions on the Chinese shippers were the first since the second U.S.-North Korea summit broke down last month. Hours after the sanctions announcement, North Korea on Friday pulled out of a liaison office with the South, a major setback for Seoul.

North Korea said it was quitting the joint liaison office set up in September in the border city of Kaesong after a historic summit between Kim and South Korea's President Moon Jae-in early last year.President Trump is signing an executive order requiring U.S. colleges to reaffirm protection of free speech or risk losing federal research funding. The order is a sign of support to conservatives who say their voices have been stifled on liberal campuses. But civil liberty activists are concerned the move is politically motivated and see it as contradictory to Trump's own attacks on freedom of speech. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has this report.President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday requiring U.S. colleges to certify that they protect free speech on their campuses or risk losing federal research funding, White House officials said.

Trump initially proposed the idea during a March 2 speech to conservative activists, highlighting the case of Hayden Williams, an activist who was punched in the face while recruiting for the group Turning Point USA at the University of California, Berkeley. At the time, Trump said that Williams took a hard punch in the face for all of us.

WATCH: Trump Signs Campus Free Speech Executive Order

The order tells federal agencies to work with Office of Management and Budget to ensure that colleges receiving research grants promote free inquiry, including through compliance with all applicable federal laws, regulations and policies. White House officials say it will apply to more than $35 billion in grants.

Public universities pursuing federal funding would have to certify that they comply with the First Amendment, which already applies to them. Private universities, which have more flexibility in limiting speech, would need to commit to their own institutional rules.

How the government will enforce the order and what type of violation could trigger a loss of funding are unclear. White House officials declined to provide specific examples and said implementation details will be finalized in coming months. In the Feb. 19 case at Berkeley, neither Williams nor the man arrested for the attack was affiliated with the university.

No new obligations, just new strings

Trumps adds no new obligations for schools but attaches strings to rules theyre already told to uphold. Colleges already are required to certify that they meet certain conditions in order to receive federal grants, and free speech protection would simply be added to the list. Leaders of some colleges have said the order is unnecessary, and some fear it wont be enforced evenhandedly.

Trumps son Donald Trump Jr. on Twitter called it a momentous day, saying the order will protect free speech rights for ALL students. He gave credit to Turning Point USA and its founder, Charlie Kirk, adding that Kirk has been pushing this since the first time I met him years ago.

Kirk has been among a growing chorus of conservatives who say their voices are stifled on college campuses. The debate has flared following a string of high-profile cases in which protesters have shut down or heckled conservative speakers, including at UC Berkeley and at Middlebury College in Vermont.

The order drew praise from conservative groups including the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal group that says it has encountered massive free speech and other First Amendment violations on campuses.

Some objections

Still, some Republicans suggested Trumps order isnt the solution.

I agree that colleges should punish hecklers who veto free speech, and stop coddling students to protect them from disagreeable points of view, said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the top Republican on the Senate education committee. But I dont want to see Congress or the president or the department of anything creating speech codes to define what you can say on campus.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in the past has been critical of government answers. In a speech in Philadelphia last September, DeVos said the remedy is not accomplished with government muscle. A solution wont come from defunding an institution of learning or merely getting the words of a campus policy exactly right. Instead, she said the problem is symptomatic of a civic sickness.

Many colleges have opposed the order, saying they already have strong free speech policies. After Trumps earlier proposal, the University of California issued a statement calling the order misguided and unnecessary. President Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago, a champion of free speech, said an executive order would be a grave error and could actually chill free speech.

And some worry the order could backfire. If a speaking event threatens to turn violent, for example, some say they might have to choose between canceling the event for safety and allowing it to continue to preserve federal funding. Some say it could force religious universities to host speakers with views that conflict with the universities values.

Still, the order has gained support from some religious institutions including Liberty University, a Christian school in Virginia whose leaders say they denounce censorship of either the left or right.

Separate student loan requirements

Separate from the free speech requirement, the order also calls for several measures meant to promote transparency in the student loan industry and in how well colleges prepare students.

By January 2020, Trump is directing the Education Department to create a website where borrowers can find better information about their loans and repayment options, and hes calling on the agency to expand its College Scorecard website to include data on the graduates of individual college programs, including their median earnings, loan debt and their default rates.

Trump, a Republican, also is asking the Education Department to prepare a policy that would make sure colleges share the financial risk that students and the federal government take on with federal student loans.U.S. President Donald Trump declared the end of the Islamic State terror group's self-declared caliphate Friday, saying the terror group had been "100 percent defeated"  a claim that was quickly refuted by U.S.-backed forces on the ground.

Trump made the announcement following a briefing from Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan aboard Air Force One en route to Florida. Trump then showed reporters onboard a map with no IS presence in Syria.

"The territorial caliphate has been eliminated in Syria," added White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

At its height in 2014, IS ruled over large swaths of Syria and Iraq, boasting dual capitals in Raqqa, Syria, and Mosul, Iraq.

Since then, the U.S.-led international coalition, along with partners on the ground, have rolled back the terror group's hold.

The very last territory under IS control  a couple of scraps of land in the northeastern Syrian town of Baghuz  began to slip through the terror group's grip for good late Thursday into early Friday, after the U.S.-led coalition launched a new wave of airstrikes targeting the remaining IS-held positions.

But shortly after Trump's announcement, SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali told VOA's Kurdish Service he could not confirm IS's defeat, as his forces were still engaged with IS fighters in Baghuz and that additional airstrikes were being carried out as he spoke.

"Heavy fighting continues ... to finish off whatever remains of ISIS," Bali tweeted later, using an acronym for the terror group.

Earlier Friday, SDF officials warned that despite the series of airstrikes that began late Thursday night, several hundred IS fighters were still battling U.S.-backed forces in Baghuz.

Both SDF and coalition officials have also been wary that unknown numbers of IS fighters could still be lurking in trenches and in a complex system of caves and tunnels.

The tunnels, which are thought to run for at least two kilometers, helped hide tens of thousands of IS fighters and their families through much of the early part of the SDF offensive. And officials said there are indications certain tunnels may even extend into neighboring Iraq.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said just within the past day or so U.S.-backed forces encountered a group of more than 300 IS fighters in one of the caves and had to call in airpower.

The SDF has been wary of declaring victory over IS in Baghuz, pointing to numerous predictions of the terror group's ultimate demise over the past several months that all proved to be premature.

But Trump has repeatedly predicted IS's demise, telling reporters just this past Wednesday the caliphate would be "gone by tonight" even though fighting persisted.

"For political reasons, he wants to declare victory," said Heritage Foundation Middle East analyst Jim Phillips. "I think his statements are aimed at a domestic, American audience."

As well as that message may be received by Trump's supporters, however, there are deep-seeded concerns that mistaking the collapse of the caliphate with the end of IS could be costly.

"The same conditions that led to the rise of ISIS and before that to the rise of al-Qaida in Iraq are still present in the region," said Phillips, adding the U.S. likely will need to "remain poised to intervene with air power, perhaps with commandos."

U.S. defense and intelligence officials are likewise concerned.

"We view this as a strategic shift," a senior defense official said. "This is really that transition point, that inflection point from ISIS holding physical control of an area to something that comes after."

The biggest worry: upwards of 60,000 people, including more than 5,000 IS fighters, who have surrendered or been captured since the SDF and coalition launched their final assault last month.

"These folks are unrepentant," the official said. "The seeds for a future caliphate, or certainly a persistent clandestine insurgency, exist in these large numbers of people who ... are looking to reposition for future perpetuation of ISIS in some form or fashion."

U.S. officials also warn that most of the group's senior leadership, including self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, remain at large, commanding at minimum "tens of thousands" of fighters and supporters across Syria and Iraq.

And even in the face of imminent defeat, IS's true believers remain defiant.

"Those who are bewildered and think that our caliphate is over ... we will say that it's remaining and expanding," a fighter from Baghuz, identifying himself as Abu al-Harith al-Ansari, said in a video released Thursday and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.

"The banner has been elevated, and the Ummah, whose sons are racing to martyrdom, does not know defeat," he said.In late 2018, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw almost all of its troops from Syria, saying the Islamic State terror group had been defeated and there was no longer a reason to deploy U.S. forces in the war-torn nation.

The announcement led to the resignation of former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who reportedly felt the drawdown was premature.

In the months since Trump announced the defeat of IS, he has wavered on whether the group has been vanquished. Sometimes he predicted that total victory would come in hours or days, while other times he has doubled down on the claim that the IS threat has been eliminated.

Here's a chronology of claims concerning the demise of Islamic State.

Dec. 19, 2018  Trump declared, "We have won against ISIS," in a video released by the White House, to explain why the U.S. was pulling most of its troops out of Syria.

Dec. 22, 2018  Trump tweets that "ISIS is largely defeated and other local countries, including Turkey, should be able to easily take care of whatever remains."

Jan. 16, 2019  Vice President Mike Pence declares in a speech at the State Department that "the caliphate has crumbled and ISIS has been defeated." Earlier that day, four Americans were killed in Syria by an IS suicide bomber.

Jan. 30, 2019  Trump tweets about the "tremendous progress" made in Syria and that the IS "Caliphate will soon be destroyed."

Feb. 1, 2019  Trump repeats that "We will soon have destroyed 100 percent of the Caliphate."

Feb. 3, 2019  Trump tells CBS News, "We will be announcing in the not too distant future 100 percent of the caliphate, which is the area  the land, the area  100. We're at 99 percent right now, we'll be at 100."

Feb. 6, 2019  Trump predicts that the declaration that the coalition has captured all IS holdings "should be formally announced sometime, probably next week."

Feb. 10, 2019  Trump tweets that the U.S. will control all former IS territory in Syria "soon."

Feb. 11, 2019  At a rally in El Paso, Texas, Trump says the announcement that 100 percent of Islamic State territory has been captured will be coming "maybe over the next week, maybe less."

Feb. 15, 2019  At a news conference Trump says a statement about "our success with the eradication of the caliphate  will be announced over the next 24 hours."

Feb. 16, 2019  Trump tweets, "We are pulling back after 100 percent Caliphate victory!"

Feb. 22, 2019  Trump tells reporters "In another short period of time, like hours  you'll be hearing hours and days  you'll be hearing about the caliphate. It will  it's 100 percent defeated."

Feb. 28, 2019  In a speech to U.S. troops in Alaska, Trump says, "We just took over, you know, you kept hearing it was 90 percent, 92 percent, the caliphate in Syria. Now it's 100 percent we just took over, 100 percent caliphate."

March 2, 2019  At a conference, Trump tells attendees, "As of probably today or tomorrow, we will actually have 100 percent of the caliphate in Syria."

March 20, 2019  Trump shows reporters a map that plots the territory still held by the Islamic State in Syria and promises that area "will be gone by tonight."

Meanwhile, U.S. military officials, as well as members of the coalition actively fighting the terror group, have been reluctant to predict when final victory will be declared. Some also note that even when IS no longer controls any territory, fighters who escaped capture and are hiding within civilian populations could still pose a security threat.A joint counter-Taliban operation in northern Afghanistan Friday killed two American service members and an Afghan partner, officials said.

The insurgent group said the raid took place in a Taliban-held area around the capital city of the volatile Kunduz province.

Officials with the NATO-led Operation Resolute Support confirmed the two U.S. fatalities, bringing to four the number of U.S. military personnel killed in Afghanistan this year.

The Taliban fiercely resisted the joint raid and ensuing clashes were still continuing in the area, said insurgent spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.

He claimed in a brief statement that three U.S. and nine Afghan commando forces were killed, though Taliban claims are often inflated. Mujahid did not discuss Taliban casualties and said more details will be released soon.

Local officials said the operation killed many insurgents and a member of Afghan special forces was also among the dead, according to the New York Times.

About 14,000 U.S. soldiers deployed to the country are tasked to train and advise Afghan forces battling the Taliban. Separately, the U.S. military is also conducting operations against terrorist groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State. Last year, 12 American service members were killed in military action in Afghanistan.

U.S. President Donald Trump plans to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan but he has linked the drawdown to progress in ongoing talks Washington is holding with the Taliban to end the war.

U.S. and Taliban negotiators announced at the end of their latest round of meetings in Qatar earlier this month that they had reached a preliminary draft agreement on the withdrawal of foreign forces in return for insurgent guarantees they will not to allow Afghan soil to be use again for international terrorism.

Chief U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad is scheduled to host his Russian, Chinese and European Union counterparts in Washington Friday to discuss progress to date in peace talks with the Taliban.

A State Department announcement said the discussions would also focus on the role Russia, China and the EU can play in bringing an end to the war, the longest overseas U.S. military intervention.Uganda on Thursday launched the China-built Isimba Hydropower Dam in the country's east. The $568 million dam is expected to improve access to power in Uganda, where less than 30 percent of people are on the grid, and cut power costs.

However, the dam has come at a price for residents.

For many locals, the Victoria Nile River is their only source of water to do laundry, bathe, and collect water for use at home. But a fence is being constructed to close access to the river.

It is a river that families depend on, says local resident Diana Namuli.

She says children swim whenever they want, but soon that won't be possible. Mothers also will not be able to send their children to fetch water, Namuli says.

The dam constructed by China International Water and Electric Cooperation will increase electricity access, but it has come at a price for the local ecology as well.

Before the dam, this Uganda part of the Nile River brought tourists to its waterfalls and wildlife. Visitors came to see red-tailed monkeys and endangered pangolins, among others.

At the official launch of the dam Thursday, officials acknowledged choosing 183 megawatts of clean power over access to water and natural beauty.

"It's been a delicate balance for government," said Simon Kasyate, spokesman for the Uganda Electricity Generating Company. "And we had to make that choice. And therefore, with the coming in place of this hydro power station, it meant that of course we destruct the social setting up of the communities around. Where someone walked with their little jerrycan and fetched water off a stream, now you have got a reservoir which is a Lake. Where someone simply walked through and crossed to visit their kith and kin across the river, now we have a hydropower station that has its own restrictions because of the safety nature and the safety precautions that we put around."

Critics say China's infrastructure projects in Africa increase Beijing's influence on the continent, along with African debt.

China's ambassador to Uganda, Zheng Zhuqiang, calls the allegations groundless.

"On the contrary, in pursuing cooperation, China values sincerity, friendship and equality. Pursue common interest, win-win cooperation and our friendship first," Zheng said.

In addition to the Isimba Dam, China is financing the $2 billion, 600-megawatt Karuma Hydropower Dam, in northern Uganda.

Once active, the two hydropower dams will nearly double Uganda's power supply.

Uganda's future generations will see if the electricity is worth the cost.A Ukrainian parliamentarian is asking Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko to prove allegations he recently made that Marie Yovanovitch, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, gave him a list of people who should not be prosecuted  a claim quickly rejected by the United States.

"The statement of Ukraine's prosecutor-general does not correspond to reality and is meant to weaken the reputation of Ambassador Yovanovitch," the State Department said.

Lutsenko, who says he rejected the demand, made the comments in a Washington television interview that aired Wednesday, just days after Yovanovitch criticized Ukraine's efforts to fight corruption ahead of the presidential election March 31.

She called for the firing of Ukraine's special anticorruption prosecutor, who has been accused of helping suspects avoid corruption charges.

Challengers in the upcoming presidential contest have sought to paint incumbent Petro Poroshenko as failing to combat corruption and abuses of power since taking office in mid-2014.

On Thursday, Ukrainian Pravda reported that parliamentarian Mustafa Nayem announced that he would like to know whether Lutsenko or the government have taken any action regarding the "list of untouchables," and why, if the list does exist, Lutsenko failed to make it public until now.

Lutsenko, a former crime reporter and one-time ally of Poroshenko, is largely credited with issuing calls on social media that sparked the 2014 Euromaidan protests that toppled pro-Russian former president Viktor Yanukovich. Since joining parliament as a member of Poroshenko's party, he has since defected, throwing his support behind a pro-democracy third-party candidate.

Poroshenko, who is campaigning on an anticorruption platform in which he has vowed to stand up to foreign influence of any kind, named Lutsenko prosecutor general in 2016, despite that fact that he had no legal training.

"If this is true, and Yuriy Lutsenko does not deceive us, then the above-mentioned actions of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fall within the scope of Article 343 of the Criminal Code," in terms of interference with the activities of a law enforcement officer, Nayem said.A second round of U.N.-mediated talks aimed at solving the Western Sahara conflict has ended with no resolution, but with an agreement by the Moroccan and the Polisario Front delegations to meet again.

Getting parties in a dispute that has lasted 43 years to agree to keep talking is an achievement itself, albeit a small one. The U.N. mediator, former German President Horst Koehler, said there was still a lot of work ahead in the effort to end the conflict.

"Nobody should expect a quick outcome, because many positions are still fundamentally diverging," he said. "At the same time, being able to listen to each other, even when things get controversial, is an important step to build trust."

Morocco annexed the mineral-rich Western Sahara in 1975. A 16-year war between the kingdom and the indigenous Sahawari people, led by the Polisario Front, ended in 1991 with a U.N.-brokered truce. But the parties remain deeply divided.

The Polisario Front is steadfast in its demand that Western Sahara become an independent state. The delegation says its aim in the talks is to achieve its people's inalienable right to self-determination and independence.

Morocco rejects independence for Western Sahara but says it is willing to grant wide-ranging autonomy to the region.

Kohler said many people whose lives are directly affected by the conflict are placing their hope in the peace process. He said it would take genuine effort by the parties to build the trust necessary to make progress.



"The costs of this conflict, in terms of human suffering, lack of prospects for the youth and security risks, are far too high to be accepted," he said. "Therefore, we must not relent in our search for a compromise."

Kohler said the opposing delegations agree the whole Maghreb region would greatly benefit from a solution to the question of Western Sahara. He said they had agreed to meet again at a time still to be determined.The Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on Thursday launched a campaign to fight prejudice. The move coincided with International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Begun with the French city of Bordeaux, the UNESCO billboard campaign features a variety of faces  old and young, men and women, and of many ethnic backgrounds. The tagline, "us different?" aims to make us think about who we are, and our prejudices.



"You would walk by it and hopefully react. ... [Is that] person on the screen different?" said Magnus Magnusson, partnerships and outreach director at UNESCO's social and human science division.

Mindful of stereotypes

"Ultimately, it's about our own awareness of our own stereotypes, and we need to work, each one of us, on those stereotypes that could illustrate or be reflections on racism," he said.

The campaign rollout comes at a time when experts say brazen forms of racism are resurging  in sports, on social media and in politics.

The initiative follows last week's mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which a self-proclaimed white nationalist opened fire on worshippers at two mosques. Fifty people were killed. The suspect has been charged with murder.



Migration is one factor behind the increase in racist incidents, experts say, but so is the power of social media in spreading and enforcing stereotypes.



Activists are fighting back. A round-table hosted by UNESCO featured imaginative ways to counter prejudice, including through chess.



Cameroonian artist Gaspard Njock fights it with his pen. He's the author of comic books and graphic novels sold in bookstores across France.

Versatile medium



Njock said comics can be a powerful tool to fight racism, because it's a medium that reaches all types of people and can tackle important themes.



One of Njock's graphic novels, Un voyage sans retour, is about the dangerous migration of sub-Saharan migrants to Europe. Njock arrived in Europe several years ago, making his way to France after a few years in Italy.

Njock said he never considered himself a victim of racism  not because he never encountered it, but because he developed ways to fight it.

Magnusson of UNESCO said education is key to wiping out racism. So is being more aware of how we think and feel.With negotiations at an impasse, Washington has imposed additional sanctions on those assisting Pyongyang  the first such action since February's failed summit in Hanoi between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

"This is not really about intensification of pressure," a senior U.S. administration official said. "This is about maintaining pressure as defined by the international community."

Thursday's sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department on two China-based shipping companies were the latest evidence of some "leakage" in the enforcement of sanctions by Beijing, but U.S. officials said that overall, China was abiding by the U.N. resolutions slapped on North Korea for its nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs.

Washington wants Pyongyang to surrender its entire nuclear arsenal and other mass-destruction weapons before being granted any relief from sanctions. The North Koreans insist on sanctions relief before halting production of fissile materials.

"Insisting on unilateral North Korean disarmament upfront is pushing on the wrong door. We should be pushing to first slow the program, then cap it, and ultimately keep rollback and disarmament the long-term goal," said Vipin Narang, associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But every month that passes without a grand deal is one in which North Korea's nuclear program continues to grow larger  increasing the risk of its own use and proliferation to other countries  and the chances of a deal grow smaller."

Analysts also worry Kim could grow impatient, turn away from diplomacy with Trump and look to China to provide sanctions relief that North Korea desperately needs.

"I'm not sure we can be confident that Beijing will uphold enforcement after Trump so abruptly walked away from negotiations with North Korea," said Jean Lee, who directs the center for Korean history and public policy at the Wilson Center, a global policy research group in Washington. "I do hope North Korea sticks to negotiation and does not resort to provocation. If Pyongyang doesn't get the response it craves and needs from Washington, North Korea may turn back to a tried and tested strategy: to get Trump, and the world's attention, with another illicit missile launch or test."

U.S. officials on Thursday, speaking to reporters on condition of not being named, expressed patience and confidence with their stance toward North Korea.

Patience

"What they're facing now is unprecedented," said one U.S. official of the sanctions on North Korea. "We'll give it some time."

Lee, currently in Seoul, told VOA she found it "interesting that we're back to a form of strategic patience. There was high hope, especially here in Seoul, that Trump's impatience and unpredictability would lead to fast movement on North Korea. But the Trump administration is finding that it's much tougher than the president may have thought of simply bullying Kim into acquiescence."

A prolonged lull in talks "could become risky, and maintaining maximalist positions will not be sustainable," said Duyeon Kim, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a national security research group in Washington.

"They need to negotiate a denuclearization-peace road map soon and preferably an interim agreement on fissile materials. Rapid and complete denuclearization is not realistic. Denuclearization will have to occur in stages but in accordance with an agreed road map on how this all ends," Kim told VOA.

The current primary point of pressure on Pyongyang by the international community is on entities, including their ships, involved with illicitly exporting North Korean goods, such as coal, and taking products  especially petroleum  into the impoverished country in violation of U.N. sanctions.

Unless North Korea denuclearizes, "we're going to maintain that pressure," a senior U.S official said.

Daily monitoring

A coalition of countries  using their vessels, aircraft and classified intelligence means  are daily watching the movement of ships involved in the illegal trade.

North Korea and those helping it are trying to obscure identities of ships and cargo by disabling or manipulating systems that identify the vessels for safety and navigation, physically altering vessel identifications and making ship-to-ship transfers to avoid ports, according to a sanctions advisory jointly issued Thursday by the U.S. Treasury and State departments and the Coast Guard.

Neither the United States nor any other country has moved to interdict the offending ships.

"I don't want to talk about potential steps we may or may not take," replied a senior administration official when asked by VOA whether there was discussion here about using the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard in international waters to take such action.

Trump and Kim have held two summits  the first in Singapore last June and the second in Hanoi this February. Trump has not ruled out a third such meeting.

"The door is wide open to continuing the dialogue with North Korea. The president wants to see progress at the working level, and he's engaged as well," a senior administration official said.A senior U.S. State Department official said arms sales to Taiwan are a matter of a policy in the United States that Taiwans defensive needs are merited, adding China has been busy changing the status quo that has maintained long-standing peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, including threats to use force against Taiwan.

Thursday, Bloomberg News, quoting unnamed sources, reported that the Trump administration has given tacit approval to Taiwans request to buy more than 60 F-16 fighter jets. Taiwan had submitted a formal request earlier this month. The United States is Taiwans largest military equipment supplier.

As a matter of policy, the Department does not comment or confirm proposed defense sales or transfers until formally notified to Congress, a State Department spokesperson told VOA.

China, which claims democratically self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory, usually condemns such sales.

China changing status quo

In a phone briefing, Patrick Murphy, the State Departments principal deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told VOA that arms sales to Taiwan are allowed under the framework of Washingtons One China Policy, which is based on three U.S.-China joint communications and the Taiwan Relations Act enacted in 1979 to govern relations between the United States and Taiwan.

Our primary desire is to see a strong commitment to the status quo that has brought about peace, stability and prosperity, Murphy said.

He added China is changing the status quo by threatening the use of violence directed at Taiwan, aggressively trying to reduce the number of diplomatic partners that Taiwan enjoys around the world, and cropping Taiwan out of the international space and international organizations where Taiwan has made important contributions to public health, civil aviation and many more.

In 2018, China persuaded the Dominican Republic, Burkina Faso and El Salvador to forge relations with Beijing, which leaves 17 countries that still recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation.

Tour of Pacific allies

On Thursday, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen embarked on a diplomatic tour to allies in the Pacific that will end with a stopover in Hawaii on March 27.

China urged the United States to block Tsais transit through Hawaii on her way home.

We have consistently and resolutely opposed the United States or other countries which have diplomatic relations with China arranging this kind of transit, said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang on Thursday.

In 2011, the Obama administration rejected a similar Taiwanese request for F-16 fighter jets over concern about antagonizing China.

The Trump administration, however, has taken a more assertive approach toward China. Vice President Mike Pence, in remarks on China policy last year at the Hudson Institute, accused the Chinese Communist Party of rewarding or coercing American businesses, movie studios, universities, think tanks, scholars, journalists, and local, state and federal officials.

Worst of all, China has initiated an unprecedented effort to influence American public opinion, the 2018 elections, and the environment leading into the 2020 presidential elections, Pence added.Venezuelan opposition leader and self-declared interim president Juan Guaido says intelligence agents working for President Nicolas Maduro have arrested his chief of staff.

Guaido aide Roberto Marrero was taken into custody in an overnight raid on his home.

"We do not know his whereabouts," Guaido tweeted Thursday. "He must be released immediately."

Opposition lawmaker Sergio Vergara says agents also raided his own home. He is accusing the agents of planting weapons on Marrero.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is demanding Marrero's immediate release and said those behind the arrest will be held accountable.

National Security Adviser John Bolton tweeted, "Maduro has made another big mistake" that "will not go unanswered."

Detained oil executives

Also in Washington, Texas Republican senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz said the Maduro regime must free six Citgo oil company executives who have been in jail since November 2017 for alleged money laundering and embezzlement.

Five of the executives are Texans.

"We are gravely concerned for their health and safety as they continue to be used as political pawns by an illegitimate government," the senators said Thursday. "Every day that passes for these families without their loved ones is excruciating."

Cornyn and Cruz say the six are being held in deteriorating conditions and say Venezuelan authorities have denied them a trial and contact with the State Department.

Citgo is a U.S.-based refinery and gasoline marketer primarily owned by Venezuela's state-run oil company, PDVSA.

Because of U.S. sanctions on PDVSA, Citgo's profits are being placed in a blocked account so the Maduro government cannot access it.

Maduro and Guaido are battling for control of Citgo, the main source of cash from the United States.

Support for Guaido

The United States and about 50 other countries recognize Guaido as Venezuela's legitimate president and say Maduro must go.

President Donald Trump has said all options are on the table for Venezuela, but has neglected to say under what circumstances he would use U.S. military force.

A collapse in world energy prices, corruption and failed socialist policies have destroyed oil-rich Venezuela's economy.

Food and medicine are scarce, and more than 3 million Venezuelans have fled the country.

Maduro has shown little tolerance for dissent. He has blamed his country's problems on the United States, and accuses the U.S. of backing the opposition in plotting a coup.Aid workers were confronted with chaos and pleas for help Friday in Mozambique as receding waters allowed them access to storm-stricken areas a week after Cyclone Idai swept through the southern African region.

The death toll is expected to soar as more bodies are discovered. Workers from relief agencies have voiced surprise over the gravity of the damage inflicted by the storm and subsequent flooding.

More than 600 deaths have been confirmed in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. The Mozambican government said it expects the figure to rise to 1,000 or more. Some 1.7 million people were affected by the storm, one of the most powerful to strike the region in decades.

As they labored to salvage any personal possessions they could find, many residents in the affected areas worried about their future and shortages of essentials such as food, water and medicine.

Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, told the French news agency AFP that aid agencies were behind in efforts to provide humanitarian relief to tens of thousands of Mozambicans.

"We are running out of time," she said.

International aid efforts are coordinated by the World Food Program, or WFP. The agency's southern Africa director, Lola Castro, told VOA that relief groups are confronted with a "humongous logistics challenge" to help victims who are "extremely stressed."

Castro said problems are compounded by the fact the stricken areas are located near the mouths of rivers. "Remember, these are deltas  and all these deltas are between salt- and freshwater."

She said the tidal waves created by Idai may have salinized area waters, adding, "People are drinking this."

Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and are in need of shelter. The World Health Organization has warned that squalid conditions could help lead to the spread of infectious diseases.

The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said Friday that cases of cholera have been reported in Beira, Mozambique's fourth-largest city.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday that the U.N. and its humanitarian partners are "scaling up the response with the initial funding from generous donors." He said the U.N. has already released $20 million, but added, "Far greater international support is needed."

The WFP's Castro said a "huge" humanitarian response is just the beginning.

"The [Mozambique] government is going to need a lot of support on this, and the international community will have to look into a very long-term" humanitarian relief campaign, she said.Three days of national mourning began Wednesday in Mozambique after one of the most destructive storms to strike southern Africa in decades killed hundreds of people..

Cyclone Idai, packing sustained winds of up to 170 kilometers per hour, hit Mozambique's port city of Beira last Thursday before sweeping inland to Zimbabwe and Malawi.

Forecasters predict more torrential rains are expected through Thursday and floodwaters are still rising. Aid groups are trying to transport essential goods to desperate survivors.

President Filipe Nyusi said Tuesday Idai had killed more than 200 people in Mozambique and that rescuers were still finding bodies. After flying over affected areas on Monday, Nyusi said he expected the death toll to exceed 1,000. The confirmed death toll Wednesday in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi stood at more than 300, officials said.

Aid agencies said they prepared for the cyclone but not for the massive floods that followed. Mozambique was hardest hit as a result of rivers flowing downstream from its neighbors. The agencies said they were struggling to reach many survivors stranded in badly damaged remote areas of Mozambique.

Mozambique and South Africa are conducting aerial rescue and aid distribution missions. The U.N. World Food Program said it was transporting enough aid for 600,000 people. The U.N. said it had allocated $20 million from its central emergency response fund, and it urged other donors to contribute. The European Union announced an initial aid package for the storm-stricken countries valued at nearly $4 million. Britain and the United Arab Emirates have also promised aid.

The U.S. State Department said the U.S. is supporting relief efforts "in coordination with our partners."Special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday turned over his long-awaited final report on the contentious Russia investigation that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trump's presidency, entangled Trump's family and resulted in criminal charges against some of the president's closest associates.



The comprehensive report, still confidential, marks the end of Mueller's probe but sets the stage for big public fights to come. The next steps are up to Trump's attorney general, to Congress and, in all likelihood, to federal courts.



The Justice Department said Mueller delivered his final report to Attorney General William Barr and officially concluded his probe of Russian election interference and possible coordination with Trump associates. The report will now be reviewed by Barr, who has said he will write his own account communicating Mueller's findings to Congress and the American public.

Quick advisory

Barr said he could send his account to Congress quickly.



``I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the special counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend,'' Barr said in his letter the top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees.



With no details released at this point, it's not known whether Mueller's report answers the core questions of his investigation: Did Trump's campaign collude with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of the celebrity businessman? Also, did Trump take steps later, including by firing his FBI director, to obstruct the probe?



But the delivery of the report does mean the investigation has concluded without any public charges of a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, or of obstruction by the president.



It's unclear what steps Mueller will take if he uncovered what he believes to be criminal wrongdoing by Trump, in light of Justice Department legal opinions that have held that sitting presidents may not be indicted.



The mere delivery of a confidential report will set off immediate demands, including in the Democratic-led House, for full release of Mueller's findings. Barr has said he wants to make as much public as possible, and any efforts to withhold details will prompt a tussle between the Justice Department and lawmakers who may subpoena Mueller and his investigators to testify before Congress. Such a move by Democrats would likely be vigorously contested by the Trump administration.

The conclusion of Mueller's investigation does not remove legal peril for the president. Trump faces a separate Justice Department investigation in New York into hush money payments during the campaign to two women who say they had sex with him years before the election. He's also been implicated in a potential campaign finance violation by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who says Trump asked him to arrange the transactions. Federal prosecutors, also in New York, have been investigating foreign contributions made to the president's inaugural committee.

Russian assault



No matter the findings in Mueller's report, the investigation has already illuminated Russia's assault on the American political system, painted the Trump campaign as eager to exploit the release of hacked Democratic emails and exposed lies by Trump aides aimed at covering up their Russia-related contacts. Over the 21-month investigation, Mueller has brought charges against 34 people, including six aides and advisers to the president, and three companies.

The special counsel brought a sweeping indictment accusing Russian military intelligence officers of hacking Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign and other Democratic groups during the 2016 election. He charged another group of Russians with carrying out a large-scale social media disinformation campaign against the American political process that also sought to help Trump and hurt Clinton.



Closer to the president, Mueller secured convictions against a campaign chairman who cheated banks and dodged his taxes, a national security adviser who lied about his Russian contacts and a campaign aide who misled the FBI about his knowledge of stolen emails.

Cohen, the president's former lawyer, pleaded guilty in New York to campaign finance violations arising from the hush money payments, and in the Mueller probe to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. Another Trump confidant, Roger Stone, is awaiting trial on charges that he lied about his pursuit of Russian-hacked emails ultimately released by WikiLeaks. It's unclear whether any of the aides who have been convicted, all of whom have pleaded guilty and cooperated with the investigators, might angle for a pardon. Trump has left open the idea of pardons.

Trump defenses



Along the way, Trump lawyers and advisers repeatedly evolved their public defenses to deal with the onslaught of allegations from the investigation. Where once Trump and his aides had maintained that there were no connections between the campaign and Russia, by the end of the probe Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was routinely making the argument that even if the two sides did collude, it wasn't necessarily a crime. The goalpost shifting reflected the administration's challenge in adopting a singular narrative to fend off allegations.



Equally central to Mueller's work is his inquiry into whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation. Since the special counsel's appointment in May 2017, Trump has increasingly tried to undermine the probe by calling it a ``witch hunt'' and repeatedly proclaiming there was ``NO COLLUSION'' with Russia. But Trump also took certain acts as president that caught Mueller's attention and have been scrutinized for possible obstruction.



One week before Mueller's appointment, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, later saying he was thinking of ``this Russia thing'' at the time.



He mercilessly harangued Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing from the Russia investigation two months before Mueller was named special counsel, a move that left the president without a perceived loyalist atop the probe. And he helped draft a misleading statement on Air Force One as a Trump Tower meeting between his eldest son and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was about to become public.



The meeting itself became part of Mueller's investigation, entangling Donald Trump Jr. in the probe. Mueller's team also interviewed the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, multiple times.



Even as Trump blasted Mueller's team, his White House and campaign produced thousands of documents for the special counsel, and dozens of his aides were interviewed. The president submitted written answers to Mueller regarding the Russia investigation, but he refused to be interviewed.At least 30 school children, 2 headmasters and a teacher are missing in Manicaland province following devastating floods in the region caused by Tropical Cyclone Idai, which has claimed 139 lives in Zimbabwe and over 200 in neighboring Mozambique.

In a tweet Thursday evening, Zimbabwes Ministry of Information did not give any further details.

A total of 30 pupils, 2 headmasters and 1 teacher are missing. The pupils are 24 from Ngangu, 4 from Dzingire and 2 from Chimanimani, read the tweet.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa has already declared two days of mourning on Saturday and Sunday in honor of the people who perished in the disaster.

Mnangagwa described scenes of unmitigated despair in Rusitu, near the border with Mozambique.

Reuters reports that three days of national mourning began Wednesday in Mozambique after one of the most destructive storms to strike southern Africa in decades killed hundreds of people.

Cyclone Idai, packing sustained winds of up to 170 kilometers per hour, hit Mozambique's port city of Beira last Thursday before sweeping inland to Zimbabwe and Malawi.

Forecasters predict more torrential rains are expected through Thursday and floodwaters are still rising. Aid groups are trying to transport essential goods to desperate survivors.The URL has been copied to your clipboard

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In Southern Thailand, a high voter turnout is expected for Sundays election, where anti-military sentiment prevails in the region. But voters and opposition politicians are concerned that a government curb on voices of dissent will result in another term of military rule.Joint Statement by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair Countries

LIVE

International Court of Justice will deliver its decision on the request for provisional measures in the case of ARMENIA v AZERBAIJAN

Statement of the Foreign Ministry of Armenia

OPEC Fund Partners Ameriabank to Address Problems and Help to Improve the Life of People in Armenia. T. Alnassar.

Google Ad

Generation A: Edition 14. Exclusive Chance to Begin Your Professional Career with Ameriabank

Katna Armenian cheeses enter the market: the new project of Galaxy Group of Companies

US$30m OPEC Fund loan to Ameriabank to promote sustainable energy and support small businesses in Armenia

Black Friday at ucom: up to 70% discount for smart home devices, gadgets and smartphones

116 million AMD assistance to minors with disabilities in Shirak Province from Mikayel Vardanyan

Discussion on the topic IT infrastructure as the basis of the digital economy with the participation of the heads of telecommunication companies in Armenia

Statement nn the ongoing Aggression by Azerbaijan against the Republic of Armenia

"We condemn any attempts at borderisation, as observed since the incursion of Azerbaijani troops into Armenian territory on 12 May" Joint statement

The United States is deeply concerned about reports of intensive fighting today between Armenia and Azerbaijan.ANTONY J. BLINKEN

Statement of the MFA of Armenia

Ookla has awarded Ucom with The fastest fixedline network in Armenia award

UCOM keeps on supporting the 42 YEREVAN programming school

Google Ad

Recognizing the One-Year Anniversary of the Ceasefire Declaration Between Armenia and Azerbaijan

They should not be positioned near civilian communities neither in Armenia nor in Artsakh

Humanitarian and human rights protection needed following the 2020 outbreak of hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh

Galaxy Group of Companies expands its activities in Belarus: a new TIME and Pandora store launched

I think its a good moment to invest in Armenia. Head of Markets at Symbiotics Vincent Lehner

Ameriabank has Raised USD 17.5M Tier 2 Capital

UNIGHT TO UNITE. UCOM CELEBRATED ITS REBIRTH

Ameriabank and HSBC Armenia to provide their customers access to each others ATMs without additional fees

Ameriabank. 62.5% Growth in Taxes YOY

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans have provided 300 million AMD to overcome the infertility in Armenia

UCOM has officially launched the sale of IPHONE 13

Six servicemen were wounded by the attack of the Azerbaijani armed forces in Artsakh, two of them in critical condition

S&P Improved the Outlook on Ameriabank to PositiveThis is the aerial view of flooding in northwest Missouri taken on March 21, 2019 (photo courtesy of Governor Mike Parson Twitter page)3,500 police on duty in Rome for visit of Chinese president.

The Colosseum and the surrounding area will be closed to the public on the afternoon of Friday 22 March, while Trajan's Markets will be shut for the entire day, for security reasons related to the visit of China's president Xi Jinping.

The Chinese leader will be given exclusive tours of both ancient sites, with similiar security arrangements expected when China's First Lady Peng Liyuan visits Palazzo Colonna and Galleria Borghese on the same day.

There are two high-security "green zones" in Rome for the duration of China's state visit, from 21-23 March, with reports of 3,500 police on duty.

Much of the city centre is currently off-limits as well as the Parioli area where Xi and his entourage of more than 200 people is staying.

The Chinese leader is in Rome as part of a wider European visit to seek support for China's global trade infrastructure programme, the $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also known as the New Silk Road.

During the visit Xi will hold talks with Italy's president Sergio Mattarella and Italy's premier Giuseppe Conte, as well as parliamentary leaders.

It is the first visit by a Chinese head of state to Italy in 10 years.

Photo AP/Andrew Medichini335 people were killed at the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome in 1944.

Rome is holding several ceremonies in memory of the 335 people killed by the then occupying Nazi forces 75 years ago, on 24 March 1944.

The mass killing was in retaliation for a partisan attack on a column of marching German policemen the day before on Via Rasella, near Piazza Barberini in central Rome.

The Nazis decided that ten Italians should be executed for each German, an order soon authorised by Hitler who stipulated that it be carried out within 24 hours.

The 2019 memorial ceremonies begin on the morning of Friday 22 March with children from schools in south-east Rome suburbs walking from Piazza S. Eurosia in the Garbatella district to the Fosse Ardeatine mausoleum.

On the evening of Saturday 23 March, from 20.00 until midnight, students of the Instituto Cine Tv Roberto Rossellini will project imagery dedicated to the 335 martyrs on the Pyramid of Cestius.



At 11.00 on Monday 25 March, Italian president Sergio Mattarella will attend a wreath-laying ceremony at the Fosse Ardeatine mausoleum, which is located in the Appia Antica area.

This year will be the first wreath-laying ceremony without Rosetta Stame, the daughter of Ardeatine massacre victim and partisan fighter Nicola Ugo Stame, who died in Rome recently aged 81.

Numerous personal items belonging to the Fosse Ardeatine victims can be found in Rome's Liberation Museum on Via Tasso, a former Gestapo headquarters where Jews and resistance figures were tortured during the Nazi occupation of Rome from 1943-1944.President Trump berated GM all week for closing a big plant in Lordstown, Ohio, with the loss of about 5,400 jobs. GMs announcement Friday was tailored to appease Trump, but the investment is not a direct result of his pushing, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.Barra tried to tell Trump during their phone call that she cant do anything about Lordstown right away because GM and the UAW will enter negotiations later this year over a new union contract. The fate of the Lordstown plant will be part of that discussion.A fight between beer giants escalated Thursday when MillerCoors filed a lawsuit against Anheuser-Busch InBev, claiming the maker of Bud Light spent more than $13 million on a Super Bowl ad campaign designed to frighten people away from its Miller Lite and Coors Lite brands by deceiving them into thinking theyd be consuming corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup.It was too soon to know whether the $544 billion deficit in the first five months of the fiscal year would mean that the governments annual deficit would breach $1 trillion, said a senior Treasury official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter in detail. But the White House did project earlier this month that the deficit this year would hit $1.1 trillion, a level not seen since the recovery from the financial crisis.Know what youre agreeing to. Jeremy Tolley, an HR executive with Tennessee-based health-care provider CareHere, explains that a right-to-represent agreement protects both you and the recruiter. However, Tolley points out, a typical right to represent is limited to one specific position for one employer: I would not encourage anyone to sign a right to represent that [covers more than] one job or one company. Ruffini applauds your tack of including the agreed-on rate with your signature, making it clear exactly what terms youre agreeing to in case the recruiter tries to change them later.The usual arguments against this are stretched to the breaking point. Like arguments about Koch family money, which has benefited cultural institutions but is, to many, inextricably linked to global warming and the impending collapse of the Anthropocene, the issues at stake seem, at first, to be consistency and pragmatism. The pragmatic argument is this: Cultural organizations need the money, and if they dont take it, that money will go somewhere else. And this leads quickly to the argument from consistency. Almost all of our major cultural organizations were built up with money derived from family fortunes that are tainted  by the exploitation of workers, slavery and the lasting impacts of slavery, the depredations of colonialism and the destruction of the environment. So why should contemporary arts and cultural groups be required to set themselves a higher, or more puritanical, standard when it comes to corrupt money? And if consistency matters, should we now be parsing the morality of every dollar that built every opera house and museum a century ago?We love to ride a new wave, set a trend, be the vanguard. Headlines scream about the decline of last years fad and the rise of this years hot new thing. Yet if we take a broader perspective and look at something over a longer time, continuity may be more apparent. Change sometimes happens slowly, like sand shifting imperceptibly in a laid-back kaleidoscope; and only when we step back and look again do we notice that the familiar has indeed shown us something new.Not that the new menu is an exact copy. For Dupont Circle, the chefs came up with a delicious riff on shrimp toast. Instead of slathering ground seafood on a piece of bread and frying it, theyre serving the toast  wedges of buttered ciabatta  separately from the springy shrimp and frizzled herbs in XO sauce, hence the name shrimp & toast. (The crisp bread makes a great mop, FYI.) Green beans blistered in the wok are another fresh idea; the addition of meaty mushrooms and a swipe of fiery red soybean paste turn the toss into something memorable. Patrons of both locations are able to explore the recently added chilled noodle salad, crunchy with roasted peanuts and slick with chile oil, too.So she strove to raise her children so her father would have been proud of them. And although there were painful times, I just have to thank God that he got me through as far as he has, she said.For many dog owners, a dog park is the front yard of their neighborhood, a place to meet and mingle while their dogs wrestle and run. Critics call them harbingers of gentrification, and several have questioned the wisdom of funneling millions of dollars into a neighborhood dog run, rather than using the money to address citywide issues, such as affordable housing.The entire staff and School Board stand in solidarity with our students of color  and with people who have been singled out for reasons such as religion or ethnicity or sexual identity in other vile threats made across the country or around the world. We are in this together, and a threat against one is a threat against all.I dont know if any superintendent would do anything other than err on the side of caution and safety, said Erardi, who joined the Newtown schools after the 2012 shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I would clearly feel more comfortable apologizing for erring on the side of caution rather than stand in front of the national media after a horrific event and say, Heres what I knew, and this is why I decided not to act. Do your homework. Ultra-selective-college diplomas dont correlate with better pay. Researchers Stacy Berg Dale and Alan B. Krueger looked at 30 schools, the most selective being Yale and Swarthmore College (11 percent). They found that students who were admitted to the most selective schools but who decided to attend less-selective colleges did not sacrifice anything in future pay: They wound up 20 years later earning as much as peers who went to selective schools. The scholars concluded that monetary success was the result of character traits such as persistence and warmth acquired long before we go to college.Christie offered his thoughts Thursday during an early-evening appearance with Hogan at Government House, the governors official residence. Christie was in Annapolis as part of a tour to promote a book about his unsuccessful run for the GOP nomination in 2016 and his subsequent stint with the Trump campaign. From the mansion, the men headed to the Annapolis Yacht Club, where Hogan introduced Christie at an event that included a discussion and book signing.The House version of the bill, which passed after an emotional debate earlier this month, is modeled after Oregons law and would apply to terminally ill people whose doctors say they have less than six months to live. A patient would have to make three requests, both oral and written, to end his or her life, with waiting periods and the ability to rescind the request at any time.Alex Espinosa served the county well for more than 21 years; and I am especially grateful for the work he has done leading up to, and beyond, my administrations transition period, Elrich said in a statement. Though I invited him to stay, an exciting opportunity opened up for Alex and it would have been hard to pass up. . . . He will be missed; and I wish him and his family well.Around the same time, the New Yorker magazine featured Ms. Ingalls in a profile that described her as unjustly neglected. This attention followed rumblings that the 2017 Academy Award-winning film The Shape of Water, about a janitor who falls in love with a merman at a government laboratory where she works, bore suspicious similarities to Mrs. Caliban. The director, Guillermo del Toro, said that he had not read Ms. Ingallss fiction, and if there were any parallels between the two works, Ms. Ingalls did not complain.Settle said investigators believe that, besides the victims ethnicities, the cases may be related because the perpetrators have entered through the back of homes and have usually struck in the late afternoon or evening. In each case, the homeowners have been away at the time of the burglary, and no injuries have resulted.The alleged abuse of the youngest victim began when she was 9, authorities say, and lasted for about a year. Authorities say Vazquez assaulted the woman during confession. The alleged assault on the teenager occurred in 2015. The assaults on the younger child and woman allegedly happened between 2016 and 2017.The U.S. Attorneys Office for the District said in a statement that Thompson approached Mayo and shot him seconds later. Prosecutors said Mayo was still alive when police arrived and asked if he knew who had shot him. He nodded yes, the statement says, but said only, I cant breathe.In the 2016 case involving a Howard student, a woman who was 17 at the time said she was taken to his barbershop and felt sick after he gave her some alcohol, police and charging documents said. She passed out and woke up to Everett driving her to his home, police said. The woman remembered waking up on a cold floor but was unable to move her body while Everett sexually assaulted her, the documents state. The Victim then recalled being bathed by the defendant, charging papers said.Authorities responded to the home and took Habte to an area hospital for treatment of minor injuries, police said. Officers later obtained a misdemeanor warrant for domestic assault and battery against the Quincer and an Emergency Protective Order against him, officials said.They confronted three other men who were in the home, including Buie, and a struggle began, according to police. Buie was shot during the incident, and the suspects fled, police said. The other two men were not injured.One of the three people in the cab of the trash truck was killed; the train engineer had slammed on his emergency brakes but still plowed into the truck at about 35 mph. Another truck passenger was seriously injured, while the 30-year-old driver suffered minor injuries. Four train crew members and three passengers also were injured.The name change has long been on the Arlington County Boards list of legislative priorities. The commonwealth made a point of its inclusivity when it pitched itself to Amazon nearly two years ago, and the name of the highway, which passes some of the buildings that the online giant will occupy in Crystal City, has been a potential embarrassment to the region.Large cocaine seizure at Philadelphia port: Drug dogs sniffed out Philadelphia's largest seizure of cocaine in more than two decades on Tuesday, when 450 bricks  more than 1,185 pounds worth about $38 million  were found inside 13 duffel bags in a shipping container, Joseph Martella, U.S. Customs and Border Protection's area port director, said Thursday. The ship was ported in Guatemala before stopping in the Bahamas and was destined for the Netherlands.Opportunistic activists (generally not the established environmental, labor or abortion-rights groups) see a chance to put an issue on the agenda with a simple yes-or-no question. Some candidates in the crowded field, afraid of being outflanked on the left, reflexively agree with the proposition (never mind that typical Democratic primary voters are not so doctrinaire). Reporters, who love conflict and favor the shorthand of pigeonholing, force others to take the litmus test. And Republicans, with an assist from Fox News, gleefully fan the flames.Biden, of course, did much over the course of his 44 years in federal office to advance the causes of women and minorities. But it should be his job to make the case for himself, including explaining how his views have evolved and what he would do differently.The bill would deny voting rights to felons who have not paid all the court fines and fees they owe. Insisting that ex-convicts pay off fines associated with a judges sentence is one thing. Denying released felons the right to vote because they still owe public-defender fees, drug-testing fees or probation supervision fees is clearly not what voters had in mind when they passed the constitutional amendment. It is also a higher standard than existed in the states old system, in which ex-convicts sought reenfranchisement from the governor, which required only that victim restitution be paid in full.Her secrecy and incompetence have created ill will in Europe, and real anger in the House of Commons, some of whose members have belatedly tried to take control of the Brexit process. They have begged her to try a series of votes, to try to find one version of an exit plan that could pass the entire chamber. John Bercow, speaker of the House of Commons, produced a decree from 1604 in an attempt to prevent yet another vote on her deal, after two had already failed. But she seems to take none of it in. On Wednesday evening, she made a bizarre, crypto-populist appeal, over the heads of Britains elected representatives, to the nation: You the public have had enough, she declared. You are tired of the infighting. You are tired of the political games and the procedural rows  as if the political games and procedural rows were not all entirely her fault. It is high time we made a decision, she said  as if she were not the one preventing Parliament from doing exactly that.Second, I know the president and many other Republicans were angry that McCain came back to Washington in July 2017 after his first operation to remove cancer from his brain and surprised everyone by voting against the repeal of Obamacare. But I can tell you, because I talked to him about it, that he didnt vote that way to spite Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) or anyone else. People who heard his speech on the Senate floor that day or have read it since know that McCain cast that vote not against repeal of Obamacare but against the partisanship that had taken over the Senate and made it into a feckless, gridlocked, divided place.There is no shortage of reasons given by Montgomery County leaders as to why they dont want to build a second crossing, but every one of them is nonsensical and a vain attempt to thumb their noses at the people of Montgomery County. The most common reason cited is that a bridge would encroach on the Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve. This argument is incredibly flawed primarily because any proposed crossing now being considered calls for construction well below the current Agricultural Reserve, thus any impact would be minimal to none. Additionally, proposed crossing routes expand on already developed areas and their further impact would again be minimal.In his op-ed, Mr. Erdogan used the slaughter in New Zealand to paint himself as an enlightened thinker. Downright shameless, but hey, we have freedom of the press, so The Post can treat us to the spectacle of a dictator spouting against a coordinated smear campaign and practices incompatible with liberal values. Hilarious!For now, indeed. As Mr. Barr considers what to release publicly, he must keep in mind that the Mueller inquiry is no ordinary investigation. Typically, the Justice Department is wary of revealing investigative information that did not lead to an indictment. This is the right instinct: It guards against law enforcement dragging people through the mud when prosecutors do not have enough evidence to charge them formally. But an attack on the countrys democracy  and senior officials response  is a national concern with unusual importance to the countrys politics and policy. Part of the point is to educate the public and reform the law to better prepare for further foreign intrusions. Mr. Muellers conclusions and supporting evidence must be released.After reading the March 18 op-ed by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Applying our values to all nations, I would like to ask her two questions: Is it Israels fault that Somalia is a failed country? Why did she flee to the United States rather than to another Muslim country? These are leading questions; they are not rhetorical. The answers matter.Within the echelons of the classical piano world, one will often hear a xenophobic stereotype  from competition judges, teachers, audience members  that Chinese students interpretations of Western music are anchored by technical brilliance but lack relevance and understanding. This is a stereotype of race and nationality as reprehensible as gender stereotypes prevalent in the music profession. Technical freedom is a must for any performer who hopes to have a career in music. Music students in China, while living in a restricted society, are eager to embrace music from the West and make it their own. Have we in the West ever shown a comparable passion for anything that is not immediately lateral to our culture?Thanks to the electoral college, Democrats have no choice but to try to win at least some of those voters back if they want to win the presidency. But if we got rid of the electoral college, Democrats could write off voters in fly-over country and focus on turning out large numbers of their supporters in big cities and populous liberal states such as New York and California. Unburdened by the need to moderate their platform to appeal to centrist voters, they would be free to pursue full socialism without constraint. If voters in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania oppose spending tens of trillions on a Green New Deal and a government take-over of the health-care, energy and transportation sectors of the economy, tough luck.Not so this time. When the council released its report this week, it bizarrely included an entire chapter seemingly designed to flesh out cable-news talking points about how Democrats secretly want to turn the United States into a socialist hellscape. Readers of the report  or of even just the councils slides posted on Twitter  might reasonably come away thinking that the most pressing economic questions facing the U.S. economy include: Was collective farming under Mao Zedong successful? How much did Joseph Stalin end up shrinking the livestock population?Rep. Elijah E. Cummingss (D-Md.) March 20 Wednesday Opinion essay, The obstructionist in chief, laid out in compelling detail the intransigence of the Trump administration to turn over documents or make officials available for testimony to his committee. But the essay fizzled out at the end by not explaining just what Mr. Cummings was going to do about the situation. If our committee must resort to issuing subpoenas. . . .  What if the administration ignores the subpoenas? The congressman should lay out the probable scenario resulting from an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.Because the demands of conscience and justice remain pressing. Bluntly: The argument that citizens should take a break from politics because it is so corrupted and corrupting is often made by relatively comfortable white people. If you lived in a neighborhood where the schools were dysfunctional and the foster system were dangerously broken, there would be no vacation from governmental failure. If you lived in a country where young women were routinely infected with HIV or where children died of malaria, the United States global role would matter greatly to you. Those who play down the importance of politics are generally insulated from the consequences when governing goes wrong. The demands of justice do not go away when citizens are disillusioned with the practice of politics. To the contrary, the scale of injustice tends to increase as responsible citizens abandon the political enterprise.Mr. Trump may be ashamed. McCain served honorably in the armed forces and, despite imprisonment and torture, refused early release if it were given only due to his military connections and chose to stay with his comrades. On the contrary, Mr. Trump had numerous deferments so that he did not have to serve. McCain also freely admitted to poor scholastics rankings, whereas Mr. Trump brags about his exceptional mental abilities but appears to want to hide his school records.Democratic presidential candidates responded swiftly to the news Friday that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had sent his long-awaited report on the Russia investigation to Attorney General William P. Barr: Make it public now.

Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) were among the first to urge Barr to release the full findings on Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump.

This report should be made public immediately, Booker said on Twitter.

Attorney General Barr  release the Mueller report to the American public. Now, Warren tweeted.

Special counsel Muellers report should be made public without any delay. The American people have a right to know its findings, Gillibrand wrote on Twitter.

Other congressional Democrats immediately added to the drumbeat of calls for the report to be made available for public consumption.

View Graphic How public perception of Mueller changed over his two-year investigation

In a joint statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) went further, adding that Barr must not give President Trump, his lawyers or his staff any sneak preview of special counsel Muellers findings or evidence, and the White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public.

The American people have a right to the truth. The watchword is transparency, they wrote.

Republicans, meanwhile, pointed to the development that Mueller had not recommended any further indictments in his final report, according to a senior Justice Department official, as backing up Trumps contention of no collusion between his presidential campaign and Russians.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the No. 2 House Republican, said, The reports that there will be no new indictments confirm what weve known all along: There was never any collusion with Russia.



Other congressional Republicans urged patience to allow Barr to digest Muellers findings and urged transparency, but not necessarily a full release.

View Graphic What we learned about Trumpworld outreach to Russia since Muellers investigation began

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Barr needs the time to review it.

The attorney general has said he intends to provide as much information as possible, McConnell said. As I have said previously, I sincerely hope he will do so as soon as he can, and with as much openness and transparency as possible.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said he will work to ensure as much transparency as possible, consistent with the law.

Reactions from other would-be challengers to Trump reiterated calls to publicize the report.

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), another presidential candidate, called for Barr to testify under oath about the investigation and its findings, and provide all underlying materials to the appropriate congressional committees.

This is about securing American democracy and protecting voters confidence in our elections and our system of government, Harris said.

Additionally, Harriss campaign emailed supporters an online petition to demand that Barr release the report and testify about it.

Beto ORourke tweeted: Release the Mueller report to the American people.

And in a statement, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) quoted Trump, who said this week that the public should see the report.

As Donald Trump said, Let it come out. I call on the Trump administration to make Special Counsel Muellers full report public as soon as possible, Sanders said. No one, including the president, is above the law.At the Justice Department and special counsels office, camera crews and satellite trucks now arrive early each morning  hoping to spot a glimpse of Mueller, Barr or any clue about what the two men might be up to. The Justice Department press room is packed to the gills with journalists afraid to leave the building even for lunch, lest they might miss some hint of the reports transmission. On Friday, they had pizza delivered.A third group backed by labor unions and billionaire Tom Steyer, For Our Future, will be deploying $80 million this cycle for a voter contact campaign starting in the coming months that will target hard-to-reach voters this year in a broader group of potential swing states. And the political operation for former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has begun planning a voter targeting and advertising effort focused on the nominating phase that could spend more than the $115 million invested in the 2018 elections, according to aides who were not authorized to speak publicly.The Democrats have very much proven to be anti-Israel, Trump told reporters as he departed the White House en route to Florida. Theres no question about that. And its a disgrace. I mean, I dont know whats happened to them, but they are totally anti-Israel. Frankly, I think theyre anti-Jewish.They have treated me so viciously, and they have treated me so badly, and we did nothing wrong, he told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox Business Network. This should never happen to another president, because most presidents wouldnt be able to take it.Many women  including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, television newsreaders, nurses, students and police officers  donned headscarves in solidarity with Muslim women, some of whom had said they were scared to go out with such a recognizable symbol of their faith. They could be seen on the streets of Christchurch throughout the day, not just during the remembrance.Local media reported that a kindergarten was less than a mile away from the facility. One 74-year-old eyewitness told The Paper, a Shanghai-based outlet, that he heard two distinct explosions less than a second apart that were so forceful they shattered the windows and buckled the ceilings of the house he was in, one mile from the blast site.

If all that were not enough, May must then woo at least a handful of members of the opposition Labour Party. Except many in the Labour Party want to remain more closely connected to the E.U.  and want to see May fail, to make way for a general election they hope to win.Both crashes involved the 737 Max 8 model and have brought intense scrutiny to U.S.-based Boeing, which marketed the 737 Max 8 as a fuel-efficient jet of the future, as well as to the Federal Aviation Administration. Garuda Indonesias cancellation is believed to be the first scrapping of an order for the plane in reaction to the crashes.Drawing on those experiences, he wrote recommendations in his book for other journalists, should they find themselves behind bars. It was necessary, he wrote, to increase ones suffering threshold to the highest possible level, in order to get out of jail with minimal damage to the body, mentally and physically. The strongest prisoner, he added, is the one who succeeds in not missing the things he loves. That did not mean forgetting life on the outside, he added, but rather, not thinking about it.The White House endorsement of Israeli sovereignty over the plateau fulfills a request from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and came less than three weeks before the April 9 election in which Israeli voters will decide whether to reelect their prime minister for a fifth term. Trumps decision was widely welcomed by Israelis, but also triggered criticism that he was interfering in a close election campaign to help Netanyahu.On Friday, Trump dodged a question from a reporter about whether he was instructing his staff not to comply with congressional requests for information. Its just a continuation of the same witch hunt, he said before leaving the White House for his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. Its just a continuation of the same nonsense. Everybody knows. They ought to go to work, get infrastructure done, and get a lot of other things done instead of wasting everybodys time.From the start of his investigation, Mueller and his team followed a consistent pattern. They would toil in silence for months, saying nothing about what leads they were exploring. Then  often on a Friday  they would reveal indictments packed with more detail than needed to substantiate the charges, though perhaps less than an insatiable public might have preferred.Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted a long-awaited report to Attorney General William P. Barr on Friday, marking the end of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump.

The submission of Muellers report ends his closely watched inquiry  a case that has engulfed the Trump administration since its inception, leading to criminal charges against 34 people, including six former Trump associates and advisers.

A senior Justice Department official said the special counsel has not recommended any further indictments  a revelation that buoyed Trumps supporters, even as other Trump-related investigations continue in other parts of the Justice Department. It is also unclear whether a Mueller report that does not result in additional charges could still hurt the president politically.

Justice Department officials notified Congress late Friday that they had received Muellers report, but they did not describe its contents. Barr is expected to summarize the findings for lawmakers as early as this weekend.

Only a small number of people inside the Justice Department know the documents contents, but it immediately sparked a furious political reaction, with Democrats vying for the presidential nomination in 2020 demanding a public release of the findings and the two top Democrats in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), calling for the full report and its underlying documentation to be provided to Congress.

[The watchword is transparency: Democrats ready to fight for Muellers complete findings]

Trumps supporters viewed the news as an optimistic indication that he was on the cusp of being vindicated.

The fact that there are no more indictments is a big deal, said David Bossie, a Trump ally. This president has had his entire two-year presidency under a cloud of this fake, made-up Russian collusion story.

Trump flew to his Florida resort Friday, accompanied by senior aides and White House lawyers. Trump did not immediately speak or tweet about the reports delivery. Privately, some Trump advisers expressed relief that the report had been filed, but the presidents spokeswoman and lawyers were more guarded in their initial reaction.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said that the next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course. The White House has not received or been briefed on the special counsels report.

In a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate judiciary committees, Barr wrote that Mueller has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters.

View Graphic How public perception of Mueller changed over his two-year investigation

[Read the attorney generals letter: Justice Dept. notification to Congress regarding the conclusion of the Mueller investigation]

Barr wrote that Mueller submitted a report to him explaining his prosecution decisions. The attorney general told lawmakers he was reviewing the report and anticipated that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsels principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.

The attorney general wrote he would consult with Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Departments long-standing practices and policies.

Barr said there were no instances in the course of the investigation in which any of Muellers decisions were vetoed by his superiors at the Justice Department.

I remain committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review, Barr wrote.

After a week of growing expectation that Muellers report would soon arrive, a security officer from Muellers office delivered it Friday afternoon to Rosensteins office at Justice Department headquarters, according to spokeswoman Kerri Kupec. Within minutes of that delivery, the report was transmitted upstairs to Barr.

Around 4:35 p.m., White House lawyer Emmet Flood was notified that the Justice Department had received the report. Around that same time, Rosenstein called Mueller to personally thank him for his work, according to a Justice Department official.

About a half-hour after the White House was notified, a department official delivered Barrs letter to the relevant House and Senate committees and senior congressional leaders, officials said.

One official described the report as comprehensive but added that very few people have seen it.

Even with the reports filing, Mueller is expected to retain his role as special counsel for a wind-down period, though it is unclear how long that may last, officials said. A small number of his staffers will remain in the office to help shut down the operations.

The investigation is complete, Kupec said.

Two of the presidents attorneys, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, said in a joint statement: Were pleased that the Office of Special Counsel has delivered its report to the Attorney General pursuant to the regulations. Attorney General Barr will determine the appropriate next steps.

Giuliani said he did not know whether he would get a briefing this weekend on the reports contents.

Well before its completion, Muellers report was a hotly debated topic. Lawmakers sought to wrest guarantees from the Justice Department that the special counsel would give a complete public accounting of what he found during the nearly two-year inquiry.

According to Justice Department regulations, the special counsels report should explain Muellers decisions  who was charged, who was investigated but not charged, and why.

Muellers work consumed Washington and at times the country as the special counsel and his team investigated whether any Trump associates conspired with Russian officials to interfere in the election.

It is unclear how much of what Mueller found will be disclosed in Barrs summary for Congress. Congressional Democrats, anticipating an incomplete accounting, have already sent extensive requests to the Justice Department for documents that would spell out what Mueller discovered.

Five people close to the president have pleaded guilty:Trumps former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates; former national security adviser Michael Flynn; former personal attorney Michael Cohen; and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.

A sixth, Trumps longtime friend Roger Stone, was indicted in January and accused of lying to Congress. He has pleaded not guilty.

More than two dozen of the people charged by Mueller are Russians, and because the United States does not have an extradition treaty with Russia, they are unlikely ever to see the inside of a U.S. courtroom.

None of the Americans charged by Mueller are accused of conspiring with Russia to interfere in the election  the central question of Muellers work. Instead, they pleaded guilty to various crimes, including lying to the FBI.

The investigation ended without charges for a number of key figures who had long been under Muellers scrutiny, including conservative writer Jerome Corsi, who said Friday that he felt vindicated by the development.

Corsi met with prosecutors repeatedly about communications he had before the November 2016 election with Stone about the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. In November, Corsi took the unorthodox step of publishing draft court documents Muellers team had provided to him as they urged him to plead guilty to lying in an October 2018 debriefing. He said that his memory had been faulty but that he had not intentionally lied, and he refused to take the deal.

They lost. They tried to give me a plea deal that was a lie and I exposed it, he said. They wisely left me alone. Seven months through absolute hell when all I did was try to cooperate.

The special counsels investigation was launched May 17, 2017, in a moment of crisis for the FBI, the Justice Department and the country.

[Mueller appointed special counsel]

Days earlier, Trump had fired FBI Director James B. Comey. The purported reason was Comeys handling of the 2016 investigation of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, but Trump said in an interview with NBC News shortly after the firing that he was thinking about the Russia inquiry when he decided to remove Comey.

Comeys firing set off alarms in the Justice Department and in Congress, where lawmakers feared the president was determined to end the Russia investigation before it was completed.

After then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Rosenstein chose Mueller as special counsel in part to quell the burgeoning political crisis.

Muellers team pursued a number of investigative tracks, including whether the presidents behavior leading up to and after Comeys firing amounted to an attempt to obstruct justice.

[Whos been charged in Mueller-linked probes, and why]

As the investigation proceeded, Republican opposition to Muellers work grew, encouraged in part by the presidents repeated declarations that the investigation was a witch hunt.

While those fights raged on, Mueller said virtually nothing. In part because of this silence, political factions tended to say almost anything they wanted about his work. Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus called it a money-wasting farce; Democrats touted every new investigative step as further evidence that the probe was so serious that Trumps days as president could be numbered.

In 2018, Muellers office took direct aim at Moscow. Thirteen Russians were charged as part of an online troll farm accused of sowing political division and distrust among Americans via social media. Five months later, Muellers office indicted a dozen Russian military intelligence officials, saying they conspired to hack into Democrats computer accounts and publicize the stolen files.

Last year, much of Muellers time and energy was focused on the question of obstruction. Whether Trump or his senior advisers had sought to stop or cripple the Russia inquiry was a key reason that Muellers job as special counsel existed in the first place.

Proving a suspects intent is an important element of any obstruction case, and there was one witness Mueller was never able to get in a room: Trump. After negotiating for months, the presidents attorneys agreed to submit written answers to questions from the special counsel. Ultimately, Mueller and the Justice Department did not serve the president with a subpoena, which could have led to a fight at the Supreme Court.

Barrs letter to Congress revealed Muellers superiors never rejected an investigative step he wanted to take  meaning Mueller never formally sought permission to subpoena the president.

Behind the scenes, however, Mueller and his team continued to hold the vague threat of a subpoena over Trumps attorneys up until December, insisting they had to interview Trump to complete their work. Up until January, Muellers team had sought to have Trump answer additional questions.

Rosalind S. Helderman, Ellen Nakashima, Carol D. Leonnig, Karoun Demirjian, Rachael Bade, Seung Min Kim and Colby Itkowitz contributed to this report.In the days since the summit, North Korea has begun construction activity at an engine testing site and openly accused Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of creating a hostile environment, charges the two men have denied. After the sanctions announcement Thursday, North Korea withdrew its officials from a liaison office with South Korea. The move was a setback for South Koreas efforts to normalize relations with the North in tandem with progress on the nuclear negotiations.Though none of people or groups designated are household names in the United States, they include researchers on radiation, physics and explosives. The administration officials acknowledged that they are not known to be currently involved in building nuclear weapons but called it gravely concerning that Iran is keeping together a team of experts with what one U.S. official called the type of expertise it takes to develop a nuclear program.Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the SDF, said the fighting had not eased up around the village of Baghouz, which has been the scene of an intense battle against those holdouts.The three bills enacted during the sessions were extraordinary in breadth. One of them gave the legislature powers usually and exclusively reserved for the attorney general, such as approving legal actions by the state and signing off on lawsuit settlements. Another was aimed at reducing the need for highway construction projects to comply with federal laws governing prevailing wages and minority set-asides. Severe restrictions were imposed limiting the availability of Medicaid.Bolton has repeatedly insisted that sanctions cannot be lifted until North Korea fully surrenders its entire nuclear arsenal, as well as any chemical and biological weapons. At the same time, U.S. envoy Stephen Biegun appears to have backtracked from his pre-Hanoi stance  that both sides can take mutual confidence-building steps together  and is now insisting that denuclearization cannot be achieved incrementally.He said that Israeli voters are less attuned to the damage that Netanyahu is doing to the relationship with the U.S. Democratic Party by tying himself so closely to Trump. Polls have shown a slide in support for Israel among young liberals in particular and veteran Democrats formed a new group - the Democratic Majority for Israel - earlier this year to counter claims the party is not behind Israel.Despite the talks, Afghanistan is suffering from crippling violence, with a record number of civilian casualties last year. On Thursday, a string of bombs exploded in Kabul as Afghans celebrated the Persian new year, Nowruz, killing six and wounding 23 more. The Islamic State claimed responsibility Friday for the bombings near a Shiite shrine and cemetery, saying the aim of the attack was to spoil the ritual of the polytheists.Qantas is predicting a surge of upbeat Eagles fans fresh from their Grand Final win, as well as hopeful Dockers fans buoyed by a new-look list, to take full advantage of finals flights that went on sale Friday morning.

The airline has added more than 1600 extra seats on three new return flights and bigger aircraft on the WA to Melbourne route over the grand final weekend in September.

West Coast players were happy with their 2018 premiership but the price for fans to get to Melbourne was less smile-inducing. Credit:AAP

It said eager fans have already started booking flights and expected sales to ramp up after West Coast play Brisbane on Saturday, and Fremantle take on North Melbourne on Sunday.

The sale, at $349 one-way, runs until Monday or until sold out.Partners abandon startup over risk concerns



By Park Hyong-ki



Viva Republica, operator of Toss peer-to-peer (P2P) online money transfer application, is facing a governance crisis even before it can form a consortium to apply for an internet banking license, industry sources said Friday.





Viva Republica founder Lee Seung-gun / Yonhap

As Shinhan Financial Group decided to ditch its partnership with Viva's envisioned Toss Bank following a disagreement over a business model, other potential partners have decided not to back Toss.



Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance, Cafe24 and Korea Credit Data have called it quits.



There was an apparent feud between Shinhan Financial and Viva as the group seemingly wanted to lead the consortium in creating an "inclusive" internet banking platform that could be easily used by everyone.



Viva wanted to take charge and launch an "exclusive" bank that offered a niche loan service to small companies or people with lower credit ratings.



However, Viva's version would carry certain risks given that it did not have sufficient financial capability to cover when offering such a service, an industry source said.



It is a startup that has a negative cash flow, even though it was able to attract notable venture capital funds to the P2P mobile service whose main customers are college students.





Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Cho Yong-byoungCommunity groups are calling on all political leaders to put Pauline Hansons One Nation last on how-to-vote cards at the federal election as pressure builds on all sides to take a tougher stand against the minor party.

Ethnic leaders warned against the danger of "racism and hate speech" in the wake of the Christchurch terror attack and said this meant all parties should punish Senator Hanson and her former Queensland colleague, Fraser Anning.

In another sign of a Coalition split on the question, NSW Liberal MP Craig Kelly argued One Nation should be placed ahead of the Greens despite a call days earlier from his Victorian colleague, Tim Wilson, to place One Nation last.

Right-wing senators Brian Burston, Pauline Hanson and Fraser Anning. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen / Fairfax Media

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said he will not strike any "deals" with One Nation while leaving room for party officials to put Senator Hanson's candidates ahead of Labor and the Greens, an option being pursued by Nationals MPs in Queensland.It's not every day that a 104-year-old upstanding citizen is arrested, handcuffed and taken away in a police car with sirens blaring.

But that day came for Anne Brokenbrow on Wednesday, the International Day of Happiness.

Anne Brokenbrow is "taken into custody". Credit:Facebook: Bristol Wishing Washing Line

Anne, a resident of the Stokeleigh Care Home an aged-care facility in Bristol, had told British charity Alive Activities "her biggest wish was to be arrested by the police".

Then, as part of an initiative by the Bristol Wishing Washing Line, a charity that collects the wishes of people in care homes, Anne filled out a form saying: "My wish is  To be arrested. I am 104 and I have never been on the wrong side of the law."Christchurch: A week after an Australian alleged terrorist began his murderous rampage in Christchurch, the imam of Al Noor mosque where the attacks began has given a speech of unity during Friday prayers that included what some heard as a rebuke of some Australian political and media figures.

And before the sun set on this first, grim anniversary, 26 of the dead would be interred in one afternoon. The oldest was Muse Awale, 77. The youngest, Mucaad Ibrahim, was three.

Zaid Mustafa, left, son and brother of victims from last week's mosque shootings, is greeted at Friday prayers. Credit:Jason South

Thousands attended the outdoor service at Hagley Park across the road from the mosque, and Imam Gamal Foudas address, as well as the call to prayer and two minutes silence, was broadcast across the nation.

Last Friday I stood in this mosque and saw hatred and rage in the eyes of the terrorist who killed 50 people, wounded 48 and broke the hearts of millions around the world, he began.Asiana Airlines aircraft / Courtesy of Asiana Airlines



By Nam Hyun-woo





Kumho Asiana Group Chairman Park Sam-koo / YonhapU.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joe Dunford said Thursday that the U.S. military is committed to stopping North Korea's sanctions evasion.



Dunford said at an event at the Atlantic Council think tank that disrupting illicit ship-to-ship transfers of refined petroleum is an important element of the military's support for diplomatic efforts to denuclearize the North.



"We've been after that now for many months. Clearly, you know, the North Koreans have found ways to work around our enforcement efforts," he said.



"It's a constant cycle of adaptation to make sure that we are staying out in front of the North Korean adaptations, and we do the very best we can to enforce the United Nations Security Council resolutions as it pertains to refined petroleum products."



Hours later, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced sanctions on two Chinese shipping companies accused of helping North Korea evade sanctions.



In a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Dunford said the disruption operations are a priority for U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.













"I would describe my job is to be the glass half-empty guy when it comes to North Korean capabilities," he added Thursday. "And that's the operative word -- capability."



The chairman said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un still has ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities.



"I still see a potential, although as yet undemonstrated, the ability to match a nuclear weapon with an intercontinental ballistic missile," Dunford said.



"And I think it's incumbent upon the United States military to be prepared to defend the homeland and our allies from that eventuality. And so that's what we are focused on." (Yonhap)



North Korea's rubber-stamp legislature will hold its first session with newly elected deputies next month, state media said Friday.







"The Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly (SPA) of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea made public on Wednesday a decision to convene a SPA session" in Pyongyang on April 11, the Korean Central News Agency said.







North Korea held nationwide polls earlier this month and elected 687 deputies. Held every five years, it was the second such election under the current leader Kim Jong-un following the one in March 2014.







The SPA is the highest organ of state power under the constitution, but it actually rubber-stamps decisions by the ruling Workers' Party of Korea. It holds a plenary session every April to mainly deal with budgets and a cabinet personnel reshuffle.







This year's meeting is drawing keen attention as the North could unveil its policy on its nuclear and missile programs following the collapse of Kim's second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in Hanoi last month. (Yonhap)

By Yi Whan-woo





Joseph YunThe enactment of the AfCFTA is fantastic news for the continent.

by Alexander Hammond

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

It looks likely that the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) will be implemented in the next few weeks. Only 22 African nations need to ratify the AfCFTA before it can be enacted, and thus far, 19 countries have done so. Last week, experts from the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa met to discuss AfCFTA implementation strategies.

The enactment of the AfCFTA is fantastic news for the continent. Securing free trade throughout the continent has the potential to kick-start Africas industrial revolution and develop its economy in ways never before seen.

AfCFTA Incentivizes Trading within Africa

Rwandan President Paul Kagame proposed the AfCFTA last March. Since then, 52 of the 55 African Union (AU) members have endorsed the free-trade area. And, once implemented, the agreement will boost intra-African trade by immediately removing all tariffs on 90 percent of goods. The remaining ten percent of tariffs on sensitive goods will be phased out later.

Currently, only 18 percent of exports from African countries are traded within the continent. By comparison, intra-regional trade accounts for 69 percent and 59 percent of total exports in Europe and Asia, respectively. The United Nations Economic Commission on Africa estimates that under the AfCFTA, intra-African trade could increase by 52.3 percent by 2022. And once the final 10 percent of tariffs are removed, this trade could double again.

Increasing intra-African trade spells especially good news for Africa due to the nature of the goods typically traded within the continent. The Brookings Institute notes that when African nations trade with each other, theyre much more likely to trade in higher-value manufactured goods, whereas the exports leaving the continent are typically in commodities.

By increasing the intra-continental trade of manufactured goods, the AfCFTA really could prove to be revolutionary.

Many African economies rely heavily on exporting raw materials, and for three-quarters of African nations, commodities account for at least 70 percent of their exports. This hurts many African economies because raw materials are especially prone to frequent price fluctuations, so reliance on commodities risks economic volatility and unstable business environments.

But theres good news. Increasing the trade of higher value manufacturing goods through the AfCFTA will help African nations diversify their exports and build more resilience to price fluctuations. A more stable economy will attract investors and allow for the growth of more small and medium enterprisessince smaller businesses with less cash flow are the most vulnerable in a fluctuating economy.

More manufacturing will help Africas economy prosper because the fastest-growing regions in the world are the ones that diversify their economies the most. According to Brookings, since 1990, East Asian economies were able to diversify exports at a rapid pace. In contrast, most African countries instead relied on rents from extractive industries. This means that between 1990 and 2017, East Asias GDP increased by over 400 percent, whereas Africas GDP grew by 177 percent. Its an impressive figure, but its far from the continents full potential.

Industrialization Is the Predecessor to Economic Growth

All rich countries have taken the same path to development. They all went through a period of industrialization, during which the population that had predominantly worked in agriculture (as most Africans do today) moved to cities for better-paid factory work. By increasing the intra-continental trade of manufactured goods, the AfCFTA really could prove to be revolutionary. Once people had some disposable income from their manufacturing jobs, they were able to afford to educate their children, who would go on to secure high-paying skilled work.

More ratifications of the AfCFTA are welcome. The continents second-largest economy, South Africa, has recently begun the process to ratify the agreement. However, some significant nations, such as Zimbabwe and Nigeria, remain reluctant to ratify. Not ratifying the AfCFTA could prove particularly damaging for Zimbabwe, where 60 percent of export revenue is reliant on mineral commodities.

By increasing the intra-continental trade of manufactured goods, the AfCFTA really could prove to be revolutionary. Wherever it has been tried, industrialization has lifted millions out of poverty, extended life expectancies, raised literacy rates, and improved living conditions. And, for those reasons, we should hope the AfCFTAs 22-member threshold is soon reached.

This article is reprinted with permission from CapX.Party General Secretary and President Nguyen Phu Trong addresses the meeting between the Politburo and Nghe An's officials in Hanoi on March 21st (Photo: VNA)



The meeting reviewed the five-year implementation of the 11th-tenure Politburos Resolution No.26-NQ/TW on development orientations and tasks for Nghe An until 2020.

Delivering a report at the event, Secretary of the provincial Party Committee Nguyen Dac Vinh said the resolution, issued on July 30th, 2013, shows the Politburos special focus on Nghe An, creating conditions for development opportunities and momentum that match its potential.

The local economy has grown fast and sustainably since then, he said, noting that the gross regional domestic product (GRDP) was estimated at VND115.67 trillion in 2018, ranking 10th among the 63 provinces and centrally-run cities. The household poverty rate was reduced to 5.54 percent.

Meanwhile, 218 communes, equal to around 50 percent, had been recognised as new-style rural areas by the end of last year.

Party building and the consolidation of the political system has been enhanced and resulted in many positive outcomes. The political system has been reorganised towards a lean, efficient, and effective apparatus. Activities of local Vietnam Fatherland Front committees and socio-political organisations have also been improved.

However, Vinh admitted, it is hard for Nghe An to achieve its set economic growth, per capita GRDP, and budget revenue targets. Infrastructure, especially in the western areas, has yet to meet the development demand, while some social issues have yet to be resolved in a timely manner.

He also pointed out certain problems in Party building, political system consolidation, and the performance of some local governments.

Highlighting some major targets in the resolution implementation, the official said his province will work harder to develop fast and sustainably so as to deserve its role as an integration and development driver of the north central region.

Addressing the meeting, Party General Secretary and President Trong said in the last five years, Nghe An has made efforts to move forwards, attaining considerable achievements in different fields, including economy, culture, society, and defence-security. He also recognised the strides taken in Party building, political system enhancement, and the new-style rural area building.

Regarding the failure to reach some of the targets set in Resolution No.26-NQ/TW, he attributed it partly to subjective reasons, such as a lack of determination and breakthroughs in leadership, as well as shortcomings in institutions, infrastructure, and human resources.

These causes made Nghe An unable to fully tap into its advantages, he added.

The province boasts a rich history, numerous forest and marine advantages, along with industrious and intelligent people. Therefore, it needs to shows stronger aspirations, capitalise on its traditions and attainments, and overcome difficulties and hindrances to become one of the leading localities in Vietnam, the leader emphasised.

He noted that after this meeting, the Politburo will issue conclusions reviewing the five-year realisation of Resolution No.26-NQ/TW that will also include orientations for further implementation. The Politburo will look back on 10 years of the implementation in 2023./.The inter-Korean liaison office in Gaeseong, North Korea. Korea Times file



By Park Si-soo

North Korea has abruptly withdrawn its officials from an inter-Korean liaison office in Gaeseong, North Korea, South Korea's unification ministry said Friday, in a setback to inter-Korean relations that have been peaceful for more than one year.

The ministry said the North had notified the South during a liaison officers' meeting earlier in the day that it would pull out of the office in accordance with a directive from above and later put the decision into action.

It happened three weeks after the second U.S.-North Korea summit in Vietnam collapsed due to disputes over U.S.-led sanctions on the nuclear-armed North.

The North said it "is pulling out with instructions from the superior authority," according to the ministry. It didn't say whether North Korea's withdrawal of staff would be temporary or permanent.

The North said it "will not mind the South remaining in the office" and that it would notify the South about practical matters later, the ministry said in a statement.

Seoul's Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung told reporters that South Korea plans to continue to staff the liaison office normally and that it expects the North will continue to allow the South Koreans to commute to the office.

He said Seoul plans to staff the office with 25 people on Saturday and Sunday.

The South Korean statement calls the North's decision "regrettable." It said South Korea urges the North to return its staff to the liaison office soon.

The joint liaison office opened in September under an agreement reached at South Korean President Moon Jae-in's first summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in April, 2018.

Cheong Wa Dae held an emergency meeting of its National Security Council (NSC) shortly after the news broke.

Top presidential security adviser Chung Eui-yong presided over the meeting, according to Cheong Wa Dae. The presidential office did not give further details.A new East Side train station and thousands of new apartments could be in Bridgeports future, according to a draft of the 10-year Master Plan of Conservation and Development.

It gets right to the point of what the city is trying to achieve, said Lynn Haig, director of Bridgeports planning and zoning commission, referring to the 171-page document.

City officials will be holding a public hearing at 6:30 p.m. Monday at 45 Lyon Terrace presenting details and giving the public a chance to weigh in on what Bridgeport should look like in the next 10 years.

Improvements to public transit and walkability  among other things  play a major role in development and growth plans for the city, according to the draft. That includes securing funding and building the Barnum Station between Seaview Avenue and Pembroke Street which has been touted for years as another economic driver for Bridgeports regrowth.

The draft also calls for an overhaul of housing development around the city, with a large portion centered near the downtown area. The city wants around 4,300 housing units less than a mile from the downtown train station.

The trove of housing would also include hundreds of new affordable housing units and more almost 2,000 units of mixed income living outside of the downtown area.

Overall liveabilty in the city over the next decade has become a priority for officials as well, according to Haig. When the city first announced its need for a new master plan, there was a focus on getting public feedback on what residents would want and need to see covered.

The city and its consultant, Hartford-based Fitzgerald and Halliday Inc., under the Plan Bridgeport initiative, attended local summer events like the Caribbean Jerk Fest and the annual picnic at Seaside Park for senior citizens asking questions.

Six meetings on different topics  open space, transportation, quality of life, arts, housing and economic development  were scheduled in neighborhoods around the city.

From doing the outreach, people didnt just want to talk about buildings and roads, said Dean Mack, project manager for the citys Planning and Zoning commission. Issues that really impact people in the city are equity and health care and public safety, so it felt strange to do a comprehensive plan on the city and not touch on the things that most worry about.

Points within the draft call for improved education and employment opportunities for residents while protecting vulnerable populations such as the economically disadvantaged, racial and ethnic minorities, those with alternative lifestyles, low-income children, the elderly, the homeless, and those with chronic health conditions, including severe mental illness.

This plan introduces health and social issues, Haig said. Those are concepts that are generally not addressed in plans of conservation and development, but we are doing it here because there is such an integral part of how our city operates and functions.

For residents unable to attend Mondays meeting there is another public hearing on April 22, and a new website with more details on the draft is slated to launch in May.

For more information, call 203-576-7221.

Jordan.grice@Hearstmediact.comOn the timeline of computer history, March 1969 does not carry the same cache as say January 1939, when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard laid the foundation for Silicon Valley in a Palo Alto garage.

Or October 1969 when the precursor to the internet first came online in California.

But when it comes to Connecticut technology lore, March 1969 deserves a footnote in bold for the staying power of a Brookfield company that has kept pace for a half-century with the most rigorous technical demands created by computer engineers.

For 50 years, Photronics has made photomasks, quartz or glass plates that concentrate light in a precision manufacturing process to create the tiniest patterns of circuitry on semiconductors and flat panel displays.

It has been a remarkable run for a company founded less than a year after industry legend Intel, with Photronics plates used to produce chips for use in everything from microwave ovens and TV remotes to the newest smartphones and large-screen TVs.

Photronics cranks out 1,500 plates a day on average, with the company producing record revenue of $535 million for its 2018 fiscal year ending last October.

Before leaving Qualitron to start Photronics in 1969, Constantine Deno

Macricostas worked for National Semiconductor, which was based in Danbury for a decade until 1968 when it designated Santa Clara, Calif., as its headquarters.

Macricostas moved Photronics in 1978 to its current campus in Brookfield, and sold stock to the public for the first time in 1987. Macricostas stepped back into an executive chairman role in 2015, with the company promoting Peter Kirlin to CEO that year to run the company on a day-to-day basis.

Macricostas remains a generous supporter of Danbury-area causes, including a $3 million pledge in 2014 to Western Connecticut State University.

The house that Deno built

In an industry that defined Moores Law  Intel founder Gordon Moores prediction that computing power would double every two years  Photronics may have the most exacting customers in the world, at least from Kirlins vantage of keeping the company at the forefront of those technological leaps.

The chip industry is now on the cusp of a new evolution of equipment that can produce circuitry at 5 nanometers in scale, or about the quarter of the diameter of the human ribosome.

If were making images that are one-10,000th the size of your hair  and they keep getting smaller  that is a tremendous challenge, Kirlin said. Another huge challenge we have every year is that the same product we build must be built cheaper. We have to not only innovate on the technology front, we have to innovate on the cost front. ... We do that better than anyone in our business. Thats the house that Deno built.

As much as the computer industry begins to bump up against the physical limits of Moores Law, Kirlin notes the advances the high-tech industry is now making in how to package arrays of chips to maximize their output and minimize the heat they generate, allowing for ever-smaller digital devices.

In our industry now, we are starting to hear people say more than Moore, Kirlin said. This concept of shrinking or getting smaller is running out of gas. ... Theres packaging technology being developed  particularly for things like cell phones  where you can literally mold the circuit board around the chips.

A Connecticut legacy

Photronics lists as its lone U.S. competitor Compugraphics, a Texas-based photomask maker whose parent entity MacDermid Alpha Electronics Solutions is based in Waterbury as a subsidiary of Platform Specialty Products. Both Photronics and Compugraphics have several rivals in Japan, Taiwan and China.

In the past year, Photronics has opened a pair of new plants in China, one located next to a customer that needs the biggest photomasks that Photronics has ever designed to produce the newest flat-screen TVs.

Photronics sees its busiest cycle at year-end, as mobile phone and tablet makers finalize chip designs that will go into fall product releases on the eve of the following holiday season. With that push now behind the company, Kirlin heads back to China next week to meet anew with the companys newest customers, with Photronics having doubled its revenues in China in the past year.

Photronics has U.S. installations outside Dallas where Texas Instruments is based, and in Boise, Idaho, where customers include Micron Technology, but the significance of the companys continued commitment to its Connecticut birthplace is not lost on Kirlin, who grew up in Pennsylvania steel country where jobs evaporated as cheaper foreign imports flooded the U.S. market.

Kirlin says he sees Photronics as not just a Connecticut treasure but a national one, given the companys legacy stretching back to the earliest days of the high-tech industry when companies like Intel, Xerox and IBM were hitting their stride. Photronics employs about 200 people today in Brookfield of about 1,800 workers globally.

I think back to my childhood when we were the manufacturing masters of the universe, Kirlin said. Were still here, right? Weve made it, because weve made it cheaper, faster, better, as our customers have done, and we have run right along with them  as an American company. Im very proud of our people. ... We have a spring in our step.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulmanSTAMFORD  A Congressional committee is investigating members of the Sackler family who own OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma and have been sued by Connecticut and Massachusetts for their alleged role in the opioid crisis.

In a letter Thursday to Purdue CEO and President Craig Landau, Democratic leaders of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform requested documents related to the lawsuits allegations that the Sacklers who control Purdue fueled the epidemic of opioid abuse through deceptive marketing of pain drugs such as OxyContin and also sought to move into the market for anti-addiction medications.

The U.S. is in the midst of its greatest public-health crisis in decades, committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, and committee member Mark DeSaulnier, D-California, wrote in the letter. Due, in part, to the aggressive over-prescribing of opioids like OxyContin, millions of Americans are in the grip of addiction.

In a statement, Purdue said that it looks forward to responding to the chairmans letter. The challenges posed by the opioid crisis are substantial, and we are committed to doing our part to help find and achieve solutions.

Cummings and DeSaulnier also cited concerns tied to a recent CBS 60 minutes report that Purdue allegedly pressured the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to expand in 2001 the designation on OxyContins labeling to cover daily, around-the-clock, long-term use.

Purdue disputes the CBS report and said the 2001 changes narrowed the intended uses for OxyContin, with a black box warning.

Originally filed last June and then re-submitted in January in an unredacted 275-page version, Massachusetts lawsuit has attracted nationwide attention. Purdue filed earlier this month a motion to dismiss the litigation.

Massachusetts was the first state to name not only Purdue, but also Sackler members as defendants. Connecticut, which filed its complaint last December, was the second state to sue the Sacklers.

Eight family members, who control a majority of the companys board seats, have led an aggressive campaign to push sales of Purdue opioids, according to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

The Sacklers allegedly orchestrated thousands of sales-representative visits to doctors that distorted the drugs risks and benefits and encouraged dangerous dosages.

OxyContin generates most of Purdues annual sales, which have been estimated at more than $3 billion in recent years. The Sackler defendants have paid themselves and their family billions of dollars from those opioid revenues, Massachusetts lawsuit said.

Purdue denies those allegations. It also challenges the complaints central accusation that it was responsible for a decade-long course of misconduct in Massachusetts that involved hundreds of deaths.

The amended complaint ignores this crucial context  that the opioid-abuse crisis is a complex, multifactorial societal issue and instead sets forth a misleading narrative in an attempt to litigate this case in the court of public opinion, the motion said, in part.

Last January, a Connecticut Superior Court judge dismissed a similar group of lawsuits that included complaints filed by the municipal governments of Bridgeport, New Haven, New Britain and Waterbury. Bridgeport, New Haven and Waterbury are challenging the decision in the states Appellate Court.

pschott@scni.com; 203-964-2236; twitter: @paulschottWASHINGTON  After the mass shooting killed 50 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, last Friday, that nations prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, acted quickly in announcing a ban on military-style, semi-automatic weaponry and high-capacity ammunition magazines  leading Connecticut lawmakers and gun-violence prevention advocates to wonder: Why not here?

They were able to do in six days what we couldnt do in six years, said Jeremy Stein, executive director of CT Against Gun Violence.

Although gun measures such as expanded background checks have long been stymied on Capitol Hill, Connecticut adopted one of the nations strictest sets of firearms laws in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on Dec. 14, 2012.

American voters last November gave control of the House to Democrats, many of them elected on a platforms including background checks and restoration of the assault-weapon ban that expired in 2004.

The House already has passed legislation expanding background checks and ending a loophole that effectively limits the time the FBI has to check backgrounds of prospective gunbuyers. But the measures appear unlikely to get votes in the Republican-controlled Senate, and President Donald Trump has threatened to veto them if they arrive on his desk.

If measures like these are stalled by Republicans, it may take a change in the composition of the Congress, specifically in the Senate  as well as a change in the person sitting in the Oval Office  before we can implement gun laws, said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District.

But unlike recent years when Republicans in control of both House and Senate scuttled gun bills, the new landscape gives some Democratic lawmakers cause for hope.

Were elevating voices, and people are electing leaders who favor common sense gun reform, said Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District. Background checks should not be a partisan issue. We should still be able to make reforms while protecting Second Amendment rights.

She added: Im optimistic the Senate will pass the legislation.

Even so, Connecticuts all-Democratic congressional delegation can only envy the process in New Zealand, in which the prime ministers pledge is likely to win swift approval in the nations Parliament. The leading opposition party has given its nod.

Its frustrating to see New Zealand respond to bloodshed so quickly, but we cant do the same because of our warped politics, said Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th District.

In Himes view, the chief culprit is the National Rifle Association and firearms manufacturers eager to stoke fear of gun laws in order to sell more weapons  a rogues gallery of opponents, he said.

Gun-rights advocates counter that broad brushstroke solutions run afoul of the Second Amendment, which states the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Though our society may not be perfect, our system of government at least recognizes an individual's right to self-protection, said Scott Wilson, president of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League.

To be sure, gun culture and gun ownership is ingrained in the politically and ethnically diverse United States, more so than in relatively homogenous New Zealand, with its population of 4.7 million.

Gun ownership in New Zealand is 30 per every 100 residents, according the Australia-based GunPolicy.org.

In the U.S., the comparable figure is 101 guns for every 100 people.

The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment as giving all Americans the right to own a gun in their home for self-protection.

But the court ruling in that case, D.C. v Heller in 2008, made it clear that like all rights, the Second Amendment has limits. Legislative bodies are free to place limits on gun buying and possession as long as they dont ban it outright, the court said.

New Zealands weapon ban and offer to buy back weapons from the public represent a model to consider emulating, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

New Zealand did in six days what we still have failed to accomplish years after Sandy Hook, Blumenthal said. There is no rational reason for weapons of war to be sold legally.

dan@hearstdc.comWESTPORT  For four years now the monthly Ukulele Meet Up at The Westport Library has been giving people something to sing  and strum  about.

I have to say its been really amazing, said Deborah White, the childrens librarian who conceived of the idea to provide a place for experienced and novice ukulele players to share the joys of music and, in the process, learn a little about the instrument.By Lee Min-hyung





President Moon Jae-in North Korean leader Kim Jong-un

North Korean media outlets denounced what they called South Korea's "two-faced" inter-Korean policy, Friday, urging the South to make efforts to stop the U.S. from intervening in Korean affairs.



South Korea cannot be a mediator between North Korea and the U.S. because what the North is discussing with the U.S. are matters for the South's own matters, they said.



The reports are deemed as aimed to cause a rift in the alliance between Seoul and Washington as Pyongyang is trying to have sanctions lifted by Washington through their denuclearization talks.



"The South's unification ministry made it a goal (this year) to drive talks between Washington and Pyongyang through inter-Korean dialogues," the North's propaganda Uriminzokkiri said in a commentary.



"But Seoul failed to live a lie by announcing that it would also come up with mediated settlements under close cooperation with Washington," it said.



The criticism came a day after the Ministry of Unification published the 2019 unification white paper. In the annual publication, the ministry underlined its achievements in enhancing inter-Korean relations last year represented by three summits between President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.



The ministry said it would expand the reconciliatory momentum between the two Koreas this year by playing a continued mediating role for resumption in talks between Washington and Pyongyang. The rare dialogue momentum between the two was suspended in the wake of the breakdown of the second summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and the regime's young leader last month.



"The ministry reiterated its old arguments that the inter-Korean cooperation and exchanges would be carried out under the framework of the ongoing international sanctions on the North," the North's state-controlled media said.



Maeari, another propaganda site of the North, also stepped up criticism of the South, saying that Seoul is walking on eggshells around Washington too much.



"The South Korean foreign ministry fails to take any practical measures to improve fundamentals in inter-Korean relations, only being conscious of the U.S.," it said.



The site went on to urge the South to be more active in the ongoing denuclearization talks on the Korean Peninsula.



"The South should play its role as an interested party (directly involved in the nuclear talks here) by being able to raise its voice to the U.S.," it said.3 1 of 3 Jarret Liotta / For Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Jarret Liotta / For Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 3 of 3





A public information meeting regarding Westports Main to Train study will take place March 25 at 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall, the Western Connecticut Council of Governments recently announced.

The purpose of the study is to identify improvements to vehicular, bicycle and pedestrian safety and circulation along Post Road and Riverside Avenue.Attorney General William Tong said he knew what to expect at the U.S.-Mexico border, south of San Diego. It was his first visit, but hes heard the stories and hes seen abject poverty in the U.S. and around the world. Hes seen people living in deplorable conditions.

That didnt make what he saw in Tijuana this week as he crossed the border with a group of fellow Democratic attorneys general any less jarring: a looming concrete and steel slab wall that reaches nearly 30 feet high in some places, just beyond the commercialized end of San Diego, and the makeshift tents on the other side where asylum seekers have taken refuge.

Youre in California and San Diego and you literally drive into a mall parking lot where theres an H&M (clothing store) parking lot and on the other side of the H&M is this huge wall, Tong said. And that wall, even though its from before President (Donald) Trumps time, has come to symbolize what President Trump wants us to mean to the rest of the world. This wall, this barrier. This unwelcome physical statement. Get out and stay out. Seeing that. Its stark and very imposing and difficult to see.

Tongs visit to the border was part of a conference hosted by the Democratic Attorneys General Association and Al Otro Lado, a nonprofit legal service provider. As part of the conference, which Tong traveled to earlier this week, the group crossed the border to observe the conditions on both sides of the San Ysidro port of entry.

Once through the border checkpoint, Tong said he observed a refugee area where dozens of asylum seekers are waiting for their claims to be heard. He visited with some of the people whove been waiting to enter the U.S., and spent nearly an hour on the Mexican side of the border before returning to San Diego.

Theres a makeshift tent and someone keeps an informal log in a composition type book that you or I might buy at Staples and they write down the names of asylum seekers, Tong said. We understand every day they take the next 40 names off that list in a dramatically different way than we did for decades and decades. These are people who believe theyre in imminent physical danger and risk if they stay in Mexico. We used to allow them to wait inside the U.S. while they waited for their case to be heard.

Tong, the son of Chinese immigrants, has made defending against the presidents immigration policies a priority for his office, and he said the visit  his first to any section of the U.S.-Mexico border  humanized the work his office has already done on the issue. Connecticut has joined multi-state cases against Trumps emergency declaration, turn-back policy for asylum seekers, the discontinuation of DACA and family separations.

Last December, prior to Tong taking office, a coalition of 13 Democratic attorneys general, filed a brief calling for a preliminary injunction to protect asylum seekers. The brief supported a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, Al Otro Lado and other organizations that challenges the Trump Administrations attempts to prevent people entering the country away from a port of entry from applying for asylum, even as access to ports of entry has been reduced.

It is an attack on who we are as a country, Tong said. Its an attack on our constitutional principles. Providing asylum and considering peoples asylum claims is a core part of who we are. Being a beacon of hope and an opportunity is a core part of who we are. Its what this country offered to my family, and to see that cut off is a crime and its tragic.

kkrasselt@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2563; @kaitlynkrasseltGraphic by Bae So-young



By Lee Suh-yoon



Frank Chinedu Obioha is a Nigerian inmate at a foreigners-only prison in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province.



He has been here for a decade now. First arrested in China in 2007 then transferred to Korea, he was given a life sentence in 2009 after being found guilty of heading a drug trafficking ring.



The only person who used to visit Obioha at the prison was the Nigerian ambassador around Christmas time. However, he has not had a single visitor after these annual visits ended in 2013.



Now 51, he wants to serve the rest of his sentence back in Nigeria, where he can get regular visits from his family and friends while serving out his term, National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) officials who interviewed him at the prison said.



But Obioha cannot apply for a transfer to a correction facility back home as Korea does not have a standing agreement with Nigeria for the transfer of convicted felons yet. After reviewing Obioha's case, the human rights watchdog called on the Ministry of Justice to "actively seek out which prisoners wish for a transfer to their home country and where possible, sign bilateral prisoner transfer pacts with the relevant countries" according to a press statement, Thursday.



"The international transfer of prisoners facilitates their social rehabilitation," the NHRCK said. The commission had to drop Obioha's case in the end due to the lack of the transfer agreement. "Through the transfer system, we hope sentenced foreigners can lower any problems due to language or cultural differences, and have better emotional stability while preserving familial ties."



Obioha is not the only one who does not have access to a repatriation procedure. Out of the 106 foreign prisoners with over 10 years remaining in their jail terms, 25 are from countries that do not have a standing agreement for the transfer, according to a 2018 government data.



In a 2014 report titled "Prisons and Health," the World Health Organization recommended foreign prisoners be transferred to an equivalent facility in their home country, stating, "foreign prisoners can experience greater isolation than others and can face greater uncertainty about life after release," which may lead to mental health issues.



The Ministry of Justice was not immediately available for comment regarding what steps were being taken following the NHRCK recommendations.



Hwang Pill-kyu, a lawyer at GongGam Human Rights Law Foundation, says mutual prisoner transfer pacts with other nations will benefit Koreans, too.



"Signing a mutual prisoner transfer pact with as many countries as possible will help Koreans who are sentenced abroad enjoy the same rights," Hwang told The Korea Times, Friday. "This is not something that will disadvantage Korea in any way or impose extra costs; it's just a system that will allow states to mutually respect each other's citizens."



Based on his experience advising both Koreans who were sentenced abroad and foreigners who were sentenced here, Hwang says the bigger problem may be outlining a clear procedure so that both groups can speedily file for transfers.



"Signing pacts is important, but making sure sentenced people predictably exercise their rights by outlining a clear and transparent procedure in advance is more often the problem," Hwang said. "In many cases, people belatedly find out about what works to their disadvantage."



As it is a signatory to the European Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons, Korea can currently transfer sentenced persons of 46 Council of Europe (CoE) member states and 21 non-European states that have also ratified the convention. It also has separate bilateral transfer pacts with Mongolia, China, Vietnam, India, Kuwait, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Kyrgyzstan.





Nearly six in 10 married women in South Korea think they should provide financial support for their offspring until graduation from college, a poll showed Friday.







According to the survey of 11,205 married women, 59.2 percent of the respondents said they think it appropriate to financially support their children until college graduation.







The state-run Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs carried out the survey on women aged 15 to 49 last year.







Another 17.4 percent replied they should give financial help to sons and daughters until they find jobs; 14.7 percent, until they graduate from high school; and 7.1 percent, until they get married.







According to the same survey taken three years ago, 62.4 percent of the respondents replied they should provide financial help for their children until their graduation from college.







The latest findings also showed the average monthly child support expense came to 733,000 won (about $650) for households with one child last year, 1.37 million won for two-child families and 1.62 million won for three-kid homes.







Spending on education accounted for about 49 percent of the total for households with two to three children and nearly 36 percent for one-child families.







South Korean parents are known for enthusiasm about children's education, which is widely seen as the key to success in the competitive society. (Yonhap)

Seen above is the inter-Korean liaison office in Gaeseong, North Korea. / Yonhap



Decision comes after US imposes new sanctions on regime



By Lee Min-hyung



North Korea withdrew its officials from the inter-Korean liaison office, Friday, further clouding the outlook for the resumption of stalled talks on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, according to the unification ministry.



"On Friday morning, the North Korean officials notified the South of the decision to withdraw from the office, citing instructions from their superiors," the Ministry of Unification said in a statement.



The two Koreas established the communications office in Gaeseong, North Korea, last September, to boost the rare mood for reconciliation.



Unification Vice Minister Chun Hae-sung told reporters the North has yet to withdraw its equipment from the office. The ministry said the exact reasons for the North's decision have not been confirmed.



It urged the North to send back its officials as early as possible, saying that staff from the South will continue to stay there.



However, the North did not respond, only saying that it would discuss the details of the decision in the future.



The move comes less than a day after the U.S. imposed new sanctions on the regime. Critics argue Pyongyang made the abrupt decision in an apparent expression of discontent over these.



Washington imposed the sanctions on two Chinese shipping firms, Thursday, for helping the North avoid international economic sanctions, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.



Relations between Washington and Pyongyang have started to waver in the wake of the failure of the second summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last month in Hanoi.



The North has in recent weeks ramped up criticism of the U.S., shifting responsibility for the summit breakdown to Washington.



Despite the provocative rhetoric from Pyongyang, Washington had so far remained cautious and sought to get the North to resume the denuclearization negotiations.





Williamson, WV (25661)

Today

Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low 33F. Winds WNW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low 33F. Winds WNW at 10 to 20 mph.Mok In-sang, Asiana Airlines senior flight attendant, poses at the carrier's headquarters in Seoul, on March 8. Courtesy of Asiana Airlines



By Kim Hyun-bin



Dining out on a signature sushi dish in Tokyo one day and having morning coffee in Paris overlooking the Eiffel Tower another could be the symbol of a luxurious life for most. But for a flight attendant traveling around the clock, enjoying different cuisines and beautiful scenery is part of their daily routine.



The lifestyle definitely caught Mok In-sang's attention, which led him to apply for a cabin crew member position at the country's second-largest carrier, Asiana Airlines.



"The stylish uniform and being able to travel oversees was the selling point for me and that was why I wanted to take the path of a flight attendant," Mok said.



Aug. 14, 1989, was his first day at Asiana Airlines but he quickly realized the luxurious image of a flight attendant was only a very small part of the job.



"After training and going through numerous drills, I realized that a flight attendant's job was not just providing services for passengers but we are also responsible for their safety and at times sharing their grievances and joy," he said.



Mok was one of the employees selected in the fourth-round of recruitments following the founding of Asiana Airlines in February 1988, but in the early stages of his career, he says male flight attendants were not as common as they are now.



"At the time, most people were aware of the word stewardess, but steward not so much. So the competition was not high," he said.



Mok has been part of the Asiana family for 30 years and has racked up over 19,200 flight hours.



Over the years, most flights were pleasant but occasionally he had some bumpy encounters.



"Dealing with passengers who disregard rules and etiquette, who are selfish and inconsiderate of others, was the hardest part of my job as well as adjusting to jet lag," Mok said.



There have been drastic changes in the aviation industry over the last three decades, most for the better, bringing in state-of-the-art aircraft, cabin facilities and in-flight services.



However, Mok says one aspect changed for the worse.



"I feel there is less communication between passengers and flight attendants and even among the cabin crew members. There is less of a human touch and friendly encounters compared to the old days, which I personally believe is a shame," he said.



There are pros and cons for all professions but even after 30 years in the airline industry, Mok says he would definitely recommend his line of work to others.



Over the course of his career, Mok was assigned to numerous positions from instructor to team leader and even serving on the presidential plane for over four years under former Presidents Roh Moo-hyun and Lee Myung-bak.









President Moon Jae-in toasts with Hassanal Bolkiah, Sultan of Brunei, during a recent trip there. The Islam country doesn't encourage toasts even with nonalcoholic drinks. Korea TimesBy Kim Young-hun



One of the most important issues in world trade these days is unprecedented imbalances. Trade wars in the past were simple. But modern trade wars are never simple.



Mutual transactions based on economic logic were choices for mutual benefit. So it was a trade war to do business with more countries. But today's trade wars are different. It's becoming a contest to reduce trade with other countries.



For economic benefit, we traded and recognized different systems regardless of ideology. The world has promoted trade through conventions and agreements for the safety of mutual relations for common purposes.



But now the purpose is not the good of the public, but profits first. As the United States is putting its own priorities first, agreements and treaties for human co-prosperity are losing power. In particular, the U.S.-China trade dispute shows this starkly.



The United States is imposing tariffs on Chinese goods to compensate for its trade deficit, saying trade with China is unbalanced. China is also in a tense tug-of-war after imposing retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods.



However, these are acting as pressure on companies and international students who operate businesses in the reciprocal countries, not trade.



There is now taking place a sense of hostility to the country, not the economy. Openly, China uses the expression "China presents the greatest challenge that the United States will face." It's a moment to change to national supremacy, not the economy.



China has made significant developments in recent years. It is going to keep abreast with the United States, one of the world's top economic powers.



In any case, given the existing hegemony, it is hard to remain calm when a challenger becomes stronger. China is aiming to become No.1 in the Asian region. No matter who wins hegemony between the United States and China, Korea's position is not easy.



What is certain is that if the conflicts between the two countries are prolonged, it will be a loss to all. The United States felt threatened enough to directly sanction a Chinese company. The U.S.-China trade dispute is not easily compliant with the two countries' demands.



Trade disputes between the United States and China are not at level that easily finds compromises as a matter demanded by the two countries. Technology transfer and infringement of intellectual property rights are problems. They have a significant impact on future businesses that are not easily accepted by anyone.



The U.S.-Chinese trade dispute is showing signs of escalating, and while U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are holding talks, news of a settlement is far away.



The United States does not want to recognize China, which is seeking global hegemony with technology, as its rival. But this is what today's world trade appears to be.



The trade imbalance between the countries is shaping up, and the situation is scraping the bottom to figure out right and wrong. Although it does not use a gun and sword, the power of retaliatory tariffs is very strong.



The networks of companies that have been established in both the United States and China are shaking.



Considering the past pattern of trade that took place during the colonial struggle between protectionism and free trade, the recent conflict may be the beginning of a 21st century colonial struggle.



About 90 years ago at the time of the Great Depression, the United States imposed 400 percent tariffs on imported goods to protect domestic companies suffering from a slump in industrial production.



As a result, the U.S. economy lost vitality and saw more problems. Production was reduced due to the Great Depression and inventories were running high.



The result was that more goods were unsold and production lines increasingly dwindled. It was World War  that saved the dying economy. Historically, the pattern of trade repeated the gap between liberty and protection and when it met with war, it found a balance. Should we expect another war?



What the world is doing now is closing doors. And countries are pulling the strings of tension. Looking at these things, it is a dangerous situation for countries that grow only by trade.





Kim Young-hun is the representative of the National Political Economy Forum.

TORONTO - Bill and Ted are embarking on another excellent adventure.

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TORONTO - Bill and Ted are embarking on another excellent adventure.

Actors Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves jumped on social media to announce plans for a third instalment to the cult comedy franchise about two time-travelling California dudes.

"Bill & Ted Face the Music" is expected to head into production this summer.

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Actor Keanu Reeves attends the premiere of "Siberia" at Metrograph, Wednesday, July 11, 2018, in New York. Actors Alex Winter and Reeves jumped on social media to announce plans for a third installment to the cult comedy franchise about two time-travelling California dudes. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Toronto-raised Reeves joined Winter in thanking fans of the series for making another sequel happen 30 years after the characters were first introduced.

"It is all because of you guys, and so we owe you a huge debt of gratitude," Winter said in a video posted to various social media platforms.

"Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" followed the airheaded teenage duo as they tried to avoid failing history class by travelling through time in a telephone booth. Along the way they cross paths with historical figures like Napoleon and Billy the Kid who join them in a rock band spectacle.

The 1989 film was a pop culture sensation at the time, leading many teens to adopt its catchphrases like "Party on, dude" and "Excellent!' into their vernacular.

It also sparked the 1991 sequel "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey" where the pair face off against robot versions of themselves.

The latest Bill and Ted sequel is set to be released on August 21, 2020, according to the Orion Pictures YouTube pageMINNEDOSA, Man. - RCMP Cpl. Graeme Kingdon got a chance Thursday to face the man who shot him during a series of break-and-enters last summer in western Manitoba, and called for the maximum sentence under the law for attempted murder.

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THE CANADIAN PRESS/JOHN WOODS The RCMP emergency response unit arrests an alleged suspect in Neepawa, Man., on Thursday, August 30, 2018, following the shooting of a RCMP officer in Onanole, Man. Two Manitoba RCMP officers spoke of anger and loss at the sentencing hearing of the man who tried to kill them. Cpl. Graeme Kingdon told a provincial court sentencing hearing he is angry at the selfishness of Therae Racette-Beaulieu, who shot the officer in the head during a series of robberies in western Manitoba last August.

MINNEDOSA, Man. - RCMP Cpl. Graeme Kingdon got a chance Thursday to face the man who shot him during a series of break-and-enters last summer in western Manitoba, and called for the maximum sentence under the law for attempted murder.

"The offender shot me in the back of the head," Kingdon told the sentencing hearing of Therae Racette-Beaulieu while reading his victim impact statement.

RCMP Therae Racette-Beaulieu

"The only reason my family is not describing my murder right now is that I fought to live, and brave police officers and paramedics saved my life."

Racette-Beaulieu pleaded guilty earlier this year to charges including attempted murder, theft and break and enter.

He was arrested after a series of homes were robbed in and around Onanole, a small resort community near Riding Mountain National Park, last August.

Kingdon and his partner, Const. Mitch Thompson, had come across a stolen truck. Three people ran from the vehicle, shots rang out and Kingdon was hit in the head.

Thompson told court he was pinned down.

"I can feel the force of the shot that missed me," Thompson said. "I still deal with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder."

Kingdon said being shot has changed his life  he has been unable to return to work, go fishing or do many activities with his two daughters.

He said his youngest girl has asked him if she can have a piggy-back ride when his "polka dots" are gone.

"Polka dots are her words for the pellet wounds on the back of my head," he told court.

Kingdon also said he has a hard time understanding how someone could shoot at people in order to steal household "stuff."

"I can't describe how angry I am at the selfishness of the offender."

The shooting led to a manhunt that ended several hours later in Neepawa, Man. Four suspects were arrested. Three have yet to enter pleas.

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Racette-Beaulieu of Sandy Bay First Nation was 18 at the time. He did not speak at Thursday's hearing.

Crown attorney Mike Himmelman asked the court to give Racette-Beaulieu a 20-year sentence. Defence lawyer Andrew Synyshyn asked for 16 years.

"A sentence of 16 years is not crushing but it serves the purpose of denouncing his conduct," Synyshyn said.

Provincial court Judge John Combs reserved his decision for April 23.

 By Steve Lambert in Winnipeg

 Follow @stevelambertwpg on TwitterOTTAWA - "(Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) thinks today's budget will distract Canadians from all of this. He is using the budget  a critical element of any government's agenda  as nothing more than a political prop in an unprecedented cover-up."  Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer, March 19

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Finance Minister Bill Morneau is congratulated by colleagues following the delivery of the federal budget in the House of Commons in Ottawa, Tuesday March 19, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

OTTAWA - "(Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) thinks today's budget will distract Canadians from all of this. He is using the budget  a critical element of any government's agenda  as nothing more than a political prop in an unprecedented cover-up."  Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer, March 19

---

Andrew Scheer and his Conservative caucus members have been scathing in their attacks on this week's decision by the Liberal-dominated House of Commons justice committee to abruptly end its examination of the SNC-Lavalin affair.

In addition to calling it a cover-up and a snub to all Canadians, the leader of the official Opposition called it an attempt by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to undermine the role of Parliament.

The committee's decision came on the same day as the federal budget was being tabled. So Scheer wove that into his broader criticism of the government, describing the budget as a "political prop" by a prime minister determined to divert the public's attention from the scandal engulfing his government.

That raises a question that cuts to the core of this week's two big national political stories, the budget and the everlasting SNC-Lavalin saga: can the regularly scheduled tabling of a federal budget be described as a political prop?

Spoiler alert: The Canadian Press Baloney Meter is a dispassionate examination of political statements culminating in a ranking of accuracy on a scale of "no baloney" to "full of baloney" (complete methodology below).

Scheer's remark earns a rating of "a lot of baloney"  the statement is mostly inaccurate but contains elements of truth.

THE FACTS

The SNC-Lavalin controversy slammed like a runaway train into Finance Minister Bill Morneau's delivery of Tuesday's budget, the government's final spending blueprint before a federal election scheduled for this fall.

While the budget lockup was underway several blocks east of Parliament Hill, the Liberal majority on the House of Commons justice committee voted to end its five-week inquiry into the controversy, enraging Conservatives and New Democrats alike.

By the time Morneau reached the Commons to deliver his 4 p.m. budget speech, he faced some serious Conservative roadblocks. The Conservatives forced a vote on a motion to allow MPs on the fisheries committee to travel. Several Tory MPs voted both for and against.

They then stood  one at a time  to apologize for voting twice. But they each also managed to also denounce the Liberals' earlier decision, which prevented former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould from reappearing before the justice committee. Chants of "Let her speak" filled the chamber, while more points of privilege and points of order ate up the clock.

Morneau's speech was delayed an hour, and when he finally rose to speak, he was drowned out by opposition MPs. Eventually, the Conservatives walked out of the Commons, with Scheer calling the committee's decision "an assault on democracy."

Morneau's budget aimed billions in new spending at a variety of areas  from pharmacare to retraining workers to helping first-time homebuyers. It was a deficit-friendly, pre-election platform that contrasted with the Conservative mantra of balanced books. Morneau decided the government would use up a big windfall, and run near-term deficits of almost $20 billion. He offered no timeline for bringing the budget back to balance, and made no apologies.

The budget document credited a stronger economy for an extra $27.8 billion in revenue over the next six years, compared with the numbers in the government's fall update. The new budget will spend about $22.8 billion of that additional cash, and the government said it has earmarked another $4 billion in spending since the fall update.

Morneau called this "investments to grow our economy for the long term  while we bring the books back towards balance."

Trudeau, meanwhile, accused the Conservatives of using the SNC-Lavalin affair to avoid talking about their own "failed" approach to the economy. "The Conservatives still don't want to talk about jobs, about growth, about investing in Canadians because they're realizing they have no plan," he said.

WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY

Financial experts say that while budgets can certainly be used by governments to make political gains, they are an annual ritual of government that are scheduled to take place on dates that are set weeks in advance.

"The content of the budget is the real issue, and here the claim the budget was used as a prop is weak," said Brett House, the deputy chief economist at Scotiabank. "Though the revenue windfall was spent, and we would have preferred to see it saved, the amount was not large and wasn't devoted to a big signature project or program."

Kevin Page, the former parliamentary budget officer, agrees there is no single big initiative in the budget to draw attention away from other issues such as SNC-Lavalin.

"Budgets are not mandatory but it is a long-standing tradition and a best practice to table a fiscal plan before the start of the fiscal year," said Page, the president of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa.

"This budget does not look like a prop."

Doug Porter, the chief economist of BMO Financial Group, says there is little doubt the government would like to shift the focus to other matters, including the economy and fiscal policy.

"But, it's also fair to say that, as the quote suggests, a budget is 'a critical element of any government's agenda,'" he said.

Porter said the convention has generally become to unveil a new budget in February or March before the start of the new fiscal year on April 1.

"It's a convention that is followed by all 10 provinces as well."

THE VERDICT

The government usually releases a budget at this time of year. Though a lot is riding on the pre-election blueprint the Liberals tabled Tuesday, and Trudeau wasted no time in using it to attack the Conservative record, it didn't feature a showcase signature initiative aimed at changing the political channel.

For those reasons, Scheer's assertion that the Liberals were using the budget as a political prop contains "a lot of baloney."

METHODOLOGY

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The Baloney Meter is a project of The Canadian Press that examines the level of accuracy in statements made by politicians. Each claim is researched and assigned a rating based on the following scale:

No baloney  the statement is completely accurate

A little baloney  the statement is mostly accurate but more information is required

Some baloney  the statement is partly accurate but important details are missing

A lot of baloney  the statement is mostly inaccurate but contains elements of truth

Full of baloney  the statement is completely inaccurateChinese companies have stopped buying canola seed from Canadian producers, leaving exporters trying to sell their supply to other markets.

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This article was published 22/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A woman and two young girls ride horses through a canola field near Cremona, Alta., Tuesday, July 16, 2013. Chinese importers have stopped buying Canadian canola seed, according to an industry group. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

Chinese companies have stopped buying canola seed from Canadian producers, leaving exporters trying to sell their supply to other markets.

The ongoing trade dispute that started earlier this month when China revoked the permit of a major Canadian exporter is also hitting canola farmers, who are grappling with lower prices and delayed shipments.

"Chinese buyers became uninterested in buying Canadian canola," said Brian Innes, vice-president of public affairs for the Canola Council of Canada.

The change from a market that accounts for about 40 per cent of Canada's canola seed, oil and meal exports came after the formal notification that China blocked imports from one of Canada's largest grain producers, Richardson International Ltd., he said. The Chinese decision cited an alleged detection of hazardous organisms in the company's product.

All of the council's members that export canola from Canada to China have reported that Chinese importers are currently unwilling to purchase their product, Innes said. Council members include Viterra Inc., Louis Dreyfus Company, Cargill Ltd. and Parrish & Heimbecker Ltd.

"What we understand is that the concern or the reluctance of Chinese buyers to purchase Canadian canola is not coming from their concern about the quality of our product," he said, adding they've had no quality questions from other markets.

Innes said he can't speculate on where the reluctance is coming from.

At the time of the Richardson announcement, some suggested the move could be retaliation for Canada's arrest of a top Chinese tech executive. In December, Canadian authorities arrested Huawei Technologies Co. Inc. senior executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver at the behest of the United States.

The council said canola exporters are now looking at other markets, including Japan, Mexico, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Europe.

"It's very difficult to replace a market that takes as much as China takes," said Innes. In 2018, canola seed exports to China were worth $2.8 billion, according to the council.

The most immediate problem though, Innes said, is a drop in price for the commodity, especially for farmers who still have unsold canola from last year's crop.

"That canola is worth less now than it was a month ago."

David Reid, 42, is a partner at the family farm he grew up on in Cremona, Alta.  about 90 kilometres northwest of Calgary. Canola accounts for about 30 per cent of what the farm produces.

The farm sells to a company that exports the product to other places, like China, but after Richardson's permit was revoked Reid said shipments slowed and he saw an immediate price drop for his product.

Prices fell by a dollar a bushel, he said, which he estimated to be a 12 per cent fall.

The price of the commodity also fell in futures contract trading since Wanzhou's arrest. The May canola futures contract was trading at $451.20 per tonne Friday afternoon  down nearly 3.8 per cent.

Reid is now holding on to more of his product in hopes the price will rise.

"We don't know how long we might have to wait for the price to increase," he said, adding that while it's possible to store the product for a long time, bin space will become an issue by the fall when he'll need room for the next canola crop.

He has already sold some product at the lower price, which hurts his bottom line.

"Everybody's feeling it for sure," he said of other canola farmers he knows.

Innes stressed that technical discussions between Canadian and Chinese scientific experts are continuing, and these talks are very important to resolve this disagreement.

Still, he believes the fundamentals of the canola trading relationship between the two countries are very strong.

"China has a need and a desire to have canola. They need healthy oil. They need protein to feed their animals," he said.

"And we believe that the fundamental market demand in China will continue to be there."

Alberta's Premier Rachel Notley reiterated her call for the federal government to resolve the issue.

"If they are unsuccessful at doing that, then all Albertans will be looking to the federal government to supply relief to our canola industry," she told reporters Friday after a campaign announcement  just as she said it would do to any other Canadian industry in jeopardy because of international actions beyond Canada's borders.

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"The farmers who work in it are very important to our economy nation-wide and if we cannot fix the diplomatic issues that led to this, then the federal government's going to need to step up and offer support to that industry."

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe echoed concerns over the reports in a statement and said the provincial government remains hopeful that the federal government will continue to engage with Chinese officials on a technical level.

"We have also requested that the federal government elevate their engagement to a diplomatic level to rectify this situation as soon as possible."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called it an important issue on Friday when speaking with reporters.

"So, we're going to roll up our sleeves and work with the Chinese officials to demonstrate that canola should continue to flow safely from Canada to China," he said, adding the government is optimist it'll be able to make headway this year.

Follow @AleksSagan on Twitter.As an alternative to the major Canadian chartered banks, credit unions in Manitoba continue to have a lot of success.

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As an alternative to the major Canadian chartered banks, credit unions in Manitoba continue to have a lot of success.

In 2018, the 27 credit unions in the province put up mid-single-digit growth metrics in everything from total assets and lending activity to deposits and equity.

The credit unions have about 643,000 members, representing almost 50 per cent of the provinces population. Actual membership numbers grew by 1.6 per cent last year, and it would appear to be a challenge to raise that growth rate any higher, even with attractive deposit and lending rates.

Garth Manness, CEO of Credit Union Central Manitoba (CUCM), which is having its annual general meeting in Winnipeg today, doesnt like to comment on strategic business approaches his member credit unions may or may not take, but he was prepared to say they are not satisfied to stand pat with current membership numbers.

"There are new Canadians and we want to make sure we serve the needs of new Canadians," he said. "Also, we are probably under-represented in the millennial-aged demographic. We want to find ways to make sure that we can service them in the way they want to be served... at the same time respecting current memberships and meeting their needs."

Manness said high single-digit growth would be ideal and that the rate of growth in 2018 was "reasonable." The more moderate pace of economic growth that now seems to be taking hold in Manitoba has to be factored in, he said.

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"We are outgrowing the economy," he said. "We are always trying to increase growth and increase market share."

Each of the individual credit unions will be more or less successful in deploying their own strategies for growth. For instance, Steinbach Credit Union, the largest in the province and the seventh largest in the country, cracked the $6-billion mark in assets in 2018.

As for CUCM, one of its main areas of focus is assisting members in making the right kind of investments in digital technology applications. Like in just about every other business, advanced digital technologies and changing demographics are affecting the way consumers want to receive services.

"Obviously, we are seeing changes in migration to digital services," Manness said. "More people want to receive services online and through mobile applications. Our focus is to make sure we make good investments to be able to do that."

Manness said CUCM continues to talk with the province about its decision a year ago to phase out a special deduction that, by 2023, will mean an additional $15 million its members will have to pay collectively in provincial corporate income tax. But no headway has been made in that regard yet.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.caORION TOWNSHIP, Mich. - Less than a week after a series of critical tweets from the president over an Ohio plant closure, General Motors is announcing plans to add 400 jobs and build a new electric vehicle at a factory north of Detroit.

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FILE - This April 26, 2017 file photo shows a Chevrolet sign at a Chevrolet dealership in Richmond, Va. Less than a week after a series of critical tweets from President Donald Trump over an Ohio plant closure, General Motors is announcing plans to add 400 jobs and build a new electric vehicle at a Michigan factory. The company said Friday, March 22, 2019, it will spend $300 million in Orion Township to build a Chevrolet vehicle based on the battery-powered Bolt. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

ORION TOWNSHIP, Mich. - Less than a week after a series of critical tweets from the president over an Ohio plant closure, General Motors is announcing plans to add 400 jobs and build a new electric vehicle at a factory north of Detroit.

The company says it will spend $300 million at its plant in Orion Township, Michigan, to manufacture a Chevrolet vehicle based on the battery-powered Bolt.

GM wouldn't say when the new workers will start or when the new vehicle will go on sale, nor would it say if the workers will be new hires or come from a pool of laid-off workers from the planned closings of four U.S. factories by January.

The company also announced plans Friday to spend about another $1.4 billion at U.S. factories with 300 more jobs but did not release a time frame or details.

The moves come after last weekend's string of venomous tweets by President Donald Trump condemning GM for shutting its small-car factory in Lordstown, Ohio, east of Cleveland. During the weekend, Trump demanded that GM reopen the plant or sell it, criticized the local union leader and expressed frustration with CEO Mary Barra.

General Motors Chairman and CEO Mary Barra announces the company investment of $300 million in its Orion Township, Mich., assembly plant to produce a new Chevrolet electric vehicle, Friday, March 22, 2019, in Orion Township, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

GM spokesman Dan Flores said the investment has been in the works for weeks. Indeed, GM has said it planned to build more vehicles off the underpinnings of the Bolt, which can go an estimated 238 miles on a single electric charge. The company has promised to introduce 20 new all-electric vehicles globally by 2023.

In November, GM announced plans to shut the four U.S. factories and one in Canada. About 3,300 workers in the U.S. would lose their jobs, as well as 2,600 in Canada. Another 8,000 white-collar workers were targeted for layoff. The company said the moves are necessary to stay financially healthy as GM faces large capital expenditures to shift to electric and autonomous vehicles.

Plants slated for closure include Lordstown; Detroit-Hamtramck, Michigan; Warren, Michigan; White Marsh, Maryland, near Baltimore and Oshawa, Ontario near Toronto. The factories largely make cars or components for them, and cars aren't selling well these days with a dramatic consumer shift to trucks and SUVs. With the closures, GM is cancelling multiple car models due to slumping sales, including the Chevrolet Volt plug-in gas-electric hybrid.

GM has said it can place about 2,700 of the laid-off U.S. workers at other factories, but it's unclear how many will uproot and take those positions. More than 1,100 have already transferred, and others are retiring.

"Right now, we're focused on the people of Lordstown, making sure they have opportunities because we do have jobs," Barra told reporters following Friday's announcement. "We want every single person in Lordstown to stay within the GM family, and that's what we're working on."

The United Auto Workers has sued GM over the closings, which still must be negotiated with the union.

"I will not spoil a great occasion here today. But there is hardship amongst four of our locations. And we've made it clear that we disagree with that," UAW Vice-President Terry Dittes said.

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Trump's latest GM tweet on Monday said GM should: "Close a plant in China or Mexico, where you invested so heavily pre-Trump," and "Bring jobs home!"

"I understand a lot of the angst that people are feeling, and I feel it, too," Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Friday. "And I want to make sure that GM knows that their investment here in Michigan is encouraged and welcomed and appreciated. And we're going to keep doing that."

Ohio and the area around the Lordstown plant are important to Trump's 2020 re-election bid. The state helped push him to victory in 2016, and Trump has focused on Lordstown, seldom mentioning the other U.S. factories that GM is slated to close.

"General Motors is committed to supporting U.S. manufacturing, including the great states of Ohio and Michigan," said Barra, who maintains that she sees no further layoffs or plant closures through the end of 2020.

___

Krisher reported from Detroit.MIAMI - Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship.

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In this photo taken on Jan. 21, 2019, people walk past a lifeguard booth painted in the colors of an American flag on a beach in Miami Beach, Fla. The Miami area is popular among Russians not only for its tropical weather but also because of the large Russian-speaking population. Sunny Isles Beach, a city just north of Miami, is even nicknamed AuLittle MoscowAu. (AP Photo/Iuliia Stashevska)

MIAMI - Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship.

They pay anywhere from $20,000 to sometimes more than $50,000 to brokers who arrange their travel documents, accommodations and hospital stays, often in Florida.

While the cost is high, their children will be rewarded with opportunities and travel advantages not available to their Russian countrymen. The parents themselves may benefit someday as well.

And the decidedly un-Russian climate in South Florida and the posh treatment they receive in the maternity wards  unlike dismal clinics back home  can ease the financial sting and make the practice seem more like an extended vacation.

The Russians are part of a wave of "birth tourists" that includes sizable numbers of women from China and Nigeria.

President Donald Trump has spoken out against the provision in the U.S. Constitution that allows "birthright citizenship" and has vowed to end it, although legal experts are divided on whether he can actually do that.

Although there have been scattered cases of authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies for visa fraud or tax evasion, coming to the U.S. to give birth is fundamentally legal. Russians interviewed by The Associated Press said they were honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even showed signed contracts with doctors and hospitals.

There are no figures on how many foreign women travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter immigration laws, estimated that in 2012, about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the U.S., then left the country.

The Russian contingent is clearly large. Anton Yachmenev of the Miami Care company that arranges such trips, told the AP that about 150 Russian families a year use his service, and that there are about 30 such companies just in the area.

South Florida is popular among Russians not only for its tropical weather but also because of the large Russian-speaking population. Sunny Isles Beach, a city just north of Miami, is even nicknamed "Little Moscow."

"With $30,000, we would not be able to buy an apartment for our child or do anything, really. But we could give her freedom. That's actually really cool," said Olga Zemlyanaya, who gave birth to a daughter in December and was staying in South Florida until her child got a U.S. passport.

An American passport confers many advantages. Once the child turns 21, he or she can apply for "green card" immigration status for the parents.

A U.S. passport also gives the holder more travel opportunities than a Russian one; Americans can make short-term trips to more than 180 countries without a visa, while Russians can go visa-free only to about 80.

Travelling to the U.S. on a Russian passport often requires a laborious interview process for a visa. Just getting an appointment for the interview can take months.

Some Russians fear that travel opportunities could diminish as tensions grow between Moscow and the West, or that Russia might even revert to stricter Soviet-era rules for leaving the country.

"Seeing the conflict growing makes people want to take precautions because the country might well close its borders. And if that happens, one would at least have a passport of a different country and be able to leave," said Ilya Zhegulev, a journalist for the Latvia-based Russian website Meduza that is sharply critical of the Kremlin.

Last year, Zhegulev sold two cars to finance a trip to California for him and his wife so she could give birth to their son.

Trump denounced birthright citizenship before the U.S. midterm election, amid ramped up rhetoric on his hard-line immigration policies. The president generally focuses his ire on the U.S.-Mexico border. But last fall he mentioned he was considering executive action to revoke citizenship for babies born to non-U.S. citizens on American soil. No executive action has been taken.

The American Civil Liberties Union, other legal groups and even former House Speaker Paul Ryan, typically a supporter of Trump's proposals, said the practice couldn't be ended with an order.

But others, like the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, said the practice is harmful.

"We should definitely do everything we can to end it, because it makes a mockery of citizenship," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an outspoken Russian lawmaker, said the country can't forbid women from giving birth abroad, and many of them also travel to Germany and Israel.

"Trump is doing everything right, because this law is used as a ploy. People who have nothing to do with the U.S. use it to become citizens," Zhirinovsky said.

Floridians have shown no problem with the influx of expectant mothers from Russia.

Yachmenev, the agency manager, says he believes it's good for the state because it brings in sizable revenue.

Svetlana Mokerova and her husband went all out, renting an apartment with a sweeping view. She relished the tropical vibe, filling her Instagram account with selfies backed by palm trees and ocean vistas.

"We did not have a very clear understanding about all the benefits" of a U.S. passport, she said.

"We just knew that it was something awesome," added Mokerova, who gave birth to a daughter after she was interviewed.

Zemlyanaya said that even her two nights in the hospital were a treat, like "a stay in a good hotel."

In contrast to the few amenities of a Russian clinic, she said she was impressed when an American nurse gave her choices from a menu for her meals.

"And then when she said they had chocolate cake for dessert, I realized I was in paradise," Zemlyanaya added.

She even enjoyed how nurses referred to patients as "mommies," as opposed to "rozhenitsa," or "birth-giver"  the "unpleasant words they use in Russian birth clinics."

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Zemlyanaya said she was able to work remotely during her stay via the internet, as were the husbands of other women, keeping their income flowing. Yachmenev said his agency doesn't allow any of the costs to be paid by insurance.

Most of the families his agency serves have monthly incomes of about 300,000 rubles ($4,500)  middling by U.S. standards but nearly 10 times the average Russian salary.

Yachmenev said he expects that birth tourism among Russians will only grow.

Business declined in 2015 when the ruble lost about half its value, but "now we are coming back to the good numbers of 2013-14," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Curt Anderson in Miami and Varya Kudryavtseva in Moscow contributed to this report.WASHINGTON - The top U.S. military officer will meet with Google representatives next week amid growing concerns that American companies doing business in China are helping its military gain ground on the U.S.

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WASHINGTON - The top U.S. military officer will meet with Google representatives next week amid growing concerns that American companies doing business in China are helping its military gain ground on the U.S.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that efforts like Google's artificial intelligence venture in China allow the Chinese military to access and take advantage of U.S.-developed technology.

"This is not about me and Google," Dunford told an audience at the Atlantic Council. "This is about us looking at the second and third order of effects of our business ventures in China, Chinese form of government, and the impact it's going to have on the United States' ability to maintain a competitive military advantage."

Google says its AI activities in China are focused on "education, research on natural language understanding and market algorithms, and development of globally available tools."

In a statement last week Google said it is not working with the Chinese military. And the company said that it continues to work with the U.S. government, including the Defence Department, in many areas, including cybersecurity, recruiting and healthcare.

Dunford's comments reflect widespread U.S. government worries that any information or data an American company has or uses as it does business in China is automatically available to the Chinese government and its military.

U.S. companies in China are required to have a cell of the communist party present, said Dunford, adding, "that will lead to that intellectual property from that company finding its way to the Chinese military."

Last week he and acting Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan expressed similar concerns during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

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"We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing that there is that indirect benefit," Dunford said during the hearing. "And frankly, indirect may be not a full characterization of the way it really is. It's more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military."

Shanahan also noted that Google is stepping away from some Pentagon contracts.

Internal protests by workers at Google led the tech company to say last year that it is dropping out of Project Maven, which uses algorithms to interpret drone video images from conflict zones. Employees had complained that Google was helping with technology that could improve lethal targeting.

Shanahan told senators that $5 trillion of China's economy is state-owned enterprises, "so the technology that is developed in the civilian world transfers to the military world. It's a direct pipeline. Not only is there a transfer, there's also systemic theft of U.S. technology that also facilitates even faster development of emerging technology."

As a result, Shanahan said the U.S. military needs to continue to invest in artificial intelligence, adding that funding would double in the proposed 2020 budget.

The Joint Staff did not release details on the timing of Dunford's meeting next week or who would be attending from Google.

New Zealand, from an American perspective, may seem to be at the end of the Earth. But that perceived isolation doesn't equal protection. Evil can come from anywhere and descend on anyone. The internet can speed messages of hate.



On Friday, at least one gunman, possibly more, attacked two mosques in Christchurch on New Zealand's South Island, killing several dozen people and wounding dozens more. It was afternoon on the day of prayer for Muslims.



The carnage was purposeful, livestreamed on Facebook. This was a heinous act of violence designed to be seen and shared. A shooter, apparently using a helmet camera, led viewers on his rampage.



The design of the crime is all too recognizable.



It is Pittsburgh, where a gunman killed 11 people in a synagogue.



It is a South Texas church, where a murderer killed 26 people.



It is a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., where the death toll was six.



It is terrorism carried out against a targeted group of victims at their most peaceful and thus vulnerable: people at prayer. One can speculate about a possible motive  in this case, white nationalist rage  but logic fails to justify such twisted acts.



New Zealand, like the United States, is a multicultural nation where Muslims are assimilated contributors to society. But like other groups, including Jewish people, Muslims are a highly visible minority, owing to their cultural identity and pattern of worship.



One aspect of this crime that gained immediate attention was the livestream. Early evidence suggested the internet also played a role in fomenting the gunman's hateful ideology. The dark corners of cyberspace are full of such lunacy.



All kinds of ideas, good and evil, go viral through social media. Societies can't outlaw hate. Government cannot regulate thought or ban words.



In the United States, the First Amendment doesn't take sides. Short of explicit threats, free speech must be free, which limits the ability of lawmakers to prevent eruptions of hate like the one in New Zealand.



But that doesn't mean civilized societies are powerless. Gatekeepers such as Facebook and other social media purveyors do have a responsibility to patrol and regulate their own venues. And all of us have a responsibility to eradicate racial supremacy and other vile forms of bigotry.



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.



If all of us listen, those messages have a chance of squelching these senseless acts.





The above editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune. It was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

TORONTO - WestJet Airlines plans to stick with deliveries of Boeing 737 Max aircraft once regulators approve the plane for re-entry into service.

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A worker walks next to a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane parked at Boeing Field in Seattle on March 14, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Ted S. Warren

TORONTO - WestJet Airlines plans to stick with deliveries of Boeing 737 Max aircraft once regulators approve the plane for re-entry into service.

The Calgary-based airline says it won't follow the lead of Indonesia's flag carrier, which cancelled its multibillion-dollar order for 49 Max 8 jets, citing a loss of confidence after two deadly crashes in the past six months.

WestJet had expected to add two more of the planes this year to increase its fleet to 13, but Boeing has suspended all future deliveries.

Spokeswoman Lauren Stewart says the 37 remaining deliveries in its order won't take place until the grounding is lifted and it thoroughly evaluates any upgrades.

"If the grounding has been lifted and the aircraft is approved for re-entry into service by all relevant regulatory bodies, we will take all deliveries as intended," she wrote in an email.

Stewart said the narrow-body planes remain "a vital part of the fleet," having performed "safely, reliably and efficiently" since 2017.

"WestJet remains unrelenting in putting safety at the forefront and will thoroughly evaluate processes, procedures and any further required training before these aircraft once again take to the skies."

Air Canada declined to say if it still has faith in the plane.

Right now our focus is minimizing the impact on our customers and as deliveries are suspended we have no further comments to share on our fleet plans," stated spokeswoman Isabelle Arthur.

The Montreal-based airline has 24 Max 8 with 169 seats. That's from an order for 61 planes, including 11 Max 9s. Last month, it forecast that 36 Max 8s would be in its fleet by the end of this year and 50 by the end of 2020.

Sunwing didn't respond to requests for comment.

Garuda Indonesia is the first airline to cancel an order for the troubled planes.

J.P. Morgan transportation analyst Seth Seifman believes that most major players in global air travel would like to see the plane flying again soon.

But he said it can't take off again until investigators have reached preliminary conclusions about the March 10 Ethiopian Air crash and similarities with the Lion Air crash last October, which he said could come as early as next week.

"If the conclusion is that from an aircraft point of view, MCAS (computer system) was the main contributing factor, then the fix Boeing has developed post-Lion, combined with enhanced training, would be appropriate in this case as well," he wrote in a report.

However, if the investigation points to a different explanation then Boeing would have to address another cause.

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"The worst case for ending the grounding is an inconclusive result," he added.

Regulatory approval could be delayed because foreign regulators, including the Canadians and Europeans, have already discussed conducting their own assessments of Boeing's MCAS fix separate from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

"We believe it is in everyones interest to avoid a prolonged situation where the U.S. and perhaps a handful of other regulators have lifted the grounding but other important authorities have not since this could be a step toward a less competent, less efficient, and more politicized global regulatory regime over time."

Seifman said customers could stop paying advances on the plane because of uncertainty over delivery dates. He estimates the aircraft sells for about US$55 million despite a US$120 million list price.

Airline compensation will likely remain unknown because of confidential contractual terms. But he assumes Boeing will pay some compensation  likely in future purchase terms than in a refund  to customers facing serious challenges from the global grounding and to avoid future legal action.

Companies in this story: (TSX:WJA, TSX:AC).Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Basia Sokal, ex-president of the Winnipeg Labour Council, quit her job Tuesday citing frustration with and misogyny among her male union brothers.

Many local union members were aware of in-fighting at the Winnipeg Labour Council long before its president's jaw-dropping resignation Tuesday.

Despite at least six organized labour groups calling for a Canadian Labour Congress investigation into allegations of sexist and degrading comments from Canadian Union of Public Employees members, it appears a formal investigation didn't start until this week.

The Free Press has obtained a May 2018 letter signed by six unions, and written on Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1505 stationery.

The ATU  along with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers Local 856, Canadian Office and Professional Employees Union Local 342, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2085, Union of Health and Environment Workers Local 50012 and Winnipeg Association of Public Service Officers  wrote the CLC, asking it to investigate major issues at the WLC, and "perceived incidents of intimidation and harassment brought forward by members of CUPE."

ATU Local 1505 president Aleem Chaudhary said Thursday there was little followup.

"I was told that they would investigate, but we never did hear back from them after that. And after that, I stopped really dealing with the CLC or the WLC, because I just did not feel that it was being run properly," he said.

CLC Prairie regional director Darla Deguire wouldn't confirm whether a WLC investigation started last year.

Two days after labour council president Basia Sokal resigned during an explosive meeting in Winnipeg, Deguire said the CLC has begun an investigation regarding her comments.

"We have now initiated our internal investigative process. So any further comments would be inappropriate while the process is underway," she said by phone Thursday.

CUPE Local 500 president Gord Delbridge said he wasn't aware of the 2018 joint letter before the Free Press sent him a copy. He refuted some of the complaints therein, and said CUPE doesn't try to dominate discussions at the labour council.

According to its web presence, the WLC executive board is comprised of 10 members, representing some 45,000 members of affiliated unions in the Winnipeg area.

Download Letter to the Canadian Labour Congress

"We've never tried to dominate the committee with members. That's not the case, and I think that's shown throughout our history," he said, noting CUPE has one seat at the executive table.

Delbridge said a conversation with the CLC did occur before the civic election last year, as political action committee members hotly debated which Winnipeg council candidates to support.

"My impression was that the CLC, as well as the rest of the affiliates, all walked out of the meeting feeling satisfied that everything was going according to their expectations," he said.

The 2018 ATU letter came to light after Sokal spoke out about alleged sexist and degrading comments she said she was subject to while working as WLC president since January 2017.

Sokal made a 15-minute resignation speech to a room of about 60 people Tuesday, which was later uploaded online. She outlined some of the comments she'd allegedly heard from union brothers, including: "You women are all the same. If you don't like what's going on, why don't you just leave?', "'Let me tell you a story about what happened to the last person who didn't agree with us," and "Nice tits."

Delbridge said Thursday he was not aware of any inappropriate behaviour from CUPE delegates.

"There was some disagreements that took place with the (2018 civic election) endorsement process. However, Ive always attempted to deal with union leaders and co-ordinating bodies with respect, even when we disagree," he said.

CUPE is among the largest unions in Manitoba, representing more than 26,000 members. Some critics allege CUPE uses its large member base to stack labour council votes in its favour, not allowing for a democratic voting process.

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Delbridge didn't deny he brought many delegates to the room.

"I would always encourage that when it comes time to vote for candidates that people rally behind and encourage many people to come out, and support their cause thats going to benefit their members. Absolutely."

He said he welcomed the CLC investigation and said the results should be made public (as did Chaudhary).

"I think thats important that... when theres bullying and harassment allegations, that we wouldnt accept any type of gender-based comments that are being reported in the workplace. Of course, we wont tolerate those types of comments in our union either," Delbridge said.

jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @_jessbuIts like Christmas coming early for Winnipeg city hall  Tuesdays federal budget held a surprise for Canadian municipalities: a one-time doubling of federal gas tax revenue.

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Its like Christmas coming early for Winnipeg city hall  Tuesdays federal budget held a surprise for Canadian municipalities: a one-time doubling of federal gas tax revenue.

For Winnipeg, it will mean an extra $40 million-plus to spend on infrastructure projects and a chance to do some of the reconstruction of residential streets that had been shelved due to a funding dispute with the province.

PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Mayor Brian Bowman listens as Federal Minister Jim Carr addresses a press briefing after they met Thursday to discuss infrastructure funding.

"When I heard the number, my reaction was, Youve got to me kidding me,'" Mayor Brian Bowman said.

Bowman spent an hour Thursday afternoon in the downtown Winnipeg offices of Jim Carr, the senior federal cabinet minister from Manitoba and the minister of international trade diversification, where he was briefed on the budget's impact on Winnipeg.

The 2019 plan includes a doubling of gas tax revenues, distributed directly to municipalities across the country, amounting to an extra $2.2 billion dispersed.

A total of $72 million will be spread among municipalities across Manitoba, based on population, with Winnipeg expected to get a little more than $40 million.

According to Winnipegs 2019 budget book, the city was expecting to receive almost $44 million in federal gas tax revenue this year, which has already been allocated to a variety of infrastructure projects. It appears the bonus $40 million could salvage at least part of the citys street reconstruction program.

The city had planned to rebuild 53 neighbourhood streets and 11 lanes this year, but scrapped it, saying the province had retroactively refused to pay $40 million for 2018 street work. Rather than increase property taxes or borrow to make up the lost money, council decided to use money it had planned on local street work in 2019 and 2020 to pay the provinces share.

Bowman said council will decide how the new extra funds are spent.

"Id like it to go to roads, local roads in particular. There could be other things, active transportation networks, recreation," the mayor told reporters. "Council will ultimately have to decide.

"The sooner that (federal) budget passes and the sooner those funds flow, the more flexibility well have for this year, especially this years construction season. If we get into May, June, its going to severely restrict or limit outright our ability to invest in roads for this season."

Carr said Ottawa will write the city a cheque as soon as the federal budget is approved by Parliament, which he said will occur no later than the end of June.

"They will be given a cheque and they will spend it as they see fit," the Winnipeg MP said.

Missing from the Thursday meeting was Premier Brian Pallister or a representative of the provincial government.

"The province has said it prefers bilateral meetings and its not interested at this stage in trilateral ones," Carr said.

A spokesman for Pallister said the issue of the premier's non-participation is a "Liberal-manufactured issue to distract Manitobans from the ongoing scandals in Ottawa."

Press secretary David von Meyenfeldt said Manitoba "will not proceed with trilateral meetings unless the federal cabinet implements a regional minister structure. In the meantime, well continue to work with federal ministers and departments on matters within their respective areas of responsibility, such as the infrastructure minister on infrastructure priorities."

Last month, the Free Press revealed Manitoba had roughly $1.9 billion in federal allocations that were sitting untapped, due to slow carbon-retrofit negotiations, half-finalized housing agreements and spats over cost-shared infrastructure projects.

In mid-February, Carr reached out to Pallister and Bowman, requesting a meeting on the issue. Pallister instead offered to dispatch deputy premier Heather Stefanson, with his office saying the premier would attend if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was at the table.

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The meeting seemed on-track until Carr's revelation Thursday.

The Winnipeg MP said the federal government and city hall are aligned on many issues, and he looks forward to having the province join them in discussions of mutual interest.

Carr said there are no meetings planned with Pallister, nor any member of his government, to brief the province on the federal budget.

 with files from Dylan Robertson

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.caWhen university-age Bahai believers in Iran want to protest how that country oppresses members of their religion, they go to school.

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When university-age Bahai believers in Iran want to protest how that country oppresses members of their religion, they go to school.

They dont go to regular state-supported universities and colleges  they are banned from those by the government because of their beliefs. They attend "underground" classes run by Bahai professors, where they study a variety of subjects.

When Clint Curle, a senior adviser at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, heard about the issue, "I became immediately interested in the story, and how the Bahai community in Iran is responding."

For Curle, the issue touches on two fundamental human rights of interest to the Winnipeg museum: education and freedom of religion and conscience. It also shows how oppressed communities can creatively respond to having their rights denied.

"Its a brilliant, non-violent response to oppression, an inspiring story deeply rooted in the Bahai faith," he said.

On March 26, the museum will focus on the issue with a public event titled: Persecution, Protection and Resilience: Canada and the Bahais of Iran.

The free event, co-sponsored by the Bahai Community of Canada and the local Bahai assembly, will feature a presentation by Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, who was working for Newsweek in 2009, when he was accused of being a spy and imprisoned by the Iranian government.

Following his release, Bahari wrote the memoir Then They Came for Me: a Familys Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival, which was adapted for the big screen (Rosewater) in 2014 by former Daily Show host Jon Stewart.

In an interview from his home in London, England, Bahari, 52, said he is "dedicated to pursuing freedom of conscience in Iran."

This includes speaking up on behalf of Bahais, even though he is not a member of the religion  he calls himself a "non-practising Muslim."

Bahari said opposition to the religion in Iran is rooted in "hatred by the clergy" in that country, where they are considered heretics. As a result, he said, "they are treated as second-class citizens."

He spoke admiringly of the Bahai Institute for Higher Education, the "underground" school that offers 38 university-level programs in science, engineering, business and management, the humanities and the social sciences. Students meet in homes, offices and other clandestine locations.

The institutes courses are recognized by almost 100 universities around the world, including the University of Manitoba.

"It shows the best kind of peaceful response," Bahari said of how the institute continues to offer programs despite periodic raids, confiscation of equipment, general harassment and imprisonment of faculty members.

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Its also "an educational miracle. They are fighting a brutal regime with education and creativity. It is instructive for the world."

For Payam Towfigh, a Winnipeg Bahai who came to Canada 30 years ago from Iran as a refugee, the event is a chance to "shine a light" on persecution in that country, and to explore ways Winnipeggers can collaborate with local Bahais and others "to end this injustice."

Its also personal; he has a nephew studying at the institute in Iran.

"Im excited to raise public awareness about it," he said.

"Getting an education is a human right."

faith@freepress.mb.caThe Manitoba governments money tap has been temporarily shut down, raising the possibility, however slim, that the province will be unable to pay some bills and civil servants paycheques will be delayed.

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The Manitoba governments money tap has been temporarily shut down, raising the possibility, however slim, that the province will be unable to pay some bills and civil servants paycheques will be delayed.

On Thursday, the Pallister government was unable to pass an interim supply bill when Independent MLA Steven Fletcher prevented unanimous consent in the legislature for extending debate beyond 5 p.m.

MLAs will not sit again until April 1 due to spring break.

Government House Leader Kelvin Goertzen blamed Opposition stall tactics for the failure of the bill to pass, noting the NDP had used procedural motions to bypass house business on two consecutive days this week.

"Theres never been an Opposition thats not allowed interim supply to pass to ensure that people get paid and the government continues to provide the services they need," he said.

Even when the Progressive Conservatives forced the legislature to sit all summer in 2013 to protest the NDP governments decision to boost the provincial sales tax, they allowed financial appropriation bills to pass, Goertzen said.

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In a last ditch effort to pass the supply bill Thursday, both Goertzen and later NDP house leader Nahanni Fontaine moved motions to allow debate to continue past 5 p.m.

On both occasions, Fletcher objected. He said the government had time to pass the bill before Thursdays deadline.

Finance Minister Scott Fielding said he and his officials will look into the potential impacts of the failure to pass the bill.

"I do want to emphasize the fact that were going to work to find a solution for Manitobans that depend on services and depend on getting paid," he said.

Fielding said he hoped the Opposition does not continue to stall house business when MLAs return.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.caOTTAWA  The Pallister government is accusing the federal Liberals of not trusting the provinces, by withholding information on a crucial overhaul of how major energy and infrastructure projects are assessed.

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OTTAWA  The Pallister government is accusing the federal Liberals of not trusting the provinces, by withholding information on a crucial overhaul of how major energy and infrastructure projects are assessed.

"Its concerning; its not how you build a relationship on something as important as environmental assessments and working with our Indigenous communities," Manitoba Enterprise Minister Blaine Pedersen told the Free Press.

He testified Thursday to the Senate energy committee on Bill C-69, which will change how officials assess the effects of everything from pipelines to hydroelectric dams on the environment and Indigenous people.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has tasked senators with fixing the bill, after concerns it will go against the legislations stated goals of speeding up reviews and flagging potential issues early in the process.

A major source of tension has been the lack of a long-promised "project list" to outline the criteria for what will fall within the scope of the new regime.

Pedersen, for example, has wondered whether upgrades to existing transmission lines will prompt reviews.

On Thursday, he told senators Ottawa showed two of his officials a draft project list  on the condition they not tell him what it says.

"They were sworn to secrecy before they walked into the meeting," he testified. "They were not allowed to memorize it, copy it or otherwise do anything with it."

Senators, many of whom were appointed by Trudeau, have derided his government for months over not providing a list. Some were aghast to hear Ottawa had presented its draft list secretly.

A spokesman for the Manitoba government said Ottawa passed the draft around during a March 5 federal-provincial-territorial meeting in Toronto of department heads who oversee environmental policies.

"A draft project list was circulated for discussion. It was done on a confidential basis under signed non-disclosure agreements," the spokesman wrote.

Sen. Rosa Galvez, the committee chairwoman, suggested the drafted list might be confidential, due to commercial considerations, as it would reveal which industries would be affected by the bill before its scope is finalized.

Pedersen said elected provincial officials like himself ought to see the list, in order to help craft it.

"We deal with confidential stuff all the time at cabinet," he said in an interview. "If its explicit that they do not want it shared commercially, we will respect that."

When asked why Ottawa is taking so long to publish its project list, a spokeswoman for federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna wrote that her office is "consulting widely," and claimed the government had spoken to the provinces about the criteria prior to this months meeting.

"This is a normal practice in the enactment of any new regulations," Sabrina Kim wrote.

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Meanwhile, Pedersen said encoding assessment powers for Indigenous leaders as well as the United Nations language of "free, prior and informed consent" requires more clear definitions.

"More needs to be done to clarify how traditional (Indigenous) knowledge is defined, and how it will be reconciled with scientific evaluation, in the event they differ," he said, later stressing the two often complement each other.

Manitoba Sen. Mary Jane McCallum, who hails from a reserve in the north, challenged Pedersen, saying Manitoba Hydro has brought flooding and environmental devastation to communities, with limited benefits.

"Im sort of overwhelmed with all that youve said, and I dont know how to proceed from there," she said.

"In Manitoba, we really havent had that conversation in public, between the government and First Nations, because theres a power imbalance," she said. "First Nations want economic development as well."

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.caThe Pallister government is on a collision course with another Tory-appointed board of a Crown corporation -- this time with the overseers of Manitoba Public Insurance.

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The Pallister government is on a collision course with another Tory-appointed board of a Crown corporation -- this time with the overseers of Manitoba Public Insurance.

MPI management and its board have been planning to allow customers to perform certain basic transactions -- such as renewing a driver's licence or auto insurance -- online.

Those plans are being opposed by insurance brokers through their association, which, sources say, have the ear of senior levels of government, including the premier.

The Crown corporation's board of directors is so concerned with the push back MPI has been receiving from the Pallister government for its service modernization plan that it solicited a legal opinion to clarify the role and responsibilities of the board.

"We're about to see a major brouhaha here. The board is so concerned about this that they're just besides themselves," a source said.

Mass resignations possible: source

He said the concern is so great that mass resignations are possible -- not unlike what occurred last year with the Manitoba Hydro board. In that case, all but one director (a government MLA) resigned over the board's inability to meet directly with Premier Brian Pallister to resolve "a number of critical issues," including the corporation's staggering debt load.

An MPI board member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said if the corporation is able to go ahead with its plans, the need for services by insurance brokers could decline. But there would still be a substantial requirement for brokers for the foreseeable future.

The board director said "It's implausible" that the corporation would not consider ways to better meet customer needs and improve its bottom line through new technologies.

The director said it is understandable that the Insurance Brokers Association of Manitoba (IBAM) is concerned with the effect of the potential changes on its members and that the transition to a new service delivery system is fair to everyone.

Asked if the entire board is poised to resign, the director said: "There are limits to what each director is prepared to accept and I trust their individual judgment to respond as they see fit."

The board member noted that IBAM "is a formidable lobbying force at every level of government."

That includes the premier, who used to own an insurance business in Portage la Prairie.

'It's tense'

The director said the board is very well qualified and has worked extremely hard for three years to improve an organization "that was brutally manipulated by political interests in the NDP regime." The new president and CEO, Benjamin Graham, is "probably the single most gifted public servant in the province," the director said, adding that both the board and senior management are on the same page about the proposed service changes.

However, the fear is that government will step in at the behest of IBAM and scuttle some of the proposed reforms.

"It's complicated. It's tense. But in Manitobans' interests, it better land in the right spot," the director said of the tug of war that is going on right now.

Similar to situation faced by MLL board

Sources said the MPI situation is similar to that faced by Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries under PC appointee Polly Craik and her board. Craik was recently removed as chair and board member by the government before her term was set to expire. She said her removal came after she objected to government bypassing her board and providing "financial direction" directly to the Crown corporation's management.

The Free Press asked for an interview with Crown Services Minister Colleen Mayer, but received a statement instead.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Colleen Mayer, Minister of Crown Services

"We expect Manitoba Public Insurance and insurance brokers in this province will work together to modernize service delivery including, but not limited to, online services," the statement said. "Our government is firm in our belief that issues between the Insurance Brokers Association of Manitoba and Manitoba Public Insurance be worked out between these two organizations as brokers play an important role in the service network Manitobans rely on to purchase vehicle insurance."

Attempts Thursday to reach MPI board chair Michael Sullivan for comment were unsuccessful.

Grant Wainikka, CEO of IBAM, said his organization has been in discussions with MPI about online services but it has yet to receive a "road map" on any planned changes.

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"We think it's very important for consumers to get the advice they need and to understand the risks that are before them before making purchasing decisions around auto insurance," he said in an interview.

Rather than being fearful of changing technology, Wainikka said, brokers embrace it. But they believe that any online transaction should go through an insurance broker, which would benefit everyone, including purchasers.

"Everyone of these transactions is far more complex than it might appear on the surface," he said.

IBAM said other jurisdictions with public auto insurance, such as Saskatchewan and British Columbia, "have a very clear and unqualified commitment to the broker channel and they understand that the broker channel serves them exceedingly well," Wainikka said.

Graham, MPI's CEO, said in a statement to the Free Press: "Both Manitoba Public Insurance and the Insurance Brokers Association of Manitoba are committed to providing exceptional service and coverage to Manitobans. Discussions are being held on how this customer service model will evolve over time to meet the changing needs of our customers. MPI is committed to working with IBAM and I believe both organizations are going to move in the right direction for the benefit of Manitobans."

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.caThe privacy of Tina Fontaine's surviving relatives should have been respected when the Manitoba advocate for children and youth published a 115-page report that detailed the teen's life and death, First Nations groups say.

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This article was published 22/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The privacy of Tina Fontaine's surviving relatives should have been respected when the Manitoba advocate for children and youth published a 115-page report that detailed the teen's life and death, First Nations groups say.

"They will always have to live with this burden of their loved one that they lost, and all of the losses before that that they had no control over," said Tara Petti, chief executive officer of the Southern First Nations Network of Care.

"We believe that the advocate can take more care in how she presents the information that is being published."

The Southern First Nations Network of Care and the Southern Chiefs' Organization are joining a chorus of criticism levelled at Daphne Penrose in the wake of her report about what could have helped 15-year-old Tina before and after she made her way to Winnipeg in the summer of 2014. Tina's body was pulled from the Red River in August 2014.

The report called for changes to the school system, mental health services, Manitoba Justice's victim services, and child-welfare protocols. It recommended the province establish "safe and secure" treatment centres for severely addicted youth.

It charted Tina's life from birth to death, and the report also shed light, for the first time, on the childhood and life experiences of Tina's mother. Although she didn't want to participate in the report, the advocate's office delved into the mother's Child and Family Services records dating to when she was six, and illustrated the early trauma and sexual exploitation she experienced.

Tina's mother isn't named in the report, and neither are other relatives whose personal information was published even though they declined interviews with the advocate's office. She couldn't be reached for comment Friday.

As a result of such information being made public, the Southern First Nations Network of Care reached out to affected individuals, Petti said.

"We have taken steps to ensure that there was no harm," she said, although she said she couldn't elaborate due to confidentiality agreements.

The agency expressed its concerns to the advocate's office before the report was publicly released March 12, and Petti said she hopes there will be a more "collaborative approach" when future reports are released.

During a media event at Sagkeeng First Nation last week, Penrose said she hoped the details included in the report would show Manitobans neither Tina nor her mother were to blame for what happened to Tina. The report states the decision to release personal information about family members was made with careful consideration.

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"I know that to tell Tinas story in a vacuum and without mention of those who loved her and surrounded her is to fail in my duty to tell the truth of Tinas story. Tina was influenced by many people, and she had two moms who loved her. Tinas first mom loved her and tried to manage her growing family, but was unable in the long-term to provide the care Tina needed in her life," Penrose wrote in the report, also referring to Tina's "grandma," who raised her, as her second mother.

Other groups, including a Winnipeg coalition for sexually exploited youth, have criticized the report's recommendations and what they described as a lack of consultation.

Earlier this week, Families Minister Heather Stefanson said Penrose didn't alert the province to 17 youth who the advocate's office said are in immediate danger. In response, Penrose said she's been sharing information about at-risk youth for months.

In a statement this week, she said her office spoke with families, policy makers, sexual exploitation survivors and Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups in preparation for the Tina report.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemayHe just couldnt keep this one under wraps.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 22/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

He just couldnt keep this one under wraps.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came under fire for snacking on a chocolate bar during an all-night voting session in the House of Commons.

"We all know that the house rules do not permit us to eat in this place and I cant help but observing that during the last vote, a number of people were eating in their seats including the minister of defence, the minister of Canadian heritage and the prime minister, who appeared to be hiding a bagel in his desk," Conservative MP Scott Reid said.

"Mr. Speaker, the prime minister has already stained this place with corruption. He does not need to stain it with mustard as well," Reid added, referencing the SNC-Lavalin affair Trudeau and the Liberal party are tangled up in.

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The SNC-Lavalin controversy came to light in February and alleges Trudeaus office pressured then-attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to intervene in criminal legal proceedings against SNC-Lavalin, an engineering and construction company that had been charged with fraud and corruption.

That controversy was the reason for Wednesday nights meeting where the Liberal party dismissed a Conservative motion to have Trudeau allow the former attorney general to testify again about the affair.

As a result, the Conservatives filibustered through Thursday morning  and were surely upset with the Liberal party, likely leading to the sweet-tooth shutdown.

Although Reids jabs may have been petty, he was correct. The rules state, "In the chamber, members may refresh themselves with glasses of water during debate, but the consumption of any other beverage or food is not allowed."

"Indeed, Mr. Speaker, I apologize. It was a chocolate bar, but I apologize," Trudeau said, admitting his wrongdoing as supporters seated nearby grinned.

 New York Daily NewsOTTAWA  A left-learning advocacy group is standing firm amid calls for it to cancel a polarizing speakers appearance at an upcoming panel, due to statements some have deemed anti-Semitic.

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This article was published 21/3/2019 (996 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA  A left-learning advocacy group is standing firm amid calls for it to cancel a polarizing speakers appearance at an upcoming panel, due to statements some have deemed anti-Semitic.

Linda Sarsour is scheduled to appear on an April 26 panel organized by the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg (SPCW), titled "Sorry Not Sorry: Unapologetically Working for Social Justice."

Sarsour is an American-born Muslim of Palestinian origin who gained notoriety for helping plan the Womens March on Washington. That massive demonstration was one of the largest in United States history, but it was also marred by allegations of anti-Semitic rhetoric, for which Sarsour apologized last fall.

Still, Sarsour has attracted controversy for her criticism of Israel, which some believe cross the line into anti-Jewish sentiment.

Last September, she chided Muslims for not adequately advocating for Palestinians, accusing them of "trying to humanize the oppressor."

We wouldnt let a Hitler come into our city and talk under the guise of free speech." Ron East

In November, she railed against criticism of a congresswomans support of Israel boycotts by chiding activists who "always choose their allegiance to Israel over their commitment to democracy," echoing a decades-old trope about Jewish people having allegiances outside of mainstream society.

Previously, Sarsour has drawn heat for saying feminists cannot support the state of Israel.

Shes also been criticized for not distancing herself from controversial preacher Louis Farrakhan, who last year said "I'm not an anti-Semite. I'm anti-termite." Farrakhan praised Hitler in the 1980s while making comments about God putting Jews "in the oven" and "false Jews that are promoting lesbianism."

Linda Sarsour has attracted controversy for her criticism of Israel, which some believe cross the line into anti-Jewish sentiment. (Mark Lennihan / The Associated Press files)

Sarsour has also embraced Palestinian activist Rasmea Odeh, whom an Israeli court convicted of terrorism in a supermarket bombing that killed two students but who was freed in a 1980 prisoner exchange. Sarsour has claimed Odeh did not have a fair trial.

Those comments are enough for SPCW to take Sarsour off their panel, argues Ron East. He launched an online petition calling for that, and accusing Sarsour of "anti-Israel hate."

"We wouldnt let a Hitler come into our city and talk under the guise of free speech," East said in an interview.

"There is a wave of people that are standing up and saying this is not acceptable in our city; not in Winnipeg, not in 2019."

So far he has collected more than 1,250 signatures along with publicity from B'nai Brith Canada.

East said Sarsour will be "demonizing Jewish people" on the last sabbath day of Passover. He fears she will "divide our city and cause more hate and more polarization" amid a rise in reported anti-Jewish incidents.

The online petition has already convinced Seven Oaks School Division to cancel the SPCWs booking at the division's Jefferson Avenue Performing Arts Centre; the group said Thursday that it is seeking another venue.

In an online message defending its choice of panelists, SPCW executive director Kate Kehler said many who criticize the Israeli government over its treatment of Palestinians are not anti-Jewish.

Having thoughtful voices heard from different perspectives is essential to serious and nuanced discussion." Kate Kehler

"Having thoughtful voices heard from different perspectives is essential to serious and nuanced discussion. We find it very difficult to believe that the Obama administration (which, in 2011, declared her a "Champion of Change") would grant an award to someone with anti-Semitic views," Kehler wrote.

She added that Sarsour will be able to speak about confronting ones own bias. "This conversation is about doing work that makes people uncomfortable," Kehler wrote.

Sarsour has previously dismissed accusations of anti-Semitism as a distraction from her critiques of Israel. Some left-leaning Jewish groups defend Sarsour on that grounds, noting that she raised funds for victims of last falls Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, as well as a vandalized Jewish cemetery a year prior.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca

By Gwynne Dyer



Extreme right-wing terrorism, mostly of the "white nationalist" variety, is becoming as big a problem as Islamist terrorism in many places. That's certainly the case in the United States, where the U.S. Government Accounting Office calculated last year that 119 Americans have been killed by Islamist extremists since the 9/11 attacks, and 106 Americans by far-right extremists.



It's also true that almost all the attacks are designed to exploit social media. Brenton Tarrant had a number of semi-automatic rifles with him in Christchurch, but his real weapon was the GoPro camera on his headband livestreaming his atrocities.



All too common in the world, but I was still astounded when I heard that such a huge terrorist attack had happened in New Zealand. Fifty murdered in two mosques! This is a country of over 4 million people where there were only 35 homicides in all of last year. Then I heard the terrorist was an Australian, and it made a bit more sense.



I write this with some reluctance because I have close family there, but Australia is the most racist country in the English-speaking world. Even in America after two years of Donald Trump, you are less likely to hear overtly racist or anti-Muslim comments (though you certainly hear a lot).



Whereas New Zealand is rather like Canada: There is undoubtedly still some racism and anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim prejudice, especially in rural areas and in francophone Quebec, but it is rarely expressed openly because it just sounds ignorant. And the urban young really do seem color-blind.



So the real question of the day is: Why is Australia like that? Why did it make more sense when I heard that the Islamophobic mass-murderer was Australian? The answer may lie largely in the character of the Australian media  and I don't mean the social media. I mean the "mainstream" media. Mostly, I mean Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.



The monolithic dominance of Murdoch's News Corp over the Australian media landscape has few counterparts in other democratic countries, and it is reflexively anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant. Indeed, Murdoch himself was over 40 years old before the "White Australia" policy (no non-white immigrants) was officially abandoned.



Murdoch's various organs never weary of demonizing Muslims, but they are full-spectrum racists, and recently they have been playing with white nationalist ideas. Within the past year they have repeated the myth about a "white genocide" among South African white farmers, and News Corp's leading national columnist, Andrew Bolt, has written a column about the alleged "Great Replacement" (of white people by non-white immigrants).



News Corp has been on the wrong side of almost every argument from Australian participation in the Vietnam War and the Iraq War to the brutal policy of refusing to admit refugees who have been rescued at sea (they are all sent to rot in detention camps rented from the neighboring Pacific Island countries of Nauru and Papua New Guinea). By now, this policy is so normalized that it has bipartisan support in the Australian parliament.



Of course, there is a chicken-and-egg question here. Murdoch and most of his journalists enthusiastically peddle this tripe, but they are Australians who were born into it. They didn't invent it, and doing it comes naturally. The real reason Australians are more racist than New Zealanders may lie further back in the past.



The two countries were settled within 50 years of each other by people from the same country and of the same ethnic stock: English, Irish and Scottish. But the people they encountered at the other end were very different.



Australia's Aborigines lived in small hunter-gatherer groups who never developed agriculture despite 65,000 years in the country. New Zealand's Maoris arrived only 500 years before the whites, but they already had farms, lived in proto-states (chiefdoms) and built hillforts all over the North Island.



The arrival of white colonists was a disaster for the Maoris, but they were tough enough to get the respect of the invaders. When a treaty was finally signed in 1840, it was written in both languages. The killing went on for another 30 years and the Maoris lost a lot, but the country is officially bilingual today and everybody does understand, more or less, that you can and must live alongside people who are different.



White Australian settlers had no difficult wars against dangerous opponents, just easy subjugation of poorly armed Aboriginal people who lived in small groups and were divided by 600 different languages. The Aborigines didn't even get citizenship and the right to vote until 1967  so traditional white Australians come quite unprepared to the world of cultural pluralism. Some of them really don't like it.



White Australian society is different: more aggressively nationalist, more racially conscious, perhaps more paranoid. Not all white Australians, probably not even most, think like that, but the history of white race riots in Australia is long: against Chinese in the 1800s, against Italians in the 1930s, against Lebanese in 2005.



That is the tradition Brenton Tarrant comes from, long before he logged on to various white supremacist websites. So no surprise, really.



Gwynne Dyer (gwynne763121476@aol.com) has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years. He is the author of "Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work)." The views expressed in the above article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.





A rescued dog from a Manitoba First Nation is finding new life as a therapy dog for first responders, much to the delight of the RCMP officer who took him in.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/3/2019 (996 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A rescued dog from a Manitoba First Nation is finding new life as a therapy dog for first responders, much to the delight of the RCMP officer who took him in.

Const. Lesley Steinke was posted to Poplar River First Nation at the start of last year, where she started meeting stray dogs who visit the local RCMP detachment in search of food.

RCMP PHOTO A stray pup discovered on Poplar River First Nation last fall by Const. Lesley Steinke. Steinke named him Casey. He eventually found a new home in Quebec and a new purpose as a therapy dog. His new owner named him Enzo.

One dog stood out. Unlike some of the other mutts, the small husky was "gentle and submissive."

"He was forced away by other more aggressive dogs, and when I hadn't seen him in a while, I went looking for him," said Steinke in an RCMP press release.

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Steinke found the dog in a nearby ditch, in poor condition. He was "emaciated," and his back had been tagged with purple spraypaint.

Rescued dog Enzo will be trained as a therapy dog to help first responders with PTSD. (Supplied)

The Mountie and the mutt soon formed a bond, and Steinke took him into her care and named him Casey. Despite her attachment to Casey, Steinke decided to put him up for adoption so that she could rescue other dogs.

"It was a tough decision to let Casey go, but I also trusted his journey would lead him to where he needed to be," said Steinke.

That journey took Casey to a new job  and a new name. In November, he was adopted by a clinical psychologist from Quebec who specializes in treating post-traumatic stress disorder among first responders. The psychologist, who renamed the dog Enzo, is training him to become a certified therapy dog for first responders.

Steinke, who was diagnosed with PTSD in 2014, called it "a true story of serendipity."

"As an officer who was diagnosed with PTSD, it means more to me than you can possibly imagine that he will be a mental health champion and help members like me move through trauma (and) PTSD."One of my New Years resolutions was to be better at responding to email. That worked about as well as most resolutions. I kept on top of things for a few weeks, but as January turned into February, the backsliding began. The number of unread emails started climbing again, as did my sense of despair. I tried to make myself feel a sense of accomplishment if I fired off a sufficient number of email responses, but it didnt take.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 22/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

One of my New Years resolutions was to be better at responding to email. That worked about as well as most resolutions. I kept on top of things for a few weeks, but as January turned into February, the backsliding began. The number of unread emails started climbing again, as did my sense of despair. I tried to make myself feel a sense of accomplishment if I fired off a sufficient number of email responses, but it didnt take.

This is a long-winded way of saying I can feel organizational psychologist Adam Grant loudly judging me. Writing in the New York Times recently, Grant argued, "You would never snub a colleague trying to strike up a conversation. Yet, when you ignore a personal email, thats exactly what youve done: digital snubbery... (V)olume isnt an excuse for not replying. Ignoring email is an act of incivility."

To be clear, Grant is not suggesting that every stray query be answered. But he suggests ones ability to answer email is a sign of other valued attributes in the workplace:

"Im too busy to answer your email really means Your email is not a priority for me right now. Thats a popular justification for neglecting your inbox: its full of other peoples priorities. But theres a growing body of evidence that if you care about being good at your job, your inbox should be a priority.

"When researchers compiled a huge database of the digital habits of teams at Microsoft, they found that the clearest warning sign of an ineffective manager was being slow to answer emails. Responding in a timely manner shows that you are conscientious  organized, dependable and hard-working. And that matters. In a comprehensive analysis of people in hundreds of occupations, conscientiousness was the single best personality predictor of job performance."

Grant makes a potent case. There are several possible rebuttals, and I desperately want at least one of them to be true so I dont need to answer every email.

First, what if one doesnt want to be a good manager? By this, I am not expressing a desire to be a bad manager, though that is what I would probably be. Rather, my desire is to not manage much at all and focus on the other aspects of my job. I am paid to be a professor and a columnist. I teach and research and write. Sure, these tasks require some management skills, but they are not the primary or even secondary aspects of the job.

Of course, email is nonetheless an omnipresent element of my day. Grant analogizes it to face-to-face interactions. This omits one of the more pernicious effects of email, which is that it enabled numerous for-profit and non-profit organizations to radically reduce support staff. Or, to think of Grants analogy another way, the problem is not the colleague who wants to have a chat with me, or the student who seeks my guidance. The problem is all the other people that a traditional secretary would have been able to have handled.

Cal Newport makes this point in an interesting Chronicle of Higher Education essay:

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"As the economist Peter G. Sassone observed in the early 1990s, personal computers made administrative tasks just easy enough to eliminate the need for dedicated support staff  you could now type your own memos using a word processor or file expenses directly through an intranet portal. In the short term, these changes seemed to save money.

"But as Sassone documents, shifting administrative tasks to high-skilled employees led to a decrease in their productivity, which reduced revenue  creating losses that often surpassed the amount of money saved by cuts to support staff. He describes this effect as a diminishment of intellectual specialization, and its a dynamic thats not spared higher education, where professors spend an increasing amount of time dealing with the administrative substrate of their institutions through electronic interfaces.

"In 2014, the Boise State anthropologist John Ziker released the results of a faculty time-use study, which found that the average professor spent a little over 60 hours a week working, with 30 per cent of that time dedicated to email and meetings. Anecdotal reports hint that this allocation has only gotten worse over the past five years."

Newport, the author of Deep Work, goes on to suggest "a reorganization of academic life to support careful thought and sustained attention." It sounds seductive, but it also cuts against the current university mania for "impact" and engagement"  i.e., ensuring professors do as much as possible to market their research to as wide a community as possible.

Much as I would like to cut the email cord, it is no longer possible. But I will try to take Grants more useful bits of advice to navigate my online correspondence. His suggestion to "start the morning by answering a few emails" to "get into a productive rhythm of deep work" is a good one. Trading social-media time for more correspondence is not the worst idea in 2019.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.Youth are using e-cigarettes (also known as vaping devices) at a rapidly increasing rate  a practice that constitutes an urgent threat to public health.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 22/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Youth are using e-cigarettes (also known as vaping devices) at a rapidly increasing rate  a practice that constitutes an urgent threat to public health.

Preliminary survey data suggest that, for the first time in 30 years, the youth smoking rate has increased in Canada, with e-cigarettes being the suspected cause. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control in the United States also found that 1.5 million more youth used e-cigarettes in 2018 than in 2017.

If unchecked by strict regulations, the next generation of youth is likely to be the most nicotine-dependent and the heaviest smoking in recent history, wiping out decades of efforts to protect them.

As researchers in tobacco control and pediatric bioethics, we seek to protect children and youth from lifelong nicotine dependency, initiation of cigarette use and the damage to lungs associated with e-cigarette use.

The most effective protection for children is evidence-based policy that addresses the reasons they start vaping. Advertising has been shown to promote a positive brand image for vaping devices and to spur youth to try them, while social media marketing has been linked to explosive growth in sales. Therefore, governments globally should promptly ban all e-cigarette advertising.

Governments should also mandate plain packaging for vaping devices, ban their use wherever tobacco use is banned and strictly limit the accessibility of sales to youth  placing e-cigarettes behind the pharmacy counter.

E-cigarettes are smoking initiation devices

Many people in the public health community had hoped that e-cigarettes would be an effective way for people to stop smoking(ourselves included). Thats because these battery-operated products deliver nicotine with fewer than the approximately 7,000 toxic chemicals in regular cigarettes.

However, e-cigarettes still contain potentially harmful substances  such as heavy metals like lead, volatile organic compounds and cancer-causing agents  and evidence of vaping being an effective cessation method is limited and, in many cases, ambiguous.

Research shows that most individuals (80 per cent) who attempt to quit smoking using e-cigarettes fail to do so. Of the 20 per cent who successfully quit smoking, most (80 per cent) remain active users of e-cigarettes.

The evidence also suggests that rather than being smoking cessation devices for adults, e-cigarettes act as smoking initiation devices for youth. The National Academy of Sciences systematic review published in early 2018 found substantial evidence that e-cigarette use increases the risks that youth and young adults will starting smoking cigarettes. It also found moderate evidence that vaping "increases the frequency and intensity" of subsequent cigarette smoking.

This finding has been affirmed in study after study published after the 2018 review. The increased risk of smoking is particularly strong (8.5-fold increased risk) in those who would otherwise be at low risk of starting to smoke cigarettes.

This pressing threat has been met with relatively muted concern. We dont hear the fire alarms that should be sounding, perhaps because of the subversive social media marketing strategies pioneered by e-cigarette manufacturers  strategies that have created a social media landscape "dominated by pro-vaping messages disseminated by the vaping industry and vaping proponents."

Using a cloud of misinformation, vaping companies have revolutionized the marketing of e-cigarettes and significantly increased youth vaping.

Whats more, the scientific research process can be corrupted. It is telling that studies published by the e-cigarette and tobacco industry are approximately 90 times more likely to find that e-cigarettes cause no harm than those published without such conflicts of interest.

The public needs clear, evidence-based information to address this emerging public health crisis.

Celebrity endorsements, gummy bear flavour

Communication to youth about the risks of e-cigarettes must address youth. Both youth and adults are attracted to e-cigarettes because they are thought to be cessation aids, to be a convenient way to avoid smoking laws and to be a safer alternative to smoking.

But e-cigarettes appeal to youth for additional reasons. Youth in particular are attracted to e-cigarettes because of their novelty, perceived harmlessness and multiplicity of flavours such as fruit, vanilla, chocolate and gummy bear.

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Such appeal is actively cultivated by the e-cigarette industry through aggressive marketing campaigns that emphasize "lifestyle" and product design.

This marketing also occurs through successful engagement on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, with online celebrity endorsements and by profiling a variety of smoke blowing "tricks."

We reiterate that the most effective protection for children is evidence-based policy that addresses the reasons youth initiate e-cigarette use. To protect children, governments globally should promptly ban all advertising of e-cigarettes.

Vaping devices should also be sold in plain packaging, should be banned wherever tobacco use is banned and should be placed behind the pharmacy counter.

Elliott M. Reichardt is a research associate at the University of Calgary and Juliet R. Guichon is an assistant professor at the Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary.

This article was first published at The Conversation Canada: theconversation.com/ca.Families Minister Heather Stefanson never uttered the term "sandbagged"  and yet, you can bet that's exactly what she thinks happened.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Families Minister Heather Stefanson never uttered the term "sandbagged"  and yet, you can bet that's exactly what she thinks happened.

Earlier this week, Stefanson challenged the integrity of Daphne Penrose, the Manitoba advocate for children and youth. Specifically, she alleged in the legislature that, prior to releasing a special report March 12 on the Tina Fontaine case, Penrose had withheld details of 17 youth who were in immediate danger due to a combination of family dysfunction, substance abuse and sexual exploitation.

As proof, Stefanson noted that during a face-to-face meeting with Penrose on Feb. 6, there was no mention of the 17 vulnerable youth. "This is unusual, I will say, where a children's advocate will not share this kind of information," the minister said.

The inference was clear: Stefanson believed she had been sandbagged by Penrose, who had withheld details about the vulnerable youth to surprise the provincial government and maximize publicity for her office.

It was an odd moment. Stefanson looked and sounded impatient, like a parent who was just finding out one of her children had been bad and had tried to conceal it.

JOHN WOODS / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Daphne Penrose, the Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth, is an independent, who reports directly to the legislature.

It was also an explosive allegation.

Penrose is an independent, who reports directly to the legislature. Suggesting she deliberately tried to embarrass the government by withholding information would be a devastating allegation that would call into question the ethics of the office.

If it were true, of course.

A deeper dive into the story reveals senior officials across multiple departments, agencies and authorities were fully briefed on the contents of the Tina report, and alerted to the 17 cases Penrose referenced, weeks before it was made public. (Tina was 15 when her body was pulled from the Red River in 2014.)

It started in early February, when Penrose's office provided draft copies of the Tina report  including evidence, analysis and recommendations  to a wide range of interested parties, including senior officials in Stefanson's department.

Two weeks later, her office held two "domain meetings" to fact-check the report and provide an opportunity to add information. The only thing missing was the final text of Penrose's executive summary, in which she makes her own commentary on the findings. That is not written until all affected departments and agencies have had a chance to respond.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth special report for the investigation into the death of Tina Fontaine.

The first of the two domain meetings took place on the morning of Feb. 25, and included senior officials from Child and Family Services (formerly the child protection branch), five CFS agencies and two CFS authorities. A second meeting that afternoon involved senior officials from the families, health, justice and education departments, along with representatives of the RCMP.

In addition, a complete and final copy of the Tina report was provided to all interested parties, including the minister's office, the day before it was publicly released.

What about the specific reference to 17 youth facing imminent danger? As it turns out, all of the youth Penrose referenced were known to the child-welfare system well before the Tina report was made public.

In an interview, Penrose said it was never her intention to suggest there were only 17 youth facing the same array of threats that Tina had. Or that the 17 youth were receiving no treatment.

She said there are many more in the child-welfare system and most are receiving some form of help. However, the help available for these kinds of cases is simply insufficient, particularly when it comes to addictions treatment.

Of the 17 cases referenced in the report, most have been assessed by authorities and deemed eligible to receive Level 5 funding for treatment, the highest level afforded to a vulnerable child or youth. As well, all have been in touch with a CFS agency or Street Reach, the child-protection program overseen by the Families Department.

TIM SMITH/THE BRANDON SUN FILES Families Minister and MLA for Tuxedo Heather Stefanson.

"All of these kids are known to CFS and many of them would have, at points in time, received services from Street Reach," Penrose said. "The point in bringing these cases up is to publicize the fact that the resources that these kids need are just not there."

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On one level, it's not hard to figure out why Stefanson is angry at Penrose.

Since taking over the position, Penrose has been a constant source of concern at the political level of the Progressive Conservative government. Her reports on the chronic shortage of addictions treatment for youth and children, solitary confinement for youth offenders and Tina Fontaine are exceedingly direct in their analysis and commentary. In almost all instances, these reports have forced Premier Brian Pallister and his cabinet to scramble for answers.

In other words, Penrose is not afraid to take on the government, which, in theory, is exactly the kind of approach you would want from an independent watchdog.

In reality, however, it is not unusual for governments of all stripes to grow weary of watchdogs who insist on living up to the full letter of their mandates. It is a lot easier to support accountability when it's part of an election campaign slogan; once in government, accountability can be a real drag.

That is surely a lesson Stefanson is learning the hard way.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.caNew Zealand has acted promptly to reform its gun laws following recent shootings at two mosques in Christchurch that left 50 people dead and dozens injured. Canada should take note.

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This article was published 21/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

New Zealand has acted promptly to reform its gun laws following recent shootings at two mosques in Christchurch that left 50 people dead and dozens injured. Canada should take note.

Acting only days after the attacks, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Thursday that military-style semi-automatic rifles, assault rifles and high-capacity magazines will be banned in her country.

In Canada, meanwhile, doctors advocating for more restrictions on gun ownership have been told to "stay in your lane" by a national gun lobby.

MARK BLINCH / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES People comfort each other following a vigil remembering the victims of a shooting on Danforth Avenue in Toronto in July.

Dr. Najma Ahmed, a trauma surgeon at Torontos St. Michaels Hospital, was on call on July 22, 2018  the night two people were killed and 13 others injured in a mass shooting on Danforth Avenue.

That experience led her to co-found Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns, a group of physicians arguing that guns are a public health issue, and pushing for the passage of Bill C-71, which would strengthen Canadas gun laws.

It also put her squarely in the sights of a national gun lobby, the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, which bills itself as the voice of Canadian gun owners and argues the issue of gun control is outside the bounds of a doctors expertise.

The gun lobby targeted Dr. Ahmed on its website last month, urging members to flood the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario with complaints against the surgeon. The post provided a step-by-step guide on how to do this, complete with a link to the complaint form. "I hate to say it, but stay in your lane, doctor," the post chided.

VINCENT YU / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES A police officer stands guard in front of the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, where one of two mass shootings occurred.

If the "stay in your lane" mantra sounds familiar, its a phrase the National Rifle Association used on Twitter last year after the American College of Physicians published recommendations for reducing gun-related injuries and deaths.

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Dr. Ahmed has vowed she will not be bullied into silence. "From our lane we will treat the victims of gun violence and quite literally sew back together the shattered organs, vessels and lives torn apart by bullets fired by guns," she wrote in an opinion piece for the Globe and Mail.

In trying to silence Dr. Ahmed, the national firearm lobby has clearly forgotten that, in a democracy such as Canada, everyone has the right to voice their opinion on the vital issues of the day.

Its fine to reject someones opinion. But its disgraceful to try to prevent someone from voicing their opinion, or to mount a campaign to have them punished by their professional regulator simply for having the temerity to speak out on a controversial issue.

It can be argued that Canadas doctors not only have the right to speak out about gun control, but thanks to their first-hand knowledge of the bloody effects of gun violence, they have a moral obligation to share their views.

In response to the gun lobby groups online campaign, Ontarios physicians regulator received more than 70 complaints against Dr. Ahmed. Commendably, the college dismissed those complaints as politically motivated.

Its time for gun enthusiasts to welcome Canadian doctors into their lane and learn the damage done when bodies are pierced by bullets.BEIRA, Mozambique - With the flooding easing in parts of cyclone-stricken Mozambique on Friday, fears are rising that the waters could yield up many more bodies. The confirmed number of people killed in Mozambique and neighbouring Zimbabwe and Malawi climbed past 600.

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This article was published 21/3/2019 (996 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIRA, Mozambique - With the flooding easing in parts of cyclone-stricken Mozambique on Friday, fears are rising that the waters could yield up many more bodies. The confirmed number of people killed in Mozambique and neighbouring Zimbabwe and Malawi climbed past 600.

Eight days after Cyclone Idai struck southeast Africa's Indian Ocean coast, touching off some of the worst flooding in decades, the homeless, hungry and injured slowly made their way from devastated inland areas to the port city of Beira, which was heavily damaged itself but has emerged as the nerve centre for rescue efforts.

Flooding in Sofala Province in Mozambique.;

"Some were wounded. Some were bleeding," said Julia Castigo, a Beira resident who watched them arrive. "Some had feet white like flour for being in the water for so long."

Aid workers are seeing many children who have been separated from their parents in the chaos or orphaned.

Elhadj As Sy, secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said the relief efforts so far "are nowhere near the scale and magnitude of the problem," and the humanitarian needs are likely to grow in the coming weeks and months.

A helicopter flies above the area destroyed by cyclone idai in Chimanimani about 600 kilometres south east of Harare, Zimbabwe, Wednesday, March, 20, 2019. Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa visited a part of Chimanimnani affected by cyclone Idai and promised assitance in the form of food and rebuilding of homes. Hundreds are dead, many more missing and thousands at risk from massive flooding in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe caused by Cyclone Idai.(AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

"We should brace ourselves," he said.

Helicopters set off into the rain for another day of efforts to find people clinging to rooftops and trees.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed for stepped up support for victims of Idai saying the U.N. and its humanitarian partners are scaling up the response but "far greater international support is needed."

Motorcycles pass through a section of a bridge damaged by Cyclone Idai in Nyamatanda about 50 kilometres from Beira, in Mozambique, Thursday March, 21, 2019. Some hundreds are dead, many more still missing and thousands at risk from massive flooding across the region including Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe caused by Cyclone Idai. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

The U.N. chief said in a statement that "with crops destroyed in the breadbasket of Mozambique more people are at risk of food insecurity in all three countries."

With water and sanitation systems largely destroyed, waterborne diseases are also a growing concern.

"The situation is simply horrendous. There is no other way to describe it," As Sy said after touring camps for the growing number of displaced. "Three thousand people who are living in a school that has 15 classrooms and six, only six, toilets. You can imagine how much we are sitting on a water and sanitation ticking bomb."

This Tuesday, March 19, 2019 photo taken from Copernicus Sentinel-1 and provided by the European Space Agency, ESA, shows the extent of flooding, depicted in red, around the port town of Beira in Mozambique. following cyclone force winds and heavy rain near the coastal city. (ESA via AP)

The death toll in Mozambique rose to 293, with an untold number of people missing and the mortuary at Beira's central hospital already reported full. Deaths could soar beyond the 1,000 predicted by the country's president earlier this week, As Sy said.

The number of dead was put at 259 in Zimbabwe and 56 in Malawi.

Thousands made the trek from inland Mozambique toward Beira, some walking along roads carved away by the raging waters. Hundreds of others arrived by boat, ferried by fishermen who plucked stranded people from patches of land that had been turned into islands. Many of the arrivals were children.

A young boy sits on the edge of a collapsed bridge in Nhamatanda, about 100km west of Beira, Thursday, March 21, 2019. A week after Cyclone Idai lashed southern Africa, flooding still raged Thursday as torrential rains caused a dam to overflow in Zimbabwe, threatening riverside populations. The confirmed death toll in Zimbabwe, neighboring Mozambique and Malawi surpassed 500, with hundreds more feared dead in towns and villages that were completely submerged. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

In Beira, people salvaged the metal strips of roofs that had been peeled away like the skin of a fruit. Downed trees littered the streets.

And yet there were flashes of life as it used to be. White wedding dresses stood pristine behind a shop window that hadn't shattered.

A downtown sidewalk was Marta Ben's new home. The 30-year-old mother of five clutched a teary child to her hip as she described the sudden horror of the storm that destroyed their home in Beira.

A UN humanitarian helicopter prepares for a day of work, at the airport in the Mozambique city of Beira, Friday March 22 2019. Some hundreds of people are dead, many more still missing and with many thousands at risk from massive flooding in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe caused by Cyclone Idai. (AP Photo/Cara Anna)

"I've never seen anything like this," she said, barefoot, a cooking pot bubbling nearby. "We were not warned. Suddenly the roof flew away."

She and others now homeless begged passers-by for help, saying they had received nothing from the government or aid groups, not even bread.

In Zimbabwe, where roads began to open and some basic communications were set up, a fuller picture of the extent of the damage began to emerge.

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A villager sulvages what remains of a piece of clothing near a section of the road damaged by Cyclone Idai in Nhamatanda about 50 kilometres from Beira, in Mozambique, Friday March, 22, 2019. As flood waters began to recede in parts of Mozambique on Friday, fears rose that the death toll could soar as bodies are revealed. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

The victims included a mother buried in the same grave with her child; headmasters missing together with dozens of students; illegal gold and diamond miners swept away by raging rivers; and police officers washed away with their prisoners.

In the city of Mutare, Maina Chisiriirwa said she buried her son-in-law, who had gone to the diamond fields to mine illegally.

"There are no jobs and all he wanted was to feed his family. He was with his colleagues. They thought it would be easier to mine since the rains would keep the guards and the police away from patrolling," Chisiriirwa said.

His colleagues survived, but her son-in-law was swept away, she said.

___

Farai Mutsaka reported from Mutare, Zimbabwe.WASHINGTON - Special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday turned over his long-awaited final report on the contentious Russia investigation that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trump's presidency, entangled Trump's family and resulted in criminal charges against some of the president's closest associates.

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This article was published 22/3/2019 (995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FILE - In this June 21, 2017 file photo, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, the special counsel probing Russian interference in the 2016 election, departs Capitol Hill following a closed door meeting in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

WASHINGTON - Special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday turned over his long-awaited final report on the contentious Russia investigation that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trump's presidency, entangled Trump's family and resulted in criminal charges against some of the president's closest associates.

The comprehensive report, still confidential, marks the end of Mueller's probe but sets the stage for big public fights to come. The next steps are up to Trump's attorney general, to Congress and, in all likelihood, federal courts.

The Justice Department said the report was delivered by a security officer Friday afternoon to the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Word of the delivery triggered reactions across Washington. Shortly afterward, Attorney General William Barr released a letter noting his plans to write his own account of Mueller's findings. The White House released a statement saying it had not seen or been briefed on the document.

Next steps are "up to Attorney General (William) Barr," said White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

Barr said he could send his account to Congress quickly.

"I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the special counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend," Barr said in his letter the top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees. He pledged a commitment to transparency.

He said the Justice Department had not denied any requested action by his office. Barr was required to disclose to Congress any instance in which Mueller asked to take an action during his investigation but was told no by the department.

With no details released at this point, it's not known whether Mueller's report answers the core questions of his investigation: Did Trump's campaign collude with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 presidential election in favour of the celebrity businessman? Also, did Trump take steps later, including by firing his FBI director, to obstruct the probe?

But the delivery of the report does mean the investigation has concluded without any public charges of a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, or of obstruction by the president.

It's unclear what steps Mueller will take if he uncovered what he believes to be criminal wrongdoing by Trump, in light of Justice Department legal opinions that have held that sitting presidents may not be indicted.

The mere delivery of a confidential report will set off immediate demands, including in the Democratic-led House, for full release of Mueller's findings. Barr has said he wants to make as much public as possible, and any efforts to withhold details will prompt a tussle between the Justice Department and lawmakers who may subpoena Mueller and his investigators to testify before Congress. Such a move by Democrats would likely be vigorously contested by the Trump administration.

The conclusion of Mueller's investigation does not remove legal peril for the president. Trump faces a separate Justice Department investigation in New York into hush money payments during the campaign to two women who say they had sex with him years before the election. He's also been implicated in a potential campaign finance violation by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who says Trump asked him to arrange the transactions. Federal prosecutors, also in New York, have been investigating foreign contributions made to the president's inaugural committee.

No matter the findings in Mueller's report, the investigation has already illuminated Russia's assault on the American political system, painted the Trump campaign as eager to exploit the release of hacked Democratic emails and exposed lies by Trump aides aimed at covering up their Russia-related contacts. Over the 21-month investigation, Mueller has brought charges against 34 people, including six aides and advisers to the president, and three companies.

The special counsel brought a sweeping indictment accusing Russian military intelligence officers of hacking Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign and other Democratic groups during the 2016 election. He charged another group of Russians with carrying out a large-scale social media disinformation campaign against the American political process that also sought to help Trump and hurt Clinton.

Closer to the president, Mueller secured convictions against a campaign chairman who cheated banks and dodged his taxes, a national security adviser who lied about his Russian contacts and a campaign aide who misled the FBI about his knowledge of stolen emails.

Cohen, the president's former lawyer, pleaded guilty in New York to campaign finance violations arising from the hush money payments and in the Mueller probe to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. Another Trump confidant, Roger Stone, is awaiting trial on charges that he lied about his pursuit of Russian-hacked emails ultimately released by WikiLeaks. It's unclear whether any of the aides who have been convicted, all of whom have pleaded guilty and co-operated with the investigators, might angle for a pardon. Trump has left open the idea of pardons.

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Along the way, Trump lawyers and advisers repeatedly evolved their public defences to deal with the onslaught of allegations from the investigation. Where once Trump and his aides had maintained that there were no connections between the campaign and Russia, by the end of the probe Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was routinely making the argument that even if the two sides did collude, it wasn't necessarily a crime. The goalpost shifting reflected the administration's challenge in adopting a singular narrative to fend off allegations.

Equally central to Mueller's work is his inquiry into whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation. Since the special counsel's appointment in May 2017, Trump has increasingly tried to undermine the probe by calling it a "witch hunt" and repeatedly proclaiming there was "NO COLLUSION" with Russia. But Trump also took certain acts as president that caught Mueller's attention and have been scrutinized for possible obstruction.

One week before Mueller's appointment, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, later saying he was thinking of "this Russia thing" at the time.

He mercilessly harangued Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing from the Russia investigation two months before Mueller was named special counsel, a move that left the president without a perceived loyalist atop the probe. And he helped draft a misleading statement on Air Force One as a Trump Tower meeting between his eldest son and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was about to become public.

The meeting itself became part of Mueller's investigation, entangling Donald Trump Jr. in the probe. Mueller's team also interviewed the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, multiple times.

Even as Trump blasted Mueller's team, his White House and campaign produced thousands of documents for the special counsel, and dozens of his aides were interviewed. The president submitted written answers to Mueller regarding the Russia investigation, but he refused to be interviewedPhoto for illustraiton

According to the chamber, China continues to be the biggest trade partner of Vietnam, and Vietnam has surpassed Malaysia to be the top trade partner of the country in ASEAN.

In 2018, total two-way trade turnover reached more than USD106 billion, a year-on-year rise of 14%. With this, China is the first trade partner of Vietnam to set a record of more than USD100 billion.

Of this, Vietnams commodity export value to the market hit over USD41 billion, a year-on-year rise of 16%.

The structure of Vietnam's exports to China has changed positively, gradually increasing the proportion of manufactured goods and agricultural, forestry and fishery products, while gradually reducing the proportion of raw materials, fuels and minerals./.By Trudy Rubin



President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has a strategy to cope with Central American caravans as well as President Donald Trump's push for a border wall and aversion to migrants.



That was the message from Mexico's first female ambassador to the United States, Martha Barcena Coqui, a highly experienced diplomat who was once a Fulbright scholar at the University of Delaware. She recently spoke at a global business conference held by the World Trade Center of Greater Philadelphia.



Known at home as AMLO, the leftist Mexican president (in office since December) has surprised U.S. observers who expected him to quickly ignite fireworks with Trump. Instead, Mexican authorities have blocked groups of migrants at border towns. They also have permitted the Trump administration to send back several dozen migrants awaiting U.S. court decisions on their asylum applications.



But, Barcena told me, AMLO's stance is part of a much broader Mexican approach on immigration. Mexican officials are discussing their views with top U.S. officials, members of Congress, governors, and relevant city mayors.



Any debate on immigration, Barcena insists, "should be based on facts and realities." So here are some facts on the immigration dispute the Mexican government wants you to know.



1. When it comes to immigration, study the demographic profile of the United States, Mexico, and Central America as one region. "The United States has aged more slowly than Europe because of immigration, which has helped keep the economy buoyant," notes Barcena. However, the U.S. is now aging fast, while Mexico is still youthful (although the birthrate is dropping). Central America is even more so. The youth bulge south of the border feeds migration north for jobs.



2. "Circular migration"  meaning some kind of legal guest-worker program  is crucial to meeting migration demand. From 1942-1964, the bracero program (despite its lack of worker rights) permitted Mexican laborers to enter the United States for seasonal work, and then return home. "When circular migration ended with the program, Mexicans continued to come because there were job opportunities," says Barcena. Many stayed illegally and later brought their families.



At present, H2A visas permit seasonal agricultural workers to enter and H2B visas (capped at 66,000) allow nonagricultural workers in when needed. But these programs are not always reliable, and need updating, especially now.



For example, last year nearly half the Eastern Shore of Maryland's crab houses had no workers to pick the meat for restaurants and supermarkets, because they couldn't secure H2B visas for their longtime seasonal employees from Mexico. Similarly, mushroom growers in Chester County were short 1,000 longtime Mexican seasonal workers, because they couldn't obtain H2A visas for temporary work.



Fewer and fewer illegal Mexican workers are entering the U.S. (in fact, there has been net out-migration), but longtime seasonal workers may not go home if their return becomes uncertain. "If there is no reliability for visas, people will stay," Barcena says.



3. Central America will remain the main source of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers from south of the border unless root causes are addressed.



"People mostly migrate because they have no options," the ambassador says. "Sixty percent from Central America come from rural areas suffering huge drought." Others are fleeing gang violence. "If we can change the economy of the poorest areas of the region  from southern Mexico through Central America  and achieve sustained economic growth, then people will stay," argues Barcena. That will require joint U.S.-Mexican efforts. "Police measures to contain or deter can be useful in the short-term, but not the medium- or long-term."



4. AMLO is cooperating with Trump on migrants for pragmatic reasons. "We had three options," says Barcena. "We could have refused to accept returnees, meaning direct confrontation with the United States." But, she adds, "A fight doesn't help either country."



Alternatively, Mexico could have accepted the returnees and sent them back to their home countries, which is not in line with humanitarian principles.



Mexico chose the third option, taking back some asylum seekers and limiting the numbers who cross the border. "We want an orderly process," says Barcena. However, this cannot be a long-term, or expanded, solution. Mexican facilities are already strained by the dozens they accepted while awaiting U.S. court decisions.



Instead, AMLO would like to see the number of legal ports of entry increased, and measures to speed up the legal flow, such as the use of huge security scanners. When I asked Barcena her opinion on "the wall," she replied, "Is a concrete wall helpful anywhere?"



When I pressed Barcena on why Mexican-U.S. relations have improved, she said: "I think there has been more respect from the White House. President Trump understands that President Lopez Obrador has 86 percent support in our country and won 53 percent of the vote."



Beyond that, she is on a mission to convey Mexico's point of view to the public and to officials around the country. Next stops: Phoenix and San Antonio, closer to the southern border. "Sometimes governors and mayors understand the issues better (than officials in D.C.)," she noted. Too true.





Trudy Rubin (trubin@phillynews.com) is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her commentary was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Russia just stepped closer to information authoritarianism. All who value the free exchange of ideas should fear what this portends.







Monday, Vladimir Putin signed into law new fines for those who spread what authorities consider falsehoods, as well as for those who demonstrate "blatant disrespect" for the state.







Most countries prohibit libel and ban speech that incites violence. Only the most repressive make the state the sole arbiter of such judgments or seek to outlaw criticism of the government.







In that last respect, Russia joins a club that includes the likes of North Korea, Turkey, Cuba and Syria. Circulating false information that leads to a "violation of public order" (say, a protest?) triggers a 400,000 ruble ($6,000) fine, many times that for repeat offenders. Showing "blatant disrespect" for the state, official government symbols or the constitution triggers a large fine, too. Repeat offenders can land in jail.







And Russia's prosecutor general can step in, without a court ruling, and block access to websites.







When the government claims the power to censor and intimidate political opponents, we go down a dark road. It's a road that Putin buddy President Trump  who has dreamed of rewriting libel laws, called "fake news" producers the "enemy of the people," urged jailing of flag-burners and threatened punishing satirists  frequently travels down, at least on his twitter feed. Thank God for the First Amendment to the Constitution.















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SPA, Johnstones Paints Limited, Kalon Investment Company Limited, Kalon South Africa Proprietary Limited, Manchester Thermoplastics LLC, Masterwork Paint, MetoKote Canada Limited, MetoKote Corporation, MetoKote Mexico Holding Inc., MetoKote UK Limited, MetoKote de Mexico S. de RL de CV, PPG AC - France SA, PPG ALESCO Automotive Finishes Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., PPG AP Resinas S.A. de C.V., PPG Aerospace Materials (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., PPG Architectural Coatings (Puerto Rico) Inc., PPG Architectural Coatings Canada Inc., PPG Architectural Coatings Ireland Limited, PPG Architectural Coatings Italy S.r.l., PPG Architectural Coatings UK Limited, PPG Architectural Finishes Inc., PPG Asian Paints Private Ltd., PPG COATINGS SINGAPORE PTE. LTD., PPG Canada Inc., PPG Cieszyn S.A., PPG Coatings (Hong Kong) Co. Limited, PPG Coatings (Kunshan) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., PPG Coatings (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Thailand) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Wuhu) Company Ltd., PPG Coatings (Zhangjiagang) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings B.V., PPG Coatings Belgium BV, PPG Coatings Danmark A/S, PPG Coatings Deutschland GmbH, PPG Coatings Europe B.V., PPG Coatings Manufacturing SARL, PPG Coatings Nederland BV, PPG Coatings S.A., PPG Coatings South Africa (Pty) Ltd., PPG DYRUP S.A., PPG Deco Czech a.s., PPG Deco Polska sp. z.o.o., PPG Deco Slovakia s.r.o., PPG Deutschland Business Support GmbH, PPG Deutschland Sales & Services GmbH, PPG Distribution S.A.S., PPG Europe B.V., PPG Finance B.V., PPG France Business Support S.A.S., PPG France Manufacturing S.A.S., PPG Guadeloupe SAS, PPG Hellas S.A., PPG Hemmelrath Coatings Inc., PPG Hemmelrath Lackfabrik GmbH, PPG Holdco SAS, PPG Holdings (U.K.) Limited, PPG Holdings Argentina USA LLC, PPG Holdings Latin America USA LLC, PPG Iberica S.A., PPG Iberica Sales & Services S.L., PPG Industrial Coatings B.V., PPG Industrial do Brasil - Tintas E. Vernizes - Ltda., PPG Industries (Korea) Ltd., PPG Industries (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., PPG Industries (UK) Ltd, PPG Industries Argentina S.R.L., PPG Industries Australia PTY Limited A.C.N. 055 500 939, PPG Industries Colombia Ltda., PPG Industries Czech Republic s.r.o., PPG Industries Delfzijl B.V., PPG Industries Europe Sarl, PPG Industries France S.A.S., PPG Industries International Inc., PPG Industries Italia S.r.l., PPG Industries Kimya a Sanayi VE Ticaret AS, PPG Industries LLC, PPG Industries Lipetsk LLC, PPG Industries Middle East FZE, PPG Industries Netherlands B.V., PPG Industries New Zealand Limited, PPG Industries Ohio Inc., PPG Industries Poland Sp. Z.o.o., PPG Industries Securities LLC, PPG Industries de Mexico S.A. de C.V., PPG Italia Business Support S.r.l., PPG Italia Sales & Services S.r.l., PPG Japan Ltd., PPG Kansai Automotive Finishes Canada LP, PPG Kansai Automotive Finishes U.K. LLP, PPG Kansai Automotive Finishes U.S. LLC, PPG Luxembourg Finance S.aR.L., PPG Luxembourg Holdings S.aR.L., PPG Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PPG Mexico S.A. de C.V., PPG Packaging Coatings (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., PPG Paints Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PPG Performance Coatings (Hong Kong) Limited, PPG Powder Coatings (Shanghai) Limited, PPG Romania S.A., PPG SSC Co. Ltd., PPG Switzerland GmbH, PPG Trilak Kft., PPG Vietnam Co. Ltd., PRC-DeSoto Australia Pty Ltd., PRC-DeSoto International Inc., PT. PPG Coatings Indonesia, Painter's Supply, Paintzen, Peintures de Paris SAS, Plasticos Envolventes S.A. de C.V., Polymeric Systems Inc., Prismo Road Markings Limited, ProCoatings B.V., ProCoatings BV, Protec Pty Ltd. A.C.N. 007 857 392, Reno A&E LLC, Revocoat France SAS, Revocoat Holding SAS, Revocoat Iberica SLU, Revocoat S.A.S, Road Infrastructure Investment Holdings Inc., SEM Products Inc., Sealants Europe SAS, Sierracin Corporation, Sierracin/Sylmar Corporation, Sigma Marine & Protective Coatings Holding B.V., SigmaKalon (BC) UK Limited, SigmaKalon Group, SigmaKalon Middle East B.V., Sikar (Shanghai) Trading Co. Ltd., Spraylat International Ltd, Texstars LLC, The Crown Group Co., The Crown Group Inc, The Homax Group, Tikkurila Group, Traffic Safety Intermediate LLC, Traffic Safety Parent LLC, United International Business NV, Vanex Inc., Vernisol S.p.A., Versaflex, Viasa S.A. de C.V., Whitford, Whitford B.V., Whitford Corporation, Whitford Jiangmen Ltd., Whitford Ltd. (HK), Whitford Ltd. (UK), Whitford Pte. Ltd., Whitford S.r.l., Whitford Worldwide Company LLC, Worwag Coatings, and Zaganite Industries Pty Ltd.The following companies are subsidiares of EnerSys: ABSL Power Solutions Inc., ABSL Power Solutions Ltd., Acumuladores Industriales EnerSys SA, Alpha Alternative Energy Inc., Alpha Broadband Services Inc., Alpha Innovations Industria e Comercio de Produtos Eletronicos Ltda., Alpha Innovations Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Alpha Mexico Network Power S.A. de C.V., Alpha Tech Energy Solutions India Private Limited, Alpha Technical Services Ltd., Alpha Technologies Ltd., Alpha Technologies Pty. Ltd., Alpha Technologies Services Inc., Alphatec Technologies (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Argus Research Ltd., Batterias Hawker de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Battery Power International Pte Ltd., Coppervale Enterprises Inc., DCPM Engineering Sdn Bhd, EH Batterien AG, EH Europe GmbH, EH Global Holdings GmbH, EH Swiss Holdings GmbH, ENAS Industrial Batteries Morocco Sarl, EnerSys (Chaozhou) Huada Batteries Company Limited, EnerSys (China) Huada Batteries Company Limited, EnerSys (Chongqing) Huada Batteries Company Limited, EnerSys (Jiangsu) Huada Batteries Company Limited (94.7%) *, EnerSys (Luxembourg) Finance Sarl, EnerSys (Yangzhou) Huada Batteries Co. Ltd., EnerSys A/S, EnerSys AB, EnerSys AD, EnerSys AE, EnerSys AS, EnerSys Advanced Systems Inc., EnerSys Argentina S.A., EnerSys Asia Limited, EnerSys Australia Pty Ltd., EnerSys BV, EnerSys BVBA, EnerSys Battery Private Limited, EnerSys Brasil Ltda., EnerSys Bulgaria EOOD, EnerSys Canada Inc., EnerSys Capital Inc., EnerSys Cayman Euro L.P., EnerSys Cayman Holdings L.P., EnerSys Cayman Inc., EnerSys Delaware Inc., EnerSys Delaware LLC I, EnerSys Delaware LLC II, EnerSys Delaware LLC III, EnerSys Delaware LLC IV, EnerSys Delaware LLC V, EnerSys Energy Products Inc., EnerSys Europe Oy, EnerSys European Holding Co., EnerSys GmbH, EnerSys Holdings (Luxembourg) Sarl, EnerSys Holdings UK Ltd., EnerSys Hungaria Kft., EnerSys India Batteries Private Ltd., EnerSys JSC, EnerSys LLC, EnerSys Ltd., EnerSys Malaysia Sdn Bhd, EnerSys Mexico Holdings LLC, EnerSys Mexico Management LLC, EnerSys Participacoes Ltda., EnerSys Reserve Power Pte. Ltd., EnerSys S.r.l., EnerSys SARL, EnerSys SNC, EnerSys South East Asia Pte. Ltd., EnerSys de Mexico II S de R.L. de CV, EnerSys de Mexico S de R.L. de CV, EnerSys s.r.o., EnerSys sp. z o.o., EnerSystem Chile Ltda., Enersys Aku Sanaya Dis Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Esfinco LLC, Hawker GmbH, Hawker Power Systems Inc., Hawker Powersource Inc., Hawker Systems GmbH & Co. KG., ICS Industries Pty Ltd, ICS Industries Pty Ltd., ICS Sheet Metal Pty Ltd., Industrial Battery Holding Ltda., International Communication Shelters Australasia Pty Ltd., Lancord Pty Ltd., Lenmic Pty Ltd., MIB Energy Sdn Bhd, N Holding AB, National Infrastructure Pty Ltd., National Infrastructure Services Pty Ltd., NaviSemi Energy Pte Ltd., NaviSemi Inc., New Pacifico Realty Inc., NorthStar Battery Company LLC, NorthStar Battery Company LLC, NorthStar Battery DMCC, Outback Power Technologies Inc., Powercom (NSW) Pty Ltd., Powersonic S de R.L. de CV, Purcell Systems, Purcell Systems Inc., Purcell Systems International AB, Quallion LLC, Riverfront Holding S. de R.L. de C.V., Shenzhen Huada Power Supply Mechanical & Electrical Co. Ltd. , SiteTel Shanghai Co Ltd., SiteTel Sweden AB, Telecomponents & Supply (Hong Kong) Ltd., The Enser Corporation, UTS Holdings Sdn Bhd, UTS Technology (JB) Sdn Bhd, UTS Technology (PG) Sdn Bhd, YCI Inc., and Yecoltd S. de R.L. de CV.The following companies are subsidiares of Tesco: Adminstore Limited, Adsega Limited, Alfred Preedy & Sons (Trustees) Limited, Alfred Preedy & Sons Limited, Anthony Heagney Limited, Arena (Jersey) Management Limited, Armitage Finance Unlimited, Armitage Luxembourg s.? r.l., BLT Holdings 2010 Limited, Bath Upper Bristol Road Management, Bedminster Estates Limited, Beehythe Estates limited, Berry Lane Management Company Limited, Blinkbox Books Limited, BlinxBox, Booker Group, Brian Fords Discount Store Limited, Broadfields Management Limited, Brookmaker (GP) Limited, Broughton Retail Park Nominee 1 Limited, Broughton Retail Park Nominee 2 Limited, Broughton Retail Park Nominee 3 Limited, Broughton Retail Park Nominee 4 Limited, Buckingham Road (Bletchley) Management Company Limited, Bugden Ltd, Buttoncable Limited, Buttoncase Limited, Canterbury Road Management Limited, Cardiff Cathays Terrace Management Company Limited, Careneed News Limited, Cheshunt Finance Unlimited, Cheshunt Holdings Guernsey Limited, Cheshunt Hungary Servicing Limited Liability Company, Cheshunt Luxembourg S.? r.l., Cheshunt Overseas LLP, China Property Holdings (HK) Limited, Chirac Limited, Cirrus Finance (2009) Limited, Cirrus Finance Limited, Cirrus Luxembourg s.? r.l., Clarepharm Limited, Clondalkin Properties Limited, Comar Limited, Commercial Investments Limited, Crazy Prices, Crest Ostrava a.s, Cullens Holdings Limited, Cullens Stores Limited, Daily Wrap Produce Limited, Day And Nite Stores Limited, Delamare Cards Holdco Limited, Delamare Cards MTN Issuer plc, Delamare Finance PLC, Delamare Group Holdings Limited, Delamare Holdings BV Netherlands, Delamare Luxembourg s.? r.l. Luxembourg, Delamare One Limited, Dunnhumby Ventures LLC, ELH Insurance Limited, Edinburgh Butterfly Farm Limited, Edson Investments Limited, Edson Properties Limited, Ek-Chai Distribution System Co. Ltd., Euphorium (London) Limited, Euphorium (North London) Limited, Euphorium Group Limited, Euphorium IP Limited, Europa Foods Limited, Faraday Properties Limited, Flitwick Pharmacies Limited, Food & Wine Lovers Limited, Forum Liberec s.r.o, Freds Food Construction Limited, Freehold and Leasehold Property Fund, Gain Land Limited, Genesis sp. z o.o., Gibbs News Limited, Gibbs Newsagents Limited, Gida Sanayi A.S., Giraffe, Giraffe Cafe Limited, Giraffe Concepts Limited, Golden Island Management Services Limited, HIT hypermarket Sp. z o. o., Halesworth SPV Limited, Harris and Hoole Holdings Limited, Harris and Hoole Limited, Harris and Hoole Nominees Limited, Homeplus, Hymall Co. Ltd., J E Properties Holdings Limited, Jasper Sp. z o. o. Poland, KSS Retail Limited, Kabaty Investments Tesco (Polska) Sp. z o. o. Sp.k, Kingsway Fresh Foods Ltd, Koxka Hungary Refrigeration LLC, Launchgrain Limited, Launchtable Limited, Laws Stores Limited, Lazada Group S.A., Lee (Southern) Limited, Lek?ren? Tesco Bansk? Bystrica k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Dunajsk? Streda k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Ko?ice k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Lama k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Nitra k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Petr?alka k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Pie?tany k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Pre?ov Vukov k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Senec k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Spi?sk? Nov? Ves k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Trenc??n s.r.o. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Zlat? Piesky k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Lek?ren? Tesco Zvolen k.s. Slovakia Limited Partnership, Linebush III Holdings Limited, Linebush III Limited, Linebush IV Limited, Linebush Limited, Linebush V Limited, London and Home Counties Superstores Limited, Lowfoods Limited, M & W Limited, Merrion Shopping Centre Ltd, Mills (East Midlands) Limited, Mills (West Midlands) Limited, Mills Group Holdings Limited, Mills Group Limited, Mobcast Services, Monread Developments Limited, Morgam Holdings Limited, Morgam News Limited, Motorcause Limited, NPL (Hardgate) Limited, Nabola Development Limited, NutriCentre Limited, OC FORUM Liberec Ltd., Oakwood Distribution Limited, Obchodn? dom Bratislava s.ro, Obchodn? dom Ko?ice s.ro., Obchodn? dom Nitra s.ro., Obchodn? dom Pre?ov s.ro., Old FEHC Inc., Old FEPC LLC, One Stop Community Stores Ltd, One Stop Convenience Stores Limited, One Stop Stores Limited, One Stop Stores Trustee Services Limited, Orpingford, Orpington (Station Road) Limited, Oxford Fox and Hounds Management Company Limited, PEJ Property Developments Limited, Paper Chain (East Anglia) Limited, Pharaway Properties Limited, Power Supermarkets Limited, Premier Garage (Worthing) Limited, Pulford Foods Limited, R.J.D. Holdings, Retail Property Co. Ltd, S Bottomley & Bros Limited, Sanders Supermarkets Limited, Sandtable Limited, Sarcon (No. 239) Limited, Seacroft Green Nominee 1 Limited, Seacroft Green Nominee 2 Limited, Shire Park Limited, Shuke Advertising (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Snowman Retail 1 Limited, Snowman Retail 2 Limited, Sociomantic AB, Sociomantic Labs B.V, Sociomantic Labs Inc, Sociomantic Labs Internet Hizmetleri Limited ?ireketi, Sociomantic Labs LLC, Sociomantic Labs Limited, Sociomantic Labs Private Limited, Sociomantic Labs Pte Ltd, Sociomantic Labs S.r.l, Sociomantic Labs SARL, Sociomantic Labs Servicos Web Ltda, Sociomantic Labs Sp.z.o.o., Sociomantic Labs s.r.o., Sociomantic S.L.U., Sociomantic labs GmbH, Spen Hill Developments (Holdings) Ltd, Spen Hill Developments (Portishead) Ltd, Spen Hill Developments (Tonbridge) Limited, Spen Hill Developments Limited, Spen Hill Management Limited, Spen Hill Properties (Holdings) plc, Spen Hill Properties (Southend) Limited, Spen Hill Regeneration Limited, Spen Hill Residential No 1 Limited, Spen Hill Residential No 2 Limited, Station House Welling Management Limited, Statusfloat Limited, Stewarts Supermarkets Limited, Streatham Management Company Limited, T & S Management Services Limited, T & S Properties Limited, T & S Stores Limited, TESCO (POLSKA) sp. z o.o., TESCO Akad?mia K?pz?si ?s Fejleszt?si Kor?tolt Felelss?g T?rsas?g, TESCO MOBILE POLSKA SP. Z O.O., TESCO STORES SR a.s., Tapesilver Limited, Teesport (GP) Limited, Teesport (Nominee) Limited, Telegraph Properties (Kirkby) Limited, Tesco (Foxtrot 1) Limited, Tesco (Foxtrot 2) Limited, Tesco (Fujian) Industry Limited, Tesco (Jersey) Limited, Tesco (Overseas) Ltd, Tesco (Yorkshire) Limited, Tesco Aqua (1LP) Limited, Tesco Aqua (3LP) Limited, Tesco Aqua (FinCo1) Limited, Tesco Aqua (FinCo2) Limited, Tesco Aqua (GP) Limited, Tesco Aqua (Nominee 1) Limited, Tesco Aqua (Nominee 2) Limited, Tesco Aqua (Nominee Holdco) Limited, Tesco Atrato (1LP) Limited, Tesco Atrato (GP) Limited, Tesco Barbers Wood Limited, Tesco Bengaluru Private Limited, Tesco Blue (1LP) Limited, Tesco Blue (FinCo2) Limited, Tesco Blue (GP) Limited, Tesco Blue (Nominee 1) Limited, Tesco Blue (Nominee 2) Limited, Tesco Blue (Nominee Holdco) Limited, Tesco Capital No. 1 Limited, Tesco Capital No. 2 Limited, Tesco Card Services Limited, Tesco Card Services Limited, Tesco Card Services Ltd., Tesco Chile Sourcing Limitada, Tesco Coral (GP) Limited, Tesco Corporate Treasury Services PLC, Tesco Depot Propco Limited, Tesco Distribution Holdings Limited, Tesco Distribution Limited, Tesco Dorney (1LP) Limited, Tesco Dorney (GP) Limited, Tesco Dystrybucja Sp. z.o.o., Tesco EU IT Services s.r.o., Tesco Employees Share Scheme Trustees Limited, Tesco Estates Limited, Tesco Europe B.V. Netherlands, Tesco Family Dining Limited, Tesco Food Sourcing Brazil Representa??o De Servi?os Ltda., Tesco Food Sourcing Limited, Tesco Foundation (Nadacia Tesco), Tesco Freetime Limited, Tesco Fuchsia (1LP) Limited, Tesco Fuel Limited, Tesco Global Employment Company Limited, Tesco Guangdong (HK) Co. Limited, Tesco High Beech Limited, Tesco Holdings BV, Tesco Holdings Limited, Tesco Home Shopping Limited, Tesco Hungary (Holdings) Limited, Tesco International Franchising s.r.o., Tesco International Internet Retailing Limited, Tesco International Services Limited, Tesco International Sourcing Limited, Tesco Ireland Holdings Limited, Tesco Ireland Limited, Tesco Ireland Pension Trustees Limited, Tesco Jade (GP) Limited, Tesco Joint Buying Service (Shanghai) Co Limited, Tesco Kipa Kitle Pazarlama Ticaret Lojistik ve, Tesco Kirkby (General Partner) Limited, Tesco Kirkby (LP) Limited, Tesco Kirkby (Nominee 1) Limited, Tesco Kirkby (Nominee 2) Limited, Tesco Kirkby (Nominee Holdco) Limited, Tesco Kirkby (Unitholder 1) Limited, Tesco Kirkby (Unitholder2) Limited, Tesco Lagoon GP Limited, Tesco Licences Limited, Tesco Lotus Retail Growth, Tesco Lotus Retail Growth Freehold and Leasehold Property Fund, Tesco Maintenance Limited, Tesco Mauritius Holdings Limited, Tesco Mobile (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Tesco Mobile CR s.r.o., Tesco Mobile Communications Limited, Tesco Mobile Ireland Limited, Tesco Mobile Ireland Limited, Tesco Mobile Limited, Tesco Mobile Services Limited, Tesco Mobile Slovakia s.r.o, Tesco Mobile Slovakia s.r.o., Tesco Mobile CR, Tesco Nanjing Zhongshan, Tesco Nanjing Zhongshan (HK) Co. Limited, Tesco Navona (1LP) Limited, Tesco Navona (GP) Limited, Tesco Navona (Nominee 1) Limited, Tesco Navona (Nominee 2) Limited, Tesco Navona (Nominee Holdco) Limited, Tesco Navona PL Propco Limited, Tesco Opticians Limited, Tesco Overseas (Holdings) Limited, Tesco Overseas Investments Limited, Tesco Overseas ULC, Tesco Passaic (1LP) Limited, Tesco Passaic (GP) Limited, Tesco Passaic (Nominee 1) Limited, Tesco Passaic (Nominee 2) Limited, Tesco Passaic (Nominee Holdco) Limited, Tesco Passaic PL Propco Limited, Tesco Pension (Jade) Limited, Tesco Pension Investment Limited, Tesco Pension Trustees Limited, Tesco Personal Finance, Tesco Personal Finance Compare Limited, Tesco Personal Finance Group Limited, Tesco Property (No.1) Limited, Tesco Property (Nominees) (No.1) Limited, Tesco Property (Nominees) (No.2) Limited, Tesco Property (Nominees) Limited, Tesco Property A.S., Tesco Property Finance 1 Holdco Limited, Tesco Property Finance 1 PLC, Tesco Property Holdings (No. 2) Limited, Tesco Property Holdings Limited, Tesco Property Limited, Tesco Property Nominees (No.5) Limited, Tesco Property Nominees (No.6) Limited, Tesco Property Partner (GP No.2) Limited, Tesco Property Partner (GP) Limited, Tesco Property Partner (No.1) Limited, Tesco Property Partner (No.2) Limited, Tesco Red (1LP) Limited, Tesco Red (GP) Limited, Tesco Red (Nominee 2) Limited, Tesco Red (Nominee Holdco) Limited, Tesco Sarum (1LP) Limited, Tesco Sarum (GP) Limited, Tesco Seacroft Limited, Tesco Secretaries Limited, Tesco Services Limited, Tesco Sourcing India Private Limited, Tesco Stores (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Tesco Stores (Thailand) Ltd, Tesco Stores CR a.s., Tesco Stores Limited, Tesco Technology Services HK Limited, Tesco Treasury Services PLC, Tesco Trustee Company of Ireland Limited, Tesco Underwriting Limited, Tesco Vin Plus SA, Tesco Worldwide Limited, Tesco for Thais Foundation, Tesco-Global Stores Privately Held Co. Ltd, Tesco.Com Limited, The Brookmaker Limited Partnership, The Teesport Limited Partnership Limited Partnership, The Tesco Aqua Limited Partnership Limited Partnership, The Tesco Atrato Limited Partnership, The Tesco Blue Limited Partnership Limited Partnership, The Tesco Coral Limited Partnership, The Tesco Dorney Limited Partnership, The Tesco Kirkby Limited Partnership Limited Partnership, The Tesco Navona Limited Partnership Limited Partnership, The Tesco Passaic Limited Partnership Limited Partnership, The Tesco Property (No.2) Limited Partnership, The Tesco Red Limited Partnership, The Tesco Sarum Limited Partnership, Trent Hypermarket Private Limited, Trigger Retail Ltd, Valiant Insurance Company DAC, Value House Properties Limited, Variable Preference, Ventnor High Street Management Company Limited, Verulam Properties (2001) Limited, Verulam Properties Limited, Victoria BB Sp z.o.o., WE7, WSC Properties Limited, Wanze Properties (Dundalk) Limited, Weymouth Avenue (Dorchester) Limited, Whitecastle Properties Limited, Wm. Low Supermarkets Limited, Woolwich Central Residents Management Company Limited, Worple Road Plc, Xiamen Firste Property Limited, Xiamen Firste Property Limited, aAcklam Management Company Limited, dunnhumby (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, dunnhumby (Thailand) Limited, dunnhumby Canada Limited, dunnhumby Consulting Services India Private Limited, dunnhumby Czech s.r.o., dunnhumby Employment Company Limited, dunnhumby Holding Limited, dunnhumby Hungary Kft, dunnhumby IT Services India Private Limited, dunnhumby Inc, dunnhumby International Limited, dunnhumby Ireland Limited, dunnhumby Italia Srl., dunnhumby Limited, dunnhumby Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., dunnhumby Netherlands B.V., dunnhumby Norge A.S., dunnhumby Overseas Limited, dunnhumby Poland Sp z.o.o, dunnhumby Slovakia s.r.o., dunnhumby South Africa (Pty) Ltd, dunnhumby Trustees Limited, and dunnuhumby.The following companies are subsidiares of Brinker International: BI INTERNATIONAL SERVICES LLC, BI MEXICO HOLDING CORPORATION, BIPC GLOBAL PAYROLL COMPANY LLC, BIPC INVESTMENTS LLC, BIPC MANAGEMENT LLC, BRINKER AIRPORTS LLC, BRINKER ALABAMA INC., BRINKER ARKANSAS INC., BRINKER ASIA INC., BRINKER BRAZIL LLC, BRINKER CANADIAN HOLDING CO. ULC, BRINKER CANADIAN RESTAURANT CO. ULC, BRINKER CB LP, BRINKER CB MANAGEMENT LLC, BRINKER FHC B.V., BRINKER FLORIDA INC., BRINKER FREEHOLD INC., BRINKER GEORGIA INC., BRINKER INTERNATIONAL PAYROLL COMPANY L.P., BRINKER LOUISIANA INC., BRINKER MICHIGAN INC., BRINKER MISSISSIPPI INC., BRINKER MISSOURI INC., BRINKER NEVADA INC., BRINKER NEW JERSEY INC., BRINKER NORTH CAROLINA INC., BRINKER OF BALTIMORE COUNTY INC., BRINKER OF CARROLL COUNTY INC., BRINKER OF CECIL COUNTY INC., BRINKER OKLAHOMA INC., BRINKER OPCO LLC, BRINKER PENN TRUST, BRINKER PROPCO FLORIDA INC., BRINKER PROPERTY CORPORATION, BRINKER PURCHASING INC., BRINKER RESTAURANT CORPORATION, BRINKER RHODE ISLAND INC., BRINKER SERVICES CORPORATION, BRINKER SOUTH CAROLINA INC., BRINKER TEXAS INC., BRINKER VIRGINIA INC., CHILIS BEVERAGE COMPANY INC., CHILIS INC. a Delaware corporation, CHILIS INC. a Tennessee corporation, CHILIS INTERNATIONAL BASES B.V., CHILIS OF BEL AIR INC., CHILIS OF KANSAS INC., CHILIS OF MARYLAND INC., CHILIS OF WEST VIRGINIA INC., Grady's Inc., MAGGIANO'S OF ANNAPOLIS INC., MAGGIANO'S OF HOWARD COUNTY INC., MAGGIANO'S OF KANSAS INC., MAGGIANOS BEVERAGE COMPANY, MAGGIANOS HOLDING CORPORATION, MAGGIANOS INC., MAGGIANOS OF TYSONS INC., MAGGIANOS PROPERTY CORPORATION, MAGGIANOS TEXAS INC., PEPPER DINING HOLDING CORP., PEPPER DINING Inc., and PEPPER DINING VERMONT INC..Former UN chief to lead agency for fighting fine dust



Former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has re-emerged in the news with the unlikely task as chief of a new government agency to respond to the fine dust pollution that has become one of the biggest concerns for Korean society today.



The organization combines officials from various ministries including the environment, health and welfare, and science and ICT ministries, among others, to establish strategies to deal with the environmental crisis.



Ban said Thursday that he had accepted Moon's invitation to take on the position after meeting with him at Cheong Wa Dae. Given that Ban was considered one of Moon's strong rivals ahead of the presidential election, it is somewhat surprising that the two have come together again. They were previously Cheong Wa Dae colleagues during the administration of the late former President Roh Moon-hyun almost 16 years ago. Moon served as Roh's chief of staff and Ban also assisted the President on diplomatic affairs before being appointed minister of foreign affairs in 2004, a post he held until 2006.



Ban served as the U.N. chief from January 2007 to December 2016, making him one of the most renowned Korean diplomats in the international community. So it has been suggested that the Moon administration should offer him a post for advancing Korea's diplomacy with the vast experience and global leadership he has acquired over his distinguished career.



However, there is uncertainty whether Ban is an appropriate choice to head a government organization for righting pollution. The appointment of a career diplomat to head an organization for battling fine dust also is somewhat awkward as it shows that the Moon administration sees the fine dust pollution as more of a diplomatic issue rather than a domestic one that requires very specific measures at home.



Many Koreans have blamed China for the aggravating pollution which has significantly affected the quality of air here and resulted in all kinds of health problems for residents. But the smog problem is rooted in various environmental causes and approaching it as a diplomatic issue will not bring fundamental solutions. Rather, such an approach could lead to cracks in bilateral relations with China, which has adamantly denied any relation to Korea's smog situation.



In previous press conferences, the Chinese foreign ministry has even criticized Seoul for blaming another country for its own problems. "One should not look for reasons elsewhere whenever there is a problem at home. Instead, one should grasp the very nature of a problem," Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Lu Kang said during a press conference earlier this month. Given the attitude from Beijing so far, Ban or any Korean official will have a limited impact on changing the issue by taking it up with China.



The Moon administration should base its claim against China with undeniable scientific facts. But the more important thing is for the government to prepare preventative measures at home through citizen participation.

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NextThe following companies are subsidiares of Abbott Laboratories: 3A Nutrition (Vietnam) Company Limited, ABON Biopharm (Hangzhou) Co. Ltd., AGA Medical Belgium, AGA Medical Corporation, AGA Medical Holdings Inc., ALR Holdings, AML Medical LLC, APK Advanced Medical Technologies LLC, ATS Bermuda Holdings Limited, ATS Laboratories Inc., Abbott, Abbott (Jiaxing) Nutrition Co. Ltd., Abbott (UK) Finance Limited, Abbott (UK) Holdings Limited, Abbott AG, Abbott Asia Holdings Limited, Abbott Asia Investments Limited, Abbott Australasia Holdings Limited, Abbott Australasia Pty Ltd, Abbott B.V., Abbott Bahamas Overseas Businesses Corporation, Abbott Belgian Investments, Abbott Bermuda Holding Ltd., Abbott Biologicals B.V., Abbott Biologicals LLC, Abbott Bulgaria Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Capital India Limited, Abbott Cardiovascular Inc., Abbott Cardiovascular Systems Inc., Abbott Delaware LLC, Abbott Diabetes Care Inc., Abbott Diabetes Care Limited, Abbott Diabetes Care Sales Corporation, Abbott Diagnostics GmbH, Abbott Diagnostics International Ltd., Abbott Diagnostics Technologies AS, Abbott Doral Investments S.L., Abbott Equity Holdings Unlimited, Abbott Equity Investments LLC, Abbott Established Products Holdings (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Finance Company SA, Abbott Financial Holdings SRL, Abbott France S.A.S., Abbott Fund Tanzania Limited, Abbott Gesellschaft m.b.H., Abbott GmbH & Co. KG, Abbott Health Products LLC, Abbott Healthcare (Puerto Rico) Ltd., Abbott Healthcare B.V., Abbott Healthcare Costa Rica S.A., Abbott Healthcare LLC, Abbott Healthcare Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Healthcare Private Limited, Abbott Healthcare Products B.V., Abbott Healthcare Products Ltd, Abbott Holding (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding GmbH, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited Luxembourg S.C.S., Abbott Holdings B.V., Abbott Holdings LLC, Abbott Holdings Limited, Abbott Holdings Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Hungary Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Iberian Investments (2) Limited, Abbott Iberian Investments Limited, Abbott India Limited, Abbott Informatics Asia Pacific Limited, Abbott Informatics Canada Inc, Abbott Informatics Corporation, Abbott Informatics Europe Limited, Abbott Informatics France, Abbott Informatics Germany GmbH, Abbott Informatics Netherlands B.V., Abbott Informatics Singapore Pte. Limited, Abbott Informatics Spain S.A., Abbott Informatics Technologies Ltd, Abbott International Corporation, Abbott International Enterprises Ltd., Abbott International Holdings Limited, Abbott International LLC, Abbott International Luxembourg S.ar.l., Abbott Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Ireland, Abbott Ireland Financing Designated Activity Company, Abbott Ireland Limited, Abbott Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Kazakhstan Limited Liability Partnership, Abbott Knoll Investments B.V., Abbott Korea Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Bangladesh) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco (Dos) SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Abbott Laboratories (Mozambique) Limitada, Abbott Laboratories (Pakistan) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Philippines), Abbott Laboratories (Puerto Rico) Incorporated, Abbott Laboratories (Singapore) Private Limited, Abbott Laboratories A/S, Abbott Laboratories Argentina Sociedad Anonima, Abbott Laboratories B.V., Abbott Laboratories C.A., Abbott Laboratories Finance B.V., Abbott Laboratories GmbH, Abbott Laboratories Inc., Abbott Laboratories International LLC, Abbott Laboratories Ireland Limited, Abbott Laboratories Limited, Abbott Laboratories Limited - Laboratoires Abbott Limitee, Abbott Laboratories NZ Limited, Abbott Laboratories Pacific Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Laboratories Products B.V., Abbott Laboratories Residential Development Fund Inc., Abbott Laboratories S.A., Abbott Laboratories SA, Abbott Laboratories Services Corp., Abbott Laboratories Slovakia s.r.o., Abbott Laboratories South Africa (Pty) Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Trustee Company Limited, Abbott Laboratories Uruguay S.A., Abbott Laboratories Vascular Enterprises, Abbott Laboratories d.o.o., Abbott Laboratories de Chile Limitada, Abbott Laboratories de Colombia S.A., Abbott Laboratories de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Abbott Laboratories druzba za farmacijo in diagnostiko d.o.o., Abbott Laboratories s.r.o., Abbott Laboratories(Hellas) Societe Anonyme, Abbott Laboratorios S.A., Abbott Laboratorios S.A., Abbott Laboratorios del Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Abbott Laboratuarlari Ithalat Ihracat ve Ticaret Ltd.Sti, Abbott Laboratorios Lda, Abbott Laboratorios do Brasil Ltda., Abbott Limited Egypt LLC, Abbott Logistics B.V., Abbott Management GmbH, Abbott Management LLC, Abbott Manufacturing Singapore Private Limited, Abbott Mature Products International Unlimited Company, Abbott Mature Products Management Limited, Abbott Medical (Hong Kong) Limited, Abbott Medical (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Abbott Medical (Portugal) Distribuicao de Produtos Medicos Lda, Abbott Medical (Schweiz) AG, Abbott Medical (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Abbott Medical (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Australia Pty. Ltd., Abbott Medical Austria Ges.m.b.H., Abbott Medical Balkan d.o.o. Beograd (Novi Beograd), Abbott Medical Belgium, Abbott Medical Canada Inc./ Medicale Abbott Canada Inc., Abbott Medical Danmark A/S, Abbott Medical Devices Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Espana S.A., Abbott Medical Estonia OU, Abbott Medical Finland Oy, Abbott Medical France SAS, Abbott Medical GmbH, Abbott Medical Hellas Limited Liability Trading Company, Abbott Medical Ireland Limited, Abbott Medical Italia S.p.A., Abbott Medical Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Korea Limited, Abbott Medical Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Medical Laboratories LTD, Abbott Medical Nederland B.V., Abbott Medical New Zealand Limited, Abbott Medical Norway AS, Abbott Medical Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Medical Sweden AB, Abbott Medical Taiwan Co., Abbott Medical U.K. Limited, Abbott Medical spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Middle East S.A.R.L., Abbott Molecular Inc., Abbott Morocco SARL, Abbott Nederland C.V., Abbott Nederland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Netherlands Investments B.V., Abbott Norge AS, Abbott Nutrition Limited, Abbott Nutrition Manufacturing Inc., Abbott Operations Singapore Pte. Ltd., Abbott Operations Uruguay S.R.L., Abbott Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Overseas Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Overseas S.A., Abbott Oy, Abbott Point of Care Canada Limited, Abbott Point of Care Inc., Abbott Poland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Procurement LLC, Abbott Products (Philippines) Inc., Abbott Products (Spain) S.L., Abbott Products Algerie EURL, Abbott Products B.V., Abbott Products Distribution SAS, Abbott Products Egypt LLC, Abbott Products Limited, Abbott Products Limited Liability Company, Abbott Products Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Products Operations AG, Abbott Products Operations LLC, Abbott Products Romania S.R.L., Abbott Products Tunisie S.A.R.L., Abbott Products Unlimited Company, Abbott Resources Inc., Abbott Resources International Inc., Abbott S.r.l., Abbott Saudi Arabia Trading Company, Abbott Scandinavia Aktiebolag, Abbott Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, Abbott South Africa Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Strategic Opportunities Limited, Abbott Trading Company Inc., Abbott Universal LLC, Abbott Vascular Devices (2) Limited, Abbott Vascular Devices Limited, Abbott Vascular Inc., Abbott Vascular Instruments Deutschland GmbH, Abbott Vascular International, Abbott Vascular Japan Co. Ltd, Abbott Vascular Limitada, Abbott Vascular Netherlands B.V., Abbott Vascular Solutions Inc., Abbott Ventures Inc., Abbott West Indies Limited, Abbott drustvo sa ogranicenom odgovornoscu za trgovinu i usluge, Advanced Neuromodulation Systems Inc., Alere, Alere (Shanghai) Diagnostics Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Healthcare Management Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Medical Sales Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Technology Co. Ltd., Alere A/S, Alere AB, Alere AS, Alere AS Holdings Limited, Alere BBI Holdings Limited, Alere Bangladesh Limited, Alere China Co. Ltd., Alere Colombia S.A., Alere Connect LLC, Alere Connected Health Limited, Alere Connected Health Ltd., Alere Diagnostics GmbH, Alere DoA Holding GmbH, Alere GmbH, Alere GmbH (Austria), Alere GmbH (Germany), Alere HK Holdings Ltd., Alere Health B.V., Alere Health BVBA, Alere Health Corp., Alere Health Sdn Bhd, Alere Health Services B.V., Alere Healthcare (Pty) Limited, Alere Healthcare Connections Limited, Alere Healthcare Inc., Alere Healthcare Nigeria Limited, Alere Healthcare S.L., Alere Holdco Inc., Alere Holding GmbH, Alere Holdings Bermuda Limited, Alere Holdings Pty Limited, Alere Home Monitoring Inc., Alere Inc., Alere Informatics Inc., Alere International Holding Corp., Alere International Limited, Alere Lda, Alere Limited, Alere Limited (New Zealand), Alere Medical BVBA, Alere Medical Co. Ltd., Alere Medical Pakistan (Private) Limited, Alere Medical Private Limited, Alere North America LLC, Alere Oy Ab, Alere Philippines Inc., Alere Phoenix ACQ Inc., Alere Pte Ltd, Alere S.A., Alere S.r.l., Alere S/A, Alere SAS, Alere San Diego Inc., Alere Scarborough Inc., Alere Spain S.L., Alere Switzerland GmbH, Alere Technologies GmbH, Alere Technologies Holdings Limited, Alere Technologies Limited, Alere Toxicology AB, Alere Toxicology Inc., Alere Toxicology S.r.l., Alere Toxicology Services Inc., Alere Toxicology plc, Alere UK Holdings Limited, Alere UK Subco Limited, Alere ULC, Alere US Holdings LLC, Alere s.r.o., Alisoc Investment & Co, Amedica Biotech Inc., Ameditech Inc., American Generics S.A.S., American Medical Supplies Inc., American Pharmacist Inc., Antares S.A., Apica Cardiovascular Limited, Aquagestion Capacitacion S.A., Aquagestion S.A., Arriva Medical LLC, Arriva Medical Philippines Inc., Arvis Investments Limited, Atlas Farmaceutica S.A., Avee Laboratories Inc., Axis-Shield AD III AS, Axis-Shield AD IV AS, Axis-Shield AS, Axis-Shield Diagnostics Limited, Axis-Shield Ltd., BBI Animal Health Limited, BBI Diagnostics Group 2 Public Limited Company, Banco de Vida S.A., Bioabsorbable Vascular Solutions Inc., Bioalgae S.A., Biohealth LLC, Biosite Incorporated, Bosque Bonito S.A., Branan Medical Corporation, Brandex Europe C.V., British Colloids Limited, CFR Chile S.A., CFR Interamericas EL Salvador Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, CFR Interamericas Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, CFR Interamericas Panama S.A., CFR Pharmaceuticals, California Property Holdings III LLC, CardioMEMS LLC, Caripharm Inc., Cephea Valve Technologies, Cephea Valve Technologies Inc., Colibri Medical Aktiebolag, Comercializadora y Distribuidora CFR Interamericas Honduras S.A., Concateno South Limited, Concateno UK Limited, Consorcio Tecnologico en Biomedicina Clinico-Molecular S.A., Continuum Services LLC, Cozart Limited, Dextech S.A., Diagnostik Nord GmbH, Distribuciones Uquifa S.A.S., Domesco Medical Import-Export Joint-Stock Corporation, Duphar International Research B.V., Endocardial Solutions, Epocal (US) Inc, Esprit de Vie S.A., European Chemicals & Co, European Drug Testing Service EDTS AB, European Services S.A., Evalve Inc., Evalve International Inc., FARMINDUSTRIA S.A., Fada Pharma Paraguay Sociedad Anonima, Fadapharma del Ecuador S.A., Farmaceutica Mont Blanc S.L., Farmacologia Em Aquicultura Veterinaria Ltda., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV Ecuador S.A., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV S.A., Fernwood Investment S.A., First Check Diagnostics LLC, Focus Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Forensics Limited, Forestcreek Overseas S.A., Fournier Pharma Corp., Fournier Pharma GmbH, Fournier Pharmaceuticals Limited, Framed B.V., Gabmed GmbH, Garden Hills LLC, Global Analytical Development LLC, Globapharm & CO LP, Glomed Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Golnorth Investments S.A., Gynocare Limited, Gynopharm Sociedad Anonima, Gynopharm de Centroamerica S.A., Gynopharm de Venezuela C.A., Hi-Tronics Designs Inc., IDEV Technologies Inc., IG Innovations Limited, IMTC Finance B.V., IMTC Holdings B.V., IMTC Technologies Inc., Ibis Biosciences LLC, Igloo Zone Chile S.A., Igloo Zone S.L., Inmobiliaria Naknek S.A.C., Innovacon Inc., Instant Tech Subsidiary Acquisition Inc., Instant Technologies Inc., Instituto de Criopreservacion de Chile S.A., Integrated Vascular Systems Inc., Inverness Canadian Acquisition Corporation, Inverness Medical (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Australia Pty Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Hong Kong Limited, Inverness Medical Innovations SK LLC, Inverness Medical Investments LLC, Inverness Medical LLC, Inverness Medical Shimla Private Limited, Inversiones K2 SpA, Inversiones Komodo S.R.L., Ionian Technologies LLC, Irvine Biomedical Inc., Kalila Medical, Kangshenyunga S.A., Knoll UK Investments Unlimited, LLC VeroInPharm, Laboratoires Fournier S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano Lafrancol S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano del Ecuador S.A., Laboratorio Internacional Argentino S.A., Laboratorio Synthesis S.A.S., Laboratorios Lafi Limitada, Laboratorios Naturmedik S.A.S., Laboratorios Pauly Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Laboratorios Recalcine S.A., Laboratorios Transpharm S.A., Laboratory Specialists of America Inc., Lafrancol Dominicana S.A.S., Lafrancol Guatemala S.A. Sociedad Anonima, Lafrancol Internacional S.A.S, Lafrancol Peru S.R.L, Lake Forest Investments LLC, Lightlab Imaging Inc., Limited Liability Company Abbott Laboratories, Limited Liability Company Abbott Ukraine, Limited Liability Company VEROPHARM, Lung Fung Hong (China) Limited, Mansbridge Pharmaceuticals Limited, MediGuide LLC, MediGuide Ltd., Medscreen Holdings Limited, Metropolitana Farmaceutica S.A., Midwest Properties LLC, Murex Argentina S.A., Murex Biotech Limited, Murex Biotech South Africa, Murex Diagnostics Inc., Murex Diagnostics International Inc., Natural Supplement Association LLC, Negocios Denia Sociedad Anonima, Neosalud S.A.C., Nether Pharma N.P. C.V., NeuroTherm LLC, Normann Pharma-Handels GmbH, North Shore Properties Inc., Novamedi S.A., Novasalud.com S.A., Nutravida S.A., OJSC Voronezhkhimpharm, Omnilab Iberia Sociedad Limitada, OptiMedica, Orgenics France SAS, Orgenics International Holdings B.V., Orgenics Ltd., PBM-Selfcare LLC, PDD II LLC, PDD LLC, PT Alere Health, PT. Abbott Indonesia, PT. Abbott Products Indonesia, Pacesetter Inc., Pantech (RF) (PTY) LTD, Pembrooke Occupational Health Inc., Penagos S.A., Pharma International Sociedad Anonima, Pharmaceutical Technologies (Pharmatech) S.A., Pharmatech Boliviana S.A., Polygon Labs S.A., Quality Assured Services Inc., RF Medical Holdings LLC, RTL Holdings Inc., Ramses Business Corp., Recben Xenerics Farmaceutica Limitada, Redwood Toxicology Laboratory Inc., Rich Horizons International Limited, SC VEROPHARM, SJ Medical Mexico S de R.L. de C.V., SJM International Inc., SJM Thunder Holding Company, SPDH Inc., Saboya Enterprises Corporation, Salviac Limited, Scanax AS, Sealing Solutions Inc., Selfcare Technology Inc., Shandong Abbott Dairy Product Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Medical Devices Science and Technology Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Shanghai Si Fa Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Sinensix & Co., Spinal Modulation LLC, St. Jude Medical, St. Jude Medical AB, St. Jude Medical ATG Inc., St. Jude Medical Argentina S.A., St. Jude Medical Asia Pacific Holdings GK, St. Jude Medical Atrial Fibrillation Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Brasil Ltda., St. Jude Medical Business Services Inc., St. Jude Medical Cardiology Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Colombia Ltda., St. Jude Medical Coordination Center, St. Jude Medical Costa Rica Limitada, St. Jude Medical Europe Inc., St. Jude Medical Export Ges.m.b.H., St. Jude Medical GVA Sarl, St. Jude Medical Holdings B.V., St. Jude Medical India Private Limited, St. Jude Medical International Holding, St. Jude Medical LLC, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings II, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings NT, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings SMI S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings TC S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Mexico Business Services S. de R.L. de C.V., St. Jude Medical Middle East DMCC, St. Jude Medical Operations (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., St. Jude Medical Puerto Rico LLC, St. Jude Medical S.C. Inc., St. Jude Medical Systems AB, St. Jude Medical Turkey Medikal Urunler Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Standard Diagnostics Inc., Standing Stone LLC, Swan-Myers Incorporated, TC1 LLC, Tendyne Holdings Inc., Tendyne Medical Inc., Thoratec Delaware LLC, Thoratec Europe Limited, Thoratec LLC, Thoratec Switzerland GmbH, Tobal Products Incorporated, Topera GmbH in Liquidation, Topera Inc., Tremora S.A., Tuenir S.A., TwistDx, UAB Abbott Laboratories, UAB Abbott Medical Lithuania, Union-Madison Realty Company Inc., Unipath Limited (dba Alere International/aka Cranfield), Unipath Management Limited, Unipath Pension Trustee Limited, Veropharm, Veropharm Limited Liability Partnership, Vida Cell Inversiones S.A., Vida Cell S.A., Vivalsol, W&R Pharma Handels GmbH, Western Pharmaceuticals S.A., X Technologies Inc., Yissum Holding Limited, ZonePerfect Nutrition Company, eScreen Canada ULC, eScreen Inc.,      ( ), and Abbott Laboratories Baltics.Ensign Energy Services Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides oilfield services to the crude oil and natural gas industries in Canada, the United States, and internationally. The company offers shallow, intermediate, and deep well drilling, as well as specialized drilling services, including horizontal, underbalanced, horizontal re-entry, and slant drilling for steam assisted gravity drainage applications; and equipment and other services. It also provides coring and oil sands drilling services to the mining, and oil and natural gas industries; directional drilling and related services for conventional and horizontal drilling applications; shallow to deep well services, such as completions, abandonments, production, workovers, and bottom hole pump changes for oil and natural gas producers; and interactive pressure drilling services with self-contained systems comprising nitrogen generation and compression equipment, and surface control systems. In addition, the company rents drill strings, loaders, tanks, pumps, rig mattings, blow-out preventers, waste bins, and wastewater treatment equipment for the drilling and completions segments of the oilfield industry. Further, the company offers transportation services. As of December 31, 2020, it operated a fleet of 271 land drilling rigs, 21 specialty coring rigs, and 99 well servicing rigs. The company was incorporated in 1987 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

Read MoreEquinox Gold Corp. engages in the acquisition, exploration, and development of mineral deposits. The company's principal properties include the Aurizona project covering a total land package of approximately 223,160 hectares located in Maranhao State, Brazil; and the Castle Mountain property situated in California, the United States. It primarily explores for gold, copper, and silver deposits. The company was formerly known as Trek Mining Inc. and changed its name to Equinox Gold Corp. in December 2017. Equinox Gold Corp. was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.

Read MoreBy Donald Kirk



President Moon Jae-in almost accidentally stepped into a battle that did not have to happen with journalists for foreign news organizations.



The ruckus was all about a Korean reporter for Bloomberg who wrote in September that Moon sounded like a spokesman for Kim Jong-un by singing the praises of the North Korean leader in a talk at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York.



So what? People say worse things every day about Moon and those around him. People also say worse about the people who say worse things about Moon. In this political climate, in which Moon is pursuing a controversial policy of reconciliation, snide remarks from one side to the other and back again are to be expected.



Moon's advocates may say how unfair, unhelpful is any criticism against him. The Bloomberg barb was not altogether unreasonable, however, considering that another Moon, Moon Chung-in, the President's loquacious foreign policy adviser, sounded a bit as if he too were taking Kim Jong-un's viewpoint in a talk at which he was besieged by questions from Korean journalists seated on either side of him.



Moon Chung-in had just returned from three days in Washington at which he had absorbed a range of views from American think-tankers about the failed Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi. Ironically, under skeptical questioning by one of the journalists next to him on the panel, he turned on her and said she sounded like "a spokesman" for the U.S. No one seemed to mind when the "spokesman" label was applied for expressing a pro-American view.



All this repartee was great until leaders of the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) were awakened to the fact that the Bloomberg reporter six months ago had had the temerity to reflect, very briefly, the same skepticism as many others in Seoul and Washington. Her story wasn't noticed until the floor leader of the opposition Liberty Korea Party quoted it in a speech.



Then all hell broke loose. The headline on the story  "South Korea's Moon Becomes Kim Jong Un's Top Spokesman at UN"  attracted the most attention. That was enough for the DPK spokesman to accuse the reporter of "treason" even though she probably hadn't written the headline. All that loose talk, though, returned to haunt the DPK, when the Seoul Foreign Correspondents' Club and then the Asian American Journalists' Association (AAJA) came out in heated defense of the beleaguered reporter.



Amid back-pedaling and even apologies, the powers-that-be, that is the ruling establishment, both party and government, seem to realize they made a mistake in pillorying a reporter for a single, brief, largely forgotten, story.



The Candlelit Revolution was about a lot of things  corruption, power-grabbing and influence-buying  but it was also about freedom of expression, freedom of the press, debate from both sides. President Moon, of all people, should recognize the basic principles that enabled him to take over the government in the spirit of justice and democracy.



In that same spirit, Moon and those around him must recognize that reconciliation with North Korea, while noble in the abstract, may not work out in practice. Knowledgeable people, ranging from veteran diplomats to business leaders to academic figures, not just the rightwing flag-wavers who parade through central Seoul every Saturday, are pointing out the flaws inherent in his policy.



Moon Chung-in, a retired Yonsei University professor, energetically calls for "steps" to be made by both sides but fails to recognize that North Korea has dishonored all its agreements. He never stops talking up an end-of-war declaration and peace treaty as if those words on paper would have real meaning nearly seven decades after the Korean War ended.



Moon Jae-in, not Moon Chung-in, may still bring about a measure of reconciliation through talks on different levels. By the time he steps down three years from now, we may see clear signs of rapprochement in the form of cultural exchanges, regular reunions of divided families and humanitarian programs. Sanctions may be eased, making it possible to reopen the Gaeseong Industrial Complex and the Mount Geumgang tourist zone.



One way not to achieve any of these goals, however, is to attack some wayward reporter for the kind of jibes that one has to expect in a democracy. Moon probably understands that. Nobody wants to see South Korea revert to the bad old days of intimidation of the media in the name of any belief, including reconciliation with a totalitarian state within artillery range of the Blue House





Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) has covered the Korean democracy struggle since the 1970s.

Fortis Inc. operates as an electric and gas utility company in Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean countries. It generates, transmits, and distributes electricity to approximately 433,000 retail customers in southeastern Arizona; and 98,000 retail customers in Arizona's Mohave and Santa Cruz counties with an aggregate capacity of 3,233 megawatts (MW), including 59 MW of solar capacity. The company also sells wholesale electricity to other entities in the western United States; owns gas-fired and hydroelectric generating capacity totaling 65 MW; and distributes natural gas to approximately 1,048,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers in British Columbia, Canada. In addition, it owns and operates the electricity distribution system that serves approximately 572,000 customers in southern and central Alberta; owns 4 hydroelectric generating facilities with a combined capacity of 225 MW; and provides operation, maintenance, and management services to five hydroelectric generating facilities. Further, the company distributes electricity in the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador with an installed generating capacity of 143 MW; and on Prince Edward Island with a generating capacity of 130 MW. Additionally, it provides integrated electric utility service to approximately 67,000 customers in Ontario; approximately 270,000 customers in Newfoundland and Labrador; approximately 31,000 customers on Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands; and approximately 15,000 customers on certain islands in Turks and Caicos. The company also holds long-term contracted generation assets in Belize consisting of 3 hydroelectric generating facilities with a combined capacity of 51 MW; and the Aitken Creek natural gas storage facility. It also owns and operates approximately 91,000 circuit Kilometers (km) of distribution lines; and approximately 49,500 km of natural gas pipelines. Fortis Inc. was founded in 1885 and is headquartered in St. John's, Canada.

Read MoreMettler-Toledo International, Inc. is a supplier of precision instruments and services. The firm manufactures weighing instruments for use in laboratory, industrial, packaging, logistics, and food retailing applications. It also manufactures several related analytical instruments and provides automated chemistry solutions used in drug and chemical compound discovery and development; and also, metal detection and other end-of-line inspection systems used in production and packaging and provides solutions for use in certain process analytics applications. Its operations are conducted by the following segments: U. S. Operations, Swiss Operations, Western European Operations, Chinese Operations and Other. The U.S. Operations segment represents certain of the company's marketing and producing organizations located in the United States. The Swiss Operations segment includes marketing and producing organizations located in Switzerland, as well as extensive R&D operations that are responsible for the development, production, and marketing of precision instruments, including weighing, analytical, and measurement technologies for use in a variety of industrial and laboratory applications. Th

Read MoreHealth Care Select Sector SPDR Fund's stock was trading at $91.56 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, XLV shares have increased by 47.0% and is now trading at $134.58.

View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19.JMP Group LLC provides investment banking, sales and trading, and equity research services to corporate and institutional clients, and alternative asset management products and services to institutional investors and high net-worth individuals. It operates through three segments: Broker-Dealer, Asset Management, and Investment. The Broker-Dealer segment includes underwriting and acting as a placement agent for public & private capital markets raising transactions, financial advisory services in M&A, restructuring and other strategic transactions. The Asset Management segment involves in the management of pooled investment vehicles, including the company's hedge funds and collateralized loan obligations. The Investment segment includes Company's principal investments in public and private securities and investment funds managed by HCS, as well as any other net interest and income from investing activities, and interest expense related to the Company's bond issuance. The company was founded by Joseph A. Jolson, Gerald L. Tuttle, Jr. and Carter D. Mack in 1999 and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

Read MoreA Samsung Electronics employee, right, introduces the firm's 8K QLED TV to U.S. buyers during the firm's national sales meeting at the Fairmont Austin Hotel in Texas in this photo provided by the firm, Friday. / Courtesy of Samsung ElectronicsThe North West Company Inc., through its subsidiaries, engages in the retail of food and everyday products and services to rural communities and urban neighborhood markets in Canada, Alaska, the South Pacific, and the Caribbean. The company's Canadian operations comprise 118 Northern stores, which offers food, financial services, and general merchandise; 5 NorthMart stores that provides fresh foods, apparel, and health products and services; 25 Quickstop convenience stores that provides ready-to-eat foods, and fuel and related services; 5 Giant Tiger junior discount stores, which offers family fashion, household products, and food; 2 Valu Lots discount center and direct-to-customer food distribution outlet; 2 Pharmacy and Convenience stores; 1 Solo Market store for rural market; and 1 North West Company motorsports dealership offering sales, service, parts and accessories for Ski-doo, Honda, Can-am and other premier brands. The Canadian operations also provides contract tele-pharmacist services to rural hospitals and health centers; water and air-based transportation services; and produce and fresh meats to independent grocery stores. Its International operations include 27 Alaska Commercial Company stores that provides food and general merchandise to remote and rural regions; 12 Cost-U-Less mid-size warehouse stores, which offers discount food and general merchandise; 5 Quickstop convenience stores; 8 Riteway food markets; and 1 Cash and Carry store. The North West Company Inc. was founded in 1668 and is headquartered in Winnipeg, Canada.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of General Motors: 2140879 Ontario Inc., ACAR Leasing, ACAR Leasing Ltd., ACF Investment, ACF Investment Corp., AFS SenSub, APGO Trust, Adam Opel, Adam Opel GmbH, Aftermarket (UK), AmeriCredit, AmeriCredit Consumer Loan, AmeriCredit Consumer Loan Company Inc., AmeriCredit Financial Services, AmeriCredit Financial Services Inc., AmeriCredit Funding, AmeriCredit Syndicated Warehouse Trust, Annunciata Corporation, Argonaut Holdings, Argonaut Holdings LLC, BOCO (Proprietary), BOCO (Proprietary) Limited, Banco GMAC, Banco GMAC S.A., Baylis (Gloucester), Boco Trust, Boden Brussels, CHEVYPLAN, CHEVYPLAN S.A. Sociedad Administradora de Planes de Autofinanciamiento Comercial, Cadillac, Cadillac Europe, Cadillac Europe GmbH, Carve-Out Ownership, Carve-Out Ownership Cooperative LLC, Chevrolet Deutschland GmbH, Chevrolet Sales (Thailand), Chevrolet Sales (Thailand) Limited, Chevrolet Sales India, Chevrolet Sales India Private Ltd., Chevrolet Sociedad Anonima de Ahorro para Fines Determinados, Controladora General Motors, Controladora General Motors S.A. de C.V., Cruise, DCJ1, DCJ1 LLC, DMAX, DMAX Ltd., Dealership Liquidations, Dealership Liquidations Inc., Delphi Energy and Engine Management Systems UK, Delphi Energy and Engine Management Systems UK Overseas Corporation, EDS (Electronic Data Systems), FAW-GM, Fundacion Chevrolet, G.M.A.C., GCAR Titling Ltd., GM (UK) Pension, GM (UK) Pension Trustees Limited, GM APO Holdings, GM Administradora de Bens, GM Administradora de Bens Ltda., GM Asia Pacific Regional Headquarters Ltd., GM Auslandsprojekte, GM Automotive, GM Automotive Services Belgium, GM CME, GM Canada Holdings, GM Canada Limited, GM Components Holdings, GM Components Holdings LLC, GM Cruise, GM Cruise Holdings LLC, GM Cruise LLC, GM Defense, GM Eurometals, GM Eurometals Inc., GM Europe Treasury, GM Finance, GM Finance Co. Holdings LLC, GM Financial, GM Financial AB, GM Financial Canada, GM Financial Canada Leasing, GM Financial Canada Leasing Ltd., GM Financial Colombia Holdings LLC, GM Financial Colombia S.A. Compania de Financiamiento, GM Financial Consumer, GM Financial Consumer Discount, GM Financial Consumer Discount Company, GM Financial Del Peru, GM Financial GmbH, GM Financial Holdings LLC, GM Financial Insurance Services, GM Financial Mexico Holdings, GM Financial Mexico Holdings LLC, GM Financial Real Estate, GM Financial de Mexico, GM Financial de Mexico S.A. de C.V. SOFOM E.R., GM Financial del Peru S.A.C, GM Global Business Services, GM Global Propulsion Systems -Torino S.r.l., GM Global Purchasing and Supply Chain, GM Global Technology Operations, GM Global Technology Operations LLC, GM Global Tooling, GM Global Tooling Company LLC, GM Global Treasury Centre Limited, GM Holden, GM Holden Pty Ltd., GM Holdings U.K. No.1 Limited, GM Inversiones Santiago Limitada, GM Investment Trustees Limited, GM Korea, GM Korea Company, GM LAAM Holdings, GM LAAM Holdings LLC, GM Mexico Holdings, GM Mobility Europe GmbH, GM PSA Purchasing Services, GM Personnel Services, GM Personnel Services Inc., GM Philippines Inc., GM Plats (Proprietary), GM Regional Holdings, GM Regional Holdings LLC, GM Retirees Pension Trustees, GM Retirees Pension Trustees Limited, GM Subsystems Manufacturing, GM Subsystems Manufacturing LLC, GM Technical Center Korea Ltd., GM Viet Nam Motor Company, GM-DI Leasing, GM-DI Leasing LLC, GMAC - Instituicao Financeira de Credito, GMAC Administradora de Consorcios, GMAC Administradora de Consorcios Ltda., GMAC Banque, GMAC Continental, GMAC Espana de Financiacion, GMAC Holdings (U.K.), GMAC Lease B.V. (aka Masterlease Europe), GMAC Nederland N.V., GMAC Prestadora de Servicios de Mao de Obra Ltda., GMAC Servicios, GMAC UK, GMAC de Venezuela, GMAC-Prestadora de Servios de Mo-de-Obra, GMACI Corretora de Seguros, GMACI Corretora de Seguros Ltda, GMAM Real Estate I, GMCH&SP Private Equity II, GMCH&SP Private Equity II L.P., GMF Australia Pty Ltd, GMF Europe, GMF Europe Holdco, GMF Europe LLP, GMF Floorplan Owner Revolving Trust, GMF Funding, GMF Germany Holdings, GMF Global Assignment, GMF Global Assignment LLC, GMF International, GMF International LLC, GMF Leasing LLC, GMF Leasing Warehousing Trust, GMF Wholesale Receivables, GMGP Holdings, General Motors (China) Investment Company, General Motors (China) Investment Company Limited, General Motors (Thailand), General Motors (Thailand) Limited, General Motors - Colmotores, General Motors - Colmotores S.A., General Motors Advisory Services LLC, General Motors Africa and Middle East, General Motors Africa and Middle East FZE, General Motors Asia, General Motors Asia LLC, General Motors Asia Pacific Holdings, General Motors Asia Pacific Holdings LLC, General Motors Asset Management, General Motors Asset Management Corporation, General Motors Australia, General Motors Australia Pty Ltd., General Motors Austria, General Motors Austria, General Motors Auto, General Motors Auto LLC, General Motors Automobiles Philippines, General Motors Automobiles Philippines Inc., General Motors Automotive Holdings, General Motors Automotive Holdings S.L., General Motors Belgique Automobile NV, General Motors Belgium, General Motors Chile, General Motors Chile Industria Automotriz Limitada, General Motors China LLC, General Motors Daewoo Auto and Technology, General Motors Daewoo Auto and Technology CIS LLC, General Motors East Africa, General Motors Egypt, General Motors Egypt S.A.E., General Motors Espana, General Motors Europe Holdings, General Motors Europe Limited, General Motors Financial Chile, General Motors Financial Chile Limitada, General Motors Financial Chile S.A., General Motors Financial Company, General Motors Financial Company Inc., General Motors Financial International, General Motors Financial Italia, General Motors Financial Suisse, General Motors Financial UK, General Motors Financial of Canada, General Motors Financial of Canada Ltd., General Motors Finland, General Motors France, General Motors GBS Hungary, General Motors Global Service Operations, General Motors Global Service Operations Inc., General Motors Hellas, General Motors Holden Australia, General Motors Holden Australia NSC, General Motors Holden Australia NSC Pty Ltd., General Motors Holden Australia Pty Ltd., General Motors Holdings LLC, General Motors IT Services (Ireland) Limited, General Motors India Private, General Motors India Private Limited, General Motors International Holdings, General Motors International Holdings LLC, General Motors International Operations, General Motors International Operations Pte. Ltd., General Motors International Services Company, General Motors International Services Company SAS, General Motors International Services LLC, General Motors Investment Limited, General Motors Investment Management, General Motors Investment Management Corporation, General Motors Investment Participacoes, General Motors Investment Participacoes Ltda., General Motors Investments, General Motors Investments Pty. Ltd., General Motors Ireland, General Motors Israel, General Motors Israel Ltd., General Motors Italia, General Motors Japan, General Motors Japan Limited, General Motors LLC, General Motors Limited, General Motors Manufacturing Poland, General Motors Nederland, General Motors New Zealand Pensions, General Motors New Zealand Pensions Limited, General Motors Overseas, General Motors Overseas Commercial Vehicle, General Motors Overseas Commercial Vehicle Corporation, General Motors Overseas Corporation, General Motors Overseas Distribution, General Motors Overseas Distribution LLC, General Motors Peru, General Motors Peru S.A., General Motors Poland Spolka, General Motors Portugal, General Motors Powertrain (Thailand), General Motors Powertrain (Thailand) Limited, General Motors Research Corporation, General Motors South Africa, General Motors South Africa (Pty) Limited, General Motors Suisse, General Motors Taiwan, General Motors Taiwan Ltd., General Motors Technical Centre India, General Motors Technical Centre India Private Limited, General Motors Treasury Center, General Motors Treasury Center LLC, General Motors Turkiye, General Motors UK, General Motors Uruguay, General Motors Uruguay S.A., General Motors Venezolana, General Motors Ventures, General Motors Ventures LLC, General Motors Warehousing and Trading (Shanghai), General Motors Warehousing and Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., General Motors de Argentina, General Motors de Argentina S.r.l., General Motors de Mexico, General Motors de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., General Motors del Ecuador, General Motors del Ecuador S.A., General Motors do Brasil, General Motors do Brasil Ltda., General Motors of Canada, General Motors of Canada Company, General Motors-Holden's Sales, General Motors-Holden's Sales Pty. Limited, GigaPower LLC, Global Services Detroit, Global Services Detroit LLC, Global Tooling Service Company Europe, Global Tooling Service Company Europe Limited, Go Motor Retailing, Go Trade Parts, Grand Pointe Holdings, Grand Pointe Holdings Inc., Grand Pointe Park Condominium, Grand Pointe Park Condominium Association, H.S.H., Haines & Strange, Holden New Zealand, Holden New Zealand Limited, IBC Pension Trustees, IBC Pension Trustees Limited, IBC Vehicles, Lease Ownership Cooperative, Lease Ownership Cooperative LLC, Lidlington Engineering Company, Lidlington Engineering Company Ltd., Limited Liability Company "General Motors CIS", Master Lease Germany, Maven Drive, Maven Drive LLC, Millbrook Pension Management, Millbrook Pension Management Limited, Monetization of Carve-Out, Monetization of Carve-Out LLC, Motor Repris Automocio, Motors Holding, Motors Holding LLC, Motors Properties, Motors Properties (Trading), Multi-Use Lease Entity Trust, North American New Cars, North American New Cars LLC, Omnibus BB Transportes, Omnibus BB Transportes S. A., OnStar Connected Services Srl, OnStar Egypt Limited LLC, OnStar Europe, OnStar Europe Ltd., OnStar Global Services, OnStar Global Services Corporation, OnStar LLC, OnStar de Mexico, OnStar de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Opel Bank, Opel Danmark, Opel Group, Opel Group Warehousing, Opel Leasing, Opel Norge, Opel Sonderdienste, Opel Southeast Europe, Opel Sverige, Opel Szentgotthard Automotive Manufacturing, Opel Wien, P.T. G M AutoWorld Indonesia, P.T. General Motors Indonesia, PIMS, PIMS Co., PT. General Motors Indonesia Manufacturing, Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center, Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center Company Ltd., Prestadora de Servicios GMF Colombia S.A.S., Rapid Motor Vehicle Company, Reliance Motor Car Company, Riverfront Holdings III Inc., Riverfront Holdings Inc., Riverfront Holdings Phase II Inc., SAIC GM (Shenyang) Norsom Motors Co. Ltd., SAIC GM Dong Yue Motors Company Limited, SAIC GM Dong Yue Powertrain Company Limited, SAIC GM Wuling Automobile Company Limited, SAIC General Motors Corporation Limited, SAIC General Motors Investment Limited, SAIC General Motors Sales Company Limited, SAIC-GMAC Automotive Finance Company Limited, SAIC-GMF Leasing Co. Ltd., Servicios GMAC S.A. de C.V., Shanghai Chengxin Used Car Operation and Management Company Limited, Shanghai OnStar Telematics Co. Ltd., Sherwoods (Darlington) Limited, Sidecar Technologies, Skurrays Limited, Stam-Terberg Autobedrijven B. V., Strobe Inc., VHC Sub-Holdings (UK), Vauxhall Defined Contribution Pension Plan Trustees Limited, Vehicle Asset Universal Leasing Trust, Vickers (Lakeside) Limited, Vision Motors Limited, WRE, WRE Inc., and Zona Franca Industrial Colmotores SAS.The following companies are subsidiares of Dominion Energy: 96WI 8me LLC, Alamo Solar LLC, Align RNG Arizona LLC, Align RNG Arizona-Snowflake LLC, Align RNG California LLC, Align RNG California-Corcoran LLC, Align RNG Grady Road LLC, Align RNG LLC, Align RNG Magnolia LLC, Align RNG North Carolina LLC, Align RNG North Carolina-Bowdens LLC, Align RNG Utah LLC, Align RNG Utah-Milford LLC, Align RNG Virginia LLC, Align RNG Virginia-Waverly LLC, Atlantic Coast Pipeline LLC, Azalea Solar LLC, BOE Holdings Inc., Blackville Solar Farm LLC, Blue Ocean Energy Marine LLC, BrightSuite Home LLC, BrightSuite Inc., BrightSuite Solar CT Inc., BrightSuite Solar SC Inc., BrightSuite Solar VA Inc., Buckingham Solar I LLC, CEA Americus LLC, CEA CO-Fort Morgan LLC, CEA Clovis LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Colorado LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Georgia LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Idaho LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Nevada LLC, CEA Dairy RNG New Mexico LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Texas LLC, CEA Greely LLC, CEA Mason LLC, CEA TX-Dimmitt LLC, CID Solar LLC, CNG Coal Company, CNG Power Services Corporation, Carolina Gas Transmission Corporation, Catalina Solar 2 LLC, Clean Energy Asset USA LLC, Clean Energy Enterprises Inc., Clipperton Holdings LLC, Consolidated Natural Gas Company, Correctional Solar LLC, Cottonwood Solar LLC, Cove Point LNG LP, Cove Point LNG Limited, DE Arlington Solar LLC, DE Fluvanna Solar LLC, DE Hanover Solar LLC, DE Henrico Solar LLC, DE King William Solar LLC, DE Louisa Solar LLC, DE Newport News Solar LLC, DE Powhatan Solar LLC, DE Virginia Beach Solar LLC, DECP Holdings Inc., Dairy RNG Holdings LLC, Dairy RNG NY LLC, Dairy RNG NY-Curtin LLC, Dairy RNG OH LLC, Denmark Solar LLC, Dominion ACP Holding Inc., Dominion Alternative Energy Holdings Inc., Dominion Atlantic Coast Pipeline LLC, Dominion Capital Inc., Dominion Cogen WV Inc., Dominion Energy Fuel Services Inc., Dominion Energy Gas Distribution LLC, Dominion Energy Generation Marketing Inc., Dominion Energy Inc., Dominion Energy Kewaunee Inc., Dominion Energy Marketplace LLC, Dominion Energy Nuclear Connecticut Inc., Dominion Energy Overthrust Pipeline LLC, Dominion Energy Payroll Company Inc., Dominion Energy Questar Corporation, Dominion Energy Questar Pipeline LLC, Dominion Energy Questar Pipeline Services Inc., Dominion Energy RNG Holdings II Inc., Dominion Energy RNG Holdings Inc., Dominion Energy Services Inc., Dominion Energy Solar CA LLC, Dominion Energy Solutions Inc., Dominion Energy South Carolina Inc., Dominion Energy Southeast Services Inc., Dominion Energy Technical Solutions Inc., Dominion Energy Technologies II Inc., Dominion Energy Technologies Inc., Dominion Energy Terminal Company Inc., Dominion Energy Wexpro Services Company, Dominion Equipment III Inc., Dominion Equipment Inc., Dominion Fairless Hills Inc., Dominion Fowler Ridge Wind LLC, Dominion Gas Projects Company LLC, Dominion Generation Inc., Dominion Greenbrier Inc., Dominion High Voltage Holdings Inc., Dominion High Voltage MidAtlantic Inc., Dominion Investments Inc., Dominion Keystone Pipeline Holdings Inc., Dominion Keystone Pipeline LLC, Dominion MLP Holding Company III Inc., Dominion Mt. Storm Wind LLC, Dominion Nuclear Projects Inc., Dominion Oklahoma Texas Exploration & Production Inc., Dominion Person Inc., Dominion Privatization Florida LLC, Dominion Privatization Georgia LLC, Dominion Privatization Holdings Inc., Dominion Privatization Kentucky LLC, Dominion Privatization Maryland LLC, Dominion Privatization Pennsylvania LLC, Dominion Privatization South Carolina LLC, Dominion Privatization Texas LLC, Dominion Privatization Virginia LLC, Dominion Products and Services Inc., Dominion Projects Services Inc., Dominion Resources Capital Trust III, Dominion Retail Gas Holdings Inc., Dominion Solar Construction and Maintenance LLC, Dominion Solar Gen-Tie LLC, Dominion Solar Holdings I LLC, Dominion Solar Holdings II LLC, Dominion Solar Holdings III LLC, Dominion Solar Holdings IV LLC, Dominion Solar Projects A Inc., Dominion Solar Projects B Inc., Dominion Solar Projects C Inc., Dominion Solar Projects D Inc., Dominion Solar Projects I Inc., Dominion Solar Projects II Inc., Dominion Solar Projects III Inc., Dominion Solar Projects IV Inc., Dominion Solar Projects V Inc., Dominion Solar Projects VI Inc., Dominion Solar Projects VII Inc., Dominion Solar Services Inc., Dominion State Line LLC, Dominion Voltage Inc., Dominion Wholesale Inc., Dominion Wind Development LLC, Dominion Wind Projects Inc., ESCT-SA-Suffield LLC, Eagle Holdco Solar LLC, Eagle Solar LLC, Eastern Shore Solar LLC, Enterprise Solar LLC, Escalante Solar I LLC, Escalante Solar II LLC, Escalante Solar III LLC, Four Brothers Solar LLC, Fremont Farm LLC, Granite Mountain Holdings LLC, Granite Mountain Solar East LLC, Granite Mountain Solar West LLC, Greenbrier Marketing Company LLC, Greenbrier Pipeline Company LLC, Greensville County Solar Project LLC, Hardin Solar Energy LLC, Hecate Energy Cherrydale LLC, Hecate Energy Clarke County LLC, Hope Gas Inc., Imperial Valley Solar Company (IVSC) 2 LLC, Indy Solar Development LLC, Indy Solar I LLC, Indy Solar II LLC, Indy Solar III LLC, Innovative Solar 37 LLC, Iron Springs Holdings LLC, Iron Springs Solar LLC, Louis Dreyfus Natural Gas, Maricopa West Solar PV LLC, Moffett Solar 1 LLC, Moorings Farm 2 LLC, Mulberry Farm LLC, Mustang Solar LLC, PSNC Blue Ridge Corporation, PSNC Cardinal Pipeline Company, Pavant Solar LLC, Phone House, Pikeville Farm LLC, Prairie Fork Wind Farm LLC, Public Service Company of North Carolina Incorporated, QPC Holding Company LLC, Questar Corporation, Questar Energy Services Inc., Questar Field Services LLC, Questar Gas Company, Questar InfoComm Inc., Questar Southern Trails Pipeline Company, Questar White River Hub LLC, RE Adams East LLC, RE Camelot LLC, RE Columbia Two LLC, RE Kansas LLC, RE Kent South LLC, RE Old River One LLC, Richland Solar Center LLC, Ridgeland Solar Farm I LLC, SBL Holdco LLC, SCANA, SCANA Communications Holdings Inc., SCANA Corporate Security Services Inc., SCANA Energy Marketing LLC, SCANA Pharmacy LLC, SRFI LLC, Scana Corporation, Scott-II Solar LLC, Seabrook Solar LLC, Selmer Farm LLC, Siler Solar LLC, Sol Madison Solar LLC, Somers Solar Center LLC, South Carolina Fuel Company Inc., South Carolina Generating Company Inc., Southampton Solar LLC, Summit Farms Solar LLC, Sussex Drive Solar Project LLC, TA - Acacia LLC, TWE Myrtle Solar Project LLC, The East Ohio Gas Company, Trask East Solar LLC, Tredegar Solar Fund I LLC, VP Property Inc., Virginia Electric And Power Company, Virginia Power Fuel Corporation, Virginia Power Nuclear Services Company, Virginia Power Services Energy Corp. Inc., Virginia Power Services LLC, Virginia Solar 201 Projects LLC, Wakefield Solar LLC, Wexpro Company, Wexpro Development Company, Wexpro II Company, Wilkinson Solar LLC, Wrangler Retail Gas Holdings LLC, and Yemassee Solar LLC.Lee Won-hee, president and chief executive officer at Hyundai Motor presides over a general shareholders' meeting in Seoul, Friday. Yonhap



Shareholders of Hyundai Motor Co. and Hyundai Mobis Co. on Friday backed the dividend plans of the two automotive firms and their proposed directors but rejected proposals by Elliott Management.



The overwhelming support for the South Korean companies is a setback for the U.S. activist investor.



Elliott called on the two South Korean companies to provide a combined 8.3 trillion won ($7.3 billion) in dividends this year for their earnings results of 2018. Hyundai Motor offered to pay 1.1 trillion won this year and Hyundai Mobis suggested a total of 1.1 trillion won in dividends over the next three years.



Nine out of 10 Hyundai Motor shareholders voted for the carmaker's dividend plans and seven out of 10 Hyundai Mobis shareholders accepted the auto parts maker's dividend programs.



Such an outcome was widely expected as the Korea Corporate Governance Service (KCGS), the main advisor of the National Pension Service (NPS), recommended shareholders of the two firms vote against Elliott's dividend requests.



In response, Elliott said in a statement, "With increasing numbers of independent shareholders, market commentators and members of the investment community expressing support for change, we are confident that the future holds further improvements at Hyundai."



The NPS, as the second-biggest shareholder, has an 8.7-percent stake in Hyundai Motor and a 9.45-percent stake in Hyundai Mobis. Hyundai Mobis holds a 21.43 percent stake in Hyundai Motor, the de facto holding company of Hyundai Motor Group.



KCGS and other advisors, such as Sustinvest and Daishin Economic Research Institute, said excessive dividends could hurt a company's mid- and long-term value, and the dividend request by Elliott was not based on the Hyundai Motor Group's affiliates' earnings last year.



In 2018, Hyundai Motor's net profit plunged 64 percent on-year to 1.645 trillion won. Hyundai Mobis' rose 21 percent to 1.888 trillion won.



As for outside board directors, shareholders rejected most of Elliott nominees  three for Hyundai Motor's board and two for Hyundai Mobis' board.



They instead accepted three nominees as outside directors of the Hyundai Motor board and two candidates as outside directors on the Hyundai Mobis board.



In other issues, Hyundai Motor shareholders approved the company board's plan to appoint Hyundai Motor Group Executive Vice Chairman Chung Euisun, President Lee Won-hee and President Albert Biermann, head of Hyundai's research and development division, as executive directors.



Hyundai Mobis shareholders also stood by the company board's plan to name Chung Euisun as representative director.



On Friday afternoon, the two companies held separate meetings to appoint Chung Euisun as representative director at their boards to give the heir apparent of Hyundai Motor Group greater leeway in key managerial decisions and shareholder policies.



The two Hyundai affiliates have been in a back-and-forth dispute with Elliott over their dividend plans and appointments for board members, with the New York-based hedge fund seeking to obtain seats on the key body.



Last year, Elliott's opposition made Hyundai Motor Group drop its attempt to overhaul its governance structure, which could have helped Executive Vice Chairman Chung Euisun take over the country's second-biggest family-owned conglomerate from his father, Chairman Chung Mong-koo. (Yonhap)

iShares Latin America 40 ETF's stock was trading at $22.49 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, ILF stock has increased by 11.8% and is now trading at $25.15.

View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19.Medtronic Plc is a medical technology company, which engages in the development, manufacture, distribution, and sale of device-based medical therapies and services. It operates through the following segments: Cardiac and Vascular Group; Minimally Invasive Technologies Group; Restorative Therapies Group; and Diabetes Group. The Cardiac and Vascular Group segment consists of products for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of cardiac rhythm disorders and cardiovascular disease. The Minimally Invasive Technologies Group segment focuses on respiratory system, gastrointestinal tract, renal system, lungs, pelvic region, kidneys, and obesity diseases. The Restorative Therapies Group segment comprises of neurostimulation therapies and drug delivery systems for the treatment of chronic pain, as well as areas of the spine and brain, along with pelvic health and conditions of the ear, nose, and throat. The Diabetes Group segment offers insulin pumps, coninuous glucose monitoring systems, and insulin pump consumables. The company was founded in 1949 and is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.

Read MoreROME, N.Y. - The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), along with Griffiss Institute held the AFRL Commercialization Academy Demo Day Thursday evening.

This event is focused on creating more economic development in the Mohawk Valley. This is the 5th year this event was held at Griffiss Institute and Bill Wolf, Griffiss Institute President, says since the event started, there has been about 45 start-ups created and half of those companies stayed in the Mohawk Valley.

"The commercialization academy is an educational program ran by Griffiss Institute sponsored by the AFRL, designed to take high-quality founders, marry them up with the technology at the lab in the hopes that theyll create new business in the Mohawk Valley," Wolf said.

The Innovation and Development Entrepreneurial Accelerator, also known as IDEA NY Mohawk Valley, is a business accelerator competition and 12-month program that was added this year.

The graduates from the program this year will have the opportunity to enter into the IDEA NY program," Wolf said. "That program is funded by New York State and we have a $2 million grant and as a result we can offer prizes this year."

There were six companies that competed in front of a room full of people, including elected officials, and three judges.

The judges' panel evaluated each start-up based on their ability to affect Upstate New York's start-up ecosystem and high-tech economy, the culture of innovation incorporating AFRL technology, the sustainability of the solution beyond the initial start-up period, and go-to market strategy.

The winning company is a Utica based company, Go Figure, being awarded $200,000. This company refers to itself as the contractors mobile office. It will allow contractors a solution to measure, estimate, and create a proposal on site using an IPad or IPhone.

The CEO of Go Figure says his company will help with economic development in the Mohawk Valley.

"The cool thing is, everything that we're doing is happening here," Justin Call, Go Figure CEO said. "We want to be a data business. AFRL is incredibly sophisticated when it comes to data and we are using data architecture technology that they developed to become a date company. So yes, we are focused on a product for contractors, but at the end of the day we are going to be a data company that sells data services to the certainties of the world and thats a huge business.

The second place winner is an Oneida based company, Skytubelive, being awarded $100,000. Skytubelive is the site for live streaming drone videos.

Wolf says the other four companies were each given $8,000 for their expenses.

Written into the contract with IDEA NY, the companies competing had to concentrate in one of four different areas with were cyber security, big data, information systems, and drone technology.

The six start-up companies that competed at Demo Day were:

-Cyber Defense Network Adapter (CDNA), Oriskany, focused on in-line malware prevention.

-E-Health Now, Philadelphia, focused on breaking down geographical barriers to provide affordable world-class cancer care.

-Go Figure, Utica, focused on helping contractors offer solutions by measuring, estimating, and creating a proposal, all onsite using just your IPad.

-Skytubelive, Oneida, a safe, private, secure, live drone video streaming site.

-Stonewall Defense, Watervliet, emphasizing leadership, technology, and training, seeking to help scrap metal recyclers protect their valuable roll away containers, giving users near real-time updates on the locations of their assets.

-Tooling Intel, Yorkville, focused on bridging the gap between corporate and operations to bring real-time global tooling asset visibility and predictive tooling analytics to all corporate stakeholders.

Wolf says this event is one of his favorite events held in the area.

"To me, this is one of the best events that we hold up here, we've been doing it for five years and each one of them has been better than the one before," Wolf said. "The thing thats really exciting is the technology comes from the lab and the technology is used by these entrepreneurs in ways the inventors never envisioned.

News Channel 2's Chief Meteorologist Bill Kardas was the emcee for the event.The "Fantastic Adventures" YouTube channel has racked up more than 250 million views, with its adorable cast of seven adopted children, silly topics and charmingly low-fi visual effects.

Behind the scenes, though, the children told a different story. A welfare check last week found the home was a den of abuse in which their mother would withhold food and water for days at a time, pepper-spray them, force them to take ice baths and lock them in a barren closet, according to a statement of probable cause in Maricopa, Arizona.

"They stated they are disciplined in the manners above if they do not recall their lines or do not participate (in the videos) as they are directed to," the probable cause statement said.

"They further stated this is one of the reasons their mom took them out of school so they can keep filming their series and they mentioned they have not been in school for years."

Police on Friday arrested their mother, Machelle Hobson, 48, on two counts of molestation of a child, seven counts of child abuse, five counts of child neglect and five counts of unlawful imprisonment. The Pinal County Sheriff's Office mistakenly listed her last name as Hackney but later provided her correct surname.

Hobson's adult sons, Logan and Ryan Hackney, also were arrested Friday. They face seven charges each. They are accused of failing to report the abuse of a minor.

Hobson's attorney, Richard Scherb, told CNN the state's case "is without merit."

Her bond is set at $200,000 and her adult sons, Ryan and Logan Hackney, have been released from jail on their own recognizance, said Christy Wilcox, spokeswoman for the Pinal County Attorney.

In the police report, Hobson said the closet in her room is never used for punishment, and she denied the accusations involving pepper spray and ice baths. She said the only forms of punishment she uses are having to stand in the corner, spankings and being grounded, the statement said.

Ryan Hackney invoked his Miranda rights, but Logan Hackney spoke to police and said the children were locked in the closet, pepper-sprayed and forced to take ice baths, the statement said.

What a welfare check found

Hobson's YouTube channel posts a new video about once a week and boasts nearly 800,000 subscribers. With titles like "The FLOOR IS LAVA!" and "Escape The Babysitter!" each of the 10- to 15-minute episodes features the family of cute children in lightsaber battles, turning into superheroes or attempting to steal cookies.

The statement of probable cause details a visit that welfare officers made to the home on March 13 after getting a tip from an adult daughter, who said one of the children said they were being abused.

During the welfare check, one child was found in an unlocked closet, which has a locking mechanism, wearing only a pull-up diaper, the statement said, adding that the other six children appeared to be malnourished. It said they had pale complexions, dark rings under their eyes, were underweight and they said they were thirsty and hungry.

According to the probable cause statement, one of the children drank three 16-ounce bottles of water within 20 minutes and said he had been pepper sprayed numerous times as punishment by his mother. Another child said she was extremely hungry and was given a bag of chips on the scene. However, she was afraid to eat the chips because she didn't want her mother to smell them on her breath, the statement said.

The Department of Child Safety then removed the seven children from their mother's custody.

A search of the home found two cans of pepper spray in the mother's room, and the closet in her bedroom had a deadbolt lock and a bare tile floor, the statement said.

In follow-up interviews, one child told of how they were kept locked in a closet for days at a time with no food, water or restroom. They also were pepper sprayed all over their face and body, spanked, forced to take ice baths, and forced to stand in the corner with their arms raised for several hours at a time, the statement said.

"I either get beat with a hanger or belt" "or a brush," one child said, "or get pepper sprayed from head to toe," according to the statement.

The child also said his mother would pinch the tip of his penis with her fingernails until it would bleed. Another child said she had been pepper sprayed on her vagina and recalled being in pain for four to five days, the statement said.

YouTube confirmed the channel was demonetized once the company was made aware of the arrest.

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the last name of Machelle Hobson.Ah, spring break -- the time of the year when tens of thousands of college kids head to the beach for fun, sun and shenanigans. But increasingly, these warm-weather locales are giving young partyers a chilly reception.

Fed up with years of unruly antics and disturbing headlines, spring break destinations have started cracking down -- hard.

Miami Beach has stationed cops in DJ booths. Other cities have enforced beach booze bans. And some places have gotten out of the spring break business altogether.

Zero tolerance, it seems, is the new normal.

"We are not going to prostitute ourselves for a buck," Tony Kennon, mayor of Orange Beach, Alabama, told CNN.

Miami Beach is warning students with a catchy but dire slogan

In Miami Beach, where hordes of rowdy youngsters have become a liability to one of the world's top tourist destinations, police this year launched a $33,000 digital ad campaign and sent letters to 300 fraternities and sororities.

Its marketing campaign centers around a catchy slogan: "Come on vacation. Don't leave on probation."

It lays out the consequences of drinking in public, riding on top of vehicles, or smoking marijuana: arrest.

Even so, spring break in Miami Beach kicked off two weeks ago and it's been pretty wild. A recent video showed a man punching a woman in the face, while locals reported women running naked in the streets and violent beach brawls. Police said 97 people were arrested this past weekend alone.

Miami Beach's diverse economy is not reliant on spring breakers, so it can afford to take a hard-line approach. The city has banned alcohol on the beach as well as loudspeakers and inflatables.

"There is an increased police presence for a five-week, high-impact period," Miami Beach police spokesman Ernesto Rodriguez told CNN. "Our message is to be responsible and don't act up."

It's putting police officers in DJ booths

To avoid being total buzzkills, the Miami Beach cops have had to get creative. So they turned an old lifeguard tower into a DJ booth which blasts summer anthems to beach revelers.

"Two officers who enjoy DJing will be in there. They can also monitor behavior on the beach. The officers are out there engaging with community and doing conga lines," said Rodriguez.

The Miami Beach business community appears to be in sync with law enforcement.

"The message is that there are rules," says Ceci Velasco, a Chamber of Commerce board member. "There has got to be a balance. Other guests have to be a consideration too," she added.

Velasco notes that business so far has not been impacted by strict policing of the students. Miami Beach is such a big draw that college kids keep coming back, no matter the welcome. This is not the case elsewhere.

Panama City Beach is out of the spring break business

Some destinations have pulled up the welcome mat to spring break partyers.

"We don't have spring break anymore. We are out of the spring break business," Panama City Beach Mayor Mike Thomas told CNN. "It shined a bad a light on our community."

Panama City Beach (colloquially known as PCB) became ground zero for debauchery in 2015. A widely reported gang rape and a house party shooting led the city to rethink its whole tourism strategy.

It became family-friendly again. Thomas banned alcohol from the beach, shut bars at 2 am and restricted scooter rentals. Word of the crackdown soon spread on social media and #RIPPCB began trending during the next spring break season.

The Florida Panhandle city's zero-tolerance policy has had the desired calming effect as the raucous college crowd has thinned out.

Some businesses on the beach are taking a big hit, though.

"We have seen a 60% drop in business," said JR Davenport, who runs Hammerhead Fred's bar. "We are losing money to bring people in."

Jack Bishop at nearby Captain Jack's restaurant told a similar story.

"It is a changed world that we live in," said Bishop, who added he has worked on the beach for 49 years and never seen it like this. "It is safer and quieter."

An Alabama city is stressing its family-friendly status

Orange Beach in nearby Alabama took up much of this slack.

After PCB shut its spring break down, this family-friendly locale was besieged by rowdy college students, forcing Mayor Tony Kennon to enact a similarly strict approach to law enforcement. An incredible 800 arrests were made in 2016, but that fell to 200 last year.

"There are no mulligans, no do-overs," Kennon said. "If you break the law you are going to jail."

The mayor says he has full support from the local business community as he pushes to retain the city's wholesome atmosphere. "The party crowd is going somewhere else," he told CNN. "This is not an MTV-type spring break."

Such stern approaches are leading students to seek more permissive destinations. It is no surprise that the recently revived "MTV Spring Break" series is shooting in Cancun, Mexico, rather than in the US.

South Padre Island is the hot new destination

South Padre Island in Texas, one of the hottest party destinations this year, is taking a novel approach.

The resort city has actively sought spring breakers and not imposed draconian rules. Instead, it uses technology to keep revelers in line.

Police have installed cameras on the beach and are flying drones to monitor traffic and crowds. They also are employing license plate readers and cellphone heat maps and are monitoring social media to spot illegal parties. In addition, the city has tripled its number of police officers this season.

"We have embraced the trend of newer technologies," Police Chief Randy Smith told CNN. "We open ourselves up and embrace the spring break period. It is chaos, yes, but planned chaos is better than unorganized chaos."

So far the policy appears to have been great for business.

"There is a lot of competition for those college kids," said Clayton Brashear, owner of Clayton's Beach Bar in South Padre Island. "We need that business. It means a lot of jobs."Robert Mueller is done.

After a 22-month investigation, charges against 37 defendants, seven guilty pleas and one conviction at trial, the Justice Department announced Friday that the special counsel's office has wrapped up its probe into Russian election interference, possible Trump campaign collusion with Moscow and obstruction of justice.

There will be no further indictments from the special counsel, a senior Justice Department official said.

The Justice Department informed lawmakers in a brief letter that Mueller has submitted a confidential report to Attorney General William Barr detailing the decisions his team made to prosecute or not prosecute those who were investigated.

Barr said he may provide Congress with 'the special counsel's principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.'

A Justice Department official described the report as 'comprehensive' and said those principal conclusions are 'expected to be made public.'

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the White House has not seen Mueller's findings.

'The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course. The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsel's report,' Sanders said in a statement.

The completion of the special counsel's investigation marks the end of one of the most dramatic chapters in Donald Trump's presidency, one that led to numerous criminal charges against and guilty pleas by some of his closest associates. The conclusion of the investigation, however, opens a new chapter into the fallout from the report and a potentially fraught political battle over the extent to which its contents are made public.

It's too soon to say what Mueller's report will ultimately mean for the President, but surviving the investigation without being subpoenaed for a sit down interview with the special counsel's team is a significant victory for Trump and his legal team.

It's also not clear what Mueller uncovered about Trump's involvement or advance knowledge, if any, of WikiLeaks release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. The special counsel's findings on the question of obstruction of justice are also unknown, but Trump's allies will likely argue anything short of a criminal indictment proves the President did nothing wrong.

Barr wrote in his letter that Justice Department leaders never told the special counsel throughout the investigation a proposed action should not be pursued.

The fight to make Mueller's report public could be fierce and possibly spark a court battle between Congress and the executive branch. Key House Democrats have said that the full report that Mueller submitted to Barr should be made public, and they intend to subpoena for the document -- and Mueller's underlying evidence -- if it is not handed over to Congress. White House lawyers, meanwhile, expect to have an opportunity to review whatever Barr intends to submit to Congress and the public.

Congressional Democrats and Democratic presidential candidates issued a flurry of statements Friday demanding that Barr make Mueller's full report public.

'We look forward to getting the full Mueller report and related materials,' said House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-New York. 'Transparency and the public interest demand nothing less. The need for public faith in the rule of law must be the priority.'

Mueller did not speak publicly during his nearly two-year investigation into Trump and his team. Instead, his prosecutors largely used indictments and court filings to illustrate their sweeping investigation. To announce charges against Russian operatives on two separate occasions in 2018, Mueller relied on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller in 2017 and oversaw much of his work.

What Mueller found

The investigation revealed that Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 election were far more extensive than previously known, and multiple Trump associates lied about their contacts with Russian officials and others with ties to Moscow.

The list of officials in Trump's orbit who have pleaded guilty in Mueller's probe is lengthy, including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former Trump White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen, former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates and former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone was charged in January with obstruction, false statements and witness tampering. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Mueller has not yet alleged a conspiracy to collude with Russians or detailed what he learned about the other key issue he investigated: whether the President obstructed justice, either by pressuring then-FBI Director James Comey in 2017 to go easy on Flynn or by later firing Comey -- which is what prompted Mueller's appointment in the first place.

Trump had repeatedly attacked Mueller's investigation as a 'witch hunt' and a 'hoax,' sending hundreds of tweets that have gone after Mueller and his team of prosecutors, as well as Cohen after he began cooperating with Mueller. Earlier this month, Trump launched into a long broadside against the probe in a two-hour speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, summing up the criticisms he's launched throughout the Mueller probe.

'You put the wrong people in a couple of positions, and they leave people for a long time that shouldn't be there, and all of a sudden, they're trying to take you out with bullshit, OK,' Trump said.

But Trump has also signaled he isn't opposed to Mueller's report being released publicly. Asked on Wednesday whether the public had a right to see the report, Trump said, 'I don't mind. I mean, frankly, I told the House, if you want, let them see it.'

While Mueller's investigation is finished, the investigations into Trump, his business and his administration are far from over. The new Democratic-controlled House has announced multiple investigations into all elements of Trump's life, while Mueller's team has farmed out some cases to other prosecutors across the Justice Department that will continue, such as the probe into the Trump inaugural committee's donations and spending.

Gates, a key Mueller witness, continues to cooperate in several ongoing investigations, prosecutors said this month.

On Capitol Hill, Cohen testified publicly last month, accusing Trump of directing him to issue hush-money payments to two women alleging affairs, which Trump has denied, and alleging Trump committed financial fraud. Multiple committees are now pursuing other Trump Organization associates for testimony, as well as Trump's family members like Donald Trump Jr.

But the biggest question for Congress may ultimately be tied to Mueller's investigation, and whether his findings spark an effort in the House to begin impeachment proceedings against the President.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said earlier this month that impeaching the President was 'just not worth it.' But Mueller's findings could amplify the liberal voices in the House Democratic caucus already calling for Trump's impeachment.

This story is breaking and will be updated.DEERFIELD, N.Y. -- Mohawk Valley organizations were busy celebrating World Down Syndrome Day Thursday.

Deerfield Elementary School got in on the festivities by wearing yellow and blue to raise awareness.

Students and teachers also got to use a photo booth from Allie's Celfie Central.

Allie, the young businesswoman, has Down syndrome and is from New Hartford.

She brings her selfie station with her to local events and gets everyone in on the fun!

World Down Syndrome Day is a global awareness day which has been officially observed by the United Nations since 2012.Hyundai Motor board chairman Lee Won-hee speaks during the company's annual general shareholder meeting at its headquarters in Yangjae-dong, Seoul, Friday. Yonhap



Chung Eui-sun gains firmer grip on control of Korea's auto giant



By Nam Hyun-woo



Hyundai Motor scored a landslide victory at the automaker's annual shareholder meeting, Friday, in its battle with U.S. hedge fund Elliott over setting dividend payments and appointing outside directors.



Also at the meeting, shareholders approved naming Hyundai Motor Group Executive Vice Chairman Chung Eui-sun as one of the company's CEOs paving the way for him to get firmer control of the auto giant. They also made R&D head Albert Biermann an executive director, the company's first foreign board member.



During the shareholder meeting at its headquarters in Yangjae-dong, Seoul, 86 percent of participants approved the company's dividend proposal of paying 3,000 won per common share. This accounted for 69.5 percent of the firm's voting shares.



Elliott's proposal of 21,976 won per common share received support of 13.6 percent approval rate, 11 percent of the total voting shares.



Also at the meeting, shareholders agreed to appoint three candidates recommended by the board as outside directors  Yoon Chi-won, Eugene Ohr and Lee Sang-seung  with support of over 77 percent, snubbing Elliott's candidates John Liu, Robert Randall MacEwen and Margaret Billson.



The meeting was attended by 17,117 shareholders holding 167.7 million shares, or 82.1 percent of the total.



The annual general meeting has garnered keen interest as a showdown between the carmaker and Elliott, as the latter had made demands which the former called "unacceptable."



Elliott's demands of 21,976 won per Hyundai Motor common share and 26,399 won per Hyundai Mobis common share were expected to cost Hyundai Motor Group nearly 7 trillion won in a single dividend payment. Elliott has an approximately 3 percent stake in Hyundai Motor and 2.6 percent in Hyundai Mobis,



Hyundai Motor and Hyundai Mobis also said they could not accept the hedge fund's call to include rival companies' CEOs on their respective boards, because of the potential for conflicts in interests.



Elliott's move was interpreted as an attempt to make up for its assumed 450 billion won loss from investments in Hyundai Motor, after the company's share price nearly halved from January to November last year.





'Killing the golden goose'



During the meeting, several shareholders voiced their concerns over the company's weakened earnings, but added they were still optimistic over Hyundai Motor's investments in future technologies.



"I purchased Hyundai Motor stock for the purpose of investing in the company for more than 10 years," said a shareholder surnamed Na. "Though the shareholder suggestion (Elliott's demand) may be tempting for now, from the long-term perspective that would be killing the golden goose."



Unlike previous efforts to persuade shareholders with open letters, Elliott did not present an argument during the meeting. The fund's representative from law firm KL Partners briefly said, "the meeting is not the stage for a Hyundai Motor-Elliott showdown."



Hyundai Motor's smooth win is largely attributable to the National Pension Service's approval of the board's proposals. The pension operator holds an 8.7 percent stake in Hyundai Motor and a 9.45 percent stake in Hyundai Mobis.



In a separate meeting, Hyundai Mobis shareholders also approved its board's dividend proposal of 4,000 won per common share, rejecting Elliott's demand for 26,399 won.



DOLGEVILLE, N.Y. -- The principal at Dolgeville High School has been named the 2019 New York State Principal of the Year.

The School Administrators Association of New York State honored Timothy Jenny with the award, which is given annually to recognize outstanding principals.

The award is given to those who have succeeded in providing high-quality learning opportunities for students, as well as someone who demonstrates exemplary contribution to the profession.

Jenny was named because he shows that he truly cares for his students, and has implemented a number of programs to further the educational experience for his school district.

He said in a statement, "As a principal, I am always looking for ways to let students and staff know that we genuinely care about them, that we are a family, and that we will do what it takes to help everyone succeed."

Jenny will be honored for his accomplishments at an awards ceremony on May 3 at the Century House in Latham, New York.ROME, N.Y. -- Revere Copper, in Rome, joined with the Manufacturers Association of Central New York and the Business Council of New York state Friday to share their concerns about two current bills they fear could force business to leave the state or close.

One bill would eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; the other, would require that 70 percent of electricity be renewable by the year 2030.

The chairman of Revere Copper says he's speaking for his dedicated workforce when he says they just want a seat at the table, to share their concerns, from the trenches of manufacturing.

The company also wants the opportunity to offer advice on energy laws that will help New York business remain strong.

What we believe is that manufacturing should be at the table when these issues are being discussed by the legislature and we're not. In New York state, it appears as though there's a deaf ear to manufacturing. And please, please listen to us. I'm pleading not just for me. Im old. I'm OK. I'm pleading for our people who work here, said Brian OShaughnessy, the chairman at Revere Copper.

United Auto Workers Union stood with Revere Copper, sharing their concerns, at Friday's press event.ATTICA, Ind. (WLFI)  Attica police are investigating a fire that happened Friday, on 200 West street. Officials on scene said the house had two people, four dogs, and a caged raccoon inside. According to Deputy Chief Chris Beedle, Gary Reitsma and his mom were inside the home when it caught fire. They were both taken to the hospital and their conditions are unknown. Beedle said all of the pets made it out safely.

There was significant damage to the first and second floor of the home. The cause is still unknown.

No report on how it started. Attica police are taking over the investigation.LEBANON, Ind. (WLFI)  The parents of a boy allegedly molested by a Lebanon pediatrician have filed a lawsuit against him. According to the lawsuit, they're seeking compensatory and punitive damages as well as a jury trial.

Dr. Jonathan Cavins faces charges of child molesting, vicarious sexual gratification and sexual misconduct with a minor. He's accused of improper sexual conduct with three different boys.

According to the lawsuit, the parents of one of those boys says Cavins actions have caused the victim physical, emotional and psychological harm. His former employer, Witham Health Services, says he has been fired.



By Park Si-soo







Two Korean civic groups have filed a joint complaint with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), asking the international organization to scrutinize the deadly crane collapse at Samsung Heavy Industries in 2017 that claimed six lives.







The complaint was submitted to the OECD's liaison offices, called National Contract Point (NCP), in Korea, France and Norway, said the NGOs  the Samsung Heavy Industries Martin Linge Project Crane Accident Workers Support Team and the Korean Transnational Corporations Watch (KTNC).







Korea is home to Samsung Heavy, and France and Norway have companies involved in the accident-hit project  Technip of France as the leader of the project consortium and Total Norge of Norway as a contractor.







The NGOs claimed the three companies had failed to abide by OECD's guidelines on worksite safety and human rights and thus are obliged to share responsibility for the deadly accident. But they said that while Technip and Total Norge had tried to shun taking responsibility, Samsung had been lazy in upgrading its safety system even after the accident, leaving workers at risk of another worksite disaster.







Companies with headquarters in OECD member countries, including South Korea, France and Norway, are encouraged to comply with the guidelines, although they are not legally binding.







"We hope the OECD will take action in response to the complaint," said Lee Hwan-choon, an attorney who offers legal advice to the NGOs.







"Its action will be helpful in finding a breakthrough for the long-pending trouble and in pressing companies to advance their safety systems and comply with related guidelines."



TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI)  Wabash Township Fire Chief Mike Francis said he has left the department. However, terms of his departure are unclear as trustee Jennifer Tiesing said Francis was dismissed.

Township Lawyer Jason Ramsland released the following statement:

"I can confirm for you that he was dismissed from his position as Wabash Township Fire Chief. Regarding the factual circumstances, I and the trustee decline further comment on the matter."

Francis told News 18 he verbally resigned at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday. He said, per Tiesing, it was "time for a change." Francis went on to say there is no animosity between the two and he understands the situation. He said he is always willing to help the department in the future.

"I love the fire department and the community," Francis said. "I truly understand her decision."

Tiesing said the township is looking to improve services to its residents in the "most cost effective way." She said an announcement about this plan would be made in the next few weeks.

Francis served with the department for 27 years, including nine as chief. Ed Ward, a full-time firefighter within the department, will serve as the interim.

Tiesing, a democrat, was elected trustee in November. In the same election, Francis lost his campaign for Wabash Township Board, claiming 19-percent of the vote.

Related: Full 2018 Election Results

Wabash Township is a volunteer department serving more than 59,000 residents of Tippecanoe County, according to the 2010 census. It is the most populated of the county's 13 townships.

If you're interested in volunteering with the fire department, you can call (765) 463-6664.Ourhome employees distribute food at the firm's meal service venue at a company in Vietnam. / Courtesy of Ourhome



By Jun Ji-hye



Ourhome, CJ Freshway and other food catering service providers here have actively sought international expansion, aiming at increasing sales in new markets amid saturation in the domestic market, officials said Friday.



The move comes as the growth of the domestic market for institutional catering services, which provide meals at institutions such as schools, companies and hospitals, has been stagnant in recent years.



According to the state-run Korea Agro-Fisheries and Food Trade Corporation (aT), the domestic institutional food service market has shown low growth rates ranging from 2 percent to 3 percent.



Ourhome has been active in targeting the Vietnamese market, setting up a branch in Vietnam's industrial port city of Haiphong in April 2017.



The firm said Vietnam has great conditions for Korean food service companies to grow as the Vietnamese, like Koreans, live on rice, in addition to the Vietnamese government's active push to host foreign companies.



After entering the Vietnamese market, Ourhome has opened four meal service venues at companies there, the firm said, noting its sales in the food service business in Vietnam are expected to jump more than 10 fold in 2018 compared to a year earlier.



"Ourhome has had notable achievements in Vietnam since entering the market in 2017," said Kang Joon-mo who heads the firm's Vietnam branch. "We plan to set up another branch in Ho Chi Minh City to target the southern area of the country. We will carry out aggressive marketing and sales activities to raise brand awareness."



Before Vietnam, Ourhome made inroads into the Chinese market in 2010 for the first time among Korean food service firms, having operated 30 meal service venues at 10 cities.



CJ Freshway has been also actively targeting the Chinese and Vietnamese markets, operating more than 30 meal service venues in the two countries. The firm's clients include Korean companies working in those countries as well as local firms.





CJ Freshway operates a meal service venue in Vietnam. / Courtesy of CJ FreshwayBotswana is a country located at the center of Southern Africa. The nation is bordered to the west by Namibia, to the north by Zambia, to the northeast by Zimbabwe, and to the south by South Africa. The country has earned a reputation on prudent macroeconomic management and registering remarkable economic growth. For 35 years, the African nation has transformed from being one of the least developed countries, one with populations that is periodically drought-stricken with a per capita income of $360 to a middle-income country with over half of its population working in informal sectors. Despite the small economy, the nation has managed to pump capital into critical sectors thereby ensuring continued growth. The mineral exploration sector which is anchored by diamond mining coupled with copper-nickel, soda ash, coal, and gold, represent an estimated 34.7% of the economy. Botswana's economic fortunes have been a result of strong performances in the mining sector.

Mining Industry

The country grew at a rate of 9.1% between the year 2000 and 2001. The growth was mainly attributed to the strong performance of the mining sector which witnessed a growth of 19.6% following the expansion of Orapa diamond mine. The relationship shows just how vital the diamond mining industry is in the country. The nation is the largest exporter of diamonds. Diamond mining contributed up to a third of the nation's GDP. Debswana Company is responsible for all diamond mining in the country. The company is a joint undertaking between the De Beers and the government of Botswana. The diamond mining including mining of other minerals and processing employs an estimated 10,000 people. In 2013 the sector contributed 50% of all government revenue. The government expects that the skilled diamond cutting and polishing will survive when the diamond reserves eventually get depleted.

Agriculture

At independence, the countrys agriculture accounted for the largest portion of the GDP. The percentage has dropped since then to a mere 3%. Produce from the sector is consumed locally. However, the production is insufficient because the country has to import food products from South Africa. Despite the low economic contribution to the overall economy, agriculture is practiced by about 80% of the rural population and provides at least 15% of the nations formal employment opportunities. Agricultural output is severely limited by adverse climatic conditions. A large part of the country sits in the Kalahari Desert. Corn, sorghum, millet, beans, and groundnuts are the main subsistence crops cultivated. A significant proportion of the sector's contribution to the economy also comes from livestock. Rearing beef cattle generated an estimated $34 million in 2010. Meat produced in the country is exported mainly to the European Union.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing account for 4% of the nation's GDP. A significant portion of the sector is tied to the diamond industry. The sector in its entirety employs about 35,000 people. The sector had witnessed steady growth from 2001 apart from 2007 when the sector experienced a small dip. The dip was attributed to the global financial crisis. The growth in the sector is aided by the nations positive ease of doing business rating which places the nation at position 56 out of 185. Manufacturing focuses on processing diamonds, beef, and textiles. Other factors that favor the continued growth of the sector include low corporate tax rate which is just 15%, laws allowing foreign company ownership. The government is increasingly looking to diversify to the manufacturing sector as it looks to explore other sectors apart from diamond mining. Areas that present opportunities for investment include textiles, beverages, food processing, jewelry making, and metal products manufacturing.

Tourism

Tourism and travel account for 6.5% of the GDP in Botswana. The industry contributes 7.6% of employment in the nation including 45,000 direct jobs. The industry is therefore ranked 124th highest in the world based on its contribution to the economy. In 2010, the nation received 2,145,000 tourists mainly from other African countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe. Visitors outside Africa came mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom.

Telecommunications and Internet Services Industry

The telecommunications and internet services industry is fairly underdeveloped. The country has experienced considerable mobile phone penetration in recent years. The sector accounts for an estimated 3% of the nations total GDP. The main provider of telecommunication services in the country is the Botswana Telecommunications Corporation Limited (BTC). The company offers fixed-line services to the residential and business markets and also has internet packages. Other notable actors in the industry include Nextcom (which provides telecommunication services), IBIS, and Mega which offer internet services. Mascom Wireless, Bee, and Orange serve the mobile phone market. Growth in the telecommunications sectors was aided by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which effectively ended the monopoly by BTC and opened doors for other actors. The company later underwent privatization under the BTC Transition Act of 2008. The sector is governed by the Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority, a body that was established by the Communications Authority Act in 2012. The government hopes to further develop the sector through the Maitlamo ICT policy which on implementation is expected to improve access to ICT and internet services by all its citizens. Through the policy, the government also hopes to connect all communities with high-speed networks.

Banking and Financial Industry

The banking and financial industry has risen significantly in the country. The sector witnessed an 11.3% growth between 1995 and 2008, which was nearly double the overall average rate of economic growth. The sector is mainly dominated by Banking and other institutions such as pension funds. Major banks in the nation include Barclays Bank, Capital Bank, Bank of Gaborone, Bank of Baroda, African Banking Corporation, and One Investment Bank.

Challenges to Economic Growth

The nations economic growth is greatly impeded by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The nation has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection in the world. The prevalence rate among adults is estimated to be 38.8%. The Botswana government has instituted some measures aimed at lowering the rate of inflection in the country. The nation has one of the best education systems in Africa that continuously churns out young people who often end up jobless. The high unemployment rate means that the nation also has a high poverty incidence. The government has adopted considerable reform measure to diversify the economy from diamond mining to manufacturing to create more employment opportunities.Models promote a Simmons mattress at the brand's showroom in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, in this file photo. Korea Times file



Family controlling 'bed empire' under fire for poor transparency



By Nam Hyun-woo





Simmons-K CEO Ahn Jung-ho

Simmons-K, the Korean partner of global mattress maker Simmons, has been grappling with growing owner risks as company CEO Ahn Jung-ho is under police investigation for alleged embezzlement and other illicit business practices, according to industry officials.



Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said nearly 20 officers raided the mattress maker's headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, and an office in Seoul, Tuesday over the embezzlement charge.



The officers suspect Ahn stole the company money from a corporate fund from 2009 to 2016 in order to pay for personal expenses, such as hiring two Filipina nannies for his daughter.



Reportedly, police had been investigating the company secretly since last month and recently started an open probe, with a plan to summon a number of company officials.



Simmons-K refused to comment on the investigation.



Though it is an issue involving only Ahn Jung-ho, industry officials say that it is attributable to the unclear business practices of the Ahn family, who control Korea's leading bed makers.





Ace Bed founder Ahn Yoo-soo

Simmons-K CEO Ahn is the second son of Ahn Yoo-soo, founder of Korea's largest bed maker, Ace Bed. In 1992, the senior Ahn found Simmons-K by winning a Simmons Bedding Company license and nurtured it as the No. 2 bed company in Korea.



After the senior Ahn stepped back from Ace and Simmons-K management, he passed control of Ace on to his first son, and gave a 100 percent stake in Simmons-K to Jung-ho.



Despite being a sizable company, logging 173 billion won ($153 million) in sales last year, Simmons-K keeps itself quite reclusive, revealing no information but annual audits.



According to its 2017 report, the company set aside 10 billion won for dividend payments in 2016, which accounted for 77 percent of Simmons-K's net profit of 12.97 billion won that year. Since the CEO holds a 100 percent stake, the dividends all went to Ahn.



"Under such a shareholding structure, it seems natural for the CEO to think he owns the company's money," an industry official said.



"Since Simmons-K is not a listed company, it is not obliged to open its corporate data, but such a structure is prone to power abuse or other misdeeds since there will be no entity or people who can pose a challenge."





Ace Bed CEO Ahn Sung-hoMontana is a US state which is located in the northwestern part of the United States. Montana is among the largest states in the US and it covers an area of about 147,040 square miles. Archaeological evidence indicated that human communities have been living in the region where it is currently the state of Montana for at least 12,000 years. Some of the Native American communities that lived in Montana include the Crow and the Cheyenne. The Europeans first arrived in Montana in the mid-18th century and established the first permanent settlement in 1841. The Europeans were the most influential community in determining the shape of Montana's borders. In the modern era, Montana shares its borders with four states, North Dakota, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Idaho. Montana also shares its borders with the three Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

Border with Wyoming

Montana and Wyoming are separated by a border located on the southern edge of Montana. Several major rivers cross the border between Wyoming and Montana such as the Tongue River, Bighorn River, and Powder River which are all tributaries of the Yellowstone River. The Bighorn River flows for about 1,875 miles and drains an area of 22,885 square miles. Francois Larocque, a fur trader, named the river in 1805 after the bighorn sheep he spotted close to the river. The Powder River flows for about 375 miles and drains an area of 21,875 square miles that is traditionally referred to as Powder River County. The river was named the Powder River because in some areas the sand along its banks looks like powder.

In 2010, Montana filed a case in the Supreme Court against Wyoming for violation of the 1950 compact on the sharing of the waters of the Yellowstone River. The disagreement stemmed from the fact that farmers in Wyoming had implemented a new irrigation system that resulted in less water flowing to Montana. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that Wyoming had not violated the compact by allowing its farmers to use more efficient irrigation techniques. In 2018, the Supreme Court decided that Wyoming should pay Montana $38,000 in damages. The Supreme Court also guided on how to implement the Yellowstone Compact.

There are several major cities on the Montana side of the border such as Red Lodge, Hammond, and Gardiner. Some of the major cities on the Wyoming side of the border include Sheridan, Lovell, and Powell. Sheridan is an important city in Wyoming and it is the administrative center of Sheridan County. Sheridan was named after Philip Sheridan, a Union General. Red Lodge is an important city in Montana and it is the seat of Carbon County. Red Lodge is a relatively small city and it covers an area of about 2.8 square miles.

Border with Idaho

Montana shares its entire western border with Idaho. The border between Idaho and Montana primarily follows the continental divide. Some of the major cities located on the Montana side of the border include Thompson Falls, Superior, and Hamilton. Wallace and Gibsonville are two of the towns located on the Idaho side of the border.

There are several famous features along the border such as the Lost Trail Pass and the Lolo Pass. The Lolo Pass is the most elevated point on the Lolo Trail that stretches from Idaho's Weippe Prairie to Montana's Bitterroot Valley. During the Nez Perce War in 1877, the pass was used by the Nez Perce to flee from the US Army. The Lost Trail Pass is located in the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of 7,014 feet above sea level.

Several rivers cross the boundary between Idaho and Montana such as the Bitterroot River and the Red Rock River. The Bitterroot River is an 84-mile long river that drains an area of 2,814 square miles. The Bitterroot River drains into the Clark Fork River and later drains into the Columbia River. The river is famous because it is home to large schools of rainbow trout and brown trout. The Red Rock River flows for approximately 70 square miles and drains an area of about 1,548 square miles.

Border with North Dakota

The boundary that separates North Dakota and Montana is located on the eastern edge of Montana. The border between the two states is a relatively straight line.

Several major rivers cross the border between North Dakota and Montana such as the Missouri River and the Yellowstone River. The Missouri River is one of the major rivers in the US and it drains an area of about 529,300 square miles. The Yellowstone River is a 692-mile long river that drains an area of about 70,000 square miles. The waters of the Yellowstone River eventually drain into the Missouri River in North Dakota. Montana and North Dakota share the waters of the Yellowstone River according to terms agreed upon in a 1950 compact. The residents of Montana mainly use the waters of the Yellowstone River for irrigation.

There are several major towns located on the Montana side of the border such as Plentywood, Sidney, and Baker. Beach and Edgemont are two of the major towns located on the North Dakota side of the border. Plentywood is an important city in Montana because it is the seat of Sheridan County. In 2016, it was estimated that the city was home to approximately 1,904 people. Beach is an important city in North Dakota and it is the administrative center of Golden Valley County. Beach is a relatively young city because it was founded in 1900.

Border with South Dakota

Montana's shortest border is the one it shares with South Dakota. The border between the two states is located on Montana's southeastern part. The boundary between the two states follows a relatively straight line. Ekalaka is one of the major towns located on the Montana side of the border. David Harrison founded the town and named it after his wife, Ijkalaka. In the modern era, the town is the administrative center of Carter County. In 2016, it was estimated that the town was home to 353 people.

The Importance of Montana's Borders

The borders of Montana are primarily important as they mark the limits of the state's territory. The boundaries are also important as they reflect a crucial part of the state's past.